CMR is the leading provider of funding and management support for small to medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs 

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge in Florida said Monday that social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate will remain in a Miami jail for at least two more weeks as they fight extradition to the United Kingdom, where the brothers are accused of rape and sex trafficking.

On July 27, U.S. Magistrate Judge Lauren Louis set a detention hearing for Aug. 13 to determine whether the Tates should be released during an extradition process that could last for months—or remain behind bars.

The brothers, who have been in custody since making a brief court appearance two days after their July 18 arrest, were not required to appear on Monday and were not present when the judge continued their detention.

Joseph McBride, an attorney for the brothers, has said they will fight extradition and that they maintain their innocence. He described the attempt to extradite the brothers as politically motivated.

McBride told reporters after their initial court appearance on July 20 that the brothers did not do anything wrong.

“They shouldn’t be extradited for crimes they did not commit,” he said.

McBride said Monday that he wants the U.S. government to provide the materials British authorities submitted to secure their arrests.

“They don’t have anything but the accusations,” McBride said after the hearing. “It’s just their word against our word right now.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Alejandra Lopez said the UK has until mid-September to submit its supporting materials to the State Department.

‘Why Am I Here?’

In remarks to the New York Post on Monday, McBride said he meets with Andrew Tate as many as six times a week and jots down the influencer’s thoughts so they can later be posted on social media.

McBride described the arrangement, which allows Tate to continue reaching his millions of online followers from jail, as the “Pony Express.”

“There’s a way to be like, ‘What would you like said to the world?’” McBride said. “It’s not very hard.”

In one July 27 post, Tate complained about being held in a special housing unit, an isolated section of the jail typically used either to protect inmates or punish misconduct.

“This is punitive housing for people who murder their cellmates,” Tate wrote. “No commissary, no phone calls, no yard time.”

Describing himself as an “innocent until proven guilty extradition detainee,” Tate noted that he is a U.S. citizen wanted by a foreign government and questioned the reason for his detention.

“Why am I here?” he wrote.

In another post, Tate called the case “politically motivated” and described it as punishment for “empowering men” and giving them “the spirit to say enough is enough.”

He also thanked supporters who gathered outside the jail with signs, telling them that although the messages were difficult to read from his cell, he could “feel every word.”

British Charges

British prosecutors have said Andrew Tate, 39, faces more than two dozen counts, including rape, assault, and arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation. The allegations also include offenses involving indecent images of a child and “extreme pornography.”

Tristan Tate, 38, faces additional charges that include two counts of rape, three counts of sex trafficking, and one count of sexual assault.

The alleged offenses occurred between 2010 and 2017. Prosecutors said the latest charges involve four additional accusers and were filed after authorities received evidence from police in Bedfordshire, southeastern England.

The brothers were already charged in Britain with rape, bodily harm, human trafficking, and controlling prostitution for gain in connection with three other accusers and alleged conduct between 2012 and 2015.

The UK’s Crown Prosecution Service has requested their extradition while emphasizing that the defendants retain the right to a fair trial.

Andrew and Tristan Tate, who hold dual U.S. and British citizenship, have millions of followers online. Their content focuses heavily on masculinity, wealth, and relationships, while their critics have accused them of promoting misogyny.

The Tates moved to Romania in 2016 and were arrested there in 2022 on allegations that they participated in schemes to lure women for sexual exploitation. They denied wrongdoing, and the case has stalled amid legal and procedural problems, although it has not been closed.

Romanian authorities lifted the brothers’ travel restrictions in February 2025, allowing them to fly to Florida on a private jet.

Defense attorney Jackie Perczek said their conduct since then shows they are not a flight risk, noting that they continued traveling back to Romania while the criminal proceedings there remained unresolved.

“For three years they have not fled,” Perczek said. “They’ve traveled the world, and every month they return to Romania.”

The Department of Energy is putting $60 million behind an effort to use AI to accelerate nearly every stage of nuclear deployment, from reactor design and licensing to manufacturing, construction, fuel fabrication, and operations.

