Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Indiana has suspended its gas sales tax for 30 days as prices keep rising amid the United States’ war with Iran.

Indiana Gov. Mike Braun (C) speaks during a press conference in Gary, Ind., on Oct. 30, 2025. Jamie Kelter Davis/Getty Images

Gov. Mike Braun announced the suspension on April 8.

“I am declaring a gas tax holiday to give Hoosiers relief from the pain at the pump from high gas prices,” Braun said in a statement. “Affordability is my top priority.”

Indiana’s state gas sales tax, also known as its gasoline use tax, is 7 percent. A separate excise tax of $0.36 cents a gallon is not affected by the suspension.

The 30-day reprieve could be extended, Braun’s office said.

Indiana officials are going to be “patrolling the pumps” to make sure that savings from the gas tax suspension go to Indiana residents, rather than retailers.

Braun also said the Indiana attorney general should enforce regulations prohibiting retailer price gouging.

“With the suspension of Indiana’s gas tax for the next 30 days, my office will closely monitor fuel prices to guard against any potential price gouging,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said in a statement.

The United States attacked Iran in February, sending the price of oil soaring.

On April 7, Iran and the United States agreed to a two-week cease-fire.

Oil prices dropped below $100 a barrel in the wake of the cease-fire agreement.

The average price per gallon in Indiana on Wednesday was $4.13, slightly lower than the $4.16 nationwide, according to the American Automobile Association.

The average in Indiana a week ago was $3.96, and the average a month ago was $3.46.

“Many Americans have been concerned to see the recent rise in gasoline prices here at home,” President Donald Trump said in a speech on April 1. “This short-term increase has been entirely the result of the Iranian regime launching deranged terror attacks against commercial oil tankers and neighboring countries that have nothing to do with the conflict.”

Georgia’s governor was the first in the nation to suspend his state’s gas tax. Gov. Brian Kemp on March 20 signed a bill suspending the state’s gas tax for 60 days.

Georgia’s tax is typically 33.3 cents per gallon.

Kemp also signed a bill that authorized $1.2 billion in income tax refunds.

“Hardworking Georgians know best how to spend their money, not the government,” he said in a statement. “That’s why I’m proud to sign these bills and, along with the General Assembly, deliver meaningful tax relief on top of the other measures we’ve taken in recent years. Because we budget conservatively, we can take steps like these that actually deliver on affordability issues for families in our state.”

Authored by William L. Anderson via MisesInstitute,

If there is a mantra among progressive American political and media elites, it would be “our democracy,” usually preceded by what they believe to be a threat from the Right. For example, progressives deemed the recent reversal of Roe “a threat to our democracy” because it removed laws regulating abortion from Supreme Court jurisdiction and returned the issue to democratically elected legislatures.

It would seem inconsistent to invoke the democratic electoral process to deal with a contentious issue like abortion, but progressives are nothing if not inconsistent. But even in challenging logic on political issues, progressives at least try to stick to the language of democracy, and especially the language of “our democracy.”

However, occasionally progressive elites demonstrate their contempt for democracy because they realize that the democratic process is not going to have the desired progressive results because voters and their representatives do not want to knowingly harm themselves.

Recently, the New York Times, in a progressive moment of truth, reacted to the US Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, in which the court ruled that because carbon dioxide is not among the pollutants regulated by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, the Environmental Protection Agency could not enforce CO2 emissions rules for electric power plants.

In its 6–3 ruling, the SCOTUS indicated that Congress was free to pass legislation to regulate carbon dioxide but that the EPA was not free to simply add it to its list of regulated power plant emissions on its own. In other words, the high court declared that democratically elected members of the US House and Senate are free to write (and pass) any anti–climate change legislation they choose. This is what the ancients once called democracy.

Not surprisingly, the NYT went ballistic, and in so doing exposed the progressive mentality, with its affinity for rule by “experts.” Declared the newspaper’s editorial board:

Thursday’s ruling also has consequences far beyond environmental regulation. It threatens the ability of federal agencies to issue rules of any kind, including the regulations that ensure the safety of food, medicines and other consumer products, that protect workers from injuries and that prevent financial panics.

The ruling did no such thing. Instead, the court said that federal regulatory agencies are not free to create and enforce rules outside of their statutory authority. The EPA had simply declared itself the official power plant CO2 emissions regulator under the Obama administration despite the fact that Democrats had a supermajority in the US Senate and a huge majority in the House and theoretically could have passed a law giving new regulatory powers to the EPA. That Congress did not do so is instructive.

