95-Year-Old Murder Suspect Okey Payne Appears In Court In Wheelchair

A 95-year-old suspect who is accused of first-degree murder appeared in court on Wednesday. Okey Payne entered the Boulder County courtroom in the morning a wheelchair.

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  • 5,000 National Guard troops remain in DC amid QAnon frenzy that Trump will be inaugurated again this week

    QAnon followers believe that on 4 March, which was once the inauguration date of US presidents, Donald Trump will become president again

  • Mother arrested after four-year-old girl found alone on NYC sidewalk remained unclaimed for days

    Over the weekend police officers were stunned to discover a four-year-old girl roaming the streets of New York City alone. Saturday, police noticed the child walking alone just after midnight at the corner of E. 156 St. and Prospect Ave. in the Bronx. Sunday, the NYPD shared surveillance video on its official Twitter page that showed a person who appears to be a woman walking ahead as the girl crosses the street alone.

  • Sussex society: The key figures at the centre of the Meghan bullying claims

    Buckingham Palace is to investigate claims that the Duchess of Sussex bullied members of her staff. These are the key figures at the centre of the allegations. Simon Case Briefly director of strategy at GCHQ before going on to work for the Duke of Cambridge as his private secretary (pictured below). He then returned to government, first as permanent secretary in Downing Street to Boris Johnson and then more recently as Cabinet Secretary.

  • Jets’ plans at quarterback are becoming increasingly clear

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  • Joe Biden just yanked away stimulus checks from 17 million Americans

    During the campaign for the two Georgia Senate races, Joe Biden repeatedly promised to pass $2,000 stimulus checks if the Democrats won. After they did, the administration argued that $2,000 really meant $1,400 in addition to the $600 that had already gone out in the December rescue package. Whether that is true or not, now Biden is inarguably breaking his promise. Under pressure from moderate Senate Democrats, he has reportedly agreed to cut down the formula under which the checks will be sent out. In the previous packages, the amount started phasing out at $75,000 in income for individuals and $150,000 for joint filers, and vanished entirely at $100,000 and $200,000 respectively (as of 2019). Now the phase-out will start start in the same place but end at $80,000 for singles and $160,000 for couples. The $1,400 promise clearly implied at least that the checks would go out according to the previous formula used under Trump. But now singles making between $80,000-100,000 and couples making between $160,000-200,000 will get nothing. The Washington Post's Jeff Stein reports that roughly 17 million people who previously got checks now will not. The supposed justification here is that moderates want the aid to be more "targeted." In fact this formula is horribly inaccurate, because the income data the IRS uses is from the year before the pandemic (unless people have already filed their taxes — and by the way, if your income decreased in 2020, you should do that immediately). This formula is therefore doubly wrong — there are no doubt millions of people who have lost jobs and should qualify but won't, and a smaller number that have gotten raises and shouldn't qualify but will. And this change will only save a pitiful $12 billion. The survival checks are one of the most popular government programs in American history. Polls have them at something like 4-1 approval. "Moderation," for Senate Democrats, apparently means breaking their party's promises in the service of unpopular, pointless actions that make their president seem less generous than Donald Trump. More stories from theweek.com7 scathingly funny cartoons about Trump's CPAC appearanceHouse cancels Thursday session amid threat of violenceThe lost art of being reasonable

  • QAnon influencers are attacking their movement's hyped March 4 event, calling it a false flag conspiracy theory

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  • U.S. won't 'shy away' from responding when necessary, Pentagon says after Iraq rocket attack

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  • McDonald's workers in Denmark are paid $22 per hour so $15 is a 'compromise', AOC says

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  • SpaceX Starship lands upright, then explodes in latest test

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  • The Trumps are trying to sell a Florida home for $49 million after buying it from the former president's sister for $18 million in 2018

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  • Buckingham Palace to investigate Duchess of Sussex bullying claims

