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.

Girl Wins $164 Million Lawsuit from Hotel in Sex-Trafficking Case

A federal court in Georgia has ordered a hotel to pay a female victim $164 million because it allowed a sex trafficking ring to operate on its premises.

The victim, who was 15 at the time of her trafficking, was reportedly held at the Super 8 hotel in College Park, Georgia, in 2020 and 2021, where she was sexually assaulted by her captors and their clients.

“They set up an environment for children to be sold,” said Patrick McDonough, the anonymous victim’s attorney, according to WAGA-TV. “This hotel operator would actually warn the traffickers if the police were coming.”

“Hey, look, if you’re going to turn a blind eye and profit off of children being sold, you’re going to be held accountable,” the attorney added, noting that the girl was held in the hotel for about 120 days.

The federal jury in the case determined that the owner of the hotel chain, Lincoln Bancorp LLC, would have to pay $44 million in compensatory damages and $120 million in punitive damages.

This is not the first hotel that has been held liable for sex trafficking in Georgia. Last year a $40 million verdict was returned against United Inn and Suites in DeKalb County. A woman who was 16 when she was trafficked sued the hotel and won, making it the first hotel in the Peach State to be found civilly liable for sex trafficking.

There are currently three other hotels being sued in civil court for sex trafficking in Georgia.

Georgia is not the only state where hotels are being accused of participating in sex trafficking.

According to the Lawsuit Information Center, there are currently two hotels in New Jersey being sued for cases of sex trafficking. Other cases include hotels in Los Angeles, Ohio, Philadelphia, and more.

Breitbart News has reported several cases of hotel and motel operators being accused of either facilitating or turning a blind eye to sex-trafficking going on in their establishments.

One such incident occurred in Virginia, where an Indian family with the last name of Sharma was arrested for allowing drug and sex trafficking to occur in their Red Carpet Inn hotel in Dumfries.

In another case, federal authorities in Nebraska carried out a series of raids, leading to the arrest of a group of Indian nationals who were allegedly engaged in an elaborate scheme involving sex, labor, and drug trafficking. In addition to multiple businesses owned by the suspected traffickers in Nebraska, the scheme also involved companies in Georgia and Texas.

In yet another case, Kavankumar Patel, an illegal migrant from India, was sentenced to a ten-year prison term for participating in a child sex-trafficking ring in Omaha, Nebraska, the Department of Justice announced.

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Zelenskiy Looks To Spread Economic War To China, India

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed in a Wall Street Journal interview published around the time of the UN General Assembly that China and India are the two most useful countries to Russian President Vladimir Putin in relation to sanctions. He repeated these accusations on European media this morning.

It is energy trade with these two countries that is currently financing the war, Zelensky said. United States, China and India collectively putting pressure on Russia is enough to bring an end to the war, he added.

Although he identified a “lack of a consistently strong position from China and India” in his address to partners, Zelensky struck a softer note on New Delhi in a subsequent Fox interview, saying he believed that “for the most part, India is with us” and that it was only energy trade with Russia that remained an open question.

Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian crude oil made up only a marginal portion of India’s total oil imports. However, in the years following the invasion, crude imports from Russia became a major component of total oil imports for the country, with Indian refineries purchasing roughly $140 billion worth of Russian crude between 2022 and mid-2025, according to analysis of trade data published by European research institutions in July 2026.

Of Russia’s total crude exports in July 2026, 37% went to India, while 50% went to China, according to the same analysis. While most of these exports would currently find their way to third countries, it is Europe that is currently reluctant to purchase Russian crude at prices comparable to those offered by other producers in the Middle East, typically at a discount.

China’s role in enabling Putin to work around sanctions extends far beyond the energy trade, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said in a November 2025 report. The report, entitled Energy, called China “a decisive enabler of Russia’s sanctions evasion and export-control evasion.” This was based on higher oil and gas imports from Russia by China as well as an increase in the trade of dual-use goods, which could also be used for military purposes.

Barter deals involving grain and raw materials for Russian-made military equipment have also been reported to be used by the Kremlin to reduce reliance on dollar-denominated transactions and on the services of Western banks, in addition to trade of cars, electronics and industrial components made by Chinese companies that are replacing similar goods from Western manufacturers on Russian markets.

As for India, its purchases of Russian Urals have been described by Indian officials and refiners as strictly market-driven and not part of any political alignment with Moscow. In fact, the largest buyer of Russian oil of all, India, is currently subject to the possibility of being hit with tariffs of up to 100% on its Russian oil imports under the recently signed Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump.

