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Accused serial killer Antonio Reyes charged with six Chicago murders in 2020

Chicago police and Cook County prosecutors on Wednesday announced murder charges against an alleged serial killer accused of killing six people at random over a span of nine months in 2020.

Antonio Reyes, 21, is charged with the murders of six people and the attempted murders of four others – including three children, between March and November 2020, according to police and Cook County court records:

  • The shooting death of 31-year-old Francisco Mangana on March 2, 2020, in the 2600 block of West 59th Street;
  • The shooting death of 21-year-old Claudio Cossio on April 5, 2020, in the 4100 block of South Sacramento Avenue; and the attempted murder of another man in the same shooting;
  • The shooting death of 16-year-old Damian Duran on May 1, 2020, in the 5200 block of South Homan Avenue;
  • The shooting death of 26-year-old Luis Davalos Garcia on June 24, 2020, in the 5800 block of South Rockwell Avenue;
  • The shooting death of 31-year-old Jose Martinez on Nov. 8, 2020, in the 5400 block of South Homan Avenue; and the attempted murders of Martinez’s three children, who were all between 3 and 9 years old at the time;
  • The shooting death of 20-year-old Justin Gonzalez on Nov. 9, 2020, in the 4700 block of West 59th Street.

“These are six lives that were brutally taken,” Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling said. “It’s difficult to comprehend how anyone could easily take someone’s life, and especially so many in one year.”

Deputy Mayor of Public Safety Garien Gatewood said, “I cannot commend the work of the Chicago Police Department enough” for its work on the case.

“Our entire administration and our entire city is grateful for the work they did to remove a serial killer from the streets. I cannot thank the work of the State’s Attorney’s office enough, either,” Gatewood said.

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Einstein’s General Relativity with a Twist: Teleparallelism

It might not be obvious to those of us only grappling with more mundane concerns, but for cosmologists bent on unlocking the universe’s deepest secrets, there’s no shortage of problems keeping them up at night. “Dark matter” is the shorthand explanation for stars and galaxies moving much more quickly than the gravity of their luminous matter should allow. Let’s not forget “dark energy,” too—the preferred solution to the mystery of the universe expanding faster than anyone expected and doing so at an accelerated rate. Meanwhile a hypothesized “evolving” form of dark energy might resolve something called the Hubble tension—the term used for a major disagreement among researchers about the present-day cosmic expansion rate.

Cosmologists have been losing sleep over such quandaries for generations, wondering what missing ingredients they need to add to their models to fix what seem to be glaring gaps in their understanding. But what if the answer to some—maybe even all—of these problems isn’t a radical new theory but rather an old one, devised almost a century ago by none other than Albert Einstein himself? It’s called teleparallel gravity, and according to a loose collection of theorists who study it, this theory deserves a closer look by the wider scientific community.

Dark matter, dark energy, the Hubble tension: underpinning these theories is Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which treats space and time as a unified “spacetime” and considers gravity as spacetime’s curvature. Perhaps, then, the answer is to modify, change or update relativity itself to gain a new understanding of gravity rather than hypothesizing mysterious dark substances and forces. But across the decades, theorists pursuing this general approach have delivered mixed results at best.

The best example may be Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), an effort to banish dark matter that, according to some research, still has to allow for the existence of some dark matter. A more recent addition, dubbed “timescape” cosmology, seeks to account for dark energy by asserting that gigantic, matter-sparse “voids” in the cosmos are much larger than most other measurements say they can be. None of these possible solutions come without their own problems.

So if these new ideas aren’t working out, why not return to the old master? In 1928, about a decade after completing his greatest scientific achievement, general relativity, Einstein began work on an alternative form of this cherished idea. His dream was to find a single set of equations that could describe both gravity and electromagnetism. His idol James Clerk Maxwell achieved such a feat in the early 1860s, using a single set of equations to describe electricity, magnetism and radiation, and Einstein hoped to follow in Maxwell’s footsteps.

