Month: March 2023

Georgia Senate Says Kids Don’t Need Permits or to Pay Taxes on Lemonade Stands

The Center Square

As a parent, T.L. Matthew knows setting up a lemonade stand can be fun and educational.

“In my personal experience, setting up a lemonade stand with my daughter was a fun and rewarding bonding experience that taught her valuable skills in communication, entrepreneurship, and money management,” Matthew, the CEO and founder of Fayetteville-based SumFoods, told The Center Square via email. “Unfortunately, in many states, kids who try to set up their own businesses have been bogged down by unnecessary regulations and taxes, forcing them to obtain permits and licenses or risk being shut down or fined.”

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Red Cross Packets Show Migrants Where to Cross the U.S. Border

Georgia Star News Staff

The American Red Cross has maps and guides for migrants to make the dangerous journeys to the U.S.-Mexico border, according to documents exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The map, which is part of a packet stamped with the International Committee of the Red Cross and American Red Cross logos, shows a list of resources, including hotels, clinics and shelters where migrants can get support in Mexico and Central America. The maps include clearly defined lines leading to cities along the U.S. border. The organization also has a guide to “self care” along the journey, which includes tips on how to survive the desert and disease, how to safely jump on trains, and how to obtain contraceptives.

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Commentary: The Right’s Long Countermarch Through the Institutions

RealClearWire

Is the Right commencing a long countermarch through the institutions, including the very one – the academy – from which the Left’s own long march began? 

Judging by the distress shown by some in the educational establishment, and like-minded corporate media, regarding higher-education reform efforts in North Carolina and Florida, one might get the impression that the countermarch is not only underway but rapidly advancing – threatening progressives’ stranglehold over schools and virtually every other American power center. 

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Suffers Concussion in Fall, to Remain Hospitalized for ‘Few Days’

Just the News

by Madeleine Hubbard    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is expected to remain hospitalized “for a few days” after he fell in Washington, D.C., during a private hotel dinner, a spokesperson for the Kentucky Republican said Thursday. “This evening, Leader McConnell tripped at a local hotel during a private dinner,” spokesman…

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Eco-Conscious ESG Investors Among Top Shareholders in Rail Giant Under Fire for Toxic Spill

Just the News

Three of the five top shareholders in Norfolk Southern — the freight rail carrier under the spotlight for its saftey and environmental record following last month’s toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio — have been aligned with the eco-conscious, socially aware ESG (environmental, social, governance) investing framework embraced by many leading financial firms in recent years. Asset management firms BlackRock Fund Advisors, JPMorgan Investment Management, and The Vanguard Group were all part of the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, a coalition of ESG-minded money mangers committed to channeling investment capital to firms working toward the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, as outlined in the Paris Climate Accord.

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Parents Organization Reports Nearly 6,000 U.S. Public Schools Support Keeping Child’s Gender Identity Hidden from Parents

Susan Berry, PhD

A Parents Defending Education (PDE) report revealed that 5,904 government schools in the United States maintain transgender or “gender nonconforming” policies that openly assert school staff can or should keep a child’s preferred gender identity hidden from parents.

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Border: 205,000 Apprehensions, Gotaways in February as Gotaways Increase in West

The Center Square

More than 205,000 foreign nationals were apprehended or reported as gotaways after illegally entering the southwest border in February, according to preliminary data obtained by The Center Square from a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent. The agent provided the information on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation; it only includes Border Patrol data and excludes Office of Field Operations data.

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THREATTOSCOTUS2022: FBI Whistleblowers Say Threat Tags Were Used to Target Conservatives

Just the News

What do school parents, Catholic attendees of Latin Mass and pro-life activists have in common? They’ve all been branded by the FBI as potential domestic terrorist threats in what whistleblowers say is a growing trend of using intelligence threat tags to enforce cancel culture.

