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Ballot Scanners Malfunction Across Westchester County, New York – Ballots Being Placed in Orange Bags?
No later than the polls opened in Westchester County, New York, at 6 am this morning, the machines started malfunctioning in what the Board of Elections has reportedly called a countywide problem.
Trump-Endorsed Republican Bruce Blakeman is on the ballot, challenging New York Governor Kathy Hochul.
Now, instead of scanning their votes, people are being told to place their ballots in ballot bags, which will later be sent to the Board of Elections to be counted.
Per News 12:
The Westchester County Board of Elections says an issue with the thickness of paper ballots is preventing voting machines from accepting them at polling locations throughout the county. Officials urge voters to stay in line and complete their ballots as instructed, saying ballots will be secured in monitored orange emergency ballot bags and counted according to election procedures.
The board is instructing poll workers to check voters in and provide them with ballots. The ballots are being placed in orange bags while technicians work to resolve the problems.
The bags will be sent to the Board of Elections at the end of the night. Those ballots will be counted first, before ballots cast through the machines.
“I Can’t Believe That N—-r” – Democrat Alaska Senate Candidate Mary Peltola Accused of Lashing Out at Army Veteran, Calling Him the N-Word
Two former staffers are accusing Alaska Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola of repeatedly using the n-word, including once to attack an Army veteran who organized a fundraiser for her.
An unnamed staffer says that during an October 25, 2024 dinner to honor Black Army soldiers who helped construct the Alaska-Canada Highway during World War II, she used the slur while privately lashing out at the man promoting the event.
Ed Wesley, an Army veteran and former commander of the American Legion Post 34, had urged Peltola’s campaign to purchase multiple tables for the event, assuring her they would be filled. But when the event was poorly attended and the tables sat mostly empty, according to Alaska Landmine, Peltola lost it, calling Wesley a “scammer” and the n-word, according to the former staffer.
“I can’t believe that n—r,” she allegedly said.
According to another staffer, Peltola used the n-word multiple times during a 2024 campaign staff meeting.
Peltola’s campaign has denied the claims to the outlet and the New York Post. In a statement to the Post, they described it as “part of a smear campaign driven by an unstable, disgruntled former staffer.”
“Mary would never use this word, which is a vile slur with a painful, hateful history,” the spokesperson said.
Soviet Dictators Used War and Famine To Create Ukraine
The Russian Empire entered the First World War in 1914 as one of Europe’s great powers, yet four years of catastrophic military defeats, economic dislocation, and social upheaval destroyed the foundations of the Romanov autocracy. By early 1917 the army was demoralized, the cities were hungry, and the authority of Nicholas II had evaporated.
In February 1917 strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd escalated into open mutiny. The Tsar abdicated, ending three centuries of Romanov rule. A Provisional Government, composed of liberal and moderate socialist politicians and eventually led by Alexander Kerensky, attempted to steer Russia toward a constitutional order while simultaneously continuing the war against the Central Powers.
The government introduced civil liberties and promised land reform and elections to a Constituent Assembly, but it refused to withdraw from the conflict or to sanction the spontaneous seizure of noble estates by the peasantry. Parallel to the Provisional Government stood the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, creating the unstable system of “dual power.” Kerensky’s attempts to rally the army for a summer offensive in 1917 failed, and by autumn the Provisional Government commanded little loyalty outside a narrowing circle of officers and urban liberals.
On the night of 25–26 October 1917 the Bolshevik Party, directed by Vladimir Lenin and executed through Leon Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee, carried out an armed coup in Petrograd. Red Guards and sympathetic garrison units seized bridges, railway stations, and the telephone exchange; the Winter Palace, where the remaining ministers had taken refuge, was stormed with relatively little bloodshed.
The Provisional Kerensky Government was there upon arrested and the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets ratified the transfer of power. Lenin’s new Council of People’s Commissars immediately issued decrees calling for an end to the war and for the distribution of land to the peasants. In March 1918 the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany formally removed Russia from the World War, ceding vast territories to Germany and its allies.
The October coup did not bring peace. Instead it ignited a brutal civil war that lasted until 1921. The Bolshevik “Reds” confronted a heterogeneous array of “White” forces – former Tsarist generals such as Denikin, Kolchak, and Wrangel, together with liberal and socialist opponents of the incipient Bolshevik dictatorship.
National movements, peasant insurgencies, and foreign intervention by British, French, American, Japanese, and other contingents further fragmented the struggle. Fighting raged across European Russia, Ukraine, Siberia, and the Caucasus.
