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Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Republican National Committee (RNC) co-chair Lara Trump said Sunday that election integrity is a top priority in the upcoming November election and the committee is focused on it “like a laser.”

Lara Trump speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., on Feb. 28, 2020. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

During an interview with Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” on April 7, Ms. Trump said that the committee will dedicate all of its resources to its Election Integrity Division “as needed.”

“When you talk about election integrity, it is vital. It is the number one thing that we are focused on, aside from getting out the vote, which, of course, Donald Trump himself will do for us,” Ms. Trump said.

“We are making sure that we leave nothing to chance because we have to understand the importance of this election,” she added.

Former President Donald Trump raked in a massive $50.5 million in funds for his reelection bid on Saturday. With this funding, Ms. Trump, the daughter-in-law of President Trump, said the RNC can now afford to ensure that poll workers are trained and lawyers are present in every voting precinct.

“Prior to last night, the largest single event fundraiser in politics ever was the one that Joe Biden had. And he needed three presidents to haul in $26 million,” she said, referring to President Biden’s fundraiser in March, which included former presidents Barrack Obama and Bill Clinton.

“We needed one man, Donald J. Trump, one president, to double that,” Ms. Trump added.

Ms. Trump said that the outcome of this fundraiser event reflects a shift where “people are not sitting on the sidelines anymore.”

“They understand what’s at stake. It’s a must-win election. And from the election integrity perspective, we’re focused on it like a laser at the RNC,” she added.

RNC Co-chair Lara Trump told Maria Bartiromo this morning that President Trump will be holding another big-haul fundraiser next week, this time in Georgia.

Trump also spoke about the critical issue of election integrity.
. pic.twitter.com/u5KeUrSGnt

Under a joint-fundraising agreement, funds from the fundraiser event will go to the Trump campaign, the former president’s Save America PAC, the RNC, and state GOP parties.

RNC chair Michael Whatley, who was also present for the interview, said the committee will spend “every dollar” raised on two “critical core” missions: increasing voter turnout and protecting the ballot.

Mr. Whatley said that the RNC is working with state legislatures, boards of elections, and secretaries of state to ensure the implementation of the rules of the road.

The committee will file lawsuits if the rules are not adhered to, he said, adding that the RNC had filed over 80 lawsuits in 24 states “to make sure that we have the ground ready to go for safe elections.”

The committee has also been recruiting and training thousands of observers and attorneys “to make sure that we are in the room” when a vote is cast and counted, Mr. Whatley said.

Michael Whatley, speaks before former President Donald Trump's arrival for a rally in Greensboro, N.C., on March 2, 2024. (Jonathan Drake/Reuters)

“What we want are fair, accurate, secure, and transparent elections. And when we have it, then we’re going to protect the sanctity of that ballot. We’re going to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat,” he added.

President Trump’s campaign’s fundraiser, dubbed the “Inaugural Leadership Dinner,” was held in hedge fund billionaire John Paulson’s $110 million home in Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday.

Thie event is a much-needed boost for President Trump, who has been routinely outraised by President Biden amid a financial squeeze due to ballooning lawyer fees and legal payouts from his criminal and civil court cases.

Mr. Paulson told The Epoch Times on Saturday that the event has now claimed the position of being the most successful political fundraiser in U.S. history.

“This sold-out event has raised the most in a single political fundraiser in history. This overwhelming support demonstrates the enthusiasm for President Trump and his policies,” he remarked.

Melanie Sun, Janice Hisle, and Reuter contributed to this report.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Social media posts urging people not to take ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19 have been taken down by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The FDA removed posts from X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn that stated: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously y'all. Stop it.”

The posts had remained up even after the regulatory agency agreed to take them down as part of a settlement in a legal case brought by doctors who said the posts wrongly interfered with their practice of medicine.

The March 21 settlement said the FDA would take down specific posts within 21 days. The posts were made in August 2021.

The FDA has also deleted the following posts:

• An Aug. 21, 2021, Instagram post that said: “You are not a horse. Stop it with the #ivermectin. It’s not authorized for treating #COVID.”

• An April 26, 2022, Twitter post that said: “Hold your horses ya'll. Ivermectin may be trending, but it still isn’t authorized or approved to treat COVID-19.”

The posts directed people to an FDA webpage titled, “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19.” The page itself acknowledged that the FDA has approved ivermectin for some uses but said “taking a drug for an unapproved use can be very dangerous” and “currently available data do not show ivermectin is effective against COVID-19.”

The agency pointed to a database of clinical trials testing ivermectin against COVID-19; some of the trials showed the drug works against the illness.

Doctors commonly prescribe FDA-approved drugs for a range of purposes, including some outside the scope of approval. The practice is known as off-label prescription.

