Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,
A Massachusetts judge openly confessed in court that she knew she was rolling the dice by giving a light sentence to a career criminal with a 20-year rap sheet packed with violence, guns, and assault convictions.
She did it anyway. Now Tyler Brown is back in custody after opening fire with 50 to 60 rounds on a busy Cambridge roadway, critically injuring two innocent drivers.
The shocking audio, released this week, comes straight from Brown’s 2020 sentencing hearing after he fired 13 rounds at Boston police officers. Prosecutors had pushed for 10 to 12 years behind bars. The judge gave him just five. He walked out on parole in March 2025.
In the newly surfaced clip shared on X, the judge tells Brown directly:
“I do realize I’m kind of taking a chance on you — when people stand up, police, experienced police officers, experienced probation officers, and they tell me this guy is a danger to the community.”
She went on to acknowledge she could not predict the future but was still willing to release him, saying she hoped her “intuitions” would prove correct and that Brown would not “endanger other peoples’ lives as you have in the past.”
NEW audio from the judge who released Cambridge gunman Tyler Brown
🚨 This audio is INSANE. The judge says she has been advised by experienced officers how dangerous he is but she’s ignoring them
In 2020, Tyler Brown fired on police officers and only got 5 years. He has a 20… pic.twitter.com/sOlw4IghHP
Brown’s record at the time already spanned two decades and included violence against both police and civilians, firearms offenses, drugs, assault with a dangerous weapon, a 2014 stabbing, and an armed robbery in Michigan. He was on probation when he shot at officers in 2020.
Yet the judge — identified as Janet Sanders — chose leniency over the unanimous warnings from law enforcement professionals on the front lines.
Earlier this week, Brown unleashed chaos on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, spraying vehicles stuck in traffic with heavy gunfire. A state trooper and an armed civilian returned fire, stopping the rampage and wounding Brown before he could kill anyone else.
This is the predictable outcome of a justice system that treats violent repeat offenders as candidates for redemption experiments while law-abiding citizens bear the consequences.
Blue-state judges keep betting against public safety, and Americans keep paying with their lives and security.
Many have responded to call for judges like this to be charged as accessories when they go lenient on violent career criminals.
The pattern is impossible to ignore. Soft-on-crime policies, activist judges, and revolving-door “justice” have turned too many American cities into danger zones.
This is not compassion. It is recklessness with other people’s lives. Real justice means keeping predators off the streets for the full measure of their sentences — no early releases, no “chances,” no crystal-ball prayers from the bench.
Strong leadership has always understood this basic truth: protect the law-abiding first. Until judges face real accountability for endangering the public they swore to serve, these tragedies will keep repeating. The audio makes it crystal clear — the warnings were there. The judge just chose to ignore them.
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Tyler Durden Fri, 05/15/2026 - 19:15Harvard faculty begin voting Tuesday on what may be the most aggressive effort in decades to curb grade inflation, a long-running issue that has also drawn attention from the White House as it pushes broader higher-ed reforms, according to Bloomberg.
The proposal would cap A grades in undergraduate classes at 20% of students, plus four additional students. The move comes after A grades surged at Harvard: about 60% of grades were A’s in the 2024–25 academic year, more than double the rate in 2006. After administrators pushed for stricter grading last fall, that number dropped to 53%. Faculty have one week to vote, with results expected May 20.
Supporters say grade inflation has made academic distinctions less meaningful. Last year, Harvard seniors needed a 3.989 GPA to earn summa cum laude, and an award traditionally given to one student ended in a 54-way tie. As professor Jason Furman said, “It’s fundamentally dishonest to give the best students in the class the same grade as someone in the bottom half.”
Bloomberg writes that students have strongly opposed the plan, arguing it would increase stress, discourage academic risk-taking, and push students toward easier courses. Nearly 85% of undergraduates surveyed by The Harvard Crimson opposed the proposal. Student leader Caleb Thompson said “people really are against this,” while senior Summer Tan said students are already seeking easier classes instead of more challenging ones.
Some faculty members agree. Scott Duke Kominers warned the policy could discourage ambitious students and make Harvard less attractive to top applicants.
Harvard’s decision could influence other elite schools. Yale recently considered an even stricter proposal for a campus-wide average GPA of 3.0. Earlier efforts at Princeton and Wellesley initially reduced top grades but were eventually reversed after student backlash.
