Jailed Former Billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky Sentence Review By Russian Supreme Court

  RT reports that in response to appeals filed by ex-Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his former business partner Platon Lebedev, the Russian Supreme Court has officially confirmed review proceedings will begin. On Tuesday court spokesman Pavel Odintsov told reporters, “Supreme Court Chairman Vyacheslav Lebedev, having looked into supervisory appeals filed by the defendants (Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev), overturned another Supreme Court judge’s ruling that rejected these appeals and ordered the start of review proceedings.”

  Quoting statements from Khodorkovsky’s defense lawyer Vadim Klyuvgant to Interfax on Tuesday, RT believes he hopes the Supreme Court chairman’s decision to begin an oversight inquiry into their clients’ complaints marks some headway in the case. “I have just learned that the Supreme Court chairman has made the decision to start an oversight inquiry into our complaints. I can only say one thing, this is either yet another special operation with the use of the court or the first step towards justice. I hope for the latter.” Khodorkovsky’s defense team remains cautiously optimistic as to what this latest event means for their client. The defense lawyer Klyuvgant also said, “We will see how the situation develops, and what the follow-up events and outcome will be. The decision alone does not tell us anything.” So if that sounds overly cautious when hearing positive statements from any Russian official then this could quite possibly be the first time you’ve ever read anything about a Russian government institution.

  Mikhail Khodorkovsky, 49, was arrested on October 25, 2003, and eventually sentenced to nine years in prison for tax fraud. Later, together with his business partner Platon Lebedev, they were found guilty on separate counts of embezzlement and money laundering. But as Raymond Chandler once insinuated in the pages of The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe detective novel, when extremely large sums are accumulated it’s hard to guess how much could come by completely honest means. However President Putin has found fit to not justify his own wealth before the legal system or Russian people, so what’s the real deal, Vladimir?

  Khodorkovsky was once ranked 16th on the Forbes list of billionaires and is scheduled to be released from prison in 2017 after a nine-year sentence. Having been arrested and jailed in 2003, one can wonder if the Russian legal system ever heard of, or pondered, the concept of time served? Vladimir?

7/25/2012

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Jailed Former Billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky Sentence Review By 
Russian Supreme Court

7/25/2012 concluded: Khodorkovsky was once ranked 16th on the Forbes list of billionaires and is scheduled to be released from prison in 2017 after a nine-year sentence. Having been arrested and jailed in 2003, one can wonder if the Russian legal system ever heard of, or pondered, the concept of time served? Vladimir?

May 8 - May 28, 2018

May 5, 2018

Dear Mr. President,

  Could we sit, at least briefly, as I've noticed your doing, publicly, whenever explaining how your time's spent, with someone your image's being profiled beside? People can be too intrusive, no? But without those excuses, heads of state can't competently bury their heads otherwise? 

  Besides all the power, and everything, your lifestyle's imaginably confining. Attention monotonous. Maybe you're immune, of course. Everyone's not as lucky as you. Everyone? Few are as lucky as you. While you're aware of what that means? Luck's made. Lottery's chance. But otherwise, luck's made. Strategies executed too.

  Ruthlessness is underestimated in the public forum. Abstractly resigned to the attribute, alarm to the consequences is diluted. Continued apace, momentum's accrued, making impossible the possibility that the networks of machinations and massive machinery could be curbed. Your position is power's iron-hand, regardless of flaws. Without responsibility for the immense collateral damage, beneath the office of a presidency. The separation of state protocol from reality. Because that general smirk, of yours, Mr. President, reflects an amusement with the general ethical compromises of rule, that, however much are your call, is not history's award passed verbatim. 

  Yes meanderingly broad's imprecise. But this conversation's purpose isn't for complaining about specifics, you ritualistic self-idolizing class adherent you. The regal façade's behind this one-sided exchange, and why we're kinda stuck in the middle with you and your, clamoring for blind obedience, fellow elitists, sir.  

  Though ruthlessness does rule every context, there should be a social obligation to have a court system that's not just, arbitrarily, commercially driven? What do I mean? What's avoided being seen? Because that's the huger canyon to span than understanding me. 

  I'd guess neither of us were invited to the Markles' wedding last weekend. Life in the publicity glare. You probably don't empathize. All the stature, good connections. Secured military career. Smiling and kissing babies and all the commendable things. You're probably jealous. Though you, like most others, have your Pilate's hands washed often, you're probably jealous of so much privilege without personally dirtying the hands. I hear the young man's probably planted food in Africa. What did you tell someone to do? 

  I'll give a gift too. For Prince and Princess Markle, Pages 287-288. Not a conventional wedding present. But we weren't invited, were we Mr. President? 

