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Tulsi Gabbard is sure to anger Trump with major admission about Canada’s fentanyl trafficking

Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday struggled to explain why Canada was left off a list of countries that pose a major drug threat to the United States.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly blasted Canada as a national security threat for the amount of fentanyl that comes over its border, which he used as one of reasons he sparked a tariff war with Ottawa.  

Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, was testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the Annual Threat Assessment (ATA) when she was asked about the omission of Canada from that portion of the threat list. 

‘The focus in my opening and the ATA was really to focus on the most extreme threats in that area. And our assessment is that the most extreme threat related to fentanyl continues to come from and through Mexico,’ she said.

Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said he was surprised by the omission of Canada ‘given some of the rhetoric’ from officials in the Trump administration.

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Vance Cautioned Against Bombing Yemen, Calling It A ‘Mistake’

Vice President JD Vance cautioned against bombing Yemen before the US restarted its airstrikes on the country, calling it a “mistake,” and suggested delaying the attack by one month, according to a leaked Signal conversation between administration officials.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a reporter for The Atlantic, was included in the Signal thread, apparently by accident, which is how he obtained the conversation. An account believed to be Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared details of the March 15 airstrikes on Yemen two hours before they happened, and the White House confirmed that the Signal conversation appeared to be authentic.

A day before the airstrikes, an account labeled “JD Vance” expressed misgivings about the idea of targeting the Houthis. “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake,” the Vance account said.

Vance framed his opposition to the airstrikes based on President Trump’s policies toward Europe, which have involved pressuring the Europeans to pay more for their own militaries to be less reliant on the US. Vance pointed out that only a small percentage of US shipping goes through the Suez Canal compared to European trade.

The message said: “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

Vance continued, “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”

An account believed to be Joe Kent, President Trump’s nominee to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, replied to Vance, saying, “There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line. We’ll have the exact same options in a month.”

Hegseth responded to Vance by saying the messaging to the American people about the war would focus on President Biden failing to deter Yemeni attacks and the Houthis being “Iran funded.” Iran is aligned with the Houthis, but it’s unclear how much support they give to the group, and US officials have acknowledged the Houthis wouldn’t take orders from Tehran and have their own weapons supply.

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NASA says Trump is responsible for stranded astronaut saga ending: ‘It would not have happened’

NASA is crediting President Donald Trump for spearheading the mission to bring back its stranded astronauts.

Bethany Stevens, a spokeswoman for the agency, spoke glowingly about the new administration’s role.

‘It would not have happened without President Trump’s intervention,’ she told Fox News Digital, adding that it was a ‘huge win for the Trump administration.’

The extended space mission entered the political spotlight in January, when Trump said he told Elon Musk to ‘go get’ the astronauts who had been ‘virtually abandoned’ by the Biden administration. 

Musk echoed this statement, and in February, the two of them doubled down on their claims by blaming the astronauts’ delayed return on ‘political reasons.’ 

Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore were only supposed to be on the ISS for eight days, but ended up staying for more than nine months due to technical issues with their spacecraft, Boeing’s Starliner.

Williams and Wilmore finally returned to Earth on March 18, splashing down off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida inside the SpaceX Crew-9 Dragon capsule.

Once the two astronauts were on the ground, NASA officials praised the Trump administration for the success and timing of their return. 

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Haunting breakthrough in case of Illinois woman, 23, who vanished one night in 1983

A haunting breakthrough has finally come in the cold case of Karen Schepers, 23, who vanished over 40 years ago in Elgin, Illinois, a suburb outside of Chicago. 

The Elgin Police Department announced on Monday that they have located Karen’s Yellow 1980 Toyota Celica buried in Fox River. 

The vehicle was first located near a boat launch before a diver located the car and identified the license plate, which matched Karen’s. 

The Toyota is scheduled to be removed from the river on Tuesday afternoon with the assistance of professional divers, the Elgin Fire Department, and the Kane County Coroner’s Office. 

Once the vehicle is safely recovered, authorities plan to search for the remains. Police Chief Ana Lalley said in a statement that the investigation is still open and the recovery process is expected to take some time. 