Critics argue schools hesitate to grade more strictly because students could be disadvantaged if peer institutions do not follow. Still, supporters believe Harvard’s prestige could set off broader reform.
If approved, the policy would take effect in fall 2027. Faculty are also voting on allowing some courses to opt out through a satisfactory/unsatisfactory grading system and on replacing GPA with percentile rank for academic honors.
Tyler Durden Fri, 05/15/2026 - 18:50Authored by Beige Luciano-Adams via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
OAKLAND, Calif.—After nearly three weeks of presented evidence, an Oakland jury on May 14 heard final arguments in a high-stakes legal battle that could have profound impacts on the race for artificial intelligence.
In a courtroom sketch, Sam Altman listens as OpenAI President Greg Brockman testifies during Elon Musk's lawsuit trial over OpenAI's for-profit conversion, at a federal courthouse in Oakland, Calif., on May 4, 2026. Vicki Behringer/ReutersTech moguls Elon Musk and Sam Altman, once friends and partners in a fledgling AI startup with big dreams and a noble mission, are nearing the climax of a bitter feud over the future of an $852 billion company.
Despite a judicial ban on testimony related to AI-induced “extinction” scenarios, references to speculative risks still surfaced during the Oakland courtroom proceedings, appeared in discussions around “risk” and “safety.” Vague promises about the future benefits of an unrealized technology were also touched upon.
On the stand, Tesla CEO Musk told the court, “We don’t want to have a Terminator outcome,” suggesting humanity would be better off with a “Star Trek” future written by Gene Roddenberry, rather than something from the mind of James Cameron.
Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015 with Altman, President Greg Brockman, and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. At the time, both Musk and Altman expressed grave concerns about the unregulated advancement of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—a hypothetical point at which the machines “outsmart” humans and operate autonomously.
Those concerns, Musk testified, were the express motivation for founding OpenAI: open-source to prevent consolidation of power, and philanthropic to offset the profit-driven AI race.
He sued Altman and Brockman in 2024, alleging they bilked him out of $38 million in donations, then restructured as a for-profit corporation by exclusively licensing their flagship product, ChatGPT, to Microsoft—and in doing so, betrayed their founding mission.
OpenAI and Microsoft deny the allegations, arguing Musk abandoned the company in 2018 to start his own for-profit competitor, xAI, when other founders rejected his bid to take full control of the operation.
Alongside the “preponderance” of evidence that both sides say supports their claims, the trial was just as focused on the two men’s reputations and characters.
“Sam Altman’s credibility is directly at issue in this case,” Steven Molo, an attorney for Musk, said in his closing statement. “The defendants absolutely need you to believe Sam Altman. If you cannot trust him ... they do not win.”
Molo questioned Altman earlier this week over a list of employees and colleagues who, both on and off the record, have characterized him as dishonest and opportunistic.
OpenAI attorneys dismissed the tactic as “character assassination.”
Sarah Eddy, an attorney for OpenAI, countered, “Mr. Molo says Sam Altman can’t be trusted, but Mr. Musk is the one whose testimony is contradicted by every other witness and all the documents.”
Altman, Brockman, and others cast Musk as a detached outsider who contributed little if any sweat equity, had fraught relationships with colleagues, and attempted to poach OpenAI’s employees for his other companies.
“The claim is that the Midas touch of Elon Musk made OpenAI what it is today,” William Savitt, an attorney for OpenAI, said in closing arguments.
“Elon, Elon, Elon. ‘It was all me.’ Mr. Musk wants all that credit, but he hasn’t earned [it].
“This requires a touch that he doesn’t have. This is not a bulldozer. ... To succeed in AI, as it turns out, all Mr. Musk can do is come to court.”
Savitt pointed out Musk wasn’t present for closing arguments, having jetted off to China earlier in the week with President Donald Trump.
Gesturing at Altman and Brockman, he said: “My clients are here because they care a lot about it. Mr. Musk came to this court for exactly one witness—Mr. Musk. Now he’s in parts unknown.”
Musk, according to the Forbes Billionaire Index, is the wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of around $826 billion. Brockman received equity in the OpenAI corporation worth around $30 billion, and Altman’s net worth is around $3.5 billion.
When Brockman took the stand last week, Molo accused him of plotting to use OpenAI to become a billionaire.
