Category: Breitbart
Prominent MIT professor — reportedly Jewish, pro-Israel — shot to death in his home; no suspect in custody
A prominent professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was fatally shot in his Brookline home, the Associated Press reported.
Nuno Loureiro was Jewish and a vocal pro-Israel nuclear scientist, the Jerusalem Post said; but the paper added that it could not confirm speculations by Jewish organizations that Loureiro was targeted for his political affiliations.
‘And a shooting in a state where it’s so hard to even have a gun?’
The shooting occurred on the heels of a deadly shooting Saturday at another prestigious school in the region — Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Police there also have yet to find a suspect. Brookline is about 90 minutes northeast of Providence. The FBI told the AP it knows of no connection between the two crimes.
Loureiro — a married 47-year-old from Portugal — was shot Monday night and died Tuesday at a local hospital, the AP noted. WBZ-TV said in its video report that Loureiro was shot several times in the foyer of his home; a neighbor said he lived in a first-floor apartment.
A reporter suggested to the neighbor on camera that the crime is atypical for Brookline, and the neighbor replied that it was a “surprise … and a shooting in a state where it’s so hard to even have a gun?” The neighbor also said fellow neighbors noted a nearby car was “parked in the wrong direction” and “seemed to be waiting.”
RELATED: Critics lambaste MIT’s vice president for equity and inclusion over ‘race baiting’ social media post
Authorities have not disclosed a possible motive, the AP said, and the Norfolk District Attorney’s Office said no suspects were in custody as of Wednesday morning.
More from the AP:
Loureiro joined MIT in 2016 and was named last year to lead the school’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, one of its largest laboratories. The center has around 250 researchers working across seven buildings and focuses on advancing clean energy technology and other research.
The professor grew up in Viseu in central Portugal, studied in Lisbon, and earned a doctorate in London, according to the university. Before moving to MIT, he worked at a nuclear fusion research institute in Lisbon.
“He shone a bright light as a mentor, friend, teacher, colleague, and leader and was universally admired for his articulate, compassionate manner,” Dennis Whyte, an engineering professor who previously led MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, told a campus publication, according to the AP.
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Exclusive: GOP Senate candidate Wesley Hunt pushes bill barring education benefits for illegal aliens
Republican Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas is moving legislation on Capitol Hill to ensure taxpayers are actually prioritized over illegal aliens.
Hunt, who is running for U.S. Senate in Texas, introduced the American Dream Protection Act on Thursday to disincentivize states and educational institutions from providing educational benefits to illegal aliens. Hunt’s legislation would require federal financial assistance to be withheld if states are found to provide taxpayer-funded education to illegal aliens.
‘Too many American resources have been used to benefit illegals.’
“For years, the left and a select few Republican senators have pushed for mass amnesty and benefits for illegal aliens,” Hunt told Blaze News. “In 2003, the Dream Act, which was voted favorably out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, created an incentive to provide illegals with in-state tuition rates intended only for legal residents.”
“The American Dream Protection Act of 2025 will eliminate federal and state funding to universities that continue to support illegals.”
RELATED: Ilhan Omar accuses ICE of ‘racially profiling’ her son during traffic stop
Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
Educational institutions across the country offer in-state tuition and other higher education benefits to illegal aliens, leaving American taxpayers to foot the bill. To counteract these inequities, Hunt’s bill withholds federal funds for schools that charge illegal immigrants lower tuition as well as states that provide them financial aid.
“Too many American resources have been used to benefit illegals while American citizens suffer,” Hunt told Blaze News.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Hunt is currently running in the Texas Senate primary against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton. The Republican primary winner will face off with one of two Democratic candidates, Rep. Jasmine Crockett or state Rep. James Talarico.
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Trump suggests Dan Bongino will leave the FBI: ‘He wants to go back to his show’
President Donald Trump suggested that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino might be stepping down from the bureau and returning to host his political show.
The president was responding to questions from reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Prince George’s County, Maryland, on Wednesday when he made the comments.
‘I gave up everything for this. … I stare at these four walls all day in DC by myself.’
Bongino had reportedly made plans to leave the bureau next year, according to eight sources who spoke to MS NOW.
“Dan did a great job,” said Trump. “I think he wants to go back to his show.”
Bongino had worked as a police officer and a Secret Service agent before he hosted a conservative show.
He was dismissive when approached by MS NOW for comment. “Print whatever you’d like,” he replied. “No one believes you anyway. Thanks.”
Bongino fueled speculation about his position at the bureau in July when he published a bizarre statement about what he had seen during his time there.
“The Director and I are committed to stamping out public corruption and the political weaponization of both law enforcement and intelligence operations,” he wrote on social media. “But what I have learned in the course of our properly predicated and necessary investigations into these aforementioned matters, has shocked me down to my core. We cannot run a Republic like this. I’ll never be the same after learning what I’ve learned.”
He added that they would investigate these matters according to the law.
