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Majority Of North Carolina Trucking Licenses Issued To Foreigners Are Illegal: Duffy

A review of non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) granted in North Carolina found that 54 percent were issued illegally, the Department of Transportation (DOT) said in a statement on Jan. 8.

The review was conducted by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and is part of its ongoing nationwide audit of trucking licensing systems, the department said.

DOT warned that if North Carolina does not “fix their serious failures” and revoke licenses issued illegally to foreign nationals, the department will withhold almost $50 million in federal funding.

“North Carolina’s failure to follow the rules isn’t just shameful—it’s dangerous. I’m calling on state leadership to immediately remove these dangerous drivers from our roads and clean up their system,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said.

According to audit findings, North Carolina illegally issued non-domiciled CDLs to drivers whose lawful presence in the United States had expired, and some of those drivers were found to be ineligible to hold a non-domiciled commercial license.

FMCSA sent a letter to North Carolina Department of Transportation Commissioner Paul Tine and Gov. Josh Stein, outlining audit results and the corrective actions that must be taken to prevent funding from being withheld.

The agency asked North Carolina authorities to “immediately” pause the issuance of non-domiciled CDLs, identify unexpired CDLs that fail to comply with FMCSA regulations, and conduct a comprehensive internal audit to identify errors, practices, quality assurance, and other issues that led to such CDLs being granted.

“The level of noncompliance in North Carolina is egregious,” FMCSA Administrator Derek D. Barrs said. “Under Secretary Duffy, we will not hesitate to hold states accountable and protect the American people.”

The Epoch Times reached out to the North Carolina Department of Transportation and Stein’s office for comment, but did not receive a response by publication time.

North Carolina is one of the latest states the DOT has warned regarding the illegal issuance of CDLs to foreign nationals.

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AI Shows Symptoms of Anxiety, Trauma, PTSD – And It’s Ruining Your Mental Health Too

Grok, Gemini and ChatGPT exhibit symptoms of poor mental health according to a new study that put various AI models through weeks of therapy-style questioning. Some are now curious about “AI mental health”, but the real warning here is about how unstable these systems – which are already being used by one in three UK adults for mental health support – become in emotionally charged conversations. Millions of people are turning to AI as replacement therapists, and in the last year alone we’ve seen a spike in lawsuits connecting chatbot interactions with self-harm and suicide cases in vulnerable users.

The emerging picture is not that machines are suffering or mentally unwell, but that a product being used for mental-health support is fundamentally misleading, escalating, and reinforcing dangerous thoughts. 

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Red-Washing: How the media sanitizes a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary as a ‘preschool teacher’

When police in Michigan arrested Jessica Plichta live on air as she finished a TV news interview supporting Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, she became an instant protest hero, seen as a victim of the heavy hand of law enforcement.

The 22-year-old from Grand Rapids was widely described in media reports as a “preschool teacher,” an “anti-war activist” and protest “organizer.” And while those descriptions are not wrong, they were hardly comprehensive. A Fox News Digital investigation reveals they are part of a pattern in the media in which the radical ties of leftist agitators are ignored, depriving readers of a deeper and more accurate picture of their sinister goals.

“Preschool Teacher, 22, Arrested on TV After Condemning Trump,” blared a headline in The Daily Beast, above an article that noted cynically, “Welcome to America.” The UK-based Guardian published an article framing her as a progressive “anti-war” activist. And Democracy Now, an anti-Trump platform, lamented, “Grand Rapids Police Arrest Protest Antiwar Organizer After She Condemns Trump.”

Few outlets reported that Plichta is a dedicated revolutionary in the radical Freedom Road Socialist Organization, a self-described Marxist-Leninist “organization of revolutionaries fighting for socialism in the United States.” The FBI in 2010 investigated the group for alleged ties to terrorist groups, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. It is part of a sprawling network of Marxist-Leninist groups funded by a China-backed billionaire and committed to sowing chaos on American streets, using issues from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Elon Musk and President Donald Trump to fan the flames of discord.

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Antifa TikTok Agitator Urges Armed Leftist Militias to ‘Fight’ ICE Agents

Radical TikTok agitator Danesh Noshirvan has crossed a dangerous line.

The Antifa-aligned mega influencer is now openly calling for organized, armed left-wing militias to confront ICE agents and federal law enforcement in America’s largest cities.

Framing ICE as “Trump’s racist army,” Noshirvan urges followers to physically block agents and force them out of communities. The rhetoric is not abstract. It is operational. It is coordinated.

And it comes from a figure already tied to dark-money networks, digital harassment mobs, perjury, and federal sanctions.

This is not protest. It is incitement—packaged as “accountability,” powered by bots, and aimed at igniting street-level conflict.

