A teenage anti-Israel protester whovandalized a World War I memorial in Central Parkearlier this week has been arrested — after his father turned him over to the cops, according to the NYPD and police sources.
The 16-year-old boy was charged with criminal mischief in the third degree, a felony, and making graffiti, which is a misdemeanor, for allegedly defacing the 107th Infantry Memorial during an unruly demonstration on Monday night.
The teen, a regular face at rallies organized by the anti-Israel group Within Our Lifetime, only landed in custody after his dad turned him in on Thursday night, the sources said.
A 16-year-old boy who vandalized a World War I memorial in Central Park earlier this week has been arrested.Getty Images
NYPD Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry posted a blurred photo to X of the young vandal in handcuffs sitting on a bench in a police station.
“The despicable vandalism we saw earlier this week on the WWI Memorial will not be ignored, and will not go unpunished,” Daughtrytweeted as he announced one of the culprits’ arrest.
“This isn’t simply juvenile hijinks — it’s an act of desecration that undermines the freedoms our heroes fought and died for,” he added.
Sources said the youngster attends Tottenville High School and has no prior arrests.
The war memorial was defaced by several vandals who scrawled “Gaza” and “Free Palestine” on its base and plastered the statue with anti-Israel stickers.
The teen, a regular face at rallies organized by the anti-Israel group Within Our Lifetime, only landed in custody after his dad turned him in on Thursday night, the sources said.NYPD Deputy Commissioner, Operations Kaz Daughtry/X
Another protester torched an American flag in front of the bronze memorial depicting seven WWI foot soldiers in battle.
Several others were seen climbing on top of the infantrymen and waving Palestinian flags.
The desecration of the memorial outraged New Yorkers who visited the site Tuesday to see the damage themselves.
The war memorial was defaced by several vandals who scrawled “Gaza” and “Free Palestine” on its base and plastered the statue with anti-Israel stickers.Jack Morphet/NY Post
“These people are just nuts and violent,” Michael Skol, who has lived in the tony Manhattan neighborhood for 25 years, had told The Post.
“Burning the flag is anti-American. It’s stupid,” he added. “It definitively doesn’t help Palestinians or the peace process. These are people who are not in the tradition of believing America is a good place. It’s disgusting.”
The enraged locals argued that the throngs of pro-Palestinian protesters were only hurting their own cause with their mindless destruction.
“It’s horrible to treat a World War I memorial the way they did. It breaks your heart,” Ron Zucher, 50, said.
Several others were seen climbing on top of the infantrymen and waving Palestinian flags.Jack Morphet / NY Post
“In this country, you have a right to voice your opinion, but not destroy memorials that pay tribute to heroes who died for our country.
“You gotta have some decency,” he added. “The protesters are not helping their own cause destroying monuments and burning the flag.”
A clean-up crew on Tuesday scrubbed off the “Gaza” and “Free Palestine” graffiti left behind at the memorial using power washers and a biodegradable chemical cleaning agent.
Anarchists on Monday night also vandalized the Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman monument in the nearby Grand Army Plaza on 59th Street.
Ironwood Pharmaceuticals, Inc. revised earnings guidance for its Fiscal Year 2024. Total Revenue reported its Prior 2024 Guidance of $435 to $455 million as compared to Revised 2024 Guidance of revenue to be $405 to $425 million.
The companies share design of global Phase 3 trial, iMMagine-3; will evaluate anito-cel in patients exposed to both an immunomodulatory (lMiD) drug and an anti-CD38 monoclonal antibody --
-- Anito-cel will be manufactured from Kite’s Frederick, Maryland facility for iMMagine-3 as the successful technical transfer is complete --
-- Remain on track to present preliminary data from the iMMagine-1 trial by end of the year --
The Biden administration is poised to open up a new front in its effort to safeguard U.S. AI from China and Russia with preliminary plans to place guardrails around the most advanced AI models, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
Government and private sector researchers worry U.S. adversaries could use the models, which mine vast amounts of text and images to summarize information and generate content, to wage aggressive cyber attacks or even create potent biological weapons.
