Businesses across Minnesota are expected to see an increase in their unemployment insurance taxes after lawmakers failed to come to an agreement on the issue before the automatic tax hike went into effect.
During the coronavirus pandemic, the state’s unemployment insurance trust fund was depleted, and the tax hike will go to replace the funds and repay the federal government for unemployment aid.
Read More
The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that cities and counties can conduct statewide elections without a strict party balance on absentee ballot boards.
Upholding a previous decision by the state’s court of appeals, Justice Barry Anderson published a 25-page ruling Wednesday dismissing the Minnesota Voters Alliance’s lawsuit against Ramsey and Olmsted counties and the city of Duluth, with the Republican Party of Minnesota listed as a co-plaintiff.
Read More
I sense a disturbance in the force. In fact, I’ve been feeling the tremors for a while. Back in January, I wrote a column for American Greatness called “The Coming Dethronement of Joe Biden.” In it, I noted that Biden’s appalling performance as president would sooner or later—and probably sooner, given the ostentatious nature of his multifaceted failure—lead to his removal as president.
I should have added that it wasn’t Biden’s performance per se that would lead to his downfall. The problem, rather, was the way his performance was undermining his—and therefore his minders’ and puppetmasters’—political power. As Saul Alinsky, community organizer to the stars, noted, the “issue is never the issue.” Accordingly, the people who put Joe Biden in power—I cannot name them, but I know they are the same people who keep him in power—do not care about inflation, rising gas and food prices, COVID lockdowns or mask mandates, the porousness of our Southern border, the threat of war with Russia, or the myriad other issues that worry ordinary voters. I am quite certain, in fact, that the word “voters” brings a vaguely contemptuous smile to their faces.
Read More
Jianjie Liu, a Chinese national arrested in Georgia in 2019, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering, amid an indictment that included money laundering conspiracy, nine counts of money laundering, and access device fraud charges
According to a release from the Department of Justice (DOJ), Liu targeted victims in several states, raking in more than $150,000 in various schemes.
Read More
Almost exactly 76 years ago, on March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill, the former prime minister of Great Britain, delivered one of the most important speeches of the century. Surveying the increasing despotic rule by the Soviet Russians over Central and Eastern Europe in the wake of World War Two, Churchill declared, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
That phrase, “iron curtain,” stuck, helping to define the Cold War for the next five decades. In such a chilled environment, significant trade and normal exchange of any kind between the Free World and the Communist Bloc was unthinkable.
So now today, we can see that an iron curtain is once again descending; only time will tell if brave Ukraine will be held, once again, as a captive nation on the wrong side of this terrible barrier.
Read More
Neil W. McCabe, the national political editor of The Star News Network, interviewed former Georgia state representative Vernon Jones, who is running in the GOP primary to replace Rep. Jody B. Hice (R.-Ga.) for Georgia’s 10th Congressional District.
Jones, who is endorsed by President Donald J. Trump, said Americans cannot wait until 2024 for Trump to be returned to the White House, so he has another plan.
Read More
Alabama officials reversed a decision to revoke a license plate belonging to Nathan Kirk, referring to the slogan criticizing President Joe Biden — “Let’s go, Brandon” — according to The Washington Post.
The state previously demanded that Kirk surrender his license plate within 10 days in a Feb. 17 letter that called the plate an affront to the “peace and dignity of the State of Alabama,” according to the Post.
Read More
A member of parliament in the U.K. said Wednesday that a hospital told police an alleged rape could not have really occurred because the attacker was transgender, according to The Telegraph.
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, a member of parliament, told the House of Lords that it took a year for the hospital to acknowledge there was a male in the ward where the rape allegedly occurred. The victim reported the alleged rape more than a year ago, but hospital staff told police officers “that there was no male in the hospital, therefore the rape could not have happened,” the Telegraph reported.
Her comments came during a debate on a policy called Annex B, which allows patients to be placed in single-sex hospital wards based on self-identification of gender, according to the Telegraph.
Read More
The dodo bird may make a comeback in the near future after recent confirmation from one scientist that the extinct animal’s genome has been fully sequenced.
The dodo was first noted by Dutch sailors on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius in the late 1590s. By the middle of the next century it had vanished from the island, having been hunted to extinction by humans and dogs; it also suffered a loss of its natural habitat due to travelers coming to the island.
Read More
Mortgage rates surpassed 4% for the first time since 2019 and the Federal Reserve announced a series of new rate hikes this week, two major shifts that mark the economic response to months of elevated inflation.
