00 First Filter

Trump, Iran cite progress in talks as uncertainty hangs over Strait of Hormuz– www.channelnewsasia.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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Trump defended the US blockade and threatened “to start dropping bombs again” unless the countries reached a long-term deal before the ceasefire expires on Wednesday.

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said Tehran’s control over the strait included demanding the payment of costs related to security, safety and environmental protection services, state media said.

Concern remained after at least two vessels reported being attacked on Saturday while trying to transit the waterway. India summoned the Iranian ambassador in New Delhi and expressed deep concern that two Indian-flagged ships had come under fire in the strait, the government said.

Trump reaffirms US-Israel support after Netanyahu ‘alarmed’ by Lebanon comments– www.mirror.co.uk

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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Donald Trump posted on social media to reaffirm the US’s support for Israel, calling it a ‘great ally’, just hours after sources told Axios that Benjamin Netanyahu had been left ‘personally stunned and alarmed’ by an earlier post in which Trump said Israel was ‘prohibited’ from bombing Lebanon

President Trump Meets With Visiting Israeli PM Netanyahu At The White House(Image: Getty)

Donald Trump reaffirmed his backing for Israel in a Truth Social message on Saturday evening, merely hours after reports suggested Benjamin Netanyahu had been unsettled by an earlier comment he made.

Writing around 9pm ET, the US president described Israel as a “great ally” of Washington while taking aim at European nations that refused to take part in the Iran conflict.

SETH ORANBURG: Local Municipalities Weaponize Bureaucracy Against Prayer– dailycaller.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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As Congress debates antisemitism legislation and the Religious Liberty Commission holds hearings on rising hate, a case pending before the Supreme Court reveals a more mundane threat: city officials who use zoning bureaucracy to shut down Jewish prayer in a private home.

Daniel Grand invited a handful of neighbors to his house on a Saturday morning to pray. The City of University Heights, Ohio, served him with a cease-and-desist order, calling his home an “illegal house of worship.” Mayor Michael Dylan Brennan then encouraged Grand’s neighbors to surveil his home and report any religious activity for punishment.

When a city criminalizes home worship, you’d figure the homeowner has recourse. On paper, yes. In practice, no. In reality, municipalities across the country destroy faith communities not through action but through something more sinister: selective inaction.

Kash Patel Announces Lawsuit Against ‘The Atlantic’ Over Latest Hit Piece– trendingpoliticsnews.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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FBI Director Kash Patel announced Sunday that he intends to take legal action against The Atlantic over a recent attack piece that accused him of frequent drinking on the job and unexplained absences. The director has thoroughly denied the allegations, calling them “fake news.”

The article, titled “The FBI Director Is MIA,” claimed to be based on interviews with more than two dozen anonymous sources, including current and former FBI officials, staff from law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers.

Among the claims were episodes of excessive drinking that allegedly affected his leadership. Sources reported that Patel had been observed drinking to the point of obvious intoxication at venues including the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., and the Poodle Room in Las Vegas. According to “six current and former officials,” meetings and briefings were sometimes rescheduled because of alcohol-fueled nights early in his tenure.

Pope Leo warns African youth against emigration, urges battle against ‘scourge of corruption’– www.lifesitenews.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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Pope Leo XIV called on young people in Africa to resist emigration and corruption, and to work for the good of their own countries.

On April 17, Pope Leo XIV addressed students and faculty at the Catholic University of Central Africa in Yaoundé and later celebrated Mass in Douala, urging African youth to remain in their homeland, combat corruption through moral integrity, and contribute to national development, during the midpoint of his pastoral journey to four African nations.

“Do not give in to distrust and discouragement,” the Pope said during the Mass in Douala. “Do not forget that your people are even richer than this land, for your treasure lies in your values: faith, family, hospitality, and work.”

Why game theory could be critical in a nuclear war– www.scientificamerican.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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“The half-life of humanity is currently around 35 years,” said Nobel laureate in physics David Gross as he concluded an evening lecture at the German Physical Society’s conference in Erlangen in March. Put another way, the physicist believes that in a little more than three decades, there is a 50 percent chance that our species will be extinct.

The alarming statement followed Gross’s estimation that the risk of a nuclear war was increasing from 1 percent per year to about 2 percent annually. After the lecture, the audience was visibly pensive. The current world situation and the award-winning speaker’s warnings hung over attendees like a dark cloud.

“I’m still hoping game theory will come to the rescue,” another physicist later told me at the conference. The rules of logic—provided everyone follows them—would prohibit a nuclear first strike, this reasoning goes.

Moonshot AI and Tsinghua Researchers Propose PrfaaS: A Cross-Datacenter KVCache Architecture that Rethinks How LLMs are Served at Scale– www.marktechpost.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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For years, the way large language models handle inference has been stuck inside a box — literally. The high-bandwidth RDMA networks that make modern LLM serving work have confined both prefill and decode to the same datacenter, sometimes even the same rack. A team of researchers at Moonshot AI and Tsinghua University is making the case that this constraint is about to break down — and that the right architecture can already exploit that shift.

The research team introduces Prefill-as-a-Service (PrfaaS), a cross-datacenter serving architecture that selectively offloads long-context prefill to standalone, compute-dense prefill clusters and transfers the resulting KVCache over commodity Ethernet to local PD clusters for decode. The result, in a case study using an internal 1T-parameter hybrid model, is 54% higher serving throughput than a homogeneous PD baseline and 32% higher than a naive heterogeneous setup — while consuming only a fraction of available cross-datacenter bandwidth. The research team note that when compared at equal hardware cost, the throughput gain is approximately 15%, reflecting that the full 54% advantage comes partly from pairing higher-compute H200 GPUs for prefill with H20 GPUs for decode.

