Post by mhbruin on Mar 27, 2022 8:56:56 GMT -8
US Vaccine Data - We Have Now Administered 559 Million Shots (Population 333 Million)
↓ 20.0% Cases, two-week change
↓ 39.1% Deaths, two-week change
981,796 Total confirmed deaths
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California Precipitation (Updated Tuesday March 22)
There was some rain in the Nor Cal. A little more in the ten-day.
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Today's Worst Person in the World Nominees
Filing a MacLawsuit
The Verpackungssteuer(packaging tax) in Tübingen, Germany imposes an extra payment of fifty cents on any disposable packaging, from coffee cups to ice cream bowls to meal plates. In addition, all disposable cutlery like folks, knives and spoons cost twenty cents extra. Even pizza boxes and the foil around a takeaway falafel are taxed. Regardless of whether they're made from sustainable or recycled material, anything that is one-time use will be costlier, based on the principle that non-production is better than future recycling or disposal.
The tax is already off to an encouraging start: the first few weeks resulted in up to 15% less waste in the city's rubbish bins. The number is only set to rise, as more people get in the habit of bringing their own cutlery and restaurants start providing reusable dishes.
Both the residents and businesses of Tübingen have risen to the challenge. "I have stopped stocking any disposable plates," said Naresh Taneja, who has owned vegan Indian restaurant Maharaja in Tübingen for 30 years. "We were already encouraging our customers to bring their own lunchboxes, and now this tax helped even more."
Yalcin added that the local government provided assistance to deal with the packaging tax and helped them buy dishwashers and reusable cutlery.
The ruling has not gone down well with Tübingen's only McDonald's, however, which is suing the city over the tax. With more than 1,500 restaurants across the country, McDonald's claim it's hard to customise solutions and are arguing for a uniform framework as opposed to rules differing across cities. "We agree that the best packaging is the one that is not produced in the first place. But local special paths of individual cities or communities stand in the way of a nationally successful and implementable concept," said a spokesperson, as the company is implementing targeted trials of their own reusables system.
Tübingen: Europe's fiercely vegan, fairy-tale city
ICE Finds New Ways to Screw People
ICE set up a fake college to catch fraudsters. Students say they were duped.
Yi Dong found himself in a bind in the fall of 2015.
After graduating from Syracuse University, the 27-year-old Chinese man was accepted into a master’s program in computer science at the University of Northern New Jersey, or UNNJ. The program, he was told, would allow him to stay in the U.S. on a student visa and continue working as a computer programmer. But he was waiting on a visa authorization form, and no one at the school was getting back to him.
With the clock ticking down on his current visa status, Dong, who lived in Brooklyn, New York, decided to rent a car and drive to the college in Cranford, New Jersey.
Inside a three-story building in a leafy office park, he was escorted into the office of a man who identified himself as Dr. Steve Brunetti, the school’s president. Brunetti produced the government form, signed it and handed it over to Dong. He then gave the student a UNNJ T-shirt and snapped a photograph that was soon posted to the school’s Facebook page.
“He told me he was proud of his students,” Dong recalled.
Over the next six months, Dong paid out more than $6,000 in tuition and broker fees, believing he was earning credits toward his degree by continuing to work at his computer programming job. He had received permission from the school to work full time prior to beginning any coursework as part of a government-authorized program that allows foreign students to gain practical skills in their fields of study.
But one day in April 2016, he heard news that he says floored him: Brunetti wasn’t a real administrator — and the University of Northern New Jersey wasn’t a real school.
The university was an elaborate ruse set up by the Department of Homeland Security to lure brokers and recruiters suspected of engaging in student visa fraud.
On that April morning, federal prosecutors announced charges against 21 people who they said arranged for students to enroll at UNNJ in a “pay to stay” scheme (a 22nd person was charged later). The defendants were accused of fraudulently obtaining student visas for about 1,000 foreign nationals in exchange for kickbacks or “commissions.”
Prosecutors said the brokers were told that no classes would be offered and that the school existed only to get immigration status for foreign nationals. The students, prosecutors said at the time, were in on the scam.
But in the ensuing months, a different narrative emerged. A group of students filed a federal lawsuit alleging that they were collateral damage in the sting, duped by both the brokers and the undercover agents who posed as university officials. As the case played out, government lawyers struggled to keep their stories about the students straight — saying in one hearing that they were, in fact, “victims of fraud,” then filing court papers that walked back the statement.
The sting resulted in little in the way of punishment for the brokers, all of whom pleaded guilty. None received prison sentences; more than half were sentenced to a year of probation.
The students, meanwhile, had their lives upended. Though none were criminally charged, they lost thousands of dollars in “tuition” or broker fees and suddenly faced the threat of deportation, according to court documents.
It's Quite a Story
Polymer80 Sounds Like a Polluting Chemical, But Their Products Kill With Lead.
Polymer80’s name has become synonymous with ‘ghost guns.’ Now it’s in the crosshairs.
The Nevada-based company accounted for nearly 90 percent of handmade guns recovered in Los Angeles last year, records show. Amid civil lawsuits, Polymer80 says it follows the law.
As Usual, Nobody Knows WFT She is Talking About
It Was Such an Honor to Serve That He Disgraced the Office
Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska on Saturday resigned from office after a California jury convicted him of lying to federal authorities about an illegal campaign donation from a foreign national.