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‘The Dog Ate My Epstein Files…’

“It may be time the FBI’s New York field office gets paid a visit in the style it’s very well accustomed to doling out.” 

– Mike Benz

Turns out new Attorney General Pam Bondi was a little off the mark earlier this week when she said the Jeffrey Epstein files were sitting on her desk. Actually, it was a six-hundred-pound tar-smeared hairball with a gift tag that read: “To Pamela Jo from her Friends in Blobville, good luck untangling this!” Well, she did tell Fox News host Jesse Waters that the thing sitting on her desk was “disgusting.”

As promised, those Epstein files were released on Thursday — a measly two-hundred pages — to much chagrin and embarrassment for all, since the material turned out to be the same old lists and flight logs that every blogger and his uncle has already put out on the Web for years — say, what . . .?

But then the plot thickened later in the day when AG Bondi said a whistleblower informed her that the New York office of the FBI and their counterparts in the Southern District of NY (Manhattan) DOJ offices were hiding “thousands and thousands” of pages evidence and other stuff (videos? photos?) they had been sitting on for years.

AG Bondi quickly fired off a letter to brand-new FBI Director Kash Patel demanding that the New York FBI office deliver all that stuff to Washington by eight o’clock in the morning today (Friday). If you were Mr. Patel, rather than waiting until morning, wouldn’t you just take a twilight ride up the Jersey Turnpike from Blobville to the Big Apple with an FBI swat team and bust into both the FBI and DOJ offices there. . . and maybe frog-march a few federal employees onto the street like so many grannies caught praying in front of an abortion mill?

Of course, I am writing this a few hours before the Friday morning deadline. So, for now there are only the ancillary considerations in this fast-developing denouement to the longest and slowest-running case of trans-national fuckery in world history. Some little details do stick in one’s craw. For example, Maurene (spelled that way) Comey, daughter of fired FBI director James Comey has been a lead US attorney out of the SDNY in the case against Ghislaine Maxwell and the more recent case against Sean (“Diddy”) Combs — both cases revolving around grand-scale sexual depravity among world-class celebrities. Note, too, that the SDNY was the origin point of more recent janky cases brought against Mr. Trump in the 2024 runup to the election.

And, as independent investigator Mike Benz points out, Bill Barr was USAG in 2019 when Jeffrey Epstein was finally busted, stuffed into the Manhattan federal lockup, and promptly (shall we say, conveniently) turned up dead a few days later (putting aside the known irregularities involving the disposal of his body and the pathology reports about the cause-of-death). Did you notice that no one was ever disciplined for that? Not the two guards on the floor that night who claimed they fell asleep. Not the warden of the jail who failed to check whether the security cameras were working (they weren’t) on his most important prisoner’s cell?

Nor did Bill Barr ever answer for that, or for some other capers — such as sitting on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the fall of 2019 when Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee held preliminary hearings to consider impeaching President Donald Trump over his inquiring phone call to V. Zelenskyy in Ukraine. The laptop, you surely know, was stuffed with deal memos and emails about the Biden family’s ex-officio financial shenanigans in Ukraine that surely would have amounted to exculpatory evidence and was withheld from Mr. Trump’s lawyers through the entire psychodrama of the impeachment and trial in the Senate.

Then there is the peculiar history of Bill Barr’s dad, Donald Barr, present at the founding of the CIA (as an OSS officer in WWII), who groomed young Jeffrey Epstein into a job teaching math New York’s Dalton prep school in 1974 on the basis of fake college credentials (Stanford). Epstein was soon transformed into a Wall Street go-getter and most probably an agent for Mossad, Israeli intel. Epstein’s rise in high finance and international spookery led him to crypto-British media mogul and Mossad agent Robert Maxwell and Maxwell’s sex-crazed daughter Ghislaine. . . and the Epstein underage sex operation proceeded from there.

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Texas Judge Rejects Attorney General’s Attempt To Reverse Dallas Marijuana Decriminalization Law Approved By Voters

A Texas judge has shot down the Republican state attorney general’s attempt to block a local marijuana decriminalization law that voters approved at the ballot last November.

