https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/xroh2z/putin_says_russias_mobilisation_mistakes_must_be/

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/xrrd2q/putin_admits_mistake_in_russian_mobilization/

When Atlanta City Council member Liliana Bakhtiari won the 5th District seat last November, it represented two major firsts: Bakhtiari was the first queer Muslim person elected in the state of Georgia and the first nonbinary councilmember of a major U.S. city.

But Bakhtiari, who uses they and she pronouns, wasn’t entirely out of the closet at the time. While they had been with their partner, Kris Brown, for 10 years, the duo kept quiet about what they’ve both described as one of the best parts of their lives: They are nonmonogamous, and are in a relationship with a third person, Sarah Al-Khayyal.

Now, a year after Bakhtiari’s election and two years into their relationship with Brown and Al-Khayyal, the three of them have decided to come out in an exclusive interview with NBC News as they plan to build a family.

Bakhtiari said that too often stories like theirs will come out “in a scandal.”

“But we’re openly showing it and proud of it,” Bakhtiari, 34, said during a video interview, as Brown and Al-Khayyal sat on either side. “It should be destigmatized. It’s a very valid familial structure that people should embrace.”

Bakhtiari said they’ve known for a long time that monogamy isn’t for them. Prior to meeting Brown, Bakhtiari was doing international crisis relief work that required a lot of travel, saying it was easier to have short connections that turned into friendships.

Bakhtiari met Brown in Atlanta in 2012 the old fashioned way — at a gay bar. When the two started dating, Bakhtiari said they were upfront with Brown that they are nonmonogamous, meaning they prefer to date and form relationships with more than one person.

“I was like, ‘That’s cool with me,’” said Brown, 33, who was a professional dancer at the time and now works in political campaign management and fundraising. “It was the first time that I had been with anyone who didn’t want to be monogamous. For me, it was kind of a relief as well to be like, ‘OK, I don’t have to be this person’s everything all the time. I can be as much of their life as works for us, and we can have this fluidity,’ and I really liked the feeling of that.”

Bakhtiari said their relationship with Brown was the first serious relationship they had, and they were coming into it at a difficult time in their life.

“I grew up in an overbearing household that didn’t allow for a lot of independence to happen,” Bakhtiari said, adding that they left home at 18. But they didn’t have “adult skills,” so they experienced homelessness on and off for the next five years, living on friends’ couches and out of their car.

“I was assaulted a lot during that time,” Bakhtiari said. “I was mugged during that time. I was very rough. So I met Kris, and there was a lot of trauma, and this was the first person that I ever felt safe with.”

Their friends and community members saw how positively the relationship affected Bakhtiari, they said, and it became publicly romanticized. But, Bakhtiari said, that meant “when people would find out that we were open or nonmonogamous, it was like someone destroyed a fairytale for them.”

As a result, Bakhtiari said, they carried a lot of shame about being nonmonogamous and feeling “that I was a terrible partner, that Kris was only doing this for me, that I was keeping them home while I went out to have my cake and eat it, too — all of these things that were very untrue,” they said.

In the fall of 2020, Bakhtiari met Al-Khayyal through a virtual nonmonogamy support group. Al-Khayyal is a policy manager at a nonprofit and is on the Atlanta mayor’s LGBTQ advisory board.

Al-Khayyal started practicing nonmonogamy about five years ago when she began to explore her queerness, though she said she doesn’t want to conflate being queer and being nonmonogamous, because straight people can be nonmonogamous.

“For me, practicing nonmonogamy is a part of this greater unlearning and deprogramming of societal conditioning,” she said. “Nonmonogamy for me doesn’t have to be having multiple partners. It’s also breaking down the platonic-romantic binary and being able to have these relationships that kind of exist in that gray area.”

Shortly after meeting, the two went on a roller skating date and they have been dating ever since, Bakhtiari said.

About a month later, Al-Khayyal met Brown, and the three began dating. Around the same time, Bakhtiari started their second run for a nonpartisan seat on the City Council after they ran unsuccessfully in 2017.

