Article is quite short, I'll post it here for you.
The Grammy-winning rapper Prakazrel “Pras” Michel of the Fugees has been sentenced to 14 years in prison for involvement in a billion-dollar Malaysia scam that funnelled money into US politics.
The 52-year-old founding member of the 1990s hit trio the Fugees was convicted of money laundering and campaign finance violations in 2023 in a global foreign influence scandal led by the Malaysian financier Low Taek Jho.
In April 2023, a federal jury convicted Michel of 10 counts, including conspiracy and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. The trial in Washington DC included testimony from the actor Leonardo DiCaprio and the former attorney general Jeff Sessions.
Justice department prosecutors said federal sentencing guidelines recommended a life sentence for Michel, who they said “betrayed his country for money” and “lied unapologetically and unrelentingly to carry out his schemes”.
His sentence, they wrote, “should reflect the breadth and depth of his crimes, his indifference to the risks to his country, and the magnitude of his greed”.
The defence attorney Peter Zeidenberg said his client’s 14-year sentence was “completely disproportionate to the offence”. Michel will appeal against his conviction and sentence, according to his lawyer.
Zeidenberg had recommended a three-year prison sentence. A life sentence would be an “absurdly high” punishment for Michel given that it is typically reserved for deadly terrorists and drug cartel leaders, Michel’s attorneys said in a court filing.
“The government’s position is one that would cause Inspector Javert to recoil and, if anything, simply illustrates just how easily the guidelines can be manipulated to produce absurd results, and how poorly equipped they are, at least on this occasion, to determine a fair and just sentence,” they continued.
In the early 2010s, Low – now a fugitive believed to be hiding in China – used billions of dollars stolen from a Malaysian state investment fund known as 1MDB to invest in luxury US real estate, fine art and Hollywood films such as DiCaprio’s The Wolf of Wall Street. Low has maintained his innocence.
Michel was accused of helping Low secretly channel money into then president Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign via shell companies, hiding the donations’ origins.
Michel also tried to end a justice department investigation of Low, tampered with two witnesses and perjured himself at trial, prosecutors said.
Michel, originally from Brooklyn, founded the Fugees with his childhood friends Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean.
The group won two Grammy awards at the peak of their fame in the 1990s and sold tens of millions of albums.
In August 2024, the judge rejected Michel’s request for a new trial based in part on his defence attorney’s use of a generative AI program during his closing of the trial’s arguments. The judges said that and other trial errors did not amount to a serious miscarriage of justice.
Fuck that, when I bought Chrono Trigger for the SNES, I owned that game. I still own that game. Nintendo has not broken into my home to rescind my license to a physical cartridge that I purchased.
Ooh, yeah, forgot about those in the DLC, my statement applies to base game. Dolores I don't think matters enough to really care about, but Thollier's spike is actually very nasty if you know what you're doing with it, it does incredibly sick stance damage as well as mega-sleep. I did pick up the Velvet STS but with my regular STS already at +10 I don't think I bothered investing in it.
The Purple Lilies in the DLC are infinite they respawn in the south west tip of the map
Now THIS I did not know, that's great info. Thanks!
Carian Grandeur/Sovereignty was very excellent and carried me through more than a couple fights - mostly against giants - but a lot of times, finding the time and space to wind up the entire home run hit just isn't going to happen, in my experience. Especially if you, like me, did not build a muscle mage and can't trade a hit with anyone without turning into paste. I got more general purpose use out of Hoarfrost Stomp and, weirdly, Spinning Weapon. I did not respect Spinning Weapon even the slightest bit for a very long time but one day I figured out exactly how good it is at status and stagger proc and then it became one of my top 5 most used ashes. Slap it on any cold or bleed weapon and get free procs for days.
In fact so far as I know, St Trina's Sword and Torch are the only sources of limitless sleep in the game, all other sources require nonrenewable resources. And a lot more things are susceptible to sleep than you'd expect.
