President Biden praised the completion of the process to destroy the United States’ chemical weapons stockpile in a statement on Friday.

Biden announced on Friday that the U.S. destroyed the final munition in the country’s chemical weapons stockpile.

‘For more than 30 years, the United States has worked tirelessly to eliminate our chemical weapons stockpile. Today, I am proud to announce that the United States has safely destroyed the final munition in that stockpile—bringing us one step closer to a world free from the horrors of chemical weapons,’ Biden said. 

‘Successive administrations have determined that these weapons should never again be developed or deployed, and this accomplishment not only makes good on our long-standing commitment under the Chemical Weapons Convention, it marks the first time an international body has verified destruction of an entire category of declared weapons of mass destruction. I am grateful to the thousands of Americans who gave their time and talents to this noble and challenging mission for more than three decades.’

The U.S. was under a Sept. 30 deadline to get rid of its remaining chemical weapons under the international Chemical Weapons Convention, which went into place in 1997 and is joined by 193 countries.

Most recently, 51,000 M55 rockets which have GB nerve agent, also known as sarin, were destroyed in Kentucky. The chemicals were stored in Kentucky since the 1940s.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, sarin is ‘one of the most toxic of the known chemical warfare agents.’

‘Exposure to sarin can cause death in minutes. A fraction of an ounce (1 to 10 mL) of sarin on the skin can be fatal. Nerve agents are chemically similar to organophosphate pesticides and exert their effects by interfering with the normal function of the nervous system,’ the CDC states.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement that ‘Chemical weapons are responsible for some of the most horrific episodes of human loss.’

‘Though the use of these deadly agents will always be a stain on history, today our nation has finally fulfilled our promise to rid our arsenal of this evil,’ he said.

Chemical weapon usage began in World War I and are responsible for the estimated deaths of at least 100,000 people.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

EXCLUSIVE: Military records obtained by a conservative watchdog show U.S. Air Force Academy instructional materials that include presentations addressing Critical Race Theory (CRT), White privilege and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

The group, Judicial Watch, announced Friday it had obtained 478 pages of records through a November 2022 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit it filed after the Department of Defense (DOD) didn’t respond to its request for Air Force Academy training materials pertaining to CRT.

The records include one particular PowerPoint presentation about ‘Prejudice and Racism,’ and addresses things like interracial relationships and White Americans’ attitudes toward the Democratic and Republican parties through a racial lense.

Judicial Watch pointed to one particular bullet point in the presentation that stated, ‘Opposition to interracial dating correlated with white partisanship after [President] Obama’s election despite being unrelated to party identification in previous decades.’

It also noted the presentation included a set of tables with the headline, ‘White Americans’ Support for Democratic Candidates for President as a Function of Old-Fashioned Racism,’ and another slide with tables showing, ‘Correlations between Republican Party Identification and Old-Fashioned Racism among White Americans.’

Another highlighted slide was one titled, ‘Radicalization of Public Policy,’ which included a bullet point stating, ‘They [pollsters] found that the image of a black man greatly impacted responses among Trump supporters.’

A bullet point in the same slide said those surveyed supporters of former President Donald Trump ‘were less supportive of housing assistance programs,’ ‘expressed higher levels of anger that some people receive government assistance,’ and ‘were more likely to say that individuals who receive assistance are to blame for their economic situation’ after being ‘exposed to the black racial cue.’

Other slides discussed subjects like ‘White identity,’ and the ‘effects’ it has on non-White people, ‘support for voter ID laws,’ and ‘support for political violence.’

The records also included a ‘CRT Talking Points’ document that claimed the phrase ‘white supremacy’ leads to ‘defensive’ feelings, but is the ‘academically correct way to talk about most of American history.’

A separate presentation appeared to promote BLM by including a depiction of a White police officer holding a sign pointing to a Black man that asked, ‘Is his life worth less than mine?’ Another image showed a White woman holding a similar sign toward a Black woman. Other slides depicted alleged police brutality towards Black Americans.

A number of additional materials obtained by Judicial Watch included in the records reiterated the same topics in various presentations, slides and communications among DOD staff members.

Fox News Digital reached out to the Pentagon and the Air Force for comment but did not immediately receive responses.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s claim that no members of the Biden family were present at the White House in the days leading to the discovery of a bag of cocaine in the West Wing has been contradicted by the Fox News press pool report on one of those very days.

According to the Friday, June 30 pool report, Biden gave remarks in the Roosevelt Room that afternoon, and didn’t depart the White House for Camp David until 6:34 p.m., along with First Lady Jill Biden, Hunter Biden, and Hunter’s son Beau Biden.