The Reds ultimately triumphed because they controlled the industrial core and the railway network, maintained stricter internal discipline through the Cheka (secret police), and offered the peasantry at least the promise of land. By contrast, the Whites remained divided, often restored landlord claims, and failed to articulate a compelling political program. By the end of 1920 the principal White armies had been defeated – even as sporadic resistance continued into 1921 but no longer threatened Bolshevik power.
In the Ukrainian lands the imperial collapse opened a brief window for independence. After the February Revolution, Ukrainian activists in Kiev organized the Central Rada, which progressively asserted autonomy and, in January 1918, proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The republic adopted national symbols, issued currency, and sought international recognition.
The latter was short-lived, however, because German and Austrian troops now occupied much of Ukraine under the terms of Brest-Litovsk. Accordingly, they installed the conservative Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky in place of the socialist-leaning Rada. After the Central Powers’ defeat in November 1918, the Directory under Symon Petliura restored a republican regime and attempted to defend Ukrainian independence against both Bolshevik and White Russian forces.
None of these successive Ukrainian governments possessed the military or administrative capacity to hold the territory. By 1920–1921 the Red Army had overrun the greater part of the Ukrainian provinces east of the emerging Polish frontier. The Ukrainian People’s Republic survived thereafter only as a rump émigré government based in Warsaw, Paris and scattered elsewhere in Europe.
Moreover, at the Paris Peace Conference the Allied powers revived an independent Polish state. The Treaty of Versailles and subsequent arrangements awarded Poland eastern Galicia, including the city of Lviv and the surrounding districts that had belonged to the Austrian Empire. These western Ukrainian territories therefore remained outside Soviet control and inside the Polish Republic until 1939.
In a similar manner,Crimea, historically administered as part of the Taurida Governorate, stayed within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and was not transferred to Ukrainian jurisdiction until 1954.
Lenin’s incorporation of the remaining Ukrainian lands into a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was an act of administrative state-building based and geographic contiguity. It was focused on control of factories, railroads, coal mines and other resources – not the vindication of an underlying national sovereignty.
Once the Civil War was won, the Bolshevik leadership had confronted the practical problem of governing an immense, ethnically diverse territory. So rather than reconstitute a unitary Russian state, they created a federal structure of nominally sovereign Soviet republics.
Why Are So Many British Teens Being Treated As Terrorists?
What is going on with Britain’s children? Last year, more than 6,000 under-18s were referred to Prevent, the UK government’s counter-terrorism scheme, with a record number reported for being obsessed with mass violence and extremism. Believe the headlines, and we are raising a generation of committed terrorists and murderous nihilists. But scratch beneath the surface, and a far more complex picture of adult failure begins to emerge.
Clearly, some children really are attracted to terrorism and extreme violence. Last week, Yusuf Shah was convicted of providing cybersecurity support to groups including al-Qaeda. He was just 16 when he was arrested at Heathrow Airport and was found to have downloaded instructions for making explosives and using different types of weapons. In 2024, Axel Rudakubana was 17 years old when he entered a dance class in Southport, killing three girls and injuring eight other children and two adults with a kitchen knife. And in 2018, 18-year-old Safaa Boular became Britain’s youngest convicted female Islamic State terrorist after she helped plan an attack on the British Museum in London.
Yet in all three of these cases, these terrorists were either not referred to Prevent, or Prevent failed to ensure their deradicalization. Rudakubana was referred to Prevent three times between 2019 and 2021, but was deemed unsuitable for intervention as officers could find no evidence that he had a fixed ideology or motivation driving his obsession with violence.
One problem for Prevent officers is their rapidly increasing workload. The 6,085 under-18s referred to the scheme in 2025 represent a threefold increase on the 2,129 participants recorded in 2020. In just that one year, the education sector reported 3,129 individuals.
Another problem is that Prevent focuses on the wrong issue. Data from 2025 show that ‘extreme right-wing‘ concerns accounted for 21 per cent of all referrals. This is more than double the proportion of referrals for ‘Islamist extremism’ (10 per cent). What’s more, compared with the previous year, referrals for ‘extreme right-wing’ concerns increased, while referrals for ‘Islamist extremism’ decreased (down from 13 per cent).
Yet this is completely at odds with the reality of the terrorist threats we face in the UK. Since 2001, nearly 100 people have been killed in terrorist attacks in Britain. Fifty-two people were slaughtered in London on 7 July 2005 when Islamist terrorists bombed public transport. In 2017, three separate attacks resulted in multiple deaths at Westminster Bridge, Manchester Arena and London Bridge. Just two people have been killed by right-wing extremists: Mohammed Saleem (2013) and Jo Cox (2016). Prevent officers kept busy dealing with children referred for right-wing extremism have less time to worry about the far more real threat posed by Islamists.
Panic about children, especially boys, being radicalized by right-wing extremists spills over into actual arrests. Figures from UK Counter Terrorism Policing show that one in five of those arrested for terrorism-related offenses is under 18. Earlier this month, a 15-year-old boy was arrested for calling a Conservative councillor a ‘rent boy’. Four police officers in two cars turned up outside the house of the Reform UK activist, despite Reform being a mainstream political party and it not being illegal to call someone a ‘rent boy’. The boy understandably believes he was targeted for his political views and allegiances. If so, then the definition of ‘extremism’ has been stretched so much it is now meaningless.
The completely disproportionate number of teenage boys being referred to Prevent for right-wing extremism betrays the cowardice of adults. It is far easier to panic about children, social media, hate speech and toxic masculinity than it is to name, let alone confront, the real threat of Islamist terrorism. Teachers, social workers and police officers routinely assume that boys with even mainstream right-wing views pose a serious threat to society.
The increase in referrals to Prevent points to adults’ failure to relate to children in ways once taken for granted. It suggests that rather than engaging with young people by talking to them about their opinions and questioning their views, adults hit the panic button and retreat. Rather than being arrested, the 15-year-old schoolboy critical of his local councillor should have had his interest in politics taken seriously. Perhaps the offended councillor could have suggested some good books for him to read instead of calling the police.
The latest Prevent statistics point to other problems with our failure to socialize the next generation. A growing number of children are being referred to Prevent for having a fascination with ‘mass violence unrelated to a political cause’. Following the Southport attack, the government is updating Prevent to enable it to better deal with children who are obsessed with violence, mass shootings and weapons despite having no obvious ideological motive. Clearly, some of these children are mentally ill and need psychiatric treatment rather than anti-radicalization counseling. Prevent is being expected to pick up the pieces when mental-health services fail.
Something else is going on, too. An increasing number of children obsessed with violence, mass shootings and weapons hints at a prevalent sense of nihilism. As we see playing out across France right now, Western nations harbor a proportion of youngsters who feel only contempt for the society they inhabit. They have no sense of allegiance to their country, its history or its institutions. Teachers, journalists, politicians and cultural curators who should have taught children to love their country and respect their fellow citizens have failed in this task.
Referring ever more children to Prevent helps no one. As adults fail in the task of socializing children and raising decent adults, the anti-extremism program has become the institution of last resort, expected to deal with every disaffected or non-conforming teenager. Meanwhile, the role Prevent should be playing in stopping terrorism – which primarily comes from Islamist extremists – is lost to panic and political correctness.
Dartmouth Provost Who Warned About AI Cheating Resigns After Investigation of His Own AI Usage
Santiago Schnell, who stepped down this week as provost of Dartmouth College, had built part of his public profile warning that universities weren’t doing enough to fight AI cheating. An internal investigation found he’d failed to disclose his own extensive use of artificial intelligence, including in that very warning.
Ars Technica reports that Schnell wrote a Washington Post op-ed on August 9 titled “Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem.” An advisory committee at Dartmouth later found that he had not disclosed significant AI use in that op-ed, nor in at least one academic paper, even though both publishers required such disclosure.
The committee’s report said Schnell showed “insufficient cooperation” during the investigation. He handed over his Dartmouth laptop but did not turn over logs from his personal AI accounts tied to the writings under review, and he declined to meet with the committee. Investigators did get access to his Claude enterprise account, used through Dartmouth, and those logs showed him using the chatbot to revise papers, find and fix bugs in code, and edit or generate figures.
In one exchange cited in the report, Schnell asked Claude to review a paper headed for the journal ChemSystemsChem as though it were a specialist referee. “I am getting read[y] to submit the enclosed paper, its supplementary materials and the enclosed repo to ChemSystemsChem. This paper is not biological, but rather chemical. Imagine that you are a reviewer for this paper with expertise in nonlinear chemical dynamics and mathematical chemical kinetics. What would be your referee report for this paper?” he wrote. He also asked language models to take TeX files, correct files and a code repository, and generate new figures.
The report also describes Schnell uploading a manuscript titled “Academic Freedom and Catholic Mission: The Procedural Overlap Zone in University Governance” to Claude and asking whether it contained “many signatures of AI writing.” He then submitted a revised version incorporating the chatbot’s suggested changes.
