Four years after North Texas home builder Scott Sherman completed a federal prison sentence for mortgage fraud, his new construction materials business received a $600,000 cash infusion. The financial boost came from a blind trust set up to prevent Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, from any overlap in their personal investments and their actions as elected officials. But previously unreleased records from the attorney general's 2023 impeachment investigation show the trust was far from blind and did not shield the Paxtons from its business dealings, including the investment in Sherman's business. Before long, Wildcatter Sand Services and Grayson County Sand and Gravel, which Sherman built with his father, grew into a vast enterprise with various locations and subsidiaries. And along the way, some of those businesses stopped paying taxes to local governments, including school districts.
The federal government sued Alaska elections officials this week as part of an attempt to preemptively line up a challenge to the results should Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan lose his race. read more
Ukrainian interceptors still cannot use the internet at high speed to shoot down Russian attack drones or conduct mid-strike operations as of Friday morning, Ukrainian officials and a drone operator said, despite U.S. President Donald Trump saying SpaceX founder Elon Musk had lifted speed restrictions on his Starshield service. "Morning tests show the speed limits of 140"160 km/h are still there, and the navigation isn't working properly," a Ukrainian government official told POLITICO on condition of anonymity. "As of this morning, instances of connectivity loss at speeds of 161 km/h are still being observed. There is currently no confirmation that the restrictions have been lifted," a defense ministry official told reporters on Friday.
The state offered little explanation for its finding, and the boy's family is calling for the bodycam footage. read more
Remember when President Donald Trump put his son-in-law in charge of negotiating a grand bargain in the Middle East, back in his first term? Understandable if not, given that no grand bargain emerged and the region is more on fire than ever courtesy of the U.S. and Israel's disastrous war with Iran, the atrocities of the Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza, and a raging conflict between Yemen's Houthi rebels and a Saudi-led coalition. Yet Jared Kushner is more than one of the many ghouls who have clambered over a track record of failure right back into Trump's second-term White House, where he's still a top envoy. He also got owned by the Dutch, according to an excerpt from Matthew Cole's new book, Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed's Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, published in Vanity Fair. read more
Decomposing Orange Chomo Shrugs Off the Rape Charges Central to Amy Acton Ad Controversy
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