THE 80'S WERE THE PORN DECADE

Olivia Newton-John Recalls When 'Physical' Was Banned for Being Too Sexy on Song's 40th Anniversary

© ET

Liz Calvario

Olivia Newton-John is reflecting on her hit song, "Physical."

It's been 40 years since the single took over the airwaves. "Physical" was Newton-John's fifth No 1. single and the most successful song in her career, selling 10 million copies. But some radio and TV stations banned it for being too sexual.

"The things that are out there now! The things they talk about and say freak me out," Newton-John jokes to ET's Nischelle Turner, adding her song "is like a lullaby!"

"Physical" came out in September of 1981, but the Grease star admits she was hesitant about the song and even tried to stop it from being released.

"A dear friend of mine wrote the song and I thought, 'This is a great song!' And I recorded it with John Farrar, who's my producer and also my friend, and after it was finished, that's when I freaked out," she recalls. "I went, 'I never even thought about the double entendre here!' I called my manager and said, 'We have to, we have to kill it! Let's stop it because I think I've gone too far.' And he said, '[It's] already on the charts, doll. It's doing really well, we can't stop it.'"

"I'm finding that very often the things you are most afraid of or tentative about doing are the things you need to do," she acknowledges. "So I'm very thrilled that I didn't pull it off the charts."

Forty years for Newton-John "feels like yesterday and it feels like a century ago," but she couldn't be happier that artists like Dua Lipa and Doja Cat are sampling her music.

"I'm honored and the people still love the song 40 years later," she notes. "I'm thrilled for Stevie [Kipner] because he wrote it and I never dreamt in my life that 'Physical,' 40 years later, people would still be loving it. I feel very lucky."



A deluxe edition of "Physical" will be out Oct. 22. Newton-John also partnered with Crunch Fitness and Third Love to celebrate the 40th anniversary of her song to help raise funds and awareness for her Olivia Newton-John Foundation Fund. The goal of the physical challenge is to set a world record for the number of leg raises.

"I doubt I can even lift a leg now," the superstar jokes. "I think it's a fantastic idea of them trying to set a world record about how many people do it at the same time!"

Newton-John recently turned 73 and is living on her Santa Barbara ranch and focusing on her health after her cancer battle.

"I had breast cancer in '92 and I had a recurrence a few years ago, so I've been through chemotherapy and radiation and all things," she shares. "And my dream always was when going through those things, because it's difficult and they're not comfortable, was to try and find treatments that were kinder."

"And my husband, John, has been growing me cannabis for a long time and making me these tinctures," she adds. "And I think that's why I'm still here. I feel very fortunate. It helps with my pain, it helps a lot of things."

For more on Newton-John, see below.

Olivia Newton-John Explains How She Was Forced to Go Public About Her Cancer Diagnosis (Exclusive)

Leonardo DiCaprio Joins Prince Harry’s Campaign To Stop Oil Drilling In Africa

Prince Harry and Leonardo DiCaprio are joining forces for a good cause

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© Photos: Shutterstock Prince Harry and Leonardo DiCaprio

Aynslee Darmon 

The Oscar-winning actor, 46, along with Forest Whitaker and Djimon Hounsou, have joined the Duke of Sussex, 37, and leading conservationists at Re:wild to call for a stop to oil and gas drilling in the Okavango River Basin in Africa.

According to a press release from Re:wild, Canadian oil and gas company Reconnaissance Energy Africa (ReconAfrica) began drilling the Okavango River Basin in late 2020 despite concern from local communities. The Okavango River Basin travels through Angola, Botswana and Namibia supplying water to nearly 1 million people.

Re:wild is a non-profit that "protects and restores the diversity of life on Earth through innovative collaborations among individuals, communities, Indigenous peoples, governments, scientists, and businesses to drive the most pressing nature-based solutions to our planet’s urgent crises."

"We believe this would pillage the ecosystem for potential profit," Harry and Namibian environmental activist, conservationist and poet Reinhold Mangundu wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post earlier this month. "Some things in life are best left undisturbed to carry out their purpose as a natural benefit. This is one of them."

"There is no way to repair the damage from these kinds of mistakes," they continued. "Drilling is an outdated gamble that reaps disastrous consequences for many, and incredible riches for a powerful few. It represents a continued investment in fossil fuels instead of renewable energies."

Adding, "The risk of drilling will always outweigh the perceived reward. In a region already facing the abuse of exploitation, poaching and fires, the risk is even higher. Knowing the above, why would you be drilling for oil in such a place?"

DiCaprio also shared an Instagram video asking fans to add their names to an open letter from Re:wild calling for the end.

leonardodicaprio

Verified

#SaveTheOkavango

From @rewild: Calling #TeamRewild! We need your help. Act now to #SaveTheOkavango by adding your name to the open letter calling for a moratorium on oil and gas drilling in southern Africa’s Okavango River Basin. Link in bio.

There is no resource more precious than water in the Okavango River Basin, where Canadian company ReconAfrica is drilling for oil and gas. Local and Indigenous communities are concerned for their homes, their water supply, and the ecosystem that supports all life around them.

The Okavango Delta is a UNESCO World Heritage site, a Key Biodiversity Area, and an ecological wonderland so vast it is visible from space. This region sustains nearly one million Indigenous and local people by providing clean water, food, livelihoods and places to live.

The Okavango watershed is also home to some of the world’s most threatened wildlife, and the stomping grounds of the largest remaining population of elephants on Earth. It is a lifeline to a desert ecosystem prone to drought. There is already too little water to spare; the cost of polluting what remains is too high.

Re:wild stands with the people of the Okavango River Basin, who depend on the health of the watershed for their survival. ReconAfrica is poised to pollute their farms and destroy a beautiful landscape—one that benefits all life on Earth—forever. Join us by signing the open letter at the link in bio. Together, we can #SaveTheOkavango.

