Elon Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC launches website to increase canvassers in battleground states

Submit your questions for Jennifer Rubin’s mail bag newsletter and live chat.

Did Week 3 bring any changes to the Post's college football rankings?

The “Ray” actor’s “Jamie Foxx Show” co-star Garcelle Beauvais posted — and later deleted — snaps from the intimate wedding via Instagram over the weekend.

John Wells is an executive producer of the new Hawaii-set series, and also directs the pilot.

Portage County Sheriff’s OfficeThe sheriff’s department in Portage County, Ohio has been stripped of its election security duties after its MAGA sheriff said people displaying Kamala Harris signs in their yards should have their addresses recorded so illegal immigrants can be sent to their homes. Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski, a Donald Trump-supporting Republican seeking re-election, likened migrants to “human locusts” and called Harris a “Flip-Flopping, Laughing Hyena” on his personal and campaign Facebook accounts earlier this month.“I say ... write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards!” wrote Zuchowski, adding the suggestion that migrants in need of housing should be sent to “their New families ... who supported their arrival!”Read more at The Daily Beast.

The suspect accused of trying to assassinate Donald Trump at his Florida golf course wrote a chilling note months earlier declaring he intended to kill the former president, the Justice Department said Monday. Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, allegedly dropped the note — addressed “To the World” — off at an unnamed person’s home in the...

We've officially entered autumn, which as columnist Glenn Whipp notes in his newsletter, means aromatic coffee and good movies, including "His Three Daughters."

It's midseason in high school football. Let's see who has been defying expectations so far this year.

Most Americans have a dollar figure in mind for what they would need to earn to stop fretting about making ends meet.

The Washington Post/GettyWell, this one probably wasn’t on your election bingo card.Amer Ghalib—the Muslim mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, which since 2021 has also been governed by a city council made up of exclusively Muslim officials—on Sunday announced his endorsement of Donald Trump.“President Trump and I may not agree on everything, but I know he is a man of principles. Though it’s looking good, he may or may not win the election and be the 47th president of the United States, but I believe he is the right choice for this critical time,” Ghalib wrote in a Facebook post. “I’ll not regret my decision no matter what the outcome would be, and I’m ready to face the consequences.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

These five products will help you set the scene for a kid-friendly Halloween bash.

"Now this thin Ozempic Oprah has lost -- along with the pounds her heart -- her sense of authenticity," Kelly said of Winfrey.

The Tufts University men's lacrosse team put practices on hold as at least 12 players recover from rhabdomyolysis or "rhabdo." Physiologist and anesthesiologist Dr. Michael Joyner says the rare condition can happen after a very intense workout.

Fans noticed that Usher's tweets mysteriously disappeared after Diddy was arrested on sex trafficking charges.

Federal officials acknowledged that few Chinese vehicles were on U.S. roads now, but said that the administration wanted to take proactive measures to strengthen national security.

The Biden administration has proposed a prohibition on Chinese and Russian automotive hardware and software to protect US drivers from 'disruption and sabotage'

The red-headed royal posed for photos with Forest Whitaker and Queen Mathilde of Belgium and was seen schmoozing with several UN Agency workers throughout the evening.

When asked whether he would run again in four years if his current presidential bid is unsuccessful, Trump said “I don’t see that at all.” He would be 82 in 2028 — a year older than Biden is now.

Authorities believe the shooting that erupted at a popular hookah bar in Birmingham's busy Five Points South entertainment district late Saturday had specifically targeted one of the four people who was killed.

The boyfriend of Indiana Fever rookie Caitlin Clark made clear how he felt about the star guard winning the AP WNBA Rookie of the Year award.

A mass shooting outside of a cigar lounge in Birmingham, Alabama, left at least four people dead and 17 others injured. Police are calling it a "targeted hit" and believe multiple shooters opened fire.

Would-be Trump assassin Ryan Wesley Routh wrote a chilling letter detailing his ambition to kill the former president, the DOJ says.

Google employees and executives attempted to hide potentially damaging communications from investigators by using auto-deleting chats and marking emails "privileged and confidential" as a regular course of business —  sneaky moves that may backfire on the internet giant as the second antitrust trial against the company rages on. The post Google Executives’ Ploy to Hide Messages from DOJ Could Be Backfiring appeared first on Breitbart.

