Four Twin Cities men pleaded guilty to defrauding Minnesota’s Housing Stabilization Services program out of approximately $2.2 million and hiding the scheme by using artificial intelligence tools to fabricate records when questioned by insurance companies, the U.S. Department of Justice said Friday.

Moktar Hassan Aden, 31, Mustafa Dayib Ali, 29, Khalid Ahmed Dayib, 26, and Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, 27 set up Brilliant Minds Services LLC in the Griggs-Midway Building in St. Paul, Minnesota, and enrolled the business as a Medicaid program provider, according to the plea agreement.

The fraud scheme “highlights a burgeoning trend of fraudsters” using AI to “further a fraud scheme targeting health care programs in Minnesota and around the country,” according to the DOJ’s announcement.

“These defendants corruptly exploited vulnerable people and a vulnerable program to enrich themselves,” Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald said in a statement.“Taxpayer dollars designed to provide shelter and support for the homeless and needy instead went to the pockets of these men. They have now admitted their fraudulent conduct and will face justice for their crimes. In the meantime, our work to stamp out fraud in Minnesota will continue in abandon.”

When reached for comment, the DOJ referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to its press release from Friday.

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Authorities say a would-be burglar was shot while attempting to force his way into a Gastonia, North Carolina, home.

Gastonia Police said in a Wednesday Facebook post that 57-year-old Cedric Ford and his girlfriend, 47-year-old Sanja Stallings, claimed that Ford had been shot at an intersection in a July 12 911 call. However, technology quickly disproved the couple’s claims that Ford had been attacked in a drive-by shooting after an investigation led cops to a home at a different location.

“Detectives utilized Flock Safety’s Audio Detection system, which identified the sound of a gunshot at approximately 7:14 a.m. within roughly 100 feet of the Ware Avenue address that had reported the crime,” Gastonia police said. “Detectives responded to that location and spoke with the homeowner, an elderly disabled resident who reported being the victim of multiple burglaries and robberies within the previous month involving the suspects.”

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Health experts in New York have confirmed the state’s first known case of a potentially deadly tick-borne illness with no cure.

Father-of-three Michael Larkin, 67, from Long Island, was diagnosed with Bourbon virus, a rare virus that causes pain, fever, fatigue and rashes.

Only a handful of cases have been identified, all of which were in the Midwest. Two patients diagnosed with the infection have died.

Larkin was bitten by two lone star ticks while he was doing yard work at his home in Suffolk County.

He quickly removed them, but several days later he fell ill with a fever and debilitating headache.

Doctors initially suspected Lyme disease and tried to treat him with antibiotics, but Larkin continued to deteriorate.

It wasn’t until April this year, after he was bitten in 2021, that he finally received a diagnosis.

Thought to only affect one American a year, Bourbon virus has previously been detected in Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma. It’s named for Bourbon County, Kansas, where it was first identified in 2014.

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It took a lot of courage for the family of Angel Sarah Rampersad to refuse to allow Mayor Mamdani to speak at her funeral on Friday.

The 28-year-old US Army staff sergeant from Queens was killed on July 17, 2026, in an Iranian missile attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan where she was stationed as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

Rampersad lost her life in a battle against the world’s largest terrorist regime, whose proxy Hamas Mamdani tacitly supports.

She gave her life for the country she loves and Mamdani clearly does not.

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America’s homeowners associations are running out of money — and patience.

Amid rising insurance premiums, drained reserve funds and increased safety measures in the wake of the Surfside condominium collapse, the country’s hundreds of thousands of homeowners associations are cracking down on delinquent residents.

Even more startling, HOAs are skipping grace periods and handing delinquent accounts over to attorneys.

HOA foreclosures spiked nearly 40% in two years to 6,376 properties in the first quarter, according to real estate analytics firm Attom, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, putting its pace ahead of overall mortgage foreclosure rates.

These foreclosure sales are “like most foreclosures in that they are typically an auction,” attorney Kirk Pearson, who represents homeowners in HOA disputes, told The Post.

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FBI and Volusia Sheriff’s Office SWAT team executed a search warrant Saturday as police hunt for a suspect

A Citadel cadet and South Carolina Army National Guard member is one of two young men found shot to death in a vacant Florida lot, with police still hunting for a suspect.

The DeLand Police Department in Florida said Dustin Rose, 19, and Samson Campbell, 18, were found dead on Wednesday around 10:40 p.m. Police haven’t identified any potential motive and have yet to publicly identify a suspect. Rose and Campbell have been friends since they were children.

Rose, who attended The Citadel Military College of South Carolina, was home on break while pursuing his childhood dream of serving in the military. According to FOX 35, Rose recently became a member of the South Carolina Army National Guard.

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Dahseir Edward Jefferson faces murder charge and is held on $650,000 bond after Susan Gehrke’s death

A Tucson grandmother who twice survived cancer died after she was allegedly attacked by a felon outside her apartment complex, authorities said.

The Tucson Police Department confirmed that 61-year-old Susan Gehrke died four days after a July 24 attack at an apartment complex.

Dahseir Edward Jefferson, 27, was arrested four days after the attack and initially booked on two counts of aggravated assault. Police later amended the charges to include second-degree murder following Gehrke’s death. He is being held on a $650,000 bond.

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Barack Obama spent eight years telling America he was the adult in the room. 

Anthony Fauci kept a diary – and Barack Obama is in it.

And Anthony Fauci’s secret diary just exposed what the 44th president really says when the cameras are off

What Fauci Was Writing While You Were Locking Down

Sen. Rand Paul released more than 1,100 pages of Anthony Fauci’s private pandemic diary this week, and the bombshells keep coming.

Buried in those pages is a November 2021 entry where Fauci recounts a personal call from Barack Obama.

Trump Jr. had been selling merchandise mocking Fauci – mugs and t-shirts referencing claims about taxpayer-funded puppy experiments.

Obama called to console him.

That’s when the former president of the United States, the man who lectured America for two terms about civility and the better angels of our nature, told Fauci that Donald Trump Jr. is “a f—ing moron.” 

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This week, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill revealed that more than 6,600 noncitizens ended up on its voter rolls, with nearly 400 of them casting ballots between June 2023 and June 2024.

Despite saying the situation is unacceptable and claiming that she is being proactive to fix it, her administration has also begun steering the same noncitizens toward taxpayer-funded legal help.

Sherrill promptly blamed the software vendor, IDEMIA, for the problem.

“Let me be clear: this entire situation is unacceptable,” Sherrill said Tuesday. “It’s unacceptable that the vendor released software with such a glaring error, it’s unacceptable that the MVC took a year to get this issue fixed and it’s unacceptable that no one in the previous administration brought this to light, demanded accountability or took action when it happened years ago.”

However, they dispute her characterization and have offered a different characterization of who was responsible.

“IDEMIA works with the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, and has for more than 40 years, to support the process through which eligible individuals may indicate their interest in registering to vote when applying for or renewing a driver’s license or state-issued identification card,” the company said in a statement. According to IDEMIA, New Jersey’s own Division of Elections, the body charged with validating and adjudicating every registration IDEMIA passed along, is ultimately responsible.

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Thousands of Florida condominium buildings have been flagged as having structural damage according to a report issued five years on from a seaside building collapse which killed 98 people.

More than 2,500 buildings were found to have sustained substantial structural deterioration in 2024 and 2025.

