Private employers across the state will pay $67 million less in workers’ compensation premiums after the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation board voted Friday morning to lower rates for the sixth straight year.
The 7% rate cut follows a 3.9% reduction for public employers that went into effect Jan. 1. The new private employer rate takes effect July 1.
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Days before Tuesday’s primary election, more than 700,000 Michiganders have already cast a ballot thanks to new voting laws.
More than 18,000 votes were cast in the first three days of in-person early voting statewide over the holiday weekend.
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Another elite university in the U.S. has backtracked on its decision to eliminate standardized testing in admissions after years of following the practice.
Yale University announced Thursday that it would be instituting a “flexible testing policy,” which allows students to submit several different test scores for admissions, including ACT, SAT, International Baccalaureate, and Advanced Placement scores, according to a Yale website. The university said that after performing extensive research, they found that “test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future.”
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Treating drug addiction is two-fold: one part is law enforcement reducing the supply and another is getting addicts the help they need to recover.
Such is what legislators heard during a House Republican Policy Committee on Thursday as Pennsylvania continues to deal with an opioid crisis that outpaces the rest of the country.
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The latest in Democrat lawfare against President Trump is nothing more than a disgusting sham. The “ruling” in the New York civil trial, where a leftist judge, who has allegedly donated exclusively to Democrats, told Trump, at the behest of a state Attorney General whose sole purpose is to be a “real pain in the ass,” that he must pay $355 million and not do business in the state for three years as punishment for a made-up “crime,” is nothing short of totalitarian.
It has been argued by many as to why the case is meritless, namely because there was no crime committed and no damaged entity, as the banks who loaned Trump money did it happily on their own and were paid back. They assessed Trump’s net worth independently, which is apparently standard practice in the New York State real estate market.
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A who’s who of transgender activists was scheduled this week to meet in Geneva at the World Health Organization to develop new guidelines on “the health of trans and gender-diverse people.”
We can presume the meeting took place, even though public notice of it didn’t appear on the U.N. website listing meetings and conferences.
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An analysis by the news media watchdog group AllSides Technology finds roughly 63% of stories last year on the Google News were from “left and left-leaning news sources.”
In the new analysis released Thursday, 937 stories were reviewed from Oct. 30 to Nov. 14, 2023.
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A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday to essentially axe an Obama-era rule that prohibited new leasing for coal mining on federal lands.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned a previous 2022 court decision that allowed for the reinstatement of an Obama-era regulation that banned new coal mining leases on federally-controlled lands. The 2022 decision overturned Wednesday found that the Trump administration did not conduct an adequate environmental review when it decided to axe the Obama regulation, but the appellate court determined that the case is now moot because the Biden administration revoked the Trump-era reversal at the heart of the case anyways.
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A New York jury on Friday held the National Rifle Association and ex-CEO Wayne LaPierre liable in a suit over lavish spending, brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
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Former President Donald Trump on Friday espoused support for continued access to in vitro fertilization in the wake of an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that determined frozen embryos have the same rights as “unborn children.”
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Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the U.S. is on track to encounter more than 600,000 illegal aliens that have traveled through the Darién Gap, which is the only land path connecting Central America and South America, to get to the U.S.-Mexico border this year.
The Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama consists of more than 60 miles of dense rainforest, steep mountains, and vast swamps. Illegal immigrants from South America and other parts of the world use the land path as a passageway to get to North America.
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The Eastern District Court of Tennessee granted Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s preliminary injunction request in his lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) illegal name, image, and likeness (NIL)-recruitment ban on Friday.
Through its NIL recruitment ban, the NCAA prohibits prospective student-athletes from discussing potential NIL opportunities with schools and collectives prior to enrolling. Specifically, the ban prohibits student-athletes from negotiating with collectives, reviewing NIL offers before making enrollment decisions, and adequately considering the full scope of NIL-related services a school might offer upon enrollment.
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Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said migrants who are crossing illegally into the U.S. are not being thoroughly screened for illnesses or criminal backgrounds.
“They often screen them before they go to detention, but they’re not being detained,” Krikorian explained on Thursday’s episode of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy. “As far as criminal behavior, they do run their names through some databases before they let them go, but that only works if we have records of them having committed crimes in the United States. The problem always with vetting is garbage in, garbage out. Do you think that the Somalia DMV or the medical records office or whatever in Venezuela is going to tell us anything about people? Of course not. So, yes, there is some kind of pro forma screening but it doesn’t really screen very much.”