For the sake of their professional future, Al-Khayyal said they all decided to only share the relationship with close friends and family.

“There’s absolutely some sacrifices you have to make being with someone who’s in politics,” Al-Khayyal said. “But they were clear that there would be a day where we could be out, and that was also important for me. I didn’t want to be in a relationship where I was always going to have to be essentially in the closet.”

Six months after the three began dating Al-Khayyal moved in, but only after the three had attended couples therapy to plan and talk about boundaries.

Brown said the three of them see nonmonogamy as an umbrella term, and under it there are a variety of relationship styles that can be romantic and/or sexual. One of the more well-known styles is polyamory, which means having more than one romantic partner, they explained.

Brown said the three of them prefer the label nonmonogamy over polyamory. “There are many more ways to be nonmonogamous than there are ways to be polyamorous, and we invite and enjoy the fluidity of the term nonmonogamy,” Brown said.

In their situation, the three of them are in a relationship together and see each other as life partners, they said, though they did not specify further.

Over the last two years, they’ve been enjoying and planning their lives together. They traveled to Mexico last year and went to Utah earlier this year. They are converting a school bus into a living and working space, and they plan to buy land at some point as part of their dream of starting a “queer commune.”

Bakhtiari said it’s been difficult to hide the relationship from the world, in part because they and Brown live a very public life. People will ask where “the other half” is if Brown doesn’t attend an event with Bakhtiari, they said. But they wanted to come out on their terms.

“This is the sort of thing that a political opponent or someone who has some ax to grind might pick up on and twist around and turn into something negative, and we want to claim it upfront, and say this is the best thing about our life,” Brown said.

Bakhtiari said that when they tell people about their relationship, people often respond in two ways: with support and/or curiosity. Older adults have more often asked questions like, “Who do you love more? Do you all sleep together? What happens? What are the rules? Don’t you have to choose?” Bakhtiari said, laughing.

Their families have also been supportive, Bakhtiari said. For example, the three of them visited with Brown’s family for the holidays in 2020. Though they had only been dating a few months, Brown and Bakhtiari wanted to make sure Al-Khayyal felt supported and included, especially since her father died that November, just a year after her mother died, in 2019.

Traditionally, Brown’s Grandma Teri will knit a custom stocking for every family member with their name on it. “We wanted to make sure that Sarah had the perfect Christmas, and we didn’t have to say anything to grandma,” Bakhtiari said. “On Christmas Day, there was a custom stocking with Sarah’s name on it hanging on the fireplace, stuffed with presents.”

In addition to allowing them to live openly and address stigma, Brown said that they hope coming out will allow them to raise awareness of barriers that nontraditional families still face.

For example, Brown was in the hospital this year, and only one person was allowed in the hospital room with them.

“There’s an opportunity for us to kind of shed light on that, and be like, ‘Hey, there are nontraditional families out there,’” Brown said. “We’re going to grow our family, and we want those kids to also be able to navigate the world how they want to navigate the world.”

Bakhtiari is likely the first elected official in the U.S. to come out as being in a nonmonogamous relationship, according to the Victory Institute, which researches LGBTQ political representation and trains queer candidates running for office.

Bakhtiari’s term doesn’t end until January 2026, but they said they’re prepared for their relationship to potentially affect their re-election if they run again.

They focused their platform on addressing the need for affordable housing and Atlanta’s backlog of infrastructure projects. Last month, after Georgia’s ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy took effect, they introduced a resolution to allocate $300,000 to a nonprofit that helps people access reproductive health care. The mayor signed the legislation after the City Council passed it unanimously.

“If people don’t want to re-elect me because I’m in love with two wonderful people and in a happy and healthy relationship that is possibly the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me, then I’m good,” they said.

Ultimately, their goal is to continue doing international crisis relief work, which they said they don’t have to do from an elected position.

“I’ll just keep offending people from the sidelines,” Bakhtiari said, sarcastically.