Schnell told Semafor he had used AI chatbots “to refine a few arguments” and “check for grammatical errors.” He told one journal editor he had “used AI as an editorial tool” to “help refine sentences, improve clarity, and the expression of arguments.” Asked why he had not disclosed AI use to an academic journal, he said he “did not understand that this type of AI-assisted editing required disclosure.”
The committee wasn’t satisfied it had the full picture. Its report said “the nature of the Provost’s actual AI use” remained unclear, and that his public statements may have understated how much he actually relied on AI tools, noting his use “went beyond his other public” characterizations of it.
Alaska’s Decoy Scandal Brings Back The Usual Suspects For Shady Election Tactics
Marc Elias is back. The notorious Democratic lawyer who played a critical role in the 2016 Russia hoax is again in the news. His law firm has been identified by the New York Times as part of the expanding scandal involving Democratic effort to confuse voters in Alaska with a decoy candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan.
For those familiar with Elias’s checkered history, this is a case of rounding up the usual suspects.
The scandal involving Democratic candidate Mary Peltola has quickly snowballed this week. A New York Times blockbuster investigative report quotes former staff who claim she knew of a cynical effort by her own campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to confuse voters by recruiting and fielding a decoy “Dan Sullivan” candidate in the race against incumbent Sen. Daniel S. Sullivan (R-Alaska). State and federal investigations are now unfolding, with dozens of federal subpoenas raining down on Alaska.
The effort to get voters to cast mistaken ballots is grossly unethical and, even in these rage-filled times, a uniquely disgraceful scheme. Peltola and the Democratic Party had long denied any involvement in the other Sullivan’s candidacy. So when the Times produced evidence that she allegedly knew, and that Democratic staffers and lawyers had been deeply involved from the beginning, many of us were surprised – that is, until the name “Marc Elias” emerged. Then it made more sense.
The Elias Law Group was already in the news this election cycle for threatening reporters with defamation lawsuits if they kept asking questions about the health of former Gov. Roy Cooper, the Democratic nominee for Senate in North Carolina. Earlier, Elias caused a stir during an unsuccessful Democratic gerrymandering effort, raising the idea that Democratic leaders could abolish the entire Virginia government after courts blocked their attempted radical redistricting plan.
The fact that figures such as Peltola and Cooper wanted to be associated with any law firm headed by Elias is itself an indictment of their judgment and standards.
Despite his losses in cases such as National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, Elias is still a favorite of many on the left thanks to his aggression and partisan fervor. The controversies that make him notorious to many make him popular with others.
Elias was the general counsel to the Clinton presidential campaign when it secretly funded the infamous Steele Dossier and pushed the false Alfa Bank conspiracy theory. (His fellow Perkins Coie partner, Michael Sussmann, was later indicted but acquitted for making a false statement to the FBI.)
Clinton campaign officials lied to reporters during the 2016 campaign, denying any involvement in the Steele Dossier. Journalists discovered the truth after the election – that the Clinton campaign had hidden payments for the dossier as “legal fees” among the $5.6 million paid to Perkins Coie. New York Times reporter Ken Vogel said that when he tried to report the story, Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.'”
Times reporter Maggie Haberman later observed that “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.” The Federal Election Commission ultimately sanctioned the Clinton campaign for the subterfuge.
While raising money as the self-proclaimed defenders of democracy, Elias’s group has been involved in gerrymandering and efforts criticized as seeking to invalidate Republican votes, including unsuccessful efforts to challenge Democratic electoral losses.
In Maryland, Elias’s team supported another abusive gerrymandering scheme that a court found not only violated Maryland law but the state constitution’s equal protection, free speech and free elections clauses. The court found that the proposed map “subverts the will of those governed.”
One media site accused Elias and his group of “making millions off gerrymandering efforts” while publicly denouncing Republican gerrymandering.
In 2024, Elias’s legal team was also accused of pushing “to bar third-party presidential candidates – including Cornel West – from swing state ballots where they might siphon votes” from Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
Likewise, the New York Times reported that the Elias firm’s work “on behalf of a Soros-funded PAC in Texas … was opposed by a left-leaning election watchdog as undermining laws intended to limit the influence of major donors.”
His group’s work for New York’s redistricting effort was ridiculed as not only ignoring the express will of the voters and also effectively negating Republicans’ votes.
In 2024, the Chief Judge of the Western District of Wisconsin criticized the Elias Law Group for one of its challenges. Judge James Peterson (an Obama appointee) said that the argument “simply does not make any sense.”
