Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

60-Year-Old British Tourist Charged Along with 20 Others in Dubai for Filming Iranian Missiles Despite Deleting the Video Immediately

A 60-year-old British tourist from London was detained and formally charged in Dubai under the United Arab Emirates’ strict cybercrime laws after allegedly recording Iranian missiles flying over the city.

The man, whose identity has not been revealed, is part of a group of 21 people of various nationalities being prosecuted for the same reason: recording and sharing material related to recent Iranian missile and drone attacks that have struck Emirati territory.

According to reports confirmed by British authorities and the organization Detained in Dubai, the tourist was arrested on Monday, March 9, 2026, in the Bur Dubai area.

Police found a video on his phone showing an Iranian missile impact in Dubai, although the man claims he deleted it immediately when confronted by the authorities and denies any intention of publishing or distributing it.

Nevertheless, he was charged with “using an information network or technological tool to disseminate, publish, republish, or circulate false news, rumors, or provocative propaganda that may incite public opinion or disturb public security.”

The invoked Emirati law expressly prohibits publishing or sharing any material that may “disturb public security.”

The UAE Attorney General’s Office had previously issued warnings: “Photographing or sharing attack sites, unreliable information, or images of projectile damage may lead to legal action and compromise national security.”

Since the start of the current conflict between Iran, the United States, and Israel on February 28, 2026, the Emirates have reported more than 1,800 drones and missiles launched against their territory, resulting in six deaths and 141 injuries.

The Emirati Ministry of Defense and senior officials, including the ambassador to the United Kingdom Mansoor Abulhoul, justified the measures as citizen protection: preventing missile fragments from falling on those filming and avoiding panic or the disclosure of defensive positions.

The British Embassy in Abu Dhabi immediately published an official alert on X: “UAE authorities warn against photographing, posting, or sharing images of incident sites, projectile damage, government buildings, or diplomatic missions. British nationals are subject to UAE laws; violations may lead to fines, imprisonment, or deportation.”

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CDC Buried COVID Vaccine Death Data In Lancet Study, Internal Documents Reveal

Researchers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) altered their own study on COVID-19 vaccine adverse events to downplay deaths linked to the shots, according to documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD).

CHD sued the CDC in 2023 to obtain the documents after the agency failed to respond to CHD’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The 100-page document tranche included an earlier draft of the CDC study that differed significantly from the version the authors published in June 2022 in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD senior research scientist, who analyzed the FOIA documents, said the CDC “severely edited” the study “to promote safety and to de-emphasize death.”

The first four words of the draft’s title were “Reactogenicity and Adverse Events.” However, the published version’s title began with “Safety of mRNA vaccines.”

Reactogenicity refers to the side effects or adverse events someone experiences after taking a vaccine or medication.

The study authors, members of the CDC’s COVID-19 Response Team, analyzed reports of adverse events following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination during the first 6 months of the vaccine rollout in the U.S.

The researchers pulled the reports from two federal vaccine safety monitoring systems — the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and V-safe.

Although there were 4,496 deaths reported to VAERS during that time frame, the study authors stripped details about the deaths from the article’s abstract.

The lead study author, Dr. Hannah Rosenblum, wrote in a comment on the draft, “Note all death results/interpretation has been removed from abstract.”

That’s a big deal, Jablonowski said — because the abstract, which appears at the top of a study and summarizes it, is typically read much more than the full body of an article.

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Newly-Elected Idaho Mayor Dies While Giving Town Hall Speech

A newly-elected mayor in Idaho died while giving a town hall speech on Wednesday.

Idaho News reported that Nampa Mayor Rick Hogaboam, 47, experienced a medical emergency on Wednesday evening while giving a speech during a regional town hall event.

The Treasure Valley Partnership reported that Hogaboam received CPR from Eagle Mayor Brad Pike, who is a former firefighter, but despite the rescue efforts, Hogaboam was later pronounced dead.

