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Women increasingly feel pressured to choose between having a family and their career in tech, according to a new study.

Almost half (49%) of women in tech said they felt pressured to make the choice between family and work, a seven per cent increase from last year.

Half said they had experienced sexism in their tech workplace.

The findings were revealed in tech events firm Web Summit’s latest report on women in the industry, which has been running since 2018.

More than 1,000 women were surveyed for the report, which found continued sexism across the tech industry.

“It’s frustrating that issues like sexism, unfair pay, imposter syndrome, and work-life balance keep appearing – it often feels like we’re stuck in the same conversations,” said Carolyn Quinlan, a vice president of community at the organisation.

More than three-quarters of the women said they feel the need to work harder than their male counterparts.

“There is always one guy in the room who will speak over me,” said one respondent.

“Without effective childcare support in place, it makes it more challenging for women who also want to have a family to fully participate in the workforce,” said another.

However, although many of the report’s findings showed discrimination against women, there were some positives.

Three-quarters of respondents said they would feel empowered to pursue and hold a leadership position, and more than 80% said there is a woman in senior management in their company.

“I can’t help but feel hopeful,” said Ms Quinlan, who said more women are “stepping up” and “leading”.

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The Northern Lights may make an appearance over the UK over the next couple of nights, after a series of solar flares erupted from the sun. 

The Northern Lights, or aurora borealis, are caused by solar storms interacting with the Earth’s atmosphere.

When solar storms react with atmospheric gases above our north and south magnetic poles, the result is beautiful displays of light in the sky, like the UK saw in May.

“Over the next couple of days, there’s a chance that we could be seeing the Northern Lights, particularly across northern parts of Scotland in the north of England and Northern Ireland,” Krista Hammond, a space weather expert at the Met Office, told Sky News.

“This is because there’s the potential to see the arrival of a geomagnetic storm.”

Earlier in the week, astronomers spotted two solar flares, which release plasma into space, coming from the sun – a process called a coronal mass ejection.

“Most of that will miss the Earth,” said Ms Hammond.

“But there’s a chance in the coming nights that we will clip the edge of these two mass ejections, which means you’ve got the potential for the storm which causes the Northern Lights,” she added.

The UK has seen the Northern Lights more than usual in recent months because the sun is in a particularly active part of its cycle.

The cycle lasts around eleven years as its magnetic fields flip, according to Ms Hammond.

Read more: Stargazers share stunning images of aurora borealis

It is currently at the “solar maximum”, meaning there are many more solar flares and solar storms – and the Northern Lights are appearing much further south than usual.

It’s hard to tell when the solar maximum is ending, so make the most of opportunities to spot the Northern Lights.

“You can’t really tell that you’ve peaked until you’re in the descending phase,” said Ms Hammond.

“But it’s estimated that solar maximum is about now to the start of next year.”

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A 20-year-old TikTok personality has been charged with murder after the body of a therapist was discovered wrapped in a tarpaulin on a motorway.

Terryon Thomas, best known online as Mr Prada, was arrested in East Baton Rouge, Louisana, on Tuesday after 69-year-old therapist William Nicholas Abraham was found dead on the side of a road near Tangipahoa Parish a few days earlier.

His cause of death was blunt force trauma, according to authorities, Sky News’ US partner network NBC reported.

Thomas has multiple accounts on TikTok, one of which has 4.3 million followers and over 500 million likes.

He is believed to have fled from police while driving Mr Abraham’s car. A later search of his home found evidence indicating a violent altercation had occurred inside, according to an arrest warrant affidavit filed by the sheriff’s office.

Police found “a significant amount of blood” and “multiple sharp objects and other weapons,” NBC said, citing the affidavit.

A release by the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office said the relationship between the TikToker and Mr Abraham was unclear. It is not thought Thomas was a patient of the therapist.

Mr Abraham was seen entering Thomas’s apartment on Saturday night, according to the arrest warrant. His body was found the next day wearing the same clothes.

Witnesses told police that Thomas was seen struggling to drag something wrapped in a blue sheet down the stairs of the apartment building before placing the tarpaulin in Mr Abraham’s car, according to the affidavit.

“It was a very physical and very violent attack,” Tangipahoa Parish sheriff Gerald Sticker told local TV station, WAFB.

“He was bludgeoned about in the head shoulders and neck.”

