Andrea Mitchell on Thursday ignored the fact that Democrat-led Louisiana is passing an abortion ban and pretended that it was only “Republican governors” who were passing such bills. Talking to the President of Planned Parenthood, she wondered, “Are you concerned that Missouri is just the beginning, the leading edge of this effort to, bit by bit chip away at abortion services in state after state where there are Republican governors and legislatures?”
Twitter has gathered a group of academics to help decide the fate of free speech on its platform. Twitter, the platform that bans people for tweeting “learn to code” at journalists, is considering cracking down on offensive “white supremacists.” Vice’s Motherboard wrote that that Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety, legal and public policy made multiple public comments on the issue. Gadde initially stated that Twitter believes "counter-speech and conversation are a force for good, and they can act as a basis for de-radicalization,…
Federal prosecutors announced indictments against three men on Tuesday as part of a new initiative targeting convicted domestic abusers who illegally possess firearms.
U.S. Attorney Benjamin C. Glassman and a collection of state and federal law enforcement officials announced indictments against 45-year-old Eldon G. Draper, 30-year-old Stephon A. Moore, and 26-year-old Brandon N. Zachariah. All three were charged with illegal possession of firearms or ammunition after having been convicted of domestic violence charges. The federal charges carry a potential punishment of up to 10 years in prison.
Under federal law, anyone with any felony conviction or a misdemeanor domestic abuse conviction is barred from buying, owning, or possessing firearms or ammunition.
The new initiative is going to be part of Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN), which the Department of Justice has made the centerpiece of its efforts to combat violent crime, especially gun crime. DOJ announced last summer that the program had been responsible for increasing federal gun and violent crime prosecutions by 60 percent.
"Through PSN, a broad spectrum of stakeholders work together to identify the most pressing violent crime problems in the community and develop comprehensive solutions to address them," DOJ said in a statement. "As part of this strategy, PSN focuses enforcement efforts on the most violent offenders and partners with locally based prevention and reentry programs for lasting reductions in crime."
The Justice Department said the program is part of their commitment to reducing and preventing domestic violence as well as coordinating law enforcement efforts to respond to it.
"U.S. Attorney Glassman announced the domestic violence program as part of the Southern District of Ohio’s ongoing commitment to protecting people from intimate partner violence and strengthening the capacity of law enforcement and communities to respond to domestic violence," said DOJ in a statement. "The initiative is being implemented with the aim of enhancing collaborations among law enforcement agencies and domestic violence victim services providers, as well as identifying and prosecuting domestic violence abusers who possess guns."
No joke. Via Daily Caller: White women around the country are invited to join private dinners where they can “bear witness” to the pain of “Black and Brown” women. Race To Dinner is aimed at white women and was co-founded by Saira Rao after her 2018 congressional run, according to the website. The group’s website points out […]
WarnerMedia, the parent company of CNN, HBO, and TNT, among many other television networks, released a statement Thursday threatening to “reconsider Georgia as the home to any new productions” if the state’s new law restricting abortions is held up in court.
“We operate and produce work in many states and within several countries at any given time and while that doesn’t mean we agree with every position taken by a state or a country and their leaders, we do respect due process,” WarnerMedia said in a statement. “We will watch the situation closely and if the new law holds we will reconsider Georgia as the home to any new productions. As is always the case, we will work closely with our production partners and talent to determine how and where to shoot any given project.”
The statement from WarnerMedia, which is owned by AT&T, came just a day after Disney CEO Bob Iger said it would be “very difficult” to for the mega-corporation to do business in Georgia if the state’s abortion law stands.
“I don’t see how it’s practical for us to continue to shoot there,” said Bob Iger when asked in an interview with Reuters if Disney has plans “to keep producing” in Georgia.
Georgia’s Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, which was signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp (R) earlier this month, prohibits abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected, usually around six weeks. The law is set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2020 but the ACLU and other organizations are mounting a legal fight to halt its implementation.
The state is one of the most frequented by the major Hollywood production companies, which made it an easy target for left-wing industry figures who launched a boycott campaign to protest the abortion law.
Coyotes are giving smuggling discounts to migrant parents who lend their young children to other migrants at the border, says a report by the Center for Immigration Studies.
“The child, real parent, unrelated adult client, and smuggler often make the trip together,” said the report by Todd Bensman, a former manager at the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division.”Only at the border is the child and bogus birth certificate given over to the paying migrant, who is expected to return the child days or weeks later once everyone is inside the United States,” he said.
Bensman spoke with Monica Mapel, an ICE agent in San Antonio, Texas, after she led a study into the novel child-trading scheme.
“I have current examples where they [the unrelated adult male] had never met them [the child] until the transportation to the U.S. began,” Mapel told Bensman. The adult male told the ICE agents that “I have no idea who the child is. I never met him before until I got on the transport. The child was given to me and the birth certificate was provided. The mom was on the bus,” she added.
