In recent years, opioids, frequently produced by the communist Chinese and trafficked by illegal aliens, have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Extra to promoting this tragic loss of life, a new congressional report indicates that the opioid crisis is also taking a profound economic toll.

 Americans have a curious fascination with serial killers, evidenced by the popularity of television dramas like "Criminal Minds" and intense interest in the real-life stories of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and David Berkowitz.

 The founders of the leftist group Occupy Democrats are having to defend some recent financial decisions after a curious Twitter and YouTube user publicly disclosed details about alleged allocations of the organization's funding.

 An audit issued by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration last week reviewed the accuracy of child tax credit disbursements made by the IRS between July and November 2021. The report found that the organization sent more than $1.1 billion in payments to ineligible taxpayers and failed to send another $3.7 billion to eligible taxpayers.

 House Democrats introduced the so-called "Combatting Financial Conflicts of Interest in Government Act" on Tuesday, which would ban federal personnel from trading stocks. The legislation has been presented as a potential remedy to previously reported conflicts of interests on the Hill and as a means to prevent more abuses from taking place in the future.

 Oklahoma Children's Hospital, part of the Oklahoma University Health system, plans to halt "certain gender medicine services," OU Health said in a statement to the Daily Caller on Tuesday.

 A mob of kids, some as young as 10 years old, ransacked a Philadelphia Wawa store. Surveillance cameras captured the crime. The Twitter feed Libs of TikTok posted the footage four days ago. Tucker Carlson aired the content Tuesday night on his popular show.

Big corporations, including Dyson, Mazda, Forbes, and PBS Kids, stated that they paused online marketing campaigns on Twitter after learning some advertisements appeared next to accounts and tweets associated with child sexual exploitation.

Nicole Saphier, MD is a physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College and bestselling author of 'Panic Attack.' Her opinions are her own and not reflective of her employers.

In President Joe Biden's first extended sit-down with a professional journalist in over 200 days, the 79-year-old commander-in-chief was confronted with a question on the minds of many Americans.

'Some people ask whether you are fit for the job,' asked '60 Minutes' Scott Pelley, 'And when you hear that, I wonder what you think.'

This is Google's Quantum AI laboratory, where dozens of super-smart people labor in an office kitted out with climbing walls and electric bikes to shape the next generation of computers -- a generation that will be unlike anything users currently have in their pockets or offices.

"It is a new type of computer that uses quantum mechanics to do computations and allows us... to solve problems that would otherwise be impossible," explains Erik Lucero, lead engineer at the campus near Santa Barbara.

"It's not going to replace your mobile phone, your desktop; it's going to be working in parallel with those things."

Quantum mechanics is a field of research that scientists say could be used one day to help limit global warming, design city traffic systems or develop powerful new drugs.

Webmaster addition: Sweeping promises like that make me doubtful.

As shock waves, initially engendered by the revelations of abuse in the high-profile conservatorship of pop star Britney Spears, begin to subside, another guardianship case has emerged of equally disturbing proportions. Seated in Nevada, this case reveals a level of relentlessness by the state as it strives to imprison two men who attempted to free a woman from a nursing home.

A writ of habeus corpus is circulating concerning the felony charges against Roger Hillygus and his associate, former Mineral County Sheriff and 30-year law enforcement veteran Stewart Handte. The charges stemmed from their trip to Stone Valley Alzheimer’s Special Care Center on August 8, 2019 and their subsequently escorting Susan Hillygus out of the facility, where her guardian had forcibly and non consensually placed her.

Handte was originally arrested in August of 2019 and released without bail. Initially charged with a number of felonies, the charges against him were subsequently reduced to a sole charge of “conspiracy.” Handte was rearrested on January 19, 2022 after apparently failing to adhere to an order to wear a GPS monitoring device and after allegedly violating a gag order, denying him any rights to discuss the case against him and against Roger Hillygus. The gag order was signed by Judge Barry Breslow. Stewart Handte has been in Washoe County Jail for over 80 days, subsequent to his re- arrest on January 19 and pending a possible trial in July of 2022.

