[FoxNews] Law enforcement officers in areas primarily run by Democrats continue to flock to red states for job security, better pay and bosses who will back them up, according to one police leader.
Joe Gamaldi is the national vice president of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP). He is an active lieutenant with the Houston Police Department, and he said police in blue cities are tired of facing hostility from local leaders.
"What we've seen is really a mass exodus of police officers leaving far-left cities for basically greener pastures," he told Fox News Digital.
"Because, ultimately, people want to feel appreciated for what they do, and when you have a boss — in this case, mayors or city councils, who regularly call you a piece of crap to the public — why would anyone stay?"
Florida is one example of a Republican-led state that has benefited from the mass departures.
According to a 2024 statement from former Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, the state welcomed 5,000 law enforcement recruits between 2022 and last year, and 1,200 of them came from out of state.
"Florida is the most pro-law enforcement state in the nation because we back our blue," Moody said at the time. "We’ve been spreading the word about all the great incentives to join our ranks, and individuals like the new Sarasota recruits have answered the call, leaving behind places where their service was not as appreciated as it is here."
She said she was "as inspired as ever to continue doing all we can to show our support to those who bravely protect and serve" after seeing the influx of police officers into the state.
Gamaldi said officers are also moving to cities that may lean blue but are in red states and still have the support of elected leadership and the community, adding officers are "voting with their feet."
"We're also seeing it [in] Texas in Houston, which is a city that leans a little blue, but they have been supportive of police officers," he said. "The mayor there has given a massive raise to police officers. You're seeing officers go there. You're seeing officers go to Dallas. So, you're seeing all these communities, and there's one common thread. It's ‘We support police officers.'"
Gamaldi emphasized that the trend began after the 2020 defund the police movement and said, in many cities, law enforcement officers are afraid to do their jobs in "critical incident" situations, even when they do them by the book.
"I think you can look no further than Seattle, Portland, Chicago [and] New York," he said. "All of these cities have basically told their police officers, 'We don't support you. We're not gonna be there for you when you need us. We're gonna try to defund you when given the opportunity.'
"I mean, my goodness, right now, one of the mayoral candidates for New York has actively said he wants to defund and dismantle the police department," Gamaldi said, referring to socialist Zohran Mamdani, who has been open with his anti-police rhetoric.
[IsraelTimes] Resignations, including of former UN rights chief, come as the US imposes sanctions on international anti-Israel investigators
The three members of a United Nations ...an organization originally established to war on dictatorships which was promptly infiltrated by dictatorships and is now held in thrall to dictatorships... commission tasked with investigating Israel quietly resigned earlier this month.
Navi Pillay, Chris Sidoti, and Miloon Kothari, who made up the UN’s Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Paleostinian Territory, submitted their resignation letters to the president of the UN’s Human Rights Council. The letters surfaced on Monday.
Pillay, 83, the commission’s chair, said she was resigning "owing to age, medical issues and the weight of several other commitments" on July 8.
Sidoti resigned a day later, saying Pillay’s retirement was "an appropriate time to re-constitute the commission," and Kothari said the group had reached an "understanding" during the previous week.
The letters were posted on a back-end Human Rights Council website and first publicized by UN Watch, a nonprofit monitoring group.
The commission will continue to exist once it appoints new members. Jurg Lauber, the head of the UN’s Human Rights Council, asked the council’s member states to propose new members by August 31.
The commission released periodic reports on the Israel-Paleostinian conflict that overwhelmingly blamed Israel. The commission’s most recent report was released in May.
Pillay, a South African jurist, was the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014, during which time she frequently criticized Israel’s actions in 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... She chaired the commission of inquiry, which Jewish groups, Israel, the US and other countries have condemned for its alleged bias. It is the council’s first open-ended commission of inquiry, the UNHRC’s highest level of investigation.
The commission overwhelmingly blames Israel for the conflict and accuses the Jewish state of other misdeeds, such as stealing natural resources.
