HORROR: Man Sets NYC Subway Passenger on Fire with Flaming Liquid – And He’s a Repeat Offender – Second Attack with Flaming Liquid in 4 Months

by | May 26, 2024 | Aggregate

Nile Taylor with flaming liquid in February

Meanwhile in the Democrat hellhole of New York City…

A New York City subway passenger was set on fire by a fellow straphanger on Saturday and ended up with burns on 30% of his body.

23-year-old Petrit Alijaj said the assailant, now identified as 49-year-old Nile Taylor, threw a cup of flaming liquid at him on Saturday as he was on his way to see the Statue of Liberty with his fiancée and cousin.

Alijaj, who is from Albania, told the New York Post that he jumped in front of his fiancée to protect her.

“I protect my fiancée with my body,” he told the New York Post.

Petrit Alijaj, photo courtesy of New York Post

It turns out Nile Taylor is a repeat offender!

NYPD identified him as the same man who threw two cans of flaming liquid at subway commuters in February.

WATCH:

NEW: SOMEONE IS THROWING CANS OF FIRE INSIDE NYC SUBWAY

A suspect on camera throwing flaming cans at subway riders in NYC

Source: Police Frequency pic.twitter.com/zkG5Cf1Nqs

— Suhr Majesty (@ULTRA_MAJESTY) March 13, 2024

Nile Taylor was arrested a few blocks away from the crime scene at Canal Street and Renwick Street, according to The Post.

The New York Post reported:

The deranged nut who tossed flaming liquid at an unsuspecting straphanger also tried to torch a group of commuters at a Manhattan subway station earlier this year, cops said Sunday.

Nile Taylor, 49 — who is in custody on an assault rap in the fiery Saturday afternoon attack on 23-year-old Petrit Alijaj at the Varick Street station in Manhattan — has now been charged over a similar Feb. 5 incident at the West 28th Street subway station, too, police said.

A man now identified as Taylor can be seen on surveillance footage in the February incident holding two cans of flammable liquid and hurling them at a group of people at the station.

No one was hurt in the incident, and the suspect fled and remained on the lam until now.

Around 2:45 p.m. Saturday, Alijaj and his fiancee were about to get off a No. 1 train at West Houston and Varick streets as they headed to the Statue of Liberty when Taylor allegedly hurled flaming liquid at him.

“I protect my fiancee with my body,” he said.

Alijaj ended up ripping off his burning shirt while his assailant fled the scene.

“I touched myself to put out the fire,” Alijaj recalled. “So, while I was running, I was burning.

“The doctors said 30% of my body was burnt. But I don’t think it is 30%. Maybe more like 10%,” he said.

The post HORROR: Man Sets NYC Subway Passenger on Fire with Flaming Liquid – And He’s a Repeat Offender – Second Attack with Flaming Liquid in 4 Months appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

WTH: Baltimore, Maryland Invites 125 People to Swim in The Baltimore Harbor Near Bridge Collapse Where Hazardous Materials Spilled into Water, Sewage, Trash, Drug Needles, and Dead Bodies Float

by | May 26, 2024 | Aggregate

 Baltimore Inner Harbor Waterfront

Waterfront Partnership, a Baltimore, Maryland non-profit “dedicated to enhancing and promoting the waterfront district, parks, and public spaces” is set to host an event in the Baltimore harbor promoting public swimming in the water near downtown Baltimore.

Supposedly, elected officials, including leftist Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, plan to start the event with a ceremonial jump on June 23. “We must start swimming,” although work to clean up the harbor is “far from over,” said the Waterfront Partnership’s Healthy Harbor Initiative chairman, Michael Hankin. According to the Healthy Harbor Initiative’s annual report card, water quality in the harbor is only safe for swimming “most of the time in dry weather.”

Per Baltimore Fishbowl,

Waterfront Partnership will host a public “Harbor Splash” swimming event on Sunday, June 23, 2024, and registration opens on May 29 for all “Harbor Splash” newsletter subscribers who would like to take the dive!

A group of key partners and elected officials, including Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman, will start the event with a ceremonial jump at 9:20 a.m. from a floating dock at Bond Street Wharf in Fells Point.

