#T.S. Ellis

[acidblum]

BABYSITTER!VI AO3

✦;𝐠!𝐩. ✶;𝐬𝐦𝐮𝐭. ꩜;𝐟𝐥𝐮𝐟𝐟. ♱;𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐬𝐭.

— TLOU ☆ Cold • A.A. • ii [✶,♱] ☆ i see you T.S. [✶]

— Headcanons ☆ dealer!ellie [꩜] ☆ dbf!tess [✶] ☆ pirate!ellie [꩜]

— Blurbs ☆ bodybuilder!abby [꩜] ☆ professor!abby ☆ jock!abby ☆ angst!ellie — Series ☆ Torn Apart • i

☆ Яitual • i, ii, iii

— ARCANE ☆ kitchen • S. (tba)

— Blurbs

☆ quickie • sevika [✶] ☆ shower • sevika [✶] ☆ sag!sevika ☆ rugger!sevika [✦] ☆ fighting for dominance!sevika [✦] ☆ tribbing • caitlyn [✶] ☆ bdsm • ambessa [✶]

☆ boob job • caitlyn [✦]

☆ sub!top cowboy!sevika [✶]

— Drabbles

☆ good ol’ alleyway • biker!sevika [✶]

[sugarbcnes]

Would abby/ellie go with their girlfriends to the Eras Tour and how would it go Lol

This is so cute lol! I definitely think both of them would go but each a little different than the other. for all my swiftie babies.

─── ✫ Abby and Ellie vs. The Taylor Swift Eras Tour

Abby would definitely be the more enthusiastic of the two.

She’s letting you plan the matching outfits, not fussed as she sees you bringing to life your pinterest board of inspiration that have you crafting with sparkling rhinestones, glitter and hearts. She kind of loves the cowboy aesthetic; letting you dress-up her outfit of a simple white wifebeater with a pink bandana around her neck, a fuzzy cowgirl hat and glitter across her freckled broad shoulders. The stares from other girls don’t go unnoticed by you, the row behind giggling as she stays oblivious to it and continues to rummage curiously through your merch bag.

She doesn’t know many of the songs apart from the popular ones. Actually, she knows a lot of the songs but none of the lyrics, just remembering them by melodies from when you’ve played them in the car. She holds you extra tight during ‘Enchanted’, smiling down at you with pure love in her eyes as you belt the lyrics, encircled by her arms around your waist. She knows how much you love this song and how much sentiment it has so she decides not to take that from you and keeps the engagement ring box hidden in her back pocket.

The girls behind have moved on from jealousy to utter awe as they watch her be completely captivated by your pure state of excitement.

Ellie isn’t mad that you’re dragging her to the concert but let’s just say, she isn’t as excited as you are.

She’s grateful you didn’t force her to wear an over the top outfit, knowing that she would not enjoy that. She’s probably wearing a tour shirt with black jeans and her boots or a white “I ❤️ T.S” Tee.

The opening act hasn’t even started and she’s already getting up to get a beer.

She only really knows the popular songs and she would never admit it — but she tried her hardest to educate herself on the lyrics to your favorite songs like 2 days before the concert. She’s humming to the music, drink in one hand and her other on your waist as she sways slowly. During ‘Lover’ specifically, she’s smiling down at you as your eyes twinkle. She leans down, placing a soft kiss on your lips, holding you tightly by the waist.

She also brings her cameras — her film camera and her digital one. She’s grinning as she sits on the hotel bed after the show; rolling through the candids she has of you on the digital camera. She jitters with excitement and she can’t wait to get her film developed, thinking about that photo of the kiss you shared during your favorite song.

She enjoyed herself a lot more than she thought she would but she’d never admit that to you. She also definitely made friends with the mom next to her.

[femperor]

If the name T.S. Ellie is available I'll start doing drag

[dankusner]

JURY — JP appeal, CC-22-05097-A, not redacted

Let’s empower jurors to halt an injustice

“Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime,” said Lavrentiy Beria, the ruthless, long-serving secret police chief in Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union who bragged that he could prove anyone guilty of criminal conduct, even the innocent.

But that could just as easily have come from President Donald Trump.

Through a series of flagrantly unconstitutional executive orders, Trump has sought to silence the opposition.

