Zorro
Zorro's JournalEx-Russian spy flees to the NATO country that captured him
TALLINN, Estonia — “The Russians have no idea,” Alexander Toots, the head of Estonian counterintelligence, tells me, laughing.
“They have absolutely no idea he is here. You can be the one to tell them.”
Toots was referring to the defection of a Russian spy to Estonia. But Artem Zinchenko isn’t just any spy. He was the first agent of Russia’s military intelligence arrested by Estonia, in 2017, then traded back to Moscow a year later for an Estonian citizen in Russian custody. Zinchenko has now sought asylum from the very NATO country that unmasked and imprisoned him for spying against it.
Zinchenko’s defection has not been publicly disclosed by either side until now, in what must count as a humiliating blow not only to the Kremlin but also to his onetime masters in the GRU, as the former Soviet military intelligence service is still known.
https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-ex-russian-spy-flees-to-the-nato-country-that-captured-him-delivering-another-embarrassing-blow-to-moscow-010049616.html
Sarasota judge awards $3 million to Gabby Petito's family in wrongful death lawsuit
A Sarasota County judge Thursday awarded Gabby Petito’s family $3 million in a wrongful death lawsuit against the estate of Brian Laundrie.
The wrongful death lawsuit is separate from the negligence lawsuit Petito’s parents, Joseph Petito and Nicole Schmidt filed against Laundrie’s parents. That case is expected to go to trial next August.
As a result of the judge ruling in favor of Petito's family, a trial that was scheduled for this December will not be held.
"The Petito family lost their daughter, and they were also denied the opportunity to confront her killer," Patrick Reilly, the Petito family's attorney, said in a statement. "No amount of money is sufficient to compensate the Petito family for the loss of their daughter, Gabby, at the hands of Brain Laundrie."
https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/courts/2022/11/17/gabby-petito-parents-awarded-3-million-wrongful-death-lawsuit/10719182002/
Trump to Try for Historic Third Impeachment
PALM BEACH (The Borowitz Report)—Stating that “no one’s ever done this before,” Donald J. Trump announced plans to be impeached for a historic third time.
Speaking to supporters in a ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, the former President claimed that he and only he could bring impeachable offenses back to the White House.
Although he was short on specifics about which crimes he might commit, Trump pledged, “We’re gonna perpetrate so much, you’re gonna get tired of perpetrating.”
He contrasted his record for getting impeached with that of his successor, Joe Biden, who, he claimed, “is too low-energy to commit a felony.”
“Joe Biden has been President for almost two years, and how many impeachments does he have to show for it? Zero,” he said. “The rest of the world is looking at us with a President who can’t get a single impeachment, and they’re laughing at us. Laughing at us. This should never be allowed to happen in this country.”
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-to-try-for-historic-third-impeachment
US regulators to vote on largest dam demolition in history
Source: AP
The largest dam demolition and river restoration plan in the world could be close to reality Thursday as U.S. regulators vote on a plan to remove four aging hydro-electric structures, reopening hundreds of miles of California river habitat to imperiled salmon.
The vote by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on the lower Klamath River dams is the last major regulatory hurdle and the biggest milestone facing a $500 million demolition proposal championed by Native American tribes and environmentalists for years.
Approval of the application to surrender the dams' operating license is the bedrock of the most ambitious salmon restoration plan in history, and if approved the parties overseeing the project will accept license transfer and could begin dam removal as early as this summer. More than 300 miles (483 kilometers) of salmon habitat in the Klamath River and its tributaries would benefit, said Amy Souers Kober, spokeswoman for American Rivers, which monitors dam removals and advocates for river restoration.
“This is an incredibly important milestone,” she said. “This project really carries important lessons for rivers and the conservation movement, and the most important lesson is the leadership of the tribes. It’s because of the tribes that these dams will come out and the river be will restored.”
Read more: https://news.yahoo.com/us-regulators-vote-largest-dam-060148105.html
Tiffany Trump Charged Full Venue Price For Mar-A-Lago Wedding
PALM BEACH, FL—Shaking her head in anger and disbelief as she scanned the invoice, Tiffany Trump reportedly received a bill from the Mar-a-Lago Club Tuesday charging her the full venue price for her wedding.
“$95,000 for catering? Are you fucking kidding me?” said the 29-year-old Trump, who noted that the wedding cake looked nothing like the one she ordered and that the food “hadn’t even been that good.”
“My dad insisted that I have the wedding here, so I assumed it would all be paid for. I didn’t even get a discount! God, they just gouged me on everything. They charged me $20,000 for a DJ, but I didn’t even have a DJ there! And what the hell is a napkin fee? I don’t know how I’m going to be able to afford this. I’m going to have to ask my dad for money.”
At press time, reports confirmed Tiffany Trump was furious after discovering she had been charged a $1.5 million speaking fee for her father’s wedding toast.
https://www.theonion.com/tiffany-trump-charged-full-venue-price-for-mar-a-lago-w-1849786318
America Deserves Better Than Donald Trump
By The Editorial BoardDonald Trump, twice impeached for seeking to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, says he is running for president again in 2024.
His new campaign has begun with the same ugliness, lies and chaos as the last, but it poses even greater dangers to American democracy.
Mr. Trump and his supporters can no longer pretend to be good-faith participants in the democratic process. They have enshrined the refusal to accept adverse election results as a defining feature of their political movement, sought to install true believers in local and state election offices and demonstrated a willingness to resort to violence.