The event is made possible by over a decade of work by the Healthy Harbor Initiative championing the goal of a “swimmable, fishable” Baltimore Harbor. Healthy Harbor has worked with numerous partners including nonprofits, educational institutions, the local government, business leaders, volunteers, and of course, the Trash Wheel Family to make the Inner Harbor clean enough to swim in.

“We know our work is far from over, but we must start swimming. It’s a commitment to keep working to ensure that our ecosystem thrives and that swimming in the harbor becomes a routine occurrence,” said Michael Hankin, president and CEO of Brown Advisory and chairman of Waterfront Partnership’s Healthy Harbor Initiative. “We had an ambitious goal and, with a lot of hard work and people believing we could do it; we are finally realizing our vision.”

This area is just miles away from where a cargo ship collided with the Francis Scott Key Bridge at the southern end of the Baltimore Harbor. As The Gateway Pundit reported, as many as 1.8 million gallons of fuel and other hazardous materials likely spilled into the water, and authorities suspended their search-and-rescue mission for the six bridge workers who fell into the water and were presumed dead. There still remain two missing bodies out of the eight who were victims of the collapse. 

UPDATE: DHS and Coast Guard Say Cargo Ship that Struck Francis Scott Key Bridge Was Transporting 1.8M Gallons of Fuel and 56 Containers with Hazardous Materials

If you want to risk unknown diseases or exposure to hazardous materials by swimming in the dirty Baltimore Harbor water, you can register to jump in here.

In 2010, Michael Hankin, CEO of Brown Advisory Baltimore, launched a campaign to make the harbor “swimmable and fishable.” Since then, there has been an array of problems. 

As recently as last month, the body of a missing man was found in the harbor in the neighborhood next to Bond Street Wharf in Fells Point, where people are encouraged to swim. Several other reports of bodies being fished out of the harbor in recent years can be found online.

In 2021, “major maintenance and operational problems at the city’s two wastewater treatment plants were discovered, with high bacteria levels routinely detected in the discharge to the harbor from the Patapsco River facility.”

The state urges people “especially children and women of child-bearing age — to limit consumption of locally caught crabs and some fish because they have toxic contaminants picked up from past industrial activity.”

To deal with some of the visible pollution, Mr. Trash Wheel was instituted to be the first “trash interceptor of its kind” and has so far removed “millions of pounds of debris from the Inner Harbor.” 

Mr. Trash Wheel (Photo from https://today.umd.edu/rollin-on-the-river)

Overflowing trash in the harbor is coupled with “persistent sewer leaks throughout Baltimore City” and an “overflow-prone sewer system.” After the city reportedly dumped more than $1 billion into fixing the sewer system, “there’s been a 75% decline in the volume of untreated sewage overflowing into the harbor since 2021.” According to Lindquist, the deadline for sewer repairs is not until 2030.

It is unclear why there would be such a heavy push to start putting people in this water or why they “must start swimming,” as Waterfront Partnership’s Michael Hankin put it.

Per Bay Journal,

“By no means are we saying mission accomplished, we can all go home,” Lindquist said. The city’s sewer repairs are expected to continue for several more years, with a 2030 deadline, he noted. “By making a splash,” he added, “we are also taking a stand, [saying] that cleaning up the harbor is important, and we need to keep working on it.”

The sampling shows that water quality in Baltimore’s harbor is closely connected to rainfall, which washes animal waste off pavement and causes sewer overflows, Lindquist said.

Despite all the problems, the time has come for people to jump in and make a splash. Some sensible individuals have expressed their concerns on social media.

One, who says they are a former environmental scientist, said, “It’s incredibly dangerous and irresponsible” for these organizations to encourage people to swim in the water “filled with fecal bacteria, lifetime pollutants, and more.” Other commenters roasted the idea and joked that you’d need a vat of antibacterial soap or that you would come out glowing:

Another noted that the water smells like the taste of “yak piss.” They continued, “Make sure to yank out all the heroin needles you’ll get stuck with.”

