Michael Daly

The assault rifle used to kill 10 at a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo on Saturday is the same model that was used to kill 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Connecticut a decade ago and that was used to kill 10 in sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C., area in 2002. And so we begin the insane cycle again; mass murder followed by calls for a renewed assault weapons ban followed by ineffectual compromise followed by the sale of weapons of war used to perpetrate more domestic carnage. “This is my Bushmaster XM-15,” Payton Gendron, […]

Janice McGeachin, the renegade lieutenant governor of Idaho who is running for governor, likes to portray herself as a law-and-order candidate. But a group of retired police officers and sheriffs in her state who oppose extremism on either side of the political spectrum have come out against the Republican. “I feel like we have to stand up and return civility to politics,” Randy Winegar, retired deputy chief of the Boise Police Department and a member of the new Defend & Protect Idaho PAC, told The Daily Beast. “And if we can’t convince somebody else with the logic of our arguments, then […]

Hundreds of outraged doctors, researchers, and students staged a walkout at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine on Tuesday after reports it is considering hiring a prominent scientist who has been the subject of sexual misconduct allegations that three other prestigious institutions found credible. “WTF NYU… STOP PROTECTING HARASSERS… HONK FOR SAFER WORK ENVIRONMENT… #NO TO SABATINI,” their hand-drawn signs read. A few truckers responded by honking, but likely none of the passing drivers had any idea that the signs referred to David Sabatini, a one-time star biotech researcher who resigned from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology earlier this month […]

Florida State Rep. Randy Fine says he championed the bill to strip Disney of its special self-governance status because the entertainment company spoke out against the “Don’t Say Gay” law and brought “California values” to his state. Fine demonstrated his own values earlier this month in a series of texts where he repeatedly described a school board member as a “whore.” And, in those same texts, Fine sank further, from a sexist lout to someone who is lower than low—even by the standard of Florida politics. At the same time Disney was preparing to host the 2022 Special Olympics at its […]

“GET A NEW HANDYMAN.” Detectives investigating the murder last weekend of Queens mother of two Orsolya Gaal found those words written on a household memo affixed to her refrigerator, a senior NYPD supervisor told The Daily Beast. The old handyman, so far as police could tell, was 44-year-old David Bonola, who was arrested for the savage killing early Thursday morning. Police say he confessed to stabbing Gaal 59 times, stuffing her body into a hockey bag, and leaving her at the edge of a park near her home. It was not clear if he had an attorney on Thursday afternoon. According […]

More than a decade after doctors told her she had only two years to live, Tara Tisch of Illinois continues to survive the cascading effects of an acute immune disorder. But unless the airline mask mandate is restored as a result of the CDC deeming it “necessary for the public health” on Wednesday, Tara has little hope of traveling to a list of dream destinations that prominently includes a return trip to Maui. “I’d like to go and swim with the green sea turtles again before I die,” she told The Daily Beast. “And I’d like to share that with my […]

The black, wheeled hockey bag had been left on a grassy area, with the bottom still resting on an adjacent sidewalk so that the blood leaked out across the pavement. But Glenn Van Nostrand, who had been led to the bag by his two Rhodesian Ridgebacks while returning home from walking the dogs in Forest Park in Queens, has poor vision in his left eye. He did not see the blood as he stepped around to pull the zipper at the top of the bag. When he peered inside, he did see a pair of bare feet. A woman in black […]

On Tuesday, 5-year-old Rebekah Sullivan sat under a perfect blue sky outside her grief-stuck North Carolina home. “Where are the clouds?”’ she asked her mother’s cousin, Vanessa Krunich. “Oh, no clouds today,” Krunich remembers replying. “It’s such a beautiful day.” “I see my daddy in the clouds and he smiles at me,” Rebekah said. Daddy was highly decorated Marine Master Sgt. Andrew “Sully” Sullivan, who retired on Sept. 11, 2021, the 20th anniversary of 9/11. He was 42 and had survived a dozen deployments during two decades of our longest wars only to encounter his toughest foe in the form of […]

“Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans?”Hillbilly Elegy author turned Senate candidate J.D. Vance asked in a campaign ad he tweeted on April 4. He goes on to say, “The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump’s wall. They censor us, but it doesn’t change the truth. Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” The unchanged truth is that only a small fraction of the illegal drugs coming into America from Mexico are smuggled by the undocumented immigrants Vance describes as “Democrat voters.” The great majority […]

A Florida second-grader with two mommies was coming back from lunch at Sikes Elementary School in Lakeland last week when he overheard two teachers saying the state legislature had just passed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. “It’s something they’re not supposed to be talking about because when they’re talking about ‘Don’t Say Gay,’ they’re technically talking about gay,” 8-year-old Sawyer Robbins noted to The Daily Beast on Monday. The boy understood that the bill to mean this teacher would not be able to discuss a family such as his at school. “What if someone’s parents are gay?” he asked. “You can’t […]

One surgical team managed to save the pregnant mother, who had been shot twice in the abdomen as she slept in her apartment with her 8-year-old daughter early on the morning of March 25 in Lovejoy, Georgia. But a second surgical team was unable to save 27-year-old Princess Wolfe’s unborn baby girl. The child had already been named Cori. Her maternal great-aunt, Stephanie McGruder, was later allowed to view her. “You want to see the little toes, little hands, you know? I wanted to salvage any precious moments I could.” — Stephanie McGruder McGruder saw that the nurses had treated the […]

Anybody who knows 5-year-old Rebekah Sullivan would understand the significance of the video her mother received on Monday at the North Carolina ICU where the girl’s father is fighting to regain enough strength for a double transplant to replace his COVID-ravaged lungs. The video showed Rebekah in a pharmacy near her home with a Band-Aid on her right upper arm. A neighbor had just taken her to get a pediatric dose of the COVID vaccine. And she hates getting shots. “It’s one of her big things,” her mother, Julie Sullivan, told The Daily Beast. “I remember when she was about to […]

