This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

The grand jury transcripts from federal sex trafficking cases involving Jeffrey Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell, have been cleared to be made public.

The Los Angeles Times confirmed that U.S. District Judge Rodney Smith cited a new law specifically authorizing those records to be released in issuing an order.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act was signed into law by President Donald Trump, and compels the Department of Justice, FBI and prosecutors to, by Dec. 19, release the boxes of material that accumulated while investigating Epstein.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

After five years of investigating, authorities have arrested a suspect in the Washington, D.C., pipe bomb case that developed at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 5, 2021.

This was just before the Capitol protest-turned-riot where thousands massed at the government building to protest what they saw as the unfair results of the 2020 presidential election. A few hundred broke into the building and vandalized it, and the government prosecuted even those who were convicted of no more than trespassing with years in jail.

President Donald Trump ended that with a pardon of those offenders when he took office in his second term.

The report cited "sources" and said the suspect, at the time, was on video wearing a gray hoodie, Nike Air Max Speed Turf sneakers, a face mask, glasses, and gloves.

The report said, "Authorities discovered the two pipe bombs near the Republican and Democratic National Committees' headquarters around the same time that thousands of protesters a few blocks away began to descend on the Capitol over the 2020 election results. Video footage released by the FBI showed an unidentified person placing the pipe bombs near the two headquarters more than 16 hours before law enforcement found them."

A wire service report said it was the first time investigators "have settled on a suspect in an act that had long vexed law enforcement."

It was the AP that cited its source, an official who "was not authorized to publicly discuss a case that has not yet been made public and spoke on the condition of anonymity."

The bombs were defused and no one was injured.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

It's one of the most consequential yet underreported stories in America today – the massive job loss and life disruption for hundreds of thousands of American workers, particularly in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), due to widespread abuse of America's immigration and visa laws. The ongoing crisis, which daily results in tremendous suffering and depression on the part of American workers, and sometimes even suicide, was the focus of a recent event at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., which featured as a key expert Amanda Bartolotta, WND's senior investigative journalist. Bartolotta's exclusive and groundbreaking reports are not only informing many Americans on the subject, but are being followed by key parts of the Trump administration, including the Office of the Vice President and the Justice Department.

Heritage, long the nation's premier conservative think tank, convened a panel of five nationally recognized experts on immigration, labor policy and visa reform, to explain the massive problem – and its solutions – to government officials, media and the public. Along with Bartolotta, the other four expert panelists included Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies; Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers and executive director of the Institute for Sound Public Policy; Ronil (Ron) Hira, Ph.D., P.E., associate professor, Department of Political Science, Howard University; and, moderating the discussion, Simon Hankinson, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

The Nov. 19 policy discussion, titled "How the H-1B Visa Led to Importing Mass Cheap Labor," examined how the H-1B program, originally created as a narrow, temporary, non-immigrant visa for specialized workers, has expanded into a gargantuan pipeline for importing large volumes of low-cost, highly controllable immigrant workers at the direct expense of American professionals. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has publicly referred to the arrangement as nothing short of "indentured servitude."

The event drew a capacity in-person audience of approximately 100, including officials from the Department of Homeland Security and Department of State, as well as congressional staff, members of policy organizations, media representatives and those involved with enforcement of immigration laws. In addition, more than 500 "attendees" registered to watch virtually, reflecting the growing national concern about visa abuse and the widespread and alarming displacement of American workers.

Notably, the audience included Mahvash Siddiqui, the U.S. Foreign Service officer who served as a consular official in Chennai, India, one of the world's largest H-1B processing posts. Siddiqui provided first-hand insight into systemic fraud in the visa pipeline, including forged degrees, fabricated employment credentials, third-party staffing company schemes, India-based networks orchestrating large-scale visa abuse and the issuance of more than 220,000 H-1Bs and 140,000 H-4s in 2024 alone. Her disclosures underscored the deep structural vulnerabilities of the program and framed the panel's discussion of foreign influence, labor trafficking and downstream green-card acquisition.

Panelists covered a comprehensive range of topics, including:

* The history and original legislative intent of the H-1B program, with Hira and Krikorian detailing how a narrowly crafted visa program intended for short-term, specialized workers evolved into a mechanism for uncontrolled mass labor importation.

* Outsourcing body shops, loopholes and corporate abuse, with Lynn and Hira outlining how offshore labor firms and multinational staffing companies dominate the program, replacing American workers with lower-cost foreign labor.