The Federal Reserve announced a 0.25% interest rate hike and said six more increases are on the way. Last week’s increase is meant to rein in inflation, but can have negative effects on economic growth. Meanwhile, mortgage rates are expected to increase along with the Federal Reserve rate.
Read More
Public university officials can be held personally liable for dumping an adjunct professor based on his anonymous criticism of the concept of microaggressions, a federal court has concluded.
University of North Texas officials should have known that math professor Nathaniel Hiers’ speech “touched on a matter of public concern and that discontinuing his employment because of his speech violated the First Amendment,” U.S. District Judge Sean Jordan wrote in a 69-page memorandum and order Friday.
Read More
College students would learn the estimated total interest they would pay on a education loan before they take it out if a law proposed by Iowa’s U.S. senators becomes law.
U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, joined Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, in proposing the measure to address student loan debt.
Read More
The nation’s largest private employer announced plans to hire tens of thousands of workers before the end of the quarter to help expand its business amid a tightening labor market.
Walmart announced Wednesday a plan to hire more than 50,000 workers in the U.S. by the end of April, the time of year when many companies decrease hiring following the busy holiday shopping season, The Wall Street Journal first reported. The new hires will reportedly fill positions in stores but also add staff in areas such as health, wellness and advertising.
Read More
An elite K-12 day and boarding school in Massachusetts separated students into race-based “affinity groups,” according to a report from Parents Defending Education.
In October, Milton Academy (MA) in Milton, Massachusetts, asked parents to pick affinity groups for their children to separate them based on race, according to a report from Parents Defending Education (PDE). The groups are now being implemented among MA students as young as five, a parent told PDE.
Read More
New Hampshire may become the first state to allow the antiparasitic drug ivermectin to be obtained without a prescription. A Republican-sponsored ivermectin bill (HB 1022) passed in the N.H. State House Wednesday on a vote of 183-159 and has been sent to the State Senate for review.
“Ivermectin is available over the counter in 79 countries,” State Representative Jim Kofalt, R-Hillsborough noted during a legislative hearing in January. “And it has a good safety profile.”
Read More
A great plague of our contemporary political landscape is that one bad policy begets even more bad policies. Such is the case with many of America’s existing immigration laws.
Federal law, for example, calls for specific enforcement protocols. But our elected representatives have decided that some of those protocols simply should be ignored. This mindset led to ideas like catching and then releasing illegal aliens into our communities, preventing local law enforcement from working with federal law enforcement, and “sanctuary” cities where those who have broken our laws can hide from accountability.
From this witches’ brew of bad ideas has come the latest product rollout, one suited for our time: stimulus checks for illegal aliens. Using the economic damage caused by COVID-19 as a pretext, anti-borders activists and their allied politicians have found a way to sustain those here illegally while creating further incentives for even more foreign nationals to move here.
Read More
Journalists with the Real America’s Voice TV network were detained by border patrol agents at the southern U.S. border on Friday, with a reporter describing being “detained at gunpoint” amid the open crossing of illegal immigrants into the United States.
Ben Bergquam, a reporter with Real America’s Voice — with whom Just the News is partnered — posted a video depicting him in the back of a border patrol vehicle, showing what appeared to be a border patrol agent directing Bergquam’s colleagues with his gun drawn.
“And all of this is happening [with] 60 illegal [immigrants] just standing by the wall, no problem,” Bergquam said.
Read More
The City of St. Paul will use a $3.75 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to hire additional police officers to increase public safety.
In addition to the DOJ money, St. Paul officials will also rely on funding from the American Rescue Plan and other city revenue to fully finance the added positions.
Read More
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been in a Washington, D.C., hospital since Friday with flu-like symptoms, according to an announcement from the court.
“He underwent tests, was diagnosed with an infection, and is being treated with intravenous antibiotics. His symptoms are abating, he is resting comfortably, and he expects to be released from the hospital in a day or two,” the press release stated.
“Justice Thomas will participate in the consideration and discussion of any cases for which he is not present on the basis of the briefs, transcripts, and audio of the oral arguments,” according to the court.
Read More
Corporations, including Citigroup, Apple and Match, are helping their employees undergo abortions in light of new, state-level restrictions.
Citigroup announced a policy of covering travel costs for U.S.-based employees seeking abortions “in response to changes in reproductive healthcare laws in certain states” in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing. The policy will cover airfare and lodging, according to Bloomberg.
Read More
Thirty-seven percent of Democrats and 62 percent of Independents say America is on the wrong track, according to the latest Reuters-Ipsos poll conducted from March 14 to March 15, signaling strong discontent among Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters headed into the Nov. 2022 Congressional midterms.
