Biden signs bill eliminating civil statute of limitations for child sex abuse victims

President Biden on Friday signed a bill that will eliminate the statute of limitations for people who were sexually abused as minors to file civil claims.

The Eliminating Limits to Justice for Child Sex Abuse Victims Act was passed by the House by voice vote on Tuesday after passing the Senate by unanimous consent in March.

The bill eliminates time constraints for survivors to file civil claims related to sex abuse crimes against minors, including forced labor, sex trafficking, sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children.

Previously, minors who survived such abuse were able to file federal claims until they reached the age of 28 or until a decade after the violation or injury was discovered.

No federal statute of limitations was in place for criminal claims regarding child sex abuse.

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Kansas Public School Pays $95K to Teacher Suspended For ‘Misgendering’ Trans Student

A Kansas public school system has agreed to pay a $95,000 settlement to a teacher who was suspended for “misgendering” a transgender student by using their birth name.

Fort Riley Middle School officials also forced the teacher, Pamela Ricard, to conceal the student’s social transition from their parents against her will.

Ricard had filed a lawsuit challenging the school district policy that forced her to use the student’s “preferred name” to address them in class while using their legal name when speaking to parents.

In the lawsuit, Ricard was represented by Alliance Defending Freedom and Kriegshauser Ney Law Group, who said in a statement that the policy “violated her conscience.”

“No school district should ever force teachers to willfully deceive parents or engage in any speech that violates their deeply held religious beliefs,” said ADF Senior Counsel Tyson Langhofer, director of the ADF Center for Academic Freedom. “We’re pleased to settle this case favorably on behalf of Pam, and we hope that it will encourage school districts across the country to support the constitutionally protected freedom of teachers to teach and communicate honestly with both children and parents.”

According to the statement, in May, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas allowed Ricard’s lawsuit to proceed. The court ruled that since she was likely to win the lawsuit on her her First Amendment free exercise of religion claim, a motion to halt enforcement of the parental communication portion of the district policy was granted.

“This case provides straightforward lessons for Kansas school boards: Schools shouldn’t lie to parents and teachers don’t forfeit their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse door,” said Joshua Ney, partner at Kriegshauser Ney Law Group, in a statement.

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Black Lives Matter Leader Accused of Stealing $10 Million: ‘Personal Piggy Bank’

A leader of the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation is being accused in a lawsuit of stealing $10 million from the group and using it for his “personal piggy bank.”

The lawsuit from former colleagues called Shalomyah Bowers a “rogue administrator, a middle man turned usurper,” according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

The complaint claimed that Bowers led the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation into “multiple investigations by the Internal Revenue Service and various state attorney generals, blazing a path of irreparable harm to BLM in less than eighteen months.”

The lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Thursday by a group calling itself Black Lives Grassroots.

“While BLM leaders and movement workers were on the street risking their lives, Mr. Bowers remained in his cushy offices devising a scheme of fraud and misrepresentation to break the implied-in-fact contract between donors and BLM,” the suit added.

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Leo DiCaprio Used Dark Money To Annoy People With Climate Lawsuits

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio reportedly used his non-profit to award funds to dark money groups, which then funneled the money to a law firm that files nuisance climate-related lawsuits.

Communications between philanthropist Dan Emmett and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) climate professor Ann Carlson revealed that they worked with law firm Sher Edling to raise money to sue oil companies over alleged climate change deception, according to Fox News Digital. Emmett told Carlson in 2018 that she could tell prospective donors that the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation had become “serious supporters” of Sher Edling’s ongoing litigation, Fox continued.

The lawsuits filed by Sher Edling were said to be supported by the Collective Action Fund for Accountability, Resilience, and Adaptation at the time, Fox News reported noted. This fund was managed by the Resources Legacy Fund (RLF), a dark money group, according to Fox News.

Emmett and Carlson reportedly discussed how Sher Edling’s director of strategic client relationships, Chuck Savitt, had sought support from the philanthropist, noting that they had received such financial support from DiCaprio’s foundation CEO, Terry Tamminen, between 2016 and 2019, the outlet continued.

“Chuck Savitt who is heading this new organization behind the lawsuits has been seeking our support,” Emmett reportedly wrote in an email to Carlson on July 22, 2017. “Terry Tamminen in his new role with the DiCaprio Foundation has been a key supporter.”