The FDA’s ivermectin posts gained tremendous traction across social media and news outlets, prompting internal excitement, emails obtained by The Epoch Times showed. Millions of people saw the posts. “That was great! Even I saw it!” Dr. Janet Woodcock, the agency’s acting commissioner at the time, said in one missive.

The FDA has not alerted its followers on social media that it removed the posts.

2022, celebrated the development.

The case “sets an important legal precedent which should deter them from attempting this stunt again anytime soon,” she wrote on X. In another post, she said that “the terms we were asking for were met when we agreed to settle” and “we were not optimistic about what we would get in discovery.”

But while the posts and page have been removed, the FDA has created a new page about ivermectin and COVID-19.

Published on April 5, it states: “One of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s jobs is to carefully evaluate the scientific data on a drug to be sure that it is both safe and effective for a particular use. There continues to be interest in a drug called ivermectin for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 in humans. The FDA has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19 in humans or animals.”

The page repeats the statement that “the FDA has determined that currently available clinical trial data do not demonstrate that ivermectin is effective against COVID 19 in humans,” but lacks the link to the database showing mixed results from trials.

The page also says that “health care professionals may choose to prescribe or use an approved human drug for an unapproved use when they judge that the unapproved use is medically appropriate for an individual patient.”

An FDA spokesperson previously told The Epoch Times that the settlement was not an admission of a violation of law or any other wrongdoing.

“FDA has not changed its position that currently available clinical trial data do not demonstrate that ivermectin is effective against COVID-19,“ the spokesperson said. ”The agency has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19.”

By George Lei, Bloomberg markets live reporter and strategist

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen implored Beijing’s top leaders during her four-day visit to refrain from boosting the country’s already vast manufacturing capacity and to focus on lifting domestic demand instead.

That push, however, is in stark contrast to the priorities of President Xi Jinping, whose “new productive forces” slogan is now dominating the economic policy discourse. His push suggests the country’s expansion of its production capacity will likely persist and contribute to increasing tensions with the nation’s major trading partners.

While its not entirely clear how Xi’s policy will play out on the ground, equity investors have already picked winners since the phrase was listed as the government’s top task in early March. Market reactions seem to imply that Beijing will double down on state spending to strengthen China’s transition toward high-tech, value-added production and advanced manufacturing. There is also a perception that “Made in China 2025” - a government plan to groom 10 globally competitive industries, and one that drew the ire of former President Trump - is making a comeback.

The push for greater investments in manufacturing will likely reinforce China’s role as the world’s factory and fuel already-tense trade relationships with the US and other major economies, both in the developed and developing worlds. Over the past few months, the European Union, for one, has pushed back hard against a glut of Chinese products flooding the bloc’s market, including EVs, semi-conductors and solar and wind equipment. Frictions have also been on the rise with countries including Chile, Turkey and India in recent years.

Beijing has also attempted to reorient its economy toward one driven by consumption, but it’s had little success. Back in 2020, Xi advocated “dual circulation,” a catchphrase calling for a greater push on reforms to build an economy with stronger local catalysts and a pivot away from export-led growth. That vision never materialized and the term has subsequently fallen into disuse, like other popular slogans during the pandemic era such as curbing “disorderly capital.”

3/4
Increased investment in manufacturing, in other words, is among the few things that will allow China to reach the 5% growth target. Without that, either it needs a major fiscal boost to consumption (something Beijing decries as "welfarism"), or it has to accept lower growth.

Tasked with delivering 5% growth yet unable to either engineer a major housing stimulus or lend a strong helping hand to consumers, policymakers can only resort to increased manufacturing investments, Michael Pettis, professor of finance at Peking University and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in a tweet on Friday.

With Xi’s motto “housing is for living in, not for speculation” surfacing from time to time in policy discourse and calls for direct cash transfer to consumers falling on deaf ears, re-balancing toward a consumer-driven economy looks like a tall order.

As production exceeds consumption, Pettis says “trade conflict is only likely to get worse.” That probably won’t change no matter who wins the White House in November.

Authored by Christian Milord via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The recent stringent Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) carbon emissions standards for internal combustion engines defy economic realities. The EPA would have us believe that coercing folks to buy electric vehicles (EV) will somehow reduce alleged climate change extremes. The new rules will negatively affect California and the entire nation.

Traffic moves along Interstate 80 in Berkeley, Calif., on August 24, 2022. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Obviously, most folks want to maintain clean air, land, and water ecosystems. However, scientists haven’t agreed on what degree human activity adversely impacts global climate change as opposed to natural causes for extreme climate events. Several dire predictions of rising seas haven’t panned out over several decades, while cooling and warming trends haven’t been too much out of the ordinary.

