Reports of robbery in the nation’s capital are up by 68% in 2023 compared to last year.

Former President Donald Trump is aiming to deport millions of people each year, several advisors told the New York Times.

About a dozen suspicious letters were sent to election offices in various states -- with at least four confirmed by the FBI as containing deadly fentanyl.

Can you guys help me out here. I'm trying to figure out what in the world is in this beaker-looking thing that Aaron Rodgers spilled on the sideline Monday night at MetLife Stadium. Take a look.

It has since been revealed that the letters all originated from a single location in Portland, Oregon.

GOP debate highlights Trump ambiguity on TikTok plans

Christopher Hutton

November 10, 06:30 AM November 10, 06:30 AM Video Embed

The competition among Republican presidential candidates on the debate stage to signal eagerness to ban TikTok drew a contrast with the lack of clarity about front-runner Donald Trump's intentions for the ubiquitous social media platform.

The presidential candidates who appeared onstage Wednesday spoke in favor of banning TikTok or forcing a sale by its Chinese parent company, noting the risk it poses to national security.

REPUBLICAN DEBATE: WINNERS AND LOSERS OF THIRD GOP MATCHUP IN MIAMI

Trump, though, has yet to clarify his plans for TikTok if he regains the presidency.

As president, Trump in 2020 tried to pry TikTok out of Chinese ownership but was thwarted. In his campaign materials, he has referred to TikTok only obliquely, even as its status has become the topic of heated debate and serious legislative efforts in Congress.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request from the Washington Examiner for comment about his proposed policies relating to TikTok.

Here is the relevant background on Trump and TikTok.

Trump and TikTok

Trump issued an executive order in 2020 to force the sale of TikTok to U.S. owners, but the sale was stopped by court order. Microsoft had considered purchasing the company's technologies but was declined by parent company ByteDance, which is headquartered in Beijing. The company described Trump's order as a "smash and grab" forced sale.

The campaign agenda outlined on Trump's website does not address TikTok directly. It does say, though, that he would "kick Chinese intelligence operations out of the country and force China to give up any U.S. holdings that put national security at risk."

Trump slammed Biden for being "weak on China" after he revoked Trump's order and opted to investigate the app instead. He did not explicitly state that he would file another executive order forcing TikTok's sale if he won the presidency.

TikTok on the debate floor

Most of Trump's competitors were eager to endorse a ban. "TikTok is not only spyware. It is polluting the minds of American young people all throughout this country, and they're doing it intentionally," former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said on the stage.

Christie faulted Trump for not banning TikTok, saying it was "one of the big failings" of the Trump administration.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) indicated support for an order along the lines of what Trump attempted. “If you cannot ban TikTok, you should eliminate the Chinese presence on the app, period," he said.

Tech executive Vivek Ramaswamy said that the government should crack down on any "U.S. company transferring U.S. data to the Chinese." Ramaswamy, though, has embraced TikTok in the near term, joining in recently to promote his 2024 presidential candidacy.

Ramaswamy and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley clashed over his use of TikTok to hype up his campaign. Haley had attacked Ramaswamy for using the app in the last debate, so he turned it around and noted that Haley's daughter was an active user of the app. That seemed to anger Haley. "Leave my daughter out of your voice," she retorted. "You're just scum."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Current legislative dealings with TikTok

The Biden administration is currently at the negotiating table with TikTok, although it does not appear responsive to the company's proposed solutions.

While members of Congress have introduced several bills restricting TikTok to varying degrees, none of them have gained enough traction to reach the Senate or House floor for a vote.

Sens. John Thune (R-SD) and Mark Warner (D-VA) introduced the RESTRICT Act, which would give the Commerce Department additional powers to regulate tech business deals related to nations of concern, such as China or Iran. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) have proposed outright bans on TikTok. Tim Scott introduced legislation forcing apps such as TikTok to show users their country of origin.