In a letter to the House, Fortenberry said he was resigning from Congress, effective March 31.
“It has been my honor to serve with you in the United States House of Representatives,” he said in the letter. “Due to the difficulties of my current circumstances, I can no longer effectively serve.”
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Today's Best Person in the World Nominees
This is What You Get When You Don't Rape Someone in College
Five recent surveys have indicated strong support for President Joe Biden's decision to nominate Jackson for the Supreme Court seat retiring Justice Stephen Breyer is vacating. According to an average of polls by Gallup, Fox, Monmouth University, Quinnipiac University and the Pew Research Center, about 53% of Americans supported her confirmation, with about 26% of Americans opposed. This is good for a +27-point net popularity rating.
If Jackson's ratings hold up through her likely confirmation, she would be the most popular nominee to be confirmed since John Roberts in 2005. Jackson's popularity should only help her in the confirmation process.
Instead of SearchING YouTube for Makeup Tips, They are Making Good Use of the Internet
Crowdsourcing has created a new form of online open-source investigation, as epitomized by the group Bellingcat that was founded by my guest, Eliot Higgins, in 2014. Higgins and people affiliated with Bellingcat, while at their computers, have uncovered evidence that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fired chemical weapons at his own people, figured out who controlled territory during the Libyan civil war, identified the Russian intelligence agents alleged to have poisoned MI6 double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia and found evidence that the 22-year-old woman alleged to have stolen Nancy Pelosi's laptop on January 6 was a neo-Nazi sympathizer who used coded neo-Nazi language in a video and in that video gave the Heil Hitler salute.
And we started identifying soldiers who were in Russia who were part of a convoy where the missile launcher that shot down MH17 was transported in. We knew that convoy existed because a bunch of Russians along the route filmed it and posted it on social media, so we could reconstruct the route of the convoy, which led us back to their air defense base, the 53rd air defense base in Kursk, in Russia. And they had a page on VKontakte, which is, like, Russia's Facebook, where all the soldiers followed their own brigades. And we could then look at those soldiers' profiles and start finding photographs of them inside this convoy that transported this missile launcher.
And we were able to basically reconstruct the entire brigade structure based off their own social media posts. And that led us to finding more and more soldiers who were involved with the conflict in Ukraine, coming from Russia and actually fighting in Ukraine, even though they were serving Russian soldiers. And that was because they were posting stuff about it on their own social media profiles. So we could find photographs of them in Ukraine, use geolocation to figure out exactly where that was and then say, this is a Russian soldier from this brigade, this unit, inside Ukraine. And that extended not just to soldiers but tanks and armored vehicles and other equipment that had been sent from Russia to Ukraine, but because of the amount of kind of video documentation, you could find the same, you know, tank in Russia and then find a photograph of it a few weeks later in Ukraine with the same markings, numbering, down to the smallest scratches and dents and prove that these were Russian tanks inside Ukraine.
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Invasions Have Consequences
The War Was Over For Him in 33 Days
Ukraine's defence ministry says another Russian general, Lt Gen Yakov Rezantsev, was killed in a strike near the southern city of Kherson.
Rezantsev was the commander of Russia's 49th combined army.
A western official said he was the seventh general to die in Ukraine, and the second lieutenant general - the highest rank officer reportedly killed.
It is thought that low morale among Russian troops has forced senior officers closer to the front line.
In a conversation intercepted by the Ukrainian military, a Russian soldier complained that Rezantsev had claimed the war would be over within hours, just four days after it began.
They Are Dying to Visit Ukraine
The war in Ukraine is proving extraordinarily lethal for Russian generals, the gray men bedecked in service medals, who are being aggressively targeted by Ukrainian forces and killed at a rate not seen since World War II.
Ukrainian officials say their forces have killed seven generals on the battlefield, felled by snipers, close combat and bombings.
If true, the deaths of so many generals, alongside more senior Russian army and naval commanders — in just four weeks of combat — exceeds the attrition rate seen in the worst months of fighting in the bloody nine-year war fought by Russia in Chechnya, as well as Russian and Soviet-era campaigns in Afghanistan, Georgia and Syria.
“It is highly unusual,” said a senior Western official, briefing reporters on the topic, who confirmed the names, ranks and “killed in action” status of the seven.
In all, at least 15 senior Russian commanders have been killed in the field, said Markiyan Lubkivsky, a spokesperson for the Ukraine Ministry of Defense.
NATO officials estimated earlier this week that as many as 15,000 Russian troops have been killed in four weeks of war, a very high number. Russia has offered a far lower figure, reporting Friday that only 1,351 of its fighters had died.
Is Walmart There? There Seem to Be a Lot of RollBacks.
Ukrainian counterattacks retake villages in Kharkiv: Kharkiv's regional administrator said a number of villages around Malaya Rogan were retaken by Ukrainian forces. Video verified by CNN shows Ukrainian troops in control of Vilkhivka, one of the settlements roughly 20 miles from the Russian border. The success of Ukrainian forces around Kharkiv has been mirrored further north, near the city of Sumy, where Ukrainian troops have liberated a number of settlements, according to videos geolocated and verified by CNN. A separate counterattack in the south also led to the liberation of two villages from Russian forces northwest of Mariupol, according to the Zaporizhzhia regional military administration.
