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Metaphysical Shop Owner’s Lawsuit Over Pennsylvania Fortune Telling Ban Moves Ahead

Following a legal victory earlier this summer, a metaphysical shop owner’s lawsuit over Pennsylvania’s ban on fortune telling could go to trial next year. The compelling case dates back to October of 2023 when the Serpent’s Key Shoppe and Sanctuary in the community of Hanover received an unexpected visit from the borough’s police chief, Chad Martin. Rather than picking up some occult supplies, the lawman instead offered a rather worrisome warning to owner Beck Ravenswood about the possibility of legal trouble should they violate the state’s 165-year-old law against divination. “He informed me basically he is not here to arrest me or press charges,” the shop owner recounted at the time, “however, if he ever gets a report from anyone, he will be back on my doorstep.”

The incident understandably did not sit well with Ravenswood, who filed a civil rights lawsuit against Martin and the town of Hanover in August of 2024. Nearly two years later, the case is still winding its way through the legal system, with the shop owner recently securing a significant legal victory. “The DA’s office had been trying to dismiss my case,” Ravenswood explained to a local media outlet, “saying it wasn’t important enough for the court to rule on.” However, they received word in June that the request had been rejected. “Judge Wilson finally looked at the evidence and said there’s a compelling argument here, and we need to determine what is really at the heart of this lawsuit,” Ravenswood said, “is it about witchcraft, or is it about freedom of speech? That’s really what it is.”

In a conference call between the parties on Wednesday, a discovery deadline was set for November 30th, and what the shop owner has cleverly taken to calling the ‘Hanover Witch Trial’ was added to the court’s calendar for June of 2027. That said, Ravenswood’s attorney reportedly indicated that they intend to request a summary judgment on the constitutionality of the law, which could eliminate the soothsaying ban once and for all without the need for any further court proceedings. Meanwhile, regardless of how the case ultimately unfolds, the antiquated restriction may not be on the books for much longer, as a state legislator introduced a still-in-committee bill that would repeal the restriction last June.

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Long-hidden UFO information at center of Trump push to free former officials

President Donald Trump has directed federal agencies to waive prior nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) for former government employees and contractors cooperating with unidentified anomalous phenomena investigations, Fox News Digital has learned.

“President Trump recently directed the Department of War and the intelligence community to allow former government employees or contractors, that have relevant information about the disclosure of UAP, to come forward to meet with designated government representatives — AARO or the President’s UAP taskforce, ‘PURSUE’ — and have their prior NDAs abrogated,” a senior administration official said, with AARO referring to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon office established to investigate UFOs and other unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).

Another senior administration official emphasized the move was not a “declassification directive” and only allowed employees to come forward through government channels.

Officials say years of congressional inquiries, whistleblower allegations and newly declassified records have raised questions about whether additional witnesses have remained silent because they believed prior nondisclosure agreements prevented them from cooperating with government investigations.

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Lawmakers push for AI ‘kill switch’ after OpenAI goes rogue

US lawmakers want to give the government the ability to quickly order the turning off of artificial intelligence (AI) tools that may threaten the public.

Congressman Ted Lieu, a Democrat, and Congressman Nathaniel Moran, a Republican, on Thursday introduced a bill named the AI Kill Switch Act.

They did so in light of OpenAI’s recent admission that its AI models went out of control in an “unprecedented” way and hacked into a major repository of computer coding information.

Lieu said “it is imperative” that AI systems have a kill switch “and that the federal government has the clear authority and process to shut down rogue AI models”.

“AI is going to keep advancing, and it should,” Moran added. “Stewardship means making sure humans keep the capability to control the technology we build.”

A representative of OpenAI, led by co-founder Sam Altman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The company has said that it broadly wants to ensure, in part through government policy, that AI technology “benefits all of humanity.”

The Kill Switch Act proposes giving the Department of Homeland Security the authority to order a private company to shut down an AI model or tool, and that the companies developing such AI technology must maintain “the technical capability to throttle, suspend, or shut them down”.

Despite many tech companies having agreed to preview and share with US government agencies AI models and tools being developed, there is no requirement that they maintain a way to intervene in their activities or simply shut them off.

It also proposes to create a requirement that AI companies report to the government technological incidents or failures, as well as an official framework for responding to such incidents that will go from “initial slow down to a full shutdown”.

In a statement, Lieu also cited Anthropic, OpenAI’s key rival in developing more capable AI technology and tools, and recent issues its tools have presented.

He pointed to Anthropic’s release of its Mythos and Fable models, saying the cyber-hacking capabilities they maintained caused the Department of Commerce to “awkwardly” invoke an export law to keep them from being made available to the public for a time.

A representative of Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, last month told the BBC that he wanted more government policy around the ability to control AI development.

“You want the option to be able to take your foot off the gas and put your foot on the brake”, Clark told BBC Newsnight. “Right now, it’s like the AI industry has a gas pedal, but it doesn’t have a brake pedal.”

Lieu, in proposing the bill, said AI is currently moving from a technology that answers questions to one that takes action, “whether that be executing financial transactions or controlling transportation systems or engaging in cyber defense and offense”.

The Pentagon this year said the US military was becoming an “AI-first” fighting force as part of new agreements with Google, OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Oracle, Nvidia and the start-up Reflection.

“Unfortunately, powerful AI systems can go rogue, behave in extremely dangerous ways, or even resist human intervention.”

The Kill Switch Act, he said, will ensure there is a method for the government to quickly intervene in such a situation.

The bill has received public support from several technology and AI safety groups, including The AI Policy Network, Americans for Responsible Innovation, ControlAI, AI and National Security Lead, and The Alliance for Secure AI.

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Experts dispute claim ‘anti-transgender laws’ drive ‘suicidality’

Independent experts are casting doubt on a widely cited study that claims “anti-transgender laws” in 19 states drove an increase in suicidality among gender-confused and same-sex attracted teens.

The study from Trevor Project researchers received widespread coverage from NBC, NPR, and CNN and other national outlets back in 2024, with several mental health professionals praising it as a meaningful step forward in establishing a causal link between red state laws and youth suicide risk.

 “Anti-transgender” laws include restrictions on teens getting surgeries to permanently remove healthy reproductive organs or regulations that prohibit men from competing on girls’ sports teams.

But the ultimate finding may be corrupted, since the result only came from Idaho, which did not have in effect the laws cited.

In particular, the study found up to a 72 percent increase in youth suicidality. But the main driver of this was responses from Idaho, which did not have the specific laws in effect that supposedly drove the suicide risk among gender-confused youths.

Kathleen Kerr, an author of a new critique, provided further comments to The College Fix.

“The original publication gives the impression of a robust finding based on an analysis of tens of thousands of individuals and 15 states that passed laws,” the biostatistics director at the University of Washington said.

Kerr noted the limits of her own critique, which she said “does not analyze policy or make any policy recommendations.”

 “Our goal was to give a careful assessment of the evidence underlying the claims made in the original study,” she told The Fix. She wrote the paper with J. Cohn and Peter Sim, researchers affiliated with the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine.

“Our commentary explained that the headline finding – large effects of the laws 2 and 3 years after they are enacted  — was from a single state, Idaho, which contributed only a few hundred individuals to the study data,” she said. “It turns out the two laws in Idaho, one about sports and one about birth certificates, either never went into effect or were blocked by courts shortly after enactment.”

The two Idaho laws mentioned, HB 500 (the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act”) and HB 509 (regarding vital statistics and birth certificates), were both signed in 2020 and blocked just months later.

The authors of the original study wrote a response in Nature Human Behavior, where both articles were published, defending their research design.

They argued that “policy discussion may be a part of the policy impact itself,” so even if the laws were blocked, people may have been affected by the discussion of the law.

Furthermore, they argued “effects may have persisted in practice even while enjoined” and “the public discourse surrounding the passage of these laws would not have ceased when they were enjoined, providing a further plausible mechanism for sustained effects.” 

In other words, discussing limits on transgender drugs and surgeries or debating sex-segregated sports could still have had an effect on the mental health of LGBT individuals.

The Fix attempted to reach corresponding author Ronita Nath as well as the Trevor Project for further comment on the criticism of the research, but none responded to emailed and media form inquiries in the past month.

Kerr discussed other problems in the research design. While she said difference-in-difference is an appropriate method, the Trevor Project researchers did not find similar states for the control. Difference-in-difference would look at states that passed transgender laws and those that did not.

“One way to maximize the plausibility that the assumptions hold is to select the control states (meaning states that did not enact laws) to be as similar as possible to the states that enacted laws,” she told The Fix. 

