He still has not paid Carroll though the money is now bonded while on appeal. Deny, delay, defend.. Really the endless appeals system in the US is awful at times.
Yeah, the process is so time-consuming and convoluted that it's akin to corrupt. Or at least corrupt adjacent. But it's something, and so it's better than nothing. And eventually is better than never. I guess it all comes down to lowering expectations. As the cereal box so aptly reads, "Some settling may occur."
Head of U.S. Space Force base in Greenland is fired after Vance visit Vice President JD Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance board Air Force Two after touring Pituffik Space Base in Greenland last month. (Jim Watson / Associated Press) By Tara Copp April 11, 2025 https://www.latimes.com/world-natio...-base-in-greenland-is-fired-after-vance-visit WASHINGTON — The commander of the U.S. Space Force base in Greenland has been fired after she sent a base-wide email breaking with official messaging following Vice President JD Vance’s visit to the Danish territory that President Trump is seeking to annex. In a statement late Thursday, the Space Force said Col. Susan Meyers was removed as commander of Pituffik Space Base in Greenland over a “loss of confidence in her ability to lead.” “Commanders are expected to adhere to the highest standards of conduct, especially as it relates to remaining nonpartisan in the performance of their duties,” the statement said. Military.com reported Thursday that Meyers sent the base-wide email defending the base’s relationship with Denmark and Greenland following Vance’s visit two weeks ago. A U.S. official confirmed Friday to the Associated Press that Meyers sent the email and its contents showing support for Greenland and Denmark. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to provide additional details not made public. Greenland is a territory of Denmark, which is a NATO ally of the United States. Trump wants to annex the territory, claiming it’s needed for national security purposes, and Vance’s visit in late March set off heated rhetoric between the U.S. and Denmark, with Trump refusing to take the use of military force off the table. In a post on X late Thursday, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell linked to the Military.com story and said that “actions to undermine the chain of command or to subvert President Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated at the Department of Defense.” Meyers’ firing was the latest in a series of terminations of senior military leaders, including several female officials. The Trump administration has previously fired Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti, U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan and U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, the only woman on NATO’s military committee. Other key firings were Gen. CQ Brown Jr., chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Tim Haugh, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency. Copp writes for the Associated Press.
Its Journalism Challenged Autocrats. Trump Wants to Silence It. Journalists at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who have been imprisoned for their work are dismayed by the effort to close the outlet. Andrei Kuznechyk, a journalist with the Belarus service of Radio Free Europe, this month. He was released in February after three years in a Belarus prison.Credit...Andrej Vasilenko for The New York Times By Paul Sonne, Alina Lobzina and Milana Mazaeva April 16, 2025 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/world/europe/trump-radio-free-europe-liberty.html Elation overcame Andrei Kuznechyk when he was freed in February after three years in a Belarus prison on charges of leading an “extremist organization,” the authoritarian government’s byword for his work as a web editor at the Belarus service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Pangs of sadness soon followed. He said he realized, after being blindfolded, driven to the border and handed over in a deal orchestrated by Washington, that he may never return to his homeland, Belarus, again. When he reunited with his 5-year-old son, the boy did not remember him. And after Mr. Kuznechyk, 47, arrived in Lithuania to live in exile, the president of the U.S.-funded news media outlet took him to buy new clothes (he had lost more than 30 pounds in prison) and relayed some difficult news: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty may close. Mr. Kuznechyk had worked for more than a decade at the outlet, which began broadcasting in the early 1950s behind the Iron Curtain. The organization has long coped with challenges from authoritarian governments while reporting on human rights and corruption. Now, for the first time, the biggest threat is coming from Washington. secured Mr. Kuznechyk’s release, President Trump issued an executive order demanding the dismantling of the outlet’s parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, through which Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty receives funding from Congress. The news did not come entirely out of the blue for Mr. Kuznechyk. In his final days in prison in Belarus, he had seen a gloating state news broadcast reporting that Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s government-cutting czar, had called for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty to be shut down. In a post on X, Mr. Musk called the media outlet, which is now primarily online, “just radical left crazy people talking to themselves” and something that “nobody listens to.” “Europe is free now (not counting stifling bureaucracy),” Mr. Musk wrote. “Hello??” In prison, Mr. Kuznechyk said, he heard a similar message from the state — everyone has forgotten you, no one reads you, no one needs you. State propaganda dismissed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a fixture in Belarus dating to the Soviet era, as irrelevant and sinister. Mr. Kuznechyk knew otherwise. In August 2020, when protests against the leader of Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, swept through the capital, Minsk, after a presidential election widely condemned as rigged, the media outlet’s service in Belarusian recorded 24.8 million views on YouTube. It was big traffic in a nation of 9.1 million. Current Time, its 24-hour channel in Russian, Belarus’s second official language, received more than 86 million views in one week alone in that month. Traffic to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty content surged in August 2020, when protests against the leader of Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, swept through the capital, Minsk.