The Mexican Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a sweeping ruling that decriminalized abortion nationwide, determining that to attach penalties to the procedure “violate[d] the human rights of women.”
Wednesday’s decision follows a 2021 ruling from the court that permitted state officials to regulate the procedure, according to the New York Times.
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Republican New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith called on his colleagues Wednesday to recognize that 120,000 Armenian Christians living in Nagorno-Karabakh are facing extinction.
“Delay is denial,” Smith, who chaired the emergency congressional hearing on Nagorno-Karabakh as co-chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, said in a statement to The Daily Signal. “The Biden Administration must say immediately that this is genocide—and stop it.”
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A week after then-Vice President Joe Biden began pressuring Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor in late 2015 by withholding U.S. loan guarantees, the European Union reached internal consensus in a memo saying that Prosecutor Viktor Shokin’s office and the country at large had met its goals for fighting corruption, organized crime and human trafficking.
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GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy released a statement on Tuesday condemning Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky after the foreign leader said elections in his country during wartime would only take place if allied countries shared the cost.
Zelensky, according to Reuters, said his country would only hold elections next year “if the US and Europe provide financial support,” adding, “I will not take money from weapons and give it to elections.”
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Back in my high-school debating days, policy debate teams frequently concluded their arguments with an extreme and somewhat absurd parade of horribles. This was a testament to their intelligence and creativity, plus being dead wrong carried few consequences. Through convoluted chains of logic, they argued that some small change in environmental or trade policy would lead to nuclear war or America’s domination by the “global south.”
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More than 100 incidents where Chinese nationals have accessed or neared U.S. military bases and other sensitive locations have sparked suspicions of a wider espionage campaign driven by Beijing, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing U.S. officials.
The FBI, Department of Defense and other agencies have dubbed the situation, where Chinese nationals appear to feign accidentally approaching high-security U.S. military installations and other federal sites, “gate crashing,” and held a review in 2022 to figure out a way to tamp down on the incidents, the WSJ reported, citing the officials. The officials said the practice appears intended to stress-test security measures at the military sites as a form of low-effort reconnaissance or espionage.
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The record number of “family units” attempting to cross into the U.S. at the border hit a record high at 91,000 in August, which immigration policy experts say was entirely predictable due to a Biden administration rule change.
August is now the highest month this year for overall U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) migrant encounters, based on a report of preliminary agency data.
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New state economic data released Thursday shows that China is facing headwinds in its effort to revive its struggling economy, according to The Wall Street Journal.
China struggled in August with low manufacturing activity, exports and consumer spending, adding more negative factors to the Chinese economy, which is already facing a fumbling real estate market, according to the WSJ. The new data from China follows disappointing economic growth for the country in the second quarter of 2023, with the Chinese economy only growing 0.8% for the quarter as opposed to 2.2% in the first, totaling 6.3% for the year.
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The Chinese parent company of Gotion Inc., which intends to build two electric battery plants in Michigan, employs 923 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members, including its CEO, according to its 2022 ESG report.
The Fremont, California-based Gotion Inc. — which is “wholly owned and controlled” by Gotion High-Tech Power Energy Co., according to a Foreign Agents Registration Act filing — seeks to “invest $2.4 billion to construct two 550,000-square-foot production plants” for electric vehicle (EV) batteries in Big Rapids, Michigan, Fox News reported.
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Three illegal migrants from Mexico assaulted a Border Patrol agent along the northern border on Aug. 20, according to an Instagram post from Swanton sector Chief Robert Garcia.
The three illegal migrants crossed the northern border from Canada illegally before assaulting the agent near Churubusco, New York, according to Garcia’s post. Border Patrol agents in the Swanton sector, which includes areas of New York, Vermont and New Hampshire have made more than 4,900 arrests of illegal migrants from 68 countries between October 2022 and July, amounting to more apprehensions than the last eight years combined in the region.
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The Biden administration is seeking to hammer out a long-term Ukraine aid agreement with European allies in hopes of both preventing Russia from gaining an edge on the battlefield and hamstringing a future president’s ability to scale back U.S. commitments, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The scheme emerged during sideline talks among Group of Seven leaders at a NATO summit in July, and so far involves negotiations between the U.S. and Ukraine, and between the United Kingdom (U.K.) and Ukraine, according to the WSJ. It’s an attempt, in part, to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin he can simply wait until a new American administration, as several top GOP political contenders have expressed intention to reduce or eliminate U.S. aid that makes up the brunt of Western support.