Vlad is Putin Us All At Risk
Ukraine has alarmingly high numbers of people living with H.I.V. and hepatitis C, and dangerously low levels of vaccination against measles, polio and Covid-19. Overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions for refugees are breeding grounds for cholera and other diarrheal diseases, not to mention respiratory plagues like Covid-19, pneumonia and tuberculosis. [...]
Ukraine and the surrounding region also make up a world epicenter of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, a form of the disease impervious to the most powerful medications.
The Ukrainian health ministry in recent years had made progress in bringing these epidemics under control, including a 21 percent drop in new H.I.V. infections and a 36 percent decline in TB diagnoses since 2010.
But health officials now fear that delays in diagnosis and treatment interruptions during the war may allow these pathogens to flourish again, with consequences that ripple for years.
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It's Great When You Can Help and Profit Too, Eh?
Canada says it can provide more oil, gas and uranium to help solve the global energy crisis.
Prices have soared as a result of Russian supplies being squeezed because of its invasion of Ukraine.
Canada's natural resources minister said many countries are committed "to help as much as we can in terms of displacing Russian oil and gas".
The world's fourth biggest oil producer has committed to exporting an extra 200,000 barrels of oil.
Its Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson told BBC News it would also export an additional 100,000 barrels of natural gas.
It follows requests from its allies at a meeting of the world's energy ministers at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, which pledged to accelerate the move to clean energy.
"We expect that by the end of the year we will be fully up to the 300,000 barrels," said Mr Wilkinson.
By the End of the Year? It is Only March
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Meanwhile, Another Animal is Killed At a Shelter
Over the last six years a new industry has emerged – pet cloning. In 2015, ViaGen began offering its services to pet owners looking to clone their beloved cat or dog. It does not come cheap – the company charges $35,000 (£22,800) to clone a cat, and $50,000 (£38,000) for a dog – but the demand is there. While ViaGen do not disclose the exact number of pets they have cloned so far, Melain Rodriguez, a client services manager at ViaGen said that the figure is in the hundreds.
"It has grown so much since we first started this, and we're cloning more and more pets every year," says Rodriguez. "We've got puppies being born every week. We don't do a lot of advertising, a lot of it is passed on by word of mouth."
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This is Better Than a Wealth Tax.
The White House is set to unveil a new minimum income tax for billionaires Monday as part of President Joe Biden's budget proposal for FY2023, according to a White House document released Saturday.
The "Billionaire Minimum Income Tax" would require households worth more than $100 million to pay at least 20% on their full income, including unrealized investment income, the White House said in a fact sheet, with over half of the revenue coming from billionaire households.
"The Billionaire Minimum Income Tax will ensure that the very wealthiest Americans pay a tax rate of at least 20 percent on their full income, including unrealized appreciation," the White House said. "This minimum tax would make sure that the wealthiest Americans no longer pay a tax rate lower than teachers and firefighters."
The proposed tax is consistent with the desire among the Democratic Party's progressive base to impose heavier levies on the wealthiest Americans. But the reality of it becoming law is unclear on Capitol Hill, where some more moderate members of the party have previously balked at such efforts.
I'm Sure Coal Joe's Rich Buddies Have Already Called on Him to Block It.
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At This Point the Scientists Have No Clue What is Happening Next ... For All of Us
It’s been a strange stretch for the icy desert at the bottom of the world.
In mid-March, temperatures in parts of East Antarctica soared 70 degrees Fahrenheit above average. It was high enough for researchers living there to brave the elements for a bare-chested group photo.
The comparably balmy temperatures, which reached around 10 degrees Fahrenheit, arrived courtesy of a history-making atmospheric river — a plume of concentrated moisture that flows through the sky. This one brought an incredible dump of snow in the inner reaches of the ice sheet, something quite rare for the area.
And in what could be a separate development, the Conger Ice Shelf — a hunk of ice similar in area to Los Angeles — collapsed into the sea right around the same time, satellite imaging shows.
Researchers are scrambling to make sense of what has happened. The surprising temperatures and moisture are already changing how they think about weather in Antarctica and raising questions about what impacts the continent could see if such a wild temperature swing had happened in summer — or in a warmer future.
And while researchers say it’s too early to know what role, if any, climate change is playing here, the event has their attention because it’s so extreme.
“It was something we didn’t think was possible in Antarctica, the magnitude of heat, especially in what should be the cold season in Antarctica,” said Jonathan Wille, a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, of the heat wave. “We’ve never seen the atmosphere behave like this over Antarctica.”
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See If You Can Tell Which One Has a Soul
Person 1
Over the past few weeks, Biden’s rhetoric on Putin — a man he once recounted telling to his face, “I don’t think you have a soul” — has become increasingly pointed. He has called him a “butcher” “pure thug” and a “murderous dictator.” So saying that he should be removed from power could viewed as the logical next step.
It also is in line with Biden at times articulating policy before his aides are ready. Last week, he called Putin a “war criminal,” which White House aides quickly said was simply him “speaking from the heart.” But within a few days, U.S. policy changed as Blinken also called Putin a war criminal and released a formal assessment on war crimes committed by Russia.