The new EPA standards are part of a government plan to make EVs two-thirds of new car sales by 2032. Thirty percent of heavy duty commercial vehicles have to be emissions-free by 2032 and 40 percent of short-haul trucks by the same time frame. Emission particulates must be reduced to nine micrograms for each cubic meter of exhaust. Spokespersons from the American Petroleum Institute stated that the new regulation “threatens consumer freedom, energy reliability and national security.”

These EPA goals are unlikely to eventuate due to several factors. First, Americans bristle when they are pressured into purchasing products that haven’t proven their worth over an extended period of time. Electric vehicles can be expensive and heavy due to large batteries that are costly to repair when they break down. They take too long to charge up when contrasted with diesel or gas refilling times. How will the grid handle millions of EVs when it can’t even cope with current electricity demands?

Next, electric vehicles lose power in wintry weather, thus increasing the already existent range anxiety. What if an owner needs to charge up the vehicle and the charger doesn’t work at a chosen location, or it has an incompatible charger? Moreover, owners must keep in mind that criminals cut charger cables for the materials, something they aren’t tempted to do at diesel or gasoline filling stations.

The car rental company Hertz learned a hard lesson when it purchased a fleet of EVs and hardly anyone wanted to rent them for reasons already noted. Hertz is now trying to sell 20,000 of these vehicles and adding back gasoline-powered cars. Other car rental companies will likely see the writing on the wall and follow suit. A similar scenario is unfolding with some bus and van companies as well.

Third, purchasing these vehicles benefits China, because the PRC controls most of the rare earth minerals that go into batteries, as well as the lithium battery industry. Products that are manufactured in China might have questionable quality control standards as they move through the production process. How reliable are these heavy batteries, and how often do they catch on fire? It is unwise to surrender critical facets of our national and technological security to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Fourth, mandating a rapid transition to EVs puts government policies way ahead of actual innovation in the free market. Consumers want choices when it comes to making big purchases, and if they want an EV or hybrid vehicle that’s fine, but buying an internal combustion vehicle ought to be an option, too. With decreasing options, the costs of energy will skyrocket and healthy competition will be stifled.

Fifth, although the new EPA guidelines would further reduce carbon emissions, the earth needs these emissions because plants turn CO2 into oxygen. Furthermore, climate alarmists ignore the fact that fossil fuel emissions have become much cleaner over the last four or five decades due to catalytic converters and pollution controls on industry. Extracting and refining fossil fuels have undergone a purer process.

Sixth, has the EPA thought about the pollution generated by the recycling of large batteries, car bodies, solar panels, and wind turbines? Fossil fuel energy will be needed to carry out this process, just as oil products keep the electric grid in operation. Solar and wind power are unreliable sources of energy and would result in brownouts and power shortages if petroleum products are left out of the energy equation.

Seventh, do government officials and well-heeled climate “progressives” truly believe what they are preaching? Most of them have fine cars, big homes, and they jet around the world leaving a huge carbon footprint in their wake. Their hypocrisy is staggering as they attempt to impose a minimalist lifestyle on other Americans while they live the high life. They don’t have to face the repercussions of their shortsighted mandates, yet they want the masses to regress back to a pre-industrial stage of existence.

Finally, America has plentiful supplies of natural gas and petroleum that could last more than a century. Transitioning to an emissions-free society will take several decades if it happens at all. Until then, cleaner and reliable fuel sources will be in constant demand to drive a modern economy and lift people out of poverty. Indeed, energy autonomy is a crucial aspect of economic, informational, and national security.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Authored by Emma Aksalic via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón is facing legal action after a “Game of Thrones” actor filed suit over dismissed pedophilia charges.

Actor Joseph Gatt attends the World Premiere of Disney's "Dumbo" at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles, Calif., on March 11, 2019. (Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney)

Joseph Gatt—best known for his role as “Thenn Warg” on the popular HBO television series—is suing the city of Los Angeles, the LAPD, and the District Attorney’s office.

The 52-year-old is seeking $40 million in damages, and says the allegations made against him were not only career-ending, but ruined his reputation by branding him as a “serial pedophile.”

The charges stem from a 2022 arrest after Mr. Gatt was accused of engaging in sexually explicit online communication with a minor across state lines. He notes the claims were inadequately investigated prior to his felony charges being publicly announced in an LAPD press release.

The alleged interaction resulted from a video on Cameo Mr. Gatt recorded for a fan’s 16th birthday, before being contacted by the teenage girl via social media on multiple occasions. Mr. Gatt did respond, but according to the suit it was in a manner that was “wholly appropriate and consistent with typical celebrity-fan exchanges.” The two, however, never met in person.

Cameo is a video-sharing website often used by public figures. Users can purchase a personalized video for the individual receiving it. This gives fans a chance to connect with their favorite celebrities with a video message for any occasion. A crucial bit of information the lawsuit says backs claims that the teenage girl was an “admittedly obsessed fan of Gatt.”

