It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too, e.g. about the changes of the moon and of the sun, about the stars and about the origin of the universe.
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As Republicans lead state efforts to prevent minors from accessing pornography, the porn industry is fighting a renewed legal battle against the federal government after the Biden administration halted a rule ensuring “fair access to banking services.”
The battle is starting what critics call “Operation Choke Point 2.0,” using its authority over the banking sector.
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Daily Mail A group of current and former employees of Gannet is suing the media giant, saying they were fired or lost out on promotions to make room for less-qualified women and minorities. The five staffers say they suffered from the firm’s diversity hiring policy, which was introduced in 2020 to get newsrooms looking more like the communities they served within five years. It’s the latest in a series of lawsuits and actions to take aim at ‘reverse racism’ in corporate America. READ THE FULL STORY
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The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) announced that the state’s Free Hunting Day this year will be today- coinciding with the opening day of squirrel season.
The Volunteer State’s Free Hunting Day is a yearly event by the TWRA with the goal of increasing interest in hunting and “for people to experience the enjoyment of the sport.”
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On Thursday, the Biden Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against SpaceX, accusing the company of discrimination for preferring American citizens over asylum seekers and refugees in its hiring practices.
In its 13-page complaint, the Justice Dept. alleges that SpaceX “routinely discouraged asylees and refugees from applying and refused to hire or consider them, because of their citizenship status, in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).” The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division seeks to force SpaceX to give “fair compensation” to non-citizens that were not hired.
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A proposal in a Stanford University journal for “news source trustworthiness ratings” would, if it advances, be like a digital reboot of the CIA’s psychedelic mind-control experiments from the Cold War era, says a former State Department cyber official who now leads a online free speech watchdog group.
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A new artificial intelligence program that finds voter registration errors can be used for voter roll maintenance, possibly being a replacement for the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC).
Since last year, nine GOP-led states have left ERIC, a multistate voter data-sharing organization that facilitates voter registration and maintenance of voter rolls, amid such concerns as partisan influence, increasing costs and a failure to address voter fraud.
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Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell raised the possibility of more interest rate hikes in prepared remarks Friday as inflation remains above the Fed’s target rate.
Powell hinted that the Fed will raise interest rates in the future if factors like high inflation, a hot labor market and sustained economic growth persist, according to a speech given by Powell at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium. Interest rates have been raised 11 times since March 2022 in an effort to fight inflation, bringing the federal funds rate within a range of 5.25% and 5.50%, the highest rate since January 2001.
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The American Family Association (AFA) issued an alert Wednesday urging Americans to sign its petition that demands the American Medical Association (AMA) “do no harm” by ending its support for taxpayer-funded “unnatural and irreversible gender-modifying procedures,” such as uterus transplants from dead women for biological men in order to improve their “mental health.”
The petition, which, at the time of publication had collected over 25,000 signers, cites a paper, published in June, in AMA’s Journal of Ethics, that AFA asserts is “driven with political and social activism.”
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As the state looks to evaluate and possibly overhaul its tax system, one state public policy group says officials should improve the tax credit system’s transparency.
“The state has taken a vital step toward creating a fairer tax system by convening this panel and by implementing specific legislative provisions like the one in 2021’s SB 6 that provided for the analyses of tax benefits,” Georgia Budget and Policy Institute President and CEO Staci Fox said in a statement. “While these measures are commendable, past evaluations of tax credits have run into resource and information limitations that hindered meaningful findings and the identification of actionable next steps.
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The Ohio Ballot Board on Thursday rejected using the full text of a proposed amendment for the November ballot that would enshrine abortion into the state Constitution, instead adopting a condensed version of the text written by the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office.
The board approved the condensed language, now titled Issue 1 for the November general election, in a 3-2 split decision. The board can decide to use the full text of the proposed amendment or use a condensed version of the text for the ballot language.
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There will be no shortage of task forces in Wisconsin this year.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos on Thursday ordered the creation of four new task forces on artificial intelligence, childhood obesity, truancy and human trafficking.
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The Florida Public Service Commission held the first of a series of hearings Thursday into how much utilities can potentially charge their customers to repair storm-damaged electrical infrastructure.
Thursday’s hearing was an organizational one to set the stage for the main hearings Sept. 14-17. Each utility and the commission’s staff can call witnesses and offer testimony during the hearings.
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Virginia’s Attorney General Jason Miyares issued an opinion this week, arguing that the governor’s model policies comply with federal and state nondiscrimination laws and that “local school boards are required to adopt policies that are consistent with them.”
The opinion comes at the request of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who has been advocating since the release of the latest version of the Virginia Department of Education’s “Model Policies on Ensuring Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for All Students and Parents in Virginia’s Public Schools” for their adoption — to strong resistance from some districts in the commonwealth.