RELATED: Bongino and Bondi clash over botched handling of Epstein files
He had also previously said that the job was very hard on his family life because of the long hours.
“I gave up everything for this,” he said. “I’m in there at 7:30 in the morning. … I stare at these four walls all day in D.C. by myself, divorced from my wife — not divorced, but I mean separated, divorced — and it’s hard. I mean, we love each other, and it’s hard to be apart.”
Bongino was a vehement supporter of Trump and his policies on “The Dan Bongino Show.”
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The West’s Embrace Of Mass Third-World Migration Is Civilizational Suicide
The West’s mass importation of Third-Worlders with no emphasis on assimilation has been, is, and will continue to be a complete failure.
OOF: Mark Zuckerberg’s losing metaverse bet cost Meta $77B
Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, changed its name back in 2021 as CEO Mark Zuckerberg planted his flag into the “metaverse,” denoting it as the future of his company. Several short years later, all Meta gained from the brash move is an empty digital wasteland, a drop in hardware sales, and substantial losses that could fund the GDP of a small country. With debt mounting, Meta would be in serious trouble if not for the help of an unwitting ally – OpenAI.
What is the metaverse?
With AI sweeping through the tech industry, it’s been quite awhile since anyone talked about the metaverse. Just in case you forgot what it is (or perhaps you dodged the initial lackluster hubbub entirely), the metaverse was supposed to be a broad digital world that replaced reality.
Yep, you read that right.
Almost all major brands have either discontinued their hardware or vastly scaled back.
In the same vein as “Ready Player One,” the metaverse was meant to be a place where we worked in digital offices, played games in virtual arenas, hung out with friends in online cafes, sold and traded digital goods like NFTs (another forgotten relic of the past), and more. Meta even built a rudimentary version of this world called Meta Horizon Worlds, which you can access today, though most people don’t.
To dive into the metaverse, all you needed was a pair of virtual reality goggles or glasses — a device along the lines of Apple Vision Pro, Samsung Galaxy XR, or more specifically in Meta’s world, the Meta Quest series.
Photo Credit: Meta
Nobody cares about VR
The mere fact that you’re reading this article on your phone, tablet, or computer — not inside some digital cyberpunk cafe on a cloud server in somebody’s basement — proves that Meta’s virtual reality endeavors amounted to a massive dud. The vision Zuckerberg had in mind for Meta never got off the ground, much less became a vital piece of our digital lives.
Why, you ask? The metaverse failed for more reasons than I can count, but here are a few off the top of my head:
- Price: VR headsets are expensive. Even the “cheap” ones cost hundreds of dollars. While the price was hard to swallow in 2021, shifts in the current economy have made these even less accessible.
- Comfort: VR headsets are unwieldy. Most iterations available today are big, bulky, heavy, and they’re annoying (or even painful) to wear for several hours or more.
- Redundancy: While phones, tablets, and laptops have become a necessary piece of tech in most people’s lives, VR headsets are an added luxury. They’re a supplemental gadget at best, all without a “killer app” that sets them apart from the devices we already own.
- Reality check: As it turns out, people would rather live life in the real world than be trapped in a digital version. Sure, if we were all still stuck at home in a COVID lockdown (as we were when Zuckerberg thought up this wild idea), then maybe the metaverse would be something more than it is today. But alas, the lockdowns were lifted, COVID vanished from headlines everywhere, and real life goes on.
The metaverse was destined to fail
COVID lockdowns aside, Zuckerberg’s interest in the metaverse was shortsighted from the start. By the time he changed the name of his company and went all-in, consumer interest in VR was already at a notable low. Major brands in the gaming space, like Playstation, Steam, and Xbox all tried their hands at VR headsets, and almost all of them have either discontinued their hardware or vastly scaled back.
We’ve seen a similar reception with Apple’s attempt at the VR space. Vision Pro has suffered from staggeringly low sales, poor developer support, and slow innovation. By most accounts, Vision Pro is a massive failure for Apple (despite Tim Cook’s candy-coated outlook), and I wouldn’t be surprised if it discontinues the product in another several years.
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Meta had 17-STRIKE policy for sex traffickers, ex-employee says Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images
Not to be outdone, Google and Samsung recently teamed up to launch their own VR headset, dubbed Samsung Galaxy XR. If you’ve never heard of this device or even seen it floating around on your social feed, that’s because it’s already headed down the same path as its predecessors. No one’s talking about it, Google and Samsung aren’t actively advertising it, and consumers have already forgotten about it.
Meta takes a multi-billion-dollar dive
The overall lack of consumer interest in the metaverse didn’t go unnoticed by Zuckerberg and company. A recent report revealed that Meta lost a staggering $77 billion on its entire strategy, including Meta Quest hardware and Meta Horizon development. To soften the blow, Meta will reportedly slash its VR budget by 30%. Layoffs are also on the way, though the actual reduced headcount hasn’t been announced yet.
