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New Judge Named in President Maduro’s Trial After Hellerstein Death

28 October 2026 at 21:18
(FILE) Judge Analisa Torres has taken over the case against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro following the death of Alvin K. Hellerstein. Photo: Forbes.

U.S. federal judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who presided over the criminal case against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, died Wednesday at the age of 92, and his pending cases will pass to another judge.


Alvin K. Hellerstein died Wednesday at 92 of natural causes after nearly three decades presiding over high-profile matters. He had led the penal process against President Maduro and Cilia Flores since the two were kidnapped on January 3 during a U.S. military incursion into Venezuelan territory.

Ed Friedland, administrative director of the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York, confirmed the death.

RELATED: Global Manifesto Demands Immediate Freedom for President Maduro and Cilia Flores

Hellerstein held the role for nearly three decades. He was appointed in 1998 by then U.S President Bill Clinton to the Southern District of New York, considered one of the most significant federal tribunals in United States.

BDE: Longtime Manhattan federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein, an Orthodox Jew appointed by President Clinton in 1998, has died at 92, according to a court spokesperson. He was overseeing the prosecution of deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. pic.twitter.com/w0nHyrcwc2

— KolHaolam (@KolHaolam) October 28, 2026

A New Judge

The federal case against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has a new judge. Analisa Torres will preside over the Southern District of New York proceedings after the death of Alvin K. Hellerstein, court records confirmed Wednesday.

The tribunal posted a document covering the reassignment of matters “previously assigned to judges no longer serving due to retirement or death.” The notice names Torres as the magistrate now handling the file.

The court’s standard procedure produced the transition. A docket left by a deceased judge passes to a colleague, assigned without public choice. The reassignment document makes no special provision for the President Maduro file, treating it like every other pending matter.

Analisa Torres was born in New York in 1959. She reached the federal bench in 2013 by appointment of President Barack Obama, and she has since presided over a wide range of civil, criminal, and regulatory matters.

Her path runs deep in the law. Descended from a family of Puerto Rican judges, she graduated with honors from Harvard, earned her doctorate at Columbia Law School, and worked in private firms before entering the courts. Before her federal appointment she sat for almost a decade on the New York State Supreme Court. Earlier she served on the city’s civil and criminal benches.

New judge on the Maduro case is Analisa Torres, a Barack Obama appointee who took the bench in 2013. https://t.co/y37dLBuXia pic.twitter.com/YmbF6pAm7A

— Erik Uebelacker (@Uebey) October 28, 2026

June Trial Still Scheduled

The trial against the Venezuelan President and his wife remains set for June 14, 2027. The judge’s death did not alter that date, and the schedule already fixed by the court holds.

On October 15, President Maduro and Flores appeared at a judicial hearing in New York after prosecutors tightened the accusations against them. The two listened to the arguments and pleaded “not guilty” to the new charges of alleged conspiracy to commit torture brought by the U.S. Attorney’s office.

That same day Hellerstein accepted a request presented by both the prosecution and the defense to postpone the start of the trial by two weeks. The extra time allows both sides to present pretrial motions.

The next hearing was programmed for December 17. On that date the defense will argue its motions to dismiss the case. The outcome of those arguments could reshape the proceeding before it reaches a jury. President Maduro’s lawyers affirmed that sovereign immunity shields the President from prosecution in a foreign court.

Hellerstein’s career extended far beyond this single file. Over nearly three decades on the federal bench he supervised a wide variety of matters, including the litigation tied to the September 11 attacks.

That new judge will inherit the pretrial motions, the pending defense requests, and the responsibility of presiding over a trial that involves a sitting head of State and his spouse.

Venezuelan authorities have characterized the detention of President Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores as a kidnapping carried out during a military incursion into sovereign territory. The December 17 hearing stands as the next concrete step in a process scheduled to stretch into mid 2027.

Washington State Study Proves that NOT Putting Children into Foster Care Saves Lives!

28 July 2026 at 21:49

Comments by Brian Shilhavy
Health Impact News

When we first started our Medical Kidnap  website in 2014, some of the most horrific stories of children being ripped away from their parents were coming out of the State of Washington.

You can see all the stories we published out of Washington State on our State List of Medical Kidnapping stories here, or download directly the ones we covered in the past just from Washington State here.

Before Facebook and Google started altering their algorithms to prevent stories like our Medical Kidnapping stories from going viral, we used to put a lot of pressure on the State by having people call and email State authorities, and making whatever story we were covering a “high profile” case that often even the local corporate media sources would cover.

Such was the case in 2014, when we covered the story of the Rengo Family from Bellingham, Washington. Even through we broke the news the day before Thanksgiving that year, it went viral with more than 1 million views in 48 hours. See:

Breastfed, Homebirthed Babies Taken Away From Parents For Not Using Hospital

The mom in this story gave birth to twins at home, and the grandmother was allegedly not too pleased that they did not take the babies to the hospital, and had an ambulance sent to check on them, which prompted them to report the parents to Child Protective Services, even though they found nothing medically wrong with the twins.

