OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during Snowflake Summit 2025 in San Francisco on June 2, 2025. Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesOpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Feb. 27 that his company has struck a deal with the…

Former President Bill Clinton released a video statement on his Epstein deposition. On Friday Bill Clinton testified before the House Oversight Committee on his connections to Jeffrey Epstein from an…

A test tube labelled "Bird Flu", eggs and a piece of paper in the colours of the U.S. national flag are seen in this picture illustration, on Jan. 14, 2023. Dado Ruvic/ReutersCHICAGO—Bird flu has wiped…

Federal officers in front of the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis on Jan. 9, 2026. John Fredricks/The Epoch TimesA federal judge on Feb. 27 extended an order that blocked immigration…

Experts explains there are numerous factors for developing trend Students nationwide are shifting the way they tackle their higher education goals, with more opting for community college as a pathway, according to recently released survey data. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center released its Final Fall Enrollment Trends report, which highlighted how growth in… Source

OPINION: Professor says recent Olympics ‘might be a little glimpse of […] a kind of radical nativist, aggressive, more isolationist great power version of America’ Progressives truly are just plain miserable. It’s bad enough their misery has taken its toll on popular entertainment; even when one thing breaks the PC boilerplate, the prog pundits are all over it — like The Guardian’s Jesse… Source

Culture The Tender Mercy of Robert Duvall  From Mac Sledge to Col. Kilgore, Duvall’s characters embodied the soul of our nation. Back in the old America, where country music still mattered and real men donned decent blue jeans and 10-gallon hats and sang until their hearts turned blue, Robert Duvall crooned beneath the heavens in front of a 40-foot wide Lonestar State Flag. In a dusty, dim Texas bar, couples held hands and swayed slowly as Mac Sledge, a washed-up country singer portrayed by Duvall in Bruce Beresford’s incredible 1983 film, Tender Mercies, sang the beautiful medley “If You’ll Hold The Ladder (I’ll Climb To The Top).” There are so many indomitable performances by Duvall throughout his career that it’s difficult to choose a favorite, but for me, his redemptive arc as Sledge in Tender Mercies takes the very top prize. Always the real deal, Duvall had told Beresford he would only take on the role if Beresford promised Duvall he could sing the songs in the music-heavy film without autotune and in his own voice.  For that magnetic, majestic performance of true grit and faded misery, Duvall won the award for Best Actor at the 56th Academy Awards in 1984. The country music star Dolly Parton, who co-presented the award standing next to a youthful Sylvester Stallone, screamed with delight as she tore open the envelope.  There is no easy answer to the film, no sudden flash of light that completes the blighted canvas. That’s what made it so great. After all, life’s a lot like that too. “I don’t trust happiness,” Sledge tells his girlfriend Rosa Lee (played by Tess Harper), a young widow living on the edge of nowhere with her impressionable son. “I never did, I never will.”  But happiness is exactly what Duvall brought to America and viewers from around the world in a career that spanned country music barrooms to the war-torn beaches of Vietnam. He didn’t dance for fun or toss away one-liners for laughter. His characters were tough men, broken men, decent men, and devout men. They were the type of men that rarely seem to exist anymore in the new world we have conjured with pixels and irony. His loss is a tragedy not only to the giant empire of film but the one we built and lost somewhere between New York City and Los Angeles.  Duvall, one of the great American actors of the 20th century, passed away peacefully at his home in Middleburg, Virginia on Sunday, February 15. He was 95 years old and remembered for his great passion and dedication to the silver screen in a statement released the next day by his wife Luciana. “Bob gave everything to his characters and to the truth of the human spirit they represented,” Luciana wrote. “In doing so, he leaves something lasting and unforgettable to us all.” Duvall played many memorable characters in a career that spanned seven decades. The actor and director starred in lead roles in The Great Santini, Tender Mercies, and The Apostle, earning nominations for best leading actor in each at the Academy Awards.  In 2003, Duvall portrayed Robert E. Lee in Ronald F. Maxwell’s Civil War drama Gods and Generals. A personal favorite of mine was his domineering force as crew chief and car builder Harry Hogge in the sports action film Days of Thunder featuring a young Tom Cruise. An old-school mechanic in Gone in 60 Seconds, a mysterious neighbor in To Kill a Mockingbird, and a fatherly CEO in Adam Sandler’s basketball love story Hustle, Duvall’s range was immense. Duvall is perhaps best remembered for his brief role in Francis Ford Coppola’s tour de force Apocalypse Now. Though on screen for barely 15 minutes, Duvall delivered one of the most indelible performances in film history. Descending into the battlefield via a helicopter blaring “Ride of the Valkyries” in the middle of a burning jungle, the raw energy of Duvall’s character, the maniacal Col. Bill Kilgore, embodies the pure anarchy, chaos, and violence of the Vietnam War.  “You smell that?” Kilgore screams over the roar of a helicopter after landing on a bombed-out beachfront. “Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know that gasoline smell? Smells like victory.”  Surveying the destruction wrought by his boys, Kilgore opens a deck of playing cards and begins tossing a card on each dead body he passes. A lieutenant in the background, via translator, yells at frightened Vietnamese civilians: “We are here to help you.” Duvall’s Kilgore is insane and completely untamed, emblematic of the on-the-ground reality for what became a red, white, and blue killing field. It’s why, nearly 50 years after its premiere, audiences can still instantly recall his stunning performance in the Palme d’Or-winning film.  