© 2023 Washington Examiner

Here's a little sliver of hope, courtesy of CNN of all places.

Poetry Comics Month, Day 2: Three Dimensional

Learn how to make your own poetry comics here: https://incidentalcomics.substack.com/p/how-to-make-poetry-comics

Professor Ivonne del Valle was suspended from UC Berkeley for stalking, sexual harassment, retaliation and violating a no-contact order.

"Having children should be incentivized, not be a financial penalty like it is in most countries."

Election security at center of voting software debate following recommendations to update

Rachel Schilke

October 31, 06:00 AM October 31, 10:48 AM Video Embed

A report highlighting possible vulnerabilities in Dominion Voting Systems's machines has spiraled into a conversation spanning multiple states over whether failing to update the software ahead of the 2024 election will compromise its security.

Vulnerabilities in Dominion’s software were identified by University of Michigan computer science professor Alex Halderman, who wrote a report in 2022 that found votes could be altered by someone who gained access to the voting equipment, such as a voter in a polling place or corrupt election officials.

NOVEMBER TO REMEMBER: SHEILA JACKSON LEE LEADS ROUNDUP OF INTRIGUING MAYORAL RACES

Halderman’s audit discovered nine vulnerabilities in Dominion’s software, each of which would require, to some extent, physical access to the electronic ballot systems. Fraudsters would also need a copy of the program's software, which would be hard to obtain and even harder to decipher.

This caused a wide-ranging debate among election security experts and secretaries of state after some agencies determined that while there were some vulnerabilities, they found no evidence that the weaknesses had ever been exploited during an election cycle.

The controversy regarding the machines only grew after Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said he would not update the state’s voting system, which has nearly 24,000 voting machines across 159 counties, and he called Halderman’s claims “theoretical and imaginary.” Raffensperger said the system was secure and “battle-tested” and that it would undergo health checks before the 2024 election, but the state does not have the bandwidth or time to update every machine.

Greater Georgia, a voter registration watchdog founded by former Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, is now going on the offense after Raffensperger’s decision not to update all the machines, saying it compromises election integrity and will financially affect Georgia’s taxpayers in the long run.

Loeffler said Raffensperger has shown “no urgency in fixing” the problem, “which invites every malign actor to come wreak havoc in our elections.”

“It's somewhat provocative and antagonistic to people who believe that secure elections are important to say that we're going to go through the 2024 presidential election, in which Georgia has been named the No. 1 battleground in the country and has the most voting machines, that we will not be updating them,” Loeffler said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.

“And the rationale given is that there is no time to do the work that they've known for two years, and four other states have already authorized the upgrade,” Loeffler added.

Other states choosing to update

Colorado, Michigan, and Washington are three states that have decided to upgrade Dominion's voting software ahead of the 2024 election, according to certifications signed by the respective secretaries of state.

In most states, to be considered for voting updates, vendors must undergo federal laboratory testing to detect vulnerabilities and apply patches to any problems, whether they involve security or performance. Once testing shows that the voting system meets the state’s and the Federal Election Commission’s requirements, a vendor can submit an application to the secretary of state’s office for approval.

The Colorado secretary of state carries out software updates every two years, so the voting systems were updated on May 26, 2023. However, the office told the Washington Examiner that Colorado does not use the software package tested in Halderman’s report. The office said the expert who conducted the analysis had unlimited access to the machines and that the analysis itself used conditions that were unlikely to exist in the real world.

In Washington, Franklin County is the only one of 39 counties that uses Dominion's voting software. Stuart Holmes, the director of elections, said in-person voting equipment was the “most vulnerable” because of who has access.

“It's getting touched by people that are not election administrators, just people voting in person, and so there's opportunities for bad actors to have access to that equipment,” Holmes said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “And so that's why it's important for these reports and the [Elections Assistance Commission] and the good work they do to bring states together to be able to identify these, because even though Washington is a vote-by-mail state, we still have in-person voting centers in which these pieces of equipment are fielded in.”

