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SummaryChildren are prime recruits for cartels seeking loyal - and enthusiastic - recruits Reuters interviewed 16 current and past child recruits Most came from homes wrecked by violence and drugs MEXICO CITY, May 28 (Reuters) - Sol remembers her first kill for a Mexican cartel: a kidnapping she committed with a handful of other young recruits that twisted into torture and bled into murder. She was 12 years old. Sol had joined the drug cartel a few months earlier, recruited by someone she knew as she sold roses on the sidewalk outside a local bar. She started as a lookout,...

Since taking office, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has taken a series of actions to push back against growing foreign government demands to censor American citizens and American technology companies like Google, Meta, and X. In April, Rubio shut down the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which had funded censorship advocacy by the Global Disinformation Index, a UK-based NGO with ties to the Intelligence Community. Last week, Rubio said the administration was considering sanctions under the Magnitsky Act against Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes for his sweeping censorship edicts. And on Monday, senior State Department officials...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump wants the world to know he’s no “chicken” just because he’s repeatedly backed off high tariff threats.The U.S. Republican president’s tendency to levy extremely high import taxes and then retreat has created what’s known as the “TACO” trade, an acronym coined by The Financial Times’ Robert Armstrong that stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” Markets generally sell off when Trump makes his tariff threats and then recover after he backs down.Trump was visibly offended when asked about the phrase Wednesday and rejected the idea that he’s “chickening out,” saying that the reporter’s inquiry was...

Canadians should prepare for a steep decline in living standards over the next five years, warns a new federal report that forecasts a grim future for the country's middle class. Blacklock's Reporter says the report, compiled by the Privy Council’s think tank Policy Horizons Canada, paints a picture of widespread financial insecurity, eroded trust in institutions, and looming mental health challenges tied to economic despair. “Downward social mobility is the norm,” stated Disruptions On The Horizon, which placed the collapse of the middle class among the top 10 most probable national disruptions in the near future. The report, dated 2024...

BASIC CONVERSATIONInstead of: "Hi there. What are your pronouns?" "Nice to meet you. Read any good female novelists lately?" "Good morning. Are you ready to combat fascism?" "Good afternoon. May I have consent to shake your hand?" "Crazy weather we've been having. Climate change is an existential threat to humanity." "Don't call me ma'am. It reeks of patriarchy."Please try: "Hi, how are you?" "Nice to meet you. Where are you from?" "What do you like to do in your spare time?"Overcorrection (do not try): "Sup, bro? What do you like more—tits or sluts?" "Wanna meet up later and do some...

SEATTLE — Some tense moments at the King County Jail Monday. This, as protesters arrested over the weekend appeared before a judge. Nearly two dozen people were arrested Saturday at Cal Anderson Park in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. That’s when a rally by a Christian pro-family group turned violent. Now Mayday USA is planning a rally of its own Tuesday, to call for Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell to resign. KIRO 7 has been pushing to get a response from the mayor. He finally responded late Monday. Just before 5 o’clock this afternoon, a spokesman for Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell released...

Washington’s Reagan National Airport (DCA) has announced its celebration of 50 Years of Pride amid recent safety concerns following a deadly crash and other incidents. In the wake of a fatal January crash that killed 67 people and multiple collisions and other incidents, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) and DCA both made an announcement to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Pride in Washington, D.C. “Join the momentous celebrations as the nation’s capital is painted with pride, featuring a variety of events to inspire, empower and connect the international LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning) community and their allies,” the...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has proposed a trilateral meeting between himself, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Russian President Vladimir Putin to break the deadlock on ending Moscow's invasion. Fighting continues between Russia and Ukraine, and Trump has expressed increasing frustration with the lack of progress towards peace, threatening to walk away from brokering the process entirely if he does not see a deal ahead. "We are ready to meet at the level of leaders. Both the American side knows this, and the Russian side knows this," Zelensky said on Tuesday, ahead of his visit to Germany on Wednesday. Zelensky said...

French President Emmanuel Macron slap memes just broke the internet😂 A combined collection of the 25 funniest memes in one thread 🧵

You don’t get to pick a fight and then blame the person trying to peacefully resolve it. The American foreign policy establishment that brought us the war in Ukraine now claims that it is Donald Trump’s war. We’ve seen this movie before. When the war in Vietnam became unpopular and seemingly unwinnable, the “best and the brightest” of the Kennedy–Johnson administration that escalated America’s involvement in the war, and their supporters among the foreign policy establishment, called it “Nixon’s war” when the new president took office in 1969. Now, neoconservative writer Hal Brands, a member in good standing with the...

