Tag: lawsuits

Federal appeals court orders Trump admin to release Los Angeles homeless funds

federal appeals court on Thursday ordered the Department of Housing and Urban Development to release federal funding that has already been allocated to homeless service organizations in Los Angeles but was not distributed. 

The court order was in response to the Trump administration’s attempt to oversee how homeless service organizations in Los Angeles can seek millions of dollars in federal funding, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The Los Angles Homeless Services Authority was seeking up to $239 million on behalf of dozens of organizations, but HUD suspended LAHSA in June, citing a record of mismanagement, and directed the groups to apply directly through the federal government.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday largely upheld a district court ruling in a 2-1 split, which restored LAHSA as the applicant for the organizations.

The court determined that HUD “chose to suspend LAHSA at a time when it would leave the Los Angeles region particularly vulnerable” with ill effects on “vulnerable populations, critical programs and ongoing services.” 

“It is likely that its plan is unworkable and, at this late stage, extremely difficult if not virtually impossible to implement,” the decision added.

The new deadline for LAHSA to apply for HUD funding is Oct. 14. The original deadline was the end of August.

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U.S. Beekeepers Sue USDA, Alleging Imported “Organic” Honey Misleads Consumers and Violates Federal Law

Four major U.S. commercial beekeeping operations have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), alleging the agency allows imported honey to carry the USDA organic seal through certification pathways unavailable to American producers [1].

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington by operations based in Washington, South Dakota, and Texas, according to the plaintiffs [1].

The lawsuit claims the practice misleads consumers, undermines domestic beekeepers, and violates federal organic law by creating a double standard for organic honey certification [1]. The beekeepers are seeking a court order to halt the alleged false labeling rather than monetary damages, according to the complaint [1].

Allegations of Certification Double Standard

The suit alleges that USDA organic standards require bees to forage within a 1.8-mile radius of certified organic land, a rule that makes large-scale organic honey production nearly impossible for most U.S. beekeepers [1]. Consequently, only four certified organic honey operations exist in the United States, all located in Hawaii, according to the plaintiffs [1].

This regulatory burden stands in contrast to the situation abroad, where foreign producers, particularly in Brazil, operate under less stringent rules that allow them to bypass USDA standards, the lawsuit alleges [1].

Experts note that the vast majority of apiary locations within the United States are not able to comply with organic regulations as currently written, and most locations that do conform tend to be in areas where bee forage is extremely limited [2]. As a result, little certified organic honey is currently being produced within the continental U.S., according to those familiar with the industry [2].

Imported Honey Dominates Market

Approximately 80% of honey sold in the U.S. is imported, according to OrganicEye, a nonprofit organization that monitors the organic industry [1]. U.S. beekeepers sold 116 million pounds of honey in 2025, down 14% from the prior year, while organic imports exceeded 78 million pounds during the same period, according to the lawsuit [1].

The complaint further states that roughly 60 million pounds of domestic honey remained unsold, with some producers holding up to three years’ worth of inventory [1].

This market imbalance has created significant financial strain for domestic producers, who report difficulty competing with cheaper imported products [1]. The situation mirrors broader trends in the food industry, where imported products can be labeled in ways that obscure their origin and undermine domestic producers [3].

Loopholes in Certification Process

The lawsuit highlights specific loopholes in the certification process that allegedly allow foreign honey to bear the USDA organic seal. One such pathway is group certification, which permits large agricultural organizations to certify multiple producers without individual site visits [1].

This option is used abroad but is not available to U.S. beekeepers, according to the complaint [1].

Additionally, the U.S.-Canada Organic Equivalency Arrangement permits Canadian-certified honey to bear the USDA seal, despite differing standards on pesticide exposure and forage requirements between the two countries [1].

These pathways create a hidden certification route that lets foreign producers label honey as USDA organic without meeting the same standards applied to domestic producers, the lawsuit alleges [1]. The concern over inconsistent certification standards is not new; observers of the organic industry have previously documented cases where the USDA organic label was applied to products that did not meet expected standards [4].

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Another Incredible Win Against the Covid Tyrants: New Jersey Jury Delivers Unanimous 8–0 Verdict for Christian Groundskeeper Fired Over a Religious Exemption — Awarded $671,000

A New Jersey jury just delivered a message that the Democrat machine in Essex County did not want to hear.

