Month: September 2017

Multiple People Injured After Van Slams Into Pedestrians Near Penn Station

A van jumped a curb and hit at least three people near Penn Station, police said. According to NBC, the vehicle jumped the curb near West 31st Street and Seventh Avenue at about 5:30 p.m., according to authorities.

None of the people who were hit sustained serious injuries, according to police. A photo shows fireman standing around one of the injured in the incident.

The van remained at the scene; it remains unclear if the collision was accidental or premeditated.

Roadways around the busy transit hub are blocked off by fire and police vehicles, and both motorists and pedestrians should avoid the area.

Developing story

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Tesla Bribes: Would $65,000 Be Enough To Sway Your Review A New Car? Ask These Guys…

Conflicts of interest exist in almost every business model…just ask the former AIG execs who bought trillions of dollars worth of mortgage CDO risk that they were told was worthy of a AAA rating.

But when you read a car review to help figure out which set of wheels you’re going to buy next, you would probably prefer that the writer of that review not be receiving payments, cash or otherwise, directly from the company producing the vehicle he’s reviewing, right?  Unfortunately, that’s not so much the case when it comes to Tesla.

While it’s no surprise that the writers of Electrek are big Tesla cheerleaders, as Jack Baruth of TTAC points out today, what may be surprising is just how much those writers receive from Tesla via their very generous referral program in return for their perpetually rosy commentary.

Take the work of Fred Lambert, for example…at the bottom of each article penned by Lambert he generously offers you the opportunity to use his Tesla “referral code” to get $1,000 off a Tesla Model S or X…

Lambert

And while we’re sure the referral discount is simply intended as a nice gesture to readers, it gets a lot more interesting when you realize exactly what those referrals are worth.  As Baruth notes, a mere 4 referrals can be worth nearly $15,000 of free Tesla swag. 

Referrals one and two are worth at least $500 each. Referral three is worth between four and seven thousand dollars on the resale market. Referral four is worth $7,200. That’s if you refer new Tesla cars. Referring new Tesla solar will get you $400 in cash, or $750 in credit, per referral.

Tesla

Meanwhile, Electrek writer Jameson Dow has over 20 referrals which TTAC estimates could be worth roughly $60,000.

Electrek’s Jameson Dow has twenty referrals. Depending on when he made them, and the conditions of each program, we could be talking about more than sixty thousand dollars in items that can be easily resold for cash. Fred Lambert has six referrals, for a total of ten grand or more. This is all direct from Tesla. We’re not talking the kind of paid vacations against which this site has traditionally railed, nor are we talking about freebies like Jonny Lieberman’s no-cost year in a $65,000 Cadillac station wagon. We’re talking cold hard cash possibilities.

J

And while you might think that the public revelation of these very clear conflicts of interest might be met with some level of embarrassment and remorse, when called out on Twitter, Electrek write Fred Lambert doubled down by calling his accusers a bunch of “jealous hypocrites.”

Tweets

So what say you…outrageous scandal that should be halted immediately or just a bunch of “jealous hypocrites” looking to “criminalize behavior that is normal?”

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With Bombardier Tariffs, Trump Continues His Protectionist Mania

Bombardier C-Series PlaneIf there is one thing Donald Trump likes more than NFL players standing for the national anthem, it is shafting American consumers with protectionist trade tariffs.

On Tuesday, the Commerce Department slapped a whopping 220 percent tariff on Canadian jet-maker Bombardier, reportedly tripling the price of its C-Series jets from $19 million to $61 million.

The tariff is a win for Bombardier competitor Boeing, which had accused the company of benefiting from unfair subsidies granted by the Canadian and British governments.

That argument is bit rich coming from a company that has received tax breaks from the state of Washington, subsidized sales from the Import-Export Bank, and billions in lucrative contracts from the Department of Defense.

Nevertheless, it was an argument Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross found convincing, saying in a statement that Canada must “play by the rules” and that “the subsidization of goods by foreign governments is something that the Trump Administration takes very seriously.”

Indeed, it does.

Trump entered office with an explicitly protectionist platform, promising to “to stop the dumping and stop all of these wonderful other countries from coming in and killing our companies and our workers.”

In late April, the president commissioned an anti-dumping investigation of imported steel.

A few days later, Trump hit Canadian softwood lumber producers with duties averaging 20 percent, claiming that the Canadian government was charging artificially low “stumpage fees” to timber companies logging on government land.

Last week, the U.S International Trade Commission sided with domestic solar companies complaining the subsidies it gets from American taxpayers are insufficient to keep it competitive with even more subsidized Chinese manufacturers. Tariffs on those Chinese panels are now in the works.

Protectionism as a means of fighting protectionism is not new, and is one of the rare instances where tariffs are permitted under international trade law.

It also strikes many voters and politicians, even those not inherently hostile to free trade, as way of ensuring fairness and leveling the playing field. If other countries’ companies are getting an unfair advantage, so should ours!

This is an understandable attitude, but it’s still wrong.

There are often powerful domestic incentives for governments to provide corporate subsidies. Anti-dumping duties are unlikely to get them to change their ways. Canada’s timber industry and its provincial governments, for example, benefit from their long-standing stumpage fee arrangement, and have stubbornly refused to change it, despite on-again, off-again trade wars stretching back to the mid-80’s.

The same can be said for the government largesse Bombardier is accused of receiving. In 2015, the provincial government of Quebec gave the company a $1 billion bailout to keep its flagship manufacturer up and running. Likewise, the British loaned $149 million to Bombardier as a way of keeping manufacturing jobs at its plant in economically-depressed Belfast.

Governments are often happy to bailout flagship industrial companies to protect jobs, and national pride. Last I checked, the United States government was not above doing this, too. So anti-dumping tariffs don’t lead to more fairness, they just lead to more tariffs. And it’s consumers who end up paying those tariffs, not foreign companies.

The tariffs Trump slapped on Canadian lumber have driven up the cost of new homes in the U.S., and making more expensive the repairs after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

And to top it all, the countries doing the subsidizing are not getting a great deal.

“Academic literature is pretty clear that export subsides are not good for the economy,” says Veronique de Rugy, a senior researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center (and frequent Reason contributor). While a specific industry might benefit from them, they are ultimately a net cost to foreign countries and their taxpayers, she says. “If other countries want to sabotage their economy,” de Rugy says, “let them.”

If Trump really cared about protecting American jobs, he’d scale back the export subsidies the government currently gives to American exporters, not double down on counter-productive protectionism that leaves everybody poorer.

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Trump’s Whitewashed New Travel Ban: New at Reason

Donald Trump has whitewashed – so to speak – his new Muslim travel ban so that it does not look like a Muslim travel ban by throwing North Refugee kidsKorea and Venezuela on the list of banned countries. This will allow his to settle his personal vendetta with these two countries while making the legal challenges to the ban easier to withstand.

That may be clever politics, notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia, but will it Make America Safe Again?

Not one iota.

View this article.

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“I Thought I Was Middle-Class?”

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“The best way to teach your kids about taxes is by eating 30% of their ice cream.” – Bill Murray

When I saw that slimy tentacle of the Goldman Sachs vampire squid, Gary Cohn, bloviating about Trump’s tax plan and how it was going to do wonders for the middle class, I knew I was probably going to get screwed again. And after perusing the outline of their plan, it is certain I will be getting it up the ass once again from my beloved government.

I know everyone’s tax situation is different, but I’m just a hard working middle aged white man with two kids in college and some hefty family medical expenses.

I’m already clobbered with Federal, State, City, and real estate taxes, along with huge toll taxes, sales taxes, gasoline taxes, utility taxes, phone taxes and probably a hundred more hidden taxes and fees.

I fucking hate taxes and want nothing more than to see them cut dramatically. I voted for Trump for the following reasons:

  1. He wasn’t that evil hateful shrew named Hillary Clinton
  2. He promised to repeal and replace Obamacare
  3. He promised to build the wall
  4. He promised to keep out Muslims
  5. He promised to reduce our military interventions around the world
  6. He promised to reduce my taxes

Well, one out of six ain’t bad. Right?

I know the Trump sycophants have a million reasons why he has been thwarted, but his pathetic support of the last GOP Obamacare lite bill reveals him to becoming just another establishment pawn. He has taken war mongering on behalf of the military industrial complex to a new level. No wall on the horizon. Now it is a figurative wall. And now he is disingenuously selling this tax bill as a huge windfall for the middle class, which is a lie based on my analysis of the known details. The truth is they need to screw the upper middle class in order to reduce corporate tax rates.