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Democrats Demand Apple and Google Ban X From App Stores

Apple and Google are under mounting political pressure from Democrats over X’s AI chatbot, Grok, after lawmakers accused the platform of producing images of women and allegedly minors in bikinis.

While the outrage targets X specifically, the ability to generate such material is not unique to one platform. Similar image manipulation and synthetic content creation can be found across nearly every major AI system available today.

Yet, the letter sent to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai by Senators Ron Wyden, Ben Ray Luján, and Ed Markey only asked the tech giants only about X and demanded that the companies remove X from their app stores entirely.

X is used by around 557 million users.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

The lawmakers wrote that “X’s generation of these harmful and likely illegal depictions of women and children has shown complete disregard for your stores’ distribution terms.”

They pointed to Google’s developer rules, which prohibit apps that facilitate “the exploitation or abuse of children,” and Apple’s policy against apps that are “offensive” or “just plain creepy.”

Ignoring the First Amendment completely, “Apple and Google must remove these apps from the app stores until X’s policy violations are addressed,” the letter states.

Dozens of generative systems, including open-source image models that can’t be controlled or limited by anyone, can produce the same kinds of bikini images with minimal prompting.

The senators cited prior examples of Apple and Google removing apps such as ICEBlock and Red Dot under government pressure.

“Unlike Grok’s sickening content generation, these apps were not creating or hosting harmful or illegal content, and yet, based entirely on the Administration’s claims that they posed a risk to immigration enforcers, you removed them from your stores,” the letter stated.

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Renee Good’s Minnesota ‘ICE Watch’ group shared manual detailing how to fight arrests, launch ‘a micro-intifada’

The Minnesota ICE Watch group of which slain Minneapolis protester Renee Good was a member shared a detailed manual providing instructions on fighting police officers to free arrested radicals from their grasp, comparing each “de-arrest” to a “micro-intifada.”

The “de-arrest primer” manual was reposted on Instagram in June by MN ICE Watch, part of a loose collective of agitators who teach members how to disrupt law enforcement officers performing their duties, including ICE agents.

Neighbors have told The Post that Renee Good had regularly attended meetings with the local chapter and had received “thorough training” from the group.

The manual — which says on the front cover it was published in the spring of 2024 — outlines four tactics for interfering with arresting officers, such as the best kind of grip to use while yanking someone in custody out of their hands, or even suggestions on “pushing and pulling an officer” off of an arrestee.

“Technically speaking for pushing off form you should have a low center of gravity and a wide base and push up explosive power with your head up at all times if possible,” the instruction guide reads.

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Quantum cameras could remake space-based intelligence

Can quantum physics enable better, cheaper, faster satellite photos? In a month or two, a startup will test a “quantum camera” aboard an orbital telescope. If it works, it could slash the cost of missile defenses and give smaller NATO allies and partners spy-satellite capabilities that were once exclusive to major powers.

Funded in part by NASA and DARPA, the Boston-based Diffraqtion is testing a radically different way to make images from photons.

You might think that the cameras on the world’s most expensive satellites are fundamentally different from what your grandfather used to take old movies. But whether using chemicals and paper or chargeable transistors on a circuit, the process of deriving images from the behavior of photons has changed little in more than a century. That is one reason why space-based image collection—especially at high resolution—is incredibly expensive.

It’s also why Johannes Galatsanos, Diffraqtion’s co-founder and CEO, uses the term “quantum camera” rather than “photography.”

“You basically have light coming through a lens; it hits a sensor, and then that sensor takes a JPEG, an image, and then you can view it… or you can run AI on top, right, and detect things,” Galatsanos said. “Whether in space with high-resolution digital cameras or old-fashioned pinhole cameras, that process hasn’t [changed].”

That traditional method limits what can effectively be photographed based on diffraction, the process by which light beams pass through an aperture. It’s also a reason why high-resolution imaging satellites, like the WorldView-3, are large and heavy: like a telescope, they are mostly glass lenses and empty space. This is a reason why launches cost an average of about $50 million per satellite, and why why only a few countries have access to high-resolution satellite imagery.

Quantum science opens the possibility of collecting images using sensors that don’t require the same dense, heavy components. One of Diffraqtion’s cameras is the size of a small suitcase, launchable for just half a million dollars..

That just might be the key to shooting down highly maneuverable hypersonic missiles, as envisioned by the White House’s Golden Dome effort. The method proposed by Diffraqtion might lower the cost of the imaging systems on space-based interceptors, or even reduce the number needed to do the job.

“You have more area coverage, you can look at more targets at the same time, and so on,” said Galatsanos.

The idea effectively reverses the process of deriving an image from photonic data. But in quantum science, the simple act of observing quantum behaviors changes them. That’s useful for things like quantum encryption because it means that the message changes—obviously so—when intercepted. But it is also what makes quantum “photography” impossible.

