An investigation into a suspected quintuple homicide has one sheriff describing the crime scene as one of the most “complex” she’s ever seen.

First responders answered a call Saturday morning about a vehicle fire at a rural property outside of Portland, Oregon, where they also discovered five human bodies.

‘Any time you have one person deceased, let alone five, that’s a logistical challenge.’

The fire personnel who were first on the scene in the 47300 block of NW Otis Lane near Forest Grove soon called deputies.

Investigators later discovered the remains of “several domestic animals,” according to a Washington County Sheriff’s Office news release; no details have been disclosed regarding the identities of the human bodies.

“I will say that in my 22 years here, I have not been a part of or witnessed a scene quite this complex involving this type of an investigation,” Sheriff Caprice Massey said, according to the Associated Press.

According to CBS News, the investigation into determining the identities of the five victims was ongoing as of Sunday afternoon.

RELATED: Threatening male begins beating up Florida mobile homeowner, but victim pulls gun, fires once — ‘and the threat was over’

In a news conference, sheriff’s Detective Shannon Wilde reportedly said, “Any time you have one person deceased, let alone five, that’s a logistical challenge.”

From the first update, detectives said they believed this case was not a “random act of violence.”

Authorities provided an update Sunday saying they had located and identified a suspect in connection with the killings.

The Washington County Sheriff’s Office identified 36-year-old Benjamin Charles Parker as the homicide suspect in this case.

Parker was found dead in a car in Enumclaw, Washington, which is roughly 200 miles north of the crime scene.

KOIN-TV reported that the car containing Parker’s body was found behind a Safeway grocery store.

His death is believed to be a suicide.

A Washington County Sheriff’s Office representative on Monday told Blaze News they are not releasing more information on the case until next of kin are notified.

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​Suicide, Suspect, Oregon, Homicide, Washington state, Bodies, Crime 

The days of the American Bar Association overseeing the accreditation of law schools may be numbered.

The ABA has enjoyed the authority to accredit law schools since 1952. This authority is vested in the ABA Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, which is supposedly independent.

‘It should not have any role, much less a monopoly role, in law school accreditation.’

However, critics have suggested that the ABA is insufficiently independent of the institutions and profession it is overseeing.

Currently, the ABA’s legal ed council fully or provisionally accredits nearly 200 law schools.

Thirteen of the programs approved and accredited by the ABA are freestanding law schools with no affiliation to a college or university. Their ABA accreditation renders them eligible to participate in federal financial student aid programs.

More consequentially, the Wall Street Journal — which first reported on the proposed termination of the council’s accreditation authority — noted that in most U.S. states, law school graduates’ ability to take the bar exam is conditional on their school’s approval by the ABA.

RELATED: The right needs a public defender network for lawfare

The ABA’s accreditation authority, last renewed in 2021, comes up for renewal next month.

According to a notice by the Education Department posted in the Federal Register on Friday, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity is scheduled to meet on Sept. 23 and 24 and will discuss the petition for renewal of recognition filed by the ABA’s legal ed council.

Daniel Thies, the previous chair of the ABA’s legal ed council, will appear as a witness. He declined Blaze News’ request for comment.

According to a report made public on Friday, Education Department staff have recommended that the ABA legal ed council be stripped of its oversight and accreditation authority, citing in part the council’s insufficient independence from the profession.

An Education Department spokesperson confirmed in a statement to Blaze News, “After reviewing ABA’s accreditation standards, Department staff found the accreditor out of compliance with the agency’s accreditation regulations and recognition standards.”

“We will not comment on details, as the process is ongoing and involves multiple stages of review, including by an independent, bipartisan advisory committee in September,” added the spokesperson.

Melissa Hart, a Democrat who previously served on the Colorado Supreme Court and now serves as chairwoman of the ABA’s legal ed council, figures that the ABA will make a convincing case and ultimately retain its accreditation authority.

Hart said in a statement to the Blaze News, “The Council is confident it complies with the Higher Education Act and with the Department’s requirements for accreditors. We look forward to the opportunity to address any misconceptions and clarify the record at our upcoming hearing before the NACIQI committee next month.”

“An initial recommendation from Department staff represents one step in the regular recognition process that the Council and other accreditors periodically complete,” continued Hart. “A hearing with NACIQI is the next step in that process, and we’re confident the Council will address any concerns the Department may have at that hearing.”

After the meeting next month, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity will issue its own recommendation to Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent.

