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Los Angeles Teen Blinded in One Eye by DHS Agent at ‘No Kings’ Rally, Attorney Says

An 18-year-old college freshman was blinded in his right eye by a federal agent during the Los Angeles “No Kings” protest on March 28. 

Tucker Collins, who is studying astronautical engineering with a minor in cinematic arts at the University of Southern California, was documenting the rally protesting policies implemented under President Donald Trump near the Metropolitan Detention Center, where immigration detainees are held. Video of the incident shared by Collins’ attorney, V. James DeSimone, shows a crowd of people separated from agents by a tall black fence surrounding the facility. Collins can be seen holding his phone and filming near the back of the group before abruptly falling to the ground. Blood streams from his right eye as bystanders come to his aid. He was helped by a nurse present at the protest, DeSimone told CNN, and later taken to the hospital.

In the video, DeSimone accuses Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents of unlawfully shooting Collins with “a less-lethal launcher…shooting directly into his head” while exercising his First Amendment rights. The strike caused irreparable damage to Collins’ eye and fractured bones in his eye socket, DeSimone told CNN. Collins’ eye had to be surgically removed. 

In a statement made to the Los Angeles Times, a DHS spokesperson claimed that agents “followed their training and used the minimum amount of force necessary to protect themselves, the public, and federal property” after a group of 1,000 protestors “threw rocks, bottles, and cement blocks at officers.” The agency said seven warnings were given before crowd control measures were used. “The First Amendment protects speech and peaceful assembly—not rioting,” the spokesperson continued. 

Under DHS use-of-force guidelines, while agents may be authorized to use less-lethal weapons, such as pepperballs and rubber bullets, using such a device is considered deadly force when “it carries a substantial risk of causing death or serious bodily injury,” such as “strik[ing] the neck or head.” Deadly force is only permissible when “the [officer] has a reasonable belief that the subject of force poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to the [officer] or to another person.” 

Even with this guideline in place, a federal court in California issued a preliminary injunction last September prohibiting DHS agents from, in part, “using crowd control weapons,” including less-lethal weapons, “on members of the press, legal observers, and protesters who are not themselves posing a threat of imminent harm to a law enforcement officer or another person.” The order was a result of a lawsuit in which DHS agents were accused of using excessive force and suppressing First Amendment-protected activities when officers shot less-lethal weapons at people protesting the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics in Southern California last summer. 

In this case, Collins “was not threatening anyone. He wasn’t attacking anyone,” DeSimone told The Guardian. “DHS officers took out his eye and they did it despite a federal injunction that plainly forbids firing these weapons at people’s heads,” he continued. 

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Federally Funded Study Reveals Marijuana Breathalyzer Breakthrough With 3-D Printed Roadside Tool Able To Detect THC

There’s been a new breakthrough in the development of a marijuana breathalyzer, with a study partly funded by the Justice Department showing a potential pathway for a “portable, low cost” device that looks like an inhaler for asthma, built with 3-D printed material that can detect delta-9 THC without secondary lab analysis.

The study, led by Emanuele Alves at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), detailed the results of experiments meant to address the current lack of a roadside impairment test for THC similar to those utilized by law enforcement for people suspected of driving under the influence of alcohol. With more states legalizing cannabis, there’s particular “need for rapid, reliable and low-cost roadside tools,” it says.

By using 3-D printed cartridges with a “Fast Blue” dye and gelatin system, the colorimetric experiments established “foundational data” that the device can be used to detect delta-9 THC, CBD and CBN “across multiple matrix systems.”

The tool was able to detect 10-100 nanograms of the cannabinoids, which could be differentiated using color-space modeling. Specifically, the tests revealed “two primary clusters,” with evidence that delta-9 THC and CBN analytes can be distinguished from CBD analytes based on color hue.

“Overall, this project established foundational data supporting the feasibility of a portable, low-cost, colorimetric tool for detecting cannabinoids using 3D-printed cartridges and readily accessible reagents,” the study says. “While additional validation and field-oriented development are needed, these findings provide a proof-of-concept framework for future roadside or point-of-collection testing technologies.”

The Justice Department provided funding for the study and posted the results on the Office of Justice Programs’s National Criminal Justice Reference Service website last month, but the author’s findings “do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies” of the agency, it says.

“The development of a breathalyzer for the early detection of marijuana’s recent use is an important matter considering the current legal status of marijuana-based products around the country,” VCU’s Alves said. “To achieve this goal, our initial approach was to develop a portable cartridge that would be able to react with cannabinoids selectively to detect THC use, but not CBD.”

“Most THC breathalyzers in the market are merely collection devices that will need further laboratory analysis,” he continued. “Considering the working system of an alcohol breathalyzer, using a redox reaction would be risky for the THC approach as it would not be selective for the specific cannabinoids and it would give a positive result to any molecule capable of oxidizing the reagent.”

