Tag: california

Army vet Greg Gross, 65, wins $20M after Yuba City cop Joshua Jackson snapped his SPINE during traffic stop and paralyzed him

A 65 year-old Army vet has been awarded $20million after a cop snapped his spine during a traffic stop and left him paralyzed – with the appalling assault captured on camera. 

Greg Gross was left horrifically-disabled after the April 2020 ‘pain compliance’ restraint by Yuba City Police Officer Joshua Jackson, with video footage showing the bloodied brutality victim sobbing as he wailed: ‘I can’t feel my legs.’ 

The bed-bound former military man has been awarded the sum by a Sacramento jury after they were told he now requires 24 hour care from a team of nurses. 

Stomach-churning body camera footage captured the moment Gross was injured after being pulled over on suspicion of causing a slow-speed crash while drunk driving. 

Jackson made Gross sit on the ground, with his legs straight in front of him. He then repeatedly pushed the senior citizen’s torso forward, towards the ground, with a force that ultimately snapped Gross’s spinal column as fellow cops Scott Hansen and Nathan Livingston looked on.  

Officers did not believe the victim when he repeatedly said ‘I can’t feel my legs’ after his spine was crushed as he was pinned to the ground outside a hospital in Yuba City, California.

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Chinese-run biolab in California that was experimenting on deadly viruses was awarded over $500,000 in US TAXPAYER cash

A Chinese-backed biolab in California was awarded over half a million dollars in US taxpayer cash, records show.

The black market lab – which was raided earlier this year – was found to be making illegal Covid and pregnancy tests and storing disease-riddled mice and hundreds of samples of pathogens, blood, and other dubious chemicals.

Public records show that the company linked to the lab received nearly $150,000 from the US government under a Covid-era loan program, receiving two separate loans of $74,912 in April 2020 and February 2021.

Universal Meditech was also awarded a massive $360,000 tax credit in 2018 through California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s CalCompetes program – though UMI’s inability to meet program guidelines meant it never actually received those funds.

The company – which was based in Fresno, California, went bust in 2022 and was taken over by its main creditor, a company with Chinese owners who moved the operation into an unassuming warehouse in the sleepy town of Reedley.

UMI had been operating legally prior to its closure, with its Fresno facility properly licensed and permitted from the state to produce pregnancy, ovulation, and menopause diagnostic tests. 

While it had received the federal money as a legal company, a subsequent move by regulators to put

In December 2022, the Food and Drug Administration, which must issue pre-market approval for diagnostic tests, recalled approximately 56,000 of UMI’s Covid tests in California and Texas, citing the company’s lack of pre-market approval from the agency.

The recall did not mention the pregnancy tests.

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Strange and Mysterious Vanishings at Mount Shasta


Looming over the landscape of Siskiyou County, California is the imposing and majestic figure of Mount Shasta. Towering alone over 14,000 feet above its surroundings, it is a solitary, formidable presence that has since time unremembered been seen as a hallowed place by Native Americans, who believe it to be the home of various gods and spirits, and feature it in many of their creation myths. The mountain has also long been saturated with tales of all manner of mysterious phenomena, including lost cities populated by refugees from a lost continent, Bigfoot, ghosts, lizard people, portals to other dimensions and vortices, and it has long been a UFO hotspot. Among the many mysteries this towering behemoth holds are the many people who have come here to never return, and the mountain seems to be in a sense a hungry place with a habit of making people vanish off the face of the earth. 

By far one of the most famous tales of a vanishing at Mount Shasta revolves around a retired mining engineer by the name of J.C. Brown in the 1930s. At the time, there was much talk among occultists and Theosophists that the mountain was the home of an ancient race of enlightened, white-robed spiritual beings called the Lemurians, who were said to have escaped their sinking continent of Lemuria millions of years ago to take refuge at first at Atlantis, and then when that sank too in a lost city within the bowels of Mount Shasta. It was a popular notion for various New Agers at the time, and although it was dismissed out of hand by the scientific community and general public, there were many accounts of people encountering these enigmatic entities and even visiting their hidden city. It was against this backdrop of strangeness that one day in 1934 Brown pushed the lost city and the Lemurians onto headlines and into the public consciousness. 

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Mysterious Company Pays Nearly $1 Billion for Land Near US Air Force Base, Power Grid

A mystery company’s purchase of large swaths of land near a United States Air Force base and key locations along the West Coast’s electrical grid has raised red flags about national security.

U.S. Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee readiness panel, wants to find out more about the buyer, Flannery Associates LLC.

The LLC is registered in Delaware but based in Folsom, California, where it lists a P.O. Box as its address at a mailbox rental center. Its employees are listed as based in the Southern California city of Glendale.

“They have surrounded one of the most important air bases on the West Coast,” Mr. Garamendi told NewsNation in an interview. “If anything happened in the Pacific with China, this base would be the way in which the U.S. Air Force and military would transit across the Pacific.”

