A few years ago, I did the Trolltunga hike in Norway. Even in summer, it’s a brutal, cold, and wet march up a mountain. The reward is an incredible view. The day before the hike, a local warned me: start as early as possible. If you get to the summit too late, you’ll be waiting in line for an hour while everyone takes pictures for Instagram. 

So that’s exactly what I did. I began the hike at four in the morning and was at the summit by around seven. I was able to enjoy the beautiful view and then take my time going back down. On the return trip, I saw dozens of people all making their way up the top. One man stopped me to ask how far he was from the top, and we had a brief conversation. He told me he hated hiking, hated nature, and hated camping. But he planned to camp at the top of the mountain. I asked why on earth he’d do that, and his response was simple: “It’s all about that photo.” Yes, that really was his answer. 

I took a few photos and videos on my journey, but that was not my primary goal. As a result, I can remember almost every part of that hike like it was yesterday. According to some research, people who are focused on social media during experiences won’t remember them as clearly. And what’s worse, social media users are so focused on getting their perfect shot that they’ll absolutely destroy the landscape, like those jerks who landed a helicopter on the superbloom in California.

More about social media.

This weekend, Mueller submitted his report to at Attorney General William Barr. Barr quickly released the basics of the report. It found no evidence of collusion with the Russians to interfere with the 2016 elections, but it did not conclude one way or another if Trump attempted to obstruct justice citing lack of evidence. Barr then cleared Trump of any obstruction of justice in the investigations. 

Though some Republicans––notably Rudy Giuliani, who managed to remove his foot from his mouth long enough to call the investigation a “waste of time”––decried the investigation, as the LA Times points out, Mueller successfully cleared a sitting president of what was essentially treason. That’s a good thing for everyone. 

Although the report was objectively good news, many are furious that no one has seen the report yet––only the Barr letter. Six Democratic committee chairs in the House have demanded that the Mueller report be released by April 2, though Mitch McConnell blocked the release of the report. 

Some are even accusing Barr of covering up for Trump’s obstruction by pardoning him. 

There were certainly be a battle over whether the Mueller report will be released and to what extent. Though the investigation is over, the aftermath will last some time.

More news.

It has only been a few weeks since an FBI investigation uncovered the largest ever college admissions scheme. The scheme was orchestrated by William Singer, owner of college admissions companies Key Worldwide Foundation and Edge College & Career Network. Singer pled guilty to accepting bribes totaling $25 million, and he has claimed to have worked with over 750 families. Singer bribed, lied, and cheated so that his “students” could get into the best colleges. 

So many students work incredibly hard––too hard, in fact––to get into university. They pay ungodly amounts of money to Kaplan and other test prep giants so that they can game the SAT, they high private admissions counselors, and when it’s all said and done they take out an average of $30,000 loans per student. Of course, the poorest students often take out the most, and they hope to reap huge rewards. 

The looming student loan crisis began to make many question the worth of a college degree, at least insofar as it was weighed against crushing debt. But for many students, the Singer scam has broken their spirits. The admissions process is so obviously biased and broken, they think, that it’s not worth bothering about. 

More about education.

The drama continues to unfold after a recent FBI investigation uncovered the largest ever college admissions scheme. The scheme was orchestrated by William Singer, owner of college admissions companies Key Worldwide Foundation and Edge College & Career Network. Singer pled guilty to accepting bribes totaling $25 million, and he has claimed to have worked with over 750 families.

Two of Singer’s most famous clients are  Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. They allegedly paid Singer to engineer their children’s admission into top universities. Singer had associates take admissions tests for students, ensuring perfect scores. He also got the students labeled disabled in some way or faked athletic credentials to bribe coaches. These bribes were often disguised as charitable donations.

Enter the lawsuit. Jennifer Kay Toy alleges that Loughlin and Huffman’s actions prevented her child from getting into a top school. The $500 billion lawsuit seems fairly ridiculous, but it is a sign of things to come. “I’m now outraged and hurt because I feel that my son, my only child, was denied access to a college, not because he failed to work and study hard enough, but because wealthy individuals felt it was OK to lie, cheat, steal and bribe their children’s way into a good college,” Toy claimed.

