A man who injured a Customs and Border Protection officer by hurling rocks through a car window during last summer’s violent anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles County pleaded guilty on Tuesday to assaulting a federal officer.  Elpidio Reyna, 41, admitted to one count of assault with a deadly or dangerous weapon resulting in bodily injury. He was one of the dozens arrested after riots erupted after Immigration and Customs Enforcement began enforcement operations in the Los Angeles area.  “This defendant could have easily killed a federal officer or innocent bystander,” said First Assistant United States Attorney Bill Essayli. “As he found out the hard way, violence against law enforcement is not constitutionally protected and will be met with swift justice. Those who engage in similar violence will be arrested, charged, and eventually convicted in a court of law.” On June 7, 2025, Reyna joined a crowd throwing rocks and improvised explosives at federal officers operating near a Home Depot in Paramount, located about 11 miles north of Long Beach.  “Protestors, including the defendant, began to throw rocks at the officers’ official vehicles, lit objects on fire, and impeded law enforcement activity. During this, defendant knowingly and intentionally lit objects on fire in the middle of the street and threw rocks at a convoy of law enforcement vehicles occupied by Customs and Border Protection Officers,” according to the plea agreement.  One of the projectiles shattered a car window, cutting a Customs and Border Protection officer on the forehead. In video released by the Justice Department, Reyna can be seen pelting law enforcement vehicles with rocks and chunks of concrete while wearing a motorcycle helmet.  The FBI offered a $50,000 reward for Reyna after a special agent identified him through a review of TikTok videos. He was on the FBI’s most wanted list before surrendering at the U.S.-Mexico border on July 23.  Reyna faces up to 20 years in prison when he is sentenced on August 7 by U.S. District Judge Fernando L. Aenlle-Rocha. He has remained in federal custody since July 2025.  Dozens of arrests were made during the protests in June and July across the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas over federal immigration operations. The unrest prompted President Donald Trump to deploy the National Guard to protect federal personnel and property, setting off a prolonged legal battle with California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom over the troop deployment.

Sanctuary authorities in Connecticut released an illegal immigrant charged with sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl and enticing minors online, forcing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to track him down in the community after officials declined to honor a detainer request, The Daily Wire has learned. Ecuadorian national Christian Espinosa-Sarango, who is in the country illegally, was charged on December 19, 2025, in North Haven, Connecticut, with sexual assault, illegal sexual contact with a child, and enticing minors with a computer, according to the Department of Homeland Security. ICE lodged a detainer request on December 23 with local law enforcement, demanding that they notify federal immigration agents before he’s scheduled for release. But local authorities did not comply and released him from jail on a $150,000 bond “onto Connecticut’s streets,” DHS said. Espinosa-Sarango communicated with an undercover agent he believed was the aunt of a 13-year-old girl, according to the New Haven Independent, citing an affidavit. When he found out the girl’s age, he allegedly began asking for photos and sex. The undercover agent agreed and instructed him to come to a local hotel with condoms and $120, according to the local news outlet. On December 19, he allegedly arrived at the hotel room with three condoms and $120 cash and was immediately arrested after knocking on the door. Espinosa-Sarango claimed he went to the hotel to “save” the girl, but said he did not want to contact police until he saw her first, according to the local report. ICE officers located Espinosa-Sarango on February 13, DHS said, and he allegedly resisted arrest. According to DHS, he attempted to flee in his vehicle and refused to roll down his window, forcing officers to break it to take him into custody. DHS is blaming Connecticut’s sanctuary policies, arguing that restrictions on cooperation with ICE prevented local authorities from honoring the detainer request and allowed Espinosa-Sarango’s release. “These are the types of monsters Connecticut sanctuary politicians are releasing from their jails and onto the streets to perpetuate more crimes against children,” Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said. “We need local law enforcement to cooperate with us to get these heinous criminals out of our neighborhoods. Seven of the 10 safest cities in the United States cooperate with ICE. This is a perfect example of why sanctuary policies make Americans less safe. Thankfully, because of our brave ICE agents, Christian Espinosa-Sarango, a pedophile, will never walk American streets again. Sanctuary politicians must stop releasing pedophiles, murderers, rapists, and kidnappers into our neighborhoods,” McLaughlin added. Lawmakers in Connecticut amended the state’s sanctuary law this year in response to the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort, allowing illegal immigrants to sue local police agencies that communicate with ICE, according to WNPR. The law was also expanded to allow local officers to comply with ICE if it involves cases of sexual assault, burglary with a firearm, and injury or risk of injury to a child, the report said.

