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“Settlement tsunami”: Chicago spends more than double city budget on police misconduct settlements

The City of Chicago is searching for financial solutions amidst hundreds of pending police misconduct cases, spending more than double the $82 million budget.

Eight years ago, police burst down the door of the Mendez family home unannounced, pointing guns at Hester and Gilbert Mendez, and their sons Peter and Jack (who were 9 and 5 at the time) – only to find they’d raided the wrong apartment.

After years stuck in the legal pipeline, between COVID delays and multiple changes in the judge presiding over the case, Mendez et al. v. City of Chicago finally began on Monday, April 21, 2025 in Courtroom 1941 at the Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse in Chicago. 

The Mendez family was seeking financial compensation for their rights being violated and the trauma their children endured. 

The city of Chicago has already spent more than $164 million in taxpayer money this year on police misconduct settlements and judgments – more than double its $82 million budget. With hundreds of cases pending, including from people alleging torture by notorious former officers, the Mendez case illustrates how these situations often play out: the city launches into a costly trial, putting families through trauma and stress, only to settle for a large sum at taxpayer expense. Officials say there’s a better way to do it – offering substantial settlements earlier – not the unfairly small settlements that the city often uses to avoid trial, as lawyers see it; or ideally avoiding police misconduct in the first place. 

During the Mendez family’s trial, a now 17-year-old Peter Mendez described on the stand how he was traumatized on the evening of November 7, 2017. “My life flashed before my eyes, my heart was pounding, and I thought maybe I could die.”

To this day, the event has left Jack, the youngest child, with the same recurring nightmare of police shooting his mother, cuffing and taking his father away to jail, and separating him and his brother as they get taken to different orphanages. 

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Messy New Jersey Voter Rolls Have More Than 32,000 ‘Questionable’ Voter Records, Report Says

Registered New Jersey voters pick a new governor in the Nov. 4 general election, but before that the state really needs to clean up its voter list.

After reviewing New Jersey’s statewide voter roll, a report from the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) shows an “urgent need for improved list maintenance practices,” after identifying more than 32,000 registration issues, many of which could allow people to vote more than once.

PILF found 14,059 duplicate registrations, with voters registered in New Jersey and at least one other state at the same time. But PILF did not look at all 50 states, meaning there are certainly more to be found. PILF identified duplicate registrations in New Jersey and Florida (6,972 cases), New York (5,725), and Pennsylvania (925).

PILF also found 15,655 registrations using fictitious birth dates, which are sometimes used as placeholders — such as New Jersey’s most common placeholder date, 1800-01-01, that is, 225 years ago. The PILF report found 5,166 such birthdates in Essex County, 2,108 in Passaic County, and 1,928 in Middlesex County.

Of the 15,655 registrations with bad birth dates, 85 percent are marked as active voters, the report shows. But PILF says it is an easy fix. The organization took a random sample of 10 such registrations and compared the “New Jersey voter roll, Social Security records, and Experian reports,” and within minutes found the correct birthdates for all 10. PILF found that seven voter registrations were accurate after the proper birth date was added; Social Security records indicated that two registered voters had died more than 20 years ago; and one individual had seemingly relocated to St. Lucie County, Florida, and registered to vote there in 2017.

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Eight Healthy Babies Born via IVF using DNA from Three People

In the United Kingdom, medical professionals have successfully delivered eight babies using a pioneering fertility procedure that incorporates DNA from three individuals.

This method aims to safeguard children from inheriting severe mitochondrial disorders. The births represent a cautious advancement in assisted reproduction, prioritizing family health and stability.

The mothers involved carried mutations in their mitochondria, risking life-threatening conditions for their offspring. Mitochondria serve as cellular energy sources, essential for bodily functions. Without intervention, these defects could devastate future generations.

The United Kingdom amended its laws in 2015 to permit this technique, reflecting deliberate ethical review. In 2017, regulators issued the initial license to Newcastle University’s fertility clinic. This institution led the development over two decades.

Among the newborns are four boys and four boys, including identical twins, from seven women. All show no evidence of the anticipated mitochondrial ailments. One additional pregnancy continues under medical care.

Professor Doug Turnbull, a key researcher, described the results as reassuring for families and scientists alike. He highlighted the relief in achieving positive outcomes for patients.

Professor Mary Herbert, a senior team member, expressed fulfillment in seeing eight healthy infants. She noted the achievement rewards the extensive collaborative work.

Human genes primarily reside in the cell’s nucleus, totaling around 20,000. However, mitochondria add 37 genes of their own. Faulty mutations here can lead to profound cellular energy deficits.

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Cocky cop jailed for stealing bitcoins had log of his crypto theft in his office

A former cop in the United Kingdom was sentenced to five and a half years in prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to covering up his theft of 50 bitcoins seized during an investigation into the now-defunct illicit dark web marketplace Silk Road.

In 2014, the former UK National Crime Agency (NCA) officer, Paul Chowles, assisted in the arrest of Thomas White, a man “who had launched Silk Road 2.0 less than a month after the FBI had shut down the original site in 2013,” the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said in a press release.

Chowles was tapped to analyze and extract “relevant data and cryptocurrency” from White’s seized devices, specifically due to Chowles’ reputation for being “technically minded and very aware of the dark web and cryptocurrencies,” CPS said.

Like US cops busted for stealing bitcoins from Silk Road seizures, Chowles’ theft was brazen. In 2017, he transferred 50 of 97 seized bitcoins from one of White’s wallets to a public address, then used a cryptocurrency mixer called Bitcoin Fog to break up the bitcoins into smaller amounts “in an attempt to hide the trail of the money,” CPS said.

At the time, the bitcoins were worth about $80,000, but today, they’re valued at nearly $6 million.

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UNHOLY WAR: Christians and Druze being massacred in Syria under new terrorist government

In recent weeks, both Christians and Druze in southern Syria have come under siege by ISIS and forces sympathetic to the Syrian government. They are being massacred and their homes burned down.

Just yesterday, a horrific massacre occurred in a hospital in Suwayda, where bodies were seen stacked on top of each other as video cameras caught the aftermath of the deadly attack. I’m not going to post the video here.

One of the men who was captured said he was sent there by Syria’s Ministry of Defense to exterminate the Druze.

Another report says that 38 homes belonging to Christian families were torched to the ground, also in Suwayda.

A series of Christian communities in Syria have come under violent attack, according to fresh reports received by a leading Catholic charity.

Several local sources told Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) that yesterday (15th July) the faithful were targeted in the village of Al-Soura Al-Kabira, in the Suwayda Governorate of southern Syria.

According to the reports, 38 homes belonging to Christian families were destroyed by fire, leaving them homeless. Around 70 people took refuge in the church hall in Shahba.

One source told ACN: “This community has lost everything. They had very little to begin with – they were already among the poorest in the region – and now they have nothing left.”

St Michael’s Melkite Greek-Catholic Church was also attacked and torched by unknown assailants.

The full extent of the damage has not yet been confirmed, as access to the area is currently impossible. But images on social media seem to confirm the attack.

There are also reports that the neighboring village of Al-Mazraa came under fire, although details remain unclear.

The attackers have not been identified, but the violence is believed to be linked to sectarian tensions and extremist activity.

Just last month, 25 were killed when a Greek-Orthodox church was bombed in Damascus.

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Study finds AI tools made open source software developers 19 percent slower

When it comes to concrete use cases for large language models, AI companies love to point out the ways coders and software developers can use these models to increase their productivity and overall efficiency in creating computer code. However, a new randomized controlled trial has found that experienced open source coders became less efficient at coding-related tasks when they used current AI tools.

For their study, researchers at METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research) recruited 16 software developers, each with multiple years of experience working on specific open source repositories. The study followed these developers across 246 individual “tasks” involved with maintaining those repos, such as “bug fixes, features, and refactors that would normally be part of their regular work.” For half of those tasks, the developers used AI tools like Cursor Pro or Anthropic’s Claude; for the others, the programmers were instructed not to use AI assistance. Expected time forecasts for each task (made before the groupings were assigned) were used as a proxy to balance out the overall difficulty of the tasks in each experimental group, and the time needed to fix pull requests based on reviewer feedback was included in the overall assessment.

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Canada’s COVID jab injury payouts triple in two years, reaching $18 million

Payments to COVID jab-injured Canadians have tripled in the past three years.

According to information recently published by Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP), payments to COVID-injured Canadians have totaled $18,140,998, nearly triple the $6,695,716 paid in 2023.

The statistics, which reflect numbers from when the program was launched in 2020 until June 1, 2024, showed that only 234 out of 3317 claims have been approved.

