Hmmmm… First we hear that little Whitewater is facing a crime wave with social services being overwhelmed by illegal aliens. Now we see that Wausau is being overwhelmed by homeless people. It’s almost as if we have an open border and illegal aliens are finding their way to communities throughout the country.
The Wausau Police Department is requesting an additional two officers as part of a team approach to working with homeless residents, as the number of people without permanent housing surged considerably over the past three months.
“The speed at which unhoused individuals are coming into our community scares me,” he said.
[…]
In his February presentation, Barnes said city workers are shoveling human fecal material from downtown parking ramps on a regular basis.
[…]
Barnes said the homeless situation in Wausau is making policing complicated and reducing the amount of policing that the rest of our community “that pay taxes to have a quality police force” is getting.
The US faces a significant threat in Venezuela’s cozy relationship with Iran, with enemy nations using the socialist country as a base in the hemisphere to attack America, experts have warned.
Fears are rising over the influence Iran has on Caracas as the two regimes strengthen economic and military ties and grow more hostile towards Washington DC.
Last week the FBI Miami launched a manhunt to find Iranian spy Majid Dastjani Farahani, who the government accuses of looking for allies to kill US officials while operating from Venezuela.
Meanwhile four Iranians were charged in 2021 for plotting to kidnap dissident journalist Masih Alinejad from Brooklyn before using a speedboat to take her to Tehran via Caracas.
Experts warned DailyMail.com the brazen acts and strengthening relationships between dictator Nicolas Maduro and America’s enemies could spell doom in the near future.
They said the rich-oil nation is being used as an ‘air bridge’ because it is geopolitical gold dust due to it being just 300 miles from the Miami coast in case any world war erupted.
Liberal implements more policies that deprive citizens of civil rights in effort to combat problems caused by previous policies.
Liberal deploys violent police power to enforce depravation of civil rights.
Liberal demands more money to support violent police power to enforce depravation of civil rights to combat problems caused by liberal policies.
Rinse.
Repeat.
Prediction: Most of the people swept up with weapons on their person are regular New Yorkers who started carrying something for self-defense. Liberals can’t tolerate people taking ownership of their own personal safety.
New York National Guard troops and New York State Police troopers will be deployed into the subway system to help riders feel safe after a spike in transit crime, Gov. Kathy Hochul said Wednesday.
The new deployment is in addition to the 1,000 New York City police officers who were ordered to patrol subway lines and do security checks on bags in the nation’s largest transit system last month following an attack on a conductor and other high-profile crimes.
[…]
Hochul said her plan also includes assigning 1,000 state workers, including 250 state police troopers and Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police members, to assist the NYPD in enhanced baggage checks at heavily trafficked areas of the subway system.
“No one heading to their job or to visit family, or to go to a doctor’s appointment should worry that the person sitting next to them possesses a deadly weapon,” Hochul said at a news conference Wednesday.
Given the crooks’ high speeds and evasive actions, this could have ended a lot worse. I admire the police for using a dog on him instead of shooting him. That’s a lot of unnecessary restraint. And Waukesha is lucky that some kid didn’t get run over during the chase.
WAUKESHA — A group’s plan to steal and resell medicine was derailed when a slow-moving train stopped them during a police pursuit. Four people from Chicago were charged after they allegedly made off with $1,075 worth of medications from the Waukesha Meijer store.
Tashyla Ellis, 27; Jamar Humphrey, 23; Rayvontay Hutchins, 30; and Margie Taylor, 29 were charged on Friday in Waukesha County Circuit Court.
[…]
Officers then pursued the suspects’ vehicle. Ellis, Humphrey, Hutchins, and Taylor were in a white Dodge Durango that fled southbound on Tenny Avenue, turned westbound onto Highway 59 and traveled south on Center Road, evading the pursuing officer who was traveling at 94 MPH. Eventually, the vehicle was blocked by a train after turning eastbound onto Lawnsdale Road. The Durango then turned off the road and got stuck in a marsh less than 100 feet in.
Hutchins exited the vehicle and walked forward, following police directions poorly. He appeared to be speaking with someone on his phone. Police suspected that Hutchins was attempting to let the others flee, the complaint said.
After multiple instructions to kneel, Hutchins did, then reached for his pocket and retrieved what officers first believed to be a firearm but was actually his phone. K-9 Arko apprehended Hutchins by biting his arm, the complaint said.
This story is also a reminder that another community’s soft on crime policies don’t just impact that community.
The 2022 child-parent relationship lawsuit filed by Walli Carranza raises multiple concerns about Moreno, who at the time was referred to as Jeffrey. Carranza alleges Moreno was diagnosed multiple times with schizophrenia and had said she was not taking prescribed medications or following treatment recommendations made by her psychiatrist.