Kothari caused a firestorm of controversy in 2022 when he said that social media was "controlled largely by the Jewish lobby," espousing a common antisemitic trope, and questioned why Israel was allowed in the UN. Pillay defended Kothari’s comments.
Pillay has dismissed antisemitism concerns as a "diversion" and "lies," and called Israeli security concerns "a fiction."
In 2014, over 100 members of Congress signed a letter to Pillay decrying the UNHRC’s bias against Israel under her leadership, saying the council "simply cannot be taken seriously as a human rights When they're defined by the state or an NGO they don't mean much... organization" while it was probing Israel, but not Hamas ..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,... The commission’s members resigned as the Trump administration cracks down on international Sherlocks into Israel.
In February, the US slapped wide-ranging sanctions on International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan over his decision to file arrest warrants against Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. The court works closely with the UN.
Khan’s US-based assets were frozen and he was barred from entering the country. He lost access to his email, his bank accounts were frozen and his American staffers were told they were at risk of arrest if they were to enter the US, The News Agency that Dare Not be Named reported in May.
Earlier this month, the US imposed sanctions against UN rapporteur for Paleostinian rights La Belle Francesca Albanese, a harsh critic of Israel with a history of antisemitism. Like Kothari, Albanese has inveighed against the "Jewish lobby."
The commission’s opponents celebrated the trio’s departure.
"First, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio ...The diminutive 13-year-old Republican U.S. Senator from Florida, Secretary of State in the second Trump administration... made the historic decision to sanction La Belle Francesca Albanese," said Hillel Neuer, the head of UN Watch. "Now the architects of the UN’s anti-Israel inquisition are fleeing the ship. The tide is turning."
Anne Bayefsky, the head of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and the nonprofit Human Rights Voices, said Pillay "has spent almost twenty years championing antisemitic causes from the highest of UN jobs."
Both the UN General Assembly and the Human Rights Council condemn Israel more than any other country every year.
[IsraelTimes] Report finds ‘Aid 48’ NGO, linked to Mansour Abbas’s Islamist party, sent money to West Bank charities proscribed by Defense Ministry; bereaved families group wants criminal probe
The Justice Ministry, in a letter from July 7 that was published on Monday, said it found grounds to dissolve the "Aid 48" association, a nonprofit connected to the Islamist Ra’am party, having concluded an investigation over alleged money transfers to groups proscribed for terror links.
"From the association’s records and its responses to requests for information, it appears that the association transferred funds or collaborated with organizations outside Israel, that were declared terror organizations, or are suspected of being linked to terror organizations," the ministry’s Israeli Corporations Authority said in the letter.
"This document should be seen as a warning before initiating liquidation proceedings against the association," the 22-page document concluded.
Aid 48 transferred funds to four organizations purporting to do charity work in the Nablus, Ramallah, and Tulkarem areas of the West Bank that were proscribed by the Defense Ministry in 2008 and 2002, according to the ministry.
The investigation into the group came after pressure from the "Choose Life" Forum, representing bereaved families, which opposed the Ra’am party’s inclusion in former prime minister Naftali Bennett’s coalition, labeling the party "terror supporters."
The forum welcomed the decision to dismantle Aid 48, calling it "a historic victory" and demanded that Ra’am’s leaders — such as MK Mansour Abbas — be "detained for questioning," asserting that "anyone who supported Hamas ..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,... leading up to October 7 must be sent to prison," in a quote carried by Hebrew media.
Though declaredly an Islamist, Abbas has courted controversy among his base by stating that Israel will always be a Jewish state and condemning Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, calling on Paleostinian terror groups to demilitarize.
In a statement in April, when the Justice Ministry first announced its findings, Ra’am blamed the Netanyahu government for funding Hamas and accused it of seeking to divert attention from its own mistakes.
"Since the negotiations on the possible entry of Ra’am into the [previous] coalition began, an ongoing and vicious campaign has been waged against us by extreme right-wing elements, aiming to thwart any chance for the political integration of Arab citizens in the country," it said at the time.
