This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

President Donald Trump says the U.S. pilots who bombed three nuclear sites in Iran Saturday are "devastated" by negative news reports in American media minimizing the damage inflicted on the Islamic Republic's nuclear weapons development.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday at the NATO Summit in the Netherlands, Trump said: "I got a call that the pilots and the people on the plane were devastated because they (the media) were trying to minimize the attack. And they all said it was hit."

"They were devastated. They put their lives on the line and they have … real scum come out and write reports that are as negative as they could possibly be. It should be the opposite. You should make them heroes and heroines.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

As the Democratic Party in America continues its downward spiral, President Donald Trump says he's come up with an idea to inject some life into the politicians.

"I have an idea for the Democrats to bring them back into 'play,'" Trump said sarcastically Wednesday on Truth Social.

"After years of being left out in the cold, including suffering one of the Greatest Losses in History, the 2024 Presidential Election, the Democrats should nominate Low IQ Candidate, Jasmine Crockett, for President, and AOC+3 should be, respectively, Vice President, and three High Level Members of the Cabinet – Added together with our future Communist Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, and our Country is really SCREWED!"

His comment comes in the wake of Tuesday's victory of socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary.

"We have won because New Yorkers have stood up for a city they can afford … a city where they can do more than just struggle," Mamdani said.

"And it's where the mayor will use their power to reject Donald Trump's fascism."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed Wednesday that the recent U.S. strike on Iran caused severe damage to the nation's nuclear program.

Ratcliffe's X post condemns media reports based on supposed leaked intelligence from the Defense Intelligence Agency claiming that the damage was not debilitating to Iran's nuclear ambitions, but only set Tehran back by a few months.

In the statement, Ratcliffe said the CIA has credible intelligence, including from a trusted source, that key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and will take years to rebuild.

"CIA can confirm that a body of credible intelligence indicates Iran's Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted strikes," he wrote.

Ratcliffe added that the agency is still gathering intelligence and will keep officials and, when possible, the public informed.

The statement directly contradicts leaked reports that suggested the strikes had limited impact. Ratcliffe said those reports were based on illegally sourced information and do not reflect the CIA's current assessment.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Multiple arrests have been made at an event at Disneyland Paris which, media reports have confirmed, featured an alleged pedophile reportedly trying to "marry" a 9-year-old girl who was dressed in a wedding dress and had high heels taped to her feet.

"The park officials were told the whole thing was for a social media video, not an actual wedding, but apparently that didn't check out because four people ended up arrested by the French police: the would-be groom, the girl's Ukrainian mother, and two Latvian nationals," according to a report at Not the Bee.

The man was identified as "Jaskarn Jhaj" and the Daily Star reported he was identified by prosecutors as being "registered on the British Sex Offenders' Register."

The report said he was "on the run" from U.K. police.

"French prosecutors claim the 39-year-old man was known in the UK for 'sexual offences against minors' and has been charged with various offences after staging a 'pretend wedding ceremony' with the Ukrainian child at the resort's Sleeping Beauty castle," the report said.

The Star said workers "grew suspicious" after seeing the young girl wearing a bridal dress "with four-inch heels taped to her feet," and they called authorities.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A commentary has come up with a stunningly direct solution to the problem created by federal judges who oppose President Donald Trump's border security plans that include deporting illegal alien criminals when they order them un-deported, or brought back.

Specifically, there's a case involving a Boston judge, Brian Murphy, who has demanded the government not deport a list of criminals who had been convicted of crimes including attempted first-degree murder, homicide, assault and more.

The criminals had been en route to South Sudan when the judge interrupted the deportation, ordering that the U.S. must maintain custody of them, so ICE officers have been guarding the criminals in a make-shift location in Djibouti.

According to the column by M.D. Kittle at the Federalist, "Murphy, like the other rogue judges who have attempted to stop the executive branch from carrying out the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws (as the Second Branch is empowered to do), demand the kind of due process rights for illegal immigrants reserved for criminal proceedings. They have no such rights."

