Hasta La Gadget!

A squalid suspected puppy mill that one officer called the worst he had ever seen was raided in New Hampshire and 84 Great Danes were rescued, said law enforcement officials.

Owner Christina Ray, 60, was charged with two misdemeanor counts of animal neglect after police, animal control officers and personnel from the Humane Society of the United States on Friday freed dogs in cages and rounded up scores of others roaming sections of Ray’s dilapidated eight-bedroom mansion in Wolfeboro. Nine puppies were collected at another property.

The mansion was smeared everywhere with dog waste, said officials.

Some dogs were starving, with the outline of their bones poking from their fur, others were suffering from serious eye and skin infections. Many were frightened. There appeared to be no access to food and water for most of the dogs. A police department statement called the situation “abhorrent behavior toward animals for profit.” 

“I’ve never seen conditions this bad in more than 21 years of law enforcement,” said Chief Dean Rondeau of the Wolfeboro Police Department said in a statement. “Words cannot describe the absolute abhorrent conditions these animals were living in.”

A staff member of the Conway Humane Society, also on the scene of the rescue, called the conditions “disturbing,” adding: “My heart is broken for these dogs.”

Concerned citizens alerted investigators to the situation. “We applaud them for coming forward,” said the police statement.

The dogs ranged in age from puppies to older adults. Many of the mature animals are believed to be pregnant.

Police said Fay was selling puppies for $2,500 each at “De La Sang Monde” kennel. Her website featured photos of dogs posed outside what appeared to be an elegant mansion.

All of the dogs will be thoroughly examined by veterinarians and receive necessary medical treatment before they’re put up for adoption. They’re currently being held at a temporary emergency shelter. Nine dogs will likely soon be available for adoption, the police department said on its Facebook page.

An investigation is continuing and may result in other arrests, said police.

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Jupiter’s ancient name really is well-deserved: according to a new study, the king of the planets isn’t just the largest in the Solar System, it’s also the oldest. A team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and th…

The small island of Tangier, Virginia, which is vanishing due to rising waters, has surpassed an important community fundraising goal after Donald Trump told the mayor not to worry about increasing sea levels.

“He said, ‘Your island has been there for hundreds of years, and I believe your island will be there for hundreds more,” Tangier Mayor James “Ooker” Eskridge said Trump told him in a surprise phone call on Tuesday. The president said “not to worry about sea-level rise,” Eskridge added.

Tangier has lost nearly 70 percent of its land mass since 1850, losing up to nine acres each year. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers predicts rising waters and erosion will be so dire in 20 years— even fewer in the event of a major storm — that the remaining residents will be forced to abandon the Chesapeake Bay island. The population has already shrunk from 1,500 to 450.

The president reached out to Eskridge after a CNN report last week on the island’s threatened future and its charm. The local residents, deep in Trump country, were thrilled with the White House phone call and have used it and the media attention to build support for the one thing they believe can save them: a sea wall.

Tangier town council member Anna Pruitt-Parks launched a GoFundMe page to raise money to buy 550 copies of a documentary on the island, “Pieces of Tangier,” by filmmaker Jenny Roberts (whose own fundraising video appeal six years ago is shown above). The plan is to send the video to everyone in the House and Senate, as well as to Trump and Vice President Mike Pence in a bid to get the sea wall built. A letter would accompany the films, explaining “Tangier’s history, its current situation and detailing the help that is needed to save our Island home,” Pruitt-Parks noted on the GoFundMe pitch.

The campaign has so far raised nearly 30 percent more than its $3,200 goal.

“Looks like over 500 copies of ‘Pieces of Tangier’ are going to be sent to Congress!” read a post on the documentary’s Facebook page. “There is no pride like Tangier pride!”

The documentary examines the changing conditions swallowing up Tangier, as well as the way of life on one of the few island fishing communities in America.

Some 87 percent of Tangier’s population voted for Trump in the presidential election, but the president has said he believes climate change is a “hoax,” making him an unusual figure rally behind to save the island.

Tangier residents remain major Trump supporters; Eskridge says he loves Trump as “much as a member of my family.” But if the president could help build Tangier a wall — in the sea — islanders would be even happier.

The mayor told CNN that he appealed to Trump to help with funding a wall and is trying to arrange a trip to Washington to meet with the president.

“They talk about a wall, we’ll take a wall,” Eskridge told CNN. “We’d like to have a wall all the way around Tangier. We’d love a wall.”

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If you shopped at Buckle in the past several months, you might want to check your financial statements — the clothing store has confirmed a Krebs on Security report of a data breach. Intruders planted malware on the chain’s cash register systems to…

As Megyn Kelly and NBC News face a firestorm over her interview with InfoWars’ Alex Jones, unedited footage from her recent interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin shows a nervous Kelly who asked the authoritarian leader softball questions and failed to hold him accountable on key topics. Most troubling, Kelly devoted precious time in her short interview to a question that led one former CIA Russia analyst to say that it sounded as if Putin had written the question himself.

