Nearly 200 Alabama churches officially seceded from the United Methodist Church (UMC) last weekend following years of conflict over social and theological issues.
Members of the UMC’s North Alabama Conference (NAC) approved the decision to leave at their meeting on Saturday at the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Center (BJCC).
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The friendly skies too often resembled “season’s beatings” shopping brawls during the pandemic, as the number of arguments and even fistfights surged on-board. Viral videos of the flight-and-fight mayhem frequently had a common denominator – the federal government’s mask requirement.
So it may come as little surprise that disruptions on commercial domestic flights have plummeted by 74% since the Biden administration’s mask mandate was  overturned by a federal judge in April. The current rate is 1.7 unruly passengers per 10,000 flights, down from 6.4 per 10,000 in February.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday announced charges against eight “social media influencers” in what the agency said was a coordinated effort to manipulate stocks via multiple Internet platforms.
The agency said in a press release those charged where involved in a $100 million securities fraud scheme in which they used the social media platforms Twitter and Discord to “manipulate exchange-traded stocks.”
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An economist says the average American family has effectively lost more than $7,000 due to inflation and higher interest rates since President Joe Biden took office.
The consumer price index, a key inflation measure, increased 0.1% in November, up 7.1% from November 2021, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday. The figure marks a slowdown in rampant inflation, but not a reversal of the trend that has caused prices for everyday goods like food and gas to ratchet up in recent months.
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A Baltimore public middle school teacher danced and celebrated in a TikTok video in which she boasted she was “indoctrinating” her students with taxpayer funds.
Fox News Digital reported the teacher is Alexa Sciuto, who teaches Spanish at Pine Grove Middle School in the Baltimore County School District.
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A fifth-grade girl who allegedly wrote the names of several of her classmates on a whiteboard and called it her “murder list” was suspended for just one day and has been back in the classroom since Nov. 11, according to a police report obtained by Alpha News.
According to the report, Isanti Intermediate School Principal Mark Ziebarth confirmed a 10-year-old student had written the names of several children she said she was going to kill on a Chromebook whiteboard.
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Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo continues to draw attention to studies that indicate the COVID mRNA shots have significant health safety concerns even as the federal government still presses Americans to take them.
Ladapo commented on social media regarding a study published in November at Clinical Research in Cardiology examined autopsies of 35 individuals who died unexpectedly within 20 days post-COVID-19 vaccination.
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Stop trying to take Ron DeSantis away from Florida. Just stop it. I understand the rationale, but it’s wrong. It may be quite reasonable to be jealous of Florida for its governor—the only governor in the nation to win my coveted “competent” rating on every major issue. But before we encourage DeSantis and Donald Trump to have a falling out that splits the party (or, rather, before we let the RINO simps do it at the behest of Democrats and lots of Chinese money), let’s review a few salient points.
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A provision tucked away in Congress’ annual defense bill would allow federal judges and their household members to request content containing personal information be removed from websites, but some free speech advocates worry the rule could enable government censorship of online speech.
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Cambridge Dictionary updated its definition of the term “woman” to include anyone who identifies as female, including biological males.
The online dictionary defines “woman” as “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth,” according to its website. The new definition is in addition to the conventional definition, which defines a woman as “an adult human female being.”
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Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of defunct cryptocurrency firm FTX, was charged Tuesday by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with defrauding investors.
In a formal complaint, the SEC alleges that Bankman-Fried raised more than $1.8 billion from investors since 2019 but diverted the funds to his personal crypto account.
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While overall inflation has slowed from its rapid pace earlier this year, grocery prices continue to rise, putting Americans in a pinch, according to newly released federal inflation data.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released the monthly Consumer Price Index report, which showed prices rose 0.1% in November, less than experts predicted, contributing to a 7.1% increase in the past 12 months.
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Ohio middle school teacher Vivian Geraghty filed a lawsuit after allegedly being fired for refusing to violate her religious beliefs by using preferred pronouns.
Geraghty, a former teacher at Jackson Memorial Middle School, was told she was required to use two students’ new pronouns and their preferred names in class, according to the lawsuit. Geraghty was fired after refusing to do so, at which point she sued the school’s Board of Directors, principal Kacy Carter and Monica Myers, the director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
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Americans listed the federal government as the top problem facing the country for the seventh year in a row, according to a new poll.
Of over 1,000 respondents, 19% mentioned the government as the top problem with the country, saying they are dissatisfied with “some aspect” of the government, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday. The government was ranked as more of a problem than inflation and the economy in general, with 16% dissatisfied with inflation and 12% dissatisfied with the economy in general.
