EDUCATION, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

INVESTIGATION: Uncovering Chinese Academic Espionage at Stanford

Posted By on May 11th, 2025

https://stanfordreview.org/investigation-uncovering-chinese-academic-espionage-at-stanford/

This summer, a CCP agent impersonated a Stanford student. Under the alias Charles Chen, he approached several students through social media. Anna*, a Stanford student conducting sensitive research on China, began receiving unexpected messages from Charles Chen. At first, Charles’s outreach seemed benign: he asked about networking opportunities. But soon, his messages took a strange turn.

Charles inquired whether Anna spoke Mandarin, then grew increasingly persistent and personal. He sent videos of Americans who had gained fame in China, encouraged Anna to visit Beijing, and offered to cover her travel expenses. He would send screenshots of a bank account balance to prove he could buy the plane tickets. Alarmingly, he referenced details about her that Anna had never disclosed to him.

He advised her to enter China for only 24 to 144 hours, short enough, he said, to avoid visa scrutiny by authorities, and urged her to communicate exclusively via the Chinese version of WeChat, a platform heavily monitored by the CCP. When Charles commented on one of her social media posts, asking her to delete screenshots of their conversations, she knew this was serious. 

Under the guidance of experts familiar with espionage tactics, Anna contacted authorities. Their investigation revealed that Charles Chen had no affiliation with Stanford. Instead, he had posed as a Stanford student for years, slightly altering his name and persona online, targeting multiple students, nearly all of them women researching China-related topics. According to the experts on China who assisted Anna, Charles Chen was likely an agent of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), tasked with identifying sympathetic Stanford students and gathering intelligence.

POLITICS Comments turned off

After papal election, Liz Cheney demonstrates how Trump continues to live rent-free inside her head By Monica Showalter

Posted By on May 11th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/05/after_papal_election_liz_cheney_demonstrates_how_trump_continues_to_live_rent_free_inside_her_head.html

With Pope Leo XIV’s election in the Vatican, politicians and world leaders of all kinds moved to deliver their congratulations, extending their best wishes.

But then there’s Liz Cheney, still dreaming of Donald Trump over anything else, even a papal election.

She actually tweeted this:

It’s always all about Trump with her, isn’t it?

Instead of congratulating the new pope, she tried to compare President Trump to him unfavorably, the one all full of ‘grace, humility, mercy, and faith’ and the other full of ‘depraved cruelty, corruption and shame,’ none of which is remotely true. The two might actually become friendly which would probably give Liz the vapors.

The whole post stinks because it’s focused on who’s the more famous one. Things like this are irrelevant to all but the most fevered swamp-dwellers, keeping score of whose status is more important.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Regime Change in Iran Is Becoming Inevitable Iran’s regime is crumbling under economic collapse, mass dissent, and regional isolation—making democratic transition less a question of if, and more of when. By Fariba Parsa

Posted By on May 11th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/10/why-regime-change-in-iran-is-becoming-inevitable/

he Islamic Republic of Iran is facing unprecedented pressure from both within and outside its borders. Internally, economic collapse, widespread political disillusionment, and mass rejection of religious authoritarianism have profoundly weakened the regime’s legitimacy. Externally, Iran’s regional influence is diminishing as its proxies suffer military defeats and diplomatic isolation. Although the precise timing is uncertain, the convergence of these pressures makes regime change in Iran increasingly likely. For Western policymakers, this is not the time for short-term crisis management—it is the time to prepare for a democratic transition.

Internal Fault Lines
Popular Rejection of the Regime

Forty-six years after the Islamic Revolution, Iranian public sentiment has turned sharply against the ruling elite. A 2022 survey by the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran GAMAAN found that nearly 90% of Iranians do not support the Islamic Republic as a system of governance. Additionally, 73% of respondents favor the separation of religion from politics—directly opposing the regime’s theocratic foundations. Calls for secular democracy and respect for human rights transcend ideological boundaries. Opposition comes from a wide range of constituencies—women’s rights activists, students, laborers, ethnic minorities, monarchists, secular republicans, and even traditional religious groups. The 2022–2023 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini while in morality police custody, revealed a society no longer willing to endure repression. The Islamic regime is increasingly unable to enforce its compulsory hijab law, as millions of Iranian women openly defy it. At the same time, hardline factions within the regime are pressuring authorities to crack down and strictly implement the law. Yet the regime finds itself paralyzed—unable either to grant women the freedom to choose their clothing or to return to the mass arrests and repression of earlier years. The gulf between state and society has grown irreparably wide. Reform is no longer seen as a viable option. Today, the Iranian people themselves pose the greatest threat to the regime’s survival—more so than any external actor.