In a hearing last week, Judge Breslow refused to lower Handte’s $50,000 bail, which Handte is unable to pay. As Handte has no prior convictions and as he is charged with a “crime” that does not entail violence, the amount of bail appears contrary to Nevada guidelines. Handte has medical problems which are reportedly not being addressed in jail.

Webmaster addition: UPDATE - Right after this article was published, the judge lowered Handter's bail and he has been released, although he still faces charges.

President Biden warned that the U.S. could follow Italy's path after it elected right wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni last week.  

'You just saw what's happened in Italy in that election,' Biden said Wednesday evening at a fundraiser for the Democratic Governors' Association at a home in Washington, D.C.. 'You're seeing what's happening around the world. The reason I bother to say that is you can't be sanguine about what's happening here, either. I don't want to exaggerate it, but I don't want to understate it.'

Meloni, Italy's first-ever female prime minister and first far-right leader since World War II, won the high office with about 26 percent of the vote. 

 Americans could literally be drowning in a morass of a physical, cultural, and economic flood, but McConnell and the GOP elites would toss the last remaining lifeline to Ukraine. Not only are Americans placed last, they simply don’t matter to American politicians in both parties.

 Rachel Vindman, who on Tuesday posted a tweet jokingly suggesting that people should refer to Hurricane Ian using "they/them pronouns" in a bid to irritate GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has announced that she deleted the tweet "because it was offensive to the trans community."

The permanently discontented co-hosts of "The View" nitpicked how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is responding to Hurricane Ian after the Republican governor thanked President Joe Biden for lending aid to his state.

Donald Trump is seeking a quick end to the defamation lawsuit by an author who claims he raped her more than a quarter century ago.

A lawyer for the former U.S. president asked a federal judge in Manhattan on Wednesday to substitute the United States as the defendant in E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit, a move that would end her case because the government cannot be sued for defamation.

The request came one day after the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Trump was a federal employee when he branded Carroll a liar, but left it to a Washington, D.C., appeals court to decide whether Trump acted as president when he spoke.

In a letter to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan, Trump's lawyer Alina Habba said the decision meant the government "must be substituted as a defendant."

She also asked to put the case on hold, saying it would be "highly prejudicial" for Trump to spend time and money preparing for trial if the Washington court ruled in his favor.

Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll, said "nothing has changed" and the case should proceed.

"The parties have been cooperatively engaged in discovery at Donald Trump's request, and nothing has happened that should change that," she said in an interview. "There has been no final determination by an appellate court that the government should be substituted in."

 In the past 17 years, Denver has launched six plans and invested millions of dollars into addressing the city's homelessness crisis. On Tuesday, the city council announced yet another plan, slated to cost $250 million.

A Democrat group has filed an appeal with Nevada’s Supreme Court over a case regarding guidance issued by Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske on vote counting, claiming that the temporary legislation "will create chaos in tabulation processes across the state."

The original complaint was filed on August 31 on behalf of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, a Democrat group serving as a parent organization to over 40 groups in the state.

Speculation abounds since both Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, designed to carry cheap Russian gas to Europe, were damaged this week in what officials widely describe as deliberate acts of sabotage. Who could be responsible? Incidents buried in the past may provide a clue.

Speculation abounds, and typically in a direction colored by the preexisting biases of the person speculating – which is hardly helpful.

Let’s start with the end result and work backwards. The outcome ultimately means that Europe’s economic impetus for ever seeking peace with Russia has been seriously undermined, if not literally destroyed. Someone has taken it upon themselves to demolish the remaining bridges between the two. Until now, there was always a chance of reconciliation. Russian President Vladimir Putin said himself recently that all the EU needed to do to pull itself out of its self-imposed energy crisis was to push the button on its gas supply from Russia and drop the anti-Russian sanctions that prevent it from doing so.