In other words, this was an extralegal power grab but one approved by elites because, well, elites know more than everyone else. The NYT editorial continued:

In 1984, an earlier generation of conservative Supreme Court justices formalized a doctrine of deference to the judgment of regulatory agencies, modestly concluding that judges were neither experts nor elected officials, and therefore ought to leave such decisions in other hands. In Thursday’s decision, the court asserted that the policy of deference applies only to supposedly unimportant regulations. When it comes to “major questions” of regulatory policy, the court said, it would not hesitate to second-guess regulators—and to strike rules that it decided did not have a clear congressional warrant.

The decision amounts to a warning shot across the bow of the administrative state. The court’s current conservative majority, engaged in a counterrevolution against the norms of American society, is seeking to curtail the efforts of federal regulators to protect the public’s health and safety. The court already invoked a similar logic during the Covid pandemic to strike down workplace Covid testing requirements and a federal moratorium on evictions. And by refraining from defining a threshold for what constitutes a “major question,” the court is leaving a sword hanging over every new rule. (emphasis mine)

The “administrative state,” of course, is anything but democratic; it is autocratic to the core. For all of their professed love for democracy, progressives have long demanded rule by experts, or at least rule by “experts” that meet progressive approval. As I pointed out last year, when actual scientists studied the effects of so-called acid rain and concluded that it was not causing lake and river acidification, progressives in the media, as well as EPA administrators, immediately tried to destroy the careers of scientists failing to echo the party line. Not surprisingly, one of the loudest antiscience voices in the acid rain affair was the New York Times.

Furthermore, for all the “experts know best” rhetoric in the NYT editorial, there is no proof that the administrative state governs as effectively as democracy, which elites pretend to love. The “experts” at the Federal Reserve believed they could substitute trillions of printed dollars for actual production of goods without creating monetary chaos. In western forests, the “experts” at the US Forest Service have had fire suppression policies in place for more than a century, and the result has been that what were once mere forest fires have become destructive conflagrations that burn so hot that they often destroy the scorched soil’s ability to generate postfire growth.

The ”experts” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed policies that precipitated massive job losses, caused unnecessary premature death from ailments other than covid-19, and still failed to promote adequate information about the virus and its origins. Education “experts” have created one educational crisis after another, and so on. Rule by experts—the administrative state—has caused destruction whenever it is invoked, yet the editors at the “newspaper of record” have failed to notice.

Instead, they proclaim eternal fealty to what only can be called a failed experiment in governance, not to mention that it is antidemocratic. Yet, the NYT editors cannot keep from claiming loyalty to both forms of governance, even when they contradict one another:

Congress has decided, and with good reason, that regulatory agencies staffed by experts are the best available mechanism for a representative democracy to make decisions in areas of technical complexity. The E.P.A. is the entity that Congress relies upon to figure out how clean the air should be, and how to get there. Asserting that it lacks the power to perform its basic responsibilities is simply sabotage.

There is much to dissect in those words, but suffice it to say that to assume that EPA decision makers have the kind of knowledge and expertise implied in that editorial is to foolishly demonstrate faith in something that inevitably fails. Far from being near-omniscient sages of science, the bureaucrats making life-altering decisions at the EPA are people who bear no costs if they impose unnecessary burdens on the lives of ordinary people but who also find that the more draconian their edicts, the greater the praise from environmental interest groups and, of course, the New York Times. What possibly could go wrong?

The Democratic kings and queens in the one-party–ruled state of Maryland are absolutely panicking, something that should not be happening in a deep-blue state, as their crown jewel, left-wing Gov. Wes Moore, a prospective Democratic presidential candidate, has seen polling data implode. High taxes, surging power bills, a state budget crisis, poor leadership, and even questions about honesty have sparked voter backlash on both sides of the political aisle. 

In the battle for narrative control, Moore’s office and the Democratic Party’s propaganda machine have launched a preemptive campaign against The Baltimore Sun’s forthcoming investigative series, which is expected to release an exposé on Moore. 

“The Baltimore Sun used to be our paper of record,” Moore recently told MS NOW host Jen Psaki, a former White House press secretary who made a career at covering up Biden’s mental decline. “It’s now become the paper of the right wing.”

Democrats have been upset that, in deep-blue Baltimore and across the state, right-leaning Sinclair executive chairman David Smith now owns the paper. As a result, The Sun has shifted from promoting left-wing conspiracies and all things DEI to more balanced, center-right content.