The three-year initiative, named Project Prometheus, is the first major Phase II project selected under DOE’s Genesis Mission. Led by Idaho National Laboratory, it brings together four national laboratories, universities, major tech companies, and more than 20 nuclear industry partners.

Participants include NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Oklo, TerraPower, X-energy, GE Vernova, Westinghouse, Aalo Atomics, Antares, Valar Atomics, and Deployable Energy.

The goal is to create a secure digital thread connecting engineering models, regulatory requirements, manufacturing specifications, construction records, and operating data. DOE wants AI tools to help prepare traceable licensing documents, organize decades of legacy nuclear records, accelerate safety analyses, improve manufacturing workflows, and support reactor monitoring while keeping humans responsible for final decisions.

Prometheus is targeting a 50% reduction in reactor deployment timelines and long-term operating costs. The project has also attracted more than $200 million in industry cost sharing and another $30 million in private capital and technical contributions.

Most attention has focused on using nuclear reactors to power AI, such as NANO Nuclear’s agreement with Supermicro and Riot Platforms’ proposed collaboration with Terrestrial Energy.

Oklo, NVIDIA, and Los Alamos National Laboratory are also working together on AI-enabled nuclear fuel research, plutonium-bearing fuels, and grid studies for nuclear-powered AI facilities. That agreement directly supports the broader Genesis Mission.

We’ve covered the increasingly ridiculous AI financing “circle jerk”, where tech companies invest in AI developers that then turn around and commit to buying chips, cloud capacity, or data center services from those same backers. Amazon, for example, plans to invest billions in Anthropic while Anthropic commits to spending more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services infrastructure.

It is an impressive growth engine, provided nobody asks where the money is actually coming from…

None of that kills the nuclear case, though. The resurgence of demand for nuclear energy was originally pushed by green energy goals and was further elevated by the increasing demands for national energy security. With neither of these demand signals waning as the AI bubble stands ready to pop at any moment, nuclear will likely continue to see support from governments across the globe in the years ahead.
 

After years of pro-Hamas protests and riots, including efforts by radical-left revolutionaries to blockade highways, bridges, and other economic chokepoints, as well as unrest across Ivy League campuses, investigators are finally examining the financial infrastructure behind the Marxist movement that increasingly appears less about Palestine and more about toppling the US empire.

At the center of the investigation is a left-wing nonprofit that may have served as a bridge, connecting major progressive foundations and revolutionary-left activist networks to organizations linked to foreign terrorist groups.

This revelation appeared in a bombshell new report by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and was first reported publicly by the New York Post.

NCRI claims that millions of dollars raised by the Middle East Children's Alliance (MECA) flowed through opaque funding channels to organizations with documented ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Notably, the PFLP is a Marxist-Leninist Palestinian militant and political organization founded in 1967 by George Habash. The U.S. has designated it a Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997 and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist since 2001.

Last summer, a rioter was seen wearing Hamas and PFLP paraphernalia as he stood in front of a burning Waymo in Los Angeles, California.

The US Treasury sanctioned Samidoun in 2024, designating it a Specially Designated Global Terrorist for allegedly serving as an international fundraiser and front organization for the PFLP. 

So why is Zohran Mamdani's intern, France Hamed... 

Zohran Mamdani's intern, France Hamed, has been on our radar every since she heartlessly ripped down posters of Jewish hostages on camera.

That wasn't a one-off. Hunter College-CUNY grad Hamed is a true Israel-hater. Here she is at a rally holding a poster for an actual terror… pic.twitter.com/JqO2IBlqC3

— Canary Mission (@canarymission) September 28, 2025

NCRI identifies MECA as the possible connective node linking revolutionary-left activist groups with major progressive donors. The Berkeley-based children's charity has become one of the most frequently promoted fundraising vehicles across the nonprofit left.

"The Middle East Children's Alliance (MECA) is a Berkeley, California–based 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Since the October 7, 2023 attacks, it has emerged as a critical U.S. charitable fundraising vehicle promoted across the pro-Palestinian activist ecosystem, including organizations within the Neville Roy Singham network, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), and a range of progressive philanthropic institutions. As MECA's public profile and fundraising accelerated, so too did questions regarding the destinations of its foreign grantmaking," NCRI wrote in the report.

