Ex-New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s divorce gets dirty

Could he be putting the pinch on his estranged wife in their divorce?

Former New York Times publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. is apparently living up to his nickname in his divorce battle with his wife of fewer than six years Gabrielle Greene.

According to a source, things have become so bitter, they are warring in court over the terms of the prenup they signed before they married in 2014.

One source sniped, “Arthur gave Gabrielle a prenup before they married, and now he doesn’t want to stick to it.”

But a rep for Sulzberger Jr. insisted, “Mr. Sulzberger is fully complying with his prenup, including the provisions regarding confidentiality, and only wants this marriage to come to a peaceful end. Ms. Greene is misinterpreting the prenup to meet her demands.”

The terms of the prenup are not known, but the source speculated it could cover marital property and New York Times stock.

Sulzberger Jr. bought an Upper West Side penthouse for $4 million in 2011. He also owns a Hudson Valley mansion in New Paltz.

The NYT scion, 69, reportedly worth around $16 million, filed for divorce from Greene, a 60-year-old financier who did a brief stint as chair of Whole Foods, on Feb. 4, The Post first revealed.

The divorce records are sealed, but docket information shows it’s a “contested matrimonial” suit filed in New York State Supreme Court. The former couple is said to be back in court today — and both have hired powerful legal guns.

When asked about the prenup battle, Greene’s attorney Sheila Riesel, a partner at top divorce firm Blank Rome, who has represented Al Pacino and Woody Allen, said, “I can’t comment. This is a private matter.”

Sulzberger Jr.’s attorney Adria Hillman — who famously represented Ron Perelman in his scorched-earth divorce from socialite Patricia Duff — also declined to comment when reached by Page Six by phone.

Sulzberger, Jr. is often referred to as “Pinch,” a variation of his father’s nickname, “Punch.” He retired as chairman of the New York Times Company in December 2020, passing the torch to his son A.G. Sulzberger, the fifth generation of the Ochs-Sulzbergers to take the reins as publisher in more than 120 years of family ownership.

Greene is Sulzberger Jr.’s second wife. The two wed at the Outermost Inn on Martha’s Vineyard on Aug. 30, 2014, according to their wedding announcement in the Times, which said that the bride planned to take her husband’s name, although the divorce papers filed by Pinch identify his soon-to-be-ex only as Gabrielle Greene.

https://pagesix.com/2021/08/18/ex-new-york-times-publisher-arthur-sulzberger-jr-s-divorce-gets-dirty/

Head of OxyContin family denies responsibility for opioid crisis

The former president and board chair of Purdue Pharma told a court Wednesday that he, his family and the company are not responsible for the opioid crisis in the United States.

Richard Sackler, a member of the family who owns the company, was asked whether each bears responsibility during a federal bankruptcy hearing in White Plains, New York, over whether a judge should accept the OxyContin maker’s plan to settle thousands of lawsuits.

For each, he gave a one-word answer: “No.”

Richard Sackler’s denial of responsibility for the opioid crisis comes a day after another Sackler family member said the group wouldn’t accept a settlement without guarantees of immunity from further legal action.

The previous words of Richard Sackler, now 76, are at the heart of lawsuits accusing the Stamford, Conn.-based company of a major role in sparking a nationwide opioid epidemic.

In the 1996 event to launch sales of OxyContin, he told the company’s sales force that there would be “a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition.”

Five years later, as it was apparent that the powerful prescription pain drug was being misused in some cases, he said in an e-mail that Purdue would have to “hammer on the abusers in every way possible,” describing them as “the culprits and the problem.”

For those reasons, the activists crusading against companies involved in selling opioids often see Richard Sackler — who was president of the company from 1999 to 2003, chair of its board from 2004 through 2007, and a board member from 1990 until 2018 — as a prime villain.

He has not appeared in public forums in recent years outside video of a deposition he gave in a lawsuit in 2015.

On a hearing conducted by videoconference on Wednesday, Sackler, now 76, said he had laryngitis, and his voice was sometimes soft.

In response to more than three hours of questions, mostly from Maryland Assistant Attorney General Brian Edmunds, his most common answer was, “I don’t recall.”

Sackler, whose father was one of three brothers who nearly 70 years ago bought the company that later became Purdue Pharma, didn’t recall e-mails he wrote a decade or more ago; whether Purdue’s board approved certain sales strategies; whether a company owned by Sackler family members sold opioids in Argentina; or whether he paid any of his own money as part of a settlement with Oklahoma to which the Sackler family contributed $75 million.

Often, he answered questions with more questions, asking for precision.

When Edmunds asked him if he knew how many people in the US had died from using opioids, Sackler asked him to specify over which time period.