Others used it as an opportunity to make fun of the COVID-19 sheep, wondering how people will be safe with wet masks or whether a triple vaxxed person will be safe:

MORE:

Screenshot

The post WTH: Baltimore, Maryland Invites 125 People to Swim in The Baltimore Harbor Near Bridge Collapse Where Hazardous Materials Spilled into Water, Sewage, Trash, Drug Needles, and Dead Bodies Float appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

State Dept: ‘Atheism Grant’ May Have Been Misused

by | May 26, 2024 | Aggregate

This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire

By Susan Crabtree
Real Clear Wire

House Republicans who have led a nearly two-year investigation into a $500,000 State Department grant to an organization that promotes humanism and secularism are pressing the agency to conduct more diligent oversight after it admitted that the organization may have misused taxpayer funds.

Rep. Mike McCaul, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican who heads the panel’s human rights subcommittee, have accused the State Department of trying to promote atheism overseas under the guise of advancing religious pluralism, a longtime U.S. foreign policy priority. Rep. Brian Mast, a Florida Republican who chairs the panel’s oversight and accountability subcommittee, has also helped spearhead inquiries into the grant.

For more than a year, the trio has been investigating the decision-making behind the State Department’s April 2021 solicitation bid for a $500,000 grant titled “Promoting and Defending Religious Freedom Inclusive of Atheist, Humanist, Non-Practicing and Non-Affiliated Individuals.” The agency awarded the grant to Humanists International, or HI, an organization aimed at promoting humanism, an outlook and system of thought attaching prime importance to human effort rather than divine or supernatural powers.

In a letter sent to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Verma Wednesday, McCaul, Smith, and Mast charged the State Department with engaging in a “pattern of obfuscation and denial” throughout the investigation in order to “expand atheism networks” overseas. The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause of the Constitution bars the use of tax dollars to promote theocracy, a specific religion or belief system.

It was not until Foreign Affairs Committee staff contacted the HI to schedule a transcribed interview, and the organization retained legal counsel, that the “true scope” of the grant’s programming was revealed, the GOP House members asserted. HI’s attorneys contacted the State Department and admitted it had provided the wrong slides presented during its training session in Nepal.

“Legal counsel for the grantee uncovered in a matter of weeks what the Department obfuscated, misrepresented and denied for years,” they wrote, expressing skepticism about the agency’s stated commitment to recoup any misused funds and take action to bar HI from further State Department grants.

“We do, however, appreciate your statements, and we expect to be informed fully and without delay of all developments in this matter,” they continued. “The Department can reasonably expect congressional oversight of grant funding to continue since the need for it is all the more pressing in light of the recent revelations.”

According to its website, HI promotes “human-rights priorities based on humanist values at international organizations,” including the United Nations. It also champions the rights of individuals persecuted or discriminated against for failing to adhere to a country’s predominant religion or those who face harsh penalties under their country’s blasphemy and anti-conversion laws.

A statement on HI’s website praises a Nigerian court for upholding the appeal of Mubarak Bala and reducing his prison sentence from 24 years to five years for violating the country’s blasphemy laws. In 2020, Bala was arrested in northern Nigeria, where Islam is the government’s dominant religion and thousands of Christians are killed each year, for a series of Facebook posts expressing his humanist beliefs.

The latest war of words comes after the State Department acknowledged in late April that the agency had provided the House Republicans with the wrong PowerPoint slides about what HI was using U.S. funds to accomplish.

Naz Durakoglu, the State Department’s assistant secretary for its bureau of legislative affairs, notified McCaul that HI had recently contacted the department to say it had initially provided the wrong slides about the information conveyed at training sessions the grant funded. The agency then passed the wrong slides on to the committee in response to its probe.

“This new information directly contradicts Humanists International’s previous representation to the Department that the slides it had earlier provided were the ones used at the training,” Durakoglu wrote to McCaul in an April 29 letter, noting that the “department is deeply concerned about this development.”

The State Department stressed that it’s taking “immediate action” to request additional information from HI to ensure its work complies with federal laws and regulations.

“Should the Department determine that any such charges were not in accordance with applicable statutes and regulations, including activities outside the grant agreement, it will take all necessary actions to recoup misused funds” and take steps to bar HI from being eligible to receive federal funds in the future, Durakoglu wrote. He also noted that it would refer any misrepresentations HI made to the State Department Office of Inspector General for further investigation.

