More Blue State welfare fraud uncovered, some of which gets shipped overseas, more Russian oil refineries knocked out of action, a CIA operative with a fortune in gold, and trouble at a Texas dam. Plus: Puppies!
Food stamps and food pantries are intended to keep struggling Americans fed.
What we found is that, in some communities, that food never reaches an American table. Instead, it gets shipped overseas and sold for profit.
The scheme works like this. Residents in cities like Lawrence, Massachusetts collect food through two channels: purchasing it at local markets using EBT cards, and picking it up for free from food banks and churches. That food is then packed into large blue barrels, dropped off at shipping companies, and sent by container ship to the Dominican Republic. Once it arrives, it is sold for profit in local stores. The people doing this see nothing wrong with it. In many cases, they do it openly.
According to a local that assisted us with this story, this fraud has been happening for over a decade.
Over the course of several weeks, Muckraker Foundation traced the full pipeline from food pantry lines in Lawrence, Massachusetts, through shipping warehouses in New York, to store shelves in Santo Domingo. This is what we found.
Lawrence is a small city about 30 miles north of Boston. It has the highest concentration of Dominican immigrants of any city in Massachusetts, and the highest rate of SNAP enrollment in the state.
John has been delivering goods in Lawrence for over 11 years, six days a week, 35 stops a day. He knows the community intimately.
“I’ve been witnessing the Dominican residents going to food bank lines and collecting non-perishable goods,” he told us, “and then packing it in barrels and in boxes, and then they ship it back to the Dominican Republic.”
“California Assembly passes “Stop Nick Shirley Act” to prevent people from uncovering fraud.”
If the bill passes the state senate, “it would become criminal to film and reveal information on taxpayer-funded immigration services like healthcare, which would include daycare, and hospices; it also covers counseling services, translation services, and immigration legal services.”
How is this not prima facia evidence that collecting fraud and graft is the highest priority of the Democrat Party?
And speaking of Democrats protecting fraud: “Seattle socialist mayor will NOT investigate fraud at Somali-run daycare centers, calls it attack on immigrants.”
Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said the city has no intention of investigating fraud claims in taxpayer-funded social programs, claiming the concerns are an effort to target immigrant communities rather than address legitimate financial irregularities.
In an interview with KOMO News, Wilson was asked if she had authorized the Seattle Police Department or the city’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs to investigate fraud charges involving daycare providers, particularly those in Somali and other immigrant communities. The mayor responded: “No.”
“This whole issue is not really about fraud,” said Wilson. “It’s about dividing and conquering.”
Translation: We can’t let people investigate fraud as long as Democrats are the ones raking off the graft. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
During a Wednesday cabinet meeting, Small Business Administration Chief Kelly Loeffler accused the Biden administration of concealing a staggering amount of fraud tied to the federal government’s pandemic-era Paycheck Protection Program. She claimed that rather than aggressively working to recover the funds, officials tried “to hide and forgive and sweep under the rug” roughly $200 billion in “fraudulent PPP loans.” The explosive allegation, if substantiated, would represent one of the largest fraud scandals in government history.
Loeffler told colleagues that small business owners are “hit particularly hard by fraud because they’re some of our biggest taxpayers in the country.” She continued:
Think about it. At the SBA, we found $200 billion in fraudulent PPP loans that the Biden administration tried to hide and forgive and sweep under the rug.
We’ve turned the first $22 billion of that over to Treasury for collection and to DOJ for prosecution. Our inspector general is already announcing that people are going to jail.
…
We’ve announced that 140,000 people have been barred from ever getting SBA loans again — defrauding the government of about $9 billion. So we are going to continue our work under the great leadership of Vice President Vance and appreciate the partnership because it’s really accelerated our ability to get the job done.
She later posted a video of her remarks on X along with the following statement: “During the Biden Admin, PPP and EIDL [the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan program] became some of THE MOST defrauded federal programs in U.S. history – robbing honest small business owners and taxpayers of vital pandemic relief, to the tune of $200 billion. … Under the leadership of @POTUS, the SBA is delivering long-awaited accountability for every criminal fraudster that the last Administration tried to forgive or sweep under the rug.”
If you subtracted fraud, madness and spite from social justice and the Democrat Party, you’d have almost nothing left.
Three oil tanks hit which were in between the units. Then hits on the connecting pipelines and the loading cranes as well surrounding the unit. Additionally, two additional oil tanks here were hit as well. So this was a pretty massive strike. As a result of this, it’s been estimated that between 90 to even 100% of the refinery’s processing capacity is out.
A war that looked like it was a grinding stalemate being fought to the last Russian or Ukrainian is looking increasingly like one that Ukraine is actually winning.
Ukraine’s tactical victories on the battlefield, as impressive as they are, won’t ensure victory. And as fascinating and gruesome as the videos of first-person drones on the battlefield are, those only explain why Ukraine is able to hold Russian advances back, and the modest gains on the battlefield Ukraine has made in retaking small bits of occupied territory.
Ukraine has mastered drone warfare on the battlefield, and even more importantly, has built an incredibly resilient and innovative system that adjusts hardware, software, and tactics at a blistering pace that Russia could not hope to achieve with its clunky and corrupt procurement and training systems. That explains Ukraine’s increasingly solid tactical position; unpredictably, Ukraine is now its own most important weapons supplier, and is now teaching the rest of the world how modern warfare is conducted on the ground.
But Russia can take a punch in the same way that Andre the Giant could. Ukraine needs strategic victories, and until, ironically, Trump weaned them off the teat of the West to the extent they were dependent completely on the West, all Ukraine could do was fight at the tactical level, guaranteeing a stalemate.
At the same time that Trump reduced American aid, he also allowed Ukraine to take the gloves off and to put Russian assets in Russia at risk, and the results are stunning. Not only have the tactical battle lines extended into Russia, making logistics infinitely harder, but Ukraine is now systematically dismantling key parts of Russia’s economic engine and weapons production facilities.
Virtually all major oil refineries in central Russia have been forced to halt or scale back fuel output following Ukrainian drone attacks in recent days, according to official data and sources.
The combined capacity of refineries that have fully or partially halted operations exceeds 83 million metric tons per year, or around 238,000 tons per day. That accounts for around one quarter of Russia’s total refining capacity, according to data and sources who spoke on condition of anonymity…
One of Russia’s largest refineries, Kirishi, with capacity of 20 million metric tons per year, has been fully shut since May 5, according to the sources.”
If you regularly read the LinkSwarm, most of this will be familiar to you. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Here’s a strange story with some disturbing implications: “FBI arrests former CIA official over $40 million worth of gold bars stashed at Virginia home.”
The FBI arrested a former CIA official last week after investigators discovered hundreds of gold bars hidden at his home in Virginia, according to court documents reported by NBC News on Wednesday.
The official, identified as David Rush, was charged with criminal theft of public money in a complaint filed last week in the Eastern District of Virginia. He has also been accused of lying to employers about his background for nearly two decades.
The CIA and FBI confirmed Rush’s arrest to the outlet in a joint statement and said CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred Rush for a criminal investigation.
“After a CIA internal investigation identified potential violations of the law, CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred the information to the FBI for a law enforcement investigation,” the statement said. “The FBI is working closely with our partners at the CIA and the Department of Justice as we continue to investigate this matter fully. We are committed to following the facts, ensuring accountability, and pursuing justice in accordance with the law.”
The arrest comes after the FBI raided Rush’s home in Virginia on May 18, where law enforcement officers found more than 300 gold bars, which are estimated to be worth more than $40 million combined, according to the New York Times.
The court papers do not indicate why Rush kept so much gold, but it comes after he requested and received “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses,” which the CIA was later unable to locate.
“Work-related expenses.” What sort of “work-related expenses” involve tens of millions of dollars in gold bars? Bribing officials? Buying cocaine?
Faster, please. “US Probe of Embattled UN Gaza Relief Agency Expands to 1,500 Staffers Suspected of Hamas Ties: UNRWA Could Soon Be Labeled a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.'” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Texas’ Supreme Court has ordered a Travis County judge to quit avoiding a critical question in the fight over Austin’s troubled rail construction plan, known as Project Connect.
In a May 22 ruling, the Court said trial courts can’t simply refuse to rule on jurisdictional challenges to avoid triggering appeals. Chief Justice James Blacklock didn’t mince words, writing that “nothing about this scenario is as it should be.”
