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Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas fired his prisoners’ affairs commissioner this week, seemingly demonstrating new seriousness about reforming the system of payments for terrorists that the commissioner oversaw and vocally defended.

But Abbas simultaneously replaced the former commissioner, Qadura Fares, with another convicted terrorist and leading proponent of the payments, Raed Abu al-Humus. The incoming boss quickly confirmed his support for killing Israelis.

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Actually, Clinton was one of the better Republican Presidents we’ve ever had.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Joy Reid’s evening news show on MSNBC is being canceled, part of a far-reaching programming overhaul orchestrated by Rebecca Kutler, the network’s new president, two people familiar with the changes said.

The final episode of Ms. Reid’s 7 p.m. show, “The ReidOut,” is planned for sometime this week, according to the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly. The show, which features in-depth interviews with politicians and other newsmakers, has been a fixture of MSNBC’s lineup for the past five years.

MSNBC is planning to replace Ms. Reid’s program with a show led by a trio of anchors: Symone Sanders Townsend, a political commentator and former Democratic strategist; Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee; and Alicia Menendez, the TV journalist, the people said. They currently co-host “The Weekend,” which airs Saturday and Sunday mornings.

I guess anti-white race hatred is no longer in tune with the zeitgeist.

UPDATE: MSNBC Cancels Far-Left-Crazed Host Joy Reid As Woke Implosion Accelerates 

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Gee, I wonder why?

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

President Trump’s return to Washington has tested the bounds of presidential power and set off alarms among Democrats, historians and legal scholars who are warning that the country’s democratic order is under threat.

But a close review of the 2024 election shows just how undemocratic the country’s legislative bodies already are.

After decades of gerrymandering and political polarization, a vast majority of members of Congress and state legislatures did not face competitive general elections last year.

Instead, they were effectively elected through low-turnout or otherwise meaningless primary contests. Vanishingly few voters cast a ballot in those races, according to a New York Times analysis of more than 9,000 congressional and state legislative primary elections held last year. On average, just 57,000 people voted for politicians in U.S. House primaries who went on to win the general election — a small fraction of the more than 700,000 Americans each of those winners now represents.

Increasingly, members of Congress are not even facing primary challenges. About a third of the current members of the House ran unopposed in their primary. All but 12 of those districts were “safe” seats, meaning 124 House members essentially faced no challenge to their election.

This is the sort of total horseshit that is constantly peddled by the Narrative Media these days.

Why is ‘competitive general elections’ the touchstone for ‘democracy’? DEMOCRACY, if you look in a decent dictionary or a decent encyclopedia, consists of people having representatives in the legislature who look out for their interests and pursue the sort of government activity that their constituents would pursue if they weren’t busy making a living. That’s why we have ‘representatives’, because everybody can’t spend their days arguing about politics and voting on every question. There is nothing in this understanding of ‘democracy’ that necessarily includes ‘competitive general elections’.

In fact, reality is quite the opposite. A ‘competitive general election’ means that either candidate can win. If either candidate can win, the one who wins DOES NOT REPRESENT THE INTERESTS of a SIGNIFICANT PART of the electorate. This is particularly true in modern politics, in which polarization has gone to the extreme that women are putting in their dating app profiles ‘no MAGA’ or ‘Woke only’. So this scurrilous rag wants us to believe that an election in which a great chunk of the voters ‘lose to Hitler’ is preferable to an election in which that losing demographic is minimized. Which of these sounds more ‘democratic’ to you?

The quiet part that never gets said out loud is that CLICKBAIT MEDIA NEED A HORSE RACE ELECTION to support their business model. If Joe (or Jane) Blow is sure to get elected, then they have nothing to write about and nobody pays any attention to them, just as nobody would bet on a game that pitted the Kansas City Chiefs against Franklin Roosevelt High School.

