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Former Golden Globes owner files $150M lawsuit against Penske Media over alleged fraud during purchase
Former Golden Globes owner files $150M lawsuit against Penske Media over alleged fraud during purchase
Virgin Mary statue defaced and set on fire at world-famous Catholic pilgrimage site: ‘Devil in a skirt’
Heart-pounding moment woman rescued from SoCal river after falling into raging rapid
Chinese University Reviewing Gene Editing Research As Family Discloses Daughter's Death
Authored by Melanie Sun via The Epoch Times,
A top-tier Chinese university said on July 26 that it is investigating gene editing research by one of its researchers following reports that scientists treated a 6-year-old girl as part of their research, who died during the unprecedented human trial.
Molecular model of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), in an undated file image. (Kateryna Kon/ShutterstockShanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, one of China's Ivy League-level institutions, said in a statement that it "attaches great importance to the matter and has established a special working group to conduct a comprehensive investigation."
New York-based nonprofit science watchdog Retraction Watch and peer-reviewed journal Science disclosed on July 23, on behalf of her grieving family, the death of the 6-year-old girl, who underwent an experimental gene editing procedure in a clinical trial conducted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University researchers at the affiliated Xinhua Hospital.
The girl had been diagnosed with global developmental delay in March 2023, her parents told Science. Genome sequencing later pointed toward a single-base mutation in her CHD3 gene as the cause. The rare mutation, which causes Snijders Blok-Campeau syndrome, impacted a vital protein essential for brain development, leaving her with challenges in her motor and language skills that became more evident when she turned 4.
The condition doesn't usually impact life expectancy, University of Montreal geneticist Philippe Campeau, who helped link the condition to the CHD3 gene, told Science. Symptoms can range from mild cases where the only obvious indication is a slightly enlarged head, to severe cases with intellectual deficits, seizures, and heart problems.
The girl, who died in March 2025 seven days into the world-first clinical gene editing trial, which was aimed at removing her condition, had milder symptoms.
Her parents told the watchdog that they were persuaded by the team of China-based researchers, led by neuroscientist Qiu Zilong, to fund an experimental procedure that would edit one nucleotide in the chromosomes of their daughter's treated cells, changing a T to a C in her mutated gene. The parents and relatives were asked to contribute $860,000 toward the experiment.
Following the girl's death, the scientists returned the funds, and the hospital was fined by local authorities, her parents told Science.
While the clinical trial was never published in a medical journal following the death, Science and Retraction Watch revealed that the researchers injected doses of two novel engineered viruses into the girl's spinal fluid. The method is currently the most common delivery system for gene-editing therapy. The trial was the first attempt to use this particular gene-editing method to treat a human.
The family told the watchdog that the cause of death was identified by the hospital's ethics committee as a severe immune response to the procedure. They also said that potential death was not explicitly listed as a risk in the procedure.
Qiu and his co-authors published related research in Nature in February 2026 that involved conducting the CHD3 gene editing procedure on mice. A peer reviewer of the study, Campeau told Science he did not notice the extent of changes made when the mouse study - whose original experiments were funded by the family - was resubmitted without the family's genetic data or a sentence recognizing their "participation and support."
He approved it for publication. The paper only mentioned that research "bridging the gap between preclinical research and clinical translation remains a significant challenge."
The child's parents told Science they submitted a formal request to the School of Medicine dean that the mice model paper be retracted "to prevent more children from suffering and our blood and tears flowing in vain." According to Science, the experiment was also conducted on monkeys, after which the ethics committee approved the family's clinical trial on Jan. 2, 2025. Other research, published Feb. 17, would soon show that monkeys receiving similar gene-editing therapies suffered moderate to severe liver damage.
The school said in its statement that it has "always attached great importance to research integrity and research norms, and resolutely opposes conducting medical scientific research in violation of research ethics."
"The medical school will take this matter seriously based on the investigation results," it said. "We appreciate the concern and oversight from all sectors of society."
A spokesperson from Nature told The Epoch Times by email, "We are looking into the matter carefully following an established process."
The same day that the family's report of their daughter's death was published by Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong was added to the Pentagon's list of research institutions deemed a threat to U.S. national security.