Despite scores being deemed ‘unsafe or uninhabitable,’ just five buildings were evacuated, according to a report by Florida Legislature’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability (OPPAGA).

Architects and engineers identified buildings with deficiencies such as cracks in the foundation and deterioration and flagged the structures as potentially dangerous.

Last year, there were 25 buildings deemed unsafe and uninhabitable. Most were located in Miami-Dade County and remained occupied, according to the report.

The figure was a slight drop on 2024, when 30 buildings were identified as unsafe and uninhabitable, five of which were evacuated.

The report highlighted that it did not have an official definition of uninhabitable, and that it was up to the inspectors to determine it.

The damage was uncovered as part of mandated surveys which have been required for certain buildings since the tragic 2021 Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside, which claimed nearly 100 lives.

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The father of a six-year-old Kentucky boy stabbed to death in his own bed is publicly breaking down after the man who did it was released from prison for the second time, this time with no supervision.

Dean Tipton took to Facebook on Wednesday and wrote that the killer of his son Logan being released again may be his breaking point.

Tipton wrote that the justice system handed his family a life sentence while giving the killer, Ronald Exantus, a slap on the wrist.

Exantus broke into the Tipton family’s Versailles home on December 7, 2015, stabbed Logan Tipton to death as he slept and also attacked Dean and Logan’s sisters. He did not know the family prior to the attack.

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Frightening footage appears to show the moment when a 17-year-old boy allegedly stood up and pointed a gun at the back of several young shoppers before pulling the trigger inside of a crowded mall.

The shooting took place inside the Westfield Wheaton mall in Maryland on Friday around 6pm ET, according to Montgomery County police. The suspect pulled out a gun. A 13-year-old male suffered a gunshot wound to the leg.

A TikTok user with the handle @anasalzaer posted the clip around 9pm ET.

The hall seen in the video matches images and footage of the mall’s interior.

The frightening scene that played out also matches descriptions from Montgomery County Police Department officers of the incident.

Police responded to the shooting after receiving reports of shots fired, Montgomery County Police Commander David Smith said in an update.

A male mall-goer is seen rising out of seating area in the footage, before firing two shots from a handgun.

The shots appeared to be directed at a group of at least three who had just passed the gunman.

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Independent Jewish candidate counters Kiros amid far-left’s string of Democratic primary victories

Progressive groups celebrated a major victory when 29-year-old Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros ousted 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado’s 1st Congressional District in June. But the Democratic primary upset heightened safety concerns among Denver’s Jewish leaders, who warn her sharp rhetoric will fuel antisemitic hostility and violence in their city.

Local Jewish leaders told Fox News Digital that Kiros has left many in the community on edge because of her controversial comments — including describing the Oct. 7 attacks as “inevitable,” refusing to label a local firebombing as antisemitic, and accusing Israel of genocide and apartheid.

In the hours after Kiros claimed victory, Rabbi Menachem Lehrfield, director of the Jewish Outreach Initiative in Denver, wrote on social media that he felt fearful knowing that many of his neighbors seemed to support the kind of anti-Israel rhetoric Kiros campaigned on. After his post was met with a barrage of antisemitic comments, Lehrfield published an op-ed explaining how for observant Jews like himself, just wearing a yarmulke down the streets in Denver now feels like a dangerous thing to do.

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European leaders criticized Madrid’s socialist government as its open-border policies unraveled for the world to see.

The invasion of the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla by 50,000 military-aged men from Morocco exposed the dire consequences of nation-killing mass-migration policies promoted by socialist regimes, which have long eroded national sovereignty across the entire continent.

For Europe, the latest border breach represents one of the clearest warnings yet that uncontrolled mass migration has evolved from a political dispute into a full-blown national security crisis.

Hours after the invasion, Italy’s Interior Ministry suspended Schengen free-movement rules with Spain and ordered the closure of air and maritime borders between the two countries, citing national security concerns.

The list of European leaders criticizing Spanish Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is growing on Saturday, as 22 EU leaders have now signed on to a demand for an “immediate and coordinated European response” to the invasion into Ceuta and Melilla.

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Unimpressive dolt Kamala Harris, the second most unimpressive presidential candidate in US history, spoke at the National Urban League’s annual conference in Nashville, Tennessee on Friday.

Obviously, it is apparent that the former VP is looking at another run for president in 2028. Because she is.

She should probably work on her ridiculous word salad rambling nonsense while she has some down time. Maybe get a speech coach?

Kamala explained to the Urban League members how she would help Americans if elected… Just kidding.

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A police officer in the small New Jersey borough of Dunellen took undercover work to a whole new level this week by dressing up as a shrub to catch distracted drivers illegally glued to their cellphones.

The unconventional tactic paid off for the Dunellen Police Department, which handed out 74 citations in just six hours on a busy downtown road.

The operation, conducted on Wednesday, targeted motorists violating New Jersey’s strict cellphone law in a pedestrian-heavy area known for traffic and a relatively high number of accidents for a one-square-mile town.

The department boasted about the high citations in a post on Facebook, which included a photo of the officer in his disguise.

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In 1997, historians William Strauss and Neil Howe published “The Fourth Turning,” a cyclical theory of Anglo-American history built around generational archetypes and recurring saecular rhythms of approximately 80 to 100 years — roughly the length of a long human life.

Their framework identified four “turnings,” each lasting roughly 20 to 25 years, that repeat in sequence.

The First Turning, the High, is an era of institutional confidence and community solidarity following a great crisis. The rules work, people trust them, conformity is rewarded — think the post-WWII boom, or the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.

The Second Turning, the Awakening, is a spiritual and cultural awakening that challenges the institutional consensus of the High. Individualism resurges; the establishment is questioned — the consciousness revolution of the 1960s-70s, the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s-30s.

The Third Turning, the Unraveling, sees institutions weaken, individualism reach its apex, and civic order decay. Trust collapses — in government, media, corporations, each other — as it did through the Culture Wars era of the 1980s-90s, or the Gilded Age of the 1870s-90s.

The Fourth Turning, the Crisis, is a decisive era of institutional destruction and reconstruction, typically catalysed by an existential threat — war, economic collapse, or civilisational rupture. The old order is swept away; a new one is forged. The Great Depression and WWII. The Civil War. The American Revolution.

“History is seasonal, and winter is coming.”

— William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning, 1997

The Current Position

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The Curse It Is Cast…

“I have nothing to hide. I can explain and validate everything that I’ve done.”

– Dr. Anthony Fauci, recorded for TV in 2022

However you cut this Fauci business, one thing Americans have learned is how slippery and treacherous this thing called The Law has become.

You saw it in the sundry Trump prosecutions of 2024, too – a marvelous demonstration of how to play Hide-the-Salami with the truth about anything and everything.

You saw it in the structured failure to adjudicate election fraud in 2020.

You saw it in the Jan-6 prosecutions and the Congressional Jan-6 Committee charade that followed.

And much more.

And one thing it’s good for is demoralizing the whole citizenry to the max. Who in this land was not mortally depressed watching Rand Paul’s Senate hearing Wednesday starring Dr. Fauci? (One last time, the center of attention!) We have become a procedural republic, slipping into an impotence of legalistic self-fuckery the way old folks slip into dementia, one lost memory at a time. There sits the murderer of millions cloaked in the banality of his evil — as it was at Nuremburg eighty years ago — and this time, you just have to lump it, America. The law can’t touch him at all.

