Complaint Claims Minnesota Nursing Home Discriminated Against Catholic Employee

Brookdale North Oaks

A North Oaks nursing home rejected a Catholic employee’s request for a vaccine exemption despite granting exemptions to employees of other faiths, a complaint filed Monday claims.

Daniel Reinke, a sales and marketing manager at Brookdale Senior Living Center in North Oaks, says he was placed on unpaid leave and threatened with termination when he refused to get vaccinated for COVID-19 on religious grounds.

“I sincerely believe that receiving an injection produced, developed, or tested using human cell lines derived from direct abortions is sinful. All three available vaccines in the United States were tested, developed, or produced using these cell lines. I believe that abortion is a mortal sin, and any act supporting it, such as receiving the COVID-19 injection, would make me complicit in the act of abortion,” Reinke says in a charge of discrimination filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

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Ex-Brooklyn Center Police Officer Potter Found Guilty of Manslaughter

A verdict was reached Thursday in the trial of ex-Brooklyn Center Police officer Kimberly Potter, who faced first and second degree manslaughter charges in the shooting of 20-year-old Daunte Wright in April. 

Potter was found guilty of both charges. She faces up to 15 years in prison during the sentencing phase of the trial. Sentencing is scheduled for  Feb. 18.

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Commentary: Abundant Evidence Shows Critical Race Theory Is in Our Schools

Mary Nicely, who is now second-in-command at the California Department of Education, went on her personal Facebook page this summer to denounce conservatives who oppose teaching critical race theory in schools as “yet another White right and education reformer distraction.”

Nicely also reposted a newspaper column in July defining critical race theory as a key used in law schools to expose racism in the legal system: “It is taught, if at all, in law school — not high school.”

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FDA Won’t Say Why Some Non-Approved Pfizer Vaccines Were Deemed ‘BLA-Compliant’

Through Ohio attorneys representing Miami University in a lawsuit against the school over its mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policy, The Ohio Star confirmed that at least none batches of Pfizer’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) vaccine were deemed Biologics License Application (BLA) compliant. 

BLA compliance is typically reserved for Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved drugs. That is the licensing procedure for drugs seeking to become FDA approved. 

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Durham Zeroes In on Clinton Campaign, Could Call Some Aides to Testify, Court Memo Reveals

Hillary Clinton’s team long fought to keep its ties to Christopher Steele’s dossier from public view, but Special Counsel John Durham is now making clear he has a strong interest in her campaign’s behavior during the Russia collusion probe. He is even suggesting some of her aides could be summoned as trial witnesses.

Durham’s earth-shaking revelation came inside a routine court filing this month in the case of Igor Y. Danchenko, a Russian analyst who was a primary source in 2016 for Steele’s now-infamous dossier. Danchenko has been charged with repeatedly lying to the FBI during the Russia collusion probe and has pleaded innocent.

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Commentary: The Glaring Similarities Between the Whitmer Kidnapping and January 6

As questions mount about the government’s animating role in the Capitol protest on January 6, the criminal case against the men charged with conspiring to “kidnap” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 continues to collapse.

Defense attorneys in the Whitmer case are carefully compiling evidence that depicts an elaborate tale of FBI entrapment; at least a dozen FBI informants were involved in the failed plot—equaling one FBI asset per defendant. FBI agents handling the informants directed every move. They funded training and reconnaissance trips, and even organized a “national militia” conference in Ohio in June 2020 to lure potential accomplices.

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Arizona Seizes Record Amount of Fentanyl, Now Cited as Leading Cause of Death of Young Americans

Fentanyl

Authorities in Arizona seized $9 million worth of fentanyl pills in the state’s largest bust of the illicit drug – enough, they said, to kill half the population of Arizona.

The bust comes after a nonprofit group cites fentanyl as the leading cause of death among Americans between the age of 18 and 45. Arizona and Texas attorneys general and governors vowed to fight what they called the “lawlessness of the Biden administration,” which they argue is enabling fentanyl to be brought into the U.S. through its open border policies.

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Commentary: The Flaw in Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying’s Proposal for the Future of Humanity

Bret Weinstein podcast

Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, evolutionary biologists and visiting fellows at Princeton University, have written a fascinating new book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, which Penguin Random House released in September.

The instant New York Times bestseller is riddled with interesting ideas and clever insights, ultimately arriving at a radical conclusion about how humanity must be governed in the future if we are to avoid civilizational collapse. However, the book’s concluding argument is built upon one fundamental economic fallacy, and to understand the flaw in the proposal is to understand how truly catastrophic the pursuit of Weinstein and Heying’s vision would be.

The Fear of Abundance

Weinstein and Heying’s fundamental claim is about the human propensity to seek economic growth, and the ultimate unsustainability of that goal.