In fact, Lora Ries, of the Heritage Foundation's Border Security and Immigration Center, has explained, "The administrative immigration judges are Justice Department employees in the executive branch; they are not federal judges under the Article III Judiciary of the U.S. Constitution. That means deportable aliens in deportation proceedings do not have the same rights as a person in a criminal trial, such as being innocent until proven guilty, the right to a taxpayer funded public defendant, etc. Removing a deportable alien is not a criminal sentence."

Kittle suggested Trump "likes a good deal," and perhaps it's time for one.

"How about this one: The administration agrees to bring back the violent criminals only if Murphy agrees to put them up at his house while the illegal immigrants receive 'time enough to express any concerns.' Maybe Enrique Arias-Hierro could bunk with the Murphy family. I'm sure the illegal immigrant wouldn't reoffend and violate the Boston judge's due process rights."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A new testimony has surfaced confirming what reports have documented over recent months and years: That Christianity is alive and well inside Iran, now run by the extreme Islamic regime that took over by force nearly 50 years ago.

Even by some descriptions thriving.

A report at Not the Bee explains the testimony comes from Ramin Parsa, born in Iran in 1986, who has experienced being kidnapped by Islamic morality police and tortured.

He had been taught to hate.

"In the school, everything was Islamic. In our textbooks, we had the caricatures of Israeli soldiers killing these Palestinian babies. And the babies crying… it was not real but they wanted to sow the seed of hatred in our hearts toward the Jews and Israel," the report said he explained.

At one point, he came upon a gospel message on a Christian television station. He paid attention.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A city official in California is under FBI investigation, according to multiple reports, for calling on gangs in her city to "protect" their "turf" from "the biggest gang there is," the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The video later was deleted, but the investigation now focuses on the threats from Cynthia Gonzalez, vice mayor of Cudahy,.

She had delivered her instructions to members of the 18th Street and Florencia 13 gangs.

There have been repeated riots in Los Angeles that were triggered by ICE officers delivering warrants and making arrests in an investigation into cartel crimes, apparently including money laundering.

Activists claimed the enforcement involved "immigration raids" and launched riots that have cost millions of dollars in damages and cleanup.

According to the New York Post, "Gonzalez later posted that the FBI came to her house and that she needs a lawyer," a Fox reporter confirmed.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A new secret investigation has been launched within the Trump administration of hundreds of scientists who are working inside the United States, but actually come from "countries of concern," such as China, according to a new report from Just the News.

The publication reported its sources have confirmed the investigation into scientists that sometimes have accessed the United States by "using visas procured with the help of the National Institutes of Health and other federal research agencies."

The concerns were heightened recently when "three Chinese scientists were arrested … trying to smuggle into America dangerous pathogens like fungi and roundworms capable of destroy crops."

The absence of a review by prior administrations of whether scientists were linked to "actors" like the Chinese military or its Community Party triggered the review.

The report explained there could be as many as 1,000 scientists from those nations, mostly from China, who have been identified as working inside NIH alone.

"The Trump administration is committed to safeguarding America's national and economic security. Taxpayer dollars should not and cannot fund foreign espionage against America's industrial base and research apparatus," White House spokesman Kush Desai told Just the News.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

If George Washington was the father of our country, is Donald Trump the daddy of the world?

"Daddy" is how NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte alluded to the U.S. president as the two talked to reporters at The Hague Wednesday as part of the alliance's meeting.

The remark came as Trump was explaining how Israel and Iran recently were allowed to fight for a while, "like two kids in a schoolyard," before being stopped.

Joked Rutte, "Daddy has to sometimes use strong language," a reference to Trump's F-bomb earlier in the week as he responded to the two nations violating a U.S.-brokered ceasefire.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

'If America's policy makers continue accepting these distorted narratives ... they will be compelling Americans to subsidize their own decline'

For years, the U.S.-India relationship has been sold as a mutually beneficial "strategic partnership." Trade agreements are marketed as balanced, offshoring is rebranded as economic modernization and the displacement of American workers is masked behind talking points about innovation and global cooperation.