A lawyer who previously represented Mr Abraham described him as a “very kind, very tender, very gentle man”.

He said: “No one deserves to die this way, but I would have never expected someone of his disposition to have been violently murdered.”

Thomas gained popularity on TikTok for making comedy videos. The management team believed to represent the social media personality were approached for comment by NBC.

He remains in custody in Dallas, Texas and is awaiting extradition to Louisiana.

This post appeared first on sky.com

The world’s first ovarian cancer vaccine could wipe the disease out, researchers have said.

OvarianVax is a vaccine that teaches the immune system to recognise and attack the earliest stages of ovarian cancer.

It’s being developed by scientists at the University of Oxford.

The hope is that women could receive the jab preventatively on the NHS with the goal of eradicating the disease.

Experts have suggested it could work in a similar way to the human papillomavirus (HPV) jab, which is on track to stamp out cervical cancer.

Professor Ahmed Ahmed and his team at the ovarian cancer cell laboratory at MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at the university are working to identify cellular targets for the vaccine.

They will establish which proteins on the surface of early-stage ovarian cancer cells are best recognised by the immune system and how effectively the vaccine kills models of the disease in a lab.

Then they can take it to human clinical trials with people who have BRCA gene mutations – which massively increase the risk of ovarian cancer – and healthy women too.

Cancer Research UK is funding the study with up to £600,000 over the next three years.

Asked if ovarian cancer could be wiped out with the new jab, Professor Ahmed said: “Absolutely – that would be the aim.

“We still have a long way to go but it is a really exciting time. I’m very optimistic myself.”

Presently, there is no screening test for ovarian cancer, which is often diagnosed late because symptoms like bloating and no appetite can be vague.

Women with BRCA mutations, such as actress Angelina Jolie, are known to be at high risk.

Almost 45% of people with an altered BRCA1 gene and almost 20% with an altered BRCA2 gene will develop ovarian cancer by the age of 80, compared with just 2% in the general population.

Currently, women with BRCA1/2 mutations are recommended to have their ovaries removed by the age of 35, which means they go through early menopause and cannot have children in the future.

There are around 7,500 new ovarian cancer cases every year in the UK, with BRCA mutations accounting for around 5-15% of these.

Professor Ahmed said BRCA mutation carriers could benefit greatly from the new vaccine because “they wouldn’t then have to have their ovaries removed”.

He added: “I am optimistic because we are talking about preventing the very first few cancer cells that develop – and not trying to cure or treat or prevent the tumour coming back.

“I’m hoping that, because the number of cells that we will be targeting is quite small, we will have success.

“We’ve seen success with the HPV vaccine – it’s really, really incredibly effective.”

While the “full-blown timeline” for the vaccine being approved “might be many years away” the visible impact could be sooner.

Professor Ahmed added that, through clinical trials, he would hope to start seeing the vaccine’s impact “in four or five years on the healthy population”.

This post appeared first on sky.com

The debate between the candidates for vice president — GOP nominee Ohio Senator JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz — was dominated by Vance, and all but a handful of hardened partisan pundits agree on that conclusion. 

Walz wobbled and panicked from the first question — which everyone in the world knew would be about Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel earlier in the day. Yet Walz still fumbled his response, and it got worse from there until the CBS moderators invoked the unwritten mercy rule for left-wing moderators watching the Democrat melt and tossed Walz some softballs on J6 at the debate’s close, by which time the internet was howling and laughing at the Minnesota governor. 

There were three important takeaways:  

First, Vance is a superb and calm debater and a reassuring figure on the national stage. 

Second, Walz is not, and he represents the one big decision Vice President Kamala Harris has had to make since President Joe Biden dropped out. It was a terrible decision. Imagine her Cabinet and White House staff if somehow, she wins.  

Third, legacy media is irretrievably broken and cannot be reclaimed from its lurch into rote leftism and extreme partisanship, or even pulled back to a minimum level of seriousness on big occasions.  

Do executives at these networks — ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC— not see what has happened? Americans don’t trust the news divisions at the legacy networks. It’s as if those divisions are run by a combination of fresh-from-campus-demonstration interns and hardened partisans from the Obama years.  

The CBS debate was not, however, as overtly biased against Vance as ABC’s earlier debate was against Trump, but it was still very, very biased against the center-right and conservative audience. Viewers saw the question set veer quickly from a world crisis and the border crisis to get to the left’s favorite issue of abortion.  

