[KhaamaPress] Haroon Hakimi, an Afghan citizen accused of sexual assault, was officially declared innocent by a court in Virginia, USA.
The trial took place on Friday, December 20, in the state of Virginia, where a 12-member jury found Hakimi not guilty of the sexual assault charges brought against him.
Hakimi had been accused of sexual assault by a 27-year-old woman residing in Virginia in late February last year.
During the trial, the accusations could not be substantiated, and the court dismissed all charges filed against Hakimi.
Following his acquittal, Hakimi told the Etilaat Roz newspaper, "The accusation of sexual assault against me was a blatant lie. I’m glad the court recognized my innocence."
He also announced his intention to file a defamation lawsuit against the woman who accused him, seeking to restore his reputation in the courts of Virginia.
It is noteworthy that Haroon Hakimi previously served as the Deputy Minister of Information and Culture in the former Afghanistan government.
Hakimi’s case underscores the importance of due process and the judicial system’s role in determining the truth. His acquittal highlights the significance of safeguarding individual rights and ensuring justice in sensitive cases.
Here’s a local news report following the original complaint back in March:
At 4:49 p.m. on March 8, officers responded to investigate a sexual assault that reportedly occurred in the 12200 block of Granada Way in Woodbridge earlier that day.
Police say the victim, a 27-year-old woman, reported that she had recently met 33-year-old Mohd Haroon Hakimi and while at his home on Granada Way, Hakimi raped her.
She eventually was able to leave the home and contacted the police.
Hakimi was arrested and charged on March 9. His bond status and first court appearance date are not known at this time.
#1
Lately, being found Innocent or Guilty has had little to do with the real case or evidence.
Mainly due to Liberal funded DA's, jury pool locations, carefully gleaned Jury Duty notifications based on Political Party Voter Registration, the selection process, behind the scenes tampering and the usual MSM cycle of pre-indoctrination.
#3
Found 'Not Guilty,' meaning there was insufficient proof - perhaps reasonable doubt that it was consensual. Honestly, that's a tough hurdle in cases like this.
[DM] Trump, 78, made the stark declaration Sunday night as he announced his pick for ambassador to Denmark, PayPal co-founder Ken Howery, who also served as the US ambassador to Sweden from 2019 to 2021.
'For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,' he wrote on Truth Social.
#4
I think the Panama thing was just a conversational hand grenade tossed into the room to get a discussion started. I would be unsurprised if Greenland as the 57th state was not the intended subject.
#6
The Trans-Panama Pipeline was opened in 1982 as an alternative to carry crude oil from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean.[1] In 1980s in average twenty supertankers, each with a capacity of a million barrels of crude oil, arrived each month at Puerto Armuelles from Valdez in Alaska, for transportation to the Caribbean Sea.[2] Between 1982 and 1996 the pipeline transported 2.7 billion barrels of Alaskan oil to the U.S. Gulf Coast ports. After declining Alaskan oil shipments, the pipeline was closed in 1996. In November 2003, the Trans-Panama pipeline was re-opened for transportation of Ecuadorian crude oil to U.S. Gulf ports.[3]
[IsraelTimes] Kay Granger, 81, is reportedly tracked down facility for dementia patients after missing all House votes since July; her office admits health issues, denies she’s in memory care
Kay Granger, a sitting member of the US House of Representatives for Texas, was recently found to have been living in an assisted living facility for dementia patients for the past few months, after being missing from her Washington, DC, office since July.
The Republican Party representative has been in Congress for 27 years but has missed every vote in the House since July.
A local Texas news hound for the Dallas Express newspaper, Carlos Turcios, tracked down her whereabouts after her constituents reported that both her DC and local offices had not answered phone calls for months and that she was placed in a memory care facility after being found wandering.
Reporters visited the Tradition-Clearfork facility in Fort Worth, and employees confirmed that Granger is a resident there.
On Sunday, after the report was published, Granger’s office admitted that she has been having health issues, but denied that she is in memory care.
Granger’s office quoted her as saying that "as many of my family, friends and colleagues have known, I have been navigating some unforeseen health challenges over the past year," and that her "health challenges have progressed, making frequent travel to Washington both difficult and unpredictable."
Granger’s son told CBS News that she is a resident at the Fort Worth facility, but said she is in the "independent wing" and not in memory care. However,
ars longa, vita brevis... he admitted that his mother has been "having some dementia issues late in the year."
Granger is 81 years old, and is set to retire from Congress in January.
She has served as the representative for Texas’s 17th district since 1997, when she was elected as the first woman to represent Texas in the House of Representatives.
[Breitbart] A lobby group for Indian H-1B contract workers is trying to use the GOP’s planned 2025 reconciliation bill to get fast-track green cards for roughly 1.2 million Indian citizens living in the United States.
