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Bellingcat and its investigative partners have established that Russian politician, Vladimir Kara Murza, was followed by a specialist FSB team prior to his suspected poisonings in 2015 and 2017.

 Members of the same FSB team, some of whom have medical and chemical weapons backgrounds, tailed Alexey Navalny before he was poisoned with a Novichok substance in August 2020.
Kara-Murza is a well-known Russian politician, film-maker and an outspoken critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin. The circumstances around his suspected poisonings have long remained a mystery.
Travel details of FSB team members show they followed Kara-Murza on a campaign trip outside Moscow that ended less than 48 hours before his first poisoning incident in May 2015.
Kara-Murza recovered in the US before returning to Russia. Yet the same team began tailing him again just five months after he came back. He was poisoned for the second time in February 2017.
The number of coinciding trips – seven destinations with fourteen overlapping flights or journeys – renders a coincidental overlap between the travels of Kara-Murza and FSB squad members statistically implausible.
On at least one tailing operation, FSB squad members were accompanied by a senior official from the FSB’s 2nd Service, better known as the “Directorate for Protection of the Constitution and the Fight against Terorism”.
This officer, Roman Mezentsev, has previously traveled on joint bookings with high-level Kremlin officials including Vladislav Surkov, President Putin’s former advisor, who is long thought to have played a powerful role in Kremlin politics
Mezentsev is the highest ranking FSB officer whom we have identified on any tailing trip linked to an FSB poisoning operation.
Phone and flight records show Mezentsev frequently interacted and traveled with the chief of the directorate of the 2nd Service, Alexey Zhalo, and with other high-ranking FSB and government officials.
Mezentsev’s recent phone records also show that he communicated with scientist Col. Makshakov, the deputy chief of the FSB’s Criminalistics Institute and de facto chief of the FSB’s poisoning program.
Another potentially relevant finding in this report is that we have tracked the earliest incident of Kara-Murza being tailed to just a few days before the assassinaiton of Boris Nemtsov near the Kremlin.
This temporal overlap, paired with the similarity in risk profile of the two political activists, raises renewed questions about whether the Russian security services may have known or had a role in Nemtsov’s assassination
It must be noted, however, that the death of Nemtsov (he was murdered in a shooting) does not appear to follow the known methods of the poison squad.
Although, the FSB has been behind shooting assassinations before, such as the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in 2019 https://t.co/qxxHAGG777
Kara-Murza, like Nemtsov, played a crucial role in the lobbying for and implementation of the Magnitsky Act which allows the US government to freeze assets of Rusisian and other government officials deemed to be human rights offenders
This legislation was sponsored in the US Congress by John McCain and has been a thorn in the side of the Russian leadership
Kara-Murza described to us in great detail the symptoms he felt upon becoming ill in 2015 and 2017. These included difficulty breathing, heavy perspiration, a starkly accelerated pulse and uncontrollable bouts of vomiting.
When he was poisoned for a second time in 2017, Kara-Murza’s wife secured samples of his blood and, on her return to the United States, handed them to US toxicology laboratories for analysis

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Today is “Korean American Day”.

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102 Korean men, women, and children arrived in Honolulu aboard the SS Gaelic to work in Hawaii’s sugar plantations. By 1905, Koreans comprised 11% of Hawaii’s plantation workforce—around 7000 people.


This first wave of Korean immigrants arrived amid sharpening imperialist rivalry in the Pacific. Korea had slowly been losing its independence for decades, and by 1903 was just two years away from becoming a protectorate of Japan.

At the same time, the US was consolidating its position in the Pacific, annexing Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines in 1898, and partitioning Samoa in 1899.

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US missionaries colluded with the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association to secure a new, cheap labor force for Hawaii’s sugar fields. Many of the Koreans who arrived in Hawaii from 1903-1905 were Methodists.
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Today in pulp I look back at the world of Soviet women's fashion!

It's not all berets, but it mostly is...


