Mister big brains

• He is also charged with theft and retaliating against a witness, related to alleged illicit payments he made to a school athletics coach, as well as stalking, prosecutors said

The principal

The audio of the recording is here

https://twitter.com/phil_lewis_/status/1747708846942851493

In summary

The voice refers to “ungrateful Black kids who can't test their way out of a paper bag” and questions how hard it is to get those students to meet grade-level expectations. The speaker uses names of people who appear to be staff members and says they should not have been hired, and that he should get rid of another person “one way or another.”

“And if I have to get one more complaint from one more Jew in this community, I'm going to join the other side,” the voice said.

Darien was being investigated as of December in a theft investigation that had been initiated by Eiswert. Police say Darien had authorized a $1,916 payment to the school's junior varsity basketball coach, who was also his roommate, under the pretense that he was an assistant girls soccer coach. He was not, school officials said. Eiswert determined that Darien had submitted the payment to the school payroll system, bypassing proper procedures. Darien had been notified of the investigation, police said.

Truong My Lan: Vietnamese billionaire sentenced to death for $44bn fraud

^{Truong My Lan is accused of looting one of Vietnam's largest banks over a period of 11 years}

It was the most spectacular trial ever held in Vietnam, befitting one of the greatest bank frauds the world has ever seen.

Behind the stately yellow portico of the colonial-era courthouse in Ho Chi Minh City, a 67-year-old Vietnamese property developer was sentenced to death on Thursday for looting one of the country's largest banks over a period of 11 years.

It's a rare verdict - she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime.

The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court's way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.

The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.

The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five defendants were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges.

"There has never been a show trial like this, I think, in the communist era," says David Brown, a retired US state department official with long experience in Vietnam. "There has certainly been nothing on this scale."

The trial was the most dramatic chapter so far in the "Blazing Furnaces" anti-corruption campaign led by the Communist Party Secretary-General, Nguyen Phu Trong.

A conservative ideologue steeped in Marxist theory, Nguyen Phu Trong believes that popular anger over untamed corruption poses an existential threat to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. He began the campaign in earnest in 2016 after out-manoeuvring the then pro-business prime minister to retain the top job in the party.

^{Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong is leading an anti-corruption campaign}

The campaign has seen two presidents and two deputy prime ministers forced to resign, and hundreds of officials disciplined or jailed. Now one of the country's richest women has joined their ranks.

Truong My Lan comes from a Sino-Vietnamese family in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. It has long been the commercial engine of the Vietnamese economy, dating well back to its days as the anti-communist capital of South Vietnam, with a large, ethnic Chinese community.

She started as a market stall vendor, selling cosmetics with her mother, but began buying land and property after the Communist Party ushered in a period of economic reform, known as Doi Moi, in 1986. By the 1990s, she owned a large portfolio of hotels and restaurants.

Although Vietnam is best known outside the country for its fast-growing manufacturing sector, as an alternative supply chain to China, most wealthy Vietnamese made their money developing and speculating in property.

All land is officially state-owned. Getting access to it often relies on personal relationships with state officials. Corruption escalated as the economy grew, and became endemic.

By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.

Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.

They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.

The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank's lending.

According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.

That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.

She was also accused of bribing generously to ensure her loans were never scrutinised. One of those who was tried used to be a chief inspector at the central bank, who was accused of accepting a $5m bribe.

The mass of officially sanctioned publicity about the case channelled public anger over corruption against Truong My Lan, whose fatigued, unmade-up appearance in court was in stark contrast to the glamorous publicity photos people had seen of her in the past.

But questions are also being asked about why she was able to keep on with the alleged fraud for so long.

^{The trial took place in Ho Chi Minh City, where Saigon Commercial Bank was based}

"I am puzzled," says Le Hong Hiep who runs the Vietnam Studies Programme at the ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

"Because it wasn't a secret. It was well known in the market that Truong My Lan and her Van Thinh Phat group were using SCB as their own piggy bank to fund the mass acquisition of real estate in the most prime locations.

"It was obvious that she had to get the money from somewhere. But then it is such a common practice. SCB is not the only bank that is used like this. So perhaps the government lost sight because there are so many similar cases in the market."

David Brown believes she was protected by powerful figures who have dominated business and politics in Ho Chi Minh City for decades. And he sees a bigger factor in play in the way this trial is being run: a bid to reassert the authority of the Communist Party over the free-wheeling business culture of the south.

"What Nguyen Phu Trong and his allies in the party are trying to do is to regain control of Saigon, or at least stop it from slipping away.

"Up until 2016 the party in Hanoi pretty much let this Sino-Vietnamese mafia run the place. They would make all the right noises that local communist leaders are supposed to make, but at the same time they were milking the city for a substantial cut of the money that was being made down there."

At 79 years old, party chief Nguyen Phu Trong is in shaky health, and will almost certainly have to retire at the next Communist Party Congress in 2026, when new leaders will be chosen.

He has been one of the longest-serving and most consequential secretary-generals, restoring the authority of the party's conservative wing to a level not seen since the reforms of the 1980s. He clearly does not want to risk permitting enough openness to undermine the party's hold on political power.

But he is trapped in a contradiction. Under his leadership the party has set an ambitious goal of reaching rich country status by 2045, with a technology and knowledge-based economy. This is what is driving the ever-closer partnership with the United States.

Yet faster growth in Vietnam almost inevitably means more corruption. Fight corruption too much, and you risk extinguishing a lot of economic activity. Already there are complaints that bureaucracy has slowed down, as officials shy away from decisions which might implicate them in a corruption case.

