Under intense pressure from the Ukrainian incursion into their illegitimate territory, the leaders of the two Kremlin-puppet pseudo-states of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in the eastern Donbas region announced Tuesday they will be holding a referendum to annex their territories to the Russian Federation later this week, the Associated Press reports.

The vote would represent a serious escalation of the Ukraine-Russia war, as the no doubt rigged result showing “overwhelming support” for annexation would mean that Ukrainian forces would be fighting in what Russia is soon to declare is their sovereign territory. It appears to be a panic move by the Kremlin, as it comes just after former President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said it would make Russian gains “irreversible,” enabling Moscow to use “any means” to defend them.

Incumbent Democrat Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock leads self-admitted “not that smart” guy Herschel Walker 47% to 42% in a Marist poll survey of Georgia voters, while incumbent Republican Governor Brian “Ku Klux” Kemp leads Dem Stacey Abrams 50% to 44%, continuing a string of disappointing numbers for the woman who barely lost in 2018 and did more than any one other person to flip Georgia’s electoral votes and two Senate seats in the 2020/2021 elections.

Following up on their story earlier this month on video footage showing fake Trump 2020 elector and Coffee County, Georgia GOP co-chair Cathy Latham entering that rural jurisdiction’s elections office back on January 7, 2021, CNN on Tuesday published a pic of Latham and her fellow acolytes of Sidney “Kraken” Powell tampering with voting systems equipment and software in a failed bid to prove the false conspiracy theory that the machines were hacked, throwing the state to Biden.

Later that month “Cyber Ninjas” assclown Doug Logan also visited the office, presumably to do more of the same shit. The former Coffee County Clerk, Misty Hampton, an election conspiracy theorist herself, had let the Kraken scumbags in to have the run of the place. Hampton resigned the next month after coming under investigation for falsifying her timesheets. Her successor, James Barnes, emailed the Secretary of State’s office when he found a business card from Logan under the computer in May 2021. The Cyber Ninjas were by then known nationally among election watchers for the ultimately failed effort to prove voter fraud in Maricopa County, Arizona.

Trump won Coffee County by 40% in the 2020 election. Republican state legislators have declined to take control of the local elections office, despite having given themselves authority to do so.

Scraping the bottom of the borscht barrel to avoid having to draft middle class Russians into the currently failing war effort against Ukraine, Putin’s top goon Yevgeny Prigozhin has been recruiting violent convicts from prison camps in the Urals to fill the ranks of the Wagner mercenary group, signing up several serial killers and at least one cannibal, the Daily Beast reports.

“Putin’s plan is to recruit at least 50,000 convicts and Prigozhin, who is an ex-convict himself, has already sent more than 3,000,” said Russian prison expert Olga Romanova, who has analyzed videos of Prigozhin personally signing up the dregs of the gulags. The convicts have not fared too well on first contact with the Sunflowers. “Pretty much all murderers we have on our watch have been recruited and they die like flies in Ukraine. Out of the first 42 convicts recruited in the first group, only three survived, out of the second group of 66 convicts, only six returned, including one who had lost his arm,” said Romanova. “We are not a battalion, we are just a bunch of people. Wagner took us… showed us what to do but you cannot learn in one week,” said one convict captured by the Ukrainians whom Romanova had worked with in the past.

Prigozhin, also known as “Putin’s chef” should be a familiar character to the veterans of the digital wars of the early Trump era, as he was the “mastermind” behind the “Internet Research Agency” troll farm which flooded American websites with poorly spelled right wing propaganda.

Kiwi geologists have raised the alert level at the Taupō supervolcano from 0 to 1 after more than 700 earthquakes since May and changes in the ground level in and around the caldera have signaled an at least minor increase in activity, the New Zealand Herald reports. This is the first time since the New Zealand official alert system was established in 1986 that the alert level was raised at Taupō, a monster volcano which cataclysmically erupted 25,000 years ago.

“Our understanding of the current activity is informed by new knowledge of past unrest. It has been helped especially by analysis of the 2019 activity, but also activity in 2008, and another 17 unrest episodes over the past 150 years,” said government volcanologist Steve Sheburn.

Continuing their stunning counteroffensive which routed Russian occupiers in the country’s east, Ukrainian forces on Monday began an incursion into the Kremlin-backed Donbas separatist region of Luhansk and were aiming to retake the entire territory within the week, Reuters reports.

“The occupiers are clearly in a panic,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Monday, marveling at the “speed at which our troops are moving. The speed in restoring normal life.” So terrified were the leaders of the two puppet regimes of Luhansk and Donetsk that they moved to accelerate long-planned referendum votes on annexing themselves to Russia.

