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Last month, President Trump singled out Georgia activist Stacey Abrams as someone who helped orchestrate a controversial $2 billion deal between left-wing nonprofit groups and the Environmental Protection Agency during the Biden administration.

“We know she’s involved,” Trump told Congress.

He was right. But after his statement, the Washington media went into overdrive to pooh-pooh her role in a frenzy of “fact-checking.”

The Washington Post, for one, claimed Abrams’ role in the Biden massive green-energy initiative has been “vastly overblown” by President Trump and the “right-wing media.”

The paper’s top fact-checker asserted it’s “a stretch” to suggest the Democratic politician helped land the grant. “[S]he was not involved with Power Forward’s EPA grant,” Post reporter Glenn Kessler recently wrote.

The Post also denied she had “any role at Power Forward Communities beyond advising Rewiring America,” one of the partners in the coalition.

This claim was echoed by PolitiFact, a fact-checking site run by the liberal Poynter Institute, which quoted an Abrams spokesperson as saying, “Abrams did not have a role at Power Forward Communities beyond her position at Rewiring America.”

But in fact, Abrams and her partner Ari Matusiak, CEO of Rewiring America, were the driving force behind winning the massive grant, something they revealed in their own words during a podcast last year. Matusiak said she helped “put together” the Power Forward Communities coalition to apply for and win the $2 billion grant.

By his own account, Matusiak also helped draft the 2022 Biden legislation that created the $27 billion green fund that Rewiring and its coalition were able to tap into two years later.

PolitiFact also claimed Abrams is no longer working for Rewiring, but Abrams’ own website said she is still working with the nonprofit.

“Stacey serves as a senior adviser and consultant for Rewiring America,” her site states.

Abrams and Matusiak did not respond to requests for comment.

A timeline drawn from public records, however, sheds light on how their histories dovetailed to secure the multi-billion dollar grant from the Biden administration:

2021-2022: Matusiak, a former special assistant to President Obama, joins Rewiring America, and the group meets with Biden officials and Democratic lawmakers to help craft many of the provisions that ended up in the climate bill – the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA). The bill, which President Biden would sign the following year, creates the unprecedented funding vehicle for green groups like Rewiring. “The Inflation Reduction Act was something that we were really involved with in shaping,” Rewiring CEO Matusiak said last year. “We were very involved in shaping that.”

Democratic U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, a big proponent of the IRA, recently confirmed, “An enormous amount of the work that Rewiring America did ended up in the climate bill.”

A search of federal lobby records turned up no record of Matusiak or Rewiring America as registered lobbyists.

August 2022: Biden signs the Inflation Reduction Act, which creates the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that would later benefit Rewiring.

September 2022: Matusiak and other Rewiring America officials travel to the White House to meet with Biden and celebrate the bill’s passage on the White House lawn.

November 2022: White House announces Washington-based Rewiring America will lead a coalition to educate low-income households about the Inflation Reduction Act rebates and tax credits to electrify “everything” in homes and businesses, effectively banning more cost-efficient natural gas.

Circa January 2023: Rewiring America, which uses a Washington, D.C., mom-and-pop shipping and mailing service as its business address, starts recruiting members of the board and key hires to support its electrification mission. It formally incorporates and begins the “transition” process from its fiscal sponsor, Windward Fund, a nonprofit managed by the liberal “dark money” group Arabella Advisors that provided at least $4.5 million in startup capital for Rewiring, according to tax filing

March 2023: After Biden officials “introduced” Rewiring to Abrams, Rewiring hires  Abrams as senior counsel to help pitch the federal project and educate communities of color about the green financial incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Summer 2023: Abrams and Rewiring CEO Matusiak “put together a coalition to apply for grants from Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund,” according to Matusiak, who is also listed as “founder and co-chair of Power Forward Communities.”

July 2023: EPA formally opens the opportunity for groups to apply for the billions in funding offered through the Inflation Reduction Act.

October 2023: Rewiring America announces it is partnering with Enterprise Community Partners, Local Initiatives Support Corporation, United Way , and Habitat for Humanity to form a coalition – Power Forward Communities – to apply for $9.5 billion from the IRA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund for household decarbonization and electrification.