For all wildkind.

Leonardo DiCaprio on Instagram: “From @rewild: Calling #TeamRewild! We need your help. Act now to #SaveTheOkavango by adding your name to the open letter calling for a…”

ZEBRA ARE NOT NATIVE TO MARYLAND
One of Maryland’s escaped zebras dies in illegal trap

Adam Gabbatt 


One of a group of escaped zebras that have spent almost two months running wild through the east Maryland suburbs has died, authorities said, in a blow to thousands who have followed the animals’ bid for freedom.

The fate of the zebras, who bolted from a farm near Upper Marlboro in late August, has captured the attention of people locally and beyond, with a number of Marylanders sharing videos and photos of the animals roaming and grazing on residents’ lawns.

Related: Stripe zone: on the trail of suburban Maryland’s elusive zebras

Now, however, has come the news no one wanted to hear: one of the zebras has died, after being caught in a snare trap. The animal was found dead on 16 September, Prince George’s county officials said, but for unknown reasons the zebra’s fate was only made public nearly a month later.

The remaining zebras have managed to avoid the bungling efforts of the local animal services division for almost two months.

Officials claimed in early September that the animals would be caught within a matter of days, and in a further misstep, animal services later revealed it had managed to miscount the number of zebras they were hunting – after originally stating that five were on the loose, the division now says only three escaped.

The local television channel Fox5 reported that Maryland’s department of natural resources police found one of the zebras dead in a trap in mid-September, but did not report this to Prince George’s county officials until 28 September. It took another two weeks for Prince George’s county to reveal that the animal was dead.

Snare traps are illegal in Prince George’s county, and police are investigating who laid the trap.

Prince George’s county workers have spent several weeks attempting to lure the escaped zebras into a corral. Last Friday the county’s department of the environment unveiled a new strategy, which involves using more captive zebras as bait for their free brethren.

“The current capture plan is to utilize food and other zebras to attract the zebras at large into a corral so they can be returned to the herd and eliminate any other potential risk to the animals,” Prince George’s county DoE said in a press release.

With winter approaching, some have expressed concern over the zebras’ ability to deal with the Maryland temperatures, which can drop below freezing.

Daniel Rubenstein, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, previously told the Guardian that zebras thrive on the frigid slopes of Mount Kenya, so they should be just fine.

If the cold does prove too much, the zebras could choose to migrate south toward warmer climes, Rubenstein said – unless they are finally caught.

Ryder, Gatik team up to roll out U.S. autonomous delivery network



By Nick Carey

(Reuters) - Truck fleet operator Ryder System Inc and Gatik said on Tuesday they will build a national U.S. autonomous short-haul, "middle-mile" logistics network for Gatik, a Silicon Valley self-driving startup, to deliver goods to business customers.

Ryder's corporate venture capital arm RyderVentures has also invested in Gatik's latest funding round of $85 million that was announced in August.

Gatik works with Walmart Inc and Loblaw Companies Ltd to deliver goods to retail stores from warehouses using autonomous trucks with safety drivers - though in Arkansas is already running some driverless deliveries.

As part of the partnership, Gatik will lease a fleet of medium-duty trucks from Ryder - initially around 20 vehicles in the Dallas area.

Gatik will add its autonomous driving systems to those trucks, which will transport goods to retail locations from fulfillment centers or "dark stores" — distribution centers catering to e-commerce business.

Ryder will also service and maintain Gatik's leased trucks.

"The significance and importance of this partnership is that it enables us to expand our footprint nationwide," Gatik Chief Executive Officer Gautam Narang told Reuters.

Miami-based Ryder has worked to build up self-driving expertise.

Ryder manages and maintains a test fleet for Waymo Via, the self-driving truck unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc.

Self-driving truck technology company TuSimple Holdings Inc is using Ryder's maintenance sites as terminals to help it expand its U.S. autonomous freight network.

And self-driving truck technology developer Embark Trucks Inc has teamed up with Ryder to launch a U.S. network of transfer points to support Embark's coast-to-coast autonomous operations.

Embark is merging with blank-check firm Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp. II.

"We want to be a leader in understanding how this all works," said Karen Jones, Ryder's chief marketing officer. "Ultimately, getting in early with these customers is the best way to do that."

(Reporting By Nick Carey; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

The DOJ Is Investigating Americans For War Crimes Allegedly Committed While Fighting With Far-Right Extremists In Ukraine

The probe involves seven men but is centered on former Army soldier Craig Lang, who is separately wanted in connection with a double killing in Florida and is fighting extradition from Kyiv.

Christopher Miller BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on October 8, 2021

Oksana Parafeniuk for BuzzFeed News
Craig Lang in Kyiv on Feb. 18, 2021


KYIV — One chilly day in February, Craig Lang, a former US Army soldier wanted for allegedly killing a married couple in Florida, pleaded with three stern-faced judges in a Kyiv courtroom to allow him to stay in Ukraine. He first came in 2015 to fight with a far-right paramilitary unit, defending the country from Russia-backed forces. And he believed that if he were extradited back to the US, he could face war crimes charges.

“Any separatist or Russian soldier that I have killed would be a murder charge” in the US, Lang, 31, said in his gruff North Carolina drawl. “Understand that some of my fellow combatants are under investigation by the FBI for war crimes.”

That was a stunning statement. It would be extremely rare for the US government to investigate its own citizens for alleged war crimes committed on foreign soil — no one, experts say, has ever been prosecuted, let alone convicted, under the US War Crimes Act. Lang’s claim, overheard by this BuzzFeed News reporter, could not be corroborated at the time.

