Biden insists that we won't use new lockdowns to fight Omicron, which means that if things get worse, we've already given up.

The National Labor Relations Board ruled that Google must “immediately” produce more than 70 subpoenaed documents related to its anti-union campaign.

Elon Musk is a dick. At least, that’s the image the Tesla and SpaceX CEO likes to project on Twitter. His profile picture is a photo of a rocket, elongated and cylindrical, silhouetted against the sky. It’s a nod to his work with SpaceX, but it’s also clearly a penis. It’s a sly wink at his stans, the fanbase who make up the core of his 64 million Twitter followers. Musk is a master at publicity, and the image is a provocation, to encourage more admirers or haters to pour into his timeline. Rich men – and no one is currently richer than Musk – still flaunt their wealth with overpowered cars or yachts, but they also now have Twitter, and we have to decide how to respond to Musk’s vanity rocket thrusting into our feeds whenever he says something clever, mean, childish or self-serving, which is every day. One response would be to ignore him, but since his entitlements come at the public’s expense, with his companies gobbling up ever more government subsidies and tax breaks, we can’t just pretend he doesn’t exist. And his dickish online persona is a useful lens for examining larger myths about wealth in our time. On 6 November, Musk put a poll on Twitter: ‘Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock. Do you support this?’ When 58 per cent of respondents said ‘yes’, he proceeded to sell some of his stock. The gesture appeared democratic, an act of civic duty, even magnanimity, in response to the urging of his ‘people’. But that isn’t the full story. In 2012, Musk was awarded Tesla stock options: 22.8 million shares at $6.24 apiece. They’re now worth nearly two hundred times that, and they expire in August 2022. He has to exercise them before that or lose the chance to earn billions. And ‘earn’ is the imperative word. This is income for Musk. He needs to pay income tax on it, like anyone taking an income, something he and other CEOs chaff at. When he posted his poll on Twitter, the share price was $1222.09. Exercising the options will net Musk around $27 billion. ‘Musk would have to pay full income tax on the massive gain in the shares’ value,’ Reuters reported, ‘but could sell some without additional capital gains taxes.’ And Tesla would be able to claim a $5 billion tax deduction for the share transfer to Musk – a loophole that President Biden’s infrastructure bill could close. ‘Musk gets the last laugh when Tesla takes a large deduction,’ a tax lawyer told Reuters, ‘which they may not get to take next year.’ The $27 billion would be taxed at the top federal rate of 37 per cent, plus a 3.8 per cent net investment tax. And because he earned the stock while living in California, before a recent tax-reducing move to Texas, he also faces state tax of 13.3 per cent. In total, as CNBC’s Robert Frank has calculated, the bill could top $15 billion. While the figure is enormous, it represents only 5 per cent of his estimated net worth of close to $300 billion. How do billionaires avoid income tax? The easiest way is a tactic that, interestingly, is never veiled but rather broadcast as if it were a superhuman feat of ascetism: not being paid a salary. ‘Note, I do not take a cash salary or bonus from anywhere,’ Musk told his Twitter followers. ‘I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock.’ In the first sentence, Musk appears to be seeking our admiration for his forbearance in not taking a ‘cash salary’; yet the second sentence implies the situation has been imposed on him. Still, he’s determined to prevail over the barriers erected against him: the ‘only way’ to pay tax is this way, so watch and applaud. He acts as if compensation in stock rather than a cash salary weren’t a deliberate choice made by him and other CEOs for a host of reputational and financial advantages. First, there are the perceptual gains: not taking a salary looks noble (see the first sentence of Musk’s tweet). It’s a mirage of selflessness, but it still looks selfless. CEOs have been doing it for decades, but it has ramped up since the 1980s when sky-rocketing salaries began to worry governance boards. By switching to compensation in stock options rather than cash, everyone looks as though they’re putting the company first. The personal bonus for CEOs is that they get to avoid both income tax and capital gains tax on shares that are not yet cashed in. They still have to live, of course, but they manage very nicely on credit from banks, collateralised with their stock options, paying interest at minuscule levels of around 3 or 4 per cent, way below the top US federal income tax rate of 37 per cent. Politicians like Bernie Sanders have long called this out for what it is: a scam. ‘We must demand that the extremely wealthy pay their fair share. Period,’ Sanders tweeted on 13 November. ‘I keep forgetting that you’re still alive,’ Musk retorted. Was it funny? Musk’s followers thought so. Was it a dick thing to say? Look at his profile picture. A few hours later, Musk whined that Sanders is a ‘taker, not a maker’, delighting the hard-right libertarians who love it when billionaires attack governments. Which is something that Musk does a lot, but he needs the US government too, not least to further his own wealth. For one thing, SpaceX and Tesla have both benefited from government subsidies. But there’s more to it than that. ‘We will coup whoever we want!’ Musk tweeted and deleted in 2020. ‘Deal with it.’ He was responding to criticism of US involvement in the 2019 overthrow of Evo Morales’s government in Bolivia, a country with major reserves of lithium, which is used in the batteries of smartphones and electric cars. After a right-wing, US-backed government assumed office (later jettisoned at the ballot box), Tesla’s stock soared. Musk is happy when the government protects his interests, bitter when it claims a share of the revenue. ‘Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you,’ he exploded angrily on Twitter a few weeks ago, condemning a new US proposal to tax the unrealised stock options that Musk and other CEOs use to collateralise their lavish lifestyles. That’s the curious thing about Musk’s attitude to government power. Coup other people for his benefit? Hell yeah! But tax him? Not fair! In truth he’s neither all-powerful nor a helpless victim. He’s just a very wealthy guy who resents being held to the same standard as regular people. To turn his own words back on him, he hates being reminded that he too is still alive.