“You had a fiduciary duty [to the nonprofit],” the attorney said. “You took the assets from the nonprofit, you moved them into the for-profit to create this money-making machine that resulted in you having $30 billion.”
Brockman said such was a “deep mischaracterization.” Personal diary entries from late 2017 in which he muses about profits, and about how it would be “morally bankrupt” to “steal the nonprofit” from Musk, he said, were expressions of frustration.
Jurors heard from a parade of Silicon Valley insiders, including all four founders, and from dueling experts on AI safety, nonprofits, business law, and forensic accounting. They watched lawyers pick through reams of internal documents, analyzing complex corporate and financial histories, while private diaries, email, and text threads offered insight on the parties’ underlying motivations and shifting alliances.
“Everyone here has rights, even really rich guys like Elon Musk,” Molo said. “His is a claim that comes from a very deep place inside him, from his passion for this issue.”
During his own testimony, Musk often told the court, “You can’t just steal a charity.”
When his time on the stand came, Altman clapped back, “No, you can’t steal it, but Mr. Musk did try to kill it.”
Altman said on Tuesday that Musk contributed only 28 percent of the nonprofit’s funding from 2015 to 2020, and failed to come through on a $1 billion pledge, leaving the startup with few options.
OpenAI argues its nonprofit foundation is now one of the “best-resourced” in the world, with an equity stake in the company’s for-profit corporation approaching $200 billion—a direct result of $13 billion worth of investments from Microsoft and a 2025 restructure sanctioned by California and Delaware attorneys general.
The details of OpenAI’s journey from a scrappy, underfunded nonprofit to one of the most powerful and valuable AI companies are highly contested. In addition to the power struggle with Musk in 2017 and 2018, it involves a messy 2023 governance shakeup in which Altman and Brockman were briefly ousted and Microsoft was deeply entangled.
By 2017, all parties had agreed they would need vastly more capital and computing power to compete with AI giants such as Google. Various ideas were floated, debated, and discarded—including rolling OpenAI into Tesla and even turning to cryptocurrency. Ultimately, under Altman’s leadership, the company created a for-profit subsidiary in 2018 and, in 2019, partnered with Microsoft. In 2025, OpenAI restructured as a public benefit corporation, which its leaders say remains under the control of the foundation and loyal to the original mission.
The foundation holds an approximately 27 percent equity stake in the corporation; Microsoft owns a 26 percent stake.
Molo argued on Thursday that Microsoft’s investment breached the charitable trust Musk created by enriching its investors and “insiders” at the expense of the nonprofit, and failing to open-source the technology, prioritize AI safety, or follow nonprofit custom and practice.
The $13 billion Microsoft has invested since 2019 dwarfed charitable contributions and weakened OpenAI in its negotiating position with Microsoft, Molo said, resulting in a company focused on commercializing AI, with a gutted charity that does little more than sanitize its reputation.
As for Microsoft, Molo said the company was aware of what OpenAI was doing “every step of the way, they helped them violate their nonprofit mission, that’s aiding and abetting pure and simple.”
OpenAI and Microsoft argued there was never any charitable trust to breach.
Eddy, the OpenAI attorney, argued there were never any strings attached to Musk’s donations to OpenAI, and that he failed to demonstrate that he “properly manifested a specific intent” to devote the trust to a specific purpose, his $38 million in donations going instead to generally further the mission of the nonprofit.
“The specific purposes cannot just be in his head,” Eddy said.
Absent evidence proving this intent and specificity, she said, the plaintiff had resorted to implication and inference.
“It’s all made up,” she said.
As Musk told it, OpenAI’s mission was clear.
“I specifically came up with the idea, the name, recruited key people, taught [them] everything I know, provided the original funding. ... It was specifically for a charity that did not benefit any individual person. I could’ve started it as a for-profit, and I chose not to,” Musk said.
He is asking that Altman and Brockman be removed from their leadership positions at OpenAI, and that more than $100 billion be returned to the nonprofit foundation.
In addition to Musk’s three claims—breach of charitable trust, restitution based on unjust enrichment, and, against Microsoft, aiding and abetting a breach of a charitable trust—jurors will decide whether those claims are barred by a statute of limitations.
The jury will begin deliberations on Monday at 8:30 am.
Tyler Durden Fri, 05/15/2026 - 18:25