Ghislaine Maxwell loses fight to keep Epstein testimony sealed | Miami Herald
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Scary microwave attack on Former CIA official, and his travails within our government …in this recommended article
Former CIA official Marc Polymeropoulos visiting Moscow in late 2017, where he says he was attacked by a microwave weapon.
Marc Polymeropoulos awoke with a start. The feeling of nausea was overwhelming. Food poisoning, he thought, and decided to head for the bathroom. But when he tried to get out of bed, he fell over. He tried to stand up and fell again. It was the early morning hours of December 5, 2017, and his Moscow hotel room was spinning around him. His ears were ringing. He felt, he recalled, “like I was going to both throw up and pass out at the same time.”
Polymeropoulos was a covert CIA operative, a jovial, burly man who likes to refer to himself as “grizzled.” Moscow was not the first time he had been on enemy territory. He had spent most of his career in the Middle East, fighting America’s long war on terrorism. He had hunted terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen. He did the same in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had been shot at, ducked under rocket fire, and had shrapnel whiz by uncomfortably close to his head. But that night, paralyzed with seasickness in the landlocked Russian capital, Polymeropoulos felt terrified and utterly helpless for the first time.
Struggling to regain control over his body, Polymeropoulos couldn’t have imagined that this incident would upend his life. It would end a promising career that had just catapulted him into the ranks of senior CIA leadership, and threw him into the middle of a growing international mystery that has puzzled diplomats and scientists, and raised concerns on Capitol Hill. In the months ahead, he would come to realize that it wasn’t a spoiled sandwich that had mowed him down. Rather, it was his macabre initiation into a growing club of dozens of American diplomats, spies, and government employees posted abroad who were suffering in much the same way he was—targets of what some experts and doctors now believe were attacks perpetrated by unknown assailants wielding novel directed energy weapons. Though many of these apparent attacks have been publicized, including those that took place in Cuba and China, others have not been revealed until now, including at least three incidents that officials from the CIA and Capitol Hill say targeted American citizens on American soil.
Polymeropoulos arrived in Moscow at the end of Donald Trump’s first, chaotic year in the White House. Shortly before Trump was inaugurated, the intelligence community released its conclusions that the Russian government had successfully meddled in the 2016 presidential election. It was the kind of high-confidence, public assessment that rarely came out of the fractious world of U.S. intelligence. Yet the new president dismissed their findings and denigrated intelligence officers as the “deep state” who wanted nothing more than to thwart his agenda. He also seemed determined to make nice with the Kremlin, even going so far as inviting the Russian foreign minister into the Oval Office in May 2017, and using the occasion to mock ousted FBI director James Comey and to share highly classified Israeli intelligence with the Russians—without Jerusalem’s sign-off. “I remember thinking this is like George W. Bush inviting bin Laden after 9/11 and saying, ‘Eh, we’re good,’ ” Polymeropoulos told me. “Stuff like that that really alarmed us considerably.” Some of it, he added, made his “head explode.”
Not only were the president’s overtures to Vladimir Putin concerning, they were also in direct contradiction to the work Polymeropoulos was doing at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In late January 2017, Polymeropoulos had been transferred from the CIA’s counterterrorism division and promoted to a new role: deputy chief of operations for the Europe and Eurasia Mission Center, the EEMC. The CIA’s leadership, along with then director Mike Pompeo, decided that it was time to start pushing back on Russian active-measures campaigns more aggressively and that the best way to show the Kremlin that the Americans were serious was to bring in the tough guys who had spent the past 15 years in the Middle East. These people, like Polymeropoulos, didn’t know much about Russia, its history, or its culture. “We knew nothing on Russia,” Polymeropoulos admits. But, like his Russian counterparts, he and his counterterrorism comrades were fluent in the language of force.
Polymeropoulos’s new job was to run clandestine operations across the Center’s approximately 50 stations, which dotted the landscape from Ireland to Azerbaijan. As far as the Agency and Polymeropoulos saw it, the area in between—Europe, Ukraine, Turkey, the Caucasus—was now a battleground between the United States and Russia. Polymeropoulos issued what he refers to as “a call to arms.” “Every station was directed to refocus its efforts on Russia,” he explained. “It goes back to the old days where, in every station around the world, there was a Soviet branch. We wanted to reconstitute that because Russia can’t be ignored anymore.” Though Polymeropoulos and the other counterterrorism officers brought in for this new mission were mostly skilled at tracking suspected terrorists, they had to rely on a different skill set in dealing with the Russians. “The best way you do covert influence traditionally is with the truth,” Polymeropoulos told me. “And Russian operations and covert influence is so easy because we never have to say, like, you know, Putin likes little boys in the back of his car. You don’t make stuff up to embarrass him. You just say what they do.” This involved exposing Russian operations across the continent—like the efforts to stop Macedonia from changing its name and to sponsor a coup in Montenegro—by working with local intelligence services to make sure that the European public knew that the Kremlin was trying to manipulate them. (The Russian government has denied its involvement in these events.)
