Dispute in Olympia over claim of $1.1
billion in potential unemployment fraud
Posted By: Ron_lfp, 4/14/2021 10:39:07 AM
Washington’s unemployment agency was “wholly unprepared” to prevent or even detect a massive criminal fraud scheme that stole more than $640 million amid a surge in jobless claims last year, a new investigation has concluded. (snip) The audits laid out vulnerabilities that left ESD exposed to cybercriminals, who used stolen Social Security numbers and other personal information to file tens of thousands of bogus unemployment claims. As The Seattle Times previously reported, ESD missed warning signs about attacks by a group of Nigerian scammers known as “Scattered Canary,” including payments to out-of-state banks and suspicious email addresses
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Washington’s unemployment agency was “wholly unprepared” to prevent or even detect a massive criminal fraud scheme that stole more than $640 million amid a surge in jobless claims last year, a new investigation has concluded. (snip) The audits laid out vulnerabilities that left ESD exposed to cybercriminals, who used stolen Social Security numbers and other personal information to file tens of thousands of bogus unemployment claims.
As The Seattle Times previously reported, ESD missed warning signs about attacks by a group of Nigerian scammers known as “Scattered Canary,” including payments to out-of-state banks and suspicious email addresses
The story of American deinstitutionalization has become familiar. In a long arc—from President Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Act of 1963 to the present (snip) In the absence of the old asylums, Olympia’s mentally ill are now crowded into a city-sanctioned tent encampment, then shuffled through the institutions of the modern social-scientific state: the jail cell, the short-term psychiatric bed, the case-management appointment, the feeding line, and the needle dispensary. In the name of compassion, we have built a system that may be even crueler than what came before
Members of the Seattle School Board demanded the mayor’s office not sweep dangerous and growing homeless encampments on two school properties. In emails obtained by the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH, Seattle School Board President Chandra Hampson and Director Zachary DeWolf stopped tried to stop Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office from sweeping encampments near Meany Middle School on Capitol Hill, and at Broadview Thomson K-8 in Bitter Lake. CORRECTIONS*
Washington saw one of the biggest estimated increases in people experiencing homelessness in the country between 2019 and 2020, according to new national figures from an annual report to Congress.
Overall homelessness across the U.S. grew by more than 2% that year, according to the report’s estimates, but Washington saw an overall increase of 6.2%, or 1,346 people — the third largest increase in the number of homeless people among all 50 states. (snip) Washington, for example, saw a 20% increase in family homelessness between 2019 and 2020, one of the biggest nationwide
Seattle may not be dying, as the saying goes. But it could be doing something we haven’t seen in decades around here: shrinking.
Whether it was the pandemic, the protests and riots, the urban decay, the high costs, the work-from-home trend or pick your reason, people appear to have ditched the Emerald City last year in unusually large numbers, new data shows.(snip) The number of households filing change-of-address requests to move into Seattle was about the same as it was in 2019. But the number leaving the city limits soared, by 36%.
In the fall of 2019, a white man spat on Edwin Lindo while he was riding his bicycle with a friend around Mercer Island.
“It gets on my jersey and I’m like, ‘I can’t believe this is happening right now,’” he recalled.
Lindo, who identifies as Central American Indigenous from Nicaragua and El Salvador, and his friend, Aaron Bossett, who is Black, viewed the encounter as a racist attempt to exclude them from the biking community. (snip) Lindo has joined a chorus of individuals and organizations calling for the repeal of the King County law that requires bicyclists to wear helmets because of disproportionate enforcement, especially among Black, Native and homeless riders
Amid mounting layoffs in Washington state that have been linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for security guards has jumped, a silver lining following a year of virus-related closures and street protests that have roiled the country and the state.
Security guards are now one of the most in-demand occupations in the state, landing in the top 25 roles being sought by employers, despite the nature of the job in which guards could be confronted with life-or-death decisions.
"The summer hit and that is when we had a surge in demand," said Steve Jones, CEO of Allied Universal,
Rolling power blackouts were ordered across Texas early Monday morning as a winter storm gripped the state.
The rotating outages will likely last throughout Monday morning and could continue until the state's weather emergency ends, (snip)
Rotating blackouts occur when power companies cut off electricity to residential neighborhoods (snip) "At the same time, we are dealing with higher-than-normal generation outages due to frozen wind turbines
TR International, a global chemical distributor, is moving from its home of more than two decades in downtown Seattle, crossing the county line to neighboring Edmonds.
