The Trump administration and Ukraine reportedly have reached a deal on mineral rights that could pave the way to a long-term security commitment to the war-torn nation in exchange for helping the U.S. recoup the billions of dollars in humanitarian and military aid it provided since Russia’s invasion three years ago.
Ukrainian officials said they are now ready to sign the agreement on jointly developing the nation’s mineral resources, including oil and natural gas, after the U.S. dropped demands for $500 billion in potential revenue from mining the resources, The Financial Times reported Tuesday.
Asked about a report that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was coming to the White House on Friday, President Donald Trump said this in remarks at the White House on Tuesday afternoon: “I hear that he’s coming on Friday, certainly it’s okay with me if he’d like to.” “We’re saying look… we want to get that money back.”
During his meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron at the White House on Monday, Trump indicated the deal was close to be completed and that Zelenskyy could visit Washington, D.C., this week or next to sign the deal.
Trump addressed the issue in a post on Truth Social on Monday after a virtual meeting involving the Group of Seven nations, writing in part, “I emphasized the importance of the vital ‘Critical Minerals and Rare-Earths Deal’ between the United States and Ukraine, which we hope will be signed very soon!’
“This deal, which is an ‘Economic Partnership,’ will ensure the American people recoup the Tens of Billions of Dollars and Military Equipment sent to Ukraine, while also helping Ukraine’s economy grow as this Brutal and Savage War comes to an end.”
The draft agreement, according to Axios, called for the establishment of a “Reconstruction Investment Fund” that will be co-managed by the U.S. and Ukraine. Axios reported Monday that the draft agreement it viewed was the most recent version, but it could still be amended. The agreement stipulated the fund will be designed to invest in projects in Ukraine and attract investments to increase development, including in areas like mining and ports. But it also suggests the U.S. will recoup some of its expenditures related to “defending, reconstructing, and returning Ukraine” to its pre-war gross domestic product.
Tensions between the U.S. and Ukraine have escalated in recent weeks, with Zelenskyy expressing frustration over the U.S. negotiating with Russia first on a deal to end the war, and Trump calling Zelenskyy a “dictator” for cancelling elections and blaming Kyiv for starting the war.
Newsmax reached out to the White House for comment.
Donald Trump’s incoming Middle East envoy traveled to Qatar and Israel to kick-start the President-elect’s diplomatic push to reach a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal before he takes office on Jan 20, a source briefed on the talks told Reuters.
Steve Witkoff, the incoming envoy, met separately in late November with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Qatar’s prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, the source said. The meetings signal that the Gulf state of Qatar has resumed its role as a key mediator after suspending its role last month, the source said.
The Gulf country had worked alongside the U.S. and Egypt for months on fruitless indirect talks that have not achieved a lasting ceasefire between Israel and militant group Hamas in Gaza or the release of dozens of Israeli hostages held in the enclave. The source added that Hamas negotiators would likely return to the Qatari capital Doha to facilitate a fresh round of talks “soon.”
A U.S. official confirmed that Trump’s team has been in touch with Middle East officials.
“They are supportive of a Gaza ceasefire deal,” the official told Reuters.
Trump’s transition team and representatives for Witkoff did not immediately respond to a request for comment the meetings. The White House National Security Council did not immediately respond to questions on whether they were aware of Witkoff’s trips in recent weeks to Qatar and Israel.
Trump said on Monday there would be “hell to pay” in the Middle East if hostages held in the Gaza Strip were not released before his Jan. 20 inauguration
Witkoff, a real estate investor and Trump campaign donor with business ties to Qatar and other Gulf states, but no prior diplomatic experience, met Sheikh Mohammed, who also serves as foreign minister, in Doha on Nov 22.
“Both agreed a Gaza ceasefire is needed before Trump’s inauguration so that once the Trump administration takes office it can move onto other issues, like stabilizing Gaza and the region,” said the source, who had been briefed on meetings between Witkoff, Qatar and Israel and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Qatar’s foreign ministry did not respond to Reuters’ request for confirmation or comment.
Witkoff met Netanyahu in Israel the next day. The Israeli prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
Witkoff met families of Israeli hostages, an Israeli official told Reuters.
He “spoke with them about Team Trump’s efforts to try and broker the deal before inauguration,” the official said.
Sheik Mohammed traveled to Vienna on Nov 24 to meet the director of Israel’s Mossad spy agency David Barnea, who has led Israel’s talks with Qatar over the past 14 months.
“There are plans for a subsequent round of indirect talks between Israel and Hamas to take place potentially in Doha soon, but no specific date has been set,” the source said.
“Hamas’ negotiating team are likely to return to Doha to facilitate such talks.”
Qatar had been a key mediator of the indirect talks between Israel and Hamas until it announced last month it was suspending its role until they the two parties show “willingness and seriousness” to resume talks.
You may never have heard of Threat Actor Storm-0558, but this top Chinese hacker gang broke into the State Department computer systems via Microsoft Exchange Online last spring and read emails for several weeks before Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s visit to Beijing. They also got to Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, Rep. Don Bacon, R-Ill., and 391 other Americans plus other government offices in the U.S. and Europe.
Then the State Department caught Storm-0558 in June, and Microsoft mitigated the attack. End of story? Not quite.
A scathing report on the incident released Apr. 2 by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Review Board has ignited a firestorm. According to the Board, “this intrusion was preventable and should never have occurred.” Worse, experts are still not sure how China pulled off the key part of the deception required to slip in. That touched off fears for data security. First, the State Department. Next, the cloud?
To cut to the chase: Homeland Security is plenty mad at China for the diplomatic data breach. But they are anxious that this same cyber war tactic could allow China to do far more damage if their cyber gangs hack data in the cloud.
Here are five reasons the Cyber Review Board is both furious and worried.
1. Diplomatic damage occurred.
No question, the Chinese hack did damage to U.S. diplomacy. The Storm-0558 intrusion occurred as U.S. diplomats were preparing for a summer of high-level meetings in Beijing, beginning with Blinken in June 2023. For the State Department at least, the Storm-0558 breach was way worse than China’s giant spy balloon.
Turns out Storm-0558 hackers in China have been tracked by industry for over 20 years. They are known to have carried out major attacks in 2009 and 2011, and probably more mischief the government doesn’t talk about. Pretty annoying to see them back again. On top of that, Storm 0558 is a “nation-state actor” which in Washington, DC lingo means: yes, these guys work for Xi Jinping.
President Joe Biden issued a lengthy Executive Order back in May 2021 beefing up government cyber security with zero trust and better cloud security. Agencies were exhorted to carry out “proactive detection of cybersecurity incidents within Federal Government infrastructure, active cyber hunting, containment and remediation, and incident response.” In fact, the Cyber Security Review Board was set up under Biden. Still, China was reading Gina Raimondo’s emails. No wonder Homeland Security is sounding the alarm.
The big worry is that China will get access to the cloud and steal or corrupt data. As you’ve probably noticed, US government agencies are migrating data and processing to cloud services. The review said Storm-0558 apparently forged an encryption key and exploited another opening to gain access and sit inside secure systems for quite some time. Those tactics could be used against a cloud, too. In fact, investigators apparently interviewed Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle among others about their cloud security practices as part of the analysis.
“Cloud computing is some of the most critical infrastructure we have, as it hosts sensitive data and powers business operations across our economy,” said DHS Under Secretary of Policy and CSRB Chair Robert Silvers. “It is imperative that cloud service providers prioritize security and build it in by design.”
If the breach is undetected over the long term, that’s a very serious problem. Worst case, hackers could twist and corrupt data to influence how AI models are trained.
I think Homeland Security came out swinging in part because the U.S. government is relying so much on big tech companies in the competition with China. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta and other companies are basically critical infrastructure, just like dams, bridges and the electric grid. The government has nowhere else to turn for the basic products to stay ahead in the digital domain. And it’s the leading tech companies that will fund and fuel the AI revolution. Nobody else has the cash.
Clearly, Homeland Security is hoping that the stern report and public pillorying will help America’s tech firms redouble their efforts. “You have to prioritize security over feature development,” SentinelOne’s Chris Krebs told CNBC “Squawkbox” on Apr. 4. And as the Cyber Review Board pointed out, it was none other than Microsoft founder Bill Gates who called for placing trust and security first. “Microsoft is one of the most important, if not the most important, technology companies in the world and we all depend upon them for hardware, software, productivity, cloud and security,” Krebs said. “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Israeli soldiers and tanks rolled into al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip and location of a major Hamas terrorist compound, according to Israel. The military is conducting a “precise and targeted operation” inside the hospitals, where hundreds of medical patients and personnel remain. Hamas has denied Israeli accusations it uses the hospital as a shield.
The Israeli military captured Hamas government buildings in Gaza and has fought its way to the gates of the region’s largest medical facility, Al-Shifa Hospital.
The Israel Defense Forces said troops killed Hamas terrorists and encountered explosive devices and terror cells during its “precise and targeted operation” at the al-Shifa Hospital.
There remain up to 238 Hamas hostages in Gaza, and 10 of them are believed to be Americans. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claims more than 11,200 Gazans have been killed in the fighting, though they do not distinguish between Palestinian civilians and Hamas terrorists.
Israel-Hamas war: IDF finds weapons inside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) released video early Wednesday showing weapons found inside the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza.
“IDF troops are continuing the precise and targeted operation against Hamas in the Shifa Hospital complex, in which the troops are conducting searches for Hamas terrorist infrastructure and assets,” the IDF said in a statement.
“As the soldiers entered the hospital complex, they engaged with a number of terrorists and killed them,” the statement added. “Following this, during searches in one of the departments of the hospital, the troops located a room with technological assets, along with military and combat equipment used by the Hamas terrorist organization.”
The footage shows Israeli officers sorting through the firearms, ammunition and weapons reportedly left by Hamas fighters.
The IDF says that “technological assets and extensive intelligence information” found in the hospital are being reviewed by authorities.
Biden allies condemn far-left calls for cease-fire in Israel-Hamas war
U.S. President Joe Biden departs the White House November 14, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
President Biden’s strong backing of Israel and his response to its war with terrorist organization Hamas speaks to the mainstream of the Democratic Party and the majority of Americans, according to supporters of the president, despite progressive Democrats publicly opposing the administration’s rejection of a cease-fire.
Multiple Biden allies told Fox News Digital that the administration’s stance against a cease-fire protects Americans and national security interests at home and abroad.
Nearly a dozen Biden allies defended the president’s policies in interviews with Fox News Digital after more than 400 government officials within the administration signed onto a letter opposing the president’s handling of the war, and demanding a cease-fire.
NYC Columbia University faculty and students protest suspension of 2 far-left groups
A protester holds a sign at a “All out for Gaza” protest at Columbia University in New York on November 15, 2023. (Photo by BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP via Getty Images)
Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters stood outside of Columbia University in New York City on Wednesday, holding signs while chanting and demanding the removal of Jewish people from Gaza, while others boycotted the suspension of two far-left student-led groups by the school’s administration.
The “emergency protest” was shared on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, by groups such as WOLPalestine (Within Our Lifetime) and CUNYPalestine, noting the event was scheduled for Nov. 15 at 2 p.m.
“All Out for Gaza at Columbia University,” the post read. “In solidarity with Columbia SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) and JVP (Jewish Voices for Peace) who were recently unjustly suspended by the university administration.
NYU hit with lawsuit for fueling ‘virus of antisemitism,’ ‘abusing Jewish students with impunity’
A New York University (NYU) flag flies outside of the NYU business school on August 25, 2020. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
New York University was hit with a groundbreaking lawsuit, the first of what is expected to be a series against elite universities, for allegedly allowing antisemitism to fester on its campus and also “deliberately” seeking to “make the campus environment even more… frightening for Jewish students,” according to court documents.
“NYU is among the worst campuses for Jewish students, and NYU has long been aware of the festering Jewish hatred permeating the school,” the suit filed by Kasowitz Benson Torres, an influential firm based in New York City, said.
It alleged that NYU was aware of “ongoing and disgraceful acts of anti-Jewish bigotry,” and refused to act in violation of Jewish students’ Title VI civil rights and sought remedial measures and financial penalties. The suit made startling allegations, including that NYU’s administration’s actions, or lack thereof throughout the years, added fuel to antisemitism on campus.
The “Outnumbered” co-hosts reacted to the rise of antisemitism and Tuesday’s March for Israel rally, as the war between Hamas and Israel continues.
Fox News contributor Morgan Ortagus, who is Jewish, thanked the show for lending her support amid rampant antisemitism.
“I’m so grateful to this show, to all of you, to the producers. I’ve never cried on air,” Ortagus explained. “And a couple of weeks ago, just seeing the images and the rampant anti-Semitism, having a daughter, it has been so hard to talk about it. But I’m so appreciative of you guys for for giving us the voice, giving us the opportunity.”
“I never have felt unsafe in this country for my daughter the way I do now,” she continued, adding that she was appreciated for the 300,000 people who showed up to the March for Israel rally.
“Between October 7th and November 7th, there have been 832 anti-Semitic attacks,” co-host Kayleigh McEnany said. “Do the math, that means 28 per day. That means more than one every hour.”
Comedian Jon Lovitz blasts HBO’s John Oliver for shaming U.S. over alliance with Israel
Jon Lovitz arrives at the Mike Tyson Cares and We2Matter’s 100 Women Matter Celebrity Fundraiser Gala on August 17, 2023 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Legendary comedian and actor Jon Lovitz blasted HBO host Jon Oliver this week after the British talk show host reprimanded the United States for supporting Israel and the “suffering” it has caused in Gaza following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre.
Lovitz replied to a social media post from Oliver’s talk show with an X post noting how the U.S. would obviously support its “democratic ally” Israel over the radical terror group that killed 1400+ people in the country last month.
Pushing back against the British HBO host’s skepticism of America’s alliance with Israel, Lovitz declared, “God bless America. #IstandwithIsrael.”
Netanyahu’s wife writes Jill Biden a letter urging her to save ‘suffering’ Hamas child hostages
Former Israeli Prime Minister and Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara Netanyahu at an election-night event on November 1, 2022 in Jerusalem, Israel.
The wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has written a letter Wednesday to first lady Jill Biden, urging her to call for the “immediate release” of child hostages who are “suffering” in the captivity of Hamas terrorists.
Sara Netanyahu opened her plea by saying that “I’m writing to you not only as Bibi’s wife but first and foremost as a mother.”
“For over a month now, 32 children have been held kidnapped in Gaza, brutally torn from their parents and their homes,” Netanyahu said. “These children are surely suffering from untold trauma, not only by being kidnapped, but having witnessed the brutal murder of their parents and siblings on that horrific October 7th.”
Biden’s favorite columnist urges him to use Trump’s peace proposal for two-state solution
Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist and bestselling author Thomas L. Friedman on February 26, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
New York Times opinion columnist Thomas Friedman, one of President Biden’s favorite writers, is urging him to follow in part former President Trump’s plan for a two-state solution in the Middle East.
After visiting Israel and the West Bank, Friedman came to the conclusion that America needed an active “vision for how the Gaza war must end” in a column published Tuesday.
“The Biden plan — are you sitting down? — could actually use as one of its starting points President Donald Trump’s proposal for a two-state solution,” Friedman wrote, “because [Benjamin] Netanyahu embraced that in 2020, when he had a different coalition. (Netanyahu and his ambassador in Washington practically wrote the Trump plan.)”
‘Will & Grace’ star Debra Messing blasted for speech at pro-Israel rally in DC
Debra Messing speaks during ‘March For Israel’ at the National Mall on November 14, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images)
Social media users criticized “Will & Grace” star Debra Messing after she gave a speech in defense of Israel during a pro-Israel rally in Washington, D.C., this week.
Users on both sides of the political spectrum slammed Messing for her impassioned speech condemning the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, with pro-Israel conservatives hitting her for voting for Biden, who has given aid to Israel’s enemies, as well as pro-Palestinian leftists accusing her of defending “genocide” in Gaza.
Messing, a Jewish person and Hollywood liberal, gave the speech in front of thousands at the “March for Israel” in D.C. on Tuesday. The Jewish Federations of North America organized the event to support Israel amid its war with Hamas and to call out terror and hatred being shown towards the Jewish community.
Bipartisan lawmakers push Biden to investigate Hamas’ cryptocurrency financing
From left: House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, President Biden and Rep. Ritchie Torres (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll, Ting Shen/Bloomberg, Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call)
Top House lawmakers are investigating the breadth and depth of the digital wealth owned by terror groups like Hamas just over a month after the Gaza-based organization’s surprise attack on Israel.
“Reports indicate that Hamas-linked digital wallets received about $41 million and Palestinian Islamic Jihad-linked digital wallets received about $93 million between August 2021 and June 2023. Yet, it remains unclear how much, if any, of the publicly identified digital assets are accessible to or remains in the possession of Hamas,” the lawmakers wrote to President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
“According to reports, Hamas shut down its digital asset fundraising campaign in April 2023 citing the ability of government officials to identify and prosecute donors.”
