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Robot dogs will soon patrol the US-Mexico border

“Robot Dogs” will soon be patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border according to the Department of Homeland Security.

These four-legged robotic quadrupeds weigh in at approximately 100 pounds and look like something out of science fiction horror.

DHS says the machines are critical in patrolling the harsh landscape of the American Southwest.

“The southern border can be an inhospitable place for man and beast, and that is exactly why a machine may excel there,” said DHS Science and Technology Derectorate manager Brenda Long. “This S&T-led initiative focuses on Automated Ground Surveillance Vehicles, or what we call ‘AGSVs.’ Essentially, the AGSV program is all about…robot dogs.” 

Reaction to the armed dogs has been mixed but police view them as just another tool.

“Due to the demands of the region, adding quadruped mechanical reinforcements is a smart use of resources. Despite the dangers, and maybe even using them as cover, there are many types of illegal activity that happen in the harsh border zones,” DHS said in a statement.

Police use of such robots is still rare and largely untested — and hasn’t always gone over well with the public.

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Former Mexican president worked for CIA

Former Mexican president Jose Lopez Portillo, who led the country from 1976 to 1982, was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset, according to a new batch of declassified documents published by the US National Archives.

Among the papers, relating to a CIA probe into the murder of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, was a memo from a meeting of CIA agents on November 29, 1976.

In the discussions, US intelligence official Bill Sturbitts informed his colleagues that “Mexico will soon have a new president, a man who has had control of Liaison for a number of years.”

Lopez Portillo was not mentioned by name in the memo, but the meeting took place just a few days before he officially assumed the presidency.

He had run for office earlier that year as the sole candidate from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled the country from 1929 to 2000. Lopez Portillo died in 2004 at the age of 83.

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Parody Hitman Website Nabs Air National Guardsman After He Allegedly Applied For Murder-For-Hire Jobs

A Hermitage, Tennessee, man is facing federal charges after meeting with an undercover FBI agent to culminate a deal to murder an individual for payment, announced U.S. Attorney Henry C. Leventis.

Josiah Ernesto Garcia, 21, was charged yesterday in a criminal complaint with the use of interstate facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire.

According to the complaint, Garcia needed money to support his family and in mid-February began searching online for contract mercenary jobs and came across the website www.rentahitman.com. Originally created in 2005 to advertise a cyber security startup company, the company failed and over the next decade it received many inquiries about murder-for-hire services. The website’s administrator then converted the website to a parody site that contains false testimonials from those who have purported to use hit man services, and an intake form where people can request services. The website also has an option for someone to apply to work as a hired killer.

Garcia submitted an employment inquiry indicating that he was interested in obtaining employment as a hit man. Garcia followed up on this initial request and submitted other identification documents and a resume, indicating he was an expert marksman and employed in the Air National Guard since July 2021. The resume also indicated that Garcia was nicknamed “Reaper” which was earned from military experience and marksmanship. Garcia continued to follow up with the website administrator indicating that he wanted to go to work as soon as possible.

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Feds charge 40 Chinese police officials for repression efforts against U.S. residents

The Department of Justice on Monday announced that it had charged more than 40 individuals, many of whom are members of the Chinese national police, in connection with transnational repression schemes to stifle the activities of Chinese citizens abroad.

Two criminal complaints included charges against 44 defendants, 40 of whom are part of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) while another two are officials in the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). The defendants allegedly partook in efforts to target Chinese individuals with political viewpoints of which the communist regime does not approve.

The first complaint targets 34 MPS officials, detailing their alleged use of fake digital personas to harass Chinese opponents of the communist regime. The operators of these fake accounts also made videos and wrote articles critical of U.S. policy on China and of Chinese dissidents.

The second complaint charges 10 individuals, six of whom are MPS officials. Two more are the CAC officials while the third is an China-based employee of a U.S. telecommunications company and the tenth is believed to reside in Indonesia. They face charges of conspiracy to commit interstate harassment and unlawful conspiracy to transfer means of identification.

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Corporate Media Are the Anti-WikiLeaks

It was impossible to imagine four years ago when WikiLeaks Editor Julian Assange was hauled out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London and thrown in Belmarsh Prison that corporate media, which had smeared Assange, could stoop to new lows of government servitude.

But it has now happened with the arrest of Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, for allegedly leaking top secret government documents. The leaks exposed a number of significant lies told by both the U.S. government and corporate media about the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Among many items of interest, the documents revealed that U.S. Special Forces as well as NATO forces are on the ground in Ukraine; that Ukraine is significantly unprepared for its planned spring offensive;  as well as evidence of U.S. spying on its allies and  António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations.

