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Trump Warns America's Ballot Machines Are Vulnerable

America's Ballot Machines Are Vulnerable

U.S. Pledges To Crack Down On Haitian Gangs Making Money Off Social Media

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The U.S. envoy to the United Nations said Monday that the U.S. government soon will move to stop violent gangs in Haiti from making money off social media posts. Gang leaders in the troubled Caribbean country are prolific users of social media and have celebrated killings, issued threats and posted musings on various sites. Younger gang members also post music videos and wave cash they've earned in an effort to recruit children in the impoverished nation. Mike Waltz, who recently visited Haiti, called the practice “incredibly disturbing” and warned the U.S. would “shut that down” in the near future. He didn’t provide further details while speaking at a U.N. Security Council meeting in New York. He spoke as the U.S. prepares this week to strip the temporary protected status of some 350,000 Haitians who live in the United States, exposing them to deportation, a move largely criticized by lawyers and human rights experts. Efforts to crack down on the gangs' use of social media are not new. In 2023, YouTube banned Johnson André, considered Haiti's most powerful gang leader and also known as Izo, following heavy criticism after he received an award for surpassing more than 100,000 subscribers. The U.S. envoy also called on countries with aircraft capacity to help with the deployment of foreign troops joining the latest U.N.-backed mission in Haiti to fight gangs, including Sri Lanka and Ivory Coast. He said sea lifts take too long and that Haitians need help now. Gang violence surges as Haitians in US brace for deportation Gang violence has displaced a record almost 1.5 million people across Haiti, where more than half of the country's nearly 12 million inhabitants need humanitarian aid. More than 2,300 people have been killed and more than 1,100 injured since January, according to the U.N. Earlier this year, clashes in the Cite Soleil slum in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, led to 542 killings and 355 injuries. In addition, at least 176 women and girls were raped, the U.N. found. Waltz shared how gangs recently surrounded an armored vehicle that got stuck in a ditch and lit a fire underneath, forcing Haitian police officers to flee. “They were flayed alive on the streets,” Waltz said, adding that their bodies were pinned to the side of the vehicle to send a message. “I want everyone to understand the fight ahead,” he added. Waltz noted that Haiti needs equipment including heavy bulldozers to clear streets and gang-controlled checkpoints, adding that armed men have taken over roads, ports, hospitals, prisons and other state infrastructure. “Haiti’s just a few hundred miles from Florida,” he said. “In that regard, it’s a critical interest to the United States.” Gangs control an estimated 70% of Port-au-Prince, and about half of gang members are children, according to the U.N. Poverty and hunger are deepening. “The situation of children in Haiti is among the most alarming anywhere in the world,” said Vanessa Frazier, the U.N.’s special representative for children and armed conflict. “Children are being killed, maimed, abducted, recruited and used by armed gangs, displaced from their homes, denied access to education and deprived of basic protection and legal identity.” Jack Christofides, special representative of the U.N.-backed gang suppression force operating in Haiti, said it has established its headquarters, deployed its first forward operating base and recently began cracking down on gang infrastructure. “The political and humanitarian environment nevertheless remains extremely challenging,” he said. “Armed gangs are likely to adapt their tactics to stay in control.” Haiti is under pressure to hold elections The international community has been pressuring Haiti to hold general elections, which would be the first in more than a decade. While the country is led by Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, who was appointed, it hasn’t had a president since President Jovenel Moïse was killed at his private residence in July 2021. Gang violence has surged since then. Seven of Haiti’s 10 provinces are ready for electoral activities, while the gang suppression force is vital to restoring security in the remaining three, said Raina Forbin, Haiti’s foreign affairs minister. The three provinces include Port-au-Prince, and overall they account for more than half of all voters, noted Carlos Ruiz Massieu, the U.N. secretary-general’s special representative for Haiti. He noted the displacement caused by gang violence and said the voter registration that began on Monday “will give us a new reality of where the voters are currently.” Forbin said that by year’s end, an additional 4,000 officers are expected to join Haiti’s National Police, which remains understaffed and underfunded. Meanwhile, an additional 1,500 recruits are expected to join Haiti’s revived Armed Forces.

