Read it.

Growth rates in U.S. metro areas dropped the steepest in communities along the U.S.-Mexico border last year because of declines in immigrants while counties along Florida’s Gulf Coast lost residents due to a series of hurricanes, according to new population estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The estimates showed that a majority of metro areas and counties had slower population gains last year, which the bureau attributed primarily to a slowdown in international migration, compared to the previous year when an influx of immigrants had helped urban areas recover from the COVID-19 pandemic a few years earlier.

The average growth rate for metro areas fell from 1.1% in 2024 to 0.6% in 2025.

Governor of Massachusetts: Female.

Governor of New York: Female.

Governor of New Jersey: Female.

Governor of Virginia: Female.

If I were Gavin Newsom or Fatso Pritzger, I’d be looking over my shoulder….

New York Post.

Loyola University Chicago’s student newspaper is facing backlash for apologizing for its coverage of freshman Sheridan Gorman’s murder — because editors labeled the alleged murderer an “illegal immigrant.”

The Loyola Phoenix originally reported — accurately — on accused killer Jose Medina-Medina‘s status as an illegal alien after he was charged on Monday with the execution of 18-year-old Gorman.

“Immigrant man charged in murder of Sheridan Gorman, DHS involved,” the student paper’s headline originally read, referring to Venezuelan national Medina-Medina, 25, as an “illegal immigrant.”

 

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

• Graver then the Mongol conquests after 1206.
• Graver than the massive die-offs produced by European diseases in North and South America after 1492.
• Graver than the millions killed under socialism and its psychotic brother, communism.

Points that the UN will neither mention nor consider:

1. All African slaves were enslaved by Africans. The surplus were sold to Europeans, a lucrative source of revenue.
2. Muslims processed more African slaves than Europeans.
3. Slavery was a universal component of human society until Christians decided to stop it in the 18th century.

UPDATE West African nation famous for selling fellow Africans into slavery demands reparations for slavery after UN vote

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The climate science world (‘settled’ division) is in shock following the discovery in ancient ice cores that levels of carbon dioxide remained stable as the world plunged into an ice age around 2.7 million years ago. Levels of CO2 at around 250 parts per million (ppm) were said to be lower than often assumed with just a 20 ppm movement recorded for the following near three million-year period. In addition, no changes in methane levels were seen in the entire period. Massive decreases in temperature with occasional interglacial rises appear to have occurred without troubling ‘greenhouse’ gas levels, and this revelation has caused near panic in activist circles.

 

Newsbusters.

There was once upon a time when the news media pretended to care about congressional ethics, and made an effort to cover alleged violations of the public trust. Nowadays, the Elitist Media appear to deploy an obvious double standard when covering these.

Consider the case of Congresswoman Sheila Cherfilus-Mccormick (D-FL). McCormick has been indicted by a federal grand jury on multiple charges related to the alleged theft of FEMA funds. The sole evening newscast item on her charges came last fall, a quick brief on the NBC Nightly News.

There has been no coverage on the evening news or anywhere else since, and the House Ethics Committee is set to hold a public hearing tomorrow.

Read it.

One week ago, when fears that the Strait of Hormuz blockade would mean a permanent collapse in oil supply (we have since seen that Iran is allowing “friendly” ships to cross the strait, especially if they grease the toll-keeper with $2 million per crossing) hit a fever pitch and pushed the price of Brent to $120, we said that “Saudi Arabia Has Already Revived More Than Half Its Oil Exports Via Hormuz Bypass.”

With Iran blocking Saudi ships from cross Hormuz for the time being, the Kingdom had drastically ramped up its oil exports to more than half of normal levels despite the disruptions from the Iran war, a successful sign for the kingdom’s ambitious contingency plan to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. To do this, Saudi Arabia has ramped up crude shipments from Yanbu export terminals on the Red Sea coast as it diverted supplies away from the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz via the East-West pipeline.

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There is perhaps nothing more revealing about the desperate state of Hollywood than its obsession with digging up old franchises in a futile race to capitalize on audeince nostalgia. In fact, it has been widely understood in the film industry for the past decade that almost no project will be greenlit unless it is a reboot, remake or “re-imagining” of a previously popular story property.

The problem, which everyone except Hollywood executives understands, is that you cannot recapture the magic of older hit movies, especially when your stable of writing talent is populated by an army of left-wing, pill popping ideological lunatics with no moral standards to speak of. These kinds of people are simply incapable of relating to the common moviegoer.

This dynamic has led Hollywood down a path of financial destruction, with dozens of big budget films bombing at the box office in the past year alone. Some projects have lost hundreds of millions of dollars and the smell of napalm is heavy in the air.

