Allison Quinn

via VKThe widow of a Texas man who spent years aiding Russia’s war against Ukraine only to apparently get murdered by Russian troops is now appealing directly to Vladimir Putin to find his mutilated remains.Lyudmila Bentley, the wife of Dallas native turned Putin fanboy Russell Bentley, appeared in a new video Wednesday in which she speaks in front of a flag of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the unrecognized territory in eastern Ukraine where Bentley first joined forces with Russian proxies back in 2014.Bentley, who obtained Russian citizenship in 2020 and had been working closely with Kremlin-controlled media, was “abducted” earlier this month by Russian troops and later reported dead by local officials and the battalion with which he’d fought. RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan also confirmed his death, without providing details on how he died. Unconfirmed reports circulated among Russian military bloggers suggested Bentley had suffered a gruesome death at the hands of Russian troops who mistook him for a spy.Read more at The Daily Beast.

AFP via Getty A Russian lawmaker took to the stage of a forum on internet safety Tuesday and briefly lost it, complaining that the younger generation should be ashamed for valuing their lives too much.Alexei Zhuravlev, the first deputy chairman of the State Duma’s defense committee, seemed disappointed that more young Russians weren’t eager to be used as cannon fodder.“What if there’s a big war tomorrow? What if we go into battle tomorrow? Who will fight? Our generation has been raised for 30 years [like] ‘What is our main value? Life is the main value!’ From childhood I was taught: first I have a country, then my family and friends, then some of my values, and only then my own life,” he said, according to video of his remarks circulated in Russian media.Read more at The Daily Beast.

via VKThe tragicomic tale of a down-on-his-luck Texan who reinvented himself as a renegade war hero in a fake Russian republic took an unexpected turn this week when he was allegedly abducted by Russian troops—after apparently being accused of being a CIA spy.Russell Bentley, also known as “Texas,” is perhaps the last person one would expect to have pulled off cunning spycraft for the nearly 10 years he’s been living among Russian fighters in Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk region. A Dallas native with a conviction on drug charges back home, Bentley briefly seized international headlines back in 2014 when he was spotted in a cowboy hat with Russian fighters and spewing Kremlin propaganda about “Nazis” in Ukraine. He obtained Russian citizenship in 2020 after remodeling himself as a combat-vet-turned-“journalist” for Kremlin-controlled media.News of his disappearance earlier this month largely went under the radar until his wife, Lyudmila Bentley, went public Tuesday with claims he’d been snatched and taken hostage by Russian troops.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Getty Images A day after encouraging members of the public to “take matters into their own hands” to deal with peaceful protesters, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) is doubling down on his endorsement of mob violence.The Arkansas Republican shared a video on X on Tuesday morning of climate protesters who were blocking a road in France being grabbed and tossed on the side of the road by angry drivers. “How it should be done,” he captioned the video.Cotton was apparently unfazed by backlash he received over comments made a day earlier, when he said protesters who blocked part of the Golden Gate Bridge would’ve been tossed off the bridge if it had happened in Arkansas.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Jason Kempin/FilmMagic Conjoined twins who set a world record as the oldest with the rare phenomenon, and who were the first to identify as different genders, have died at the age of 62.Lori and George Schappell died at a hospital in Pennsylvania on April 7, according to their obituary. The craniopagus twins—joined at the head—shared 30 percent of their brains, but led drastically different careers and interests.“Dori had a career as a country singer, performing throughout the United States; and Lori is a trophy-winning bowler,” their obituary notes.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Emanuele Cremaschi/GettyA new slander trial against Amanda Knox began in Italy on Wednesday, almost a decade after her conviction for the murder of her 21-year-old British roommate was tossed out by the country’s highest court.Despite Italy’s Cassation Court finding in 2015 that Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, had not murdered Meredith Kercher in 2007—for which both had spent four years in prison—she has still taken flak over her slander conviction for wrongly accusing a Congolese bar owner of the murder. Knox has sought to have her slander conviction dropped in light of a European Court of Human Rights ruling in 2019 that found her rights had been violated during her interrogation.A retrial for her slander conviction was ordered by Italy’s top court last fall.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Evelyn Hockstein/ReutersThe Russian government has—without any evidence whatsoever—accused a Ukrainian energy company known for its ties to Hunter Biden of financing terrorist attacks.The Investigative Committee announced the startling claim in a press release Tuesday, accusing Burisma Holdings—where President Biden’s son once worked—of sponsoring terrorist attacks both “inside Russia and beyond its borders.” Although no mention was made of last month’s deadly attack on Crocus City Hall, the news comes after Russian authorities earlier this week claimed the perpetrators of that attack were hired by figures in Ukraine and, rather dubiously, promised payment in Russian rubles.Moscow is also now suggesting that certain unnamed U.S. officials may have been involved in funneling money to Burisma to finance terrorism in Russia, perhaps hoping to spark a few new Hunter Biden-related conspiracy theories ahead of the U.S. presidential election.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Ugra-TV / YouTube eA former Massachusetts city councilor who fled to Russia and joined the military there as he was due to stand trial in the U.S. on child pornography charges says he hopes to gain Russian citizenship.That’s according to an interview with a local TV station, in which he was quoted saying it’s “important” to him to obtain citizenship “and the benefits it brings.”“Insurance, pension, and other support measures. I’m grateful for the opportunity,” he was quoted telling Ugra-TV from a military registration office in Khanty-Mansiysk.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Getty Images More than two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, at least 187 Ukrainian children who were forcibly brought to Russia and made to become new “Russian citizens” are languishing in the country’s orphanage system, where they’ve been forced to undergo “patriotic” training and “tests for aggression,” according to a new report.A joint investigation by the independent Russian-language news outlets Verstka and iStories found a total of 285 children taken from Ukraine’s Donbas region listed in a Russian database. Some of them, however, have since aged out of the system, been (illegally) adopted into Russian families, or in rare cases, returned to their biological families.Several kids from a boarding school in Ukraine’s Donetsk region described being rounded up almost a week before Moscow’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.Read more at The Daily Beast.

via Facebook A New Jersey politician is facing calls to step down from his own party after he was accused of falsely claiming to have been a Navy SEAL.Sussex County Commissioner William Hayden, a Republican and fervent Trump supporter who is in his first term, was called out by the Sussex County Republican Committee in a scathing statement last week.“Commissioner Hayden has not been forthright regarding his military service and has demonstrated a lack of integrity in dealings with his supporters and colleagues since his election,” the committee said, accusing him of having “tarnished” the GOP’s reputation.Read more at The Daily Beast.