Biden’s comment was particularly striking because his administration has taken pains to avoid even implying that regime change is a goal of the Western response to Russia’s aggression. [...]
Person 2
Donald Trump chose a rally in Georgia on Saturday night once again to praise Vladimir Putin, calling the Russian president “smart” even as he said the invasion of Ukraine amounted to a “big mistake”.
The Republican former president also had warm words for China’s president Xi Jinping and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and referred to such leaders collectively by saying: “The smartest one gets to the top.”
He spoke admiringly of Xi in terms of the fact that he “runs 1.5 billion people with an iron fist” and referred to Kim as “tough”.
Then of Putin, Trump told the crowd: “They asked me if Putin is smart. Yes, Putin was smart.”
He also praised Russia’s strategy of a huge accumulation of military force on its border with Ukraine prior to invading, even if the war is not going well for the aggressor.
“That’s a hell of a way to negotiate, put 200,000 troops on the border…That was a big mistake, but it looked like a great negotiation. That didn’t work out too well for him,” Trump said.
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Sometimes You Have to Stop and Smell the Poop
Across the country, academics, private companies, public health departments, and sewage plant operators have been working to hone a new public health tool, one with uses that could reach well beyond covid. Wastewater surveillance is not a new concept, but the scale and scope of the current pandemic have vaulted the technique over the narrow walls of academic research to broader public use as a crucial tool for community-level tracking of covid surges and variants.
Sewage surveillance is proving so useful that many researchers and public health officials say it should become standard practice in tracking infectious diseases, as is already the case in many other countries. But whether that happens — and which communities get access — depends on the nation’s ability to vastly scale up the approach and make it viable in communities rich and poor.
Like many other public health tools, wastewater testing initially took off in big cities and university towns with access to research expertise, equipment, and money. The Modesto project offers a glimpse of the challenges and opportunities involved in making this technology available in communities with more limited resources.
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Who Won the Week?
The Disney employees who walked off the job to protest the corporate shrug CEO Bob Chapek gave as FL Republicans passed their "Don't Say Gay" bill
Ketanji Brown Jackson, for receiving the ABA's highest rating and then acing her Supreme Court confirmation hearings
Prosecutor Mark F. Pomerantz, whose published resignation letter eviscerates Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg for dropping the fraud case against Trump as “a grave failure of justice”
Stability in Canada, as Justin Trudeau strikes a deal with his coalition partners to remain prime minister until at least the middle of 2025
President Biden: travels to Brussels to coordinate Putin ass kicking; gets 56th judicial nominee confirmed; best jobless claims report since 1969; signs Amache National Historic Site Act
Shalanda Young, whose Senate confirmation makes her the first Black woman to serve as director of the White House’s Office of Management & Budget
Ukraine's leadership, military, and civilians, for continuing to make Putin's invasion a living hell even in the face of Russian atrocities against them
Americans' credit scores, as the top three credit reporting firms agree to strip out 70 percent of medical debt---tens of billions of dollars---from credit reports
MacKenzie Scott, as Jeff Bezos' ex-wife continues her philanthropy efforts by donating over $430 million to Habitat for Humanity
The dude who slow-pedaled his bike in front of the MAGA truckers convoy in D.C. and brought the line of macho rigs to a crawl
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No One Cares What You Do With Your Piece of Metal, Sean
Actor Sean Penn says he will destroy his Academy Award if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy isn't allowed to speak during the broadcast.
In an interview with CNN, Penn, 61, said having Zelenskyy speak during Sunday's broadcast was of the utmost importance.
"There is nothing greater that the Academy Awards could do than to give him that opportunity to talk to all of us," Penn said.
He said if Zelenskyy isn't given the floor for an address during the broadcast, Penn will destroy his own Oscar.
"When I return, I will smelt mine in public," he said. "I pray that’s not what happens."
Next, He Will Want Zelenskyy Declared the Next American Idol
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↓ 20.0% Cases, two-week change
↓ 39.1% Deaths, two-week change
981,796 Total confirmed deaths
New Cases 7-Day Average | Deaths 7-Day Average | |
| Mar 26 | ||
| Mar 25 | 705 | |
| Mar 24 | 27,784 | 732 |
| Mar 23 | 27,134 | 753 |
| Mar 22 | 27,545 | 787 |
| Mar 21 | 28,657 | 861 |
| Mar 20 | 27,786 | 901 |
| Mar 19 | 27,747 | 909 |
| Mar 18 | 28,274 | 972 |
| Mar 17 | 29,317 | 1,035 |
| Mar 16 | 30,040 | 1,052 |
| Mar 15 | 30,934 | 1,107 |
| Mar 14 | 32,458 | 1,186 |
| Mar 13 | 34,113 | 1,187 |
| Mar 12 | 34,253 | 1,210 |
| Mar 11 | 34,805 | 1,198 |
| Mar 10 | 35,269 | 1,197 |
| Mar 9 | 37,146 | 1,179 |
| Mar 8 | 37,879 | 1,161 |
| Mar 7 | 40,433 | 1,208 |
| Mar 6 | 42,204 | 1,259 |
| Mar 5 | 43,665 | 1,281 |
| Mar 4 | 45,555 | 1,319 |
| Mar 3 | 49,888 | 1,413 |
| Mar 2 | 53,016 | 1,558 |
| Mar 1 | 56,253 | 1,674 |
| Feb 28 | 68,480 | 1,832 |
| Feb 27 | 62,556 | 1,686 |
| Feb 26 | 66,053 | 1,719 |
| Feb 25 | 69,203 | 1,751 |
| Feb 24 | 72,111 | 1,720 |
| Feb 23 | 75,208 | 1,674 |
| Feb 22 | 79,539 | 1,602 |
| Feb 21 | 78,306 | 1,872 |
| Feb 16, 2021 | 78,292 |
| At Least One Dose | Fully Vaccinated | % of Vaccinated W/ Boosters | |
| % of Total Population | 76.8% | 65.5% | 44.7% |
| % of Population 5+ | 81.7% | 69.6% | |
| % of Population 12+ | 86.5% | 73.9% | 46.4% |
| % of Population 18+ | 88.3% | 75.4% | 48.1% |
| % of Population 65+ | 95.0% | 89.0% | 67.1% |
California Precipitation (Updated Tuesday March 22)
There was some rain in the Nor Cal. A little more in the ten-day.
