Authored by Frank Fang and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,

The Trump administration is taking steps to prevent Chinese nationals from exploiting a visa-free travel program to the Northern Mariana Islands, according to White House border czar Tom Homan.

Speaking to Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek in an “American Thought Leaders” interview aired on Sept. 26, Homan called birth tourism a “driver of illegal immigration.”

When asked specifically about Chinese travelers utilizing the U.S. territory’s visa-free entry to give birth on U.S. soil, Homan confirmed that federal authorities are moving to close the channel.

“We’re on it,” Homan said. “It’s being addressed.”

The push to close the U.S. territory’s visa loophole comes amid an ongoing legal battle over U.S. citizenship.

After the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order restricting birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens and temporary visitors as violating the 14th Amendment, the president issued two narrower orders, including one banning birth tourism.

On Sept. 2, a federal judge in Maryland blocked enforcement of the new order restricting who qualifies for citizenship at birth.

Birth tourism refers to foreign nationals’ traveling to the United States, often on a temporary visa, to give birth so their child can automatically obtain U.S. citizenship.

Currently, Chinese citizens can visit the U.S. territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands visa-free for up to 14 days under the program.

Homan called China and Russia the “two biggest abusers” of birth tourism in the United States. He warned that children of the two nations will eventually have the legal right to vote and run for public office.

“I just think it’s a national security vulnerability, and we need to address it,” Homan said.

Homan expressed disappointment at the Supreme Court’s ruling, but he also said, “It’s Congress’s job.”

A group of Republican lawmakers from both chambers of Congress introduced the One Nation, One Visa Policy (H.R.7780 and S.3857) earlier this year. The legislation would bar Chinese nationals from entering the United States and its territories without a valid visa, a measure intended to curb birth tourism by Chinese nationals.

“It’s time to end this abuse by Communist China. America’s laws must not be gamed, our generosity must not be exploited, and our national security must not be compromised,” Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), who introduced the House bill, said in a statement at the time.

In April, four Republican senators sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, urging them to end the 14-day visa-free program for Chinese nationals. They said the program “threatens America’s national security and encourages illegal drug trafficking and birth tourism.”

In May 2025, Fang Ye, a Chinese national, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in Saipan for conspiring to possess more than 500 grams of methamphetamine with the intent to distribute.

According to prosecutors, Fang arrived in the Northern Mariana Islands from China in 2016 and overstayed his visa-free admission. He subsequently operated a birth tourism business in Saipan for three years, hosting more than 200 pregnant women and their families from China who traveled to the island to give birth. He later became involved in trafficking methamphetamine.

Fang’s co-conspirator, Yang Liang, was sentenced to 55 months in prison in Saipan for trafficking methamphetamine in August 2025.

Beyond birth tourism, Homan said federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been working to track military-aged Chinese males entering the country, noting that the mass influx of these individuals does not occur “without the coordination of the Chinese government.”

Homan also said that he expects Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests and deportations to reach record figures next year.

“You can’t have strong national security if you don’t have border security,” Homan said. “We need to know who’s coming in, what’s coming in, where it’s coming in, [and] why it’s coming.”

Boston taxpayers are funding a program that teaches immigrants how to organize, lobby city officials and advocate for political change, then hands participants $575 for completing it. Illegal immigrants are eligible, while U.S.-born Boston residents are not.

The Immigrants Lead Boston program, operated by Mayor Michelle Wu’s Office for Immigrant Advancement, is a 10-week course for what the city calls emerging immigrant leaders.

Candidates must be Boston residents, at least 18 years old and immigrants. Separately, the city states that interested applicants are encouraged to apply “regardless of their immigration status.”

So an illegal immigrant living in Boston can apply for the taxpayer-funded program and its $575 scholarship, while a U.S.-born resident cannot qualify under the city’s stated requirement that candidates be immigrants.

According to Boston’s own description, participants learn:

• Civic engagement and community organizing
• Public narrative and storytelling
• How to build leadership teams to produce community change
• How to navigate city government and engage city officials
• Immigration issues, racism and equity

Participants also conduct civic activities outside class and are expected to use the skills and relationships developed through the program to advocate for their communities. 