GERRYMANDERING IS NOT A BUG. GERRYMANDERING IS A FEATURE. The more like-minded voters you cram into a single district (providing that it doesn’t have an unbalanced number of voters compared to other districts), the more sure you are that those voters will get the representative that they prefer. That is not a distortion of ‘democracy’, but more closely approximates its perfection.

Newspapers and TV news shows and political journalists of every stripe want a tense, nail-biting contest that goes down to the wire, and preferably includes a hard-fought recount that winds up in the courts. This is how they make their money; this is how they aggregate the great glowing gobs of attention that is the lifeblood of every TV talking head and scribbler with a byline: ‘Look at me! Look at me! I’m important! I Am Making A Difference!'[tm].

Think it through, and pay no attention to the NPCs in front of the curtain.

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There was an “Allahu Akhbar” moment today in the French city of Mulhouse during a demonstration in support of the Congo, where an Algerian mujahid went on a stabbing rampage, killing one person and wounding several others. The deceased victim is reportedly a visitor from Portugal.

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Next week, an ever-smaller audience will tune into the Oscars to watch the Hollywood elite congratulate themselves on their bravery for sharing the opinion that Donald Trump is a bad man. Hollywood’s ironclad embrace of the Democratic Party line is nothing new—it is evident in Best Picture nominee A Complete Unknown. The film pretends that Bob Dylan was ostracized from the folk music scene because he went electric when in reality it was because he did not share their radical left-wing politics. This rewriting of history through the movies is sadly the rule, not the exception, when it comes to Hollywood biopics.

UK Daily Mail.

For years, thousands of Americans who suffered debilitating side effects after getting the Covid vaccine were told there was no evidence the shot was linked.

Some were branded antivaxxers, others told their symptoms were imagined or related to other conditions, like long Covid.

But that changed this week.

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

police officers with a knife shouting “Allahu Akbar” has died in eastern France.

Two police officers were also seriously injured in the suspected Islamist terrorist act, which took place in the city of Mulhouse during a demonstration in support of the Congo on Saturday afternoon. Three other police officers were lightly wounded.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said the knife attack was “without any doubt an act of Islamist terrorism”. The suspected attacker, an Algerian male who has been arrested, is on a terror prevention watchlist, according to the anti-terrorism prosecution office (PNAT).

He has been under judicial supervision and house arrest, and was under an expulsion order from France, according to union sources.

Read it.

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Saturday a knife attack that killed one and injured three in eastern France on Saturday was “Islamist terrorism,” after France’s anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office confirmed it was investigating the case.

My, what a surprise….

ZMan:

Trucks are like guns and dogs. You always have more than you need, but you never have more than you want.

Read it.

How many climate scientists are willing to bend the truth to keep their access to federal grant money?

How much money are dissembling students and faculty members at the University of Helsinki receiving from the US Government?

How deep is the rot, if the Chancellor of a major university appears to think it is OK to talk positively about students attempting to deceive the US Government, by rewording the titles of their grant applications to evade restrictions imposed by the Trump Administration? Though to be fair, maybe the chancellor did condemn bending the truth to win Fulbright grants, and Guardian reporter Oliver Milman forgot to include the Chancellor’s condemnation in his article.

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Inspired by recent jihad attacks in various parts of Europe, Islamic zealots in Germany are calling for new vehicular jihad attacks against poor clueless German citizens.

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For almost twenty years I’ve been reporting on the culture-enriching criminality of “New Swedes” in Modern Multicultural Sweden. One of the features of my early investigations was the organized violence directed at first responders — firemen and EMTs. I remember one incident, possibly in Malmö or Gothenburg, in which mischievous “youths” deliberately set a fire and then hid on a rooftop, waiting for the fire trucks to arrive. When the first firemen passed beneath their perch, the youngsters dropped rocks on them.

The situation deteriorated to the point where emergency personnel refused to enter certain “sensitive areas” without a police escort. One such incident in the Rosengård district of Malmö was described in this translated report posted in July of 2010.

Vlad recently unearthed an old video news report about the incident, and Gary Fouse has kindly translated it.