On Friday, an Essex County jury returned a unanimous 8–0 verdict for Theodore “Teddy” DeBlasio, a longtime groundskeeper at Essex County Hospital Center who was fired after the county denied his religious exemption from the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

The panel awarded him more than $670,000 for economic and emotional harm. Attorneys’ fees are still to come. Punitive damages are next.

Attorney John D. Coyle of Coyle Law Group called it New Jersey’s first jury verdict in a COVID-19 religious exemption case.

DeBlasio, raised Catholic and now a Christian, objected to taking a shot tested or developed using aborted fetal cell lines. That is a sincerely held religious belief millions of Americans share. Essex County treated it like a punchline.

According to trial evidence cited by Coyle Law Group, in February 2022 the county denied every religious exemption request submitted by Christian and Catholic employees, and approved every request submitted by Muslim employees.

Coyle put it bluntly on X:

“It was revealed at trial that Essex County denied each and every request from a Christian employee and granted every Muslim exemption. That isn’t an exaggeration.”

“Catholic groundskeeper could not safely test and mask but a Muslim NURSE could test and mask.”

“Essex County determined that Teddy DeBlasio—with the crown of thorns tattooed on his wrist to remind him to think of Jesus with his actions—did not have sincere beliefs but a Muslim employee who photocopied another Muslim’s exemption, did.”

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New Jersey Faces Lawsuit Over Knife, Baseball Bat Ban For Self-Defense

A pro-Second Amendment group led a lawsuit Monday seeking to have New Jersey’s laws barring the carrying of items like baseball bats and knives for self-defense thrown out.

The Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs and Knife Rights filed the lawsuit on behalf of four individual plaintiffs, arguing that by prohibiting the use of items other than firearms for self-defense, New Jersey was violating the Second Amendment rights of residents. The complaint said that the state has been in “panic mode” since the Supreme Court’s decision in Heller v. District of Columbia.

“New Jersey demands that its citizens be defenseless when they go about their day in public. Defenseless. Until forced to issue Permits to Carry a Handgun by the Bruen decision in 2022, New Jersey banned its citizens from carrying any weapon for self-defense,” the complaint filed Monday says. “Still today, New Jerseyans cannot carry any ordinary object for protection against violent crime, not a baseball bat, not a stick, not a knife, not a pair of scissors, not anything. If a person keeps an ordinary baseball bat in her car or if she keeps a small baton (sometimes called a kuboton) on her keychain she can find herself arrested and thrown in prison under New Jersey law.”

“The Second Amendment protects all common arms not just guns. There are many situations in which a person may prefer to defend against violent attack with something other than a firearm,” the legal filing continued. “New Jersey does not allow that. This is how a single mom using a carpet cutter to defend herself and her young daughter against a violent and potentially fatal beating found herself a convicted felon.”

In a 1990 decision from the New Jersey Supreme Court, the conviction of a single mother for carrying a carpet cutter and using it to protect herself when an ex-boyfriend was beating her was upheld.

The Supreme Court has already ruled on non-firearms being protected, issuing a unanimous ruling in Caetano v. Massachusetts that held that stun guns were protected by the Second Amendment. While the main opinion was unsigned (also known as a “per curiam” opinion), a concurrence from Associate Justice Samuel Alito went into more detail.

“A weapon is an effective means of self-defense only if one is prepared to use it, and it is presumptuous to tell Caetano she should have been ready to shoot the father of her two young children if she wanted to protect herself,” Alito wrote in a separate opinion. “Courts should not be in the business of demanding that citizens use more force for self-defense than they are comfortable wielding.”

“The Commonwealth of Massachusetts was either unable or unwilling to do what was necessary to protect Jaime Caetano, so she was forced to protect herself,” Alito added. “To make matters worse, the Commonwealth chose to deploy its prosecutorial resources to prosecute and convict her of a criminal offense for arming herself with a nonlethal weapon that may well have saved her life.”

Second Amendment Foundation President Massad Ayoob, who has decades of experience as a law enforcement officer, firearms instructor and an expert witness in the use of force for self-defense, explained why many states tend to treat knives and other items more stringently in self-defense cases in an August interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Historically, the pistol was seen as the weapon that would be chosen by the lady or the gentleman and the knife and the club were seen as the weapons of the thug and there’s a little bit of that yet today,” Ayoob said.

