hiring

WASHINGTON — FBI Director Kash Patel on Tuesday defended the bureau’s loosening of hiring standards regarding an applicant’s past experience with prostitution and bestiality, insisting that the changes were meant to enable victims of those acts to be considered for employment without fear of automatic disqualification.

The subject arose during a contentious Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which Patel clashed with Democrats over his firing of agents who participated in investigations of President Trump, a spate of media leak probes, and whether employees would be dispatched to the polls on Election Day in light of the bureau’s ongoing election-related investigations and Trump’s repeated and false claims about the existence of pervasive voter fraud.

The hearing featured the name-calling and bitingly personal exchanges that have come to define Patel’s appearances on Capitol Hill, with Democrats characterizing the Trump appointee as unqualified, criticizing him for politically charged investigations into Trump’s enemies and highlighting travel that has included a trip to the Winter Olympics in Italy during which he partied with U.S. hockey players and a snorkeling excursion at the Pearl Harbor memorial in Hawaii.

“He’s an incompetent lackey. He’s like an 18-year old-kid who wants to join a fraternity that he could never be a member of, doing keg stands and chugging with friends. He’s an embarrassment to the agency and wouldn’t qualify even to be an FBI agent,” said an exasperated Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), his voice rising in anger.

Given a chance to respond, Patel replied: “I don’t have much to say. This guy called me a thug. It’s kind of ironic. He’s running for president of the United States. He just got his 20-second ad campaign.”

Booker ran for president in 2020. He has not announced a candidacy for 2028.

Patel was pressed on the FBI’s hiring standards

The FBI quietly issued guidance this spring lifting a categorical hiring ban on applicants who had previously engaged in prostitution. The bureau made a similar change with regard to past experience in bestiality as a child.

Under questioning, Patel denied that the changes reflected a lowering of employment standards and insisted they were designed to prevent victims who’d been forced to engage in that conduct from being automatically disqualified.

“We did not want to punish victims of bestiality, victims who were trafficked. We did not want to make it an automatic disqualification for the FBI to consider you if were a victim of these awful, heinous acts,” Patel said. “We are not going to target victims and prevent them from serving in their capacity to serve this country.”

The questioning spanned partisan lines, with Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) grilling Patel about the rationale for a change that the FBI director said was proposed to him by subordinates.

“When you saw bestiality, I say this with respect: The person who recommended it, why didn’t you just say, ‘What planet did you parachute in from?’” Kennedy asked. Patel conceded that that was his initial reaction.

The Associated Press reported last month that the FBI still intends to disqualify some applicants who are revealed to have previously engaged in prostitution, including if they’ve done so within the last 10 years.

Patel faced questions about the FBI’s role on Election Day

The hearing unfolded two months before the midterm elections in November and at a time when the FBI has opened investigations related to the 2020 contest, including by seizing voter data in Fulton County, Ga.

Trump regularly makes false claims that elections are rigged and riddled with fraud, especially in the months before an election. But there is no widespread fraud in American elections. Local election officials have detailed processes for auditing the accuracy of the vote after ballots are tallied. Even as he disputed his loss in 2020, audits, reviews and recounts in the battleground states where he challenged the outcome all affirmed President Biden’s win.

Democrats repeatedly pressed Patel on whether the FBI would be dispatching agents to polls. The director said the FBI has an election coordinator in each of its 56 field offices to respond to issues at polling places, including alleged election interference. He did not rule out the idea that agents could be dispatched to the polls if problems arose.

“Do you pledge that you will not in any way interfere in the will of the America people when they go to the polls in November?” asked Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) in one of the more combative exchanges.

“I pledge unequivocally that I will not participate in your charade of lies,” Patel said, later calling Welch a “total fraud.”

FBI firings were also a featured topic of the hearing

Patel repeatedly touted what he asserted was his record-breaking success at the FBI, proclaiming the “most prolific reduction in crime in U.S. history” even though murder rates in American cities had begun dropping even before Trump took office last year.