It also just does a boatload of damage with high INT scaling, I'm pretty sure it had the highest raw AR out of any straight sword I owned in that run. Even without the sleep effect it would be pushing top tier vs other straight swords, and with the unique sleep effect it just blows them out of the water.
Also also, it just looks cool as hell, one of my favorite straight sword designs in the entire game.
If I were to do the build again, though, and focus straight swords rather than focus DEX/INT and just happen to land on a straight sword, I'd probably build it to be either a guard counter or dual wielding build. A 1h SS doesn't do a whole lot for you in combat. It's not heavy enough to stagger people reliably and it's not high damage enough to just delete them before you have to worry about incoming damage. Guard counter solves the former and dual/powerstance solves the latter.
DMG is probably best in slot for an INT build but I mostly didn't use it as it felt against the spirit of the run. So I ran most of the game with the Crystal Straight Sword and/or St Trina's Sword. STS is extremely underrated, for the record.
Once I hit the DLC area I locked in on Milady and finished the rest of the game with that.
One of these days I'll get around to finishing Silksong. But my friend picked it up during my break and is now playing my copy so I'll probably wait until they're done to dive back in.
STR is just objectively the best Soulslike build, stagger is (by a long shot) the biggest factor in Fromsoft combat. In fact I forgot just how strong it was until I went back through Elden Ring trying to do an INT/DEX build.
You'd think that playing the build with built in ranged magic would be easier, but the lack of ability to stagger enemies out of their animations required a complete rewrite of the way I approached combat. With the STR build you can just happily unga-bunga your way through the whole game, not so with DEX.
It's a lost identity, is what it is. American conservatives will give you 4 different definitions of what conservatism is supposed to be, and leftists will give you an additional 6 more.
What it's supposed to be is a political counter to the progressivism of the left. Lefties push progressive rhetoric and the conservatives keep them in check to prevent them from blowing up the economy.
Except, in practice, we haven't had a conservative leader that actually knows the value of a dollar bill in (at least) over a century, even prior to that it was primarily the political party of "I want to keep slaves and I'm not going to let you stop me", and in the modern day it's been entirely co-opted by the Christian Church and its tireless quest to completely enslave every human being on the planet.
Get organized at the local level, create food pantries for affected workers, and pool money together for bills. The fact that we are so divided as a country that a mere thought of a community is seen as "communism."
... With what food and money? Serious question, I'm not trying to be an ass. If nobody has enough of their own savings, nobody is working because we're on strike, where are we getting this food and money with which to maintain our community?
I'm open to this idea, but myself and most everyone else in my local community are afraid for their lives and livelihoods. It would take us roughly around 3-6 weeks to become so resource starved that we either die, or return to laboring under probably a worse deal than we left in the first place. Six weeks of no income isn't even going to make a noticeable dent in the pocketbook of the Starbucks CEO.
There's some attempt to try and make it genuine, and there are guidelines around it to support that (e.g. 1 = barely noticeable, 3,4 = distracting, 5,6 = unignorable, 7,8 = prevents normal activities, 9 = prevents conversation)
But in practice you're going to get about one in every dozen patients who engages with this scale in good faith and you're going to get a number between 8-11 from everyone else.
Because people are scared. If you don't show up to work and cite "General strike" or "political protest" as your reason, you won't have a job when you return for 90% of people.
No job means no food and no home. SNAP/EBT are being cut so you can't rely on the social safety net to survive. Being homeless means you're free game to get snatched off the street and shipped to El Salvador in an unmarked van.
The average American is in a vise. Many federal workers now don't have much left to lose because they aren't being paid anyway, most everyone else is just trying to survive.
Hey I was that weirdo that down voted this, and I assure you it was by accident and I changed it now. I actually never got the chance to play Apocalypse and hot damn, I had no idea it was a whole sequel, I thought it was an expanded release in the same vein as a bunch of the Persona games have (P3->FES, P4->Golden, P5->Royal).
So, amending my statement, play SMTIV and then play Apoc.
Also, excuse me, I have some shopping I need to do.
I like your funny words, magic man