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Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Forty-eight immigrants have been charged with voting in a federal election or other election-related crimes, the Department of Justice announced on Oct. 26.

All but a few of the immigrants are accused of voting in federal elections, violating 18 U.S. Code, Section 611, which says, "It shall be unlawful for any alien to vote in any election held solely or in part for the purpose of electing a candidate for the office of President, Vice President, Presidential elector, Member of the Senate, Member of the House of Representatives, Delegate from the District of Columbia, or Resident Commissioner."

Each count carries a prison term of up to a year, and the possibility of a fine.

Most of the immigrants are legal permanent residents, but one, 73-year-old Alfredo Santiesteban, is an illegal immigrant from Cuba, federal prosecutors said.

Santiesteban allegedly voted in the 2024 presidential election, according to charging documents filed with the federal court in eastern Pennsylvania. He did not have an attorney listed on the court docket.

Others charged include Artur Kopacz, a 50-year-old national of Poland and a lawful permanent resident who allegedly voted in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 election, and Maricela Nazarín González, 43, of Mexico, who allegedly voted in elections in 2022, 2024, and 2025 despite not being a U.S. citizen.

A lawyer representing Kopacz, who has pleaded not guilty, did not return a request for comment by publication time. González could not be reached.

Other legal permanent residents were hit with election-related charges such as registering to vote and lying in their naturalization paperwork.

FBI agents in one of the cases found evidence that Carlos Antonio Galeas checked the box on voter application forms for "I am a U.S. citizen" in both 2012 and 2016, according to charging papers.

The Honduran national later allegedly checked a box on the application to become a naturalized U.S. citizen that said he had never claimed to be a U.S. citizen, and that he had never registered to vote.

Galeas did not have an attorney listed on the docket.

Authored by Benjamin Bartee via Armageddon Prose,

Since September of last year, a team of Danish researchers, backed by $1.6 million in funding from RFK Jr.'s CDC, had planned a large-scale hepatitis B vaccine trial in the sub-Saharan African nation of Guinea-Bissau.

Per the study design, the control group of 7,000 infants would skip the at-birth hepatitis B vaccine dose and receive it later on at six weeks, whereas the experimental group of 7,000 infants would receive the shot immediately at birth, the objective being to assess potential adverse health impacts of the hepatitis B shot in day-old infants - a practice which the Public Health™ experts stateside have gone to war to shield from scrutiny, notwithstanding the facts that:

· Screening mothers for hepatitis B is cheap and easy

· Hepatitis B, outside of mother-to-infant transmission, is nearly exclusively acquired via unprotected sex and intravenous drug use, neither of which most rational people outside of Portland or Brooklyn would recognize as normal activities for infants

Vaxx shill Bill Cassidy "very concerned" CDC might not recommend hepatitis B shots for one-day-old newborns anymore pic.twitter.com/hUAENSdOhl

— Armageddon Prose (@ArmageddonProse) November 28, 2025

The World Health Organization (WHO), which relies heavily on funding from the likes of vaxx overlord Bill Gates, came out swinging in February against the proposal.

Via World Health Organization, February 13, 2026:

"The World Health Organization (WHO) underscores that the hepatitis B birth dose vaccine is an effective, and essential public health intervention, with a proven record...

WHO is aware of the proposed randomized controlled trial (RCT) on the hepatitis B birth dose vaccine in Guinea-Bissau. Based on questions raised in publicly available information and consultation with relevant experts, WHO has significant concerns regarding the study's scientific justification, ethical safeguards, and overall alignment with established principles for research involving human participants...

Placebo or no-treatment vaccine trials are only acceptable when no proven intervention exists or when such a design is indispensable to answer a critical question of efficacy or safety. Neither condition appears to be met based on publicly available descriptions of the study...

WHO stands ready to support Guinea-Bissau as it considers its way forward and in accelerating the introduction of the birth dose and strengthening implementation through."

Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Recently, the WHO appears to have won out, as the relevant authorities in Guinea-Bissau have put the kibosh on the project by refusing to issue the necessary permits.

The trial now appears DOA for good.

Via The Guardian:

"The US-backed hepatitis B vaccine trial in African newborns that drew global backlash was halted, the lead researcher said on Wednesday.

It was "now clear" that the study "will not move forward in Guinea-Bissau", Frederik Schaltz-Buchholzer, a Danish researcher, wrote on LinkedIn, adding, "we were not given the necessary governmental approval."

The minister of health in Guinea-Bissau, Quinhin Nantote, previously denied that the project would move forward. "This is not even remotely true," Nantote told the Guardian in Portuguese last week.

The study was to be funded with $1.6m from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), along with another $1.6m from private partners like the Bill Ackman-backed Pershing Square Foundation and the Bluebell Foundation.

