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The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives intentionally overstated the duties of dozens of employees, labeling them as law enforcement agents so it could pay them more money and costing the government tens of millions of dollars.Investigators said ATF has been making overpayments since at least 2003. They identified more than 100 jobs in human resources and other administrative areas that were misclassified as criminal investigators.They said the government wasted roughly $20 million on overpayments in just one five-year period.ATF officials disputed the exact numbers but admitted to the overall nature of the scam. Officials said they are still...

LIKE MANY GREAT SPY STORIES, this one begins with a brief, mundane scene whose significance only becomes apparent later on. Around lunchtime on February 1, 2000, a man dropped a piece of paper near a table in a Middle Eastern restaurant outside Los Angeles and paused long enough to strike up a conversation with two Arabic-speaking men dining nearby. It would take FBI agents nearly 20 years to understand the full meaning of that small event. The man who dropped the piece of paper was Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi intelligence asset, recently declassified FBI documents show. And the two Arabic-speaking...

U.S. federal and state officials are assessing whether "market manipulation" caused the recent volatility in banking shares, a source familiar with the matter said on Thursday, as the White House vowed to monitor "short-selling pressures on healthy banks." Shares of regional banks resumed their slide this week after the collapse of First Republic Bank , the third U.S. mid-sized lender to fail in two months. Short sellers raked in $378.9 million in paper profits on Thursday alone from betting against certain regional banks, according to analytics firm Ortex. Increased short-selling activity and volatility in shares have drawn increasing scrutiny by...

'In the absence of ammunition they're doomed to perish senselessly,' Yevgeny Prigozhin saysYevgeny Prigozhin, leader of Russia's Wagner Group mercenary force, said in a sudden and dramatic announcement on Friday that his forces would pull out of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut that they have been trying in vain to capture since last summer. Prigozhin said they would withdraw on May 10 — ending their involvement in the longest and bloodiest battle of the war — because of heavy losses and inadequate ammunition supplies. He asked defence chiefs to insert regular army troops in their place. "I declare on behalf...

A pair of state representatives are calling for an investigation into the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) for misuse of power against a local farm opposed to the Gotion battery plant. MDARD is investigating Majestic Friesians Horse Farm in Green Charter Township in Mecosta County. The investigation comes nearly two weeks after the owner of the farm, Lori Brock, hosted a rally against the proposed battery plant. “I feel like we’re being harassed,” Brock exclaims. “They are trying to shut me up. They’re trying to scare me and I’m not going to put up with it.” The rally...

A team of researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that as many as 80 percent of tweets about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine invasion in its early weeks were part of a covert propaganda campaign originating from automated fake “bot” accounts.An anti-Russia propaganda campaign originating from a “bot army” of phony automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war.The research shows that of the more than 5 million tweets studied, 90.2 percent (both bot and non-bot) came from accounts that were pro-Ukraine, with fewer than 7 percent of the accounts being classed as pro-Russian.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Friday avoided commenting on the statement by the head of the private military company Wagner threatening to withdraw from the battlefield in the Ukrainian town of Bakhmut, saying the matter is related to a "special military operation" of Russia. "We have seen it in the media, but I cannot comment on it because it concerns the course of a special military operation," Peskov told reporters at a press briefing in Moscow.

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner resigned on Thursday after years of accusations that she willfully neglected the duties of her office. Gardner announced her resignation in a letter to Republican Gov. Mike Parson of Missouri, in which she did not reference any of the criticism her office faced but instead said she was resigning in order to deter Republicans from appointing a special counsel in her stead. "The most powerful weapon I have to fight back against these outsiders stealing your voices and your rights is to step back," she wrote. "I took this job to serve the people...

A man covers his face while mourning in the village of Dubona, Serbia, on Friday after a mass shooting, the second in the country in two days. Photo by Andrej Cukic/EPA-EFE *********************************************************************** May 5 (UPI) -- Serbian authorities captured a suspect early Friday in a mass shooting in a rural area near the capital of Belgrade, the second in two days. Police conducted a manhunt for the 21-year-old suspect overnight before taking him into custody near the city of Kragujevac, about 40 miles south of where the attacks occurred in the small village of Dubona. Eight people were killed and...

A Catholic health system in Oklahoma has threatened to sue the federal government for violating its First Amendment rights over a decision to deny re-accreditation to one of its hospitals if it doesn’t follow an order to extinguish a long-lit sanctuary candle for safety purposes. Following a hospital inspection in February, a federal surveyor deemed that a living flame in the Saint Francis Hospital South chapel – part of the Saint Francis Health System – violated code, as it is “an open flame burning unattended 24/7.” The surveyor issued a citation demanding the candle be extinguished. Saint Francis Health Systems...

