When U.S. officials are asked about China, the discussion usually defaults to Taiwan or tariffs. But another threat from Beijing has been growing for years, and it can be found much closer to home—in Latin America.
Case in point: the deep-sea megaport that just opened in Chancay, Peru.
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Just weeks before President-elect Trump announced that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya would be his nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Bhattacharya and I were together at Stanford University for a bold, first-of-its-kind symposium on public health decision making during the COVID-19 crisis. The idea behind the symposium was to shatter the public health echo chamber and bring diverse perspectives together in respectful dialogue. Dr. Bhattacharya and I are close friends, but our backgrounds are quite different. He is firmly at home at Stanford, having gone there as an undergraduate, and then going on to get a medical degree and a Ph.D. there before joining the faculty as a Professor of Health Policy. I, on the other hand, am a blue-collar Midwesterner who enlisted the in U.S. Navy after high school. I carry no titles of academic distinction and was likely the only participant at the symposium without a medical degree or PhD.
Yet, I was invited by Stanford to moderate the symposium’s opening panel with seven leading public health authorities from top institutions across the world. What brought me into this unusual position was my expanding work to rebuild truth and trust in public health—a collaboration that began with former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and the Braver Angels organization, which is nation’s largest movement working to bridge the partisan divide.
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by Julie Kelley Even as President-elect Donald Trump promised on Sunday to act “very quickly” on pardons for many of the protesters involved in the events of January 6, the Biden administration’s Justice Department is continuing to arrest and try people for actions that occurred almost four years ago while opposing…
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by J.V. Caro China’s infiltration into agricultural IoT (Internet of Things) networks represents a critical yet underexplored dimension of its global technological strategy. Through key players such as Huawei and Alibaba Cloud, Beijing has embedded IoT technologies into agricultural systems in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. These initiatives, often…
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In recent months, a disturbing revelation has emerged from the heart of our nation’s immigration system: Over 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S. border during the Biden-Harris administration are unaccounted for. An internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report dated Aug. 19, 2024, confirms this alarming statistic, highlighting a profound failure in our duty to protect the most vulnerable.
The DHS report reveals that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has lost track of at least 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children, with the whereabouts of up to 323,000 remaining unknown. Without a doubt, we cannot deny the fact that many of these children are now tools and victims of the human sex trafficking industry – a heinous trade that represents the worst of the worst. This staggering number raises urgent questions about the safety and well-being of these children. They are left to fend for themselves in a dangerous world without proper oversight.
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If for no other reason than that it will elicit fear in the hearts of autocracy-phobics, I propose that Donald Trump’s second-term Cabinet be known as “The Wild Bunch.”
The name is best known as the title of Sam Peckinpah’s classic 1969 western featuring a colorful cast of aging outlaws – William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O’Brien, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson – who give it their all as they battle bounty hunters, the Mexican Federal Army, and the passage of time in order to make their mark while they still have a chance.
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In June, Victor Martinez-Hernandez was charged with the murder of Rachel Morin, a mother of five in Maryland. Police in Oklahoma tracked the accused repeat offender down with a sample of his DNA recovered from a Los Angeles home invasion in which a nine-year-old girl and her mother were assaulted. Police say he came to the U.S. illegally to escape prosecution for at least one other murder in his native El Salvador in December 2022.
“That should never have been allowed to happen,” said Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler, referring to the numerous missed red flags the case presented. His office apprehended Hernandez in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
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Sixty-one autumns have passed since the assassination of John F. Kennedy that Friday, Nov. 22, a day that traumatized a generation of children and revealed the impermanence of their innocence. For many, it was their first rendezvous with death. It endured as a vivid remembrance even as other memories lapsed with the passage of age. Many of those children are now grandparents, having lived past the average American life expectancy in 1963. Others, like my father, are not here for the somber milestone. But until his own twilight, my father – like any Irish-Catholic child of that period – remained haunted by that afternoon, transfixed by what Kennedy meant at that time, and committed to imparting those reminiscences unto his three sons.
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America’s most famous fast-food fan may be an unlikely candidate to make America healthy again, but Donald Trump seems willing to tackle the eating habits that have led to skyrocketing rates of obesity. The junk food industry is not lovin’ it.
RealClearInvestigations has learned that representatives of companies that make snack foods, sugary beverages, and cooking oils are already meeting to discuss how to thwart the reform agenda of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former consumer rights attorney Trump has said he will nominate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Their response provides an early example of what experts predict will be a massive effort by D.C. lobbyists to position their clients in response to Trump’s pledge to change how Washington does business.
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It just might be the most personal hiring decision President-elect Trump will ever make, but if he’s already chosen, he’s keeping the contenders in suspense.
After surviving two assassination attempts in roughly two months, Donald Trump is in the awkward position of owing his life to the Secret Service agents and officers who intervened to protect him, even as he remains deeply critical of the failures that allowed the near-misses to occur.
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It wasn’t as if the Tar Heel state didn’t see Hurricane Helene coming. On Sept. 25, one day before Helene stormed ashore, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency as the storm’s path showed it churning northward toward Appalachia after making landfall in Florida.
Yet that advance declaration was not followed by any state evacuation orders, and the population largely sheltered in place as Helene hit the steep, wooded hills of western North Carolina, squatting over the area, unleashing more than an inch of water an hour for more than a day. The unprecedented, relentless downpour, falling on ground already saturated by rain the week before, tore old pines and hardwoods out by the roots, creating arboreal torpedoes that rocketed down the steep inclines; water that turned photogenic stony creeks into whitewater torrents, lifting ancient streambed boulders and tossing them like chips on to roads and into homes and buildings. The storm left 230 people dead, nearly half of them in North Carolina, with dozens still missing as of early November.
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Donald Trump’s win is a big victory for the American energy industry and for all Americans. The climate crazed don’t want to recognize the fact that more than 80% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas. They don’t want to admit that the use of all three are at record highs and are continuing to grow. Or that a thriving economy needs reliable, affordable, and abundant energy. Because the cost of energy is built into everything that we do, consume or use, even watching Netflix.
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After what has felt like years of non-stop campaigning, news coverage, polling, analysis, and predictions, our nation finally elected its 47th president. Sadly, the sharp, sometimes heated disagreement and discord of the campaign season didn’t end on Election Day.
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Voters handed control of the U.S. Senate to Republicans Tuesday, although the contests in several battleground states won by Donald Trump were still too close to call Wednesday morning.
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Secret Service leaders meddled in an independent government investigation of the July 13 assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump and are still not following many basic agency security protocols for presidential candidates, presidents, and vice presidents in the final days before the election, according to emails reviewed by RealClearPolitics and several sources in the Secret Service community.
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Donald Trump currently holds a razor-thin 0.6 percent lead over Kamala Harris in the RealClearPolitics Polling Average for Pennsylvania. With this key swing state potentially deciding the outcome of the Electoral College, Democrats can only wonder how different the polls might look if Pennsylvania’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro – once considered a frontrunner for Harris’ VP pick – were on the ticket instead of Tim Walz.
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At 7:30 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 27, Chris Trusz was standing on one of the bridges spanning the Broad River in Chimney Rock. He wanted to get a photo. It had been raining steadily for 36 hours and the river was running 10 inches above normal. Trusz, who’d moved to the western North Carolina mountain town 18 months earlier, wasn’t worried; residents had been warned there might be a bit of flooding. He got his picture and walked up the hill to his home.
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Heading into Election Day, we hear constantly that the presidential candidates are mortal threats to American democracy. Anxieties about Donald Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, rampage at the U.S. Capitol and his declaration that he would act as “dictator for a day” are countered by Elon Musk’s warning that if Harris wins, “this will be the last election,” or alarms that Harris’ designs on overhauling the Supreme Court will lead to an end to the rule the law.
The very idea that our republic’s future hangs on the outcome of a single presidential contest, however, reveals the deeper, unacknowledged, underlying danger: a Congress incapable of performing its constitutional duties as our country’s lawmaking body and the guarantor of our representative democracy.
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In 2021, near the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, investigators tailed a Jeep Cherokee stolen from an airport Avis to a New York City apartment they called a “fraud factory” – no furniture, just an air mattress, a computer, stacks of loan and tax forms, and a shredder.
Two men who had first met in prison – Adedayo Ilori, 43, and Chris Recamier, 59 – were using stolen identities and fake paperwork to falsely claim they employed 200 people, bilking the federal government’s pandemic-relief programs of more than $1 million, according to federal prosecutors. They used the stolen money to splurge on big-ticket purchases, such as cryptocurrency, leasing luxury apartments and a Mercedes, the evidence showed.
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Although there isn’t much public information available about the Justice Climate Fund, it appears to have been an overnight success.
After gaining nonprofit status in August 2023, the organization was awarded $940 million by the Biden administration just eight months later in connection with the White House’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which aims to provide financial assistance to reduce carbon emissions and reduce pollution.
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The presidential election is in its final stretch and the race is neck-and-neck, according to the polls. The outcome will have a profound impact at all levels of government and business, so preparing for a second Trump term would be prudent.
In office and on the campaign trail, former President Trump has championed federalism and granting the states greater latitude to implement policies and programs. He has voiced a commitment to reducing the footprint of federal regulations. As president, he implemented executive orders and other actions that sought to ease regulatory costs and effects. The Trump Administration also galvanized deregulatory efforts at the state and local level through the Governors’ Initiative on Regulatory Innovation. A similar effort can be expected in a second term.
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The U.S. Secret Service and the FBI are downplaying the threat to former President Donald Trump posed by a man arrested outside a California rally Saturday night – despite assertions made by a local sheriff that his detention likely thwarted a third assassination attempt.
Deputies working for the Riverside County sheriff’s office arrested a man, identified as Vem Miller, and subsequently discovered a shotgun, loaded handgun, and high-capacity magazine in his car about a quarter mile from the entrance to Trump’s campaign rally in Coachella Valley. Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco, who endorsed Trump publicly in June, said Miller’s car, identified as a black SUV, had a fake license plate that was unregistered and possessed several phony passports and driver’s licenses with different identities, as well as what Bianco described as a fake press pass.
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American journalism has experienced a spectacular collapse in the last 25 years – daily newspaper circulation has declined from over 60 million subscribers to just over 20 million. And the trend is accelerating: According to the Pew Research Organization, the average monthly number of unique visitors to the websites of the country’s top 50 newspapers plummeted 20 percent in one year from 2021 to 2022.
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Americans are like members of a quarrelsome family, so intent on arguing their petty grievances around the kitchen table that they don’t smell the rising smoke from the oven. As our nation fumes and the world burns, neither major party presidential candidate is addressing the lapping flames around us.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are not simply ignoring our frightening national debt – both vow to ramp it up. Neither candidate has a serious plan to respond to the threats posed by China, Russia, or Iran.
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On the eve of a highly-anticipated live X “Spaces” conversation between Elon Musk and former president Donald Trump, the powerful European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton warned in August that authorities would be “monitoring” the conversation for “content that may incite violence, hate, and racism.”
While reminding Musk that the EU was already investigating X for alleged failures “to combat disinformation,” Breton said he and his colleagues “will not hesitate to make full use of our toolbox … to protect EU citizens from serious harm.”
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“A bun in the toaster oven,” a woman exclaims off-camera, handing an ultrasound image to family members who erupt into tearful emotion over the news. “Oh my God!”
The touching baby announcement video then gets down to business as text appears on the screen amidst the ongoing celebration, suggesting the best way to stay alive for this joyous birth is by becoming vaccinated against COVID-19. “Why will you get vaccinated? … Because some people you just want to meet in person.”
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A Secret Service agent has been accused of sexually assaulting a staffer who works for Vice President Kamala Harris, according to four sources in the Secret Service community.
The incident in question took place sometime over the last week during a trip devoted to providing advance security work and planning for a Harris campaign event in Wisconsin that ultimately did not take place. Several Harris staffers and Secret Service agents were in Green Bay to provide advance security and other planning for an upcoming Harris campaign event. The Harris campaign opted to go to Atlanta instead of Wisconsin on Friday, Sept. 20.
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Crime is a major issue in this year’s election, yet major media ignored the release of a significant new government report showing a surge in violent crime. The increase in violent crime during the Biden administration is a record increase.
The latest data released last Thursday from the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) reveal a sharp increase in violent crime under the Biden-Harris administration compared to when Trump left office.
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Attorney General Merrick Garland broke precedent just weeks before the November election, delivering politically charged remarks at the U.S. Attorneys’ National Conference in Washington – pointedly speaking publicly rather than privately in a departure from his usual practice. “Our norms are a promise that we will not allow this department to be used as a political weapon,” he said before a packed house, gathered in the Great Hall of DOJ headquarters on Sept. 12. “Federal prosecutors and agents may never make a decision regarding an investigation or prosecution for the purpose of affecting any election or the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”
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Understandably, we want to blame someone besides the 14-year-old who murdered four people last week at Apalachee High School in Georgia. People are shocked and upset that the father taught the boy to shoot and hunt and bought the boy a rifle for Christmas. But that doesn’t mean it made any sense for police to arrest the father the day after the school shooting on two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter, and eight counts of cruelty to children.
This isn’t the first time that parents are being held liable for their children’s actions. Jennifer and James Crumbley were sentenced to prison for 10 to 15 years after their son perpetrated the 2021 Oxford High School shootings in Michigan. Their crime? Letting their son have access to the father’s pistol, which was used in the murders.
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After yanking Joe Biden off the ticket with a giant vaudeville cane, Kamala Harris has breathed new life into the Democratic party. Kamala opened her campaign with the “politics of joy,” replete with twerking rappers, sassy X clapbacks, and quirky Doritos videos.
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Candidate questionnaires have long been a part of American politics, locking in politicians to certain policies, pledges and positions. But it has been decades since one has threatened to roil a presidential race, or undercut a major party nominee’s carefully crafted image.
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Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will soon meet in a high stakes nationally televised debate, perhaps the only one of this campaign.
In previous elections – 1960, 1976, 1980, 2000, and 2020 come immediately to mind – the election contests were heavily influenced by such encounters. This year, for sure, it is “high risk, high reward.” With an election so close, we believe this debate will be important – maybe even decisive – in determining the winner.
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Last Thursday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. withdrew (kind of) from the 2024 presidential race. He didn’t have to, and in the case of 40 out of 50 states, he actually didn’t. But, he also didn’t have to endorse Donald J. Trump, and yet he did. As I waited for his press conference, I wondered: What could drive a lion of Democratic party royalty to side with Trump? The answer turned out to be a trio of existential crises. As RFK Jr. explained, he and Trump are aligned on three critical issues, and they are of such existential importance that he was willing to set aside their differences to work together.
Beyond being a refreshing break from the mind-numbing drumbeat of Trump’s opposition, RFK Jr.’s remarks were a stark reminder of why two-thirds of Americans believe the country is moving down the wrong track. He first took aim at the military-industrial complex’s perpetual provoking of foreign wars and followed up with the alarming assault on free speech. These were, however, just the warmup acts for his primary grievance: the moral and legal corruption of the food and pharmaceutical industries, assisted by their captured agencies, e.g., the FDA and USDA.
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Since 2020, the nation’s military has undergone one of the most humiliating periods in its history. The disgraceful rout at Hamid Karzai International airport during the Afghanistan withdrawal. Soon after, the decrepit state of naval maintenance and shipbuilding is the worst since the Navy’s founding.
Further compounding the humiliation, the Marine Corps has been castrated into a regional force whose legendary force in readiness is being replaced by a combination of colonial light infantry and coastal defense artillery.
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Since the 2000 presidential election, the left has worked to undermine the legitimacy of the Electoral College, labeling it a relic of slavery. No doubt, if Donald Trump returns to the White House while again losing the popular vote, these attacks will be renewed with fervor. In fact, it has already begun as commentators denounce the undemocratic nature of the system. Just last month, the New York Times published a piece trashing the Constitution and asserting that the Electoral College’s only purpose was to protect slavery. These critiques are based on misconceptions and hostility toward the very structure of our Constitution.
The History
Our method of electing the president came about through compromise. The framers agreed upon a system that ensured the states had a say in choosing the president. The Constitution gives each state a share of electors, and the states decide for themselves how to select those electors.
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Brent and Donna McGee were the “First Couple” of Wetumka, Oklahoma. He was athletic director and football coach at the high school who had once served as mayor; she was superintendent of the school system.
And as if all those levers of local power weren’t enough, they also owned the Dairy Queen, the prime hangout in this small rural town and a key source of high school jobs.
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Kamala Harris shrugged.
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Law enforcement in the United States has collapsed. Americans in many parts of the country see that products at CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart stores are behind plexiglass, that you must call a clerk to unlock the glass and then wait while you read and examine the different packages. People know these companies have no choice. Americans know that crime is rising, but the true collapse in law enforcement, particularly in large cities, is without precedent.
A Gallup survey last November showed that 92 percent of Republicans and even 58 percent of Democrats believed that crime was rising. In a series of surveys from March 2023 to April 2024, Rasmussen Reports finds a remarkably constant percentage of Americans who believe that violent crime is getting worse – 60 percent to 61 percent. Roughly four times as many people think violent crime is rising rather than getting better.
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Abundant and affordable energy drives America’s powerful and productive economy. That’s been true throughout our nation’s history, and America’s recent achievement of energy independence provides the most concrete illustration of that fact.
But to keep our nation firing on all eight cylinders, we need government policies that prioritize providing adequate, reliable and secure domestic energy supplies.
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Jon Graft is on a mission to reignite the passion for learning by pushing a long-denigrated classroom practice: vocational education.
The superintendent of the Butler Tech District of high schools in Ohio is a leader in the growing movement to revive public education, marred by low test scores and high absenteeism, through a hands-on approach to learning that prepares students for careers in today’s tech-driven economy. Traditionally a means of funneling disadvantaged kids into outdated shop classes and dead-end jobs, vocational education is being reimagined by Graft and others in sophisticated career and technical education (CTE) programs nationwide, offering high school students of all academic abilities training in healthcare, computer science, engineering, skilled trades, and even the arts.
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Three weeks ago, Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe angrily pushed back on senators’ calls to immediately fire or discipline key agents directly responsible for the security failures that led to the assassination attempt against former President Trump at last month’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Since that time, Secret Service leaders have placed several members of the Pittsburgh Field Office on administrative leave, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.
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Ever since early 2021, Americans have watched as illegal aliens have flooded across the Southwest border unimpeded. They have read with horror the accounts of innocent Americans victimized by those here unlawfully. They have seen family and friends die after being poisoned by fentanyl coming across the border. And the Biden-Harris administration has largely done nothing.
Yet now, following a few months of somewhat-reduced numbers of apprehensions between ports of entry along the Southwest border, the Biden-Harris administration is taking a victory lap. Such premature celebration, however, ignores the reality of the continuing nature of this crisis.
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Most of us get the big things right: Don’t touch fire, wrestle alligators, or play in traffic. But beneath these necessary survival strategies, we are boundless reservoirs of delusion.
While many of our unmoored beliefs are specific to us – I seem to be the only person who thinks I have a beautiful singing voice – some are universal. Chief among these is the claim: I’m my own worst critic.
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Even the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post could not stomach the new proposal from Kamala Harris to place price controls on food. The headline of the opinion piece from Catherine Rampell read:
“When your opponent calls you a ‘communist,’ maybe don’t try price controls?”
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Amid the many battles over how to improve American schools, it’s often forgotten that what’s taught in the classroom is but one component of ensuring that students receive a high-quality education; it’s also important to remove barriers to children’s learning.
And the idea to remove one major impediment – cell phones in K-12 schools – has gained significant traction over the past year, most recently in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
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Vice-presidential picks generally balance a ticket, but Kamala Harris’ selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate does anything but. And American Catholics and others who care about the poor and vulnerable should be alarmed.
Consider their attacks against their states’ life-affirming pregnancy care centers. For me, this issue is more than political. It’s personal. Like many Catholics across the country, I volunteer at our local pregnancy centers. I’m the medical director for the centers run by the Archdiocese of Miami and I read their fetal ultrasounds. Helping families and expectant mothers through my work there is one of the most rewarding ways in which I practice medicine.
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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrating into everyday life – as chatbots, digital assistants, and internet search guides, for example. These artificial intelligence (AI) systems – which consume large amounts of text data to learn associations – can create all sorts of written material when prompted and can ably converse with users. LLMs’ growing power and omnipresence mean that they exert increasing influence on society and culture.
So it’s of great import that these artificial intelligence systems remain neutral when it comes to complicated political issues. Unfortunately, according to a new analysis recently published to PLoS ONE, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
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The National Educators Association, the largest teachers union in America, is “fired up” for Kamala Harris’s VP nominee, Tim Walz. “Gov. Walz is known as the ‘Education Governor,’” wrote NEA President Becky Pringle, “because he has been an unwavering champion for public school students and educators, and an ally for working families and unions. As a high school teacher and NEA member, Walz is committed to uplifting our public schools.”
The NEA’s endorsement should be worrisome for Americans who are actually concerned about the state of education in this country: for years, the NEA has put radical politics above children.
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“I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from.”
Cast off by a drug-addled mother, raised by a discipline-demanding, f-bomb-wielding Mamaw, J.D. Vance’s inspirational story is one of lost potential reclaimed. If Vance is elected and remembers where he came from, this country has much to look forward to – because his redemptive story envelopes millions of Americans.
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