One disastrous reboot attempt that set Hollywood on the path of total defeat is Amazon’s ludicrous Lord Of The Rings project, “The Rings Of Power”. A non-canonical adaptation of limited parts of The Silmarillion, the show turns Galadriel, the personification of the pure feminine, into a spitting, angry feminist girl-boss that slaughters orcs by the barrel. The show’s writing was saturated with sad approximations of Tolkien-style dialogue written by people with no life experience or wisdom.

The Antiplanner.

The Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA) wants to build 28 bus-rapid transit lines in the four counties (Fairfax, Loudoun, Arlington, and Prince William) and five cities (Alexandria, Fairfax, Falls Church, Manassas, and Manassas Park) in its jurisdiction. As described in the agency’s Bus Rapid Transit Action Plan, these lines total to 170 miles of bus routes.

I used to think bus-rapid transit was a smart and economical alternative to light rail, but the NVTA expects to spend $4.2 billion on this plan. The actual cost will almost certainly be more: one line that is already underway, the Richmond Highway route, was supposed to cost $638 million, but according to the Federal Transit Administration it is costing $730 million. That route is 7.4 miles long, which means the line is costing almost $100 million per mile.

$100 million a mile is cheaper than light rail, which is averaging more than $300 million a mile for lines now under construction or in planning stages. But it is still a needless expenditure of money, as most of it is going for dedicated bus lanes that will be occupied by ten buses an hour during rush hours, five buses an hour the rest of the day, and no buses an hour at night (midnight to 6 am). Thus, entire lanes of traffic will be dedicated to just 125 vehicles per day.

Of course, mass transit systems aren’t really about providing convenient transit for people who would otherwise drive cars (or who can’t afford cars in the first place). They’re actually jobs programs for Fashionable Minorities—spend a day in the offices of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system, or a day riding their buses and trains, and I’ll give you five dollars for every non-brown face you see—and lucrative make-work jobs for politically-connected construction and supply companies (all of whom have to be women-owned or minority-owned, naturally).

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

olumbia, the first victim of Donald Trump’s assault on America’s grandest universities, has an endowment of roughly $15bn. Mr Trump’s administration withheld a mere $400m in federal funding when it handed Columbia its peremptory list of demands. Why, indignant alumni ask, did Columbia not simply tell Mr Trump to get lost and fall back on its plump cushion of billions?

Alas for Columbia and other rich universities, the calculus is not so simple. Their endowments are not easy to access. Research grants are not the government’s only leverage. And the chaos Mr Trump has created in the markets makes it a bad time to be selling or borrowing. Indeed, even if research funding were still flowing, the Ivies’ accountants would be losing sleep.

Federal research grants account for a double-digit share of the revenue of most prestigious private universities, so losing them permanently would be a body-blow for any of them. They make up 11%, 15% and 18% of the income of Harvard, Yale and Princeton universities respectively. Columbia, at 20%, is especially vulnerable.

Even for those institutions still receiving such disbursements, the government is imposing arduous new rules. The National Institutes of Health (nih), which dispense most funds for medical research, announced in February that they will cap the portion of grants that can be spent on overheads at 15%. Previously, about 26% was spent in this way. Universities have challenged the change in court and on April 4th a judge threw out the cap. But the administration has said it will appeal, so all universities may soon have to find extra cash to keep their labs operating.

Universities’ endowments are not as much help as their billion-dollar valuations would suggest. For a start, much of the money is reserved for a particular purpose, funding a specific professorship or research centre, say. Legal covenants often prevent it from being diverted for other purposes. In any case, the income from an endowment is typically used to fund a big share of a university’s operating costs. Eat into the principal and you eat into that revenue stream.

The ‘ivy-league’ universities (which commonly refer to similar universities not belonging the the actual Ivy League, like Stanford, MIT, Chicago, and Rice) aren’t really educational institutions (as a glance at the supposed qualifications of their faculty members and administrators makes clear) but rather a jobs program for the Clerisy. Much like the Welfare State, there are always more Good Causes and Undeniable Human Rights to fund, so the money is never enough.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

The picture of electrons “orbiting” the nucleus like planets around the sun remains an enduring one, not only in popular images of the atom but also in the minds of many of us who know better. The proposal, first made in 1913, that the centrifugal force of the revolving electron just exactly balances the attractive force of the nucleus (in analogy with the centrifugal force of the moon in its orbit exactly counteracting the pull of the Earth’s gravity) is a nice picture, but is simply untenable.

I have to confess that I never gave it much thought.

