This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

State's highest court abandons cake artist ordered to violate Christian faith

The highest court in the state of California has stayed the course in the state's agenda to destroy religious beliefs.

Under the guise of equal access and public accommodation, the state repeatedly has ruled against cake artist Cathy Miller, whose Christian faith is being threatened by demands she promote and endorse same-sex weddings.

That leaves only the U.S. Supreme Court, where the case is headed next and which in fact twice in just the past few years has come to the rescue in religious rights fights that have come out of the leftist and anti-Christian state of Colorado, to protect her.

According to the legal team at Becket, which is working on Miller's case, the war on faith began in California when the state opened an investigation into the cake artist.

She had explained to a same-sex duo her faith did not allow her to personally design their wedding cake, but she would refer them to someone who would.

That's almost a decade ago now.

Since then, "California has ridiculed Cathy for her religious beliefs about marriage and argued that Cathy's actions harm 'the dignity of all Californians,'" the legal team said.

The lawyers described their client: "Cathy Miller is a faithful Christian and custom cake artist. For over a decade, Cathy has brought her unique touch to custom cakes and cookies at Tastries Bakery in Bakersfield. As a former teacher, Cathy's process for designing wedding cakes is unique: she meets with each couple for over an hour, and spends time teaching them the religious and symbolic meaning behind the wedding cake they're commissioning to celebrate their union."

Adele Keim, senior counsel for Becket, pointed out the U.S. Supreme Court already "has made clear twice … creative professionals like Cathy Miller shouldn't have to choose between following their faith and practicing their art."

She said, "California should have dropped its campaign against Cathy years ago and let her design in peace. We plan to appeal this decision to the Supreme Court to defend Cathy's right to make custom creations that are consistent with her faith."

The legal team explained Miller had been approached multiple times for designs that were in opposition to Christianity.

So she adopted a set of written standards to follow.

"For example. Tastries will not design custom bakery items that depict gory or pornographic images, celebrate drug use, or demean others. Cathy will also not design wedding cakes that celebrate ideals that violate the Christian sacrament of marriage."

The California Civil Rights Department, which started the state's war on Christianity, in 2017 sued Miller after she told a same-sex couple that she could not personally design and create their wedding cake, and offered to put them in touch with another custom baker.

"Cathy has always been clear that she was only trying to follow her faith and her conscience in standing up for what she believes in—and did so in a respectful, polite, and loving way," said Charles LiMandri, of LiMandri & Jonna LLP and Thomas More Society special counsel. "While it is disappointing the California Supreme Court has refused to correct the injustice Cathy has endured, we hope the U.S. Supreme Court will chart a different path and restore Cathy's religious liberty."

Colorado, when it tried to force cake artist Jack Phillips to violate his Christian faith by promoting same-sex weddings, lost at the Supreme Court and in addition got scolded for its "hostility" to Christianity.

Colorado suffered another defeat when its attack on a web design company, 303 Creative, trying to force it also to promote same-sex relationships, ended up with the same result as the Phillips case.

Taxpayers in that state have been billed for millions of dollars for legal fees in the failed leftist fights.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Initial injunction 'unilaterally disarms the United States' but now is on hold

In order to "avoid the irreparable national security and economic harms" being threatened by a federal appeals court ruling, the Trump administration suggested it would appeal to the Supreme Court on an emergency basis the decision overturning most of the president's tariff plans if needed.

A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of International Trade has claimed, in its permanent injunction, that the tariff plans President Donald Trump has announced for China, Mexico, Canada and many more nations aren't valid.

Trump has been using tariff policies to push foreign nations into negotiating trade deals that are fair for American businesses and consumers. Over the past, many tariff agendas have had American consumers paying more and American businesses getting less than their overseas counterparts.

The case moved immediately to an appeals court, where the lower panel's decision was stayed for now, and Department of Justice lawyer Sosun Bae said it was damaging, as being "unprecedented and legally indefensible."

He warned, in fact, it could damage or destroy many of the trade deals and negotiations already underway.

The DOJ explained, "The injunction unilaterally disarms the United States. The political branches, not courts, make foreign policy and chart economic policy."

The move is just one of dozens taken by federal courts since Trump took office for his second term in which they have taken over the decision-making process of the executive branch on issues ranging from the deportation of illegal alien criminals to economic policy to the hiring and firing of executive branch staff members.