With the world tuning in only hours after Iran launched 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, the moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan did open with an obligatory round of questions on that crisis. But, after 10 minutes, they plowed on to a quick exchange on immigration and the Biden-Harris massive fail on the relief efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene’s savaging of North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Virginia in order to get to … abortion, which had been discussed at length in the ABC debate and about which there are zero mysteries.  

Three rounds of questions on abortion, really? And three rounds marked by the rote framing favored by the hard left? Predictable but still shocking.  

The debate ended in a morass of childcare questions and then the obligatory ‘Wasn’t January 6th terrible?’ questions.  

What a farce. Not one question on China’s vast military build-up and its threat against Taiwan and the Philippines. Not one question on the Chinese Communist Party spies shot through our country, including the office of New York’s current and past governor.  Not one question on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  

Yes, there was a quick dash through the consequences of more than 10 million illegal immigrants flowing across the southern border under the Biden-Harris regime, but also a quick cut-off when Vance began what was an obviously embarrassing factcheck of the CBS factcheck on the ‘legal status’ of the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. ‘We have a lot to get to,’ was the trigger for cutting off anything uncomfortable.  

Walz was asked about his lying about his trips to China — sort of. It was left hanging. A knuckleheaded answer for a knuckleheaded team of debate organizers. Chinese President Xi Jinping is a sort of Voldemort for the networks — never to be named — perhaps because ABC and CBS all have corporate ties to companies that must do business there?  

Look, whatever votes were moved by the debate moved toward the GOP because Vance hammered that the costs of everything from food to gas skyrocketed under Biden-Harris, gave a quick tutorial on why construction costs have soared and thus the price of houses, and repeatedly reminded the audience of Harris’s failure in her job as ‘border czar,’ while also stressing the need for more domestic energy production. Tim Walz provided comic relief.  

The loser wasn’t just Walz though. It was also CBS, which joined ABC in a legacy media hall of shame. When we get back to debates in four years, the good news is the ‘debate commission’ is already dead and that, by 2028, the idea of the big networks hosting debates unchecked by center-right moderators will be as well. The candidates will call on C-SPAN and find some fair moderators. Siri could have done a better job in our past two debates this year.  

What has to be dawning in the C Suites of networks — if they are at all self-aware — is that their product and their talent are awful, and their audiences have already left or will soon leave. Tuesday night was just the most recent example of why. 

Hugh Hewitt is host of ‘The Hugh Hewitt Show,’ heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990.  Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

This post appeared first on FOX NEWS

Iran has finished its largest-ever barrage of missiles fired at Israel, but warns that a retaliatory strike could warrant further ballistic response.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said during the Asia Cooperation Dialogue summit this week that Israel must not believe it can act with ‘impunity,’ according to Reuters.

‘Any type of military attack, terrorist act or crossing our red lines will be met with a decisive response by our armed forces,’ said Pezeshkian.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with the heads of the country’s security establishment on Wednesday following Iran’s firing of 181 missiles into Israel amid fears that a lethal regional war is around the corner.

Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani of Qatar was also in attendance at the summit in Doha, where he called the ongoing violence in the Middle East a ‘collective genocide’ perpetuated by Israel, according to Reuters.

‘It has become crystal clear that what is happening is genocide, in addition to turning the Gaza Strip into an area unfit for human habitation, in preparation for displacement,’ the Qatari monarch said.

Iran’s strikes on Israel forced nearly 10 million people to find safety in bomb shelters on Tuesday. 

The barrage of aerial warfare was the first time in Israeli history that the country’s densely populated cities – Tel Aviv and Jerusalem – in the center of the biblical nation, faced such devastating attacks.

The only fatality from the Iranian barrage was the murder of a Palestinian man in the West Bank (known in Israel by its biblical regional name of Judea and Samaria).

President Biden said Wednesday that he would not support an attack by Israel on Iranian nuclear sites in retaliation for Iran’s firing of 181 missiles at Israel amid fears that a lethal regional war is around the corner.

‘We’ll be discussing with the Israelis what they’re going to do, but all seven of us [G7 nations] agree that they have a right to respond, but they should respond proportionally,’ he said.

But when asked whether he would back Israel striking Iranian nuclear sites as it has long threatened, Biden told reporters, ‘The answer is no.’

Fox News Digital’s Sarah Rumpf-Whitten and Benjamin Weinthal contributed to this report.