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Researchers from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and Lehigh University have developed a groundbreaking nanostructured copper alloy that could redefine high-temperature materials for aerospace, defense and industrial applications.

Their findings, published in the journal Science, introduce a Cu-Ta-Li (Copper-Tantalum-Lithium) alloy with exceptional thermal stability and mechanical strength, making it one of the most resilient copper-based materials ever created.

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New York Times bestselling author Peter Schweizer is once again speaking out against China’s sinister role in fueling America’s deadly fentanyl crisis, as President Donald Trump seeks to punish the communist regime for its involvement.

“There are 2000 Chinese nationals in northern Mexico working for the Sinaloa drug cartel,” Schweizer, citing DEA data, told The Cats and Cosby Show on Friday. “They’re basically chemists.”

“They take the precursor chemicals that, of course, arrive from China and they turn it into the deadly cocktail, which is what people are dying from. They produce pills. People who die of fentanyl overdose, they think they’re talking a Vicodin or Adderall,” he added.

UPDATE: DOJ: Chinese Firms, Nationals Charged in Fentanyl Plot

The Robb Report.

It’s a dream many might share: turning a scrap of tropical land into a luxury paradise, a rarefied riff on Robinson Crusoe. And the appeal of such an idea—not to mention the practicalities of it—has only been enhanced in the Covid pandemic’s wake. “When you’re in the middle of Zoom calls, no one knows where you are, as long as you’re not doing it on the beach with palm trees in the background and staff bringing you spicy margaritas,” says Edward de Mallet Morgan, who runs super-prime sales at Estate Prestige Knight Frank and has carved out a particular niche in island-brokering. “Nothing about it feels like normal life,” he adds. “Its incredibly peaceful and good for the soul.” As soon as you’ve tamed the landscape enough to build somewhere to sleep, that is.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

First, of course, you need to watch the film The Punisher to be aware that living on a tropical island can go very wrong very quickly.

Read it.

Nature magazine is at the front of the pack in the New Scientific Journalism: First, they have to tell you how to respond to what they’re going to tell you, then they can actually give you the information—without, apparently, being conscious of the fact that quite often the data don’t support their conclusions.

I’m not sure whether this is related to Fembot Journalism, in which the writer (typically female) first has to relate a tear-jerking anecdote before describing whatever the subject is that you’re supposed to wring your hands over.

Read it.

Most Democrats want their party to “become more progressive,” and say they agree with the more aggressive stance being taken by lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who are calling on the party to take a “more aggressive stance” against President Donald Trump and his administration, according to new polls.

A poll from Survey USA, taken from April 2-6 of 859 Republicans and 885 Democrats, showed that 50% of Democrats want their party to become more progressive, with 24% wanting it to stay the same, and 18% calling for it to become more moderate, reports Real Clear Polling.

Among Republicans, 40% said their party should become more conservative while 44% said it should remain the same.

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In 2021, dermatologist David Ozog was on holiday with his family in the Bahamas, when his 18-year-old son had a massive stroke. The teenager was airlifted to Florida, and then to Chicago for surgery. As his son was lying partially paralysed in a hospital bed, Ozog got a call from a colleague who had an unconventional suggestion.

The colleague, a dermatologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, told Ozog about research he was conducting with the US Department of Defense. Early results hinted that red and near-infrared light applied to the head might protect neural tissue after brain injury. He urged Ozog to consider trying it on his son.

Ozog stayed up until 4 a.m. that night reading scientific papers and, ultimately, ordering several panels made of red and near-infrared light-emitting diodes (LEDs). “I started sneaking them into the hospital,” says Ozog, who works at Henry Ford Health in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Today, his son is walking and back in university. Ozog cannot prove that light therapy made a difference, but he thinks that it helped. He has since become a convert to an idea that, at the time, was considered fringe. “I thought the same thing,” he says, “How could shining this thing on you possibly have any biologic effect?”

Some of you will get this, and you are my tribe.

Read it.

Tatler is a British vehicle where the Comfortable and Constructive classes can read about the doings of the Crust and the Clerisy under the illusion that it will unlock the secret achievement badge for fame and fortune. America doesn’t really have an equivalent; perhaps if one did a mashup of Vogue and Vanity Fair run by the editors of Hello! magazine.

Entry to the world’s top universities is increasingly becoming a long-term strategy rather than a final-year push. For high-net-worth families, preparation now begins earlier, stretches further and involves a level of planning that mirrors any other major investment decision.

The decoupling of famous-tier university life from actual education that began with the progressive march through the institutions in the 1960s and transformed them into Woke DEI indoctrination factories is pretty much complete.

