Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Feb. 2 announced a new $100 million program that he said will help homeless people find jobs and treat drug abuse.

Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. in the East Room of the White House on Jan. 16, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

The $100 million investment is aimed at assisting homeless people and drug users in recovering from addiction, finding employment, and locating stable housing.

Kennedy told an event on Prevention Day—which is sponsored by the government and dedicated to preventing drug abuse—in Washington on Monday that the health care system under the previous administration was designed to cycle people who suffer from mental illness and drug addiction “between sidewalks, emergency room visits, jails, mental hospitals, and shelters.”

“No one took responsibility for the whole person. No one stayed long enough to help them recover, to help them reestablish their links, and teach them the lessons of how to live in a community,” he said. “That system is neither humane nor effective.”

Kennedy, who has said his addiction to heroin ended with help from 12-step programs, said that the $100 million would fund pilot initiatives that are crafted to resolve long-term homelessness and reduce opioid addiction by expanding treatment regimens that emphasize recovery and self-sufficiency. The program is known as Safety Through Recovery, Engagement, and Evidence-based Treatment and Supports, or STREETS.

“STREETS will engage people continuously, from first contact on the street through recovery, through employment, and through self-sufficiency,” Kennedy said. “Law enforcement, first responders, courts, housing providers, and health care systems will work as one team, so people will no longer fall through the cracks.”

Anyone else rewatching The Wire rn?

STREETS follows an executive order President Donald Trump signed in January that says drug addiction is a chronic disease and that the administration needs to prioritize addiction treatment and recovery.

The new program builds on an investment federal health officials awarded in 2025 to boost homes for recovering addicts. Kennedy says he knows many people who have recovered in such homes.

Kennedy also announced the government will be providing $10 million through an assisted outpatient program to help adults designated as having serious mental illness, which he said will reduce hospitalization, incarceration, and homelessness.

Officials also said that the Department of Health and Human Services will, moving forward, let states use federal funding to pay for addicted parents to receive Food and Drug Administration-approved medications.

And they said that they would be giving faith-based organizations that meet certain standards funding to help with drug addiction recovery.

“This is a chronic disease. It’s a physical disease, it’s a mental disease, it’s emotional disease, but above all, it’s a spiritual disease,“ Kennedy said. ”And we need to recognize that, and faith-based organizations play a critical role in … helping people reestablish their connections to community.”

This past several days saw Iran conduct limited ‘live fire’ war drills in the Strait of Hormuz, and prior to that there were some joint Iran-China-Russia naval maneuvers – but with the USS Lincoln carrier group reportedly moving away from the potential flashpoint, into waters off Yemen, there remains an uneasy de-escalation (for now) in anticipating of Turkish-hosted US-Iran nuclear negotiations.

Israel and the United States have still flexed back, as the partner forces kicked off the week Monday with joint naval military drills in the Red Sea. The war games come amid fears of a potential US attack on Iran.

AP via Getty Images

“A joint exercise was conducted yesterday between a U.S. Navy destroyer and Israeli Navy vessels. The drill was held as part of the ongoing cooperation between the Israeli Navy and the US Fifth Fleet in the Red Sea arena,” The IDF posted on X Monday.

“The destroyer docked at the port as part of a pre-planned, routine visit and within the framework of the strategic and close cooperation between the two navies and respective militaries,” it said.

The US meanwhile continues to send cargo planes, fighter jets, and advanced air defense systems into the Gulf region to prepare for a potential coming conflict with Iran.

Maximalist demands are still being made of Tehran. While it is willing to talk about its nuclear program, Iranian leaders have balked at Washington demands to give up or at least reduce the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile program.

All the while, Israeli defense officials have traveled to the US for meetings with top military officials. The Netanyahu government is reportedly lobbying for robust Pentagon action against Iran.

One astute Middle East observer has noted, “There is a persistent and unresolved gap between Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu — a gap that was not closed even during the recent 12 day war.”

The same analyst lays out the following:

Moreover, even when Trump gave Israel the green light to carry out strikes bacm in June, he did so with the assumption that military pressure would increase Iran’s willingness to accept a deal, not as part of a strategy aimed at regime change. Until recently, Trump rarely spoke in terms of overthrowing the Iranian regime.

US and Israel showing the world they’ve got each other’s back at sea.
Red Sea drills like this send a clear signal don’t test this partnership.

— War Monitoring (@WarMonitoring_x) February 2, 2026

Iran is naturally deeply distrustful and suspicious of US motives – especially given it was the first Trump administration which unilaterally pulled out of the Obama-era JCPOA nuclear deal to begin with.

