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Arizona Corrections Officer Arrested for Smuggling 5,400 Rounds of Ammo for Mexican Drug Cartel

Mexican authorities said they arrested an American who allegedly was bringing ammunition into Mexico for a drug cartel.

The woman had 5,400 rounds of ammunition with her when she was detained, Mexican authorities said, according to the New York Post.

The name of the woman was given variously as “Yanet ‘N’” and Yanet Dowden.

The second name was based on a report from the Mexican newspaper Excelsior, which said an Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry identification card calling the suspect “Yanet Dowden” was found on the suspect.

The card said she was a “Level II correctional officer.”

The New York Post report said the woman was 22, based on a social media account.

The website Cartel Insider noted that the ID card had not yet been verified.

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How Romania Came To Host A Post-9/11 CIA Black Site & Got US Cash Bonanza

Ammar al-Baluchi remembers the cold most of all. Held nearly naked in a cell lit around the clock by fluorescent bulbs, he referred to his detention “as if I was living in a refrigerator”.

The nephew of self-declared 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Baluchi was one of six to a dozen men believed to be held and tortured in a secret CIA prison in Bucharest between 2003 and 2005. The treatment of detainees at the facility, formally known as “Detention Site Black”, is described in detail in Guantanamo court filings.

Solitary confinement under lights that never switched off, sleep deprivation that at times meant being forced to stand shackled for days, repeated dousing with icy water, and forced shaving and physical handling that interrogators euphemistically logged as “attention grasps” and “facial holds” were common practice.

A photo released by Baluchi’s lawyers to the press in 2024 shows him stripped naked and photographed. It is believed to be the first published image – of tens of thousands – of a “war on terror” detainee in a CIA black site.

“We know they were tortured horrifically,” Ben Keith, a British barrister representing Baluchi outside the US, told Middle East Eye. “It’s not always possible to say which bit of torture took place because they were tortured for days and weeks, but you don’t detain somebody in a black site with the purpose of just talking to them.”

A quarter-century after the 9/11 attacks, which triggered the so-called “war on terror” and devastating US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that directly killed at least 940,000 people, a US military judge has finally set a trial date for Baluchi: 5 June 2028.

Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama ruled this month that the case against Mohammed, Baluchi, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi will begin on that date.

Schrama is the fifth military judge to preside over a case that has been trapped for more than a decade in disputes over evidence, national security secrecy and, above all, whether confessions obtained under torture before the men ever reached Guantanamo can be used at trial.

That question runs directly through a basement in Bucharest, where the accused are believed to have been detained and tortured.

In April 2025, a Guantanamo military judge ruled that statements Baluchi gave the FBI in 2007 were involuntary and inadmissible, tainted by what the court called torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment inflicted on him in CIA custody, including in Romania.

The judge found that Guantanamo’s “modestly changed confinement circumstances” had not been enough to remove the “lingering taint” of what happened before he arrived there.

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Florida’s Attorney General Sues Netflix For Allegedly Harvesting, Selling Children’s Data

Attorney General James Uthmeier is seeking billions in damages from the company and asked the judge to order Netflix to stop its alleged deceptive practices.

“Parents were told kids’ profiles were a child’s own space – safe, separate, great for kids,” Uthmeier said in a news conference Wednesday.

“Families believed them. But behind the brand, Netflix built something different.”

In the lawsuit, Jill McLaughlin reporets for The Epoch Times,that Uthmeier claims Netflix offered an ad-free service that promised not to collect or sell data but began to track children and their profiles when it launched an advertising business in 2022.

The streaming service offers an under-12 profile option for children which promotes a non-advertising space, according to the state.

Uthmeier alleges Netflix violated the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act and the state’s Digital Bill of Rights, including by selling sensitive personal data collected from known children without prior consent.

He seeks a permanent injunction, an order requiring Netflix to purge any deceptively collected data from Floridians, and an end to addictive designs that keep children watching on the platform, in addition to billions of dollars in civil and other monetary relief, he said.

“Parents, not streaming corporations, need to direct the upbringing of children,” Uthmeier said.

In the complaint, Uthmeier stated Netflix’s executive officer Reed Hastings told investors during a Jan. 22, 2020, earnings call the company’s model was not based on using customer data.

“We don’t collect anything, we’re really focused on just making our members happy and we’re not tied up on all that controversy around advertising,” Hastings said.

Hastings also said Netflix wasn’t interested in tracking customers’ locations or other things they were doing. “We want to be the safer spy where you can explore, you can get stimulated, have fun, enjoy, relax, and have none of the controversy around exploiting users with advertising,” Hastings said during the call.

