Woke Alabama probate judge Yashiba Glenn Blanchard has been suspended after a state complaint accused her of making racist remarks about a white court clerk and failing to promptly handle critical cases involving hospitalized patients.
According to the Judicial Inquiry Commission filing, Blanchard allegedly responded to a staffer who said she liked Chief Clerk Amanda Reid, who is white, by saying, “Oh, I forgot you all like kissing white ass,” a remark cited as part of the misconduct charges.
The complaint further alleges that Blanchard repeatedly delayed or canceled hearings for patients involuntarily committed to hospitals, with one attorney emailing that he was “so worried that my client is going to die” if another continuance were granted.
Hospital officials warned that one canceled docket left a patient hospitalized an extra two weeks and disrupted unit flow, delaying care for other patients needing admission and posing potential risks to public safety.
Investigators say Blanchard told staff she was late to an involuntary commitment docket because she “had three dogs to walk,” and that she did not hear a single involuntary commitment case for the first nine months of her term, creating what they describe as a chaotic backlog.
In all, the Judicial Inquiry Commission has brought seven charges accusing Blanchard of violating multiple provisions of the Alabama Canons of Judicial Ethics, leading to her indefinite suspension while the case proceeds.
In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz is under fire after local outlet Alpha News and other media reported that he was a no-show at a Memorial Day ceremony at Fort Snelling National Cemetery, where he was listed in the program as a speaker, while instead appearing at George Floyd Square.
Video from the “Rise & Remember” festival at George Floyd Square shows Walz laying flowers, joining the crowd for music and dancing during events marking the sixth anniversary of Floyd’s death, held on Memorial Day.
In one widely shared clip, Walz can be heard joking that his moves were “not bad for an old white guy,” a line that drew cheers on-site by black activists but sparked online outrage from critics who called his absence from the Fort Snelling program a “slap in the face” to veterans.
Walz’s office has so far not publicly explained why he missed the Fort Snelling ceremony, even as Republican officials and veterans’ advocates on social media accuse him of prioritizing the Floyd commemoration over honoring fallen service members.
EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas and US President Donald J. Trump
Many feel Kallas is not up to the job.
Of all the bloated bureaucracies installed in Brussels, the seemingly less effective official is the EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas.
In yet another of her faux-pas, she announced that the heroic European diplomats were still in Kiev, while the American would have fled after the Russian warnings of massive drone and missile attacks programmed for the next days and weeks.
But no one’s surprise, the information was incorrect, prompting US officials to criticize her statement, calling it a ‘false reporting’.
“Kaja Kallas, the EU’s most senior diplomat, claimed the US was the only country to evacuate its embassy in response to Russian threats against the Ukrainian capital over the weekend, while praising Europeans’ courage for remaining in place.
But in an unusual intervention highlighting the tensions between Washington and Brussels, the US embassy in Ukraine stated: ‘There are no changes to our operations, and reports otherwise are false’.”
Moscow has issued multiple warnings urging diplomats and foreigners living in Kiev to leave the city before its planned strikes on ‘decision-making centers’ in Kyiv.
“Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, also urged the US to evacuate its envoys in a personal phone call to Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state. In the days after their discussion, unsubstantiated images of what appeared to be diplomatic staff leaving the US embassy in Kyiv emerged.
[…] On Thursday, Ms. Kallas told reporters before a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Cyprus: ‘What we heard from Ukraine yesterday was that all the embassies stayed, except one, so that also takes courage from those embassies, but yes, all the Europeans stayed, America left’.”
Not only the US, but also the Ukrainians denied Kallas’ statement, in a big embarrassment for the EU official.
Residents of a small island nation are getting a taste of China’s pervasive surveillance state after the country opened its doors to Beijing, The New York Times reported.
The surveillance began when Chinese police arrived in the small Solomon Islands community of Fighter One after residents requested help dealing with unruly teenagers, the Times reported. The nation signed a security pact with China in 2022 after supporting Beijing’s development proposal in 2019.
The island nation serves as another example of China’s efforts to spread its influence across the globe through economic and security initiatives. China’s influence in the Solomon Islands has drawn concern from Australia, a key AUKUS ally.
“Solomon Islands is a textbook example of the way China first corrupts a society, then captures it, and finally controls it,” China policy analyst Gordon Chang told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The U.S. State Department did not respond in time for publication, while the Pentagon, the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force and the Chinese Embassy in the Solomon Islands did not return any inquiries for comment.
The policing tactics Chinese authorities imposed on the community have roots in the Mao-era Fengqiao Experience, a system that encourages neighbors to monitor and report on each other to officials regarding dissident behavior, the Times reported.
Soon after the policing began, community members objected when Chinese authorities attempted to harvest biometric data, the Times reported. The opposition ended the Chinese policing experiment.
