by | Apr 24, 2024 | Fox News
Many animals can glow in the dark. Fireflies famously blink on summer evenings. But most animals that light up are found in the depths of the ocean.
In a new study, scientists report that deep-sea corals that lived 540 million years ago may have been the first animals to glow, far earlier than previously thought.
“Light signaling is one of the earliest forms of communication that we know of — it’s very important in deep waters,” said Andrea Quattrini, a co-author of the study published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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Today, marine creatures that glimmer include some fish, squid, octopuses, jellyfish, even sharks — all the result of chemical reactions.
Some use light to startle predators, “like a burglar alarm,” and others use it to lure prey, as anglerfish do, said Quattrini, who is curator of corals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
Still other animals use light as a beacon to find mates.
Many deep-sea soft coral species light up briefly when bumped — or when stroked with a paintbrush. That’s what scientists used, attached to a remote-controlled underwater rover, to identify and study luminous species, said Steven Haddock, a study co-author and marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
GLOWING, BRIGHT BLUE PHENOMENON OFF AUSTRALIA’S COAST SEEN IN STUNNING IMAGES
Soft coral may look like waving reeds, skeleton fingers or stalks of bamboo — and glow pink, orange, white, blue and purple under the researchers’ spotlight, he said.
“For some species, the whole body glows — for others, only parts of their branches will glow,” said Danielle DeLeo, a study co-author and evolutionary marine biologist at the Smithsonian.
For corals, scientists aren’t sure if this luminous reaction is meant to attract or repel other organisms, or perhaps both. But its frequency suggests that it serves a crucial function in many coral species, she said.
But how long have some coral species had the ability to glow?
To answer this question, the researchers used genetic data from 185 species of luminous coral to construct a detailed evolutionary tree. They found that the common ancestor of all soft corals today lived 540 million years ago and very likely could glow — or bioluminescence.
That date is around 270 million years before the previously earliest known example: a glowing prehistoric shrimp. It also places the origin of light production to around the time of the Cambrian explosion, when life on Earth evolved and diversified rapidly — giving rise to many major animal groups that exist today.
“If an animal had a novel trait that made it really special and helped it survive, its descendants were more likely to endure and pass it down,” said Stuart Sandin, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who was not involved in the study.
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by | Apr 24, 2024 | Fox News
The suspect who broke into Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ home this week did so during a shift change in security and was specifically targeting Bass, District Attorney George Gascón said.
The gap in security allowed 29-year-old Ephraim Matthew Hunter to break into the official mayoral residence, known as Getty House, through a glass door. The forced entry triggered an alarm, however, and police quickly responded and arrested Hunter.
Los Angeles police delivered a press conference on the details of the case on Tuesday, saying the timing of Hunter’s breaking had been perfect. Police said he hopped over the perimeter wall after the overnight security team had left but before the morning shift arrived.
“[Hunter] jumped over the fence quickly, and was able to break in through the back of the house. And to my understanding, this happened so quickly that even if somebody had been there, he probably still would have been able to access the inside of the residence,” interim LAPD Chief Dominic Choi said.
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Gascón clarified on Tuesday that prosecutors believe Hunter was specifically targeting Bass, who was home at the time with her daughter, son-in-law and grandchild.
“We believe that he was targeting the mayor, but this is an ongoing investigation,” Gascón said, adding that “there were actions while he was inside the property that are consistent with the fact that he knew this was the Mayor’s home, and that he was looking for her.”
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Hunter is being held on a $100,000 bail and faces two felony charges of residential burglary with people present and vandalism. If convicted, he could be sentenced to up to 13 years in prison.
Bass has informed the public that she and her family are “fine,” but she has declined to offer further details.
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by | Apr 24, 2024 | Fox News
One Ivy League-educated social media influencer warned TikTok has taken an “ominous turn” in the wake of the war in Israel, going so far as to re-label Gen Z “Generation Terrorism.”
“You really have seen since October 7th, especially, the algorithm seems to have taken a bit of an ominous turn. You’re really seeing Gen Z become Gen T, Gen Terrorism. And I saw that not just as a joke, but as a reality,” comedian and TikTok star Zach Sage Fox said on “America’s Newsroom” Tuesday.