You hear the talking head “experts”, paid for by corporations, spinning a yarn about the 35% corporate tax rate and how it makes our corporations terribly disadvantaged. The truth is corporate lobbyists (I don’t have a white working man middle class lobbyist working for me) have bribed Congress to insert so many exemptions, deductions, credits, and loopholes into the tax code, the big corporations pay an effective tax rate of 19% already. If overly burdensome corporate taxes were really a problem, would corporations be generating record after-tax profits while GDP grows at a pitiful 2% rate?

I don’t know how many people are in my boat, but I’m guessing it is a large portion of the middle class.

We already know about 50% of the households in the U.S. don’t pay any Federal Income Tax. Some even get refunds for not working. That’s why there are tax preparation offices all over West Philly and other urban welfare enclaves around the country. Here are the tax brackets for a married middle class family:

Most middle class families see the majority of their income taxed between the 10% and 15% rate, with upper middle class families having a portion taxed at 25%. A family with taxable income of $100,000 would have a tax bill of about $16,500, for an effective rate of 16.5%.

Trump’s plan has three rates: 12%, 25%, 35%. The weasels do not give the income level cut-offs. But we do know they are proposing elimination of the $4,050 personal exemption and the deduction for state and local taxes. They increase the standard deduction from $12,700 to $24,000. The idea is to keep people confused until the 2,000 page bill gets passed in the middle of the night after corporate lobbyists insert their goodies. In my situation, it is certain I will be getting screwed.

My family of four will lose $16,200 of personal exemptions versus gaining $11,300 in the standard deduction. Where I’m really getting screwed is losing the state and local tax deduction. The only single benefit to me working in this godforsaken hell hole called Philadelphia is I get to deduct the massive tax shakedown amount on my tax return. My PA, Phila, and real estate tax bill is huge. It’s far more than my mortgage deduction. And Trump is taking it away.

I’d be in favor of taking all deductions, exemptions, credits, and corporate loopholes away. But that’s not how it works. Corporations and Trump billionaire cronies will add loopholes and goodies into the bill, while people like me get fucked again. By replacing the 10% and 15% tax rate with 12% and 25%, the average middle class family will get screwed.

In the previous example of a family making $100,000, with a significant state and local tax deduction, the $16,500 annual tax bill will likely go up dramatically. Even if they taxed the first $50,000 (a big if) at 12%, their annual tax bill would go up to $18,500, a 12% increase. If that 12% bracket cutoff is lower, then the tax bill will soar. There isn’t a reasonable scenario where a home owning middle class family of four doesn’t pay more taxes under the Trump proposal.

Don’t believe what you hear on TV from paid for propagandists. You are going to get screwed so corporate fat cats can boost their profits even more.

If they reinvest those profits, it will be in robots and technology to eliminate the jobs they haven’t shipped overseas. Oh. By the way, where are those tariffs against China, Mexico and the rest of the world to bring back our jobs? Trump is a phony and his tax plan sucks. Remember, up until 1913 citizens didn’t pay a dime in personal income taxes and the industrial revolution still happened and the country grew like a weed.

“One thing is clear: The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens would pay nearly half of everything they earn to the government.” ? Ron Paul

 

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U. of Colorado Says No Thanks to Betsy DeVos and Her Tougher Sexual Assault Investigation Standards: New at Reason

This whole miscarriage of justice on campus when it comes to Title IX is overblown, one Colorado professor says.

Lindsay Marchello writes:

It looks like the University of Colorado has no intention of following U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ lead on changing the way it investigates allegations of sexual assault.

DeVos rescinded Obama-era Title IX guidelines on September 22, encouraging schools to return to a higher, “clear and convincing,” standard for weighing evidence in such cases, rather than a “preponderance of the evidence.”

When she announced her plans to review and replace those guidelines two weeks earlier, the university declared it would stick with the recommendations set forth in the so-called “Dear Colleague” letter issued in 2011 by the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education of the Obama administration.

The university doesn’t appear convinced by stories of Title IX investigators throwing due process to the wind in campus kangaroo courts.

View this article.

