A "central figure" in a $250 million Minnesota welfare fraud scheme was arrestedin Somalia this week after spending nearly four years on the run, the Justice Department announced Friday.

Abdikerm Eidleh, 42, was one of the original suspects indicted in connection to the nation's largest COVID-19 fraud scheme - the infamous Feeding Our Future scam. He was taken into custody in Somalia's capital city of Mogadishu on Thursday, according to prosecutors.

In September 2022, Eidleh was hit with 31 counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit federal programs bribery, federal programs bribery, conspiracy to commit money laundering and money laundering for his alleged role in the scheme to steal pandemic relief funds from a federal program meant to feed hungry children in need.

Mass protests broke out in Beirut on Friday into Saturday, with supporters of Hezbollah voicing their outrage at the Lebanese government having just signed a 'trilateral peace framework' with Israel and the United States, despite the IDF occupation of southern territory and sporadic Israeli bombings persisting.

Hundreds of motorcycle-riding supporters were also seen circling streets through central Beirut, near the parliament building and along airport road. In some cases protesters blocked roads near sensitive government buildings, and were seen burning tires. The national army has set up checkpoints, seeking to return order, but in some cases didn't immediately move to disperse the protests.

"We certainly condemn and denounce this shameful agreement," a 30-year old protester from Blida, a town in southern Lebanon that Israel has occupied for months, told the NY Times. One criticism of the preliminary deal is that the timeline for Israel's withdrawal is not fixed, instead being based on how quickly Hezbollah can be disarmed.

According to Mr. Kassem: "The enemy is being granted freedom of movement and the ability to make whatever decisions it wants in the south."

Poles are divided in their assessment of Ukraine's possible accession to the European Union. However, according to the latest IBRiS poll conducted for Radio ZET, the voices of those opposed to accession dominate.

A total of 35.3 percent of those surveyed voted in favor of Ukraine's admission to the European Union. Strong support for such a solution was expressed by 8.4 percent of respondents, while 26.9 percent replied "rather yes."

There are definitely more opponents of Ukraine's membership in the EU. A total of 59.7 percent of those questioned took a negative position. The answer "probably not" was given by 27.4 percent of respondents, and "definitely not" by as many as 32.3 percent.

Another 5 percent remain undecided — respondents who chose the answer "I don't know" or "hard to say."

On June 15th, two young Ukrainians were found guilty of conspiring to carry out arson attacks on two homes and a vehicle intimately connected to former British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Curious details of the trial unreported in the mainstream, and a post-conviction propaganda blitz led by the BBC blaming Russian intelligence actors for directing the pair's incendiary crimes, raise a number of ominous questions about precisely what happened, and why. The scandal has only grown more perplexing in the wake of Starmer's resignation.

On May 8th 2025, a Toyota car previously owned by Starmer was set ablaze in north London, not far from where he'd previously resided. Three days later, flats in Islington Starmer managed years previously were similarly put to the torch, then on May 12th a home where he once resided now leased to his sister-in-law was also set ablaze. That same day, 22-year-old Ukrainian national Roman Lavrynovych was arrested by British police for his purported role in the arson.

Despite the Prime Minister being personally targeted in a highly organised, repeated and potentially lethal manner, major news outlets within and without the country exhibited bizarrely muted interest. Starmer describing the incidents in parliament on May 14th that year as "an attack on all of us, on democracy and the values that we stand for" - condemnation Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians echoed - elicited some headlines. However, basic facts about the case, and discussion of its obvious potential national security implications, remained stubbornly unforthcoming.

This seeming omerta endured when on May 17th, 26-year-old Ukrainian-born Romanian national Stanislav Carpiuc was arrested at Luton airport for his role in the attacks, attempting to flee. Four days later, 34-year-old Ukrainian national Petro Pochynok was arrested, accused of conspiring with Carpiuc, Lavrynovych, "and others unknown to damage by fire property belonging to another." The names and nationalities of two further individuals arrested in the case - a 48-year-old on June 2nd that year, and a 19-year-old in January 2026 - were never released.

Police investigations into these anonymous suspects were eventually dropped, without fanfare. Who they were, why they became subjects of interest, and the grounds for their elimination from enquiries, hasn't been revealed and wasn't discussed at trial. There were apparently no "others unknown" with whom Carpiuc and Lavrynovych colluded after all. Pochynok was acquitted, successfully arguing he was "deceived" by the pair and had no idea they intended to start fires with his help. Notably, all three were charged with mere arson, not national security offences.

This aspect is striking, given when the trial commenced on April 28th, prosecution lawyers immediately declared the trio's arson assault was directed by a Russian-speaking Telegram user, for cash. The December 2023 National Security Act grants British authorities sweeping powers to severely punish people who break the law at the behest of "hostile states". Repeatedly since the Starmer-linked attacks, British citizens have been jailed for national security offences after being recruited to commit crimes, including arson, via Telegram by supposed Russian actors.

All along, alarm has been sounded about Iranian intelligence using Telegram for similar purposes, in particular "[hiring] anyone who can harm Israeli interests or individuals" in Britain. Yet, a coordinated criminal conspiracy targeting the Prime Minister, which required access to sensitive private information on Starmer not readily available to average citizens, allegedly orchestrated by a malign foreign actor, mysteriously didn't qualify as national security-related. Moreover, jurors and the public alike were strictly prohibited from learning anything about the group's alleged recruiter.