“The scholarship rewards participants for their time and commitment to learn, lead, and advocate for their communities,” the city says.

Way More Than $575 Each

The $575 is just what Wu is paying the aspiring organizers – while Boston’s FY2026 budget documents allocate $100,000 to Immigrants Lead Boston, with the city saying the money will fund training for up to 40 emerging leaders in immigrant communities.

If all 40 positions were filled and every participant received $575, the scholarships themselves would total $23,000. The budget presentation does not itemize where the remaining $77,000 goes. 

The program predates Wu. It began under former Mayor Marty Walsh in the fall of 2020, with an inaugural class of 18 participants. Wu’s administration has continued and expanded it. The city’s own alumni pages provide a fairly good picture of what some graduates have done with the training.

Members of the 2021-22 class advocated for driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. Participant Griselda Polanco told the city: “I want to see an opportunity to give driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.”

Another participant, Marie Jacques Toussaint, said she wanted “access to a Driver’s License for everyone, including the immigrant community.”

Participants also drafted testimony on public-policy issues including housing, mental-health services and immigration. Massachusetts ultimately enacted the Work and Family Mobility Act, allowing residents who cannot provide proof of lawful presence to obtain standard driver’s licenses if they meet the other requirements.

Wu’s administration later created an advanced alumni program called Immigrants Lead Boston Lab: From Ideas to Action.

That curriculum was developed with ‘re:power,’ which Boston itself describes as a national training organization of organizers, strategists and technologists dedicated to building social-justice movements. For nine weeks, graduates received additional instruction in public speaking, meeting facilitation, conflict management and community organizing.

Their goals are clear. From Immigrants Lead Boston Lab’s own website: 

“I want to participate more with City Life and the organizations that are fighting for rent control,” said Adelaida Carbajal Rosales. 

Viera Andrea Ilse said she was embarking on a mission to help immigrants obtain driver’s licenses “regardless of immigration status.”

Cindy Marchando said the program had taught her about “the inner workings of social justice movements” and coalition building, which she intended to apply to her advocacy work.

Another participant described the skills involved as “campaign and community organizing.”

The current program is being run in partnership with the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, or MIRA, which Boston describes as New England’s largest coalition promoting immigrant and refugee rights and integration.

Authored by David E. Firester via RealClearDefense,

On May 1, 2026, the State Department released the 2024 edition of the Country Reports on Terrorism – a full year past the deadline in effect when the report came due, and months past even the more forgiving date Congress has since written into law.

No Annex of Statistical Information, the report’s statistical backbone in years past, has been published with it.

And the report’s own pages cite terrorism-incident rankings from the Global Terrorism Trends and Analysis Center, or GTTAC – the same data program whose funding the department allowed to lapse in March.

The report is not optional. Federal law – 22 U.S.C. § 2656f, on the books since 1987 – directs the secretary of state to transmit to Congress each year “a full and complete report” on terrorism worldwide, including, “to the extent practicable, complete statistical information” on those killed, injured, or kidnapped “by each terrorist group during the preceding calendar year.”

For two decades, professionals met that statistical requirement: the National Counterterrorism Center from 2004 to 2011, the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database from 2012 to 2017, and GTTAC’s Record of Incident Database – GRID – from 2018 on. GRID was purpose-built for the statutory task. It applied the government’s own definition of terrorism, named its sources, published its codebook, and put its methodology through peer review this year in the journal Democracy and Security.

In March, the funding stopped. The team behind GRID kept collecting for a time on its own; the public record now ends in mid-May. Ambassador Adam Blackwell, a GTTAC principal, told me that appeals to senior officials at the State Department, in Congress, and at the White House all failed, and that he finds the timing difficult to credit: the United States is engaged in active campaigns against Hamas, Ansar Allah, Hezbollah, and the IRGC, and has newly designated cartels and gangs from across the hemisphere – Venezuelan, Salvadoran, Mexican, and Haitian – as foreign terrorist organizations. This is the moment Washington chose to stop counting.