Kent appears keen on accreditation reform. He said in a statement on Wednesday, “The Trump Administration’s proposed changes to the accreditation system are intended to reorient our quality assurance framework so that accreditors prioritize student outcomes rather than bureaucratic processes or the promotion of divisive and unlawful ideological agendas.”

“Instead of ensuring institutions offer high-quality educational programs that justify the time and cost of a college education, the antiquated accreditation system has contributed to inflated tuition, administrative bloat, and ideology-driven mandates on college campuses,” added Kent.

While the White House did not immediately respond to Blaze News’ request for comment, it’s clear that the ABA is on the president’s radar.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in April 2025 tasking Education Secretary Linda McMahon with holding accountable, “through denial, monitoring, suspension, or termination of accreditation recognition, accreditors who fail to meet the applicable recognition criteria or otherwise violate Federal law, including by requiring institutions seeking accreditation to engage in unlawful discrimination in accreditation-related activity under the guise of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ initiatives.”

In the order, Trump called out the ABA’s legal ed council for requiring law schools “to ‘demonstrate by concrete action a commitment to diversity and inclusion’ including by ‘commit[ting] to having a student body [and faculty] that is diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity.'”

With its accreditation authority now in the balance, the organization — in an apparent effort to counter claims that the ABA is “ideologically captured” — may be kicking DEI to the curb. The ABA’s legal ed council voted in May to eliminate its rule requiring law schools to demonstrate commitment to DEI.

The change was not, however, final. According to the ABA Journal, the final determination on whether to jettison the DEI policy is scheduled for Sept. 8.

Conservative legal scholar John Eastman, founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, is among those who welcome the administration’s move to remove the ABA from the law school accreditation process.

“It has long ceased to be a politically neutral professional organization and has instead become a front for the radical wing of the Democrat Party, using its accreditation authority to push radical DEI policies, for example,” Dr. Eastman told Blaze News. “I witnessed this firsthand when I was dean at Chapman Law School from 2007 to 2010, as we confronted demands for minority hiring and admissions in order to have our accreditation renewed. And one need not look further than the list of Supreme Court cases in which it has filed amicus briefs to confirm the hard-left bent of this organization.”

Eastman added, “It should not have any role, much less a monopoly role, in law school accreditation — just like it was removed from its preferred role in the judicial nomination process by President Bush in 2001 (restored by Obama in 2009, but then removed again by Trump in 2017 and not revived since).”

The ABA did not immediately respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.

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​American bar association, Education department, John eastman, Linda mcmahon, Dei, Politics 

Democrats will do anything to get the black vote, and Senate candidate James Talarico is no exception.

“He’s trying to win over the black vote because the black people in Texas, the Democrats at least, are very, very upset that Jasmine Crockett didn’t win. They wanted … Jasmine Crockett because she was black,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales explains.

“So I think now his tactic to try to win over the black Democrat vote is saying that he’s cool with a little murder as long as it’s a black person carrying out the crime, I guess,” she adds, before playing a clip of Talarico on “The Breakfast Club.”

“From Texas, we seen what happened with Karmelo Anthony, and you said it was a tragedy. What did you mean by that?” Talarico was asked.

“Well, I’ve done a lot of work in the state House on justice reform, and right now we’ve got a system that doesn’t serve all Americans equally, and we know that black Texans have not gotten the justice they deserve in many cases,” he responded.

“And you know, I’m not an expert on this particular case, but I know that there were no black members of the jury. And to me, that’s the only evidence you need to really prove that this system is not working for black Texans,” he added.

Adam Johnson, who is well known as January 6th’s “lectern guy,” points out that he went to federal prison for “misdemeanor trespassing.”

“So if it’s about color, if it’s about these things that he’s bringing up, I don’t know. I think a lot of us went to jail and we were very much white when we were there,” he tells Gonzales.

But Talarico isn’t the only Democrat trying to court black voters.

“[Abdul El-Sayed is] actually taking a different approach than James Talarico,” Gonzales says.

“Apparently, now he is African,” she adds, noting that originally she just believed him to be Muslim.

“I am Arab. I’m also African. My family immigrated to this country from Egypt. I’m proud of my African heritage,” he said in a recent press conference.

“So obviously he is like, ‘Oh, well, technically I’m African,’” Gonzales says.

“He’s like, ‘I’m just a plain old black man like you,’” she adds.

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​Adam johnson, Black vote, Democrats, James talarico, Jasmine crockett, Karmelo anthony, Texas democrats, Lectern guy, Sara gonzales, Abdul el-sayed, Blazetv show 

The controversy started early for former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom on Sunday night.

