Flint man was shot and killed after breaking into a home

FLINT, Mich. (WJRT) – Police are investigating a home invasion in Flint in which the home’s residents shot and killed one of the intruders Saturday.

The incident occurred on Saturday around 12:30 a.m. in the 500 block of Spencer Street.

According to the Michigan State Police, a 34-year-old Flint man was shot and killed, and a 41-year-old Flint man was shot during an alleged home invasion and felonious assault. Police say the residents of the home who shot at the men have been identified, interviewed and released by detectives pending further investigation.

Drone strike in Baghdad kills high-ranking militia commander

BAGHDAD — A U.S. drone strike blew up a car in the Iraqi capital Wednesday night, killing a high-ranking commander of the powerful Kataib Hezbollah militia who is responsible for “directly planning and participating in attacks” on American troops in the region, the U.S. military said.

The strike came on a main thoroughfare in the Mashtal neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, attracting a crowd as emergency teams picked through the wreckage. It came amid roiling tensions in the region, and is likely to further anger Iraqi government leaders, who U.S. officials said were not notified before the strike.

Security forces closed off the heavily guarded Green Zone, where a number of diplomatic compounds are located, amid calls for protesters to storm the U.S. Embassy.

There were conflicting reports on the number killed, with U.S. officials saying the initial assessment was one, and saying there were no civilians hurt or killed. But two officials with Iran-backed militias in Iraq said that three died, including Wissam Muhammad Sabir Al-Saadi, known as Abu Baqir Al-Saadi, the commander in charge of Kataib Hezbollah’s operations in Syria. Kataib Hezbollah announced Abu Baqir’s death “following the bombing of the American occupation forces” in a statement.

Those officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to journalists.

In a statement, U.S. Central Command said “there are no indications of collateral damage or civilian casualties at this time.” It added that the U.S. “will not hesitate to hold responsible all those who threaten our forces’ safety.”

The strike came days after the U.S. military launched an air assault on dozens of sites in Iraq and Syria used by Iranian-backed militias and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard in retaliation for a drone strike that killed three U.S. troops in Jordan in late January.

The U.S. has blamed the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a broad coalition of Iran-backed militias, for the attack in Jordan, and officials have said they suspect Kataib Hezbollah in particular of leading it.

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has regularly claimed strikes on bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria against the backdrop of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, saying that they are in retaliation for Washington’s support of Israel in its war in Gaza that has killed 27,707 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

Kataib Hezbollah had said in a statement that it was suspending attacks on American troops to avoid “embarrassing the Iraqi government” after the strike in Jordan, but others have vowed to continue fighting.

On Sunday, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed a drone attack on a base housing U.S. troops in eastern Syria killed six fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led group allied with the United States.

The latest surge in the regional conflict came shortly after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday rejected terms proposed by Hamas for a hostage-release agreement that would lead to a permanent cease-fire, vowing to continue the war until “absolute victory.”

Also on Wednesday, the media office of the Houthi rebels in Yemen reported two airstrikes in the Ras Issa area in Salif district in Hodeida province.

Of course you interview Putin: The media now opposes freedom of the press. We live in Bizarro World.

Tucker Carlson announced on Twitter that he will be interviewing Vladimir Putin. It will be posted on Twitter.

Carlson explained why: “Here’s why we’re doing it. First, because it is our job. We’re in journalism. Our duty is to inform people.”

He went on for another four minutes but in 20 words, he gave the only explanation that matters. I wish he would drop the imperial first-person.

Among the many replies, Ian Miles Cheong said, “Massive credit to Elon Musk for allowing the video to be posted uncensored. It’ll surely be banned elsewhere.”

Alex Barnicoat tweeted, “Tucker Carlson is about to save us from World War 3 with Russia. The West needs to hear the other side of the story.”

Preventing World War 3? This is why they hate him and why they hate Trump. These idiots want another world war and they really don’t care if America loses.

All evidence points to their desire to lose so they can set up a totalitarian government. The traitors in Washington have emasculated the military and literally cut the balls off generals. They opened the border to allow our enemies in. The traitors welcome Muslim terrorists and Chinese spies. The traitors depleted our military supplies by giving them away to Afghanistan and Ukraine.

