This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

President Donald Trump has sanctioned the International Criminal Court, an international group that has no jurisdiction over the United States or its ally Israel, but yet issued arrested warrants for a number of key Israeli officials.

The sanctions target ICC officials, their family members and even their properties. Financial sanctions and visa restrictions are a part of the plan.

The action was in response to the ICC's claim to have issued an arrest warrant of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a move that followed the ICC's leftists claims about Israel's military response to the war started by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, when those terrorists invaded Israel, slaughtered some 1,200 civilians and abducted hundreds more.

The determination by Trump is that those officials, employees and agents, "as well as their immediate family members," would be "detrimental to the interests of the United States" if they enter the country.

"I therefore determine that any effort by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute protected persons, as defined in section 8(d) of this order, constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States, and I hereby declare a national emergency to address that threat."

He determined others will be added to the order, following a determination by State and Treasury officials and the attorney general.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Among the millions of things the federal government has been spending money on are the media.

Those revelations came as part of the work by President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, which is run by Elon Musk.

The spending is through USAID, an agency that has been put on notice it is being shut down, or at least radically modified. It could come under the State Department going forward and Trump officials say its spending will be in pursuit of American policy and agenda worldwide, nothing else.

But revealed this week was the expenditure of millions of dollars on media organizations.

Those cited included the New York Times, Politico, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, AP, and more.

But that's now, apparently, over.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

The Office of Special Counsel has concluded that the Internal Revenue Service improperly removed agents from the Hunter Biden case, and then issued illegal gag orders to keep them quiet.

The information comes from a letter Tristan Leavitt, chief of Empower Oversight, wrote to Sen. Chuck Grassley, chief of the Senate's committee on the judiciary.

It involves retaliation against IRS agents who had been assigned to work on the Hunter Biden case, then removed.

Hunter Biden has been involved in a long list of criminal counts in recent years. He was convicted by a jury in a case involving his illegal purchase of a gun, and he later pleaded guilty to a long list of tax charges that erupted when he refused to pay income taxes on massive amounts of revenue.

There had been evidence of political influences on the cases as they developed.

His father, Joe Biden, then issued a presidential pardon granting him a free pass on the offenses.

Now a letter to Grassley, from Empower, explains that it filed a whistleblower retaliation complaint with the Office of Special Counsel on behalf of IRS Agent Gary Shapley 20 months ago. IRS Agent Joseph Ziegler filed a similar complaint.

"These career law enforcement officers alleged that the IRS improperly removed them from the Hunter Biden investigation in retaliation for their protected whistleblower disclosures. The removal also extended to the entire IRS International Tax and Financial Crimes ("ITFC") group led by SSA Shapley, including case agent SA Ziegler. At long last, the career nonpartisan staff at OSC responsible for investigating whistleblower retaliation has finally reached some conclusions. OSC confirmed in a December 30, 2024 email to counsel for the whistleblowers that it found the IRS issued illegal gag orders and improperly removed them from the Hunter Biden investigation as reprisal for their protected disclosures."

A report at Just the News explained the two agents "blew the whistle on political interference in the Hunter Biden criminal investigation" and then the IRS "wrongly retaliated."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Under Joe Biden's agenda to promote transgenderism to all, including those horrific body mutilations done on children, it was routine for prison inmates to demand, and be provided, tax-paid surgeries.

But it appears that might be coming to a halt.

A new report at HeadlineUSA explains Indiana's prison system was told by a judge to arrange for such "treatment" for one inmate, but now cannot find a doctor to participate in the procedure.

The report cited social media documentation that, "Indiana's prison system can't find a single doctor in the state willing to give a sex change to the baby-killing, self-purported trans Muslim inmate. It also looks like doctors around the country are shuttering their sex-change practices. Moreover, 15 states refused to even consider giving the baby-killer a sex change, while the rest of the states have signaled they probably won't, either."

HeadlineUSA said a federal judge had ordered the sex-change operation last year to "self-purported Muslim transgender inmate Jonathan Richardson."