Economic Collapse and Systemic Corruption

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Roadblocks prevent Trump from deporting millions of illegal immigrants Local judges and officials aren’t the only obstacle to Trump’s immigration enforcement Charles Lipson

Posted By on May 11th, 2025

https://thespectator.com/topic/roadblocks-prevent-trump-from-deporting-millions-of-illegal-immigrants/

“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” So goes the bartenders’ refrain to customers at closing time. The Trump administration is issuing that same call to millions of illegal immigrants, beginning with the most violent (and those caught staying with them). You can’t stay here.

It’s a wildly popular stance, but it is running into predictable problems.

The first is that rounding up the millions here illegally is costly, time-consuming and sometimes dangerous. That problem was vastly increased by Joe Biden’s deliberate decision to open the southern border, allow millions of people to cross it illegally and then lie to the public and Congress about what his administration was doing.

President Biden, Vice President Harris and Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas repeatedly said the border was “closed and secure” when they knew it was not. Mayorkas said it in sworn testimony to Congress. These weren’t just lies; they were stupid lies because voters could see the increasing problems and the obvious deceit.

Second, while Biden ignored the laws protecting our borders and did so with legal impunity, the immigrants gained rights of due process once they arrived on American soil. Again, the Biden administration failed in its basic responsibilities, with considerable support from the entire Democratic Party. The Biden administration could have detained these illegal immigrants at the border, which would have facilitated swift, legally appropriate deportation. They chose not to. Instead, they released almost all the illegal arrivals into the country’s interior. Some were given instructions to return in several years for court hearings. Some were simply released with no instructions or documentation.

Those policies swamped states and localities with new, illegal residents and vast expenditures for schools, housing, healthcare, crime prevention and more. The “sanctuary” policies of many blue cities and states invite them to come and stay. One unanticipated result has been a deepening cleavage within the Democratic Party, pitting progressives (who favor the influx without ever saying the word “illegal”) and minority voters who rely on jobs and government services that are under greater pressure.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Tragic Story of Ivan Morales Corrales Allan Wall

Posted By on May 11th, 2025

https://mexiconewsreport.com/index.php/2025/05/10/the-tragic-story-of-ivan-morales-corrales/

The tragic story of recently-murdered Ivan Morales Corrales displays the power and ruthlessness of a Mexican drug cartel.

Ivan Morales Corrales was a Mexican federal agent.

On May 1st, 2015, Morales was part of a secret mission in Jalisco state to capture Nemesio Ruben “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, leader of the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG).

There were five helicopters on the mission. The one Morales Corrales was in was hit by RPGs and crashed and burned. Of the 18 persons on board the aircraft 9 survived.

Morales survived but was horribly burned, with second and third degree burns over 70% of his body, after which he underwent 15 reconstructive surgeries.

In December of 2015, Morelos received the Police Medal of Merit from then-President Enrique Pena Nieto.

2015 – President Pena Nieto and Ivan Morales Corrales. Source: Univisión

In September of 2024, Morelos was in the U.S. where he testified in the trial of
Ruben Oseguera González  “El Menchito”, the son of “El Mencho”.

El Menchito had actually given the order to attack the helicopter and was later arrested in Mexico and extradited to the United States.

On March 7th, 2025, El Menchito was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment for international drug trafficking.

On April 30th, 2025, nearly 10 years after the attack on the helicopter, Morales and his wife were ambushed and shot to death in Temixco, state of Morelos.

So the CJNG got its revenge on a brave Mexican who had already suffered greatly in the Cartel War.

ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

John Fetterman: Sluggish Schizophrenic? Once praised, John Fetterman now faces Soviet-style smears from the left, deemed mentally unfit for defying party orthodoxy and supporting Israel. By Stephen Soukup

Posted By on May 11th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/10/john-fetterman-sluggish-schizophrenic/

Readers of a certain age or a certain educational predisposition will undoubtedly recall the name Andrei Sakharov—for good reason. Sakharov was a hero, a dissident, and a brilliant man who paid an enormous price for his convictions. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The European Parliament honored him for his bravery and sacrifice by naming its coveted human rights award after him. He was, in short, an extremely impressive person.

Before he became a brilliant human rights and peace activist, Sakharov was a brilliant physicist, one of the most brilliant of the twentieth century. He was the youngest person ever elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, at the tender age of 32. For his work on developing the Soviet Union’s hydrogen bomb, Sakharov was named a “Hero of Socialist Labor” three times—in 1953, 1956, and 1962. He was a member of the Soviet Atomic Energy Commission and is credited as being a key contributor to the advancement of the Soviet thermonuclear weapons program.

Near the end of the 1960s, however, Sakharov’s concern about the (literal) fallout from nuclear testing morphed into concern about nuclear weapons in general and then into peace activism and advocacy for civil liberties. His manifesto, “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,” was smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1968, was published by the New York Times, and turned Sakharov into an international icon, a respected and admired dissident.

