Authored by T.J. Muscaro via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The United States on Thursday announced the creation of a second military zone along its southern border with Mexico, further expanding the military’s presence in the area.

Dubbed the “Texas National Defense Area,” and announced late on May 1, it is a 63-mile stretch that runs east from the Texas-New Mexico state line in El Paso.

The zone’s creation follows the creation in April of a first military zone along a 60-foot-wide corridor called the Roosevelt Reservation. The corridor runs along the border lands of New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

Nearly 110,000 acres of federal land along the border were transferred from the Department of the Interior to the Army on April 15, granting military control in the zone for three years.

According to court documents filed on April 28, the United States has initiated criminal prosecutions for 28 illegal immigrants for allegedly crossing into the new military zone, charging them with “violations of security regulations,” and entering a “restricted and controlled” New Mexico national defense area on top of illegal entry.

“Any illegal attempting to enter that zone is entering a military base—a federal, protected area,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a video message on April 25 during a visit to the area. “You will be detained. You will be interdicted by U.S. troops and Border Patrol working together.”

“If you have attempted to evade, that’s evading law enforcement, just like you would any other military base,” he added. “You add up the charges of what you can be charged with misdemeanors and felonies, you can be looking at up to 10 years in prison when prosecuted.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said that 82 illegal immigrants have been charged with crossing into the New Mexico military zone. The federal government announced in March that the number of illegal immigrant crossings had dropped to the lowest level ever recorded.

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has opposed the operation, calling it a “deportation buffer zone” in her state, and “a waste of resources and military personnel, especially when migrant crossings are at the lowest in decades.”

Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who continued to send his state’s National Guard to secure the border during the Biden administration, has welcomed the federal assistance. Posting pictures of razor wire barriers on May 1, he said in a Facebook post, “Texas continues to work with the Trump Administration to stop illegal immigration.”

Around 11,900 troops are stationed on the border. According to the Department of Defense, U.S. Customs and Border Protection retains jurisdiction over illegal border crossings. Troops detain and hand over illegal immigrants to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Aldgra Fredly and Reuters contributed to this report.

California has significantly revised its population estimates upward, crediting a larger-than-expected influx of international immigrants for reversing recent trends of population decline, according to Just the News.

Governor Gavin Newsom framed the shift as a testament to California’s enduring appeal: “People from across the nation and the globe are coming to the Golden State to pursue the California Dream, where rights are protected and people are respected.”

According to the state Department of Finance (DOF), the population grew by 108,000 in 2024, bringing the total to approximately 39.5 million residents. The key driver was an upward revision of immigration figures, with 277,468 more immigrants arriving between 2021 and 2024 than previously estimated. This shift turned 2023’s reported population decline into net growth and further boosted 2024’s numbers.

Meanwhile, domestic outmigration continues but is slowing. The DOF reported that California lost 197,016 residents to other states in 2024, down from 249,308 in 2023. Natural increase—births minus deaths—also contributed, rising modestly from 105,550 to 114,805 over the same period.

The Just the News report says that out of California’s 482 cities, 241 saw population gains, 240 experienced declines, and one—Morro Bay—held steady. Among the state’s ten most populous counties, only Contra Costa in the East Bay reported a net loss, shedding just 24 residents.

Despite the population rebound, questions remain about the state’s fiscal outlook. Earlier Census data revealed that those leaving California generally earn more than those arriving, with outmigration from mid-2021 to mid-2022 causing a net loss of $24 billion in personal income. This demographic shift raises concerns that increased population won’t necessarily translate into higher tax revenues.

Compounding the issue, California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office warned in November 2024 that the state has “no capacity” for new spending and is on track for annual deficits rising to $30 billion by 2026, as expenditures outpace stagnant revenue growth.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A 25 percent tariff on imported automobile parts took effect on May 3, marking a significant step in President Donald Trump’s effort to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign supply chains and boost domestic manufacturing jobs.

The new duties—authorized under a March 26 proclamation—apply to key components used in passenger vehicles and light trucks, including engines, transmissions, and electrical systems.

The tariffs affect imports from all countries, although parts that meet U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) requirements are exempt, in a bid to preserve the tightly interwoven North American auto supply chain.

According to updated guidance issued by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on Thursday, USMCA-compliant parts will not face the new duties—so long as they are not part of knock-down kits, or bulk component packages intended for assembly.