Details on what led to Hogaboam’s sudden medical emergency are currently under investigation.

er The New York Post:

A newly elected Idaho mayor died after he collapsed mid-speech during a town hall meeting — as another elected leader tried to save his life.

Nampa Mayor Rick Hogaboam suffered a “medical emergency” while speaking around 6:45 p.m. Wednesday in Eagle, Idaho, according to Idaho News.

Eagle Mayor Brad Pike, who was sitting next to the 47-year-old politician, was the first to administer CPR.

The Treasure Valley Partnership town hall meeting was adjourned as the politician was being treated by cops, fire crews and medics who rushed to the scene.

In his last Facebook post, Hogaboam posted a picture of himself attending a fire training event at a Nampa firefighter training facility.

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Researchers uncover iPhone spyware capable of penetrating millions of devices

A powerful software exploit capable of penetrating and stealing information from potentially hundreds of millions of Apple (AAPL.O), opens new tab iPhones ‌was planted on dozens of websites in Ukraine in recent weeks, researchers said on Wednesday.

The discovery marks the second time this month that researchers have found spyware targeting iPhones and other Apple devices. Together, the two hacking tools show that the market for sophisticated malware capable of stealing data and cryptocurrency wallet information ​is flourishing, researchers said.

Researchers with cyber firm Lookout, opens new tab, mobile security firm iVerify, opens new tab and Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O), opens new tabGoogle, opens new tab published coordinated analyses of the malware they dubbed “Darksword.” ​On March 3, Google and iVerify revealed a separate powerful iPhone spyware called “Coruna.” Researchers found Darksword hosted on ⁠the same servers.

“There’s now a verified pipeline of recent exploits … that have ended up in the hands of potentially criminal entities with ​a financial focus,” said Justin Albrecht, principal researcher with Lookout.

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Blocking the Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase the Web’s Historical Record

Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper. 

That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive—the world’s largest digital library—has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s. The Archive’s mission is to preserve the web and make it accessible to the public. To that end, the organization operates the Wayback Machine, which now contains more than one trillion archived web pages and is used daily by journalists, researchers, and courts.

But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web’s traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists have relied on for decades. Other newspapers, including The Guardian, seem to be following suit. 

For nearly three decades, historians, journalists, and the public have relied on the Internet Archive to preserve news sites as they appeared online. Those archived pages are often the only reliable record of how stories were originally published. In many cases, articles get edited, changed, or removed—sometimes openly, sometimes not. The Internet Archive often becomes the only source for seeing those changes. When major publishers block the Archive’s crawlers, that historical record starts to disappear.

The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several—including the Times—are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There’s a strong case that such training is fair use. 

Whatever the outcome of those lawsuits, blocking nonprofit archivists is the wrong response. Organizations like the Internet Archive are not building commercial AI systems. They are preserving a record of our history. Turning off that preservation in an effort to control AI access could essentially torch decades of historical documentation over a fight that libraries like the Archive didn’t start, and didn’t ask for. 

If publishers shut the Archive out, they aren’t just limiting bots. They’re erasing the historical record. 

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Pentagon seeks $200 billion in additional funds for the Iran war, AP source says

The Pentagon is seeking $200 billion in additional funds for the Iran war, a sizable amount that is certain to be met with questions from Congress, which would need to approve any new money.

The department sent the request to the White House, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private information. Asked about the figure at a press conference Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not directly confirm the amount, saying it could change.

“It takes money to kill bad guys,” Hegseth said.

But he said “we’re going back to Congress and our folks there to ensure that we’re properly funded.”

It’s an extraordinarily high number and comes on top of extra funding the Defense Department already received last year in President Donald Trump’s big tax cuts bill. Such a request would need to be approved by Congress, and it is not at all clear such spending would have political support. The nation’s debt has surged past a record $39 trillion.

Congress has been bracing for a new spending request but it is not clear the White House has transmitted the request for consideration. Lawmakers have not authorized the war, and Congress is showing growing unease with the military operation’s scope and strategy.

The new funding request was first reported by The Washington Post.

