The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has announced that the US will introduce new visa restrictions on “foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans”.
In a post on X, Rubio said that “Americans have been fined, harassed, and even charged by foreign authorities for exercising their free speech rights” and foreigners who “undermine” those rights “should not enjoy the privilege of traveling to our country”.
Here’s the full post:
For too long, Americans have been fined, harassed, and even charged by foreign authorities for exercising their free speech rights. Today, I am announcing a new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans. Free speech is essential to the American way of life – a birthright over which foreign governments have no authority.
Foreigners who work to undermine the rights of Americans should not enjoy the privilege of traveling to our country. Whether in Latin America, Europe, or elsewhere, the days of passive treatment for those who work to undermine the rights of Americans are over.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed legislation on Tuesday to start the process of allowing Floridians to pay for goods and services with precious metals such as gold and silver.
A report will be given to the state legislature, which has until November 1, 2025, to ratify the rules. The law would take effect on July 1, 2026.
If ratified, the law would establish precious metals as a legal form of tender, but it specifies that accepting them would be optional, except for check cashers and money service businesses. Any business seeking to accept precious metals as payment must obtain a license.
“That means these precious metals can start functioning like real currency again, not just investment vehicles for the wealthy,” DeSantis said.
Purchases of precious metals will be exempt from sales tax.
Democrats desperately want to control the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections. However, their plan to wield power will likely doom their political future, but could give Republicans a golden opportunity.
An expert political strategist has issued a stark warning to the Democrats about their midterm prospects. If their plan succeeds, it would mean short-term gain but long-term pain for the embattled party.
A Democratic mayor is under investigation for allegedly “aiding and abetting” the escape of illegal immigrants from custody, a Republican congressman has confirmed.
Freddie O’Connell, the progressive mayor of Nashville, is reportedly the target of an investigation exploring whether he provided material “aid” to illegal immigrants and obstructed an investigation by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement.
Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) announced that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the House Judiciary Committee are investigating a potential “criminal enterprise” involving federal funds.
“We’ve heard it: the individuals that the mayor is standing with are murderers, rapists, drug traffickers, sexual predators, child traffickers…the list goes on,” Ogles said from the Tennesee State Capitol building on Monday.
A federal judge has sided with the Trump administration, resolving a dispute with New York Attorney General Letitia James about the expansive scope of cost-cutters to examine U.S. Treasury payments that they claim are laden with wasteful spending.
James was among 18 Democratic attorneys general who filed suit to block an investigation by the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency into the Treasury payment system. The coterie was dealt a severe setback on Tuesday when U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas, for the Southern District of New York, lifted the last legal hurdle for the four DOGE employees tasked with carrying out the investigation.
An earlier order was also relaxed after the Trump administration showed evidence that it appropriately trained the four employees to safeguard sensitive taxpayer information during the probe. In April, Vargas granted access to one DOGE employee after they completed a similar training program.
Prior to those decisions, the judge, a Biden appointee, was mostly siding with the state prosecutors who argued that Treasury’s processes for granting access were poorly established, a likely violation of law.
The Texas legislature has passed a bill protecting single sex spaces, such as girls’ locker rooms in schools, and mandating identification by biological sex on government-issued documents, including driver’s licenses and other photo IDs.
House Bill 229 passed in the Texas Senate early Wednesday by an exact party-line vote of 20 to 11, according to the Texas Tribune. The bill, which passed in the Texas House on May 12, defines “female” and “woman” as “an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova.”
The bill, sponsored by Republican Texas state Rep. Ellen Troxclair, also defines “male” or “man” as “an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.” The legislation also describes “sex” as “an individual’s biological sex, either male or female.”
Troxclair’s bill states that “there are legitimate reasons to distinguish” between men and women “with respect to athletics, prisons … domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, locker rooms, restrooms, and other areas where biology, safety, or privacy are implicated.”
The Trump administration is implementing visa restrictions on foreign nationals with histories of censoring Americans, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Wednesday.
