America

Matt Lauer’s long-suffering wife has finally had enough of the former Today Show host’s notorious philandering. According to Fox News, former model Anne Roque.

Roquet reportedly jetted to her native country the Netherlands amid the bombshell sexual misconduct allegations. Before leaving, Roque, a former model, was last spotted at their home in the Hamptons, Long Island, Wednesday, the same day NBC News announced that Lauer had been fired for “inappropriate sexual behavior.”

Shortly before 2am on Saturday, the Senate passed "the most sweeping rewrite of the U.S. tax code in three decades, slashing the corporate tax rate and providing temporary tax-rate cuts for most Americans" handing Republicans a badly needed legislative and political victory. Senators voted across party lines in a 51-49 vote, ending days of debate and "hand wringing" as leadership worked frantically behind the scenes to win over holdouts and get the proposal in line with the chamber’s rules.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

It now seems evident that the Neoliberal Camp of the U.S. Deep State is highly vulnerable on an individual basis.

I tend to notice things like a year-old blog entry suddenly getting thousands of page views. The essay that received a surge of recent interest: Is the Deep State at War--With Itself? (December 13, 2016).

The Brooklyn prosecutors who won a guity verdict against former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli over the summer are demanding the “Most Hated Man in America” forfeit $7.4 million in cash and assets as part of his punishment.

In order to do this, Bloomberg says Shkreli will likely need to surrender the $5 million bail he posted in late 2015, and the one-of-a-kind Wu Tang Clan album he purchased for more than $2 million shortly before his former company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, was exposed for hiking the price of Daraprim, a live-saving AIDS drug, by 5,000%.

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

In the morning darkness of Wednesday, Kim Jong Un launched an ICBM that rose almost 2,800 miles into the sky before falling into the Sea of Japan.

North Korea now has the proven ability to hit Washington, D.C.

Unproven still is whether Kim can put a miniaturized nuclear warhead atop that missile, which could be fired with precision, and survive the severe vibrations of re-entry. More tests and more time are needed for that.