Walli Carranza said Moreno had “a history of constantly erratic, paranoid, stalking and mendacious behavior and was diagnosed as exhibiting Munchausen and Munchausen by proxy signs and symptoms.” Munchausen syndrome is when someone fakes illness, abuse or other hardship to gain sympathy or aid. By proxy means they took on someone else’s misfortune as their own.
[…]
“(Moreno) has been investigated four times by Child Protective Services for child abuse and neglect and was found by them to have intentionally harmed her child on at least two occasions,” the suit states.
Bulletproof vests, ammunition, plastic bottles filled with unknown substances, antisemitic books and a white mask that read “Free Gaza Trump” were pulled from the Conroe home of the suspected Lakewood Church shooter, records show.
[…]
Officers also found a book titled “All Remainers are Neo-Nazis.” It’s unclear what the book is referring to, but the term remainers is often used in the United Kingdom to describe people who voted for the country to stay in the European Union. Seven handmade poster signs were found in a trash can, but the warrant does not indicate what they said.
[…]
Conroe police have responded to more than 20 calls since 2019 tied to the address where Moreno lived, records show. The calls ranged in severity from neighbors reporting strange interactions with the woman to one who said Moreno tried to hit her with her vehicle.
Good. It’s good to see the House Republican leadership stick with this. Yes, it’s largely symbolic since the Senate will never convict, but when you only control one half of one branch of government, you should still do everything in your power to fight for the American people.
The House of Representatives has narrowly voted to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, making him the first cabinet member to face impeachment in nearly 150 years.
Many Republicans blame Mr Mayorkas for an unprecedented influx of migrants at the US-Mexico border.
Student Kai Zhuang was reported missing by his high school last week and later found “very cold and scared” in a tent in rural Utah after anonymous scammers convinced the 17-year-old to isolate himself, according to local police.
Once the teenager was alone in the wilderness, officials said the kidnappers sent a ransom demand and a picture – that Zhuang took of himself – to his parents in China and claimed he had been abducted. Zhuang’s family eventually paid $80,000 (£62,600) to the perpetrators.
Experts told the BBC that advancements in technology have made it easier for criminals to pursue cyber kidnapping schemes. While there is no clear data on the number of cases, they said, Zhuang’s experience is not an isolated occurrence.
[…]
There have been several cases in which Chinese foreign exchange students in other countries – including Canada and Australia – were coerced into staging their own kidnappings to extort money from relatives, said Dr Maras, who has studied cyber kidnapping cases.
What is going on in West Bend? Kids fight… I get it… but in the space of a week there have been three major incidents of violence in which the police have been called. The Washington County Insider has been covering it and Mark Belling has been trying to get the district administration to pretend, at least, that they are doing something about it.
December 6, 2023 – West Bend, WI – On 12/05/23 at 6:06 p.m. officers were called to Badger Middle School regarding a physical altercation that occurred between a parent and coach at the conclusion of the 8th grade boys’ basketball game.
December 6, 2023 – West Bend, Wi – West Bend Police and the West Bend School District are looking into an incident that reportedly occurred Monday afternoon, December 4, 2023, at Badger Middle School.
[…]
“The Badger police liaison officer was asked to respond to a disturbance in one of the school hallways during dismissal time. The officer determined that two 13-year-old female students were having an argument in the hallway. A 14-year-old male student inserted himself into the argument and struck one of the female students and pushed the other into a locker or a wall.
I’ve watched the video of this attack. It was a vicious punch to the face where a boy slugged a girl.
December 8, 2023 – West Bend, Wi – On Friday, December 8, 2023, at 2:30 p.m., the West Bend Police Department received a report of a fight in progress in the parking lot of the West Bend High Schools (1305 E Decorah Rd). A 14-year-year-old female student, two 15-year-old male students, a 16-year-old female student, and two 16-year-old male students were involved in a physical fight near the bus pickup area during dismissal.
The fight was broken up by school staff, school police officers, and other responding area law enforcement officers. Five subjects were immediately taken into custody on scene. A sixth subject was located shortly after the incident at his residence and taken into custody.
One of the 16-year-old males suffered facial and head injuries and was taken to a local hospital for treatment via ambulance. The 14-year-old female, one of the 15-year-old males, and the 16-year-old female complained of minor injuries and were also taken to a local hospital for treatment via ambulance. All subjects remained in police custody while receiving initial medical treatment.
During the ensuing investigation, one of the initially detained subjects was determined to have been actively trying to stop the fight and was released to his parents. The other five subjects remained in custody until processed through the criminal juvenile intake system.
