Lawmakers began voting Monday to choose India's next president in an election expected to be won by a tribal woman from India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The election of Draupadi Murmu is a formality as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP controls enough seats in federal and state legislatures to push its favored candidate. She is also likely to get the support of other regional parties in state assemblies.

The president in India is chosen by an electoral college that consists of lawmakers in both houses of Parliament and elected members of the legislative assemblies of all states. The president's role is largely ceremonial, but the position can be important during times of political uncertainty such as a hung Parliament, when the office assumes greater power.

The votes from Monday's election will be counted Thursday.

Modi's party has projected Murmu as a leader representing poor tribal communities, which generally lacks health care and education facilities in remote villages. Murmu, 64, hails from the eastern of state Odisha and previously was governor of Jharkhand state.

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/18/1111984482/india-president-winner-tribal-woman

Earlier this year, a client of Christopher “Kit” Arthur told him that agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms had come to his home and taken an inventory of his weapons.

A retired Army scout and former sheriff’s deputy from Mount Olive, NC, Arthur’s business, Tackleberry Solutions, taught “wartime tactics to civilians for civil defense purposes,” as he described it in a promotional video. Arthur sold manuals that he said were developed from his direct experience in two combat tours in Iraq, and later from working in a covert drug enforcement and anti-terrorism unit in the Army National Guard.

Arthur allegedly counseled his client that he had two options: Stand and fight or flee. If he chose to stand and fight, Arthur had a specific set of instructions.

“It evolves back to this technique,” FBI Special Agent Greg Garey would later testify before a magistrate in federal court in Wilmington. “Or a theory behind the spiderweb or creating fatal funnels on your property, setting up perimeter charges — explosives — around the CHS’ house, installing explosives in the walls to, to, to render the ATF or any other law enforcement to, when they come to the house, to render them useless — to kill them.”

Garey explained the “spiderweb,” based on Arthur’s public YouTube videos and manuals, as a “death box,” or technique allowing the individual resisting a federal siege to “effectively kill more people without exposing yourself, and do it with, essentially, one person against an entire SWAT team.”

https://www.rawstory.com/christopher-arthur/

This guy will not be the first or only

A West Virginia woman awoke from a years-long coma after being brutally attacked and identified her brother as the assailant, according to local reports.

Wanda Palmer had been in a long term care facility in New Martinsville, West Virginia, after being beaten in her home in June of 2020, according to the West Virginia Metro News. When Palmer was discovered, Jackson County Sheriff Ross Mellenger said she was so savagely attacked, authorities thought she was dead, the paper reported.

Palmer's care facility contacted authorities last week to let them know the woman had come out of her coma, the Metro News reported.

NBC News has contacted Jackson County Sheriff's Department for comment.

Medical staff told authorities that, despite suffering brain damage from the assault, that Palmer was able to speak enough to identify her assailant, Metro News reported.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/two-years-coma-west-virginia-woman-wakes-name-brother-attack-rcna38602

You in a heap o' trouble, boy. (Now I'm wondering about his motive.)

Russia’s Trade Ministry has decided that white copy paper is now dangerous for Russians’ health and must be avoided at all costs.

“We have learned that this kind of gleaming, white office paper is harmful to human health,” Deputy Trade Minister Oleg Bocharov said, according to RIA Novosti.

“It turns out that paper with a rougher texture is better for your eyes.”

The reality is much simpler: Sanctions imposed on Russia after President Vladimir Putin ordered the illegal invasion of Ukraine in February has left paper manufacturers without whitening chemicals for paper. Normally, Russian manufacturers relied on imports from Finland to do the trick.

But the government is scrambling for a way to explain away the changes in paper quality—particularly because officials have yet to formally admit that Russian forces are fighting a full-fledged war and continue to claim that they are not attacking Ukrainian cities. Kremlin officials continue to tell Russians that their forces are simply a part of a “special military operation” meant to demilitarize Ukraine.

