It’s hard to describe any New York team winning a championship in this century as an underdog story, but the Knicks seemed like a genuinely likeable team and it’s good for the NBA that its postseason has gotten much less chalky. On the other hand, it’s deeply regrettable that this guy had to win anything:

The Knicks assistants were told they would receive championship rings eventually, but many longtime employees at Madison Square Garden, including some who work in the Knicks’ business operations, will not receive rings at all, team sources told The Athletic. Typically, most employees for NBA teams receive rings, even if they are not as fancy and expensive as the ones the players receive.

Those Madison Square Garden employees got their hopes up at the end of September when the Knicks sent an email to a long list of employees, which gave recipients a first glimpse at their would-be championship rings. Atop the email, a copy of which The Athletic has obtained, was a graphic of two differently styled rings.

“Congratulations, your Employee Championship Ring is here,” the email read.

“(Employee name), this one is on the house. MSG is issuing a complimentary employee championship ring. The same jeweler, the same craftsmanship, personalized with your name. No cost to you.

“There are two designs to choose from: Championship Gold and Garden Classic. Reserve the one you want below.”

But the email was a fake-out, a phishing test Madison Square Garden sent to see if those employees would click, multiple team sources said.

Those who did click the link at the bottom of the message did not get to choose any jewelry; instead, they were forced to attend a mandatory cybersecurity class to help satisfy some of Dolan’s growing cybersecurity concerns, those team sources said.

Those unfamiliar with him can learn more about Dolan’s management techniques from this documentary.

The post Asshole even by the standards of pro sports owner outdoes itself appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

High Country News had a powerful story in their July issue about the creation of “man camps” in rural Alaska, all-male spaces in extremely remote mining campus, and the enormous epidemic of sexual assault that results enacted upon Native communities. The communities themselves are organizing against both individual incidents and organized trafficking.

THE MAHN CHOH MINE began operating in late 2023. During the permitting process earlier that year, Alaska Native advocates started preparing local communities for the coming influx of workers, most of whom would reside in man camps.

When Charles-Smith first learned about the mine, she began reaching out to tribal leaders near similar camps in neighboring Canada and the Lower 48 and contacting sexual assault prevention coalitions and organization. She read studies that focused on man camps and violence against Native communities. 

“There were horrific stories coming out … of Canada in relationship to mining man camps in proximity to tribes,” she said. 

The village got to work immediately, establishing a Native-led sexual assault response team that could provide onsite medical care and connect survivors to services. Community members received training on how to recognize and respond to human trafficking, and the village created a dedicated hotline for victims. 

“It’s the first Native-led sexual assault team in the state,” said Alan Faulkner, chief operating officer for Dot Lake Village. “We’ve got our number ready for anybody that is a victim — they can call, and we can respond and get them access to services.”

The training has already had tangible results. Last summer, the village received a report that two teenage girls were being trafficked near Manh Choh man camp, said Faulkner. Community members alerted village leaders who then alerted law enforcement, which quickly intervened.

“We have tried to make our tribal members aware of the dangers — to keep our staff updated and to know what the signs and symptoms are,” Faulkner said.

The people in charge of the mine carried out their own preparations. According to a statement provided to HCN on behalf of Kinross Alaska, the company took measures to ensure community concerns were heard.

“Since the early planning stages of the Manh Choh Mine, and as is standard practice at all projects and operations, Kinross met with and listened to nearby villages and communities to better understand their perspectives about potential social impacts associated with large industrial developments. This included increased alcohol-related crime, pressure on local law enforcement resources, and the social impacts that can accompany a predominantly male workforce operating near rural communities,” the company’s statement read.

According to the statement, the company made the man camp alcohol- and drug-free. Only authorized personnel were allowed onsite, and procedures were established for tracking personnel. The company also supported events that raise awareness of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women.

Faulkner said, however, that to his knowledge, neither the mine itself nor Kinross had reached out to Dot Lake or to Charles-Smith or to him for consultation.

Dot Lake Village decided to take matters into its own hands owing to the community’s rural location, which left residents vulnerable to outsiders.

HCN does really powerful reporting, especially in recent years when it became more a paper about the rural West than just environmental issues, and this is the kind of work that even someone like me, who pays a lot of attention, wouldn’t know about otherwise.

The post Man Camps appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Few things would make the schadenfreude flow like Bud Light at an Ohio State football game than for every single one of these crypto bros to end up broke:

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, said on Thursday that it had halted withdrawals after it was attacked by hackers who made off with more than $6 billion in digital coins, in what could be the biggest crypto heist in history.