Trump Administration Pushes Ahead With Plans To Reopen The U.S. Embassy In Libya

WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department has informed Congress that it plans to move ahead with the potential reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Libya, proposing to allocate nearly $41 million to restore America’s formal diplomatic presence in the North African nation after a near 14-year absence. The department told lawmakers on Monday that the money would cover “a range of security-related activities associated with plans for the potential phased resumption of embassy operations in Libya,” according to a copy of the notification obtained by The Associated Press. The move to reopen the embassy “is essential to advancing U.S. national security interests,” it said. “The United States must remain engaged in regions where near-peer competitors and other adversarial actors are actively expanding their influence.” “Libya’s strategic location on the Mediterranean and its role in regional security, energy markets, and migration flows make it vital to U.S. interests,” it said. “The country’s instability has drawn increased involvement from near-peer competitors, notably Russia, which threatens U.S. and allied objectives in North Africa.” Libyan officials representing both the western and eastern regions of the country that have been in conflict for more than a decade have recently met with top Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the senior adviser for Africa, Massad Boulos. The State Department had told Congress in March that it was looking to begin preparations for a potential reopening of the embassy in Tripoli, which was shuttered in July, 2014, as conflict enveloped the country. Since then, U.S. diplomats assigned to Libya have been based in neighboring Tunisia and the Mediterranean island of Malta. But, until Monday, the department had yet to program any money to support that effort. The new funding will be used to vastly expand the security posture at a satellite office in Tripoli that currently handles short visits by U.S. diplomats and other officials and set the stage for a permanent presence. The move to fund the project comes as the Trump administration has reopened the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, Venezuela, following the ouster of former President Nicolas Maduro in January and is seeking to reopen the closed embassy in Damascus, Syria, to build ties with the new Syrian government. Yet, it also comes amid new warnings of Iranian-related attacks against U.S. facilities in interests around the world, particularly in the Middle East.

Trump Says US-Lebanon Flights Can Resume After Meeting President

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has pledged significant support for Lebanon during a White House meeting with Lebanese leader Joseph Aoun. The meeting on Tuesday aimed to promote long-term peace after months of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. After it concluded, Trump announced that he would allow the resumption of direct flights between the U.S. and Lebanon, suspended since 1985. Lebanon hopes that talks that are being mediated by Washington will lead to Israeli troop withdrawal from southern Lebanon and increased support for the Lebanese military. A framework agreement for peace between Lebanon and Israel is being tested, but confusion remains over troop withdrawals. The U.S. continues to endorse the Lebanese agreement.

Trump Pledges Support For Lebanon During White House Meeting With Aoun

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is pledging support for Lebanon following months of conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. The promise came during a White House meeting with Lebanese leader Joseph Aoun on Tuesday. Trump expressed a commitment to treating Lebanon with respect and helping the country. Lebanon and Israel are engaged in rare direct talks, mediated by Washington, to address Israeli troop withdrawal and Hezbollah disarmament. The talks aim for a peace agreement between the countries, which have been in a state of war for nearly 80 years. The Lebanese military is preparing for Israeli withdrawal from certain areas.

Gulf Coast Braces For Tropical Storm Bertha

Tropical Storm Bertha is expected to weaken in the Gulf of Mexico as it chugs closer to the U.S. But forecasters say it still could bring coastal flooding and heavy rain from the Florida Panhandle to Louisiana. Those areas along the northern Gulf Coast are under a tropical storm warning through Wednesday and could see heavy rain and flooding into Thursday morning. New Orleans is under a tropical storm watch. Authorities in Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida have opened sites to provide sandbags. Red flags warning are posted along some Gulf Coast beaches advising swimmers about the dangers of rip tides.

New Jersey Says Software Error Put 6,600 Noncitizens On Voter Rolls

July 21 (Reuters) - Roughly 6,600 people who were not U.S. citizens were accidentally added to New Jersey's voter rolls because of a software error at the state motor vehicles department, but fewer than 400 actually cast ballots in elections since 2023, Governor Mikie Sherrill said on Tuesday. The announcement comes as President Donald Trump, a Republican, has undertaken an aggressive push before November congressional elections to identify and mitigate voting by noncitizens, which experts have long determined was not a significant problem in American elections. Sherrill, a Democrat who took office in January, said she learned last week of the software mistake in New Jersey's Motor Vehicle System in which people who had indicated they were not U.S. citizens were registered as voters anyway between June 2023 and June 2024. The individuals did nothing wrong and were mistakenly registered "through no fault of their own," she said. The state's preliminary analysis showed that fewer than 400 of those 6,600 - Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated people who were scattered across the state - actually voted. Sherrill said she has ordered the removal of those individuals who were mistakenly added to the voter rolls and will replace the vendor responsible for the error, which occurred before she took office. “As the Trump administration tries to weaponize elections for political gain, I am ensuring we protect our elections," Sherrill said in a statement. “The difference is simple: when we find a problem, we don't hide it, deny it, or invent conspiracies. We investigate it, we fix it, and we tell the public. That's what accountability and good governance look like, and that's exactly what my administration is doing." Trump has spent years raising doubts about electoral outcomes, falsely asserting that his ?2020 loss to Democrat ?Joe Biden was rigged. He has also advanced other false claims, including that mail-in balloting is rife with fraud, voting machines are untrustworthy and non-citizen voting is widespread. Numerous courts and vote recounts found no evidence of large-scale fraud in the 2020 election. A Reuters data analysis revealed that voting violations by noncitizens were often inadvertent, the result of misinformation from others or confusion on their part. Last week, the Trump administration threatened state officials with fines and criminal charges if they do not comply with election security measures, including providing the federal government with unredacted voter rolls. Courts have blocked Trump administration efforts to obtain states' unredacted voter rolls, which contain sensitive, personally identifiable information about residents.

