A U.S. operation lead to the death of the leader of the Islamic State in northwest Syria late Wednesday evening, the Pentagon said.
The mission resulted in the death of its target, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the known leader of the terror group ISIS, according to the Department of Defense. There were no American casualties and all U.S. forces were safely evacuated.
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Elementary and high schools throughout the country this week are having children participate in Black Lives Matter at School’s “Week of Action,” using lesson plan “resources” based on the activist organization’s core principles that seek to disrupt Western family structure, and teach children to affirm the “transgender” and “queer” lifestyles.
Black Lives Matter (BLM) at School has provided a toolkit for schools and teachers with a curriculum that features a movie for different grade bands matched to “the 13 guiding principles of the BLM movement.”
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One way of understanding the 2009-2014 Obama Administration policy of “reset” with Vladimir Putin’s Russia is to recall two iconic incidents.
The first was the 2009 “reset.”
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On Wednesday, the United States Army announced that it will begin the process of discharging any soldiers who refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccine effective immediately.
As reported by ABC News, the Army is the last branch of the United States military to fully discharge those who do not comply with the strict vaccine mandates; the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps have already discharged all personnel who refuse the vaccines, from active-duty members to entry-level members at boot camps.
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Facebook parent company Meta is on pace to lose roughly $200 billion in market value as shares plummeted early Thursday.
The company’s shares dropped as much as 23% in pre-market trading which, if the losses hold, would lose Meta roughly $200 billion in market value.
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The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) redefined racism again on Monday with what it called an “interim definition.”
Racism is now defined by the group as occurring “when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity,” according to Professor Robert Livingston of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University.
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A Minnesota gubernatorial candidate released a video statement saying that he stands with the Canadian truckers. Dr. Scott Jensen, a frontrunner in Minnesota’s 2022 gubernatorial election said, “From Minnesota, to Canada, and beyond… I stand with them.”
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Though children are least likely to experience severe illness from COVID-19, the level of mental health distress many are exhibiting during the government’s response to the pandemic is “utterly devastating,” child psychiatrist Dr. Mark McDonald said in a recent interview.
The Los Angeles-based clinician expressed his concern during a late November podcast for the Unity Project, an organization working to end COVID-19 vaccine mandates for healthy children in grades K-12.
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Hennepin County Sheriff Dave Hutchinson won’t seek reelection in November, multiple sources told Alpha News.
This was confirmed Wednesday morning when Hutchinson told his staff that he has “made the difficult decision not to seek reelection in the 2022 election.”
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Very odd things are happening in Canada, not the least of which is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fleeing the capital city for security reasons, or so officials say. Canadians are a notoriously compliant, unquestioning, deferential lot. But this hasn’t stopped thousands of them from gathering near the parliament buildings in Ottawa to effectively shut down the central part of the city.
The trigger for this unprecedented protest is a vaccine mandate for long-haul truckers, whose big rigs now line the streets, horns blaring between a variety of protest chants, some of which are more printable than others (“Truck Trudeau,” and variations thereof, has been a common refrain). Last week, as the convoys moved toward and converged on the capital from the east, west, and south—numbers are disputed, but it seems certain they formed the longest convoys in history—it became clear that the list of grievances had grown to include just about everything associated with some of the most enduring, draconian, and nonsensical COVID restrictions in the world.
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On Monday, FBI Director Christopher Wray declared that the greatest foreign threat to the United States is the country of China, adding that the nation’s recent escalation of tensions regarding the country of Taiwan are “more brazen” and “more damaging” than anything seen in recent history.
The New York Post reports that Wray made his remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. Just days before the start of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Wray said that China poses a threat “to our economic security and to our freedoms: Our freedom of speech, of conscience, our freedom to elect and be served by our representatives without foreign meddling, our freedom to prosper when we toil and invent.”