This one didn't help calm the "Chiefs get all the calls" narrative.

Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay was buzzing following the team's dramatic victory over the San Francisco 49ers at home on Sunday.

Alex Wong/Dominic Gwinn/Getty ImagesVice President Kamala Harris tried to block Kimberly Guilfoyle—the former prosecutor turned Fox News host turned MAGA beau to Donald Trump Jr.—from getting a job in the San Francisco district attorney’s office over 20 years ago, even going so far as to falsely pose as a member of the hiring committee, according to allegations in a New York Times report.While Harris says she never suggested Guilfoyle couldn’t have a job, former District Attorney Terence Hallinan, their boss at the time, largely backed Guilfoyle’s version of events, the newspaper reported. Hallinan died in 2020.The contested incident between the two happened around 2000, the Times said. Harris phoned up Guilfoyle—then a lawyer at the Los Angeles district attorney’s office who was in talks to come back to San Francisco, where she used to work—and, Guilfoyle alleges, told her there was no job for her.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Travis Kelce was barely a factor in the Chiefs' third straight win to start the 2024 NFL season.

Brook Cheuvront was reported missing on Saturday after a tracking app she was using stopped updating and friends could not reach her.

The mayor of the first US city to have an all-Muslim city council has endorsed former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Amer Ghalib, the mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, announced his endorsement in a Facebook post Sunday, just days after meeting the Republican candidate in person. “I believe he is the right choice for...

“I appreciate the efforts of these team members who have made the difficult choice to step away from the campaign, and I wish them well in their future endeavors,” Robinson said in the release.

Karwai Tang/GettyEven casual followers of royal news will likely be aware that Kate Middleton’s brother has a dog or two, and that his old hound, Ella, is the posthumous fulcrum of his new dogograph and memoir.While we can be quite sure publishers around the world would have bounded after the opportunity to publish Meet Ella: The Dog Who Saved My Life regardless of his last name, people do seem rather keen to ask James Middleton about his interactions with the royals as well as his new line of yummy dog food.James is carefully distributing occasional treats to the baying hordes, and the latest is a claim that one of Ella’s descendants, Orla, whom he gave to William and Kate, might have helped his sister through her recent cancer diagnosis.Read more at The Daily Beast.

The Massachusetts State Police have suspended full-contact boxing training activities among recruits until further notice after a trainee died

Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesDonald Trump has surged ahead of Kamala Harris in three key battleground states, according to a new poll.Trump is ahead by three points in North Carolina, four points in Georgia, and five points in Arizona, says the latest New York Times/Sienna College poll.They are three of seven swing states that are central to a victory in November and represent a possible turnaround for Trump after weeks of poor polling.Read more at The Daily Beast.

In a surprising act of capitulation, Elon Musk and his X social media platform are complying with the demands of Brazil's Supreme Court after weeks of defiance. The post Elon Musk Bends the Knee to Brazil’s Censorship in X/Twitter Free Speech Fight appeared first on Breitbart.

No one on USC’s staff comes out of the loss to Michigan looking worse than the Trojans offensive line coach.

Jessica Caloza gets The Times' recommendation for this Assembly district. She has extensive experience in local, state and federal government and would be an important pro-housing voice in Sacramento.

The social media trend is taking refrigerator organization to a whole new level. Here are the pros and cons.