The ruling clarifies that courts may not ignore jurisdictional challenges while proceeding to trial, something that will be relevant to a similar case in which the City of McKinney is suing its own citizens to expeditiously validate its airport expansion bonds.
In 2020, Austin voters approved Proposition A, which authorized a property tax increase to fund Project Connect. The original plan promised 20.2 miles of light rail, subway, rapid bus routes, and connections to the airport.
The City of Austin formed a corporation called Austin Transit Partnership (ATP) to implement the project and issue the bonds.
However, the project was significantly scaled back by 2022.
What remained was a 9.8-mile surface line with no subway and no airport link. Community members argued the new plan constituted a “bait and switch,” since voters never approved the scaled-down version.
This led a group of taxpayers to file a lawsuit in 2023 to stop ATP’s bond issuance.
In response, the City of Austin and ATP filed a lawsuit against its own citizens under the Texas Expedited Declaratory Judgement Act (EDJA), seeking to validate the bonds and throw out any legal challenges they may face—including the pending taxpayer lawsuit.
This little-known law allows bond issuers—including cities—to file an expedited declaratory bond-validation lawsuit against a very broad group of defendants, including all taxpayers, property owners, or residents whose rights might be affected by the bonds.
The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) is automatically served in EDJA cases and is tasked with informing the court whether the bonds comply with Texas law.
“Issuing authority” details snipped.
Last week, Texas’ Supreme Court ruled in the OAG’s favor, finding that a jurisdictional challenge must always be addressed before proceeding to the merits.
“Proceeding to trial without first resolving the State’s challenge to the court’s authority to do so was an abuse of the district court’s otherwise broad discretion to manage the progress of the case,” reads the opinion.
Chief Justice James Blacklock did not hold back in writing the opinion of the Court.
“Nothing about this scenario is as it should be,” wrote Blacklock. “A court may not withhold a ruling on the government’s properly presented plea to the jurisdiction in order to prevent the government from appealing. And the government may not appeal from an interlocutory order that does not exist.”
The Court therefore construed the OAG’s petition for review as a petition for writ of mandamus that would order the lower court to issue a ruling on the jurisdictional challenge.
“The writ will issue only if the court does not do so. The judgment of the court of appeals is undisturbed,” wrote Blacklock.
Now, the trial court must rule on the OAG’s jurisdictional challenge. If the court denies the plea, the OAG gets an automatic appeal that pauses everything. If the court grants it, ATP’s bond validation suit gets tossed.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution outlining the locations of drop boxes for the upcoming early-voting period without consulting Recorder Justin Heap.
The board approved the resolution while it continues to deal with an ongoing lawsuit with Heap about who runs specific election functions.
In April, a judge ruled in favor of Heap, saying the board members need to hand over control of specific election functions to his office.
The board sought a stay of the motion, but the Arizona Superior Court denied it. The board then announced it was appealing the lower court’s decision.
Snip.
Heap said he was not consulted before the board approved the resolution Wednesday on drop-box locations.
“The law is not optional,” he said. “The court has already ruled that the Board does not possess unlimited authority over election administration, yet the Board continues attempting to exercise powers Arizona law assigns to the recorder.”
He also said: “Voters deserve lawful, professional election administration, not political gamesmanship and last-minute public ambushes.”
How are they supposed to manufacture votes for Democrats at the last minute without controlling the boxes?
“MSNOW Senior Washington Correspondent [Eugene Daniels] Thinks Abortion and Trans Kids Are ‘Kitchen Table Issues.’ ‘When you talk about whether or not people can have access to healthy abortions—safe abortions, that is a kitchen table issue, right?'”
Shelby Campbell…is a candidate in Michigan’s Democratic primary for the 13th Congressional District, which includes portions of Detroit and some of its suburbs.
She has built her campaign around provocation — relying on edgy rhetoric, inflammatory stunts, and degrading online content to attract attention. Just in time for Memorial Day weekend, she released a new video urging voters to “quit thanking the troops for sacrificing their lives” for their country.
Snip.
I don’t want to thank these men and women who join the military because they had no other option. Like, they didn’t want to go to school. They didn’t have the resources. They don’t have the knowledge. They don’t have people to like, love them. And, [yawning] they go into the military. Military preys on more rural populations.
She evidently learned nothing from John Kerry’s presidential campaign…
Did Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey honor America’s fallen warriors on Memorial Day? No. He honored George Floyd.
“Come meet the all Native American ICE troop ‘The Shadow Wolves.'” “ICE apparently has an all American Indian squadron who patrol the Mexican border in the Sonoran Desert. Their job is primarily to use native tactics to track down and stop narcos and human traffickers on the southern border.”
“Texas woman says she was arrested for making Facebook posts about town’s water quality.” “Jennifer Combs says she would complain on Facebook about the brown water coming out of her faucet in Trinidad, Texas, and then every time the police would show up afterwards. Eventually, she says, she was arrested.” Sounds like a clear First Amendment violation.
Chicago: “39 people shot, 5 cops seriously injured at black teen ‘takeovers’ during Memorial Day weekend.”
“26-year-old man arrested over bomb and death threats targeting Erika Kirk.” “Jacob Wenske, 26, was arrested Wednesday night in San Antonio…Wenske was charged with two third-degree felony counts of making a terroristic threat with the intent to impair public service, create public fear of serious bodily injury and influence government conduct, legal filings revealed.”
Livingston Dam in Texas, where Houston gets most of its drinking water, is deteriorating.
A food emergency: “Some of Texas’s oldest barbecue joints close as meat prices skyrocket Even the state’s most celebrated restaurants are struggling to remain open as costs climb, with no relief in sight.”
For some reason, Vladimir Putin seems to think he can force NATO to back down from supporting Ukraine against his illegal war of territorial aggression by launching various provocations. Here’s a roundup of recent NATO country responses to Russia.
First up: Cappy Army on NATO beefing up it’s defensive line against Russia:
“NATO is racing to build a multi-billion dollar 2,000 mile long defensive line that stretches across the entire European continent.”
“There are several names for the new fortification depending on the section you’re standing at. In the Baltics, it’s officially known as the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line, which is a 500 mile long network of bunkers and fortified border zones.”
“The Eastern Flank Deterrence Line is not mainly physical barriers, because the distance is far too great. Instead, it’s a network of computer sensors to fill these physical gaps. It’s not designed to completely defeat a potential Russian conventional advance. It’s made to slow down and channel the enemy’s forces into these predetermined kill zones.”
“The Army and NATO’s focusing their efforts at the places deemed most vulnerable in the Baltics. Here they’re deploying a layered modular barrier system that runs 30 miles deep.” First they hit sensors lines, then get a dose of HIMARS and artillery, then drone swarms in the air and on the ground. “Estimates are these methods will have to kill or wound 70% of the attacking force to be successful.”
The length of the entire defensive line is roughly the length of the U.S.-Mexico border.
“It’s designed this way to cover large sections of land that may not already have trenches pre-plotted artillery and mortar kill zone are linked to a network of sensors and then anything that makes it past that runs into rows of landmines, then physical obstacles, including anti-vehicle ditches and rows of concrete dragons teeth. These are strategically placed at the high-speed avenues of approach that lead directly to the Baltic state capitals.”
“The second line of defensive positions in the network is over 600 bunkers of distributed firing positions, trenches, and roadblocks. Infantry and anti-tank javelin teams fight from here.”
“The European Deterrence Initiative in the United States requested $2.9 billion from America in 2025 to deter Russia. Poland’s portion of the defensive line will cost over $50 billion with much of that funding coming from the EU. And the Baltics and Finland are spending a combined billions of dollars more as well.”
“Similar to the Cold War doctrine, [Baltic forces are] a kind of tripwire force here. Troops stationed here jokingly refer to themselves as tactical speed bumps.” The idea is to buy time until reinforcements arrive.”
“In Estonia, there’s only 127 miles from the border with Russia to the capital city.”
“The defining issue along the defensive wall is manpower. The shortage of manpower is what has shaped all of the decisions for how this fortification is being built. The Estonian army has roughly 6,000 active soldiers with a NATO force of 2,000 UK and French troops also deployed here. And if we look across the whole Baltics, we see that there’s roughly 29,000 active duty soldiers total here. This does not fully take into account reserve forces or air power advantages, but it outlines the basic tactical problem.”
In Poland the defensive line continues under the name Eastern Shield. “This runs from the Kalinigrad enclave down along Belarus and towards Slovakia, which is another 500 miles.”
