White House Dossier's

Meet the CEO of Hamas . . . When Zaher Jabarin ran a Hamas cell in the 1980s, he borrowed cash from his mother to buy weapons. Now, he oversees a financial empire that the U.S. estimates is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and funds Hamas’s operations against Israel. The 55-year-old militant manages Hamas’s financial relationship with its main benefactor Iran and handles how Tehran gets cash to the Gaza Strip, U.S. and Israeli officials say. He looks after a portfolio of companies that deliver income annually for Hamas and runs a network of private donors and businessmen who invest for the Islamist group. Current and former U.S. and Israeli security officials believe he enabled the group to pay for weapons and fighters’ wages to mount the Oct. 7 attacks. Wall Street Journal

Haley surpasses DeSantis in national GOP polling average . . . GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley has surpassed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average for the first time in the 2024 campaign. Nathaniel Rakich, a senior editor and senior elections analyst for the polling analysis website, announced Haley’s move into second place Tuesday on X, formerly known as Twitter. He noted caveats about the confidence interval of polls and multiple ways that exist to calculate a polling average. The Hill

DeSantis' strategy of trying to hijack Trump's supporters has failed. He was touted as "Trump without the baggage," but he turned out to be "Trump without the personality." Haley has staked her candidacy on appealing to anti-Trump Republicans while trying not to anger the pro-Trump crowd and maybe peel off a new of them as well. 

Haley's "I can beat Biden better" argument is undermined by new poll . . . A new survey threatens Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley's argument that she is the sole 2024 candidate who can defeat President Joe Biden in next year's election in the final two weeks before the Jan. 15 Iowa caucuses. A YouGov poll released on Wednesday showed Biden tied in a hypothetical matchup against former President Donald Trump 44% to 44%. But in a matchup against Haley, Biden beats the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador by 5 percentage points, 41% to 36%. Washington Examiner

Trump asks Supreme Court to keep him on the Colorado ballot . . . Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to keep him on the ballot in Colorado, urging the justices to overturn a state court decision that deemed him ineligible to run in the 2024 election. In a 43-page petition, the former president said the Colorado Supreme Court improperly ruled last month that he had run afoul of the Constitution’s “insurrection clause” by stoking the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. State courts cannot make that determination, Trump’s attorneys say. Politico

Documents allege Jeffrey Epstein said Bill Clinton "likes them young" . . . Former President Bill Clinton was alleged to prefer young girls and to have a close personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein in documents released Wednesday related to the lawsuit by Virginia Giuffre against former Epstein lover and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. In one document, the deposition of Epstein accuser Johanna Sjoberg, revealed that Sjoberg alleged Epstein had said the former president likes younger girls. Fox News

David Copperfield did "magic tricks" during dinner at Epstein's house

"And now ladies, I will make your clothes disappear"

Dozens of Republican lawmakers travel to the border . . . U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson traveled to the Texas-Mexico border on Wednesday and said that if President Joe Biden wants Republican support for helping Ukraine and Israel in their wars, he needs to crack down on illegal immigration at the border. “If President Biden wants a supplemental spending bill focused on national security, it better begin by defending America's national security. It begins right here on our southern border,” Johnson said during a news conference at the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, where he was accompanied by 60 other House Republican lawmakers. Texas Tribune

International

Russian hackers infiltrated Ukrainian telecom giant for months . . . Russian hackers were inside Ukrainian telecoms giant Kyivstar's system from at least May last year in a cyberattack that should serve as a "big warning" to the West, Ukraine's cyber spy chief told Reuters. The hack, one of the most dramatic since Russia's full-scale invasion nearly two years ago, knocked out services provided by Ukraine's biggest telecoms operator for some 24 million users for days from Dec. 12. Reuters

Swedish show chaos leaves 1,000 vehicles trapped . . . People who got trapped in 1,000 vehicles in heavy snow for more than 24 hours have been evacuated, Swedish authorities say. Rescuers worked through the night to free people stuck on the main E22 road in the Skane area of southern Sweden. Many of those trapped were evacuated by rescue teams and told to return to their cars later. The travel chaos occurred amid plummeting winter temperatures across the Nordic countries. BBC

Money

Google is taking a bite out of cookies . . . Google is going forward with sweeping changes to how companies track users online—moves that have been years in the making. Advertisers still aren’t ready.