Mr. Trump is unfit for public office. As president, he showed himself to be incompetent and self-dealing. He should have been convicted by the Senate in 2019 for abusing his power and in 2021 for inciting an insurrection. Voters repudiated him at the ballot box after his second campaign, but he has the legal right to try again, so Americans must weather the trial of a third candidacy. If he is still in the race when the first votes are cast in 2024, the election will once again be a referendum on American democracy, because if our system of government is to survive, voters must choose leaders who accept and submit to the rule of law.
https://tinyurl.com/yry9r92t
Trump is out for vengeance -- and to protect himself from prosecution
By George T. Conway IIIHe was always going to run. Absent incarceration or interment, and perhaps only the latter, he inevitably would seek the presidency again. His narcissism, his megalomania, his delicate yet illimitable ego, would have it no other way.
Donald Trump craves the power. Even more, he craves the attention. And more than ever — after an unprecedented two impeachments, a humiliating reelection defeat that he can’t even admit, and amid multiple criminal investigations and civil suits — he seeks vengeance. The l’état c’est moi president who apparently tried to sic the IRS on his enemies (and perhaps succeeded), and who tried to extort Ukraine into smearing Joe Biden, can’t wait to get back on the job.
Trump won’t succeed, as his successive losses of the House, Senate, presidency and last week’s midterm results show. Too many Americans would crawl on broken glass to vote against him, no matter who his general election opponent may be. They have seen enough.
That goes also for many Republicans, particularly the sophisticated ones. Their views were succinctly stated by Marc Thiessen just the other day: “Mr. President, it is not in your interest to run in 2024. If you do, you will likely lose. And you will destroy what remains of your legacy in the process. Please, don’t do it,” Thiessen begged.
Legacy? Trump has none, other than his impeachments and the stain of Jan. 6, 2021. He’ll never be remembered for much else. Historians will perpetually rank him as among the worst — if not the worst — in the presidential pantheon. As they should, befitting a man who, despite having sworn an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, did his level best to destroy it.
https://wapo.st/3Eys8F1
Watching TV could increase seniors' risk of dementia, study says
How older adults spend their sedentary time — what they do while sitting — makes a difference in their chances of developing dementia, according to research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It found that those whose time sitting was primarily spent watching television had a 24 percent increased risk for dementia, whereas those who spent that time on a computer had a 15 percent reduced risk for dementia. The researchers explained that TV watching is cognitively passive, meaning little thinking is required, while computer use is cognitively active, meaning it (like reading) is more intellectually stimulating.
For both groups of study participants, their odds of developing dementia linked to their sitting persisted, no matter how physically active they were at other times of the day. Previous studies have pointed to physical exercise as beneficial to reducing risk for cognitive decline and dementia.
Dementia, which is not considered a normal part of aging, is an umbrella term used to describe a set of symptoms — memory loss, confusion, problems with language and reasoning, and behavioral changes — that progress over time and affect a person’s daily life and activities. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia. Today, about 6 million people in the United States have Alzheimer’s and related dementias — most older than 65 and more women than men — and the number is expected to increase to 14 million by 2060, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/story/2022-11-15/watching-tv-could-increase-seniors-risk-of-dementia-study-says
Might explain a lot about TFG.
D.C.'s bitcoin king: Yachts, penthouses, a python -- and tax dodging?
Michael Saylor lived large while allegedly paying no D.C. income tax. Here’s how whistleblowers unraveled what could be one of the largest tax scams in city history.Michael Saylor amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune, splurging to combine three Georgetown penthouses into a palatial 7,000-square-foot residence, snapping up a 154-foot yacht dubbed Mr. Terrible and throwing lavish soirees including one where he was draped with an albino python.
All the while, the tech titan did not pay income tax in the District for years and bragged about it to friends, anonymous whistleblowers allege. They said he told people they were “fools” if they did not buy a home in Florida as he did and claim to live there. The state has no income tax.
The whistleblowers’ allegations come in a lawsuit filed in D.C. Superior Court that provides a stunning inside look at the lavish lifestyle of what it calls “arguably the wealthiest person in the District” and an allegedly brazen scheme to defraud the city of tens of millions. It is one of the largest income tax cases in D.C. history.
The whistleblowers, whose legal efforts were joined by District officials in August, stand to earn a staggering payday — possibly $25 million or more — and to return as much as $150 million to city coffers if their case against Saylor is successful.
https://wapo.st/3hyTule
DEA's most corrupt agent: Parties, sex amid 'unwinnable war'
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — José Irizarry accepts that he’s known as the most corrupt agent in U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration history, admitting he “became another man” in conspiring with Colombian cartels to build a lavish lifestyle of expensive sportscars, Tiffany jewels and paramours around the world.
But as he used his final hours of freedom to tell his story to The Associated Press, Irizarry says he won't go down for this alone, accusing some long-trusted DEA colleagues of joining him in skimming millions of dollars from drug money laundering stings to fund a decade’s worth of luxury overseas travel, fine dining, top seats at sporting events and frat house-style debauchery.
The way Irizarry tells it, dozens of other federal agents, prosecutors, informants and in some cases cartel smugglers themselves were all in on the three-continent joyride known as “Team America” that chose cities for money laundering pick-ups mostly for party purposes or to coincide with Real Madrid soccer or Rafael Nadal tennis matches. That included stops along the way in VIP rooms of Caribbean strip joints, Amsterdam’s red-light district and aboard a Colombian yacht that launched with plenty of booze and more than a dozen prostitutes.
“We had free access to do whatever we wanted,” the 48-year-old Irizarry told the AP in a series of interviews before beginning a 12-year federal prison sentence. “We would generate money pick-ups in places we wanted to go. And once we got there it was about drinking and girls.”
All this revelry was rooted, Irizarry said, in a crushing realization among DEA agents around the world that there’s nothing they can do to make a dent in the drug war anyway. Only nominal concern was given to actually building cases or stemming a record flow of illegal cocaine and opioids into the United States that has driven more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths a year.
https://news.yahoo.com/dea-most-corrupt-agent-parties-134305720.html
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