The exact nature of the attack was not immediately clear. Binance’s founder, the crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao, said it “does look like a hack.” The company said it had temporarily suspended all deposits and withdrawals and that its customers would be made whole.

Binance said that it would cover all losses, estimated at about $6.3 billion. The company said that it had coordinated with other crypto firms to freeze about $3 billion in assets that were swept up in the hack.

The message “don’t worry we have enough of somebody’s real money to pay you back your fake money” achieves Zen-like levels of obscurity for me, but I’m an increasingly confused elderly person who doesn’t understand the world today.

The attack appeared to be the work of “North Korea’s elite hacking unit,” according to TRM Labs, a crypto research firm.. The attack on Binance was a stunning illustration of the risks of trading crypto, a renegade branch of finance. For years, the industry has sought mainstream respectability, pouring money into politics and earning the support of President Trump, who pledged to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” But the industry remains a wild west, vulnerable to hacks and fraud.

News of the security breach caused chaos in the crypto industry, which has faced a string of damaging cyberattacks over the years. In February 2025, Bybit, one of Binance’s top rivals, lost $1.5 billion to North Korean hackers — the largest crypto heist at the time. The Binance attack appears poised to top it.

Outlaw regime steals outlaw money sounds like a good Netflix series premise.

On social media, Mr. Zhao tried to steady nerves with a mix of soothing responses and prayer hand emojis. He suggested in a post on X that customers’ investments were safe because they were backed by an emergency reserve fund.

“It hurts, but we will survive,” Mr. Zhao wrote on Thursday evening.

He also spent time combating what he interpreted as trolling by X’s owner, the billionaire Elon Musk. After an X user compared Mr. Zhao’s statements about his customers’ deposits to the reassurances of Sam Bankman-Fried during the collapse of his crypto exchange, FTX, Mr. Musk responded with a grimacing emoji.

“Elon, have a lot of respect for you, but bad time to troll,” Mr. Zhao replied. He then noted that Binance had helped Mr. Musk in the past, investing $500 million in his acquisition of Twitter.

Insert let them fight meme here.

Binance has weathered years of legal and regulatory problems. In 2023, the company pleaded guilty to violating anti-money-laundering laws and paid $4.3 billion in penalties to the U.S. government. Mr. Zhao was sentenced to four months in federal prison.

After his release, Mr. Zhao received a pardon from President Trump. Binance has also forged a business relationship with the Trump family crypto business, World Liberty Financial, a major source of the president’s wealth.

I remember when this kind of thing would have been some sort of significant scandal for an American president. We’re obviously way past the concept of scandal even having any sort of applicability to Trump. He is the scandal.

The post Even me know that not real money appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Last week, following a full day of people thinking it might be too unfair to blame the Vivek Ramaswamy Ohio gubernatorial campaign for an ad featuring his opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother, the campaign came forward not just to take credit for the ad, but to announce their plans to drop $4 million to spread it far and wide. Because they thought it was like, a really good, really powerful ad.

And it has been! Just not in the way that Ramaswamy had hoped. Despite both Donald Trump and JD Vance backing the ad and promising everyone that it is good, actually, the ad was so bad and so damaging that public polls and leaked internal polls found him losing to Acton not long after it debuted.

Even Trump saying that it was unfair that anyone would suggest that the ad was anything other than a mother who hadn’t seen her child for 50 years testifying as an expert to the fact that she was lying about Vivek Ramaswamy, in particular, and nothing else? Well, that didn’t seem to help much, either.

Even people in his own party like Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Nikki Haley (who went so far as to say “he’s a bad guy”), and Nancy Mace have come out against the ad, probably realizing it could hurt them more than help him at this point. Even leaders in the biotech industry where Ramaswamy made his money have come out to tell him he needs to take it down and apologize to Acton.

Everyone who builds a company in our industry asks for trust: from patients who take an unproven medicine and from the people who fund and prescribe it. You asked for that trust when you built Roivant, and you received it. The obligations that come with it are simple. Follow the evidence. Never use the suffering of the people who depend on your judgment against them. Those obligations do not lapse when you file for office, and your advertisement violates both. […]

Consider the message. We work every day with people who have disclosed abuse, or an illness they spent years unable to speak about. Their willingness to seek help rests on a single promise: that their vulnerability will be met with respect. In pursuit of your political ambition, your advertisement attempts to shame a survivor of rape and deny the awful family trauma she experienced, as supported by overwhelming evidence. Anyone who has sat with a patient knows the harm in that message. You know it too.