President Donald Trump plans to commute the sentence of a notorious Chicago gang leader, his attorney said. Attorney Jennifer Bonjean confirmed to ABC7 Wednesday that her client, Gangster Disciples founder Larry Hoover, is being granted clemency by the president.

In Seattle last weekend, violence broke out—not from the pulpit, but from the pavement.Pastors and churchgoers, gathered for a permitted worship event in a city park, found themselves besieged by a black-clad mob who attempted to tear down fencing, rush the stage, and shout them down.The attackers were not counter-protesters in any constitutional sense of the word. They were masked militants whose tactics have become a hallmark of Antifa: organized, aggressive, and aimed not at persuasion but suppression.To their credit, the Seattle police intervened. Arrests were made. Barricades held. For a moment, law reasserted itself in a city too long...

This is not my war,” stated President Donald Trump emphatically to a dubious—nay, hostile—White House Press Corps when asked about the potential outcome of negotiations with Russia over ending the Ukraine War. Whether those in the corporate press fully grasped what the 47th president was saying is another matter. Without stating it plainly, the president was essentially acknowledging that he had no real leverage over Russia to get them to end the war. So, rather than needlessly drag out this hopeless conflict (for the NATO side of the proxy war with Russia), where 5,000 young men die every week, Trump...

Announcement follows Elon Musk's criticism of the "One Big, Beautiful Bill."On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) outlined two actions the House will take based on findings from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, led by Elon Musk. The announcement followed Musk’s statement that the current version of President Donald Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” narrowly passed by the House last week, “undermines” the DOGE initiative’s cost-cutting efforts because it risks further increasing the federal deficit, which has already surpassed $1 trillion in recent years. Musk and the DOGE “team have done INCREDIBLE work exposing waste, fraud, and abuse...

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker is parlaying his marathon 25-hour speech from the Senate floor last month into a new book set to be published in November, sparking widespread mockery online. Booker’s “filibuster” oration — appropriately made on April Fool’s Day — was the longest continuous speech ever given on the floor of the upper chamber, eclipsing a record set by late South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond in 1957. Now, less than two months later, St. Martin’s Press will be publishing the book “Stand,” intended as a companion piece to the Senate floor bloviation. “This book is about the...

The lives of untold thousands have been lost or permanently diminished.It is an undeniable scandal of mammoth proportions, but one that is – surprise, surprise – still being ignored by major media. It all began in February of 2021, shortly after Joe Biden took the oath of office with the pandemic still raging. Health officials in Israel sent a dire warning to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) detailing “large reports of myocarditis, particularly in young people” who received the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Many doctors and vaccinated individuals witnessed the same phenomenon here in the US. The affliction strikes...

The Trump administration has told US companies that offer software used to design semiconductors to stop selling their services to Chinese groups, in the latest attempt to make it harder for China to develop advanced chips. Several people familiar with the move said the US Department of Commerce had told so-called electronic design automation groups — which include Cadence, Synopsys and Siemens EDA — to stop supplying their technology to China.

An energy watchdog group wants to know whether eight of President Joe Biden’s far-left executive orders related to energy were signed by autopen.Power the Future argues that Biden never mentioned the orders publicly, which raises the corollary question of whether the mentally addled president even knew about them, and whether his radical underlings wrote and signed them.The questions are important because of the autopen scandal that surfaced in March. It raised the question of whether autopenned orders — including presidential pardons — are valid.Power The Future’s also invites a look at House Speaker Mike Johnson’s claim that Biden didn’t know...

Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY) said Wednesday on CNN’s “News Central” that President Donald Trump was trying to destroy the “fabric of America” so he could be a king. Meeks said, “This is about retribution. This is about individuals as we’ve seen again and again, universities, law firms, any individual that Trump perceives to be his enemy, it’s about retribution. It’s about him wanting to be a king. This is a danger and a violation of the Constitution of the United States of America, which does give individuals the freedom of speech and the freedom of standing up and educating individuals...

“Unless those journals change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing in them and we’re going to create our own journals in-house,” HHS Secretary Kennedy said. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr is threatening to prevent National Institutes of Health scientists from publishing in some major medical journals because they are "corrupt."Kennedy said Tuesday on the “Ultimate Human” podcast that three of the most influential medical journals in the world – the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Lancet – are “corrupt” becaus they publish studies funded...