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.

More of Connecticut’s AI Law Takes Effect. Lawmakers Already Say It Doesn’t Regulate Enough

More provisions of Connecticut’s artificial intelligence (AI) law, Public Act 26-15, take effect today (Oct. 1), with broader workplace requirements scheduled to begin next year. 

While Connecticut is still implementing the law, legislators are already considering another round of AI regulations. Legislative leaders want tougher rules for AI developers, while labor unions are seeking additional protections for workers affected by the technology. 

Connecticut could be writing another set of AI rules before the largest provisions of its current law have had a chance to take effect. 

What Takes Effect October 1 

The first change concerns large layoffs. Under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, certain employers must give advance notice of a mass layoff or plant closing. Starting today, an employer sending that notice to Connecticut’s Department of Labor must also disclose whether the layoffs are related to its use of AI or another technological change. 

The requirement does not prevent a layoff. It could, however, give the state a better record of where technology is changing employment. 

Employers also remain responsible for discriminatory employment decisions made with automated technology. If a company uses software to screen applicants, it cannot dismiss a discrimination claim by saying the computer made it do it. 

For consumers, companies that make generative AI systems with more than 1 million monthly users and sell subscriptions in Connecticut must spell out key terms, including limits on use and whether they can reduce or cut off access. Customers must accept those terms in writing when they sign up or renew.

Large AI providers face another rule. When technically and commercially reasonable, they must include information that helps identify certain images, audio and video as computer-generated. 

State agencies can still put AI to work, but they must follow state standards when using it to deliver public assistance or perform work that could significantly affect residents’ rights, safety or welfare. Agencies authorized to purchase AI must complete an impact assessment.

Software helping staff answer routine questions is one thing. Software involved in a family’s benefits is another. 

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DOJ Sues University for Penalizing Americans with High Tuition, Putting ‘Illegal Aliens Over U.S. Citizens’

The University of Delaware is being sued by the Department of Justice for giving illegal immigrants a tuition discount to which they are not entitled.

The school allows illegal immigrants to qualify for the lower tuition rate charged for Delaware residents, according to a Justice Department news release.

American citizens who do not live in Delaware do not qualify, the release said, leading to a situation where illegal immigrants are given preference over Americans.

The University of Delaware allows illegal immigrants to attend at a tuition rate of $15,740, the rate for state residents. The rate for students from outside of the state is $42,470.

“This Department of Justice’s efforts will not cease until we have challenged every state law or university policy that gives preferential treatment to illegal aliens over our Nation’s own citizens,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. said in the release.

“Congress long ago made clear that states cannot give reduced tuition to illegal aliens not available to all Americans. When a state Attorney General allows her own state to violate federal law, this department must step in to enforce it,” he continued.

Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division said that “this is a simple matter of federal law: colleges cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens.”

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DOJ Seeks $61M in Iranian Oil Proceeds Laundered Through Binance Accounts

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed to forfeit $61 million in crypto it says was generated from Iranian black-market oil sales.

The U.S. Department of Justice said Monday it is seizing and seeking to forfeit $61 million in cryptocurrency that it alleges came from black-market sales of sanctioned Iranian oil.

That sum is a fraction of the operation prosecutors describe in the civil forfeiture complaint. A cluster of self-custodied wallets received and distributed more than $1.5 billion in oil proceeds, routing funds to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-linked businesses, other crypto addresses and an Iranian exchange, according to the filing. Two China-based firms, Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale, allegedly used trading accounts at Binance to launder proceeds and funnel them to the Iranian government and its proxies.

It comes after the U.S. tries to crack down on Iran’s use of the leading cryptocurrency: the U.S. in July said that it had frozen crypto linked to the Iranian regime, mostly in the form of Tether’s stablecoin; Iran started a bitcoin-backed insurance service for its counties shipping companies earlier this year.

There was no mention of bitcoin in Monday’s claim — but the Iranian government is also using bitcoin to skirt around sanctions. Bitcoin has no issuer, so no blacklist function and bitcoin held without intermediaries can’t be frozen

“The Government of Iran relies on black-market sales of sanctioned crude oil to fund its military and foster terrorism in the Middle East and around the world, along with other malign efforts to develop a nuclear program and ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear payloads,” Deputy U.S. Attorney Sean S. Buckley said in a statement. 

“As alleged in the complaint filed today, the Government of Iran used a network of cryptocurrency actors in China and elsewhere to launder more than $1.5 billion in illicit oil money intended to benefit the Iranian military and the terror-designated IRGC.”

The filing alleges that the illicit oil money was laundered via Chinese companies Blessed Trust Limited and Hexa Whale Trading Limited.

Once the money was laundered, it was funneled back to Iran’s government, its agents, and its proxies, feds said. 

The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in July said Iran had been dodging sanctions by accepting pay in bitcoin from ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. 

