Managers, supervisors, human resource personnel indicted for crimes stemming from the largest single-state worksite enforcement action in nation's history

Charges include harboring illegal aliens, assisting in representing false citizenship and obtaining false Social Security cards, lying to law enforcement, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft

JACKSON, Miss. – Indictments were unsealed Thursday against four individuals who were managers, supervisors or human resources personnel at Mississippi-based companies where federal agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) executed criminal and administrative search warrants in August 2019. ICE Deputy Director and Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director Matthew T. Albence, HSI New Orleans Acting Special Agent in Charge Gilbert Trill, Southern District of Mississippi U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst and U.S. Department of Labor Office of Inspector General Special Agent in Charge Rafiq Ahmad announced the unsealed indictments at a news conference Thursday in Jackson.

“The results of this ongoing criminal investigation illustrate the importance of strong interior enforcement. The arrests made last year pursuant to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s execution of more than a dozen search warrants, have thus far yielded 126 indictments, 117 criminal arrests and 73 convictions. In total, more than 403 individuals falsified social security information in order to gain illegal employment in the United States,” said Albence. “Companies who intentionally or knowingly base their business model on an illegal workforce deprive law abiding citizens and lawful immigrants of employment opportunities, which are especially critical as our economy looks to recover from the challenges faced by the COVID-19 pandemic. ICE Homeland Security Investigations will continue its commitment to uphold the laws Congress has passed. These laws protect jobs for the legal workforce, reduce incentives for illegal migration, and eliminate unequitable financial advantages for businesses employing illegal immigrants.”

“This office has a successful history of prosecuting employers for violating our immigration laws, and today marks another step in ensuring that justice is fairly and impartially done, no matter the law-breaker. I want to thank our partners at ICE Homeland Security Investigations and our office’s federal prosecutors for doggedly pursuing these criminal violations. The indictments unsealed today mark the beginning, not the end, of our investigations and prosecutions. Rest assured that we will continue to pursue criminal wrongdoers and enforce our criminal laws wherever the evidence may take us,” said Hurst.

https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/managers-supervisors-human-resource-personnel-indicted-crimes-stemming-largest-single

Colombia: Former President Uribe Placed Under House Arrest By The Supreme Court

The Colombian Supreme Court ordered the house arrest of former president (and current senator) Álvaro Uribe Vélez on Tuesday, in a historic event in the South American country. The decision took effect immediately, though the former president has the opportunity to appeal the decision.

The decision was unanimous among the six magistrates of the Supreme Court’s Investigative Chamber who decided the case (the seventh, Cristina Lombana, a military officer during Uribe’s presidency, declared herself impeded from hearing the case). Although Uribe can appeal the decision, this will not alter the decision’s legal effect until and unless the appeal is successful.

The decision concerns accusations that Uribe tried to bribe ex-paramilitary members who are now prisoners, to persuade them to change their testimony against the former president implicating him in the creation and financing of several former paramilitary groups.

The decision was confirmed by ex-president Uribe himself, who, through his social networks, announced the precautionary measure against him.

“The deprivation of my freedom causes me deep sadness for my wife, for my family and for the Colombians who still believe that I have done something good for the Homeland,” Uribe said in this regard.

La privación de mi libertad me causa profunda tristeza por mi señora, por mi familia y por los colombianos que todavía creen que algo bueno he hecho por la Patria

— Álvaro Uribe Vélez (@AlvaroUribeVel) August 4, 2020

The arrest warrant, which may last for a maximum of one year, must be carried out immediately.

Uribe has also been under increased political and legal pressure following revelations made by the magazine Semana in a series of investigative reports including ‘Chuzadas sin cuartel’ (Illegal electronic surveillance without quarter) and ‘Las carpetas secretas’ (The secret archives), which implicated Uribe’s Democratic Centre political party in the illegal surveillance and interception of communications carried out primarily by military intelligence units against government opponents (or suspected opponents) including journalists, human rights defenders, the then Secretary-General of the Presidency, and an adviser to the High Commissioner for Peace. LINK

In a press release, the Democratic Centre party said it was indignant that the Supreme Court put Uribe under house arrest, possibly ending the political career of one of the most powerful politicians in Colombia.

