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Arkansas Democrat Hallie Shoffner Doubles Down on Trading ‘Five Americans’ for One ‘Undocumented Immigrant’

Arkansas Democrat Senate candidate Hallie Shoffner’s campaign is defending her comments about immigrant farm labor after she said farmers would trade five Americans for one ‘undocumented immigrant,’ but the campaign did not say whether or not Shoffner herself employed illegal immigrants.

Shoffner, who is running to unseat Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), said on September 9, “Every farmer will tell you at one point, we did, or still do, employ undocumented immigrants, and it’s absolutely ridiculous that these folks are being rounded up because they’re hardworking people. They’re some of the best people we know, and honestly, we’d trade five Americans for just one of them because of how hard they work.”

“And why is it that there’s no pathway for them to work here legally when they’re good workers? We pay them well. They spend money here. They have family here,” she continued.

Cotton’s campaign seized on the unanswered question.

“Shoffner’s campaign isn’t denying that Hallie Shoffner employed illegal immigrants. Nor did Hallie Shoffner’s campaign even try to walk back her claim that a single illegal immigrant is more valuable than five American citizens – in fact, they’re doubling down,” said Cotton campaign spokesman James Arnold. “Arkansans deserve to know how many illegal aliens Hallie Shoffner employed, how ‘well’ she paid them, and how long they worked for her.”

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Hackers claim to have stolen data on ‘almost all FBI agents’

The cybercriminal group ShinyHunters has claimed it breached the FBI and stole terabytes of sensitive personal information about nearly all of the agency’s agents and their spouses, as well as people who had applied for jobs there.

ShinyHunters is a prolific hacking and extortion group linked to large-scale data thefts targeting major companies and government organizations. The FBI itself warned about the group in May.

“We have compromised the FBI. We hold very sensitive data on almost ALL FBI Agents and individuals who filed an application with the FBI,” the group announced on its dark-web leak site on Tuesday. It reportedly released a sample of the purportedly stolen data and a screenshot of a defaced FBI recruitment website.

The group claimed to have taken terabytes of information, including names, home addresses and phone numbers. Reuters reported that it was able to find apparent matches for some individuals contained in a sample of the data, but could not establish that the information had actually been taken from FBI systems.

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FDA Should Demand Proof, Not Just Protein, for Duchenne

On microdystrophin, the FDA is doing what the accelerated-approval standard has always required: asking that a biomarker be shown to predict real benefit before it is trusted.

Much of the commentary around REGENXBIO’s RGX-202 has framed the FDA’s stance as regulatory inconsistency, arguing that the agency is holding one sponsor to a standard it waived for another. But the question before the FDA is simpler: whether microdystrophin expression is actually strong enough to predict clinical benefit.

The charge of inconsistency does not survive contact with the record. And it is worth noticing that its loudest version comes from a sponsor whose commercial position gives it every reason to want the bar set lower.

Nor is REGENXBIO alone in having a commercial interest in how low that bar is set. Solid Biosciences is pursuing the same accelerated-approval opening for SGT-003 while emphasizing high microdystrophin expression and other biomarker results from its early-stage trial. Solid is still gathering the controlled functional evidence that can show whether those laboratory findings actually translate into meaningful improvement for boys with Duchenne. That is precisely why the FDA cannot allow impressive protein numbers themselves to become the standard of proof.

The problem is larger than any one company. If microdystrophin expression can secure accelerated approval without convincing evidence that it predicts how patients actually function, every sponsor developing a similar therapy has an incentive to race toward the biomarker rather than wait for the harder clinical answer.

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Antidepressants (SSRI) Trigger Hyponatremia, Which Causes Severe Anxiety

Hyponatremia, or low sodium in the blood, is one of the most common electrolyte disorders seen in clinical settings, and its effects are anything but minor. Sodium keeps your nerves firing and your muscles working. When levels dip, even slightly, you feel drained, confused, or shaky. Push it further and symptoms like nausea, seizures, or fainting start to appear. In severe cases, sodium imbalance drives long hospital stays, lasting cognitive decline, and death.

