Espionage case aided last December when an FBI official received a package sent to the foreign country containing U.S. Navy documents, a letter and instructions for how to conduct encrypted communications with the defendant, unsealed charges show.
The U.S. Justice Department unsealed a criminal complaint Sunday alleging that a Navy engineer and his wife repeatedly tried to pass secrets about U.S. nuclear submarines to a foreign power in a plot thwarted by an undercover FBI agent.
Jonathan Toebbe, 42, and his wife Diana, 45, both of Annapolis, Md,. were arrested Saturday in West Virginia by the FBI and Naval Criminal Investigative Service on espionage-related charges of violating the Atomic Energy Act, officials said.
Jonathan Toebbe worked as a nuclear engineer for the Navy’s Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, and his wife participated in the plot as a witting accomplice, including functioning as a “lookout” for one of the alleged deliveries of secrets, the criminal complaint said. You can read the court document here.
The couple is accused of trying to sell information “known as Restricted Data concerning the design of nuclear-powered warships to a person they believed was a representative of a foreign power. In actuality, that person was an undercover FBI agent,” DOJ said in a press release.
The criminal complaint did not identify the foreign power but said the couple sought to be paid in cryptocurrency.
The case was aided last December when an FBI official received a package from a foreign official that had been sent to the foreign country containing U.S. Navy documents, a letter and instructions for how to conduct encrypted communications with the defendants, the unsealed charges show.
The criminal complaint contains chilling communications the couple allegedly sent to the undercover FBI agent thinking he was a foreign country’s official, including one in March that laid out details for paying for the theft of the submarine secrets.
“I propose exchanging gifts electronically, for mutual safety,” the encrypted communication stated. “I can upload documents to a secure cloud storage account~, encrypted with the key I have provided you. You can send me a suitable g~ft in Monero cryptocurrency to an address I will provide. 100,000 usd should be enough to prove to me that you are not an unwelcome third party looking to make trouble for me. When I have confirmed receipt of your gift, I will provide you the download link.”
The complaint detailed two instances when Toebbe, aided by his wife, delivered encrypted secrets to the FBI undercover in exchange for cryptocurrency payments, once in June with an “SD card concealed within half a peanut butter sandwich” and again in August when an SD card was concealed in a chewing gum package.
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Sunday hailed the operation that led to the arrest.
“The work of the FBI, Department of Justice prosecutors, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Department of Energy was critical in thwarting the plot charged in the complaint and taking this first step in bringing the perpetrators to justice,” he said.
California took another step toward its goal of ridding the state of all gas-powered engines thanks to a new bill signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday.
The new law will ban the sale of all off-road, gas-powered engines, including generators, lawn equipment, pressure washers, chainsaws, weed trimmers, and even golf carts. Under the new law , these machines must be zero-emissions, meaning they will have to be either battery-powered or plug-in, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“This is a pretty modest approach to trying to limit the massive amounts of pollution that this equipment emits, not to mention the health impact on the workers who are using it constantly,” Marc Berman, the bill’s author, told the outlet. “It’s amazing how people react when they learn how much this equipment pollutes, and how much smog forming and climate changing emissions that small off-road engine equipment creates.”
The new law is expected to affect nearly 50,000 small businesses . California’s budget includes $30 million to help professional landscapers and gardeners quit using gas-powered equipment, but even then, the budget is still not capable of bearing the full financial burden.
The National Association of Landscape Professionals also noted how zero-emission commercial equipment is both more expensive and less efficient than gas-powered equipment. A gas-powered riding lawn mower costs between $7,000-$11,000 while the zero-emissions version costs more than twice that amount, according to the outlet.
The new rule will be implemented by January 2024, or as soon as regulators determine is “feasible,” whichever date is later. The California Air Resources Board has already started working on executing the law, which is a lengthy process scheduled to conclude early next year, per the outlet.