Here are some threats posed by AI:
DEEPFAKES AND MISINFORMATION
Deepfakes - realistic yet fabricated videos created by AI algorithms trained on copious online footage - are surfacing on social media, blurring fact and fiction in the polarized world of U.S. politics.
While such synthetic media has been around for several years, it's been turbocharged over the past year by a slew of new "generative AI" tools such as Midjourney that make it cheap and easy to create convincing deepfakes.
Image creation tools powered by artificial intelligence from companies including OpenAI and Microsoft, can be used to produce photos that could promote election or voting-related disinformation, despite each having policies against creating misleading content, researchers said in a report in March.
Some disinformation campaigns simply harness the ability of AI to mimic real news articles as a means of disseminating false information. While major social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have made efforts to prohibit and remove deepfakes, their effectiveness at policing such content varies. For example, last year, a Chinese government-controlled news site using a generative AI platform pushed a previously circulated false claim that the United States was running a lab in Kazakhstan to create biological weapons for use against China, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in its 2024 homeland threat assessment.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, speaking at an AI event in Washington on Wednesday, said the problem has no easy solutions because it combines the capacity of AI with "the intent of state, non-state actors, to use disinformation at scale, to disrupt democracies, to advance propaganda, to shape perception in the world."
"Right now the offense is beating the defense big time," he said.
BIOWEAPONS
The American intelligence community, think tanks and academics are increasingly concerned about risks posed by foreign bad actors gaining access to advanced AI capabilities. Researchers at Gryphon Scientific and Rand Corporation noted that advanced AI models can provide information that could help create biological weapons.
Gryphon studied how large language models (LLM) - computer programs that draw from massive amounts of text to generate responses to queries - could be used by hostile actors to cause harm in the domain of life sciences and found they "can provide information that could aid a malicious actor in creating a biological weapon by providing useful, accurate and detailed information across every step in this pathway."
They found, for example, that an LLM could provide post-doctoral level knowledge to trouble-shoot problems when working with a pandemic-capable virus.
Rand research showed that LLMs could help in the planning and execution of a biological attack. They found an LLM could for example suggest aerosol delivery methods for botulinum toxin.
CYBERWEAPONS
DHS said cyber actors would likely use AI to "develop new tools" to "enable larger-scale, faster, efficient, and more evasive cyber attacks" against critical infrastructure including pipelines and railways, in its 2024 homeland threat assessment.
China and other adversaries are developing AI technologies that could undermine U.S. cyber defenses, DHS said, including generative AI programs that support malware attacks.
Microsoft said in a February report that it had tracked hacking groups affiliated with the Chinese and North Korean governments as well as Russian military intelligence, and Iran's Revolutionary Guard, as they tried to perfect their hacking campaigns using large language models.
Scan news accounts of anti-Israel campus and street protestors. Read their demands and manifestos. Collate the confusion after October 7 from the Biden administration.
Here are ten of their most common untruths about October 7 and the war that followed.
“Progressive Hamas”: Gay and transgendered student protestors in America would be in mortal danger in Gaza under a fascistic Hamas that has banned homosexual acts and lifestyles. Anyone protesting publicly against Hamas or its allies would be arrested and severely punished.
Women are segregated in most Hamas-run educational institutions. Under the Hamas charter, women are valued mostly as child-bearers. By design, there are almost no women in high positions in business or in government under Hamas.
“Colonists and Settlers”: Students scream that Israelis are “settlers” and “colonists” and sometimes yell at Jewish students to “go back to Poland.”
But the Jewish presence in present-day Israel is deeply rooted in ancient tradition. Dating back at least three millennia, the concept of “Israel” as a distinct Jewish state, situated roughly in its current location, is ingrained in history.
By contrast, the much later Arab invasions of the Byzantine-controlled Levant and their arrival in Palestine occurred about 1800 years after the establishment of a Jewish Israel.
“Two-state Solution”: When student protestors scream “from the river to the sea,” that is not advocacy for a two-state solution. It is a call to eliminate the state of Israel—lying in between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea—and its 10 million Jewish and Arab citizens. The Hamas charter is a one-state/no-Israel agenda, which we saw attempted on October 7.