Luckily for Meta, the terrible news couldn’t come at a better time. As the metaverse melts into vaporware, Zuckerberg’s AI division continues to grow. In fact, if it weren’t for the AI boom of 2022 — ushered in by OpenAI with ChatGPT — Meta might be in serious trouble right now. Towering high over the colossal failure that is Meta Horizon Worlds, Meta’s Llama has done surprisingly well with the service showing up in all of Meta’s major apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Today Meta AI boasts one billion active users per month.
That said, Meta isn’t out of the water yet as recent development delays could cause trouble for the future of Zuckerberg’s AI ambitions. Only time will tell if AI is the vital lifeline Meta needed to escape its metaverse hell or if Llama will join it in the burning pit of dissolution.
Glenn Beck warns: Sydney’s Hanukkah bloodbath proves the West is sleepwalking into another Holocaust
On December 14, two gunmen — a father and son radicalized by Islamic State ideology — opened fire on a crowded Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, killing 15 people, including children and elderly victims, and injuring over 40 others in what authorities declared a targeted anti-Semitic terrorist attack.
While it was certainly the deadliest, this wasn’t the only anti-Semitic violence that happened last weekend. In Amsterdam, pro-Palestinian protesters disrupted Hanukkah concerts at the Concertgebouw concert hall by throwing smoke bombs, chanting anti-Semitic slogans, and attempting to storm the venue. In Los Angeles, a drive-by attack targeted a Jewish family’s home, which was decorated for Hanukkah. An unidentified person fired shots while yelling anti-Semitic slurs.
Glenn Beck says these targeted attacks on Jewish people reveal an uncomfortable truth most don’t want to admit: Once again, we find ourselves on the same fertile ground that cultivated Hitler’s crusade.
“Jewish people carry history, not as abstraction, but as inheritance,” Glenn says. “And it lives in names that are whispered at dinner tables and photographs rescued from ash in stories that begin with, ‘And we thought it would never happen here.”’
He comments that before WWII, “polite society everywhere” ignorantly believed that lie — that genocide could never happen on their civilized turf. But then it did, ushering in incomprehensible war and death.
Glenn warns that today, we’re making the same mistake. We’re primed for another Holocaust, and we can’t even see it.
But the signs are everywhere.
“Shadows that all of us hoped were buried forever — hatred with organization, ideology, hatred with teeth, violence, justification — they’re no longer whispers,” he says. “They’re shouting it now in our streets. They’re shouting it in the streets of Australia. They’re shouting it in the streets of Germany and England and France and Norway.”
“They’re burning flags. They’re firing guns. They’re chanting not only, ‘Death to the Jew,’ but, ‘Death to the West,’ ‘Death to Canada,’ ‘Death to the U.S.,’ ‘Death to Europe.”’
But the West, brainwashed by progressive dogma that repackages self-sabotage as inclusivity, is “tolerating it.”
For years, Australia’s Jewish community warned authorities that anti-Semitism was “metastasizing into something ideological and organized and deadly,” but they were dismissed and told to “calm down.” They were told that “multicultural harmony would manage itself.”
“But it didn’t, because it doesn’t. Ideology doesn’t dissolve when it’s ignored. It consolidates. It grows,” Glenn says.
And grown it has — all across the West from Europe to America to Australia.
As a result, today, “Jewish schools [are] guarded like fortresses” and “Jewish families [wonder] whether visibility itself is now a liability,” Glenn laments. “And yet all across the West, officials hesitate to name the problem clearly. So let me do it precisely, truthfully.”
“Islamism is a political ideology. It’s not about faith. It is about power. It’s the belief that society has to be governed by religious law — Sharia law — that freedom of conscience is illegitimate, that women are subordinate, that dissent is heresy, and that the world and everybody in it has to submit,” he lays bare.
This isn’t myth or exaggeration either. It’s their doctrine — documented in writing and preached to the masses.
“Any culture built on individual liberty, freedom of speech, equality before the law — it can’t survive alongside an ideology that views all of those principles as sins or as an affront to Allah,” Glenn says.
Western nations ignorantly “assume that everybody ultimately wants to live and to compromise and live side by side. We assume violence is accidental. We assume that it’s a lone wolf. We assume that words like ‘tolerance’ and ‘dialogue’ mean the same thing to everybody. But they don’t,” he continues.
We have to stop treating Islamism as anything other than what it is: a worldview incompatible with Western ideology.
“I ask you to think about what it feels like to be Jewish today because of the Jewish people, but also because you’re next,” Glenn warns. “Jewish communities always pay the price first. They always do. And believe me, you are on the list — you, your faith, your freedom, your children are on the list.”
“History shows this with brutal consistency. When a society begins to rot from ideological cowardice, the Jews are always the early warning system. They’re the canary in the coal mine,” he analogizes.
The question is: Will we first wake up and see it? And then will we have the courage to do something about it?
“If we refuse to do that work now, our children are going to have to do it later under far worse conditions,” Glenn says.
“[We’re] running out of time.”
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