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[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

ON AN AUGUST night in 2003, a young woman who went by the name Paulina sank into the sofa of her modest, rented apartment, opened up her laptop, and began talking about sex with a man she’d recently met in a Yahoo chat group. His name was Stephen Bolen. His first communications had been terse, but he soon warmed to Paulina. It didn’t take long for both of them to begin to open up.

Paulina had told Bolen she lived in the Atlanta area, that she had a three-year-old daughter, that her daughter’s father was no longer in the picture. Soon, she was sharing more intimate details: what it was like growing up a skinny white girl in a rough neighborhood outside of D.C.; how her dad, a Marine, had died by suicide two weeks before she was born; how her mom had been emotionally and physically abusive, and had never really shown her love. How she’d had a sexual relationship with her stepfather.

Paulina would put her daughter to bed and then she and Bolen would chat throughout the night, over Yahoo and sometimes on the phone. The back-and-forth could feel like dating, but with an added element of danger and risk: Both Paulina and Bolen knew they were tiptoeing up to a line to see if they trusted each other enough to cross it. It could take a while to figure that out.

Eventually, Bolen asked Paulina to send pictures of her daughter, and she agreed to do so, though the ones she’d shared were chaste — the little girl clothed and her face turned away from the camera or obscured behind an untamable halo of blond curls. After seeing the pictures, Bolen asked to meet. While a lot of the men Paulina had encountered in chatrooms like “Sex With Younger” just wanted to trade images and videos of children, to expand their illicit collections, Bolen was a “traveler,” someone looking to act upon his obsessions.

On Sept. 17, just as they’d arranged, Paulina sat on a bench outside Perimeter Mall with a stroller parked in front of her, scanning the parking lot nervously. Part of her hoped Bolen wouldn’t show. When he did, she could see he was handsome, a preppy guy in a pink polo shirt and khakis. “Paulina?” he asked eagerly. She nodded. As he smiled and pulled back the blanket draped across the stroller, he found himself surrounded, handcuffs slipped around his wrists.

“Paulina” watched his face fall, his confusion giving way to distress as FBI agents took him into custody. It was her first undercover arrest. It would be the first of many.

[long read]

IF ONE WANTED to hide in plain sight, one could do no better than the tidy, suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of St. Louis, where FBI Special Agent Nikki Badolato now resides. The well-tended, two-story homes are so pleasantly indistinct that I could hardly tell you what hers looks like, even if it were safe for me to do so, which it is not. Suffice to say that Midwestern comfort and conformity unspool around every gently winding curve. Here Badolato has raised her two children, a daughter who is now in college and a son who is a junior at a local high school. When planning a neighborhood scavenger hunt or tending the community garden, Badolato does not often mention her many years as head of the Child Exploitation Task Force, a joint effort between the feds and local law enforcement that targets some of the country’s most heinous crimes. Open a cabinet in her kitchen, however, and a government-issued Glock 42 can be found stowed away between the vitamins and mixing bowls.

On a sunny morning this past October, Badolato sat at her dining room table, scrapbooks and albums spread out before her on the dark wood. There was the acceptance letter she’d received from the bureau the spring of her senior year of high school, after a representative had shown up to administer a test in the typewriting room. “I chose to wear a red dress and red heels,” she says of her first day as an FBI mail clerk, two weeks after her 18th birthday. “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I guess maybe I was trying to go in bold?” She pauses at a picture of herself on the gun range at Quantico almost 10 years later, her shoulders squared and her caramel hair pulled back into a ponytail as she fires off rounds. By then, she’d married a man she met just after high school, had a little girl, completed college at night, and been accepted into agent training in the heady days after 9/11. She’d seen her first dead body only a few weeks into the job, after the pursuit of a bank robber ended with a shootout in a Walmart. When Badolato got to the scene, the body was still warm, and the perp’s head was resting on a bag of cookies. “It was surreal,” she says. “How many times have you been in a Walmart and walked down Aisle 4, not really expecting there to be a dead person with his head lying on a bag of Chips Ahoy?”

Badolato wasn’t deterred. She felt like the bureau saved her, plucked her out of a shitty home life, and gave her prospects and purpose. As a new agent, she was intent on proving herself worthy. “My training agent told me, ‘You know, Nikki, it’s a marathon, not a sprint,’ ” she says. “I was like, ‘That’s ridiculous. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.’ ” She turned a few pages to show a picture of the 391 kilos of cocaine and 140 pounds of meth she’d recovered on a single raid during a stint with a cartel squad, then pointed out another in which she poses with a five-year-old child she’d rescued, the little girl’s hair cut short because the kidnapper had wanted her to look like a boy. But the keepsake she really wants to find is the card that Bolen’s wife had pressed into her hand at his sentencing, the one with the picture of their children — a blond girl of about three years and a tiny baby — and the words “These are the faces of the children you protect each day.” Bolen’s wife had been the only one she’d ever encountered who had lobbied for her husband to receive the maximum sentence. Some wives accused the FBI of planting evidence inside computers. Most seemed intent on clinging to their delusions. (Attempts to reach Bolen for comment were unsuccessful.)

“Right now some little girl is being dropped off in the parking lot of a motel. There are four girls holed up in a hotel next to a McDonald’s. It is happening all the time.”

Which, Badolato has come to understand, is the way it goes with child trafficking and sexual abuse. She had invited me into her home — had agreed to speak on the record about her decades-long career working undercover — because when it comes to the crimes she’s spent her career fighting, she has had enough of the delusions people are under. She’s had enough of the way movies like Sound of Freedom both glamorize and trivialize the work she and her colleagues do, enough of the idea that swashbuckling white men burst through doors and rescue trafficked children with a Bible in one hand and a firearm in the other, enough of conspiracy theories about Hollywood and Washington that detract from the real root causes of why children are trafficked and abused. “Human trafficking is not the movie Pretty Woman — the girl doesn’t get the guy — and it’s not the movie Taken, where people are kidnapped in a foreign country and sold on the black market, or shipped in a container across the world,” one of the detectives who worked on Badolato’s task force tells me. “I’m not saying that doesn’t ever happen, but it’s not what we’re seeing.”

What they are seeing is a lot more insidious and a lot more homegrown. A report released in 2018 by the State Department ranked the U.S. as one of the worst countries in the world for human trafficking. While the Department of Justice has estimated that between 14,500 and 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into this country every year, this number pales in comparison to the number of American minors who are trafficked within it: A 2009 Department of Health and Human Services review of human trafficking into and within the United States found that roughly 199,000 American minors are sexually exploited each year, and that between 244,000 and 325,000 American youths are considered to be at risk of being trafficked specifically in the sex industry. Heartbreakingly, many of these children are victimized not by strangers who’ve abducted them from mall parking lots but rather by people they know and trust: Studies have found that as much as 44 percent of victims are trafficked by family members, most often parents (and not infrequently parents who were trafficked themselves). Between 2011 and 2020, there was an 84 percent increase in the number of people prosecuted for a federal human-trafficking offense. Of the defendants charged in 2020, 92 percent were male, 63 percent were white, 66 percent had no prior convictions, and 95 percent were U.S. citizens.

Badolato started her career as an FBI agent in some of the earliest days that children could be bought, sold, and traded online. As the internet-porn industry mushroomed, its most lucrative branch turned out to be that of child sexual-abuse materials (the term “child pornography” is no longer used by those in the field, as it implies consent). And as demand for these images increased, so did the abuse that led to their creation.

In 2003, just a few months after Badolato graduated from Quantico, a Crimes Against Children squad was formed in the Atlanta office where she’d been stationed. By then, the FBI was starting to get a handle on the extent of the problem — if not exactly what to do about it. At a weeklong training in Baltimore, Badolato was given a tour of the darkest underbelly of fetish chat groups and then instructed to figure out how to infiltrate. “Everyone was a little nervous,” she explains of the directive. “It was a process, a direction that was new.” Agents were told that they would need to come up with a “persona” and a “story,” and that they would likely have to provide images of children to “prove” they had a minor on offer. They were also told that they could use images of their own children, if they were comfortable doing so (the FBI no longer endorses this policy).

Badolato’s unit with a kidnapping victim after her recovery in 2011. A Health and Human Services review found that roughly 199,000 American minors are sexually exploited each year, and that as many as 325,000 American youths are considered to be at risk of being trafficked in the sex industry. 