“Occupied Gaza”: Gaza was autonomous. The Israeli border is closed, but so is the Egyptian border. There have not been any Jews in Gaza for nearly two decades.
So on October 7, Gaza was not occupied by Israel. It was under the control of Hamas, designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization. After being elected to power in 2006, Hamas cancelled all subsequent elections and ruled as a dictatorship. Gaza forbids Jews from entering Gaza and has driven out most Christians. Israel hosts two million Arabs, both as Israeli citizens and residents.
“Netanyahu is the Problem”: The U.S. and Europe claim that the conservative government of Benjamin Netanyahu is alone behind the Israeli tough response in Gaza. Thus, both the EU and the U.S. are doing their best to undermine or even overthrow the elected Netanyahu administration.
Yet, most Israelis support Netanyahu’s coalition government’s agenda of destroying Hamas in Gaza. There is no evidence that any other alternative Israeli government would do anything differently from the present policies toward Hamas.
“Targeting Civilians”: After murdering nearly 1,200 Israelis on October 7, Hamas scurried back to Gaza and hid in tunnels and bases beneath hospitals, schools, and mosques. Its preplanned strategy was to survive by ensuring Gaza civilians would be killed. Hamas has indiscriminately launched more than 7,000 rockets at Israel, all designed to kill Jewish civilians.
Outside assessors have concluded that Israel has not inadvertently killed a greater ratio of civilians to terrorists compared to most other urban fighting conflicts elsewhere, and perhaps even fewer than American engagements in Mosul and Fallujah.
“Protestors Are Pro-Palestine”: Increasingly, protestors make no distinction between supporting “Palestine” and Hamas. Their chants often echo the original Hamas eliminationist charter and recent genocidal ravings of its leadership. Some protestors wear Hamas logos and wave its flag. Many cheered the Hamas massacre of October 7.
“Anti-Israel Is Not Anti-Semitic”: When protestors scream to Jewish students to “go back to Poland” or call for the “Final Solution,” or assault them or bar them from campus facilities, they do not ask whether they are pro-Israeli. For protestors, anyone identifiable as Jewish becomes a target of their anti-Semitic invective and violence.
“Genocide”: Israel has not tried to wipe out the Palestinian people in the fashion of Hamas’s one-state solution plan for Jews. Before October 7, some 20,000 Gazans a day requested to work in Israel—on the correct expectation of much higher wages and humane treatment.
If Hamas had come out of its tunnels, separated from its impressed civilian shields, released its surviving Israeli hostages, and either openly fought the Israeli Defense Forces or surrendered the organizers of the October 7 massacre, no Gaza civilians would have died.
According to Hamas’s questionable “genocide” figures, roughly 4 percent of the Gazan population died during the Israeli response to October 7. At least a third to almost half of those deaths, according to various international observers, were Hamas terrorists.
“Disproportionate Response”: Iran tried to send 320 missiles and rockets into Israel. Israel replied with three. Hamas launched 7,000 rockets into Israel and slaughtered 1,200 Israelis before the IDF responded in Gaza, often dropping leaflets and sending texts to forewarn citizens.
Israel has been disproportionate only in the effectiveness of its response. Hamas and its Iranian benefactor intended disproportionately to hurt Israel but utterly failed.
So Israel proved to be competent, and Hamas incompetent in their similar efforts to use disproportionate force.
The Athens Neighborhood Health Center, Indiana Health Centers, and Mariposa Community Health Center collectively sit on over $58 million in assets and receive regular checks from the federal government.
As federally qualified health centers registered as tax-exempt nonprofit organizations in Georgia, Indiana, and Arizona, respectively, they cater to low-income patients benefiting from Medicaid and Medicare. The FQHCs, along with their counterparts, are set for a windfall thanks to President Joe Biden earlier this year freeing up $4.4 billion for them, the most substantial annual funding increase in a decade.