The statement asserted that the bribery charges and accusations Uribe had tried to obstruct justice were “slanderous” and “sustained by false witnesses”. Democratic Centre is already struggling to refute allegations that drug trafficking money financed the presidential campaign of Ivan Duque in 2018, among numerous other major scandals.

The announcement left the political party of former president Uribe and current president Ivan Duque‘s in disarray. One of the party’s members in the Senate, Paloma Valencia, even proposed a comprehensive reform to the judicial system to abolish the units investigating Uribe on fraud and bribery charges, something the party has been unsuccessfully promoting for years.

However, the proposal is less likely than ever to gain support in the national Congress, where the Democratic Centre has a minority (19 of 108 seats in the senate and 32 of 172 in the House of Representatives) and the other major parties are distancing themselves following the party’s heavy defeat in the 2019 regional elections and a series of damaging allegations and investigations.

While the leadership of the coalition Conservative Party stated that they “regretted the situation the former ex-president is in,” they nonetheless expressed support for the Supreme Court.

Radical Change party leader German Vargas, whose party also is in the governing coalition, did not immediately respond to the Supreme Court’s announcement.

Several of Uribe’s main political adversaries, former President Juan Manuel Santos and leftist Senator Gustavo Petro, stated that they expect the court to do its utmost to ensure that Uribe receives a fair trial.

The Supreme Court’s statement justifying the house arrest noted that the magistrates’ decision to proceed with the trial is unanimous and that it is based on solid evidence. LINK

https://southfront.org/colombia-former-president-uribe-placed-under-house-arrest-by-the-supreme-court/

Russia Hoax: Are We All Being Played? Put Up or Shut Up.

Many people have asked me why I haven’t written a book since the start of my reporting on the FBI’s debunked investigation into whether President Donald Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia.

I haven’t done so because I don’t believe the most important part of the story has been told: indictments and accountability. I also don’t believe we actually know what really happened on a fundamental level and how dangerous it is to our democratic republic. That will require a deeper investigation that answers the fundamental questions of the role played by former senior Obama officials, including the former President and his aides.

We’re getting closer but we’re still not there.

Still, the extent of what happened during the last presidential election is much clearer now than it was years ago when trickles of evidence led to years of what Fox News host Sean Hannity and I would say was peeling back the layers of an onion. We now know that the U.S. intelligence and federal law enforcement was weaponized against President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and administration by a political opponent. We now know how many officials involved in the false investigation into the president trampled the Constitution.

I never realized how terrible the deterioration inside the system had become until four years ago when I stumbled onto what was happening inside the FBI. Those concerns were brought to my attention by former and current FBI agents, as well as numerous U.S. intelligence officials aware of the failures inside their own agencies. But it never occurred to me when I first started looking into fired FBI Director James Comey and his former side kick Deputy Director Andrew McCabe that the cultural corruption of these once trusted American institutions was so vast.

I’ve watched as Washington D.C. elites make promises to get to the bottom of it and bring people to justice. They appear to make promises to the American people they never intended to keep. Who will be held accountable for one of the most egregious abuses of power by bureaucrats in modern American political history? Now I fear those who perpetuated this culture of corruption won’t ever really be held accountable.

These elite bureaucrats will, however, throw the American people a bone. It’s how they operate. They expect us to accept it and then move on.

https://saraacarter.com/russia-hoax-are-we-all-being-played-put-up-or-shut-up/

2 year DELTA appriaching

Gov. DeSantis Admits Florida Unemployment System Built To Not Work, Designed With 'Roadblocks'

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis publicly admitted that his state’s unemployment system seems to be designed to discourage residents from trying to use it. He said the system is built to pay out as little as possible in benefits, an effect that is being felt sharply by many Floridians during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think the goal was for whoever designed, it was, ‘Let’s put as many kind of pointless roadblocks along the way, so people just say, oh, the hell with it, I’m not going to do that,’” DeSantis, a Republican, said in an interview with CBS4 in Miami.

The current unemployment system Florida uses was put in place during by the administration of the previous governor, Rick Scott, a Republican. DeSantis said that while he is unsure if the roadblocks were intentional on his predecessor’s part, the faults in the system’s design seem deliberate.