On its website, which is run by Rewiring, Power Forward Communities lists two nonprofits founded by Abrams – Fair Count and Southern Economic Advancement Project – as some of its “partners” in helping implement its EPA-backed project.  

October 2023: Abrams tweets that she is “thrilled to be part of @rewiringamerica and the Power Forward Communities coalition.”

December 2023: White House hosts an “Electrification Summit” with Rewiring America and other green community organizers to discuss how the Inflation Reduction Act created an “electric bank account” of $10,600 on average per household “to help people electrify their homes.”

Circa 2023: Rewiring pressures the U.S. Energy Information Administration to change its methodology for measuring efficiency to show the cost of heating homes with electricity is on par with that of natural gas.

Note from WND News Center Editor-in-Chief David Kupelian: When I first read “Letter to the American Church” by Eric Metaxas, I immediately purchased three additional copies and gave them all away to various pastors and church elders I knew. The author, having become an expert on Nazi Germany by virtue of researching and writing the No. 1 New York Times bestselling biography, “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy,” was convicted by the realization that today’s Christian church in America bears a chilling resemblance that of Germany during the 1930s.

In a nutshell, in the face of ever-increasing evil slowly increasing all around them as Hitler and Nazism steadily rose, the vast majority of German churches and pastors chose to do nothing to oppose what they saw, choosing instead to “stay in their lane,” to worship and preach the Gospel, to avoid “politics” in favor of evangelism, to keep themselves “unstained” by the messy “worldly” affairs of government and culture.

The clear lens of history proves how catastrophic was this attitude of most German churches of that time. Yet today’s American churches and pastors are, with a few notable exceptions, following in the German churches’ disastrous footsteps. To sound a loud and clarion warning to today’s American church, Metaxas wrote “Letter to the American Church,” the introduction to which is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Metaxas’ other books, all bestsellers, have included “Is Atheism Dead?,” “Martin Luther,” “Amazing Grace,” and most recently, “Religionless Christianity: God’s Answer to Evil.” He is the host of “Socrates in the City” and the nationally syndicated “Eric Metaxas Radio Show.”

Regarding “Letter to the American Church,” Erwin W. Lutzer, pastor emeritus of the famed Moody Church in Chicago, had this to say: “This book is like a bucket of cold water thrown into the face of a sleeping church.”

I have written this book because I am convinced the American Church is at an impossibly – and almost unbearably – important inflection point. The parallels to where the German Church was in the 1930s are unavoidable and grim. So the only question – and what concerns us in this slim volume – is whether we might understand those parallels, and thereby avoid the fatal mistakes the German Church made during that time, and their superlatively catastrophic results. If we do not, I am convinced we will reap a whirlwind greater even than the one they did.

The German Church of the 1930s was silent in the face of evil; but can there be any question whether the American Church of our own time is guilty of the same silence? Because of this, I am compelled to speak out, and to say what – only by God’s grace – I might say to make plain where we find ourselves at this moment, at our own unavoidably crucial crossroads in history.

It is for good or for ill that America plays an inescapably central role in the world. If you have not read Alexis de Tocqueville on this subject, you likely nonetheless understand that the extent to which that central role has been used for good and for God’s purposes has had everything to do with our churches, or with the American Church, as we may call her. So if America is in any way exceptional, it has nothing to do with the blood that runs through American veins and everything to do with the blood shed for us on Calvary, and the extent to which we have acknowledged this. America has led the world in making religious liberty paramount, knowing that it is only with a deep regard for it that we may speak of liberty at all. It was this that made Tocqueville marvel most: that while in other nations – and especially in his own nation of France – the Church was adamantly opposed to the idea of political liberty, in America it was the churches that helped encourage, create, and sustain a culture of liberty.

Because of the outsized role America plays in the world today, the importance of whether we learn the lesson of what happened to the German Church ninety years ago cannot be overstated. Though it may be a gruesome thing to consider, the monstrous evil that befell the civilized world precisely because of the German Church’s failure is likely a mere foretaste of what will befall the world if the American Church fails in a similar way at this hour.

And at present we are indeed failing.