The emails were sent roughly two months prior to the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation’s announcement of $20 million in grants for various climate and conservation efforts, Fox News reported. The announcement was subsequently deleted, but archives shared by Fox News show that the RLF received funding “to support precedent-setting legal actions to hold major corporations in the fossil fuel industry liable.”

Sher Edling received more than $5.2 million from RLF between 2017 and 2020, Fox News continued. The firm predominantly filed suits on behalf of cities and states, including California, Delaware, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York City, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Baltimore, and Honolulu against major oil companies.

“Wanted to let you know that we filed the first three lawsuits supported by the Collective Action Fund on Monday,” Savitt told Emmett in one of the emails reviewed by Fox News.

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Alex Jones and the Right to Offend

On Dec. 14, 2012, a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut resulted in the deaths of 20 children and six staffers.  Alex Jones, a controversial far-right talk show host, called the Sandy Hook massacre a U.S. government hoax, staged using crisis actors, to serve as a pretext for gun control.  Parents of one of the slain children filed a defamation suit against Jones, claiming that followers of Jones had harassed them and sent them death threats for years in the false belief that they were lying about their son’s death.

Jones’s defense was his right to free speech and that he was not responsible for the harassment.  He lost.  The jury awarded the parents $45.2 million in punitive damages on top of $4.1 million in compensatory damages — another example of outrageous damage verdicts that plague the legal system.

Freedom of speech is coming under attack from all directions.  The primary assault is based on the existence of a new “right”: the right not to be offended.  It is claimed by many on the left that the right not to be offended is more important than the right to free expression.

Our colleges and universities have fallen victim to this new “right.”  The feelings of students often constitute sufficient justification for campus censorship.  If a conservative speaker offends some of the students, that speaker can be denied a platform.  “The belief that free speech rights don’t include the right to speak offensively is now firmly entrenched on campuses and enforced by repressive speech or harassment codes,” wrote attorney Wendy Kaminer in The Atlantic.

The problem is spreading to the mainstream.  In the 2010 case of Nurre v. Whitehead, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld lower court rulings that school authorities can deny students’ rights to free speech just to keep other students from being offended.  The courts are “allowing schools the discretion to let an offended minority control a cowed majority,” constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead wrote in the Huffington Post.  “There is no way to completely avoid giving offense,” he said.  “At some time or other, someone is going to take offense at something someone else says or does.  It’s inevitable.  Such politically correct thinking has resulted in a host of inane actions, from the Easter Bunny being renamed ‘Peter Rabbit’ to Christmas Concerts being dubbed ‘Winter’ Concerts.”

In a democratic republic, there can be no right not to be offended.  If anyone can prohibit another person’s speech because it’s offensive, there is no limit to the restrictions that can be placed on free expression.  As the late author Christopher Hitchens said, “[f]reedom of speech must include the license to offend.”

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22 States Sue Over ‘Gender Identity’ Rule Controlling $29 Billion For Poor Kids’ Meals

Twenty-two states are suing President Joe Biden’s administration for threatening to zap school-meal program funding unless the states comply with new rules surrounding gender identity and sexual orientation in schools.

The lawsuit represents the latest volley fired in the ongoing battles between state officials and Biden, who they accuse of usurping their authority through his executive orders.

The states complain that a federal nondiscrimination rule, set to take effect Aug. 15, seeks to impose “obligations that apparently stretch as far as ending sex-separated living facilities and athletics and mandating the use of biologically inaccurate preferred pronouns,” said the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, Tennessee, on July 26.

“The Biden administration’s sweeping rhetoric treats normal practices, such as sex-separated bathrooms and athletics, as ‘discriminatory’ even though DOJ and the Department of Education treated those as legal, nondiscriminatory practices as recently as last year,” the suit says.

A fact sheet about the proposed policy cited examples of discriminatory acts, as interpreted by bureaucrats, under the new rule: “Preventing a transgender high school girl [a biological male] from using the girls’ restroom” and “preventing a transgender high school girl [a biological male] from “try[ing] out for the girls’ cheerleading team,” the lawsuit says.

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Biden administration officials are subpoenaed over Big Tech censorship collusion

The suspected collusion between Big Tech and Big Government is nothing new, but now the issue is playing out in court: in May, a lawsuit filed at the US District Court for the Western District Court of Louisiana seeks to prove that such inappropriate ties in fact exist.

