Amy Mek of RAIR Foundation reports that one Islamic center alone in San Antonio converts about three people per week. They are even converting entire families at once. The center follows Sharia law. RAIR reports the plan is to “Recruit nonstop, build the infrastructure, and methodically convert and conquer. Texas, this is Sharia creep, right […] The post One Texas Islamic Center Alone Converts 3 People a Week appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

A four-week-old baby giraffe is becoming a social media sensation, thanks to his remarkable tuft of hair. His new name, Eugene, chosen from public suggestions, has proven to be a perfect fit for the young giraffe’s charming personality. The Toledo Zoo & Aquarium in Ohio welcomed the calf, weighing 130 lbs, on January 17 when […] The post Newborn Giraffe With Distinctive Hair-do is Charming Visitors to Ohio Zoo–And They Gave Him the Perfect Name appeared first on Good News Network.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. X has filed a legal challenge against a $140 million fine the European Commission handed down in December, making it the first large company to contest the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) in court. The appeal, lodged at the EU’s General Court, argues X was denied due process and subjected to a biased enforcement process. This is a direct challenge to the Commission’s authority to define and punish disfavored speech at scale. The DSA is a controversial mechanism. Under it, Brussels can fine tech companies up to 6% of their global annual revenue for failing to remove content the Commission decides is “disinformation,” “illegal,” or otherwise problematic. Who decides what those categories mean? The Commission does. The same body that writes the definitions also runs the investigations and levies the fines. There is no external review and no independent adjudication before penalties land. X’s Global Government Affairs team didn’t soften its language: “This EU Decision resulted from an incomplete and superficial investigation, grave procedural errors, a tortured interpretation of the obligations under the DSA, and systematic breaches of rights of defense and basic due process requirements suggesting prosecutorial bias. X remains committed to user safety and transparency while defending our users’ access to the only global town square.” The law leans heavily on non-governmental organizations to advise regulators on what content may cross the line under EU standards, then places extensive reporting and compliance obligations on platforms to act on that advice. Third parties help set the bar, the Commission enforces it, and companies that push back risk fines large enough to alter business decisions. Alliance Defending Freedom International, which does a lot of good work, is supporting the legal challenge. Its senior European counsel, Adina Portaru, didn’t hedge: “X is where millions of people go to freely express their views. This is a crackdown on X by authorities who view a free speech platform as a serious threat to their total control of online narratives. By targeting X, they are targeting the free speech of individuals across the world who simply want to share ideas online free from censorship.” Portaru’s broader concern is the precedent. “If the Commission’s concentration of power goes unchallenged, it will further cement a highly problematic standard for speech control across the EU and beyond,” she said. The Trump administration and congressional Republicans have both pushed back against the DSA. Speaking in December while the fine was fresh, President Trump said, “Look, Europe has to be very careful. They’re doing a lot of things…Europe is going in some bad directions. It’s very bad for the people.” Last week, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan said his committee is looking at legislation that would protect American companies from penalties under foreign speech laws. The committee has already released documents that reveal the EU pressured tech companies to develop guidelines governing legal speech. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post X Challenges EU’s $140 Million Digital Services Act Fine in Court appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

'Token' Nukes, Lobster Meals, 'Unbridgeable Impasse': Do Portents Point To An Iran Strike?

