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UK Courts Block Grooming Gang Survivor from Enforcing Compensation Award: Could this be happening in America?

For Americans, the term “Grooming Gang” may seem like a distant UK issue. But the story of “Liz,” a Rotherham survivor in North England, should resonate. In March 2023, she won a £425,000 ($550,000 USD) compensation award against her rapist, Asghar Bostan, part of a Muslim Pakistani grooming gang (rape gangs). Yet, by October 2025, court delays have left her empty-handed.

These delays, coupled with fears of “Islamophobia” accusations that shielded UK gangs, mirror U.S. struggles with justice for sexual abuse victims. They raise alarms about whether similar crimes could hide in America under the same guise of political correctness. Short prison sentences, like the lenient terms often handed to UK offenders, further erode trust—a pattern Americans see in trafficking or abuse cases.

The UK’s endless inquiries, costing millions with no action, and courts that stall survivors’ justice, parallel American issues. From trafficking rings to campus assaults, both nations grapple with backlogged systems and institutional failures. Liz’s fight is a warning: justice delayed is justice denied.

A Stalled Victory with American Implications
Liz’s trauma began in the early 2000s, when she was raped as a teenager by Ashgar Bostan, a taxi driver convicted in 2018 under Operation Stovewood. This probe targeted Rotherham’s child sexual exploitation crisis from 1997 to 2013. She pursued the UK’s first private civil prosecution, funded by philanthropists including Lord Pearson of Rannoch, who raised £30,000 with Lord Vinson to cover legal costs. Her team secured a default judgment for £425,934—now about $585,000 with interest—for her lifelong trauma.

Bostan’s criminal sentence was shockingly light: just seven years for multiple rapes, with parole eligibility by 2022, reflecting a UK trend of lenient sentencing for grooming gang members.

But Liz’s win remains hollow. A charging order on Bostan’s property was granted in September 2023, finalized in November, with a sale order in October 2024. Yet, no final court date exists as of October 2025.

The 2.5-year delay mirrors U.S. court backlogs — 1.3 million pending civil cases in 2024. Elizabeth faces postponed hearings and months-long waits for fee waivers, despite judges’ “shock” at these delays. And at each stage the system demands £10,000 from her in “court fees.”

Even obtaining court transcripts is a lang drawn out expensive ordeal. Lord Pearson fought for Bostan’s 2018 trial transcripts, battling Sheffield Crown Court from December 2020 to March 2021 for the civil case. After the House of Lords Library admitted they were too expensive for them to obtain, Lord Pearson personally paid for them. Bostan’s 2024 parole breaches went unmonitored, echoing U.S. failures like Larry Nassar’s parole mishandling. With UK courts adding 500 more cases to the backlog each month, trials now stretch to 2027 — much like U.S. survivors enduring prolonged pain.

Could Grooming Gangs Hide in America?
And the pattern is not foreign to the U.S. either. In the UK, grooming gangs—largely Muslim Pakistani men targeting vulnerable white English girls—operated for decades while authorities hesitated, fearing “Islamophobia” accusations. That fear allowed abuses to fester unchecked. Short sentences, like Bostan’s seven years, enabled early releases, undermining justice and retraumatizing victims.

In the U.S., similar dynamics could conceal organized abuse. The FBI’s 2024 trafficking report highlights vulnerabilities in marginalized and underserved communities. Cases like a 2023 Minnesota trafficking ring, involving Somali-American men exploiting teenage girls, show disturbing parallels. Local officials delayed action amid community sensitivities. In cities like Minneapolis or Dearborn, fear of “Islamophobia” labels could mirror UK failures, letting exploitation go unchecked. Political correctness risks becoming a shield for predators, as it did in Rotherham.

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The Covid Re-Review Project: All Models Are Wrong, and Some Are Dangerous

Iwelcome Eyal Shahar’s call for a re-review of Covid vaccine papers. In fact, I started long before Eyal blew the whistle — even before the vaccines appeared.

At the end of the terrible year 2020, a highly influential paper appeared in Science. It made headlines in major media outlets around the world. The paper, titled “Inferring the effectiveness of government interventions against COVID-19,” was soon used by governments across the globe to justify their increasingly authoritarian policies.

It attracted my attention because the last author was Czech mathematician Jan Kulveit. Together with my two colleagues, Ondřej Vencálek and Jakub Dostál, we wrote the following response:

“All models are wrong, but some are useful“ goes a famous saying usually attributed to George Box. Today, he would perhaps say that all models are wrong, and some are even dangerous. This, in our opinion, is the case for the study “Inferring the effectiveness of government interventions against COVID-19”1 that appeared in Science and received widespread attention around the world. 

