Aggregator

As celebrations raged on for Spain’s first World Cup final win since 2010, a restaurant in West Orange, N.J., was poised to provide the champions with sustenance.

Some 18% see communists as a major threat, 25% see them as a moderate threat, and 23% see them as a minor threat.

France has recorded more than 5,700 excess deaths during its historic summer heat wave, marking the country's deadliest heat-related toll in more than two decades, Public Health France announced Wednesday.

The SoCal mother of the 2-year-old boy who tragically shot himself appeared in court Wednesday with a grim expression on her face.

As the algorithmic age takes Holocaust denial mainstream, historians must admit a bitter defeat.

Terrazas repeatedly rushed toward the agents to throw remnants of cinder block at them.

Biden Bucks: Climate Change Funds A Bonanza For State Outfits

Authored by James Varney via RealClearInvestigations,

For much of its five-decade history, the Colorado Energy Office was a small department with a handful of employees who supported practical, cost-saving energy conservation measures. From 2010 to 2022, records show, the office received an average of $7 million per year from the U.S. Department of Energy.

All that changed after the Biden administration and Congress approved hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending to provide "a more equitable, low-carbon, and clean energy economy." In fiscal year 2024, Colorado's state energy office was slated to receive $157.5 million from the energy department, along with another $156 million from the Environmental Protection Agency. The Biden team's defeat in the 2024 election didn't stop the gusher, either, as an additional $60 million in funding was allocated after voters elected Trump and his promise to halt the spending.

A RealClearInvestigations search of government data shows that the Colorado Energy Office was just one of many agencies and groups across the country that received exponential increases in federal grants during Biden's last two years as part of the unprecedented attempt to refashion federal agencies into the finance engines that would transform the U.S. energy sector to a renewable, Net Zero future.

The Treasury Department's database suggests that after Congress passed the unprecedented funding to fight climate change, it looked for outfits that could disperse that money at the state and local level. In response, it turned to many organizations in the public and private sector with no track record for handling such vast sums, as well as state energy offices and agencies.

"Biden-era climate policy sometimes prioritized sending money out the door first, and worrying about logistics and oversight second," said Jeremy Portnoy, an investigator with OpenTheBooks who seeks to make all government spending public. "Money went to groups that were receiving grants larger than they had the capability to manage."

Although they represent only a sliver of Biden-era spending on green energy, the sudden promise of $9.5 billion in awards to state and county energy programs beginning in FY2024 and the Trump administration efforts to claw back some of that money highlight how shifts in White House policies can make long-term planning hard, especially regarding partisan policy issues.

In response to Trump's efforts to halt much of the spending, a coalition of 13 Democratic state attorneys general filed suit in February seeking to have all the approved grant money dispensed. They argued the Trump administration unfairly targeted states controlled by Democrats, and that without the money those states' "ambitious climate goals" may not be reached.

"Since the first day of President Donald J. Trump's second term, his Administration set out to reverse and undermine the historic energy and infrastructure funding measures enacted by Congress in the preceding years," according to the lawsuit. "Its true purpose was to give the Administration thin bureaucratic cover to eliminate congressionally established energy and infrastructure programs and rescind their funding, for no other reason than a fundamental disagreement with the programs' policy underpinnings."

The legal challenges have scored some successes; last month the Energy Department agreed to reinstate 11 grants, although the largest of them remain in limbo.

Three Huge Beneficiaries

While most states received some portion of the climate splurge, RCI's analysis focused on three of the biggest beneficiaries: Colorado, California, and New York, which were poised to receive more than $1 billion.

Like the Colorado Energy Office, the New York Energy Research and Development Institute and the California Energy Commission were started as energy conservation initiatives in the 1970s when the U.S. was reeling from the oil embargo shock, and the economy's blood seemed dependent on the wills of foreign actors. In more recent decades, all three have also focused on renewable energy, with a special emphasis on social justice equity. Today, the New York institute has nearly 500 employees with an average salary of $127,220, while the California Commission enjoys regulatory powers over siting energy plants and sets state energy policies.

In addition to state funding and, in New York and California, money from ratepayers, these three state agencies routinely received federal grants for relatively small amounts, according to the Treasury Department's usaspending.gov.

