Trix are for kids!
NYT: Republican Election Clerk Takes on Trump and His Supporters
“Name of public officer for whom recall is sought: Cindy Elgan.”
“Reasons why: Cindy Elgan has run interference in our elections.”
It was an outcome she’d feared for the last three and a half years, ever since former President Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 election, and his denials and distortions spread outward from the White House to even the country’s most remote places, like Esmeralda County. It had neither a stoplight nor a high school, and Elgan knew most of the 620 voters on sight. Trump won the county with 82 percent of the vote despite losing Nevada. In the days after the election, some residents began to suspect that he should have won by even more, and they parroted Trump’s talking points and brought their complaints to the county’s monthly commissioner meetings.
Globe: Andrew Coyne: Eighteen years and $46-billion later, the CPP admits it could have earned more just by buying index funds
The Canada Pension Plan Fund had a bad year last year. You’d never know it to read the latest annual report from the fund’s managers, the CPP Investment Board, which spends much of its nearly 80,000 words boasting how, thanks to the herculean efforts of its employees and the sophisticated investment stratagems of its managers, it eked out an 8-per-cent return on investment for the CPP’s beneficiaries.
But of course it did: asset markets generally were up wildly last year. As an investment manager, you’d have to have gone pretty far out of your way not to have earned a sizable return. Indeed, the fund’s benchmark “reference portfolio,” a composite of global equity and bond indexes, gained 19.9 per cent on the year.
What does that mean? It means that if the fund’s managers had stopped trying to pick stocks and just bought index-linked ETFs like the rest of us — a strategy, known as passive management, that could be executed by your average high-school student — they would have earned more than twice as much on their investments last year as they in fact did.
That’s not the news, however. The news is not that the fund trailed its benchmark in its most recent fiscal year. The news is that it is now trailing it, on average, over the entire 18-year period since the fund, until then a small, low-cost outfit that mostly just bought the indexes, went all in on active management.
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The fund’s staffing levels, consequently, exploded: from roughly 150 employees in 2006 to more than 2,100 today. So did its costs, particularly the fees paid to external investment managers: from $36-million in 2006 to $3.5-billion in 2024, a near hundredfold increase.
The Conversation: Records of Pompeii’s survivors have been found – and archaeologists are starting to understand how they rebuilt their lives
But recent research has shifted the narrative. The story of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius is no longer one about annihilation; it also includes the stories of those who survived the eruption and went on to rebuild their lives.
The search for survivors and their stories has dominated the past decade of my archaeological fieldwork, as I’ve tried to figure out who might have escaped the eruption. Some of my findings are featured in an episode of the new PBS documentary, “Pompeii: The New Dig.”
Daniel Ricciardo answered criticism from retired Formula 1 champion Jacques Villeneuve by qualifying fifth for the Canadian Grand Prix on Sunday morning, AEST.
Villeneuve, the 1997 champion now working as a television pundit, had questioned on Sky Sports why the 34-year-old Australian was still in Formula 1.
“We’re hearing the same thing for the last five years. ‘We have to make the car better for him, poor him’. No. You’re in F1. If you can’t cut it, go home. There’ll be someone else to take your place,” the Canadian previously said.
“I think his image has kept him in F1 more than his actual results.”
Daniel Ricciardo answered criticism from retired Formula 1 champion Jacques Villeneuve by qualifying fifth for the Canadian Grand Prix on Sunday morning, AEST.
Villeneuve, the 1997 champion now working as a television pundit, had questioned on Sky Sports why the 34-year-old Australian was still in Formula 1.
“We’re hearing the same thing for the last five years. ‘We have to make the car better for him, poor him’. No. You’re in F1. If you can’t cut it, go home. There’ll be someone else to take your place,” the Canadian previously said.
“I think his image has kept him in F1 more than his actual results.”
NewsNation: Aid is delivered to Gaza from newly repaired US-built pier, US military says
The first aid from an American-built pier arrived in Gaza on Saturday since storm damage required repairs to the project, the U.S. military said, relaunching an effort to bring supplies to Palestinians by sea that had been plagued with problems.
About 1.1 million pounds (492 metric tons) of humanitarian aid was delivered to Gaza through the pier on Saturday, U.S. Central Command said in a statement. It reiterated that no U.S. military personnel went ashore in Gaza. The U.S. Agency for International Development works with the U.N. World Food Program and their humanitarian partners in Gaza to distribute food and other aid coming from the U.S.-operated pier.
Last Updated: 08.Jun.2024 23:28 EDT
