New news out of Romania
Romanian prosecutors indict Andrew Tate on trafficking minors and money laundering
The agency said on Friday that Tate and his brother coerced a victim by pretending to be in a loving relationship and then forcing her to produce pornographic material for an online webcam business.
The charges in Romania comes on top of the 56 charges in the UK.
The Tate brothers are currently fighting extradition from the US to the UK in the US courts.
Looking from outside the current hellhole that is the US, I can’t help think about how the country will ever recover. My main conclusion is there has to be a real reckoning, where there are real consequences for the people who have broken the laws, and who have tried to kill democracy in the US.
This was something which should have been done already after the first Trump term, but unfortunately Biden and his administration were not the right people for this. They thought that they could make the US move on, and more or less forget Trump, and instead it created the opportunity for Trump to return and behave even worse.
The current US administration, and the people around it, have broken numerous laws, and they need to be hold accountable for that. But on top of that, a lot of people have enabled them to do so, especially some of the members of the Supreme Court. These need to be removed from their positions of power – through firings or impeachments, depending on their job.
On top of this, there should be something similar to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the Apartheid in South Africa, allowing the victims of the Trump administrations to speak out and tell their stories. It would also allow lower ranking officials to explain what they were ordered to do, and tell who ordered it.
I have little hope that Trump will ever go to jail, but several of his cohort, including his children and their spouses are deeply involved in criminal behavior, and should be possible to prosecute. As is Supreme Court Justice Thomas, who clearly has accepted bribes, and who in most other countries would not only be fired, but behind bars.
As part of the whole cleanup, it is also important to take a hard look at the laws, and tighten them, so future rogue presidents can’t break them with the help of a deeply partisan Supreme Court.
It often seems that rich people can break the law with no consequences, but once in a while, you come across a story where this isn’t the case.
Vietnam sentences real estate tycoon Truong My Lan to death in its largest-ever fraud case
Real estate tycoon Truong My Lan was sentenced Thursday to death by a court in Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam in the country’s largest financial fraud case ever, state media Vietnam Net said.
I am against the Death penalty, and I think it cannot be defended in any case, least of all an economic case, but it is hard to overstate how large this case is
The 67-year-old chair of the real estate company Van Thinh Phat was formally charged with fraud amounting to $12.5 billion — nearly 3% of the country’s 2022 GDP.
Lan illegally controlled Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank between 2012 and 2022 and allowed 2,500 loans that resulted in losses of $27 billion to the bank, reported state media VnExpress. The court asked her to compensate the bank $26.9 million.
Despite mitigating circumstances — this was a first-time offense and Lan participated in charity activities — the court attributed its harsh sentence to the seriousness of the case, saying Lan was at the helm of an orchestrated and sophisticated criminal enterprise that had serious consequences with no possibility of the money being recovered, VnExpress said.
When your fraud can be measured as a percentage of the country’s GDP, you have done some serious fraud, and it will effect a lot of people, either directly or indirectly
Her actions “not only violate the property management rights of individuals and organizations but also push SCB (Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank) into a state of special control; eroding people’s trust in the leadership of the Party and State,” VnExpress quoted the judgement as saying.
I don’t care for a second if someone’s action lead people to loose trust in the leadership of Party and State, but the fraud also led to a more serious type of lack of trust
Analysts said the scale of the scam raised questions about whether other banks or businesses had similarly erred, dampening Vietnam’s economic outlook and making foreign investors jittery at a time when Vietnam has been trying to position itself as the ideal home for businesses trying to pivot their supply chains away from China.
The real estate sector in Vietnam has been hit particularly hard. An estimated 1,300 property firms withdrew from the market in 2023, developers have been offering discounts and gold as gifts to attract buyers, and despite rents for mixed-use properties known in Southeast Asia as shophouses falling by a third in Ho Chi Minh City, many in the city center are still empty, according to state media.
I think few of us will cry for the rich factory owners and property tycoons who are loosing money, but underneath them, are a lot of everyday Vietnamese whose job opportunities disappeared because of the foreign investment staying away.
Content warning: rape, murder, sexual assaults, police brutality
A couple of days ago, an police officer from London’s Metropolitan Police was convicted for rape and murder, and sentenced to a whole-life prison term, which means that there is no chance of a parole.
It is always shocking when a police officer breaches the trust in such a way, but now the Mirror shows that he was far from the only one.
Fury as 26 Met police colleagues of Wayne Couzens committed sex crimes since 2016
A damning probe into the Met Police today reveals 26 colleagues of murderer Wayne Couzens have committed sex crimes since 2016.
Offences included rape and possessing indecent images of children. Two officers were jailed in April, a month after Couzens raped and killed Sarah Everard.
The alarming figures uncovered by the Sunday Mirror come as pressure mounts on Met Commissioner Cressida Dick to stand down – and for the force to be given a radical overhaul to end a sexist culture.
