A medical examiner has concluded that the injuries Paul Kessler sustained during an altercation with a pro-Hamas protester last year are consistent with a bullhorn strike, despite the alleged assailant claiming he did not cause the 69-year-old pro-Israel protester’s fall and subsequent death.Paul Kessler was holding an Israeli flag at a California gas station in November when Moorpark College professor Loay Alnaji allegedly hit him in the head with a megaphone. Kessler fell to the ground and suffered a skull fracture. He was brought to the hospital, where he died from blunt-force injuries seven hours after the attack.
Alnaji was arrested one week after the November 5 incident and charged with involuntary manslaughter. However, Alnaji and his defenders maintained that Alnaji and other pro-Hamas protesters were demonstrating peacefully and that Kessler was the aggressor in the incident, in which he merely slipped and fell to the ground, hitting his head.
Barbara Furlow-Smiles, 38, set up fake business deals, invoices and events — including a Juneteenth celebration — to line her own pockets, the Justice Department said.
“Furlow-Smiles shamelessly violated her position of trust as a DEI executive at Facebook to steal millions from the company utilizing a scheme involving fraudulent vendors, fake invoices, and cash kickbacks,” US Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan said in a statement.
Barbara Furlow-Smiles bilked more than $5 million from Facebook and Nike during her time as a DEI manager. Amazon
“After being terminated from Facebook, she brazenly continued the fraud as a DEI leader at Nike, where she stole another six-figure sum from their diversity program.”
Selahattin Demirtas, the former leader of the pro-Kurdish HDP party, has been sentenced to more than 40 years in prison in Turkey for allegedly inciting the deadly Kobani riots in 2014.
The White House has criticized Israel in the past for the slow pace of humanitarian aid delivery, as well as for recent attacks by right-wing activists on aid trucks, but struggled Wednesday to criticize Egypt for blocking aid to Gaza.
Egypt has been blocking the passage of aid trucks into Gaza ever since Israel seized control of the Rafah Crossing, on the Egyptian-Gaza border, last week. Egypt opposes Israel’s operation in Gaza to defeat the last Hamas battalions. On Wednesday, Jake Turx, the White House correspondent for the Orthodox Jewish magazine Ami, asked White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to react to Egypt’s actions. Jean-Pierre appeared to dodge the question.
“We’re going to continue to have those diplomatic conversations,” Jean-Pierre said, without adding any additional commentary on the need for Egypt to help move humanitarian aid through the border crossing and into Gaza.
The food stamps scheme used by 42 million US residents has become too widespread and costly and hooks recipients on welfare, new research shows.
The conservative Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) in a report urges Congress to pare back a ballooning program by requiring more beneficiaries to work when they can.
The study comes amid mounting challenges for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps low-income families buy groceries, snacks, and non-alcoholic drinks.
Washington lawmakers are poised to release the text of an updated Farm Bill within days, with Republicans gunning to trim $30 billion worth of nutrition program funding over 10 years.
Preschool teacher Jaqueline Benitez, one of 42 million US food stamp recipients, shops for groceries at a supermarket in Bellflower, California
About 42 million Americans currently get the US Department of Agriculture's monthly benefits
Some 42 million Americans currently receive the US Department of Agriculture's monthly benefits at an average of $212 per person or $401 per household.
EPIC analyst Matthew Dickerson, a former House Budget Committee advisor, said food aid has mushroomed this century and raised fears about 'long-term dependency' among recipients.
'The story of the food stamp program is one of expanding enrollment, higher spending, benefit payments growing faster than inflation,' Dickerson says in his 35-page report.
SNAP has led to 'little work by recipients, and ultimately, a greater dependence on taxpayers,' he adds.
Dickerson says food stamp enrollment surged from 17.3 million beneficiaries in 2001 to 42.1 million last year.
That's an increase from 6.1 percent to 12.6 percent of the US population over the same period.
Meanwhile, SNAP costs have exploded from $31 billion to $135 billion, his report says, using inflation-adjusted numbers.
That's close to the entire annual turnover of Morocco.
As the scheme grows, recipients stay on stamps for longer, says Dickerson.
In the mid-1990s, less than a fifth of beneficiaries collected food stamps for 20 months or longer.
Nowadays, nearly half of them keep getting benefits for that period.
Worse still, says Dickerson, recipients include ever-more people who should be at work.
Nearly two thirds of SNAP recipients who could work did not, says the report
Food stamp recipient Steve Summers fixes his evening meal in his apartment in Oakland, California
A sign alerting customers about SNAP food stamps is displayed in a Brooklyn grocery store
Nearly half of food stamp recipients keep getting benefits for more than 20 months nowadays
Between 2017-2019, the latest year for which relevant data were available, nearly two thirds of SNAP recipients who could work did not, he says.
SNAP's work requirements are 'limited, weak, and are currently waived completely or in part in 34 states,' he adds.
Matthew Dickerson, a former House Budget Committee advisor
'Congress should continue the important work of welfare reform to encourage opportunity rather than the long-term dependency promoted by the status quo,' he adds.
The food stamp program that was launched in 1978 faces strengthening political headwinds.
Republicans and Democrats are clashing over food stamps and other issues in the delayed $1.5 trillion Farm Bill being negotiated this month.
Democrats accuse Republicans of trying to shave some $30 billion off food stamps, putting poor families at risk.
Ty Jones Cox, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, said the cuts hurt 'children, older adults, and people with disabilities.'
Steve Moore, from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a free market think tank, says Democrats were to blame for refusing 'to mandate work for welfare.'
They 'view food stamps as an economic stimulus and/or virtuous income redistribution,' he said.
Meanwhile, the scheme is increasingly targeted by fraudsters.
A New York Times investigation spotlighted the scammers who use illegally installed skimming machines to lift payment card data from beneficiaries who swipe their SNAP cards through the devices in stores or at ATMs.
Skimming cons picked up in 2022 and cause significant concern for victims and taxpayers. The federal government has spent at least $30 million reimbursing stolen benefits in the past year.
The firm of Democrats’ favorite lawfare artist — who was also the attorney behind the Russia-collusion hoax — was all but laughed out of court in a recent Wisconsin election integrity case.
D.C.-based Elias Law Group, founded by former Clinton campaign and Democrat National Committee lawyer Marc Elias, brought a “novel” absentee ballot complaint against the state that an Obama-appointed judge called “head-scratching.”
In dismissing the lawsuit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission, U.S District Court Chief Judge James D. Peterson summarily rejected the leftist law group’s outlandish claim that a state law requiring a U.S. citizen witness and sign an absentee voter’s ballot is a violation of voting and civil rights.
‘Absurd’ Interpretation
In a 37-page ruling, Peterson railed against the complaint’s core argument, concluding that “the most obvious problem with plaintiffs’ interpretation is that it simply does not make any sense.”
“The absurd results to which plaintiffs’ interpretation would lead are reason enough to reject that interpretation. But the text, purpose, and history of [Wisconsin Statute] § 6.87also support an interpretation that a witness is required to certify only the statements about the process of preparing the ballot,” Peterson wrote of the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin.
“It is plaintiffs’ interpretation that leads to head-scratching results,” the federal judge wrote.
RIGGED ELECTION? Harris County Judge Orders New Election for 180th District Court Seat After Controversial 449-Vote Loss — Nearly 1,500 Votes Cast Illegally
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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