China’s overbearing influence may have contributed to the election of its new prime minister, Matthew Wale, Reuters reported. Wale has strong anti-China views, according to the outlet.
China has an official Belt and Road Initiative strategy where it pays for the infrastructure of developing nations to expand Beijing’s influence. One example of this can be seen in China’s recent investments in Latin American countries like Panama, Peru and Brazil.
The Chinese surveillance program in Fighter One was suspended after backlash from local critics, who argued the Chinese had no right to collect biometric data or conduct neighborhood surveillance. Solomon Islands police denied the program was about surveillance or coercion and said no data would be transferred to a “foreign authority,” the Times reported.
“China is attempting to export its totalitarian system to the entire world,” Chang told the DCNF. “The Solomon Islands is just a way station, an intermediary step. Every other nation is on Xi Jinping’s target list. He has been pushing the ludicrous imperial-era notion that all in the world owes obedience to China’s ruler.”
Solomon Islands signed a security pact with China in 2022 after a riot in Honiara’s Chinese community near Fighter One killed four people, Reuters reported.
“I have also noticed that, according to reports, the US Embassy in Solomon Islands has been closed for 29 years,” Wang said during the press conference. “The most recent visit to Fiji made by a US Secretary of State was 37 years ago. Several senior US officials now fancy a visit to some PICs all of a sudden after all these years. Are they doing so out of care for PICs or ulterior motives?”
Fighter One gets its name from a World War II airstrip that was constructed near the current location of the community to support American warplanes fighting Japan. The Fighter One airstrip was constructed to support the primary airstrip in the area, Henderson Field, according to National Park Service history.
“Americans died in the Solomons during the Second World War freeing the islands from tyranny,” Chang told the DCNF. “Now, a totalitarian China took over the country without firing a shot.”
Henderson Field still exists today and is currently known as Honiara International Airport, according to flysolomons.com.
China embedded police inside the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force in 2022 and donated about $1.5 million in riot gear, including bulletproof vests, shields, helmets and stab-resistant suits and gloves, according to the Times report. Chinese officers have also trained local police in the use of batons and the anti-riot fork, a tool commonly used in China to pin down suspects.
U.S. Central Command said it had “received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data."
U.S. forces deployed to war zones have been targeted using commercially available location data, according to reports fielded by military officials, an illustration of how the global surveillance economy is shaping the battlefield.
In a letter shared with Reuters by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, U.S. Central Command said it had “received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater.”
The message, sent on April 14, offered no further specifics, but CENTCOM’s area of responsibility includes the Gulf, where U.S. forces are facing off against the Iranian military over the Strait of Hormuz.
The disclosure was the first official confirmation that U.S. forces had been targeted in an active war zone, Wyden and a bipartisan group of legislators said in a letter sent on Thursday to the Pentagon.
“Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes,” the letter warned.
Wyden said in a statement that it was time to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.”
The Pentagon did not return messages seeking comment. The lawmakers said in their letter that their efforts to obtain more information from military officials about the reported targeting had been unsuccessful.
LOCATION DATA TRADE FUELS PRIVACY CONCERNS
Location data is widely used in digital advertising, which is a key source of revenue for many tech companies. Such data is typically collected from smartphones or other devices by apps or service providers before being sold to data brokers who collate and resell the data, sometimes via complex networks of intermediaries.
Although the threat to privacy inherent in selling the details of people’s day-to-day movements on the open market has long been a matter of public discussion, its potential as a national security risk has recently drawn concern as well.
As far back as 2016, one U.S. defense contractor was able to leverage commercially available location data to track special operations forces from their bases in the United States to a sensitive staging post in Syria, according to an account first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal.
More recently, journalists at Wired and two German news outlets drew on billions of coordinates collected by a data broker to expose the granular comings and goings of people stationed at or around 11 U.S. military and intelligence sites in Germany.
Two groups that represent digital advertisers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Association of National Advertisers, did not return emails seeking comment.
The letter from U.S. lawmakers to the Pentagon said that, given what military officials know about the trade in location data, they should have acted faster to protect their personnel, for example by disabling the unique advertising ID attached to military-issued devices, automatically turning off location sharing on smartphones in the field and steering staff away from Google’s Chrome web browser toward more privacy-focused alternatives.
One of the letter’s cosigners was U.S. Representative Pat Harrigan, a North Carolina Republican who was formerly a U.S. Army Special Forces officer.
Harrigan said that browsers like Chrome “are built from the ground up to collect and share user data” and that every day they remain on government-issued devices “is another day we are handing our adversaries a weapon against our own troops.”
In a statement, Alphabet’s Google said that Chrome had “industry leading security.” The company added that it had “long advocated for stronger rules and safeguards against data brokers.”