An American flag hangs at the Venture Global Plaquemines LNG plant while under construction in Port Sulphur, Louisiana. The US is now producing more oil and gas than any country in history. As the name suggests, global warming is a global issue that effectively requires every country to act to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Any ton of carbon dioxide produced anywhere adds to warming globally, while any ton reduced anywhere has the same effect in reverse. That’s why the most efficient way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions broadly is through policies that encourage the cheapest clean technology, wherever it comes from. But the leading presidential candidates of both major American political parties are increasingly pushing for the US to develop all forms of energy — oil and natural gas included — and shield its own clean tech sector, even at the expense of its allies and its own climate goals.  It’s little surprise that former President Donald Trump, a skeptic at best about climate change, has repeatedly boasted about his track records in boosting domestic energy production, including fossil fuels, and has pledged to impose more tariffs on Chinese goods like solar panels if he becomes president again. But Vice President Kamala Harris has also been hyping an America First energy policy. While the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act signed by President Joe Biden represents the single-largest US investment to address climate change, his vice president has been taking credit for how it expanded oil and gas development.  “I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking,” Harris said.  It’s part of a stark bipartisan shift from the one-time consensus support for free trade and open markets. But it’s a particularly notable change in tune from Democrats, who once made global, collaborative action on climate change a central issue.  Harris, during her first run for president in 2019, pledged to ban fracking, a controversial technique for extracting oil and gas from shale rock, and one that is largely responsible for making the US an oil and gas power again.  Biden promised no new fossil fuel extraction on federal lands and to restore America’s climate standing on the global stage. Biden did bring the US back into the Paris climate agreement shortly after taking office, but since then has overseen a massive expansion in oil and gas production and ramped up fossil fuel exports to other countries. At the Democratic National Convention last month, climate change scarcely came up at all. Now US energy production is at an all-time high, and the US is producing more oil and gas than any country in history. Why the change? The simple reason is that voters right now care a lot more about the economy and much less about the environment. “It’s not the climate politics of four years ago, or eight years ago,” said Noah Gordon, who leads the climate program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Though it remains a priority for many young Democrats, the spike in inflation and gasoline prices in the past several years pushed concerns about greenhouse gasses onto the back-burner. And when Democrats have acted on climate change, they haven’t received much credit from voters, many of whom are not even aware of the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act.  “If voters think climate policy is a loser for jobs and the economy, it becomes a losing issue,” said Samantha Gross, who heads energy security and climate research at the Brookings Institution, in an email. “So if you care about the climate, solutions need to speak to voters’ economic concerns, like job creation and maintenance.”  Instead of talking about climate change as its own issue, Democrats have increasingly broken it down into a subset of things that voters do demonstrably care about, like insurance rates, housing, energy prices, and food security. And when they do talk about climate change by name, it’s primarily to highlight how addressing warming can create new economic opportunities. The fact that the US’s largest climate investment in history is called the “Inflation Reduction Act” speaks to this strategy.  “​​When we invest in climate, we create jobs, we lower costs, and we invest in families,” Harris said earlier this year.  The Biden-Harris administration has thus spent the past four years promoting job creation without being too picky about where they’re coming from, including the fossil fuel sector, and using protectionist trade policies to promote domestic energy production.  But this shift in focus is leading to the US deliberately taking some of the cheapest clean energy options, like solar panels and cheap EVs made in China, off of the table, while extending a lifeline to some of the dirtiest sources of energy.  