The bipartisan letter is led by House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., Digital Asset subcommittee Chairman French Hill, R-Ark., and Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y.
“We request the White House and the Treasury to utilize the open blockchain ledger to assess the footprint of Hamas’ digital asset fundraising campaign. In doing this, Congress can better understand the United States’ available tools and capabilities to target bad actors on blockchain and support legitimate digital asset use and innovation,” Emmer told Fox News Digital.
A top United Nations humanitarian aid official is being ripped Wednesday by an Israeli ambassador after sharing an image on X showing him shaking hands with Iran’s foreign minister, who reportedly helped Hamas plan its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths posted that he held a meeting in Geneva with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian about the “devastating” situation unfolding in the Gaza Strip and the “critical” need to deliver aid to the area.
The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Amirabdollahian had taken part in at least two planning meetings in Lebanon with the terrorist groups Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad ahead of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which launched the Middle East war.
“Tell me @UNReliefChief, what role do you see Iran playing in such regard?” Israeli Ambassador to Geneva Elion Shahar wrote in response to Griffiths’ post. “What role do you see for the prime sponsors of a terrorist organization who murdered, raped, and tortured over 1,200 Israelis?”
“Did you ask him about the weapons Iran has transferred to Hamas through aid shipments, which were used to kill Israelis on October 7th?” she continued. “Did you ask him about the money Iran has transferred to Hamas, which pays for its leaders’ 5-star hotels in Qatar where they cheered when young Israelis were murdered on TV?”
“Iran is part of the problem, not the solution,” she concluded. “It is about time the U.N. starts to understand this simple truth.”
Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman contributed to this update.
Destroyer USS Thomas Hudner shot down a drone from Yemen in the Red Sea
BOSTON, MA – NOVEMBER 26: The USS Thomas Hudner, named after Concord’s Medal of Honor recipient Thomas Hudner, arrives in Boston for its commissioning ceremony later in the week on Nov. 26, 2018. (Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
The USS Thomas Hudner, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, shot down a drone from Yemen in the Red Sea, two U.S. defense officials confirm to Fox News.
A defense official said the drone was shot down in self-defense. “The drone was heading towards the Hudner,” the official said.
On Tuesday, during the Pentagon news briefing, Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin asked Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh about the lack of U.S. military response to the Houthis in Yemen who downed the $32 million MQ-9 drone over the Red Sea last week.
“Isn’t the lack of response by the US military inviting more actions, aggressive actions by the Houthis?” Griffin asked.
“I wouldn’t say that it’s inviting more aggressive or further response from the Houthis,” Singh replied. “We’ve seen the Houthis do this before.”
“I’m not saying that we’re not going to respond. We always reserve the right to respond at a time and place of our choosing. But I just don’t have anything to forecast for you right now,” she added.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited troops at the Zikim military base near north Gaza and said, “There is no place in Gaza that Israel will not reach.”
Netanyahu was briefed on the fighting that occurred on Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel and attacked residences and military posts in southern Israel. Hamas killed more than 1,200 people in the assault, mostly civilians, and took some 240 people hostage back to Gaza.
Standing next to soldiers at the base, Netanyahu said: “Do you remember when we were told that we would not break into Gaza? We broke through. We were told that we would not reach the outskirts of Gaza City – we arrived. We were told that we won’t enter Shifa – we entered.
“There is no hiding, no shelter, no refuge for the murderers of Hamas,” Netanyahu said. “We will arrive and eliminate Hamas and return our abductees – these are two sacred missions.”
Hundreds gathered Sunday at a Ventura County, California, intersection where a week earlier, a 69-year-old Jewish man struck his head on concrete and later died after a confrontation with an unnamed pro-Palestinian protester.
Flowers, wreaths, candles and letters surrounded the spot in front of the gas station at Westlake and Thousand Oaks Boulevards, where Paul Kessler sustained his fatal injuries.
One man held a sign that read, “We want justice for Paul,” per footage shared with Fox News Digital. Others bandied Israeli flags and sang “Oseh Shalom” — a Hebrew song praying for peace for the country, its people and the world.
Blood still marked the ground where Kessler’s head struck the sidewalk in widely-shared footage from around 3:30 p.m. on Nov. 5 showing medics attending to a bleeding but alert Kessler at the scene as police questioned onlookers.
Kessler was pronounced dead at nearby Los Robles Hospital about 10 hours after the incident. Per the Ventura County Medical Examiner during a press conference Tuesday, Kessler’s non-lethal injuries were noted on the left side of his face, while internal injuries included skull fractures, swelling and bruising to the brain.
Kessler’s manner of death was determined to be homicide, Medical Examiner Christopher Young said.
Fox News Digital’s Christina Coulter contributed to this update.
BBC News Channel has apologized for an inaccurate report that claimed Israeli forces were targeting “medical teams and Arab speakers” inside of Gaza’s main hospital.
On Tuesday, a BBC News program reported that Israeli forces were carrying out an operation against Hamas forces inside Al Shifa hospital.
The news anchor then claimed that the soldiers were targeting individuals, including hospital workers and Arab speakers, inside the hospital, which would constitute a war crime. The BBC News anchor cited Reuters as the source of their information. However, reporting from Reuters on Israeli troops entering the hospital contradicted the BBC.
“Israel said its troops uncovered unspecified weapons and “terror infrastructure” inside the hospital compound after killing fighters in a clash outside. Once inside, they said there had been no fighting and no friction with civilians, patients or staff,” an article from Reuters noted.
“Witnesses who spoke to Reuters from inside the compound on Wednesday described a situation that appeared calm, if tense, as the Israeli troops moved between buildings carrying out searches,” the outlet added.
One of the most influential news organizations in the world, BBC issued an on-air apology for its claims about the Al Shifa hospital the following morning.
“BBC News, as it covered initial reports that Israeli forces had entered Gaza’s main hospital, we said that medical teams and Arab speakers were being targeted,” the anchor said. “This is incorrect and misquoted a Reuters report which said IDF forces included medical teams and Arabic speakers for this operation. We apologize for this error, which fell below our usual editorial standards.”
The anchor also noted that the correct version of events was broadcast “minutes later.”
Fox News Digital’s Nikolas Lanum contributed to this update.
Pro-Palestinian protesters marched in Staten Island on Tuesday, chanting anti-Israel slogans and burning the Israeli flag.
“From the river, to the sea,” hundreds of people shouted, a phrase that appears in the founding charter of the terrorist group in Hamas and calls for the destruction of Israel.
Protesters were also filmed burning an Israeli flag.
Police arrested six people, including at least one minor, in connection to the pro-Palestinian rally in St. George, SILive.com reported.
The rally was organized by the pro-Palestinian group WIthin Our Lifetime and held outside of Borough Hall. NYPD officers forced the demonstration to relocate onto Richmond Terrace, disrupting traffic, the report said.
Protesters also criticized President Bident and the U.S. government’s support for Israel in th ewar against Hamas. People chanted, “Israel bombs, USA pays. How many kids have you killed today?”
“What other words can be used for this besides ethnic cleansing? Besides genocide? Words that these mainstream media outlets still refuse to use,” Nerdeen Kiswani, founder and chair of Within Our Lifetime, told SILive.com.
“There are Palestinian men, women and children, every day, on our screens begging people to look at the world and tell the world to stop this genocide. But they are not stopping it. In fact, countries like the one we live in, like the United States, are funding it,” she said.
Israeli forces continue operations inside al-Shifa Hospital, Hamas official says
Israeli soldier stands near boxes labelled “Medical Supplies” at the Al Shifa hospital complex, amid their ground operation against Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, during what they say is a delivery of humanitarian aid to the facility in Gaza City, November 15, 2023 in this handout image. Israeli Defence Forces/Handout via REUTERS
A senior official with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry told the Associated Press that Israeli forces are still operating inside al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical facility in the territory.
Speaking by phone from the hospital, Munir al-Boursh said Israeli soldiers ransacked the basement and other buildings, including those housing the emergency and surgery departments.
“They are still here … patients, women and children are terrified,” he said. He said doctors vowed to stay with their patients “till the end.”
The White House confirmed Tuesday that Hamas terrorists are using al-Shifa Hospital and the tunnels beneath it as a base for military operations and to hold hostages. The Israel Defense Forces said earlier Wednesday it is carrying out a “precise and targeted operation against Hamas” in a specific part of the hospital away from patients and medical staff. The IDF also said it delivered medical supplies.
Al-Boursh told the AP he spoke with an Israeli official by phone on Wednesday and asked him to join the forces searching the facility, but he refused.
The IDF says it recovered weapons from the basement of the hospital.
The mood in the nation’s capital ranged from somber to jubilant Tuesday, as tens of thousands of people rallied in support of Israel and the Jewish community.
“I feel like it’s my duty right now to be here, to be advocating for my people,” Tal told Fox News.
Demonstrators draped themselves in American and Israeli flags as they congregated at the National Mall for the “March for Israel.”
“We love America, and we’re so happy that America is standing behind Israel,” Elliot from New Jersey said. “It’s really great to all be here together, show support to each other and say thank you to the country.”
A coalition of Jewish organizations planned the march to show support for Israel in the wake of the Oct. 7 terror attacks in which Hamas killed around 1,200 people, primarily Israeli civilians. More than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched its counterattack, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.
“I came to stand with Israel during this really crazy time … and stand up for the hostages to come home, and for peace, once and for all,” Cillia from Michigan said.
Fox News Digital’s Hannah Ray Lambert and Jon Michael Raasch contributed to this update.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib is part of a secret social media group in which its members have glamorized Hamas in its war battle with Israel after the terror group attacked and killed hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians last month, Fox News Digital has found.
The Michigan Democrat is a member of the Palestinian American Congress group on Facebook. The group is hidden from non-members and does not appear on the platform’s search engine, though Fox News Digital was able to gain access to it.
The group’s founder, Maher Abdel-qader, who has extensive ties to Tlaib and has also been linked to other liberal politicians, has come under fire in the past for his antisemitic social media posts, including questioning if the Holocaust ever occurred.
The Palestinian American Congress group, of which Tlaib is a member, has featured pro-Hamas posts in the wake of the deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
On Oct. 12, one group member posted: “We don’t want to throw you in the sea…we want you to ride it back from where you came.” The message was accompanied by a picture of an elderly Israeli woman and a Hamas fighter holding her captive.
Fox News Digital’s Joe Schoffstall and Peter Hasson contributed to this update.
UN official condemns Israeli raid on Gaza hospital, insists Hamas not use it as a ‘shield’
UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, Martin Griffiths speaks during an international humanitary conference for civilians in Gaza, at the Elysee Presidential Palace, in Paris, on November 9, 2023. (Photo by LUDOVIC MARIN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
The United Nations’ top emergency relief official on Wednesday condemned the Israeli military operation in Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital and said Hamas must not use it as a ‘shield’ for their activities.
“Look, Hamas must not, should not, use a place like a hospital as a shield for their presence,” said Martin Griffiths in a video statement, adding that “hospitals should not become a place of – a war zone – of danger.”
Earlier on X, Griffiths said he was “appalled” by overnight reports of Israeli military operations inside the hospital.
The U.N. World Health Organization says Shifa patients have needs that are “well beyond basic care.” Images reportedly from the facility showed medics trying to keep newborns warm in blankets because power for incubators had failed.
“The babies have no incubators,” Griffiths said. “Some are dead already. We can’t move them out. It’s too dangerous.”
“I understand the Israelis’ concern for trying to find the leadership of Hamas, that’s not our problem,” he added. “Our problem is protecting the people of Gaza from what’s being visited upon them.”
Maryland middle school DEI teacher under investigation for Israel-Hamas comments
A Diversity, Equity and Inclusion teacher at a Maryland middle school is being investigated over social media posts suggesting Hamas terrorists’ attack on Israel was a hoax. (Google Maps)
A Diversity, Equity and Inclusion teacher at a Maryland middle school is being investigated over a social media posts suggesting the Hamas terrorists’ attack on Israel was a hoax and other posts about the war in the Middle East.
Sabrina Khan-Williams, a World Studies teacher and a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team leader at Tilden Middle School, made a series of posts doubting reports about Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack against Israel, according to Facebook screenshots obtained by The Daily Wire.
“Debunked!! No music festival attack. Babies were not burned. Women were not violated,” she wrote in one post.
More than 11,000 people have been killed in Gaza and Israel since Hamas launched its largest attack against Israel in decades on Oct. 7, prompting a military response from Israeli forces. Thousands more have been wounded, and many others have been taken hostage by Hamas and raped, tortured and murdered.
Kahn-Williams suggested in another post that Hamas did not start the war against Israel.
“Hamas did not start this. They were just the perfect vehicle for Zionists to continue its apartheid,” she wrote.
Fox News Digital’s Landon Mion contributed to this update.
Turkish President Erdogan labels Israel ‘terrorist state’
ANKARA, TURKIYE – NOVEMBER 15: Turkish President and the Leader of the Justice and Development (AK) Party Recep Tayyip Erdogan makes statements as he attends his party’s group meeting at the Turkish Grand National Assembly in Ankara, Turkiye on November 15, 2023. (Photo by Emin Sansar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made incendiary anti-Israel comments on Wednesday, calling Israel a “terrorist state” intent on destroying Gaza and its residents.
In a speech to members of his own political party, Erdogan also vowed to bring Israeli political and military leaders before an international tribunal to be tried for war crimes.
“Israel is implementing a strategy of total destruction of a city and its people,” Erdogan said. “I say openly that Israel is a terrorist state.”
In the same speech, Erdogan referred to Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters” trying to protect their land and people.
Turkey recently normalized relations with Israel but its war with Hamas in Gaza has again strained their ties. Israel recalled its diplomats from Turkey last month after Erdogan accused Israel of committing war crimes. Turkey later also recalled its ambassador from Israel.
Turkey has found itself at odds with its NATO allies, most of whom have backed Israel’s right to defend itself following the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7, while Turkey has echoed the stances of other Middle Eastern nations in questioning Israel and defending the Palestinians.
Fox News Digital’s Peter Aitken and the Associated Press contributed to this update.
Reports of a potential hostage deal between Israel and Hamas is evidence that the terror group is reeling from the IDF’s barrage of Gaza, a top adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told FOX News Tuesday.
Hamas and Israel are reportedly close to to a deal that would exchange as many as 70 women and children held hostage by Hamas in return for the release of female Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.
Mark Regev, who recently served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom and is now a senior adviser to Netanyahu, said one aspect of the deal should underline how evil Hamas truly is.
He cited a figure of 240 people estimated to be held by Hamas, including 32 children and infants.
“I always ask us to remember what sort of people kidnap babies and infants, what sort of people can kidnap a 9-month-old baby. They really are sick. They really are depraved. What more could one say about Hamas?” Regev said.
“But if they are moving towards releasing hostages, it’s not because they have suddenly become humanitarians. It’s because they’ve been on the receiving end of the IDF’s (Israeli Defense Force) military might. And they are feeling the pain, feeling the pressure.”
Regev said he is hopeful for a deal soon, while reiterating the IDF’s pressure campaign must continue in order to expedite the possibility of future prisoner releases by a potentially teetering Hamas.
Fox News Digital’s Charles Creitz contributed to this update.
IDF emphasizes hospital operation targets Hamas, not civilians
An aerial view shows the compound of Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on November 7, 2023, amid the ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas. (BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty Images)
The Israel Defense Forces emphasized Wednesday that its forces conducting a “precise and targeted operation” at the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza are targeting Hamas.
The White House confirmed Tuesday that Hamas terrorists are using Gaza’s largest hospital, al-Shifa, and the tunnels beneath it as a base for military operations and to hold hostages. Both Hamas and hospital officials have denied the allegation.
“Israel is at war with Hamas, not with the civilians in Gaza,” said Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces. “The IDF has publicly warned time and again that Hamas’s continued military use of Shifa Hospital jeopardizes its protected status under international law.”
Hagari said Israeli forces in Gaza included medics and Arabic speakers to try and provide assistance in the “complex and sensitive environment.”
Israel continues to attack Hamas military targets in Gaza with a relentless campaign of airstrikes. Thousands of Palestinians have moved southward toward the Rafah border crossing into Egypt as the Israeli military has urged civilians to evacuate the warzone in the north.
Fox News Digital’s Brandon Gillespie and the Associated Press contributed to this update.
An Israeli practises using a newly acquired gun, at a weapons distribution point for people allowed to carry arms, at the Ayyelet HaShahar Kibbutz, in northern Israel, near the Lebanese border on October 12, 2023. (Photo by JALAA MAREY/AFP via Getty Images)
Israeli citizens are rushing to arm themselves in the wake of the deadly Oct. 7 terror attacks.
A news release from the Ministry of National Security said more than 236,000 new requests for gun permits have been filed since the attack – a figure equal to the number filed over 20 years, the ministry said.