The civilian institution joins 87 other institutions in China that have been barred from projects involving U.S. federal funding and collaboration starting fiscal year 2026.
Scientists in China and around the world are vying to be the first to deliver safe gene-editing treatments, with most at this early stage focusing on treating life-threatening conditions.
Some scientists have had success in gene-editing treatments, including the most recent breakthrough last year by a Philadelphia team who used lipid nanoparticles delivered by intravenous infusion to treat a baby boy with a life-threatening liver disorder.
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DSA Platform Includes Abolishing Prisons, Supreme Court, And Presidency
The Democratic Socialists of America wants you to know exactly what it wants, and Megan Romer, the group's national co-chair, laid it out on national television without once reaching for a hedge word over the most radical ideas on the party platform.
The platform itself reads like a fever dream a committee wrote line by line. A 32-hour workweek with no reduction in pay and benefits, a federal jobs guarantee, canceling all student debt, and free college from pre-K through graduate school anchor the economic wish list, alongside healthcare that is universal, free, and includes gender-affirming care as a guaranteed right.
The platform calls for more publicly owned social housing, universal rent control, and a guaranteed lawyer for every tenant. On policing, the platform wants demilitarized police departments, defunded police unions, and money pulled out of police budgets entirely, all of which the DSA frames as a first step toward abolishing prisons and policing outright.
On foreign policy, the platform demands the defunding of the Department of War, the closure of overseas military bases, and an end to all foreign wars, and it pairs that with support for International Criminal Court prosecutions of what it deems American war criminals. As for Israel, the DSA calls for an end to all U.S. military and economic aid, prosecution of American and Israeli leaders over what many consider a genocide in Gaza, and recognition of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
The DSA is just as blunt about reimagining how the government works. The platform seeks statehood for Washington, D.C., self-determination for U.S. territories, and the abolition of both the Electoral College and the Senate, alongside an expanded House and a presidency and Supreme Court that answer to Congress instead of operating independently. The DSA wants to swap the two-party system for proportional representation and ranked-choice voting and pay for all of it through full public financing of every election.
And, to top it all off, the platform calls for slavery reparations.
Fox News host Shannon Bream ran through the DSA's platform position by position, true or false, no room to dodge. Romer never flinched. She confirmed that the Democratic Socialists of America's platform calls for abolishing the Senate, replacing the presidency and Supreme Court, eliminating ICE, ending borders while granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, defunding the Pentagon, abolishing prisons as a long-term goal, and placing most large corporations under government or public ownership. At every step, she answered without hesitation, affirming that each position accurately reflected the DSA's platform.
DSA Co-Chair Megan Romer confirms their platform includes:
- Abolishing the Senate, presidency, & Supreme Court
- Abolishing ICE, borders, & prisons
- Defunding the Pentagon
- Mass amnesty for illegals pic.twitter.com/rPQiT9HCXN
The problem this presents for Democrats is that the DSA is no longer a fringe group begging for a seat at the table. DSA candidates are running for Congress as Democrats and winning. Claire Valdez won her primary in New York's 7th congressional district. Darializa Avila Chevalier took the 13th. Brad Lander won the 10th. All three ran with DSA muscle behind them and the backing of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has become the group's biggest trophy. Melat Kiros knocked off longtime Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado's 1st District, a seat DeGette had held for decades. Chris Rabb won his primary in Pennsylvania's 3rd District. Janeese Lewis George won the mayoral primary in Washington, D.C.
Asked whether the Democratic Party ought to be nervous about where the DSA is dragging it, Romer flipped the question back on the party's leadership.
"The establishment Democrats should be worried about the voters and about what the voters think and about what the constituency thinks, and ... right now they have not been delivering, and our candidates are and have been, and it's resonating with voters," Romer replied. "I also have been told a lot of times by Democrats, don't vote third party. It's wasting your vote," the DSA co-chair continued. "So, we run on the Democratic ballot line where it makes sense. We run independents sometimes where that is a viable possibility, but it's a ballot line. And what matters is what the voters think. And the voters are overwhelmingly choosing our candidates."
