The former NIAID director refused to answer lawmaker questions throughout the hearing, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, despite having a presidential pardon that covered his work during the pandemic.

Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, where he was grilled about his work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The former NIAID director refused to answer lawmaker questions throughout the hearing, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, despite having a presidential pardon that covered his work during the pandemic.

Despite Fauci’s refusal to answer questions, the hearing was filled with major revelations and accusations.

Here are the top 10 major takeaways from the Senate hearing:

1. Fauci applied for government grants for himself/got government employees to do it for him 

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley revealed during the hearing that Fauci allegedly used federal employees while he was NIAID director to apply for government grants on his behalf for his work during the pandemic.

“You got rich while people were dying,” a heated Hawley said. “You were using federal employees with taxpayer money to apply for and solicit cash prizes for you personally. Cash prizes totaling over a million dollars.”

Hawley said he has evidence of the applications for cash prizes that Fauci received, including the Dan David award and the Smithsonian award.

“You actually wrote to people and said, ‘Do you think maybe I’d qualify?’ And you got cash for all of this. And it wasn’t just one or two employees, was it? In fact, you used eight separate federal employees on federal time using federal resources to solicit cash awards. Isn’t that true?”

Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment in response.

2. Ron Johnson alleges Fauci covered up evidence ivermectin works

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New York City’s socialist mayor just claimed another “victory.” Zohran Mamdani stood before cameras and posted online that his administration had put $104 million back into the pockets of delivery workers. “This is only the beginning,” he declared.

The applause line landed. The details did not.

The changes that forced Uber Eats and DoorDash to make tipping prompts more prominent on their apps came from a city law approved by the New York City Council before Mamdani ever took the oath. Former Mayor Eric Adams neither signed nor vetoed the measure. It became law after the waiting period.

The rules simply took effect in January under the new administration, which then enforced them. Mamdani’s office now insists implementation equals authorship. A law is only as good as its enforcement, a spokesperson told Fox News.

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The pro-diversity former vice president’s California property sits in a census tract with virtually no racial diversity

Despite a career-long commitment to combating racial disparities in housing and touting the importance of living among Black people, former Vice President Kamala Harris’ new California mansion is situated in a neighborhood with virtually no racial diversity.

Harris’ new 4,000-square-foot property, which reports indicate she acquired for $8.15 million, is located in the exclusive seaside community of Point Dume and includes ocean views, multiple wine fridges, private golf greens and enough parking to accommodate five vehicles.

Point Dume is situated entirely within Census tract 8004.08, which the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey estimated was just 0.2% Black and roughly 94% White as of 2019.

Harris’ choice of neighborhood may surprise longtime observers given past comments she has made about the importance of living among other Black Americans.

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A “booming backlash” against AI data centers is shaping the midterm election – candidates cutting ads touting their anti-data-center credentials, protesters showing up at campaign events, industry players taking note – which will come as genuinely useful news to anyone who has spent the past year getting their information exclusively from NBC News.

The network’s framing is that last year’s elections in a handful of states revealed the hyperscale buildout as a major tension point up and down the ballot, and that the fight has now intensified into a full midterm issue – with demonstrators displaying “Stop Data Centers” signs at President Trump’s Michigan appearance on Sunday – the protest movement having now reached the point where it greets the president of the United States at his own events.

According to the report, Republicans, Trump included, have shifted toward ensuring data centers do not drive up voters’ power bills, which is what happens when the polling gets loud enough to be heard over the donor calls.

A June Yale Program on Climate Communication poll cited by CNBC found 58% of registered voters oppose data-center construction in their own area – including 53% of conservative Republicans, which is not a demographic famous for agreeing with the 74% of liberal Democrats who feel the same way. More than 300 cities, towns and counties have enacted bans or moratoriums on hyperscale construction, per a count by The Information, and Data Center Watch tallied 75 major projects worth more than $130 billion delayed or canceled in the first quarter of 2026 alone – roughly matching the damage from all twelve months of 2025. New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the nation’s first statewide moratorium this month, voters in Monterey Park, California passed a permanent ban at the ballot box, and in April an unknown attacker fired 13 shots into the home of an Indianapolis councilman who had voted for an AI facility, leaving a note reading “No Data Centers,” per The Week – the point at which a land-use dispute stops being a land-use dispute.

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Four Twin Cities men admitted to looting more than $2.2 million from a Minnesota Medicaid program meant to house the homeless and disabled, then used artificial intelligence to fake the paperwork when insurers asked questions.

The Department of Justice announced the guilty pleas Friday, naming Moktar Hassan Aden, 31, Mustafa Dayib Ali, 29, Khalid Ahmed Dayib, 26, and Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, 27, as co-owners of a company called Brilliant Minds Services LLC. The firm operated out of the Griggs-Midway Building in St. Paul and billed Minnesota’s Housing Stabilization Services program, a Medicaid-funded effort designed to help people with disabilities and addictions find and keep housing, for work it never performed.

Court documents show Brilliant Minds claimed to serve roughly 350 beneficiaries and submitted $2,253,385.06 in claims. But the company did not deliver all the services it billed for. Where work was actually done, employees inflated the hours. Where no work was done at all, employees simply fabricated client notes to make it look like they had.

When insurance companies started asking questions, the defendants turned to AI tools to generate fake records. The DOJ called the scheme part of “a burgeoning trend of fraudsters” using artificial intelligence to target health care programs “in Minnesota and around the country.”

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One of the Trump family’s largest crypto investments has handed the First Family profits while investors were left with devastating losses.

Last August, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump proudly waltzed through the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York to tout their partnership with an obscure company called ALT5 Sigma.

A small digital payments firm with less than two dozen staff and a history of legal headaches, ALT5 would now benefit from direct business ties to the First Family.

The deal would give investors better access to a cryptocurrency run by the Trump and Witkoff families, World Liberty Financial (WLF). ALT5 later purchased $1.5 billion in WLF crypto.

The President, his sons, his Special Envoy and business partner Steve Witkoff and his son Zach Witkoff, co-founder of WLF, all stood to benefit.

According to Trump’s financial disclosures released earlier this year, the President and some undisclosed family members were entitled to around $500 million in proceeds from the deal.

Less than a year later, ALT5’s share price has plummeted by over 90 percent, wiping out gains for investors that piled in. After its share price dipped well below $1, the firm was threatened with being delisted from the Nasdaq exchange.

It has since changed its name to AI Financial Corporation, and it continues to struggle.

Long-time San Diego Chargers linebacker Billy Ray Smith Jr. has passed away at 64 after a battle with dementia that his family blames on the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

Smith’s exact cause of death has not been revealed publicly.

‘It is with profound sadness that we share the loss of our beloved Billy Ray Smith Jr., who passed away peacefully surrounded by family,’ the family said in a statement this week. ‘Billy Ray faced his long journey with dementia caused by CTE with unmatched bravery, dignity, and strength.

‘Billy Ray brought so much joy, light, and laughter to the world as a devoted father, husband, son, and loyal friend. On the NFL gridiron for a decade with the Chargers, and decades that followed in sports broadcasting, Billy Ray earned deep respect from teammates, colleagues, and fans, who he cherished in return.

‘He leaves an irreplaceable void in our lives. His undeniable legacy will live forever in our hearts, and we thank our incredible community for the outpouring of love and support.’

It’s not clear if the family was referring to an official CTE diagnosis. The degenerative brain condition, which has profoundly impacted many former NFL players, can only be diagnosed posthumously.

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NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the County Council of Wicomico County, Maryland, will convene in open session on Tuesday, August 4, 2026 at 5:00 p.m., in the Government Office Building, Room 301, Salisbury, Maryland for the purpose of entertaining a vote to go into Closed Session to discuss an administrative function pertaining to the Wicomico Nursing Home, which, pursuant to Section 3-103 (a) (1) (i) is not subject to the Open Meeting Act. Should any aspect of the Closed Session not to be an administrative function, then the purpose of entertaining a vote to go into Closed Session is to discuss a personnel matter that affects one or more specific individuals at the Wicomico Nursing Home, in accordance with Sections 3-104 and 3-305(b)(1) of the General Provisions Article of the Annotated Code of Maryland.

The regularly scheduled Legislative Session will commence at 6 p.m.

Knox County, Tennessee, Mayor Glenn Jacobs is calling on Congress to pass legislation regulating the government’s use of Flock Safety Cameras to surveil Americans.

Mayor Jacobs, better known as “Kane” during his years in the WWE as a professional wrestler, issued a statement on X on Monday. “Today, I am urging our Commission to prohibit the use of Flock cameras and similar devices in our County,” he said.

