Donald Trump is opening up a new frontier in his trade war.

Despite striking a pact with China last month, the US president is threatening to reignite tensions with Beijing by entangling the entirety of Asia in a sprawling web of tariff deals.

Even with fresh levies imposed on Japan and South Korea, Trump is racing to land a string of agreements across the continent, including with Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia.

If he pulls that off, he will build a cage around Xi Jinping’s ability to use Asian markets to prop up Beijing’s strained export-driven economy.

“What we are witnessing is no passing trade war,” says Neil Shearing, an economist at Capital Economics. “Rather, it is the manifestation of a deeper, more durable superpower rivalry between the world’s two largest economies.”

House Democrats are getting torched by their own base - and some of their constituents are literally suggesting they light a match. Shocker, we know - from the party that held nationwide riots over George Floyd (though 'mostly peaceful' of course), tried to assassinate Donald Trump and Steve Scalise, and put Rand Paul in the hospital.

Liberal activists are confronting Democrat lawmakers in town halls, office meetings, and online, demanding they ditch political niceties and start “fighting dirty” — even if it means getting hurt, arrested, or worse.

“There is fear and despair and anger among our voters that puts us in a different position where  we can't keep following norms of decorum anymore,” one House Democrat admitted to Axios, as Dems face a mounting tidal wave of frustration from within their own ranks.

In candid interviews with over two dozen House Democrats, Axios found a theme of rage  and a dangerous appetite for violence.

If he is as upset as his expletives suggest, the Russians need to be concerned. What has really changed is that Trump knows his air power can easily penetrate Russian air defenses following the attacks on Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

The Russian president might not live on potatoes but most of the country does, and with the price of spuds rising and Russian sons returning in over a thousand boxes a day, this is the very time President Trump must turn the screw and force Putin to negotiate for peace.

It is now the US president who holds all the aces.

Has Elon Musk gone off the deep end yet again?

Until a few days ago, we thought he had established a cautious truce with President Trump, having apologized for all the awful things he said about the man who had given him a major role in government, estranging their relationship significantly.

Ostensibly, it was all supposedly over the passage in Congress of Trump's budget, known as the Big Beautiful Bill.

It's true that federal spending did increase with its passage and should not have, but it wasn't a massive expansion. It contained critical tax cuts, money for immigration enforcement, money for defense and other important spending.

Nevertheless, Musk was incensed, as if this was the first time he ever heard of it, his ego wounded because it seemingly negated his DOGE work (it didn't so long as DOGE remains in place as it does), and now he says he wants to start a third party, presumably to challenge Trump's party as well as the leftists.

When we look back on the 1980s, a decade characterized by renewed Western strength and prosperity after the malaise of the 1970s, many of us think of three towering figures: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II.

These three people were committed to individual liberty, both political and spiritual, and they provided the economic, military, and moral impetus for that amazing decade, a decade that ended with the collapse of the once formidable—indeed, seemingly unbeatable—Soviet Union.

When I look at the world today, I’m beginning to wonder whether, in place of the Trio of Titans in the 1980s, the third decade of the 21st century will bring us the Dynamic Duo of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Working in tandem in the last few months, these months have brought about the military downfall of Iran and its proxy armies (Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis), even as we’re witnessing the resurgence of the Abraham Accords, which will bring Israel into the fold of its Arab-Muslim Middle Eastern neighbors.

[I’ve known Grover for over 40 years. In all those years, the dream of his organization, Americans for Tax Reform, is what this bill makes possible.  We’ll be talking about this more in tomorrow’s HFR. Read Grover now for a head start. – JW]

President Donald Trump’s permanent tax cut will change the world.

The "big, beautiful bill" is the capstone of years of work to create a pro-growth tax policy that will make the American economy so strong we will leave Europe in the dust and convince China they cannot compete with us militarily or economically.

The big bill provides lower tax rates for all. Permanent, immediate expensing of business investment. Tax simplification. America competing in the world economy with lower taxes, not lower wages.

And the largest spending cut of any budget resolution in history.

The importance of permanent 100% business expensing cannot be overstated. This is an achievement pursued by the taxpayer movement for the past five decades.

Another Democrat former first lady is taking her contempt for children way beyond her distaste for baking cookies.