But beneath this polished narrative lies a stark truth: The partnership has become a one-sided arrangement, heavily tilted in India's favor, enabled by U.S. multinationals, Indian lobbying and economic misdirection.

The latest example comes from the India-based Global Trade Research Initiative or GTRI, which now claims the U.S. runs a $35-$40 billion trade surplus with India. This new characterization of the trade balance between the U.S. and India uses selective accounting tactics, such as counting offshore labor operations in India as American exports, while ignoring the long-term damage to U.S. wages, employment and innovation capacity.
The official U.S. trade deficit with India, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, remains substantial. In 2024, the United States recorded a $46.08 billion goods deficit with India, an increase from the previous year. While the Global Trade Research Initiative argues that this gap is offset by other revenue streams, such as student tuition payments, software exports, digital services and intellectual property royalties, these claims require closer scrutiny.

It's true that India is a growing consumer of U.S. technology and services. In 2024, total U.S. exports of goods and services to India reached $82.1 billion, a 10.3% increase over 2023. But imports from India also rose to $128.2 billion, up 6.7%, widening the overall trade deficit to $46.1 billion.

Reframing the deficit

The Global Trade Research Initiative attempts to reshape this trade gap by including loosely associated or tangential revenue flows in its analysis, such as digital advertising income, licensing fees and revenues earned by U.S. companies operating in India.

While these revenues may appear in corporate accounting books, they often have little to no bearing on actual trade flows between the two countries. In many cases, the value is created and consumed entirely within India, booked through third-country tax jurisdictions and excluded from official trade statistics maintained by institutions such as the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the World Trade Organization. Therefore, including such figures in bilateral trade balance calculations not only violates established global trade accounting standards, it actively obscures the real asymmetry in the U.S.-India economic relationship.

This misrepresentation is not accidental; it is intentional and serves a high-stakes political objective.

As President Donald Trump intensifies efforts to reassert America's economic sovereignty and address long-standing trade deficits, India faces pressure to open its markets, reduce tariffs and eliminate non-tariff barriers. In this context, reframing the deficit becomes a tactical necessity for India. By inflating U.S. gains through creative accounting, India seeks to portray the relationship as balanced, thereby neutralizing demands for reciprocity and delaying enforcement actions that would disrupt its export-driven model.

India has much to gain from maintaining this illusion of parity. It wants continued access to the U.S. market for goods and services, protection of its visa-dependent labor supply chain and uninterrupted flows of American capital, contracts and technology.

At the same time, it remains one of the most protectionist economies in the world, with high tariffs, opaque regulatory processes and a digital economy increasingly shielded by localization mandates and indigenous innovation schemes to become "self-reliant" India. GTRI's economic spin is thus designed to protect this one-sided arrangement by misleading American negotiators, media and lawmakers into believing India is playing fair, when in fact it is extracting significant benefits while offering minimal concessions in return.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has explicitly attacked President Trump's "protectionist" "American First" policies, saying "Many countries are becoming inward focused and globalization is shrinking, and such tendencies can't be considered lesser risks than terrorism or climate change." Meanwhile, India's policies and budgets often include import duties to "provide adequate protection to domestic industry" and "promote creation of more jobs." Critics have even remarked that India's "Make in India" slogan has become, in effect, "Protect in India."

According to Rick Rossow, former deputy director at the U.S.-India Business Council, India's strategy has always been "pro-investment and anti-trade."

By reframing the deficit through distorted metrics, India is not engaging in honest diplomacy; rather, it is executing a long-term influence strategy. And unless U.S. officials look beyond surface-level numbers and examine the underlying capital flows, labor displacements and regulatory asymmetries, the trade relationship will remain fundamentally unequal, hidden behind the illusion of balance.