Because of the “excellent results” of the experiment in the “establishment of the foundational chemical profile needed for the development of a THC breathalyzer,” the study says, a patent application has been filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), with a proposed design for a future prototype.

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Millions of gallons of RADIOACTIVE water released into New York’s Hudson River, damning report shows

Radioactive water was discharged into New York’s Hudson River for more than 60 years, with millions of gallons released annually during its decades of operation.

The long-running practice at the now-defunct Indian Point nuclear plant is drawing renewed scrutiny after a 2025 court approved a controversial plan to release an additional 45,000 gallons of radioactive water per year from the shuttered facility.

The Daily Mail has uncovered a 1970 federal investigation showing the plant discharged an average of two to three million gallons of processed wastewater each year between 1962 and 2021, including treated radioactive effluents.

The probe into the plant’s environmental impact found that millions of fish were killed during its early years, largely after being pulled into the facility’s cooling system.

Investigators also documented chemical discharges that exceeded state safety limits and warned that gaps in monitoring made it impossible to rule out toxic releases that may have contributed to fish kills.

Testing conducted near the plant further detected measurable increases in radioactivity in water, sediment, vegetation and fish closest to discharge areas.

The findings, combined with a newly circulated stakeholder letter from the plant’s current owner, Holtec International, confirming decades of releases, have intensified concerns about the long-term environmental impact on the Hudson River.

Patrick O’Brien, director of government affairs and communications for Holtec International, which purchased the plant in 2021, told the Daily Mail: ‘I can’t speak to operations, since that covers previous owners to the ’60s.’

‘During our ownership, no releases have occurred exceeding federal limits, and every batch is tested and reviewed prior to dilution and discharge.’

The Indian Point nuclear power plant is located along the Hudson River just south of Peekskill. Holtec International purchased the facility shortly after its closure and now oversees its decommissioning, including the handling of stored wastewater and spent nuclear fuel.

A recently circulated letter to stakeholders confirmed that treated radioactive wastewater had been discharged into the Hudson River since the plant’s earliest years, with annual environmental and radiation reports submitted to federal regulators.

Those records indicate that radioactive materials, including tritium and other radionuclides, were diluted and released into the river following treatment processes designed to remove most contaminants before discharge.

Federal investigators first examined concerns about the plant’s environmental impact decades ago, launching a detailed study in 1970 amid growing public alarm about the effects of nuclear facilities along the Hudson River.

While the investigation found no clear evidence that radioactive releases alone caused widespread ecosystem collapse, it documented significant environmental impacts tied to plant operations.

Among the most notable findings was the death of large numbers of fish during the plant’s early years.

Between 1962 and 1970, officials estimated that between 1.5 million and five million fish were killed after becoming trapped against intake screens used to draw cooling water from the river.

The report also warned that fish eggs, larvae and other small aquatic organisms were likely harmed as they passed through the plant’s cooling systems. 

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US’s Erosion of the Right to Cartoon Is No Laughing Matter

During World War II, cartoonist Bill Mauldin was summoned to a meeting with Gen. George S. Patton. Mauldin’s Stars and Stripes cartoons drew Patton’s ire over his matter-of-fact depictions of war and American GIs.

To Mauldin, war was no fun adventure. In Up Front, his Willie and Joe were war-weary and disheveled soldiers, not heroes ready for movie stardom. They expressed a darkly comic view of the life of an infantryman. In an exemplary cartoon, one of the duo says to a medic attempting to hand out a medal: “Just gimme th’ aspirin, I already got a Purple Heart.”

Mauldin avoided punishment when Gen. Dwight Eisenhower circulated a letter instructing all officers “not to interfere” with “such things as Mauldin’s cartoons” (Oklahoman, 4/16/82). Mauldin won the Pulitzer twice for his editorial cartooning, once during the war and once afterwards.

Perhaps Donald Trump’s Pentagon saw itself as acting in the Patton tradition when it eliminated comics from Stars and Stripes. As FAIR (3/20/26) previously documented, Pete Hegseth has taken steps to crack down on the independence of the Pentagon’s own newspaper. Among the new guidelines to promote “good order and discipline” is a ban on syndicated material, including comics (Stars and Stripes, 3/13/26). US servicemembers have now been saved from the woke, subversive influences of Doonesbury, Pearls Before Swine and, perhaps worst of all, Beetle Bailey.

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Tennessee House votes to ban kratom, bill now moves to Senate

The State of Tennessee is another step closer to becoming Kratom free.

State representatives voted Wednesday to approve legislation that would outlaw all forms of the substance, including a more potent derivative known as 7-OH.

The proposal now heads to the Senate.

