Rick Gates, the prosecution’s star witness in the federal fraud trial of Paul Manafort, testified Tuesday that he once had an extramarital affair that involved maintaining a London apartment.
The topic came up as Kevin Downing, Manafort’s attorney, tried to paint Gates as self-motived and untrustworthy by hammering away at his admitted practice of filing doctored expense reports.
Downing asked about “the secret life of Rick Gates,” inquiring whether Gates had kept an apartment in London and if he had engaged in an extramarital relationship there.
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Rick Gates, a former campaign aide to President Donald Trump, departs federal court in Washington in December 2017.Joshua Roberts / Reuters file
PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, one of the most prominent women to lead a Fortune 500 company, will step down on October 3.
She will remain as chairwoman of the board of directors until early 2019. Nooyi, 62, will be replaced by Pepsi’s (PEP) global operations chief Ramon Laguarta, 54.
Nooyi, who was born in India, is one of a handful of people of color to lead a Fortune 500 company.
She helped turn Pepsi into one of the most successful food and beverage companies in the world. Sales grew 80% during her 12-year tenure. She spearheaded Pepsi’s transition to a greener, more environmentally aware company.
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The number of female Fortune 500 CEOs is shrinking
About 20,000 people have lost their homes and many moved to unaffected areas of the Indonesian island of Lombok after a powerful 6.9 magnitude earthquake left nearly 100 people dead.
Boats were sent to evacuate about 2,000 tourists from the nearby Gili islands.
Witnesses spoke of chaos and terror during Sunday’s quake, with thousands of buildings damaged, and power and communication lines cut.
Aid agencies said the priority was to provide shelter for residents.
Many are said to be too scared to return to their homes.
The agencies said the impact was far bigger than another quake that hit Lombok last week, killing 16 people.
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Image caption Moment the quake struck caught on camera
In a plot that could have come out of a heist movie, two men on Tuesday raided a Swedish cathedral and stole a set of 17th-century crown jewels, before fleeing the crime scene on a speedboat, according to police and Swedish news outlets.
The heist, in which the suspects took two crowns and a golden orb, happened around noon local time on Tuesday, at the Strängnäs Cathedral, located west of Sweden’s capital of Stockholm.
The crowns once belonged to King Karl IX and Queen Kristina, whose jewels are on display at the cathedral. The items had been displayed in a locked case equipped with an alarm, cathedral officials said in a statement.
The Crozet islands is located halfway between the southern tip of Africa and Antarctica. One of the islands in the archipelago, named Île aux Cochons, is home to the largest colony of king penguins on earth. The king penguin is the second largest penguin species on earth after the emperor penguin. The last time scientists counted the population there was an estimated population of 2,000,000 of the 3 foot tall highly specialized birds. Reviewing satellite images and other photographic evidence, Antarctic scientists report that the colony has collapsed to a population of only 200,000. This is significant because the Île aux Cochons represents one third of the earth’s King Penguin population. These birds do not make a nest on the treeless island, instead they “lay one egg at a time and carry it around on their feet covered with a flap of abdominal skin, called a brood patch”.
The University of Vienna describes the conditions on which this particular penguin requires for survival. Hint, they are not flexible.
King penguins are in fact picky animals: in order to form a colony where they can mate, lay eggs and rear chicks over a year, they need tolerable temperature all year round, no winter sea ice around the island, and smooth beach of sand or pebbles. But, above all, they need an abundant and reliable source of food close by to feed their chicks. For millennia, this seabird has relied on the Antarctic Polar Front, an upwelling front in the Southern Ocean concentrating enormous amounts of fish on a relatively small area. Yet, due to climate change, this area is drifting south, away from the islands where most King penguins currently live. Parents are then forced to swim farther to find food, while their progeny is waiting, fasting longer and longer on the shore. This study predicts that, for most colonies, the length of the parents’ trips to get food will soon exceed the resistance to starvation of their offspring, leading to massive King penguin crashes in population size, or, hopefully, relocation.
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A huge colony of king penguins on the Île aux Cochons in 1982
The giant antenna rises from the desert floor like an apparition, a gleaming metal tower jutting 16 stories above an endless wind-whipped stretch of Patagonia.
The 450-ton device, with its hulking dish embracing the open skies, is the centerpiece of a $50 million satellite and space mission control station built by the Chinese military.
The isolated base is one of the most striking symbols of Beijing’s long push to transform Latin America and shape its future for generations to come — often in ways that directly undermine the United States’ political, economic and strategic power in the region.
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Our correspondent went to the deserts of Patagonia to examine how China secured its new base, a symbol of its growing clout in the region.
Rachael Pomerleau, 40, had taken opioids before, having had procedures like wisdom teeth removal and gallbladder surgery.
But during the tumultuous two years that her children, now ages 7 and 8, were born, opioids took over her life, she told HuffPost. She was put on bed rest as a result of complications with the pregnancy of her daughter. A few months after her daughter’s birth, she became pregnant with her son. This time, her back and abdominal pain grew so severe that doctors prescribed Vicodin followed by Percocet during her pregnancy ― which wasn’t an unusual prescription for pregnant women at the time, prior to the onset of the opioid epidemic.
“It hurt so bad,” she said. “There were times when I could hardly walk without being in pain.”
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Erin Schumaker/HuffPost
Rachael Pomerleau, 40, was prescribed opioids in a medical setting. Her years of addiction have included homelessness, loss of custody of her children and struggles to get the resources she needs.
A new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open underscores an often overlooked factor in gun-policy debates: When it comes to lethality, not all guns are created equal.
Analyzing data on hundreds of shootings in Boston from 2010 to 2014, Anthony Braga of Northeastern University and Philip J. Cook of Duke University found that on a bullet-per-bullet basis, shootings committed with a large-caliber firearm are much more likely to result in a fatality than those with a smaller-caliber gun. Caliber is a measure of the diameter of the bullets fired by a particular gun.
The study analyzed data on 221 gun homicides and 1,012 nonfatal shootings that happened in Boston between 2010 and 2014. On first glance, the numbers provided a confirmation of the depressing demographics of shooting cases: “Most gunshot victims and survivors were young minority men with prior court arraignments,” Braga and Cook found. “Most attacks occurred in circumstances where gangs or drugs played an important role.” Most occurred outdoors in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
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Handguns for sale at a store in Greeley, Pa., on April 26. (Bryan Anselm/Redux for The Washington Post)
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
The number of female Fortune 500 CEOs is shrinking
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Our correspondent went to the deserts of Patagonia to examine how China secured its new base, a symbol of its growing clout in the region.
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James' World 2 