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Trump Treasury Blocks $175 Million In Federal Payments To Dead Recipients

The Treasury Department blocked $175 million in federal payments from going to deceased recipients in fiscal year 2026 as the Trump administration expanded efforts to prevent fraud and improper government spending.

Treasury screened more than 1.1 billion federal payments totaling approximately $3.7 trillion during the fiscal year, identifying and returning about 13,500 payments that otherwise would have gone to people listed as deceased, according to the department.

The results represent another step in President Donald Trump’s push to tighten safeguards around taxpayer money. Access to Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” system expanded from roughly 4 percent of federal programs at the end of fiscal 2025 to 99 percent in fiscal 2026.

“Treasury continues to transform how the federal government protects taxpayer dollars by using better data, stronger controls, and advanced technology to stop fraud and improper payments before money goes out the door,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

The administration’s efforts received praise from Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who spent years pushing legislation giving Treasury permanent access to Social Security death records.

“Unless you were playing Frisbee in the quad during Econ 101, you know the federal government shouldn’t be sending taxpayer money to dead people,” Kennedy said.

Congress advanced legislation to permanently authorize the Social Security Administration to share its full Death Master File with Treasury’s Do Not Pay system, giving federal agencies more complete death information when determining eligibility for payments.

Treasury has also added safeguards to verify bank account ownership and Taxpayer Identification Numbers associated with federal payments. Those capabilities became fully operational Sept. 30, allowing Treasury to flag payments that fail verification before the money leaves government coffers.

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Three Years of Gaza as a Ghetto of Genocidal Extermination

Israel is lost.

Every day for the last three years, the decent people of the world — in our untold millions — have been sunk in a pit of moral despair, weeping, having breakdowns or being permanently enraged by the most extraordinarily depraved example of full-spectrum, live-streamed barbarism in our lifetimes — the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip by the State of Israel.

The trigger for Israel’s ongoing genocide was, of course, one particularly bloody day, October 7, 2023, when militants from the Gaza Strip, which had been maintained by Israel as an “open-air prison” for the previous 16 years, broke out through the perimeter fence and went on a killing spree in southern Israel in which 1,195 people were killed, and 251 others were taken hostage.

These are the bare facts, and, for anyone like myself who is an intuitive lifelong pacifist, they are, of course, deeply unpalatable. 1,124 Israelis and 71 foreign nationals, who all had hopes and dreams and loves and fears, were killed on October 7. 367 of them were members of the Israeli security forces, while the rest, including 36 children, were civilians.

We should mourn them all, but we cannot regard their deaths in isolation, because, in response, beginning on the evening of October 7, 2023 and continuing ever since, the Israelis have killed, at the barest minimum, 75 times as many Palestinians over the last three years, including over 21,500 children — at least 600 times as many children as were killed on October 7.

In total, according to statistics with which no one can seriously argue, 74,228 Palestinians have been killed and 175,188 injured (many very severely so) by Israeli forces over the last three years, although those figures are undoubtedly a serious undercount (see my notes at the end of this article). The remains of at least 8,000 Palestinians are still buried under the rubble, and untold numbers of others are unaccounted for, or are dying of secondary causes beyond the direct military attacks — of starvation and disease, and of everyday ailments, grievous wounds or chronic pre-existing health conditions, few of which can be adequately treated in a healthcare sector that has been deliberately destroyed by Israel, and from which it is still deliberately preventing the delivery of essential medical supplies and equipment.

According to an invisible assessment of the relative value of lives that Israel uses, and that has been shamefully adopted by most western leaders, we’re meant, today, to continue mourning those who died on October 7, 2023, while completely ignoring the genocidal carnage visited on the Palestinians ever since.

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Report: Federal Govt Spent $26.5 Billion on NGOs for Illegal Migrants

A new report finds that the U.S. government doled out 1,272 awards to pay for programs costing $26.5 billion to encourage and welcome illegal migration.

The site DataRepublican.com has gotten down into the financial weeds with a review of spending on migrant resettlement and Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) awards through January of 2025.

The site also noted there are 217 contracts worth $5.2 billion that are still active.

The active contracts include $3.4 billion to care for unaccompanied children who are already in the system. An additional $544 million is going to aid states with migrants who are already here and in the system, and $1.2 billion is being spent on other ORR grants that have already been granted.

One other program costing five million dollars has been forced to remain active by a court order.

The Trump administration has also canceled 63 awards, worth a total of $186 million.

