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Tuesday, August 26, 2025

DOT threatens funding cuts for 3 states over language proficiency standard

 

  • The U.S. Department of Transportation is threatening to withhold funding from three states if they do not enforce an English language proficiency standards for commercial drivers, Secretary Sean Duffy said Tuesday.
  • California, New Mexico and Washington have 30 days to enforce regulation regarding English proficiency for drivers, officials said. The three states collectively have tens of millions of dollars in federal funding that could be at risk, Duffy said, and the DOT wants them to carry out rules regarding English proficiency for drivers.
  • “We don’t want to take away money from states, but we will take money away, and we’ll take additional steps that get progressively more difficult for these states,” Duffy said, declining to share what those additional steps would entail.
States can and must enforce English language proficiency provisions, federal officials said, adding that most of the DOT partners performing the language assessments are state and local partners.

Drivers can face out-of-service orders if found to violate the standard, but assessments are not always done — only if there’s a challenge in communication, according to Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Chief Counsel Jesse Elison.

Duffy’s warnings to the aforementioned states come after the DOT investigated a deadly crash involving a tractor-trailer. The DOT said its review revealed three states violated federal standards.

The Aug. 12 crash between a tractor-trailer and a minivan on Florida’s Turnpike left three people dead, according to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

In the crash, the 18-wheeler made an illegal U-turn in an “Official Use Only” access point, crashing into a passenger vehicle, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Both California and Washington issued the truck driver a CDL, and New Mexico State Police showed no evidence that law enforcement administered an English language proficiency assessment when issuing him a speeding ticket, the DOT noted in preliminary results of its review of the case.

But the truck driver couldn’t speak English and couldn’t understand road signs when tested in Florida, Duffy said.

“If states had followed the rules, this driver would never have been behind the wheel and three precious lives would still be with us,” Duffy said previously in a news release.

https://www.truckingdive.com/news/elp-transportation-department-funding-california-washington-new-mexico/758635/

RFK Jr. Links Autism to "Certain Interventions," Says Big Announcement Next Month

 President Trump and his Cabinet convened on Tuesday to discuss a wide range of topics, including a crackdown on crime in Washington, D.C. During the meeting, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. informed Trump that a major announcement regarding the cause of autism is expected in September.

Here's the transcript:

Trump:

Bobby, autism if I could just... I don't want to go too long because we have a lot of people but the Autism is such a tremendous horror show what's happening in our country and some other countries. But mostly our own country. How are you doing on that?

RFK Jr.:

We're going very well. It will have announcements as promised in September. Finding interventions. Certain intervention now that are clearly almost certainly causing autism. And we're going to be able to address those in September.

Trump:

It's such a big day. I'm looking forward to that date because there is something wrong when you see the kind of numbers that you have today versus 20 years ago. And what are these numbers about?

RFK Jr.:

In 1970, biggest epidemiological study in history was done in Wisconsin. They looked at 900,000 children. They were looking for autism, what it looked like. And they were very, very precise about it and found an incident rate of 0.7. In other words, less than 1 for every 10 thousand children. Today, our most recent numbers are one in every 31 kids. It's probably actually much worse than that because California, which has the best collection system, is reporting one out of 19 American children as autism. One in 12.5 boys. So it's gone, from less than one in 10,000 in 1970 to one in 12.5 boys.

Trump:

Think of those numbers. So there has to be something artificially causing this, meaning a drug or something. And I know you're looking very strongly at different things, but I hope that you can come out with that as soon as possible.

This announcement is likely to be one of the most significant health announcements for parents of newborns and children in a generation, if not more. 'Big pharma' has spent decades capturing parts of the government...

... that has resulted in the vaccine schedule for children continuing to grow...

...while autism rates soar.

Related:

For parents with newborns and young children, Children's Health Defense (Notably, RFK Jr. served as chair of CHD's board from 2015 to 2023)  offers ten questions to ask your doctor or pediatrician...

Also, eat clean food:

The countdown begins to RFK Jr.'s big reveal in September of what HHS believes could be the root cause of the autism spike in children. 

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/attention-parents-rfk-jr-links-autism-certain-interventions-says-big-announcement-next

Additional reference: https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-025-01208-0

YouTube Using AI To Secretly Alter Creators' Videos Without Their Knowledge

 YouTube took the liberty to make so-called "enhancements" to videos without notifying or seeking permission from creators, according to a report.

Among the creators who had content altered was musician Rick Beato, who told the BBC that he first noticed the changes when he watched his own videos.

"I was like 'man, my hair looks strange', Beato recalled. "And the closer I looked it almost seemed like I was wearing makeup.” said Beato, whose channel does deep dives into the music industry and boasts over 5 million subscribers. "I thought, 'am just I imagining things?’"