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Lawsuit says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made illegal agreement on AI slowdown

A new lawsuit claims Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an illegal deal to slow the pace of their respective AI development.

The lawsuit, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues that the leading AI companies violated antitrust laws when they agreed to coordinate slowdown efforts, and that doing so would reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions.

The coordination largely took place on Sept. 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures. That same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei’s proposals in agreement.

But the lawsuit also alleges that the coordination began to take shape months earlier. It points to a statement from July 2026 that high-ranking employees from several of the leading AI labs signed that acknowledged the “intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow” development. That statement called on the government to support a global effort to slow automated AI development.

It is clear that an agreement among the chief rivals in AI that their progress “should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers,” the plaintiffs argue.

Lawyers representing four named plaintiffs, who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, are bringing the lawsuit on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers to those services.

The plaintiffs don’t object to the companies individually deciding to slow their own progress in favor of safety. They instead argue in the complaint that antitrust laws forbid them from taking the “shortcut” of agreeing to “substitute collective restraint for individual accountability.” A competitive market allows for responsibility and genuine progress, the lawsuit argues.

“AI will quickly spin out of human control and could kill us all if we allow AI safety and protocol … to be controlled by private self-serving agreements between the world’s most powerful ‘for profit’ technology companies,” said Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

In his initial essay proposing the slowdown, Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust challenges, writing that it would be helpful for the U.S. government to mediate “or at least enable” these cross-lab discussions. The government wouldn’t need to participate, he wrote, but it would need to “issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”

In response, Altman said on social media that OpenAI welcomes the idea of a “federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements,” but said “we do not believe we need to wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence.”

While the recent conversations about pacing development were spurred by increasing concerns about AI evading human control, several leaders in the AI space have long talked about developing a shared set of standards or otherwise coordinating to ensure safety efforts remain paramount.

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White Coat Waste Sues NIH to Force Release of ‘Wuhan West’ Virus-Smuggling Records

White Coat Waste has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit demanding that the Department of Health and Human Services turn over records on animal experiments and the virus smuggling scandal at NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, the NIAID campus the group has nicknamed “Wuhan West.”

The taxpayer and animal welfare watchdog filed the complaint on September 15 in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The lawsuit covers seven FOIA requests sent in 2025 and 2026, some of which have sat unanswered for more than 18 months.

The requests seek IACUC protocols for work at Rocky Mountain Labs on Ebola, other filoviruses, Nipah, Hendra, Lassa, Sudan virus, SARS-CoV-2 variants, Heartland virus, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, avian influenza, and tick colonies, including photos and video of animals used in those studies.

Later requests target records on the undeclared importation of biological materials from Africa by NIH personnel, specifically virologist Vincent Munster, including correspondence with Customs and Border Protection, the FBI, CDC, USDA, DOJ, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the HHS inspector general.

The agencies acknowledged the requests, but sent nothing over, according to White Coat Waste.

White Coat Waste has long worked to expose this lab and scientist.

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Another Act of Betrayal, Another Act of Air Force Inspector General Complicity

A federal court has ruled that the Air Force inappropriately diverted thousands of service members from the Integrated Disability Evaluation System (IDES), which is a congressionally mandated process for evaluating disabilities.

The court determined that an unauthorized prescreening process, known as Initial Review-in-Lieu-of (IRILO), violated the Administrative Procedure Act. IRILO effectively prevented wounded, injured, or sick service members from receiving the medical evaluations and protections they are entitled to.

The decision, made by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, highlighted that the Air Force lacked the authority to create such a process.

The lawsuit, filed in July 2025 by former Air Force personnel, including Kathleen L. Watts and Robert Newman, argued that this prescreening mechanism denied them consideration for medical retirement benefits due to their medical conditions incurred in the line of duty.

Although the case illustrates a significant issue where service members were stripped of their rights and protections under federal law, the prescreening process remains in place for now, as the court has yet to finalize a remedy for the matter. Meanwhile, as this could potentially impact tens of thousands of service members, the possibility of a larger class action hangs in the balance.