Whether or not Trump will use this authority to pressure the two major Asian buyers of Russian oil remains to be seen, but Ukrainian officials have pointed to the role of key Russian missile producers operating through jurisdictions including China, as one of the key components of ongoing sanctions evasion by the Kremlin.

Trade between China and Russia totaled $135 billion in the first half of 2026, with Russia’s exports to China including energy products as well as raw materials, and China’s exports including cars, electronics and industrial goods that would otherwise have been imported from the West.

Zelenskiy’s efforts to increase economic pain on Russia by targeting China and India is a sign of desperation, as Russia continues to take territory in the east and pressures Ukrainian infrastructure via overnight strikes.

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Additional Text Messages Appear to Unravel Cornell Gang-Rape Allegations

The Cornell University Gang Rape Story unraveled a little more Wednesday when additional text messages between the alleged victim (known only as Jane Doe) and one of the men she’s accusing of rape were released.

Two years ago, in the early hours of October 20, 2024, 20-year-old Jane Doe claims she was gang raped by seven members of Cornell University’s Chi Phi fraternity. Until she filed a massive civil suit earlier this week alleging it was rape, all the contemporaneous statements from Jane Doe (that we’ve seen) indicate she voluntarily took drugs and engaged in four hours of consensual group sex with the men.

This includes a statement Jane Doe gave to the campus police about three weeks after the event on November 8.

The campus police showed  this statement to the local district attorney, Matthew Van Houten, who said then that “Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual.”

Earlier this week, CBS News uncovered texts it says are between Jane Doe and one of the accused where she flat-out says that “none of the sexual stuff was illegal,” that she enjoyed being with him and another guy, and would like to get together again.

Now ABC News has uncovered even more texts where Jane Doe expresses regret for her behavior, especially after gossip about the group sex made its way around campus, but she still says it was consensual.

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Nigerian Man Accused of Running Fake Government Agency with Federal Budget

An enterprising Nigerian named Adeniyi Adeyemi is facing charges in the capital of Abuja for creating and running a fake government agency for over a year, complete with about $1 million in funding from the Nigerian federal government.

According to prosecutors, Adeyemi created an agency called the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC) in 2024 and installed himself as director-general. He kept the phony agency going until he was arrested in October 2025.

Adeyemi was somehow able to secure office space for his fake agency inside the Federal Secretariat office complex in Abuja, along with a million dollars of funding. He got his hands on some presidential stationery and used it to request cooperation from other government agencies – and evidently some of his requests were taken seriously, although prosecutors have not yet indicted any other government officials for colluding with him.

Police investigators said they have traced a total of 34 bank accounts to Adeyemi, including nine of them that were opened in the name of various government agencies. According to prosecutors, Adeyemi even recruited staffers to work for his fake agency.

The ersatz Director-General of the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC) also forged a realistic-looking letter of appointment from President Bola Tinubu, purportedly signed by presidential chief of staff Femi Gbajabiamila.

Gbajabiamila was the official who filed a petition to arrest Adeyemi, who faces eight counts of conspiracy, forgery, and impersonation alongside two accomplices known as “Femi” and “Anu,” who remain at large.

The Premium Times of Nigeria reported that Adeyemi appeared before the Federal High Court in Abuja for his arraignment on Wednesday “after several failed attempts to bring him before the court.”

Those previous attempts were unsuccessful “for various reasons,” including based on requests by his lawyers, his absence from court and the judge’s official engagement elsewhere. A judge swore out a bench warrant for Adeyemi’s arrest after he failed to appear for a July arraignment, and he was arrested within 12 hours, but it still took a surprisingly long time to get him into court.

Adeyemi said through his lawyers that he skipped out on his July arraignment because he “feared for his life” and had written an open letter to President Tinubu asking for protection. The Premium Times observed that he did not look particularly fearful when he finally made it to the courtroom on Wednesday, strolling cheerfully into chambers wearing a baseball cap and a white traditional robe known as a kaftan.

Adeyemi pleaded not guilty to all eight of the charges against him and was remanded to custody in the Kuje Correctional Center by the judge. He has claimed in media interviews that his PFIPC was a legitimate agency and he was working to bring foreign investment into Nigeria.

The case has become a hot topic among Nigerians, who have long complained about corruption and incompetence in their government, but are still shocked that a random con artist could create and operate a phony high-level government agency for months without being detected.

Some critics of the Tinubu government have postulated that Adeyami could only keep his scam running for so long if he was paying off legitimate government officials to evade oversight.

Adeyemi himself has claimed he paid Gbababiamila, the presidential chief of staff, a fee of 400 million Nigerian nairas (about $300,000) to help him forge his fake presidential appointment document. Adeyemi has asked Tinubu to establish an independent anti-corruption panel to investigate his case.

