“We were shocked and saddened to hear of the abhorrent violence in Amsterdam. While there were no reported incidents of violence on any Uber trip, we’re actively supporting law enforcement as they work to identify the offenders,” a spokesman for Uber told the Washington Free Beacon.

Uber’s comments come amid concerns from Jewish activists over reports that rideshare drivers participated in the assaults on Israeli soccer fans visiting Amsterdam on Thursday—and allegations on social media that some may have used the Uber app to coordinate the attacks. The company told the Free Beacon that there’s no way for its drivers to communicate with each other through its platform.

“To be clear, drivers can’t use the Uber Driver app to communicate with one another, so no coordination of the violence took place on our platform,” the spokesman said.

Uber’s comments follow news reports that police are investigating the role that rideshare and taxi drivers may have played in the mob violence against Israeli soccer fans visiting Amsterdam for a game on Thursday. Images posted on social media appeared to show taxi driver groups coordinating the attacks on chat apps such as Telegram. […]

— Read More: freebeacon.com

The Justice Department alleges that Hinds County district attorney Jody Owens and Jackson mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, both Democrats, accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from two FBI informants posing as real estate developers seeking projects in downtown Jackson, Miss.

According to prosecutors, Owens solicited $115,000 in bribes from the informants and directed them to pay bribes to Lumumba. The mayor accepted $50,000 in bribes in exchange for “exerting his influence and taking official action relating to the Developers’ proposed project in downtown Jackson,” prosecutors allege.

Owens and Lumumba ascended to their offices with the help of Soros and Sanders, respectively. Owens, who was elected in 2019 on a platform of providing “alternatives to incarceration,” received $500,000 that year from Soros’s Mississippi Justice and Public Safety PAC, according to the Capital Research Center. Owens, a former attorney for the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, was accused during his race for district attorney of sexual harassment. While in office, he has been accused of pulling a gun on a man at the home of his chief of staff.

Sanders endorsed Lumumba, who has called himself a “revolutionary” who aimed to make Jackson “the most radical city on the planet,” in 2021. […]

— Read More: freebeacon.com

The State Department, in a non-public notice to Congress, determined that the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) are not complying with agreements to curb terrorism against Israel and end the “pay-to-slay” program, which rewards imprisoned terrorists for committing acts of violence.

Those violations should trigger American sanctions, barring members of the Palestinian government from obtaining U.S. visas. The Biden-Harris administration nonetheless used its executive power to waive the sanctions.

“A blanket denial of visas to PLO members and PA officials, to include those whose travel to the United States to advance U.S. goals and objectives, is not consistent with the U.S. government’s expressed willingness to partner with the PLO and PA leadership,” the State Department told Congress in the private notification obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The agency issued the waiver just as Americans headed to the polls Tuesday to hand Donald Trump a decisive victory driven in part by the former president’s clear-cut commitment to Israel’s security amid a broadening regional war. The waiver enables the Palestinian government to duck American sanctions for another 180 days, at which point it will come up for renewal once Trump is in the White House. […]

— Read More: freebeacon.com

“[These rules] will be essential to delivering real emissions reductions, creating the stimulus for broader investments across the hydrogen value chain, and cementing the U.S.’s global climate leadership,” Air Products president and CEO Seifi Ghasemi said in a Dec. 22 statement. The administration blasted out Ghasemi’s praise—an anomaly in the hydrogen industry, which largely opposed the proposed rules—in a Treasury Department press release, which also highlighted a letter Air Products sent days earlier that called for stringent “climate-aligned” rules governing which projects can receive the tax credit.

But the company’s main green hydrogen investment is an $8.5 billion under-construction facility located not in the United States, but in Saudi Arabia, according to a Washington Free Beacon review of financial filings. The company is developing the project as a joint venture with two Saudi government-tied companies but remains its primary beneficiary, according to SEC filings.

Last year, Ghasemi said he hoped the majority of the hydrogen produced at the Saudi-based “mega project” would be exported to Europe and California. His company went on to announce that it was indefinitely pausing its largest investment in North America, a green hydrogen project being developed in Texas. That decision leaves Air Products with only one project that could be eligible for the hydrogen production tax credit: a tiny 10 metric ton-per-day facility in Arizona set to come online this year.

Air Products’s substantial investment in green hydrogen production overseas—and lack of active investment in domestic production—raises questions about its enthusiasm for strict eligibility requirements governing the tax credit, which was established under the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden-Harris administration’s flagship climate bill. Industry groups say the proposed requirements could kneecap domestic production, thus protecting Air Products’s imports from Saudi Arabia against U.S. competition. […]

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The California Teachers Association has given some $213,000 to four local unions that are fighting to subvert or reverse school board policies that require officials to tell parents if their child begins socially transitioning at school, such as by adopting pronouns of the opposite sex and using opposite-sex bathrooms and changing rooms. The funding levels are multiple times higher than any union contributions those affiliates have previously received.

California Teachers Association president David Goldberg told EdSource last week that his group is fighting “white Christian nationalists” who want to mount a “fundamentalist attack on democracy.”