In September, the White House outlined nearly $1 billion in wasted tax dollars spent on migrants.

The White House recently launched a new initiative to eliminate wasteful and harmful spending and pledged to “cut wasteful and harmful government spending that does not benefit American citizens.”

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‘Bunker Mode’: OpenAI’s Jaw-Dropping Math Blitz Draws Boycott, Warning Over Crypto Wallets

OpenAI just unleashed hundreds of AI-generated mathematical papers in a single release, which include breakthroughs on problems that have frustrated researchers for generations. The pace of discovery here has started to freak out mathematicians – who are now calling for a boycott – while top minds in crypto are raising a chilling question: could AI eventually undermine the mathematics protecting digital wallets before quantum computing?

On October 6, the company published 722 manuscripts covering 372 groups of related findings, all generated by an internal AI model that has not been released to the public. The papers appeared in a public GitHub repository. OpenAI says the work emerged from testing the model on roughly 4,000 research problems, with each result in the final collection using, on average, computing power equivalent to about three hours of ChatGPT Pro’s thinking mode. The collection includes claims about prime numbers, geometry and the mathematics underlying computing, touching problems that have resisted some of the world’s best minds for decades.

Perhaps the most startling claim concerns the Riemann hypothesis, a mathematical puzzle dating to 1859 that deals with the hidden patterns governing prime numbers – the building blocks from which every whole number greater than one can be made.

For math nerds: 

Mathematicians study those patterns through a special mathematical function, looking in particular at the points where it equals zero. The full Riemann hypothesis predicts that all the important zeros fall along one precise line. OpenAI’s model has not proved that. Instead, it claims to have ruled out zeros across an enormous, permanently defined region where previous proofs offered a much narrower guarantee. If the claim holds up, it would be a major advance toward understanding one of mathematics’ most famous unsolved problems.

For specialists, the dividing line in the new claim is a value of 7/8, while the full hypothesis would require 1/2. The related equations are known as the Riemann zeta function and Dirichlet L-functions. For everyone else, the point is simpler: the AI claims to have established a far stronger limit on where these crucial mathematical points can appear, without claiming to have settled the entire puzzle.

Other OpenAI papers claim progress on the Hodge conjecture – which concerns the structure of complex geometric shapes – though only for a class of objects called CM abelian varieties.

Math nerds rejoice? Or panic?

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Husband of Texas Mayor Arrested by ICE

The husband of a Texas mayor was arrested by ICE for overstaying his visa.

Armando Garza Lira, the husband of Crystal City, Texas, Mayor Jose Cerda, was arrested on Wednesday night for overstaying his visa.

According to NewsNation, the Zavala County Sheriff’s Department along with ICE took Lira into custody following complaints he was in the US illegally.

NewsNation reported:

The husband of Crystal City, Texas, Mayor Jose Cerda was arrested by ICE Wednesday night, law enforcement sources told NewsNation.

According to NewsNation sources, Armando Garza Lira overstayed his visa. NewsNation has reached out to the city and has not received a response.

In a statement, the Zavala County Sheriff’s Office said it took Lira into custody after conducting immigration enforcement action following complaints of an individual reportedly residing unlawfully in Crystal City, 115 miles southwest of San Antonio.

Lira was transported to the Zavala County Jail, where he was transferred to jail personnel pending further immigration enforcement action by federal authorities.

Cerda was released without further incident.

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Yes, The Public Education System Is Broken

I have been in education for a long time. My first teaching job came two weeks after my younger nephew was born. His birthday is next week, and he’ll be 29. Take out the five years when I was working in retail and going to graduate school, and I’ve been a teacher for 24 years. There is not enough money in the world to tempt me back into public education. I’d rather stay poor, thank you. I keep hearing about a teacher shortage. That’s incorrect. There’s not a teacher shortage; there’s a people willing to be treated like dirt shortage. Why? How did public education come to this sad state? Jonathan Turley’s opinion piece in The Hill speaks to the problem and nails it right to the wall.

His opinion piece titled “The Blue-State Model for Education has Failed, and the Public has Caught On” states early on that one of the reasons the public schools have gone down the drain is because of the teachers’ unions. Early in the article, Turley states, “New polling shows that K-12 education has now reached a record low in the number of people who are even “somewhat satisfied” with the state of education in the U.S.” He then talks about the “education cartel,” a self-sustaining, self-perpetuating alliance between unions and politicians. The cartel has rendered families and students irrelevant.