* PERM (Program Electronic Review Management) fraud and discriminatory hiring, regarding which Bartolotta presented the pipeline from H-1B misuse to green-card acquisition, explaining how so-called PERM recruitment is systematically manipulated to exclude U.S. workers while securing permanent residency for foreign labor.

* Impact on the American workforce, with panelists highlighting how U.S. STEM graduates struggle to find employment, how tens of thousands of mid-career American professionals are laid off, so-called "labor shortages" are artificially manufactured narratives, and American wages are suppressed and job mobility undermined.

During the following Q&A with the audience, which included federal officials, questions addressed included: Which reforms should take priority, the misuse of federal "training fund" fees collected from visa petitions, and public reactions to high-profile statements on H-1B from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, among others.

Engagement and public impact

Heritage produced individual video clips for each panelist, and interaction metrics across X (Twitter) demonstrated significant public and policy-community engagement:

Heritage officials noted the unusually high engagement levels for a policy event, signaling a deepening public appetite for immigration and labor-market reform.

* WATCH clip of Amanda Bartolotta's speech on X:

* WATCH video of the entire event on YouTube.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

President Donald Trump closed his final Cabinet meeting of the year on Tuesday with a ferocious message to Somali immigrants including Democrat Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota who "complain and do nothing but bitch."

'I don't want 'em in our country, I'll be honest with you," Trump said of the immigrants who have penetrated Minnesota in large numbers.

"Somebody will say, 'Oh that's not politically correct.' I don't care. I don't want 'em in our country. Their country's no good for a reason. Their country stinks. … I could say that about other countries too."

Trump said America is on the brink of disaster if the trend continues.

"You know, our country's at a tipping point. We could go bad," he explained.

"We could go one way or the other. We're gonna go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage to our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She's garbage. Her friends are garbage."

The president continued: "These aren't people that say, 'Let's go, come on let's make this place great.' These are people that do nothing but complain. And from where they came from, they got nothing.

"You know, if they came from paradise, and they said this isn't paradise, but when they come from hell, and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don't want 'em in our country. Let 'em go back to where they came from and fix it."

As WorldNetDaily reported Tuesday, a recent City Journal investigation uncovered the fact that Minnesota state taxpayers likely are the biggest single source of funding for the Muslim terror network of al-Shabaab.

And now U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has confirmed the federal government is investigating the scandal that has developed on the watch of Democrat Gov. Tim Walz.

On Monday, both Trump and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went scorched earth on Walz for what some say is a surrender of the state to Somalia.

Trump himself highlighted a report by investigative journalist Amy Mekelburg of the RAIR Foundation in which she indicated: "Minnesota is being systematically transformed – its people replaced, its cities being turned into foreign enclaves, its future rewritten by mass migration and soaring immigrant birth rates, all by design."

"Minneapolis already holds the largest Somali population in the U.S. – a hub for Shariah push and radical recruitment. You can see it on display at the Somali Culture and Music Night held this weekend."

"This isn't assimilation. It's colonization," Mekelburg concluded.

Trump said sarcastically in reaction: "Welcome to Minnesota – Great job Governor Walz!"

Leavitt held a White House press briefing Monday, during which she scorched the Democrat governor, saying "Somali immigrants have been ripping off American taxpayers."

She said, "59 [Somalis] have been convicted for their roles in fraud plots that have stolen $1 billion from taxpayers."

"In one scheme, and this is egregious, a nonprofit and its affiliates with the Somali migrants claim to have fed tens of thousands of American children during the pandemic. They were reimbursed for those meals by taxpayers. However, federal prosecutors found that almost all of those meals were never even delivered to hungry children."

"In fact, those organization's leaders spent the money on houses, luxury cars and real estate in Turkey and Kenya."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A new report reveals that a cache of evidence released by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, confirms that the Joe Biden administration knowingly violated the Constitution by diving into the telephone records of Republicans in Congress as part of its lawfare against President Donald Trump.

The report in the Federal confirmed, "The Biden Administration okayed Special Counsel Jack Smith's subpoenaing congressional phone records knowing the subpoenas were unconstitutional, emails released last week revealed. That same trove of documents also established the illegality of the nondisclosure orders issued by the courts to prevent the telecommunication providers from alert[ing] the members of Congress of the unconstitutional seizure of their toll records."