  Leverage-wise, your boxscore's strong with observers. Can't fix what's always been broken. Buncha finger pointers, right? What matters is on the ground facts. Control and controlled. Ethical behavior be damned? 

  Even you know there's a bridge over the exploitive madness. The question is why we're not past the nonsense of being sold that's the path we're on? 

THEY KNEELED

     Among the world's evils are self-righteous nationalism. Getting to the crux, let's question whether I'm loyal enough to my flag and country. Fiddlesticks. This is a soapbox, not pedestal. 

     Right. The National Football League owners own their game. Rah rah. I suppose, the thing to do, to appeal to that so treasured, medium of agreement, public approval, would be to explain how the NFL's locker room decision is at least close to a rational outcome resulting from the voices of the people. Some of whom only a short-time before were dancing on their privilege to extol the honorable confederate flag till this issue arose of football players symbolically renouncing the violence that had not only gone on long enough, BUT WAY TOO FAR. 

  Notice the politically social path's been just one piqued resentment following the next? But this locker room talk's had legs through these angry expressions of Americanism. When the kneeling protest was never about undermining what America will mean, but turning back the tide of nonsense. It's literally nonsense that the best defended group in America has to resort to offensive tactics to protect themselves. Man overboard? Everyone's overboard. The crap should end and why the problem facing that? The protest honored the flag, you bastards. Look what your defending honor facade made me say. They knelt before the flag. Stop using the flag to conceal denial.

     But by all means we should all stand behind a rickety president, (I'm offended to be confronted with saying that), who exalts sycophantic obedience as virtuous. And beyond that, coaxing a portion of the public through a vast denial of actual history. The shame. The shame. 

     But by all means, to tell the truth, or virtually any cliched expression could be inserted here. Such as in all honesty discuss the flag. Kneeling was respectful. Using the flag to cover America's inertia of not fully facing history, in its' totality, marks this time, really, as The Era of the Scapegoat. Some seriously ridiculous things happened in the past. But in what's become of the trend owned public consciousness, in this truly privileged elitist time, takes the cake. Marie Antionette's been reborn. I'm not proud. I'm ashamed of it all. 

The Soapbox View pursues the Twin Legacies

 Andy Rooney and I.F. Stone

New York City’s Lia Neal Pulls Herself To Next Plateau

  True, yesterday influences tomorrow. So today’s New York Times profile of Olympic freestyler Lia Neal and her family is more than just a feel-good promotional story leading up to the 2012 London Summer Olympics. By WILLIAM C. RHODEN, The Times tale begins with her father Rome Neal and how he could finally vocalize from the stage, while doing his one-man show honoring Thelonious Monk, that his daughter had indeed made the Olympics. Quote: “My daughter’s name is Lia Neal and she just made it to become an Olympic swimmer, and she’ll be swimming in the Olympics in 2012 in London, England, the 4×100 relay.” Because, “In the beginning, my wife was saying, ‘Keep it down, keep it down, we don’t want to jinx this thing. Don’t be talking so much about it to people.’ Now I can talk because the whole world is talking.”

  But despite our slow to mature society, the second African-American female to make the American Olympic Swim Team is no different from all the Olympians who’ll ever live because as significant an achievement in African-American progress as Ms. Neal’s feat symbolizes, what’s lost sight of is what’s always taught in swimming and understandably a little overlooked here. The race is against yourself, as Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte can no doubt attest how everyone is producing their peak performances now, and what Lia has done is what hasn’t been done in generations by anyone training full-time in a New York City pool.

  Because swimming was always a backwater event compared to America’s major subsidized sports, and California dominated for decades until Florida broke through by swimming full-time on the heels of the success of Winter Haven’s Rowdy Gaines. As had other local swimmers come before Maryland’s Olympics phenomenon. But what’s really noticed less than it should be, other than Lia’s Chinese heritage from her mother, Siu, is that Misters Michael Phelps and Daytona Beach, Florida’s Ryan Lochte owe their present economic successes to Title IX’s achievement that raised women’s sports profile and as a consequence men’s swimming. While our exclusionary society still uncomfortably embraces its’ past exclusivity that the sport of swimming can still also symbolize through its’ own economics as an elite country club sport as the Times and Huffington Post point to in chronicling Lia Neal’s leg up in the sport, bought with her parents’ time and a grant, described in more detail by the magazine USA Swimming, and provided by her local team, Asphalt Green.

  Go Lia! The only question that matters is how fast can you go?