We should underscore the idea that the centrality of our nation in the world does not mean that we are intrinsically exceptional, but rather that God has sovereignly chosen us to hold the torch of liberty for all the world, and that the Church is central to our doing this. So the idea that He has charged us with this most solemn duty should make us tremble. Nonetheless, we must carry out that duty in a way that is the opposite of prideful and that is meant to be an invitation to all beyond our shores. If we should aspire – in the words of Jesus as quoted by John Winthrop – to be a “shining city on a hill,” the idea is that we should exist and shine for the sake of others and not for ourselves alone. President Abraham Lincoln said that we in America were God’s “almost chosen people,” and acknowledged that this placed upon us an almost unbearable burden. It is certain from the Scriptures and from our experience over the centuries that apart from God we can do nothing. So if God has chosen us for some task, we must do all we can to shoulder that task, and must know more than anything that unless we lean on Him and acknowledge Him in all our ways, we are guaranteed to fail.

We must also remind ourselves that when God chooses anyone – whether the nation of Israel or a single person – to perform any role or any task, it is never something to be celebrated, as though the one chosen has won a contest. Quite to the contrary: It is a grave and fearsome responsibility. So if the Lord has chosen America and the American Church to stand against the evils and deceptions of this present darkness, we had better be sure we understand what is required of us, and had better make sure we do all that is possible to fulfill our charge.

Throughout this book I will touch on some of the issues we are facing, but let us here say that it is something almost unprecedented: the emergence of ideas and forces that ultimately are at war with God Himself. It’s easy to see this with regard to Germany in the 1930s, when we think of the death camps and the murder of so many millions, but we need to understand that in the beginning they had no idea where it was leading, and had no idea they were facing nothing less than the forces of anti-Christ. We are now facing those same forces in different guises. But the extent of it is even worse than it was ninety years ago, because those forces do not have an agenda that is hyper-nationalistic, as in Germany, but that is actually anti-nationalistic – which is to say that it is globalist.

These ideas seem to have emerged lately, but they have been growing quietly in our midst and we have not taken them seriously enough. Many have been fooled into thinking them essentially harmless.

We are today like the proverbial frog in the saucepan, simmering along and never realizing that unless we see our situation and leap out now, we are very soon to be cooked and beyond all leaping. The ideas and forces we face have an atheistic Marxist ideology in common, although it never declares itself as such. It knows that doing this would wake many people up who are still asleep, and that would ruin everything.

But what we must dare to see is that these many ideas share a bitter taproot that leads all the way down to Hell. Critical Race Theory – which is atheistic and Marxist – and radical transgender and pro-abortion ideologies are all inescapably anti-God and anti-human. So they are dedicatedly at war with the ideas of family and marriage, and with the idea of America as a force for good – as a force for spreading the Gospel and Gospel values throughout the world. These ideas have over many decades infiltrated our own culture in such a way that they touch everything, and part of what makes them so wicked is that they smilingly pretend to share the biblical values that champion the underdog against the oppressor. As Stalin and Hitler and Mao would butcher millions in the name of fighting for “the people,” so these forces do the same and are angling to do much, much more of the same – if we will allow them the time to strengthen themselves, if we do not fight with all our might and main against them right now.

One of the principal ways in which they have gained strength is in persuading so many in the American Church that to fight them is to abandon the “Gospel” for pure culture warring or for politics. This is not just nonsense, but is a supremely deceptive and satanic lie, designed only to silence those who would genuinely speak for truth.

So those who behave as though there is really nothing to worry about, who seem to think – as such prominent pastors as Andy Stanley and others do – that we ought to assiduously avoid fighting these threats and be “apolitical” are tragically mistaken, are burying their heads in the sand and exhorting others to do the same. Or to put it another way, they are in their churches singing more and more loudly to drown out the cries of those in the boxcars heading to their gruesome deaths. Sing with us, they say, and don’t worry about all of those other issues out there. They don’t concern us. Our job is to focus on God, and to pretend that we can do so without fighting for those He loves, whose lives and futures are being destroyed.

So to restate our situation, this is not a task or duty we in the American Church have asked for. Nonetheless, just as the German Church had a painfully important task and did not rise to that occasion to perform it, so we have a painfully important task, whether we have asked for it or not. God calls us to do something, but the choice whether we do it is entirely ours. Because we are made in God’s image, we are perfectly free, and therefore cannot be compelled to do what is right. It is a chilling prospect, especially in light of the failure of the German Church.