| Percent of Average for this Date | 2 Weeks ago | 3 Weeks ago | |
| Northern Sierra Precipitation | 79% (62% of full season average) | 84% (61%) | 87% (60%) |
| San Joaquin Precipitation | 69% (54%) | 74% (53%) | 76% (51%) |
| Tulare Basin Precipitation | 65% (51%) | 71% (51%) | 70% (48%) |
| Snow Water Content - North | 46% | 55% (52%) | 59% (53%) |
| Snow Water Content - Central | 55% | 59% (64%) | 58% (66%) |
| Snow Water Content - South | 52% | 60% (66%) | 54% (63%) |
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Today's Worst Person in the World Nominees
Filing a MacLawsuit
The Verpackungssteuer(packaging tax) in Tübingen, Germany imposes an extra payment of fifty cents on any disposable packaging, from coffee cups to ice cream bowls to meal plates. In addition, all disposable cutlery like folks, knives and spoons cost twenty cents extra. Even pizza boxes and the foil around a takeaway falafel are taxed. Regardless of whether they're made from sustainable or recycled material, anything that is one-time use will be costlier, based on the principle that non-production is better than future recycling or disposal.
The tax is already off to an encouraging start: the first few weeks resulted in up to 15% less waste in the city's rubbish bins. The number is only set to rise, as more people get in the habit of bringing their own cutlery and restaurants start providing reusable dishes.
Both the residents and businesses of Tübingen have risen to the challenge. "I have stopped stocking any disposable plates," said Naresh Taneja, who has owned vegan Indian restaurant Maharaja in Tübingen for 30 years. "We were already encouraging our customers to bring their own lunchboxes, and now this tax helped even more."
Yalcin added that the local government provided assistance to deal with the packaging tax and helped them buy dishwashers and reusable cutlery.
The ruling has not gone down well with Tübingen's only McDonald's, however, which is suing the city over the tax. With more than 1,500 restaurants across the country, McDonald's claim it's hard to customise solutions and are arguing for a uniform framework as opposed to rules differing across cities. "We agree that the best packaging is the one that is not produced in the first place. But local special paths of individual cities or communities stand in the way of a nationally successful and implementable concept," said a spokesperson, as the company is implementing targeted trials of their own reusables system.
Tübingen: Europe's fiercely vegan, fairy-tale city
ICE Finds New Ways to Screw People
ICE set up a fake college to catch fraudsters. Students say they were duped.
Yi Dong found himself in a bind in the fall of 2015.
After graduating from Syracuse University, the 27-year-old Chinese man was accepted into a master’s program in computer science at the University of Northern New Jersey, or UNNJ. The program, he was told, would allow him to stay in the U.S. on a student visa and continue working as a computer programmer. But he was waiting on a visa authorization form, and no one at the school was getting back to him.
With the clock ticking down on his current visa status, Dong, who lived in Brooklyn, New York, decided to rent a car and drive to the college in Cranford, New Jersey.
Inside a three-story building in a leafy office park, he was escorted into the office of a man who identified himself as Dr. Steve Brunetti, the school’s president. Brunetti produced the government form, signed it and handed it over to Dong. He then gave the student a UNNJ T-shirt and snapped a photograph that was soon posted to the school’s Facebook page.
“He told me he was proud of his students,” Dong recalled.
Over the next six months, Dong paid out more than $6,000 in tuition and broker fees, believing he was earning credits toward his degree by continuing to work at his computer programming job. He had received permission from the school to work full time prior to beginning any coursework as part of a government-authorized program that allows foreign students to gain practical skills in their fields of study.
But one day in April 2016, he heard news that he says floored him: Brunetti wasn’t a real administrator — and the University of Northern New Jersey wasn’t a real school.
The university was an elaborate ruse set up by the Department of Homeland Security to lure brokers and recruiters suspected of engaging in student visa fraud.
On that April morning, federal prosecutors announced charges against 21 people who they said arranged for students to enroll at UNNJ in a “pay to stay” scheme (a 22nd person was charged later). The defendants were accused of fraudulently obtaining student visas for about 1,000 foreign nationals in exchange for kickbacks or “commissions.”