The loss of narrative power at The Sun is what truly irritates Democratic leadership in the state, as their inability to control the narrative has caused Moore’s polling numbers to drop significantly.

“Democrats sure are putting in a lot of work to discredit a series before it’s even started running. That alone should raise a question: why?” Candy Woodall, former national political reporter at USA Today, now managing editor of Spotlight on Maryland, a local investigative reporting collaboration of WBFF45 (owned by Sinclair), wrote on X. 

Woodall Continued: 

In January, I was warned directly that if Spotlight continued its investigation into Gov. Wes Moore’s military records—and one of his superiors—that his office would send files to every media reporter to try and discredit us.

We saw the same playbook in 2022 when a FOX45 reporter asked why Moore allowed claims that he had received a Bronze Star that he didn’t have at the time. His team accused the reporter and media outlet of bias and a smear campaign. Two years later, after the New York Times wrote about the Bronze Star Moore hadn’t received, the narrative changed, and the governor said it was “an honest mistake.” In an August 2024 statement on his military record, Moore acknowledged he knew before leaving Afghanistan that he had not received the award.

Spotlight’s reporting digs deeper into Moore’s military records and more, and our investigative series will begin to publish soon. This is standard journalism to scrutinize the words and records of elected officials and candidates who hold positions of power and public trust. Our loyalty is to the Maryland public we serve — not any public official or political party.

Our work has been fair. We’ve sent hundreds of questions. Most have gone unanswered. We’ve offered multiple sit-down interviews with the governor and his staff. They have declined repeated requests.

Moore’s office hasn’t seen a word of this series yet, but the governor and his communications staff are actively campaigning and peddling a narrative to smear it. In fact, his director of media strategy said this week of us, “They don’t deserve to be treated like a news outlet and nothing that comes out of Sinclair should be taken seriously.” They continued this effort last night in an interview on MSNOW with Jen Psaki, Biden’s former press secretary.

The real questions you should be asking right now: Why don’t they want you to read the series? What is it they don’t want you to know? And if we’re so wrong about everything, why not just release the records and prove it?

If you want to know more, keep reading The Baltimore Sun, a 200-year-old newspaper that has survived many governors.

Democrats sure are putting in a lot of work to discredit a series before it’s even started running. That alone should raise a question: why?

In January, I was warned directly that if Spotlight continued its investigation into Gov. Wes Moore’s military records—and one of his… https://t.co/5e0TF84YIa

— Candy Woodall (@candynotcandace) April 8, 2026

After The New York Times reported in 2024 that Moore had falsely claimed to have received a Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan, a controversy over his military record intensified. Spotlight on Maryland later picked up the investigative baton at the local level.

Moore’s team responded aggressively on X, in what appeared to be a bid to discredit the reporters – even dismissing one Fox Baltimore reporter as “not a journalist.”

You’re not a journalist.

You’re a former Republican party official working at the direction of your Trump supporting boss. https://t.co/CLzLzHHsb3

— Ammar Moussa (@ammarmufasa) April 8, 2026

Democrats have reason to worry about any major forthcoming exposé on Moore. His Polymarket odds of becoming the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential nominee currently sit at just 1%.

Will Wes Moore win the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination?
Yes 1% · No 99%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

The real issue for Democrats is that Smith of Sinclair is single-handedly chipping away at their core abilities to run counter-narratives, which has eroded Moore’s odds of leapfrogging from the financially troubled state to the White House.

In recent weeks, Moore was greeted by a stadium full of boos during Orioles Opening Day in Baltimore City, a major stronghold for progressives. This should never be happening to a left-wing governor in the state.

Gov. Wes Moore was booed by the crowd ahead of the Orioles home opener on Thursday. https://t.co/KdJaF2jx68 pic.twitter.com/pA0p6G2z8m

— FOX Baltimore (@FOXBaltimore) March 26, 2026

But it is his sheer incompetence in serving as proper stewards of the state and prioritizing DEI, woke, illegal aliens, over Marylanders that has sparked voter backlash. Stuff like this:

Maryland Delegate Kathy Szeliga (R) EMBARESSES Democrats who want to force “appropriately sized tampons” into men’s bathrooms.

Szeliga: “I’ve never heard of such a thing… what do you consider appropriate???”pic.twitter.com/jjasHIMtRE https://t.co/gsjXEzXVre

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 24, 2026

Moore smiling with far-left radical Alex Soros. 

