Blog

Ohio State receives first-ever DEA license to grow psychedelic mushrooms for research

Ohio State University is about to grow psychedelic mushrooms.

For scientific research, people.

Ohio State, alongside the mental health and wellness research and development company Inner State Inc., was awarded the first-ever license by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency to grow whole psilocybin mushrooms. The mushrooms will be used in the study of mental health treatment capabilities with naturally grown psychedelic mushrooms.

“This license is a major milestone not only for Inner State and Ohio State, but for the entire field of psychedelic research,” Inner State CEO Ashley Walsh said Wednesday in a news release.

The license allows Ohio State and Inner State to cultivate psilocybin mushrooms for research purposes only. All research will be conducted in a federally sanctioned and secured grow house in accordance with strict DEA regulations and guidelines.

“By combining cutting-edge techniques in genomics and metabolomics, we have the opportunity to obtain a high-resolution picture of the chemical diversity of mushrooms that have remained difficult to study for several decades,” according to Ohio State researchers Dr. Jason Slot and Dr. Kou-San Ju.

Keep reading

Florida cop charged with using dead man’s credit card information to buy fast food, gas, and hotel stay

A police officer in Florida was arrested with her handcuffs and charged with stealing a dead man’s credit card information to purchase fast food, according to the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office.

St. Cloud Police Officer Dianne Ferreira, 25, stands accused of theft of credit card information with intent to use, fraudulent use of a credit card over $200, and use of the personal ID of a deceased person. Her arrest was announced Tuesday during a joint press conference held by the OCSO and the SCPD.

“She was an officer, but she doesn’t deserve that title now,” St. Cloud Police Chief Doug Goerke said on Wednesday.

Keep reading

It’s Been 10 Years Since the IRS’s Tea Party Scandal. Will Congress Finally Act?

A bombshell revelation came to light 10 years ago this week in 2013, when the IRS apologized for years of deliberately delaying applications for tax-exempt status from right-of-center organizations. Hundreds of groups were improperly subjected to baseless investigations, invasive and improper demands about their donors, and lengthy delays in processing routine paperwork. The IRS’s actions at the time put a severe chill on conservative speech at the height of the Tea Party movement and leading up to the 2012 presidential election.

The revelation set off years of investigations and resignations at the IRS. Yet the agency secretly continued its efforts to silence nonprofits disfavored by the agency’s bureaucrats and political appointees. In November 2013, the IRS proposed new regulations that were nearly as damaging to the First Amendment as the targeting itself.

The agency proposed severe limits on issue speech by certain nonprofits, which would have forced many nonprofits to reclassify as political action committees and publicly expose their donors’ names and home addresses. The IRS also solicited comments on potentially expanding the restrictions to cover trade associations and other groups in the future. After backlash from across the political spectrum, the proposal was withdrawn, but that victory does not change the sad fact that federal law governing nonprofits is no safer today than it was when IRS officials decided they had the authority to discriminate against groups based on their views.

Enter the American Confidence in Elections (ACE) Act, the subject of a full committee hearing tomorrow in the Committee on House Administration. The legislation addresses a broad range of election, free speech, and privacy-related issues, including remedies for the IRS’s sordid history of policing speech. The bill, first introduced in 2022 and awaiting reintroduction this Congress, would prohibit the IRS from writing new speech-chilling rules for nonprofits and codify Trump-era reforms protecting nonprofit donors against unnecessary disclosures and warehousing of their personal information.

Keep reading

Billionaire Who Funded E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuit Against Trump Visited Epstein’s Island

The Democrat billionaire who funded E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against Donald Trump visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island and met him on at least two other occasions, records show.

Trump was ordered by a New York City jury to pay $5 million in damages to E Jean Carroll for “sexually abusing” her nearly three decades ago in a department store changing room.

The former president was also found responsible for defaming Carroll by calling her a “liar” after asserting that he had never even met the woman.

Trump called the case a “con job,” posting on Truth Social that he has “absolutely no idea who this woman is” and that the verdicts is “a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time.”

The civil verdict, which was overseen by Clinton-appointed judge Lewis Kaplan, is likely to remain tied up in appeal for a significant amount of time, during which Trump won’t have to pay Carroll anything.