Hell, Ramaswamy’s own 8th grade teacher and honor society advisor has even come forward to chastise him. A Trump advisor came forward anonymously to say they told him the ad was a bad idea before it ever ran.

It’s almost as though people think that kind of thing is pretty gross.

Ramaswamy has even found himself confronted on the campaign trail by people who think that, because of this ad and the other one featuring an actual pedophile, he might be interested in cheering for the pedos of America.

In the meantime, even more has come out about Cledith Arthur, the stepfather Acton accused of raping her until the age of 12. Like the indictment from when he was accused of raping his own daughter.

One of his other daughters has also come forward to back up Acton’s story about living in a tent and to say that she believes that he raped her, because he had raped her other, since-deceased sister Christine “more than once.”

“It was a terrible time for our family and it’s very hard to talk about it,” she told the Daily Mail. “My brother won’t say anything at all. It’s a nightmare for us to relive what happened in our family after all these years.”

“Christine was a wonderful person but she was very damaged by it,” she added. “It affected her. Our whole family was. Seeing it played out in this campaign and on TV has brought a lot of terrible memories back.”

Alas, it seems they only got to drop $1 million on promoting the ad, as they’ve pulled it for just no apparent reason following the bad polling. Ramaswamy told reporters that the ad “ran to completion.” So he’s pulling it, but not admitting that there was anything wrong with it or that they had to pull it since it was killing him and making him look like the terrible person he very obviously is. Surely, everyone will believe that this was the plan all along, even though it looks exactly as though he’s admitting it hasn’t worked out the way he’d hoped.

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If this tanks Ramaswamy’s campaign, it’s going to be a very big deal for Republicans. Donald Trump got elected despite, and probably even because of, all the horrible things he said about women. I don’t think anyone thought there were lines left to cross here, anything that could go too far. If Republicans have to now consider that there is a “too far” they could possibly go when it comes to being horrible to women, that could certainly make a few of them nervous about how to navigate 2028. Should they not call female reporters “pigs” or will people still find that charming?

What if Vivek loses and Max Miller, accused wife beater and Republican candidate to represent Ohio’s 7th District wins? Will it be determined that beating a woman is okay but siding with her rapist isn’t? Or vice versa if Vivek wins and he loses? How will future Republicans figure this out?

These are just very complicated issues, and a Republican candidate needs to learn the precise way to denigrate women that will earn him favor with the misogynists but still be something the pretend moderates can pretend to ignore and say they haven’t heard about.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

What’s more wondrous than towering spires on a building? Stained glass? Vaulted windows, or garden roofs? One word: Ghouls. Nothing jazzes up a normal old cathedral or mansion more than a mischievous face etched in stone, smiling (or, more likely, grimacing) at those passing below. Gargoyles and grotesques, in their own endearingly ugly way, are one of the best ways for architects to let their creations stand apart from the pack and inspire reflection for centuries to come.

While most of these creatures are made in a similar style, with recognizable bodily features, expressions, and poses, there are a handful around the globe that are unapologetically unique: sometimes familiar, sometimes offbeat, and always worth a closer look.

A Note on Gargoyles vs. Grotesques

Both are ornate stone figures carved into buildings; however, gargoyles also double as waterspouts to drain rainwater off a building, whereas grotesques are purely decorative.

1. Darth Vader Grotesque - Washington, D.C.

D.C.’s National Cathedral is the largest in the U.S. and the sixth largest in the world, but it has another, less obvious claim to fame: a small carving of Darth Vader among its spires. When the cathedral underwent constuction in the 1980s, it held a contest for schoolchildren to submit designs, and this infamous villain took third place, earning it a spot on the exterior. For the best view of the Dark Lord, grab your binoculars and head to the northwest parking lot. Near the top of the northwest tower, Vader is just above a large skull.

2. House with Chimaeras - Kyiv, Ukraine

Polish-Ukrainian architect Vladislav Gorodetsky, “the Gaudí, of Ukraine,” intended for this animal-themed building to be his permanent residence; however, he was forced to vacate it when his pocketbook ran dry. The house, located in Kyiv’s historic Lypky neighborhood, is right across the street from the Ukrainian president’s office and has been used for diplomatic ceremonies since 2005. Its gargoyles and grotesques were inspired by Gorodetsky’s love of hunting, and inside is even filled with stuffed versions of many of these same animals.