This culminated with an executive order demanding that the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security investigate former administration officials who pushed back against Trump’s frivolous claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

The Framers understood the danger of a despotic regime and regarded the criminal jury trial as a key procedural safeguard to help ensure that only those acts and individuals society deemed truly culpable result in criminal punishment.

This is of particular importance today — in a nation plagued by rampant overcriminalization and coercive plea bargaining — where often all that stands between us and a criminal record is a prosecutor’s decision to charge.

Though citizen jury trials are the best our system has to offer, they’re only as effective as the information jurors receive.

In 2019, Paul St. Louis penned a haunting confession in The Washington Post: As a juror in a 2018 federal drug trial, he helped send then-37-year-old, low-level drug dealer Frederick Turner to prison for 40 years — a sentence that shocked St. Louis and soon resulted in Turner’s premature death behind bars.

“I wasn’t aware of the concept of jury nullification,” St. Louis told my colleague who recently interviewed him for the Cato Institute’s Free Society magazine.

“If I could go back in time, and if I knew Turner faced 40 years, I would nullify.”

Even U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis bristled at the mandatory 40-year term and lamented that he had “no discretion to change the punishment” because of a combination of mandatory minimums and stacked charges.

As a juror, however, St. Louis did have a choice — one that judges and prosecutors go to considerable lengths to ensure juries don’t exercise.

St. Louis didn’t know at the time that he didn’t have to vote to convict, regardless of how strong the government’s case against Turner may have been.

That’s because jurors in our system have the unquestioned power to acquit factually guilty defendants to prevent injustice, including the imposition of horrific trial penalties such as the one inflicted on Turner.

St. Louis could have asked what sentence would be imposed if Turner were convicted and what collateral consequences, such as permanent loss of certain civil rights, might also occur.

And if that information were not forthcoming — as it most likely would not be — then he could draw whatever inference he wished from the refusal to provide such basic information, which would be available to anyone who cared to look it up.

With countless examples like St. Louis, Congress should consider legislation to help empower criminal juries to exercise their full measure of powers and prerogatives and better equip them to play their historic injustice-preventing role in our breathtakingly punitive criminal justice system.

They could call it the Judicial Undermining Rights Originally Recognized (JUROR) Act.

The act would codify the institution of jury independence in statute by requiring federal judges to inform jurors of their historical powers and duties, including the prerogative to not only acquit against the evidence but also to ask questions and draw inferences based on how their questions are answered or ignored.

Additionally, the act would ensure that judges apprise jurors that they are not obliged to accept the judge’s interpretation of the law.

Had this law been in effect at the time, St. Louis could have asked, reasoned and acted — potentially saving Turner’s life.

At the founding, criminal jurors weren’t relegated to the role of mere fact-finders, as they are today.

Historically, the institution of jury independence, which includes but is not limited to the power to acquit against the evidence, played a vital role in assessing the wisdom, fairness and legitimacy of a given prosecution.

Founding-era jurors were tasked not just with finding facts but also with preventing injustice.

Jurors could acquit factually guilty defendants if they perceived a law as immoral as applied to a specific case or if they considered the sentence disproportionate to the wrongfulness of the crime.

Independent jurors can blunt the force of immoral laws and arbitrary prosecutions by refusing to subject their neighbors to unjust laws or overtly cruel punishment.

The institution of jury independence is nothing new.

In 1735, dissident publisher John Peter Zenger was charged with seditious libel for criticizing New York’s royal governor.

A New York jury acquitted Zenger in what came to be a celebrated early example of so-called jury nullification in the New World.

Whether protecting dissident publishers such as Zenger from politically motivated prosecutions or acquitting abolitionists prosecuted for delivering fellow human beings from bondage under the Fugitive Slave Act, jurors acquitted against the evidence without controversy before, during and after the founding to shield victims of an excessively punitive government.

Just as Zenger’s jury defied a tyrannical governor, St. Louis likely would have defied an overly harsh drug law and blatant prosecutorial overcharging if only he’d known he could.

The JUROR Act could ensure that future federal criminal jurors are cognizant of their historic powers and duties — allowing jurors to serve as guardians against unjust laws, precisely as the Framers intended.

