They've been vilified for simply doing their jobs. Now America's Finest are risking everything for a better life... and its transforming the country
From New York to California, cops are reportedly handing in their badges and moving to states like Florida, and South Carolina, where experts say they feel appreciated, respected and empowered to do their jobs.
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Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
John Oliver's savage two-word response to Jay Leno's criticism of late-night hosts being too political
Last Week Tonight host John Oliver had two words for former Tonight Show host Jay Leno criticizing his Strike Force Five buddies (Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel) for getting too political in their nightly monologues - 'hard pass.' The 75-year-old comedian had lamented to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation CEO David Trulio on July 22 that the current late-night hosts are too busy pushing their Democratic agenda to entertain a wider audience. 'I don't think anybody wants to hear a shoot for just half an audience? Why not try to get the whole? I like to bring people into the big picture,' Jay explained. 'I don't understand why you would alienate one particular group, you know, or just don't do it at all. I'm not saying you have to throw your support or whatever, but just do what's funny.' In response, the British 48-year-old scoffed to THR Magazine on Tuesday: 'I'm going to take a hard pass on taking comedic advice from Jay Leno.' 'Who thinks that way? Executives?' John continued. 'Comedy can't be for everyone. It's inherently subjective. So, yeah, when you do stand-up, some people try to play to a broader audience, which is completely legitimate. Others decide not to, which is equally legitimate.' Many comics still don't forgive Leno for refusing to retire from late-night after reluctantly handing over The Tonight Show to successor Conan O'Brien in 2009, which lasted seven months before NBC gave the gig right back to Leno. Oliver - who became an American citizen in 2019 - went on to defend his HBO Max satirical news show, which 'comes from a point of view, but most of those long stories we do are not party political.' 'They're about systemic issues. Our last few shows were about gang databases, AI slop, juvenile justice, med spas, air traffic control,' the investigative journalist listed. 'I'm not saying that these don't have a point of view in them. Of course they do. But I hope a lot of them actually reach across people's political persuasions. You want people to at least be able to agree on the problem, even if you disagree on what the solution to it is.' On July 21, John joined his former Daily Show boss Jon Stewart, Fallon, Meyers, Watch What Happens Live host Andy Cohen, and CNN's Anderson Cooper on The Late Show in order to show support for Colbert amid his shocking cancellation. 'As soon as the news broke, we were all checking in with Stephen,' Oliver recalled. Jay explained: 'I don't think anybody wants to hear a shoot for just half an audience? Why not try to get the whole? I like to bring people into the big picture' He continued: 'I don't understand why you would alienate one particular group, you know, or just don't do it at all. I'm not saying you have to throw your support or whatever, but just do what's funny' (Strike Force Five's Jimmy Fallon, John Oliver, Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel pictured in 2023) Oliver recalled: 'As soon as the news broke, we were all checking in with Stephen. He came up with the idea and asked us to come, and of course we're all going to do it. You want to be able to support him and his staff in a horrible, horrible time' 'He came up with the idea and asked us to come, and of course we're all going to do it. You want to be able to support him and his staff in a horrible, horrible time.' The Kamala Harris supporter called it 'incredibly sad for comedy' but noted: 'We are fortunate enough to be in a very different situation than network commercial TV, so those corporate pressures are not comparable, and we have no pressures from advertisers.'
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Fake nurse busted after treating over 4,000 patients without a medical license
A Florida woman posing as a nurse was arrested Tuesday after she treated nearly 4,500 patients without ever possessing a valid nursing license, according to Flagler County police. Autumn Marie Bardisa, 29, has been charged with 14 felony counts of practicing medicine without a license and fraudulently using of someone else's ID, court records show. She was also accused of selling Ozempic to one hospital employee and giving a birth control injection to another, according to a police affidavit. Bardisa worked as an advanced nurse technician at AdventHealth Palm Coast Parkway in Palm Coast for about seven months before her supervisors got suspicious and fired her, police said in a statement. 'This is one of the most disturbing cases of medical fraud we've ever investigated, said Flagler County Sheriff Rick Staly. 'This woman potentially put thousands of lives at risk by pretending to be someone she was not and violating the trust of patients, their families, AdventHealth and an entire medical community.' The hospital hired Bardisa on July 3, 2023, after she represented herself as an 'education first' registered nurse. Bardisa was essentially saying that she had gotten through nursing school with a passing grade but hadn't passed the national exam needed to obtain a license. During the months-long hiring process, she lied and told the human resource specialist responsible for onboarding her that she had passed the exam on October 17, 2023, according the affidavit. She then provided a registered nurse number 'matching an individual with her first name, Autumn, but with a different last name,' police said. She allegedly stole the RN number of another nurse who shared her first name and worked at a different AdventHealth hospital, the affidavit stated. Bardisa explained the name discrepancy away by saying she had recently gotten married and changed her name, according to police. Bardisa was supposed to upload her marriage license to a company database but never did, police said. Despite that, she was allowed to start a nurse residency program at the hospital, which she graduated on June 20, 2024. That was when she was able to start treating patients. Shortly after Bardisa was offered a promotion in January 2025, an employee did a background check on her and found that she had an expired certified nursing assistant license, according to police. 'This prompted Advent Health to start an inquiry which led to asking Autumn Bardisa for her pre-requested marriage license to confirm her licensed identity. Autumn gave several excuses and ultimately could not provide the documentation,' according to the affidavit. This led to her getting fired on January 22, which also started the ball rolling on a criminal investigation thanks to her fellow employees coming forward to the authorities. Throughout the course of the investigation, detectives interviewed the nurse whose identity was allegedly stolen by Bardisa. That nurse, also named Autumn, told police she attended the same college as Bardisa but didn't know her personally. This Autumn also revealed that she was married and had recently undergone a name change to the name Bardisa used while working at the hospital. The chief nursing officer at the hospital, Kristen Sutton, was also interviewed by police about two months after Bardisa was fired. Sutton accused Bardisa of selling Semaglutide, more commonly known as Ozempic, to another employee and administering a birth control injection to a different staff member. It's unclear if more charges will come as a result of these allegations. Bardisa treated approximately 4,486 patients from June 2024 through January 2025, according to the affidavit. On Tuesday, the Flagler County Fugitive Unit arrived at Bardisa's home and arrested her without incident. She was then taken to Sheriff Perry Hall Inmate Detention Facility, where she is being held on a $70,000 bond. She is scheduled to be arraigned on September 2.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