‘As the recovery of the vehicle is made, it is important to stress that this is the beginning of what is still considered an open and active investigation with many questions still to be answered,’ Lalley said in a media update. 

‘As we continue to investigate this case, we will remain steadfast in our resolve to provide answers and closure to Karen’s family.’ 

Lindsay Bussick, the manager of Chaos Divers, a nonprofit organization assisting in the search, told the Chicago Tribune that authorities used sonar technology to determine the license plate and model of the vehicle. 

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Sleepwalking Into a Cashless Society

Philip Lane, chief economist of the European Central Bank, recently expressed urgency for the need to develop a digital euro—also known as a central bank digital currency (CBDC)—to compete against stablecoins such as Tether and electronic payment systems developed by U.S. tech firms, such as Google Pay and Apple Pay. Not content with eliminating cash, now the goal of central banks is to eliminate any competing electronic payment system.

We’re sleepwalking into a world with digital currencies without any government coercion whatsoever. As a 51-year-old Generation Xer, I carry lots of cash in my wallet. I teach personal finance at the local university and recently asked a class of about 30 students if any of them had any cash. Not one of them had a single bill or coin on them. They use debit cards, credit cards, Venmo, and Apple Pay. As it turns out, cash usage among the 18–24 age cohort has declined from 28 percent to 13 percent over the last five years. Most like the convenience of electronic payments, even though studies show that people spend 12 percent to 18 percent more when using credit cards than cash. If the government does attempt to implement a digital dollar, there will be little resistance to it.

Currently, there is $2.36 trillion in U.S. currency in circulation. Of course, much of this is held outside our borders, owing to the dollar’s dominance as the global reserve currency. The most common denomination of U.S. currency is the $100 bill. There are more $100 bills in circulation than $1 bills. Many residents of foreign countries, such as Argentina, consider the U.S. dollar to be a store of value and a hedge against inflation and local currency depreciation. If the U.S. government ever decided to phase out paper currency, it would have far-reaching effects around the globe.

Promoters of a digital currency allege that it would cause a drop in criminal and illicit activity. That may be correct, or people may simply resort to another medium of exchange or barter. Philosophically speaking, virtue is not possible without the freedom of choice. If people can’t choose to misbehave, it does not make them virtuous. A society in which nobody has the freedom to misbehave is far more horrifying than a society where people actually misbehave. 

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Marijuana Industry PAC Attacks Biden And Canada In New Ads Designed To Appeal To Trump

A marijuana industry-funded political action committee (PAC) is attacking former President Joe Biden’s cannabis policy record as well as the nation of Canada, with new ads promoting sometimes misleading claims about the last administration while making the case that President Donald Trump can deliver on reform.

The American Rights and Reform PAC–which launched in 2023 under a different name, Legalize America, and lists an executive at the major marijuana company Curaleaf as its treasurer—has two ads on its site that appear designed to appeal directly to Trump.

The ads aim to accomplish that by sharply criticizing the president’s predecessor and also emphasizing that American cannabis businesses are losing out to Canada, a more recent target of Trump’s ire, because of prohibitionist U.S. laws.

But with respect to the Biden-centered ad, the PAC’s attempt to draw a sharp contrast between the two administrations included inaccurate characterizations of Biden’s record—at one point stating that Biden was personally involved in criminalizing marijuana while completely ignoring his direct role in initiating a federal marijuana rescheduling review.

“Millions of American patients depend on medical cannabis, but Joe Biden and Democrats classified their medication as a dangerous narcotic like heroin, eliminating their access to relief,” the ad says.

“President Trump is fighting to make America healthy again,” it continues. “He did it before by giving patients life saving treatments with the Right to Try, and he can do it again by rescheduling cannabis. Ask President Trump to end Biden’s war on medical cannabis and put patients first.”

To be sure, advocates have widely criticized Biden for championing punitive anti-drug laws during his time in the Senate and not doing more to release people still incarcerated over federal cannabis-related convictions while in the White House.