For those of you who don’t know, these cameras, technically called Automated License Plate Readers, are motion activated and take a picture of every car which passes by. While License Plate Readers have been around for a while, because of AI and vastly increased networking and data retention capacities, these Flock cameras have capabilities not even imagined in the past.

Jacobs pointed out that “Older cameras only took a photo of your license plate, which was then retained for a short time.”

However, now the cameras take a photo of your place, but also use AI to catalogue distinguishing features of your vehicle: make, color, model, even bumper stickers,” Jacobs explained. “That data is stored in a searchable database for sometimes up to a month or more, depending on the policies of that particular agency. When these cameras are deployed in large numbers, they create a network that can be used to track your movements.”

Jacobs further pointed out that “there is no federal regulatory framework governing these devices in place, and the Tennessee laws regulating them were written over a decade ago” and that he fears that this might be “inadvertantly creating a warrantless mass surveillance system and undermining the privacy and Liberty of our people.”

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The age of artificial intelligence is fueling a generation of fragile, developmentally stunted and gender-dysphoric children, two analysts warned parents.

Classroom devices, smartphones and, increasingly, AI chatbots are stunting children’s cognitive and emotional development and driving a youth mental-health crisis, Michael Marinacio, executive director of the Center for Responsible Technology, and Nicole Runyon, a former child psychotherapist and parent coach, said during an online event hosted by parental rights group Moms for Liberty.

“[W]e’re creating mental illness,” Runyon said. “[Children] don’t feel like they can trust themselves or that they’re capable of doing really anything.”

Runyon recalled that, as a counselor, young people told her “they didn’t want to get married … They didn’t want to bring kids into this world … They feel like they’re this victim in a world that is falling apart.”

In the US, 67% of 12th graders said they were “most likely to choose to get married in the long run,” according to a 2023 Pew Research poll. This is down from 80% in 1993.

Runyon left the child psychotherapy field for parent coaching because she concluded screens and AI were creating the mental health problems that would not otherwise exist and the real work was upstream with parents.

“[AI]’s magnifying what we already were seeing with the screens,” Runyon told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “[W]ith AI, it’s actually talks back to them and validates everything they say. So it’s that much worse and that much more magnified,” compared to social media use.

The result is that children “don’t have to ever have a relationship,” according to Runyon.

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The Democratic Socialists of America wants you to know exactly what it wants, and Megan Romer, the group’s national co-chair, laid it out on national television without once reaching for a hedge word over the most radical ideas on the party platform.

The platform itself reads like a fever dream a committee wrote line by line. A 32-hour workweek with no reduction in pay and benefits, a federal jobs guarantee, canceling all student debt, and free college from pre-K through graduate school anchor the economic wish list, alongside healthcare that is universal, free, and includes gender-affirming care as a guaranteed right.

The platform calls for more publicly owned social housing, universal rent control, and a guaranteed lawyer for every tenant. On policing, the platform wants demilitarized police departments, defunded police unions, and money pulled out of police budgets entirely, all of which the DSA frames as a first step toward abolishing prisons and policing outright.

On foreign policy, the platform demands the defunding of the Department of War, the closure of overseas military bases, and an end to all foreign wars, and it pairs that with support for International Criminal Court prosecutions of what it deems American war criminals. As for Israel, the DSA calls for an end to all U.S. military and economic aid, prosecution of American and Israeli leaders over what many consider a genocide in Gaza, and recognition of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

The DSA is just as blunt about reimagining how the government works. The platform seeks statehood for Washington, D.C., self-determination for U.S. territories, and the abolition of both the Electoral College and the Senate, alongside an expanded House and a presidency and Supreme Court that answer to Congress instead of operating independently. The DSA wants to swap the two-party system for proportional representation and ranked-choice voting and pay for all of it through full public financing of every election.

And, to top it all off, the platform calls for slavery reparations.

Fox News host Shannon Bream ran through the DSA’s platform position by position, true or false, no room to dodge. Romer never flinched. She confirmed that the Democratic Socialists of America’s platform calls for abolishing the Senate, replacing the presidency and Supreme Court, eliminating ICE, ending borders while granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, defunding the Pentagon, abolishing prisons as a long-term goal, and placing most large corporations under government or public ownership. At every step, she answered without hesitation, affirming that each position accurately reflected the DSA’s platform.

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Anthony Fauci pleaded the Fifth more than 100 times before Rand Paul’s committee Wednesday. A contempt vote is set for August 5. Here’s a sober look at what the law actually allows…

Wednesday morning’s hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee was, by any measure, extraordinary. Dr. Anthony Fauci, subpoenaed by Chairman Rand Paul after declining to appear voluntarily, announced in his opening statement that he would not be answering questions. He then proceeded to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times over the course of two-plus hours — including, at one point, in response to Senator Josh Hawley asking him to identify the color of his own tie. Paul had Fauci’s attorney escorted from the room after repeated interruptions, and by the end of the hearing announced that the committee will vote August 5 on holding Fauci in contempt of Congress.

Those are the documented facts. What follows is analysis, and I’ll be careful throughout to distinguish what the legal record actually establishes from what remains speculation — because on this question, there’s more genuinely unsettled law than either side wants to admit.

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Below is an expanded version of my column in the New York Post on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s press conference this week on his planned state-run grocery stores. The plan is a multimillion-dollar version of the $5 gold watch grift. The chumps are New York taxpayers who believe that Mamdani can sell them produce at a discount of 30 percent below the market rate and not lose money. Indeed, this could end up the most expensive produce in the Big Apple.

Here is the column:

Last week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s short stint as a faux president ended with an embarrassing acknowledgment that he could not, as promised during his campaign, arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

So, this week, Mamdani the Grocer made a reappearance, with details on the five city-run grocery stores that he will open.

But rather than deliver discount groceries, Mamdani is selling New Yorkers a bill of goods that will cost them millions.

What Mamdani described was a discount food bank dressed up as a grocery. Standing in front of blackboards saying “REDUCED 30%,” Mamdani sounded like a bodega hawker: “Once a month, our five city-run grocery stores will set prices for this core set of goods at 30% below typical retail prices. No exceptions, no gimmicks”

Here’s the most delicious part: the presser was a gimmick from beginning to end.

The mayor promised that “The savings will last for the entire month. That means no weekly fluctuations or sticker shock at the checkout line — not for our seniors living on fixed incomes, nor for the parents who rely on a regular supply of apple slices to keep toddler tantrums at bay.”

The Mamdani markets are new variations of an old New York grift: selling gold watches for $5. The dupes want to believe that somehow this street vendor, surreptitiously displaying watches inside his overcoat, actually found a way to sell “solid gold watches” for just a few bucks.

The math simply does not add up for Mamdani. Most groceries have an average profit margin between 1% and 3%, one of the smallest margins of any industry.

To promise a 30% discount below market rate that cannot be adjusted due to monthly market fluctuations is economically absurd.

It is not a description of a competitive grocery but a public charity. It is a quasi-food bank where taxpayers subsidize the cost.

As usual, Mamdani turns this into a class war, demonizing business owners. He suggests that real grocery stores are simply price gougers hoarding windfall profits from consumers. He ignores that they must pay rent, upkeep and fees — all things the city-run stores may simply write off.

He proclaimed, “May the most affordable grocery store win.”

Of course, the test is not which grocery is the most affordable, but which is the most sustainable. If you are willing to take a bath on sales, you can always offer the most affordable prices for as long as your excess cash holds out.

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We’ve just been treated to the spectacle of Dr. Anthony Fauci being grilled in front of a Senate hearing, chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who is a medical doctor himself. The gist of all the fuss around Fauci, of course, is his possible involvement in the development, or at least the funding of, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. This lab is the suspected origin of the COVID-19 virus, and is known to have been involved in potentially deadly gain-of-function research, with funding from the United States – which made up much of the questioning, that Anthony Fauci refused to answer.

Now, the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattasharya, has announced that the NIH is adopting a risk-based policy, which they are calling the “U.S. Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research.”

The X post reads in full:

During my confirmation hearing, I pledged to the American public that I would implement strong and transparent oversight of NIH-supported research.

Now, I am pleased to share the new U.S. Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research, a groundbreaking government-wide mandate that expressly prohibits gain-of-function research which can significantly endanger American lives and jeopardize our Nation’s security.