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The chairman of the Islamic School in the Swedish city of Växjö is in serious trouble due to his preaching jihad to the children during Friday prayers. In Arabic, mind you, so that “die dummen Schweden” can’t understand it.

I hadn’t realized that there was only one remaining Islamic school in Sweden. But maybe that’s because it seems like all Swedish schools are now Islamic schools.

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As reported here last weekend, a Syrian culture-enricher went on a stabbing spree in the Austrian city of Villach on Saturday, killing a 14-year-old boy and wounding three other people.

The video below features remarks to the press by a police spokesman in Villach about the deadly attack. His statements shed little additional light on the event, and at this point there is no mention of “Allahu Akhbar” or anything similar.

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The scandalous spending at USAID on foreign programs (think a transgender opera in Colombia) and progressive NGO’s (think The Aspen Institute) set off an explosion of headlines. Separately, our own auditors found $22 BILLION spent by the Office of Refugee Resettlement – a division of Health and Human Services – on aid to migrants since 2020. Again, NGO’s were granted the money to go out and act as ideological proxies for the Biden administration.

It’s become clear that Americans need an exhaustive map of the federal government and how much spending at each agency has grown over time.

When we began that work, we immediately found another problem.

Record keeping within the Federal Register, which is supposed to be the definitive guide to government policy, is shockingly bad.

At least 75 agencies listed there are effectively defunct or obsolete; they’ve been subsumed by other entities, renamed, or don’t even exist any longer.

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More and more good news from the southern border highlights how the Biden administration intentionally created a catastrophe and how President Donald Trump—through a change in policy and rhetoric—has reversed the system practically overnight.

We didn’t need the phony “border security” bill President Joe Biden championed—which was really more of a handout to Ukraine—to fix the problem. We just needed an executive branch willing to enforce the law.

Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks said in a CBS News interview on Thursday that unlawful crossings at the southern border are down 94% since this time last year.

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Continuing his government-reformation fiesta, President Trump is expected to issue an executive order dissolving the US Postal Service leadership and absorbing the organizaton into the Commerce Department. That bold move may be just a first step toward an even more ambitious and controversial goal: privatizing the perpetual money-loser.

From leadership to rank-and-file employees, the USPS will most certainly mount intense legal and political efforts against both initiatives. The USPS governing board is already gearing up: On Thursday, the USPS board held an emergency meeting in which it hired outside attorneys and directed them to file legal challenges when Trump makes his first move, the Washington Post reported.

…

The Postal Service is politically powerful — starting with its raw headcount: While you may not guess it given the long lines that typify a visit to a post office, USPS has a staggering 650,000 employees, who rise up whenever privatization gains momentum. It’s also popular among Americans — 72% view it favorably, compared just 21% who view it unfavorably, according to a 2024 Pew Research poll.

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It’s 2025, and we’re still dealing with the fallout and ramifications from COVID lockdowns. The inflation bringing down global economies, the devastating learning loss from years of school closures, and the endless masking still visible nearly everywhere.

All based on the assumption from 2020 that COVID was exceptionally dangerous. The World Health Organization claiming that 3.4 percent of people that contracted COVID would die. Anthony Fauci’s series of press conferences warning that reopening was impossible. The CDC, FDA, other expert organizations and politicians demanding vaccine mandates and passports. The politicians and hospital administrators denying medical care to unvaccinated individuals. A practice that continues even today.

All of it stems from the assertion that COVID was a uniquely, extremely lethal virus. We knew long ago that The Experts were wrong about the mortality rate. And now we have more proof that their misleading estimates, which led to a complete societal breakdown, were absurdly, catastrophically inaccurate.

UPDATE: Blockbuster Yale Study: Millions Of Long COVID Patients Might Actually Be Vaccine Injured

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Most people think wrinkles, graying hair, and a few creaks in the knees define aging. Yet scientists have spent decades exploring whether these signs, along with genetic mutations, tell the whole truth about growing older.