The tariffs are part of a broader trade policy agenda that includes earlier duties on imported vehicles and steel. However, an executive order signed by Trump on April 29 prohibits overlapping tariffs—known as “stacking”—on the same item. The order is intended to prevent the compounding of multiple tariffs and to reduce the cost burden on manufacturers operating in the United States.

To further soften the impact on domestic producers, the administration also unveiled an “import adjustment offset.” Available to automakers that conduct final vehicle assembly in the United States, the program allows them to reduce their tariff obligations on imported parts based on their total domestic output.

Specifically, manufacturers can offset 3.75 percent of the total Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) value of U.S.-assembled vehicles produced from April 3, 2025, through April 30, 2026, and 2.5 percent for those assembled in the following year. The offset roughly corresponds to imported parts making up 15 percent of a vehicle’s value in year one, and 10 percent in year two.

In a proclamation, Trump said the revised tariff structure would “more effectively eliminate the national security threat” by accelerating the shift away from foreign manufacturing and reinforcing U.S. capacity to produce critical automotive components.

A White House fact sheet accompanying the proclamation highlighted the scale of the challenge. In 2024, only 25 percent of the content in vehicles sold in the United States was American-made. Although 8 million vehicles were assembled domestically, their average U.S. content hovered between 40 and 50 percent. The nation also ran a $93.5 billion trade deficit in auto parts.

While the Trump administration says the tariffs will ultimately revitalize the U.S. auto industry, industry analysts warn of short-term consequences, including higher prices and supply disruptions.

A recent estimate from the Center for Automotive Research projected that the tariffs could increase costs for U.S. automakers by as much as $108 billion this year alone.

Stephanie Brinley, associate director of auto intelligence at S&P Global, cautioned that the most severe impacts on production and sales are likely to emerge in 2026.

“Based on the activity in the past three months and the trajectory of the latest actions across the globe, the impact of the tariffs has potential to have a massive near-term impact on global sales and production, with the US and North America feeling the worst of the impact,” she wrote in a note.

While the full impact of the auto parts tariffs may not be felt immediately, the May 3 rollout represents another milestone in Trump’s global trade policy reset.

Authored by Amin Haqshanas via CoinTelegraph.com,

Tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) is evolving from an abstract concept to a practical financial tool as institutional players increasingly test and deploy blockchain-based infrastructure at scale.

This past week alone saw a flurry of announcements from both traditional financial institutions and blockchain-native firms advancing their RWA initiatives.

On April 30, BlackRock filed to create a digital ledger technology shares class for its $150 billion Treasury Trust fund. It will leverage blockchain technology to maintain a mirror record of share ownership for investors.

The DLT shares will track BlackRock’s BLF Treasury Trust Fund (TTTXX), which may only be purchased from BlackRock Advisors and The Bank of New York Mellon (BNY).

On the same day, Libre announced plans to tokenize $500 million in Telegram debt through its new Telegram Bond Fund (TBF). The fund will be available to accredited investors and usable as collateral for onchain borrowing.

The week’s biggest headline came from Dubai, where MultiBank Group signed a $3 billion RWA tokenization deal with United Arab Emirates-based real estate firm MAG and blockchain infrastructure provider Mavryk. The deal is touted as the largest RWA tokenization initiative to date.

Source: MultiBank

“The recent surge isn’t arbitrary. It’s happening because everything’s lining up,” Eric Piscini, CEO of Hashgraph, told Cointelegraph:

“Rules are getting clearer in major markets. The tech is stronger, faster, and ready to scale. And big players are actually doing it — BlackRock is tokenizing funds, Citi is exploring digital asset custody, and Franklin Templeton has tokenized money market funds on public blockchains.”

Tokenization has moved beyond theory

Marcin Kazmierczak, co-founder of RedStone, said the recent announcements “demonstrate that tokenization has moved beyond theoretical discussions into practical application by market leaders.”

He added that the growing adoption by big institutions gives the space more credibility, making others feel more confident to join in and help boost new ideas and investments.

Kazmierczak stated that the renewed interest in RWA tokenization is primarily driven by US President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto administration and growing regulatory clarity.

Trump, who has pledged to “make the US the crypto capital of the world,” has taken a different approach to crypto compared to the Biden administration. That era saw an aggressive crackdown from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), prompting many firms to withdraw from US operations.

However, the narrative appears to be shifting. Since Trump’s election victory, the SEC has dropped or paused over a dozen enforcement cases against crypto companies.

Additionally, the DOJ recently announced the dissolution of its cryptocurrency enforcement unit, signaling a softer approach to the sector.