The biggest problem for Starmer and co: the machinery of government is broken and they can't fix it
In one of my favourite Seinfeld episodes, George Costanza is sitting in a New York diner and – this shows how long ago it was – reading his morning paper. Suddenly he folds the paper up, sets it down on the table and looks across to his companion with weary exasperation. Why, he asks, does the high-minded New York Times refuse to accept that China is a turn-off? Just like George, many readers will at some stage probably have experienced a similar feeling. Perhaps it was about China, but perhaps about something completely different. Call it the 'not right now' syndrome. It is the syndrome that recognises that a subject might be important, but reading a lengthy report about it can be another thing altogether. Journalists know from bitter experience that prisons are often a turn-off as well. Prisons are remote, often unpleasant places. Most people have never been inside one, and are happy to keep it that way. It is important that prisons exist, of course. They do a difficult but necessary job. Hopefully they do it well. In most respects, though, prisons are out of public sight and, as a result, out of public mind. Until they are not. Today is one of those times when 'not right now' no longer cuts it. The reason is the publication this week of a truly devastating report by Anne Owers, the former chief inspector of prisons for England and Wales, on the mishandling of prison capacity. The report lays bare the reasons why prisons have become so consistently overcrowded over so many years to the point of frequent near-collapse. But, as it does so, it also makes clear that the underlying cause is neither a surge in human wickedness nor a rise in overzealous sentencing by the courts. Instead, the cause is bad and broken government. This is why the report, indispensable though it is for understanding the prisons crisis, is also important in a wider sense. It reads like an account of not just a government department on the verge of failure, but a whole nation state. Owers shows how overcrowding has its roots in a conflicted approach that has been deeply entrenched among generations of politicians. On the one hand, 21st-century governments have all promised more police and tougher sentences. On the other, they have all promised to cut departmental spending, to hold taxes down and to outsource programmes. As there are almost no voters in prisons, the criminal justice system became a prime target for cuts. But the two policies were – and are – contradictory. The upshot was too many prisoners and not enough prisons or cells to house them in. This reached crisis point under Rishi Sunak's government in October 2023, when Owers says the criminal justice system was within three days of meltdown. Early release schemes were hurriedly but grudgingly implemented. Many of the same pressures still exist under Labour today. Money is still tight and courts are still busy. The possibility of mass arrests this weekend in response to Palestine Action protests is simply the latest example of the system's lack of headroom. Owers has two particular criticisms of systemic government failings. The first is that the response to our prisons crisis between 2022 and 2024 was far too bureaucratic and repetitive. Several committees, often involving the same people, found themselves endlessly having the same discussions without triggering action. The second is that 'surviving the day' then became the overriding preoccupation for government. The approach in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), which oversees prisons policy, was to manage the crisis, doing 'as little as possible as late as possible'. But there is a third, very important criticism lurking in her account. Ministers were far too slow and unwilling to face the facts. Sometimes this was true even within the MoJ itself, but the main resistance was from the Home Office, the Treasury and 10 Downing Street. The Home Office had an interest in talking tough and, as the former justice secretary Alex Chalk put it this week: 'Some home secretaries' egos will be writing cheques that the MoJ is expected to cash.' The Treasury tried to hold the line against all increased expenditure. No 10 played for time because it feared the political optics of early release schemes. The sum of these actions was government without leadership. Some of this has changed under Labour. The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, did well by commissioning three important independent reports on different aspects of the criminal justice process – Owers on prison capacity, David Gauke on sentencing, and Sir Brian Leveson on the criminal courts' backlog – all of which (compare and contrast the Covid inquiry) have been briskly completed within a few months, their recommendations mainly accepted. The wider problems in Whitehall, however, remain. Mahmood still has to get all the changes in these reports past the Home Office, the Treasury and No 10, at a time when all three are preoccupied by Reform UK. Yet crisis processes and pressures are not in any way unique to the MoJ. On the contrary, they can apply across any part of government. Every Whitehall department has its hands tied by Treasury oversight. Think of the way the NHS, and thus the health department for England, moves into surviving-the-day mode as soon as winter looms. There are lessons in the Owers report for areas such as health and social care, welfare, policing, defence and education, as well as justice. All of this poses a collective challenge for the way that the British state is organised and does its business. It can be addressed, and perhaps answered, with skill and good fortune in one of two ways. One is by ever-more crisis management, in which, as Sam Freedman puts it in his book Failed State, politicians and officials 'keep using the machinery we have, making promises they can't keep, pulling levers that aren't there, filling newspapers with announcements of actions that never happen'. That approach is broken. The other approach is for a more draconian reform of priorities. The Owers report depicts a system that does not work. Yesterday's report by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research argued that, in her autumn budget, Rachel Reeves must either cut spending or raise taxes by more than £40bn if she is to balance the books without breaking Labour's election promises. These are defining reminders of what is now at stake. It is foolish not to recognise that there are no easy choices here. The pitch has not been rolled with the public for change and the chances of success are uncertain. But it is no less foolish not to recognise – right now – that we cannot go on as we are. Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