The company is one of at least 160 businesses that have left Seattle since last March.
While some of the companies that have left Seattle is due to the coronavirus pandemic, business leaders have said that much of it could be traced back to a sense that no one is minding the store in Seattle anymore, and a lack of accountability from city leaders.
TR International CEO Megan Gluth-Bohan said the decision to leave was easy. She cited ongoing violence, along with rampant homelessness and drug use.
Seattle cruise season again a victim of
COVID-19 after Canada extends ban
through early 2022 12 replies
COVID-19 after Canada extends ban
through early 2022 12 replies
Much of Seattle’s 2021 cruise season could be canceled after Canadian authorities on Thursday extended a pandemic-related ban on large cruise ships in Canadian waters through February 2022.
Passage through Canadian waters and to Canadian ports is key for the Seattle-based cruise business, which has been largely on hold since last spring due to U.S. and Canadian restrictions. (snip) Cancellation of the 2020 cruise season cost around 5,000 local jobs and at least $900 million in economic activity. In 2019, the Seattle cruise industry had its biggest year: Seven cruise lines carried 1.2 million passengers on 11 vessels over more than 220 voyages, a port spokesperson said.
Much of Western Washington had reason to rejoice Thursday when Gov. Jay Inslee modified his COVID-19 restrictions and allowed seven counties, including Pierce, to move to Phase 2 in his revised reopening plan. (snip) Washingtonians shouldn’t lose sight of the extraordinary power that remains entrenched in the executive branch.
The Legislature now has a chance to balance the scales, at least somewhat. For the next three months, Washington’s 49 senators and 98 representatives can reassert their status as a co-equal branch of government, no longer sidelined by a governor who wouldn’t call a special session as the public-health crisis dragged on last year.
The president of the Pasco Association of Educators (PAE) claims reopening schools for in-person learning is an example of “white supremacy,” and compares listening to concerned parents to following rioters breaking into the U.S. Capitol. He even says concern over student suicide is an example of “white privilege.”
Scott Wilson, PAE president, made a series of unhinged, controversial remarks during a Pasco School Board meeting this week.
The statements come as the union pushes for total remote learning for elementary schools, even with near-consensus from the medical community that it is safe to reopen schools with mitigation policies in place.
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An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released Thursday found that a majority of Americans oppose woke corporations influencing everyday life.
The poll asked registered voters if they support or oppose American companies using their public role, position, or events to influence political, cultural, or social change. The findings show that over half (58 percent) oppose any type of corporation using its power to influence any type of political, cultural, or social change across the country. They also show that 35 percent did support the efforts by woke corporations, while seven percent were unsure how to answer.
The survey also asked, specifically, whether the voter supports or opposes “professional sports teams
An elderly Mexican-American woman was badly beaten by a racist bus passenger who mistook her for an Asian-American, the victim's son said. The 70-year-old victim, named only as Becky by her son Pete, suffered a concussion, a broken nose, swollen eyes and had her hair pulled out last Friday. She was attacked while on her way to go grocery shopping in Los Angeles' Eagle Rock neighborhood. Los Angeles police arrested 23-year-old Yasmine Beasley shortly afterwards on suspicion of the attack, KTLA 5 reported.(Snip) 'Nobody would help. Not even the bus driver,' Pete told The Eastsider.
Why Is Everyone Swallowing Biden’s Lies?
28 replies
How did this happen? How did the nation go in an instant from disbelieving every utterance of Donald Trump to robotically repeating — and acting on — every claim that falls out of Joe Biden’s mouth, no matter how disconnected from the truth?
The most glaring example involves Biden’s fact-challenged tirade against Georgia’s new voting law. At his first and only press conference, Biden declared the state’s efforts to protect against voter fraud were worse than Jim Crow, “un-American,” “sick,” and “despicable.” (This was the same press conference where moments later Biden bragged about how much time he’s spent with China’s genocidal communist dictator before calling him “a smart, smart guy.”)
White House press secretary Jen Psaki called the video of 13-year-old Adam Toledo getting shot by a Chicago police office 'chilling' during Friday's press briefing. Psaki said she hadn't spoken to President Joe Biden before the morning briefing, so didn't know if he'd watched it, but said it served as a 'reminder' that 'too often in this country law enforcement uses unnecessary force, too often resulting in the death of black and brown Americans.' She said the shooting was unnecessary after Chicago cops released bodycam footage showing the boy had a gun and dropped it just before the officer opened fire.