But now, BuzzFeed News can reveal that the Department of Justice and the FBI have in fact taken the extraordinary step of investigating a group of seven American fighters, including Lang, under the federal war crimes statute. Authorities suspect that while in eastern Ukraine, Lang and other members of the group allegedly took noncombatants as prisoners, beat them with their fists, kicked them, clobbered them with a sock filled with stones, and held them underwater.

Lang, the DOJ believes, may have even killed some of them before burying their bodies in unmarked graves.

The war crimes investigation was detailed in a DOJ appeal for assistance sent to the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine in 2018 along with two Ukrainian documents responding to the appeal the following year. The documents were leaked to an obscure pro-Russian website. BuzzFeed News reviewed and authenticated the documents and interviewed six people, in Kyiv and stateside, with direct knowledge of the US investigation. They include a top Ukrainian law enforcement official; a former Ukrainian National Police official who was involved in gathering information to fulfill the US appeal; and two other people who have assisted the FBI and spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

BuzzFeed News also interviewed Dalton Kennedy of North Carolina and David Kleman of Georgia, both 24, who had interviews with federal agents and provided proof of those encounters. They, along with Quinn Rickert, 27, of Illinois; Santi Pirtle, 30, of California; Brian Boyenger, 33, of North Carolina; and David Plaster, 37, of Missouri were investigated by the DOJ and FBI in the probe. When they arrived in Ukraine, Lang, Rickert, and Pirtle allegedly joined Right Sector, a volunteer far-right nationalist group that formed in November 2013 and later created a paramilitary force to respond to Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in spring 2014. Human rights groups have accused Right Sector fighters of abusing and torturing civilians and combatants.


Courtesy David Kleman
Brian Boyenger (left) and David Kleman in eastern Ukraine

All the men were connected to Lang, who also briefly served in Ukraine’s military, and privy to his actions in the country. Their alleged roles in the war crimes vary, and BuzzFeed News has found that some were likely not present when they are believed to have taken place.

The DOJ — based on video and photo evidence, as well as interviews with some of Lang’s fellow American fighters — says in the documents that Lang was the main instigator of the alleged torture of detainees in eastern Ukraine. In April, BuzzFeed News detailed how Lang became increasingly radicalized while fighting in Ukraine and had ties to white supremacists. He now resides with his Ukrainian partner and their child in Kyiv. He was detained by Ukrainian border guards in August 2019, wears an ankle monitor, and is banned from leaving the country while he fights extradition to Fort Myers to face trial in the 2018 killings of Deana and Serafin “Danny” Lorenzo in Florida. Authorities allege that Lang and another former Army soldier who fought with Right Sector in Ukraine lured the couple to a meeting to buy guns — but instead ambushed them and robbed them of $3,000, used to fund Lang’s foreign fighting adventures.

A separate message obtained exclusively by BuzzFeed News suggests the FBI was investigating Lang and the others as early as April 2017, and had already received information on them from search and seizure warrants.

The DOJ appeal doesn’t make clear whether US authorities had interviewed any alleged victims in Ukraine or confirmed that anyone was killed. But based on the evidence gathered, the DOJ appeal says, the Americans “allegedly committed or participated in torture, cruel or inhuman treatment or murder of persons who did not take (or stopped taking) an active part in hostilities and (or) intentionally inflicted grievous bodily harm on them.”




Pages from the DOJ appeal for assistance sent to the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine


It continues: “Such actions, if committed by US citizens or directed against them, respective to the United States War Crimes Act, are classified as war crimes in the context of the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.”

Two sources who have aided the DOJ and the Americans under investigation who spoke to BuzzFeed News in the past four months said that they believe the probe is active. But, to date, no related charges have been filed. Calls and emails sent to the DOJ and FBI officials named in the leaked appeal went unanswered. The US Embassy in Kyiv also declined to comment. The FBI and DOJ spokespeople each said they do not confirm or deny the existence of an ongoing investigation.

During extradition hearings in Kyiv over the past year, Lang has denied involvement in the Florida killings and said federal authorities are going after him because of his political views and extremist ties. Four of the six sources, including Kennedy and Kleman, said they believed the DOJ’s focus now is getting Lang extradited to the US, something Irina Venediktova, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, told BuzzFeed News this month that she would also like to see happen. “We did our homework [on Lang],” she said, noting that she approved the US request for extradition last year. (The European Court of Human Rights ordered a stay on Lang’s extradition until it reviewed his case. The court had not yet made a decision when this article was published.) In May, the US government said during a court hearing that it would waive the death penalty for Lang in order to speed up the process.

Lang didn’t respond to a request for comment. His Ukrainian lawyer, Dmytro Morhun, declined to respond directly to the DOJ investigation and claims made against Lang, saying he would only do so if presented with evidence of alleged crimes, not assumptions of law enforcement agencies. He said the US investigation was proof of what he has argued since Lang was detained in Ukraine — that the US efforts to bring him back home were political in nature and are “connected precisely with his participation in the armed forces of Ukraine in the east, while fighting against the Russian aggressor.”

In interviews in person and by phone, Kennedy, Kleman, Plaster, and Boyenger confirmed they had fought in Ukraine, but they all denied the allegations that they committed or aided any possible war crimes and said they were never part of Right Sector; the four served with the regular Ukrainian military and provided documentation showing they did. Rickert didn’t respond to messages seeking comment, and Pirtle couldn’t be reached. But a family member of Pirtle’s told BuzzFeed News by phone that Pirtle spoke to the FBI at least twice about his experience once he left Ukraine and returned home to San Jose. The family added that Pirtle is currently serving in the US Army and is based in Louisiana. An Army spokesperson confirmed Pirtle is an active-duty infantryman with no combat deployments who has served since October 2020.