Already, pulp and paper mills in Svetlogorsk, Kondopoga, and Turinsk have begun shifting to produce paper successfully without the use of bleach as a result of sanctions, RIA Novosti reported.

It’s not the first time that the Russians have had to fudge the record in recent days due to struggles following the invasion.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russias-hilariously-bad-excuses-for-why-everything-sucks-after-vladimir-putin-waged-war-on-ukraine?ref=home

Thought y'all could use some laughter. This is on par with the old Soviet system.

A Michigan woman was denied a protection order against her husband two weeks before she and her family were found dead Sunday in an apparent murder-suicide, court documents show.

Tirany Savage, 35, filed for the order June 24 in Michigan’s 34th Circuit Court, claiming her husband, Bo Eugene Savage, had recently bought a gun, repeatedly threatened suicide and refused to leave the family’s home, according to documents published by NBC affiliate WPBN of Traverse City.

“I do not want my safety or my son’s safety in jeopardy,” she wrote, according to the order.

The order was denied three days later by a judge who found insufficient evidence of immediate or irreparable injury, according to documents obtained by the station.

The judge, Troy Daniel, wrote that Savage could request the order in divorce court, the documents show. Tirany Savage filed for divorce last Thursday, the station reported.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/weeks-was-denied-protective-order-michigan-woman-family-are-dead-rcna38132

The most dangerous time in a woman's life is immediately after she separates from her partner. Proven again. Sleep well tonight, Judge Daniel.

Celebrity doctor and Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz has plenty of personal wealth to help fund his upstart campaign. And while the TV doctor might be a political neophyte, his fundraising operation has incorporated a sophisticated technique—what one expert described as “legalized money laundering.”

Like so many aspects of today’s campaign finance system, it traces back a decade—to the Supreme Court’s watershed Citizens United decision.

The Oz setup involves a somewhat confusing super PAC, which has a “dark money” nonprofit twin. The super PAC has raised more than $4 million, including a donation from the nonprofit.

That pairing was made possible thanks to Citizens United, which gave rise to super PACs—political committees that can raise unlimited amounts of money.

Brett Kappel, campaign finance specialist at Harmon Curran, explained the arrangement.

“The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowed corporations, including nonprofit organizations, to make unlimited contributions to Super PACs, which then could spend those funds on independent expenditures supporting or opposing candidates,” Kappel said.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/dr-oz-is-already-benefiting-from-dark-money-and-citizens-united?ref=home

As if the dozens of charges for financial crimes and allegedly attempting to stage his own killing were not enough, Alex Murdaugh has a new problem: murder charges implicating him in the deaths of his own wife and son.

A Colleton County grand jury on Thursday indicted the 63-year-old former lawyer on two counts of murder and two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime in connection with the June 2021 killings of his 52-year-old wife, Margaret, and their 22-year-old son, Paul. They were both found fatally shot near the hunting dog kennels at the family’s 1,700-acre estate in South Carolina—and Murdaugh was the one who called 911.

“Over the last 13 months, SLED agents and our partners have worked day in and day out to build a case against the person responsible for the murders of Maggie and Paul and to exclude those who were not,” SLED Chief Mark Keel said in a statement. “At no point did agents lose focus on this investigation. From the beginning I have been clear, the priority was to ensure justice was served. Today is one more step in a long process for justice for Maggie and Paul.”

The indictment does not provides many details—including what allegedly prompted the slayings—but does state that Murdaugh fatally shot his wife with a rifle and his son with a shotgun, allegations his attorneys deny. While the prospect of such charges was teased in the media in recent days, their announcement represented the most disturbing episode yet in the saga of the once-prominent lawyer, a man whose downfall has taken on the veneer of a Greek tragedy.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/alex-murdaugh-disgraced-former-south-carolina-lawyer-charged-with-murder-of-wife-and-son?ref=home

Another chapter in the miniseries

The space community has been abuzz this week after NASA unveiled five stunning, highly anticipated new images from the James Webb Space Telescope. While the pictures stirred the awe and wonder of normal people, they also became a target for good old-fashioned idiots—er, conspiracy theorists—who believe that the photos are fake, or really evidence of enormous aliens, or that Webb is a giant space laser, actually.