“Poland’s Eastern Shield has an entirely different strategy than the Baltics. They expect to absorb the first hit and then fight a long, protracted war on their own soil if they have to. The shield here does not have the benefit of being built around geographic obstacles like in the Baltics. This is why you see full-length anti-tank ditches and multi-mile long trench systems laid out in depth.”
“The scale of the project is gigantic, with 8,000 combat engineers working to lay 10,000 concrete dragon’s teeth and over 800 miles of layered anti- vehicle barriers backed up by massive amounts of artillery. Terrain denial is the focus on this stretch.”
“Manpower and mass is less of a problem on this section of the front, because in Poland there’s 280,000 well-trained and equipped active forces with an additional 10,000 American soldiers already stationed there before reinforcements arrive.”
“The defining piece of this part of the puzzle is the anti-air assets, with 48 Patriot air defense launchers provide a protective umbrella for forces massing here.”
“The logistics backbone is being built here. Poland would be the transit region into the Baltics and much of the large stockpile of fuel and ammo are positioned here because they have the space.”
NATO has a more difficult problem defending Poland than the Warsaw Pact did when Moscow called the shots. “Today’s NATO and EU is an alliance of sovereign states that must coordinate instead of obey. This makes rapid unified action more difficult.”
“The US Army themselves acknowledge Russia has the advantage in manpower and equipment on this front, and that Russia can choose the time and place of the attack.” I sincerely doubt Russia has the equipment or manpower advantage now that Vlad’s Big Adventure has run through Soviet-era tank stockpiles and slaughtered Russian manpower to gain tiny slivers of Ukrainian territory.
A history of static defenses snipped and Cold War defensive realities snipped.
NATO General Chris Donahue: “The massive momentum problem that Russia poses to us, we’ve developed the capability to make sure that we can stop that mass and momentum problem.”
In their panic over Ukraine slowly destroy both their Black Sea fleet and their shadow fleet, Russia has managed to piss Turkey off:
“After Russian forces increased their activity and provocations over [the Black Sea] and NATO country’s airspace, Turkey was the first to act and shot down Russian surveillance drones without warning.”
“As more accidents followed, the Russians are now at risk of facing the Turkish wrath, getting all their trade cut off outright without any strikes needed.”
A Russian drone with transponder equipment was found on the ground in a Romanian forest. “With a wingspan of roughly 2 meters, Romanian authorities assessed that the device had been used to monitor NATO facilities or track military aid deliveries to Ukraine.”
“Three separate Russian drones violated Turkish airspace, pushing the country closer to decisive action. The first incident occurred when a Russian drone entered Turkish airspace from the Black Sea. Turkish air defense reacted swiftly and F-16 fighter jets intercepted the target, ultimately shooting it down with an M9X sidewinder missile.”
“The second incident was even more alarming when a Russian Orlan reconnaissance drone crashed near the city of Izmit just 50 kilometers from Istanbul.”
“The third case involved debris from a Russian Merlin reconnaissance drone discovered in western Turkey. The Merlin can remain airborne for up to 10 hours flying at altitudes of up to 5 kilometers and carrying advanced opto-electronic sensors. Its presence again pointed to sustained intelligence gathering activity rather than an isolated malfunction.”
“If Ankara were to sight repeated Russian drone incursions as a security threat, it could even restrict civilian Russian shipping through the Bosphorus in retaliation. The consequences would be severe as such a move would devastate Russia’s Black Sea trade and challenged the 1936 Montreux Convention, guaranteeing free passage for merchant vessels.”
“Russian drone operations continue, Ankara appears willing not only to shut down the sky over the Black Sea, but also to potentially escalate further and close the boss for us, making it clear that spying on NATO members in the region will carry real and costly consequences.”
“Russia’s shadow fleet is coming under mounting pressure in the Baltic, as interceptions increase and European states move more aggressively against sanctioned vessels. However, now Russia is responding by placing Wagner mercenaries on board these ships, bringing one of its most violent forces directly into Nato-monitored waters.”
“The European Union has just released a new sanctions package targeting forty-one additional shadow fleet vessels, bringing the total to more than six hundred ships now barred from European-linked ports, insurance, and services. These ships are losing access to harbors, maintenance, and technical certification, which forces Moscow to rely on improvised routes that squeeze through increasingly narrow corridors.”
“Beyond oil, these vessels also move sensitive cargo linked to Russia’s war effort, which makes each interception far more consequential than a financial loss alone, and as enforcement tightens, the risk shifts from paperwork violations to direct seizure.”
This shift became visible when Swedish authorities detained the Russian cargo vessel Adler after it entered Swedish waters with unresolved documentation issues. The ship’s owner is sanctioned for transporting materials linked to Russia’s weapons production, and when Adler suffered engine trouble in Swedish waters, the crew could not produce clean documentation. Swedish authorities boarded immediately, as the detention came amid growing reports that Russia has begun placing Wagner mercenaries on board shadow fleet vessels, raising the stakes for any inspection or boarding operation, and signaling that European states are no longer intimidated by the possibility of armed Russians on these vessels.”
“According to Danish maritime pilots, once Wagner personnel are on board, they often restrict access to the bridge and interfere with communication between captains and port authorities, and push for routing that avoids areas where inspections are common.”
“For Moscow, Wagner functions as a last-line enforcement tool. Their role is to ensure that vessels keep moving even when legal and operational risks become unacceptable by normal commercial standards. Crews bullied, beaten, or threatened by the mercenaries may even quietly signal nearby NATO ships for help, or attempt to sabotage equipment to force an emergency stop in Western waters, with the Adler’s crew possibly sabotaging the engine before they reached a Russian port, and Wagners would come on board. On top of that, owners of leased ships may object to hosting armed Russian soldiers, whose presence massively increases legal liability and operational danger.”
The case of Adler matters because it highlights how the shadow fleet is being used not only for oil, but for moving weapons and military-linked cargo. Western officials assess that a substantial portion of Russia’s imported ammunition components, explosives precursors, and sanctioned industrial equipment now arrives by sea, precisely because land routes and air transport are more exposed to interception. If vessels like Adler are increasingly detained or disrupted, Russia does not just lose revenue but risks bottlenecks in the supply chains that feed its weapons production.”
NATO hasn’t been backing down in the face of repeated Russian provocations. Putin is playing an increasingly weak hand badly.
The world’s first American Pope, India and Pakistan trade blows, Israel hits Syria again, Trump’s tariffs bring trade deals, more leftwing waste uncovered, Starbase becomes a real city, and a surprising amount about Disney.
Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected by the College of Cardinals to succeed the late Pope Francis on Thursday, taking the papal name Pope Leo XIV.
Prevost, 69, is a native of Chicago. He is the 267th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church and the first American Pope in the Church’s history. A former prefect of the influential Dicastery for Bishops, Pope Leo XIV spent decades as a missionary in Peru. Leading up to the conclave, he was considered a compromise candidate and one of the frontrunners because of his missionary work and Vatican experience.
French Cardinal Dominique Mamberti, another rumored candidate for the Papacy, announced Pope Leo XIV’s election on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to a roaring crowd. The newly elected Pontiff appeared to be emotional during the blessing he delivered from the balcony as he re-introduced himself to the world. Eagle-eyed observers noticed the Pope wore traditional garments for his introductory remarks, but he broke with custom by initially reading his speech from a piece of paper.
Pope Leo XIV paid tribute to Pope Francis in his speech while reiterating the Church’s missionary zeal and charitable heart. He also touched on the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and peace in his address.
“We have to seek together to be a missionary church, a church that builds bridges and dialogue, always ready to accept, like this great piazza, with its arms, we have to show our charity, presence and dialogue with love,” he said.
Pope Francis elevated Prevost to Bishop of Chiclayo in Peru in 2015 and named him a Cardinal in 2023 after the Church played an important role in maintaining stability in Peru amid political crises. He became prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops in January 2023, making him responsible for the appointment of Bishops, an enormously powerful role within the Church.
Ordained in 1982, Prevost received an undergraduate degree from Villanova University in 1977 and then obtained a Master of Divinity from the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. He went off to Rome for degrees in canon law at the Pontifical College of St. Thomas Aquinas before joining the Augustinian mission in Peru in 1985.