This in turn has a cost for the planet: a slower path to decarbonization for the US, the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter. And that means locking in more warming and all its myriad harms for the world.  Putting jobs first has big political upsides, and some environmental downsides For a long time, climate change was a direct function of economic output. As countries built more cars, roads, buildings, bridges, and farms, they burned more coal, oil, and natural gas, which produce greenhouse gasses that heat up the planet. That’s why early industrializing countries like the US are the biggest historical emitters of carbon dioxide, and why the unprecedented industrial giant that is China is now the world’s biggest current emitter. But as energy efficiency has increased and clean power has taken root, economic output no longer has to be tied to greenhouse gas increases. More than 30 countries (including the US) have severed the connection between emissions and economic growth, meaning they’re generating wealth and prosperity at a higher rate than they’re heating up the planet as they reduce their relative use of fossil fuels.  And increasingly, many countries see a business opportunity in limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Clean technology sectors like solar power, electric vehicles, and batteries have been a major focus in China, contributing $1.6 trillion to its economy and driving 40 percent of its gross domestic product growth last year alone. China now has 80 percent of the world’s solar manufacturing capacity, and its intense investment in the sector has helped drive a precipitous decline in global solar panel prices.  But as China gains momentum, and as its government doubles down on export-driven growth, its cheap products are undercutting efforts in the United States to build up its own clean tech sector. To compete, the US has struck back with tariffs of up to 100 percent on Chinese EVs, 25 percent on EV batteries, and 50 percent on solar cells. Legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act contains additional tax credits for energy projects that require the use of US-made hardware and mandates that grantees buy American products.  These trade hurdles on other countries have helped shield US workers. Jobs in the US clean tech sector grew at more than double the rate of overall employment. However, they impose a cost on consumers and the overall economy, raising the prices for many of the tools required to curb emissions, including blocking some of the cheapest, most popular EVs in the world, which come from China, from US roads.  This is all a clear demonstration that the US government is prioritizing domestic jobs and limiting China’s influence ahead of the most efficient ways to reduce carbon emissions. And these are efforts that have largely drawn support from both parties. Republicans in Congress have even introduced a border-adjustment carbon tax that would add a fee to goods imported from countries deemed to be major greenhouse gas emitters (i.e., China).  But “Buy American” provisions have also created friction with US allies and trading partners like the European Union that want to sell their clean technologies in US markets. These requirements also create more competition for limited supplies of US-made hardware, sometimes leading to delays and raising costs of projects as US factories struggle to compete. And tariffs on China aren’t airtight: Chinese companies are relocating factories for components like batteries to South Korea and Morocco to dodge US regulations.  Such measures may be necessary to build a political coalition to support an energy transition, but they make the overall process slower and more expensive, and they’re difficult to undo. “It becomes hard to roll back tariffs once they’re implemented,” Gordon said.  The Biden administration has also shown that it’s concerned about the political consequences of switching to clean energy too quickly, especially if those actions are viewed as contributing to higher prices. They weakened vehicle pollution rules that were designed to accelerate the shift to EVs. They’ve also continued to push for more oil and gas drilling in the US, even tapping reserves to lower gasoline prices, while also renewing alarm about the US’s energy imports. “We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil,” Harris said at the debate.    Though the Biden administration did pause approvals of new export terminals for liquefied natural gas, US LNG exports are still poised to double by 2030 — and could rise higher depending on who takes the White House next year.  Globally, greenhouse gas emissions are on the cusp of leveling off and could soon begin their decline. But the pace of that drop-off — and America’s influence on it — will shape whether or not the world will meet its climate change goals.  As the US puts up trade barriers to get ahead, the world is falling behind schedule. 

