Arrests Made in Brown County Homicide Investigation
On Wednesday, Detectives from the Indiana State Police Bloomington Post along with several other Troopers including Indiana State Police SWAT, served search warrants in Indianapolis regarding the homicide investigation of 38 year-old Angela M. Weisheit, which started in November of 2020 after her body was found in Brown County. 64 year-old Paul S. Fox of Indianapolis has been charged with Murder, and 28 year-old Candy A. Lopez Ortega of Indianapolis has been charged with Assisting a Criminal. Both individuals were incarcerated at Brown County Jail. The body of Weisheit was found located near Bean Blossom Road and Bell Road last November.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita issues statement on China
When I ran for Attorney General, I promised Hoosiers I would hold China accountable for their many abuses, including stealing our intellectual property, committing human rights violations, and unleashing a deadly virus on the world, which they unsuccessfully tried to cover up. I continue keeping my end of the bargain to Hoosiers.
Just weeks ago, the Office of the Indiana Attorney General started an investigation into Valparaiso University’s affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) through its Confucius Institute. These organizations operate to spread propaganda and circulate the mantra of the CCP at both the university and in several K-12 schools in Indiana. Valparaiso alone has received at least $1.1 million from the CCP to operate its institute.
Three weeks after I announced the investigation, the university did the right thing by stating it intends to finally end its relationship with its Confucius Institute in six months. After March 1, 2022, there will no longer be any Confucius Institutes in the state of Indiana, but 38 still remain throughout the country. As a result of public scrutiny, Valparaiso has agreed to terminate its relationship with the CCP and has stated that the university will no longer receive CCP or other funding to hire CCP-blessed professors and staff from China through these partnerships.
According to a 2019 Senate Homeland Security Report, the CCP handpicks the directors and teachers for Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms in the United States. The cherry-picked faculty and staff are then required to sign a pledge to protect Chinese national interests while teaching American students on American soil. Meanwhile their contracts can be terminated at any point should they violate “Chinese law” or “engage in activities detrimental to national interests.” Not only are teachers bound to protect the CCP’s interests, contracts between these American schools and the CCP’s Hanban Institute actually require them to obey Chinese law. Chinese law makes criticizing the CCP or the Chinese government illegal, thus making these American schools a CCP tool to suppress free speech.
A subsequent report issued by the congressionally created U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in 2020 stated that these propaganda efforts, which are referred to by the CCP as the “United Front,” are nothing more than an attempt to “co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party.”
In short, these Confucius Institutes are designed to infiltrate and influence the U.S. on issues that are important to how China and the CCP view the world. Any mention of historical events that show the Chinese government in a negative light — such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, sensitive topics including Falun Gong abuses or its aggression towards Taiwan — are prohibited from being taught. Under the Hanban contracts, it is illegal to mention China’s numerous human rights violations, including executing dissidents, forcing Tibetans into labor camps, and enslaving more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region.
In essence, through these CCP-funded organizations, the CCP is using bribery and extortion to operate a massive PR campaign in the U.S. and around the world designed to conceal its history and malign intentions.
China is not our friend.
As we speak, China is actively robbing U.S. companies of our intellectual property, stealing our patents, and then attempting to replace U.S. firms in the global marketplace using this stolen technology. Moreover, to this day they remain unwilling to allow any transparent investigation into the origins of the China Virus.
While hundreds of big, woke corporations, such as Facebook and Google, continue to lecture Americans about “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility” (DEIA), they have remained silent on China’s gross abuses of human rights, looking the other way while continuing to do business with them.
Rest assured, in Indiana we’ll be taking a different approach as long as I am in office. Our investigation into Valparaiso University’s ties to the CCP is ongoing but could be just the start of similar investigations elsewhere in the Hoosier state, regardless of the name given to these United Front CCP-funded organizations.
It is time to demand accountability from China, and my office will continue to make it a top priority.
– Todd Rokita, Attorney General of Indiana.
Indiana allocates more than $19 million to school safety
The Indiana Secured School Safety Board has approved more than $19 million in matching state grant funds, marking a third consecutive year of record-breaking school safety investments. The $19,058,808 million in awards allows the Board to fully fund all eligible, top-priority projects identified by 392 schools in their applications to the Secured School Safety Grant program (SSSG). Every applicant this year received either full or partial funding once award determinations were made. Schools have received notification that their top priority requests were fully funded for all eligible items. The General Assembly allocated $19 million to the grant fund for each of the past three years.
The Secured School Fund is administered by the Indiana Department of Homeland Security. Including the funds committed this year, the SSSG program will have distributed more than $110 million in state matching grants to schools since the program became law in 2013. All of these funds focus specifically on school safety. Visit the IDHS website for a full breakdown of SSSG awards. The SSSG issues matching grants for eligible items and then schools match those funds at a certain level, either 25 percent, 50 percent or 100 percent. The match requirement is based on average daily membership of the school district, the total amount of the project or what the request covers.
Eligible items in the grant include funding for school resource officers (SROs) and law enforcement officers in schools; equipment and technology; active event warning systems (no matching requirement); firearms training for teachers and staff that choose to allow guns on school property; threat assessments and to implement a student and parent support services program. The Indiana School Safety Hub also provides schools with a wealth of resources, training opportunities and other information designed to give schools the tools they need to keep students and staff safe.