Virginia Democrats Show That They Are All Power, Not Democracy– www.dailysignal.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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Day after day, new Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger and her fellow Democrats demonstrate how much of their agenda is simply about securing power.

Spanberger signed a bill Monday that added the Commonwealth of Virginia to the National Popular Vote Compact, which is a misguided and downright unconstitutional attempt to get around the Electoral College in presidential elections.

The compact, which has now enlisted 18 states and the District of Columbia, would make the state’s Electoral College votes be whatever the national popular vote is, potentially nullifying democracy in the name of democracy.

I’d like to note that this move is awful for several reasons, the first one being that the National Popular Vote idea is a toxic one that undermines America’s federal, constitutional system.

Iran Pushes Too Far in Hormuz, and the U.S. Pushes Back – PJ Media– pjmedia.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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President Donald Trump authorized a direct response after an Iranian-flagged vessel moved into a restricted pattern of activity in the Strait of Hormuz.

U.S. Navy forces intercepted and disabled the vessel after it failed to comply with repeated warnings. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth supported the operation, and the U.S. Central Command coordinated the response, stopping the vessel before it could continue its course through one of the world’s most contentious shipping lanes.

It was the first interception since the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports began last week. Iran’s joint military command called the armed boarding an act of piracy and a ceasefire violation, the state broadcaster said.

With the U.S.-Iran standoff over the strait sharpening and the ceasefire expiring by Wednesday, it was not clear where President Donald Trump ’s earlier announcement on new talks with Iran now stood. He had said U.S. negotiators would head to Pakistan on Monday.

MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell Smears RFK Jr. as ‘Sick Racist’– www.newsbusters.org

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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On Thursday’s The Last Word, MS NOW host Lawrence O’Donnell used a selectively edited clip to portray HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a “deeply perverted racist madman” who wants to remove all black children from their parents and have them “reparented” by the government. In fact, the HHS secretary said no such thing.

The MS NOW host began his dishonest segment by claiming that Kennedy wants to forcibly remove all black children from their parents:

Donald Trump’s Human Services secretary, who was convicted of the felony of heroin possession during the 14 years that he admits to having been a heroin addict, is the first cabinet secretary in history — indeed, the only administration official in the administration of any President in history — who wants to rip every black child in America out of the arms of that child’s mother and that child’s father. Every single black child.

O’Donnell worked in the word “Nazi” as he continued:

Robert Kennedy Jr believes that every black child in America has bad parents, and that every black child in America needs to be reparented. That is his personal Nazi word for it. “Reparented.” He did not say that some black children need to be reparented by him. He did not say that thousands of black children need to be reparented. He said, quote, “every black kid” needs to be reparented by the federal government and institutions run by him.

Zelensky Says Oil Sanctions Relief Provides Billions for Russian Military– www.themoscowtimes.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday condemned the easing of sanctions on Russian oil after the United States extended a waiver meant to soften surging energy prices driven by the Middle East war.

“Every dollar paid for Russian oil is money for the war” and is used for devastating strikes on Ukraine, Zelensky said in a post on X.

Zelensky did not mention the United States, but President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday issued a month-long sanctions waiver allowing the sale of Russian oil and petroleum products that are at sea.

The action was intended to bring down soaring energy prices. But the U.S. Treasury Department extension came two days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that Washington would not renew the waiver.

US seizes Iranian vessel in Hormuz; Iran vows ‘retaliation soon’ — what we know– timesofindia.indiatimes.com

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US President Donald Trump on Sunday claimed that American forces seized an Iranian-flagged cargo ship TOUSKA after it tried to bypass a naval blockade near the Strait of Hormuz.Iran initially contradicted the claim, saying US forces were forced to retreat…

In a post on Truth Social he wrote, “Today, an Iranian-flagged cargo ship named TOUSKA… tried to get past our Naval Blockade, and it did not go well for them.”

Trump said the ship was warned by a US Navy guided missile destroyer in the Gulf of Oman to stop, but it did not comply.

“The US Navy Guided Missile Destroyer USS SPRUANCE intercepted the TOUSKA in the Gulf of Oman, and gave them fair warning to stop. The Iranian crew refused to listen, so our Navy ship stopped them right in their tracks by blowing a hole in the engine room. Right now, US Marines have custody of the vessel. The TOUSKA is under US Treasury Sanctions because of their prior history of illegal activity. We have full custody of the ship, and are seeing what’s on board!,” he further wrote.

A new force of nature is reshaping the planet, study finds– www.sciencedaily.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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Human societies have not just adapted to the natural world. They have steadily learned how to transform it. Drawing on research from archaeology, ecology, anthropology, and evolutionary theory, Erle Ellis, professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, explains how cultural practices have evolved to give humans extraordinary influence over the ecosystems that sustain them.

From early uses of fire to cook food and shape landscapes to modern systems like industrial agriculture, global trade, and rapidly growing cities, societies have developed powerful tools and institutions. These social and cultural advances have allowed humans to reshape the planet on a massive scale while improving their ability to survive and thrive.

Theoretical models of supernova chemistry overhauled after X-ray data from Perseus Cluster reveal key discrepancies– phys.org

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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The Perseus Cluster is a massive galaxy cluster located in the constellation Perseus. It is one of the largest structures in the observable universe, comprising more than a thousand galaxies—equivalent to roughly a thousand trillion times the mass of the sun. Hot gases within the cluster, known as the intracluster medium (ICM), emit powerful X-rays detectable by telescopes. These gases are produced by billions of supernova explosions, and their chemical composition reveals how typical supernovae have exploded throughout cosmic history.