Two quarterback player props to bet ahaed of "Monday Night Football."

Shenker, who hung Delvey's artwork in a listing featured on Owning Manhattan, also dished on her friendship with Chloe Tucker Caine and which celebrity she's working with.

Kiss those night sweats goodbye.

The Dubai International Financial Center is home to thousands of companies from around the world. Some of them have organic connections to the emirate; others are merely taking advantage of the center’s business-friendly rules and regulations around tax, immigration, and labor. A third group of businesses have chosen the DIFC not for the office space, or the taxes, but as a home base for legal disputes alone. In the event of a lawsuit, the DIFC is where they want to have their day in court.That’s because Dubai’s financial center is not governed by Dubai—at least, not in the way most of us understand governance. The enclave is a special economic zone overseen by a board appointed by the city-state’s ruler, with its own bespoke laws drawn up for the benefit of its clients.The DIFC is also a shimmering shopping center with three hotels, luxury apartment towers, high-end restaurants, clothing stores, spas, beauty salons, and art galleries. There’s even a mosque, open 24/7. The 110-acre compound sits in the shadow of the Gate, a gigantic rectangular structure inspired by the Arc de Triomphe. The Gate looks like the Parisian monument—had the French only chosen to commemorate their war dead with millions of gray Legos. But when you walk through it, you enter a microcosm of a world where we may someday all live. This is a world where boundaries are drawn not just around nations but around people and companies and wealth—a world with new kinds of states and new kinds of laws. Dubai is a test case for where they will take us.[From the March 2024 issue: The great Serengeti land grab ]The DIFC’s story began in the early 2000s, when Dubai began opening gated business districts—Media City, with nominally freer speech laws than the rest of the country; Healthcare City; Internet City; and so on. In 2004, the president of the UAE changed its constitution to allow zero-tax, low-regulation “zones” specifically geared toward the exchange not of material goods but of financial assets. With that, the DIFC was born. The essay was adapted from the forthcoming book The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World. In a part of the world that had been losing money to wars and civil unrest, the DIFC promised businesses an oasis of protection and deregulation: a little Switzerland on the Gulf. The center’s tenants—who would come to include Bloomberg, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs—would benefit from such concessions as corporate tax breaks, fully foreign ownership of companies, and expedited immigration procedures for expat workers.But Dubai couldn’t stop there. After all, those who wanted Switzerland already had Switzerland—and Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands, and any number of places that exacted little or nothing in taxes and had long track records of protecting wealth at all costs. So to entice investors further, the DIFC sold them on something new: law.Law is no static thing. It does not sprout from the soil, like a tree. It doesn’t require a particular habitat to thrive, like a bug or a bird. It behaves more like a virus, hopping from place to place, cultivating new hosts and carriers, and mutating along the way.Early on, the DIFC established a start-up court to oversee civil and commercial matters within the special zone. Its laws came mostly from elsewhere. So did its judges, plaintiffs, and defendants. The result was a state within a state within a state, or to borrow from a DIFC publication, an “example of how globalisation is reconfiguring the relationship between legal institutions and political systems in the twenty-first century.”[Read: Trump’s interest vs. America’s, Dubai edition]Legal pluralism—the maintenance of multiple systems of law within a given territory—wasn’t a new concept in Dubai. From the early 19th century until 1971, Dubai and its sister emirates had been British protectorates, with one set of rules for non-Muslim subjects and another for natives and believers. After achieving independence, the new nation-state set out to build a devolved judicial system that allowed each emirate to strike out on its own or abide by federal rules instead.From a judicial standpoint, the UAE had much in common with the federalism of the United States. But no matter the emirate, court hearings were in Arabic and rooted in Islamic jurisprudence as well as civil law. This, the then-ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and his advisers realized, was a problem: To put it crudely, Western lawyers did not want to deal with Muslim courts.Although a free zone with low taxes and minimal red tape was all well and good, Dubai’s rulers understood that foreign firms wanted a familiar legal system in which to settle things such as bankruptcy, data protection, intellectual property, and employment. Grafting on an identically British system would be too close to colonialism for comfort. So they sought another model: a composite jurisdiction, stitched together from regulations borrowed from elsewhere and with judges trained in the laws of the world.To put it all together, the DIFC would need its own Dr. Frankenstein. He came to them by chance, in the form of a blue-eyed Englishman named Mark Beer.I met Beer for breakfast in Manhattan on a spring day in 2022. He came off as game and unpretentious: a dad of five who looks like he could have been a rugby player if he hadn’t ended up working as the registrar of an upstart court very far from home. His career had taken him around the world. After law school in the U.K., Beer trained as a mediator in Singapore and worked for brief stints in Dubai and Switzerland. In 2003, he returned to the Gulf to take a job in Internet City, as an in-house