Source: ALX

Aside from regulatory clarity, advancements in technological capabilities, especially in wallets, have also played a key role in driving tokenization adoption, Felipe D’Onofrio, chief technology officer at Brickken, said.

“In parallel, macroeconomic pressures are pushing institutions to search for efficiency and liquidity in traditionally illiquid markets,” he added.

Ethereum remains main hub for tokenization

Ethereum continues to serve as the primary hub for RWA tokenization, thanks to its mature ecosystem, broad developer support and robust infrastructure.

“Ethereum remains by far the most suitable blockchain for large-scale RWA issuance due to its unparalleled security, developer ecosystem, and institutional adoption,” Kazmierczak said.

However, he noted that dedicated RWA-specialized ecosystems like Canton Network, Plume, and Ondo Chain are building compelling alternatives with features designed explicitly for compliant asset tokenization.

According to data from RWA.xyz, the market value of tokenized US Treasurys currently stands at $6.5 billion. Ethereum accounts for the lion’s share of the market, hosting over $4.9 billion in tokenized Treasurys.

Source: RWA.xyz

Herwig Koningson, CEO of Security Token Market, said companies like BlackRock have shown that it’s possible to build large-scale tokenized products, worth billions of dollars, using more than one blockchain at the same time.

He said this shows that the success of tokenizing assets doesn’t depend so much on which blockchain is used, but rather on what the company needs the system to do.

“This is why you will see many banks and traditional firms use permissioned blockchains or even private DLT systems,” Koningson said.

Challenges remain, but growth potential is huge

Yet hurdles remain. Regulation continues to be a significant barrier, especially for risk-averse institutions requiring guarantees around compliance and privacy.

Technical limitations also persist, chiefly the lack of interoperability between blockchain platforms, according to Piscini. However, he said hybrid models are gaining traction by offering the privacy of permissioned systems with optional future interoperability with public chains.

Looking ahead, Piscini estimated that more than 10% of global financial assets could be tokenized by the end of the decade. D’Onofrio also made a modest projection, estimating that between 5% and 10% of global financial assets could be tokenized by 2030.

On the other hand, RedStone’s Kazmierczak predicted that approximately 30% of the global financial system will be tokenized by the end of this decade.

In terms of numbers, STM.co predicted that the world’s RWA market will be anywhere between $30 and $50 trillion by the end of 2030.

Most firms predict that the RWA sector will reach a market size of between $4 trillion and $30 trillion by 2030.

If the sector were to achieve the median prediction of about $10 trillion, it would represent more than 50 times the growth from its current value of around $185 billion, including the stablecoin market, according to a Tren Finance research report.

On Sunday Yemen’s Houthis (Ansarallah movement) launched another ballistic missile on Israel – but this time instead of the projectile landing in the desert or being intercepted, as with most prior such launches – the Houthis scored a direct hit on Israel’s major international airport in Tel Aviv.

“A ballistic missile fired by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen impacted on the grounds of Ben Gurion Airport on Sunday morning, injuring six people, none of them seriously,” Times of Israel confirms. “The blast occurred in a grove of trees alongside an access road close to the airport’s main Terminal 3, several hundred yards from the airport control tower.”

The military said there were several failed efforts to intercept the missile as it was inbound. “An impact was identified in the area of Ben Gurion Airport,” an IDF statement said.

The US-supplied THAAD missile as well as the Arrow defense system failed to intercept the ballistic missile. Israel’s defenses tend to be most effective for the type of shorter-range missiles launched by Hamas and Hezbollah.

Video taken from near the blast site at moment of impact on the airport:

אזעקה ואז פיצוץ אדיר: “וואו איזה בום” | תיעוד חדש מהנפילה בנתב”גhttps://t.co/bQeqHjLptK pic.twitter.com/cQOwt9rlmi

— החדשות – N12 (@N12News) May 4, 2025

While over the course of the Gaza war Houthi missiles have impacted in the vicinity of Tel Aviv and central Israel, this was the first time that grounds within the international airport have ever been hit.

Emergency authorities identified “a man in his 50s in good-to-moderate condition with trauma to his limbs and two women, aged 54 and 38, in good condition who were hit by the shockwave.”

Additionally an elderly person was hit with an object that was ejected from the impact site, while two younger women were injured while running for shelter amid the blast. Others were reportedly treated for acute anxiety.

The Houthis successfully landed a ballistic missile at Israel’s main airport.

A few Israeli civilians were injured.