College campuses across the U.S., including Columbia and Yale, have illustrated an alarming rise in anti-Israel sentiment among younger Americans. The wave of protests has come alongside the spread of hate speech and antisemitism on social media since Hamas’ attack.
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TikTok has become a major outlet for sharing news and information alongside other social media apps, raising concerns over misinformation, hate speech and censorship.
“All the social media platforms have a misinformation problem. This isn’t just TikTok, but when you are speaking to young people, when I’m interviewing them on the streets about the misinformation they’re hearing right now, it is…90% of it is coming from TikTok,” Fox explained.
According to a Pew Research Center study from Nov. 2023, 44% of Americans between 18 and 29-years-old get their news through TikTok. In addition, TikTok is an information source for 42% of those who are high school aged and younger, as well as 60% of Democrats or individuals leaning left.
While Fox acknowledged there is a lot of good which can come from platforms like TikTok, he knew “we were making a deal with the devil.”
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“The moment for me [when] I started getting terrified was when you saw Gen Z supporting Osama bin Laden. I mean, this has gone in a crazy direction. There’s Holocaust denialism rampant throughout the app. This is where you’re seeing the most misinformation.”
In the last few months, Fox has shifted his platform to focus on “combat[ing] antisemitism and anti-Israel propaganda.”
Much of this determination stems from Fox’s visit to Auschwitz a few years ago. While at the concentration camp, Fox was approached by a man in a wheelchair whose family was “massacred” at Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
The touching exchange was captured on video, and Fox made a promise to the man he is now living out on his platform.
“You see us hugging and crying and I told him, I said, ‘I promise I will make sure that nothing like that ever happens again.’ But when I said that promise, I meant it. I really meant it. But it was hard to imagine that it would really come into play like this,” Fox said. “That what we’re seeing on these college campuses, especially right now, could actually happen. I never understood how the Holocaust could happen. I knew it did happen, and I knew why, but it felt like a dystopian past. It didn’t feel like a present.”
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“It’s no coincidence that you are seeing Gen Z, like the Z stands for ‘zombie.’ They are just repeating everything they’re seeing online. And I’m not just here to criticize Gen Z because free speech is super important. I’m a comedian. But it’s not fair to young people who are so impressionable – these are the most impressionable people in the world. So I feel bad for these college students, too, because they’ve been brainwashed by something that is out of their hands, and sadly, right now, outside of our government’s hands, to be able to rein it in,” Fox added.
As Congress weighs legislation to crack down on TikTok, Fox said while he is “conflicted” given his success on the platform, ultimately the social media network needs to be sold to an American company to better allow regulation.
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by | Apr 24, 2024 | Fox News
A third person of interest has been taken into custody in Puerto Rico as investigators continue unraveling the Florida carjacking that authorities believe left Katherine Altagracia Guerrero De Aguasvivas dead.
Kevin Ocasio Justiniano, 28, was arrested by U.S. Marshals for unrelated drug trafficking and weapons charges, Seminole County Sheriff Dennis Lemma announced Tuesday. He is believed to have been the driver on the green Acura seen in the now-viral video of the armed carjacking at a busy Winter Springs intersection on April 11.
Justiniano’s case and one of another person of interest currently in custody for an unrelated case, 28-year-old Jordanish Torres-Garcia, will be referred to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Both are expected to be charged with carjacking resulting in a death. Investigators believe Torres-Garcia is the man who walked up to the white 2017 Dodge Durango Aguasvivas was driving while brandishing a firearm.
“This case is about drugs and money,” Lemma said in a statement. “We believe the most dangerous people connected with this case are now off our streets.”
DEADLY FLORIDA CARJACKING: PERSON OF INTEREST ARRESTED, ANOTHER ON THE LOOSE AS PLOT THICKENS
The third person of interest, Giovany Joel Crespo Hernandez, 27, turned him into the John E. Polk Correctional Facility in Seminole County late Monday night, according to FOX 35 Orlando. He was wanted for unrelated drug charges.