Now you may think that fashion and the Soviet Union go together like Groucho Marx and Friedrich Engels. However that is to misunderstand the nature of the Commad Economy: if she commands it, you'd better buy it for her!


So there is a rich history of fashion and fun (along with the tractor factories and endless ballet performances) in the old USSR. Let's take a sashay along it...


At the start of the Soviet years women's fashion, let's face it, tended towards the functional. Red was popular, as were headscarves, hobnail boots and the ability to field strip a 3-line rifle.

But all that was about to change...


...because Russia had a new fashionista in charge: Stalin! He hated the peasant look of War Communism because it made socialism seem synonymous with poverty. He ordered Soviet Woman to spruce herself up.
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taporth\u012bya
taporthīya
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These moρlahs, guided by the bigot Alι Mµsαlιαr did not fight against any oppression, Britishers or landlords. The moρlah rebellion is a vιolent vehιcle of jιhαδ. Its sole purpose: to mαssαcre Hindu-s, convert them to ιslαm and establish M sovereignty.
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Tyrant Tιρµ was largely responsible for the forced conversions in Kerala. He surrounded homes of the H and forced them to convert to ιslαm, consume bεεf and be circµmcised.


Fleeing persecution from the rogue, many H fled to Tiruvanantapuram. There too, common M would now and then be enraged and wage jιhαδ on the helpless Hindu-s. The forcible conversions and desecration of our temples were the norm of the day.
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T L Strange, a special commisioner of the Malabar region was appointed to enquire into the reasons for the outrages. He filed a report "Malabar Manual" in 1852 where he firmly says that the reason for the 'uprising' was M rεligιous fαnatιcism —
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Moplah outrages on H was a regular occurrence in Kerala as we will show below. The most gruesome one in 1921 is what is famously referred to as such nowadays. In the aftermath of 1921, a special tribunal of 3 judges convened in Calicut.
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Nicola Borzi
Nicola Borzi
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1/ By far, the biggest Ponzi scheme I've discovered until now was the diamonds one. In 2014, two years before other media and 3 years before prosecutors, I wrote stories about physical diamonds sold by 2 brokers through banks to tens of thousands of Italian investors.


2 / Diamonds were sold at constantly rising prices in a sort of linear progression, which wasn't related to real market prices. The prices were produced by the two brokers themselves, Intermarket Diamond Business (Idb) and Diamond Private Investment (Dpi), then published monthly


3/They published monthly table of their prices in markets pages on my newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy's highest-selling financial daily. Then the 2 diamonds brokers cut the price tables from the pages and presented them to the public as "Il Sole 24 Ore records" but they weren't


4 / People were lured into the scheme with the promise of constantly revaluating physical luxury assets, easy to be hidden (a lot of diamonds were sold to tax evaders and probably gangsters). For just connecting their clients to the 2 brokers, banks earned 15-20% fees.


5 / The business throve thanks to a hole in Italy's financial regulations: diamonds weren't overseen neither by Bank authority Bank of Italy nor financial authority Consob. In two decades, the 2 brokers sold diamonds for 2/3 billion € proceeds.
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Sri Sanjeevi Rayar Temple located in Ayyangar Kulam,near Kanchipuram,TN

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Ancient but beautiful temple dedicated to Hanuman. This temple is a legendary one. According to the Sthala Puranam of Sanjeevi Rayar temple,it is associated with an episode from Ramayana.


Legend story -Hanuman was flying from Himalayas to Lanka bearing Sanjeevi hill to revive Lakshmana during battle between Rama& Ravana, a piece of the Sanjeevi Parvat fell at this place.Many believe this legendary story & even today that no one here dies of any kind of poisoning.

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The bandits immediately ran away &Tatacharya decided to build a temple dedicated to Anjaneya at that very place.This Sanskrit poem is called Hanumad Vimshati, has been inscribed in Grantha script inside this temple.The huge temple tank called Tatasamudram, in honor of Tatacharya.
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