Federal authorities have arrested and charged two men with assaulting U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick with bear spray during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot but have not determined whether the exposure caused his death.

Julian Elie Khater, 32, of Pennsylvania and George Pierre Tanios, 39 of Morgantown, W.Va., were arrested Sunday and are expected to appear in federal court Monday.

“Give me that bear s---,” Khater allegedly said to Tanios on video recorded at the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol at 2:14 p.m., where Sicknick and other officers were standing guard behind metal bicycle racks, arrest papers say.

About nine minutes later, after Khater said he had been hit with bear spray, Khater is seen on video discharging a canister into the face of Sicknick and two other officers, arrest papers allege.

A dog rescue charity with links to Lara Trump has spent as much as $1.9 million at former President Donald Trump’s properties over the last seven years and will drop an additional quarter-million at his Mar-a-Lago country club this weekend.

According to a permit filed with the town of Palm Beach, Florida, Big Dog Ranch Rescue estimates it will spend $225,000 at the club where Donald Trump has taken up full-time residence since leaving the White House. All the profit from that spending winds up in his pocket.

Internal Revenue Service filings show that the group has spent as much as $1,883,160 on fundraising costs at Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s golf course 18 miles north in Jupiter starting in 2014. Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump, started being listed as a chairwoman for charity events in 2018, and the group’s president, Lauren Simmons, visited the White House in 2019 for the signing of a bill addressing animal cruelty......

Daughter-in-law Lara Trump has been advertised as a “chairwoman” of the charity’s fundraisers over the past several years. The spending by a charity she is associated with at her family’s businesses mirrors practices at Donald Trump’s now-shuttered Trump Foundation and Eric Trump’s Eric Trump Foundation, which also spent donor money at Trump properties.

The self-dealing by the Trump Foundation was so egregious that New York state Attorney General Letitia James cited it as the reason the charity could no longer operate.

Donald Trump over the course of his presidency funneled $8.5 million of Republican donor money into his own cash registers by directing spending by the entities he controlled, including the Republican National Committee, toward his own businesses. He similarly directed several million taxpayer dollars into his own properties by insisting on spending his frequent golf vacations there, thereby forcing Secret Service and other support staff to spend money at them, as well.

The group most dependent on Fox News as a source of information is Republican men. Pew Research Center measured America’s media consumption habits last year and found that a third of Republican men cited Fox News as a major source of post-election news, with another 40 percent identifying the network as a minor source of information. That 72 percent was higher than other sources of information like CNN (37 percent), network television (62 percent, mostly as a minor source), NPR (24 percent) or conservative radio (52 percent). No other group was as likely to cite Fox News as a source.

Earlier in the day on Thursday, NPR released the results of a poll conducted by Marist College with PBS NewsHour. Among the questions included in the poll was one asking Americans if they planned to get vaccinated for the coronavirus when vaccines became available. No group was more likely to say that they wouldn’t than Republican men, about half of whom rejected the idea.

Interestingly, the percentage of Republican men rejecting the vaccine is up substantially from December, when Marist asked the same thing. Then, only about a third of Republican men said they wouldn’t get the vaccine. No other group turned so robustly against the vaccine over that period.
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It’s possible that this is a statistical anomaly. Such things happen. But this finding that Republicans are among the most fervent vaccine skeptics tracks with other polls, like one released earlier this week by Monmouth University. In that poll, 36 percent of Republicans said that they didn’t plan to get the vaccine — a lower percentage than the Marist poll but similarly larger than other groups. In both polls, for example, Republicans were more likely to express skepticism about the vaccine than non-White Americans, a group that has been a focus of concern about vaccine uptake.