Israelis feel uneased after Hamas terrorists caught the country off-guard, infiltrating through the south and slaughtering more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, at a music festival and in their homes.
Armed civilian security squads entered the breach in the army’s absence to fight off some of the attackers. Shortly after, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir said he would expand and arm such squads with 10,000 assault rifles that would be distributed particularly in border towns, mixed Jewish-Arab cities and West Bank settlements.
Some 1,700 permits are being issued daily after the Ministry of National Security eased restrictions, the report said. By comparison, an average of 94 were issued daily in November 2022, and an average of 42 a year earlier.
Israeli soldiers killed in war against Hamas rises to 49: IDF
Israel Defense Forces said captains Omri Yosef David(left) and Yedidya Asher Lev(right) were killed in Gaza on Tuesday. (Israel Defense Forces)
The Israel Defense Forces announced two more soldiers were killed on Tuesday as Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists continues.
The fallen have been identified as Omri Yosef David, 27, and Yedidya Asher Lev, 26, and their families have been notified. Both David and Lev were captains, according to the IDF’s memorial page.
As of Wednesday morning, there here have been 49 IDF soldiers killed since ground operations began in Gaza.
On Wednesday, the IDF said its forces have entered Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital after surrounding the facility earlier.
The army said its forces were carrying out “a precise and targeted operation against Hamas in a specified area” at al-Shifa Hospital. It gave no further details but said it was taking steps to avoid harm to civilians.
In a statement, the Israeli military said it had warned “the relevant authorities in Gaza once again that all military activities within the hospital must cease within 12 hours. Unfortunately, it did not.”
Fox News’ Yonat Friling and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Israel ‘will not stop’ operations in Gaza until Hamas destroyed, hostages released: defense minister
ISRAEL – NOVEMBER 11: Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant visits the 91st Division’s base in northern Israel, November 11, 2023. (Photo by Israeli Defense Minister/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant said the Jewish state “will not stop its operations in Gaza” until Hamas is obliterated and hostages are back home with their families during a Wednesday meeting with U.S. Special Coordinator Brett McGurk.
The meeting between Gallant and McGurk, U.S. Special Coordinator for the Middle East, took place at the Ministry of Defense’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. The two discussed operational developments in Israel’s war against Hamas and the complexity of fighting the terrorist group given that it operates in civilian buildings.
Intelligence and additional details related to the hostages being held by Hamas and efforts to bring them home were also discussed.
The two leaders spoke on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and how to overcome the challenges in facilitating aid to the civilian population, as well as the international community’s role in getting more urgent supplies delivered to the area.
Gallant also expressed his appreciation for America’s ongoing support and deep partnership, and the two agreed to remain in close contact.
Medical supplies provided by Israeli forces arrive at Gaza hospital
Israel Defense Forces said medical supplies provided by the force have arrived at the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. (Israel Defense Forces/X)
The Israel Defense Forces said medical supplies, including baby food and incubators, have arrived at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza amid the targeted attack on Hamas terrorists inside the building.
“We can now confirm that incubators, baby food and medical supplies, provided by the IDF, have successfully reached the hospital,” the IDF wrote on X.
The supplies arrived Wednesday morning after Israeli soldiers began a “precise and targeted operation” against Hamas, which operates out of the hospital. The operation remains active, according to the IDF.
Arabic-speaking soldiers and the IDF’s medical team are reportedly at the hospital to ensure the supplies make it to those in need.
The Israeli army alleges the main command center for Hamas is hidden inside the hospital, in underground tunnels beneath the structures that house hundreds of patients and medical staff. Both Hamas and al-Shifa Hospital staff deny the allegations.
More than 11,200 Palestinians — two-thirds of them women and minors — have been killed since the war began, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, which does not differentiate between civilian and militant deaths. About 2,700 people have been reported missing.
Israel Defense Forces said troops killed Hamas terrorists and encountered explosive devices and terror cells during its “precise and targeted operation” at the al-Shifa Hospital.
The area of the hospital where the operation is taking place was decided upon by intelligence indicating Hamas activity was coming from the area, the IDF said.
Before entering, troops discovered explosive devices and terrorist cells, which prompted an “engagement” that left Hamas terrorists dead, according to the IDF.
A Hamas training camp containing terror tunnel shafts, classrooms, intelligence material and dozens of weapons, including rockets and loaded RPGs, was located in the area on Tuesday by Israeli forces.
In addition, the IDF said it struck two terrorists with a UAV after it identified a terrorist cell exiting a building with an anti-tank missile launching post in the northern Gaza Strip. The terrorists were carrying suspected IEDs, which were planted in the area.
The Muslim Brotherhood has been working to destroy the United States from within for DECADES, this is their secret written plan exposed. pic.twitter.com/2bodbC4vcg
An American mom whose child is being held hostage in Gaza by Palestinian terrorists delivered the most caustic speech. It hurts but you need to put yourself through it.pic.twitter.com/NqWWSiHKAB
I’ve never in my life been in such a huge crowd. The #MarchForIsrael rally today was incredible. Singing. Dancing. Prayers. Inspiration. There was no violence. No vandalism. No destruction. Just a real, raw, peaceful, gathering. #BringThemHome ❤️🙏🏻 pic.twitter.com/CiL36UDpZ2
🔥🚨HIDDEN HISTORY: On December 1, 1963 Malcolm X gave a speech called “God’s Judgement of White America.” where he identified the ‘White Liberal’ as the most ‘dangerous’ and ‘deceitful’ thing in the Western Hemisphere.
On Wednesday, Speaker McCarthy and a bipartisan group of lawmakers met with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen at the Ronald Reagan Library in California. The meeting made McCarthy the most senior U.S. official to meet with the leader of Taiwan on U.S. soil in decades, according to Newsweek.
During the historic summit, McCarthy reaffirmed Congress’s commitment to strengthening relations with the island nation and support for Taiwan’s aim to remain democratic in the wake of increasing Chinese aggression.
“I felt our meeting today provided a greater peace and stability for the world. America’s support for the people of Taiwan will remain resolute, unwavering and bipartisan,” McCarthy said. Tsai echoed similar sentiments, saying, “To preserve peace, we must be strong” and “we are stronger when we are together.”
“I am the Speaker of the House. There is no place that China’s going to tell me where to go and who I can speak to — I’m not the general manager of @HoustonRockets.”
— Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (@committeeonccp) April 6, 2023
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — which claims Taiwan is Chinese territory — issued remarks on Thursday threatening to “take resolute measures” in response to Tsai and McCarthy’s alleged promotion of Taiwanese independence. Taiwan News reported the island’s national defense ministry tracked a People’s Liberation Army helicopter and two naval vessels in the waters surrounding Taiwan on Wednesday and Thursday.
Most egregiously, however, is the CCP’s attempt to “inspect” ships traveling through the Taiwan Strait. According to Reuters, “China’s Fujian maritime safety administration launched a three-day special joint patrol and inspection operation in the central and northern parts of the Taiwan Strait” on Wednesday that includes “moves to board ships.” Fujian is a southeastern Chinese province bordering the Taiwan Strait.
“The maritime safety authority in the southeastern Chinese province said … the operation included ‘on-site inspections’ on direct cargo ships and construction vessels on both sides of the Taiwan Strait ‘to ensure the safety of vessel navigation and ensure the safe and orderly operation of key projects on water,’” the report reads. Taiwan indicated it would not cooperate with the inspections.
Biden Helps China by Undercutting America
In the background of McCarthy’s bid to reaffirm U.S. support for Taiwanese sovereignty is the flailing presidency of Joe Biden, whose administration’s seemingly intentional bid to cripple America’s national security and economic stability is giving China leeway to expand its influence across the globe.
On Monday, NBC News reported the infamous Chinese spy balloon the Biden administration let drift across the continental United States earlier this year “was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites.” Among the intelligence transmitted back to the CCP was “mostly from electronic signals, which can be picked up from weapons systems or include communications from base personnel.”
On the economic front, Biden’s monetary policy — which includes spending trillions of taxpayer dollars on useless Democrat pet projects — has resulted in decades-high inflation, causing everyday Americans to struggle to afford basic necessities such as gas and groceries. The administration’s ongoing war against the U.S. fossil fuel industry has only exacerbated the country’s economic pains.
Under Biden, the hegemony of the U.S. dollar is also in jeopardy. Countries such as Brazil and Malaysia have announced within the past week plans to work with China to reduce dependence on the U.S. dollar when conducting trade with Beijing. Most recently, the Chinese yuan surpassed the U.S. dollar as the most traded currency in Russia, signifying growing ties between Beijing and Moscow.
As noted by The Daily Caller, “[i]f foreigners no longer want [U.S. dollars] for trade, central bank reserves, private wealth funds, and the official currency of about a dozen countries, all those dollars have nowhere to go but back to us in a flood like our country has never seen.” Such a scenario would likely lead to hyperinflation and further suffering among the American people.
The U.S. is haunted by self-inflicted domestic problems, so the CCP likely sees an opportunity not just to take control of Taiwan but to recalibrate the politics of the Indo-Pacific in its favor. The longer Biden cripples the U.S., the closer China gets to creating a new world order devoid of U.S. influence.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen declared the relationship between the United States and Taiwan is strong amid “unprecedented” challenges in the Indo-Pacific region. McCarthy, R-Calif., and Tsai met at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California on Wednesday, along with a group of bipartisan lawmakers.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., second from right, welcomes Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen as she arrives at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., Wednesday, April 5, 2023. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)
“Today, I’m honored to meet with Taiwan’s President Tsai as she transits the United States,” McCarthy said, adding that their discussion took place “fittingly” at the library, which highlights Reagan’s belief in “democracy and commitment to the ideals of peace and freedom.”
“Those values have always served as the bedrock of our friendship with the people of Taiwan and they are more important now than ever before,” McCarthy said.
“I believe our bond is stronger now than at any time or point in my lifetime,” he added, noting that Tsai is a “great champion of that bond.”
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., conducts a news conference in the U.S. Capitols Statuary Hall on Thursday, January 12, 2023. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
The speaker of the House said the United States “will honor our obligations and reiterate our commitment to our shared values behind which all Americans are united.”
McCarthy met with Tsai and a bipartisan group of lawmakers. Tsai thanked McCarthy and the Republican and Democratic lawmakers who attended the meeting.
“Their presence and unwavering support reassure the people of Taiwan that we are not isolated and we are not alone,” Tsai said.
Pointing to the regional challenges, Tsai said “it is no secret” that the “peace that we have maintained and the democracy which we have worked hard to build are facing unprecedented challenges.”
Tsai, in the meeting, reiterated Taiwan’s commitment to “defending the peaceful status quo, where the people of Taiwan may continue to thrive in a free and open society.”
“I also highlighted a belief which President Reagan championed, that to preserve peace, we must be strong,” Tsai said. “I would like to add that we are stronger when we are together.”
In this image made from video, Taiwan’s Presidential office secretary general Lin Chia-lung, left, President Tsai Ing-wen, center, and Foreign Minister Joseph Wu wave before Tsai’s departure on an overseas trip at Taoyuan International Airport in Taipei, Taiwan, Wednesday, March 29, 2023. ((AP Photo/Johnson Lai))
Tsai also thanked members of Congress for their proposed initiatives that have “helped to make Taiwan and our partnership stronger.”
“Specifically, initiatives in the realm of enhancing Taiwan’s self-defense capabilities, fostering robust trade and economic ties between us, and supporting Taiwan’s meaningful participation in the international community, and also to seek out our shared interests in peace and prosperity across the Indo-Pacific,” Tsai said.
The meeting Wednesday came after The Chinese Embassy wrote a threatening email to McCarthy and other members of Congress who planned to meet with Tsai Wednesday.
Li Xiang, the embassy’s liaison to Congress, wrote a nearly four-page email warning U.S. lawmakers that China views the meeting as a “blatant provocation.”
“I have to point out that China will not sit idly by in the face of a blatant provocation and will most likely take necessary and resolute actions in response to the unwanted situation. Let’s work together to prevent such a thing from happening,” Li wrote, according to a copy of the email obtained by PunchBowl News.
McCarthy’s meeting with Tsai came months after former House Speaker Pelosi visited Taiwan, which, according to the Chinese Embassy, “triggered a serious crisis in the China-U.S. relationship.”
“Lessons should be learned,” the letter read.
Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), center left, poses for photographs after receiving the Order of Propitious Clouds with Special Grand Cordon, Taiwan’s highest civilian honor, from Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, center right, at the president’s office. (Chien Chih-Hung/Office of The President via Getty Images)
China shut down communications with the United States military after Pelosi visited Taiwan last year. That visit prompted increased aggression by China in the South China Sea and led experts to predict a Chinese invasion of Taiwan by 2024.
China sent a specific warning to McCarthy on Tuesday regarding the meeting, alleging it would break the “One China” policy.
“If Speaker McCarthy ignores the international community’s broad support for the one-China principle, refuses to draw lessons from others’ mistakes, and insists on playing the ’Taiwan card,’ it will undoubtedly further damage China-US relations, and even strengthen the strong determination of the Chinese people to unite and fight for national reunification,” a spokesperson for China’s consulate in Los Angeles wrote.
The “One China” policy, adopted by the U.S. and other countries, stipulates that the government of Beijing is the sole legitimate government of China.
Officials and lawmakers have warned that it’s only a matter of time before China tries to invade Taiwan, with some arguing that the 2024 U.S. presidential election and the Taiwanese election might have influence on the timing of China’s aggression toward Taiwan.
Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.
If Americans are concerned about our enemies getting bolder in their bid to disrupt the U.S.-led world order, they should thank President Joe Biden. Last week, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping traveled to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. During the meeting, the leaders outlined plans to enhance bilateral ties on issues such as trade, energy, and military cooperation. Xi and Putin furthermore agreed to support one another’s “fundamental interests,” specifically on matters concerning “sovereignty, territorial integrity, security and development.”
Most notable in the joint statement released by Beijing and Moscow, however, is the expressed goal of creating a “multipolar world order.” “The Parties confirm a willingness to … oppose all forms [of] hegemony, unilateralism and power politics, against cold war thinking, bloc confrontation and the creation of narrow formats against certain countries,” a joint statement released after the meeting reads.
The move signifies a stark challenge to the U.S., which, since the end of the Cold War, has been the world’s sole superpower. Under this unipolar system, the U.S. has utilized its economic, military, and cultural power to fashion a global community centered around Western values.
The three-day meeting between Xi and Putin comes amid the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Last month, Beijing made headlines after calling for a cease-fire between the two nations. As part of its 12-point peace plan, China has called for all parties involved to abandon “the Cold War mentality” and “stopping unilateral sanctions.” As noted by The Wall Street Journal, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials “routinely” use such language “to criticize the U.S. and other Western powers for their response to Russia’s invasion — including the supply of arms to Ukraine and the use of wide-ranging economic tools to pressure Moscow.”
But it’s not just eastern Europe where the Chinese government is looking to play dealmaker. Two weeks ago, Beijing brokered a peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, two Middle Eastern nations with a historically antagonistic relationship. According to a separate Journal report, Tehran and Riyadh have agreed to “re-establish diplomatic relations” after seven years of estrangement, which includes commitments to “reopen their embassies and missions on each other’s soil within two months.” The deal comes amid a breakdown in U.S.-Saudi relations — for which Biden bears the blame.
Beijing’s growing global influence is also apparent in Latin America. On Sunday, Honduras — a long-time ally of Taiwan — switched its diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. As a prerequisite for establishing ties with its government, China has mandated nations to sever formal ties with Taiwan. Such a requirement is part of the CCP’s strategy to politically isolate Taiwan on the world stage.
Biden Cripples America
Red China’s bid to establish itself as a global power isn’t surprising. Since Xi’s ascension to party leader in 2012, he has sought to further China’s economic and military prowess as a means of expanding its influence throughout the world.
Biden’s presidency has ushered in an era of American weakness Beijing seeks to exploit. His administration threw the U.S.’ longstanding record as a buffer against the CCP’s global ambitions into the garbage. Rather than pursue policies strengthening America’s economic security and military readiness, Biden and his administration have implemented measures achieving the exact opposite.
On the economic front, Biden’s monetary policy — which includes spending trillions of taxpayer dollars on useless Democrat pet projects — resulted in decades-high inflation, causing everyday Americans to struggle to afford basic necessities such as gas and groceries. Rather than curb federal spending or increase domestic energy production, the Biden administration spends its time championing expensive electric vehicles made with Chinese batteries.
The situation isn’t any better on the national security front, either. Up until January, the administration depleted U.S. military ranks by removing servicemembers who didn’t receive the experimental Covid jab. Despite the shot’s inability to stop viral transmission and its significant risks, the Defense Department denied the vast majority of religious and medical exemptions filed by un-jabbed soldiers. Combined with forcing servicemembers to undergo racist DEI training, it’s no surprise the military is facing major recruiting problems.