Antidepressants such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are routinely prescribed for mood disorders, but what often gets overlooked is how they disrupt sodium balance in your body. This translates into real-world risks like falls, broken bones, and worsening mental health. Older adults, especially women, are hit the hardest, with even short-term use setting off dramatic shifts in sodium control.

The severity of harm varies depending on the drug, the dose, and how long it’s used, yet the outcome is always unpredictable — and sometimes catastrophic. Research makes it clear that these medications disrupt sodium balance in dangerous ways, and a major study to track this problem shows exactly how quickly and severely those drops in sodium occur.

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Bibi: Send More Bombs

As we approach the three-year mark of the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Israel has signaled that it has every intention of continuing its massive bombing campaigns against Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and possibly other countries. And Donald Trump has signaled that he is ready to help. On September 15, the Washington Post reported a decision by the Trump administration to provide Israel with some 40,000 of the US Air Force’s massive 2,000-pound bombs, the largest such transfer to any country in many years.

Bombs Away for Zion

Specifically, the administration announced that it was prepared to “sell” to Israel a $2.8 billion package of US Air Force 2000-pound bombs, consisting of 20,000 MK-84 bombs and another 20,000 BLU-117 bombs. The two versions are similar in size, weight, and functionality. Although both models are considered “general purpose” and “dumb” bombs, they can be configured with various guidance kits into precision guided munitions, aka “smart bombs.” Presumably, Israel will use its own guidance kits which it produces domestically. The administration’s package for Israel also includes 20,000 of the USAF’s I-2000 penetrator warheads, which function as a heavy-duty bomb body for the MK-84 or the BLU-117, effectively converting the munition into a hard target penetrator or “bunker buster.”

Israel’s profligate use of massive munitions on civilian populations has drawn international criticism since the opening weeks of the Gaza conflict. According to CNN, “In the first month of its war in Gaza, Israel dropped hundreds of massive bombs, many of them capable of killing or wounding people more than 1,000 feet away…. Satellite imagery from those early days of the war reveals more than 500 impact craters over 12 meters (40 feet) in diameter, consistent with those left behind by 2,000-pound bombs. Those are four times heavier than the largest bombs the United States dropped on ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, during the war against the extremist group there. Weapons and warfare experts blame the extensive use of heavy munitions such as the 2,000-pound bomb for the soaring death toll. The population of Gaza is packed together much more tightly than almost anywhere else on earth, so the use of such heavy munitions has a profound effect.”

“The use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area as densely populated as Gaza means it will take decades for communities to recover,” said John Chappell, advocacy and legal fellow at CIVIC, a DC-based group focused on minimizing civilian harm in conflict. Such massive bombs are “normally used sparingly by Western militaries, experts say, because of their potential impact on densely populated areas like Gaza. International humanitarian law prohibits indiscriminate bombing.”

Separately, a writer for the Concord Monitor has described the catastrophic effects of a MK-84 2000-pound bomb being dropped on a crowded residential area such as Gaza: “The detonation will create an instantaneous fireball that will lash out at temperatures exceeding 8,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The explosion will carve a crater 50 feet wide and 35 feet deep and hurl 10,000 pounds of rock and dirt debris at supersonic speed. The lethal radius will be a quarter-mile wide and will kill all the people within that area. But the destruction will not stop there. The bomb will rip through thick concrete and metal, creating a wider blast radius. The blast waves will be felt up to half a mile away, rupturing lungs and tearing off limbs. A single bomb will destroy entire city blocks.”

Israel regularly boasts about the professionalism of its military and likes to call the IDF the “most moral army in the world.” Its record in action tells a vastly different story. One curious decision by the IDF that apparently has never been challenged by the US is why it has opted for 2000-pound bombs against “soft” civilian targets, when 250-pound, 500-pound and 1000-pound munitions, which are readily available from the US, are far cheaper and cause far less collateral damage. Could it be that Israel’s real goal is simply genocide, a charge that it has claimed is unfounded

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Microsoft Claims a Quantum Breakthrough That Physicists Still Debate As DARPA Tests It

Microsoft says it has made one of quantum computing’s hardest problems dramatically easier.

Some physicists aren’t convinced.

Now DARPA gets to put its hands on the hardware.