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The John Fredericks Radio Network announced it has expanded to West Virginia, where it will provide 24 hours of programming, seven days a week, to five stations from Morgantown to Clarksburg.
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President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday that the United States needs to incarcerate criminals to stop the rise in violent crime, akin to his policies.
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A bill advancing in the Tennessee House of Representatives would prohibit local governments from returning lawmakers to the General Assembly after they have been successfully expelled from office.
HB 2716 by State Representative Johnny Garrett (R-Goodlettsville) seeks to amend Tennessee law to mandate that any local government body must “elect a successor to fill a vacant seat” in the General Assembly due to a vacancy caused “due to the expulsion of a member for disorderly behavior, then the local legislative body shall not elect the expelled legislator to be the successor to fill the vacant seat.”
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Republican lawmakers and a former immigration official are sounding a new alarm about the national security threats facing the U.S. at the U.S.-Mexico border.
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Atlanta Journal-Constitution Nathan Wade appeared to make almost three dozen visits to the Hapeville neighborhood where Fani Willis was living before the district attorney hired him to lead Fulton County’s election interference prosecution, according to cellphone data included in a court submission filed Friday. The filing, by attorneys for Donald Trump, raises fresh questions about the relationship between the two prosecutors, which the former president and other defendants argue has tainted the case against them and should result in Willis and her office being disqualified. Trump’s lawyers relied on data collected from Wade’s cellphone and cellphone tower transmissions to track his movements. It seems to contradict Wade’s testimony last week in which he said he had visited Willis at her condo in Hapeville no more than 10 times before he was hired in November 2021. It also indicates Wade twice arrived late at night at the condo and left early the next morning in the months before Willis and Wade said their relationship became romantic early in 2022. READ THE FULL STORY
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Breitbart News Former President Donald Trump promised to use a second term in the White House to defend Christian values and even suggested he’d shield the faith’s central iconography, warning a convention of religious broadcasters on Thursday night that the left wants “to tear down crosses.” “Remember, every communist regime throughout history has tried to stamp out the churches, just like every fascist regime has tried to co-opt them and control them. And, in America, the radical left is trying to do both,” Trump told hundreds of cheering attendees at the National Religious Broadcasters International Christian Media Convention in Nashville. “They want to tear down crosses where they can, and cover them up with social justice flags,” Trump added. “But no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration, I swear to you.” READ THE FULL STORY
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The Biden Administration is studying the possibility of invoking broad presidential authority to make it more difficult for migrants to pass the initial asylum test at the southern US border, three officials with knowledge of the matter told NBC News.
The actions, which are still weeks away from completion, would be an effort to reduce the number of migrants illegally crossing the border, in what has become an issue of utmost importance in the country ahead of the 2024 presidential elections.
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According to an expert in internet free speech, the RussiaGate hoax perpetrated against former President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 election campaign was the beginning of the security state’s inward focus on domestic censorship online.
Mike Benz, the founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week that since the mid-20th century, there was an unwritten rule that security state apparatuses like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were not to be used domestically against the American people, but that the security state knew how powerful its apparatus could be if turned inward.
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The nation’s most prolific left-wing dark money behemoth quietly added a new organization to its network of nonprofits, newly surfaced documents reveal.
The Telescope Fund became the seventh organization managed by the shadowy for-profit firm Arabella Advisors in 2021, joining a network of organizations notable for pouring hundreds of millions of untraceable dollars into left-of-center political and advocacy groups, The Washington Free Beacon reported. The new nonprofit will offer donor-advised funds (DAFs), a type of charitable account that allows donors to obscure their giving by routing donations through a DAF.
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Multiple legislatures are considering bills that would require students to watch a video of an infant’s development in the womb as part of their sex education.
Live Action, a pro-life activist organization, created a three-minute video, which shows an animated infant named Olivia go through the developmental process from conception to full term at nine months. Bills have been proposed in Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri and West Virginia to include an animation “comparable” to the Live Action video for students from high school to as young as third grade.
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The Ohio Department of Aging has launched a new online tool to empower Ohioans when considering a nursing home for themselves or a loved one.
The Ohio Nursing Home Quality Navigator is an online tool that provides users with detailed information about nursing homes across the state.
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A New York City law that would allow non-citizens to vote in local elections was deemed unconstitutional by a state appeals court on Wednesday.