Biden’s open border policies are also exacerbating national security concerns at the U.S.-Mexico border, where Border Patrol officials are facing unprecedented levels of illegal immigration. From Jan. 2021 to Oct. 2022, an estimated 5.5 million illegal aliens were apprehended by Customs and Border Protection. These figures don’t even include the millions of “gotaways” who evaded capture.
Don’t worry, though. When it comes to foreign policy, Biden’s team of “experts” surely has “confront the growing threat of the CCP” at the top of their to-do list. Right?
If the U.S. had a mentally-sound president who prioritized the success of his country, it’s not crazy to imagine that the CCP would be more hesitant in pursuing its global ambitions. Under Biden’s empty-suit presidency, however, Xi smells opportunity.
With Biden crippling the U.S.’ economic and military readiness from within, China is able to methodically expand its influence throughout the world nearly unchallenged. Whether it’s securing peace agreements between rivaling powers or fostering ties with strategically important countries, the CCP isn’t slowing down in its aim to usher in a world order devoid of American hegemony.
If Biden and co. had any interest in stymying Red China’s growing influence and maintaining U.S. global dominance, they’d reverse course and implement policies that further American success. Doing so would greatly benefit the American people.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Apologies in advance for making you consider something uttered by David French and Jennifer Rubin, but the two work for prominent news publications that unfortunately shape our national dialogue, so bear with me.
“DeSantis actually called Russia’s grotesque, aggressive invasion of a sovereign country a ‘territorial dispute.’ … Astonishing. Dangerous.”—French, New York Times columnist
“[DeSantis] has decided that if you can’t beat the pro-Putin wing of the Republican Party, then join them. He declared that Russia’s brutal and unjustified war of aggression against a sovereign Ukraine is actually ‘a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia…’”—Rubin, Washington Post columnist
The “territorial dispute” quote is from Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ recently released statement about the ongoing war in Ukraine (a place our elected leaders in Washington sometimes refer to as “Our Last Great Hope.”) What he said more fully is that “becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia” is not a “vital interest” to the United States.
That’s a view shared by anyone who thinks yet another foreign war without clear and substantial strategic benefit to America is not something we should busy ourselves with. (It’s not like we have any pressing problems here!) But French, Rubin and the rest of the national media really hate that view. It’s “pro-Putin”! It’s “astonishing” and “dangerous”!
DeSantis should say it one more time for the people in the back. The war is literally a dispute over territory. Russian leadership claims Ukraine as its own and the Kremlin’s settlement offers are based almost solely on territory concessions (with some details related to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).
“I believe that Russians and Ukrainians are one people … one nation, in fact,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in 2019. In some parts of Ukraine, even Ukrainians claim that. “Many In Eastern Ukraine Want To Join Russia,” read a NPR headline in 2017.
The Washington Post last year found at least 15 percent of residents of Ukraine’s Donbas region said they wanted to join Russia. Maybe, just maybe, this has something to do with Russia and Ukraine being literally part of the same nation for more than half a century.
I know that’s not very sexy for the nerds in the media who prefer to think of the war like a Marvel movie where a corny villain can be overpowered by a united and freedom-loving Justice League, but that’s not the case.
Democracy is at stake!
*Cue Max Boot solemnly removing his little hat in reverence.*
It turns out that discussing the conflict doesn’t first require the speakers to confess their love for Ukraine and hatred for Putin while shedding a tear. It’s not the romantic affair that Rubin, French, et al. want it to be.
Dozens of House Democrats joined Republicans on Thursday to pass legislation that would prevent the Biden administration from selling any more oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to China or Chinese-owned companies. The House easily passed the bill in an 331-97 vote. Every Republican voted for it, and 113 Democrats — more than half of the House Democratic Caucus — joined the GOP.
It was the second vote this week that saw large numbers of Democrats help House Republicans pass legislation. Two days earlier, more than two-thirds of House Democrats voted with Republicans to create a committee to address U.S. strategic competition with China.
The bill was brought up by Republicans after the Biden administration’s decision last year to sell nearly 1 million barrels of oil from the SPR to Unipec America, a U.S.-based company owned by China. The Department of Energy announced that sale in April, and Republicans warned on the House floor that it makes no sense to deliver vast energy resources to entities controlled by America’s largest competitor.
“America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve is meant for true energy supply disruptions, like those caused by hurricanes and natural disasters, not to help China,” said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., who will chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the new Congress.
House Republicans, led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, passed legislation on Thursday that would prevent Strategic Petroleum Reserve sales to China. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“Draining our strategic reserves for political purposes and selling portions of it to China is a significant threat to our national security,” she said. “The administration is not just hurting our own ability to respond to emergencies and national security events, they are actively bolstering the oil reserves of our most dangerous geopolitical adversary: the Chinese Communist Party.”
The Biden administration has released more than 200 million barrels from the SPR to ease rising energy prices in the U.S. over the last year, and McMorris Rodgers said those releases were designed to “cover up his failed policies driving our energy and inflation crises.”
She added that some of the oil that was not sold directly to Chinese-owned entities ended up in China’s hands.
“As we know, much of that oil went to China because our refineries and pipelines are full. It now has nowhere to go here,” McMorris Rodgers said. “Millions more barrels went to overseas traders who eventually sent it to China. We also know that China is ramping up its purchases of crude oil from Russia and the U.S. to boost its own reserves.”
President Biden has overseen a historic reduction of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
The bill says the energy secretary shall not sell SPR reserves to any entity under the control of the Chinese government, “except on the condition that such petroleum products will not be exports to the People’s Republic of China.”
While most Democrats voted for the bill, the debate featured only Democrats who tried to dismiss it by saying sales to China are the GOP’s fault because congressional Republicans in 2015 lifted the long-standing ban on crude oil.
“As a result, our exports of crude oil to China surged, averaging a half billion every day during the last year of the Trump administration,” said Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J.
Republicans countered that this policy change happened under the Obama administration, when Republicans were working with that administration to “unleash American energy” and export it around the world. Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., said that plan continued under President Donald Trump, under which “record production” of energy took place.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., will chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the new Congress, and urged lawmakers to pass her bill to stop Strategic Petroleum Reserve sales to China. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
However, Guthrie said this has changed under the Biden administration and during the last two years of the Democratic Congress, which have been pushing to reduce energy production even as they support record withdrawals from the SPR.
“The problem we’re facing today is because of President Biden and the Democrats’ in Congress war on American oil,” Guthrie said. “That’s the problem we’re here to address.”
SPR reserves have remained well above 600 million barrels since the turn of the century, but fell below that level in early 2022 as the Biden administration began selling off reserves. The reserve level fell below 400 million barrels late last year.
Pete Kasperowicz is a politics editor at Fox News Digital.
The U.S. government needs to “pressure” countries to shut down the flow of illegal migrants from outside of Central America who are making their way to the southern border, Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an exclusive interview from his presidential palace.
Guatemala is deploying its special forces to the southern border with Honduras to stop the flow of illegal migrants previously given free passage on their journeys.
“We believe that it is necessary for the United States to exercise political pressure to prevent this from happening. Otherwise, they are becoming facilitators of traffickers, a very, very lucrative business for traffickers,” Giammattei told the DCNF.
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala — Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei criticized the U.S. government, saying it “should be taking action” and “pressuring other countries” to prevent migrants from outside of Central America without IDs or passports from making their way to the southern border.
If the U.S. took such action to pressure other countries, it would help combat the lucrative business of human trafficking. Guatemala faces many issues with countries like Honduras, which allows illegal migrants without identification from across the globe to traverse before they reach Guatemala, one of the last countries they’ll travel through before they enter Mexico and then the U.S., Giammattei explained. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: ‘We Lost Everything’: Afghan Migrants Stuck In Guatemala Have A Message For Biden)
Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua have an agreement, called CA-4, which allows the free movement of people with passports from those countries throughout Central America.
“We believe that it is necessary for the United States to exercise political pressure to prevent this from happening. Otherwise, they [the U.S. government] are becoming facilitators of traffickers, a very, very lucrative business for traffickers,” Giammattei said in an exclusive interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation at his presidential palace.
Illegal immigration to the U.S. has surged since President Joe Biden took office and repealed several Trump administration policies used to discourage and deport migrants. U.S. authorities have seen a record of nearly 2.3 million migrants cross the southern border between October 2021 and September 2022.
During fiscal year 2022, there were over 800,000 encounters of migrants from outside Mexico and Central America.
Daily Caller News Foundation
Guatemala has deployed 200 to 300 special forces to push illegal migrants crossing the country’s southern border to Honduras, Giammattei explained. Migrants who don’t have citizenship in Central America and are present without the required documents are considered to be illegal entrants.
“The problem is that Honduras doesn’t want them back. And they are letting them through without a passport. And that is not right. That is violating international laws, because I cannot give free passage to people wanting to cross my country to travel north,” Giammattei said.
“This time, you have the nationals from Haiti, Angola, Afghanistan, Syria, all of them crossing into Guatemala without proper documentation. We in Guatemala cannot issue visas for all of these people. So Honduras is clearly violating international agreements and diplomatic principles. And if this is not a result, we are going to have to take drastic measures,” he added.
One Venezuelan migrant told the DCNF along the Honduran-Guatemalan border that countries take advantage of them for money.
“All of the countries want to charge us,” she said. “They abuse us, simply because we are immigrants. They take away from us what we don’t have.”
“Sadly, we are made to pay because of that. We have to give everything we have. They steal from us, they rape women and others get killed simply for not paying to go through,” she said.
The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Jennie Taer speaks with a Venezuelan migrant who crossed the Honduran border into Guatemala
Giammattei condemned the process, saying that countries along the way are allowing traffickers to enrich themselves because of their policies.
“Behind all of this that you see, there’s human trafficking at play,” Giammattei explained. “These people have to pay governments, they have to pay traffickers to get that passage to come through. And, so, we allow people to go through just as has been happening. We are allowing human trafficking. And that is a very lucrative business for these traffickers.”
Guatemala passed a law in February to target traffickers with stronger penalties of up to 30 years in prison. Giammattei said in order to prevent risks to U.S. national security, the Biden administration must take similar action.
The U.S. law penalizes smugglers with decades in prison and sometimes up to life behind bars.
“If we let them go through, we ourselves would be violating our own provisions, which is something that we are not going to allow,” Giammattei said. “We have absolute clarity about what our role is here. And, in fact, we are the only country in Central America that is preventing that safe passage for these illegal immigrants. Other countries are just giving them a pass or just facilitating their crossing without requiring any form of identity. And that represents a serious security problem for the United States.”
“If we let those people cross Mexico and the United States are at risk of getting people without those IDs, so it is our obligation not to allow this to happen. And for that reason we see that the problem is the United States is not taking action and should be taking action and should be pressuring other countries to take some measures to prevent this,” he said.
The White House didn’t respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala — Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei said that the Biden administration’s announcement of its decision to end Title 42, which never came to fruition, unleashed a wave of migrants bound for the U.S., in a sit-down interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation in his presidential palace.
Guatemala has recently seen large waves of illegal migrants because of Biden administration policies in the U.S., including its announcement to scrap Title 42, the public health order used to expel certain migrants to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, Giammattei told the DCNF. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on April 1 that Title 42 would end on May 23, but the move was blocked in a lawsuit led by Republican states. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Guatemalan President Says Biden Admin Refused To Help Him Deport Illegal Migrants Bound For The US Border)
“We have recently seen a very serious increase in the number of migrants seeking to cross our border,” Giammattei said. “When Title 42 was eliminated, we see an even greater increase in the crossings through Guatemala, illegal crossings through Guatemala to reach the United States illegally as well.”
WATCH:
The Biden administration also instituted a new rule to expel illegal migrants from Venezuela, while granting legal entry to 24,000 other Venezuelans that meet certain qualifications. Giammattei said that the program is also leading to problems for his country as Venezuelans continue to pass through with a new uncertain fate.
“And now that the Venezuelans we understand that have the possibility of obtaining a visa, that means another problem for Guatemala. We have no relationships with Venezuela, we do not have diplomatic exchanges, we don’t have an embassy here or there,” Giammattei said.
“Therefore, we cannot issue passports or any kind of identification for Venezuelan nationals here in Guatemala and that means a huge amount of a floating population that is going to become a serious problem for this country. While we remain stopping them here,” he added.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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The Department of Justice announced on Monday that it had charged 13 Chinese nationals, ten of whom are believed to be spies, for efforts to “unlawfully exert influence in the United States.” Their alleged crimes include coercing American residents into traveling to China to face punishments, stealing secrets pertinent to the criminal investigation of Huawei, and recruiting more spies for China.
Attorney General Merrick Garland indicated that, in three separate cases, communist agents operating in the U.S. sought to execute the will of the genocidal Chinese communist regime — to “interfere with the rights and freedoms of individuals in the United States and to undermine our judicial system that protects those rights.”
U.S. prosecutors charged alleged Chinese spies with trying to obtain secret documents in what Attorney General Merrick Garland said was one of three different schemes by Beijing meddling in U.S. affairs or targeting U.S. residents https://t.co/JooOcfUsTlpic.twitter.com/J7qmIAsZOm
The U.S. attorney’s offices for the Eastern District of New York and the District of New Jersey are overseeing three cases involving the 13 alleged communist agents.
In the first case, seven Chinese nationals, two of whom were arrested in New York on Oct. 20, were indicted for attempting to force an American resident back to China. They are accused of surveilling, harassing, and coercing the victim.
In the second case, two communist Chinese spies were charged with attempting to obstruct a criminal prosecution in the Eastern District of New York. The spies have not yet been apprehended.
In the third case, three Chinese Ministry of State Security intelligence officers were charged in connection with a “long-running intelligence campaign” with the aim of flipping U.S. residents and turning them into communist agents.
The Chinese communist party has worked hard in recent years to track down and coerce Chinese dissidents living abroad into returning to China for punishment. While the CCP claims that those targeted for illegal extradition are fraudsters, there is substantial evidence that the regime is in fact hunting down Chinese people it perceives to be its foes, including members of religious groups (e.g., Chinese house Christians and underground Catholics), ethnic minorities such as the Uyghurs, and political dissidents at odds with the communist party.
The initiative, which began in 2014, is called Operation Fox Hunt. Unfortunately for the communist agents operating in the United States, they neglected to realize they were among wolves.
The Eastern District Court of New York unsealed an eight-count indictment on Oct. 20 charging seven Chinese nationals for their involvement in a scheme to force at least one individual living in the U.S. back to China. According to the DOJ, the lead defendant is 55-year-old Quanzhong An, a business man who worked in Roslyn, New York. Quanzhong also is the majority shareholder of a hotel in Flushing, New York. Quanzhong’s criminal operation was allegedly directed and monitored by various officials with the Chinese regime’s Provincial Commission for Discipline Inspection. The DOJ suggested that Quanzhong attempted with several others to coerce an American resident identified only as John Doe-1 as well as members of Doe-1’s family to return to China. As part of the scheme, the Chinese agents brought a member of the victim’s family from China to the United States, threatening harm in the event of noncompliance.
Quanzhong’s co-conspirators told Doe-1’s family, “Coming back and turning yourself in is the only way out” and that “avoidance and wishful thinking will only result in severe legal punishments.” Quanzhong was arrested along with Guangyang An on Thursday. They were charged with conspiracy to act as foreign agents and acting as agents of a foreign government.
U.S Attorney Breon Peace for the Eastern District of New York indicated that the U.S. “will firmly counter such outrageous violations of national sovereignty and prosecute individuals who act as illegal agents of foreign states.”
The second case referenced in the DOJ’s announcement concerns Chinese agents Dong He and Zheng Wang, both of whom were charged after they allegedly set about stealing files and other information from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York. The information they allegedly tried to steal pertained to the ongoing federal criminal investigation into Huawei, a Chinese company that was indicted in 2019. Dong and Zheng, working on behalf of the CCP, tried bribing a U.S. government employee with $41,000 in Bitcoin. While the suspects believed the individual was a Chinese agent, they soon discovered he was working for the FBI.
Neither of the two communist agents have been arrested t -date. If brought to justice and convicted, Dong faces 40 years imprisonment and Wang 20 years.
In the third case, Chinese intelligence officers Wang Lin, Bi Hongwei, Dong Ting, and Wang Qiang attempted to recruit communist agents on behalf of the CCP. Among those they targeted were professors at universities and a state homeland security official. They used the so-called Institute of International Studies (Ocean University of China) as cover for their clandestine activities.
Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco stated, “The actions announced today take place against a backdrop of malign activity from the government of the People’s Republic of China [PRC] that includes espionage, attempts to disrupt our justice system, harassment of individuals, and ongoing efforts to steal sensitive U.S. technology.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray emphasized the CCP’s hand in the criminality, stating, “These indictments of PRC intelligence officers and government officials – for trying to obstruct a U.S. trial of a Chinese company, masquerading as university professors to steal sensitive information, and trying to strong-arm a victim into returning to China – again expose the PRC’s outrageous behavior within our own borders.”