“I’ve spoken a lot about this threat since I became FBI director,” Wray continued. “But I want to focus on it here tonight because in many ways it’s reached a new level — more brazen, more damaging than ever before, and it’s vital, vital, that all of us focus on that threat together.”
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Record amounts of fentanyl and other drugs are being seized in Kansas after they’ve made their way north from Mexico and the state’s attorney general, Derek Schmidt, said he is trying to stop it. He joined a coalition of other Republican attorneys general at the Texas-Mexico border to see first-hand how the Biden administration’s open border policies are contributing to crime in Kansas.
In one briefing with the Texas Department of Public Safety, the AGs learned that Texas state troopers alone had seized enough fentanyl last year to kill over 200 million people. They also arrested more than 10,000 illegal immigrants for committing state crimes, including for child trafficking and drug smuggling, seized over five tons of methamphetamine, and over $17 million in cash as part of Operation Lone Star, Texas’ border security initiative.
While it’s “good news that they’re seizing more, there’s no reason to think that there’s less of it eluding seizure at the border because the border’s wide open in large swaths,” Schmidt told The Center Square. “I don’t think it’s a good news number. I think it’s an indication of the increased volume coming across the border, not an indication of increased success in stopping it at the border.”
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At least eight of Joe Biden’s nominations for the Department of Justice have been placed on hold by Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), due to the Department’s failure to answer Cotton’s questions about its inaction over the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.
As reported by Fox News, Cotton’s criticisms have focused specifically on the DOJ’s failure to properly defend a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, which ended up under siege by far-left domestic terrorists on a daily basis throughout 2020 and even into 2021. Cotton has already sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland pointing out that, on top of letting the courthouse itself be attacked, the DOJ has not offered any legal assistance to several U.S. Marshals who have been sued for defending the courthouse against rioters.
“These courageous officers were attacked by left-wing street militants with weapons such as mortar fire, ball bearings, and blinding lasers,” Cotton’s letter reads in part. “A refusal to represent these Deputy Marshals would violate the Department’s long-standing practice — not to mention its moral duty — to defend law-enforcement officers when they’re sued for actions in the line of duty.”
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The flow of natural gas through a key Russian-controlled pipeline suddenly stopped Wednesday as tensions continue to increase between Russia and the West.
The Yamal-Europe pipeline’s liquified natural gas (LNG) flows, which are operated by Russian state-run firm Gazprom and have usually been pumped westward from Russia to Germany through Poland, were halted early Wednesday, European data showed, according to Reuters. The sudden stoppage reportedly represented a setback after leaders expected the pipeline to return to its normal flow pattern.
In December 2021, Gazprom slowed the pipeline’s gas flows, which represent 10% of the region’s supply, and the company reversed the flow direction from westward to eastward. The sudden reversal sent natural gas prices, which had already spiked amid a European energy crisis, even higher.
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President Joe Biden plans to send another 3,000 troops to Europe amid continued tensions between Russia and Ukraine.
Biden is sending about 2,000 troops from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to Poland and Germany this week. The president is also moving about 1,000 soldiers based in Germany to Romania, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing administration officials.
“They are trained and equipped for a variety of missions during this period of elevated risk,” a senior defense official told the Wall Street Journal.
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The federal government, like many private companies that have offices in different locations, has provisions to adjust employees’ pay based on their location. It’s called locality pay.
For example, an employee in San Francisco, Calif. has a significantly higher cost of living than an employee in Casper, Wyo. San Francisco’s locality adjustment is an additional 41.44% of base pay.
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“The Postal Inspection Service data revealed that mail theft reports soared by 600% over three years, from about 25,000 in 2017 to roughly 177,000 through August of 2020,” Frank Albergo said. “But when asked to explain the apparent explosion in mail theft, the Inspection Service backtracked and said the figures might be inaccurate.”
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NASHVILLE, Tennesee- Before you ask, yes, Bobby Cyrus is related to Billy Ray Cyrus. Bobby Cyrus is Billy Ray Cyrus’ younger cousin. They both hail from the same region around Louisa, Kentucky where bluegrass music was a prominent part of their heritage. Their grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher and church music was an integral part of their upbringing.