Lefties Sabotage America's First Antifa Terrorism Trial On Day One

China’s multi-decade long, successful effort to plant a ring of trees around one of the world’s most hostile deserts has sprouted an unexpected benefit to humanity. Along with protecting the nation’s grasslands and agriculture from the spreading sands of the dismal Taklamakan Desert, the giant ring of trees has turned previous unproductive land into a […] The post Planting Billions of Trees Turned Barren Desert into a Carbon Sink That Lowers Atmospheric CO2 appeared first on Good News Network.

Featured Essays book culture One Way to Immunize Yourself Against Pseudoscience and Other Nonsense Classic SF was chock-full of dubius ideas; Martin Gardner supplied the antidote. By James Davis Nicoll | Published on February 18, 2026 Credit: Medical Photographic Library (Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0) Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Medical Photographic Library (Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0) Given the science fiction that enthralled me as a teen, you might wonder how I escaped infection with delusions like: Dean drives population paranoia libertarianism Wilsonian occult conspiracies …and all the other nonsensical crap to which SF authors turned for plot (or, in some cases, sincerely believed). How is that I emerged with a glimmering of skepticism and rationality? Any tendency towards libertarianism is of course easily cured simply by spending time with libertarians1. Immunization against the other nonsense, however, was greatly facilitated by my reading of Martin Gardner’s classic 1957 Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. The title says it all. The book is a brief and necessarily incomplete survey of all the pseudoscience, cult lunacy, and all-around bonkers notions with which the world is too well supplied. Now, Gardner had harsh words for science fiction, or at least the sort that appeared in Astounding: “Judging by the number of Campbell’s readers who are impressed by this nonsense, the average fan may very well be a chap in his teens, with a smattering of scientific knowledge culled mostly from science fiction, enormously gullible, with a strong bent toward occultism, no understanding of scientific method, and a basic insecurity for which he compensates by fantasies of scientific power. However, this was not the caustic approbation of an outsider for a genre about which he knew little. Gardner was an SF fan. He read the stuff. He wrote the stuff. He appeared in Asimov’s! His was the critique that flowers from familiarity. In any case, most of his examples came from outside the pages of Astounding… despite John W. Campbell, Jr.’s best efforts to promote every crackpot idea that crossed his desk. Gardner provided an abundance of case studies—on flat and hollow Earths, Velikovskyism, contra-relativity, scientific racism, creationism, Lysenkoism, occult nonsense, pyramid woo-woo, and all that jazz—detailed with humor designed to undermine the gravitas of the various pseudoscientific prophets. While he is clearly aware that there is a human cost to this stuff—ineffective medicine is an obvious example, but Soviet-era crank agricultural theories made what would likely have been unpleasant lives even worse through famine—Gardner seems to have known that laughter is far more caustic to reputation than rebuke. It is hard to present oneself as a heroic iconoclast when everyone thinks of you as a punchline. Even more usefully, Gardner presented a theoretical framework to unify what might otherwise have been a collection of anecdotes. In particular, he concluded that the various eccentrics he featured tended to have two common elements: Cranks tend to be isolated from the scientific community. Cranks tend to be paranoids with delusions of grandeur. Having spent decades on talk.origins2, I would add a third: Cranks almost never settle for a single eccentric belief. Put together, this is a useful lens through which to scrutinize iconoclastic models. Sure, a novel proposition might be the 21st-century answer to continental drift, and maybe the resistance it meets could be analogous to Sir Arthur Eddington kneecapping Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar—but if the person proposing it is uncredentialed, has no contact with the field in which they’re dabbling, replies to constructive criticism with insults and rants, and furthermore believes that the Moon is a turnip, that the metric system was invented to sterilize white people, and that Montana is a Coca Cola ad campaign that got out of hand, it probably isn’t. Gardner’s lens is especially useful when what you’re hearing is something you really want to believe. Gullibility is directly proportional to appeal. Wouldn’t it be delightful if this novel suggestion were correct? More reason to peer closely, prod a bit, and hold that notion up to a bright light. It’s no surprise that despite being the product of a previous millennium, Fads and Fallacies remains in print. Pseudosciences come and pseudosciences go… but their general form remains the same. Of course, it would be a mistake to rely on a single source of skepticism, and seven decades is long enough for an abundance of books akin to Fads and Fallacies to appear. Which of them would readers recommend?