The latest revelation came this past weekend when House Republicans released testimony from an FBI whistleblower who alleged colleagues in the bureau flipped a terrorist threat tag originally created to flag threats against pro-life Supreme Court justices into a signifier that anti-abortion protesters were somehow a threat.

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Former New York Times Science Editor Testifies Fauci ‘Not Too Pleased to Hear’ Virus May Have ‘Escaped from Research His Agency Had Funded’

Susan Berry, PhD

The former science editor at The New York Times testified Wednesday morning before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic there is now strong evidence the COVID-19 virus escaped from a Wuhan lab, but that “powerful scientific officials, such as [Anthony] Fauci and [National Institutes of Health Director] Francis Collins, kept researchers “in line” with their natural origins narrative with the knowledge the scientists were dependent on government grants to continue their research.

In his testimony, Nicholas Wade, who not only served as former science and health editor at the Times, but also as former editor at Science and at Nature, quickly got to the heart of the matter: the campaign to suppress the lab leak narrative.

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Poll: Plurality of Americans Believes We Are Heading for Next World War

M.D. Kittle

As the war in Ukraine and tensions with China intensify, more Americans fear we’re on the brink of World War III, according to a new Convention of States Action poll. 

The survey of more than 1,000 U.S. voters, conducted Feb. 22-26 by The Trafalgar Group, finds more than 43 percent of respondents worry that Russia’s continued war and threats against other European nations, as well as China’s aggressive actions, have put the world on the precipice of another global conflict.

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State to Fund Public Safety Office in Atlanta’s Buckhead Community

The Center Square

A week after state lawmakers killed a proposal to de-annex and incorporate a portion of Atlanta as Buckhead City, state leaders announced they plan to fund a state patrol office in the community.

Last week, the state Senate voted 33-23 against Senate Bill 114, which would have allowed residents of the proposed Buckhead City to vote on the measure in November 2024. This week, House Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington, announced the proposed fiscal 2024 budget will include nearly $1.3 million for the state patrol’s “satellite post.”

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Commentary: The Difficult Truths About Unrenewable ‘Renewables’

Georgia Star News Staff

Today in America, there are obvious disconnects between observable reality and the narratives we get from the corporate special interests controlling the news we consume, along with politicians who are supposedly elected to represent us.

This is nothing new. Elites have defined America’s destiny throughout its history. The only difference today is that the internet, despite ongoing crackdowns, still manages to deliver an unprecedented volume of contrarian perspectives to millions of people. We aren’t any freer or less manipulated today than we ever were, we’re just more aware of it.

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Students Demand Catholic University ‘Eliminate’ Christian Group from Campus Due to Its ‘Discriminatory’ LGBTQ Views

Georgia Star News Staff

Students at DePaul University, a private Catholic university in Illinois, are circulating a petition demanding the elimination of a Christian group after it posted a Q&A on its now-deleted Instagram page denouncing LGBTQ lifestyles, student newspaper The DePaulia reported.

Signees called on DePaul University officials to ban the group “from meeting on campus and promoting discrimination against members of the LGBTQIA+ community,” according to the petition titled “Eliminate Vessel.” Vessel is not an official student organization on campus and appears to have deleted their Instagram page soon after sharing that they are a “non-affirming” group and “do not agree that the LGBTQIA+ lifestyle is supported by biblical text. Below are verses which support this,” according to a screenshot obtained by the DePaulia.

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Commentary: Gender Ideology is Losing and the Equal Rights Amendment Should, Too

RealClearWire

Medical professionals and the public are pushing back against radical gender ideologies that have claimed the minds, bodies, and lives of too many children. Those at war against biological sex are losing — but only if the ERA is defeated, too.

On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee hosted its latest hearing on the Equal Rights Amendment. This time, to consider the merits of removing the amendments’ pesky expiration date.