"The solution is clear here: take the money and vaccinate as many kids as you can," said Paul Offit*, a vaccines expert at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, who sharply criticized the proposed study as unethical...

It was vital to support Guinea-Bissau in rolling the immunizations out to all newborns as soon as possible, Offit said. Guinea-Bissau currently plans to offer the universal birth dose in 2028."

*Imagine quoting Paul Offit as if he's an expert and not what he is, which is a crooked vaccine pimp.

Dr. Paul Offit aggressively defends metal adjuvants in childhood vaccines and pharmaceutical legal immunity pic.twitter.com/daPz8AmgIY

— Armageddon Prose (@ArmageddonProse) December 7, 2025

The idea that vaccine evangelists - who maimed and killed untold numbers of people worldwide with the mRNA "vaccines" they shoved down everyone's throats - care about African babies is, of course, laughable; they've slaughtered possibly more African children via reckless pharmaceutical experimentation than all the bloodthirsty warlords of the land and multinational corporations running cobalt slave labor mines combined.

(Did you know? In a deep, rich, sadistic irony, vaccine-derived polio cases now outstrip wild polio cases in Africa.)

All of the hullabaloo from the likes of the WHO, of course, stems from their desperation to prevent any legitimate study of adverse vaccine effects, especially in babies, from ever seeing the light of day.

Reading the tea leaves, understanding how Third World nations are boxed into corners by powerful international interests, it's virtually guaranteed that this is what happened:

· Emissaries of the Deep State, deeply intertwined with the pharmaceutical industry, relayed through back channels, subverting official communications from RFK Jr.-led CDC, the message to Guinea-Bissau interim president Horta Inta-A Na Mana that, if he doesn't kill the project, he can kiss all of his foreign aid and foreign investment bucks - what props his country's sorry economy up - goodbye

· Or, if he really wants to play hardball, they might just have the CIA run a counter-coup on him and he'll end up like Muammar Gaddafi, sodomized by a bayonet while a gleeful mob of color revolution goons films and cheers (Horta Inta-a seized power in a coup in November of last year and has spent the intervening months consolidating his precarious grip on power and purging rivals.)

· Project terminated, score one for the WHO

Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

Japanese prosecutors have indicted a U.S. Marine on robbery and murder charges over the death of a woman in a hotel in Okinawa, according to NBC News, citing Japanese media. Lance Cpl. Devin Jacob Ballard, 20, is accused of killing Anna Yagi, 39, at a hotel in Naha, the prefectural capital, and stealing her backpack. Ballard, stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, denies the allegations.

The indictment was filed Sunday. A court spokesman confirmed to AFP that "the case was indicted on October 25," ABC Australia reports. Prosecutors allege Ballard strangled Yagi with a telephone cord on October 3 and took a backpack holding her wallet, according to the Telegraph.

The case began with an arrest within hours. Police picked Ballard up late on October 3 after an officer spotted him alone on a street in the entertainment district of Okinawa City, WBTV carried a wire report at the time. Security footage showed a man believed to be the suspect entering the hotel with Yagi and leaving alone, and Kyodo News said her body was found in the room, apparently strangled.

Tokyo's reaction was immediate. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi called the crime "extremely regrettable" and her government lodged a strong protest with Washington, demanding maximum cooperation, tougher discipline for U.S. service members and preventive measures. Okinawa Gov. Genta Koja called it "absolutely unforgivable." Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi summoned U.S. Ambassador George Glass to convey Japan's outrage, the report said.

The killing set off protests in Okinawa and Tokyo. The U.S. military responded with a two-day operational pause and then a month-long curfew and alcohol ban for personnel on the island, according to the Telegraph. Motegi said officials are "reviewing the off-base code of conduct for US troops," and ABC says high-level bilateral talks will take up off-duty conduct and the "liberty" policy covering private activities off base. That policy was already tightened in 2024 after a string of sexual assaults by U.S. personnel, and bans public drinking off base between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m.

The III Marine Expeditionary Force said: "We recognise the seriousness of the charges and will continue to cooperate fully with Japanese authorities."

Okinawa is where most of the roughly 54,000 U.S. troops in Japan are based, and about 10% of the island's land is used exclusively by the U.S. military, the Telegraph notes. The island was under U.S. administration until 1972. The Telegraph lists a 2025 conviction of a Marine for choking and sexually assaulting a Japanese woman, and the 2016 rape and murder of Rina Shimabukuro by a base worker and former Marine, who got a life sentence, among earlier cases that fed opposition to the bases. NBC adds that the case fits a series of incidents over several years that have fueled unease about the U.S. presence on islands near Taiwan and China.

