California Retail Theft Blitz Leads To 97 Arrests And $1 Million In Stolen Merchandise
A coordinated crackdown on organized retail crime across California ended with 97 arrests and the recovery of thousands of stolen products, according to KTLA.
Over nine days in early August, California Highway Patrol investigators worked alongside more than 100 law enforcement agencies as part of the National Organized Retail Crime Blitz. The enforcement effort focused on suspected theft activity at retailers, shopping centers and other businesses throughout the state.
The KTLA report says that authorities ultimately recovered more than 8,500 items believed to have been stolen. CHP estimated the merchandise was worth roughly $1.05 million. Of the 97 people arrested during the operation, eight were taken into custody on felony charges.
The enforcement push included operations in several communities. In San Diego, authorities recovered a large quantity of stolen sneakers, while officers in Roseville, Lodi and Stockton carried out proactive operations that led to additional arrests.
CHP Commissioner Sean Duryee said retail theft can have lasting consequences for businesses and the communities they serve, and said the agency plans to continue committing resources to identifying and apprehending those involved.
The latest operation adds to several years of organized retail crime enforcement by the CHP. Since its Organized Retail Crime Task Force began operating in 2019, the agency has been involved in more than 4,700 investigations and over 5,300 arrests.
During that period, authorities have recovered more than 1.6 million stolen products with an estimated combined value exceeding $76.6 million, according to CHP.
Harvard University has agreed to pay $53 million to resolve lawsuits brought by the families of those whose loved ones' body parts were donated to its medical school only to be sold on the black market by its morgue manager.
A state court judge in Boston preliminarily approved a class action settlement on Aug. 18 that would resolve the lawsuits filed against the Ivy League institution eight months after Cedric Lodge, the former manager of Harvard Medical School's morgue, was jailed.
Dozens of relatives of individuals whose bodies were donated to Harvard filed lawsuits accusing the school of negligence, contending it turned a blind eye to Lodge's years-long misconduct until he was indicted in 2023.
On Dec. 16, 2025, Lodge, 58, pleaded guilty to charges related to the interstate transportation of stolen goods and was sentenced to eight years in prison.
He admitted to stealing body parts from cadavers donated to Harvard Medical School's Anatomical Gift Program and selling them to buyers across the country.
Morgue Manager Stole Brains, Skin, Bones
Prosecutors said that between 2018 and March 2020, Cedric Lodge stole and trafficked "heads, brains, skin, bones, and other human remains" after the donated bodies had been used for teaching and research.
His wife, Denise Lodge, 65, was also sentenced to 12 months and one day in prison.
Cedric Lodge, who had worked in Harvard's morgue for almost three decades, smuggled the body parts from the morgue in Boston to his home in Goffstown, New Hampshire, where he and his wife sold them, prosecutors said.
A judge had initially dismissed the class action lawsuit against Harvard, but in October 2025, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned that decision, finding that the plaintiffs had sufficient claims that the institution had failed to act in good faith in handling the bodies.
"Instead of the dignified treatment and disposal of human remains required ... the donors' remains were ghoulishly dismembered and sold for profit under the most horrifying of circumstances," Justice Scott Kafker wrote in the court's opinion at the time. "This horrific and undignified treatment continued for years and involved numerous donors."
'Flagrant Betrayal of Our Values'
Harvard's dean of the faculty of medicine, George Daley, and the dean for medical education at Harvard Medical School, Bernard Chang, said in an Aug. 17 message to the school's community that Lodge's actions took place without the school's knowledge.
"His violations ... were despicable, abhorrent, and a flagrant betrayal of our values as a medical community," they wrote. "These events do not reflect the reverence we hold for the altruistic individuals who selflessly donate their bodies to our Anatomical Gift Program (AGP) to provide essential educational opportunities to medical and dental students, practicing surgeons, and allied health professionals."
Daley and Chang offered their "deep sorrow and empathy" to the families of the donors and said that, in addition to the financial payment, they will provide a statement to the families via a live webinar "confirming that Lodge's criminal acts were morally reprehensible" and inconsistent with the standards Harvard Medical School expects for the treatment of anatomical donors.
