What you should know from the week of 04/14/23:

• One Good Thing: Snailfish!
• Clarence Thomas: Ethics violations on SCOTUS, and the quagmire of SCOTUS oversight;
• Classified Leak: The Petagon Leaks traced back to a 21 year old on Discord;
• Mortgage Losses: For the first time since records began in 2008, the MBA records bank losses rather than profits from mortgages;
• Tennessee Three: Protest and expulsion in TN makes a big mess for democracy.

One Good Thing:

Check out the deepest-swimming fish ever caught on camera

The unknown snailfish species, of the genus Pseudoliparis, was recorded swimming in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench near Japan at a depth of 8,336 meters — or more than 27,000 feet down.

NPRJoe Hernandez

Scientists working off the coast of Japan say they've managed to capture images of the deepest-swimming fish ever caught on camera.

That is pretty cool. Any new discoveries are always exciting, but the nugget that I liked the most was this little blurb:

"We have spent over 15 years researching these deep snailfish; there is so much more to them than simply the depth, but the maximum depth they can survive is truly astonishing," University of Western Australia professor Alan Jamieson said in a press release.

I really enjoy the idea of scientists being all excited about their favorite obscure fish making the news from this discovery, and wanting to tell the world that snailfish are really quite interesting for many reasons, not just depth!

Clarence Thomas:

Clarence Thomas Secretly Accepted Luxury Trips From Major GOP Donor

Island-hopping on a superyacht. Private jet rides around the world. The undisclosed gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the Supreme Court. “It’s incomprehensible to me that someone would do this,” says one former judge.

ProPublicaJoshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

On April 6, ProPublica reported on a decades-long relationship between Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and real estate billionaire and political activist Harlan Crow. The report noted that Justice Thomas accepted gifts from Crow worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for about 25 years.

The report sparked a flurry of activity:

• Justice Thomas issued a response that ProPublica addressed.
• New reporting broke that Crow had previously purchased property from Thomas and Thomas' mother that Thomas never reported, and which resulted in Crow owning the home in which Thomas' mother was living.
• Congress announced a hearing and requested Chief Justice Roberts launch an investigation.

In the wake of all this reporting, a few things are clear and a few things are murky. I'll look at two questions. Was this wrong, and should Thomas be impeached?