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An Iowa representative introduced Tuesday a bill that would allow parents to watch live footage of their children in public school classrooms.
“I think we need to showcase the great work our teachers do,” Rep. Norlin Mommsen, R-DeWitt, a farmer, told The Center Square in a phone interview Tuesday.
He said that through the COVID-19 pandemic, parents learned they wanted to be more involved, and this is a mechanism of facilitating parental involvement.
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Although Connecticut will add 60,000 jobs this year, the state won’t be back to pre-pandemic levels of employment until 2023, industry groups say.
“The inability to grow jobs at the national average or even at the top of the Northeast means that Connecticut’s economy is going to continue to grow slower than the rest of the country and the Northeast,” Chris DiPentima, president and CEO of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, told The Center Square. “The slow job growth means that businesses are not meeting the customer demand that they have. Connecticut, in turn, is not realizing the state’s total economic growth potential. Most businesses are hopeful that the state will put some policies in place to fuel growth and the jobs added each month will increase. This will help recover the jobs that we’ve lost before the end of this year.”
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I had a junior high social studies teacher who was fond of saying that if it reached its logical conclusion, liberalism would eventually become fascism. He was long dead before Ilhan Omar hit the scene, but he would be gratified to see his prediction in action.
Omar’s Combating International Islamophobia Act passed the House of Representatives on a narrow party line vote recently. If it becomes law, it will mandate a new State Department bureaucracy to report on anti-Islamic activity as a human rights violation. English is Omar’s second language, and the wording of the bill shows it. Its definition of Islamophobia is not precise. An example of the text includes “acts of physical violence against, or harassment of, Muslim people, and acts of violence against, or vandalism of, Muslim community institutions, including schools, mosques, and cemeteries, and instances of propaganda in government and nongovernment media that attempt to justify or promote racial hatred or incite acts of violence against Muslim people.”
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The Interim Chief of Police with the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) notified a local Black Lives Matter activist about an officer involved shooting that left an African American man dead on Wednesday morning.
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CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker has resigned from the company due to an undisclosed relationship with his “closest colleague.”
In a memo to employees, Zucker wrote, “As part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, someone I have worked with for more than 20 years. I acknowledged the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong. As a result, I am resigning today.”
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President Joe Biden’s commitment to only nominate a a new Supreme Court justice who is a Black female does not have broad support, a newly released poll suggests.
The ABC/Ipsos poll found that 76% of surveyed Americans say Biden should consider “all possible nominees” to fill Breyer’s seat while 23% say Biden should “consider only nominees who are Black women, as he has pledged to do.”
Biden promised several times during the campaign to nominate a Black female justice, saying he is “looking forward to making sure there’s a Black woman on the Supreme Court.”
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The omicron variant may be nearing its peak in some states, but across the country it’s produced a dizzying array of conflicting signals on whether the nation should remain under a COVID national emergency or move on to an endemic “new normal.”
Comedian Bill Maher’s “I don’t want to live in your mask-paranoid world anymore” monologue went viral last week, just days after the Atlantic, the standard-bearer journal for the liberal intelligentsia, ran a story headlined: “COVID Parenting Has Passed the Point of Absurdity.” Accompanying the article was a black-and-white photo of a woman frozen in a more desperate and primal state of panic than the subject of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
Omicron, for most people without co-morbidities, produces much milder symptoms than do the coronavirus’s previous variants, but it’s far more infectious, racing through schools, shutting down classrooms and forcing parents to consult their district’s ever-shifting COVID “decision trees” on a seemingly daily basis.
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Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, author of the new book “Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win,” told The Star News Network that the leader of Senate Republicans, Kentucky’s Sen. A. Mitchell “Mitch” McConnell, is tied to the top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party through his wife’s family.