Newsom banning futures purchases of gas-powered lawn equipment continues his pursuit of making California run exclusively on green energy. The governor signed an executive order in September 2020 mandating that all of California’s new car sales be zero-emissions models by 2035. The order also requires new bus and truck sales, whenever feasible, to be zero-emissions vehicles by 2045.
Legendary actor Morgan Freeman is not down with the “defund the police” movement.
What are the details?
In a recent interview, Freeman rejected the premise that police officers are bad people and that money needs to be shifted away from police departments.
“I’m not in the least bit for defunding the police,” Freeman said in an interview with Black Enterprise’s Selena Hill.
“Police work is, aside from all the negativity around it, it is very necessary for us to have them, and most of them are guys that are doing their job. They’re going about their day-to-day jobs,” Freeman added. “I know some policemen who would never even pull their guns, except in a range, that sort of thing.”
Freeman was promoting his new movie, “The Killing Of Kenneth Chamberlain,” for which he served as an executive producer. The movie chronicles the tragic real-life story of Chamberlain, who was killed by police in November 2011. Chamberlain, a New York resident, was a veteran of the Marine Corps.
Frankie Faison, who portrays Chamberlain in the film, appeared alongside Freeman in the interview, and affirmed Freeman’s perspective.
“Well, I agree with Morgan,” Faison told Hill. “I’m certainly not in favor of defunding the policemen.”
Both men, however, expressed the need to address police violence, and agreed that, as Faison said, their experience as wealthy, successful Hollywood personalities means “police treat you differently.”
Interestingly, Freeman and Faison expressed their view to an interviewer who supports the “defund the police” movement.
“To be clear, I’m an avid supporter of defunding police and the ideas behind the #AbolishThePolice movement,” Hill wrote on her Instagram post.
Anything else?
Freeman joined forces with a criminal justice professor to donate $1 million to the University of Mississippi earlier this year to establish the Center for Evidence-Based Policing and Reform.
“Look at the past year in our country – that sums it up,” Freeman said, USA Today reported. “It’s time we are equipping police officers with training and ensuring ‘law enforcement’ is not defined only as a gun and a stick. Policing should be about that phrase ‘To Serve’ found on most law enforcement vehicles.”
Britain and other Western nations should welcome declining populations and ageing demographics as it will help them meet climate change goals, the former chairman of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has argued.
In a report from Population Matters entitled Smaller Families and Ageing Populations, Lord Adair Turner, the chairman of the UK Energy Transitions Commission and former head of the FSA, argued that declining native populations will enhance prosperity.
“The biggest reason to welcome this demographic shift is that it results from the free choice of empowered people, and in particular women,” Lord Adair wrote.
“But ceasing endless population growth will also reduce humanity’s future press on the natural environment, ease the challenge of adequate housing provision, and make it easier to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions while supporting prosperity growth in developing countries.”
The report said that Britain could cut carbon emissions by approximately 38 million tonnes by 2035 if it experiences a similar decline in population to Japan, which is expected to see a drop of 9.6 per cent in population from 125m to 113.1m people by 2035.
In contrast, the United Kingdom is expected to see an increase in the population of 5.2 per cent over the same time period to 71.1 million people, driven in large part by mass migration.
Aside from the supposed benefits of falls in carbon emissions, a drop in population would also cut the need for the construction of 4 million new homes in Britain, saving some 435,000 acres of land from developers.
The green movement has long hailed population control as a means of saving the world from the so-called climate crisis. In a notable example, the founder of CNN, Ted Turner, called for a Chinese-style one-child policy in order to save the planet from climate change in 2010.
Turner — himself a father of five — also suggested that “fertility rights” could be sold in order to incentivise poor people not to have children by profiting from the sale of their child credit to wealthier people.
Other prominent leftist figures in the West, including NY Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. have all suggested that they may have fewer children than they would have otherwise if not for climate change.