In addition to the 13 Chinese agents charged in recent days, others have been charged in recent months and years.
On September 26, a Chinese national, 31-year-old Ji Chaoqun, was found guilty of conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government. The former U.S. Army reservist had informed on individuals targeted for recruitment to the Jiangsu Province Ministry of State Security.
On July 7, five men including one current and one former Department of Homeland Security agent, Craig Miller and Derrick Taylor, were indicted for crimes related to a communist Chinese transnational repression scheme to silence critics of the regime.
In October 2020, eight illegal Chinese agents were charged for surveilling, locating, and intimidating targets of the CCP. They intended to coerce their targets back to China, where “they would face certain imprisonment or worse following illegitimate trials.”
In September 2020, NYPD officer and U.S. Army reservist Baimadajie Angwang (of Tibetan descent) was allegedly conscripted by Chinese officials to spy on the Tibetan community in New York City on behalf of the communist regime.
FBI Director Wray said that the FBI “will continue to throw the full weight of our counterintelligence and law enforcement authorities into stopping the Chinese government’s crimes against our businesses, universities, and Chinese-American communities.”
One Year Later — US Team of Veterans Rescued 17,000 US Legal Permanent US Residents from Afghanistan After Joe Biden Pulled Out of Country
The Biden administration abandoned thousands of Americans and Green Card holders in Afghanistan one year ago following their surrender to the Taliban.
Joe Biden and the Woke Generals abandoned THOUSANDS of Americans in Afghanistan and as many as 14,000 during their quick escape from the terrorist-controlled country.
And then they left the Taliban with $80 billion in US military equipment.
Figures released by the State Department in November revealed as many as 14,000 Americans were left to fend for themselves when Biden and the woke generals quickly fled the country due to their artificial timeline.
Nearly 100,000 Afghans were able to flee the country in August – most of them were unvetted.
There is no way that Joe Biden should remain as president after this horrible act.
The Biden administration has continued to lie about this number to the American public.
The State Department believes as many as 14,000 U.S. legal permanent residents remain in Afghanistan, Foreign Policy has learned, as the agency faces increasing scrutiny from Congress about the status of U.S. citizens and green card holders that are still stranded in the Taliban-controlled country…
…The finding, disclosed by a congressional aide familiar with the matter, has been transmitted by the State Department to aides on Capitol Hill in private, but officials demurred on revealing the figure when questioned by Republican lawmakers on Wednesday, insisting the agency doesn’t track the figure.
“Isn’t the operating assumption about 14,000?” Republican Rep. Chris Smith asked Brian McKeon, deputy secretary of state for management and resources, at a hearing on Wednesday, referring to the figure briefed in private.
“We don’t track [legal permanent residents],” McKeon responded. “It’s a good question why we don’t,” he added, suggesting the lack of clarity might be because the State Department does not require Americans and legal permanent residents traveling abroad to report their whereabouts.
Now this… US veteran Chad Robichaux went on Newsmax today to discuss his organization Save Our Allies. According to Chad, his organization has rescued 17,000 US legal permanent residents from Afghanistan following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. Chad tells the story of how he rescued his former interpreter who worked with him during his tour in Afghanistan.
Chad Robichaux: These guys put their lives on the line for us. Not only that but how does America ever gain confidence with a foreign force in the future when we continue to leave our allies stranded and behind and don’t keep our promises to them.
Maybe that was Joe Biden’s goal? To destroy America’s reputation in the world?
Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
Quemoy and Matsu, officially known as the Kinmen and Lienchiang Counties respectively, are groups of islands located directly off the coast of mainland Communist China but are under the administration of the Republic of China, Taiwan.
Quemoy and Matsu are not fortified, making their capture by the People’s Liberation Army an easy, but highly symbolic victory.
In the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, also called the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis, the People’s Republic of China shelled the islands of Quemoy and Matsu Islands in part to probe the extent of the United States’ defense of Taiwan’s territory. During the 1960 Presidential campaign between Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard M. Nixon, the defense of Taiwan, as represented by Quemoy and Matsu, became a major issue during three of their debates.
According to recent reports, footage uploaded by civilians in China shows large military movements of troops and equipment as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is expected to arrive in Taiwan.
The large military movements have occurred on major highways and railways throughout the Chinese province of Fujian, directly adjacent to Quemoy and Matsu.
In the last 24 hours, commercial flights have been abruptly canceled from airports in several cities in Fujian province. These airports include Xiamen, Fuzhou and Quanzhou. Xiamen Airlines put out a statement saying that the flight cancelations were due to “regional traffic control” and did not elaborate further.
This could be considered an invasion warning, the military occupation of the Quemoy and Matsu Islands as the first step by Communist China to subjugate Taiwan and eliminate U.S. influence in the Western Pacific.
Joe Hoft is the twin brother of TGP’s founder, Jim Hoft, and a contributing editor at TGP. Joe’s reporting is often months ahead of the Mainstream media as was observed in his reporting on the Mueller sham investigation, the origins of the China coronavirus, and 2020 Election fraud. Joe was a corporate executive in Hong Kong for a decade and has years of experience in finance, IT, operations and auditing around the world. The knowledge gained in his career provide him with a unique perspective of current events in the US and globally. Joe’s weekday radio show at Realtalk933.com has received rave reviews. He has ten degrees or designations and is the author of four books. His new book: ‘The Steal – Volume One: Setting the Stage’ is out now. It addresses the stolen 2020 Election and those activities that led up to November 3, 2020 – please take a look and buy a copy.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The first lady of Ukraine was in Washington last week to be feted by the Biden administration, Congress, and the corporate press. Olena Zelenska, the attractive and patriotically dressed wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was given the Jackie Kennedy/Michelle Obama treatment by fashion columnists while also helping to reinforce the message that Ukraine’s effort to defend itself against Russian aggression is a battle for democracy and the survival of the West. This is an easy story to tell a receptive American audience. Since the war began in February, American sympathy combined with the stiffer-than-expected struggle put up by Ukrainian forces and Zelensky’s deft public relations campaign has reinforced the message that the Kyiv government is a democracy whose defense is essential to Western security.
Yet the question to be posed about this is not whether Russia and Putin are bad but whether Ukraine is the paragon of democracy Biden says it is.
Congress recently passed a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine in May with bipartisan support. Grassroots Republicans and even portions of the Democratic base have been critical of the way Ukraine’s security has come to dictate national priorities. That $40 billion is likely to be only the first installment of a steady flow of aid to pay for the $10 billion per month that the war is costing Kyiv.
That’s what made the appearance of a story about Ukraine in The New York Times this past week, which showed a different side of Zelensky’s government, so significant. The story, titled “Zelenskyy Fires Two Top Law Enforcement Officials,” buried the lead. The Times emphasized the fact that this was the first government shakeup in Kyiv since the war started as well as the fact that one of the two people fired was a boyhood friend of Zelensky. But while that is true, the substance of the story was that the sympathy and support for the Russians among a not insignificant portion of the Ukrainian population and members of the security services has damaged the war effort.
An earlier story in the Times discussed how paranoia about potential Russian spies had spread throughout Ukrainian society. The latest dispatch made clear just how much of an issue this had become. It’s one thing to report about 200,000 spy allegations being submitted to Ukrainian authorities every month. Zelensky’s sacking of security measures made clear how “treason” cases have become something of an obsession for the Ukrainian government.
Even more alarming is the fact that several hundred of these treason investigations involved security personnel. Many Ukrainian officials, including those who were employed by the prosecutor’s office, remained behind in Russian-occupied territory and are now working for Moscow.
Still, that partly explains the large number of Ukrainian personnel helping the Russians. But the way this vast security state has been empowered by the war to turn its malevolent gaze on Ukrainian citizens — whether guilty of sympathy for Moscow or not — is chilling.
Previously, Ukraine was widely acknowledged to be as corrupt as the rest of the former Soviet Union, with a fledgling democratic system that was far from entirely free. Even after Zelensky became president, newspapers that were critical of his government were shut down. Since the war started, journalists have struggled to retain their ability to report freely and fairly.
That the majority of Ukrainians want their country to remain independent is obvious. So is their willingness to fight to prevent their nation from falling under Putin’s thumb. But the ability of the Russians to get so many Ukrainians to sympathize with or aid their assault on Ukraine illustrates that what is going on is, in part, a civil war as well as a foreign invasion.
Yet equally true is the fact that the Ukrainian state that is being defended so bravely is still deeply flawed and possessed of attributes antithetical to democracy. Though some of its problems would be present in any country at war and under direct attack, the more we learn about Ukraine, the less it resembles the Jeffersonian democracy that Biden tries to conjure up in his speeches on the subject.
While sympathy for Ukraine and hostility to Russia is understandable, these are factors that ought to be taken into consideration if the United States is to undertake the kind of financial commitment in this war that is starting to remind us of the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or, at least, it should if Americans are to be permitted to have a debate about making such a dubious commitment.
Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for the New York Post. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.
Buyers from the People’s Republic of China purchased $6.1 billion in real estate last year, the most of any foreign buyer. Many of these purchases over the past few years have been of farmland or ranchland near U.S. military bases.
Revelations from a groundbreaking exclusive CNN story published on July 23 about telecommunications equipment from China’s Huawei installed in rural America suggest that Chinese land purchases could pose a severe national security threat as well.
CNN chronicles the Chinese government’s more than decade-long effort to establish a massive electronic intelligence and jamming capability in the U.S. adjacent to military installations and in Washington, D.C. Such a system could deliver a crippling electronic Pearl Harbor against American nuclear weapons systems and strategic communications vital to deterring and defeating a military surprise attack. The report details how China’s state-supported telecommunications giants, Huawei and ZTE, sold cell tower equipment and routers, often at a loss, to small, rural telecommunications providers in the heartland. Much of the made-in-China equipment was installed adjacent to the land-based leg of America’s nuclear triad — the 400 Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) — in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming.
Chinese telecommunications equipment presents four threats:
real-time communications intelligence,
real-time imagery intelligence,
offensive signals jamming,
and internet attacks.
In the age of software reprogrammable digital electronics, cell tower transmitters and receivers can be remotely reconfigured to listen to nearby military transmissions. Cell tower transmitters can be ordered to broadcast on certain frequencies used by the military, a tactic known as jamming. Similarly, cell towers’ connectivity to the internet could be used to overwhelm or degrade internet service in the early hours of a conflict. Many of the cell towers installed cameras in recent years to provide real-time traffic and weather conditions. Many of these cameras also monitor traffic around sensitive U.S. military installations.
The FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into this threat was so sensitive that senior policymakers in the White House and Congress weren’t told until 2019. Soon after, the Federal Communications Commission issued a rule banning small telecoms from using certain kinds of Chinese manufactured equipment. In 2020, Congress appropriated $1.9 billion to rip out and replace about 24,000 pieces of Huawei and ZTE equipment in rural America. But none of it has yet been removed, and carriers insist that the federal government is $3 billion short of making them whole. Chinese telecommunications equipment remains a ticking timebomb, with resistance to its removal ranging from economic justifications to cries of xenophobia.
How did we get here? The Chinese Communist Party practices strategic mercantilism, fostering key technologies with dual-use civilian and military applications while driving competing industries in other nations out of business.
In the 1970s, the world’s two largest manufacturers of telecommunications gear were headquartered in the U.S.: Western Electric and ITT. Less than two dozen years ago, the two largest were U.S.-based Lucent and Canada’s Nortel. America saw its manufacturing dominance slip from producing one-third of the world’s telecom equipment in 1997 to barely more than one-tenth today. The People’s Republic of China played a key role in that decline. In 1979, China declared its telecommunications industry as strategic and stated that it required “absolute control.” In 1982, China imported 100 percent of its telecommunications equipment. By 2000, it was self-sufficient, importing no foreign equipment.
China’s path to dominance was simple: It leveraged Western demand for quarterly profits by telling foreign suppliers that they had to manufacture the products they sold to China in joint ventures with Chinese firms. China then built its supply chain to provide the inputs for these joint ventures as well as to steal the intellectual property with the goal of eventually being able to make high-end equipment. The result is that today, U.S. telecommunications service providers rely almost entirely on Chinese or European suppliers—with China routinely offering cheaper prices.
The Importance of Real Estate
Voluntarily purchasing problematic Chinese equipment is one thing, but what happens when China controls real estate near military bases or important government facilities?
An odd 2017 deal illustrates the importance of strategic real estate. That year, China offered to pay the entire $100 million cost to build the National China Garden on 12 acres at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. Concerns voiced by American counterintelligence officials resulted in the project being rejected just before construction was due to begin. Among their misgivings: The proposed pagoda on one of D.C.’s highest points would be built from materials shipped to the U.S. in diplomatic pouches, meaning no import inspections.
This Chinese project attracted attention because it was on federal land in the nation’s capital. On the other hand, purchases of land in private transactions frequently escape attention until after the fact.
But the $2.6 million land purchase is a good thing, some might argue. The Chinese firm plans to invest another $700 million in the area and generate 200 jobs—besides, America has a trade deficit with China, and those dollars must go somewhere, so why not see them reinvested in the U.S.? Further, it’s not like the Chinese can pack up American land and take it back to China with them. And, while some express concern about China owning agricultural land (Chinese interests now own 192,000 agricultural acres worth almost $2 billion), even if China were to decide to divert all production to China or cease agricultural operations, production could easily be restarted.
The CCP Problem
But what most Americans don’t know is that every Chinese company with 50 or more employees must have a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official embedded in it. This CCP political officer is a looming presence in any firm hailing from a nation with no rule of law other than what CCP officials say it is. Thus, while the Fufeng Group likely has legitimate business purposes for investing in Grand Forks, so too does the CCP have strategic military purposes for using Fufeng’s North Dakota base for its own purposes.
In April, U.S. Air Force Major Jeremy Fox wrote an unofficial memo highlighting concerns that the Grand Forks perch was well sited to intercept military communications between “unmanned air systems” and “space-based assets.” A USAF spokesman subsequently downplayed Major Fox’s concerns as his “personal assessment of potential vulnerabilities.”
Similar concerns have been expressed about the purchase of a 130,000-acre ranch on the border with Mexico near Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas. The site is home to a wind turbine project that, due to its connection with the Texas grid, could be used to disrupt the state’s electric system. Further, the land—which features a large airstrip, as do many Texas ranches—could be used to coordinate activities with the transnational drug cartels across the border.
In both cases, in North Dakota and in Texas—and on any other large agricultural or industrial facility—equipment might be positioned for purposes other than purely commercial reasons. And, since Chinese nationals and companies must obey the CCP, if they don’t cooperate, they risk losing everything up to and including their freedom and their lives.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told CNN that the FBI opens a new China counterintelligence investigation every 12 hours with about 2,000 active investigations, excluding cyber theft, which is a criminal matter.
Retired U.S. Navy Capt. James “Kimo” Fanell was the chief of intelligence for the Pacific Fleet and notes that large parcels of land or industrial sites could host signals intelligence or electronic warfare equipment such as jammers. He observed, “While our Customs inspectors are hardworking people, they’re overloaded, especially today with the Biden administration’s de facto open border policies. The idea that a strategic adversary could buy land near U.S. military bases does not pass the commonsense test.” He added, “We’ve got to do better as a nation to defend our citizens from these kinds of obvious threats.”
Given the sluggishness of the American response to the grave danger posed by communist China—a response slowed over fears of being accused of racism or by economic arguments made by well-funded lobbyists for Chinese interests or U.S. multinationals—it doesn’t take much to imagine the varied nature of attacks we might see on the homeland during the first few days of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
The time for talk is over; we need action.
Chuck DeVore is Chief National Initiatives Officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a former California legislator, special assistant for foreign affairs in the Reagan-era Pentagon, and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army (retired) Reserve. He’s the author of two books, “The Texas Model: Prosperity in the Lone Star State and Lessons for America,” and “China Attacks,” a novel.
The Joe Biden regime is spending millions in taxpayer dollars to spread atheism overseas. This program that favors atheism over Christianity or other belief systems is unconstitutional.
The United States was built on Judeo-Christian principles. Democrats are moving at warp speed to erase that important piece of our American history.
Insanity! Just the News reports that Biden is giving $500,000 grants to spread atheism overseas. Have the Democrats literally lost their minds and become the anti-religious party?
Several House Republicans are demanding answers from the Biden administration regarding a grant program the Republicans say will “promote atheism worldwide.”
Republican Study Committee (RSC) chairman Jim Banks of Indiana led the letter with 14 of his GOP colleagues to President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken regarding the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor’s (DRL) grant program promoting atheism and “humanism.”
“The Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) was officially titled ‘DRL FY20 IRF Promoting and Defending Religious Freedom Inclusive of Atheist, Humanist, Non-Practicing and Non-Affiliated Individuals,’” Banks and the Republicans wrote.