Read More
After its CEO suggested the now-infamous Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian Russian disinformation, NewsGuard, the self-styled arbiter of internet truth, is not backing down.
“My personal opinion is there’s a high likelihood this story is a hoax, maybe even a hoax perpetrated by the Russians again,” NewsGuard CEO Steve Brill said on CNBC just before the 2020 presidential election.
Read More
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration Act of 1965 formed the core of the Great Society. Together, they became what some have called the “Second Reconstruction.” Professor Gabriel Chin noted that “[i]n a remarkable fifteen-month span between July 1964 and October 1965 . . . these laws unquestionably marked a turning point in American history and dramatically changed American society.”
Read More
Vision is the primary way that humans sense the world, so what happens when you suddenly strip sight away? In 2004, researchers at Harvard Medical School found out.
Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a Professor of Neurology, led a team that blindfolded thirteen healthy young adults for 96 hours straight. During that time, as part of a broader study, participants were taught braille for four hours a day, engaged in tactile stimulation activities like puzzles and clay modeling, took daily brain scans, and otherwise lived their lives – they got dressed, they ate, they walked around, and they went to the gym, all in total, numbing darkness.
“A specially designed blindfold was worn that prevented all light perception,” the researchers described. “It was held in place by a Velcro strap and further secured by Ace bandages. The blindfold permitted full motion of the eyes as well as opening and closing of eyelids. Potential tampering with the blindfold by the subjects was controlled with the use of a piece of photographic paper attached to the inside of the blindfold.”
Read More
A free speech event hosted at Yale University that featured both conservative and progressive speakers was shouted down last week by over 100 far-left radicals from the university’s law school.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the panel was hosted on March 10th by the Yale Federalist Society, and featured Monica Miller of the left-wing American Humanist Association, and Kristen Waggoner of the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom. The purpose of the panel was to demonstrate that even two activists with such different political beliefs could agree on several things when it comes to the assault on freedom of speech in America today, as both groups had been involved in at least one Supreme Court case together dealing with violations of the First Amendment, when the Court sided with a Christian student in a Georgia university who was initially forbidden from preaching on campus.
Read More
The new deputy head of a propaganda and espionage agency in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has documented ties with business tycoons, university heads and other elite members of American society.
Chen Xu, former party secretary of one of the PRC’s most prestigious universities, Tsinghua, was promoted to deputy head of the United Front Work Department (UFWD), according to an updated leadership roster on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) portal, which was first reported in Chinese media on Feb. 28.
Read More
At a time of tectonic shifts in foreign policy alliances, with Russia and China forming a new pact and aggressively asserting themselves on the international stage, Washington’s national security community is splintered across the ideological spectrum on how best to counter the dual threats.
Yet, even before Russia invaded Ukraine, a group of national security practitioners, military veterans, and scholars began trying to move beyond their policy differences to help repair the damage inflicted by the last U.S. foreign policy failure – the chaotic U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan nearly seven months ago.
When the Vandenberg Coalition, a group of primarily Republican experts representing diverse foreign policy views and approaches, began their Afghanistan assessment, its members couldn’t have known that international alarm over Russia’s bloody land grab would soon eclipse the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan. Some national security experts believe that the two U.S. foreign policy nightmares are inextricably linked – that America’s ignominious retreat in Afghanistan emboldened Vladimir Putin to move on Ukraine.
Read More
For years, Beijing has pushed to have the Chinese yuan accepted as an international currency, while countries unfriendly to the U.S. such as Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and North Korea have been looking for a dollar alternative for international trade. Western economic sanctions against Russia are now accelerating talks between Moscow and Beijing about finding “workaround” solutions, as Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell is warning the invasion of Ukraine may step up Beijing’s efforts to cut its dependency on the dollar.
Over the past decade, it has irked Beijing that, in spite of being the number two economic power, China’s currency has never become truly international. Technically, the yuan’s admission to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Special Drawing Rights currencies (SDR) in 2016 makes the yuan an international currency. In practice, however, the yuan has very limited internationalization. Only 10.9% of the SDR is comprised of yuan. The only country which recognizes the yuan as an official currency is China, whereas about 15 countries use the U.S. dollar as their only official currency or an additional official currency.
Read More
The number of Americans who filed new unemployment claims decreased to 214,000 in the week ending March 12, the lowest level since the beginning of 2022, the Department of Labor announced Thursday.
The Labor Department figure showed a decrease of 15,000 compared to the week ending March 5, when new claims numbered just 227,000, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The week’s claims were below predictions of economists surveyed by Dow Jones, who estimated that new claims reported Thursday would total 220,000.
