Waste Of The Day: Secret Settlements Get Taxpayer Money Authored by Jeremy Portnoy via RealClearInvestigations, Topline: Eight Massachusetts state agencies and 13 colleges spent $6.8 million to settle grievances, partly in secret, brought by their own employees from 2019 to 2024, according to a Jan. 16 report from State Auditor Diana DiZoglio.  At least 80 of the 263 settlements contain confidentiality language such as a […]

Pentagon Threatens To Blacklist Anthropic As ‘Supply Chain Risk’ Over Guardrails On Military Use The Pentagon is reportedly about to cut ties with Anthropic, makers of Claude, which is already embedded in classified systems The company insists on implementing guardrails over how the US military can use Claude – specifically when it comes to mass surveillance and autonomous weapons – after it was used in the Maduro raid without their […]

ByteDance Vows To Crack Down On “Unauthorized IP” In Seedance 2.0 After Legal Threats From Hollywood Update (Monday): Disney and Paramount Skydance have both sent cease-and-desist letters to ByteDance, accusing the Chinese tech firm of “blatant infringement” by embedding their intellectual property into its AI video generator, Seedance 2.0. After Seedance 2.0 videos went viral across social media following the model’s release five […]

Coffee Tied To Lower Dementia Risk, Harvard-MIT Study Finds New research published in JAMA reveals a strong reason to feel even better about being three to four espressos deep before the cash market opens in New York.  Here’s the short version of the findings: Caffeinated coffee was linked to lower dementia risk. Comparing the highest vs lowest consumption groups, the study reported a hazard ratio of 0.82 (95% CI, 0.76 to […]

Giddy EU Elites Gush Over Newsom & AOC’s Brave New World (Same As The Broken Old World Order) Authored by Jonathan Turley, This week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) joined the many Californians now seeking their fortune elsewhere. The difference is that Newsom is planning to come back to California, even as billionaires, investors, and companies flee his state for greener pastures. Newsom and Democrats such as […]

LGBTQ+ Identity Dips In 2025 (But Doubled Over Last Decade) Authored by Jeffrey Jones via Gallup, Gallup estimates that 9% of U.S. adults personally identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual. This percentage is essentially unchanged from last year but remains more than double the 3.5% from 2012, the first year Gallup measured LGBTQ+ incidence. The current figure is also higher than […]

Futures, Global Markets Rise With US Markets Closed For President’s Day Stocks gained, bitcoin tumbled and bonds steadied after Friday’s cool CPI data reinforced expectations that the Fed will cut interest rates on multiple occasions this year. With US markets closed for the Presidents’ Day holiday and mainland China’s markets closed for Lunar New Year holidays, trading was muted on Monday. As of 9:00am ET, futures on the […]

Downdetector Users Report Widespread Outages At X, AWS, Cloudflare Around 8:00 a.m. ET, users on Downdetector reported outages and disruptions on X across the United States. At the same time, the outage tracker also showed a spike in reported issues involving Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare. Downdetector users reported X outages and disruptions across major U.S. cities. Simultaneously, Downdetector users reported outages […]

Ukraine’s Former Energy Minister Charged With Money Laundering As ‘Operation Midas’ Expands Months after Ukraine was shaken by a sweeping corruption probe into state nuclear giant Energoatom, and subject of international embarrassment given it even touched Zelensky’s office, former Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko has now been formally charged – after authorities detained him while he was allegedly attempting to leave the […]

Detroit Police Chief Targets Officers Allegedly Coordinating With ICE Authored by Luis Cornelio via Headline USA, Detroit Police Chief Todd Bettison said Thursday that officers purportedly collaborating with federal immigration agents will be held “accountable,” as the city defends its so-called “welcoming” status. Bettison made the comments during a hearing with the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners regarding two […]

US NatGas Futs Sink To Four-Month Low As Mid-Atlantic Exits Brutal Winter US natural gas futures tumbled to a four-month low early Monday as weather models indicate the Lower 48 is exiting the peak of the Northern Hemisphere winter and entering a much-needed warmup. For the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, which experienced some of the coldest weather in decades, the next few weeks are expected to feel more like spring. March contracts […]

Macron’s AI Clown Show: Europe’s Digital Dilemma Submitted by Thomas Kolbe The European Union has lost its place in the global race for artificial intelligence. In a single tweet on platform X, France’s President Emmanuel Macron inadvertently outlined the convoluted situation while simultaneously revealing his personal emotional fragility. The leading representatives of the European Union like to present themselves as […]