The study aims at understanding the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in controlling the Covid-19 pandemic. The authors analyze data on the total case counts and death counts from 41 (mostly European) countries between January and the end of May 2020. They produce an estimate of the effects of 8 different NPIs (such as limiting gatherings of people, closing schools, etc.) which were implemented in many countries during the studied period. The effect of each NPI is quantified by the reduction in the infection reproduction number R at the time of the NPI imposition in the respective country. 

The results have been widely welcomed because they seem to show that all of the NPIs generally work, and the effect sizes seem to agree with the common sense (e.g. the more you restrict gatherings, the greater reduction of R you obtain). Governments across the world will be very happy to hear that the restrictions they imposed were justified. But were they?

In fact, we do not know, and this study does not help us to find out. We argue that there is a fatal flaw in the model which renders it useless. Looking at the only equation in the body of the paper (see the “Short model description” section), we see that the authors assume the underlying (unobservable) basic reproduction number R0,c to be constant in time for each country. This basic reproduction number is then multiplied by the effects of the NPIs and this is fitted to data. Thus, the model assumes that any change in the dynamic of the epidemic is due to the NPIs. This is deceptive because it is circular. If you want to quantify the effects of an intervention, you cannot assume that all the observed effects are due to the very intervention. 

Also, this assumption of constant R0,c suggests why the authors chose to stop modeling once any NPI is lifted. The NPIs are usually lifted as the epidemic dwindles. Thus, the NPIs are present when R is high, and they are absent when R is low. With data from a longer time interval (including the summer period of low prevalence and relaxed NPIs), the simple model the authors used would learn a negative effect – that NPIs speed up the epidemic. This was clearly undesirable, so the authors chose not to use the data from the summer to fit the model. Such modeling strategy is highly questionable.

To make our point completely clear, we performed the following experiment. We took the original dataset2 and invented a new NPI that never existed. Let us say that from the imposition of this new NPI on, each citizen was required to wear a T-shirt with a “Stop-Covid” inscription, until this NPI was lifted. 

We drew a random date uniformly from the period over which a particular country was modeled, and “imposed” this T-shirt NPI on the data (see reference [3] for the original dataset with the T-shirt NPI added). We did not change the numbers of cases and deaths anyhow. Such an NPI never existed and so it could not have had any effect. We then ran the original model (see reference [4] for the link to GitHub to the version we used) without touching any parameters. The result is shown in Figure 1. The T-shirts almost made the pandemic go away!

How is this possible? Every epidemic has its intrinsic dynamics. The simplest SIR model produces a single peak in the number of active cases. If we want to reproduce such a peak with a simple exponential function (which is what the authors do), the coefficient in the exponent (i.e. the empirical reproduction number) must decrease in time from the beginning of the first wave. Thus, assuming that any effect on the reproduction number is due to NPIs, the model cannot produce anything other than assign a positive effect (i.e. a reduction in R) to any NPI. Even to a nonexistent one, as we have shown.

Thus, in our view the model is deceptive and very dangerous, because it can be used by the governments to retrospectively justify any NPI they chose to impose on the people. We do not claim that some/all of the NPIs have not had a positive effect. We only say that this model is no way to find out.

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Increasingly Authoritarian Zelensky Prepares for Future Elections by Targeting Rivals – After Ousting Odessa Head, Now He Sets His Sights on Kiev Mayor and Former Boxer Klitschko: REPORT

The authoritarian behavior of Volodymyr Zelensky has become impossible to ignore.

An article written by Pavel Lokshin for the German newspaper WELT sharply criticizes Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for his increasingly authoritarian tendencies.

The report shows how the man lionized by the MSM as ‘a second Churchill’ is in fact consolidating his power through the suppression of political opponents.

Welt reported (translated from the German):

“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is consolidating his power. Anyone who stands in his way must give way – most recently the freely elected mayor of the city of Odessa. Zelensky is thus sending a clear signal to other opponents.”

The article comments on the recent dismissal of the elected mayor the of the important Black Sea port of Odessa, Gennady Trukhanov.

Zelensky accused him of ‘having a Russian passport’, and the move is seen as a prime example of this authoritarian pattern, just a naked intimidation tactic aimed at silencing dissent.