Flannery has invested about $800 million in about 55,000 acres of land surrounding the Travis Air Force Base since 2018, according to public records.

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Officials bust illegal lab containing 20 infectious agents, hundreds of lab mice

Local and federal authorities have shut down what seems to be an illegal medical lab hidden in a California warehouse that contained nearly 1,000 laboratory mice, hundreds of unknown chemicals, refrigerators and freezers, vials of biohazardous materials, including blood, incubators, and at least 20 infectious agents, including SARS-CoV-2, HIV, and a herpes virus.

According to NBC News affiliate KSEE of Fresno, local authorities were first tipped off to the unlicensed facility when a local code enforcement officer noticed that a garden hose was illegally attached to the back of the building. That led city officials to obtain a search warrant to inspect the warehouse, which was supposed to only be used for storage.

According to court documents obtained by NBC News, city officials inspected the warehouse, located in Reedley, southeast of Fresno, on March 3. County health officials then inspected the facility on March 16. What they found reportedly shocked them.

“This is an unusual situation. I’ve been in government for 25 years. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Reedley City Manager Nicole Zieba told KSEE.

There were rooms with “vessels of liquid and various apparatus,” court documents said. ” “Fresno County Public Health staff also observed blood, tissue and other bodily fluid samples and serums; and thousands of vials of unlabeled fluids and suspected biological material.” There was also a room full of mice.

According to the court documents, the mice were kept in inhumane conditions. More than 175 were found dead, and the city took possession of the remaining animals in April and euthanized 773. Substances collected from the lab were given to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing. The agency detected at least 20 potentially infectious agents, the documents read.

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A SWAT Team Destroyed an Innocent Man’s Shop. Then the City Left Him With the Bill.

It took Carlos Pena decades to build his local business after immigrating to North Hollywood, California, from El Salvador. It only took a few hours to destroy it.

While Pena is the one who created NoHo Printing & Graphics, where he fashioned commercial signs and banners, T-shirts, headshots, and other products, he is not the one who did the damage, despite the fact that he has been left with the bill and without a livelihood.

In early August of last year, after a fugitive violently thrust Pena from his shop and barricaded himself inside, a SWAT team from the City of Los Angeles fired more than 30 rounds of tear gas canisters over the course of 13 hours. When the government entered the building, the officers found their target had escaped. Left inside was a shop that was a shell of itself, with Pena’s inventory ruined and the bulk of his equipment unusable.

Pena didn’t fault the city for attempting to subdue an allegedly dangerous person. But he objected to what came next: The government refused his requests for compensation, strapping him with expenses that exceed $60,000 and a situation that has cost him tens of thousands of dollars in revenue, as he has been resigned to working at a much-reduced capacity out of his garage, according to a lawsuit he filed this month in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

“Apprehending a dangerous fugitive is in the public interest,” the suit notes. “The cost of apprehending such fugitives should be borne by the public, and not by an unlucky and entirely innocent property owner.”

Pena is not the first such property owner to see his life destroyed and be left picking up the pieces. Insurance policies often have disclaimers that they do not cover damage caused by the government. But governments sometimes refuse to pay for such repairs, buttressed by jurisprudence from various federal courts which have ruled that actions taken under “police powers” are not subject to the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

That’s what happened to the Lech family in Greenwood Village, Colorado, after cops destroyed their residence while in pursuit of a suspected shoplifter, unrelated to the family, who forced himself inside their house. The $580,000 home was rendered unlivable and had to be demolished; the government gave them a cool $5,000.

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California’s War on Math

“California is America, only sooner” was an optimistic phrase once used to describe my home state. The Golden State promised a spirit of freedom, innovation, and experimentation that would spread across the nation. And at the heart of the state’s flourishing was a four-letter word: math.

Math made California prosper.

It’s most obvious in top universities like Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, and UCLA. Those schools funneled great minds into California STEM enterprises like Silicon Valley, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and aeronautical engineering. Both the Central Valley and Hollywood—America’s main providers of food and fodder, respectively—rely upon engineering to mechanize production and optimize output. 

All of this has made California’s GDP $3.6 trillion—making it the fifth largest economy in the world as of last year.

But now “California is America, only sooner” is a warning, and not just because of the exodus of people and jobs and the decay of our major cities, but because of the state’s abandonment of math—which is to say its abandonment of excellence and, in a way, reality itself. 

Perhaps you’ve read the headlines about kooky San Francisco discarding algebra in the name of anti-racism. Now imagine that worldview adopted by the entire state.

On July 12, that’s what happened when California’s Board of Education, composed of eleven teachers, bureaucrats, professors—and a student—decided to approve the California Mathematics Framework. 

Technically, the CMF is just a series of recommendations. As a practical matter, it’s the new reality. School districts and textbook manufacturers are already adapting to the new standards.

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He Caught a Burglar in the Act. But When Police Came, He Says They Tased Him Instead of the Intruder.