OFAC said at the time that Hormuz Safe, developed by Iran’s Ministry of Economy, “accepts payment in bitcoin and other digital assets” so it can bypass sanctions. 

The Financial Times last week reported that the Middle Eastern country was using bitcoin to settle cross-border transactions through Iranian crypto exchanges after the central bank advised its countrymen to do anything necessary to help the economy.

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Pharma Spent Record $456.9 Million Last Year on Lobbying — With No Signs of Slowing Down

Big Pharma set a new record for lobbying spending in 2025 — and 2026 is shaping up to be another year of big spending, as the industry seeks to influence U.S. healthcare policy.

The pharmaceutical and health industry combined spent $456.9 million on lobbying expenses in 2025, according to OpenSecrets, up 16.7% from 2024. According to The Boston Globe (citing STAT), it was the largest-ever single-year increase in lobbying spending.

This spending was part of what OpenSecrets called a “record” $868 million in lobbying outlays by the healthcare sector in 2025.

Big Pharma’s leading trade group — the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) — led the way, spending nearly $38 million on lobbying last year, a 22% increase from 2024, according to Politico. PhRMA was joined by “nine of the 13 U.S. drugmakers on the Fortune 500,” who reported “their highest spending in at least a decade” on lobbying.

There are no signs of a slowdown. OpenSecrets data show the pharmaceutical industry has reported $245.7 million in lobbying expenses so far this year, part of the $459.3 million the health sector overall has spent in 2026.

PhRMA spent a reported $19.8 million in lobbying expenses in 2026, ranking third among business and trade organizations this year — a position it also held in 2025, when it spent $38.19 million.

Among drugmakers, Eli Lilly has spent over $7 million on lobbying this year. Pfizer has spent $6.62 million, and Merck has spent $6.58 million.

According to OpenSecrets, PhRMA’s record spending bucked the overall trend, in which “some of Washington’s biggest spenders, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Realtors, cut back from their 2024 lobbying expenditures.”

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Report: US Weighing Targeted Sanctions On Israel Over Settler Attacks In West Bank

The Trump administration is considering levying targeted sanctions against Israel over the rising phenomenon of attacks by armed settlers in the West Bank, reports Israeli progressive newspaper Haaretz.

According to that report, Senior US officials, including those in the president’s circle, have in recent months been receiving a unconventional and unusually harsh brief regarding Israel’s defense establishment. It does not merely repeat, day in and day out, the often-rehearsed mantra of “concern” over rising violence, nor does it limit itself to seriously worded official memoranda. Rather, those who are following the issue closely have come to the conclusion that there is a real possibility that either Israeli officials have a hand in the attacks or that they are failing in their duty to prevent them from taking place.

A number of steps are reportedly under consideration, including restrictions on IDF forces that are accused of causing severe harm to Palestinians, and possible restrictions on the use of US-made weapons by certain forces or in certain regions. There is even talk of blacklisting Israeli army officers and police officials suspected of allowing attacks by settlers to take place. The contemplated measures are, at this point, being held in abeyance pending the conduct of elections in both Israel and the US, Haaretz’s sources noted.

The report did not emanate from the White House nor from the Israeli government. Rather, it appeared in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which attributed the account to “sources” who were not identified by name. Months of US frustration with settler violence have apparently been building to this.

In August, the White House concluded that Israel was not taking settler attacks seriously enough, after a group of armed settlers laid a six-month siege on homes on the outskirts of the northern West Bank village of Qusra. One of the homes under siege belonged to the relatives of a US citizen, and Ambassador Mike Huckabee, a supporter of the settlement movement, this week called the individuals involved in the attacks “Israeli terrorists.”

The US embassy here pressed the Israeli government for arrests and prosecutions of those involved, rather than mere statements of condemnation of the violence. The Trump administration has generally taken a hands-off approach to the settlement issue, choosing not to criticize the Israelis over the matter, cancelling sanctions that were placed on individuals involved in violence against Palestinians on his first day back in office after the Biden transition.

Despite the Trump administration’s hands-off approach to the issue, however, reported violence by armed settlers in the West Bank has continued to escalate in recent months, with the conflict monitor ACLED reporting that 2026 is on track to become the most violent year for incidents of settler-related violence since it first began to monitor the West Bank a decade ago.

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Oman Banned FlyDubai Hijacker From Flying. So Why Was He?

FlyDubai has major questions to answer, because the anti-Israel terrorist who tried to hijack an airplane and crash it this week while acting as a FlyDubai copilot had a ban from his home country on flying because of his beliefs.

We already knew the airline company had messed up because pilots flying to Israel are not supposed to be from countries that do not have diplomatic ties with Israel, and Oman does not. So an Omani copilot should never have been on a flight to Tel Aviv. But now it appears the failure goes back much further, because FlyDubai didn’t even do enough background checking when hiring the copilot to discover that even pro-terrorist Oman thought he was too radical to pilot a plane.