“With today’s election of His Holiness, Pope Leo XIV, I cannot help but reflect on what his Augustinian papacy will mean to our University community and our world. Known for his humility, gentle spirit, prudence and warmth, Pope Leo XIV’s leadership offers an opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to our educational mission,” said Villanova president Rev. Peter Donohue.
He spent a notable portion of his career at the Augustinian seminary in Trujillo until returning to Chicago in 1999 to oversee the Augustinian province. Prevost later led the Augustinian order for two terms from 2001 to 2013 until he went back to Peru.
Snip.
The new Pope’s name, Leo, suggests a spiritual connection to Pope Leo XIII, a 19th century Pope known for his combination of supporting workers rights and opposing communism.
Let’s hope he keeps up that “opposing communism” tradition…
More union graft off the taxpayer: “Senate DOGE Caucus Leader Uncovers Federal Employees Cashing Taxpayer Checks While Doing Union Work.”
In fiscal year 2019, the Office of Personnel Management reported that federal employees spent 2.6 million hours on union activities, costing taxpayers $135 million. The Biden administration temporarily halted OPM’s data reporting, but the Trump administration resumed it after a request from Ernst.
“Through the course of the past 10 years and studying government efficiency and fraud, waste, and abuse, we have uncovered the issue of taxpayer-funded union time. It’s where we see federal employees—and they can legally do this right now—work during their regular workday, and do that as taxpayer-funded dollars going to their paycheck, but they’re not actually working on their duties as a federal employee,” [Sen. Jodi] Enrst said during a panel discussion on government bureaucracy at the The Hill & Valley Forum this week. “What they’re doing is working for their union, maybe to increase their wages or increase their benefits, on the taxpayers’ dime.”
Ernst also sounded off on “egregious” examples of federal employee misconduct. “Federal employees who were caught, you know, one taking a bubble bath when he was on a Zoom call with other employees—he got ratted out, of course. Those that are on the golf course, we get those all the time,” senator said. Even more shocking cases included a HUD employee who was in prison for driving drunk during work hours, unbeknownst to her supervisor, and a remote worker who ran a full-time business while his mother answered his work emails.
“Somehow her supervisor did not know she was in jail,” she explained about the HUD employee, adding, “And one of the most egregious was one federal employee that was working remotely that had started his own business, full-time business, and during the work hours, his mother was responding to his emails.”
Last month, Ernst introduced the Taxpayer-Funded Union Time Transparency Act to revealed just how much federal employee unions are subsidized by tax dollars after the Biden administration paused the public release of the figures. Rep. Scott Franklin (R-FL) introduced companion legislation in the House of Representatives.
The graft thickens. “Foreign Aid Official Who Resisted DOGE Took Secret Payments After Steering Africa Money To Friend.”
A foreign aid official who refused the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to his agency’s financial records may have had a reason to keep auditors out: he steered illicit contracts to a friend who sent him secret payments, according to a law enforcement affidavit obtained by The Daily Wire.
Mathieu Zahui, chief financial officer of the African Development Foundation, refused to grant DOGE access to its books and told the White House that the agency would not acknowledge President Donald Trump’s appointee as chairman of the board. After a dramatic showdown in March, DOGE physically took over the building with U.S. Marshals, but control of the agency is now the subject of a lawsuit objecting to “swooping in with DOGE staff, demanding access to sensitive information systems” — an objection that reads differently in light of the criminal probe.
For years, workers at the small, USAID-adjacent federal agency focused on Africa have told oversight bodies about allegations of self-dealing, procurement violations, and mysterious offshore bank accounts, many of them involving Zahui. But little was done about it, several told The Daily Wire.
One action that raised eyebrows was Zahui’s insistence on directing both grants and contracts to a company in Kenya called Ganiam Ltd. According to spending records, it was awarded nearly $800,000 in contracts without competition. For example, a one-year, $350,000 contract for “transport, travel, relocation” services was executed in March 2020, when few people were traveling or holding conferences because of coronavirus.
According to a search warrant application uncovered by The Daily Wire, USAID’s inspector general established by August 2024 that the company’s owner had secretly wired money to Zahui’s personal bank account at times that matched up with the federal contracts. To date, the Department of Justice has not charged either man with a crime.
Ganiam Ltd. is owned by Maina Gakure, whom Zahui has known for decades. Both worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs in San Diego and later moved to Fairfax, Virginia. Gakure had been in charge of awarding contracts at the VA, then created his own company designed to get government construction contracts by taking advantage of a minority preference program. It was called Ganiam LLC and was based out of a house in Virginia. Gakure similarly created a company based in Kenya called Gakure Ltd. The African Development Foundation is permitted by law to give grants only to African entities.
Overseas aid is just a gigantic bucket of graft for Democratic Party grandees. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
The Trump administration’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 seeks to eliminate over $15 billion in funding associated with Biden’s expensive and inane “Green New Deal” initiatives, specifically targeting “clean energy”, the “climate crisis”, and environmental programs.
The White House said the energy budget proposal cancels more than $15 billion in carbon capture and renewable energy funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law that former President Joe Biden, a Democrat, signed in 2021. It also proposes to cancel $6 billion from that law for EV chargers.
“The Biden Administration spent more than three years implementing these programs, but built only a small number of chargers because it prioritized over-regulating and ‘climate justice’ goals,” the White House said. “EV chargers should be built just like gas stations: with private sector resources disciplined by market forces.”
The plan reorients Energy Department funding toward research and development of technologies that could produce an abundance of oil, gas, coal and critical minerals, nuclear reactors and advanced nuclear fuels, the White House said without further details.
Winning. “Supreme Court Allows Trump to Enforce Transgender Military Ban.”
Over the last three years, Minh Phuong Ngoc Vong, a U.S. citizen, pulled down $970,000 working at a nail salon in Bowie, Maryland.
But Vong wasn’t just filing nails.
He was also filing applications at U.S. tech companies for IT and development jobs, some of which had government contracts requiring security clearance. However, Vong wasn’t performing any of the duties at those jobs; he was outsourcing all his work virtually to China and North Korea.
This alone is sketchy. But the reason he was caught shows the true severity of the crime.
An unnamed Virginia-based tech company wanted to include him on a job that needed more security clearance, but when they submitted his credentials to the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency for a secret clearance, he was flagged as having another job with security clearance, namely working with the Federal Aviation Administration.
The Virginia company fired him for having more than one job, but when the CEO showed his picture to the lead-developer, they realized that the man they hired was not the same one who was showing up to virtual meetings and doing the work.
As a result of Vong’s fraudulent misrepresentations, these government agencies unknowingly granted Vong’s co-conspirators access to sensitive U.S. government systems, which they accessed from China.
My respect for the hustle ends at creating gaping security holes for the commies.
Following India’s attack on terrorist bases in Pakistan, both countries have launched escalating attacks on the other.
Friday has seen the border conflict between India and Pakistan escalate once again, with The New York Times describing that it has escalated to the most expansive military clashes in decades. Entire large expanses of border zones are swarming with drones overhead – a first in the history of the long-running rivalry.
“There were reports of nonstop barrages along the border overnight into Friday, as well as reports of attacks by Pakistan into the Indian city of Jammu, a part of Kashmir,” the Times report says, citing that drone attacks have been exchanged along India’s entire western border.
India’s Operation Sindoor has not just avenged the deaths of the 26 people in the Pahalgam attack, but also had a far-reaching impact on the global fight against terrorism. The Indian Armed Forces’ precision strikes on Wednesday reportedly killed Abdul Rauf Azhar, the operational head of Jaish-e-Mohammad and mastermind of the IC-814 hijacking.
Azhar was involved in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. Hence, yesterday’s strikes on nine terror hubs in PoK and Pakistan delivered justice to the American-Jewish journalist.
Suchomimus says that India’s missile strikes were quite precise.
An aside: As of this writing, there’s not a single entry on this Indo-Pakistani conflict on The Institute for The Study of War’s homepage. Look guys, I know you’re busy with Ukraine, Iran, and China, but given that this is a war between two nuclear-armed nations that just went hot, do you think you could spare an analyst or two to, you know, study it?
President Donald Trump and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a historic trade deal between the two countries on Thursday that Trump says will include billions of dollars of increased market access for American exports, including beef, ethanol and other farm products.
The president, speaking from the Oval Office, said the details of the deal with Britain will be finalized in the coming weeks, but said the close U.S. ally has agreed to “eliminate numerous non-tariff barriers” under the agreement, which Trump touted as a “great deal for both countries.”