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In his speech before the United Nations General Assembly last week, President Biden proposed building a ‘more effective and more inclusive U.N.’ by ‘bringing in new voices and new perspectives.’ 

What he should have said instead is that the U.N. has lost its way, and it will need to be seriously reimagined if it is to remain relevant.

To be sure, the creation of the U.N. system to reconstruct global order after World War II was inspired, and its specialized agencies, such as the Food and Agricultural Organization, have done important work for decades.

Today, however, the U.N. suffers from a fundamental flaw: it gives too much power to revisionist autocracies like China and Russia that want to tear down the U.S.-led global system. Beijing, Moscow and other revisionist authoritarians use their influence in the U.N. to turn the institution against its founding mission.

The list of abuses is long. 

Russia chaired a U.N. Security Council meeting on the situation in Ukraine as it was launching an invasion of that country. China continues to prevent the World Health Organization from investigating COVID-19’s origins, making a future outbreak more likely. 

Russia and China also use their seats in the U.N. Security Council to weaken sanctions efforts against the illegal nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran. The U.N. Human Rights Council includes repressive regimes – such as China – ensuring that these countries escape scrutiny for their barbaric human rights records. 

And employees of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) participated in the Oct. 7 attacks against Israel. 

These are only the most prominent examples.

Nevertheless, the proceedings last week demonstrate that many still believe the U.N. remains the best possible forum to bring countries together to address shared global challenges.

This is wishful thinking.

Biden is right when he says we are at an inflection point in history, but we will only rise to this challenge if the United States and its allies can revitalize and adapt multilateral institutions to reflect new realities.

Instead of Biden’s platitudes about global cooperation, the next U.S. administration should acknowledge that America’s adversaries have transformed the U.N. into another arena for competition between free nations and an axis of revisionist autocracies. 

They should use speeches at the General Assembly to call out the bad behavior of U.S. adversaries, such as China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, and encourage close allies to join in the condemnation. They should be unrelenting in opposing this axis’ threats to their neighbors, their unfair trade practices and their abhorrent human rights abuses.

They should unrelentingly defend U.S. allies, like Israel, from unfair attacks, and acknowledge that the U.N. is becoming even more obsessively antisemitic. 

In both 2022 and 2023, the number of U.N. General Assembly resolutions condemning Israel exceeded the combined total of those condemning all other countries. Yet, the body refrained from condemning Hamas after the abhorrent Oct. 7 attack – even after it fired nine UNRWA employees for likely involvement in an act of war.

To counter the U.N.’s capture by cynical autocracies, Washington and its allies should use their diplomatic weight to place U.S. and allied officials in leadership institutions in key U.N. bodies, including the Human Rights Council.

The United States provides one-third of U.N. funding, giving it enormous potential influence if it is willing to use it. But the U.S. should move from mandatory assessments to voluntary contributions in order to prioritize programs that advance U.S. interests and defund others.

In addition, Washington should advance multilateralism by selectively routing around the U.N. system in favor of institutions that include America’s democratic allies and exclude authoritarian regimes such Russia and China. These groupings, like the G-7 and NATO, are often the only places where genuine international cooperation happens today. 

Finally, there is no need to cling to the preexisting system. After WWII, there was an explosion of creativity as Washington and its allies invented new bodies from scratch. The world needs a new burst of such innovative thinking now to design the multilateral frameworks necessary to meet contemporary challenges. 

Priority should be given to frameworks that bring together U.S. allies in North America, Europe and the Indo-Pacific. NATO, the Quad, AUKUS, IP4 (Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea), and the American–Japanese–Korean trilateral pact are promising steps in this direction.

Last week’s U.N. proceedings show that hope for multilateral cooperation remains alive. But to transform that spirit into effective governance, Washington will need to reimagine the U.N. and other global institutions to return them to their founding mission of promoting peace, prosperity and freedom.

Matthew Kroenig is vice president of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center, a professor at Georgetown, and a former Pentagon strategist. Dan Negrea is a former State Department special representative for commercial and business affairs and an Atlantic Council distinguished fellow. The authors write only in their personal capacity and not on behalf of any person or organization.

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A federal judge on Wednesday unsealed a key filing from special counsel Jack Smith’s updated election interference case against former President Donald Trump.

