The Tide Has Turned Against Data Centers In NCC. Here’s proof:
The New Castle County Council on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed its second ordinance regulating data centers — with little debate.
If signed by County Executive Marcus Henry, the new ordinance will mandate that any developer who wants to build a large energy-use facility, including data centers, first prove that there will be enough electricity and transmission infrastructure to support it.
Councilman Dave Carter, the ordinance’s sponsor, said the measure is meant to prevent large energy users from raising the electric bills for homes and businesses, which can occur when there is a massive new demand on power.
The new rule does not apply retroactively, meaning data center proposals already in the county’s approval pipeline will not be subject to it. Still, those pending plans have largely been stalled in the face of resident opposition and state regulations.
“It was a lot easier to get this piece through, which tells me how much the public sentiment has changed,” Carter said in an interview.
The first set of regulations was also more expansive. It included new rules that require data centers to maintain buffer zones around them, and to use energy-efficient backup generators, among other requirements.
The newest ordinance also is similar to a law that the state legislature passed in June. That law requires large energy users, such as data centers, to enter into energy service agreements meant to ensure they pay the full costs of the electricity they use.
If a developer can’t agree to the terms of that agreement, then a utility would not have to provide power to it, the law states.
Can we just step back for a second and thank Dave Carter for standing up for the public in all of this? He is, and always has been, a true public servant.
Charlotte-Mecklenberg Police Are Who We Thought They Were:
Multiple sources confirm to WBTV that more than half a dozen officers with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department have been recommended for termination or quit after a text thread with racist messages came to light during a different investigation.
According to sources who spoke to WBTV on the condition of anonymity, the text thread between some Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers includes a competition over who can pull over the most black drivers. There are also numerous uses of the “n-word” related to use of force and discharging firearms at black residents.
Multiple sources say the text messages were discovered while the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation was investigating Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer Seth Elliott for misuse of the Flock network. Elliott is facing a criminal charge after court records show he allegedly used Flock Safety and other technology to help someone involved in a drug investigation, documents revealed.
During that investigation, text messages and other data were downloaded from Elliott’s phone and turned over to Charlotte-Mecklenburg police. A further review of those messages showed Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers in a text thread making derogatory statements about black people.
Last week, officers who were involved in the text thread faced an internal affairs independent chain of command review board, and numerous officers were recommended for termination.
The good news?: These racist cops are being fired. The bad news? ICE is hiring.
The Real SNAP Fraudsters. Congress Can, But Won’t, Provide The Easy Fix:
It wasn’t the kind of call a grocery store gets every day. A customer with a thick Eastern European accent was on the phone saying he wanted to buy several thousand cans of Red Bull. Could the store have them in stock in a few days? Also, did they have equipment to move all those stacks of energy drinks into the parking lot, where two minivans would be waiting?
(You’re already hooked, aren’t you?)
When the day came, Oct. 19, 2022, employees at the Smart & Final store in San Diego sold 3,960 cans of Red Bull and 720 of Monster Energy to two men and two women, all with the same accent, and helped them wheel the pallets out back. To pay for it all — the bill came to $10,747.05 — the group pulled out piles of plastic. These weren’t credit or debit cards; they looked more like hotel-room keys. There were 25 cards in all, each with a different amount loaded onto it, and the four people took turns swiping one after another. Then, the payment complete, they drove off.
In the days that followed, people as far away as New York and Florida made panicked calls to the store. They wanted to know why their food-stamp accounts (containing their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits) had been drained at this seemingly random location in San Diego.
It would turn out that what became known as the Red Bull Crew had gotten ahold of their SNAP data and used the funds to buy the energy drinks, which they then sold online or to smaller stores. It was hardly an isolated event. From September through November of that year, the same crew, part of a criminal syndicate based in Romania, bought at least $305,274.52 in energy drinks, using SNAP account information and PINs stolen from at least 174 victims nationwide, according to court documents and federal investigators.