If anyone would feel that believing God has chosen the American Church for such a vital role somehow smacks of an egotistical nationalism, they have already bought into the Marxist and globalist lie that America is nothing special – or is probably a force for evil at this point. In any case, they miss the point and have only leapt away from one ditch to fall headlong into another. It is a fact that God in His sovereignty chose the German Church to stand against the evils of its day, but it shrank from acknowledging this and from standing. Germany has been living with the deep shame over it unto this day. So for the American Church to say that God has not chosen us is as bad as saying He must choose us because we deserve to be chosen. Both stances are equally guilty of the sin of pride. It is far easier to ignore God’s call than to acknowledge it and rise to fulfill it, but it is more difficult and painful than anything to live with the results of ignoring God’s call. Let the reader understand.

Eric Metaxas’ “Letter to the American Church” is available here.

Watch WorldNetDaily’s recent interview with Eric Metaxas on The Elizabeth Farah Show.

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George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said on Fox News Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s real estate background gave him a strategic mindset as he faces off against a growing number of federal judges ruling against his administration.

Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration likely committed criminal contempt by deporting alleged gang members in violation of a court order. During an appearance on “Special Report with Bret Baier,” Turley said that on the legal front the Trump administration is likely to win some of the ongoing cases, despite early setbacks at the district court level.

“These are district court judges that actually have been reversed in some cases on appeal. He’s [Trump’s] going to lose some as well. But that’s something of the signature of Trump. I think he really learned that in real estate. He’s sort of a maximalist. He asks for the maximum possible authority, and he often settles for something less than that,” Turley said. “We have a court system that’s designed to make those decisions. Now will they hear all these cases? No. But I think the court is trying to send a message to these lower courts.”

Turley also reacted to a slew of federal rulings that temporarily blocked the Trump administration policies.

WATCH:

“It’s extremely unlikely that Garcia will ever be back in this country. And all of these Democratic senators going down to El Salvador are about as significant as sending the Rockettes to El Salvador,” Turley said. “It’s not going to have any legal or even political significance for that case. For these other cases you mentioned, I think the administration is going to prevail on a number of those.”

Turley then addressed the looming threat of criminal contempt against the administration and said the conflict could fall into dangerous constitutional territory.

“It could create a very difficult conflict because the [U.S.] Marshals may be called upon to carry out those orders, and the marshals should. The administration should not interfere with them, even though they could do so with their authority,” Turley said when Baier asked what would happen if the Justice Department refuses to prosecute a potential criminal contempt charge against the Trump administration for defying a judge’s deportation order.

Turley added that while criminal contempt sanctions are rare, the implications are serious.

“It would go on appeal, and these types of sanctions are rare, and they have not done well on appeal. The Supreme Court does not look kindly upon the use of criminal contempt and these types of issues,” Turley said. “These are messy cases, and I’ve got to tell you, the Court has indicated it desperately wants this cup to pass from its lips, but it’s going to have to take a long and hard drink because all of these cases are careening towards the Supreme Court.”

The Supreme Court overturned Boasberg’s orders blocking the administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged gang members, ruling the case was improperly filed in Washington, D.C. Boasberg, however, said that the Supreme Court’s decision “does not excuse” the administration’s earlier violations of his temporary restraining order.

To avoid contempt, Boasberg said the administration must take custody of those removed and allow them to challenge deportation through habeas proceedings. He gave officials until April 23 to file a declaration detailing those efforts—or, failing that, to name who authorized the removals.

The Trump administration told the court Monday it isn’t obligated to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an alleged MS-13 member deported to El Salvador. The Supreme Court ruled the government must “facilitate” his release and instructed the lower court to clarify its order.

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An active shooter has been reported on the Florida State University campus in Tallahassee Thursday, the school said in an alert.

“Police are on scene or on the way. Continue to seek shelter and await further instructions,” the alert said. The university also cautioned students to lock and stay away from all doors and windows.

Police responded to an active shooter call from the area of the Student Union around 12:01 p.m., FSU said.

A star academic behind an influential but unsound study arguing that black infants die more often with white doctors has for years been privately beleaguered by plagiarism charges from her own subordinates and will soon depart her university, leaving the multimillion-dollar antiracism center she founded in jeopardy.