Oman has been fairly consistently in support of the terrorist Iranian regime throughout this whole year of Iran’s domestic and international massacres, so the copilot must be extreme indeed if he is worse. Fox News reported Friday:

The FlyDubai co-pilot accused of stabbing the captain of a passenger jet mid-flight and nearly causing a catastrophic crash was grounded by Oman Air in 2024 after the airline discovered he had been visiting radical Islamic websites, according to a source familiar with the matter… Authorities believe the co-pilot moved to Dubai later that same year, according to the source, who also told Fox News the co-pilot spent a significant part of his life outside Oman, including with his mother, who is from Syria.

According to the source, FlyDubai did not check with Oman Air about the co-pilot before hiring him.

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REALLY? MSNOW Guest Suggests the Second Amendment Was About ‘Slave Patrols’

Left wing author Malcolm Gladwell recently appeared on MSNOW’s ‘Morning Joe’ and suggested that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees American citizens the right to bear arms, was really written about slave patrols.

He spends much of the segment complaining about the Supreme Court, which he says has been ‘a significant impediment’ in the left’s pursuit of gun control.

The most amazing thing is that what he is saying here is treated as completely normal by the hosts, who do not interrupt or correct him in any way.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

MIKE BARNICLE, MS NOW CONTRIBUTOR: What do you say about a culture, American culture, that when a disease is identified and it’s threatening and it’s killing people, you can talk about from the inception of polio vaccines through AIDS, we — we react, we find — we find a cure almost immediately. People feel relieved. Guns have been killing Americans on the streets for decades — decades. And there’s nothing we can do.

GLADWELL: Yeah. I mean, here I have two chapters in the book on the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court has been a significant impediment here. They have — the last two major gun rulings — in the Bruen case and the Heller case — are abominations. And I had — I actually have fun with them because in both of those cases, the court plays historian and plays linguist, because in the Heller case, of course, Scalia famously.

And the — and the fellow justices try to make sense of the grammatical convolution that is the Second Amendment, which, if you read, makes — no one would ever write that sentence today. It makes no sense whatsoever. It’s commas everywhere. There’s this weird initial what’s called an initial being clause. Does it modify the main clause? And all of these linguists lined up and told the court, “Okay, here’s how people in the 18th century used an initial being clause — here’s how James Madison used that clause. Here’s what James Madison meant.” What he meant was, we’re talking about militias here, and by militias he meant slave patrols, right? And the court had no interest.

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Iran’s Disappearing Oil Is Becoming Everyone’s Problem

Iranian oil is disappearing from the market just as its biggest buyer returns for more. China’s recovering crude demand is colliding with the loss of a supplier that sustained its independent refiners through the crisis, forcing them to compete for increasingly expensive alternatives. The consequences reach beyond China: every replacement barrel tightens supplies for other buyers, while Tehran faces a growing incentive to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz, which is now carrying an unexpectedly strong 13 million barrels a day (just 5 million below pre-crisis level), while its own oil remains trapped.

Iranian crude has long been an underestimated part of the global oil balance. After Bashar al-Assad’s government fell in December 2024, breaking the political relationship that sustained Iranian shipments to Syria, China became Iran’s only crude buyer – in 2025, it received an average of 1.4 million b/d. The war initiated by the US and Israel in late February initially made Iran even more important to Chinese buyers: while Tehran blocked other tankers from crossing Hormuz, its own cargoes passed freely, lifting Chinese intake of Iranian oil to around 1.76 million b/d in April.

That competitive edge ended with the US blockade announced on April 13. Loaded tankers could no longer leave the Gulf, while empty vessels could not enter. Loadings at Kharg Island, Iran’s main export terminal, collapsed from 1.8 million b/d in March to 260,000 b/d in May. A June 17 memorandum allowing Iranian cargoes to pass for 60 days offered temporary relief: loadings recovered to 740,000 b/d in June and 890,000 b/d in July. But the reprieve expired in August, shipments slumped again to 250,000 b/d, and no Iranian loadings were observed in the Gulf in September.

The more important part of the story, however, was unfolding outside the Strait. Iran had accumulated a vast floating stockpile that allowed deliveries to China to continue even when fresh cargoes could not leave the Gulf. In mid-April, that cushion stood at about 160 million barrels, spread across waters around South, Southeast and East Asia. Drawing on those stocks, China still imported 1.37 million b/d of Iranian oil in May, just 10% below February’s level. But the buffer was shrinking; floating storage fell to 106 million barrels by mid-June before the temporary reopening replenished it to 128 million by mid-July.

That replenishment of available floaters has since stopped. China still received 980,000 b/d of Iranian crude in August, but only 475,000 b/d in September, with arrivals ceasing from September 26 (all of the last arriving cargoes had been loaded in June).