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A North Carolina woman is facing federal charges for allegedly orchestrating a scheme that defrauded the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Discrimination Financial Assistance Program of millions of dollars.

A federal grand jury in Charlotte returned an indictment charging Linda Faye Hough, 64, of Rockingham, N.C., with one count of mail fraud and six counts of making false, fictitious, or fraudulent claims to a federal program in connection with more than $9 million in DFAP applications.

“Regardless of the program, hard-earned taxpayer dollars should be spent where Congress intended, not to personally benefit those who exploit the system,” said U.S. Attorney Russ Ferguson.  “My office is committed to rooting out fraud, safeguarding taxpayer dollars, and preserving the integrity of federal assistance programs.”

The Inflation Reduction Act established the DFAP in 2022, which appropriated $2.2 billion in federal funding to compensate farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners who experienced discrimination in USDA farm lending programs before January 2021. To be eligible for funding, applicants were required to submit documentation demonstrating eligibility, including that they owned or leased farmland; that they participated in or attempted to participate in a USDA farm loan program; that they experienced discrimination by USDA employees; and that they suffered financial losses. Individual DFAP awards were capped at $500,000 per applicant.

 “A program designed to remedy wrongdoing instead turned into another vector for criminals to defraud the taxpayer. The USDA Office of Inspector General is committed to ensuring taxpayer money is wisely spent. Those who steal from the public can expect to be found and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” said USDA Inspector General John Walk.

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An unprecedented wave of 60,000 illegal migrants from Africa flooded the Spanish enclave of Ceuta this week, prompting Spain to deploy its military – as terrified locals likened the invasion to an “apocalypse.”

Harrowing local media reports reveal residents and business owners in Ceuta – a Spanish territory located on the north African coast – are too afraid to open their doors amid the rush of migrants, many of whom arrived wearing nothing but swimwear, without a penny or possession to their name.

“Businesses closed. Shops shut because if you open a business, it gets overrun … We’re scared. The streets are packed. There are no measures in place. It’s every man for himself. They’re not giving us any help,” a frightened downtown restaurant owner who didn’t want to give their name told state-owned Spanish media outlet RTVE.

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A doctor working as a DoorDash driver to support his wife’s medical career was shot in the back of the head after being sent to a Philadelphia address where residents told police they had not ordered food.

Md Mahfuzul Haque, 43, was making a delivery in the city’s Kingsessing neighborhood on July 7 when he was killed in what police described as a targeted attack involving three masked suspects.

Zakah Johnson, 15, has been charged as an adult with murder, robbery, conspiracy and firearms offenses over Haque’s death.

Johnson was already in custody in connection with an unrelated investigation when authorities identified him as a suspect and rearrested him before his scheduled release, police said.

The teenager was denied bail and is being held at the Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Services Center ahead of a preliminary hearing on August 10, according to NBC 10.

Investigators were still searching for two other people believed to have been involved in the killing.

Haque, a physician from Bangladesh, had temporarily set aside his own medical ambitions and taken odd jobs to support his wife, Minara Rahman, while she pursued an optometry career in the US, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

But their attempt to build a new life in America ended in tragedy just as Rahman was beginning the career her husband had worked to support.

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The equity is ‘to enhance the return for the US taxpayer,’ the department says

The Commerce Department indicated that the federal government is on track to dole out millions of dollars to seven companies to fund technology development but will require the businesses to fork over equity in exchange for the money.

“The Department of Commerce today announced the signing of 7 letters of intent to provide $874 million in federal incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act,” a Wednesday press release noted. “These incentives will support innovative domestic technologies to dramatically increase the performance of the world’s fastest computers, secure domestic supply chains, and strengthen U.S. leadership in the compute supply chain.”

The CHIPS and Science Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden in 2022.

The seven companies, which include GlobalFoundries, Kepler, Multibeam Corporation, Extropic, Thintronics, OBSIDIA Semiconductors and Aeluma, “have entered into letters of intent with the Department of Commerce, and there will be further diligence and approval by the Department before final awards are made,” according to the announcement, which is posted on the National Institute of Standards and Technology site. “The Department will receive a minority, non-controlling equity stake in each company as a condition for receiving the funds to enhance the return for the U.S. taxpayer.”

The department detailed the planned funding allotments for each company should the government move forward.

“GlobalFoundries will receive up to $300 million to accelerate the domestic research and development of co-packaged optics by two to three years. By integrating photonics directly alongside AI processors, this technology will deliver ultra-fast, energy-efficient computing to reinforce U.S. leadership in AI infrastructure,” the release noted. “Kepler will receive up to $245 million for R&D to develop in the U.S. a new class of high-performance AI memory technology enabled by innovative 3D and ferroelectric technologies.”

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Troy Jackson, the Democratic candidate and US Senate hopeful tapped to replace the scandal-ridden Graham Platner, has already managed to find himself smack-dab in the middle of his own controversy.

Jackson, a fifth-generation logger and politician who has played up his family’s longtime roots in the state, has an unusual significant other – one who is, allegedly, his second cousin.

The news could be a devastating twist for Democrats in one of the most critically important Senate races this fall.

Though Jackson and his partner, Lana Pelletier, do not appear to be officially married, Jackson has referred to Pelletier as his wife on various occasions.

The two have dated since high school, live together, and share two adult children.

They also, allegedly, share the same great-grandparents.

News of their shared ancestry was first reported by the Maine Wire’s chief editor, Steve Robinson, who cited tipsters and genealogical records that linked the two to a shared set of great-grandparents, Thomas Pelletier and Edith Thibodeau.

‘Jackson, a 26-year politician and lobbyist, has made a career of bragging that he’s a  a fifth-generation logger, but you don’t have to go far back the generational line to find where it crosses paths with the ancestors of his significant other Lana M. Pelletier,’ writes the publication.

Jackson’s campaign blasted the flurry of headlines about Jackson as ‘shameful’ and a politically motivated attempt to help the Republican incumbent retain her seat this fall.

‘Susan Collins will do anything to distract from the fact that she votes with Trump 96 percent of the time and has sold out working people in Maine,’ a campaign official told the Daily Mail in response to a request for comment.

‘Personal attacks on Troy’s family are shameful and desperate,’ the campaign spokesman added.

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Three inmates freed under the Nellie Pou-backed program were later linked to separate homicide cases

A COVID-era prison release law championed by Rep. Nellie Pou, D-N.J., is facing renewed scrutiny after multiple inmates freed early under the program were later charged with murder.

More than 7,000 inmates received an early release starting in November 2020 after then-Gov. Phil Murphy, D-N.J., signed legislation sponsored by Pou, then a New Jersey state senator.

Under the law, state inmates were eligible for early release via “public health emergency credits” if they had less than one year remaining on their sentences and had not been convicted of murder or sexual assault and were not sex offenders.

People serving time for other violent offenses — including aggravated manslaughter and kidnapping — could still receive a shortened sentence of up to eight months.

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A small Colorado town plagued by fraud allegations and violent altercations was deemed abandoned after all elected officials resigned from their posts and the local water became a health hazard to the citizens.

The former statutory town of Hartman, CO, with a population of 30 and little more than a town hall and a post office, was declared abandoned by Secretary of State Jena Griswold on Wednesday.

“Yesterday, the Colorado Department of State issued a formal determination that the Town of Hartman has been abandoned pursuant to 31-3-201 C.R.S.,” Griswold’s office announced.