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Many people believe that one of the best defenses to an armed attack on any location, including a school, is an immediate armed response. Certainly, the actions already taken this year to put “school resource officers” in public schools with taxpayer funding evidences at least some in government and many in the public see the life saving necessity of an immediate armed response to a potential mass killing or assault.
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A new lawsuit says Michiganders should get a permanent income tax break instead of one for just one year.
Lawmakers, including two plaintiffs, passed legislation in 2015 enacting an income tax reduction trigger that lowers the current rate when the state’s revenue outpaces inflation by a set amount. Last year’s state revenue triggered a rollback of the rate from 4.25% to 4.05%.
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A third party seeking to bridge the political divide and offer more choices for voters has added two local Republicans to its roster.
One official, a longtime Democrat – although defeated in the primary election – won enough write-in votes to secure the GOP nomination. He will again be facing his opponent in November, but from the other side of the fence.
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Connecticut’s top law enforcement office is being faulted for poor accounting practices that have cost the state millions of dollars in unretrievable debt and allowing unauthorized overtime that tripled during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report by the state Auditors of Public Accounts, released Wednesday, found that an estimated $10 million owed to the AG’s office and other state agencies from court settlements and other receivables is “unrecoverable” and cited decades of lax accounting practices for the loss of revenue to state coffers.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hasn’t declared a winner in this week’s GOP presidential debate, but he does know who the loser is: The American people.
The Kennedy family scion and Democrat challenger to President Joe Biden for the Democratic Party presidential nomination blasted the eight Republican candidates who took the stage in Milwaukee as out of touch with the average American.
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Gov. Tim Walz announced the appointment of one of his administration’s top attorneys to the Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday.
Karl Procaccini, 40, has spent the last 4.5 years as general counsel and deputy chief of staff in the governor’s office. Depending on who you ask, the Connecticut native and Harvard Law grad has been regarded as either a prudent or overreaching legal advisor to Walz during the Covid-19 pandemic and riots in 2020 and 2021.
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Arizona State senator and registered nurse Janae Shamp (R-Suprise) reminded Arizonans this week of safeguards put in place by Republicans at the legislature to protect against any effort by the federal government to reinstate COVID-19 mask mandates.
This follows movie studio Lionsgate in Santa Monica, Rutgers University in New Jersey, Georgetown University in Washington DC, and Morris Brown College in Atlanta announcing they are reinstating mask mandates due to reported COVID-19 cases.
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Rather than simply try to defeat Donald J. Trump, Democrats want him to die in prison. Neo-totalitarian Democrat campaign operatives masquerading as local, county, and federal prosecutors have deployed four criminal cases against the former president. The New York Post calculates that if he is convicted on all 91 charges he faces, Trump would spend 712 years behind bars. The surprisingly spry 77-year-old could enrage his critics even further, live until at least 2735 A.D., and regain his freedom at age 789.
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A growing cohort of Hispanics find themselves political orphans. Many of them have yet to fully align with the Republican Party, but they increasingly turn away from the economic mismanagement and leftist social extremism of the 2020’s Democrats.
As such, Biden finds a new and worsening problem headed into election year: hemorrhaging support among Hispanics, and especially among working-class Latino voters.
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When I received information about Tyler Reese Tritt, I knew she belonged to someone famous (Travis Tritt is her dad). But what mattered to me was whether she could sing.
The answer is a resounding “yes.” Tyler Reese Tritt sings as naturally as many of us breathe. She said that her dad got her the Disney Princess videos when she was a tot, and her mother added that she would run around the house in her diaper singing “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid.
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As with his other indictments, supporters turned out for former President Donald Trump as he reported to face charges by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s grand jury for questioning the integrity of the 2020 election in Georgia, where just 11,779 votes separated Trump and Joe Biden.
Hours before Trump’s scheduled appearance at the Fulton County Jail at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, hundreds of his supporters could be found on the narrow, tree-lined streets in the couple of blocks surrounding the Fulton County government and jail facilities.
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After the Tennessee House of Representatives introduced a new amendment to modify SB 7088, an anti-human trafficking bill, several Republican members pledged their support to fight the practice, which has been described as “modern-day slavery.”
The original text of the Senate bill requires the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) “to submit a report on child and human trafficking crimes and trends in this state, based upon data available to the bureau, as well as current programs and activities of the bureau’s human trafficking unit, to the governor, the speaker of the house of representatives, and the speaker of the senate by December 1, 2023, and by each December 1 thereafter.”
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Conservative businessman Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign said Friday that he set a new fundraising record in the day following the first GOP presidential debate, the Daily Caller News Foundation confirmed Friday.
Ramaswamy first launched his presidential campaign in February in an interview with DCNF co-founder Tucker Carlson, where he pledged to take on America’s “national identity crisis.” The conservative businessman’s campaign said he raised $600,000 Thursday after making his presidential debate debut alongside Republican heavyweights like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, where many argued he won the night.
