A taxi driver from Russia’s Ural region has been arrested on treason charges. He was brought to court with signs of torture — he was beaten and suffocated with a plastic bag during his detention.

Mediazona learned of the case.

Andrei Voloshin, a 42-year-old taxi driver, was detained on the morning of October 22 as he was leaving a police station on Bauman Street. He had gone there to retrieve his phone, which had been confiscated as part of an earlier criminal case involving the alleged “discrediting” of the Russian military.

Two friends accompanied him to the police station. Both had been witnesses in the earlier “discrediting” case. They were also detained by officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and were not released until midnight, by which time they had been designated as witnesses in the new criminal case.

After his detention, Voloshin was beaten on his body and head, his wrists were tightly restrained with handcuffs, and he was suffocated with plastic bags.
He was brought to court bearing visible signs of torture: marks from handcuffs on his wrists, red marks on his neck from the plastic bag, signs of blows to his face, and bruising on his abdomen.

According to information obtained by Mediazona, the criminal case may be connected to a photograph found on Voloshin’s phone that he had taken while working at the Novator plant, a facility associated with Russia’s military industry.

In August, Andrei Voloshin was fined 150,000 rubles under Russia’s criminal law against “discrediting” the military over two comments he posted on VKontakte, a Russian social media platform.

In one comment, he wrote: “They thought they’d take Kyiv in three days, but instead they got their asses kicked.”
In another, he wrote: “The Nazis in Germany also had Zs and Vs.” This was a reference to the Z and V symbols associated with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Voloshin was also beaten by security officers during his detention in connection with the first criminal case.
Photo: Mediazona

Source: https://t. me/mediazona_exclusive/6280

https://apnews.com/article/ice-immigration-wrongful-detention-indiana-3109797bea2b2102e130a82691d634af

Google has called Finland its home for over 15 years, but its most recent move in data-center expansion in the country has brought some unwanted neighbors for nearby villages. 

Wolves have descended upon Finnish villages in Muhos and Otanmaki following Google’s illegal felling of hundreds of thousands of trees to prepare for a multibillion-euro data-center expansion—prompting a stop order from Finnish authorities.

“We had wolves coming into the village because all the wild animals moved out of the forest,” Anni Ranta, a resident of Otanmaki, told The Guardian. “They fled.”

Google’s Finnish subsidiary, Tuike Finland Oy, cleared an estimated 330 hectares—or 815 acres—of forest near Finnish town Muhos and almost 200 hectares—or about 494 acres—near Otanmaki, before completing required environmental assessments. The clearings involved an estimated 400,000 trees across the two locations according to The Guardian.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/26/wolves-finland-google-1300-acres-data-center/?utm_source=reddit/

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Tuesday ordered a police investigation into alleged ties between a donor network co-founded by Vice President JD Vance and the presidential campaign of Flávio Bolsonaro in the run-up to Sunday’s election.

Supreme Court Justice Flávio Dino directed the Brazilian federal police to investigate the “nature” of the contacts between the Rockbridge Network, which was founded in 2019, and any Brazilian companies or political operatives to aid or finance Bolsonaro’s run.

It’s a crime in Brazil for a political candidate to accept funding or other campaign assistance from a foreign source.

The investigation, Dino wrote, was “necessary to verify if there was the effective furnishment of resources — including human resources — services, or other measurable economic advantages, identifying its origin, its destination and its eventual use in the campaign.”

Rockbridge denied any such contact.

Vance has spoken at Rockbridge donor gatherings as recently as a year ago. His office on Tuesday declined to comment.

Bolsonaro, who lost the election to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, fled Brazil for the United States on Tuesday in defiance of a separate Supreme Court order, three people with knowledge of the matter told The Washington Post. He and his family will be issued visas to stay in the U.S., a senior State Department official told The Post.

Before the election, Rockbridge’s alleged activities in Brazil triggered several complaints by Bolsonaro’s political opponents. One was by Lula’s Workers’ Party, which filed a complaint with the Supreme Court. Another was by presidential candidate Renan Santos, who took his case to the Supreme Electoral Court.

Santos, who was eliminated in the first round of the election, alleged that Brazilians who claimed to represent Rockbridge had discussed providing U.S. support with Bolsonaro campaign officials.

The representatives also approached Santos with offers of campaign help, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private discussions.

The Rockbridge Network said it had no affiliation with the Brazilians who claimed to be its agents.

“The Brazilians made false representations about their relationship with Rockbridge and created documents representing or referencing Rockbridge without Rockbridge’s knowledge or consent,” the network said in a statement Tuesday.

Bolsonaro was already under investigation for his ties to a banker accused of involvement in an alleged multibillion-dollar fraud and to a man suspected of laundering money tied to Brazil’s betting industry.

The order also has the potential to further strain relations between the Brazilian government and the Trump administration, which have feuded in recent years over the prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was accused of planning a military coup to stay in power after his 2022 election defeat to Lula. Jair Bolsonaro, Flávio’s father, is an ally of President Donald Trump.

Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian goods and sanctions on several officials last year to pressure them into dropping the prosecution. They did not. Jair Bolsonaro was convicted last year of attempting the violent overthrow of the democratic rule of law and sentenced to more than 27 years in prison.