The town had been without any form of government since January 14 when the three remaining board trustees resigned, a day after a violent brawl broke out between four older women following a tense board meeting, the Denver Post reported.

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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) dropped a truth bomb at the Anthony Fauci hearing on Wednesday that got very little attention, but deserves some extra scrutiny. And what it says about the Democrat Party and its role in the Fauci-led COVID tyranny is pretty damning.

Paul, of course, has been one of Fauci’s fiercest critics for many years now. A doctor himself, not to mention chairman of the Senate committee that finally summoned the diminutive Dr. Fauci to Capitol Hill, Paul has been particularly effective at putting the screws to Fauci in order to force a reckoning for his draconian COVID-era “safety” measures. (He even wrote a book about it.)

We wrote up an article on the devastating fallout from those measures, including way too many stories about families having to say their last goodbyes to loved ones over Zoom or only being allowed to communicate with their elderly parents through a window. In one appalling example, a family was notified of their loved one’s death through Post It notes on a hospital window.

Dr. Anthony Fauci had a lot to answer for – and Rand Paul had a lot of questions.

To no one’s surprise, Fauci took the coward’s way out by invoking the Fifth a whopping 111 times.

Although the fatuous Fauci clammed up on the advice of his lawyers, there was still much that was revealed during the hearing. For instance, Fauci was incensed at having to sit there (mostly) silently, seething with rage as he was confronted with his long list of misdeeds and being unable to respond.

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An infuriating tragedy unfolded this month as an illegal migrant killed a Connecticut police officer and his girlfriend in a traffic ‘accident,’ and the news gets even more outrageous.

As The New York Post reported on Tuesday, 27-year-old Melissa Ramirez, who is from Mexico, was speeding in a 45 mph zone when she smacked into 38-year-old Connecticut policeman Cooper Whiteside’s Harley Davidson on July 13.

This sent Whiteside and his 34-year-old girlfriend, Brittany Islami, flying through the air. Both were killed.

Per the Post, police stumbled upon a horrific scene:

Whiteside, a Bridgeport police officer, was found “lying in a supine position” and he sustained “significant injuries to his head, upper extremities and torso,” police said in their report.

“His right femur was protruding through the skin,” cops added, noting there was a “large pool of blood” in the road.

Islami — a mom to three children aged 7, 10, and 12 — suffered “significant injuries” and “had blood around her face,” police said, noting she wasn’t wearing a helmet.

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A British man has told the BBC how he unearthed evidence indicating that his former employer, Howard Lutnick – now US commerce secretary – failed to disclose a business relationship with the paedophile financier, Jeffrey Epstein.

Simon Andriesz, previously a managing director at a Wall Street firm, discovered an email chain from 2018 in which Lutnick and Epstein had discussed the prospects of a start-up business they were both involved in.

Andriesz shared his findings – from the millions of released Epstein files – with US politicians on the influential House Oversight Committee, ahead of an appearance there by Lutnick in May.

Lutnick told the committee that, to the best of his knowledge, he had only learned this year that Epstein had been an investor in the firm. Speaking on his behalf, the US Commerce Department told us there was no evidence of wrongdoing.

Andriesz also discovered in the files that one of Lutnick’s firms had made plans in 2013 to go into business with another figure linked to Epstein, the then-Prince Andrew, by commercially exploiting the contacts the former UK trade envoy had made.

“What it involved was a loan to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor of £1m… to basically buy a prince,” he tells File on 4 Investigates.

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The WNBA leadership circus has somehow found another way to embarrass itself.

The league’s official social media account posted a video on Wednesday, appearing Dallas Wings guard Paige Bueckers and Atlanta Dream forward Angel Reese agreeing to a $400 wager on the outcome of a game between their own teams.

Yes, the WNBA itself promoted the apparent bet.

The clip, recorded during the league’s All-Star Weekend in Chicago, showed Reese holding a stack of $100 bills while discussing the wager with Bueckers.

“This is how the rich stay rich,” Bueckers joked during the exchange.

The WNBA later shared the footage ahead of Wednesday night’s Dream-Wings matchup with a laughing caption referencing “the bet” between the two players.

There was just one enormous problem.

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Dr. Anthony Fauci was deceiving lawmakers during his Wednesday hearing, according to a body language expert.

After delivering an opening statement in which he claimed Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chair Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was out to get him, Fauci took the Fifth Amendment 111 times in response to questions, as noted by The Hill.

While attempting to deflect questions, Fauci’s posture spoke volumes, Dr. Lillian Glass told the New York Post.

“When he was asked poignant questions, his autonomic nervous system took over, and he became flushed, his breathing changed, hunched over, paler, squirmed around, blinked a lot [and] licked his lips — all signals of deception,” Glass said.

Glass noted changes at some points in the hearing when the man Americans had trusted to lead them through COVID shifted from appearing confident and arrogant to “guarded” and “weak.”

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When people talk about violent crime in America, there’s no shortage of opinions.

A new report from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) tries to cut through the politics by digging into the FBI’s latest homicide data. The findings cover where murders happen, who commits them, who the victims are, and how often murders cross racial lines.

Some of the numbers may surprise you.

One of the biggest takeaways is just how concentrated murder is in the United States. As we discussed earlier this week, the worst 1% of counties account for 41% of all murders while containing only about 20% of the country’s population. Expand that to the worst 2% of counties, and they account for 54% of murders despite making up just 30% of the population.

On the flip side, most counties rarely see a homicide at all.

More than half of U.S. counties—53%—recorded zero murders in 2024. Another 16% had just one. Together, those counties make up 69% of all counties in America but account for only 3% of the nation’s murders.

The report also looks at who is committing those murders.

According to the FBI data analyzed by the CPRC, Black offenders accounted for 56.4% of known murderers in 2024. Lott notes that the FBI’s race data combines Hispanic and non-Hispanic White offenders into a single “White” category. He argues likely understates the number of Hispanic offenders because ethnicity isn’t reported consistently across jurisdictions.

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Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.

Police in Gastonia, North Carolina, say a man was shot last week while allegedly trying to kick his way into a disabled 75-year-old homeowner’s house. Instead of admitting what happened, investigators say he and his girlfriend drove to a nearby gas station and claimed he’d been wounded in a random drive-by shooting.

According to reports from WCNC and WBTV, that story unraveled quickly.

The homeowner, Donald Bolynn, told reporters he’d already been targeted once before. So when he heard someone trying to force their way into his Ware Avenue home again, he wasn’t taking any chances.

Surveillance video reportedly shows 57-year-old Cedric Ford repeatedly pounding on the front door before trying to pry open a window and shove in a window air-conditioning unit to gain entry. Bolynn said he saw Ford outside the window and fired a single shot through the glass.

“It looked like he was trying to come in, so I shot,” Bolynn told reporters.

The bullet struck Ford in the chest.

Instead of sticking around, police say Ford jumped back into a waiting vehicle driven by his girlfriend, Sanja Stallings. The pair headed to a nearby QuikTrip and called 911, claiming Ford had been hit during a drive-by shooting.

Investigators weren’t buying it.

Gastonia police say the supposed drive-by didn’t match the evidence. Using the city’s Real Time Crime Center, Flock license plate cameras, surveillance footage and one of the city’s 158 Flock gunshot detection sensors, detectives traced the gunfire back to Bolynn’s home. The technology reportedly narrowed the location of the gunshot to within about 100 feet of where the homeowner fired.