The Netflix executive compared the company to Google, Facebook, and Amazon’s advertising models that used consumer data collection and targeting information, saying Netflix was “not controversial that way.”

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Trump says he’s lifting a 10% tariff on Irish whiskey because ‘everybody’s been bugging me’ about it

President Donald Trump says he plans to remove a 10% tariff on Irish whiskey.

DOONBEG, Ireland (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Sunday at the close of a golf tournament in Ireland that he plans to remove a 10% tariff on Irish whiskey.

Trump said during the trophy ceremony for the Irish Open that he had been asked about the issue by everyone, including Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin and even some of the golfers. Irish Open winner Shane Lowry was among them, Trump said.

“Everybody’s been bugging me” to do it, the Republican president said. “And I said, ‘On behalf of the United States of America, I am going to take the tariffs off’” of Irish whiskey.

Irish whiskey currently faces the standard tariff imposed by Trump on most imports from the European Union, which was reduced from 15% to 10% in July.

Trump announced in April that he was lifting certain tariffs on U.K. whiskey, which includes Scotch and spirits made in Northern Ireland, creating an imbalance with Ireland.

Trump’s surprise announcement was met with loud whistling and cheers from the crowd of spectators. Details on how soon the tariff would be lifted were not immediately available.

Chris Swonger, president & CEO of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, called Trump’s announcement “another positive step toward reducing barriers to spirits trade” and said everyone would benefit from it during the coming holidays.

“As U.S. hospitality businesses enter the critical holiday season, this action will provide a welcome boost for retailers, restaurants, consumers and the American economy,” Swonger said.

In May, the Irish Whiskey Association called for the tariffs to be removed, arguing that such a step would help many U.S. companies with Irish products in their portfolios and avoid uncertainty for consumers.

Trump said on April 30 that he gave the United Kingdom a tariff break on whiskey after King Charles III and Queen Camilla visited the White House. “The King and Queen got me to do something that nobody else was able to do, without hardly even asking!” Trump posted on social media.

The Scotch Whisky Association said July 24 that the zero-tariff policy had come into effect.

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Woodbury Republican Registrar Alleges Democrat Counterpart Altered Election System Results, Leading To “Hostile Workplace” Dispute

Woodbury’s Republican registrar says she will not run another election with her Democrat counterpart after he allegedly altered official returns in the state’s election system right before the window to fix them closed.

Lisa Amatruda, Woodbury’s Republican Registrar of Voters, put the allegations in writing on September 11. Her letter to Republican Town Committee (RTC) Chairman Paul Luchetti and the Woodbury RTC details a chain-of-custody complaint regarding the Democrat Registrar of Voters, Daniel Lonegan.

On August 11, Woodbury ran two primaries. Amatruda wrote that when they left the Senior Community Center that night, candidate totals on both ballots had been counted, reviewed, and verified as correct. Democrat Registrar Daniel Lonegan and the head moderator then entered those results into the Secretary of the State’s Elections Management System (EMS). However, Amatruda spotted one problem: absentee totals were placed in the wrong column. Because the return had already been submitted, the Secretary of the State (SOTS) had to unlock the system before a correction could be made. That did not happen that night.

On August 12, Lonegan and the moderator filed an amendment for each primary and fixed the absentee columns. Amatruda checked the four candidate totals again and confirmed everything was correct. She assumed the rest of the process was just standard housekeeping.

It was not.

On August 27, a friend sent Amatruda a Facebook screenshot indicating that she and the moderator were being sued.

During meetings on August 28 and 29, Amatruda learned for the first time that Lonegan had logged back into the EMS by himself on August 13 and August 20. They discovered at least 13 amendments to the moderator’s returns, affecting both results pages and statistics pages. These statistics cover how ballots were cast—including poll tabulators, early voting, and absentee hand counts—which are kept in fields separate from candidate totals. Amatruda stated that Lonegan admitted to the changes, explaining that he had signed in using the head moderator’s credentials, called it a mistake, and could not explain why the results themselves were touched instead of only completing the statistics fields.

By then, Amatruda wrote, what the EMS showed—and therefore what appeared on the Secretary of the State’s website—was no longer correct. Lonegan asked the SOTS to unlock the return on August 29. On August 31, elections officials stated that they were past the open window, and follow-up communications confirmed the returns could no longer be changed.

