Seven more women filed sexual assault claims against the U.S. Coast Guard on Thursday, according to an attorney representing the women, as fallout from the assault scandal at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London continues to widen. A total of 29 such claims have been filed since September. The claims, filed under the Federal Tort Claims Act, allege that Coast Guard Academy officials did not take reasonable steps to protect cadets and prospective cadets from sexual assault, and that they knew about and concealed a pattern of sexual assault and harassment at the academy for decades. “Many of them have been emotionally devastated,” said Christine Dunn, a partner at the law firm Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight who is representing the complainants. “To this day, they’re devastated. They’re in therapy and they suffer from PTSD. It’s something that they carry with them every day.” Many of the claims stemmed from a policy that barred cadets at the academy from locking their room doors, Dunn told CT Insider. In several instances documented in the claims, women say they woke up to find male classmates on top of them. “I told him I would scream if he did not get out of my room,” one former cadet said in her complaint. “He threatened me, ‘If you yell, we’ll both get in trouble.’ I knew he was right. I had been drinking alcohol that night and knew the Academy had a strict zero-tolerance policy for underage drinking. I knew I would get in trouble for drinking, even though I had been assaulted, and likely nothing would happen to my assailant. The Academy created an environment that protected young men like him at the expense of young women like me.” The complaints identify the women as Jane Does one through 29, rather than by name. Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight shared redacted copies of the

A New Beltway Intrigue: Follow The Biden EPA Money Authored by James Varney via RealClearInvestigations, When the Biden administration announced $27 billion in environmental grants last April, it set the clock ticking on a predicament: how to get the unprecedented sums for the President’s envisioned NetZero future out the door before the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30? The task was complicated by the fact most of the money – $20 billion – would go to just eight nonprofits that, like the Environmental Protection Agency itself, had never handled such gargantuan grants. In hindsight, it’s easy to suspect that corners were cut, or laws were broken, or, at the very least, extraordinary measures were taken. Those possibilities are clearly on the mind of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as he tries to unravel what happened to Inflation Reduction Act spending that the Biden White House’s Office of Management and Budget and the EPA decided to expedite before the November election – an effort that included moving the roughly $20 billion to a private institution, Citibank, away from oversight of the Treasury Department.  On Wednesday, Zeldin moved to terminate the arrangements as the enriched nonprofits have filed lawsuits looking to protect their grants. The battle has thrust into the spotlight what had been a rather quiet attempt by the Biden administration to spend the $27 billion. The money was put into the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a new entity born in 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats pushed through Congress without any Republican support.   “This bold investment will not only deploy clean energy and combat the climate crisis but also improve health outcomes, lower energy costs, and create high-quality jobs for Americans,” Biden’s EPA declared when seeking applications for the grants, “all while strengthening our country’s economic competitiveness and ensuring energy security.”  The

Violent tornadoes ripped through parts of the U.S., wiping out schools and toppling semitractor-trailers in several states, part of a monster storm that has killed at least 26 people as more severe weather was expected late Saturday.