Early research suggests that epigenetics might help us measure how our bodies grow older, but what actually pushes these epigenetic “clocks” forward has been heavily debated.

The answer may involve unexpected links between random genetic changes and the epigenetic patterns found in older cells, according to Dr. Steven Cummings from Sutter Health’s California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute.

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Rumored to have killed the Roman emperor Augustus, nightshade’s berries are notoriously deadly. Tomatoes belong to the same plant family, Solanaceae, and produce toxic steroidal glycoalkaloids too.

Yet, generally, tomatoes don’t kill us.

Once believed to be poisonous, tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) actually convert their bitter toxins into something more palatable and less deadly. Sichuan University biologist Feng Bai and colleagues have now identified the genetic mechanisms involved in the tomato fruit’s safe transformation.

Times of Israel.

Kibbutz Nir Oz said early Saturday morning that resident Shiri Bibas was murdered while held captive in Gaza, after Hamas handed over her body overnight and it was brought to Israel for identification.

“With pain and deep sorrow, Kibbutz Nir Oz announces the murder of Shiri Bibas, may her memory be a blessing, who was kidnapped from her home,” said a statement from the community, which was one of most devastated by the Hamas-led terror onslaught on October 7, 2023.

“Today, after 16 unbearable months, this painful circle has finally been closed for the family and in the coming days she will return, together with her two small sons, to eternal rest in the soil of Israel,” added the Nir Oz statement.

According to assessments by Israeli officials issued after the body had been identified, Shiri was “brutally” murdered along with her two boys, Ariel, 4, and baby Kfir, nine months, in November 2023.

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The U.S. Marshals Service has deputized members of White House adviser Elon Musk’s private security detail that provides them with some of the same rights and protections as federal law enforcement officials.

CNN reported on Friday that multiple members of the detail have been made special deputies by the Marshals Service, possibly enabling them to carry weapons on federal grounds and making the agency legally liable for mistakes or errors made by the detail, according to a law enforcement source.

Several of the news outlets’ sources said that the level of security around Musk has surprised White House staffers and people close to the president, some of who say that his detail is nearly the size of President Donald Trump’s.

Billionaires are always targets. If they don’t have security in place, they’re fools.

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Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

Don’t like the F-word? Blame farmers and soft food. When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth. That changed the growth of their jaws, giving adults the overbites normal in children. Within a few thousand years, those slight overbites made it easy for people in farming cultures to fire off sounds like “f” and “v,” opening a world of new words.

The newly favored consonants, known as labiodentals, helped spur the diversification of languages in Europe and Asia at least 4000 years ago; they led to such changes as the replacement of the Proto-Indo-European pat?r to Old English faeder about 1500 years ago, according to linguist and senior author Balthasar Bickel at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The paper shows “that a cultural shift can change our biology in such a way that it affects our language,” says evolutionary morphologist Noreen Von Cramon-Taubadel of the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York system, who was not part of the study.

Postdocs Damián Blasi and Steven Moran in Bickel’s lab set out to test an idea proposed by the late American linguist Charles Hockett. He noted in 1985 that the languages of hunter-gatherers lacked labiodentals, and conjectured that their diet was partly responsible: Chewing gritty, fibrous foods puts force on the growing jaw bone and wears down molars. In response, the lower jaw grows larger, and the molars erupt farther and drift forward on the protruding lower jaw, so that the upper and lower teeth align. That edge-to-edge bite makes it harder to push the upper jaw forward to touch the lower lip, which is required to pronounce labiodentals. But other linguists rejected the idea, and Blasi says he, Moran, and their colleagues “expected to prove Hockett wrong.”

Unherd.

While Cruse is rarely remembered today, his name was often mentioned in the same breath as those of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X in the Sixties and Seventies. As a writer and professor (who achieved his position without a college degree), he was deeply influential in establishing the field of black studies. The Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. reports that as an undergraduate in the Seventies, he was assigned Cruse’s masterpiece, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, in three separate courses. Indeed, Gates said he “received the call to be an intellectual through Harold Cruse”.