On Friday, 134th Civil District Court Judge Dale Tillery denied a motion for temporary injunction from Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) that sought to undermine the local law by allowing continued enforcement of cannabis criminalization in the state’s third most populous city.

The one-page order from the judge states: “Upon consideration of the pleadings, the application, responses, evidence, and oral arguments presented, if any, the Court finds that the application is hereby DENIED.”

This comes about a month after the Dallas Police Department instructed officers to stop arresting or citing people for possession of up to four ounces of marijuana, in accordance with the voter-approved ballot initiative.

Paxton had filed a lawsuit with the intent to invalidate the law just weeks after the November vote. It’s one of several examples of the state official attempting to leverage the court system to reverse local cannabis reform efforts.

Numerous Texas cities have enacted local decriminalization laws in recent years, and, last January, the attorney general similarly sought to block the reform in Austin, San Marcos, Killeen, Elgin and Denton.

State district judges dismissed two of the lawsuits—which argue that state law prohibiting marijuana preempts the local policies—in Austin and San Marcos. The city of Elgin reached a settlement, with the local government pointing out that decriminalization was never implemented there despite voter approval of the initiative.

Dallas lawmakers formally put the marijuana decriminalization initiative on the ballot in August after activists turned in sufficient petitions for the reform. Cannabis icon and music legend Willie Nelson had urged Dallas voters to pass the marijuana measure.

Prior to last August’s vote on ballot placement, some members of the Dallas City Council had expressed interest in streamlining the process of decriminalizing cannabis by acting legislatively, but plans to introduce the proposal at a hearing in June did not materialize, leaving the matter to voters.

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‘Maximally transparent’ DOGE now tells federal court its records are ‘not subject to FOIA’ requests 

While standing next to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office earlier this month, billionaire Elon Musk, the de facto head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), claimed that his team had been “maximally transparent” as the Trump administration seeks to gut the federal workforce. But in recent court filings, the government said it will not provide DOGE records to the public under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, claiming that the organization is exempt from the law.

Justice Department attorneys on Thursday filed court documents in connection with a FOIA lawsuit in Washington, D.C., wherein they state that Trump’s executive order redesignated the U.S. Digital Service as the U.S. DOGE Service, removing the organization from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to make it a “free-standing component of the Executive Office of the President.”

As such, the government claimed that DOGE is “not subject to FOIA.”

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How Obama’s FAA used a skewed multiple-choice quiz to prioritize DEI applicants and bar the brightest from air traffic controller jobs

A job questionnaire for aspiring air traffic controllers introduced by the Obama administration was designed to meet secret DEI target numbers, DailyMail.com can reveal. 

The aspiring controllers were given extra credit for being ‘risk takers’, in the bizarre multiple-choice quiz to secretly prioritize DEI applicants. 

It required virtually no knowledge of aviation to pass but top marks were awarded to candidates who ‘need a great deal of time to complete assignments’ and ‘take chances very often’.  

And playing three or more sports in high school was rated more valuable than having a stint as an air traffic controller in the military.

Now DailyMail.com has obtained the quiz so you can see how you would fare. 

The 2014 entry test proved notoriously hard to pass for elite, mostly white college graduates who excelled in traditional cognitive tests.

But race reformers said it paved the way for more ‘off the street’ hires – namely women and minorities – to land high stakes jobs responsible for the lives of millions of air passengers.

‘Bonkers is the right word for this,’ one aviation expert told DailyMail.com.

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New AI text diffusion models break speed barriers by pulling words from noise

On Thursday, Inception Labs released Mercury Coder, a new AI language model that uses diffusion techniques to generate text faster than conventional models. Unlike traditional models that create text word by word—such as the kind that powers ChatGPT—diffusion-based models like Mercury produce entire responses simultaneously, refining them from an initially masked state into coherent text.

