Welcome to the show: One day after student activists at Columbia chained themselves to a campus gate to protest the school’s board of trustees, they targeted university president Claire Shipman.
Members of the anti-Semitic group Columbia University Apartheid Divest “welcomed” Shipman—or “Shitman,” as they put it—by defacing a campus bathroom with red paint, inverted Hamas triangles, and flyers that featured a doctored image of Shipman crawling out of a toilet, our Jessica Costescu reports. In a tweet touting the “redecoration,” CUAD referred to Shipman—a former CNN and ABC journalist who was until recently married to former Obama press secretary Jay Carney—as “AIPAC-backed.”
CUAD has a history of targeting Columbia bathrooms, having used cement to clog toilets in the School of International and Public Affairs. To our knowledge, the perpetrators in that case have not been caught. We’ll see if Shipman has better luck tracking down yesterday’s anarchists.
Nice work if you can get it: As the owner of an Ohio-based telecommunications company, Jeffrey Ansted amassed an $8 million private jet, a $250,000 Ferrari, and yacht and country club memberships in Florida. He did so by embezzling millions from a federal program you’ve probably never heard of: the FCC’s Universal Service Fund.
The fund subsidizes phone and internet access for low-income Americans through a surcharge on consumers’ telephone bills. But the FCC doesn’t set the size of the charge—that’s the responsibility of a private corporation “run by representatives of the very companies that receive subsidies of the program,” our Aaron Sibarium reports. Those representatives are also tasked with preventing fraud, and they don’t appear to be doing a good job: In addition to Ansted’s racket, the program lost more than $100 million to fraud from a single company between 2012 and 2021.
Now, the fund’s structure is the subject of an ongoing legal challenge, one that “has trained the klieg lights on USF, which also subsidizes internet access for schools and libraries,” Sibarium writes. And while the Supreme Court seems poised to uphold the program, FCC chairman Brendan Carr has spotlighted its shortcomings in the past, meaning it may be time for a change.
READ MORE: Private Jets, Ferraris, and False Claims: Inside An Obscure Federal Program Rife With Fraud
Away from the Beacon:
- The U.S. government has banned staffers in China from having romantic relationships with Chinese citizens due to security concerns. Thankfully for Eric Swalwell, the rule does not apply to government officials based in the United States.
- Republicans in Georgia introduced a bill to bar the use of taxpayer funds for state inmates’ sex-change surgeries. Democrats in the state legislature staged a walkout in response.
- Dems in disarray: DNC staffers were greeted Thursday morning by a group of dancing climate protesters holding signs that read, “SCHUMER, STEP ASIDE,” “CHUCK THE SCHMUCK,” and “RESIST OR RESIGN.”
