Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 247 at Background Briefing.

I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin as this year ends with selected programs from our archives, following yesterday's

coverage of events from early in the year. Today we will cover stories from the middle of the

year, then on tomorrow's program from later in the year before special programming on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

Let's start with a broadcast of background briefing from May the 1st,

2023, growing concerns at the Supreme Court's impunity from ethical norms as its credibility with the public plunges.

We'll begin with hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee

to deal with the need for an ethics code of conduct at the Supreme Court after the chairman

Nick Durbin was rebuffed by Chief Justice Roberts, who declined to testify and following

recent revelations of unreported favors from billionaires to Justice Thomas,

Gorsuch's sale of a hunting lodge to the head of a law firm with business before the court,

and the Chief Justice's wife's $10 million in earnings from law firms also with business before the court.

We were joined by Moira Donigan, a writer in residence at the Clayman Institute

for Gender Research at Stanford University, whose work has appeared in the London Review of

Books, Book Forum, and the Paris Review. She is a columnist at The Guardian, where her latest

article was, the US Supreme Court's alleged ethics issues are worse than you probably realize.

Then we'll go to a broadcast of background briefing from June the 7th, 2023,

evidence that it was Ukraine, not Russia, behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream Gas Pipelines.

We began with the revelations from the Washington Post that a small group of six Ukrainian

operatives blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines, which the US government blamed on Russia,

leading to many journalists, including myself, reporting that the Kremlin was most likely

...