However, Jean-Pierre claimed Friday while angrily responding to a reporter’s question about whether the cocaine belonged to a member of the Biden family that they weren’t present at the White House on that day.

‘They were not here Friday. They were not here Saturday. They were not here Sunday. They were not even here Monday. They came back on Tuesday. So to ask that question is actually incredibly irresponsible. And I’ll just leave it there,’ she said.

The White House did not immediately respond to Fox’s request for comment.

The illicit drugs were discovered by a member of the Secret Service on Sunday evening near the West Executive entrance, and have prompted questions from the press over who might have brought them into the White House.

One source told Fox News Digital on Thursday that the Secret Service still didn’t have any suspects in the investigation surrounding the cocaine, and that it wasn’t clear if the culprit would ever be found.

Fox News’ Andrew Mark Miller and Mark Meredith contributed to this report.

Amazon’s top technology officer told the United Nations this week that people will need to eat more fish and less beef if they want to protect the environment, and said artificial intelligence is a tool that is already helping to make that happen.

Dr. Werner Vogels, chief technology officer and vice president of Amazon, told the ‘AI for Good’ global summit in Geneva this week that AI is helping rice farmers and other food producers around the world be much more efficient. However, he said AI will also play an important role in making sure food comes at a lower cost to the environment.

In his remarks to the conference on July 6, Vogels showed a graphic that said it takes seven times more feed to produce a given amount of protein from a cattle farm compared to a fish farm. He said that means people need to move away from eating beef.

‘We need to shift the protein,’ Vogels said. ‘And we know… how damaging cattle farming is, not just because of the amount of food that it needs, but the impact on the environment that it has.’

‘If we want to reduce that impact, we will need to move to consuming fish as our main source of protein,’ he said.

To shift that dramatically to fish, more efficient fish farms are needed. Today, he said, fish farms are plagued by disease that can spread too quickly to every fish in the same pen.

However, he said AI is already helping to solve that problem. Vogels said companies like Aquabyte are using AI and machine learning to gather data on fish in order to quickly detect the presence of disease and other problems that hurt yield.

‘Their mission is to improve fish farming techniques,’ he said. ‘They build this very unique camera… to identify the individual fish, to identify their growth, to identify potential diseases.’

He said AI systems have already analyzed more than 1 billion fish, which is allowing these systems to create a vast data library on fish that will make it more efficient to monitor farmed fish as they grow.

Vogels added that farmed fish is a necessary step because fishing from the ocean has also proved to be bad for the environment.

‘This is an extremely damaging industry,’ he said at the U.N. meeting. ‘Greenpeace reports that fishing nets account for about 86% of the large plastic waste, which is caught in the ‘great Pacific garbage patch,’ which is sitting in the Pacific Ocean which is three times the size of France.’

‘It’s extremely damaging – current fishing approaches – to the environment,’ he said. ‘So fish farming is a much better-controlled environment to grow fish.’

The U.N. conference ran from July 6-7 and featured top U.N. officials and industry leaders. On July 6, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the audience that while AI has the potential for ‘enormous good,’ even though it also poses possible dangers, ‘from the development and use of autonomous lethal weapons, to turbo-charging mis- and dis-information that has undermined democracy.’

The U.S. Justice Department is pressuring some British journalists to cooperate with the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is accused of publishing classified U.S. military documents leaked to him by a whistleblower.

The DOJ and the FBI are using ‘vague threats and pressure tactics’ in their efforts to receive journalists’ help in building their case against Assange, according to Rolling Stones’ James Ball, who said he is among the journalists being pressured to cooperate. Ball is sought by the DOJ as someone who had briefly worked and lived with Assange, and was a whistleblower revealing what he described as ‘WikiLeaks’ own ethical lapses.’

The first attempt at receiving Ball’s cooperation in Assange’s prosecution came through London’s Metropolitan Police in December 2021, he wrote. He remained silent at the time, on the advice of counsel, but has since learned that more journalists have had police show up at their doorsteps in the last month. Former Guardian investigations editor David Leigh, transparency campaigner Heather Brooke and writer Andrew O’Hagan have all been approached by police.

Assange is facing an uphill legal battle over his potential extradition from London, where he has been held at the high-security Belmarsh Prison, to the U.S. over Wikileaks’ 2010 publication of top secret cables detailing war crimes committed by the U.S. government in the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, detention camp, Iraq and Afghanistan. The materials, which were leaked to him by then-U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning, expose instances of the CIA engaging in torture and rendition. Wikileaks also published a video showing the U.S. military gunning down civilians in Iraq, including two Reuters journalists.