By the time the 6’10” giant arrived at Wintrust Arena in Chicago to watch a WNBA game, he was already being heckled by fans.

‘I’m just here to protect women.’

Fans yelled at the former NBA center, even giving him the middle finger as he arrived at the Chicago Sky vs. Indiana Fever game with a police escort.

Attendees took issue with Kanter’s pro-women T-shirt stating that the word “woman” is a “noun” that means “adult human female.”

Freedom recently declared himself eligible for next season’s WNBA draft, mocking the league’s refusal to define what a woman is.

The former NBA player told Fox News he had no intention of causing any issues or disruptions at the WNBA game, saying he texted the Chicago GM beforehand and received the simple reply, “Enjoy the game.”

The first half went without incident, as Freedom posted a joking image deciding which restroom he should use at halftime. However, as the third quarter came to a close, all hell broke loose when Sky player Natasha Cloud began screaming at Freedom as he sat courtside.

“Sophie Cunningham shot a three, and I put my hands up to celebrate,” Freedom told Fox News. “Literally, a couple possessions later, Natasha came back and started screaming and yelling and said, ‘She’s not gonna sleep with you.'”

Freedom went on, “I was like, ‘I am not trying to sleep with her. I’m just here to protect women and support her.’ And then, obviously, after that she started yapping, and she started to walk towards me, and literally I just got up, and then I was like, ‘I’m just here to protect women, and that’s all.'”

RELATED: Sophie Cunningham gets relentlessly booed in Canada — and shuts the haters down in the classiest way possible

The former NBA player stood up to reveal his shirt, showcasing the massive size difference between him and the WNBA players. Cloud is a full foot shorter than the Swiss-born man.

Freedom added that Cloud used a lot of “heavy language,” including swear words, which he said surprised him due to the number of children present.

“I was obviously wearing a shirt explaining what a woman is, and I think that had a lot to do with what she thinks about women. I think it triggered her a lot,” Freedom claimed.

Immediately following the interaction, security approached Freedom and started escorting him out of the arena. As taunts and jeers were directed at him, Freedom egged the crowd on while showing off the message on his shirt.

Cloud did not offer remarks on the incident and was not available to members of the press after the game. She did, however, post a message to Threads, vowing to protect trans-identifying people.

“To every trans kid/person, You are apart of MY community & tribe,” she wrote. “You belong. You’re loved. You’re seen. You’re perfect as you are. & you will always be protected by me.”

Sophie Cunningham and the Fever trounced Cloud and the rest of the Chicago Sky, 113 to 90.

RELATED: Sophie Cunningham supporters speak out: WNBA is just passing the blame

Blaze News reached out to the Sky for comment.

Although the league’s collective-bargaining agreement says that “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA,” the league has refused to clarify its stance on whether males who identify as women would be allowed in the league.

The WNBA recently met to discuss the issue, however, the result of its meeting was that there were “no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA.”

Freedom says if the league doesn’t clarify its rule, he is willing to step on the court next season.

“If they don’t come up with a rule, then I am ready and prepared to play in May and just get ready for the draft in April,” Freedom told Fox News. “These are the rules. People are mad at me. I’m confused why people are mad at me. These are the rules that literally they put, so I’m just literally following their rules.”

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​Fearless, Wnba, Basketball, Transgenderism, Enes kanter freedom, Sports, Womens sports 

Rosie O’Donnell doesn’t just struggle with her feelings about the president, she also has an issue with remembering her own daughter’s chosen pronouns — to the point that she needed to get them tattooed on her wrist.

In an interview on the “Good Hang” podcast with Amy Poehler, O’Donnell explained that she got the word “they” tattooed on her left wrist in honor of her 13-year-old daughter Clay, who apparently is “nonbinary.”

“This is a true story. So she, they, they, and it’s a they/them. That’s the pronouns that they choose, but it’s very hard,” O’Donnell told Poehler.

“I love that you’re constantly correcting in real time like we all do,” Poehler responded.

“It’s very hard, honey,” she said.

“I know it matters to them. And so when they first told me that it was they/them, I tried my best, but I kept saying ‘she,’” she continued.

Because O’Donnell kept getting it wrong, her daughter began carrying around a piece of cardboard that said her pronouns on it and held it up whenever O’Donnell said “she.”

“And so I took her to my cousin’s tattoo shop with the ‘they’ in her handwriting, and I had it tattooed on my wrist so that I would never forget, that it would remind me. And I thought she’d be very touched, and she didn’t give two s**ts,” she explained, adding, “She could not care less.”