Greater Georgia knocks Raffensperger’s out-of-office tendencies

Loeffler believes that the time Raffensperger has spent outside of his office over the last few years could have been spent directing teams to update the voting machines.

Data from an open records request from Greater Georgia provided to the Washington Examiner showed that Raffensperger had spent 42 days in his office, out of a possible 176 non-weekend/holiday calendar days, for an average of four hours a visit. Since 2021, Greater Georgia found that 70% of Raffensperger’s days were spent away from the office.

“We have a part-time secretary of state in a full-time role, which is not only unfair to voters, but it's unfair to taxpayers, and Georgia's taxpayers are now on the hook for a $150 million contract for voting machines over 10 years that the secretary of state has refused responsibility to maintain,” Loeffler said.

Following pressure from election security experts, politicians, and advocates, Raffensperger approved the new version of Dominion’s software, which will be piloted in municipal elections in five counties this fall. The decision came after a closed-door election security meeting at the state Capitol between Raffensperger, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones (R-GA), and Republican state Senate leaders, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

Nevertheless, election officials aren't planning a massive statewide rollout of the software, which encompasses tens of thousands of touchscreens and ballot scanners, until the software is thoroughly tested — and only after the 2024 presidential election.

However, Jason Torchinsky, a partner at the Holtzman Vogel law firm who specializes in campaign finance and election law, said the decision to not update all of the machines might not be as dramatic as some groups are making it out to be.

“I’m not aware of any legitimate election officer who thinks that there’s a voting machine security issue with software,” Torchinsky said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “I mean, look, if you were able to connect your computer to a voting machine, might you be able to do something with it? Maybe, but you’d have to have a physical connection to the machine … which is unrealistic, on any kind of scale.”

He added that the slow rollout of the software updates sounds like typical secretary of state protocol to “roll things out in pieces, so I don’t have a statewide meltdown.”

"It's not like updating your home PC and then you're done, right? You've got to do updates, you've got to test everything, you got to make sure that the systems function, you know, and talk to each other and operate under load,” Torchinsky said. “I mean, it's the people that think that running elections is just super easy and you flip a switch and it's done — are not people who have ever run an election or been around the running of an election.”

Holmes said that when upgrading voting systems, a secretary of state’s office has to “plan backward,” particularly when it comes to training election workers to update, replace, and operate the equipment.

“And as you're replacing all of your scanners, all of your printers the state of Georgia, if they are having to replace their in-person, accessible voting units, that's very, very costly. And so it may be part of the equation. It’s just pure funding,” Holmes said. “But I think the other piece is the training side of it, as well.”

He also disagreed with Loeffler’s suggestion that an official's time in office could have affected the software update rollout, saying that Raffensperger is “not the guy who personally implements the update.”

“That feels like a bit of a red herring kind of argument,” Torchinsky said.

Loeffler, however, said that the voting software updates should not be ignored for an argument of “low probability.”

“That's often true of cybersecurity. Why do we do any of it? It is low probability, but the edge cases have extremely high economic and reputational and societal costs,” the former Georgia senator said. “And that's what we're protecting against, are the edge cases.”

“I don't know anyone who manages cyber exposure by saying, ‘Well, it's an outlier and we're just going to ignore it,'" she continued.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

She added that updating the machines would ultimately instill confidence in elections for voters, particularly following the 2020 election when Republicans targeted Dominion Voting Systems as fraudulent following former President Donald Trump's loss. One example is in Coffee County, where local election officials gave access to computer technicians working for Trump supporters. Four people involved in the Coffee County breach faced charges, one of whom has pleaded guilty.

“Taxpayers are asking him to do the job. We're asking him to do the job,” Loeffler said of Raffensperger. “Make our elections secure and engender confidence so that people vote because at the end of the day, if people don't vote, we will not have elections that reflect the will of the people.”