Students have also sued universities. The Hallmark channel dropped Loughlin from their lineup, though she had worked with the network since 2010. 

More news.

Higher education has gotten so competitive and so expensive that you might be tempted to think it’s just one  big scam. According to a recent FBI investigation, you would be right to feel that way. Fifty people have been charged with participating in a massive college admissions cheating scheme––the largest such scam ever. 

Those who have been indicted so far have been accused of paying up to $6.5 million in bribes to get their children into schools like Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, and the University of Southern California––among others. 

William Singer, owner of college admissions companies Key Worldwide Foundation and Edge College & Career Network, the alleged ringleader of the scam, has pled guilty to accepting bribes totaling $25 million. The scam worked like this: parents would pay Singer, and Singer would in turn render their child’s application much more likely to be accepted. He had people take admissions tests for students, ensuring perfect scores. He would get the students labeled disabled in some way. He would fake athletic credentials and bribe coaches (as was the case with Yale soccer coach who accepted a $400,000 bribe to let a non-soccer player in as an “athlete”). Bribes were often disguised as charitable donations, Aunt Becky from Full House (Lori Loughlin), for example, “agreed to pay bribes totaling $500,000 in exchange for having their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team — despite the fact that they did not participate in crew — thereby facilitating their admission to USC.” 

More about education.

Hip-hop artist and producer Robert Kelly has turned himself in after being charged Friday with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in Cook County, Illinois. In the bail hearing, the judge set bond at one million dollars. The Associated Press details the women’s accusations against Kelly, which are obviously graphic in nature.

Kelly’s attorney said that he believes all four women who accuse Kelly are lying. If Kelly is convicted, he will face three to seven years in prison for each count aggravated sexual assault. 

Homeland Security is also investigating Kelly, but there are no details yet about that investigation. 

The recent Lifetime’s documentary called “Surviving R. Kelly” initially led Chicago authorities to open an investigation into Kelly. In that documentary, several women reported that Kelly sexually assaulted them when they were underage.

 Michael Avenatti, the attorney who represented Stormy Daniels in her suit against Donald Trump, submitted video evidence of R. Kelly engaging in sexual activities with underage girls. These charges against R. Kelly are the result of this video, in which Kelly is seen having sex with a girl who was fourteen years old at the time. Three of the four women involved in these charges were between 13 and 16 when Kelly forced them to engage in sexual activities.

More news.

Amazon has announced that their plans to build their headquarters in New York City will be cancelled after sustained backlash from New Yorkers as reported by CNN. The news comes as a surprise to many since New York City was chosen over all other major urban areas in a lengthy deliberation process. Last years, many …

A former US Air Force intelligence specialist has just been charged with spying for the Iranian government. The story which broke today has shaken the American intelligence world, reported by The Guardian and all major outlets. Monica Elfriede Witt, a 39-year old counterintelligence agent for the US Air Force, has been accused of delivering highly …

According to Reuters, congressional negotiators have come up with a plan to avoid another government shutdown this month but it seems unlikely Trump will support the move. The newly-negotiated deal does not grant border wall funding, but instead funds a “fence” for a fraction of the $6 billion or so originally requested by the President. …

Stocks opened higher today on Monday as optimism for a U.S.-China trade deal grows. The deal will strike an end to an ongoing tariff war between the two countries which has caused investors significant worry and uncertainty. The Dow Jones stock index climbed 84 points today as the S&P 500 grew 0.26 percent. The industrial …

A Redditor posted the gif below, saying (accurately) that this is what the Mueller investigation feels like.

This is so painfully accurate, especially to those who hope that the investigation will reveal some major massive corruption or conspiracy. One has to wonder whether this is how Americans felt during Nixon’s presidency, or if the twenty-four-hour news cycle and social media make the sense of an impending political catastrophe feel more impending than it is. That being said, the slow and steady march of Mueller’s investigation continues to suggest that members of the Trump administration, and perhaps even Trump himself, have been involved in questionable practices (to say the least). 