Carroll’s secret funding source has been outed as being Democrat billionaire and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

Keep reading

Serial Killer John Wayne Gacy Tried to ‘Manipulate’ Criminal Profiler in Newly Disclosed Death Row Letter

A psychoanalyst who wanted to interview serial killer John Wayne Gacy while he was imprisoned ended discussions after Gacy required completion of a questionnaire.

John Kelly said he gave up trying to interview the convicted killer one year before his 1994 execution in an Illinois prison.

Fox News further reported:

Illinois serial killer John Wayne Gacy made such creepy demands to a criminal profiler that the psychoanalyst gave up on his attempts to interview him a year before he faced the death penalty at the Stateville prison.

The “Killer Clown” sent a pamphlet maintaining his innocence and demanded the profiler fill out a questionnaire full of personal questions and send it back with a photo.

Keep reading

CIA ‘May Have Assisted in Obtaining Signatories’ for Letter Discrediting Hunter Biden Laptop: House GOP Report

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency may have helped get intelligence community members to sign the notorious letter falsely labeling the Hunter Biden laptop story Russian disinformation.

House Republicans investigating possible weaponization of federal law enforcement against political opponents of Democrats or their policies reportedly found a link between the agency and the letter.

Politico published the letter where 51 IC members painted reports of wrongdoing by the president’s son as Russian disinformation a few weeks before the 2020 general election.

Fox News further reported:

The Central Intelligence Agency “may have assisted in obtaining signatories” for the letter signed by 51 former national security officials to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation ahead of the 2020 presidential election, the House Judiciary and House Intelligence committees found.

Keep reading

How the Murder of a CIA Officer Was Used to Silence the Agency’s Greatest Critic

ON THE NIGHT of December 23, 1975, Ron Estes, the CIA’s deputy station chief in Athens, was lounging on the couch in his girlfriend’s apartment when the man who worked as a driver for his boss, Richard Welch, burst through the front door.

“A shooting, and Mr. Welch is down,” the driver yelled.

Estes grabbed his coat and ran outside, ignoring his girlfriend’s pleas to stay.

At Welch’s house in the Greek capital, Estes saw the station chief lying on his back on the sidewalk, his wife, Kika, kneeling beside him. Blood covered Welch’s face, and Estes could see immediately that he was dead. “I didn’t need to feel for a pulse,” he said in an interview. A police car arrived, and Estes asked the officer to call an ambulance. When no ambulance arrived, they hauled the body into Welch’s car and Estes and Welch’s driver followed the police officer, siren blaring and lights flashing, through the streets of Athens to the nearest hospital. A medical team was waiting; they quickly placed Welch on a gurney and took him to an examining room. There, a doctor placed a stethoscope on Welch’s chest and confirmed to Estes that he was dead.

Welch was 46 years old. A career CIA officer, he had been the CIA’s Athens station chief for six months.

At the hospital, Welch’s driver finally caught his breath and told Estes what had happened. He had driven Welch and his wife home from a Christmas party at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, then stopped in front of the walled compound that enclosed Welch’s house to open the front gates. As Welch and his wife got out, three armed men in a black car pulled up behind them, burst out of the car, and confronted Welch.

“Put your hands up!” one of the men told Welch in Greek.

“What?” Welch asked in English.

One of the gunmen leveled his .45 caliber handgun and fired three times. An autopsy later showed that the first shot hit Welch in the chest, rupturing his aorta and killing him instantly. The three men got back in their car and sped away. That’s when Welch’s driver rushed to get Estes.

Keep reading

NIH restarts bat virus grant suspended 3 years ago by Trump

Three years after then-President Donald Trump pressured the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to suspend a research grant to a U.S. group studying bat coronaviruses with partners in China, the agency has restarted the award.

The new 4-year grant is a stripped-down version of the original grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization in New York City, providing $576,000 per year. That 2014 award included funding for controversial experiments that mixed parts of different bat viruses related to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the coronavirus that sparked a global outbreak in 2002–04, and included a subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The new award omits those studies, and also imposes extensive new accounting rules on EcoHealth, which drew criticism from government auditors for its bookkeeping practices.

But EcoHealth’s embattled director, Peter Daszak, says his group is pleased: “Now we have the ability to finally get back to work,” he says.

Keep reading