Read More
Another leading Minnesota company matches employee donations to a nonprofit that has bailed out a repeat sex offender and numerous other violent criminals.
Medtronic, a biomedical engineering company that employs over 90,000 people worldwide and houses its operational headquarters in Minneapolis, provides a “match opportunity” for employees when they donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, according to a screenshot provided to Alpha News.
Read More
On Wednesday, federal prosecutors in New York charged five individuals with acting on behalf of the Chinese government as they attempted to spy on U.S. citizens, and to subsequently harass them for criticism of China.
As reported by the Washington Post, three separate charges were brought against each of the five defendants in Brooklyn, with the charges coming from the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. The defendants have been accused of stalking and harassing Chinese nationals living in the country who are now critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Read More
Every single one of senile president Joe Biden’s struggles was easily foreseeable.
It’s a bold statement, since many if not most of the issues that confront a new president can’t always be seen from a distance. If it can be said that elections are always about the future, it’s just as true to claim that the future would almost certainly be shaped by yet unseen events and circumstances that no politician could forthrightly discuss in the lead-up to his victory.
Read More
Incumbent Democrat U.S. Representative Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX-15) has elected to run for reelection in TX-34, leaving Texas’ Fifteenth Congressional district an open seat.
Redistricting changed the district lines and made an already competitive TX-15 an even more appetizing target for Republicans, who already have a nominee while the Democrats are scheduled to have a run-off in late May.
Read More
American’s spending slowed in February amid surging inflation and gas prices, the U.S. Census Bureau announced Wednesday.
Retail sales grew 0.3% in February, a significant dip from January’s 4.9% monthly increase, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday. January’s spending increase marked the largest jump since March 2021 after Americans received the final $1,400 government stimulus check.
Read More
Historians say that a New York Times reporter aided the Soviet Union’s attempts to conceal a genocide.
The late Walter Duranty, whom many historians accused of helping Josef Stalin’s regime hide the Holodomor, a man-made famine that was used as an instrument of genocide that killed at least 3.9 million people, served as the Times’ top reporter in Moscow for 14 years.
Read More
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) leadership is allowing officials to waive a pandemic-related public health order for Ukrainians seeking asylum at ports of entry at U.S. borders, according to a memo obtained by CBS News.
“The Department of Homeland Security recognizes that the unjustified Russian war of aggression in Ukraine has created a humanitarian crisis,” the executive director of CBP’s Admissibility and Passenger Programs, Matthew Davies, wrote in a memo, CBS News reported. “CBP is authorized, consistent with the Title 42 Order, on a case-by-case basis based on the totality of the circumstances, including considerations of humanitarian interests, to except Ukrainian nationals at land border ports of entry from Title 42.”
Read More
University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas won the 500 free event at the NCAA Women’s Championships by 1.75 seconds Thursday.
In first place, Thomas swam finished at 4:33.24, according to results published on swimmeetresults.tech. The three runners-up swam 4:34.99, 4:35.92 and 4:36.18.
Read More
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday refused to comment on the New York Times’ “confirmation” that emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop are authentic, after repeatedly claiming the story was “Russian disinformation”—before and after the 2020 presidential election.
Read More
The day after President Biden announced that the United States would ban imports of Russian oil and gas, a group of eleven powerful European investment funds that includes Amundi, Europe’s largest asset manager, outlined plans to force Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second largest bank, to cut its lending to oil and gas companies. The juxtaposition of these two events dramatizes the fundamental disunity of the West. At the same time as the Biden administration is sanctioning Russian oil and gas producers, Western investors are sanctioning Western ones. Under the banner of ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing, the West’s capital is being deployed to create an artificial shortage of oil and gas produced by its companies and reward non-Western oil and gas producers such as Russia and Iran with higher prices. In doing so, the West is undermining its own security interests.
Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy markets were already extremely tight. In the past, high oil and gas prices stimulated a supply-side response leading to increased output and to prices falling back. This relationship has broken down. According to analysts at JP Morgan, capital spending by S&P Global 1200 energy companies peaked in 2015 at just over $400 billion and shrank to around $120 billion last year – less than half its previous trough of $250 billion in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, even though global demand is now around 15% higher than it was then.
Read More
Democratic Party activists in Wisconsin on Thursday filed a lawsuit in federal court demanding that Wisconsin Republicans Sen. Ron Johnson and Reps. Tom Tiffany and Scott Fitzgerald be barred from the 2022 ballot for highlighting abnormalities in the 2020 election process and their alleged attempts to interfere with the congressional certification of the results.