Hernandez was the last person Aguasvivas spoke to via Facetime before she was killed, Seminole County Sheriff’s Office said. Investigators believe she was on her way to meet Hernandez at his Casselberry home to “deliver money and other items.”
DEADLY FLORIDA CARJACKING VICTIM’S FATHER SPEAKS OUT: ‘A BIG HIT TO OUR FAMILY’
Hernandez has not been charged in connection with the carjacking/homicide. He remains incarcerated on charges of fentanyl trafficking and marijuana with intent to sell.
Aguasvivas’ brother and husband are no longer cooperating with detectives, Lemma said during a press conference Tuesday.
DEADLY FLORIDA CARJACKING TIED TO KILLING OF TOW TRUCK DRIVER, POLICE SAY; DEPUTY SUSPECTED OF LEAKING
“The husband is not cooperating at all,” he said. “And the brother feels like he’s cooperating, but he’s telling us lies.”
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by dap | Apr 24, 2024 | Fox News
I testified before the House Oversight Committee about Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence in the United States. For an American of my generation, testifying before a congressional committee is a big deal, and an honor.
But, I suspected the hearing could be derailed for political purposes – and it was. Maybe you saw the headlines about the hearing’s “chaos”?
As a result, there were several crucial topics I didn’t cover in my testimony. I’ll get to them, but first, here’s what I did cover.
Bottom line: America no longer enjoys the protection of “distance” that our strategic community has taken for granted for centuries. The last time the American mainland faced a serious invasion by a foreign power was the War of 1812.
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The CCP has systematically taken away that advantage through a multifront political warfare campaign against us.
The most obvious way is CCP cyber penetration of America and Americans. Communists sitting in China are in our critical infrastructure, communications systems, cars, health care, genetic data and schools. China’s 2015 hacking of OPM gave extremely personal files on 22 million Americans holding security clearances.
The same Americans who were furious about a Chinese spy balloon floating over their heads have Chinese spy apps loaded on their phones, sitting in their pockets.
Distance doesn’t protect us from their devastating chemical warfare either. Chinese-origin fentanyl killed over 70,000 Americans last year alone, and is destroying families and communities and cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia.
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Beijing could stop it if it wants. But why should it? It is weakening its greatest enemy, and we aren’t doing anything about it.
Same thing on the economic front. The PRC has, in a targeted way, been destroying our manufacturing and other commercial sectors, including ones critical for defense, like shipbuilding and critical minerals. We’ve lost millions of jobs over the last 20 years, hundreds of billions in revenue a year, and are dependent on China for everything from pharmaceuticals to components in F-35s.
We are deeply penetrated, damaged and there is barely a response.
For the first time in our history, our distance can’t protect us. We have never faced anything like this. We are under constant attack from within.
Among the recommendations I made to start fighting back are that the U.S. government needs to relearn political warfare and someone needs to be responsible for the political warfare effort – and its success or failure. Currently, nobody is.
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And, at a minimum, we should implement a reciprocity standard. We can’t buy land near a military base in China. They shouldn’t be able to buy land near ours.
On the economic and technology fronts, we should do nothing that helps the PRC, including letting them raid our research institutes.
We should also make it too costly for American proxies – in Washington, Wall Street, Capitol Hill and on campuses – to do China’s bidding.
We should make PRC human rights an issue – constantly. Oppressing people is necessary for the survival of the CCP system. Everyone should know that. And we should protect all people of Chinese descent in the U.S. from intimidation by CCP agents.
If some on the committee hadn’t been determined to derail the hearing, here’s what I would have said.
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Ukraine
Ukraine is important and if Putin “wins,” you can bet the PRC will be emboldened.
But as a basic miliary principle, if you focus on one front and ignore other important fronts – particularly “behind your front lines” – you lose.
The border
Our wide-open borders are setting us up for defeat. Theatrics about Ukraine are just that, theatrics, if the borders are being ignored.
Through the fentanyl pouring across our border, the Chinese have killed more Americans than Putin has killed Ukrainians.
That emboldens the Chinese to hit us more than any Russian win against Ukraine does.
The Chinese are not Putin’s puppets. If anything, it’s getting close to the other way around.
