The newly installed head of the Oklahoma National Guard has ordered that troops under his command will not be forced to comply with the Pentagon’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for members of the armed forces.
“No Oklahoma Guardsman will be required to take the COVID-19 Vaccine,” Army Brig. Gen. Thomas Mancino wrote in a Thursday memo. The memo was at odds with a Defense Department directive that the “total force” – including the National Guard – must be vaccinated against COVID-19.
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Minnesota Representative Tom Emmer (R-MN-06) introduced legislation to try and reduce opioid related deaths. Emmer, along with Representative Annie Kuster (R-NH-02), wrote the Inpatient Opioid Safety Act of 2021, which is “legislation to improve patient safety, simplify care, and reduce preventable opioid-induced injury and death under the Medicare and Medicaid programs.”
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Few would argue the United States, or any country for that matter, was prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, even though, starting in 2003, the U.S. devoted $5.6 billion to fund Project Bioshield, running through 2013, and another $2.8 billion of funding through 2018. Project Bioshield was designed to prepare the United States against a bio attack, including provisions for the stockpiling and distribution of vaccines.
Though Covid-19 was a new virus, congressional testimony from 2003 paints a concerning picture about what we knew – and when – about the family of viruses from which it originated.
“I am particularly interested in learning how Project BioShield would assist in addressing the current public health emergency created by the epidemic known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome [SARS],” said Tom Davis, chairman of the Committee on Government Reform. “More than 2,000 suspected cases of this mysterious disease have been reported in 17 nations, including the United States, with 78 fatalities. So far, there is no effective treatment or vaccine to combat this deadly syndrome.”
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A federal appeals court on Friday reaffirmed its early ruling temporarily halting President Biden’s national vaccine mandate for companies with more than 100 employees.
In its ruling, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals called the mandate “fatally flawed,” while ordering OSHA to “take no steps to implement or enforce the Mandate until further court order.”
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FBI Director Christopher Wray “made it clear” during an October speech that FBI agents “would not be attending school board meetings” and the Bureau “would stay in its own lane,” a former agent who saw the speech told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Cecil Moses, a retired FBI special agent and former police chief in Alabama, was in Scottsdale, Arizona, for the national conference for the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, where he said Wray met with former agents on Oct. 22 and assured them that the Bureau would not be monitoring school board meetings.
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Median home prices surged in the third quarter of 2021 in almost every housing market in the U.S., the National Association of Realtors said in a report Wednesday.
The median price of a single-family home increased in 182 out of the 183 markets tracked by the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Prices grew by 10% from the previous year in 78% of the 182 markets.
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Unprecedented: It is the word most often applied to the events at the Capitol on January 6.
In his remarks that afternoon, as the chaos was still ongoing, Joe Biden warned that “our democracy is under unprecedented attack.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Attorney General Merrick Garland, and leaders of both political parties also describe the four-hour mostly nonviolent disturbance at the Capitol complex as something without precedent.
“On January 6, 2021, the world witnessed a violent and unprecedented attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Vice President, Members of Congress, and the democratic process,” wrote Republican and Democratic senators in a joint committee report released earlier this year.
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Around 30% of Department of Homeland Security employees won’t be fully vaccinated before the federal deadline, My RGV reported on Tuesday.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees needed to receive their second COVID-19 vaccination shot or the Johnson & Johnson vaccine by Monday, two weeks before President Joe Biden’s executive order goes into effect, to be considered fully vaccinated, according to My RGV.
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In a 34-page ruling issued Tuesday night, D.C. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan denied Donald Trump’s request for injunctive relief to prevent the January 6 Select Committee from obtaining privileged information currently housed at the National Archives. In August, Representative Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the committee, demanded “a wide range of White House records of the previous administration . . . [related to] how the January 6th events fit in the continuum of efforts to subvert the rule of law, overturn the results of the November 3, 2020 election, or otherwise impede the peaceful transfer of power.”
The National Archives notified the committee a few days later it would comply with the request for documents; Joe Biden twice denied Trump’s claims of executive privilege, something without precedent, which Chutkan noted: “This case presents the first instance . . . in which a former President asserts executive privilege over records for which the sitting President has refused to assert executive privilege.”
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The carbon footprint of COP26, the ongoing United Nations climate summit, is expected to double that of the previous conference held in 2019, according to a report.
The two-week COP26 conference, which is entering its final days in Scotland, is projected to lead to about 102,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide in emissions, according to a preliminary assessment commissioned by the UN from British professional services firm ARUP. That’s the equivalent of more than 225.9 million pounds of carbon emissions.
