More: Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

Kremlev's previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin's circle financially supporting the president's son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family. For a decade, Putin's government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections. Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president's first term.

In the days leading up to Trump Jr.'s wedding, Kremlev was in China as part of the delegation accompanying Putin, according to Chinese state media. The month before, Putin had bestowed him with a state honor, the Order of Friendship. The Ukrainian government has imposed sanctions on Kremlev personally, citing his closeness to Putin and Russian security services.

It's not clear why Kremlev helped pay for Trump Jr.'s wedding. The men appear to have met only recently. Public reporting suggests Trump Jr. could have afforded it himself, with Forbes recently estimating his net worth at roughly $300 million.

America's ship of state has never been controlled by pirates like the Trump family before.

Sure seems like something HIPPA should prohibit.

More: The 80-year-old president issued dark warnings at this week's GOP midterm convention about the nation's future if Republicans lost the November elections, and he even asked his followers to pledge to cheat if necessary or risk hellfire, and politics and history professor Alan Elrod published a column for Liberal Currents offered a disturbing theory about his plans.

"Trump's speech came off more like a sermon from Jonestown, and observers noticed," Elrod wrote. "My own overriding thought was: 'This speech was like some sort of performance art piece of a live entombing of a mad king and his most loyal followers.'"

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"My colleague Samantha Hancox-Li has an elegantly simple theory for why Trump has become even more obsessed with legacy and with slapping his name on buildings and projects than he already was over his lifelong career as a shameless self-promoter: fear of death," Elrod wrote.

"As she put it: 'My current theory of Donald Trump is that he is utterly gripped by the terror of death, and is desperately attempting to leave some mark on the world that history cannot erase " this is the point of the wars, the annexation threats, the D.C. vandalism. I think right now he is genuinely fixated on adding new American territory as the brass ring, the thing they'll never be able to take away from his memory.'"

Elrod found himself inclined to agree as he watched the president's rambling, self-aggrandizing speech.

"It's a macabre but convincing psychological assessment," he wrote. "Rather than making America great again, Trump is inflicting grievous harm on it with tariffs, now upgraded to import bans against select Canadian goods; an illegal war; and a total ransacking of our public and private sectors for the enrichment of his courtiers and his family. And he is going to bury us all with him in a tomb of his own design " a ballroom."

Is now a good time to bring up Trump's Saudi nuclear deal?

More: Cooke, who has criticized the president on multiple previous occasions, first noted the "obvious moral problem that the money in question does not belong to those to whom Trump is promising it."

It is also a "reckless, shapeless, irritable spasm, divorced from the nature and purpose of our government and from the Constitution that created it," he said.

The idea is "deeply irresponsible," he added, because of the additional federal debt it would heap on the U.S.

And politically, argued Cooke, it would essentially confirm "for all time that the second Trump administration has been a failure" because he had to resort to what's been dubbed by critics as bribery of voters.

More: "The cost of diesel gets into just about everything," KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk said in a recent interview.

"From running a farm ... [to the] cost of food, but also everything across the economy that's shipped," she said. When diesel prices rise, everything "gets that extra fee tacked onto it."

Swonk predicted that the high cost of diesel will be an "inflationary problem" for months to come.

Since late July, diesel prices have been rising higher and faster overall than the cost of regular unleaded gas.

That's because key refineries that produce it have been knocked offline or destroyed, both in Eastern Europe " where the Ukraine-Russia war still rages " and in the Middle East.

#5,

You sure he didn't rename it "America?" That would explain a lot.

why not give it to us right now?

That would be socialism. /s

Also, it will have identified the loop holes that Trump was able to wiggle through and as a result of their identification, legislation can be enacted to close those loop holes.

I can't imagine Congress doing anything about it though, especially if Republicans are in charge.

Public executions are a hallmark of conservative governments around the world. They'd have them all across the American South if they could get away with it.

Let's call it the Minorities Report.

Mail ballots can't be hacked.

You can't keep a mail ballot in line all day.

You can't send men with guns to intimidate a mail ballot.

You can't erase a mail ballot with a power outage.

You can't tell a mail ballot the machines aren't working.

Is this making more sense now? This is why Trump is desperate to get rid of mail-in voting even though HE uses it every time he votes.

More: Key findings from the documents, which were reviewed by The New York Times before Tuesday's announcement, include:

Asbestos and other contaminants were found at levels that exceeded acceptable levels in dust and air in part of lower Manhattan, based on measurements taken by city agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency and privately contracted laboratories.

A draft document of data compiled by the city Department of Environmental Protection listed locations throughout lower Manhattan where asbestos levels in dust samples exceeded hazardous limits in the days after September 11.

A November 2011 audit, prepared by a private company and submitted to the EPA, showed the amount of the carcinogen benzene was still spiking in the air around the towers' footprints.

That audit also showed that the concentration of asbestos in the air at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island has increased after the attacks.