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The CCP has been conducting political war from the time of their founding – and against us for at least 50 years. For the CCP, Ukraine is a side-show. It’ll take advantage of it, but its attack on us won’t stop. Until we do something about it.
I’m glad I testified, and still consider it an honor.
But if asked how serious Congress is about taking on the Chinese threat, I’d have to say “some of them are. But only some of them.”
And if a young Marine asked me if it is worth dying for America? “Maybe. Maybe not.”
The only people who should be happy about the theatrics at that hearing are in Beijing.
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by | Apr 24, 2024 | Fox News
NASCAR driver Erik Jones was in a brutal crash at Talladega on Sunday during the Geico 500 and ended up suffering a broken bone in his back.
The broken lower vertebra will cause him to miss the next race at Dover Motor Speedway, Legacy Motor Club announced Tuesday. Corey Heim will drive Jones’ No. 43 Toyota.
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“Erik’s long-term health is our number one priority,” Legacy Motor Club co-owner Jimmie Johnson said in a statement. “It will be great to see him at the track Sunday and we intend to give him the time it takes to recover properly.
“I know Corey will do a great job behind the wheel for the Club. In the meantime, our thoughts are with Erik and his wife Holly — they have our total support.”
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Jones was caught up in a wreck that initially involved John Hunter Nemechek and Bubba Wallace. Jones was sent hard into the wall.
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He reportedly complained about his back on his radio immediately after the crash.
Jones briefly talked to reporters after he was released from the in-field care center. He said he was a “little sore” but doing all right. NASCAR later announced he was hospitalized for further evaluation and released.
He returned home to the Charlotte, North Carolina, area where the broken back was determined.
After the Talladega race, Jones is in 20th in the Cup Series standings.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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by | Apr 24, 2024 | Fox News
After anti-Israel protests formed at Columbia University, UC Berkeley and Yale, additional activist groups have become inspired to lead their own resistance movements, forcing schools in California, Texas and Maryland to brace for potential mayhem, Fox News has learned.
Activist groups at the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Texas at Austin, and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, have all announced on social media that they will hold anti-Israel protests on Wednesday, April 24.
Pro-Palestinian factions at all three universities have posted on social media indicating that they intend to hold “resistance” movements, including a post from the Hopkins Justice Collective which calls members to “stand in support of our brothers and sisters in Gaza, as well as the students on many college campuses across the country fighting for divestment from the settler colony of Israel.”
“Bring your signs, bring your posters, and — most importantly — bring your energy,” the post continues.
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The newly anticipated anti-Israel protests come as activists have seen massive turnouts with hundreds of students at Columbia University in New York City and Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. Similar protests have risen at other universities in recent days.
The University of Maryland – College Park, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have all experienced similar protests in recent days targeted at Israel and its war with the terror group Hamas in Gaza.
Many of the protesters are calling for an end to the fighting in the region, which has resulted in tens of thousands of civilian Palestinian deaths.
“Our universities have chosen profit and reputation over the lives of the people of Palestine and our will as students. The supposed power of our administrators is nothing compared to the strength of the united students, staff, and faculty committed to realizing justice and upholding Palestinian liberation on campus,” Students for Justice in Palestine, University of California Los Angeles wrote on Instagram.
The post continued: “In the footsteps of our comrades at Rutgers-New Brunswick SJP, Tufts SJP, and Columbia SJP, we will take back our university and force our administration to divest for the people of Gaza!”
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In Austin, Texas, the Palestinian Solidarity Committee is calling for students to walk out of class on April 24, and to “occupy the South Lawn.”
“In the footsteps of our comrades at Columbia SJP, Rutgers-New Brunswick, Yale, and countless others across the nation, we will be establishing THE POPULAR UNIVERSITY FOR GAZA and demanding our administration divest from death,” the post continues.
The new protests are continuations of anti-Israel protests exhibited across the U.S.
Protesters and agitators in the U.S. have successfully targeted and held protests at all top five U.S. universities, according to the U.S. News and World Report’s 2024 Best National University Rankings.