Thousands of foreign fighters have flocked to eastern Ukraine to join a war that Russia incited in spring 2014 — using troops in unmarked uniforms and local separatist proxies — that has killed more than 14,000 people. Venediktova told BuzzFeed News that her office is investigating 250 foreign fighters from 32 countries for war crimes. All of them have fought with Russia-led forces.

Venediktova said that, for now, there are no active investigations into foreign fighters who joined the Ukrainian side. But Gyunduz Mamedov, the deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine, said in an interview in Kyiv in August that after learning of the US war crimes probe in 2019, he considered opening his own into Lang’s alleged crimes. “I thought that a proper legal assessment of the situation should be done in Ukraine as well,” he said, adding, “My main concern was [Lang’s] crimes in Ukraine.” Mamedov said he asked US authorities to share the evidence used to build their case against Lang and the other Americans. “Unfortunately,” he said, “there has been no response.”

Roughly 40 other Americans have fought on the Ukrainian side, according to BuzzFeed News’ reporting and expert research. Many are veterans or men who had hoped to join the US military but couldn’t, and wanted to help a democratic ally in its fight against Russia’s aggressive authoritarianism. Others are opportunists who see a shot at a once-in-a-lifetime adventure and a fresh start. And several are combat enthusiasts who hop from war to war.

But some are far-right extremists who have set their gaze on Ukraine, a place that has become a destination and training ground for such types in the West. As far-right extremism has risen in the US, so has the interest among American white supremacists in militarized right-wing Ukrainian groups that have had success in growing and mainstreaming their organizations and movements. They include violent neo-Nazis like those from the Rise Above Movement who have gone to Ukraine to meet and train with some of the groups — and then export what they learned to the US.


Timo Vogt / EST&OST
Members of “Task Force Pluto.” Front, from left: Austrians Benjamin Fischer and Alex Kirschbaum. Back, from left: Americans Quinn Rickert, Craig Lang, and Santi Pirtle.

The seven Americans arrived in Ukraine at different times. Plaster, who has familial ties to Ukraine, was in the country before the war broke out. The other six arrived between 2015 and 2016.

Lang touched down in May 2015, after two tours with the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. He served in the infantry and was dishonorably discharged in 2014. A string of disturbing personal events the previous year, including an incident in which he allegedly threatened his wife, court documents show, led to their divorce and him losing custody rights and a job.

Ukraine offered adventure and a new start. He joined Right Sector, he said earlier this year, “because I thought they were the most active on the front line.” The far-right paramilitary group handed him a loaded AK-47 the moment he arrived, he said.

As one of the first and most visible American fighters in eastern Ukraine — his Facebook page, which has since been removed, showed him firing machine guns and AK-47s in interviews with Ukrainian media, running through trenches, and posing in uniform on the battlefield — he quickly became a key contact for others looking to join the war and Right Sector. The DOJ also believes that Lang used Facebook to actively recruit other Americans to the unit.

Among them were Rickert and Pirtle, who, along with Lang and two Austrian fighters, formed a close-knit, informal group that called itself “Task Force Pluto,” after the Greek god of the underworld. Photographs shot by a German photographer in early 2016 show them cleaning their AK-47 rifles and firing rocket-propelled grenades at the front line together.

While Rickert was once close with Lang, he seems to be one of the government’s prime sources of information and evidence in its war crimes case. Lang, he apparently told investigators, was the Task Force Pluto leader while the group was stationed at a makeshift military base located on the edge of Novohrodivka, an unremarkable coal mining town in the Donetsk region that is under Ukrainian government control.

Rickert, the DOJ document says, told the FBI about several instances of Lang allegedly abusing people at the base in late 2015 or in 2016. In one, Rickert said that Lang went to a nearby village and captured a local man. Rickert claimed that Lang brought the man back to the Right Sector base and “severely beat and tortured” him in a cell and “eventually took him out of the base and killed him.” Rickert told the DOJ that he had video footage of the incident and others.

Rickert also told investigators he witnessed Lang and Benjamin Fischer — an Austrian who, the DOJ notes, fought with Right Sector and has also been accused by his government of war crimes in Ukraine and was briefly detained in 2017 before reportedly being released due to a lack of evidence — committed “numerous killings and tortures” of prisoners. These happened, Rickert said, in a small room at the base in spring 2016. After the torture sessions, Rickert told DOJ, Lang took them outside, killed them, and buried their bodies in a field near the base.


Timo Vogt / EST&OST
A view of the Right Sector base near Novohrodivka in eastern Ukraine

Rickert told the DOJ he also had a video of Lang beating and drowning a woman who Fischer injected with adrenaline to keep her from losing consciousness. According to Rickert, another foreign fighter filmed the incident on video. Fischer’s whereabouts are unknown and he could not be reached for comment.

Pirtle told investigators, according to the DOJ document, that Rickert filmed several of the interrogations and uploaded the videos to his Google accounts, including one in which a man was detained, thrown into a shower stall, and beaten with a sock filled with stones. According to Pirtle, the man was thought to have fought with Russia-backed forces. Pirtle told investigators he saw Lang punch and push the man, demanding his password to a Facebook account because Lang thought that it was holding information on pro-Russian fighters.

Pirtle’s family member said he returned to the US in spring 2016 because he had grown tired of the poor living conditions in eastern Ukraine and was worried about “somebody who did terrible things.” That person, the family member said, was Lang. Pirtle, according to the family member, emailed them explaining that “things are going downhill and he didn’t want any part in it.”

Morhun, Lang’s lawyer, did not directly respond to these or any specific allegations, saying “in order to deny or confirm any accusations, they must be brought,” and since the DOJ has not presented he or Lang with evidence, “we are talking about assumptions, and that makes no sense to comment on.”

The DOJ appears to have obtained and viewed that video and others, writing in the appeal that investigators got a warrant authorizing them to search the Google account and emails apparently belonging to Rickert.

