Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s “Director of New and Indigenous Americans” finally became a U.S. citizen on Thursday after living in the country for apparently many years.
O’Connell posted the news to X that the Nashville government staffer, Jacky Gomez, was naturalized.
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Bloomberg Philanthropies announced on Tuesday that three Tennessee cities will take part in an initiative that would use federal funds provided by the Biden administration.
Nashville, Memphis, and Chattanooga were selected for the organization’s American Sustainable Cities Initiative, which stated its focus would be on creating economic equity and green energy jobs, according to a Tuesday news release from Bloomberg Philanthropies. Mike Bloomberg, the former Democratic New York Mayor, founded Bloomberg Philanthropies.
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A Memphis judge on Friday postponed the state court trial of four former Memphis police officers charged in the killing of Tyre Nichols until a federal trial against them concludes, the Associated Press reported.
The delay comes after the former officers’ attorneys requested the judge postpone the state trial so as not to “hinder the officers’ rights to defend themselves in both cases,” the outlet continued. The federal trial is set for September 9, 2024.
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U.S. Representative Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN-03) stood up to pro-Hamas activists who followed Fleischmann through a Capitol Hill hallway and repeatedly accused him of supporting genocide on Wednesday.
Fleischmann told activists, who captured their encounter with him on a video posted to X, that he would “always” support Israel.
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The Tennessee General Assembly is advancing a bill that would bar the state’s Department of Child Services (DCS) from forcing ideology about gender and sexuality on prospective foster and adoptive parents.
SB 1738/HB 2169 passed through the House Children and Family Subcommittee on Wednesday after testimony and discussion.
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A federal district court judge dismissed a challenge to a Tennessee election integrity law meant to encourage people to only vote in the primary election associated with their party. District Judge Eli Richardson dismissed the lawsuit on Monday, The Associated Press reported.
The League of Women Voters of Tennessee, Knoxville News-Sentinel columnist Victor Ashe, and real estate developer Phil Lawson filed the lawsuit against the Tennessee Secretary of State, the state election coordinator, and the Tennessee Attorney General in November 2023, The Tennessee Star previously reported.
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti joined in filing an amicus brief with 21 other state attorneys general in a case being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court that could decide the fate of a popular abortion pill.
“This case is about protecting the authority of the people of Tennessee to govern themselves,” Skrmetti stated, according to the attorney general’s website. “In our system, major policy decisions are made by the people through their elected representatives and decisions about abortion law are made by state governments. The U.S. Constitution prevents federal bureaucrats from undermining Tennessee’s Human Life Protection Act no matter how much they disagree with it.”
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A veterans memorial at East Tennessee State University (ETSU) was recently vandalized with anti-Israel messages. University officials reportedly told a local news outlet that they were working to remove the vandalism from the site Friday night.
The top of the memorial statue was vandalized with messages saying “Free Palestine,” “We have failed ourselves,” and “How many must die?”
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Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett stated that state Democrat lawmakers are trying to “weaponize” the United States Department of Justice against the state.
“Tennesseans should not be surprised that some want to weaponize the Department of Justice against the state ranked number one in election integrity,” Hargett said in the statement obtained by The Tennessee Star on Friday.
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The Tennessee General Assembly is considering a bill that would restrict the state’s Department of Child Services from requiring prospective adoptive or foster parents to get vaccinated.
The State House Children and Family Affairs Subcommittee voted to pass the State House version of the legislation today after discussion and testimony. It is now on the calendar for the State Senate for February 29.
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Tennessee State Representative Jason Zachary (R-Knoxville) said California Governor Gavin Newsom should pay more attention to his state’s problems after Newsom’s super PAC released an advertisement attacking Tennessee for proposing a parental rights bill.
Zachary made his comments in a phone interview on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Monday.
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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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Several Rutherford County officials received a mysterious email message cautioning them to support incumbent property assessor candidate Rob Mitchell following a Tennessee Star report about his hiring practices, according to an email obtained by The Star.
Ahead of Mitchell’s bid for reelection, he hired the son of two Rutherford County officials, Michael Maxwell, for a position in the property assessor’s office created for Maxwell after determining he was unqualified for the original job posting, The Star previously reported.
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Many Vanderbilt University students took seats at a campus speaking event only to leave them because of the event’s headliner, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.
