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Colorado Supreme Court Blocks Democrat Redistricting Effort

The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday blocked the Democrats’ effort to redraw its congressional map.

The proposed map would have added three more Democrat seats in the US House of Representatives.

Colorado’s high court unanimously struck down two attempts at redistricting.

Colorado’s Congressional map will remain at 4D and 4R.

Politico reported:

Democrats just suffered a major setback in their plans to counter Republican redistricting gains before the 2028 elections.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Monday that all five proposed redistricting ballot measures in the state — three led by Democrats and two led by Republicans — violated the state’s constitution, preventing either party from implementing new maps by undoing the independent commission that currently controls the process.

Colorado’s eight House seats are currently split evenly between both parties, and one of Democrats’ most ambitious redraw efforts would have created a map where seven of the districts favor the party.

Because Democrats would have needed a measure on the ballot this fall in order to redraw for 2028, the timing of the ruling makes it all but impossible to redraw.

The court issued two opinions on the redistricting measures Monday, and both were unanimous decisions against proposed remapping efforts.

Meanwhile, Republican-led states have successfully eliminated racially gerrymandered districts going into the midterm elections.

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New Study Strongly Links Merck’s Gardasil HPV Vaccine to POTS, but Authors Downplay Signal

A new analysis of adverse events reported to the federal vaccine safety surveillance database after the HPV vaccine detected a strong safety signal for POTS, an autonomic nervous system disorder, in some people who received the shots.

The authors of the study, published last week in PLOS One, analyzed 77,909 reports associated with human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) between 2006 and 2024.

They concluded that the signal for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) warranted further investigation. However, they downplayed the significance of their findings, according to experts who spoke with The Defender.

Their discussion section dedicated only two sentences to POTS, even though the condition was the strongest signal identified by the analysis.

The authors underscored that a signal for POTS does not prove that it was caused by the shot, and said that a strong signal “does not necessarily translate into a large clinical or public health impact.”

Warning that when people hear about serious adverse events, it affects their “perception” of safety, the authors framed their paper as part of a process of identifying and addressing potential risks that “is crucial to maintaining high vaccination coverage.”

Cynthia Nevison, Ph.D., said this approach led the authors to be dismissive of their own results. “I always object in principle to papers that start out with the motivation of reducing vaccine hesitancy,” Nevison told The Defender.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker said the attempts to downplay POTS as a side effect of the HPV shot are “criminal and the paper is expertly crafted to hide this very obvious signal in order to repeat the default ‘safe and effective’ lie.”

He added that given VAERS underreporting, “we know that the pesky result they’re downplaying could represent 68,000 POTS cases nationwide and over 1 million serious adverse events total.”

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Chilling Report Finds Israel Deliberately Targeting Children As Genocide In Gaza Continues

Tension over Israel continues to grow within US political discourse. From both sides of the aisle, people’s attitudes towards the Zionist settler-colonial project are souring. Israel is the most disliked it has ever been, with a recent survey from the Pew Research Center finding that the majority of people across 36 countries hold unfavorable views of Israel and Netanyahu, with the number as high as 60% among Americans.

Support for Israeli war crimes continues to drive a rift between both parties. Just this week, opposition to Israel played a key role in the outcomes of New York’s congressional primaries, with anti-Zionist candidates receiving sweeping victories over candidates backed by establishment Democrats. Meanwhile, on the right, conservative firebrand Tucker Carlson officially announced he was leaving the Republican Party specifically due to its continued support for Israel.

These sentiments will likely only continue to grow in light of a new report recently released by the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. From the very beginning, the report is unambiguous in its findings with the headline reading “the essence of childhood has been destroyed.” In it, the inquiry found conclusive evidence that Israeli forces have consistently and deliberately targeted children in Gaza, as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and including within protected refugee camps, resulting in the death of at least 20,179 and injury of 44,143 since October 7th, 2023.

According to the report, among those killed, 5,031 were under the age of five, while more than 1,000 were under one year of age. Most disheartning, the inquiry found that approximately 420 of those killed were newborn babies.

The commission noted the actual number of child casualties is “certainly higher”, due to the amount of unaccounted child victims who are missing or buried under rubble, estimated to be roughly an additional 5,160.

The commission interviewed 17 medical professionals who had worked at hospitals across Gaza. Among them, one doctor attested that many of the injuries they documented were akin to “a game of target practice”, with Israeli snipers targeting different body parts of teenage boys on different days. With other doctors documenting similar acts of deliberate depravity.

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Study Claiming COVID Vaccines Benefit Heart Health ‘Hopelessly Flawed,’ Scientists Say

A new study linking COVID-19 vaccines to a significantly lower risk of heart attack and stroke joins “the latest in a growing body of research about the vaccine’s benefits for heart health,” according to The Washington Post, which reported on the study.