Per Judd Legum of Popular Information, one of the planes hired by Republican Florida Governor and human trafficker Ron DeSantis to fly asylum seekers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts as a stunt to “own the libs” while using human beings as props is scheduled to make a trip from Longview, Texas to Delaware Coastal Airport, a small airport by Wilmington, Delaware, home of Joe Biden.  The plane will make pitstop in Okaloosa County, Florida so DeSantis to say the migrants came from Florida, ’cause he’s just that much of an asshole.

A Platteville, Colorado police officer is on administrative leave after he parked his patrol car on railroad tracks while a suspect was confined in the back seat and the car was subsequently struck by a train–because that’s what happens when you park a car on railroad tracks.

According to Colorado Public Radio, the unnamed officer pulled over a woman suspected of waving a gun in a road rage incident.  After he put the 20-year-old suspect in the back seat of his patrol car, he and two other responding officers began to search the suspect’s car, a train snuck up and smashed into the patrol car.

The detained woman, who was not identified, sustained serious injuries and was transported to a hospital in Greeley.  The officers were not injured, but they should have their hearing checked.

One of Donald Trump’s lawyers who defended him during his first impeachment, senior White House advisor Eric Herschmann, told Trump that he faced investigation and legal liability if he did not return presidential records he was storing at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s senior fleecing facility and buffet, the New York Times reports.

A one-time federal prosecutor, Hershmann stressed to Trump the critical nature of returning the documents to avoid potential future legal issues in the future.  The fact that a one-time Trump aide informed him of the criminality of holding the government documents further establishes Trump’s knowledge about the legal falsity of his claims that the papers were his personally.

Not long after Trump’s conversation with Herschmann, Trump arranged for 15 boxes of material to be returned to the National Archive in January 2022.  In those boxes, the historians found 184 classified documents, prompting a subpoena which resulted in more being turned in June 2022, but investigators had to get a court-issued search warrant in August to search the property and secure thousands of pages of government documents.

With an unintentionally provocative photo that looks like what you call the guy who won’t let you merge in traffic, NASA released the sound of a meteoroid striking the surface of Mars on Earth day September 5, 2021, picked up by the InSight lander, CNN reports.  The photo used is not what you might think:  NASA directed the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter over the calculated spot of the impact and snapped of pic of the three impact locations.

For the sixth time since January 2021, woman who can count to three on her hooves, Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene (Q-Ga.) has introduced articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden, this time for selling oil from American oil reserves to our European allies to help ease their energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  [For the record, there is no law against selling oil from the National Petroleum Reserve to anyone.]  Her previous efforts:

HR 1318 (August 12, 2022):  for investigating Donald Trump’s malfeasance.
HR 598 (August 23, 2021):  for fulfilling Trump’s treaty to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, but not doing it in a way Marge likes.
HR 597 (August 23, 2021–same day as above):  for not building Trump’s wall, essentially.
HR 596 (August 23, 2021–same day as above):  for extending eviction moratorium during coronavirus pandemic.
HR 57 (January 21, 2021, Joe Biden’s first full day in office):  for Hunter’s laptop or somesuch nonsense about Hunter and Ukraine. 

McDonald’s announced it will begin a phased reopening of its stores in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, through delivery-only services and catering orders available through a third-party app, with drive-thru service scheduled to open in October, Politico reports.

The spokesperson for McDonald’s in Ukraine posted on her Facebook page that three locations will open this week and another seven locations around the city will open next week.  Dining rooms at the restaurants will likely open in October.

Of course, the restaurants need to implement some protocols for the unique conditions under which they’re working:  “Restaurants will be open from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. and close during the air alert to allow employees and visitors to move to the nearest shelter. With this, the team promptly issues already paid orders while stopping production processes and disable equipment before closing,” the post notes.

Responding to a question from Special Master Senior Judge Raymond Dearie about how he’s supposed to review the stolen top secret documents seized by the FBI in the August 8th raid on Mar-a-Lago, disgraced former President Trump’s lawyers write to the judge they don’t want to say anything one way or another on whether the Orange God Emperor had actually declassified any documents as it would “disclose specific information regarding declassification to the Court and to the Government. We respectfully submit that the time and place for affidavits or declarations would be in connection with a Rule 41 motion that specifically alleges declassification as a component of its argument for return of property. Otherwise, the Special Master process will have forced the Plaintiff to fully and specifically disclose a defense to the merits of any subsequent indictment without such a requirement being evident in the District Court’s order.”

Translation: “FUCK FUCK FUCK! OH GODDAMMIT WHY THE FUCK IS THIS GUY PUTTING US ON THE SPOT LIKE THIS? HE WAS SUPPOSED TO JUST DICK AROUND AND WASTE EVERYONE’S TIME! SHIT! SOMEBODY HAS TO FIGURE OUT SOME WAY TO GET HIM TO RECUSE NOW!”