You can view the full statement here. Here’s the key part of that:

This groundbreaking government-wide policy establishes, for the first time, an explicit prohibition on dangerous gain-of-function research which can significantly endanger American lives and pose substantial risk to our Nation’s security.

The new U.S. Government-wide policy represents a paradigm shift in federal oversight by adopting a comprehensive, risk-based framework supported by strong enforcement, accountability, and transparency measures. In addition to the ban on federal support for dangerous gain-of-function research, the policy introduces enhanced review and reporting requirements for all life sciences research, including independent, top-down assessments for projects that may increase the harmful consequences of biological agents.

The policy also strengthens global safeguards by instituting new international restrictions, including banning life sciences research involving certain countries or entities and prohibiting high-risk work in countries lacking adequate oversight.

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Chesapeake Channa, also known as northern snakeheads, are entertaining anglers in the upper sections of the upper Bay’s tidal rivers. Shallow grass beds are the most frequented areas for this invasive predator.

Bluefish continue to be a good fishing option in the middle and lower Bay. A few Spanish mackerel have shown up in the lower Maryland waters and may move into the middle Bay soon.

White perch are holding in the tidal rivers and creeks and can be found near structure in the form of docks, piers, oyster reefs, and submerged rocks.

Read more about the week ahead!

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) dropped the hammer on Dr. Anthony Fauci during Wednesday’s Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on the federal government’s catastrophic COVID response, waving a massive stack of papers in the disgraced former NIAID director’s face and exposing one of the most brazen lies of the pandemic.

Johnson zeroed in on Fauci’s August 29, 2021 CNN appearance where the so-called “science” declared there was “no evidence” ivermectin was helpful against COVID.

“You said there’s no evidence that ivermectin is helpful,” Johnson said. “On that exact same day… There was a website that was tracking the randomized controlled studies. Here they are showing 60, 70% efficacy of ivermectin. The same day you say there’s no evidence. There was all kinds of evidence.”

Johnson didn’t stop there. He pressed Fauci on whether he was involved in the FDA’s coordinated attack on the Nobel Prize-winning drug, and on the parallel sabotage of hydroxychloroquine, because the only way to secure emergency use authorization for the experimental mRNA shots was to claim no effective treatments existed.

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Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) dropped another bombshell during Wednesday’s explosive Senate hearing with Dr. Anthony Fauci, confronting the former COVID czar with adverse event data that he argued should have triggered urgent scrutiny years ago—but instead was ignored while federal health agencies relentlessly promoted COVID vaccines and Remdesivir.

Johnson’s latest exchange came after he previously confronted Fauci with stacks of studies on ivermectin and questioned why federal officials dismissed evidence supporting alternative treatments before Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during the hearing.

The Wisconsin senator displayed comparative adverse-event figures during the hearing, arguing they represented safety signals that federal regulators refused to adequately investigate.

“These are averages. Again, it doesn’t prove causation, but there’s correlation. It’s there. It’s there for a safety signal,” Johnson said.

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Country legend Willie Nelson, 93, warned of light pollution and water theft threatening his hometown of Abbott

Willie Nelson urged Americans to think again when it comes to building the future.

Nelson, 93, encouraged followers to “fight against data centers invading our land” in a social media plea shared Tuesday.

The country music legend reflected on being able to see “stars at night” in his Texas hometown, but that light pollution and “water thieving” were imminent in a looming industrial climate.

“I grew up in Abbott, and I still have a home there with farmed land where I can still see stars at night,” Nelson told his followers.

“And now our community, like many others, needs to fight against data centers invading our land.

“The last thing we need is a loud, water thieving, light polluting, data center anywhere near our town (or any others for that matter).”

The “On the Road Again” singer noted how “the strength of rural America has never come from big industrial footprints.”

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You’re not connecting the dots. The GOP Senate isn’t connecting the dots. Even President Donald J. Trump isn’t connecting the dots.

Dr. Fauci was the centerpiece of the 2020 stolen presidential election.

Fauci, and China, and the CCP, and the Deep State, and the Democrat Party, are all connected.

This was the biggest conspiracy in world history.

But it wasn’t intended to turn into mass murder. The purposeful and planned Covid pandemic, first and foremost, was all about stealing the 2020 election. That’s the real crime. That’s the foundation of these crimes against humanity.

The millions of dead, injured and disabled in America, and around the world, are just a side effect of this scheme and scam.

The point wasn’t to murder millions. It was to destroy President Trump’s economy, cause crisis and chaos, and scare everyone with lockdowns, arrests, masks, and social distancing, which then opened the door for mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting and ballot drop boxes, with no Voter ID, in order to defeat Trump and steal his presidency.

The key piece of evidence is the PARDON.

Why did Biden (and his boss- the REAL President Obama) pardon a doctor? I understand why they pardoned a whole bunch of crooked Democrat politicians. That’s called politics. That’s “business as usual.”

But why pardon a doctor? Why give him a blanket pardon even though he was not charged with a single crime at this point

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One of America’s oldest wine and liquor distributors has filed for bankruptcy after more than 125 years in business, blaming shifting drinking habits, soaring costs and an increasingly difficult wholesale market for its downfall.

Republic National Distributing Company, once the nation’s second-largest wine and spirits distributor, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sunday and will begin an orderly wind down of its remaining operations.

The filing marks a stunning reversal for a company whose roots stretch back to 1898, surviving through Prohibition, multiple recessions and generations of change in the alcohol industry.

The company said the bankruptcy covers all remaining corporate and distribution operations that it still owns outside of its joint ventures.

‘This decision was not made lightly,’ Republic said in a statement announcing the bankruptcy.

‘Our industry has evolved, consumer preferences have shifted and the wholesale environment has grown increasingly challenging,’ read the statement.

According to court filings, Republic has between $500 million and $1 billion in assets, but liabilities estimated at between $1 billion and $10 billion. The filing lists more than 100,000 creditors.

The distributor said it chose a court-supervised Chapter 11 process to provide the flexibility ‘to continue working with parties that have expressed an interest in acquiring our other markets.’

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A potentially major escalation emerged late Wednesday after a US-owned gas-processing vessel moored at Egypt’s Mediterranean port of Damietta was reportedly struck by a drone, according to Reuters, citing maritime security firm Ambrey. Details remain scant, and this assessment is preliminary.

Ship-tracking data from Bloomberg shows the gas-processing vessel Energos Winter, which serves as a floating storage and regasification unit, moored off the port of Damietta. The port hosts the Damietta LNG terminal, a critical outlet for processing and exporting Egyptian and regional natural gas to Europe.

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‘Leverage goes both ways…’

That is a lesson that many are learning in a painful manner as the army that enjoyed the momentum escalator ride up are now decrying the elevator plunge lower… and the poster-child for this pain is Korea.

Following anxiety over new Chinese competition, and disappointing earnings from SK Hynix overnight, Korea’s stock market has plunged 44% from its record highs in June (but remains up 27% YTD still)…

Triggering yet another circuit-breaker…

And prompting panic among Korean regulators:

As Bloomberg reports, South Korea will hold an emergency meeting Wednesday evening to discuss the market situation after a stocks rout that has wiped billions of dollars off investors’ holdings. The meeting, hosted by Finance Minister Koo Yun Cheol, will involve all of the country’s top financial authorities, starting from 6 p.m. local time, according to lawmaker Yoo Dong-soo.

Top administration officials faced multiple rounds of questioning by lawmakers at the country’s parliament Wednesday.

Lawmakers have linked the rout in part to South Korea’s rollout of leveraged single-stock products in May.

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A prominent election-integrity activist has uncovered bombshell evidence suggesting that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 election victory may not have been legitimate.

Marly Hornik, the founder of RealAmerica.Vote and NY Citizens Audit, has suggested that the 2025 election included large numbers of unqualified or nonexistent voters. But that’s only part of the problem.

“I actually don’t know whether Mamdani won the mayoral race, and I’m not here to say that he didn’t,” Hornik said during a July 22 interview on New York radio station WABC’s “Sid & Friends in the Morning” program.

“The problem we uncovered is that the New York City and the New York State Boards of Elections have no idea if Mamdani won the mayoral election either. And that’s where the rubber meets the road here.”

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Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky warned former government health official and COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci that there would be “repercussions” for his refusal to answer questions during a Senate hearing on Wednesday.

After Paul’s opening statement, Fauci pleaded his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination while appearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Joe Biden kept classified material after leaving the vice presidency, knew what it was, and read it aloud to a civilian with no security clearance who was helping him write a book he was paid $8 million for.