Note that the most important characteristic of “the world’s top universities” is not the education they provides but the credential as a member of the Clerisy—and, ultimately, of the Crust—for one’s children, justifying full-court-press helicopter parenting.

Figtree Learning describes the shift as a far more layered process than it used to be. ‘It’s no longer enough to achieve top grades and write a strong personal statement. Securing a place at a top university is now akin to completing a pentathlon, which demands success across five distinct elements: outstanding grades, rigorous entrance tests, demanding interviews, compelling references, and a persuasive personal statement. Falling short on any one of these can cost a candidate their place, no matter how strong they are in the others.’

Needless to say, none of these elements has much to do with the efforts of the child, any more than success in the Olympics can be achieved without an extensive support team of coaches and nutritionists to act as pit-crew.

I would be prepared to argue that any 18-year-old who could demonstrate “outstanding grades, rigorous entrance tests, demanding interviews, compelling references, and a persuasive personal statement” could pretty much skip the rather tedious step of actually attending university for four years and just parachute into whatever nepo-baby slot has been prepared for him/her since he/she were conceived (probably by genetically-screened IVF). (And increasingly it’s going to be a “she”, since the Deep State world has pretty much agreed that Men Are The New Hitler upon whom it isn’t worth wasting a lot of time and effort.)

I am reminded of the famous “Machine That Goes Ping” scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life, where the pregnant woman lying on the gurney awaiting the birth of her child watches the team of doctors walk the visiting Corporate Bureaucrat through their array of high-tech medical machinery, and eventually is moved to say, “What am I supposed to do?”, to which Graham Chapman responds, “Nothing my dear; you’re not qualified.”

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Useful nuggets of information can be found in the most unlikely of places—even The Hollywood Reporter.

Cutting-edge technology was once a de rigueur residential amenity for any eight-figure listing, along with elaborate home gyms, zero-edge swimming pools and 12-car garages. It’s becoming nearly impossible to find a fridge, toaster or LED light that isn’t Wi-Fi-enabled or voice-activated. But the fully loaded tech compound is suddenly falling from favor as high-end homeowners frantically reset the password to escape the $100 billion home-automation industry.

“Just like the arts-and-crafts movement was a reaction against industrialization, we’re now experiencing a reaction against the smart home. People are looking for more manual, less complicated places to live,” says interior designer Jamie Bush, who has worked on some of Los Angeles’ most iconic architectural residences for studio heads, celebrities and tech titans.

While celebrities like Sofía Vergara were once the smart home’s most vocal advocates — the Modern Family actress gushed about how she controlled her home’s security, appliance and media systems from her phone — the honeymoon period with digital domiciles is now facing the reality of unintelligible interfaces, endless updates and forgotten passwords.

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The Sifraniyah, whose name loosely translates to “those of the cipher,” operated not merely with books and balances, but with an internal trade-language that bore all the hallmarks of early programming logic. This was not a language of poetry or politics, but a kind of economic compiler, designed to streamline, automate, and encode trade transactions across nodes in the Mediterranean-African lattice.

Called Al-Khatt al-Tujjari (The Commercial Line), this cryptic syntax resembled a curious fusion of abjad notation, Berber numerals, and Nabataean counting gestures. But its true novelty lay in its structure: conditional statements, looped inventory management, abstract commodity representations, and even primitive error-checking glyphs.

Imagine this: a caravan master receives a wax-sealed scrolllet from the coastal guildhall in Mahdia. On its surface, not a letter of Arabic or Greek, but a modular script indicating: IF salt > 50 kantar AND camels ? 20 THEN delay; ELSE proceed to Ghadames via Node-B. This wasn’t mere instruction — it was compiled logic, a kind of analog execution framework.

I’m wondering whether this sort of encoded procedural logic might be used for compact tactical communications and orders in a battlefield situation.

LifeHacker.

Sure, the refrigerator can keep food fresher longer, but for serious life extension, the freezer is where you should focus your attention. Preserving food isn’t just better for reducing food waste, it’s crucial for staying on budget, especially as grocery prices hit new highs. Stop the pattern of bulk buying and bulk tossing spoiled food, and get comfortable with freezing more of your grocery haul. Here are the best ways to pack your freezer, the best things to freeze, and how to do it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

SciTechDaily.

A newly identified cellular system monitors subtle variations in genetic coding, hinting at a hidden level of control over how genes are expressed.

Human DNA stores instructions for life in sequences built from just four nucleotides. Those instructions are read in three-letter groups called codons, and each codon tells the cell which amino acid to add when building a protein. Since several codons can specify the same amino acid, these alternative spellings were once thought to be mostly interchangeable.

