Blog

Detroit Cop SUES City After Suspension for Calling Border Patrol on Venezuelan Illegal

A veteran Detroit police sergeant has filed a federal lawsuit against her department after being slapped with a 30-day unpaid suspension for contacting U.S. Border Patrol during a routine traffic stop that uncovered an undocumented Venezuelan migrant.

This case spotlights the absurd priorities in blue cities, where enforcing immigration laws gets you punished, even as Americans demand more cooperation to secure the borders.

Sgt. Denise Wallet, a 27-year department veteran, pulled over the driver on February 9, 2026, in downtown Detroit. The man presented a fake driver’s license and admitted he was in the country illegally without proper identification.

Leaked body camera footage captures Wallet explaining her decision to seek federal assistance. “I don’t want to be the reason that somebody who shouldn’t be getting away gets away, exactly, and then you find out (laughs). It turns out he was Pablo Escobar Jr.,” she said, underscoring the potential risks of letting unidentified individuals slip through.

Wallet consulted her superior before acting, with her lieutenant advising her to call Border Patrol.

Border Patrol agents arrived, confirmed the man’s illegal status, and took him into custody. But instead of commendation, Wallet faced discipline under the Detroit Police Department’s “bias-free policing” policy, which bars officers from enforcing federal immigration laws or contacting agencies like CBP for identification purposes.

The policy claims such actions amount to “differential treatment” based on perceived ethnicity or background. Wallet’s attorney, Solomon Radner, fired back in the lawsuit, arguing no policy was violated and that her due process rights were trampled.

Keep reading

Iranians flood streets in mourning as Tehran confirms assassination of supreme leader

Iranians flooded the streets of Tehran and other cities across the country on 1 March, hours after state television confirmed the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the US-Israeli strikes on the Islamic Republic. 

Video footage showed millions of people on the streets of the capital and other cities, waving Iranian flags and mourning the leader’s death.

Protests against the US and Israel have also erupted in Pakistan and Iraq. 

Angry protesters in Pakistan’s Karachi attempted to storm the US consulate on Sunday morning. At least ten have been shot dead by Pakistani security forces and US consulate personnel. Thousands protested in Kashmir as well.

Iraqis also stormed the Green Zone in Baghdad, where the US embassy is located. The popular movements coincided with continued US-Israeli strikes on Iran and retaliatory drone and missile operations targeting Israel and Washington’s assets across the region. Iraqi resistance groups have also begun drone operations against US bases. 

Keep reading

FTC Says Companies Can Collect Kids’ Personal Data, As Long As It’s Called “Age Verification”

The FTC just told companies they can collect children’s personal data without parental consent, as long as it’s for “age verification.”

That’s the practical effect of a policy statement the agency issued this week. Under COPPA, websites collecting data on kids under 13 generally need verifiable parental consent first. The FTC’s new statement carves out an exception: gather whatever personal information you need to verify someone’s age, and the Commission won’t come after you for it.

The agency calls this child protection. The infrastructure it’s enabling looks different.

Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said “Age verification technologies are some of the most child-protective technologies to emerge in decades,” and framed the announcement as a tool for parents.

What the statement actually does is green-light personal data collection from minors, on the theory that knowing someone’s age requires knowing who they are first.

The exemption is conditional. To avoid enforcement, sites must delete age verification data “promptly” after use, restrict third-party sharing to vendors with adequate security assurances, post clear notices about what they’re collecting, and use methods likely to produce “reasonably accurate” results. These requirements are unverifiable by the people whose data gets collected, and enforced by an agency that just announced it won’t enforce.

COPPA supposedly exists precisely because children’s personal data is sensitive and companies can’t be trusted to protect it without legal pressure.

The FTC’s new exemption uses that same sensitive data as the price of admission for age verification, then steps back from enforcement. The agency is weakening the law’s protections in order to expand the infrastructure that the law was supposedly designed to regulate.

Keep reading

Republican Lawmakers Demand Answers on UK’s iCloud Encryption Backdoor Order

Two senior Republican lawmakers are demanding answers from the British government about its secret order forcing Apple to break its own encryption. The UK has until March 11 to respond.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast sent a joint letter on Wednesday to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, pressing for a formal briefing on the Technical Capability Notice (TCN) served on Apple under the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

It’s the latest move in a surveillance fight that began over a year ago and has rattled the US-UK relationship at the highest levels.

In January 2025, UK security officials secretly ordered Apple to build a backdoor into iCloud that would allow them to decrypt any user’s data, anywhere in the world. Not just suspected criminals, not just UK citizens. Everyone.

The order targeted Apple’s Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature, the optional end-to-end encryption that ensures even Apple can’t read iCloud backups. Apple’s response was to pull ADP from the UK market entirely in February 2025, stripping strong encryption options from roughly 35 million iPhone users rather than comply with a demand it couldn’t legally discuss.

