Category: Daily news

The fiasco at Bill Barr’s Justice Department, explained

Attorney General Bill Barr and his allies are centralizing control over the Justice Department and acting in increasingly blatant ways to protect President Donald Trump’s interests and allies.

This became evident in dramatic fashion Tuesday when the entire team prosecuting longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone withdrew from that case after Justice Department higher-ups made clear they planned to override their sentencing recommendation.

But the Stone controversy was just the latest in a series of recent moves by Barr to “take control of legal matters of personal interest to President Donald Trump,” as Carol Lee, Ken Dilanian, and Peter Alexander of …

Larry Ellison is doing an unthinkable thing for a tech titan: Hosting a fundraiser for Donald Trump

Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and one of the world’s richest men, is throwing a fundraiser for Donald Trump — the most significant display of support from a major tech titan for the president, by far.

Ellison is hosting Trump at his estate in California’s Coachella Valley next week for a “Golf Outing and Reception,” according to a copy of the invitation obtained by The Desert Sun, a local newspaper. Tickets run as high as a quarter million dollars.

While Ellison has consistently backed Republicans in the past — he was a major donor to a super PAC …

Tech underestimated Bernie Sanders. Now it has to deal with him.

Silicon Valley has freaked out over Elizabeth Warren. But its meltdown over Bernie Sanders never quite happened.

That is probably about to change, now that Sanders’s victory in New Hampshire on Tuesday makes him the frontrunner in the Democratic presidential contest. Sanders shares many of the exact same positions as Warren — he, too, wants to break up Big Tech companies and drastically increase taxes on the richest people, including those in tech — but only now is he tickling the amygdala of Silicon Valley’s elite.

There are a few reasons for the lack of focus on Sanders over …

What we know (and don’t know) about the Nevada caucus “tool”

Here we go again!

Fresh off the unmitigated (and still unfolding) disaster that was the Iowa Democratic caucuses, Nevada will soon kick off caucuses of its own. After understandably scrapping its plans to use an app made by Shadow Inc., the company behind Iowa’s fated caucus app, the Nevada State Democratic Party is now scrambling to come up with a solution before the early voting period begins on February 15.

Exactly what that solution might be remains a mystery to the greater public. Multiple reports say the party is planning to use what it calls an iPad “tool,” …

Why C-SPAN’s quirky call-in show has endured for 40 years

The Senate had just rejected witnesses in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, and for those who had feeling about it, there was a phone number for “guilty,” another for “not guilty,” and another for “undecided.” Once the lines were posted, it didn’t take long for the calls to come in.

“They’re not going to have a fair trial. It’s just going to be worse for our country,” Mason, a caller from Chuckey, Tennessee, said. He finished with a warning about the fall of Rome: “That’s exactly what’s going to happen here.”

Rick from Willoughby, Ohio, said that …

The coronavirus cruise ship quarantine is a scary public health experiment

It’s a hypochondriac’s worst nightmare and a startling public health crisis: The largest coronavirus outbreak outside of mainland China is currently floating in Japanese waters, on a cruise ship owned by Princess Cruises.

The outbreak was first detected when an 80-year-old passenger tested positive for the virus on February 1, a week after disembarking in Hong Kong. By February 4, the remaining 3,700 passengers and crew of the Diamond Princess — currently docked at the port city of Yokohama, Japan — were asked to stay on the ship under quarantine orders.

Since then, the number of passengers and crew …

The race for presidential delegates has begun. Track them here.

The magic number to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president is 1,990 delegates. It could take months to officially get there.

Presidential candidates are all competing for a majority of 3,979 pledged delegates. Separately, there are also 771 automatic delegates, otherwise known as “superdelegates.” But after a contentious 2016 primary, the Democratic National Committee changed its rules around superdelegates so they may now vote on the first ballot to select a nominee at the Democratic National Convention only if a campaign has secured a supermajority of pledged delegates. (Otherwise, they weigh in in the event of a second round …

How the Nevada Democratic caucuses will work

With New Hampshire’s primary voting now complete, the next contest for the Democratic presidential contenders will be the Nevada caucuses on Saturday, February 22, at noon Pacific time.

But will these caucuses turn out to be a disaster like Iowa’s did?

Already, Nevada Democrats have abandoned plans to use Shadow Inc., the vendor for a vote-reporting app that performed so poorly in Iowa. They need a plan B, and we don’t yet know very much about what it will be.

Beyond the tech support challenges, they’ll face a similar underlying issue that plagued Iowa: They have to report three …

Live results for the New Hampshire Democratic primary

The New Hampshire primary could finally bring clarity to a crowded Democratic race.

No candidate dropped out after the days-long mess of the Iowa caucuses, so New Hampshire voters could be the first to winnow a candidate field that is still in the double digits. And unlike the confusing three sets of numbers that determined a winner in Iowa, New Hampshire’s results will be cleaner. It’s a traditional primary with a secret ballot.

All polls close in New Hampshire by 8 pm on February 11, and results will come in shortly after. Vox has live results, powered by our …

The T-Mobile + Sprint deal is good for you if you like paying more for your wireless plan

A federal judge blessed a merger between Sprint and T-Mobile on Friday, which would reduce the number of big wireless carriers in the US from four to three. The Department of Justice says that it will be good for consumers.

The key to that confusing argument: The deal is supposed to create another big wireless carrier, more or less from scratch, which would bring the number of competitors back to four.

And if that logic confuses you — why build a new company to create competition when you could just keep the ones you have and let them continue …