It continued, "In other words, the Biden Administration ignored Smith's blatant violation of congressional Republicans' constitutional rights under the Speech or Debate Clause because the special counsel's office was unlikely to criminally charge any of the congressional Republicans — and therefore, there was little 'litigation risk' that a court would exclude the unconstitutionally seized evidence."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A Republican member of Congress says America as we know it is on the verge of being lost because Democrats have "sold their soul to the devil," and he's blaming Christians and gun owners for allowing it to happen.

U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, appeared Saturday night on "The Big Weekend Show" on Fox News, and slammed citizens on the political right who choose not to vote in elections.

"The problem basically is, it's on us!" Burchett said.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A recognized expert on China has written in a column at the Gatestone Institute explaining that Alibaba, the Chinese version of megacompany Amazon, should be unceremoniously booted from the New York Stock Exchange.

"In these circumstances, it is strategically wrong to support any element of a system that is assaulting the free world in general and the United States in particular," explained China expert Gordon Chang. "It is also morally wrong to do so. It is time to delist Alibaba and all other Chinese companies from American stock exchanges and to prohibit Americans from doing business with any of them. All of them are America's enemies."

Alibaba, in fact, had a market value of some $231 billion when its IPO in 2014 raised $25 billion.
It is in the top few dozen companies worldwide. It is into technology, e-commerce, retail, Internet and more.

It provides consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer, and business-to-business operations.

It owns and operates a long list of other corporations.

It is into capital investments and artificial intelligence.

However, Chang wrote in the Gatestone Institute column that, "Alibaba provides tech support for Chinese military 'operations' against targets in the U.S."

He said, at least, that's what a White House memo charged, according to the Financial Times.

"The Chinese giant reportedly provided 'access to customer data that includes IP addresses, WiFi information and payment records, as well as different AI-related services,'" he explained, "Whether the FT report is accurate or not—it sounds accurate—it is time to delist Alibaba from the New York Stock Exchange and remove all other Chinese companies from U.S. stock listings. All of them are integral parts of a hostile regime assaulting America."

While China's embassy in Washington denied the memo's information, Chang explained its denials "cannot possibly be true."

"There are no real privacy protections in China's total surveillance society " Chang explained. "The Communist Party of China runs a unitary state and demands absolute obedience from all individuals, businesses, and institutions in the country. Businesses operate as separate entities and report to separate controlling government bodies, but they are not separate. Washington must stop assuming that Chinese society is organized the same way as America's."

He charged that any and all Chinese entities, government or commercial, should "be treated as one single organization, the way the Party views them."

After all, the Chinese Communist Party "has access to everything any Chinese company, state-owned or privately owned, or Chiense institution possesses."

And that party "has declared the United States to be its enemy," he said.

He noted the opinion from Richard Fisher, of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, who said, "The Chinese Communist Party has exceeded the extreme lengths taken by the Soviet Communist Party to integrate and subordinate its 'civilian economy' to serve the larger goals of its 'military economy.' All Chinese companies, factories, universities, and local governments either directly or indirectly support the military."

"Did Alibaba in fact support the Chinese military as the White House memo charges? Only those with access to classified information know," Chang wrote. "Yet the truth of the White House's charge does not matter. What matters is that Alibaba is part of the Communist Party's system."

 

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

The ramifications of a decision by six Democrats in Congress, already known as the "seditious six," to promote to the U.S. military the defiance of presidential orders, still remain to be seen.

One senator, Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly, could be subject to military discipline for promoting dissension within the ranks. The FBI is looking into the statements by the others.

President Donald Trump has reminded Americans of the penalties for sedition and treason, and now there are online reports that a group linked to leftist billionaire George Soros has been "fomenting sedition" for the military "around the same time a 'script" went out to Democrat members of Congress urging rebellion."
Soros, of course, long has pursued radical leftist and globalist agendas, almost always in direct opposition to Trump's agenda for making America "Great Again."

He's now in the process of turning over his empire to his son, Alex, who perhaps is even more extreme.

For example, the Soros empire of activists recently has been accused of pushing the recent government shutdown, the Schumer Shutdown, which happened over Democrats' demands that Congress spend more than a trillion dollars on their pet projects.