“For too long, Americans have been fined, harassed, and even charged by foreign authorities for exercising their free speech rights,” Rubio wrote in an X post. “Free speech is essential to the American way of life — a birthright over which foreign governments have no authority.”
According to the secretary, this new policy “will apply to foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans.” Any noncitizen “who work[s] to undermine the rights of Americans should not enjoy the privilege of traveling to our country,” he added.
“Whether in Latin America, Europe, or elsewhere, the days of passive treatment for those who work to undermine the rights of Americans are over,” Rubio wrote.
Jake Tapper continues to try to gain fans on the right side of the aisle by insulting the Left. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. President Donald Trump is coming down on Harvard and they definitely deserve it. He has a plan to reroute the money and encourage people to go into business without spending time in school. Is this the new future of America or is college still the road to success?
Most Americans assume the United States is the world’s unrivaled nuclear superpower. The truth is, America’s nuclear stockpile has shrunk significantly. Meanwhile, China is building nuclear weapons at a rapid pace, and arms experts believe the world’s security is now at serious risk due to the communist regime’s expansionist schemes.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has dramatically reduced the number of nuclear weapons it has deployed or in storage. That arsenal today is roughly 85 percent smaller than at the height of the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and the number of operational nukes is tiny compared to 40 years ago.
America’s nuclear stockpile has fallen to levels not seen since the 1960s, while China has embarked on an unprecedented nuclear buildup.
A new study reveals the biological secret to the Zika virus’s infectious success: Zika uses host cells’ own “self-care” system of clearing away useless molecules to suppress the host proteins that the virus has employed to get into those cells in the first place.
While these cell surface proteins are valuable for viral entry, they also have roles in producing an antiviral response. Before that can happen, the virus manipulates a process cells use to keep themselves healthy to lower the proteins’ activity, clearing the way for unfettered viral infection.
Though other viruses, such as HIV, are known to silence host receptors that let them into cells, Zika is unusual for having at least three of its own proteins that can get the job done, said Shan-Lu Liu, senior author the study and a virology professor in the Department of Veterinary Biosciences at The Ohio State University.
On March 20, 2025, members of the World Health Organization adopted the world’s first pandemic agreement, following three years of “intensive negotiations launched by governments in response to the devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.” The U.S., however, did not participate, in part because of its intention to withdraw from the WHO.
“This also strengthens Telegram’s financial position: we will receive $300M in cash and equity from xAI, plus 50% of the revenue from xAI subscriptions sold via Telegram.”
Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov announced on Wednesday that the company has teamed up with Elon Musk’s xAI to bring the AI chatbot Grok to the messaging platform.
Durov wrote that he and Musk have agreed to a one-year partnership to bring Grok to Telegram’s users, and Grok will be integrated across all Telegram apps. “This also strengthens Telegram’s financial position: we will receive $300M in cash and equity from xAI, plus 50% of the revenue from xAI subscriptions sold via Telegram,” Durov wrote.
A video posted by Durov stated that the partnership will see Grok pinned for all users on Telegram, will appear in the search bar when asking a question, provide message editing and chat summaries, summarize documents posted in Telegram chats, and can serve as a moderator. The inclusion of Grok will begin in the “summer of 2025,” the video stated.
MADRID: Spain’s government on Wednesday (May 28) denied a press report that an “experiment” on the national power grid caused a huge blackout that crippled the Iberian Peninsula one month ago.
Authorities have been scrambling to find answers after the Apr 28 outage cut telecommunications, halted transport and plunged cities into darkness across Spain and Portugal.
Conservative British daily newspaper The Telegraph reported on Friday, citing unnamed sources in Brussels, that Spanish authorities “were conducting an experiment before the system crashed, probing how far they could push reliance on renewables in preparation for Spain’s rushed phase-out of nuclear reactors from 2027”.
“The government seems to have pushed the pace recklessly, before making the necessary investments in a sophisticated 21st-century smart grid capable of handling it,” it added.
Asked about the report in parliament, Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen said: “It is false, totally false, that the government carried out any sort of experiment on the grid prior to the outage.”