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The Department of Natural Resources (DNR) reminds Maryland recreational anglers that targeting striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay and its tidal tributaries is prohibited from August 1 through August 31.

The striped bass targeting closure, shifted to August for the 2026 season, was put in place to protect the younger, resident striped bass population when hot water and air temperatures in mid-summer make fish more vulnerable to dying after being caught and released.

During the closure, DNR officials encourage anglers to pursue other fish, such as invasive blue catfish and Chesapeake Channa, also known as snakehead, by using different fishing methods than those used for striped bass. These invasive species have no bag or size limits and their harvest contributes to a healthier ecosystem in the Bay.

Read more about the closure.

Additional Resources

• Striped Bass Homepage
• Recreational Striped Bass Rules
• Regulatory Maps
• Maryland Fishing Report
• Striped Bass Volunteer Angler Survey

A Spanish enclave in North Africa has been overrun with migrants.

This week, more than 49,000 migrants from Morocco have flooded into Ceuta, population 83,600, according to news reports.

The catalyst for the flood was a ruling by Spain’s Supreme Court saying that migrants intercepted at sea trying to reach Ceuta or the nearby Spanish enclave of Melilla cannot be sent back where they came from, according to Tech Times.

The court ruling said there was a difference between those who entered by sea and those who crossed fences and other barriers on land.

An Irish teacher was released from prison in the latest stage of his legal battles against preferred pronoun policies — and related contempt of court charges — forcing him to violate Christian sexual ethics.

Enoch Burke, an evangelical Christian and former teacher at Wilson’s Hospital School in County Westmeath, was suspended from his teaching job in 2022 for objecting to a policy requiring staff to address so-called transgender students by their preferred pronouns, per a July 2 report from Christian Today.

He eventually received court orders telling him to stay away from the school, which he has refused to honor, resulting in him spending around 700 collective days in prison.

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Dana Bash spent years telling you Fauci was a hero.

Now his own diary proves she was secretly cheering him on behind the scenes.

Fauci’s private journal is out — and what it reveals about CNN’s anchors is something their network hopes you never see.

Dana Bash Was Texting Fauci Insults About Jim Jordan

The moment is right there in black and white.

After Rep. Jim Jordan grilled Fauci in April 2021 – asking the simple question of when Americans would get their freedoms back – Bash texted the doctor her support.

“I just watched the whole Jordan thing. Again, you’re a better man than I,” she wrote, according to Fauci’s diary.

Then she relayed what CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer had told her – that no one would have blamed Fauci if he’d told Jordan to go f*** himself.

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For months now, a battle has been raging between Trump’s FCC and ABC News/Disney, the owners of the daytime talk show ‘The View.’

ABC News claims that ‘The View’ is a legitimate news show, a claim that is preposterous at best, while the FCC argues that it’s not a news show.

The argument is important because the decision ultimately governs what the show is and is not allowed to do.

In a way, it’s amazing that this debate is even taking place. The View is easily the most anti-Trump and anti-Republican show on network television.

Anyone who watches the show even once knows this if they possess average intelligence.

Now, Trump’s FCC chief Brendan Carr has posted a video to Twitter/X which shows the hosts of The View basically campaigning for the Democrats.

Breitbart News reports:

Federal Communications chief Brendan Carr posted a montage video to social media of some of ABC daytime talk show The View’s most biased, left-wing chatter and electioneering for Democrats as the agency considers whether the show has broken federal equal time rules.

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Kentucky’s Democratic  governor has issued a formal written demand that 84-year-old Sen. Mitch McConnell publicly demonstrate he can still perform his duties, or resign, after more than 40 days without a public appearance.

Gov. Andy Beshear sent the letter Monday, one day after McConnell’s office confirmed the Republican senator had not been medically cleared to leave the rehabilitation facility where he has been recovering since a June 14 fall at his home that briefly left him unconscious. McConnell’s office declined to comment on the letter.

Beshear’s demand raises a legitimate question that cuts across party lines: What does a state’s electorate deserve to know when one of its two U.S. senators disappears from public life for weeks on end? But the governor’s motives are not above scrutiny, either. He is a Democrat pressing a Republican senator to vacate a seat, and he has dodged questions about whether he would appoint a Republican to fill it.

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Five officers with the Albany Police Department in Georgia were arrested and fired after allegedly abusing Flock cameras.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation revealed in a July 6 release that the officers were charged with “Misuse of License Plate Data and Violation of Oath of Office.”

The Albany Police Department had conducted an internal audit of the Flock cameras, which automatically read license plates and capture other vehicle details such as color, make, and model.

The audit revealed that the officers “previously accessed the Flock system on multiple occasions and utilized the retained license plate data for non-law enforcement purposes.”

Each of the five officers — Tytianna Davis, Jade Jackson, Nicholas Richardson, Brittney Smith, and Issac Whitus — are between 23 and 32 years of age and were charged with one count of Violation of Oath of Office.

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Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Minneapolis district office sits inside a Somali-focused community center that received redirected campaign donations from two men convicted in the largest pandemic-era fraud scheme in American history, and Omar has since paid that same center more than $46,700 in rent.

The Minnesota Democrat moved her congressional office into the Sabathani Community Center in 2023, federal campaign finance records show. That was one year after she donated $5,400 to three Minneapolis food pantries, Sabathani among them, money she had originally accepted from Ahmed Abdullahi Ghedi and Abdihakim Ali Ahmed, two operatives in the massive Feeding Our Future child nutrition fraud. Both men later pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering.

Omar’s office said at the time that it redirected the donations “out of an abundance of caution” after Ghedi and Ahmed were named as suspects. But the timeline raises harder questions. Ghedi gave $2,700 to Omar’s reelection campaign in February 2021. Ahmed gave the same amount a month later. Between September 2020 and September 2021, the same window, the two men and their co-conspirators were stealing $7.2 million in federal child nutrition funds through bogus reimbursement claims filed from a fake meal-delivery site run out of a Somali deli.

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is publicly lobbying Sen. John Fetterman to remain a Democrat, a move that reveals just how far the Pennsylvania senator has strayed from his own party’s leadership.

Schumer praised Fetterman as “a very good member of Congress” and insisted the Democratic caucus still has room for him. “People in our caucus very much like him and respect him, and we’re a big-tent party,” Schumer said. “We can have a lot of different views in that party.”

The plea came as Fetterman has grown louder about his willingness to walk away. In an NBC  News interview this week, the senator from Pennsylvania offered a blunt invitation to his colleagues: “If the Democratic caucus doesn’t want me, they could just let me know.”

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The WNBA has suspended Seattle Storm minority co-owner Celeste Keaton from attending the team’s next five home games after she berated two teenage girls for supporting Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham and her defense of women’s sports.

The league also imposed an undisclosed fine on the Storm following the ugly confrontation at Tuesday night’s game at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena, according to ESPN.

The confrontation happened Tuesday night during the Storm’s home loss to the Fever at Climate Pledge Arena. The teenage girls wore XX-XY Athletics shirts highlighting biological sex and held a sign that read, “Thank you Sophie for speaking up for girls.”

According to their account on the unDivided podcast with Brandi Kruse, Keaton approached them, raised her voice, called them “f***ing insane,” and launched into a rant that left at least one of them in tears. Reports also indicate she invoked religion, telling them she hoped Jesus could forgive them.

