More: Instead of spending about 18 weeks training at the academy in Quantico, Va., the group of agents, tentatively scheduled to start in October, will receive eight weeks, according to the people. And the agents will no longer need to fulfill a longstanding requisite for joining the bureau: a bachelor's degree.

Lowering recruiting standards will allow the F.B.I. to draw deeper from the ranks of other federal law enforcement agencies, specifically a category of criminal investigators classified in the federal system as 1811s. Investigators with that designation work at dozens of agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, inspector general offices and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The new plan, current and former agents say, seems to be part of a larger effort by Mr. Patel to have the bureau focus more on street crime, rather than on complicated cases touching on financial fraud, public corruption and national security. Doing so, they added, will erode the bureau's reputation as an elite law enforcement agency, known for its selectiveness about its recruits.

Tiffany Trumpf's husband, Michael Boulos, arranged for oligarch Jared Kushner to buy a mega yacht at a steeply inflated price.

Sorry but mega yachts cost hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, not a paltry $15 million.

People still eat at Cracker Barrel? Their "food" is consistently awful.

First, boaz, Axios doesn't have a paywall.

The others weren't allowed flee the country, just this one Israeli government official.

Trump's government could have stopped it but chose to let him return to a country that does not have an extradition treaty with us instead.

When has religion not killed?

Whats wrong, can't count to four?

More: Data from an internal Israeli intelligence database indicates that at least 83 percent of Palestinians killed in Israel's onslaught on Gaza were civilians, an investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian can reveal.

Figures obtained from the classified database " which records the deaths of militants from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) " contradict by a huge margin the public statements of Israeli army and government officials throughout the war, which have generally claimed a 1:1 or 2:1 ratio of civilian to militant casualties. Instead, the classified data backs up the findings of several studies suggesting Israel's bombardment of Gaza has killed civilians at a rate with few parallels in modern warfare.

The Israeli army confirmed the existence of the database, which is managed by the Military Intelligence Directorate (known by the Hebrew acronym "Aman"). Multiple intelligence sources familiar with the database said the army views it as the only authoritative tally of militant casualty figures. In the words of one of them: "There's no other place to check."

It's four posts below this one.

Now tell us about the Israeli pedo they let off scot-free, boaz.

How much will this meaningless act of cruelty cost?

More: "Empathy becomes toxic when it encourages you to affirm sin, validate lies or support destructive policies," said Allie Beth Stuckey, author of "Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion."

Stuckey, host of the popular podcast "Relatable," is one of two evangelicals who published books within the past year making Christian arguments against some forms of empathy.

The other is Joe Rigney, a professor and pastor who wrote "The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits." It was published by Canon Press, an affiliate of Rigney's conservative denomination, which counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth among its members.

...

While their anti-empathy arguments have differences, Stuckey and Rigney have audiences that are firmly among Trump's Christian base.

"Could someone use my arguments to justify callous indifference to human suffering? Of course," Rigney said, countering that he still supports measured Christ-like compassion. "I think I've put enough qualifications."

Historian Susan Lanzoni traced a century of empathy's uses and definitions in her 2018 book "Empathy: A History." Though it's had its critics, she has never seen the aspirational term so derided as it is now.

It's been particularly jarring to watch Christians take down empathy, said Lanzoni, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School.

"That's the whole message of Jesus, right?"

From the artile: "If Trump is genuinely concerned about the safety of D.C. residents," one resident said, "I would see National Guard in my neighborhood. I'm not seeing it, and I don't expect to see it. I don't think Trump is bringing in the National Guard to protect Black babies in Southeast."

You won't find the National Guard in any of the city's high-crime areas. A vast majority of soldiers and agents deployed to Washington are stationed in the vicinity of the White House and other high-profile sections of the city. There are soldiers patrolling the National Mall; armored vehicles parked at Union Station; and ICE agents manning checkpoints on U Street, an area known for its bars, restaurants and nightlife. They're not there for safety, but for show.

It is a truth of this administration, in fact, that much of it is for show. Hardly a day goes by without a new transgression against democratic norms or a fresh assault on the constitutional order. Each represents a serious threat to the American experiment in self-government, and yet each is also highly performative.

This should surprise no one.

