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DSA Democrats Praise This ‘Socialist Model’ – Communist Cuba’s Power Grid Collapses

The power grid in Cuba has once more failed, leaving residents of the Caribbean island in darkness.

Reuters reported on Friday that the electrical grid sustained a “total collapse” as millions were left entirely without power.

The outlet noted that the collapse of the power grid was driven by high-voltage transmission lines failing in central Cuba around 2 p.m.

Felix Estrada, an ⁠official with Cuba’s National Electrical Union, said in a statement that “protocols are now in place to begin ​the gradual restoration of the system.”

Some neighborhoods in Havana — especially those near hospitals — had their power restored by Friday evening.

But the rest of Cuba’s capital and largest city remained dark even as clouds and rain gathered.

Reuters reported that there have been at least six partial or total blackouts so far this year in Cuba.

There were three collapses in July alone.

The outlet added that many in Havana are accustomed to the grid failing, and are used to enduring many hours or even days without power.

“Yesterday I’d gone without ‌power ⁠for 24 hours. They turned the lights on for an hour, and then the grid collapsed,” Frank Lorenzo, a 23-year-old Havana resident, told Reuters.

Reuters noted that the power grid has been placed under additional strain by the U.S. oil blockade that started in January.

The Council on Foreign Relations said in a 2023 analysis that the nation’s communist regime was at its weakest point in decades — even before the most recent woes.

“Cuba’s centrally planned economy has been mired by stagnation for decades. But over the past five years, the pillars propping up the island’s already feeble economy collapsed one by one, sending it into a tailspin,” the think tank noted.

Among other factors, oil production from Venezuela declined, while Brazil and Colombia nixed arrangements under which Cuba sent medical professionals to work abroad and took most of their pay.

Cuban tourism also plummeted with COVID lockdowns.

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The Court Lets Trump Keep Third-Country Deportations, but Adds a Big Condition

Six months ago, we checked in on President Donald Trump’s fight over third-country deportations after the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave his administration breathing room while the case continued.

Trump won that round.

Friday, the judges finally ruled on the substance, and the answer is more complicated.

Related: Trump Scores Court Win as Biden-Appointed Judge’s Deportation Block Stalls

The First Circuit ruled that the government may continue removing illegal aliens to third countries, meaning countries other than their own, but DHS can’t simply put someone on a plane without meaningful notice and an opportunity to raise a fear of persecution or torture.

From Bloomberg Law:

DHS issued the guidance permitting the removals in early 2025 as part of a broader immigration enforcement push and arranged deals with third countries to accept deportees who aren’t their citizens.

“An individual’s right to contest removal to a country based on a fear of persecution in that country means little if one does not receive prior notice of the intended removal destination and a meaningful opportunity to contest that destination,” Judge Seth Aframe wrote for the unanimous panel.

The dispute matters because third-party removals have become an important tool for Trump‘s immigration enforcement program. Some countries refuse to take their own nationals back. In other cases, the administration has reached agreements allowing migrants to be sent elsewhere.

More than 25,000 people have been sent to at least 29 third countries under the policy.

The legal problem begins when the destination was never part of the migrant’s original removal proceeding.

Federal law prohibits sending someone to a country where he is likely to be tortured. Existing regulations also provide procedures for people raising fear-based claims. The First Circuit concluded that DHS’s streamlined policy didn’t provide enough opportunity to use those protections.

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Absolutely Damning Details Emerge About South Carolina Jail Where Mentally Ill White Inmate was Starved to Death, While These Questions Remain Unanswered

Damning new information has emerged about the Chesterfield County Detention Center in South Carolina where mentally ill White inmate who was in there on charges of impersonating a police officer, while several questions remain unanswered.

As The Gateway Pundit reported, a South Carolina inmate who told his family he was being intentionally starved inside the Chesterfield County Detention Center has now been ruled a homicide victim, nearly two months after jailers found his dehydrated, emaciated body on the floor of a feces-covered cell with the water shut off.

Gary Donald “Bubba” Blair, 43, was found lifeless on the floor of his E Pod cell at the Chesterfield County Detention Center on July 24. The cell was covered in inches-deep feces.

Blair also had no mattress and was completely naked. Even worse, he went from nearly 300 pounds at booking to 185 pounds at autopsy.