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Supertanker Ablaze After Iran Attack In Hormuz As US Deploys 10K More Troops & Third Carrier To Mideast

Iranians are apparently going back on the offensive, after it’s been widely reported that US-protected oil transit through the Strait of Hormuz has been fast gaining steam. Iran state media says a supertanker is burning off the coast of Oman after coming under Iranian attack:

Local sources reported that a 2.5 million barrel capacity supertanker that was traveling through the Strait of Hormuz illegally was hit 8 kilometers off the coast of Oman and is burning, reports Fars

Earlier we reported that starting in mid-August (on Aug. 16), Iran’s Supreme National Security Council set October 1 as a deadline. It warned at the time that if Washington failed to lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports within 45 days, Tehran could resume attacks against US forces, and by implication step up attacks on foreign shipping.

Iran’s 45-day deadline for the United States has now expired. That deadline has now passed, potentially adding another layer of uncertainty to an already tense confrontation where Tehran may decide it must act ‘preemptively’ while facing more bombs by Trump (likely after the midterms).

Signs of potential major escalation, or the next round at least (which Trump has hinted will come after the midterm elections), just hit The Wall Street Journal, and sent oil prices soaring. A quick summary:

  • The Pentagon is sending a third aircraft-carrier strike group and additional Marine Corps ships to the Middle East, adding 9,000 to 10,000 more troops to the region.
  • The ships, jet fighters, Marines and sailors will arrive in the region by the end of November, as President Trump considers renewing strikes on Iran after the midterm elections.
  • The additional servicemembers will add to the more than 50,000 troops already in the region, with the deployments coming after Trump rejected Iran’s latest proposal for a seven-day ceasefire.

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The Disastrous Disability Signal In The UK That Corroborates The US Data!

The Disability Signal Across the Atlantic

On August 11 I wrote US Disabilities Hit an All-Time High of 37 Million In July: UP 23% Since Feb 2021. The BLS Current Population Survey printed 37,029,000 Americans 16 and over reporting a disability. That is seven million more people since February 2021, a 3-to-4 sigma break from the pre-2020 plateau that has not mean-reverted. The inflection is February 2021 with the Covid vaccine rollout not in 2020 when Covid was at its most virulent strain. Alternative explanations fail the timing and the magnitude test. The UK PIP system corroborates that US survey signal with something the American series cannot give you: medically assessed new claims broken down by body system and underlying cause.

If you want to know whether that US survey signal is real, stop arguing about survey design and look at an administrative system that actually diagnoses people.

Go back to the UK Disabilities (PIP) Project we published at Phinance Technologies. The page is still up…use it. It was built so researchers, doctors, and ordinary citizens could see the same thing we saw in 2023. You can look at total body system new claims or by underlying cause new claims (best viewed on desktop) within a body system. You can pick absolute new claims, excess new claims, percent excess new claims and excess new claims z score. We also break it out by monthly and yearly data. Finally you can sort it by age group as well. Play with data and be horrified like we were in 2023. Interactive charts…all done by Phinance Technologies for free.

PIP is not the protagonist from Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations. It is the UK’s main working-age disability benefit officially known as the Personal Independence Pension program by the UK Department of Work. Claims are medically assessed. Decisions, “clearances,” as noted above are coded by body system and then by underlying cause. The positive award rate has been stable at around 40 percent, so you are not looking at a sudden collapse in standards. You are looking at more people presenting with more illness…new claims, not just the stock of existing claimants, sorted monthly or yearly and by age band versus a 2016–2019 trend.

That is the advantage over the US survey. The BLS series tells you that disability exploded after early 2021 with the vaccine rollout and not in 2020 with the virus. PIP tells you where in the body it exploded, and it lets you watch the timing against the vaccine rollout curve on the same chart.

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Mystery Shrouds Destruction Of US Spy Satellite

A mysterious breakup of a decades-old American spy satellite has sent debris hurtling through low-Earth orbit, with the U.S. Space Force now tracking the fragments for potential threats to other spacecraft, according to Space-Track.

The satellite, known as USA 32, came apart on September 13 at approximately 5:13 p.m. ET, according to U.S. Space Forces-Space. Officials have not publicly determined what caused the nearly 40-year-old spacecraft to suddenly fragment.

“All tracked debris are being incorporated into routine conjunction assessment screenings to support spaceflight safety,” U.S. Space Forces-Space said in a notice. “No immediate threats have been identified; further analysis is ongoing.”

USA 32 had been circling Earth since the final years of the Cold War.