University of Minnesota Prof. Rachel Hardeman’s rise to academic superstardom in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis included major media coverage of her research on racial bias and maternal and infant mortality, a tenured position, and recognition as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people.

Now, two former employees allege that she plagiarized the research proposal that helped rocket her into a national figure.

Hardeman secured a landmark National Institutes of Health grant in 2021 — the sole NIH proposal for which she is the primary author — with a hypothesis and methodologies she copied from her mentee’s dissertation proposal, they allege.

The former mentee alleges Hardeman plagiarized the grant proposal with near identical wording, equations, graphics and even formatting, and that the university scuttled the misconduct claims to protect its star. A second employee, a coauthor of two papers underwritten by the NIH grant, alleges that when employees ran the center’s grant proposals through a plagiarism checker they “lit up like a Christmas tree.”

A third researcher who worked on the NIH project said on LinkedIn that she could corroborate the claims, sharing that Hardeman struggled to implement the proposal she said she had authored.

Hardeman will leave the university on May 14, at which point the antiracism center she founded, the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity (CARHE), may shutter, according to an email sent to staff Monday and obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The email does not address the plagiarism accusations.

“Rachel Hardeman, Blue Cross Endowed Professor of Health and Racial Equity and Founding Director of the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity will conclude her faculty appointment and center leadership at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, effective May 14, 2025,” the email reads.

The now completed $1.8 million grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development was announced by the university in April 2021. Two months earlier, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota had donated $5 million in seed money to create Hardeman’s center. The center now faces an uncertain future.

“In light of Dr. Hardeman’s departure, School of Public Health Dean Melinda Pettigrew, in consultation with other key stakeholders, will make a determination regarding CARHE in the near future,” the email states.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota did not respond to a request for comment.

A high-impact study coauthored by Hardeman finding black newborns die more frequently with white physicians due to the doctors’ “spontaneous bias” generated enormous media coverage and social media chatter, Altmetric shows. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson prominently cited it as evidence for the benefits of affirmative action in her dissent in the 2023 Supreme Court ruling Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

But the study’s findings proved irreproducible in a 2024 replication study. Internal communications between Hardeman and her coauthors obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) demonstrated a key data point had been buried in the paper’s annex because it “undermined the narrative,” the DCNF reported in March.

Hardeman does not have a medical degree, her CV shows.

Washington University in St. Louis Senior Scientist Brigette Davis said in a LinkedIn post on April 10 that Hardeman copied her dissertation proposal when Davis was early in her career and seeking guidance from the famous academic. Davis was later recruited to work for Hardeman’s Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity from November 2022 to March 2024.

Hardeman has excused the apparent replication of her mentee’s research proposal by saying she had intended to cite the unpublished work, the two employees allege. The employees also claim that two internal investigations by the University of Minnesota Office of Research Integrity dismissed the alleged plagiarism, calling it an “honest error in attribution.”

The University of Minnesota and the School of Public Health would not comment beyond the internal email. Hardeman and her center did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The Office of Research Integrity did not respond to a request for comment.

‘I Was Being Emotionally Manipulated’

Davis initially viewed Hardeman as someone willing to help her “navigate the hellscape that academia can be for Black women,” she wrote. Davis shared a dissertation prospectus with her informal mentor for feedback in November 2019.

The central premise of Davis’s dissertation was a hypothesized link between infant mortality and police brutality: Did the August 2014 shooting of Mike Brown by St. Louis police have ambient effects on the survival black newborns in the city?

Davis said that Hardeman “plagiarized verbatim” the premise of her dissertation in January 2020 while tweaking it to suit her Minneapolis focus. Hardeman simply retrofitted the same research question to focus on the August 2016 death of Philando Castile, she said.

“When I say ‘verbatim’ I mean, she performed a find+replace in my document, and replaced all instances of ‘Mike Brown’ with ‘Philando Castile,’ and all instances of ‘St. Louis, Missouri’ with ‘Minneapolis, Minnesota,’ and submitted this to the NIH as if it were her own,” Davis said.

Side-by-side comparisons of two documents — documents that Davis claims are Hardeman’s research proposal to the NIH and her own earlier dissertation prospectus — indicate that their central hypotheses were nearly identical.