The pivotal question of what will follow the crack-up of the liberal international order dominated the highest levels of European politics at the recent 2026 Munich Security Conference.Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave his own forceful answer, following Vice President JD Vance’s provocative speech last year. Rubio delivered an equally spirited address that issued an ultimatum: Rationalizing collapse and weakness is no longer the policy of the United States — and it should no longer be Europe’s policy either. America has no “interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,” he said.Alliances should be made, renewed, or even disbanded depending on whether they help secure America’s interests in the present.Instead, Rubio urged a reformation of the “global institutions of the old order” to defend and strengthen the key pillars of Western civilization.The problem in Rubio’s mind was that the 20th-century web of international alliances, designed to counter the Soviets in the wake of two devastating world wars, took on a life of its own. Its keepers began putting the preservation of their supranational relations “above the vital interests of our people and our nations.”Institutions such as the United Nations have utterly failed to protect national interests, and they simply have no answers to the most pressing problems in international affairs today. Instead, they actively encourage deindustrialization, mass migration, and shortsighted climate policies, causing a loss of confidence in the very sources that have supplied the West’s vitality for centuries.To counter this, Rubio proposed that the U.S. partner with Europe to lead a “reinvigorated alliance … that boldly races into the future.” It will focus on “advancing our mutual interests and new frontiers, unshackling our ingenuity, our creativity, and the dynamic spirit to build a new Western century.” If the West wants to safeguard and promote its historic ways of life, then an international realignment is inescapably necessary.The themes Rubio articulated were also the subject of this year’s “Budapest Global Dialogue,” an annual conference put on by the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and the Observer Research Foundation. This year’s gathering focused on what HIIA President Gladden Pappin presented as the choices currently before the world: endless conflict that’s likely to spin out of control or the emergence of a foundation for long-term security, peace, and prosperity.Keynote speakers and panelists agreed that continuing to prop up a decaying international order was not a viable option. Though necessary for its time, it is clearly inadequate in a world that looks far different from the one that featured creeping death in the form of the USSR. As Rubio recently told a gaggle of reporters before his address in Munich, “The old world is gone.” He noted that nations must re-examine their roles in our “new era in geopolitics.”RELATED: What’s Greenland to us? Photo by Alessandro Rampazzo/AFP via Getty ImagesThe urgency of this project has been amplified by the European Union’s various machinations against popular government. Its censorship machine is attempting to export the EU’s liberty-denying laws to America and other Western nations. Unsurprisingly, the problem of censorship, which has been a chief focus of Vice President Vance, took up much of the conversation of the opening-night panel.Headlined by Sarah B. Rogers, the U.S. undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, and Balázs Orbán, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s political director, panelists discussed the countless issues stemming from the EU’s Digital Services Act. It uses “trusted flaggers” like HateAid — an organization funded by the German government — to censor online speech, including that of Americans.Pappin and other participants also noted the myriad problems stemming from unchecked globalization. Nations happily traded away the most basic elements of sovereignty for a mess of pottage in the form of lower prices on select goods. This was justified using free-market language, in which attaining the highest GDP possible seemingly became the summum bonum of political life. Former Trump administration official Andrew Peek termed this problem “economics without politics.”In the United States in particular, key supply chains were mostly shipped out of the country, the folly of which was fully exposed during the COVID debacle. The U.S. essentially followed a systematic deindustrialization plan as we helped build up other countries, especially China.China’s rise didn’t happen solely due to its sheer geographic size or population. It occurred because the Clinton administration and Western leaders decided the best way to fend it off was by inviting the Chinese into the heart of the world’s economic system. This was a catastrophic choice that helped hasten the collapse of the old order.Now, China is by far the world leader in many positive economic indicators. The country is also looking to become the world’s first electrostate, adding another gigawatt of capacity to its grid every year.Meanwhile, the United States is facing mounting problems with our electric grid, which will be further exacerbated by the construction of data centers and older plants going offline. No nuclear power plants were built in the U.S. between 1996 and 2016. Additionally, as noted in a Department of Energy report last year, utopian green energy mandates have helped bring the U.S. closer to the brink of a full-blown energy crisis.RELATED: America won’t beat China without Alaska Photo by Simon Bruty/Anychance/Getty ImagesThough the conference featured discussions on other pivotal topics — especially the promise and peril of artificial general intelligence — there wasn’t a dedicated panel on immigration. But that didn’t stop speakers from addressing the topic. Alexandre del Valle, a professor at France’s IPAG, called mass Islamic immigration to Europe a long-term bomb. And in a keynote address that served as a campaign speech of sorts, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó celebrated the fact that illegal migration to Hungary is nonexistent.Szijjártó also devoted time to underscoring the stakes of the upcoming Hungarian parliamentary elections. The April 12 contest will feature a rather personal battle between current Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Péter Magyar, who resigned from Fidesz in 2024 and then joined TISZA, the Respect and Freedom Party. The campaign billboards and posters I saw plastered around Budapest, which were nearly all pro-Orbán, showed Magyar gladly acquiescing to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s insistence to send Hungarian armaments to Ukraine.Fidesz is asking voters if they want to keep Orbán’s government in power or elect those who would sacrifice the country’s blood and treasure in war. President Trump clearly wants the former. During Rubio’s trip to Budapest after his Munich speech, he said that the American president is “deeply committed” to Orbán’s victory in April.As the Trump administration sees it, the path forward is clear: maintaining alliances when political goals and traditions are shared, as is the case between Hungary and the United States. And as Rubio was careful to point out in Munich, when alliances become strained, renewal through strategic thinking that connects means and ends is essential. One such example is Elbridge Colby’s recent discussion of the creation of NATO 3.0, in which U.S. allies bear more of the financial burden.What won’t work, however, is elevating prudential considerations to the level of principle, as world leaders and bureaucrats have done far too often in recent decades. They have frozen in amber the specific circumstances of the second half of the 20th century, thinking that those paradigms must forever dictate how nations should act. But as Dhruva Jaishankar, the executive director of the Observer Research Foundation America, pointed out, the ballroom in which the 2026 Budapest Global Dialogue was held was built in 1896. Five international orders have come and gone in that time.Contrary to the Anne Applebaums of our foreign policy elite class, who have helped drive the West into a ditch, the Nazis aren’t marching just over the horizon, and Vladimir Putin isn’t the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. Alliances should be made, renewed, or even disbanded depending on whether they help secure America’s interests in the present. As Daniel J. Mahoney is fond of saying, it isn’t always Munich 1938. Serious leaders acknowledge current realities and marry their rhetoric to actions that will lead to peace, prosperity, and the good of the West — and the good of America above all.Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