BlazeTV host Pat Gray is about as impressed as her daughter.

“There’s no nonbinary people. None,” Gray says. “So she can say whatever she wants. We don’t have to play that game.”

Want more from Pat Gray?

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​Amy poehler, Nonbinary, Pronouns, Rosie odonnell, Pat gray, Theythem, Blazetv show 

An individual was caught on video kicking a man in the back of the head while he sat in a Southern California jacuzzi earlier this month, after which another suspect stole the man’s phone.

The incident occurred Aug.14 when Greg Medina — who serves the homeless in San Bernardino — said he was relaxing in a jacuzzi when two suspects approached him from behind, KTLA-TV reported.

‘I could have lost consciousness, or I could have been hurt a lot worse and drowned.’

Surveillance video captured one of the suspects delivering a hard kick to the back of Medina’s head, the station said, adding that the other suspect reached down to steal Medina’s phone, which was sitting on the concrete.

Medina told KTLA he was listening to a class with earbuds when he “felt a sharp kick behind my head. I saw the kids off in the distance [but] didn’t really pay much attention to them.”

Medina added to the station that he didn’t get a look at the two suspects but that he believed they were either teens or young adults.

Medina tracked his phone to a neighboring apartment complex and contacted police, the station said.

He then went to an emergency room, where he learned he had suffered a concussion, KTLA added.

Soon, however, the case broke in a surprising way.

RELATED: ‘Teen chaos in DC’: Brawl with chairs used as weapons erupts in Chipotle after Pirro’s warning to parents of thugs

Investigators told KTLA the parents of the two 13-year-old suspects turned them in Friday morning, and the pair were arrested on felony charges.

Police told the station that both teens were taken to Juvenile Hall; the suspect who allegedly delivered the kick was booked on robbery and battery charges, while the other suspect was booked on robbery charges.

The teens have not been identified because of their ages, KTLA said.

“I don’t hate them. … I forgive them,” Medina noted to the station. “I don’t wish any bad on anybody. However, I do feel that they need to be held accountable, especially the parents.”

“I could have lost consciousness, or I could have been hurt a lot worse and drowned,” he added to KTLA.

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​Physical attack, Jacuzzi, San bernardino, California, Police, Arrests, Parents, Battery, Robbery, Crime 

President Donald Trump has revived speculation about whether Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) might be visited by consequence for alleged immigration fraud. On Sunday, the president shared a provocative Aug. 11 report from Just the News with the headline “ICE refuses to disclose records on Ilhan Omar fraud probe, cites ongoing ‘enforcement proceedings.'”

Quick background

Years after coming to America as a refugee, Omar, a Somali-born ethno-nationalist, reportedly took out a marriage license to marry a man named Ahmed Hirsi. In 2002, she married Hirsi in a Muslim ceremony and had children with him but did not initially marry him legally.

‘You are not allowed to marry your brother.’

After supposedly breaking it off with Hirsi, in 2009, Omar legally married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi — a British-Somali national reportedly identified by numerous Somalis as Omar’s alleged brother. Omar allegedly separated from Elmi with a Muslim divorce in 2011, reunited and had another child with Hirsi in 2012, then formally divorced Elmi in 2017, reported the Center for Immigration Studies.

The Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board revealed in 2019 that Omar and Hirsi filed joint tax returns in 2014 and 2015 — while Omar was still legally married to Elmi. The Hill noted at the time that filing a joint tax return where no legal marriage exists violates both federal and state law.

Abdihakim Osman, a self-identified friend of Omar, claimed to the Daily Mail in 2020 that Omar had confirmed that Elmi was her brother and that she married him so he could remain in the United States.

RELATED: Tennessee Republican begins impeachment process against judge who BLOCKED TPS removals to Somalia

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Omar called the marriage-related allegations “absolutely false and ridiculous” in a 2016 statement, adding that “insinuations that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is my brother are absurd and offensive.” There has been no concrete proof, DNA or otherwise, yet brought forward to verify that Omar’s legal husband from 2009-2017 was her biological brother.

In December, border czar Tom Homan said that the Trump administration was investigating Omar for alleged immigration fraud. Trump stated the following month that the Justice Department was “looking at” the Minnesota Democrat.

When asked in May about a possible forthcoming indictment against Omar for alleged immigration fraud, Vice President JD Vance said both that “it certainly seems like something fishy is there” and that it was something “the Department of Justice is looking at right now.”