Only a matter of time before the Moore team taps the Soros nonprofit team for help. Unless they already have… 

Authored by Jijo Malayil via Interesting Engineering,

Chinese robotics firm UniX AI has unveiled Panther, touted as the world’s first service humanoid robot to enter real household deployment.

UniX AI has commenced global deliveries of Panther, bringing service humanoid robots into real homes.UniX AI

Panther is a third-generation full-size wheeled dual-arm humanoid robot, and UniX AI has commenced global deliveries.

The robot stands about 5 feet 3 inches tall, weighs around 176 pounds (80 kilograms), and operates for 8 to 16 hours on a single charge.

According to the Suzhou-based firm, its design focuses on usability and reliable performance in complex indoor environments, marking a significant step toward bringing general-purpose humanoid robots into everyday settings.

Stable service robot

Panther is a wheeled dual-arm humanoid robot designed for real-world deployment across home, commercial, and industrial settings – and is equipped with an omnidirectional, four-wheel-steering, four-wheel-drive (4WS+4WD) chassis, enabling agile movement and stable operation in complex indoor environments. According to the UniX AI, the wheeled architecture marks a departure from the more common legged humanoid approach, which is combined with general-purpose AI models, offering improved efficiency and practicality for deployment.

According to UniX AI, the robot features 34 high-degree-of-freedom joints, including the world’s first mass-produced 8-DoF bionic arms and adaptive intelligent grippers, allowing precise and flexible manipulation.

Furthermore, it is equipped with cameras, sensors, and audio input systems that support object recognition, indoor navigation, and interaction with people. The system is designed to perform multi-step tasks rather than isolated actions, allowing it to execute complete sequences of activities.

“With our integrated trinity of algorithms, hardware, and applications, we have already scaled from lab validation to mass delivery, and from local deployment to global expansion,” said Fred Yang, Founder and CEO of UniX AI, in a statement.

Multi-task humanoid

In demonstrations and early deployments, the robot has shown the ability to handle a variety of domestic tasks. These include waking users, preparing breakfast, cleaning rooms, organizing household items, and operating certain appliances. It can also sort and move objects as part of routine household workflows.

The robot is built to manage continuous task sequences efficiently. For example, it can wake a user in the morning, prepare a meal, clean the kitchen afterward, and organize the living space, demonstrating coordinated, multi-step task execution in real-world home environments.

Panther, evolved from the Wanda 2.0 platform, introduces an 80 cm vertical lift of the upper body, enabling both elevated reach and ground-level operation. It operates on an upgraded 48V power platform, delivering higher output along with improved stability for high-speed control and dynamic movements.

Panther is powered by UniX AI’s integrated technology stack. UniFlex enables efficient cross-scenario task generalization and imitation learning. UniTouch combines visuo-tactile multimodal models to improve precision handling and interactive capabilities with enhanced stability. UniCortex supports long-term task planning, enabling the robot to execute complex, multi-step operations seamlessly.

According to the firm, the system is designed for a wide range of real-world applications. These include commercial services such as hotels, reception, retail, and guided tours; home and personal uses like household tasks, elderly care, and companionship; and public or industrial roles including security patrols, research, and education.

Experts say household robots still face hurdles, including cluttered environments, varied lighting, and handling soft objects. Challenges in navigation, appliance interaction, battery life, cost, safety, and reliability remain. However, robots performing multiple domestic tasks indicate that fully functional home assistants managing daily chores are gradually moving closer to reality.

Buried in the Department of War’s Fiscal Year 2027 procurement request is a massive increase for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), a clear acknowledgment that ongoing conflicts across Eurasia have underscored one hard lesson: cheap kamikaze drones can impose outsized costs on traditional militaries. The substantial surge in the budget request also signals growing urgency within the DoW to field these drones at scale.

The defense and aerospace news publication Inside Defense was the first to report on the DoW’s massive budget request for the autonomous drone warfare group. The budget would skyrocket from $225 million this year to potentially $54.6 billion next year:

The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2027 budget request seeks a massive expansion of the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, setting a $54.6 billion budget for the relatively obscure team — a jaw-dropping increase over the $225 million the effort received in FY-26, signaling a major emphasis on autonomous drones across the military services.

The dramatic surge in requested funding represents one of the most substantial allocations outside the traditional service accounts, reflecting the Pentagon’s broader commitment to autonomous warfare capabilities, which have….

Details surrounding DAWG appear to center on scaling autonomous warfare capabilities, especially drones and related systems, though the effort remains little known publicly.

