My neighbors come and visit me. They're a lesbian couple.
The one says we remember that you told us your birthday
is coming up. What do you want for your birthday. So I tell
them. about a week later they come back and hand me a box.
I open it up and inside is a Rolex. I think they misunderstood
when I said "I wanna watch." ;)
[MEDIA=youtube]YN-e7aegla4[/MEDIA]
[SIZE=7]A Florida man got millions in coronavirus aid. Officials say he used it to buy a Lamborghini.[/SIZE]
[pressherald.com/2020/07/28/a-florida-man-got-millions-in-coronavirus-aid-officials-say-he-used-it-to-buy-a-lamborghini/]('https://www.pressherald.com/2020/07/28/a-florida-man-got-millions-in-coronavirus-aid-officials-say-he-used-it-to-buy-a-lamborghini/')
By Jaclyn PeiserWashington PostJuly 28, 2020
Before May 13, David T. Hines’s corporate bank account was in the red by more than $30,000. But after the 29-year-old Florida man nabbed a nearly $4 million loan from the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), his fortunes quickly changed.
In fact, just one week after getting money from the fund meant to bailout businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic, Hines was cruising around Miami Beach, Fla., in a new blue Lamborghini Huracán Evo, which cost more than $318,000.
Now, federal prosecutors say that Hines illegally used hundreds of thousands of dollars in PPP loans meant for his moving companies to buy the car as well as a host of personal expenses, including shopping sprees and high-end hotel stays, instead of covering his companies’ payroll. The Justice Department announced Monday that he was arrested and charged with making false statements to a lending institution, bank fraud, and engaging in transactions in unlawful proceeds, officials said.
“Collectively, Hines falsely claimed his companies paid millions of dollars in payroll in the first quarter of 2020,” Bryan Masmela, a U.S. Postal inspector, said in an affidavit. “State and bank records, however, show little to no payroll expense during this period.”
“David is a legitimate business owner who, like millions of Americans, suffered financially during the Pandemic,” said Chad Piotrowski, Hines’s attorney, in a statement to The Washington Post. “While the allegations appear very serious, especially in light of the Pandemic, David is anxious to tell his side of the story when the time comes.”
Hines was among millions of business owners who sought government help when the novel coronavirus upended the U.S. economy. The Cares Act, the $2 trillion coronavirus bill signed into law in late March, included $349 billion in forgivable loans for small businesses to maintain operating expenses, such as payroll. Congress added an additional $310 billion in funding in April.
Hines’s arrest is the latest case of alleged fraud to best the program, with business owners inflating employee numbers and claiming higher operating costs. Some even claimed loans for defunct companies. Federal prosecutors have filed numerous charges, including against reality star Maurice “Mo” Fayne, who allegedly spent his funds on a Rolls-Royce and $85,000 in jewelry.
An analysis from The Washington Post also found that data from the Small Business Administration recorded that far more American workers were “retained” thanks to the loans allocated to the businesses than there were actual employees, calling into question the Trump administration’s claim that PPP loans helped support 51 million jobs.
Hines first submitted applications for seven businesses, requesting more than $13.5 million worth of loans from a bank in Charlotte, prosecutors said. The bank approved three of the applications for $3.9 million and began sending the funds on May 11.
Hines claimed to own and operate a handful of moving companies, but Masmela said that authorities “found no record of any operating websites” for those businesses. Hines also falsely claimed he had 70 employees, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said his payroll costs were far less than he claimed.
“A review of Hines Companies Accounts from January through April of 2020 shows monthly inflows averaging around $200,000 – far less than the millions of dollars in payroll that Hines sought in the PPP application,” Masmela said.
It didn’t take long for Hines to exploit the funds for his own enjoyment, prosecutors said. On May 18, just five days after receiving a deposit for almost $750,000 in one of the bank accounts, Hines allegedly wired $320,000 for the Lamborghini, registering the car under both his name and one of the companies that received a PPP loan.
Throughout May and June, Hines also spent the funds on a $4,600 shopping spree at Saks Fifth Avenue. In addition to ride-hailing apps, food delivery services and dating websites, Hines spent thousands on luxury hotels as well as more than $8,500 worth of jewelry, prosecutors allege.
“There does not appear to be any business purposes for most, if not all, of these expenses,” Masmela said in the affidavit.
Well geez he is doing nothing more than some politicians do. Happens every day.