Prosecutors said the brokers were told that no classes would be offered and that the school existed only to get immigration status for foreign nationals. The students, prosecutors said at the time, were in on the scam.
But in the ensuing months, a different narrative emerged. A group of students filed a federal lawsuit alleging that they were collateral damage in the sting, duped by both the brokers and the undercover agents who posed as university officials. As the case played out, government lawyers struggled to keep their stories about the students straight — saying in one hearing that they were, in fact, “victims of fraud,” then filing court papers that walked back the statement.
The sting resulted in little in the way of punishment for the brokers, all of whom pleaded guilty. None received prison sentences; more than half were sentenced to a year of probation.
The students, meanwhile, had their lives upended. Though none were criminally charged, they lost thousands of dollars in “tuition” or broker fees and suddenly faced the threat of deportation, according to court documents.
It's Quite a Story
Polymer80 Sounds Like a Polluting Chemical, But Their Products Kill With Lead.
Polymer80’s name has become synonymous with ‘ghost guns.’ Now it’s in the crosshairs.
The Nevada-based company accounted for nearly 90 percent of handmade guns recovered in Los Angeles last year, records show. Amid civil lawsuits, Polymer80 says it follows the law.
As Usual, Nobody Knows WFT She is Talking About
It Was Such an Honor to Serve That He Disgraced the Office
Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska on Saturday resigned from office after a California jury convicted him of lying to federal authorities about an illegal campaign donation from a foreign national.
In a letter to the House, Fortenberry said he was resigning from Congress, effective March 31.
“It has been my honor to serve with you in the United States House of Representatives,” he said in the letter. “Due to the difficulties of my current circumstances, I can no longer effectively serve.”
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Today's Best Person in the World Nominees
This is What You Get When You Don't Rape Someone in College
Five recent surveys have indicated strong support for President Joe Biden's decision to nominate Jackson for the Supreme Court seat retiring Justice Stephen Breyer is vacating. According to an average of polls by Gallup, Fox, Monmouth University, Quinnipiac University and the Pew Research Center, about 53% of Americans supported her confirmation, with about 26% of Americans opposed. This is good for a +27-point net popularity rating.
If Jackson's ratings hold up through her likely confirmation, she would be the most popular nominee to be confirmed since John Roberts in 2005. Jackson's popularity should only help her in the confirmation process.
Instead of SearchING YouTube for Makeup Tips, They are Making Good Use of the Internet
Crowdsourcing has created a new form of online open-source investigation, as epitomized by the group Bellingcat that was founded by my guest, Eliot Higgins, in 2014. Higgins and people affiliated with Bellingcat, while at their computers, have uncovered evidence that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fired chemical weapons at his own people, figured out who controlled territory during the Libyan civil war, identified the Russian intelligence agents alleged to have poisoned MI6 double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia and found evidence that the 22-year-old woman alleged to have stolen Nancy Pelosi's laptop on January 6 was a neo-Nazi sympathizer who used coded neo-Nazi language in a video and in that video gave the Heil Hitler salute.
And we started identifying soldiers who were in Russia who were part of a convoy where the missile launcher that shot down MH17 was transported in. We knew that convoy existed because a bunch of Russians along the route filmed it and posted it on social media, so we could reconstruct the route of the convoy, which led us back to their air defense base, the 53rd air defense base in Kursk, in Russia. And they had a page on VKontakte, which is, like, Russia's Facebook, where all the soldiers followed their own brigades. And we could then look at those soldiers' profiles and start finding photographs of them inside this convoy that transported this missile launcher.
And we were able to basically reconstruct the entire brigade structure based off their own social media posts. And that led us to finding more and more soldiers who were involved with the conflict in Ukraine, coming from Russia and actually fighting in Ukraine, even though they were serving Russian soldiers. And that was because they were posting stuff about it on their own social media profiles. So we could find photographs of them in Ukraine, use geolocation to figure out exactly where that was and then say, this is a Russian soldier from this brigade, this unit, inside Ukraine. And that extended not just to soldiers but tanks and armored vehicles and other equipment that had been sent from Russia to Ukraine, but because of the amount of kind of video documentation, you could find the same, you know, tank in Russia and then find a photograph of it a few weeks later in Ukraine with the same markings, numbering, down to the smallest scratches and dents and prove that these were Russian tanks inside Ukraine.
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Invasions Have Consequences
The War Was Over For Him in 33 Days
Ukraine's defence ministry says another Russian general, Lt Gen Yakov Rezantsev, was killed in a strike near the southern city of Kherson.
Rezantsev was the commander of Russia's 49th combined army.
A western official said he was the seventh general to die in Ukraine, and the second lieutenant general - the highest rank officer reportedly killed.
It is thought that low morale among Russian troops has forced senior officers closer to the front line.
In a conversation intercepted by the Ukrainian military, a Russian soldier complained that Rezantsev had claimed the war would be over within hours, just four days after it began.
They Are Dying to Visit Ukraine
The war in Ukraine is proving extraordinarily lethal for Russian generals, the gray men bedecked in service medals, who are being aggressively targeted by Ukrainian forces and killed at a rate not seen since World War II.
Ukrainian officials say their forces have killed seven generals on the battlefield, felled by snipers, close combat and bombings.