The taxpayer-backed health centers, however, also have something else in common. Like hundreds of others scattered across the United States, they are partners of a little-known charity in Boston called Vot-ER behind a sprawling “nonpartisan” operation to register vulnerable patients to vote ahead of the 2024 election between Biden and former President Donald Trump.
But Vot-ER, according to a Washington Examiner investigation, is hardly middle-of-the-road. Funded by top Democratic-allied dark money groups, staffed by left-wing activists, and organized by a former White House fellow now sitting on a Department of Health and Human Services advisory panel focused on outreach to “vulnerable and underserved patient communities,” Vot-ER is a progressive hub poised to play a key role in voter mobilization in the lead-up to November.
That mobilization effort is at the heart of a 2021 Biden executive order gifting unprecedented new tools to federal agencies to register voters with the help of “approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations and state officials.”
And Vot-ER, according to documents unearthed through the Freedom of Information Act, appears to be directly linked to the White House’s efforts to make Biden’s order a reality. The documents indicate that two top staffers from the Boston-based charity were present at a 2021 meeting with representatives from the Executive Office of the President, the Department of Justice, and other agencies, as well as other outside left-wing groups, to plan implementing the order.
This report is one of several in theWashington Examiner exploring Biden’s March 2021 executive order on voter registration and left-wing groups connected to it. To conservative legal experts and Republican lawmakers, the order is unconstitutional and will be used as a partisan weapon to score Biden a second term unlawfully.
“Under the IRS Code, all 501(c)(3) organizations are strictly forbidden from engaging in voter registration or get-out-the-vote efforts in a partisan manner,” said attorney Stewart Whitson at the Foundation for Government Accountability, a right-leaning think tank. In a 2023 study, FGA’s advocacy arm found a 30-point swing favoring Democrats among current welfare enrollees compared to low-income voters who have never received welfare.
“But Biden’s executive order sets the conditions for groups like Vot-ER to do just that, a clear violation of federal law,” Whitson said. “With the DOJ controlled by the current president, the onus falls on Congress to step up and investigate this activity.”
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, Vot-ER Executive Director Aliya Bhatia insisted her group adheres to all IRS regulations and operates in a nonpartisan fashion.
“We ensure that our voter engagement efforts do not support or oppose any political party or candidate,” Bhatia said. “Our focus is on connecting voter registration and health-related outcomes.”
‘Sacred’
President Joe Biden speaks at the Wilmington Convention Center, Thursday, May 2, 2024, in Wilmington, D.C., as he announces his administration is providing states an additional $3 billion to replace lead pipes across the country. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Biden’s 2021 executive order, issued in March of that year, required every federal agency to hand over a plan to the president’s domestic policy adviser detailing how it would increase voter registration and participation. Conservative legal experts, including fellow Hans von Spakovsky at the Heritage Foundation, say that agencies generally have no business registering voters over a risk of the current administration using the full weight of the government to push a partisan agenda.
But moreover, there is a lack of transparency from the Biden administration about the criteria for “approved” outside groups coordinating with the government on voter registration, a fact that prompted congressional Republicans to launch an investigation. It’s unclear who fits under this approved umbrella, though internal documents provide a glimpse into how groups enlisted by the White House for advice during a July 2021 order planning call were overwhelmingly of the progressive Left.
Two staffers from the Boston-based Vot-ER were present on that July 12, 2021 call, according to internal meeting notes. On the call, the outside organizations suggested registering groups such as low-income people in public housing, prison inmates, welfare recipients, and illegal immigrants, with the latter being a topic Vot-ER has explored in videos published on its YouTube account.
One Vot-ER staffer listed as having been on the White House call, Aliya Bhatia, is the group’s executive director. The second, Leah Ford, is Vot-ER’s chief of staff. Bhatia, who says on her personal website that she “prioritizes diversity and inclusion in all her endeavors,” cut a $500 check to Biden’s 2020 campaign. Ford, who has also donated to Biden and other Democrats, is a former Democratic political campaign aide and previously worked for Planned Parenthood, according to Ford’s LinkedIn profile and Federal Election Commission filings.