Welcome to the age of the Webb Truthers.

Before we proceed any further, though, it’s worth heeding the words of Nietzsche: “If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.” A few hours down the rabbit hole of any conspiracy theory might just have you putting on the old tin foil hat yourself—so be warned.

There’s a wide range of inane theories and speculations about the new Webb images’ origins, with some claiming that the pictures were created by CGI, Photoshop, Hollywood special effects, or some combination of all of the above. Some are even saying there might be a more diabolical reason behind Webb, suggesting that it could be weaponized against people on Earth.

“Hollywood is capable of great visual effects,” one Twitter user wrote in reply to a NASA tweet about the telescope. “Just sayin’... This is all fake.” Another user claimed that the photos are fake because “every star has the same pixel pattern.”

In one of the more herculean examples of mental gymnastics, one Twitter user said Webb’s snapshot of SMACS 0723, a region of the sky that provides a view to a dazzling amount of galaxy clusters, is actually computer generated. Plus, President Biden, who personally unveiled the image Monday, purposely named it “SCAMS” backwards—after all, the best way to dupe everyone into believing your scams is to leave little clues to your lies in plain sight.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/meet-the-conspiracy-theory-kooks-who-think-nasas-james-webb-telescope-is-a-giant-space-cannon?ref=home

Oh FFS!

In the immediate wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, social media filled with images and memes playing off a viral tweet: A clean-cut couple beams at the camera while standing outside the Supreme Court building and holding a sign reading “We will adopt your baby.” (Slate has the full story on the couple featured in that photo.)

In a post-Roe world, there is already a renewed focus on adoption as a supposed solution for unwanted pregnancies. Indeed, in the arguments before the Supreme Court last year, Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that adoption is a foolproof substitution for abortion. Yet the rhetoric around adoption too rarely takes into consideration the person having the baby who will be adopted.

Kathryn Joyce, an investigative reporter at Salon, has been covering adoption in America for over a decade. Her book The Child Catchers is one of the best ever written about the messy intersections of capitalism, Christianity, and adoption, digging deep into the ways the adoption industry wrings every dollar it can out of an incredibly fragile period in the lives of everyone it touches. (Disclosure: I am adopted.)

Joyce and I talked recently about adoption rhetoric at a time when American reproductive rights have been gutted. That rhetoric touches on so many other aspects of American life, most notably race and class.

“For decades now, there’s been a pro-choice rejoinder to anti-abortion activists: What are you going to do with all these extra kids you want to see born? Are you prepared to adopt all these kids?” Joyce said. “And the answer is: kind of? A lot of people will say, ‘That’s exactly what we want.’”

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23200880/adoption-abortion-roe-we-will-adopt-your-baby-kathryn-joyce

This article explains a lot. These people are positively infuriating. So smug.

Olympic gold medalist Mo Farah says he was trafficked to the U.K. under a false name and forced into child labor, revealing stunning details about the painful path that culminated in him being awarded a knighthood.

"Most people know me as Mo Farah, but it's not my name — or, it's not the reality," Farah said in a new documentary about the track star.

"The real story is, I was born in Somaliland, north of Somalia, as Hussein Abdi Kahin," he added.

Farah has previously said he came to the U.K. as a young child with his parents, fleeing the war in Somalia. But he now says his father died when Farah was four years old, and that he was soon separated from his mother and other relatives.

"I was brought into the U.K. illegally under the name of another child, called Mohammed Farah," he said. At the time, he was around 8 or 9 years old.

The documentary, made by the BBC and Red Bull Studios, includes footage of visa documents that Farah says were faked, bearing his photo and another child's name.

"I know I've taken someone else's place. And I do wonder, what is Mohammed doing now?" he said in the documentary, clips of which are posted on the BBC's website.

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/12/1111002952/mo-farah-trafficked-child-labor