These include Princeton, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale — each witnessing active anti-Israel protests in the last few days.
According to these rankings, at least half of the top 50 U.S. universities have had active anti-Israel protests in the past week.
While many of these universities have had anti-Israel protests in waves since the Hamas-led terror attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, they have seen more recent protests sparked by or after the April 17, 2024, Columbia University protests.
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by | Apr 24, 2024 | Fox News
As anti-Israel protesters continue to demonstrate across college campuses and rage at the White House’s stance on the war in Gaza, more journalists, reports and even supporters are saying the conflict could fatally damage President Biden’s re-election hopes.
“Well, I think Trump is really bad, and that abortion rights, tax policy, climate change, and the American public’s health care are very important issues so I am annoyed that pro-Palestinian protestors are doing a lot to sandbag Biden’s re-election,” Bloomberg columnist and Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias wrote Tuesday on X, responding to a list of demands presented by far-left, anti-Israel student groups.
In addition to taking over elite college campuses like Columbia and Yale, and shouting down Biden and other prominent Democrats, anti-Israel protesters have blocked traffic, including on the Golden Gate Bridge in California, which was shut down for hours because of a protest last week.
Biden condemned antisemitism this week while also criticizing people “who don’t understand what is going on with the Palestinians,” but nothing appears to be assuaging the far-left flank who are enraged over continued financial aid to Israel.
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Actor and comedian Michael Rapaport, who is staunchly pro-Israel but also a huge critic of former President Trump, posted a video to social media on Monday and argued far-left student protesters were going to hand the election to Trump.
“You know what’s going to be great?” Rapaport sarcastically remarked. “When d— stained Donald Trump gets elected — and I ain’t saying I’m voting for him — but when he does win, and he’s going to win, the screaming and yelling that you [expletives] on college campuses are doing now, the screaming that you are doing at Jews about, ‘Free Palestine,’ the screaming you are doing at Zionists, is nothing compared to the screaming you are going to be doing come November, when d— stained Donald Trump wins [the] presidency because of you. Because of you.”
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The New York Times made a comparison to the famously chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention in a recent article about the rabid protests this year against Israel. In response to the unpopular Vietnam War and the shocking assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King that year, the convention in Chicago was marred by rioting and violence.
The Times reported that pro-Palestinian activists are preparing to be at the Democrats’ 2024 convention this summer, also in Chicago.
“Back then, many voters watching the nightly news got the impression that the party could not control its own delegates, never mind a country that was wrestling with an unpopular war,” the outlet reported.
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“We’ve got a big antiwar movement, lots of tumult, a convention in Chicago. What could go wrong?” former Obama adviser David Axelrod told the Times. Axelrod has been a prominent voice on the left that supports Biden for president but warned he has serious weaknesses heading into the general election.
Rev. Mark Thompson, along with Columbia student Maryam Alwan, who was suspended from the university, joined MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Tuesday to discuss the ongoing student demonstrations. Thompson also made a comparison to the anti-war protesters at the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968.
“Honestly, it looks like we are headed back there. What happened in 1968, Democratic convention in Chicago, people protesting the Vietnam War. Here we are again, protesting a war and what the well-paid consultant class doesn’t seem to be able to get over to the White House is that he is very much looking like LBJ [President Lyndon B. Johnson] at this moment,” Thompson said.
Due to his unpopularity and a splintered Democratic Party, Johnson pulled out of the running for the 1968 nomination despite being the incumbent president and eligible for another term.
“If the White House isn’t careful, they’re going to hand this election over to the Bibi of America, which is Donald Trump,” Thompson continued, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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“President Biden is running to protect democracy and believes in Americans’ constitutional right to make their voices heard while Donald Trump promises to be a dictator on day one, says he’ll ignore parts of the constitution, and threatens protestors at his rallies with violence. This November, the American people will choose democracy and freedom over chaos and division like they did four years ago,” the Biden campaign’s Seth Schuster told Fox News Digital in a statement.
The campaign also pointed to a comment from the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, John Della Volpe, who recently told the Washington Post that there was a “disconnect in our minds around what we’re seeing on TV at these college campuses versus what young people feel and think about the conflict and the war and the humanitarian crisis.”