lawyer for Mastercard. For most of his life, he had operated under the conventional wisdom that ever since the world had been organized into a map of decolonized nation-states, laws and lands had been inextricable. The law was about codifying the values of a society and—in the best case—achieving justice. But he began to think of legal systems differently: “not just as a tool for fairness, but as a tool for economic development,” he told me.In 2006, Beer met Nasser Saidi, a Lebanese politician who was then the chief economist of the DIFC. The commercial zone he was pitching to companies wasn’t just a group of high-end buildings; it was, as he put it, a “Vatican of international finance.” Beer was in the business of law, not divinity, but the similarities were striking: What was the DIFC if not a micro-sovereignty devoted to the interests of a group of powerful men serving what they believed was a higher power—in this case, the market?In 2008, Beer became the new court’s first registrar. He understood that the role of the court was to “provide confidence” to businesses, he told me. “I don’t think anyone was that fussed about principles of the rule of law. In order to have confidence, they needed to feel that their promises would be honored. And they wanted to do that in a familiar environment—hence the establishment of that court.” He foresaw the possibility of an independent court not just for the free zone, or for the emirate, but perhaps for the entire world. [Read: An ally held me as a spy–and the US is complicit]The first big cases the court handled, however, were not what anyone had anticipated. Just as the DIFC was finding its feet, the global financial crisis brought Dubai World, the city-state’s equivalent of a sovereign wealth fund, to its knees. Before the crash, Dubai World employed 100,000 people working in real estate, shipping, and logistics spread over some 200 subsidiary companies. It was huge—and now it had almost $60 billion in debts that neither the parent company nor its offspring could repay on time. When the firm’s creditors came knocking, Dubai did something novel: It assembled a team of outside advisers to establish a brand-new insolvency tribunal, to be run by three DIFC judges. In December 2009, the court opened its doors to any of Dubai World’s creditors, regardless of where they conducted their business. The cases were complex, but the tribunal proved that it could be counted on to hear them fairly and impartially.In the process, it broke the territorial seal. All kinds of parties showed up to file claims, including New York City hedge funds and local contractors. “The judges were clearly independent and agnostic as to who owed the money and were quite happy to award damages and costs and all sorts of things against the government,” Beer told me. The DIFC’s courts were now open to all. As of 2011, anyone could opt into the financial center’s judges, laws, and procedures to resolve their disputes. The court was in Dubai—but it could have been anywhere.On the surface, such a court might seem like a nice thing for Dubai to have—a little strange, sure, but befitting a city full of migrants and expatriates. There aren’t any real losers in these trials, because to file a claim in the DIFC is to be, almost by definition, in a position of privilege to begin with. This is not a venue conceived for the overworked Filipina housekeepers, the trafficked Moldovan sex-workers, the injured Bangladeshi laborers on whose backs Dubai has been built.At the same time, Dubai’s legal entrepreneurship reveals something more troubling: that speaking only of a “law of the land” no longer makes much sense. The law itself is the commodity here. The DIFC court thus set a new standard in play. To accommodate the needs of foreign firms, multinationals, and expatriates, countries can go so far as to offer them a separate system of justice.The DIFC has since exported its court-in-a-box to other jurisdictions. In 2008, Saidi proclaimed in a speech that “we have been approached by countries as far away as the Caribbean and Latin America and Korea and Africa to establish DIFC clones.” By last year, independent commercial courts and DIFC-style tribunals, which are both part of and separate from the domestic system, had popped up in Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Benin, Kosovo, Iraq, the Netherlands, France, and Kazakhstan—where Mark Beer led the charge.When it comes to seducing capitalists, Kazakhstan’s defining features—its enduring autocracy, its dependence on oil exports, its tendency toward graft, that goddamn Borat movie—might seem like disadvantages. Who would want to open a company in such a place? It turns out that there are perks to doing business in a state with such a lousy reputation.In 2016, Beer was appointed to an advisory body called the International Council of the Supreme Court of Kazakhstan, whose purpose was to modernize and internationalize the country’s domestic courts. Two years later, the Astana International Financial Center was launched, combining an arbitration center (in which disputes are mostly privately resolved) and a DIFC-style tribunal.Beer was bullish on the tribunal. He wrote celebratory columns for the local English-language newspaper and made cameos in press releases and videos. In June 2020, he wrote a report for the Council of Europe praising the success of Kazakhstan’s judicial reforms. “Objectively, no other judiciary has endeavored to achieve so much reform at such an accelerated pace,” he wrote.All the while, Kazakhstan was battling a series of high-level corruption cases and experiencing unprecedented popular unrest over graft and inequality. Billions of profits from extracting uranium, titanium, gold, copper, and, of course, oil had been hoarded by oligarchs who stashed most of their wealth in foreign property holdings and offshore accounts.