Note the statutory asymmetry. The report is mandated unconditionally; only the statistics carry the qualifier “to the extent practicable.” Defund the sole mechanism that made the statistics practicable, and the qualifier becomes an exit. The 2024 report’s own compliance chapter makes the gap explicit: it states that the statistical requirement “is satisfied through the inclusion of a statistical annex to the report” – an annex that has not been published. The 2025 edition will be worse still, because the incidents of 2025 are not being systematically collected by anyone charged with the task.

The reflex answer – use the alternative datasets – does not survive contact with the data. I spent my doctorate inside those datasets, and their custodians have been admirably candid about the limits. By its own founding director’s account, the Global Terrorism Database’s source-validity rule excluded 28 percent of otherwise-eligible cases worldwide in an early-2014 sample – and 76 percent in Syria, precisely where the fighting was.

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, the other presumed substitute, measures political violence broadly and does some things well; it was never designed to be the statutory instrument. My dissertation documented what that costs. ACLED codes a suicide bombing only as a stand-alone event, never as part of a battle. Re-coding its Iraq narratives for 2016-2018 by hand, I found 860 suicide bombings where ACLED had coded 344 – and my recount landed within 1 percent of the Global Terrorism Database’s independent tally, so the missing events were real. The same re-coding captured 48 percent more incidents than ACLED had coded in Afghanistan, and 111 percent more in Nigeria. ACLED’s data are not without merit, as I wrote then. But extracting reliable answers from them requires heavy engineering that most consumers – congressional staff included – will never perform.

Methodology is not a technicality. Across 2018-2020, the years both instruments covered, GRID recorded 30 percent more incidents than the Global Terrorism Database and nearly twice the fatalities – and the two disagreed about whether global terrorism was rising or falling. The choice of instrument decides the trend line the government sees. Choose none, and there is no trend line at all.

There is precedent for the way back. When the Global Terrorism Database lost its State Department funding in 2018, allied governments – first Germany’s foreign office, then Britain’s – stepped in to keep collection alive, because the capability was too valuable to lose. GRID’s case is stronger: the mandate is still on the books; the archive – public once again, and current through mid-May – and the trained pipeline still exist; and the gap to close is measured in weeks, not years. The cost of restarting collection is a rounding error against what the government spends to fight the groups it is no longer counting. The combatant commands consume this data. So do the insurers and reinsurers who price political-violence risk. So do the scholars and students who will train the next generation of analysts.

The 2024 report proves the mandate outlived the capability. The question Congress should be asking – and that any serious funder, public or private, should be answering – is who restores it. The threats were never in doubt. What remains in doubt is whether we intend to see them.

Federal authorities have now pulled 87 foreign crew members off cruise ships under Operation Tidal Wave, a Customs and Border Protection initiative aimed at child sexual abuse material aboard the vessels.

Six Philippine nationals on a cruise ship at the Port of Boston admitted to possessing child sexual abuse material, according to a Sept. 25 CBP statement. Julio Caravia, CBP’s acting director of field operations, said authorities won’t tolerate the exploitation of children and that the agency will keep identifying and arresting those involved.

The multiagency operation, led by CBP, targets crew members tied to the possession, production, procurement, distribution, or use of child sexual abuse and exploitation material.

As the Epoch Times notes further, the current phase of the operation has been in effect since mid-August, with 41 crew members removed in two previous phases.

In phase 1 of Operation Tidal Wave, which took place in San Diego in April, administrative enforcement actions were taken against 27 crew members from six vessels. These people were processed for removal and sent back to their home nations.

In phase 2, which took place in San Juan during June-July, enforcement actions were taken against 14 crew members from three vessels.

In the case of the Philippine nationals, they were processed for removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act. This provision makes foreign nationals who admit to committing acts involving moral turpitude inadmissible into the United States.

CBP clarified that under federal law, people involved with child sexual exploitation material can face severe penalties, including removal from the country, 10-year inadmissibility into the United States, and criminal prosecution.

In addition to CBP, Homeland Security Investigations and the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force were also part of the operation.

According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), its CyberTipline received more than 21 million reports last year related to child exploitation. CyberTipline receives reports of suspected child sexual exploitation from the public and electronic service providers.