In February 2021, just one month before Biden issued the executive order that prompted that call, Vot-ER became registered as a charity with the IRS. Its founder was listed on financial disclosures as Alister Martin, a physician and White House fellow from August 2021 to October 2022. Martin, who government visitor logs show has made trips to the White House since his departure, joined an HHS advisory panel in 2023, according to a Federal Register notice.
HHS spokeswoman Renata Miller confirmed to the Washington Examiner that Martin is still on the advisory board. Panel members are vetted by the Ethics Office before participation to ensure there are no conflicts of interest, Miller said.
“It is clearly a conflict of interest for someone so closely tied to the Biden administration and the HHS to be running a group that is actively benefiting from Biden’s executive order,” Parker Thayer, a charity expert at the conservative Capital Research Center think tank, argued.
Launching Vot-ER, which says it trains paid fellows to understand topics such as “health disparities and medical racism,” was made possible with the help of a cadre of deep-pocketed left-wing donors. Those include the Tides Foundation, Progressive Multiplier Fund, and the Windward Fund, a key cog in the $1 billion Arabella Advisors consultancy, the largest Democratic-allied dark money network in the country.
A Tides Foundation spokesperson declined to comment on the grants, though the spokesperson told the Washington Examiner the group has no plans for future giving. A spokesperson for Progressive Multiplier Fund said its grants to Vot-ER were for “development efforts,” while a spokesperson for a Windward Fund project, who declined to comment on any future giving plans, said its grants were for “nonpartisan civic engagement tools.”
In 2021 articles of organization documents filed in Massachusetts, Vot-ER described to the Commonwealth how it would “provide the tools, training, and community that support a growing movement to help patients and providers use their voices to improve America’s Democracy.” Vot-ER, in its own telling, “develops nonpartisan civic engagement tools and programs for every corner of the healthcare system — from private practitioners to medical schools to hospitals.”
Martin is now CEO of A Healthier Democracy Inc., which is legally the same entity as Vot-ER, according to tax records. The Vot-ER founder, who has praised the work of far-left “anti-racist” activist Ibram X. Kendi, has made clear why he determines the healthcare space to be ripe for voter registration.
“There’s still something very sacred about the caregiving relationship,” Martin said in August 2023 during an interview with the left-leaning Aspen Institute, according to footage reviewed by the Washington Examiner. “And I think you can use that to take advantage of that to do some work upstream at the political and social determinants of health.”
In the interview, Martin described how a project connected to Vot-ER was purportedly moving federal funding “directly into the pockets of low-income patients” to “pay their rent, pay their phone bills, pay their heating and electricity bills.”
“And then,” he emphasized, “we can have a conversation with them in six months, nine months, about voter registration.”
Now, the expansive registration push is taking place at hundreds of Vot-ER-tied health centers in Alabama, Arizona, Michigan, Florida, Nevada, and various other states, according to Vot-ER. Partners, the charity says, are encouraged to conduct on-site voter registration and staff trainings in their workplaces.
But while Vot-ER has a tab on its website advising healthcare professionals to proudly wear Vot-ER badges with QR codes that direct patients to voter registration materials, Vot-ER has also appeared to promote conflicting messages about the legality of this endeavor.
Vot-ER’s website, separately, links to a “best practices” document on advising health centers not to allow “providers and other staff to wear the VotER lanyard with the QR code and text message while on the job” to avoid the appearance of partisanship.
The document was prepared by the legal team in Washington, D.C., for the National Association of Community Health Centers, or NACHC.
A taxpayer-funded voter turnout army
According to its website, Vot-ER is delivering grants of up to $10,000 to approved public health centers through its so-called community civic engagement program.
NACHC is partnered on the program, a 2024 application of which asks representatives from centers to provide information about whether their patients identify as “LGBTQIA+, Native American/Alaskan Native, Hispanic/Latinx,” or are “best served in a language other than English,” among other questions.
Vot-ER also lists hundreds of participating sites on its website that have coordinated with the group on voter registration, many of which are federally qualified health centers. Participating sites receive election-related materials from Vot-ER, including its badges with voting resources.