MECA reported about $35 million in foreign grants between fiscal 2017 and 2025. NCRI traced $13.5 million in institutional donations, with roughly 67% routed through donor-advised funds and giving platforms that conceal the original donors. The ten largest funding sources accounted for 70% of traced contributions.

"Between FY2017 and FY2025, MECA's tax filings report approximately $35 million in foreign grant disbursements. This report identifies a persistent pattern of funding organizations with documented ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which the United States designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in 1997. It further documents personnel overlap between MECA and organizations affiliated with the PFLP, as well as longstanding organizational and coalition relationships suggesting these connections are structural rather than incidental. The structure may partially shield the extent of collaboration with the PFLP from activist networks in the United States who both raise money for MECA and ideologically support the PFLP," NCRI said.

Foreign disbursements surged to $10.7 million in fiscal 2024, about 4.5 times the previous year. Meanwhile, more than 70% of foreign-grant entries were labeled only as "community projects," preventing outsiders from identifying the recipients or specific purposes. NCRI said the decline in disclosure began in 2020, years before the Gaza war.

The report identified six longtime MECA partners assessed as having PFLP affiliations. Those organizations gradually disappeared from MECA's public grant descriptions as scrutiny of their alleged ties intensified. Named funders included Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Tides-linked entities and organizations associated with Neville Roy Singham.

Path of funding from anonymous donors to MECA.

NCRI: A conceptual model of paths from entities and individuals soliciting funds for MECA to groups affiliated with the PFLP and on to militant and terrorist groups such as Fatah and PFLP.

"The convergence of these findings raises concerns about whether donors in the United States may be unknowingly donating to a group that ultimately benefits a foreign terrorist organization," NCRI stated.

MECA's operations overlap with the PFLP through personnel and civil society groups, according to NCRI. 

The strongest link is the "red-green alliance" between communist and Islamist activist networks.

The ShutItDown4Palestine campaign brought together organizations linked to China-based Marxist Neville Roy Singham with Students for Justice in Palestine, the campus network associated with American Muslims for Palestine.

NCRI's bombshell findings come nearly two weeks after Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared war on the radical left while standing in front of delegations from 65 nations.

The State Department later released a report detailing far-left subversion networks routed through Cuba that have been sowing chaos in America.

The American people are getting a clear picture of what only appears to explain why segments of America's left have become increasingly revolutionary, embracing anti-American rhetoric and an explicitly anti-capitalist agenda, as well as seeking the destruction of America's current form.

Read the report here. 

Markets rarely hand you a clean morality play. On Monday night, a federal judge entered one, clocking in no less than 78 pages, in the public docket. And for anyone who has played one of America's chart-topping “skill gaming” apps - a group that certainly includes many readers of this site - this may be for you.

A federal trial has now established that at Papaya Gaming, the private Tel Aviv-based publisher of Solitaire Cash and Bingo Cash, the “humans” across the table were actually quite often programmed bots.

The winner in all of this is Firy, Inc. (of the eponymous FIRY ticker), the operator that played the SPAC game to a $3.5 billion valuation in 2020, roundtripping 96% to a $130 million market cap with an estimated 20% of its float sold short.

Needless to say, at a market cap of a paltry $130 million, the market had written the whole thing off, pricing FIRY below the $185 million of cash on its latest, March 31st balance sheet, never mind the platform or anything else left on either side of the ledger.

But all that changes now. FIRY led the lawsuit against Papaya and is the beneficiary of a $719 million award handed down overnight, well over 5 times its market cap. This is the judge’s ruling after a $420 million jury award and Papaya’s failed attempts to get the case tossed out.

What Papaya did, in the court's own words (from Monday’s Opinion)

• “In January 2021, for example, Papaya used bots in about 90% of its cash tournaments” (Op. at 8.)
• From 2021 to 2024, “bots accounted for over 13 million of the participants on Papaya's platform, compared to about 11 million human players.” (Op. at 7.)
• "Papaya only paid customers roughly $2 billion of the $6.7 billion that it advertised had been awarded in prizes.” (Op. at 8.)
• "When a bot ‘won’ one of these tournaments, Papaya kept all entry fees.” (Op. at 28.)