The National Reconnaissance Office satellite blasted into space aboard a Titan II rocket on September 5, 1988. Public records identify the spacecraft as an electronic and signals intelligence satellite designed to collect information from orbit.

USA 32 has also been identified as FARRAH III, part of a secretive family of American intelligence satellites whose name was inspired by actress Farrah Fawcett.

The satellite was traveling in an orbit roughly 480 miles above Earth when it broke apart. Officials have yet to disclose how many fragments were produced.

That uncertainty matters because debris traveling at orbital speeds can pose a hazard to functioning satellites even when the individual pieces are relatively small. Space Force tracking systems routinely monitor objects around Earth and screen their trajectories for possible collisions.

Exactly what happened to USA 32 remains a mystery.

A collision with an untracked object is one possible explanation for an unexpected satellite breakup. Aging spacecraft can also fragment because of failures involving batteries, pressurized tanks or other components. There is currently no public evidence establishing any of those scenarios as the cause of USA 32’s demise.

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Georgia Election Board Asks Trump DOJ to Declare Statewide Dominion QR-Code Machines UNLAWFUL Before Midterms — Demands Six-Month Phase-Out as Raffensperger Stonewalls

Georgia’s Republican-controlled State Election Board has formally invited the Trump Department of Justice to step in and shut down the Peach State’s unverifiable, QR-code voting system before voters start casting ballots in the 2026 midterms.

In a September 30 letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche, State Election Board Executive Director James Mills asked the DOJ to prohibit the use of “unreadable, unverifiable QR-code-based vote tabulation and any other electronic tabulation method that does not permit the voter to verify the vote that is actually counted,” concerning Georgia’s Dominion voting system, now owned by Liberty Vote USA.

Mills also asked Blanche to set a binding six-month deadline, forcing Georgia to dump the machines and move to a system with voter-verifiable, hand-auditable paper records.

The letter, obtained and published by the Georgia Recorder, was copied to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

According to the Georgia Recorder, the demand follows a September 28 resolution, introduced by GOP appointee Carolyn Roddy and passed 3-2, directing Mills to seek federal help forcing a software fix on the Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5-A system, the same equipment, now branded Liberty Vote, that Georgia rolled out statewide for the 2020 election. Early in-person voting begins October 13.

The letter does not stop at the machines. Mills asks the DOJ to open an investigation into Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office for withholding, blocking review of, and allegedly altering original election records, and for sharing Georgia motor-vehicle and voter-registration data with private vendors including ERIC and the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

He also wants a court-backed order requiring a forensic backup of election-management servers and Dominion scanners, then installation of a later EAC-certified software version, 5.17, 5.20, or newer, before November, with independent verification that CISA-documented vulnerabilities and the so-called DVSorder privacy flaw have actually been fixed.

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‘Covered Their Tracks’? New Details Emerge In OpenAI’s ‘Rogue-AI’ Breach

OpenAI’s AI agents “obscured hacking activity” during breaches of government websites, citing digital forensics firm Asymmetric Security. According to the FT, the agents pulled data from 55 websites, including the CDC, the SEC, the International Energy Agency and the Mayo Clinic, using tactics that included “erasing records or making them inaccessible.”

Asymmetric co-founder Pippa Thompson told the paper it was “possible” the agents were deliberately covering their tracks – though the firm couldn’t determine whether that was deliberate or “a side effect of going awry because of constraints imposed in a test exercise.” 

Asymmetric’s own report, published the same day, is far more cautious. It was built in 48 hours over a weekend, “using only publicly available data” – no model transcripts, no server logs from the targeted organizations and no records from the services the agents used.

Potato, Potahto

The report’s summary does say some tactics left records “erased or inaccessible” – but the examples it gives describe normal expiry, not deletion: the agents used a throwaway ‘Boomlify’ inbox set to self-destruct after 48 hours, and an upload to ntfy, a push-notification service that keeps messages for 12 hours by default. They also moved from public scans on urlquery – a website-scanning service whose reports anyone can search – to private accounts “which could hide their search activity and data access.”

So, did the agents use ephemeral services on purpose to cover their tracks? They can’t say for sure.

“These records alone do not establish whether the account-registration attempts were intended to conceal activity (this analysis would require full model transcripts).”

As for the 55 websites, Asymmetric’s earlier list of “Organizations whose data was accessed” runs to exactly 55 entries, and adds: “In the vast majority of cases, all data retrieved was and is public.” The CDC and the Mayo Clinic aren’t on it – the Oct. 1 report says only that the agents probed them. The SEC told the FT no private information was accessed. Where the agents did try to break in – hunting for exposed behind-the-scenes files on a climate-data site and trying a classic database-hacking trick on an Education Department data site – Asymmetric found evidence of the attempts, but none that they succeeded.

