At today's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) confronted Secretary of State Antony Blinken about records on COVID-19 research funding.

“Pharmaceutical marketers have noticed the power of patient persuasion and begun to leverage ‘patient influencers’ in brand campaigns,” says a new study by researchers at the University of Colorado, alongside the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

With the wider influencer-marketing industry expected to be worth up to $21.1 billion in 2023, the study published in The Journal of Medical Internet Research provides early insights into this growing new area, including its darker side.

“The bottom line here is that patient influencers act as a form of interactive direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising, sharing their knowledge and experiences on pharmaceutical drugs with communities of followers in which they wield great influence,” said author Erin Willis, an associate professor of advertising, public relations and media design.

“This raises ethical questions that need more investigation.”

DTC advertising allows drug manufacturers to target consumers directly, rather than through physicians. This method of advertising emerged in the 1980s, and is only prevalent in the US and New Zealand. In these countries, about half of all people who ask their doctor about a new drug do so after seeing a television commercial for it.

Patient backlogs and staffing shortages have stretched New York City’s hospital system to the breaking point, leaving patients to suffer long waits surrounded by garbage and human waste.

The main reason why Elon Musk’s Tesla doesn’t take massive losses on its electric vehicles is because a) that’s the only kind of vehicles the company makes; and b) Musk long ago scaled production of Tesla EVs to demand.

The head of the U.S. Space Force, Gen. Chance Saltzman, says that China has launched numerous satellites in the past six months and currently possesses 347 orbiting crafts capable of gathering intelligence on American armed forces.

The dominoes will fall. Have no doubt whatsoever, Silicon Valley, Signature, and Silvergate banks are just the first three banks in a long, long line of banks that will not just need bailing out, but will completely collapse in the coming days, weeks, and months of 2023 and on into 2024. This is a mass bank run, and the whole system is set to collapse. It’s a plan, not a byproduct or pitfall. It’s a total system collapse, and the FDIC $100 billion bailout is just a tiny band aid on a deep, gaping wound that will bleed out its victim – America. Who’s ready for what follows?

OpenAI claimed the group’s most robust AI to date is accurate in generating language responses and even better at solving problems.

According to the biotech industry, genetically modified (GM) foods would help reduce pesticide use and increase the nutritional content of various food products. They also promised that GM crops could help farmers by boosting their profits and feed the world by increasing crop yields.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was caught lying Wednesday when Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked a question about Chinese payments going to the Biden Crime Family.

President Trump called the recent meeting between China’s Xi and Russian leader Putin “maybe a low point in history for the USA.”

New laws are being proposed to increase access to automated external defibrillators (AEDs) in educational institutions in the states of Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania.

On March 28, 2023, Walmart will begin charging 42 cents per bag for delivery orders and 10 cents per bag for pickup or in-store purchases in the state of New Jersey.

President Trump came out with a series of Truths about Ron DeSantis yesterday. They were pretty devastating.

Loss of confidence in the US Dollar is growing. Saudi Arabia has begun earnestly dumping US Treasuries, with the Oil-rich nation now having fewer US Treasuries than anytime in the past 7 years.

This trend with Saudi Arabia is being mirrored by many other countries which are fearful the US has already over-spent itself (into oblivion) and will NOT be able to actually repay the money it owes.

Other countries have also been unloading US debt notes.

On Tuesday, it was revealed that despite the FBI investigating over two dozen different instances of parents and parents’ rights groups protesting school boards, not a single credible or legitimate threat was discovered at any point.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the House GOP released its findings on the FBI’s 25 different preliminary investigations, all of which were based on tips submitted to the National Threat Operations Center. Of these 25, six were assigned to the FBI’s counterterrorism division. In the end, only one of them led to a full investigation, and this single probe did not discover any serious threat to schools or school board members.

The House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government came to its conclusion after subpoenaing the FBI, determining that the Biden Administration abused its power by using counterterrorism tools to target conservative parents and parents’ groups, following the rise of a grassroots protest movement at school board meetings across the country. These protests were often in opposition to far-left curriculum, including the teaching of Critical Race Theory and transgenderism, as well as coronavirus-related mandates on masks and vaccines.

Doctors who work for the Department of Defense apparently believe that children as young as seven years old are capable of making decisions for themselves when it comes to taking hormones and puberty blockers.

Has everyone working in Washington, DC completely lost their minds?

Decent parents wouldn’t leave a seven year old child at home without a sitter, but these doctors think a child of that age can make life-altering decisions about their gender?

Democrats continue to push one scheme after another to take down Trump. They really seem to think one of these plots will actually work. But after news broke this weekend that New York Democrats plan on arresting Trump–the Internet nearly broke.

It’s clear that more than just Trump supporters are outraged by this news. Especially, when you consider the flimsy reasons they want to indict him. Rumors abound that only a small group of radicals within the DA’s office actually want to arrest Trump–while law enforcement fears what might happen if they try to arrest him.

All this chaos and confusion has seemingly brought their plot to a standstill.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg responded to several leading House Republicans’ requests for information on the probe into former President Donald Trump, saying Trump "created a false expectation" that his arrest was imminent.

Bragg’s general counsel sent a five-page letter to GOP House committee chairmen Jim Jordan of Ohio, Bryan Steil of Wisconsin and James Comer of Kentucky regarding their request for documents and testimony in the Trump investigation.

When District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought forth his case against 45th President Donald Trump, he probably thought that he could make the grand jury do his bidding. This is despite the fact that his investigation has proven to be weak both in terms of the legal theory it takes and in the factual pattern of the case.

While Mr. Bragg may yet prevail in securing an unprecedented criminal indictment against a former president from the grand jury, the fact that the grand jury suspended hearings yesterday and will likely not reconvene until next week suggests something is going wrong.

Yesterday the New York Post reported that the New York City grand jury did not reconvene as scheduled and that the planned afternoon session was quashed by the request of Mr. Bragg. The jurors were told to be ready to possibly reconvene today. However, ABC 7 reported today that the Trump case will be heard next week on Monday by the grand jury and that at least one more witness is slated to appear before them.

Russia has issued a new warning as Washington continues to fly drones over the Black Sea, with tension between the nations surging. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the US that Russia will retaliate with "countermeasures" if it continues to fly surveillance drones over the international waters.

In a stark message to US President Joe Biden, he said: "We warn the United States against trying to play on the nerves, testing our patience."

It comes after two Russian fighter jet pilots downed an unmanned MQ-9 Reaper drone on March 14. Moscow claimed the American vehicle violated airspace restrictions in connection with its invasion of Ukraine.

But Washington said the vehicle flying near the Crimean Peninsula Russia annexed in 2014 was attacked in international airspace.

Should America go communist as a result of the difficulties and problems that your capitalist social order is unable to solve, it will discover that communism, far from being an intolerable bureaucratic tyranny and individual regimentation, will be the means of greater individual liberty and shared abundance.

At present most Americans regard communism solely in the light of the experience of the Soviet Union. They fear lest Sovietism in America would produce the same material result as it has brought for the culturally backward peoples of the Soviet Union.

They fear lest communism should try to fit them to a bed of Procrustes, and they point to the bulwark of Anglo-Saxon conservatism as an insuperable obstacle even to possibly desirable reforms. They argue that Great Britain and Japan would undertake military intervention against the American soviets. They shudder lest Americans be regimented in their habits of dress and diet, be compelled to subsist on famine rations, be forced to read stereotyped official propaganda in the newspapers, be coerced to serve as rubber stamps for decisions arrived at without their active participation or be required to keep their thoughts to themselves and loudly praise their soviet leaders in public, through fear of imprisonment and exile.

Nearly 300 suspected terrorists have been apprehended attempting to enter the U.S. in the first few months of fiscal 2023 as 28 members of Congress formed a new caucus to address the crisis at the northern border, where record numbers of foreign nationals continue to illegally enter from Canada.

The Northern Border Security Caucus, formed by U.S. Reps. Mike Kelly, R-Pennsylvania, and Ryan Zinke, R-Montana, is expressing concerns about “the increased human and drug trafficking, along with the decrease in Border Patrol agents and lack of security, along the U.S.-Canada border.”

They did so as U.S. Customs and Border Protection released apprehension data for February, which appears to publicly report for the first time those on the terrorist watch list (Terrorist Screening Dataset) who were apprehended at ports of entry and between ports of entry. Historically, it didn’t make the distinction or publicly report ports of entry apprehensions.

A mother from New York is suing American Airlines after her son when into cardiac arrest on a flight to Florida and died because the plane’s automatic external defibrillator (AED) was not charged.

Prague has already sent Kiev everything it can from its weapons stockpiles, Czech President Petr Pavel says Czech President Petr Pavel © AFP / Vladimir Simicek

The Czech Republic has already done everything it can to help Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, President Petr Pavel has said. The nation’s capacity to produce more ammunition is limited due to workforce shortages, he added.

“We have not only delivered what we could from our own stocks, but also bought material abroad,” Pavel said in an interview with Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung on Wednesday.

Earlier this week Florida Governor Ron DeSantis finally responded to the news that President Trump was going to be indicted by a Soros-funded New York City DA on garbage charges that have been tossed from court several times already.