“In the first video, LANG’s voice is heard demanding that the man give his password from a social network account,” the DOJ writes. “After the man refuses to give LANG his password, behind the scenes someone says, ‘You need to beat him.’ LANG hits the man several times with his knee in the abdomen and head, throwing him on the floor, where he writhes in pain.”

A second video, according to the DOJ, “shows a Ukrainian man repeatedly hitting a man with something hard in a sock in his cell. After this beating, a person similar to RICKERT enters the shower and demands the man’s password. After that, you can see how RICKERT punches the man in the back of the head.”

Rickert’s and Pirtle’s accounts to the DOJ, and the agency’s descriptions of the videos, closely align with what BuzzFeed News was told by an American fighter in Ukraine who knew the Task Force Pluto members and described them as having a “fetish for death and torture.” It also aligns with a screenshot of a video viewed by this reporter that shows a man who appeared to be Lang standing over a man seated and bound in a small room. That scene also closely resembles one described by a Vice News journalist who interviewed Lang, Rickert, and Pirtle at the Novohrodivka base in 2016. In that story, a man was detained by Right Sector fighters, held in “a standing-room-only shower stall” with the lights on for a week, and beaten with a sock “stuffed with sharpened rocks.”

The Google account data, the DOJ writes, also uncovered numerous images of Rickert, Lang, Pirtle, and other people handling weapons and explosives in eastern Ukraine, including in “a trench dug for combat.”

The DOJ document doesn’t describe any instances in which Kennedy, Kleman, Boyenger, and Plaster took an active part in the abuse of civilians. Plaster, who now runs an NGO in Kyiv that helps Ukrainian veterans, said he “kept a distance from anyone with radical ideologies” and provided “medical aid and training” to the country’s soldiers during his time on the front line. Boyenger said, “I have always conducted myself with honor and fidelity, as a taxpayer I do expect the government to investigate to the fullest extent any and all allegations of wrongdoing and I look forward to seeing the results of their investigation as much as anyone."

The DOJ document also says that US authorities believe that Lang and Kennedy, after spending time back in the US, “returned to Ukraine with the intention of planning and participating in an armed attack on the Ukrainian [parliament]” in 2017.

The DOJ says in the document that US authorities in Kyiv received reports around March 14, 2017, that Lang was detained upon his arrival at a Ukrainian airport because authorities “found something similar to a rifle with a silencer and a full box of ammunition” on him.

Kennedy told BuzzFeed News that he never planned any such attack on Ukraine’s parliament building, calling the accusation “bullshit.” He showed BuzzFeed News his passport, which indicated that he wasn’t in Ukraine at the time the DOJ claimed he was there. But Kennedy did say that Lang had told him about being detained at a Ukrainian airport and found to have gun parts in his luggage. Lang didn’t respond to questions about the alleged incident.

“I do believe the FBI is unfairly demonizing and trying to prosecute us for no real reason other than our involvement in Ukraine,” Kennedy told BuzzFeed News.

Kennedy — who also served for a time as a soldier in the Ukrainian armed forces — said Lang convinced him to join Right Sector in April 2016, and that he stayed only for a couple of months. “When I was there nothing like that happened,” Kennedy said of the alleged war crimes. “We didn’t even take any prisoners the whole time I was there.”


Brendan Hoffman for BuzzFeed News

Lang stands with his partner Anna Osipovich and members of the Right Sector battalion following an appeals hearing on a request by the United States to extradite Lang on murder charges at the Kyiv Court of Appeal on Feb. 23, 2021.

The DOJ and FBI investigation marks the first attempt to hold American volunteer soldiers accountable for their alleged actions in Ukraine. Besides going after alleged war criminals, the extraordinary investigation also ticks another box for the DOJ: a case against far-right extremists. The Biden administration has said fighting extremism is a top priority.

At least two of the other men under investigation could be described as far-right extremists: Kennedy, who was briefly in the US Army, told BuzzFeed News in an interview that he’s now “apolitical,” but he was once a member of the American neo-fascist group Patriot Front and photographed making a Nazi salute. Kleman’s social media presence includes a video of him making a Nazi salute, a photo of a Nazi WWII flag, and posts with white supremacist language. He told BuzzFeed News from his home in Boston that he “was never a Nazi” but is “very into Germany.”

The DOJ appeal document was first leaked by an obscure pro-Russian website called UkrLeaks on April 9, after BuzzFeed News published an investigation into Lang’s alleged involvement in the double killing in Florida and the issue of American extremists fighting in Ukraine. UkrLeaks is run by Vasily Prozorov, a Ukrainian who worked from 1999 to 2018 as a consultant in the country’s security service, the SBU, before defecting to Russia. In a Facebook post in March 2019, the SBU claimed he had been fired for his poor job performance and heavy drinking.

Since arriving in Russia, Prozorov has used UkrLeaks and appearances on state television to push some of the Kremlin’s favorite conspiracy theories about Ukraine. But Prozorov had access to sensitive and classified information, and while he seems to have used some of it to smear Ukraine and his former employer, some things he leaked have checked out. For instance, Prozorov has published information about the SBU detaining pro-Russian Ukrainians and holding them in secret detention centers. And although the security service has vehemently denied using such facilities, Ukrainian journalists, international human rights groups, and the United Nations have investigated the claims, interviewed people who were detained, and found the centers to be real.

Prozorov, who fled Ukraine before the DOJ appeal was sent to Kyiv, told BuzzFeed News the appeal and two related Ukrainian documents were given to him by a source in the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office whom he declined to name.

The bar for charging someone under the War Crimes Act is incredibly high, according to Beth Van Schaack, a law professor at Stanford University who previously served as the deputy to the ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues in the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice. “No US citizen has ever been tried or convicted under the country’s war crimes statute” since it became law in 1996, she told BuzzFeed News.

