Emojis are doing the news rounds after Australian lawmakers said they wanted to know what their foreign minister meant when she used the red-faced angry emoji to describe Russian President Vladimir Putin.
So we got to thinking: If we were to illustrate the big news story of the day in the same way, what would it look like?
So here it is: The five things to know today … in emojis.
1.
Pop the cork, pour the bubbly: That sound you hear is House Republicans doing the nae nae. Because it looks like Paul Ryan will go for Speaker of the House after all. He’d said he didn’t want the headache. But the Republicans wouldn’t take no for an answer. So, Ryan relented on condition the divided party unite behind him. Yesterday, the biggest stumbling block, the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said ‘Fine.’
2.
Pondering? Posturing? : Three years, seven investigations and thousands of pages of emails later, Hillary Clinton will show up this morning for a marathon, televised grilling by the Select Committee on Benghazi. The Republicans in charge of this hearing say they only want to get to the bottom of what happened in Libya on September 11, 2012. Clinton’s allies say it’s just another political witch hunt to derail her presidential bid.
3.
You’ve got (someone else’s) mail: If the director of the CIA can get hacked, are any of us safe? A hacker hit the personal email of John Brennan and – you guessed it – WikiLeaks was oh so happy to post the info online. The documents are from before Brennan’s time in the Obama administration and contain no classified data. But the agency’s got to be concerned because WikiLeaks says it plans to post more emails.
4.
Not a drop to drink: If you’re pregnant, don’t drink. Not. Even. A. Sip.* The American Academy of Pediatrics says prenatal exposure to alcohol is the most preventable cause of birth defects. It can also mess up Junior’s intellectual development.
* NOTE: This edict, for some reason, doesn’t apply to the U.K. and Italy where docs say a little sippy-sippy once a week is apparently OK for moms-to-be.
5.
Long arm for Shorty: Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman is still out of reach, but cops have busted the drug lord’s brother-in-law and a couple of others who allegedly helped spring him out of the slammer through an underground tunnel last summer. Guzman’s called ‘Shorty’ for his height. But he’s pretty slippery as well. When cops almost closed in on him recently, he evaded them yet again.