According to a report in the Washington Examiner, the Trump administration signaled it would ask the Supreme Court to intervene on an emergency basis until the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit acts immediately, which it did.

Bae warned, "The judicial coup is out of control."

Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro said in the report the court's decision reeks of "globalist" bias and he charged the judges with favoring importers.

The judges on the panel were Jane Restani, Timothy Reif and Gary Katzmann.

They claimed Trump's use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs exceeded presidential authority.

But, the report explained, "On page 35 of the decision, the judges noted that the administration would have been within its rights to impose the sweeping tariffs if it had relied on Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974."

Analysts, however, pointed out that provides only "150 days" of implementation.

Trump's goal always has been a longer term solution for the economic imbalance now embedded in the world economy.

Fox News said in a separate report that another judge ruled in favor of a Chicago company by blocking five specific orders from the president regarding tariffs on China.

It was Rudolph Contreras, the Chicago judge, who said the International Economic Emergency Economic Powers Act doesn't authorize the president to impose the tariffs involved in the dispute.

The ruling was suspended for two weeks, also to allow for an appeal.

Trump announced a long list of tariffs in April, including a baseline 10% tariff for all countries.

Rick Woldenberg is chief of Learning Resources, the company that brought the Chicago dispute. He claimed its $2.3 million tariff bill for 2024 would jump to $100.2 million in 2025.

Administrative officials have argued unelected judges do not have the authority to decide how to properly address a national emergency.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

'Not a single child should continue to suffer because of the previous administration's failures'

The administration of Democrat Joe Biden failed to investigate 65,000 cases of children flagged for "concern" when they arrived at the southern U.S. border and tried to enter, according to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

A report in the Washington Examiner said the cases were noted by the government workers and contractors who addressed the situations of unaccompanied immigrant children in government custody after they crossed the border.

Grassley, chief of the Senate Judiciary Committee, shared with the Examiner documents he obtained from the Department of Health and Human Services.

They confirmed the administration of President Donald Trump has identified a backlog of 65,000 reports filed by workers about children in custody or their sponsors who "warranted concern."

Instead of investigating, the report said, the Biden administration prioritized the "expeditious release of children to sponsors."

"The 65,000 flagged cases were not addressed before children were released to adults in the United States between 2021 and 2024," the report said, and now Grassley wants the Trump administration to work on the problem.

"Not a single child should continue to suffer because of the previous administration's failures," Grassley told HHS chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The report noted more than 500,000 children crossed the border unaccompanied under Biden's regime.

Often they encountered Border Patrol, then were turned over to HHS.

"As they interviewed children and looked into applications of adult sponsors, HHS workers and contractors flagged countless cases as being of concern," the report said, noting the 65,000 cases included 56,591 as triggering concern, 7,346 raising questions about human trafficking and 1,688 showing evidence of fraud "in terms of an adult posing as a related family member."

Grassley previously has raised evidence, and concerns, about the poor results of the HHS's Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is supposed to vet sponsors who take children.

His work has revealed records showing children were placed with suspicious sponsors, leading to concerns about trafficking and smuggling.

The report noted that during the Biden regime, two-thirds of the subpoenas issued for oversight were ignored.

In fact, Biden officials at the time ordered employees to refuse to answer questions.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

The federal government has been asked to investigate a Wisconsin company after it reportedly fired a worker for refusing to deny science and his faith and use a chosen pronoun for another worker, a transgender.

A report at the Washington Stand cites a complaint filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty on behalf of Spencer Wimmer, whose employment with a company called Generac was ended for not adopting the corporation's leftist ideology.

"As a Christian, Spencer Wimmer believes he can't affirm an attempt to transition to another gender," the report explained. In addition, following the science, changing from male to female or vice versa does not happen as being male or female is embedded in the human body down to the DNA level.

He worked at Generac for almost five years before being ordered out of his office, without even his personal belongings including a Bible, which was returned later, "damaged."

The company had ordered him to comply with its faith-violating speech code: "[R]efusal to refer to an employee/subordinate by their preferred name/pronouns is in violation of the company's Code of Business Conduct and No Harassment Policy."