Badolato developed “Paulina” based on her understanding that any persona would need to share most of her own backstory and traits. “That’s the only way you can really do undercover work,” Badolato says. “People can tell the sincerity in what you’re saying, so there has to be a level of genuineness, but then you just add this criminal element to it.” Most of the things Badolato had told Bolen were true: where she was from, her family background, the monstrousness of her mother, a woman who she says would pass out cigarettes and beers to Badolato’s 13-year-old friends in a state of manic permissiveness one minute and fly into a violent rage about a piece of lint on the floor the next. (Badolato’s mother declined to comment for this article, but a childhood friend corroborated Badolato’s account.) It was true that growing up in an unstable home with a string of stepdads, she had never really felt loved, true that she had divorced her first husband, true that she was raising their three-year-old daughter on her own. The only thing that wasn’t true was her tale of being molested, her initiation into the “lifestyle” — to use the chatroom parlance — that Paulina said she now wanted for her daughter. As Badolato had familiarized herself with the language and behaviors of the chatrooms, she’d honed that added criminal element, imagining what psychological conditions might believably lead a parent to traffic their own child and how those conditions could be grafted onto her real life story. She already had a history of abuse; it was not hard to extrapolate to a fictional stepfather who had seemed to provide a gentle counterpoint, showing her love and making her feel special when no one else had, even if others couldn’t understand. From there, it was easy to convince the chatroom participants that she shared their belief — or justification — that most people had it all wrong and that “child love” was natural, and could even be beneficial for the child.

Badolato estimates that she has arrested more than a thousand people; not one of those arrests has failed to end in a conviction. She didn’t know until she was in the thick of it that most agents refuse this sort of work, that most can’t even pretend to forge a relationship with someone looking to victimize a child. But she could. “Paulina,” she points out, is not a name she chose at random; it’s similar to her own mother’s name. Badolato says she had grown up learning to compartmentalize for the sake of her own emotional survival. She’d perfected the art of engaging with someone whose actions she couldn’t stand. Doing this work had felt like a way of taking her trauma and putting it to good use, of leveraging her past as a safeguard against her daughter’s and other children’s futures.

Of course there were moments that were hard to take — when suspects mentioned which brands of lubrication were best or whether or not a parent might hold a child down. There were times when she knew that even talking about these things was a turn-on for these men, times when the conversations made her nauseous, times when she’d lie awake all night or play back a recording and think, “Holy shit, I listened to this? I said these words?” But she kept faith in the mission. She reminded herself that the pictures she sent of her daughter — the beautiful, little girl sleeping in the next room — did not represent a real child on offer. “I was thinking, ‘If I send this obscure picture of my daughter and he acts on it, then he’s never going to harm my daughter or anybody else’s,’ ” Badolato says now. “I was presenting a fake girl to save a real one.”

KYLE PARKS SEEMED to think he could get away with anything. He seemed to think, for instance, that he could get away with running a brothel, a 1-900 sex line, and a housecleaning company out of the same Columbus, Ohio, office park and under the same oxy-moronic name, XXXREC and Hygiene Services. He seemed to think he could invite one young woman and five teenagers (four of whom he had only just met) on a road trip to Florida, but instead deposit them in two rooms of a Red Roof Inn in St. Charles, Missouri. When they piled out of the minivan — high on the drugs he’d given them — saw snow falling and asked to be taken home, he thought he could make a little money off them first. All it took was a few ads in Backpage — the Craigslist of sex advertisements — and men began showing up.

Even after things started going south for him, Parks couldn’t fathom that he wouldn’t prevail. When someone alerted law enforcement as to what was going on, Parks (who, according to legal documents, had been out getting food when the police showed up) burst into the precinct the next morning looking to bail his “friend” out. When questioned about the 88 condoms found in the back of his van, he said they had been prescribed to him by a doctor. After being taken into custody, he protested that he was being set up. Most people would have cut their losses and pleaded guilty, but not Parks. He thought he could take his case to court and win.

And it wasn’t impossible to imagine that he might. Badolato knew that even the tightest cases could go sideways when put before 12 people who would inevitably enter the courtroom with a cinematic sense of what sex trafficking was supposed to be. In fact, it wasn’t just the jury that Badolato knew she would need to convince; it was also often the victims themselves, young people who had internalized the exact same misconceptions about trafficking that the jury had — along with any number of other judgments society had thrown their way — and who were loath to submit themselves to a courtroom full of more judgment.

Of all of Parks’ underage victims, the hardest to pin down had been a 17-year-old we’ll call Sierra. Once she returned to Columbus, Sierra seemed to basically disappear. Calls to her mother’s number went unanswered. When one of the other victims managed to track her down in December 2016, a month before the case was to go to trial, Sierra agreed to meet Badolato on a blighted Columbus block with a string of dilapidated homes, climbing into the bureau’s Chevy Malibu with matted hair, dirty clothes, and a wary expression.

By this time, Badolato had remarried, had a second child, relocated to St. Louis, and taken over as head of the Child Exploitation Joint Task Force, which had become one of the most productive FBI teams in the country in terms of arrests and convictions. Meanwhile, as the internet streamlined the process of buying or selling any good or service, trafficking had become one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises, estimated by the Department of Homeland Security to bring in $150 billion globally and considered by many criminals to be a superior business model: If caught, the sentences were often lighter than those for peddling drugs; and unlike crack or heroin, the same product could be “used” again and again and again.

Badolato taught her team of 20 how to do the online undercover work she’d trailblazed in Atlanta, tracking the movements of child-abuse material through the online underworld and then prosecuting those who distributed and produced it. Her new squad also initiated her in the type of undercover work it had been doing before her arrival: covert sting operations in which a detective would pose as a john, set up a “date,” and then meet said date in a hotel room fitted out with hidden recording devices while, in the next room over, a taskforce team listened in, waiting for the code word that would let them know that enough evidence had been gathered for them to swoop in and shut the op down. This had proved a very effective technique for getting convictions, but Badolato’s arrival coincided with both a growing sentiment that consensual sex work had been over-criminalized and an increasing awareness that what looked like consensual sex work might actually be trafficking, no matter what the “date” professed in that hotel room.

Badolato has a tendency to say aloud the things she notices — about you, about others, about situations — observations that are not at all unkind but are perceptive enough that most people would keep them to themselves. She points out when someone deflects, and she has a sharp eye for defense mechanisms. She once casually mentions my tendency to mirror other people’s vocal and speech patterns. She is not shy about bringing up the emotional and physical abuse she says she experienced as a child, and she is quick to comment when someone is making excuses for someone else’s behavior. It was soon clear to her colleagues that Badolato brought a trauma-informed mentality to the work, a tendency to look beyond what someone was doing and instead try to parse why they were doing it. And she was relentless: While some squads did one or two trafficking sting ops a year, her team was doing four or five a month. In addition to the hotel rooms reserved for the john and the team, they would have a social worker set up in a third room, ready to offer services to the victims. They would have lookouts stationed to see who might be dropping the date off. If that date was found to be underage, the case was automatically classified as trafficking. But even if they weren’t, Badolato’s team was primed to get to the bottom of what was going on, to figure out whether they were being manipulated or coerced, and by whom.

“If I could put my hands on a pimp, that’s what I wanted,” says Jeff Roediger, a St. Louis county detective who was the “john” for many of Badolato’s sting ops and who makes clear that the team was not interested in policing voluntary sex work. “When I had those types of cases, and I knew they were being sincere with me, I wouldn’t book them,” he says. “It was all about talking to the girls. It’s not like in the movies where they come running to you. You know, ‘Thanks, you rescued me!’ It’s not like that. A lot of them try to bullshit you at first — ‘That’s my boyfriend, blah blah blah’— but once I talked to them for a while, they would become more forthcoming.”

Badolato’s unit was one of the first in the country to take on this “progressive and proactive” approach, as she puts it. Soon, St. Louis looked like a sex-trafficking capital — not because it was actually trafficking more victims than other cities but because the task force was so aggressively pursuing those cases, and classifying them as what they were. “I mean, I was working in vice for years,” says Roediger. “Back in the day, it was always ‘prostitution,’ ‘prostitution,’ ‘prostitution’ — until we started to figure it out a little bit, until we started digging a little deeper.”

Once they did, the task force found that roughly a third of the sex-trafficking victims they recovered were under the age of 17 — and they began to see the reach of the problem. Kids were being trafficked out of every hotel in the area, from the seediest roach motel to the fanciest Ritz-Carlton. They were being trafficked every time of day and by every socioeconomic group (“Before you go do brain surgery, you got to bust a nut real quick,” one underage victim told Badolato of her high-end clientele). Some of the victims were girls. Some were boys. Some were LGBTQ kids who’d been kicked out of their homes. Some were straight cis kids from the suburbs. “I tell people that I could probably name two or three [kids] in the school district they live in that have been trafficked,” Roediger says. “And they just can’t comprehend it.”