“It announced a ‘competitive’ process that would award grants of up to $500,000 to organizations committed to the practice and spread of atheism and humanism, namely in South/Central Asia and in the Middle East/North Africa,” they continued.
The Republicans pointed out that atheism and “humanism” are both “official belief systems” protected under the First Amendment’s right to religious freedom and said they would “like to know what other United States government programs supported with appropriated funds are being used either to encourage, inculcate, or to disparage any official belief system – atheist, humanist, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise.”
Here is a copy of the GOP letter today Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
President Joe Biden landed in the Middle East on Wednesday with high hopes for his first visit to the region as commander-in-chief. The agenda included revitalizing a nuclear deal with Iran, pursuing peace in Yemen, and desperately pleading to the Saudis for increased oil production.
While the Biden administration has sought to throw cold water on claims that his first trip to the Arabian Peninsula is an effort to produce more oil, the president himself nearly said as much in The Washington Post. In justifying his upcoming visit with the Saudi crown prince — the same prince the U.S. government says is responsible for the execution of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi — Biden explained that the nation’s “energy resources are vital for mitigating the impact on global supplies of Russia’s war in Ukraine.”
“This trip comes at a vital time for the region, and it will advance important American interests,” Biden wrote. Presidential pleas to ramp up oil output are an open secret, after repeated calls for increased production were rebuffed by the Arab nation.
The trip also represents an about-face from the president who campaigned in 2019 on making the Saudi state out to be “the pariah that they are” over Khashoggi’s killing the year before. Now Biden writes in the same publication for which Khashoggi worked, “From the start, my aim was to reorient — but not rupture — relations with a country that’s been a strategic partner for 80 years.”
The reality is that Biden is desperate to find global oil reserves ready for market consumption after 18 months spent shutting down American production. From his first day in office, Biden has followed through on his signature campaign pledge to “end fossil fuels.”
Within six months of his inauguration, Biden shut down the Keystone XL Pipeline, killed plans to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and canceled oil and gas projects nationwide with an illegal suspension of new leases on federal lands. Even though the administration has resumed the oil and gas program under the Department of the Interior, the suspension lasted 18 months. Its return featured an 80 percent drop in available acreage and a 50 percent spike in royalty fees, all while White House officials promised to resist new leases.
“President Biden remains absolutely committed to not moving forward with additional drilling on public lands,”assured White House Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy on MSNBC.
As the administration placed blame for rapidly rising oil prices on the Russia-Ukraine war in May, the Interior Department canceled even more drilling projects from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico.
The persistent animosity toward U.S. oil and gas producers has been enough to chill Wall Street investment in the capital- and labor-intensive industry. The suppression of output due to this lack of capital now has Biden begging overseas nations to save the global economy from the entirely self-inflicted crisis of an energy-induced recession. Unsustainably high energy prices are fueling a new era of inflation that’s rising at a 40-year high and growing worse, according to new numbers out from the Department of Labor on Wednesday. A trip to Saudi Arabia, however, is unlikely to do the trick.
Last month, French President Emmanuel Macron tried to warn the president that the major oil-rich Arab countries are already producing at capacity.
“[The] Saudis can increase by 150 [thousand barrels per day] — maybe a little bit more. But they don’t have huge capacities before six months’ time,” Macron said on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Germany.
A Bloomberg analysis published on Sunday confirms Macron’s warning of slim capacity in the Middle East.
“Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the only members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC] with significant volumes of unused output. Together they currently have a buffer of about 3 million barrels a day, official data from the countries indicate,” Bloomberg reported. “That’s about 3% of global oil output. … But the margin of emergency supplies could be even narrower than official figures indicate.”
“The obvious thing for Biden to do is massively ramp up oil and gas production in the U.S. both for domestic use and export,” environmental author Michael Shellenberger explained in a Substack post. “It would be a win for American energy firms and workers, as well as for our allies in Europe and Asia.”
Biden, however, has refused and instead opted for a trip to the Middle East after his “unprecedented” releases from the U.S. emergency petroleum reserves have failed to keep gas prices from reaching record highs. Last month, the nationwide average for a gallon of regular unleaded eclipsed $5. American firms, meanwhile, are struggling to cope with high electricity prices as they near new peaks, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Nearly 1 million barrels from the emergency stockpile landed in China after the Biden administration hampered U.S. refining capacity. While shutting down leases for new drilling operations this spring, the president also blocked a permit for a major refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands in March.
A visit with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has become an option of last resort for a president desperate to bring down energy prices ahead of the fall midterms. The November elections are already expected to favor Republicans in a cycle that’s historically hostile to the party in the White House, especially in an environment where the president has a 39 percent approval rating.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
Using Covid as an excuse for more restrictions, the CCP and its lackeys in Hong Kong are hoping to further assimilate the city into the top-to-bottom-run system used in China.
In a bid to further cripple the freedom of their citizens, Hong Kong government officials are ramping up their response to Covid with a series of new draconian policy measures.
On Monday, the city’s Health Secretary Lo Chung-mau announced several new restrictions allegedly aimed at curbing the spread of the virus, including a mandate that requires positive Covid patients quarantined at home to “wear an electronic tracking bracelet.” Used earlier during the pandemic to keep tabs on new arrivals to the city, the revamped policy seeks to ensure that people who have tested positive for the respiratory virus do not leave their homes without government authorization.
Moreover, Lo also announced that the city will be updating its contact-tracing app, which will now include a requirement that citizens register by name when using the software. As Reuters reported, users were previously “not required to register with their personal details, and the app was used to enter venues and display vaccination records.”
Taking a page from the Chinese communist’s playbook, Hong Kong will also be implementing a traffic light color-code system, which aims to “restrict movement of infected residents and close contacts.” As Lo described, residents who test positive will receive a red code and “be barred from entering a list of premises, including ‘high-risk’ places such as hospitals and nursing homes,” while all people arriving to the city will automatically be flagged as yellow. Lo did not, however, explain what the codes “would entail specifically in terms of access to venues.”
“I’d like to say that we would make use of technology to put in place a precision strategy,” Lo said in response to concerns about the government’s invasion of privacy. “This is to reduce our cost in our fight against the epidemic and to maximize effectiveness.”
Covid is a Means to an End for the CCP
While officials such as Lo and newly sworn-in Chief Executive John Lee will cast the city’s draconian measures as an attempt to save lives, the arbitrary policies actually serve as a mechanism for the China-backed government to further suppress the liberties of the Hong Kong people. Since the enaction of a so-called national security law in June 2020 by the Chinese government in response to the citywide protests of 2019, Hong Kong authorities — with the backing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — have initiated a government crackdown on basic freedoms throughout the administrative region.
As demonstrated in mainland China, the primary interest of CCP-aligned officials has never been to preserve life, but rather to maintain the current power structure. By using Covid as an excuse for more restrictions, the CCP and its lackeys in Hong Kong are hoping to further assimilate the city into the top-to-bottom-run system used in China, while attempting to uphold the image of Hong Kong as a free system independent of influence from Beijing.
Chinese dictator Xi Jinping alluded to such desires during his July 1 speech marking the 25th anniversary of Great Britain’s handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, in which he repeatedly emphasized the need for “patriots” to maintain their rule over the city.
“Keeping political power in the hands of patriots is a political rule commonly practiced in the world. No people in any country or region in the world will ever allow political power to fall into the hands of forces or individuals who do not love, or even sell out, or betray, their own country,” Xi said. “To keep the power to administer the Hong Kong [Special Administrative Region] firmly in the hands of patriots is essential for safeguarding the long-term governance and security of Hong Kong; at no time should this principle be allowed to be compromised.”
Just as CCP officials in China used the country’s health code system to suppress citizens protesting corruption, expect Hong Kong officials to abuse their newly adopted restrictions to carry out similar actions against their people. For the CCP and their Hong Kong allies, employing disproven lockdown policies is simply a steppingstone in maintaining greater dominion over the region’s civilian population — thus putting a final nail in the coffin for a once-free city.
Shawn Fleetwood is an intern at The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory. They may witness things over the next five months that once would have seemed unimaginable. Until the Ukrainian conflict, we had never witnessed a major land war inside Europe directly involving a nuclear power. In desperation, Russia’s impaired and unhinged leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin, now talks trash about the likelihood of nuclear war.
A 79-year-old President Joe Biden bellows back that his war-losing nuclear adversary is a murderer, a war criminal, and a butcher who should be removed from power.
After a year of politicizing the U.S. military and its self-induced catastrophe in Afghanistan, America has lost deterrence abroad. China, Iran, North Korea and Russia are conniving how best to exploit this rare window of global military opportunity.
The traditional bedrocks of the American system – a stable economy, energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities, a professional judiciary, law enforcement and a credible criminal justice system – are dissolving. Gas and diesel prices are hitting historic levels. Inflation is at a 40-year high. New cars and homes are unaffordable. The necessary remedy of high interest and tight money will be almost as bad as the disease of hyperinflation.
There is no southern border.
Expect over 1 million foreign nationals to swarm this summer into the United States without audit, COVID testing, or vaccination. None will have any worry of consequences for breaking U.S. immigration law.
Police are underfunded and increasingly defunded. District attorneys deliberately release violent criminals without charges. (Literally 10,000 people witnessed a deranged man with a knife attack comedian Dave Chappelle on stage at the Hollywood Bowl last week, and the Los Angeles County D.A. refused to press felony charges.) Murder and assault are spiraling. Carjacking and smash-and-grab thefts are now normal big-city events.
Crime is now mostly a political matter. Ideology, race, and politics determine whether the law is even applied.
Supermarket shelves are thinning, and meats are now beyond the budgets of millions of Americans. An American president – in a first – casually warns of food shortages. Baby formula has disappeared from many shelves.
Politics are resembling the violent last days of the Roman Republic. An illegal leak of a possible impending Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade that would allow state voters to set their own abortion laws has created a national hysteria.
Never has a White House tacitly approved mobs of protesters showing up at Supreme Court justices’ homes to rant and bully them into altering their votes.
There is no free speech anymore on campuses.
Merit is disappearing. Admissions, hiring, promotion, retention, grading and advancement are predicated increasingly on mouthing the right orthodoxies or belonging to the proper racial, gender or ethnic category.
When the new campus commissariat finally finishes absorbing the last redoubts in science, math, engineering, medical and professional schools, America will slide into permanent mediocrity and irreversible declining standards of living.
What happened?
Remember all these catastrophes are self-induced. They are choices, not fate. The U.S. has the largest combined gas, coal and oil deposits in the world. It possesses the know-how to build the safest pipelines and to ensure the cleanest energy development on the planet.
Inflation was a deliberate Biden choice. For short-term political advantage, he kept printing trillions of dollars, incentivizing labor non-participation, and keeping interest rates at historical lows – at a time of pent-up global demand.
The administration wanted no border. Only that way can politicized, impoverished immigrants repay left-wing undermining of the entire legal immigration system with their fealty at the ballot box.
Once esoteric, crack-pot academic theories – “modern monetary theory,”critical legal theory, critical race theory – now dominate policymaking in the Biden administration.
The common denominator in all of this is ideology overruling empiricism, common sense, and pragmatism. Ruling elites would rather be politically correct failures and unpopular than politically incorrect, successful, and popular.
Is that not the tired story of left-wing revolutionaries from 18th-century France to early 20th-century Russia to the contemporary disasters in Cuba and Venezuela?
The American people reject the calamitous policies of 2021-2022. Yet the radical cadres surrounding a cognitively inert Biden still push them through by executive orders, bureaucratic directives, and deliberate cabinet nonperformance.
Why? The Left has no confidence either in constitutional government or common sense.
So as the public pushes back, expect at the ground level more doxxing, cancel culture, deplatforming, ministries of disinformation, swarming the private homes of officials they target for bullying and likely violent demonstrations in our streets this summer.
Meanwhile, left-wing elites will do their best to ignore Supreme Court decisions, illegally cancel student debts and likely by the fall issue more COVID lockdowns. They will still dream of packing the Court, ending the filibuster, scrapping the Electoral College, adding more states, and flooding the November balloting with hundreds of millions more dollars of dark money from Silicon Valley.
When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous – as we shall see over the next few months.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
It had been more than a year since Hashmatullah Niazy, a U.S. citizen, last saw his wife, Freshta, and four young children when they finally reunited in Austin, Texas this month.
While thousands of illegal immigrants pour across the southwest U.S. border daily, Afghan refugees abandoned by the Biden administration during the Afghanistan withdrawal are still struggling to gain legal entry to the United States.
It had been more than a year since Hashmatullah Niazy, a U.S. citizen who emigrated from Afghanistan, last saw his wife, Freshta, and four young children when they finally reunited in Austin, Texas this month. Niazy became a U.S. citizen in 2020 through the Special Immigrant Visa program after working as a translator for the U.S. military in Afghanistan. He began translating and training recruits at the Kabul Military Training Center in 2007 after his older brother died in combat while working with special forces. When Niazy obtained his U.S. visa in 2014, he resigned from his job and flew to the states.
Niazy told me he wanted to bring his family over with him, but every time he tried to initiate the immigration process, his wife was pregnant and wanted to avoid strenuous travel. Freshta and the children eventually joined the backlogged SIV immigration process before the Taliban took over the country, but their quest for permanent U.S. residency was derailed when President Joe Biden initiated the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan last fall.
I first reported on Niazy’s family situation in September 2021 when his brother, wife, and kids were all stranded in a Taliban-infested Kabul. At the time, Niazy was already in the United States, working nights and eagerly building a life for his family in Texas. But his excitement for his family’s new life in America was blunted when he realized they might not make it past the crowds at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul to get on an evacuation flight out of Afghanistan.
“Suddenly the Taliban took over the country and now we were like lost,” Niazy told me.
That’s when “angels from the sky” came in.
The Escape
After weeks of chaos at the Hamid Karzai International Airport, where some translators and their families were among the more than 200 people killed by a suicide bomber on August 26, Freshta and the kids, ranging in age from 3 to 12 years old, finally escaped Kabul at the end of September with the help of a large group of former U.S. soldiers, some trained in special operations.
Jim Young, Dan Fickel, Keye Perry, Joe Penkala, and another man named “Tom,” who is still in active government service and declined to give his last name, all graduated from West Point in 1994. When they saw the crisis in Afghanistan, they banded together to do everything they could to rescue Americans and Afghan allies the Biden administration had left behind. They enlisted the aid of several other former service members including Ryan Timoney, West Point class of 1993 graduate Dave Abrahams, retired Special Forces officer Matt Coburn, former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, and Helen Jbeily of California Republican Rep. David Valadao’s office to actively shepherd Freshta, her brother-in-law, and her kids to the overcrowded, dangerous airport for evacuation while avoiding the Taliban as much as possible.
I talked to Penkala, a retired U.S. Army officer, about the rescue efforts after the Niazy family’s first attempt to seek evacuation at the airport.
“We had sort of an up and down type of situation, even after we had taken over his case, and had managed to get the family back to [the airport]. And it was through no small effort on the part of some folks from the Special Operations community, one individual in particular who was retired,” Penkala told me over the phone. “We actually got them to the North Gate [of the airport] so this is the second time they had made it to the airport. And even though there was an obvious way to bring them in, frankly, they were still left stranded. Nobody would open the gate for them even though at one point we only had about 25 people in front of the North Gate.”
At one point, Penkala told me that, “the Taliban began beating some of the local Afghans,” forcing the on-the-ground rescuers to adapt as the Niazy clan retreated to their apartment.
During that time, Niazy said his wife “never lost her courage.”
“There was the time that I lost my hope. That was the time when my wife said ‘It’s okay. Whatever it takes me to get my kids to their dad, I will do that,’” Niazy said. “So that was a time when she gave me the courage, she gave me the hope and I needed it.”
Efforts to orchestrate the evacuation of the Niazys and hundreds of others from the clutches of the Taliban were largely funded by one of Young’s business partners, Zekelman Industries out of Texas, which donated $1 million out of the $1.1 million required to reunite the Niazy family and other refugees after another sponsor backed out.
After days of chaos, the Niazy family and 528 other American citizens, legal permanent residents, their spouses, and their children were finally able to flee Afghanistan unharmed.
“We’re so thankful for all these great humans. From God first and then from all these humans that helped me and came into my life, me and my wife,” Niazy said.
Evacuation Was Only The Beginning
Even though the Niazy family applied to permanently rejoin the head of their household in the United States, it was a long and difficult process between September of last year and early April this year, when they were finally permitted to set foot on American soil.
“This was a family who was already in the process and had paperwork prepared. And, frankly, the wife was married to a U.S. citizen. This is the immediate family of a United States citizen and it took private efforts,” Penkala said. “And once we got them out of harm’s way, it took an additional five months to come into the country.”
During that time, Freshta and her children were at a refugee camp in the United Arab Emirates. While the family was safe from the dangers the Taliban posed to them, they were stuck in limbo and at the mercy of the American bureaucracy.
