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April fools: Keith Raniere and Clare Bronfman sentencing hearings set for cruelest month

[Keith Raniere and Clare Bronfman]

Judge Nicholas Garaufis has announced sentencing dates for Nxivm leaders Keith Raniere and Clare Bronfman in the month April. []

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Just what the year 2020 needs: Locusts

 Crises from all over the world seemed to be competing to grab the headlines in January: Australia’s devastating bushfires, the impeachment trial in America, Brexit finally becoming reality, and the coronavirus outbreak in China. But Africa, often starved for attention, has a growing crisis of its own: a swarm of locusts, already the largest in []

Why scientists think they have identified the remains of Vesuvius victim Pliny the Elder

 In the year 1900 Italian civil engineer Gennaro Matrone uncovered a cluster of bodies (73 eventually recovered) under volcanic rubble near the mouth of the Sarno River which flows from Mt. Vesuvius down to the Bay of Naples. This was only a few kilometers from Pompeii and Herculaneum, the twin towns famously buried in lava []

Still awaiting sentencing, Keith Raniere and other Nxivm leaders are now being sued

[Sarah Edmondson vs. Keith Raniere]

After a highly-publicized trial that resulted in the conviction or guilty pleas of six Nxivm leaders who now await sentencing, they and numerous others are now facing another kind of fight in []

From Nobel Peace Prize winner to genocide enabler?

 The town of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh was once a popular trading post, named for Captain Hiram Cox of the East India Company in the early days of the British Raj, sited on a coast which boasts the longest stretch of sandy beach on the planet. The district was a violently contested no man’s land []

The timing of the John Bolton book leak could not be worse for Trump’s legal team

 Attorney Scott Pilutik wrestles with the news of the day, from a lawyerly perspective…

[Regarding this story: Trump Tied Ukraine Aid to Inquiries He Sought, Bolton Book Says]

Months after not being called to testify at the impeachment trial, John Bolton drops a bomb in a book that previews what his testimony would be if []

The numerous reasons why the recording of Trump saying to ‘take her out’ matters

 Attorney Scott Pilutik wrestles with the news of the day, from a lawyerly perspective…

[Regarding this story: ‘Take her out’: Recording appears to capture Trump at private dinner saying he wants Ukraine ambassador fired]

A few things to keep in mind and reasons this is []

Derp-showitz: Trump team doesn’t like the Constitution, bases its defense in English law

 Attorney Scott Pilutik wrestles with the news of the day, from a lawyerly perspective…

[Regarding this story: Constitutional Crabgrass: President Trump’s Defenders Distort the Impeachment Clause]

Yesterday I spent a few paragraphs deconstructing Alan Dershowitz’s argument (which he’s expected to make next week on the Senate floor) that “high crimes and misdemeanors” requires “criminal-like conduct,” whatever that’s []

Senate impeachment trial shaping up more to be a motion to dismiss than a trial

 Attorney Scott Pilutik wrestles with the news of the day, from a lawyerly perspective…

Whatever the senate impeachment trial winds up being, it appears it will resemble a motion to dismiss more than a trial, since McConnell evidently has 51 votes for a process that won’t permit a vote on witnesses until after the two sides []

Dershowitz for the defense: Only Giuliani has debased himself more zealously

[Alan Dershowitz]

Attorney Scott Pilutik wrestles with the news of the day, from a lawyerly perspective…

[Regarding this story: George Conway: Why Trump had to hire this legal odd couple]

I was never a Van Halen fan but nevertheless found myself wincing at a video of David Lee Roth in Las Vegas from a few weeks ago. He []