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/disintegrated-canadas-last-intact-arctic-174209424.html[/URL]
So what's going on up there? Though the planet is warming worldwide due to climate change, the Arctic has been warming at a rate twice that of the rest of the world, according to the [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]('https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/arctic-report-card-record-territory-for-warm-temperatures-loss-of-snow-and-ice'). This summer has been particularly warm: [Arctic sea ice melted to its lowest July level ]('https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/08/05/climate-change-arctic-sea-ice-hits-record-low-july-2020/3302738001/')on record and in June, a [town in Siberia soared to 100.4 degrees]('https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/06/21/record-high-temperature-town-above-arctic-circle-weather/3232848001/'), believed to be a record high for the Arctic.
Surprisingly, not a "Florida Man" story:
[URL unfurl="true"]https://nypost.com/2020/08/07/naked-man-caught-chasing-boar-that-stole-his-laptop/[/URL]
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/eagle-rips-propeller-off-mapping-163018897.html[/URL]
*The drone was a $950 Phantom 4 Pro Advanced and is no longer made. The agency said it will replace it with a similar model.
The department said the incident could have been territorial attack — or just a hungry, confused eagle.
*
anybody here?? congratulations!!!
[
This dude is nuts!
]('https://trib.al/bbJrC2D?fbclid=IwAR3PrlOZxcq8Jea9BVfBtq1U3iJk-Bo340dXB0oxgpZ5REk2IeDS--E4MHM')
NYDAILYNEWS.COM
[Man in ‘Pointing guns at penis’ Facebook group shoots self in penis, becomes a hero in group]('https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftrib.al%2FbbJrC2D%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR21yxmYOJX6hFN89AzOhCYsS8eu9yiAxLGiYg9IIbiuQd1Ch2rS5fROt9A&h=AT2HqtpJgAEn_nxbI3lPb2no6XNH4HqemPzXYxIfJh9dQUtP6h0hNWBa02zLBoRQbLs-pFMh0XkjTVnowZl4n5cdYod-j8T8oXPvBeM7eyKEIZoihiNFtFnneDRNmtbEPudZuWNIF37S-vHxvfPJU3Os')
This dude is nuts!
[]('https://trib.al/bbJrC2D?fbclid=IwAR1-IliRdu8HY20vN-A2RJCZT2-BrFWHipgWNvcV410nLj5a45sd_0-KntY')
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/death-valley-hits-130-degrees-053931284.html[/URL]
:eek:
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/death-valley-hits-130-degrees-053931284.html[/URL]
:eek:
Yes, but some will say, "It's a dry heat..." My response to that one is, "So is a blast furnace!!"
How does one go about getting this?
[[SIZE=7][COLOR=rgb(184, 49, 47)]47-year-old man kept getting drunk from alcohol produced in his own gut[/COLOR][/SIZE]]('https://www.yahoo.com/news/47-old-man-kept-getting-210000238.html')
Great!
More good news...............
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.weatherboy.com/solar-storm-could-strike-earth-on-thursday/?fbclid=IwAR09sn6bQeomiocVGKvAi6pqFiAJhV4aWhgUptoUwps-CeWiSVZmeQwZ_yQ[/URL]
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/ecuador-says-chinese-fishing-vessels-082059376.html[/URL]
Wait until PETA gets a hold of this...
[SIZE=7]Mail-order chicks are arriving dead, costing Maine farmers thousands of dollars[/SIZE]
[pressherald.com/2020/08/19/dead-chick-deliveries-costing-maine-farmers-thousands-of-dollars/]('https://www.pressherald.com/2020/08/19/dead-chick-deliveries-costing-maine-farmers-thousands-of-dollars/')
By Scott ThistleStaff WriterAugust 19, 2020
Last week Pauline Henderson was shocked when she picked up a shipment of what was supposed to be 800 live chicks from her post office in New Sharon.
Henderson, who owns and operates Pine Tree Poultry, a family farm and chicken meat processing facility that specializes in chicken pot pies, said all 800 chicks sent from a hatchery in Pennsylvania were dead.
“We’ve never had a problem like this before,” said Henderson, who has been running her farm for five years and regularly receives shipments of live birds.
“Usually they arrive every three weeks like clockwork,” she said Wednesday. “And out of 100 birds you may have one or two that die in shipping.”