How it’s going

According to the Just the News report that Trump referenced on Sunday, Just the News filed a Freedom of Information request in January for any records related to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation into allegations of immigration fraud by Omar.

In response to the request, the outlet learned that ICE may have “enforcement proceedings” underway in connection with Omar.

ICE told Just the News in May, “ICE has determined that the information you requested is being withheld in full pursuant to Title 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(A). Disclosure of any responsive records at this time could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.”

ICE noted that FOIA Exemption 7(A) “applies to records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes when their release could disrupt such proceedings.”

According to the DOJ,

Exemption 7(A) requires a two-step analysis. First, there must be a “reasonable likelihood” of a pending or contemplated law enforcement proceeding. Second, release of the information must be reasonably expected to cause some articulable harm to that proceeding.

When asked for comment, ICE referred Blaze News to the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS, the White House, the DOJ, and Omar’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Trump has made no secret that he dislikes Rep. Ilhan Omar and is skeptical about her legal status in the country.

In November, for instance, he wrote, “The worst ‘Congressman/woman’ in our Country, Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab, and who probably came into the U.S.A. illegally in that you are not allowed to marry your brother, does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how ‘badly’ she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation.”

Trump suggested further that Omar “should go back!”

Omar is fighting to keep her seat in Congress and is scheduled to face off with challenger John Nagel, a Republican who served for three decades as a state trooper, in November.

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​Ilhan omar, Immigration fraud, Justice department, White house, Minnesota, Us immigration and customs enforcement, Politics 

The end of the year is nigh.

The calendars you buy at Walgreens are all wrong, and so is your iPhone. The end of the year is not a month or so after we have swollen ourselves with food from Thanksgiving or when the Christmas decorations are up. The spiritual change of the year doesn’t occur when there is frost on the ground and winter boots by the door.

Perhaps the school schedule isn’t arbitrary or based on temporary factors but reflects a deeper truth.

The end of the year is nigh. Nay, it’s here (!); it’s right now. You and I are living through it today, at the end of the summer.

Back to school

I came across a post the other day from Benjamin Braddock. It read, “It feels like the fading of summer is the real ending of the year.” I tapped my iPhone, turning the little heart icon from white to red, indicating I agreed with his sentiment, sent it to a few friends for further discussion, and decided I needed to write something.

It would be easy to explain the feeling as a product of schooling. We spend more than a decade of our youth on that schedule, and it gets ingrained in us. A few weeks after Memorial Day, we would be let out and free for what felt like forever.

But it wasn’t forever. The summer always went quicker than we wished it did, and by the time the middle of August rolled around, we would start feeling a bit ill and rather depressed at the thought of beginning school again.

The last weeks before September aren’t the middle of the year; they are the end, and as children we knew it.

We live that schedule for years in our youth, but I don’t believe it’s that which is responsible for our feeling that the end of the summer is the real end of the year. Perhaps the school schedule isn’t arbitrary or based on temporary factors but reflects a deeper truth that indeed the year begins when the summer ends.

RELATED: Do you wear your shoes in the house?

Glen Asakawa/Getty Images

Cold snap

It’s something about the knowledge of the impending cold and the freezing of the living world. I know that soon, all too soon, the leaves will begin to change. First the young trees and the very old ones. They go from yellow to orange, to red, and then they fall and they crackle and we rake them, and some burn them, and fall is here.

It’s a clear transition, even though it happens slowly, and a dramatic change in the world we see. And for some reason the change from winter to spring doesn’t feel like the beginning of the year even though we might think it would. Like the sun rises and the dark becomes bright, we might logically conclude that as the temperatures rise and the world blooms, we are beginning the year. But it doesn’t feel like that, does it?

Seemingly, counterintuitively, it is when the air turns cold that the year begins. And truth to be told, I believe it’s less about the arrival of the cold and more about the passing of the warmth.

Fleeting treasure

The end of the summer is the high point of the year. It’s when the air is at its warmest, when the water is most comfortable and swimming is best, and when every single tree is full of leaves. The way the light fills the sky and glitters on the water is very different at the end of the summer than it is at the beginning. It’s more golden, more full, and more treasured.

It’s finite, and we know it, just like we knew those last weeks of summer vacation were finite as kids waiting to begin sixth grade.

Then end of summer is the end of the year, and it has always felt right to me that Rosh Hashanah — the Jewish New Year — comes in September. God gave the dates of the calendar in the Bible, and he made the new year at the end of the summer. Our feelings about the nature of the seasonal cycles and the feelings that accompany them reflect deeper ancient truths about the way the world has been ordered since the beginning of time. The school schedule came later.