But then Biden's Investment Infrastructure and Jobs Act and his Inflation Reduction Act kicked in, and the Energy Department began to approve enormous sums for the state agencies. The grant bonanza went on for roughly 18 months beginning in 2023 and was capped by a post-election frenzy in December 2024 and January 2025, records show. Suddenly, the three Democratic state agencies were receiving grants 10 or more times bigger than anything they had gotten previously.

An RCI review of the FY2024 data showed both the unprecedented size of the grants and the rapidity with which they were greenlit:

• The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority got an average of $5.2 million a year in Energy Department grants from 2015 to 2021. In 2024, however, it was slated to receive $335.38 million. Even after Trump's 2024 election, $30 million was approved in three grants.
• The Colorado Energy Office averaged $6.7 million from 2015 to 2021. Its 2024 grant haul was on top of almost $60 million in fiscal year 2023, and post-2024 election grants to the office were for nearly another $60 million.
• The California Energy Commission averaged $3.1 million for the seven years between 2015 and 2021, a figure that increased by more than a hundred-fold in 2024. After the 2024 election, another $630.5 million grant was approved, one of seven post-election grants.

And the grants came in rapid procession, records show. In California's case, there were four grants totaling $1.4 billion in the last six months of the 2024 calendar year, while the Energy Department and the EPA combined to greenlight more than $400 million in July and August of that year.

The Treasury Department has rarely disbursed these grants in full. Unlocking that money is the main goal of a February lawsuit brought by the attorneys general. And, as RCI previously reported, totals on usaspending.gov do not always match those from other agencies, reflecting the complexity and scale of federal spending.

But the extraordinary amounts and compressed timeline reflect a blizzard of approved spending that the inspectors general of the respective federal agencies warned would make effective oversight of the money nearly impossible.

Nebulous & Questionable

The grants were designed to pay for tasks such as improving the resilience of the grid in the face of disasters or the integration of renewable energy into the grid, or for reducing methane emissions. Yet another purpose was for programs such as home weatherization, a federal operation dogged by allegations of fraud and shoddy work, as RCI reported in 2022.

Some of the biggest grants were for nebulous-sounding work. For example, the Inflation Reduction Act was the source of funding "to provide initial guidance for the planning, administration or technical assistance for future distributions of formula awards through the home energy rebate programs."

Such "initial guidance" would not come cheaply. The Colorado Energy Office was set to get two separate $70 million awards for such work, records show, while the California Energy Commission would get $580 million for the same task and the New York energy institute more than $310 million.

The weatherization of low-income households began with the Obama administration's 2009 spending bill, and it got a big boost under President Biden. For example, two grants, for $70 million each, were earmarked for the Colorado Energy Office's weatherization projects in fiscal year 2024, records show.

As with other stories RCI has done on Biden's climate change spending, the Department of Energy did not respond to requests for comment. But current White House officials maintain that the grant binge ended during President Trump's second term.

"While the Biden administration threw taxpayer dollars at Green New Scam ideological pet projects, the Trump administration is focused on reshoring critical supply chains and safeguarding our national and economic security - all while ensuring the best bargain for taxpayers in every deal," White House spokesman Kush Desai told RCI.

The Colorado Energy Office declined comment, and NYSERDA did not respond to RCI's questions about the grants.

The California Energy Commission, on the other hand, said much of the grant money was tied to formula spending, such as "clean energy retrofits" in residential homes.

"California is meeting growing electricity demand by rapidly building out affordable clean energy infrastructure, increasing grid resilience and transmission capacity, and electrifying new and existing buildings with energy efficient appliances that help lower energy bills," a Commission spokesperson told RCI. "Federal grant funding is critical for California and other states to quickly meet growing energy demand and to do it in the smartest way possible - with clean renewable electricity."

There was one FY2024 grant to the CEC specifically labeled as "formula;" however, an $11.7 million grant was fully disbursed by Treasury.

New Priorities

In the grand scheme of federal spending, the amounts may not seem huge. They are dwarfed, for instance, in comparison to the grants Washington has made for interstate highways.

"Biden wanted to jumpstart the green energy economy so it's not surprising to me a couple of billion dollars were spent," said John Joseph Wallis, an economics professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in public finance. "They just decided to make that a priority, and there are hundreds of examples of that kind of thing over the last century."

But as the renewable energy grants began to flow, inspectors general at the Energy Department and the EPA warned the unprecedented amounts would make oversight next to impossible.