Hunter Biden's new autobiography, Beautiful Things posted disappointing sales in its first week on the shelves, selling just over 10,000 copies despite a massive promotional push. The new 272-page book detailing Hunter's struggles with addiction and tragedy debuted at #12 on the Publisher's Weekly hardcover nonfiction chart, after selling a meager 10,638 copies.
It was edged out slightly in the rankings by 'The Calcium Connection: The Little-Known Enzyme at the Root of Your Cellular Health.' Topping the list was poet Amanda Gorman's The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country, which sold 42,000 copies for the week.
Say what you want about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, but one thing about the first-term Republican Congresswoman from Georgia that no one can dispute is that she does not back down from a fight, especially when she’s on the receiving end of an unprovoked attack.(Snip)The latest Democrat to learn that Greene has not morphed into a meek and timid freshman lawmaker after the House voted in February to strip her of her committee assignments was Rep. Eric Swalwell (CA), .(Snip)
It all started on Wednesday after Greene challenged Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to a debate about the Green New Deal.
On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The ReidOut,” White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said that fully vaccinated people can go to indoor restaurants, but “it’s a relative risk. When you have a lot of infection in the community, then you want to be careful. That’s why we say, wear a mask.”
Host Joy Reid asked if fully vaccinated people can eat in indoor restaurants, fly, or hug their older relatives.
Fauci said, “You know, it depends on the level of infection in your community. It doesn’t matter what the level of infection is, if you are vaccinated and you want to have something in the home, you, your family
WEST YELLOWSTONE — A person is recovering at Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center after being attacked by a grizzly bear Thursday afternoon.
Emergency crews were called to an area near Bakers Hole Campground around 3:45 p.m., according to a Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office news release. They searched for 50 minutes before finding the injured person, who had significant scalp and facial injuries. Gallatin County Sheriff Search & Rescue were called to respond on snowmobile with a rescue toboggan. The victim was loaded onto the toboggan and taken to a nearby ambulance. Hebgen Basin Fire Department EMS crews then drove the patient to EIRMC.
“Now is the time to remember to be conscientious
With all this push for Hollywood “diversity” one often wonders if Hollywood has a vendetta against traditional standards of movie making. According to one insider, that’s exactly the case for at least one major studio. Sci-fi author Nick Cole, co-author of the Galaxy’s Edge series, claimed that during a pitch meeting, a major Hollywood studio passed on a recent project he had been working on, citing the fact that they’re done producing content for “White, Christian, Trash.”
Oh wow, that’s a hell of a way to say it. Perhaps this is the sentiment underlying Hollywood’s spate of inclusivity-over-everything pledges they’ve made in the past few years.
Public support for marijuana legalization has reached a new high. According to pollsters at Quinnipiac University, 69 percent of all Americans and clear majorities in every demographic group now favor the legalization of marijuana. That's up from 51 percent of Americans who said they favored legalization in 2012, the first year Quinnipiac included questions about marijuana in their national surveys, and up from 60 percent who backed legalization in 2019. (Snip) Support isn't just growing, it is broadening. The Quinnipiac poll found that 78 percent of self-identified Democrats, 62 percent of self-identified Republicans, and 67 percent of self-identified independents favor legalization.
BROOKLYN CENTER, Minn —When William Adams moved to this area a few years ago, he joined thousands of Minneapolis residents in transforming Brooklyn Center from the mostly White suburb it once was into one where people of color account for more than half the population. But as he tried to settle into the community, Adams, who is Black, was always reminded of how Brooklyn Center police used to harass him in the early 1970s when he came to visit his girlfriend, who was White. “They would see something hanging in the window, or a light out on my car and
Can we finally start ignoring Fauci?
21 replies
Anybody who’s taking Dr. Anthony Fauci seriously probably needs to stop doing so. He endlessly moves the goalposts to maintain his unlimited power over the American people, something Democrats support. That’s why, on Thursday, during House testimony, Rep. Maxine Watters (who is a low-rent harridan) tried to shut down Rep. Jim Jordan’s efforts to get Fauci to say when enough Americans will be vaccinated so that COVID restrictions can end.
The past year has shown that Fauci either has no idea what he’s talking about or is trying to advance an agenda that invariably has to do with maintaining the 2020 status quo of lockdowns, isolation, and masks.
Comments:
Gov. Jay Inslee rewards the criminal incompetence of his donors he appoints.