The Australian journalist would face 17 charges for receiving, possessing and communicating classified information to the public under the espionage act and one charge alleging a conspiracy to commit computer intrusion if he is extradited to the U.S., and could be sentenced to as many as 175 years in an American maximum security prison. Manning was convicted by the Obama administration’s DOJ in 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses over the Cablegate leak.

Assange has been held at Belmarsh Prison since he was removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy four years ago for breaching jail conditions. He had sought asylum at the embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations he raped two women because Sweden would not promise him protection from extradition to the U.S. The investigations into the sexual assault allegations were eventually dropped.

Ball was first contacted about helping in the Assange case by a Metropolitan Police officer on the special investigations team, who had called him on a blocked number Ball failed to answer. He then received a ‘deliberately innocuous’ email from the police.

‘James, I would like to meet with you to ask if you would be willing to participate in a voluntary witness interview,’ the officer wrote. ‘You are not under investigation for anything. It is a delicate matter that I am only able to discuss with you face to face.’

A lawyer spoke to police on Ball’s behalf and learned that U.S. and U.K. authorities were asking him to testify about a story he wrote on Assange’s relationship with Israel Shamir, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ball wrote, adding that, without his testimony, the ‘U.S. government cannot make much use of what I revealed in the article in a court of law.’

Ball said he was ‘more than willing’ to write about his relationship with Assange in the media, but he does not believe ‘it should be used to help a vindictive prosecution of Assange.’

An officer told Ball’s lawyer that U.S. intelligence agencies claimed to have discovered that ”James Ball’ doesn’t exist,’ which Ball said was a false accusation as the name is his actual birth name that has never changed. After seeking further legal advice, Ball was told by multiple attorneys not to travel to the U.S. or speak out publicly over concerns about potential prosecution for his refusal to cooperate.

‘That uneasy truce has come to an end,’ Ball wrote. ‘As a journalist, I need to be able to travel to the U.S. to work, and I am doing so this week. Also, other journalists are now being contacted in relation to the case. Both together make continued silence impossible.’

Ball said the two years he avoided traveling to the U.S. on legal advice has ‘stifled stories I would otherwise have written for U.S. outlets. I had a real and credible fear of prosecution.’

Last year, the editors and publishers of U.S. and European news outlets that worked with Assange on the publication of excerpts from more than 250,000 documents he obtained in the Cablegate leak — The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País  — wrote an open letter calling for the U.S. to end its prosecution of Assange.

The Obama administration elected against indicting Assange after Wikileaks published the cables in 2010 because it would have had to give the same treatment to journalists from other major news outlets that worked with Assange on the documents. But former President Trump’s DOJ later moved to indict Assange under the Espionage Act, and the Biden administration has continued to pursue his prosecution.

‘If President Biden wants his Department of Justice to reverse the decision of the Obama DOJ on prosecuting Assange for his 2010 actions, he should at least explain it, and say why it is worth the silencing effect it is having on mainstream journalism,’ Ball wrote.

‘As it stands, Biden’s DOJ is threatening the U.S. media’s First Amendment rights, even as it claims to be standing up to a Supreme Court that is threatening many other rights. The hypocrisy should not stand,’ he continued.

Assange’s case has received the attention of some lawmakers on Capitol Hill, with Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., leading a letter to the DOJ demanding the charges against him be dropped. Lawmakers in Australia and other countries have also pushed the U.S. to end its prosecution of Assange. Pope Francis recently met with Assange’s wife, Stella, who said the Pope expressed support for her family’s situation and concern about Assange’s suffering.

The Trump administration CIA reportedly had plans to kill Assange over the publication of sensitive agency hacking tools known as ‘Vault 7,’ which the agency said represented ‘the largest data loss in CIA history,’ according to a 2021 Yahoo report. The agency had discussions ‘at the highest levels’ of the administration about plans to assassinate Assange in London. Acting on orders from then-CIA director Mike Pompeo, the agency had also drawn up kill ‘sketches’ and ‘options.’

The CIA had advanced plans to kidnap and rendition Assange and had made a political decision to charge him, according to the report.

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CONCORD, N.H. – President Biden’s changes to the 2024 presidential primary calendar is heading for a clash with New Hampshire’s cherished, generation’s old position as the first-in-the-nation presidential primary state.

‘New Hampshire has a law that says we will go at least seven days before any similar event,’ New Hampshire Secretary of State Dave Scanlan told Fox News Digital at his Statehouse office.

Scanlan is firm that ‘the Secretary of State schedules the date of the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary.’

New Hampshire has held the first primary in both the Democratic and Republican nominating calendars for a century. And for the last 50 years it’s held the second overall contest, following the Iowa caucuses. While the Republican National Committee’s keeping their order as is — with Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada as their first four states to vote in the schedule — the Democrats earlier this year upended that lineup.