The plaintiffs are the states of Missouri and Louisiana while President Biden and senior figures from his White House – including Dr. Anthony Fauci – are named as defendants. The allegation is that the collusion to suppress speech happened specifically around topics like Covid and election security, and that this was done with the pretense of fighting “misinformation.”

The legal process is now in the discovery phase and those who must respond to discovery requests and present documents and information relevant to the case are Fauci and the institution he heads, the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its head, Jen Easterly, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

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Biden Administration is sued over DHS social media surveillance allegations

The Oversight Project, run by conservative think tank Heritage, has sued the Biden administration over surveillance of people through social media.

The lawsuit demands the release of documents related to the DHS’ contract with Babel Street, a Virginia-based company that provides surveillance and data mining technologies.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

The DHS has a contract with Babel Street to provide Babel X, a tool that scrapes data from smartphone apps and online sources. According to a report on Heritage’s website, government agencies “can aggregate and search that data by any number of keywords and in many languages.”

Speaking to The Washington Post in 2017, the company’s founder Jeff Chapman said: “There are billions of smartphones on the planet. All you have to do is listen to them.”

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Pfizer Asks Court to Dismiss Whistleblower Lawsuit Because Government Was Aware of Fraud

lawsuit filed by whistleblower Brook Jackson alleging Pfizer and two of its contractors manipulated data and committed other acts of fraud during Pfizer’s COVID-19 clinical trials is paused following a motion by the defendants to dismiss the case.

In an interview with The Defender, Jackson’s lawyer said Pfizer argued the lawsuit, which was filed under the False Claims Act, should be dismissed because the U.S. government knew of the wrongdoings in the clinical trials but continued to do business with the vaccine maker.

Under the False Claims Act, whistleblowers can be rewarded for confidentially disclosing fraud that results in a financial loss to the federal government.

However, a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision that expanded the scope of a legal principle known as “materiality” resulted in a series of federal court decisions in which fraud cases brought under the False Claims Act were dismissed.

As interpreted by the Supreme Court, if the government continued paying a contractor despite the contractor’s fraudulent activity, the fraud was not considered “material” to the contract.

Pfizer is a federal contractor because it signed multiple contracts with the U.S. government to provide COVID-19 vaccines and Paxlovid, a pill used to treat the virus.

“Pfizer claims they can get away with fraud as long as the government would write them a check despite knowing about the fraud,” attorney Robert Barnes said.

The other two defendants in the case are Ventavia Research Group, which conducted vaccine trials on behalf of Pfizer, and ICON PLC, also a Pfizer contractor.

In an attempt to strengthen the False Claims Act’s anti-retaliation provisions and install new safeguards against industry-level blacklisting of whistleblowers seeking employment, Congress in July 2021 introduced the False Claims Amendments Act of 2021.

In December 2021, Pfizer hired a well-connected lobbyist, Hazen Marshall, and the law firm Williams & Jensen to lobby against the bill.

Pfizer previously was heavily fined in connection with the False Claims Act. As part of a 2009 settlement, the company paid $2.3 billion in fines — the largest healthcare fraud settlement in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice — stemming from allegations of illegal marketing of off-label products not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

“Pfizer, one of the most criminally fined drug companies in the world, wants to weaken the laws that hold them accountable,” Barnes told The Defender.

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Facebook blocks links to website detailing how users can get class action settlement payout from Facebook

Facebook is blocking links to the official class action claims page for a lawsuit settlement for users affected by privacy concerns. The page helps users receive their payout from Facebook and Facebook is marketing the page as “spam” or “abusive,” which prevents people from learning about how to claim.

“If you are a person who, between April 22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, inclusive, were a Facebook User in the United States who visited non-Facebook websites that displayed the Facebook Like button, you may be eligible for a payment from a Class Action Settlement,” the website reads.

Reclaim The Net was alerted to the censorship by a reader and was able to confirm with David Strait, a partner at the DiCello Levitt Gutzler law firm, a party litigating the case, that fbinternettrackingsettlement.com is the official page for users to see if they’re eligible for a claim.

When users on Facebook Messenger try to share the link with someone, they’re greeted with a message saying, “(#368) The action attempted has been deemed abusive or is otherwise disallowed,” hindering the sharing of the claim information.

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