(One US citizen came close: Boston-born Charles Emmanuel, aka Chuckie Taylor, aka Roy Belfast Jr., the son of Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia. He led the Liberian Anti-Terrorist Unit that tortured and killed civilians opposed to his father’s rule. His 2008 US conviction for torture committed in a foreign country was the first of its kind. He was sentenced to 97 years in prison.)

Edgar Chen, a former attorney in the DOJ’s Office of Special Investigations, the department’s unit tasked with targeting and prosecuting human rights violators and war criminals, told BuzzFeed News that during his nearly 10 years there he wasn’t aware of any US citizen being investigated for committing a war crime in circumstances similar to the Ukraine case.

“They’re not going to do that unless they think they’ve got the goods,” Chen said, suggesting that the DOJ might see the case against Lang and the other American fighters as its opportunity to finally put the War Crimes Act to use.

One person who has assisted the FBI with the probe told BuzzFeed News that investigators had expressed that very thought to them. Speaking on the condition of anonymity so they could talk about discussions with the federal agents, the person said, “They want to make Craig the first [American] to be tried for war crimes” in the US. ●

Tanya Kozyreva contributed reporting from Kyiv.

Here’s What It Actually Means To Cut $1 Trillion From The Democrats’ Big Social Spending Bill

Democrats will have to choose between greatly watering down all of their policies or giving up on some big promises.

Paul McLeodBuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From
Washington, DC


Posted on October 11, 2021, 

Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi conducts a rally to promote climate benefits in the Build Back Better Act.


WASHINGTON — Democrats are facing torturous choices of which social programs to slash or get rid of altogether, as they will have to cut $1 trillion or even $2 trillion out of their signature social spending bill.

While the topline numbers have gotten a lot of attention, there’s been little public discussion about what cutting the Build Back Better Act in half actually looks like: abandoning programs and reforms badly wanted by progressives and centrists alike.

Do you give up on a child tax credit that helped cut the child poverty level in half, or the country’s first universal paid family leave program? Do you drop prekindergarten subsidies or expanding Medicare to cover vision, hearing, and dental? What if you can afford investments in green energy or expanding the Affordable Care Act but not both?

After winning the White House and Congress, Democrats kicked off an ambitious plan to holistically reform America’s social safety net and tackle climate change with massive investments in green energy. The total price tag, including tax credits, was set at $3.5 trillion over 10 years. Now, they’re looking at something around half that.

Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are pushing their party to drastically shrink the size of their Build Back Better Act. It’s not clear what the final number will be but guesses range from $1.5 trillion — Manchin’s proposal — to President Joe Biden’s counteroffer of somewhere over $2 trillion.

One of the top Democratic priorities is universal paid family and medical leave, allowing people to take paid time off due to illness, having a baby, or looking after a sick family member. Estimates peg this at about $550 billion. (All numbers are projected costs over 10 years, which is how Congress calculates the price.

Take that policy and add a few hundred billion to move the country toward green energy, plus around $800 billion to make permanent the universal child tax credit, enacted on a temporary basis earlier this year, that is giving parents up to $3,600 per year for each child. At that point, you’ve pretty much hit your budget cap.

But this hypothetical bill doesn’t include things like expanding the Affordable Care Act to provide health insurance to over 2 million people, long-term care for older adults, universal prekindergarten for 3- and 4-year-olds, funding for schools, and many other prized progressive ideas. To add any of these, you have to either take something else out or shrink it way down.

Democrats have two choices: They can either cut out major planks of the bill or they can winnow each program down, making them skimpier and temporary to fit into the budget. If you only extend the child tax credit for five years and bet that in 2026 the government of the day will extend it again, that brings down the price tag substantially. But if you bet wrong, the tax credit ends.

“If you set up programs so they are automatically going to expire, that creates the risk that they actually do expire,” said Ben Ritz, a director at the Progressive Policy Institute. “I think it’s very problematic for Congress to create a new benefit that people come to rely on and then a few years later it goes away.”

Ritz pointed to the Affordable Care Act signed into law, permanently, by President Obama. Republicans have failed to actively repeal the ACA despite years of vowing to do so. But it would be a very different calculus if they could simply do nothing and let it expire on its own.

Ritz put together a framework of what a roughly $2 trillion Build Back Better Act could look like. It includes:


$800 billion to make the child tax credit permanent.


$600 billion of green investments, including funding for public transit, energy grid modernization, and industry subsidies for utilities that switch to green energy.


$425 billion to expand ACA subsidies and Medicaid eligibility to provide health insurance to 2.2 million people with lower incomes.


$175 billion for prekindergarten, plus some funding for job training.

No estimates of what a $2 trillion plan would look like have come out of Congress, because the party is still fighting over the size of the bill. Sen. Bernie Sanders recently called on Manchin and Sinema to stop hiding behind numbers and say exactly what policies they want cut out of the bill.

“We’ve got 48 senators who support $3.5 trillion. We’ve got two who don’t,” said Sanders. “It is wrong, it is really not playing fair, that one or two people think they should be able to stop what 48 members of the Democratic caucus want, what the American people want, what the president of the United States wants.”

But the Senate being split 50-50 means any single Democratic senator has the power to tank the bill. Manchin has expressed a willingness to compromise, but not to go anywhere near a bill the size of $3.5 trillion. Sinema has said even less about her demands, at least publicly.

Democrats may need to decide whether to cut a slew of smaller programs out of the Build Back Better Act. Affordable housing funding ($332 billion), increased financial assistance for students ($111 billion), child nutrition programs such as free meals at schools ($35 billion), and upgrades to Veterans Affairs facilities ($18 billion) are among the less-talked-about items that flesh out the bill. Many or all of them may need to be jettisoned.

