From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Nicole Silverio

Authorities revealed new disturbing details Thursday about the illegal migrant accused of burning a woman alive on a New York City subway.

Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, a 33-year-old foreign national from Guatemala, is facing first and second degree murder and arson charges over the death of a woman set ablaze on the F train in Brooklyn on Sunday. A new criminal complaint alleges that Zapeta-Calil set the woman’s clothes on fire with a lighter and intentionally fanned the flames by waving a shirt around her, according to CBS News.

The victim has yet to be identified, though a medical examiner’s office concluded that she died from smoke inhalation and from severe burns, CBS News reported. Authorities said the suspect did not know or have any interactions with the unidentified woman, who is referred to as Jane Doe, before the incident.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson Jeff Carter confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation Tuesday that the suspect is an illegal migrant who had previously been deported from the U.S. Carter said that border officials encountered Zapeta-Calil in Sonoita, Arizona, on June 1, 2018, and removed him from the U.S. back to Guatemala on June 7, 2018.

Police officers who were on patrol on the upper level began to investigate after they sensed smoke, New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said during a Sunday press conference. As they approached the scene, officers found the woman in the train car completely engulfed in flames, and immediately rushed to put the fire out as soon as they could.

Bodycam footage found that Zapeta-Calil stayed at the scene and watched the events unfold as he kept a lighter in his pocket. Witnesses later identified the suspect to authorities, leading to his arrest.

During the press conference, the police commissioner referred to the incident as “one of the most depraved crimes one person could possibly commit.”

Zepeta-Calil appeared in court for his arraignment Tuesday and is due back in court Friday, according to CBS News.

 David Clinton

Canadian Taxpayers are funding programs in foreign countries with little effect

Back in early November I reached out to Global Affairs Canada (GAC) for a response to questions I later posed in my What Happens When Ministries Go Rogue post. You might recall how GAC has contributed billions of dollars to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, only to badly miss their stated program objectives. Here, for the record, is my original email:

I’m doing research into GAC program spending and I’m having trouble tracking down information. For instance, your Project Browser tool tells me that, between 2008 and 2022, Canada committed $3.065 billion to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The tool includes very specific outcomes (like a drop of at least 40 per cent in malaria mortality rates). Unfortunately, according to reliable public health data, none of the targets were even close to being achieved – especially in the years since 2015.

Similarly, Canada’s $125 million of funding to the World Food Programme between 2016 and 2021 to fight hunger in Africa roughly corresponded to a regional rise in malnutrition from 15 to 19.7 percent of the population since 2013.

I’ve been able to find no official documentation that GAC has ever conducted reviews of these programs (and others like it) or that you’ve reconsidered various funding choices in light of such failures. Is there data or information that I’m missing?

Just a few days ago, an official in the Business Intelligence Unit for Global Affairs Canada responded with a detailed email. He first directed me to some slightly dated but comprehensive assessments of the Global Fund, links to related audits and investigations, and a description of the program methodology.

To their credit, the MOPAN 2022 Global Fund report identified five areas where important targets were missed, including the rollout of anti-corruption and fraud policies and building resilient and sustainable systems for health. That self-awareness inspires some confidence. And, in general, the assessments were comprehensive and serious.

What initially led me to suggest that GAC was running on autopilot and ignoring the real world impact of their spending was, in part, due to the minimalist structure of the GAC’s primary reporting system (their website). But it turns out that the one-dimensional objectives listed there did not fully reflect the actual program goals.

Nevertheless, none of the documents addressed my core questions:

• Why had the programs failed to meet at least some of their mortality targets?
• Why, after years of such shortfalls, did GAC continue to fully fund the programs?

The methodology document did focus a lot of attention on modelling counterfactuals. In other words, estimating how many people didn’t die due to their interventions. One issue with that is, by definition, counterfactuals are speculative. But the bigger problem is that, given at least some of the actual real-world results, they’re simply wrong.

As I originally wrote:

Our World in Data numbers give us a pretty good picture of how things played out in the real world. Tragically, Malaria killed 562,000 people in 2015 and 627,000 in 2020. That’s a jump of 11.6 percent as opposed to the 40 percent decline that was expected. According to the WHO, there were 1.6 million tuberculosis victims in 2015 against 1.2 million in 2023. That’s a 24.7 percent drop – impressive, but not quite the required 35 per cent.

I couldn’t quickly find the precise HIV data mentioned in the program expectations, but I did see that HIV deaths dropped by 26 percent between 2015 and 2021. So that’s a win.

I’m now inclined to acknowledge that the Global Fund is serious about regularly assessing their work. It wouldn’t be fair to characterize GAC operations as completely blind.

But at the same time, over the course of many years, the actual results haven’t come close to matching the programs objectives. Why has the federal government not shifted the significant funding involved to more effective operations?