"That's the paradox," says Le Hong Hiep. "Their growth model has been reliant on corrupt practices for so long. Corruption has been the grease that that kept the machinery working. If they stop the grease, things may not work any more."

!nooticers why is the AfD growing in popularity?

Germany's transport minister is threatening to ban driving on weekends to meet climate goals if the ruling coalition does not pass reforms to the Climate Protection Act by July.

“The fact that the amendment is still not in force leads to considerable legal and factual uncertainties,” liberal politician Volker Wissing wrote in a letter to the parliamentary group leaders of the coalition, German outlet BILD reported Thursday.

“This serves neither the climate nor the reputation of the federal government," he said.

A reduction in traffic to help meet the climate goals would only be possible through measures that are difficult to communicate to the public, such as “comprehensive and indefinite driving bans on Saturdays and Sundays,” Wissing added.

The federal coalition government, made up of the center-left Social Democrats, the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats, has been at odds for months over issues including a payment card for refugees, Germany's debt brake and, lately, elephants.

The planned amendment to the emissions-reduction law allows climate goals to be reviewed for compliance by looking at all sectors together instead of individually. If the overall target is missed two years in a row, then the federal government is to decide in which sector and with which measures the permitted total amount of carbon dioxide emissions is to be achieved by 2030.

If the planned reforms are not passed through parliament by July 15, Wissing warned, the Ministry for Digital and Transport would be obliged to submit an "immediate action program that ensures compliance with the annual emission levels of the transport sector" until 2030 — which would include a driving ban on weekends.

Environmental organizations — including Greenpeace, the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation BUND, and Fridays for Future — criticize the planned abolition of individual sector targets. They fear that an overall calculation obscures the impact of certain sectors — especially the traffic sector, which frequently doesn't meet targets.

"This claim is simply wrong," Green parliamentary group leader Julia Verlinden told the German Press Agency, referring to Wissing's threat of a weekend driving ban. She added that Wissing should not aggravate people unnecessarily because there are other ways to tackle climate issues, such as a speed limit.

The highway speed limit is a controversial debate in Germany. At the beginning of April, Wissing stressed that the government isn't looking to implement a speed limit on highways.

The FDP, the right-wing Alternative for Germany and the conservative Christian Democratic Union have spoken out against it. Wissing's party rejects any disproportionate bans on mobility” in its election program.

Greenpeace mobility expert Clara Thompson told the German Press Agency that the transport minister was “shamelessly” trying to distract from his his own failures.

“Wissing has wasted two years blocking every climate protection measure in road traffic — now he is coming up with horror scenarios so that he won't have to do anything in the future either," she said.

With news Thursday night that a fifth of the U.S. milk supply contains fragments of bird flu virus, the Biden administration and dairy industry are racing to convince the public not to worry about the spread of the disease among the nation's cattle.

A FIFTH???? Of our milk is contaminated with this shit!!!!!!!!?

A jury on Thursday found a Minnesota man guilty on all charges in connection with the fatal stabbing of a teenager during a tubing trip in western Wisconsin in the summer of 2022.

Nicolae Miu, who's now 54, was found guilty of first-degree reckless homicide in the death of 17-year-old Isaac Schuman of Stillwater during a confrontation on the Apple River. The verdict was read just after 11 a.m. in St. Croix County Circuit Court in Hudson, Wis.

Miu was also found guilty of four counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety, in connection with four people who were wounded in the stabbing — Alexander Martin, Dante Carlson, Anthony Carlson and Ryhley Mattison.

Miu also was found guilty on a count of battery.

He had been charged with first-degree intentional homicide, and four counts of attempted first-degree intentional homicide.

But KARE 11 reported that the jury was given the option to find Miu guilty on less-severe charges of reckless homicide and recklessly endangering safety — and exercised that discretion in their verdict.

!chuds !nooticers @arsey the zoomies won

Some of the comments are interesting but it's actually surprisingly tame for a Zerohedge comments section:

If you are stupid enough to have a fakebook account, you deserve to have your personal data stolen.

Not mine, I never DM on FB. In fact, I'm only on FB for Marketplace. You can nail some pretty good deals on there. I just drove 6 hours yesterday to Treasure Coast to pick up my new office chair. A Skully & Skully Williams Executive, American made full grain leather chair for $460. Chair is in mint condition, like it's hardly been sat in. It retails for $4775.

based deal maxer.

Never signed up to Facebook. I always found it funny that up 2006 it was the unwritten rule on the Internet that you NEVER use identification markers that could lead back to YOU IRL.

Then in 2006 somebody just said fu*k that - "let's share everything"!

Nahhhhh!

remember when schools taught kids not to share personal info online cause strangers wanted to diddle you?

Say what you will, that is a poétique young man.

!britbongs Why do you still have holes in your doors when all you get through them is junk mail, politician bullshit and severed fingers?

seethe about anti-vaxxers

https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1c1ozae/us_measles_elimination_status_threatened_due_to/?sort=controversial

A Texas gunman who called himself a “sovereign citizen” not bound by US laws was killed in a shootout with cops while livestreaming on Facebook.

Patrick Hurst, 47, told Harris County deputies who pulled him over for an expired registration and busted tailgate in Houston on Sunday that he would not comply with their orders because he was a member of the extremist movement that doesn't accept the legitimacy of government institutions.

He drove off soon after cops learned he had a possible open out-of-county felony warrant for evading police before he was stopped with spike strips.

Hurst then streamed on Facebook Live as he pulled a handgun and jumped out of his car to confront the pursuing officers — getting killed after firing first at the deputies, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said.

Does WPD have the stream?