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Empress Wu kept some young and handsome male imperial concubines; she even set up an office to manage and organize them. When she was old and sick, two of her favorite male concubines, the Zhang brothers, obtained lots of power and committed many horrible crimes.
https://www.chinafetching.com/wu-ze-tian
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After his first presidency, Lula remained active in politics, and began giving lectures in Brazil and abroad. In 2016, he was appointed as Rousseff’s Chief of Staff, but the appointment was suspended by the Supreme Federal Court.[16][17] In July 2017, Lula was convicted on charges of money laundering and corruption in a controversial trial that was later nullified in April 2021 by the Supreme Court Justices, due to the court lacking proper jurisdiction over his case.[18][19] Lula attempted to run in the 2018 Brazilian presidential election but was disqualified under Brazil’s Ficha Limpa law.[20] Before the annulment of his cases, he was sentenced to nine and a half years in prison, and after an unsuccessful appeal, Lula was arrested in April 2018 and spent 580 days in jail, until being released in November 2019, when the Supreme Federal Court ruled that his imprisonment was unlawful.[21][22][23][24] In March 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal judge presiding over the case, Sergio Moro, who served as Minister of Justice and Public Security in the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro,[25] was biased,[26] and all of the cases Moro had brought against Lula were annulled in June 2021. Following the court ruling, Lula was legally allowed to make another run for president in the 2022 elections, defeating Bolsonaro in the runoff.[27] He became the first Brazilian president to have been elected to a third term, and the first to have defeated an incumbent president in an election. At age 77, he was sworn in on 1 January 2023, as the oldest Brazilian president at the time of inauguration.[28][29][30] A week later, the Praça dos Três Poderes was attacked in an invasion led by pro-Bolsonaro rioters. Lula condemned the attack and promised to punish everyone involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luiz_In%C3%A1cio_Lula_da_Silva
The Mensalão scandal (Portuguese: Escândalo do Mensalão, IPA: [isˈkɐ̃dɐlu du mẽsɐˈlɐ̃w]) was a major parliamentary vote-buying scandal by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva‘s administration that threatened to bring down his government in 2005.[1] Mensalão is a neologism, a variant of the word for “big monthly payment” (salário mensal or mensalidade).
The scandal broke on June 6, 2005 when Brazilian deputy Roberto Jefferson (Brazilian Labour Party) told the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper that the ruling Workers’ Party (PT) had paid a number of deputies 30,000 reais (around US$12,000 at the time) a month to vote for legislation favored by the ruling party. The funds allegedly came from state-owned companies’ advertising budgets, funneled through an advertising agency owned by Marcos Valério.
The investigation then implicated members of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, Democrats, Brazilian Democratic Movement Party and seven other political parties also involved. Many key advisers to Lula resigned, and several deputies were faced with the choice of resignation or expulsion from congress. The president himself went on to be re-elected in 2006, and in 2010 Brazil elected his chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, as president.[2] Much of PT’s leadership was affected in some way, with many resigning or failing to win re-election. Brazil’s economy was widely perceived as not having been substantially impacted by the scandal.[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensal%C3%A3o_scandal
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By Vaughn Cockayne – The Washington Times – Updated: 6:12 p.m. on Thursday, April 13, 2023
Movie star and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made headlines earlier this week by personally filling in a pothole near his Los Angeles home.
Except it wasn’t a pothole, the city said, but rather a service trench used by utility company SoCal Gas.
The former governor tweeted out a video Tuesday showing him and a few others filling in a large hole on a street in Brentwood. In the post, Mr. Schwarzenegger said that the hole had bothered his wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood for weeks.
“Today, after the whole neighborhood has been upset about this giant pothole that’s been screwing up cars and bicycles for weeks, I went out with my team and fixed it,” the former bodybuilding star wrote. “I always say, let’s not complain, let’s do something about it. Here you go.”
Unfortunately, soon after the video was posted, the Los Angeles Department of Public Works told local media that the hole was actually a service trench.
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