In the full, unedited discussion, obtained by HuffPost, Kelly repeatedly fails to interrupt the Russian president while he rambles in his responses. She also asks Putin questions he can easily dispute.

The last question Kelly asked Putin, which was not aired, was startling in its pandering. “We have been here in St. Petersburg for about a week now. And virtually every person we have met on the street says what they respect about you is they feel that you have returned dignity to Russia, that you’ve returned Russia to a place of respect. You’ve been in the leadership of this country for 17 years now. Has it taken any sort of personal toll on you?”

A former CIA Russia analyst who spoke to HuffPost was taken aback by the last question Kelly asked. “I can’t begin to tell you what this did for Putin’s ego, and I wouldn’t put it past the Kremlin to use it for propaganda purposes. Putin’s obsession is, by his definition, making Russia great again. He’s obsessed with the idea that he has returned the country to what he sees as the glory days of the USSR. He feels that since the breakup of the USSR, Russia has too often ceded ground where it shouldn’t have. And he’s obsessed with people seeing him as the one who brought dignity back to Russia.”

Kelly’s Putin interview and her upcoming Alex Jones interview have led many to wonder if NBC has gone over its skis by placing Kelly in a position to interview tough subjects. Jones has propagated conspiracy theories about both 9/11 and the Sandy Hook massacre, and has doubled down on those positions in previous interviews.

In Putin’s case, Kelly had just 20 minutes with the de-facto dictator. If a reporter interviews a subject for hours, he or she might ask more personal questions in order to get the subject to relax. But Kelly needed to hit key questions quickly.

She didn’t. At no point in the unedited footage did Kelly ask Putin about the imprisonment, torture and murder of gay men in the Chechen Republic. She didn’t ask him about his incursion into Ukraine. She didn’t pointedly ask him, using specific names, about journalists and critics who have been murdered or imprisoned. (She included human rights concerns in a long question, but Putin successfully pivoted in his response.)

I can’t begin to tell you what this did for Putin’s ego, and I wouldn’t put it past the Kremlin to use it for propaganda purposes.
A former CIA Russia analyst on Megyn Kelly’s last question for Russian President Vladimir Putin

Kelly didn’t ask questions that could have pierced Putin’s armor and offered some clue as to his thinking. For example, she could have asked him what he thought of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Specifically, she could have asked Putin what he thought about Clinton’s comments with respect to the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections. The American intelligence community has confirmed that Putin ordered an intrusion into the American election partially as payback for Clinton questioning the legitimacy of the 2011 Russia parliamentary elections, which led to protests.

Kelly also didn’t ask questions about Putin’s family. For example, she didn’t ask Putin how his ex-wife can reportedly afford a $7 million villa in Biarritz, France, when she appears on paper to have no wealth and her husband is the director of a nonprofit.

Kelly did ask more nuanced, detailed questions when she moderated a plenary between Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the St. Petersburg International Economic forum. (MSNBC and CNBC both aired footage from the plenary.) But even then, some of her inquires were surprising. For example, Kelly asked the Russian leader whether U.S. sanctions against his country “hurt more than helped.”

At Fox News, Kelly was known for hosting a panel-style program, and she has never served as a foreign affairs reporter. And certainly, interviewing a head of state from an authoritarian regime is a different experience from interviewing a U.S. member of Congress or a political pundit.

But Kelly’s questions were so weak and she missed so many opportunities that several network news reporters asked HuffPost the unthinkable: “Did NBC News, in their negotiations with the Kremlin, agree to terms and conditions on questions or topics?” No major news organization would ever agree to conditions limiting topics or questions. A well-placed source at NBC News confirmed to HuffPost that there were no conditions. A spokesman for NBC News declined to comment on Kelly’s choice of questions.

Two sources with knowledge of the preparation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the internal team that helped Kelly prepare for the interview with Putin included, but wasn’t limited to, NBC News Chairman Andy Lack, NBC News President Noah Oppenheim, “Sunday Night” Executive Producer Liz Cole and NBC News executives David Corvo and David Verdi. According to one well-placed source, Kelly also spoke to five prominent Russia experts in advance of her interview.

Lack has told reporters that he is playing the long game with Kelly, and he knows there may not be an immediate payoff with respect to ratings. But unforced errors like the Alex Jones interview have led multiple sources at NBC News to wonder if Lack misjudged Kelly’s skill set, popularity and savvy as a reporter.

In advance of the airing of his interview with Kelly, Jones released audio he secretly recorded of their conversations. In it, she says, “It’s not going to be some gotcha hit piece, I can promise you that.” She also tells Jones she finds him “fascinating.”

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