Liquidity bots, tailored bots, and losing before you played Papaya ran two kinds of fakes.

• "Liquidity bots were used to create immediately accessible tournaments of various sizes, including up to 20 or more ‘players’.” “[A] 20-player tournament might have one human player and nineteen bots.” (Op. at 7.) Their job was to make a game exist instantly, at any hour of the night.
• The second kind decided outcomes: “bots were used to give a player a designated win or loss. For instance, a player who had a losing streak could be given a ‘win’ to motivate them to keep playing in more tournaments.” (Id.) These “tailored bots” operated “in over 630 million Papaya tournaments, or in roughly one-quarter of the 2.6 billion tournaments that Papaya hosted during the years 2021 to 2024,” and “[m]ore than 6.1 million of those human beings played in at least one tournament where tailored bots were designed to give them a loss.” (Id.)

Think about that: millions of Americans paid to lose games that were over before they started.

The Fifth Amendment and the apology

Perhaps predictably, Papaya's executives pled the Fifth Amendment during the case and the court did not let them un-
ring that bell at the last minute.

• “Papaya's executives invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at their depositions. About a year later, on the eve of trial, those same executives sought to withdraw their invocation of the Fifth Amendment privilege.” (Op. at 13.)

Later on, Papaya's own trial lawyers conceded to the jury: “Papaya has taken responsibility for its actions. It stopped
giving those customer complaint responses. It stopped using bots.” (Op. at 11 n.2.) Please clap. 

The $719 Million Blow

On April 23, a unanimous jury found Papaya liable for false advertising and awarded $420 million in damages - what the winning law firm King & Spalding calls the largest false-advertising award in U.S. history.

Yesterday's opinion granted a $719 million disgorgement of Papaya's profits - higher than the $420 million jury verdict - and did not mince words: “Papaya's fraudulent conduct was extraordinary.” (Op. at 37.) Papaya “entered the U.S. market through a massive deception” (Op. at 71) — a “willful, bad faith violation of the law.” (Op. at 76.)

FIRY ends up the big loser and the big winner

FIRY launched the first real-money skill-gaming platform back in 2012 (Op. at 4) and rode the SPAC wave public at a $3.5 billion valuation in December 2020. The court traced what happened next: “Skillz’s revenue had fallen by 60% in just two years, tumbling from $384 million in 2021 to $152 million, while Papaya's revenue skyrocketed from $163 million to $461 million over the same period.” (Op. at 10.) In June the company rebranded itself FIRY... because five years of a tortured stock price will do that to you.

Now What?

The cheater owes $719 million and the honest player collects. Good over evil, with interest.

The 20% of the float that was short into Monday's opinion bet on the wrong hand. On the April jury verdict alone, FIRY closed up 238% amid multiple volatility halts. And that was before the judge denied a new trial and raised the number above what the jury awarded ($420 million to $719 million).

To appeal, Papaya must produce an appeal bond on the order of $800 million in real money — no bots accepted. Will the private credit bubble extend to writing that paper for a private Israeli company whose only product a federal jury and a federal judge have both found was fraudulently marketed? Is there an AI angle here? Asking for a friend in Tel Aviv.

Next Up: Voodoo

Monday was not the first time this has happened. In 2024, FIRY took AviaGames - publisher of Pocket7Games - to a California jury and won $42.9 million for patent infringement, two years before its latest win against Papaya (“Skillz Wins $42.9M IP Trial Against Rival Accused Of Bot Fraud”).

Now in 2026, FIRY takes a win against Papaya.

Then there is the one more case not yet discussed: FIRY’s July 2024 lawsuit against Voodoo, the French owner of Blitz Win Cash, over what it alleges is the same bot playbook. While Voodoo fights these claims and nothing has been decided, one would imagine the Papaya verdict is being analyzed today in Paris.