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Poll: Inflation Has Americans Worried About Covering Expenses After Job Loss

The Center Square

A majority of Americans polled said they couldn’t afford to pay emergency expenses or cover their living expenses for just one month if they lost their primary source of income, according to Bankrate’s latest Annual Emergency Savings Report. The main reason cited is record-high inflation.

The majority surveyed, 68%, said they’re “worried they wouldn’t be able to cover their living expenses for just one month if they lost their primary source of income.”

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Some January 6 Defendants Seek Trial Delays over Emergence of Capitol Video Footage

Just the News

Amid the public emergence of new video from the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, multiple defendants have sought to delay their trials so they can access and review the footage for possible exonerating evidence.

At least five alleged participants in the demonstrations have sought trial delays citing a lack of access to all the relevant evidence in recent weeks, the Epoch Times reported.

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Civil Rights Commissioners Urge Speaker Kevin McCarthy to Hold Hearings on Title IX to Assure ‘Biological Sex’ is Protected

Susan Berry, PhD

In a letter obtained by The Star News Network, four members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) are calling upon House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to hold hearings on the Biden administration’s “radical and legally unsupported proposals to change Title IX” to require that its prohibition on sex discrimination be interpreted to bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

The letter, signed by USCCR Commissioners labor attorney Peter Kirsanow, University of San Diego law professor Gail Heriot, Public Interest Legal Foundation President J. Christian Adams, and South Carolina African American Chamber of Commerce CEO Stephen Gilchrist, asserts to McCarthy that the Biden Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has erred in its claim that the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County “requires that Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination be interpreted to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.”

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Biden Considers Adopting Trump-Era Immigration Policy He Once Criticized: Report

Georgia Star News Staff

The Biden administration is considering detaining illegal migrant families after criticizing a similar program under the Trump administration, according to The New York Times.

The possible policy change would mean the Biden administration might be reversing course on its promises to end many Trump-era immigration policies, according to the NYT. Nothing has been finalized, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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GOP Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy Wants to Fire ‘At Least Half the Federal Workforce’

Just the News

Arguing that a lot of the U.S. government’s “civil service protections” for federal employees are unconstitutional, entrepreneur and 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has vowed to end public sector unions. 

“I take a strong view of Article Two of the Constitution,” Ramaswamy said in an interview at CPAC. “It says the president of the United States runs the federal government, runs specifically the executive branch of the federal government. That means, I think, a lot of those civil service protections are unconstitutional.”

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Pentagon, FBI Collaborated on AI, Facial Recognition Tech for Federal Agencies, Documents Show

Georgia Star News Staff

The Department of Defense (DOD) and the FBI collaborated on an artificial intelligence-driven facial recognition technology program provided to at least six federal agencies and a Pentagon agency that supports civilian police forces, The Washington Post reported.

The facial recognition software could be used to identify individuals whose features were captured by drones and CCTV cameras, the Post reported, citing documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request as part of an ongoing lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed against the FBI.  The documents reveal federal authorities were more deeply involved in development of the technology than was previously known, sparking concerns over Americans’ privacy rights.

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Georgia Senate Passes Bill to Create State-Funded Education Savings Accounts

The Center Square

The Georgia Senate passed legislation to create state-funded education savings accounts.

Under Senate Bill 233, the Georgia Promise Scholarship Act, taxpayers would fund $6,000 per student per school year. Families could use the money to defray “qualified” education costs, such as private school tuition.

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Commentary: Secret Surveillance Video Dismantles January 6 Narrative

Georgia Star News Staff

Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired the first set of previously-unseen surveillance video captured by Capitol police security cameras on January 6, 2021 that undermines several aspects of the reigning narrative about what happened that day.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) last month gave Carlson’s team “unfettered” access to 41,000 hours of footage the government kept hidden from the American public and individuals charged in the Justice Department’s unprecedented and ongoing investigation into the events of January 6. Capitol Police and the Justice Department designated the recordings as “highly sensitive” material in March 2021; the trove remains under tight protective orders and defendants must agree to strict rules before gaining access to clips entered as evidence against them.