Amatruda’s core point is one she believes Hartford will try to bury: she is not claiming the winners flipped. Instead, she is claiming that official, state-facing returns were altered after the fact by a single registrar working alone under another official’s login, and those records were left uncorrected.

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Popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs linked to potentially deadly brain disorder

Researchers are warning about a rare but potentially life-threatening brain condition that may be linked to popular GLP-1 weight-loss medications.

A new study, published in Clinical Nutrition, identified 15 reported cases of Wernicke encephalopathy, a neurological disorder caused by severe vitamin B1 deficiency, in people taking GLP-1 receptor agonists.

Most of the reported cases involved semaglutide, sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, or tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound.

Researchers found 15 cases through the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), published medical literature and their own medical center.

Most patients reported gastrointestinal symptoms or nutritional issues, including weight loss, vomiting, loss of appetite or malnutrition, the study noted.

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Trump Says He Likes Flock Cameras for Law Enforcement – “I Sort of Like Them”

President Trump on Sunday told reporters that he likes the controversial license plate-reading Flock cameras on roads across the country. 

Concerns have been raised by Americans about the right to privacy and unwarranted surveillance on ordinary motorists, tracking their every move and storing the information in a database.

Several Republican lawmakers and state officials have also expressed opposition to the technology.

When asked about the cameras on Sunday, Trump said, “I sort of like them because of that,” noting that law enforcement uses them to apprehend suspects.

“I sort of like them because of that, because of law enforcement, but some people don’t,” Trump said.

“They think it’s an infringement, but I like them.”

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China Stops And Interrogates Crews Of 200 Commercial Ships In Philippine Sea — Analysts Warn Of ‘Status Quo Change’ Near Taiwan

China’s Coast Guard is conducting an unprecedented campaign of maritime coercion in the Philippine Sea. Analysts have confirmed that the Chinese Coast Guard has been stopping and interrogating the crews of nearly 200 commercial vessels in the area.

Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) of Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) wrote about this unprecedented maritime coercion by China in its August 2026 issue. The issue was written just in time as the operations started to take place in mid-June this year, shortly after Japan and the Philippines jointly announced that they were going to discuss ways to delimit their overlapping exclusive economic zones (EEZs) in the Philippine Sea, east of Taiwan.

Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and the Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in May 2026 upgraded ties between Japan and the Philippines including possible sale of Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s destroyers to the Philippines as well as sharing of classified military information between both sides. Beijing swiftly responded to the two countries’ joint move by deploying large numbers of Coast Guard vessels and survey ships to the Philippine Sea in a series of “unprecedented” operations, according to AMTI.

AMTI notes that even within China’s own EEZ, the Coast Guard has no authority to stop and question vessels in this manner. The Philippine Sea is far beyond the limits of any plausible jurisdictional claim by China.

The region in which China is conducting these surveys is strategically located near Taiwan, and outside the boundary line being discussed by the Japan-Philippines negotiations. Moreover, the type of data that China is collecting can have dual-use values — while appearing to be related to safety of navigation it can also be used for military targeting and even for the routing of attack submarines.

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Trump-Appointed D.C. Judge Blocks President Trump’s USPS Mail-In Ballot Safeguards After Democrat Lawsuit — Claims Postal Service “Lacked Authority”

A Trump-appointed federal judge in Washington, D.C. on Sunday blocked the U.S. Postal Service’s new mail-in ballot rule, the one designed to stop untracked, unverified absentee ballots from flooding the midterms, after Democrat committees, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, LULAC, and the NAACP sued to kill it.

As reported right here on The Gateway Pundit back in May, Judge Nichols originally smashed the Democrats’ desperate, multi-headed lawsuits, brought by Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and left-wing activist groups, ruling they had absolutely zero standing to challenge President Trump’s March 31 Executive Order.

We celebrated this as a massive win for basic ballot security. Now, with the election breathing down our necks, Nichols has completely reversed course and sided with the very same activists he previously dismissed.

U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols granted preliminary injunctions against the Postal Service’s Final Rule on “Ballot Mail for Federal Elections.”

He ruled that key parts of the rule were ultra vires: Congress never gave USPS the power to force states to enroll mail voters in a federal portal, build state-specific absentee lists, and refuse outbound ballots that don’t match the list.

According to the court’s memorandum opinion, the rule created a Federal Ballot Mail Portal, required state and local election officials to submit voter and ballot information to USPS, established state-specific participation lists, and allowed the Postal Service to reject outbound federal ballot mail that failed to meet the new requirements.

Judge Nichols wrote that the Postal Reorganization Act authorizes USPS to collect, handle, transport, and deliver mail.

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