The Gateway Pundit interviewed retired Air Force pilot and advocate for injured service members, Jeremy Sorenson, who stated, “The US Air Force has long known that the IRILO is a completely illegal process. But, because it ‘saves’ the Air Force money, senior leaders have refused to correct it.” In August 2023, Sorenson informed Lt. Gen. Stephen Davis (SAF/IG) that the Air Force was using the IRILO to improperly deny Airmen entrance into the congressionally-mandated Disability Evaluation System processing (IDES).

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Grandmother jailed for six months after facial recognition mistake launches $10 million lawsuit against Fargo and detective

A Tennessee grandmother who spent six months in jail after facial recognition tech falsely linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation now wants compensation for what happened. Angela Lipps is suing the City of Fargo and a Fargo Police Department detective for $10 million over the incident, which led to the loss of her home, car, and dog.

In July 2025, a team of US Marshals arrested 50-year-old Lipps in Tennessee at gunpoint while she was babysitting four young children. She was booked into the county jail in Tennessee as a fugitive from justice wanted in North Dakota.

The arrest stemmed from an investigation into bank fraud cases in April and May 2025. Detectives reportedly reviewed video of a woman using a fake US army ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars.

By using facial recognition software, the investigators identified Lipps as a possible match. She was charged with eight felonies, the most serious of which carried a 10-year prison sentence.

But Lipps had never been to North Dakota in her life, and bank records later confirmed she was more than 1,200 miles away at the time of the alleged crime.

She was held in a Tennessee county jail for 108 days before being transported to North Dakota. Jail staff allegedly denied her access to her dentures and medication for extended periods.

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DOJ Sues San Jose, Alleging $1,600 Firearm Fee Is Unconstitutional

The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the City of San Jose, California, alleging that its nearly $1,600 firearm licensing fee infringes the Second Amendment right to carry firearms for self-defense. The fee has risen by about $300 over three fiscal years to $1,591.

“San Jose is a national outlier when it comes to burdening the exercise of fundamental rights. Its fees are abusive and violate the Second Amendment,” the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in the Sept. 16 lawsuit.

The DOJ asked the court to issue permanent injunctive relief that would prevent defendants from imposing any “abusive licensing fees.” The San Jose Police Department is also a defendant in the case.

“The City’s law enforcement officers are charged with enforcing its abusive licensing scheme and are doing so. Such law enforcement misconduct is unlawful,” the DOJ added.

In Washington, the nation’s capital, a concealed carry license costs $75, while in New York, a handgun license costs $340. In Boston, the nonrenewable processing fee for a license to carry is $100. And in Philadelphia, a new license to carry firearms costs only $20.

Compared with other California locations, such as San Francisco, Berkeley, Santa Clara, and Alameda County, San Jose’s fees are still high, the DOJ said in the complaint.

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Twin Brothers Acquitted in FBI’s Whitmer “Kidnap Plot” Sue Dana Nessel, FBI Agents, and Michigan State Police — Allege They Were Framed in a Manufactured Fednapping Hoax

Twin brothers Michael John Null and William “Bill” Null, two of the Michigan men a jury cleared in 2023 after the FBI and Democrat Attorney General Dana Nessel spent years painting them as terrorists, have now taken the fight to federal court.

They filed a civil complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan on September 15, 2026, Null v. Nessel, naming leftist Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, disgrace-ridden former FBI Special Agent Richard Trask II (who was fired after domestic assault charges), agent Henrik Impola, former Detroit FBI chief Steven D’Antuono, along with the Michigan State Police and a parade of Deep State actors.

In October 2020, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel charged the Null brothers (along with Eric Molitor and several others) in state court with:

  • Providing material support for terrorist acts (related to an alleged plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and attack the state Capitol).
  • Possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony.

Prosecutors alleged they acted as lookouts during nighttime surveillance of Whitmer’s vacation home in Elk Rapids and participated in militia training and planning meetings tied to the Wolverine Watchmen and other groups. The kidnapping plot was manufactured by the FBI.

The case against the Michigan militia members plotting to ‘kidnap’ Governer Whitmer fell apart when it was revealed that Chris Wray’s FBI was behind the scheme, the FBI paid for training, Governor Whitmer was in on the planning, and the FBI even had an agent sleeping with the militia leader during the planning and training.

Did you catch that… Governor Whitmer was also involved in planning the plot to kidnap herself!

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