Kratom is a plant-based substance from a Southeast Asian tree, often sold in gas stations and smoke shops. It has been at the center of a growing debate in Tennessee.

Supporters of the bill say the ban is needed to address safety concerns.

“This bill addresses the growing public concern and safety surrounding kratom,” Rep. Esther Helton-Haynes said during earlier hearings.

The legislation is named after a Chattanooga man whose family says he died after using kratom with other substances.

Lawmakers have pointed to risks, including possible links to overdose deaths and concerns about how the substance is marketed.

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Army survivors of deadly attack in Kuwait dispute Pentagon’s account, say unit “was unprepared” to defend itself

Survivors of the deadliest Iranian attack on U.S. forces since the war began have disputed the Pentagon’s description of events and said their unit in Kuwait was left dangerously exposed when six service members were killed and more than 20 wounded.

Speaking publicly for the first time, members of the targeted unit offered CBS News a detailed account of the attack and its harrowing aftermath from the perspective of those on the ground. 

The members CBS News spoke to disputed the description of events from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who described the drone as a “squirter” — in that it squirted through the defenses of a fortified unit inside Kuwait.

“Painting a picture that ‘one squeaked through’ is a falsehood,” one of the injured soldiers told CBS News. “I want people to know the unit … was unprepared to provide any defense for itself. It was not a fortified position.”

That service member, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of rigid media restrictions within the military, said that in spite of the carnage that ensued, those inside the charred and splintered compound responded with swiftness, ingenuity and valor that saved lives.

“I don’t think that the security environment or any leadership decision diminishes in any way their sacrifice or their service,” the member of the Army’s 103rd Sustainment Command said in an interview. “Those soldiers put themselves in harm’s way and … I’m immensely proud of them, and their family should be proud of them.”

These first eyewitness accounts, along with photos and videos of the attack’s aftermath obtained exclusively by CBS News, offer the first descriptions of what occurred March 1 at the thinly fortified Kuwaiti port facility on the day of the Iranian drone strike.

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Is the ‘Ghost Murmur’ quantum device possible? Scientists are skeptical

On Monday afternoon President Donald Trump and CIA Director John Ratcliffe hinted at technology that had helped locate a downed American Air Force officer hiding in a mountain crevice in southern Iran. By Tuesday, the New York Post reported that the CIA had deployed Ghost Murmur, a device that uses vaguely described “long-range quantum magnetometry” to find signals of human heartbeats, after which artificial intelligence software isolates each heartbeat from the noisy data. An unnamed source told the Post it was like “hearing a voice in a stadium, except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert.” Another line landed like a movie tagline: “In the right conditions, if your heart is beating, we will find you.”

It’s a terrific story. It is also, according to scientists who study magnetic fields, almost certainly not true. The rescue was real—the mission involved multiple aircraft and a survival beacon carried by the airman—but Ghost Murmur, at least as publicly described, finds no support in decades of peer-reviewed physics, even with the help of AI, experts told me.

Quantum magnetometers are real; they are ultraprecise at, for instance, detecting heart arrhythmias by measuring magnetic fields (via quantum properties) produced by the cardiac muscle. The problem is that the heart’s magnetic field is weak. “At the surface of the chest, where you’re about 10 centimeters away from the source, the magnetic field is just barely detectable,” says John Wikswo, a professor of biomedical engineering and physics at Vanderbilt University. “Now, [if] instead of going 10 centimeters away—which is a tenth of a meter—you go a meter away, the amplitude of the signal has dropped to a thousandth of what it was.” The signal becomes dramatically weaker at a kilometer.

Wikswo was the first scientist to measure the magnetic field of an isolated nerve and has been measuring the heart’s magnetic field since the mid-1970s. The first such detection was done by other researchers with two coils, each containing two million turns of wire, and then with a magnetometer “cooled to four degrees above absolute zero,” Wikswo says. This magnetometer is not spy gear—it is a cryogenic instrument designed to keep the rest of the universe out.

To find a heartbeat, a quantum Ghost Murmur tool would have to contend not just with Earth’s magnetic field and magnetic noise from natural and human-made electric currents but also with “the heartbeats of the sheep and dogs and jackrabbits—whatever else is running around out there,” says Chad Orzel, a professor of physics at Union College in New York State and author of How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog. He uses refrigerator magnets to illustrate the weakness of magnetic fields in general. “You have to get the magnet very, very close to the refrigerator before it snaps into place,” he says. “That field drops off very quickly.” Clinical sensors “are usually butted right up against your body … at a distance of centimeters,” Orzel adds. Even pattern-matching using artificial intelligence, he says, couldn’t find a magnetic signal large enough to identify the presence of a person from kilometers away in a desert. At one kilometer away, the signal would diminish to about one trillionth of the strength.

