The former child reality star is asking his mom to sit in the hot seat to respond to his allegations of child abuse.

Carlo Ancelotti, Gabriel Martinelli y Casemiro expresaron su felicidad por la victoria sobre Japón y aseguraron que merecían el triunfo. Por otro lado, Hajime Moriyasu y las figuras niponas tuvieron autocrítica para reconocer sus carencias en la derrota.

EXCLUSIVE: Amazon MGM Studios has landed film rights to New York Times bestselling author Ali Hazelwood’s novel, Love, Theoretically.  It Ends With Us author Colleen Hoover will produce with her Heartbones Entertainment partner Lauren Levine alongside Max Siemers and Tanner Anderson for Magic Hour Entertainment. Along for the Ride filmmaker Sofia Alvarez is directing the romantic comedy and […]

Naomi Osaka has long been renowned for dazzling crowds with her on-court outfits – but making that compatible with Wimbledon’s all-white dress code required special inspiration.

Naomi Osaka has long been renowned for dazzling crowds with her on-court outfits – but making that compatible with Wimbledon’s all-white dress code required special inspiration.

Naomi Osaka has long been renowned for dazzling crowds with her on-court outfits – but making that compatible with Wimbledon’s all-white dress code required special inspiration.

Naomi Osaka has long been renowned for dazzling crowds with her on-court outfits – but making that compatible with Wimbledon’s all-white dress code required special inspiration.

By now much has been said about Vice President JD Vance’s comments last week at the Nixon Library, where he attempted to rewrite the history of the Watergate scandal by musing that “if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story.”

He further stated, “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”

I am a former assistant Watergate special prosecutor. I was there. Vance’s description of the Watergate scandal was a fairy tale.

The June 1972 arrest of burglars at the Democratic National Committee may have been a 12-hour news story if the Nixon White House cover-up, which described the matter as a third-rate burglary, had been successful.

It was not.

While the cover-up held up through the 1972 presidential election in which Nixon won in a landslide victory, Nixon’s stonewalling began unraveling two months after he was inaugurated to his second term. On March 23, 1973, Judge John Sirica, a Republican appointee who presided over the criminal prosecution of the burglars, said he believed there was a wider conspiracy and planned to sentence the burglars to stiff sentences.

One of the Watergate burglars, former CIA operative James McCord, came forward and revealed to the judge that the burglars had been pressured to plead guilty and remain silent at the direction of others.

This breakthrough in the case was the beginning of the end for Nixon. Additional facts emanated from the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of L. Patrick Gray to be FBI director. Gray admitted to burning relevant documents in his fireplace. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were publishing various exposés from their source identified as “Deep Throat.”

None of this drip-drip of almost daily revelations amounted to a mere 12-hour news cycle. While Nixon pushed back, proclaiming, “I am not a crook,” more details of his crookedness were revealed over a two-year period. Working on the Watergate case, I dealt with the onslaught of allegations that turned into a flood of criminality. All of this amounted to an ongoing news cycle that did not end, even after Nixon left office. Should a similar scandal emerge today, in a similar fashion, we shouldn’t expect it to play out much differently.

Play

Vance defends Nixon: The idea that Watergate took down a president ‘is crazy’

June 26, 2026 / 08:03

The Nixon revelations led to the formation of a Senate select committee to investigate the burglary and the appointment of Archibald Cox as special Watergate prosecutor.

The nationally televised Senate committee hearings revealed the existence of a secret taping system in Nixon’s White House offices. After the Supreme Court unanimously ordered Nixon to release the tapes on July 24, 1974, Nixon proposed a compromise by which former Sen. John Stennis, who was partially deaf, would listen to the tapes to create summaries.

Cox refused to agree to this compromise since summaries of the tapes would not be admissible at the Watergate cover-up trial. Cox’s position resulted in the Saturday Night Massacre on Oct. 23, 1973, in which Nixon fired his attorney general and deputy attorney general, who refused to fire Cox. The solicitor general, the third highest member of the Justice Department, carried out Nixon’s order to fire Cox.

The Watergate scandal was not limited to the burglary at the Democratic National Committee. In the course of over a year, there were revelations that some of the same people who were involved in the burglary also burglarized the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Ellsberg was No. 1 on Nixon’s enemies’ list because he had released the Pentagon papers exposing the problems with the rationale for America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Some of these same individuals were also part of a plot to kill Ellsberg.