BBC reports:

It turns out, he wasn't. In recent months, YouTube has secretly used artificial intelligence (AI) to tweak people's videos without letting them know or asking permission. Wrinkles in shirts seem more defined. Skin is sharper in some places and smoother in others. Pay close attention to ears, and you may notice them warp. These changes are small, barely visible without a side-by-side comparison. Yet some disturbed YouTubers say it gives their content a subtle and unwelcome AI-generated feeling.

There's a larger trend at play. A growing share of reality is pre-processed by AI before it reaches us. Eventually, the question won't be whether you can tell the difference, but whether it's eroding our ties to the world around us.

Beato’s colleagues, including fellow music YouTuber Rhett Shul, also noticed that his content had been tweaked by the Google-owned video platform.

"The more I looked at it, the more upset I got,” Shull said. "If I wanted this terrible over-sharpening I would have done it myself. But the bigger thing is it looks AI-generated. I think that deeply misrepresents me and what I do and my voice on the internet. It could potentially erode the trust I have with my audience in a small way. It just bothers me.”

Shull was so furious about the issue that he posted a video on the subject.

In response to the controversy, YouTube came (somewhat) clean in a post on X.

"We're running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses traditional machine learning technology to unblur, denoise and improve clarity in videos during processing (similar to what a modern smartphone does when you record a video)," admitted Rene Ritchie, who lead’s YouTube's editorial and creator liaison division. "YouTube is always working on ways to provide the best video quality and experience possible, and will continue to take creator and viewer feedback into consideration as we iterate and improve on these features."

Eh, really?

Some researchers fear that this type of technology could have widespread dystopian effects.

"You can make decisions about what you want your phone to do, and whether to turn on certain features. What we have here is a company manipulating content from leading users that is then being distributed to a public audience without the consent of the people who produce the videos,” Samuel Woolley of University of Pittsburgh said. "I think using the term 'machine learning' is an attempt to obscure the fact that they used AI because of concerns surrounding the technology. Machine learning is in fact a subfield of artificial intelligence."

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/youtube-using-ai-secretly-alter-creators-videos-without-their-knowledge

Who Abrego Garcia Really Is

 

We knew his freedom wouldn’t last. As Leah wrote yesterday, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was arrested by federal immigration agents not long after his release from jail in Tennessee. He was picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Baltimore. The so-called Maryland man is a reported human trafficker and MS-13 member and has been under a deportation order since 2019.  

He’s not a citizen, nor a constituent of Maryland’s congressional delegation, which debased itself trying to free this man, at home and abroad. You remember Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) flew down to El Salvador, where Garcia was detained, before coming back to the US to face human trafficking charges. Since some time has passed, please read this great thread from Article III Project’s Will Chamberlain, who provided a nice refresher on this guy:

 

Deport this guy already. 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2025/08/26/heres-the-perfect-thread-on-abrego-garcia-n2662323

How Hamas and its useful idiots have poisoned the narrative about Gaza

 These are dangerous days for Israel. It faces a two-pronged attack. From one flank come the radical Islamists, from the other Western intellectuals. The former are entrenched in dank tunnels in Gaza City prepping IEDs for their last stand against the Jews they so feverishly loathe. The latter are ensconced in the airless ivory towers of the West, prepping hyperbolic claims bordering on misinfo to the end of delegitimising the Jewish State they so manically oppose. One’s weapon of choice is violence, the other’s propaganda. Their aim, though, is the same: to wound, possibly fatally, the world’s only Jewish nation.

The West-Hamas alliance is undeniable now. Events of the past week have made it clear that however unwitting this unholiest of hook-ups might be, it is nonetheless real. Hamas has scurried to its tunnels in Gaza City, one of its ‘last major strongholds’, where a brigade under the command of Izz al-Din al-Haddad is planning to ‘resist’ the forthcoming IDF assault. Meanwhile, the Israelophobic influencers of the West pump out report after report on how criminal Israel is. The ante has been upped. The terrorists throw grenades, the intellectuals throw shade. They’re in league in all but name, united by a merciless antipathy for the Jewish State.

The most pressing front in Israel’s multi-flank war with its haters is in Gaza City. We should soon see a bloody showdown there between the IDF and Hamas’s surviving battalions. Benjamin Netanyahu says it will be Israel’s ‘Battle of Berlin’. The IDF is mobilising thousands of reservists. They will encounter an army of anti-Semites that has turned from a conventional fighting force into localised guerrilla units planning surprise strikes. Hamas’s threat remains largely subterranean: its Gaza City militants lurk and plot in a ‘highly developed underground’.

