Breitbart: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said in a statement Wednesday that President Joe Biden’s move to enact amnesty would protect illegal immigrants at the “expense” of “American jobs and workers.”
“It is deeply troubling that most of Joe Biden’s first acts as president were to protect illegal immigrants and encourage illegal immigration at the expense of American jobs and workers,” Cruz said after Biden announced plans to pass legislation that would provide amnesty for illegal immigrants that arrived before January 1, 2021.
Not only has he chosen to halt construction of a wall on America’s southern border and to continue [former President] Barack Obama’s illegal executive amnesty by preserving the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, but he is promoting open-borders legislation that would gift citizenship to over 11 million illegal immigrants, roll back immigration enforcement, and promote and increase foreign labor at a time when many Americans desperately need work.”
“These actions illustrate that today’s Democratic Party puts people here illegally — or attempting to come here illegally — before American workers,” Cruz emphasized. Read More
Breitbart: Twitter repeatedly told the victim of child sexual abuse that a video of his ordeal circulating on the platform didn’t violate the platform’s policies, according to a lawsuit filed on the victim’s behalf by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
The victim, anonymized in the lawsuit as John Doe, alleges that Twitter allowed the video of his abuse — filmed when he was 13 years old — to accumulate hundreds of thousands of views.
According to the lawsuit, Twitter only eventually complied after an agent from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) got involved with the case.
By that time, according to the allegations, the video had already accumulated over 165,000 views on the platform.
The lawsuit further states that Twitter knowingly allows pedophiles to use the platform to exchange material depicting child sex abuse, and profits from their activity, which includes use of the ads system. The lawsuit also alleges that Twitter made money from the video of the victim’s abuse. Read More
Lexology: Research in blockchain technology continues to expand with Chinese companies dominating the number of patents filed for applications in 2020.
Blockchain technology has been used in financial technology, the Internet of Things (IoT), digital property, domain name registry, and supply chain management.
Chinese Companies Lead Blockchain Patent Filings for 2020
In a bid to increase development in the blockchain industry, Chinese President Xi Jinping encouraged Chinese companies to intensify their blockchain-related projects. Blockchain research can require establishment of funding programs that can help small companies pursue promising projects, and local companies in China that cannot finance their own research on blockchain can tap into a $1.6-billion fund available for startups. The Xiong’An Global Blockchain Innovation Fund is partly funded by the city of Hangzhou. Innovators that want to avail of the funding can also set-up their businesses in the Blockchain Industry Park in Hangzhou.
The President’s endorsement, as well as the availability of public funds for blockchain-related projects, has been productive as it resulted in an increase in the filing of blockchain patents by Chinese companies in 2020. Read More
Israel Hayom: After a few consecutive days of over 10,000 positive COVID tests, the Health Ministry reported Thursday morning that 8,174 people had tested positive for the virus on Wednesday. Of the 93,283 tests processed in that 24-hour period, 9% came back positive, the ministry said.
In slightly more encouraging news, a report prepared by the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate said that Israel’s rate of coronavirus contagion, the number of people infected by a single confirmed carrier, has dropped below 1 for the first time in some two months, a factor that could signal that the latest outbreak of coronavirus is being checked.
Since midnight between Wednesday and Thursday, 14,620 COVID tests were process, resulting in the identification of 984 new carriers, or a positive rate of 6.7% (compared to the total 9% of all tests processed Wednesday).
As of Thursday morning there were 82,401 active of symptomatic COVID patients in Israel, 1,901 of who were hospitalized. Of the hospitalized patients, 1,132 were listed in serious condition. A total of 367 hospitalized patients were listed in critical condition, and 317 were on ventilators.
The virus or complications from the virus have killed 4,179 Israelis since the pandemic reached the country in early 2020, including 21 who succumbed on Wednesday. Read More
Breitbart: President-Elect Joe Biden’s promise to embrace transgender ideology will likely include supporting biological men who say their gender identity is female to compete in sports against biological women.
Attorneys representing transgender athletes and women athletes expect Biden’s Department of Education to reverse course in two lawsuits in Idaho and Connecticut that the Trump administration had backed to protect women’s rights.
The Associated Press (AP) reported on the ongoing legal battles:
Transgender athletes are getting an ally in the White House next week as they seek to participate as their identified gender in high school and college sports — although state legislatures, Congress and the courts are all expected to have their say this year, too.
Debate is also expected in statehouses. Last year, bills to restrict transgender athletes’ participation to their gender assigned at birth were brought up in 17 states, although only one, Idaho’s, became law.