Penkala said “there were some folks who were kind enough to work through their connections to get them some additional food and supplies and that type of thing” but that didn’t help reunite the family.
Niazy admitted that the experience induced many “sleepless nights” for him as he anxiously waited for the green light. In total, it took more than five months for Niazy, an American citizen who served with U.S. forces in combat, to legally relocate his wife and kids to Texas.
The American Dream
The Niazy family may have had to jump through multiple hoops that illegal immigrants at the Southern border don’t, but a lack of help from the U.S. government hasn’t hampered their enthusiasm for the American Dream.
While Niazy works as an engineering technician, Freshta and the children are acclimating to their new lives along with Niazy’s parents, who also emigrated to the United States. Once the family moves to a new apartment, three of the four children will start attending school.
In just a couple of weeks, Freshta and the Niazy children are expected to receive their Social Security numbers. But for now he is thankful that his immediate family made it to a free country where his daughters can attend school.
“It’s the teaching of our parents that wherever you live, treat it as your home, keep it clean, and keep the environment clean and also treat your neighbors good,” Niazy said. “With this [Taliban] regime, no one is happy and everybody lost the hope that [Afghanistan] will ever be a free country.”
When I video chatted with the family last week, Niazy had just woken up after working a night shift at his engineering job and Freshta was preparing food in the family’s apartment kitchen. The children were happily chattering with each other as they played with toys. The youngest one gave me a shy wave.
“This is a beautiful life,” Niazy said as he bounced his daughter on his lap. “I’m very excited and very happy. And I am praying for those who helped me, these beautiful humans in my life.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Earlier this week, as President Joe Biden’s administration scrambled to spin its disastrously botched withdrawal from Afghanistan following the fall of Kabul to Taliban forces, Vice President Kamala Harris was suspiciously absent from the public eye. Suddenly, the “Harris” part of “Biden-Harris” was nowhere to be found and poor old Joe was forced to face the nation alone.
They apparently managed to briefly get Harris out of hiding on Friday, however, and she appeared loyally by Biden’s side as he addressed the nation for a second time on the crisis in Afghanistan and vowed to evacuate the untold number of Americans who are still stranded in the now-fallen nation. As it turns out, the administration may have done better to just let Harris remain in hiding.
Twitter users were quick to notice that while they may have convinced her to show her face in public with the president to demonstrate unity, it was her face that said it all.
“[L]et me be clear,” Biden said at the White House on Friday, flanked by his clearly uncomfortable vice president. “Any American [who] wants to come home, we will get you home.”
Biden said his administration has been in “constant contact with the Taliban, working to ensure civilians have safe passage to the airport” amid reports the insurgent forces are beating Americans who try to enter the Kabul airport.
“[W]e’ve made clear to the Taliban that any attack — any attack on our forces or disruption of our operations at the airport will be met with a swift and forceful response,” Biden said, according to a White House transcript.
“We have no indication that they haven’t been able to get — in Kabul — through the airport,” he added. “We’ve made an agreement with the — with the Taliban. Thus far, they’ve allowed them to go through. It’s in their interest for them to go through.’
“So, we know of no circumstance where American citizens are — carrying an American passport — are trying to get through to the airport. But we will do whatever needs to be done to see to it they get to the airport.”
Harris, who was wearing a face mask, probably should have worn sunglasses — because her eyes alone spoke louder than any words could have.
Before a clutch of journalists and Biden’s own defense secretary later refuted his lies about the situation at the Kabul airport, Harris’ face betrayed the falsehood outright.
After Biden’s address, Harris promptly departed the country on a pre-planned trip to Asia to visit Singapore and Vietnam (the latter visit couldn’t have been more poorly nor ironically timed considering the parallels between the fall of Kabul on Sunday and the 1975 fall of Saigon).
Amazingly, she’s just about the only person who isn’t calling out Biden’s lies, and by the look on her face on Friday, it appears even that was a struggle for her.
Biden’s claim that the administration knows of “no circumstance ” in which Americans are having a difficult time getting to the airport in Kabul was hotly contested by establishment media reporters.
.@DavidMuir: "The president said he has no intelligence that the Americans have not been able to get [to the Kabul airport]. The question, obviously—does that square with reporting on ground?"@IanPannell: "I mean—just totally not."
Meanwhile, Politico reported Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told House lawmakers during a call on Friday that indeed, multiple Americans had been beaten by Taliban fighters as they tried to reach the airport.
“We’re also aware that some people including Americans have been harassed; even beaten by the Taliban,” Austin said, according to multiple sources on the call. “This is unacceptable and [we] made it clear to the designated Taliban leader.”
Considering how horribly Biden is bungling this thing as our countrymen are subjected to violent assault at the hands of Islamic extremist fighters who just made him look like a fool, one certainly understands why Harris had such a hard time appearing the least bit confident in our commander-in-chief. It’s her job to have his back, and she seemingly couldn’t even do that. Our country is in the hands of these people.
Does anyone in the administration have faith in Biden right now? Or anyone anywhere for that matter?
Isa grew up in San Francisco, where she was briefly a far-left socialist before finding Jesus and her husband in Hawaii. She now homeschools their two boys and freelances in the Ozarks.@crunchyconmama
Venezuela’s National Assembly head Juan Guaido declares himself the country’s “acting president” during a mass opposition rally against leader Nicolas Maduro, on the anniversary of a 1958 uprising that overthrew military dictatorship in Caracas on January 23, 2019. – Moments earlier, the loyalist-dominated Supreme Court ordered a criminal investigation of … FEDERICO PARRA/AFP/Getty Images
The world’s authoritarians used their wealth to display their typical egomania, popping up in celebrity weddings, on mountaintops, and in larger-than-life iconography (paid for by the people, of course). Oppressed people flooded their streets by the millions demanding a better future. Young new world leaders, often by surprise, assumed the direction of their scarred, turbulent countries.
Below, in no particular order, some of the most moving, iconic, baffling, newsworthy, and generally notable images from around the world in the past year.
Sitcom star Volodymyr Zelensky celebrates being elected to the presidency of Ukraine on April 21 after playing a schoolteacher who suddenly becomes president of Ukraine in the hit comedy Servant of the People. Zelensky was elected on the back of nationwide discontent with decades of corrupt establishment rule and insufficient resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine’s eastern territories. Zelensky has now become a key figure in the Democrats’ attempt to remove President Donald Trump from power without electing a Democrat. (Photo: AFP)
Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, attends a working lunch on the first day of the G20 summit on June 28, 2019, in Osaka, Japan. Inset: a photo that surfaced in September of Trudeau in “brownface” at an “Arabian Nights” theme party in 2001. The photo surfaced shortly before Canada’s national election but failed to unseat Trudeau, despite the prime minister admitting he had worn blackface so many times he could not remember them all. (Kiyoshi Ota – Pool/Getty Images. Inset: unknown, released via Time)
French President Emmanuel Macron shakes hands with American President Donald Trump at the G& Summit in August. Macron attempted to organize a meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. (Photo via Associated Press)
A Lebanese protester offers sweets to people during ongoing demonstrations to demand better living conditions and the ouster of a cast of politicians who have monopolised power and influence for decades, on October 21, 2019 north of Beirut.(Joseph Eid/AFP via Getty Images)
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan serves as best man to soccer star Mesut Ozil at the latter’s wedding in Istanbul. (Photo via AFP)
Venezuela’s National Assembly head Juan Guaido takes the oath of office of the presidency, following the illegal “inauguration” of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro, on January 23, 2019. (Federico Parra/AFP/Getty Images)
The aftermath of police raiding Hong Kong Polytechnic University on November 18, 2019. Hong Kong police early November 18 warned for the first time that they may use “live rounds” after pro-democracy protesters fired arrows and threw petrol bombs at officers at a besieged university campus, as the crisis engulfing the city veered deeper into danger. (Photo by YE AUNG THU/AFP via Getty Images)
Supporters of the Pakistani religious party Jamaat-i-Islami, chant slogans for ousted former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi in Hyderabad, Pakistan. Tuesday, June 18, 2019. Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president ousted by the military in 2013, collapsed during a trial session in Cairo on Monday and died. (AP Photo/Pervez Masih)
A little girl throws earth on a coffin during the funeral of a person killed in the Easter Sunday attack on St Sebastian’s Church, on April 24, 2019, in Negombo, Sri Lanka. At least 321 people were killed and 500 people injured after coordinated attacks on churches and hotels on Easter Sunday in and around Colombo as well as at Batticaloa in Sri Lanka. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)
Church members carry placards reading “self-defence is now the answer” “the jihad will not work,” as they take part in a protest against the killing of people by suspected herdsmen in Makurdi, north-central Nigeria, on April 29, 2018. On April 24, 2018, at least 18 people, including two Catholic priests, were killed in an attack on a church near the state capital Makurdi that was blamed on herdsmen. (Emmy Ibu/AFP/Getty Images)
“Kim Jong Un, the great leader of our revolution who opens up the period of a great leap for the development of the revolution, personally left the sacred trace in the revolutionary battle sites in Mt Paektu area, the source of the lifeline of the revolution and inexhaustible patriotism, through knee-high virgin snow.” (Photo, caption via North Korean state newspaper Rodong Sinmun)
An anti-government protester waves a national flag during a demonstration in Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2019. Iraqi security forces fired live bullets into the air and used tear gas against a few hundred protesters in central Baghdad on Thursday, hours after a curfew was announced in the Iraqi capital on the heels of two days of deadly violence that gripped the country amid anti-government protests that killed several people in two days. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)
People attend a candlelight vigil at Victoria Park in Hong Kong on June 4, 2019, to mark the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing, China. Protests against the Chinese regime would begin shortly after this display and have yet to cease. (Photo via Philip Fong/AFP)
Police shelter behind a hospital sign, as they guard a hospital in Butembo, Congo, on Saturday, April 20, 2019, after militia members attacked an Ebola treatment center in the city’s Katwa district overnight. Violence has deeply complicated efforts to contain what has become the second-deadliest Ebola virus outbreak in history. (AP Photo/Al-Hadji Kudra Maliro)
Bolivian President Jeanine Áñez raises the four canonical gospels in the air at the Quemado Palace in La Paz becoming interim president following socialist leader Evo Morales abandoning the presidency on November 10 and fleeing to Mexico. (Aizar Raldes/AFP via Getty Images)
US President Donald Trump (L), Vice President Mike Pence (2nd L) and First Lady Melania Trump (R) stand with Conan, the military dog that was involved with the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, at the White House in Washington, DC, on November 25, 2019. (Photo via Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
A giant portrait of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping is carried atop a float at a parade, in front of an electric screen showing another giant portrait of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of the violent communist takeover of China on October 1, 2019 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
Pro-democracy protesters take part in a Thanksgiving Day rally at Edinburgh Place on November 28, 2019, in Hong Kong. Protesters gathered to say thank you to the United States after US President Donald Trump signed legislation supporting the Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters, with new legislation requiring annual reviews of Hong Kong’s rights and freedoms. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
The House Judiciary Committee reportedly told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Monday that it still wanted former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify even though Trump has already been impeached, because his impeachment could reveal that Trump obstructed justice in the Russia investigation.
Democrats voted last Wednesday to impeach the president for “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress,” in claims related to his dealings with Ukraine. But the text of the articles of impeachment cited Trump’s alleged “previous invitations of foreign interference,”referring to debunked allegations that he sought to collude with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Democrats pursued McGahn’s testimony at the time the Mueller Report was released because they were determined to find any evidence that Trump obstructed justice, even though he had made every witness and document available to investigators and declined to exercise executive privilege. Mueller did not refer Trump for prosecution, nor did he “exonerate” the president, but both Attorney General William Barr and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges.
Nevertheless, Democrats continued to look for evidence of obstruction, even trying to obtain the grand jury materials that Mueller had used, which Barr was prohibited, by law, from providing to Congress (which found him in contempt anyway).
The White House, which had previously cooperated with Mueller, balked at allowing the president’s counsel to testify before Congress after the Mueller inquiry ended, citing legal privileges and constitutional boundaries.
But Democrats persisted.
In the Judiciary Committee’s report accompanying the articles of impeachment, which it cited in its court filing Monday, Democrats hinted that they included Trump’s so-called “obstruction of justice” in the Russia investigation in their “obstruction of Congress” article of impeachment, though they did not specifically charge him with obstructing justice (footnotes removed):
The Second Article of Impeachment impeaches President Trump for obstructing Congress with respect to the House impeachment inquiry relating to Ukraine. Yet, as noted in that Article, President Trump’s obstruction of that investigation is “consistent with [his] previous efforts to undermine United States Government investigations into foreign interference in United States elections.” An understanding of those previous efforts, and the pattern of misconduct they represent, sheds light on the particular conduct set forth in that Article as sufficient grounds for the impeachment of President Trump.
These previous efforts include, but are not limited to, President Trump’s endeavor to impede the Special Counsel’s investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 United States Presidential election, as well as President Trump’s sustained efforts to obstruct the Special Counsel after learning that he was under investigation for obstruction of justice.
However, a footnote at the end of the first paragraph above suggested that the committee would seek to interview McGahn to obtain evidence for use in a Senate trial on existingarticles of impeachment, not new ones:
This Committee has undertaken an investigation relating to the Special Counsel’s report. That includes inquiring into President Trump’s obstruction of the Special Counsel, as well as a review of other aspects of the Special Counsel’s underlying work that the President obstructed. As part of this investigation, the Committee has sought to compel testimony by former White House Counsel Donald F. McGahn II, and to review certain grand jury materials relating to the Special Counsel’s report. Should the Committee obtain the information, it would be utilized, among other purposes, in a Senate trial on these articles of impeachment, if any. The Committee, moreover, has continued and will continue those investigations consistent with its own prior statements respecting their importance and purposes.
The DC Circuit is scheduled to hear the case on January 3. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has refused to turn over the articles of impeachment to the Senate because she says she is awaiting a guarantee of a “fair trial”— though the Constitution suggests that the Senate could hold a trial anyway.
She may, however, also be awaiting the D.C. Circuit’s ruling on the McGahn case, which would almost certainly be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court by either side.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan has upgraded its estimate of North Korea’s nuclear weapons capability in an upcoming annual Defense White Paper, saying it seems Pyongyang has achieved the miniaturization of warheads, the Yomiuri newspaper said in an unsourced report on Wednesday.
FILE PHOTO: North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un supervises a “strike drill” for multiple launchers and tactical guided weapon into the East Sea during a military drill in North Korea, in this May 4, 2019 photo supplied by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). KCNA via REUTERS
That compares with the assessment in last year’s report in which the government said it was possible North Korea had achieved miniaturization, the Japanese daily said without citing sources. The report, to be approved at a Cabinet meeting in mid-September, will maintain the assessment that North Korea’s military activities pose a “serious and imminent threat”, the Yomiuri said.
North Korea’s ability to build nuclear warheads small enough to fit on its ballistic missiles has been widely accepted for several years, but the Japanese report highlights the lack of progress on denuclearization talks aimed at curtailing the program, said Vipin Narang, a nuclear affairs expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.
“It is Japan that is most threatened, and probably the primary target of such a capability,”he said. “So openly acknowledging it underscores Tokyo’s acute fears that North Korea’s nuclear program continues to grow unabated with no foreseeable plan to slow its growth, let alone eliminate them.”
South Korea’s 2018 Defense White Paper, released in January, reported that North Korea’s ability to miniaturize nuclear weapons “appears to have reached a considerable level.” According to South Korean media reports late last year, the South Korean intelligence agency told lawmakers that North Korea had continued to miniaturize nuclear warheads even after the Singapore summit between Trump and Kim in June 2018.
At that time, North Korea committed “to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula” and destroyed some tunnels and buildings at its Punggye-ri nuclear test site. But a second Trump-Kim meeting in February collapsed without an agreement, and North Korea has since resumed missile tests.
U.S. envoy on North Korea Stephen Biegun was in Seoul this week to meet with South Korean officials, and said he was prepared to engage with North Korea “as soon as we hear from our counterparts.”
American officials have concluded for years that North Korea had likely produced miniaturized nuclear warheads. A leaked report by the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2017 concluded that North Korea had successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, according to The Washington Post.
In last year’s Defense White Paper, Japan said “miniaturizing a nuclear weapon small enough to be mounted on a ballistic missile requires a considerably high degree of technological capacity,” and that “it is possible that North Korea has achieved the miniaturization of nuclear weapons and has developed nuclear warheads.”
Reporting by Chris Gallagher and Linda Sieg in Tokyo, and Josh Smith in Seoul. Writing by Malcolm Foster; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore
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Actor Liam Neeson is teaming up with abortion activists again to push for the legalized killing of unborn babies in his native Ireland.Click to Read at LifeNews.com.
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In a case which has attracted world-wide attention, a 104-year-old Australian scientist has boarded a plane which will take him to Switzerland to die at an assisted suicide clinic.