The United States and its allies are facing a defining moment in history — one Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck believes most people don’t yet fully recognize.However, one man who does recognize this moment is Marco Rubio, who laid out Glenn’s feelings precisely in a recent speech at the Munich Security Conference.“What Rubio was talking about this weekend was this system has failed, and Donald Trump is going a completely different direction, and we will lead the way … but you have to restore common sense,” Glenn explains.“You cannot keep doing the same thing over and over again. This system doesn’t work, and we all know it. Just we’re the first ones to admit it,” he adds.And in order to make a change going forward, Glenn believes we need to look at the real history of Western civilization instead of the “woke” version.“I like history. I know what history means. And when it comes to Western civilization, how could you make the case that it’s worth letting go? You could only make a case if you’ve been carefully taught that Western civilization means nothing except bad things,” he says. “And you’re misinformed on that.”This is why Glenn says that “we’re already in World War III.”“We’re fighting World War III. You just don’t know it yet. Islam is on the move. And what is their target? Western civilization. … And they occupy those countries, which they’ve been trying to do for a thousand-plus years. They occupy those countries. They now have nuclear weapons. And if they occupy those countries, you no longer have what built us,” Glenn explains.“May I suggest that we understand that times have changed, and we want our country to survive, and we want the Western civilization to survive. … We see the world is changing and has changed, and we adapt so we don’t lose who we are. We do it in a different way. We do it in a better way,” he continues.And that better way, Glenn says, is to “hold our values and what made us a country in the first place.”“Let’s remember those things. Let’s restore those things, and then let’s adapt those to today’s issues and problems. I think that’s what Rubio was saying. And he was challenging Europe, and at the same time, he was reminding America: This is what Donald Trump is challenging America to do as well,” he explains.“We’re going to do it. Join us,” he adds.Want more from Glenn Beck?To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

CIA Admits Political Bias in Obama-Era Intelligence. The 2017 Assessment Deserves Scrutiny