The child-trading is made profitable by Congress’ refusal to fix the 2015 Flores Catch-and-Release loophole. The policy bars the detention of adults for more than 20 days, so the migrants and the cartel-tied coyotes have an incentive to bring and share many children so every migrant can get a child and walk through border fences via the Flores loophole.
Once through the border, the migrants are supposed to return the children to the mother, and then get blue-collar jobs to repay the cartel’s labor-trafficking business.
Democratic legislators have been silent about the child trading and the loopholes which make the journey possible, but very vocal about young migrants who die on the last stage of the journey into the United States. Republicans did little to close the loopholes when they held the House and Senate in 2017 and 2018.
Democrats and Republicans are also silent about the harms suffered by children of blue-collar Americans who are stuck in classrooms alongside migrant children who speak little or no English.
Bensman reported how the child trade works:
Mapel said human smugglers or brokers in home countries cut package deals where a parent provides a child (especially if parents have more than one) to a child-less migrant for a fee or an in-kind reduction in the real parent’s own smuggling fee. Such packages can reach $7,000 for transportation, food, doctored birth certificates, and the child.
“If you have children to spare during your trip to the U.S., your trip is not as expensive,” she explained.
…
To best maintain a ruse where the child is unable to blow the cover, Mapel said, young children are preferred, especially infants and toddlers who can’t answer questions or make mistakes. Border Patrol has often reported the arrival of single men carrying infants without baby formula, bottles, diapers or any other accoutrements indicating infant caretaking.
“I think it’s because they [a young child] won’t make a mistake in a facility. To them, it’s just a trip. They clearly have no idea what’s happening,” Mapel said.
The trade is dangerous and traumatizing for the migrant children, Bensman reported:
“In the cases I’m looking at,” Mapel said. “the mother lost track of that child. That child is now in another person’s custody because they didn’t reunite or something, somewhere.”
Others may be abandoned in the field. Plenty of abandoned-child cases have come to the attention of federal agents, such a 3-year-old boy found recently near McAllen, Texas, crying alone in a corn field, the only tie to his family possibly the phone number written on one of his shoes. While it’s unclear whether those children had been used for the asylum loophole entry, Mapel described the vulnerability that complicit parents allow by turning their kids over to others, during detention and after release, as “just foul.”
“It’s a new low for humanity that you would give your child away like this to a stranger or friend,” she said. “I’d hate to see something happen to that child after the handoff occurs. They are with somebody who is not their parent. What if fake mom or fake dad needed to make medical decisions for the child? Just some random guy is going to be saying it’s ok to do this procedure at a hospital? It’s just not right; the person who is supposed to be protecting them is not there.”
…
Mapel said she believes true mothers and fathers who participate in faux family schemes should be subjected to child endangerment charges and perhaps something new that could bring [a] higher penalty.
“DHS has seen many examples of family unit fraud; you’ve victimized your child. A young, young child is sitting in a facility. If these children ended up with ORR, there’re no hugs. There’re no kisses. What are they, Facetiming? What are you doing to see your child? And yes, you did do that to him. That seems like child endangerment. So yes, I think children are the pawns in this scheme.”
The inflow of children is huge. The Washington Postreported May 28:
Nearly 169,000 youths have surrendered at the southern border in the first seven months of this fiscal year, and more than half are ages 12 and under, according to federal records and officials familiar with Customs and Border Protection statistics. Minors now account for nearly 37 percent of all crossings — far above previous eras, when most underage migrants were teenagers and accounted for 10 percent to 20 percent of all crossings.
The migration is also emptying towns in Central America. On April 21, the Wall Street Journalreported:
COLOTENANGO, Guatemala—Gloria Velásquez is used to saying goodbye. Four of her six siblings have migrated to the U.S. and she, too, is thinking about heading north with her 9-year-old daughter.
…
Ms. Velásquez said her four siblings in the U.S. are encouraging her to join them. Her daughter Helen Ixchel likes to teach language and mathematics to fellow children. She wants to learn English and become a teacher.
“I’m a bit scared [about going to the U.S.] after hearing all the news about the suffering of migrants at the border. But it’s my daughter’s greatest dream,” Ms. Velásquez said.
But the flow of migrants provides U.S. employers with an extra supply of tough, compliant, low-wage workers just as labor shortages are forcing companies to raise pay for Americans. The extra labor supply also reduces U.S. employers’ incentive to hire the population 12 million unemployed or underemployed Americans, some of whom are sidelined by disability, underinvestment in rural areas, or drugs, or even to hire U.S. factory workers to build labor-saving machinery.
Data released by the Department of Homeland Security shows that a huge volume of migrants is getting work permits for U.S. jobs.
