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Minnesota Democrats Blocked Auditors from Tackling ‘Avalanche’ of Somali Fraud, Blacklisted Whistleblowers

The Somali-dominated Democratic political machine in Minnesota successfully silenced hundreds of government experts who tracked the huge flow of taxpayer funds through Somali-run businesses, a top Minnesota Republican told a House hearing on Wednesday.

Up to 1,000 government auditors, accountants, and program managers were silenced by Democratic threats, Minnesota House Rep. Marion Rarick told a House hearing:

The most severe ones was that they would be fired with cause so they couldn’t have unemployment insurance, that they would be blacklisted from all state agencies… [including] Hennepin County, Ramsey County. As you know, those are Democrat-run.

Many government experts, non-government professionals, and Republicans detected many of the frauds, but their voices were muffled by Democrats who allied with the Somalians’ political machine in the state. “They don’t want a fraud unit to do anything — they want a fraud unit [only] on paper,” Steve Halicki, a Minnesota fraud investigator, told a TV station in 2015.

In 2023, state employees formed an anonymous group on Twitter to report the fraud to the public: “We are over 480 Minnesota state staff serving with pride & commitment to our people & state. We strive for a better Minnesota free of fraud. Commentary Account,” they wrote.

On January 7, the group declared:

We’ve been yelling from every rooftop possible about fraud. Few understood or listened to the scale of the problem. Systemic issues mean that someone in leadership is advising or forcing staff to commit wrongdoing. And these leaders will be NAMED.

Journalists’ clout in Minneapolis has also been shattered by the political and economic power of the Somali migrants. The result is that local politicians and cops were able to ignore multiple articles and TV segments about blatant fraud by many Somali businesses.

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Pakistan Blocks Major VPNs Under New Licensing Rules, Expanding State Control Over Internet Access

Over the past two weeks, internet users in Pakistan have watched their encrypted connections vanish one after another. Beginning December 22, 2025, major VPNs, including Proton VPN, NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark, Mullvad, Cloudflare WARP, and Psiphon have been systematically blocked across the country, according to Daily Pakistan.

The blackout follows a government licensing framework that, on paper, regulates VPN providers but in practice gives the state the power to decide which privacy tools are permitted.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) began enforcing its Class Value Added Services (CVAS-Data) licensing rules in November 2025, nearly a year after quietly introducing the policy.

Under these regulations, companies that want to operate legally must install “Legal Interception” compliant hardware and hand it over “to nationally authorized security organizations” at their own expense whenever instructed.

Any VPN not listed as licensed is automatically subject to blocking by domestic internet providers.

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Trump to Ban ‘Large Institutional Investors’ from Buying Up U.S. Homes

President Donald Trump is moving to ban “large institutional investors” from buying up United States homes meant for Americans, a move that is likely to be welcomed with bipartisan support.

On Wednesday, Trump wrote in a Truth Social post that he would be taking action to prevent corporations from buying single-family American homes — a growing trend that researchers have said has been a drag for first-time homebuyers, neighborhoods, and quality of life.

Trump said Congress ought to codify the ban into law so that a new administration cannot open the door for investors to buy single-family homes in the future.

“For a very long time, buying and owning a home was considered the pinnacle of the American Dream. It was the reward for working hard, and doing the right thing,” Trump wrote in the post, “but now, because of the Record High Inflation caused by Joe Biden and the Democrats in Congress, that American Dream is increasingly out of reach for far too many people, especially younger Americans.”

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Mamdani’s Rich Kid Commie Tenant Advocate Starts Crying When Asked About Millionaire Parents

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly installed tenant advocate, Cea Weaver – a limousine liberal (socialist), popped out of her apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn Wednesday (a historically black neighborhood until people like Weaver priced out longtime residents) – only to start crying and run back inside when reporters asked her about her mother’s $1.6 million home in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Weaver came under fire on Monday after resurfaced tweets on her now-deleted X account called for the government to “seize private property,” and called home ownership a “weapon of white supremacy.”

In December, she pushed to “Elect more communists” while a street in Harlem was being renamed after former communist Rep. Vito Marchantonio of Manhattan. 

And in May of 2020 she slammed law enforcement following the death of George Floyd, writing “The Police Are Just People The State Sanctions To Murder W[ith] Immunity.” 

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California Family Loses Custody Of Daughter After Refusing To Medically “Affirm” Her Transgender Identity

A Ukrainian family in California says Child Welfare removed their teenage daughter from their home and placed them on the child abuse registry after they declined to “affirm” her transgender identity. Speaking to Reduxx under the condition of anonymity, the parents say the removal followed a report filed by their daughter’s psychiatrist without their knowledge.