But McCaul, Smith, and Mast aren’t convinced the State Department is acting in good faith, considering that the agency had pushed back against their concerns for more than a year. The House Foreign Affairs Committee obtained the PowerPoint slides from the actual HI training sessions and argued they show that only humanists or atheists attended the sessions, instead of members of several faith traditions. They also complained that the slides appeared to show that HI was using the grant to advance the humanist cause and its influence on government policy and touted the benefits of setting annual numerical goals for recruiting new humanist or atheist members.

For more than a year, U.S. officials claimed that the grant’s work was not aimed at increasing the number and influence of atheists abroad but was merely a routine award aimed at promoting the larger goal of religious tolerance in South and Central Asia or the Middle East and North Africa, the grant offering’s targeted area.

The State Department’s stated aim for the grant was to prevent discrimination against individuals who do not adhere to the predominant religious tradition. In several countries across those regions, blasphemy and anti-conversion laws, such as those in Nigeria, prohibit insults to the prevailing religion and are often used to enact harsh penalties against religious minorities, atheists, and other nonbelievers.

The State Department provided another grant opportunity in 2021 to help “expand” religious freedom and tolerance in Mozambique, where Christians face horrific levels of persecution despite making up roughly 50% of the population.

“The genesis of these activities is how do we bring the most persecuted and the most marginalized [when it comes to religious freedom] and bring them into the conversation,” a senior department official of the State Department’s Office of Religious Freedom told RealClearPolitics in a lengthy interview. “In Central Asia, there’s significant persecution of Christians, there’s significant persecution of religious minorities, and most of these folks just want to live their lives in accordance with their own conscience.”

The average Muslim in Saudi Arabia doesn’t necessarily want to practice Islam the way the government dictates, the senior official said, so the purpose of the grant offering was to acknowledge that people who don’t adhere to approved religious belief are often the victims of religious discrimination.

“The idea behind the request for proposal was not to make a program for atheists or for members of a particular group,” he added. “It was to make sure that when we think about promoting religious freedom for everyone, we’re doing things that are inclusive and [including] members of those communities who often get left out because they don’t have an obvious spokesperson.”

The official vigorously defends that rationale for providing the grant, but says his office is deeply concerned that HI may have engaged in misconduct.

“I will stand proudly behind the [rationale], but as soon as there’s the potential whiff of fraud or misrepresentation, that’s a very different matter entirely,” he said. “We take that very seriously and want to ensure that, as stewards of taxpayer dollars, that not one penny of taxpayer money is being misappropriated or misused.”

The State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, which was created in 1998 by an act of Congress, promotes universal respect for religious freedom or belief as a core objective of U.S. foreign policy. The office monitors religiously motivated abuses and discrimination worldwide and engages with faith-based actors, groups, and organizations to help promote democracy and pluralism.

In 2016, Smith, a longtime human rights champion in Congress, worked to update the religious freedom law to expressly protect the rights of people around the world who practice no religion at all.

“We want to make clear that … nobody is coerced into believing in God if they don’t want to,” Smith said at the time. “I’m a Catholic, and I believe very deeply in God, but Christ said, ‘I stand at the door and knock. If you welcome me, I come in.’ And that’s the way religious liberty ought to be, absolutely voluntary. People have the right not to believe.”

Smith also said the language clarifying that the law is meant to protect nonbelievers was noncontroversial even among the more evangelical members of Congress.

“It speaks well of all of, of everyone, that we really want to protect freedom of conscience for all people,” Smith said.

But Smith is now deeply concerned that the State Department is using taxpayer funds to directly benefit the atheist and humanist cause and possibly grow its numbers. In the coming weeks, the New Jersey Republican plans to introduce legislation explicitly barring grants violating the Establishment Clause. He cited language in the Notice of Funding Opportunity, the official agency notice describing the grant and requesting applicants, as potentially violating the First Amendment prohibitions. The notice states that the “expected program outcome” was to “[i]ncrease capacity among members of atheist and heterodox individuals to form or join networks or organizations.”

“It is hard to believe that Department officials refused to read the words right in front of them, but we are not sure what else may have happened,” the GOP members wrote in their Wednesday letter to Verma.

