Germany may have spent up to 10.3 million Swiss francs (about $11 million today) in bribes to host the World Cup in 2006, according to documents obtained by German newspaper Der Spiegel.
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What to watch for today
During the first debate between Democratic candidates for the US presidential nomination, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders thundered about America’s “rigged economy.” It is wrong, he underlined, “that 57% of all new income is going to the top 1%.” But this gap is not just an American problem.
When asked about the supposed scandal surrounding Hillary Clinton’s use of private email while she was US secretary of state, Bernie Sanders delivered his zinger for the night: ”The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!”
For a moment it seemed like Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were running for president of Denmark, not the United States.
What to watch for today
Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, is buying the online music magazine Pitchfork Media for an undisclosed amount, The New York Times reports (paywall).
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden took to his new favorite social media platform on Monday (Oct. 12) to argue that indiscriminate mass surveillance is a tool of social control that disproportionately affects the underprivileged:
Ben Carson, brain surgeon and presidential candidate, is repeating a controversial and historically inaccurate argument against gun control. In his alternative version of history the Holocaust could have been prevented if regular Germans, or German Jews, had been armed.
Acknowledging its failure to produce any tangible results on the ground, the Obama administration has ended its $500 million program to train Syrian rebels to fight against Islamic State militants.
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The Republican leadership dissolved into chaos today (Oct. 8) as Representative Kevin McCarthy, frontrunner in the race for new US House speaker, pulled his name from consideration, pushed out by the party’s conservative faction. As the drama unfolded, Democrats had little else to do but sit back and relax, with White House press secretary Josh Earnest noting: “It certainly is easy to poke fun at the chaos.”
Representative Kevin McCarthy abruptly dropped out of a race for speaker of the US House of Representatives, a position for which he was a favorite. According to Rep. Tom Rooney of Florida, the decision, announced by McCarthy at a caucus meeting, left GOP lawmakers in shock, even “audibly crying.”
A new study has found that children living around Japan’s Fukushima, where in 2011 a tsunami caused a nuclear reactor to melt down, are diagnosed with thyroid cancer at a rate that is 20 to 50 times higher than normal.
Inmates at federal prisons will no longer have the option of getting a side of bacon with their breakfast. The US Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has pulled pork off of its national menu for fiscal year 2016, which started Oct. 1.
Harvard’s debate team picked up a world championship last year. But just last month, they were defeated by an unlikely opponent: a team composed of maximum-security prison inmates.
Airlines have come up with yet another way to make plane travel more miserable. The latest seating arrangement from hell—which stacks passengers on top of each other—comes from Airbus, which filed a patent, published on Oct.1, with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The US Justice Department is set to spring 6,000 federal inmates from prison before their sentences are complete, the Washington Post reports, in the largest one-time release of inmates in US history. The release, between Oct. 30 and Nov. 2, is the first tranche of what could eventually total 46,000 early-release prisoners, and is accompanied by a push by president Barack Obama to mitigate the effects of harsh drug sentencing laws and to ease overcrowding in prisons.
Donald Trump’s lead is slipping in the early voting states of New Hampshire and Iowa, and the Republican Party’s heavyweight donors are spreading cash to his rivals in anticipation that his prospects are in terminal decline.
On their way to this month’s 70th United Nation’s General Assembly, the organization’s annual high-level meeting in New York, diplomats and world leaders will pass by a makeshift glass structure—both a glossy multi-media hub, and a gateway to an entirely different world.
A whopping 87 out of 91 former NFL players who donated their brains to science have tested for positive for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease that causes memory loss, dementia, and depression. The study, based on information from the largest brain bank in the United States, is the latest evidence of a link between football and brain damage in the ongoing debate about head injuries in the sport.
Refugees and migrants arriving in Europe are finding themselves with fewer and fewer options to enter the European Union, and move further north. Hungary fenced off its border with Serbia this week, deflecting migrants with tear gas and a water cannon, and after thousands of people made their way to the Croatian border instead, the country also shut down its checkpoints, unable to handle the influx. Now, tiny Slovenia, which unlike Croatia is a member of the border-free Schengen zone, has halted trains coming in from Croatia.
With healthcare costs rising across the developed world, many argue that the rise of wearable technology as a way to determine health insurance premiums is inevitable–and one company in Switzerland is putting the idea to the test.