The Democratic National Committee in early February overwhelmingly approved a plan by President Biden to move New Hampshire down in the primary schedule. New Hampshire is to vote second in the DNC’s calendar, along with Nevada, three days after South Carolina. The DNC moved Iowa entirely out of their lineup of the early voting — or carve out states — which hold nominating contests ahead of the rest of the nation.

Many Democrats for years have knocked Iowa and New Hampshire as unrepresentative of the party as a whole, for being largely White with few major urban areas. Nevada and South Carolina, which in recent cycles have voted third and fourth in the calendar, are much more diverse than either Iowa or New Hampshire.

The DNC emphasized that its push to dramatically alter the top of its presidential nominating calendar for the 2024 election cycle was a move to give more representation at the top of the schedule to Black and Hispanic voters in a party that’s become increasingly diverse in recent decades. And the president and supporters of the new nominating calendar argued that it would empower minority voter whom Democrats have long relied on but have at times taken for granted.

‘This committee put together a calendar proposal that reflects our values and will strengthen our party. This calendar does what is long overdue. It expands the number of voices in the early window. And it elevates diverse communities that are at core of the Democratic Party,’ DNC chair Jaime Harrison said earlier this year.

But New Hampshire Democrats have vigorously fought to keep their primary position. Longtime New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley has called the move by the DNC ‘mind-boggling’ and a ‘self-inflicted wound’ that would hurt the chances of Democratic candidates in 2024 in the key northeastern general election battleground state.

The DNC insists that New Hampshire, in order to keep its early voting slot in the new calendar, needs to scrap its decades-old state law that protects its first-in-the-nation primary status and must expand legislation to expand access to early voting. But with Republicans in control of New Hampshire’s governor’s office and both houses of the state legislature, Granite State Democrats argue that’s a non-starter.

The DNC a month ago gave New Hampshire an extension to come into compliance, but that just kicked the can down the road. The national party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee is expected to find the state non-compliant later this summer or early autumn.

Enter Scanlan, who will follow state law as he schedules the primary’s date. 

‘If South Carolina is scheduled as the first primary, it would be at least seven days before that,’ Scanlan said. 

That would likely move the date of the New Hampshire primary into late January.

As for his timetable, Scanlan said that ‘we will schedule the filing period, which will happen sometime this fall, and then after that I would expect to announce the date of the primary. However, we’re just going to watch the developments as they occur and will make decisions based on what happens. We still have plenty of time in this process.’

With New Hampshire nearly certain to move up the date of their contest, President Biden will likely stay off the ballot in New Hampshire to avoid an unsanctioned primary. And with Biden’s two primary challengers — environmental lawyer and high-profile vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and best-selling author and spiritual adviser Marianne Williamson — taking aim at the president and the DNC as they repeatedly campaign in New Hampshire, trouble could be brewing for the president in the Granite State’s primary.

‘President Biden will not file for election in the New Hampshire primary, which will still go first,’ Buckley predicted earlier this year. ‘This will set him up, we believe, for an embarrassing situation where the first primary in the country will be won by someone other than the president. This will only fuel chatter of about Democrats divisions.’

While he is the commanding front-runner in the Democratic presidential nomination polls, the 80-year-old Biden has faced plenty of concerns from Democrats over his age and physical and mental stamina and his approval ratings among all Americans have remained in negative territory for nearly two years.

But most Democrats argue any potential setbacks in unsanctioned contests in New Hampshire or Iowa won’t sidetrack Biden’s expected overwhelming renomination.

‘The Democratic primary in a president’s re-election is never about any single state. It is about the opportunity to tout how that President has delivered for the American people with policies that have put working class and middle class families first,’ veteran Democratic strategist Maria Cardona told Fox News. 

Cardona, a DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee member, argued that ‘the Democratic Party had adopted a primary calendar that reflects the country and gives all communities a strong voice and vote. President Biden will run away with this primary and be our party’s nominee who will then go into a second term in the White House. And that is nothing to be embarrassed about.’

Back in New Hampshire, Scanlan says the battle over the primary has had a unifying affect by transcending the swing state’s increasingly bitter partisan politics. 

‘This is a battleground state and our state House of Representatives right now is almost equally divided between Republicans and Democrats,’ said Scanlan a Republican who succeed longtime Democratic Secretary of State Bill Gardner. ‘It’s polarized. And we have some great debates based on political ideology, but I can tell you that there is one issue where the state is united — both Republicans and Democrats — and that is the first in the nation status of the New Hampshire primary.’