The mother, who will be referred to as Ellie, told Reduxx that a social worker from Shasta County Child Welfare Services arrived at the family’s home on June 3, 2024, without prior notice. According to Ellie, the worker accused the parents of emotional abuse and demanded access to their daughter, who will be referred to as Maya, without presenting a warrant or court order.

“She just kept saying, ‘You’re emotionally abusing your child,’” Ellie said. “But she had nothing in her hands. No paperwork. Nothing.”

The removal was a dramatic climax following years of instability that Ellie says began in early childhood. After the family immigrated to the United States in 2007, Maya began experiencing anxiety, anger issues, attention difficulties, and emotional dysregulation. Her mental health concerns, which once resulted in a temporary placement in a psychiatric facility, were made worse by the persistent bullying she experienced at school starting in first and second grade. She said the bullying came not only from other students but also from indifferent teachers, and that repeated complaints to school administrators were dismissed.

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Advanced alien civilizations could be communicating ‘like fireflies’ in plain sight, researchers suggest

Advanced alien civilizations may communicate via a series of flashing lights, similar to how fireflies do, a new paper hints. This would potentially make extraterrestrials much harder to spot if we continue to rely on our current observation techniques, the researchers argue.

However, while this thought experiment raises interesting questions about alien intelligence, it does not provide any evidence that these signals actually exist.

So far, the quest to uncover alien intelligence has focused on finding evidence of distant human-like civilizations. For example, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute — the world’s leading organization dedicated to searching for alien life — spends most of its time searching for radio signals from distant exoplanets or heat given off by technological megastructures, such as the theoretical Dyson sphere.

However, some scientists believe that these searches suffer from an “anthropocentric bias” — meaning we’re trying to understand nonhuman entities through a distinctly human lens — and do not account for potential civilizations that are wholly different from our own. Due to this bias, we may be overlooking promising signs of life.

In the new study, uploaded Nov. 8 to the preprint server arXiv, researchers proposed a new way that an alien civilization could communicate — by flashing to one another like fireflies. These flashing signals could be used for specific and complex communications. However, the researchers argue that they are more likely being widely broadcast to other civilizations, like a luminous repeating beacon. (This paper has not yet been peer reviewed, but is now under consideration for publication in the journal PNAS.)

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Editorial Boards Cheer Trump Doctrine in Venezuela

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain allegedly quipped. On January 3, 1990, Panamanian Commander Manuel Noriega surrendered to US forces, who carried him off to face drug charges. Thirty-six years to the day later, US forces swooped into Venezuela, abducting President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, following decades of hostility between the oil-rich socialist country and the United States. The pretext offered: Maduro had to be taken to the US to face drug charges.

The coincidence is a reminder that the US has a long history of both covert and military intervention in Latin America: President Donald Trump, as extreme as he might be, isn’t an outlier among American presidents in this regard. And despite the right’s attempt to paint Trump as some sort of peacenik (Compact, 4/7/23; X, 10/14/25), he is no less an imperialist than his predecessors.

And that’s precisely why many of the nation’s leading editorial pages are hailing Maduro’s capture.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (1/3/26) called the abductions “an act of hemispheric hygiene,” a dehumanizing comparison of Venezuela’s leaders to germs needing to be cleansed.

For the Journal, the abductions were justified because they weren’t just a blow to Venezuela, but to the rest of America’s official enemies. “The dictator was also part of the axis of US adversaries that includes Russia, China, Cuba and Iran,” it said. It called Maduro’s “capture…a demonstration of Mr. Trump’s declaration to keep America’s enemies from spreading chaos in the Western Hemisphere.” It amplified Trump’s own rhetoric of adding on to the Roosevelt Corollary, saying “It’s the ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine”—a nod to the long-standing imperial notion that the US more or less owns the Western Hemisphere.

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EU Veterans Rally to Recast the Digital Services Act as Accountability Not Control

It’s not every day that a collection of retired European grandees emerges from Brussels’ revolving doors to tell everyone how misunderstood the European Union is.

Yet here we are, with Bertrand Badré, Margrethe Vestager, Mariya Gabriel, Nicolas Schmit, and Guillaume Klossa linking arms to pen a sentimental defense of the bloc’s new digital commandments.

Their essay, “The Truth About Europe’s Regulation of Digital Platforms,” aims to assure us that Europe’s online rulebook, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA), does not constitute censorship. It is “accountability,” they say.

In their telling, the DSA is less a blunt legal instrument than a moral document, a kind of digital Magna Carta designed to civilize Silicon Valley’s chaotic playground.