The Republican-led panel tried through its questioning to keep the focus on Patel’s crime-fighting efforts from his perch at the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency. But Democrats seized on the tumult inside the FBI over the last year, including sweeping firings of agents who participated in investigations of Trump, the bureau’s aggressive efforts to investigate media leaks by serving subpoenas at reporters’ home and Patel’s travel schedule that has blended private leisure with professional responsibilities.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) pressed Patel on the firing of national security agents with expertise in Iran shortly before the U.S. launched attacks on the country last February. He noted that the agents had participated in an FBI investigation into Trump over his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

“Do you think firing the president’s political opponents is more important than retaining the decades of experience and expertise monitoring intelligence threats from Iran?” Blumenthal asked.

“I think what’s most important is to not have a weaponized FBI, and I will endeavor every single day to make sure we have no one there that is doing that,” Patel responded. He did not say why their participation in the Mar-a-Lago investigation represented “weaponized” law enforcement.

Patel later suggested that the firings had been overblown, saying many agents had retired on their own. And he defended his personal travels by pointing to numbers that he said showed that two recent predecessors, Chris Wray and James Comey, had traveled more.

Tucker writes for the Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO — In a show of defiance to the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, California lawmakers on Monday voted to ban federal immigration agents from being hired for many local and state government jobs and to outlaw electric-shock gloves similar to those that may be distributed to federal officers.

The two bills were among a slate of legislation approved by the Democratic-led state Legislature to thwart certain tactics and tools used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, such as arresting people who appear at courthouses for scheduled immigration hearings.

“We have the fourth largest economy in the world because of our immigrant and undocumented community, and they’re being penalized and targeted by the Trump administration,” said Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez (D-Los Angeles). “This package of immigrant bills that we’ve sent [to the governor] is trying to say that we are here to defend you.”

Gonzalez is the author of a bill to prohibit agents and contractors involved in immigration enforcement from being employed in the future by the state, cities, counties, school districts and other public entities. It was supported by Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) and called the “Get the Feds Out” Act, or “GTFO.”

It would allow an exception for officers who are accepted to a police agency and take the state’s basic police training course, but notes that “suitability shall be determined on a case-by-case basis.”

State Sen. Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach), chair of the Latino Legislative Caucus, said the state “expects its public employees to be moral” and to defend the state and U.S. constitutions.

“Anyone who is participating in the raids have shown that they do not live up to the bar that Californians deserve from their public servants. This bill says that individuals who participated in immigration enforcement activities will be disqualified from holding state, county or local public employment in California” except in certain circumstances, she said.

A separate bill by Assemblymember Isaac G. Bryan (D-Los Angeles) would block police and other law enforcement officers from taking second jobs or working as contractors on federal immigration enforcement.

“If you sign up to protect and serve our communities during the day with a local law enforcement agency, you cannot moonlight with ICE,” Bryan said.

During a June hearing, state Sen. Kelly Seyarto (R-Murrieta) said the bill was “based on anger at an issue” that “a lot of people disagree on,” which Republican lawmakers commonly cited when debating the immigration-related bills.

“It opens up this can of worms of interpretations that are sometimes not based on reality,” he said.

State and federal law enforcement officers will be banned from using electric-shock gloves until 2030, and the state Department of Justice will be required to study their safety, under a bill passed Monday night. The last-minute legislation was introduced last week after a report that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security planned to purchase the gloves for use in immigration enforcement.

The bill “draws a clear line,” said state Sen. Jesse Arreguín (D-Berkeley): “Public safety technology must be proven safe and accountable before it’s deployed, not after someone is killed or seriously injured.”

Republicans opposed the bill, arguing the gloves could be a safer way to subdue suspects than firearms.

“If electric shock is a better alternative than actually shooting someone, I don’t think we should take it off the table,” said state Sen. Tony Strickland (R-Huntington Beach). “Law enforcement deserves the tools they need to keep us safe.”