John Morgan, whose law firm Morgan & Morgan represented families in the litigation, said, "We hope that this resolution ensures that this never happens to another family ever again."
The remains were sold to, among others, Katrina MacLean, who ran Kat's Creepy Creations, a studio and store in Peabody, Massachusetts, the indictment stated. Payments were often made to Denise Lodge through her PayPal account.
On Aug. 18, MacLean, 47, was jailed for 24 months by Chief U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann for interstate transportation of stolen property.
This past week ended with shock and sadness at the news that Jason Arday ended his own life in the midst of an investigation over his intellectual credibility. He was the vaunted education sociologist at Cambridge University, media darling and beneficiary of a big book contract, the toast of the town, and the subject of countless hagiographic profiles in media venues.
Plenty of people had whispered for years that he nowhere near qualified for all this celebration. He was not a genius. He was a fabulist. Saying it, however, was dangerous to one's career. As a result, he kept getting away with it. His luck ran out when a U.S. academic pressed the issue. The tissue of lies collapsed.
The circumstances surrounding his absurd appointment to a full professorship with a named chair - the youngest black professor to enjoy such privilege - are hardly unique to him. When the full truth coming out about his plagiarism and autobiographical embellishments hit the international news, despair overwhelmed him in tragic ways.
It goes without saying that this young man had benefitted from what's called DEI, which is the new term for what used to be called "affirmative action" but mutated into rampant privilege based on raw identity politics. Reverse racism doesn't describe it fully. It is institutionalized discrimination that breeds deep resentment from those passed over and cultivates hidden contempt for those who ride this wave to unearned prestige and plaudits.
Something else has always bugged me about these systems that confer high titles and salaries on people solely on grounds of their race. It is deeply condescending and cruel to the point of being abusive of our fellow human beings. While it is easy to resent people who benefit from unearned exaltation, the plight of those who are its seeming beneficiaries also deserves some attention.
Years ago I had the opportunity to get to know a university administrator and his wife who occupied such a role. We met at a dinner party. He was the only black gentleman in the upper echelon of a major state university. His title was vice president for civil rights or some such made-up badge. It was a position invented to create the appearance of diversity. The position fell to him because he ticked all the boxes.
He was proud of his new position. But the more we spoke, the more he had doubts that he would express under his breath. He said that he has a large budget and staff but is rarely included as part of any serious planning team. He told me that he is mostly sent out on fundraising efforts to tell his story about how he grew up poor, overcame racism, and now has a prestigious position in university administration. But, he told me with frankness, he is tired of that story of himself.
We met up a few weeks later because I was curious to know more. He laid it all out to me. He came of age in an educational environment that was especially seeking blacks who performed above expectations which he always did. But instead of moving up a notch based on merit, he said he became aware early on that he was being accelerated and escalated beyond a level that was justified.
It became obvious in his college admissions, which pushed him into an institution far above that for which he was prepared. He found himself lost in a sea of high achievers. His privilege became a burden. He could not keep up in his classes and began to cut corners. It became obvious to him early that he was going to get away with this.
It seemed like the entire system was on his side. He tried to justify this to himself on grounds that every university has white kids on trust funds with legacy connections. They work less hard than a working-class kid who made it on his own so perhaps this is not unusual.
But, he said, he always felt burdened in multiple directions. It was sad enough that he grew up poor and black in the Deep South and was not expected to achieve. But it was far worse that he was given advancements beyond what he deserved when everyone knew it and considered him to be little more than a token of a compensatory system.
He described to me that choice he had to make. He could refuse the high grades, the advanced placements, the awards and attention that he knew were unmerited. But he was never sure what the point of that would be. Instead, he accepted them all as part of a game. He lost trust and respect in the system that he joined precisely because the system never really expected a high degree of performance from him.
He continued in this vein to tell me about graduate school and PhD studies which were more of the same. There was no point in this where he knew when to refuse, when to say no, when to call out the condescension and fakery of which he was presumably benefiting. In fact, he never saw himself as much of a beneficiary at all. He felt burdened by it all, and even robbed of what all the white kids faced: high expectations and the satisfaction of knowing that one climbed the ladder by virtue of his own efforts.