The Sheriff of Bexar County, Texas on Monday announced his office is opening a criminal investigation into Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for his trafficking of Venezuelan migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts under false pretenses.

The US intelligence community estimates Ukrainian forces have shot down 55 Russian fixed-wing aircraft since the start of the Russian invasion of the nation in February, averaging nearly two per week, Politico reports.

Air Forces in Europe and Africa commander Gen. James Hecker told reporters at the annual Air Force Association conference that using older Russian-made air defense systems, the Ukrainians have been able to limit Russian air forces ability to support ground operations, allowing Ukrainian forces to neutralize a once-believed Russian tactical advantage.

Hecker noted that the US has been supplying Ukraine with time-sensitive intelligence allowing it to target the current locations of enemy troops.  The US, however, has declined providing the Ukrainians with long-range missiles that could hit deep inside Russia for fear that would lead to an escalation by the Kremlin.

“… and the people of Martha’s Vineyard, who by the way, aren’t the fancy summering folks, it’s the real people who live there–the average median income in around $70,000; they’re a majority minority enclave except in the summer when a bunch of rich white people show up and, y’know, they ignore Alan Dershowitz,” token liberal-esque host of The Five Jessica Tarlov skewers, to which you hear Greg Gutfeld honk approvingly ’cause he got the joke for once.

Doug Ramsey, Chief Operating Officer of plant-based beef substitute producer Beyond Meat, was arrested in the parking garage of Razorback Stadium in Fayetteville, Arkansas late Saturday on charges of terroristic threatening and third-degree battery after he got into a brawl and bit off a piece of another man’s nose in the altercation, KNWA/Fox24 News reports.

Ramsey, who joined Beyond Meat in December of 2021 after three decades with poultry giant Tyson Foods, reportedly snapped when the driver of a Subaru made the slightest contact with his Ford Bronco as traffic was inching out of the stadium following the University of Arkansas Razorbacks’ 38 – 27 win over Missouri State University. He then stepped out, and possibly in a rage over being deprived of animal-based protein for over nine months, punched through the back window of the Subaru. The other driver got out, upon which Ramsey “pulled him in close and started punching his body,” per a police report, and “bit the owner’s nose, ripping the flesh on the tip of the nose.” The would-be cannibal is due in Fayetteville District Court on October 19.

A Baltimore judge threw out the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, the subject of the first season of the popular podcast “Serial,” determining the prosecution withheld key exculpatory evidence that may have swayed a jury, the Baltimore Banner reports.  Per the judge’s order, Syed will be immediately released from prison after 22 years.

Syed was convicted in 2000 for the murder of Hae Min Lee, his ex-girlfriend who was found buried, dead by strangulation, in a shallow grave in a city park.  Prosecutors withheld evidence that another man had threatened Lee’s life and there was a serial assaulter active in the neighborhood.

While they are quick to say the court’s reversal does not exonerate Syed, prosecutors must decide whether they want to re-charge Syed for the crime.

Disgraced former Trump has been telling his minions he’s angry with Florida governor Ron DeSantis for stealing “my idea” to send migrants north to Blue Cities, Rolling Stone reports on the latest bitching and moaning about the diminutive challenger to leadership of the MAGA Republican Party.

We will give this to Trump: It really was his idea. Like a lot of shit he said he wanted to do to migrants arriving over the Southern border, he never followed through, but in an April 2019 rally speech he confirmed to the crowd he had ordered the Department of Homeland Security to bus migrants to sanctuary cities. “Now we’re sending many of them to sanctuary cities. Thank you very much. They’re not too happy about it. I’m proud to tell you that was actually my sick idea,” said Trump at the time before the plan never materialized and was forgotten amid other insane shit he said and did. The other funny thing to note here is that Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been at this a lot longer than DeSantis, of course Trump never cared about him because he doesn’t feel threatened by a guy in a wheelchair or think he’s serious competition for the 2024 GOP nomination.

The Biden Administration made arrangements to free an American civil engineer being held by a Taliban-affiliated group since he was kidnapped in January 2020 in Afghanistan in exchange for an Afghan drug dealer, the Associated Press reports.

Sixty-year-old Mark Frerichs, a Navy veteran, had been working on civil engineering projects for a decade when he was summoned to a meeting in Kabul in January 2020, which was actually a set-up by the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network to abduct him.  The Haqqani took him from Kabul to Khost, near the Pakistan border.

Frerichs was exchanged for Bashir Noorzai, a Taliban-connected heroin dealer who was serving the 17th year of a life sentence in US federal prison.  President Joe Biden essentially commuted Noorzai’s sentence into order to facilitate the trade and gain Frerichs’ freedom.