[
]('')
Pauline Henderson, owner of Pine Tree Poultry, poses for portrait at her family farm and chicken meat processing facility in New Sharon on Wednesday. Last Thursday Henderson went to the post office to pick up her order of 800 live chicks and all of them were dead. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
She said the dead birds she received last week shipped in the normal amount of time but apparently were mishandled.
She said thousands of birds that moved through the Postal Service’s processing center in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, all met the same fate, affecting several farms in Maine and New Hampshire.
The U.S. Postal Service’s media contact for the Eastern U.S. did not return a message Wednesday.
What was once a reliable and safe method of transporting chicks has apparently been undermined by widespread overhauls of operations at the U.S. Postal Service, including cutbacks in sorting equipment, ending extra trips by carriers and an edict to end all overtime by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Some Democrats accuse DeJoy of intentionally raising concerns about the timely delivery of absentee ballots in the November election, sowing concern and confusion among voters as President Trump repeatedly asserts – without evidence – that mail-in voting is vulnerable to fraud.
Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democrat who represents Maine’s 1st Congressional District, is raising the issue of the dead chicks and the losses Maine farms are facing in a letter to DeJoy and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue. Pingree’s office has received dozens of complaints from farmers and other Mainers just trying to raise a small flock of chickens in the backyard.
“It’s one more of the consequences of this disorganization, this sort of chaos they’ve created at the post office and nobody thought through when they were thinking of slowing down the mail,” Pingree said.
“And can you imagine, you have young kids and they are getting all excited about having a backyard flock and you go to the post office and that’s what you find?”
[
]('')
Baby chicks that were safely delivered to Pine Tree Poultry earlier in the day on Wednesday. The chicks were replacements for last Thursday’s shipment in which all 800 chicks were dead. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
Pingree said she included Perdue on the letter because she’s not sure he would even be aware of how the changes in the postal service are affecting small poultry farms in the U.S. Pingree said the USDA also is responsible for enforcing farm regulations that protect against animal cruelty.
“This is a system that’s always worked before and it’s worked very well until these changes started being made,” Pingree said.
Concerns over delayed absentee ballots in November and ongoing complaints from consumers about late and mishandled mail prompted DeJoy Tuesday to say he would [delay the changes in the postal service]('https://www.pressherald.com/2020/08/18/postmaster-general-says-hes-suspending-policies-blamed-for-mail-delays/') until after the election.
But those promises have not allayed the concerns of attorneys general from about a dozen states, including Maine, who filed multiple federal lawsuits Tuesday in an attempt to force Trump and DeJoy to fund the service adequately so it can handle what is expected to be a deluge of absentee ballots sent by mail this fall.
Trump also has steadily criticized voting by mail and threatened to withhold funding for the postal service to derail what he calls “universal mail-in voting,” which the president has claimed, without evidence, would lead to widespread voter fraud.
DeJoy [is expected to testify before Congress this week]('https://www.pressherald.com/2020/08/16/house-dems-summon-postal-leaders-to-hearing-on-mail-delays/') on the changes he had implemented that have been blamed for delays and the mishandling of mail. Democrats in Congress have backed legislation that would boost postal service funding by as much as $25 billion in order to ensure voting by mail will be safe and secure, but those efforts have been rejected by the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate.
The postal service is the only entity that ships live chicks and other small animals and has done so since 1918, according to the service’s website. For farmers in Maine it has been an affordable method for receiving live chicks from hatcheries in other parts of the country. The state has no hatcheries of its own. A newly hatched chick can live for up to two days without food or water, drawing its nutrition from the yolk of the egg it was hatched in, according to poultry experts with the University of Maine’s Cooperative Extension Service.
Henderson said an earlier shipment of chicks she received had 150 dead chicks out of 800. These problems prompted her and her husband to stop ordering chicks through the mail and instead send one of their four full-time employees to pick the birds up by car – at a cost of about $700 for the round trip to South Fork, Pennsylvania.
The practice was cost-prohibitive, Henderson said, because of the travel expenses as well as the two days of lost labor.
The worker risked exposure to COVID-19 by traveling in parts of the country with higher infection rates than Maine before returning to New Sharon, where they could be exposing their families or other co-workers to the virus, Henderson said. So they decided to go back to using the mail. That’s when they received the 800 dead chicks.
At least 4,800 dead chicks have been received by Maine farms in recent weeks, Pingree said. In her letter to DeJoy and Perdue, Pingree said the financial impact on farms like Henderson’s is staggering.