Amid Saber-Rattling, Iran Touts Economic Benefits To West If Nuclear Deal Reached Days ahead of another round of talks with US negotiators — and on the heels of more saber-rattling by the Trump administration — Iran is touting the potential mutual economic benefits of a deal that would terminate the West’s long-running sanctions regime against the second-largest and second-most-populous country in the Middle East.   “For the […]

Germany’s Elites Demand “Location Patriotism” As Green Industrial Policy Unravels Submitted by Thomas Kolbe As social glue and as a bond tying the individual to a higher purpose of existence, patriotism has acquired a dubious reputation in Germany after decades of culture war. The United Left has succeeded in amalgamating this binding and integrating cultural ferment with the historical catastrophes of National Socialism, […]

Hillary Clinton Breaks With Party Line, Admits Mass Migration Is “Disruptive & Destabilizing” After U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke earlier on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference, where he said the U.S. and Europe “belong together” and argued for a stronger West, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who served under former President Barack Obama, appeared on a panel later that afternoon and made […]

These Are The Countries Buying (And Selling) The Most Gold Since 2020 As gold prices surged more than 230% since 2020, central banks around the world launched one of the largest gold-buying waves in modern history. For many countries, bullion became more than just a hedge—it became a strategic reserve asset amid rising geopolitical tensions, currency volatility, and growing efforts to diversify away from the U.S. dollar. Yet […]

India Might Soon Replace Russian Oil With Venezuelan At Scale After All Authored by Andrew Korybko, A new US license is being interpreted as prohibiting Venezuelan energy companies from transactions with China among other countries, which if true, could lead to India purchasing the 642,000 barrels of oil per day that China imported on average last year and thus halving its import of Russian oil. RT drew attention on social […]

Mercedes-Benz Recalls Nearly 12,000 Electric Vehicles, Says Battery Packs Could Ignite What happens when spending $70,000 to signal virtue with your fancy EV goes wrong? FIRE!  Mercedes-Benz USA has announced a recall of 11,895 electric vehicles due to potentially faulty cells in the automobiles’ high-voltage battery packs that could lead to a fire, like what happened in front of a MBZ dealer in Malaysia in 2024 – though […]

‘No Prospect’ Of European Governments Preventing Civil War, Warns British Army Colonel Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news, Major unrest looms as political leaders kick the can down the road on immigration and integration failures, according to a seasoned military expert. Retired Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, has issued a stark warning about the trajectory of social cohesion […]

Munich, 2007: The Day The West Was Told ‘No’ Authored by Gerry Nolan via The Islander They like to pretend it came out of nowhere. They like the bedtime story: Europe was peacefully humming along in its post-history spa — open borders, cheap energy, NATO as a charity, Russia as a gas station with a flag… and then, one day, the barbarian kicked the door in for no reason at all. That story is not just dishonest. It’s […]

The “Swipe Era” Has Forever Reshaped How Couples Meet Tinder forever changed the landscape of online dating when it introduced the swipe function in 2012: left to pass, right to like. The result was a gamified experience that felt frictionless and addictive. Other dating apps copied it, and then the “swipe era” ignited. Before that, online dating was mostly on boring websites, like Christian Mingle and Farmers Only, that felt […]

The Biggest Bait-and-Switch War Of The Century Authored by Jim Bovard A few presidencies ago, Washington politicians used boundless political and intellectual chicanery to drag America into a ruinous war. Thousands of Americans died and scores of thousands of Iraqis perished due to the official myth of Saddam Hussein as the twentieth hijacker. Last November, Axios published new damning information on the role of Saudi government […]

Bastards, Worldwide Across much of the world, long-standing norms around marriage and family formation are changing. In many countries, having children outside of marriage has become increasingly common, while in others it remains rare. This visualization, via Visual Capitalist’s Niccolo Conte, shows countries ranked by the share of children born outside of marriage using the latest available data from the OECD Family Database. […]

After Years Of Border Crisis, Small Texas Town ‘Back To Mayberry’ Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), BRACKETTVILLE, Texas—The chaos caused by millions of illegal immigrants flooding across the southwest border under the Biden administration left scars on this border town. Samira Bouaou; Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times ​The constant high-speed chases, buzzing helicopters, screaming […]

“You Ought To Be In Jail”: Senator Unloads On Minnesota AG Ellison Over Fraud Scandal During a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearing this week, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) confronted Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. The Missouri Republican exposed Ellison’s ties to the Feeding Our Future scandal, where fraudsters stole $250 million in federal child nutrition funds.  Hawley didn’t hold back, […]