HIDALGO, Texas (NewsNation) — Human smuggling in the Rio Grande Valley is a daily occurrence and a lucrative business for cartels south of the U.S.-Mexico border. With all of that money on the table, organized crime outfits are investing in technology to protect their profits.

Flying high above in the south Texas night, a small orb of light can be seen on camera by law enforcement: it’s a drone — owned and operated by the Mexican cartels and keeping a watchful eye on law enforcement.

“They’ll use drones to scout our positions, where our border patrol agents are, how can they facilitate the drug trade,” said Brandon Judd of the National Border Patrol Council. “They’ll also use the drones to actually fly into United States land and they’ll carry small packages with drugs.”

Judd said this is happening all along the southern border — regardless of the sector.

NewsNation reporters saw it first-hand when they tagged along with the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) on a smuggling bust. In Hidalgo, when law enforcement holds, the smugglers hold their positions as well. But as soon as the agents get a call to move, migrants were sent across the border.

“They’re able to scout everything and watch what we are doing, every movement we are making. That’s why it’s a cat and mouse game and we have to try and be one step ahead of them,” said Lt. Chris Olivarez of DPS.

Sometimes, law enforcement is able to be a step ahead but Judd believes it’s time to evolve.

“We have to beef up our intel,” he said. “We have to beef up understanding and knowing where these drones are coming from, when they’re going to come, where they’re going to land; if we can do that, we can be much more successful.”

Welcome to the California Briefing, the weekly dispatch of California Jewish news from the Forward’s Louis Keene. In this edition: Jewish-made zombies, giant zippers, a letter from Streisand and more “Dave.”

To get the latest on pop culture, politics and Jewish life in the Golden State in your inbox every Thursday, subscribe here: forward.com/california.

This fake LeBron James tweet isn’t real. I wish it was.

As I was scrolling Instagram late on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a suggested account, @thesportsmemery, showed me what appeared to be a screenshot of a LeBron James tweet. In the apparent tweet, LeBron had written “Nvr 4get @Kaepernick7 lost everything for telling the truth. #KaepWasRight.”

It’s a fake tweet, but it looks legit! Courtesy of @sportsmemery

But instead of the accompanying photo being of Colin Kaepernick — the Black San Francisco 49ers quarterback who was effectively banished from the NFL for kneeling during the national anthem — it depicted Jew-fro sporting rapper Lil Dicky, wearing a 49ers jacket. (Kaepernick and Dicky are similarly hirsute, but to say they look alike would be a risible stretch.)

The same image also shows Kaepernick’s apparent reply to the James tweet: “Thank u brotha ✊🏾 I think that’s a photo of Lil Dicky, but still…Much love ✊🏾”

“Honest mistake 👑,” @thesportsmemery’s Instagram caption reads, seemingly taking the high road on what would have to be the most embarrassing faux pas in James’ two decades in the public eye.

Deep down, I knew it couldn’t be real. And it wasn’t. But I’m not letting the fantasy go. Instead, I have simply decided to exist in the world where the LeBron James/Lil Dicky/Colin Kaepernick tweet was real.

James mistaking a Jewish humorist for racial justice touchstone Colin Kaepernick would hardly make up for his disappointingly late, and weak, response to the swirl of antisemitic hate kicked up by his former teammate Kyrie Irving. But it might give us a grim feeling of cosmic justice, or at the very least, a bitter laugh.

(The third season of Dicky’s hilarious show, Dave, premieres April 5 on FX.)

What we’re watching and not watching

🧟  Critics (including me) are hyping The Last of Us, a new horror series on HBO Max from Israeli American creator Neil Druckmann, that premiered Sunday (trailer above), as the rare video game adaptation worth its budget — which exceeded that of each of the first five seasons of Game of Thrones — and your time. This profile of Druckmann and co-producer Craig Mazin in The New Yorker will convince you it’s deeper than a zombie show. But there are definitely zombies!

💌  With a casting controversy and a buccal fat tabloid circus (mostly) behind her, Funny Girl’s Lea Michele went on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to spill her superstitions — which involve a letter from Barbra Streisand.

🥺 Last week I demanded you watch Ke Huy Quan’s touching tribute to Steven Spielberg at the Golden Globes. Here’s Spielberg’s response.

𑁍  The White Lotus star Aubrey Plaza will host this week’s Saturday Night Live, and she dropped a racy teaser with SNL cast member (and noted impressionist) Chloe Fineman to promote it.