To this day, Polymeropoulos doesn’t know how much President Trump knew of the work he was doing at the EEMC. “Did he go down and brief the president?” Polymeropoulos said of Pompeo. “I don’t know, and it doesn’t even matter because we were given kind of the green light to go ahead and do it… It was simply a matter of us deciding internally in the CIA, this is what we’re going to do. We don’t need any kind of approval on that. It’s not like we were killing Russians.” (That would require high-level permission because physically targeting the officers of a sovereign country creates a different level of political risk. Polymeropoulos, along with other sources familiar with the CIA’s counterintelligence efforts, insists that at no point did these efforts involve physically harming Russian operatives.)
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Twitter is temporarily throttling how you retweet posts. The changes will be in place until “at least” the end of election week, to “help prevent abuse and the spread of misinformation.”
Oct 20, 2020
From Disclose TV
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Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family are being forced to pay upwards of $8.3 billion dollars on their malfeasance with OxyContin which has ravaged a huge swath of the country and resulted in 450,000 deaths since 1999. This is a big settlement, but probably a lot less considering the Sacklers have dispersed funds amongst themselves before the lawsuit.
DOJ is putting this one on the books and is showing that it has brought down another big one.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Purdue Pharma, the company that makes OxyContin, the powerful prescription painkiller that experts say helped touch off an opioid epidemic, will plead guilty to three federal criminal charges as part of a settlement of more than $8 billion, Justice Department officials announced Wednesday.
The company will plead guilty to three counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and violating federal anti-kickback laws, the officials said. The resolution will be detailed in a bankruptcy court filing in federal court.
The deal does not release any of the company’s executives or owners — members of the wealthy Sackler family — from criminal liability, and a criminal investigation is ongoing. But one state attorney general said the agreement fails to hold the Sacklers accountable.
The settlement is the highest-profile display yet of the federal government seeking to hold a major drugmaker responsible for an opioid addiction and overdose crisis linked to more than 470,000 deaths in the country since 2000.
“Purdue deeply regrets and accepts responsibility for the misconduct detailed by the Department of Justice in the agreed statement of facts,” Steve Miller, who became chairman of the company’s board in 2018, said in a statement. No members of the Sackler family remain on that board, though they still own the company.
The deal comes less than two weeks before a presidential election where the opioid epidemic has taken a political back seat to the coronavirus pandemic and other issues. But it does give President Donald Trump’s administration an example of action on the addiction crisis, which he promised early in his term.
To Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, the Justice Department “failed” and she said in a statement that she was not done with either Purdue or the Sacklers. “Justice in this case requires exposing the truth and holding the perpetrators accountable, not rushing a settlement to beat an election,” she said.
As part of the resolution, Purdue is admitting that it impeded the Drug Enforcement Administration by falsely representing that it had maintained an effective program to avoid drug diversion and by reporting misleading information to the agency to boost the company’s manufacturing quotas, the officials said.
A Justice Department official said Purdue had been representing to the DEA that it had “robust controls” to avoid opioid diversion but instead had been “disregarding red flags their own systems were sending up.”
Purdue is also admitting to violating federal anti-kickback laws by paying doctors, through a speaking program, to induce them to write more prescriptions for the company’s opioids and for using electronic health records software to influence the prescription of pain medication, according to the officials.
Purdue will make a direct payment to the government of $225 million, which is part of a larger $2 billion criminal forfeiture. In addition to that forfeiture, Purdue also faces a $3.54 billion criminal fine, though that money probably will not be fully collected because it will be taken through a bankruptcy, which includes a large number of other creditors. Purdue will also agree to $2.8 billion in damages to resolve its civil liability.
Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, has agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges of defrauding federal health agencies and violating anti-kickback laws, and faces penalties of roughly $8.3 billion, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday.
The company’s owners, members of the wealthy Sackler family, will pay $225 million in civil penalties.