“If I can be perfectly honest, I truly don’t believe that the FBI realizes what they put their agents through doing that kind of work.”

There were kids who were about to age out of foster care (a particularly at-risk group, according to those who work in the field), kids who’d run away, kids who were being sold to pay their family’s rent, or to buy their family member’s drugs. There were kids who’d sit in the hotel room, backpack at their feet, dutifully working on their math homework while agents and social workers tried to figure out what to do with them. Was their home life safe enough that they could be returned to it? Would a residential program take them? Of all the imperfect options, which would make them least likely to be trafficked again?

The one common denominator was this: They all had a vulnerability that could be preyed upon. They all lacked a safety net — societal, familial, emotional, or some combination thereof — that might have broken their fall. Mostly, their stories weren’t dramatic; they were typical American tales of neglect, of abuse doled out casually, of a steady stream of letdowns by people and institutions who should have propped them up. Badolato found that she had a knack for getting them to talk about this, for getting them to open up to her. She didn’t look like an FBI agent — at least not what they’d imagined. She spoke softly, but with authority and a slight vocal fry. And she thinks that, at some level, they could probably sense that she’d once been a vulnerable kid too, that with only a few slightly different twists of fate, she could have become a trafficking victim herself — and that she knew it. “My trauma looks different than theirs, but it’s trauma nonetheless,” she says.

“And I think victims can feel that.”

AS THE TASK force learned more about the psychology of victims, they also learned more about the ways in which their vulnerability was being manipulated, and how those ways were evolving. It was known in law-enforcement circles that once a skilled trafficker set his or her sights on a vulnerable young person, they could be groomed in a matter of days: one day for an introduction, a day or two to make the victim feel special and cared for, and then the day when a “friend” comes over and he needs to be “cared for” as well. Sometimes violence was involved at that point; sometimes drug use was involved throughout. But emotional manipulation was the key element, which is why it was so easy for grooming to move online, for groomers to take advantage of the false senses of connection fostered on social media.

Of the victims who are not being trafficked by family members, the majority are being groomed in this way. “I would say that probably 75 percent of the initial grooming is happening online now,” says Cindy Malott, the director of U.S. Safe Programs at Crisis Aid International. “Recruiters used to have to work really, really hard to get access to kids, but now they’re practically sitting in a child’s bedroom. And kids put everything out there — what’s going on in their life, who they’re angry about, parents are going through a divorce, their insecurities about their body, about themselves, what they do, how they spend their time — so it’s like a gift to these predators.”

The ways to manipulate are legion: Get a kid to send a compromising photo, and she’ll do almost anything to keep you from sending it out to all her Facebook friends; find out a gay kid is still closeted, and the threat of outing him gives you incredible power. And predators aren’t just on Instagram and Snapchat; they lurk in the chat functions of Roblox, Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto. “They’re everywhere,” says Malott. “People think, ‘Oh, I just got to keep my kids away from those porn sites, those horrible places.’ Well, no, predators are gonna go where the kids are.” And once there, they’re going to zero in on the kids who are most vulnerable.

That’s what got to Badolato. In her online undercover work, she’d plumbed the psychology of pedophiles, but now she wasn’t just dealing with suspects; she was spending time with victims and seeing the same vulnerabilities in them that the traffickers had seen: the instability or poverty, the addiction or mental health issues or abuse that had been normalized in their lives long before the traffickers entered them. Sometimes Badolato couldn’t help but feel that all the conspiracies and misconceptions weren’t just a distraction from the truth of trafficking but rather some sick attempt to let society off the hook for trying to solve the much more intractable problems at trafficking’s root.

“People would rather stick their head in the sand than address the real problem, because then you have to face and talk about the societal issues,” she says. “With a movie like Sound of Freedom, it’s like, ‘Oh, this is in a jungle in South America. This isn’t actually in [my neighborhood].’ You know? It’s easier for people to ignore the problem than deal with the issues on a societal level.”

BY THE TIME Badolato was sitting in that Chevy with Sierra, on that blighted Ohio block, she knew that the rate of revictimization for children who are trafficked was as high as 95 percent, according to FBI reports. She knew that 90 percent of sex-trafficking victims have a history of child sexual abuse, that more than 75 percent had lived in foster or adoptive care. She knew that she could arrest one perpetrator, and another would pop up in his place, that she could send one pimp to prison and the same victims would show up to stings some short time later, run by a different crew. She knew that testifying was a way for Sierra to psychologically push back against what had happened to her, and she was right: After the young woman took the stand on Jan. 10, 2017, Parks was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years; while testifying, Sierra had seemed to transform, to channel and embody a sort of empowerment. But Badolato also knew that once her testimony was over, Sierra would go back to that blighted block. She wondered how long that empowerment would last.

She also wondered about her own trajectory, her own ability to continue doing this work. The youngest trafficking victim she’d ever recovered from a sting op — an 11-year-old who’d been recruited through Facebook — had been returned to her family in a house that had no heat (Badolato had used an FBI slush fund to get it turned back on). One did not become immune to the human misery of such things. They compounded, became harder and harder to compartmentalize. “It’s just a combination of all of those years — and it’s all awful,” she says. “But there are particular moments that, for one reason or another, you can’t get out of your head. I just don’t think it’s in human nature to be exposed to that for so long and it not start changing who you are.”

One night, at a restaurant near where Badolato lives, I ask her whether she thinks children are being sex-trafficked right then, in that very moment, in just the mile or two radius around us. She’s quiet for a long time, her gaze fixed downward at her glass of wine. By the time she looks up, her whole body is trembling. “It’s happening right now,” she says quietly. “Right now some little girl is being dropped off in the parking lot of a motel. There are three or four girls holed up in a hotel next to a McDonald’s. It’s not only when we think about it. It is happening all the time. And if I’m just sitting here, present, having dinner, not thinking about it, that means I’m ignoring a problem that I know is real.” Tears stream down her face.

“Many images have never left my mind,” she says. “It’s really hard to have worked your entire life in law enforcement with a lot of child crime victims and be at the end of your career looking at the situation where you realize you can only do so much to make a difference.” Badolato wipes back the tears with the palm of her hand and shudders her head, as if she can shake the thoughts away. “Damn,” she says. “Fuck. I shouldn’t be the one crying. I’m not the victim of this.” The veteran agent steels herself and repeats, “I am not the victim.”

THE HOUSE WHERE Korina Ellison says she was first sex-trafficked no longer exists. It once stood on an unassuming lot in a residential suburb of Portland, Oregon, that stumbles down to the banks of the Willamette River. Now, Ellison can’t quite bring the house’s features to mind. She was so young back then, maybe four or five. There is so much she’s repressed, or only pieced together after the fact. As a child, she wouldn’t have known what she now believes to be true: that her grandmother scored her drugs by offering up her youngest daughter, Ellison’s mom. Or that, once her mom was hooked on the meth cooked by the man who’d lived in that house, she’d known just what to do to get more. But Ellison does remember being inside the house, unclothed. She does remember how the man would touch her.

Her life unspooled from there. Her father died of a heroin overdose when she was six. Her mom lost custody for good. She bounced around foster care, then various residential institutions, then whatever shelter she could find. In the story she tells of how she was sex-trafficked again in her teenage years, there’s no moment of drama, no kidnapping, no clear coercion. There was just a random, rainy afternoon when she had no place to go and was alone in the street and a car pulled up. The man inside took her home with him, fed her, introduced her to his girlfriend. They took her shopping. They let her stay. When men showed up at the home to have sex with the woman, Ellison was invited to watch, but she wasn’t expected to participate — not at first, anyway. According to a statement Ellison later made to law enforcement, she just “realized that people aren’t going to take care of [me] for free.” Soon, the woman was posting Ellison’s services on Backpage — $150 for half an hour, $200 for a full one — and the trio were traveling the Midwest. For a long time, it didn’t even occur to Ellison, then 16, to leave. “Where would I have gone?” she asks. “I’d been missing for over a year. Nobody was looking for me.” When the man told her to call him “Daddy,” she complied.