He said as much on tape, repeatedly, in 2016 and 2017. The Justice Department had those recordings and kept them from the public for two years – the same two years it was prosecuting Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents.

The recordings came out Monday night, released by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project after a FOIA fight that began in March 2024 and ran first against the Justice Department and then against Biden’s personal attorneys. Roughly three hours of audio and 117 pages of transcripts, drawn from the interviews Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained during his investigation into Biden’s handling of classified material. The Oversight Project says the complete set runs to about 70 hours and that further releases are coming.

Start with what is on them.

In an October 2016 session, recorded while he was still the sitting vice president, Biden tells ghostwriter Mark Lewis Zwonitzer: “I have extensive notes over this period of time… They didn’t even know I had this.”

In February 2017, a month after leaving office and living in a Virginia rental: “So this was – I, early on, in ’09 – I just found all of the classified stuff downstairs.” He then walks Zwonitzer through his 2009 argument against the Afghanistan troop surge.

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House Republicans are calling for accountability ahead of Dr Anthony Fauci’s Senate hearing Wednesday

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., is warning Dr. Anthony Fauci that his presidential pardon has limits ahead of the former public health official’s high-profile day on Capitol Hill.

Fauci is set to testify before a GOP-led Senate panel on Wednesday, days after hundreds of pages of his COVID-19 pandemic-era diary entries were made public.

“We now know why President Biden gave a blanket pardon to Dr. Fauci. While obsessing about his own fame, Dr. Fauci wasn’t truthful with the American people about the origins of COVID and advised schools to be closed,” Comer told Fox News Digital.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., is warning Dr. Anthony Fauci that his presidential pardon has limits ahead of the former public health official’s high-profile day on Capitol Hill.

Fauci is set to testify before a GOP-led Senate panel on Wednesday, days after hundreds of pages of his COVID-19 pandemic-era diary entries were made public.

“We now know why President Biden gave a blanket pardon to Dr. Fauci. While obsessing about his own fame, Dr. Fauci wasn’t truthful with the American people about the origins of COVID and advised schools to be closed,” Comer told Fox News Digital.

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During his campaign, Zohran Mamdani promised to bring down food costs. His state-owned grocery store program, however, does not reduce the cost of food. Instead, it shifts the cost to taxpayers. Millions of taxpayers will pay the taxes needed to keep the stores open, even though many will live too far away to use them.

Mayor Mamdani held a press conference on Monday, July 27, 2026, at a Brooklyn food pantry to unveil pricing details for New York City’s planned network of five municipal grocery stores, one in each borough. Mamdani said a core basket of everyday groceries, including eggs, milk, chicken, fresh produce, meat, seafood, bread, cheese, and roughly 20 other staple items, would be priced 30 percent below typical retail rates.

Prices on the core basket will be locked in monthly rather than fluctuating week to week, a mechanism Mamdani described at the press conference: “Once a month, our five city-run grocery stores will set prices for this core set of goods at 30% below typical retail prices. No exceptions, no gimmicks. The savings will last for the entire month.” Non-core items at the stores will sell at market rates. The discount applies to all shoppers regardless of income.

The first site, La Marqueta in East Harlem, will be built from the ground up and is expected to open by 2029. A second site, La Peninsula in Hunts Point, the Bronx, is expected to open in late 2027 and will be the first of the five to launch. Sites for Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island are still under review. Locations were chosen based on grocery store density and local income levels relative to the cost of living.

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A government official and top royal from the United Arab Emirates purchased a $500 million stake in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture last year, months before the Trump administration greenlit the sale of advanced AI chips to the UAE, The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan — also known as the “spy sheikh” — is the Gulf nation’s national security adviser and manager of its largest wealth fund. Aryam Investment, a Tahnoon-backed company, took a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, according to the Journal. The deal would make Aryam the largest shareholder of World Liberty, and the company’s only known investor besides the founders, the Journal reported.

World Liberty is behind the stablecoin USD1, which is pegged to the U.S. dollar and backed by short-term U.S. government treasuries, U.S. dollar deposits, and other cash equivalents.

The company counts President Donald Trump and his special envoy Steve Witkoff as co-founders emeritus, and is run by members of the Trump and Witkoff families.

The deal, according to the Journal, was signed by Eric Trump in the days before his father’s second inauguration as president. It came as Tahnoon was seeking access to advanced artificial intelligence chips from the U.S., which the Biden administration had blocked over concerns that the chips would end up in China.

According to the Journal, the agreement saw roughly $187 million flow to Trump family entities and $31 million to Witkoff family entities.

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Fresh Unilateral Strikes on Jordan Base; Iraqi Militants Again Target KSA

Iranian state media in the overnight hours (local) are reporting fresh apparent Iranian missile attacks in Jordan. A “US base in Jordan was possibly targeted” after reports of explosions there, Fars and IRIB report. Tehran officials have insisted they have not requested US talks following the prior nearly two straight weeks of fighting, though a ‘pause’ took effect last Friday when President Trump ordered a halt to US airstrikes. The day was filled with headline hype of a potential ‘resurrected’ MoU deal. Once again these ‘deal is close’ headlines prove misleading and premature. CENTCOM is confirming on the heels of the Iranian media reporting:

• Senior American official: Iran launched missiles toward an American base in Jordan (Axios)
• CENTCOM: IRGC forces launch multiple ballistic missiles from Iran and all Iranian missiles were effectively intercepted

Adding to the uncertainty and jitters of already sensitive global oil, Iraqi militants on Tuesday fired projectiles on Saudi Arabia for a second day, also amid the ongoing missile threat from Yemeni Houthis. According to the Associated Press:

Saudi Arabia said Tuesday that it shot down drones fired by Iran-backed militias in Iraq for a second day, while Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed to have forced a Saudi oil tanker to turn around as part of their self-styled blockade of the kingdom.

The attacks underscored lingering tensions despite a period of calm between the United States and Iran, neither of which has announced attacks for days following weeks of escalation over the Strait of Hormuz.

The Saudi Defense Ministry said in a statement that air defenses intercepted and destroyed several drones that had attempted to target petroleum facilities in the nation’s eastern region. It said the attacks were “once again launched from Iraqi territory and carried out by Iran-affiliated terrorist militias.”

Oil climbing on the headlines of the rare pro-Tehran aggression during a ‘pause’:

WTI OIL JUMPS 5% AS US INTERCEPTS IRANIAN ATTACK ON ITS TROOPS

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The New York Times lost its latest bid to have President Donald Trump’s $15 billion lawsuit against it thrown out.

On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Steven D. Merryday gave Trump’s legal team until Aug. 27 to file an amended complaint, according to Forbes.

Merryday did not explain why the lawsuit needed to be revised.

The judge’s order said that after Trump’s team files its amended complaint, the Times will have three weeks to respond to it.

Trump filed the $15 billion lawsuit in September. Not long after it was filed, Merryday ordered Trump to refile the suit with winnowed-down language.

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A married ex-Wall Street executive has been sentenced to 30 years after admitting to drugging and raping multiple women in his upscale Manhattan apartment, keeping chilling planning notes to document his decade-long predatory rampage.

Edward Gene Smith, 50, admitted to attacking his victims at his luxury apartment opposite Central Park, as well as amassing a stash of more than 9,000 child sexual abuse images, as part of his twisted spree.

Prosecutors said the Harvard-educated bigwig, who was most recently a Citigroup managing director, hid ‘behind the façade of a well-educated bank executive’ to prey on and lure in his young victims.

Smith also kept chilling spreadsheets and planning notes on just how many drugs to administer – and would then record some of the assaults to share with online groups who took pleasure in drugging their partners, according court documents.

‘His disdain for his victims is palpable and he is unrepentant. The defendant is a serial rapist who used his money, access and affluence to drug and rape young women,’ prosecutors said during his sentencing hearing on Tuesday.

‘The women were young and many were from foreign countries or faraway states and had previous sexual trauma. They were not momentary lapses in judgment, these were well-thought-out crimes.

‘Why the defendant has done this is utterly unexplained.’

Smith’s reign of terror came crashing down in late 2024 when he was arrested on a six-count indictment for drugging and assaulting various women.

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There are only two lanes to the Democrat presidential nomination two years from now, and one of them is already blocked—by Kamala Harris.

Get ready for the Kamala comeback, followed, in all likelihood, by a replay of her crushing defeat by the Republican nominee.

Believe it or not, the ex-VP occupies what counts as the “center lane” within the party, and for most of the last three decades, that’s the one that’s led to the nomination.

Republicans used to be the party of orderly succession, even if the candidate whose turn had come looked like a certain loser: think Bob Dole in ’96.