More than 19 million reports were related to the manufacture, possession, and distribution of child pornography. Other reports included child sex trafficking, child sexual molestation, online enticement of children for sexual acts, and unsolicited obscene material sent to children.

In Operation Relentless Justice, conducted last year to tackle child exploitation in the country, 205 child victims were located, and 293 alleged offenders were arrested. And in April, the month-long Operation Iron Pursuit resulted in more than 200 child victims being rescued and more than 350 alleged offenders being arrested nationwide.

Via The Cradle

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is due to announce plans to reduce by 20 percent the number of positions reserved for generals and admirals, according to an exclusive released by Fox News on Tuesday. 

“Hegseth approved reduction plans for the Army, Navy, Air Force and the military’s joint pool earlier this month,“ the US outlet reported, citing memos. 

“The services were directed to implement the plans and complete the reductions by January 1, 2027. The new target doubles the 10 percent overall reduction in general and flag officer positions Hegseth ordered last year as part of his effort to streamline the military’s senior ranks,” Fox News added.

The announcement will come during a State of the Force address on Wednesday. The earlier directive separately called for a 20 percent decrease in active-duty four-star positions, as well as a 20 percent reduction in National Guard general officers. 

A Department of War source told Fox News that “The latest reductions apply to billets – positions designated for generals and admirals – rather than an across-the-board removal of 20 percent of the officers currently serving in those ranks.”

Some of the positions will be “downgraded” instead of removed completely, the report goes on to state. 

“Hegseth directed officials to establish O-6 requirements for general and flag officer positions identified for downgrade, allowing colonels and Navy captains to fill those jobs,” according to a September 16 memo cited by Fox News. 

The report follows a string of resignations within the military establishment, the latest of which saw US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll step down. The White House announced his resignation without much elaboration, but reports said the move followed months of “friction” with Hegseth.

The war secretary had ousted former chief of staff General Randy George in April. Additionally, the US military’s Europe and Africa commander, General Christopher Donahue, resigned suddenly in June.

Hegseth had said last year that those who did not support his “reforms” for the military could step down. In late 2026, the New York Times (NYT) reported that Hegseth’s “purge” has left the US military “rudderless.”

“There were 10 four-star generals on active duty [when Hegseth took office]. The service currently has five, the fewest in decades,” that report said. 

The war secretary’s reduction plans come as 50,000 US troops are deployed across West Asia.

More recent reports have said that US President Donald Trump plans to renew bombardment of the Islamic Republic after mid-term elections. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran, which has never been formally authorized by Congress, has killed thousands.

On September 19, Bloomberg reported that cuts within the Pentagon led to the US airstrike on an elementary school in Minab that killed at least 120 Iranian schoolchildren at the start of the war. 

Authored by Jeremy Portnoy via RealClearInvestigations,

It’s no wonder that California’s infamous high-speed rail line has more than tripled in cost and been delayed by 20 years. The consultants working on the project have been killing time at a tiki bar, a nightclub, an escape room, a gym and more.

Their travel expenses add up to more than $2 million, including $592,000 that was “not allowable,” per a Sept. 15 inspector general report.

Key facts:

The consultants are allowed to bill taxpayers for legitimate business expenses, but the state “routinely” allowed them to travel without advance approval, as required. State officials admitted they sometimes had no idea the consultants had taken trips until the invoices arrived.

Many travel expenses had no written justification, or had vague explanations like “typical travel” or “meetings.”

Consultants booked first-class flights and premium services like Uber Black, which picks up riders in a luxury car. One consultant booked a premium Uber to travel 25 miles to a steakhouse, and another used the service for “repeated” trips to Planet Fitness gym locations around Sacramento. Another took a ride to a nightclub at 9:40 p.m. and booked his return trip at 2:30 a.m.

State employees said the absurd expenses were approved due to “the volume of travel expense claims, limited time to review them, and errors.”

One legal consulting firm’s contract allows employees to earn $570 per hour while traveling on a plane, plus the price of airfare. The consulting firm billed for more than 30 trips. Only three were approved in advance, and even those contained no “adequate explanations for why the travel was necessary.”

