Socialist Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson FIRES Police Chief Shon Barnes Days After He Went Missing in Action During Deadly Bite of Seattle Festival Mass Shooting

Seattle’s far-left Mayor Katie Wilson reportedly fired Police Chief Shon Barnes on Wednesday night, just days after a deadly mass shooting rocked the city and triggered fierce scrutiny of City Hall’s disastrous response.

According to five sources who spoke to FOX 13 Seattle, Barnes began texting people Wednesday evening about his dismissal.

He had been scheduled for one-on-one media interviews that afternoon, but those were abruptly canceled. Barnes appeared at a silent vigil for the victims around 6:30 p.m., placed flowers, then left abruptly for a meeting with the mayor, after which he was told to resign.

According to KIRO Newsradio, Barnes reportedly refused to resign.

Investigative journalist Brandi Kruse reported that, according to her sources, Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes has been told to resign or be fired and could be out as early as Thursday, while officers reportedly describe City Hall as being in “absolute, rudderless chaos.”

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FDA Continues Its Legacy of Radical Delays on FOIA Requests

We fund the government. We pay the salaries of its employees. They work for us—though they often seem to forget that. One of the ways we keep tabs on what they are doing is a tool called the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Congress passed this law specifically so that anyone can request emails, documents, records, etc., regarding the work our government is doing.

For years now, FDA has been dragging its feet when it comes to producing documents in response to FOIA requests. And not just dragging its feet—burying them in concrete. So much so that my firm has brought over 100 lawsuits against the federal government, on behalf of ICAN, just to get documents that should clearly have been produced. And even then, the government still drags its feet, wasting taxpayer money fighting us in court to generate more delay.

The 21-year FOIA request

Many of you are likely familiar with the FOIA case we filed for the Covid-19 vaccine licensure documents in which FDA wanted 75 years to produce the documents! Sadly, that was not an outlier. It was business as usual for the government in responding to FOIA requests.

Here is just one other example of FDA’s FOIA behavior. In a court filing on January 30, 2026, FDA told a federal judge that the FOIA request at issue, which was originally submitted on January 26, 2024, was “currently positioned 471” in the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) Complex Track. Meaning, it was behind 470 other requests. FDA then conceded it “cannot reasonably estimate” when that request will reach the top of the track. Let that sink in. It cannot even estimate when it will comply with the law.

It gets worse. FDA then asked the Court to pause the litigation for “at least eighteen months, through and including June 25, 2027.” By then, FDA explained, it “anticipates” that it “will be in a better position to evaluate when it might be able to respond” to the FOIA request. Read that again. It doesn’t even commit to producing the documents by 2027—instead that’s the date it will evaluate the request’s status. That is not a commitment. That is a dodge.

While FDA pretends it cannot provide an estimate, we can reasonably estimate when it will produce these documents based on recent movement in the queue. In a 6-month period, the request at issue advanced just 11 positions in the queue—from number 482 to 471. If that rate continues, it will take more than 21 years before this request reaches the top of CBER’s Complex Track.

So much for transparency. And this is a FOIA request under the jurisdiction of a federal court. Imagine those requests that are stuck at the administrative levels.

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“YOU’VE BEEN SERVED!” MI Sec of State Jocelyn Benson Served By Former MI Attorney General Over Potential Involvement In Funding Hate Groups Like KKK While Member of SPLC Board

MCR Special Teams and the Mike Cox law firm served Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson with Southern Poverty Law Center-related court papers on Wednesday evening.

Former Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox recently dropped his bid for the Republican candidate for governor. The highly unpopular Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is the likely Democratic candidate running for governor after being term-limited as Secretary of State.

Jocelyn Benson, who the Gateway Pundit frequently refers to as “America’s most dishonest Secretary of State,” is familiar with lawsuits. Benson has been involved in 69 election-related lawsuits during her time as Secretary of State. That is more than the combined total of the previous four Secretaries of State.

In addition to fighting an onslaught of election integrity-related lawsuits during her corrupt reign as Michigan’s top election official, it looks like she is about to be defending herself in yet another lawsuit. This time, Benson will potentially have to explain her role as a board member of the Southern Poverty Law Center during the same time the group has been accused in a federal lawsuit of paying hate groups like the KKK.

According to a federal indictment unsealed in April 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice charged the Southern Poverty Law Center with wire fraud, false statements, and related offenses.

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US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference

A U.S. government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a State Department presentation at ‌a global conference taking place in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attendees who took screenshots and posted them online.

Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map ​displayed halfway during a presentation about the State Department’s new health agreements.

A Reuters analysis found the ​image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that ⁠signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company said it was investigating the report.

The State Department said ​it took “full responsibility” for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who ​hastily changed the slide deck before the event.

The map showed Nigeria, where the U.S. currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara Desert. Mozambique, which is in southeastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Ivory ​Coast in West Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.

Screenshots of the map first appeared ​in a Substack post by AIDS expert Emily Bass and were widely shared on LinkedIn, with one post garnering some ‌40,000 views.