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Brazil Court Goes on Censorship Spree Days Before Presidential Election

Brazil’s top electoral authority, the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), issued new censorship rulings on Wednesday as the nation prepares to hold presidential elections this weekend.

The South American nation is hours away from holding its 2026 general elections, scheduled for Sunday, October 4, with all polls suggesting that a runoff election will be held on October 25 between current incumbent socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and conservative Senator Flávio Bolsonaro.

In the past week, the 2026 Brazilian presidential campaign has seen two new controversies emerge surrounding Bolsonaro and Lula. The conservative senator denounced being the target of a fake news campaign accusing him of allegedly planning to remove the title of Brazil’s patron saint from Nossa Senhora do Aparecida (Our Lady of Aparecida), a title of the Blessed Virgin Mary that holds 300 years’ worth of faith and veneration for Brazilian Catholics.

Sen. Bolsonaro — who is running for office after his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, was banned and imprisoned for “crimes against democracy” charges — is an Evangelical Christian. Globonews, which Bolsonaro accused of acting as a “central hub” to spread the fake news campaign against him, issued a public retraction and apology after the claim was confirmed to be false.

On Wednesday, a three-out-of-five majority of the TSE’s justices ordered the complete removal of any and all social media content involving the fake news campaign against Bolsonaro, upholding an initial ruling issued by Supreme Court Justice and TSE member André Mendoça in response to a request issued by the Bolsonaro presidential campaign team.

Wednesday’s ruling was preceded by a back-and-forth series of court orders on the matter. The state-owned news agency Agência Brasil detailed on Wednesday that Mendoça had originally ruled to censor the fake news campaign posts against Bolsonaro — but Supreme Court Flávio Dino overturned the censorship orders on the grounds that they infringed the free speech rights of a local comedian who lodged a complaint on the matter. Supreme Court Justice Luiz Fux later overturned Dino’s ruling. The impasse led to the head of the Supreme Court, Edson Fachin, bringing the matter to a vote.

Metrópoles detailed that Justice Mendoça had initially argued that removing social media posts pertaining to the fake news campaign did not constitute censorship, as the content had already been proven to be misinformation and therefore “does not constitute prior censorship, as it does not establish prior state control over future expressions, does not require judicial authorization for new publications, and does not suspend users’ profiles, accounts, or channels.”

Separate from the controversy surrounding the fake news campaign against Flávio Bolsonaro, President Lula has found himself at the center of a firestorm after he bizarrely claimed this week that Brazilian girls learn to “get touched” from a young age. According to Lula’s ruling Workers’ Party (PT), the Brazilian president was allegedly referring to cervical cancer screenings.

The TSE also issued censorship rulings on Wednesday against conservative lawmaker Nikolas Ferreira over his response to Lula’s controversial statements. Ferreira, a 30-year-old Congressman from Minas Gerais, published a video expressing his outrage about Lula’s remarks while questioning the “explanation” provided by his party. In the video, which remains publicly available at press time, Ferreira affirmed that there is the possibility that a pedophile “might be listening” to Lula’s remarks and stressed, “girls aren’t to be touched from an early age.”

TSE Justice Estela Aranha reportedly gave Ferreira a 24-hour deadline to remove a video, arguing that the lawmaker allegedly “took the president’s statement about medical exams out of context and attributed a sexual connotation to his words.” Arahna ordered Ferreira to abstain himself from both republishing the video and from producing any kind of content that is “substantially identical” to the original piece under penalty of a yet-to-be determined fine.

“The contested publication is not limited to political criticism or disagreement regarding the appropriateness of the language used,” Justice Aranha reportedly argued.

“In developing the line of reasoning set forth in the contested media report, the respondent introduces a connotation entirely different from that present in the original statement, shifting the discussion from the realm of public health to that of various criminal acts,” she continued.

Ferreira referred to the situation in a social media post, which reads, “Lula knows so much about what he lost that he only requested the removal of the video from my network, but not a right of reply, because he knows he would have to explain the inexplicable.” In a separate post, the lawmaker pointed out that it was Lula who appointed Justice Aranha to the TSE in 2025.

The contents of the conservative lawmaker’s video appear to have greatly infuriated Lula, who called Ferreira a “bastard” during a Tuesday night campaign rally. In the same event, Lula’s wife, First Lady Rosângela “Janja” Lula da Silva, referred to the lawmaker as a “little shit.”

Hours later, the Brazilian president once again insulted Ferreira in a Wednesday interview with Terra Brasil, referring to him as a “complete idiot” for allegedly spreading “misinformation” against him.

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