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The United Auto Workers (UAW) union authorized a strike on Friday in negotiations with major automakers, according to the union.
The union voted 97% in favor of a strike for its 150,000 autoworkers as negotiations continue with the Big Three automakers, which include Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, according to a union press release. The union is demanding wage increases to counter inflation, defined benefit pensions, retiree healthcare, the elimination of tiers for wages and benefits among other demands.
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The disbarment trial of former Donald Trump attorney and constitutional scholar John Eastman for his role advising the previous president about challenging the 2020 presidential election resumed on Thursday after almost a two-month break caused by conflicting schedules among the parties. It was scheduled to resume on Tuesday but was postponed for two days due to Eastman’s brief arrest in Georgia as one of the 18 people along with Trump who were indicted for their efforts investigating election fraud after the 2020 election.
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China quietly revived a program in 2020 that aimed to recruit foreign-trained scientists to help the country’s efforts in bolstering its semiconductor manufacturing industry, according to Reuters.
The program, originally named the Thousand Talents Plan, stopped work in 2018 after the U.S. launched investigations into the scientists that were a part of the program, and it was later revived under the name Qiming and overseen by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, according to Reuters. The U.S. and China are currently in a tech war, with both countries trying to gain an advantage in the strategic semiconductor industry, which is essential for technological research.
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In order to facilitate electric vehicle (EV) production, the U.S. is seeking to spend taxpayer dollars to develop cobalt supply chains from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a country which is known for high prevalence of unsafe child labor in its mines, many of which are controlled by Chinese interests, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Labor (DOL) are jointly committing $23 million in taxpayer funds to U.S. firms and other mining companies to integrate local Congolese operations and “artisanal” mines into their supply chains, as well as to improve labor standards for miners in the DRC, which are essentially non-existent in most cases, according to the WSJ. Chinese-controlled interests dominate the DRC’s cobalt industry, refining about 75% of the global cobalt supply and manufacturing approximately 70% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries, which are cobalt-intensive products that power EVs.
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With little more than a year until the 2024 elections, the reappearance of some COVID-era protocols has sparked concerns that more widespread measures may be ordered in the months ahead.
This week, Morris Brown College announced on Instagram that “effective immediately,” several COVID-19 protocols, including a campus-wide mask mandate, had been enacted for at least 14 days despit there having been no confirmed COVID-19 cases on campus recently. The measure, the college says, is instead “due to reports of positive cases among students” at other Atlanta-area schools.
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Michigan’s race to increase the state’s number of Electric Vehicles and other non-gasoline fuel vehicles may have caught its second wind after a new company is seeking to invest in hydrogen storage systems.
A subsidiary of French automotive supplier, Compagnie Plastic Omnium, is planning to invest up to $171 million at two sites in the state.
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The Libertarian law group, the Pacific Legal Foundation, is deep into two court cases involving a Virginia high school and several Maryland middle schools and what it calls “race neutral proxies” in their admissions policies.
In an effort to have more students of all backgrounds, the schools have developed policies that put Asian American students at a disadvantage, the foundation claims.
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Despite years of Biden family and media disinformation, we are finally learning that Joe Biden really did fire Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for looking into state corruption involving the oil company Burisma and Hunter Biden—and ultimately Joe Biden himself.
As Vice President, Biden, in his own words, bragged that he had threatened to cancel the deliverance of American foreign aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was dismissed.
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Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost rejected a petition Wednesday that tries to amend the state Constitution by creating a 15-member citizen-appointed panel to draw state legislative and congressional maps, claiming that the language lacks clarity and accuracy.
The amendment, submitted by the Ohio coalition known as Citizens not Politicians, aiming for the November 2024 presidential election, looks to repeal Articles XI and XIX of the Ohio Constitution and introduce Article XX to create a citizen-led redistricting commission and remove that power from the Ohio Redistricting Commission.
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Arizona State Representative Matt Gress (R-Scottsdale) announced Wednesday that the Arizona Department of Housing will not enforce a provision in its contract with the City of Scottsdale that allows the city to pay for hotels for homeless people.
Scottsdale tried to utilize state funds to pay a hotel along Pima and Indian Bend Roads to house homeless persons from “the zone” in downtown Phoenix and foreign nationals who would have otherwise been kicked out under Title 42, which President Joe Biden allowed to expire in May.
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The Florida Board of Education (BOE) voted Wednesday to require restrooms in private K-12 schools and state colleges to be used on the basis of biological sex rather than gender identity, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.
The new rule requires all institutions within the Florida College System to alert the Florida BOE if their bathrooms and locker rooms within instructional spaces and dormitories are separated on the basis of biological sex rather than gender identity, according to the Tallahassee Democrat. If violations of the policy are reported, institutions must have an investigation process that determines disciplinary actions, such as termination, under the rule.