Labour’s Harriet Harman said: “Women’s confidence in the police has been shattered.”
A staggering 27 Met Police officers were convicted of sex crimes in the past five years, a Sunday Mirror probe has found.
As happens in all institutions where sexism has been allowed to stay unchallenged, it has grown into much worse things. The leadership of London’s Metropolitan Police has accepted a culture, where the police officers have felt safe being sexist or worse
Former Det Supt Paige Kimberley tells how – days after Sarah was murdered – she warned Dame Cressida about a WhatsApp group where male officers were sharing pornographic images and offensive remarks
A panel found their behaviour to be “distasteful” but did NOT amount to misconduct. It is now known the group is similar to the one Couzens and colleagues used in the run-up to 33-year-old Sarah’s death.
The leadership has failed, and there needs to be a reckoning – and there needs to be a purge of the officers in the force, removing everyone who has either participated in these things, or turned a blind eye to it.
The open hearings in the impeachment inquiry have started, and despite the orders from Trump of people not participating, some key people have already been in and have given some pretty damning evidence.
So far we have heard career diplomats like William Taylor, George Kent, and Marie Yovanovitch speak about what they experienced, and it has been pretty damning.
For a full transcript of the testimony by Taylor and Kent see: Read George Kent and William Taylor’s Full Opening Statements at the First Public Hearing in Trump’s Impeachment Inquiry
As for Marie Yovanovitch, this is an article worth reading.
The diplomatic rank and file believe Mike Pompeo has allowed Trump to pollute the State Department with politics. Marie Yovanovitch made their case. “I think people are feeling huge pride in Masha,” says a former ambassador.
While the testimony of the three career diplomats have been very damning, things are going to be much worse for Trump. Coming up are witnesses like State Department official David Holmes , US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, Defense Department official Laura Cooper, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale, and National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill. And many more are probably to come, including John Bolton and Mick Mulvany, especially if the courts find that the House’s subpoena overrules the orders from Trump (something which would be obvious in any other timeline).
It hasn’t gotten much notice, but Roger Stone has been found guilty on all counts, making him the 6th Trump Associate Convicted Under Mueller Probe.
Or so it would seem
Giuliani ‘is potentially in a heap of trouble’ and could be indicted today: ex-prosecutor
On MSNBC’s “AM Joy,” former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade suggested that President Donald Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani could be indicted today, based just on the facts that are already known about his involvement in the Ukraine plot.
The idea of Giuliani going to jail is bringing me great joy.
Trump uses his presidential power to grant pardons – and unsurprisingly he pardons the worst sort of people.
Trump Clears Three Service Members in War Crimes Cases
Top military leaders have pushed back hard against clearing the three men. Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy have argued that such a move would undermine the military code of justice, and would serve as a bad example to other troops in the field, administration officials said.
It is not like US soldiers often get prosecuted for their actions in war zones, and even rarer they get found guilty. In these cases, there is clear evidence that they killed unarmed civilians – often the witnesses were their fellow soldiers – yet Trump decides that he knows better, and pardons them.
It has come out that NBCUniversal has helped stop the stories of Harvey Weinstein’s abuse of women from getting out, and have tried to hush women who had been sexual harassed at NBCUniversal. Rachel Maddow is not afraid of calling her employer out for it.
Gizmodo reports on the arrest of programmer superstar Ola Bini by the Ecuadorean government:
Police in Ecuador have arrested Swedish programmer and digital privacy activist Ola Bini for allegedly trying to destabilize the Ecuadorian government by “collaborating” with WikiLeaks. Bini was arrested at Quito Airport in Ecuador on his way to Japan.
Ola Bini is a Swedish programmer with a truly impressive resume, and a frequent speaker at conferences. According to his own website, he has choose to focus on “privacy enhanching technologies”.
So far, it doesn’t seem like Ola Bini has been charged with anything, but the claims made by the Ecuadorian government are very serious.
The EFF has come out in defense of Ola Bini: The Ecuadorean Authorities Have No Reason to Detain Free Software Developer Ola Bini
I am entirely on the side of the EFF on this. I have met Ola Bini, and find it very doubtful that he would do anything like the things claimed by the Ecuadorian government. And even if he had, he should still be allowed proper due process, unlike how he has been treated so far, according to his lawyers.
There is a petition to get Ola Bini released, which you can sign here
There is a well-known saying, called Blackstone’s formulation, which is supposed to represent the concept behind the judicial systems in the West
It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer
Yet, looking at the US judicial system, it seems like the exact opposite is the case. A lot of people are wrongfully convicted – either through being forced into plea bargains, or though plain wrongful convictions. The Innocence Project, which has been working to free innocent people for 25 years, have freed hundreds of people, many from the death row. Unfortunately, there is not enough resources to help everybody, and sometimes it takes a very unlikely series of events for someone innocent to get the attention of someone who can help.