That was more than a decade ago, near the beginning of Badolato’s tenure as head of the Child Exploitation Task Force. But by 2021, leaving it had seemed a necessary form of self-preservation. One of her last cases had gone well legally: The perp, a retired police officer from California who had produced child sex-abuse materials of three sisters in Manila, had pleaded guilty to such charges when he learned that Badolato had brought the girls to the states to testify against him. But the experience had been emotionally devastating for Badolato, who had wanted the sisters, then 16, 13, and 11, to have memories of the U.S that consisted of more than reliving their trauma in a courtroom. She took them shopping and to the zoo, invited them to her home to have dinner with her own family, saw them slowly start to open up and laugh and behave like the children they were. Then she’d had to put them on a flight back to Manila, back to the aunt who had allowed the man to abuse them and who Badolato had been unable to extradite. Fortunately, she says, their estranged father ended up intervening and taking custody of the girls, but that feeling of futility in the fight lingered.

“I stayed for a little bit longer after that trial, but it really was when I should have been able to look myself in the mirror and say, ‘Nikki, you’re done,’ ” Badolato had told me in St. Louis. “It became clear that I had been doing it too long.” She’d spend the last couple of years working national security, a position without the immediacy of child-exploitation work, but also without the heartache. “If I can be perfectly honest, I truly don’t believe that the FBI realizes what they put their agents through doing that kind of work. I just don’t,” she says.

And yet, here Badolato was in Portland, leading Ellison, now 30, up to her hotel room, telling her about all the announcements she’d heard in the Atlanta airport instructing travelers to be on the lookout for sex trafficking. “It’s like white noise in the background,” she says as Ellison settles into the sofa. “It’s a false sense of doing something to help.”

“Here’s the thing: Nobody knows what to look for,” Ellison agrees.

“And what about the victims who are in that airport, who are walking around and listening?” Badolato asks.

“I wouldn’t have even heard that announcement,” Ellison replies. “Because I didn’t feel like a victim. It goes a lot, lot, lot deeper than anybody realizes.”

That’s what she and Badolato both understand. That’s why they started talking eight months ago. Of all the teenage victims Badolato’s task force recovered, Ellison is one of the few who she knows has permanently extricated herself from being prostituted, though it took years for her to get to that point, years for her to see that what happened to her was not her fault but rather a fault in the system, a fault in many systems over the course of generations. Neither she nor Badolato can fix that.

Yet they can’t help feeling like there’s something they can fix — or at least try to. Under the umbrella of an organization she’s founded called Innocent Warriors, Badolato created a program for schools, instructing educators on the signs that might indicate a student is being trafficked and teaching kids how to avoid getting groomed online, which, she believes, is not about stranger danger but rather an awareness of subtle manipulation. Ellison has been working with trafficked youth through nonprofits like Children of the Night, the residential program where Badolato’s team sent her when she was 17. Together, they’ve been talking about having Ellison help train undercovers who are learning to do trafficking sting ops. They’ve also discussed starting a mentorship program in which children who are still being sex-trafficked are paired with young adults like Ellison who once were, providing a way for victims to begin to envision a different future for themselves and a path toward it even while being prostituted. Such a program may be retroactive rather than proactive, but it would capitalize on Badolato’s and Ellison’s experience and expertise — and it could help in the healing of mentors and mentees alike.

Badolato had traveled to Portland for the two to talk face-to-face about how the program might work. “You have to understand how they’ve been traumatized because sometimes, to a child, relating doesn’t sound like you’re relating. It sounds like you’re pointing out all the bad things in them,” says Ellison from the driver’s seat of her Nissan Pathfinder as she drives Badolato around to show her certain landmarks of her past after she’d left Children of the Night: the bridge she’d slept under for over a year after a boyfriend had gotten her hooked on heroin, the blocks downtown where she’d bounced between a children’s shelter and the needle exchange. It had taken a prison sentence for her to finally break her addiction and commit to a different kind of life, though that evolution had had less to do with not having access to drugs than with seeing her own mother cycle in and out of the same facility — like looking into her own future and witnessing how bleak it would be. Maybe, she thought, she could provide the inverse of that for kids in Innocent Warriors. Maybe she could reverse engineer her own escape.

“I just want to make it very clear that if you were a victim, you are a victim, and just to not have any shame in that,” she tells Badolato as they drive through Portland’s misty streets.

“What I anticipate and hope is that then we get survivors that are like, ‘They get it,’ ” Badolato replies. “And that it opens up doors to help, for people to recognize that there are people who get what’s really going on.”

“It took a really long time for me,” Ellison says of coming to terms with her own victimhood.

“It’s like reworking your thought process about some of those things,” Badolato agrees. “And that’s hard, and it happens slowly over time, and it looks different for everybody.”

Ellison grips the wheel tightly. “The truth does matter. It does. The truth is the fucking truth. And it’s been empowering to be able to talk about it because that’s another way that I’ve realized, like, ‘Man, I was a victim,’ is re-going over all of this. Because when it happens so many times, you do blame yourself. It’s a lot easier to just continue to live in a lie than believe that you were lied to.”

Still, Ellison and Badolato agree that the impressionability that makes children vulnerable is also what makes them open to guidance and mentorship if a relationship of trust can be established. “What do you think a parent does? They groom you. I’d been waiting to be guided and groomed,” Ellison says.

It’s been instructive to see that potential from another perspective, as a mother doing the guiding. As the afternoon wears on, Ellison stops to pick up her then-15-month-old son, who was being watched by a social-worker friend. She buckles the little boy into his car seat, ruffles his hair, and passes him a bottle. He grins widely and begins removing his shoes and socks, throwing them gleefully onto the floor of the car and then kicking his tiny feet in time with the music as Ellison glances back at him and smiles. “Kids are so perfect,” she says.

The last stop of the day is the large plot of land where the drug dealer’s house once stood. Now, it’s been turned into a playground, with brightly-colored jungle gyms, a covered picnic area, and a large lawn, where a couple leisurely walks their dog. Ellison and Badolato climb down from the car and stand at the park’s edge, as Ellison’s son toddles around the grass, oblivious to what had transpired in that very spot. There is some form of poetic justice in the land being earmarked for children’s enjoyment, but neither woman voices it. Mostly, they’re quiet. Night is falling, the air growing cooler, and the gray sky fading into dusk.

“You would never think a park could hide what it used to be,” Ellison says at last. And yet it did. Driving off with Badolato at her side and her son babbling happily in the back seat, Ellison glances in the rear-view mirror, but only for a moment. Badolato keeps her eyes fixed only on the road ahead.

[usairling-official]

How do i talk to a live person at British airways?

A flag carrier of the United Kingdom, Britsih Airways is famous for its customer-centric approach. The customer service staff is experienced, friendly, and able to handle any kind of issue related to the flight. Most of the time, passengers ask questions related to last-minute flights, reservations, and cancellations. If you have questions like these, you can easily try the communication methods stated below in this post. 

Direct communication with a representative of British Airways 

To talk with a professional at British Airways, you can utilize the most popular method, which is dialing the phone number. The British Airways phone numbers is mentioned in the following points: 

Begin the journey by using the helpline number 0124 412 0715 

you need to pick out the language that is comfortable for you. 

After selecting the language, pay attention to IVR information. 

Choose the correct button to talk with a British executive. 

As your call will be attended by the executive, share your problem. 

The agent will look into your matter in order to resolve it. 

Drop an email to British Airlines 

Another approach to get in touch with a British representative is writing an email. The British Airways customer care focuses on making the flight journey of the passengers hassle-free. However, if you have any doubts regarding your flight, then you can share an email with British anytime you want: 

Open your email account (Gmail/Yahoo/Outlook/others). 

Here, you need to write about the purpose of composing the email. 

Start writing about your issue in the main email part. 

Now, share all the flight-related details here. 

In addition, mention your contact details. 

Next, share it with the British at customer.service@ba.com. 

The response time of Britsih is 2-3 working days after receiving the email. 

Use the chat method  

Passengers looking for an online way to connect with the customer service of British Airways can opt for the chta method. The virtual assistant of British is capable in resolving the common questions related to the flight. The below steps will help you to connect with the virtual assistant of British: 

Reach out to the official website of Britsih Airways. 

Click on the tab of Help and Contact. 

Here you must immediately hit the symbol of chat. 

A message box will open on th screen. 

Write your concern in the box and send it. 

Virtual assistant of British will join the conversation. 

Soon, your problem will be solved by the chatbot. 

Get help on social media 

Today, social media is not used for entertainment only but also used a source of information. British Airways can be found readily on various digital media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and others. Here, you can use any of these platforms and ask for help from the customer service agent of British Airways. The agent will soon help you out of your situation. 

Conclusion 

In order to help the passengers, British Airways offers multiple ways that will assist them in talking with the airline's representative. In this post, you will get the answer of How do I speak to someone at British Airways?, go through them. 