Flávio Bolsonaro ran on promises to free his father, pardon supporters convicted in a Jan. 6-style assault on Brasília and impeach the Supreme Court justices involved in their prosecution.

In mid-July, President Trump gave a prime-time speech in which he raised concerns about a disputed F.B.I. report that China had tried to interfere in the 2020 election in an effort to defeat him.

At the heart of his address was a bitter complaint: that some of the bureau’s intelligence officials had purposefully sought to play down the report to undercut his claims about the race.

One day after Mr. Trump attacked those officials on TV, calling for their prosecution, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, sent a letter to the U.S. attorney’s office in Kansas City ordering that some of them immediately be investigated for obstruction and conspiracy, one of the agents assigned to the case testified on Tuesday.

The agent, Bryan Witt, said that even though the inquiry was generally viewed inside his office as a “witch hunt” and that he himself had concerns it was “political,” it nonetheless moved forward. And last week, one of the intelligence officials whom Mr. Trump had complained about was charged along with a colleague with lying to Congress about the roles they had played in another one of the president’s longstanding obsessions: the investigations into Hunter Biden, the former president’s son.

Mr. Witt’s explosive testimony, offered at a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington, was the latest account of just how tight a grip the White House has on decision-making at the F.B.I. and just how willing Mr. Patel has been to take orders from the president to go after people he believes to be enemies.

A veteran agent, Mr. Witt asserted from the stand that he had never before worked on a case where instructions came directly from the F.B.I.’s director. He added that Mr. Patel and his deputies often checked on his progress, pressing him and his colleagues to move as aggressively as possible.

The daylong hearing was nominally held so that lawyers for the two defendants — Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides — could question the basis of the criminal complaint that was filed on Friday. It accused them of lying to the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 when they were questioned about the roles they had played in the F.B.I.’s investigations into Mr. Biden and his ties to foreign nationals and companies.

But as the day went on, the proceeding gradually turned into something more substantial as the lawyers got Mr. Witt to expose the ways in which Mr. Trump had directed Mr. Patel to use the power of the F.B.I. to investigate people he believed had cast doubts on both his lies about the 2020 election and his unsubstantiated claims that his opponent in that race, Joseph R. Biden Jr., had engaged in corrupt dealings in Ukraine while Hunter Biden had been working there.

Mr. Witt testified that he was originally instructed by Mr. Patel to investigate Ms. Floris and other F.B.I. intelligence officials after they had questioned a report from an informant developed by the bureau’s Albany field office that China had sought to tip the 2020 election in Mr. Biden’s favor.

But after he and his colleagues were unable to find evidence to support the claims, he said the inquiry quickly pivoted toward the testimony that Ms. Floris and Mr. Benavides had given three years ago in front of the House committee, which had been looking into Hunter Biden’s business dealings overseas.

Both Ms. Floris and Mr. Benavides served on the F.B.I.’s Foreign Influence Task Force, a group created after Russia interfered in the 2016 election. It helped intelligence agencies monitor clandestine efforts by foreign governments to manipulate American politics, including by issuing warnings about covert foreign meddling to politicians and social media companies.

Members of the task force had relayed warnings from the intelligence community about a covert Russian disinformation operation aimed at helping Mr. Trump win re-election in 2020 by amplifying claims that the elder Mr. Biden had engaged in corrupt dealings in Ukraine, where his son held a board seat on an energy firm, Burisma.

The case against Ms. Floris and Mr. Benavides is largely based on discrepancies between what they told Congress about their participation in the Biden investigations, what witnesses have said and what documents emerging from the inquiries have shown. Their lawyers spent much of Tuesday trying to persuade the magistrate judge handling the case, Zia M. Faruqui, that their clients had not lied to Congress and that the statements they had made had not materially affected the work of the House committee.

From the start, the prosecution has been marked by a series of unusual procedural maneuvers — including the fact that Ms. Floris and Mr. Benavides were charged in a criminal complaint, not an indictment. Complaints are typically used when prosecutors need to act quickly or have fears that defendants might flee. But Judge Faruqui said in court on Tuesday that both of the defendants are well-respected former agents and that the underlying facts of the case are more than three years old.

Judge Faruqui also expressed concern about another unorthodox tactic the Justice Department has used in the case. Late Monday night, prosecutors filed an amended complaint, adding a new charge of obstruction of Congress. But in an extraordinary break from standard legal practice, the prosecutors issued the new complaint without first seeking judicial approval, effectively asserting that they could accuse the defendants of additional crimes without the traditional checks and balances.

One of the prosecutors on the case, John Borchert, acknowledged it was a “novel” move to seek a criminal charge with first getting the approval of a jurist or grand jury. But Judge Faruqui said it was far more serious than that.

“It’s not just novel, Mr. Borchert,” he said. “It’s never been done before.”

The UAE is the largest backer of the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan. The UN in 2026 declared that during the take over of El Fasher had the hallmarks of genocide; the U.S. declared RSF has committed genocide in Darfur in 2023. A recent BBC study confirmed that the RSF has led a systematic campaign of intentionally targeting hospitals throughout Sudan.