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How a Blue Butterfly Stamp Brought Down One of the Dark Web’s Biggest Marijuana Vendors

Go to any U.S. Post Office and you’ll see a poster that tells USPS employees how to identify a suspicious and potentially dangerous package. Which means if your package looks like the one below, the odds of it being intercepted and inspected increase dramatically.

Those screening guidelines are meant to intercept packages containing poisons and explosive devices. But as the Justice Department continues to indict suspected drug vendors operating on the AlphaBay and Hansa markets, some new, unpublicized screening tactics are coming to light. The Justice Department built its case against Michael Farber–who allegedly sold nearly $7 million worth of illicit drugs (mostly marijuana) on The Silk Road, Pandora and AlphaBay cryptomarkets under the user names purefiremeds and humboldtfarms—using USPS surveillance.

According to an affidavit filed last month in the Eastern District of California, the postal trail started with a raid on a drug lab in Boston, where agents uncovered several USPS Express Mail shipping labels addressed to Farber. All of these labels used the “waiver of signature” option. According to the affidavit’s author, Homeland Security Investigation’s Special Agent Matthew Larsen, Express Mail and waiver of signature are both drug-dealing giveaways:

Using data from The Silk Road’s server, as well as information provided by an unlicensed bitcoin-for-cash exchanger, Larsen’s team was able to tie Farber to a defunct dark web account called purefiremeds, which operated on The Silk Road. Scouring reddit threads—where users frequently post public reviews of vendors—led them to believe the person or persons behind purefiremeds was also running humboldtfarms, a vendor on the AlphaBay site that the DOJ shut down in July. So, federal agents set up a controlled buy on AlphaBay, purchasing “7g Cali Orange Krush Grade A++ Weed,” translated as a quarter ounce, from humboldtfarms. The package was intercepted by a postal worker in Fresno, where investigators picked it up. As is often the case with dark web vendors, the package had a fake return address.

This is where it gets really interesting. Nothing about the controlled buy package tied it to Farber. But the parcel did contain some unique qualities: Regular stamps.

“The more common method” for shipping a large volume of packages, according to the criminal complaint, would be digitally printed stamps containing tracking information. Whoever operated Humboldtfarms preferred to use the kinds of stamps one might put on a birthday card. So, in March 2017, Larsen’s team asked Postal Inspector Lyndon Versoza to have USPS staff at Verdugo Viejo Post Office in Gendale, Calif., alert him if they received a large number of packages with the same two stamps. Lo and behold, just such a delivery arrived a week later:

Over the course of several months, the USPS documented the return addresses used for the packages—all of them either fake addresses or fake businesses at real addresses—and documented who dropped them off using surveillance footage. After verifying that each batch of packages contained at least one or two shipments of marijuana, Versoza had police stop the men who dropped them off so that they could be identified (but not arrested).

All told, several people allegedly working with humboldtfarms bought thousands of dollars worth of the Gardens and Butterfly stamps from nearby USPS facilities in California, paying for them in cash:

Eventually, Larsen’s team was able to tie together the alleged actors behind humboldtfarms by matching security footage from post office locations with Farber’s friends on social media; they also used a GPS tracker on one suspect’s car, looked at IRS records, compared public PGP keys, and turned a bitcoin exchanger into a C.I. Five people are now facing charges in the Eastern District of California, which is a hotbed of dark web prosecutions.

As with street level drug prosecutions, the dark web cases coming to light are generally built using the same tactics: One person in the supply chain gets caught due to an operational security issue and turns confidential informant to lessen their punishment.

This leads investigators to a new group of suspects and new operational security flaws. In the humboldtfarms case, it was stamps and the recycling of a PGP key. But I’ve seen cases where a vendor tried to trademark his dark web handle, another who chose an easily crackable password, and another who tied his dark web account to his personal, public email account.

The reddit angle is also pretty damning, suggesting the trust system used by dark web customers—naming and shaming vendors—actually helps law enforcement identify people who’ve switch user handles to evade identification.

All of which is to say whatever tech advantages dark web users had in the early days of The Silk Road are now gone. The Justice Department not only has three captured servers with six years of user and transaction data, it knows how the game is played.

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Let’s Take Politics Out of Sports: New at Reason

People sympathetic to Donald Trump’s condemnation of NFL players who “take a knee” during the national anthem lament the kneeling because, they say, football of all things should not be “politicized.” Their mistake is in thinking that the players initiated the politicization, Sheldon Richman writes.