Get ready for several years of even more record-breaking heat that pushes Earth to more deadly, fiery and uncomfortable extremes, two of the world’s top weather agencies forecast.
There’s an 80 per cent chance the world will break another annual temperature record in the next five years, and it’s even more probable that the world will again exceed the international temperature threshold set 10 years ago, according to a five-year forecast released Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization and the U.K. Meteorological Office.
“Higher global mean temperatures may sound abstract, but it translates in real life to a higher chance of extreme weather: stronger hurricanes, stronger precipitation, droughts,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the calculations but said they made sense. “So higher global mean temperatures translates to more lives lost.”
With every tenth of a degree the world warms from human-caused climate change “we will experience higher frequency and more extreme events (particularly heat waves but also droughts, floods, fires and human-reinforced hurricanes/typhoons),” emailed Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. He was not part of the research.
Artistic mediums certainly change. While modern humans have paint and paper, ancient humans had ochre and pebbles. However, both work well for finger painting, whether for Homo sapiens today or for Homo neanderthalensis thousands of years ago.
According to a new study in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, a team of researchers may have discovered one of the oldest art objects adorned with a fingerprint from across Europe. The object, a pebble, was stamped with ochre by a Neanderthal around 43,000 years ago and was found by researchers in Spain in 2022.
“This object contributes to our understanding of Neanderthals’ capacity for abstraction,” the researchers stated in their study, as it could “represent one of the oldest known abstractions of a human face in the prehistoric record.”
Indeed, the placement of the ochre fingerprint could suggest that Neanderthals were more advanced artists than traditionally thought, adorning objects not only with fingerprints but with human faces, as well.
In a groundbreaking move for aerospace engineering, SpaceX launched the ninth integrated test flight of its Starship Super Heavy system from Starbase in South Texas on Tuesday evening. Unlike previous missions aimed at precision landings, this flight intentionally ended in a powerful splashdown. The goal was to gather critical data on the rocket’s structural limits and boost progress toward full reusability. This dramatic crash was a calculated experiment, marking a pivotal step in SpaceX’s mission to create reliable, reusable launch systems for future space exploration, including routine missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
SpaceX Starship lost control in mid-flight causing mission to end with ocean crash
At 7:36 p.m. EDT (2336 GMT), the completely integrated Starship launch vehicle — consisting of the upper-stage Starship spacecraft riding on top of the Super Heavy booster — departed from SpaceX’s Starbase complex on the Gulf Coast near Brownsville, Texas.The launch was live-streamed on SpaceX’s webcast, with observers seeing the rocket rise into the evening sky. The firing of Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines created a powerful plume of fire, exhaust, and water vapor, marking another milestone in the company’s long-term build-out of fully reusable spaceflight systems.For the first time, a previously launched Super Heavy booster powered a Starship flight — an important step toward SpaceX’s larger goal of routine, reusable spaceflight. This specific booster had been upgraded since its previous mission and was being asked to prove it could withstand repeated launches and touchdowns.A few minutes into flight, the first-stage booster broke away from the upper-stage Starship vehicle as anticipated. But SpaceX lost communication with the booster during descent, and it’s thought to have crashed into the ocean instead of executing the controlled splashdown SpaceX had intended. This kept engineers from capturing the full range of descent and landing data, though initial flight data will still be helpful.
The Supreme Court let stand a lower court decision that allowed a public school in Massachusetts to prevent a 7th grader identified in court documents as “L.M.” from wearing a T-shirt that read, “There are Only Two Genders.”
The student was given the option of removing the shirt or going home. When he returned, he was wearing a shirt that read, “There Are CENSORED Genders.” Rather than miss more school, the student took off the shirt.
The parents sued on First Amendment grounds but were denied relief by an appeals court.
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas wrote a scorching dissent based on the First Amendment rights enjoyed by students. That right was codified in a 1969 decision, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, where the Supreme Court allowed students to wear a black armband to protest the Vietnam War.
Justice Abe Fortas famously wrote that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” The exception Fortas cited was “disruptive speech.”
“ICE is removing illegal aliens from ALL states, communities, and worksites across this country… If you are here illegally, use the CBP Home app to self-deport. If not, you will be arrested and deported without a chance to return.”