Three of the five subjects were placed into secure detention on felony charges of Physical Abuse of a Child. The remaining two subjects were processed, released to their parents, and will be facing a felony charge of Physical Abuse of a Child. Additional charges may be forthcoming.
There was a time when the media was filled with 1st Amendment zealots. Rightfully so. Their zealotry has ebbed as they supported the silencing of dissenting voices. If we don’t support rights of people to do and say things we don’t like, then we don’t really support them at all.
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) —
Officials in a suburban Chicago community have issued municipal citations to a local news reporter for what they say were persistent contacts with city officials seeking comment on treacherous fall flooding.
The tickets from Calumet City, a city of 35,000 located 24 miles (39 kilometers) south of Chicago, allege “interference/hampering of city employees” by Hank Sanders, a reporter for the Daily Southtown, the Chicago Tribune reported Friday.
It’s the latest of several recent First Amendment dust-ups involving city officials and news outlets around the country, following this week’s arrest of a small-town Alabama newspaper publisher and reporter after reporting on a grand jury investigation of a school district, and the August police raid of a newspaper and its publisher’s home in Kansas tied to an apparent dispute a restaurant owner had with the paper.
Pablo Escobar’s notorious “cocaine hippos” are facing a cull, according to a statement from Colombia’s minister of environment and sustainable development Thursday.
The herd, which the Colombian government said currently stands at 169 animals, has rapidly reproduced from the original population of one male and three females the drug kingpin owned as part of his private collection of exotic creatures.
After Escobar’s death in 1993, authorities relocated most of the other animals in the collection, but not the hippos – because they were too difficult to transport. Free from any natural predator, the rising population poses an environmental challenge. If “strong measures” are not taken to control them, the population could boom to “1,000 individuals by 2035,” the statement said.
Here is my full column that ran in the Washington County Daily News last week:
With October upon us, the well-meaning, morally repugnant, and oft-extended moratorium on student loan repayments has finally come to an end. It is not a crisis. It is a return to normalcy.
According to Forbes, borrowers owe $1.75 trillion in student debt, including federal and private loans, or about $28,950 per student. Interestingly, the average debt for just federal loans is $35,210 per borrower, indicating that federal loans are granted much more liberally than private loans. In Wisconsin, the average borrower owes $30,778 in federal student loans.
That is a lot of money by any measurement. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that many of the people who owe tens of thousands of dollars for their education are not earning enough money to comfortably pay it back. It is difficult for a person earning $36,754 per year (the average per-capita income in Wisconsin in 2021 according to the U.S. Census Bureau) to fit student loan payments into their monthly budget — especially in Biden’s inflationary economy.
Student loans have been around for generations, but the issue has become acute in recent decades because of two aggravating factors. First, the cost of a college education has skyrocketed. Between 1992 and 2022, the inflation-adjusted average cost of college at a four-year public university increased by 26.7% according to College Board. A $50,000 education in 1992 now costs $129,000. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted median household income rose by only 17.6%. The price of higher education has been increasing much faster than students’ ability to pay.
The reasons for those increases are myriad. The federalization of student loans made for easy money for universities to tap. They took advantage of students flush with borrowed cash to bloat up their administrations and go on a building binge.
Meanwhile, the second aggravating factor is that demand has risen as high schools across America portray a college education as the only viable path to stave off poverty. Instead of portraying the military, the trades, entrepreneurship, or other career paths as equally viable, too many high school teachers and counselors — all college graduates themselves — have culturalized kids to think that anyone without a college degree is lesser.
Compounding the misleading culturalization, the abysmally wretched financial education provided in those high schools leave prospective students ill-equipped to evaluate the risk/reward of financing a college degree with debt. Ignorant of the power of compounding interest, too many kids are borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree with little market value. The result is that they are unable to get jobs after graduation that pay enough to easily pay off the debt.
It is true that some people are not getting the value out of their degrees that they had hoped for or were promised. It is true that college costs more than it should. It is true that student loan payments make it more difficult to afford other things and that everything is more expensive than it used to be. It is true that lenders were all too eager to dole out money without any consideration of the degree being pursued or potential future earnings of the graduate.
All of these things are true, but it does not absolve the borrowers from the obligation to pay off their own debt. It is not a financial question. It is a moral one. If you borrowed the money, then you must pay it back. To fail to do so makes you a shameful deadbeat and a drain on your family and community. Having a college degree does not make you any less of a loser if you renege on your obligations.
