Russians No Longer Dispute Olympic Doping Operation; New York Times, 12/27/16

Rebecca R. Ruiz, New York Times; Russians No Longer Dispute Olympic Doping Operation:

"Russia is for the first time conceding that its officials carried out one of the biggest conspiracies in sports history: a far-reaching doping operation that implicated scores of Russian athletes, tainting not just the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi but also the entire Olympic movement.

Over several days of interviews here with The New York Times, Russian officials said they no longer disputed a damning set of facts that detailed a doping program with few, if any, historical precedents.

“It was an institutional conspiracy,” Anna Antseliovich, the acting director general of Russia’s national antidoping agency, said of years’ worth of cheating schemes, while emphasizing that the government’s top officials were not involved."

Trump Says His Russia Comments Were a Joke. He Always Lies Like This.; Slate, 7/28/16

Josh Voorhees, Slate; Trump Says His Russia Comments Were a Joke. He Always Lies Like This. :

"Trump wasn’t joking or being sarcastic; he was just being Trump. He was speaking without thinking and didn’t grasp the full implications of what he was saying in the moment or even its immediate aftermath. It’s possible that now that enough people have explained the situation to him, he understands the danger of calling on a geopolitical rival to conduct cyberespionage against your political opponent. That, though, should make us all sleep only marginally better given this time next year there is a legitimate chance this man could be performing his belligerent and ill-informed improv in the White House."