UK law makes it a criminal offense for companies to confirm or deny the existence of such orders, even to their own government.

Apple couldn’t tell the US Department of Justice that the order existed. The DOJ couldn’t verify whether it complied with the CLOUD Act, the bilateral agreement governing how the two countries share access to digital evidence. That agreement explicitly states it “shall not create any obligation that providers be capable of decrypting data.” The UK’s order appears to do exactly that.

The reaction in Washington was bipartisan. Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Andy Biggs slammed the order as “effectively a foreign cyber attack waged through political means.”

President Trump compared the UK’s conduct directly to China’s. Speaking to the Spectator after meeting Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump said: “We actually told [Starmer] . . . that’s incredible. That’s something, you know, that you hear about with China.” DNI Secretary Tulsi Gabbard called any attempt to compel Apple to create security weaknesses an “egregious violation” of privacy and confirmed legal and intelligence teams were assessing the implications.

Keep reading

There Are ‘Questions’ About Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’—But Don’t Expect AP to Answer Them

It’s not a failsafe test, but it can be a tip off that a journalistic outlet is off its feet when its language falls apart. I give you the Associated Press (2/19/26), describing the actions of a person who rarely strings a coherent sentence together, to hand over billions of US taxpayer dollars to create a global entity. This is the “Board of Peace,” of which Trump has declared himself “Chairman for Life“—because that’s a normal thing—and which Google’s AI describes as “potentially replac[ing] existing international institutions”:

Trump’s vision for the board has morphed since he initiated the group as part of his 20-point peace plan to end the conflict in Gaza. Since the October ceasefire, Trump wants it to have an even more ambitious remit—one that will not only complete the Herculean task of bringing lasting peace between Israel and Hamas but will also help resolve conflicts around the globe.

If you aren’t staggered by the notion of Donald Trump “resolving conflicts around the globe,” every other word still deserves interrogation: Are completing the genocide and mass dislocation of Palestinian people, and violently converting their historic homeland to a playground resort for wealthy internationals, going to now be labeled by the press as “bringing lasting peace,” and “ending the conflict” in Gaza?

But worry not: AP tells us in bold letters, “There are many questions about how the board will work.” That implies that AP will be asking them, or care about the answers. But given no one who had a real problem with the creation of the board itself is cited in the article on its launch, why would we look to AP for critical eyes going forward?

Keep reading

Trump Starts a Major Regime-Change War with Iran, Serving Neoconservatism and Israel

For decades, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and American neoconservatives have dreamed of only one foreign policy goal: having the United States fight a regime-change war against Iran. With the Oval Office occupied by Donald Trump — who campaigned for a full decade on a vow to end regime-change wars and vanquish neoconservatism — their goal has finally been realized.

Early Saturday morning, the United States and Israel began a massive bombing campaign of Tehran and other Iranian cities. President Trump posted an eight-minute speech to social media purporting to justify his new war, dubbed “Operation Epic Fury.” Trump’ war cry was filled with the same slogans and clichés about Iran that Americans have heard from the carousel of bipartisan neocons dominating U.S. foreign policy for decades: Iran is a state sponsor of “terror”; it is pursuing nuclear weapons; it took American hostages forty-seven years ago (in 1979); it repressed and kills its dissidents, etc.

As if to underscore how fully he was embracing the very foreign policy dogma he vowed to reject, Trump invoked the Marvel-like “Axis of Evil” formulation that White House speechwriter David Frum wrote for George W. Bush at the start of the War on Terror. Iran’s government, President Trump proclaimed, is one determined to “practice evil.” This is how Bush — speaking of Iraq, Iran and North Korea — put it in his 2002 State of the Union address: “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil.”

Trump left no doubt about the scope and ambition of his new war. This will not be a quick or targeted bombing run against a few nuclear sites, as Trump ordered last June as part of Israel’s 12-day war with Iran. There is nothing remotely constrained or targeted about any of this. Instead, this new war is what Trump called a “massive and ongoing” mission of destruction and regime-change, launched in the heart of the Middle East, against a country of 93 million people: almost four times the size of Iraq’s population when the U.S. launched that regime change war back in 2003.

That Trump claimed to have “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program last June — just eight months ago — was not something he meaningfully acknowledged in his new war announcement, other than to vaguely assert that Iran somehow resumed their nuclear program. In fact, Trump seemed to delight in repeating the same triumphalist rhetoric that he used last year when he assured Americans that Iran’s nuclear program could no longer pose a threat as a result of Trump’s triumphant Operation Midnight Hammer.