[helpoiinfoos]

How To Contact Yahoo Email Support

If you need immediate assistance with your Yahoo email account, you can call Yahoo email support by phone. Yahoo offers phone support in a variety of countries, so be sure to select your country from the drop-down menu on the Yahoo email support website before calling.

Once you have selected your country, you will be given a phone number to call. When you call, you will need to provide your Yahoo email address and a brief description of the problem you are experiencing.

How to Contact Yahoo Email Support via Live Chat

If you prefer to chat with a support representative in real time, you can use Yahoo's live chat feature. To access live chat, go to the Yahoo email support website and click the "Live Chat" button.

Before you start chatting, you'll need to provide your Yahoo email address and a brief description of the problem you're having. Once you provide this information, you will be connected to a support representative who can help you resolve your issue.

How to Contact Yahoo Email Support by Email

If you do not need immediate assistance, you can contact Yahoo Email Support via email. To do this, go to the Yahoo Email Support website and click the “Email Us” button.

Before sending your email, you will need to provide your Yahoo email address, a brief description of the issue you are experiencing, and your contact information. Once your email is sent, you will receive a response from a support representative within 24-48 hours.

Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Yahoo Email Support Experience

Here are some tips to get the most out of your Yahoo email support experience:

Be as specific as possible when describing the problem you are experiencing. The more information you provide, the better equipped the support representative will be to help you.

If you are having issues with a specific feature of Yahoo Mail, try to include steps to reproduce the issue. This will help the support representative resolve the issue and provide you with a solution.

[alltypeservice]

How do I Get a Human at Yahoo Customer Service Team?

How can I Get a Human at Yahoo?

Yahoo is an email service provider by an American company. It offers different services or different email plans for personal use as well as for business use. Yahoo has extended its operations there live representatives will be available 24x7 to provide the best assistance to its customers. 

Steps Through Which One Can Easily Get Connected with Humans at Yahoo

Via Phone

One can easily get connected through live representatives of yahoo by getting attached to them via phone. Yahoo customer services are there to assist its customers. Their services are free of cost yahoo doesn’t charge for its services; it provides efficient services to all its customers their representatives are available all around the world. By simply calling them, one can get in touch with their live representative. IVR menu will guide you to the assistance of one’s required.

Steps to Easily Get Through to Yahoo Live Representatives

Firstly dial Yahoo number +1-888-589-7001.

Press 1 - To know about email services.

Press 2 - to know about hiccups in the account.

Press 3- To Know about the policies of the company.

Press 9 -To speak to a live representative. 

Yahoo customer service numbers are always there to assist its customers. Yahoo services are available to support you 24x7. The representative will always be there to take your call and provide you assistance.

Via chat

One can easily get connected through the customer service of yahoo via chat. Chatting is the quickest and easiest way to communicate with the live representative of yahoo. It helps to deliver the best services to its customers at any given point in time. There is an option that is available to talk to a live expert. Someone will be there to assist you. Steps through which one can get in touch with a live representative of yahoo. 

Firstly log -into their official site.

Please scroll down the screen and look for an option that says talk to a live expert. One has to click in there.

By clicking there, one will revert from the virtual chat section (representative). One has to put their query forward to the live - representative. The representative will provide you the assistance once ‘s needed effectively or efficiently.

By following the above-written methods, one will have a clear idea How to get a human at yahoo and get ready assistance one’s needed or required yahoo services are there to assist its customers.

How do I Reach Yahoo?

We often feel the need to consult an expert while having some issue with Yahoo. If you are stuck with a query with your Yahoo account or products, you are on the right page. You can get the steps to contact the Yahoo live person using the steps in this article.

Steps to Contact Yahoo Customer Support

You need to dial the Yahoo Phone number +1-888-589-7001 first.

Once you get connected with an automated voice, you have to select the language.

Now follow the OC prompts given below to get the desired menu.

Press 1 to get assistance with your Yahoo Account.

Press 2 to know or resolve some queries with Yahoo products.

Press 3 to resolve some queries related to Yahoo mobile services.

Press 4 to get more menu of Yahoo products.

Press 5 to speak to a live person in cal.

You have to wait on hold for a while, and the system will direct your call to the customer representative of Yahoo.

Alternate Methods to Reach Yahoo Support

Help Page: You need to get on the Yahoo Help page to find the Contact Us option. You need to click on the button to see the Speak to a live person tab. You can click on the button to contact Yahoo.

Email: You will see the email option on the same Contact page of Yahoo help. You can click on the link to see the email form.

These are the methods by which you can contact Yahoo customer service without any hustle. If you feel the need for further assistance, you can check the FAQ section on the Support page of Yahoo.

Can You Call in Yahoo?

Yes, you can call Yahoo. To call Yahoo 888-589-7001, you can use the customer service phone number. If you need help from the customer service team, you can use the different ways of communication, and you will get the solution to your difficulty. To know about Can you call in Yahoo, you can read the alternative ways of communication out here. 

Alternative Ways of Communication

Here are some alternative ways of communication to get in touch with the Yahoo team:

Contact

If you face any problem with Yahoo, you can call the Yahoo team. If you don’t have the Yahoo phone number, you can follow the process:

Open yahoo. 

Click on the contact us option. 

Select the contact number according to the query. 

Dial this Yahoo official number by phone +1-888-589-7001.

Hear out to the IVR command carefully. 

After that, you will reach out to the representative, raise your difficulty with the team, and get the possible solutions according to your query as soon as possible.

Chat

You could use the chat option if the team did not respond to Yahoo. To use the chat option, you must follow the process

Open yahoo.

Sign in to your account.

Click on the help center option. 

Under the help center option, you must select the chat option. 

Select the topic according to the query. 

The team will respond to your query as soon as possible.

Email

Suppose you need immediate assistance, and the Yahoo team is very busy. If Yahoo did not respond to your call or chat, you could use the email id of Yahoo. To use the email id of Yahoo, you should have the email id. Now, you must visit Yahoo and click on the help center option. Select the email id according to the query. After that, you can send the email to the Yahoo team. Now, the team will respond to the query, and you will get the possible solution to the query. 

Use Complaint Form

To use the complaint form, you must sign in to yahoo. Click on the form option. Select the form option and click on the complaint form. Please provide all the details and click on the submit option. Now, the yahoo team will respond to your complaint as soon as possible. 

Social Media

You can connect to Yahoo on social media platforms- Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You must visit the website and click on the social media icon to connect on social media. Select the social media platform according to your preference. Now, you can start to like and follow Yahoo on the social media platform. Now, you can send the message on their business pages, and the team will give you a reply as soon as possible.

If you use these above options, you will get a response from the Yahoo team as soon as possible.

Does Yahoo have Live Chat Support?

Talking about Yahoo, it is one of the popular platforms that provide the services of email and web browsing. There are certain conditions when Yahoo users face issues with the services provided by Yahoo. These conditions have been listed below, read ahead for details. 

Yahoo account recovery 

Yahoo password not working 

Yahoo not receiving emails 

In such critical situations, we need assistance from the support team that is available at the headquarters of Yahoo. This article contains all the relevant information regarding the modes of connecting to the Yahoo customer service support team.

[antoine-roquentin]

The CIA’s new powers are not about hacking to collect intelligence. Instead, they open the way for the agency to launch offensive cyber operations with the aim of producing disruption — like cutting off electricity or compromising an intelligence operation by dumping documents online — as well as destruction, similar to the U.S.-Israeli 2009 Stuxnet attack, which destroyed centrifuges that Iran used to enrich uranium gas for its nuclear program.

The finding has made it easier for the CIA to damage adversaries’ critical infrastructure, such as petrochemical plants, and to engage in the kind of hack-and-dump operations that Russian hackers and WikiLeaks popularized, in which tranches of stolen documents or data are leaked to journalists or posted on the internet. It has also freed the agency to conduct disruptive operations against organizations that were largely off limits previously, such as banks and other financial institutions.

Another key change with the finding is it lessened the evidentiary requirements that limited the CIA’s ability to conduct covert cyber operations against entities like media organizations, charities, religious institutions or businesses believed to be working on behalf of adversaries’ foreign intelligence services, as well as individuals affiliated with these organizations, according to former officials.

“Before, you would need years of signals and dozens of pages of intelligence to show that this thing is a de facto arm of the government,” a former official told Yahoo News. Now, “as long as you can show that it vaguely looks like the charity is working on behalf of that government, then you’re good.”

The CIA has wasted no time in exercising the new freedoms won under Trump. Since the finding was signed two years ago, the agency has carried out at least a dozen operations that were on its wish list, according to this former official. “This has been a combination of destructive things — stuff is on fire and exploding — and also public dissemination of data: leaking or things that look like leaking.”