That view has changed. Scientists now know that some of these synonymous codons help messenger RNA, or mRNA, remain stable and get translated efficiently, while others do not. In effect, two genetic sequences can encode the same protein but still behave differently inside a cell. mRNAs rich in non-optimal codons are translated less efficiently and are often broken down more quickly, but the mechanism human cells use to detect this difference has been unclear.

Researchers at Kyoto University and RIKEN, led by Osamu Takeuchi and Takuhiro Ito, set out to solve that puzzle. Their work points to a protein called DHX29 as a key part of the system cells use to read this hidden layer of genetic information.

Read it.

Apparently, if you run a computer game that uses a virtual currency in the EU, the EUBigBrother wants that game to have the same ‘consumer rights’ protections that they require of Real Money in the Real World.

God help you if you have slaves in the game….

Read it.

Women and minorities hardest hit.

Read it.

Humans tend to put our own intelligence on a pedestal. Our brains can do math, employ logic, explore abstractions and think critically. But we can’t claim a monopoly on thought. Among a variety of nonhuman species known to display intelligent behavior, birds have been shown time and again to have advanced cognitive abilities. Ravens plan (opens a new tab) for the future, crows count and use tools (opens a new tab), cockatoos open and pillage (opens a new tab) booby-trapped garbage cans, and chickadees keep track (opens a new tab) of tens of thousands of seeds cached across a landscape. Notably, birds achieve such feats with brains that look completely different from ours: They’re smaller and lack the highly organized structures that scientists associate with mammalian intelligence.

“A bird with a 10-gram brain is doing pretty much the same as a chimp with a 400-gram brain,” said Onur Güntürkün (opens a new tab), who studies brain structures at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. “How is it possible?”

How is it possible that an iPhone has more computing power than the Apollo Lunar Lander? Yeah, that’s a head-scratcher.

Researchers have long debated about the relationship between avian and mammalian intelligences. One possibility is that intelligence in vertebrates — animals with backbones, including mammals and birds — evolved once. In that case, both groups would have inherited the complex neural pathways that support cognition from a common ancestor: a lizardlike creature that lived 320 million years ago, when Earth’s continents were squished into one landmass. The other possibility is that the kinds of neural circuits that support vertebrate intelligence evolved independently in birds and mammals.

The third possibility is that we still don’t have an adequate definition of “intelligence”. Look at Congress.

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After a years-long legal battle, the Supreme Court vindicated a Colorado Christian baker hounded by a “Civil Rights Commission” for the sin of refusing to craft a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding. A woman by the name of Kristen Clarke found that ruling “devastating.”

Clarke, who would go on to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President Joe Biden, arguably grew to embody the weaponization of civil rights law against conservatives. Yet on Wednesday, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People hailed Clarke as a “civil rights giant” in announcing her new position as NAACP general counsel.

NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said Clarke’s “record of fearless advocacy, leadership, and deep commitment to justice makes her the ideal general counsel to help chart our path forward.”

What, exactly, would shake the NAACP’s faith in Clarke’s “commitment to justice”? Would the NAACP reconsider if, hypothetically, Clarke had weaponized civil rights law against pro-life protesters, or worked closely with an anti-Christian smear factory, or twisted civil rights law to enforce transgender orthodoxy? Would this storied civil rights institution reconsider hiring her if, let’s say, she sliced open her husband’s hand in 2006 and then lied to cover it up in her Senate confirmation hearings?

Exclusive: Trump’s approval hits new 36% low as fuel prices surge amid Iran war, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds (Jason Lange/Reuters) Sure,  I believe that. (EXCLUSIVE: Critical Swing State Poll Shows Trump Retains High Support Among Base)(Heartland Polling: Iran War Is Unpopular, But Not Hurting Trump)

NPR’s Mueller Tribute Includes Replay of ‘Impeach Trump’ Commercial. But that trick never works.

US Troops Are Being Told to ‘Get Ready’ to Invade Iran (Prem Thakker/Zeteo)

How Jack Smith connected the dots between GOP lawmakers, Trump aides in 2020 election probe (Politico)  Mostly by making it up.

Trump appeared to have business motive for keeping classified documents, Jack Smith finds (Carol Leonnig/MS NOW)  Oh, gee, how did that happen….,

Raskin says he has “damning” memo on Trump classified docs case (Andrew Solender/Axios)

Collusion between judges and Jack Smith?