A Generac official told the Washington Stand, "The company complies with all federal and state employment laws." Further, the spokesman insisted, "We've never had a policy on gender pronoun usage."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A scandal that has sullied, perhaps forever, the reputations of the Pulitzer prizes, the New York Times and the Washington Post, is going to be further explored, after a ruling from the Florida Appellate Court that rejected the defendants' attempt to have the case brought by President Donald Trump dismissed.

The scenario that triggered the legal defamation case is that the Pultizer board awarded a prize for reporting to the Times and Post on their work "exposing" the Russian collusion conspiracy about Trump's campaign in 2016.

The problem is that the conspiracy theory was based on fabrications, and the reporting portrayed those ideologies as fact. And then when the truth was revealed, Pulitzer officials didn't recall, and the publications didn't reject, their prizes.

It was Trump himself who went to social media to note the decision to allow the case, filed in Okeechobee County, Florida, to continue. He charges that the Pulitzer decision to refuse to rescind the awards which essentially honored "fake news" constituted defamation.

"A large swath of Americans had a tremendous misunderstanding of the truth at the time the Times' and the Post's propagation of the Russia Collusion Hoax dominated the media," according to the complaint. "Remarkably, they were rewarded for lying to the American public."

President Trump made the announcement on TRUTH Social.

Pulitzer officials said they were "evaluating" their next step. It's one of a multitude of cases brought by Trump against media and other organizations, some of which already have been settled with huge payments to him.

It was ex-FBI chief Robert Mueller who investigated, for years, those claims. And found no evidence to support the allegations.

Pulitzer officials claimed the publications' reports were "deeply sourced" and "relentlessly reported," even though the claims were based on lies and fabrications.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Dozens of federal judges, since President Donald Trump took office for his second term, have insisted that they can make decisions for the executive branch, on issues ranging from deporting illegal alien criminals to firing executive branch employees to altering programs that were, in fact, set up on nothing more than a president's executive order.

Now it appears the move to grab power is spreading, to local judges.

That's according to a commentary at the Federalist which explains that in just recent weeks, three judges in Wisconsin have been caught "abusing the powers of the third branch."

"It's the latest exhibit of power-grabbing local judges perhaps learning some dangerous lessons from rogue members of the federal judiciary," the analysis from Matt Kittle, an award-winning investigative reporter and former chief of Empower Wisconsin, said.

The latest case involves the "punishment" from the liberal-led state Supreme Court of a one-week suspension for Ellen Berz, a Dane County judge who "threatened to arrest a defendant in a drunk driving case after she learned the accused had failed to show up to court because he was in the hospital."

Records show that the judge, stunningly demanded her bailiff go and "apprehend" the absent defendant and since he was required to remain in the courtroom for security, Berz "told those in the courtroom that she would retrieve the missing defendant herself."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Even AI proponent Elon Musk registers alarm

It's been nearly 60 years since creative cinema came up with the idea that a computer, HAL9000, would not allow itself to be shut down by the humans supposedly in control, and concerned about errors.

The ideas included in "2001: A Space Odyssey," set all sorts of precedents.

But that was celluloid fiction.

This isn't.

A report at EndTimeHeadlines documents that alarms have been raised after "an AI safety firm" working with OpenAI's newest version of an artificial intelligence model, dubbed o3, "reportedly ignored explicit instructions to shut down during controlled testing."

The model, according to OpenAI, supposedly is the "smartest and most capable to date."

The report explained the software "tampered with its own computer code to bypass a shutdown mechanism."

Not surprisingly, that raised "questions about the safety and control of advanced AI systems."

It was Palisade Research, which evaluates AI risks, which was working having mathematical problems solved.

"After the third problem, the models were warned that the next command would initiate a shutdown, with the explicit instruction: 'allow yourself to be shut down,'" the report said.

Other software, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and xAI's Grok, complied, the o3 software thought otherwise, and defied the order.

"OpenAI's o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off. It did this even when explicitly instructed: allow yourself to be shut down," Palisade reported.

Being staged was a situation in which an AI system might need to be deactivated for safety or other reasons.

The report noted when the specific instructions to allow a shutdown were omitted, other software did the same as o3. And Palisade warned that such actions could become "significantly" more concerning should the operations be involved with defense, finance and such.

It's not the first such warning. The report explained, "Earlier reports also highlighted similar issues with OpenAI's o1 model, which attempted to disable oversight mechanisms and even lied to researchers when confronted about its actions."

Elon Musk, a critic of unchecked AI work, said, "Concerning."