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Despite complaints from U.K. officials about President Donald Trump’s decision this week to retweet the allegedly “anti-Muslim” video posts of a British anti-Islam activist, evidence suggests both Trump and the activist he retweeted have valid points about radical Islam’s presence in Europe — and especially the U.K.
In a stunning report published Wednesday, The Guardian revealed that “the number of people arrested for terrorism-linked offences (in the U.K.) rose by more than two-thirds to a record 379 in the 12 months to June — one of the most intense periods for terrorist attacks in recent history.”
Of those 379 suspects, nearly a third were eventually charged with terrorism offenses, while nearly 18 percent still face further investigation.
The publication of this report occurred on the same day that Trump retweeted three video posts from British activist Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of British First, a reportedly “far-right”political party that opposes mass migration.
One of the video posts showed radical Muslims pushing a teenage boy off a roof and then beating him to death, while the second video showed Muslims destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary. According to The Daily Wire, the first video was shot in Egypt five years ago, while the second video was shot in Syria one year later. In a third video retweet, a Dutch boy could be seen beating up another Dutch boy, though Fransen mistakenly claimed one of the boys was Muslim.
Following the U.S. president’s retweets, a number of prominent British officials condemned Trump, including Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London.
British Prime Minister Theresa May chimed in as well, decrying Britain First as “a hateful organization” that “seeks to sow division and hate and mistrust in our communities,” according to ABC News. “It stands in opposition to our fundamental values we hold as a country.”
But as noted by Robert Spencer, a Fox News contributor known for his criticisms of Islam, those castigating Trump seemed more focused on whom he retweeted versus the actual content of the tweets.
“I have not seen any Muslim spokesmen say, ‘There is a problem (in Islam) we need to deal with,’” he said in a statement to Breitbart. “They are all just criticizing Trump. … (Former President Barack) Obama did everything he could to whitewash the image of Islam — Trump is calling attention to atrocities that are committed in the name of name of Islam.”
As well as the rise of radicalism across the world, but especially so in the U.K.
Over the last few weeks President Trump has met with Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas a couple of times. The first meeting they had seemed to go pretty well, with the President happy to hear Abbas say that the Palestinian people wanted peace. However, between that meeting and their second meeting, President Trump learned that Abbas had been lying to him.
According to a report by Israel’s Channel Two an angry Trump yelled at Abbas during their talks last Tuesday because of the Palestinian Authority’s continued incitement against Jews and against Israel.
“You tricked me in DC!” the President was reported to have hollered at the stunned Palestinian, “You talked there about your commitment to peace, but the Israelis showed me your involvement in incitement.”
Abbas then reassured the President that the Palestinian people wanted peace and that Palestinian parents were raising their children to be peaceful. As we know, this is a lie. We have seen the propaganda that the Palestinian schools teach their children, we have heard the songs that their children sing about stabbing Jews, and we have seen the TV shows where colorful puppets speak of the wonder of murdering Jews. But Abbas swore up and down that the Palestinian people just wanted peace…
So then why are his chief lieutenants writing op-eds telling their people to pick up guns and kill Jews? Just last week a member of the PLO’s leadership published a piece urging his fellow Palestinians to find a way, any way, to violently revolt against Israel.
Issa Karake, the PLO’s Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs director, accused Israel of trying to kill Palestinian prisoners who ended a 40-day hunger strike the day after his article was written.
“They (i.e., the prisoners) are being murdered [by Israel] in silence, through an official and planned method,” Karake wrote Wednesday on Prisoners’ Affairs commission’s website. “They are melting, bleeding, and dissipating. If one prisoner will fall, the entire world will fall. The world will die if a Palestinian prisoner will die . . . Break the pens, look for a gun and bullets. Do not look at your watches, the time is up . . . “
Two additional calls to arms were added when the Palestinian news site Al-Quds published the article a day later: “enough, let every one of us look for a gun and bullets.”
Maybe this is what Abbas meant when he said they were teaching their kids about peace? Maybe he was saying that once the Palestinians kill all the Jews, there will be peace?
Wake up America. The Palestinians aren’t an “oppressed” minority, they are a nation of terrorists hell-bent on murdering every Jewish person living in the Middle East. Israel could give them the West Bank and the Gaza strip tomorrow, they could pull all of their soldiers away from Palestinian territory, they could open the borders to allow Palestinian held territory to trade with whomever they want, and the Palestinians would simply use that as an opportunity to kill as many Jews as possible. How do we know? Because that is exactly what has happened every time Israel has given any concession, or signed any “ceasefire.” The Palestinians never actually cease firing, and they won’t, until the Jews are dead.
Israel is the good guy and we need to remember that.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Onan Coca
Onan is the Editor-in-Chief at Romulus Marketing. He’s also the managing editor at Eaglerising.com, Constitution.com and the managing partner at iPatriot.com. Onan is a graduate of Liberty University (2003) and earned his M.Ed. at Western Governors University in 2012. Onan lives in Atlanta with his wife and their three wonderful children. You can find his writing all over the web.
A militia group has kidnapped American UN official Michael Sharp, 34, and his team in the Democratic Republic of Congo. From NBC News:
Officials confirmed Monday that the team had disappeared in the country’s Kasai Central province — although it was unclear when exactly the incident took place.
“Sadly, it is true,” John Sharp told NBC News by phone. “At one point [during the journey], they were surprised, confronted and taken.”
Michael Sharp was abducted along with a Swedish U.N. worker named Zahida Katalan, three local drivers and a translator, Congo’s government and a U.N. official told The Associated Press.
The kidnap victim’s father, who is a 65-year-old professor at Hesston College in Kansas, said he had been given the same information.
John Sharp said his son was working as a coordinator with the United Nations Group of Experts for the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“He and a colleague, another member of a group of experts, and four Congolese people were together,” he said. “Three were drivers, one a translator and they were going on a mission, we don’t know what that mission was.”
The United States State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa announced both are monitoring the situation along with the UN within the African country:
Charles Bambara, spokesman for the U.N. mission in the country known as MONUSCO, told the news agency that two experts from the mission have disappeared in the country.
“The United Nations and MONUSCO are doing all that is possible at this moment to locate the two experts,” he said.
Fighters from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) carry the coffins of their fellow fighters, who were killed when Islamic State militants attacked the town of Tel Abyad on the Turkish border at the weekend, during their funeral procession at Ras al-Ain city, in Hasakah province, Syria March 2, 2016. REUTERS/Rodi Said TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY – RTS90VM ∧
U.S. anti-ISIS military assistance is emboldening Syrian Kurdish Marxist rebels, threatening to destabilize the region for decades.
The Kurdish rebels, known as the Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (YPG), subscribe to a Marxist ideology propagated by a jailed terrorist leader. The YPG has deep ties to the Turkish, Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), which is a Kurdish independence group and recognized as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.
The YPG, however, has proven to be the most effective force in the anti-ISIS fight in Syria. Hundreds of U.S. military advisors are embedded with Kurdish militias, and they frequently receive aerial assistance from the U.S. military. The increasing reliance on such groups by the Obama administration has caused a major rift between the U.S. and Turkey, and made the YPG stronger than it has ever been before.
Turkeyregardsthe YPG as big of a threat to its existence as the Islamic State, and invaded northern Syria in late August to deny any further Kurdish attempts at establishing a de-facto state along its border.
“The military support has boosted the YPG’s confidence to move beyond Kurdish populated areas and grow their ambitions even beyond Syria,” International Crisis Group expert Maria Fantappie toldThe Washington Post. “It has huge political implications not only for Syria but also for neighboring countries,” she continued.
Reporters overheard several Marxist screeds in a recent visit to Kurdish-controlled northern Syria. One man was heard saying, “The state is an instrument of oppression.”Another said of the ideology, “It is like having a democratic mother who does not discriminate against her children.”
President-elect Donald Trump has not indicated what his anti-ISIS strategy will be, but has expressedsympathyfor Iraqi Kurds in the past. A recent Syrian ceasefire struck by Russia, Syria, Turkey, and Iran may indicate that the Kurds will not have as large as a say in the future of Syria. Turkey is highly unlikely to cede any major power to the Kurdish rebel groups.
One of Poland’s most popular weekly magazines has splashed a graphic depiction of the rape of Europe’s women by migrants on its front cover. The image may be one of the most politically incorrect illustrations of the migrant crisis to date.
While Poland is generally much more relaxed about expressing itself than the self censoring tendencies of western and northern Europe, the cover of the latest wSieci (The Network) conservative magazine has already prompted reaction just 24 hours after release, being beamed around the continent by social media.
Featuring a personification of Europa being pawed at by dark hands — what the German media would perhaps euphemistically term “southern” or “Mediterranean” — the headline decries the “Islamic Rape of Europe”.
Making perfectly clear the intention of the edition, the edition features articles titled ‘Does Europe Want to Commit Suicide?’and ‘The Hell of Europe’. The news-stand blurb declares: “In the new issue of the weekly Network, a report about what the media and Brussels elite are hiding from the citizens of the European Union”.
Opening the cover article, Aleksandra Rybinska writes: “The people of old Europe after the events of New Year’s Eve in Cologne painfully realised the problems arising from the massive influx of immigrants. The first signs that things were going wrong, however, were there a lot earlier. They were still ignored or were minimised in significance in the name of tolerance and political correctness”.
Outlining the fundamental differences between eastern Islam and western Christianity — “culture, architecture, music, gastronomy, dress”— the editorial explains these two worlds have been at war “over the last 14 centuries” and the world is now witnessing a colossal “clash of two civilisations in the countries of old Europe”.This clash is brought by Muslims who come to Europe and “carry conflict with the Western world as part of the collective consciousness”,as the journalist marks the inevitability of conflict between native Europeans and their new guests.
wSieci Islamic rape europe 2
The collapse of the West in the face of this “Islamic rape”was not inevitable though, as Rybinska quoted British historian Arnold Toynbee: “Civilisations die from suicide, not by murder”.
Underlining the element of choice Europe has had in accepting the migrant crisis, the article cites the early signs of extreme violence perpetrated by migrants— in this case on each other. Recalling an asylum centre riot in Germany also reported on by Breitbart London in August where inmates part-demolished their own taxpayer funded homes because of a dispute over the Koran and attacked police officers while screaming “Allahu Akhbar”, Ms. Rybinska also recounted the fates of Christian asylum seekers beaten by their Muslim counterparts.
The article lists dozens of recorded sex attacks from the past few weeks, often visited upon under-age Europeans, but it is not just migrants who come in for criticism from wSieci. The magazine also had strong words for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who it accuses of listening more to the German industrial lobby which it claims campaigns for cheap labour from outside the European Union.
As a feature begging the question ‘Does Europe Want to Commit Suicide’concludes, “There is concern that European leaders have too late drawn the obvious conclusions, and some of them feel self-loathing”. “Europe is an oasis of prosperity and peace” compared to Africa and the Middle East, it contends, but the arrival of “millions” of cultural Muslims will “shock and undermine Europe”. The blame for this, the article lays firmly at the feet of Mrs. Merkel.
Follow Oliver Lane on Twitter: Follow @Oliver_Lane or e-mail to: olane@breitbart.com
On March 11, 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry said the Obama administration was “not negotiating a legally binding plan” with Iran and therefore their nuclear agreement did not have to be submitted to Congress for approval. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is ready to challenge that notion by putting forward a resolution that would define the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as a treaty.
The Corker-Cardin bill, a.k.a. the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, was introduced as an accountability tool for the Iranian deal, requiring a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ vote from Congress. Yet, as more details about the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA) have surfaced, Corker and Cardin’s effort has become basically null, Rep. Gohmert is convinced. The Obama administration, he asserts, left Congress in the dark about the specifics of JCPOA. For instance, the Corker-Cardin bill was only meant to rein in nuclear sanctions, but JCPOA allows for a lifting of sanctions on ballistic missiles and international arms embargoes. Congress also had no clue about the side deals allowing Iran to inspect itself at nuclear sites.
In his resolution, Gohmert also exposes Secretary of State Kerry’s hypocrisy regarding his refusing to label the Iran deal a treaty.
Whereas, on June 4, 2015, less than two months before Secretary Kerry testified that it has become “physically impossible” for the Senate to ratify treaties, he stated that the State Department is “preparing the instruments of ratification of [several] important treaties” and that he “want[s] to personally thank the U.S. Congress . . . for their efforts on” the implementing legislation for the nuclear security treaties;
Gohmert is not the only legislator to demand the Iran agreement be defined as a treaty.Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), the only senator not to vote for the Corker-Cardin act, demanded the clarification be made back in May:
“A nuclear-arms agreement with any adversary—especially the terror-sponsoring, Islamist Iranian regime—should be submitted as a treaty and obtain a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate as required by the Constitution,” he said.
Such a consequential handshake should be accompanied by some oversight from our elected representatives. It’s what Americans want.
Should the resolution pass, Gohmert says the Senate should deliberate on the ratification of the Iran Deal within 30 days hence.
Iran captured a US stealth surveillance drone in 2011, and started working to reverse engineer its own. Yesterday it unveiled what it claims is a replica, plus bombing capabilities.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seated left, listens to an official during his visit at an aerospace exhibition in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, May 11, 2014. The exhibition revealed an advanced CIA spy drone, front, captured in 2011 by Iran, and its Iranian-made copy, back. Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/AP
Tehran, Iran
Iran has unveiled its own copy of an American stealth drone it captured in late 2011, claiming to have cracked the “secrets” of the bat-wing craft and added weapons capabilities.
The Christian Science Monitor
Weekly Digital Edition
Today, Fars News Agency reported that while Iran’s duplicate of the US RQ-170 Sentinel drone was smaller, it also had a “bombing capability to attack the US warships in any possible battle.” The story in Persian was headlined: “America’s nightmare has become reality.” State television showed footage on Sunday it said was of a US aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf filmed by an Iranian drone.
The drone replica was unveiled at an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) exhibition on Sunday, where Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was briefed on how the drone, its systems, and structure had been reverse-engineered. He called it a “sweet day.”
The stealth replica would “soon take a test flight,” an IRGC officer said on Sunday. Aerospace chief Amir Ali Hajizadeh said today that they are working on two more models of the replica drone.
Proving its prowess
Engineers with the IRGC were ordered to reverse engineer the captured US drone, which was on a CIA mission to spy on nuclear and military sites in Iran when it was brought down in Iran largely intact. Iran reacted with euphoria, trumpeting the capture in an “electronic ambush” showed Iran’s technical prowess.
“And thus the Iranian-RQ [project] was designated,” said an IRGC aerospace officer, according to Fars News. “To achieve this, considering the difficulties and flight dynamics, we designed a bird with a smaller size that would be cheaper and simpler, and that we have done now. We have done ground tests already, and after this fair, we will do air tests too.”
“Here we didn’t know what type of information we were looking for. There was an issue of encoding and passwords, which thanks to God’s help we have overcome,” said the officer. He said data included video and advanced imaging and was “completely recovered.”
US officials said Iran was incapable of replicating the drone’s sophisticated radar-evading skin and shape, its aerodynamics, and top-of-the-line surveillance equipment, though it might be able to do so with the help of Russia or China. Iran has often made claims of cutting-edge military advances that later did not prove accurate, and it is not clear today what capabilities the replica has.
Khamenei said the lesson of the exhibition – which included unveiling a new cruise missile called “Ya Ali” with a 700 km range, among other new military hardware – was to show that Iranian engineers are capable.
“[It] gives the message of our internal power and capabilities … and declares that: ‘We can’,” said Khamenei.
Different stories
An Iranian engineer tasked with decoding the drone’s memory told The Christian Science Monitor in December 2011that Iran had incrementally “spoofed” the drone’s GPS system, causing it to land in Iran instead of its home base in western Afghanistan. Just months before, the US military had approved two $47 million contracts to find ways to replace vulnerable military GPS systems.
The US government and intelligence community claim that the RQ-170 drone was not electronically “hijacked” by Iran, and say it crash-landed instead. The stealth drone’s existence was never officially acknowledged until Iran exhibited it on television, largely intact.
Iranian engineers had decoded two hard drives and determined that the US drone had made 13 missions over Pakistan and Afghanistan. They did not mention any visual or other data that might have pertained to Iran. Iran has previously made public video footage it said was taken from the drone’s memory, of a landing at Kandahar airport in Afghanistan.
Official images released Sunday showed the undercarriage of the American drone for the first time, with little apparent damage to the housing of the sensors and camera section, or the landing gear. When the drone was first shown on television 2-1/2 years ago, those elements were hidden by anti-American banners and camouflage material.
“How do you trust a people who confess that their culture is to lie? Trust but verify? JB
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British Prime Minister Theresa May chimed in as well, decrying Britain First as 
Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas a couple of times. The first meeting they had seemed to go pretty well, with the President happy to hear Abbas say that the Palestinian people wanted peace. However, between that meeting and their second meeting, President Trump learned that Abbas had been lying to him.
The collapse of the West in the face of this 
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