The law would have allowed roughly 800,000 green card holders and individuals with federal work authorization living in the Big Apple to vote in the city’s elections, including in mayoral and City Council elections. Democratic and Republican elected officials have been in a drawn-out legal battle over the law, and the court’s ruling Wednesday hands Democrats a defeat.
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The Tennessee State Senate on Thursday passed a bill that would ban politicians in the state from seeking more than one elected office simultaneously.
SB 1968 passed the Tennessee Senate on Thursday with 17 votes in favor and 15 votes against. The bill, introduced by Senator Richard Briggs (R-Knoxville), would prohibit an individual from holding multiple elected offices in Tennessee, and would also ban any politician in the state from actively campaigning for more than one elected position.
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U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) revealed details of a letter he sent to President Joe Biden on Wednesday to urge his administration to refrain from sending “offensive weapons” to Israel. Kaine said sending such weapons would hurt the chances of successful negotiations to secure the release of hostages taken during the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas and ease tensions with the U.S.-designated terrorist group.
Kaine’s office said the senator “underscored the importance of pursuing a deal to immediately release all hostages taken by Hamas” during the radical group’s October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel, “end the violence in Gaza,” and all for the distribution of humanitarian aid.
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A Republican presidential candidate is silent after a news report said that entities related to her campaign might be targeting Democrats to vote for her in South Carolina’s Saturday primary election.
A report by NBC News shows a mailer sent by the Stand For America PAC, a political action committee solely dedicated to getting Republican former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley elected president, soliciting the votes of Democrats who did not vote in the Democratic Presidential Primary on February 3.
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One state prosecutor and one civilian plaintiff have already won huge fines and damages from Donald Trump that may, with legal costs, exceed $500 million.
Trump awaits further civil and criminal liability in three other federal, state, and local indictments.
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A poll of U.S. voters released on Thursday found just under half of American voters want Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to be disqualified from prosecuting her election case against former President Donald Trump in Georgia.
The Rasmussen poll, conducted after Willis testified on in the hearing to determine whether she should be removed from the case against Trump, determined that 48 percent of likely U.S. voters say there is significant evidence indicating Willis should be disqualified. The pollsters found that just 39 percent said Willis should remain on the case, while 13 percent were unsure.
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Kari Lake holds a commanding, 33-point lead in the race to secure the Arizona Republican Party (AZGOP) nomination to run for U.S. Senate, according to a poll released Wednesday.
Pollsters additionally found Lake statistically tied with Representative Ruben Gallego (D-AZ-03), who is poised to secure the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, when Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) was included in the survey.
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VoterGA, a nonprofit election integrity organization, spoke out against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s request for more taxpayer funds from the Georgia Legislature to implement an audit of Georgia’s QR-coded Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5 voting system.
On Monday, Raffensperger called on the Georgia State Senate to “agree to funding for new technology approved by the House that would give election officials the ability to audit the text of every choice on every ballot, in every contest – without the use of QR codes.”
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Some Republicans on the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) are resisting calls to stop Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) plans by the utilities they regulate, and the controversy has extended to the upcoming fall election.
Three of the five seats are up for election: two are wide open, and the third is held by Commissioner Lea Márquez Peterson, who is seeking reelection. While two new Republican candidates appear to be running as a slate with Márquez Peterson, newcomer Christy Kelly is running alone on a platform that emphasizes stopping ESG, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and the Green New Deal.
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CBS News has reportedly “seized the files, computers and records” of fired investigative reporter Catherine Herridge, including information on privileged sources.
“The network grabbed Herridge’s notes and files and informed her that it would decide what, if anything, would be turned over to her,” George Washington University law Professor Jonathan Turley reported at the Hill on Thursday. “The files likely contain confidential material from both her stints at Fox and CBS.”
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Due West is a trio of country musicians who met at a house party in 2004. Tim Gates, Matt Lopez, and Brad Hull are from the western U.S., but like many aspiring artists, they found themselves in Music City.
The three of them were all invited to the same party. As happens in Nashville, when everyone gets together, they usually sing. When Gates started singing, Hull and Lopez chimed in, playing and singing harmony.
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Alabama’s largest hospital paused in vitro fertilization treatments to help women get pregnant following concerns about potential prosecution of patients and health care providers after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled this week that frozen embryos are children.
“We are saddened that this will impact our patients’ attempt to have a baby through I.V.F., but we must evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for I.V.F. treatments,” the University of Alabama at Birmingham health system said Wednesday, according to The New York Times.