But it was under the administration of Republican President Richard Nixon that marijuana was placed in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in 1970, before Biden joined the Senate. That was also before any states had legalized medical cannabis, despite the ad suggesting that patients were criminalized while legal programs existed.

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Pentagon ‘still mystified’ as drone drama deepens

Objects exhibiting advanced technology continue to fly with complete impunity over sensitive military installations and critical infrastructure. Despite the Pentagon’s advanced imaging and sensor capabilities, the nature, purpose and origin of these enigmatic craft are unknown, raising an array of pressing national security concerns.

In interviews with “60 Minutes” earlier this month, two recently retired four-star Air Force generals and the Air Force commander overseeing North American airspace defense begrudgingly admitted that the “drones” that loitered in dramatic fashion over key military assets in recent years remain a confounding mystery.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told “60 Minutes” that, despite being “privy to classified briefings at the highest level,” the “Pentagon and the national security advisers are still mystified” by the repeated incursions.

Notably, the objects are impervious to electronic jamming efforts, indicating that they are not off-the-shelf hobbyist drones.

On their face, these incidents pose an alarming intelligence and espionage risk. In the most brazen incidents in recent years, the unknown craft displayed bright flashing lights as they hovered over sensitive facilities and assets.

Such conspicuous tactics are the opposite of basic intelligence collection tradecraft, which calls for stealth. Once exposed, any foreign surveillance operation is not only at risk of compromise, but of sparking a major geopolitical crisis.

Despite this, “dozens” of unknown, brightly illuminated objects hovered and flew with complete impunity over a critical Air Force base for 17 nights in 2023. Ditto for a series of audacious incursions over sensitive American military bases in the United Kingdom last year. In those incidents, witnesses reported dozens of brightly-lit craft “hovering” and exhibiting extreme performance characteristics while evading detection and multiple advanced counter-drone systems.

These enigmatic craft also demonstrate baffling flight dynamics that surpass any known technologies. For several months in 2019, for example, objects with bright flashing lights swarmed some of the Navy’s most advanced warships off the coast of southern California, often well over 100 miles offshore.

In the most detailed publicly available footage of one of these craft, the perplexed crew of the USS Omaha watched their infrared video display as a spherical object moved against strong winds before descending slowly into the ocean. The sphere was one of many “drones” tracked on radar swarming their ship that evening. Meanwhile, sailors positioned outside on the ship’s deck recorded multiple objects with bright flashing lights hovering and maneuvering around the Omaha.

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German Socialists Want to Use Citizen’s Own Money to Propagandize Them

The German socialists (SPD) are desperately seeking new ways to improve their standing after the electorate roundly rejected their political agenda—especially relating to mass migration—in the February elections.

An outright ban on the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) opposition is, of course, one option. Another is funnelling taxpayer cash into the coffers of media organisations that can be trusted to put a positive spin on the SPD’s flaws.

Such considerations appear now to have made their way into ongoing coalition talks, in which Friedrich Merz’s CDU has already proved happy to ‘cede ground’ further to the left.

Die Stimme Berlins reports that the SPD is calling for a new “media innovation fund” which would provide state support to what the paper described as “reliable” and “trustworthy” publications. That is, reliable and trustworthy according to the state.

AfD Bundestag member Götz Frömming said this, in effect, would mean papers that are “loyal to the [governing] party line,” while journalist Henning Rosenbusch added that ‘reliable’ translated in this case to “preemptively obedient government propaganda.”

Reports also note that the fund would be intended to support these selected media companies while they improve their digital arms—which, of course, is where influencing can today take place most effectively—as well as to combat ‘disinformation.’

This closely follows a slew of criticism surrounding accusations that the main U.S. aid agency’s (USAID) funds were used to deliver particular political outcomes in Europe, as well as calls by leftist Brussels officials for taxpayers to fund, effectively, pro-European Union propaganda.

Apollo News claims that the SPD demand is currently being met with “displeasure” from CDU negotiators. But with Merz, the chancellor-in-waiting, hoping to forge a coalition by April 20th, it is not at all difficult to imagine the ‘conservatives’ backing down.