Just over a decade later, Sakharov openly criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, prompting the Brezhnev regime to take drastic action against him. In the conventional telling of the story the dissident and his wife (fellow physicist and activist Yelena Bonner) were arrested and exiled to the closed city of Gorky. In truth, what happened to Sakharov was much more nefarious. He wasn’t just exiled or “banished.” And he was never officially “arrested.” Rather, he was removed from the proximity to power for what the Brezhnev regime called “his own good.” On December 9, 1983, The New York Times explained precisely what that meant:

A prominent Soviet official implied at a news conference today that Andrei D. Sakharov, the physicist and human rights campaigner, was mentally disturbed. The official, Vitaly P. Ruben, who is chairman of one of the two houses of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal Parliament, called Dr. Sakharov “a talented but sick man” and said an article the physicist published in the West earlier this year had invited an American nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Iranian Regime’s Trojan Horse “Civilian Use” Lie on Nuclear Weapons by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on May 10th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21607/iran-lies-nuclear-weapons

Any deal that permits Iran to keep centrifuges spinning, continue uranium enrichment, or store nuclear material is a deal that guarantees a future nuclear-armed Iran. We cannot afford a disastrous “JCPOA, the Sequel.”

Now, after President Trump’s return, the world is watching to see whether the United States really has the backbone to compel Iran completely to dismantle its nuclear weapons infrastructure – or actually to deliver the alternative.

The Iranian regime is not to be trusted. Its so-called “civilian” nuclear program is a Trojan horse, a fraud designed to keep the West paralyzed. There have to be no more talks, no more half-measures, no more inspectors playing cat and mouse with a regime that lies to their faces with impunity. The only acceptable outcome is either full dismantlement — no centrifuges and enriched uranium for “civilian use”, no secret sites — or unfortunately, the less pretty “Plan B,” if Trump and his administration are to have any credibility.

For more than two decades, the Iranian regime has played a dangerous and calculated game of deception with the West by skillfully masking its nuclear ambitions under the pretense of “civilian use.” This is not a new tactic — it’s a time-tested playbook used by rogue regimes to buy time, mislead international watchdogs, and continue marching in the shadows toward nuclear weapons and the missiles to them.

Tehran has manipulated global diplomacy by leveraging Western naivety and its obsession with appeasement and the search for “peace” to keep all the core elements of its nuclear program intact.

While negotiations and deals were struck in the name of “peace,” Iran preserved and advanced the infrastructure necessary to build nuclear bombs. Preserving its nuclear programs by proliferating secret sites under the deceitful banner of civilian energy has allowed the regime to reap the benefits of economic deals while continuing to lie and manipulate.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Separation or Collapse: Which Comes First? David Solway

Posted By on May 10th, 2025

https://pjmedia.com/david-solway-2/2025/05/09/separation-or-collapse-which-comes-first-n4939639

The province of Alberta has a legitimate grievance with the ROC (Rest of Canada).

According to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, since the inception of Canada’s equalization program in 1957, which sees the wealthier provinces subsidizing their less fortunate counterparts, Alberta has made a net contribution of $67 billion, $2.9 billion alone in 2021 — which in turn represents only a portion of the province’s immense financial contribution to federal coffers and the governments and residents of other provinces. 

The Fraser Institute notes that the equalization drain represents “just a small part of the province’s outsized contribution to confederation in recent years.” It calculates that “the gap between Albertans’ contribution to federal revenues and federal expenditures plus transfers to the province, totalled $20.5 billion annually in 2017/18. And this measure excludes Albertans’ disproportionate cumulative contribution to the Canada Pension Plan, which on net totalled $2.9 billion in 2017.”

Albertans had voted in a referendum to abolish the system of equalization payments to other provinces. Speaking of transfer payments, it was former Premier Jason Kenney who made that issue a referendum question. Alberta voted yes, an affirmative totally ignored by Ottawa and the rest of the country.

Meanwhile, the Liberals are doing everything in their power to eviscerate Alberta’s energy industry, the source of its prosperity and a major contributor to Canada’s overall solvency, by shutting down pipeline projects, banning tanker activity along the coast of British Columbia, and levying anti-emission, net-zero protocols designed to strangle the province’s economic output. The cognitive dissonance is appalling. 

Obviously, it is not only Alberta and Saskatchewan that are at risk, but the rest of the country as well, as the Liberal administration under Mark Carney moves to effectively collapse the country’s economic output. Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, and now the UK are the models for a Canadian makeover. Debt, deficit, money printing, and capital flight are the inevitable results of the net-zero fantasy. Canada is intent on committing economic suicide.