One of the most egregious distortions in the Global Trade Research Initiative narrative is its treatment of Indian student spending in the United States as a form of "export revenue" contributing to a U.S. trade surplus.

According to GTRI, Indian students studying in America inject over $25 billion annually into the U.S. economy, $15 billion in tuition and $10 billion in living expenses. From this, they argue that education represents one of the most significant and undercounted U.S. "exports" to India. This is not only false, it's a deliberate manipulation of established trade definitions.

At the heart of this argument lies a fundamental misunderstanding – or willful misrepresentation – of how global trade balances are measured. Under internationally accepted accounting standards used by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, student spending is classified as "personal travel" or "consumption expenditure by nonresidents," not as a commercial export of goods or services between nations. It is a private expense made by individuals voluntarily choosing to reside temporarily in the United States.

In other words, when an Indian student pays tuition at Purdue or rents an apartment in Ann Arbor, that is not India sending American money for a product. It is an individual participating in the U.S. economy, no different than a tourist buying a Broadway ticket or a foreign national eating at a restaurant in San Francisco. GTRI attempts to retrofit these personal financial decisions into a bilateral trade framework to fabricate a U.S. surplus where none exists.

Moreover, education-related travel is already captured in the BEA's international transactions account under "Exports of Services: Travel (Education-Related)", a line item that includes all spending by international students in the U.S. But even in this context, it remains a subset of consumer spending, not the kind of commercial export one would expect in a trade negotiation or tariff discussion. Including it as a central pillar of the U.S.-India economic relationship is both misleading and irrelevant to the structural trade imbalance.

GTRI's framing also obscures the true cost of this education pipeline. While universities benefit from full-tuition international students, the broader American public does not. Indian students often use international F-1 student visas to secure U.S. work authorizations under Optional Practical Training (OPT) and STEM OPT loopholes, which allow them to work for up to three years post-graduation without being subject to employer-sponsored visa caps and labor protections.

From 2023 to 2024 there were a recorded 378,175 jobs that went to international students studying at U.S. colleges and universities. And according to the Pew Research Center, the OPT program has grown 400% from 2008-2016.

These programs, poorly monitored and exploited by multinational corporations, function as backdoor immigration channels that displace qualified American graduates in STEM and tech roles. So while universities gain revenue, the American workforce loses essential job opportunity.

If India, through its think-tank GTRI, insists on classifying student tuition payments as part of a U.S. trade surplus, then by that logic, the United States should equally account for the far larger and more impactful flows of capital into India – namely remittances, foreign aid and direct investment.

Indian students who often remit income earned during and after their education back to India contribute to a reverse flow of wealth. Once they secure employment under OPT or H-1B, their presence is frequently used by outsourcing firms to build long-term foreign labor pipelines, creating a net drain on U.S. job availability and wage growth.

In 2024 alone, India received approximately $129 billion in inward remittances, 28% of which came from the U.S. – the largest single remittance source for India's economy. These outflows represent real earned income leaving the U.S. economy and directly bolstering India's GDP. If India is going to distort trade logic by including private tuition payments as national income, then it must also reckon with the scale of wealth, investment and development subsidies flowing from the United States into India, none of which are ever acknowledged in GTRI's conveniently narrow calculations.

Misclassifying offshoring as U.S. gains

In its attempt to reframe the U.S.-India trade deficit, the Global Trade Research Initiative also misleadingly counts revenue from Global Capability Centers (GCCs) operated by U.S. corporations in India as part of a supposed American "trade surplus." This framing is fundamentally flawed. GCCs are offshore units – outsourced operations intentionally set up by U.S. firms to cut costs by shifting high-paying white-collar jobs from the United States to low-wage labor markets like India.

These centers do not generate export revenue or contribute to America's GDP. Instead, they represent capital outflows, where U.S. companies pay Indian-based employees and infrastructure to perform work that would otherwise be done by Americans. Indeed, the very function of a GCC is to replace U.S. workers with cheaper foreign labor, often reducing labor costs by 50-80% per employee.