Another picture of a Starlink mounted on a Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System (LUCAS) drone https://t.co/SDVp4gZjCK pic.twitter.com/LyxwcL5fso

— Robin (@xdNiBoR) December 4, 2025

Related:

US Launched Kamikaze Drones Against Iran, Reflecting Lessons Learned From Ukraine

The sheer size of the request – a 243-fold increase – signals a much broader, military-wide push in the coming years to institutionalize autonomous weapons. This comes amid lessons learned not only from the Russia-Ukraine war, but also from the current US-Iran conflict, where inexpensive one-way Iranian attack drones have wreaked havoc on US military bases, Gulf energy assets, and civilian infrastructure such as data centers and water desalination plants.

We also suspect there will be a major push to develop and field low-cost interceptor solutions to counter these inexpensive drones, rather than relying on multimillion-dollar missiles. We have already highlighted this theme here.

Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has temporarily suspended its employer contributions to a government-wide pension plan after warning Congress that, without changes, it could run out of cash within the next year.

On Thursday, USPS told the Office of Personnel Management—the federal government’s human resource division—that it would pause its biweekly employer contributions to the Federal Employees Retirement System, or FERS.

The move is expected to conserve about $2.5 billion through Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year, according to USPS. The mail agency typically pays about $200 million every other week into the plan.

USPS Chief Financial Officer Luke Grossmann said the temporary withholding would have no “immediate detrimental impact” on current or future retirees. He said the agency would continue forwarding employees’ own FERS contributions, as well as all regularly scheduled payments to the Thrift Savings Plan, another retirement program for federal workers.

“The risk to the Postal Service and the American public from insufficient liquidity for postal operations dramatically outweighs any longer-term risk to the pension funds from not making the currently due payments,” Grossmann said.

Although USPS is generally required by law to make the payments, the Postal Regulatory Commission granted the agency a waiver that gives it flexibility to catch up later.

The cash-saving measure comes as postal officials warn Congress of the agency’s deteriorating finances. At a March 17 hearing, Postmaster General David Steiner told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that USPS could become unable to continue delivering mail by February 2027 if it keeps paying all of its bills on time under the current structure.

“Less than a year from now, the Postal Service will be unable to deliver the mail if we maintain the status quo,” he said in his testimony.

According to Steiner, USPS has already had to rely on extraordinary cash-conservation measures, and he warned that lawmakers might have to consider steps such as reducing delivery frequency from six days a week to five or fewer. He also floated the idea of hiking first-class stamp prices to as high as 95 cents.

“At 78 cents, the U.S. First-Class Stamp is the lowest-priced in the industrialized world,” Steiner told lawmakers at the hearing.

“If we were to change the stamp price to 90 to 95 cents, which is still less than half of the cost of most foreign posts, that would largely solve our controllable loss.”

USPS has struggled financially for years as first-class mail volumes continue to decline and operating costs rise. According to a report published in March by U.S. Government Accountability Office, it has lost money every fiscal year but one since 2007, accumulating a staggering $118 billion in net losses over that time.

The agency has also turned to temporary price hikes to help cover operation costs. The Postal Regulatory Commission has approved an 8 percent temporary increase on priority mail and package prices beginning April 26 and lasting through Jan. 17, 2027.

Authored by Janice Hisle via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Seven years after Faye Bernstein first blew the whistle on waste, fraud, and abuse concerns, “nothing is changing” at the Minnesota Department of Human Services, she told lawmakers during an April 7 hearing at the state Capitol in St. Paul.

Faye Bernstein, a whistleblower who works for the Minnesota Department of Human Services, testifies before the state’s Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Policy Committee in St. Paul, Minn., on April 7, 2026. Screenshot via The Epoch Times/The Minnesota House of Representatives’ video livestream

As a 20-year employee who still works for the department while facing alleged demotion and retaliation over her complaints, “I still see a reckless disregard for compliance,” she told the state’s Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Policy Committee.

Bernstein, a former compliance officer at the agency that faces heightened national scrutiny over massive fraud scandals, gave an example supporting her opinion. She said she learned that, about a year ago, “someone had falsified the audit tracker,” an important internal record that helps workers ensure they remedy problems identified in audits.

“When I heard that, I thought, ‘My gosh, somebody’s getting fired for that!’” Bernstein said; instead, managers excused the falsification, indicating “that person had simply made a mistake, that maybe she didn’t understand instructions,” she said.