“When Mitch McConnell married Elaine Chao, he married into a family with very substantial connections on mainland China and the Chinese Communist Party,” said Schweizer, who is also the president of The Government Accountability Institute.
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A large coalition of state financial officers announced their opposition to one of President Joe Biden’s top nominees for the Federal Reserve over her “radical” policy positions.
Sarah Bloom Raskin would put U.S. financial and economic stability at risk to achieve her “preferred social outcomes” if confirmed, the top financial officers of 25 states wrote to Biden in a letter Monday. Raskin, the former deputy secretary of the Treasury Department during the Obama administration, has taken particular aim at addressing climate change through aggressive financial policies.
“As State Treasurers, Auditors, and financial officers, we write to express our strong disapproval of Sarah Bloom Raskin as your choice for Vice-Chair for Supervision at the Federal Reserve Bank. We urge you to withdraw her nomination,” the letter stated.
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President Joe Biden’s nominee to regulate the banking industry has previously expressed support for economic reparations to black Americans, Fox Business reported Monday.
Lisa Cook, a professor of international relations and economics at Michigan State University, has an extensive history of supporting “race-specific” financial compensation “because the injury was race-specific,” Fox reported. Cook was nominated on Jan. 14 to serve on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
“Everybody benefited from slavery. Everybody. So, I think that we absolutely need some sort of reckoning with that,” said Cook on the EconTalk podcast in September 2020. “One thing I do support is H.R. 40 … I think that’s absolutely what needs to be done,” said Cook in a March 2021 talk at Berkeley Haas, referencing a bill that would establish a commission to study and develop reparation proposals.
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A worker rights group is calling out two powerful teachers unions, claiming that they “hold the education of kids hostage” in a press release.
Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTWLDF), told the Daily Caller News Foundation that teachers unions like the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) are taking advantage of a labor law provision passed in the 1930s for the private sector.
“In several states across the country, union officials, specifically teachers’ union officials, have been granted a really unique privilege called exclusive monopoly bargaining,” Mix said, adding that former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt opposed granting such privileges to public-sector unions while in office.
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The Washington Post has recused its new national editor, Matea Gold, from the news organization’s coverage of the FBI and Justice Department over a personal conflict of interest. A month before Gold was promoted, her husband, Jonathan Lenzner, was named FBI chief of staff.
A Post spokeswoman told RealClearInvestigations that the paper’s managing editor, Steven Ginsberg, will be overseeing coverage of the Justice Department and the FBI. Kristine Coratti Kelly, the paper’s chief communications officer, said the decision does not reflect on Gold’s objectivity or credibility.
“We have every confidence in Matea’s professionalism and high standards,” Kelly said. “She has recused herself from this area of coverage to avoid even the appearance of partiality.”
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The crisis on the Russian-Ukrainian border has been a surreal spectacle for some weeks. This is not how invasions occur and wars begin. The potential aggressor does not mass large forces on the border of a possible target country before full international view and issue continuous statements to the international media about its intentions. And the senior military officials of great powers do not—as Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley ( leading man of the Afghan debacle) and some of his colleagues have done—publicly speculate on the psychology and likely intentions of the leader of the country implicitly threatening to start a war. Whatever Milley’s talents may be, there is no reason to believe that mind-reading is among them. It is, in any case, not part of his brief to give regular bulletins on what he thinks Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions may be.
This is Gilbert and Sullivan warmongering.
If Putin intended to invade Ukraine he would do so as he did with Crimea in 2008 and attempt to achieve some element of surprise. Instead he has made an international public spectacle of amassing six to 10 divisions on the Ukraine border, which every informed person in the world knows is inadequate to defeat and dominate a resistant country of 40 million people. This is theater: Russia pretends to threaten to be going to war; America pretends to react strongly, the NATO allies send forces to neighboring countries that are not under threat while asserting that they will on no account deploy forces into Ukraine, but will apply sanctions to Russia; some even propose preemptive sanctions against Russia although it has not actually done anything objectionable. (Russia could never be more than moderately inconvenienced by sanctions, especially if China and Germany ignore them.)