The 16-year-old went on to claim to have pictures of the supposed inappropriate conversations, but the defendants failed to “interview or even remotely assess for credibility.” Mr. Gatt was arrested in April of 2022 following a search warrant on his home. He called the act an “invasion of privacy” that deprived him of his “liberty and freedom.”

Court records show the charges were dismissed in February of this year, after finding there was no sustainable evidence, and following forensic analysis, the minor in question fabricated the incriminating screenshots.

According to the suit, officials allegedly withheld exculpatory information critical to Mr. Gatt’s case and failed to take action for over 20 months following his initial arrest. The complaint notes the defendants showed “reckless disregard for the truth,” while acting with the knowledge that the pictures were not “reliable, credible, or trustworthy on their face.”

As a result, Mr. Gatt says he was fired from two movie roles he had already been cast in, with scenes being cut or reshot from movies he previously filmed in. He was excluded or disinvited from premieres and immediately stopped receiving any future business opportunities. The actor’s PR team and representatives dropped him as a client, and said death threats had become a recurrence.

At the time of the incident, the actor took to social media vehemently denying the claims made against him, calling them “100% categorically wrong and reckless.” He pointed out errors and misleading information in the case, but was ultimately cooperating with authorities to clear his name.

In California, if a person is falsely accused of a crime the accuser could be held liable via civil action for malicious prosecution. As a result, Mr. Gatt is requesting “compensatory, punitive and exemplary damages in an amount to be determined at trial, constituting his losses foreseeably resulting from Defendants’ misconduct,” per the suit.

Meanwhile, Mr. Gascón has made headlines in recent months, after one of his staff prosecutors spoke out accusing him of intimidation tactics. Deputy District Attorney Tatiana Chahoian said authorities showed up to her home to deliver a disciplinary letter after blowing the whistle on a memo from Mr. Gascón telling prosecutors not to charge for crimes regarding street racing, a major issue facing the city of Los Angeles.

In an interview with FOX, Ms. Chahoian said she feared retaliation adding her job was on the line because she “said something my boss didn’t like.”

“Silencing people by threatening them with the police is literally a mafia tactic, and I don’t work for the mob,” Ms. Chahoian said.

The embattled DA is up for reelection and will face off against contender and former attorney general Nathan Hochman to defend his seat come November.

The Epoch Times reached out to Mr. Gascón’s office for comment.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's largest contract chip maker, plans to build a third chip factory in Arizona after receiving $6.6 billion in grants and $5 billion in loans through US government subsidies. This is part of a massive effort led by the Biden administration to make America's semiconductor manufacturing industry great again. 

"Today, we continue building on that historic progress, with the Department of Commerce announcing a preliminary agreement with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to support the construction of leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing facilities right here in the United States," the White House wrote in a press release. 

The White House said, "Thanks to this investment, TSMC will also build a third chip factory in Phoenix, increasing its total investment in Arizona to $65 billion and creating over 25,000 direct construction and manufacturing jobs, along with thousands of indirect jobs."

"It's a national security problem that we don't manufacture any of the world's most sophisticated chips in the United States," US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters. 

TSMC's third chip plant will produce next-generation 2-nanometer chips, forecasted to be in production by the decade's end. According to Bloomberg, the other two chip plants are expected to begin production in 2025 and 2028. 

Raimondo pointed out that 2nm chips will be crucial for artificial intelligence chips that power the defense industry. 

"For the first time ever, we will be making at scale the most advanced semiconductor chips on the planet here in the United States of America, by the way, with American workers," the official said. 

TSMC's expansion in the United States will mitigate China's influence on chip supply chains across Asia, especially Taiwan-based ones. 

Here are some of the latest investments the Biden administration has dished out to tech firms for re-shoring efforts. 

Source: Bloomberg

Raimondo recently said the Chips Act allows the US to capture about 20% of the world's most advanced chip production by 2030. As a reminder, the US once had 37% of the world's chip production in 1990 and has since plummeted to about 12% in recent years due to the West's globalist leaders who off-shored America's manufacturing capacity. It's time to bring the production back as the world fractures into a dangerous multi-polar state. 

Authored by Alice Giordano via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The result of a six-month special grand jury investigation into the murder of 8-year-old Tommy Valva by his father has revealed another disturbing instance of abuse of power by child protection agencies and the family court system.

A picture of Harmony Montgomery before she went missing in 2019 (Courtesy of Justice For Harmony)

The New York boy died in 2019 from hypothermia after his father, an NYPD cop, inflicted a series of cruel punishments on him. He made the child strip naked, lay on a cold cement garage floor, and hosed him down with cold water. Michael Valva was convicted of his son’s murder in 2022.