Damien Smith says he came home one night in October 2021 to find an intruder burglarizing his house. When the police arrived, they tased him instead of the intruder. Smith, who is black, has now filed a lawsuit against the officers, claiming that they racially profiled him and violated his civil rights.

The officers “racially profiled Mr. Smith, and acted pursuant to LAPD policies and practices that allow and encourage officers to over-react to black people, whom they wrongly assume to be criminals,” the 24-page suit argues.

Smith is an actor and filmmaker known for his appearances in The Purge and Snowfall. Smith had even been working on a documentary about police brutality when he had his own police encounter on October 13, 2021. According to the suit, when he entered his house around 12:30 a.m., he caught an intruder in the process of burglarizing his home. The intruder remained in the apartment while Smith called 911.

LAPD officers arrived around 1:30 a.m. and entered through the back door of Smith’s apartment. According to the lawsuit, police “unholstered their taser guns, pointed them toward Mr. Smith, and screamed at Mr. Smith: ‘Get on the ground!'” Smith protested saying, “I live here, I called 911!” LAPD officers subsequently tased Smith, striking him in the chest and back. According to a Los Angeles Times interview with Smith, when police tased him, the intruder used the opportunity to escape.

Several LAPD officers then handcuffed Smith and walked him out to a patrol car. Outside, a small crowd of Smith’s neighbors had gathered, and several told the officers that they “had arrested the wrong person” and that Smith “lived there.” Still, the officers placed Smith in the patrol car and closed the door.

“The physical pain, emotional distress and embarrassment that Mr. Smith endured at the hands of Defendant Doe Officer Guillen and other Defendant Doe LAPD officers remains to this day,” the complaint states. “This incident and injury occurred only because Defendant Doe Officer Guillen and other individual and Doe defendant LAPD officers…failed to carefully and thoroughly investigate the facts leading to Mr. Smith’s 911 call.”

The lawsuit alleges that the officers’ actions violated Smith’s First, Fourth, and 14th Amendment rights and asks for damages to cover medical expenses and attorney’s fees, as well as special damages for the emotional suffering the ordeal inflicted on Smith.

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Proposed California bill would fine school districts who ban books with ‘inclusive and diverse perspectives’

A proposed California bill would fine school districts that ban books.

Introduced and authored by Assemblymember Corey Jackson of Riverside, the measure does not prohibit book banning. However, it would impose a fine if books are banned because they contain “inclusive and diverse perspectives.”

The bill, AB 1078, was created to directly target local school board control of curriculum and books that will be allowed in schools. The measure was heard in the Senate Education Committee and passed 5-2 on Wednesday. 

Tensions were heated during a debate from both sides about book banning at the hearing of the California State Senate Education Committee.

“Our students of color and our LGBTQ+ students should not be threatened for their viewpoints, and they should not have education withheld from them,” State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, who spoke in favor of the bill, said.

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Zodiac witness speaks out for first time to claim the murders were the work of multiple killers – because the man she saw did not match criminal sketches made after notorious cab driver shooting

The Zodiac killings of the late 1960s and 1970s may have been the work of more than one murderer, a witness has suggested. 

The terrifying new theory was revealed by a woman who believes she saw the man responsible for one of the gruesome murders in the new Peacock docuseries, ‘Myth of the Zodiac Killer,’ which premiered on Tuesday. 

‘The Zodiac’, as the killer became known, was believed to be responsible for five deaths and two more attempted murders in the San Francisco bay area, but his correspondence claims he killed 37 people.  

The supposed murderer wrote confessional letters to local news outlets and four cryptic ciphers, but his identity has never been revealed. 

Now a witness at Lake Berryessa in Napa County – where Cecelia Ann Shepard, 22, and Bryan Calvin Hartnell, 20, were stabbed in broad daylight on September 27, 1969 – has spoken publicly for the first time. 

Shepard survived but Hartnell died, and before leaving the park the killer left the dates of two previous murders on the side of Hartnell’s car. 

Linda Jensen, who was sunbathing at Lake Berryessa that day, claims the man she believes she saw is inconsistent with police sketches from other supposed Zodiac murders. 

‘There are other drawings that came out, of the Zodiac, that looked nothing like what I saw that day,’ Jensen told the documentary. 

Jensen was at the lake sunbathing with friends when a strange man had stalked the group and hid behind a tree for around 45 minutes. 

The group pretended he wasn’t there, for their own safety, she explained. 

Jensen believes the man she saw had notably different hair, eyes and facial features to another sketch produced after the murder of a 29-year-old cab driver named Paul Lee Stine who was shot by a passenger on October 11, just a few weeks later. 

‘He had very smooth, parted hair and combed [it] really straight…[he looked] just very intense, like focused,’ Jensen, said of the man she saw.  

‘The vibes coming off of him were bad, were dark. All of us felt that’ she said. 

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