You know, FDR never gave away a daggone thing. He made our allies take out loans to pay for the war materiel we sent them.

The traitors oppose giving Putin’s side of the story, as self-servingly ridiculous as it likely will be. Carlson told the Swiss magazine, Die Weltwoche, last fall that the Biden administration prevented him from interviewing Putin.

Carlson said, “I tried to interview Vladimir Putin, and the U.S. government stopped me. By the way, nobody defended me. I don’t think there was anybody in the news media who said, ‘Wait a second. I may not like this guy, but he has a right to interview anyone he wants, and we have a right to hear what Putin says.’

“You’re not allowed to hear Putin’s voice. Because why? There was no vote on it. No one asked me. I’m 54 years old. I’ve paid my taxes and followed the law.”

Nevertheless, Adam Kinzinger of CNN, a former congressman, tweeted, “He is a traitor.”

Not to be outdone, Bill Kristol said, “Perhaps we need a total and complete shutdown of Tucker Carlson re-entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

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Judge dismisses Alvin Bragg’s felony case against vax card forgers, says DA has let criminals off for much less

Bragg and his office “move to dismiss significantly more serious counts or entire indictments,” the judge wrote.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg attempted to charge two New York residents with felonies for having false vaccine passports while he has let off others charged with far worse crimes scot-free.

New York State Supreme Court Justice Brendan T. Lantry dismissed the felony charges against the residents, identified as J.O. and R.V. in the decision, who had bought the forged vax passports, usurping Bragg’s decision.

The judge said the two were among 16 others that Bragg had “cherry-picked” to prosecute, according to the case.

Lantry slammed Bragg in the decision decided at the New York Supreme Court on Jan. 30.

The judge wrote in the opinion, “Clearly, Criminal Possession of a Forged Instrument in the Second Degree (Penal Law § 170.25) is not among the most serious crimes in the New York Penal Law, nor are the factual allegations against Defendants R.V. and J.O. particularly serious in nature.”

“Moreover, the factual allegations — that the Defendants purchased fake COVID-19 vaccination cards so that they could provide same to their employer (R.V.) and school (J.O.) — do not rise to the level of the majority of the crimes adjudicated in Supreme Court, New York County, namely homicide, sexual assault, drug sale, robbery, burglary, and other violent and non-violent serious felony offenses,” Lantry continued.

The judge expanded on the decision that Bragg and his office almost daily “move to dismiss significantly more serious counts or entire indictments” and avoid harsher penalties for far more violent and convicted felons. Bragg also recently allowed a group of all but a single illegal immigrant to be released without bail after they allegedly beat up two NYPD officers. He later defended this saying that the video evidence was not enough to hold the foreign nationals.

NYC government officials, including Bragg, have faced increasing scrutiny over the government’s lackluster effort to control crime in the city as well as the high influx of illegal immigrants.

Kristi Noem: ‘Somebody’s Running the White House. I Don’t Believe It’s Joe Biden’
‘We see the president undermining our country by allowing this invasion at the southern border, it’s destabilizing our country,’ the South Dakota governor said.

South Dakota governor Kristi Noem said President Joe Biden is not running the White House, but someone else is governing the country as she raised concerns over the border crisis that is “an extreme remaking of America.”

During an interview on Fox News on Feb. 4, when asked by host Maria Bartiromo why President Biden is providing free housing and health care to illegal immigrants, Ms. Noem said, “He’s weak. Somebody’s running the White House. I don’t believe it’s Joe Biden. He’s never been this extreme. This is an extreme remaking of America.”

“It is a socialist-communist agenda. I think that they’ve so infiltrated the Democrat party that it’s no longer the Democrat Party of 20 years ago; it’s now a socialist party that does not want a strong America,” she added.