(L-R) Danielle Haim, Alana Haim, and Este Haim attend Louis Vuitton and W Magazine’s awards season dinner on Jan. 6. Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for W Magazine

What we’re reading

🤐  “We need to talk about Haim’s giant zippers.” The zippers on the Jewish girl band’s haute-fits are indeed giant.

😆 Variety profiled Modi (real name Mordechi Rosenfeld), a Laugh Factory staple who keeps showing up in my Instagram Reels cracking wise about Ashkenazi vs. Sephardic Jews. Modi’s gay, Orthodox, and a Yeshiva University graduate. He’s proud of being all three.

🤓 The San Francisco Chronicle is launching an event series at Manny’s, a cafe and lefty hotspot in the Mission run by Bay Area macher Manny Yekutiel. The series kicks off Tuesday with “Data Trivia Night,” with questions by the paper’s culture critic and data editor. Only $5 to play!

😱  Celebrity painter Jonas Wood won a bidding war for an extremely cool looking Art Nouveau hilltop mansion in the Los Feliz neighborhood of LA. I still can’t believe my $10.1 million offer was beaten.

🥰  Supermodel and bestselling author Emily Ratajkowski has now been seen on outings with comedians Eric Andre and Pete Davidson and Seagram heir Eli Bronfman in short succession, the latter two at Knicks games. Is it safe to say she has a (bold-face) type? And should I move to New York?

😇  Boy Meets World actor Ben Savage, who ran last year for West Hollywood City Council and lost, announced a run for Adam Schiff‘s soon-to-be old congressional seat.

That’s not me — that’s Dylan Cease. Photo by Ron Vesely/Getty Images

Your humble correspondents

🔎  After it was reported that White Sox ace and Cy Young runner-up Dylan Cease was on the early roster for Team Israel, I asked a genealogist to help me trace his Jewish ancestry. We found burial records, marriage licenses, and … the tombstone of his apparent great-great-grandfather, Koppel Hirsh Cease. This is the most fun I’ve had writing a story in some time.

Finally, in the we-are-so-lucky-to-live-in-California-department…

Ryan Turell‘s Motor City Cruise came to the Los Angeles area for three games this week, and I’ll be at the third tonight in El Segundo, where they’ll be playing the South Bay Lakers. If you’ll be there too, come say hello! I’m the one who looks kinda like Dylan Cease.

The post California Briefing: This fake LeBron tweet isn’t real. I wish it was. appeared first on The Forward.

דער הײַנטיקער קאַרטון, געשאַפֿן פֿון ראַבינערטע ר. ווײַס, שפּיגלט אָפּ אַן ענין וואָס ווערט אָפֿט באַהאַנדלט אין די נײַעס די טעג.

The post CARTOON: This dove has a problem appeared first on The Forward.

With all the bad things going on in our world, Republicans are determined to focus on classified document related to President Biden. James Comer (R-KY), who is now chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, has opened an investigation into classified documents-on Biden, not Trump. According to the Hill, he has asked for visitor logs, security information, and donations to China. Keep in mind that this is one of the same men who downplayed Donald Trump’s taking of hundreds of classified documents. By most accounts, approximately two dozen documents have been found in President Biden’s think tank office and his home. Richard Sauber, who is special counsel to President Biden, told CNBC: “The documents were discovered when the President’s personal attorneys were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space….” President Biden used the office “periodically” from 2017 until he announced his run for president in 2020. The documents were obviously there-they were found there-but they were also obviously not being used by the president for any reason.

Alternatively, Donald Trump left the White House with over 100 classified documents and tried to prevent the DOJ from confiscating them. Unlike Biden, he obviously had some use for them in mind, and they were mixed in with his personal belongings as if he needed to refer to them periodically. The holding of classified documents is not a good thing, no matter who is holding them, but trying to compare President Biden’s documents issue to Trump is like comparing apples to grapefruit. They are not at all similar. Republicans such as Comer and Jim Jordan, however, are taking this opportunity to try to paint President Biden in a bad light, even as they continue to ignore what Donald Trump did. Republicans are on a crash course of trying to destroy what’s left of this country. While they focus on something that is already being investigated, they have put conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Green on the Homeland Security Committee of all places. Adding insult to that injury, George Santos is going to the Small Business and Science committees. Perhaps he can teach small businesses how to make money by lying and cheating. The very nature of these appointments is beyond ironic.