The story ends with his then appointment, which he knew to be fake at least on some level, though he believed that he truly did have something to contribute to university culture. It was that tag of having been marked by DEI that prevented it. He said he knew from childhood that in any endeavor in life, a title is easy but genuine respect from colleagues must be earned. He simply did not have that and did not know how to get it.
I was hardly in a position to give him advice so I did my best simply to be a sympathetic ear. I've thought about this case often through the years, knowing all the while that such cases were growing in academia to absurd extents.
What if the entire system of educational and professional achievement suddenly decided that white guys from Southwest Texas needed a boost through the ranks to make up for past wrongs? Everything I did and everywhere I went was read through my accidental identity and I was celebrated on the basis that I was from Southwest Texas, bypassing everyone else. How would this sit with me?
Absurd, right? Well, for my friend and by virtue of his race, whole degree programs were being manufactured as well as departments all designed to create the illusion of achievement without the reality. And who was doing this? For the most part, it was white left-liberals who were seeking some kind of propitiation for perceived social sins, using black people as pawns in their egalitarian gamesmanship.
And it wasn't just academia. DEI bled into corporate America, banking, media, the movies, arts institutions, publishing, and into every space and sector in modern life. Objecting to it at any point meant taking a huge risk of being called a racist. Whole systems of communication and enforcement have been invented to cover up all the ways in which meritocracy was being displaced by a new racial hierarchy.
Countless whistleblowers in academic and corporate life have faced brutal retaliation for calling this out. Everyone knows the rules: play along or face the purge. This is how Arday and so many others have gotten away with this for so long. The brave dissidents are smeared and broken. All that's left are the people willing to live with the lies.
None of this can end well. In the case of Jason Arday, it was not a case of Icarus who flew too closely to the sun and saw his wings melt before falling to earth. No. Instead he was catapulted by others at his previous schools and by Cambridge itself as high in the air as possible but given no parachute.
One day, seemingly out of the blue, the standards police came for him and revealed vast plagiarism and implausible biography. He tried the old tricks of calling them names but they would not stop their investigations. His entire life story was being upended and he was being made a laughingstock, merely for playing along with a system that everyone knew was fake to begin with.
The personal pain of this level of public humiliation is impossible to describe. It is worse than prison. Even when it is completely deserved - he had played the game all along, just as his critics had said - the suffering is unbearable for most mortals. What angers me most about this is not even that Arday played along with the racket that he knew was nothing more than that. It's that the racket was constructed to work exactly the way it did work, and then suddenly and without any warning, it stopped working.
Decades have gone by when such intellectual fakery has only grown and persisted. It's not that such systems have been abused by bad actors. It's that the systems themselves were built to baptize abuse and injustice as a fairness and compensation for past wrongs.
In reality, DEI is demeaning to everyone: the bypassed, the whistleblowers, and the seeming beneficiaries. It is a socially engineered scam created by guilt-ridden intellectuals that is exploitative even of those who seemingly win from its emoluments.
Jason Arday, despite all his failings, never deserved the indignity that comes with an unmerited promotion to the top. He knew this all along, just as my friend knew it. Any serious person with the capacity for self-examination knows it. We should stop these absurd games. They are unsustainable and can end in terrible tragedy.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently "Liberty or Lockdown." He is also the editor of "The Best of Ludwig von Mises." He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
A federal court on Aug. 17 blocked a Trump administration plan to move the proposed new FBI headquarters to the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington instead of a site in nearby Greenbelt, Maryland, that was chosen in 2023.
Congress passed laws requiring the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages the federal government's real estate holdings, to select a site for the project from among three suburban sites outside of Washington: Greenbelt; Landover, Maryland; or Springfield, Virginia. In 2023, GSA chose Greenbelt.
However, in July 2025, the Trump administration jettisoned those plans and said it would be more cost-effective to move the FBI to the Reagan Building, which houses U.S. Customs and Border Protection and, until last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development.