Summer sigh

The last days of summer, the days we are living through right now, are like a sigh. A smiling and not yet mournful sigh, a sigh that means we are content and happy. The kind of sigh that you let out when you are so full that you wish the moment could last forever.

On the beach, the kids playing in the sand, splashing in the water, running and laughing, the sparkling water, sun-kissed skin more caramel than ever before, the happiness the sun brings, the sound of the waves.

Endless summer might be heaven, but heaven isn’t here on earth; for that we must wait. Those last days, the days at the end of the year, they tease us. And the knowledge that they are finite is what makes them precious. But what if these could last forever? If only they could last forever!

But they can’t. Time marches on, we are at the end now, a new year must begin, and it will begin soon, after the last day on the beach.

​Lifestyle, Culture, Summer, Back to school, Rosh hashanah, Seasons, The root of the matter 

What happened to investigative journalism?

Lots of things, none of them good. The conglomeration of publishers, revelations concerning Project Mockingbird, the re-legalization of government propaganda in the Obama era, drastically truncated attention spans, and the super-saturation of sheer information all came together to diminish its once-proud tradition.

Whistleblowers blew, the government failed to protect them, and a great many journalists (so-called) operated less as the brakes on power and more as easily purchased shills.

A new AI-integrated operation, however, seeks to put things back on track.

The turnaround time is already approaching lightning speed.

Effort.news is the creation of entrepreneur Brian Chau. The endeavor brings together high-power, customized artificial intelligence with an evolving human competency/responsibility component that signals the best of what’s possible in the era of AI integration.

Speaking to Blaze Media on the human component of his operation, Chau said, “When we hire, the single most important human skill is the ability to anticipate which stories, ideas, and issues will matter to potential audiences. That’s true across the publication. What findings are newsworthy? What headlines and prose read well? What will readers remember or infer about the graphs? When do we include information in prose vs. a table vs. a graph vs. a footnote? All of these are questions the AIs don’t answer well right now. I also don’t think it’s the type of skill that can be pulled out and separated. The people who are good at knowing what matters tend to be good writers, editors, and researchers.”

Hard-hitting coverage

Readers notice a few things immediately with Effort.news — first off, its leaders aren’t playing around in terms of applying those brakes on power. Recent investigations have focused varyingly on EU machinations in the Ceuta invasion-migration story, California’s race-based pregnancy funding, and the old-money families behind the “degrowth” meme.

Secondly, the investigations are not surface scrapes. They are going deep, isolating patterns in vast amounts of information (often intentionally obscure and hidden information) to cull what otherwise simply wouldn’t be done in either mainstream or, lacking the tools, grassroots journalism outfits.

RELATED: This app censors your phone in a stunning new way — and people are using it on purpose

Juliane Sonntag/Photothek/Getty Images

And, finally, they’re moving extremely fast. “Our complete production time used to be 4-10 days from first looking into a lead to finishing the completed article. Now it’s closer to 1-4 days,” says Chau. “I think the research techniques we use would just be impractical for human use.”

For example, Chau explains, “the main thing we did to uncover donation rows for the degrowth article was that we used AI to look up every single donor to Swiss Philanthropy Foundation and search the donor’s financials for whether they donated to P4NE. For context, SPF hides P4NE’s donations by mixing 106 different funds into one account. SPF had 249 donors in 2024, so depending on how thoroughly people searched each donor’s records and tried to validate matching financials, that table could take around a month at least.”

A glimpse of the future

So the product is high-level. The turnaround time is already approaching lightning speed and getting better. The key with AI, that it’s too late to turn back, appears to be finding the proper balance between human and machine. Chau may not have all the answers to how we get there as a whole, but he’s starting to fill in some blanks. No question, it will require immersion into the messy, and dangerous, process of trial and error, but it’s also going to require a return to standards and someone honest and/or determined enough to implement them.

Chau says Effort.news is still refining. “Our AI workflows are extremely customized, and our team updates them several times every day,” he says. “There’s a lot to optimize around cost and speed of retrieving data, mostly around cost and breadth of information covered. We also make a lot of qualitative improvements to how AI models present information to us. It’s still not clean enough to directly publish, but it made reading the AIs 95% more readable. We’ve improved the models enough to cut our production time by more than half on average, and I think we can cut our production time by half multiple times more.”

Come what may, Effort.news is just the beginning.

​Artificial intelligence, Tech