The sign high over the half-dozen fuel pumps reads LUKOIL in big red letters. But if any of the customers were aware that is the name of Russia’s second largest oil company, it was not keeping them away from this Brooklyn service station. What did sway the customers were the black numbers under the LUKOIL sign announcing that regular gas here was going for $3.95 a gallon at the start of Monday. The surrounding stations were charging as much as $4.29. The price is determined by Lukoil, which adopted this marketing strategy long before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. The drawing power […]

Thirteen-year-old Kensey Dishman arrived back at Wayne County Middle School in rural Kentucky on Tuesday morning after a bout with COVID and the required quarantine. Her mother, Kim Gibson, had driven her there, as they had an appointment to see a counselor. Kensey had still been occasionally experiencing difficulty breathing, but that was deemed common after COVID and her oxygen levels had been good. Kensey seemed fine as Kim dropped her off at the front, where she joined the crowd of classmates returning from a holiday weekend. The students were no longer required to wear masks, as the Wayne County School […]

Unless you saw the coffin on the flatbed trailer in the lead, you might have thought the convoy of more than 200 trucks in central Missouri on Monday was a political statement of some kind. But the long procession on Highway 54 from Eugene to Jefferson City was in honor of a 13-year-old named Dalton Frank who loved trucks and often told his uncle that he wanted to be part of a convoy someday. The uncle, 33-year-old Carey Frank, led the way in his big, gleaming Peterbilt with the boy’s father beside him. The only message Carey and his fellow truckers […]

This week, a patient came in to see Dr. Thomas Nguyen with a tale of the pandemic so heart wrenching that the veteran Ohio pediatrician broke what he calls “my no-hug rule.” Throughout his 15 years of practice, Dr. Thomas Nguyen has scrupulously avoided any physical contact with his patients that could conceivably be misconstrued. And with COVID-19 came an added concern that proximity might transmit the virus. “From about mid-December through the end of January, we were seeing a ridiculous number of cases,” he told The Daily Beast. On Tuesday, a 15-year-old patient arrived at his private pediatric outpatient clinic […]

Raysean and Rich Autry of Ohio were born one minute apart in 1986 and they were nearly inseparable over the next 35 years. They roomed together in college, founded a media company and launched the hip-hop website Kollege Kidd. They produced films and TV pilots and marketed music artists. And they had bigger than big plans for ever more projects. “I believe we’re here to stay,” Raysean said in a video he made with Rich when they were starting out in 2009. But something the co-founders of this fledgling empire did not do was get vaccinated for COVID. And their grand […]

The X-rays showed that COVID had trashed Trevor Henlsey’s lungs, and the seventh grader was still struggling to breathe after nine days on maximum oxygen in a Missouri pediatric intensive care unit in early November. “Something you never want to hear your child say is, ‘I feel like I’m going to die,’” his mother, Deb Hensley later told The Daily Beast. Over the next three months, her sweet-natured son would wage a ferocious fight for his life. Even with the efforts of a remarkable medical team, his battle would at moments seem about to end as grimly as thousands of other […]

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a politician by profession, so he easily puts politics above all else, even when it concerns the fight against a virus that has killed 870,000 Americans, including 61,000 of his constituents. “Without a shred of clinical data to support its decision, the Biden Administration has revoked the emergency use authorization for lifesaving monoclonal antibody treatments,” DeSantis tweeted after the FDA’s Monday night announcement that it was suspending approval of the two main therapeutics offered by the centers he opened with great fanfare just last week. DeSantis went so far as to say, “This indefensible edict takes […]

Rosie Diven, a mother of three in rural South Carolina, had no idea her 16-year-old son had COVID-19 until a fearsome syndrome nearly killed him. Branson Diven had been vomiting and suffering a loss of appetite when Rosie brought him to an urgent care center near their home in Hartsville on Dec. 10. But he did not have classic COVID symptoms such as a sore throat or a cough, and after testing negative for COVID and positive for flu, he was sent home under the assumption he would soon be better. Six days later, Branson seemed to become only sicker. “I […]

If Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis were a responsible leader dedicated to the well-being of his constituents, he would have made clear that the Regeneron monoclonal antibody being administered at his five new treatment sites is all but useless in the current COVID-19 surge. But DeSantis is DeSantis and therefore his own top priority. He is happy to offer false hope in the middle of a pandemic—as his state breaks infection records week after week—if he believes it is to his political advantage. Last month, DeSantis held a press conference outside Ocala Medical Center with a sign reading “Early Treatment Saves Lives” […]

Halfway into robotically reading her hour-long State of the State speech off teleprompters, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem promised “to protect the people’s right to a medical or religious exemption from COVID vaccines.” She then raised her hand with the index finger extended to emphasize some particular idiocy. “We will also recognize natural immunity,” she said. The majority of the state legislators applauded, indicating they are not only Republicans but also foolish enough to endorse her fiction that people who have had COVID-19 do not need to be vaccinated. A leading research bioinformatician at the Yale School of Public Health terms […]

As told by one of the first firefighters to respond to alarms at 331 E. 181 St. in the Bronx just before 11 am on Sunday, they were met by impenetrable smoke when they stepped from the stairwell into the main hallway on the third floor of the 19-story building. “It gets real, real quick,” the firefighter later told The Daily Beast. They knew from too many other fires that this likely meant the door to one of the apartments was open, feeding the flames with oxygen and allowing smoke to fill whatever parts of the building it can reach. “It’s […]

The cops in Texas are calling it “a manhunt for a boy.” “Charged with killing three people,” Lt. Pedro Barineau of the Garland Police Department told The Daily Beast. “You got a suspected father who drove him to the scene and drove him away.” Fourteen year-old Abel Elias Acosta of Garland is all of five-foot-eight and 125 pounds. He is believed to be armed with a black and silver .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol with an extended magazine. He is the prime suspect in the fatal shooting of three fellow teens and the wounding of a fourth at a gas station convenience […]

Show yourself, Ron. Your press secretary says you are on vacation with your wife and three children. If that is so, you can surely still take a moment to reassure your constituents that you have not deserted them during a record-breaking surge of new COVID-19 cases. For a moment late Thursday afternoon, it seemed you had materialized at a bagel shop. A photo on your Twitter account showed you smiling with four of the staff. “Had some great bagels from Bagelicious Deli & Bakery in Ocala,” your tweet announced. But it turned out the photo had actually been taken back on […]