Some CIA officials greeted the new finding as a needed reform that allows the agency to act more nimbly. “People were doing backflips in the hallways [when it was signed],” said another former U.S. official.

But critics, including some former U.S. officials, see a potentially dangerous attenuation of intelligence oversight, which could have unintended consequences and even put people’s lives at risk, according to former officials.

The involvement of U.S. intelligence agencies in hack-and-dump activities also raises uncomfortable comparisons for some former officials. “Our government is basically turning into f****ing WikiLeaks, [using] secure communications on the dark web with dissidents, hacking and dumping,” said one such former official...

The CIA’s new cyber powers prompted concerns among some officials. “Trump came in and way overcorrected,” said a former official. Covert cyber operations that in the past would have been rigorously vetted through the NSC, with sometimes years-long gaps between formulation and execution, now go “from idea to approval in weeks,” said the former official.

Former officials declined to speak in detail about cyber operations the CIA has carried out as a result of the finding, but they said the agency has already conducted covert hack-and-dump actions aimed at both Iran and Russia.

For example, the CIA has dumped information online about an ostensibly independent Russian company that was “doing work for Russian intelligence services,” said a former official. While the former official declined to be more specific, BBC Russia reported in July 2019 that hackers had breached the network of SyTech, a company that does work for the FSB, Russia’s domestic spy agency, and stolen about 7.5 terabytes of data; the data from that hack was passed to media organizations.

In another stunning hack-and-dump operation, an unknown group in March 2019 posted on the internet chat platform Telegram the names, addresses, phone numbers and photos of Iranian intelligence officers allegedly involved in hacking operations, as well as hacking tools used by Iranian intelligence operatives. That November, the details of 15 million debit cards for customers of three Iranian banks linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were also dumped on Telegram.

Although sources wouldn’t say if the CIA was behind those Iran breaches, the finding’s expansion of CIA authorities to target financial institutions, such as an operation to leak bank card data, represents a significant escalation in U.S. cyber operations. Under prior administrations, senior Treasury Department officials argued successfully against leaking or wiping out banking data, according to former officials, because it could destabilize the global financial system. These were operations the “CIA always knew were an option, but were always a bridge too far," said a former official. “They had been bandied about at senior levels for a long time, but cooler heads had always prevailed."

[firespirited]

Re recommendations. Ages ago, yahoo chat years ago, someone online recommended Nip Tuck because it "took an interest in socially relevant storylines and ethics" was made by a gay man with equal opportunity nudity. And now, i could write a very very long very angry dissertation on how Ryan Murphy threw every single minority under the bus, breathed new life into old bigoted concepts and couldn't write a normal human for the life of him. I will kick him in the shin then punch him in the groin if ever i meet him and have not watched Pose because my distrust runs so deep i expect him to destroy the entire cast if it goes on for more than two seasons. So do please be specific in your recommendations.

Ladies who love sci fi and fantasy generally don't like the rapey sci fi and fantasy, queer folks are represented in sense8 but it's still a sex and violence show. Queer as folk is a fascinating slice of life in the gay scene but the main character's a stereotype of a selfish hedonist who gets involved with a naive too young man then is a dickwad when the young guy caught feelings. My socially awkward ass watched Sex and the City to try and understand womanhood and female friendships better and came out of most episodes wondering what planet they were living on. Representation only matters if it's done properly and may not work for you at all if your life experience intersects with race, class, fat, disability, gender non conformity...

It's like asking for neurodivergent media reccs. Neurotypicals will suggest stuff that features an autist or other dx as either the 'burden' or the 'genius' and all the NDs will suggest She-Ra's Entrapa, TNG's Data and other ND coded characters because sometimes you get better representation from subtext than text.

Thought exercise: Can you name an out non-predatory butch in media other than Poussey? Now can you name butch coded women in media who are textually straight?

Can you name any character that has two of your important intersections?

[scroll-of-thought]

Rowan & Dandelion! ❤️

ROWAN: How did you learn your Craft (e.g. from a teacher, from books, etc)?

From a lot of places! Initially, I learned the very basics from a neighbor and her daughter. The neighbor was a Wiccan priestess, I asked questions, my parents gave her the ok to answer my questions, and that kind of got me started. She didn’t teach me a ton, but she did get me pointed in the right direction. From there I found whatever books I could. This was in the early 2000s, and I barely had internet access, so any book I could find on wicca, witchcraft, herbs, nature, old religions, whatever. I just got it all. Luckily for me at the time, the library was like 4 blocks down the road and I lived in a sleepy rural town, so I could just walk down there at the age of 13 or so.

Eventually I ventured into the internet more and more. Found a lot of junk mixed in with a bunch of gems. I read everything from geocities websites to the Key of Solomon, to personal spells made by people on yahoo groups. Like I said, a lot of junk mixed in with good stuff, and I started to learn from an early age to check sources and filter out stuff like pseudoscience based “facts”. Like, ever sense I was a kid I was real into learning literally everything I could, so having a well rounded base of knowledge really helps you pick out the stuff that seems fishy.

Currently I’m still doing a bit of all of it. When I find a topic I want to learn more about I’ll seek out someone who knows the topic, usually watch some youtube videos on it and read some first hand articles. I’ll follow that up with any source material I can find, now that I have a better idea of what I’m looking for and how to understand it. See if I can find any PDFs, books, or academic papers on the topic. Then I’ll circle back around to learning from people who practice and understand it, and with my newly shored up foundation and deeper understanding of the topic I can better understand and digest the information. And you can apply this to anything really. Like I learned blacksmithing the same way. Watched some people do it online, read solid information about it, historically and modern, buy a couple books, be lucky enough that there’s some smiths at the local county fair once a year and chat with them, same thing for ren fairs, go back to your materials with a better understanding and dig in. Obviously through out each of those steps you’re dabbling and putting it all into practical application to get your feet wet, but when you really get it you start really digging in and trying it.

DANDELION (my favorite flower): What do you feel was the most powerful magick you have ever performed?

This one is a little tricky, because it’s a little hard to quantify “power” in practical terms.

The one that comes to mind most prevalently is probably the time where I designed and preformed a pretty intense banishing for a close friend. He was being harassed by a spirit for some time. He was looking for a spirit to work with, but this one seemed shady and made uncomfortable demands of him, so when he told it to get lost it wouldn’t take no for an answer. It started causing everything from nightmares of being eaten alive by wolves, to mild poltergeist activity. Eventually when it started getting violent we said it was time to fight back. We’d already tried basic banisments and cleansing, even diplomatic actions and making deals with it.

I’ll preface this by saying this is a dumb way to do any banishing, but I was like 18ish and spent most of my childhood and teens getting into fights, some potentially life threatening, so the idea of squaring off with a spirit didn’t particularly scare me.

I don’t want to give most of the details, because like I said it’s a bad idea I wouldn’t want anyone to replicate, but the ritual went something like this. We went to the place where he’d met the spirit, a park near the woods in our home town. These woods went on for miles and miles through rural Pennsylvania, and I’d communed with plenty of spirits while hiking and camping out there. I called to the spirit. I took out my knife, the first ritual knife I ever had, and I drew a circle around myself with the blade in the asphalt. I told myself “This is my world” and in that moment the circle represented the entirety of existence to me. It was almost like an out of body experience and one of the most intense trances I’ve ever been in. In that moment, inside that circle, I could see the forest around my legs where I sat, I could see the wolf staring at us and I could see us, all in miniature inside my personal world. I lifted my knife as the wolf ran from the forest towards us and I plunged it down between it’s tiny shoulders, stabbing the knife into the asphalt. It laid there pinned to the ground, both at my finger tips as a tiny representation of itself, and in full scale a few meters away at the edge of the tree line. I’ve rarely seen a spirit look so physical. I told it that I’m banishing it from our lives and this plane of existence, and that it should look for peace elsewhere. It cursed at us before giving off the feeling of surrender and saying something along the lines of I was probably right and peace is the best option. It kind of faded away and I pulled the knife out of the ground.

I don’t know if that’s “powerful” in the way the person who wrote the questions or how you, Anon, were thinking, but it was a very powerful experience. Like I said, the most intense trance I’ve ever been in, the most solid looking spirits, the most powerful sense of being connected to everything around me all at once.

So yeah, that was a story from my younger, dumber, wilder days. If anyone wants a less anime, but still pretty powerful story, let me know. I’ve got another one about a bad breakup and used a spell to help cope. It was a pretty powerful experience and it took me from devastated to manageably broken up.