Furthermore, nobody wants to hear you whine about your student loans. In 2022, less than 38% of adults 25 and older had at least a bachelor’s degree. Three in five adults in the United States do not have a college degree and did not sign up to pay off the debt of people who have one. Most adults who do have a college degree have either paid off their student loans, are paying off their own student loans, or never took out a loan in the first place. They did not sign up to subsidize deadbeats who do not want to pay off their student loans.
The college and student loan system is terribly broken and has led far too many people into borrowing more money than they can easily afford to buy degrees of marginal value. Honor, respect, and dignity demand that the borrowers pay it back as promised.
A box of giraffe feces was confiscated and destroyed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection after a woman brought it back from a trip to Kenya and planned to make necklaces out of the excrement.
Perhaps she should have come through the southern border where she wouldn’t have been harassed.
A sleepy town in southern Spain is in shock after it emerged that AI-generated naked images of young local girls had been circulating on social media without their knowledge.
The pictures were created using photos of the targeted girls fully clothed, many of them taken from their own social media accounts.
These were then processed by an application that generates an imagined image of the person without clothes on.
So far more than 20 girls, aged between 11 and 17, have come forward as victims of the app’s use in or near Almendralejo, in the south-western province of Badajoz.
[…]
The suspects in the case are aged between 12 and 14. Spanish law does not specifically cover the generation of images of a sexual nature when it involves adults, although the creation of such material using minors could be deemed child pornography.
Another possible charge would be for breaching privacy laws. In Spain, minors can only face criminal charges from the age of 14 upwards.
Some good questions. Clearly, the girls are victims. But is it child porn if the images are fake? What is the appropriate legal sanction, if any, for taking a public image of someone and manipulating it? If the boys had done this by drawing or painting, is it morally different than using AI to create the images? Is it a crime to draw an imagined image of a naked person – adult or child? Our legal infrastructure in the age of AI is woefully behind. The action is clearly disgusting and morally reprehensible, but how should the law deal with it?
With decades of failed attempts at gun reform amid the frequency in mass shootings, some have sought alternative solutions through artificial intelligence.
The Ocean City School District in New Jersey, as well as the city’s boardwalk, have implemented new technology developed by ZeroEyes, a company that says it uses AI, paired with human experts, to scan camera feeds for guns.
“I don’t think anybody should question or be fearful of an artificial intelligence program that’s going to identify an immediate imminent threat of someone being shot or killed. You can’t put a price tag on saving a life,” Jay Prettyman, the police chief in Ocean City, told ABC News.
Body camera video of the fatal police shooting of Ta’Kiya Young, a 21-year-old pregnant mother in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, has raised questions about how an allegation of shoplifting led to a bullet being fired through her windshield.
[…]
The video of the Aug. 24 shooting, released Friday, shows Young in her car in a parking space as a police officer orders her to exit the vehicle. A second officer is seen drawing his firearm and stepping in front of the car, despite a department policy advising officers to get out of the way of an approaching vehicle instead of firing their weapon.
“Are you going to shoot me?” Young asks, seconds before she turns the steering wheel to the right and the car moves toward the second officer. The officer fires through the windshield and Young’s sedan drifts into the grocery store’s brick wall.
I’ve watched the video. You should too. A few thoughts…
The fact that the woman was young and pregnant is irrelevant. She was accused of shoplifting – that’s why the police were stopping her – but I can’t find any story that says whether she was likely guilty of that or not. That is, however, also irrelevant.
What is relevant is that she was given a lawful order to stop, and she proceeded to use her vehicle as a weapon to hit the officer in front of her car and drag (slightly) the one on the side in an attempt to flee. On the other hand, the officers demonstrated poor judgment by putting themselves in harm’s way in an attempt to apprehend her for a minor crime. If she fled without hitting them, then any use of deadly force would not have been justified. But she didn’t. She hit them.
So… in my humble opinion, the shooting was justified as she used deadly force against the officers in her attempt to flee. But it would have never happened if the officers had not put themselves physically in the way to apprehend her. It’s easy for us to second-guess the decisions made in seconds. I give officers a lot of leeway.
I do think that we overthink these things. If we have decided that execution is still moral and right as a punishment for the worst crimes, then the moral boundary has been crossed. From there, we just need to determine the most effective, least costly, and most humane way to do it. And frankly, the first two considerations are more important than the third.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama is seeking to become the first state to execute a prisoner by making him breathe pure nitrogen.
The Alabama attorney general’s office on Friday asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution date for death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58. The court filing indicated Alabama plans to put him to death by nitrogen hypoxia, an execution method that is authorized in three states but has never been used.
Nitrogen hypoxia is caused by forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, depriving them of oxygen and causing them to die. Nitrogen makes up 78% of the air inhaled by humans and is harmless when inhaled with oxygen. While proponents of the new method have theorized it would be painless, opponents have likened it to human experimentation.