Bernie Sanders & The Anti-Israel Left

Trump Administration Says Door To Diplomacy Is Open With Iran

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. and Iran are back to bombing every day in a bid to control the Strait of Hormuz. And neither is backing down, showing the limitations of President Donald Trump’s reliance on escalating airstrikes to bend Tehran to his will. While the Trump administration says it is open to diplomacy, Iran so far has refused to loosen its grip over the crucial oil shipping corridor in the Persian Gulf. It is raising questions about the strategy for the next phase of the conflict as intensifying attacks have collapsed an interim ceasefire deal, left additional American troops dead and sent U.S. gasoline prices back up — posing new problems for Republicans ahead of the midterm elections. Even with glimmers of hope for talks, the sides could be headed back to all-out war, with Trump warning that “every time Iran kills an American Soldier” going forward, “they will pay for that killing many times over.” The renewed escalations reflect "a fundamental misreading of the Iranian psyche and a lack of learning” from previous fighting, said Mona Yacoubian, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I think it’s driven by a calculus on either side that they can double down on military escalation as a way of breaking the impasse and getting the other side to relent,” Yacoubian said. “The danger, of course, is that the more escalatory it becomes, the harder it will be to seize any potential opening back to diplomacy.” The Trump administration says the door to diplomacy is open Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. is still open to negotiating, telling reporters Sunday night that Iran continues "to send signals that they want to talk, that they want to negotiate, but their behavior is what we’re responding to. And their behavior is they’re launching missiles and drones at ships” in the Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world's oil normally passes. “The United States always remains open to a diplomatic solution, and we’ve tried multiple times with Iran, and we’ll continue to try," he said. "If that door opens, we’ll be happy to see it open.” Trump is focused on making Iran pay for the recent deaths of U.S. troops, violations of the interim deal reached last month and attacks on ships in the strait, according to a U.S. official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The official said that military strikes on Iran would continue until Trump decides otherwise, but that talks between the countries also would go on. For some outside observers, the administration appears to be struggling to find an off-ramp, both militarily and diplomatically. “This administration currently is flustered,” said Alan Eyre, a former U.S. diplomat once involved in past nuclear negotiations with Tehran and now a fellow at the Middle East Institute. “It really doesn’t have a coherent and consistent strategy as to how to extricate itself from this quagmire.” There are some limitations to Trump's air war The U.S. military can only accomplish so much as it ramps up attacks on Iran, experts say. The conflict has demonstrated the limits of relying solely on air power, said Christopher Preble, a scholar at the Stimson Center think tank focused on U.S. foreign policy. But he noted that sending in ground troops would be unpopular with many Americans and members of Congress. “It seems that President Trump certainly has the capability to continue to bomb, and Iran will have the capability to continue to keep the strait closed — or closed well enough,” Preble said. David Schenker, a former official in the first Trump administration who is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the renewed strikes on Iranian infrastructure are a repeat of attacks during the early weeks of the war. And those did not result in Iran’s capitulation. “The U.S. hit 13,000 targets in the first 6 weeks of the war, and this didn’t sway Iran to take a knee,” he said. Retired Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who served under President Joe Biden, said previous wars such as Vietnam showed the limitations of air power alone. “Generally, you have to couple air power with ground operations, sometimes naval operations as well, and certainly space today,” he said. When launching the war on Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israel struck many fixed targets identified before the conflict began. But Iran had a long time to prepare for the attacks by concealing and dispersing weapons. “So the easy targets are pretty much gone,” Kendall said. “They can hide ballistic missiles and cruise missiles and small air vehicles pretty easily. So it’s a very hard job to try to suppress that kind of a threat over a period of time. And that’s why they’re still able to attack not just ships in the Straits, but also our bases in the region and so on.” Diplomacy has struggled with a lack of trust between the US and Iran A diplomatic solution also could prove elusive. Eyre, of the Middle East Institute, said the Trump administration has shown no preference for “actual diplomacy,” relying instead on close advisers with little international relations experience while outsourcing some of the work to mediators such as Qatar, Pakistan and Egypt. “We’ve got a tough road ahead of us, but it theoretically could be done,” Eyre said of potential negotiations to end the conflict. “Unfortunately, there is so little mutual confidence in the other side. There’s so little bilateral trust between the U.S. and Iran that it makes everything so much harder.” Both Schenker and Yacoubian said recent comments from Trump, Rubio and their Iranian counterparts reflect some openness to diplomacy. Yacoubian pointed to the “measured” response from Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to the recent killing of U.S. service members in Jordan, indicating a possibility for an off-ramp. Iran’s release last week of an Iranian-American woman who had not been allowed to leave the country also showed a sign of goodwill from Tehran, she said. But these small, positive signals could quickly become moot if the decision by Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels Monday to announce a maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia expands to a complete shutdown of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. That, Yacoubian says, could constitute “a perfect storm of disruption” for the already precarious global economy.