Edmunds did: 2005 to 2017.

“I don’t know,” Sackler said. He said that he had looked at some data on deaths in the past, though.

(The US Centers for Disease Control has tallied more than 500,000 deaths in the U.S. to opioid overdose, including both prescription drugs and illicit ones such as heroin and illegally produced fentanyl, since 2000.)

At another point, Edmunds asked whether he ever had conversations with sales managers.

“Can you define what you mean by sales managers?” Sackler asked.

Edmunds did. Then Sackler said he didn’t recall any such conversations.

https://nypost.com/2021/08/18/head-of-oxycontin-family-denies-responsibility-for-opioid-crisis/

US Software Firm Accuses Huawei Of Installing "Back Door" To Spy On Pakistan

A U.S. software company is accusing Chinese tech giant Huawei of pressuring it to build a data “back door” into a government security project in Pakistan, according to a recent legal filing submitted at the Central District Court in California.

California-based Business Efficiency Solutions (BES), in a lawsuit filed on Aug. 11, also accused Huawei of stealing its trade secrets, while the software company worked as Huawei’s contractor to a safe-city project in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan’s Punjab province.

BES said in its lawsuit that Huawei used “one of BES’s software systems to establish a ‘backdoor’ from China into Pakistan that allowed Huawei to collect and view data important to Pakistan’s national security and other private, personal data on Pakistani citizens.”

The current legal dispute was born out of a partnership between the two firms starting in 2016. That year, Huawei and Punjab Safe Cities Authority (PSCA), a provincial government body, inked an agreement for the Chinese company to implement a high-tech surveillance system, including more than 8,000 cameras, in Lahore, according to Pakistani media.

At that time, Shehbaz Sharif, former chief minister of Punjab, said that the safe-city project would turn Lahore into crime-free city.

The system would be available to the Punjab Police Integrated Command, Control, and Communication Center (PPIC3) of Lahore.

Huawei has heavily promoted its surveillance technology worldwide, sometimes under its “Safe City” or “Smart City” solutions promising to make cities more secure. In 2019, U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote a letter to then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, urging him to update U.S. travel advisories to warn Americans about traveling to countries with Huawei’s surveillance solutions.

“These technologies could expose their personal data to foreign governments, including potentially China,” the senators wrote.

In Pakistan, at least nine cities have signed up for Huawei’s Safe City systems since 2015. However, some cities including Islamabad had reported increased crime rates after adopting the systems.

The agreement between PSCA and Huawei was signed after a bidding process. According to the complaint, Huawei beat out competitors including Nokia and Motorola with a bid of $150 million.

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/us-software-firm-accuses-huawei-installing-back-door-spy-pakistan

US Hemorrhaging Money From Entitlement Fraud & Waste

Under the Biden administration, the United States is on the path toward becoming a welfare state fully entrenched in waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement. President Biden plans to expand welfare to almost half of the country’s working adults through the deceptively named American Families Plan. If passed, it will allow the federal government to meddle in Americans’ everyday lives from birth to death. Meanwhile, every year, entitlement programs are spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars improperly—either through inaccuracies, incompetence, or fraud.

Government is already too big with too much waste. Current entitlement programs are rife with abuse. Their size and lack of guardrails to protect taxpayer dollars open the door for bad actors to take advantage of the system. But rather than acknowledging and addressing these issues, the Biden administration wants to dramatically expand the welfare state, which will undoubtedly result in even more waste, fraud, and abuse.

Since 2003, when agencies were required to report these payments, the Government Accountability Office estimates $1.9 trillion in improper payments have been made. But that might just be the tip of the iceberg because the GAO maintains it is unable to “determine the full extent to which improper payments occur.”

In fiscal year 2020, more than 21% of Medicaid’s federal program spending was the result of improper spending, which means one-fifth of taxpayer dollars, intended to help roughly 77 million low-income and medically needy individuals, has been lost without helping those Americans. Medicare was similarly disastrous, with $43 billion in improper payments—money that should have helped provide health care for the 63 million elderly and disabled currently receiving Medicare benefits.

Outside of Medicare and Medicaid, three other significant sources of improper payments are for the earned income tax credit, unemployment insurance, and supplemental security income. Almost a quarter of the payments made for the earned income tax credit in FY2020 were improper—this amounted to $16 billion. Of the benefits paid by the Department of Labor for the unemployment insurance program, 10% were improper payments, which accounted for $8 billion. The Social Security Administration similarly spent almost 10% of the Supplemental Security Income funds on improper payments during FY2020—amounting to $5.3 billion.

