A Swedish man wanted by the United States for defrauding over 3,500 victims of more than $16 million has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for securities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering, the Department of Justice said Thursday.

The DOJ says 47-year-old Roger Nils-Jonas Karlsson ran an investment fraud scheme from 2011 until his arrest in Thailand in June 2019. He pleaded guilty in March.

According to court documents, Karlsson encouraged victims to buy shares in a scheme called “Eastern Metal Securities” using cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, promising “astronomical returns” tied to the price of gold.

The funds paid by these victims were instead directed to Karlsson’s personal bank accounts, where the money was put toward expensive homes, a racehorse, and a resort in Thailand. Karlsson has been ordered to forfeit this Thai resort and various other properties and accounts as part of the sentence.

On July 6, 1944, Lieutenant Jackie Robinson, while stationed at Camp Hood in Texas, was instructed to move to a seat farther back in the bus. Robinson refused and was court-martialed.

Robinson’s account of what happened is included in his letter to the Assistant to the Secretary of War.

The Black press gave national visibility to the story. The army was worried about bad publicity as a result of Robinson’s sports fame. The court acquitted Robinson of all charges.

Read a detailed description at Jim Crow, Meet Lieutenant Robinson: A 1944 Court-Martial by John Vernon at the National Archives. Find a collection of related stories at Transportation Protests: 1841 – 1992.

Racial trauma or race-based traumatic stress, is the cumulative effects of racism on an individual’s mental and physical health.[1] It has been linked to feelings of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation, as well as other physical health issues.[2]

Racial trauma is not included in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), since it does not meet the current criteria. However, researchers such as Robert T. Carter, Thema Bryant-Davis, and Carlota Ocampo have lobbied for its addition. According to them, racial trauma evokes symptoms similar to that of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), hence the push for its recognition as a viable mental health concern.[1][3] The effects race-based traumatic stress have on individuals depend on their experiences, and the ways in which it can manifest itself can vary significantly as well.[4] Individuals who are exposed to race-based trauma or stress may experience dissociative symptoms following the event.[5]Dissociative symptoms include depersonalization, in which an individual feels disconnected from their body or mind, and derealization, in which an individual has unreal or distorted sense of experiences.

"... “Their self-professed leader wanted very much known their ideology is not anti-government,” the colonel said. “Our investigation will provide us more insight into what their motivation, what their ideology is.”

He said that the group was making its way from Rhode Island to Maine for “training.”

“We are not anti-government,” a man said early Saturday morning on a livestream on the group’s YouTube channel. The man, who was wearing military-style gear, went on to explain that the group had pulled over to fuel up their cars with gas cans to avoid “making any unnecessary stops” while carrying firearms. The man also said they were traveling to “their private land.”

In total, congressional campaigns and political parties spent an estimated $2.6 million on security in the first three months of 2021. During the comparable timeframe in 2019, at the start of the last Congress, Federal Election Commission filings show campaigns and political parties made $902,000 in security expenditures. In 2017, parties and campaigns together spent $2 million over the course of the entire year—less than the security costs racked up in the three months after January 6.

The campaign operation of Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who voted to convict Trump during his first and second impeachment trials, paid more than $43,000 to Ambolt Security Group, a Utah-based firm run by former law enforcement officers that offers services including close protection, “safe room consulting and design,” “residential escape plans,” and threat assessments. “Political uncertainty, rioting in US streets, attacks on governance are contributing to a climate of fear within our communities, the business sector, and most troubling our homes and families,” the company notes on its website. (Security is not a subject that members of Congress seem eager to discuss. Mother Jones reached out to 10 lawmakers, including Cheney, Romney, and Toomey. None responded.)


And the FEC ultimately imposed no strict limitations on who could be paid with campaign funds to perform security. In a brief, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—the NRSC's and the NRCC’s Democratic counterparts—contended that in doing so the FEC was "opening the door to the improper use of campaign funds to compensate fringe militia groups under the guise of legitimate security expense." The groups noted that some Republicans have known links to far-right organizations like the Three Percenters, Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers, whose members participated in the Capitol attack. (In at least one instance, members of the Three Percenters militia group provided security at a campaign event for then-candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, although they don’t appear to have been paid.) What was stopping Republican lawmakers from employing guards associated with the very same groups involved in the assault on the Capitol?

Rep. Peter Meijer, a first-term Republican from Michigan who voted to impeach Trump and recently decried members of his party for “salivating for civil war,” told Rolling Stone he foresees more political violence ahead: “I don’t put it beyond the realm of assassinations.”

Portland is a leafy, tree-festooned city that sits further north than either Toronto or Montreal. A typical hot summer day might spike into the 90s, but this week the city experienced the kind of radiant, baking temperatures and convection-oven winds more typical of Death Valley. A rare high-pressure formation blocked the region’s evening coastal breezes, forming a “heat dome” over Oregon and Washington. The previous record high temperature for Portland was 107, set in 1965 and tied in 1981. On Saturday, the mercury hit 108. On Sunday, it spiked to 112. And then yesterday, 116.

Heat waves are natural phenomena, of course. But such record-shattering heat extremes are one of the most predicted impacts of manmade global warming, which has now run rampant for decades. As meteorologist Eric Holthaus described the record heat: “We’ve left the era of fucking around, and we’re now entering the era of finding out.”

I’ve been writing about global warming for nearly two decades. One of my first features for Rolling Stone, in 2004, “Diary of a Dying Planet,” grappled with the first observable effects of climate change. That story began with a description of a deadly 2003 heat wave that killed some 70,000 people across Europe, and reported that global warming was no longer an over-the-horizon threat, but here and now:

Droughts are longer, torrents heavier, flooding more severe. Heat waves are turned up to 11. “Because of our fossil-fuel burning, we are changing the climate,” says Sir John Houghton, former co-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.… Houghton, a mild-mannered knight, insists he’s “not a hyping sort of person.” Yet as the scientist surveys the recent string of heat waves, floods, and other extreme weather wracking the planet, he concludes that they are the “most obvious manifestations” of global warming in our time. “These are the biggest disasters we know in the world,” Houghton says. “They cause more death, more economic loss.… I have no hesitation in describing it as a weapon of mass destruction.”