As 2021 concludes with record numbers of new COVID-19 cases in Florida and the nation as a whole, Dr. Claudia Espinosa plans to spend New Year’s Eve quietly with her family in their Tampa home. “I am just going to stay in my house, probably go to bed early,” she told The Daily Beast. But she knows that even though Florida reported 46,923 cases in a single day, many people will be gathering to ring in 2022 as if the paramedics were not suddenly roaring back. “I know that nobody cares,” Espinosa, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of […]

Dr. Matthew Harris saw 30 patients at his New York metropolitan area pediatric emergency room the night after Christmas. Twelve of them—12 kids—tested positive for COVID-19. “Every single child I saw with fever had COVID,” Harris told The Daily Beast. “Every single one including, I can tell you, several infants.” He would have expected no positive cases at all two months ago. “Maybe one if they were immunocompromised,” the pediatric emergency physician told The Daily Beast of the lull earlier this fall. “It’s a huge difference.” The New York State Department of Health reported that 157 out of 7,536 children 4 […]

Liz Smith-Breslin had just returned from a Christmas party late Friday night when her sister texted her a photo of a handgun posted by an eighth grader at the New York City public school their children attend. “So fucking sexy,” the poster had written, adding a flame emoji. The sister also sent a second Snapchat posting by somebody with the same handle. This one was a message written on white letters on a black background that made the first one all the more chilling. “Ya’ll do good to find a good hiding spot on monday.” Smith had just finished reading when […]

After challenging shifts in a packed Colorado emergency room, Dr. Will McNitt goes on Twitter to combat the misinformation that is perpetuating a pandemic in which lies translate into deaths. Tweet by tweet, McNitt counters untruths with scientific fact, often adding links to peer-reviewed research papers. “I’ll say, ‘No, that’s true and here’s why and here’s the paper,’” McNitt told The Daily Beast this week. “Usually, I’ll post a link.” When people cast doubt on the efficacy of the vaccine, McNitt refers them to a pair of studies featured in Nature. “I’ll say, ‘In fact, see here the vaccine seems to […]

We are taught not to speak ill of the dead, these now including 64-year-old Marcus Lamb, the anti-vax, pro-ivermectin televangelist who died of COVID-19 last week. But what of the still living who may join the dead if they listen to the falsehoods about the virus and the vaccines that were being aired by Lamb’s television network even as his funeral was held at a Texas megachurch on Monday? Among the shows available for streaming on the Daystar Christian TV network valued at more than $1 billion and capable of reaching 2 billion viewers is one from last Mother’s Day, in […]

As governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis is understandably big on gators. He had a gator logo along with the words “Don’t Tread on Florida” stenciled onto a sign he unveiled in October when calling for a special session of the legislature to counter federal COVID-19 vaccine mandates. And his office had that gator’s twin on another sign with the words “Let Us Alone” affixed to the podium at a national guard armory in Pensacola on Thursday. The staging was completed with a huge American flag and a dozen national guardsmen who stood at attention as DeSantis entered. “At ease,” he quietly […]

The two gunmen stepped from a car as 14-year-old Samir Jefferson was waiting to catch a Philadelphia city bus home from Thomas Edison High School just before 3:30 p.m. on Monday. The gunmen began firing and Jefferson fled alongside a Rite Aid store on Wyoming Avenue. The gunmen continued blazing away as they gave chase. Police would later use bits of adhesive tape to mark a line of a dozen bullet gouges in the bricks. Evidence markers numbered 1-35 would be placed by the shell casings that littered the street. Jefferson collapsed 200 feet away with 18 wounds. He became the […]

At 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, a 55-year-old woman in South Philadelphia was talking to a man near a red pickup when she suddenly became alarmed. “No!” she can be heard crying in a video that appeared on Twitter. The woman dashed across the street as the man reached into the back of the truck and ran after her. He had a gun in his upraised right hand. “Call 911! Call 911! Call 911! Call 911!” she screamed. The man fired five times, the shots sounding more deliberate than hurried. The woman pitched to the pavement, fatally wounded. Her death became the […]

To hear the fringe doctors who gathered at an equine facility for the Florida COVID Summit earlier this month, ivermectin is as effective against the virus in humans as it is against worms in horses. “I have been on ivermectin for 16 months, my wife and I,” Dr. Bruce Boros declared at the end of the meeting at the World Equestrian Center in Ocala. “I have never felt healthier in my life.” Two days later, the 71-year-old cardiologist fell ill with COVID-19, according to the organizer of the one-day gathering and two other people with direct knowledge. The organizer, Dr. John […]

FBI agents were waiting when 6-year-old Stella Schaefer landed with her mother in Chicago at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday on a connecting flight via Seoul from Bali. The mother, 26-year-old, Heather Mack, had been released 36 months early early for good behavior from a 10 year sentence for her part in what became known as the Suitcase Murder. Stella had not yet been born when her pregnant 18-year-old mother joined her 21-year-old father, Timmy Schaefer, in an Aug. 12, 2014, killing at a luxury resort in Bali. The victim was Stella’s maternal grandmother, 62-year-old Sheila van Wiese-Mack. Source link

A highly regarded homcide sergeant with Amarillo Police Department who died of COVID this minth handled 116 murder cases and solved them all. “One hundred percent,” department spokesman Cpl. Jeb Hilton told The Daily Beast. But in one case—the killing of a woman who went missing in 2016—Sgt. Mike Dunn was unable to recover the body. Dunn remained in regular contact with the family of 28-year-old Nicole “Nikki” Moore and assured them he would continue to do everything he could to return her remains to them. Source link

Exactly seven weeks before she died of COVID, a pediatric nurse and mom named Dianna Brummel-Rathbun espoused her passionate anti-mask views to a Michigan school board. “My hubby said many people stood up and applauded after I was done!” Brummel-Rathbun wrote in a Facebook post with video the day after her speech at the Aug. 9 meeting. the next day. Among those who watched the five-minute clip was her cousin Jackie Verhage Tellier, who joins every respectable medical and scientific authority in believing that masks, as well as vaccines, save lives. Source link