The coming battle for Gaza City will give the lie to the claim that Israel is carrying out a genocide. Israel has delayed its ‘Battle of Berlin’ so that civilians can flee Gaza City for safer zones – odd behaviour for a ‘uniquely murderous’ state hell-bent on ‘erasing’ the Palestinian people. The sight of Hamas’s fascistic guerrillas striking at the army of the Jewish nation will confirm this is war. War between the army of a democratic state and the army of an aspiring caliphate. The genocide libel will become unsustainable in the face of what promises to be brutal urban conflict between two parties.

Hamas will be on the back foot in this face-off, having had its ranks devastated by the IDF. But it has something in its favour: the anti-Israel hysteria of the West’s influencers. Over the past week, our elites’ crusade of criminalisation against the Jewish State has reached dizzying new heights. Israel has been found guilty in the kangaroo court of the West’s puffed-up moralists of every war crime imaginable. It has been judged the most savage nation in existence. Such shrill damnation of the Jewish State has one effect and one effect only: to inspire Hamas to continue its ruinous war in Gaza.

‘It’s definitely genocide’, the cry went up last week, following the publication of an exposé by the Guardian and others claiming that 83 per cent of the dead in Gaza are civilians. The figures come from the IDF’s own ‘intelligence database’, we were told. They show that ‘five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces’ have been civilians. This is ‘an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare’, said the Guardian. You have to look to Srebrenica or Rwanda, it said, to see similar levels of wanton destruction of human life.

The truth – as we have come to expect on everything Israel-related – is far more complicated. What the IDF database actually says is that 8,900 – around one in six – of the dead in Gaza are ‘named fighters’ from ‘Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’. There will be many other dead, it says, who are either fighters who could not be identified or fighters from other Islamist groups. Indeed, the purple-prose ‘exposé’ of the IDF’s supposed genocidal ruthlessness undercut its own claims by acknowledging that the number of fighters killed is ‘likely higher’ than 8,900 since the IDF’s database ‘does not include… operatives who were killed but could not be identified by name [or] Gazans who took part in fighting but were not officially members of Hamas or PIJ’.

Right. So it’s not true that only one in six of the dead are militants. That was a reckless and sinister misrepresentation of the facts. It’s even feasible that the number of fighters who could not be identified is higher than the number who could be: war, after all, is a messy business where establishing facts is hard. And yet the post-truth insistence that 83 per cent of the dead are civilians spread like a fire in influencer circles. ‘Barbarians’, they cried. ‘Demons’, even. The small print, the truth, was incinerated in the rush to damn Israel as genocidal.

It seems the butchery of truth is a small price to pay for that most jealously coveted goal of the West’s cultural establishment: to find Israel guilty of genocide. It’s not only numbers they’ll twist – it’s language, too. Recall when the Irish government said the International Court of Justice should broaden its definition of genocide in order that Israel might be put in the dock for its ‘collective punishment’ of Gaza. Can’t find Israel guilty of genocide? No problem, just change the meaning of genocide. Classic Orwellianism. One human-rights expert reminds us dimwits that genocide is ‘a crime that can be committed without a single person dying’. So whether Israel had killed 60,000 people or none, it could still be deemed a genocidal state. This is a species of madness.

Also last week, the IPC – the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification group linked to the UN – ruled there is famine in Gaza. No one doubts there’s huge suffering in Gaza, including deathly hunger. And yet some scepticism is warranted here, too. Israel says the IPC applied a lower ‘famine threshold’ to Gaza than it does for other countries. The IPC report also seems highly politicised: one of its contributors is an expert on international nutrition who has a track record of stinging commentary on Israel, including describing its founding in 1948 as being built on ‘the destruction of the state of Palestine by Jewish insurgents’. Could we not have some neutral analysis for once, please?

The screws are truly being turned on Israel. A sick union of anti-Semitic militants and fashionably Israelophobic Westerners has devoted itself to damning the Jewish nation as the wickedest nation. Nothing better captures the crisis of civilisation than this sinister pincer movement, this double siege of Israel by the neo-fascists on its borders and their gurning useful idiots in the cultural citadels of the West. Israel should win in Gaza City. But that other flank, the one overrun by Westerners so suspicious of our civilisation that they find greater common cause with its enemies – that will be a harder fight. And not just for Israel – for all of us.


Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now.

Exxon held secret talks with Rosneft about returning to Russia - WSJ

 Exxon Mobil (NYSE:XOM) and Rosneft, Russia's largest state energy company, have held secret talks about resuming work on the massive Sakhalin project in the Russian Far East if governments approve it as part of a Ukraine peace deal, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Only a few people at Exxon (NYSE:XOM) knew about the talks; one of the company's top executives, Senior VP Neil Chapman, led the talks on the Exxon side, meeting Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin - a close ally of President Putin - in the Qatari capital Doha, according to the report.