“I hypothesize that infants conceived or born in the St. Louis Region during the civic unrest in Ferguson were at increased risk of low birthweight and prematurity compared to those who became pregnant in the year prior,” Davis’s dissertation prospectus reads. “I hypothesize the effect will be strongest among all women living closest to the civic unrest (spatial proximity) and among black women, regardless of physical proximity to the unrest (social proximity).”

A document identified by Davis as Hardeman’s grant proposal echoes that wording almost verbatim.

“Our working hypothesis is that infants conceived or born during the civil unrest were at increased risk of [preterm birth] and [low birthweight] compared to those born in the year prior,” the document reads. “We hypothesize the effect will be strongest among all women living closest to the civil unrest (spatial proximity) and among black women, regardless of physical proximity to the unrest (social proximity).”

Davis said that her career is “in freefall” because she refused to co-publish on the grant she alleges was plagiarized from her work.

Repeated requests to Davis by the DCNF to view the original documents and for interviews did not receive a reply.

However, two other researchers who worked with Hardeman on the NIH project — Jé Judson and Naomi Harada Thyden — claimed in LinkedIn posts and blog posts that their experiences with Hardeman lent credence to Davis’s account, saying that Hardeman had surprisingly little direct involvement with and knowledge of her own research.

Judson, who coauthored two of the papers underwritten by Hardeman’s NIH grant, said in a blog post that she had struggled to implement the center’s grants without guidance from Hardeman or her top aides. A plagiarism checker revealed that Hardeman’s grant proposals included ideas from multiple sources cobbled together, she said. Judson said she believes this is why she received little help with the research.

“Each grant had several paragraphs that were verbatim copied from other papers, that although she cited, she didn’t even attempt to reword, which is still plagiarism,” she wrote. “I finally understood why I couldn’t implement the grants I was in charge of – why the methods sections didn’t make sense. Each paragraph was plagiarized from a different qualitative paper using different methodologies that wouldn’t be used simultaneously, and they were combined into one section.”

Judson, who worked for Hardeman’s center from June 2022 to September 2024, likened the approach to baking a loaf of bread by stitching together two disparate recipes.

“It would be like trying to include directions for making sourdough and focaccia into one recipe – and saying they’re both bread, what difference does it make?” Judson wrote in the blog post.

Thyden also received little guidance from Hardeman or her top aides about how to conduct the research. Thyden was a researcher at the Minnesota Population Center from August 2021 to July 2022, and again from August 2023 to March 2024. The Minnesota Population Center helped to implement the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity’s research proposals.

Thyden said that she worked on the NIH grant (sometimes referred to as an “R01” in reference to the three characters that begin every NIH grant number) but that Hardeman could not execute the “Aim 1 analyses” of her own research proposal.

“I can personally corroborate Dr. Davis’s account regarding the plagiarism of her work,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “I joined the R01 in question and was perplexed when not a single person who officially contributed to the grant could explain the Aim 1 analyses to me or point me to someone who could.”

By late 2022, Hardeman and her center’s leadership had recruited Davis to execute the very research aim plagiarized from her work, she said.

Davis, still a new hire, immediately recognized the ideas, the proposed equations, the wording, and even the arbitrary formatting decisions.

“I had been told by Rachel that the ‘work was too important,’ and that if I said anything it would cast doubt on the empirical study of racism overall,” Davis said. “Over time it became clear that I was being emotionally manipulated.”

A presentation compiled by Judson of the alleged plagiarism includes four pages demonstrating identical wording and methods.

Hardeman encouraged staff to delete emails that could be subject to the Freedom of Information Act, Davis also alleges.

‘An Honest Error’

Davis wrote that when she attempted to raise the issue with university leadership and research integrity officials, the university sided with the high-profile researcher.

“The University of Minnesota Office of Integrity—on two separate occasions found that there was no plagiarism but rather an ‘honest error’ on Rachel’s part,” Davis wrote. “The UMN [School of Public Health] Dean nudged me to remain silent.”

Davis expressed confusion at how someone could cite an unpublished proposal submitted as a PhD requirement.

Meanwhile, Hardeman and the center’s leadership blamed Davis and Judson for the center’s problems, Davis said.