[how2fit]

April is finally here. With warmth, longer days and nature all around us reviving and starting to blossom. It’s a time of new beginnings. Of new hope. And of new energy to go after your goals and dreams. In today’s post I’d simply like to share 85 of the most inspirational, positive and funny short April quotes. I hope you’ll find something here that’ll help you to appreciate April a little extra this year and to have a wonderful and a less stressful month. Short Positive April Quotes to Welcome This Spring Month “April is the sweetest month of the year, the mellow season of rebirth and renewal.” – Mary Sojourner “No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it.” – Hal Borland “Where flowers bloom so does hope.” – Lady Bird Johnson “The first blooms of spring always make my heart sing.” – S. Brown “Happiness? The color of it must be spring green.” – Frances Mayes “Sweet April showers do bring May flowers.” – Thomas Tusser “April hath put a spirit of youth in everything.” – William Shakespeare “Spring is when life’s alive in everything.” – Christina Rossetti “The earth laughs in flowers.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson “April brings the primrose sweet, scatters daisies at our feet.” – Sara Coleridge “I shine in tears like the sun in April.” – Cyril Tourneur “Spring will come and so will happiness. Hold on. Life will get warmer.” – Anita Krizzan “April is a reminder that life is a beautiful, ever-renewing cycle.” – E.E. Cummings “Sweet April’s tears dead on the hem of May.” – Alexander Smith “The beautiful spring came, and when nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.” – Harriet Ann Jacobs “Spring makes its own statement, so loud and clear that the gardener seems to be only one of the instruments, not the composer.” – Geoffrey B. Charlesworth “April is a promise of what’s to come.” – Gladys Taber Short Motivational April Quotes for Work “Spring is the time of plans and projects.” – Leo Tolstoy “Despite the forecast, live like it’s spring.” – Lilly Pulitzer “Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment.” – Ellis Peters “It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the spring who reaps a harvest in the autumn.” – B.C. Forbes “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson “No rain, no flowers.” – Haruki Murakami “You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep Spring from coming.” – Pablo Neruda “With the coming of spring, I am calm again.” – Gustav Mahler “Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.” – John Muir “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” – Lao Tzu “In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” – Margaret Atwood “To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.” – George Santayana “Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence.” – Yoko Ono “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson “The deep roots never doubt spring will come.” – Marty Rubin “Renewal is rooted in gratitude for what has been and hope for what can be.” – Jonathan Lockwood Huie “Every moment is a fresh beginning.” – T.S. Eliot Short Hello April Quotes for Inspiration “Winter’s done, and April’s in the skies. Earth, look up with laughter in your eyes!” – Charles G.D. Roberts “April, the joy of the green hours, clothes with flowers over all her locks of gold.” – Remy Belleau “It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.” – Rainer Maria Rilke “Sweet April-time – O cruel April-time! Year after year returning, with a brow of promise, and red lips with longing paled.” – Dinah Craik “April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks, ‘Go!'” – Christopher Morley “Oh, to be in England now that April’s there.” – Robert Browning “Our spring has come at last with the soft laughter of April suns and shadow of April showers.”