The grand jury report, released on April 3, is wrought with similar findings in the recent review of the murder of 5-year-old Harmony Montgomery. Details of the girl’s murder and the state of New Hampshire’s inability to account for her whereabouts for two years gripped the nation.

It was a tragedy set in motion when Massachusetts Family Court Judge Mark Newman awarded custody of the little girl to her father Adam Montgomery. Mr. Montgomery was convicted in February of murdering his daughter.

Judge Newman granted custody to Mr. Montgomery instead of the girl’s mother despite his lengthy violent criminal history and transient status.

Before Tommy Valva’s murder, Suffolk County Family Court Judge Jeff Zimmerman also awarded full custody of the little boy along with his two brothers to his father Michael Valva over the boy’s mother Justyna Zubko-Valva.

In both Harmony and Tommy’s cases, court records, which were widely publicized in both murder trials, show that neither of their mothers had any history of abuse or violence.

In both of the children’s cases, child protection service workers went along with the court’s custody awards despite knowing that there were serious child abuse allegations and child welfare concerns pending against both men.

In her office’s findings from an investigation into Harmony’s murder, Maria Mossaides, director of the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate, slammed the state child protection agency for what she called system-wide failures and also for “recklessly” favoring parental rights over Harmony’s safety.

Throughout its 75-page investigative report, the New York grand jury charges New York’s child protection services system with the same kind of failures.

It faulted CPS employees for deeming child abuse allegations by another parent as unfounded with little evidence. It also cited the system as flawed for not having any independent checks and balances with the agency over such decisions.

According to the grand jury, the agency even refused to return its records for the investigation.

“The failure of CPS to do so can only be interpreted as a transparent attempt to shield their own inaction from public scrutiny. Thus, the laws and rules must be changed to prevent such future injustices,” the investigative jury charged.

In its report, it also focuses on another familiar issue raised in other states regarding the operations of child protection agencies and the family court system: the immunity that child protection workers and judges enjoy from dereliction of duty.

Rep. Bryan Slaton presents Amendment 1 to House Bill 567, on April 1, 2021. (Screenshot courtesy of Bryan Slaton)

“Even though immunity does not preclude a finding of criminal liability for CPS caseworkers who have engaged in willful misconduct or gross negligence, such caseworkers are still effectively impervious to any such liability in cases where reports are deemed unfounded,” the panel wrote.

The panel discovered that caseworkers, due to not being required to substantiate their findings to the court or even a supervisor, created a shield against accusations of “willful misconduct or gross negligence.”

“In this regard, employees of CPS have the unilateral ability to thwart criminal investigations prior to the matter of immunity even becoming relevant, by determining that a case is unfounded, or by deciding not to migrate prior unfounded reports and related materials in a new indicated investigation,” the panel found.

At a press conference during the murder trial, Ms. Zubko-Valva talked about her many pleas for help to child protection workers and other state officials that went ignored.

“I kept thinking about all the institutions who failed to help him, who completely did absolutely nothing ... now everybody’s trying to do the right thing ... but where were you when I begged you for help when you could have saved my child’s life,” said Ms. Zubka-Valva who said she also filed a complaint with the FBI after Judge Hope Schwartz Zimmerman gave custody to Mr. Valva.

The judge awarded custody to the father after a divorce attorney complained to the court Ms. Zubko-Valva was “interfering with her access to the children,” according to a pending wrongful death lawsuit Ms. Zubko-Valva filed against the county CPS.

Details of CPS' alleged complicity in the court’s custody ruling are scattered throughout the lawsuit. These include accounts of the agency’s quick dismissal of a flash drive. The lawsuit stated the mother provided this drive to the agency, and it contained 320 documents and other evidence supporting the claim that Tommy and his brothers were enduring severe abuse by their father and stepmother, Angela Pollina, who was convicted last March of the second-degree murder of her stepson.

According to the lawsuit, the evidence included several letters from Tommy’s pediatrician and therapists corroborating the abuse. It was already revealed in the lawsuit and during Mr. Valva and Ms. Pollina’s trial that the agency ignored visible signs Tommy and his brothers were being starved.

Two years ago, the Institute for Justice (IJ) launched “Project Immunity and Accountability,” a national campaign to end immunity for government officials.

“If we the people must follow the law, our government must follow the Constitution,” the group states as the headline to its campaign’s mission.

CPS agencies have long been accused of using immunity to justify their troubling decisions rather than reform them.

In a 2007 case, a child advocate brought a federal suit against the Standing Rock Child Protection Services and Bureau of Indian Affairs in North Dakota after the agencies claimed immunity for knowingly placing a juvenile sex offender into a foster home with three young children.

