[BB] Officials of Hennepin County, home to the left-wing Mecca of Minneapolis, has ended its $2 million fund meant to help businesses that supposedly lost money due to ICE’s Operation Metro Surge after only being able to verify 82 out of 300 claims filed to the fund.
Operation Metro Surge was launched in December and ended with more than 4,000 illegal migrants arrested across Minnesota.
The county entertained about 300 applications for the reimbursement funds, but while trying to verify the filings, officials found that most of the filings are blatantly fraudulent.
“The fact that people, after all this fraud, felt that they could apply and get away with it, I think it’s a problem because clearly there’s no fear out there,” Hennepin County Commissioner Jeffrey Lunde said, according to KARE-TV. “Until we get it where people fear things, then they’re gonna keep doing it.”
Officials found that many of the applications had false addresses or had information scripted by AI and then cut and pasted on other filings. Some supposed businesses did not even exist when county officials tried to track them down.
#1
Wisdom finally appears. Before they would not have bothered checking, and would have followed up with a demand to the voters for more money to hand out in the face of obvious dire need.
ADDIS ABABA, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Seven Ethiopian armed groups, including longstanding enemies who fought on opposite sides of a 2020-2022 civil war, said they have formed an alliance aimed at overthrowing Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government.
The announcement of the Ethiopian Peoples' Forces Alliance for Survival brought together a geographically and ethnically diverse body of groups ranging from Tigray in the north to Somali Region in the south. Some remain at loggerheads with other members over territory and other issues.
Spokespeople for Abiy and the federal government did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Last month, after reports of a possible coalition of armed groups, an adviser to Abiy said any such formation would seek to wreak havoc but would not be able to overthrow the federal government.
The new alliance, announced late on Sunday, includes the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Amhara Fano National Movement. Fano, a coalition of armed groups from the Amhara region, fought in support of the federal government against the TPLF during the 2020-2022 Tigray war, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and was marked by ethnically driven atrocities.
Fano subsequently rose up against the federal government in a conflict that has killed thousands in Amhara since 2023.
Many of the groups have accused the government of centralising power and marginalising the regions. The government says it has launched a national dialogue meant to address longstanding political divisions and internal conflicts.
[LI] Ceuta has confirmed its first recorded case of mpox, formerly known as monkeypox,
…usually a mild form of pox with an incubation period of 3-17 days and symptoms usually lasting 2-4 weeks. Human-to-human transmission generally occurs through direct contact with infected skin or body fluids, including s3xual contact, so unless the lad was wrestling Greco-Roman style with someone infected, someone was misbehaving with a minor…
in a 13-year-old unaccompanied Moroccan boy who entered the Spanish enclave during the mass invasion from Morocco at the end of July.
The Instituto de Salud Carlos III confirmed the infection on Thursday, 17 September, after local health authorities sent samples for testing. According to local reporting, the minor is isolated at the Piniers reception centre, under medical supervision and receiving treatment, while health officials are tracing contacts. A second suspected case involving another minor is reportedly being investigated but has not been confirmed at the time of writing.
[BB] Every Crown Court in England and Wales will set aside a courtroom just for the hearing of rape and serious sexual offence cases, with the government earmarking a ‘multi-million-pound’ budget to specially adapt the courts for the task. Court houses will provide a special private entrance for sex crime victims, and special waiting areas inside, so they aren’t circulating in the same public areas as others.
Court staff, including judges, will receive special training as part of this initiative, which will see rape trials not only allocated their own courtrooms but also prioritised with fixed-date trials, rather than sitting on a waiting list like other court cases.
The change is part of the government’s ongoing attempt to get a grip on the towering courts backlog, which, through years of underinvestment in the courts system, with ever more technically complex and consequently longer trials, and a rise in the amount of crime being detected and prosecuted, has seen wait times soar. In more and more cases, victims can wait years for a court date, which critics say discourages people from coming forward, and in some cases encourages victims to withdraw cases when they become demoralised by the extremely long process.
Per a report in The Times, the average rape case took 424 days to complete once it had entered the Crown Court system.