U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang ruled in favor of the state of Maryland and Prince George's County, finding the federal government illegally scrapped the plan to build the facility in Greenbelt, and reprogrammed funds Congress already approved for the project to an alternate location.
Chuang said choosing the Reagan Building ran afoul of legislation Congress approved in 2022 and 2023 that directed the GSA to select one of three sites.
"Notably, the text provides no conditions under which the selection could be unilaterally rescinded or switched to a nonconforming site," Chuang said in his written opinion.
"Had Congress sought to make the location restriction associated with the site selection provisional or qualified, it could have done so," the judge said.
Because the Trump administration did not have authority to choose the Reagan Building, it could not lawfully reprogram $555 million in previously appropriated funds to prepare that site, he said.
The federal government's decision to reprogram the funds was "arbitrary and capricious" because it was based on a misinterpretation of existing law "under which the FBI erroneously concluded that the FBI and the GSA had the authority to select the Reagan Building as the site for the consolidated FBI headquarters," the judge said.
The court vacated the reprogramming and site selection decisions and issued a permanent injunction blocking the government from implementing the Reagan Building plan or reprogramming the funds.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, hailed the new court ruling.
"From the beginning, we said the decision to move the FBI headquarters to Greenbelt was final, earned, and the Trump Administration's attempt to overturn it was illegal and wrong for our national security. Today, the court agreed," Moore said in a statement.
"Now it is time to stop the games and get to work building the world-class FBI headquarters that our public servants deserve, where it belongs: in Prince George's County, Maryland."
The Epoch Times reached out to the U.S. Department of Justice for comment. No reply was received by publication time.
Copper Squeeze Deepens In London As Futs Near Record; Barclays Flags Top Mining Picks
Copper prices in London have held above $14,000 a ton for nine consecutive sessions, with steep backwardation signaling that near-term demand is outstripping available supply. A confluence of bullish drivers is pushing prices toward record highs, while the key cash-to-three-month spread has widened to its highest level since the 2021 market squeeze.
The spot price traded as much as $543.50 a ton above three-month contracts on the London Metal Exchange, a hallmark of steep backwardation that signals near-term demand is outstripping available supply.
LME copper curve signals deep backwardation:
Three-month futures rose as much as 1.7% to $14,396 a ton on Monday, closing in on January's record of $14,527.50.
Richard Garchitorena, a New York-based Barclays equity research analyst covering North American metals and mining stocks, wrote Monday morning that mining stocks are poised for further gains as copper supplies continue to tighten.
Garchitorena said copper supplies remain constrained for a number of reasons: Chilean production fell 6.7% year over year through June, prompting Cochilco to cut its 2026 forecast to 5.27 million tons, down 2.6%. Antofagasta separately reduced its annual guidance by about 5% after severe weather disrupted its Los Pelambres mine. An outage at Indonesia's Gresik smelter has also delayed shipments, with no restart date established.
He added that LME copper stockpiles have plunged 32% from a month earlier to 205,000 tons, while Comex inventories rose 8% to 735,000 tons as traders await a potential U.S. tariff on refined copper. He also noted that speculative net-long positions increased to 77,123 contracts, up 20% from July.
Garchitorena's preferred individual mining stocks to watch include Freeport-McMoRan, First Quantum Minerals, Hudbay Minerals, Newmont and Agnico Eagle.
Global X Copper Miners ETF (COPX)
Separately, David Wilson, head of metals strategy at BNP Paribas SA, told clients, "There seems to be momentum for it to get there," referring to the potential for LME copper to exceed the January record. "It's moving into overbought territory, but I don't know if that means anything at the moment, given how tight it is."
"Normally you'd expect to get more Chinese deliveries into the LME," BNP's Wilson said. "But the thing is, why would you deliver to the LME when you can still effectively ship metal into the US?"
Bloomberg noted that the copper squeeze comes "ahead of the third Wednesday of the month delivery date, the main focus of liquidity in the LME's contracts. That may pile pressure onto traders with short positions."