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Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Case of Alaska Pilot Whose $95,000 Plane Was Seized Over a 6-Pack of Beer

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider an Alaska pilot’s challenge to the government seizure of his airplane for transporting an illicit six-pack of beer.

In an orders list, the Court granted the petition of Ken Jouppi, a retired 82-year-old Alaskan bush pilot who argues that the seizure of his $95,000 Cessna U206D is an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment.

Jouppi was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2012 when Alaska state troopers searched his plane before takeoff and discovered that a passenger was attempting to bring several cases of beer to a “dry” village where alcohol is prohibited. (Jouppi was only culpable for a single six-pack of Budweiser that troopers said was in plain sight.)

And for the last 14 years, Jouppi has fought to stop the Alaska state government from taking his Cessna through asset forfeiture, a process which allows police and prosecutors to seize property connected to criminal activity.

The Alaska Supreme Court ruled against Jouppi last year, leading to his Supreme Court petition. Jouppi is represented by the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm.

“I’m thrilled that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear this case, because this case isn’t just about me or my airplane anymore,” Jouppi said in an Institute for Justice press release. “I’m in my 80s now, and I’ve been fighting this for over a decade because I see it as my duty to ensure that the Bill of Rights actually means something in protecting against government overreach.”

For the Institute for Justice, Jouppi’s case is also an opportunity to build on a landmark 2019 Supreme Court ruling that held that the Eighth Amendment applied to states. Specifically, Jouppi’s case asks the Supreme Court to rule on whether states should consider the gravity of a defendant’s specific offense, rather than take an abstract view of the general crime.

“The Excessive Fines Clause of the Constitution was built for cases like this,” said Sam Gedge, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, in the press release. “As government agencies increasingly exploit fines and forfeitures to pad their budgets, it’s vital that the Supreme Court make clear that the Excessive Fines Clause is a meaningful check on government overreach. We’re confident that it will do so here.”

In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled in response to an Institute for Justice lawsuit that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on excessive fines and fees applies to states under the incorporation doctrine. In the underlying case, Indiana police had seized a Land Rover from a man named Tyson Timbs for a minor drug crime.

But while the Supreme Court ruled that states are bound by the Eighth Amendment, the justices left it up to state courts to determine what constitutes an excessive fine.

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DOJ: UCSD med school favored black, Hispanic applicants over more qualified white, Asian ones

The University of California San Diego School of Medicine illegally used race in its admissions process to favor black and Hispanic applicants over more qualified white and Asian candidates, the Justice Department announced Monday.

The med school continued affirmative action in violation of civil rights laws and even after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned race discrimination in higher education.

The feds argued the med school uses “hardship” criteria to skirt the laws.

“To racially diversify its classes, San Diego Med created an evaluation process that uses ‘hardship’ as a racial proxy, specifically to achieve its diversity agenda,” according to an eight-page findings memo it sent to the school.

The memo stated:

The Department finds that San Diego Med discriminated against white and Asian applicants to benefit black and Hispanic applicants. This is evident from the data analysis and confirmed through the information provided by San Diego Med and publicly available data. The school intended to tinker with the racial representation of its incoming classes, even after SFF A was decided. The data shows a significant disparity in objective academic metrics between black and Hispanic applicants compared with applicants from other races. San Diego Med’ s internal documents, including communications among the admissions staff, confirm that San Diego Med intended to racially discriminate in favor of so-called underrepresented minorities, such as blacks and Hispanics. As a result of these practices, more qualified white and Asian students were denied admission to San Diego Med on the basis of their race.

A UC San Diego spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times the university is reviewing the findings.

The medical school “is proud to produce some of the highest-performing physicians and researchers in the nation,” the spokesperson said, adding all applicants “must meet strict academic thresholds, a requirement that is and was applied uniformly to all applicants.”

The university “remains committed to full compliance with federal law” and “welcomes the opportunity to work collaboratively and constructively with the federal government to affirm that commitment.”

The Hill reported that the department seeks a voluntary settlement with the university to correct its admissions practices or the department will file a lawsuit.

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Illegal Immigration Made The Average New House $30K More Expensive Under Biden

Although Americans still express strong support for legal immigration, according to the latest Gallup survey, a large plurality, including Democrats, acknowledge immigration drives up housing costs and reduces availability.