– Byron Caldwell Smith “If April showers should come your way, they bring the flowers that bloom in May.” – Buddy DeSylva “April in Paris, chestnuts in blossom, holiday tables under the trees.” – Yip Harburg “Oh, the lovely fickleness of an April day!” – William Hamilton Gibson “April weather, rain and sunshine both together.” – English Country Saying “The April winds are magical and thrill our tuneful frames.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson “The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day.” – Robert Frost “Spring shows what God can do with a drab and dirty world.” – Virgil A. Kraft “April splinters like an ice palace.” – Ruth Stone “When April steps aside for May, like diamonds all the raindrops glisten.” – Lucy Larcom “Blossom by blossom the spring begins.” – Algernon Charles Swinburne Short and Funny April Quotes for Laughs and Stress Relief “The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.” – Mark Twain “Here cometh April again, and as far as I can see the world hath more fools in it than ever.” – Charles Lamb “Spring is nature’s way of saying, ‘Let’s Party!'” – Robin Williams “Snow in April is abominable, like a slap in the face when you expected a kiss.” – L.M. Montgomery “Science has never drummed up quite as effective a tranquilizing agent as a sunny spring day.” – W. Earl Hall “In the spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.” – Mark Twain “A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.” – Steve Martin “Gardening requires lots of water – most of it in the form of perspiration.” – Louise Erickson “The early bird gets the worm but the late bird doesn’t even get the late worm.” – Charles M. Schulz “I’m 100 percent sunshine.” – Lil Yachty “Isn’t it amazing how much stuff we get done the day before vacation?” – Zig Ziglar “Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?” – Edgar Bergen “Today has been a day dropped out of June into April.” – L.M. Montgomery “Although I was born in April, I’m quite certain I was not fully awake until October.” – Peggy Toney Horton “Some people can’t be fooled on April Fool’s Day because they were fooled too many times during their entire lifetime.” – Akash B Chandran “Everybody wants to save the earth; no one wants to help mom do the dishes.” – P.J. O’Rourke Short Happy April Quotes for Your Letter Board and Instagram “April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year.” – Vita Sackville-West “My favorite weather is bird chirping weather.” – Terri Guillemets “April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” – Edna St. Vincent Millay “Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.” – Doug Larson “Spring won’t let me stay in this house any longer! I must get out and breathe the air deeply again.” – Gustav Mahler “Spring unlocks the flowers to paint the laughing soil.” – Bishop Reginald Heber “Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.” – Theodore Roethke “Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair.” – Susan Polis Schutz “I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.” – Virginia Woolf “A flower blossoms for its own joy.” – Oscar Wilde “Always it’s Spring and everyone’s in love and flowers pick themselves.” – E.E. Cummings “Spring: a lovely reminder of how beautiful change can truly be.” – Unknown “Spring is shoving up the front windows and resting your elbows on the sill, the sun burning your nose a little.” – Ruth Wolff “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” – Audrey Hepburn “A kind word is like a spring day.” – Russian Proverb “If people did not love one another, I really don’t see what use there would be in having any spring.” – Victor Hugo “The coming of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.” – Henry David Thoreau “An optimist is the human personification of spring.” – Susan J. Bissonette Want

more spring inspiration? Then have a look at these inspirational April quotes, the positive spring quotes here and also these short spring quotes and the short spring captions in this post.

[dustedmagazine]

Trust Fund — Has It Been a While? (Tapete)

If you’re familiar with Trust Fund at all, you likely remember it as a clever, breezy indie pop band, always on the verge of twee but held back by bracing self-awareness and humor. That bash-and-pop iteration of Trust Fund called it quits after 2018’s Bringing the Backline, but its leader, songwriter Ellis Jones continues on. Has It Been a While? is his first solo album since the band’s hiatus, a spare and lovely collection of tunes with surprising lyrical bite. 

The disc tilts towards folk, partly its main ingredients are acoustic guitar, voice and strings, but also because of the way these elements are deployed. Indeed, the opener, “Leaving the Party Early,” sketches shadowy melancholy with its minor key picking. The guitar here is like Bert Jansch but less jazzy, the vocals echoey and haunting like Nick Drake, and a brace of stringed instruments add trad folk swirl and swoon and uplift. The kicker, though, is in the lyrics, which twist sounds and meanings into intricate patterns. Ellis mouths them quickly and without drama, barely landing on the phrases; he connects mundane details and hearts’ longings and an admiration for Nietzsche and Spinoza in a seamless spray of words.    

Jones has a way of decocting cerebral quirk into the lightest, easiest, clearest musical forms, as for instance in “Mirror” his duet with Radiant Heart’s Celia MacDougall. The two do a version of the acting exercise “mirroring,” facing each other and copying musical gestures in a slightly altered form. Yet even small changes in the buoyant verse, indicate radically different points of view. 

For example, MacDougall trills, “I know you want to be remembered/when you go, you don’t want to go/all fruits and flowers of adoration/you write things down to make sure they are here.” And Jones answers, “I know you want to be remembered/when you go, you don’t want to go/our worldly goods are men and nations/you write things down to make them disappear.” Same verse, different conclusion.

The lightness and warmth of these simple arrangements takes on, occasionally, a bossa nova lilt, as for instance in “In the Air” and “A Wooden Medal,” where the guitar licks come syncopated, a slight hitch in their flow. But while the strumming takes on a lively rhythm, Jones’ trebly singing unspools fluidly and easily, almost without a beat in it. Amid all this sonic ease, the sharpness and specificity of the words catches you short occasionally, like a nursery rhyme that suddenly quotes T.S. Eliot. And yet sometimes, too, simplicity is allowed to just be, as on the lovely title track, which shimmies up a minor scale with effortless grace. “Has it been a while?” asks Jones, and perhaps it has, but the moment is lovely enough to make time itself irrelevant. 