“Such immunity, it maintains, is based on the agency’s policy decision to protect the privacy interests of its former ward,” the lawsuit charged. “By this argument, CPS creates a smokescreen within which to hide from liability, despite its flagrant abuse of a system that it is duty-bound to protect.”

As part of its campaign, IJ is asking state legislators to adopt amendments to their state constitution to abolish government immunity, but so far no lawmakers have taken up the cause.

In New Hampshire, where Harmony Montgomery was murdered in 2019, Republican lawmakers like Rep. Leah Cushman have been pushing for reform of the child protection agency and family courts.

The state did not accept any blame for the girl’s murder even though evidence was introduced during her father’s trial that the agency failed to conduct mandatory checks on her and appeared to be unaware that she had been missing for two years.

Recently, Ms. Cushman successfully convinced House leaders to form a special committee to investigate the New Hampshire Division of Children, Youth, and Family (DCYF).

As reported previously by The Epoch Times, the committee had only started when she was removed as chairman of the committee by the House Speaker when she initiated a voluntary oath for both victims and officials as part of the special committee’s investigation.

She has since told The Epoch Times she believes the “real fix” is to take child protection service agencies out of the “investigation business,” abolish family courts, and return allegations of child abuse to the criminal courts where there is real due process.

“Keeping these cases civil is being soft on crime and letting people shown to be abusive to never face justice in a real court of law,” she said.

The NH DCYF, Massachusetts Department of Children Services, and Suffolk County Child Protective Services did not respond to requests for comment from The Epoch Times.

For the second time in a week, trading in an ETF that owns gold companies was halted in China overnight.

The ETF’s price had gained over 40% in the past four sessions before falling 10% after trading resumed Monday.

“The lack of alternatives, and the fact that it’s become a lot more difficult than it was a few years ago to get your money out of China and invest elsewhere - I think that’s definitely helping gold,” said Nikos Kavalis, managing director at consultancy Metals Focus Ltd.

“Demand is pretty decent, considering where the price is.”

China Asset Management Co. - who run the ChinaAMC CSI SH-SZ-HK Gold Industry Equity ETF - halted the investment vehicle "to protect investors' interests" as the fund’s premium over its underlying assets increased to more than 30%...

As Bloomberg's Eric Balchunas highlighted: "Investors [in China] are so desperate to buy things that are not linked to their own economy/stock mkt, which has been in the gutter."

For context, that surge in the ETF correlated with a spot gold price near $2700...

Source: Bloomberg

As Bloomberg reports, the enthusiasm about products tied to gold, which has staged a record-setting rally in recent weeks, shows a desire to park money in a sector seen relatively immune to a struggling economy.

“Gold is trading at an all time high and gold ETF demand has surged in the past week with almost $600 million of net inflows into gold ETFs globally,” said Rebecca Sin, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst.

“Demand in Mainland China could continue as investors look to diversify their holdings with commodities and foreign ETFs.”

The ETF fervor is a fresh example of yield-hungry Chinese investors flocking to pockets of market strength as deepening property woes, volatile stocks and falling deposit rates reduce their options.

For those wondering why buying bitcoin ETFs is not allowed there, Bloomberg's Eric Balchunas notes that "if it were, they’d be going gaga for them given how much FOMO they have been showing for gold and US stocks (btc easily outperforming both)."

President Biden is in danger of not appearing on Ohio's general election ballot, thanks to the fact that the Democrats' nominating convention is scheduled to take place after the state's candidate certification deadline. 

The chief legal counsel for Ohio secretary of state Frank La Rose broke that news to Ohio Democratic Party Chairwoman Liz Walters via a letter, the Washington Post reports. He noted that Ohio law sets the presidential candidate certification deadline at 90 days before the election -- which this year means Aug. 7. Trouble is, the Democratic national convention in Chicago doesn't start until Aug. 19. 

The state of the race per 

The letter offered two varyingly implausible avenues by which Dems could fix the snag: 

• Reschedule the national convention so Biden can be nominated before Aug. 7
• Persuade the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature to enact an exception to the law out of the kindness of their hearts, and coax Republican Gov. Mike DeWine to sign it

In 2020, both party conventions were similarly scheduled after the Ohio deadline. Legislators did pass a one-time exception then, but they were incentivized to do so because the GOP also needed relief. This time, it's only the Democrats swinging in the breeze.  

Right on cue, a University of Cincinnati political science professor told the Post that if Biden doesn't appear on the ballot, it would sap confidence in American governance. “If this were to actually occur and President Biden were held off the ballot, it would be devastating to the general sort of faith in democracy,” said David Niven. 