But football, like other professional sports and public spectacles, first politicized their events by displaying the flag, playing the national anthem, and lauding the military.

By all means, let’s take politics out of sports and other public events, writes Richman. That means no flags, no anthem, and no military. Rid private functions of all symbols of the church-state. Then play ball.

View this article.

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Even The Cheapest Obamacare Plans Are “Unaffordable” In 94% Of American Cities, New Study Finds

We’ve frequently warned that Obamacare is locked in an inescapable death spiral that will result in its inevitable failure.  The problem is that the folks who make too much to qualify for subsidies (currently defined as roughly $80,000 for a family of 3) are increasingly being priced out of the market for individual insurance by Obamacare’s 30%+ price hikes that consistently come year after year.  Meanwhile, those “rich” families making $80,000 a year are the ones expected to overpay for their health insurance so that a portion of their premiums can be “spread around a little bit” (as Obama likes to say) to subsidize the premiums of others.  Of course, it’s easy to see the circularity here as higher premiums equals less “full-paying” customers and less subsidies equals higher premiums…until the whole system collapses.  

Luckily you no longer have to take our word for it as eHealth.com has just published a new study that finds that, even by Obamacare’s own definition of “affordability”, residents in 47 out of 50 cities surveyed can’t afford the cheapest Obamacare plan.

According to a study released today by eHealth, Inc., which operates eHealth.com, the average family of three earning slightly too much to qualify for subsidies in 2018 would need to increase its household income by nearly $29,000 before health insurance became “affordable” based on Obamacare criteria.

 

The Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare) considers health insurance to be “unaffordable” when annual premiums for the lowest-priced plan in a market cost more than 8.16% of a household’s modified adjusted gross income (or MAGI). When health insurance is unaffordable by this standard, individuals and families may qualify for an exemption from Obamacare’s individual mandate to buy health insurance.

 

“Coverage under the Affordable Care Act is becoming seriously unaffordable for many families, even by Obamacare’s own rules,” said eHealth CEO Scott Flanders. “I find it hard to believe that the framers of the law ever intended the cost of family health insurance to rival that of a second mortgage. Without the introduction of lower-cost options into the market or expanded government subsidies, many middle-income Americans are in danger of being priced out of the health insurance market entirely.”

Meanwhile, if anything, the study conducted by eHealth was somewhat conservative as it only assumed a 10% premium increase in 2018.

In preparing its analysis, eHealth reviewed the lowest-price 2017 plan available for families of three comprised of two adults age 35 and one child. The same family model was analyzed using data from Healthcare.gov in 40 cities, data from eHealth.com in 9 cities not utilizing Healthcare.gov, and data from the New York state exchange for New York City.

 

After applying a relatively modest annual rate increase of 10% to 2017 rates to project 2018 rates, eHealth discovered the following:

 

  • In 47 of 50 cities surveyed, the lowest-priced plan would be officially unaffordable under Obamacare affordability standards for families earning 401% of the federal poverty level (about $82,000 per year in the contiguous US, making them ineligible for Obamacare subsidies).

 

  • Among these, the average three-person household would need to earn an additional $28,939 per year before the lowest-cost plan becomes affordable according to Obamacare rules.

To put eHealth’s findings in perspective, a family of 3 in Charlotte, NC, with an annual income of $81,884, would have to spend 18% of their gross income in 2018 just to purchase the cheapest Obamacare plan for their family.  On a post-tax basis, that expenditure would be well over 20%.  Moreover, as eHealth points out, that family of 3 would have to find a way to make an extra $102,245 per year to meet the “affordability” test included in the Obamacare legislation.

Here’s how other cities compared on Obamacare “affordability”:

Obamacare

Sure, Obamacare is working just fine and should be left alone…

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Tom Price Resigns As HHS Secretary Amid Private Jet Scandal

As part of the growing private jet (ab)use scandal that has recently rocked the Trump administration, on Friday afternoon the White House announced that Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price offered his resignation and President Trump has accepted, according to the Press Sec. office.