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the deal would create $5 billion of opportunity for U.S. exports after Britain identified products it was importing from other countries that it could instead purchase from the U.S.
Trump said the deal will also include a “historic” economic security component and said that Britain will “fast track” American goods through its customs process.
Under the deal, the U.K. will still be subject to Trump’s 10 percent baseline tariff that he has imposed on all countries.
Lutnick said the U.S. has agreed to lower its 25 percent tariff on imports of British cars to just 10 percent. He also indicated Rolls Royce engines and plane parts will be imported tariff-free, while Britain is set to buy $10 billion of Boeing airplanes. Meanwhile, tariffs on British steel exports will drop from 25 percent to zero.
If all that weren’t enough, “Israel carried out waves of airstrikes against terrorists and military targets in Syria, including the capital city of Damascus, after jihadists — reportedly backed by the new Islamist regime — launched attacks on the country’s non-Muslim Druze minority, killing at least 100 people in two days of fighting.”
According to the 20-page document, Schiff may have violated Maryland Code §7-401 and California’s Election and Tax Codes, including statutes that mirror the allegations recently leveled against New York Attorney General Letitia James—particularly in the realms of mortgage and insurance fraud.
According to the complaint, “In 2009, Adam Schiff’s residence and voting registration was called to question in a House Ethics Committee hearing. Adam Schiff, despite claiming to live and represent the people in the state of California, filed and reaffirmed through refinancing documents, his primary residence at 8204 Windsor View Terrace, Potomac Maryland, 28054.”
The complaint further alleges, “Adam Schiff is on the record having acknowledged the mortgage document filings [of Maryland as his primary residence] during a House Ethics hearing in 2009… He made the claim of ‘mistake,’ thereby acknowledging the appearance of possible mortgage fraud.”
But the complaint doesn’t stop there. It outlines a disturbing pattern of what Maryland law defines as a “pattern of mortgage fraud,” involving repeated false representations of Schiff’s primary residence across multiple properties and years. Under Maryland Code §7-407(c), such conduct could constitute a felony punishable by up to 20 years imprisonment or a $100,000 fine—or both.
Rules are for the little people…
“The Army cancels the M10 Booker, a ‘light tank’ that was too heavy.” I always thought the Booker suffered from “neither fish nor fowl” syndrome, and that was before the Russo-Ukraine War’s use of drones necessitated a radical rethink of the deployment of armored vehicles on the battlefield. (Hat tip: : Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Friedrich Merz was elected chancellor of Germany after facing a historic loss in the Bundestag. In the second round, 325 lawmakers voted for Merz, bringing him past the 316-vote threshold. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has already demanded that Merz step down and call for new elections following his loss in the first round.
Merz’s initial loss marked a historic moment, as it was the first of its kind in post-war Germany.
The result came as a major upset, as Merz was widely expected to win, thanks to a coalition deal involving his party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU); its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU); and the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
Evidently continuing unchecked, unassimilated Muslim immigration remains the highest priority of Europe’s ruling elites.
Romania’s prime minister will resign on Monday after a conservative opposition leader who aligned himself with Donald Trump scored a resounding first-round victory in the Black Sea nation’s presidential election.
Bloomberg reports, that Marcel Ciolacu informed coalition partners of the decision to submit his resignation in a meeting Monday in Bucharest, according to people familiar with the decision who spoke on condition of anonymity. The government will be led by an interim premier until coalition parties choose Ciolacu’s successor. There are no current plans for an early election.
The prime minister’s decision was a response to the electoral defeat of the coalition’s preferred candidate in Sunday’s first-round contest, in which George Simion of the ultranationalist Alliance for the Union of Romanians secured more than 40%.
He’ll face off against Nicusor Dan, the centrist mayor of Bucharest.
Trump’s new NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is wasting no time reforming the corrupt NIH.
As a part of a general phase-out of some animal testing, Trump’s appointees have closed the last remaining Fauci-supported and funded beagle lab on the NIH campus.
We all remember the infamous experiments funded by Fauci’s NIH that forced beagles to have their faces eaten by sand flies, with their vocal cords cut to take away their ability to cry in pain:
Western Carolina University is not changing its Title IX policy to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive action after the school was embroiled in a dispute last year over a male attempting to use women’s bathrooms.
WCU administrators refused to update their Title IX policy to comply with Trump’s order restoring sex segregation to federally funded colleges and universities and have instead continued to allow males in women’s spaces, according to public records provided to National Review by right-leaning campus watchdog group Speech First.
“For years, advocates have worried that Title IX procedures on campus have become weaponized – and these emails highlight that such concerns are indeed well-founded,” said Nicole Neily, acting executive director of Speech First.
“Universities across the country are actively ignoring and resisting the Trump Administration on Title IX, which underscores the need for strong action from both Congress and the executive branch to provide clarity for administrators and safety for women and girls.”
Far left college administrators don’t get to unilaterally redefine the statutory definition of “woman.”
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO) announced Friday that four felony charges pending against former Harris County Health Director Barbie Robinson had been dropped.
“After an exhaustive review of the evidence concluded by career prosecutors, the HCDAO has determined that the State cannot prove any of the charged offenses beyond a reasonable doubt and that pursuing this case is not in the interests of justice,” according to an official statement from HCDAO.
Robinson was fired from her post last September, and in November former District Attorney Kim Ogg announced Robinson would be charged with misuse of official information. In December, HCDAO charged Robinson with additional felonies, including tampering with a government record and two counts of fraudulent securing of document execution.
The charges stemmed from allegations that Robinson used her private email to coordinate with International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) officials regarding a $31 million contract to craft a social services program called Accessing Coordinated Care and Empowering Self Sufficiency (ACCESS). IBM would later successfully bid to create the ACCESS project for the county.
Before beginning her work for Harris County, Robinson served as the director of the Sonoma County Department of Health Services where she also worked with IBM to create a nearly identical program.
According to emails obtained by the Texas Rangers, Robinson exchanged emails with IBM officials shortly after she was hired by Harris County. Communications included discussion of “sole-source” contracts that could be exempted from competitive bids.
In July 2021, the county paid IBM $45,000 to put on a workshop to discuss the ACCESS program, and in November 2021 Robinson continued to use her personal email to coordinate with the company to craft a scope of work document in the weeks before the county issued a public request for proposals.
Robinson had also drawn scrutiny in 2024 for communications surrounding a $6 million contract awarded to DEMA, a California-based company selected to run Harris County’s Holistic Assistance Response Teams.
Scoring documents obtained by the Houston Chronicle showed that DEMA won the contract by a fraction of a point over a state-funded agency with experience in responding to 911 calls.
Early in 2021, Robinson had been instrumental in bringing DEMA to operate COVID-19 testing sites in Harris County. That year, DEMA CEO Michelle Patino offered her a contract for legal consulting, even though Robinson is not a practicing attorney.
The county has since severed ties with DEMA.
Of course, Soros-backed social justice warrior Sean Teare defeated Ogg in the Democratic primary last year.
“Sean Combs Was Once Celebrated at the Met Gala. He’s Now on Trial. He was lauded by Anna Wintour, was a regular guest at the gala, and his influence on the current exhibition is undeniable.” Diddy is the perfect poster boy for the Met Gala: A self-interested hedonist flaunting his wealth under the guise of virtue signaling.
Woke backlash has struck yet again and this time it’s among car giants Jaguar Land Rover who are currently on the search to replace their advertising agency after its controversial rebrand. Jaguar’s rebrand video went viral for all the wrong reasons back in December last year and were criticised for their new look which was described as “the biggest change in Jaguar’s history – a complete reinvention for the brand”. Despite the Jaguar vehicle being noticeably absent in the brand’s new relaunch video, other iconic brand images were left out too, including Jaguar’s classic leaping-cat icon.
This was replaced with futuristic pink moonscape images, dotted with boulders and included a cast of diverse and eccentrically-dressed models. The result of this rebrand, however, was met with harsh backlash with many devoted Jaguar Land Rover lover’s not shy about their dismay towards the car company, resulting in Jaguar now launching a review for a new global creative account.
Snip.
But despite their best efforts to appeal to all, the results were met with loss particularly among its sales which plunged by more than 25% in 2024.
The brand also recorded selling 33,320 cars in the same year – a stark drop from the 61,661 that were sold in 2022 and 161,601 sold in 2019.
Funny how literally everyone but Jaguar leadership saw this coming.