At least you knew right away that Dr. Stella Immanuel was nuts when she spoke about demon semen. The far more dangerous of the white-coated figures of America’s Frontline Doctors who appeared in a press conference outside the U.S. Supreme Court last year was Dr. Joseph Lapado. Lapado gave the impression of talking sense until you realized that he was joining Immanuel in endorsing hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 despite extensive scientific research finding it had no therapeutic value and might even be dangerous. Source link

Gabriela Acuna had already given birth to a premature infant, been put on a ventilator, and gone into cardiac arrest when her family got the call last week. A medevac helicopter had landed at the Las Vegas hospital where she was being treated to take her to California for a double lung transplant—her best chance for recovering from the ravages of the virus she contracted when she was 23 weeks pregnant. Acuna’s sister, Paula Olmeda, says the nurse told them the next call they got would be when the 29-year-old new mom was in the air, on her way to the […]

Nicole Sperry stepped into the cramped ICU room and for a few surreal moments felt she as if she had walked into an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. “I heard somebody say ‘the defibrillator,’ and how much epinephrine they need to give her and ‘chest compression,’’’ the 40-year-old school teacher recalled. Then the medical team began to step away, and a doctor started toward her. “That’s when they said she was gone,” Nicole recalled. Nicole gazed down where her 10-year daughter, Teresa, lay dead five days after exhibiting the first signs she had been infected by a virus that people are still […]

As some healthcare workers balk at taking an FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine with fewer known side effects than eating Chicken McNuggets, we should remember and honor the thousands of frontline heroes who died risking their lives to save others. Those fallen healthcare workers were as brave in the pandemic as any soldiers in war and they prominently include a 49-year-old Pennsylvannia ICU nurse named Deanna Reber. Her final message to us was imparted in an obituary penned by her 27-year-old daughter. “Deanna’s dying wish was that everyone get vaccinated so we can protect our loved ones from COVID-19,” the daughter, Kelseyleigh Hepler, […]

In a prolonged medical nightmare beginning with repeated resuscitation at birth, 2-year-old Grayson Hunziker has been diagnosed with everything from a rare form of diabetes to an optic nerve deficiency portending blindness to cerebral palsy to an underdeveloped brain whose scans make his mother think of the Apple icon. “It looks like somebody just took a big bite out of his brain,” his 22-year-old mother, Makayla Hunziker, told The Daily Beast. But despite multiple surgeries, along with countless tests and needles and tubes, Grayson maintained an unusually sunny disposition from the very start. And he kept smiling through it all, even […]

She was an adventurous young woman who left her hometown on the East Coast for a new life with her boyfriend out West—and then just vanished. She is not Gabby Petito, the missing white woman who became a social media fixation after she disappeared in similar circumstances last month and has since been found slain. She is Lauren “El” Cho, and many people believe her June 28 disappearance from Morongo Valley in the California desert near Palm Springs received relatively little attention because she is a woman of color. Three months later, the 30-year-old’s friends and family can only put their […]

With a rosy dawn on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, a figure in the uniform of an Army Green Beret stood to the edge of Ground Zero wearing a name tag reading BUCCA. Master Sgt. Ron Bucca, Jr. is the son of a former Green Beret who became a legendary member of the New York City Fire Department. Fire Marshal Ron Bucca, Sr. was also one of 343 FDNY members who perished at the World Trade Center across from where Ron, Jr. now stood exactly two decades later. Ron, Jr. had been 23 when he enlisted to get the people who […]

Deep into a moonless night after 9/11, Dr. Mike Brown headed into Central Park with 20 off-duty New York City firefighters he dubbed ”ninja gardeners.” They soon came to a spot at the top of the Great Lawn corresponding to an X that his legendary brother, FDNY Capt. Patrick Brown, had marked on a map that he included in a letter to Mike to be opened in the event of his death. Mike had also been a firefighter, while attending medical school, and had become an emergency medicine doctor while Patrick—also known as Pat or Paddy to his friends—went on to […]

Her mother tells people that 6-year-old Hattie Shell and her 8-year-old sister, Hazel, are “dirt balls with glitter on it.” “Hattie loves to have her nails done and loves to have her outfits match, but then she’s going to go outside and climb a tree or carry a chicken around,” Kady Shell says of her younger daughter. “She has about 25 chickens at home. She carries them around like footballs… She has them in the house.” Of the older girl, the mother says, “Hazel makes sure she has her jewelry on and her headband matches what she’s wearing, and then she’s […]

FDNY Captain Jay Jonas was leading Ladder Company 6 up the burning north tower of the World Trade Center when a woman whose clothes had burned off descended past them. Jonas saw that a man had given the woman his sport coat and was helping her down towards safety. “That was the spirit in the stairway all the way through,” he would later say. “We were facing something terrifying and we were going to get through it together.” Source link

The dangerous lies about COVID-19 and the vaccine that Father Michael Panicali spewed from the white marble pulpit at St Mark’s Roman Catholic Church have left the outraged family of one pandemic victim shamefully deprived of what they call their spiritual home. Helen Sylvester was married at St. Mark’s in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. St. Mark’s was also where her parents’ funerals were held and where her daughter, Elizabeth, and son, Anthony, made their first communion. Elizabeth and Anthony also attended the parish school. When the pandemic hit, Helen was in a nursing home in Long Beach, New York. Elizabeth was unable […]

After more than a year, the New York City Housing Authority was finally going to at least inspect the water leaking into 62-year-old Ana Del Valle’s apartment from the floor above. “It was a constant struggle to get Housing to come by,” her daughter, Mireya, later told The Daily Beast. Otherwise, Ana almost certainly would have headed out on the morning of Friday, May 11, 2018, as she did every day. She might have spent the day at one of the nearby community centers, maybe taking a yoga or a zumba class. Or she might have headed for the gym she […]