“She and her leadership team … began to use the words ‘hostile’ and ‘difficult to work with,’” she wrote.

Amid the effusive external praise but serious internal concerns, Hardeman encouraged her staff to delete emails in violation of records retention law, Davis alleges.

“On occasion she encouraged us to delete emails because UMN is subject to FOIA (I’ve confirmed she has no more emails that mention me in her inbox), and before we knew it, Rachel went on leave and all other CARHE leadership had quit,” she wrote.

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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will begin chip production at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s (TSMC) facility in Arizona, marking the first time the company’s processors will be made on U.S. soil.

The announcement, delivered Tuesday by CEO Lisa Su in Taipei, signals a sharp pivot in AMD’s manufacturing strategy as the Trump administration ramps up scrutiny of foreign-made semiconductors. With Washington eying tariffs on chip imports over national security concerns, AMD joins a growing list of tech giants racing to localize operations amid mounting trade risks.

“TSMC has been a key partner for many years and our deep collaboration with their R&D and manufacturing teams has enabled AMD to consistently deliver leadership products that push the limits of high-performance computing,” Su said, according to an AMD press release. “Being a lead HPC customer for TSMC’s N2 process and for TSMC Arizona Fab 21 are great examples of how we are working closely together to drive innovation and deliver the advanced technologies that will power the future of computing.”

Huge step forward for advanced chip manufacturing in the U.S. We have seen great results as a lead customer @TSMC in Arizona and we look forward to building even more of our highest performance compute and AI chips here in America. https://t.co/okaHBw2YQL

— Lisa Su (@LisaSu) March 4, 2025

Though AMD’s shift stateside has been in motion since before President Donald Trump returned to office, Su’s announcement comes as the administration prepares to invoke Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act — a move that would allow the White House to impose sweeping tariffs on foreign chips if deemed critical to national security. A formal investigation was disclosed in a Federal Register filing Monday.

Until now, AMD has relied almost exclusively on TSMC’s facilities in Taiwan for its chip fabrication. But the transition to TSMC’s new Arizona facility, operational since late 2024 and also working alongside Apple and Nvidia, represents a broader push to localize in light of geopolitical and trade tensions.

Nvidia, a key AMD rival in the AI hardware space, announced Monday that it will manufacture AI supercomputers and Blackwell chips in the U.S. in partnership with TSMC and others — an effort that could see up to $500 billion in U.S. based AI server production over the next four years.

“This is very big and exciting news,” Trump said of the Nvidia investment. “All necessary permits will be expedited and quickly delivered to NVIDIA, as they will to all companies committing to be part of the Golden Age of America!”

AMD’s stateside expansion coincides with its March acquisition of ZT Systems, a U.S. server manufacturer, which Su said will help scale domestic output, according to Reuters. Apple has also confirmed limited chip production at the Arizona plant.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

In a blow to tech giant Google, a move that could be a prelude to a breakup of the giant money-making machine, a federal judge has concluded that it operates an illegal monopoly over two markets related to digital advertising tech.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia found that Google is in violation of the Sherman Act because it dominates the online publisher ad server market and the ad-exchange market that connects ad buyers to sellers.

Google has illegally built “monopoly power” with its web advertising business, a federal judge ruleshttps://t.co/a5tnkNh9iF

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) April 17, 2025

BOOM: Google loses ANOTHER antitrust suit, it’s a monopolist of the software used by publishers to manage online ads, as well as the exchanges used to buy and sell online ads. pic.twitter.com/5bstcP50PN

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) April 17, 2025

Judge rules Google illegally monopolized ad tech, opening door to potential breakup https://t.co/pZBRKPVGKn

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) April 17, 2025

A report from New York Post said the judge found that the corporation’s antics “substantially harmed” customers.

The judge wrote, “Google further entrenched its monopoly power by imposing anticompetitive practices on its customers and eliminating desirable product features.”

The ruling continued, “In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web.”

The report explained the Department of Justice has expressed the desire for the court to force Google to sell of its digital advertising operations, including Google Ad Manager.

“Remedies” will be taken up in a second phase of the trial.

Explained the Post, “The ruling is another major legal blow for Google. Last year, a federal judge ruled in a separate case that Google has an illegal monopoly over the online search market.”