Biden's absence could hurt incumbent Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who's in a tight race with GOP challenger Bernie Moreno

Given their attempts to block Trump from ballots on flimsy 14th Amendment "insurrectionist" claims, Democrats are in no position to ask for mercy. Republicans aren't the only ones who'd like to tell the Democrats "tough luck." After all, while constantly crowing about saving Our Democracy®, the Dems are engaging in aggressive lawfare to make sure Americans don't have the option to vote for independent and third-party candidates. 

Donald Trump won Ohio in 2016 and 2020 -- beating both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden by 8 percentage points -- and he's up by 10 in the RealClearPolitics Ohio polling average. Given that, Biden's absence from the ballot may be something of a moot point in the race for Ohio's 17 electoral votes, but could sap already-sagging leftist enthusiasm about the election, which could impact down-ballot Democrats.   

One of those trying to ride Sleepy Joe's musty, mothball-scented coattails is incumbent Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, who's in a competitive race with Republican challenger Bernie Moreno. In a poll taken before Moreno won the primary, Brown led the Trump-endorsed Moreno by 4 points. 

Whistling past the Ohio election graveyard, a Biden-Harris 2024 spokesman told the Post, “We’re monitoring the situation in Ohio and we’re confident that Joe Biden will be on the ballot in all 50 states.”

The NY Times on Monday published an opinion piece by UPenn senior lecturer and Open Society Project senior fellow (!) Damon Linker titled "Why Is Biden Struggling? Because America Is Broken."

And while it's more or less a recap of what ZeroHedge readers have known for years, the essay provides a sobering dose of reality for the "You should really watch Rachel Maddow" types.

Seven months away from a rematch election pitting President Biden against former President Donald Trump, the incumbent is struggling. Mr. Biden suffers from persistently low approval ratings, he barely manages to tie Mr. Trump in national head-to-head polls and he lags behind the former president in most of the swing states where the election will be decided (despite some recent modestly encouraging movement in his direction).

The question is why. -NY Times

Biden's defenders, and the administration itself, has chalked the president's unpopularity up to "a failure of communication," however Linker instead suggests "It's usually wiser to listen to what voters are saying" (beyond the obvious concerns about the president's age).

'Too Numerous to List'

Citing a January 2021 essay in Tablet titled "Everything Is Broken," and a follow-up essay by the same author, Alana Newhsouse, who wrote that "whole parts of American society were breaking down before our eyes," Linker encapsulates why Americans are so pissed (h/t Dean Baker):

The examples are almost too numerous to list: a disastrous war in Iraq; a ruinous financial crisis followed by a decade of anemic growth when most of the new wealth went to those who were already well off; a shambolic response to the deadliest pandemic in a century; a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan; rising prices and interest rates; skyrocketing levels of public and private debt; surging rates of homelessness and the spread of tent encampments in American cities; undocumented migrants streaming over the southern border; spiking rates of gun violence, mental illness, depression, addiction, suicide, chronic illness and obesity, coupled with a decline in life expectancy.

That’s an awful lot of failure over the past 20-odd years. Yet for the most part, the people who run our institutions have done very little to acknowledge or take responsibility for any of it, let alone undertake reforms that aim to fix what’s broken. -NYT

Linker then writes that the above is why "angry anti-establishment populism has become so prominent in our politics over the past decade," which both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have capitalized on.

And Biden, a career politician, has been part of the problem (and therefore implicated in these abject societal failures), and is "badly out of step with the national mood, speaking a language very far removed from the talk of a broken country that suffuses Mr. Trump’s meandering and often unhinged remarks on the subject." (gotta get that shot in!)

That leaves Mr. Biden as the lone institutionalist defender of the status quo surrounded by a small army of brokenists looking for support from an electorate primed to respond to their more downcast message.

Linker suggests that in order to recover, Biden 'stop being so upbeat' - about the economy in particular, and stop making the election about how awful Trump is. Biden "should admit Washington has gotten a lot of things wrong over the past two decades and sound unhappy about and humbled by it."

Further, Biden "could make the argument that all governments make mistakes because they are run by fallible human beings — but also point out that elected representatives in a democracy should be up front about error and resolve to learn from mistakes so that they avoid them in the future."

"Just acknowledging how much in America is broken could generate a lot of good will from otherwise skeptical and dismissive voters," Linker suggests.

Let's see how that goes.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Bang-and-Whimper

“Whoever doesn’t miss the Soviet Union doesn’t have a heart. Whoever wants it back doesn’t have a brain.”

- VV Putin

Have you checked if your hair is on fire today? Here comes an eclipse of the sun. Our moon will cast a totality of its shadow in a path about 100 miles wide arcing from Del Rio Texas to Bangor Maine, with lesser effects outward on each side of the path so that night will seem to fall at mid-day over most of America east of the Big Muddy. This event typically freaks out primitive peoples, and brings out the latent archaic terror even in supposedly civilized minds, reminding us in a powerfully spooky way that the cosmos runs things, not us puny humans.