Now, Elias’s group is linked to the decoy scandal in Alaska, which allegedly aimed to make voters cast mistaken ballots. What distinguishes lawyers involved in this type of voter disruption is less their talent as their willingness. There are simply some things that most lawyers will not do.
Hackers Attack Supermarkets Across Europe Again, Destroying Millions of Dollars of Food
Food suppliers and retailers have been warned to urgently update the software on their fridges as European supermarkets have been hit by another wave of hacks, destroying millions of Euros of food.
Over 100 supermarkets and food suppliers in Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg, and Estonia were the target of a hacking attack late on Sunday night. The attackers remotely instructed internet-connect smart refrigerators in stores and warehouses to engage their defrost mode, boosting temperatures from the normal working sub-freezing to as high as 50 degrees centigrade (122 F).
While a handful of these attacks were detected quickly, most were not and huge quantities of food were defrosted, rendering them unfit for human consumption. The affected supermarkets and chains include French and German retail giants Carrefour and EDEKA, as well as Spar, Intermarché, ICA Group, Colruyt, Axfood, Delhaize, the Belgian Cooperative, and IKEA.
Some stores quickly deployed refrigerated trucks, allowing staff to transfer frozen goods before they were destroyed. Elsewhere, supermarkets hired dumpsters and brought staff in overnight to clear the shelves of spoiled food. Millions of Euros of food has been destroyed.
The European Commissioner for Agriculture and Food Christophe Hansen said the hacks were a deliberate bid to sabotage food supply in Europe and undermine public confidence. Who is behind the attacks is not yet known, but the European Union has said it will investigate.
This latest attack on the food industry follows by weeks another, larger attack where hackers did the same, taking advantage of vulnerabilities in outdated software loaded onto smart fridges intended to allow large grocery businesses to remotely monitor and troubleshoot their equipment across the whole business. In that case, over 700 supermarkets were hit.
The realisation that the digital systems that help keep Western civilisation fed and alive is actually mostly unprotected and connected to the open internet, and consequently massively vulnerable to attack by even technically unsophisticated malign actors has triggered a wave of investigations. As reported by Breitbart News, the Pentagon is now considering whether a series of refrigeration failures impacting the daily chow for troops may have not been simple malfunctions but deliberate sabotage.
Ukrainian Intelligence Just Tried Its Own Version Of The Israeli Pager Attack
It appears Ukrainian intelligence has attempted to do its own version of the Israeli pager bomb attacks that decimated many Hezbollah commanders in September 2024.
Russian authorities announced Monday the uncovering of a bizarre and twisted plot involving boobytrapped goggles for military drone operators.
The FSB security service said Monday it thwarted a shipment of drone goggles rigged with explosives that were meant to be distributed across drone units.
“During an X-ray examination, explosives specialists established that Ukrainian special services had embedded improvised explosive devices into the first-person view goggles where cooling fans are normally placed,” the FSB said.
Per the official statement and claims, the explosives would have detonated the moment the goggles were turned on, resulting in immediate death or injury.
It was undisclosed just how many headsets were intercepted, but likely border authorities are on high alert protecting against any further shipments or severe security breaches.
The rigged shipment in question was first discovered in the southern Volgograd region – but then other shipments were intercepted elsewhere. The shipments were presented as part of ‘volunteer’ donations.
This isn’t the first time that electronic items had bombs planted in them allegedly by Ukrainian intelligence operatives. Russian authorities are on the lookout for pontentially tampered items including speaker systems, power banks, laptops, or even car parts.
The incident is being compared to the prior similar Israeli operation which was years in planning that rocked Lebanon at the height of the recent Israel-Hezbolllah war there. As we featured at the time:
Former Mossad agents revealed new details of Israel’s pager and walkie-talkie terror attacks carried out against members of Hezbollah in interviews with the CBS News program 60 Minutes this week..
According to a former Israeli intelligence agent known as Michael, Hezbollah bought more than 16,000 of the exploding devices. When Mossad chief David Barnea gave the green light for the attack in September, the pagers and walkie-talkies were detonated on subsequent days.
Some 42 people were killed, including two children, while about 4,000 were injured. Many lost their hands and eyes or had their stomachs ripped open by the explosions. Michael said the walkie-talkie batteries, which included explosive devices, were made in Israel at a Mossad facility.
Drone warfare has become front and center in the longrunning Ukraine war, and has fundamentally transformed the battlefield. And so drone parts and operating equipment continue to be in high demand among both warring sides.
In some cases loitering drones have even been known to attack and bomb single individuals in gruesome scenes. Both sides have been deploying these tactics.
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