Israel’s response should be unprecedented.pic.twitter.com/7gVIjyRdJn

— Vivid.🇮🇱 (@VividProwess) May 4, 2025

There were reportedly at least 40 flights disrupted for international flights, mainly due to disrupted landings and inbound planes being turned around. An update by Al Jazeera details:

A data analysis conducted by Al Jazeera’s fact-checking agency Sanad shows more than 40 cases of disrupted landings for international flights at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv because of the Houthi missile strikes.

The disruptions tracked were ones occurring since Israel’s renewed escalation of war on Gaza beginning in late March. The analysis relied on aviation data provided by the specialized flight tracking website Flight Radar.

Sanad cross-referenced the timing of Houthi missile strikes with the activation times of alarm sirens at Ben Gurion Airport. It then analysed aviation records to determine the exact number of flight delays caused by the incidents.

Airport surveillance footage also captured the impact:

Surveillance camera footage shows the moment of the Houthi missile impact at Ben Gurion Airport.

The missile struck a grove adjacent to an access road, within the airport’s perimeter. pic.twitter.com/AUyQwKrEOy

— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) May 4, 2025

Pressure is likely to increase on Iran over the attack, given the Trump administration has alleged Tehran is behind basically all Houthi decision-making, which Iranian leaders have vehemently denied.

Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh on Sunday has warned Tehran will strike back if the United States or Israel attack the Islamic Republic. “If this war is initiated by the US or the Zionist regime [Israel], Iran will target their interests, bases and forces – wherever they may be and whenever deemed necessary,” Nasirzadeh told a state broadcaster. “The countries in the region are our brothers, but America’s bases are our targets,” he added.

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

Late next month, Huawei will be testing its new powerful AI processor, the Ascend 910 D, even as by early May the previous 910C will start to be mass-delivered to scores of Chinese tech companies.

These serious breakthroughs are the next chapter of Huawei’s drive to counter Nvidia’s global monopoly in GPUs. The Ascend 910D is supposed to be more powerful than Nvidia’s extremely popular H100.

Huawei is pulling no punches in its race to manufacture a new generation of processors. Huawei has collaborated with SMIC – China’s largest semiconductor foundry – to apply Deep Ultraviolet Lithography (DUV) on what was previously only possible on EUV (Extreme Ultra-Violet technology). Once again, Huawei and SMIC defied the proverbial American “experts” with creative engineering solutions.

Huawei arrived at fabricating 5nm chips with DUV even as the process is more expensive than with EUV. If Huawei had access to EUV they would be already manufacturing 2-3nm chips. That will come, in short time, as both China and Russia, under permanent US high-tech blockade, must by all means develop their own EUV technology.

Shanghai geeks are convinced that Huawei will switch on 6G networksbefore the end of the decade. Their current breathless drive is not just aimed at the smartphone front – where Huawei is peerless; the new Huawei Mate 70 Pro + is by far the absolute top smartphone in the world, running on Harmony OS. Huawei is looking at cloud computing, AI and enterprise servers – and to become no less than the core player in the AI infrastructure race.

Ditching Any Reliance on American Technology

Earlier this month, Huawei introduced the CloudMatrix 384, a system connecting 384 Ascend 910C chips. The tech word in Shanghai is that this configuration, under certain conditions, and of course consuming much more power, already outperforms Nvidia’s flagship rack system – which is powered by 72 Blackwell chips.

Meanwhile, Huawei’s Kirin X chip is targeting the PC market, offering stiff competition to Apple, AMD, Intel and Qualcom while Harmony OS plus removes the necessity of using US software such as Microsoft and Android.

Shanghai geeks swear that China essentially doesn’t need to beat Nvidia or other US chips developers. After all, China already has the largest consumer market in the world – by volume and by value. If a parallel tech universe is the likely result of the Trump Tariff Tizzy (TTT), so be it. China already controls over 60% of the global gadget consumer market.

Kirin X may not – yet – match the power of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs. But Huawei chips are already the real deal for every Chinese company which is following the new Beijing-defined direction to reduce any reliance on American technology.

All of the above naturally brings us to the enormous AI elephant in the (digital) room: Nvidia.

A recent book, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and The World’s Most Coveted Microchip, is quite helpful to track not only the personal story of CEO superstar Huang, a Taiwanese who played the American Dream to the hilt and became a tech multi-billionaire, but Nvidia’s enviable tech accomplishments.