Trump administration’s $1B deal to stop offshore wind shows an evolution in its anti-wind strategy (Jennifer McDermott/Associated Press)

Trump Picks ‘Alpha Male’ Influencer to Be Tourism Envoy (Chris Cameron/New York Times)

Trump breaks military recruitment vows as he arrests and deports veterans (Travis Gettys/Raw Story)

Terrorists Give Up After Three Hours In TSA Line (Babylon Bee)

Airport Wait Times Eliminated After TSA Checkpoints Taken Over By Chick-Fil-A (Babylon Bee)

Kari Lake’s dismantling of VOA is a full-blown fiasco (Liz Dye/Public Notice) Blown by heavy breathing in the Narrative Media.

Trump Loses the Home Front (William A. Galston/Wall Street Journal)  Or so they would have you believe.

Trump Throws Stephen Miller Under the Bus in Surprise Show of Panic (Greg Sargent/New Republic)  Greg Sargent loses his shit.

Pentagon has no plan to stop Trump sons profiting from defense contracts: Warren, Blumenthal (Garrett Downs/CNBC)  Perhaps because they aren’t doing anything illegal.

Amanpour Spews on PBS: ‘White Supremacy in Donald Trump’s White House’

A Dunning-Kruger War, Courtesy of the Dunning-Kruger President (Paul Waldman/The Cross Section)  Reported by a Gell-Mann Narrative Media.

Trump’s ‘absurdly incoherent’ Iran pleas leave allies befuddled (Politico)  Politico thinks that everybody is as stupid as they are.

‘Trump is Sending Masked ICE Agents to Murder US Citizens,’ Dem Seeking Md. House Seat Claims  Find. Give us a lit.

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The very serious nation of Canada is going to get to the bottom of this incident.

No, not the Air Canada plane crashing into a truck on the La Guardia airport runway in New York earlier this week. We’re talking about the REAL incident.

Read it.

This might be Gavin’s strongest endorsement yet!

Locking down the violent criminal demographic.

Read it.

In a lawsuit against the Trump administration, immigration advocates insist that an asylum case should take “years” to conclude and want “at least a year” to prepare while applicants remain in the United States.

The lawyers claim that the administration is unfairly singling out their clients, Somali asylum-seekers, in a “Somali Fast-Track Policy,” giving them a compressed timeline of just four months or less to prepare for hearings—a timeline they argue is “essentially impossible.”

Meanwhile, immigration enforcement advocates argue that extending the process enables abuses by asylum-seekers.

Read it.

A German court has sentenced four men to imprisonment for their involvement in a network that stored weapons to be used in attacks in Europe—under the direction of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. The verdict was delivered in Berlin on Wednesday, March 25th.

The men, aged between 36 and 58, were convicted of membership in a foreign terrorist organisation and received prison sentences ranging from four to six years. According to presiding judge Doris Husch, the group had been involved in building and maintaining weapons depots as part of preparations for possible attacks targeting Jewish and Israeli sites across Europe.

The defendants were partially identified as Abdelhamid Al A. and Ibrahim El R., both born in Lebanon, Egyptian national Mohammed B., and Dutch national Nazih R.

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A wave of suspected antisemitic attacks across Europe has prompted fresh security measures, with Belgium deploying armed soldiers after a synagogue explosion in Liège.

Belgian authorities said troops would be stationed at Jewish sites in major cities following the March 9th explosion, which MP Sam van Rooy described as “the predictable outcome of importing antisemitism from the Islamic world.”

Interior Minister Bernard Quintin on Tuesday said it was better to assume further attacks are coming than to wait for them to happen.

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As most Americans are now well aware, national retail theft has seen a significant spike since 2021, with total shoplifting incidents increasing by roughly 53% between 2021 and 2024 based on industry data. This has led to sweeping policy changes to retail businesses, specifically in urban locations, and long aisles of locked glass cases are only the beginning.

In the case of Walgreens, the company has closed a significant number of locations in high crime areas since 2024 as part of a broader plan to shutter underperforming stores nationwide. The company announced in October 2024 that it would close approximately 1,200 stores across the U.S. over three years (through 2027), with about 500 targeted for fiscal year 2025.

This decision is not unique. Hundreds of larger retailers are also shutting down stores in risky neighborhoods, and critics argue that these closures are directly targeting areas in predominantly black and minority neighborhoods. They complain that this trend is leading to “food deserts” where minorities do not have easy access to convenient shopping.

The problem, of course, is that these are the areas with the worst crime rates. Furthermore, to keep said stores open in such places also puts employee safety at risk and makes the companies vulnerable to liability.

Read it.

he two-year anniversary of the catastrophic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge at the Port of Baltimore is on Thursday.

Gubernatorial candidate Ed Hale criticized Democrats in the one-party-ruled state for their inability to properly manage the reconstruction of the Key Bridge, which is critical to the port and local economy and regional supply chains across the Mid-Atlantic region.