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The WNBA leadership circus has somehow found another way to embarrass itself.

The league’s official social media account posted a video on Wednesday, appearing Dallas Wings guard Paige Bueckers and Atlanta Dream forward Angel Reese agreeing to a $400 wager on the outcome of a game between their own teams.

Yes, the WNBA itself promoted the apparent bet.

The clip, recorded during the league’s All-Star Weekend in Chicago, showed Reese holding a stack of $100 bills while discussing the wager with Bueckers.

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Liberal Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared on Michelle Obama’s “IMO” podcast this week in an episode titled, “Move Through the Hard Times with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.”

Ketanji Jackson discussed her life before serving on the Supreme Court, motherhood and other topics.

At one point, Ketanji Jackson stressed the importance of impartiality.

“There are lots of limits on what judges can do, and I try to be very, very mindful and scrupulous with respect to that because, as you say, our obligation is to be unbiased in our approach,” said Jackson.

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Republicans in the senate grilled Dr. Anthony Fauci this week, so leftists like Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNOW had to step up and defend him.

It’s all so predictable. You always know what the left is going to do because it’s always a knee-jerk reaction to whatever Trump or Republicans are saying or doing.

In the case of O’Donnell over on MSNOW, he was determined to go farther than anyone else on the left. Virtue signaling is very important to him.

From the TV Insider:

Lawrence O’Donnell jumped to Anthony Fauci‘s defense amid the former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Senate hearing about his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment rights while being grilled by Rand Paul, a Republican senator from Kentucky, and O’Donnell supported his decision on the July 29 episode of The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell.

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Senator John Kennedy explained the GOP game plan for November. It’s called Operation Let Them Speak. The DSA wing of the Democrat Party, which has taken it over, is crazy, and when they speak, it removes all doubt.

That will be a successful game plan as long as the public hears what they are saying. The media covers for them. We need the Democrat Party to return to sanity.

Senator Kennedy torched the crazies, who want a dictatorship. Thanks to the DSA wing, the Democrat party has to run on the we’re not crazy, honest platform.

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Remember all the outcry about National Guard deployments to dangerous American cities? Well, despite the Left’s clamor, crime is reaching historic lows under the Trump Administration.

According to a new report, homicides are on track to reach the lowest levels in over a century, and carjackings, motor vehicle theft, and burglaries are down again. The first half of 2026 saw an 18 percent decrease in homicides, 47 percent decrease, in carjackings, as well as decreases in motor vehicle thefts, robberies, and burglaries, compared to the same time the previous year. Homicides, carjackings, motor vehicle thefts, burglaries, and robberies have all decreased by more than 50 percent compared to peaks like 2020 over the last nine years, where overall violent crime spiked during the COVID era.

Notably, murders continue to drop in Memphis, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, all Democrat-run cities where the Trump administration stepped in to deploy the National Guard earlier this year. Memphis and Washington, D.C. saw a more than 42 percent drop in murders this year, with a 32 percent drop in New Orleans. The National Guard was also deployed for a time in Los Angeles in response to anti-ICE riots. Los Angeles saw an 18 percent decline in murders so far this year.

Other major cities are reporting the same trend. In March, Philadelphia announced a 56 percent decrease in homicides, with some police departments reporting zero murders since January. A report from the Council on Criminal Justice reported that homicides in Baltimore have decreased by 68 percent since 2019.

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New York City dwellers can expect another big boost in their taxes if yet another giveaway backed by Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is approved.

The latest scheme from the red Mayor: reparations for slavery.

During an interview with far-left “journalist” Charles Blow for The Root, a website that provides “Black News, Opinions, Politics and Culture,” Mamdani backed paying reparations to blacks who were never slaves.

Legacy Must Be Repaired

The interview was more of a tongue bath than a hard-hitting back-and-forth meant to put the close-to-communist mayor in the hot seat. Blow’s first question: “You have been mayor for a little over 200 days. … What campaign promise so far are you proudest of already accomplishing?”

That isn’t exactly what Blow might ask President Donald Trump. But in any event, the former New York Times columnist read back to Mamdani his campaign’s statement on reparations, a leftist obsession making headway in California, where slavery was illegal.

“When you were running for mayor, you submitted a written statement to a reparations convening that read in part, ‘New York City participated actively in the slave trade and furthered its legacy through racist institutions, policies, and laws. The city should reconcile and repair this legacy of slavery, stolen wealth, and discrimination,’” Blow said:

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The former NIAID director refused to answer lawmaker questions throughout the hearing, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, despite having a presidential pardon that covered his work during the pandemic.

Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, where he was grilled about his work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The former NIAID director refused to answer lawmaker questions throughout the hearing, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, despite having a presidential pardon that covered his work during the pandemic.

Despite Fauci’s refusal to answer questions, the hearing was filled with major revelations and accusations.

Here are the top 10 major takeaways from the Senate hearing:

1. Fauci applied for government grants for himself/got government employees to do it for him 

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley revealed during the hearing that Fauci allegedly used federal employees while he was NIAID director to apply for government grants on his behalf for his work during the pandemic.

“You got rich while people were dying,” a heated Hawley said. “You were using federal employees with taxpayer money to apply for and solicit cash prizes for you personally. Cash prizes totaling over a million dollars.”

Hawley said he has evidence of the applications for cash prizes that Fauci received, including the Dan David award and the Smithsonian award.

“You actually wrote to people and said, ‘Do you think maybe I’d qualify?’ And you got cash for all of this. And it wasn’t just one or two employees, was it? In fact, you used eight separate federal employees on federal time using federal resources to solicit cash awards. Isn’t that true?”

Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment in response.

2. Ron Johnson alleges Fauci covered up evidence ivermectin works

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New York City’s socialist mayor just claimed another “victory.” Zohran Mamdani stood before cameras and posted online that his administration had put $104 million back into the pockets of delivery workers. “This is only the beginning,” he declared.

The applause line landed. The details did not.

The changes that forced Uber Eats and DoorDash to make tipping prompts more prominent on their apps came from a city law approved by the New York City Council before Mamdani ever took the oath. Former Mayor Eric Adams neither signed nor vetoed the measure. It became law after the waiting period.

The rules simply took effect in January under the new administration, which then enforced them. Mamdani’s office now insists implementation equals authorship. A law is only as good as its enforcement, a spokesperson told Fox News.

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The pro-diversity former vice president’s California property sits in a census tract with virtually no racial diversity

Despite a career-long commitment to combating racial disparities in housing and touting the importance of living among Black people, former Vice President Kamala Harris’ new California mansion is situated in a neighborhood with virtually no racial diversity.

Harris’ new 4,000-square-foot property, which reports indicate she acquired for $8.15 million, is located in the exclusive seaside community of Point Dume and includes ocean views, multiple wine fridges, private golf greens and enough parking to accommodate five vehicles.

Point Dume is situated entirely within Census tract 8004.08, which the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey estimated was just 0.2% Black and roughly 94% White as of 2019.

Harris’ choice of neighborhood may surprise longtime observers given past comments she has made about the importance of living among other Black Americans.

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A “booming backlash” against AI data centers is shaping the midterm election – candidates cutting ads touting their anti-data-center credentials, protesters showing up at campaign events, industry players taking note – which will come as genuinely useful news to anyone who has spent the past year getting their information exclusively from NBC News.