Duvall is also remembered for his iconic portrayal of Tom Hagen, the quiet intellect of the Corleone mob family in Coppola’s 1972 film, The Godfather, and its 1974 sequel, The Godfather II. Though born a German-Irish orphan, Duvall’s character becomes consigliere and lawyer for mob boss Vito Corleone, acting as the trusted advisor and confidant for the crime family. Duvall’s character is the order amid Corleone chaos. He anchors the film in a way that no other character can. It’s a role that only an actor as skilled as Duvall could portray.  Duvall could be raw and electrifying, remorseful and forlorn, direct and blistering, calculated and charismatic. He was one of the greatest to ever do it. He often portrayed a side of America that is now fleeting, in honest and mercurial ways. He will be missed, immensely. See you on the other side, Mr. Duvall. The post The Tender Mercy of Robert Duvall appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Trump Seeks to Extend Domestic Spying Powers He Once Condemned The White House is pushing Congress to extend the government’s surveillance authority. In an April 10, 2024 post on Truth Social, then-candidate for president Trump urged Republicans in Congress to “KILL FISA,” referring to the U.S. law establishing procedures for foreign surveillance. “IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” Yet now that he has entered the White House for a second term, Trump is seeking to extend those spying powers he once denounced. As POLTICO reported last week, the Trump administration, in an effort led by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, is quietly pressing Congress to approve a “clean” extension of Section 702 surveillance authorities, potentially through 2027.  Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act originally became law in 2008 after the U.S. Congress voted to retroactively authorize parts of a secret, unconstitutional warrantless surveillance program constructed under the George W. Bush administration during the War on Terror after it was exposed to the American public in December 2005 by James Risen of the New York Times. As Risen and a colleague wrote at the time, citing anonymous U.S. officials, Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency [NSA] has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda. We later learned through the brave whistleblowing of Edward Snowden and reporting from Glenn Greenwald that the NSA’s secret data collection program extends well beyond the originally reported “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of Americans; the NSA’s internal motto is “collect it all,” and that organization engages in surveillance and bulk data collection against every American citizen. Under the pretext of targeting foreigners abroad, Section 702 of FISA has expanded the federal government’s ability to warrantlessly collect Americans’ private communications, then later search through those communications using Americans’ personal data. So-called “incidental” or “backdoor” searches have long allowed intelligence agencies like the FBI to access constitutionally protected private communications without ever going to a judge. Congress has nominally required intelligence agencies to estimate the frequency of such database queries, yet when intelligence officials are—albeit rarely—confronted by lawmakers, they have repeatedly failed to produce meaningful numbers. With the FBI and other intel agencies ignoring even minimal legal mandates to keep a tally of its own “backdoor searches,” the true scope of warrantless access to Americans’ communications remains largely unknown. Even so, Americans do not have to wonder whether or not those vast spying powers will ever be wielded for political purposes against them. That has already happened. In a 2019 report, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the FBI made “fundamental errors” and provided misleading information to the secret FISA court in order to obtain surveillance authorization targeting 2016 Trump campaign official Carter Page. In April 2022, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its annual transparency report on the intelligence community’s use of national security surveillance authorities, revealing that the FBI conducted up to 3.4 million warrantless queries of Americans’ data in 2021. Those high profile spying abuses led to a legislative battle in April 2024 between the House intelligence committee—which had proposed a version of FISA that kept all of the U.S. security state’s abilities to surveil and collect data on American citizens in tact—and the House judiciary committee—which sought to introduce reforms to prevent intelligence agencies from engaging in those surveillance activities against Americans. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA)—who in July 2023 claimed that the unchecked power of intelligence agencies “is what keeps [him] up at night” and denounced how “the top law enforcement agency in the country, that is supposed to be protecting and serving the American people, is being used against them, it’s violating the privacy of Americans”—ultimately cast the deciding vote to reject an amendment requiring law enforcement to obtain a warrant before searching Americans under Section 702, extending the U.S. security state’s authority until its scheduled sunset on April 20, 2026. In January 2025, a federal district court ruled that law enforcement agencies must obtain a warrant before searching Americans’ communications collected under Section 702 of FISA, rejecting the government’s longstanding reliance on a “foreign intelligence” exception. But the current version of Section 702 that Miller and the Trump administration are pushing through Congress does not include an official warrant requirement for querying Americans’ data, signaling the administration’s willingness to openly violate the Constitution and continue the now decades-long process of shredding Americans’ fourth amendment protections. Congress, which has routinely abdicated its own responsibilities to the executive branch on matters of war and intelligence oversight, will likely follow their lead. The post Trump Seeks to Extend Domestic Spying Powers He Once Condemned appeared first on The American Conservative.