"We commend the Duke and Duchess for taking this enlightened decision, and for affirming that a smaller family is also a happy family," said Population Matters https://t.co/ZV0BO7tFhx
The report acknowledged that a declining and ageing population would result in workforce shortages, but pointed to the use of automation and migration as possible solutions to the problem as well as increasing retirement ages.
“With more than 750 million people willing to move from their countries to others, migration of workers across borders can help address shortage of labour in some circumstances, as well as boosting tax revenues and pension funds.”
The report did add a caveat that migration could lead to some “negative effects” on both the source and destination countries, including migrants driving down wages by increasing the labour pool and in many cases willing to work for lower salaries.
While the report did highlight some of the negative ramifications of migration, it failed to note that the vast majority of population growth in Britain in recent years has come as a result of mass migration policies.
A report from the Migration Watch UK think tank estimated that “about 90 per cent of population growth between 2017 and 2019 was linked to the impact of arrivals from abroad and their subsequent UK-born children”.
Mass migration over the past twenty years has seen the foreign-born population hit nine million and the ethnic minority population rise to 13 million, which Migration Watch warned could lead to a breakdown of social cohesion.
As the foreign population soared in Britain, the native population has faced drastic declines, with the fertility rates falling last year to half that seen during the post-war baby boom.
UK: One Third of Babies Born to Foreign Mothers, as Fertility Rate Falls to Lowest Level Since Before World War II https://t.co/xrTG5fBqWU
The far-left and Mainstream Media claim there were no ‘irregularities’ found in the audit of the 2020 Election results from Maricopa County. These claims are simply not true.
Far-left media outlet Slate claimed on Thursday that there was “no evidence of election irregularities” in the audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 Election results. This is simply false.
Is it any surprise that two of the main authors of the partisan election review in Arizona didn’t even show up to Thursday’s hearing by the House Oversight Committee to investigate their report? The so-called audit in Maricopa County found no evidence of election irregularities and even turned up more votes for President Joe Biden. But that hasn’t stopped the review’s leaders from suggesting Trump won in Arizona. Yet on Thursday, two leaders of the Cyber Ninjas investigation thought it better to stay home than to testify under oath that their review signaled a win for the former president.
Attacks like this by the far-left online site are typical of Big Media’s attention to the Maricopa audit. However, last night President Trump had a different interpretation of the results of the audit in Arizona, sharing:
The Thursday House hearing of the Arizona Election Scam turned sharply against the Democrats when Congressman Andy Biggs and others started asking questions about all the damning findings of the audit and the people for Maricopa County were unable to give an answer. It was incredible.
They could not answer why they deleted and moved election data after they received a subpoena, or why they have never delivered chain of custody documents for millions of ballots. Congressman Andrew Clyde exposed the Democrats’ “Big Lie” that Biden “won” the recount, because no matter how many times you count counterfeit money, “you may have 100 pieces of paper in your pocket, but you sure don’t have $100 dollars in legal tender.”
The hearing exposed how numerous laws were broken during the Arizona voting, how blank mail-in ballot envelopes were approved, and how there are tens of thousands of suspected fraudulent ballots.
The Fake News, however, refuses to cover those questions and answers because they prove, without question, that we won Arizona (and many other states).
The problem for the dishonest, far-left media is that nearly 700,000 ballots from the 2020 Election in Maricopa County have issues.
You see, when liberal, far-left garbage websites and the Mainstream media claim there was no evidence of irregularities, they are either misinformed or biased to the point of dishonesty.
For anti-cop blue city, further depleting its already-depleted force of 1,000 officers is par for the course.
The city of Seattle is considering firing 40% of its police officers for failing to take the COVID-19 injection by its October 18 deadline.
The 1,000-person police force, which has already suffered mass layoffs following the George Floyd riots in 2020, may see an additional 403 officers fired from the force.
“The environment has been pretty toxic and negative,” an unnamed officer told Fox 13 News. “Not just from this whole mandate, but prior to that as well. I’m not sure this would be a good place for me to work long-term for my mental health. It has been very stressful.”