The lobbying effort is built on the hope that President Donald Trump’s West Coast business allies will defeat the rising skepticism of many voters and GOP legislators, many zig-zagging Democratic legislators, and President Donald Trump’s American-first mandate.
“There’s a blank slate at the moment,” immigration attorney Leon Fresco told many of the Indian migrants during a phone conference hosted by the Immigration Voice lobby group on Sunday night.
“We don’t know this could literally be the best of times, or this could literally be the worst of times,” said Fresco, who worked as an advisor for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as the “Gang of Eight” amnesty was being drafted in 2013.
“We believe that the time is now as the upcoming new administration takes over,” said Aman Kapoor, the president of Immigration Voice. “There is new energy, there is now a desire to make changes, and we want to be part of that change.”
There is a trickle of media reports about the emerging clash between West Coast investors and Trump’s pro-American populist deputies. But that coverage focuses on demands by a smaller number of Silicon Valley investors who want more imported elite software writers to accelerate their start-up companies toward buyouts on Wall Street.
Unfortunately for the Valley’s start-up investors, experienced American software experts want to be paid with equity shares from the Wall Street buyouts. Instead of that free-market bargain, many investors prefer to hoard their shares by hiring foreign experts who can be paid with government-provided green cards and citizenship.
The renewed Indian push for green cards emerges from a different source — the million-plus Indians who have been imported for routine jobs in technology, accounting, healthcare, recruitment, or management at Fortune 500 firms and their subcontractors.
Advocates in D.C. are hiding that elite vs routine distinction.
“If the US is to stay competitive, Elon must win this ideological fight [for migrants] over [Trump aide] Stephen Miller,” immigration lawyer Greg Siskind tweeted on December 13.
“In the same way that it took Nixon to go to China — because he was tough on China — President Trump may have an interesting opportunity” to get the GOP support for more white-collar migration, Vivek Chilukuri, a former Democratic staffer now at the Center for a New American Security think tank, told Politico on December 1.
Many Indian migrants are praying for intervention by Musk, who once had an H-1B visa as he migrated step-by-step from South Africa to the United States.
Many Indian migrants are praying for intervention by Musk, who once had an H-1B visa as he migrated step-by-step from South Africa to the United States.
Musk, however, zig-zags between his economic goal of mass migration and his political goal of preserving Americans’ entrepreneurial and high-trust culture.
India’s government heavily promotes Indians for these multi-year visas. In 2023, roughly 69,000 low-skilled, mid-skilled, or high-skilled Indians got approved for H-1B visas, and another 210,000 got three-year extensions on their visas, according to Indian reports.
Those numbers suggest that at least 600,000 Indian H-1B workers now hold white-collar jobs needed by American graduates. More than 500,000 other Indians hold jobs via other visa programs.
Critically, some of these white-collar migration programs also allow executives to dangle the huge deferred bonus of green cards and citizenship for their visa workers and all of their descendants.
Since 1990, that dangled bonus has pulled millions of Indian graduates into a wide variety of white-collar jobs where they work long hours at low wages to win the approval of their executives who have the remarkable power to nominate them for U.S. citizenship — or to send them home in disgrace.
This inflow is cheered on by executives who can convert every $1 in payroll savings into $20 of additional stock value.
…proud that Dr. Jill Biden is a 2006 alumna of their EdD program…
on Dec. 16 settled with NASA after allegedly failing to disclose a professor’s ties to and support from the Chinese regime.
In 2020, NASA awarded the university a grant to establish a research center focused on the use of satellites to collect weather, climate, and ocean data, to better understand how sea-level rise affects U.S. coastlines.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, the university certified that no funds from the NASA grant would be “used to participate, collaborate, or coordinate with the People’s Republic of China.” However, the university allegedly failed to disclose that the center’s lead researcher, Xiao-Hai Yan, had significant ties to Chinese institutions and funding while the grant was active. Funny. He sounds Yiddish
That’s a Kaifeng name, right? ;-)
The settlement revealed that between June 2020 and August 2023, Yan was simultaneously a faculty member at Xiamen University, one of the 75 institutions directly controlled by China’s Ministry of Education. During this period, Yan also applied for and received funding from the National Science Foundation of China and China’s State Oceanic Administration.
Additionally, Yan was a participant in China’s Thousand Talents Program, an initiative offering lucrative financial benefits and research advantages to recruit scientists from abroad to bolster China’s economic and military development. The program has raised national security and academic integrity concerns in the United States and has prompted scores of federal investigations and prosecutions over recent years.
The university agreed to pay $715,580 to the U.S. government to resolve the allegations but did not admit to any wrongdoing.