“Zelenskyy’s decision to remove the mayor, who was democratically elected, underscores a troubling trend: the prioritization of loyalty over electoral legitimacy.

In a time of war, such moves may be justified by some as necessary for unity, but they erode the foundations of the democracy Ukraine is fighting to preserve.”

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US Army Colonel Found the IDF Intentionally Killed Palestinian American Journalist in 2022

A retired US Army colonel who was involved in the investigation into the Israeli military killing of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh has revealed that he found the shooting was intentional shortly after she was killed.

Abu Akleh, a veteran Al Jazeera reporter and a Christian, was killed by the Israeli military while reporting on an IDF raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on May 11, 2022. She was shot in the head while wearing a vest clearly marked with the word “PRESS.”

“My findings were beyond a reasonable doubt that this was an intentional killing of Shireen Abu Akleh,” Col. Steve Gabavics told Zeteo reporter Mehdi Hasan. Gabavics affirmed that he came to the conclusion within 10 days of Abu Akleh’s killing.

Despite Gabavics’ findings, the Biden administration’s State Department claimed in a statement issued on July 4, 2022, that the shooting was unintentional and the result of “tragic circumstances.”

Gabavics told Hasan that his boss at the time, Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel, who led the US Security Coordinator liaison office for Israel, took the word of an Israeli general over his findings. Gabavics said that Gen. Yehuda Fox, the head of Israel’s Central Command at the time, told Fenzel that an Israeli soldier may have killed Abu Akleh, but that it was an “accident, that it was a matter of tragic circumstances,” the same language used in the Biden administration’s statement.

“So the US general takes the word of a foreign general over his own officer, who he sent to investigate?” Hasan asked Gabavics, to which he answered in the affirmative.

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At least 25 states plan to cut off food aid benefits in November

Millions of low-income Americans will lose access to food aid on Nov. 1, when half of states plan to cut off benefits due to the government shutdown.

Twenty-five statestold POLITICO that they are issuing notices informing participants of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — the nation’s largest anti-hunger initiative — that they won’t receive checks next month. Those states include California, Arkansas, Hawaii, Indiana, Mississippi and New Jersey. Others didn’t respond to requests for comment in time for publication.

USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service recently told every state that they’d need to hold off on distributing benefits until further notice, according to multiple state agencies.

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, told reporters at the state capitol Wednesday that President Donald Trump is the “first president in U.S. history to cut off SNAP benefits to people in America.”

“The state funding can’t begin to match what the federal government provides,” said Healey, whose state is also ending benefits Nov. 1.

Nutrition programs like SNAP and another one serving low-income mothers and infants have been caught in the crossfire of lawmakers’ spending negotiations, with the shutdown now in its fourth week. States are scrambling to maintain the programs using money from their own coffers and emergency funding from the Trump administration, but that pot is rapidly decreasing.

The administration would have to find more than $8 billion to keep SNAP afloat if the shutdown continues.

“We just can’t do it without the government being open,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in a NewsNation interview Tuesday. “By Nov. 1, we are very hopeful this government reopens and we can begin moving that money out. But right now, half the states are shut down on SNAP.”

Under SNAP, which serves more than 42 million people, families receive an average of $187.20 per month to pay for groceries. The pause in benefits would kick in just before the Thanksgiving holiday and add further strain on food banks and pantries during a typically busy season.

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Australia’s eSafety Chief Pressures Big Tech and AI Firms on Verification, Age Checks

Australia’s top online regulator, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, is intensifying her push to reshape speech in the digital world.

Her office has formally warned major social platforms and several AI chatbot companies that they could soon be forced to comply with far-reaching new age verification and “online safety” requirements that many see as expanding government control over online communication.

The warnings are part of the government’s effort to enforce the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, which would bar Australians under 16 from creating social media accounts.

Letters sent to Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, X, and YouTube make it clear that each company is expected to fall under the scope of the new law.

The Commissioner’s preliminary assessment is that these services exist mainly for “online social interaction,” which brings them within the definition of social media platforms and subjects them to strict age verification and child protection obligations.

Not all of the companies accept that classification. Snapchat claims to be primarily a messaging platform similar to WhatsApp, while YouTube has opposed losing its original exemption.

At this stage, only services with a clear focus on messaging or education, such as WhatsApp, Messenger, YouTube Kids, and Google Classroom, remain excluded from the Commissioner’s oversight.

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Physicists Change the Nature of Matter With Light in Breakthrough That Blurs the Line Between Science and Magic

When physicists at the University of Konstanz shone a flash of light on a simple iron crystal, they weren’t expecting to watch the rules of matter change before their eyes. Yet that seems to be what happened.