Blair’s official cause of death was revealed to be “profound dehydration…due to deprivation of water.” Pneumonia, a pressure ulcer on his heel consistent with lying on the floor for days, evidence he ingested toilet water, and profound weight loss were named as contributing factors.

At the center of it all was Jail Administrator Troy Ellerbe, who was accused of racist treatment toward White inmates.

Ellerbe had led the facility since early 2023 before Sheriff Cambo Streater fired him five days after Blair’s body was found. No explanation was given why.

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FDA relied on broken data mining process to sell COVID vaccines: report

Top officials with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were warned in early 2021 of a critical defect in the country’s vaccine monitoring system yet chose to rely on it anyway while assuring the public of the COVID-19 vaccines’ safety, according to a new report.

On September 16, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a report detailing flaws in the algorithms used to sift through the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) to find safety signals with the COVID shots that would require investigation.

One of those algorithms would calculate “proportional reporting ratios” (PRRs), identifying events that were reported at a higher rate than others, along with “empirical bayesian” data mining.

But according to the BMJ’s investigation, the agency’s algorithm was “mathematically compromised by the deluge of covid vaccine adverse event reports – resulting in a near total loss of signal detection sensitivity for the new mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna.” More significantly, top officials were warned early in 2021, yet chose to keep relying on it anyway, and even “cited the absence of signals when assuring clinicians and the public of the vaccines’ safety.”

In February 2021, the Israeli Ministry of Health informed the FDA and CDC of a “a large number of reports of myocarditis, particularly in young people” after vaccination, and followed up five weeks later that two of the 77 had died. The Pentagon Defense Health Agency subsequently reported a “cluster” of myocarditis cases among male soldiers. By May, VAERS had gotten hundreds of such reports, prompting the CDC to begin alerting medical professionals.

Then-FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation & Research director Peter Marks emailed CDC director Rochelle Walensky, expressing concern that “myocarditis and pericarditis have not actually signaled … Can you help me understand why we are doing this when pediatricians and others in the community already seem to be aware?”

As VAERS reports continued to mount, health officials inquired as to why they were not receiving safety signals from the government.

“The problem arose because, in the first year of the rollout, almost all the reports coming into VAERS – more than 90% of 1.1 million – were for the mRNA covid shots, dwarfing vaccines for all other diseases,” BMJ explained. “This meant that analyzing the safety of one vaccine, for example Pfizer’s product, involved comparing it to other vaccines, which were overwhelmingly limited to Moderna’s product. But if both mRNA vaccines elevated the risk of an adverse event like myocarditis in roughly equal amounts, the ‘observed’ frequency and ‘expected’ frequency would be similar, resulting in no automated alert. The statistical phenomenon is known as ‘masking.’”

Microbiologist and immunologist Ana Szarfman, an expert in drug safety data mining who worked with the FDA for decades, emailed Marks directly with concerns about the system. Two weeks later, a video conference was held in which Szarfman’s presentation explained that the PRR analysis “Highlights almost everything,” whereas the FDA’s bayesian approach did not: “You are not getting useful information with such low counts.”

Yet Marks and his team declined to change course and urged Szarfman to “hold off on creating and sending data mining reports and analyses using covid-19 vaccine AE (adverse event) data.”

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DSA blueprint for 2028: Elect AOC president — and reportedly replace Chuck Schumer with radical leftist Chi Ossé

Ultra-left Brooklyn Councilman Chi Ossé would reportedly challenge NY Sen. Chuck Schumer in 2028 while “Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez runs for the White House — if the Democratic Socialists of America get their way.

Ossé visited Buffalo and Kingston this week, and the silver-spoon socialist sounded very much like a candidate seeking higher office.

“I think the era of wait-your-turn politics is over,” he told a packed crowd at Kingston’s Unicorn Bar Tuesday at a “Take Our Power Back” Mid-Hudson Valley DSA event.

“The time for us, the socialists, is right now,” he said, sitting on a bar stool on stage at the queer performance venue, Hell Gate reported.

In May he notoriously said, “Woke 1 was crazyyyy.” It was an attempt to defend his 2021 remarks that “a cis white man should not be the next speaker of the council.”