Cruse was unlike the dissenters from the civil-rights consensus we have come to expect. He harboured few fantasies about bootstrapping self-improvement in the manner promoted by black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele. Nor did he have patience for black radicals’ overheated rhetoric extolling a black separatist utopia. Rather, the problem with the civil-rights consensus for Cruse was that it advanced the interests of the black professional class over and against those of the black masses.

Middle-class professionals, black or white, push their particular material interests in the name of universal ideals. In the case of black professionals, Cruse thought, the earnestness — and thus the self-dealing — are doubly intensified. They serve at the leisure of the white middle class, which, in turn, serves those in the commanding heights of economy and society. As a result, there are very few public voices advancing the genuine interests of poor and working-class black people.

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That was the U.S. Agency for International Development’s approach to protect its autonomy from the president. It had nothing to do with resisting Donald Trump and DOGE—this line was written three decades ago to resist reforms by Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton’s mild-mannered secretary of state.

The career bureaucrats and their aid-industrial complex won out. That marked the last shovelful of dirt on the grave of attempts to rein in USAID.

Until Trump and his DOGE team.

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As President Donald Trump reforms the executive branch, rooting out gender ideology, “Marxist equity,” and waste from the federal government, Democrats and leftist groups have filed lawsuits to block him, and some judges have abetted these efforts. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has predicted that this lawfare will not stop.

“The entire four years of Trump’s presidency, the Left is going to wage lawfare against him,” Cruz told The Daily Signal in an interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday.

“You’re going to have Democrat attorneys general who are going to sue the federal government over and over and over again,” the senator predicted. “You’re going to have left-wing activists paid for by George Soros, paid for by leftist billionaires, that are just going to file relentless lawsuits. And they’re going to go seek out friendly judges—they’re going to file these cases in blue states, they’re going to go out and seek left-wing radical judges, and that means the Department of Justice is going to be defending the president day in and day out.”

Soros, a Hungarian American billionaire who has funded most leftist causes, founded the Open Society Foundations, a large nonprofit now run by his son, Alex Soros. Open Society Foundations or its sister nonprofits have funded the American Civil Liberties Union and the Human Rights Campaign, two organizations that have already sued the Trump administration to block its border and gender policies.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

In every human organization there are things that are true but for one reason or another, everyone agrees to ignore them. It may be that these things are just annoying, like the personal ticks of the boss. In other cases, they are things that would put the organization at risk if people tried to address them. Human systems often must ignore things that contradict the logic of the system.

The American political order as established by the Constitution has holes that the Framers chose to ignore because they had no choice. The final results were a compromise between thirteen states that often had serious conflicts on things, conflicts that could not be reconciled, so they were ignored. The most obvious one is the issue of slavery that was resolved at a later date.

The managerial system that is under assault by Trump was made possible by ignoring things that were essential to its existence. The creation of executive agencies and who controls them is a good example. For fifty years everyone in Washington pretended that these agencies were a fourth branch of government. Trump has stopped pretending and is challenging a core assumption of managerialism.

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Islam is an honor-shame culture and to humiliate the bodies of the children of your enemies is to show the strength of Allah and jeering the bodies of murdered children shows the glory of Islam.

The celebration and mocking of the bodies of murdered children was not the work of some fringe group. Hamas took care to have every Islamic terrorist organization taking part in claiming victory, including the PLO’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades representing the ‘Palestinian Authority’ and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (Omar al-Qassim Brigades) popular on college campuses, as well as the Al-Ansar Brigades which has links to Al Qaeda.

There is no ‘Palestinian’ group that was not there to take its share of credit for the dead children.

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Vice President J.D. Vance drew criticism from European leaders and press following his speech last week at the Munich Security Conference in Germany where he openly chastised European authorities over their suppression of free speech.

Now, just days after Vance’s warning to European official about censorship, a woman has been confronted by police and arrested for holding a sign that read “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want” outside of a Scottish abortion clinic.