U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia Tanya Chutkan unsealed Smith’s 165-page filing, in which Smith argues that Trump is not immune from prosecution for his alleged criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 election results. Smith submitted the document after the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year ruled that a president is immune from prosecution for official acts. 

‘Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,’ Smith wrote. ‘Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted — a function in which the defendant, as President, had no official role.’ 

The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States held that Smith could not prosecute Trump for the president’s alleged use of the Justice Department to look into unproven claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. In response, Smith filed an updated indictment that revised the allegations against Trump to fit within the scope of the Supreme Court’s decision. 

In the unsealed filing, Smith told the court that Trump is not immune from the remaining allegations against him and laid out his case for why Trump ‘must stand trial for his private crimes.’ 

Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges brought against him by Smith.

Here are five key details from the special counsel’s new filing, which is partially redacted: 

1. Smith’s ‘factual proffer’ 

In the filing unsealed Wednesday, Smith outlined a ‘factual proffer,’ alleging Trump ‘resorted to crimes to try to stay in office’ after losing the 2020 presidential election.

‘With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,’ Smith wrote. 

‘His efforts included lying to state officials in order to induce them to ignore true vote counts; manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes in the targeted states; attempting to enlist Vice President Michael R. Pence, in his role as President of the Senate, to obstruct Congress’s certification of the election by using the defendant’s fraudulent electoral votes; and when all else had failed, on January 6, 2021, directing an angry crowd of supporters to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification.’ 

Smith claims that the ‘throughline of these efforts was deceit,’ alleging Trump and co-conspirators engaged in a conspiracy to interfere with the federal government function by which the nation collects and counts election results, which is set forth in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act (ECA); a conspiracy to obstruct the official proceeding in which Congress certifies the legitimate results of the presidential election; and a conspiracy against the rights of millions of Americans to vote and have their votes counted.’ 

2. Smith claims Trump’s personal attorney told POTUS election fraud claims were ‘bulls—’ 

Smith claims that several people close to Trump had told the former president his claims of election fraud were ‘bulls—.’ 

According to Smith, in one conversation, an unnamed Trump attorney had told Trump that the campaign was ‘looking into his fraud claims and had even hired external experts to do so, but could find no support for them.’ 

‘He told the defendant that if the Campaign took these claims to court, they would get slaughtered because the claims are all ‘bulls—,’’ the filing states, with Smith claiming that a lawyer discussed with Trump the investigations and ‘debunkings on all major claims.’ 

For example, the attorney allegedly told Trump that Georgia’s audit disproved claims that votes had been altered. 

Smith also claims a senior campaign adviser who spoke with Trump on a ‘daily basis’ and had ‘informed him on multiple occasions that various fraud claims were false’ had complained that Trump was losing his election lawsuits because his lawyers could not back up false claims about the election.

‘When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0-32 on our cases,’ the campaign adviser allegedly wrote.

‘I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy s— beamed down from the mothership.’  

3. New details on Trump’s interactions with Vice President Mike Pence

The filing details several alleged interactions between Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence in the days following the election.

Smith details a Nov. 7, 2020, call between Pence and Trump in which Pence allegedly ‘tried to encourage’ Trump ‘as a friend’ by reminding him that he ‘took a dying political party and gave it a new lease on life.’ 

Smith also details a private lunch between Trump and Pence on Nov. 12, 2020, when Pence allegedly gave Trump a ‘face-saving option.’ That option, according to the filing, was ‘don’t concede but recognize the process is over.’ 

In another private lunch between Trump and Pence on Nov. 16, 2020, Pence allegedly tried to encourage Trump to accept the results of the election and run again in 2024. Trump is alleged to have responded, ‘I don’t know, 2024 is so far off.’ 

In yet another private lunch on Dec. 21, Pence allegedly ‘encouraged’ Trump ‘not to look at the election ‘as a loss – just an intermission.” Later that day in the Oval Office, Trump allegedly asked Pence for advice on what he should do. According to Smith, Pence said, ‘after we have exhausted every legal process in the courts and Congress, if we still came up short, Trump should ‘take a bow.’’ 

Additionally, Smith reveals that Trump allegedly showed little regard for Pence’s safety during the Jan. 6, 2023 riot at the U.S. Capitol after it became clear that Pence would not support his attempt to stop the certification of the election. 