However, the claims do not represent the total number of Canadians injured by the allegedly “safe and effective” COVID shots, as inside memos have revealed that the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) officials neglected to report all adverse effects from COVID shots and even went as far as telling staff not to report all events.

The PHAC’s downplaying of jab injuries is of little surprise to Canadians, as a 2023 secret memo revealed that the federal government purposefully hid adverse effect so as not to alarm Canadians.

Canada’s VISP was launched in December 2020 after the Canadian government gave vaccine makers a shield from liability regarding COVID-19 jab-related injuries.

To date, the health department does not have an estimate on how many compensation claims will be filed.  Officially, in Canada, there have been 442 deaths linked to the COVID shot, and Canada’s Public Health Agency data claims that 98.2 million jab doses have been administered.

Earlier this week, Conservatives demanded an official investigation into the Liberal-run vaccine injury program, which has given more to VISP administrators than injured Canadians. Notably, there have been no press releases regarding the contracts on the Government of Canada website nor from Carney’s official office.

An explosive Global News report found that Oxaro Inc., the company contracted for $50 million to run the program, misallocated taxpayer funds and disregarded many jab-injured Canadians.

Of the $50.6 million that Oxaro Inc., has received, $33.7 million has been spent on administrative costs, compared to only $18.1 million going to jab-injured Canadians.

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Disgraced CNN Claims Egg Prices *Increased* Under Trump

CNN, a far-left propaganda outlet that spreads disinformation and promotes violence against Jews, is spreading Orwellian lies about the cost of eggs under President Donald Trump.

From Orwell’s 1984:

“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday […] it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.”

Paraphrasing CNN this week:

Egg prices have increased under President Trump from an average of $6.55 a dozen to $2.89 a dozen.

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Mexican illegal alien charged after staging fake ‘ICE abduction’ to garner financial donations and sympathy

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced charges against an illegal alien from Mexico after she purportedly orchestrated a fake kidnapping by federal agents in an attempt to generate sympathy and financial donations.

41-year-old Yuriana Julia Pelaez Calderon, who is now in U.S. immigration custody, is being charged with conspiracy and making false statements to federal officers.

The fabricated “incident” initially garnered media attention after Calderon’s family held a press conference on June 30th, claiming that she had been abducted by ICE “bounty hunters” at gunpoint from a Los Angeles Jack in the Box location.

At the time, the family went on to claim that she was eventually taken to the U.S.-Mexico border and was told to “self deport.” During the press conference, the family’s lawyer argued that she had refused to sign self-deportation paperwork and was thus forcefully taken to a “warehouse at an undisclosed location” with other detainees — until she was willing to sign the paperwork.

The family then set up a fundraising page, requesting $4,500, according to the DOJ.

Despite the family’s claim, the federal agents began looking for Calderon after she reportedly never appeared in official records of having been in immigration custody, according to the DOJ.

However, agents later discovered Calderon at a shopping mall in Bakersfield, California.

“Dangerous rhetoric that ICE agents are ‘kidnapping’ illegal immigrants is being recklessly peddled by politicians and echoed in the media to inflame the public and discredit our courageous federal agents,” stated United States Attorney Bill Essayli.

“The conduct alleged in today’s complaint shows this hoax ‘kidnapping’ was a well-orchestrated conspiracy. The defendant and all those involved will face the full consequences of their conduct under federal law. I thank our partners at Homeland Security Investigations and all federal agents facing unprecedented levels of assaults for once again providing cool heads and professionalism during these difficult times,” he added.

A Justice Department press release revealed that federal authorities obtained video surveillance footage of Calderon leaving the Jack in the Box parking lot and entering into a nearby sedan, “as well as telephone records demonstrate Calderon fabricated the entire story.”

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Low IQ Jasmine Crockett Says USAID Is Vital To Fund Sesame Street In Iraq… Or Something

Idiocracy-a-like Democrat Jasmine Crockett argued during a hearing that USAID, the slush fund decimated by DOGE, is desperately needed in order to fund US propaganda in places like Iraq to ensure Islamists there don’t become radicalised against America.

Yes, really.

Crockett claimed that past programs including a version of Sesame Street that was made for Iraq are vital to national security, suggesting “This is so that there is not this warped thought process about the Western world.”

What in God’s name is she on about?

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