Vitaly Mutko has many jobs. He is the minister of sport in Vladimir Putin’s government, the chairman of the organizing committee for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, a member of the FIFA executive committee, and also the head of Russia’s Football Union.
The International Olympic Committee is using hindsight to crack down on doping. After re-testing more than 400 samples from the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the committee announced that the tests of 31 athletes from 12 countries had produced suspicious results. The committee is investigating its findings, but depending on what it discovers, those athletes (whose names have not been disclosed) could be banned from competing in Rio this summer.
What if, instead of lamenting the high unemployment rates for people released from prison, society gave ex-offenders the chance to start their own businesses?
When Sue Googe, a candidate for the US Congress in North Carolina, was choosing her campaign logo, she went for recognizability. Capitalizing on a last name that was only one letter away from the world’s favorite search engine, her campaign picked a font that looks an awful lot like Google’s logo.
Europe’s tackiest musical event, the Eurovision Song Contest, has always been inherently political. After the show, which is filled with glitz, dramatic lighting, sequins, and Finnish Ork look-alikes, the audience watches votes for the best song come in from each country. Neighborly loyalty and age-old animosities rule the vote, making it often quite predictable.
Losing custody of a child can be just as devastating as a prison sentence, if not worse. Yet in recent years, the pitfalls of the American criminal justice system have vastly overshadowed the devastating effects on America’s poor of its civil justice counterpart.
In what could be a historic step, Pope Francis announced plans to create a special commission to study the possibility of letting women serve as deacons in the Catholic Church.
Barack Obama pledged in September 2015 that the US would resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees by the end of the fiscal year. But at the current glacial pace of the resettlement process, it doesn’t look like the administration will make the goal: So far, the US has taken in only 1,736 Syrian refugees, less than a fifth of the whole, The New York Times reported (paywall).
A judge in Arkansas has resigned after a state commission uncovered nude photos of male defendants on his computer. Several men, including one minor, allege that the judge offered reduced sentences to poor young men who had committed minor crimes in exchange for various sexual favors. The allegations go back as far as 30 years, including a period of time when he served as a deputy prosecutor.
After the G-7 summit concludes in Japan this month, Barack Obama will become the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima, which was devastated by a US atomic bomb during World War II.
In what has become a legal tit-for-tat, the US government and North Carolina are suing each other over the basic human function of using the bathroom.
The Russians go all out when celebrating the anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany during World War Two. For the Kremlin, it’s an occasion to tout the country’s triumphant past and flex today’s military muscle. This year’s 71st anniversary parade, held on May 9 in Moscow’s Red Square, included 10,000 servicemen and women, 135 military vehicles and 71 aircraft.
When you call the Verizon customer service line these days, a nice automaton’s voice tells you that because Verizon workers are on strike, wait times are longer than normal. Sure enough, it took me a very long time to order FiOS service at my new apartment, but I managed to, astonishingly, get an installation date for the next day.
“My vagina is angry!” a woman’s voice loudly echoed through a large gym at a minimum security prison in Queens, New York. Minutes later, the gasping and moaning of an imitated orgasm filled the space, accompanied by the loud, uncomfortable laughter and knee slapping of the men in the audience.
President Obama has made criminal justice reform an important cause during his presidency. In an effort to mitigate the effects of tough-on-crime policies of the past, he has commuted the sentences of 306 people with the latest tranche of 58 announced today (May 5). In total, he shortened the sentences of more people than the last six US presidents combined. But on pardons, which in contrast to commutations fully forgive a crime, wiping an individual’s slate clean, he has been exceptionally merciless.
The #NeverTrump movement suffered a big loss yesterday when Ted Cruz pulled out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. It’s still unclear how many Republicans will support Trump in the general election, but some fired-up voters may find it a little difficult to prove their registration status come election time, as Buzzfeed reported.
The US presidential campaign’s gender war is in full gear, especially now that the two likely candidates for the Democratic and Republican tickets are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
When she was an adolescent, Lauren Book was sexually, physically and emotionally tortured by her nanny for six years. Her abuser’s name will be forever included on a publicly available sex offender registry. So will the name of Shawna Baldwin, a hardworking and loving mother of two whose life has been blighted by a decision, when she was 19, to have consensual sex with an underage friend.
Former Republican House speaker John Boehner is retired, but he clearly misses a good Capitol Hill brawl.
Hillary Clinton has taken a lot of flack for supporting policies of her husband that contributed to America’s mass incarceration crisis, as well as for accepting money from the private prison industry.
If Donald Trump wins the US presidential election, the country’s northern neighbor will face an influx of celebrity migration. The latest to join the flock that will flee to Canada is Lena Dunham, actor and creator of the HBO show “Girls.”
Tamir Rice was a 12-year-old black boy who was shot and killed by a white Cleveland police officer because he was playing with a toy gun. According to a court filing, the city of Cleveland has agreed to pay Rice’s family $6 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit, but the officers responsible for his killing will likely come out unscathed.
Decades before we started communicating via 😢 , 🎸,or ☔️ there were the idiosyncratic lyrics of Prince, the visionary rebel musician who died today at age 57. As early as in 198os, Prince decided his lyrics would not conform to traditional notions of written language, popularizing a form of shorthand that would become ubiquitous in the age of instant messaging.
As he cements his lead, which could even allow him to avoid a contested convention, Donald Trump is pivoting to the general election, presumably hoping to appeal to a broader voter base.