Smith alleges that an unnamed Trump aide, ‘upon receiving a phone call alerting him that Pence had been taken to a secure location… rushed to the dining room to inform the defendant [Trump] in hopes that the defendant would take action to ensure Pence’s safety.’ 

Smith writes that instead, after the aide delivered the news, Trump ‘looked at him and said only, ‘So what?” 

4. White House staffer allegedly overhears Trump say, ‘It doesn’t matter if you won or lost’ 

Smith alleges that Trump at multiple times showed complete disregard for those who informed him his claims of voter fraud were false, including Republican elections officials in states where Trump had claimed the election was stolen. 

‘Election officials, for instance, issued press releases and other public statements to combat the disinformation that the defendant and his allies were spreading,’ Smith wrote. ‘At one point long after the defendant had begun spreading false fraud claims, [REDACTED], a White House staffer traveling with the defendant, overheard him tell family members that ‘it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.’ 

Smith goes on to assert that Trump and his legal team ‘repeatedly changed the numbers in their baseless fraud allegations from day to day,’ and even ‘made up figures from whole cloth.’ 

The special counsel claimed Trump ‘was on notice that there was no evidence of widespread election fraud in Arizona within a week of the election’ and claimed Trump also ‘had early notice that his claims of election fraud in Georgia were false.’ 

By the time Trump spoke at his rally on Jan. 6, after Pence had refused to stop the certification of the election, Smith said the former president knew his ‘last hope’ to overturn the results was ‘the large and angry crowd standing in front of him.’ 

‘So for more than an hour, the defendant delivered a speech designed to inflame his supports and motivate them to march to the Capitol. The defendant told the crowd many of the same lies he had been telling for months—privately and publicly, including to the officials in the targeted states—and that he knew were not true.’

5. Smith presents case against presidential immunity

Smith argues that based on a ‘factbound analysis’ of Trump’s conduct, the court should determine that the former president was not acting in his official capacity when he challenged the election results and is therefore not immune from prosecution. 

‘None of the allegations or evidence is protected by presidential immunity,’ Smith wrote, asserting Trump’s ‘scheme was a private one.’ 

‘He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office,’ Smith claimed. ‘To the limited extent that the superseding indictment and proffered evidence reflect official conduct, however, the Government can rebut the presumption of immunity because relying on that conduct in this prosecution will not pose a danger of intrusion on the authority or functions of the Executive Branch.’ 

Fox News Digital’s Brooke Singman and Fox News’ Jake Gibson contributed to this report.

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The debate between the candidates for vice president — GOP nominee Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — was dominated by Vance, and all but a handful of hardened partisan pundits agree on that conclusion. 

Walz wobbled and panicked from the first question — which everyone in the world knew would be about Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel earlier in the day. Yet Walz still fumbled his response, and it got worse from there until the CBS moderators invoked the unwritten mercy rule for left-wing moderators watching the Democrat melt and tossed Walz some softballs on J6 at the debate’s close, by which time the internet was howling and laughing at the Minnesota governor. 

There were three important takeaways:  

First, Vance is a superb and calm debater and a reassuring figure on the national stage. 

Second, Walz is not, and he represents the one big decision Vice President Kamala Harris has had to make since President Joe Biden dropped out. It was a terrible decision. Imagine her Cabinet and White House staff if somehow, she wins.  

Third, legacy media is irretrievably broken and cannot be reclaimed from its lurch into rote leftism and extreme partisanship, or even pulled back to a minimum level of seriousness on big occasions.  

Do executives at these networks — ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC— not see what has happened? Americans don’t trust the news divisions at the legacy networks. It’s as if those divisions are run by a combination of fresh-from-campus-demonstration interns and hardened partisans from the Obama years.  

The CBS debate was not, however, as overtly biased against Vance as ABC’s earlier debate was against Trump, but it was still very, very biased against the center-right and conservative audience. Viewers saw the question set veer quickly from a world crisis and the border crisis to get to the left’s favorite issue of abortion.  

With the world tuning in only hours after Iran launched 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, the moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan did open with an obligatory round of questions on that crisis. But, after 10 minutes, they plowed on to a quick exchange on immigration and the Biden-Harris massive fail on the relief efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene’s savaging of North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Virginia in order to get to … abortion, which had been discussed at length in the ABC debate and about which there are zero mysteries.  

Three rounds of questions on abortion, really? And three rounds marked by the rote framing favored by the hard left? Predictable but still shocking.  