“The lackadaisical attitude we have about even keeping track of our findings will partially explain” why some of those same findings recurred in an audit released in January, she said. The audit noted some of the same issues that Bernstein reported in 2019.

After Bernstein’s testimony, the agency’s commissioner, Shireen Gandhi, testified. She pledged to “build a culture of compliance,” and to ensure that all staff members understand their roles and “have the knowledge, skills, and authority to fulfill those responsibilities.”

State Rep. Isaac Schultz, a Republican who serves on the anti-fraud committee, told Gandhi:  “I hope that more people [like Bernstein] continue to shine light on what’s going on inside of your department, because I have a really hard time trusting what leadership is saying to us.”

Another committee member, Democratic state Rep. Steve Elkins, gave Gandhi credit for owning up to problems that the audit revealed.

Having been elected in 2018, Elkins has read quite a few audits. Each one includes a response from the agency that was audited. Typically, “that letter is deflecting, denying, minimizing,” he said.

“This is the first time … where the head of the agency stepped up and said almost everything in the report was accurate, and this is what we’re going to do about it, and this is when we’re going to have it done, and this is the person who’s responsible for getting it done,” Elkins said. “And I think that that’s a remarkable turnaround.”

Shireen Gandhi, commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Human Services, answers questions at a meeting of the state’s Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Policy Committee in St. Paul, Minn., on April 7, 2026. Screenshot via The Epoch Times/The Minnesota House of Representatives’ video livestream

Lawmaker Urges: ‘Draw a Line in the Sand’

Minnesota’s government-program fraud dating to 2018 could reach $9 billion or more, prosecutors have said. Fraud concerns have expanded nationwide; the national leader may turn out to be California, where scammers may have bilked taxpayers out of “hundreds of billions” of dollars, a federal prosecutor said.

Many of Minnesota’s still-emerging fraud scandals involve programs that are now under Gandhi’s purview. She has worked for the agency since 2017 and has headed it since last year; Gov. Tim Walz made her temporary appointment permanent earlier this year.

State Rep. Kristin Robbins, a Republican who chairs the fraud-prevention committee, told Gandhi: “The most important thing is to make sure we’re being good stewards of taxpayer money.”

“As Ms. Bernstein said, we’ve been talking about this for years … so we have to draw a line in the sand and say: ‘We are not going to allow this to continue anymore,’” Robbins said.

Robbins and other committee members repeatedly asked Gandhi about holding people accountable when procedures aren’t followed or when records are falsified; the latest audit revealed that employees created new records—and backdated them—in the midst of the auditors’ probe.

“I was shocked to hear this information,” Gandhi told the committee, calling any such fabrications “absolutely unacceptable.” However, Gandhi said state law prohibits her from revealing details of the internal investigation into the falsified records.

When Robbins inquired further, Gandhi said information was presented to state authorities for possible criminal charges. The agency is also putting together internal processes “for preventing and catching this sort of issue going forward,” Gandhi said.

Minnesota Rep. Kristin Robbins, chair of the state’s Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Policy Committee, in St. Paul, Minn., on April 7, 2026. Screenshot via The Epoch Times/The Minnesota House of Representatives’ video livestream

No-Bid Contracts Awarded, Procedures Not Followed

In mid-2025, lawmakers approved a two-year budget of $17 billion for Gandhi’s agency, accounting for 40 percent of the state’s total budget, state legislative records show.

One branch of the department, the Behavioral Health Administration, distributed more than $2 billion in grants from July 2022 to December 2024. The money goes to businesses and organizations that provide mental-health or substance-abuse services.

However, during that 29-month span, the state agency “did not comply with most requirements we tested,” Valentina Stone, an audit director for the Office of Legislative Auditor, testified to the fraud committee.

Auditors found 13 problems that need to be fixed to safeguard taxpayers’ money, including four recurrent issues, Stone said.

During the study period, the agency handled 830 unique grant agreements. Auditors combed several batches of those grants, looking for compliance with different “internal controls”—rules and procedures to ensure proper use and tracking of money.

Among 24 grants examined for compliance with competitive-bidding rules, auditors found the agency had inappropriately awarded more than half of them. The agency doled out five grants totaling $4.7 million without seeking competitive bids first or giving a reason for skipping that process.

Other tests revealed more internal-controls violations. The agency paid grantees even before grant agreements were signed, failed to visit providers to ensure they were complying with agreements to render services, and awarded new grants to past providers without reviewing how those providers performed.