LIA NEAL @ 2016 RIO OLYMPICS

Lia Neal.com

Meet the 2016 Olympic Swim Team: Lia Neal

7/16/2012

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New York City's Lia Neal Pulls Herself To Next Plateau

7/16/2012 concluded:   Because swimming was always a backwater event compared to America’s major subsidized sports, and California dominated for decades until Florida broke through by swimming full-time on the heels of the success of Winter Haven’s Rowdy Gaines. As had other local swimmers come before Maryland’s Olympics phenomenon. But what’s really noticed less than it should be, other than Lia’s Chinese heritage from her mother, Siu, is that Misters Michael Phelps and Daytona Beach, Florida’s Ryan Lochte owe their present economic successes to Title IX’s achievement that raised women’s sports profile and as a consequence men’s swimming. While our exclusionary society still uncomfortably embraces its’ past exclusivity that the sport of swimming can still also symbolize through its’ own economics as an elite country club sport as the Times and Huffington Post point to in chronicling Lia Neal’s leg up in the sport, bought with her parents’ time and a grant, described in more detail by the magazine USA Swimming, and provided by her local team, Asphalt Green.

Nov. 10 - Dec. 27, 2017

What I'd Ask Lia Neal

  1. I haven't. Have you swam in the East River or Hudson? 

  Even if I had lifted weights, I'd still have been less than half as fast as Lia Neal. I'm exaggerating to an extent, but not about perceptions. People, in general,  referencing the American Public, as it's so often characterized, are thought of as having a winner's mentality. Why second and third are made special on Olympic Platforms. 

  So publicly, concerning swimming, as with so many things. People are awed out of proportion, and recognition, by the Mark Spitz/Michael Phelps effect. Where quantity overshadows quality's accomplishments. They're all flying in the water at unbelievable rates.
  I had no sprint and couldn't hold up my end of our 400 free relay. I wanted it, but not enough. The great Swim Coach Tom Boniol, who trained my improvement, told me I'd never make that next level of good. And thinking while lifting weights just wasn't happening for me. 
  Eventually after committing to becoming a novelist, my facility for swimming distance went into carrying loads on a bike through long days for years. There was a lot to think about. It's true, if said, that swimming builds a person in special, self-reliant independent ways. A strength and command that translates through all the environments. 

SHS Swimming and Diving 2017 Girls AND Boys 

Seminole Athletic Conference Champions 

Jen Reviews - 8 Health Benefits of Swimming, According to Science, (+5 Tips to Help You Swim Better).

  Uh oh. I saw Michael Phelps on Argentina television in Buenos Aires. Showing photos of his extended arms holding all the medals as well. It really was a brilliant career. Even he had to say, answering a question, that he's curious to see what the next stage of his life entails. I'm paraphrasing. And of course he didn't choose the biographical photos, but,

  How about seeing how old you were when you could no longer win an Olympic medal? ...
  Now. To begin with ... . Mr. Phelps' appearance felt entirely out-of-the-blue. Just a traveling-through sports-promotional-tour. Just in, from out, I, in the kitchen, saw him standing between two Argentine celebrities. So, even before being asked the, specific, cheer Messi question, Mr. Phelps had already called the game of football, "soccer." Like it's unquestioningly acceptable for Americans' insistence American Football's name football be a cultural cornerstone. Malarkey. It's the world's game of football. 
  Words, in a sense, are all our imaginations have to work with. Mr. Phelps enjoyed repeating the word too much for my comfort. Speculating, it's more than just different cultures different language.  
  Soccer comes from the English word association. From when in the game's earliest days, association was the name for  an organized team sport. All in all, for one thing, though, touching the ball with your hands means American Football isn't football. 
  Argentina's transportation is commendable for not gouging it's customers/citizens. And like America, they lost comprehensive train transit from mobile throne worship. There's even more motorcycles than bikes in the big city. Status-ly propelled forward by a vague awareness we're all participating in a success, when speeding congestion creates the "mistakes" we scapegoat as "accidents."

  High top sneakers saved my ankle. I was astounded. Passing a sidewalk florist stand, a crevice swallowed, while the cliff held and ankle dropped in. Astounded, by how far, it was shock, the ankle hadn't quite reached damaged. Its' retrieval due to High-Tops that I'd given up for a long time, because of the freer mobile feeling. As they say, I was lucky. 
  But depending on luck's usually the mistake. The interior train system was sacrificed on the gamble the future's all about cars. Logical. Nice driving into your house. Check. 

  Still. We're supposed to have been smarter than less people pocketing the change?

I objected to the eventual four lane-ing of Orange Avenue, that was a vast stretch of noble oaks grown from an era following this photo. The train track remains a noble tourist trap near the lake. Guess that's something ... as they say.

   ...

  Morality's too hypocritical for reality's pace. Yet here we all are -

  What's stopping superficial culture's expansion?

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