[end-mark] See also my exposure to back-to-the-land hippies, as well as to the Enver Hoxha-loving baby communists who once used a procedural loophole to take over a campus newspaper. ︎A USENET newsgroup. USENET is a thriving medium of communication that is even healthier than Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the West Indian Federation combined. ︎The post One Way to Immunize Yourself Against Pseudoscience and Other Nonsense appeared first on Reactor.

The White House is hosting a roundtable Wednesday with representatives of social media companies working to end the sale of illicit drugs on platforms like Meta, X, YouTube, and TikTok.   Sara Carter, director of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, will lead the discussion on ways to keep children and youth safe from drug traffickers who may target them online.   “Throughout my career, I have spoken to countless families who lost a child or loved one to drugs purchased through social media,” Carter said in a statement first provided to The Daily Signal.   “In many of these cases, the victim thought they were purchasing a safe pill, which actually contained a lethal dose of illicit fentanyl,” Carter continued. “These drug poisonings are incomprehensible tragedies that cannot continue.”   Angel Mom Anne Fundner will attend Wednesday’s roundtable. Fundner, who testified before Congress in 2024, lost her 15-year-old son Weston in 2022 after he took drugs that contained fentanyl.   “When your child dies, the whole family dies. We’ve lost everything with Weston’s death. We lost everything but each other. It has been a very hard road,” Fundner told members of Congress in her prepared testimony after her son’s death.  When young people become addicted to drugs, for “$7.50 they can go on an app like Snapchat or Instagram and have it delivered and put underneath the doormat at your front door,” Fundner said.   Over the past decade, roughly 500,000 lives have been lost in the United States to synthetic opioid overdoses, mainly fentanyl, according to the National Institutes of Health.  In an effort to prevent more parents from suffering a loss similar to the Fundner family’s, the Office of National Drug Control Policy “will need full-scale cooperation from social media companies, law enforcement, and the whole-of-government,” Carter says.  Carter is also calling on families to educate their children on the dangers of drug use, and is encouraging parents to monitor their children’s “social media use to protect them from those who seek to do irreparable harm.”  The meeting is Carter’s first public event since being confirmed as President Donald Trump’s drug czar in January. Prior to serving in the White House, she was an investigative journalist and reported extensively on the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.    Multiple Trump administration officials will join the roundtable, including Terry Cole, administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Ronnie Kurtz, assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Debbie Seguin, acting deputy director for the Office of National Drug Control Policy.   The post EXCLUSIVE: White House Works With Social Media Companies on Deadly Drug Crisis   appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The UK government wants to scan people’s photos before they send them. Not just children’s photos. Everyone’s. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall spelled it out on BBC Breakfast, floating a proposal to “block photographs being sent that are potentially nude photographs by anybody or block children from sending those.” That second clause is the tell. Blocking “anybody” from sending potentially nude images requires scanning everybody’s messages. There’s no technical path to that outcome that doesn’t involve reading content the sender assumed was private. Kendall said the government is conducting a consultation on “whether we should have age limits on things like live streaming” and whether there should be “age limits on what’s called stranger pairing, for example, on games online.” The consultation, she said, will look at all of these. That list now covers messaging apps, photo sharing, gaming, and live streaming. Any feature that lets you share an image with another person potentially falls inside it. This is how the mandate grows. The government announced