Tag: corruption

Federal prosecutors defend job posting that placed white, heterosexual applicants last

The Public Prosecution Service of Canada is defending an internal hiring process that gave priority to applicants from selected racial, disability, Indigenous and LGBTQ groups.

According to reporting by Blacklock’s Reporter, an internal call letter for an $81,000-a-year recordkeeping position at the Nunavut Regional Office said candidates who self-identified as members of specified groups would be considered “before others.”

The position involved supporting complex and high-priority cases, including homicide prosecutions and dangerous-offender applications within Nunavut’s circuit court system.

“We will consider employees who self-declare as being a Black person, a racialized person, a person living with a disability, a First Nation, an Inuit, a Métis or a member of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community for this opportunity before others,” the notice reportedly stated.

Applicants were instructed to include their self-declared identity in their résumés.

Prosecution Service spokesperson Alessia Bongiovanni denied that the preferential process violated anti-discrimination provisions in federal collective agreements.

Bongiovanni said the Employment Equity Act permits measures intended to address historical disadvantage and under-representation. She argued that workplace equality may require proactive hiring measures in addition to equal treatment.

The policy effectively placed white, heterosexual applicants without disabilities behind candidates belonging to one or more of the preferred groups.

The Treasury Board reported in July that representation of all federally designated employment-equity groups increased between 2010 and 2025.

Women now account for 59 percent of employees in the federal government’s core administration. Visible minorities comprise 24 percent, employees with disabilities nine percent and Indigenous employees 5.5 percent.

Ottawa maintains that preferential employment measures are necessary to create what it calls a “diverse and representative public service.”

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Agriculture Canada admits researchers breached scientific integrity rules

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada has acknowledged cases of potential scientific misconduct involving improper publication practices and unauthorized animal research, but the department is refusing to identify the employees or studies involved.

The admission was uncovered by Blacklock’s Reporter in the department’s annual report, Addressing Misconduct and Wrongdoing at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

“Concerns were raised regarding non-compliance with the department’s policy on science and technology publications related to the publication of scientific articles and book chapters,” the report said.

Officials also received complaints involving the unauthorized use of animals for research. The department said the allegations were reviewed under its science-integrity policy but provided no details about the findings, consequences or affected research.

The policy applies to federal employees and affiliated researchers involved in conducting, managing, reviewing or communicating scientific work.

Possible breaches include fabricating or misrepresenting data, improper authorship, failing to acknowledge scientific contributions, interfering with the release of findings and violating ethical or legal research requirements.

Despite the admission, no federal agency has attempted to document the full extent of plagiarism across the federal government.

A 2015 case involving an open-book Transport Canada employment examination found that six of 114 applicants had plagiarized material. The Public Service Commission concluded the applicants knowingly presented someone else’s work as their own to improve their chances of being hired.

Records released in 2017 revealed the commission had received 67 allegations involving plagiarism and résumé fraud over two years. At least seven cases were referred to the RCMP.

Agriculture Canada did not disclose whether the latest cases resulted in disciplinary action or whether any compromised publications were withdrawn or corrected.

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$50 Million NIH Autism Study Ignores Link to Vaccines, CHD Scientist Says

A $50 million federal research initiative examining the potential causes of autism is sidestepping any examination of a possible vaccine-autism link and is instead funding research by establishment scientists who have denied such a link, a new letter to National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya alleges.

The NIH announced the $50 million Autism Data Science Initiative (ADSI) last year. In his letter, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker wrote that three projects funded by the initiative are led by scientists who “built their careers on explicit, public denial that vaccines could play any role in autism etiology.”

Hooker wrote that his review of the ADSI portfolio turned up no studies examining “vaccines or vaccine components.” The ADSI appears designed to come to a predetermined conclusion that vaccines are not linked to autism, Hooker alleged.

The NIH-funded research instead largely focuses on connecting autism to a range of genetic and environmental causes while ignoring a possible link to vaccines, Hooker said.

In an assessment accompanying his letter, Hooker called the ADSI, as currently structured, “not a search for the truth” but, instead, a “validation engine” for mainstream autism narratives.

Hooker told The Defender he was motivated to write the letter after the Aug. 19 ADSI update meeting and the Aug. 27 meeting of the federal Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee.