When state officials tried to enforce their authority over travel approvals, they were “resisted or overridden,” according to the report. Consultants argued that Ian Choudri, CEO of the California High Speed Rail Authority, had asked them to travel for in-person meetings, and so all their expenses were justified. Choudri has no authority to approve travel for consultants, according to the audit.

The audit reviewed four consulting firms, which are not identified by name.

The Rail Authority said it would only make some changes to its travel expense procedures, arguing that “state regulations do not require justification for each consultant trip.”

Background:

The high-speed rail was supposed to be finished in 2020 at a cost of $40 billion. Barely any track has been laid, and the estimated completion date is now 2040 at a cost of $126 billion.

Last year, President Donald Trump rescinded federal funding and told reporters the project has “the worst overruns that there have ever been in the history of our country.”

Summary:

Californians have lost billions of dollars and countless hours of taxpayer-funded labor waiting for their high-speed rail line to be built, but at least the contractors working on the project are enjoying themselves.

Syria has reported at least two acts of major sabotage against its gas infrastructure in six weeks, and it raises questions over who or what group is behind it, and what this means for future energy transit projects.

Monday evening saw a fire rage out of control for many hours at a gas pipeline between al-Shola and Deir Ezzor following a mystery explosion. 

Syrian Petroleum Company (SPC), which oversees the site, called it an act of sabotage which abruptly halted gas flows from the Jbeissa gas plant to power generation stations, according to details from state-run SANA.

The New Arab writes that “In January, the SPC began pumping raw gas from the Jbeissa fields in Hasakah to the Furqlus gas plant in Homs province, with around 1.2 million cubic metres passing through the network each day to support electricity generation.”

The report adds, “Damascus has also been working to reconnect other major eastern gas facilities to the national network.”

For several years stretching through much of the last decade, Syrian cities – including the capital – have suffered intermittent and long power outages. It was especially during the tail-end of the proxy war to oust Assad that lack of fuel and electricity became a major crisis.

Damascus residents, for example, often had a mere one hour of electricity in their homes per day – if at all. Entire remote villages and towns simply proceeded with daily life amid a total and persistent blackout. This was to a large degree the result of a US-led sanctions war which in effect strangled the population. US troops had even for years directly occupied Syria’s eastern oil and gas fields, which had been crucial for meeting domestic energy needs.

But now after Jolani and his HTS jihadists seized power, and with Washington sanctions declared removed, the country is trying to restore and rebuild services.

While no group has yet claimed responsibility for sabotaging facilities in the east, it illustrates how the country is still in a deeply unstable situation.

Powerful explosion hits a gas pipeline in Syria’s Deir ez-Zor, near the Iraqi border.

Follow: https://t.co/Ez42KDdHXv pic.twitter.com/G0eS2BUCO1

— PressTV Extra (@PresstvExtra) September 28, 2026

As for the initial attack among these two latest, it happened on August 18 and involved an explosion at the Jbeissa plant’s gas export pipeline. Other sabotage examples back when the war was at its height are plentiful.

One explanation which has emerged for Monday’s incident is being reported in The National:

Hisham Al Saleh, a gas sector official at the Syrian Petroleum Company, said crews began isolating the area immediately after the fire broke out.

The local official said that the explosion was apparently caused by thieves who broke into the pipeline to steel the gas. “It seems that the theft had gone wrong. It takes a degree of professionalism to break into a gas pipeline and emerge unscathed,” the official said.

Whether sabotage or theft, it raises big questions as regional officials talk about ‘reviving’ energy pipelines crossing Syria as an ‘alternative’ to Hormuz Strait shipping, given the war-ravaged country’s longtime geopolitical importance and access to the Mediterranean. A future Iraq-Syria oil pipeline, for example, could be a prime target for unknown terror entities.

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

The United Arab Emirates has expressed intent to invest another $25 billion in India, including in the energy sector, Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said at a high-level meeting in Mumbai.

The UAE has already invested about $25 billion in India and has signaled its intent to invest another $25 billion in the near term, the Indian minister said at the 14th Meeting of the India-UAE High Level Joint Task Force on Investments.