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Pennsylvania’s state government has taken action in recent years to legalize fentanyl test strips and expand medication for opioid use disorder in county jails and state prisons.
Now, some are looking to provide more funding for recovery services to help people stay sober and find community.
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The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee’s LGBTQ+ Resource Center recently posted an Instagram infographic regarding one of the “hidden gems” of polyamory: “petamours.”
The post defines “petamours” as “a pet you get to enjoy due to being part of a polyamorous relationship or polycule.” The term is a portmanteau of the words “metamour,” which the Polyamory Dictionary defines as “[someone] that your romantic partner is in such a relationship with, but you are not,” and pet.
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The Department of Justice (DOJ) charged more than 20 individuals with using social media to entice Arizonans to participate in illegal human smuggling on Tuesday. The Justice Department highlighted an example of criminals using Snapchat, the multimedia instant messaging app, to promise to pay for Arizonans to help smuggle illegal immigrants into the United States.
The U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona filed 13 indictments containing 22 charges of Conspiracy to Transport Illegal Aliens for Profit against 22 individuals, alleging the smugglers “utilized social media, including Snapchat, to recruit” people in Arizona, before then generally switching to messaging applications like WhatsApp “to coordinate the logistics” of the crimes.
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Osseo Area Schools appears to have approved a proposal to fly an LGBT “pride” flag at all district buildings “indefinitely,” according to an audio recording of a recent school board work session.
Under the district’s existing “LGBTQIA+ History and Culture Resolution,” the school board “invites the community to join in the celebration by raising the LGBTQIA+ Progress Pride flag on June 1st at all district buildings and in the school board room as a symbol of support.”
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The Cleveland Browns owners on Monday endorsed State Senator Matt Dolan (R-Chagrin Falls) in his run for U.S. Senate against U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) in 2024.
The Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam announced their support for Dolan, who owns a stake in another professional sports team, the Cleveland Guardians, saying they have taken on the roles of his Senate campaign’s Statewide Finance Chairs.
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Cochise County Supervisor Tom Crosby, who attempted to conduct a hand count of ballots during the 2022 election and delayed the certification of election results, filed a lawsuit with another Arizonan, David Mast, against numerous Arizona officials challenging the results of the election. The lawsuit cited lawbreaking regarding signature verification on mail-in ballots, asserting that the violations resulted in “hundreds of thousands of illegal votes in all statewide results for the 2022 General Election.”
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A report published in the Washington Times last week, entitled “Young conservatives take climate activism to GOP presidential debate,” undoubtedly is of grave concern to conservatives and the Republican Party. A group of young Republicans called the American Conservation Coalition is warning GOP presidential candidates that they “need to engage on energy and climate or they’re going to lose young voters.”
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The Biden administration issued a final notice Wednesday for the lease of 67 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for offshore energy activity, a figure which represents a 6.4 million acre reduction from the initial proposal, Bloomberg News reported.
The 6.4 million acre reduction amounts to 9% of the initially proposed lease area from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), according to Bloomberg. The reduction follows the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) July decision to settle with environmentalist groups and move to introduce protections for the Rice’s whale species in a nearly 11 million acre swath of the Gulf.
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U.S. Customers and Border Protection’s “nationwide encounters” of illegal migrants have gone up almost 300% since 2020, which was former President Trump’s last fiscal year in office, according to a Just the News review of the latest CBP data.
Nationwide encounters of illegal migrants in FY2022 were 2.7 million, the highest total since FY2020, when nationwide encounters stood at 646,000.
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New reports suggest that Hunter Biden traveled to as many as 13 different countries with his father Joe Biden while he was vice president during the Obama Administration.
As Fox News reports, video footage, messages, and Secret Service records obtained from Hunter’s abandoned laptop indicate that the two Bidens traveled together to such locations as Africa, Asia, Europe, and Mexico. At the time, Hunter was still leading the firm Rosemont Seneca Partners, which he used to broker many of his international business deals.
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Major Wall Street firms that decided to expand their asset management operations into China are struggling to capitalize on the market, according to The Wall Street Journal.
BlackRock, a top U.S. investment company, is one of many American firms that are struggling to compete in the Chinese market, ranking only 145th out of almost 200 Chinese mutual funds, with other firms like Fidelity International and Neuberger Berman ranking even lower, according to the WSJ. Factors contributing to the firm’s woes are a lack of willingness from local companies to utilize American investment banks, a struggling Chinese economy and restrictions from both the U.S. and China.
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Following his processing at the Fulton County Jail, President Donald Trump briefly addressed the press pool and called the events of the day a “travesty of justice” and “election interference.”
Trump scheduled his appearance at the Fulton County Jail for 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, responding to the 13-count indictment from District Attorney Fani Willis’ grand jury.
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