A woman who lived in lower Manhattan wrote a letter to the DEP in Feburary that detailed alleged missteps by officials in removing contaminants from in and around her building, where workers dug up grass and dirt from a small roundabout in the neighborhood several weeks after 9/11.

The documents were discovered last year after being hidden from the public in 68 boxes stashed in a government office, city officials told the NYT.

Milei is so deeply unpopular and his economic policies have all turned out to be so bad that this is the only card he has left to play.

More: The North Carolina State Board of Elections Friday voted 3-2 along party lines to pass two numbered memos, despite voter opposition, that make it harder for voters to return their absentee ballots and easier for counties to throw those ballots out.

The Board revisited the measures after more than 10 people formally objected and requested legislative review. But with the election nearly underway, the Board circumvented the General Assembly to quickly greenlight the restrictions.

The memos were not publicized until 7:09 a.m. today " just hours before mail-in ballots are set to go out at noon.

Overall, we rate Civitas Institute as far-Right Biased based advocacy for policy issues that align with Christian Conservative Ideology. We also rate them Mixed for factual reporting due to the use of questionable sources and rejection of scientific consensus on some issues.

From an OpEd from The Charlotte Observer today: "I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country," Tillis wrote on X. "He is intimidated by competence and retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and well-being of our fighting force."

A reminder: the disaster that has been Pete Hegseth was completely avoidable, and Tillis can blame himself for it. Hegseth was supremely unqualified from the start, and Tillis had every reason to be skeptical about his leadership before he was even confirmed. And he was, until he folded at the last minute after President Trump threatened a primary challenge. Had Tillis had more of a spine, we might not have this problem.

Tillis may be right about Hegseth's incompetence, but he's the wrong person to be complaining about it. Which is why his post received thousands of replies from people who really didn't want to hear it.

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Tillis deserves every bit of the criticism he's getting. After years of watching Tillis undermine his own words with his actions, people are just tired of hearing it. He may be more willing to speak up now that he's retiring, but he often didn't have the courage to do so when it mattered. No amount of outrage or clever innuendo is going to change that.

As one commenter put it: "He put his career over his country, and in the end damaged both."

"priced for collecting"

You mean scam priced. You fools paid more than a dollar for a dollar coin that will be in regular circulation.

Heck of a job Orangey.

I see our new FSB agent has checked in.

Yes W is, was and always will be a terrible person. Just because Trump has made him look like an amateur when it comes to being awful doesn't mean he's somehow not the person who got us into two disastrous wars because of his daddy issues.

Even more: The result of all this is that the United States is losing a war to a third-rate power in the Middle East. The Russians, meanwhile, are continuing their rampage in Europe and apparently considering things so perilous that the CIA director had to fly to Moscow just to warn the Kremlin off of whatever it was thinking of doing. The Chinese are watching as Trump and Hegseth have stripped the Pacific theater of its only American aircraft carrier. In the midst of this chaos, Hegseth does chin-ups while he ponders calling all of America's admirals and generals back to another mass meeting so he can again carp at them about fat soldiers and bearded sailors.

Pete Hegseth has failed in every mission except one: keeping his job. But firing or forcing out everyone else in the Pentagon will not make Pete Hegseth into the secretary of defense America and its men and women in uniform need. With each dismissal, he exposes only his own insecurities, even as he manages to stay employed"but the people and the armed forces of the United States are paying the inevitable price of his incompetence.

More: But more issues were in play than "Army transformation." Hegseth's tenure has been disastrous on multiple scores. Instead of giving sound advice to the commander in chief and ensuring that America remains secure while the president fights a deeply unwise war of choice, he has been pursuing his political grievances about DEI and other pet peeves against the U.S. military. Hegseth seems to have a special animus toward the Army, an institution he claims "spit me out." He fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, and he has pushed out other senior Army officers; at this point, the Army has no Senate-confirmed chief of staff or secretary. (George's replacement, General Christopher LaNeve, so far does not have the necessary votes to be confirmed.)

Even in less dangerous times, Hegseth's irresponsible behavior would be a hazard to American national security. The Defense Department is a huge bureaucracy; it requires a leader who understands more than the mechanics of teaching trainees how to do push-ups or how to handle a weapon. Secretaries of defense must grasp the economics of the defense industry, the nature of alliances, congressional politics, the policy process, and dozens of other issues for which Hegseth seems to care little and about which he knows even less.

In a time of war, however, Hegseth's shortcomings may prove deadly. Leave aside his early stumbles, including the mishandling of sensitive information. Leave aside, even, that Hegseth dissembled about the severity of Iranian attacks on U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf that had succeeded in disrupting the logistical support for American forces in the theater and led to the kind of deprivations that were suffered by the crew of the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln. Hegseth's incompetence, and his commitment to staying in Trump's good graces, helped launch the war itself in the first place.

More proof that Trump lives in a fantasyland and is completely divorced from reality.