Hale described the Democrats as exhibiting a “failure of leadership” and cited “unacceptable delays” in rebuilding one of Maryland’s major freight networks, which links to broader regional supply chains.

“Two years. And what do the people of this community have to show for it?” Hale asked reporters earlier.

He said, “As a Maryland developer, I know what it takes to move projects forward. These delays are unacceptable, and Maryland families and businesses are paying the price every single day.”

Read it.

The Trump administration’s housing department launched an investigation into the Washington State Housing Finance Commission for allegedly violating the Fair Housing Act via its race-based housing finance program, according to a March 24 press release.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Office for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO) notified the commission of the investigation into the state’s Covenant Homeownership Program.

Launched in 2024, the program offers down payment and closing cost assistance to homeowners, which, according to its website, seeks to rectify “state-sanctioned racial discrimination in housing.” Applicants for the program must have a household income at or below 120 percent of the area median income, and be a first-time homebuyer who had family living in the state before April 1968. Also, those relatives must have been black, Hispanic, Native American/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, Korean, or Asian Indian.

Persons of European, Japanese, Arab, or Jewish ancestry do not appear to qualify, said the HUD statement.

Newsbusters.

ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel has a Hollywood elitist problem. In his Tuesday monologue, Kimmel discussed the news that Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin has become the new Secretary of Homeland Security, but according to Kimmel, Mullin is not qualified for the job because in his pre-congressional life, he was a plumber.

Kimmel began with what has become common for the late night comedians: a jab at Mullin’s name, “Trump’s got a whole new generation of thinkers lined up, including his newly confirmed secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne ‘Chuck Mike Bruce Dave’ Melon—Mullin. Maybe melon’s better. He’s the now former senator of Oklahoma. Before he was elected to the Senate, Markwayne Mullin was a low-level MMA fighter and a plumber.”

What was Kimmel before he became a late-night propagandist? Oh, that’s right: a comedian. Nevcr did anything constructive, Never did anything challenging. Never got elected to anything. Pretty much a drone.

Read it.

The district attorney in Philadelphia threatened to arrest Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers patrolling the city’s international airport.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner issued the warning Tuesday at Philadelphia International Airport, where ICE agents have been deployed to assist amid Transportation Security Administration staffing shortages tied to the ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown.

“This is how it works,” Krasner said at a press conference. “You commit crimes within the jurisdiction that is the city and county of Philadelphia, I prosecute you.”

Good luck with that. The FBI is going to have a fun time packing the Supremacy Clause up your pooper.

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Liberal academic @Musa_alGharbi’s observations when he moved to Manhattan:

“One of the first things that stood out to me is that there’s a racialized caste system here that everyone takes for granted. You have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver food to you… mostly minorities and immigrants and disproportionately women… And this is basically taken for granted in New York, that this is the way society operates. And yet… this is not how things are in many other parts of the country. Most other places, the person buying a pair of shoes and the person selling them are likely to be the same race — white — and the gaps between the buyer and the seller are likely to be much smaller. Even the most sexist or bigoted rich white person in many other contexts wouldn’t be able to exploit women and minorities the same way as the typical liberal professional in a city like Seattle or New York; the infrastructure simply isn’t there. It’s these progressive bastions associated with the knowledge economy that have these well-oiled machines for casually exploiting the vulnerable, desperate and disadvantaged. And it’s largely Democratic-voting professionals who take advantage of them.

A few months after I arrived at Columbia, Trump won. I expected this to happen, but for most people, that was not the expectation. So here at Columbia, the day after Trump won, a lot of the students claimed to be so traumatized that they couldn’t do tests or homework. They needed time off. Now there are two things striking about that to me. First, these are students at an Ivy League school, overwhelmingly people from wealthy backgrounds — and even if they don’t come from wealth, they’re likely to be well-positioned… [but these] students seemed to view themselves as somehow uniquely vulnerable to Trump and his regime, as being especially threatened or victimized. And so they demanded all of these accommodations for themselves. Meanwhile, there was this whole other constellation of people [mostly minorities and immigrants] around them who seemed to be literally invisible to them. The people doing all the work on the campus… these ignored laborers — the people with the most at stake in this election — [were not] saying they needed time off because they were too traumatized. They showed up to work the next day and did their jobs. They weren’t making a scene, sobbing as they scrubbed rich kids’ mess out of the toilets. The juxtaposition was sobering…

When I left campus, walking around the Upper West Side, or other affluent parts of Manhattan, similar scenes were playing out. Nor was New York City unique in this regard. Other knowledge economy hubs had similar scenes playing out. And the same drama that was playing out in Columbia was unfolding at colleges and universities across the country. This is precisely what I found so troubling, so difficult to shake off: It wasn’t about my own school. It was about this broader disjuncture between knowledge-economy elites, their narratives about the world, and the realities on the ground.”