Plus-size far left Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker dresses up for Star Wars Day and promptly gets roasted. “Sith Lard” and “Boba Fat” are two of the better ones…
Metaphor alert: Sovereignty defeats Journalism. Not since philly Eight Belles came up lame and had to be euthanized on the track during Hillary Clinton’s run against Obama in 2008 has there been such a potent horse-racing metaphor for the current moment…
Disney strongly supports the gay community…so it’s building its newest park in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The UAE criminalizes homosexuality. The Ministry of Education, I kid you not, “explicitly prohibits discussing gender identity, homosexuality or any other behavior deemed unacceptable to the UAE’s society’ in class.”
Islam is the state religion. Sharia is the source of law.
Sharia law…so same-sex sexual activity is punishable by death.
Consistency and integrity are for the little people…
Random person in New York City: “I tripped! I’m suing the property owner and New York City government!” City government: “Hey, we don’t own anything there. Take us off the suit.” Property owner: “Oh, you don’t own anything? Well, I looked at the deed map, and you’re right. So I’ve put up a fence over the sidewalk and the street parking the map says I own.” City: “No fair! Now we’re fining you!”
Biden family corruption tops this week’s LinkSwarm (with a lot of links to go through), Juicy heads back to jail, and the Houthi’s tug on Superman’s cape.
A corporation owned and controlled by Hunter Biden made several direct monthly payments to President Biden beginning in 2018, according to bank records released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday.
The subpoenaed bank records obtained by National Review reveal Owasco PC established a monthly payment of $1,380 to President Biden beginning in September 2018. The committee says the payments establish a direct benefit Biden received from his family’s foreign business dealings, despite Biden’s claims that he has never benefitted from or been involved in his son’s ventures.
“This wasn’t a payment from Hunter Biden’s personal account but an account for his corporation that received payments from China and other shady corners of the world,” House Oversight chairman James Comer says in a new video detailing the findings. “At this moment, Hunter Biden is under an investigation by the Department of Justice for using Owasco PC for tax evasion and other serious crimes.”
Comer says the payments “are part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in, and benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes.”
“As the Bidens received millions from foreign nationals and companies in China, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Kazakhstan, Joe Biden dined with his family’s foreign associates, spoke to them by speakerphone, had coffee, attended meetings, and ultimately received payments that were funded by his family’s business dealings,” the committee added in a press release.
It was unclear based on the bank records how many monthly payments were made, but a source familiar with the committee’s probe said investigators had discovered at least three payments.
Last week, the committee released an email from a bank money-laundering investigator who expressed serious concerns about a transfer of funds from China that ultimately trickled down to President Biden in the form of a $40,000 check from his brother, James Biden.
Biden received a $40,000 personal check from an account shared by his brother, James Biden, and sister-in-law, Sara Biden, in September 2017 — money that was marked as a “loan repayment.” The alleged repayment was sent after funds were filtered from Northern International Capital, a Chinese company affiliated with the Chinese energy firm CEFC, through several accounts related to Hunter Biden and eventually down to the personal account shared by James and Sara Biden.
Northern International Capital sent $5 million to Hudson West III, a joint venture established by Hunter Biden and CEFC associate Gongwen Dong on August 8.
On the same day, Hudson West III then sent $400,000 to Owasco, P.C., an entity owned and controlled by Hunter Biden. Six days later, Hunter Biden wired $150,000 to Lion Hall Group, a company owned by James and Sara Biden. Sara Biden withdrew $50,000 in cash from Lion Hall Group on August 28 and then deposited the funds into her and her husband’s personal checking account later that day.
On September 3, 2017, Sara Biden wrote a check to Joe Biden for $40,000.
An unidentified bank investigator sent an email on June 26, 2018 to colleagues raising concerns about money sent from Hudson West III to Owasco P.C. The email said the $5 million in funds sent from Northern International Capital to Hudson West III were primarily used to fund 16 wire transfers totaling more than $2.9 million to Owasco PC. The wires were labeled as management fees and reimbursements.
Joe Biden used several email aliases to regularly correspond with Hunter Biden’s business partner in recent years, including while he was serving as vice president, a GOP-controlled House committee leading the Republican impeachment inquiry revealed Tuesday.
IRS whistleblowers Joseph Ziegler and Gary Shapley provided the eleven-page log of emails ahead of a closed-door hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday. The document includes metadata associated with emails sent to and from Joe Biden’s alias email addresses from 2010 to 2019, though it does not include the content of those emails.
In total, Joe Biden exchanged 327 emails with Hunter Biden’s business partner, Eric Schwerin, the founding partner and managing director of Hunter’s defunct Rosemont Seneca Partners investment firm. Fifty-four of those emails were sent directly to Schwerin, while the rest included other parties. Out of the 327 emails logged in the document, 291 were sent during Joe Biden’s Vice Presidency. Joe Biden’s email aliases included “robinware456,” “JRBware” and “RobertLPeters.”
“Through months of testifying for hours and producing hundreds of pages of documentation, and just as many months of baseless attacks against them, their story has remained the same and their credibility intact. The same cannot be said for President Biden,” committee chairman Jason Smith (R., Mo.) said in a statement.
“So far, our witnesses have produced over eleven-hundred pages of evidence, sat for 14 hours of closed-door testimony with counsel from the majority and minority on this committee, testified publicly before the Oversight Committee, and today, have provided us with new evidence.”
Smith also emphasized that much of the email correspondence between Joe Biden and Schwerin occurred around the then-vice president’s June 2014 trip to Ukraine.
Hunter Biden received a whopping $4.9 million from Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris in a three-year period, according to an IRS agent who investigated the president’s son for alleged tax evasion.
The revelation signifies a substantial increase in the known amount that Hunter, 53, got from his so-called “sugar brother” after the men reportedly met for the first time at a December 2019 campaign fundraiser.
IRS agent Joseph Ziegler shared the jaw-dropping figure and additional documentation Tuesday with the House Ways and Means Committee in a follow-up appearance as House Republicans near an expected vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Biden for his alleged role in his family’s foreign dealings.
Prior reporting indicated Morris paid about $2 million in tax debts for Hunter and purchased some of his novice artworks.
Morris’ motives for helping the first son financially and the authenticity of their friendship have been debated by Republicans.
As part of his Tuesday testimony, Ziegler provided legislators an email showing that as early as Feb. 7, 2020 — two months after they met — Morris was contacting accountants on Hunter’s behalf and warning them to work quickly to avoid “considerable risk personally and politically.”
Ziegler, who investigated Hunter’s taxes for five years before he was removed from the case this year, said the first son’s income from Morris — at least some of it deemed loans — resembled Hunter’s practice of trying to avoid paying taxes on other income by describing it as loans.
And after the hundreds of stories of Hunter Biden’s corruption, and his key role in funneling foreign money into his father’s hands, Hunter has finally been indicted on nine criminal counts.
An American warship and several commercial ships faced attacks in the Red Sea on Sunday, the Pentagon said.
“We’re aware of reports regarding attacks on the USS Carney and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and will provide information as it becomes available,” the Pentagon said.
A U.S. official told the Associated Press the attack began around 10 a.m. in Sanaa, Yemen, and lasted five hours.
Officials did not say where the attacks may have come from.
Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have launched several attacks in the Red Sea in recent weeks and has launched drones and missiles toward Israel since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October.
Texas is suing the Biden Administration yet again, this time over imposing censorship.
The Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG) filed a joint lawsuit, along with co-plaintiff media outlets The Daily Wire and The Federalist, against the U.S. Department of State, alleging the federal government both directly and indirectly violated the First Amendment rights of certain online news outlets by placing them on a censorship “blacklist.”
According to the OAG, the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, alleges an office within the state department known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC) was used to “limit the reach and business viability of domestic news organizations by funding censorship technology and private censorship enterprises.”
The stated purpose of the GEC is to lead the federal government’s effort to “counter foreign state and non-state propaganda” and disinformation efforts that pose a risk to the United States or influence the government’s policies.
However, the plaintiffs argue the GEC was weaponized to “violate the First Amendment and suppress Americans’ constitutionally-protected speech.”
In short, the lawsuit describes how the government created multiple censorship programs that worked to de-platform, shadowban, discredit, and demonize certain American media outlets.
It argues that some of these mechanisms were not just surveillance tools for the government to monitor and identify potential propaganda and disinformation, but rather characterized the technology that had been developed as “tools of warfare” used to shape opinions and perceptions that had been “misappropriated and misdirected to be used at home against domestic political opponents and members of the American press with viewpoints conflicting with federal officials.”