In his remarks in Munich, Vance gave examples of Germany arresting people criticizing feminism, Sweden arresting individuals for criticizing religion and Scottish police arresting a man for silently praying for his aborted son outside of an abortion clinic.

Read it.

Sometimes the lawfare works, and sometimes it does not.

Times of Israel.

the bodies of Ariel and Kfir Bibas have been identified after their remains were given to Israel by Hamas on Thursday.

However, the third body at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute was not that of their mother, Shiri Bibas, says the Israel Defense Forces. Specialists at Abu Kabir were not able to identify the body.

The authorities, using forensic evidence and intelligence, assess that the two young boys were ‘”brutally murdered” by terrorists in November 2023, says the IDF. Ariel was 4-years-old and Kfir was 10-months-old when they were murdered.

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As a prospective Senate candidate, Pete Buttigieg is denouncing the diversity trainings that have become synonymous with the Democratic Party’s liberal wing, saying they look “like something straight out of Portlandia.” As mayor of South Bend, Ind., he championed such training, with his administration implementing a series of diversity sessions that lectured cops on “sizeism” and “languageism” amid a surge in violent crime.

Buttigieg, speaking Tuesday at a University of Chicago Institute of Politics panel on the “Future of the Democratic Party,” addressed the party’s focus on “diversity.” He said he would “always fight” to care “for people’s different experiences.” He also took aim at diversity training, saying Americans shouldn’t be made to “sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia, which I have also experienced, and it is how Trump Republicans are made.”

Cops in South Bend had a similar experience when Buttigieg served as mayor.

This is why you don’t want to live in Europe.

You want to Go Where You’re Treated Best.

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On Thursday night Israel’s Transportation Authority halted all public transport including the operation of all buses, trains, and light rails, following an attempted terror attack in the Tel Aviv suburbs of Bat Yam and Holon.

Three empty buses exploded had exploded in quick succession in parking lots in these areas, and police believe the detonations were actually intended to happen in the morning, when the buses are usually packed.

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Legacy media TV anchor Gayle King of CBS appeared shocked to learn that President Trump’s layoffs of FAA employees do not impact air travel safety in the US. Meanwhile, Democrats have been drumming up misinformation and disinformation campaigns with their legacy corporate media partners to push a narrative that layoffs are endangering air safety.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian sets the record straight for far-left propagandist TV news anchor Gayle King:

The cuts do not affect us. I’ve been in close communication with the Secretary of Transportation. I understand that the, the cuts at this time are something that are raising questions, but the reality is there’s over 50,000 people that work at the FAA. And the cuts, I understand, were 300 people, and they were in non-critical safety functions.

The Trump administration has committed to investing deeply in terms of improving the overall technologies that are used in the air traffic control systems and modernizing the skies. They’ve committed to hiring additional controllers and investigators, and safety and investigators. So no, I’m not concerned with that at all.

UK Daily Mail.

When a new Yale University study identified a debilitating syndrome linked to Covid vaccines, Lindy Ayers breathed a sigh of relief.

The 31-year-old Army veteran, from Arkansas, has been wheelchair-bound since she took her second Pfizer shot in 2021 as part of the government’s military mandate.

For years she was told her extreme fatigue, sickness and heart palpitations were anxiety. Then doctors said it was long Covid. She was branded an antivaxxer for suggesting it could have been the vaccine.

Thousands of Americans have reported similar stories. After the study news dropped, DailyMail.com spoke to dozens of Americans, including those in healthcare, law, and the military, who said they felt a sense of validation after years of being dismissed as crazy.

Read it.

The Navy has relieved the commanding officer of the USS Truman — the aircraft carrier that had a collision with a merchant ship outside the Suez Canal last week.

Capt. Dave Snowden was relieved Thursday for “loss of confidence in his ability to command” by Rear Adm. Sean Bailey, the commander of Carrier Strike Group 8, a Navy statement announced Thursday.