Full White House statment below:

Statement from the Press Secretary

 

Secretary of Health and Human Services Thomas Price offered his resignation earlier today and the President accepted. The President intends to designate Don J. Wright of Virginia to serve as Acting Secretary, effective at 11:59 p.m. on September 29, 2017. Mr. Wright currently serves as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health and Director of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

The resignation follows a Politico report according to which Tim Price took military jets to Europe, Asia for over $500K. In addition to all of the more than two dozen private and chartered jets Price has taken since May, the pricetag had risen north of $1 million taxpayer dollars, according to calculations made by Politico.

Trump had previously left open the question of Price’s future employment. “I was looking into it and I will look into it,” he told reporters earlier this week. “I will tell you personally, I’m not happy about it. I am not happy about it I’m going to look at it. I let him know it.” Asked whether he will fire Price over the private jet use, Trump responded cryptically: “We’ll see.”

Price, sensing he is in deep trouble, tried to stanch the bleeding on Thursday by pledging to write a check covering the cost of his seat on all of these private plane trips – including one from Washington to Philadelphia that cost $25,000.

In the end it wasn’t enough.

Price if just one of several Trump officials who are in trouble over private jet use. As Axios summarizes, there are at least four others who are in hot water over the exact same thing:

Scott Pruitt, Environmental Protection Agency administrator

The flights: A June 7 military flight to Ohio then New York ($36,068); a July 27 charter flight from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Guymon, Oklahoma ($14,434); an August 4 charter flight from Denver, Colorado, to Durango, ColoradoA ($5,719); an August 9 flight on the North Dakota governor’s plane ($2,144). Pruitt took “non-commercial” flights costing taxpayers more than $58,000, according to CBS News.

 

The defense: “When the administrator travels, he takes commercial flights,” EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman told the Washington Post Wednesday, adding that the one charter flight and three government flights were due to particular circumstances.

 

Where things stand: Last month, the EPA’s inspector general announced it was launching a preliminary probe into Pruitt’s travels to Oklahoma.

Steve Mnuchin, Treasury Secretary

The flights: Mnuchin requested a government jet earlier this year for his honeymoon, according to ABC News. He and his wife also used a government jet when traveling to Louisville and Fort Knox, Kentucky, which coincided with the eclipse. An Air Force spokesman told ABC News that a government jet typically costs roughly $25,000 per hour to operate.

 

The defense: Mnuchin told Politico’s Ben White that the honeymoon story was “misreported” and the use of such a plane would only be for “national security” purposes. He also denied that his Kentucky trip had anything to do with watching the eclipse.

 

Where things stand: Mnuchin later withdrew the plane request for his honeymoon. Meanwhile, the Treasury Department’s Inspector General is reviewing his Kentucky trip.

Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior

The flights: Zinke and his aides have reportedly taken several flights on private or military aircraft, including a $12,000 charter flight — which belongs to Nielson & Associates, a Wyoming-based oil-and-gas exploration firm — from Las Vegas to his hometown in Montana, and private flights between St. Croix and St. Thomas in U.S. Virgin Islands, per the Washington Post. Total cost: Unclear, as the total number of charter or military flights is unknown.

 

The defense: Interior Department spokeswoman Heather Swift said those trips were booked only after officials failed to find commercial flights that would accommodate Zinke’s schedule. She added that they all were “pre-cleared by career officials in the ethics office,” per Politico.

 

Zinke’s defense: “All this travel was done only after it was determined by multiple career officials at the department that no commercial options existed to meet the promulgated scheduled,” Zinke said. “The flights were only booked after extensive due diligence by the career professionals in the department’s general law and ethics division.”

 

Where things stand: The Interior Department said in a statement to the Huffington Post Friday that Zinke’s travel “was completely compliant with all applicable laws, rules, and regulations.”

David Shulkin, Secretary of Veterans Affairs

The flights/luxury purchases: Although Shulkin flew commercial to Europe for meetings with Danish and British officials about veterans’ health issues in July, he did use government funds to fly his wife out, stating that she was traveling on “approved invitational orders,” per the Washington Post. The government also provided a stipend for her meals. They also attended a Wimbledon championship tennis match, toured Westminster Abbey, and took a cruise on the Thames.

 

The defense: All of Shulkin’s activities on the trip, including Wimbledon visit, “were reviewed and approved by ethics counsel,” VA press secretary Curt Cashour said in a statement.

 

Where things stand: In response to questions from The Post, the VA announced Friday that they’ll start posting details of the Shulkin’s travel online, and disclose any use of government or private aircraft. This information was never previously public.

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