Thirty years ago I remember satire being part of mainstream television. There was Spitting Image of course, the show which turned the great and the good into latex puppets. It amused the nation and often offended those in power, especially politicians. A little later, Chris Morris' Brass Eye mocked the sensationalist nature of news media, including how it created moral panics, rather than informed reporting. In the 1980s, there were plenty of left wing, stand up comedians, at a time when the right of centre, led by the Tory Party, dominated British politics. Today, if I want to be sure of seeing good satire, I visit Comedy Unleashed at The Backyard Comedy Club in Bethnal Green on the second Tuesday of every month. It sometimes feels like the last bastion of comedy: then again it is usually sold out.

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe," wrote famed naturalist John Muir more than a century ago, referring to an epiphany he had while hiking in California's Yosemite Valley.

In our call of the day, Blackstone BX, -0.70% strategist Joseph Zidle offers a similar take, but with dollar signs instead of granite cliffs.

"At the end of any economic cycle, we often get warnings that appear to be unrelated," he wrote in a recent note. "It's in hindsight that we realize that they were not at all random." Investors saw this during the runup and aftermath of the housing bubble, he added, and we're seeing it now.

Among the recent troubles he thinks are connected are repo market woes, negative-yielding debt, global trade conflicts and collapsing manufacturing. And every cycle ends with excess.

Amy Robach has spoken out about her controversial hot-mic moment about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

On Tuesday morning, a right-wing activist group, Project Veritas, leaked a video of the 20/20 co-anchor venting her frustrations with ABC for allegedly not publishing her story on Epstein in 2015.

Robach had interviewed Virginia Giuffre, one of the women who accused the late Epstein and Prince Andrew of sexual misconduct. And in the video, the journalist appeared to claim that the network refused to air her story due to pressure from Buckingham Palace.

The biggest bank in Europe is in the process of imploding, and there are persistent rumors that the final collapse could happen sooner rather than later. Those that follow my work on a regular basis already know that this is a story that I have been following for years. Deutsche Bank is rapidly bleeding cash, they have been laying off thousands of workers, and the vultures have been circling as company executives desperately try to implement a turnaround plan. Unfortunately for Deutsche Bank, it may already be too late. And if Deutsche Bank goes down, it will be even more catastrophic for the global financial system than the collapse of Lehman Brothers was in 2008. Germany is the glue that is holding the EU together, and so if the bank that is right at the heart of Germany's financial system collapses, the dominoes will likely start falling very rapidly.

There has been a tremendous amount of speculation about Deutsche Bank over the past several days, and so let's start with what we know.

We know that Deutsche Bank has been losing money at a pace that is absolutely staggering...

Deutsche Bank reported a net loss that missed market expectations on Wednesday as a major restructuring plan continues to weigh on the German lender.

It reported a net loss of 832 million euros ($924 million) for the third quarter of 2019. Analysts were expecting a loss of 778 million euros, according to data from Refinitiv. It had reported a net profit of 229 million euros in the third quarter of 2018, but a loss of 3.15 billion euros in the second quarter of this year.

Are gay people allowed to meet and organise in defense of their interests? A hard yes, you might have thought. But some apparently disagree.

Witness the response to the London-based LGB Alliance, a newly created British group that asserts "the rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people to define themselves as same-sex-attracted." The group's creation has sparked vitriol, not from the traditionalist Christians or social conservatives who might have opposed such groups in the 1980s or 1990s, but from the self-described progressive left.

Readers who aren't steeped in the most fashionable iteration of identity politics might now be scratching their heads. Unless you're taking cues from Leviticus, what could possibly be wrong with saying it's okay to be gay?

The answer is that, in acknowledging the reality of same-sex attraction, you are indirectly acknowledging the reality and importance of biological sex as a driver of attraction. You are also indirectly acknowledging that members of the opposite sex are not members of your dating pool — even if they tell you that they share your gender identity. Which means you have effectively pled guilty to that grave modern thoughtcrime, transphobia.