Socialism Doesn't Create, It Destroys

U.S. Pauses $1 Billion In Medicaid Payments To California, Minnesota

WASHINGTON, July 21 (Reuters) - The Trump administration is pausing $1 billion in Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota over "suspected fraud and noncompliance," U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Tuesday. "If those states want that money they need to provide documentation that these payments are legitimate," Kennedy said at a news conference alongside U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz. CMS is deferring approximately $867.5 million in federal Medicaid payments to California and $199 million to Minnesota, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The pause is the latest in a series of payment suspensions mostly in Democratic-run states as Vice President JD Vance, Kennedy and Oz lead a campaign the White House has called an "unrelenting" war on fraud. Kennedy said the administration suspects much of the questionable California spending involves in-home services. The Minnesota deferrals target 14 high-risk areas the state's own legislative auditor identified as vulnerable to fraud. "If it smells like fraud, we're not paying for it anymore," Oz said. He and Kennedy cited data anomalies and outlier billing patterns but offered no proof of fraud. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz rejected the move as political retribution against Minnesota, saying the administration was punishing children, seniors and people with disabilities rather than fraudsters. He said it "is cutting more money in healthcare than they've prosecuted for fraud." California Governor Gavin Newsom called the move a recycled political stunt and said in a post on X that California was being targeted for political reasons. He said the state opposes fraud and would "collaborate with CMS in good faith efforts to combat fraud," arguing its in-home program saves money by keeping seniors and disabled people out of costlier nursing homes. The deferrals are pauses, not permanent cuts, and do not affect benefits or eligibility. States recover the funds by showing claims meet federal requirements; Minnesota has already returned documents that CMS is reviewing, Oz said. Kennedy said he was also expanding exclusion authority to CMS and the HHS inspector general, letting them remove "bad actors" from federal healthcare programs and potentially ban them permanently.

U.S. Soldier Killed In Iraq Was 30-Year-Old Father From NC

RALEIGH, North Carolina (AP) — The U.S. military has identified a soldier killed while disarming an Iranian drone in Iraq as Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton from North Carolina. The military said Tuesday that Swinton will receive a Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and Combat Action Badge, and be promoted to staff sergeant. Swinton’s wife, Mia Gonzalez-Swinton, posted on social media: “I will never recover from this.” His mother said he leaves behind a 6-year-old son and a 4-year-old daughter. Two U.S. Army soldiers were also killed in Jordan last week by an Iranian attack. They were the first U.S. troop deaths from direct Iranian fire since the opening days of the war.

Pathetic Virtue Signaling

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s suggestion that he could order the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu is called “utterly ridiculous” by CNN legal commentator Elie Honig, who stresses the mayor has zero law enforcement authority and cannot direct the DA or NYPD.

A Prayer For America: Wisdom For Trump & Protection For Our Troops

As tensions with Iran continue to escalate, the discussion centers on the need for strong leadership rooted in wisdom, faith, and resolve.

Biden Loses Appeal To Block Release Of Ghostwriter Recordings

A federal appeals court has rejected former President Joe Biden's request to block the release of audio recordings and transcripts from interviews he gave to his memoir ghostwriter before taking office. In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the public interest in the materials outweighs Biden's privacy concerns, though the court delayed the release until Aug. 3 to give him time to pursue another appeal. The interviews with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer were obtained during Special Counsel Robert Hur's investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents. Although Hur declined to bring criminal charges, the recordings became the subject of public records requests and litigation. Biden argued the conversations were private and conducted in his home while working on his memoir. The appeals court said redactions would help protect any remaining privacy interests while allowing the public access to the material.