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ESG investment strategies can see investors giving up financial returns for no societal gain. In the second of his four part review of Terrence Keeley’s Sustainable, Rupert Darwall explores the implications of investment theory for ESG artificially constraining investment opportunities; the risks of regulators worsening an already inflated ESG bubble; and the distortions that arise from the widespread adoption of sustainability as an investment concept lacking an objective definition.
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ESG has its origins in a speech by UN secretary-general Kofi Annan at the Davos World Economic Forum in 1999. In the first of his four part review of Terrence Keeley’s Sustainable, Rupert Darwall shows how this created ESG’s dual mandate that accounts for its success – and its unsustainability as an investment strategy.
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A strategic memo created by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) that examines the party’s success in the 2022 midterm elections says the party recaptured some Hispanic Americans who left the party and turned Republican during the Trump years, according to reports.
The DCCC spent $18 million on digital and TV ads along with other forms of communication to target Hispanic Americans in races across the country, which was double the money spent on Latinos in 2020, according to the memo.
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During a recent hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, Congressman Dan Bishop (R–NC) asked Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas, “Do you continue to maintain that the border is secure?” Mayorkas replied, “Yes, and we are working day in and day out to enhance its security.”
Contradicting that claim, objective measures show that the border is less secure than ever, and the situation is putting many thousands of lives at risk.
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Republicans made gains in the midterm elections among voters under 30, a demographic that tends to lean heavily Democratic, according to the Associated Press.
Young voters swung 53 percent for Democratic House candidates and 41 percent for Republican candidates, according to the AP. The result marks a decline from recent elections: voters under 30 chose President Joe Biden over former President Donald Trump 61 percent to 36 percent in 2020, swung for Democrats 64 to 34 percent in 2018 House races.
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The Department of Energy has fired Sam Brinton, thought to be the nation’s first openly gender fluid federal employee, amid multiple allegations of luggage theft.
“Sam Brinton is no longer a DOE employee,” a department spokesperson told the Daily Beast on Monday. “By law, the Department of Energy cannot comment further on personnel matters.”
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Trump attorney Harmeet Dhillon is getting some support from within the Republican National Committee in her bid to unseat Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.
Over the weekend, Dhillon got the backing of longtime RNC member Morton Blackwell, founder of the conservative training group The Leadership Institute.
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The Kansas Board of Regents is considering stripping specific university math requirements after it was found that a significant percentage of college freshmen fail algebra, NPR affiliate KCUR reported.
The Regents, who oversee the system’s six public universities, are considering implementing the Math Pathways approach which matches students to a math course based on their major instead of mandating algebra for all incoming students. While many universities require that all freshmen pass algebra as a prerequisite for graduation, one in three Kansas students reportedly fail the course, which could delay a student’s graduation.
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America First Legal (AFL) released a fourth set of documents obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that reveals more evidence of alleged collusion between the nation’s public health agency and social media companies to censor free speech and silence Americans under the government’s label of “misinformation.”
Last week, AFL’s 600-page document release uncovered evidence that Twitter operated a “Partner Support Portal” for government employees and other selective “stakeholders” that would allow them to delete or flag posts viewed as “misinformation,” noted AFL, which is led by former President Donald Trump’s immigration advisor Stephen Miller.
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The state’s teachers union, a top ally of and donor to Minnesota Democrats, who now control the whole of state government, said it wants a $5 billion chunk of the budget surplus.
Minnesota Management and Budget announced in an economic forecast this week that state lawmakers will have a projected $17.6 billion surplus to work with when crafting a budget for the 2024-2025 biennium next session. That’s up from an estimated $9.2 billion surplus projected in February.
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The U.S. Supreme Court finally heard oral arguments in Moore v. Harper last week. The case involves a mundane constitutional issue concerning the definition of “legislature” as used in the elections clause. Yet it has produced panic among Democrats and a torrent of portentous predictions about the death of democracy from various leftist law professors. In the Washington Post, for example, Harvard University’s Noah Feldman expressed alarm that the court took up the “insane” case at all.
Is Moore v. Harper really insane? Of course not. The case arose early this year when the North Carolina Supreme Court struck down a redistricting map produced by the state Legislature, then replaced it with a redistricting scheme of its own. The North Carolina General Assembly petitioned SCOTUS for relief on the grounds that this action violated Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution.
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Legislation offered by Senators Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) would repeal Sections 1 and 2 of the 1887 Electoral Count Act, and replace the appointment of electors by state legislatures in the event a state fails to make a choice in that election under current federal law to “the executive of each State”.