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Bill Aims to Protect American Sovereignty Against World Health Organization’s Pandemic Plan

M.D. Kittle

As negations move forward on an international pandemic treaty, Republican House members are pushing a bill that would check the pandemic powers of the World Health Organization. 

U.S. Representatives Tom Tiffany (R-WI-07) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ-05) joined a dozen of their Republican colleagues in introducing the No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act.

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Commentary: The Border Crisis and Violent Crime

Georgia Star News Staff

When Joe Biden chose to revoke the Trump Administration’s border rules, he sparked an unprecedented crisis at the southern border. The illegal immigrant population has already risen by 2 million since Biden’s inauguration, and the flow has not stopped. Some of the consequences of this crisis are indisputable—a strain on border communities, a fiscal burden for taxpayers, and a weakening of the rule of law.

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Commentary: The Dark Origins and History of International Women’s Day

Georgia Star News Staff

March 8 is International Women’s Day, and over the past few years, this means our news and social media feeds are flooded with stories and advertisements centering on women (and sometimes men identifying as women). Some of these stories do shine a light on how women have contributed to the world we live in, but most seem to come from left-wing outlets propagating their ideas of women, gender politics, and equity.

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Ramaswamy Rebuffs Alleged Offer to Buy CPAC Straw Poll, Promises Transparency

RealClearWire

Vivek Ramaswamy wants to do something normal politicians work to avoid. A successful biotech entrepreneur turned “anti-woke” reformer, the Republican author and activist is running for president while actively trying to break the fourth wall of American campaign politics.  

Candidates don’t generally talk trash about the cadre of operatives and politicos who manipulate the political landscape behind the scenes. But Ramaswamy says his campaign received a call the day after he announced, and the consultant on the other end of the phone offered a prize that would intrigue any upstart presidential candidate: second place in the CPAC straw poll.

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Georgia Leaders Plan to Review State’s Tax Credits

The Center Square

Georgia leaders plan to review the state’s various tax credits, saying they want to ensure any credits provide a “significant return on investment” for Georgia’s taxpayers.

The review, announced Thursday, will include the oft-lauded film tax credit. House and Senate members will work with various industry stakeholders and state offices, including the Georgia Department of Economic Development, the Governor’s Office of Planning & Budget and the Georgia Department of Revenue.

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Big Ag Set to Crush Family Farmers with ‘Climate-Smart’ Carbon Markets: Report

The Center Square

Family scale farmers in the Midwest may lose a lot to large agribusinesses through carbon markets, a new report says.

According to the report, “Agricultural Carbon Markets, Payments and Data: Big Ag’s Latest Power Grab” by Open Markets Institute and Friends of the Earth, carbon markets programs will entrench chemical-intensive farming practices and increase corporate control of agriculture rather than reduce greenhouse gas emissions like politicians assert.

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Tennessee AG Skrmetti Leads 46 States to Demand China-Based TikTok Comply with Multistate Investigation

Admin

Forty-six attorneys general joined Tennessee in requesting that a state court force TikTok to comply with an ongoing multistate investigation into the platform’s impact on children.

Following TikTok’s failure to comply with a Request for Information (RFI) last week, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti filed a motion Monday to require the Chinese-owned social media company to preserve documents and internal messages, his office announced. Colorado and 45 other states also filed an amicus brief Monday in support of Skrmetti’s motion, arguing that TikTok’s failure to respond impedes “the State’s ability to protect their citizens.”

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Atlanta Police Say 35 Detained, 23 Arrested after Mob Attacks Officers, Destroys Construction Equipment

Admin

The Atlanta Police Department said 35 people are in custody after a violent mob attacked police officers and destroyed construction equipment at the site of the proposed law enforcement training center.

Police said Sunday “a group of violent agitators used the cover of a peaceful protest of the proposed Atlanta Public Safety Training Center to conduct a coordinated attack on construction equipment and police officers.”