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The Biden administration is fraying relations with some allies and generating pushback from Congress by spending millions of taxpayer dollars to promote the woke ideology abroad that has stirred controversy at home since President Biden took office.
In a “national security memorandum” shortly after his swearing-in, Biden ordered all federal agencies with dealings abroad not only to protect LGBT rights in the face of discrimination and violence but to actively advance them. His State Department has said one of its goals is to “embed intersectional equity principles into diversifying public diplomacy and communications strategies” in relations with other nations.
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A coalition of 1,609 scientists from around the world have signed a declaration stating “there is no climate emergency” and that they “strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy” being pushed across the globe. The declaration does not deny the harmful effect of greenhouse gasses, but instead challenges the hysteria brought about by the narrative of imminent doom.
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Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas demanded answers from the Biden administration regarding the status of American prisoners in the Dominican Republic – the number of which is currently unknown – in a letter sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday, and obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
A number of American citizens are currently imprisoned in the Dominican Republic, some of which are likely under the country’s “preventative detention” system, which requires no charges or evidence of crime for imprisonment, according to McCaul’s letter. McCaul expressed concern to Blinken that the Biden administration has failed to keep track of the number of these American prisoners and demanded action on behalf of the detainee’s families, who are unaware of the status or condition of their loved ones.
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Donald Trump’s historic arrest in Georgia Thursday evening was a virtual declaration of war on America. A former president was dragged into a filthy county jail behind enemy lines and had his mugshot taken, adding insult to the injury of an indictment for the bogus crime of challenging his political opponent. The dramatic moment followed days of buildup, as the “co-conspirators” in his “criminal enterprise” were methodically paraded in front of the country. These nefarious plotters include lawyers like John Eastman, a decent man whose “crime” is giving legal advice on a contentious constitutional question.
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Among the more than 8.6 million people who’ve illegally entered the U.S., at least nearly 1.6 million are “gotaways.”
Gotaways is the official term used by Border Patrol agents to describe foreign nationals who illegally enter the U.S. between ports of entry and don’t return to Mexico or Canada.
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Pope Francis is set to make the first-ever visit to Mongolia, a country with fewer than 1,500 Catholics, all of whom have come to the faith since 1992. But the pope’s visit is a reminder that the country has a long and complex history with Christianity, among many other faiths.
Mongolia has only 3.4 million people, and at least 87.4% are Buddhists. The small Catholic community came into existence after this landlocked country, bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, began to abandon its communist ideology and embraced different religions. At that time, it also restored diplomatic relations with the Vatican and welcomed Catholic missionaries.
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China quietly revived a program in 2020 that aimed to recruit foreign-trained scientists to help the country’s efforts in bolstering its semiconductor manufacturing industry, according to Reuters.
The program, originally named the Thousand Talents Plan, stopped work in 2018 after the U.S. launched investigations into the scientists that were a part of the program, and it was later revived under the name Qiming and overseen by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, according to Reuters. The U.S. and China are currently in a tech war, with both countries trying to gain an advantage in the strategic semiconductor industry, which is essential for technological research.
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In order to facilitate electric vehicle (EV) production, the U.S. is seeking to spend taxpayer dollars to develop cobalt supply chains from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a country which is known for high prevalence of unsafe child labor in its mines, many of which are controlled by Chinese interests, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Labor (DOL) are jointly committing $23 million in taxpayer funds to U.S. firms and other mining companies to integrate local Congolese operations and “artisanal” mines into their supply chains, as well as to improve labor standards for miners in the DRC, which are essentially non-existent in most cases, according to the WSJ. Chinese-controlled interests dominate the DRC’s cobalt industry, refining about 75% of the global cobalt supply and manufacturing approximately 70% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries, which are cobalt-intensive products that power EVs.
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New reports suggest that Hunter Biden traveled to as many as 13 different countries with his father Joe Biden while he was vice president during the Obama Administration.
As Fox News reports, video footage, messages, and Secret Service records obtained from Hunter’s abandoned laptop indicate that the two Bidens traveled together to such locations as Africa, Asia, Europe, and Mexico. At the time, Hunter was still leading the firm Rosemont Seneca Partners, which he used to broker many of his international business deals.
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Workers for a major Chinese developer are going without pay, and job sites are going unfinished as the Chinese real estate market struggles, according to Reuters.
Country Garden, formerly China’s largest real estate developer by sales volume, is in the midst of a debt crisis indicative of the Chinese real estate industry as a whole, according to Reuters. Workers at the Country Garden Yunhe Shangyuan project site on the outskirts of the 14 million-person city of Tianjin are saying that they have not been paid for months and that construction has stopped, leaving sites unfinished.
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Germany is on track to fall short of its ambitious long-term climate change goals despite its plans to have spent more than $500 billion to reach them, according to Reuters.
The German government is primed to miss its targets of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 65% by 2030 and reaching net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, according to Reuters. The German government will have spent by 2025 the equivalent of at least $580 billion toward achieving the goals that it is now forecasted to miss, according to Bloomberg.
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Just weeks before then-Vice President Joe Biden took the opposite action in late 2015, a task force of State, Treasury, and Justice Department officials declared that Ukraine had made adequate progress on anti-corruption reforms and deserved a new $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee, according to government memos that conflict with the narrative Democrats have sustained since the 2019 impeachment scandal.
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For months, the Biden administration has been “disposing” of portions of the Trump border wall to be auctioned off, a local official at the southern border and the Department of Defense (DOD) told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The auction house GovPlanet has been selling off the “thick wall tubes” and other wall materials since April, according to listings on its website, and has already sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of wall materials. The Pentagon confirmed that the Biden administration is “disposing” of portions of the border wall construction materials in a statement to the DCNF.
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Imagine if the United States treated China in the same way it does us?
What if American companies simply ignored Chinese copyrights and patents, and stole Chinese ideas, inventions, and intellectual property, as they pleased and with impunity?
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Republicans launched an organization Tuesday to advocate for continued financial support of Ukraine in the war against Russian aggression, according to a press release.
GOP Strategist Sarah Longwell and commentator Bill Kristol will head Republicans for Ukraine, which unveiled its $2 million campaign to encourage party voters and politicians to stand with the nation, according to the press release. The organization will run digital ads of Republican voters’ testimony about why they believe the party should continue providing aid to Ukraine on cable, television and YouTube throughout the remainder of 2023.
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The border crisis under President Joe Biden has fueled Mexico’s economy through an increase in Mexican migrants in the U.S. sending money back home, according to multiple reports.
Remittances, the money sent by Mexicans working abroad sent back home, increased from $33.5 billion in 2018 to $60 billion in 2023 after a record number of migrants crossed the southern border, according to The Associated Press. From 2018 to 2022, Mexico’s poverty rate declined from 49.9% of the population to 43.5%, declining by 5.7 million, according to a study conducted by Coneval, an autonomous organization coordinated by the Secretariat of Welfare in Mexico.
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Jessica Berlin, a policy analyst writing in the Center for European Policy Analysis’ online journal, has proposed a NATO without limits–an expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to all democratic nations. “The 21st-century threat landscape,” she contends, “calls for a global alliance capable of mutual defense.” “NATO must open its doors,” she writes, “to new members beyond Europe and North America.” Her proposal is breathtaking in scope: an attack on any democracy is an attack on all democracies. It is a recipe for endless wars on all continents and a reckless extension of America’s nuclear guarantee to all the world’s democracies. It turns John Quincy Adams’ prudent counsel on its head: America goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy and is the champion and vindicator of the freedom and independence of all democracies.
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The White House on Thursday outlined a $40.1 billion funding request in a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that includes $24 billion for Ukraine-related expenses but just $4 billion to bolster security at the southern border.
Specifically, the White House wants $13.1 billion for the Pentagon to send military aid directly to Kyiv and replenish its own stocks. It further seeks $8.5 billion for the State Department to provide humanitarian and economic support. Lastly, it seeks $2.3 billion for the Treasury to provide financial programs for the country in place of Chinese or other adversarial sources.
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The Sino-U.S. “cold tech war” is reaching new heights—or rather depths—as tensions are building under the sea. First it was semiconductors. Now it’s submarine cables.
Undersea cables, unseen and often ignored, are essential to daily life and critical to U.S. national security. Over 97 percent of global data traffic travels through a network of cables that sit atop the seabed of the world’s oceans. Those same cables transmit upwards of $10 trillion in financial transactions every day and are a central component of the American military’s network-centric warfare operations.
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President Joe Biden’s administration’s diplomats encouraged Pakistani political leaders to remove former Prime Minister Imran Khan from office after he hesitated to criticize Russia for its war against Ukraine, according to a new report on Wednesday.
Imran Khan was removed from office in April 2022 after a controversial vote of no-confidence by the Pakistani National Assembly. On March 7, 2022, officials from the Department of State met with Pakistan’s then-Ambassador to the United States Asad Majeed Khan and encouraged Imran Khan’s removal from office after he visited Russia shortly after it began hostilities in Ukraine, according to a diplomatic cable that was published by The Intercept.
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by Jennie Taer Federal authorities are growing increasingly concerned about a route Chinese migrants are utilizing to make their way to Florida illegally, according to an internal federal intelligence report obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The report states that law enforcement lacks information regarding who is coordinating…
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by Bethany Blankley A coyote, a colloquialism for a human smuggler, is critical to Mexican cartel human smuggling operations. Combined, they cover thousands of miles primarily guiding foreign nationals first through Central America into Mexico, then through Mexico and into the U.S. They also operate along the U.S.-Canada border.…
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A federal judge ordered CBS News senior correspondent Catherine Herridge to reveal her sources for a series of stories about the FBI’s investigation of a Chinese American scientist back when she worked for Fox News.
The order last week from U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington D.C. comes after scientist Yanping Chen filed a lawsuit against the FBI, claiming that the agency violated the privacy act by improperly leaking information about her.
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In the end, there really was a silk road of money that flowed from China to the Biden family’s coffers, despite Joe Biden’s insistence to the contrary.
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Voters should remember that a President’s role is primarily foreign affairs, which includes trade and border security. In 2016, and today, President Trump is the only candidate that has consistently focused on what the actual job of the president is, rather than what those with outsized influence want it to be.
President Trump is the first president to start no new wars since Jimmy Carter. Like Carter, he also affected a Middle East peace deal with Israel – not just one of them, but four. Arguably the first realist president since Richard Nixon, Trump’s combination of unpredictability enforced by blunt and brutal talk, credible military deterrence reinforced through a more robust military that was less used and overstretched, and a genuine and authentic desire to be a peace-maker created a moment in time for cooperation and peace through strength. Unfortunately, under Biden, the promise of peace has become a Shakespearean tragedy when considering our present dilemma in Europe and East Asia.
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British Rowing announced biological men will be banned from female-only competitions starting next month, according to The Times.
The organization said there is now an open category for anyone who is eligible to compete in it and also a separate category solely for biological women, according to the The Times. It also said that only biological women will be allowed to represent England in international rowing events.
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“If we keep quiet, we are going to go extinct,” says Catholic Bishop Chipa Wilfred Anagbe of the Diocese of Makurdi in Benue state, Nigeria.
In June, the Congressional Values Action Team caucus met with Anagbe and the Rev. Remigius Ihyula who shared their testimonies of atrocities committed against Christians in Nigeria by Islamic extremists and about the complacency of the Nigerian government.
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U.S. Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) announced Friday in advance of Sunday’s World Day Against Trafficking in Persons that he is planning to introduce legislation that would require the federal government to provide reports on its work investigating potential child trafficking related to the unaccompanied minors released from federal custody and with whom contact has now been lost.
“In the near future, I will be introducing new legislation drafted in collaboration with Eduardo Verastegui—the producer of ‘Sound of Freedom’ and Roger Severino of The Heritage Foundation,” Smith said in a press statement sent to The Star News Network, further detailing that the legislation would “require the federal government to report on efforts to locate, establish contact with, conduct wellness checks on, and investigate any suspicion of human trafficking related to the approximately 85,000 unaccompanied minors who were released from federal government custody and with whom subsequent contact has been lost.”
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Nine months into fiscal 2023, more known or suspected terrorists have been apprehended at the northern and southwest borders than in all of fiscal 2022.
So far this fiscal year, 525 known or suspected terrorists have been apprehended attempting to illegally enter the U.S. compared to 478 last fiscal year.
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A federal judge Tuesday blocked a Biden administration rule that allowed migration officials to turn away asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border if the migrants did not apply online first or seek protection in a country that they traveled through.
U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in California’s northern district gave the Biden administration 14 days to appeal his order, which takes away a key migration enforcement tool, according to The Associated Press.
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A recent Fareed Zakaria Washington Post op-ed nicely summarized our new reality:
There is a debate within the Republican Party. Some senior figures, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and former vice president Mike Pence, are vigorously making the case for an active and engaged America. But the party’s base seems to be with the isolationists, as can be seen in the tilting stances of the weather-vane speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy (Calif.). From Donald Trump to his copycat, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and the party’s most powerful media ideologist, Tucker Carlson, conservatives are increasingly contemptuous of America’s support for Ukraine and its strong alliance with Europe. Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.) told the New York Times that although some Republicans remain staunchly interventionist, “That’s not where the voters are.”
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Although Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has dominated worldwide headlines for more than a year and refocused the attention of U.S. policymakers on NATO and Eastern Europe, Americans are much more worried about China’s emerging power.
In an open question asked by RealClear Opinion Research, 53% of registered voters named the People’s Republic of China as “the greatest threat to the United States.” Russia was cited by 29% of respondents, while 4% named North Korea – the same percentage who answered that America’s biggest threat was the United States itself.
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Congressional investigating are probing whistleblower allegations that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency may have retaliated against a top agency official after he testifying before lawmakers.
House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and Rep. Mark Green wrote in a letter Friday that they have been told by a whistleblower that El Centro Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino was relieved of his command after he finished a transcribed interview with two congressional committees earlier this month.
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The Miss Italia beauty pageant will not allow male contestants, the contest’s curator told Italian outlet Radio Cusano.
The pageant’s curator, Patrizia Mirigliani, told Radio Cusano that only biological women are allowed to participate in the beauty competition. Weeks earlier, a man who identifies as transgender drew international headlines after winning the Miss Netherlands beauty pageant.
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Over 175,000 people came through the southern border in June, according to newly published U.S. Customs and Border Protection data and preliminary data first published by The Center Square.
The official CBP data published on Tuesday isn’t as straightforward as it normally is, possibly due to a recent shakeup at CBP with outgoing chiefs leaving June 30. A press release issued on Tuesday doesn’t include data typically published every month.
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The Iraqi government called U.S. Ambassador Alina Romanowski to Baghdad after the State Department made critical remarks about the government’s dismissal of a Vatican-appointed bishop, according to Reuters.
Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid recently rescinded a decree recognizing Cardinal Louis Sako the head of the Chaldean Catholic church in Iraq and all of its assets, claiming that no other state entity should appoint religious leaders in Iraq, according to Reuters. Rashid called Romanowski to Baghdad Wednesday after State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the U.S. was disturbed by the Iraqi government’s decision.
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Border Patrol has arrested 143 illegal migrants on the terror watchlist in fiscal year 2023, surpassing 2022’s total by roughly 25%, according to federal data updated Tuesday.
In all of fiscal year 2022, Border Patrol nabbed 98 individuals whose names appeared on the terror watchlist, according to the data. The data include both southern and northern border apprehensions of individuals on the terror watchlist.
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A new cross-border conservative coalition is calling on Washington lawmakers to change their policy toward Mexico and scrutinize the neighboring country for its alleged collusion with drug cartels.
The US-Mexico Conservative Policy Coalition states: “The Mexican government and Mexican criminal cartels exist in conscious and voluntary symbiosis, at multiple levels, up to and including the Mexican presidency…the current president of Mexico has expressed openness to a pact with the cartels and has spoken of his willingness to defend them from US action.
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The government of Hong Kong is offering a bounty of up to $1 million to anyone who can help find eight activists who fled to other countries and continue to fight against its authoritarian government.
I am not one of the eight, but all of us who fight for democracy in Hong Kong are in danger from a Chinese government that is chasing us for showing that it has broken its promises to keep Hong Kong a vibrant and free city-state.
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