Fashion tech founder sentenced to prison for $300m fraud scheme

• Experts interviewed by Vedomosti on August 20th report that Europe's economic gap with the United States is widening due to lower labor productivity and structural challenges. • The decline is attributed to a combination of demographic issues, exchange-rate effects, and a heavy dependence on foreign trade.

• India and Bangladesh are facing a critical diplomatic test regarding the management of the Teesta River and the strategic "Chicken's Neck" corridor. • The situation is being exacerbated by climate change, which has increased hydrological uncertainty, alongside rising agricultural demands and intensifying strategic competition.

The former gang leader was charged with planning the drive-by shooting that killed Tupac Shakur in 1996Jurors on Thursday heard Duane “Keffe D” Davis tell detectives in 2008 that his nephew Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson fired the shots that killed Tupac Shakur.Davis, who said in the interview that he was also in the car with Anderson, is accused of orchestrating the 1996 killing of the 25-year-old hip-hop superstar in Las Vegas. At the time of the interview, his nephew had been dead for a decade. Continue reading...

Progressive wins bitter fight for seat formerly held by congressman who quit amid sexual misconduct claimsProgressive Aisha Wahab was elected to Congress in a special election on Tuesday following a bitter intra-party battle over the seat formerly held by Eric Swalwell, who resigned in April after facing sexual misconduct allegations. Swalwell has denied the allegations.Wahab, a state senator, was widely considered the frontrunner in the district in California’s East Bay and had the backing of the state Democratic party as well as Our Revolution, labor unions, local officials and the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta. She won the primary for the special election for the final months of Swalwell’s term by more than 20 points over Hernandez, the president of the board of directors for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (Bart) agency. Continue reading...

Move may signal attempt to improve relations between military-backed government and ex-leader’s partyThe jailed former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan has been ⁠transferred to a hospital in Islamabad for medical examination, fulfilling a longstanding demand by supporters who ⁠say his health has deteriorated during more than three years in prison.The move ​followed a supreme court order ‌this week and is ‌seen as a potential first step toward easing tensions between Khan’s party and ‌Pakistan’s powerful military establishment, which have been at odds since his removal from office in 2022. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Rahil Prakash tells the Guardian: ‘I wanted to see if fake polls could penetrate the ecosystem that easily’A 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California, the Guardian can reveal.The website, Median Strategies, abruptly shut down and withdrew its polling earlier this week following questions from a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. In an unsigned statement, it described a “short-term social experiment” to examine how fake polling “could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification”. Continue reading...

José Mejía Hernandez, 45, who was hospitalized for his injuries, was then transferred to an ICE office and fitted with an ankle monitorA man in Virginia was hospitalized with a brain injury and severe bruising all over his face after he was arrested by US immigration agents, according to his lawyers, who shared photos and medical records with the Guardian.José Mejía Hernandez, 45, was walking to a bus stop in Arlington on the morning of 11 August when two agents got out of an unmarked vehicle and started chasing him, according to one of his lawyers, Margaret Hellerstein. The man recalled being hit by some kind of stun gun, but did not remember what happened after that, only waking up hours later in the hospital, Hellerstein said. Continue reading...

Courier network carried millions of dollars in cash to Lebanon on commercial flights, treasury department saysThe US treasury department announced sanctions on Thursday against 10 people it says formed a courier network that smuggled hundreds of millions of dollars to Hezbollah by carrying cash onboard commercial flights between Iran, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon.The office of foreign assets control (OFAC) said the network allowed Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group,to obtain foreign currency and dodge sanctions outside the formal banking system. The treasury department linked the operation to a scheme once associated with Behnam Shahriyari, a now-deceased finance official for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force. Continue reading...

Albanese said now-infamous interview, dubbed ‘melon-gate’, taught him he needs ‘to do better every day’. Follow today’s news live Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAnthony Albanese has said he should not have appeared on a podcast where he engaged in a joke about the Japanese prime minister’s gift to him of melons.During an appearance on the comedy podcast Bush Deep last month, the prime minister explained that Japan’s leader, Sanae Takaichi, offered him royal Japanese melons and appeared to make hand gestures in front of his chest, saying “she brought two, as you do”. Host Nikki Osborne joked: “She came in looking like Pamela Anderson.” Continue reading...

Ex-White House ethics tsar calls it ‘shocking’ that executive assistant to US president didn’t have clearance for a yearUS politics live – latest updatesThe White House faced fresh questions on Thursday over whether Donald Trump’s closest aide, Natalie Harp, had access to US government secrets without security clearance.Harp, who is executive assistant to the US president, worked at the White House for a year without the routine clearance, the MS Now network reported on Thursday. She refused to file the relevant forms for unknown reasons, according to two unnamed sources cited by MS Now. Continue reading...

Jessica ​Bowie, 35, of Albany, allegedly planned to deploy explosive before fleeing ⁠to IS-controlled territory in SyriaUS authorities arrested and charged a New York woman with ⁠planning to carry out an Islamic State-inspired attack on the state’s capitol building in Albany, the justice ⁠department said on ⁠Thursday.Jessica ​Bowie, 35, of Albany, was charged with planning to deploy an explosive device at the state ⁠capitol with the intention of killing public officials and destroying “as much of the building as possible” before fleeing ⁠to IS-controlled territory in Syria, according to John A Eisenberg, assistant attorney general ​for national security. Continue reading...