The United States on Tuesday revoked its designation of the Colombian group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia as a foreign terrorist organization five years after it reached a peace deal with the Colombian government.

In the second year of a pandemic that began by wiping out 20 million jobs, American workers are doing surprisingly well. It’s just that American business is doing even better.

Aswad Khan declined to become an FBI informant. His friends began getting questioned at the U.S. border.

The RNLI has confirmed an incident took place following claims Hastings RNLI lifeboat crew were blocked from going out to sea by people angry at them for rescuing refugees in the Channel.

The historic Russian vodka concoction, zapekanka, is infused with a range of spices and baked for hours in your oven.

On Thanksgiving eve, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife announced that wolf OR-93 had been found dead by the side of Interstate 5 in Kerns County, Calif. The department says it doesn’t suspect foul play, and the wolf likely died from being hit by a vehicle. He was 2 years old.

The COVID-19 Omicron variant was detected in the Netherlands before two flights arrived from South Africa last week carrying the virus, Dutch health officials said on Tuesday.

Barbados ditched Britain's Queen Elizabeth as head of state, forging a new republic on Tuesday with its first-ever president and severing its last remaining colonial bonds nearly 400 years after the first English ships arrived at the Caribbean island.

Dramatic footage of what appears to be a jet crashing off the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth was posted on Twitter.

It was not long after Arizonans could start filing to expunge past marijuana arrests and convictions in July that lawyer Sarah Mayhew began to see some cases bogged down in court. “We really were expecting expungements would be something that would be organized and occur very quickly. We weren’t expecting to have to relitigate every single case,” said Mayhew, an attorney at the Pima County Public Defender’s Office and secretary of the group Arizona Attorneys for Criminal Justice. Proposition 207 allows people to seal criminal records in certain cases, such as if they were charged with possession of 2.5 ounces or less of marijuana, six plants or less or certain paraphernalia. But Mayhew said some expungements have run into obstacles despite approval from prosecutors, such as when the charge is solicitation of marijuana rather than possession. In some cases, judges are demanding to know the exact weight of the marijuana involved, even if it is unclear from court records, she said.

Chris Cuomo advised a top aide to his brother Andrew Cuomo about reports that detailed alleged sexual harassment by the then-NY governor, new records show.

An Inupiaq man living in the Northwest Territories, and married to an Aklavik woman, is fighting a deportation order that would see him sent back to Alaska.

The US scientists who created the first living robots say the life forms, known as xenobots, can now reproduce -- and in a way not seen in plants and animals.

All aboard the idiot boat TOOT TOOT

Raw throats, burning eyes, strong acid smells. Air monitoring that showed chemicals linked to leukemia. Barbara Weckesser and her neighbors told regulators that air pollution was making them sick. The law let them ignore her.

However much the Build Back Better Act has been whittled down from the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion opening salvo, the latest version still retains some significant goodies, including spending on health care, family leave, and climate. Now that the bill has passed the House, members of Congress and their political allies have been out in force, hyping its contents in order to build public support and encourage the bill’s passage in the Senate, where it can’t afford to lose a single vote. Many of the law’s most ardent cheerleaders have zeroed in on a provision related to a drug whose price has been repeatedly tied to high-profile deaths: “The Build Back Better Act will cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35 a month. Thinking of Alec Smith, a Minnesota restaurant manager who tragically passed away because he couldn’t afford the cost of his insulin. This insulin cap is for him and so many others,” tweeted Representative Ilhan Omar. “House Democrats just passed a cap on the price of insulin at $35 a month—and now it’s time for the Senate to get it done,” Senator Ron Wyden blogged at Data for Progress. Even President Biden praised the measure for ensuring “that no one pays more than $35 a month for their insulin.” Dozens more lawmakers echoed these sentiments. There’s just one problem with this exciting claim about insulin: It isn’t true. Capping the price of insulin would indeed be a seismic achievement, one that diabetes patients have spent years fighting for through grassroots organizing and nonprofit initiatives like T1 International’s #insulin4all campaign. Unfortunately, what’s actually included in the legislation isn’t a price cap at all but rather an insurance copay cap. The deceptively significant difference between the two says everything about how we wound up with a deadly insulin pricing crisis to begin with, and what it will take to stop it.

The first thing you should know about Caroline Potts of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, is that she loves her pets. “I have five cats and three dogs,” she told me, proudly. “The only thing I don’t have is birds.” So when she needed a job, PetSmart seemed like the perfect solution. “My sister worked at PetSmart and I was in there so much,” she said. She started as a bather, and showed enough promise to be invited to the company’s dog grooming academy, where they teach how to cut hair. “I knew it was what I wanted to do with my life,” Caroline said. “I was really passionate about animals and I loved grooming.” There was only one problem: PetSmart. Groomers were pressured to complete as many dogs as possible, through a constant whirlwind of commotion and barking and often verbal abuse and harassment from customers. Without enough staff available, Caroline sometimes worked seven days in a row. Company policy was supposed to prohibit grooming dogs with seizure disorders or those that couldn’t handle the stressful environment. Managers in Murfreesboro continually pushed Caroline to groom them anyway. “Some can die in the kennel from stress,” she said. “One dog was terrified of the dryer, and they wanted me to dry her straight through. They said, ‘Figure it out.’”