This is done on the back of a humanitarian aid organization that operates with the knowledge and cooperation of all authorized entities in the country. We have no doubt that the organization will prove it acted lawfully."
At the time, Aid 48 itself called the investigation a "campaign of persecution for a clear political goal of thwarting any possibility of a political partnership between Arabs and Jews."
[GEO.TV] Mediators are pursuing "innovative mechanisms" to bridge the gaps between Israeli and Hamas delegations after a week of Gaza truce talks in Qatar, an official with knowledge of the negotiations told AFP on Monday.
"Mediators are actively exploring innovative mechanisms to help bridge the remaining gaps and maintain momentum in the negotiations," the official said, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/15/2025 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[14 views]
Top|| File under: Hamas
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Leonid Tsukanov
[REGNUM] Lebanon, a country traditionally considered a French zone of influence, is at odds with two of the Fifth Republic's intelligence services: the Directorate General of External Security (DGSE) and the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DRM).
In June, the DRM significantly increased its presence and activity in Lebanon, which did not please the DGSE resident. A fight for territory broke out between the services using less than ethical methods.
And a couple of weeks later, the scandal, which had been hushed up, received an unexpected continuation: the “French connection” suddenly led Beirut to Syrian illegals who, for some reason, were receiving funding from France.
STRUGGLE FOR INFLUENCE
Despite the fact that DGSE and DRM are formally assigned to the same department (the French Ministry of Defence), there is an unspoken rivalry between them, which is also due to self-perception.
The DGSE traces its history back to the second half of the 19th century and considers itself one of the "pillars" of French security. While military intelligence, on the contrary, is relatively young and was only made an independent agency in 1992.
This is where the “proprietorial” trait inherent to DGSE operatives comes from – they consider the territory of Lebanon “theirs” and do not tolerate the appearance of “outsiders” there. Even if they are compatriots and colleagues in the shop.
This is what happened in June, when the DRM headquarters, without properly informing foreign intelligence, sent a group of special forces from the capital's garrison to Beirut "to strengthen the military attaché's apparatus." The military intelligence officers who arrived in Lebanon were tasked with collecting information about the situation in the country, the real positions of Hezbollah, the activity of Iranian agents of influence, and the pace of disarmament of the Lebanese Shiite militias.
For some time, the DGSE residency turned a blind eye to the work of the guests from Paris. However, they quickly began to behave in Lebanon in a more homely manner, holding meetings with representatives of local political and military movements, thereby taking on the functions of foreign intelligence. Moreover, the leadership of the "seconded" began to double-check even the information and reports that came from Lebanon through the DGSE, which caused indignation among the latter. Foreign intelligence accused the military apparatus of "threatening" French interests in the Middle East.
And a little later, the two special services also had a falling out over the local agents. The DRM complained that the Beirut residency was “disrupting meetings” with local residents and activists, and was accusing military intelligence of “intercepting foreign informants.” In response, the DGSE representatives stated that the “military attaché’s office” was engaged in political intelligence for some reason and was looking for new connections in local parties, but was not working with the military at all.
The "Lebanon incident" is interesting because it quickly took a dangerous turn - the intelligence officers abandoned their ethics and began to threaten each other with "exposing" overzealous operatives.
This was fraught with political consequences for Paris if they came to the attention of official Beirut and Hezbollah functionaries.
The conflict had to be resolved at the headquarters level, with the involvement of the heads of the special services - Nicolas Lerner (DGSE) and Jacques Langlade de Mongro (DRM). The head of the defense department, Sebastien Lecornu, acted as the "arbitrator".
In the end, the situation was resolved in favor of the DGSE. The DRM command gave in and agreed to "slow down" when working in Lebanon. An additional DGSE employee was also assigned to the military attaché's office in the country, which was supposed to emphasize the "détente" between the intelligence services.
A major role in the settlement was played by the authority of Lerner, who, although considered one of the youngest heads of foreign intelligence in the history of France, has great influence on the course of the Elysee Palace and enjoys the favor of Lecornu and other ministers.