The changes, among the biggest in the history of the $600 billion-a-year online ad industry, center on the use of cookies, technology that logs the activity of internet users across websites so that advertisers can target them with relevant ads. Starting Thursday, Google will start a limited test that will restrict cookies for 1% of the people who use its Chrome browser, which is by far the world’s most popular. By year’s end, Google plans to eliminate cookies for all Chrome users. Wall Street Journal

App allows consumers to delete their data from dozens of companies

Amazon's Bezos bets on Google challenger using AI to upend internet search . . . Perplexity, a startup going after Google’s dominant position in web search, has won backing from Jeff Bezos and venture capitalists betting that artificial intelligence will upend the way people find information online. Started less than two years ago, Perplexity has fewer than 40 employees and is based out of a San Francisco co-working space. The company’s product, which it calls an answer engine, is used by about 10 million people monthly. Those ingredients were enough to persuade Institutional Venture Partners, Bezos and other tech executives to invest $74 million in the company. Wall Street Journal

Culture

Former Harvard president plays the race card . . . Claudine Gay once again cited racism as a reason for her resignation, doubling down on the claim in a Wednesday opinion piece published in The New York Times.

Gay resigned as the president of Harvard University Tuesday after a fourth round of plagiarism allegations and after submitting two rounds of corrections to her scholarly works in December. Gay cited “racial animus” as a reason for her resigning from the presidency in a Tuesday letter to the university community and also cited racism in her opinion piece, saying her detractors used “tired racial stereotypes.” Daily Caller

Were the copy and paste buttons racist?

Mob of over 100 loot Compton bakery . . . A mob of over 100 looters purposefully crashed a Kia into a small Compton bakery before they flooded in and ransacked the store during a night of rampage on the streets earlier this week. The thieves had gathered in the area for an illegal street takeover around 3 a.m. Tuesday before making the mile-long trek to Ruben’s Bakery & Mexican Food. When they got to the locked store, a white Kia emerged and backed into the front doors, clearing an entryway for the crowd of pillagers to get to their loot. New York Post

They suspect they won't get arrested, and if arrested, won't get prosecuted. Lack of "moral hazard" leads to . . . amorality.

Consumer Reports finds plastics "widespread" in food . . . Consumer Reports has found that plastics retain a "widespread" presence in food despite the health risks, and called on regulators to reassess the safety of plastics that come into contact with food during production. The non-profit consumer group said on Thursday that 84 out of 85 supermarket foods and fast foods it recently tested contained "plasticizers" known as phthalates, a chemical used to make plastic more durable. Reuters

Anti-Israel group peddles children's book that glorifies Jewish state's destruction . . . An anti-Israel group whose founder said he was "happy to see" Hamas attack Israel is urging local libraries to feature children's books that push propaganda against the Jewish state—including one that contends all of Israel belongs to "Palestine." The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in late December released its "Palestine Beyond Borders" toolkit, which it said aims to "encourage libraries and bookstores to feature book displays on Palestine." Washington Free Beacon

This kind of indoctrination begins very early in Palestinian communities in the Middle East.

Nevada judge attacked by defendant after suggesting he was going to jail . . . A Nevada judge was attacked Wednesday by a defendant in a felony battery case who leaped over a defense table and the judge’s bench, landing atop her and sparking a bloody brawl involving court officials and attorneys, officials and witnesses said. Judge Mary Kay Holthus suffered some injuries but was not hospitalized. A courtroom marshal was also injured and was hospitalized for a bleeding gash on his forehead and a dislocated shoulder. As the judge made it clear she intended to put him behind bars, and the court marshal moved to handcuff him, Redden yelled expletives and charged forward. Associated Press

Who knows people are fleeing California? U-Haul knows . . . For the fourth year in a row, liberal California topped U-Haul's Growth Index list for having the largest net outbound movers in 2023. U-Haul publishes its Growth Index report every year, analyzing the difference between the number of one-way U-Haul trucks coming into a state or city and those leaving. If a mover relocates from California to Texas, for example, that would be calculated as Texas's gain. Fox News