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Trump DOJ Invokes State Secrets Privilege, Tells Judge Boasberg it will Provide Him No More Info on Deportation Flights

The Trump DOJ said it is exercising the State Secrets Privilege and informed Judge James Boasberg it will no longer provide him with any information related to deportation flights.

Boasberg, an Obama appointee, has been grilling DOJ lawyers about the Trump Administration’s move to deport dangerous Venezuelan aliens under the Alien Enemies Act.

Judge Boasberg said Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to deport criminal aliens is “incredibly troublesome and problematic” and threatened the Trump Admin with consequences if they violate his order in the future.

On Monday evening, the DOJ had enough of Judge Boasberg’s intrusive orders and invoked the State Secrets Privilege.

“The Executive Branch hereby notifies the Court that no further information will be provided in response to the Court’s March 18, 2025 Minute Order based on the state secrets privilege and the concurrently filed declarations of the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security,” the DOJ wrote.

US Attorney General Pam Bondi told the judge that President Trump has plenary authority under Article II to remove from the homeland designated terrorists.

“This is a case about the President’s plenary authority, derived from Article II and the mandate of the electorate, and reinforced by longstanding statute, to remove from the homeland designated terrorists participating in a state-sponsored invasion of, and predatory incursion into, the United States. The Court has all of the facts it needs to address the compliance issues before it. Further intrusions on the Executive Branch would present dangerous and wholly unwarranted separation-of-powers harms with respect to diplomatic and national security concerns that the Court lacks competence to address,” the DOJ said.

The DOJ straight up told Boasberg you will get no more information related to the deportation flights and that’s the end of the story.

“No more information is needed to resolve any legal issue in this case. Whether the planes carried one TdA terrorist or a thousand or whether the planes made one stop or ten simply has no bearing on any relevant legal issue. The need for additional information here is not merely “dubious,” or “trivial,” it is non-existent. The Executive Branch violated no valid order through its actions, and the Court has all it needs to evaluate compliance. Accordingly, the Court’s factual inquiry should end,” the DOJ said.

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California and Its Collapsing Blue-State Democrat Model

While the media and the new Democrat Party grow hysterical over the Trump counter-revolution, they are missing some of the most revolutionary and insidious changes in American society of the last century.

Much has been written about the collapse of the old orthodox Democratic Party, along with the growing irrelevance and dysfunction of the legacy media, elite universities, and state and federal agencies. But their growing unattractiveness is all related and was not just the result of top-down development.

Rather, current Democrat Party radicalism, street theater, and violence were merely reflections of its own preexisting cultural antipathy toward the middle class. The party is now a pyramidal coalition of the very wealthy and professional classes comprising the capstone, resting atop a vast, expanding bottom of the subsidized and working poor, strapped pensioners and retirees, angry indebted students, 30s-something urban wannabees, impoverished immigrants—including perhaps 30 million here illegally—and, increasingly, trapped residents of a dystopian big-city America.

The collapse of the blue-state/blue-city model and those who work within and promote it reflects the radical environmentalism of the college-educated, as well as an array of high taxes, high crime, endless government regulations, housing shortages, massive homelessness, illegal immigration, critical-legal-theory prosecutors, ethnic and racial chauvinism, defund-the-police city councils, and, most importantly, chronic budget deficits and vast, unfunded pension liabilities and obligations.

In response to this progressive implosion that accounts for Democrat Party unpopularity, under the radar are historic demographic shifts. They reflect two insidious phenomena.

One, the blue-state, urban/professional/college-educated profile has become antithetical to fertility.

No one knows exactly the contributory relative roles to childlessness played by the progressive embrace of abortion on demand or secularism and atheism. Certainly, the fixations on higher education certification, massive student loan debt, years of student limbo, prohibitive housing prices, and a cultural value system that places status, titles, careers, and degrees over children all further promote a declining birthrate.

But in the end, the cause of asymmetrical fertility does not matter: red-state, traditional populations are simply growing, while blue-state fertility remains stagnant.

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