ETF Summary

Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is expected to endorse former President Donald Trump in his 2024 White House bid at a rally in her home state on Friday, multiple sources have confirmed to Fox.

Another source told Fox there would be little reason for Trump to travel to South Dakota other than to get Noem’s endorsement considering the deep-red state is not part of the early primary contests and not typically competitive in a general election.

‘The question isn’t whether Donald Trump wins South Dakota, the only question is how massive is the margin,’ the source said.

Noem, whose national recognition has grown in recent years, was previously considering her own run for the White House, but appears to have ultimately decided against tossing her hat into the already crowded GOP primary field. Her name has been mentioned as a potential nominee for vice president.

She joins a number of other Republican governors who have already thrown their support behind Trump months before any votes are set to be cast in the primaries and caucuses, including South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice and Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy.

Noem declined to endorse any presidential candidate during an interview in June, but said at the time that she didn’t see a  ‘path to victory’ for anyone but Trump.

In the interview Noem revealed she’d had discussions about the 2024 election with presidential candidate and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who she said had asked for her support. She called him a ‘good guy’ who was ‘working hard.’

Noem is also the latest high-profile endorsement Trump has gotten since his fourth, and most recent indictment on criminal charges. He surrendered to the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, Georgia last month on charges related to his alleged effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state.

Fox News’ Chris Pandolfo contributed to this report.

The floating border buoys that Texas installed in the middle of the Rio Grande to curb the flow of illegal immigrants may remain while the controversial measure makes its way through the courts, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

The temporary stay issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit comes abruptly after a U.S. judge ordered the state a day prior to move the floating buoys to the embankment. 

Although that order was not meant to take effect until Sept. 15, Thursday’s ruling could prevent Texas from having to take immediate steps to start moving the barriers.

Gov. Greg Abbott deployed the buoys in July to deter the flow of migrants coming across the southern border. The plan was part of the governor’s broader Operation Lone Star. 

The buoy barrier was installed near the border town of Eagle Pass, with anchors in the riverbed. The area is part of a Border Patrol sector that has seen the second-highest number of migrant crossings this fiscal year with about 270,000 encounters. 

The buoys brought legal challenges from the U.S. Justice Department, which accused Texas of putting a barrier on the international boundary without permission. The Biden administration also said the water barrier raised humanitarian and environmental concerns.

Fox News Digital has reached out to Abbott’s office for comment. 

Reuters contributed to this report.

Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson plans to relocate the city’s nearly 1,600 asylum-seeking migrants currently living in police stations to winterized camps with big tents before winter.

In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Johnson said the relocations will happen ‘before the weather begins to shift and change.’

Each of the massive tents will be able to hold up to 1,000 migrants, the mayor said, and under his plan the camps will provide meals as well as recreational and educational programming.

Currently 16 shelters in the city house 13,500 migrants, and more arrive every day.

The newspaper reported that the cost to shelter the 13,500 migrants costs the city about $30 million per month.

Johnson and his administration are working with the State of Illinois and Cook County to establish more shelters to take some of the pressure off Chicago, the mayor said.

‘These families are coming to the city of Chicago…If we do not create an infrastructure where we’re able to support and, quite frankly, contain these individuals who have experienced a great deal of harm, individuals who are desperate…that type of desperation will lead to chaos,’ Johnson said.

Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to inquiries from Fox News Digital on the matter.

Chicago and other cities have struggled to house and provide services amid an influx of migrants bussed from Texas, an initiative by Gov. Greg Abbott to push back on federal immigration policies.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Lawmakers on the Senate Energy Committee were warned on Thursday about both the threats and opportunities that come with artificial intelligence being integrated into the U.S. energy sector and everyday life as a whole.

The committee held a hearing on the rapidly advancing technology, and experts present spent a significant amount of time not only discussing AI but the ever-looming threat of China and its efforts to steal and recreate emerging U.S. capabilities. 

‘China released their new generation of AI Development Plan, which includes [research and development] and infrastructure targets. The U.S. currently does not have a strategic AI plan like this,’ Committee Chair Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said at the hearing’s outset. 

People will have AI ‘in their pockets’

Among the revelations the witnesses made on Thursday were about just how pervasive AI is going to be in daily life – as Professor Rick Stevens of the Argonne National Laboratory put it, ‘There’s no putting Pandora back in the box.’

He suggested that instead of trying to stymie its advancement, that officials and other Americans need to get educated quickly on how AI works and how to curb its negative impacts.

‘I think we’re going to have…to get smarter about how we manage the risks associated with advanced AI systems,’ Stevens said.

‘Every person with the next few years is going to have a very powerful AI assistant in their pocket to do whatever it is they can get that assistant to help them to do. Hopefully most of that will be positive advances for society and so on. Some of that will be negative. 

‘We’ve got to be able to understand how to reduce that negative element, detect it when it happens and mitigate it either through laws or through other means technical means before something dramatically bad happens.’