House Intelligence Committee’s Democratic leadership will vote on whether to send Donald Trump Jr.’s closed testimony before that body to Mueller. This is significant because some Democrats have hinted that Don Junior was untruthful in his testimony. If that turns out to be the case, Don Junior––like others who have been untruthful before Congress––could face criminal charges. This would, in turn, give Mueller a potentially explosive source of information from deep within the Trump camp––a source that Mueller has leverage on. It is also possible that the Committee will turn over the testimony of other Trump insiders, including Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon.

Democrats are also suspicious of some of Donald Trump’s real estate holdings. Maryland prosecutors have subpoenaed the  company that owns President Donald Trump’s Scotland golf courses for its financial filings. Some Democrats believe that the funding for these golf courses may have come from Russian sources. If this turns out to be the case, it would lend further credence to the connection between Trump and the Russians. 

A recent Buzzfeed article revealed that a Russian-born lobbyist received half a million dollars of suspicious payments just before the controversial June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. This meeting has become a focal point for the possibility of potential Russia-Trump collusion to influence the 2016 election. 

One of Trump’s former campaign aides, Sam Nunberg, believes that the Mueller team has a “strong case of conspiracy” against Trump. 

Aside from the various speculations––which will never be fully resolved until the Mueller investigation is finished, if Trump even makes it public––there is one law that Trump has definitively broken, but you probably missed it. According to the law, “On or after the first Monday in January but not later than the first Monday in February of each year, the president shall submit a budget of the United States government for the following fiscal year.” But if you are hoping that this violation will lead to impeachment, don’t get too excited. This deadline has been missed several times throughout history, and besides, there are no penalties for missing it anyway. 

Overall, it seems that there is one clear narrative emerging from the Mueller investigation: Trump was probably involved in something sketchy with the Russians. The continued avenues of inquiry from the Mueller investigation hint at that, and the events covered in this article support it. 

More politics.

According to a recent complaint filed by Robert Mueller, Russians are using his discovery materials as part of a disinformation campaign. The goal of this campaign, Mueller suggests, is to discredit his investigation into possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. Mueller hopes that his complaint will enable him to stop sharing information with the Russian company Concord Management. 

Concord Management is run by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, known as President Vladimir Putin’s “chef.” Concord Management is also one of the companies behind the social media election tampering campaigns in 2016. 

In the latest disinformation campaign––the one designed to discredit Mueller’s investigation––hackers released some of the nonsensitive materials from Mueller’s investigation. The information was released through a twitter account based in Russia claiming to have hacked the Mueller investigation, which has subsequently been suspended. The release was designed to make readers believe that this information was all Mueller had. There is no evidence that the material was obtained through a hack. As a result, Mueller concluded that the material was leaked by Concord Management. 

The fact that the Russians accused of tampering with the 2016 presidential campaign are now tampering with the investigation to that tampering suggests that Mueller is indeed onto something. It’s also significant that the company under investigation is run by someone close to Putin. Although circumstantial, this does point to some ties between the current administration and Russia. 

This conclusion is supported by the fact that Trump has, for the second time, met with Vladimir Putin with none of his aides or notetakers. According to a report by the Washington Post, 

President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.

The ties between Americans and Russians go deeper than even these connections suggest. This hacked emails reveal that: “revealed that a senior figure in the Bradley Foundation, a prominent financier of right-wing groups in the US, attended a gala alongside Russian oligarchs and officials shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014.”

I think it’s an overstatement to suggest that the entire Republican Party is somehow in cahoots with Russia, as some critiques are suggesting. But the evidence is mounting that extremely wealthy Russians and extremely wealthy Americans are working together to align political circumstances in ways that work best for both groups. 

While this is happening, Donald Trump’s campaign promises are crumbling. He caved on the Wall––and long gone was the promise that Mexico would pay for it. The economy isn’t as fantastic as Trump says. Oh, and that $10,000,000 factory that would bring 13,000 jobs to Wisconsin? Foxconn is reconsidering their plans to build that plant. So much of what Trump promised is not happening. But the business ties between Trump and Russia could be a potential gold mine. Time will if these speculations are true. 

More news.