Lawmakers on Friday approved legislation to ban federal immigration agents and other law enforcement officers from wearing masks in the state. The measure, Senate Bill 1004, was introduced by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) to fix an earlier law that was struck down as unconstitutional by a federal judge.

Other bills would prohibit arrests of people traveling to or from court, as federal agents have arrested people who show up for immigration hearings; impose a 25% tax on income earned by companies operating immigration detention centers; and allow individuals to file lawsuits against federal agents over alleged civil rights violations such as excessive force, unlawful home searches and interfering with the right to protest.

Critics argued that some bills might not stand up to legal challenges.

“This seems to fit the general pattern that California will bend over backwards to protect people who are in the country illegally, even if it means putting the public at risk,” said Ira Mehlman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that advocates for strict immigration limits.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto bills approved by the Legislature.

EasyJet is about to launch its latest recruitment drive and is looking to hire hundreds of new flight attendants

EasyJet is about to hire hundreds of new flight attendants – but you have to meet certain requirements to join.

The budget airline recruitment drive begins next month. This year, easyJet has particularly encouraged older people to apply. Since first launching its initiative to recruit older workers in 2022, the number of cabin crew over the age of 50 more than doubled at the airline, with the number of over-60s almost quadrupling in numbers.

However, you don’t have to be in the OAP camp to apply. You don’t even need aviation experience. But you will need to:

• Be 18 years or older
• Be between 5’2” (157.5 cm) and 6’3” (190 cm) without shoes
• Be fluent in written and spoken English as well as the language native to your base
• Hold a valid passport with unrestricted travel across the UK, EEA, and the easyJet network. (Skilled Worker visa sponsorship is not available)
• Live within 90 minutes of your chosen base or willing to relocate
• Have no visible tattoos on the head, face, or neck (all tattoos must be inoffensive)
• Be comfortable selling items from our CAFE.SHOP range, including alcohol (this contributes to commission earnings)
• Be able to swim 25 metres unaided, tread water, inflate a life jacket, and climb in and out of a life raft
• Pass a UK CAA or EASA Cabin Crew medical and fit securely into a jump seat

EasyJet is particularly keen to have applications from people who:

• Have at least 6 months’ experience in a customer-facing or people-focused role
• Communicate clearly, confidently, and kindly
• Stay calm under pressure and make safe, well-informed decisions
• Enjoy working as part of a diverse, energetic team
• Take ownership, solve problems with empathy, and go the extra mile for customers

EasyJet began its ‘Returnships’ initiative in 2024, offering free in-person and online cabin crew taster sessions for hundreds of interested career changers over 50. Francesca Hicks was part of the process.

Aged 64 and a former secretary and nurse for those living with dementia, Francesca was seeking an opportunity to adapt her skills and broaden her horizons. She attended a taster open day, submitted her formal application, and completed a series of interviews before joining her easyJet cabin crew training course. A year and a half on, she is now a fully trained cabin crew member and has taken to the skies over 250 times.

Francesca Hicks said: “When the opportunity to join easyJet as cabin crew came up, I jumped at the chance. I knew I already held all the skills required for the job, but it gave me another way to use my communication, organisation and interpersonal skills in a new and exciting setting.

“The reception both I and my fellow new joiners have received has been overwhelmingly positive. This, and the experiences I’ve had over the past 18 months, have given me a confidence and sense of fulfilment that I’ll take with me through the next stage of my career.”

Michael Brown, director of cabin services at easyJet, said: “It’s been incredibly encouraging to see the numbers of cabin crew over 50 more than double since 2022 – evidence that many are increasingly viewing cabin crew as a fantastic career pivot regardless of age.

“We want more over 50s to apply as they not only bring their existing skills to excel in a career at easyJet, but also a wealth of life experience that is appreciated by our customers and colleagues alike, which is at the heart of the fantastic service our crew is known for.

“With hundreds of cabin crew roles set to be available across the UK, we would encourage even more to apply, and we look forward to seeing this community at easyJet grow further in the years to come.”

To find out more about being cabin crew at easyJet, visit easyJet Cabin Crew.