Meanwhile, Republicans are determined to fight any proposals lifting the debt ceiling, which will be disastrous for the U.S. Many believe that Republicans are eyeing social security and Medicare as bargaining tools-programs depended on and paid into by retired and almost-retired Americans. The Hill reported that experts believe the failure to reach a deal on the debt ceiling “could plunge the world into recession and a financial crisis.” We can’t afford for that to happen, regardless of what Republicans think about social security and Medicare. If they want to steal money from hardworking people who were forced into a retirement plan not of their choosing, let them go for it. They had better think long and hard before they start trying to take money from people who never asked to be part of the system.

The post Shameless and useless appeared first on Palmer Report.

U.S. President Joe Biden said on Thursday he is looking forward to getting the investigation into classified documents found at his home and former office resolved and said he has no regrets.

Attorney General Merrick Garland last week named a special counsel to investigate the matter after classified documents were found at Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home and a Washington, D.C., office he used before becoming president.

“We’re fully cooperating and looking forward to getting this resolved quickly,” Biden said in remarks after touring flood damage in Northern California.

Biden said he has been doing as instructed by his lawyers after “a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place.” He said the documents were immediately turned over to the National Archives after they were found.

“I think you’re gonna find there’s nothing there. I have no regrets,” Biden said.

The White House has largely been on the defensive since the initial revelations on Jan. 9 that the documents had been discovered.

David Crosby, one of the most influential rock singers of the 1960s and ’70s with the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY) has died at the age of 81, Variety reported on Thursday, citing a statement from Crosby’s wife.

“It is with great sadness after a long illness, that our beloved David (Croz) Crosby has passed away” Variety quoted his wife, Jan Dance, as saying in the statement.

Crosby’s UK-based representatives could not immediately be reached for comment by Reuters.

Crosby was a founding member of two revered rock bands: the country and folk influenced Byrds, for whom he cowrote the hit “Eight Miles High,” and CSNY, who defined the smooth side of the Woodstock generation’s music. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a member of both groups.

Musically, Crosby stood out for his intricate vocal harmonies, unorthodox open tunings on guitar and incisive songwriting. His work with both the Byrds and CSN/CSNY blended rock and folk in new ways and their music became a part of the soundtrack for the hippie era.

“I don’t know what to say other than I’m heartbroken to hear about David Crosby. David was an unbelievable talent – such a great singer and songwriter. And a wonderful person,” Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson said on Twitter.

Personally, Crosby was the embodiment of the credo “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” and a 2014 Rolling Stone magazine article tagged him “rock’s unlikeliest survivor.”

In addition to drug addictions that ultimately led to a transplant to replace a liver worn out by decades of excess, his tumultuous life included a serious motorcycle accident, the death of a girlfriend, and battles against hepatitis C and diabetes.

“I’m concerned that the time I’ve got here is so short, and I’m pissed at myself, deeply, for the 10 years — at least — of time that I wasted just getting smashed,” Crosby told the Los Angeles Times in July 2019. “I’m ashamed of that.”

He fell “as low as a human being can go,” Crosby told the Times.

He also managed to alienate many of his famous former bandmates for which he often expressed remorse in recent years.

His drug habits and often abrasive personality contributed to the demise of CSNY and the members eventually quit speaking to each other. In the 2019 documentary “David Crosby: Remember My Name,” he made clear he hoped they could work together again but conceded the others “really dislike me, strongly.”

Crosby fathered six children – two as a sperm donor to rocker Melissa Etheridge’s partner and another who was placed for adoption at birth and did not meet Crosby until he was in his 30s. That son, James Raymond, would eventually become his musical collaborator.

“Thank you @thedavidcrosby I will miss you my friend,” Etheridge said on Twitter alongside a photo of the two of them.

Looking back at the turbulent 1960s and his life, Crosby told Time magazine in 2006: “We were right about civil rights; we were right about human rights; we were right about peace being better than war … But I think we didn’t know our butt from a hole in the ground about drugs and that bit us pretty hard.”

Crosby was born on Aug. 14, 1941, in Los Angeles. His father was a cinematographer who won a Golden Globe for “High Noon” in 1952 and his mother exposed him to the folk group the Weavers and to classical music.

As a teenager, Crosby found that one of his passions aided him in the pursuit of another. “It (playing music) was absolutely joyous to me,” he wrote. “I always loved it. I always will love it. And I did get laid.”