As a convicted felon, Ramos was prohibited from owning any firearms. An investigation into a string of graffiti incidents culminated with Portland Police busting a ghost gun workshop operated by one of the taggers. Jacob Ramos, 43, was arrested and hit with a slew of charges, including eleven counts of manufacturing firearms. His tagging partner, 26-year-old Shelaleh Rostami, was also charged, but only for the graffiti. The investigation, launched by Mayor Ted Wheeler, sought to track down those responsible for defacing the city's infrastructure. Authorities were able to identify Rostami via her tag, "THUJA," and connect her to Ramos, "BIER,"...

PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) -- Investigators say a man is in custody in connection to the murder of a woman on a north Phoenix trail. Investigators confirmed the suspect in his early 20s was arrested around 6:30 p.m. at his apartment near Scottsdale and Bell roads on Thursday, less than a mile from the trail where 29-year-old Lauren Heike’s body was found. Officers haven’t released his name. Sources tell Arizona’s Family the suspect is 23 years old and is linked to the crime through DNA. They also say the suspect stabbed Heike multiple times.

The Twitter Files gave us a window into how government agencies, civil society, and tech companies work together to censor social media users. Now, key nations are attempting to enshrine this coordination into law explicitly. Around the world, politicians have either just passed or are on the cusp of passing sweeping new laws, which would allow governments to censor ordinary citizens on social media and other Internet platforms. Under the guise of preventing “harm” and holding large tech companies accountable, several countries are establishing a vast and interlinked censorship apparatus, a new investigation by Public finds. Politicians, NGOs, and their...

The U.S. economy added 253,000 jobs in April, surpassing analyst forecasts of 180,000 new jobs, according to Labor Department data released Friday. The unemployment rate remained historically low at 3.4 percent, down from 3.5 percent the previous month. The jobs report reveals that the economy is slowing, but the labor market remains surprisingly robust. The unemployment rate for Black Americans dipped slightly to 4.7 percent, a record low. That’s a huge recovery from the onset of the pandemic, when the Black unemployment rate spiked to 16.8 percent in May 2020. Wage gains also came in slightly stronger than expected. Hourly...

Around 15 years ago CTH outlined the inclusive goal of the progressive movement, modern Democrats as they were evolving, was to deconstruct the U.S. economic system so that Americans would be forced to live in government-controlled poverty. Essentially reduced to circling a campfire, eating sustainable algae cakes and picking parasites off our family members.Most people understandably scoffed and said we were being hyperbolic. However, what we were highlighting was the natural conclusion of a visible ideology and set of policies. The modern democrat ideology is based on a worldview that feudalism is superior, and Democrats are elite in their global...

China is selling “industrial pill press equipment” used to turn powdered fentanyl into pills to Mexican cartels, according to a senior Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official’s testimony Wednesday. Over 70,000 people died of drug overdoses involving fentanyl in the United States in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Matthew Millhollin, assistant director with DHS’ Homeland Security Investigations, (HSI) briefed Senate members on what steps DHS is taking to combat the illicit fentanyl trade. Millhollin said the Mexican cartels, using chemicals obtained from China, produce fentanyl-laced pills on an industrial scale to be smuggled to the...

Former President Donald Trump has all but dropped a key word from his vocabulary: Republican. He didn’t say it when he met with supporters — including a Jan. 6 defendant — at the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, New Hampshire, late last month. During remarks to a packed ballroom at the DoubleTree hotel earlier that day, he said it only in praising some GOP governors’ work during the Covid-19 pandemic. Since he hit the campaign trail in early March, according to an NBC review of Trump’s speeches, interviews, video posts and face-to-face interactions with voters, the front-runner for the Republican...

The Realitometer, which will be published each month, shows the real-world global warming per century equivalent since January 1990 from the satellite monthly temperature dataset of the University of Alabama in Huntsville...Month by inexorable month, the Realitometer will show just how absurdly exaggerated were and are the official predictions of global warming...Yet not one mainstream news medium has reported just how startlingly large the ratio of prediction to reality is proving to be.

Should the Food and Drug Administration be allowed to approve whatever drugs it wants however it wants because the FDA is the expert on drug safety and efficacy? Should Congress defer to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and let stand a rule that is nonsensical and harmful? And here’s the general question: should executive branch agencies have broad authority to make whatever rules they want to accomplish their aims, as long as Congress hasn’t explicitly prohibited it? For too many politicians, regulators, and commentators, the answer is “yes.” “Believe in Science” or “Trust the Experts” has come to...

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor declined to recuse herself from multiple copyright infringement cases involving book publisher Penguin Random House despite having been paid millions by the firm for her books, making it by far her largest source of income, records show. In 2010, she got a $1.2 million book advance from Knopf Doubleday Group, a part of the conglomerate. In 2012, she reported receiving two advance payments from the publisher totaling $1.9 million. In 2013, Sotomayor voted in a decision for whether the court should hear a case against the publisher called Aaron Greenspan v. Random House. Greenspan...