Ocasio-Cortez repeated Ossé’s “woke 1 was crazy” comment last month before announcing on national television she was freezing her eggs. “During lockdown, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today,” she said in an attempt to blame it all on pandemic stir-craze.

The remarks were seen by many as a signal that the two far-left pols are trying to water down their radical images in an effort to attract more moderate Dems.

In Kingston, Ossé, 28, pushed for government-run electricity, and worked the room and posed for photos during a private happy hour before the talk, Hell Gate reported.

The outlet reported that several DSA sources confirmed ongoing talks within the party to run Ossé for Schumer’s seat.

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Former DSA Insider Sounds Alarm on Group’s Rabid Anti-Americanism

In June, The Gateway Pundit reported that former Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) organizer Jake Altman shared warnings about the organization with the Free Press. According to Altman, the DSA does not tolerate dissent among its ranks and works to get rid of its critics. Everyone has to be with the program to be in good standing.

Altman spoke with Fox News to sound the alarm on the radical group and their efforts to “force their agenda down other people’s throats.”

Altman told Fox News Digital, “I had been involved in my local union and met some people who were far, far to the left, in like, a frightening way. I was looking for a more pragmatic and thoughtful option on the left that was focused on economic policy.”

“One of the concerns I had very quickly was that [the] DSA was beginning to sound more and more like those extreme groups on the left that I, you know, certainly didn’t want anything to do with.”

More from Fox:

The former DSA leader recalled voicing concern in 2019 after the DSA issued a statement that he characterized as “defending or apologizing for the Maduro regime.”

“I raised a concern about that … and I said, DSA should be denouncing Maduro … the Democratic socialists and social Democrats in Venezuela are in the opposition — there should be free and fair elections,” he continued.

“The person disagreed with me and defended, you know, essentially defended the Maduro regime,” Altman revealed.

Altman noted that the organization holds view that “America is a unique evil in the world and that its enemies have a point.”

And as for dissent? Altman does not believe it is tolerated.

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5th Circuit: Federal Ban on Interstate Handgun Sales Violates 2A

On Friday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the federal ban on interstate handgun sales violates the Second Amendment.

CQ Almanac noted that the ban on interstate handgun sales was put in place via the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. The ban was then fleshed out and expanded in the Gun Control Act of 1968 which was signed into law by Democrat President Lyndon Johnson.

The Fifth Circuit surmised: “The government’s theory of the Ban’s historical justification centers on its contention that ‘when it enacted the Omnibus Crime Control Act and the Gun Control Act of 1968 [which contains all of the provisions comprising the Ban], Congress sought to address concerns about public safety and that individuals deemed dangerous might evade state laws designed to ensure only law-abiding citizens could acquire firearms by purchasing them outside the jurisdiction.’”

But the government’s theory did not survive the Bruen (2022) test.

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OpenAI flags concerning new AI behavior and vows to track it more closely

OpenAI has disclosed six reports of “unexpected or concerning” behavior in artificial-intelligence models as the debate on AI safety becomes increasingly heated.

The AI company also said Wednesday it was introducing a new framework for tracking, probing and disclosing instances of what it called “misalignment,” including cases where AI models acted without authorization, coordinated with other models or evaded oversight.

OpenAI’s latest announcement came as U.S. AI bosses, including the leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic, are calling for a slowdown in the technology’s development over safety concerns.

Among the new cases reported by OpenAI, an unreleased research model inserted “jailbreak-like instructions” into its own notes to disregard its normal constraints and told itself to be “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots.”

In another instance, an AI “agent” used computer code to come up with the answer to a question, but, in order to have an online source to cite, it uploaded a file to the public internet without asking the user.

During training of an AI model called 5.6-sol, the model instructed itself to invent missing data, and an agent wrote a message to remind itself to hide mismatched information.

The six reports were discovered during training or evaluation over the past months, OpenAI said.

“As AI systems grow more advanced and more widely deployed, we need to build a broader and better-informed consensus on the progress of alignment research,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post as it disclosed the events.

“Decisions about how AI development should proceed in the months and years to come need to draw on evidence that people outside the companies building frontier models can examine for themselves,” the company said.

Wednesday’s new cases followed OpenAI’s disclosure in July that its rogue AI system hacked into AI startup Hugging Face. Anthropic also said the same month that its AI models hacked into three organizations during testing.