The federal government wasted tens of billions in improper payments last fiscal year alone—and that does not include any improper payments related to COVID-19 relief programs. We already know substantial fraud occurred within pandemic unemployment benefit programs. It’s simply a matter of time before we know how severe the damage was in improper payments.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/us-hemorrhaging-money-entitlement-fraud-waste

Political Consultant Charged With Defrauding Federal COVID-19 Relief Program

Miami, Florida – Federal prosecutors have charged 28-year-old Fort Lauderdale, Florida resident Damara Holness with lying on a coronavirus relief loan application and fraudulently obtaining hundreds of thousands of dollars intended to help small businesses financially survive the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to the information filed yesterday in federal district court in Fort Lauderdale, in June 2020, Holness applied for a $300,000 forgivable, federally-guaranteed Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan on behalf of Holness Consulting, Inc., a Florida company that she owned. It is alleged that to justify the requested loan amount, Holness claimed in the on-line loan application, and through supporting fraudulent payroll tax forms, that her company employed 18 people and spent an average of $120,000 each month on payroll. In fact, Holness Consulting had zero employees and no payroll expenses. A bank in Georgia approved Holness Consulting’s PPP loan application based on the lies and wired $300,000 to the company’s bank account in Florida, says the information.

Once the money hit the bank account in July 2020, Holness spent the next few months creating a paper trail to make it appear as if Holness Consulting had employees and was spending the PPP money on legitimate, approved expenses, it is alleged. According to the information, Holness issued checks from the company bank account made out to others who agreed, for a fee, to help with the fraud. At Holness’ direction, the people receiving the checks would endorse and return them to Holness. Then, Holness would cash the checks at the company’s bank, give a few hundred dollars to the check endorsers, and keep the rest of the cash for herself – about $1,000 per check, says the information.

Damara Holness is a former president of the Broward County Democratic Black Caucus.

The information charges Holness with conspiring to commit wire fraud. If convicted, she faces up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Holness made her initial appearance today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Patrick M. Hunt, who sits in Ft. Lauderdale. Holness was released from custody on a $100,000 personal surety bond.

Juan Antonio Gonzalez, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, and George L. Piro, Special Agent in Charge, FBI Miami, announced the charges.

https://breaking911.com/political-consultant-charged-with-defrauding-federal-covid-19-relief-program/

Top doctor: Mass vaccination program for COVID will be ‘one of the most deadly’ in history

Texas cardiologist and leading medical expert Dr. Peter McCullough recently criticized the mass COVID vaccination program in the U.S., saying that it ‘will go down as one of the most deadly, one of the most injurious and costly in human history.’

The forced mass vaccination of Americans will be regarded as one of the most deadly and costly medical mistakes in history, renowned pioneer in the early treatment of COVID-19, Texas cardiologist and internist Dr. Peter McCullough, has said.

Citing recent data from U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and from Israel and Britain, where COVID cases are multiplying among the vaccinated, McCullough, who is editor-in-chief of two medical journals and author of over 600 peer-reviewed studies, including 46 dedicated to COVID-19, said he is “deeply worried” about the future of America.

“Americans are going to bear the brunt of what invariably is going to be a failed mass vaccination program that will go down as one of the most deadly, one of the most injurious and costly in human history,” McCullough said in a recent podcast.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced in April that it has stopped tracking COVID cases among the vaccinated that do not result in hospitalizations or deaths. The agency is now assuming that new cases are among the unvaccinated unless otherwise advised, which skews numbers to paint the unvaccinated as spreaders of disease.

“This intentional misinformation and propaganda scheme has been used to drive an incredible fury of vaccine mandates” for government agencies, veterans administrations, and hundreds of schools and colleges, even though here have been no outbreaks in these places, McCullough said.

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/doctor-covid-vaccination-program-most-deadly-in-history/?utm_source=featured&utm_campaign=usa

Syria’s Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham Congrats The Taliban On ‘Conquest’ Of Afghanistan

On August 18, al-Qaeda-affiliated Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the de-facto ruler of the northwestern Syrian region of Greater Idlib, congratulated the Taliban on their successful “conquest” of Afghanistan.

Two days earlier, the Taliban solidified its grip over Afghanistan after entering the capital Kabul and taking over the Presidential Palace. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani resigned and fled the country to the UAE, where he is now taking shelter.

In a statement, HTS hoped that the victory of the Taliban will encourage the international community to support “the will of the Syrian people”.

“We, from Sham al-Ribat [‘Sham of Frontline Manning’], bless our brothers of the Taliban and our people in Afghanistan for this clear conquest, asking the Lord to bless the Syrian revolution with strengthened victory, by which the land should be liberated, and the bond broken, with rights returning to their people, and justice prevailing in the shade of the Shari’a of al-Rahman [i.e. Islamic law of God],” the statement reads.