He's in jail for 55 years for murdering his infant stepdaughter.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A federal judge in Massachusetts, at the request of government employee unions who stand to lose money, has interfered with President Donald Trump's effort to fulfill his mandate to cut the size of government.

The judge, George A. O'Toole has blocked a buyout program that millions of federal workers were offered – to resign by end of day Thursday but still be paid through the end of September.

The gorilla in the room is that there will be layoffs anyway, depending on how many workers accept a buyout.

But O'Toole has put that on ice now, at least until a hearing he has scheduled on Monday.

Just the News said Trump's Office of Personnel Management had sent the offer to millions of federal government workers last week, offering pay and benefits through September for quitting now.

Not included in the offer were military personnel, national security and immigration workers, and postal workers.

Already, some 40,000 workers had signed up for the program, and administration officials suggested the final number could be as high as 100,000.

The Gateway Pundit said the judge insisted on seeing "more court proceedings on the program's legality."

In fact, previous presidents have taken similar actions.

The report explained, "In the meantime, O'Toole, Jr., who Bill Clinton nominated, has at least temporarily saved hundreds of thousands of federal employees from potential termination as the Trump Administration plans massive layoffs for those who refuse to accept the buyout offer."

The fight was brought to the judge by the American Federation of Government Employees and multiple other unions, who stand to lose significant revenue if 40,000 of their members no longer are paying union dues.

Department of Government Efficiency chief Elon Musk "has pointed out this is a fair and generous deal, especially compared to what happens when private sector workers get canned," the report said.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Under Joe Biden's presidency, indeed under that of his mentor, Barack Obama, too, American government was rife with anti-Christian bias.

There was Obama's orchestrated war to try to force Catholic nuns to pay for abortions, there were Biden's orders that churches be shut down for COVID, while bars and strip clubs were open. There was Obama's blast at voters who "cling to their Bibles." There was Biden's open defiance of his own claimed Catholic beliefs in his support for unlimited abortions.

Biden dispatched federal investigators to monitor religious parents at school boards and conservative Catholics in worship. Obama's IRS openly attacked Christians for their beliefs.

President Donald Trump is changing that trend:

He has announced, that "to confront such weaponization and religious persecution," there now is a new task force.

"Today I am signing an executive order to make our attorney general, who's a great person … she's gonna be a great attorney general, Pam Bondi, the head of a task force, brand new, to eradicate anti Christian bias," he said.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., has unleashed on the spending by the American government … for what she believes is abuse of animals.

Right now, the government's spending in a bull's-eye because of President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, which has already singled out money lavishly spent by USAID in wildly inappropriate projects, such as promoting transgenderism worldwide. Spending by other departments also are being reviewed.

Mace, in a hearing for the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, cited government spending on animal experimentation.

The hearing was titled, "Transgender Lab Rats and Poisoned Puppies: Oversight of Taxpayer Funded Animal Cruelty."

She called out the White Coat Waste Project that last year exposed more than $10 million in tax dollars spent "creating transgender mice, rats, and monkeys."

"These DEI grants funded painful and deadly transgender experiments that forced lab animals to undergo invasive surgeries and hormone therapies at universities across the country," she charged.

"For example, the Biden-Harris Administration spent $2.5 million taxpayer dollars to study the fertility of transgender mice. $1.1 million dollars were spent to find out if female rats receiving testosterone therapies to mimic transgender men were more likely to overdose on a party drug commonly used in the LGBTQ community to induce drug-fueled 'chemsex.'
Federal funds were also used to forcibly transition male monkeys to see if hormone therapy made them more susceptible to HIV," she said.

She said the work emanated from the Biden-Harris insistence on spreading their transgender ideology "across all facets of American society," so that they ignored the fact such experiments not only were cruel, but unneeded.

"It is well known that because of the differences between animal and human biology, animal testing frequently does not produce results relevant for humans. In fact, 90 percent of novel drugs that are successful in animal tests fail in human clinical trials," she said.