Other revelations included illegal campaign contributions, misuse of the federal agencies such as the IRS to target Nixon’s enemies, the Nixon White House’s mistreatment of demonstrators and Nixon’s scheme to commit tax fraud by backdating a deed of a gift of papers to the government to obtain a tax deduction.

Vance was also dead wrong that the “deep state took down” Nixon. It was just the opposite. The former FBI and CIA operatives who were involved in the Watergate burglary and the actions against Ellsberg were those typically considered part of the deep state, rather than those that helped hold all involved accountable.

Nixon himself attempted to use a deep state conspiracy to cover up the White House’s involvement in the burglary. On June 23, 1972, less than a week after the arrest of the Watergate burglars, Nixon is heard on tape directing his chief of staff to call the director and deputy director of the CIA to have them call the FBI to halt the investigation into the break-in for ostensibly national security reasons. That was the “smoking gun” tape that led to Nixon’s resignation.

In another tape recording of March 21,1973, Nixon is overheard meeting with his closest advisers, approving the payment of $1 million in cash as hush money to the Watergate burglars who were demanding funds to pay their lawyers. This was orchestrated by Nixon, not by the deep state.

It is important to recognize that in 2024, the Supreme Court upended the law governing crimes committed by a president. The court created presidential immunity for all “official acts” as opposed to personal acts. As such, Nixon’s attempt to direct the CIA and FBI to obstruct the Watergate investigation would now be off limits from prosecution. Other crimes, such as the burglaries, are arguably “personal” and not subject to presidential immunity.

This is not to say that a Nixon-style cover-up under the Trump administration would not have the same impact today. A prime example, which Vance should have understood, is Trump’s stonewalling of the Epstein files. The yearlong clamor for full release of the government’s Epstein files has clearly reached beyond the bounds of a 12-hour news cycle, with Congress and the public still demanding full disclosure of the remaining reported 1 million documents and disclosure of the redactions.

The public interest has shown no sign of dissipating. Indeed, just a few days ago, a federal judge ordered the DOJ to release certain redacted documents in unredacted form by July 2 or explain why these documents should remain hidden.

It is still too early to know whether Trump’s transgressions will ultimately bring down his presidency, as happened with Nixon. But it is clear that plenty of folks and even governing bodies will continue to work hard to hold Trump accountable, given what is at stake.

The post I was a Watergate prosecutor. Here’s what JD Vance missed. appeared first on MS NOW.

If you’ve never heard of Dynomutt, don’t expect an easy score.

View Entire Post ›

People who rely on wheelchairs say that industry consolidation driven by private equity means long delays in getting them fixed, which isolates them from society and endangers their health.

Historically, being ultra-wealthy meant that there was an obligation to share a chunk of it with the world. Gilded Age industrialists like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie made lasting cultural and philanthropic contributions, many of which still bear their names. But increasingly, our modern billionaires don’t seem inclined to follow suit.

To show just how little they’ve given, let’s look at the Giving Pledge. Over 15 years ago, some of America’s ultra-rich promised to give at least half of their wealth to charity throughout their lives or when they died. Even Elon Musk, briefly the first-ever trillionaire in history, signed it. That pledge is now on life support. 

Bella DeVaan is the director of the Charity Reform Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies, where she co-authored a study looking at how the pledge is impossible to fulfill. To explain the study’s findings, DeVaan spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about why the pledge isn’t the road to a more equitable future and how philanthropy should be done instead. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Can you remind us what the Giving Pledge was and who signed it?

The Giving Pledge was a voluntary philanthropic commitment founded by Bill Gates, his then-wife Melinda French Gates, and Berkshire Hathaway chair Warren Buffett in 2010. Since then, north of 250 people in the world have signed onto this pledge. And it’s people with tons of money who feel like signing onto something like this is something that they could do, or at least want to be seen as pledging to do.

The Giving Pledge is now 16 years old. My team did a study at 15 — old enough for a driver’s permit. And we feel like there’s a significant body of evidence that the pledge is unfulfilled and unfulfillable. Of the 32 original signers who are still billionaires, they had collectively gotten 283 percent wealthier — or 166 percent adjusting for inflation — since they signed onto the pledge, and only one couple in the group fulfilled their pledge.

So the idea is to get poorer over time, and meanwhile, almost everyone, or if not everyone, has gotten significantly richer.