It might explain why the Obama children never looked very happy, and why young Malia Obama no longer wants to use her mom and dad's last name in the career she is trying to build in film.

But more broadly, it highlights the moral disorder seen among Democrat opinionmakers. To downgrade motherhood, the one thing only women can do to perpetrate the human race, is an outrageous take on the vital role of women and the role they play most naturally.

It's like a war against human civilization, obvious enough in that thoughtless yet deeply felt opinion of Michelle Obama, a remark bound to be met by approval by Democrats who will clap like seals at its mention.

One of the 10,000 Russian tanks destroyed in Ukraine

Last month (6/25), Russian casualties climbed through the one million mark after three and a half years of Putin’s “special military operation”, originally expected to last three days.

For an army of such size in manpower and equipment this seems a remarkable price to pay for less than a fifth of Ukrainian territory, fighting against an army which was minuscule in comparison on the day of the illegal invasion – 24th Feb 22.

What are the reasons for this ineptitude, and is this purely a problem of the modern Russian army – or a reflection of systemic failures across the centuries? A soldier (Hamish) and a historian (James) will try to answer these questions today.

When it comes down to it, the Russian military has always relied on mass and brutality. It has aspired historically to ambitious intellectual underpinnings for its military power but this has tended to falter on first contact with reality.

Which leads to Ukraine.

On his first day in office of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order ending anchor babies, the practice of treating kids born to illegals on U.S. soil as full-fledged citizens.

Three federal district court judges promptly issued (you’ll never guess) nationwide injunctions blocking Trump’s order. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on those injunctions any day now.

That is clearly the assumption of smug liberals sneering that Trump’s executive order is “blatantly unconstitutional,” as one injunction-happy judge put it. Their sublime confidence in the permanence of a made-up constitutional right is awe-inspiring.

In fact, the whole “birthright citizenship” scam is based on a wildly expansive interpretation of post-Civil War amendments that were designed to help blacks and former slaves.

Birthright citizenship, let alone the anchor baby con, has nothing to do with the original Constitution. And as Trump keeps saying, the post-Civil War amendments, such as the 14th, are all about slavery.

Mullah Iran has long cultivated the image of a nation unwilling to bend to foreign pressure. From Ayatollah Khomeini’s rejection of the West in 1979 to today’s battles over nuclear sovereignty, the Islamic Republic has projected an unyielding front.

Even now, it promptly violated a ceasefire with Israel. Yet, behind this posture, events of the past 72 hours tell a starkly different story.

On June 23rd, Iran fired a volley of missiles toward Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar—America’s largest military installation in the Middle East. All failed to reach their target. The U.S. had been warned of the attack in advance. And shortly afterward, a mutual ceasefire was declared.

Far from being a show of strength, this final strike marked something else: the quiet but unmistakable surrender of Iran’s regime to mounting military and economic pressure. I.e., to President Donald Trump.

It’s official without being official.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has put Israel all in to try to help facilitate regime change in Iran.

He is not saying it 100% explicitly, and the IDF is very carefully avoiding saying it, but on Monday (6/23), for the first time, the IDF attacks on Iran seemed to be overwhelmingly against the regime’s internal political power versus its nuclear or external military power.

Israel is now doing almost everything it can to remove the obstacles preventing the Iranian people to rise up and remove the mullahs from power.  Here’s how.

The word “badass” was bandied about a lot after the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump last year.  Famously, the bloodied Republican candidate raised his fist in defiance.

In a different context, the same pungent word applies to his 2 a.m. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Trump the TV star has a knack for the theatrical and grand gesture. That obviously matters in domestic politics, but in international affairs, too, where projecting strength and command are just as important.

Bombing Fordow and the other sites was also quite focused, but the operation came as a strategic thunderclap.

One way to put it is that the “shock and awe” bombing campaign before the second Iraq war was much less awesome than advertised, and a prelude to a grinding, drawn-out conflict. Trump’s operations tend, in contrast, to be all shock and awe, and for real.

The Trump method is to simplify everything and apply blunt-force solutions, undergirded by a very human psychology of dominance.  That’s what makes him a presidential badass.

In Tehran and cities throughout Iran, Iranians are today chanting enthusiastically about the anticipated fall of the “Islamic Republic” regime and the potential return of the Crown Prince, heir to the ancient throne of Persia.