According to Al Jazeera:

“Several purported U.S. intelligence assessments paint a more pessimistic outlook for the Ukrainian military than the U.S. has provided publicly. They suggest Kyiv is heading for only ‘modest territorial gains’ in its much-anticipated spring counteroffensive.”

In other words, the content of these leaks expose lies told directly by the U.S. and NATO, as well as the corporate media that serve them.

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BACKGROUND CHECK INDUSTRY PROFITS OFF ‘DIGITAL PUNISHMENT,’ DESPITE FLAWED DATA

Tony Taylor was not anticipating becoming the center of a class action lawsuit when he attempted to rent an apartment through Airbnb in 2020. But when a standard background check by a third-party provider turned up a violent felony on Taylor’s record, the short-term rental company informed him that it had permanently banned him from using their services.

Taylor was perplexed. He’d been through countless background and credit checks before. And he thought the crime in question was well behind him: In 2014, Taylor—who spent years working in the security and personal protection field—carried his Glock handgun into Minneapolis City Hall. Unbeknownst to Taylor, he was bringing a firearm into a building with a courthouse in it. And, as such, he was accidentally committing a felony under Minnesota law, even though he says he never removed his licensed weapon from its locked holster.

Minneapolis police arrested Taylor and charged him with “dangerous weapon possession in a courthouse.” His wife, Sarah, was also arrested during the incident.

Rather than take on the costs associated with a criminal trial, Taylor decided to plead guilty. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail. As part of the plea, his crime would be reduced to a misdemeanor if he completed three years of probation.

Six years later, Taylor assumed the consequences of his run-in with the criminal legal system had been laid to rest. He had completed his probation and maintained good legal standing since the arrest.

However, Inflection Risk Solutions, a private company that provides background checks for employers and services like Airbnb, had erroneously reported that Taylor was a violent criminal. After seeing errors on his background check, Taylor requested a report for his wife, who was convicted of the same charge, to ensure any mistakes could be corrected. Her records contained the same error, and Inflection Risk had even duplicated her charges, listing her as having two violent felonies.

“At this point, I’m pissed,” Taylor said in an interview with The Appeal. “How dare you call me a violent felon. The reason why I was in security was to keep people safe, not to hurt people.”

Neither Inflection Risk nor Airbnb responded to a request for comment.

As the Taylors fought to correct the record, they would soon discover that they were far from the only ones whom private background check companies like Inflection Risk had harmed.

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NYC will target food choices in its battle against climate change

The Adams administration has announced a plan to begin tracking the carbon footprint created by household food consumption as well as a new target for New York City agencies to reduce their food-based emissions by 33% by the year 2023.

Mayor Eric Adams announced the plan on Monday along with the Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice as part of the city’s ongoing pledge to reduce the impact of climate change. At the same event, the Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice published a new chart in the city’s annual greenhouse gas inventory that publicly tracks the carbon footprint created by household food consumption — primarily generated by meat and dairy products.

The new analysis is a spin on the emissions data that comes standard with the annual inventory. It was made through a partnership with American Express, C40 Cities and EcoData lab.

Adams, an ardent evangelist of plant-based diets, announced the new tracker and policy at a Brooklyn culinary center run by Health + Hospitals, the city’s public health care system.

“It is easy to talk about emissions that are coming from vehicles and how it impacts our carbon footprint,“ Adams said. “But we now have to talk about beef.”

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The Curious Case of “Blinky” the San Francisco UFO

The history of ufology is filled with examples of curious sightings by one or two people that soon fade from memory. But then there are the cases where so many people see the same thing that they earn a nickname and frequently show up in the lore. Many are familiar with the tales of Charlie Red Star in Canada. Stories of the famous “Flying V” in New York’s Hudson Valley have been passed down among local inhabitants. 

Less well-known but perhaps equally interesting was a series of mass sightings that took place in San Francisco, California in February of 1953. Somewhat ironically, the exact date of the largest sighting was Friday the 13th. For a few days prior, local residents had been calling in reports of a glowing “bulb” or “ball” in the sky that would show up in various locations. It reportedly shifted in color from amber to silver or white and would “turn off” and then back on again. Some of the locals had taken to calling it “Blinky.” But in the late afternoon of the 13th, four Civil Defense Ground Observer Corpsmen stationed on top of Mt. Sutro outside the city would see the same thing approaching from the ocean and passing over their outpost. They later reported that it made a “deep throbbing sound.”