“Whoever ⁠created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work,” wrote Matt Petit, who focuses on AI and geopolitics at the Atlantic Council, in the post.

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Covering Medical Marijuana Through Workers’ Compensation Can Improve Health And Reduce Opioid Use, Government Study Suggests

Covering the costs of medical marijuana through workers’ compensation could be a “viable” option that improves health outcomes and leads to voluntary reductions in opioid use, according to a study led by Colorado state officials.

The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment’s Division of Workers’ Compensation (DOWC) conducted the first-of-its-kind experiment as part of its Alternative Pain Management Program, following a rigorously screened chronic pain patient for a year to assess the potential impact of medical cannabis reimbursements.

The study, published in the Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine, resulted in “meaningful life improvements,” no adverse events and voluntary reductions in opioid use.

The patient who received compensation for non-inhalable cannabis reported lower pain levels, as well as improved physical functioning, quality of life and psychosocial stability. The reduction in opioid use, which did not involve any tapering requirements, was initially “modest.”

“Due to improved symptom control under clinical supervision, the participant voluntarily reduced monthly opioid intake by 17%,” Colorado officials said. “Since the final compilation of the study’s data, the participant successfully transitioned off both opioids and THC completely, relying only on less psychoactive cannabinoids.”

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Russian Missile Strikes NATO Soil In Poland As Moscow Launches Widest Ukraine Assault Yet

In the early hours of Thursday, July 30th, something happened that NATO’s bureaucrats in Brussels are desperately hoping you will not dwell on: a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile crossed the Polish border during Moscow’s massive overnight assault on Ukraine and detonated in a field near Targowisko in eastern Poland, roughly 100 kilometers from the Ukrainian frontier. The explosion left a crater reported by multiple outlets to be approximately ten meters wide — 33 feet of scorched earth sitting inside sovereign NATO territory. Polish authorities confirmed they are investigating after the crater was discovered on Polish soil, and Warsaw scrambled fighter jets to secure its airspace alongside allied aircraft, according to Reuters.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha stated directly that the Russian Kh-101 cruise missile “violated NATO airspace” and crossed into Poland, per Ukrainian officials cited by Ukrainian news outlet UNN. The BBC confirmed that Ukraine’s foreign ministry said the missile had “crossed into Poland” as part of the broader attack, “violating NATO airspace.” Poland confirmed the crater but as of publication was still formally investigating its origin — the careful diplomatic hedging of a government that knows exactly what happened and also knows that saying so plainly drags NATO to the edge of its Article 5 cliff.

The Russian barrage that spawned the Polish incident was itself one of the most extensive strikes of the entire war. According to NBC News and Reuters reporting as of the morning of July 30th, Russian air strikes killed at least 13 to 14 people across Ukraine on Thursday, including one person in Kyiv, with attacks stretching as far west as Lviv — a city not known for frontline exposure and just 70 kilometers from the Polish border.

The timing is not incidental. Russia launched this particular assault on the same day Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were both at the White House for back-to-back meetings with President Trump — meetings organized, in part, around the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham and the continuing Iran war. Moscow clearly chose this moment deliberately, striking at maximum diplomatic noise to test whether Washington’s attention was elsewhere.

What makes the Polish crater especially significant is what it reveals about the state of NATO’s collective nerve. Article 5 of the NATO treaty — the alliance’s foundational mutual defense clause — states that an attack on one member is an attack on all. A Russian missile detonating on Polish territory is, by any plain reading of that clause, exactly the kind of event Article 5 was written for. And yet NATO’s response, as of this writing, has been to carefully avoid saying so. Alliance officials have called for “investigations.” Warsaw has called for “verification.” Brussels has issued statements urging “calm.” The hedging is deliberate and revealing: NATO is not ready to invoke Article 5 over a single missile crater, and everyone — including Moscow — knows it.

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Texas Orders Discord to Run UK-Style Age Checks for State Users

A Texas court has ordered Discord to turn on the age-verification system it built for the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act for every user in the state. Britain’s age-check regime has reached America by court order, and opening or keeping a Discord account in Texas can now mean a face scan or a government ID.

The agreed temporary injunction, signed by a Collin County judge, gives Discord 90 days to extend its age-assurance and default settings to Texas.

We obtained a copy of the temporary injunction for you here.

The company can still ask the court for more time if it shows the deadline is not feasible. Discord must serve the Texas Attorney General’s Office a confidential progress report every 30 days until it complies, and the order binds the company until final judgment, enforceable by contempt. The order lets Discord identify Texas users from data it already holds rather than gather new categories of personal information.

Today a Texan opens an account with an email address and a self-reported birthday, nothing more. The injunction imports that system instead. By Discord’s own published account, more than 90 percent of users are never asked to confirm their age, facial age estimation runs on the user’s own phone, and identity documents go to a third-party vendor rather than to Discord. The reassurance holds only for the users the system never questions. For everyone else, the account now comes with a face scan or a government ID handed to an outside company.

Under the order, Discord must route messages from strangers into a separate request inbox and block sensitive content for Texas teens unless it confirms the user is an adult. It must also close adult-only spaces to anyone it has not age-assured, according to the attorney general’s office. The state says these are the protections Discord already gives British children under the Online Safety Act and withheld from Texas.