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Over 160 Mediterranean Migrants Drowned from Shipwrecks in One Week

Two shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea resulted in more than 160 Europe-bound immigrants drowning over the weekend, according to the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration, the Associated Press reported.

At least 102 people died in a shipwreck off the coast of Libya on Friday, while 8 were rescued, a spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration said, the AP reported. The Libyan coast guard reportedly found at least 62 bodies after a separate boat capsized Saturday, and it intercepted a third ship transporting at least 210 migrants.

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Commentary: Saying Christians Fuel ‘Martyr Dreams of Being Ostracized’ During Christmas Ignores International Persecution

An opinion piece published in The Battalion, a student-operated newspaper at Texas A&M University, recently argued that the Christmas season is a time when conservative Christians “perpetuate their martyr dreams of being ostracized.”

“Winter is Coming,” penned by Abbie Beckley, is an opinion piece that takes a deeper drive into Christmas’ purported true meaning.

According to the author, the commercialization of the holiday is not necessarily a bad thing as she attributes that trend to the expansion of inclusivity.

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Georgia, 23 Other States File Lawsuit Against Head Start Vaccination, Mask Mandate

Georgia is again pushing back against the Biden administration’s COVID-19 mandates.

Georgia and 23 other states are asking the court to block the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Administration for Children and Families from requiring Head Start program staff, certain contractors and volunteers to wear masks and be fully vaccinated by Jan. 31.

Gov. Brian Kemp and Attorney General Chris Carr announced the court challenge against the Head Start vaccination and mask mandate Tuesday.

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Trump to Hold News Conference on January 6, 2022 to Discuss ‘Rigged’ 2020 Election

Former President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he plans to hold a news conference at Mar-a-Lago on January 6, 2022, the one year anniversary of the Capitol Hill riot.

In a statement, Trump said the real insurrection took place on November 3rd, not January 6, which was a “completely unarmed protest.” The former president  questioned why the partisan select committee is not exploring the reason his supporters were on Capitol Hill that day, which was to protest the “rigged” 2020 election.

Why isn’t the Unselect Committee of highly partisan political hacks investigating the CAUSE of the January 6th protest, which was the rigged Presidential Election of 2020? Does anybody notice that they want to stay as far away from that topic as possible, the numbers don’t work for them, or even come close.

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Top Republicans Pressure Manchin to Switch Parties

Republicans are upping their calls for West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin to switch parties after he said he would not vote for President Joe Biden’s domestic spending bill.

Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn told Nexstar that he texted Manchin to encourage him to switch after he came out as a “no,” telling him, “Joe, if [Democrats] don’t want you we do.”

While Cornyn said he did not get a response, he said that Manchin switching would be “the greatest Christmas present I can think of.”

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Commentary: Biden’s Blind Spot on Democracy

President Biden’s Summit for Democracy hasn’t yet provoked the sort of debate about Biden’s relationship to his church that abortion has. But questions about the president’s adherence to church teaching may be as applicable to democracy as it is to a woman’s right to choose since, in both cases, Roman Catholicism has much to say. In the case of democracy, Americans used to view Rome, a hierarchical church that had a long history of cooperation with emperors and monarchs, as an arch opponent of the nation’s democratic politics. Until the 1960s, the perception may have been accurate, but today it is a relic of an earlier era in church history.

One question that emerged after the Summit for Democracy is whether Biden’s faith might explain the presence of nations who seem to lean more authoritarian than democratic. As the story in the New York Times put it, “It was no surprise that China and Russia were not included, but the administration was second-guessed for its decision to invite other countries with checkered human rights records, like the Philippines and Nigeria, while excluding NATO allies Turkey and Hungary, both led by rulers with authoritarian streaks.”

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Pfizer’s Comirnaty Available Abroad, Not in U.S.

New York-based Pfizer has sold and shipped hundreds of millions of doses of its Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved COVID-19 vaccine Comirnaty to the European Union (EU) despite saying last week that it is not being shipped in the United States. 

“Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) and BioNTech SE (Nasdaq: BNTX) today announced they will supply an additional 100 million doses of COMIRNATY®, the companies’ COVID-19 vaccine, to the 27 European Union (EU) member states in 2021,” Pfizer said in an April press release. “This announcement is a result of the European Commission’s (EC) decision to exercise its option to purchase an additional 100 million doses under its expanded Advanced Purchase Agreement signed on February 17, 2021. This brings the total number of doses to be delivered to the EU to 600 million.”

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Minnesota Gubernatorial Candidate Dr. Scott Jensen Responds to Criticisms of Discussion with State Rep. John Thompson

Dr. Scott Jensen, a 2022 gubernatorial candidate, responded to criticisms of his interactions with Rep. John Thompson (D-St. Paul) in an interview with The Minnesota Sun. Jensen said that the way some people are discussing what happened is “just plain silliness.” Jensen explained that Thompson was an invitee to an event he was speaking at.

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