a push for new delegated powers on February 16, framing them around age verification for social media and VPNs. What Kendall described in broadcast interviews goes well beyond that framing. The official press release mentioned consulting on how companies might “safeguard children from sending or receiving” nude images. Kendall’s BBC comments dropped the qualifier about children entirely, proposing to block “potentially nude” images sent by anyone. The mechanism matters here. The government plans to introduce these new authorities as amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which has already cleared the House of Commons and the House of Lords and sits in its final stage. Amendments introduced this late receive less parliamentary scrutiny than standard legislation. Delegated powers allow a minister or department to issue secondary legislation without returning to Parliament for a full vote. That secondary legislation isn’t subject to the same debate as the original Act. The government gets to decide the specific rules, on its own timeline, with limited opportunity for challenge. Kendall told Good Morning Britain that the government plans to push new “online safety rules” every year through this mechanism. The bill already contains amendments requiring age verification for VPNs (amendment 92) and for “user-to-user” services (amendment 94a). User-to-user covers most online platforms where people share content: social media, messaging apps, forums, and gaming services. Email and SMS are exempt. Most everything else isn’t. A charitable reading of why the government wants delegated powers: it needs flexibility to update technical standards for age verification as the technology changes, and only if Parliament first approves the underlying requirements. The less charitable reading, and the more plausible one: the government wants the ability to impose VPN and social media age verification even if those amendments fail. It’s building a back door to bypass the outcome of the parliamentary vote it’s currently trying to win. The House of Lords previously considered and rejected an amendment that would have required constant client-side scanning on most smartphones and tablets to detect child sexual abuse material. The Lords declined to adopt it. That rejection happened through the full parliamentary process. The government is now signaling it may pursue functionally identical surveillance through delegated powers, bypassing the scrutiny that killed the first attempt. Kendall’s photo-scanning proposal and the failed Lords amendment work the same way technically. Both require software installed on your device to examine content before it leaves. The Lords’ amendment targeted CSAM via client-side scanning. Kendall’s proposal targets “potentially nude” images via client-side scanning. The mechanism is identical. The content category is different. End-to-end encryption means the service provider can’t read your messages. Client-side scanning, which has already proven to be a disaster in Germany, means your device reads them first, before encryption activates, and reports back. The encryption remains technically intact. The privacy it’s supposed to provide doesn’t. This is the same architecture that Apple proposed and then abandoned in 2021 after security researchers explained what it actually meant for private communication. The government hasn’t acknowledged that its photo-scanning proposal requires dismantling the privacy guarantee that makes encrypted messaging meaningful. It’s describing the outcome it wants, not the infrastructure required to deliver it. Photo scanning that flags “potentially nude” images requires training a model to identify what nudity looks like, running that model continuously on a device, and reporting matches somewhere. The system built for that purpose can be retrained or repurposed. A scanner that identifies nudity can be adjusted to flag political content, protest coordination, or anything else a future government decides warrants detection. The delegated powers structure means those future decisions don’t require new primary legislation. They require a minister, a statutory instrument, and limited parliamentary review. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s February 16 Substack noted that “private chats” are supposedly harming children without proposing to target them specifically. The official press release didn’t mention messaging apps at all. What Kendall said on television this week went further than either document. The consultation hasn’t launched yet. The powers to act on its findings, at speed, with reduced oversight, are already being written into law. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK Government Plans to Use Delegated Powers to Undermine Encryption and Expand Online Surveillance appeared first on Reclaim The Net.