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Former President George W. Bush’s most recent donations to Republican candidates included maximum contributions to the campaigns of two Republicans who voted in favor of impeaching President Donald Trump.
Politico reports that the only donations made by the 43rd president in the year 2021 were to the campaigns of Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). Bush gave the maximum possible amount of $5,800 to Cheney in October, while also giving $2,900 to Murkowski’s campaign. According to FEC filings, Bush had also previously donated to Cheney’s first campaign for the House of Representatives in 2016; Cheney is the daughter of Bush’s former Vice President Dick Cheney.
Both represent small portions of each candidates’ respective war chests, with Cheney finishing the year with $1.9 million and Murkowski raising $4.7 million; but the symbolism of the former president only donating to Republicans who voted to impeach President Trump speaks volumes about the ongoing divide between the previous generations of Republican leadership and the rising “America First” movement, led by Trump.
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Inspired by their Canadian brethren, American truckers have decided to form their own nationwide “Convoy to DC” in protest of the Biden regime’s authoritarian COVID policies.
The group’s Facebook page, Convoy to DC 2022, already has over 131,000 thousand followers.
“We are part of many large groups who believe in our founding fathers. We believe everyone has a voice. We support our freedom. Help us spread the word about this group and together we all can make it a better place. God Bless America,” the page reads.
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On Monday, the office of the Inspector General at the National Security Agency (NSA) released a report showing that the agency failed to follow basic internal guidelines and court-ordered procedures in its surveillance of American citizens’ communications.
According to CNN, the report showed that the agency abused a loophole in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). While Section 702 allows the government to collect such communications of foreign citizens on foreign soil without a warrant, it prohibits the government from doing so with American citizens. The loophole allows the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to use this section to collect American communications without a warrant if they believe “a query is reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information.”
The inspector general’s report “revealed a number of concerns involving [U.S. person] identifiers used as query terms against FISA Section 702 data.” Furthermore, some of these NSA queries “did not always follow NSA procedural and policy requirements.” Among other discrepancies, information gathered on “selectors,” or particular search terms in an investigation, were not properly documented; in addition, the NSA’s internal query tools designed to automatically prevent the processing of queries involving any Americans associated with the selectors ultimately failed to do so, thus allowing Americans to be investigated and monitored.
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Allegations that “masks work” and “don’t cause harm” have been enforced by governments and corporations around the world for more than 18 months through arrests, firings, censorship, fines, and denial of access to schools, supermarkets, hospitals, streets, and other public spaces. This has made it virtually impossible for many people to live without complying with mask mandates.
In recent weeks, however, more medical scholars and media outlets are coming to grips with facts about masks that Just Facts has been documenting for more than a year and painstakingly compiled in a September 2021 article sourced with more than 50 peer-reviewed science journals. Here’s a sample of people who are speaking up about the facts and their implications:
Dr. Vinay Prasad—an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco—has written an article that examines the scientific evidence for masking children and concludes that:
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The cost of living is skyrocketing in certain “migration destination” cities where those fleeing mostly blue states are landing, according to a newly released report.
Redfin released the analysis, which shows that cities like Atlanta, Phoenix and Tampa have seen higher rates of inflation than the country overall. According to the report, those increases are “double the inflation rates in San Francisco and New York, places people are moving away from.”
“Migration into those places is one reason for rapidly rising prices of consumer goods and services,” Redfin said. “Because of high inflation, including rising home prices, the financial advantage of living in what are now relatively affordable places is likely to diminish.”
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A Republican National Committee member and former Trump adviser is asking the party to vote Thursday on a resolution demanding that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy expel Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from the House GOP conference for their participation on the Democrats’ Jan. 6 investigation committee.
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Sen. Amy Klobuchar appeared on Fox News’ Special Report Thursday night, primarily to promote an antitrust bill aimed at reforming laws that govern Big Tech and increasing competition.