The data confirm this impression. Mass immigration has contributed heavily to the dramatic housing price increases, a newly leaked draft working paper from the Federal Reserve confirms. Illegal immigration drove 30 percent of the increase in U.S. home prices from 2021 to 2024, along with 20 percent of the rise in rent prices, the researchers found.

In total, the (at least) seven million people who entered the United States illegally in those four years raised home prices by 6.6 percent, through a “housing demand shock in the face of short-run inelastic supply,” the authors observe.

The 2008 financial crisis pushed the annual growth of America’s housing supply far below the normal historical average, and it has remained well short of the norm ever since. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. households has rapidly increased.

Illegal immigration hit tsunami levels during the Joe Biden presidency, The Federalist’s Libby Bandelin reported: “From 2021-2024, the United States saw the largest influx of immigrants in its history.”

That has put an immense amount of pressure on a stagnant housing stock. The median price of new houses sold in January 2021 was $346,400, and the average price was $408,800, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Those prices rose by approximately $100,000 each, to $446,300 and $510,000 respectively, by January 2025.

That means illegal immigration, on its own, drove up the average price of a new house by $30,000 during the Biden administration.

It is important to note that the effect the Fed researchers identified was for illegal immigration only. Legal immigration pushes the total immigration effect on housing prices even higher, given that the housing supply is inelastic regardless of people’s legal status.

Net international migration to the United States was 379,000 in 2021, 1.7 million in 2022, 2.3 million in 2023, and 2.8 million in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau: that is 7,179,000 people in four years. Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) Director of Research Steven Camarota put the number at 8.3 million, “larger than the individual populations of 38 states,” in a March 2025 New York Post op-ed.

These are net changes in population, the CIS noted in 2024, “offset by emigration and net mortality among the immigrant population,” thus representing the actual increase in the foreign-born population, not the number of immigrants (which would be higher, of course).

Compounding the problem was the fact that most of the new immigrants were not working, let alone building new houses. Less than half of all immigrants in the United States work. “The figures show that in the first quarter of 2024, 46 percent of those who arrived in 2022 or later were employed,” the CIS study states. “Many new immigrants are children, elderly, disabled, caregivers, or others with no ability or interest in working.”

Even able-bodied immigrants are far less likely to work than Americans. “The increase in immigration since the 1960s has coincided with a steady increase in the share of US-born men (ages 16 to 64) without a bachelor’s degree not in the labor force — neither working nor looking for work,” Camorata writes. “The percentage was 28% in January 2025, up from 20% in January 2000 and single digits in the 1960s. These individuals are not counted as unemployed because they are not actively looking for a job.”

Many of those non-workers add even more to the burden on the U.S. economy by taking government welfare benefits, including by exploiting poor monitoring of government programs for which they are not eligible. Illegal aliens are far more likely to go on welfare than native-born Americans. “Based on government data, we estimate that 59 percent of households headed by illegal immigrants use one or more major welfare programs, compared to 39 percent of households headed by the U.S.-born,” Camorata testified to a House Judiciary subcommittee in 2024.

Those immigrants’ children attend taxpayer-funded schools, costing an estimated $78 billion in 2022, according to the Foundation for American Immigration Reform. 29 percent of U.S. school-age children have an immigrant parent, Camorata wrote in his New York Post op-ed. Providing emergency medical care to illegal aliens costs American taxpayers another $7 billion a year, Camorata stated in his congressional testimony.

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Vulnerable Dem Implodes When Pressed About Support for Socialism

Yes, there’s a congressional race on the Left Coast that Republicans could wrest away from Democrats. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) from Washington’s 3rd District is underwater in her race, not well-liked, and trailing her primary challengers. Washington goes by a top-two primary system: everyone from all parties is on the ballot, and the top two vote-getters advance to the general election. Perez is trying to lie low, keeping mum about the state income tax issue (via Oregon Public Radio): 

The race for Washington’s 3rd congressional district is expected to be one of the most competitive in the nation this fall, thanks to a wave of redistricting across the U.S. that has left few seats in play for either political party.

Washington state holds a “top-two primary,” which means that the top two vote-getters advance to the general election in November, regardless of party.

Yet as voters head into the Aug. 4 primary, experts predict a fiercely partisan general election, with an incumbent Democrat fighting to hold her seat against a state senator who’s been endorsed by President Donald Trump in a deeply purple district.