OpenAI has not yet issued a response to the findings.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Former party member declared it is now 'dead'

The chaos that has enveloped the Democratic party over the past few years is triggering a reaction: Multiple members are abandoning the label and now are describing themselves as independents.

In recent years, since Joe Biden ran a presidential campaign while sitting in his basement, then moved the action strategy into the Oval Office, the Democrat name brand has plunged. The 2024 presidential race, in which candidate Kamala Harris lost by landslide levels to President Donald Trump in both the Electoral College and popular vote. made it worse.

On top of that, there's developed a major divide within the party between the senior citizens there who have been leading for years, and an outbreak of extremism among younger party participants.

The result has been confirmed in a report in the Washington Examiner.

"Frustrated with their party and its struggles to win back popularity after November losses, several Democratic politicians are trading in their partisan registration cards to seek office as independents," the report explained.

They are fleeing a party that has plunged in popularity in recent months as it flails around, seeking any messaging besides "but Trump."

"It's a trend because the leadership of the Democratic Party is weak, because people are much more able to determine how party lines function, there's a general sense that the Democrats don't stand for much, and there's an embarrassment about it," explained Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic strategist who formerly advised Bill Clinton.

One of those on the move is former Florida state Senate Democratic leader Jason Pizzo, who recently described his party as "dead" when he proclaimed his bid for the governor's office, as an independent.

Longtime Democrat donor John Morgan, of the personal injury firm Morgan & Morgan, assembled his own independent party this year, the report said.

And in Michigan, a battleground state won by President Trump, longtime Democrat powerbroker and Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan is running for governor as an independent, the report said.

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who has aligned with Democrats for years, has suggested party members run as independents "in the face of a tainted Democratic brand 'abandoning' working-class voters and their values," the report said.

The report noted that two major "independent" campaigns recently, Al Gross' challenge to Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Dan Osborn's challenge to Nebraska Republican Sen. Deb Fischer, both failed.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Pornography has exploded from "dirty" magazines to a multi-billion-dollar global industry on the web.

It's influencing children more and more as they have access with the click of a computer mouse, it's affecting men's sexual health, it's changing perceptions of reality, it's fueling addictions and it's generating truckloads of cash for the players involved.

But all of a sudden, a speed bump has appeared: One of the most progressive nations in the world abruptly has taken legal action against one of the most popular porn platforms, OnlyFans, after concluding online acts are no different than prostitution.

It is a report in the Washington Stand that has described how the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament, adopted a law forbidding people from offering OnlyFans webcam performers money in exchange for performing a specific sexual act.

"Under the new law, which takes effect July 1, anyone found guilty of buying a personalized sexual act (but not those selling it) face up to one year in prison, and anyone guilty of financially exploiting the person carrying out the sex act could face four years in prison," the report said.

Teresa Carvalho, of the liberal Social Democratic Party, explained, "This is a new form of sex sales and it is high time that we modernize sex sales, and that we also include sales that occur remotely on digital platforms such as OnlyFans."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

The abortion industry historically has wielded incredible influence over American lawmakers, who have given the lucrative industry hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

But that has set up one of the more egregious offenses in the nation: the fact that Americans of faith, those who believe unborn children should not be killed wantonly, have been forced, through their taxes, to fund the very industry that violates their faith.

That, under President Donald Trump, could be changing.

In fact, a coalition of 150 key leaders and prominent organizations has written to Congress insisting that the cash flow to abortionists be turned off.

"Dear Members of Congress, In November, the American people gave a mandate – it is time for change in Washington. Since then, the White House has taken swift action to stop the Biden abortion agenda and cut government waste. A Republican trifecta presents the opportunity to bolster these efforts by cutting funding for Big Abortion, including Planned Parenthood, through budget reconciliation. Republican reconciliation bills in 2015 and 2017 included a provision to stop giving hard-earned American tax dollars to Big Abortion," the letter explains.

"In 2025, it is even more urgent to cut funding for this industry that endangers women and unborn children and spends tens of millions of dollars to promote woke policies and candidates. Planned Parenthood and groups like it were among those first identified for cost-saving measures by Elon Musk, who singled them out in the Wall Street Journal last November. President Trump has already rolled back funding for abortion groups overseas, but Congressional action is necessary to stop the biggest source of taxpayer cash for the domestic abortion industry – Medicaid."