    Buckingham Palace is to investigate claims that the Duchess of Sussex bullied several members of her staff, it has been announced. A spokesman said they were “clearly very concerned” about allegations that Meghan, 39, had forced out two PAs and undermined the confidence of a third during her time as a working royal. Aides had expressed concerns about how such matters were handled by the palace, expressing concern that nothing was done at the time to investigate the situation, and that nothing had been done since to protect staff against the possibility of bullying by a member of the Royal Family. Buckingham Palace confirmed that its HR team would now look into the circumstances outlined in various allegations leaked to The Times. It said: “Members of staff involved at the time, including those who have left the Household, will be invited to participate to see if lessons can be learned. “The Royal Household has had a Dignity at Work policy in place for a number of years and does not and will not tolerate bullying or harassment in the workplace.” While the palace did not reveal a timetable for its investigation, it is understood that HR staff hope to begin soon. Any resulting change in policy or procedure will be shared in its annual Sovereign Grant report, which highlights significant changes in operations. Read more: Sussex society: The key figures at the centre of the Meghan bullying claims The provenance of the leaked allegations caused the battle between the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the Royal Household to escalate as palace aides branded allegations they had leaked the claims as “untrue” and “disingenuous”. The revelation that Meghan faced several complaints of bullying from members of her own staff also thwarted hopes of a reconciliation between Prince Harry and Prince William. Instead, the disclosures about the Duchess’s behaviour provoked another bitter war of words, as palace aides sought to distance themselves from the leak and staff on both sides scrambled to establish who was responsible. The claims are thought to have been carefully and deliberately collated, with multiple sources briefing against her. Jason Knauf, the Sussexes’ communications secretary at the time, submitted a formal complaint in October 2018, describing her treatment of one employee as “totally unacceptable.” He added: “ The Duchess seems intent on always having someone in her sights.” The Sussexes are convinced that senior Buckingham Palace aides leaked the allegations as part of an orchestrated defence because they are “nervous” about revelations made in their forthcoming Oprah Winfrey interview, to be broadcast in the US on Sunday.

  • Dr. Seuss Gets Blindsided by a Moral Minority

    If, in 1987, the editorial boards of the major newspapers learned that a fanatical cult of angry moral scolds, representing a small sliver of the population, was successfully campaigning to remove books from the public eye with the not-so-subtle encouragement of the president and his political allies, they would have been outraged. In fact, liberal pundits were outraged — by far-less disturbing developments than these — and in the Nineties, they were re-enraged by suggestions that even the most deliberately offensive art should not enjoy a public subsidy, nor scarce space among museum displays. So, what changed? The Left used to be against banishing books, banning books, burning books. Now, scarcely a week goes by without some breathtaking new advance in its campaign to bury this or that book in order that the public might never be infected with its ideas. Just six years ago, when Barack Obama was publicly praising Dr. Seuss on March 2, Read Across America Day — a day specifically chosen by the National Education Association to honor Theodor Geisel’s birthday — you would have called me a paranoid wingnut if I had told you that books such as On Beyond Zebra! would soon be yanked from bookshelves across America at the behest of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Yesterday, that’s exactly what happened. The memory of (perhaps) the single most beloved author in America was insulted by having that title and five others pulled as an anti-birthday present and the traditional presidential mention of Dr. Seuss on a day built around his work was absent. It was as if all mentions of George Washington were scrubbed from the official celebration of President’s Day. (That’ll never happen, though. Not until at least 2022.) Geisel’s illustrations sometimes strayed into awkward racial stereotypes, but it is a massive stretch to label them “racist.” “Racist” implies racial hatred. As Geisel’s stepdaughter put it, “There wasn’t a racist bone in that man’s body.” The body of his work identifies him as a progressive humanist, undoubtedly a man of the Left, who lampooned various kinds of prejudice. Some of his stories, notably The Sneetches, are brilliant allegories about the stupidity and vileness of racism. Dan McLaughlin points out in his excellent essay that most of the six books yanked by Dr. Seuss Enterprises seem to have been targeted for trivial details that only the most hypersensitive hysteric would deem “hurtful and wrong,” as the Seuss outfit now labels them, declining to specify exactly what it finds offensive. McElligot’s Pool seems to have been nixed simply because of a harmless drawing of an Eskimo; On Beyond Zebra! for its depiction of a proud-looking camel-riding Arab nobleman, dubbed Nazzim of Bazzim. The Dr. Seuss books stand accused both of depicting too many white people and for including non-white people in its blithe comical sensibility. Our friends on the left are ridiculing conservatives for defending Dr. Seuss’s work; this tendency isn’t censorship, they point out. (No, but it was college roommates with censorship, and they played a lot of hacky sack together.) It’s a private company’s decision, they say. Yes, but it’s a private company whose strings are being pulled by an alarming cultural regime that wields immense power despite being opposed by most people. You racists only like Dr. Seuss now that he’s been revealed to be racist, racists. But Geisel very obviously wasn’t a racist, and ordinary sensible people object to huge swaths of imagery and speech being retroactively classified as racist, just as we find it ridiculous that it is becoming hard to have a mature discussion about anything from math to Muppets without some hysteric poisoning the wells of discourse with a claim of racism. This isn’t cancel culture, it’s a company withdrawing its legal property from circulation, and anyway there are 50-odd Seuss books that remain in print. Though the word “cancel” is, like “snowflake,” becoming so trite as to be on the verge of uselessness, what single better word is there for forcing books out of print because they supposedly offended someone, rather than due to lack of sales? This is simply good cultural hygiene, and slippery slopes are a myth, critics say, as the mountain turns to mud and slides into the ocean. Reports the Los Angeles Times: “The Cat in the Hat, one of Seuss’ most popular books, has received criticism, too, but will continue to be published for now.” For now. Note that the six withdrawn Seuss books are lesser titles; the Woke Brigades for Cultural Sanitation haven’t come for the really beloved ones yet. But they’re just getting warmed up, aren’t they? No one who acquires immense power ever says, “I’ve had enough of control now.” Babar the Elephant, Curious George, Little House on the Prairie, et al. are now in the crosshairs. The progressive Left enjoys greater control over the educational establishment than any other institution, and it senses an opportunity to revise the canon of young people’s literature so that every title in it advances the propaganda imperatives of today. The Sneetches, for instance, rings with Civil-Rights-era idealism by saying it’s silly to pay attention to race when we’re all the same underneath the skin. Today, that is now a right-wing vision of race. The Left today obsessively focuses on race with the purpose of apportioning good things according to the accident of skin color rather than the content of people’s character. Once the educational establishment has fully turned its guns against Laura Ingalls Wilder, it’s a short step to getting her removed from libraries, then bounced from Amazon. As the shelf of America’s children gets emptied of the classics and the boringly nonpolitical stuff, it is being busily restocked with books that overtly advance the activist Left’s agenda on illegal immigration, “white privilege,” capitalism, and everything else. I’m old enough to remember when liberals saw looming Christian theocracy as the most pernicious threat to liberal values, and when banning books was the single most horrible manifestation of that tendency that they could imagine. Now that we’re in the early days of the establishment of a woke theocracy, they’re eagerly looking for more books to throw on the cultural bonfire. Look out, The Cat in the Hat. There’s a fable promoting Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax that’s eager to take your place.