After a stay in New York’s Greenwich Village music scene, Crosby was back in California in 1963 and helped Roger McGuinn start the Byrds, whose first hit, a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” came in 1965, followed by “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

Crosby was kicked out of the Byrds because the band did not want to play his songs with the flashpoint being “Triad,” about a menage a trois, and disputes over on-stage political rants.

Crosby and Stephen Stills, whose band with Neil Young Buffalo Springfield had fallen apart, then began playing together. Graham Nash of the Hollies, who met Crosby in 1966 and went on to become his closest collaborator and a closer friend, joined them. Their first album, “Crosby, Stills and Nash,” was a big seller in 1969 with such songs as “Marrakesh Express,” “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” and “Guinnevere.”

Guitarist and singer/songwriter Young fell in with them that year and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young came to be considered one of the greatest amalgams of talent in rock history.

Their second performance together was the landmark Woodstock music festival in 1969 and their 1970 album, “Deja Vu” contained hits “Teach Your Children,” and “Woodstock,” and one of Crosby’s signature songs, “Almost Cut My Hair.”

As CSNY was taking off, Crosby was in a drug-fueled downward spiral caused by the 1969 death of girlfriend Christine Hinton in a car accident.

“I had no way to deal with that, nothing in my life had prepared me for that,” wrote Crosby, who had added cocaine and heroin to his drug repertoire.

The next decade was a blur of drug arrests, album releases and women. “I was not into being monogamous – I made that plain to everybody concerned. I was a complete and utter pleasure-seeking sybarite,” he wrote in his autobiography.

Crosby had a daughter with a girlfriend but soon left her for Jan Dance, who moved in with him in 1978. That relationship lasted and they had a son, Django, in 1995.

Crosby introduced Dance to heroin and the free-basing method of smoking cocaine. “We went down the tubes together but we did it with our hearts intertwined,” he wrote.

There were several failed attempts at rehab and Crosby developed a reputation as a bloated, hapless addict. In 1985, Nash told Rolling Stone: “I’ve tried everything – extreme anger, extreme compassion. I’ve gotten 20 of his best friends in the same room with him. I’ve tried hanging out with him. I’ve tried not hanging out with him.”

Crosby beat a series of drug charges but lost in Texas after being arrested with a drug pipe and gun at a club in Dallas and went to prison in 1985. The prison system required him to shave his trademark bushy mustache, but he found solace in playing in the prison band during his year of incarceration.

“Playing and singing straight was an unfamiliar feeling,” he wrote. “I hadn’t been onstage with a drug-free system in more than 25 years.”

After his release, Crosby told People magazine he had beaten his addictions.

“Most people who go as far as I did with drugs are dead,” he said. “Hard drugs will hook anyone. I don’t care who you are … I have a Ph.D. in drugs.”

He was also arrested on gun and marijuana charges in New York in 2004.

In 2014 he released “Croz,” his first solo album since 1993, but his tour to promote the record was interrupted in February by heart surgery.

He continued recording and was an active, presence on Twitter, in addition to writing an advice column in Rolling Stone.

In March 2021, the Guardian reported that Crosby sold the recorded music and publishing rights to his entire music catalog to Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group for an undisclosed sum. He was quoted as saying that the COVID-19 pandemic prevented him from playing concerts and that the widespread use of music streaming “stole my money.”

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CIA Director William Burns recently traveled in secret to Ukraine’s capital to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a U.S. official told Reuters on Thursday.

“Director Burns traveled to Kyiv, where he met with Ukrainian intelligence counterparts as well as President Zelenskiy and reinforced our continued support for Ukraine and its defense against Russian aggression,” the U.S. official, who declined to be identified, said.

The official declined to say when the visit took place. The Washington Post, which first reported the visit, said it took place at the end of last week.

Burns briefed Zelenskiy on his expectations on Russia’s upcoming military plans, the newspaper said, adding he also acknowledged that at some point U.S. assistance would be harder to come by.

Zelensky and his senior intelligence officials discussed how long Ukraine could expect U.S. and Western assistance to continue after Republicans won a narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in the midterm elections, the Washington Post reported, citing sources.

Zelenskiy and his aides came away from last week’s meeting with the impression that U.S. support for Kyiv remained strong, the newspaper said.

Western allies have pledged billions of dollars in weapons for Ukraine. Fearing winter will give Russian forces time to regroup and unleash a major attack, Ukraine is pushing for more assistance to combat Moscow’s invasion which began in February last year.