And she said now there are tech tools that "can more accurately model human biology and identify solutions that are more useful for human patients."

She said experiments on animals now are done by 27 NIH branches as well as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, Defense and more.

Those actions cost Americans $20 billion a year, she said.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

We all have a hard time believing that President Donald Trump took office just two-plus weeks ago. All those phenomena we accepted as givens – DEI, transgenderism, DoJ weaponization, medical tyranny, foreign aid, fentanyl deaths, endless wars, illegal immigration, bureaucratic bloat, government censorship – were, to say the least, no longer inevitable.

For 30 years the Left imposed its agenda through a media that lied to sustain that agenda. To be sure, American Marxists have always shown an indifference to the truth as profound as that of their Soviet role models.

Until 1994, however, media lies were generally plausible, their suppression of facts subtle. Although liberals dominated America's cultural and political institutions, they were confident enough to do so with something of a gentle hand.

If any one individual embodied the post-war establishment spirit, it was Walter Cronkite, "America's most trusted man." The CBS News anchor from 1962 to 1981, Cronkite represented the gold standard of useful journalism during that era, namely the ability to feign objectivity.

But objective he never was. Biographer Douglas Brinkley quotes Cronkite as saying, "I thought that some day the roof was going to fall in. Somebody was going to write a big piece in the newspaper or something. I don't know why to this day I got away with it."

The "it" was Cronkite's liberalism. After retirement, he could be more forthcoming. At a 1988 dinner honoring Democrat Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, Cronkite went full Howard Beale:

"God Almighty, God Almighty, we've got to shout these truths in which we believe from the rooftops, like that scene in the movie 'Network.' We've got to throw open our windows and shout these truths to the streets and to the heavens." Cronkite made perfectly clear to this friendly crowd that "these truths" were the soft-core Marxist orthodoxies of the moment.

One powerful source of establishment confidence was the House of Representatives. Coming into November 1994, Democrats held an 82 seat majority in the House. They had controlled the House for 40 consecutive years and 58 of the previous 62.

Yes, Republicans could elect a president, but Democrats could, if need be, dispose of one. Richard Nixon may have won 49 states in 1972, but he lost the District of Columbia, then and now the power source for the WMD known as "lawfare."

What changed the game, I'm convinced, was the midterm election of 1994. Democrats lost an incredible 52 seats in the House, eight in the Senate, and control of both. Going forward, a shocked media would do and say whatever was necessary to keep President Bill Clinton and the Democrats in power.

In the 30 years that followed, the Marxist infection metastasized. Ever more aggressively, our left-leaning elites labored under the grand illusion that "truth" was what they said was true and "just" was what they said was just.

Too bourgeois to be full-blown Marxists, these elites came to mimic, if anyone, the French Jacobins. In their fondness for the state and their hostility to faith, they launched a revolution of their own, a "fundamental transformation" of America, however dishonest and improvised.

Our Jacobins quickly moved beyond liberalism to progressivism. Here, as in revolutionary France, Jacobin orthodoxies were what the moment warranted, what the mobs demanded.

They used that open-ended ideology as bait to corral the radical among their intersectional ranks – the blacks, the browns, the greens, the gays, the lesbians, trans, the feminists, the Muslims, and any other "marginalized" group willing to make noise in the street.

Club members in the know did not really care about issues. For them, the ultimate goal was always power, global power. Having transcended the nation-state, they allied themselves with Jacobin elites throughout the world and proudly alienated those citizens who clung bitterly to their gods and their guns.

By 2020, every elected Democrat in Washington, some elected Republicans, much of the intelligence community and most of the administrative state belonged to Club Jacobin.

Jacobin clubs in Hollywood, on Broadway and in Silicon Valley exercised nearly monopolistic control over their respective industries. Jacobins ruled higher education and, through their unions, controlled the public-education establishment. They dominated almost every commercial newsroom and TV network as well as NPR and PBS.

By 2021, with the inauguration of President Joe Biden, Jacobins controlled the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives and many of the instruments of justice, including the D.C. courts and the FBI. They told America what it was permissible to think and say and were eager to punish those who thought and said differently.