In an experiment that reads like science fiction, the team discovered a way to use light—not heat or exotic materials—to alter a substance’s magnetic properties, effectively turning one material into another in a fraction of a trillionth of a second.

The results, published in Science Advances, show that the effect doesn’t require supercooling or specialized alloys: it happens at room temperature. The light responsible doesn’t melt, burn, or deform the crystal. Instead, it simply changes the way its atoms behave. This process opens a door to new physics that merges the quantum and the macroscopic. With this, light itself can rewrite the physical identity of matter.

The researchers describe their discovery as a way to “change the frequencies and properties of the material in a non-thermal way.” In other words, they have shown that light alone, “not temperature,” can alter a material’s magnetic behavior, offering a new route to control magnetism without heat.

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“Every solid has its own set of frequencies: electronic transitions, lattice vibrations, magnetic excitations,” lead author and physicist at the University of Konstanz, Dr. Davide Bossini, said in a statement. “Every material resonates in its own way. It changes the nature of the material, the ‘magnetic DNA of the material,’ so to speak, its ‘fingerprint.’ It has practically become a different material with new properties for the time being.”

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Researchers used laser pulses to excite pairs of “magnons”—quantum waves that represent collective spin oscillations in a magnetic material. These magnons act like tiny disturbances or waves in a sea of electron spins. By controlling them, researchers found they could change the material’s magnetic “fingerprint.”

“The result was a huge surprise for us,” Dr. Bossini said. “No theory has ever predicted it.”

In essence, when light strikes the hematite crystal, it excites pairs of magnons to vibrate in sync. Those vibrations cascade through the lattice, coupling with other magnetic modes—types of oscillations in the arrangement of atomic spins—and reshaping the entire magnetic spectrum.

That transformation lasts only as long as the excited states persist—mere trillionths of a second—but it’s long enough to prove that light can temporarily redefine the intrinsic behavior of matter itself.

To achieve the effect, researchers used haematite, a naturally occurring iron ore once used in medieval compasses. “Haematite is widespread. Centuries ago, it was already used for compasses in seafaring,” Dr. Bossini said.

Using ultrafast laser pulses, each less than a millionth of a billionth of a second, the researchers could excite high-momentum magnons—quantized packets of spin waves that carry magnetic energy—within the hematite, a type of iron oxide. When these tiny magnetic waves coupled with lower-energy modes (slower, less energetic oscillations), the material’s resonance pattern shifted. This wasn’t a thermal effect from heating; it was purely quantum mechanical.

In their paper, the researchers verified this by changing the laser’s pulse rate and intensity. Even when the overall heat input varied by a factor of four, the results were identical. The magnetic states had changed, but not because of temperature. “The effects are not caused by laser excitation. The cause is light, not temperature,” Dr. Bossini confirmed.

In traditional physics, to alter a material’s state—for example, turning metal into a magnet—you’d need to heat, cool, or chemically modify it. However, here, the transformation is instantaneous and reversible.

Once the light stops, the material returns to its normal state. But for those fleeting moments, its magnetic behavior, and potentially its quantum properties, become something entirely new.

The experiment demonstrates a fundamental ability to control quantum phenomena at room temperature, something that has long eluded researchers. Normally, the delicate interactions behind quantum behavior collapse at everyday temperatures. However, by exciting magnon pairs, researchers achieved effects previously observable only near absolute zero.

These findings could have big implications for quantum technology. In quantum tech, information is stored and processed using magnetic spins and waveforms, not electric charges. This technique offers a way to modulate those spins without heat or energy loss. Heat and energy loss are major hurdles for developing fast and efficient quantum devices.

This ability to control magnetism with light could one day enable faster data storage and transmission at terahertz rates—without the thermal slowdowns that limit current electronic systems.

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Ohio Lawmakers Approve Marijuana Bill That Creates A Process To Expunge Past Convictions

Some of the tens of thousands of Ohioans dogged by dated marijuana possession offenses could clear their names under new legislation passed by the State House on Wednesday.

The bill would allow expungement, a legal process that erases prior convictions from one’s record, which can impair housing and job applications even years later. It only applies for crimes of possessing less than 2.5 ounces of marijuana, which voters legalized in 2023.

The expungement provision passed within larger legislation on a bipartisan 87-8 vote that sets new rules on the sale of recreational marijuana and so-called “intoxicating hemp” marijuana knockoffs.