If true, the deaths of so many generals, alongside more senior Russian army and naval commanders — in just four weeks of combat — exceeds the attrition rate seen in the worst months of fighting in the bloody nine-year war fought by Russia in Chechnya, as well as Russian and Soviet-era campaigns in Afghanistan, Georgia and Syria.
“It is highly unusual,” said a senior Western official, briefing reporters on the topic, who confirmed the names, ranks and “killed in action” status of the seven.
In all, at least 15 senior Russian commanders have been killed in the field, said Markiyan Lubkivsky, a spokesperson for the Ukraine Ministry of Defense.
NATO officials estimated earlier this week that as many as 15,000 Russian troops have been killed in four weeks of war, a very high number. Russia has offered a far lower figure, reporting Friday that only 1,351 of its fighters had died.
Is Walmart There? There Seem to Be a Lot of RollBacks.
Ukrainian counterattacks retake villages in Kharkiv: Kharkiv's regional administrator said a number of villages around Malaya Rogan were retaken by Ukrainian forces. Video verified by CNN shows Ukrainian troops in control of Vilkhivka, one of the settlements roughly 20 miles from the Russian border. The success of Ukrainian forces around Kharkiv has been mirrored further north, near the city of Sumy, where Ukrainian troops have liberated a number of settlements, according to videos geolocated and verified by CNN. A separate counterattack in the south also led to the liberation of two villages from Russian forces northwest of Mariupol, according to the Zaporizhzhia regional military administration.
Vlad is Putin Us All At Risk
Ukraine has alarmingly high numbers of people living with H.I.V. and hepatitis C, and dangerously low levels of vaccination against measles, polio and Covid-19. Overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions for refugees are breeding grounds for cholera and other diarrheal diseases, not to mention respiratory plagues like Covid-19, pneumonia and tuberculosis. [...]
Ukraine and the surrounding region also make up a world epicenter of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, a form of the disease impervious to the most powerful medications.
The Ukrainian health ministry in recent years had made progress in bringing these epidemics under control, including a 21 percent drop in new H.I.V. infections and a 36 percent decline in TB diagnoses since 2010.
But health officials now fear that delays in diagnosis and treatment interruptions during the war may allow these pathogens to flourish again, with consequences that ripple for years.
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It's Great When You Can Help and Profit Too, Eh?
Canada says it can provide more oil, gas and uranium to help solve the global energy crisis.
Prices have soared as a result of Russian supplies being squeezed because of its invasion of Ukraine.
Canada's natural resources minister said many countries are committed "to help as much as we can in terms of displacing Russian oil and gas".
The world's fourth biggest oil producer has committed to exporting an extra 200,000 barrels of oil.
Its Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson told BBC News it would also export an additional 100,000 barrels of natural gas.
It follows requests from its allies at a meeting of the world's energy ministers at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, which pledged to accelerate the move to clean energy.
"We expect that by the end of the year we will be fully up to the 300,000 barrels," said Mr Wilkinson.
By the End of the Year? It is Only March
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Meanwhile, Another Animal is Killed At a Shelter
Over the last six years a new industry has emerged – pet cloning. In 2015, ViaGen began offering its services to pet owners looking to clone their beloved cat or dog. It does not come cheap – the company charges $35,000 (£22,800) to clone a cat, and $50,000 (£38,000) for a dog – but the demand is there. While ViaGen do not disclose the exact number of pets they have cloned so far, Melain Rodriguez, a client services manager at ViaGen said that the figure is in the hundreds.
"It has grown so much since we first started this, and we're cloning more and more pets every year," says Rodriguez. "We've got puppies being born every week. We don't do a lot of advertising, a lot of it is passed on by word of mouth."
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This is Better Than a Wealth Tax.
The White House is set to unveil a new minimum income tax for billionaires Monday as part of President Joe Biden's budget proposal for FY2023, according to a White House document released Saturday.
The "Billionaire Minimum Income Tax" would require households worth more than $100 million to pay at least 20% on their full income, including unrealized investment income, the White House said in a fact sheet, with over half of the revenue coming from billionaire households.
"The Billionaire Minimum Income Tax will ensure that the very wealthiest Americans pay a tax rate of at least 20 percent on their full income, including unrealized appreciation," the White House said. "This minimum tax would make sure that the wealthiest Americans no longer pay a tax rate lower than teachers and firefighters."
The proposed tax is consistent with the desire among the Democratic Party's progressive base to impose heavier levies on the wealthiest Americans. But the reality of it becoming law is unclear on Capitol Hill, where some more moderate members of the party have previously balked at such efforts.
I'm Sure Coal Joe's Rich Buddies Have Already Called on Him to Block It.
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At This Point the Scientists Have No Clue What is Happening Next ... For All of Us
It’s been a strange stretch for the icy desert at the bottom of the world.
In mid-March, temperatures in parts of East Antarctica soared 70 degrees Fahrenheit above average. It was high enough for researchers living there to brave the elements for a bare-chested group photo.
The comparably balmy temperatures, which reached around 10 degrees Fahrenheit, arrived courtesy of a history-making atmospheric river — a plume of concentrated moisture that flows through the sky. This one brought an incredible dump of snow in the inner reaches of the ice sheet, something quite rare for the area.