Republicans are likely to use the DSA's radical platform as a cudgel against every Democrat on the ballot in this year's midterms. Establishment Democrats can keep insisting the DSA is a small, manageable faction, but the reality is that its candidates are winning real primaries as Democrats nationwide, and that leaves Republicans a simple play: put every Democrat opponent on the spot and force them to either embrace the DSA's agenda or publicly reject it.
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ICE Dismantles SIM Farms In Nationwide Operation
Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,
Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE's) Homeland Security Investigations carried out a nationwide operation between June 22 and July 10 that dismantled "SIM farms" run by transnational criminal organizations.
File photograph of a cell phone sim card at a press conference in Paris, France, on Feb. 25, 2015. Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty ImagesSIM (subscriber identity module) farms are systems containing large numbers of SIM cards from different wireless carriers, often housed in banks of cellphones, modems, or specialized devices known as SIM boxes.
These can be used to send and receive bulk messages or calls and often exploit voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology to do so. Initially developed for legitimate purposes, the technology has become prominent among organized fraudsters targeting mass audiences through phishing texts, scam calls, and fraudulent online accounts.
The recent nationwide operation, dubbed Operation Signal Break, "dismantled critical command-and-control infrastructure used to perpetrate large-scale telecommunications fraud across the United States," ICE said in a July 24 statement.
Authorities will now analyze the seized SIM data to identify victims and assess losses caused by such fraud. The illicit proceeds from the fraud, which are suspected to be linked to Chinese transnational criminal organizations and distribution networks, will be traced.
This is expected to support criminal indictments, sanctions targeting national and international infrastructure used in criminal activity, and asset seizures. SIM box operations are estimated to result in losses worth $15 million annually to Americans, according to ICE.
SIM box fraud, "also known as interconnect bypass fraud, is a scheme in which fraudsters reroute international calls to appear as local ones," a Nov. 8, 2025, post from IT services provider Synaptique said.
For instance, when a foreign national calls someone in the United States, the call is diverted through VOIP to a SIM box in America instead of passing through a legitimate international call gateway. The SIM box then uses one of the local SIM cards to place a new local call to the recipient.
SIM boxes can be used by criminals to communicate in a clandestine manner. Foreign rival states and intelligence agencies can also use SIM boxes in their operations.
In its statement, ICE said that Operation Signal Break mobilized specialized SIM Box Surge Teams composed of criminal analysts, special agents, and computer forensic analysts, surging them to California, Florida, Texas, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey to tackle SIM farm operations.
"I commend our special agents for their outstanding dedication and teamwork in dismantling illicit telecommunications infrastructure," Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Acting Executive Associate Director John Condon said in the statement.
"Their relentless pursuit of justice and commitment to protecting the integrity of our communications networks have made our communities safer and sends a clear message to those seeking to exploit our systems to defraud Americans."
Since 2024, the HSI has seized more than 1,900 SIM boxes, more than 500,000 SIM cards, and in excess of $700,000 in illicit proceeds. It has executed more than 116 federal criminal search warrants. In total, 68 SIM farms used to facilitate fraudulent texts and calls have been disrupted across 15 states. The probes have led to one criminal arrest and 11 administrative arrests.
In September 2025, the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) announced the dismantling of an "imminent telecommunications threat" in the New York tristate area that involved the use of thousands of SIM cards.
A network of electronic devices located throughout the region was used to conduct telecommunications-related threats against senior government officials. In total, more than 300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards were found across multiple sites.
In addition to enabling anonymous telephonic threats, the infrastructure could facilitate other crimes, such as enabling encrypted communications between criminal enterprises and threat actors, and disabling cell phone towers, according to the U.S. Secret Service.
"The potential for disruption to our country's telecommunications posed by this network of devices cannot be overstated," Secret Service Director Sean Curran said in the statement.
In an international case of SIM box criminal operations, Europol announced in October 2025 that it had taken down a cybercrime-as-a-service criminal network that provided SIM box services to criminals worldwide.
A server farm in New York City on Sept. 23, 2025. US Secret Service via Getty Images Tyler Durden Tue, 07/28/2026 - 21:45