Ms. Noem is one of over a dozen GOP governors who have visited Texas to show their support for Gov. Greg Abbott in his fight with the Biden administration over the influx of illegal immigrants crossing the border in Eagle Pass.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) estimated throughout the 2023 fiscal year, 2.4 million people illegally crossed the border, up from 2.3 million the previous year. In contrast, between Oct. 1, 2019, to Sept. 30, 2020, before President Biden took office, there were only 458,000 encounters with illegal immigrants by border patrol agents.

In the interview, South Dakota’s governor criticized the Biden administration for the border crisis. “We see the president undermining our country by allowing this invasion at the southern border, and it’s destabilizing our country,” she said.

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Why Burn Books When You Can Bury Them? The White House Pressured Amazon to Target Dissenting Books

The House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Monday revealed yet another facet of the Biden Administration’s sprawling censorship system that targeted dissenting books. It appears that, as with social media companies, it succeeded in getting the company not to promote disfavored books.

Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan revealed on X that the White House was directly involved in the censorship campaign. That includes a 2021 email from one Biden official asking to discuss “the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon?”

Amazon in turn appears to ask only how high the Biden White House wants it to jump on censorship: “[i]s the [Biden] Admin asking us to remove books, or are they more concerned about search results/order (or both)?”

After the meeting, Amazon confirmed in an email that it was actively doing what the government demanded in suppressing sales by not promoting disfavored books: “As a reminder, we did enable Do Not Promote for anti-vax books whose primary purpose is to persuade readers vaccines are unsafe or ineffective on 3/9, and will review additional handling options for these books with you.”

This effort notably parallels demands from Democratic leaders who have called for enlightened algorithms to frame what citizens access on the internet. In 2021, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) objected that people were not listening to the informed views of herself and leading experts. Instead, they were reading views of skeptics by searching Amazon and finding books by “prominent spreaders of misinformation.”

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BLUF
This is not “teaching” in any sense of the word. It is “indoctrination” much like the Chinese Communists in the 1950s or the Hitler Youth of the 1930s. When kids are taught to view the world through a specific ideological lens, changing their thought processes to give them critical thinking skills is nearly impossible.

‘Woke Kindergarten’ Is Working Out About as Well As You Might Expect.

Many schools around the country are doing a poor job in early education. To address that issue, San Francisco educators hired a firm called “Woke Kindergarten” which may not be successful in improving literacy and math scores but is doing a bang-up job of fighting racism.

Woke Kindergarten claims on its website that it’s “a global, abolitionist early childhood ecosystem and visionary creative portal supporting children, families, educators and organizations in their commitment to abolitionist early education and pro-black and queer and trans liberation.”

Don’t ask them what it means. One teacher, Tiger Craven, asked about the program’s objective to “disrupt whiteness.” “What does that mean,” he asked. “I just want to know, what does that mean for a third-grade classroom?”

Good question. Unfortunately, it got him banned from future training sessions.

Woke Kindergarten has sessions on “woke wondering” that sound like the musings of a ten-year-old who asks, “Daddy, why is the sky blue”?

San Francisco Chronicle:

The Woke Kindergarten curriculum shared with schools includes “wonderings,” which pose questions for students, including, “If the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?”

In addition, the “woke word of the day,” including “strike,” “ceasefire” and “protest,” offers students a “language of the resistance … to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.”

Other “wonderings” include, “If we abolished the police, what else could we do to keep the world safe?” and “If we eradicate borders, how might we build our communities to include and support neighbors from all over the world?”

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BLUF
In other words, look at how consistently inconsistent AI already is in its biases, without the intervention of powerful government actors. Imagine just how much more biased it can get — and how difficult it would be for us to recognize it — if we hand the keys over to the government.

A Tale of Two Congressional Hearings (and several AI poems)

We showed up to warn about threats to free speech from AI. Half the room couldn’t care less.

Earlier today, I served as a witness at the House Judiciary Committee’s Special Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which discussed (among other things) whether it’s a good idea for the government to regulate artificial intelligence and LLMs. For my part, I was determined to warn everyone not only about the threat AI poses to free speech, but also the threats regulatory capture and a government oligopoly on AI pose to the creation of knowledge itself.