Again, it comes down to the choice of having the bill do a few things well — and permanently — or a great number of things with less funding and on a temporary basis.

Ritz argued that Democrats will have an easier time running on passing a few large, impactful programs, potentially allowing them to pass more in the future.

“It makes sense to have a bill that we can message, say this is what the purpose of the bill is: having an inclusive recovery and focusing on the future,” Ritz said. “Trying to do 50 different programs, I think it’ll come off as a progressive wish list and the purpose gets lost.”

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said the honest policy debates haven’t begun yet as progressive and centrist Democrats angle for positioning. “It would be great to have the details of what we’re actually talking about,” she said.

Her group doesn’t take a position on which policies should be included, but they’ve made one exception in opposing a contentious tax break referred to by the shorthand SALT.

A group of Democrats and Republicans, dubbing themselves the SALT Caucus, are pushing to raise the cap on the State and Local Tax (thus the acronym) Deduction, allowing filers to save on their federal income tax if they pay high taxes to their local governments. The most vocal Democrats who support the policy tend to come from California, New York, and New Jersey, where constituents would most benefit.

Lifting the SALT cap provides only a small benefit to middle-income earners but can greatly benefit tax filers with over $1 million in income. Budget-wise, it could cost as much as $100 billion per year.

It’s in stark contrast to the rest of the Build Back Better Act. The bill could end up raising about $2 trillion in tax revenue from large corporations and wealthy Americans, depending on what the final text looks like. Even Manchin supports increasing taxes on the rich to pay for social programs.

SALT would do the opposite, cutting into money for social programs to pass a tax cut that disproportionately benefits the wealthy.

A group of House Democrats are vowing not to support the reconciliation bill unless SALT relief is included. It’s one of the many sticking points that have no obvious solution, and with the size and contents of the bill in flux, no one knows the prospects for it getting in. But among all the proposals in the Build Back Better Act, SALT relief is getting among the most pushback.

“It’s the most regressive tax cut basically you could craft,” MacGuineas said. “In an entire package that is designed to help families that need it the most, there’s not a single justification for that one.”

Fed Chair Jerome Powell under investigation for dumping millions in stocks amid COVID economic crisis

Sarah K. Burris
October 18, 2021

Donald Trump and Jerome Powell (Screen Capture)

The American Prospect is reporting that Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell dumped between $1 million and $5 million in his personal stock before the COVID-19 crisis and the economic crash that began in early 2020.

"Powell's sale of shares from a Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund has not been previously reported. This sale occurred right before the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered a significant drop," said the report.

Powell joined with three other senior Federal Reserve officials who made stock trades during the pandemic as the economy went into freefall. Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan and Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren took an "early retirement" after disclosing their COVID-19 stock trades. Those trades are now under investigation by the Federal Reserve Inspector General and SEC. Fed Vice Chair Richard Clarida is also coming under fire for questionable stock trades.

"There is no American with more insider knowledge about government policy that drives financial market movements than the chair of the Federal Reserve," explained the Prospect. "And as COVID caseloads, hospitalizations, and deaths spiked last fall, the economy was in a precarious condition. October turned out to be the stock market's worst month since March 2020, when the pandemic began."

Powell dropped the stock sales came amid four meetings with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and as Donald Trump was preparing to announce the need for a large stimulus package. Instead, it was announced he had COVID and ended up being rushed to Walter Reed with dangerously low oxygen levels.

"Powell also made several other smaller stock and bond trades during 2020, as he has done in previous years. For example, he sold a more nominal amount of the Vanguard equity fund, between $50,000 and $100,000, on September 21, 2020," said the Prospect.

According to the report, Powell was pressing the administration for the package, but Trump instead tweeted he wanted to stop negotiations and would hold the country hostage until after the election. The market immediately lost nearly 600 points.

Powell's sales came after a meeting Sept. 15-16 with the Federal Open Market Committee but before the minutes became public.

"Participants continued to see the uncertainty surrounding the economic outlook as very elevated, with the path of the economy highly dependent on the course of the virus; on how individuals, businesses, and public officials responded to it; and on the effectiveness of public health measures to address it," the Prospect revealed. "Participants cited several downside risks that could threaten the recovery." These included insufficient fiscal stimulus and excessive risk-taking in a very-low-interest-rate environment created by the Fed itself."

The report also cited Powell's net worth somewhere between $20 million and $55 million, according to 2020 financial disclosure statements.

Read the full report at the American Prospect.

White House says Trump deserves to be held accountable for attempting to overthrow the government

Sarah K. Burris
October 19, 2021

Donald Trump and Joe Biden (Photos: Screen capture and AFP)

The White House made it clear on Tuesday that they have no intention of protecting former President Donald Trump from any accountability involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

In a statement about Trump's lawsuit declaring executive privilege to protect him from submitting information about Jan. 6 and what led to it, the White House made it clear they have every intention of turning over information.

"Former President Trump abused the office of the presidency and attempted to subvert a peaceful transfer of power," said the statement. "The former president's actions represented a unique - and existential - threat to our democracy that can't be swept under the rug. As President Biden determined, the constitutional protections of executive privilege should not be used to shield information that reflects a clear and apparent effort to subvert the Constitution itself."

Trump filed a lawsuit late Monday in an attempt to block documents from being turned over to the Jan. 6 House Select Committee. He has also told anyone subpoenaed by the committee to defy the subpoena, even if they risk being held in criminal contempt.

Mark Zuckerberg ‘personally involved in decisions related to Cambridge Analytica’: DC AG

David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement

October 20, 2021

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is facing a new firestorm over the social network's handling of Russian misinformation efforts in the 2016 US election season AFP/File / GERARD JULIEN

Facebook founder, chairman, CEO, and majority shareholder Mark Zuckerberg was involved with decisions the social media behemoth made involving Cambridge Analytica according to the Attorney General of Washington, D.C., who says he is adding him to a major privacy lawsuit. That could potentially expose the billionaire personally to financial or other penalties.