3 U.S.C. Section 2 currently states, “Whenever any State has held an election for the purpose of choosing electors, and has failed to make a choice on the day prescribed by law, the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct.”
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A school district that gave preschoolers a book on cross-dressing has changed its procedures for giving out books after news of the incident surfaced last week.
As first reported exclusively by The Lion and The Heartlander news sites, a 4-year-old preschooler in the Turner School District in Kansas City, Kansas, took home the book Jacob’s New Dress. It’s a picture book in which a little boy wears girls’ clothes and even competes with his friend Emily to be a princess.
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A new report by a watchdog group reveals the extent of how many schools abused their COVID-19 relief funds to instead pay teachers even more despite not returning to work.
According to the Washington Examiner, the report by FutureEd reveals that many schools still haven’t completely spent the money that they received as a result of three major stimulus bills passed in 2020. Following Joe Biden’s “American Rescue Plan,” at least $190 billion has been allocated exclusively for schools. But as of October, schools nationwide have spent less than 15 percent of the money given to them through the American Rescue Plan.
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Over its first nine months, the Biden administration removed 71% fewer locally arrested criminal aliens than were deported during a comparable period in 2019 under Donald Trump, according to a new study of state and local statistics — despite record illegal immigration numbers.
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When Parker Noland launched his trash-hauling business at age 20 in the summer of 2021, he was excited about the opportunities that lay before him. After taking out a loan from a local bank, the Montana native bought a truck and some dumpsters and got to work promoting his services. The business plan was simple: he would deliver dumpsters to construction sites looking to get rid of debris and then transport the dumpsters to the county dump once they were full.
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U.S. government scientists have recently managed to make significant progress toward successfully utilizing fusion energy, according to The Financial Times.
Scientists at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California managed to create net energy gain via a fusion reaction in the past two weeks, the FT reported Sunday, citing three people with knowledge of the experiment. Researchers have been attempting to produce more energy than they burn during fusion reactions, which power the sun, for 70 years; however, no reaction has produced more energy than it burns until now.
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The school choice movement is gaining momentum as states focus on legislation that would give families greater freedom to select their child’s education, advocates told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Utah, New Hampshire and South Carolina are pushing for more expansive school choice legislation that would increase the value of school choice vouchers and the number of eligible students, while states such as Arizona and Florida have already implemented programs that provide vouchers to students outside of the public school system. The increasing push for more school choice legislation across the country is because other states have provided the model to do so, advocates told the DCNF.
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Host Stephen K. Bannon welcomed The Star News Network’s CEO and Editor-in-Chief of The Arizona Sun-Times, Michael Patrick Leahy, Sunday to War Room: Battleground to discuss Arizona’s Gubernatorial candidates Kari Lake’s contest to the certified election result in Arizona.
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The average price for a gallon of gas has fallen below what it was one year ago, and the White House is preparing to go on the offense politically as consumers see more money in their pockets ahead of the holidays. The administration argument? Thank President Biden.
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The University of Idaho (U of I) paid $90,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by three Christian students and a faculty advisor who claimed the university violated their right to free speech.
The lawsuit was filed after the university issued no-contact orders prohibiting Peter Perlot Mark Miller and Ryan Anderson, all members of the Christian Legal Society (CLS), and faculty advisor Professor Richard Seamon from interacting with a law student who disagreed with a CLS requirement that all members define marriage as between a man and a woman, according to the lawsuit’s text. U of I rescinded the no-contact orders in a settlement in favor of the legal society, ADF announced in Wednesday’s press release.
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The federal government is looking to dole out nearly $2.3 billion to “expand and modernize” intercity passenger rail across the country.
But a leading transportation analyst says that Amtrak, the nation’s passenger railroad, doesn’t have any plans to break even.
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House Democrats introduced a bill Tuesday known as the “Identifying Mass Shooters Act” that will direct the National Institute of Justice to collect, study and analyze online content to identify potential mass shooters before they act, according to a copy of the bill obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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A lawsuit filed Friday by Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake contesting the results in the November 8, 2022, election in Maricopa County exposes, among other things, the complexities of the process for mail-in and drop-box ballots and the county’s reliance on a third-party vendor for essential election functions.
The 70-page complaint filed by Lake named Democratic gubernatorial opponent Katie Hobbs who is the Secretary of State of Arizona who certified the election in her favor on December 5, as well as Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer as an officer in charge of elections, Maricopa County Director of Elections for Election Day and Emergency Voting Scott Jarrett and the five members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.
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A new study released by The Tax Foundation this week reports high tax rates on cigarettes induce smuggling of tobacco products from low-tax states or foreign sources into high-tax states.