How is that possible? people ask. Without the students, there is no school system. It doesn’t matter to the cartel. As long as the money keeps coming, which it does through dues, the cartel continues to operate. Personally, I have very little experience with the teachers’ unions. I joined the American Federation of Teachers briefly so I could get some legal help regarding the principal at the high school where I taught. I was a second-year teacher, and he had determined that I needed to go. He was black, and I was white. The AFT pointed me to the union steward at my high school, a government teacher who was also one of the basketball coaches. He told me that there was nothing the principal could do to force me from the building. I had to leave on my own. I’m a stubborn soul, so I was determined that the principal was going to leave first. He did, two years later.

Was the advice I got worth the annual membership? Absolutely. But that was twenty years ago. I dropped my membership the next year. Today, I wouldn’t join any teachers’ union because at their very core, they are about representing the teachers, not the students. The unions protect every teacher, even the teachers who have no business being anywhere near a classroom. In the states where teachers are required to join a union, the power is tenfold over the states that give teachers a choice, the right-to-work states.

In states where union membership is required, even if the teacher is able to quit the union, the union will still take a deduction from the teacher’s paycheck unless the teacher stands up and says “No.” In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court in Janus vs. AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) said that taking dues from non-union members was a violation of the First Amendment. This had an effect on union membership, which dropped by 10% after the ruling. However, the unions are not letting the decision slow them down. One year after the Janus ruling, a full 52% of teachers surveyed did not know they could leave the union without paying a fee. We are now eight years after the Janus decision, and the deep blue Democrat states with powerful teachers’ unions are working to make it easy to join a union but very hard to leave.

Aren’t unions supposed to protect workers and allow them to negotiate on a level playing field with their bosses? During the time of the Robber Barons in the early 1900s, yes. Today, most unions serve no purpose other than to enrich their heads. Both the head of the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) make six figures. The head of the Chicago Teachers Union makes six figures. Their salaries come from dues. Fewer dues-paying members, lower salaries. If the unions actually promoted better teaching and better practices, I would have no problem with them, but they don’t. The problem? Money. As long as the money keeps flowing to the unions, they can do whatever they want.

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China Nominates Communist Health Official to Lead World Health Organization

The Chinese government has nominated one of its own, former China National Health Commission director Dr. Song Li, to become the next director-general of the World Health Organization (W.H.O.).

Reuters reported the nomination on Thursday morning and Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning confirmed it at a press conference.

Mao said the nomination was part of China’s bid to gain more influence in multinational organizations like W.H.O. after the United States withdrew support – an action taken by President Donald Trump in July 2020, in part because he said China already had far too much sway over the U.N. health agency.

“China has total control over the World Health Organization despite only paying $40 million per year compared to what the United States has been paying, which is approximately $450 million a year,” Trump said when announcing the withdrawal.

The Biden administration retracted Trump’s decision to withdraw in January 2021, but Trump once again signed an executive order to pull out of W.H.O. when he returned to office in January 2025.

“At a time when multilateralism is facing challenges and much remains to be done in advancing global health, the role of the W.H.O. director-general is particularly important in ensuring that the organization continues to develop steadily amid new changes and circumstances,” Mao said at her press conference on Thursday.

“China’s nomination of Dr Song Li demonstrates China’s willingness to work with all parties to build a community of health for all, and reflects China’s firm support for multilateralism and the W.H.O.,” she said.

“We believe that if Dr. Song Li is elected W.H.O. director-general, she will help the organization play a more active role in improving the health and wellbeing of all humanity,” she said.

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) noted on Thursday that Song would become “the first person from mainland China to head the United Nations health agency.”

A doctor from Hong Kong named Margaret Chan held the post from 2007 to 2017, to be succeeded by the current director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The director general of W.H.O. is appointed to a five-year term by the World Health Assembly (W.H.A.), and can be reappointed once, so Tedros must leave office in August 2027.

Song is the seventh candidate to be nominated so far to succeed Tedros. The others hail from Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Indonesia, Spain, and Botswana.

Song held the post of Director-General of the Department of Women and Child Health at China’s National Health Commission until last month. She also sits on the secretariat of the All-China Women’s Federation, an organ of the Chinese Communist Party that is directly supervised by Party leadership.

Song was educated at Shandong Medical University and Peking University, and was a “visiting scholar in global health” at Harvard for six months in 2010. She was involved in China’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, helping to create procedures for maternity and newborn care, and she helped to establish networks for treating pregnant women infected with the coronavirus.