Just before 11 a.m. on Sunday, Father Michael Panicali stepped up to a white marble pulpit and delivered a demented anti-vax homily in a Brooklyn community that was reporting the high COVID transmission rate of 161 new cases per 100,000 residents in the past seven days. According to the official statistics for that zip code—which covers the neighborhoods of Sheepshead Bay, Manhattan Beach, and Brighton Beach—one in every five people have contracted COVID and one in 125 have died from it. Only 56 percent have had at least one shot of the vaccine, significantly lower than the city’s overall rate of […]

Back in 2011, two years before American women were authorized to engage in combat, the U.S. military fashioned a loophole called the Cultural Support Team (CST). Women from the Army, the Navy, the Marines, and the Air Force took special forces training and went into action in Afghanistan alongside their male counterparts. The idea was the CST could deal directly with Afghan civilian women the teams encountered without violating cultural prohibitions. And just as male special forces operators train male Afghan soldiers, the CST did the same with female Afghan enlistees. Those female Afghan warriors are now trapped in a country […]

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Photos Getty Patrick Dowdell is an Army combat vet as well as the son of an FDNY lieutenant who died on 9/11. And when he saw the images of panicked Afghans clutching the outside of a moving C-17 transport at Kabul airport, he thought of the people who had jumped from the burning twin towers. “That shows how desperate they are,” Dowdell said. The thought was all more searing because his father, Lt. Kevin Dowdell of Rescue 4, was killed along with 343 other members of the department while trying to rescue those people […]

Tennessee state Rep. David Byrd was recorded apologizing to one of two former students who accused him of molesting them when he was a girls’ high school basketball coach in the 1980s. “I can promise you one thing, I have been so sorry for that,” he says in a recording that surfaced along with the allegations in 2018. “I’ve lived with that and you don’t know how hard it has been for me.” A third student charged that he had attempted to molest her. But Byrd never admitted nor explicitly denied what the three alleged, saying only, “I have done nothing […]

Coroner Dr. Charles Preston of St. Tammany Parish reports that the Delta variant has the hospitals there and the rest of Louisiana approaching critical overload, with long lines extending from the emergency rooms. “A very highly contagious and aggressive beast of a virus,” Preston told The Daily Beast. “Things are at a critical point. I talk like it’s a future event, but it’s actually happening right now.” He finds a glimmer of hope when he sees some people actually obeying Gov. John Bel Edwards’ renewed mask mandate. And Preston has been watching the vaccination rate in the parish inch up to […]

Craven opportunism is all about timing, and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry made his move two hours before his state’s governor announced a mask mandate in response to a record increase in new COVID-19 cases, a distressing number of them involving children. Gov. John Bel Edwards might be alarmed that Louisiana’s pediatric hospitals are all full, but not Landry. He proved that with an email he sent out to his whole department advising parents how to get their kids exempted from the governor’s impending mandate. “Louisiana law offers broad and robust protections for students’ and parents’ religious and philosophical objections to […]

Councilwoman Lisa Clancy of the St. Louis County Council was breastfeeding her 8-week-old son while she virtually attended a meeting on Tuesday night as a series of unreasoning anti-maskers some call “spreadnecks” offered public comment against a renewed mask mandate she is proposing despite the madness. “Pretty much, you see me moving by screen angle up and you just see the top of my head, that means I’m nursing,” she later told The Daily Beast. Clancy’s other son is 5 years old and attends a preschool where two youngsters have tested positive for COVID-19 this past month even though masks are […]

As the 40-year-old medical director for Miami-Dade Fire Rescue and Urban Search & Rescue Florida Task Force 1, Dr. Ben Abo spent a horrific month at the scene of the Surfside building collapse. He has resumed his second job as an emergency room physician just as new virus cases and hospitalizations in Florida have spiked to an all-time high. “It’s the worst it’s ever been,” he told The Daily Beast on Monday morning after coming off an overnight shift at a Naples hospital. Source link

Dolly Parton became a true hero of the pandemic when she put $1 million into vaccine research and appeared in a video of herself getting the shot in March. She marked that occasion by singing an a cappella version of her anthem “Jolene” that should have convinced all who heard it. “Vaccine vaccine, vaccine, I’m begging of you, please don’t hesitate. Vaccine, vaccine vaccine, because once you’re dead, that’s a bit too late.” Source link

Any suggestion that COVID-19 can be equated with the flu should have ended more than 4 million deaths ago. But here is what the Northeast Independent School District (NEISD) in San Antonio, Texas, sent to parents four days ago: “This school year, public schools will treat COVID-19 exposure similar to the flu or strep throat and will not send home COVID-19 letters.” The announcement, signed by Superintendent Sean Maika, also reported that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the state legislature have continued to concoct a parent’s nightmare. “As we enter the 2021-2022 school year, remember that a mask mandate is prohibited, […]

The record-setting COVID-19 surge in Missouri springs from Branson, a superspreader tourist town whose visitor policy—to sell lots of tickets and take few precautions—is endangering thousands of lives. “It’s crazy busy with no mask mandate,” said the person who answered the town’s tourist information line on Thursday. As the crowds come and go, the infection rate for Branson and surrounding Taney County is 19.3 percent. There are 54 new cases a day in a population of 57,000, which is 10 times the national per capita average. More than two-thirds of the population are unvaccinated, including the very nice tourist information person. […]

In a display of total sanity amid an alarming COVID outbreak, the organizers of the annual Birthplace of Route 66 Festival in Springfield, Missouri, have voted unanimously to cancel the annual event for a second year. “With our region’s low vaccination rate against COVID-19, the resulting surge of infections are overwhelming our hospitals and making our community sick,” said Cora Scott, Springfield’s director of public information and civic engagement, in the July 12 announcement. “We feel it is just not safe to bring tens of thousands of people from all over the world to this community for any reason.” But from […]

A beloved Florida track coach was nearing the end of a monthlong fight against COVID-19 when Gov. Ron DeSantis began selling a new line of T-shirts and beverage coolers seeking to capitalize on mistrust of science and mitigation measures. “DON’T FAUCI MY FLORIDA,” read the message on the $21 T-shirts and beverage coolers priced $12 for a set of two. The campaign merchandise went on sale with a “NEW TODAY” online announcement on July 12. That was one day before Dunbar High School track coach Guy Thomas succumbed to the virus that Dr. Anthony Fauci and his fellow infectious disease experts […]