In the meantime, the three of them joked that they’re “very boring” when they aren’t attending political events or traveling. For example, they recently picked out paint colors for an accent wall, and they can typically be found hanging out with their eight pets.

Bakhtiari and Brown had three cats and one dog, and when Al-Khayyal joined the family she brought her two cats. Then, when Al-Khayyal’s parents died, they adopted their two cats.

“For the record, I want more dogs,” Bakhtiari said. “And I never intended on having seven cats.”

“None of us did,” Al-Khayyal said, laughing. Brown chimed in “Yeah, here we are though.”

Reddit Threads:

• r/Atlanta

• r/politics

• r/polyamory

Once unthinkable, mobile phones could go dark around Europe this winter if power cuts or energy rationing knocks out parts of the mobile networks across the region.

Russia's decision to halt gas supplies via Europe's key supply route in the wake of the Ukraine conflict has increased the chances of power shortages. In France, the situation is made worse by several nuclear power plants shutting down for maintenance.

Telecoms industry officials say they fear a severe winter will put Europe's telecoms infrastructure to the test, forcing companies and governments to try to mitigate the impact.

Currently there are not enough back-up systems in many European countries to handle widespread power cuts, four telecoms executives said, raising the prospect of mobile phone outages.

European Union countries, including France, Sweden and Germany, are trying to ensure communications can continue even if power cuts end up exhausting back-up batteries installed on the thousands of cellular antennas spread across their territory.

Europe has nearly half a million telecom towers and most of them have battery backups that last around 30 minutes to run the mobile antennas.

FRANCE

In France, a plan put forward by electricity distributor Enedis, includes potential power cuts of up to two hours in a worst case scenario, two sources familiar with the matter said.

The general black-outs would affect only parts of the country on a rotating basis. Essential services such as hospitals, police and government will not be impacted, the sources said.

The French government, telecoms operators and Enedis, a unit of state-controlled utility EDF (EDF.PA), have held talks on the issue over the summer, the French government and the sources said.

The French Federation of Telecoms (FFT), a lobby group representing Orange (ORAN.PA), Bouygues Telecom (BOUY.PA) and Altice's SFR, put the spotlight on Enedis for being unable to exempt antennas from the power cuts.

Enedis declined to comment on the content of the talks held with the government on the matter.

Enedis said in a statement to Reuters all regular customers were treated on an equal footing in the event of exceptional outages.

It said it was able to isolate sections of the network to supply priority customers, such as hospitals, key industrial installations and the military and that it was up to local authorities to add telecoms operators infrastructure to the list of priority customers.

"Maybe we'll improve our knowledge on the matter by this winter, but it's not easy to isolate a mobile antenna (from the rest of the network)," said a French finance ministry official with knowledge of the talks.

A French finance ministry spokesperson declined to comment on the talks with Enedis, the telecoms groups and the government.

SWEDEN, GERMANY & ITALY

Telcos in Sweden and Germany have also raised concerns over potential electricity shortages with their governments, several sources familiar with the matter said.

Swedish telecom regulator PTS is working with telecom operators and other government agencies to find solutions, it said. That includes talks about what will happen if electricity is rationed.

PTS is financing the purchase of transportable fuel stations and mobile base stations that connect to mobile phones to handle longer power outages, a PTS spokesperson said.

The Italian telecoms lobby told Reuters it wants the mobile network to be excluded from any power cut or energy saving stoppage and will raise this with Italy's new government.

The power outages increase the probability of electronic components failing if subjected to abrupt interruptions, telecoms lobby chief Massimo Sarmi said in an interview.

TRAFFIC FLOW

Telecom gear makers Nokia (NOKIA.HE) and Ericsson (ERICb.ST) are working with mobile operators to mitigate the impact of a power shortage, three sources familiar with the matter said.

Both companies declined to comment.

The European telecom operators must review their networks to reduce extra power usage and modernise their equipment by using more power efficient radio designs, the four telecom executives said.

