[Investigators are looking into if Nadine Arslanian, the wife of Sen. Bob Menendez allegedly received gifts or services from people who wanted things from her husband. Getty Images/Chip Somodevilla. New York Post]
Yesterday, I happened to notice the article at reference 1 and marked it down to look at later. Which I did not get around to. But I did remember about it this morning, and tried to find it again. Browsing the NYT did not turn it up. Using the search button seemed pretty hopeless. Maybe it was not the NYT at all, rather the FT, but search there drew a blank too.
Then I thought I would ask Google with a key along the lines of 'senator wife young' and it put the article from NYT in among the first two or three hits. Clearly they reserve the best search technology for their own product.
When we get there, a very old fashioned story about an older senator - an important person in the US - who acquires a younger wife who seems to have moved from rags to riches in fairly short order. Well, not exactly rags, but maybe a spot of bother with her mortgage. With the snap above being a random selection from the bit of New Jersey, just across the Hudson from the Bronx, where they live.
The story is all mixed up with gold bars, property dealers and, probably more importantly, a chap who seems to have got a contract from the Egyptian government to certify all relevant imports into Egypt for their adherence to Sharia law, which in this case looks to be the rules for Halal meat. Certification for a fee that is, and with Egypt being home to 90m Muslims and importing a lot of meat and meat products, there might well be a lot of fees. Maybe a lot of these imports start out in the chicken, sheep and cow parts of the US. The FBI was on the case before, and is now on it again. Has someone been buying influence in the corridor of US power?
PS 1: maybe someone should cut a deal with the Jewish authorities or with the Israelis. The rules for Kosher meat might be very similar to those for Halal meat and there might well be economies of scale to be made. Perhaps abattoirs serving big outlets like Walmart have, in effect, already done this.
PS 2: I just got a text message arising from a recent trip under and back over the Dartford Crossing. Just the one message for the two crossings. Did my debit card not work for one of them? Is there a fine pending? Bing's new assistant is actually quite helpful and comes up, unsolicited, to tell me that yes, you do pay in both directions. While the GOV.UK website is not very helpful at all, and it takes me some minutes to work out that I have indeed paid twice: a poor bit of design. Plus it continues to irritate me that they bother to levy such a modest charge - £2.50 - a crossing. It would make much more sense to me just to scrub the whole charging performance - which must itself cost a good deal to run - and take the money needed to run the crossings out of some general government pot. Perhaps the contractors involved in charging have good relations with the relevant authorities: maybe not gold bars, but maybe the odd spot of hospitality, the odd fact finding mission. Directorships for relevant big cheeses when they retire from government?
References
Reference 1: A Senator’s New Wife and Her Old Friends Draw Prosecutors’ Attention: Unlike her husband, Nadine Menendez has lived a mainly private life. Investigators appear focused on the possibility that she or the senator received undisclosed gifts - Tracey Tully, New York Times - 2023.
Reference 2: https://tradingeconomics.com/egypt/imports/meat-edible-meat-offal. $US1.3bn in 2022, down from more than 2bn in 2019.
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