Read MoreA new timeline of events in the controversial National School Boards Association (NSBA) letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland shows that the NSBA was in contact with the White House before sending the letter to President Joe Biden.
Emails obtained by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) from the group called Parents Defending Education request show that NSBA President Viola Garcia sent a memo to state NSBA chapters on October 12 describing its work against parents who were protesting at school board meetings nationwide. Some of those protests regarded mask mandates and liberal activism within schools.
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A record 4.4 million people quit their jobs in September, and job openings remained near a record high as labor shortages continue throughout the country.
Roughly 3.0% of U.S. workers left their jobs in September, a jump from August, when 4.3 million people left the workforce, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report released Friday. The number of job openings remained near its August level of 10.4 million.
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Someone from the Department of Justice appears to have tipped off the New York Times about recent raids on current and former employees of Project Veritas, and leaked privileged communications between founder James O’Keefe and his lawyers to the paper.
These potentially illegal actions come amid a Project Veritas defamation lawsuit against the NYTs that claims the paper’s coverage of a Veritas video was incorrect, defamatory and driven by resentment on the part of the newspaper’s reporters.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the national public health agency of the United States, so it made sense that during a once-in-a-century pandemic the agency would be given a leading role. With that leadership, however, came limelight. And in so many ways during the COVID-19 pandemic, the CDC, under the spotlight, undeniably flopped.
In his recently published book, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic, former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb critiqued numerous aspects of the worldwide response to COVID-19. Many CDC actions garnered forceful rebukes. While Gottlieb recognizes that a lot of talented, smart, and dedicated individuals work within the CDC, he says it’s hard to deny that the respected governmental agency failed in a lot of vital respects. Here are six of them:
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Yale University nearly doubled its number of administrators from 2003 to 2019 while only bringing in an additional 600 students, according to the Yale Daily News.
Yale now has an approximately equal number of students and administrators, the Daily News reported. Yale professors expressed concern about the impact of the school’s massive bureaucracy on teaching, students’ lives and university costs.
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Skyrocketing inflation and consumer costs are hurting President Joe Biden’s and Congressional Democrats’ hopes to pass another major spending bill through the reconciliation process.
The Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics this week reported an 8.6% increase in wholesale prices over the past 12 months, the highest increase in years. The federal agency also said this week that the consumer price index, another key tracker of inflation, is rising at the fastest rate in decades.
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It is not a novel concept that family engagement is one of the strongest predictors of children’s school success. Studies over the past 50 years demonstrate a positive relationship between family engagement and student achievement for students of all backgrounds. Children are most successful when supported by families and schools working together collaboratively. As a parent, I understand the unique needs and learning behaviors of my children more than anyone. Through my respective roles as an educator and a federal K-12 policy professional, I also understand the nuances of balancing parental input with a safe and effective education for all students.
For years, parental involvement in education has been supported by Republican and Democratic leaders as integral to student success and as a guiding principle for federal and state education policy. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the bipartisan K-12 federal education law, explicitly requires that parents be meaningfully involved and consulted in the development of state and school district education plans. These plans provide the framework for how states and school districts will deliver education to elementary and high school students. Additionally, the law requires that parents be involved in the creation of “state report cards,” providing information on how schools in each state are performing – including student achievement levels. The report cards must be written and in an accessible way so that parents can take action to engage with their child’s school.
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Despite massive public interest in the court proceedings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, this week, Facebook has blocked search results for the name “Kyle Rittenhouse.” Facebook shows zero posts when the query “Kyle Rittenhouse” is entered into the social media platform’s search bar. A message appears that states that “832,000 people are talking about this,” but no results show up.
An attempt to find Kyle Rittenhouse posts brings up a message informing the user that Facebook did not find any results with a prompt to make sure your spelling is correct.
Rittenhouse, 18, is currently on trial for shooting three people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two of them outright during a riot in August 2020. He is charged with two counts of homicide, one count of attempted homicide, recklessly endangering safety and illegal possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18.
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NASHVILLE, Tennessee – Belmont student and former NBC’s The Voice contestant Gracee Shriver hails from Owasso, Oklahoma.
Shriver started singing lessons at age nine to give herself something to do. About a year after starting lessons, she got her first guitar and began writing songs.
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Earlier this month, St. Paul voters chose 53%-47% to impose a 3% cap on rent increases per year. Despite the rule not activating until May 22, developers already are pausing and pulling out of projects.
The cap is strict: it doesn’t account for inflation, small or large landlords, new or old buildings, “regardless of change of occupancy.” The goal is to obtain stable, affordable housing prices, but there are also wide-reaching unintended consequences.
Pre-election, Mayor Melvin Carter said he supported the initiative.
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