Microsoft announced Tuesday that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will receive direct, on-site access to its latest quantum system at a new Maryland research center. The arrangement gives government evaluators something far more useful than another presentation about Microsoft’s roadmap. They can examine and test the technology itself.

The machine centers on Microsoft’s Majorana 2 technology. Microsoft says its newest topological qubits are more than 1,000 times more reliable than the previous generation. Their average lifetime is about 20 seconds, with some lasting more than a minute. The company says those advances have allowed it to cut its timetable in half and target a scalable quantum computer by 2029.

From Microsoft:

To create Majorana 2, the Microsoft Quantum team improved Majorana 1’s material stack to create a more stable topological phase. Majorana 2 replaces Majorana 1’s superconductor, aluminum, with lead, and also updates the semiconductor active region to a combination of indium arsenide and indium arsenide antimonide. This change in materials results in significant increases in performance, which are reflected in the improved robustness of the topological phase. The topological gap, which protects the topological qubits from environmental noise and errors, is more than double that of the previous quantum processor.

The gate-defined devices in our quantum processors are composed of tetrons, a type of topological qubit consisting of two superconducting nanowires with Majorana Zero Modes (MZMs) at their ends. MZMs are the building blocks of topological qubits, storing quantum information through parity, the evenness or oddness of the number of electrons in a topoconductor wire.

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Lab-Grown Human Brain Cells Power World’s First ‘Biological’ Data Center

Researchers in Singapore last month released a prototype for a “biological data center” — a computing facility that uses lab-grown human brain neurons connected to electronics to process data.

The prototype uses “wetware” — living neural cells derived from human stem cells and maintained in a lab — to interface with silicon hardware.

The cells, reprogrammed from donor skin or blood cells, have a six-month lifespan. Life-support equipment maintains them at a controlled temperature in sterile conditions and feeds them nutrients, the company said.

Electrodes stimulate the cells and read their activity. Then computers translate that activity into usable software inputs and outputs.

In a press release, the National University of Singapore Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, which partnered with Cortical Labs and DayOne to make the prototype, said it offers “a powerful glimpse into how biology and technology can come together to transform the future of computing.”

Patrick Wood, editor-in-chief of Technocracy News, called the prototype “creepy.”

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California Democrat Assemblywoman’s Staffer and Former News Anchor Busted by ICE

ICE arrested Ho-Yin Mo, a field representative for California Assemblywoman Catherine Stefani and former news anchor, at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas on Thursday.

Homeland Security told The Daily Mail that he is an illegal alien from Hong Kong who entered the country legally on a temporary basis on January 13, 2020, and failed to leave by May 15, 2020.

“Work authorization or a pending application do NOT confer legal status in the United States,” DHS said.

A source told the Daily Mail that Mo is being held at the Nevada Southern Detention Center in Pahrump and is expected to stay in custody through removal proceedings.

Under Joe Biden, illegal aliens were free to fly around the country without fear of being picked up and deported. That has changed under President Donald Trump.

“DHS reversed the horrendous Biden-era policy that allowed aliens in our country illegally to jet around our country,” the department said. “Under President Trump, DHS will no longer tolerate this. This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport.”

Mo was a news anchor and reporter at KTSF Channel 26, the Chinese-language station in San Francisco. He also worked on Asian American outreach for then-Mayor London Breed’s failed 2024 re-election campaign.

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Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Racism Is Why Her Daughter Can’t Do Math

Nikole Hannah-Jones has curated herself an extremely lucrative, notoriety-winning career by blaming white people for black people’s problems. In her latest article for The New York Times Magazine, she does it again. It’s titled, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”

In it, the creator of the scholarly abomination known as the 1619 Project admits that her warped educational ideas have harmed her daughter’s future and their relationship. When her daughter finally convinced her parents to let her attend a more challenging high school, she went from getting straight As in math to “barely keeping up”: “After an assessment, the center’s director called me in and told me that Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.”

This was after Najya had gotten As in a previous algebra class and been on her middle school’s honor roll. For elementary, Hannah-Jones and her husband had deliberately enrolled their daughter in one of New York City’s worst public schools, which Hannah-Jones calls “a poor Black one.” In 2016, Hannah-Jones’ daughter was literally on the cover of NYT Magazine to flaunt her mother’s decision.

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