© 2023 Washington Examiner

The statue of Robert E. Lee that stood in Charlottesville was incinerated in a 2,250-degree furnace Saturday.

Vice President Kamala Harris condemned the shootings in Lewiston, Maine, and pointed to Australia's gun control as the path to a better way.

An injected version of Eisai and Biogen's Alzheimer's drug Leqembi works as well as the current intravenous version at removing toxic brain plaques, according to an analysis presented by Eisai on Wednesday. A weekly shot form of Leqembi, given as two consecutive injections,...

Alternatives to Elon Musk's X struggle to dent app's user base a year after purchase

Christopher Hutton

October 27, 04:00 AM October 27, 04:00 AM Video Embed

The multitude of alternatives to X, formerly known as Twitter, have struggled to gain traction to compete even as X seems to be struggling to stay afloat in the year since Elon Musk's takeover.

Following Musk's purchase of the platform, many users attempted an exodus and sought a platform worthy of their attention. Some established networks, such as Mastodon, saw increased downloads, while others launched alternatives, such as Instagram's Threads. While the rival platforms regularly see surges when X makes design decisions that people dislike, they've yet to draw away the hundreds of millions of monthly users that X still has.

MURTHY V. MISSOURI COULD HAVE MAJOR RAMIFICATIONS FOR BIG TECH AND FREE SPEECH

Here's how X's clone attempts look a year after Musk acquired the company.

Mastodon

Mastodon, a decentralized social network that allows users to make their own private social networks, was presented by many Musk critics as an alternative to Twitter in the initial months of Musk's takeover. That push caused its user base to surge to about 2.5 million in December 2022. However, that number dropped to 1.4 million in January 2023.

The platform saw its user base surge to 2.1 million users in July after Musk renamed Twitter "X," according to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko.

BlueSky

Bluesky is a project founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in 2019. Initially founded as a side project at Twitter, Dorsey spun it into its own company to create a "decentralized" platform that requires an invite code to get access.

The platform saw a surge of new users in September after Musk announced plans to charge every user an annual $1 fee for the ability to post or repost. The platform has moved from fewer than 50,000 registered users in May to over 1.7 million users on Oct. 25, according to BlueSky Stats.

Instagram Threads

When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was launching Instagram Threads, expectations rose that the platform might present a serious challenge to X. Not only did Meta have the funds to make the popular social platform, but it also had experience with the technology. Over 100 million users signed up for Threads in the first five days of the new platform's launch, according to the company.

The users did not stick around for long, however. Daily active users for Threads on the Android app dropped from 49 million on July 7 to 12.6 million on July 23, suggesting that most users did not stick around and stay active on Threads.

Meta claims that user numbers have improved on the platform since. Threads has "just under" 100 million monthly users, Zuckerberg said during his company's quarterly earnings call. However, daily and monthly active users are different metrics, making it challenging to ascertain accuracy.

State of X

X's metrics have declined since Musk's takeover. Daily active mobile users fell 15% year-over-year, according to the analytics firm SensorTower. App downloads also dropped 38% between October 2022 and September 2023. User churn, or the number of people who stop using the app, went up 30% year-over-year as of September 2023.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

The majority of the platform's top advertisers have also left X, according to a report released by the marketing consultancy Ebiquity.

Musk has attempted to improve the state of the app, including by hiring former NBCUniversal CEO Linda Yaccarino to take over as CEO and attempt to convince advertisers to return. He is also trying to rebrand X as an "everything app," adding new functions such as video chats and encrypted DMs.

© 2023 Washington Examiner

"Law enforcement is asking people to shelter in place. Please stay inside your home with the doors locked."

COMEDIANS TO THE RESCUE: Comedians to the Rescue: Bill Burr’s New Movie Helps Hollywood Find Its Spine: “Old Dads” is hated by reviewers, loved by audiences.

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Think Gen Z is going to get drafted into World War III? Think again, because this is what Gen Z looks like, and it ain't good, brother.