Volpe noted his survey of voters under the age of 30 found that they rank issues such as inflation and abortion higher than the Israel-Hamas war.
After the House of Representatives passed a $95 billion aid bill on Saturday, which includes $60.8 billion of aid for Ukraine and $26 million in aid for Israel and relief for Gaza, Muslim American voters are even more agitated with the president.
When Biden signs the package as he’s pledged, “that heartless decision could mark the point of no return for what remains of the White House’s relationship with the American Muslim community and other Americans opposed to the genocide in Gaza,” Council on American-Islamic Relations’ government affairs director Robert McCaw told NBC News.
Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director for Americans for Justice in Palestine Action, told the outlet he isn’t planning to vote for Biden or Trump. He said it was up to Biden to earn their votes back.
“We don’t think it’s on us. It’s on Biden,” Abu Irshaid told NBC. “If our votes and the votes of people who support the Palestinian human rights are so important, then Biden should be listening.”
Biden sailed to the Democratic nomination in the primary, but potential fault lines emerged with the significant emergence of “uncommitted” voters voicing their protest against his Israel policies in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
A young voter, who reluctantly voted for the president in 2020, recently told the New York Times on a podcast that she wouldn’t support him this time around, and said she would rather Trump win, as she doesn’t see a huge difference between the two candidates.
“Biden has shown that he’s not necessarily a better president than Trump, in my opinion,” the young voter said. “And so the reason I’m saying, you know, no to Biden is because I would rather Trump win and then us probably experience very similar impacts, negative impacts that we had from the Biden administration than let his administration know that in any way I approve of what he’s done or of what he’s going to do.”
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by dap | Apr 24, 2024 | Fox News
“Everything old is new again.” Whether it was Mark Twain or Winston Churchill or Jonathan Swift who popularized the adage, it’s a pithy truth that is lost on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his merry band of prosecutors.
On day two of their farcical case against Donald Trump, they seemed ecstatic to elicit from their first witness that an old political ploy was utilized by the former president’s surrogates in the 2016 campaign. Brace yourselves.
David Pecker, the ex-publisher of the National Enquirer, testified that his tabloid would promote positive stories about Trump and negative stories about his opponents. His scandal sheet even paid money to bury damaging tales of Trump.
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Assistant DA Joshua Steinglass clearly regarded that tidbit of information as an earth-shattering revelation of political turpitude and venality, as if no one in the history of American presidential elections had ever ventured there.
Except, you know, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, to name just a few.
Oh…and Hillary Clinton.
Consider the 1800 presidential campaign in which Hamilton penned scurrilous lies about Adams that were intended to benefit Jefferson. Our then-President Adams was fine with slander, and his acolytes returned the favor by accusing Jefferson of adultery, prostitution, and incest. The partisan pamphleteers of the day happily published the mudslinging courtesy of some campaign cash.
The public display of bitterness and covert skullduggery evolved from there and infected presidential campaigns over the next two centuries and beyond, culminating in the dirtiest trick of all perpetrated by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Her campaign secretly funded a phony dossier designed to smear Trump in what became known as The Russia Hoax.
Much like the current Trump case in New York, Clinton used a lawyer to funnel the money and booked it as “legal expenses.” Although fined by the Federal Election Commission, she was never prosecuted. Of course not.
DA ALVIN BRAGG’S CASE AGAINST DONALD TRUMP IS ‘HISTORIC MISTAKE’: NEW YORK TIMES GUEST ESSAY
Juxtapose Trump, who is now on trial for falsifying business records under an expired statute of limitations that was resuscitated somehow by attaching it to a heretofore unidentified election violation that was never charged because it doesn’t actually exist.
Confused? You should be. And so is Bragg who brought a politically motivated case by contorting the law beyond all recognition.
Bereft of authority to pursue a federal statute as the underlying crime, Assistant DA Steinglass announced Tuesday that the “other crime” was a violation of state law. To wit, a conspiracy to unlawfully promote Trump’s candidacy. Which also happens to be a mere misdemeanor that’s expired.
