BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — A retired Republican state senator from North Dakota has been charged with traveling to Europe with the intent of paying for sex with a minor and with receiving images depicting child sexual abuse, according to a federal indictment unsealed Monday.

Longtime state Sen. Ray Holmberg, 79, was arrested Monday and released after pleading not guilty to the charges in U.S. District Court in Fargo. His trial is set for Dec. 5.

Prosecutors said in a statement that Holmberg repeatedly traveled to Prague in the Czech Republic from June 2011 to November 2016 for the purpose of paying for sex with a person under 18 years old. The indictment, which also suggests Holmberg used aliases, says he received and attempted to receive images that depict child sexual abuse from November 2012 to March 2013.

Holmberg served more than 45 years in the North Dakota Senate until his resignation last year, after local media outlet The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead revealed he exchanged dozens of text messages with a person who was jailed on charges related to child sexual abuse images.

Holmberg’s attorney, Mark Friese, said in a text message that authorities investigated Holmberg “for 2 years or more and allege nothing recent. The conduct they allege is from more than a decade ago.”

**Holmberg was released with conditions, and the judge did not require posting of any bond, Friese said. ** A text message sent to Holmberg after his release Monday was not immediately returned, and his phone did not have voicemail so a message could not be left.

Holmberg chaired the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, which writes budgets. He announced in March 2022 he wouldn’t seek reelection. He cited stress and “a weakened ability to concentrate on the matters at hand and effectively recall events” before ultimately resigning.

**Former North Dakota Senate Majority Leader Rich Wardner told The Associated Press he was saddened and disappointed by the indictment.

“Here’s a situation where a man was a public servant and did a lot of positive things for the state of North Dakota, and now, I don’t know what’s going to come of this thing, but this really neutralizes all the good,” said Wardner, a Republican who served in the Senate with Holmberg for nearly 25 years.**

If Holmberg is convicted, his decades serving the public “will be forgotten about, and only the negative things will be remembered,” Wardner said.

Current Senate Majority Leader David Hogue declined to comment on the indictment.

Holmberg was reimbursed roughly $126,000 for nearly 70 out-of-state trips from 2013 through mid-April 2022 to places that included four dozen U.S. cities, as well as Canada, Puerto Rico and several European countries, according to an AP review of his travel records.

Law enforcement searched his Grand Forks home in November 2021, seizing video discs and additional items.

The indictment comes after Nicholas James Morgan-Derosier pleaded guilty last month in federal court to six counts of possessing images depicting child sexual abuse and one count of receiving and distributing such images. According to The Forum’s reporting, Morgan-Derosier was the person texting with Holmberg from jail.

Morgan-Derosier is scheduled to be sentenced in January. A spokesperson for the two federal public defenders who represented Morgan-Derosier did not immediately respond to a phone message regarding his case.

Death to america.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231030232756/https://apnews.com/article/north-dakota-senator-indictment-ray-holmberg-prague-8c30a68285dff5ee66668340deb4effc

The Environmental Protection Agency approved a component of boat fuel made from discarded plastic that the agency’s own risk formula determined was so hazardous, everyone exposed to the substance continually over a lifetime would be expected to develop cancer. Current and former EPA scientists said that threat level is unheard of. It is a million times higher than what the agency usually considers acceptable for new chemicals and six times worse than the risk of lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking.

Federal law requires the EPA to conduct safety reviews before allowing new chemical products onto the market. If the agency finds that a substance causes unreasonable risk to health or the environment, the EPA is not allowed to approve it without first finding ways to reduce that risk.

But the agency did not do that in this case. Instead, the EPA decided its scientists were overstating the risks and gave Chevron the go-ahead to make the new boat fuel ingredient at its refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Though the substance can poison air and contaminate water, EPA officials mandated no remedies other than requiring workers to wear gloves, records show.

A group of Internet service providers that won government grants are asking the Federal Communication Commission for more money or an "amnesty window" in which they could give up grants without penalty.

The ISPs were awarded grants to build broadband networks from the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), which selected funding recipients in December 2020. A group calling itself the "Coalition of RDOF Winners" has been meeting with FCC officials about their requests for more money or an amnesty window, according to several filings submitted to the commission.

The group says broadband construction costs have soared since the grants were announced. They asked for extra money, quicker payments, relief from letter of credit requirements, or an amnesty window "that allows RDOF winners to relinquish all or part of their RDOF winning areas without forfeitures or other penalties if the Commission chooses not to make supplemental funds available or if the amount of supplemental funds the Commission does make available does not cover an RDOF Winner's costs that exceed reasonable inflation," a July 31 filing said.

A different group of ISPs urged the FCC to reject the request, saying that telcos that win grants by pledging to build networks at a low cost are "gaming" the system by seeking more money afterward.

So far, the FCC leadership seems reluctant to provide extra funding. The commission could issue fines to ISPs that default on grants—the FCC recently proposed $8.8 million in fines against 22 RDOF applicants for defaults. Group’s members are a mystery

The Coalition of RDOF Winners doesn't include every ISP that was granted money from the program. But exactly which and how many ISPs are in the coalition is a mystery. The group's attorney, Philip Macres of Klein Law Group, told Ars today that he is "not at liberty to provide the list of all the members in the Coalition of RDOF Winners."