But Dr. Vinay Prasad, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, called the study “hopelessly flawed.”

Prasad, the former director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research before stepping down in April, and other scientists said the study’s methodological flaws skewed its findings.

“Not only should it not be in the news, the paper should not be in print,” Prasad wrote on Substack.

Canadian researcher Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., called the paper “outright bad science” that “should not be used whatsoever to ‘help inform clinical and public health discussions’ as they propose.”

The study, published last week in JAMA Internal Medicine, tied COVID-19 vaccination to a 37.7% lower risk of serious cardiovascular conditions, particularly among people 75 and older or people with comorbidities.

The authors also found that the vaccinated had a 6.2% lower risk of serious heart conditions overall and a 6.6% reduction in all-cause hospitalizations.

“Extrapolating these estimates to a population of 1 million people, vaccination could plausibly be associated with averting approximately 2370 [major cardiovascular] events and 1580 deaths over an 8-month period,” the study claims.

However, the researchers acknowledged that “the absolute benefit” of COVID-19 vaccination “was modest for the general cohort.”

Heart conditions such as myocarditis are widely associated with the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, with reports of deaths connected to the vaccines, particularly among teenage and young adult males.

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Erin Brockovich Launches Plan to Take on AI Data Centers Around the Country

Erin Brockovich, who secured a historic $333 million settlement against PG&E in 1993 and was immortalized by Julia Roberts on the silver screen, has launched a new battle against the proliferation of AI data centers across the United States and beyond.

The Guardian reports that the environmental activist who became a household name after her work on the Hinkley, California, groundwater contamination case has identified what she describes as a threat on par with that scandal, only larger in scope. After receiving thousands of emails from concerned citizens, Brockovich has turned her attention to the rapid construction of massive AI data centers happening with minimal public input or environmental oversight.

The campaign began when Brockovich noticed an unusual pattern in her inbox. She received 30 emails from people in the same town, all expressing concerns about data centers. In April, she issued a public call on her website asking anyone with concerns about data centers near them to contact her. Within a month, 3,862 people responded. Brockovich characterizes the situation as “Hinkley on steroids.”

Using the information gathered from these emails, Brockovich created an open-source map documenting AI data centers across the United States. As of June 24, the map shows 33 AI data centers that are operational, 68 under construction, and 41 proposed. More than 7,000 reports have been submitted through her online form, revealing a pattern of construction happening largely without public knowledge or consent.

AI data centers are enormous in scale. Some stretch over hundreds of acres, and in May, Utah approved a center twice the size of Manhattan. According to Brockovich, many communities learn about these facilities only after construction has already begun, or in some cases, months after they have been approved by local officials.

A major concern for Brockovich is the secrecy surrounding the approval process. Data center developers often enter into nondisclosure agreements with local officials, making it impossible for residents to understand why projects were approved without environmental impact assessments or public input. Brockovich reports receiving emails from people whose local leaders are changing zoning laws to accommodate these facilities. “If data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?” reads one headline on her Substack blog.

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Can a U.S. Senator Encourage Troops to Disobey Orders? The Mark Kelly Case

When six Democratic lawmakers released a video in November 2025 urging U.S. troops to refuse unlawful military orders, they framed it as a defense of the Constitution. The Trump administration called it sedition.

The video appeared against the backdrop of two controversial administration actions: the deployment of National Guard troops to U.S. cities, a policy being actively litigated in federal court, and U.S. military strikes on suspected drug-trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

It is important to note that no court had issued a final ruling determining either policy to be illegal, nor had any court found that illegal orders were given to individual U.S. troops. Equally significant, even if the Supreme Court were to ultimately determine that the president lacked the authority to order these deployments, the duties carried out by individual soldiers would not necessarily constitute illegal orders. Both issues involve complex questions of constitutional law that ordinary soldiers are neither trained nor qualified to adjudicate.

The lawmakers named neither action in the video, nor did they identify any specific order they considered unlawful. That omission would prove legally significant. Under military law, there is a critical distinction between reminding soldiers of a constitutional principle and encouraging them to act on their own political judgments. The latter is not a constitutional safeguard. It is a prescription for insubordination, and in some circumstances a crime.

The senator at the center of the resulting legal battle is Mark Kelly, a Democratic U.S. Senator from Arizona, a retired Navy Captain, and a former NASA astronaut who commanded multiple Space Shuttle missions.

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Democrat Minneapolis Mayor Lifts Ban on Gay Sex Bathhouses

An ordinance to repeal a ban on gay sex bathhouses in Minneapolis has been signed by Mayor Jacob Frey (D), who did so to support “our LGBTQIA+ neighbors.”