“States and municipalities have spent millions to combat cigarette smuggling. Recent policy responses include greater law enforcement activity on interstate roads, differential tax rates near low-tax jurisdictions, banning common carrier delivery of cigarettes, and cracking down on tribal reservations that sell tax-free cigarettes,” the “Cigarette Taxes and Cigarette Smuggling by State, 2020” report said. “However, the underlying problem persists. High cigarette taxes act similarly to a ‘price prohibition’ on the legal product in many U.S. states, incentivizing smuggling and illicit activity.”
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Last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen blamed the American people for the 40-year high inflation we have been enduring.
Appearing on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” she said that Americans “were in their homes for a year or more, they wanted to buy grills and office furniture, they were working from home, they suddenly started splurging on goods, buying technology.” According to her, this consumer “splurging” caused prices to rise so much.
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It is Christmas season. The decorations are hung or need to be. Gifts are being purchased. The Advent Week of peace is being celebrated. Parties are being thrown. And Americans wind down from a long, stressful year.
Unfortunately, while most Americans refocus, the rest of the world doesn’t stop, but in many cases looks at this time as an opportunity to exploit.
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Scientists in Florida say they have established a link between the common artificial sweetener aspartame and anxiety-like behavior in mice test subjects.
A press release out of Florida State University revealed that the researchers “provid[ed] mice with drinking water containing aspartame at approximately 15% of the FDA-approved maximum daily human intake.”
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Dozens of athletic competitions for women and girls have been upended by the participation of males identifying as transgender women, who benefit from a host of biological advantages over female competitors, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.
Transgender-identified males have competed in a variety of women’s athletic competitions, from school sports for young children to top college events and Olympic competitions. Differences in an average woman’s strength, stamina and physique compared to the average male are sustained even when a male undergoes testosterone suppression, according to the Sports Councils’ Equality Group.
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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed new rules on Friday that would restrict the use of refrigerators, air conditioning equipment and heat pumps that utilize hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).
The EPA’s proposed rule would crack down on the manufacturing and importing of goods containing HFCs, which would restrict the use of HFCs in refrigeration units, air conditioning systems and heat pump equipment starting in 2025, according to an agency press release. In accordance with the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, a global climate treaty that the Senate ratified in September, the agency intends to reduce the production and consumption of HFCs by 85% by 2036.
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The Biden administration announced Wednesday new greenhouse gas goals and standards for federal buildings.
The White House said it plans “to cut energy use and electrify equipment and appliances in 30 percent of the building space owned by the Federal government by 2030.”
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The fourth entry in the ongoing “Twitter Files” series of explosive revelations dropped on Saturday night, with part four in the series focusing on the removal of Donald Trump from the popular social media platform in early 2021.
The latest thread, published by writer Michael Shellenberger, details the process that “Twitter executives” took as they were “build[ing] the case for a permanent ban” against the former Republican president.
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Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, had weekly meetings with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) at least as far back as 2020, when former President Donald Trump was still in office, internal communications between Twitter staff obtained by journalist Matt Taibbi Friday reveal.
Yoel participated in one such weekly meeting shortly after the company’s moderation team was thrown into a crisis following its decision to suppress an October 2020 New York Post story concerning a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, according to Taibbi. Roth appeared to explicitly ask the government officials in the meeting to “share anything useful” concerning the laptop story, but they apparently declined to do so.
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While record numbers of foreign nationals continue to enter the U.S. through the southern border every month, one of the tiniest states by geography and population is also being impacted by the surge: Vermont.
Mexican cartels are now increasingly flying foreign nationals who arrive in Mexico from all over the world to Quebec from Mexico City, Border Patrol and law enforcement officers told The Center Square. Cartel scouts help them make their way from Canada into northern states illegally, they said. Vermont, which is seeing record-breaking illegal entries, has a population of roughly 645,545 people.
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A federal judge has ordered Southwest Airlines to rehire a flight attendant and award her damages, back pay, and interest after she was fired in 2017 for stating her pro-life views on social media.
The ruling marks a victory for the religious freedom rights of Christians in the workplace at the same time that the U.S. Supreme Court wrestles with the issue in 303 Creative v. Elenis.
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Billionaire and Democratic mega-donor George Soros poured $50 million into a Democratic super PAC this fall in preparation for the 2024 election cycle, according to Politico.
The massive cash influx went to the Democracy PAC, according to Politico. Soros spent another $50 million throughout the 2022 campaign cycle, with cash going to Democratic groups including the Senate Majority PAC, House Majority PAC and candidates including former Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
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