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Trump orders plan to invade Greenland – media

US President Donald Trump has ordered his senior commanders to draw up a plan for a potential invasion of Greenland – a move that could potentially lead to a complete collapse of NATO, the Daily Mail reported on Saturday, citing sources.

The US president has long sought to take control of Greenland, an autonomous territory under Danish sovereignty, citing security concerns and the need to deter Russia and China, while not ruling out a military option to capture the island. This stance has put him at loggerheads with the European members of NATO, which have rallied behind Denmark.

According to the Daily Mail, Trump asked the Joint Special Operations Command to prepare invasion plans, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff are pushing back, arguing that the move would be illegal and lack congressional support. One source told the paper that senior generals “have tried to distract Trump by talking about less controversial measures,” such as a “strike on Iran.”

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California to Keep Bird Broiling Solar Plant in Operation

I was in Las Vegas with my family the week before Christmas. On the drive back to California we passed a solar generation site called Ivanpah. If you haven’t seen this before it’s pretty striking in person. Instead of using photo-voltaic cells, the site has three towers surrounded by mirrors. The mirrors focus light and heat on the towers which use the concetrated heat to turn turbines.

The site was built with funds from several major companies including Google and a federal loan guarantee of $1.6 billion dollars. When this site opened in 2014, it was considered a step into the future of solar energy, but that quickly changed for several reasons. First, the site never produced as much power as was promised. Second, the cost of PV solar panels dropped dramatically to the point that rate-payers were paying a lot more for Ivanpah’s solar energy than they would be if the site were just full of regular solar panels. And thirdly, the site had some environmental problems including interfering with local tortoises and killing as many as 6,000 birds a year.

A macabre fireworks show unfolds each day along I-15 west of Las Vegas, as birds fly into concentrated beams of sunlight and are instantly incinerated, leaving wisps of white smoke against the blue desert sky.

Workers at the Ivanpah Solar Plant have a name for the spectacle: “Streamers.”

And the image-conscious owners of the 390-megawatt plant say they are trying everything they can think of to stop the slaughter.

Federal biologists say about 6,000 birds die from collisions or immolation annually while chasing flying insects around the facility’s three 40-story towers, which catch sunlight from five square miles of garage-door-size mirrors to drive the plant’s power-producing turbines.

For all of these reasons, both the Biden administration and the Trump administration agreed the state should shut down Ivanpah. Here’s a video Reason made about it last April.

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Australians Sound Alarm Over New Draconian “Hate” Bill

The Australian government has released a draft of what it describes as its most far-reaching federal hate speech legislation, a proposal that significantly expands criminal penalties for speech and grants sweeping new powers to the executive, raising alarms among free speech advocates and legal observers.

The legislation, titled the Combating Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026, was drafted following the December 2025 terrorist attack at Bondi Beach that left 15 people dead. The bill builds on hate crime amendments passed in 2025 and is now before the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS).

Attorney General Michelle Rowland said the Jewish community was closely consulted for the structuring of the hate speech legislation following the Bondi attack, which she later described as the “toughest hate laws Australia has ever seen.”

Under the proposed law, Australians could face up to five years in prison for publicly promoting or inciting “hatred” based on race or nationality if a “reasonable person” might feel intimidated, harassed, or fearful. The offence does not require proof of actual harm, intent to cause violence, or even that a complaint be made.

The bill defines “public place” to include the internet, placing social media posts, videos, blogs, memes, and online commentary squarely within the scope of criminal enforcement.

In effect, critics argue, the legislation lowers the threshold for criminal liability to subjective emotional response, rather than demonstrable harm.

The draft law also introduces a new framework for banning “prohibited hate groups,” granting ministers broad discretion to outlaw organisations without traditional procedural safeguards. Membership alone could carry prison sentences of up to seven years, while supporting, recruiting for, training, or funding a prohibited group could attract penalties of up to 15 years.

Notably, the legislation allows groups to be banned based on conduct that occurred before the laws existed, including actions carried out overseas. Legal analysts have described the retrospective elements as a significant departure from established legal norms.

Ahead of the bill’s release, the National Socialist Network announced it was disbanding. In a statement posted on Telegram, the group said it was shutting down in anticipation of legislation that would allow the government to ban organisations retroactively for acts such as Nazi salutes. The group described the proposed laws as “some of the most draconian the West has ever seen.”

While framed as a response to antisemitism and violent extremism, the bill makes no explicit reference to Islam or Islamist ideology. Instead, it includes broad religious exemptions. One clause states that hate speech provisions do not apply to conduct that consists only of directly quoting or referencing a religious text for the purpose of religious teaching or discussion.

Free speech groups argue this exemption could shield extremist preaching so long as it is framed as religious instruction.

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