Snowden’s replacement will be Capt. Chris “Chowdah” Hill, the commander of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower who rose to fame online last year while he commanded his aircraft carrier in the Middle East amid Houthi attacks.

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A Boston University employee who allegedly threatened members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in a social media post is reportedly under federal investigation for potential violations of federal law.

Campus Reform recently reported that Jared May, who works as an assistant media technician at Boston University, shared a post online identifying six young members of DOGE with the caption, “Wanted for Treason, Dead or Alive.”

“We will not tolerate threats against DOGE workers or law-breaking by the disgruntled,” interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Edward R. Martin Jr. posted on X.

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More than 500 studies on COVID-19 have been withdrawn due to “bias,” “unreliable” information, or unspecified reasons, a blog that tracks retracted documents, found.

Retraction Watch co-founder Ivan Oransky told The College Fix via phone interview one reason for the high number of retractions is the academic system’s incentive structure which pressures researchers to rapidly produce studies and get them peer reviewed as quickly as possible.

“Why do they feel the need to rush papers through? Well, it’s because that’s how they get or keep their jobs, that’s how they get grants, everything is based on that,” he said.

“When you know that your whole career depends on publishing papers in particular journals, you’re going to do what you have to do to publish those papers. Most of the time that means you work hard, you hire the smart grad students and postdocs,” he said.

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Austria is facing “high-risk threats” of Islamist terrorism, according to the head of the Central European country’s domestic intelligence agency, who spoke after yet another terrorist attack, this time targeting a railway station, was thwarted.

Austrian authorities announced on Wednesday, February 19th, that they had arrested a 14-year-old boy with Turkish roots last week. He was planning to carry out an attack on one of Vienna’s largest train stations, the Westbahnhof.

The boy had been radicalised on the internet and had shared posts and videos with Islamic extremist content—including an excerpt from the 2015 Islamist terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo—on several TikTok profiles.

During a search of his home in Vienna, investigators found numerous Islamist extremist books as well as sketches of attacks with knives and machetes at a station and against police officers, and drawings of fighters with the Islamic State (ISIS) flag. They also found handwritten instructions for making explosive material to serve as a detonator for a bomb.

John Yoo.

My friends at the Claremont Institute have provided the intellectual underpinnings for President Trump’s executive order that attempts to end birthright citizenship and replace it with a rule that recalls the ius sanguinis rules of Old Europe.

According to the view advanced by participants in this symposium, including John Eastman, Ed Erler, Michael Anton (since departed for the Department of State’s Office of Policy Planning Staff), and my podcast host, the international woman of mystery Lucretia (yes, that is her official title), not only must a baby be born on American territory to become an American citizen, but the baby’s parents must also be in the country legally. I take them to mean that the parents must be either citizens or legal aliens, such as permanent resident aliens, but they cannot be in the United States illegally or even under short-duration visas, such as for tourists or students. I assume Claremont Institute scholars draw the line at citizens and green card holders because of Eastman’s argument in 2020 that Kamala Harris could not become vice president because she was born to parents who were in the U.S. on student visas.

We are all familiar with the first sentence of the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Unfortunately, my friends have misconstrued the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the amendment’s text. To describe their argument fairly, Claremont scholars read the phrase as referring to someone whose parents are already part of the American political community, such as a citizen or permanent resident alien.

I think their reading takes a text with a defined legal meaning at the time of the 14th Amendment’s ratification and reads into it a deeper political theory that it does not bear. I don’t blame Claremont scholars for this—they are trained political theorists, after all. Sometimes, however, Claremont scholars seem to be engaged in a competition to find deeper political theories lurking in places where no one thought they resided. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And in this case, the cigar is just the use of standard common law legal concepts in the interpretation of the constitutional text.

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In their most shocking propaganda display to date, Hamas terrorists paraded the coffins of two dead children, their mother, and an 83-year-old man through the streets of Gaza before throngs of cheering Palestinians.