From October 2015 to September 2016, for example, 270,000 migrants got work permits via the (c)(8) process, and another 78,000 migrants got paroled and got work permits via the “Paroled pursuant to INA 212(d)(5)” category.
In the next fiscal year of 2017, the regular number spiked to 403,000, but the parole number dropped to 59,000 as Trump’s deputies curbed the parole number. In 2017, the regular number dipped to 345,000, and the parole number lurched down to 18,000.
DHS officials have refused to tell Breitbart News how long the work permits last, so they are hiding the number of migrants getting new work permits or extended work permits.
Immigration Numbers
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including roughly one million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
CHICAGO (AP) — Prosecutors in Chicago have charged R&B singer R. Kelly with 11 new sex-related counts, including some that carry a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Cook County prosecutors filed the new charges against Kelly on Thursday. Among the new charges are four counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault, two counts of criminal sexual assault by force, two counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse and three counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse against a victim between the ages of 13 to 16. The charges apparently pertain to a single victim.
The four aggravated criminal sexual assault counts carry maximum terms of 30 years in prison.
Kelly was already facing 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse involving four women years ago, three of whom were minors when the alleged abuse occurred.
Kelly’s defense attorney, Steve Greenberg, didn’t immediately respond to an email from the AP seeking comment. He told the Sun-Times that he had received word of new charges from prosecutors but hadn’t seen any filings in the case. He did say he understood that the allegations are “from years ago.”
Italian megabrand Gucci is celebrating the abortion movement in its latest runway collection in Rome, Italy.
During the showing of its Resort 2020 collection at the Musei Capitolini, Alessandro Michele showcased his pro-abortion designs for Gucci brandishing one jacket with the infamous slogan “My Body, My Choice.”
“‘My Body My Choice’ is a feminist slogan from the 70s which appears on the reverse of this jacket seen before the [Gucci Resort 2020] fashion show by Alessandro Michele,” Gucci’s Instagram post read of the purple jacket.
Another design invoking the abortion movement featured an embellished uterus branded on the front of a pale gold silk dress.
“This piece reflects the Creative Director’s continuing vision of freedom, equality, and self-expression,” the Gucci Instagram post read.
One model wore a top with the date that abortion became legal in Italy, which Michele referred to as the “protection of motherhood and the voluntary interruption of pregnancy.”
The fashion establishment has praised the Gucci Resort 2020 collection for its upfront support of the abortion movement while states like Alabama have nearly outlawed abortion to protect the life of unborn babies.
“Michele’s Gucci speaks to a large, diverse audience, but this collection will resonate loudest with those who understand just how much is at stake in the fight for women’s reproductive rights,” Vogue Runway’s fashion critic Nicole Phelps wrote in her review of the collection. “His sensitivity to the issue is bound to influence designers and brands, just as his eclectic magpie aesthetic and embrace of individual style has reverberated down through the seasons since his appointment at Gucci.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
University of Chicago student government member Brett Barbin says that he has received death threats over his pro-life bill which would have prohibited mandatory student fees from funding student abortions.
Student government member Brett Barbin said that he introduced the pro-life legislation as a means for ensuring that no student who finds abortion in violation of their conscience would be forced to fund it through the school’s mandatory “student life” fees.
The pro-life student told Fox News on Thursday that he has since received death threats for his legislation, which was voted down in a student government meeting by 15-1, Barbin being the only student government to have voted in favor of the bill.
“At the University of Chicago, we pay a student life fee every year as part of our tuition that’s supposed to go to recreational, educational, social, and cultural activities on campus,” said Barbin to Fox News on Thursday.
“A portion of those fees go to student government,” added Barbin, “Just a few weeks ago, the incoming president of our student government said on Facebook that abortions are a good thing and that her committee supports and funds abortions proudly.”
The student mentioned that several students had approached him, expressing their concerns over the possibility that their student fees might be allocated toward funding abortions. “So they asked me, as a member of student government, to draft some legislation in order to address this situation,” said Barbin.
The pro-life student added that while there had been a “relatively civil discussion” about his proposed legislation at the student government meeting, he was protested, and had received death threats online.
“I received death threats, people who were calling for people to track me down and beat me up, there was a student who was egged outside of the [student government meeting] room,” said Barbin, “and it really was unfortunate to see on a campus like University of Chicago, where we have such strong free speech and free expression principles.”
“I considered my legislation to be a compromise,” added the pro-life student, stating that just like the Hyde Amendment, his bill also gave room for three exceptions in order to use the student fees: if continuing the pregnancy would endanger the mother’s life, or if the pregnancy results from rape or incest.