While it is unclear exactly the extent of the damage Israel has inflicted on Iran and whether or not the current genocidal regime will fall because of it, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi confirmed that Iranian soldiers and officials have reached out to him, and he urged the Iranian people to rise up, announcing he already has a plan for renewing Iran should he come to power again.

In his message above, Pahlavi condemned the violence, cowardice, and destructiveness of Ayatollah Khamenei and co., and confidently predicted that the collapse of the regime there is irreversible. “We are prepared for the first hundred days after the fall, for the transitional period, and for the establishment of a national and democratic government — by the Iranian people and for the Iranian people,” he vowed.

Pahlavi is an advocate for a Westernized, secularized government in Iran. Think of what that would mean for the Middle East. And indeed the world.

While chess originated in India, the game as we know it came from Persia (now known as Iran).

It was from Persia that the term for the final, winning move came: “Checkmate.”

The original Farsi phrase is “shāh māt,” which literally means “the king is dead.”

No matter how fast or slow a chess game, whether it takes minutes or weeks, it ends when the king is dead.

Israel has taken note of that fact and has decided to fight a new type of warfare, ignoring the pawns and killing the king in the first instance.

Of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, about 7-10% of them are “in it to win it.”

While 10% is a small percentage, 160,000,000 fanatics are still a good-sized global army, and many of them are troops in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

They will fight to the death, buoyed up by promises of martyrdom’s rich rewards (mostly creepy sex but, perhaps, a glut of fine raisins).

But no matter how fanatic your troops are, they still need leaders.

Think of them as savage sheep.

If led to battle, they’ll fight fiercely, but if there is no shepherd, they lose the plot, often becoming frightened or disheartened, and almost all will scatter.

It’s this savage sheep concept that gets me to my chess metaphor.

Strains of the pathogen Fusarium graminearum confiscated from Liu Zunyong. (Source: U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan)

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has a long history of engaging in agricultural espionage and, potentially, sabotage in the United States.

On Tuesday, June 3rd, two citizens of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), both specialists in the fungus and its modes of transmission and infection in crops, Jian Yunqing (简云青), 33, and Liu Zunyong (刘尊永), 34, were charged in a criminal complaint for conspiracy, smuggling goods into the United States, false statements, and visa fraud.

The pair is accused of conspiring to smuggle samples of the crop-destroying fungus Fusarium graminearum—which the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) describes as “a potential agroterrorism weapon”—into the United States (DOJ, June 3). Consumption of grain contaminated by this fungal blight can cause vomiting and liver damage in humans and livestock.

This is far from the first attempt of Communist China, which may now have a strategy of agroterrorism on America’s food supply.

Iran bet on bluff and delay—but lost its proxies, deterrence, and leverage, leaving a regime rich in threats but bankrupt in power.

Iran apparently had not adjusted to its new 2025 status—or maybe it had.

Most of its bought terrorists are currently either destroyed or anemic.

There is no more ascendant Iranian “Shia crescent” in the Middle East.

Russia is no longer a Middle East power, patron, and protector.

The Assad dynasty imploded, flipping Syria from an Iranian proxy into a likely Iranian enemy.

Hezbollah, once supposedly the most fearsome of all the Iranian terrorist tentacles, was humiliated and neutered by a series of surreal Israeli operations.

With the end of the Biden administration and Obama a distant memory, Iran lost all hope that it could bluster, bluff, and negotiate itself out of sanctions and embargoes—and into nuclear weapons.

There are no more John Kerrys or Antony Blinkens in charge, eager to meet Iranian demands. Ben Rhodes’s “echo chamber” Iran Deal is ancient history.

Israel had done more than all of America’s Middle East wars or all of NATO’s global presence to end Iran’s claims on power and the ability to project its brand of terror and fear throughout the Middle East.

So why did a neutered Iran still sound like the fiery Iran of old, when it once terrorized the Middle East and sent its assassination teams worldwide, with its nearly weekly loud threats to wipe out the one-bomb “Zionist entity?”

What was Iran thinking in refusing to negotiate seriously with the Trump administration to disband its nuclear weapons program and “normalize” its role in the Middle East?