“There is no content regulation at the EU level,” they wrote, invoking the phrase like a magic spell meant to ward off skeptics.

The laws, they explained, simply make big tech companies “evaluate and mitigate systemic risks” and “act against illegal content.” Nothing to see here, just a little transparency, a dash of democracy protection, and the occasional removal of whatever a member state happens to call “illegal.”

It is the sort of language that can only come from officials who have spent decades describing regulation as liberation.

The letter was a response to a growing chorus of critics, including former US officials, who say Europe’s digital regime gives bureaucrats indirect control over what billions of people can see or say online.

Under the DSA, platforms must scan for “harmful or misleading” content, report their mitigation efforts, and warn users when something gets zapped.

Free speech groups have pointed out that when the law tells companies to “evaluate risks to democracy,” those companies tend to err on the side of deleting anything remotely controversial.

To them, “mitigation” often means mass deletion.

Badré and company brushed this off. “When we require platforms to be transparent about their algorithms, to assess risks to democracy and mental health, to remove clearly illegal content while notifying those affected, we are not censoring,” they wrote.

“We are insisting that companies with unprecedented power over public discourse operate with some measure of public accountability.”

When Europe does it, it is not censorship, it is civic hygiene.

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Germany’s “Transparency Act” Lets Regulators Search Media Offices and Platforms Without Warrants

The German government has discovered a clever way to expand its surveillance powers: call it “transparency.” The federal cabinet has approved a bill that would let state agents enter media offices and digital platforms without needing a judge’s permission.

The official justification, ensuring honesty in political advertising, sounds harmless enough until you read the fine print and realize it’s about as transparent as a brick wall.

The “Political Advertising Transparency Act” is described as an effort to align with new EU rules on political ad disclosure.

What it actually does is grant the Bundesnetzagentur, a telecom regulator, search powers usually reserved for criminal investigators.

If the agency suspects a company has failed to file the right paperwork, it could send its people to “inspect” offices without a court order, provided they claim there’s an “imminent danger.”

“Imminent danger” is one of those magic bureaucratic phrases that can mean anything from “credible bomb threat” to “somebody forgot to upload a PDF.”

Once that phrase appears in law, the limits become a matter of interpretation.

Legal experts have warned that the law tramples Germany’s Basic Law, which guarantees the inviolability of the home. For journalists, the stakes are higher.

Confidential sources, ongoing investigations, and protected data could all be exposed to inspection because a regulator feels “concerned” about compliance.

In plain language: this opens the door to state intrusion under the banner of good governance.

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Rising psychedelic use has not led to a corresponding surge in hospital admissions

A new analysis suggests that while the use of psychedelic substances appears to be increasing in the United States, this trend has not resulted in a corresponding surge in emergency room visits or hospitalizations. The findings indicate that severe adverse events requiring hospital care for hallucinogens remain comparatively rare when measured against other substances like alcohol and opioids. This research was published in JAMA Network Open.

The cultural landscape regarding psychedelics is shifting rapidly in the United States. Changes in state and local laws regarding decriminalization are occurring alongside increased media attention on the potential therapeutic benefits of drugs like psilocybin and MDMA. Government agencies have granted breakthrough therapy designations to some of these substances, acknowledging their potential medical utility.

This changing landscape raises important safety questions for public health officials. It is necessary to understand whether increased availability and reduced stigma are leading to more adverse health outcomes in the general population. Jacob Steinle, a psychiatry resident, and Kevin Xu, an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, led an investigation to address this gap.

“Hallucinogen use is increasing in recreational settings, and legislation around clinical use is evolving,” explained Steinle. “Prior to the study, relatively little was known about the safety of these substances in real-world settings beyond small clinical trials or theoretical risk assessments. We wanted to investigate the prevalence of hospitalizations associated with hallucinogens to address this knowledge gap.”

To address this, the research team designed a retrospective cohort study using large-scale administrative data. They utilized records from the Merative MarketScan Commercial and Multi-State Medicaid databases.

These databases provide a comprehensive view of healthcare claims from a diverse population across the country. The study period spanned seven years, covering data from 2016 through 2023. The investigators specifically focused on individuals between the ages of 16 and 64 years.

This age range captures the demographic groups most likely to engage in substance use. The researchers focused on identifying specific medical codes associated with hallucinogen-related disorders. They used the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, known as ICD-10.

Specifically, they looked for the code F16, which denotes hallucinogen-related issues in medical records. The team calculated the monthly rate of these admissions to track changes over time. They expressed this rate as a proportion of all substance-related emergency or hospital admissions.

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