Bradley Roth, a physicist at Oakland University and author of the 2023 review Biomagnetism: The First Sixty Years, agrees. “People have been measuring the magnetic field of the heart for 60 years, and usually it’s done in a lab with shielding, and it’s done just a few centimeters or a couple inches from the heart, and even then you can barely record it.” A helicopter-borne version, he says, “would be not just a small advance, but it’d be a revolutionary advance from the state of the art.”

Orzel struggles to see how a Ghost Murmur could work. “There is really fascinating work being done using quantum magnetometry to measure heart rates,” he says, and magnetic brain scans can now catch the tiny flickers of firing nerves. “But none of that is something that works over ranges of many miles.”

So why was this a story at all? Orzel has a guess: “Somebody yanking a reporter’s chain,” he says. It could be a “snarky, clever way to say, ‘Of course, I’m not going to tell you how we figured this out’”—or a piece of disinformation “to fool somebody into thinking that we actually have this secret technology.”

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Ninth Scientist Linked to U.S. Secrets Confirmed Dead Under Highly Suspicious Circumstances — Disturbing Pattern of Deaths and Disappearances Among U.S. Space Program Experts Raises Alarming Questions

A troubling pattern is once again drawing renewed scrutiny after the death of yet another scientist tied to America’s most sensitive space and defense programs.

Michael David Hicks, a longtime research scientist at NASA’s prestigious Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), died on July 30, 2023, at just 59 years old, according to the Daily Mail.

Hicks was known in scientific circles for his work connected to advanced research initiatives, many of which intersect with highly classified aerospace and defense projects.

But nearly three years later, basic questions surrounding his death remain unanswered.

According to available records, the cause of Hicks’ death has never been publicly disclosed. Even more alarming, there appears to be no publicly available record indicating that an autopsy was ever conducted

The Daily Mail reported:

Hicks, who worked at JPL from 1998 to 2022, was credited with publishing over 80 scientific papers and was part of multiple teams helping NASA understand the physical properties of comets and asteroids.

Specifically, Hicks was involved with the DART Project, NASA’s test to see if humans could deflect dangerous asteroids away from Earth. He also worked on the Deep Space 1 Mission, which tested new spacecraft technology that flew by a comet in 2001.

While there have been no public allegations of foul play, Hicks’ case marks the ninth person with ties to America’s space or nuclear secrets who has died or mysteriously vanished in recent years, which has set off alarm bells among US national security experts.

Moreover, three of these scientists had close ties to Hicks, as all of them worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab or participated in NASA missions there. Monica Reza, JPL’s new Director of the Materials Processing Group, vanished without a trace in June 2025, just months after beginning her tenure at the NASA lab.

Two other men with deep ties to JPL died recently, including a long-time coworker of Hicks, Frank Maiwald, who died in July 2024 at age 61, with even less public acknowledgement of his untimely passing.

Meanwhile, astrophysicist Carl Grillmair, 67, was murdered on the front porch of his home on February 16, 2026. The California Institute of Technology researcher’s work was heavily supported by NASA’s JPL, and Grillmair was personally involved with major space telescope missions led by NASA.

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Far-Left Canadian MP Introduces Insane 15-Letter Acronym in Tirade at PM Mark Carney

A Canadian Member of Parliament (MP) has debuted an insane new acronym.

Leah Gazan, who is an MP for the far-left New Democratic Party, used the phrase “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” during a speech attacking Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Her specific gripe with Carney is over his cuts to various indigenous funding programs to make way for increased military spending, as President Trump demands NATO do more to shoulder the burden of international defense.

She ranted:

When the budget was released, I was shocked to find out that Prime Minister Carney is cutting $7 billion between Indigenous Services Canada and Crown Indigenous Relations. They provided zero dollars to deal with the ongoing genocide of MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+.

This is abhorrent. This is callous. This is callous because the very Liberal government that has stripped organizations of life-sustaining funding has now promised, committed $13 billion, $13 billion on military spending.

Who is paying for it? Indigenous women across this country, Indigenous women, girls, 2SLGBTQQIA+, are not safe. In fact, rates of violence are increasing. And what is the Prime Minister doing? He is turning a blind eye on this violence.

You know, the Prime Minister talks a lot about projects of national interest. What is in the national interest are the lives, safety, security, and dignity, not in the national interest, of Indigenous women and girls, 2SLGBTQQIA+. Is the Prime Minister okay having Indigenous women, 2SLGBTQQIA+ family members and organizations coming to Parliament begging time and time again to see our humanity?

Is he okay with that? Well, clearly, with his behavior the other day, laughing at a woman from Grassy Narrows who is suffering from mercury poisoning, having her even having to beg for an apology, is an example of how this Prime Minister has turned his back on Indigenous peoples, particularly Indigenous women and girls, 2SLGBTQQIA+. And what does that look like? It looks like rates of violence increasing.

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