The network’s framing is that last year’s elections in a handful of states revealed the hyperscale buildout as a major tension point up and down the ballot, and that the fight has now intensified into a full midterm issue – with demonstrators displaying “Stop Data Centers” signs at President Trump’s Michigan appearance on Sunday – the protest movement having now reached the point where it greets the president of the United States at his own events.

According to the report, Republicans, Trump included, have shifted toward ensuring data centers do not drive up voters’ power bills, which is what happens when the polling gets loud enough to be heard over the donor calls.

A June Yale Program on Climate Communication poll cited by CNBC found 58% of registered voters oppose data-center construction in their own area – including 53% of conservative Republicans, which is not a demographic famous for agreeing with the 74% of liberal Democrats who feel the same way. More than 300 cities, towns and counties have enacted bans or moratoriums on hyperscale construction, per a count by The Information, and Data Center Watch tallied 75 major projects worth more than $130 billion delayed or canceled in the first quarter of 2026 alone – roughly matching the damage from all twelve months of 2025. New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the nation’s first statewide moratorium this month, voters in Monterey Park, California passed a permanent ban at the ballot box, and in April an unknown attacker fired 13 shots into the home of an Indianapolis councilman who had voted for an AI facility, leaving a note reading “No Data Centers,” per The Week – the point at which a land-use dispute stops being a land-use dispute.

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Four Twin Cities men admitted to looting more than $2.2 million from a Minnesota Medicaid program meant to house the homeless and disabled, then used artificial intelligence to fake the paperwork when insurers asked questions.

The Department of Justice announced the guilty pleas Friday, naming Moktar Hassan Aden, 31, Mustafa Dayib Ali, 29, Khalid Ahmed Dayib, 26, and Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, 27, as co-owners of a company called Brilliant Minds Services LLC. The firm operated out of the Griggs-Midway Building in St. Paul and billed Minnesota’s Housing Stabilization Services program, a Medicaid-funded effort designed to help people with disabilities and addictions find and keep housing, for work it never performed.

Court documents show Brilliant Minds claimed to serve roughly 350 beneficiaries and submitted $2,253,385.06 in claims. But the company did not deliver all the services it billed for. Where work was actually done, employees inflated the hours. Where no work was done at all, employees simply fabricated client notes to make it look like they had.

When insurance companies started asking questions, the defendants turned to AI tools to generate fake records. The DOJ called the scheme part of “a burgeoning trend of fraudsters” using artificial intelligence to target health care programs “in Minnesota and around the country.”

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One of the Trump family’s largest crypto investments has handed the First Family profits while investors were left with devastating losses.

Last August, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump proudly waltzed through the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York to tout their partnership with an obscure company called ALT5 Sigma.

A small digital payments firm with less than two dozen staff and a history of legal headaches, ALT5 would now benefit from direct business ties to the First Family.

The deal would give investors better access to a cryptocurrency run by the Trump and Witkoff families, World Liberty Financial (WLF). ALT5 later purchased $1.5 billion in WLF crypto.

The President, his sons, his Special Envoy and business partner Steve Witkoff and his son Zach Witkoff, co-founder of WLF, all stood to benefit.

According to Trump’s financial disclosures released earlier this year, the President and some undisclosed family members were entitled to around $500 million in proceeds from the deal.

Less than a year later, ALT5’s share price has plummeted by over 90 percent, wiping out gains for investors that piled in. After its share price dipped well below $1, the firm was threatened with being delisted from the Nasdaq exchange.

It has since changed its name to AI Financial Corporation, and it continues to struggle.

Long-time San Diego Chargers linebacker Billy Ray Smith Jr. has passed away at 64 after a battle with dementia that his family blames on the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

Smith’s exact cause of death has not been revealed publicly.

‘It is with profound sadness that we share the loss of our beloved Billy Ray Smith Jr., who passed away peacefully surrounded by family,’ the family said in a statement this week. ‘Billy Ray faced his long journey with dementia caused by CTE with unmatched bravery, dignity, and strength.

‘Billy Ray brought so much joy, light, and laughter to the world as a devoted father, husband, son, and loyal friend. On the NFL gridiron for a decade with the Chargers, and decades that followed in sports broadcasting, Billy Ray earned deep respect from teammates, colleagues, and fans, who he cherished in return.

‘He leaves an irreplaceable void in our lives. His undeniable legacy will live forever in our hearts, and we thank our incredible community for the outpouring of love and support.’

It’s not clear if the family was referring to an official CTE diagnosis. The degenerative brain condition, which has profoundly impacted many former NFL players, can only be diagnosed posthumously.

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NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the County Council of Wicomico County, Maryland, will convene in open session on Tuesday, August 4, 2026 at 5:00 p.m., in the Government Office Building, Room 301, Salisbury, Maryland for the purpose of entertaining a vote to go into Closed Session to discuss an administrative function pertaining to the Wicomico Nursing Home, which, pursuant to Section 3-103 (a) (1) (i) is not subject to the Open Meeting Act. Should any aspect of the Closed Session not to be an administrative function, then the purpose of entertaining a vote to go into Closed Session is to discuss a personnel matter that affects one or more specific individuals at the Wicomico Nursing Home, in accordance with Sections 3-104 and 3-305(b)(1) of the General Provisions Article of the Annotated Code of Maryland.

The regularly scheduled Legislative Session will commence at 6 p.m.

Knox County, Tennessee, Mayor Glenn Jacobs is calling on Congress to pass legislation regulating the government’s use of Flock Safety Cameras to surveil Americans.

Mayor Jacobs, better known as “Kane” during his years in the WWE as a professional wrestler, issued a statement on X on Monday. “Today, I am urging our Commission to prohibit the use of Flock cameras and similar devices in our County,” he said.

For those of you who don’t know, these cameras, technically called Automated License Plate Readers, are motion activated and take a picture of every car which passes by. While License Plate Readers have been around for a while, because of AI and vastly increased networking and data retention capacities, these Flock cameras have capabilities not even imagined in the past.

Jacobs pointed out that “Older cameras only took a photo of your license plate, which was then retained for a short time.”

However, now the cameras take a photo of your place, but also use AI to catalogue distinguishing features of your vehicle: make, color, model, even bumper stickers,” Jacobs explained. “That data is stored in a searchable database for sometimes up to a month or more, depending on the policies of that particular agency. When these cameras are deployed in large numbers, they create a network that can be used to track your movements.”

Jacobs further pointed out that “there is no federal regulatory framework governing these devices in place, and the Tennessee laws regulating them were written over a decade ago” and that he fears that this might be “inadvertantly creating a warrantless mass surveillance system and undermining the privacy and Liberty of our people.”

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The age of artificial intelligence is fueling a generation of fragile, developmentally stunted and gender-dysphoric children, two analysts warned parents.

Classroom devices, smartphones and, increasingly, AI chatbots are stunting children’s cognitive and emotional development and driving a youth mental-health crisis, Michael Marinacio, executive director of the Center for Responsible Technology, and Nicole Runyon, a former child psychotherapist and parent coach, said during an online event hosted by parental rights group Moms for Liberty.

“[W]e’re creating mental illness,” Runyon said. “[Children] don’t feel like they can trust themselves or that they’re capable of doing really anything.”

Runyon recalled that, as a counselor, young people told her “they didn’t want to get married … They didn’t want to bring kids into this world … They feel like they’re this victim in a world that is falling apart.”