Jewish Voice for Peace Vanderbilt, a student organization part of the larger Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) group that advocates for Israel to stop its military campaign against Hamas terrorists, posted a video of the February 15 walkout to Instagram.
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The number of gun thefts from vehicles in Nashville for the first six weeks of the year decreased 43% from 2023, according to a press release from the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department.
So far, 90 guns have been stolen from Nashville cars compared to last year’s 158. Gun thefts from cars comprise 72% of all gun thefts in Nashville so far for 2024.
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Rutherford County Property Assessor Rob Mitchell hired the son of the Rutherford County GOP chairman for a position he was unqualified for ahead of Mitchell’s bid for reelection in 2024.
Mitchell hired Michael Maxwell, son of Rutherford County GOP Chairman Austin Maxwell, in January 2024 despite not meeting the minimum requirements of the position he applied for, according to documents obtained by The Tennessee Star with an open records request.
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Former U.S. Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY-at large) and former MSNBC contributor Jon Meacham warned their audience at Vanderbilt University of increasing support for former President Donald Trump as a threat to democracy ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
During the public conversation on January 6, titled “Defending Our Democracy,” Meacham and Cheney agreed that “Trumpism” is a cult and suggested the country may have to be recovered by “great violence and upheaval.”
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Lakie Derrick, now 21, first traveled less than 30 miles to attend East Tennessee State University (ETSU) in the fall of 2020. She had always known her hometown of Kingsport, Tennessee, to be a relatively conservative city.
In 2016, the two counties that contain Kingsport overwhelmingly voted to elect Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States. Washington County, where ETSU is located, did the same that year and supported Trump again in 2020. Only two Tennessee counties held blue through the 2022 gubernatorial election.
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Many Tennessee universities maintain speech codes that suppress campus free speech, according to a recent report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Of the six Tennessee schools included in the report, five reportedly have rules restricting free speech.
The Spotlight on Campus Speech Codes 2024 report rates U.S. colleges based on whether their written speech codes do not infringe on protected speech. According to the report, 85.4 percent of schools maintain policies that can or do infringe on free expression.
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East Tennessee State University (ETSU)’s Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) demanded the university strengthen its “hate speech policy” in response to an upcoming visit from conservative speaker Kyle Rittenhouse for the school’s chapter of Turning Point USA (TPUSA).
However, an ETSU spokesperson said no such policy exists.
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The Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter at East Tennessee State University (ETSU) has demanded the school makes a specific policy prohibiting “hate speech.” The call comes as the right-of-center ETSU chapter of Turning Point USA prepares to host Kyle Rittenhouse for a February 8 event they’re calling “The Rittenhouse Recap.”
ETSU’s Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) said Rittenhouse’s visit to campus is “in clear violation of ETSU’s supposed hate speech policy” in a Friday Instagram post. YDSA also demanded that ETSU’s president and student government issue a statement condemning the event.
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Outspoken former President Donald Trump critic Jon Meacham, who compared Trump’s rhetoric to that of Nazi Germany’s Third Reich, serves as a co-chair of Vanderbilt University’s “Project on Unity and American Democracy.”
Vanderbilt launched the project in 2021 because the United States “has become disconnected from evidence and reason” and suffers from political and ideological polarization, according to its website.
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Pro-Palestine Vanderbilt students and alumni activists accused the university and its chancellor of “supporting genocide” in an Instagram post on Monday.
The Instagram accounts for the Vanderbilt Alumni for Palestine and the Vanderbilt chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine jointly posted a series of graphics in response to an email that the groups claim Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier sent to students.
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Middle Tennessee State University named Jennifer Woodard as the new program coordinator for the school’s Social Justice Journalism concentration, according to the university’s online academic catalog.
Woodard, a Ph.D. in mass communication from Indiana University-Bloomington and an MTSU alumna, is an expert in “diversity, equity and inclusion,” “race, class, gender and media issues,” and “mediated representations of women” according to her university faculty bio. She is also a faculty member of the Women’s and Gender Studies department and “concentrated on scholarship that would enhance her ability to teach students the value of a diversified newsroom” while pursuing her Ph.D., according to her faculty bio.
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Middle Tennessee State University offers a “Social Justice Journalism” track of study for undergraduate students.
The track is called the Social Justice Journalism concentration, which students can declare if they are pursuing a major in journalism. A concentration is a specialized track of study an undergraduate student can pursue within their declared major, according to Academic Info.
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