The UAE ultimately targets to have $100 billion invested in India in the long term, according to the minister.

The UAE-India meeting was co-chaired by Sheikh Hamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, managing director of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), and was attended by Thani bin Al Zeyoudi, the Emirati Minister of Foreign Trade.

The Indian minister noted that he held “productive discussions on further strengthening our robust trade & investment partnership, with a focus on advancing cooperation across energy, infrastructure, logistics, advanced technology, food security and other priority sectors.”

ADIA’s Al Nahyan and the Indian minister also discussed “accelerating the India-UAE economic partnership and fully leveraging the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), a landmark framework driving trade, investment, and building resilient supply chains,” Goyal said.

The India-UAE bilateral trade has doubled to $100 billion since the countries signed the CEPA deal four years ago. Now they plan to double this again to $200 billion by 2032, India’s Goyal said at the investment task force meeting.

Earlier this year, at the peak blockage of the Strait of Hormuz in May, India signed a strategic agreement with the United Arab Emirates to receive liquefied petroleum gas from the UAE, as well as a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on strategic petroleum reserves.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi signed the LPG supply deal and the strategic reserves pact during a quick two-hour visit to the UAE in the middle of May, as India was scrambling to ease energy supply pressures that began to hit its economy.

The Cornell fraternity rape case produced a national outrage campaign two years ago, after a student claimed she was raped at a fraternity house. Her allegations surfaced two weeks ago after the woman, known as Jane Doe in the lawsuit, sued seven men, the university, her sorority and the fraternity. 

Except, now we find out that the accuser’s original sworn statement described the encounter as consensual. Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten is reopening the investigation into allegations that seven former members of Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity sexually assaulted a student in October 2024. And shall we take a guess as to why there were no charges filed?

According to CBS News, Van Houten said the woman’s November 2024 statement “did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped” by multiple men.

“On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual.”

That’s the prosecutor’s characterization of her earlier account. It conflicts sharply with the civil lawsuit filed this month – and creates an obvious question for the reopened investigation: how should those accounts be reconciled?

The woman, identified as Jane Doe, was 20 at the time. Her lawsuit alleges that she arrived at the fraternity house already intoxicated, was pressured into taking what she was told was ketamine, and was sexually assaulted by multiple men over several hours.

She reported the incident to campus police approximately three weeks afterward. The nearly two-year gap concerns the civil lawsuit; it does not mean she waited two years to contact police.

Then there are the texts.

CBS News New York obtained screenshots that a source described as an exchange between Doe and one defendant two days after the alleged assault.

In that exchange, the woman wrote that “non(e) of the sexual stuff was illegal,” said she liked being with him and another man, and suggested they smoke together again – “but like leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine.”

The man replied by apologizing for “how things went down.” He described his memory as “kinda fuzzy” and said he and another man felt bad about being too intoxicated to stop the situation and remove others before it got out of hand. The woman described her own memory as “super clouded too.”

So she may or may not have willingly let a group of frat boys bust a train on her, and now she’s suing. 

Doe’s attorney, Thomas Giuffra, confirmed that she exchanged texts with the defendant, but could not confirm that these were the specific messages. He told CBS she was traumatized and in denial, had been intoxicated to the point of incapacity, and was trying to obtain information without alienating someone who could explain what happened.

Then there’s the fraternity’s group chat. CBS reported a message advertising the woman’s availability for sex, followed later by “Shop still open?” and the reply “Yea.”

Van Houten called the exchange “disgusting, vulgar” and said it would be presented to the grand jury. His position is that the messages do not resolve the question of consent.

The Investigation

The university says it conducted a months-long Title IX investigation followed by a hearing at which both sides could testify and present evidence. Sanctions included expulsions and suspensions. The Chi Phi chapter closed in 2024 and remains barred from campus.

“None of the individuals charged were offered the opportunity to write essays as a sole consequence of their involvement,” Cornell said.

That, of course, is open to scrutiny. Claims that the university imposed no meaningful consequences do not comport with the expulsions, suspensions and shutting down the fraternity’s chapter. Meanwhile, the political verdict has been considerably less tentative.