Alabama authorized nitrogen hypoxia in 2018 amid a shortage of drugs used to carry out lethal injections, but the state has not attempted to use it until now to carry out a death sentence. Oklahoma and Mississippi have also authorized nitrogen hypoxia, but have not used it.
The Giant on Alabama Avenueisthe only major grocery store in the entire ward, serving more than 85,000 people, and White had the sense its future could be at risk. The management reported an uptick in shoplifting and crime at the Ward 8 location. The managers had, according to White, spent hundreds of thousands on security upgrades and yet, White said, were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars per month because of theft. They didn’t say they were planning on closing the store. But still, White was worried, and now so were some of the residents who relied on it.
“If we don’t have this one, there will be nowhere else,” said Traci Pratt, a 58-year-old Ward 8 resident who has been shopping at the Giant ever since it opened in 2007.
[…]
“However, we need to be able to run our stores safely and profitably,”read the statement, sent by spokesperson Felis Andrade. “The reality is that theft and violence at this store is significant, and getting worse, not better. As a result, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to operate under these conditions.”
[…]
Jo Patterson of the East of the River Public Safety Consortium put it this way: “If people are hungry, they’re going to — I’m not going to use the word ‘take.’ I’m going to use the word ‘survive.’ They’re going to survive by any means necessary.”
She questioned if the cost of theft could possibly be more than the money Giant has made serving the community.
While this Washington Post article correctly cites that the store is at risk because the amount of theft is making the store run at a loss, nobody in the story actually addresses that issue. Instead, we get moans about how tough it would be for residents if the store closes. We get activists like the last lady I quoted who is questioning the severity of the problem. We get activists griping about the ending of Covid-era handouts.
There is one way to fix the problem. Deal with the criminals. Arrest them. Lock them up. Make it more costly for them to commit the crime than whatever gain they get out of it. Not only will this remove the bad actors from the street – at least for a little while – but it will deter other criminals. We all know the solution. The residents of District 8 just refuse to do it.
But no… Ward 8 won’t do that. They will keep voting Democrat and coddling their criminals. And when this store closes in a year, they will blame the grocery store company. No business is obligated to serve a community that refuses to maintain a safe and profitable environment for the business to operate.
We have a right and a duty to fortify and protect our border. If someone gets themselves killed while trying to illegally enter our country, that’s on them. Sad to say, but it will take more deaths before people get the message that it is in their best interests to immigrate legally instead of paying a coyote to traffic them across the border.
One body was found stuck in the lines of orange buoys installed by Texas authorities near the U.S.-Mexico border. A second body was discovered separately in the area of the buoys by the Beta Group of Piedras Negras, according to a statement from Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Secretary and Mexico’s Migration Institute.
The Texas Department of Public Safety notified the Mexican Consulate in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Wednesday afternoon that a person was found dead in the southern part of the floating barriers. Members of the Mexican National Institute of Migration’s assistance unit are spearheading efforts to recover the body, according to the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“So far, the cause of death and nationality of the person is unknown,” the ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.
On Thursday, however, a source close to the investigation told ABC News that both of the people found were men. The man found by the buoys was from Mexico and is believed to have been dead for some time. The other man, who was found further away, was from Honduras. He is believed to have died more recently, the source said.
[…]
Added DPS Director Steven McCraw: “Preliminary information suggests this individual drowned upstream from the marine barrier and floated into the buoys. There are personnel posted at the marine barrier at all times in case any migrants try to cross.”
The Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs repeated its condemnation of the buoys, calling them a “violation of our sovereignty.”
Two US Navy sailors in California have been arrested on charges of providing sensitive military information to China, authorities said Thursday.
Jinchao Wei, 22, a naturalised US citizen, is accused of conspiring to send national defence information to a Chinese agent.
A second sailor, Wenheng Zhao, 26, was arrested on charges of accepting money for sensitive photos and videos.
It is not clear if the two men were contacted by the same Chinese agent.
[…]
He was allegedly approached by a Chinese agent in February 2022, while he was going through the process of becoming a US citizen.
The agent paid Mr Wei, who also goes by the name Patrick Wei, thousands of dollars for photographs, videos, technical manuals and blueprints of the ship, the indictment said.
Justice Department officials said Mr Wei also gave the agent details of US Marines who were on a maritime training exercise.
“When a soldier or sailor chooses cash over country and hands over national defence information in an ultimate act of betrayal, we have to be ready to act,” said US Attorney Randy Grossman.
It seems that ol’ Randy’s statement might apply to the CIC and his mini me.