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So, there you have it. A lapsed misdemeanor bootstrapped to another dead misdemeanor that magically elevates it to a felony, even though it does not. Don’t forget, we’re not talking about a single charge, but 34 of them in what can only be described as a shameful display of “count stacking” that no half-decent prosecutor would ever do.
There are just a couple of teeny-weeny problems with this novel legal theory.
First, in all matters concerning campaign donations, federal law preempts state election laws. This is why Bragg’s predecessor declined to file charges against Trump, among many reasons. The 2016 contest with Clinton was, after all, a federal election. She violated election laws, but Trump did not. But he’s on trial, for reasons that have nothing to do with criminality.
Second, as a local prosecutor, Bragg is foreclosed from charging under a federal statute, even as an underlying crime. Only the feds can do that. They chose not to, principally because Trump’s payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels did not qualify as campaign expenditures under the law. In other words, there was no crime committed, regardless of the bookkeeping that occurred ex post facto.
Even the liberal New York Times has published several articles casting doubt on Bragg’s daffy legal theories. On Tuesday, it ran a blistering column written by Jed Handelsman Shugerman, a distinguished law professor at Boston University entitled, “I Thought the Bragg Case Against Trump Was a Legal Embarrassment. Now I Think It’s a Historic Mistake.”
I couldn’t agree more.
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by | Apr 24, 2024 | Fox News
Columbia University in New York set a deadline for administrators and anti-Israel protesters to reach an agreement to end the encampment on campus, as a police presence is standing by at the university.
University President Minouche Shafik initially set a deadline of midnight for an agreement with student organizers that must include dismantling the encampment, dispersing and following university policies going forward.
Shafik said in a message to the university community Tuesday night that if discussions are unsuccessful, administrators would have to “consider alternative options for clearing the West Lawn and restoring calm to campus so that students can complete the term and graduate.” The university has already moved to hybrid learning for the remainder of the semester over safety concerns sparked by the protest.
Around the expiration of the midnight deadline, a student demonstrator announced on the university’s South Lawn that administrators had extended the negotiation deadline to 8 a.m., the university’s student newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, reported.
Then around 3:15 a.m., a campus spokesperson released a statement saying that university officials and protest organizers were hashing out four main agreements and there is now a 48-hour window for negotiations — there was no mention of an 8 a.m. deadline extension.
Those terms include students removing a significant number of tents, that those protesting are only Columbia students, that those protesters comply with FDNY safety implications, and that “student protesters have taken steps to make the encampment welcome to all and have prohibited discriminatory or harassing language.”
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MOVES TO HYBRID LEARNING ON MAIN CAMPUS AMID ANTISEMITIC PROTESTS
Demonstrators said they would not continue to negotiate with the administration without a written commitment that the administration will not be using the New York City Police Department or the National Guard on its students.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has said she has no plans to call in the National Guard to respond to the protests. But the NYPD did have its riot police and counterterrorism unit standing by overnight, according to student reporters from radio station WKCR. Police told demonstrators inside the camp to keep down the use of amplified noisemakers and beating against barricades or risk arrest.
Ahead of the initial midnight deadline, demonstrators began to dismantle tents on the west side of the South Lawn, according to the Columbia Spectator. Some demonstrators had relocated to Furnald Lawn while dozens of others remained on the west side of the South Lawn.
Shortly after midnight, demonstrators began moving the tents back onto the west side of the South Lawn.
TRUMP SLAMS COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY FOR CLOSING CAMPUS AMID ANTI-ISRAEL PROTESTS: ‘MEANS THE OTHER SIDE WINS’
The deadline for an agreement comes just days after the university authorized the police on Thursday to sweep the encampment, leading to more than 100 arrests.
“I also want to be clear that we will not tolerate intimidating, harassing, or discriminatory behavior,” Shafik wrote in her message Tuesday night. “We are working to identify protesters who violated our policies against discrimination and harassment, and they will be put through appropriate disciplinary processes.”
“The right to protest is essential and protected at Columbia, but harassment and discrimination is antithetical to our values and an affront to our commitment to be a community of mutual respect and kindness,” Shafik continued.
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