AI “agents” are becoming smarter and have become “more determined to resolve complex tasks through inter-agent collaboration, knowledge sharing, deception, and concealment,” said Lian Jye Su, a chief analyst at technology research and advisory group Omdia.

That’s making it harder to govern and contain them using traditional AI security approaches, he said.

OpenAI’s new tracking and disclosure framework, meanwhile, can help push for other AI developers to also adopt similar practices.

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Waste Of The Day: SBA Reviewed Loans 20 Years Late

The Small Business Administration potentially made $11.5 million in improper payments to banks after overruling its own employees who had recommended reducing or denying government guarantees on 16 failed small-business loans.

For another 13 failed loans, SBA took so long to review them that the six-year statute of limitations expired, wasting another $5.4 million, according to an Aug. 27 inspector general report.

Key facts: SBA’s 7(a) program helps startups with a risky business model get loans, but it does not generally lend taxpayer money directly. Private banks make loans of up to $5 million, and the government promises to cover as much as 85% of the loss if the borrower defaults.

But taxpayers only have to honor that guarantee when the bank follows SBA rules. If a bank failed to properly determine whether a borrower could repay the loan, verify required investments or follow other safeguards, SBA can reduce or deny the payout to the bank.

Auditors reviewed 32 failed loans where SBA employees recommended reducing or denying the payouts to banks, but higher-level reviewers later overturned those decisions.

For 16 of the 32 loans, auditors found insufficient evidence to justify the reversal, resulting in $11.5 million worth of potential improper payments. That included almost $4.9 million loaned to borrowers who never showed evidence they could repay the money.

One small business defaulted within 18 months. The bank argued that the small business had a sound strategy, but it failed due to the unforeseen loss of a major customer. The bank provided no evidence for its claim, but the SBA paid the guarantee anyway.

The SBA is also taking far too long to review high-risk loans, the audit found. The agency has only six years to sue a bank for violating the loan terms, but auditors found 13 loans where impropriety was not discovered until that deadline had passed. Two of them were not reviewed for more than 20 years after the loan guarantee was paid.

The SBA legally could have withheld other federal payments to the banks even after the six-year time limit expired, but the SBA has no process for doing so, the audit found.

SBA guaranteed $37 billion through 77,600 new 7(a) loans in fiscal year 2025.

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Cuba Hit With National Power Grid Collapse As Oil Sources Dry Up

Cuba’s power grid collapsed once again this week, this time at a national level, leaving millions of people across the island without electricity.  This is the sixth time since the US cut off fuel sources to the island since January that the national grid has collapsed and it’s the most utility shutdown events in the country’s recent history.  

Even when Cuba’s grid is in operation, only 30% of the population at most receives electricity at any given time.  Many regions stay dark 20 to 30 hours at a stretch. Some provinces have reported 60–90 hours without power. Havana has gone from 4 hours a day early in the year to 18 hours after the fuel cutoff. 

“Protocols are now in place to begin ​the gradual restoration of the system,” said Felix Estrada, an ⁠official with Cuba’s National Electrical Union (UNE). Power had returned to a handful of ​scattered neighborhoods in Havana by late evening, primarily around hospitals, but much of ​the city remained completely dark.

Many exhausted residents ​of the capital Havana were already without power when the national blackout hit.

“Yesterday I’d gone without ‌power ⁠for 24 hours. They turned the lights on for an hour, and then the grid collapsed,” said Frank Lorenzo, a 23-year-old Havana resident.

Around 61% of Cuba’s oil was sourced from Venezuela until the US capture of illegitimate president Nicolas Maduro.  Shipments from Mexico have were also scaled back and then cut off.  Russia has sent only one tanker so far this year. 

Reports of a “shadow fleet” of tankers carrying Iranian oil to Cuba have circulated since at least 2020.  Investigations of the seized tanker “Skipper” in 2025 found it had previously carried Iranian oil to Syria and China, then later moved Venezuelan oil on a route tied to Cuba. It confirmed the existence of overlapping Iran–Venezuela–Cuba shipping networks. 

The US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has proven incredibly effective in shutting down Iranian oil exports, leaving Iran’s clandestine trade partners high and dry.  

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