Huang does not interpret AI as emergent machine superintelligence, and firmly dismisses any direct analogy to biology. For this all-round pragmatist, AI is merely software – running on hardware that his company sells for a fortune.

Still, Nvidia has ventured into virgin territory way beyond the American biz-tech Valhalla, complete with holding the most valuable stock on the planet: arguably, when it comes to AI, Nvidia unveiled a new phase of evolution.

It’s crucial to understand how Huang sees China. It is indeed a key market for his AI chips – and he wants to keep selling them in droves. Trump’s tariffs though make sure that won’t happen.

And that’s what moved Huang to ditch his proverbial leather jackets and don a crisp business suit for a strategic visit to Beijing, where he affirmed the sacred importance of the Chinese market, whatever the new Trump-dictated gimmicks.

By 2022, the China market represented 26% of Nvidia’s business; this year, it has fallen to 13%, because of euphemistic “technology export controls”.

The problem is the US government, already by 2022, under the previous automatic pen administration, had blocked sales to China of advanced A100 and H100 chips. Nvidia started selling modified versions – and even after the ban chips continued to arrive in China. By June 2023, it was easy to find A100s for double their price in the black market in Shenzhen.

Huang is convinced that “no AI should be able to learn without a human in the loop” – even as he admitted, two years ago, that “reasoning capability is two or three years out”. Translation: according to Huang AI will start thinking for itself within the next few months.

Even as Nvidia prepares to invest billions of dollars to build AI supercomputers in Texas, the Chinese essentially are not losing any sleep on “thinking AI”: their focus is extremely practical, to conquer not only the Chinese market but also the supply chains of most of Eurasia.

The US National Security Council has concluded that it’s too dangerous for China to buy Nvidia’s high-end chips, even the H20 – designed for the Chinese market. Huawei, anyway, already produces chips somewhat comparable to the H20.

Huang is losing his sleep because, essentially, Nvidia is losing the immense Chinese market to Huawei – with Trump’s direct input. Nvidia has tens of thousands of H20s specially designed for China which they simply cannot sell. Each chip cost between $12,000 to $20,000.

How China Is Opening a Digital “Pandora’s Box”

Huawei’s new drive is yet another example of Chinese will capable of staring down any challenge – based on indigenous talent, tech expertise and national pride. The record, even before Trump 1.0 sanctions, shows that Huawei does eat massive uphill battles for breakfast. In fact Ascend in many aspects was ahead of Nvidia as early as in 2019 – and that’s why two different US administrations banned it.

China is already light years ahead of the US on chip research. Chinese universities amass most places in the global Top Ten for published papers on semiconductors and on citations – a distinction shared, among others, by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (number one), Tsinghua University (one of China’s top two universities), the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (number four), and Nanjing, Zhejiang and Pekin Universities.

Two weeks ago in Shanghai I first heard that Huawei would catch up with US semiconductor giants in maximum two years. Now, after the announcement of the Ascend 910D, the buzz shifted to only one year for China to overtake Nvidia and develop better lithography machines than the ones currently produced by ASML.

And the debate is fast switching to how far Huawei will be able to go within the next 2 to 3 years.

In several aspects we are already in the early stages of a US-China tech decoupling. For years Nvidia has dominated the AI hardware space. Their GPUS are the brains behind most contemporary advanced AI. The H100 chip is the gold/platinum standard for AI infrastructure worldwide. Nvidia’s chips had huge demand from Chinese tech giants – Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Bytedance.

Soon that may not be the case – and that goes way beyond Nvidia’s certified loss of market share in China. China is now all out focused on building a successful, self-sufficient AI hardware ecosystem. The coup de grace will be to restrict the export of all rare earth minerals to the US. Huaweii then will pull up in no time.

Everyone remembers how DeepSeek R1 wiped out over $1 trillion from Wall Street only three months ago. DeepSeek R2 will be released soon; training was a whopping 97% cheaper than OpenAI. And training happened on Huawei’s Ascend. No Nvidia.

Quantum Bird, a world-class physicist formerly with the CERN in Geneva, puts everything in much needed context. He stresses how indigenous chip development by China – and in a near future, Russia and probably India – is “multi-faceted; what we are observing are the initial stages of a redefinition of the notion of recognizing patterns and machine learning, technologies that are popularly referred to as ‘AI’ by the media.”