At the latter meeting, NIH Principal Deputy Director Matthew Memoli said the agency is “working toward more investigation of vaccines as a cause of autism,” according to Hooker’s original letter.

“Those are reassuring words. They are also, unfortunately, contradicted by the facts on the ground,” Hooker wrote. He told The Defender the ADSI instead “consists of a bunch of re-tread genetics projects that have been altered to look like gene-environmental interaction projects.”

Hooker’s allegations come despite recent reports that studying the vaccine-autism link is a priority for President Donald Trump and U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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US Postal Worker Indicted After Dumping at Least 30,000 Pieces of Mail in Vacant Lots Since 2024

A St. Louis postal worker has been federally indicted after allegedly dumping an astonishing 30,000 pieces of Americans’ mail in overgrown vacant lots instead of delivering it.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri, 54-year-old Armond Paige was indicted on September 2 on one count of delaying or destroying mail while employed by the U.S. Postal Service.

Federal prosecutors allege Paige discarded the mail in vacant, weed-covered lots across St. Louis from approximately 2024 through April 29, 2026.

At the time of the alleged scheme, Paige was working out of the Maryville Gardens Post Office on Meramec Street in south St. Louis.

Paige appeared in federal court Tuesday and pleaded not guilty, according to the Justice Department and First Alert 4.

If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000, or both.

The U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General conducted the investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorney Gwen Carroll is prosecuting the case.

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FCC Chairman Says Agency May Issue Guidance On ‘Fake Polls’ Ahead Of Midterms

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said the agency may soon issue guidance to television broadcasters over what he called “fake polls,” particularly if they are intended to suppress voter participation ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Carr said Sunday that broadcasters face federal public-interest obligations because local television stations use FCC-licensed public airwaves, unlike cable networks and online platforms.

“There’s a lot of interest right now in fake polls that are out there,” Carr said. “And so the FCC may put guidance out soon to remind broadcasters about their obligations with respect to not airing fake polls, particularly if they’re done to suppress people heading into the fall.”

Carr’s comments follow criticism from President Donald Trump over media coverage of political polling and his endorsement record in Republican primaries.

Trump recently called for the FCC to take action against NBC News’ Kristen Welker after she said on a local NBC affiliate that Trump had experienced “mixed results” with candidates he endorsed in this year’s primaries.

Trump disputed that characterization and said Welker should be reported to the FCC for “rebuke or punishment.”

NBC News defended Welker.

Carr did not announce a formal investigation of Welker.

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LIAR: James Talarico Suddenly Says There Are Only Two Sexes After Claiming There are “Six Genders” — “I Missed the Mark on Some of My Past Statements”

After years of pushing the far-left’s extreme gender ideology, far-left Texas Democrat and Senate candidate James Talarico was caught backpedaling furiously on his past claims.

Speaking with Fox News national correspondent Brooke Taylor on The Story, Talarico admitted he “missed the mark on some of my past statements.”

Asked about his 2021 claim that there are six biological sexes, the Austin Democrat said, “There are not six sexes. There are two.” He added that he “didn’t say it correctly” at the time, then quickly changed the subject to diesel prices, groceries, utilities, and health care.

In 2021, during debate over legislation concerning transgender participation in school sports, Talarico claimed that “modern science” recognized six biological sexes.

He listed chromosomal disorders and declared that “biologically speaking, scientifically speaking, sex is a spectrum, and oftentimes can be very ambiguous.” He was arguing against protecting female athletes.

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Dozens of academic papers have references made up by AI – research

Dozens of academic papers have fake references in them that have been made up by AI, according to new research from the University of Auckland.

The study looked at more than 3000 peer-reviewed papers published in the last few years and found 2 percent of them – or 69 papers – had fake references hallucinated by AI.

Some of the references had realistic author and journal names and publication details – but when the researchers went looking for them, they did not exist.

In a research paper, each reference is meant to be a promise, that if anybody wanted to check the evidence a claim is based on, they could. But what happens if that reference does not lead anywhere?

University of Auckland computer science lecturer Ulrich Speidel was one of the co-authors of a research paper which looked at that problem.