Latin America Killing Cartel Bosses Won’t Solve Mexico’s Organized Crime Problems Cartel violence and drug trafficking can’t be fixed with just bullets or explosives. The Mexican Army on Sunday closed the net on Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, the leader of the brutal Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), one of Mexico’s largest and most violent criminal organizations. Oseguera decided to go down fighting, and the operation turned into a vicious gunfight that left the kingpin mortally wounded and eight cartel members dead. The cartels responded aggressively to the Mexican government’s takedown of one of their most prominent leaders. Attacks against Mexican military and police forces broke out across the country, and cartels burned hundreds of vehicles in the streets, a tactic used to disrupt and delay state reaction to cartel activity and terrorize civilian bystanders. In the state of Jalisco, the government reported Monday that cartel attacks killed 25 Mexican national guardsmen, a state prosecutor, and a private citizen; Mexican security forces returning fire killed 30 cartel gunmen. The operation was made possible by American intelligence, which pinpointed the cartel leader’s location, although the attempted capture was carried out by Mexican troops alone. The U.S. has placed increasing pressure on the Mexican government to crack down on cartels as part of its border security plan, something Mexico under the Morena party has long been hesitant to do. Its previous president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, largely ignored organized crime under his “hugs, not bullets” campaign to end violence by attempting to solve its “root causes” of poverty and youth unemployment. The American right broadly has taken an aggressive stance against the cartels, and support for further militarization of anti-cartel operations is popular among MAGA influencers and the Republican party base. “I am once again calling to bomb the cartels,” Jack Posobiec wrote in a popular post on X earlier this week, and the sentiment has been echoed by figures as diverse as Elon Musk, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX). The Trump administration itself has hinted at an endorsement of this approach, with President Donald Trump at times suggesting that the U.S. would begin conducting airstrikes against cartel assets on the ground similar to the strikes the U.S. military has conducted on drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific.  The Mexican government has responded to U.S. pressure by scaling up the intensity of anti-cartel operations and cracking down on its northern border. Since President Claudia Sheinbaum’s election, Mexican forces have seized hundreds of tons of illegal drugs and imprisoned tens of thousands of participants in drug production and trafficking and organized crime. Sheinbaum also took the remarkable step of extraditing 55 of the country’s imprisoned cartel leaders to the U.S. to face justice on American soil. But while aggressive and flashy military operations and the capture and killing of drug kingpins may appeal to the imaginations of the American right, the truth of the matter is that cartels are not a problem that can be solved by bombs, drones, special ops teams, or even large-scale military deployments. We know because Mexico and the U.S. have attempted this strategy before, during the presidencies of Vicente Fox and most notably Felipe Calderón. With U.S. assistance in the form of the Mérida Initiative, the Mexican Army swept through cartel strongholds with the intent to kill as many gangsters as they could, destroy their redoubts, and shatter their leadership and morale. The results were disastrous. The Mexican Army was able to kill thousands of criminals, but cartels adapted and hit back hard. Organized crime became increasingly militarized and significantly more violent than it had in the 20th century, and cartels adopted guerilla and insurgent tactics, killing Mexican soldiers in ambushes and bombings and then melting away to blend in with the civilian populace. Mexican police and military forces became frustrated and paranoid, and reports soon followed about civilians shot by nervous soldiers at checkpoints or killed by police in firefights with fleeing criminals. Cartels began targeting civilians in reprisals against government