And in what could be a separate development, the Conger Ice Shelf — a hunk of ice similar in area to Los Angeles — collapsed into the sea right around the same time, satellite imaging shows.
Researchers are scrambling to make sense of what has happened. The surprising temperatures and moisture are already changing how they think about weather in Antarctica and raising questions about what impacts the continent could see if such a wild temperature swing had happened in summer — or in a warmer future.
And while researchers say it’s too early to know what role, if any, climate change is playing here, the event has their attention because it’s so extreme.
“It was something we didn’t think was possible in Antarctica, the magnitude of heat, especially in what should be the cold season in Antarctica,” said Jonathan Wille, a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, of the heat wave. “We’ve never seen the atmosphere behave like this over Antarctica.”
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See If You Can Tell Which One Has a Soul
Person 1
Over the past few weeks, Biden’s rhetoric on Putin — a man he once recounted telling to his face, “I don’t think you have a soul” — has become increasingly pointed. He has called him a “butcher” “pure thug” and a “murderous dictator.” So saying that he should be removed from power could viewed as the logical next step.
It also is in line with Biden at times articulating policy before his aides are ready. Last week, he called Putin a “war criminal,” which White House aides quickly said was simply him “speaking from the heart.” But within a few days, U.S. policy changed as Blinken also called Putin a war criminal and released a formal assessment on war crimes committed by Russia.
Biden’s comment was particularly striking because his administration has taken pains to avoid even implying that regime change is a goal of the Western response to Russia’s aggression. [...]
Person 2
Donald Trump chose a rally in Georgia on Saturday night once again to praise Vladimir Putin, calling the Russian president “smart” even as he said the invasion of Ukraine amounted to a “big mistake”.
The Republican former president also had warm words for China’s president Xi Jinping and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and referred to such leaders collectively by saying: “The smartest one gets to the top.”
He spoke admiringly of Xi in terms of the fact that he “runs 1.5 billion people with an iron fist” and referred to Kim as “tough”.
Then of Putin, Trump told the crowd: “They asked me if Putin is smart. Yes, Putin was smart.”
He also praised Russia’s strategy of a huge accumulation of military force on its border with Ukraine prior to invading, even if the war is not going well for the aggressor.
“That’s a hell of a way to negotiate, put 200,000 troops on the border…That was a big mistake, but it looked like a great negotiation. That didn’t work out too well for him,” Trump said.
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Sometimes You Have to Stop and Smell the Poop
Across the country, academics, private companies, public health departments, and sewage plant operators have been working to hone a new public health tool, one with uses that could reach well beyond covid. Wastewater surveillance is not a new concept, but the scale and scope of the current pandemic have vaulted the technique over the narrow walls of academic research to broader public use as a crucial tool for community-level tracking of covid surges and variants.
Sewage surveillance is proving so useful that many researchers and public health officials say it should become standard practice in tracking infectious diseases, as is already the case in many other countries. But whether that happens — and which communities get access — depends on the nation’s ability to vastly scale up the approach and make it viable in communities rich and poor.
Like many other public health tools, wastewater testing initially took off in big cities and university towns with access to research expertise, equipment, and money. The Modesto project offers a glimpse of the challenges and opportunities involved in making this technology available in communities with more limited resources.
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Who Won the Week?
The Disney employees who walked off the job to protest the corporate shrug CEO Bob Chapek gave as FL Republicans passed their "Don't Say Gay" bill
Ketanji Brown Jackson, for receiving the ABA's highest rating and then acing her Supreme Court confirmation hearings
Prosecutor Mark F. Pomerantz, whose published resignation letter eviscerates Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg for dropping the fraud case against Trump as “a grave failure of justice”
Stability in Canada, as Justin Trudeau strikes a deal with his coalition partners to remain prime minister until at least the middle of 2025
President Biden: travels to Brussels to coordinate Putin ass kicking; gets 56th judicial nominee confirmed; best jobless claims report since 1969; signs Amache National Historic Site Act
Shalanda Young, whose Senate confirmation makes her the first Black woman to serve as director of the White House’s Office of Management & Budget
Ukraine's leadership, military, and civilians, for continuing to make Putin's invasion a living hell even in the face of Russian atrocities against them
Americans' credit scores, as the top three credit reporting firms agree to strip out 70 percent of medical debt---tens of billions of dollars---from credit reports
MacKenzie Scott, as Jeff Bezos' ex-wife continues her philanthropy efforts by donating over $430 million to Habitat for Humanity
The dude who slow-pedaled his bike in front of the MAGA truckers convoy in D.C. and brought the line of macho rigs to a crawl
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No One Cares What You Do With Your Piece of Metal, Sean
Actor Sean Penn says he will destroy his Academy Award if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy isn't allowed to speak during the broadcast.
In an interview with CNN, Penn, 61, said having Zelenskyy speak during Sunday's broadcast was of the utmost importance.
"There is nothing greater that the Academy Awards could do than to give him that opportunity to talk to all of us," Penn said.
He said if Zelenskyy isn't given the floor for an address during the broadcast, Penn will destroy his own Oscar.
"When I return, I will smelt mine in public," he said. "I pray that’s not what happens."
Next, He Will Want Zelenskyy Declared the Next American Idol
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