If you are not on Twitter, have not set foot on a college campus in the last few years, and don't read woke web sites such as Teen Vogue, where this sort of thing is taken very seriously, you may imagine that I am engaged in some kind of Swiftian send-up of identity politics gone amok. After all, just about every single person reading this knows quite well how sexual attraction works. But I am quite serious: Activist groups that brand themselves as mainstream representatives of the LGBT community not only preach the idea that true attraction is based on gender, they also have sought to de-platform and mob anyone within their ranks who points out that this idea is completely divorced from the way the human brain actually works. In this make-believe world, to be gay — in the way gay people actually experience being gay — is to be a transphobe.

Police failed to respond to complaints by women who said they were victimized by the operators of the Girls Do Porn website, made as far back as 2015. The owners of the adult website were charged with sex trafficking in October.

They were allegedly tricked into signing a contract, forced into prolonged and painful sex acts, then blackmailed with x-rated footage sent to relatives, but now it's emerged that the young women who were unlucky to choose the group behind Girls Do Porn as a beginning of their modeling career might have also been failed by the police.

Three women filed complaints about the men running the porn website four years ago, but police never followed up on them, The Appeal reported. One woman even alleged that she was raped by a man working for the website, but her case was closed on the very day that it was filed.

Should women unashamedly wear mustaches? Should men abandon their masculinity because it's 'toxic'? This is all just a smoke screen capitalist overlords use to hide real issues and stay in power, philosopher Slavoj Zizek believes.

In one of the latest anti-objectification messages, women's razor brand Billie ran an ad timed to Movember (the annual 'mustache month' event), proclaiming that "women have mustaches too" and should not be ashamed to grow them out. It looks like a step in the right direction of gender (identity) equality - but is in fact a drive fueled by the big corporations that do not want people to challenge the existing status quo in more substantial ways, world-renowned philosopher Zizek believes.

A court in Barcelona cleared five men of sexual assault charges on Thursday after saying the crime did not fit the legal definition of rape because the unconscious teenage victim didn't fight back.

Under Spanish law, a sexual attack can only be classified as an assault or rape if the perpetrator uses violence or intimidation. Because the 14-year-old victim was unconscious, the five were convicted of a lesser charge of sexual abuse.The case renewed pressure on the government to reform the law and specify that any sexual act without consent is an assault.The Barcelona court sentenced the five men to 10 to 12 years in prison, despite the prosecution arguing they should be charged with assault.

The attack happened at a party in Manresa, a town northwest of Barcelona, in 2016. The court heard that the group was partying in an abandoned factory, when the victim consumed "alcohol and drugs" and became unconscious.

Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg has decided not to take a bonus for 2019 after US lawmakers hammered him over compensation during Capitol Hill hearings last week in the wake of two 737 MAX plane crashes.

The new chairman of the aerospace company, David Calhoun, gave an enthusiastic vote of public confidence in Dennis Muilenburg on Tuesday, stating that he "has done everything right." He also revealed to CNBC that the embattled CEO himself suggested forgoing his compensation for this year, including bonuses.

"It came in two fronts: one, no short-, no long-term bonus, and three, no consideration for equity grants, until the MAX in its entirety is back in the air and flying safely," Calhoun said. It may take more than a year to return the plane to the skies, he suggested.

In December 2018, the Justice Department's inspector general dropped a bombshell: Investigators had "substantiated" allegations that a senior DOJ official was a repeat sexual harasser.

The official, who had retired by that point, harassed five women under his chain of command, the inspector general announced. One woman reported that she was not only harassed, but also sexually assaulted. Another woman reported that she was pressured into having sex to get a promotion.

Few details were available at the time. The inspector general's summary of the investigation was barely two pages. The official had worked in the Office of Justice Programs, an arm of the Justice Department that partners with federal, state, and local law enforcement, but he wasn't identified. The summary didn't specify what the women accused him of doing or the time period. Because the official had left the department, there wouldn't be any internal disciplinary process. No criminal charges were filed.

Nearly 10 months later, BuzzFeed News obtained a copy of the inspector general's full report. The 12-page document is redacted but includes a slew of new information, including detailed accounts from two of the women who described a pattern of escalating workplace harassment, as well as investigators' findings that the former official "lacked credibility" and provided "conflicting testimony."