“I can remember going through one, where out of I think 29 references in the paper there wasn’t a single one that actually existed. When you look at them initially, they all look – pompous titles, real names for the articles, in some cases real journals.”

They were published papers in fields related to AI in education that had gone through the peer review process and been checked by other academics.

Speidel said they found that online academic database Google Scholar had also fallen victim to the problem.

“If enough papers have referenced a particular fake reference it’ll actually add that to Google Scholar and maked it look as if it’s a real paper. That was a bit of an eye opener.”

The “AI slop” was degrading the quality of science, Speidel said.

“The thing of course is ‘will you trust me as a scientist if that stuff that I read, if that stuff’s possibly made up?'”

In Australia, consulting firm Deloitte last year had to pay back $440,000 to the Australian government for a report which was found to have hallucinated references.

Deloitte later admitted it was written with the help of AI.

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Michigan Man Says Voting Records Show Two Absentee Votes He Never Cast — Mother Turned Away After Poll Workers Said She “Already Voted”

A Flint man says Michigan’s official voter file is showing absentee ballots he never requested and never mailed, and that his mother was refused an in-person ballot after election workers told her she had already voted.

Kevin Tay laid out the claim in an interview with Dave Bondy of Keeping it Real. Bondy published the sit-down on Tuesday.

“It never, it never happened,” Tay told Bondy, according to The Midwesterner. “I actually only voted one time in my life, and I voted at the city of Flint up on the third floor in the council chamber, and that was for (former) Mayor (Karen) Weaver.”

Tay said he has never used an absentee ballot.

“No, I don’t even know what an absentee ballot looked like,” he said.

When he checked his own voter information, the record showed two prior absentee votes. Tay says that is false. He voted once, in person, for Weaver.

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Indiana Man Charged with HOMICIDE After Shooting ‘Suspicious’ Man Trying to Break into His Home – Police Let Would-Be Burglar Go Minutes Before Incident

An Indiana man has been busted for killing a ‘suspicious’ person in what he argues was self-defense. At the same time, evidence also shows police let the perpetrator walk minutes before the incident occurred.

As WANE reported on Tuesday, 30-year-old Fort Wayne resident Martell Pickens was home on May 7 when someone reported a suspicious person in his neighborhood. The individual, later identified as 25-year-old Khadolphee Taylor, was seen on video allegedly trying to break into various vehicles.

Taylor then attempted to break into Pickens’s home. Pickens armed himself and went outside to confront Taylor.

Pickens demanded to know what Taylor was doing and then told him to “back up.” But Taylor ignored Pickens and continued to advance toward him.

Pickens then shot him once in the chest.

When Fort Wayne police officers arrived on the scene, Taylor was bleeding from the gunshot wound.

He was then rushed to a nearby hospital and was later pronounced dead.

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Tyrannical EU To Threaten AfD But Could Be Its Downfall

EU technocracy shows its face again – this time it’s aiming at German voters, the AfD in particular.

Brussels is discussing the freezing of EU funding for Saxony-Anhalt where the populist party just won. The €2.95 billion in EU funding for the German federal state for the current 2021-2027 budget period alone amounts to around €500 million per year and approximately 20 percent of the Saxony-Anhalt investment spending in schools, in hospitals, in daycare centers across the country.

Green MEP Daniel Freund is one of the lobbyists from Brussels who wants to strip Saxony-Anhalt of its EU funding because the voters in the German state ‘chose wrong’. He threatens that if the AfD-led government ‘undermines EU fundamental rights or the rule of law’ then the European Commission should take away his money. Freund did not wait for the new government to be sworn in, he attacked the voters in Saxony-Anhalt already before the election results had been confirmed.

It would be nothing new for the EU to use such a measure – as it has done already with Hungary and Poland. Brussels has frozen up to €18 billion of funding for Hungary so far because of alleged rule-of-law violations. Billions more have been withheld from Poland. In both cases, the EU’s financial pressure has had serious consequences for the governments and have contributed to changes of government which the EU regards more favorably.

It is undemocratic and the EU has been attacking Saxony-Anhalt for too long now. The European Superstate is trying to starve the region of vital public services – as is already the case in Hungary and Poland – if the voters there choose a party that is not approved of by the Brussels elite.

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