The first round of negotiations reportedly took place shortly after Exxon's (NYSE:XOM) exit from Russia in 2022.

WSJ also reported that Exxon (XOM) executives received a sympathetic hearing when they asked for U.S. government support if the company returns to Russia, according to a senior administration official, and CEO Darren Woods discussed Exxon's possible return with President Trump at the White House in recent weeks.

The Sakhalin-1 project was one of Exxon's (XOM) biggest investments, operating the venture and owning 30% alongside Rosneft as well as Japanese and Indian companies, which are still working at the site.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/exxon-held-secret-talks-with-rosneft-about-returning-to-russia-wsj/ar-AA1LgO17

Scottish Girl, 14, Arrested For Using Knife And Axe To Ward Off Migrant Stalker

 The systematic and engineered destruction of Europe through "multicultural" invasion is heartbreaking to watch.  It is clear, beyond any doubt, that this program spearheaded by progressive politicians (and fake conservative politicians) is designed to crush the spirits of predominantly white, native born citizens still retaining a sense of national pride and cultural heritage.  That is to say, they have become the targets of a government funded terror campaign to subjugate the west.

Starting around 2014, millions of third world migrants have been allowed to flood into Europe's borders, often encouraged by globalist NGOs, the UN and leftist political leaders within the host countries.  The effects of this decade long campaign have been devastating. 

Violent crime has skyrocketed and migrant "grooming gangs" have spread, targeting underage girls for sexual exploitation.  Rape has become a common problem, which local governments have chosen to ignore.

Just this week an American man visiting Dresden, Germany was stabbed in the face while bravely preventing two migrants from assaulting a pair of women on a tram.  One of the man's attacker, a Syrian refugee, was arrested by police and then immediately released by prosecutors back onto the streets.

And so the story is repeated, over and over again.  European elites invite third world migrants, largely military age men, into their borders in the name of progressive multiculturalism.  The migrants then attack the native population because their culture tells them Europeans are cattle to be farmed.  Whenever a European dares to speak up or defend themselves, they are slapped down by officials or arrested.  The population slowly becomes apathetic, passive and easier to control because they have no recourse but silence.

At bottom, the migrants are merely an ugly symptom of a bigger disease; the source of the problem is the political oligarchy that is facilitating the multicultural agenda.

Yet another example occurred in Scotland this week with the arrest of a 14-year-old girl who went viral on social media after defending another girl from a migrant man stalking them on video.  The teen can be seen pulling out a kitchen knife and a hatchet and screaming at the man to leave them alone. 

She warns the migrant man "Don't touch my sister, she's fucking 12..." 

Now, that same girl has reportedly been arrested by Scottish authorities for "brandishing a bladed weapon".  It is illegal in the UK to carry almost any self defense tool and knives over three inches are banned from personal carry.  These laws never seem to apply to migrants, of course, leaving native law abiding citizens helpless against armed attackers. 

UK media coverage conveniently leaves out any mention of the migrant man when reporting on the arrest.  Details of the arrest are thin and the incident raises many question. The apparent mother of one of the teens present at the scene claims that the man and another woman were sexually propositioning a young girl when she intervened.  The migrants then allegedly attacked her and that is when the weapons came out. 

It's clear from the footage that the migrant was following the girls, filming them and refusing to leave when they ask him to go away.  It's hard to come up with a justification for his behavior, but we're sure the UK media will find a way.  The fact that the migrant man was willing to film the altercation suggests he believes he is protected while the girls are not.  He may be right.  

If the man had been white and Scottish, the teen would likely have been held up as a hero.  Instead, she faces prosecution.  And this is how you know mass immigration is a malicious agenda, not a sincere humanitarian effort.

The migrant issue is only becoming worse, even as European citizens become more aware and more vocal.  In the Netherlands, a 17-year-old Dutch girl was recently assaulted and murdered by a 22-year-old "asylum seeker" while walking the streets of Amsterdam.  She was followed and then stabbed to death while trying to call police.

The Dutch media proceeded to cover up the event by turning it into a story on "male violence against women" instead of what it really was, a story about migrant violence against European women.

Consider for a moment what might have happened to those Scottish girls had one of them not been armed.  The fact that a child felt the need to carry a knife and a hatchet just to walk around her neighborhood is a testament to the downfall of the UK and the rest of Europe.  The fact that she has been arrested for warding off a migrant man, a man who refused to leave her alone and who should never have been allowed into the country to begin with, is a testament to the corruption at the heart of European decay. 

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/scottish-girl-arrested-using-knife-and-axe-ward-migrant-stalker