3. Plein Rond de Eik - Amersfoort, Netherlands

Architect Changiz Tehrani designed this mixed-use structure with 22 different WhatsApp emoji faces that stare out at passersby, including fan favorites like the smile, the wink, the heart eyes, the kissy face, and the winking face with tongue out. Tehrani drew inspiration from an Amsterdam building called “The House with the Heads,” which depicts the faces of six Greek gods.

4. The Policeman Grotesque - Carlisle, England

An officer who died in the line of duty is memorialized on the south-facing outer wall of Carlisle Cathedral, surprisingly inconspicuous beside the medieval gargoyles and grotesques. Police Constable George Russell’s stone likeness wears a helmet and star badge, marking his life’s dedication to service and safety. Russell is buried in Carlisle and also honored by a plaque at the Oxenholme Lake District railway station.

5. The Bull of Santa Maria del Fiore - Florence, Italy

Among the Duomo’s many easy-to-miss intricacies is this stone bull’s head facing Via Ricasoli and right over the Porta della mandorla, the door that allows one up into the grand dome. There are two explanations for the bull’s origin: One holds that it was the builders’ tribute to the draft animals used to construct the cathedral. The other (far more fun) theory is that a stonemason designed the bull to look straight into the shop of his girlfriend’s husband, a daily reminder that it was the stonemason she truly loved.

6. The Vampire Rabbit of Newcastle - Newcastle upon Tyne, England

For over a century, this deformed rabbit has sat at the back of St. Nicholas Cathedral, but no one can say why or how it came to be. Some say it represents the coming of spring (à la the Easter Bunny), whereas others insist it was built to scare away grave robbers. Still others believe the creature was intended to be a normal rabbit but, unfortunately, its ears were accidentally put on backward.

7. ‘Alien’ Gargoyle - Paisley, Scotland

When Paisley Abbey underwent renovations in 1993, 13 of its gargoyles were removed and replaced with updated versions, though one of the stonemasons on the job took some major creative liberties. His contribution to the facade looks strikingly like H.R. Giger's Xenomorph from the “Alien” franchise, though it’s never been confirmed whether this was his exact intention or a happy coincidence.

8. Park Grove Manor - Oak Park, Illinois

E.E. Roberts designed a number of homes in this sleepy Chicago suburb, working in styles that ranged from Victorian to Tudor to Prairie. Perhaps his most fanciful building, Park Grove Manor is adorned with playful, chubby-faced gargoyles and grotesques. Above the service entrances to the building are sculptures depicting an architect and a bricklayer, both of them amusingly cartoonish. This may have been Roberts becoming less self-serious in his older age, joyfully deriding the pretensions of modern architecture.

Leo Sands reports for the NY Times (archived) on the rediscovery of a forgotten recording from 1935:

In a doctor’s waiting room in Lafayette, La., Emma Benoit was puzzled: A bespectacled academic was there with a hulking machine that looked like a wooden closet. He wanted her to speak into it. The man was Lorenzo Dow Turner, a pioneering Black scholar of linguistics. He was crisscrossing southern Louisiana in the summer of 1935 with an enormous recording device that weighed 100 pounds and required at least two people to carry.

Ms. Benoit leaned toward the machine and began outlining the “passing of my life.” A 69-year-old widow, she was born in the ashes of the Civil War to a formerly enslaved mother and a white father. She spoke in Louisiana Creole, a language that only a few thousand people now use but was once the predominant one in parts of the state.

Nearly a century later, the machine’s aluminum disc recordings were analyzed and shared publicly on Friday for the first time. Oliver Mayeux, the Cambridge University linguist who found Ms. Benoit’s interview alongside 12 others from Dr. Turner’s trip, said they were the oldest known examples of someone speaking Louisiana Creole, also known as Kouri-Vini. (Older recordings exist, from 1934, but the language is sung rather than spoken.)

“The moment I heard these recordings, I knew that they would drastically change our understanding of this language,” Dr. Mayeux said. His research findings were published in the journal “Language Documentation and Description.”

(The LDD article is open access.) It’s great to be able to hear the recording; I was surprised at how much it sounds like regular French, but Sands covers that:

The rediscovered spoken recordings revealed that the language borrowed far more from French than was previously known, Dr. Mayeux said. They showed how speakers of Louisiana Creole readily threw in French grammatical forms and switched between the languages midflow.

(We covered Kouri-Vini back in 2023.) Thanks, Eric and Bonnie!