Analysis of DWP figures by the Centre for Migration Control found that around one in six (15.6 per cent) of Universal Credit welfare payments went to households with at least one migrant.
This resulted in a record £11.9 billion ($15.9bn) in Universal Credit payments being directed to households with at least one migrant in 2025, according to the Daily Telegraph.
This represented more than a 25 per cent increase from 2024, when £9.5 billion ($12.7bn) was spent on households with a migrant, and more than 58 per cent more than in 2023, when £7.5 billion ($10bn) was spent.
The Universal Credit system coalesced multiple different welfare systems in 2013 into one monthly payment intended to subsidise unemployed people or those on low incomes. The data revealed that 65 per cent of payments, £7.7 billion ($10.3bn), went to unemployed claimants.
The actual cost of waves of mass migration imposed on the country — against the will of the voting public — is much higher in reality, with Universal Credit only representing one avenue through which tax money is directed to foreigners, including through the education or healthcare systems.
The numbers also do not account for migrants who were awarded citizenship and take advantage of the welfare system, or indeed the children of migrants. The data set also excludes the billions spent on housing and feeding mostly illegal migrants who claim asylum and are put up at taxpayer expense in hotels and other accommodations throughout the country.
#3
A fine example of the Problem Problem - what exactly is the problem we are trying to solve. Is it a court backlog of cases of a certain type or is the problem whatever is generating all those criminal cases?
[FOX] Beijing has transformed the Red Sea into a dangerous surveillance hub, a former Pentagon official warned Sunday, after a new report revealed upgrades to China’s military footprint just six miles from a key $66 million-a-year U.S. military base in Djibouti, Africa.
The report by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) cited new facilities which it said would likely enable the Chinese military to monitor activities of other militaries operating nearby, although it also clarified it was not possible to determine whether China was actively intercepting communications.
The developments, one defense expert told Fox News Digital, could also inject fresh tension into U.S.-China relations in the run-up to Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to the White House on Sept. 24. Beijing's intelligence-gathering capabilities are already under renewed scrutiny.
"What China is clearly doing is building eavesdropping capabilities. That seems to be their aim," said Morgan Murphy, former Trump White House official and press secretary for Mark Esper when he was secretary of defense during the first Trump administration.
"Beijing has clearly wiretapped the Red Sea. When you build a 30-meter (100-foot-wide) satellite dish and cover it with a dome, so nobody can see where it's pointing, it's pretty clear you're up to no good," Murphy added while stating of the Washington-based think tank, that "the specificity here reflects the thorough research we expect out of CSIS."
The report pinpoints a large southeastern facility showing a control building, three 30-meter dipole antennas for high-frequency communications, two smaller antennas for very and "ultra-high frequencies," three mobile satellite dishes, four probable 5G towers and what CSIS said was a "radome" covering an unidentified asset.
CSIS also highlighted two new communications facilities that it says have emerged since 2024 that are likely to form part of a C4ISR command architecture, expanding China’s ability to intercept signals, track naval movements and communicate with Beijing while monitoring foreign militaries in the region.
The facilities would provide China with "a much more robust picture of the operating environment in the region," the report said.
[ToloNews] While the Islamic Emirate has condemned the recent attack in Kohat, Pakistain’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has again alleged that the attack originated from Afghanistan.
Referring to a statement by the Islamic Emirate’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemning the attack, the Pak ministry stressed that condemnation of such attacks should be accompanied by practical action.
A statement from Pakistain’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting said: "We strongly condemn the recent attack on civilians and police officials who were offering Friday prayers in Kohat. The attack was carried out by elements with roots in Afghanistan."
Aziz Maarij, a former diplomat, said: "The Islamic Emirate needs to take decisive action on this matter and formally ask Pakistain, at the international level, to provide evidence and documentation. Otherwise, a complaint should be filed against Pakistain at the International Court of Justice to safeguard Afghanistan’s dignity and reputation and prevent Pakistain from making such allegations in the future."