I was joined on the panel by investigative journalist Lee Fang, reporter Katelynn Richardson, and former U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic Norman Eisen. Richardson testified about her reporting on government funding the development of tools to combat “misinformation” through a National Science Foundation grant program. As FIRE’s Director of Public Advocacy Aaron Terr noted, such technology could be misused in anti-speech ways.

“The government doesn’t violate the First Amendment simply by funding research, but it’s troubling when tax dollars are used to develop censorship technology,” said Terr. “If the government ultimately used this technology to regulate allegedly false online speech, or coerced digital platforms to use it for that purpose, that would violate the First Amendment. Given government officials’ persistent pressure on social media platforms to regulate misinformation, that’s not a far-fetched scenario.”

Lee Fang testified about his reporting on government involvement in social media moderation decisions, most recently how a New York Times reporter’s tweet was suppressed by Twitter (now X) following notification from a Homeland Security agency. Fang’s investigative journalism on the documents X released after Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform has highlighted the risk of “jawboning,” or the use of government platforms to effectuate censorship through informal pressure.

Unfortunately, I was pretty disappointed that it seemed like we were having (at least) two different hearings at once. Although there were several tangents, the discussion on the Republican side was mostly about the topic at hand. On the Democratic side, unfortunately, it was overwhelmingly about how Trump has promised to use the government to target his enemies if he wins a second term. It’s not a trivial concern, but the hearing was an opportunity to discuss the serious threats posed by the use of AI censorship tools in the hands of a president of either party, so I wish there had been more interest in the question at hand on the Democratic side of the committee.

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Michigan School Shooter’s Mother Found Guilty in Precedent Setting Conviction

Jennifer Crumbley, the Michigan mother of a child who carried out a mass school shooting killing four students in 2021, just became the first parent in the U.S. to be held responsible for their child’s criminal actions. She was found guilty today of involuntary manslaughter. The unanimous verdict in the unprecedented case came on the second day of deliberations.

Crumbley, 45, had been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each victim. Being found guilty, the mother faces up to 15 years in prison for each count. She will be sentenced April 9.

Prosecutors made the case that the mother had a duty under state law to prevent her son’s actions by securing the gun and ammunition at home and obtaining mental health services for her son who had allegedly shown signs of a distressed mental state prior to the shooting.

In what in hindsight now seems like an epic failing by both the parents and the school, Oxford High School in Pontiac, Mich., where a then 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley was a student, the parents, James and Jennifer, had been summoned to the school after the boy was caught drawing pictures of a gun, bullets and a wounded person on a math assignment accompanied by phrases crying out for help. According to a journal police found after the shooting, Ethan had written his parents ignored his pleas for help and lamented that he had mental problems that were going to cause him “to shoot up the…school.”

The parents met with school administrators that morning and talked to Ethan, but then he was allowed to return to class. Nobody checked his backpack, which contained a 9mm SIG, his parents had bought him as an early Christmas present just four days prior.

Jennifer Crumbley had also taken Ethan to the range just three days before and was the last known adult to handle the weapon prior to Ethan using it in the school shooting. The boy, now 17, was charged as an adult with murder and terrorism and eventually pled guilty. He is currently serving life in prison without the possibility of parole.

James Crumbley, the boy’s father, is set to go to trial on March 5, 2024, for the same charges Jennifer faced. He is currently being held in jail on $500,000 bond.

Between firearms storage laws and additional legislation in states across the country, there has been an increasing effort to hold the parents of juvenile mass shooters responsible for their children’s actions where negligence on their part may have played a hand in their child accessing the firearm(s) used in such crimes. With the Crumbley case now setting a precedent for the conviction of a parent

Alleged thief dead after trying to steal gun from man

DECATUR, Ga. — A man is dead after wrestling with another man over a gun, DeKalb County officials say.

Police responded to The Terraces at Snapfinger condominiums in Decatur just after 10 p.m. Saturday to a person shot call.

When police arrived, they found a 19-year-old who had been shot. He died on the scene, according to police.

The initial investigation shows the suspect attempted to steal the other man’s gun, they both struggled over the gun before it went off, killing the suspect.

DeKalb County officials say they do not expect to file charges against the victim.