Authored by Larry C. Johnson via Sonar21,

Good news from the Persian Gulf: the war is going so well that the sea itself has joined the fight. While Washington's experts debate missile counts and the price of oil (around $115 for Brent on Friday, in case anyone in the White House is still checking), Karl Miller, who is actually on the ground in the Gulf, sent me a note this week that nobody in the briefing rooms seems to have read. Don't underestimate the damage to the world's crude tanker fleet, he wrote, and don't underestimate the pollution now spreading through the Gulf and down the coast of Oman. "It's an Exxon Valdez on steroids," he told me. "This is a catastrophe in its own right."

But I'm sure it's fine. Let's look at the numbers, just for fun.

Shooting the delivery trucks

The UK Maritime Trade Operations center has now counted 119 vessels reporting damage this year, and 77 sailors killed or injured. October is shaping up to be a banner month: Bloomberg counted at least 23 attacks on ships in or near the Strait of Hormuz in just the first two weeks, at least five of them in engine rooms, which is the maritime equivalent of being shot in the knees. Two ships sank last week. Two more tankers, the Kylo and the Riesco, went down in September. Nothing says "freedom of navigation" quite like a navigable ocean floor.

On October 9, somebody put a hole in the Gem No. 2, a 302,783-ton Very Large Crude Carrier, off the UAE coast near Umm Al Quwain. On October 22, Iran claimed four more hits on ships doing ship-to-ship transfers. Tehran's new "Persian Gulf Strait Authority," which sounds like a harbor commission and acts like a firing squad, says it has 122 "non-compliant" vessels on its list. One oil broker told Bloomberg that "every VLCC hit is material." You don't say.

Eight Valdezes to a ship

A little arithmetic for the folks at the Pentagon. The Exxon Valdez spilled about 257,000 barrels of oil into Prince William Sound in 1989, and Americans are still talking about it. A single VLCC carries about two million barrels. So every supertanker sitting in the Gulf is roughly eight Exxon Valdezes waiting for a drone. And the Gulf is a shallow, nearly enclosed bathtub with lousy circulation. Whatever goes in, stays in. Steroids, indeed.

We're already enjoying the preview. This week the UAE closed the beaches of Umm Al Quwain after a slick more than 22 miles long and more than 60 square miles in area washed ashore on the Khor Al Beidah peninsula. The UAE said, with admirable understatement, that the oil was "likely coming from a VLCC struck earlier in the month." Fishermen have been advised to stay away from the fish.

Down the coast, Oman is hosting the Caroline Bezengi, a tanker carrying about 800,000 barrels that suffered a mysterious explosion on June 8, was abandoned by its crew and then drifted aground in, of all places, a marine nature reserve near Qibliyah Island, home to humpback whales and Socotra cormorants. It started leaking at the end of June. By August the slick covered hundreds of square miles. The whales were not consulted. Across the water, Iran is mopping up its own crude spill off Qeshm Island. Everyone gets a souvenir.

But who needs drinking water?

Here's the fun part that the war planners seem to have skipped. The Arab Gulf states don't just pump oil out of the sea. They drink the sea. Desalination supplies about 99 percent of Qatar's drinking water, more than 90 percent of Bahrain's, about 90 percent of Kuwait's, 86 percent of Oman's, 70 percent of Saudi Arabia's and 42 percent of the UAE's, according to figures compiled by CSIS and the Atlantic Council. The six Gulf states run about 3,400 desalination plants, a third of the world's capacity, and more than 90 percent of the Gulf's desalinated water comes from just 56 of them. What could possibly go wrong?

Desalination plants have a small design quirk: they need clean seawater. When an oil slick reaches an intake, the plant has to shut down or risk wrecking its membranes and filters. We've run this experiment before. In 1991, Saddam Hussein dumped oil into the northern Gulf and trashed Kuwait's desalination capacity, and Kuwaitis got running water four days a week, with the rest delivered by truck. Even a humble algal bloom in 2008 and 2009 shut plants in Oman and the UAE for up to two months. Imagine what eight Exxon Valdezes could do.

And the backup plan? The UAE's own water-security planning envisions about two days of stored supply under normal demand. Two days. Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, the countries that depend most on desalination, have what analysts politely call "insufficient storage." Plants have already been hit directly: a strike in Bahrain in March cut water to as many as 30 villages, and Kuwait and the UAE have reported damage too. So the strategy appears to be: keep shooting at tankers in a shallow sea full of desalination intakes, and hope the wind cooperates. In the Gulf summer, a city without water is not an economic inconvenience. It is an evacuation.

Supertankers: now priced like space travel

Meanwhile, the world has discovered that you can't actually move oil without ships. Who knew? In early January, chartering a VLCC on the benchmark Middle East to Far East route cost about $30,000 a day. By early October, according to Poten, it cost $1.3 million a day, a modest 43-fold increase. On October 8 it hit a record $1.4 million a day. For a few days this month, Bloomberg noted, renting a supertanker cost more than launching a rocket into space. Freight alone now adds about $33 to the delivered price of a barrel. In January it added $1.73.