Wednesday’s announcement does not conclude the extensive litigation against Purdue, but it does represent a significant advance in the long legal march by states, cities and counties to compel the most prominent defendant in the opioid epidemic to help pay for the public health crisis that has resulted in the deaths of more than 450,000 Americans since 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Still, it is unlikely the company will end up paying anything close to the $8 billion negotiated in the settlement deal. That is because it is in bankruptcy court and the federal government will have to take its place in a long line of creditors. Typically, creditors end up collecting pennies on the dollar.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: US in crisis - Black Lives Matter Fallout - National and local responses
Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl Indicted AGAIN Over Voter Intimidation
The pro-Trump duo are in trouble with the law, yet again.
Conservative operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have been indicted in Ohio, once more over a racist robocall aimed at minority voters.
Wohl and Burkman, who rose to some level of infamy online for blundering attempts to manufacture sexual assault allegations against Democratic politicians and other Trump foes, have each been charged in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County with eight counts of telecommunications fraud and seven counts of bribery, a charge that includes attempts to convince people not to cast ballots. The indictment only adds to the growing mountain of criminal and civil problems facing the notorious pro-Trump pair.
In late August, a robocall that claimed to come from Wohl and Burkman warned voters not to use mail-in ballots, falsely claiming that the ballot information would be used to enforce vaccine mandates and collect on credit card debts. In the call, which was sent to 67,000 voters in the Midwest, according to prosecutors, a Black woman warned potential voters not to send in mail-in ballots or risk being fooled by “the man.”
“The right to vote is the most fundamental component of our nation’s democracy,” Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael C. O’Malley said in a statement. “These individuals clearly infringed upon that right in a blatant attempt to suppress votes and undermine the integrity of this election These actions will not be tolerated.”
Michigan’s attorney general charged Wohl and Burkman in a separate case on Oct. 1 for the same robocall, which was also sent to voters in that state. They have also been sued in New York in a civil lawsuit by people who received the call.
Wohl, 22, and Burkman, 54, didn’t respond to an immediate request for comment.
The pair have claimed they didn’t arrange the robocall. In the Michigan case, however, prosecutors intend to call as a witness the owner of a robocall company who prosecutors say will testify that his company was used by Burkman and Wohl to send the robocalls. Michigan prosecutors have also claimed they have an email from Wohl arranging the robocall’s scripts.
Wohl is also facing felony charges in California over alleged violations of securities laws. And the FBI is investigating the pair over the leak of juror questionnaires in the trial of former Trump adviser Roger Stone, according to sealed court documents obtained by The Daily Beast.
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Watch the Big Tech Hearings in front of Senate Commerce Committee - 10/28/20 Live
Senate Democrats and Republicans grilled the chief executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter on Wednesday at a highly partisan, wide-ranging review of their content-moderation practices less than a week before Election Day.
Lawmakers on the Senate Commerce Committee are convening the gathering chiefly to discuss a controversial, decades-old law known as Section 230 that spares social media sites from being held liable for the way they police their platforms.
But the hearing is a public trial of sorts for Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, who appeared virtually and faced tough questions about the way they have handled hate speech, extremist content and election disinformation, including the most controversial online comments from President Trump.
From Washington Post
Here are the moments to watch for:
- Republicans on the panel, led by Chairman Roger Wicker (Miss.), pressed the tech giants over allegations that they systematically censor conservatives online — a charge for which lawmakers historically have provided little evidence and one that the tech giants deny.
- Many GOP lawmakers have criticized the tech giants for the way they handled an article this month published by the New York Post about Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Facebook and Twitter limited the spread of the article — with Twitter initially blocking links outright before relenting — out of concern about the origins of the information.
- Democratic lawmakers are expected to question the three tech executives about their efforts to stop the spread of viral disinformation. They see the censorship allegations as an attempt to cow Silicon Valley at a time when tech giants have taken a more active role in taking down harmful content, including tweets and other posts from Trump.
- With no limit to what lawmakers may ask, there may be other uncomfortable questions. The U.S. government last week filed antitrust charges against Google, for example, and Pichai’s testimony on Wednesday marks the first opportunity for members of Congress to ask him about allegations that the search giant violated federal competition law. Similar charges are expected against Facebook as soon as November, putting Zuckerberg on a similar hot seat.
As per usual R’s are going after twitter over the Hunter Biden story in the NY Post. And Jack Dorsey responds with the fact that the NY Post used ‘hacked materials’
And Sen Cruz of course is going to town on this…and setting it up in HIS TWITTER feed as a fight of the century type of exchange…FFS
video of Sen Ted Cruz spewing
video of Sen Ted Cruz spewing
And Dem Sen Schatz (D-HI) is coming after the GOP for their" hit job" - he’s talked w/ Politico about this prior to his testimony
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About time.