"The EPA's inspector general Sean O'Donnell warned Congress that money would be lost to fraud and waste if the EPA went ahead with its plan to spend billions in Inflation Reduction Act funds in a short timeframe, but the money was funneled out anyway," Portnoy said.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has made several moves to reorient the Department toward Trump's policy goal of increasing affordable and abundant energy, a shift the administration in a first-day executive order labeled "unleashing American energy," and Wright's Department calls the "Energy Dominance Financing Program."

Over the past year and a half, the administration has slashed away at what it considers Biden's fanciful push toward a Net Zero future. Within two months it had put together a so-called "kill list" of recent renewable energy initiatives, and last October, the administration canceled $7.6 billion in Biden-era energy grants, with White House budget director Russell Vought saying the money had been designed to "fuel the Left's climate agenda."

Wright told a House committee last month that politics were not behind cuts at Energy, but the February lawsuit insists that they were, pointing to the hit list drawn up by the Department in 2025. "The list was intended to further the Administration's goal of eliminating renewable-energy programs created by Congress through the duly-enacted 2021 IIJA and the 2022 IRA - programs the Administration derisively calls the 'Green New Scam,'" the lawsuit alleged. It's not clear how many of the grants that were approved in Biden's final year are tied to that lawsuit, although the California Energy Commission said its major grants are not.

The suit makes various arguments as to why this money should still be spent. Chief among them is that the money flows out of statutes duly passed by Congress and signed by the president. And in some cases it also says that without these huge infusions of federal funds, some states will not be able to hit ambitious targets they set to combat global warming.

Leftist environmental groups have calculated the difference between the closure of renewable energy projects in the Biden and Trump administrations, according to a New York Times column in May. Their figures show Biden "canceled, closed or downsized" 25 such projects worth $3.5 billion in 2023 and 2024, while last year, Trump's first back in office, saw 61 such projects crimped or shuttered with a value of $34.76 billion.

But Larry Behrens, spokesman for the conservative Power The Future energy advocacy group, said there is no reason taxpayers should finance coastal states' efforts to shift their economies from traditional energy sources to renewables.

"Working families in Louisiana, Florida, or Ohio should not be forced to bankroll the out-of-touch climate goals for politicians in New York, California, or Illinois," he said. "Every one of these grants should be scrutinized for fraud so taxpayers will stop being treated like an unlimited ATM for the green agenda."

Tyler Durden Wed, 07/22/2026 - 18:25

With two out and a runner on base in the sixth inning, Caballero was called for an automatic strike on a pitch-timer violation.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani keeps talking about Israel while ignoring concerns in the Big Apple.

It has been four years since the Padres made the blockbuster trade with the Washington Nationals for superstar outfielder Juan Soto, and they’re still facing the ramifications of it. Former Major League Baseball executive Jim Bowden appeared as a guest on Foul Territory on Wednesday afternoon and took a shot at the team for mortgaging...

Here's where to watch tonight's game live online!

Secret Service Official Sounds Alarm: "Threat Environment Highest Ever" As Assassination Attempts Explode

The threat environment facing individuals under U.S. Secret Service protection, including President Trump, is the highest the agency has ever recorded, a senior official said during a background briefing with reporters, according to CNBC.

Getty Images

"What we're seeing now is something I've never seen before," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of a public briefing.

The Secret Service has logged roughly 10,000 cases involving threats against government officials, including Supreme Court justices, so far in 2026 - a 40% increase from the same period a year earlier.

"They're increasing in volume and complexity," the official warned. The agency has also recorded a tenfold increase in mental-health commitments of individuals suspected of threatening protectees.

The remarks landed a week after Justice Amy Coney Barrett told a House subcommittee that threats against her and her colleagues on the Court have risen sharply.

Why They're Briefing Now

The timing is not incidental. The briefing came ahead of Friday's rescheduled White House Correspondents' Association dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, which Trump is expected to attend.

It needed rescheduling because of what happened at the last one. In April, a man carrying a shotgun, a handgun and knives stormed a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton during the dinner, with the president in attendance, before being apprehended. Cole Tomas Allen now faces charges of attempting to assassinate the president.

That was not an isolated event. On May 4, a man was wounded in a firefight with Secret Service personnel near the Washington Monument. Three weeks later, on May 23, a gunman approached the White House while Trump was inside the residence, drew a firearm and discharged multiple rounds before being fatally shot by agents. In February, Secret Service and local police shot and killed a man armed with a shotgun who had breached a secure perimeter at Mar-a-Lago.