The macabre scene unfolded on Thursday morning as Hamas returned the bodies of four Israeli captives who were held for more than 500 days: Shiri Bibas, 32; her two children, 4-year-old Ariel and 9-month-old Kfir; and 83-year-old Oded Lifshitz. The caskets bore smiling pictures of those killed alongside messages listing their “date of arrest” as Oct. 7, 2023.

Hamas displayed the caskets on a makeshift stage in front of an anti-Semitic sign depicting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a bloodthirsty vampire snarling above a photo of the murdered captives. The sign included the caption, “The War Criminal Netanyahu & His Nazi Army Killed Them with Missiles from Zionist Warplanes.” There is no evidence to date that supports the claim.

ZMan tries to keep up.

One of the new features of life since Trump came back to town is that things move quickly and if you are not careful, they will move without you. Ten thousand USAID employees learned this in week one. One day they were organizing the resistance and then the next day they were setting up a LinkedIn account. The first month of the Trump presidency has been a whirlwind of change. This is creating two classes of people, one who keep pace and one who are left behind.

One of those being left behind is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He now finds himself on the wrong side of the Trump’s friend-enemy distinction. He made the mistake of thinking the new boss was the old boss and his tricks would keep working. When those tricks did not work, he made the very big mistake of saying the new boss was misinformed. Now the new boss is making it clear that Zelensky will not be part of the future. Just like that, Zelensky is being reassigned to the dustbin of history.

The reason that Zelensky has so quickly gone from being the indispensable man to the guest who refuses to leave is that long before he was told about any of this, decisions were made about his future. For months prior to the election Trump would say he had a plan to end the war in Ukraine, but he refused to elaborate on the grounds that it was not prudent to talk about it publicly. The only clue he provided was that the war would never have happened if he had been president.

People dismissed this as hubris, but it was an important clue. If Trump had been president, he would have demanded to talk with the Russians and he would never have elevated Zelensky to the status of indispensable man. Project Ukraine was only possible by first anathematizing Russia and then turning Zelensky into a heroic figure at the point of the spear resisting the evil Russians. Remove that friend-enemy set up and the war never gets started.

 

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MSNBC hack Chris Matthews received widespread condemnation Tuesday for asking during a live broadcast “who is going to take a shot” at President Trump.

The leftist propaganda machine is back to spreading incendiary rhetoric where Trump is concerned.

In fact, it never stopped.

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Over the past decade, Germany has experienced a series of Islamist attacks that have exposed the deficiencies of both the country’s and the European Union’s immigration policies, at a high human cost. According to reports from the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), the number of individuals classified as dangerous Islamists has increased drastically, rising from 550 in 2015 to over 2,000 in 2025, representing an almost fourfold increase in just ten years.

This sharp growth has led to a tightening of security policies, with increased surveillance and preventive detentions of terrorism suspects. However, some of these measures have sparked criticism, as they have involved restrictions on individual freedoms, including home raids for social media posts deemed “offensive,” a trend that has also been observed in the United Kingdom, especially for non-Islamists posting.

Between 2015 and 2025, Germany has been the scene of numerous Islamist attacks. According to reports from the BfV and the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), these follow a recurring pattern: radicalized individuals, mostly linked to ISIS, targeting public and symbolic places to inflict the highest number of casualties. The deadliest attack occurred at the Berlin Christmas market in 2016, with 12 fatalities. That same year, the country suffered three attacks in total, making it the most violent year of the decade.

The methods used by attackers included knives, vehicles, and explosives to maximize impact. Authorities dismantled cells and foiled attacks in 2017, 2022, and 2023. In 2017, an ISIS sympathizer was arrested in Berlin before he could detonate explosives in Alexanderplatz. In 2022, police prevented an attack planned against a Christmas market in Essen, arresting the suspects before they could act. In 2023, an intelligence operation successfully thwarted an attack on a synagogue in Düsseldorf, leading to the arrest of those responsible.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.