 

The Gateway Pundit reassured readers they had “read that right” in response to a report that Michael Kratsios, the tech chief for the White House, had stated, “Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space.”

“We are capable of so much more,” he said, according to a White House posting. The nation’s tech, he said, “leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity. As Vice President Vance said in a recent speech, the tradition of American innovation has been one of increasing the capacities of America’s workers, of extending human ability so that more people can do more, and, more meaningful work. But unrestricted immigration, and reliance on cheap labor both domestically and offshore, has been a substitute for improving productivity with technology.

“It is the choices of individuals that will make the new American Golden Age possible: the choice of individuals to master the sclerosis of the state, and the choice of individuals to craft new technologies and give themselves to scientific discoveries that will bend time and space, make more with less, and drive us further into the endless frontier.”

The “cryptic” statement about manipulating time and space, however, was left with no elaboration.

But the report noted that was “no surprise given the likely classified nature of such tech.”

The remark followed only by days President Donald Trump’s own comment about America’s capabilities, when he said, “We have weaponry that nobody has any idea what it is. And it is the most powerful in the world … not even close.”

He, too, didn’t provide specifics.

Kratsios, at the Endless Frontiers Retreat in Austin, Texas, noted America’s accomplishments, the Atomic Age, the Space Race, the internet, and more.

“Today we fight to restore that inheritance. As the failure of the Biden administration’s ‘small yard, high fence’ approach makes clear, it is not enough to seek to protect America’s technological lead. We also have a duty to promote American technological leadership.”

He said the nation now is losing ground on nuclear power, life expectancy, passenger planes and trains and “our cars do not fly.”

“Stagnation was a choice,” he said. “We have weighed down our builders and innovators. The well-intentioned regulatory regime of the 1970s became an ever-tightening ratchet, first hampering America’s ability to become a net-energy exporter and then making it harder and harder to build. We seem to have lost focus and vision, to have lowered our sights and let systems and structures and bureaucracies muddle us along.”

But that’s not required.

“We can build in new ways that let us do more with less, or we can borrow from the future. We have chosen to borrow from the future again and again. Our choice as a civilization is technology or debt. And we have chosen debt. Today we choose a better way.”

He said going forward America must make “smart” choices, must make the “right” choices, and then the “easy” choice “to adopt the incredible products and tools made by American builders and to enable their export abroad.”

“Whether in AI, quantum, biotech, or next-generation semiconductors, in partnership with the private sector and academia, it is the duty of government to enable scientists to create new theories and empower engineers to put them into practice. Prizes, advance market commitments, and other novel funding mechanisms, like fast and flexible grants, can multiply the impact of government-funded research. At a time defined by the desire to build in America again, we have to throw off the burden of bad regulations that weigh down our innovators, and use federal resources to test, to deploy, and to mature emerging technologies.”

He said the current rules must be evaluated for what they prohibit, and what they cost.

“Our innovators make incredible breakthroughs, but consumers, government included, require products that meet their needs, not just the wide-open country of frontier technology. Our industrial might, unleashed at home, and our technical achievements from AI to aerospace, successfully commercialized, can also be powerful instruments of diplomacy abroad and key components of our international alliances.”

The Gateway Pundit noted, “This kind of talk isn’t without precedent. Since its inception in 1958, DARPA—the Pentagon’s secretive research arm—has been quietly developing breakthrough technologies decades ahead of their time. From stealth aircraft and GPS to early internet infrastructure, DARPA’s track record shows that by the time the public hears about these programs, they’re already old news in classified circles. It’s not a stretch to believe that far more advanced systems, possibly even those capable of ‘bending time and space,’ are already deep in the pipeline.”

(FOX NEWS) — A kidnapped American pastor was rescued in South Africa following a deadly shootout at a house in the country’s Eastern Cape province, officials announced Wednesday.

The Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (HAWKS) said an operation led by the agency “resulted in the successful rescue” of an American citizen, “reportedly a local pastor who had allegedly been kidnapped and held at a safe house in KwaMagxaki, Gqeberha, on 15 April 2025.”

Though the news release did not name the pastor, 34-year-old Josh Sullivan, of Tennessee, was kidnapped by several armed, masked men last week at his church in the Eastern Cape, Fellowship Baptist Church Motherwell.