This cash infusion marks a new strategy for the Golden State’s most influential union, and highlights its intensifying role in the contentious campus culture wars raging across California. While the California Teachers Association perennially ranks as a top campaign and lobbying spender in the state, the group typically directs its large-dollar donations to its biggest and most influential members in Los Angeles and San Francisco, independent expenditure committees, and powerful statewide officials rather than unions in low-profile districts.

The California Teachers Association did not respond to a request for comment. Union critics, meanwhile, have noted the play. […]

— Read More: freebeacon.com

The Israeli government said the once-classified information, which originates from documents discovered in the Gaza Strip during military operations over the past year, was “cleared for publication” on Wednesday. It is just the latest evidence tying members of Al Jazeera, the news outlet funded in part by Qatar’s Hamas-friendly government, to regional terror groups.

Cleared for publication: 6 Al Jazeera journalists have been exposed as Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.

The @IDF has declassified documentation found in Gaza confirming military affiliation of six Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza with Hamas and the Islamic Jihad terrorist… pic.twitter.com/lxfwpnzs2j

— Embassy of Israel to the USA (@IsraelinUSA) October 23, 2024

Those named by the IDF on Wednesday include Anas Al-Sharif, Alaa Salama, Hossam Shabat, Ashraf Al-Saraj, Ismail Abu Amr, and Talal Aruki, all of whom are affiliated with either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Israel says. Israel released Arabic-language documents that show terrorist training courses, salary records, and personnel tables.

Al-Sharif was identified as the leader of a rocket-launching squad and member of Hamas’s Nukhba Force, according to the Times of Israel. Salama is believed to be the deputy head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Shaboura Battalion, which includes a propaganda unit. Shabat reportedly served as a sniper in Hamas’s Beit Hanoun Battalion, the documents show, while Al-Saraj served in Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Bureji Battalion. Additionally, Aruki was listed as a team commander in Hamas’s Nuseirat Battalion and Abu Amr as a training company commander in Hamas’s East Khan Younis Battalion.

Amr was notably injured several months ago during an IDF campaign in Gaza, with Israel identifying him at the time as a Hamas militant. Al Jazeera denied the accusation, and Israel says the latest evidence shows the outlet lied. […]

— Read More: freebeacon.com

In a press release issued Wednesday—less than two weeks before Election Day—the group said Harris is wasting “precious time chasing GOP endorsements that won’t translate into votes.” The release included a survey of thousands of “progressive voters,” 15 percent of whom said they would not vote for Harris due, in part, to her “strategy of embracing Republican figures like Liz Cheney.”

“We’ve seen time and time again that it is not a winning strategy,” said Our Revolution executive director Joseph Geevarghese. “In a world of limited time and resources, Democrats should invest resources in their base, not in courting Republicans who aren’t coming over.”

“Our survey and reports from the field tell us that progressives are deeply concerned about the campaign’s focus on appeasing conservatives while ignoring the bread-and-butter issues that matter most to working families.”

The group’s willingness to spar with Harris in the open just days before the election could spell trouble for the vice president. Harris is polling neck-and-neck with former president Donald Trump in swing states such as Michigan, where more than 100,000 people voted “uncommitted” in the state’s Democratic primary. Our Revolution endorsed that effort, which was led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s (D., Mich.) sister. […]

— Read More: freebeacon.com

“We will not allow virtue signaling. We will not allow identity politics. Black men are not political infants,” Pastor Lorenzo Sewell of Detroit’s 180 Church said during an appearance on Fox & Friends, referring to Harris’s recent outreach to black voters. “We know exactly what’s happening with the Democratic Party. We know that they’ve exploited us for over six decades, and we are saying, just like Moses said to Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go.’”

Sewell’s remarks come in response to Harris’s planned interview Tuesday evening with black podcaster and comedian Lenard Larry McKelvey, known professionally as Charlamagne tha God, in Detroit. The interview is part of Harris’s campaign effort to regain support from black men in a key swing state as recent polls indicate her backing is slipping.

“I have never been so offended in my life,” Sewell said. “She’s bringing a man here who is Charlamagne, a false god, to a community that has 4,500 churches, all people of faith. We are extremely offended that she’s bringing a podcaster here to talk to black men about politics.”

The Detroit pastor also criticized two other high-profile events the Harris campaign organized in recent weeks to bolster support among black voters in Michigan. […]

— Read More: freebeacon.com

But in the year since she survived the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre in her kibbutz, Nir Oz, Lahav has struggled to explain to international media what happened that day. No matter how many interviews she arranges with her traumatized neighbors or tours she gives of their burned-out homes, many journalists have continued to tell the story of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust as another chapter in Israel’s supposed persecution of the Palestinians.

“People are saying Israel is bad,” Lahav, a former peace activist, told the Washington Free Beacon during a visit to Nir Oz last week. “What? The Palestinians are holding our hostages … How would one feel if it was their daughter, their grandfather, their father, their 2 -year-old children, baby Kfir [Bibas in Hamas captivity]?”

Nir Oz was one of the first Israeli communities to be overrun on Oct. 7, and it was among the hardest hit. Some 120 Hamas and Hamas-affiliated terrorists and 800 Palestinian “civilians,” including women and children, poured into the kibbutz, massacring 41 people and abducting 76 others, according to Lahav. Israel responded with an ongoing war to destroy Hamas and return the hostages.

[…]

— Read More: freebeacon.com