"A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced an heir to the Seagram's liquor fortune to 81 months behind bars for providing financial support to the NXIVM sex cult.The penalty handed down to Clare Bronfman, the 41-year-old daughter of late philanthropist and Seagram's CEO Edgar Bronfman, was more than the five years sought by prosecutors in the disturbing case.Bronfman admitted in a guilty plea last year that she harbored someone who was living in the U.S. illegally for unpaid "labor and services" and that she committed credit card fraud on behalf of Keith Raniere, who was convicted last year of turning women in his group into sex slaves who were branded with his initials."Bronfman twisted our immigration system to serve a reprehensible agenda, and engaged in flagrant fraud to the detriment of her victims and in the service of a corrupt endeavor," Acting U.S. Attorney Seth DuCharme said in a statement."With today's sentence, she has been held accountable for her crimes."Prosecutors had wanted U.S. District Court Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis to sentence Bronfman to five years in prison, arguing that her financial support was the underpinning of the group NXIVM, pronounced "nexium."She gave tens of millions of dollars to NXIVM, which operated a program of intense self-improvement classes."
"A member of a white supremacist gang has been shot dead by police in California after ambushing deputies who were pursuing him through a cemetery.San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson confirmed in a press conference that the man, who has not been identified, was killed by deputies in Templeton on Thursday morning after he shot an officer in the leg who was chasing him."
"In 2010, Jeff Rodgers and his wife, Patti, decided to try selling the weight-loss products of Herbalife Nutrition . At training events, the distributors atop the company's layers of independent sellers bragged of their rich earnings. So, Patti Rodgers says, she and her husband cashed out their retirement accounts to fund a few storefront sales locations—where Jeff worked days, and Patti, evenings and weekends, around her job as a teacher of disabled preschoolers. To ensure success, they paid to attend more than 50 Herbalife training events led by the top distributors.By 2015, Patti Rodgers says, they'd lost more than $100,000 chasing the Herbalife dream. They ran out of money for Jeff's cancer treatments, she adds, before he died in April of this year."I've lost so much," she says.In multilevel sales, early salespeople recruit other salespeople, who recruit recruits—all hoping to make money on the commissions of those down the line. Recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that Patti could proceed with a federal lawsuit against 44 top-level Herbalife distributors. In the suit, for which she's seeking class-action status, she claims they deceived new recruits."
"The TM organization has for almost a half-century now denied the religious nature of its methods and doctrine, almost to the point of absurdity. The fact of the matter is that almost all of the TM promotional material - books, websites, the content of introductory lectures - is littered with various synonyms for, what people in much of the world call "God." More specifically, the underlying system is that of a Vedic, or Hindu, cosmology, and there's a central concept of supreme divinity or ultimate reality in the TM subculture that they repeat under many alternate names."
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