Traditional large language models build text from left to right, one token at a time. They use a technique called “autoregression.” Each word must wait for all previous words before appearing. Inspired by techniques from image-generation models like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney, text diffusion language models like LLaDA (developed by researchers from Renmin University and Ant Group) and Mercury use a masking-based approach. These models begin with fully obscured content and gradually “denoise” the output, revealing all parts of the response at once.

While image diffusion models add continuous noise to pixel values, text diffusion models can’t apply continuous noise to discrete tokens (chunks of text data). Instead, they replace tokens with special mask tokens as the text equivalent of noise. In LLaDA, the masking probability controls the noise level, with high masking representing high noise and low masking representing low noise. The diffusion process moves from high noise to low noise. Though LLaDA describes this using masking terminology and Mercury uses noise terminology, both apply a similar concept to text generation rooted in diffusion.

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California State Fair Will Again Feature On-Site Marijuana Sales And Consumption, With New Award Categories For Blunts, Hash And Chocolates

The California State Fair will once again feature a cannabis exhibit and competition at this year’s event, with expanded award categories meant to showcase the diversity of the state’s market.

This is the fourth year that California’s annual event has invited marijuana entrepreneurs and consumers to join the festivities—and, for the second year in a row, on-site sales and consumption will be permitted during the 17-day fair.

“Last year, we made history by integrating cannabis sales and consumption into the State Fair, and we are thrilled to return in 2025,” Lauren Carpenter, co-founder of Embarc, which is facilitating the sales component, said. “Through an immersive educational experience, we’re shining a light on the cannabis brands reflecting and shaping cannabis culture in California and beyond.”

As for the competition, there are 150 medals available this year. Submissions will open on March 1 and close on May 4. The winners will be announced at the start of the fair on July 11.

This year’s award categories have been expanded to include cannabis blunts, hash and chocolates.

“For more than 170 years the California State Fair has had a long-standing tradition of celebrating the best of the Golden State, especially those who epitomize the state’s agricultural excellence,” Tom Martinez, CEO of the California State Fair, said. “Since welcoming cannabis to the Fair, we’ve witnessed firsthand the pride and dedication of California’s cannabis cultivators, who are crafting some of the best products, not just in the state, but in the entire industry.”

Other categories up for awards include indoor, outdoor and mixed-light flower, beverages, cartridges, concentrates, edibles, pre-rolls and wellness.

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Medical Marijuana Is A ‘Safe And Effective Treatment’ For Pain And Sleep Issues In Older People, Study Shows

A new study on the use of medical marijuana by older patients—age 50 and above—concludes that “cannabis seemed to be a safe and effective treatment” for pain and other conditions.

“Most patients experienced clinically significant improvements in pain, sleep, and quality of life and reductions in co-medication,” the paper says.

Published late last month in the journal Cannabis, the study evaluated 229 participants in British Columbia and Ontario, Canada, with an average age of 66.7 years. The bulk of participants—around 90 percent—used medical marijuana to treat pain-related conditions, including chronic pain and arthritis. About two thirds (66.2 percent) were female.

Nearly all patients used products consumed orally, such as edibles and extracts, as opposed to smoked or vaporized cannabis, and most preferred products high in CBD and relatively low in THC.

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GOP Congressman Tells Welfare Recipients To ‘Stop Buying The Medical Marijuana’ And Eating Cheetos

A GOP congressman is peddling a stigmatizing message to justify a new bill on adding work requirements for certain federal benefits, implying that it’s necessary to prevent people from buying marijuana with taxpayer dollars and lazing around on the couch while eating Cheetos.

During an appearance on Fox Business on Wednesday, Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX) was asked about recently filed Republican legislation that would impose restrictions on access to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits—specifically mandating that able-bodied people under 65 work at least 20 hours per week in order to receive the assistance.

That’s already part of federal law, but lead bill sponsor from Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD) claims his America Works Act would close “loopholes” that have been exploited in certain states.

Fallon, for his part, decided to justify the legislation by playing into cannabis stereotypes and arguing that federal dollars are going toward medical cannabis purchases by welfare recipients.

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