Cut to the News

February 23, 2024

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Welcome to the news for independent thinkers

Leading the News . . .

Meta staff found Instagram tool enabled child exploitation but company pressed ahead . . . Meta Platforms safety staff warned last year that new paid subscription tools on Facebook and Instagram were being misused by adults seeking to profit from exploiting their own children. Two teams inside Meta raised alarms in internal reports, after finding that hundreds of what the company calls “parent-managed minor accounts” were using the subscription feature to sell exclusive content not available to nonpaying followers. The content, often featuring young girls in bikinis and leotards, was sold to an audience that was overwhelmingly male and often overt about sexual interest in the children in comments on posts or when they communicated with the parents, according to people familiar with the investigations, which determined that the payments feature was launched without basic child-safety protections. Wall Street Journal

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Politics

Haley's South Carolina problems not just about Trump . . . Nikki Haley is running into a wall of hard feelings among conservatives in her home state, who feel that she ditched them for national politics years ago. Since leaving the governor’s office, Haley has largely ignored the state’s grassroots activists, according to interviews with more than a dozen GOP operatives across South Carolina. One striking illustration came in December, when a junior-level staffer on Haley’s presidential campaign sent the South Carolina GOP an email asking how to find out about county party events so that Haley could begin sending surrogates to them. Politico

Trump vows to end Biden "persecution" of Christians . . . Former President Donald Trump compared the criminal indictments he faces to the Biden administration’s targeting of Christians as he spoke at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention Thursday night. “For all Americans, but especially for Christians, nothing is more important than to defeat this wicked system and to return to equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law,” the former president said. “They’re weaponizing law enforcement to target parents, conservatives, and Catholics,” Trump noted. Daily Signal

Speaker Johnson call Biden's stronger immigration stance "election year gimmicks"

Fani Willis gets $600K to buy cars . . . Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis on Wednesday secured over $600,000 in taxpayer funds to buy her staff a fleet of brand new cars—even though lawmakers don’t know what she plans to use them for. Four of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners’ Democratic members voted to approve Willis’s request, with one Democrat joining the board’s two Republicans to block it. The trio objected that Willis, who has already spent over $1.2 million on vehicles for her office since 2021, gave no justification for the purchase of 16 additional vehicles. Washington Free Beacon

Rudy Giuliani faced with mountain of debt

California reparations bill would require state licensing boards to favor blacks . . . A proposed California reparations bill would require occupational licensing boards in the state to prioritize black applicants, especially descendants of slaves. A.B. 2862, introduced last week by Assemblyman Mike Gipson (D.), would update California's Business and Professions Code, seemingly requiring every certification board in the state—including medical boards—to favor black applicants. Washington Free Beacon

National Security

Four charged in incident connected to SEALs deaths . . . Four men were charged Thursday in federal court in relation to an incident that led to the death of two Navy SEALs in the Arabian Sea in January. Muhammad Pahlawan, Mohammad Mazhar, Ghufran Ullah and Izhar Muhammad were charged in federal court in connection with the Jan. 11 incident in which Navy Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Christopher J. Chambers and Navy Special Warfare Operator 2nd Class Nathan Gage Ingram were swept overboard while seizing Iranian-made weapons in the Arabian Sea. Daily Caller

But the true killers of these brave men are the leaders of Iran.

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International

Netanyahu plan would give Israeli military permanent access to Gaza . . . Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined a blueprint for postwar Gaza that calls for it to be administered by local Palestinian officials free of links to militant groups and that would allow Israel to conduct security operations in the strip indefinitely. The blueprint appears at odds in significant ways with both U.S. plans and those of Arab governments in the region. It was presented for the first time to Israel’s security cabinet Thursday night. Wall Street Journal

Oct. 7 victims sue AP for employing alleged Hamas agents . . . Victims of Hamas's Oct. 7 terror strike on Israel are suing the Associated Press, alleging the news organization "materially supported terrorism through payments that they made to known agents of Hamas," according to a copy of the lawsuit and statement from the plaintiffs. The suit alleges that the AP employed at least one photographer with known ties to Hamas and that the individual had advance knowledge of the Iran-backed terror group's unprecedented attack on Israel. Washington Free Beacon