On Tuesday morning, federal immigration authorities, led by ICE and supported by the FBI, DEA, ATF, and Coast Guard, swept through Nantucket, Massachusetts, detaining and deporting at least 12 individuals illegally residing in the country.
This operation was part of a larger federal sweep that also included Martha’s Vineyard and Hyannis, resulting in 40 total arrests. According to ICE, among those apprehended were a known MS-13 gang member and at least one convicted child sex offender. Federal agents also conducted vehicle stops on roads across mid-island, including Old South Road, Surfside Road, and Miacomet Road.
“Public officials must protect the inalienable rights of all citizens, regardless of their faith or religious beliefs.”
On Tuesday, Paula White-Cain, head of the White House Faith Office, issued a strong statement condemning the violent disruption by Antifa of a Christian concert in a Seattle park on Saturday.
“The White House Faith Office condemns the violent disruption of Seattle’s MayDay USA worship event,” White-Cain said. “We affirm the fundamental rights to free speech and religious freedom for all Americans, as protected by federal law. Public officials must protect the inalienable rights of all citizens, regardless of their faith or religious beliefs.”
Pope Leo XIV this week appointed Monsignor Renzo Pegoraro — longtime chancellor of the Pontifical Academy for Life involved in a controversy over his 2022 comment suggesting contraception could be permissible in certain cases — as the academy’s new president.
Msgr. Pegoraro succeeds Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who became president in 2016. Msgr. Pegoraro studied in Padua and Rome, where he obtained a licentiate in moral theology and a diploma in advanced bioethics, according to the Academy for Life website. He was president of the European Association of Centers of Medical Ethics from 2010 to 2013, and he has served as a bioethics lecturer at the Theological Faculty of Trivento.
Pope John Paul II established the Pontifical Academy for Life in 1994, charging it with the task of “defense and promotion of the value of human life and of the dignity of the person,” according to its Vatican profile. Its main actions are to study problems related to promoting and defending human life; assist, through Catholic initiatives, the pro-life formation of persons; and inform Church leaders, the media, other organizations, and civil society in the findings of its research.
In Trump’s Orders, Harvard’s Most International School Sees a Crisis
At the Harvard Kennedy School, the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke Harvard’s eligibility to enroll international students — temporarily blocked in court — could eliminate nearly 60 percent of the student body.
HKS is Harvard’s most international school, and the proportion of international students there has grown over recent years, reaching a record high of 59 percent in 2024. The announcement that international students might have to transfer or face deportation sent shockwaves across the Kennedy School — as students feared being displaced and faculty worried that the Kennedy School’s identity as a global center for public policy scholarship could hang in the balance.
US embassies across the world have been ordered by the Trump Administration to put an immediate halt to visa interviews for foreign students.
According to reporting by US news site Politico, the US is planning to monitor social media posts of all foreign students planning to study in the country.
A briefing issued from Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent on Tuesday ordered embassies to stop arranging future interviews.
Trump administration halts US student visa interviews
The message sent by the state department said: “Effective immediately, in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting, consular sections should not add any additional student or exchange visitor (F, M, and J) visa appointment capacity until further guidance is issued septel (separate telegram), which we anticipate in the coming days”.
GLENN: Carol Roth, the author of The War on Small Business and former investment banker who started to use her gifts for the good, instead of the evil, is joining me now. She’s also got a new book coming out, the week after mine. And they are great hand-in-glove books. You Will Own Nothing.
Could the dollar get knocked off the top spot, as the world’s reserve currency? Challenges are emerging, and history shows, that countries whose currency has dominated the globe, can fall from that global reserve, that top spot, pretty fast, even over the course of a few days. We didn’t luck our way into this position. Listen to me carefully, it was a carefully engineered plan that unfolded in the mountains of New Hampshire, nearly 80 years ago. At the time, the British pound sterling, was the international currency. A title it had held for texting. But Bretton Woods changed everything. Now, this is actually — these are not my words. These are the words of NPR. They just came out with this story. The US dollar conquered the world. Is it at risk of losing its top spot? I know because I’ve been talking about this for a long time. And everyone has said, that will never happen….
