August 18, 2026

SOMALI PIRATES UPDATE: Minnesota Man Arrested for Medicaid Fraud Scheme Previously Won State’s ‘Outstanding Refugee’ Award.

In 2021, Salman Ahmed Elmi was awarded the Outstanding Refugee Award for Entrepreneurship by the Minnesota Department of Human Services. Now, he’s facing charges in connection with a Medicaid fraud scheme with alleged ties to a sex trafficking ring.

Elmi, a native of Somalia, was charged last week with three counts of aiding and abetting theft by swindle and five counts of aiding and abetting theft by false representation.

Prosecutors allege Elmi and three associates — Frank Reeves, Viktoriya Komonash and Andrea Sampson — ran four agencies that they used to bill more than $4.5 million to Medicaid since 2023. Those agencies were called Reva Health, Reva Autism, Helpful Housing and Homefelt Assisted Living.

Elmi and his associates allegedly recruited young women who were homeless or struggling with addiction, housing or finances. They then rented apartments in the women’s names using fake pay stubs and enlisted them in a pay-for-sex scheme. Investigators say they’ve been tracking the alleged sex trafficking ring since 2019. Sampson and Reeves were arrested as part of the sex trafficking ring bust last week.

The group then began stealing victims’ identities to bill Medicaid in their name, according to court filings.

As Amy Curtis writes, “We have yet another story of Medicaid fraud out of the corrupt state of Minnesota, and this time the suspect was not just busted for stealing taxpayer dollars; he was actually given an award from the state’s Department of Human Services before allegedly billing the state more than $1 million for fraudulent services.”

Minnesota appears to be resorting to the Obama-style tactic of “stray voltage” to give the DNC-MSM a reason to ignore Elmi’s misdeeds:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

GO AWAY: Woke Mob Tries to Sink Children’s Ride. Owner Doesn’t Give a Ship.

A handful of parents in England decided a Titanic-themed children’s slide was the iceberg to die on. The slide has been there for years. Nobody cared until the slide’s return this summer.

At Graveley Fruit Farm near Hitchin, Hertfordshire, just north of London, £2 buys a turn on the ride. Children climb into a replica of the ship’s stern, which rises and sends them down four slides onto a crash mat.

Graveley opened in 1981 and offers fruit picking in summer, crazy golf, a playground, and water slides. The Titanic ride ran for several years before returning in May; the online complaints showed up this summer.

Before each turn, the children get boarding passes. The farm calls the trip a “wreck,” and about 500 people use the ride on a busy day. Roughly 500 children happily abandoning ship, and until recently, very few adults demanding an inquiry.

That changed on Facebook.

I haven’t been on Facebook since 2018 or 2019, when the company demanded my phone number to complete my login. It appears nothing has changed.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

CONGRESS CLOSES HUGE TRANSPARENCY LOOPHOLE: But the issue now may be if President Donald Trump will sign it into law. Check it out in my latest for The Washington Stand. 

Posted at 3:14 pm by Mark Tapscott

WHERE DID ALL THE MEN GO? It’s true, a growing legion of men are dropping out of the workforce. They just stop looking for work. The result is not merely economic damage; the traditional family structure, among much else, suffers grievous damage when hard-working, responsible men aren’t available for marriage.

Writing for The Washington Stand, Zachary Patton, a talented young journo, offers this prescient analysis of the problem:

“A major driver of this contraction in the workforce is the direct consequences of social safety net expansion. What was once designed with the intention of being temporary cushions during economic recession has morphed into a permanent way of living for millions of able-bodied Americans.

“Divided amongst state-funded disability benefits, nutritional assistance, and low-income housing subsidies, the economic estuary that exists between a demanding career and remaining jobless has dried up to almost a point of non-existence. When safety nets mitigate non-work without demanding an exchange, the motivator to persevere through demanding labor dissolves.”

 

 

Posted at 2:39 pm by Mark Tapscott

STURDY, TOO:

And even more pics:

Starship flight 14 is tentatively set for Aug. 28.

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

DANIEL MCCARTHY: Democrats’ Southern Strategy. “It’s actually about keeping power in the hands of the party establishment, the people who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, and who are likely to wind up supporting Kamala Harris in 2028.”

They sure can pick’em.

Posted at 2:16 pm by Stephen Green

WOLFGANG IS A PARODY ACCOUNT…:

…but I had to double-check to make sure.

Posted at 12:58 pm by Stephen Green

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: NSA sat on election threat reporting over Trump ‘deep state’ label, memo shows. “In a tense March 2020 meeting just months before the presidential election, the National Security Agency’s (NSA) deputy director blocked the release of a long-delayed report on foreign targeting of U.S. elections—not because the intelligence was flawed, but because he feared it would brand the agency as part of the ‘deep state.'”

Posted at 12:43 pm by Stephen Green

NOW, WE’VE LOST THOSE COMPUTERS WITH ALL OF THE 13TH CENTURY IN THEM. NOT MUCH IN THE CENTURY, JUST DANTE AND A FEW CORRUPT POPES, BUT IT’S SO DISTRACTING AND ANNOYING! TV Station in a Fight to Retrieve Its Archive After Cloud Company Went Bust.

A local TV station is in a messy situation after the cloud company it was using to store 70 years’ worth of archival material vanished.

Gizmodo reports that Nine PBS in St. Louis had a rolling annual contract with Open Source Storage (OSS), a cloud storage provider, but when the station went to renew the deal earlier this year, OSS didn’t respond.

On the day the contract expired, Nine PBS suddenly lost access to its data without any warning. That’s when staff there realized that OSS’s website was inactive and the state of Colorado listed the company as delinquent.

The station lost access to 50 terabytes of archival materials, which included all of its footage of historical events that have taken place in St. Louis.

Note that below the article are two news articles on “Sabrent’s New Thunderbolt Dock [Which] Features a 16TB SSD and Tons of Ports.” Three of those and the PBS station would have been pretty much set with their own in-house backup.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS IS THE SAME THING DISNEY DID TO STAR WARS:

Posted at 12:22 pm by Stephen Green

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: California regulators approve new rules limiting what replacement tires you can buy for your car.

California regulators on Monday approved new rules that will restrict what tires you can buy when it’s time to replace them on your car.

In a unanimous vote, the California Energy Commission voted to adopt new rules that will phase out the sale of replacement tires that don’t meet certain energy efficiency standards.

“This ultimately is about protecting consumers,” said David Hochschild, the chairman of the California Energy Commission. “I see this as sheltering the public from higher costs in the long run.”

Tire manufacturers and the commission’s staff are at odds over whether this will add to the cost of living in the state. Both sides acknowledged this will no longer allow the sale of a significant portion of the tires currently sold in California.

War is peace, freedom is slavery:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll