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Obama Declines To Endorse Harris In Lengthy Statement On Biden’s Withdrawal

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By HAILEY GOMEZ

 

Former President Barack Obama declined to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris on Sunday in a lengthy statement on President Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race.

Obama praised Biden’s career and time in office as president, and called him “a patriot of the highest order” following the former vice president’s decision to bow out of the 2024 presidential race.

Shortly after announcing he would not seek the Democratic nomination, Biden endorsed Harris. But rather than endorsing Harris, Obama wrote that he was confident Democratic leadership would “create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges” at the upcoming Democratic National Committee convention in Chicago next month.

“I believe that Joe Biden’s vision of a generous, prosperous, and united America that provides opportunity for everyone will be on full display at the Democratic Convention in August. And I expect that every single one of us are prepared to carry that message of hope and progress forward into November and beyond,” Obama said.

“We will be navigating uncharted waters in the days ahead. But I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges,” Obama continued. “I believe that Joe Biden’s vision of a generous, prosperous, and united America that provides opportunity for everyone will be on full display at the Democratic Convention in August. And I expect that every single one of us are prepared to carry that message of hope and progress forward into November and beyond,” Obama said.

Obama said Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race exemplified his former vice president’s love for the country.

“For him to look at the political landscape and decide that he should pass the torch to a new nominee is surely one of the toughest in his life. But I know he wouldn’t make this decision unless he believed it was right for America,” Obama wrote. “It’s a testament to Joe Biden’s love of country — and a historic example of a genuine public servant once again putting the interests of the American people ahead of his own that future generations of leaders will do well to follow.”

The statement from the former president came shortly after both former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton announced they would be throwing their support behind Harris.

“We join millions of Americans in thanking President Biden for all he has accomplished, standing up for America time and again, with his North Star always being what’s best for the country. We are honored to join the President in endorsing Vice President Harris and will do whatever we can to support her,” the couple said in a joint statement on X.

Biden released his announcement to drop from the 2024 race Sunday afternoon on X, posting a letter in which he expressed his belief that it would be best for the Democratic Party and the country for him to “stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term.” The president’s withdrawal comes after weeks of a steady trickle of Democratic lawmakers publicly urging him to step down.

Despite the concerns from his party, Biden and his team had insisted for weeks that he would stay in the race, despite reports indicating that major Democratic donors would pause contributions totaling an estimated $90 million to the largest pro-Biden super PAC if he remained the nominee.

Endorsements for Harris have rolled through from party lawmakers since the announcement, but some have proposed a “mini primary process” to select a nominee ahead of the Democratic convention in August.

(Featured image credit: Screen Capture/CSPAN)

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Warning Canada: China’s Economic Miracle Was Built on Mass Displacement

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If you think the CCP will treat foreigners better than its own people, when it extends its power over you, please think again: Dimon Liu’s warning to Canadian Parliament.

Editor’s Note: The Bureau is publishing the following testimony to Canada’s House of Commons committee on International Human Rights from Dimon Liu, a China-born, Washington, D.C.-based democracy advocate who testified in Parliament on December 8, 2025, about the human cost of China’s economic rise. Submitted to The Bureau as an op-ed, Liu’s testimony argues that the Canadian government should tighten scrutiny of high-risk trade and investment, and ensure Canada’s foreign policy does not inadvertently reward coercion. Liu also warns that the Chinese Communist Party could gain leverage over Canadians and treat them as it has done to its own subjugated population—an implied message to Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has pledged to engage China as a strategic partner without making that position clear to Canadians during his election campaign.

OTTAWA — It is an honor to speak before you at the Canadian Parliament.

My testimony will attempt to explain why China’s economic success is built on the backs of the largest number of displaced persons in human history.

It is estimated that these displaced individuals range between 300 to 400 million — it is equivalent to the total population of the United States being uprooted and forced to relocate. These displaced persons are invisible to the world, their sufferings unnoticed, their plights ignored.

In 1978, when economic reform began, China’s GDP was $150 billion USD.

In 2000, when China joined the WTO, it was approximately $1.2 trillion USD.

China’s current GDP is approximately $18 trillion USD.

In 2000 China’s manufacturing output was smaller than Italy’s.

Today it’s larger than America, Europe, Japan, and South Korea combined.

If you have ever wondered how China managed to grow so fast in such a short time, Charles Li, former CEO of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, has the answers for you.

He listed 4 reasons: 1) cheapest land, 2) cheapest labor, 3) cheapest capital, and 4) disregard of environmental costs.

“The cheapest land” because the CCP government took the land from the farmers at little to no compensation.

“The cheapest labor,” because these farmers, without land to farm, were forced to find work in urban areas at very low wages.

The communist household registration system (hukou 戶口) ties them perpetually to the rural areas. This means they are not legal residents, and cannot receive social benefits that legal urban residents are entitled. They could be evicted at any time.

One well known incident of eviction occurred in November 2017. Cai Qi, now the second most powerful man in China after Xi Jinping, was a municipal official in Beijing. He evicted tens of thousands into Beijing’s harsh winter, with only days, or just moments of notice. Cai Qi made famous a term, “low-end population” (低端人口), and exposed CCP’s contempt of rural migrants it treats as second class citizens.

These displaced migrant workers have one tradition they hold dear — it is to reunite with their families during the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday, making this seasonal migration of 100 to 150 million people a spectacular event. In China’s economic winter of 2025 with waves of bankruptcies and factory closures, the tide of unemployed migrant workers returning home to where there is also no work, and no land to farm, has become a worrisome event.

Historically in the last 2,000 years, social instability has caused the collapse of many ruling regimes in China.

“The cheapest capital” is acquired through predatory banking practices, and through the stock markets, first to rake in the savings of the Chinese people; and later international investments by listing opaque, and state owned enterprises in leading stock markets around the world.

“A disregard of environmental costs” is a hallmark of China’s industrialization. The land is poisoned, so is the water; and China produces one-third of all global greenhouse gases.

Chinese Communist officials often laud their system as superior. The essayist Qin Hui has written that the Chinese communist government enjoys a human rights abuse advantage. This is true. By abusing its own people so brutally, the CCP regime has created an image of success, which will prove to be a mirage.

If you think the CCP will treat foreigners better than its own people, when it extends its power over you, please think again.

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Artificial Intelligence

UK Police Pilot AI System to Track “Suspicious” Driver Journeys

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AI-driven surveillance is shifting from spotting suspects to mapping ordinary life, turning everyday travel into a stream of behavioral data

Police forces across Britain are experimenting with artificial intelligence that can automatically monitor and categorize drivers’ movements using the country’s extensive number plate recognition network.
Internal records obtained by Liberty Investigates and The Telegraph reveal that three of England and Wales’s nine regional organized crime units are piloting a Faculty AI-built program designed to learn from vehicle movement data and detect journeys that algorithms label “suspicious.”
For years, the automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system has logged more than 100 million vehicle sightings each day, mostly for confirming whether a specific registration has appeared in a certain area.
The new initiative changes that logic entirely. Instead of checking isolated plates, it teaches software to trace entire routes, looking for patterns of behavior that resemble the travel of criminal networks known for “county lines” drug trafficking.
The project, called Operation Ignition, represents a change in scale and ambition.
Unlike traditional alerts that depend on officers manually flagging “vehicles of interest,” the machine learning model learns from past data to generate its own list of potential targets.
Official papers admit that the process could involve “millions of [vehicle registrations],” and that the information gathered may guide future decisions about the ethical and operational use of such technologies.
What began as a Home Office-funded trial in the North West covering Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Cheshire, Cumbria, Lancashire, and North Wales has now expanded into three regional crime units.
Authorities describe this as a technical experiment, but documents point to long-term plans for nationwide adoption.
Civil liberty groups warn that these kinds of systems rarely stay limited to their original purpose.
Jake Hurfurt of Big Brother Watch said: “The UK’s ANPR network is already one of the biggest surveillance networks on the planet, tracking millions of innocent people’s journeys every single day. Using AI to analyse the millions of number plates it picks up will only make the surveillance dragnet even more intrusive. Monitoring and analysing this many journeys will impact everybody’s privacy and has the potential to allow police to analyse how we all move around the country at the click of a button.”
He added that while tackling organized drug routes is a legitimate goal, “there is a real danger of mission creep – ANPR was introduced as a counter-terror measure, now it is used to enforce driving rules. The question is not whether should police try and stop gangs, but how could this next-generation use of number plate scans be used down the line?”
The find and profile app was built by Faculty AI, a British technology firm with deep ties to government projects.
The company, which worked with Dominic Cummings during the Vote Leave campaign, has since developed data analysis tools for the NHS and Ministry of Defence.
Faculty recently drew attention after it was contracted to create software that scans social media for “concerning” posts, later used to monitor online debate about asylum housing.
Faculty declined to comment on its part in the ANPR initiative.
Chief constable Chris Todd, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s data and analytics board, described the system as “a small-scale, exploratory, operational proof of concept looking at the potential use of machine learning in conjunction with ANPR data.”
He said the pilot used “a very small subset of ANPR data” and insisted that “data protection and security measures are in place, and an ethics panel has been established to oversee the work.”
William Webster, the Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner, said the Home Office was consulting on new legal rules for digital and biometric policing tools, including ANPR.
“Oversight is a key part of this framework,” he said, adding that trials of this kind should take place within “a ‘safe space’” that ensures “transparency and accountability at the outset.”
A Home Office spokesperson said the app was “designed to support investigations into serious and organised crime” and was “currently being tested on a small scale” using “a small subset of data collected by the national ANPR network.”
From a privacy standpoint, the concern is not just the collection of travel data but what can be inferred from it.
By linking millions of journeys into behavioral models, the system could eventually form a live map of how people move across the country.
Once this analytical capacity becomes part of routine policing, the distinction between tracking suspects and tracking citizens may blur entirely.
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