Iran still has around 86 million barrels on the water, the lowest volume since January 2025. Yet 23 million barrels (more than a quarter) are trapped inside the Gulf. The total has barely changed since Chinese arrivals have wound down to an almost complete halt over the past two weeks, with evident loadings in the Kharg island stopping completely. With onshore storage gradually filling up (Kpler data suggests Iranian storage tanks are now 60% full, storing around 70 million barrels), Iran will face the inevitable choice of cutting production. Whilst roughly 2.2 million b/d of production is relatively safe due to demand from its refineries, Tehran’s pre-war crude output of 3.2 million b/d seems to be no longer achievable.

For China’s ‘teapots’ (the smaller independent refineries concentrated in Shandong province), this removes a cornerstone of their crude supply. Accounting for roughly a fifth of Chinese crude imports, these refiners have built their purchasing strategies around discounted sanctioned barrels, particularly from Iran and Russia. Now they must search for barrels farther away, from the Middle East, West Africa and South America. In mid-September, ten Chinese independent refiners reportedly sent traders to Singapore to secure available supplies from the mentioned regions.

The shift is visible at Shandong’s ports. Qingdao, connected by pipeline to 12 independent refineries, relied on Iran for 40% of its 690,000 b/d incoming flows in 2025. In recent months, it has increased purchases of Brazil’s Tupi and Buzios grades and even started receiving Guyana’s Golden Arrow in July, while still relying on Saudi and Russian supplies. Nevertheless, intake has fallen to a record low of around 150,000 b/d over the past three months.

At Dongying, on Shandong’s northern Bohai coast, situated near 32 independent refineries, Russia and Iran supplied virtually all of last year’s 330,000 b/d intake, accounting for two-thirds and one-third respectively. Iranian deliveries started to decrease in summer months, with just two cargoes arriving in August and just one in September. Total intake fell to a mere 220,000 b/d in September as crude-deprived refiners were compelled to cut refinery throughputs.

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Former Congressman Sentenced To 10 Years In Federal Prison After Secretly Lobbying For Foreign Regime And Laundering Millions

A former U.S. congressman will now spend a full decade behind bars after being handed a 10-year federal prison sentence on Friday.

Former Florida politician David Rivera was slapped with the decade-long sentence after being convicted of secretly acting as an unregistered foreign agent for a hostile regime, failing to register under FARA rules, and conspiring to launder tens of millions of dollars tied to the illicit scheme.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported in May, Rivera and Nuhfer were found guilty by a federal jury following a trial that exposed the secret Venezuela-linked lobbying arrangement.

The previous Gateway Pundit report detailed prosecutors’ allegations that Rivera and Nuhfer accepted millions connected to the Maduro government while concealing the relationship and using Rivera’s political connections to pursue Venezuela’s interests in the United States.

Rivera had faced a statutory maximum of as much as 60 years behind bars following his conviction.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Melissa Damian handed down the 120-month sentence on October 2 following Rivera’s conviction on conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), violating FARA, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and four counts involving transactions in criminally derived property, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida.

Rivera, 61, represented Florida as a Republican in the U.S. House from 2011 to 2013.

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Google Accused of Illegally Killing a Massive Forest for Its New Data Center Project

As the AI race reaches white-hot temperatures, big tech companies are caught up in a heated race to build as many pollution-belching and power-sucking data centers as they can.

And while the Trump administration is largely clearing their way by easing environmental rules for the polluting facilities, other governments are less inclined to give companies a pass.

As Finnish newspaper Kaleva reported last month, Google is under fire for clearing over 300 hectares — the equivalent of almost 500 football fields — for two new data centers in the northern part of the European nation without concluding the necessary environmental assessments.

Despite the assessments still being in progress, the tech giant’s contractors started clearing trees in the area months ago, raising the alarm bells at the Finnish Nature Conservation Association.

“Either this is gross incompetence from Google’s Finnish project company, Tuike Finland Oy, or gross disregard for Finnish legislation, or at worst both,” said the association’s chair, Hanna Halmeenpää, in a statement, as translated by Wood Central.

Satellite images show that four separate sites were bulldozed to make way for two new data centers.

Google maintains that its felling of the trees met the requirements of the country’s Forestry Act and that it had completed extensive environmental evaluations.

Nonetheless, the Finnish Nature Conservation Association has since asked Finnish regulators to suspend activities until the conclusion of the ongoing environmental assessments.

Halmeenpää said she was worried that local bird species may have been impacted by the area being razed. The forest also serves as a critical ecological connection, allowing animals to spread from one habitat to another.

The incident highlights the explosive growth in new AI data center projects across the globe, a major infrastructure undertaking that could have a significant impact on the local environment.

Meanwhile, Google is hoping to appease the Finnish government by having picked it for its largest single investment in the continent, to the tune of $15 billion.

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