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UK Regulator Ofcom Has Fined 4chan £520,000 Under a Law That Doesn’t Apply in the US

Ofcom has now fined 4chan £520,000 ($691,572) under the Online Safety Act. The platform hasn’t paid a penny and isn’t intending to. Its lawyer replied to the latest demand with a picture of a hamster.

That’s the state of UK online speech regulation in 2026: a regulator issuing fines to American websites, receiving rodent-themed correspondence in return, and collecting almost nothing.

The breakdown: £450,000 for failing to put age verification in place, £50,000 for failing to assess the risk of illegal material being published, and £20,000 for failing to set out in its terms of service how it protects users from criminal content. Ofcom says 4chan must comply by April 2 or face daily penalties on top.

But this confrontation and push for 4chan to start checking IDs didn’t start with a £520,000 fine. It started with an email sent across the Atlantic to a company that owes the UK government nothing.

4chan is an American platform. Its registered in Delaware. Its servers are in the United States. It has no employees in Britain, no offices in Britain, no legal registration in Britain, and no business presence of any kind in Britain. It is, in every meaningful sense, none of Ofcom’s business.

And what good would the First Amendment be if it could be overridden by foreign demands?

When the Online Safety Act came into full force, Ofcom declared that any site with “links to the UK” had duties to protect UK users, regardless of where in the world it was based.

That phrase, “links to the UK,” is intentionally vague, allowing British authorities to demand compliance from virtually any website. Under that logic, any American platform that a British person can visit is subject to UK speech law. No presence required. No UK operations required. Ofcom thinks it has jurisdiction over planet Earth.

Beginning in April 2025, Ofcom sent a “legally binding information notice” to 4chan’s corporate services company, by email, demanding compliance with the Online Safety Act and threatening that failure could “constitute a criminal offence” resulting in a fine of £18 million or 10% of 4chan’s worldwide turnover, arrest, and imprisonment for up to two years.

The notice was sent to a company not authorized to accept service on 4chan’s behalf. No UK court had issued it. No treaty process had been followed. It was, legally speaking, a strongly worded email.

Preston Byrne, the attorney representing 4chan, described the regulator’s actions as “an illegal campaign of harassment” directed at American tech firms, and made clear his client would not comply: “4chan has broken no laws in the United States, my client will not pay any penalty.”

By June 2025, Ofcom had opened a formal investigation.

Byrne’s reply was characteristically direct: “Increasing the size of a censorship fine does not cure its legal invalidity in the United States.” He continued: “After an entire year of your agency’s spectacular failure to get the memo, my only suggestion is that you take a first-year course on U.S. constitutional law.”

In August 2025, 4chan and Kiwi Farms took the fight to the US federal courts. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, argues that the Online Safety Act is not only an unlawful extraterritorial power grab but a direct attack on foundational American liberties. The complaint states: “Where Americans are concerned, the Online Safety Act purports to legislate the Constitution out of existence.”

The platforms argue that Ofcom’s demands, including written “risk assessments,” content moderation systems, removal of speech deemed “illegal” by UK standards, and user identity verification, would require violating the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Byrne told reporters: “American citizens do not surrender our constitutional rights just because Ofcom sends us an email.”

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Outrage as Texas town official spends $5,000 of taxpayers’ cash on OZEMPIC

A tiny Texas town has been rocked by a bizarre spending scandal after thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds were used to purchase weight-loss drugs and items from TikTok Shop.

Mayor Ken Padilla of Campbell, a small city in Hunt County with fewer than 1,000 residents, confirmed that roughly 150 unauthorized credit card charges were made between 2024 and 2025 that totaled more than $28,000.

Eyebrow-raising purchases include over $5,000 spent on GLP-1 weight-loss medications such as Ozempic, along with another $5,000 on items from TikTok Shop, Fox 4 reports.

The spending spree amounts to about 3.5 percent of the city’s annual budget, raising serious concerns about oversight and accountability in the tight-knit community.