To hear the Trump administration tell it, the SNAP program is under siege by well-heeled recipients of food stamps. Vice President JD Vance, upon being named “Fraud Czar” this spring, said: “There are people who have Lamborghinis who currently receive SNAP benefits.” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, whose agency oversees the program, regularly goes on TV and social media to allege that masses of SNAP recipients are scamming the system, driving Bentleys, Ferraris, Maseratis and, yes, Lamborghinis.
The federal government’s own statistics tell a different story. Confirmed cases of intentional program violations — fraud — committed by SNAP recipients account for $64 million a year, or about 0.08% of all benefits issued annually, according to the most recent 50-state reports compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Meanwhile a far bigger fraud wave has exploded over the past five years: organized theft from SNAP recipients. In 2025, $470 million was stolen electronically from beneficiaries — and thus from the U.S. taxpayer — according to data supplied to ProPublica by Propel, a company that provides a mobile app for SNAP recipients to check their account balances and transaction histories. More than 990,000 households that received food assistance last year had benefits stolen. (The reason it’s necessary to use data from a private company: The federal government has stopped tracking rates of this crime.)
So, what’s the fix?:
Perhaps the most vexing aspect of all: The federal government knows how to prevent the vast majority of this crime in a single step. Congress just hasn’t been willing to take it.
SNAP theft is an old scheme applied to a new target. For years, scammers would surreptitiously install skimming devices on card readers at ATMs, gas pumps and corner stores. These devices could read the data on people’s cards as they swiped — while a pinhole camera or overlay keypad captured their PINs — all of which could be picked up later or sent via Bluetooth to someone sitting in a nearby cafe or parking lot. This pilfered data, in turn, was used to make online purchases, or it was loaded onto cloned cards to withdraw cash.
Skimming became exponentially more difficult when credit and debit card companies installed digital microchips in the 2010s and then introduced tap-to-pay. But one kind of card did not get the new chips: Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT, cards, which people use to access SNAP and other public assistance. These still rely on the 1960s-era magnetic-stripe technology that skimmers can easily read.
Yet congressional leadership has continually blocked legislation that would fund chip EBT cards nationally, despite universal support for the measure among Democrats and significant support among the Republican rank and file. For instance, House Committee on Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said at a hearing in March that chip technology is “very effective.” But he shut down a bipartisan proposal to upgrade EBT cards with chips, citing unspecified budgetary constraints.
An Elon Musk Cameo:
The main thing Congress has done about SNAP theft is to abandon a previous effort to help victims. The federal government had, since late 2022, been replacing people’s stolen funds, just as banks are required to do if your debit card is hacked. As a result, 753,929 households were compensated.
In December 2024, a bipartisan spending agreement that included a provision to extend these reimbursements through 2028 was on the brink of becoming law. But Elon Musk, who had been named a leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency, attacked the legislation more than 100 times on X, pushing to “defund everything.” (Musk did not reply to a request for comment.) Trump then sank the deal. Victims of SNAP theft can no longer get any of their benefits replaced. And with the government off the hook for losses, there is now less incentive to put money into the solution.
Personal to Sarah McBride: You wanna push some bipartisan legislation? Start here. Be relentless about it. I’m serious. You can do this.
Serbian Dictator Moved To Help Trump. It might not work out how he intended:
Serbia’s authoritarian ruler personally intervened to advance an allegedly illegal scheme to hand over a protected site in Belgrade for a Trump tower, the Guardian can reveal.
Aleksandar Vučić summoned officials to a meeting at his presidential offices about the project, which has culminated in a landmark indictment of senior figures from his regime on charges of abuse of public office.
The criminal case is believed to be the first resulting from the Trumps’ global moneymaking campaign, described by critics as a “pay to play” arrangement where everything from sanctions relief to cutting-edge chips is available to those who enrich the first family and their associates.
The alleged scheme to override the protected status of a historic building in the Serbian capital looms over an election scheduled for 25 October, when Vučić will seek to extend his 12 years in power in the face of a mass protest movement spurred by government corruption.
The real key here is the Trumps’ worldwide ‘pay to play’ scheme, a scheme that only works when Presidential power and pressure provides the sought-after results.
This is all blatantly criminal, as is the DOJ that would presumably investigate these crimes.
What do you want to talk about?