As Alabama trades off with Mississippi for the dishonor of being the state with the nation’s lowest COVID-19 vaccination rate, one of its officials is raising the specter of federal agents going door to door, subverting personal freedom. “Ban home intrusion by vaccine squads in Alabama,” Alabama state auditor Jim “Zig” Zeigler declared. Last week, President Biden said vaccinations had stalled just as the latest variant was proving itself alarmingly more infectious. Source link

From battering a woman for seven years to making a sex tape of an underage girl to mocking the bereaved, Tekashi 6ix9ine has proven there are more profound ways to be a rat than testifying against your co-defendants to get a lighter sentence. His latest bit of ratdom was a rank betrayal of some of his most loyal fans at a concert venue on June 27. Along with a private jet to fly him from his $1.8 million home in Palm Beach County, Florida, and a luxury RV to transport him from the Houston airport to the arena, Tekashi demanded and […]

The College World Series known as “The Greatest Show in Dirt,” which will be decided Wednesday night, has been shadowed by the nation’s two biggest ills. One is racism as manifested by the epithets allegedly spewed at Vanderbilt University parents as their team defeated Mississippi State in the first game in the best-of-three contest on Monday night. “I am deeply troubled that some of our student-athlete parents were subjected to racist slurs during last night’s game,” Vanderbilt Athletic director Candice Storey Lee tweeted on Tuesday. “This is absolutely unacceptable and disgraceful behavior, and such hateful language has no place anywhere in […]

Investigators concluded that the surveillance video of 28-year-old Nathan Allen clutching a semi-automatic pistol on a Winthrop, Massachusetts, street on Saturday afternoon is an image of murderous racism in action. They noted that Allen walked gun in hand past several white people without firing before he shot to death a Black Air Force veteran and then a Black retired Massachusetts state trooper. And the investigators later discovered white supremacist and anti-semitic rantings in Allen’s handwriting, complete with swastikas. But instead of the usual hate and bigotry on Allen’s Facebook page, they found a post calling on others to join him in […]

From the continuing culture wars, a true hero arose this week in the person of 13-year-of Hazel Herring of Virginia. And in so doing Hazel put to shame Dick Black, a former Virginia state legislator and longtime perpetrator of homophobia who seemed to have receded from public life only to roar back on Tuesday at a public hearing on the Loudoun County School Board’s policies regarding transgender rights and racial equality. Hazel’s 10-year-old brother is transgender and has already suffered torments ranging from being called a sinner to having other kids inform him that the school bus is “only for boys […]

What could have been an inspiring lesson in Catholic faith but has become just another tale of hypocrisy began on Dec. 17, 1948, after a porter slashed the throat of assistant manager Fred Naumann at 905 Liquor Store in St. Louis, Missouri. “He had told me to help unload a liquor truck,” the porter, V.O. Willams, said in a written confession following his arrest. “I refused because I was mopping the floor. He told me two or three times to go out, but I said I would go out after I dried the floor. He had been behind the counter when […]

As gun purchases reached record highs last year, gun thefts from motor vehicles were right behind them everywhere from Atlanta to Memphis to Charlotte. “There are people who can’t buy guns who are basically shopping for firearms,” Atlanta Police Officer Steve Avery says of these thieves. Each gun necessarily passes into the hands of a criminal—the one who steals it. Police say the thief then either keeps it or sells it to another criminal. The gun is then often used in a range of violent crime, including murder and robbery. Source link

When she heard on the news that JBS USA had paid $11 million in ransom to cyber criminals who shut down several of its meat plants, Beatriz Rangel could only think of how differently the mega company had responded to the COVID-19 outbreak last year that killed her father and five co-workers, while sickening hundreds of others. “I thought, ‘I’m sorry God, but they deserve everything they get,’” she said of JBS on Thursday. “They’re so quick to pay something like that, but they don’t value human life.” JBS officials emphasized in news reports that they had taken immediate action at […]

Kiran Shukla of New Jersey is only one of hundreds of U.S. visa holders stranded in their native India after traveling there to attend to a dying parent in this time of COVID-19. But she may be the only one who then has been kept from attending to a spouse back home who became critically ill and died in her forced absence. She had to watch a YouTube livestream from 7,300 miles away as her American-born 19-year-old son, Samyak Shukla, participated in funeral and cremation rites for her 50-year-old husband, Jitendra Shukla. “That was my first time with any kind of […]

Each night Ashu Mahajan was stranded in India, his two daughters back home in New Jersey asked his wife a variation on a question that continues to be posed in thousands of families separated by a senseless bureaucratic hurdle. “My girls would ask me, ‘When’s Daddy coming home?’ and I really did not have an answer for them,’” the wife, Neha Mahajan, recalled on Monday. In the case of the Mahajans, the answer proved to be that daddy would be coming home after Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) got involved as both a senator from their home state and the chairman of […]

After the one-term president pardoned his one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort for tax and bank fraud, the undoing of justice included the snipping of a government padlock on the front gate of a brownstone at 377 Union St. in Brooklyn and the removal of a sign in the door that read: “NO TRESPASSING Property of United States Marshals Service.” Source link

Manveen Kaur Sethi might not have been able to save her mother from the coronavirus, but she could have been with her in India at the end. Sethi also would have been better able to help her father, brother, sister-in-law and nephew secure the oxygen and medicines they still need for their continuing fight against COVID-19. Yet because of some bureaucratic nonsense, she has remained stuck 7,150 miles away in Boston. “I can risk my life, but not hers. I have to choose between my daughter and my family.” — Manveen Kaur Sethi Source link

Her 9-year-old daughter was home in Tennessee with a fever this week as a bureaucratic technicality kept Payal Raj 8,900 miles away in India, hoping, hoping, hoping it did not signal anything serious. “Today I’m going out of my mind waiting to hear from my husband how her temperature is,” Raj told The Daily Beast. Raj and her daughter, Saanvi, had flown from Tennessee to her native India on April 6. She saw no reason not to assume she would soon be back in Hendersonville. Source link

