Crooked Media - What A Day: More like CRUDE-y Giuliani

Ukraine is fighting a war for its survival and it’s getting a lot of help from the riled West.

• President Volodymyr Zelensky took his roadies on tour in Europe this weekend and got pledges of more, more, more. Rivaling the schedule of The Amazing Race, Zelensky hit up Rome, Paris, Berlin, and London all this past weekend. He met with leaders in each country who pledged more and continued support of Ukraine in its war against the unluckiest men of Russia. The U.K. pledged new long-range drones, and France will train and equip several battalions with armored vehicles and light tanks. The new long-range drones will supplement a haul of Western arms for a counteroffensive against Russian invaders.
   
• Previously unreported U.S. intelligence documents from the Discord leaks reveal that top Wagner Group mercenary Yevgeniy Prigozhin offered to supply Ukraine with the locations of Russian troops if they agreed to back off of Bakhmut, where the Wagner fighters were suffering huge losses. Prigozhin has long maintained that the Russian Defense Ministry has not given his fighters the ammunition and other resources they need to succeed. It's incredible that Putin and Prigozhin still seem to be friends but it means that Prigozhin is simply too important to push out of a window like his other enemies. But guess what, assholes? Even though the deal was never made, Ukraine is winning in Bakhmut now anyway. Russia has even acknowledged that its forces have fallen back.
   
• Now that Ukraine has recorded its first substantial battlefield advances in six months, what about those reports that Zelensky was planning attacks inside Russia? Officially, that is untrue. Zelensky clarified that such planned attacks are only in Russian occupied regions of Ukraine, not Russia proper. But that’s still an improvement, and only the party line, who knows, Moscow might get some more explosions they are unable to explain soon.

Of course, the news is never ALL good. Ukraine hasn't come out of the weekend unscathed.

• Ukraine might have more support from its own people than Russia, it just doesn’t have as many people to actually fight. Despite a lack of support for the war, Russia is drawing on a population three times the size of Ukraine and Putin is capable of conscripting as many as 25 million fighting-age men. Putin mobilized some 300,000 recruits last September and has now changed the law so he can draft men by serving them with a “digital summons” online. The postage was getting so expensive. 
   
• Ukraine is also losing in some other important European contests. For the first time in his career, Putin ally and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fell short of the 50 percent needed to win Sunday’s presidential election (though he's still likely to win the runoff). Better for Ukraine if the strongman goes down but the results make his extended tenure look likely, even as “Free Speech When Convenient” activist Elon Musk’s Twitter sought to silence anti-regime tweets from Turkey. Twitter announced on Friday before the election that it had “taken action to restrict access to some content in Turkey,” which predictably included high-profile critics of Erdogan. Ukraine also suffered heavy losses in a different battle: this weekend’s Eurovision Song Contest in London, where Sweden’s Loreen claimed the top prize. 

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Toot toot. The Mormon Church has a whistleblower. Former investment manager for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints David A. Nielsen has claimed a stockpile of over $100 billion that was intended for charity work was actually just a clandestine hedge fund. Nielsen insists the charity funds were spent on for-profit initiatives as a tax dodge, alleging that, “Once the money went in, it didn’t go out.” The church collects tithings that are intended to be 10 percent of the earnings of the church’s 17 million members—which amount to about $7 billion dollars per year. The good news is they’ll have plenty of money for lawyers. 

Nielsen was a devout Mormon recruited from Wall Street to work at Ensign Peak Advisors, a Mormon-run “nonprofit fund” created in 1997. Now worth $100 billion, the fund is twice the size of Harvard’s endowment or The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Nielsen told 60 Minutes “I thought we were gonna change the world. And we just grew the bank account.” He resigned from his position in 2019 after links were revealed between church members and shell companies that held billions of dollars in stocks and bonds that were actually controlled by Ensign Peak. The Securities and Exchange Commission has said that the church went to great lengths to hide the size of its investments through shell companies and fake office addresses.

• Uh oh, America’s decayer, Rudy Giuliani, is in the news again. Former employee Noelle Dunphy has filed a 70-page harassment lawsuit detailing how he sexually exploited her. Allegations against  Giuliani include forcing her to work naked and making her perform oral sex on him while he talked on the phone, sometimes with Donald Trump on the other line. She also says Rudy bragged that he and Trump were selling pardons for millions of dollars (!) and splitting the money (!!!).  
   
• The digital director for Rep Paul Gosar (R-AZ) turns out to be a prominent follower of neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Gosar, who gave the keynote last year at the Nick Fuentes-hosted America First Political Action Conference must be SHOCKED. 
   
• Religiously indoctrinated parents had a meltdown after a 5th-grade teacher showed the 2022 Disney movie Strange World which boasts a gay character. Their worry? Indoctrination, of course.
   
• The U.S. border has seen fewer migrant-crossings than expected after Title 42 expired. Officials claim there’s been a 50 percent drop in asylum seekers since the days before the border restriction policy ended. 
   
• The most hated man in football that isn’t named Aaron Rogers, Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder, loses his death grip on the team. Without clicking the link, you already know the new owner is another white guy.
   
• The Supreme Court rejected Alabama's bid to execute a death-row inmate by lethal injection, leaving in place a lower-court ruling that his preference for lethal gas is a viable alternative method.
   
• President Biden has selected cancer surgeon (and patient) Dr. Monica M. Bertagnolli, who has led the National Cancer Institute since October, to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health. 
   
• America’s Next Top Kyle Rittenhouse has a new winner. Donors have kicked in over a million dollars for Subway Choker’s defense fund.
   
• An American citizen charged with spying in China has received a life sentence. 
   
• While we were focusing on brain injuries in the NFL, a Colorado Rockies pitcher suffered a fractured skull after being hit with a line drive this weekend. 
   
• Krysten Sinema is running marathons and a grift, simultaneously, using her attendance at races to raise a little money and get heavily pampered. 
   
• College graduates are leaving coastal cities. I guess they have to go to wherever their parent's basements are located.

While the world’s richest weirdos are focused on escaping to outer space as the world melts, the world’s smartest weirdos are focused on living underwater. After all, that’s where all of this is headed, right? U.S. researcher Joseph Dituri has broken a record of 73 days of underwater living and doesn’t plan on surfacing until he hits the 100-day mark. He’s staying in Jules’ Undersea Lodge (named after 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea author Jules Verne) at the bottom of a 30-foot deep lagoon near Key Largo, FL. Dituri says it's been pretty chill but he eats microwaved salmon down there so you be the judge. The previous record was achieved in the same lodge by two professors in 2014.

It’s not just a vacation as he has continued to teach classes online. The goal seems to be more of an effort to raise awareness than to actually build a real-life Atlantis, although that is something the professor would like to see. “The idea here is to populate the world’s oceans, to take care of them by living in them and really treating them well,” Dituri said. It's pretty refreshing to see some educational benefits from a stunt like this. It’s as if a David Blaine “magic trick” actually had scientific merit. You can follow Dituri’s countdown to his resurfacing on his website. The thing he’s most excited to see upon his return to land? The sun. Makes sense but a salmon-cooking oven was probably a close second.

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Platypi are finally back in Sydney’s Royal Park after their decades-long trip to the store to get cigarettes.

Martha Stewart became the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue’s oldest cover model and the oldest in the magazine’s history as well, confusing teens with limited internet access.

IRS finally gets its head out of its ass, testing a way to simplify the process of doing your taxes on its website for free.