End of the Road Trip: A 23-year-old Florida man is refusing to cooperate with the police about what happened to his fiancée who went missing on a cross country trip. The search for Gabrielle Petito, 22, by FBI agents and National Park Rangers has become a national story after she was reported missing by her parents … not her fiancé … on September 11^th

  Petito left Florida with Brian Laundrie, 23, on July 2^nd in her white Ford van outfitted for adventure and exploration. They had intended to make it a four-month trip, according to her family.

  The last known sighting of the two together was when police in Moab, Utah responded to what was described as a domestic problem. On police bodycam video, Petito rambled, cried, said she suffered from anxiety, and that she was afraid Laundrie would leave her. She said, “This is a rough morning.”

  On September 1^st, Laundrie returned to Florida in Petito’s van and hasn’t been talking. 

Stimulating Speech: President Biden went to the mound yesterday to push for his economic stimulus plans.

  “This pandemic has been god-awful for so many reasons,” Biden said. “But it does present us with an opportunity. We can build an economy that gives working people a fair shot this time. We can restore some sanity and fairness to our tax code. We can make the investments that we know are long overdue in this nation.”

  An economy that has improved since the onset of the pandemic and Biden taking office is giving him a platform to fight for an expanded social safety net. 

  Facing opposition even within his own party, Biden said, “It’s a historic middle-class tax cut, cutting taxes for over 50 million families. My Republican friends are making a different choice, though. They’d rather protect the tax breaks of those at the very top than give tax breaks to working families. It’s that simple.”

The Missiles of September: In a week of muscle flexing, North Korea has revealed that it has a train-launched missile system. It pops out of the top of a box car. Lionel trains used to have a car like that.

  The South demonstrated for the first time that it has a submarine launched missile.

  North and South Korea have been trading missile tests in what’s described as an increase in tensions. South Korean President Moon Jae-in said his country now has “sufficient deterrence to respond to North Korea’s provocations at any time.”

Unfriended: The Wall Street Journal published a series of scathing articles that says Facebook knows that its platforms can cause emotional harm to users. The paper says Facebook “knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands.”

  The WSJ says, for instance, that  Facebook knows Instagram is harmful particularly for teenage girls. They cite internal research that said, “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.”

Facebook’s problems 

Bowing Out: As a member of Congress in the party dominated by Donald Trump, Rep. Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, said in an interview on Thursday that he would not run for re-election in 2022  rather than fight it out with a Trump-backed primary opponent.

  Gonzalez is one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach then President Trump and has called him “a cancer for the country.” The other nine who voted to impeach are also likely to face stiff opposition within the party. 

The Spin Rack: France announced that it is outraged over the US decision to share nuclear-powered submarine technology with Australia, which in turn is pulling out of a $66 billion submarine-building contract with the French. China isn’t happy either. — The Russians plan to shoot the first full-length feature film in space after blasting off next month. In “The Challenge,” a woman doctor rockets to the International Space Station to save the life of an astronaut. — Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings, one of the all-time winners on “Jeopardy!”, will host the hostless show “through the end of the calendar year.” —  The new Apple iPhone comes without a charger. — The White House has offered rapper Nicki Minaj a telephone conversation with more knowledgeable sources after she tweeted to her 22.6 million followers that a cousin’s friend in Trinidad “became impotent” and “his testicles became swollen” after receiving the coronavirus vaccine shot. They wanted to just talk to her because there’s no vaccine for stupid.

 Naked Came the Celebrity: While Congress member Alexandria Ocasio Cortez caused outrage for wearing a ball gown painted with the slogan “Tax the Rich,” the latest thing among professional celebrities is the transparent dress in which they go to the ball nearly naked.

  Megan Fox showed up at last weekend’s Met Gala wearing a dress that revealed pretty much everything, including a triangle of underwear held up by strings. Zoë Kravitz went to the same event in a shimmering mesh dress that was equally revealing. Kendall Jenner was all out there, too. Hailey Baldwin was on stage at the Video Music Awards, and so was her underwear.

  Transparent dresses come and go, as do the women who wear them. The singer Cher is believed to be the first to show at the Met Gala back in 1974 en-tranparent, and who’s seen Cher lately, transparent or opaque?

  The singer Rihanna brought back the see-through dress briefly in 2014 at the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards, creating what was then a short-term trend of near-total exposure. 

  Now it’s back, and so is the front.

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