“Media Plaintiffs each face blacklisting, reduced advertising revenue, reduced potential growth, reputational damage, economic cancellation, reduced circulation of reporting and speech, and social media censorship — all as a direct result of Defendants’ unlawful conduct,” the lawsuit states.
“I am proud to lead the fight to save Americans’ precious constitutional rights from Joe Biden’s tyrannical federal government,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a news release announcing the lawsuit.
“The State Department’s mission to obliterate the First Amendment is completely un-American. This agency will not get away with their illegal campaign to silence citizens and publications they disagree with.”
“Those government-funded, government-promoted censorship technologies and enterprises targeted conservative media outlets, including The Daily Wire,” Ben Shapiro said in a video statement released regarding the lawsuit. Shapiro is the editor emeritus of The Daily Wire.
“Their goal is to paint us as unreliable and therefore to push advertisers away from advertising on programs like this one, websites like The Daily Wire, websites like The Federalist, that is an ongoing problem that is being pushed by the state department,” he said.
Back to jail for Juicy. Nate the Lawyer offers a good overview of the twists and turns of the case. I had forgotten that he had paid his “attackers” with a personal check…
The F-117 Nighthawk was retired in 2008. Or was it?
the Belarus Red Cross Society is suspended from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).
The suspension is the result of noncompliance by the Belarus Red Cross with the request for the dismissal of Mr. Dimitry Shevtsov, Secretary General of the National Society. This follows the decision of the IFRC’s Governing Board of 3 October 2023 relating to the investigation into the allegations against Belarus Red Cross Secretary General for his statements, including on nuclear weapons and on the movement of children to Belarus, and his visit to Luhansk and Donetsk.
The suspension means that the Belarus Red Cross loses its rights as a member of the IFRC. Any new funding to the Belarus Red Cross will also be suspended.
“Governor Greg Abbott is keeping the endorsements rolling, announcing his support for Marc LaHood for Texas House. LaHood, an attorney from San Antonio, is challenging State Rep. Steve Allison (R–San Antonio), who was elected to the House in 2018 to replace retiring House Speaker Joe Straus. Since then, Allison has consistently had one of the most liberal voting records among his Republican colleagues.”
The Walt Disney Co. effectively controlled the local government around the site of Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, for decades in what an extensive review by the state government calls “the most egregious exhibition of corporate cronyism in modern American history.”
After Disney bought the land that would become its massive amusement park and resort, it received permission from the Florida Legislature and governor in 1967 to create a local government, the Reedy Creek Improvement District.
From that time until Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill Feb. 27 abolishing the Reedy Creek district, Disney heavily influenced the local government to its advantage, according to a new report Monday from the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District.
The legislation signed into law by DeSantis, a Republican, transformed the Reedy Creek district into the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, which aims to root out what critics see as Disney’s corrupt hold over the local government.
In the report, a copy of which was provided early to The Daily Signal, the new Central Florida Tourism Oversight District claims that “Disney not just controlled the Reedy Creek Improvement District, but did so by effectively purchasing loyalty.”
Although the Reedy Creek district was a separate entity from the Walt Disney Co., the district treated its employees as if they were Disney employees, sometimes referred to as “cast members,” and awarded them lavish perks unavailable to the general public.
The new Florida government report used the expertise of George Mason University Professor Donald J. Kochan in governance; William Jennings at Delta Consulting Group in accounting; the consulting firm Kimley-Horn for engineering; and Public Resources Advisory Group Managing Director Wendell Gaertner for public finance.
The report notes: “Disney effectively bribed RCID employees (and retirees, members of the [RCID] Board of Supervisors, and vendor VIPs) by showering them with company benefits and perks: millions of dollars’ worth of annual passes to theme parks worldwide, 40% discounts on cruises, free transferable single-use tickets during the holiday season, steep discount on merchandise, marked discounts on food and beverage, and access to non-public shopping reserved for Disney cast members (where merchandise was greatly discounted and items were made available that were otherwise not available for public purchase).”
The Biden family and its business associates created a complicated web of more than 20 companies, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee — a system, GOP lawmakers say, that was meant to conceal money received from foreign nationals.
Sixteen of the companies were limited liability companies formed during Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president, the committee said in a press conference on Wednesday. The Biden family, their business associates, and their companies received more than $10 million from foreign nationals’ and their related companies, the records show. These payments occurred both while Biden was in office as vice president and after his time in office ended.
In what Representative Nancy Mace called an act of “financial gymnastics,” many payments were routed from foreign companies to the Biden family’s business associates’ companies which then doled out payments to the Bidens in incremental payments to different bank accounts in an alleged attempt to hide the source of the funds.
At least nine Biden family members received payments, according to committee chairman James Comer. That includes Hunter Biden; James Biden; James Biden’s wife, Sara Jones Biden; the late Beau Biden’s wife, Hallie Biden; Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle; Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen; and “three children of the president’s son and the president’s brother.”
Much of the money came from Chinese nationals and companies with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Multiple Biden family members received money after it passed through an associate’s account. Comer said of the countries the Biden family was influence peddling in, China is “the most reputable.”
The committee revealed Wednesday that records suggest the Biden family and its associates’ business dealings in Romania “bear clear indication of a scheme to peddle influence” from 2015 to 2017.
At the time, then-Vice President Biden spoke out against Romanian corruption while the Biden family received more than a million dollars from a company controlled by a Romanian national, Gabriel Popoviciu. Popoviciu, who has been accused of corruption, sent the money through a Biden family associate, according to the committee. Sixteen of the seventeen payments involved in the deal occurred while Biden was still in office. The money “stops flowing from the Romanian national soon after Joe Biden leaves the vice presidency,” Comer said.
The Bidens also received “millions of dollars from China,” with Comer saying it is “inconceivable that the president did not know” about the payments.
Comer said the information revealed Wednesday is the result of subpoenas to four different banks and stressed that the committee is still early in its investigation and believes there are as many as 12 banks with records relevant to its investigation.
Naturally, the mainstream media are doing their very best to ignore these revelations…
You might have noticed a meme floating around the media about how Britons could become “no better off than people living in Poland”. “If the UK continues with the same level of growth it has seen for the last decade,” writes Sam Ashworth-Hayes, “Poland will be richer than Britain in about 12 years’ time”:
It sounds like an absurd idea that in 2040 we might see complaints in the Polish press about a flood of British plumbers undercutting wages, or Brytyjski Skleps lining the rougher areas of Warsaw, but it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
This talking point has also appeared in the Telegraph, the Express and the Financial Times. It often comes with a sense of vague alarm and bewilderment. Poland? The post-communist place? Don’t they live entirely off vodka and potatoes? Don’t they have horses clippety-cloppeting down the streets selling women’s underwear pinched off a truck in Germany? Poland?
Having lived in Poland for nine years, I can say that I am not at all surprised by these projections. To be clear, that is all they are — projections. A lot can change in nine years, in Britain and in Poland.
Still, I think a lot of British people would be surprised by how much better things can be in the land of Lech Wałęsa and John Paul II. Equally, a lot of Polish people would be surprised by how much worse things can be in Britain — given that a lot of Poles of my acquaintance appear to think that getting rich in the U.K. is as easy as walking outside with a wheelbarrow and catching the banknotes that rain down from the sky.
Britain has had minimal economic growth for years. Poland has long been enjoying some of the highest economic growth in Europe. It even emerged from the pandemic better off than other European nations with, as Paweł Bukowski and Wojtek Paczos wrote for the LSE, “a relatively lax approach to economic lockdown and a bit of sheer luck”.
Institutions often seem to work better as well. I can generally visit a GP on the day I call. Britons often have to wait for more than a week. Maternal mortality is higher in the UK — and infant mortality is about the same, despite Britain being much richer overall. Actually, Polish life expectancy as whole is just a touch shorter than British life expectancy, despite the nation having a lot more smokers.
Polish kids have ranked higher on the PISA education rankings than British kids — ranking, indeed, the third highest in Europe in science and maths, and the fourth in reading comprehension. Poland is a more peaceful place than Britain, with murder and rape generally being rarer (granted, statistics in the latter case are famously difficult to trust). Terrorism, for reasons I leave to the reader, has been almost non-existent in Polish society.