City Secretary Trisha Lowery, who was hired after the transactions occurred, told a tense city council meeting on Monday that officials still cannot determine who made the charges.

‘I cannot tell you one way or the other who made these transactions. Obviously, we all have our own opinion on who did them and how they transpired,’ Lowery said. 

‘There has to be some sort of individual identifying information that says this person used this card.’

Padilla refused to comment further due to the pending investigation. 

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Neanderthals may have used birch tar for its anti-bacterial properties, experiments suggest

Neanderthals probably used birch tar for multiple functions, including treating their wounds, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS One by a team of researchers led by Tjaark Siemssen of the University of Cologne, Germany, and the University of Oxford, U.K.

Birch tar is commonly found at Neanderthal archaeological sites, and in some cases this tar is known to have been used as an adhesive to assemble tools.

Recently, some researchers have raised the question of whether Neanderthals had multiple uses for this substance. For instance, Indigenous communities in northern Europe and Canada use birch tar to treat wounds, and there is growing evidence that Neanderthals also employed a variety of medical practices.

To investigate the medicinal potential of birch tar, Siemssen and colleagues extracted tar from modern birch tree bark, specifically targeting species known from Neanderthal sites.

They used multiple extraction methods, including distillation of tar in a clay pit and condensation of tar against a stone surface, both of which would have been methods available to Neanderthals. When exposed to different strains of bacteria, all of the tar samples were found to be effective at hindering the growth of Staphylococcus bacteria known to cause wound infections.

These experiments not only support the efficacy of Indigenous medicinal practices, but also reinforce the possibility that Neanderthals used birch tar to treat wounds.

The authors note that there are other potential uses of birch tar, such as insect repellent, as well as other plants to which Neanderthals had access. Further exploration of the multiple potential uses of these natural ingredients will enable a more thorough understanding of Neanderthal culture.

The authors add, “We found that the birch tar produced by Neanderthals and early humans had antibacterial properties. This has important implications for how Neanderthals may have mitigated disease burden during the last Ice Ages, and adds to a growing set of evidence on health care in these early human communities.”

“By bringing together research on indigenous pharmacology and experimental archaeology, we begin to understand the medicinal practices of our distant human ancestors and their closest cousins. Additionally, this study of ‘palaeopharmacology‘ can contribute to the rediscovery of antibiotic remedies while we face an ever more pressing antimicrobial resistance crisis.”

“The messiness of birch tar production deserves a special mention. Every step of the production is a sensory experience in itself, and getting the tar off our hands after spending hours at the fire has been a challenge every time.”

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Court Backs First-Grader in Suit Over School Reaction to ‘Any Life’ Matters Drawing

Can a “schoolyard dispute” warrant federal court intervention? Do first-graders have First Amendment rights? The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit just gave a resounding yes to both questions.

The case centers on a first-grader identified in court documents as B.B. After her teacher read a story about Martin Luther King Jr., B.B. drew a picture of her and her multiracial friend group. “Black Lives Mater [sic] any life,” it said. Sweet, right?

Apparently not to the administrators at Viejo Elementary School in California’s Capistrano Unified School District. The school’s principal, Jesus Becerra, spoke with B.B. about her drawing, allegedly telling her that it was inappropriate. According to B.B., she was also barred from recess for two weeks.

B.B.’s mother, Chelsea Boyle, sued, alleging that her daughter’s First Amendment rights had been violated.

A federal district court sided with the school and Becerra, holding that B.B.’s drawing was not protected by the First Amendment. “This schoolyard dispute—like most—does not warrant federal court intervention,” wrote U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in the court’s 2024 opinion.

Now, the 9th Circuit has weighed in and reversed course. “We hold that elementary students’ speech is protected by the First Amendment,” the appeals court ruled, vacating the lower court’s decision and sending the case back for reconsideration.

“Schools may restrict students’ speech only when the restriction is reasonably necessary to protect the safety and well-being of its students,” the 9th Circuit judges wrote.

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