The debate ended in a morass of childcare questions and then the obligatory ‘Wasn’t January 6th terrible?’ questions.  

What a farce. Not one question on China’s vast military build-up and its threat against Taiwan and the Philippines. Not one question on the Chinese Communist Party spies shot through our country, including the office of New York’s current and past governor.  Not one question on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  

Yes, there was a quick dash through the consequences of more than 10 million illegal immigrants flowing across the southern border under the Biden-Harris regime, but also a quick cut-off when Vance began what was an obviously embarrassing factcheck of the CBS factcheck on the ‘legal status’ of the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. ‘We have a lot to get to,’ was the trigger for cutting off anything uncomfortable.  

Walz was asked about his lying about his trips to China — sort of. It was left hanging. A knuckleheaded answer for a knuckleheaded team of debate organizers. Chinese President Xi Jinping is a sort of Voldemort for the networks — never to be named — perhaps because ABC and CBS all have corporate ties to companies that must do business there?  

Look, whatever votes were moved by the debate moved toward the GOP because Vance hammered that the costs of everything from food to gas skyrocketed under Biden-Harris, gave a quick tutorial on why construction costs have soared and thus the price of houses, and repeatedly reminded the audience of Harris’s failure in her job as ‘border czar,’ while also stressing the need for more domestic energy production. Tim Walz provided comic relief.  

The loser wasn’t just Walz though. It was also CBS, which joined ABC in a legacy media hall of shame. When we get back to debates in four years, the good news is the ‘debate commission’ is already dead and that, by 2028, the idea of the big networks hosting debates unchecked by center-right moderators will be as well. The candidates will call on C-SPAN and find some fair moderators. Siri could have done a better job in our past two debates this year.  

What has to be dawning in the C Suites of networks — if they are at all self-aware — is that their product and their talent are awful, and their audiences have already left or will soon leave. Tuesday night was just the most recent example of why. 

Hugh Hewitt is host of ‘The Hugh Hewitt Show,’ heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990.  Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

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Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff issued a letter to major social media executives this week demanding they reveal how they will combat ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ in the 2024 election. 

The letter, co-signed by seven other members of Congress, accuses social media platforms such as X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok of failing to properly prepare for malicious info-hazards in November. 

‘We write to your platforms as concerned Members of Congress, seeking further information about your preparation for and response to the spread of misinformation and disinformation, or the potential incitement of violence on your platforms leading up to the 2024 elections,’ the California congressman wrote. ‘We have already seen how posts with disinformation have spread on the major social media platforms both in the United States and across the globe during election cycles.’

The letter continued, ‘We continue to be concerned with each of your companies’ ability to react efficiently and effectively to misinformation and disinformation, or to any potential incitement of violence occurring on your platforms.’

In the letter, the signers accused social platforms Meta, Discord, and Snap specifically of ‘[reducing] their elections team dramatically’ following the 2022 elections.

X, Meta, and TikTok were singled out and scolded for having ‘not increased their transparency for external groups who can aid in monitoring election information.’

READ THE FULL LETTER — APP USERS CLICK HERE

‘While the impetus of this letter is the 2024 election, political and election-related mis- and disinformation persists even between elections, so we are also urging your companies to commit to taking action on election and political misinformation year-round, not just in the leadup to elections.’

A series of specific questions are offered at the end of the letter, including ‘Will your company be changing your election integrity policies between now and the 2024 U.S. general election?’ and ‘How will your company be more transparent in enforcement of its community guidelines regarding election integrity and transparent with the public about actions it has taken?’

‘Will your company commit to sharing data and metrics on the effectiveness of your enforcement systems in relation to US elections and political speech?’ the Democratic congress members asked. ‘How will your company address mis- and disinformation made by political actors or verified accounts, and how will they be treated differently, if at all, compared to ordinary users?’

The letter was co-signed by Democratic Representatives Julia Brownley of California, Andre Carson of Indiana, Dan Goldman of New York, Robert Garcia of California, Raúl M. Grijalva of Arizona, Hank Johnson of Georgia and Doris Matsui of California.

It was addressed to the following executives: Mark Zuckerberg, Meta; Linda Yaccarino, X; Shou Zi Chew, TikTok; Sundar Pichai, Google; Adam Mosseri, Instagram; Evan Spiegel, Snap; Neal Mohan, YouTube; Satya Nadella, Microsoft.

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