Four incidents in six months, at four separate protected sites. That is the ledger behind the 40% figure.

The Butler Problem

The current alarm builds on two assassination attempts in 2024. On July 13 of that year, gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing attendee Corey Comperatore and seriously wounding two others.

An Office of Inspector General report found that the Secret Service missed more than 100 radio transmissions from local law enforcement about a suspicious individual - now believed to be Crooks - armed with a rangefinder and rifle. Agents failed to relay critical warnings, establish proper joint communications, or secure the rooftop vantage point.

Those findings describe a catastrophic operational breakdown. They do not describe complicity, and the OIG made no such finding. But for the family of the man who died there, the distinction has offered cold comfort.

Comperatore's widow, Helen Comperatore, made headlines last week when she suggested the attempt on Trump's life was "an inside job."

"I believe he was working with somebody," she told NewsNation. "I believe it was an inside job, inside the government somewhere." No investigation has produced evidence supporting that claim, and the agency has attributed the failures to breakdowns in communication and planning.

Two months after Butler, a Secret Service officer fired at another gunman, Ryan Routh, who had concealed himself in shrubbery near the perimeter of Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Routh was convicted in Florida federal court last September of attempting to assassinate the president, among other charges, and is serving a life sentence.

The Problem Above The Perimeter

The concern growing fastest inside the agency is one that walks past every countermeasure it has spent a century building. Drones approach from outside conventional security perimeters and cannot be screened, wanded, or turned away at a checkpoint.

The scale is no longer theoretical. The FBI said this week it seized more than 700 illegal drones and detected roughly 1,600 in total across the eleven U.S. stadiums hosting World Cup matches - venues holding tens of thousands of people at a time.

Secret Service Director Sean Curran has said the agency is examining "kinetic solutions - something that we haven't done before," and has pushed its technology division to move faster. The OIG's Butler review separately faulted the agency's counter-drone training and preparedness, a gap it has since worked to close.

The Foreign File

More recently, Israel shared intelligence with the U.S. indicating a fresh Iranian plot to assassinate Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal. Iran has for years publicly vowed retaliation for the 2020 killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani, and the ongoing war has sharpened concern about foreign actors targeting the president.

U.S. Secret Service Director Sean Curran testifies during the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee hearing in the Rayburn building in Washington, April 16, 2026. Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Image Tyler Durden Wed, 07/22/2026 - 18:00

We're fall-ing for these Nordstrom Anniversary Sale finds.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed away California's share of future casino revenue in a new 25-year gaming compact with the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe, a move critics say is yet another example of the state surrendering billions of dollars in potential gaming revenue.

The suspect got into the car around 4:15 a.m. July 11 on Prospect Avenue near Bedford Avenue in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens and threatened the 21-year-old driver, authorities said.

Analysts warned it could become difficult for Tesla to keep up with its recent capital-spending pace.

During Fox's four-hour World Cup Final pregame coverage, the on-air talent got the full New York experience.

It was then Baty took an indirect route to Joey Ortiz’s fly ball that should have been the third out.

The preliminary results of an independent autopsy of 18-year-old Nolan Wells have been shared with the public, after famed civil rights attorney Ben Crump and Wells’ heartbroken parents, Christine and Elmore Wonsley, flew their son’s body over 800 miles to Washington, DC, for an independent opinion on Wells’ untimely death. In a press conference at...

DARPA's 'ECHO' Project: A Computer System That Declares You A Bio Threat - With No Physical Evidence

Authored by Jon Fleetwood via JonFleetwood.com,

In 2018, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposed building a portable computer system allegedly capable of determining whether a person had been exposed to biological or chemical threats - including weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their precursors.

Even with no physical evidence.

DARPA outlined the proposal in Broad Agency Announcement HR001118S0023 for a program known as ECHO (Epigenetic CHaracterization and Observation).

DARPA proposed accomplishing this by comparing purported changes inside the person's own biology against a government-built reference library and algorithmically identifying both the alleged threat and when the exposure supposedly occurred.

Viewed alongside DARPA's broader pandemic-era research portfolio, the proposal also raises a larger question explored by this publication's In Silico Theory: as governments increasingly replace direct observation with computational models, reference libraries, and algorithmic determinations, where does objective evidence end and computer-generated conclusions begin?