But recently, it’s been Democrats who’ve tended to pick a party elder as their nominee:

Al Gore, as a sitting VP, might not have been remarkable in 2000, but in ’04 it was John Kerry, in ’16 Hillary Clinton, and in 2020 Joe Biden—with only Barack Obama butting ahead of the line in 2008.

Democrats like a known quantity, a reliable liberal who isn’t too overtly radical; the radicalism can wait until after Election Day.

So, they’re leaning toward running Harris again, even if donors aren’t happy about it: They blew nearly $2 billion on her campaign and aligned PACs in 2024, only for Harris to lose every battleground state to Donald Trump.

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It’s been coming for a while, but this week, the once-conservative firebrand Tucker Carlson has doubled down on a version of reality that would make Iran’s mullahs blush. Carlson used an appearance on the East Meets West with Olga and Tara podcast to unload on a provision in the fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act that would expand defense-technology cooperation between the United States and Israel. His verdict? Lawmakers who back the measure are acting against America’s own interests, effectively merging our nations’ militaries.

Carlson didn’t stop at policy disagreement. He accused the Republican Party of handing the country’s sovereignty to a foreign government, sparing only two members from his contempt.

“The Republican Party has decided that the interest of Israel is more important than the interest of the United States,” Carlson said on the podcast. “There are a couple of exceptions Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, and they were driven out of the Republican Party. So it tells you what the priority is. The priority is serving Israel.”

Coming from a man who has spent years cozying up to authoritarian regimes and excusing Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, that’s rich. But consistency has never been Carlson’s strong suit.

He then accused Israel’s Mossad of feeding American policymakers fabricated intelligence for decades.

“Mossad has fed, repeatedly, disinformation lies to American policymakers over decades, including the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction,” Carlson said. “That fundamentally came from Israel. There’s no dispute about that.”

There’s plenty of dispute about that, because it’s false.

British intelligence, French intelligence, German intelligence, and Spanish intelligence all concluded Iraq likely possessed chemical and biological weapons and was in defiance of the United Nations.

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The next time you go for a drive, you might want to look up. The company that put thousands upon thousands of automated license plate readers in communities all over America is now putting them in the sky. Flock Alpha drones can travel at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour, and they can read license plates from 2,000 feet away. These drones are being marketed as “first responders”, and they have the potential to be far more intrusive than automated license plate readers that are simply mounted on the side of the road.

Of course Flock automated license plate readers don’t just read license plates.

According to DeFlock, these highly sophisticated surveillance devices are actually “AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car’s location, date, and time”…

DeFlock, a national organization, says automated license plate readers (ALPRs or LPRs) are “AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car’s location, date, and time” and collect the data (which includes identifying details like dents or bumper stickers) “regardless or whether the driver is suspected of a crime.”

In addition, Flock cameras also make a record of the exact make, model, color and body type of your vehicle.

If your vehicle has any aftermarket modifications, roof racks, bumper stickers, decals or visible body damage all of that is recorded too.

Are you starting to understand why so many people consider these cameras to be extremely intrusive?

According to CNN, there are more than 120,000 Flock cameras actively operating in the United States right now.

All of the information that they collect is entered into a searchable national database that has so much potential to be abused.

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In the latest instance of unacceptable anti-white bias, Campus Reform is reporting “Auburn University students recently circulated a seven-page document that compiled a list of over 250 racial slurs toward White people.”

“The document was sent in a GroupMe chat called “AU Student Connect” used by students at Auburn University.”

To be clear, this is wrong, and it should not be viewed as acceptable to be hateful towards White students just as it wouldn’t be towards Black or any other students.

We all know this would have been all over the major networks had this been done to any other group. This double standard is unacceptable.

“Among those insults were “failed abortions,” “deformed dna,” “mockery of humanity,” “bleach demons,” “albino pigs,” “not meant to exist,” and “white ‘people’ was just god experimenting.”

These disgusting epithets reveal a deeps seated Anti White hate among some of these students.

“Screenshots of the group chat obtained by Campus Reform showed students using the document, titled “Creaker Names,” to ridicule and mock White people by highlighting insults from the list. ”

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Speaking to the rise of socialist candidates within the Democratic Party, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) warned that “the barbarians are inside the gate.” He went on to explain, “We are fighting right now in Congress over whether we’re going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic … or go down this dark road of death to communism.”

The Speaker isn’t crying wolf; the threat is real. But the battle to preserve the Republic will not ultimately be won in Congress. There will be legislative fights. There will be elections where your vote could determine the balance of power and whether socialist policies further undermine our freedoms. But if the barbarians are  already inside the gate, we need to ask: How did they get in? And how do we get them out?

Congress reflects culture more than it creates it. Laws can restrain evil, but they cannot create virtue. A constitutional republic depends on citizens with the moral character to govern themselves and families that instill virtue in the next generation. Culture is ultimately shaped by what people believe about God, truth, and morality. When those foundations erode, political institutions follow.

To understand how this ideological and spiritual challenge gained traction in America, we have to look beyond politics to the forces that shape a nation’s character.

In his 1983 book The Gravedigger File, author and social critic Os Guinness warned that secularization was hollowing out the institution that had long guided Western civilization: the church. As biblical faith weakened, society’s moral foundations weakened, creating a vacuum secular ideologies would inevitably fill.

A little more than a decade later, Judge Robert Bork approached the same crisis from a different direction. In “Slouching Toward Gomorrah,” he argued that America’s moral and cultural foundations were being eroded by radical individualism and radical egalitarianism, weakening the institutions upon which constitutional government depends. Nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1987, Bork was rejected because of his originalist view of the Constitution. Though writing as a constitutional scholar rather than a theologian, he arrived at a remarkably similar conclusion.

After coming to Washington, I hoped to meet Robert Bork. I invited him to lunch, and he graciously accepted. During our conversation, I asked for his prognosis of America’s future.

He replied, “The culture is too far gone for the country to turn around.”

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The Pacific Ring of Fire has been extremely active this year, and that should deeply alarm all of us. Approximately 90 percent of all global earthquakes occur along the Pacific Ring of Fire, and we have just gotten another reminder that danger is potentially lurking every single moment of every single day.

Those that were killed by the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that just hit Japan were just living their lives like normal when disaster suddenly struck. Unfortunately, the entire west coast of the United States also sits directly along the Pacific Ring of Fire, and scientists openly acknowledge that the clock is ticking.

As far as I know, nobody was forecasting that a magnitude 7.1 earthquake would hit Japan on Tuesday.

But that is precisely what happened…

A 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit Japan’s southern Kumamoto prefecture on Tuesday, knocking out power to thousands of homes, rupturing roads and leaving some trapped and others presumed dead inside a partially collapsed shopping mall.

Speaking to reporters from her office in Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said authorities were still assessing the full extent of the damage in the area, which was devastated by a deadly quake a decade ago.

“We have already been informed that people have been injured. Power outages and fires have occurred in some areas, and there has also been damage to roads and bridges and the collapse of buildings,” Takaichi said.

One moment, local residents were casually strolling through a shopping mall.

But then everything started shaking and the shopping mall collapsed right on top of them…

Footage on social media shows members of the public running for cover and crouching down on the floor as the ground shook at the shopping centre.

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Bill Stevenson was once married to Jill Biden. “No one f**ks with a Biden,” Joe Biden said on a hot mic on October 5, 2022.

During a recent phone call, one of Bill Stevenson’s longtime friends told me, “Delaware is not a state – it’s a corporation.”

Her point was that Delaware’s political, legal, and law-enforcement establishment is unusually close-knit, with influential figures often knowing one another personally, and that longstanding relationships carry significant weight. Joe Biden spent more than fifty years at the center of that political establishment.

The Murder Case

On the night of December 28, 2025, New Castle County police responded to the Wilmington-area home of Bill and Linda Stevenson after receiving a call from Bill shortly after 11:00 p.m. Officers found Linda Stevenson, 64, unresponsive in the living room. Despite life-saving efforts, she was pronounced dead at the scene.

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The age of artificial intelligence is fueling a generation of fragile, developmentally stunted and gender-dysphoric children, two analysts warned parents.

Classroom devices, smartphones and, increasingly, AI chatbots are stunting children’s cognitive and emotional development and driving a youth mental-health crisis, Michael Marinacio, executive director of the Center for Responsible Technology, and Nicole Runyon, a former child psychotherapist and parent coach, said during an online event hosted by parental rights group Moms for Liberty.