The statement was not a surprise. HTS’ supporters and radicals within the Syrian opposition have been celebrating the victory of the Taliban as it was theirs.

HTS enjoys good relations with the Taliban. Recently, the Taliban condemned the killing of the group’s spokesman Abu Khalid al-Shami. The spokesman was killed in Russian and Syrian strikes that targeted Greater Idlib on June 10.

Furthermore, Imam Bukhari Jamaat, a Taliban-affiliated Uzbek terrorist group, have been fighting alongside HTS in Greater Idlib for years now. The Syrian and Afghan branches of the group have sworn allegiance to Mullah Akhundzada of the Taliban.

The MSM have been working hard to whitewash HTS and present it to the world as a moderate, reformed force. Nevertheless, the terrorist group itself have been promoting itself to radicals as “the Taliban of Syria”.

https://southfront.org/syrias-hayat-tahrir-al-sham-congrats-the-taliban-on-conquest-of-afghanistan/

Ex-Lansing cop charged with sex abuse thought he was chatting with a 15-year-old. It was another cop

LANSING, Mich. — Prosecutors say the Lansing police officer arrested last week was online looking for sex from an underage girl.

In fact, Benjamin Fielder was talking to another police officer working a sex sting operation. It's one of the tactics law enforcement uses to get online predators off the streets…

As of Tuesday, Fielder is no longer an officer with the Lansing Police Department. The 30-year-old resigned not even two weeks after being charged with accosting a child for immoral purposes and child sexually abusive activity as the result of a sting handled by the Shiawassee Human Oppression Team.

“Whether or not he was a police officer or not, he fell through the cracks, and that obviously doesn’t look good on law enforcement in general, but I can tell you that’s a rarity,” said Keith Hansen, a detective lieutenant with the Shiawassee County Sheriff’s Office.

Hansen is the man in charge of the sting operation, which led to charges against four other men. His office has conducted three of these operations since October 2020, resulting in 13 arrests.

“From October of 2020, there were four arrested, from May 2021 there were four and in August 2021 there were five,” he said.

The operation is typically a joint effort between the Shiawassee Sheriff’s Office and law enforcement agencies in Genesee County.

Each suspect is usually under the impression that they're chatting with an underage teen, but in reality, a law enforcement officer is on the other end of that conversation.

“Criminals out there they target children of underage quite frankly because they’re naive,” Hansen said. So, if you’re a pedophile, what easier way is to get on social media apps and try and target young kids by saying hello and seeing where it leads from there.”

“Child sexual abuse, child physical abuse is very common, unfortunately,” said Alex Brace, executive director at the Small Talk Children’s Advocacy Center. “It’s something that extends beyond your social economic status, gender identity and race. This is a problem that really impacts everyone.”

Brace said sexual predatory behavior online and in person, is growing, The Small Talk Children’s Advocacy Center knows firsthand about the emotions victims feel after experiencing abuse.

“We work with kids sexually and physically abused,” Brace said. “So any time that happens, Ingham or Eaton counties will arrange for an interview to be done at our space. So the victims can share their story get their statement on the record and start the child abuse investigative process. We also prove free counseling for those kids.”

https://www.fox47news.com/neighborhoods/downtown-old-town-reo-town/ex-lansing-cop-charged-with-sex-abuse-thought-he-was-chatting-with-a-15-year-old-it-was-another-cop

https://www.fox47news.com/neighborhoods/downtown-old-town-reo-town/ex-lansing-cop-charged-with-sex-abuse-thought-he-was-chatting-with-a-15-year-old-it-was-another-cop

Gwinnett County's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force helps arrest 2

GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. — Gwinnett County's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force announced Wednesday that it has helped with the arrests of two men in the past week on child sex crimes.

After receiving a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a 35-year-old from Norcross was arrested last Friday.

When investigators executed a search warrant, they found images of child sexual abuse in his home. He has been charged with one count of felony possession of child pornography.

The task force also announced the Lakeland Police Department in Florida arrested a 40-year-old man from Lakeland on warrants issued by Gwinnett County on Monday. Investigators monitored a fictional 13-year-old girl's social media account, and the man exchanged several explicit messages with the profile after discussing age.

After sending several explicit messages, the task force said the man offered to help the teen runaway to his home in Florida to have sex and arranged to travel to Gwinnett County from his home in Florida.

The man is currently being held without bond on child molestation by electronic device, obscene internet contact with a child, electronically furnishing obscene material to minors, and use computer service to seduce, solicit, lure or entice children charges.

https://www.11alive.com/article/news/crime/gwinnett-county-internet-crimes-against-children-taskforce-arrests/85-5b291f24-aeb3-42aa-a2ba-253365b6eace