If passed, the new legislation will grant the U.S. government sweeping powers to crack down on any technologies and services it sees as a threat. Remarkably, that includes VPN technology.

Those opposing the bill say it will give the state the power to police the entire internet and any platforms on it. Furthermore, some referred to it as the “Chinafication of America.”

The legislation is frighteningly similar to that in China, which has some of the world’s harshest internet censorship.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told Congress on Wednesday that the US should be targeting Iran’s Quds Force, a branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), following a drone attack in Syria that killed a US contractor.

“We do know that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard [Corps], and specifically their Quds Force … that group there is what we need to be targeting, and targeting them very harshly over time, and that’s exactly what we plan on doing,” Milley said, according to Al-Monitor.

The Pentagon said the drone that hit a US base in Syria last week was of “Iranian origin” but provided no evidence for the claim. President Biden ordered airstrikes against facilities the Pentagon said were used by groups affiliated with the IRGC, referring to Shia militias that operate in Syria.

Turkey’s parliament voted unanimously to formally approve Finland’s membership to NATO on Thursday, marking a historic step for the traditionally nonaligned Nordic country that shares an 830-mile border with Russia.

The vote follows a months-long saga that saw Turkey demand certain concessions from Finland and its neighbor Sweden, both of whom applied to NATO in May 2022 in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Joining NATO requires unanimous approval from all member states. Ankara’s vote late on Thursday marked Finland’s clearing of its final hurdle in the accession process.

Avi Silverberg, the head coach for Team Canada Powerlifting, reached his limit with the nonsense going on today and entered a woman’s weightlifting competition in Canada to make his point.

He set and set a new record easily passing the previous mark that was held by a trans lifter. Silverberg, beard and all, entered Saturday’s Heroes Classic tournament in Lethbridge, Alberta, after identifying as a female.

He easily bench-pressed nearly 370 pounds and beat the current Alberta women’s record by almost 100 pounds. The old record was 275 pounds. It was held by trans athlete Anne Andres.

CONS Women, a network of women athletes & our supporters advocating for female protected categories in sport, posted the video of the event that quickly went viral.

GOP Senator from Missouri Eric Schmitt blew the whistle on President Joe Biden and his team’s scandalous behavior. Schmitt said:

“Biden and his team colluded with social media to censor truthful info on a scale never before seen. The FBI planted false info to deceive social media into censoring Hunter Biden’s laptop. FBI had a 50% success rate in getting info censored.” 

The Attorney General of Louisiana Jeff Landry said: “As a result of collusion between social media companies, CDC and NIH, American citizens, scientists, and journalists were censored & de-platformed for their valid concerns about lockdowns, masks, and vaccines while deceitful voices like Fauci were elevated.”

Former President Donald Trump fired back after the news broke of his indictment Thursday in New York City. Trump slammed the move calling it political persecution at the high levels before calling Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg a disgrace.

Trump said: “The Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen in their obsession with trying to ‘Get Trump,’ but now they’ve done the unthinkable – indicting a completely innocent person in an act of blatant Election Interference.

“Never before in our Nation’s history has this been done. The Democrats have cheated countless times over the decades, including spying on my campaign, but weaponizing our justice system to punish a political opponent, who just so happens to be a President of the United States and by far the leading Republican candidate for President, has never happened before. Ever.

The federal government has lost at least $276 billion in taxpayer money that was designated as “COVID-19 relief funding,” according to the estimates of inspectors general.

The funds were lost due to “fraud” and “waste,” according to cumulative estimates from the inspectors general of the Labor Department, Treasury Department, and Small Business Administration (SBA).

The revelation was revealed during recent testimony before a House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee in Washington, D.C.

Larry Turner, inspector general for the Labor Department, estimated that $76 billion slated for “unemployment insurance” was deployed via fraudulent claims.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis responded to former President Donald Trump’s indictment by telling Alvin Bragg to pound sand. DeSantis said:

“The weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda turns the rule of law on its head. It is un-American. The Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct. 

“Yet, now he is stretching the law to target a political opponent. Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue with this Soros-backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda.”

Israeli and Jordan officials agreed to ban sit-ins at the Al-Aqsa compound during the holy month of Ramadan at last month's Aqaba summit, according to anonymous sources who spoke to the Arabi21 news website.

The two countries reportedly agreed to restrict time spent by worshippers at Al-Aqsa during February's US-brokered Aqaba summit, which was roundly criticised at the time for failing to put meaningful pressure on Israel as it carried out deadly attacks in the occupied West Bank.

Israel's government is "on a rampage" against human rights, the new head of Human Rights Watch said on Thursday and urged the United States and other allies to do more to hold it accountable for alleged abuses and persuade it to change course.

A planned overhaul of the judiciary by Israel's religious-nationalist government would be "a disaster" for human rights, HRW Executive Director Tirana Hassan told Reuters.

She called on Washington to follow through after it issued a rare reproach over the move.

U.S. forces have trained more than 7,000 Ukrainian troops since Russia first attacked the country last year, the Pentagon’s top spokesperson said Thursday. 

Among those soldiers were 65 Ukrainians who completed training on the Patriot air defense system at Fort Sill, Okla., and returned to Europe this week, press secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder told reporters.   

Israel for the first time sent F-35I Adir fighter jets to the American-led Red Flag exercise in Nevada, which ran March 12-24.

The training comes amid tension between Israel and Iran as well as the former’s procurement of KC-46A tanker aircraft. The U.S. and Israel have engaged in several recent high profile joint drills, including Juniper Oak, which began in late January. Israel called that event the largest-ever U.S.-Israel drill.

The soon-to-be-formed Israeli 'national guard' is a "new tool for settlers' violence" Palestinian observers said in reaction to the deal struck between Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and Israel's security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, that will allow the formation of the new force.

According to the deal, Ben-Gvir will withdraw his opposition to Netanyahu's judicial reforms which provoked widespread protests in Israel. In exchange, Netanyahu's government will approve the formation of the 'national guard' force under the control of the security ministry, thus under the personal control of Ben-Gvir.

REP. RASHIDA TLAIB, D-Mich., is circulating a letter among her House colleagues that calls on the Department of Justice to drop charges against Julian Assange and end its effort to extradite him from his detention in Belmarsh prison in the United Kingdom.

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Intercept, is still in the signature-gathering phase and has yet to be sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The Justice Department has charged Assange, the publisher of WikiLeaks, for publishing classified information. The Obama administration had previously decided not to prosecute Assange, concerned with what was dubbed internally as the “New York Times problem.” The Times had partnered with Assange when it came to publishing classified information and itself routinely publishes classified information. Publishing classified information is a violation of the Espionage Act, though it has never been challenged in the Supreme Court, and constitutional experts broadly consider that element of the law to be unconstitutional.

In a quest to maintain its hegemony in a unipolar world, American foreign policy strategy has sought to weaken a Russia that it sees as an “acute threat” and to confront and contain a China that it sees as “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security.”

The immediate challenge is Russia, the theory goes, but the long-term challenge is China. It is not strategically optimal to fight both superpowers at once. Russia has to be weakened so China can be confronted in its challenge to the U.S.-led unipolar world.

The attempt to weaken Russia in the war in Ukraine, though, may be having the ironic effect of strengthening China’s role in an emerging multipolar world.

Lebanon has no alternative for economic recovery but to make progress on a deal with the International Monetary Fund, a senior U.S. official said on Thursday.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf visited Lebanon, which is suffering one of the world's worst financial meltdowns, according to the World Bank, on a regional trip earlier this month.

Beirut signed a staff-level agreement with the IMF in April 2022 but its progress towards financial reforms required to unlock $3 billion in funding has been "very slow", according to the lender of last resort.

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency plans to upgrade its international intelligence-sharing system to allow more seamless collaboration with a broader coalition of allies.

DIA uses the top-secret system to communicate with and share intelligence among the U.S. and its Five Eyes partners — the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Chief Information Officer Doug Cossa told reporters the agency will begin designing an upgrade to Stone Ghost in fiscal 2024 to allow information to be shared with more countries as needed.

Webmaster addition:

The U.S. Air Force isn’t going to buy the hypersonic AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon after the prototyping phase ends, following problems during testing, the service’s acquisition chief told lawmakers Wednesday.

But the service will still finish the ARRW program’s last two all-up round test flights to collect data to help with future hypersonic programs, Andrew Hunter told the House Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee in written testimony.

“This started from a trip my daughter and I had and we stopped by McDonald’s and this lady [who was] going to a pro-abortion march asked my daughter to join her because she saw she was black, and she thought she was a liberal Democrat,” Vince Everett Ellison recalls. “And my daughter very, very nicely said, ‘Uh, ma’am, I’m a Christian and I vote my values.’”

“And that was just so interesting to me because I said, why don’t more people say that? ‘I’m a Christian and I vote my values?’”

Fear? The fear of being shouted at. The fear of being ostracized. The fear of being canceled, and losing one’s career, friends, and social standing. The siren song of the woke herd mentality can be enticing. But not to the Ellison family.

Three predictable themes surfaced. 

The first was led by none other than Joe Biden. He lectured that guns were the cause of the mass deaths, not the free will of a psychopathic killer. 

Few noted that the shooter illegally purchased firearms by hiding her documented record of emotional disorders. 

Second, America was told that it would serve no purpose to publish the shooter’s manifesto. Apparently, this exception to the usual practice was due to fears her manifesto would hurt the transgender cause. 

Third, some in the activist media claimed that, while such murdering was regrettable, it was also understandable—given supposed Christian, conservative America’s intolerance of the transgendered. In our sick society, the targeted victims became the political victimizers.

Donald Trump has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury after a probe into hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, becoming the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges even as he makes another run for the White House, the New York Times reported on Thursday.

The charges, arising from an investigation led by Democratic Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, could reshape the 2024 presidential race. Trump previously said he would continue campaigning for the Republican Party's nomination if charged with a crime.

Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) is planning to host a family event featuring a drag story hour and a talk given by the director of a pediatric gender clinic who has previously claimed that children as young as three years old are able to “identify” as “transgender.” 

A “gender resource fair” is scheduled for Thursday, April 13, at Loring Elementary School. The Minneapolis school district advertises the event as “a gathering for families and their gender creative young ones.” 

Dr. Angela Kade Goepferd, director of the “gender health program” at Children’s Minnesota hospital, will be featured as a guest speaker pushing gender ideology and“transition” procedures for gender confusion on the parents in attendance. Meanwhile, their children will be exposed to a drag queen story hour. 

A court in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore has struck down a colonial-era sedition law, calling it “inconsistent” with the constitution, in a verdict hailed by free speech advocates and journalists.

A single-judge bench of the Lahore High Court on Thursday declared the sedition law unconstitutional. The court’s verdict will be applicable across the country unless the Supreme Court overturns the high court’s decision.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) on Friday filed a class action lawsuit against President Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top administration officials and federal agencies, alleging they “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.

Kennedy, CHD and Connie Sampognaro filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, Monroe Division, on behalf of all the more than 80% of Americans who access news from online news aggregators and social media companies, principally Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

The plaintiffs allege top-ranking government officials, along with an “ever-growing army of federal officers, at every level of the government” from the White House to the FBI, the CIA and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to lesser-well-known federal agencies induced those companies:

“to stifle viewpoints that the government disfavors, to suppress facts that the government does not want the public to hear, and to silence specific speakers — in every case critics of federal policy — whom the government has targeted by name.”

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Friday called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine and for talks to start on a lasting peace settlement.

In a scheduled address to the nation, Lukashenko said there should be no preconditions for a ceasefire. He warned Ukraine against launching an anticipated counter-offensive, saying it would make negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv impossible.

The Kremlin said on Friday that it had noted a call by Lukashenko for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine and would discuss it with him, but that it could not at the moment achieve the goals of its "special military operation" in this way.

 For the first time in years, India's splintered opposition is sinking its differences to take on strongman Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which could extend to a substantial challenge in national elections due in 2024. That is if the disparate groups can stay united, which is far from certain.

  Since Modi came to power in 2014, he has dominated Indian politics, and trounced the opposition in two successive general elections. But his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party does not get a majority of the vote and could be in trouble if it comes up against a united opposition.

The opposition has come together after this month's conviction of opposition leader Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party on a charge of defamation and his disqualification from parliament.

Joanne Segovia, the police union director for San Jose Police Officers' Association (SJPOA), has been charged with illegally importing Fentanyl into the U.S., as reported by the Washington Examiner.

Ismail Ramsey, United States Attorney, and Charge Tatum King, Homeland Security Special Agent, announced the federal complaint against Segovia on Wednesday. The complaint alleges that she used her office at the SJPOA to distribute controlled substances and sent herself shipments from various countries, including Hong Kong, India, and Singapore, all labeled as “Wedding Party Favors,” “Chocolate and Sweets,” and “Gift Makeup.”

I have served on or chaired two dozen data safety monitoring boards for randomized trials of novel experimental drugs or devices. I can tell you first hand that for COVID-19 vaccines, a 30 day regulatory window after injection is fair game for attribution of health events to the product when the adverse events of interest are known to be caused by the mRNA induced Wuhan Spike protein.

Jabagi et al, NEJM, reported from the French National Health Data System linked to the national COVID-19 vaccination database disclosing cardiovascular events after mRNA BA4/BA5 bivalent boosters. All persons who were 50 years of age or older and who had received a booster dose between October 6 and November 9, 2022, were included in the study. The composite of ischemic/hemorrhagic stroke, myocardial infarction, or pulmonary occurred in 335 unfortunate individuals. The authors make the mistake of dividing by the cases by the entire number vaccinated and comparing rates to monovalent boosters. Neither of these operations are valid since there is incomplete capture of events and comparison was not made to a placebo or control group.

Ron DeSantis, a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is set to visit Israel in April despite widespread condemnation of Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial judicial overhaul.