CAROL: Right now. It’s Russia. It’s China. It’s China courting Saudi Arabia. And we have issues, not just with reserves, but also that the key piece. Because you asked me this one time offline. It’s not just the reserves. The reserves allow us to finance debt cheaply at the government level, and create some arbitrage.
But really what is this pole position as well, is being a huge piece of the payments.
We dominate, dominate. And have not lost ground, by the way, on the payment side. But China.
President Donald Trump has announced that Canada is “considering” a deal that would see the nation become America’s 51st state.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said Canada is mulling an offer to join the United States in exchange for protection by the proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense system at no cost.
“I told Canada, which very much wants to be part of our fabulous Golden Dome System, that it will cost $61 Billion Dollars if they remain a separate, but unequal, Nation, but will cost ZERO DOLLARS if they become our cherished 51st State,” Trump wrote.
It seems quite clear that Iran’s leaders do not believe that President Trump will ever order a military strike on their nuke sites. While we don’t know all of the details of the U.S-Iran nuke negotiations, some of what is being reported is quite concerning. We are going to have to wait and see what happens. If Iran is allowed to enrich uranium, it will be able to build several nuclear bombs. Which it would surely attempt to do when President Trump is out of office. If not sooner.
Khamenei will consider all this as he contemplates the most serious decision of his tenure: whether finally to cross the nuclear threshold. How scary does he think America is under Trump? Everything hinges on the answer to that question, write @FDD@ReuelMGerecht and @CFR_org Ray… pic.twitter.com/OhFWMx77s0
The idea that Iran should never have nuclear *weapons* is a repeat of the Obama-Biden policy, famously exposed in the Biden-Ryan VP debate in 2012. The Republican position, which remains sensible, was that Iran should not have any nuclear enrichment at all https://t.co/o7aG6rbjaM
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered its missions abroad to stop scheduling new appointments for student and exchange visitor visa applicants as the State Department prepares to expand social media vetting of foreign students, according to an internal cable seen by Reuters on Tuesday.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in the cable that the department plans to issue updated guidance on social media vetting of student and exchange visitor applicants after a review is completed and advised consular sections to halt the scheduling of such visa appointments.
The move comes as the Trump administration has sought to ramp up deportations and revoke student visas as part of its wide-ranging efforts to fulfill his hardline immigration agenda.
US President Donald Trump warned Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Tuesday he was “playing with fire,” escalating tensions as Washington considers new sanctions over Ukraine. The remarks follow Trump calling Putin “absolutely CRAZY” after a drone strike, as ceasefire talks stall
The communist regime of North Korea published an outraged screed on Tuesday denouncing President Donald Trump’s plan to implement a “Golden Dome” missile defense system over the United States, and potentially other parts of North America.
President Trump campaigned throughout 2024 on investing in a missile defense system covering the entire United States designed to protect America from the threat of hypersonic, ballistic, and other advanced missiles, referring to it as akin to Israel’s “Iron Dome” system. A week after taking office for his second term, Trump issued an executive order requiring a plan from the incoming secretary of defense within 60 days for a missile defense architecture of this type.
The White House announced last week that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had indeed selected an architecture for the missile defense system, called the “Golden Dome.” President Trump described the system as featuring “next-generation technologies across the land, sea, and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors” and indicated that the scope of the project is so large that the government of Canada is also interested in participating in the project.
The Trump administration asked a federal court late Tuesday to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national and suspected MS-13 gang member deported earlier this year under disputed circumstances, arguing the court has no jurisdiction to force his return to the United States.
Abrego Garcia and his family sued after he was removed from the U.S. despite a prior immigration court order granting him withholding of removal to El Salvador due to what Abrego Garcia claimed were gang-related threats to his safety in his home country. He is now detained there anyway and is seeking emergency relief to be brought back to the U.S.
Wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, second from left, joins a rally outside the U.S. Courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland, where a federal judge will hear arguments Friday, May 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)