To save power, telecom companies are using software to optimise traffic flow, make towers "sleep" when not in use and switch off different spectrum bands, the sources familiar with the matter said.

The telecom operators are also working with national governments to check if plans are in place to maintain critical services.

In Germany, Deutsche Telekom has 33,000 mobile radio sites (towers) and its mobile emergency power systems can only support a small number of them at the same time, a company spokesperson said.

Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE) will use mobile emergency power systems which mainly rely on diesel in the event of prolonged power failures, it said.

France has about 62,000 mobile towers, and the industry will not be able to equip all antennas with new batteries, the FFT's president Liza Bellulo said.

Accustomed to uninterrupted power supply for decades, European countries usually do not have generators backing up power for longer durations.

"We are a bit spoiled maybe in large parts of Europe where electricity is pretty stable and good," a telecom industry executive said. "The investments in the energy storage area have maybe been less than in some other countries."

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/exclusive-europe-braces-mobile-network-blackouts-sources-2022-09-29/

>Mr Wingett invested £410,000 of the charity's earnings into a project for the 210ft sculpture in Chirk, Wrexham.

>The bronze dragon had planning permission to be erected on a former colliery site near the A5.

>His charity, Frank Wingett Cancer Relief, was set up by his father to buy equipment and resources for cancer patients in Wrexham and the surrounding area, after he was diagnosed with throat cancer in the 1980s.

>Its last payment in 2011 to Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board was for £4,500.

>Following an investigation by the Charity Commission, which began in 2017, Mr Wingett was banned from acting as a trustee of any charity for 10 years.

>He has now been ordered by the High Court to pay more than £117,000, which will be distributed to local charities supporting the relief of cancer patients treated in Wrexham.

>The charity regulator said on Thursday that the dragon statue project had "no connection to advancing the charity's aims and, to date, no statue has been built".

Unfortunately they caught him before he could actually build it

Affirmative Action is set for Halloween!

Not sure how legit it is coz i got it from a friend but found it funny enough so im sharing

A Johns Hopkins anesthesiologist and her spouse, a doctor and major in the U.S. Army, were federally indicted for attempting to provide medical information about members of the military to the Russian government.

Anna Gabrielian and Jamie Lee Henry, who had a secret security clearance as a doctor at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, communicated and met several times with an undercover FBI agent who they believed was from the Russian embassy, offering sensitive medical information on military members and their families, the indictment alleges.

Gabrielian, 36, touted the Rockville couple’s access to the health records as “a useful long-term weapon.”

During an initial Aug. 17 meeting in a Baltimore hotel room, Gabrielian told the agent “she was motivated by patriotism toward Russia to provide any assistance she could to Russia, even if it meant being fired or going to jail.”

Her spouse had access not just to medical information, she said, but insight into how the U.S. military establishes Army hospitals in war conditions and about training the military provided to Ukrainian military personnel. Henry participated in a second meeting later that night.

“My point of view is until the United States actually declares war against Russia, I’m able to help as much as I want,” Henry, 39, told the agent, according to the indictment. “At that point, I’ll have some ethical issues I’ll have to work through.”

“You’ll work through those ethical issues,” Gabrielian replied.

Henry also told the agent she had looked into volunteering to join the Russian Army after the conflict in Ukraine began.

In an Aug. 24 meeting with the agent at a Baltimore hotel room, Gabrielian called Henry a “coward” for being concerned about violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA,) a federal law that limits the disclosure of patients’ confidential medical information. She told the person she did not share those concerns because she violated the law “all the time.”

Gabrielian did fear what might happen to her and Henry’s children if she put herself at risk of arrest, demanding that the kids be put on “a nice flight to Turkey to go on vacation” if arrest seemed imminent. “I don’t want to end in jail here with my kids being hostages over my head,” she said, according to the indictment.