Another unnamed patrol officer said she hopes Seattle will scrap the draconian mandates, adding she applied for a religious exemption but doesn’t believe it will be approved.
“Losing even 50 to 75 officers in one day, the response times for the city will go up drastically,” said the officer.
“I will continue working until the day that they fire me and that’s about all that I can do,” he added.
The Seattle Police Department has already lost about 300 officers since the Black Lives Matters’ “defund the police” crusade began after Floyd’s death.
Mayor Jenny Durkan defended the vaccine mandates in an email this week urging the police holdouts to get the COVID injection before the deadline.
“We value each of you, and do not want to lose you as employees,” Durkan said in the email. “But the people that count on you the most are the ones that need you to get vaccinated.”
In response to the imminent law enforcement crisis in the city, interim police chief Adrian Diaz advised his department to transition into “Phase 3 Mobilization” starting Oct. 13, which requires all sworn personnel to be on standby duty to respond to 911 calls, according to Fox 13 News.
Donald Trump failed at business…a lot. USFL, Tour de Trump, Trump Resorts, Trump Airlines, Trump University, etc. Leftists love to point that out. But that’s not the whole story. Trump had great successes as well. Not only has he developed world-class properties around the globe, but he was also produced and starred in one of the most popular television shows for more than a decade. Most telling of all was his renovation of the Wolman Ice Rink. New York City had spent $13 million and six years trying to renovate the Central Park icon when, in 1986, NYC admitted it had failed and must start from scratch. Trump offered to do the job in six months and under the $3 million budget. Reluctantly, the city gave him the contract and he finished in 4 months at a cost of $2.25 million. In just four months Donald Trump demonstrated exactly how dysfunctional government is!
But it’s his failures that provide the life lesson that leftists never get: Whether in business, love, or most non-government-related things, failure is the sign that someone was willing to risk the consequences to try and accomplish something. I say “non-government related” because government is one of the few areas of life where failure is the rule rather than the exception and it rarely results in soul searching.
Proof abounds! From a failed fifty-year War on Poverty to the abject failure of government schools to twenty-year wars that end exactly where they started, government continues to grow and accumulate more power year after year, regardless of its demonstrable and perpetual lack of success.
But government is not the nation. Government is not the people. Government is supposed to be a mechanism by which citizens protect individual rights and defend the nation—but that’s not what it is today. Today it’s everywhere, all the time. There is nothing in our lives that is more ubiquitous than government regulation.
In 1958, Leonard Read wrote an essay called I, Pencil that looked at the countless elements and activities necessary to make a #2 pencil. The whole point of this Cold War-era piece was to demonstrate how complex it is to make a simple pencil, how society benefits from freeing up markets to provide all the necessary inputs, and how it’s unlikely government control could accomplish that task. It’s extraordinary and it’s just a simple pencil!
Now, exponentially expand that complex process for a pencil to our modern society and you understand what the challenge is. On the one hand, you look at the iPhone or Google or Tesla and you might conclude we’re doing pretty well with government regulating as much as it does. Actually, that’s a mirage. While a Tesla may be a step up from a ’55 Ford, it’s still just a car. While carrying your iPhone in your hand is a leap from being tethered to a wall phone, it’s still just a mobile phone and a personal computer, both invented in the early ’70s, years after the internet began.
Over the last 50 years, things have gotten smaller, faster, and portable, but we haven’t cured cancer, we don’t have teleportation or time travel (as far as we know), and we haven’t been back to the moon or beyond. We have lots of apps and services, but not much truly revolutionary.
Compare that to the 50 years from 1850 to 1900 when Americans invented such revolutionary things as the light bulb, the safety elevator, the telephone, the phonograph, the vacuum cleaner, and the dishwasher. Or between 1900 and 1950 when they invented air conditioning, plastic, vulcanized rubber, television, talking movies, the photocopier, and the transistor. Not to mention airplanes, helicopters, and nuclear power.
