Billionaires Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov used to own Privatbank -- the largest bank in Ukraine -- and now they are being sued for using it for a decade to launder more than $470b (through its Cyprus subsidiary) ($470b is more than double the GDP of Cyprus over the same period). Read the rest
Rustem Kazazi is a 67-year-old retired Albanian policeman who became a US citizen in 2010; last October, he boarded a flight from his hometown in Cleveland to Newark, planning to continue on to Albania. Read the rest
In 1968, the Supremes ruled in Terry v. Ohio that the police did not need "probable cause" to stop a person, it was sufficient that they have "reasonable suspicion." Read the rest
Dennis Kucinich was once the youngest mayor of a major city in the US, leading Cleveland through a hard fight with the banks and mobbed-up city contractors to save its municipally owned power plants and kill a plan to privatize the city's energy; after decades in Congress, he's running for Democratic governor of Ohio (a state whose Republican leadership has shamelessly corrupted the state's electoral process) and promising to kill fracking and oil extraction, fund studies that will produce the evidence to sue Big Oil, and create jobs by funding a conversion of the state to renewable energy. Read the rest
YouTuber craftsman Paul Jackman fashioned his own "major award" a la A Christmas Story, a "manly" leg lamp based on his own leg's measurements. It's really quite impressive.
He writes:
This leg is an exact full scale model of my own leg. The leg and base are made from maple butcher block scraps from previous projects. The lamp shade is welded from scrap lengths of rebar and wrapped in pleather attached using paracord that looks like Carolina's boot laces. The boot is attached using a threaded brass lamp rod through the entire leg with a nut on both ends. There are also a couple of screws into the toe of the boot/foot.
By the way, if you're not super crafty like Mr. Jackman and want a leg lamp for your very own, the A Christmas Story House & Museum in Cleveland, Ohio has full-sized replicas of the original for sale. The downside? It won't be shaped like your own leg.
In 1986, Cleveland was desperate to put the nickname "Mistake by the Lake" behind them, so they tried to set a world record for a balloon release. Balloonfest takes us through the failures. Read the rest
The city of Cleveland has revealed its crowd control plan for next month's Republican National Convention, a heavily policed, fenced off 3.3 square-mile "event zone" -- the size of Baghdad's Green Zone -- with fenced-off protest areas far from the convention itself. Read the rest
The City of Cleveland has filed a creditor's claim against Tamir Rice's estate. Tamir Rice is the unarmed 12-year-old kid shot dead on sight by a Cleveland cop; they want his parents to pay the EMS bill for the boy's "dying expenses." Read the rest
Redditor Heyitsnick discovered an abandoned Cleveland factory filled with rubber ducks, and that's not all: Read the rest