Reuters quoted a former senior W.H.O. official who said China might use Song’s candidacy as “leverage to ​gain greater influence in the W.H.O. by making ​sure there are more Chinese senior officials at the organization.”

The U.S. is still the largest single contributor to W.H.O. by assessments, with China in fourth place, but the WHA suspended America’s voting rights in the organization in May because of “unpaid arrears.” 

W.H.O. said it reduced its base budget by about 21 percent after President Trump signed his executive order to withdraw in January. The W.H.A. said that it will not officially recognize U.S. withdrawal until it pays all of its unpaid dues.

Argentina also withdrew from W.H.O. last year, but unlike the United States, it had no legal right to withdraw included with its membership, whether its dues are paid or not. To date, W.H.O. has never formally accepted the withdrawal of a member nation.

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Feds Storm Skid Row with a 100-Vehicle Convoy to Take Down Drug Network Operating in Tents and Storefronts

Federal agents and Los Angeles police raided Skid Row before dawn Thursday, serving dozens of warrants in a takedown of dealers supplying fentanyl, meth, cocaine, and PCP to the blocks of homeless encampments that plague downtown Los Angeles.

Authorities called the raid Operation Skid Row, and targeted more than two dozen suspected street dealers and suppliers after a three-month investigation.

The FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the LAPD used phone taps, undercover officers, and drones to build the cases.

By morning, agents had arrested 28 people.

A convoy of roughly 100 law enforcement vehicles cordoned off blocks and parks around Fifth and Crocker streets, trapping dealers who had been working the sidewalks.

Investigators said the dealers were not standing on corners in the open. Some sold from a Mercedes. Some posed as homeless men living in tents that were in fact drug dens. Others used storefronts or posed as social workers and homeless-services providers.

Drugs were also stashed in single-room-occupancy units and low-income housing.

Agents seized narcotics, guns, and luxury cars.

Officials said homeless people were not the target. The warrants were for dealers, and multiple gang members are among those facing charges.

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Russia’s Crown Jewel Refinery Ablaze After Drone Strike, Data Center Also Hit In War First

Ukrainian drones have hit a major Russian industrial hub and oil refinery which lies very far away from the front lines of fighting, in Western Siberia, north of the Kazakh border.

The Omsk Oil refinery and industrial complex is located well over 1500 miles from the Ukrainian border. Regional Governor Vitaly Khotsenko announced Telegram that several drones were shot down by air defenses, but that one made it through to impact.

Ukraine’s General Staff was quick to own up to the Thursday attack, stating, “The destruction of such facilities is the exercise by Ukraine of its inalienable right to self-defense in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter and is aimed at reducing the military-economic potential of the Russian Federation.”

While the extent of potential damage to the refinery itself remains unknown, images from local residents showed explosions and fire in the area near the oil refinery.

Emergency crews are active at the scene of the facility, Russia’s largest, which is owned by Gazprom Neft

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2SLGBTQIA+ Activists Demand a WHOPPING $450 MILLION in Taxpayer Funding from Canadian Government to Expand LGBTQ Agenda

A coalition of more than 40 LGBTQ advocacy organizations descended on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, demanding that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government commit a staggering $450 million ($350 million US) in taxpayer funding over the next five years to expand the country’s federal LGBTQ action plan.

That’s $450 million in Canadian dollars, equivalent to roughly $325 million in U.S. currency, that activists want Ottawa to commit to their expanding programs and initiatives.

According to NOW Toronto, approximately 45 LGBTQ, human rights, feminist, and labor organizations participated in what organizers described as the largest-ever Queer Day of Action on Parliament Hill on October 6.

Organizers branded the lobby day the largest-ever “Queer day” on the Hill. The money would renew and expand the federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan before it expires in March 2027. That plan was launched by Justin Trudeau in August 2022 with $100 million over five years, about $70 million US, a massive 350% increase over the original allocation.

The day was organized by Queer Momentum, Rainbow Railroad, Egale Canada, Pride at Work Canada, Fierté Canada Pride, and Dignity Network Canada, with more than 40 allied groups in tow, according to a CNW release from the Society of Queer Momentum.

Delegates spent the day in meetings with MPs, senators, and ministers’ offices, then closed with a reception in the Senate co-hosted by the Canadian Pride Caucus. NOW Toronto reported the coalition’s line as “double down, not back down.”

The coalition also wants Canada to expand its international LGBTQ advocacy programs.

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