Labour Party Suspends Jeremy Corbyn Over Anti-Semitism Response
A long-awaited official report strongly criticized Britain’s main opposition party, which Mr. Corbyn once led. His reply to the findings prompted his suspension.
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Taiwan’s military includes same-sex couples in wedding for first time
Two lesbian couples have become the first to take part in a mass military wedding in Taiwan, the only place in Asia to have legalised gay marriage.
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One more reason to win back the Senate. Come on Georgia!
Puerto Ricans have voted in favor of statehood. Now it’s up to Congress.
PS: I was born in Puerto Rico, a navy brat, so I would LOVE to see this be a thing.
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From the newly elected Senator of Alabama
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Holy moly. Rumors are flying that Putin is quitting soon and may have Parkinson’s. He’s been showing major signs of pain and issues and recent legislation to make him a “senator for life” when he resigns are causing speculation!
PUTIN ‘TO QUIT’
Vladimir Putin, 68, ‘set to resign as Russian president early next year amid fears he has Parkinson’s’
VLADIMIR Putin is planning to quit early next year amid growing fears for his health, Moscow sources claimed last night.
Kremlin watchers said recent tell-tale footage showed the 68-year-old strongman has possible symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease.
And informed analysts claimed that the Russian president’s glamorous ex-gymnast lover Alina Kabaeva, 37, is begging him to release his grip on power.
Observers who studied recent footage of Putin noted his legs appeared to be in constant motion and he looked to be in pain while clutching the armrest of a chair.
His fingers are also seen to be twitching as he held a pen and gripped a cup believed to contain a cocktail of painkillers.
Speculation that his 20-year-reign - second only to that of Stalin - could be nearing an end grew earlier this week when laws were drafted to make him a senator-for-life when he resigns.
Legislation introduced by Putin himself was being rushed through parliament to guarantee him legal immunity from prosecution and state perks until he dies.
Moscow political scientist Professor Valery Solovei fuelled further speculation last night by suggesting Putin may have symptoms of Parkinson’s.
The academic said he also understood Putin’s undisclosed partner Alina was pressuring him to quit - along with his daughters Maria Vorontsova , 35, Katerina Tikhonova, 34.
Solovei said: "There is a family, it has a great influence on him. He intends to make public his handover plans in January”.
The professor predicted that Putin would soon appoint a new prime minister who would be groomed to become his eventual successor.
The president’s staff have repeatedly played down rumours that he is paving the way for a political exit.
And Putin himself has regularly released pictures of him looking fit and toned in Action Man poses hunting, shooting, horse riding and playing ice hockey.
His spokesman Dmitry Peskov said of the senator-for-life move: : "This is the practice that is being applied in many countries of the world, and it is quite justified.
“This is not innovation from the point of view of international practice.”
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I am glad Vindman is there - writing a book and supported by an honorable grant supporting the military.
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And in another election…
It can’t fly and it hides during the day but a critically endangered large parrot is back in the limelight having been named New Zealand’s bird of the year for an unprecedented second time.
The green and fawn kākāpō – the world’s heaviest, longest-living parrot – first won in 2008. After conservation efforts, the population of this large parrot has risen from 50 during the 1990s to 213 now.
Kākāpō – a bird also known as “mighty moss chicken” – used to live throughout Aotearoa, but today survive only on predator-free islands.
Another endangered bird, the antipodean albatross, which is often caught in fishing nets, won most first-choice votes out of the more than 55,000 votes cast but under the competition’s preferential system the kākāpō came through. Organisers said they hoped the antipodean albatross did not feel robbed.
The world’s most famous Kākāpō is Sirocco, who reputedly thinks he is human after a respiratory illness meant he became the first male to be hand reared.
Aged 23 – scientists believe kākāpō can live for around 60 years – Sirocco has toured New Zealand to promote the plight of his species. In 2009, he rocketed to global fame after attempting to mate with zoologist Mark Carwardine’s head during filming for the BBC documentary Last Chance to See with British actor Stephen Fry, who likened the bird’s face to that of a Victorian gentleman. The video of the incident – with commentary from Fry: “He’s really going for it!” – has had more than 18m views.
No stranger to scandal, the competition this year involved the endorsement by an adult toy store of the polyamorous hihi, or stitchbird, and voter fraud. Volunteer scrutineers found 1,500 votes cast one night were from the same IP address, all for the smallest kiwi species, the kiwi pukupuku or little spotted kiwi.
Some of our birds are now twittering that it was a rigged election!
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Coronavirus (Community Thread)Some good news to be thankful for:
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I really want to read that because I could use some news like that, but paywall 
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Not sure how to copy the whole article.
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