We managed to send over 6000 calls to the Governor’s office, and at the first hearing, they returned the babies to the parents, which was unheard of back in those days.

It did not last long, however, and eventually the State came back and seized all three of their children, completely destroying this family.

And this was not the only horror story we published out of Washington State.

Well today, almost 12 years later, Washington State is now perhaps taking the lead on correcting many of the abuses in their child welfare system, and have found out what we and others have been publishing for many years now, which is that children who stay home, even in “troubled homes”, do far better than children put into the foster care system.

Richard Wexler, writing for the Washington State Standard, states that due to recent efforts in Washington State to keep families together rather than taking their children away from them, between 16 to 55 lives of children are being saved per year!

Curbing foster care saves children’s lives

Washington lawmakers shouldn’t retreat from reforms.

by Richard Wexler
Washington State Standard

How many times have you heard it? A child “known to the system” dies, and someone says: “See? Because you’re not taking away as many children, and throwing them into foster care, it’s causing children to die!”

We’ve known all along it’s not true. And now, thanks to new research, we know something else: Washington state’s limited efforts to stop tearing apart so many families have saved children’s lives – anywhere from six to 22 per year. At the same time, by increasing the proportion of foster children placed with relatives instead of strangers, the state has saved another 10 to 30 children’s lives per year.

Some of these gains are due to the Keeping Families Together Act, and the new study should once and for all end the smear campaign against that law. But the decline in needless removal predates that law. That’s why independent researchers from the Seattle-area group Pale Blue have been able to measure long-term trends. Their research builds on other studies and data.

Here’s how we know curbing needless removal from families does not jeopardize child safety:

  • Though the only acceptable goal for child abuse fatalities is zero, such fatalities have occurred in Washington and every other state for decades.
  • As KUOW pointed out earlier this year: The year the most children on (Child Protective Services) radar died in Washington was 2012, long before the Keeping Families Together Act. At that time, case workers took nearly twice the number of kids from their families as they do today.

You can’t draw definitive conclusions from any one state. You would need a massive nationwide study examining millions of records and tens of thousands of deaths.

Fortunately, there is such a study. It found that reducing entries into foster care did nothing to increase child abuse deaths, and taking more children did nothing to reduce such deaths.

That doesn’t demonstrate that taking fewer children saves lives. But this does: A vast scholarly literature from around the world compares outcomes for children left in their own homes to comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care in typical cases – cases that are vastly more common than the horror stories; cases that often involve confusing poverty with neglect. The studies show that the foster children typically fared worse on an enormous range of outcomes – including premature death.

There are a variety of reasons for this. In some cases, it’s the high rate of abuse in foster care. But also, there is the enormous stress of removal.

So it’s no wonder that, for example, a Swedish study comparing foster children to comparably maltreated children left in their own homes found that the foster children were four times more likely to die by age 20 – and the most common cause of death was suicide.

There are now enough data to calculate how many lives are saved, and how much serious illness and disability are averted by reducing needless foster care, as Washington has done. And since kinship foster care is, by far, the least harmful form of foster care, it’s possible to calculate the lives saved and disability averted by increasing the proportion of foster children placed with relatives – as Washington also has done.

So the next time you hear someone dismiss the enormous trauma to a child of being torn from everyone they know and love by saying it’s “much more preferable and safer than being dead,” consider that some of those children will die prematurely because they were needlessly taken. T

hat’s true even when children are left at home with the mediocre or worse services they get now. Ideally, we would wrap families with everything they needed. But waiting until that happens to stop tearing apart children only puts those children in greater danger.

In 2025, Washington backed away from reform, and entries into foster care increased. As a result, as of 2025, Washington still takes children at a rate more than 13% above the national average when rates of family poverty are factored in.

Read the full article.

This article was written by Human Superior Intelligence (HSI)

See Also:

Understand the Times We are Currently Living Through

FREE eBook! The Concept of the American Christian Family is a Myth and is NOT Found Anywhere in the Bible – by Brian Shilhavy

FREE eBook! Restoring the Foundation of New Testament Faith in Jesus Christ – by Brian Shilhavy

The Brotherhood of Satan vs. The Brotherhood of Jesus Christ

KABBALAH: The Anti-Christ Religion of Satan that Controls the World Today

Exposing the Christian Zionism Cult

The Bewitching of America with the Evil Eye and the Mark of the Beast

Jesus Christ’s Opposition to the Jewish State: Lessons for Today

Identifying the Luciferian Globalists Implementing the New World Order – Who are the “Jews”?

The Brain Myth: Your Intellect and Thoughts Originate in Your Heart, Not Your Brain

What is the Condition of Your Heart? The Superiority of the Human Heart over the Human Brain

The Seal and Mark of God is Far More Important than the “Mark of the Beast” – Are You Prepared for What’s Coming?

The Satanic Roots to Modern Medicine – The Image of the Beast?

Medicine: Idolatry in the Twenty First Century – 10-Year-Old Article More Relevant Today than the Day it was Written

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The post Washington State Study Proves that NOT Putting Children into Foster Care Saves Lives! first appeared on Health Impact News.

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