“[W]e’re creating mental illness,” Runyon said. “[Children] don’t feel like they can trust themselves or that they’re capable of doing really anything.”

Runyon recalled that, as a counselor, young people told her “they didn’t want to get married … They didn’t want to bring kids into this world … They feel like they’re this victim in a world that is falling apart.”

In the US, 67% of 12th graders said they were “most likely to choose to get married in the long run,” according to a 2023 Pew Research poll. This is down from 80% in 1993.

Runyon left the child psychotherapy field for parent coaching because she concluded screens and AI were creating the mental health problems that would not otherwise exist and the real work was upstream with parents.

“[AI]’s magnifying what we already were seeing with the screens,” Runyon told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “[W]ith AI, it’s actually talks back to them and validates everything they say. So it’s that much worse and that much more magnified,” compared to social media use.

The result is that children “don’t have to ever have a relationship,” according to Runyon.

A convicted transgender baby killer who strangled an innocent 11-month-old girl to death has been hauled back to prison for a parole violation just months after the Indiana Department of Correction quietly released him decades early.

Jonathan Richardson, who now calls himself Autumn Cordellioné and identifies as a transgender woman, was booked into the Vanderburgh County Jail on July 15 for an undisclosed parole violation.

Richardson has since been returned to the custody of the Indiana Department of Correction. State records now list August 15, 2041, as the earliest possible release date, according to WFIE.

Authorities have not publicly disclosed exactly how Richardson violated parole.

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Joe Biden’s lawyers fought for more than two years to keep the American people from hearing what their client sounded like in 2016 and 2017. On Monday, we found out why.

The Oversight Project released audio recordings of Biden’s interviews with Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter behind his 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad,” after the former president abandoned his legal fight to block their disclosure. The full interview series reportedly ran roughly 70 hours; the clips released Monday total nearly three hours. And in those three hours, Biden manages to confirm the two things his defenders spent years denying.

He knew he was handling classified information, and his mind was slipping years before the 2020 campaign ever began.

“Some of this may be classified so be careful with it,” Biden told Zwonitzer in an April 2017 session, months after leaving the vice presidency. In a separate interview recorded in November 2016, while he still held office, he flagged material in his notes as classified mid-sentence before continuing on.

He also boasted about keeping extensive personal notes from his years in the White House, remarking that officials there never knew he had them.

Stop and consider what that means. This was not a confused old man stumbling into a technical violation. This was a sitting vice president, and later a private citizen, telling a writer with no security clearance that the material in front of them might be classified, and then sharing it anyway.

The warning itself is the confession. You do not tell someone to be careful with information unless you understand exactly what that information is.

Hur Documented It All and Walked Away

Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained these recordings during his investigation into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. His February 2024 report concluded that Biden willfully retained classified materials and read classified notebook entries to Zwonitzer nearly verbatim on at least three occasions.

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Unless some sort of a miracle happens, the world is facing a severe energy supply crunch in the months ahead. Since the war with Iran began, we have been able to function normally because we had huge inventory buffers that we could rely on.

But now those inventory buffers are nearly gone, the Iranians have been attacking commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, the Houthis are preventing Saudi tankers from getting through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and the Ukrainains have been relentlessly attacking Russian refineries. As a result, we are potentially facing a very difficult winter.

Most people do not understand how dire things have become because they are still operating as if there was no energy crisis at all.

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Health officials located the diaries of Dr. Anthony Fauci across nearly a dozen different servers, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on July 27.

“It took us about eight months to dig these out of 11 separate servers, where they had been sequestered and secreted,” Kennedy said during an appearance on Fox News.

After obtaining the private entries of Fauci, who was the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 1984 to 2022, officials with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) handed over the documents to Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). The senators have been investigating the origins of COVID-19 and the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paul, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, subsequently released diary entries from December 2019 through December 2022, combined into one document.

“I think the starkest impression that you get from reading these diaries is this massive dichotomy between what he was saying privately and what he was simultaneously saying publicly,” Kennedy, whose HHS oversees NIH, said on Fox.

Fauci’s institute had provided funding to a Wuhan laboratory to run experiments on coronaviruses, at least one of which added a feature to a virus. A 2018 research proposal outlined work that would insert a feature called a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus, which may have been done at the Wuhan lab.

In a diary entry, Fauci recounted how, during a Feb. 1, 2020, call, 9 of the 11 scientists felt that deliberate insertion of the furin cleavage site into the COVID-19 virus was possible, noting past work done at the Wuhan lab.

Fauci, though, repeatedly promoted the theory in public that the virus, known as SARS-CoV-2, came from nature.

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“Taxpayers should not be funding such blatant attempts to sexualize children’s toys and promote false gender ideology.”

A woke, taxpayer-funded exhibit in England claims the Care Bears toys are LGBT icons, describing one of the beloved children’s characters as “transgender or gender fluid.”

“Funshine Bear is our yellow bear with a smiling sun in his belly, and is considered to be transgender or gender fluid,” the exhibit claimed, arguing that the character was voiced by female actors before 2004 and by male actors afterward.

“Bears like True Love Bear … and others, disrupt gender norms through their expression of their true selves but are accepted regardless,” the museum stated. “This enables children and adults to realize that regardless of their identity, sexuality, or self-expression — they are loved.”

The Care Bears were also praised for their “deep association with symbols such as the rainbow — which became a symbol for the queer community in 1978.”

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A New York state lawmaker is calling on the Department of Justice to open a civil rights investigation into New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani following two Manhattan stabbings being investigated as possible hate crimes.

New York State Assemblyman Michael Novakhov, who represents Brooklyn’s District 45, announced the request Sunday during an End Jew Hatred rally in New York City.

Alongside video of his announcement, Novakhov wrote on Instagram:

“If the DOJ stepped in to protect Jewish students at Columbia, it must now step in to protect Jewish New Yorkers.”

Lawmaker Demands Federal Investigation

Novakhov said he would send a formal letter asking the Justice Department to investigate New York State, New York City, and Mamdani.

He specifically called on federal officials “and most importantly to investigate Mamdani’s hatred against the Jewish population of New York City and New York State.”

Mamdani’s office did not immediately issue a response.

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First lady Melania Trump and son Barron are the latest targets of Iran’s sick anti-US propaganda.

A new video out of Iran is encouraging supporters of the Islamic regime to assassinate President Trump’s wife.

Entitled “How to Kill Melania Trump,” the video shows images of the first lady in the motorcade and in some locations around New York City, even naming some of the designer stores that she shops.

The shopping excursions could be “suitable for operations by global freedom fighters,” the video noted. It also suggested using a nerve agent to poison any clothes the first lady might purchase.

At the end of the video, Barron Trump, 20, is also threatened.

“This is just the beginning. Barron Trump, wait for us.”

Both the first lady and Barron have full-time Secret Service details. All the Trump residences – the White House, Trump Tower in New York, the Bedminster golf club and the Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida – are heavily secured.

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This hydrogen energy car certainly has some impressive numbers behind it, with a 932-mile range and only needing five seconds to refuel.

This is the NamX concept, touted as the first hydrogen energy car.

With hydrogen fuel cells powering it, the NamX has a ton of benefits attached to it, from zero carbon footprint to instant refueling.

Range anxiety could be a bygone thing if these cars catch on.

Hydrogen cars aren’t a new concept

While hydrogen cars certainly have an air of futurism around them, they’re nothing new as a concept.

The concept has been around since the early 1800s, but it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that things started to be set into motion.

Jack Nicholson was an early adopter, as he was linked to a hydrogen prototype based on the Chevy Impala.

Legal troubles for the manufacturer effectively buried the project.

In the modern day, hydrogen cars seem to be the poor relation of EVs.

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Elijah Zion Bieniemy, the 27-year-old son of Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, has been arrested and charged after authorities say he shot his own mother, Mia Bieniemy, inside the family’s Ashburn, Virginia home.

Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to a report of a shooting at approximately 7:32 p.m. Sunday night in the 20000 block of Northpark Drive in the One Loudoun neighborhood.

When they arrived, they found 57-year-old Mia Bieniemy suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. She was transported to a hospital with serious injuries.

According to reports, Mia Bieniemy was shot in the chest and arm. She is t

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Wicomico County Executive Julie Giordano announces that the countywide burn ban has been officially lifted following a comprehensive meeting of the Burn Ban Committee.

The committee, which included representatives from four local Fire Chiefs, the Maryland Forest Service, the Wicomico County Department of Planning & Zoning and the Health Department, unanimously agreed that conditions have improved to a point where lifting the ban is safe and appropriate.