Nvidia chips, Qantum Bird remarks, are indeed “computational beasts”, but they work better around “processing models and workloads typical of ‘AI’ models developed by Western scientists.” DeepSeek’s development, on the other hand, showed a transgression of established models: “The possibilities opened for performance leaps are huge, even using relatively modest hardware, with alternative approaches based on advanced math and different calculus flows.”

In a nutshell: “This is the Pandora’s box that Nvidia now fears the Chinese may have opened”. And that totally ties in with Huang’s red alert, prompting his visit to Beijing.

We may be heading indeed towards a serious tech decoupling. Or as Quantum Bird frames it: “A technological and scientific divergence medium and long-term. If the architectures that emerge from these developments are incompatible when it comes to their usage on specific ‘AI’ models, Nvidia will lose its global monopoly and will become just a company reduced to a corporate/scientific Western niche.”

Even as Huawei, from its privileged base in the Chinese market, will go on to win most markets across the Global Majority – from BRICS to BRI.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

The Department of Justice has reached a settlement with the family of Ashli Babbitt, the Jan 6 rioter who was unjustifiably shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer’s pistol shot, despite her being unarmed and posing no threat of significant harm to anyone in the vicinity. The news comes weeks after President Trump promised to look into the Department of Justice’s effort to defeat the claim. As of a few months ago, the case had been expected to reach trial phase in July. 

On Friday, lawyers representing the DOJ and Babbitt’s family notified a Washington DC judge that they’d reached an agreement in principle. When filing suit early last year, Babbitt’s surviving loved ones sought $30 million in compensation for her being killed by officer Michael Byrd. The value of the pending settlement has not yet been revealed, and family attorneys say precise details are still being worked out. Beyond a potential monetary reward, there’s also the question of to what extent the federal government will acknowledge Byrd’s wrongdoing. Babbitt family lawyer Robert Sticht said he expects a signed agreement within three weeks. 

Byrd killed then-35-year-old Babbitt as she attempted to climb through a broken window that was part of an interior doorway close to the House chamber. Though the unarmed, 5’2″, 115-pound Babbitt posed no imminent threat of inflicting death or serious injury as she awkwardly navigated the narrow space — with a furniture barricade still ahead of her —  Boyd opted against using any type of nonlethal force, and instead shot her from an ambush position, killing her with a bullet that perforated her trachea and lung. 

In a softball interview, Byrd told NBC News, “I showed the utmost courage on January 6…I know that day I saved countless lives.” To the contrary, he’s the only person who took a life that day. The family’s 32-page complaint alleged Byrd’s weapon-handling violated Capitol Police Policy, saying that he:

• Took it out of his holster before any proportionate threat had been presented
• Didn’t hold the weapon at “low ready,” and proceeded to point it at a variety of people who, like Babbitt, posed no immediate threat
• Put his finger inside the trigger guard, “tapping it on and off the trigger for at least 14 seconds before he shot and killed Ashli.” A finger shouldn’t be put inside the guard until the officer has decided to fire the weapon 

While it’s been little-publicized by major media or leftists who screech that Babbitt “got what she deserved,” Byrd had some serious disciplinary issues before Jan. 6, with some of the incidents involving the irresponsible handling and even firing of his weapon.  Despite the damning facts of the case, leftists in and out of media have treated Byrd as a hero for fending off a nonexistent “insurrection.” The left’s reaction to the wrongful killing demonstrated a glaring double-standard on cop misconduct. 

Byrd was not only officially cleared of wrongdoing, but promoted to the rank of captain in 2023. In a March interview, Newsmax’s Greg Kelly asked Trump how he felt about Byrd still being on duty, with a pay raise and higher authority. The president replied: 

“I think it’s a disgrace. I’m going to take a look at it. I’m going to look at that, too. His reputation was … I won’t even say; let’s find out about his reputation. We’re going to find out. But I watched that and I saw that. And by the way, she was killed, but nobody else was killed.”

He also vowed to look into the DOJ’s decision to fight Babbitt’s family in court: 

“Well, I’ll look into that. I mean, you’re just telling me that for the first time, I haven’t heard that. I’m a big fan of Ashli Babbitt. And Ashli Babbitt was a really good person who was a big MAGA fan, Trump fan. And she was innocently standing there; they even say trying to sort of hold back the crowd. And a man did something to her that was unthinkable when he shot her. And I think it’s a disgrace. I’m going to look into that. I did not know that.”