Gabrielian is listed as an instructor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at Hopkins, and her profile page says she speaks Russian. Johns Hopkins Medicine did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Henry received attention in 2015 after becoming the first known active-duty Army officer to come out as transgender. A Buzzfeed article from that time said she was also to her knowledge and to the knowledge of LGBT advocates the first and only active duty service member who had changed her name and gender within the United States military.

During an Aug. 31 meeting at a hotel in Gaithersburg, Gabrielian provided the agent with medical information related to the spouse of a person currently employed by the Office of Naval Intelligence, and medical information related to someone only described as a veteran of the Air Force.

“Gabrielian highlighted to the [agent] a medical issue reflected in the records of [the military member’s spouse] that Russia could exploit.,” the indictment says.

During the same meeting, Henry also provided medical information related to five patients at Fort Bragg, including a retired Army officer, a current Department of Defense employee, and spouses of active and deceased Army veterans.

Some clues about the couple’s mindset were revealed earlier last month when Gabrielian told the agent about a 1986 book she instructed Henry to read. It describes the recruitment and training of a Soviet-era Russian spy. “It’s the mentality of sacrificing everything ... and loyalty in you from day one. That’s not something you walked away from.”

The indictment was handed up Wednesday and unsealed Thursday. The pair are charged with conspiracy and wrongful disclosure of individually identifiable health information.

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/xr64o1/the_us_and_europe_are_running_out_of_weapons_to/

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/xqvkwq/the_us_and_europe_are_running_out_of_weapons_to/

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/xr9625/ukraine_calls_emergency_meeting_of_security/

TLDR This:

Police in Mexico have conducted a raid on an extremist Jewish sect known for advocating child marriage, arresting two men and reuniting a young boy with his father who left the cult.

Multiple children were rescued, and one, age three, was reunited with his father Yisrael Amir, a former Lev Tahor member who has been trying to gain custody since disavowing the sect several years ago.

'I now look forward to building my new life as a young father in Israel.

Shlomo Helbrans (pictured left in 1992) founded Lev Tahor in Israel, having been deported from the US for kidnapping a 13-year-old boy. He later gained refugee status in Canada, claiming he was being persecuted by the Israeli government for his anti-Zionist teachings

Nachman Helbrans, the son of the group's founder, was convicted of kidnapping and child sexual exploitation crimes last year Among those taken into custody in the raid were Israelis with dual citizenships including Canada, the US and Guatemala, Israel's foreign ministry said.

Federal police and agents of the attorney general's office carried out the raid following an investigation by the Special Prosecutor for Organized Crime (FEMDO).

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/xr8rje/russia_open_to_inperson_talks_with_us_on_nuclear/

MOSCOW, Sept 29 (Reuters) - Russia said on Thursday it was studying the possibility of a face-to-face meeting between Russian and U.S. negotiators on a landmark nuclear arms control treaty.

In a briefing in Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Russia was open to reviving inspections under the New START treaty and considering the possibility of in-person meetings of a joint commission of representatives from the United States and Russia.

Physical inspections under the treaty have been suspended since 2020, initially as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

"The topic of resuming them is being considered," Zakharova said on Thursday. "The possibilities for holding a face-to-face session of the bilateral advisory commission are being studied."

The treaty sets limits on the number of nuclear arms each side can have deployed, and outlines the terms for verification and inspection of each other's nuclear arsenals.

Moscow said in August it was considering a new meeting of the commission, as well as a possible resumption of negotiations to extend the treaty, one of the few major diplomatic agreements that remain in place between Moscow and Washington as relations hit rock-bottom over the conflict in Ukraine.

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/xr4jxu/the_number_of_russians_fleeing_the_country_to/

https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/xr92ai/number_of_russians_fleeing_draft_bigger_than_1st/

Generated from TLDR This:

The UK's MOD said the number of fleeing Russians likely exceeds Putin's original invasion force.

The exodus is likely to affect Russia's economy and add to "brain drain," the MOD said.

Sign up for our newsletter to receive our top stories based on your reading preferences — delivered daily to your inbox.

—Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) September 29, 2022 Since Putin announced on September 21 that he would call up 300,000 reservists, there has been a mass rush for the border as Russians attempt to evade being sent to the Ukrainian frontlines.

That was sharply interrupted with last week's announcement.

https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/xr8fer/alito_on_scotus_critics_questioning_our_integrity/

Generated from TLDR This:

Justice Samuel Alito says criticism of the Supreme Court is going too far.

But saying or implying that the court is becoming an illegitimate institution or questioning our integrity crosses an important line,” he said.

“I think judges create legitimacy problems for themselves – undermine their legitimacy – when they don’t act so much like courts and when they don’t do things that are recognizably law,” she said in New York earlier this month.

Roberts had a different view of the court’s legitimacy.

In a speech in Colorado, he said that while all of the court’s opinions are open to criticism, he pointedly noted that “simply because people disagree with opinions is not a basis for questioning the legitimacy of the court.”

The justices will also come together Friday morning – along with President Joe Biden – for the investiture of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/xr65fk/finland_will_shut_border_to_russian_tourists_from/

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/xr64bu/finland_will_shut_border_to_russian_tourists_from/

https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/xr607c/finland_will_shut_border_to_russian_tourists_from/

https://x.com/Reuters/status/1575445378203357190#m

Generated from TLDR This:

HELSINKI, Sept 29 (Reuters) - Finland said on Thursday it would close its border to Russian tourists at midnight, shutting off the last remaining direct land route to the European Union for them as thousands of Russians seek to avoid conscription into the war in Ukraine.

"The entry of Russian citizens in tourist purposes into Finland endangers Finland's international relations," Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto told a news conference, explaining that the decision had followed talks with Ukraine and neighbours.

Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Haavisto said entry for family visits, as well as for work and studies, would still be permitted.

Ukraine has said Russians should stay at home and seek to stop the war.

The almost 17,000 Russians who crossed the border into Finland during the weekend, represent an 80% rise from a week earlier, Finnish authorities said on Monday.

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/xqzz6y/as_invasion_slows_russian_media_turns_to/

https://old.reddit.com/r/realSlovakia/comments/xr68hw/tradicne_nacisticke_praktiky/

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/xr3zt8/russia_to_formally_annex_four_more_areas_of/

https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/xr3yx2/russia_to_formally_annex_four_more_areas_of/

Lump sum sale of 250M

That's like 25% our normal defence exports a year lol.

>the value of the pound sank to its lowest recorded level: 1 pound = $1.03 after falling more than 20% this year.

>The immediate cause of the pound’s alarming fall Monday was the announcement of a spending and tax plan by Britain’s new conservative government, which promised steep tax cuts that primarily benefited the wealthiest individuals along with expensive measures to help blunt the painful rise in energy prices on consumers and businesses.

>The sense of crisis ramped up Wednesday when the Bank of England intervened, in a rare move, and warned of “material risk to UK financial stability” from the government’s plan. The central bank said it would start buying British government bonds “on whatever scale is necessary” to stem a sell-off in UK debt.

>The Bank of England’s emergency action seemed at odds with its efforts that began months ago to try to slow the nearly 10% annual inflation rate, which has lifted the price of essentials like petrol and food to painful levels.

tl;dr

1. Kwasi Kwarteng's mini-budget speech threatened the bond market and a possible run on pensions.

2. the Bank of England swooped in by announcing emergency QE for the next 2 weeks by buying bonds.

3. since inflation is already 10% in Bongland, this move has crumpled the pound sterling.

The Democratic Party will collapse by 2030.

Redditors waste no time to gloat.

https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/xqu92e/marjorie_taylor_greenes_husband_perry_files_for/

https://old.reddit.com/r/celebrities/comments/xqxnco/us_congress_republican_house_rep_marjorie_taylor/

https://old.reddit.com/r/inthenews/comments/xquugb/rep_marjorie_taylor_greenes_husband_files_for/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Georgia/comments/xqtqoj/rep_marjorie_taylor_greenes_husband_files_for/