The State Department will announce on Wednesday that it is planning to designate Brazil’s two most powerful organized criminal syndicates, the Comando Vermelho (Red Command) and Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Capital Command, or PCC), as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs) and Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs).
The designations impose onerous sanctions on the gangs and their members, block them from keeping their assets in the United States or freeze assets already in the country, and make it illegal for American citizens to offer material support to them. In a statement on Wednesday, the State Department explained that the PCC and Red Command pose a significant security threat both in Brazil and internationally and engage in violent narco-terrorism throughout South America, meriting the designation.
The designations will become effective on June 5.
“Together, they command thousands of members and have orchestrated brutal attacks against Brazilian police officers, public officials, and civilians,” the State Department explained of the two syndicates. “Their influence and illicit networks extend far beyond Brazil’s borders, across our region and into our country.”
“The Trump Administration will continue to use all available tools to protect our nation and our national security interests by keeping illicit drugs off our streets and disrupting the revenue streams funding violent narco-terrorists,” the State Department added. “Today’s action taken by the State Department further demonstrates the Trump Administration’s unwavering commitment to dismantling cartels and criminal organizations in our region and ensuring the safety of the American people.”
The PCC and Red Command are best known for their transnational fundraising crimes, including lucrative drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, and building relationships with other known South American criminal syndicates. During prior periods of rivalry, the PCC and Red Command have been behind gruesome prison riots in which inmates have massacred each other in gory ways meant to send a message to the other side. In times of “peace” between the two gangs, they have united to increase illicit activity and pose a threat to the public.
Authorities on the continent have long expressed concerns that both gangs have sought a friendly relationship with the Iranian terrorist proxy Hezbollah. In 2018, Joseph Humire, the current Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for Americas Security Affairs, told Congress during a hearing that “proven ties” existed between the PCC and Hezbollah.
Unnamed officials told the Argentine outlet Infobae a year later that both gangs’ decision to form an alliance, following then-President Jair Bolsonaro’s increase in law enforcement activity to contain their influence, could also benefit Hezbollah as it could now safely seek ties to one without angering the other.
Drug traffickers spend their day at a drug den in the outskirts of Boa Vista, Roraima, Brazil, Wednesday, September 18, 2024. The First Capital Command (PCC), South America’s largest criminal organization, is expanding into the vast Amazon basin.
That alliance resulted in widespread violence in Brazil, as the gangs sought to disrupt law enforcement activity against them by engaging in terrorism. Messages spread by gang members in Ceará, Brazil, in 2019 openly stated that gang members were ordered to “set off general terror.”
“We will leave the state in a state of public calamity,” the criminals vowed.
More recently, reports from Brazil indicate that the gangs have expanded their drug trafficking to include legal prescription drugs by organizing widespread armed robberies of pharmacies. The leftist newspaper the New York Times reported last year, amid the current peace between the PCC and Red Command, a surge in robberies targeting supplies of weight loss drugs such as Ozempic occurred followed by their sudden appearance on black markets using mobile phone applications such as WhatsApp.
Despite the chaos they have sown in Brazilian society, leftist politicians have opposed large-scale attempts to curtail their activities, and reports suggest that socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva opposed a U.S. terrorist designation for the gangs. In October, following a massive police raid ordered in Rio de Janeiro by conservative Governor Cláudio Castro, leftist politicians accused police, and not the gangs, of disturbing the local peace.
“What has been done to tackle criminal organizations is a bloodbath,” Socialism and Liberty Party Congresswoman Talíria Petrone complained. “For decades, we have been wiping up blood, and families continue to be destroyed by a public security model championed by Governor Cláudio Castro, who is incompetent and cowardly.”
Lula personally visited the White House in early May for an exchange that both sides described as friendly and productive despite past tensions between Trump and Lula. Trump praised Lula as “very dynamic,” and reports indicated the two discussed organized crime in Brazil. Lula and his allies reportedly opposed the terror designation out of concern that the U.S. government could greenlight military action in Brazil to deal with the threat the gangs pose to law-abiding Brazilians.
Shortly after his visit, Lula announced a new federal plan against organized crime.
“Brazil is keen to avoid such designations,” the news agency France 24 reported at the time, referring to terrorist designations, “and in recent weeks has stepped up intelligence sharing with the U.S. to combat arms and drug trafficking.”
The State Department designations will closely follow a visit to the White House by Lula’s strongest competitor in the 2026 presidential election, conservative Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president. Bolsonaro revealed after meeting with Trump that he had requested the U.S. government consider designating the two gangs terrorist groups.
“While Lula came to the White House to lobby on behalf of drug traffickers, I came to do exactly the opposite: to emphatically ask President Trump to designate the PCC and Comando Vermelho as foreign terrorist organizations as soon as possible,” Sen. Bolsonaro told reporters this week. “And they are, indeed, terrorist organizations.”