Right-wing rocker Ted Nugent expressed not a peep of concern for anybody he might have infected as he announced that he had tested for COVID-19. “I have had flu symptoms of the last 10 days,” Nugent reported via Facebook Live on Monday evening. “I thought I was dying.” That timing meant the people who had cause for concern prominently included South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem. Source link

Dr. Comilla Sasson spent the weekend at her Colorado home awaiting the results of a COVID-19 test her 6-year-old was given after developing a fever. On Monday morning, the 42-year-old emergency medicine physician got word that the results were negative. She herself is fully vaccinated, along with 26 percent of the adults in her state. Her husband is one of the 43 percent who have received at least one shot. And even though her state is among the 22 with increased new cases, the numbers are considerably lower than they were at their height. She dares hope the whole country is […]

A police officer standing over the body of the FedEx shooter on Thursday night radioed a report that should shame every member of Congress who persists in doing nothing meaningful about gun control. “We have the suspect here inside. Looks like he has a gunshot wound to the head. Two rifles here,” the officer said. “Unless there’s another person out, this is going to be our suspect here.” The suspect was Brandon Scott Hole, aged 19. He was still two years short of the federal minimum age to buy an alcoholic drink. But the federal minimum for buying a long gun […]

The lights of an apartment complex named after a former Ku Klux Klan member shone just beyond the clouds of tear gas used to disperse protesters outside police headquarters in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, after an unarmed 20-year-old Black man was fatally shot during a traffic stop on Sunday. The KKK member was Earle Brown, on whose farm the city of Brooklyn Center was founded back in 1911. Along with the Earle Brown Farm Apartments, there is the Earle Brown Heritage Center and Earle Brown Tower, and Earle Brown Drive. Until June 2020, there was also Earle Brown Elementary School. And the […]

On COVID-19 maps where red indicates the highest rate of new infections, The Thumb of Michigan looks like a huge hammer smashed the whole peninsula that gives the area its name. The entire mitten-shaped state has been exploding with new cases over the past fortnight, to a daily average of 72 new cases per 100,000—the highest infection rate in the nation. But the rates of hospitalization and deaths, as well as new infections, are all highest in The Thumb—which has considerably fewer medical resources than the urban areas. Source link

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott uttered nary a public syllable when it was revealed in 2019 that 1,000 unaccompanied migrant children had reported being sexually abused or harassed while in federal custody in his home state and elsewhere during the previous four years. After all, that report came during the Trump administration. But now Joe Biden is president. And so Abbott scrambled to hold a press conference on Wednesday as soon as state officials received a small number of unsubstantiated tips of abuse and neglect among approximately 1,600 unaccompanied migrant children at a temporary mega-shelter in San Antonio in Bexar County. He […]

As he drove past reopened churches on Sunday, critical care nurse John Haacke figured Easter will prove to be yet another holiday followed by a surge in COVID-19. “It’s not like a guessing game,” Haacke told The Daily Beast on Sunday night. “We told you it’d go up after Halloween. We told you it’d go up after Thanksgiving. We told you it’d go up after Christmas. We told you it’d go up after New Year’s. And it’s going to go up after Easter.” COVID-19 cases were already on the rise in recent days at the hospital in Eastern Maryland where he […]

As millions of Americans were desperately seeking the COVID-19 vaccine, the imprisoned former Army Green Beret physician from the famous “Fatal Vision” murder case was one of at least four inmates who turned down a shot and still sought early release because of the virus. Jeffrey MacDonald declined the offer of a Moderna vaccine on March 2 at the federal prison in Cumberland, Maryland, where he is serving a life sentence for the 1970 stabbing and bludgeoning deaths of his pregnant wife, Colette, and their two daughters, 2-year-old Kristen and 5-year-old Kimberly. But that did not stop his lawyers from arguing […]

Were it not for a little girl in a light blue T-shirt reading from a single sheet of white paper, Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken may not have betrayed more than half a million American dead and broken a private promise to support a continued mask mandate at Tuesday evening’s city council meeting. “We’re about seven months into this mask game and there’s probably not a lot anyone’s going to say that’s going to be something we haven’t heard before,” TenHaken said as he invited members of the public to address the council in advance of the vote. A tiny figure […]

As a group calling itself Free Idaho held a mask-burning outside the statehouse in Boise last weekend, the three Pugel sisters took turns visiting their COVID-19-stricken father in a hospital ICU across town. The mask burners were a bizarre mix of recklessness and caution as their kids joined in feeding protective face coverings to the flames in a steel barrel. “Not too fast, kids,” a grown-up called out. “Be careful. Watch the fire.” Source link

Jody Liebmann resides in Detroit, which means her mayor turned down 6,200 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine when less than 9 percent of the city has been vaccinated “Feeling isolated and forgotten,” she tweeted on Friday. “The @CityofDetroit (my city) Mike Duggan received his Covid vaccine on Dec. 22. He said yesterday the J&J vaccine wasn’t good enough for Detroit. I’ve been stuck at home for 10 months. This is absurd!” She was tweeting as someone whose daughter is 30 weeks pregnant and caught COVID-19 two months ago. The absurdity of Duggan’s position is doubled when you consider that […]

Even as it condemned as “morally compromised” a COVID-19 vaccine that the Vatican itself has approved for emergency use, the Archdiocese of New Orleans was being hit with dozens of new clergy sex abuse claims. The new claims were filed in advance of a March 1 deadline set by the judge in a federal bankruptcy proceeding instituted by the archdiocese in August, citing the double impact of pending sex abuse lawsuits and the pandemic. The archdiocese was already facing more than 30 outstanding abuse claims and was seeking to curtail future ones. Federal Judge Meredith Grabill set March 1 as a […]