While technology is most certainly unleashing heretofore impossible advances in research, medicine, and data analysis (the MRI machine, sequence of the human genome, etc.), the relative lack of tangible revolutionary advances is extraordinary. And why is that? Are we at the end of science? Have we accomplished everything that man can do? Obviously not. It’s almost as if there’s something holding America back…
There is. It’s called regulation. Federal regulation from a seemingly endless array of agencies: IRS, EPA, OSHA, DOE, DOT, etc. The Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that federal regulation alone costs the US almost $2 trillion per year in lost productivity. That’s essentially 10% of our GDP, annually!
Over the 50 years between 1921 and 1970, the American GDP grew at an average annual rate of 4.02%, while between 1971 to 2020 it grew at an annual rate of 2.73%, dropping down to 1.77% for the last 20 years.
The result of that slowdown has been staggering. In 2020, after growing at a rate of 2.73% a year for 50 years the American GDP was approximately $21 trillion. Had it instead grown at the same rate it had the previous 50 years, the 2020 GDP would have been almost twice as high, $39 trillion. Imagine the Research & Development a whole additional US GDP could fund! $18 trillion or, put another way, every American household would have had another $50,000 to spend annually.
But households don’t. And it’s directly related to regulation. The Code of Federal Regulations contains every law and rule of the federal government. In 1938 it was 18,193 pages. After dropping down to 9,745 pages in 1950 it shot up to 56,720 pages in 1972 and by 2019 it stood at 185,984 pages.
On every one of those pages are rules that govern Americans’ lives. From what goes into their food to the employment conditions of every person who manufactured or transported or sold every single product they buy. From reporting rules for companies to bank deposit info to what’s printed on the side of a can of corn or a box of cereal. Then there’s who you can or must rent your home to, how much energy your computer monitor uses, what you pay for gas and, now, what you have to put into your body.
That is the world the swamp dwellers have built, the one Donald Trump fearlessly leaped into a cauldron of fire to fight. Sadly, far too many Americans are either part of that system or comfortable with the illusion of security it provides. This exemplifies G. Michael Hopf’s statement that “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
Those who oppose Donald Trump’s attempt to save America from itself are those “weak” men. Like the European nations that grew soft under the security umbrella the United States provided, those “weak” men flourished and took over media, academia, Wall Street, and high-tech even as working America was focused on building on the promise of opportunity.
Weak men’s control of culture has undermined the nation that allowed them to flourish in the first place. However, as Joe Biden delivers the omnipresent government they desire, reality will shatter the illusions of security they hid behind while strong men’s failures and successes were building Pax Americana.
Facebook and its affiliated social media sites like Instagram are under scrutiny, especially when it comes to their influence on adolescents.
CBN News anchor Efrem Graham talked with media analyst Dr. Ted Baehr about the growing concern over social media and suicide among teens.
“Facebook is such a dominant force,” Baehr said. “These are serious issues. It gets people hooked and it plays into their fears and frustrations.”
Baehr explained there are literally hundreds of thousands of studies showing that kids are extremely vulnerable in the teenage years because that’s the self-esteem years.
“So it’s nice to see people coming together and saying ‘This is a gigantic issue and we’ve got to protect our kids,” he said.
The media analyst’s comments come not long after news broke that Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, is aware of just how harmful the photo-sharing app can be, particularly to teen girls’ self-esteem.
As Faithwire previously reported:
After studying the app’s impact on teenager users’ mental health over the last three years, researchers for the company found 32% of teenage girls who “felt bad about their bodies” said the problem was worsened by Instagram. In one study of teens in the U.S. and U.K., Facebook found that more than 40% of Instagram users who reported feeling “unattractive” said the feeling began on the social media app.
“Teens told us that they don’t like the amount of time they spend on the app but feel like they have to be present,” one Instagram research manager explained. “They often feel ‘addicted’ and know that what they’re seeing is bad for their mental health but feel unable to stop themselves.”