People in the streets of German cities protesting against Berlin’s blind following of Brussels’ anti-Russia sanctions also knew that was the answer. But now that option has been taken off the table. The EU is now adrift amid a deepening energy crisis and someone burned its last sails. It’s clear that Europe itself wouldn’t benefit from that. Nor does it benefit at all from any of its own anti-Russian sanctions. But who gave Brussels that idea, to harm its own economy in the first place?

At the onset of the Ukrainian conflict, it was Washington that egged on the EU to mirror measures that Washington itself had adopted in an effort to deprive Moscow of revenues to fuel its interests and objectives in Ukraine. The problem is that the EU’s economy was far more entwined with Russia’s than America’s. Any sense that US President Joe Biden and his administration may have given EU leaders, that they’d be there to help the bloc soften the blow of its self-sacrificial sanctions, has since been replaced by a harsh, pragmatic reality. US shale executives have explained to Western media that they simply lack the capacity to ramp up production for Europe’s winter crunch, even amid the growing rationing, deindustrialization, and risk of blackouts.

Researchers have revealed a never-before-seen piece of cross-platform malware that has infected a wide range of Linux and Windows devices, including small office routers, FreeBSD boxes, and large enterprise servers.

Black Lotus Labs, the research arm of security firm Lumen, is calling the malware Chaos, a word that repeatedly appears in function names, certificates, and file names it uses. Chaos emerged no later than April 16, when the first cluster of control servers went live in the wild. From June through mid-July, researchers found hundreds of unique IP addresses representing compromised Chaos devices. Staging servers used to infect new devices have mushroomed in recent months, growing from 39 in May to 93 in August. As of Tuesday, the number reached 111.

Black Lotus has observed interactions with these staging servers from both embedded Linux devices as well as enterprise servers, including one in Europe that was hosting an instance of GitLab. There are more than 100 unique samples in the wild.

"The potency of the Chaos malware stems from a few factors," Black Lotus Labs researchers wrote in a Wednesday morning blog post. "First, it is designed to work across several architectures, including: ARM, Intel (i386), MIPS and PowerPC—in addition to both Windows and Linux operating systems. Second, unlike largescale ransomware distribution botnets like Emotet that leverage spam to spread and grow, Chaos propagates through known CVEs and brute forced as well as stolen SSH keys."

Nearly since the inception of COVID-19, there have been various theories that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab. This also ties in with gain-of-function research reports, along with questions about the United States government’s role in funding this research.

White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci initially denied that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) used US taxpayer dollars to fund gain-of-function research in China. Though later on, the NIH released its own statement that contradicted Fauci’s denial.

Fauci’s track record also involves refuting claims that the Chinese communist regime covered up information about COVID-19. Though the medical adviser is now conveniently walking this back as well.

Fauci Finally Admits the Truth?
When Americans first suggested that COVID-19 came from a lab leak and was ultimately concealed by the Chinese government, they were deemed as liars and conspiracy theorists.

Though during a recent talk with The Atlantic, Fauci admittedly in a roundabout way that this is likely what happened.

Turkish Airlines has extended its cancellation of flights to and from Belarus and Russia.  

Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the national carrier of Turkey operated passenger flights to and from Minsk (MSQ) in Belarus as well as Rostov (RVI), Sochi (AER), and Yekaterinburg (SVX) in Russia.  

The Istanbul-based air carrier announced that it will not resume flights to the named destinations until at least December 31, 2022. 

Hurricane Ian inundated cities, turned out the lights on millions of residents and left migrants from an overturned boat missing Thursday as Florida assessed damage from what the state governor described as a "500-year flood event."

Officials launched a major emergency response after one of the most intense US storms in years, with helicopter crews plucking survivors from barrier islands slammed by a deluge that saw storm surges crash through beachfront towns and horizontal rain pound communities for hours.

After an initial look at the breathtaking destruction, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said the coastal city of Fort Myers and adjacent Cape Coral were "really inundated and really devastated" by the storm.