DOE Deputy Secretary David Turk echoed the sentiment at another point in the hearing, pointing out that AI’s advancement ‘makes it easier for less sophisticated actors to do more sophisticated kinds of attacks.’

‘The Pandora’s box is open. We now need to deal with it. And we need to take these kinds of emerging AI challenges head on,’ Turk said ‘We’re not there, where we need to be. We need to make the investments we need to keep working at this.’

We need policies ‘for the China we have’

Anna Puglisi of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology also warned senators that current U.S. policy surrounding our adversaries, specifically China, will not be sufficient in the rapidly changing tech landscape.

‘We need to have policies for the China we have, not the China we want. Most policy measures to date have been tactical and not designed to counter an entire system that is structurally different than our own,’ Puglisi said.

‘It’s essential that the United States and other liberal democracies, democracies invest in the future. We’ve heard about the great promise of these technologies. But we must build research security into those funding programs from the start. 

‘Existing policies and laws insufficient to address the level of influence that the CCP exerts in our society, especially in academia and research.’

Turk later added that it was not China alone that posed a threat, and that the U.S.’s traditional opponents on the world stage also presented a host of new issues with AI.

‘It’s not just China. There’s others as well, of course, Russia, Iran, North Korea,’ Turk said. ‘The threat is evolving, and we need to evolve our responses accordingly…We are annually updating that risk matrix now so that we make sure that we are updating in terms of what technologies we consider sensitive, what protocols we have in place.’

Why regulation is not enough

Despite emphasizing the importance of guardrails to mitigate AI’s worst outcomes, hearing witnesses also cautioned that regulation can only go so far. 

It comes as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is pushing his chamber to move forward with an AI regulatory framework even as some, mainly on the Republican side, worry it is too soon to do so.

Asked by Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, whether imposing watermark requirements on AI content would help mitigate issues with disinformation, Stevens explained it was a ‘flawed’ approach.

‘I think it’s flawed in the sense that there will be ultimately hundreds or thousands of generators of AI, some of which will be the big companies like Google and OpenAI and so forth. But there will be many open models produced outside the United States, and produced elsewhere, that of course wouldn’t be bound by U.S. regulation,’ the scientist said.

‘We can have a law that says ‘watermark AI-generated content,’ but a rogue player outside the [country] operating in Russia or China or somewhere wouldn’t be bound by that and could produce a ton of material that wouldn’t actually have those watermarks. And so it could pass a test, perhaps.’

Stevens said the U.S. approach must be ‘more strategic’ than watermark label laws.

‘We’re going to have to authenticate real content down to the source. Whether it’s true or not is a separate issue.’

California lawmakers approved a bill decriminalizing the possession and personal use of numerous psychedelics, including ‘magic mushrooms,’ on Thursday.

Senate Bill 58, which passed by a 43-15 vote in the state Assembly on Wednesday and a 21-14 vote in the Senate on Thursday, now heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom who will decide the fate of the measure.

If signed into law, the bill would remove the criminal penalties for the possession and use of psilocybin and psilocin, the active ingredients in psychedelic mushrooms, mescaline (excluding peyote) and dimethyltryptamine, or DMT.

The bill does penalize possession of the psychedelics on school grounds, or possession by, or transferring to, people under 21 years of age.

The pro-psychedelic measure would also require the California Health and Human Services Agency to study the therapeutic use of psychedelics and submit a report to the Legislature with recommendations, the bill says.

California Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher strongly opposed the bill by arguing that legalizing psychedelics will worsen the crime and homelessness ravaging the Golden State.

‘Crime and homelessness are out of control in California. If Democrats don’t think this will make things worse, they’re hallucinating – no mushrooms needed,’ Gallagher said in a statement to Fox News Digital.

Democrat State Assemblyman Scott Wiener, who introduced the bill, argued that veterans and first responders struggling with PTSD, depression, and addiction ‘deserve access to these promising plant medicines.’ 

Wiener argued that psychedelics are not addictive and that the U.S. needs to stop criminalizing people who use them.

‘We know these substances are not addictive, and they show tremendous promise in treating many of the most intractable conditions driving our nation’s mental health crisis,’ Wiener said in a news release. ‘It’s time to stop criminalizing people who use psychedelics for healing or personal well-being.’

Newsom has until Oct. 14 to approve or veto the bill. If signed, the bill would go into effect on Jan. 1, 2025.

Two Republican lawmakers are introducing legislation to force the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to release with their documents on the origins of COVID-19 — or else pay $1 million per day.

Republicans Rep. Chip Roy of Texas and Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas told Fox News Digital that the HHS COVID-19 Origin Transparency Act would require HHS to publicly release all of its records related to the emergence of the virus that brought the world to a halt in 2020.

‘The ‘public health’ regime continues to conceal the truth regarding the origins of COVID-19, vaccine development, masks, and the pandemic as a whole,’ Roy told Fox News Digital.

‘This legislation will cut through bureaucratic stonewalling and let the American people finally seek the truth wherever it may lead.’ the Texas Republican continued.