Texas’s expert told the court that extending Discord’s existing safety features to the state was “just a matter of turning it on for Texas.” Discord runs the age-assurance system in the UK, Australia, and Brazil, its witnesses testified. In Texas the company still relies on a self-reported birthday at signup, a fact it did not dispute for the order.

Discord announced in February 2026 that it would roll its protections out worldwide, with the US launch only weeks away. Then it pulled back, telling the public the rollout would wait until the second half of 2026.

Attorney General Ken Paxton called the ruling a historic victory. “Discord built a platform where adult predators could hunt Texas children, then looked parents in the eye and told them it was safe,” he said in a statement. His office says Discord submitted 489,782 reports of suspected child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2025, more than 1,300 a day. Under cross-examination, Discord’s lawyers drew out that those reports largely amount to the company flagging crimes it finds on its own platform and passing them to the center.

New Jersey sued before Texas did, and Nevada, Indiana, and Arkansas have taken their own legal action. Texas filed on May 22, 2026, and won a restraining order within weeks. The case heads to a trial on the merits set for June 2027, where the state will seek civil penalties under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which can reach $10,000 per violation.

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Massachusetts Lawmakers Create DEI Hiring Program to Give Muslims Priority for State Jobs

Liberal lawmakers in true-blue Massachusetts are creating a new commission which is essentially a DEI hiring program that will benefit Muslims looking for state jobs.

When did it even become the job of lawmakers to do anything like this? And why do it specifically for Muslims? It doesn’t even sound legal.

It’s just another reminder of what comes with one-party rule.

FOX News reports:

DEI hiring boost for one blue state’s Muslim commission initiative flies in face of Trump’s anti-woke push

Massachusetts lawmakers are taking steps toward prioritizing the hiring of American Muslims for state government positions under a permanent so-called Muslim commission.

The group would help recommend Americans who practice Islam to appointed government positions in the New England state at the same time the Trump administration is moving to dismantle such diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs nationwide — teeing-up a standoff between local leaders and the president.

A proposed bill would create a panel of 11 Muslims appointed by Democratic Gov. Maura Healey and other state officials to represent the Islamic faith on issues such as business, economy, healthcare and other concerns.

The Muslim commission would influence government recruiting and, “Identify and recommend qualified American Muslims for appointive positions at all levels of government, including boards and commissions, as the commission considers necessary and appropriate,” according to language in the bill.

“Massachusetts has always prided itself on being a leader in equality and civil rights, a legacy this bill builds upon,” said Democratic state Sen. Jamie Eldridge, the bill’s primary sponsor.


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Fauci’s most heinous crime: advancing fake science in pursuit of societal ruin

Sen Rand Paul (R-KY) has released 1,141 pages of Anthony Fauci’s private covid era diaries, and on Wednesday he will haul the man before the Senate Homeland Security Committee under subpoena. Sen Paul should be applauded for his heroic persistence in holding Fauci accountable, and he has spent the past few days discussing the distinction between what the longtime government bureaucrat wrote privately and what he told the public. That is indeed a true scandal.

Yet it’s not the lab-leak question and the real, widespread confusion surrounding those early days of hysteria that is the scandal here. What we lived through was a seasonal respiratory outbreak converted by an unaccountable bureaucracy and a compliant press into the largest episode of mass hysteria in modern American history. The pathogen was not a significant part of the covid story. The panic and hysteria that resulted in civilizational disruption is.

Agree with my premise or not, but on top of that, Fauci’s “mitigation” record is still indefensible, and Fauci has already admitted it under oath.

In January 2024, in a closed-door transcribed interview with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci was asked where the six-foot rule came from. His answer, released in full that May: “I don’t recall. It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall, like, a discussion of whether it should be 5 or 6 or whatever.” Asked whether he had seen any studies supporting six feet, he said he was not aware of any, and that such a study would be very difficult to do. He called it an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data, or even on data that could be gathered. Asked whether he recalled reviewing any studies on masking young children, he could not.

Now remember what six feet actually did.

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Brampton PC MPP Hardeep Grewal billed taxpayers nearly $20,000 for Toronto hotels

Ontario PC MPP Hardeep Grewal charged taxpayers nearly $20,000 for hotel stays in downtown Toronto despite representing a Brampton riding less than 50 kilometres from Queen’s Park.

Grewal, the MPP for Brampton East and Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of Transportation, submitted $19,827.73 in hotel expense claims between 2023 and 2026 under the legislature’s “special circumstances” accommodation policy.

The policy is intended for exceptional situations, such as severe weather or other emergencies that prevent an MPP from returning home. However, a review of expense records by Global News found most of the claims occurred during the spring and fall legislative sessions, suggesting the hotel stays had become routine rather than exceptional.

Grewal’s constituency office is approximately 43 kilometres from Queen’s Park.

Premier Doug Ford’s office has since said that any hotel expenses that did not meet the intent of the rules will be repaid to taxpayers.

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