The retired NYPD cop now charged with assaulting a D.C. cop in the Capitol riot that has been called domestic terrorism was previously assigned to guard the ruins of the World Trade Center as recovery teams extracted the remains of innocents killed by Islamic terrorism . And 54-year-old Thomas Webster once presented himself as a victim of terrorism in a civil suit filed in the same federal jurisdiction where he was accused this week of attacking a District of Columbia police officer “like a junkyard dog.” Webster can be seen on video wielding a metal flagpole and seeking to tear off […]

As the COVID-19 death toll in America continues its march past 500,000 this week, all the big anti-maskers will be at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida. The speakers at “the largest and most influential gathering of conservatives in the world” will include former President Trump, who set an example for anti-maskers by not wearing one, and Donald Trump Jr., who partied in the New Year with a bare face at Mar-a-Lago. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem—who endorsed the superspreading Sturgis motorcycle rally and even refused to wear a mask at a ribbon-cutting for a mask factory expansion […]

As Ted Cruz was fleeing Houston on Wednesday, the rapper and water company entrepreneur A.J. McQueen was out on the city’s frozen streets, delivering free bottles of his purified best to a desperate city. “I want to help those in need.” he posted on instagram. “DM me if you are out of water. I will try my best to get to you today. I’m gonna do this until I run out. Only for those that are IN NEED (Elderly, those with kids, sick, etc.)” One immediate response read, “My mom has no water. We have a grandma with Párkinson, [sic] and […]

At the end of a week in which four fellow members of South Dakota’s House of Representatives tested positive for COVID-19, Minority Leader Jamie Smith presented Speaker Spencer Gosch with a letter calling for a mask mandate in their chamber to match one in the State Senate. “He said, ‘Thank you, I’l read it,” Smith later told The Daily Beast. Smith then departed the State Capitol building in Pierre and began the three-hour drive home to Sioux Falls. He received a text on the way informing him that two more House members had just tested positive. All six are Republicans. And […]

While the prosecution at the Senate impeachment trial was showing a video clip of MAGA supporters storming the Capitol, a Trump lawyer in another matter was in a Zoom meeting with the Palm Beach Town Council, screen-sharing a document that had two highlighted lines. “TITLE: President NAME: Trump, Donald J” Source link

As the COVID-19 variants prompt the CDC to study whether we should all be double-masking, three states are demonstrating triple insanity. North Dakota has ceased to require wearing any masks at all. Wisconsin’s state legislature voted in recent days to end the mask mandate there. And at least two counties in Kansas have voted to opt out of that state’s mask order. This all comes as health officials say masks are more important than ever before in reducing the spread of COVID-19 and the chances of getting infected by more contagious and thus more lethal variants. “We allowed the variants to […]

Abraham Lincoln had been prominently mentioned in the invocation and the opening remarks and the inaugural address at the swearing-in of President Joe Biden earlier in the day down in Washington, D.C. Now, as night gathered in Brooklyn, I passed along a row of small signs reading “vaccine entrance” affixed to the cast iron fence outside Abraham Lincoln High School at the edge of Coney Island, in a zip code where the COVID-19 positivity test rate was 17.53 percent over the previous week, almost double the city average. Many people in the neighborhood could tell you that Lincoln High is the […]

Anna Borgia of Florida was a Trump supporter until she learned the former president had granted last-minute clemency to the doctor who had left her blind while subjecting scores of other patients to unnecessary treatments—often involving injections directly into the eye—before being sentenced to 17 years in federal prison for the biggest Medicare fraud on record. “I’m writing a letter to Trump,” Borgia told The Daily Beast this week. “I’m very disappointed in him, I’m going to tell him, ‘Why did you pardon this son of a bitch?’” The son-of-bitch is Dr. Salomon Melgen, who was convicted of defrauding Medicare and […]

Over the long weekend, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem reacted on Twitter to a post about grocery-style food bank in a Texas school that seeks to reinforce the dignity of needy students and families by enabling them to shop with credits earned through good deeds and acts of service. “There is no such thing as a free lunch,” Noem wrote, quoting conservative economist Milton Friedman, who used that line as the title of a 1975 book. Noem has vocally opposed government handouts and the higher taxes that accompany them. She turned down a federal offer of a $400-a-week hike in jobless […]

A week after President Trump unleashed the storming of the U.S. Capitol building, a Texas public health official worried he will now be unleashing COVID-19 with a gathering at the border wall. “I am very concerned that if there is a crowd without social distancing that there may be transmission,” Dr. Ivan Melendez, the Hidalgo County health authority, told The Daily Beast. “Without masks absolutely.” If all the many previous Trump events during the pandemic are any indication, Tuesday’s gathering in the town of Alamo—not to be confused with the old Spanish mission 250 miles north where the 1823 battle was […]

When Arizona received its first shipments of the COVID-19 vaccine in early December, emergency room nurse Nicole Koller saw a first ray of hope in the seemingly unending horror that had arrived with a post-Thanksgiving surge. The 47-year-old traveling nurse filled out an online “pre-screening survey” and figured she and the other health care workers battling COVID day after day at Banner University Medical Center in Phoenix would be among the first to get vaccinated. But in a sign of the national dysfunction over vaccine distribution, Koller was told she could expect to wait up to six weeks because of a […]

The pro-Trump thugs who charged up the Capitol steps on Wednesday were met with what seems like a different police department than 32-year-old disability activist Stephanie Woodward has encountered when being arrested at least 15 times. Woodward had never been left with hard feelings, even after a half-dozen cops lifted her from her wheelchair, carried her out to the street, and set her on the sidewalk with her hands cuffed behind her back. “I had a job to do and they had a job to do,” she said. “I wasn’t upset they were arresting me.” Source link

As people were dying in Los Angeles at an average rate of two every hour and overwhelmed hospitals were turning ambulances away and as oxygen supplies were running perilously low, a group of some 50 anti-mask protesters stormed an upscale grocery just after 3 p.m. on Tuesday. “Masks don’t work!” “they chanted at the entrance to Erewhon on Beverly Boulevard. “It’s a conspiracy!” A woman in a red “Keep America Great Hat” and a red hoodie with “Beverly Hills Freedom Rally” stenciled on the chest bellowed into a megaphone. Source link