One group listed as a “participating site” on Vot-ER’s website is the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas, the largest federally qualified health center in the Sunflower State. It services over 70,000 people, including in Oklahoma.
Footage reviewed by the Washington Examiner shows examples in which personnel at the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas touted their work turning out voters who ultimately rejected a 2022 anti-abortion referendum.
The videos call into question whether the health center has conducted itself in a nonpartisan fashion while being a participating Vot-ER site, according to Stewart Whitson, the attorney at FGA.
In a 2022 Vot-ER webinar, the center’s CEO, Krista Postai, said its “mostly female” and young “army” worked to send 65,000 text messages to patients about the referendum.
“And as you can see, we had an impact,” the CEO touted in the webinar, which also featured a Vot-ER adviser named Manisha Sharma, whose Zoom background depicted an image of feminist political activist and Marxist Angela Davis.
During a separate 2024 Vot-ER webinar about its prior partners, Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas Patient engagement director Leah Gagnon, who has made small-dollar donations to Biden and other Democrats, described how the center zeroed in on informing patients about the “reproductive healthcare” referendum. Gagnon said in the webinar that the group received a grant from Vot-ER and a matching grant from a related organization of Vot-ER.
Gagnon touted in the webinar how, after the referendum failed, Vot-ER was apparently thanked for its work by Lt. Gov. David Toland of Kansas, a Democrat.
“Kansas had some of the highest voting turnout we have historically had, especially for a primary election,” Gagnon said. “We were really excited about that. We got a cool little note from the lieutenant governor saying like, ‘Hey, that was badass, like you know, good job reaching your patients.”
Republican Kansas state Rep. Pat Proctor, who chairs the Elections Committee, told the Washington Examiner that Gagnon’s comments are cause for an investigation since it appears Toland may have acted partisan in his official capacity as lieutenant governor.
Kansas state GOP Rep. Pat Proctor, Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023, at the Statehouse in Topeka, Kansas. (AP Photo/John Hanna)
Reached by phone, Proctor said he’ll now be conferring with other lawmakers about sending a letter to the Democratic governor to demand answers.
“This is outrageous,” said Proctor, who supported a bill vetoed by Gov. Laura Kelly (D-KS) in April that would ban state agencies from using federal funds to administer elections without approval from the legislature. Kelly has notably received donations in recent years, including in 2022, from Postai, the center’s CEO, Kansas state records show.
Postai told the Washington Examiner she was unaware of Gagnon’s comments about Toland on the webinar. The CEO, who earned a salary of $404,760 in 2022, also claimed her center received no money directly from Vot-ER and said it is not using Vot-ER’s materials anymore to register voters.
“We do not take political positions or religious positions,” Postai said in a phone call. “I know people are analyzing to death what happened, but I don’t think it was about parties or politics. I think it was just women didn’t like being told — I don’t think anybody wants to be legislated.”
“You can’t legislate morality,” Postai said
Vot-ER did not respond to questions from the Washington Examiner about its relationship with Postai’s group.
‘Stinks to high heaven’
Meanwhile, Vot-ER also appears to have participating sites in various swing states before the November election.
Some are federally qualified health centers, such as Adelante Health Center in Maricopa County, Arizona, or Southern Nevada Community Health Center in Las Vegas. Other listed participating sites, such as Campesinos Sin Fronteras, are not in this category.
Campesinos Sin Fronteras, which calls itself “a grassroots social justice organization that promotes dignity and respect for Latino seasonal and migrant farmworkers and their families,” is located in a county in Arizona nestled on the U.S.-Mexico border. The registered charity reportedly helps transport and house undocumented immigrants.
It has also been linked to certain programs at public health centers in Arizona and received millions of dollars from the federal government.
To Spakovsky, the Heritage Foundation legal fellow, a troubling fact of Vot-ER’s operation with public health centers is the appearance of nonregistered welfare recipients being taken advantage of by healthcare professionals they rely on for care.
Michael Chamberlain, director of the ethics watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust, said it’s concerning that the Biden administration appears to be refashioning government programs into a sprawling get-out-the-vote operation to boost Democrats.
The White House did not reply to numerous requests for comment.