In the US, 67% of 12th graders said they were “most likely to choose to get married in the long run,” according to a 2023 Pew Research poll. This is down from 80% in 1993.

Runyon left the child psychotherapy field for parent coaching because she concluded screens and AI were creating the mental health problems that would not otherwise exist and the real work was upstream with parents.

“[AI]’s magnifying what we already were seeing with the screens,” Runyon told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “[W]ith AI, it’s actually talks back to them and validates everything they say. So it’s that much worse and that much more magnified,” compared to social media use.

The result is that children “don’t have to ever have a relationship,” according to Runyon.

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The Democratic Socialists of America wants you to know exactly what it wants, and Megan Romer, the group’s national co-chair, laid it out on national television without once reaching for a hedge word over the most radical ideas on the party platform.

The platform itself reads like a fever dream a committee wrote line by line. A 32-hour workweek with no reduction in pay and benefits, a federal jobs guarantee, canceling all student debt, and free college from pre-K through graduate school anchor the economic wish list, alongside healthcare that is universal, free, and includes gender-affirming care as a guaranteed right.

The platform calls for more publicly owned social housing, universal rent control, and a guaranteed lawyer for every tenant. On policing, the platform wants demilitarized police departments, defunded police unions, and money pulled out of police budgets entirely, all of which the DSA frames as a first step toward abolishing prisons and policing outright.

On foreign policy, the platform demands the defunding of the Department of War, the closure of overseas military bases, and an end to all foreign wars, and it pairs that with support for International Criminal Court prosecutions of what it deems American war criminals. As for Israel, the DSA calls for an end to all U.S. military and economic aid, prosecution of American and Israeli leaders over what many consider a genocide in Gaza, and recognition of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

The DSA is just as blunt about reimagining how the government works. The platform seeks statehood for Washington, D.C., self-determination for U.S. territories, and the abolition of both the Electoral College and the Senate, alongside an expanded House and a presidency and Supreme Court that answer to Congress instead of operating independently. The DSA wants to swap the two-party system for proportional representation and ranked-choice voting and pay for all of it through full public financing of every election.

And, to top it all off, the platform calls for slavery reparations.

Fox News host Shannon Bream ran through the DSA’s platform position by position, true or false, no room to dodge. Romer never flinched. She confirmed that the Democratic Socialists of America’s platform calls for abolishing the Senate, replacing the presidency and Supreme Court, eliminating ICE, ending borders while granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, defunding the Pentagon, abolishing prisons as a long-term goal, and placing most large corporations under government or public ownership. At every step, she answered without hesitation, affirming that each position accurately reflected the DSA’s platform.

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Anthony Fauci pleaded the Fifth more than 100 times before Rand Paul’s committee Wednesday. A contempt vote is set for August 5. Here’s a sober look at what the law actually allows…

Wednesday morning’s hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee was, by any measure, extraordinary. Dr. Anthony Fauci, subpoenaed by Chairman Rand Paul after declining to appear voluntarily, announced in his opening statement that he would not be answering questions. He then proceeded to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times over the course of two-plus hours — including, at one point, in response to Senator Josh Hawley asking him to identify the color of his own tie. Paul had Fauci’s attorney escorted from the room after repeated interruptions, and by the end of the hearing announced that the committee will vote August 5 on holding Fauci in contempt of Congress.

Those are the documented facts. What follows is analysis, and I’ll be careful throughout to distinguish what the legal record actually establishes from what remains speculation — because on this question, there’s more genuinely unsettled law than either side wants to admit.

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Below is an expanded version of my column in the New York Post on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s press conference this week on his planned state-run grocery stores. The plan is a multimillion-dollar version of the $5 gold watch grift. The chumps are New York taxpayers who believe that Mamdani can sell them produce at a discount of 30 percent below the market rate and not lose money. Indeed, this could end up the most expensive produce in the Big Apple.

Here is the column:

Last week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s short stint as a faux president ended with an embarrassing acknowledgment that he could not, as promised during his campaign, arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

So, this week, Mamdani the Grocer made a reappearance, with details on the five city-run grocery stores that he will open.

But rather than deliver discount groceries, Mamdani is selling New Yorkers a bill of goods that will cost them millions.

What Mamdani described was a discount food bank dressed up as a grocery. Standing in front of blackboards saying “REDUCED 30%,” Mamdani sounded like a bodega hawker: “Once a month, our five city-run grocery stores will set prices for this core set of goods at 30% below typical retail prices. No exceptions, no gimmicks”

Here’s the most delicious part: the presser was a gimmick from beginning to end.

The mayor promised that “The savings will last for the entire month. That means no weekly fluctuations or sticker shock at the checkout line — not for our seniors living on fixed incomes, nor for the parents who rely on a regular supply of apple slices to keep toddler tantrums at bay.”

The Mamdani markets are new variations of an old New York grift: selling gold watches for $5. The dupes want to believe that somehow this street vendor, surreptitiously displaying watches inside his overcoat, actually found a way to sell “solid gold watches” for just a few bucks.

The math simply does not add up for Mamdani. Most groceries have an average profit margin between 1% and 3%, one of the smallest margins of any industry.

To promise a 30% discount below market rate that cannot be adjusted due to monthly market fluctuations is economically absurd.

It is not a description of a competitive grocery but a public charity. It is a quasi-food bank where taxpayers subsidize the cost.

As usual, Mamdani turns this into a class war, demonizing business owners. He suggests that real grocery stores are simply price gougers hoarding windfall profits from consumers. He ignores that they must pay rent, upkeep and fees — all things the city-run stores may simply write off.

He proclaimed, “May the most affordable grocery store win.”

Of course, the test is not which grocery is the most affordable, but which is the most sustainable. If you are willing to take a bath on sales, you can always offer the most affordable prices for as long as your excess cash holds out.

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We’ve just been treated to the spectacle of Dr. Anthony Fauci being grilled in front of a Senate hearing, chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who is a medical doctor himself. The gist of all the fuss around Fauci, of course, is his possible involvement in the development, or at least the funding of, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. This lab is the suspected origin of the COVID-19 virus, and is known to have been involved in potentially deadly gain-of-function research, with funding from the United States – which made up much of the questioning, that Anthony Fauci refused to answer.

Now, the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattasharya, has announced that the NIH is adopting a risk-based policy, which they are calling the “U.S. Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research.”

The X post reads in full:

During my confirmation hearing, I pledged to the American public that I would implement strong and transparent oversight of NIH-supported research.

Now, I am pleased to share the new U.S. Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research, a groundbreaking government-wide mandate that expressly prohibits gain-of-function research which can significantly endanger American lives and jeopardize our Nation’s security.

You can view the full statement here. Here’s the key part of that:

This groundbreaking government-wide policy establishes, for the first time, an explicit prohibition on dangerous gain-of-function research which can significantly endanger American lives and pose substantial risk to our Nation’s security.

The new U.S. Government-wide policy represents a paradigm shift in federal oversight by adopting a comprehensive, risk-based framework supported by strong enforcement, accountability, and transparency measures. In addition to the ban on federal support for dangerous gain-of-function research, the policy introduces enhanced review and reporting requirements for all life sciences research, including independent, top-down assessments for projects that may increase the harmful consequences of biological agents.

The policy also strengthens global safeguards by instituting new international restrictions, including banning life sciences research involving certain countries or entities and prohibiting high-risk work in countries lacking adequate oversight.

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