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times Mr. Lukashenko, who has kept an iron grip on power for more than three decades, responded with an intense crackdown. Security officials raided and sealed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s office in Minsk. Its journalists were arrested, with one snatched during a live broadcast. The outlet was designated an extremist organization. Mr. Kuznechyk, though he worked an editing job without regular bylines or on-camera appearances, was apprehended on a bike ride. Another journalist from the outlet, Ihar Losik, is still in prison in Belarus, as is Ihar Karnei, a former contributor. Mr. Trump issued the executive order. The president tapped Kari Lake, the Republican former news anchor, as a senior adviser to oversee the dismantlement of the outlet’s parent organization. In a recent interview with Newsmax, she likened her task to killing a venomous snake with a shovel. Steve Capus, the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said that he had tried to speak with Ms. Lake, and was ready to discuss accusations of bias and irrelevance, but that his efforts to secure a meeting had failed. “If there was a conversation about ideology or about focus or about prioritization, we take our responsibility seriously,” he said. “Let’s have a good honest conversation about the size of the organization and what we do. But we haven’t even been afforded that courtesy and respect.” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty filed a lawsuit in federal court against its parent organization, arguing that it would be illegal for the Trump administration to subvert Congress and withhold the rest of the $142 million appropriated for the outlet this fiscal year. A judge ruled in its favor, but the organization has still not received this month’s tranche of funding, which was supposed to arrive on April 1. As a result, Mr. Capus reluctantly has begun to furlough staff. Last week, the Trump administration set out onerous new requirements for the outlet to receive its money, including demands that the organization says would violate a U.S. law protecting the outlet’s editorial independence. In response, the outlet filed a new court request for emergency relief. Because the news outlet is classified as a nonprofit, it in theory can receive private donations. Some European officials have floated the idea of stepping in to save the outlet. But Mr. Capus said those proposals were still hypothetical and may come too late. Kari Lake, a Trump-appointed special adviser at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the federal entity that funds Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.Credit...Maansi Srivastava for The New York Times “We desperately don’t want to have even an hour where we have to go silent,” Mr. Capus said, citing a duty to the outlet’s weekly audience of 47 million. help free Mr. Kuznechyk while simultaneously eviscerating his employer. On a recent day, Mr. Capus arrived at the organization’s headquarters in Prague to find that officials in Washington had cut the satellite feed carrying Current Time, a joint project with Voice of America. Current Time reaches its audience in Russian primarily online, receiving 2.4 billion views across social media in 2024. But the cutoff still hurt. Mr. Kuznechyk said he could not understand why Washington would shutter Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty at a time when Belarus and its patron Russia have curtailed freedoms to a degree unseen since the Soviet era. “Why make this gift” to authoritarians, he asked. “What will the world be like next?” Started in the early days of the Cold War, what was known as Radio Free Europe in the Warsaw Pact countries and Radio Liberty in the Soviet Union was conceived by Washington as a “surrogate free press.” Beamed in over shortwave radio, it would show, through reporting, talk shows and cultural offerings in local languages, what the media would be like if the country were democratic and free. In Belarus, for example, listeners in the 1980s tuned in to figure out what was really happening after the nearby Chernobyl nuclear accident, which Soviet authorities initially covered up. Today, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty still focuses on places where media freedom is absent or threatened, reaching 23 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as Iran and Afghanistan, in 27 languages. An empty studio at a Radio Free Europe office in Vilnius.Credit...Andrej Vasilenko for The New York Times The outlet often undertakes investigative journalism in places where local media are too fearful, state-dominated or underfunded to do similar work. In Iran, it posts on women’s rights protests in Persian to 4.6 million followers on Instagram. In Central Asia, its journalism reaches millions and exposes high-level corruption. In Ukraine, its reports have revealed the perpetrators of war crimes and the secret foreign real estate holdings of top officials. And in Russia, its cultural streaming platform, Votvot, is hosting documentaries, stand-up comedy and musical performances by people targeted or exiled by Moscow. Zakir Magomedov, the editor of the unit covering the North Caucasus region in Russia, which includes Chechnya and Dagestan, leads a team out of Prague. Like many of the organization’s journalists, he cannot go back home if it disappears. “It cost me the loss of my family,” Mr. Magomedov said. Alsu Kurmasheva, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist who was jailed in Russia for more than nine months before her release last year in a prisoner swap, keeps in touch with the families of imprisoned journalists from the outlet. “What am I going to tell them next time?” she asked. Mr. Kuznechyk refuses to believe it will cease to exist. “It doesn’t fit into my idea of the world,” he said. “It just cannot be — at the peak of repression against journalists, at the peak of the threat to freedom of information, which we now see is a very fragile notion.” President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris greeting Alsu Kurmasheva, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist, after her release from Russian captivity in 2024.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times Paul Sonne is an international correspondent, focusing on Russia and the varied impacts of President Vladimir V. Putin’s domestic and foreign policies, with a focus on the war against Ukraine. Milana Mazaeva is a reporter and researcher, helping to cover Russian society.
Where Trump describes his father as having been born in New Jersey to Swedish parents is going to surpriee XI.