You might ask: Are we hostages to cycles, Astronomical, Kondratieff, the Maunder Minimum, Fourth Turning, the Great Wave. . .?  Considering the feckless doings of our own society, we seem to be yielding to some final act of cosmic punishment.

What is not falling apart? Our livelihoods? Our politics? Our money system? Our morals? Our common sense, our families, our relations with other societies, our infrastructure, our culture, our business models, our education, our medicine?

Alas, our government still lurches along, gone mad-dog on its citizens as it desperately sucks all power and resources unto its inner engine like a red giant star preparing for death.

Today is also the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting, prayer, atonement, and reflection.

What follows this pause in the troubled Middle East, a.k.a. Armageddonville? I daresay most adult citizens of sore-beset America actually don’t care. . . can’t care, because they have trouble enough of their own keeping a roof overhead, a car on the road, and food on the table.

The Woke-Marxist college kids are wailing over the actions of Israel in Gaza — as they will for anyone within their dumb-ass equation of victims-and-oppressors, especially involving brown and white people. It is a brutal operation in Gaza, for sure, but so was the Hamas act-of-war on October 7 that many want to forget about now. They still hold and torture hostages, you know.

I doubt that Israel wants to exterminate the Gazans, but at this point they would probably like to export them to other nations that share their Arab culture. Those other Arab nations are not eager to take in the Gazans. The fractious minority in the USA who militate against Israel because, you know, the Jews, never ask if the Palestinians have some other plan, some other position other than From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free! — meaning Death to Israel. Can you name any alternate proposal they have proffered? No, because there is none.

Not only have they no intention of getting along somehow with Israel, but they give every sign that they prefer to continue making war on her one way or another: rocket attacks, café bombings, rape and murder ops. Because they’re oppressed. They might have turned their 40 kilometers of Mediterranean beach-front into a world-beating resort, but instead they spent billions in international aid building a tunnel network and purchasing arms to wage war against Israel. And with October 7, they got war.

So, the rest of the world is very concerned now that this will lead to World War Three, world wars being the grand prize at the end of many historical cycles.

Of course, the Iranians have been chanting Death to Israel in so many words for decades, so no one can mistake Iran’s intentions. And Iran has funded and deployed Hezbollah military bases on Israel’s northern frontier with Lebanon. They are said to have thousands of high-tech rockets capable of decimating Tel Aviv. Everybody knows that launching such an operation could result, ten minutes later, in Tehran becoming an ashtray.

And what if Mr. Netanyahu launches a peremptory attack against southern Lebanon to destroy those bases? Does Iran ride to the rescue? And does Russia ride to Iran’s rescue? And does China rush in to secure the sea lanes in the Persian Gulf and the oil refineries of Iran that Israel doesn’t manage to blow up? And what does the USA do? Or Europe (watching much of its oil supply go off-line)? Looks World War Three-ish, a little bit.

There is also, lest we forget, the mess in Ukraine, another world war flashpoint.

There, the stark reality is that Russia is in control of the tactical situation on the ground. The WEF syndicate’s project — fronted by NATO — to weaken Russia and eventually loot its resources is a flop. The indignities heaped on Russia in sanctions and foolish objurgations will not be forgotten. There will be a Great Reset for Europe, but not the one it ordered. Not the nirvana of transhumanism and social control; rather a cold plunge into neo-medieval poverty, the breakup of large states, and a shocking simplification of daily life.

Everything that the USA and NATO are doing these days is pretense: pretending that they have the military mojo to directly enter the Ukraine War; pretending to continue pouring money into the hopeless and unnecessary conflict; pretending that the ill-conceived project even matters. The hidden truth now is that the USA war blob needs to cut its losses in Ukraine and wants to bug out. The trouble is: how to do that in a way that does not amount to another gross American strategic humiliation? That’s Russia’s problem, too: how to adroitly work the conclusion of this fiasco in a way that doesn’t humiliate the USA to the degree that we resort to some new act of geopolitical insanity in compensation. Do you remember the half century when Ukraine was indisputably within Russia’s sphere-of-influence and was not a problem for the world? I assure you this was so, and will have to be again. It will be all right.

So, if you are among those who believe that the cosmos seeks to convey an occult message in this eclipse that will supernaturally darken half our country today, maybe it’s this one: just stop it, America!

Stop meddling in every flashpoint across the planet. Look to yourself and your own monstrous problems: your jive-tragic government, your fake economy, your breached borders, your sick-and-depressed population, your racketeering corporations, your broken banks, your buggered election methods, your faithless news media, your political mental illness.

Or else, get ready for bang-and-whimper.

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