The FBI arrested a Somali-born man accused of stealing $4 million from a federal food program for children in need through his participation in the nation’s largest COVID-era scam. FBI Director Kash Patel announced Wednesday that 47-year-old Said Abdullahi Ereg surrendered to federal authorities after being wanted since 2024 on fraud charges. Ereg was placed ...
There is a wave of buzz and excitement looming across North America, as the FIFA World Cup is set to begin Thursday afternoon. But what most people don’t know is the hidden costs and loss of revenue that come with the event. According to Adam Crafton of The Athletic, the World Cup will take a...
The Federal Bureau of Investigation says a federal fraud suspect turned himself in after being placed on the newly created "Most Wanted Fraudsters" list.Said Abdullahi Ereg was indicted in the Feeding Our Future scam in June 2024, but the U.S. District Attorney's office said he was living overseas and his exact whereabouts were unknown.Prosecutors say Ereg falsely claimed to have served '3,000 meals, twice a day, seven days a week' as part of the scheme.Ereg turned himself in just one day after the fraudsters list was announced.Prosecutors claim Ereg received more than $4.2 million in funds from the Federal Child Nutrition Program after submitting false reimbursement claims through a deli and grocery business he owned in Minneapolis.Ereg's Evergreen Grocery and Deli participated in the "Feeding Our Future" program, allowing Ereg to allegedly scam the government beginning about April 2020 and lasting until about April 2021, coinciding with the COVID pandemic.Prosecutors say Ereg falsely claimed to have served "3,000 meals, twice a day, seven days a week" as part of the scheme. His wife, Najmo Ahmed, also received payments directly from Feeding Our Future.The couple spent the money they allegedly stole on Burberry, Louis Vuitton, and Canada Goose, and also allegedly transferred about $2.5 million to foreign accounts. Ereg was indicted on charges that included conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. His wife pleaded guilty in Feb. 2025 to one charge of money laundering and is scheduled to be sentenced on Monday.FBI Minneapolis Field Office Special Agent Chris Dotson said at a media briefing Wednesday that Ereg was one of the first eight people put on the fraudsters list, which was published within the last week.RELATED: 'Feeding Our Future' scam artist agrees to plea deal with a slap-on-the-wrist sentence "Today's apprehension of Said Abdullahi Ereg, a fugitive on the FBI's Most Wanted Fraudsters List, highlights the collective commitment of the DOJ, FBI, IRS, and USPIS, along with our USAO to bring every alleged fraudster to justice," Dotson said."FBI Minneapolis will be nominating more fugitives to this Most Wanted Fraudsters list," he added.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Just days after the FBI and the Department of Justice released the “Most Wanted Fraudsters” list, an arrest was made of a former Minneapolis grocery store owner. […]
President Donald Trump is apparently tampering so thoroughly in elections that even a staunchly MAGA official is raising alarms about it.“[Maricopa County Attorney Rachel] Mitchell garnered national attention after Senate Republicans tapped her to question Christine Blasey Ford during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process after Ford alleged that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her as a teenager,” wrote MS NOW’s Ja'han Jones on Wednesday. “Kavanaugh has flatly denied the allegation.”Yet despite Mitchell’s impeccable MAGA credentials, including endorsing Trump’s 2024 campaign, Jones reported that she has filed a lawsuit against America First Legal, White House adviser Stephen Miller’s right-wing activist group that is trying to make sure Trump does not lose control of Congress during the 2026 midterm elections.“The office is led by Justin Heap, who has egged on the Trump administration’s push to acquire sensitive voter data in Arizona,” Jones reported. “And the disturbing context to all this is Trump has openly declared that Republicans should nationalize voting processes and ‘take over the voting’ in several cities — like Phoenix, perhaps.”Jones added, “In a June 8 legal filing, Mitchell’s lawyers asked Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney to rein in Recorder Justin Heap’s politically connected firm, the America First Legal Foundation, which it said has undertaken ‘an unprecedented power grab.’” Her lawyers argued that “the Recorder lacks any explicit or implicit statutory authority to hire outside counsel — let alone a partisan organization — to serve as in-house counsel on ‘all’ matters under his ‘purview.’”Overall Jones concluded, “The fact that even conservative officials are sounding the alarm here shows how extreme, unprecedented and potentially threatening to democracy this situation could prove to be.”Speaking with AlterNet earlier this month, Common Cause Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation Dan Vicuña said that Trump’s various voter repression policies — including trying to stop mail-in voting, demanding voter files, gerrymandering, supporting voter ID laws and stating he will deploy law enforcement to voting places — are all part of a larger plan to steal the midterms. Common Cause is a nonprofit good government group with a distinguished pedigree tracing back to 1970.“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”
Members of Congress are scrambling to jump on the growing anti-data center fervor sweeping through local communities across the country. Why it matters: Where there is this kind of intense grassroots uproar, there is also political opportunity — and lawmakers know it.The latest example is legislation from Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.) to restrict companies' ability to sue municipalities for rejecting applications to build data centers.The bill — called "the Local Control Protection Act" — would also require developers to file a legally binding "community benefit agreement" or lose out on federal tax incentives, per legislative text first shared with Axios.State of play: Growing public anxiety about the rapid growth of AI is fueling bitter fights at the local level to stop data centers from being built, Axios' Madison Mills reported.Objections include alleged environmental damage, high energy usage and resultant utility cost increases, and noise, air and water pollution.More than 350,000 people signed a petition opposing a proposed data center bordering the Nashville Zoo, according to Axios' Nate Rau.In Seattle, local officials have moved to ban new large data centers for a year, Axios' Melissa Santos wrote.By the numbers: Legislative proposals to restrict data center construction were fairly rare on Capitol Hill before this year. Now, Republicans and Democrats alike are flooding the zone.In the last three months alone, more than a dozen bills have been introduced to either investigate data centers' impacts or restrict their proliferation in some way.Between the lines: It's not just toothless bills to commission reports and studies — though there are those too, looking at resource consumption, environmental ramifications and the effects on communities of color.Several proposals aim to protect consumers from any energy cost spikes that result from data center production.Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has introduced a bill to impose an outright moratorium on new data center construction "until legislation is enacted that safeguards the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence."What they're saying: "We should never let billion-dollar corporations supersede the voices of those who live in the community," Bresnahan, one of Republicans' most endangered incumbents, said in statement."The people who live here, work here, and raise their families here are the ones who know what's best for our communities."Reality check: The prospect of any of these bills passing is slim — Congress has notoriously made scant progress in passing any guardrails on AI.And as Axios previously reported, AI and AI-adjacent companies are spending big through super PACs in the 2026 midterms to curry favor with sitting lawmakers and get allies elected to Congress.