crackdowns, and the military occasionally attacked civilians who they suspected of harboring or protecting cartel operatives. The murder rate in Mexico skyrocketed, and has never come down to pre-21st century levels, but the quantity of drugs crossing the border to the U.S. did not significantly decline. In 2009, Calderón published a list of Mexico’s most wanted criminals, naming 37 cartel leaders and drug kingpins. By 2015, 33 of the 37 had been captured or confirmed dead, but their elimination had little apparent effect on the volume of drug trafficking or cartel violence. Taking out a cartel leader often weakened or sometimes even destroyed his gang, but the territory was simply taken over by competing groups, sometimes sparking turf wars that further escalated violent crime in the region. The death of “El Mencho” is likely to have the same effect. His son and heir, “El Menchito,” is currently imprisoned in the U.S., leaving the CJNG without leadership. That is more likely to result in a fight as other cartels muscle in to take over their operations and CJNG subordinates fight for the throne than in a material decline in drug trafficking. The fundamental problem facing Mexico is not one of guns or manpower. The cartels are overwhelmingly outmatched militarily by the Mexican Army and National Guard, regardless of the photographs of cartel gunmen looking tough in fatigues and armored cars that circulate on the internet.  Ultimately, the issue is one of state capacity and economics. The Mexican army can kill cartel operators and capture cartel bosses, but the Mexican government and police forces can’t stop new entrants from moving into the territory, intimidating civilians, buying off government officials, and purchasing local complaisance with the largesses of the drug trade. Drug trafficking is lucrative enough to create a practically endless appetite for expansion and promises wages high enough to make recruitment from Mexico’s youth functionally limitless. Adding American weapons and manpower to the equation will not change these realities. The U.S. military cannot govern the country for the Mexicans, nor can it turn off the massive consumer market in the U.S. that funds the drug trade. If the U.S. is not careful, its pressure to crack down on cartels could lead to a less stable situation south of the border. Instead of fantasizing about airstriking the cartels into oblivion, the American right should take seriously the need to cooperate to build Mexican state capacity and choke off the cartels economically. This has already been a major theme of Sheinbaum’s security policy, which aims to increase centralization and federal control over policing via the National Guard and building up Mexico’s intelligence services. Increasing intelligence penetration and identifying the means of disrupting cartel supply chains and operations in ways that cause the greatest cost and reduce the economic viability of drug trafficking is the most durable way to reduce the volume of drugs and crime that reach American soil. This requires the use of military force and police action, to be sure, but force alone will not be sufficient; it must be well used. Additional work needs to be done to increase the professionalization and integrity of local government and the Mexican judicial system—the latter of which has recently become more vulnerable to exploitation after the recent judicial reform which subjects judges to popular election. Only once the Mexican government, national and local, is capable of holding its own against cartel influence will eliminating cartels function as a way to reduce organized crime and drug trafficking rather than simply opening new territory for other gangs to fight over. This kind of work is not glamorous. It is not easy, the way smashing sicarios with cruise missiles or drones would be. But it is the only serious and durable approach to dealing with the cartel problem that the U.S. and Mexico face. The post Killing Cartel Bosses Won’t Solve Mexico’s Organized Crime Problems appeared first on The American Conservative.

from Revolver News: Every now and then, some dirt surfaces that make everyday Americans stop and ask a very simple question: who on earth thought this was a good idea? That is exactly where we are now. But this “dirt” actually surfaced a year ago, and many people missed it. And we also know who […]