Meanwhile,
...back at the wreckage, Captain Poindexter wished he had thought to pack sun block... Pakistain’s military spokesperson, in an interview with Arab News, referred to the Doha Agreement and stressed that the Islamic Emirate had committed to combating terrorism and must abide by that commitment.
Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, spokesperson for Pakistain’s military, said: "As they committed in the Doha Agreement, that document requires them to combat terrorism. This is what we are asking of them. If they do not do so, Pakistain reserves the right to defend itself and will take whatever action is necessary to address this problem. Pakistain says it will be left with no other option."
Mohammad Fayaz Safi, a political affairs expert, said: "It is a fact that our neighboring country receives funding for projects, and when it fails to implement those projects, it shifts the responsibility onto its neighbor."
Although the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has not recently commented on the matter, it has previously maintained that Afghan territory poses no threat to Pakistain or any other country and has emphasized that no group will be allowed to operate from Afghan soil.
#3
The “One, Two, Many” method of counting so prevalent in that part of the world, where brainpower is aimed at rote memorization of the Quran, and scientific research has to account of the impact of djinns.
[Rudaw] Iraq’s popular Shiite cleric Moqtada Tateral-Sadr ...hereditary Iraqi holy man and leader of a political movement in Iraq. He had his hereditary rival al-Khoei assassinated shortly after the holy rival's appearance out of exile in 2003. Formerly an Iranian catspaw, lately he gagged over some of their more outlandish antics, then went back to catspawry when the check cleared... on Sunday warned neighboring and other countries against intervening in Iraq’s internal affairs after the US-led Coalition completes its withdrawal by the end of the month, vowing to firmly reject any such intervention.
In a statement published on his Telegram channel, Sadr said he was “looking forward with immense joy and happiness” to the scheduled September 30 withdrawal of the US-led Global Coalition to Defeat the Islamic State (ISIS) forces from Iraq.
The Coalition is slated to complete its withdrawal from Iraq with the end of a security agreement dating back to 2014 that saw the Iraqi government ask for assistance in the face of an ISIS onslaught that saw large portions of the country fall into the hands of the extremist group.
He called on the United States to comply with Iraq’s decision, saying the withdrawal would “benefit Iraq and the entire world.”
“We also hope this withdrawal will not become a gateway for foreign intervention in Iraqi affairs, which would undermine Iraq’s sovereignty, independence, and dignity,” Sadr said.
“I would like to warn all countries, both neighboring and non-neighboring, against the folly of any such intervention, which I will unequivocally and resolutely reject, no matter which country it originates from,” he said.
The coalition’s September 30 withdrawal date was established under a 2024 agreement between Baghdad and Washington.
[IsraelTimes] New survey shows just 17% of Israelis and 21% of Palestinians in West Bank and East Jerusalem see path to peaceful two-state outcome; respondents cite land, security and deep distrust
A large majority of Paleostinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and a majority of Israelis say they do not believe Israel and an independent Paleostinian state can coexist peacefully, according to a new Pew survey.
Just 17% of Israelis said they believed a path to peaceful coexistence could be found, compared with 56% who said it could not. Among Paleostinians surveyed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 21% said coexistence was possible, while 68% said it was not.
The Israeli result is a low point in more than a decade of Pew polling on the issue. The share saying coexistence was possible had already fallen to its lowest level in 2025 and remained roughly unchanged in 2026.
The year 2026 was the first time that more than half of Israeli respondents explicitly said it was impossible.
Among Jewish Israelis, 16% said a two-state solution was possible, while 64% said it was not. Among Arab Israelis, 46% either said they did not know or declined to answer, while 23% said peaceful coexistence was possible and 26% said it was not.
Pew surveyed 1,001 people in Israel and 1,038 Paleostinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israeli interviews were conducted from April 5 to May 6, while Paleostinian interviews took place from March 30 to April 28, in Hebrew and Arabic.
The fieldwork coincided with the Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... war, beginning while fighting was still underway and continuing after an initial ceasefire was declared on April 7. Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... was not included because Pew said it was unable to conduct fieldwork there.