Florida man Robert Dillon filed a lawsuit against police for what he believes is a wrongful arrest from an artificial intelligence facial recognition error. In 2023, Dillon […]
One of the FBI's most wanted fraud suspects in the massive Feeding Our Future scandal has finally returned to face justice. The post Somali Fraudster Said Abdullahi Ereg Surrenders to the FBI After Fleeing to Kenya — First Arrest from the New Most Wanted Fraudsters List appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Trump's U.S. ambassador to Turkey is accused of helping Jeffrey Epstein find a personal assistant who became both a recruiter and a victim in his sex trafficking network, Raw Story has learned.Sarah Kellen told members of the House Oversight Committee last month that she was working as a host at the W Hotel in Honolulu in 2001 when she was recruited to work for Epstein and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell. A woman working as an intern at the hotel’s front desk befriended her and told her about the opportunity.Kellen told the committee that Epstein had helped get the woman, whose name is redacted from an interview transcript, an internship at the W “because he was friends with Tom Barrack," who owned the hotel.Kellen said she didn’t realize at the time that Epstein and Maxwell were her prospective employers.“She never told me his name,” Kellen told members of the committee, chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-KY), during her May 21 interview. “She just told me there was a wealthy couple in New York that was looking for a new traveling assistant and if I would be interested. She had taken some risqué photos of me earlier, and I learned that she had sent them to Jeffrey, and then she started telling me about the job opportunity.”Barrack, a key diplomatic player for the Trump administration in the Middle East as ambassador to Turkey and special presidential envoy for Syria and Iraq, has not commented publicly about his well-documented, decades-long relationship with Epstein. His role in potentially connecting Kellen with Epstein has not been previously reported.The start of Kellen’s employment with Epstein and Maxwell overlaps with a period when the couple was friendly with the future president and first lady. Donald Trump told New York magazine in October 2002 that he had known Epstein for 15 years and that he was “a lot of fun to be with,” adding, “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”The friendship between Epstein and Trump, along with Barrack, is detailed in the book Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff, which describes the three as “a 1980s and ’90s set of nightlife Musketeers.”A billionaire real estate investor, Barrack reportedly introduced Trump to Paul Manafort, his first campaign chairman during the 2016 campaign. Manafort was later convicted of crimes related to his political consulting work for a pro-Russia party in Ukraine.A prolific fundraisier for the Trump campaign, Barrack spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention, and following Trump’s election, chaired the 2017 inauguration committee.Before that, Barrack reportedly leveraged his business connections in the Middle East to smooth over distrust among Gulf Arab leaders following Trump’s call early in the campaign for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering” the United States. The effort appeared to pay dividends when Trump made the first international trip of his first term, a visit to a summit in Saudi Arabia. The close relationship between Trump and the Gulf states has continued into the second administration, with the government of Qatar giving a plane to the president. Tom Barrack described Donald Trump as "one of my closest friends for forty years" during his speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention.Courtesy C-SpanIn 2022, Barrack was acquitted of charges that he acted as an unregistered foreign agent for the United Arab Emirates during the 2016 campaign. Now, as a U.S. diplomat stationed in Ankara, he praises the partnership between the two countries as being "of critical importance to the Middle East," and recently claimed credit for processing visas for the Iranian team so they could travel to the United States to compete in the World Cup.Epstein, who would be indicted for sex trafficking in July 2019, appeared to view himself as the odd-man-out during Trump’s ascent to power, while Barrack quietly assisted.Summarizing Wolff’s Fire and Fury in a January 2018 email, Landon Thomas Jr. — author of the 2002 New York profile — reported to Epstein: “There are a few paragraphs on you, TB, DJT partying around NYC in 90s etc. — and then MW says you are airbrushed out of DJT history while Barrack sticks around.”“I know,” Epstein replied.Raw Story was unable to reach Barrack for comment through the State Department or the U.S. Embassy in Ankara.In 2012, Epstein credited Barrack with connecting him to Kellen in an email to another employee to arrange for a visit by Barrack and Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, then the ruling emir of Qatar who was interested in buying Epstein’s New York townhouse.Epstein had planned to be in Paris at the time of the visit. In an email, he instructed an unidentified employee to be ready to receive the guests “well dressed” and in “heels.”“It’s Tom Barrack coming, so you can tell him I thank him every day for Sarah,” Epstein added.