The university said it is “proud of its strong record of compliance” in overseeing sponsored research and remains committed to “promoting and safeguarding the responsible pursuit of scientific research.”
“The university relies, in part, on the candor and complete disclosures of individuals involved in the grant process,” a spokesperson said in a statement to The Epoch Times. “As noted in the release, this settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing by the university, but rather a strategic decision to avoid costly and distracting litigation.”
The settlement was a coordinated effort between the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware and NASA’s Office of Inspector General, the space agency’s internal watchdog.
“Federal law requires universities, institutions, and researchers to make disclosures, including certain foreign affiliations, when applying for grants so that the granting agencies can assess whether to fund their research and development,” David Weiss, U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware, said in a statement.
The FBI has detailed how the Chinese government uses expert recruitment programs, such as the Thousand Talents Program, to attract individuals working or studying abroad who have access to high-priority research or proprietary technologies. The FBI estimates that China operates more than 200 similar initiatives, with some funded unwittingly by U.S. taxpayers.
A 2019 Senate subcommittee report also highlighted numerous instances of misconduct by Thousand Talents participants. These include downloading sensitive research files before leaving for China, falsifying information on U.S. grant applications, and failing to disclose funding received from Beijing.
One of the most high-profile cases in recent years involved Xiang Haitao, a former researcher at Monsanto. The Thousand Talents participant was arrested in November 2019 after returning to the United States from China, where he had worked on using a proprietary U.S. technology to boost farm output. In 2022, Xiang was sentenced to 29 months in prison, three years of supervised release, and a $150,000 fine for conspiring to commit economic espionage.
Another widely reported case was that of Charles Lieber, former chair of Harvard University’s chemistry department. Lieber was arrested on campus in 2020 and charged with lying to federal investigators about his involvement in the Thousand Talents Program and his undisclosed ties to the Wuhan University of Technology. In April 2023, he was sentenced to two days in jail with two years of supervised release and received a $50,000 fine.
[KhaamaPress] The "Afghanistan Polio-Free" organization announced that a new round of polio ...Poliomyelitis is a disease caused by infection with the poliovirus. Between 1840 and the 1950s, polio was a worldwide epidemic. Since the development of polio vaccines the disease has been largely wiped out in the civilized world. However, since the vaccine is known to make Moslem pee-pees shrink and renders females sterile, bookish, and unsubmissive it is not widely used by the turban and automatic weapons set. Currently the disease is only found in Pakistain and Afghanistain... vaccinations will begin on Monday, December 23, in various provinces of Afghanistan. The organization did not specify which provinces will be targeted or how long the vaccination campaign will last.
Afghanistan and Pakistain are the only two countries in the world where polio has not been eradicated.
On December 4, 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a statement reporting a 283% increase in polio cases in Afghanistan. According to the WHO, the number of positive environmental samples for wild poliovirus type 1 in Afghanistan in 2024 reached 84, compared to 62 cases in 2023.
The Taliban ...Arabic for students... ’s Ministry of Health claimed in November 2024 that no new cases of polio had been reported in Afghanistan for the year.
On Monday, September 18, the Taliban administration suspended the polio vaccination campaign in Afghanistan for about one and a half months.
The announcement of the new vaccination campaign is a positive step in the ongoing efforts to combat polio in Afghanistan. However,
those who apply themselves too closely to little things often become incapable of great things... the sharp rise in cases highlighted by the World Health Organization underscores the challenges faced by the country in its fight against this disease. Continued efforts and broader coverage of vaccination programs are essential to prevent further outbreaks and move closer to the global goal of polio eradication.
The suspension of the vaccination program earlier this year also points to the political and logistical hurdles that can impede public health initiatives in Afghanistan. For the country to make meaningful progress in eliminating polio, it will require coordinated efforts from both the local authorities and international health organizations, alongside stable and secure conditions that allow for the widespread delivery of vaccines.
[AFRICANEWS] The corpse count from stampedes during two separate Christmas charity events in Nigeria has risen to 32, police said on Sunday.
The victims, include at least four children.
As the country grapples with the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation, large crowds had gathered to collect food and clothing distributed at the Christmas charity events.
The dead included 22 people in southeastern Anambra state's Okija town, where a philanthropist had organised a food distribution, local police said.
Ten others died in the capital, Abuja, during a similar church-organised event.
''They opened the gate this morning, everybody just rushed in, then some people fell, and they started marching on people. They marched on them till they died," said one eyewitness.
''We discovered that a lot of people were trampled upon. It took a lot of effort to be able to move them immediately to the hospital,'' said Tunji Disu, head of the Intelligence Response Team in Abuja.
