The post Catster Photo Contest: Cats of the Week Winners (May 1, 2025) by Radim Chudej appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com. Click to Skip Ahead Winner Silliest Cutest Most Dignified Most Expressive Best Action Shot Sleepiest Enter Your Cat This Week’s Winner Name: Gunther Fun Fact: Gunther is a two year old rescue, super energetic and playful, but also super sweet. He always retracts his claws during play time, what a good guy! Silliest Name: Nickie Breed: Domestic Short Hair Most Dignified Name: Benji Breed: Domestic Shorthair Best Action Shot Name: Savannah Breed: Maine Coon Fun Fact: Savannah like anything Green. If any door of my VW Westy is open, in she goes and stretches out over the dash, sink area or bed. Sleepiest Name: Saffron Breed: Domestic Short Hair Fun Fact: She will only sleep, or sit on a chair that has a blanket, she likes to run around then just crash for an hour, wherever is the most comfortable spot Cutest Name: Princess Skunk Breed: Long Haired Feral Fun Fact This is Princess Skunk. She passed away in 2016. She was the sweetest feral, that came to me at est 4 yrs old from the vet. She looked like a skunk, as her back was black with a white stripe! Most Expressive Name: Kit-Kat Fun Fact: She will sit and stare without blinking for long periods of time like an owl. Enter Your Cat Submit your kitty for a chance to be featured! Click here This article is a part of our Weekly Photo Contest View our previous week’s winners here: April 24, 2025 Click here to view our full list of past winners The post Catster Photo Contest: Cats of the Week Winners (May 1, 2025) by Radim Chudej appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com.

The Department of Justice is fighting child abuse in American schools in the form of radical gender ideology, said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller at a press briefing on Thursday. “It is child abuse to change a child’s gender, particularly if you do not inform the parent,” Miller said. “So, if there was a five-year-old or a six-year-old that goes to school, or a seven-year-old that goes to school, and the teacher tries to ‘turn’ the boy into a girl and a girl into a boy, that is child abuse, and this administration is treating that as child abuse and as a gross violation of parental rights.” The Department of Education is working with the Department of Justice to investigate school districts that promote gender ideology, their policies of hiding from parents if their children choose to identify as another gender, and whether they are allowing males to compete in female sports and use female spaces such as bathrooms and locker rooms. The Trump administration is also sending the message to hospitals that they cannot use taxpayer dollars to conduct so-called transgender medical interventions on children, including “chemical castrations and sexual mutilations of children, castration surgeries, castration drugs, and sterilization treatments of children.” .@StephenM SLAMS Dems for supporting child sex changes. "You cannot use taxpayer dollars to perform these barbaric procedures on America's children.""It is child torture, it is child abuse, it is medical malpractice." pic.twitter.com/9kAsSCPykE— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) May 1, 2025 President Donald Trump signed an executive order Jan. 28 preventing the federal government from funding or supporting irreversible transgender medical interventions for minors. In essence, the order would remove most, if not all, federal funding from entities such as hospitals and clinics that performed such interventions. “You cannot use taxpayer dollars to perform these barbaric procedures on America’s children,” Miller told hospitals. More than 200 hospitals and health care facilities provided irreversible transgender procedures to children, according to medical watchdog Do No Harm’s database. “It is child torture, it is child abuse, it is medical malpractice,” Miller continued. The Department of Health and Human Services has updated its guidance to exclude “all of the junk, fake science that was produced under the Biden administration promoting sex changes on children, promoting the idea of sterilizing children,” he said. “That’s been cleaned out, that’s been removed, and new guidance is being issued to doctors and hospitals, advising them that they cannot perform these horrifying procedures,” Miller said. Early Wednesday morning, HHS released a review of transgender procedures for minors revealing a “growing body of evidence pointing to significant risks—including irreversible harms such as infertility—while finding very weak evidence of benefit.” NEW TODAY: An HHS review of trans procedures for minors reveals a “growing body of evidence pointing to significant risks—including irreversible harms such as infertility—while finding very weak evidence of benefit.” pic.twitter.com/yszApaC42y— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) May 1, 2025 The Trump administration will continue to fight for women’s private spaces and sports as well, Miller said. “We are also making clear in our prison system: Male prisoners will not be allowed into women’s prisons,” he stated. “The Biden administration promoted prison rape by putting men into female prisons.” “That is obviously insane, cruel, and