Commentary Culture Investigations

See the recording of a live conversation between ICIJ’s Gerard Ryle and tax expert Tove Maria Ryding, going behind the scenes of the groundbreaking investigation and exploring its global impact.

A look back at a decade of changes after the Pulitzer-Prize winning investigation sent a shock through the offshore world.

If the university can get faculty who don’t want to tear down America and the West, students will benefit from learning those things.

Adding to the pain of a staggering $40 trillion national debt, which undoubtedly includes wasteful government spending and failed projects, a new federal audit reveals the U.S. Navy has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars to sustain idle submarines and crews that “provide no operational capability.” The scandal involves the country’s fleet of submarines, critical to national defense because they carry out Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions, project power ashore with Tomahawk cruise missiles and support battle group operations. As of fiscal year 2025, the Navy has 44 attack submarines, according to the probe, recently published by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, and the vessels are some of the most requested assets by global combatant commanders.
However, in the last 10 years the Navy has lost over 15,000 operational days and an estimated $3.4 billion because maintenance delays have kept active attack submarines idle. “Lost operational days include delays completing depot maintenance and active idle time,” the GAO report states. “Active idle time describes a period when an attack submarine and its crew must remain pier-side because they are no longer certified to conduct normal operations and cannot be inducted into a maintenance period.” The probe also found that the Navy faces “significant challenges” managing inactive idle time for attack submarines. This is when a sub designated for decommissioning cannot be inducted into a dry dock in a shipyard. “As a result, the submarine and its crew must remain pier-side until a shipyard has the capacity in a dry dock to defuel their nuclear reactor,” according to the GAO.
The Navy’s 44 active attack submarines need access to shipyards for maintenance and repairs, but the constant backlog of older vessels that have been designated for decommissioning block access to the dry docks creating a serious holding pattern known as idle time. Although this technically differs from active idle time when operational subs wait for maintenance, both are tremendously inefficient, drain taxpayer resources and slash the number of submarines available for deployment. In the period examined, fiscal year 2016 through 2025, the maintenance delays wasted huge amounts of public funds to sustain both crews and submarines that provided no operational capability and contributed nothing to national defense. “Inactive idle time for submarines has grown and is projected to worsen,” the GAO confirms, adding that “without mitigation, 15 attack submarines will enter inactive idle time from fiscal year 2026 through fiscal year 2030.” During that time the Navy could incur over 14,000 days of inactive idle time and $3.1 billion in costs to operate and support the inactive submarines, the probe found.
The attack submarines get serviced at four aging public facilities— Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, and Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard—described by the Navy as “obsolete” and inefficient. The work is very involved and time-consuming and includes overhauls, alterations, refits, restorations and nuclear refueling. GAO investigators determined that the costly maintenance backlog has persisted since at least fiscal year 2008 with no improvement in site. “Further, the U.S. Navy only completed about 11 percent of attack submarine depot maintenance on time at the public shipyards, from fiscal years 2016 through 2025,” the report states. It appears that the Navy is not that concerned about the problem and hasn’t even bothered to fully evaluate alternative options to more efficiently decommission attack submarines and develop and implement an inactivation plan that could allow it to reduce inactive idle time for crews to save billions.
Congressional investigators reveal that they made two common-sense recommendations, that the Navy decommission attack subs more efficiently and develop a plan to reduce inactive idle time. Seemingly dismissive of the GAO’s findings, the Navy “verbally concurred” with the watchdog’s recommendations but did not bother to provide written comments as is customary after getting slammed in a federal audit. It also failed to disclose when it will make changes to its inefficient, decades-long system that continues fleecing American taxpayers out of huge sums amid record-breaking national debt.
The post Navy Wastes $3.4 Billion to Sustain Crews, Submarines that “Provide No Operational Capability” appeared first on Judicial Watch.

Those who work at the fact-checking websites like to portray themselves as the heroic defenders of civilization against the barbarians at the gate who come armed with misinformation and seek to destroy it. Therefore, it was rather interesting on Friday when Snopes’s Nuir Ibrahim sought to reassure all of the Israel haters on the internet that Dolly Parton did not, in fact, donate books to Israeli children.Ibrahim is the kind of fact-checker who in her previous life worked for Al-Jazeera and who, less than a week after October 7, was writing articles claiming that talking about Hamas beheading babies was Islamophobic.Now, after Parton’s death, Ibrahim recalled, “An online debate ensued on X about whether Parton had donated books to Israeli children, part of a broader discourse about her alleged views on the state of Israel. Some posts claimed Parton worked with PJ Library (archived), an organization that sends free books to Jewish children worldwide, including children in Israel.”She added, “One X user wrote: “People accusing Dolly of being evil because she MAYBE donated books to some Israeli children?”As of the publication of this article, that X user has a mere 749 followers. The other X user Ibraham linked to has only 150 followers and has a picture of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei as his header.Nevertheless, Ibrahim reassured the Israel haters that they can still be Parton fans, “There is no evidence the Imagination Library has ever operated in Israel. According to its website, the organization operates only in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Ireland and Australia. In 2022, the Library announced it would provide free books each month to 200 refugee children in London until they turn 5.”Much of the rest of the article was focused on differentiating Parton’s Imagination Library from PJ Library, and so while Ibrahim is correct to say that Parton’s organization didn’t donate books to children in Israel, the question is why did Snopes feel the need to clarify that some nobody on the internet was wrong? I’ll explain it like you’re 5: “Dolly Parton donated books to Israel” would only be a statement worth debunking if its untruth was somehow harmful. The framing of “don’t worry folks, she didn’t do it and you can keep loving her” is the problem. https://t.co/y1WZxa07SX— Noam Blum (@neontaster) September 1, 2026 If someone claimed that Parton donated books to Palestinian children, would Ibrahim still have fact-checked it? Probably not, because she wouldn’t view that as problematic.