Hope you found this all interesting. Thanks a lot for the asks, and as always, more asks and followups welcome :)

Ask list and answered questions here!

[virtchandmoir]

Tessa Virtue: 'Everyone struggles to feel comfortable in their skin'

Tess Virtue is showing us what it’s like to live with no limits.

The NIVEA Canada brand ambassador, Canadian ice dancer and Olympic gold medallist performed a gorgeous and symbolic ice performance in a costume made entirely of body makeup for a new campaign.

Yahoo Canada chatted with the Canadian icon about inspiring people to challenge their own boundaries, feeling comfortable in your skin and being fearless.

Yahoo Canada: What does the performance represent to you?

Virtue: I think it's about finding your strength and owning your individuality. I mean, the whole notion of showing your true colours, being authentic, finding and embracing all of the things that make you unique is really the messaging that resonated with me in this campaign. I'm so proud of Nivea. I mean, I signed on with them last year as their very first ever Canadian ambassador and this year - just year two - I feel they're such risks in their marketing and it's attention grabbing and it's also - that message of empowerment and being determined to be the best version of yourself you can possibly be without any limits is really powerful.

Yahoo Canada: What was it like getting the suit painted on?

Virtue: It took about four and a half hours and maybe... five people working on me? It was quite a process but it was fascinating and the more layered it became the more it felt like I was really embracing this peacock character. It looked like real tights I was wearing, it looked like I was wearing a wet suit or something. It was amazing to think it was just my bare skin.

Yahoo Canada: Have you ever struggled to feel comfortable in your own skin?

Virtue: Of course! I think everyone struggles to feel comfortable in their skin or has at one time or another. Nivea's campaign about feeling good in your skin is special and relevant and meaningful now because there's such a crazy standard of beauty for people that's an unrealistic measuring stick that we're supposed to be gauging our own appearance by. I think just looking inward, and realizing “what is it that makes us special” and “how can we be fearless” without those limits and express ourselves and kind of playing with that narrative and starting that conversation and continuing that conversation is really imperative, especially for a skincare brand.

Yahoo Canada: You have a lot of young Canadian fans. What would you say to young women that are struggling to feel comfortable in their skin that look up to you?

Virtue: I think it's important to note that you're not alone. Everyone has those insecurities, everyone doubts themselves but it's how we handle that as humans and as people and how we support one another and how we really embrace the things that make us unique. Ultimately, and I can appreciate this as I get older, those quirks and those differences are what I find so attractive about other people, that's what I think being beautiful is. The more people feel comfortable to showcase that and the more we highlight that as a visibility for young girls to see and look up to - I think that's better.

Yahoo Canada: How does the skincare and makeup relate to all of this?

Virtue: I think it's being free to express yourself however you see fit, and for a lot of women, that's makeup. It's how you show yourself to the world, it's how you sometimes find confidence because you feel you can highlight your features or experiment with different looks and different moods and aesthetics and there's no limit to that and I think there's no judgement and also no limits to how you can take that off because its so easy with the MicellAIR Expert. Anything goes nowadays. As far as what makes you feel confident - I think just owning that apologetically being yourself and feeling comfortable to do so, that's really what we wanted to click with other Canadians.

—Yahoo

[yahoohelpcentral-blog]

Yahoo customer support is known for offering reliable customer service through its various support options that include help through Yahoo Help Centre, Social Media Pages, Email Support, and Live Chat support. Other than this, if you are using a paid version of Yahoo account, then you are eligible to use the advanced platform of Yahoo Customer Support to get in touch with Yahoo support representatives.

[therapidhelpyahoo-blog]

How to Fix Yahoo Mail Error Code 550 Mail Box Unavailable in Yahoo

Yahoo Mail Error Code 550:

“Yahoo Mail Error code 550″ basically belongs to the SMTP error codes which happen when the outgoing emails of the users aren't addressed to the priority email receiver. If you're getting this issue then it’s better to not send an email because it can start to permanent damage to your mailbox. Here, you'll study important methods to repair this error 550.

The possible symptoms you face When Yahoo Mail error code 550 occurs

You unable to access the mail account for a short-term period of your time

wouldn’t be ready to convey messages to the actual email recipients

All the emails become spammed

You will be continuously occupied by the incoming of the error information.

What are the most Reasons/ Causes of Yahoo Error Code 550?

Block IP Address: – This error code may appear when the IP address has been blocked during a Spam Haus.

Invalid Email Address: – once you try to send emails to an invalid email address, this will head to the arrival of this mailbox error 550.

Invalid SMTP Connection: –This can happen thanks to the declination of your SMTP connection.

Invalid Content: –The content of the e-mail involves things that are restricted by Yahoo policy.

Authentication Failure: – Sent email from Yahoo Mail account couldn’t clear authentication analyses against your sending Domain Keys policy or Domain’s DKIM.

ConclusionThe above steps are easy to execute. After doing these you're presumably to unravel your issue but if still, it continues. Then you want to instantly communicate with a team of experts via Yahoo contact number 24 hours who are reachable at all-time despite time and site restrictions. they're recognized for providing instant help and powerful solution for each technical glitch user face while accessing the Yahoo email account. The services fulfilled by the technicians are efficient and price achieving.

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Dating Apps To Meet Foreigners

International Dating

International dating websites and apps are a great way to meet foreigners online and if looking to date a foreigner you've come to the right place!

An interesting feature is that, like Tinder, it offers the possibility of passing the profiles one by one, and give them a like or discard them. The system will notify you both when there is mutual interest. This is the Finnish subsidiary of match.com, the great dating website created in 1995.

Most dating app profiles display your first name. Don’t waste valuable real estate repeating it in your bio. 300 Character Or Less Online Dating Profile Examples. On CoffeeMeetsBagel, your profile is a little longer – but 276 characters max still isn’t much real estate. Make every word count with a profile like Short Dating. Introduction in dating app. If you're not sure how to introduce yourself on a dating site or app, try out these fun options. Basic First Message Examples Just as you would introduce yourself to. Downloading a dating app is the easy part. What’s not easy is sweating over the pictures that best represent you (or the ones you want to present to hundreds of single women).It’s also not easy to painstakingly craft a bio that’s equal parts informative and humorous. When it comes to introductions in dating sites, its a good idea to read first the dating profile of the person who was interested in you and take a little bit of time to respond. If he or she had sent you a short email introduction and you are ready to respond then make it short as well.

Do you have some really cheesy pick-up lines in a foreign language you have been dying to try out? You're in luck.. you'll have the chance to meet people all over the world, from all different walks of life.

Tired of Swiping?

Are you sick of all the meet up apps? Just endlessly swiping all day, sure those people are in your area, but are you really that interested in meeting them? Dating site for yahoo boys. We're a free international dating platform where you can meet your foreign sweetheart online. Think about it - you spend all the time and invest all that money - but what are your options really? When you think locally - you're really limited to people in your Country, State, Province, etc. If you expand your thinking - to a foreign dating app - you're now opening up the possibilities of the entire world.

Looking beyond your borders

Dating Apps To Meet Foreigners Dating

It's 2021, online dating is now the most popular way to meet someone. Singles around me dating site. But, even if you live in a very large country like the United States, you're severely limiting your options by only considering dating people in your own country. If you join an international cupid type app, you'll be opening yourself up to 7 billion new people, imagine the possibilities when you can reach out to the entire world, and no longer limit yourself to your domestic audience.

For those who have traveled overseas before - you're already in the know - there are a lot of options out there for romantic partners abroad. Many of our customers have met their fiance online within 90 days, and gotten married after getting to know each other and sparking the tinder that developed into a friendship, and then later falling in love. We're always delighted to see this kind of cherry blossom of love sparked by our 1's and 0's showing the right person at the right time.

Dating Apps To Meet Foreigners 2020

Pros and Cons of International Dating Apps

If you haven't tried an international dating app before, they can be different from the apps you're used to. Instead of seeing people strictly near you, you can meet new people all over the world. Even if they're on the other side of the planet in India, or Germany, or South Africa - you'll be able to instantly message them and send them a message.

East Meet East is one of the most popular dating sites and apps for Asian singles to meet each other in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. Some of the founders of the company are Japanese, so it’s no wonder you’ll find many Japanese men and women on the site.

AmourFactory Review. This is a great dating site that focuses on international dating. It has only few years of experience but connects thousands of singles from around the world. If you are looking for a partner from abroad, then this is the best dating site to join.