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The hilarity in California continues.

Because nothing says “let’s stop judging people based on skin color” like scrapping a political debate because of the candidates’ races.

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In the Year of our Lord 2026, wokies still think mocking Christianity is edgy.

However, even in the “not very religious” country of Belgium, would they destroy a statue of Mohammad?

Let’s see what these “journalists” have to say.

Of course they wouldn’t. They’re not suicidal.

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Why would the United States send one of its least stealthy combat aircraft into airspace that should punish slow, low-flying jets? The answer says less about the A-10 Thunderbolt II than about the condition of the defenses below it. The aircraft’s appearance around the Strait of Hormuz points to a basic airpower rule: a platform built for close-range attack only works when the enemy’s radar and missile network has already been broken down enough to make the sky tolerably safe.

A fork makes quite a versatile interrogation device. It’s also useful for cheesecake.

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Prepper Disk is a plug-and-play offline survival computer that gives you instant access to thousands of critical resources – without internet, subscriptions, or technical setup.

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Researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) along with international collaborators have brought us one step closer to harnessing the sun’s energy to convert carbon dioxide into liquid fuel and other valuable chemicals. In a recent publication in Nature Catalysis, the researchers debut a self-contained carbon-carbon (C2) producing system that combines the catalytic power of copper with perovskite, a material used in photovoltaic solar panels. This advance builds on over 20 years of research and brings the scientific community one step closer to replicating the productivity of a green leaf in nature.

This work is part of a larger initiative, the Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA), which is a Fuels from Sunlight Energy Innovation Hub funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Led by Caltech in close partnership with Berkeley Lab, LiSA brings together more than 100 scientists from national lab partners at SLAC and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and university partners at UC Irvine, UC San Diego, and the University of Oregon. Researchers involved in this multi-institutional collaboration have made advances in developing our understanding of and the tools needed to develop liquid fuels generated from sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water. (Learn more about the LiSA collaboration in this roundup, “Five Ways LiSA is Advancing Solar Fuels.”)

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While keyboards dominate modern classrooms, a new study in Frontiers in Psychology suggests handwriting may be irreplaceable when it comes to learning. Researchers found that writing by hand activates far more extensive and interconnected brain networks compared to typing, particularly in regions linked to memory and sensory processing. These findings provide new evidence that handwriting engages the brain in unique ways, raising concerns about the growing reliance on digital tools for education.

As digital tools replace traditional handwriting in classrooms, concerns have arisen about how this shift might impact learning. Typing on a keyboard is often preferred because it enables children to express themselves more quickly and with less physical strain. However, prior research has shown that handwriting is linked to better memory retention, letter recognition, and overall learning outcomes. The fine motor movements involved in handwriting seem to stimulate the brain differently than typing, but the exact neurological mechanisms behind this difference remained unclear.

To investigate, the researchers focused on brain connectivity, which describes how different brain regions work together to accomplish a task. By comparing brain activity during handwriting and typing, the team hoped to uncover whether the physical act of handwriting promotes more extensive brain communication patterns—patterns thought to support learning and memory formation.

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In just about a month, three NATO states arrested or imposed some form of civiliter mortuus on the biggest political threats to their respective regimes. Romania forbade Georgescu, who won last year’s presidential election, from participating in May’s re-run; Turkey, with Istanbul’s mayor; Macron’s France, with Le Pen. In Poland, the Europhile regime of Prime Minister Tusk forces—for the first time since the dark days of communism—the opposition into exile and subjugates newspapers and TV stations through a series of brazen police raids; in Germany, the nation’s largest party, the AfD, is under the confirmed, official surveillance of the intelligence services while its legislation remains under consideration by the authorities, even after they lost the recent federal election and their popularity continues to implode; in Italy, a deputy prime minister nearly got arrested for upholding—rather than breaking—the law of the land. In Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia, protests—obviously sold by the mainstream media as spontaneous and innocent—erupted almost simultaneously: the targets are, of course, all governments known to be opposed to—and loathed by—the Brussels mandarinate. Fico, in Slovakia, nearly died at the hands of a terrorist hostile to the Prime Minister’s Ukraine policy.

Gothamist.

The argument came in response to a claim filed by Amanda Luci, who alleged NYPD officers failed to protect her from a mob of young men and boys who attacked her in Crown Heights in 2025.