President Trump addresses the latest on the case of Ashli Babbitt, the Trump supporter who was shot and killed at the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021, rips the police shooting, the overall treatment of now-pardoned defendants, and the actions of the former House J6 select committee. pic.twitter.com/kPXPyGVuJT

— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) March 26, 2025

Hours after being inaugurated in January, Trump granted clemency to some 1,600 Americans who’d either been convicted or charged out of their actions on Jan 6. The move combined both full pardons and sentence commutations. In March, Trump entertained the possibility of a compensation fund for all of them. 

Cover your ears: the left is about to blow its collective stack in irrational indignation that the government will compensate the family of a dead woman who was clearly on the receiving end of wildly excessive force.  

What If Ashli Babbitt Was Black?

If the scenarios were reversed and Ashli Babbitt was a black woman at a BLM protest/riot and Michael Byrd was a white police officer, how would the left have responded to the killing of an unarmed black woman on video? pic.twitter.com/uXq9b00ozx

— Gain of Fauci (@DschlopesIsBack) May 2, 2025

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Florida adults who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine were more likely to die following vaccination than Moderna COVID-19 recipients, according to a new preprint study that was co-authored by Florida’s top health official.

Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general, and other researchers identified nearly 9.2 million Florida adults not living in institutions who received at least two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine less than six weeks apart between Dec. 18, 2020, and Aug. 31, 2021.

They narrowed the group to nearly 1.5 million, half who received Pfizer’s vaccine and half who received Moderna’s vaccine, by matching them based on criteria such as age and sex. They then analyzed the records to see which group had the higher risk for all-cause mortality, or death from any cause, in the 12 months following vaccination.

That analysis found that more Pfizer recipients died, with 847 deaths per 100,000 recipients, compared to 618 deaths per 100,000 for Moderna recipients. Pfizer recipients were also more likely to suffer heart-related deaths and COVID-19 deaths.

Pfizer and Moderna did not respond to requests for comment.

The study was published as a preprint, which means it has not been peer reviewed, on the medRxiv server on April 29.

“Did your doctor tell you that you might be more likely to die if you took Pfizer instead of Moderna? That’s what we found in Florida, and other studies have shown similar results,” Ladapo wrote on social media platform X.

Two other employees of the Florida Department of Health are listed as co-authors for the new study.

Both Ladapo and Retsef Levi, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the fourth author, have called previously for the suspension of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines over what they’ve described as alarming findings in various studies.

Limitations of the paper included the matching process reducing the size of the studied population and not including co-morbidities, according to the researchers.

The study adds to a body of research that looks at non-specific effects, or the potential impact of vaccines on all-cause mortality and other measures not directly related to the target of the vaccines.

A previous analysis, published in 2023 and drawn from clinical trial data, concluded that neither the Pfizer nor the Moderna COVID-19 vaccines impacted all-cause mortality. Researchers found that the vaccines protected against deaths from COVID-19 but that vaccinated trial participants were more likely to die from heart issues, which offset the effect. A third vaccine, from Johnson & Johnson, performed better, researchers said.

Ladapo and the others in the new paper noted that three previous studies used U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs data to compare Pfizer recipients to Moderna recipients. One study found that Pfizer recipients were at a higher risk of COVID-19 hospitalization and death. Another study determined that Pfizer recipients were at higher risk of heart attack and stroke.

They said their study is different in part because the size of the population studied is bigger and the matching is more precise.

Critics of the study questioned why it did not also compare the vaccinated to the unvaccinated.

“Why did you not include this comparison in your paper?” Jeffrey Morris, George S. Pepper professor of public health and preventive medicine at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, said on X.

“One of the common methodologies in pharmacovigilance is to compare between different vaccines,” Levi wrote on X. “The advantage of this approach is that it controls for many of the unobserved confounding differences [that] typically exist between vaccinated and unvaccinated.”

Open-source intelligence analyst Mehdi H., known on X as “mhmiranusa” and known for his reporting on Iranian naval developments, reports that the Iranian Navy’s new forward base ship—also referred to as a forward operating base ship—is set to begin sea trials. 

“Iranian Navy will soon start sea trials of a new forward base ship named Kurdestan. This new base (442) like IRIS Makran (441) is a converted crude oil tanker previously named Tabukan (IMO: 8917467),” Mehdi H. said, adding, “The conversion by ISOICO includes a helipad likely for helicopter & UAV ops.” 