In lieu of outlining any clear mission statement for this new war, let alone a cogent exit strategy, Trump offered a laundry list of flamboyantly violent vows. The U.S. will “totally obliterate” Iran’s ballistic missile program (which Iran could not use to reach the American homeland but which Trump admitted last June caused Israel “to get hit very hard” in retaliation). Trump also promised that the U.S. would “annihilate” Iran’s navy. And he told Iranians: “the hour of your freedom is at hand….bombs will be dropping everywhere.”

Trump also attempted to prepare the nation for caskets and body bags of American soldiers returning to the U.S. “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost; we may have casualties,” the President said. But, said the man who did everything to avoid military service including during the Vietnam War, mass death of American soldiers “often happens in war.”

Keep reading

US and Israel Launch Illegal War on Iran, Call for Regime Change

he U.S. and Israel carried out a series of unprovoked and devastating strikes on Iran on Saturday, sparking retaliation from the country as U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on Iranians to overthrow their government.

Iranian media reported strikes across the country, including in the capital of Tehran and around the offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, The Associated Press reported. It’s unclear if Khamenei and other top leaders survived.

One of the strikes, reportedly launched by Israel, destroyed an elementary school for girls in the southern city of Minab, killing at least 85 people, Iranian semi-official outlet Tasnim News Agency reported — seemingly the first reported casualties of the conflict.

Iran retaliated with strikes targeting Israel and U.S. bases in numerous Gulf Coast countries, including in a strike on the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. Many U.S. bases in the region were partially evacuated prior to the first U.S.-Israeli strikes.

In a video address posted as the first strikes were launched, Trump described the attack as “a massive and ongoing operation.”

Keep reading

Trump Says He is Entitled to Third Term Because Democrats ‘CHEATED Like HELL’ in 2020

President Donald Trump told the crowd at a rally in Corpus Christi, Texas, on Friday, that he would be entitled to a third term in office, because the Democrats “cheated like hell” in 2020.

Trump has been floating the idea of a third term for some time.

“I’ve been here one year. Think of it, one year, a little bit more than one year. Now, time flies. Time flies,” Trump said.

“Maybe we should — maybe we do one more term. Should we do one more? One more term?” Trump continued.

“Well, we’re entitled to it! ‘Cause they CHEATED like HELL on the second one. We’d actually be entitled to it.”

The U.S. Constitution’s 22nd Amendment limits presidents to two terms, a rule established after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four elections, but many supporters have argued that there are workarounds.

Trump has a history of playfully, and sometimes seriously, referencing the idea of a third term in office, often citing 2020 election fraud or constitutional workarounds.

One of the earliest instances came in March 2018, when Trump praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for abolishing term limits, quipping that perhaps the U.S. should “give that a shot someday.”

In April 2019, during a speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee, he joked about staying in office for another 10 or 14 years, prompting laughter from the audience.

A couple of months later, Trump clarified in an interview that he had just been joking about it, emphasizing he would not violate the Constitution.

The tone of the jokes changed a bit during his second term.

In January 2025, at a Nevada rally, Trump teased serving “twice or three times or four times,” before correcting himself to “twice.”

Two months later, during an NBC News interview, Trump explicitly stated he was “not joking” about a third term, mentioning “there are methods” to pursue it without elaborating on potential avenues.

Keep reading

Secretary of War Brings Some Sanity Back to Scouts, Ends DEI Requirements

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that Scouting America, formerly the Boy Scouts of America, has agreed to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and clarify that membership is based solely on biological sex at birth in order to maintain its longstanding relationship with the military.

The Department of War had threatened to withdraw its support, including access to military bases and logistical assistance for major events such as the 2026 National Jamboree in West Virginia, because the organization embraced “radical, woke ideology.” An agreement has now been reached.

Under the deal, Scouting America will immediately comply with Executive Order 14173, eliminate DEI programs, and discontinue a DEI-related merit badge which had become a requirement to make Eagle Scout. Applications will list only male or female, consistent with the applicant’s birth certificate, and biological boys and girls will not share intimate spaces such as tents, showers, or restrooms.

In addition, the organization will waive registration fees for children of active-duty, Guard, and Reserve families and introduce a new military-service merit badge in partnership with the Department of War.

In exchange, Scouting America will retain its name and continue admitting girls, at least for now. Hegseth said the Department’s continued support is contingent on substantial progress over the next six months and warned that failure to comply could result in termination of military backing. He added that, ideally, the organization should return to its original identity as a group focused on developing boys into men.

Scouting America emphasized its historic ties to the armed forces, noting that Scouts are more likely than the general population to serve in uniform and that Eagle Scouts are heavily represented in ROTC programs, service academies and military leadership tracks.

The organization said it engaged in months of dialogue with the Department of War and framed the agreement as a strengthened partnership focused on serving military families and reinforcing leadership, character, duty to God and duty to country.

Keep reading