Police said they are investigating the two incidents, which took place only days after dozens of children were killed during a crush at a holiday funfair in Ibadan.
The organisers had promised to give cash handouts and food.
Africa's most populous country is seeing a growing trend by local organizations, churches, and individuals to organise charity events ahead of Christmas to ease economic hardship.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/23/2024 00:08 ||
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Cybersecurity is still a Wild West, as far as I can tell — everyone making it up as they go along, while the laws try to catch up. And then there’s national security stuff…
[IsraelTimes] ‘We’re proud to have stood up against NSO,’ says WhatsApp head; expert says ruling ‘makes it clear that NSO Group is in fact responsible for breaking numerous laws’
A US judge ruled on Friday in favor of WhatsApp in a lawsuit accusing Israel’s NSO Group of exploiting a bug in the messaging app to install spy software allowing unauthorized surveillance.
US District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in Oakland, California, granted a motion by WhatsApp and found NSO liable for hacking and breach of contract.
The case will now proceed to a trial only on the issue of damages, Hamilton said. NSO Group did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, said the ruling is a win for privacy.
“We spent five years presenting our case because we firmly believe that spyware companies could not hide behind immunity or avoid accountability for their unlawful actions,” Cathcart said in a social media post.
“Surveillance companies should be on notice that illegal spying will not be tolerated.”
A WhatsApp spokesperson said they were grateful for the decision.
“We’re proud to have stood up against NSO and thankful to the many organizations that were supportive of this case. WhatsApp will never stop working to protect people’s private communication,” he said.
Cybersecurity experts welcomed the judgment.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher with Canadian internet watchdog Citizen Lab — which first brought to light NSO’s Pegasus spyware in 2016 — called the judgment a landmark ruling with “huge implications for the spyware industry.”
“The entire industry has hidden behind the claim that whatever their customers do with their hacking tools, it’s not their responsibility,” he said in an instant message. “Today’s ruling makes it clear that NSO Group is in fact responsible for breaking numerous laws.”
WhatsApp in 2019 sued NSO, seeking an injunction and damages, accusing it of accessing WhatsApp servers without permission six months earlier to install the Pegasus software on victims’ mobile devices. The lawsuit alleged the intrusion allowed the surveillance of 1,400 people, including journalists, human rights activists and dissidents.
NSO had argued that Pegasus helps law enforcement and intelligence agencies fight crime and protect national security and that its technology is intended to help catch terrorists, pedophiles and hardened criminals.
NSO appealed a trial judge’s 2020 refusal to award it “conduct-based immunity,” a common law doctrine protecting foreign officials acting in their official capacity.
Upholding that ruling in 2021, the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals called it an “easy case” because NSO’s mere licensing of Pegasus and offering technical support did not shield it from liability under a federal law called the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which took precedence over common law.
The US Supreme Court last year turned away NSO’s appeal of the lower court’s decision, allowing the lawsuit to proceed.
[IsraelTimes] US President-elect Donald Trump ...The man who was so stupid he beat fourteen professional politicians, a former tech CEO, and a brain surgeon for the Republican nomination in 2016, then beat The Smartest Woman in the World in the general election. Then he beat Kamala while dodging bullets... ’s transition team is pushing to pull America out of the World Health Organization on its first day in office, the Financial Times reports, citing public health experts concerned about the potential impact.
"America is going to leave a huge vacuum in global health financing and leadership. I see no one that is going to fill the breach," one of the experts is quoted as saying.
The US is the WHO’s largest donor, contributing about 16 percent of its funding in 2022-23, according to the Financial Times.
Trump cut ties with WHO in 2020 during his first term, charging that the UN public health agency had failed to do enough to combat the initial spread of the novel coronavirus (aka COVID19 or Chinese Plague)
...the twenty first century equivalent of bubonic plague, only instead of killing off a third of the population of Europe it kills 3.4 percent of those who notice they have it. It seems to be fond of the elderly, especially Iranian politicians and holy men... .
He recently announced vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his nominee to run the US Department of Health and Human Services.
#1
Given some of W.H.O.'s its biggest verbal supporters are the Globalist Population Control Elites. The W.H.O. still has the US Taxpayers as its #1 supporter, with about $110M per year, or about 24% of the entire WHO budget?
The W.H.O.'s handling of the recent Planned-demic and the notable collection of US election year sudden New disease "Warnings". Has cast serious doubt, about its focus on being strictly a World Health Org.
BUT if the USA pulls it 23% funding then CCP becomes the #1 donor and agenda director.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[IsraelTimes] Kay Granger, 81, is reportedly tracked down facility for dementia patients after missing all House votes since July; her office admits health issues, denies she’s in memory care
...Arabic for 