"I just added Mark Zuckerberg as a defendant in my lawsuit against Facebook," D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine announced Wednesday via Twitter. "Our continuing investigation revealed that he was personally involved in decisions related to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook's failure to protect user data."

The New York Times Wednesday morning adds that Racine "said on Tuesday that continuing interviews and reviews of internal documents for the case had revealed that Mr. Zuckerberg played a much more active role in key decisions than prosecutors had known."

The privacy lawsuit, first filed in 2018, "alleges that Facebook misled consumers about privacy on the platform by allowing Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, to obtain sensitive data from more than 87 million users, including more than half the district's residents," the Times adds

A portion of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal includes Cambridge Analytica harvesting data of approximately 87 million users and then using it to help the 2016 political campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

In 2018 The Times reported that along with other news organizations it had "obtained a cache of documents from inside Cambridge Analytica," which "proved that the firm, where the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon was a board member, used data improperly obtained from Facebook to build voter profiles."

The shuttered and rebranded and re-shuttered Cambridge Analytica was owned by right-wing donor Robert Mercer, who also reportedly played a key role in the Brexit movement. Mercer was a top Trump donor and major financial supporter of the far right wing website Breitbart.

Here's how right-wing media outlets kill people who take their advice

Thom Hartmann, Independent Media Institute

October 18, 2021

(Shutterstock.com)

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It happened three times yesterday, and I only watched or half-watched a few hours of TV news. It happens every day, it seems. Somebody wonders out loud (yesterday's most prominent was Alex Witt with Dr. Anthony Fauci) why over 60 million Americans who are eligible to be vaccinated are still refusing — including hospital workers in some parts of the country.

Everybody treats it like it's a confounding question with no easy answer. The actual answer, though, is pretty straightforward: the psychopaths running the rightwing media ecosystem dominated by Fox "News" and social media, and echoed by 1500 radio stations across the country, have decided people dying and being disabled is both profitable and politically advantageous to them.

When Joe Biden was elected president the Republican Party and their joined-at-the-hip rightwing media did a sudden about-face from praising Trump's "Operation Warp Speed" to encouraging their followers to remain unvaccinated so President Biden would struggle to get the economy back on sound footing.

That, they figured, was their best bet to take back Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024, and they've stayed on-message ever since Biden took office on January 20th. As I noted in considerable detail back in July, death is their political strategy.

And now, as if to put a punctuation point on it, the headline at Raw Story warns: Fox News host uses Colin Powell's death to launch anti-vax rant: "Fully-vaccinated are dying of Covid."

Almost 750,000 Americans have died of Covid and recent research published by the Journal of the American Medical Association concludes that as many as half of the 45 million Americans who've been diagnosed with the disease will suffer long term consequences, the main ones being dementia, exhaustion and damage to the heart and kidneys.

It used to be in American business that you knew where the psychopaths were: tobacco. It's an industry producing a product that, when used as directed, kills around a half-million Americans every year.

Being able to comfortably fall asleep every night knowing that the product of your workday had killed another 1300 people is a rare competence that typically requires the mental illness of psychopathy.

About 1% of Americans are psychopaths, although such people tend to be concentrated in some areas: as many as 12% of major corporate CEOs are believed to be psychopaths, and about 15% of people in prison.

A psychopath, for all practical purposes, believes that he's quite literally the only "true human being" on planet Earth.

Everybody else is an actor of some sort, a prop, in the grand play of the psychopath's life. Everybody else is here to make him happy and meet his needs, and he doesn't have to worry about hurting them or not meeting their needs because they are not "real people" like he is.

The clinical terminology is that psychopaths "lack the ability to feel empathy." Weirdly, this lack of empathy can make them more successful in big business and politics, as well as in criminal and prison environments.

Thus, the CEO of Fox "News" — the network that daily spreads vaccine misinformation leading to deaths that are tearing apart American families — tells the Hollywood Reporter that she sleeps "well at night." Just like the tobacco CEOs.

Meanwhile, people who watch Fox and all its imitators across various media are taking the implicit advice of Fox's primetime hosts and avoiding vaccination…and getting sick and in some cases dying.

They're embracing quack cures promoted on the network and across rightwing media, including hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, giving their viewers the false sense of security that if they get sick with this awful disease there's a ready cure at hand…so there's no need to get vaccinated.

Even worse, consumers of this media are doing their best to disrupt rational public health efforts like mask and vaccine mandates by harassing public health officials, school boards, and elected representatives across the country — all leading to even more disease and deaths.

When Americans realized, mostly as the result of massive lawsuits in the 1990s, that the CEOs of the tobacco industry were knowingly killing people (and even reaching out to addict children) we took action.

We limited access to this death-dealing product, from outlawing television advertising to limiting placement of cigarette vending machines and strict enforcement of age-limited retail sales. We also required that the product be honestly labeled: "Tobacco kills."

This isn't an option for media, and rightly so because of our First Amendment protections of the press (including this article). And nobody wants to take those freedoms and protections away.

But the most important and effective campaign our nation embarked on to cut tobacco use was the nationwide campaign to educate people about the dangers of tobacco use. We taught adults and schoolchildren alike how the industry was trying to addict them and showed them the consequences of using that deadly product.

Now that rightwing media has arguably caused more Americans to die in the past year than has tobacco, it's time to consider a similar strategy to balance the lies and misinformation streaming out of them every day.

If we can't rely on the news and social media industries' content producers or executives to stop spreading death-dealing misinformation, we can at least wake people up to the dangers of their products.

#RightwingMediaCausesDeat

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Healthcare and more than 30+ other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.