Grand Jury probing Trump payoff may be about to issue an indictment:

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, had told people years earlier that she had an affair with Trump, which he has long denied. Cohen has acknowledged making the payment, saying he did so expecting to be reimbursed; that refund was allegedly documented as payment for legal work.

Cohen later served time in prison after pleading guilty in two criminal cases in 2018, including one involving campaign finance violations related to payments made to Daniels and another woman alleging an affair with Trump. During one of his guilty pleas, Cohen said he acted at Trump’s direction and described the payments as intended to influence the 2016 election by keeping the women from sharing their stories publicly.

Bolding mine, because many of those checks to Cohen were written from the Resolute desk. May not be a crime in itself, but it should be. It also highlights just how brazen Trump is when it comes to unethical behavior. Speaking of brazen, Trump called the Georgia Speaker of the House and tried to get him to overturn the state's election results:

Can you recognize this signature?

Across all ideologies investigated by the researchers, people who endorsed “extreme pro-group action”, including ideologically-motivated violence against others, had a surprisingly consistent psychological profile.

The extremist mind – a mixture of conservative and dogmatic psychological signatures – is cognitively cautious, slower at perceptual processing and has a weaker working memory. This is combined with impulsive personality traits that seek sensation and risky experiences.

The first thing that crossed my mind is somebody who misses the funniest part of a joke, or wildly misinterprets the joke. I must admit I often throw something out when I first meet somebody, in an unconscious(?) attempt to gauge their personality. It's a faulty, self-centered approach, because you have no way of knowing what they're dealing with at the time. But it is surprisingly accurate. Here's more on their findings:

The deep freeze on Christmas weekend exposed major flaws in their approach:

The first domino fell in Duke Energy Carolinas territory, which serves 2.5 million residential, commercial and industrial customers. Starting at midnight on Christmas Eve, utility officials cut back power at the Dan River combined cycle plant, which runs largely on natural gas, to 360 MW, roughly half of its capacity, said Sam Holeman, vice president of transmission. (This is also known as derating.) Some of the plant’s instrumentation had frozen, and to prevent the facility from failing altogether, operators had to reduce the strain. The Buck plant in Salisbury encountered low pressure issues and had to be derated after peak energy usage had passed.

Solar energy “performed as expected,” Duke officials said, although it was not available overnight during the peak hours of 2 to 6 a.m.

It could have been available to ease that burden if Duke had dedicated more resources to battery storage in NC:

The loss of objectivity cannot be reclaimed:

The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth, from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.

The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.

Theoretically speaking, such coverage within the District itself, should have provided voters the information they need to make a sound decision. But there's a problem: the paper in question has a solidly conservative bent, which means two things: Their "loyal" readership leans so heavily Republican that those revelations fell on deaf ears, and that obvious lack of objectivity made it much less likely their reporting would attract the attention of state-level (or national) news outlets that would have reached all the voters in the District. Here's more on what their loyal readers chose to ignore: