Important Takeaways:
- President Trump on Thursday said he’ll sign an executive order making new Attorney General Pam Bondi the head of a task force to target “anti-Christian bias.”
- He said he was doing so to “confront such weaponization and political persecution.”
- “The mission of this task force will be to immediately halt all forms of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government, including at the DOJ — which was absolutely terrible — the IRS, the FBI and other agencies,” Mr. Trump told a crowd at the Washington Hilton.
- He also said work will be done to “fully prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism in our society and to move heaven and earth to defend the rights of Christians and religious believers nationwide.”
- Trump added, “If we don’t have religious liberty, then we don’t have a free country.”
- “We will bring our country back together as one nation under God with liberty and justice for all.”
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Important Takeaways:
- The U.S. will “take over the Gaza Strip,” level it and rebuild the area, President Donald Trump said during a press conference Tuesday evening after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.
- “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too,” Trump said Tuesday evening in a joint press conference with Netanyahu. “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous, unexplored bombs and other weapons on the site.”
- “Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area,” he said. “Do a real job. Do something different. Just can’t go back. If you go back, it’s going to end up the same way it has for 100 years.”
- “I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East and maybe the entire Middle East,” Trump said.”
- “Developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent in a really magnificent area that nobody would know. Nobody can look because all they see is death and destruction and rubble.”
- Netanyahu, when also asked about the Gaza Strip, reiterated to the media that he has three goals, one of which is to “make sure that Gaza never poses a threat to Israel again.”
- “President Trump is taking it to a much higher level,” the Israeli leader said. He sees a different future for that piece of land that has been the focus of so much terrorism, so much, so many attacks against us, so many, so many trials and so many tribulations. He has a different idea, and I think it’s worth paying attention to this.”
- The pair’s White House meeting included discussing the current ceasefire deal between Israel and the Hamas terror group and its future, Iran’s grip on the Middle East and resettling Gaza residents in other nations.
- “In our meetings today, the prime minister and I focused on the future, discussing how we can work together to ensure Hamas is eliminated and ultimately restore peace to a very troubled region,” Trump said during the press conference. “It’s been troubled, but what’s happened in the last four years has not been good.”
- The Israeli leader continued that his nation’s victory would also be a win for America.
- “Israel’s victory will be America’s victory,” Netanyahu said. “We will not only win the war working together, we will win the peace. With your leadership, Mr. President, and our partnership, I believe that we will forge a brilliant future for our region and bring our great alliance to even greater heights.”
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Important Takeaways:
- President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday withdrawing the United States from the UN Human Rights Council, UNRWA, and UNESCO – ending funding to the UN agency which deals with Palestinian refugees.
- Trump had previously withdrawn from the UNHRC and ended funding to the UNRWA in 2018…
- The UNHRC, according to the group, is “responsible for strengthening the promotion and protection of human rights around the globe and for addressing situations of human rights violations and making recommendations on them.”
- The United States has given the most money of any country to UNRWA. In 2023, the United States gave the group $422 million.
- However, critics say that UNRWA is a breeding ground for hatred toward the Jewish state through its schools and that Hamas uses its facilities to store weapons, including rockets, and hold hostages.
- UNRWA has refuted the criticisms.
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Important Takeaways:
- President Donald Trump says rumors of conflict with Iran ‘are greatly exaggerated’
- Trump made the statement on social media Wednesday morning, reaffirming the U.S. position that Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon. It comes just one day after Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.
- “I want Iran to be a great and successful Country, but one that cannot have a Nuclear Weapon. Reports that the United States, working in conjunction with Israel, is going to blow Iran into smithereens ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED,” Trump wrote.
- “I would much prefer a Verified Nuclear Peace Agreement, which will let Iran peacefully grow and prosper. We should start working on it immediately, and have a big Middle East Celebration when it is signed and completed. God Bless the Middle East!” he added.
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Important Takeaways:
- China announced retaliatory tariffs on select American imports and an antitrust investigation into Google on Tuesday, just minutes after a sweeping levy on Chinese products imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump took effect.
- American tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico were also set to go into effect Tuesday before Trump agreed to a 30-day pause as the two countries acted to address his concerns about border security and drug trafficking. Trump planned to talk with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the next few days.
- This isn’t the first round of tit-for-tat actions between the two countries. China and the U.S. engaged in an escalating trade war in 2018 when Trump repeatedly raised tariffs on Chinese goods and China responded each time.
- This time, analysts said, China is much better prepared, announcing a slew of measures that go beyond tariffs and cut across different sectors of the U.S. economy. The government is also more wary of upsetting its own fragile and heavily trade-dependent economy.
- “It’s aiming for finding measures that maximize the impact and also minimize the risk that the Chinese economy may face,” said Gary Ng, a senior economist at Natixis Corporate and Investment Banking in Hong Kong. “At the same time … China is trying to increase its bargaining chips.”
- John Gong, a professor at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, called the response a “measured” one. “I don’t think they want the trade war escalating,” he said. “And they see this example from Canada and Mexico and probably they are hoping for the same thing.”
- China announced export controls on several elements critical to the production of modern high-tech products.
- They include tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum and indium, many of which are designated as critical minerals by the U.S. Geological Survey, meaning they are essential to U.S. economic or national security that have supply chains vulnerable to disruption.
- The export controls are in addition to ones China placed in December on key elements such as gallium.
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Important Takeaways:
- When I decided to write this article, I was feeling quite overwhelmed, because there is just so much going on right now. This is going to be a very long article, and I will take it one step at a time. With all that being said, let’s take a look at some of the highlights…
- [And I, not the author of this article highlighted the highlights so you have to go to the website for more information]
- The U.S. Treasury
- If you want to understand what is really going on in any organization, you need to follow the flow of money.
- So Elon Musk has been wanting access to the U.S. Treasury’s payment system, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted him that access on Friday…
- After getting in, Musk discovered that payment approval officers at the U.S. Treasury were simply rubber-stamping all payment requests that were submitted to them…
- Every single year, more than 6 trillion dollars is disbursed through the U.S. Treasury’s payment system…
- In a typical year, over one billion payments are made by the U.S. Treasury, and not a single one was ever being denied.
- OPM
- The Office of Personnel Management is the largest HR department on the entire globe.
- “A team including current and former employees of Musk assumed command of OPM on Jan. 20, the day Trump took office. They have moved sofa beds onto the fifth floor of the agency’s headquarters, which contains the director’s office and can only be accessed with a security badge or a security escort, one of the OPM employees said…. The sofa beds have been installed so the team can work around the clock, the employee said.”
- Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.
- … During an internal meeting Friday morning, Trump administration officials directed OPM senior career staff to begin making plans to cut the agency’s workforce and programs by 70%. Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting confirmed the details of the meeting to Federal News Network…
- USAID
- When officials from Musk’s team went over to USAID headquarters, they were physically prevented from entering.
- In response, the representatives from Musk’s team “threatened to call US Marshals to be allowed access”…
- Two top security officials at the US Agency for International Development were put on administrative leave Saturday night after attempting to refuse officials from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access systems at the agency, even after DOGE personnel threatened to call law enforcement, multiple sources familiar told CNN.
- According to sources, personnel from the Musk-created office physically tried to access the USAID headquarters in Washington, DC, and were stopped. The DOGE personnel demanded to be let in and threatened to call US Marshals to be allowed access, two of the sources said.
- The DOGE personnel wanted to gain access to USAID security systems and personnel files, three sources said. Two of those sources also said the DOGE personnel wanted access to classified information, which only those with security clearances and a specific need to know are able to access.
- If you go to USAID’s website now, you will find that it has been shut down…
- On his Twitter account, Robby Starbuck detailed how this works…
- USAID essentially functions as one of many money laundering machines for Democrats in DC. Here’s how it works:
- Activists create obscure NGO
- Dems fund it lavishly
- NGO does bare minimum (or actively hurts the United States)
- Activists get paid and donate to Dems
- Not only that but USAID helped spread their gender ideology nonsense and brought millions of illegals into our country.
- That’s why Democrats are freaking out about the possibility that USAID’s being shut down by President Trump. It needs to be done.
- The EPA
- It appears that the EPA could soon be getting a lot smaller.
- Last week, over 1,000 EPA employees were notified that “they were deemed to be on probationary status” and could soon be fired…
- …The same message will be sent to other agency workforces, a White House official said. Across the US government, the latest data shows there are more than 220,000 employees on probation.
- The FBI
- Last week, the Washington Post reported that “at least eight senior FBI executives” were being terminated…
- A top Justice Department official on Friday ordered the firing of at least eight senior FBI executives and a sweeping examination of the work of thousands of other bureau employees, including all those who worked on investigations tied to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post.
- The directive from Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove said those field agents and FBI support staff could face “additional personnel action,” suggesting that the number of firings could swell in the coming weeks.
- Ken Dilanian with NBC News reported that a number of the FBI’s “top executives” were told they would be out of a job by Monday. Friday, Dilanian reported a “purge” was underway that could see the heads of up to 20 of the FBI’s 55 field offices relieved.
- Dilanian reported, “The purge is bigger than first understood, we are told, and includes more than 20 heads of FBI field offices, including the ones in Miami and Washington, DC.”
- Vast numbers of federal workers that have been working at home since the pandemic began are going to have to start showing up at the office each day.
- If they choose not to report, they will gladly be given their walking papers…
- President Trump on Wednesday warned that federal workers will have to show up to the office “or be terminated,” framing his administration’s so-called buyout offers to 2 million employees as an effort to shrink the government.
- “We’re requiring them to show up to work or be terminated,” Trump said in remarks from the East Room before signing an immigration bill into law.
- “We think a very substantial number of people will not show up to work, and therefore our government will get smaller and more efficient,” Trump added. “And that’s what we’ve been looking to do for many, many decades, frankly.”
- In the entire history of the United States, we have never seen anything quite like this, and there is widespread panic among federal employees right now…
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Important Takeaways:
- Panama’s president vowed Sunday to end a key development deal with China after meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and after complaints from President Donald Trump that the Latin American country had ceded control over its critical shipping canal to Beijing.
- “I think this visit opens the door to build new relations … and try to increase as much as possible U.S. investments in Panama,” Mulino told reporters after meeting with Rubio on his first international trip since being confirmed.
- Trump has complained that China exerts control over the canal and charges U.S. ships six-figure premiums to cross Panama’s isthmus. The canal was built over several decades by the U.S. and completed in 1914 but handed over to Panama during the Carter administration.
- The bill, named the Panama Canal Repurchase Act, was introduced by Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., a member of the Select Committee on China and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
- If it becomes law, the bill would give the president authority to act in coordination with the secretary of state to “initiate and conduct negotiations with appropriate counterparts of the Government of the Republic of Panama to reacquire the Panama Canal.”
- The U.S. Department of State estimates around 72% of all vessels that travel through the Panama Canal are coming from or going to a U.S. port.
- Noting the canal’s strategic importance to the United States, Johnson’s office also noted how the waterway is a key transit point for U.S. Coast Guard and Department of Defense vessels.
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Important Takeaways:
- According to Harris Faulkner on Fox News, the Trump administration already found about 75,000 to 80,000 of those kids that were missing under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
- Faulkner: “Trump has told me about all of this, and it will focus on those missing children, hundreds of thousands of them that we know. That number has already started to come down from 300,000. They’ve found about 75,000 to 80,000 of those kids already.
- If they can get the list of these guys, four full days in office for Trump—if they can get the list of where some of those kids have been and they’ve been identifying it since the election, going after them and trying to find those little ones—what in the world was Biden’s administration doing?!
- What was Secretary of Homeland Security, Mayorkas, doing when he said to the committees on Capitol Hill, ‘We don’t know where those kids are. I’ll look into it.’ No, dude, you obviously had a better way to find them, and you didn’t do your job. I can’t believe they impeached him and didn’t remove him.”
- An investigation by Muckraker exposes the Biden-Harris administration’s trafficking of humans and children and the pathway of the hundreds of thousands of children that are trafficked into the United States with the federal government’s help.
- We discovered that while in federal government custody, some children asked to be sent back to their home country, but are instead taken away in the middle of the night and sent to sponsors who they do not know. It is also well documented that this program has placed children in the hands of criminal organizations such as MS-13, as well as labor and sex trafficking rings,” says Muckraker CEO Anthony Rubin.
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Important Takeaways:
- In signing the pardons, Trump said what the Biden Administration had done to them was “ridiculous.”
- “Twenty-three people were prosecuted, they should not have been prosecuted – many of them are elderly people – they should not have been prosecuted. This is a great honor to sign this,” he said.
- Earlier in the day, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) delivered a speech on the Senate floor calling the pro-lifer prosecutions a “dark period of our history” and “a grotesque assault on the principles of this country.”
- He supported Trump’s plan to pardon the pro-life prisoners, saying, “He can right the wrongs that this last administration perpetrated. . . He can, again, renew the commitment that is found right there in our Constitution. That commitment to honor liberty of conscience. To honor the right to follow God, to live out our faith peaceably—which is exactly what these pro-life prisoners, still prisoners, were doing.”
- The Thomas More Society recently sent a letter to President Trump contending that the defendants they represent had been “unjustly imprisoned.”
- According to the Daily Signal, the Thomas More Society had requested pardons for the following people: Joan Bell, Coleman Boyd, Joel Curry, Jonathan Darnel, Eva Edl, Chester Gallagher, William Goodman, Dennis Green, Lauren Handy, Paulette Harlow, John Hinshaw, Heather Idoni, Jean Marshall, Fr. Fidelis Moscinski, Justin Phillips, Paul Place, Paul Vaughn, Bevelyn Beatty Williams, Calvin Zastrow, Eva Zastrow, and James Zastrow.
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Important Takeaways:
- President Donald Trump has announced a new artificial intelligence company called Stargate, which will be a collaboration between some leading U.S. tech figures.
- Trump used his first full day in office to announce the $100 billion project alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, signifying Trump’s close relationship with Big Tech.
- What Is Stargate?
- Stargate is a new project designed to maintain the U.S. as the global leader in artificial intelligence. Backed by a $500 billion investment over four years, Stargate plans to build AI infrastructure across the U.S., creating thousands of new jobs and doubling down on American advantages in AI development.
- With $100 billion already set for immediate deployment, the project will focus on re-industrializing the U.S. while enhancing national security and developing transformative AI technologies.
- The project will be based in Texas, where the construction of 10 new data centers has already begun.
- Stargate will prioritize AI advancements in industries such as healthcare, where the technology could revolutionize patient care through improved diagnostics, earlier disease detection and even potential cancer vaccinations.
- Who Is Part of Stargate?
- Stargate is a collaborative effort between some of the most prominent global players in technology and investment.
- The initiative consists of top U.S. tech companies, including SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX.
- Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, chairman of SoftBank, will serve as Stargate’s chairman.
- Key technology partners in the project include Arm, Microsoft and NVIDIA, all of whom will contribute to designing and operating the computing systems needed to maintain AI infrastructure.
- Altman emphasized the significance of Stargate, calling it “the most important thing we do in this era”
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