OKC is one of the most popular dating apps out there. With over 10 million users since its launch, it’s available in the U.S., Europe, and Canada. It asks a series of questions, designed for you to meet your perfect match.

Dating Apps To Meet Foreigners Free

For those looking for dating sites overseas, Findmate is probably one of the best possible options. There are other sites out there that are great if you're looking to meet a foreign husband online, find a girlfriend on a dating app, or just looking for friends in your local area, but one of the unique aspects of our platform is the ability to explore the entire globe, country by country, and looking through who has signed up in each of those countries. On other apps (like Tinder for example), this is a premium service that you need to pay for, but on Findmate you can immediately start exploring all over the world without paying a dime.

Dating Apps To Meet Foreigners Women

You might be very surprised the first time you use the app - at how many people are interested in chatting with you. One of the things that makes international dating online different is people are quite curious about you, because they may have never been to your country, or maybe they have never even heard of your country. This kind of mystique makes for a magical experience where you can learn about other cultures from around the world, while also possibly discovering the love of your life.

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How to Make the Transition from Brick-and-Mortar to Ecommerce

Last year saw an unprecedented number of businesses moving online as brick-and-mortar stores adapted to the conditions created by COVID-19. While the surge in online sales may have led to record ecommerce revenue in 2020, it also maintained the existing trend of significant ecommerce revenue increases each year for over a decade.

Whether your brick-and-mortar business is currently adapting to the ecommerce space or you took the last year to adjust and have decided to set up your ecommerce store now, you may be facing some uncertainty as you find yourself in an environment that looks very different from what you’re used to.

Making the adjustment from brick-and-mortar to ecommerce means adapting to changes in four major categories: ecommerce store setup and design, shipping and fulfillment, customer service, and marketing. In this post, we’ll take a look at each and provide the strategies brick-and-mortar retailers need to know as they turn their new online home into a thriving, long-term revenue stream.

Setting Up Your Ecommerce Store

While ecommerce store setup and design may be the most daunting process for many brick-and-mortar retailers, ecommerce platforms are growing more streamlined and user-friendly by the day to meet the demand. As you set up your products and build out a store that reflects your brand, learn how to think in terms of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) vs. long-term wishes.

If you choose a beautiful theme that aligns with your store’s aesthetic and functionality needs, it’s fairly easy to get your store to the MVP stage—after all, another designer has already performed most of the heavy lifting for you. Once you’re there, allow yourself to publish and promote your site; don’t hold off and wait for perfection, because that can be a moving goalpost. Do start building out a list of more long-term design and functionality needs and goals, and pay attention to the feedback you receive about your site so you can begin the process of optimizing your store on an ongoing basis. Even the biggest ecommerce stores in the world are never “finished;” they’re always a work in progress.

After your store makes its online debut, you may notice that the ecommerce world affords certain benefits you didn’t have with a traditional brick-and-mortar. These include:

Sell 24/7: Unlike physical stores, online stores stay open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

More eyes on your products: Your customers are no longer location-dependent, which means your target audience has just become much larger.

Customer retargeting: From displaying remarketing ads to creating email opt-in forms, you have more freedom to capitalize on piqued interest and turn one-off purchases into repeat visits.

Shipping and Fulfillment

If you haven’t had an ecommerce presence at all until now, then shipping and fulfillment is one of the biggest changes you’ll be facing. The need to package and ship products adds a massive logistical layer that you didn’t need to consider before, often requiring planning and frontloading to get it just right.

First, decide whether you’ll be handling packing and shipping yourself/in-house or whether you will outsource to a fulfillment service. The former tends to lead to larger profit margins, but the latter is often the more efficient and scalable option. Consider both short- and long-term goals as you select which is right for you.

Either way, make sure your ecommerce platform integrates with your shipping provider(s) of choice. You’re in luck on this front if you’ve chosen Volusion, as we integrate with all of the major shipping providers.

Customer Service

Now that you’ve moved online, your customer service needs are going to look a little different. Fortunately, the skills your customer service representatives need have not changed, which means that all of your former local customer favorites are still major assets online. The biggest changes will be the nature of the customer service requests—more logistics and troubleshooting—and the mediums through which your customers and representatives will communicate.

To address logistical concerns, anticipate as many questions and problems ahead of time and give your representatives all of the training they need to address them. You may not predict all of them, and that’s okay. Have your representatives keep records of every interaction so you can spot trends right away and make the changes/provide the training needed to manage them.

The question of which mediums to use for your customer service is a matter of what works for your business. Options include phone, live chat, email, social media, and even text messages. Most businesses use a blend of phone, chat, and email at a minimum, which gives their customers options without spreading staff too thin. Make addressing concerns as quickly as possible your priority no matter which method you use. This often means adding at least one option that gives customers a chance to interact in real-time during business hours.

Marketing

Marketing is the space where you may feel like you’ve entered new territory; since waiting for foot traffic won’t work anymore, you need to be actively sourcing your customers. Web traffic isn’t a given, and you may need to invest in some marketing strategies upfront before they start producing returns. Invest in SEO to build a base of sustainable organic traffic over the long term, and consider paid advertising to kickstart revenue in the short term.

At the same time, continue building out a fun, engaging social media presence. This is often the easiest part for brick-and-mortar businesses who are making the transition because successful brick-and-mortars usually have a robust social presence to begin with. If this is the case for you, your ad money might be best spent on the platforms where your customers are congregating. If it’s not the case but you’ve used a different marketing tactic with great success, lean into that one. The mediums that will be most successful for you are the ones with which you and your employees have already established comfort and enthusiasm.

As you start to transition your business online, think about what lessons you’ve gleaned from your physical store and how they can be used to build your ecommerce brand.

Do your customers typically prefer one color SKU over another? Make that the featured image for the product.

Do they typically repurchase an item after 45 days? Create an automatic email offer around that timeline.

Do your in-store products generate higher revenue when they’re demonstrated? Create online video demonstrations to add to product and landing pages to assist your customers with their purchase decisions.

No matter which marketing strategies you choose, keep the following tips in mind:

Use a professional email address: From customer support to email marketing, you’ll find it necessary to communicate through email at some point. Don’t hurt your brand by using a non-company email like Gmail or Yahoo. Professional, domain-specific email addresses are easy and inexpensive to set up, and they instantly improve your branding and credibility.

Test, track, and iterate: There are many suggestions on how to build out the perfect marketing strategy, but the reality is, you also have to watch what works and commit yourself to optimizing your strategy on an ongoing basis. Install Google Analytics immediately so you can begin the process of monitoring your results and making improvements.

Don’t neglect leads: Most ecommerce platforms will collect emails from customers who purchase your products, but what about visitors who are not quite ready to buy? Add conversion points via pop-ups, sidebars, or gated content to help you build an email lead list of potential customers.

In Conclusion

If making the transition to ecommerce feels daunting, just remember that your existing knowledge and insight give you a huge leg up. You already intimately understand what your customers want and need, so you already know which value propositions work and which pain points drive your customers away. This insight will help you create a user experience that is shaped by your knowledge. From there, learn from your successes and failures as you continue finding what works best. And most importantly, remember that being online gives you the ability to make a difference for more customers than ever.

How to Make the Transition from Brick-and-Mortar to Ecommerce published first on https://yousweetluxury.weebly.com/

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Basic Steps for a way to vary Yahoo Mail Profile Picture?

Change Yahoo Mail Profile Picture

The profile picture on email is must important to spot you quickly and also important for professional emails. So, if you're trying to find the way to add or

change the Yahoo Mail profile picture? then during this post, we'll explain to you thru basic steps for a way you'll change your Yahoo profile photo.

Follow steps to vary Yahoo mail profile picture:

The Method is nearly an equivalent as other emails for adding or changing the Profile picture on Yahoo mails.

Steps 1: – Open the Yahoo main site and Login into your Yahoo mail account. Move a cursor on your profile picture at the topmost right corner. you'll view a little window as given below.

Steps 2: – Click the “Account Info” option. you'll see the private info at rock bottom of the Settings menu.

Steps 3: – Tap on your current profile picture as displayed within the above screenshot and choose the image from the photo gallery.

Steps 4: – Later choosing a picture then choices will appear below your chosen picture (you can crop it there) and choose crop and save option.

Steps 5:Click “Crop and Save” to stay your picture. you'll now view your preferred photo displayed as your profile picture!

Conclusion: 

Changing Yahoo Mail Profile picture may be a very easy method, one can easily change his or her profile picture by following the above steps or check the instruction on images or if still, you stuck somewhere then with none hesitation you'll directly connect with Yahoo customer service for Yahoo Mail help.