“Mortality losses from delays and mishandling are not only hugely problematic from an animal welfare perspective, but have also taken an emotional toll on the recipients, many of whom are families building a backyard flock or children raising birds for 4-H or Future Farmers of America (FFA) projects,” Pingree wrote. “For these families, receiving chicks in the mail is a longstanding tradition, and with family farms in America already struggling to keep younger generations engaged and interested in agriculture, these negative experiences could significantly undermine those efforts.”
Henderson said the hatchery in Pennsylvania that ships the birds will refund to farms the cost of the chicks, but they can’t make up the lost time. Efforts to contact the hatchery were not successful Wednesday.
Henderson said each bird can be worth as much as $32, depending on whether it’s sold whole or processed into parts or pies, she said.
“This is our livelihood, this isn’t a hobby farm,” Henderson said. “We are trying to save our livelihood.” The farm employs four full-time workers, two part-time workers and has a crew that comes to help process the birds every few weeks. The farm is one of the largest producers of poultry meat in Maine, she said.
Pingree said farmers deserve some answers from DeJoy and want to know how recent changes he instituted to cut postal service costs, like eliminating overtime and other changes to the way mail is processed, is affecting the delivery of live chicks.
“Rural Americans, including agricultural producers, disproportionately rely on USPS for their livelihoods, and it is essential that they receive reliable service,” Pingree said.
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/cheers-bar-boston-set-close-135011149.html[/URL]
what could possibly go wrong?
:unsure::whistle::oops::eek:
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/jurassic-park-experiment-750-million-132816442.html[/URL]
[SIZE=7]Trump wants Supreme Court to let him block critics on Twitter[/SIZE]
[pressherald.com/2020/08/20/trump-wants-supreme-court-to-let-him-block-critics-on-twitter/]('https://www.pressherald.com/2020/08/20/trump-wants-supreme-court-to-let-him-block-critics-on-twitter/')
By MARK SHERMANAssociated PressAugust 20, 2020
President Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to allow him to block critics from his personal Twitter account.
The administration said in a high-court filing Thursday that Trump’s @realdonaldtrump account with more than 85 million followers is his personal property and blocking people from it is akin to elected officials who refuse to allow their opponents’ yard signs on their front lawns.
“President Trump’s ability to use the features of his personal Twitter account, including the blocking function, are independent of his presidential office,” acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall wrote in urging the justices to review the case.
The federal appeals court in New York ruled last year that Trump uses the account to make daily pronouncements and observations that are overwhelmingly official in nature. It held that Trump violated the First Amendment whenever he blocked a critic to silence a viewpoint.
A decision about whether even to hear the case is not likely before the November election.
The case grew out of a challenge brought by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which sued on behalf of seven individuals blocked by Trump after criticizing his policies.
Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director, said the justices should decline to take up Trump’s appeal.
“This case stands for a principle that is fundamental to our democracy and basically synonymous with the First Amendment: government officials can’t exclude people from public forums simply because they disagree with their political views,” Jaffer said in a statement.
The administration argued in its appeal that the Supreme Court, not lower courts, “should decide where to draw the line between the President’s personal decisions and official conduct.”
The pace of the case was slowed by the coronavirus pandemic as well as Trump’s decision to ask the full 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the ruling by a three-judge panel. The court refused to do so by a 7-2 vote in March. Two Trump appointees, Judges Michael H. Park and Richard J. Sullivan, were the only members of the court to side with the president.
The Supreme Court extended its deadline to file an appeal from 90 days to 150 days when it shut the building to the public and abandoned in-person meetings in favor of telephone conferences because of the virus outbreak.
[SIZE=7]Gilgo Beach murders: Authorities identify woman who vanished two decades ago[/SIZE]
A woman whose partial remains were found on Long Island, New York,
nearly a decade ago was identified Thursday as . . . . .
Gilgo Beach murders: Authorities identify woman who vanished two decades ago
[SIZE=7]Gilgo Beach murders: Authorities identify woman who vanished two decades ago[/SIZE]
A woman whose partial remains were found on Long Island, New York,
nearly a decade ago was identified Thursday as . . . . .
[Gilgo Beach murders: Authorities identify woman who vanished two decades ago]('https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/gilgo-beach-murders-authorities-identify-woman-who-vanished-two-decades-n1217096')
Old news. That story came out in May.
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/autos/driver-successfully-outruns-cops-one-210000458.html[/URL]
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