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Across rural America, the expanding crisis of fentanyl-fueled overdoses is ravaging a generation. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fentanyl deaths in the U.S. have tripled since 2016, and initial data from 2022 indicates that synthetic opioids cause about 90% of all opioid overdose deaths – which translates to nearly 75,000 Americans killed in that year alone. Rural communities, where hundreds of hospitals have already closed and more are on the chopping block, are bearing the additional weight of overdoses. We need states to do more to protect Americans and ensure access to all overdose reversal agents that have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. Hidden in counterfeit prescription pharmaceuticals like Adderall, Xanax, and Oxycontin, it’s so lethal that just two milligrams, the size of a pencil tip, can kill.
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Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed into law a bill that protects the religious convictions of people approached to solemnize or officiate a marriage.
“A person shall not be required to solemnize a marriage if the person has an objection to solemnizing the marriage based on the person’s conscience or religious beliefs,” reads the new law which took effect on Wednesday.
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The Anti-Defamation League claimed that right-wing extremists committed “all” the extremist-related murders in 2023, discounting the apparent extremism of Audrey Hale, the transgender shooter who killed three adults and three students in March at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.
Conservative commentator Steven Crowder released three pages of the shooter’s manifesto, which police confirmed were legitimate, in November.
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Tennessee State Representative Scott Cepicky (R-Culleoka), who chairs the Education Instruction Subcommittee, said Governor Bill Lee’s universal school choice bill, known as the Education Freedom Scholarship Act, will likely be revealed next week.
Cepicky said there was a meeting on Wednesday for the committee chairs and caucus members to go over the bill’s language, making tweaks to ensure the bill will “function properly” and is “constitutional.”
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Tennessee State Senator Bill Powers (R-Clarksville) has announced he has “no plans” to run for Congress in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District amid the announcement of incumbent U.S. Representative Mark Green’s (R-TN-07) retirement.
“For me, family is more important than any congressional title in Washington DC. I’m honored to be your state senator and have no plans to run for congress,” Powers wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday.
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Phillip Schwenk, the founding head of school at Rutherford Classical Academy, said one of the reasons why parents are drawn to the charter school is due to the classical education model assuming that the parent is the primary educator for their children.
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Tennessee U.S. Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN-05) said he has received a response from the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Memphis in regards to his request for inmate Stewart Parks, who is serving his eight month sentence for being present at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to be moved to the prison’s minimum security satellite camp.
On February 13, Ogles sent a letter to Warden F.J. Bowers of the FCI in Memphis requesting that Parks be moved to the satellite camp for the duration of his incarceration, as previously reported by The Tennessee Star.
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James Biden altered his story during a closed-door interview with lawmakers on Wednesday after congressional investigators presented him with evidence directly contradicting his claims, according to a source familiar with the interview.
Joe Biden’s younger brother, in closed-door testimony to the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, initially told his interviewers that he was not part of a business deal involving Hunter Biden and several of his associates, according to a source familiar with the interview. However, after investigators showed him an agreement that featured his signature alongside those of Hunter Biden and his business partners ,James Biden then told legislators that he did not remember signing the agreement.
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An Arizona county prosecutor is refusing to allow the man accused of murdering a New York mom and getting away while wearing her leggings to be extradited to New York City to face charges over concerns about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s response to violent crime.
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More U.S. cell phone users are reporting service outages Thursday at major networks, including AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, and the outage is impacting some 911 networks.
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Former President Donald Trump’s legal team has sought a 30-day extension to pay the $355 million in penalties that New York Judge Arthur Engoron imposed in New York Democratic Attorney General Letitia James’s civil fraud case against him.
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Steve Cortes, former senior spokesman and strategist for the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns and current head of the League of American Workers, said there is a consensus among Americans that Chinese companies should not be allowed to buy and control American resources, including farmland.
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture is working with a left-wing advocacy group to boost voter turnout as part of President Joe Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to get involved in elections.
The USDA worked directly with Demos, a New York-based group that helped draft Biden’s Executive Order 14019, according to records obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
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Mortgage applications sank last week as high prices and rising mortgage rates have increased unaffordability for average Americans, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association.
The total volume of mortgage loan applications for homes declined 10.6% in the week ending Feb. 16 compared to the previous week when seasonally adjusted, while the purchase index fell 10% in that same time, according to a release from the MBA. The drop in applications follows an increase in the average interest rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for homes under $766,550 to 7.06% from 6.87% the week prior, intensifying housing unaffordability.
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