3 charged with killing sex ring mastermind in prison

Robert Snell
The Detroit News, Aug. 21, 2019 |

Detroit — Three prison inmates stabbed, beat, kicked and stomped to death Christian Maire, the mastermind of an international child exploitation ring who was killed inside the federal detention center in Milan in January, according to an indictment unsealed Wednesday.

Alex "Sniper" Castro, 39, Jason "J" Kechego, 38, and Adam "Creeper" Wright, 39, were charged with first-degree premeditated murder and accused of conspiring to prey upon smaller, weaker inmates, including Maire and another member of the child exploitation ring, Michael Figura, prosecutors said.

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Maire and Figura belonged to an international child exploitation ring that perfected the art of preying on preteen and teenage girls. Members of the ring who were called hunters posed as teenage boys and trolled social media websites to lure victims to a private online chatroom before manipulating more than 100 children, including at least one from Metro Detroit, to strip, masturbate and perform sex acts on camera.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2019/08/21/trio-charged-killing-sex-ring-mastermind-christian-maire/2076515001/

Welcome to the Trump dictatorship

by Lucian K. Truscott IV

Another week of shaking our heads and wondering how much longer we can survive him. Yet again, Donald Trump overwhelmed practically everything with the force of his obscene personality, running his mouth and his thumbs even while he was failing to run the country in any sort of conventional sense. He doesn’t actually do anything, but he dominates everything. Living in America today is like being trapped in a room with him — no doors, no windows, no exits, only Trump and the sound of Trump and the hideous image of Trump, all day, every day, for day after day after day.

I was trying to think how to describe what it feels like to live in this country today when I came across a big profile of Neil Young published in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. The author, David Samuels, was commiserating with Young about the state of music in the age of Spotify and Apple and the digitization of everything comprised of musical notes. Surveying a landscape into which he doesn’t feel he fits anymore, Samuels described Young as “stumped.” “I’ve got great melodies, and the words are all profanities,” Young said.

Exactly. That’s America in the age of Trump, why everyone’s Facebook posts are screams of frustration and anger stuffed with profanity. The sense of powerlessness is almost overwhelming. You don’t feel like you can actually do anything. Everything is in stasis, stuck. Neil Young is right. We’re stumped.

Our senses dictate how we experience the world — our hearing and sight and touch and smell, even the ineffable stuff like intuition and belief. But when our senses are overwhelmed by someone like Trump, when our lives seem filled with a man who does nothing but endlessly tweet and lie and hate, it kills us inside. Trump is killing us.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/welcome-to-the-trump-dictatorship/

URI Friedman of The Atlantic:

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Understanding what Putin said depends on what you watch or where you look. If you watch the video of the news conference provided by the Russian government, or by news outlets such as PBS and the Associated Press, you will hear the Reuters reporter Jeff Mason ask a bombshell of a question: “President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?”

Putin then responds with a bombshell of an answer, according to the English translation of his remarks that was broadcast during the press conference: “Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.”