'No place in bank exams'

EL PASO, Texas—Two Border Patrol vehicles stopped for a moment as they drove along the southern border, the only activity that could be seen from along the wall dividing Mexico and El Paso, Texas. The border wall stretched far into the desert from the view of the helicopter.   There has been a decline in activity along the border in recent months, a Customs and Border Protection Air and Marine Operations pilot explained, but the agents still patrol the skies night and day.   It’s quiet along the border in El Paso today. ? pic.twitter.com/vcnv9W55RI— Virginia Allen (@Virginia_Allen5) August 26, 2025 “Recently, obviously, we’ve gotten great operational control of the border,” El Paso Air Branch Director Efren Gonzalez told The Daily Signal.   “Stats are coming down, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that traffic is not coming through,” Gonzalez said. “It’s just we’re performing the job to a higher level and partnering up with the Department of Defense and other law enforcement agencies to be able to secure the border and do our job, contrary to [the] previous administration, where we felt like we, you know, were doing it halfway.”  CBP’s Air and Marine Operations work hand in hand with Border Patrol. They are the eyes in the sky, and seek both to detect threats on the ground and carry out rescues.? pic.twitter.com/JYFhy4XEDV— Virginia Allen (@Virginia_Allen5) August 30, 2025 CBP’s Air and Marine Operations works hand in hand with Border Patrol. When an agent sees a threat from any one of the Air and Marine Operations’ roughly 240 aircraft, they coordinate with Border Patrol, or other law enforcement officials on the ground, to respond.   There are areas along the border where Border Patrol cannot station personnel, Gonzalez explained, so “if we see an abnormality coming across the border, then we start communicating [with Border Patrol] on the radio.”   In addition to working to prevent threats from crossing the border, Air and Marine Operations also conduct rescue missions.   “It’s not safe to cross the border,” Gonzalez says, adding, “We have predators out in the desert, snakes, mountain lions, … black bears.” Temperatures can easily reach over 100 degrees in the summer, or drop very low in the winter.   The border wall can be up to 30 feet, but “smugglers don’t care,” he says. “They’ll bring them up with a rope on one side, and then there’s nothing on the outside, and they expect for them to … slide down, [but] it doesn’t always go that way.”  If a migrant gets hurt in the desert or can’t keep pace with the group he or she is with, human smugglers will leave him or her behind. Air and Marine Operations sometimes discover injured or abandoned illegal aliens before it’s too late, but that’s not always the case.   El Paso Air Branch Director Efren Gonzalez (The Daily Signal) CBP Air and Marine Operations conducts rescue missions of hikers or other individuals who might find themselves stranded as well. Agents also respond to national disasters in the U.S., working closely with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and they provide support and security during large events, such as presidential inaugurations or the Super Bowl.  There are about 1,800 Air and Marine Operations agents throughout the U.S., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. In addition to operating in the sky, the CBP branch also has about 300 marine vessels working to respond to threats and crisis situations across U.S. waters.   The post WATCH: Aerial View of Southern Border Confirms Reports appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump says he is open to the idea of bringing back insane asylums.   During an interview in the Oval Office Friday with Daily Caller White House Correspondent Reagan Reese, Trump was asked if he would consider reopening insane asylums for those suffering from severe mental illness.   “Yeah, I would,” Trump responded, adding, “They used to have them, and you never saw people like we had, you know, they used to have them.”   Trump said he remembers seeing insane asylums in New York but then the residents of those facilities were released “into society because they couldn’t afford it.”   Insane asylums, or mental hospitals, grew in New York and across the U.S. from the early 1900s to 1950. In the 1950s, care for the mentally ill began to shift away from inpatient care to outpatient treatment in a move known as “deinstitutionalization,” according to the Manhattan Institute.   Trump says he remembers when the facilities began to close in New York, adding that they released the people onto the streets in what he termed “a rough situation.”  During Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s tenure from 2011—2021, Cuomo worked to reduce the number of people living in state psychiatric centers under an initiative known as “Transformation Plan.” The Manhattan Institute found that while the number of people staying at state psychiatric centers on a daily basis fell by 12% from 2014—2018, the number of mentally ill homeless in the city grew by about 22% from 2015—2017.   About 67 out of every 100 homeless people suffer from a mental health disorder, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.   Trump’s comments regarding insane asylums come as the president is focused on tackling high crime rates across the nation. Trump has federalized the police in Washington, D.C. and deployed the National Guard to crack down on crime. Trump has now declared the district a “crime free zone.”   Trump, in a Truth Social post on Monday, praised Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser for working with his administration to bring “CRIME down to virtually NOTHING in D.C.,” but bashed other Democrat politicians.   Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “spend all of their time trying to justify violent Crime, instead of working with us to completely ELIMINATE it,” Trump said.   Multiple reports indicate violent crime has fallen in the nation’s capital since Aug. 11 when Trump federalized the city’s Metropolitan Police Department. The post Trump Open to Bringing Back Insane Asylums appeared first on The Daily Signal.