If the Jacobins said the election of 2020 was "free and fair," to say otherwise was to perpetuate "the big lie."

If they said January 6 was an "insurrection," to call it anything less was to side with "white supremacists."

If they said President Biden was "sharp as a tack," to say he was slipping was to pull a "deep fake" and risk rebuke from more enlightened members of the club. "I can tell you, I talked to Joe Biden in private for decades," insisted MSNBC's Joe Scarborough in March 2024. "This is the best Joe Biden."

Even a child could pinpoint the moment the woke empire imploded. That would be, of course, June 27, 2024, when a senescent President Biden took the stage to debate former President Donald Trump and fell harder than Humpty Dumpty.

Biden promptly shattered the grand illusion that had sustained his coalition for the last four years, and not even the media could put it together again.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

As Elon Musk continues his deep dive into wasteful government spending, reports are now emerging that big names in left-leaning American news, including Politico and the New York Times, have been propped up by millions in U.S. taxpayer dollars.

"Many media outlets are going to experience a mysterious drop in revenue," the head of DOGE posted on X Wednesday morning.

USASPENDING.gov, the government-spending tracker, reveals Politico received up to $27 million – some counts indicate $32 million – from different federal agencies during Joe Biden's term in office.

"What they found was absolutely shocking," Tyler Durden of ZeroHedge said concerning the internet sleuths that unearthed the information.

Some $500,000 was reportedly spent on 37 Politico "pro" subscriptions.

The New York Times received $3.1 million in taxpayer funds, while the BBC in Britain collected $3.2 million.

During a briefing Wednesday at the White House, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed media outlets have been receiving federal tax dollars, and that "will no longer be happening."

"The DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now," she said.

Interestingly, Politico staffers on Tuesday were told that a "technical error" prevented their paychecks from being distributed.

The Shore News Network noted of the financial hiccup at Politico: "The timing of these payroll issues is particularly sensitive as it coincides with broader discussions about government funding for media.

"Posts on X (formerly Twitter) have expressed skepticism and concern, with some users suggesting that the inability to pay employees might be a consequence of government funding cuts, although no official confirmation or denial has been issued by Politico on this matter."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

The chief of one of the nation's biggest teachers' unions, Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, has "endorsed" the idea of shutting down the federal Department of Education.

That's one of the goals President Donald Trump has expressed, because of the department's agenda that has included spending hundreds of millions of dollars to inculcate discriminatory gender and race ideologies in children amid its failure to improve the test scores of American children.

Trump has appointed a secretary of education with instructions to see how much of the federal agency's responsibilities can be given back to states and local communities. In Congress, there's already a plan to shut down the bureaucracy.

Now, in an interview, Weingarten "accidentally endorses ABOLISHING the Department of Education," according to a report.

"States and localities run education… they should run it. The federal government should not run it," she said.

Her quote was, "States and localities run education. It's basically. That's where 90% of the funding for education goes. They already run it. They should run it. The federal government should not run it."

Under Trump's administration, already dozens of Education Department bureaucrats have been put on leave because they were promoting the ideological diversity and equity campaigns to students.

The moves are part of the shakeup of federal government that is being implemented under Trump, who appointed Elon Musk to his administration's Department of Government Efficiency to look for ways to cut the size and expense of government.

Twitchy commented, "Yesterday, Twitchy covered Weingarten's appearance on MSNBC to rail against President Trump's call to end the Department of Education. It wasn't so much an interview that Ana Cabrera conducted with Weingarten; it was more like a mutual admiration society, with both participants spending their time agreeing with each other and patting each other on the back for their brilliant insights. But even in that softball environment, Weingarten still couldn't help but step on a massive rake as she accidentally agreed with Trump that the DOE shouldn't even exist."

Other social media responses:

"Finally she has a good idea."

And, "Ma'am we literally been saying this for decades."

They also noted Weingarten "makes over $560,000 per year, 9 times average teacher."