"Like me, Trump should have been found guilty. How the F.E.C. committee could rule any other way is confounding," Michael Cohen said in a statement.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) revealed that it has ditched a case related to whether former President Donald Trump breached election law in connection with a payment made to Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 election by Trump's then-lawyer Michael Cohen.

Cohen served time for violating campaign finance laws, tax evasion and lying to Congress, according to the New York Times, which noted that Cohen has stated that Trump directed him to set up payments to two women amid the 2016 election contest.

Rebel News co-founder Ezra Levant announced that payment processor PayPal has canceled their account without an explanation. The Canadian outlet has been critical of the Covid-19 lockdowns and the government of PM Justin Trudeau.

"Look, this isn't a mistake. It's a cancel culture attack on the largest independent news agency in Canada. It's censorship," Levant announced on Thursday, in a fundraising appeal for legal fees to sue PayPal.

"They're finally coming to kill us," the Rebel News account tweeted.

None of the 10 doctors on the committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control on COVID-19 vaccines would say if they support the CDC removing a world-leading scientist from that committee for opposing a pause that may have spooked Americans off COVID vaccination.

The Federalist contacted all of the committee's members for comment on the CDC's decision that could affect the integrity and public perception of the committee's work, as well as Americans' willingness to accept COVID vaccines, a current pressing concern for the public health agency. None was willing to comment.

The reluctance underscores the retaliatory climate CDC communicated when it punished a "world-class" scientist who helped invent methods dramatically improving the very vaccine safety system the CDC uses today. That story The Federalist broke received major media attention, and so has the vaccine hesitancy the agency's pause seems to have amplified.

In April, CDC official Dr. Amanda Cohn emailed Harvard Medical School's Dr. Martin Kulldorff to remove him from the CDC's COVID-19 Vaccines Safety Technical Work Group (known as VaST). In her email, she made it clear that the agency was retaliating against Kulldorff because he publicly expressed his professional opinion that pausing the Johnson and Johnson COVID vaccine wasn't scientifically warranted and would increase COVID deaths.

Europe's medicines regulator is reviewing reports of a rare nerve-degenerating disorder in people who received AstraZeneca's (AZN.L) COVID-19 shots, raising fresh questions about potential side-effects of the vaccine.

As part of a regular review of safety reports for the vaccine, Vaxzevria, the safety committee of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), is analysing data provided by AstraZeneca on cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS), it said on Friday, without specifying the number of cases.

The Anglo-Swedish drugmaker did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Barely a month has passed since Jared Kushner, former US President Donald Trump's son-in-law and Middle East envoy, declared the Arab-Israeli conflict over.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Kushner declared that "the political earthquake" unleashed by the latest wave of Arab normalisations with Israel wasn't over. Indeed, Kushner enthused, more than 130,000 Israelis had already visited Dubai since Trump hosted the signing of the Abraham Accords last September.

New friendly relations were flowering between Jews and Arabs. Just wait for the direct flights between Morocco and Israel. Saudi Arabia would soon be next. "We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict," Kushner wrote triumphantly.

Anti-Asian violence in New York right now is more than random street-corner sucker punches and terrifying subway shoves. It's also the deliberate disassembly of meritocratic public education under the guise of ethnic equity — a dagger to the heart of the fastest-growing and arguably most dynamic immigrant group in the city.

Not to diminish the thuggery, the most serious threat to Asian American New Yorkers is the Department of Education's ill-disguised effort to eliminate merit test-based admission to the city's eight highly selective high schools. The process is dominated by Asian kids to the virtual exclusion of black and Hispanic students.

The new numbers came out last week, and they are beyond harsh: Asians won 54 percent of this year's freshman class seats; whites, 28 percent; Hispanics, 5 percent, and African Americans, 4 percent.

Violent crime surged in several U.S. cities that saw massive Black Live Matter and anti-police protests in the wake of George Floyd's death last summer.

The upswing of violent crime, including homicides, coincided with the protests, increased anti-police sentiment among Americans and declining morale in police departments, which have since struggled to recruit new officers. The number of murders alone increased by 36.7% in 2020 compared to 2019, according to public information compiled by data analytics reporter Jeff Asher.

"We are definitely at a critical manpower shortage here," Louisville police union spokesperson Dave Mutchler told the Daily Caller News Foundation last week. "The climate that we all find ourselves in right now is a lot more demanding and stressful on officers."

"Morale is basically in the toilet," he continued.

Critical race theory is fast becoming America's new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it — and of those who have, many don't understand it. This must change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.

To explain critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism.

Originally, the Marxist left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Karl Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: The workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class and usher in a new socialist society.

During the 20th century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million people. They are remembered for gulags, show trials, executions and mass starvations. In practice, Marx's ideas unleashed man's darkest brutalities.

By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West had begun to acknowledge these failures. They recoiled at revelations of Soviet atrocities and came to realize that workers' revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, which had large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living. Americans in particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class division. Most Americans believed in the American dream — the idea that they could transcend their origins through education, hard work and good citizenship.

But rather than abandon their political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s. Abandoning Marx's economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.

Utah's governor said Thursday the state has no plans to require masks for students in K-12 schools next fall, following months of mounting pressure from parents calling for the mandate's end.

Republican Gov. Spencer Cox has previously defended his administration's decision to mandate masks in schools this school year against parent protests, but now says the state's rising vaccination rates indicate that districts are prepared to limit restrictions. He spoke to The Associated Press:

"We now have the ability for those that have concerns about the virus to protect ourselves much more. We have better masks available and opportunities for people to make those decisions."

Dozens of districts nationwide have already dropped mask mandates and many more districts have indicated they are likely to not require them next fall. At least half of states still have statewide mask mandates in place, and many school districts still require masks. The school-tracking site Burbio found 62% of schools were offering in-person learning every day by late April.

An illegal cat and dog mail-order courier operation, which offered an online pet sale gimmick also known as a 'pet mystery box', has been exposed and shut down by animal rights activists in Southwestern China.

Chengdu Municipal Postal Administration in Sichuan province revealed this week that it had launched an investigation into courier operation Hehuachi Station of ZTO Express for sending live animals through the postal system.

Volunteers from Chengdu Love Home Animal Rescuing Centre found workers at the delivery station had packaged a total of 156 cats and dogs into separate boxes before couriering them in vans, state media CCTV reported.

When the volunteers arrived at the station in the city's Jinniu District earlier this week they were greeted by screeching animals. The animals were found wrapped up in boxes with plastic bags, making it difficult for them to breathe. The volunteers also found four dead animals.

"Once the doors of the van close, the animals in it will definitely be suffocated to death," Chen Yulian, founder of the animal centre said. Chen said the delivery station did not feed the animals prior to delivery to prevent them from defecating during transit. She added that when animals died during transportation, workers would just dump the bodies on the side of the road.