This is the case with Valentino Dixon. He was wrongfully convicted of murder, and had served 27 years behind bars before getting his conviction overturned. While he family had fought for him getting released, the big breakthrough came when a golf magazine took up his case. Dixon came to the attention of Golf Digest because of his golf-related drawings. And as Golfworld explains, it didn’t take long for the magazine to notice that his conviction seemed rather doubtful.
It took about a hundred drawings before Golf Digest noticed, but when we did, we also noticed his conviction seemed flimsy. So we investigated the case and raised the question of his innocence.
The case is complicated, but on the surface it involves shoddy police work, zero physical evidence linking Dixon, conflicting testimony of unreliable witnesses, the videotaped confession to the crime by another man, a public defender who didn’t call a witness at trial, and perjury charges against those who said Dixon didn’t do it. All together, a fairly clear instance of local officials hastily railroading a young black man with a prior criminal record into jail. Dixon’s past wasn’t spotless, he had sold some cocaine, but that didn’t make him a murderer.
Golf Digest wrote about this, and the story was picked up by other media, without Dixon’s case got any traction. Then his case was picked by 3 Georgetown undergraduate students as their case in a Prison Reform Project course.
Dixon’s case was certainly the most advanced, mostly because he already had an attorney representing him and pursuing his innocence. But the case had stalled. One barrier to such efforts is the challenge of proving there is new evidence that needs to be considered — difficult in this case, since the real killer’s confessions had been well-known for decades.
The three students working on Dixon’s case kept pushing, traveling to visit Dixon in prison, tracking down witnesses, and interviewing the key figures in his original trial. Several interviews revealed the blatant incompetence and callousness of his original trial attorney, who didn’t seem troubled at all by the conviction.
But the bombshell moment occurred when the original prosecutor, unprompted, revealed that after Dixon had been arrested, the investigators had conducted gun residue testing on his hands and clothes, and the test came back negative.
This was a blatant violation of the landmark Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland, which ruled prosecutors are obligated to provide defense attorneys with any material evidence helpful to the defense. Yet in this case, no one knew about the test until the Georgetown students captured the prosecutor talking about it on camera.
In short, these remarkable students broke new investigative ground and contributed to Dixon’s lawyers’ final and ultimately successful motion to overturn his conviction based on new evidence.
If Gold Digest hadn’t picked up the story, creating some media buzz, it is unlikely the case would have gotten the attention of the Georgetown professors running the course, and then the graduate students wouldn’t have begun their digging.
I cannot help wonder how many other wrongfully convicted people there are out there without the benefit of a passion that catches the eye of someone outside the prison. Given what we know about the conduct of US prosecutors and police forces, and in many cases public defenders, I can’t help but think that every case should be reviewed, especially those against poor, non-white people, who historically has been badly served by the US judicial system. This is not a small task, but it should be possible to identify cases with a high risk of wrongful conviction – this would be cases from districts where there has already been identified problems with the methods used by the prosecutor and the police force, cases where the public defender has a noteworthy bad record, and cases where there is evidence of a bias in the system (e.g. black crime against white people).
This is unlikely to happen as long as the GOP, and other though-on-crime politicians, are in political position – including the position of public prosecutor and judge in many cases. The only way to change this, is to vote for better politicians, and then pressure the elected politicians to work for justice, rather than being though on crime.
The original 2012 article in Golf Digest: Golf Saved My Life – Drawings From Prison
On Wednesday at 13:00 Danish time, Peter Madsen was found guilty of the murder of Kim Wall, and sentenced to life in prison.
By Danish standards, that is an unusually harsh sentence, as he had no prior convictions of any kind, but this was an unusual case in many ways, as the trial has shown.
I have written about the Peter Madsen trial before (here and here), and don’t really feel that I can add more to the story.
Peter Madsen has said that he will appeal the conviction and sentence.
When someone has been sentenced a lifetime sentence in Denmark, they rarely serve the full time, and are eligible to get freed on parole after 12 years. This is not likely to happen in the case of Peter Madsen though, since you have to be considered to no longer being an danger to society – something which it is unlikely anyone will say about Peter Madsen for a very long time.
Content notice: violence, death, mutilation
In a recent post I wrote about the bizzare case of the death of Swedish journalist Kim Wall, who was last seen on the submarine belonging to amateur rocket builder Peter Madsen.
As I wrote in that post, Peter Madsen claims that she died onboard the submarine in an accident, but that there are many signs that something more sinister had happened – a major reason why many believe so, is that only the torso of Kim Wall has been found, and that it contained stab wounds.
Since my last post, the Danish police gained access to Peter Madsen’s computer, which was found to contain deeply troubling videos of women getting tortured and killed.
And in the newest development, yesterday the Danish police managed to find the head and legs of Kim Wall, allowing them to examine those. The police has already said that there is no fracture in Kim Wall’s skull, making Peter Madsen’s story, about her getting killed by getting hit in the head with a heavy hatch, even more unlikely.