One slide summarizing the research stated Instagram makes “body image issues worse for one in three teenage girls” and found that “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression.”
Instagram, for its part, attempted to cast doubt on the WSJ report by claiming its article “focuses on a limited set of findings and casts them in a negative light.”
While social media can be a great tool for connection, there is no doubt it comes with its fair share of pitfalls, chief among them the research indicating a direct tie between social media use and increases in depression and anxiety.
For those feeling overwhelmed by social media, Faithwire compiled a list of Bible verses to remember.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed a host of bills into law on Friday, including AB 1084, which requires “gender neutral retail departments” in toy stores, so that shoppers will not be encouraged some toys for girls and others for boys.
The bill, authored by Assemblymember Evan Low (D-Campbell), declares that differences in products that are marketed to girls or boys are “unjustified,” and that it is “inappropriate” to imply they should be used by one gender instead of another.
As such, the bill provides:
(a) A retail department store that offers childcare items or toys for sale shall maintain a gender neutral section or area, to be labeled at the discretion of the retailer, in which a reasonable selection of the items and toys for children that it sells shall be displayed, regardless of whether they have been traditionally marketed for either girls or for boys.
(b) This section shall apply only to retail department stores that are physically located in California that have a total of 500 or more employees across all California retail department store locations. This section shall not apply to retail department stores that are physically located outside California.
(c) Beginning on January 1, 2024, a retail department store that fails to comply with this section is liable for a civil penalty, not to exceed two hundred fifty dollars ($250) for a first violation or five hundred dollars ($500) for a subsequent violation, which may be assessed and recovered in a civil action brought in the name of the people of the State of California by the Attorney General, or a district attorney or city attorney, in any court of competent jurisdiction. If the Attorney General, district attorney, or city attorney prevails in an action under this subdivision, the court shall award to the Attorney General, district attorney, or city attorney reasonable attorney’s fees and costs.
Stores can still maintain boys’ and girls’ sections, as long as they create one “gender neutral” area, though the legislation is unclear whether retailers could be punished for selling the same toys in gendered and gender neutral sections of the store.
Low told the Los Angeles Times: “Part of it is to make sure if you’re a young girl that you can find a police car, fire truck, a periodic table or a dinosaur,” Low said. “And then similarly, if you’re a boy, if you’re more artistic and want to play with glitter, why not? Why should you feel the stigma of saying, ‘Oh, this should be shamed’ and going to a different location?”
Is There a Connection Between Suicide Among Teens and Social Media? Experts Say ‘Yes’
Facebook and its affiliated social media sites like Instagram are under scrutiny, especially when it comes to their influence on adolescents.
CBN News anchor Efrem Graham talked with media analyst Dr. Ted Baehr about the growing concern over social media and suicide among teens.
“Facebook is such a dominant force,” Baehr said. “These are serious issues. It gets people hooked and it plays into their fears and frustrations.”
Baehr explained there are literally hundreds of thousands of studies showing that kids are extremely vulnerable in the teenage years because that’s the self-esteem years.
“So it’s nice to see people coming together and saying ‘This is a gigantic issue and we’ve got to protect our kids,” he said.
The media analyst’s comments come not long after news broke that Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, is aware of just how harmful the photo-sharing app can be, particularly to teen girls’ self-esteem.
As Faithwire previously reported:
The data, compiled in an internal report, was leaked to The Wall Street Journal.
One slide summarizing the research stated Instagram makes “body image issues worse for one in three teenage girls” and found that “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression.”
Instagram, for its part, attempted to cast doubt on the WSJ report by claiming its article “focuses on a limited set of findings and casts them in a negative light.”
While social media can be a great tool for connection, there is no doubt it comes with its fair share of pitfalls, chief among them the research indicating a direct tie between social media use and increases in depression and anxiety.
For those feeling overwhelmed by social media, Faithwire compiled a list of Bible verses to remember.