Jennifer Kelly

[fabioperes]

I Visited the Most Remote Town in the USA (Outside of Alaska) P.S. Jase asked me to tell y'all that there IS, in fact, a small gas station in Jarbidge where you can fill up ;) My bad! For exclusive content, PATREON → https://ift.tt/lOMs8u9 For casual daily updates, INSTAGRAM → https://ift.tt/BvDTqcR For my social commentary, UNPLUGGED → @UnpluggedEva For written thoughts, NEWSLETTER → https://ift.tt/Q5k4gVi For the food that fuels Vilk's adventures → https://ift.tt/rRkTdVX → Thank you to my wonderful supporters on Patreon: Bulent Alkanli, @_bulentalkanli_ Śānti Collective Martin PSW Christian Tucker Positive Travel, @inspiring.positive.travel Katarzyna, @katarzyna_photo_equine Vee Jeffry Watson Juergen Rehbein Dalibor from sLOVEnia Christopher Dow, @TaoOfDow Robert Jureit, Photographer, Explorer Viet Chu Photography, @the_viet_x Muhammad Fahad Bhutta Martyn Greville-Giddings Gene and Dena Dahilig Sara Rijaluddin Geanina Butiseaca Ryan Luna Tony 24p Jeff Falgout Ricardo Santos Andreia Santo Piotr Koscianski Greg Scopel Sylvan The TerraMax Michael Steele Fred 42 74Coree Kyle R BarryMcE Sovelars Patrick Low Chris Katie Duff Calderoni James R. Young Otto Weisspfenning Nate Jonas Ken Dick David J. Kiss Jessica MeadeSports Slava Val Tamiwawa Nicole Arno Benson Elizabeth P. Ellie Little Tom Bicak Meghan L Riley Kelly Turner Rich Kaitlin & Audrey Jeff Wheelock Damon Wong Michael Campos Erik Klee Claudio Las Vegas Tom Lioba Washington Dave Steve Burre David Perry Vinod Acharya Chris Peterson Arne Shulstad Tim Joseph T. Warren Herd Pierce Castleberry Marlin Edwards Andrew J. Salmon Alec R. Sam Crowter Rich K Joan Arlet Renée Theriault Soft Roaders MN Gary Jepson Dr Beth Raul O Speed2Fly Gary Jepson Dimitar del Mar Raul O Soft Roaders MN Cornell J.W. Cheri Fairbrother Blair Anderson Sharon Tuck David Honl Anna Julia Eahsan Steven and Ginger Harrod Arik Burns // Papa Snuggs Edward Coyne The Wandering Goats Rashid Nora and Robert Visser Bob Wolford Anton Riazanov Pete Simons Christian The Thuli’s Victoria Adam jtoddsherman Jael Chairi Matt Schwoebel Avner Juan Torrico Leva Brian Miller Anton Riazanov Patrick J Al Patzke Steve Ross Chris Friedline Hu Zhening Steve Ross Terry Buckley Brian B Fred Schulze Dr. Wayne and Dr. Patricia Tope Darrell Klasey Thor John Carter Michael Twórczy Derek Silva Jeffrey Parks Music Wally Hartshorn Jim and Harriett Esk and Family Thomas Wilson Julian Brian B Minchi Fox Terry Buckley Ashanti B David Stiversx + J. & T.S. Paulo Roberto Jay Yogan Rob Brannon Katie Ann Curtis Chrystian SimonsDad Gregory Pappas James Costa CaptWoody79 Jim, Harriet, and Yuki Patrick Heiden Annie Steve McConnell Joe Savage Ron Horn George Lotridge Jakub Jelonek Christina V via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uacxPmj2PlA

[usnewsper-politics]

The Russia Investigation: The Latest Development #donaldtrump #JeffSessions #paulmanafort #robertmueller #Russiainvestigation

[thatsulleninhabitant]

nick cave, carnage || paris, texas || t.s. eliot || eternal sunshine of the spotless mind || james baldwin, giovanni’s room || midnight cowboy || mitski, brand new city

[ryita13]

Some of the "scary quotes" I doodled.. last March

[nofatclips]

Why is Cats?