More than 16,000 possession arrests per year in Ohio

For most of the 21st century, an average of 16,000 Ohioans would be arrested each year (not necessarily convicted), according to FBI data. The numbers began to fall in 2019, when Ohio first allowed for the medicinal use of marijuana, followed by recreational use in 2023.

While President Joe Biden in 2022 issued a blanket pardon for federal marijuana offenses, state level convictions have festered since then. The House-passed bill paves the way to expungement for many of those with convictions lingering on their records.

“If you smoked a joint when you were 18, in 2002, in your 40s, you should not have barriers to housing, or employment, or public services, because you got in trouble when you were 18 for something that is completely legal,” said Rep. Dani Isaacsohn, the ranking House Democrat, in a floor speech Wednesday.

How to apply for expungement under the bill

Expungements didn’t go as far as some Democratic lawmakers and the ACLU wanted. Rep. Desiree Tims, a Dayton Democrat, said in committee the bill should have an automatic expungement mechanism, or at least a system to notify affected people that the new option is available. Plus, the application comes with a $50 fee that some can’t afford, she said.

Rep. Josh Williams, a Toledo Republican and attorney who regularly champions expungement policy, said a recent Ohio Supreme Court decision effectively tied lawmakers hands on the issue and requires them to leave judges some discretion. However, he said SB56 gives defendants every advantage possible while still likely passing court muster.

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Leaked: How British Intel Infiltrates Lebanon

In a markedly revealing September 22nd interview with The National, US special envoy to Syria Tom Barrack made a number of stunning admissions about the state of play in Lebanon. Despite Western governments for months demanding Beirut disarm Hezbollah, he acknowledged the Resistance group had “zero” incentive to voluntarily do so, as “Israel is attacking everybody” across West Asia. As such, Hezbollah’s “argument gets better and better”, and its public support grows. Barrack went on to propose arming the Lebanese Armed Forces for the purpose:

“[The LAF] is a good organisation and it’s well-meaning, but it’s not well-equipped…Who are they going to fight? We don’t want to arm them so they can fight Israel…So you’re arming them so they can fight their own people, Hezbollah…our enemy…We need to cut the heads off of those snakes and chop the flow of funds. That’s the only way you’re going to stop Hezbollah.”

Barrack’s comments are a uniquely candid admission of Washington’s overarching strategy in West Asia. Namely, to construct intelligence, military, and security apparatuses in pliable puppet states for the purposes of internal oppression, posing no threat whatsoever to the Zionist entity, while Tel Aviv attacks “everybody” in the region with total impunity. Yet, efforts to bring Lebanon to heel, and neutralise Hezbollah’s influence in the country, have been ongoing for many years – with London secretly leading the charge.

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39 Bipartisan State And Territory Attorneys General Push Congress To Ban Intoxicating Hemp Products

A bipartisan coalition of 39 state and territory attorneys general is calling on Congress to clarify the federal definition of hemp and impose regulations preventing the sale of intoxicating cannabinoid products.

In a letter sent to the Republican chairs of the House and Senate Appropriations and Agriculture Committees on Friday, members of the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) expressed concerns with provisions of the 2018 Farm Bill that legalized hemp, which they said has been “wrongly exploited by bad actors to sell recreational synthetic THC products across the country.”

They’re asking that lawmakers leverage the appropriations process, or the next iteration of the Farm Bill, to enact policy changes that “leave no doubt that these harmful products are illegal and that their sale and manufacture are criminal acts.”

Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin (R), Connecticut Attorney General William Tong (D), Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita (R) and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) led the letter, underscoring the bipartisan sentiment driving the call for congressional action.

“Intoxicating hemp-derived THC products have inundated communities throughout our states due to a grievously mistaken interpretation of the 2018 Farm Bill’s definition of ‘hemp’ that companies are leveraging to pursue profits at the expense of public safety and health,” they wrote. “Many of these products—created by manufacturers by manipulating hemp to produce synthetic THC—are more intoxicating and psychoactive than marijuana a Schedule I controlled substance and are often marketed to minors.”

While the debate over revising federal hemp laws has been a consistent talking point this year, with attempts in both chambers to enact a ban on products containing THC, so far such restrictions have only been implemented at the state level.

“Unless Congress acts, this gross distortion of the 2018 Farm Bill’s hemp provision will continue to fuel the rapid growth of an under-regulated industry that threatens public health and safety and undermines law enforcement nationwide,” the letter says.

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