Why? Partly because ships keep getting sunk, burned and sent to the repair yard from a fleet that had zero spare capacity to begin with. Partly because, with Hormuz restricted, tankers are stuck shuttling and pumping oil from ship to ship in the Gulf of Oman, a process the head of Vitol called "very inefficient" before observing that "there is really not quite enough shipping to go around." And partly because shipowners have developed an irrational reluctance to sail a $100 million ship full of two million barrels of crude into waters where Iran keeps a target list. Cowards, all of them.

And the winner is...

Now for the punch line, courtesy of Miller. When the smoke clears, the country sitting prettiest on the water will be Russia. For years, while Washington and Brussels were busy sanctioning Russian oil, Moscow and its friends were quietly buying up tankers, mostly older midsize ships, to build the so-called shadow fleet. Ukraine's government counted 1,337 of them as of February. Western capitals called it a sanctions-evasion network. In a world that suddenly can't find enough tankers, it is called a fleet.

And the West has already come crawling. In March, the U.S. Treasury temporarily lifted restrictions on selling Russian oil sitting on detained tankers, for the sake of "stability in global energy markets." This month, the President of the United States personally negotiated a deal to buy Russian diesel. Four years of sanctions, followed by asking Putin for fuel. Bravo.

To be fair, the shadow fleet has its own charms. The tanker leaking all over Oman's nature reserve, the Caroline Bezengi, is believed to be one of Russia's: old, opaquely owned and, by most accounts, insured by somebody's cousin. So the shadow fleet is both Russia's trump card and a floating environmental time bomb that nobody is accountable for. Naturally, the bill for that lands on the beaches of Oman and the UAE, not in Moscow.

So let's review. We have shot up the world's supertanker fleet. We have turned the Gulf and the coast of Oman into an oil-slicked bathtub. We have put the drinking water of tens of millions of people at the mercy of the wind and a few seawater intakes. And we have handed the biggest stock of spare tankers to the one country Washington spent four years trying to sanction into oblivion. Miller summed up the outcome for the rest of the world in a word I can't print in a family publication. I'll paraphrase: when this settles, Russia comes out on top, and the rest of us are in very deep kimche. Mission accomplished.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

More than 250 hospitals have committed to serving healthier food, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Oct. 26.

The hospitals signed the Make Hospital Food Healthier Pledge, which commits them to providing healthier food to patients and emphasizing nutrition.

"Hospitals have a responsibility to promote health in every part of patient care, including the food they serve," Kennedy said in a statement. "More than 250 hospitals are taking action to improve nutrition for their patients, staff, and communities. I am calling on every hospital in America to join them, sign the pledge, and help make healthy food a standard part of health care."

The hospitals include multiple Cleveland Clinic facilities in Ohio, Houston Methodist Cypress Hospital in Texas, and Sanford Medical Center Fargo in North Dakota.

Tina Freese Decker, CEO of Corewell Health, which signed the pledge, said Monday during an appearance with Kennedy that the focus on healthier food and nutrition is embedded in Corewell's organization, cafeterias, and programs.

"And it's a badge of honor that we know that if you do come to one of our hospitals, you should be leaving saying that was really good food," Decker said. "We hope you don't come back to the hospital; you stay out of the hospital, but we hope that you enjoyed it, you got healthier, and we have a program that helps you be healthier when you're out of the hospital."

She said that one patient who had diabetes and hypertension and took a dozen different medications said that he wanted to change, and the health system helped him lose 70 pounds and stop taking the medications.

"He said that he can walk and do the things that he wished he could do before," Decker said. "And he said that a huge weight was off his chest."

Kennedy's department told hospitals in March they must provide patients with more nutritious food, and several months later, the agency released the Make Hospital Food Healthier Pledge.

The pledge commits hospitals to limiting highly processed foods and sugar-sweetened beverages, forgoing deep-fried foods, using whole grains rather than refined grains, and limiting processed meats and foods high in added sugar, sodium, and artificial additives.

Tampa General Hospital in Florida was among the first hospitals to commit to providing more nutritious food and to increasing its emphasis on nutrition programs.

Kennedy told reporters in Michigan on Monday that patient satisfaction at Tampa General has already improved.

Tampa General is looking at measuring health outcomes, and officials are confident that hospitals' commitments will lead to better patient outcomes, Kennedy said.

The biggest challenges for hospitals relate to cost, the health secretary said. Officials have met with Sysco and other large companies that hospitals buy food from, and the companies are working to offer more options, he said.

"Because we now have almost 300 hospitals that's going to send a signal to the marketplace where you're going to see that more and more of that real food being accessible," Kennedy added.