The White House and House Republicans wrapped up another round of debt ceiling talks Sunday as Washington races to strike a budget compromise along with a deal to raise the nation's borrowing limit and avert an economy-wrecking federal default.

President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy spoke by phone Sunday while the president was returning home on Air Force One after the Group of Seven summit in Japan. They plan to meet Monday at the White House.

“It went well, we’ll talk tomorrow,” Biden said of the phone call as he arrived back in Washington late in the evening.

Upbeat, McCarthy, R-Calif., told reporters at the Capitol that the call was “productive" and that the on-again, off-again negotiations between his staff and White House representatives are focused on spending cuts.

A prominent civil rights attorney deleted his viral tweet that attacked a female New York City hospital worker hours after her lawyer threatened defamation lawsuits in a Fox News segment against those who defamed her.

Ben Crump, who has been a lead attorney in several police brutality cases, tweeted a viral video with more than 4 million views of a verbal altercation between a pregnant New York City physician assistant and multiple young Black men before deleting it hours later after the segment aired and went viral on Twitter.

"This is unacceptable!" Crump captioned the tweet with the video. "A white woman was caught on camera attempting to STEAL a Citi Bike from a young Black man in NYC. She grossly tried to weaponize her tears to paint this man as a threat. This is EXACTLY the type of behavior that has endangered so many Black men in the past!"

There was no follow-up tweet with a correction or an apology.

House Republican negotiators declined an offer from the White House to freeze government spending in the 2024 budget as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The development underscores how far apart the two sides are on the fundamentals of a deal.

An organization called America First Legal has filed at least two dozen lawsuits against the Biden administration.

“We need to fight for the American people, advance conservative principles, and be there to really make a difference,” Gene Hamilton, vice president and general counsel for America First Legal, says.  

Hamilton served as counselor to the attorney general at the Justice Department during the Trump administration and he recalls growing weary of various leftist groups filing lawsuits to block President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“It’s a little bit of an exaggeration … ,” Hamilton says, “but it’s almost close to the truth that every time we’d have a press conference, there would be some organization that would file a lawsuit representing somebody to get us enjoined before we could even get done with the press conference to get things off the ground.” 

Fox News employees are allowed to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity, rather than their biological sex, and permitted to dress in alignment with their preferred gender. They must also be addressed by their preferred name and pronouns in the workplace. 

These are just a few of the policies outlined in the company handbook, dated January 2021, a copy of which was shared with The Daily Signal. Fox also offers to help employees come up with a “Workplace Transition Plan” to ease their gender transition at work. 

The revelations comes amid conservative consternation at Fox Digital’s use of activist language like “gender affirming care” in stories on its website, as well as the site’s consistent use of female pronouns for biological males like TikTok celebrity Dylan Mulvaney and swimmer Lia Thomas (formerly known as Will Thomas).

Fox also drew strong backlash for a June 2022 on-air segment praising a child’s gender transition as an “inspiration to others.” That segment quoted California state Sen. Scott Weiner, a far-left Democrat who led the move to soften sex offender registry requirements for sodomy with minors, and highlighted the activist claim that a child might commit suicide if he or she is not permitted to transition.

No human being is illegal, Democratic politicians said. All migrants are welcome, they declared. Then Joe Biden became president, and border crossings spiked to record highs.

Now, many of those same Democrats are declaring they can't possibly accept any more migrants. In some cases, they're embracing the same Republican-favored responses they recently decried as racist and cruel.

President Joe Biden in December began working to replenish the 180 million barrels he sold last year from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Nearly six months later, he still has zero barrels to show for it.

Biden's Energy Department on Monday announced its intention to purchase up to three million reserve barrels as a "continuation" of the president's "replenishment strategy." So far, however, that "strategy" has seen the Democrat fail to purchase a single barrel of reserve oil. The administration first tried to purchase three million reserve barrels in December, when Biden kicked off his "plan to replenish the SPR." One month later, Biden's Energy Department revealed it had rejected all offers it received to purchase the oil because those offers "were either too expensive or didn't meet the required specifications."

Republicans have hammered Biden for his management of the reserves, which sit at their lowest levels in four decades after the Democrat last year sold 180 million reserve barrels in an attempt to lower gas prices ahead of a difficult midterm election. While Biden responded by pledging to "refill" the reserves with oil his administration would purchase this year, the Democrat has so far made no progress. If Biden's Energy Department does manage to fulfill its recently announced purchase plan, the oil would be delivered to the reserves in August, meaning Biden would have secured just three million reserve barrels in eight months. At that pace, it would take the Democrat 40 years to procure the 180 million barrels he sold.

Despite progress in reducing nuclear weapon arsenals since the Cold War, the world’s combined inventory of nuclear warheads remains at a very high level: nine countries possessed roughly 12,500 warheads as of early-2023.

Combined, the United States and Russia now possess approximately 89 percent of the world’s total inventory of nuclear weapons, and 86 percent of the stockpiled warheads available for use by the military. Currently, no other nuclear-armed state sees a need for more than a few hundred nuclear weapons for national security, although many of these states are increasing their nuclear stockpiles.

Globally, the overall inventory of nuclear weapons is declining, but the pace of reductions is slowing compared with the past 30 years. Moreover, these reductions are happening only because the United States and Russia are still dismantling previously retired warheads.

A California teacher has been accused of raping a 16-year-old male student. Detectives believe that the former "teacher of the year" may have sexually assaulted other victims.

Tracy Vanderhulst was arrested on Thursday night on suspicion of having unlawful sexual intercourse with a 16-year-old male student, according to a news release from the Yucaipa Police Department. Vanderhulst was charged with statutory rape.

Vanderhulst was booked into Central Detention Center in San Bernardino, and her bail was set at $30,000.

A bombshell report claims that Jeffrey Epstein appeared to threaten Bill Gates over his alleged extramarital affair with a Russian bridge player.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Gates met Mila Antonova around 2010, when the Russian bridge player was in her 20s. At the time, Gates was in his mid-50s, and he was married to Melinda French Gates. Gates reportedly had an affair with the young Russian woman.

In 2013, Epstein met Antonova and paid for her to attend software coding school.

"In 2017, Epstein emailed Gates and asked to be reimbursed for the cost of the course, according to the people familiar with the matter," the Wall Street Journal reported. "The email came after the convicted sex offender had struggled and failed to convince Gates to participate in a multibillion-dollar charitable fund that Epstein tried to establish with JPMorgan Chase."

The news outlet claims that Epstein appeared to threaten to reveal Gates' affair with Antonova if the Microsoft co-founder "didn’t keep up an association between the two men."

Former deputy national security adviser under former President Donald Trump, K. T. McFarland, joined Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street on Friday to discuss the Durham Report and others.

In a stunning allegation, McFarland said that the FBI, Justice Department, and CIA are planning to rig the upcoming 2024 U.S. presidential election.

According to McFarland, these intelligence agencies, having succeeded in rigging the 2016 and 2020 elections, aim to prevent Donald Trump from winning.

“We now have black-and-white evidence that the FBI interfered in the 2016 election. When they failed to elect Hillary Clinton, they set out to destroy the Trump administration,” said McFarland.

Back in 2016, ahead of the presidential elections, the FBI suddenly dropped FOUR investigations into Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, according to the Durham report.

Target is already facing boycotts for selling "tuck-friendly" bathing suits and LGBTQ onesies for babies. Now it has been revealed that Target is selling LGBTQ Pride products from a designer that appears to promote violence, drug use, and Satanism.

Target sells three items by the brand Abprallen – a "We Belong Everywhere" messenger bag, a 'Too Queer For Here" messenger bag, and a "Cure Transphobia, Not Trans People" shirt. The LGBTQ items are available on the Target website and in its stores.

Target describes all the products as: "All items were designed for all bodies, regardless of gender identity and presentation. We added design features to help make the fit customizable for you. Our hope is for all guests to find clothing that makes them feel comfortable and affirmed in their identity. We understand that fit is incredibly important and will continue to evolve and improve on fit needs for the LGBTQIA+ Community."

Several vandals from a climate activist group called Ultima Generazione dyed the water in Rome's Trevi Fountain black Sunday before police hauled them away, multiple outlets reported.

"Enough of these absurd attacks on our artistic heritage," Rome's mayor Roberto Gualtieri tweeted, adding that restoration would be "expensive and complex."

He asked that activists stop putting monuments at risk.

Gualtieri praised the timely intervention of the local police, thanking them for ensuring the damage was kept to a minimum. The mayor said the vandalism would require wasting 300,000 liters of water.

The FBI repeatedly abused its search powers to query the names of over ten thousand Americans in a database of raw intelligence data, used to confirm suspicions of foreign ties, according to an opinion from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court released on Friday. 

Those unlawfully targeted for searches included over a dozen protesters thought to be involved in the January 6 Capitol riot, 133 protesters arrested in connection to the George Floyd riots, 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate, more than 400 defense contractors and holders of security clearances, and numerous persons-of-interest appearing in police homicide reports – including victims, next-of-kin, and witnesses. 

The court found the FBI had no factual basis to search the names in this particular database, a mammoth trove of information gathered under the controversial Section 702 provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expires this year. Section 702 gathers up emails, phone calls, text messages, and more. It is intended to target only foreign nationals located abroad thought to be acting as agents of a foreign power or terrorist organization. However, it has increasingly been misused as a backdoor to accessing Americans’ communications without a warrant.

The United States embassy in Khartoum has destroyed the passports of Sudanese and “other third country nationals” who were in the process of applying for visas and passports there. 

The move leaves those affected unable to leave Sudan, which has been in a state of turmoil since 15 April, when war broke out between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Alhaj Sharaf, a Sudanese software engineer, had been accepted into a master's degree programme in computer science at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. He was supposed to start courses on 2 May. 

In order to study in the US, Sharaf's passport had been submitted to the embassy in Khartoum for non-immigrant visa processing. The visa had already been issued when the fighting began, but the passport had not been returned. 

Shots puts an amusing spin on the little-known history of eugenics. It traces the genocidal, anti-ethnic eugenics movement which resulted in the sterilization and elimination of millions. It exposes how the wealthiest families financed the evolution of eugenics into Nazi Germany, and pushed America into perpetual wars. These families further influenced the government's elimination of financial liability for vaccine manufacturers while simulating run-ups to the 2020 pandemic. By that year the wealthiest had bought and controlled the media, and censored medical experts that criticized government actions. Shots illuminates how the government censored effective therapeutics, financially incentivized hospitals to adopt misleading reporting practices and deadly treatments, doubled global deaths with lockdowns, bankrupted small businesses, and allowed the most unsafe vaccines in a century.

Workers at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) lost security clearance for objecting to the use of the bureau to persecute the Biden administration’s political enemies, according to an interim report released this week by the House Judiciary Committee and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

Fox News reports that the House report says that was the fate suffered by former FBI Special Agent Steve Friend and staff operations specialist Marcus Allen. 

“The leadership at the FBI and Justice Department have weaponized federal law enforcement against everyday Americans, seeking to silence those who dare to have a different viewpoint,” the report says. “Meanwhile, whistleblower testimony highlights that the FBI’s partisan leadership is currently engaging in a ‘purge’ of agents who hold conservative beliefs.”

As LifeSiteNews previously covered, Friend was suspended last September for protesting excessive treatment of suspects accused only of nonviolent misdemeanors at the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, as well as the bureau’s alleged manipulation of information to give the public an inflated perception of the “threat” posed by right-wing “domestic violent extremism.”

A growing number of Republicans have been pushing to impeach President Joe Biden and some members of his administration, an issue that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has addressed.

According to Punchbowl News earlier this month, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, was making efforts to obtain records from the FBI. Comer said he believes that the records could potentially shed light on allegations suggesting that Biden may have received bribes from a foreign national in exchange for exerting influence over policy decisions while he served as Vice President under the Obama administration.

Comer’s basis for this allegation stems from information provided by an anonymous whistleblower; three FBI whistleblowers testified before the Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

Biden's national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, is making headlines.

As the investigation into the Biden regime continues, more details are coming to light, and they're unbelievably sketchy.

Jake Sullivan served with Hunter Biden on the Truman National Security Project board. This project is a liberal think tank that centers around foreign policy. Hunter began serving on the board in 2012.

Sullivan joined in 2017 and served until 2019. Before that, he served as Biden's national security advisor during the Obama era. During that period, he traveled with Hunter to various locations. One of which was China.

It’s quite literally the greatest threat to humanity this world has ever seen and it’s on a biblical scale. Dramatic? I think not.

A life of forced medical treatments, medical passports to buy food, goods and services, enter venues, attend church, school, work. Elimination of property ownership, small business, freedom of religion, sovereign governments…Sounds pretty biblical to me.

It’s something nobody on the planet would agree to of their own free will, so they needed a global crisis to usher it in. They needed the cancel-culture, division of race, religion, friendships, governments and suppression of love and intimacy. They needed to break us down.

From what I can gather, their plan is going swimmingly so far, wouldn’t you agree?

A proposed measure by Democrat Senator Michael Bennet would provide a new federal agency the authority to establish a council that would define “enforceable behavioral codes” for AI and social media platforms.

The council would also have “disinformation” specialists on its panel.

The legislation, which would establish a federal organization tasked with monitoring public discourse 24/7 in order to combat “hate speech” and “misinformation,” has been submitted in the Senate.

The Digital Platform Commission Act (DPCA) was proposed last week by the Colorado senator, with support from Peter Welch (D-Vt.). It would develop a de facto “Ministry of Truth” called the Federal Digital Platform Commission.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Internal Revenue Service doesn't have to notify bank account holders before requesting their records if efforts are geared toward collecting someone else's delinquent taxes.

The IRS is given broad authority under tax code Section 7609(c)(2)(D), which exempts the agency from giving notice when a summons is issued to help collect a tax assessment "against the person with respect to whose liability the summons is issued," according to the unanimous high court.

New NASA Cassini data shows that Saturn is not the world we once thought it was

It's clear the experience was powerful for them.

"As a gay child, being told you are an abomination and should be destroyed, warped a lot of my thinking. Finding The Satanic Temple has really helped me embrace logic and empathy."

The Satanic Temple is recognised as a religion by the US government, and has ministers and congregations in America, Europe and Australia.

More than 830 people snapped up tickets for its late April convention, dubbed SatanCon.

Members say they don't actually believe in a literal Lucifer or Hell. Instead, they say Satan is a metaphor for questioning authority, and grounding your beliefs in science. The sense of community around these shared values makes it a religion, they say.

A North Carolina pastor gave the perfect response when members of an Asheville school board tried to stop him from reading the sexually explicit text in one of the LGBT books the board has refused to take off school shelves.

Rev. John Amanchukwu appeared before the Asheville City School Board of EducationFo on Monday to raise the alarm over a book that the board has approved for school libraries in the district. But when he tried to read aloud some of the book's inappropriate content, the board quickly tried to shut him down.

During his time at the mic, the minister said he wanted to read out loud some of the text from the book entitled "It's Perfectly Normal," by Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley, which can be found on school bookshelves. Some editions of the book, first published in 1994 and frequently updated as leftist culture has grown, have little banners on the cover that says the book is "For age 10 and up."

Rev. Amanchukwu read some of the sexually explicit material in the book, but only got seconds into his reading before the members of the school board tried to stop him from voicing the explicit material.

"Was it something I said?" the pastor said, with a deadpan expression.

The gloves are off in the SCOTUS feud, with Elena Kagan taking a swing at Sotomayor's opinion, attacking her opinion in a copyright case.

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan sent her colleague Sonia Sotomayor up in flames Thursday regarding a court opinion in a case addressing the fair use doctrine. According to Blaze News, Kagan delivered a knockout punch.

The case revolves around photographer Lynn Goldsmith, artist Andy Warhol, and singer Prince. Blaze News says after the pop singer died in 2016, "photographer Lynn Goldsmith learned that Andy Warhol had used an image she took of the pop legend in 1981 as the basis of his famous 'Prince Series' of portraits. Warhol had licensed her image under 'artistic reference' guidelines."

The idea of a specific race being excluded from a British theatre performance is so appalling that, when I learnt yesterday that this was happening at the prestigious Theatre Royal Stratford East, I simply could not believe it.

Segregation goes against every principle I hold dear as a black Briton.

Yet on July 5, a performance of Tambo & Bones – a play said to explore 300 years of African-American history – will be staged for an exclusively black audience.

The theatre may claim that ‘no one is excluded’. But it also makes clear that white people will not be welcome at the so-called ‘Black Out night’. The aim, organisers insist, is to create a ‘safe, private space’ for an ‘all-Black-identifying audience, free from the white gaze’.

Former President and 2024 Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump delivered remarks at a campaign event in Manchester, NH. During his speech, he said that he would retire using his “Crooked Hillary” moniker for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and talked about what he saw as failures of the Biden Administration. After his remarks, the former president took a few questions from the audience. This was his first public campaign event in New Hampshire, which was slated to hold the first GOP presidential primary in 2024, since he announced his campaign shortly after the 2022 midterms.