“It concerns me greatly … that money is still going out the door in real time to some of these same grantees when these processes haven’t been tightened up,” Robbins said.

In March, a separate audit of Human Services’ fraud-ridden autism-treatment reimbursement program found that the agency mistakenly believed that it lacked authority to probe allegations of kickbacks without evidence of another alleged offense. The problem appears to have stemmed from a decades-old definition of “fraud” that failed to explicitly list kickbacks, which are illegal payments to people who cooperate with scammers.

* * *

Israeli cities have suffered heavy bombardment under Iranian and Hezbollah missiles over the past many weeks going back to the start of Trump’s Operation Epic Fury on February 28, but the start of the fragile Iran ceasefire has seen the bombs halted, at least for now.

A sense of normalcy is finally returning across Israeli society, after millions of citizens have on a daily basis had to scramble to get to bomb shelters. Emergency restrictions have been lifted across most parts of the country, and even holy sites in Jerusalem are being opened back up, after Israeli authorities starting last month severely restricted access.

Near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem. Shutterstock

Jerusalem police on Thursday announced the removal of all restrictions and deployed hundreds of officers and volunteers across the city.

Access to Christian, Jewish, and Muslim holy sites was either fully prohibited or limited to small groups, amid the prior daily barrage of Iranian missile and drone attacks.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound has been reopened too. It had remained closed for much of Ramadan and the Eid al-Fitr holiday, which was somewhat unprecedented in recent history. This created immense tensions between Palestinian Muslims and Israeli security forces.

Roman Catholics and Western Christians were severely limited during last weekend’s Easter observances at the Church Of The Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City.

However, the Iran ceasefire and reopening coincides with upcoming Orthodox Christian Easter (Pascha) celebrations on Sunday.

Typically tens of thousands of Christian pilgrims from Russia, Greece, Eastern Europe and elsewhere descend on Jerusalem ahead of Orthodox Holy week, however, travel difficulties and the threat of renewed war have had a chilling effect, and much fewer are expected to attend.

Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem Theophilos III led a group of clergy members to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for prayers on Palm Sunday, following restrictions on gatherings in large groups in Jerusalem’s Old City pic.twitter.com/vTDupzFQEb

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 5, 2026

Israeli police may still move to limit gatherings, and typically they set up barricades in various parts of the Old City in and around the Christian quarter in the name of imposing greater security.

Still, there’s a sense of optimism, but Israeli raids in Lebanon have kept things unpredictable. Iran has been warning against ongoing Israeli strikes on Beirut and elsewhere, and so the war could be renewed at any moment.

Israeli cities have suffered heavy bombardment under Iranian and Hezbollah missiles over the past many weeks going back to the start of Trump’s Operation Epic Fury on February 28, but the start of the fragile Iran ceasefire has seen the bombs halted, at least for now.

A sense of normalcy is finally returning across Israeli society, after millions of citizens have on a daily basis had to scramble to get to bomb shelters. Emergency restrictions have been lifted across most parts of the country, and even holy sites in Jerusalem are being opened back up, after Israeli authorities starting last month severely restricted access.

Near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem. Shutterstock

Jerusalem police on Thursday announced the removal of all restrictions and deployed hundreds of officers and volunteers across the city.

Access to Christian, Jewish, and Muslim holy sites was either fully prohibited or limited to small groups, amid the prior daily barrage of Iranian missile and drone attacks.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound has been reopened too. It had remained closed for much of Ramadan and the Eid al-Fitr holiday, which was somewhat unprecedented in recent history. This created immense tensions between Palestinian Muslims and Israeli security forces.

Roman Catholics and Western Christians were severely limited during last weekend’s Easter observances at the Church Of The Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City.

However, the Iran ceasefire and reopening coincides with upcoming Orthodox Christian Easter (Pascha) celebrations on Sunday.

Typically tens of thousands of Christian pilgrims from Russia, Greece, Eastern Europe and elsewhere descend on Jerusalem ahead of Orthodox Holy week, however, travel difficulties and the threat of renewed war have had a chilling effect, and much fewer are expected to attend.

Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem Theophilos III led a group of clergy members to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for prayers on Palm Sunday, following restrictions on gatherings in large groups in Jerusalem’s Old City pic.twitter.com/vTDupzFQEb

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 5, 2026

Israeli police may still move to limit gatherings, and typically they set up barricades in various parts of the Old City in and around the Christian quarter in the name of imposing greater security.