Macres confirmed that the group doesn't include every RDOF winner but said he cannot reveal how many ISPs are members. There appear to be at least two members: Arkansas-based wireless broadband provider Aristotle Unified Communications and a Texas ISP called TekWav both joined the meetings at which the coalition asked the FCC for more money or an amnesty window.

In late 2020, the FCC tentatively awarded $9.2 billion over 10 years to 180 Internet providers that agreed to deploy broadband to over 5.2 million unserved homes and businesses. But after seeing evidence that the program was mismanaged under former Chairman Ajit Pai, the current FCC re-evaluated the grants and authorized payments of $6 billion to a smaller group of ISPs.

The size of individual grants didn't change, but the FCC refused to give final authorization to certain grants, including $886 million that was originally awarded to SpaceX's Starlink satellite service and $1.3 billion that was slated for wireless provider LTD Broadband.

Separately, the US government is distributing over $42 billion in the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program that was authorized by Congress in November 2021. Geographic areas that have RDOF funding are generally ineligible for BEAD grants.

In cases where an ISP defaults on an RDOF grant, the geographic location associated with the grant would become eligible for funding from the larger BEAD program. But if a default happens after BEAD funding is allotted, an unserved area could end up with no subsidized networks. Other ISPs urge FCC to enforce rules

The Coalition of RDOF Winners' request for more funding or an amnesty window drew opposition from WTA—Advocates for Rural Broadband, formerly called the Western Telecommunications Alliance, which says it represents over 360 rural telecommunications companies across the US and over 85 industry vendors.

The WTA said it's not a proponent of the "reverse auction" format the FCC used for the RDOF, in which ISPs bid on grants organized by census blocks. But "if the Commission employs reverse auctions as a device to determine and distribute Universal Service Fund support in certain areas, it must strictly enforce all of its auction rules, terms and conditions in order to prevent such reverse auctions from being abused, distorted and undermined by various gaming tactics," the WTA said.

The WTA pointed out that winning RDOF bidders got their grants because they made lower bids than other ISPs. In other words, the ISPs that agreed to serve specific census blocks at a lower cost to the government are the ones that got the grants.

"An obvious gaming danger is the use of a 'strategy' of making support bids as unreasonably low as necessary in order to 'win' specific service areas, and then coming back to the Commission later for the additional support that is actually needed to construct and operate the promised broadband networks in such areas," the WTA told the FCC in a July 28 filing.

For over 10 years, millions of emails associated with the US military have been getting sent to Mali, a West African country allied with Russia, due to a typo, according to a report from the Financial Times. Instead of appending the military’s .MIL domain to their recipient’s email address, people frequently type .ML, the country identifier for Mali, by mistake.

Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch entrepreneur contracted to manage Mali’s domain, tells the Financial Times that this has been happening for over a decade despite his repeated attempts to warn the US government. When Zuurbier began noticing requests for nonexistent domains, like army.ml and navy.ml, he set up a system to catch these misdirected emails, which the Financial Times reports “was rapidly overwhelmed and stopped collecting messages.”

Since January alone, Zuurbier has reportedly intercepted 117,000 misdirected emails, several of which contain sensitive information related to the US military. According to the Financial Times, many of the emails include medical records, identity document information, lists of staff at military bases, photos of military bases, naval inspection reports, ship crew lists, tax records, and more.

Once Zuurbier’s 10-year contract with Mali ends on Monday, authorities in Mali will be able to gain access to the emails

Some of the misdirected emails were sent by military staff members, travel agents working with the US military, US intelligence, private contractors, and others, the Financial Times reports. For example, an email from earlier this year reportedly contained the travel itinerary for General James McConville, the US Army’s chief of staff, for his visit to Indonesia. The email included a “full list of room numbers,” along with “details of the collection of McConville’s room key at the Grand Hyatt Jakarta.”

Zuurbier won’t be able to intercept these emails for much longer, however. Once his 10-year contract with Mali ends on Monday, authorities in Mali will be able to gain access to the emails. Russia established a presence in Mali last year through the Wagner Group, a Russian state-backed paramilitary organization that recently staged a rebellion against President Vladimir Putin. In May, the US State Department said the Wagner Group sought to use Mali as a route to transport war supplies to Ukraine.

“The Department of Defense (DoD) is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorized disclosures of Controlled National Security Information or Controlled Unclassified Information seriously,” Tim Gorman, a spokesperson for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, says in an emailed statement to The Verge. Gorman adds that emails sent from a .mil domain to Mali are “blocked” and that the “sender is notified that they must validate the email addresses of the intended recipients.”

Gorman acknowledges that this doesn’t stop other government agencies or those working with the US government from mistakenly sending emails to Malian addresses, though. Still, he notes that “the Department continues to provide direction and training to DoD personnel.”

i seen it

testing emojis in the title

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/762611

I would paste the actual content of the post here but it would probably get me banned from the instance, even with the slur filters (cringe).

Anyway. I didn't know who this cracker was before the mastodon spam post here and I've since done a bit of research. This was a recent post by whoever empress is, apparently they are seething all over reddit and it has spilled in this direction. She also really hates fitgirl, someone we all know and love.