“I’m not sure if it was his [Scott’s], but I think definitely in terms of how it was internally constructed, you know,” DeSantis said. “It was definitely done in a way to lead to the least number of claims being paid out.”

DeSantis’s administration is set to award a $130 million contract to the same firm that designed the state’s current unemployment system, despite his admission that its system is faulty. The contract is for a website that will handle Medicaid data.

According to interviewer Jim DeFede, an audit was conducted in 2019 which pointed out the flaws in the state’s unemployment system. When asked if his government should be held responsible for not fixing the system, DeSantis claimed that he was not shown the audit results directly at the time. Since he's seen them, he believes that its findings would not address its systemic issues.

“Floridians are still not getting paid so it begs the question if the governor believes the website was built not to work … then why hasn’t he fixed it?” State Representative Anna Eskamani, a Democrat, said in response to the governor’s comments.

https://www.ibtimes.com/gov-desantis-admits-florida-unemployment-system-built-not-work-designed-roadblocks-3023929

10 facing federal drug trafficking charges related to distribution of opioids through bogus pain clinics across Southern California

ICE HSI arrests Orange County man allegedly selling oxycodone on Craigslist

SANTA ANA, Calif. – Law enforcement authorities, including special agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Los Angeles, this morning arrested four defendants charged in two federal grand jury indictments alleging a narcotics trafficking ring that sold illegal opioid prescriptions for cash through a series of sham medical clinics.

Those charged in the indictments include Dr. John Michael Korzelius, 68, a.k.a. “Dr. K,” of Camarillo, who worked at a Santa Ana pain management clinic where he allegedly wrote medically unnecessary prescriptions to “patients” who paid cash. Over the course of two years, Korzelius and other medical professionals working under his guidance, prescribed approximately 439,090 pills of 30mg oxycodone – the highest dose of short-acting oxycodone available, and the dose most popular for the drug-abusing population, according to court documents.

The charges in this matter are the result of an investigation into ChiroMed, which operated a group of chiropractic, medical and wellness clinics in Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties. Korzelius, along with other medical professionals, including physician’s assistants, allegedly met with fraudulent patients and provided them with unnecessary prescriptions for drugs, including oxycodone.

The two grand jury indictments unsealed today charge 10 defendants with a variety of narcotics-related offenses, including conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, possession with intent to distribute oxycodone, distribution of fentanyl, and money laundering.

https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/10-facing-federal-drug-trafficking-charges-related-distribution-opioids-through-bogus

Why is Big Tech Dictating What #COVID19 Treatments You Can Take?

Join Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton for a discussion of how big tech, and the political establishment, are trying to silence efforts to promote #Hydroxycholoroquin, a potentially functioning treatment for COVID-19. The government, just like big tech, doesn’t have the right to decide your preferred treatment, or trample upon your rights to privacy. TUNE IN!

https://www.judicialwatch.org/videos/big-tech-covid-2/

>>10202111

That's awesome, trips of God

France and Cyprus Sign Defense Cooperation Agreement To Further Exert Pressure On Turkey

On August 1st, the Cyprus-France Defense Cooperation Agreement came into effect.

It ensures “energy, crisis management, counter-terrorism and maritime security cooperation between the two countries.”

According to an official announcement, the agreement, which was signed on April 4, 2017, entered into force on August 1, 2020 after the completion of internal procedures.

“This agreement strengthens and further expands the cooperation of the Republic of Cyprus with the French Republic, in matters of defense and security, while at the same time it is an important step towards achieving the common goal of ensuring a stable and secure environment in the Eastern Mediterranean,” the announcement said.

The agreement “enhances co-operation between the two countries in the fields of energy and maritime security, early warning and crisis management, as well as tackling terrorism and piracy.”

In addition, it states, “at the military level, co-operation in the fields of armaments and defense technology, joint training of military personnel and conducting search and rescue exercises is envisaged.”

“The Cyprus-France Defence Cooperation Agreement confirms the excellent level of bilateral relations and the multifaceted cooperation between them,” the announcement said.

At the end of July, President Nicos Anastasiades went to Paris to meet with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.

After the meeting, Macron called on the EU to come down harder on Turkey for provocations in the Eastern Mediterranean region.

Cypriot Foreign Minister Nicos Christodoulides said that it was agreed for France to play a leading role in the region, especially in matters that concern Turkey’s conduct.