Reporter Eric Daugherty said, "It's been revealed that a nonprofit linked to George Soros is fomenting sedition within the military around the same time a 'script' went out to Democrat members of Congress urging rebellion within the ranks against President Trump. There are also links to ANTIFA. On November 11th – just days before the video – the National Lawyers Guild published a page urging service members to refuse 'illegal' orders. The same talking point in the video. Win Without War has put up a billboard in NC urging chaos and dissent within the ranks, a group linked to a 501(c)(4) backed by Soros' Open Society. The group was previously named New Security Action. As per @DataRepublican, Win Without War is partnered with the National Lawyers Guild. National Lawyers Guild is a supporter of antifa. And to wrap it all together? Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) said on national TV a 'script' was sent to him. He ended up not participating, but admitted it was coordinated from an external party. There it is."

In fact, Win Without War has been open in its defense of the Democrats in Congress calling for disobedient troops.

"Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan sent servicemembers a crucial reminder that they should disobey illegal orders 48 hours later, Trump accused them of sedition and called for their arrest and execution. It's an unprecedented incitement of violence against political opponents, who were targeted simply for encouraging servicemembers to uphold the law and their oath to the Constitution," the organization claimed.
Online reaction, however, was clear about which side Americans should choose.
Trump already was working on it, apparently.
A related development had GOP members of Congress issuing their own call to the troops, to "stand strong" for law and order.

While the Democrats complained of "illegal orders," without being able to identify any, Fox News, reported Rep. Zach Nunn, R-Iowa, said, "I've flown combat missions, and I know what happens when people disobey an order. This cannot happen to the men and women who are serving right now."

The report said, "Republicans argue the Democrats' video risks undermining the military's chain of command, while the Democrats insist they were simply reminding service members not to carry out 'illegal' actions."

It was Secretary of War Pete Hegseth who called on the military to investigate Kelly, as he's still subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, while the FBI is on the others.

Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., a Gulf War veteran, specifically criticized Kelly's role in the video, Fox reported. He said, "What he said was egregious for multiple reasons. I thought it was very dishonest of him to say, 'We have your back.' No, they don't."

On "The Story," Medal of Honor recipient Sgt. Dakota Meyer called the Democrats' video "unacceptable."

"The question that needs to be asked to all of them is, do you just not trust our men and women in uniform anymore? Is that the issue or is it the fact that you don't like what the president's doing?" he said.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Another biological man has dressed up like a woman, but this time it's not for the typical reason. This incident involves a man posing as his own mother to collect her pension – all after she had died.

According to The Telegraph in the U.K., the alleged crime has been dubbed to as the "Mrs. Doubtfire" scandal, a reference to the 1993 hit film starring Robin Williams portraying an elderly housekeeper.

An unemployed 56-year-old Italian man allegedly dressed up as his dead mother, including lipstick and pearl necklace, as a means to collect her pension.

According to a report in Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper, the out-of-work nurse managed to pocket thousands of euros before the ruse was exposed.

In addition, he allegedly concealed his mother's body in his home, so long so that it became mummified. The woman, Graziella Dall'Oglio, is said to have died three years ago.

The Telegraph reports the man cut his hair in a similar style to his mother as he visited a government office to collect his mother's money. An alert employee apparently noticed his "low voice and thick neck," and the jig was up.

"He came into the council offices wearing a long skirt, he was wearing lipstick and nail varnish, a necklace and old-style earrings," Francesco Aporti, the mayor of Borgo Virgilio, told the Italian newspaper.

The man's total income, including his dead mother's pension, was €53,000, which is more than $61,000.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A school-board member in Tennessee is "unquitting" after initially resigning amid revelations she appeared to have sex on the Showtime series "Gigolos."

Last Monday, Teresa Crosslin was sworn in as the District 3 School Board member for the Clarksville-Montgomery County School System.

"That same day, the school district received an 'anonymous call' claiming that I appeared in an adult Showtime television show more than a decade ago," Crosslin wrote in Clarksville Now. "When this was disclosed to me, I panicked.

"Believing that resigning might spare the School Board and my family embarrassment, I stepped down before I had time to think clearly."

Crosslin is now withdrawing her initial resignation, saying: "I apologize for the whiplash caused by my resignation and now my withdrawal of that resignation. My initial decision was made in a moment of panic and isolation. After prayer, counsel and reflection, I know I am ready and willing to serve our community with integrity, resilience and renewed purpose."

She does admit the information from the initial call is true.