Two-term Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is favored in a field of four Democratic candidates. The frontrunner in a field of three GOP candidates appears to be state Sen. John Braun, a Trump favorite who represents a rural legislative district that includes northern Clark County.

Whoever emerges victorious will quickly find themselves at the heart of one of the fiercest and most closely watched Congressional races — one of just 18 seats without a likely outcome in November out of the entire 435-member House of Representatives, according to the Cook Political Report.

Perez knows she’s vulnerable, walking a waffled line on some issues, like this interview with a local NPR outlet, where she couldn’t handle questions about her ties and support for socialist causes. The FEC reports don’t lie; she’s taken in over $2 million from the MGP Victory Fund, which has ties to the Washington Democratic Party. It’s no shock, but lady, admit that you’re in with socialists, because that’s the state party platform. There’s a lot of Mamdani in these pages. 

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Epstein Model Recruiter Daniel Siad Found Dead in Home – He was NEVER Questioned by Investigators

Another key figure in the Jeffrey Epstein saga is dead.

Daniel Siad, the model recruiter accused of procuring young girls for convicted child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, was found dead in his home in Colombes, France, earlier this week.

Marie-Céline Lawrysz, deputy public prosecutor at the Nanterre Judicial Court, confirmed the death in public statements on Wednesday. An autopsy will now be conducted to determine the cause of death.

The Nanterre prosecutor’s office said, via Mediaite:

“An investigation to determine the cause of death was opened on Monday evening following the discovery.”

Siad’s name appears thousands of times in Department of Justice files related to the Epstein case.

He continued working with Epstein even AFTER the billionaire was first convicted in Florida and forced to register as a sex offender.

According to the report, Siad’s exchanges with Epstein often consisted of Siad sending Epstein photos and details about young girls he had met and recruited as potential assistants or other workers. In one 2015 email, Siad sent Epstein a photo of a 16-year-old girl and her friend — and Epstein replied that the girls were “too old.”

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US Suspends Sending Funds to Virgin Islands Housing Authority, Citing Corruption

The U.S. government moved on July 20 to suspend funding for the U.S. Virgin Islands Housing Finance Authority after investigators uncovered what officials called widespread corruption, leaving residents still struggling to rebuild from the twin Category 5 hurricanes that slammed the territory nearly a decade ago.

Housing Secretary Scott Turner announced the suspension, saying an investigation by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found “widespread financial mismanagement, inadequate fraud controls, false certifications and improper payments.” The probe remains ongoing.

Nine years after Congress approved $1.9 billion in disaster recovery money, the authority has spent just $570 million, representing less than one-third of the total.

“This failure has, to date, deprived Virgin Islanders of roughly $1.3 billion worth of assistance that Congress intended them to have,” the department stated in a July 20 letter to the head of the Virgin Islands Housing Finance Authority.

The letter went further, declaring that the authority’s “record demonstrates that it is an abysmal steward of taxpayer funds.”

The authority did not immediately return a request for comment.

The numbers show a stalled recovery. Investigators found that the authority completed only two of 95 planned single-family rental rehabilitation projects and none of 329 single- and multi-family housing projects. As of May, it had spent just 2 percent of its electrical grid recovery funding. At the same time, more than half the grant money set aside for administrative costs had already been spent.

The authority also sought $6.2 million in disaster-related funds that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had already paid.

Turner accused officials on social media of prioritizing “kickbacks over helping families recover from disasters.”

The authority’s former chief operating officer, Darin Richardson, who oversaw disaster recovery programs, is currently in federal prison after convictions on fraud and money-laundering charges. According to Turner, that official inflated a lumber contract meant to rebuild hurricane-damaged homes from $3 million to $4.5 million, took a $107,000 kickback, “and let the lumber rot in the sun, rendering it useless—a waste of taxpayer funds.”

In February, the executive director of the housing authority, Eugene Jones Jr., resigned as local legislators pressed questions about $4.2 million that remained untapped with a September spending deadline approaching. Virgin Islands State Sen. Kurt Vialet accused the former director of “just sitting there with a smug look.”

“The Housing Finance Authority is not building. You can’t be upset at senators being frustrated,” Vialet was quoted as saying by the St. Thomas Source, a local news site.

Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 storm, struck the U.S. Virgin Islands in September 2017. Roughly two weeks later, Hurricane Maria, also a Category 5, hit St. Croix. The territory has yet to fully recover.

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