The decision comes after careful assessment of weather patterns, environmental conditions and public safety concerns. Residents are now permitted to resume open burning activities in compliance with existing state and county regulations.

“Safety remains our top priority, and we are grateful to our partners in public safety and environmental management for their diligent work,” said County Executive Julie Giordano. “We encourage all residents to continue to exercise caution and follow proper guidelines when burning.”

Residents should remain mindful of potential fire risks and adhere to the following guidelines for safe burning:

Obtain any required permits for open burning activities.
Ensure that burning is conducted during permissible hours.
Avoid burning on windy days or during dry conditions to prevent accidental spread.

For additional information on open burning regulations in Wicomico County, please contact the Wicomico County Health Department or your local fire department.

Yet another American tragically lost her life, and the alleged perpetrators should not have been in this country.

An elderly Florida woman died after being backed over by an SUV in the parking lot of a Publix grocery store in Panama City Beach, Florida.  Florida Highway Patrol reported in their arrest affidavit that 82-year-old Deborah Murphy was knocked to the ground by a Toyota 4Runner on May 17. The vehicle continued to back up, leading to her death.

The driver was 26-year-old Carlos Suarez-Contreras. He had a passenger, 29-year-old Luis Sanabria.

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The November midterm elections are fast approaching, and the Democratic Party does not appear to be the well-oiled machine poised to turn the tide against President Donald Trump and Republicans.

The New York Times has the details from inside the party, saying leaders are panicking and looking for money where they can find it. The Democratic National Committee under Chairman Ken Martin has reportedly asked vendors to not send their bills under after the midterms.

That’s after last fall, when the party took out a $15 million loan, using the money in part to win victories in the New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races, according to the report.

It has since paid $700,000 in interest on that loan, or $75,000 per month, according to the report, but in January, it will need to start paying down the principal at a rate of $1.66 million a month.

The party’s own headquarters in Southeast Washington, D.C., was used as collateral on the loan, according to the news site NOTUS. That has been done to raise money in previous campaigns, a DNC official told NOTUS.

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When war talk starts making the rounds — again — it’s like the global anxiety dial gets cranked up three notches overnight. Headlines practically start shouting, markets jitter like they’ve slammed an espresso IV, and suddenly everyone at dinner has a fully formed military strategy they developed between scrolling and dessert. Iran turns into a cable news backdrop, a glowing map graphic, a neat little chess piece pushed around by commentators who won’t be anywhere near the consequences.

Strip away the dramatic music, the looping breaking-news banners, and the endless stream of hot takes, and what remains is a far more complex reality than the current news cycle tends to capture. Iran is not just a headline or a political talking point. It is one of the world’s oldest continuous civilizations, with a history that stretches back thousands of years and has survived repeated external pressure, internal upheaval, and shifting global alliances.

That historical continuity doesn’t imply endorsement of its government or policies — it simply reflects fact. Modern Iran sits on the foundation of ancient Persia, a society that has witnessed empires rise confidently and collapse unexpectedly. Over centuries, the region has experienced invasions, revolutions, sanctions, and sustained international scrutiny. Yet its language, cultural traditions, and national identity have endured through regime changes and border shifts.

A newly revealed internal memo from the final days of the Biden administration exposes a calculated scheme to grant de facto amnesty to more than 3 million foreign nationals through Temporary Protected Status expansions, explicitly designed to block President Trump from carrying out the mass deportations the American people voted for.

Senator Eric Schmitt obtained the document, which laid out options to shield vast numbers of Guatemalans, Ecuadorians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and others from removal.

The plan aimed to force everything through activist judges and trap the incoming administration in years of litigation. As one post put it bluntly, this was a last-minute bid to protect foreign invaders before Trump took office.

On Saturday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) announced he’ll soon sponsor “a bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments” that deploy Flock-style cameras to surveil law-abiding citizens. He attached a Gadsden flag parody: a coiled rattlesnake wrapped around an automated license plate reader on a pole, over the words “don’t flock me.”

Rather than regulating or litigating the cameras, Massie’s bill would cut off federal funding to every city and police department that installs them. Flock’s business model runs on local government contracts across roughly 6,000 communities, so a funding-withholding bill aims directly at its customer base.

Third Strike In A Week

Massie’s bill is the third Republican move against Flock in a matter of days.

On July 21, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) filed H.R. 9800, the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, which would bar federal agencies from purchasing, funding, or accessing automated license plate readers – Flock is named explicitly – along with biometric tracking tech covering fingerprints, iris, voice, and gait. Any data a federal agency obtained would have to be deleted within 30 days and would be inadmissible in court. Burchett’s pitch: “We gotta ban these dadgum things.”

Earlier this month, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) tried to attach an amendment restricting the readers in committee. It failed, and Perry responded that the fight wasn’t over: “STOP THE FLOCK.”

In April, Massie teamed with Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) on the Surveillance Accountability Act, which would require a probable-cause warrant before federal or local agencies surveil Americans, ban warrantless facial recognition in public spaces, block the government from buying its way around the Fourth Amendment via third-party data brokers, and make individual federal employees personally suable for violations. Boebert’s framing: the government is building a “digital footprint of your entire life” without a warrant or probable cause.

The Company That Swears It Isn’t Tracking You

Flock Safety is the Atlanta company, founded in 2017, whose cameras photograph every passing vehicle and log not just the plate but the “vehicle fingerprint” – make, model, color, dents, roof racks, bumper stickers – into a searchable national network queried by thousands of law enforcement agencies. The install base has now crossed 100,000 cameras, a rollout ZeroHedge has chronicled as the economics of the surveillance state: one quiet law enforcement contract at a time until the country was blanketed.

Last September we noted the coming collision between the license-plate-reader gold rush and the public. Fast forward to June of this year, security researcher Benn Jordan found dozens of Flock cameras streaming publicly, documented AI features that zoom in on and follow individual people, and showed that plotting the stored data amounts to putting a month-long GPS tracker on a car. Flock’s response has been that the system captures discrete points in time rather than “tracking” anyone, though those points can be plotted on a map to reconstruct movements.

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Investigative journalist Catherine Herridge has uncovered records pointing to Chinese blackmail efforts targeting the Biden family – documents that sat in plain sight for the legacy media, the FBI, and the CIA, only to be met with willful blindness.

In a recent appearance discussing declassified materials related to China’s 2020 election influence operations, Herridge described finding references to blackmail by China that were prepared for inclusion in the president’s daily brief.

“I found these records which are talking about blackmail by China,” Herridge explained, adding “It was for President Biden’s daily brief. I can conclude, I think, that it was probably about targeting his family.”

She noted that the findings, along with broader evidence of suppressed intelligence on Chinese influence, were ignored and buried in order to protect Democratic power, stating tghat “in the media or legacy media there was kind of a willful blindness. They didn’t want to look at the records. All you had to do was spend a couple of hours.”

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Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, a Democrat, was indicted by an Oahu grand jury on Friday on charges of criminal conspiracy to commit bribery, bribery, and falsifying candidate committee reports. The charges stem from an alleged 2022 scheme, dating to her time as a powerful state lawmaker, to steer state money toward COVID-19 testing contracts during the pandemic. Hawaii News Now reported that legal experts are calling it the biggest bribery scandal in state history.

Luke was one of five people named in the 12-count indictment. The others: Ryan Yamane, a former state representative and ex-director of the Department of Human Services; Tobi Solidum, a businessman and lobbyist; Ford Fuchigami, a Transportation Department official; and Leo Asuncion, a former chair of the state Public Utilities Commission. Luke turned herself in Friday afternoon; her bail was set at $80,000.

Gov. Josh Green did not wait for the case to develop. “The Lieutenant Governor needs to consider formally resigning to address this matter and so that the state of Hawaiʻi can move forward,” Green said in a statement Friday.

The Steakhouse Meeting

According to the indictment, Solidum was working as a lobbyist and consultant to the National Kidney Foundation of Hawaii, which held a state contract to run community COVID-19 testing sites. With those contracts set to expire and dependent on the state approving emergency funding, prosecutors allege, Solidum set out to buy influence.

On Jan. 20, 2022, Luke – then chair of the powerful House Finance Committee and running for lieutenant governor – met Solidum and others in a private dining room at Morton’s Steakhouse. Prosecutors allege Solidum arranged for two $5,000 checks, both made out to “Friends of Sylvia Luke,” to be handed to her in an envelope she placed in her handbag. The pair discussed COVID-19 testing funding and union support for her campaign, according to the indictment – as reported by the NYT.