Iranian Navy will soon start sea trials of a new forward base ship named Kurdestan.
This new base (442) like IRIS Makran (441) is a converted crude oil tanker previously named Tabukan (IMO: 8917467).
The conversion by ISOICO includes a helipad likely for helicopter & UAV ops. pic.twitter.com/EqXqjRiuOv

— Mehdi H. (@mhmiranusa) April 30, 2025

A separate OSINT account on X by the name of U.S. Homeland Security News commented on IRIS Makran (441), calling it an “Iranian mothership” that “provides intelligence and targeting information to the Houthi rebels in Yemen against US forces in the Red Sea.” 

🚨Update: Iranian mothership is providing intelligence and targeting information to the Houthi rebels in Yemen against US forces in the Red Sea. Will the US target this warship?? US is doing the same for Ukraine against Russia. pic.twitter.com/B7vnyZbqPq

— US Homeland Security News (@defense_civil25) May 4, 2025

Mehdi H. did not provide information on when IRIS Kurdestan (442) will begin sea trials. The Iranians have been converting tankers and cargo ships into military vessels. 

Mehdi H. noted that Iran Shipbuilding and Offshore Industries Complex (ISOICO) was responsible for IRIS Makran’s conversion, which involved significant structural modifications to support its new role as a forward base ship.

Public trade data compiled by counterparty and supply chain risk intelligence firm Sayari shows that the U.S. government has sanctioned ISOICO. These sanctions are part of broader U.S. efforts to restrict Iran’s maritime and defense sectors across critical maritime chokepoints.

In February, Iran inaugurated its first-ever drone-carrier warship, which was converted from a former cargo ship and has the capacity to launch 60 drones. 

Iran Inaugurates First-Ever Drone Carrier Warship In Persian Gulf https://t.co/lQhpig6jFm

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 7, 2025

It appears the U.S. military has new maritime targets.  

Authored by Guy Birchall via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Most iPhones and other Apple products bound for the American market will no longer be made in China, Apple CEO Tim Cook said on May 1.

The majority of the iPhones heading for the United States in the coming months will be made in India, while Vietnam will be the main production point for products such as iPads and Apple Watches.

During a call with investors discussing the tech giant’s second-quarter results, Cook was asked about how the company planned to adapt to the new U.S. tariff regimen, which significantly targets Chinese-manufactured goods.

“For the June quarter, we do expect the majority of iPhones sold in the U.S. will have India as their country of origin and Vietnam to be the country of origin for almost all iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and AirPods products also sold in the U.S,” Cook said.

Trump has imposed a 145 percent tariff on Chinese goods shipped into the United States, which experts say would have increased the cost of iPhones and other Apple products.

However, the White House provided temporary exemptions to a range of electronic devices and components imported into the United States last month.

Cook said that China would “continue to be the country of origin for the vast majority of total product sales outside the U.S.”

“We have a complex supply chain. There’s always risk in the supply chain,” he said. “What we learned some time ago was that having everything in one location had too much risk with it.”

He also said Apple has started to create a stockpile of products so that the majority of its devices sold in the United States this quarter will not come from China.

The tech giant currently makes more than 90 percent of its products in China.

Cook also said that he predicted a hit to the company’s gross margins, saying that for the next quarter ending in June, “assuming the current global tariff rates, policies and applications do not change for the balance of the quarter and no new tariffs are added, we estimate the impact to add $900 million to our costs.”

However, the CEO said that so far, the ongoing tit-for-tat tariff tumult had not impacted Apple’s sales, and customers had not been rushing to purchase products to beat the impending impact of U.S. tariffs.

The company said that sales and profit for the second quarter ending March 29 were $95.36 billion and $1.65 per share, respectively, compared with analyst estimates of $94.68 billion and $1.63 per share, according to London Stock Exchange Group data.

The outlook for the Cupertino-based company could worsen going forward, however, as although electronics have so far been exempted from import tariffs, Washington has signaled that levies could be imposed in the coming weeks.

Trump said in a Truth Social post on April 13: “We are taking a look at Semiconductors and the whole electronics supply chain in the upcoming National Security Tariff Investigations. What has been exposed is that we need to make products in the United States, and that we will not be held hostage by other Countries, especially hostile trading Nations like China, which will do everything within its power to disrespect the American People.”

On the same call, Cook discussed $500 billion worth of investment inside the United States, telling investors the company would be “expanding” its teams in its “facilities in several states, including Michigan, Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Iowa, Oregon, North Carolina, and Washington.

“And we’re going to be opening a new factory for advanced server manufacturing in Texas,” he said.

Apple shares fell by nearly 3 percent in premarket trading on Friday in the wake of the quarterly results being released.