[somanybookssolittletime1]

May Book Wrap Up

~~~ Good Morning, bookish lovelies! 📚 These are the books I read/am currently reading. I feel like I read so much more than I did. This month felt like it flew by so fast, it feels like yesterday I started reading the first book in the Tasting Maddnes series by Albany Walker. I feel like I didn’t get to read everything I wanted to. I have so many books I really want to read, and my TBR keeps…

[beardedmrbean]

FALLS CHURCH, Va. -- Defense lawyers for a British national facing trial later this month for helping the Islamic State group torture and behead American hostages are seeking to block testimony from a Kurdish girl held as a slave by the group.

The girl, identified only as Jane Doe in court documents, was abducted at age 15 from Kurdistan in August 2014 and held by the Islamic State. She spent several weeks in captivity with American Kayla Mueller, whose death at the hands of the Islamic State will be a key issue at trial.

The defendant, El Shafee Elsheikh, is charged with playing a key role in Mueller's abduction, ransom and eventual death, along with three other Americans: journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid worker Peter Kassig.

In court papers filed late Tuesday, Elsheikh's lawyers say Jane Doe was told after her abduction to forget about her family because she would be “selected for marriage” by an ISIS fighter.

Doe escaped, but she was caught the next morning and beaten with sticks, belts and hoses. It was then that she was taken to a prison, where Mueller was also held, according to the defense memo.

After a month, Doe, Mueller, and two other girls were taken into captivity by a senior ISIS leader named Abu Sayyaf, where they were locked in a bedroom other than when they were cleaning or gardening.

Doe escaped the home in October 2014 and made her way back into Kurdish custody. Information she provided helped U.S. fighters launch a raid in May 2015 that killed Abu Sayyaf and other ISIS fighters, according to the memo.

Mueller, who was killed in February 2015, was raped by the Islamic State’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, during her time in captivity, according to the indictment.

Inside the house, U.S. fighters recovered ISIS documents justifying slavery and guidelines for how it should be implemented.

Elsheikh's lawyers are seeking to keep the slavery documents from being introduced at trial, and want to severely limit Doe's testimony, restricting it only to her time in captivity with Mueller.

The evidence “is unduly inflammatory and would only cause undue prejudice against Mr. Elsheikh, confuse the issues, and mislead the jury by imputing the actions of others to Mr. Elsheikh,” defense lawyers Nina Ginsberg, Edward MacMahon and Jessica Carmichael wrote.

While Doe's testimony may not central to the case against Elsheikh, it provides a glimpse into some of the emotionally powerful evidence jurors will confront if the case indeed goes to trial at the end of the month.

Elsheikh is one of four British nationals who joined the Islamic State, dubbed “the Beatles” by their captives because of their accents. Elsheikh and a co-defendant, Alexenda Kotey, were captured in Syria in 2018 and brought to Virginia in 2020 to stand trial in federal court.

Kotey pleaded guilty last year and is awaiting sentencing. A third Beatle, Mohammed Emwazi, also known as “Jihadi John,” was killed in a 2015 drone strike. The fourth member was sentenced to prison in Turkey.

Federal prosecutors will respond to the defense memo about Jane Doe at a later date. So far, though, prosecutors have been successful in turning aside defense efforts to restrict evidence at trial. The presiding judge, T.S. Ellis III, ruled earlier this year that prosecutors can use incriminating statements Elsheikh made in interrogations and in media interviews. Defense lawyers argued unsuccessfully that the statements were coerced.

As for the slavery documents, defense lawyers argue that it would be unfair to ascribe them to Elsheikh because he did not write them. But in a 2018 interview with journalist Jenan Moussa after he was captured, Elsheikh said slavery was justified under Islamic law.

"Islamic texts have spoken about slavery and rights of a slave. There is a whole jurisprudence about slavery and the rights of slaves and the rights of slave owners,” he said in an interview.

[musicreadinglists]

Manic Street Preachers reading list part 1: Richey’s Favourite Books

Tennessee Williams – Small Crypt Warnings

Tennessee Williams – Suddenly Last Summer

Tennessee Williams – Baby Doll

Anonymous (Beatrice Sparks) – Go Ask Alice

Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar

Arthur Rimbaud – A Season in Hell

William Burroughs – Junky

Albert Camus – The Myth of Sisyphus

Albert Camus – The Outsider

Albert Camus – The Fall

Albert Camus – The Plague

Philip Larkin – poems

Primo Levi – Collected Poems