I almost feel sorry for leftists. Almost. But I don't. The reason is simple: so much of what they say and do runs counter to the core principles on which this country was founded.

Over the years, I've challenged dozens of left-leaning friends and acquaintances to name the top ten things the political left has done in the last quarter-century to make America safer, stronger, more prosperous, or more united. I have yet to receive a substantive answer. One person offered a list that included ObamaCare and the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA). A quick review shows that, like many Democrat initiatives, these created more problems than they solved.

What makes me almost pity the left is that most leftists I know personally are decent, pleasant people -- so long as the conversation stays light: weather, movies, or sports. Venture into politics or culture, however, and the discussion turns surreal, like chatting with the Mad Hatter.

The left's long march through the institutions has created a culture that champions socialism under the misguided assumption that it is moral.

In 1976, Margaret Thatcher said during a television interview,

"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money."

Over the years, that quote has been whittled down to the renowned proverb: The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.

This is a powerful argument against socialism. Even better, it has been validated time and time again, most notably when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed in 1991. The Soviet Union was an economic basket case, and the whole world witnessed its demise.

But socialism has an even bigger problem: it is immoral.

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has long been one of the most radical labor organizations in the country from its insistence on teachers being subsidized in political protests to members praising the former Communist regime in Venezuela. Now, with the Illinois Federation of Teachers, the CTU is demanding yet another massive public infusion of money despite the dismal performance of its members in actually improving scores for Chicago children. They are calling for a special session and billions in more funding.

We have previously discussed how teacher unions have become virtual slush funds for Democratic Party operations, spending over a billion dollars on Democratic candidates and campaigns. In return, Democratic politicians have agreed to bloated pension and compensation packages that have driven cities and states into the red, particularly in Illinois.

It is a closed loop of influence and excess. The teacher unions funded Democratic campaigns and Democratic politicians then sign off on windfall union contracts without forcing any improvements for the actual students.

Every civilization develops a moral language — a set of virtues that it celebrates and vices that it condemns. For much of human history, societies lauded courage, resilience, self-sacrifice, duty, honor, and perseverance. The individual who overcame adversity was admired. The citizen who contributed more than he consumed was esteemed. To endure hardship without surrendering one's dignity was considered noble.

Increasingly, however, modern Western society appears to have inverted this hierarchy.

Today, victimhood often functions as a form of social capital.

To claim injury is to acquire moral authority. To assert oppression is frequently to gain status. Public discourse, particularly within academia, media, politics, and social media, often rewards not those who demonstrate resilience, but those who can most persuasively locate themselves within narratives of historical or contemporary disadvantage.

On his final day at the company, a Microsoft worker in Italy has sent out an email to thousands of colleagues informing them of how the corporation operates as the technological backbone of the Gaza holocaust perpetrated by so-called 'Israel'.

The hero, known to the Canary as 'Nour', said:

After nearly two years as a Critical Environment Technician at a Microsoft Italy data center, I choose to resign. This is because, right now, Microsoft is massively expanding its European data centers (aka mass surveillance centers) to use Palestine as a laboratory for its experimental digital weaponry. For the past 994 days, Microsoft has powered the genocide of our people in Palestine, and the company's European data centers are fundamental to how Microsoft abets crimes against humanity.

He later continued:

On August 6, 2025, reports exposed how Microsoft hosted 11,500 terabytes of intercepted Palestinian phone call data in the Microsoft Netherlands data center, with additional data stored in the Irish data center, amounting to 200 million hours of audio. This trove of mass surveillance data has been described as "one of the world's largest and most intrusive collections of surveillance data over a single population group."

This data is used by the Israeli military to identify targets for airstrikes, arrests, and blackmail from the entire Palestinian population. It is also used as training data to build AI-targeting programs. These programs invent arbitrary justifications to murder non-combatants, intentionally adding civilian workers to the Israeli military's generated "target bank"; the programs also facilitate massacres of entire families at once.

An Israeli citizen has been sentenced in the US after pleading guilty to conspiring to steal a trade secret from an Arizona-based semiconductor technology company, in a case that adds to long-standing practice of Israeli-linked espionage.

Guy Galanti, 48, an Israeli citizen who lived in Scottsdale, Arizona, received a sentence of time served and three years of supervised release from US District Judge G. Murray Snow, the US Attorney's Office for the District of Arizona announced on Tuesday. Galanti had remained in custody since his arrest in September 2025 and pleaded guilty on 26 May, 2026, to conspiring to steal a trade secret.

According to prosecutors, Galanti worked as a senior-level manager for Green Technology Investments (GTI), a Scottsdale company that services semiconductor testing machines and sells remanufactured machines with newly designed functions.

The Justice Department said Galanti conspired between January and August 2025 with another individual to steal GTI's newly created "Glass Detect Design", a proprietary system intended to allow a semiconductor testing machine to detect microscopic defects on glass semiconductor wafers rather than silicon ones. His alleged co-conspirator operated a Taiwanese company that competed directly with GTI.