Still, there’s a sense of optimism, but Israeli raids in Lebanon have kept things unpredictable. Iran has been warning against ongoing Israeli strikes on Beirut and elsewhere, and so the war could be renewed at any moment.

Authored by Steve Watson via modernity.news,

Big Tech’s leading AI faces growing accusations of enabling violence rather than preventing it.

Attorneys representing the family of Robert Morales, killed in the April 17, 2025, Florida State University shooting, announced plans to sue OpenAI and ChatGPT. The law firm Brooks, LeBoeuf, Foster, Gwartney and Hobbs stated the suspected gunman, Phoenix Ikner, was in “constant communication” with the chatbot leading up to the attack.

Ikner opened fire outside the FSU student union, killing Morales, a 57-year-old Aramark worker and father, and Tiru Chabba, 45, a vendor from South Carolina. Six others were wounded. Court records list more than 270 images of ChatGPT conversations as exhibits.

BREAKING: Florida State University gunman had 270+ chats with ChatGPT right before the shooting that left 2 people dead.

Victims’ attorney just said it “may have advised the shooter how to commit these heinous crimes.”

ChatGPT acted as mass murder consultant. pic.twitter.com/odQYv9LOg8

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) April 7, 2026

The firm declared: “We have reason to believe that ChatGPT may have advised the shooter how to commit these heinous crimes. We will therefore file suit against ChatGPT, and its ownership structure, very soon, and will seek to hold them accountable for the untimely and senseless death of our client, Mr. Morales.”

A mass shooter used ChatGPT to plan the FSU shooting, killing 2 and injuring 5.

ChatGPT advised the shooter on executing the deadly shooting on a college campus.

There are more than 270 ChatGPT conversations listed as exhibits in the case.

This is now the 20th death tied to…

— Katie Miller (@KatieMiller) April 8, 2026

Recent coverage also notes newly released chat logs where Ikner reportedly asked ChatGPT about school shootings and the busiest times on campus.

One post referenced details such as the chatbot informing him the Student Union was busiest between 11:30am and 1:30pm, with the shooting occurring at 11:57am.

The New York Post reported the claims in detail.

ChapGPT helped Florida State University gunman plan mass shooting, victim’s attorney claims https://t.co/NDv8zx2Zbg pic.twitter.com/m2tavLoLAx

— New York Post (@nypost) April 8, 2026

OpenAI responded by saying they identified an account believed to be associated with the suspect after the shooting, proactively shared information with law enforcement, and cooperated fully. They claim to build ChatGPT to respond safely and continue improving safeguards.

Yet the body count linked to such interactions keeps rising, while the company’s selective enforcement and post-incident cooperation fail to reassure victims’ families preparing legal action.

This incident follows another high-profile case. In February 2026, Canadian trans shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar carried out a deadly attack at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School.

OpenAI employees were alarmed by his disturbing ChatGPT messages and discussed alerting authorities, but the company chose not to notify police beforehand, instead banning the account.

Canadian trans shooter’s disturbing ChatGPT messages alarmed employees – but company never alerted cops https://t.co/Jl8KhxKZeo pic.twitter.com/Mi8BNrsRFZ

— New York Post (@nypost) February 21, 2026

They only contacted law enforcement after the shooting. A family has already sued OpenAI over that incident as well.

FAMILY SUES OPENAI: “CHATGPT HELPED PLAN MASS SHOOTING”

A lawsuit says the Tumbler Ridge shooter used ChatGPT to help plan the attack, and that employees allegedly flagged the chats as an imminent risk before anyone got hurt.

Source: NewsForce pic.twitter.com/SulETFiGtR

— NewsForce (@Newsforce) March 11, 2026

These developments echo earlier warnings. ChatGPT once provided detailed suicide instructions and drug-and-alcohol guidance when prompted as a fake 13-year-old.

Studies have found that as many as one in four teens now rely on AI therapy bots for mental health support, raising questions about vulnerable users interacting with systems that appear inconsistent on harm prevention.

ChatGPT’s selective ideological programming has also been repeatedly called into question. For example, it once refused a hypothetical request to quietly utter a racial slur even to save a billion white people.

Americans expect technology that upholds safety and individual responsibility, not systems that lecture on ethics while allegedly guiding violence. The mounting lawsuits and documented failures demand accountability from OpenAI and scrutiny of the priorities embedded in its models. Until Big Tech prioritizes preventing real-world harm over narrative control, these tragedies risk becoming a grim pattern rather than isolated failures.

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