‘The world and the American people deserve to know the truth about the origins of Covid-19, China’s involvement, and the ongoing cover-up,’ Marshall told Fox News Digital.

‘Yet, here we are after YEARS of asking for the Biden Administration to provide this much-needed transparency and they continue to stonewall our investigations and find ‘work arounds’ to dodge our requests,’ the Kansas senator continued. ‘Every American should be asking, ‘Why is that?’’

‘Our legislation requires the HHS to publicly release all agency records related to the origins of COVID-19, the cover-up of the pandemic origins, and coronavirus research, including vaccine development,’ he added. ‘It’s past time for answers- this is a matter of national security.’

The Republicans’ bill requires the HHS secretary to publicly release all ‘unpublished and unreleased records,’ including ‘all records pending authorization or other approval from any organization of the People’s Republic of China,’ ‘all coronavirus records,’ and ‘all coronavirus research records,’ among other documents.

The legislation also requires the HHS secretary to publish ‘a record pertaining to sick researchers in Wuhan, China, during the Fall of 2019, including for any such researcher’ his or her name, the name of the laboratory and the researcher’s role there, ‘symptoms, and date of symptom onset.’

The published record would also be required to disclose ‘whether the researcher was involved with or exposed to coronavirus research in Wuhan research laboratories,’ if he or she ‘visited a hospital or medical clinic while they were ill,’ and ‘a description of any other actions taken by the researcher that may suggest they were experiencing a serious illness at the time.’

The HHS secretary would also be required to publish ‘a record pertaining to coronavirus research conducted in cooperation with any Chinese national public research university affiliated with and funded by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China’ and ‘a record pertaining to concerns of bioweapon programs in China,’ including records related to COVID-19 as a bioweapon.

The bill requires the HHS secretary to ‘submit a report to the Congress containing a summary of each item of information that is described’ in the required publications, but ‘withheld’ under the bill’s provisions for classified information that was not initially determined to be confidential.

Should the HHS secretary not comply, the bill mandates the department transfer money to pay off the national debt in increments of $1 million per day.

Roy is introducing the bill to the House on Friday while Marshall will bring the bill to the Senate floor next week when the upper chamber comes back to work.

The bill comes after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) published a lackluster report on the origins of COVID-19 after being mandated by Congress to do so.

A bill led by Republican Senator Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and signed into law by President Biden earlier this year required the director of national intelligence to declassify COVID-19 origins documents.

The Biden administration is considering forcing migrants who cross into the United States illegally to remain in Texas while they wait out their asylum screening.

Administration officials cite the proposed plan as a way to curb the flow of illegal immigrants at the southern border, The Los Angeles Times reported, citing three U.S. officials not authorized to discuss the matter.

The plan would force migrants to remain in Texas, or possibly other border states by tracking their location through GPS monitoring devices, such as ankle bracelets, the officials told the Times. 

The migrants would undergo an asylum screening to determine whether they can remain in the U.S. Officials have discussed working with local groups to provide housing for the migrants.  

Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office and several immigration agencies. 

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told Fox News Digital that the Biden administration ‘is committed to expanding safe and orderly pathways for migrants to lawfully enter the United States, while imposing consequences to those who fail to use those pathways.’

Since May, DHS has removed or returned over 200,000 people, the agency said.  

‘DHS continuously holds policy and operational discussions on how to leverage our authorities to ensure a fair, humane, and effective immigration process that efficiently removes those without a lawful basis to stay in the country,’ the DHS statement said. 

The plan would expand upon the Family Expedited Removal Management (FERM) program, which places migrant families under a curfew and GPS monitoring. It applies to those heading to various cities like Baltimore, Washington and Chicago. 

The potential move comes amid an increase in migrant encounters at the southern border. Texas has also continued to feud with the federal government, most recently over Abbott’s effort to stem the influx of migrants with floating buoys on the Rio Grande. 

A Texas judge ruled Wednesday that the buoys must be removed no later than Sept. 15. 

In addition to the floating barriers, Texas has operated a bussing program to transport migrants to so-called ‘sanctuary cities’ like Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles, in an effort to provide relief to border towns. Abbott argues that Texas cities have carried the weight of illegal immigration and that ‘sanctuary cities’ need to begin sharing the burden.

‘Texas has bused over 35,000 migrants to self-declared sanctuary cities,’ he wrote Tuesday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. ‘Over 11,300 to D.C., over 13,300 to NYC, over 6,700 to Chicago, over 2,600 to Philadelphia, over 1,000 to Denver, over 480 to LA.

Many of the targeted cities have become overwhelmed and continue to struggle with providing resources to the migrants. Democratic mayors have demanded more support from their states and the federal government.

Los Angeles leaders recently voted to sue Abbott over the program, and New York Mayor Eric Adams has demanded Biden expedite the work-permitting process for migrants to allow them to support themselves, rather than take up city and state resources housing them in shelters.

Fox News Digital’s Adam Shaw contributed to this report.