Now Iran is being asked to scrap everything and start afresh, but including ballistic missiles on the agenda will be a non-starter. If Iran gives up or reduces its missile capability, it will have nothing to defend against in the next Israel conflict. The June war saw the Islamic Republic get attacked without warning.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The massive hospice fraud racket thriving under California’s lax oversight is finally getting the spotlight it deserves, as the Trump administration’s CMS chief Dr. Mehmet Oz hits the streets of Los Angeles to call out the billions in stolen taxpayer dollars.

With organized crime rings, including Russian-Armenian mafia elements, infiltrating the system through ghost patients and fake companies, the scam highlights how globalist policies have opened the door to foreign exploitation of U.S. resources. As fraudsters traffic beneficiaries like commodities, real Americans suffer denied care while the deep state looks the other way.

Los Angeles County alone accounts for 18% of the entire country’s home health care billing, a staggering figure that screams foul play.

The fraud being exposed in California is INSANE

– 18% of THE WHOLE COUNTRY’S home health care billing is coming out of Los Angeles County
– One doctor billed the government $120 million in a single year claiming to oversee 1,900 patients
– With almost 2,000 hospice agencies, Los… pic.twitter.com/0mTPG1ENL2

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) February 1, 2026

One California physician billed the government $120 million in a single year, claiming to oversee 1,900 patients—a workload that defies logic and reeks of corruption.

The county boasts almost 2,000 hospice agencies, more than 36 states combined and 30 times the number in Florida or New York.

Dr. Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was forthright during his on-the-ground tour: “Hospice is crazy here… You’ve got hospice that’s grown seven-fold in the last five years. They represent about three and a half billion dollars of fraud, we believe, just in LA County.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has admitted the problem’s scale, calling it “an epidemic in California, specifically in the greater Los Angeles area.”

The fraud operates through recruiters who lure seniors with freebies like walkers or cash, harvest their Medicare numbers, and sell them to providers for $1,000 to $3,000 each. Providers then bill the feds $260 per day per patient, often for nonexistent services, while shuffling enrollees between sham outfits to evade detection.

In LA’s San Fernando Valley, particularly Van Nuys, the density is absurd: 210 agencies crammed into one square mile, with one building listing 112 hospices showing no actual operations.

Sheila Clark, president of the California Hospice and Palliative Care Association, exposed the human cost: “A Medicare MIB number is more lucrative than a credit card… They’re human traffickers. They’re trafficking beneficiaries in and out of hospices, home health.” She added, “We need to listen to these people when they say, ‘I’ve been scammed.’”

A notorious example is the Mirzoyan-Terdjanian ring, where 73 members were prosecuted for $100 million in fraud using phantom clinics, netting light sentences for racketeering and money laundering.

This constitutes a direct assault on American seniors and the integrity of the U.S. healthcare system, enabled by years of Democrat-led neglect that prioritized open borders over accountability.

While Governor Gavin Newsom claims credit for a 2021 moratorium on new hospice licenses and revoking over 280, the damage was done under his watch, with fraud ballooning unchecked for years. Critics point out that the Trump administration’s renewed federal push, including DOJ investigations, is what’s truly turning the tide against these scams.

Newsom has responsed by filing a civil rights complaint against Dr. Oz for highlighting Armenian community ties to the fraud, a move that reeks of deflection rather than real reform.

This mess underscores the failures of unchecked immigration and weak enforcement, allowing foreign actors to siphon billions meant for American citizens. It’s time for America First policies to root out these parasites and protect seniors from exploitation.

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Authored by Jonathan Turley,

In the last week, protesters in Minneapolis began putting up barricades to create checkpoints that bar federal immigration officers from entering certain neighborhoods.

It is all too familiar to those of us who remember what the mayor in 2020 called “the Summer of Love” in Seattle and the establishment of an autonomous area known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP).

Ironically, these barricades are being set up after a jury ruled against the City of Seattle for negligence after the killing of 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. in CHOP.

The self-declared anarchist enclave was originally called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) but was later renamed the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP).

In 2020, we discussed the prospect of tortious liability for the city, which abandoned the Seattle Police Department (SPD) East Precinct to the mob and stood by as CHOP declared itself the sole authority in its seized area.

As I noted in the column, “If Seattle gets chopped in court, it will be due not to a failure of government but to a failure to govern.”

Seattle-based ice cream company, Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream, and other businesses sued the city.

While first supporting the autonomous zone as part of a “summer of love,” Democratic politicians like then-Mayor Jenny Durkan later distanced themselves from the massive damage and crime in the zone.

The Mays lawsuit included not only the city but former Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best and Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins.

The jury awarded the Mays family more than $30 million in damages — $4 million to the estate of Mays Jr. and $26 million to Mays Sr., according to The Seattle Times.

Mays Jr. was visiting Seattle from San Diego when he went to the area to join the protests.

He was later shot and the police failed to respond for five hours due to the limits on entry into CHOP.

At that point, the crime scene was hopelessly corrupted.

Here is the complaint: Complaint Antonio Mays, Jr.