unacceptable. And even though the Democrat Party and [House Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries and the Democrat media continue to fight to put men into women’s prisons,” Miller continued, “this administration will not allow that and will not allow men as well in our K-12 system into women’s private spaces and restrooms.” The post White House Issues Warning to Democrats Promoting ‘Barbaric’ Child Sex Changes appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Department of Health and Human Services released a report Thursday detailing the dangers of experimental transgender medical interventions euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care.” The report marks a sea change from the Biden administration, which forcefully advocated for off-label use of hormones to make males appear female and vice versa, and surgical interventions to remove healthy body parts to “affirm” a person’s gender identity that is at odds with the person’s biological sex. “HHS is committed to protecting children and restoring the federal government’s commitment to follow the gold standard of science,” HHS press secretary Vianca Rodriguez Feliciano told The Daily Signal in a statement Thursday. “Despite growing pressure to promote harmful medical interventions for minors, this review makes one thing clear: There is extremely weak evidence that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries have any benefits in children and adolescents with gender dysphoria,” Feliciano added (emphasis original). “At the same time, the risks—particularly permanent harm like infertility—are becoming increasingly undeniable.” “Major medical guidelines, including those from WPATH, have been shaped more by ideology than by science,” she added, referring to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (emphasis original). “Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our nation’s history, and it must end,” President Donald Trump said in Executive Order 14187, which ordered the HHS review. The review focuses on gender dysphoria, the persistent and painful sense of identifying with the gender opposite one’s biological sex. According to the executive summary, the HHS review found that most children will grow out of their gender dysphoria: “The natural history of pediatric gender dysphoria is poorly understood, though existing research suggests it will remit without intervention in most cases. Medical professionals have no way to know which patients may continue to experience gender dysphoria and which will come to terms with their bodies.” “Nevertheless, the ‘gender-affirming’ model of care includes irreversible endocrine and surgical interventions on minors with no physical pathology,” the summary states. (The endocrine system involves the hormones that drive growth and other functions in the body.) “These interventions carry risk of significant harms including infertility/sterility, sexual dysfunction, impaired bone density accrual, adverse cognitive impacts, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders, psychiatric disorders, surgical complications, and regret,” the executive summary adds. “Meanwhile, systematic reviews of the evidence have revealed deep uncertainty about the purported benefits of these interventions.” The full report laments that “there is a dearth of research on psychotherapeutic approaches to managing gender dysphoria in children and adolescents” that is “due in part to the mischaracterization of such approaches as ‘conversion therapy.'” The HHS review is “not a clinical practice guideline, and it does not issue legislative or policy recommendations.” Even so, it makes the case that experimental “gender-affirming care” likely does more harm than good for minors. This marks a sea change from the Biden administration, which full-throatedly endorsed “gender-affirming care.” Dr. Rachel Levine, a man who identifies as a woman and who served as assistant secretary of health in Biden’s HHS, tried to enlist children’s doctors and nurses in the transgender activist movement. On Sept. 22, 2022, he spoke to doctors at the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Pediatrics, urging them to become “ambassadors” for what he described as “gender-affirming care.” He championed “acceptance” as a lifesaving message and painted opponents of his ideology as driven by an “agenda” that has “nothing to do with warmth, empathy, compassion, or understanding.” “I encourage all of you to think of yourselves as ambassadors to your communities, ambassadors for science, ambassadors for compassion, and ambassadors for care,” Levine said. “These conversations don’t have to be limited or restricted to a medical setting. Offer yourselves as informational resources not just for youth but for schoolteachers, principals, school boards, professional organizations, recreation centers, county commissioners, and others who would benefit from this information and your perspective. Please proactively seek opportunities to speak about what you know.” The HHS review noted that “thousands of American children and adolescents have received” the “gender-affirming care” from “social affirmation of a child’s self-reported identity, puberty suppressing drugs to prevent the onset of puberty, cross-sex hormones to spur the secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex, and surgeries including mastectomy and (in rare cases) vaginoplasty.” Indeed, one study showed that more than 3,500 children underwent some form of transgender surgery in a 5-year period. The post SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT: HHS Releases New Report Revealing the Dangers of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and his deputy, Alex Wong, will be leaving their jobs at the National Security Council, Politico first reported. Waltz is a former Florida congressman and a decorated Green Beret combat veteran. At the end of March, Jeffrey Goldberg, a longtime Trump critic, published a story saying national security adviser Waltz added him to a group chat on March 15 that included Vice President JD Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and other officials. At the time, the president told NBC News’ Garrett Haake that he thought Goldberg’s story was essentially a nonissue, and that Goldberg’s presence on the chat had “no impact at all.” “Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” Trump said. The post BREAKING: Mike Waltz Reportedly Out as National Security Adviser appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Before freshman Rep. Pat Harrigan, R-N.C., came to Washington in January, no one seemed to notice that a Chinese Communist Party-linked company had stores that sold health products to our troops. Though it was once an American-owned company, the vitamin store GNC was purchased by the CCP-linked Harbin Pharmaceuticals in 2020 after GNC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Even prior to the sale, the CCP-linked company held a 40% stake in GNC. Harrigan, 37, joined “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss his legislation to kick CCP-linked entities off military bases as well as the great power competition between China and the United States. Shortly after being sworn in, Harrigan introduced the Military Installation Retail Security Act, or MIRSA for short. “It’s like MRSA,” Harrigan told me, “it’s like this infectious disease we just have to rid ourselves of, which is the Chinese Communist Party or other adversarial nations owning companies that are operating on our military bases.” (MRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a strain of bacteria responsible for several difficult-to-treat infections in humans.) The legislation “requires the Department of Defense to do a broad investigation into all of the federal contractors that are working on our military bases and make sure that they aren’t owned by our foreign adversaries,” Harrigan said. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran all make the list. “When a military base or installation wants to have private contractors come in and actually operate on the base, they sign what’s called a concession contract, and these are contracts that are really not very well vetted, which is a problem in and of itself, but it forces a broad-based review of all of that,” Harrigan explained. But the “teeth” of the legislation, Harrigan told me, is “to kick any private contractor that has lied … to the federal government.”  The North Carolina congressman added that GNC already has a record of downplaying its ties to Harbin or the CCP in their previous government disclosures. The risk of GNC stores on military bases is simply “too high to tolerate,” Harrigan contended. “We have risks associated with the potential information that they could collect from our service members.” The CCP could “know what products they’re purchasing, they know what physical ailments they might be having or trying to correct. GNC even offers free supplement consultations so that they can kind of do a deep dive into your health,” Harrigan explained. “We don’t need foreign-owned cash registers taking the credit cards of our military servicemen and servicewomen, having access to their data.” The problem is larger than you’d think. GNC has “83 different facilities on our military installations across the country, and they’re wholly owned by the Chinese Communist Party,” Harrigan said. On a previous visit to Fort Bragg, Harrigan found four GNC stores. Fort Bragg is the largest Army base in the country, home to about 55,000 Army troops, which represents about 10% of the Army. Add their families and civilians employed by the bases, and more than 250,000 people have access to Bragg and its four GNCs. I asked Harrigan if he thought something more nefarious was afoot or if this issue had been simply overlooked by Congress. “It was just overlooked,” he replied. GNC was “initially a U.S.-owned—wholly owned—company. And through a multiyear transition process and a bankruptcy, they became wholly owned by Harbin Pharmaceuticals, aka the Chinese Communist Party.” That’s a familiar story in the era of America’s growing trade deficit with China: U.S. capital funds the inflow of inexpensive Chinese goods, only to return when Chinese firms acquire American businesses. But the concern becomes especially stark when those firms establish operations on or near U.S. military bases. The post CCP-Linked Stores on Military Bases? This Congressman Is Trying to Close Them Down appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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