In addition, his opponent de Mongro quickly realized that conflict with the foreign intelligence residency in Lebanon was not advisable from the point of view of Paris's long-term interests. If the spearhead of the DGSE's work is "aimed" at the Middle East, then for military intelligence this region remains in the background.
De Mongro's subordinates are much more interested in Ukraine, due to insufficient attention to which the general's predecessor lost his shoulder straps. Apparently, the chief of military intelligence was unable to explain why the DRM is dispersing its efforts on the Middle East instead of working "on a priority basis".
Despite the fact that the aftertaste remained, the bosses preferred to hush up the scandal before it became public knowledge and required the personal intervention of the French president. For both bosses, this would have meant big problems at work.
THE FRENCH CONNECTION
Although the conflict between the two French intelligence services was quickly resolved, it did not go unnoticed by the Lebanese elite.
And the reason is the excessive diligence of the DGSE operatives. Wanting to sting their opponents, they “leaked” to the Lebanese press a column criticizing the activities of French military intelligence in the country.
The planted journalist was outraged by the “abundance of foreign soldiers” in Lebanon (and especially in Beirut), wondering whether this was a sign of preparations for “something big.” And although the most seedy local newspaper was specifically chosen for the critical campaign, the passages from it coincided with the fears of the masses and quickly spread across Lebanese social networks.
In response to the unrest, official Beirut decided to carry out several counterintelligence and police actions - emphatically public ones, to show that the situation is under control and that no one will allow a "spy rampage".
The raids took place in the camps for Syrian refugees of Anfe, Bishmezin and Amyoun, which had previously been visited by French military intelligence officers. Moreover, they did so quite officially, with inspections that were carried out within the framework of a joint program of “strengthening the borders” and with the permission of the country’s president, Joseph Aoun.
More than a hundred people who were in Lebanon illegally were arrested. Some of those arrested later admitted that they had been in contact with DRM operatives but had not received any instructions from them.
And although most of those detained turned out to be simple illegals, there were some dubious elements among them. In particular, at least three people from Syria were caught “preparing destabilizing actions” on Lebanese territory and admitted to receiving foreign funding and “instructions from Israel.”
The latter is probably a standard formulation chosen by Lebanese security forces to further expose Tel Aviv, which is increasing its military activity in the south of the country.
More importantly, the potential saboteurs (whose names the Lebanese security forces are not disclosing) were sponsored by companies registered in France. This only strengthened Beirut's suspicions that Paris was planning to use the recruited refugees for its own interests. And it used military intelligence for these purposes.
RESULTS OF THE CONFLICT
At first glance, the DGSE residency was not affected by the new round of conflict. Including because after the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria in December 2024, it has not been very active in working with Syrian refugees, fearing to spoil relations with the new Damascus and complicate the work of agents.
The military intelligence became the scapegoat, which in exchange for containing the scandal had to reduce the number of officers assigned to the military attaché's office. In exchange for this, official Beirut agreed not to make the story public, shifting the focus to Israel.
On the other hand, foreign intelligence was also unable to emerge from the water completely dry.
The shell companies used to pay the salaries of potential agents of influence had previously figured in spy scandals in Mali and Burkina Faso and had links to people from the DGSE.
This suggests that Paris was aware of the planned action and took part in it, although it used its resources in a very limited format.
If the two agencies had not started fighting for territory, this action might have gone unnoticed. Now Beirut has to figure out what goals the Syrians sent to the country were pursuing and who they were supposed to cooperate with after arriving in Lebanon.
This means that French foreign intelligence will also have to slow down in Lebanon for a while. At least until the scandal dies down.
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.
[FoxNews] Law enforcement officers in areas primarily run by Democrats continue to flock to red states for job security, better pay and bosses who will back them up, according to one police leader.
[IsraelTimes] Resignations, including of former UN rights chief, come as the US imposes sanctions on international anti-Israel investigators
..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,...
..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,...