“If we have people who are so passionate about the issue on both sides — those who believe it’s a violation of their conscience shouldn’t be financially coerced through their tax dollars to be funding abortions,” affirmed Barbin, “It’s the same thing on campus, where we’re just trying to go to school to get an education, we shouldn’t have to be violating our conscience in this way.”
An allegedly close former military aide to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez leveled scandalous accusations against Chávez’s Cuban ally Fidel Castro in a story carried by Argentine media on Wednesday, suggesting the Castro regime killed Chávez after seducing him with “women” and “witchcraft.”
The accuser, retired Lieutenant General Emiro Antonio Brito Valerio, reportedly made the allegations in audio relayed to the Argentine news outlet Infobae. Infobae published his extensive remarks, which detail his friendship with Chávez during their military training and his longtime concern that Fidel Castro was using his friend for political gain.
The Castro regime is deeply embedded in Venezuela, dependent on it for free oil and money generated from its oil industry. A former Maduro official once estimated that there may be nearly 100,000 Cuban government agents helping run the Maduro regime in Venezuela.
Brito’s revelations are the latest in a series of attempts to revise the bloody legacy Chávez’s tenure: turning the wealthiest country in Latin America into the world’s most miserable economy; the largest exodus in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere; widespread hunger and disease; hundreds of political prisoners; and the collapse, in the country with the world’s largest known oil reserves, of its petroleum industry.
Those who defend Chávez’s brutal socialist legacy blame his hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro, for sinking the country. Maduro loyalists blame sanctions on Maduro loyalists for the disaster.
Chávez referred to Brito as a “good soldier friend” in life and kept him in the highest levels of power as an adviser, including a position at the Venezuelan embassy in Cuba, Infobae noted.
The soldier claims Chávez’s brother, Adán – currently the governor of Barinas state – “contaminated” him with socialism. Brito also claims to have warned Chávez against at least one of Maduro’s closest henchmen: Diosdado Cabello, the drug trafficker and television host Maduro keeps by his side to control the military.
In the audio Infobae asserts it has confirmed is of Brito, the man saves his sternest condemnation for the Cubans, claiming that he repeatedly warned Chávez to keep Fidel Castro and his henchmen at the distance.
“Hit the brakes, hit the brakes,” Brito claims he told Chávez in their last conversation. “Fidel doesn’t want anything good for you.”
At the time, Chávez was suffering from the cancer that would ultimately kill him while undergoing treatment in Havana. Brito says he told Chávez, “look for a good doctor, in Germany or where the gringos are. It’s just you have some bullshit going on with the gringos.” Chávez was a virulently anti-American leader who regularly referred to President George W. Bush as the devil.
Despite the rift, Brito claims he told Chávez, “those people are more advanced. Don’t go over to Cuba.”
“We don’t know today if the Cubans killed Chávez. It is very probable,” Brito says in the audio. “There can’t be two bosses.”
Brito says Fidel Castro “enamored him and Chávez fell hopelessly in love with Fidel Castro. Fidel wanted Chávez to work for him, the man ensnared him with the promise of power, he tricked Chávez and swindled him and he was fucked.”
“Fidel blinded him with many things, with women, he got to him with witchcraft,” Brito claimed. The Infobae article does not add any more specifics on either claim, suggesting Brito did not detail them in the audio.
Practitioners of santería, a Cuban religion combining Nigerian Yoruba worship with Spanish Catholicism, have long believed that Fidel Castro practiced witchcraft and had been made a high priest of the religion. In 2016, when Castro died, santería priests warned Cubans to cover their heads to prevent Castro’s spirit from possessing them and returning to the living world.
Brito, if the audio is indeed of him, follows several members of Chávez’s regime in attempting to absolve Chávez of his role as the architect of modern Venezuela. Unlike in the case of Maduro, the Venezuelan people elected Chávez in a free and fair election despite the fact that he never hid his disdain of democracy, as exemplified by his failed coup against the democratically elected government in 1992. By absolving Chávez and blaming the Cubans, the Chávez defenders exonerate the Venezuelan people of their role in the situation.
Chávez’s former intelligence chief, Hugo Carvajal, recently came out against Maduro, accusing him of “murdering” hundreds of young Venezuelans and urging the military to turn on him. General Ramón Rangel, another Chávez loyalist, also floated the theory that the Cubans killed Chávez in a video published to social media this month.
Earlier in Maduro’s tenure, former Chávez ministers Héctor Navarro and Jorge Giordani accused Maduro government workers of stealing $300 billion in oil industry profits between 2006-2016.
Not all former Chávez officials who have turned against Maduro have exonerated the late dictator.
“This all started with Chavez!” Luisa Ortega Díaz, former attorney general under both Chávez and Maduro, said in a recent interview. “I think that Chávez’s proposals strayed. But with Maduro, boy Maduro did not deserve to be president. That guy is incapable. We all know it and I knew it.”