In his trip to Washington in December, Zelenskiy told the U.S. Congress that aid to Ukraine is an investment in democracy, and not charity, while pressing for continued American support.

The United States on Thursday announced a new package of military assistance for Ukraine it valued at up to $2.5 billion, including hundreds of armored vehicles and support for Ukraine’s air defense.

APTOS, Calif. (AP) — A frustrated President Joe Biden said Thursday there is “no there there” when persistently questioned about the discovery of classified documents and official records at his home and former office,

“We found a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place,” Biden said to reporters who questioned him during a tour of the damage from storms in California. “We immediately turned them over to the Archives and the Justice Department.”

Biden said he was “fully cooperating and looking forward to getting this resolved quickly.

“I think you’re going to find there’s nothing there,” he said. “There’s no there there.”

The White House has disclosed that Biden attorneys found classified documents and official records on four separate occasions — on Nov. 2 at the offices of the Penn Biden Center in Washington, on Dec. 20 in the garage of the president’s Wilmington, Delaware, home, and on Nov. 11 and 12 in the president’s home library.

Discovery of the documents in Biden’s possession complicates a federal probe into former President Donald Trump, who the Justice Department says took hundreds of records marked classified with him upon leaving the White House in early 2021 and resisted months of requests to return them to the government.

The two cases are different — Biden for example, willingly turned over the documents once found. But the issue is wearing on the president and his aides and allies, who have repeatedly said they acted swiftly and appropriately when the documents were discovered. They have sought to focus the media’s attention back onto his agenda.

Biden expressed frustration that the documents matter was coming up as he surveyed coastal storm damage, telling reporters that it “bugs me” that he was being asked about the handling of the classified material even as “we have a serious problem here” in California.

“Why you don’t ask me questions about that?” he pressed.

Attorney General Merrick Garland last week appointed Robert Hur, a former Maryland U.S. attorney, to serve as special counsel to oversee the Justice Department’s inquiry into the documents.

(NewsNation) — The Monday killing of six people at a home in central California remains unsolved, but what happened may be linked to a far bigger and growing issue — Mexican cartel revenge killings on American soil.

The victims of the shooting in Goshen, California, ranged in age from just 10 months to 72 years old and were killed in less than an hour.

Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux said the home was known for drug activity, and one of the victims had gang affiliations.

“This was a family that was massacred on purpose, and they were targeted specifically,” Boudreaux told NewsNation. “This was a message that was being sent from someone to someone.”

Law enforcement had been at the house just two weeks earlier in a raid that netted guns, marijuana and methamphetamine. 

“This is not something that is characteristic of gangs. Women and children are to be left alone, unless there is something so egregious that it involves the cartel to get involved,” Boudreaux said.

The sheriff said Thursday he’s confident investigators will find the perpetrator. Earlier in the week, Boudreaux did not definitely say the shooting was committed by cartel members, but he said his department isn’t ruling out the possibility.

Consistent drug demand in the U.S. is driving increased cartel activity everywhere. Goshen is a remote farming town in Tulare County, between Bakersfield and Fresno. Authorities have yet to confirm which cartel may be responsible.

The Drug Enforcement Agency has been tracking the two biggest players for decades and offering big rewards — $15 million for Sinaloa Cartel leader Ismael Zambada Garcia, known as “El Mayo,” and $10 million for Jalisco New Generation Cartel leader Nemesio Oseguera-Cervantes, known as “El Mencho.”

There have been scores of killings in America linked to cartels.

In 2021, a North Carolina high school teacher died in a shootout after he tried to steal drugs and money from a cartel stash house.

“As sheriff, I’m still worried about some retaliation because the Mexican cartels, they don’t forget,” Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson said at the time. “They’re going to pay somebody back.”

According to U.S. officials, Mexican cartels supply the bulk of illegal drugs — mainly cocaine, heroin, meth and fentanyl. The dealing and deadly revenge are rampant.

“Fentanyl (is) coming across our border, methamphetamine (is) coming across our border, and the cartels (are) freely coming in across our border, using the state of California, in the United States, as if it was their own property,” Boudreaux said.

In the case of the Goshen shooting, authorities are searching for at least two suspects. A number of relatives did not respond to requests for comment.

Neighbors have also declined to speak with the media, with some telling NewsNation affiliate KSEE they are fearful of stepping outside their homes.