LAREDO, TX. (KGNS) - The South Texas Food bank received some help in getting food to families in Laredo and the region.

The Tecos mascot Tico was on hand preparing food bags for families and helping with operations at the food bank.

Some of the food items included bread, water, meat, fruits, and vegetables.

Alexandro Carraman with the South Texas Food Bank said the Adopt A Family Program is one of the food bank’s biggest programs.

“For $120, you can sponsor a family for the entire year, it translates to a bag of about 60 to 70 pounds of food every month, and it contains vegetables, fruits, and any other essentials that we have in store,” said Carraman.

If you’re interested in learning more about some of the assistance the food bank offers, you can call 956-726-3120.

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rose to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic because of his strident opposition to vaccines. Yet, he insists he’s not anti-vaccine. He has associated with influential people on the far right – including Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn – to raise his profile. Yet, he portrays himself as a true Democrat inheriting the mantle of the Kennedy family.

As he challenges President Joe Biden, the stories he tells on the campaign trail about himself, his life’s work and what he stands for are often the opposite of what his record actually shows.

Though Kennedy’s primary challenge to a sitting president is widely considered a longshot, he’s been sucking up media attention due to his famous name and the possibility that his run could weaken Biden ahead of what is expected to be a close general election in 2024. He’s drawn praise from Republican presidential candidates like Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Meanwhile, Trump supporters, including his longtime ally Roger Stone, have ginned up interest by floating a Trump-Kennedy unity ticket.

Debra Duvall, 62, who lives in Fort Myers, Florida, and said she serves on the Lee County GOP executive committee, described herself as a longtime Trump supporter, but said she’s torn for 2024. 

“I’ll take Trump or RFK. Either one,” she said, explaining that she was drawn to both because she believes they can’t be bought.

That kind of support has demonstrated some of the contradictions in Kennedy’s candidacy. He has said he wants to “reclaim” the Democratic Party, while aligning himself with far right figures who have worked to subvert American democracy. He touts his credentials as an environmentalist, yet pushes bitcoin — a cryptocurrency that requires massive amounts of electricity from supercomputers to generate new coins, prompting most environmental advocates to loudly oppose it.

And though he peppers his speeches, podcast appearances and campaign materials with invocations of the Democratic Party legacies of his uncle President John F. Kennedy and his father, Robert F. Kennedy, his relatives have distanced themselves from him and even denounced him.

“He’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame,” Jack Schlossberg, President Kennedy’s grandson, said of his cousin in an Instagram video in July. “I’ve listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. What I do know is, his candidacy is an embarrassment.”

Kennedy’s recent comments that COVID-19 could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people — which he denies were antisemitic but concedes he should have worded more carefully — also drew a condemnation from his sister Kerry Kennedy.

The contradictions between what Kennedy says and his track record were nowhere more apparent than when he testified before a congressional committee in July at the invitation of Republican members.

Anti-vaccine activists, some who work for Kennedy’s nonprofit group Children’s Health Defense, sat in the rows behind him, watching as he insisted “I have never been anti-vaxx. I have never told the public to avoid vaccination.”

But that’s not true. Again and again, Kennedy has made his opposition to vaccines clear. In July, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.

“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” Kennedy said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has threatened to sue a group of independent researchers whose research documented an increase in hate speech on the site since it was purchased last year by Elon Musk.

An attorney representing the social media site wrote to the Center for Countering Digital Hate on July 20 threatening legal action over the nonprofit’s research into hate speech and content moderation. The letter alleged that CCDH’s research publications seem intended “to harm Twitter’s business by driving advertisers away from the platform with incendiary claims.”

Musk is a self-professed free speech absolutist who has welcomed back white supremacists and election deniers to the platform, which he renamed X earlier this month. But the billionaire has at times proven sensitive about critical speech directed at him or his companies.

The center is a nonprofit with offices in the U.S. and United Kingdom. It regularly publishes reports on hate speech, extremism or harmful behavior on social media platforms like X, TikTok or Facebook. 

The organization has published several reports critical of Musk’s leadership, detailing an increase in anti-LGBTQ hate speech as well as climate misinformation since his purchase. The letter from X’s attorney cited one specific report from June that found the platform failed to remove neo-Nazi and anti-LGBTQ content from verified users that violated the platform’s rules.

In the letter, attorney Alex Spiro questioned the expertise of the researchers and accused the center of trying to harm X’s reputation. The letter also suggested, without evidence, that the center received funds from some of X’s competitors, even though the center has also published critical reports about TikTok, Facebook and other large platforms.

“CCDH intends to harm Twitter’s business by driving advertisers away from the platform with incendiary claims,” Spiro wrote, using the platform’s former name.

Imran Ahmed, the center’s founder and CEO, told the AP on Monday that his group has never received a similar response from any tech company, despite a history of studying the relationship between social media, hate speech and extremism. He said that typically, the targets of the center’s criticism have responded by defending their work or promising to address any problems that have been identified.

Ahmed said he worried X’s response to the center’s work could have a chilling effect if it frightens other researchers away from studying the platform. He said he also worried that other industries could take note of the strategy.

“This is an unprecedented escalation by a social media company against independent researchers. Musk has just declared open war,” Ahmed told the Associated Press. “If Musk succeeds in silencing us other researchers will be next in line.”

Messages left with Spiro and X were not immediately returned Monday.

It’s not the first time that Musk has fired back at critics. Last year, he suspended the accounts of several journalists who covered his takeover of Twitter. Another user was permanently banned for using publicly available flight data to track Musk’s private plane; Musk had initially pledged to keep the user on the platform but later changed his mind, citing his personal safety. He also threatened to sue the user.

He initially had promised that he would allow any speech on his platform that wasn’t illegal. “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” Musk wrote in a tweet last year.

X’s recent threat of a lawsuit prompted concern from U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who said the billionaire was trying to use the threat of legal action to punish a nonprofit group trying to hold a powerful social media platform accountable.

“Instead of attacking them, he should be attacking the increasingly disturbing content on Twitter,” Schiff said in a statement.

LAREDO, Tx. (KGNS) - Officials are investigating a fire that broke out at a retail store in west Laredo Monday morning.

The incident happened at the 4800 block of San Bernardo on Monday, July 31 at around 2:46 a.m.

The Laredo Fire Department responded to the Sam’s Club store and found smoke coming from the building.

Firefighters were able to enter the building and found a refrigerator on fire.

Officials were able to extinguish the fire without incident.

According to the fire department the building was empty during the time of the fire.

The store manager was notified and a fire investigator was called to the scene.

Sam’s Club officials say that the Laredo location is closed for the day.

LAREDO, Tex. (KGNS) - Officers with Customs and Border Protection catch a man wanted for an alleged sex crime with a child. It happened this past Wednesday when 64-year-old Jose Ramiro Ramos Reinero was taken in for secondary inspection at the Gateway to the Americas pedestrian bridge. A background check showed he was wanted by the Webb County Sheriff’s Office for indecency with a child.

He was arrested and taken to the Webb County Jail.

EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – The federal government is bringing to El Paso the fight against Mexican drug cartels mass-producing fentanyl and smuggling it into the United States.

A new joint lab led by the Drug Enforcement Administration is set up at the El Paso Intelligence Center in Fort Bliss. Its purpose is to track drugs seized all along the U.S.-Mexico border to individual cartels, and to be on the lookout for novel illicit and potentially deadly synthetic drugs, DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said this week.

“We asked the Federal Drug Administration and Customs and Border Protection and the Border Patrol to join us. It is a fentanyl profiling lab to test fentanyl quickly as it gets seized at the border so we can determine who is responsible for making that fentanyl, what it is made up of so we can have an early warning system for future drugs,” Milgram told members of a House Judiciary Subcommittee on Thursday.

The El Paso Intelligence Center, or EPIC, is a DEA-led multi-agency intelligence clearinghouse involving more than 20 federal agencies that support law enforcement all over the country with threat analysis, particularly at the Southern border.

More than 110,000 Americans died last year of drug overdoses, many of them involving fentanyl, federal officials said. The substance, which is being splashed into other illicit drugs like heroin and cocaine and pressed into pills made to resemble brand-name legal drugs, is now the number one killer of Americans ages 18 to 45, Milgram said.

“Americans are experiencing the most devastating drug crisis in our nation’s history. It is like nothing that we have seen before. This one drug, fentanyl, has transformed the criminal landscape: It is cheap to make, easy to disguise, and deadly to those who take it,” the DEA administrator told the subcommittee.

She said two transnational criminal organizations – the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) – are mass producing the drug in Mexico with chemicals imported from China. She said these groups employ an army of smugglers at the border and associates in virtually every state of the union to bring the drug to communities.

“What we are seeing now is these two cartels are acting with calculated, deliberate treachery to put that fentanyl in other products,” Milgram said. “They are marketing and branding (pills) as the real thing (Oxycodone, Xanax, Percoset). They are cutting powder (fentanyl) into cocaine and heroin and selling those drugs as if they were (only) heroin and cocaine.”

The purpose is to make the product stronger and more addictive so people buy more of it, regardless of how dangerous it is.

The administrator fielded questions from lawmakers on why the DEA is not going after more drug lords. The U.S. government in 2017 extradited Sinaloa cartel drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, but his sons — known as the Chapitos — have since taken over the Sinaloa cartel and, according to the DEA, transformed it into a gigantic fentanyl manufacturing and exporting operation.

Milgram said the DEA is pursuing a comprehensive strategy that involves going after chemical suppliers, money launderers, and “enablers” of the cartels in more than 40 countries, not just the drug lords.

US Rep. Andrew Biggs, R-Arizona, chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance, called the Mexican drug cartels “narco-terrorists” and claims they control much of the U.S.-Mexico border.

“One of our biggest national threats is control of our southern border by transnational narco-terrorist cartels,” he said.