  • Dr. Fauci has a stunningly simple way to explain how Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine differs from Pfizer's and Moderna's shots

    All three of the COVID-19 shots authorized for use in the US train the body to recognize the coronavirus, but J&J's uses a cold virus instead of mRNA.

  • Biden cuts 16 million people off from stimulus checks after striking deal with moderate Senate Democrats, study says

    Biden approved phasing out direct payments entirely for individuals making above $80,000 a year and married couples earning more than $160,000.

  • Nicola Sturgeon chokes back tears as she rejects 'absurd' claims she was out to destroy Alex Salmond

    Nicola Sturgeon today choked back tears and insisted "I would never have wanted to 'get' Alex Salmond" as she rejected as "absurd" his claims of a plot among senior SNP figures to destroy him. The First Minister told a Holyrood inquiry the "simple" truth was that several women made complaints about Mr Salmond's behaviour and "I refused to follow the usual pattern of allowing a powerful man to use his status and connections to get what he wants." In an appearance spanning more than eight hours, against the backdrop of calls for her resignation, Ms Sturgeon insisted she had seen "nothing that comes within a million miles" of backing Mr Salmond's conspiracy claims. Although she reiterated it was "beyond question" that Mr Salmond had been cleared of all criminal charges, she said his behaviour was still "deeply inappropriate" and "there was not a single word of regret" from him during his six hours of testimony last week. Ms Sturgeon appeared on the verge of tears, with her voice breaking, as she was invited to apologise to the Scottish people for arguing for years they could trust Mr Salmond to take them to independence. Murdo Fraser, a Tory MSP, pressed her when she had decided he "was no longer the Charles Stewart Parnell of Scotland, and was in fact a liar and a fantasist?’"

  • The FBI has arrested a white supremacist in Fort Lauderdale. Here’s the charge

    The arrest of Paul Nicholas Miller by FBI agents at his Fort Lauderdale home Tuesday morning on a pedestrian charge of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon seems a minor thing for the feds to make a point of announcing.