It’s become commonplace for the elitist media to platform radical left-wing Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, and give him a pass on most, if not all, of his most controversial stances, past and present. On CNN’s The Source on Monday, host Kaitlan Collins mostly followed that script, and never followed up when she did stray and ask a tougher question.Collins led into the interview by playing a couple of dueling clips from Vance and El-Sayed attacking each other.

ABDUL EL-SAYED CLIP: So, if you’re starting a trade war with Canada, it’s because you’re the a–hole. I think Michigan is going to remind JD Vance why he should send his ass back to Ohio at the end of this day.Disrespectful garbage from El-Sayed, but according to Collins, not as bad as what Vance would say, as she played an edited clip.COLLINS: Now, when Vice President Vance landed in the state [Michigan], in his comments, he went even further.VANCE CLIP: Remember that the same guy who defends literal terrorism is maybe not going to have your best interest at heart, when he gets to Washington, D.C.There’s something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America.But whatever you want to talk about, Abdul, keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth because she’s way out of your league.Vance’s language was tame compared to El-Sayed, despite claims from Collins, who never explained what Vance was talking about with regards to his wife. According to Fox News, Vance’s remark was in response to what critics say was a post that, “appeared to take aim at Usha Vance’s Indian heritage.”That might have been useful information for the viewers, and a good question for El-Sayed. But  Collins asked her first question, and never mentioned Vance’s wife.COLLINS: Do you want to respond to what the Vice President said today, saying that there is something that is quote, “Very, very evil” about you?EL-SAYED: Well, let me tell you what’s evil. Evil is the idea of starting wars when there’s peace.He would go on to mention gas prices, health care, the trade war with Canada, and the high price of having a kid play baseball, and never address the question asked to him. Collins did not press him, but did ask about his original response to an attack on a Michigan synagogue in March, and his recent apology for those remarks.

COLLINS: At the time you condemned the attack, but said violence is a cycle, unquote. Hurt people hurt people. You actually apologized for those comments over the weekend. Why now?EL-SAYED: Because I have had the opportunity to listen to folks, to learn how it hit them. My goal wasn’t to cause anybody pain at all. I grew up in the community in which Temple Israel sits. I got to go to bar and bat mitzvahs at Temple Israel. I’m grateful for the opportunity I got to spend with my Jewish sisters and brothers.And as I’ve traveled the state, I’ve heard that that comment caused a lot of pain, and it was not my intention to cause any pain at all. But I’m big enough to apologize when I make mistakes. I understand that it’s not what people wanted to hear at the time.Not surprisingly, El-Sayed was allowed to finish his answer by turning to the trade war with Canada. Collins never asked about his Republican opponent Mike Rogers’ calling it a “sham apology,” or El-Sayed’s recent refusal to cut ties with radical leftist streamer Hasan Piker, whose recent anti-Jewish remark was condemned by Democrat House Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Collins would continue on the trade war issue, before turning to data centers. But her final question went back to his remarks about Vance’s wife, asking, ” The Vice President himself called you out today for what you said about his wife, Usha Vance, someone that you’ve now invoked a couple of times. Do you believe that spouses, political spouses, people who aren’t running for office, should be off-limits?You can see El-Sayed’s answer, where he was allowed to go on uninterrupted for over a minute and  half, in the video below.

Collins never confronted El-Sayed for making vulgar remarks in April, about Usha Vance’s “brown children”, or for saying she dreads having to sleep with the VP. She also never asked about a CBS News story from earlier that day, noting his deleted tweets from 2020, calling for the same outrage over the COVID death toll, as we saw for the 9/11 count. No real surprise, that’s Collins and this is CNN!

The first clear image of the alleged shooter — face down and in handcuffs on the carpet of the Washington Hilton — was posted without caption by United States President Donald Trump.The man has been identified by US media as Cole Tomas Allen, 31.

Empayar runcit fesyen tempatan, Padini Holdings Berhad, kini berdepan tekanan luar jangka apabila beberapa akaun bank milik syarikat

Shortly after publication, a slew of fake ICIJ reporters approached journalists, Taiwanese officials, and human rights advocates seeking sensitive data. With Citizen Lab, we investigated.

Sunway begitu terdesak untuk memiliki IJM. IJM pula terus fokus menghadapi kes rasuah pengerusinya Tan Sri Krishnan Tan.