Pressure grows in Israel to force ultra-Orthodox to serve . . . For almost as long as the state of Israel has existed, the draft that powers the tiny country’s outperforming military has exempted its ultra-Orthodox Jews. The conflict in Gaza has reignited resentment about that pact and sparked new calls to upend it, as the Defense Ministry pushes for regular soldiers and reservists to serve longer and keep Israel’s ranks stocked. Some members of the governing coalition, the opposition and protesters are calling for an extension to mandatory service for the existing group of soldiers to be coupled with a new law that would draw recruits from the ultra-Orthodox community. Wall Street Journal

Biden meets privately with Navalny's wife, daughter

Money

Nvidia stock soars on role as dominant chip maker for AI . . . It took Nvidia NVDA 24 years as a public company for its valuation to reach the rarefied air of $1 trillion. Thanks to the chip maker’s role in powering the AI revolution, the company is closing in on adding a second trillion in just eight months. The journey to become one of the three most-valuable U.S. companies might have started at a Denny’s in 1993, but it has been fast-tracked by Nvidia’s dominance of GPUs, or graphics processing units. These chips, worth tens of thousands of dollars each, have become a scarce, treasured commodity like Silicon Valley has seldom seen, and Nvidia is estimated to have more than 80% of the market. Wall Street Journal

Google apologizes after new Gemini AI refuses to show achievements of white people

Looks like artificial intelligence is going to be just as politically correct as the human kind.

Culture

Teachers, students uncomfortable learning about gender identity . . . Half the teachers, including 62% of grade school teachers, said students should not learn in class that “a person’s gender can be different from or is determined by their sex assigned at birth,” and 48% favored letting parents opt out of LGBTQ lessons. Among students ages 13 to 17 who encountered the topics in class, 38% said they were comfortable learning about race issues in school and 29% said the same about LGBTQ issues. About 48% of teens said they would prefer not to learn about gender identity in school. Washington Times

Sex education in schools opened the door to teaching students all kinds of things that should be the domain of parents. But out-of-wedlock births have soared since they starting teach sex education. And the Left controls education nation and wants to impose its ideology on students. Meantime, they can't do math.

Judge upholds school suspension of black student over dreadlocks . . . A Texas judge has ruled that a school district did not discriminate against a black high school student when it punished him over his dreadlocks. Barbers Hill Independent School District suspended Darryl George, 18, last August, saying his hairstyle violated its dress code. The judge found the Houston-area school did not break a state law banning race-based bias on hair. BBC

DC mom given $10,800 in program to help poor families blows it on Miami vacay . . . A Washington DC mom has shared how she splurged most of a $10,000 taxpayer-funded lump sum intended for impoverished mothers on a luxury holiday to Miami. Canethia Miller, 27, was accepted onto a DC government pilot last year as she and he three children were struggling to make ends meet. The Strong Futures offers the cash as a $10,800 lump sum, rather than in 12 smaller monthly installments. Miller opted for the former - and confessed to that she splurged more than $6,000 of the windfall on a five night trip to Miami for herself and her three sons. Daily Mail

You should also know

CBS seizes confidential files of fired reporter who was investigating Hunter Biden . . . The acclaimed CBS reporter who was investigating the Hunter Biden laptop scandal before she was fired last week had her personal files seized by the network in an “unprecedented” move. Catherine Herridge — who is the middle of a First Amendment case being closely watched by journalists nationwide — was among 20 CBS News staffers let go as part of a larger purge of hundreds of employees at parent company Paramount Global. Her firing had stunned co-workers, but the network’s decision to hold on to her personal materials, along with her work laptop where she may have other confidential info, has left many staffers shaken, according to insiders. New York Post

Mississippi cop arrested for shoplifting in uniform . . . A Mississippi cop was caught shoplifting on duty from a Dick's Sporting Goods while wearing her police uniform. Robin Conner, 33, was arrested on Wednesday after she allegedly shoplifted a pair of $140 shoes from the retailer. Conner was on duty, in uniform and driving a police cruiser during her shoplifting spree. Daily Mail

Guilty Pleasures

MLB's new uniforms so cheap that baseball isn't the only ball you can see . . . Major League Baseball’s new uniforms are giving an entirely new meaning to the phrase “nut up or shut up.” The MLB’s new Fanatics-made uniforms are so cheap and shoddily made that you can literally see players’ nutsacks through their pants. Numerous photos and videos of MLB players rocking the new threads blatantly show their family jewels in see-through white pants in a wildly embarrassing display for the multi-billion dollar league. Daily Caller

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