At a Sunday event near Cornell, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned a “culture of rape” protected by elite institutions and treated the group chat as evidence that the conduct had become normalized, according to the Associated Press. The prosecutor said his office had received a flood of messages, including insults and threats.

Public pressure can expose institutional failures. It can also reward certainty long before the underlying facts justify it.

There are substantial questions for investigators, too. Van Houten told CBS his office did not have Cornell’s Title IX records and was seeking them. He also said there was no indication that police had interviewed the seven accused men at the time.

Giuffra says his client received no investigative follow-up after her initial campus-police report. Van Houten defends the officer who took that statement as experienced and trained in trauma-informed sexual-assault investigations. He also says Doe’s lawyers never approached his office to correct the original account or request reconsideration before he contacted them following the lawsuit.

Van Houten says he hopes to present the case to a grand jury within 45 days. Cornell supports reopening the investigation, and Doe’s attorney has welcomed it while pressing for a thorough review.

For now, the public record contains a serious allegation, a sharply different earlier account as described by the prosecutor, reported text messages, competing explanations and unanswered questions about the original investigation.

Authored by Tom Gantert via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge has struck down New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act, blocking the state from collecting $75 billion from fossil fuel companies to pay for projects addressing concerns the state attributed to climate change.

The Justice Department on Sept. 28 hailed the ruling as a “significant step in … protecting American energy from state overreach.” U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel issued a judgment against the law on Sept. 25 after stating two days earlier that it intruded on federal authority in multiple ways, including by regulating greenhouse gas emissions that cross state lines.

The law would have required large companies involved in fossil fuel extraction or crude oil refining to pay into a state fund over 25 years. Each company’s share would have been based on greenhouse gas emissions attributed to its products from 2000 through 2024. New York intended to use the money for infrastructure and other projects to help communities address issues the state blames on climate change.

The Justice Department and Environmental Protection Agency sued to block the law. They argued that New York’s law ran afoul of the legal doctrine of preemption, which says that federal law takes precedence if there is a conflict with state law.

The federal government said the Clean Air Act gives the EPA authority to decide whether and how to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. It said New York’s law would impose its own liability on fossil fuel producers based on emissions attributed to their products worldwide.

New York argued that its law did not regulate emissions. It said the payments would compensate the state for harm from past emissions and fund projects to protect New Yorkers from problems it attributed to climate change. Castel rejected the state’s argument, saying the charges effectively regulated interstate emissions.

Castel found that the law reached beyond New York’s authority even though the state planned to spend the money on local projects.

Castel also said the law infringed on foreign affairs by seeking payments from fossil fuel companies for activity outside the United States. Citing an earlier appeals court ruling, he said holding oil companies accountable for what they did outside U.S. territory would bypass diplomatic channels and “needlessly complicate the nation’s foreign policy.”

Two federal judges have now ruled on New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act because different plaintiffs brought separate lawsuits. There were 22 states and business groups that challenged the law in the Northern District of New York, where U.S. District Judge Brenda Sannes blocked it on Aug. 31.

The DOJ and EPA filed their own case in the Southern District, where Castel issued a second ruling.

“New York’s woke climate change law is not only unconstitutional, it is harmful, jeopardizing every American’s access to affordable and reliable energy,” said Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward, Jr., in a statement on Monday.

“We are pleased with the district courts’ decisions finding New York’s law unlawful and recognizing that the Federal Sovereign, not the States, regulates our Nation’s energy market.”

Advocates such as the Fiscal Policy Institute had supported the Climate Change Superfund Act. The Fiscal Policy Institute had said that the $75 billion was needed to “adapt to rising sea levels and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events – measures that wouldn’t be needed but for the high emissions caused by these companies’ business activities.”

New York had said the federal government didn’t have standing in the case because it hadn’t shown how the state’s law would stop it from enforcing federal law or interfere with compliance with international agreements. The state also argued its law didn’t seek to regulate emissions, just compensation for harm it attributed to climate change.

The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James did not respond to an emailed request for comment. James was named as a defendant in the lawsuit in her official capacity.