They also cite HI’s state strategic goals, which include having member organizations in “every part of the world,” according to its website.

Gary McLelland, HI’s CEO, has been very vocal about his animus against the Roman Catholic Church, arguing in one podcast that, “It’s obviously my job in [the international HI organization] to combat the Vatican policies and to push against them.”

The timing of the grant may have helped HI recover from a tough financial period. An RCP analysis of HI’s charitable 990 tax forms shows that the organization operated at a net loss every year from 2019 until 2021, ending that year with a net loss of $322,000, although it listed $3.8 million in assets. In 2022, roughly the time of receiving the State’s $500,000 Department grant, the organization reported only a $3,000 loss and $3.2 million in assets.

As recently as March 21, during an appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Verma dismissed the Republicans’ concerns that the grant was promoting converts to atheism or humanism instead of tolerance for all religious minorities. At one point during his testimony, Verma deemed the grant “exactly the right kind of program.”

“I have looked at the grant. I have looked at the materials,” he said. “[Promoting atheism] is not what the grant is for, and that is not what the work would be for. We would never authorize such a grant to any organization.” I have seen no evidence of any grant to promote atheism in Nepal … I have looked at the materials this grantee has used. It was about supporting civil society.”

In February, a State Department assistant secretary told the House Republicans that the grant-funded training in Nepal only concerned “creating guidelines … for the promotion of human rights and dignity.”

The agency continued to deny that it provided funds to any organizations with “the aim of using the funds to promote or advance specific ideologies or beliefs,” even though the official State Department “scope of work” for the program stated that participants would “conduct advocacy and members activities promoting humanism” and would work to “increase and diversify their membership network.”

The post State Dept: ‘Atheism Grant’ May Have Been Misused appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

UPDATE: Chinese Nationals Breached US Military Bases and Sensitive US Sites Over 100 Times in Recent Years

by | May 26, 2024 | Aggregate

 US Fleet Forces Commander Admiral Daryl Caudle warns of attempted penetrations at US bases by foreign nationals are taking place 2-3 times a week.

The US Fleet Forces Commander Admiral Daryl Caudle warned FOX News viewers that there have been an uptick in foreign nationals attempting to penetrate US military bases around the country. These attempted breaches are taking place two to three times a week now.

Journalist Lara Logan reported on attempted breaches at several US bases by Chechens, Jordanians and Chinese.

https://t.co/tAcg3EZruU https://t.co/6Cjh3EKqtK

— Lara Logan (@laralogan) May 25, 2024

More…

How about now? Do you see it now? https://t.co/pIjgwTlqOV https://t.co/PBRmhQDuHL

— Lara Logan (@laralogan) May 25, 2024

Of course, the blame for this goes back to Joe Biden and the Democrat Party’s organized plan to open the borders to millions of unknown aliens.

U.S. Fleet Forces Commander Admiral Daryl Caudle told Bill Hemmer on America Reports that attempted penetrations of U.S. military bases by foreign nationals are taking place ‘two or three times a week.’

But this appears to be a much larger problem than what is being reported.

Kennedy Space Center – flickr fair use image

Chinese nationals have breached US military sites and sensitive areas like Kennedy Space Center over 100 times in recent years.

Chinese spies breach US military bases 100 times, officials say https://t.co/fl7cFtT88G

— Lara Logan (@laralogan) May 26, 2024

The New York Post reported on this back in 2023.

Chinese nationals have snuck onto military bases and other sensitive US sites more than 100 times in recent years — sparking federal investigations into possible spying, according to a report Monday.

Alarming cases include people crossing into a United States missile range in New Mexico — and scuba divers swimming near a rocket launch site and Kennedy Space Center in Florida, officials told the Wall Street Journal.

Some have also used drones to take detailed aerial footage of sensitive military sites — while the Pentagon confirmed cases of people “speeding through security checkpoints.”

Many would-be intruders, however, claim to be confused tourists who think they have a reservation at an on-base hotel — and they often use what appears to be scripted language when confronted by security, the report said.

The post UPDATE: Chinese Nationals Breached US Military Bases and Sensitive US Sites Over 100 Times in Recent Years appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.