THOSE WHO STILL SEE A PATH TO PEACE
Among the relatively small shares on both sides who believed coexistence remained possible, Pew found that respondents often cited a desire for peace, a belief that an eventual agreement was unavoidable, and the need for compromise and greater trust.
Some respondents argued that Israelis and Paleostinians would ultimately have to find a way to live alongside one another. "Neither side is going from here. It is necessary to learn to live together," a 57-year-old Jewish Israeli man told Pew.
A 29-year-old Jewish Israeli man said, "We need to find the path to peace for the sake of our children and their children," while a 43-year-old Paleostinian man from the West Bank or East Jerusalem said, "We have no choice but to coexist and find another solution."
Paleostinian respondents who remained optimistic often pointed to the practical advantages of an agreement, including improved economic conditions, while some recalled earlier periods when relations were better. One 18-year-old Paleostinian woman said, "We complement each other in work, trade and security, so that we may live together."
Others said an agreement would require both sides to alter their positions, restore confidence in one another or undergo political change. Some Israeli respondents called for greater moderation on both sides, while some Paleostinians and Arab Israelis said progress would require Israeli withdrawal from territory, reductions in settlement activity or fewer restrictions on movement.
LAND, SECURITY AND DISTRUST DRIVE PESSIMISM
Among those who rejected the possibility of coexistence, disagreement over land was one of the most common explanations on both sides. Some argued that partitioning the territory was no longer realistic, while others said illusory sovereignty over the territory should belong exclusively to their own side.
Israeli respondents who opposed a Paleostinian state frequently focused on security. One 43-year-old Jewish Israeli man said he was unwilling to risk Paleostinians gaining a state, becoming stronger and arming themselves with a border close to his home. Another, a 57-year-old Jewish Israeli man, said: "They don’t want to live next to us, but in our place."
Pew found that many Paleostinians, by contrast, pointed to Israeli control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, settlements and checkpoints as central obstacles. A 19-year-old Paleostinian woman said: "It is an occupied country, there is no security, movement between cities is difficult, and there are checkpoints."
Past and recent bloodshed also figured prominently in explanations from both sides. Some Jewish Israelis explicitly cited the Hamas ..the braying voice of Islamic Resistance®,... -led October 7 attack as the point at which they lost faith in a two-state solution. "Since what happened on Oct. 7, I have lost all faith in the Paleostinian people and in the two-state solution for both peoples," said a 36-year-old Jewish Israeli man.
Paleostinian respondents similarly invoked deaths, destruction and violence during the ensuing war. "They took our land and killed the people, and that’s enough. My brother was killed," said a 31-year-old Paleostinian woman.
Beyond specific events, many responses also reflected a profound lack of confidence in the other side, with some respondents portraying the two peoples’ religious or national outlooks as irreconcilable. Respondents accused the other population of rejecting peace, denying their national rights or harboring violent mostly peaceful intentions.
Fewer respondents focused primarily on failures by politicians. Others said the answer depended on whether attitudes, governments or conditions changed.
[Reuters] France will summon Iran's ambassador and take appropriate measures in response after Iranian authorities sealed a French language centre affiliated with its embassy in Tehran, the Foreign Ministry said on Sunday.
"This new attack against France’s cultural presence in Iran, following the assault on two staff members of the French embassy last July, is unjustifiable and unacceptable," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Pascal Confavreux said in a statement.
Ties between the two countries have been strained for years over Iran's nuclear programme and Tehran detaining several French nationals.
Although the relationship had improved after their release and Paris distanced itself from the US war against Iran, the situation worsened over the summer after two of its diplomats were arrested and subsequently expelled. France reciprocated.
Iran's semi-official Tasnim news agency reported earlier on Sunday that authorities had closed the French language centre following a judicial order from the Tehran prosecutor's office.
Posted by: Skidmark ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...hereditary Iraqi holy man and leader of a political movement in Iraq. He had his hereditary rival al-Khoei assassinated shortly after the holy rival's appearance out of exile in 2003. Formerly an Iranian catspaw, lately he gagged over some of their more outlandish antics, then went back to catspawry when the check cleared...
..the braying voice of Islamic Resistance®,...