As emeritus professor of economics Steve Ambler points out, “Private investment in Canada was already hemorrhaging under the Trudeau administration. Even larger federal deficits under the new Liberal administration, and its continued emphasis on managing the economy from the top down by administrative fiat, will not improve the situation. Instead, investment funds will continue to migrate to the US where tax rates and the business climate in general are more advantageous.” Indeed, an internal government report from Policy Horizons Canada warns of a “near-collapse of Canada’s economy, trigger[ing] a mental health crisis and more grassroots approaches to housing and food—including families foraging and hunting wildlife for food.”  

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The British elites have capitulated to Islamo-censorship Our backdoor blasphemy laws were decades in the making, inked in blood and cowardice. Tom Slater

Posted By on May 10th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/09/the-british-elites-have-capitulated-to-islamo-censorship/

Does freedom of speech include the right to blaspheme? In 21st-century Britain, you’d have thought the answer would be ‘yes, obviously’. Our last blasphemy conviction was in 1977. England’s blasphemy law was abolished in 2008, having been a dead letter for decades. The centuries-long struggle for free speech in this country, as in so many others, was built on defaming gods, kings, clerics, prophets. Without the right to blaspheme, there is no right to speak freely. But in this identitarian age, what was once taken for granted is fast melting into air.

In Britain, in 2025, whether or not you should be able to criticise a religion, mock its practices, burn its texts, is an alarmingly live issue. And when I say ‘a religion’, you know which one I’m talking about. This debate has lit up again this week, following the charges brought against Hamit Coskun for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London in February. His one-man protest against the Islamist turn of Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been chalked up as a religiously motivated public-order offence, drawing the condemnation of shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick and causing an X feud between two MPs. Rupert Lowe – the member for the Very Online right – condemned our backdoor blasphemy laws, while Adnan Hussain – one of the so-called Gaza independents who rode a wave of sectarian, anti-Israel bile into parliament at the last General Election – accused Lowe of singling out Muslims under the guise of freedom of speech.

Hussain’s arguments are as banal as they are illiberal. Free speech isn’t absolute, ackshually. Those who claim to care about Koran-burners are really just racists. Do you know who also burned books? Hitler! What most sticks in the craw is how depressingly pedestrian they are – not simply among the ‘Gaza independents’, but also the liberal elites, who long ago sacrificed genuine liberalism on the altar of multiculturalism. It is their cowardice and relativism that has brought us to this point: where the old Christian blasphemy laws may be long gone, but informal Islamic blasphemy laws are fast taking shape, with hate-speech laws refashioned to forcefield a faith from criticism.

Those shocked to see a case like Coskun’s haven’t been paying attention. Ever since the Rushdie affair, we have witnessed an unholy alliance between Islamist censors, a cowardly political establishment and an increasingly identitarian left. The first protest against The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie’s ‘blasphemous’ novel which earned him the Ayatollah’s fatwa and almost cost him his life, was not on the subcontinent or in the Middle East, but in Bolton on 2 December 1988. While this movement never succeeded in getting Rushdie’s novel banned in Britain, or extending Britain’s blasphemy laws to cover Islam, it put the fear of Allah into anyone who dared publish a book, display a cartoon or make a statement that some perma-outraged prick, claiming to speak on behalf of Muslims, might deem to be offensive or heretical. This haunts us to this day, as the still-disappeared Batley school teacher or the recent – mercifully foiled – attempts to murder ex-Muslim Hatun Tash show.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

On being called “Nazi filth”by Scott Johnson

Posted By on May 10th, 2025

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/05/on-being-called-nazi-filth.php

I’m in New York for last night’s Manhattan Institute’s annual Alexander Hamilton Award dinner. Held last night at Cipriani on 42nd Street, this year the award honored long-time Manhattan Institute chairman Paul Singer. As of last night, Mr. Singer has stepped down and been succeeded as MI chairman by Betsy DeVos.

Mr. Singer is the founder and president of Elliott Investment Management. He is also the philanthropic supporter of conservative and Jewish causes.

Is that the reason that the lunatic left was out in force at the event last night? I don’t know, but they were. If NYPD had not been out in force to provide security along with others, the “protesters” would likely have shut down the event. Walking in with my daughter and one of her Jewish colleagues and his father, the loudest loudmouth among the nuts shouted out in a throaty voice that we were “Nazi filth.” That was a new experience for me.

Among the guests singled out for recognition last night was Daniel Penny. He may have received the biggest ovation of the evening.

The New York Post covers the “protest” in “Daniel Penny attends Manhattan Institute fundraiser — where swarm of protesters staged a ‘die-in.’” The Post identifies Third Act NYC as the organization behind the “protest.” The “protest” appears to have covered the gamut of causes promoted by the left at present. I don’t think the reporter hung around for the “Nazi filth” part of the proceedings.