The prohibition on the adult facilities known for hosting sexual activity with strangers was originally passed in the city in 1988 as a response to the AIDS epidemic. Local leaders, including those who identified as gay, deemed the bathhouses too risky to be open to the public due to the rampant spread of disease. 

When the “R-rated” bathhouses were banned nearly 40 years ago, the city had three, which the Washington Post says were “often frequented by gay men looking for sex.” San Francisco shut its venues down in 1984, and New York followed suit in 1985 as a measure to slow the transmission of HIV. 

The Minneapolis City Council voted 9-2 on Thursday to do away with the ban, arguing that it is homophobic, Minnesota Public Radio reported. One council member abstained, and one was absent. 

Frey, who had already indicated his support for reversing the ban, signed it when it came to his desk on Monday as a group of activists applauded.

“Minneapolis stands with our LGBTQIA+ neighbors — we always will,” Frey wrote on X. “That’s why I’m proud to have stood with members of the City Council and community advocates to sign the Bathhouse Repeal Ordinance and Pride in Policy package into law.”

Just two days before he signed the ordinance lifting the bathhouse block, Frey celebrated the Independence Day of Somalia, a country where there is a death penalty for homosexual activity.

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US strikes Iran again, as Trump threatens the country “will no longer exist”

US warplanes bombed Iranian coastal radar and air defense sites on Friday and again on Saturday, striking 10 targets near the Strait of Hormuz in the second wave.

The US attacks are the latest in a series of military escalations since the announcement of a “ceasefire” on June 17, when US President Donald Trump signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran at Versailles.

After ordering Saturday’s strikes, Trump threatened to annihilate the country. The United States, he wrote, “will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”

As he has done repeatedly, Trump is using genocidal language, threatening to annihilate a country and exterminate large portions of its population. As with his earlier outbursts, the vow to make Iran “no longer exist” carries an implicit threat to use nuclear weapons.

The attacks and threats come amid a deepening political crisis within the American ruling class over the ceasefire Trump announced on June 17. In the 11 days since, the deal has come under sustained attack from dominant sections of both the Republican and Democratic parties, which have denounced it as a surrender to Tehran.

Republican Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said it “negotiates away the victories” of the war. The Democrats condemned the agreement as having failed to secure the interests of US imperialism. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said that under the deal,“Iran is stronger and America is less safe.”

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Here We Go… Duplicate Ballots Sent Out in Green Bay, WI for Primary Election – For the Second Time This Year!

In the same week that the US Supreme Court legitimized late-arriving ballots in US elections, news broke in Wisconsin that duplicate ballots had been sent to voters in Green Bay.

What a farce. Everyone knows mail-in ballots result in increased risk of fraud – but the geniuses in the US Supreme Court don’t seem a bit concerned.

FOX 11 reported that this was not the first time this happened this year.

For the second time in 2026, the city of Green Bay has accidently sent duplicate ballots to some voters across the city.

The city of Green Bay announced early Sunday evening that residents across the city have started to receive their mail-in ballots for the August primary election.

However, some of the residents who received one of the 5,084 total ballots also received an additional ballot.

The city says its staff became aware of the issue on Saturday that some voters in wards 11a, 12a, 37a, 44-47 and part of ward 43 received a duplicate ballot.

It was not disclosed how many residents were sent duplicate ballots.

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In the Nick of Time: NRA Secures Injunction Against Virginia ‘Assault Weapons’ and Magazine Ban

On Monday, the NRA secured a preliminary injunction against enforcement of Virginia’s “assault weapons” and 15-plus rounds magazine ban.

The case, Santolla v. Katz, was heard by Judge Jeffrey Campbell, a former Republican member of Virginia’s House of Delegates.

The NRA announced the filing of the lawsuit on May 14, 2026, noting that plaintiffs included the Virginia Shooting Sports Association (VSSA), Middletown Firearms, Middletown Training, Virginia Pride Ltd., and VSSA members Joseph Santolla, and Reagan Adams.

Virginia Scope reporter Brandon Jarvis published Campbell’s ruling, wherein he wrote, “…the Motion for Preliminary Injunction enjoining the Defendants from enforcing the subject Firearms Ban and Magazine Bans as contemplated by the recently enacted Senate Bill 749 and House Bill 217 is GRANTED.”

Judge Campbell noted, “This injunction shall remain in effect until further Order of this Court or no later than July 1, 2027, consistent with the Governor’s recently passed budget amendment, and this matter is continued on the docket of this Court for any additional proceedings as the parties may so advise.”

The “assault weapons” and 15-plus rounds magazine ban was set to take effect July 1, 2026.

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