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Commentary: ‘Geofence Warrants’ Threaten Every Phone User’s Privacy

Admin

The last time your phone asked you to allow this or that app access to your location data, you may have had some trepidation about how much Apple or Google know about you. You may have worried about what might come of that, or read about China’s use of the data to track anti-lockdown protesters. What you probably didn’t realize is Google has already searched your data on behalf of the federal government to see if you were involved with January 6th.

But last month, the federal district court in DC issued an opinion in the case of  one of the many defendants who stands accused of sacking the Capitol in the wake of the 2020 election.

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Commentary: Your Tax Dollars at Work in Ukraine in Six Charts

Admin

According to a report by Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, since Russia’s invasion in February of 2022, Ukraine has become far and away the top recipient of U.S. foreign aid. It’s the first time that a European country has held the top spot since the Harry S. Truman administration directed vast sums into rebuilding the continent through the Marshall Plan after World War II.

Since the war began, the Biden administration and the U.S. Congress have directed about $75 billion in assistance to Ukraine, which includes humanitarian, financial, and military support. The number is documented in a report by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research institute, analyzed by Masters and Merrow. 

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Commentary: Class Divisions Versus Factions, and the Role They Play in a More Perfect Union

RealClearWire

We live in politically divided times. How we describe the sources of our divisions, though, varies. Some focus on principles such as equality, justice, liberty, and order. Some take up policy disputes related to those principles while others look to economic class, race, or even geography.

Does using these lenses to view our divisions violate our founding principles? Since humans will disagree about justice, especially its application, one can defend principled lines. Indeed, our Founders created mechanisms of elections and deliberative bodies to adjudicate those differences. Moreover, one can rightly conclude that race presents a troubling source of division in light of our commitment to human equality.

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Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions Hit Record High

Admin

Global carbon dioxide emissions hit a record high of more than 36 billion tons in 2022, although emissions grew more slowly than anticipated, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported Thursday.

Emissions from coal surged by 1.6%, to a record breaking 15.5 billion tons, as Europe turned to coal after Russia slashed exports of natural gas following its invasion of Ukraine, the IEA reported. Growth in renewable energy sources mitigated more than half a billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions, helping keep emissions growth below expectations, and accounted for roughly 90% of all new power generation.

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‘Corrupt’: Ramaswamy Says Consultant Promised Second-Place Finish in CPAC Poll for ‘a Few Hundred Thousand Dollars’

Admin

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said Monday he was offered second place in the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll if he paid a consultant.

“One of the things you see as an outsider is how corrupt the system is. You know something funny about this? I’ve attended CPAC before. I didn’t know it works this way,” Ramaswamy told Fox Business host Stuart Varney. “A consultant calls my campaign shortly after I declared, says ‘Hey, we can get you up to number two on there if you pay us a few hundred thousand dollars.’ I was shocked, you know … there’s a lot of people making money not only off of me, but every presidential campaign.”

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Civil Rights Commissioner Warns House Judiciary Committee of Biden’s ‘Trojan Horse’ Radical Equity Executive Order

Susan Berry, PhD

A member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has written to Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan (R), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, warning that Joe Biden’s sweeping executive order embedding radical woke equity ideology in all agencies of the executive branch is a “Trojan Horse” that represents “a major step toward socialism.”

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Ohio U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan Demands Transparency: Why Was Dr. Fauci ‘So Consumed’ with Refuting COVID Wuhan Lab Leak Narrative?

Susan Berry, PhD

Ohio U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH-04) said Sunday he is determined to obtain transparency on the origins of the COVID-19 virus, specifically why Dr. Anthony Fauci insisted on a dismissal of the narrative that the virus originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China.