A bipartisan U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee voted 16-6 Thursday to advance the legislation — The American Innovation and Choice Online Act — as bipartisan lawmakers seek to curtail the power and influence of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and others.
In short, the bill would prevent companies from “unfairly preferencing their own products and services” on their platforms while prohibiting “specific forms of conduct that are harmful to small businesses, entrepreneurs, and consumers.”
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Just months before Joe Biden forced his firing, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor was told by U.S. State Department officials that they were “impressed” with his anti-corruption plan and fully supportive of his work, according to newly released memos that cast doubt on a key Democrat impeachment narrative.
During former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial two years ago, House Democrats alleged that Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired in March 2016 because State officials were widely displeased with his anti-corruption efforts and not because Shokin’s office was investigating the Ukrainian gas firm that had given then-Vice President Biden’s son Hunter a lucrative job.
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The Minnesota Legislature kicked off its first day of the 2022 session with plans to crack down on violent crime and spend down $7.7 billion of taxpayer surplus.
Senate Republicans are targeting tax cuts, reducing crime, and empowering parents in education, Senate Majority Leader Jeremy Miller, R-Winona, said in a press conference last week.
“We are hearing from folks across the state and people are concerned. Crime is up, kids are falling behind, and record inflation is eating away at family budgets. Things are moving in the wrong direction and Senate Republicans are focused on solutions to get Minnesota back on the Right Track,” Miller, said in a statement. “We will fund more police officers and hold criminals accountable to reduce crime. We’ll empower parents to be partners in their kids’ education so they can catch up and meet expectations after nearly two years of disrupted learning. We will provide permanent, ongoing tax relief so people have more money in their pockets after every paycheck.”
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The investigative journalist whose new book “Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win” exposes Chinese Communist Party influence in the United States told The Star News Network President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and his family collected $31 million from the CCP and military-intelligence entities under its control.
“The Biden Family has collected some $31 million from deals in China. You’ve got intelligence officials involved, or at least indirectly involved, which raises very troubling questions about whether the Biden Family is compromised,” said Peter Schweizer, whose new book exposes the Chinese Communist Party has infiltrated Capitol Hill, Wall Street, sports, entertainment and higher education.
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Chaos is the new, the intentional, normal. A pandemic of nihilism has been unleashed upon the land. As in Lord of the Flies, when laws, rules, protocols, traditions, and customs are mocked and dismantled, primitive human nature in the raw is unleashed.
Madness now reigns in every quarter, from the iconic to the irrelevant to the fundamental. Statues of Lincoln, Douglass, and Jefferson are toppled or defaced. The rules of capitalization have been altered. We are told that 1619, not 1776, was our founding date—and this by a “civil rights” activist-journalist who had no idea of the date that the Civil War began.
Quite quickly after the revolutionary boilerplate, America began reverting to its natural Hobbesian or Thucydidean essence. If you dispute that, look at looted packages along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Try walking the nocturnal streets of Chicago or Baltimore. Visit the sidewalk homeless of San Francisco. Fly over our constipated ports. Drive into our empty new car dealerships. Pull up to our European-priced gas pumps. Shop in the emptying shelves of our Sovietizing food and discount stores. The common theme of the upcoming Super Bowl halftime show, apparently, is that the entertainers must have written lyrics threatening the police, denigrating women, using the N-word . . . and be worth $100 million.
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Republican lawmakers in Minnesota have set out their priorities for the upcoming legislative session beginning Monday.
One of them is to address the issue of forced masking in classrooms across the state.
At a Wednesday press conference announcing the Senate GOP’s priorities, Sen. Roger Chamberlain stated that in the educational sphere they will focus on getting “back to basics.”
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North Korea acknowledged Monday having test-fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of striking the U.S. territory Guam.
South Korea and Japan first reported Sunday that the Hwasong-12 missile had been launched – making it the seventh nuclear-capable missile having been launched since 2017 by the rogue nation.