  • Live stimulus updates: Senate no longer expected to begin debate on COVID-19 bill Wednesday

    Sen. Chuck Schumer said Democrats would be "on track" to pass the bill by March 14, when a federal boost to unemployment benefits expires.

  • Cuomo Brushes Off Creepy Pic: ‘It Was My Father’s Way of Greeting People’

    Seth Wenig/GettyAt his first press conference since three women accused him of unwanted sexual advances, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo apologized while insisting he didn’t know his alleged actions—grabbing a woman’s face, bringing up an aide’s sexual assault, giving an aide a kiss on the cheek—made people uncomfortable.“I never touched anyone inappropriately. I never intended to make anyone feel uncomfortable. And if I did, I apologize for it. But let’s let the attorney general’s office decide the facts,” he said Wednesday, adding that he has no plans to resign.Cuomo discussed the most recent allegation, from former Biden campaign worker Anna Ruch, who said that the governor had grabbed her face and asked to kiss her shortly after they met at a 2019 wedding. She provided a picture and texts to corroborate her story.My Cuomo ‘Crush’ Turned Out to Be Stockholm SyndromeHe said the face-grabbing and kissing-on-the-cheek was a greeting habit he picked up from his father, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, who served from 1983 to 1994.“You can find hundreds of pictures of me making this gesture,” Gov. Cuomo says. “It was my father’s way of greeting people. You’re the governor of the state, you want people to feel comfortable.”“But it doesn’t matter,” he continued. “It doesn’t matter my intent. What matters is whether anybody was offended by it. I could intend no offense but if they were offended by it it was wrong."Beyond that, however, the governor was short on specifics. When asked by a reporter whom specifically he was apologizing to, Cuomo did not provide a name.“I am apologizing to the young woman who worked here who said I made her feel uncomfortable in the workplace,” Cuomo said. “I’m embarrassed that someone felt that way in my administration.”Two aides, Lindsay Boylan and Charlotte Bennett, both came forward in February describing repeated propositions from the governor. Boylan wrote in a Medium post that she resigned after Cuomo gave her an unwanted kiss on the lips; Bennett told The New York Times that Cuomo repeatedly brought up a past sexual assault of hers.Following news of Bennett and Ruch’s allegations, some Democratic lawmakers have called on Cuomo to resign, including one member of Congress, Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-NY). Cuomo, however, said Wednesday he didn’t plan on resigning, with no mention of whether or not he would run for a fourth term in 2022, as he has previously said he would do. In a statement following Wednesday’s news conference, Bennett’s lawyer Debra Katz—who also represented Dr. Christine Blasey Ford after she alleged she was sexually assaulted by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh—wrote that Cuomo lied.“My client... reported his sexually harassing behavior immediately to his Chief of Staff and Chief Counsel. We are confident that they made him aware of her complaint,” Katz wrote. “We fully expect that the Attorney General’s investigation will demonstrate that Cuomo administration officials failed to act on Ms. Bennett’s serious allegations.”She pointed to reporting from Politico on Wednesday, detailing how two Cuomo aides—senior adviser Gareth Rhodes and deputy press secretary Will Burns—had resigned in the wake of the scandal. “As reports are emerging of other staff resigning from the Governor’s office in the wake of his scandals, the people charged with helping him execute the duties of his office are once again bearing the consequences of his actions,” Katz wrote. “If they know anything or have experienced this themselves, we call on them to come forward and report this misconduct.”Boylan also expressed her frustration with Cuomo on Twitter, shortly after the conference. “How can New Yorkers trust you @NYGovCuomo to lead our state if you ‘don’t know’ when you’ve been inappropriate with your own staff?” she wrote. Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • North Carolina mocked after prioritising anyone who has smoked 100 cigarettes in their lifetime for a vaccine

    North Carolina is offering priority vaccination to anyone who has smoked 'at least 100 cigarettes in their lifetime'. The roll-out plan, announced on Tuesday, was mocked online as residents claimed they would immediately chain-smoke their way to the top of the queue. Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said that all frontline essential workers can have their vaccine now while giving three weeks' notice for those who are obese, in jail, pregnant, homeless - or who have smoked just five packets of cigarettes in their life. The cohort including smokers will be called forwards on March 24, and is designed to include adults at higher risk of virus exposure or who are at an increased risk of having a severe illness Smokers are defined as “current or former” having “smoked at least 100 cigarettes in their lifetime.”