 | | POLITICAL MOJO FROM DAVID CORN, KEVIN DRUM, AND THE NEWS TEAM | | | MOTHER JONES | August 2, 2013 | TOP STORY By Dana Liebelson One of China's largest and most prominent media companies—12 percent of which is owned by a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox—has been rocked by a major sexual harassment and assault scandal. A lawsuit filed on July 19 in federal court against Phoenix Satellite Television contains a series of jaw-dropping allegations concerning its onetime Washington, DC, bureau chief, Zhengzhu Liu. The Chinese journalist is accused of a litany of offenses, including encouraging job applicants to meet him in hotel rooms for interviews and then groping them, attempting to coerce the wife of a cameraman to have sex with him to preserve her husband's job, telling a job candidate about the "gigantic and powerful penis" of his black friend, and attempting to rape a reporter. [READ MORE] MOST READ TOP IN SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISEMENT | IN OTHER NEWS By Kevin Drum Obviously the United States isn't the only place that got rid of leaded gasoline, which means the United States isn't the only place that should have seen declines in violent crime. But other countries made the switch at different times, which means their declines in violent crime should also have taken place at different times. Rick Nevin has done a lot of work on crime trends outside the US, so after my piece appeared I asked him for his predictions for other parts of the world. Here was one of them: "Crime will also plummet over the next 10 to 20 years in Latin America, where leaded gasoline use and air lead levels fell sharply from around 1990 through the mid-1990s." [READ MORE] THIS WEEK'S NEWS ROUNDUP Conservatives were meeting and talking about fighting a "30-front war" on liberals, mainstream Republicans, and Karl Rove. It's called " Groundswell." | | | MOTHERJONES.COM Mother Jones 222 Sutter Street, Suite 600, San Francisco, CA 94108 |  | | |