Some Polish achievements are more difficult to quantify. In Britain, the 20th century was marked by a curious habit of ripping down beautiful buildings and constructing ugly ones. Poland, meanwhile, has been beautifully renovating and reconstructing many of its urban spaces, pursuing a philosophy of “preservation meets modernisation”. Warsaw and Kraków are famous enough, but travellers could also visit lovely towns and cities like Wrocław, Toruń and Gdańsk — or my own, Tarnowskie Góry.
Also, Poland seems to have actual conservatives who aren’t afraid to push for the right policies, instead of timid functionaries scared of their own shadow.
Last quarter, Disney+ lost 2.4 million subscribers. But this quarter is different! This quarter, Disney+ lost 4 million subscribers.
Related. “They got these ulterior motives, and you know, it’s about this this sort of political shit. And, yeah, I guess that’s part of it. But a lot of it is just these guys are just fucking stupid.”
Peter Zeihan says the abysmal performance of the Russian Army is going to have a whole lot of ramifications around the world, many in Russia’s own near abroad. “It means that the image of the Russians as a regional power, much less a global one, is gone, and it’s not coming back.”
Some takeaways:
“The countries that had signed on to kind of a Russian Alliance, if you will, [they’re] on their own completely, and that provides opportunities for their rivals to take matters into their own hands.”
Belarus: “Here’s a country of 10 million people that has basically hitched itself to Putin’s star. And the Poles, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, the Estonians, the Finns, and the Swedes they have been chomping at the bit for years to try to take Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus down to size and basically peel Belarus out of the Russian orbit. They will now have the opportunity, and it’s unlikely that anyone in Europe or the United States is going to try to stand in the way.”
“Unless Lukashenko sues for peace with the Balts and the Nordics, very quickly we should count on seeing him being brought up on war crimes before very long. Because after all he did provide the access that was necessary for the assault on Kiev early in the war.”
Georgia: “Here I do expect things to be a little bit more circumspect. The Georgians tried to call Russia’s bluff and invade their former secessionist Republics of North Ossetia and Abkhazia several years ago in 2004, and it was a trap and the Russians were able to destroy the Georgian Army. So the Georgians are not going to do this until a couple of other countries in the region have already pulled this off successfully.”
Moldova:
There’s a small secessionist republic there called Transnistra. It’s only 10 percent of the population of a country of like three and a half million people. There’s not much going on there, but the Russians intervened decisively right at the end of the Soviet collapse to basically make sure that Transnistra could be functionally independent under Russian sponsorship, but unlike the Georgian secessionist territories, which share a land border with Russia proper, Transnistra is on its own. The only way to supply it is through Ukraine, and that has obviously stopped. So the Moldovans and their sponsors in Romania have now a vested interest in ending this historical aberration, and I would expect to see that being wrapped up within a year or two.
Israel: Without big brother Russia providing help, Syria may be screwed.
The Russians have very publicly, unfortunately for them, relocated a lot of hardware from Syria to Ukraine, specifically air defense equipment to help them with their assaults. Which means that if you are Israel, the only thing that is standing in your way of going after the Syrian regime is someone from the Biden Administration saying “You know what? We really don’t want a nuclear event to erupt because there are Russian troops involved.” Well, the tone of the Biden Administration in the last 72 hours has kind of changed. Now it’s more of “You kids go have fun” sort of vibe, so I expect us to see some very interesting pyrotechnics between the Israelis and the Syrians in a very short period of time, followed by the Syrians suing for peace. Which means that we get to revisit the entire Syrian Civil War now without the Russians being players.
Two caveats from my viewpoint: 1. Given the history of Israeli striking Syria with impunity several times over the past decade, with possibly one Israeli plane hit during that period, I don’t think Russian anti-aircraft equipment have provided any significant deterrent to Israel doing whatever it wanted in Syria. I view it more likely that Israel views a weakened Assad continually beset by a grinding civil war against numerous enemies a preferable option to taking him out entirely. 2. Not sure where Zeihan is getting his information on a change in the Biden Administration’s messaging to Israeli, but I readily concede that he likely does have better sources than I do. It may also be that the most recent failure of the asinine Iran deal has changed the collective mind of whatever passes for a Biden brain trust.
Speaking of Iran: “Tehran has lost its primary weapons sponsor, and its primary Security Council sponsor, and that is going to force the Iranians to think differently and act differently in every theater.”
Plus possible policy changes in (or toward) Cuba and Venezuela.
With Russia shutting down the NordStream gas pipeline for maintenance, Peter Zeihan wonders if the end of Germany’s vaunted economic engine is nigh.
Some takeaways:
NordStream has made Germany “horrendously” dependent on Russia for energy.
Russia is blackmailing Germany to stop supporting Ukraine.
“Four things that the Germans rely upon to be the economic powerhouse that they are:”
That cheap natural gas.
Their economic model it is based on access to large volumes of cheap Russian energy, both in terms of for electricity, and as industrial inputs to power the entire German manufacturing model. So that all by itself could kill the German system almost overnight. Well, not overnight, but within a year.
“The Germans rely on a large, robust, highly skilled workforce, but Germany has one of the fastest aging societies in the world…Germany will hit mass retirement this decade, and so the model was always in danger on demographic grounds.”
Third: “Access to central European labor all the way from Poland to Romania and even further east…but that’s going away too. Because just as the Germans are rapidly aging, the central Europeans are aging even more rapidly…the birth rate in all of these countries is actually lower than it is in Germany, so it’s every bit as terminal.”
Fourth, you need the global economic trading system that is now breaking down and America is backing away from.
His conclusion:
All of this put together suggests that the manufacturing model that has sustained Germany, that has provided the tax base, that has provided economic growth, that has made the population relatively happy with their situation, it’s gone. And it’s going to vanish within the next year. And a Europe that does not have a German motor at its heart is a Europe that all of a sudden needs to find a very very different way to function.
As with a lot of Zeihan’s observations, he has a lot of fundamentals right but his conclusions seem overstated. Germany has the resources to abandon their green delusions and restart coal and nuclear plants, assuming they have the political will. And the degree to which globalization is breaking down is the significant subtraction of China and Russia from it. There’s still a lot of U.S./EU trade to be had, even if it does get a bit more expensive. And Germany, so high up on the value-added foodchain, is well-position to survive.
The labor shortage is a trickier problem to solve, and probably was one of the main reasons Angela Merkel was so intent on raking in Islamic “refugees.” But maybe real refugees from the Russo-Ukrainian War might provide an opportunity. It would be pretty ironic if Ukrainians were to find their lebensraum in the bosom of Germany…
So here’s that Tucker Carlson interview with Hunter Biden business associate Tony Bobulinski that everyone is talking about. So many Biden corruption revelations are coming down the pike (despite the media’s best efforts at suppressing them) that I can’t wait for Monday’s BidenWatch to post them.
Bobulinski seems particularly pissed off at the “Russian disinformation” charge. The fact that Biden and Adam Schiff refused to withdraw their “Russian disinformation” accusation against him. “People were accusing my family of treason after I served this country and defended this country.”
He was shocked that no news organization but Fox wanted to tell his story.
Countries where Hunter Biden’s business contacts were doing business include Oman, Luxembourg, and Romania.
Places he went along with Hunter Biden to do business: Bucharest, Romania (with Jim Biden as well) and Monaco (for the Grand Prix, where he waited for two hours without hearing from Hunter, because he was on the phone with Burisma at the time, “fighting for the only income he had” on “the Kazakhstan deal.” )
Imagine if a phone call linked that Donald Trump Jr. admitted to having a Russian business partner who was the chief of the KGB. It would be all the media talked about for months, and a second set of impeachment proceedings would begin almost immediately. But when it comes to the Biden Crime Family, the Democratic Media Complex refuses to investigate anything.
Here’s an interesting Romanian TV interview with former Columbia tenured acting professor Andrei Serban, who resigned over imposition of social justice warrior ideology over talent and common sense. Here’s a short interview with him (if you don’t see the subtitles, click on the Closed Caption (CC) button before watching).
Serban escaped communist-dominated Romania, and he says that Columbia is “some sort of socialist left, on its way toward full blown communism.”
If you’re not going to believe it from conservative bloggers, maybe you’ll believe it from a guy who actually grew up under communism.
Seems like we as a society have been remiss in communicating to Millennials what a horrible murderous failure communism has been.
We don’t need more “civics lessons,” we need more movies like The Killing Fields and The Lives of Others. And given how eagerly Hollywood kowtows to China, we’re not likely to get them…