The North Korean state news said the missile was fired as a test and took a high trajectory to avoid flying over neighboring countries. The projectile flew just under 500 miles before landing in the sea between Japan and the Korean Peninsula.
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A South American energy company was forced to halt operations of a pipeline traveling through the Amazon rainforest after a rupture caused a large leak of crude oil, multiple sources reported.
OCP Ecuador, which generates about $133 million in annual revenue transporting oil in the region, had immediately started a clean up and mitigation effort when the leak was discovered, the company said in a statement Saturday. The rupture was likely caused by a rock fall in the area which damaged the pipeline infrastructure, NBC News reported.
Roberto Grijalva, OCP Ecuador’s Operations Manager, said the company was committed to taking all measures necessary to prevent further damage to the environment. The Ecuadorian government, meanwhile, added that it was closely monitoring the rupture.
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A federal study asks underage boys to report their sexual behavior to a mobile app in exchange for up to $275 all without requiring permission from their parents, The Washington Free Beacon reported.
Researchers at Columbia University funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have spent more than eight million dollars of taxpayer money on a study that pays gay and transgender minors as young as 13 to track their sexual behavior on an app called MyPEEPS without parental permission, the Free Beacon reported. Questions such as whether or not they have “condomless anal sex” are asked as part of the study.
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A Chinese man alleging that he was imprisoned and tortured after he revealed substandard working conditions in factories making Amazon products is asking the company for an apology.
Tang Mingfang spent two years in prison after he shed a light on working conditions inside Foxconn factories manufacturing Amazon Echo, Echo Dot and Kindle devices, he told The Guardian. Tang said he was beaten and tortured by Chinese authorities during his internment.
“I think Amazon should give me an explanation, tell me if I really deserve to be sent to jail?” Tang said. “If not, Amazon should give me an apology, along with its partner, Foxconn, to assist me to appeal for a redress, and provide compensation.”
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An adult biological male child molester will be housed in a juvenile detention facility for girls because he began identifying as a woman after being taken into custody, according to Fox News.
William Tubbs, a 26-year old who now goes by “Hannah,” pled guilty to molesting a 10-year-old girl when he was two weeks shy of 18, Fox News reported. Prosecutors said that Tubbs grabbed the 10-year-old victim by the throat, locked her in a bathroom stall and put his hands down her pants, Fox News reported.
Tubbs did not claim to be a woman until after he was taken into custody for the attack, prosecutors told Fox News. Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon refused to prosecute Tubbs as an adult.
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House Republicans are staunchly opposed to Democrats’ proposed bill to bolster American competitiveness against China, potentially complicating their goal of passing legislation by the beginning of March.
White House officials have said that passing the bill before President Joe Biden’s March 1 State of the Union is a top priority, but the House bill is a stark departure from the Senate’s legislation that sailed through on a bipartisan vote in June 2021. And while House Democrats can pass their version without Republican support if nearly all of them vote in favor, there is no guarantee that their bill would reach the 60 votes necessary to pass the Senate.
Further, any House-passed bill would likely head to a conference, where House and Senate leaders would privately meet in an attempt to work out their differences and compromise on a bill that can pass both chambers. Not only would that process require additional time, but Senate Republicans would have great leverage given the chamber’s 60-vote threshold.
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A public university forced a law professor to take “sensitivity training” that used the very “expurgated slur” he was punished for including in a law exam question, according to a First Amendment lawsuit seeking $100,000 in damages.
The University of Illinois Chicago allegedly violated its agreement with Jason Kilborn not to require such training after the Rev. Jesse Jackson joined black student protests demanding his firing last fall.
Kilborn’s employment discrimination question of 10 years, which the lawsuit claims prompted “one or two” complaints for the first time in 2020, referred to a hypothetical plaintiff whose managers “expressed their anger” at her by “calling her a ‘n___’ and ‘b___’ [sic].”
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