[From the January 1967 issue: The eagles of Kazakhstan]Beer has described his mission in Kazakhstan as an effort to increase the low levels of trust that foreigners would (understandably!) have in the country’s judicial and political systems. But however well the new court works, it won’t necessarily do ordinary citizens much good. At worst, it will end up helping an undemocratic regime make more money and launder its reputation by attracting fancy international businesses, without doing anything to improve economic inequality, social justice, or human rights.When I confronted Beer with this objection, he invoked the response of Sir Anthony Evans—the chief justice of the DIFC—when he was fielding a controversy about Dubai’s treatment of migrant workers. Beer said, “His answer, which I thought was brilliant, was: I must be doing what I do to improve the system. People have access to a system they didn’t have access to before. If the court is credible and independent, it must be making a positive contribution.” Beer pointed out that the idea of a female judge was for a long time sacrilegious in the UAE. But after the DIFC appointed one and “the sun continued to rise the next day,” the “onshore” system decided to appoint female judges too.In fact, Beer has been succeeded in his post at the DIFC by a woman: Amna Al Owais, a vivacious young Emirati lawyer from Dubai. Under Al Owais’s leadership, the court has kept expanding, adding clients, cases, and divisions. It’s also been conscious not to overshadow the original courts of Dubai. Even in Dubai, whose ruler invited the court in, replacing a homegrown legal system with borrowed law and rented judges on quasi-extraterritorial ground remains controversial. To help maintain the fragile balance between the national and the global, authorities have created yet another court, staffed with a mix of local and foreign judges, to decide which court has jurisdiction in contested scenarios.But when I visited the DIFC in late 2021, I discovered a more literal display of power. Near the main entrance stood a glass case, and inside it, the clay handprint of Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, alongside those of his six children. The artifacts seemed a crude attempt at conveying an important point: that no matter where its laws and litigants and judges had come from, this cathedral of high finance was still very much a part of Rome.In the years since leaving Dubai, Mark Beer has found an additional venue for his ideas and ambitions, one as far from the Gulf, the Steppe, and his home in Oxford as you can get.Beer’s latest preoccupation is with the laws of outer space: an arena with no nations, no territory, and no people. In a sense, space is the ultimate free zone—an extraterrestrial DIFC, offshore even from offshore. Of course it needs laws. And who better to serve as their keeper than Mark Beer?Beer told me he got curious about space when he met the owner of a satellite company at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2017. Shortly thereafter, Beer nominated himself to become the justice minister of Asgardia: the world’s first space-based nation, whose “landmass” was briefly a server on a satellite orbiting the Earth, whose “population” communicates predominantly on a blog platform, and whose “laws” are decided by the community.[Listen: Our strange new era of space travel]I had signed up to be a citizen of Asgardia too, long before I met Beer. Like him, I wanted to understand what it might mean to have a jurisdiction without a nation or a territory. But I let my membership lapse because the citizenship fees—$110 a year—began to add up. Beer, by contrast, persisted, as one of a handful of officials who is “not a Trekkie,” as he puts it. (He’s not in it for the money: The position is unpaid. In the meantime, he also mounted a run for Oxford City Council, in 2022, as a Conservative, but lost that race.)“Like in Dubai, I want to do more, and perhaps I’m pushing harder than I ought to,” he told me. “But we’ll soon launch the formation of companies in Asgardia, and I think that gives a whole new dimension and platform to talk about economic zones outside any territorial jurisdiction.”For the time being, Asgardia is cosplay: a thought experiment for those of us who like to imagine a world beyond our own, whether it’s for fun or out of despair, or even, perhaps, in the hopes of striking it rich (asteroid mining, anyone?). “It’s a bit like the pioneers of the internet,” Beer told me. “We thought they were crackpots too.”As we finished our breakfast, it occurred to me that Beer was either light-years ahead of most political thinkers when it came to predicting the silhouette of state sovereignty 10, 20, 50 years from now—or he was on a different planet. And just maybe, these things were not opposed, but one and the same.The essay was adapted from the forthcoming book The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World.

Businessman Guillermo Sohnlein founded Titan owner OceanGate with Stockton Rush, who was among the five people who died when the submersible imploded in June 2023.

Nadya Suleman announced that one of her sons welcomed a baby girl, making her a first-time grandma.

Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott had a message after the team's three-point loss to the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday evening.

New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi allegedly "bombarded" Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for months with "increasingly pornographic" messages that the former presidential hopeful found difficult to resist, his friend has claimed.

"This includes scrutiny of their bank accounts both in Iran and abroad, as well as their travel history and that of their families."

Pop singer Janet Jackson, sister of Michael Jackson, issued her comments about the vice president's race during a wide-ranging interview with The Guardian on Saturday. The post Janet Jackson Says Kamala Harris Is ‘Not Black’: ‘That’s What I Heard. That She’s Indian’ appeared first on Breitbart.