Tennessee U.S. Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN-02) said he expects that U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA-04) will be reelected in his role as Speaker next month and work to fulfill President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda “as best he can” given Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House.
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Less than a month after being offered a job by incoming President Donald Trump heading up the Voice of America (VOA), Kari Lake announced on X that she will not be running for office again. Instead, she accepted the job heading up the journalism position with the Trump administration. Many believe that progressive activists conducted illegal election activity to defeat her in both the 2022 election race for governor and the 2024 race for U.S. Senate.
“We know the movement that we have in Arizona, and I will never take that for granted,” she posted on Elon Musk’s social media platform on Saturday. “But there is a corrupt machine here that is hellbent on making sure I never hold office. So, I won’t put my family (and myself) through the torture of running again. I will go to Washington, D.C., return @VOANews to its glory days, and help President Trump Make America Great Again.”
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Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell on Sunday touted his “years” of “successful collaboration” with the Tennessee Immigrant Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC), a nonprofit that was asked by U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) to help facilitate the release of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants from a Louisiana detention facility into Tennessee.
After The Tennessean asked O’Connell about his disappointment following the decision by the Metro Nashville Council not to approve a contract for a private company to install license plate readers in the city’s streets in its Sunday interview, the mayor pivoted to public safety concerns raised by a “segment” of Nashville’s immigrant community, before referencing another “segment” that is concerned about President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportation of illegal immigrants.
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Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who next month will begin overseeing the Senate’s most powerful investigative body, says the government’s vaccine safety system is no longer protecting Americans adequately because of conflicts of interest and lack of transparency, and he is vowing to work with the incoming Trump administration to press for sweeping reforms.
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NBC Montana Mexico is developing a cell phone app that will allow its citizens in the U.S. to alert family members if they are at risk of being detained, a senior official announced Friday. The app, which will be officially launched in January, will allow migrants to notify both relatives and the Mexican consulate nearest to their location. Applicable family members must have been selected ahead of time, according to a press release. Juan Ramón de la Fuente, the Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, likened the app to a panic button during a press conference. READ THE FULL STORY
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Axios A U.S. appeals court on Monday upheld the verdict against President-elect Trump in the civil suit for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. The ruling means Trump must pay Carroll $5 million in compensatory and punitive damages for his alleged defamatory statements after she accused him of sexually assaulting her in the 1990s. “We conclude that Mr. Trump has not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings,” U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said. READ THE FULL STORY
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President-elect Donald Trump on Monday endorsed House Speaker Mike Johnson to remain in his post as some conservatives express frustration with his leadership during key budget fights.
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Matthew Graves, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia whose name surfaced in testimony by IRS whistleblowers about political interference in the Hunter Biden tax case, will resign in early January, the Department of Justice confirmed Monday.
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The Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County has been hit with a class action lawsuit filed over a city ordinance that created a stormwater capacity fee to fund improvements to the city’s stormwater system.
The stormwater fee, passed by the Metro Nashville Council in 2023 and implemented at the beginning of 2024, charges individuals seeking a development permit a fee to fund capital improvements to the city’s stormwater system.
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Linda Lavin, whose career spanned more than sixty years, died Sunday of complications from a newly-found lung cancer, a spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter. She was 87.
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A man wanted for allegedly sending death threats to a retired Davidson County judge was arrested on Sunday in Nashville after his vehicle was pinged by a license plate reader in Arkansas.
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Legislation submitted to the Tennessee State House of Representatives on December 19 would allow Local Educational Agencies (LEAs) and public school charters to adopt policies allowing the display of the Ten Commandments, the U.S. Constitution, and Declaration of Independence in classrooms.
According to its summary, House Bill 47 by State Representative Michael Hale would give entities governing Tennessee’s schools the opportunity to publicly display, “the Ten Commandments, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of Tennessee, the Bill of Rights,” and other historical documents at a “prominent location in each school building.”
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In 2024, The Tennessee Star reported multiple revelations about Audrey Elizabeth Hale, the biological woman who identified as a transgender man when she killed six at the Covenant School on March 27, 2023, after obtaining the killer’s journal and a selection of documents related to the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) case from a source familiar with the investigation in June 2024.
The Star first shared on June 4 that a retired MNPD lieutenant said police knew Hale was a patient at Vanderbilt University Medical Center immediately after searching her family’s home in March 2023, and on June 19, confirmed it obtained an internal police document labeled “Vandy Psych” that appeared to include investigative notes about the killer’s time as a mental health patient.
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