The plaintiffs allege the Republicans “used their public positions of authority to illegally foment an atmosphere meant to intimidate and pressure Vice President [Mike] Pence and Congress to take actions inconsistent with the facts and with their duties under the Electoral Count Act and the U.S. Constitution,” according to a report from the Epoch Times.
Read More
Neil W. McCabe, the national political editor of The Star News Network, a constellation of 11 state-focused news sites, which includes The Georgia Star News, interviewed Rep. Jody B. Hice (R.-Ga.) about his race for Georgia secretary of state.
Hice said it was frustrating to watch Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger botch the 2020 election, and be unable to do anything about it, and this frustration motivated him to run against him.
Read More
Social media platforms would be prohibited from using algorithms to target children under a bill advanced by a Minnesota House committee Tuesday.
Rep. Kirstin Robbins, R-Maple Grove, sponsored the bill, HF 3724, after reading about the impact of social media on teenagers. She said in the House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee meeting the Child Internet Protection Act, which the federal government passed in 2000 and updated in 2011, does not cover social media platforms. Schools and libraries must educate minors about appropriate online behavior, including interactions on social networking websites, an FCC document said.
Read More
The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), a group of 97 left wing lawmakers, urged President Joe Biden to declare a “climate emergency” and issue a series of bans on federal oil and gas leasing.
The requests were part of the CPC’s proposed agenda for executive action released Thursday that it would like to see the White House pursue moving forward. Democratic Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal is the caucus’ chair and Sen. Bernie Sanders is its sole member from the Senate.
Read More
One. Reassuring an enemy what one will not do ensures that the enemy will do just that and more. Unpredictability and occasional enigmatic silence bolster deterrence. But Joe Biden’s predictable reassurance to Russian President Vladimir Putin that he will show restraint means Putin likely will not.
Two. No-fly zones don’t work in a big-power, symmetrical standoff. In a cost-benefit analysis, they are not worth the risk of shooting down the planes of a nuclear power. They usually do little to stop planes outside of such zones shooting missiles into them. Sending long-range, high-altitude anti-aircraft batteries to Ukraine to deny Russian air superiority is a far better way of regaining air parity.
Three. Europe, NATO members, and Germany in particular have de facto admitted that their past decades of shutting down nuclear plants, coal mines, and oil and gas fields have left Europe at the mercy of Russia. They are promising to rearm and meet their promised military contributions. By their actions, they are admitting that their critics, the United States in particular, were right, and they were dangerously wrong in empowering Putin.
Read More
In an interview with The Star News Network, nationally known school choice advocate Corey DeAngelis said teachers’ unions would be incentivized to push for more student-focused policies in public schools if school funding followed the child and more states adopted school choice programs.
DeAngelis, the national director of research at the American Federation for Children, is also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a senior fellow at the Reason Foundation.
Read More
No one ever said that the business of politics made good sense, but if you’re a politician, and the vast majority of your constituents — including a high percentage of those in your own party — no longer want you to represent them, shouldn’t you take their distaste as a hint and get the heck out of office?
Such is the case for notorious Donald Trump bashing RINO congresswoman Liz Cheney. As everyone knows by now, Cheney is the lone House representative from the huge but sparsely populated state of Wyoming, which means hers is the sole voice of every single Cowboy State resident and citizen in the lower chamber. Liz has never had an issue with winning elections in blood red Wyoming, which would seem to be an argument in her favor. But times and circumstances have changed markedly in the rocky mountain high plains and there’re hardly any folks there who hanker to send Cheney back to DC for another two years.
Yet onward Liz trudges. Because Cheney has fallen so far out of favor with conservatives and Republicans in her jurisdiction, she’s now relying on Democrats to try and (literally) save her seat. The optics alone are odd, but reality is even weirder. In a piece titled “Liz Cheney turns to Democrats to save her hide,” Tara Palmeri wrote at Politico:
Read More
Meghan Linsey’s latest single, “If You Need Me, Don’t” takes her fans back to her soulful New Orleans roots with her evocative, powerhouse vocals.
Read More
A Boston-based BLM activist and her husband are accused of bilking taxpayers and liberal donors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars to use on vacations, restaurants, and trips to the nail salon.
The pair reportedly went on the spending spree using unemployment benefits, and donation funds of the non-profit organization “Violence in Boston.”
Read More
New Hampshire Governor Republican Chris Sununu has declared that he will veto the redistricting plan that was passed by the state Senate on Thursday.
The plan had previously passed the state House in January.
Read More
Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday endorsed former Republican Sen. David Perdue for governor of Georgia by saying he is the only candidate who can beat Democrat Stacey Abrams in the fall.
Read More