Corruption Ledger

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A federal judge says Tennessee’s first-in-the-nation law designed to place strict limits on drag shows is unconstitutional. In a 70-page ruling handed down late Friday night, U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker wrote that the law was both “unconstitutionally vague and substantially overbroad.” He also added that the statute encouraged “discriminatory enforcement.” “There is no question that obscenity…

NEW YORK, May 30 (Reuters) – Bankrupt OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma can shield its owners, members of the wealthy Sackler family, from opioid lawsuits in exchange for a $6 billion contribution to the company’s broader bankruptcy settlement, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Tuesday. The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that U.S. bankruptcy law allows legal…

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force walked back comments reportedly made by a colonel regarding a simulation in which a drone outwitted its artificial intelligence training and killed its handler, after the claims went viral on social media. Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek said in a June 2 statement no such testing took place, adding that the service member’s comments…

The United Nations officially launched its mission this week to prevent what it says could be an “environmental catastrophe” on the Red Sea. Sitting off the coast of Yemen lies a nearly half-century-old ship with roughly 1.14 million barrels of crude oil on board, the global agency said – and it’s “deteriorating rapidly.”  The massive 47-year-old supertanker, FSO Safer, rests…

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines was the big star of a gala awards ceremony hosted by the Atlantic Council that was touted as the “Washington Oscars.” The Atlantic Council is a neo-conservative think tank, which has three former CIA directors on its board and another as a lifetime director. Paul Craig Roberts, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy…

The symposium that was to take place on Sunday aimed to honor the memory of Dominique Venner, a historian who took his life exactly 10 years ago in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris as a “sacrifice” to “break with the lethargy that is overwhelming us,” to “awaken slumbering consciences.” “I rebel against fate. I protest against poisons of the soul and…

Governments around the world are cracking down on free speech. What they are demanding includes the ability to read private encrypted text messages and invade homes in search of wrongspeech. Their demands thus go far beyond what the Censorship Industrial Complex was able to get away with over the last six years. And things are getting worse. Last week, the…

Epstein’s calendars show the financier meeting with A-listers including tech billionaires Bill Gates and Peter Thiel, music executive Tommy Mottola, artist Jeff Koons, magician David Blaine, and filmmaker Woody Allen – all after being required to register as a sex offender as part of the sweetheart plea deal that allowed him to serve less than two years under house arrest. …

WASHINGTON — More than 1 million F-35 spare parts worth at least $85 million have gone missing over at least the last five years, according to a new Government Accountability Office report criticizing the program’s supply tracking. Auditors said that because the government doesn’t have its own system tracking those parts, officials may not truly know how many spare parts…

Aderrien Murry, 11, called the police as his mother asked — but when officers arrived, one of them shot him in the chest. A new lawsuit says officials failed to train and supervise its officers. Courtesy of Nakala Murry The family of Aderrien Murry has filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Indianola, Miss., and at least two police…

India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filed a complaint on Monday against British multinational aerospace and defense company Rolls Royce, the company’s former India director – Tim Jones, arms dealer Sudhir Choudhrie and his son Bhanu Choudhrie (who are UK citizens), and British Aerospace Systems (BAE Systems). The allegations include criminal conspiracy, cheating and corruption in a 2004 procurement of…

A former Federal Security Service officer said Putin could be overthrown by Wagner. The Wagner Army is Putin’s private military army, largely made up of mercenaries. The Army chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, could pose an active threat to Putin, said the war analyst. Vladimir Putin could be ousted by Russia’s private military group, the Wagner army, according to Igor Girkin, a…

Schwartz was using ChatGPT for legal research for the first time when he put it to work drafting the ten-page brief he hoped would convince Manhattan Federal Judge P. Kevin Castel not to dismiss his case, he told the court in an affidavit on Thursday, explaining that he “therefore was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”…

PORTLAND, Ore.—After a six-week trial in Portland, a federal jury found three former executives of Aequitas Management, LLC, and associated companies, guilty today for their roles in a vast fraud conspiracy. Evidence at trial showed the conspirators raised nearly $300 million from defrauded investors. Robert J. Jesenik, 63, former chief executive officer of Aequitas and resident of Lake Oswego, Oregon;…

Mila Antonova – a bridge player who multiple media reports this week claim had an affair with Gates starting in 2009 – was captured in a newly unearthed photograph walking alongside Chapman in New York City. The picture, which is believed to have been taken in 2009 or 2010, around the same time as Gates’ alleged trysts with the decades-younger…

CorruptionLedger commentary in red.   Twitter has pulled out of the European Union’s voluntary code to fight disinformation, the EU has said. Thierry Breton, who is the EU’s internal market commissioner, announced the news on Twitter – but warned the firm new laws would force compliance. “Obligations remain. You can run but you can’t hide,” he said. Twitter will be…