More: Trump appeared on Tuesday's edition of The Mark Levin Show, where he repeated his context-less claim to have ended six or seven global conflicts in his first seven months in office.

"I've settled six wars, and a lot of people say seven because there's one that nobody knows about," Trump said cryptically. "But I've settled six wars, and we did the Iran" I wiped out their nuclear capability, which they would've used against Israel in two seconds if they had the chance. But we wiped it out."

After claiming that the conflict between India and Pakistan was the "easiest" to resolve, Trump turned his attention to "Aberbaijan" and Albania.

More: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's unusually large personal security requirements are straining the Army agency tasked with protecting him as it pulls agents from criminal investigations to safeguard family residences in Minnesota, Tennessee and D.C., according to numerous officials familiar with the operation.
The sprawling, multimillion-dollar initiative has forced the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, or CID, the agency that fields security for top Defense Department officials, to staff weeks-long assignments in each location and at times monitor residences belonging to the Hegseths' former spouses, the officials said.
One CID official, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity citing a fear of reprisal, characterized Hegseth's personal protective arrangement as unlike any other in the agency's recent history.
"I've never seen this many security teams for one guy," the official said. "Nobody has."

---

"We have complete inability to achieve our most basic missions," one person said.

---

Historically about 150 of the agency's approximately 1,500 agents serve on VIP security details, according to people familiar with the matter, who said that when Hegseth took office a call went out for many more. Now there are hundreds assigned to personal protective duty, these people said. One person characterized the figure as "400 and going up." Another said it's "over 500."

More: Schwalb said it's the greatest threat to Home Rule that the District has ever faced, and officials are fighting to stop it.

"By declaring a hostile takeover of MPD, the Administration is abusing its limited, temporary authority under the Home Rule Act, infringing on the District's right to self-governance and putting the safety of DC residents and visitors at risk. The Administration's unlawful actions are an affront to the dignity and autonomy of the 700,000 Americans who call DC home," Schwalb said in the press release.

More: Established after October 7, the unit sought information on Hamas' use of schools and hospitals for military purposes, and on failed rocket launches by armed Palestinian groups that harmed civilians in the enclave. It has also been assigned to identify Gaza-based journalists it could portray as undercover Hamas operatives, in an effort to blunt growing global outrage over Israel's killing of reporters " the latest of whom was Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif, killed in an Israeli airstrike this past week.

According to the sources, the Legitimization Cell's motivation was not security, but public relations. Driven by anger that Gaza-based reporters were "smearing [Israel's] name in front of the world," its members were eager to find a journalist they could link to Hamas and mark as a target, one source said.

The source described a recurring pattern in the unit's work: whenever criticism of Israel in the media intensified on a particular issue, the Legitimization Cell was told to find intelligence that could be declassified and employed publicly to counter the narrative.

"If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent journalists, then immediately there's a push to find one journalist who might not be so innocent " as if that somehow makes killing the other 20 acceptable," the intelligence source said.

---

Two of the intelligence sources recounted that, in at least one case since the war began, the Legitimization Cell misrepresented intelligence in a way that allowed for the false portrayal of a journalist as a member of Hamas's military wing. "They were eager to label him as a target, as a terrorist " to say it's okay to attack him," one source recalled. "They said: during the day he's a journalist, at night he's a platoon commander. Everyone was excited. But there was a chain of errors and corner-cutting.

"In the end, they realized he really was a journalist," the source continued, and the journalist wasn't targeted.

A similar pattern of manipulation is evident in the intelligence presented on Al-Sharif. According to the documents released by the army, which have not been independently verified, he was recruited to Hamas in 2013 and remained active until he was injured in 2017 " meaning that, even if the documents were accurate, they suggest he played no role in the current war.

The same applies to the case of journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul, who was killed in a July 2024 Israeli airstrike along with his cameraman in Gaza City. A month later, the army claimed he was a "military wing operative and Nukhba terrorist," citing a 2021 document allegedly retrieved from a "Hamas computer." Yet that document stated he received his military rank in 2007 " when he was just 10 years old, and seven years before he was supposedly recruited to Hamas.

#5

You have to be 21 to drink and smoke, gramps.