For instance, a $140,000 software engineering role in the U.S. is commonly offshored and replaced with a $45,000 job in India, a direct wage-suppression tactic that not only destroys American incomes and career paths, but also drains local economies of tax revenue and consumer spending.

But according to GTRI's logic, because companies like Amazon, Microsoft, JPMorgan and Google generate digital services revenue from Indian-based Global Capability Centers, some of which may be booked in U.S. corporate accounts, that somehow constitutes a U.S. economic win. This is a fundamental misrepresentation of how GCCs function economically and why they are, in fact, a mechanism for capital outflow and labor arbitrage, not trade inflow.

While revenues may technically be booked in the United States, these centers do not drive American exports; rather, they displace American workers. They should be understood for what they are: job-exporting, wage-suppressing mechanisms that facilitate capital outflow, not trade inflow. U.S. multinationals have poured more than $300 billion into India over the past two decades, fueling Indian infrastructure, technology parks and manufacturing capacity. Framing them as contributors to a U.S. surplus is not only misleading; it conceals the very offshoring engine that is hollowing out the American middle class.

GTRI lumps in the gross revenues earned by U.S. digital giants (e.g., Google, Meta, Microsoft) in India without accounting for local cost and operations, revenue booking across jurisdictions and, most critically, the fact that many of these revenues are generated inside India, often through localized operations, content moderation centers and sales teams. In many cases, these companies reinvest heavily in India or engage in transfer pricing, whereby profits are booked in tax havens, not the U.S.

This maneuver lowers U.S. multinational enterprises' (MNEs) tax jurisdictions while reducing the U.S. Gross Domestic Product and raising the host country's GDP. The use of transfer pricing by digital giants to shift profits into low- or no-tax jurisdictions means revenue from Indian users may be booked in Ireland, Singapore or Bermuda, not the U.S. GTRI's assumption that this revenue counts toward the U.S. trade surplus, citing $15-20 billion in revenue as part of the U.S. trade surplus, is factually incorrect and totally misleading.

In fact, a 2020 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report clearly outlined how digital services companies structure their international operations and why revenue earned abroad is not always taxable, reportable or traceable to the United States in a way that would qualify it as part of the U.S. trade surplus.

Yet, by presenting revenue as a "U.S. surplus," GTRI implies that this money benefits the American economy. But as the Congressional Research Service notes, this revenue does not translate into U.S. tax gains or trade credit, especially when it's routed through foreign subsidiaries. The CSR report also details a 2% "Equalization Levy" – India's version of Digital Service Taxes (DSTs) – a fact undermining GTRI's claim that the revenue constitutes a legitimate U.S. trade surplus. In fact, India doesn't even view the activity as contributing to its own economy, let alone to the U.S. But the U.S. does not necessarily record those revenues as national income either, meaning neither country treats this revenue the way GTRI does.

The illusion of balance, the reality of betrayal

At its core, the Global Trade Research Initiative effort to recast the U.S.-India trade relationship as one of balance, let alone surplus, rests on economic sleight-of-hand, not statistical truth.

India's campaign to redefine the trade deficit is not a misunderstanding; it is a geopolitical tactic.

As trade negotiations with President Trump intensify, India has every incentive to soften the numbers, obscure the imbalance and delay enforcement. Its overall goal, however, is not parity, but preservation for continued access to U.S. markets, expanded visa pipelines and unfettered flows of U.S. capital and technology, all while maintaining protectionist barriers and repatriating economic gains.

Meanwhile, American workers are left jobless, American innovation is offshored and America's economic sovereignty continues to erode.

The U.S. must stop treating statistical propaganda as economic reality. GTRI's manipulated data is not just bad math, it is designed to manipulate American lawmakers into surrendering leverage at the negotiating table. If America's policy makers continue accepting these distorted narratives, they will not only fail to correct the trade deficit, but they will be compelling Americans to subsidize their own decline.