The moment Israeli fighter jets cracked open Iran’s air-defense umbrella last week, the professional panic class—President Trump aptly calls them the “Panicans”—went straight to Defcon Twitter, wailing that World War III had begun and demanding that America stay out of it.

As if we weren’t already in it.

The Pentagon has been clear: our forces are in a defensive posture, which means active radar, ready launchers, and iron in the sky—not a bunch of soldiers sitting around waiting to be target practice.

And now, for anyone still half-asleep, the President just announced that we hold “complete and total control over Iranian skies.”

That is not mission creep; that is mission accomplished at thirty-thousand feet.

First, a little memory‑jog for the amnesiacs.

Candidate Trump never promised monastic isolation. What he promised—and delivered—was an end to feckless, open‑ended nation‑building while preserving America’s right to strike quickly, decisively, and overwhelmingly when genuine threats emerged.

In 2017 he unleashed new rules of engagement that collapsed the Islamic State’s “caliphate” in weeks—something Washington’s polite war managers had failed to do for three long years.

Then came January 3, 2020.

Qassem Soleimani, the terror architect who had American blood on his hands from Baghdad to Beirut, learned in a flash of white light that presidential red lines are real.

Trump’s surgical order saved untold American and allied lives and stunned Tehran into recalculating its aggression.

The strike was not the beginning of a new war; it was the punctuation mark that prevented one.

Nothing about this week’s move contradicts that record.

Approximately a year after tech billionaire Elon Musk acquired X, formerly known as Twitter, in November 2023, a number of major companies collectively removed their ads from the platform.

They all did so while citing dubious concerns that Musk was allowing the promotion of anti-Semitism and “hate speech” on his platform.

The effort to get companies to pull their ads from X was spearheaded by the Leftmedia organization Media Matters.

Companies that pulled ads significantly impacting X’s revenue generation included the likes of Disney, Apple, IBM, Comcast/NBC Universal, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount.

The European Commission also joined in on the ad boycott, with spokesman Johannes Bahrke contending that the EU had “seen an alarming increase in disinformation and hate speech on several social media platforms in recent weeks,” singling out X.

The Biden administration also tacitly supported the campaign against X, with the White House posting the following statement on November 17, 2023: “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans.”

The pretext for all this — what proved to be faux outrage given the subsequent silence on actual anti-Semitism that would soon roil college campuses across the country — was that Musk had dared to agree with an X post observing that Jewish communities support a “dialectical hatred against whites.”

However, the ad boycott was too coordinated to pass the spontaneous, supposedly organic movement sniff test.

Soon, House Republicans began asking questions, with the House Judiciary Committee launching an investigation into the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM).

The Committee concluded that GARM “likely violated federal antitrust laws.”

The criticisms of our universities seem endless: charges of antisemitism; exorbitant student fees leading to lifetime debt; ridiculous programs with no practical use; the list goes on.

While the Ivies continue to flex their muscles with the Trump administration, very little has changed.

The schools insist that they have no responsibility to the people whose money they receive through taxes, and they should be allowed to function unencumbered.

Gradually, however, potential post-high school students are showing they are smarter than those who think they are superior to them.

The celebrated option is the trade school.

We have been talking about the value and benefits of trade schools for years.

Ten years ago, our current Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised the value of these schools, because they were filling a need in the United States:

“Why did we stop doing vocational education in America, people that can work with their hands; people you can train to do this work while they’re still in high school so they can graduate ready to go work? What’s happening is some of these tech companies are taking centers to Canada because they can get people to go over there instead of here. The ideal scenario is to train Americans to do the work so we don’t have to rely on people from abroad.”

What does the Palestinian jihad against Israel have to do with allowing illegal migrants to remain in Los Angeles?

On the face of it, absolutely nothing, and yet there the jihadis are, out burning down the City of Angels along with their leftist allies.

The immediate explanation for this is that both leftists and jihadis have a common enemy — the United States of America — and while that is certainly true, this is much more than just an alliance of convenience. What we are seeing in Los Angeles is just the latest manifestation of a deep affinity between leftists and jihadis.

The pro-Hamas contingent appears to be well represented in L.A. One photo shows a masked man with a Hamas armband and a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine headband, waving a Mexican flag next to a car that had been graffitied all over with leftist slogans and set on fire.

In a video, rioters sporting keffiyehs throw burning material from an overpass onto police cars below, trying to set them on fire.

Another keffiyeh-wearing rioter says that the U.S. is the “enemy” and that Los Angeles should burn down. [pictured]

The deeper reason why jihadis as well as leftists are out on the streets of Los Angeles is that both rely on terror as the source of their power.

The right to self-defense, and by extension the right to bear arms, has a long and complex history in Britain.

Today, many see strict gun control as a hallmark of British law, but this was not always the case.

Indeed, Britain has a robust tradition of armed citizenry, rooted in common law, enshrined in the 1689 Bill of Rights, and eroded only in the modern era.

British society faces unprecedented strains, from mass immigration, rising crime and public disorder to distrust of the State, so it is worth re-examining whether Britain has moved too far from its historic principles.

The roots of Britain’s approach to bearing arms can be found in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

The overthrow of King James II and the ascension of William III and Mary II resulted in the English Bill of Rights in 1689.

Mostly focused on the abuses of State (Royal) power, it contained a clause declaring:

“That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defense suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.”

It was not an unlimited right. It was conditioned by status and subject to the law, but it established that the government could not arbitrarily disarm the population.

Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, the English militia system required men to possess and train with weapons to ensure that defense was a civic responsibility, not a purely professional one.

Far from fearing private firearm ownership, the State encouraged it, not least because it lacked a standing army and viewed armed citizens as vital to national defense.

This tradition continued well into the 19th century. Gun ownership was common; regulation was minimal.

This changed after World War I, which left Britain with a surplus of weapons, a newly politicized working class that knew how to use them, and an Establishment fearful of a Bolshevik revolution, culminating in the Firearms Act of 1920, the first major piece of modern gun control legislation.

On a recent podcast episode, Joe Rogan and his guest Cody Tucker found themselves in a discussion that was clearly skeptical of the atheistic consensus among prominent thinkers of the past few generations.

That atheistic consensus generally states that the following is true. There was obviously once a Great Nothingness that suddenly became our universe and the existence of everything within it -- and all of this happened for no reason whatsoever.

Rogan asks a question that every person has likely asked themselves countless times, “wouldn’t it be crazy if there wasn’t something at some point in time?  That seems even crazier than [to think] there has always been something.”

He's not wrong.

To believe that nothing suddenly became everything for no reason whatsoever is an act of pure faith based upon no observable data.

What’s more, the proclamation itself an act of heresy for scientific atheists.

A database search of 12 million books published in the 300 years before 9/11 reveals only one instance of the phrase “Islam is a religion of peace.”

It appears in fiction and is spoken by Ayatollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, an Iranian leader in Tom Clancy’s thriller titled Executive Orders.

But the dangerous notion that Islam is peaceful has been so frequently reiterated by world leaders, clerics, and the liberal media-academia complex that it has taken on the status of COWDUNG—a facetious near-acronym for ‘conventional wisdom of the dominant group.’

Denying 1,400 years of history, these apologists would have us believe that extremist Islam is a perversion.

Their sanitized version presents Islam’s prime motif of violent jihad—or religious war against infidels—as an individual’s “inner struggle” for spiritual growth.

To expose these falsehoods—which have circled the globe before the truth even got out of bed—conservative authors Tommy Robinson and Peter McLoughlin wrote Mohammed’s Koran: Why Muslims Kill for Islam.

In light of Robinson’s early release from a British prison a few days ago, an overview of this important book seems fitting.

The key to understanding what the Koran signifies to Muslims is naskh….

As one anonymous and unelected judge after another rules against the Trump agenda, Republicans must decide whether they want to abide by the will of the American people.

If Tren de Aragua gang members aren’t “alien enemies” of the United States, aren’t able to be deported by the American president under the ancient Alien Enemies Act, then language itself has lost its meaning. But that’s the world we’re living in.

In a way, it shouldn’t surprise us. The Left, after all, has been at war with the language — and at war with reality — for decades.

Indeed, they insist that men can become pregnant, that women can only be described by biologists, that pedophiles are merely minor-attracted persons, and that last year’s version of Joe Biden was the best Biden ever.