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Bank of America Worked with Feds to Target Gun Owners, Whistleblower Confirms

Admin

Bank of America (BOA) worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to investigate customers who made purchases with BOA credit and debit cards on and around Jan. 6, and pushed those who had made gun purchases to the top of the list, according to whistleblower testimony obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The whistleblower, George Hill, a retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, testified to the House Judiciary Committee In February that BOA gave the FBI’s Washington Field Office (WFO) a list of individuals who made transactions in the D.C., Maryland and Virginia area between Jan. 5 and Jan. 7, saying the company did so of its own volition and without any known legal process, according to testimony made to the House Judiciary Committee in February. The list of individuals, later distributed to FBI field offices across the country, included BOA customers that purchased any product between those dates, while customers who had bought firearms were prioritized.

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Lawmakers Demand Biden Declassify COVID Origins Investigations

The Center Square

Lawmakers are demanding that President Joe Biden declassify documents related to the origins of COVID-19, in particular federal investigations into the matter.

The Senate passed a bill by unanimous consent that would require Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to declassify documents related to COVID’s origins. Republicans have a majority in the House, giving the legislation a chance, but whether Biden would sign it is in doubt.

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Advocates Sound Alarm About ‘After-School Satan Club’ Chapters Sprouting Across the Country

Admin

The Satanic Temple (TST) made headlines in 2022 for fighting for the right to create after-school clubs for students and has recently been launching new groups across the country, raising concerns for religious advocates about the potential impact Satanism may have on students’ perception of faith.

A TST “After-School Satan Club” was approved in December 2022 at a Virginia elementary school, provoking many parents, who were disturbed by the push to indoctrinate children into Satanism, to protest the club, according to RealClearEducation. TST has announced the formation of multiple new clubs in New York, Pennsylvania and Colorado in just the past month and religious advocates have taken note of the trend, telling the Daily Caller News Foundation that the normalization of Satanism could be detrimental to students later in life.

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Report Finds $860 Million Lost in Homes Seized by Government

The Center Square

Local governments or lienholders have taken more than 8,950 homes with more than $860 million in equity from 2014 to 2021 under laws that allow them to seize properties for unpaid property taxes, according to a new report. 

Pacific Legal Foundation, which is working to ban the practice, found that taking property to pay property tax debts can be ruinous for people with small tax debts.

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Georgia State Senate Passes Bill to Close ‘Zuckbucks’ Loophole

Just the News

The Georgia Senate has passed a bill to prohibit local election offices from using private funding to conduct elections, after election officials reportedly used a loophole to accept the money.

The bill stipulates “costs and expenses related to conducting primaries, elections, runoffs, or other undertakings authorized or required by [state law] shall be paid from lawfully appropriated public funds.”

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Commentary: Mayor Derides Ranked-Choice Voting Pilot Program Failure as Know-it-All Legislators Seek to Expand the Program

Admin

A “guinea pig.” That is what Sandy, Utah Mayor Monica Zoltanski said that “ranked-choice voting” (RCV) made of her hometown. The town opted into Utah’s controversial RCV pilot program, but the experiment has not gone well. The cost-saving promised by proponents never materialized, but the real alarm bells should have sounded when the experiment produced voter confusion and voter disengagement.

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Professor: ‘How We Eat Our Chicken’ Is a Racial Issue

Admin

A DePaul University (DePaul) alumna and Nevada State College professor, Erika Abad, gave a presentation to other DePaul alumni on “colorism,” the notion that minority groups discriminate against each other based on how dark their skin is.

Abad said in her early February presentation that even tastes and smells are racialized, including “[h]ow we eat our chicken.”

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More than Dozen Mayors Have Been Arrested for Child Sex Offenses over the Past Two Years

Admin

At least 13 mayors have been arrested for sexual crimes against children since 2021, according to a review of news articles and police reports.

College Park, Maryland, Mayor Patrick Wojahn is the most recent mayor to be charged with child sex crimes and has been arrested for 56 counts of possession and distribution of child pornography, according to NBC Washington; Wojahn submitted his letter of resignation Thursday.

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