“Macron is working toward that direction,” Christodoulides told state broadcaster CyBC radio.

He added that the French president had decided to invite the seven leaders of the southern EU member states (MED7) to a meeting in Paris at the end of August to discuss this issue.

The French president’s statements prompted a reaction by Ankara, which said that France, “with every statement it has made and with every wrong step it has taken on the latest developments in the eastern Mediterranean, keeps losing impartiality and her chance to contribute to stability in the region.”

“Turkey will not be threatened by anyone with a discourse of sanctions and this will yield no results,” Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy, said.

Signed over three years ago, the agreement comes into force at a very opportune time that is expected to put further pressure on Turkey which appears dead set on extracting more resources in the Mediterranean, especially owing to the agreement it signed with Tripoli’s Government of National Accord.

https://southfront.org/france-and-cyprus-sign-defense-cooperation-agreement-to-further-exert-pressure-on-turkey/

Police officer charged with attempted rape of schoolgirl he met at a train station while on duty

One of the two police officers charged with attempting to rape a 17-year-old schoolgirl, was on duty when he initially befriended her at a train station in Sydney's south-west.

Angelo Dellosa, 30, a married father of two from Moorebank, and James Delinicolis, 29, from Concord West, have been charged with alleged attempted sexual assault of the teenager in March this year.

Both are friends and two senior constables attached to Bankstown's Police Transport Command.

https://www.9news.com.au/national/nsw-police-officer-charged-with-schoolgirl-attempted-rape-on-duty-when-they-met/e0151990-c0c6-42ce-876f-bcaab553d676

Heavy Clashes In Northern Lattakia As Syrian Army Pushes Forward

Early on August 6, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) launched a limited ground offensive on militants’ positions in the northern Lattakia countryside.

Army units advanced towards al-Hadadah hill in the al-Kurd Mount under the cover of artillery. Heavy clashes broke out with al-Qaeda-affiliated Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and other jihadi groups present in this area.

According to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, nine Syrian service members and five jihadists have been killed, so far.

“The death toll will likely rise as many of the wounded [on both sides] are in a critical condition,” the monitoring group said in a report.

The army’s limited attack appears to be a response to the militants’ repeated shelling in northern Lattakia. Earlier this week, a number of soldiers were killed and injured by militants’ fire. Russian warplanes responded with airstrikes on August 3.

Tension is mounting in Greater Idlib. A day earlier, a number of soldiers and militants were killed when heavy clashes broke out in the southern part of the region.

Recent reports revealed that the SAA and its allies are preparing to launch a new operation in Greater Idlib. The recent developments in the region indicate that the operation will start very soon.

https://southfront.org/heavy-clashes-in-northern-lattakia-as-syrian-army-pushes-forward-video/

NRA fights back, files its own suit against NY attorney general seeking to disband organization

President Trump slammed AG Letitia James’ suit against the group, calling it 'a very terrible thing'

The National Rifle Association is fighting back against a lawsuit filed Thursday by New York’s attorney general by submitting its own civil suit against the state official, accusing her of defamation and violating its rights to free speech.

The NRA’s lawsuit was filed in the federal court of New York and alleges Attorney General Letitia James “made the political prosecution of the NRA a central campaign theme” when she was running for the AG’s office in 2018, and has not treated the association fairly since.

“Despite hopes that playing by the rules would procure a just outcome, the NRA has not been treated fairly by James’s office,” the 19-page suit states. “The New York Democratic Party political machine seeks to harass, defund, and dismantle the NRA because of what it believes and what it says.”

The defamation allegations stem from James' public descriptions of the NRA as a "criminal enterprise" and "a terrorist organization."

“James boasted that she would strike foul blows against the NRA and pound the NRA into submission. She vowed that she would use the NYAG’s investigative and enforcement powers for the precise purpose of stanching political speech (‘deadly propaganda),” the lawsuit states. “She has begun to deliver on her campaign promises to retaliate against the NRA for constitutionally protected speech on issues that James opposes. As NYAG, James has regrettably succumbed to ‘individual passions, and individual malevolence.’”

https://www.foxnews.com/us/nra-lawsuit-ny-attorney-general-lawsuit