It also raises an immediate practical question.

If an algorithm operating on a government-controlled reference library determines that someone was exposed to a dangerous biological or chemical threat without physical evidence, what meaningful mechanism exists for independently verifying - or successfully challenging - that determination?

SAM.gov search results associated with DARPA solicitation HR001118S0023 identify at least $53.8 million in awards, including a $49.2 million contract awarded to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a $4.5 million contract awarded to Arizona State University.

The Core Capability

Rather than searching for the biological or chemical agent itself, ECHO proposed "identifying" alleged long-lasting biological signatures left behind after an exposure.

DARPA described the objective:

"utilize an individual's epigenome to reveal their history of exposure to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and WMD precursors."

The solicitation explains why DARPA believed this was possible:

"the epigenome is persistent and detectable even when physical evidence has been erased."

That sentence is arguably the centerpiece of the entire program.

The proposed system was designed to continue generating exposure determinations long after the original biological or chemical material was no longer available for direct examination.

Epigenetics is the study of purported chemical modifications associated with DNA that researchers say can change in response to biological and environmental influences without altering a person's genetic code.

A Government-Built Exposure Library

To accomplish that objective, DARPA instructed performers to create what it called the ECHO Signature Panel (ESP) - a centralized library containing purported epigenetic signatures associated with specific exposures.

Contractors were required to generate signatures for a minimum of 21 exposure conditions, including mandatory biological threat agents and additional chemical, radiological, explosive, and related materials.

Future unknown samples would then be compared against that growing reference panel.

DARPA explained the process:

"The developed algorithms will need to compare an unknown exposure against the ESP to identify the specific exposure, and when the individual was exposed."

In other words, the proposed system would not simply measure biology.

It would compare an individual's biological patterns against a government-built reference library and output a determination regarding both the nature and timing of an alleged exposure.

The Computer Makes The Determination

The solicitation envisioned an almost completely automated process.

DARPA required:

"no human intervention between the time the sample is introduced and results pertinent to exposure and timing is provided."

Insert the sample.

Run the algorithms.

Receive the determination.

The individual would not be interpreting raw laboratory findings.

The system itself would produce the conclusion.

When The Person Becomes The Evidence

Traditional forensic investigations often rely on recovering the biological or chemical agent itself.

ECHO proposed something different.

According to the solicitation, the system was intended to continue identifying exposure after the physical evidence had been erased by relying instead on computational comparison against stored biological signatures.

That architecture raises an obvious question.

If the original biological or chemical material no longer exists, and the determination instead comes from an algorithm comparing an individual's biology against a government-controlled reference library, how would an ordinary person independently verify - or meaningfully challenge - that conclusion?

Could the system be weaponized or used fraudulently?

The document itself does not answer that question.

Instead, it focuses on improving the speed, automation, and reliability of the computational determination.

DARPA Anticipated Attempts To Defeat The System

One small line buried within the solicitation is especially revealing.

Among the categories requiring special handling, DARPA listed:

"Potential procedure to evade ECHO Signature Panel identification."

The agency was not merely interested in creating exposure signatures.

It was already contemplating how those signatures - and the identification system built around them - might be circumvented.

Bottom Line

Much of the discussion surrounding ECHO focuses on epigenetics.

That risks obscuring what the solicitation actually proposed.

At its core, ECHO described a government-built computational system designed to determine whether an individual had been exposed to specified biological or chemical threats by comparing representations of that person's biology against a centralized signature library - even after the underlying physical evidence was gone.

Whether such a system could perform as intended is a separate scientific question.

The more immediate journalistic question is what follows if such algorithmic determinations are relied upon in military, intelligence, public-health, or legal settings.

When there is no physical evidence and the conclusion rests on a proprietary reference library and algorithmic comparison, what avenues exist for independent verification or meaningful challenge?

What happens to the person after the algorithm determines they've been exposed?

And if those algorithmic determinations are ever used to justify quarantine, criminal investigation, military action, employment decisions, travel restrictions, or other government action, what protections exist for the person the computer has already declared was exposed?

Follow Jon Fleetwood on Instagram and X, and subscribe at JonFleetwood.com. (h/t Modernity.news)

Tyler Durden Wed, 07/22/2026 - 17:40