They would be far from the only ones because Blinky seemed intent on putting on a show. A toll collector named Fred Peterson on the Golden Gate Bridge reported seeing it at 5:35 pm. Two police officers driving in separate cars saw it, providing almost identical descriptions. Calls were coming in to the police and various radio stations in large numbers. The next day, the San Francisco Examiner ran a story about it on page 1. (Continued on page 7.) The editors’ description of the UFO’s antics was vivid.

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Nearly $500 million continues to sit in a bloated, unused government fund

As Americans rush to file their taxes by this year’s April 18 deadline, a sliver of them — less than 4 percent, if recent history holds — will check a little box that directs $3 to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund.

But that’s still millions of $3 contributions, year after year. And they’ve caused the Presidential Election Campaign Fund — a once-popular resource for White House aspirants that hasn’t been used regularly in 15 years — to swell past $430 million in value as of February 28, according to U.S. Treasury records reviewed by Raw Story.

With the untapped fund likely to continue growing after Tax Day en route to half a billion dollars, politicians and nonprofits have ideas for how to reform the nation’s obsolete public campaign financing policies and reallocate this resource at a time when, according to the Treasury, the country is facing more than a $1 trillion dollar deficit.

Among them is Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), who told Raw Story the money could be used to help close the nation’s budget gap.

“It’s just sitting there … This is just a small effort on many other efforts that we have in trying to tackle this budget,” Ernst said. “You’ve just got to get out there and raise money if you’re gonna play, so why do we do this?”

Nonprofits could benefit from the money that’s sitting in the fund, said Rick Cohen, chief communications officer and chief operating officer for the National Council of Nonprofits. While the Council is focusing much of its tax policy efforts on getting the universal charitable deduction back after it expired in 2021, the hundreds of millions of dollars in the Presidential Election Campaign Fund could help numerous charities.

“Every dollar can make a big difference for people who rely on nonprofits,” Cohen said. “It may seem like a small amount when it comes to the government’s budget, but 90% of the sector has less than a $1 million budget every year. You could double the budget of 500 nonprofit organizations and still have more to go around.”

Cohen said it would be great to see a tax form checkoff box for donating to charities like Colorado has that allows taxpayers to donate their return to nonprofits.

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Oklahoma sheriff, commissioner, accused of discussing killing a reporter and returning to Black hangings

In southeast Oklahoma, the sheriff of McCurtain County, one of his investigators and a county commissioner are accused by a newspaper of discussing to kill a local reporter and lamenting that modern justice no longer includes hanging Black people. 

The explosive accusations were published this week in the McCurtain Gazette-News.

According to the newspaper, Sheriff Kevin Clardy, investigator Alicia Manning and District 2 Commissioner Mark Jennings were part of an impromptu discussion after the March 6 meeting of the county Board of Commissioners. 

The Gazette reported that it is in possession of the full audio recording of the discussion. The FBI and the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office also have copies of the recording, according to the newspaper.

A portion of the audio recordings were released online over the weekend, and while the audio matched some of the quoted material in the story, The Oklahoman could not identify who the speakers were in the recordings.

None of the allegedly recorded individuals could immediately be reached for comment.

Chris Willingham is the reporter for the Gazette who was discussed in recordings. He is also the author of the article.

Willingham declined to comment on the story, citing ongoing litigation between himself and the sheriff’s office.

During the discussion, which was recorded without the trio knowing, the Gazette reported Manning saying she needed to take some packages to a shipping center near the newspaper’s office. 

She expressed concern about what could happen if Willingham walked out of the newspaper’s office, according to the newspaper. 

According to the Gazette, Willingham that day had filed a defamation lawsuit against the sheriff’s office, Manning and the Board of County Commissioners. 

The lawsuit claims were published in the Gazette about three months ago when the initial tort claim was filed, according to the newspaper’s report.

“Oh, you’re talking about you can’t control yourself?” Jennings allegedly said.

In response, Manning allegedly said:

“Yeah, I ain’t worried about what he’s gonna do to me. I’m worried about what I might do to him. My papaw would have whipped his ass, would have wiped him and used him for toilet paper … if my daddy hadn’t been run over by a vehicle, he would have been down there.”

Jennings replied that his 86-year-old father, in response to an opinion published in the newspaper, once “started to go down there and just kill him,” according to the Gazette.

“I know where two big, deep holes are here if you ever need them,” Jennings allegedly said. 

Clardy, the sheriff, allegedly said he had the equipment. 

“I’ve got an excavator,” Clardy is accused of saying during the discussion.

“Well, these are already pre-dug,” Jennings allegedly said. 

Jennings allegedly talked about knowing hitmen in Louisiana who could “cut no (expletive) mercy.”

A brief discussion about assaulting local judges followed, according to the Gazette. 

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