California is leading the resistance against President Donald Trump’s deregulation agenda with new rules that will force companies operating in the state to produce audited reports on their CO2 emissions, and analysts say these rules may soon apply to companies throughout the United States.  California is preparing to implement two laws, SB 253 and SB 261, which would require companies operating in the state to monitor and report their CO2 emissions, as well as those of their suppliers and customers. These rules, originally passed in 2023, are similar but broader in scope than the mandate that was imposed nationwide by the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden administration, but which was effectively canceled under the current Trump administration.  California’s so-called “green accounting” mandate “sets the U.S. standard for climate-related disclosures and has the potential to reach every part of a company’s value chain,” Sidley, a global law firm, stated. The mandate would also align America’s climate accounting rules with those of the European Union.   “California’s SB 253 and SB 261 function as a de facto national mandate, especially for large companies that do business in the state,” Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, told The Daily Signal. “While the Trump administration is backing away from the SEC’s overreaching climate disclosure rule, California is charging ahead, forcing private companies to publish speculative and politically motivated climate data, even if they’re not headquartered in California.”  In March, the SEC dropped its opposition to lawsuits against a mandate it enacted in 2024, which would have forced American companies to produce audited disclosures of their greenhouse gas emissions, together with their plans to reduce them. This mandate is now effectively dead at the federal level.  The SEC had attempted to force firms to disclosure their own emissions (Scope 1 emissions) and those of their energy suppliers (Scope 2). But California’s laws go further, mandating that companies also disclose “upstream” and “downstream” emissions from their supply chain and users of their products (Scope 3).   A report by Baker Donelson, a law firm, states that Scope 3 emissions “are notoriously hard to record as they encompass indirect emissions from purchased goods and services, business travel, employee commutes, and the processing and use of sold products.”  These reporting rules, which require third-party audits and are scheduled to take effect in 2026 for Scope 1 and 2 emissions, and in 2027 for Scope 3, will apply to firms operating in California with $1 billion or more in sales. But analysts say California could set the standards for other states.  “I think the goal of California right now is to get as many other states as it possibly can to go along with this,” Bonner Cohen, senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, told The Daily Signal. “They know that as long as Trump is in the White House they’re not going to get anything done on this nationally, so if they can get other states—Oregon, Washington, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island—to do something similar, they can at least reach part of their goal.”  State-level “green” accounting rules could lead to a patchwork of regulations for companies to reckon with, forcing many to comply with the strictest standards to be able to operate across the country.   “Companies doing business in California, which is a huge market, might find it easier to comply with their rule than have different rules for states vs. federal,” asset manager William Flaig, CEO of American Conservative Values ETF, told The Daily Signal. “This would likely circumvent what Trump is doing at the federal level.”  A similar fight between California and the Trump White House is ongoing over the regulation of CO2 emissions. In 2024, the Biden administration granted California an exception to implement its own greenhouse gas emissions laws, but Trump revoked that exception this past June.  Critics of “green accounting” say the costs of compliance could be enormous and doubt that it will help to reduce global temperatures.   A 2022 analysis of the SEC’s “green accounting” proposal by Heritage Foundation economic policy fellow David Burton stated that it would create a $6.4 billion annual wealth transfer from American companies to “a new compliance ecosystem” of economists, accountants, attorneys, compliance officers, consultants, and emissions auditors.   “We should always be skeptical of environmental rules that have all economic pain and no environmental gain, and that’s precisely what we have here,” Jack Spencer, The Heritage Foundation’s senior research fellow on environmental policy, told The Daily Signal. “You have a single state trying to impose its will on the rest of us, and it will result in nothing but lining the pockets of special interests.”  However, policy analysts say the costs to companies could go beyond collecting and reporting emissions data and include exposure to climate-related lawsuits.  “It’s something of a litigation trap, in that they are being forced to turn over information which might be completely benign in its own right, but in the hands of an enterprising, well-funded green lawyer, can at the very least drag the company into court,” Cohen said.  In recent years, more than 20 states and cities have filed lawsuits against energy companies such as ExxonMobil, Shell, Sunoco, Citgo, Chevron, Koch Industries, and BP, according to the Center for Climate Integrity, and claims of harm from CO2 emissions could amount to trillions of dollars. These lawsuits have been financed by millions of dollars from tax-exempt philanthropic organizations, according to the Capital Research Center, an investigative think tank.   We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post California Fights Trump Deregulation by Implementing Its Own ‘Green Accounting’ Rule appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. There are many ways to return to Britain after a long-haul flight. Maybe you get a cup of tea, a mildly annoyed customs agent, and a taxi driver who tells you London’s gone to hell. Or, if you’re Graham Linehan, you’re met at Heathrow by five armed officers who then take you into custody over things you wrote on the internet. The man who created Father Ted and The IT Crowd, shows that helped define British humor, was arrested, detained, and taken to hospital, all because of three tweets. He wrote later: “I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital because the stress nearly killed me, and banned from speaking online.” The Metropolitan Police confirmed that Linehan was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence, related to posts he made on X. Armed officers from the Met’s Aviation Unit escorted Linehan off of a flight from Arizona and into custody. The tweets in question included one joke suggesting that if a “trans-identified male” is found in a women-only space, people should “make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” Another tweet featured a photo of a transgender rally with the caption: “A photo you can smell.” A third read: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em.” Linehan says he was taken to a holding cell, stripped of his belongings, and interrogated in detail about the tweets. This isn’t satire. This is modern Britain. At some point, Lineham’s blood pressure spiked high enough that he had to be taken to the hospital. Not exactly how most comedy writers picture the fallout of posting online. He suspects the arrest wasn’t spur-of-the-moment. It was planned. Before he even left the US, something odd happened. At the gate in Arizona, he says, airline staff told him his seat was suddenly unavailable and he needed to be rebooked. At the time, he chalked it up to airline chaos. But later, reflecting on the timing, he wrote: “At the time, I thought it was just the sort of innocent snafu that makes air travel such a joy. But in hindsight, it was clear I’d been flagged.” As for bail, it came with only one condition: he’s not allowed to use X. Linehan has become a public enemy in some progressive circles and a hero in others. For years, he’s spoken out against what he sees as the ideological overreach of gender activism. In the process, he’s lost work, colleagues, and mainstream support. Linehan’s arrest has, unsurprisingly, drawn criticism from those concerned about Britain’s increasingly twitchy attitude toward online speech. Conservative MP Neil O’Brien called the incident “laughable if it wasn’t so serious,” adding, “Britain is now a total laughing stock—a country where we arrest the authors of light comedies and interrogate them about their tweets.” Linehan expressed disbelief at the force mobilized against him, especially when contrasted with the UK’s handling of serious crime: “In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for this tweet… and no, I promise you, I am not making this up.” Linehan said he initially laughed at the absurdity of the situation. “I couldn’t help myself. ‘Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists.’” While officers were professional, he noted they seemed confused by the political nature of the arrest. “Entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.” Though during questioning, Linehan said officers took his posts literally, ignoring the satirical context. “I explained that the ‘punch’ tweet was a serious point made with a joke… certainly not a call to violence.” When the officer referred to “trans people,” Linehan challenged the phrasing. “‘Assigned at birth? Our sex isn’t assigned.’ He called it semantics, I told him he was using activist language.” The stress of the arrest triggered a medical emergency. “Eventually, a nurse came to check on me and found my blood pressure was over 200—stroke territory. The stress of being arrested for jokes was literally threatening my life!” Support for Linehan poured in almost immediately. JK Rowling, who has herself faced relentless backlash for her gender-critical positions, reacted to the news by writing: “What the fuck has the UK become? This is totalitarianism. Utterly deplorable.” Others echoed her alarm. Elon Musk described Britain as a “police state.” Piers Morgan posted: “What’s happened to [Linehan] today is absolutely ridiculous. Five armed cops arresting him at Heathrow for tweets mocking the scandal of biological men invading women’s spaces? When it comes to free speech, Britain’s turning into North Korea.” Robert Jenrick, the Shadow Justice Secretary, also condemned the operation, stating: “This is ridiculous and a complete waste of police time. The police only respond to 1 in 5 reported shoplifting offences, but deployed 5 armed officers to arrest a comedian over three tweets. We desperately need to end this nonsense and go after actual criminals.” The Free Speech Union has stepped in, vowing to provide financial support for Linehan’s legal defense, which it described as a response to “preposterous allegations” and “a disproportionate response from the police.” The UK is currently experiencing a free speech crisis and this is only the latest example. One of the starkest recent examples is Lucy Connolly. She was sentenced to 31 months in prison for a single social media post about the Southport killings. Her case didn’t surprise anyone paying attention. What happened to her is now part of standard enforcement. British police units are actively integrated with online monitoring tools. These systems flag content without the need for a complaint, though Linehan suspects his arrest was prompted by a complaint. Once flagged, police follow up with in-person visits, arrests, or digital bans. The state has built a process for regulating speech without having to say so directly. This is the legal and operational environment created by the Online Safety Act. The law was passed in 2023 and came into force in 2024. It was announced as a protective measure focused on child safety. That framing has not held. The Act gives regulators authority over any online content deemed harmful, even when it is not illegal. The language of the law is broad enough to allow intervention based on tone or framing. Linehan’s arrest is not difficult to explain in the current legal context. Linehan is facing police interviews, a court case, and a ban from using X. Connolly served a prison sentence. Foreign websites are entering litigation with British regulators. The pattern is already visible. This used to be the kind of thing that happened elsewhere. It was the sort of legal system that British commentators once condemned on human rights grounds. But for Britons, it’s not a foreign problem anymore. It’s happening at Heathrow, with five armed officers. And a man who once wrote some of the best modern British sitcoms is now being interrogated like a criminal for online posts. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Graham Linehan Arrested by Armed Police Over X Posts as UK Free Speech Crisis Deepens appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

When Lisa Reingold bought Bella and the Bulldogs, Volume 4 for $20.79 on Amazon, she expected to have it in her digital library. Not a copy that expires, not a subscription, not a temporary lease. She paid full price. Then it vanished. The episode isn’t rare. People who think they own movies or shows they “buy” through Amazon are learning they don’t. Become a Member and Keep Reading… Reclaim your digital freedom. Get the latest on censorship, cancel culture, and surveillance, and learn how to fight back. Email Subscribe Already a supporter? Sign In.Having trouble logging in? Get help here. The post The “Buy” Button Is a Lie appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Former Biden Aide: Tlaib Isn't in Conyers' Seat to Represent Gaza

Prehistoric lurgies of the Ice Age.

The curious phenomenon can be spotted under the right conditions.

Ninety percent of Pittcon’s net profit is dedicated to the future of science.