July 22 (UPI) — A Kentucky man was arrested and charged Monday with a federal hate crime for pulling a loaded gun on a Palestinian American at a restaurant in March.
The Justice Department said in a statement that an indictment was unsealed Monday accusing Melvin Litteral III of threatening a Palestinian American man and practicing Muslim while they were “enjoying the goods, services and facilities of a local restaurant” on March 28.
Little about the crime was revealed by the Justice Department, but local reports published following the incident state it occurred at the Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen on Walden Drive in Lexington.
The victim in the court document is identified as O.S. Following the incident, Omar Shalash identified himself as the victim in a lengthy post on X, screen shots of which were published online by LEX 18.
In the post, Shalash states he and his wife were at the restaurant to break their fast when harassed by a man who was making racist and anti-Muslim remarks.
Shalash said he attempted to confront the man about his comment who then pushed him and produced a firearm.
“He pulled a gun out of his pocket and stuck it to my head and asked me, ‘Do you want to die, Arabia?’” Shalash said.
Officers with the Lexington Police Department took Litteral into custody that night at his home, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported in the days following his arrest.
According to police cited in the report, Litteral tried to slam his front door on the arresting officers and then used his body to prevent their entrance. He then resisted arrest by not willingly giving up his hands to be handcuffed.
The federal prosecutors have charged Litteral with a hate crime offense and a second firearms charge. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine for the hate crime offense and a mandatory minimum penalty of seven years in prison to run consecutively for the firearm offense.
The alleged crime occurred amid Israel’s war against Hamas in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza and a spike in hate incidents directed at Palestinians and Muslims in the United States.
According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, it received 3,578 complaints during the last three months of last year, starting with October, which is when the Israel-Hamas war began.
“We welcome the hate crime charge in this case and thank federal law enforcement authorities for their swift and professional actions to apprehend a suspect,” CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said Monday in a statement.
“No American should be targeted by hatred or violence because of their religion, ethnicity or national origin. Our country has been consumed by a wildfire of anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Muslim bigotry spread by those who seek to justify the genocide in Gaza by dehumanizing Palestinians and Muslims. It must stop.”
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During his recent radio show, Pope offered a sobering reality check regarding the timeline for the rest of his staff overhaul.
“We’re going through a little bit of a hiring process that will be ongoing—probably for the next six weeks,” Pope explained. “We could have some closure on some things quickly, but I can’t really talk in detail about anything until it gets through the whole HR process.”
In a vacuum, a six-week HR timeline is standard corporate procedure. But in the modern landscape of college basketball, that timeline is a massive hurdle because of the newly accelerated Transfer Portal window instituted by the NCAA.
Players cannot officially enter their names into the Transfer Portal until April 7th. However, anyone paying attention knows that backdoor deals are already being orchestrated, and agents are prematurely announcing their clients’ intentions to leave. It is an unregulated mess, but it is the reality of the sport.
That April 7th opening is the first major date to circle on your calendar.
Once the portal opens, it remains active for exactly 15 days. When that window slams shut, no new names can enter. There are no graduate exemptions or special loopholes for late decisions. If a player plans on transferring, they must formally notify their current school before that 15-day window expires on April 21st at 11:59 PM. If they miss the deadline, they are stuck.
Mark Pope has to have his staff aligned, his evaluations complete, and his recruiting pitches perfected before that window opens. It is indeed a very short clock as the coaching staff looks to change drastically.
Once the dust from the transfer portal finally settles, the new-look Wildcats will quickly hit the floor.
Official mid-June practices will tip off the summer schedule, but Pope recently hinted that an international offseason trip is currently in the works. Per NCAA rules, college basketball programs are only allowed to take these foreign exhibition tours once every four years.
If the trip gets finalized, BBN will get a highly anticipated, early look at this brand-new roster competing against actual opponents long before Big Blue Madness in the fall.
Needless to say, it is going to be an incredibly busy, high-stakes few months in Lexington.
Any guesses on where Pope and company plan on going? And do you like the new Transfer Portal window?
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WAVE) – Kentucky’s optometry board is trying to address a scandal after years of issuing waivers for optometry graduates who couldn’t pass their national exams.
The board reversed course earlier this year. But at a public hearing on the new rules, the national testing group said the reforms still carve out loopholes.
Nevada and New Hampshire say they will not accept the testing exceptions Kentucky has proposed and won’t recognize Kentucky optometry licenses as equivalent to their own.
21 Kentucky optometrists have been under scrutiny.
At Wednesday’s public hearing, the state gave the public under 15 minutes to make their case.
In the conference room of a Holiday Inn Express, two members of the public voiced their opposition to Kentucky’s proposed reforms. Both are from the National Board of Examiners in Optometry.
“The KBOE has not taken the straightforward and obvious path to ensure public safety,” NBEO Secretary/Treasurer Daniel Taylor said.
“The Kentucky optometry board has lost its way, putting patient safety at risk and placing a lower priority on public health than on upholding competency standards,” said NBEO Executive Director Jill Bryant.
Kentucky reversed itself after a series of reports about optometrists who were granted licenses with waivers. Some didn’t pass a single part of the national exams.
In February, the state said optometrists with these waivers would have to stop performing laser procedures and would be dropping a Canadian substitute test. But it did not prohibit these doctors from practicing and proposed other alternative tests.
Daniel Taylor said these tests have been standardized across the country for a simple reason.
“If you were to see an optometrist in Kentucky, and then go across the border and see an optometrist in another state or move to another state, you would have to check with the local standards to see what those levels of quality were,” Taylor said.
No one else spoke. The optometry board did not respond, saying it will file its response as part of the process, taking this feedback into consideration.
A letter from NBEO to the state revealed the group had questioned how 21 optometrists had gotten their licenses based on their lack of testing records.
The state board denied WAVE’s records request for another letter NBEO sent to the board in the fall. The attorney general’s office is currently reviewing our appeal.
Copyright 2026 WAVE. All rights reserved.
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