More: Noem's remarks understandably spooked a lot of people. Vanessa Crdenas, executive director of the immigrant-rights group America's Voice, said details about ICE's plans should send a chill down every American's spine.

"Take a teenager with more testosterone than wisdom, arm them with guns and masks, fast cars and"to top it off"dangle cash incentives for indiscriminate and speedy arrests," she said. "Mix in an ICE culture of impunity and overreach. Now, what could go wrong?"

And there's precedent for a move like this creating problems. Deb Fleishaker, who served more than a dozen years at DHS, told me that in previous cases when standards were relaxed and hiring spiked, corruption among Customs and Border Patrol agents went through the roof. One study found that arrests of CBP employees rose 44 percent from 2007 to 2012. A New York Times investigation found that over a ten-year period, CBP employees and contractors took $15 million in bribes.

"We've seen with DHS when they've reduced hiring requirements it's gone very badly," Fleishaker said. "I think standards and training are hugely important to doing the job appropriately and carefully. This is further evidence that the Department cares about the numbers of bodies and numbers of arrests, without counterbalancing what the impact of those bodies and arrests will be."

---

Chris Newman, the general counsel for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and a lawyer for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, said that, with the huge ramping up of recruiting and the dropping of age limits, he fears ICE may end up composed of agents who were rejected from every other law enforcement agency. Consciously or not, he warned, the administration was giving people from the fringes of society power over those with less power.

"It's a commonly known fact that recruiting efforts in the past have attracted the bottom of the barrel in terms of talent," he said. But now, he added, "it's no laughing matter to think of the type of disturbed individuals that they are attracting."

More: It is unclear who will replace former BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer. Still, any signs that lead investors to suspect data is being politicized could exacerbate concerns about CPI data collection.

In that case, investors are likely to demand higher compensation to hold TIPS, or Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, whose value is linked to the CPI, and raise the federal government's cost of funding itself, analysts said. Rises in TIPS yields could be exacerbated by poorer liquidity compared to the much larger market for nominal Treasuries.

"This isn't just an academic discussion about getting the right numbers - these numbers matter for TIPS," said Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase. "There's real money on the line here."

More: Several hundred Palestinians have been detained on suspicion of direct involvement, and at least 200 of them remain in custody, according to public records. Israeli military officials have said that at least several dozen Palestinians were arrested in or near Israeli territory around the time of the attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

In addition to those detainees, Israel is holding roughly 2,700 other Palestinians who were rounded up in the Gaza Strip over the 21 months since the attack, according to government data. They are suspected of affiliation with Hamas or other militant groups in Gaza, but not necessarily of direct involvement in the Oct. 7 attack.

Israel has killed many of the senior Hamas figures from Gaza who were seen as masterminds of the attack. But some in the country worry that the extensive delays in prosecuting the suspects in custody will allow some perpetrators to escape justice.

Palestinians and rights groups have other concerns.

They say Israel has systematically violated the detainees' rights by holding them without charge or trial in harsh conditions, with limited access to legal counsel. Sweeping gag orders keep most details of their cases under wraps and for most of these detainees, there is no trace of them in any public records.

The way Israel detains those prisoners "effectively erases these individuals from public awareness and strips them of fundamental rights," said Nadine Abu Arafeh, a lawyer who has represented detainees from Gaza in other cases in Israeli courts. "Families in Gaza live with questions: Are their loved ones alive?"

Israel's Justice Ministry declined to comment.

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Ms. Malinovsky, the opposition lawmaker, said she believes that senior Israeli officials feared that pursuing the cases could intensify public scrutiny of the failures by the government and military or undermine negotiations to exchange Palestinian detainees for Israeli hostages.

"They don't want that discourse," she said of the government.

The prime minister's office declined to comment on the reasons for the delay in prosecutions. The prison service and Justice Ministry would not provide any information on the detainees.

More: The force would be made up of about 600 National Guards troops, half of which would be based on military bases in Alabama and Arizona, ready at all times to fly into any given city or state to lay down Trump's law. They'd have military-style weapons and riot gear, would dispatch from their bases in waves of 100 soldiers, and would cycle out after 90 days to "limit burnout."

Bread and circuses without the bread.

Will they be crucifying immigrants at this gladiator even or just feeding them to lions?