It may ultimately fall to Congress to clarify once and for all whether Title IX, the civil rights law that guarantees equal opportunities for women and girls in education, protects or bars the participation of transgender females in women’s sports, said Elizabeth Sharrow, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts. Read More
One month ago, we said that the beginning of the end of the covid pandemic would mysteriously coincide with the Biden inauguration, and sure enough that’s precisely what has just happened. As BofA’s Ethan Harris writes overnight in his daily COVID news wrap, “with COVID cases falling and vaccines accelerating, this is probably the beginning of the end of the COVID crisis”, echoing similar notes from a variety of other banks published today.
What has sparked BofA’s optimism? Harris explains:
Renewed restrictions and the end to the holiday season seem to be bending the cases curve.
The vaccine rollout should continue to accelerate as new resources and effort is put into the project.
There is one major caveat: new more contagious strains have arrived in the US. Bending the curve
The BofA economist then argues this point with his chart of the day, which shows that the US is now clearly over the hump, with 142,000 COVID cases in the US on Monday, down 32% from the prior Monday.... the seven day average has also dropped, to 209,000, down 16% from the peak on January 8th. In another good sign, Harris notes that “testing is increasing and the share of tests that come back positive is falling” and cheerfully adds that “It seems clear that an end to the holiday season, a modest increase in restrictions and a small increase in herd immunity is bending the COVID curve.” Read More
Jewish Press: It appears that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is already preparing for a confrontation with the new US president over the Iran nuclear deal, seeing as on Joe Biden’s inauguration day the PM has leaked an aggressive message to the media on the subject.
President Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki on Wednesday held her first exchange with White House reporters and revealed that President Joe Biden wants the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) back – probably not the Obama version, but the deal is will be resurrected.
“The president has made clear that he believes that through diplomacy, the United States should seek to lengthen and strengthen nuclear constraints on Iran and address other issues of concern,” Psaki said. “Iran must resume compliance with significant nuclear constraints under the deal in order for that to proceed.”
Psaki added regarding Biden’s interest in restarting the talks this early in his presidency: “We would expect that some of his earlier conversations with foreign counterparts and foreign leaders will be with partners and allies and you would certainly anticipate that this would be part of the discussions.”
Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Senate that before the US restarts talks with Iran on the nuclear agreement, it would consult with Israel. “It’s also vitally important that we engage on the takeoff and not the landing with our allies and with our partners in the region to include Israel and to include the Gulf countries,” Blinken said. Read More
PJ Media: At noon, Joe Biden took the Oath of Office and became the 46th president of the United States.
Biden has promised to be a “president for all Americans” and a uniter, attempting to heal America’s divisions. Yet his policies do not reflect this uniting rhetoric. Biden has staked out radical positions on a host of issues, most notably transgender identity and abortion.
Biden has pledged to spend his first day in office signing executive orders that will erase much of former President Donald Trump’s legacy. The new president has pledged to stop the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and increase regulations on oil and gas, weakening America’s energy production and energy independence. He has suggested a return to the disastrous Iran nuclear deal. Biden also intends to raise taxes and increase federal spending.
In a petty move, Biden will rename Operation Warp Speed, a key Trump accomplishment, which rushed the production of COVID-19 vaccines in record time. The new president will not reject the vaccines produced thanks to Trump’s effort, but he will attack the former president’s legacy in this fashion.
While Biden spent decades in the Senate upholding the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits direct federal funding for abortion, he reversed course in the 2020 primary and pledged to strike the amendment. Biden has also supported the Equality Act, radical pro-LGBT legislation that would weaken religious freedom protections and force transgender ideology. This week, Biden also announced he would nominate a man who identifies as a woman to a key health position.
Perhaps most troublingly, Joe Biden has not sufficiently responded to claims from Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of Biden’s son Hunter, that Joe Biden was personally involved in lucrative business deals Hunter Biden made with the Chinese Communist Party and state-owned Chinese businesses. Thanks in part to the legacy media ignoring the story and Big Tech companies effectively burying it, Biden succeeded in winning the presidency without having to definitively explain these claims.
The president also refused to rule out packing the Supreme Court while running for office.
The president may also use a budding new War on Terror to target conservatives in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. Vice President Kamala Harris has long relied on the far-left smear factory the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to demonize conservatives by listing them along with the Ku Klux Klan, and Biden has called for an SPLC-style terror watchlist to ostensibly protect transgender people. Read More
For higher-profile remarks, [Biden would] obsessively rehearse portions until he committed them to memory. And at times through the various iterations of outlining remarks, Biden could grow downright ornery.
“I would never say this,” Biden once snapped at an aide, aghast over the prepared remarks he was reviewing, according to a person in the room during a speech prep session last year. “Where did you get this from?’”
The aide explained that Biden had just said it in a public speech a couple of weeks earlier.