William Blake – poems

Siegfried Sassoon – The War Poems

Julie Burchill – The Boy Looked at Johnny: The Obituary of Rock and Roll

Greil Marcus – Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll

Nik Cohn – Apobpopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock

Charles Shaar Murray – Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-War Pop

Albert Goldman – Elvis

Albert Goldman – Lives of John Lennon

George Orwell – 1984

Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita

James Baldwin – The Fire Next Time

Brendan Behan – Borstal Boy

Bret Easton Ellis – Less Than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis – American Psycho

William Golding – Lord of the Flies

William Golding – The Inheritors

John Lahr – Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton

Ken Kesey – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Aldous Huxley – Brave New World

Jack Kerouac – Desolation Angels

Luke Rhinehart – The Dice Man

Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man

J.D. Salinger – The Catcher in the Rye

William Wharton – Birdy

William Wharton – Pride

Osamu Dazai – No Longer Human

Franz Kafka – The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka – The Trial

Dennis Cooper – Frisk

Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Notes from the Underground

F. Scott Fitzgerald – Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Masuji Ibase – Black Rain

Yukio Mishima – Thirst for Love

Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray

Jean Genet – Miracle of the Rose

J.G. Ballard – Crash

J.G. Ballard – The Atrocity Exhibition

A.E. Hotchner – Blown Away: The Rolling Stones and the Death of the Sixties

R.D. Laing – Knots

Malcolm Lowry – Under the Volcano

T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land

Octave Mirbeau – The Torture Garden

Harold Brodkey – The Runaway Soul

Junichiro Tanizaki – Naomi

[imagahub]

Famously Creepy Sayings from Books

Here are some of the scariest quotes of all time, drawn from books over the years. Enjoy this creepy list curated by the Imagahub review team.

“Hope not ever to see Heaven. I have come to lead you to the other shore; into eternal darkness; into fire and into ice.”

Inferno (Dante Alighieri)

“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble.”

Macbeth (William Shakespeare)

“O little one, My little one, Come with me, Your life is done. Forget the future, Forget the past. Life is over: Breathe your last.”

Abarat (Clive Barker)

“Some teeth long for ripping, gleaming wet from black dog gums. So you keep your eyes closed at the end. You don’t want to see such a mouth up close. before the bite, before its oblivion in the goring of your soft parts, the speckled lips will curl back in a whinny of excitement. You just know it.”

The Ritual (Adam Nevill)

“Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore. ‘Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,’ I said, ‘art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore – Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!’ Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.'”

The Raven (Edgar Allan Poe)

“Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”

Robert Bloch

“I laugh maniacally, then take a deep breath and touch my chest – expecting a heart to be thumping quickly, impatiently, but there’s nothing there, not even a beat.”

American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis)

“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”

Dracula (Bram Stoker)

“Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.”

I Am Legend (Richard Matheson)

“Walls have ears. Doors have eyes. Trees have voices. Beasts tell lies. Beware the rain. Beware the snow. Beware the man You think you know.”

Songs of Sapphique (Catherine Fisher)

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

The Tempest (William Shakespeare)

“We ask only to be reassured About the noises in the cellar And the window that should not have been open.”

The Family Reunion (T.S. Eliot)

“There are horrors beyond life’s edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man’s evil prying calls them just within our range.”

The Thing on the Doorstep (H.P. Lovecraft)

“Last night I saw upon the stair, A little man who wasn’t there, He wasn’t there again today Oh, how I wish he’d go away…”

Antigonish (William Hughes Mearns)

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”

Knock (Fredric Brown)

“Naughty John, Naughty John, does his work with his apron on. Cuts your throat and takes your bones, sells ’em off for a coupla stones.”

The Diviners (Libba Bray)

“I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.”

The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson)

“Blood is really warm, it’s like drinking hot chocolate but with more screaming.”

Zombie Haiku (Ryan Mecum)

For plenty more thrilling horror, check out Imagahub today.