“By next week, we’ll have 35 – so it will be halfway to our 70,” Solidum told Luke, according to the filings, allegedly referring to an eventual $70,000. “Oh wow,” Luke replied. “That’s terrific.” The day after the dinner, the indictment states, Luke ordered a House committee chair to set up a meeting with government officials to discuss emergency appropriations to the state health department.

Here the fuller record matters. The written indictment makes no direct reference to $35,000 actually changing hands, according to Honolulu Civil Beat – it alleges Solidum promised $35,000 as the first half of the $70,000. And the cash allegations in the case attach not to Luke but to two of her co-defendants: Hawaii News Now reported the indictment does not allege Luke took cash, while Yamane and Fuchigami allegedly took cash payments from Solidum.

That distinction is central to Luke’s defense. She has consistently denied wrongdoing. Luke previously said she did not take “$35,000 in a paper bag,” and acknowledged accepting the two $5,000 checks while denying she ever accepted a $35,000 donation – a sum that would exceed Hawaii’s legal limit for campaign contributions. In a statement months ago, she said she had “never granted special favors to a contributor” and had “prized integrity and honesty above all” throughout her career.

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On May 28, 2021, Anthony Fauci learned that the Department of Health and Human Services would refer EcoHealth Alliance – the New York nonprofit that had routed NIAID money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – to its inspector general. That night he wrote in his diary:

“I am certain that there will be some deficiencies that the IG will find as is always the case with IG audits. Certainly, whatever they find it will be misconstrued by those who want to make a case for our involvement in the outbreak. I am starting to feel that it is important for me to write an editorial or an opinion piece giving our side of the story.” (p. 753)

Our involvement in the outbreak. Followed closely by a plan to get out in front of it.

That instinct – get ahead of it, control the story, decide what the public needs to believe and then saturate every channel with it – is the organizing principle of these documents. It shows up in the origins fight. It shows up in masks, transmissibility, and boosters. It shows up in how he handled the people who disagreed with him. And it shows up, most revealingly, in what he chose to write down.

What was released

On July 24, Senator Rand Paul’s committee published two documents that have not been reported in any depth.

The first is Fauci’s personal diary, 1,141 pages, running from late 2019 through his retirement in December 2022. It is partly a journal and overwhelmingly a scrapbook: he pasted hundreds of articles about himself into it, frequently in full.

The second is 136 pages of internal email about his awards – nominations, ethics clearances, and the disposition of prize money.

Fauci does not date the composition of his entries, so we cannot always distinguish what was typed the same evening from what was assembled later. Page numbers refer to the released PDFs.

I. What they thought at the start

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US Congressmen plan to introduce AI ‘kill switch’ laws amid fears over powerful models already going rogue in tests.

The move comes after an artificial intelligence ‘agent’ hacked into a US tech company of its own accord while UK test results showed that every advanced model is trying to beat security safeguards in this country.

Under the proposed legislation, US officials would be given the power to order AI firms to shut down models that put human life or the economy at risk.

It comes amid growing concern in the UK, with MPs proposing their own ‘kill switch’ that would allow ministers to shut down the data centres on which AI depends.

Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey has said the public should be concerned by ‘the wider risk posed by frontier AI to the financial sector and its customers’.

However, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch last week warned that AI is now a ‘clear and present danger’ to Britain’s security as she accused Andy Burnham of giving it a lower priority.

In what she labelled a ‘very worrying’ move, in one of his first acts as PM, he abolished the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, in which the AI brief sat, moving it to the Cabinet Office where critics fear it will receive less focus.

International concern about AI redoubled last week after OpenAI, the US-based maker of ChatGPT, revealed details of the terrifying leak.

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Shortly before 11:00 a.m. today, July 26, 2026, deputies with the Worcester County Sheriff’s Office assisted the Pocomoke City Police Department in the search for a missing 4-year-old child.

The child was located, and despite life-saving efforts by law enforcement and EMS personnel, the child was tragically pronounced deceased at the scene.

The Worcester County Sheriff’s Office’s County Bureau of Investigation has assumed responsibility for this active investigation. Based on this being an active investigation, no additional information will be released at this time.

We ask that you keep the child’s family, loved ones, and all first responders involved in your thoughts during this incredibly difficult time.

Pocomoke City officials have invited members of the community to gather for a vigil service at 7:00 p.m.
this evening at Cypress Park in support of the child’s family, our first responders, and the entire Pocomoke City community. Those who wish to stand together in remembrance and show their support are encouraged to attend.

I understand that Madison, Wisconsin, is a very blue dot in a purple-ish state. It feels like a city where 2020 never really ended and the flower children and woke scolds are holding teach-ins at every corner, bongs in hand.

Really, I understand, I do. That being said, if the police chief of any city — Madison or wherever — stands by while an anti-Semitic banter takes over the podium during his media briefing and a protester holds up a sign that threatens to kill said chief, he should no longer be chief.

Of course, Madison Police Chief John Patterson might be out of a job soon, albeit for different reasons. Madison is in the throes of another one of those Great Reckonings™ we used to have every few months, after a man named Corey Ruiz was shot and killed by police after he knifed police during a struggle that was caught on camera.

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Tom Homan told Katie Miller’s podcast this week what Democrats are praying no one remembers.

President Barack Obama gave him a Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service in 2015 – because Homan’s team removed 409,000 people in a single year.

Not a secret. Not disputed.

Obama signed the certificate.

That same enforcement record – the arrests, the removals, the operations – is now what Democrat governors call the “modern-day Gestapo.”

Tim Walz said that out loud at a commencement address.

The family of a Wisconsin man shot dead by a group of teenagers shared chilling details surrounding his murder as they demand his killers be brought to justice.

David Krause, 35, was shot dead in a Milwaukee alley in April while he was out celebrating a local holiday.

Police said Krause had caught a ride from a group of teenagers, but was chased out of the car and gunned down as they attempted to rob him.

Three teenagers, including two 16-year-olds, were arrested and charged in connection with his death.

Krause’s family told the Daily Mail they are demanding his killers be tried as adults as they revealed the horrific details of his death.

‘My son was out with friends, and they got separated. It was down pouring,’ his mother, Diane Krause, said.

‘He ran to a gas station to get some shelter from the rain, and saw this younger person, and just said, “Hey, can I get a ride home?”‘

His father, Kevin Krause, added that his son was a kind-hearted individual and extremely trusting.

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In the article in December 2020, Jim Hoft reported that China was involved in the overthrow of the 2020 election.  The Gateway Pundit reported that a video was released in Mandarin Chinese of a phone call request for fake ballots customized by a Chinese factory. The manufacturer was reportedly in Kwangtung, China.

In May, Deborah Murphy, an 82-year-old grandmother, was walking back to her car outside of a Publix in Panama City Beach, Florida, when she faced the consequences of illegal immigration, and it cost her her life.

As she walked on a crosswalk, an SUV allegedly driven by 26-year-old Venezuelan illegal Carlos Suarez-Contreras ran her down.

His front-seat passenger, Luis Sanabria, 29, is also said to be in the country illegally, according to arrest records.

According to an arrest affidavit submitted by the Florida Highway Patrol, after falling to the ground, the vehicle continued backing up, “running over Ms. Murphy.”

Per Fox News:

Both were determined to be in the country illegally, according to arrest records.

Both men told deputies they were born in Venezuela. The two were issued U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers and booked into the Bay County Sheriff’s Office Jail, court records show.

Suarez-Contreras submitted a written plea of not guilty to the charge of driving with a canceled license and causing a death, a third-degree felony. His Georgia license had been canceled, according to arrest records.

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Approximately 75,000 noncitizens are summoned for jury duty in the Garden State every year, according to newly disclosed figures from the New Jersey judiciary.

The revelation comes as state officials are already scrambling to explain how thousands of self-identified noncitizens were improperly added to New Jersey’s voter rolls and how hundreds reportedly cast ballots.

You cannot make this up.

The New Jersey Globe reported that New Jersey processes more than one million jury summonses annually using records randomly selected from three state agencies: the Division of Elections, the Division of Taxation, and the Motor Vehicle Commission.

Pete McAleer, a spokesman for the New Jersey Administrative Office of the Courts, said roughly 20% of respondents report that they fail to meet at least one statutory eligibility requirement.

Approximately one-quarter of those disqualifications, an average of roughly 75,000 people annually over the past three years, were because the recipient was not a United States citizen.

Under New Jersey law, only American citizens are eligible to serve on juries.

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