EARLY EDITION: Five Quick News Stories For Your Water Cooler Chat (Fri. Feb 17)
Today's Stories: FB sells ads to oligarch; Iran moves $4B; Human Trafficking Arrests; Soros friend defunded; Bursting Biden's Balloon
Today’s Stories: FB sells ads to oligarch; Iran moves $4B; Human Trafficking Arrests; Soros friend defunded; Bursting Biden’s Balloon
1. Facebook took ad money from sanctioned oligarch
Kremlin-tied oligarch Ilan Shor got millions of views through Facebook ads in Moldova before the ads were eventually pulled down.
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Those ads called for protests and uprisings against the pro-Western government in the tiny nation bordering on Ukraine, despite Ilan Shor being named on a sanctions list.
In other words, Facebook, which routinely iced out accounts that were too right-of-center claiming them to be somehow agents of Russia, literally took money from a pro-Putin oligarch calling for … insurrection against a Western government in a country bordering on Ukraine.
2. Iran’s Supreme Leader just transferred $4B to Venezuela
The leader of an organization critical of the regime claims to have found a document proving that four billion dollars have been shifted from Iran’s national treasury into the personal Venezuelan account of his son, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei.
The document is said to have been written by the chief of staff of Khamenei to the Governor of Iran’s central bank.
As reported by the Jerusalem Post, the letter said, “In light of the current crisis in the country and the extensive wave of rioting by antirevolutionary elements and rioters across the country, and the security institutions’ declaration of a Level Orange alert, your honor is requested to transfer the sum of $4 billion (US) [sic] from the state treasury to the personal account of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei at the Central Bank of Venezuela, in Venezuela.”
As we contemplate the implications of robbing the national treasury at a time when so many impoverished Iranians are on the brink, let us recall that this is the same regime that Obama, Biden, Kerry, and the Western media have told us was one with which we could negotiate in good faith. At one point John Kerry was even actively undermining official US foreign policy when the other team was in office.
3. Human trafficking sting nabs hundreds
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd has been working very hard to make his county a difficult place to be a criminal. From time to time, his announcements and arrests become national stories.
This time, it was due to the success of the very simply named, ‘Operation Traffic Stop’.
There were a total of 213 arrests, with charges for those who solicited, those who sold, and those who profited from the prostitution of others.
“Not only did we arrest more suspects during this single operation than we have ever arrested before, we identified 24 human trafficking victims – the highest number of victims we’ve ever rescued during one of these investigations,” said Sheriff Judd. “The valuable relationships that we have with the social services organizations who join us in these operations make it possible for these women to get help and be emancipated from this way of life.”
Of the 111 sex workers arrested, 24 were identified as possible human trafficking victims, with 14 of them being migrants from Cuba and Mexico. Some of the victims claimed that they were forced into prostitution to pay off debts owed to those who smuggled them into the country, with their families being threatened if they refused. — Breaking911
We bring the reader’s attention to that last statement, in which victims were migrants extorted into paying debts to the cartels for the ‘favor’ of smuggling them over the border.
The possible implications of that dynamic, in light of criminal cartels having facilitated more than 5 million illegal entries, are staggering.
4. Large Soros-connected dark money group dropped by credit card processors over terror ties
Alliance for Global Justice scrambles to readjust funding strategies after the anti-capitalist group was shown to have ties to Palestinian terror networks. They, and therefore the 140 left-wing initiatives reliant on them, can no longer make use of Salsa Labs Credit Card processing.
Itself an offshoot of the Nicaragua Sandinista regime, Influence Watch describes them as sympthetic to Castro, Maduro, North Korea, and Palestinian extremists. They get funding from Open Society Foundations, Tides Foundation, Arca Foundation, Surdna Foundation, Public Welfare Foundation, and the Brightwater Fund while supporting. among other causes, the elimination of the State of Israel.
AFGJ had a budget in 2021 of $56M, and received over $254,000 in Covid relief dollars which were forgiven by Biden in 2021.
Now that credit card processing is no longer an option, they have moved their appeal to old-school donations by way of paper checks.
5. Biden lampooned over hobby balloon revelations
It has come to light that a likely culprit for the mystery objects shot down by our military were not, in fact, foreign entities at all, but science projects by hobbyists. These are kits that can be put together for anywhere between twelve and two hundred dollars.
One club, specifically the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, has compelling reasons to believe their recently-gone-missing balloon may have been among the several mystery objects shot out of the sky.
Ted Cruz made the obvious point, that Biden needs to stand before the American people and tell them if it is true. He was one of many Biden critics who got a couple of digs in by framing it in humor:
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