That’s exactly right. Mackenzie Scott, who is one of the most prolific and generous pledgers, has given away $26 billion. [But] she’s decreased her wealth by less than $6 billion since her separation from Jeff Bezos. So if that’s what the most generous philanthropist is struggling to keep up with, everybody else is faring far worse.

Is it because they don’t genuinely want to give their money away, or is it because they’re simply doing so well all the time and getting exponentially richer all the time that it is really hard to do?

If we want to give them some credit, yes, it is mathematically incredibly challenging to give away as much money as their skyrocketing wealth. But I definitely think these billionaires are not stepping up to the plate and giving as much as they should and even as much as they’ve committed to. 

A great caveat of the Giving Pledge is that you get to fulfill it upon your death in your will. That could look like giving your children control of your charitable intermediaries. A big part of our study was finding out that 80 percent of all the gifts that these pledgers have given go into private foundations, often that they control.

That’s what it looks like when you can make a donation that seems like you’re parting ways with your wealth and delivering some kind of benefit to the public, but actually that money doesn’t reach public charities or public works or on-the-ground aid until it leaves the foundation, and there’s a significant lag time in there.

And what’s wrong with all the money going to their foundation that then goes and distributes money to, I don’t know, needy children, medical research firms, whatever it might be?

A weigh station lengthens the journey, right? We figured out that out of all of the living pledgers who are still billionaires, when they signed on, their median foundation payout rate was 9.2 percent a year. 

If you’re getting so much wealthier and your foundation is only giving away a single-digit percentage of your foundation’s wealth every year, and you’ve gotten a tax incentive and reduction up front for your gift — which the general public is subsidizing up to 73 cents per dollar — that’s a very significant investment. You’re asking the public to shoulder it and that money is trickling out back to the public. It’s not keeping pace.

Is there any good news here, Bella? Have we accomplished anything? Have we eradicated any diseases? Have we cured any diseases? 

It depends who you ask, but I would say no. I think that the great indignity of philanthropy and concentrated wealth at this scale is that multiple things can be true at once. 

It can be true that billionaires overexert their power, that they are able to influence the state of science, innovation, the deliverance of public aid, the shape of housing policy, and that can make significant inroads and deliver benefits to people. There’s no arguing with that. But at the same time, they can be hoarding wealth, not doing enough, resting on their laurels, banking on this idea that the reputational benefit of signing the pledge is enough. 

That those two things can be true at the same time, while regular people are struggling to make ends meet, means that the system is in need of a dramatic overhaul. And if the billionaires who promised to give half their money away are doing this poorly at it, that tells us everything that we need to know.

Tell us about an overhaul. If you designed the Giving Pledge or a system that’s altogether different, what would it look like?

If it were up to me, the number one most meaningful intervention is to figure out how to tax wealth, figure out how to restructure our economy so that people can’t accumulate these fortunes in the first place, over which they can exercise such plutocratic control. 

But knowing that we live in a society that has all these billionaires already and has all these foundations with piles of money that haven’t been deployed for the public benefit, I think we have to increase transparency so that donors can’t use donor-advised funds and other popular intermediary and foundations to conduct dark-money giving or play shell games to change the timing of tax benefits, so that philanthropists have to make the gift and then see their tax benefit instead of getting it upfront without having any obligation to move money.

I’m hearing tax the Rich, I’m hearing reform tax code, I’m hearing change public policy. But as you could admit, less likely to happen. And I just wonder, have all of those things become less en vogue 15 years down the road? 

Elon Musk talks about empathy as a weakness. He made cuts to USAID programs that directly resulted in hundreds of thousands of people dying. And people still love him and want to invest in his companies and make him even richer! Do you think we’ve seen a cultural shift around giving around empathy itself?

Yes. In these political conditions, the Giving Pledge is what we’re stuck with. We’re stuck with waiting for a voluntary effort to reshape society instead of knowing that we’ll get structural reform that would be guaranteed to deliver it. 

These are all very concerning trends. Philanthropy in America has always been an expectation of the wealthy people in the country. Reaching back to Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller, that is what is expected of a rich person in America. That value is no longer closely held at all. 

Regular people are as generous as they can be. We see this in remittances. We see this in small donations to your local food bank, to your religious institution. Everyday people are as generous as they can be, and I think that our ultra-wealthy people need to take after them more.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was spotted Monday on Capitol Hill, amid the high court releasing a slate of opinions before it heads on recess for the summer. While Thomas, surrounded by a Metropolitan Police Department officer and another man, was walking through the House side of the Capitol, the justice told MS NOW’s Mychael…