Nor should the current judicial war against Donald Trump surprise any of us. All throughout his first term, Trump and his agenda were sabotaged from within by entrenched deep-state leftists and by old-guard establishment Republicans.

In this second term, though, with Trump having remade the Republican Party and having cleaned up the executive branch, the attacks are coming from without — from the third and supposedly coequal branch of government that Thomas Jefferson once presciently warned could become despotic: the judicial branch.

Since his inauguration, Trump has been busy trying to unscrew the mess bequeathed him by four years of the Autopen Presidency, but he’s been opposed at nearly every turn — from mass-deporting illegal aliens to ending birthright citizenship to trimming down our grotesquely bloated federal government to imposing tariffs on predatory trading partners — by lower-court judges and, in some cases, by the very Supreme Court justices that he nominated for the bench.

For openers, kudos to President Donald Trump for his leadership on addressing this heretofore missing piece of the energy puzzle.

Incomprehensibly, the preceding administration embarked on a quixotic mission to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, while simultaneously ignoring our single safe, abundant, and non-polluting means of generating electricity.

Somehow, in the midst of ongoing firestorms on immigration, trade, taxes, and two wars, Trump still manages to attend to other important matters that have been lost in the shuffle.

Some call it chaos, but we should be happy to have a president with the stamina to keep so many balls in the air.

Will Trump’s blitz of actions get nuclear power back on track?

The only way to answer that question is to understand how we got so far off track so quickly and so completely.

Why did we suddenly stop building nuclear plants?

It’s a complicated picture with numerous parts and pieces. But in my opinion, it all boils down to one root cause: the realization by prospective investors that nuclear power’s opponents, with sufficient legal and political support, can render a new, multibillion-dollar facility unusable.

If that seems implausible, consider the fate of the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, the poster child for anti-nuclear activism.

On May 9, 2024, a fire broke out at an IKEA warehouse in Vilnius, Lithuania (Lrytas, May 20, 2024). Subsequent investigations revealed that the arson was orchestrated by Russia’s military intelligence agency, the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces (GRU), and that the suspects were also planning similar attacks in Latvia (LRT, March 17).

The Lithuanian Prosecutor General’s Office classified the incident as an act of terrorism aimed at intimidating the societies of Lithuania and pressuring them to reduce support for Ukraine (LRT, March 17).

Russia’s hybrid warfare strategy extends beyond its war against Ukraine as it also targets other European frontline states through influence operations, election interference, and intimidation.

The Baltic States—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—are targeted by Russian hybrid tactics as a daily reality and direct challenge to their sovereignty.

Historically, Moscow has used political, economic, energy, and cyber tactics to undermine the Baltics.

Recent efforts, however, are markedly more aggressive, particularly as they involve military pressure.

Understanding the origins of Russia’s hybrid strategy is crucial to recognizing its evolving influence in the region.

A new rapid blood test for newborns could potentially detect genetic mutations linked to thousands of rare diseases all at once, greatly improving on current inefficient detection methods, according to a study to be presented Monday.

The new test developed by Australian scientists has proven highly accurate in identifying gene mutations associated with many rare, inherited diseases, all from just a minimally invasive blood sample taken from infants and children, the authors say.

The study, being unveiled at the European Human Genetics Conference in Milan, Italy, demonstrated that a single, untargeted test capable of analyzing 8,000 human proteins at once was able to correctly identify 83% of people with confirmed rare, inherited diseases.

The "proteomics" test was also able to differentiate between parental carriers of the mutations, who only have one copy of the defective gene, and the affected child, who carries two copies.

Those encouraging results are raising hopes for a new era in which screening infants and children for suspected inherited rare diseases can be accomplished quickly and efficiently for the first time, and that testing can be extended to many more of the estimated 300 million people worldwide affected by these genetic mutations.

Testing for suspected inherited diseases has traditionally been a time-consuming, costly and sometimes painful process that required different procedures for different suspected mutations. But that paradigm could be about to change, the study's lead author says.

Daniella Hock, a senior postdoctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne, told UPI that if the test is implemented in clinical labs, "it can potentially replace multiple functional tests. This can potentially reduce the diagnostic time for patients and families and healthcare costs.

"The test only requires only 1 milliliter of blood from infants, and results can be achieved in less than three days for urgent cases," she said.