The number of Americans filing new unemployment claims increased to 332,000 last week as the economy continues to slowly recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics figure released Thursday represents an increase in the number of new jobless claims compared to the week ending Sept. 4, when 312,000 new jobless claims were reported. That figure was revised slightly up from the 310,000 jobless claims initially reported last week.
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Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley called on Google Wednesday to explain its recent censorship of pro-life ads.
In a letter addressed to Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai, Hawley called on Google to explain why ads placed by the pro-life organizations Live Action and Choose Life Marketing had been “seemingly censored.”
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Columbia University’s official Instagram account promoted a post on its story calling on students to get involved in a school program where they can “critically engage with whiteness.”
The university’s Office of Multicultural Affairs first posted the photo and caption on Instagram to promote its Students Exploring Whiteness program.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday that Democrats should take an even more aggressive approach in fighting the coronavirus pandemic, pointing to his recent recall election win as evidence that such a strategy was popular.
“We need to stiffen our spines and lean in to keeping people safe and healthy,” Newsom told CBS News in an interview. “We shouldn’t be timid in trying to protect people’s lives and mitigate the spread and transmission of this disease.”
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Employers and business organizations are voicing their opposition to the vaccine mandate announced last week by President Joe Biden.
Biden ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to requite companies with more than 100 employees to make sure their workers are either vaccinated against COVID-19 or tested weekly for the virus. The mandates received a mixed reaction from companies and business groups, with some welcoming the new rules and others expressing their opposition.
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The House Committee on Energy and Commerce rejected a key drug pricing control bill in a stunning rebuke of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic leadership.
Democratic Reps. Kurt Schrader, Scott Peters and Kathleen Rice voted alongside their Republican colleagues on the panel, creating a 29-29 tie on the vote to pass the legislation during a committee hearing Wednesday. The hearing was held to mark up parts of Democrats’ sweeping $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package, the Build Back Better Act.
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John Pence, a former Senior Advisor to the Trump-Pence 2020 Campaign, was named Chief Executive Officer of Ace Specialties.
The organization, which managed President Trump’s campaign merchandise operations, explained the move as an expansion of their existing commitment.
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Hurricane Ida has already caused oil supply losses of 30 million barrels, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports, resulting in the first decline in global oil supply in five months.
Hurricane Ida shut in 1.7 million barrels per day of oil production in the Gulf at the end of August, “with potential supply losses from the storm approaching 30 mb. An uptrend in supply should resume in October as OPEC+ continues to unwind cuts, outages are resolved and as other producers increase,” the agency stated in its September Oil Market report.
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Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger expects to be subpoenaed as early as Friday by the congressional commission investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and is vowing not to comply.
“I’m focused on secure and accessible elections — not re-litigating the past, whether January 6th, the 2018 election, or the 2020 election,” Raffensperger said in a statement provided to Just the News on Thursday evening.
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As the embattled Gen. Mark Milley took a defiant tone regarding reports that he surreptitiously tried to circumvent the authority of his then-commander-in-chief, President Donald Trump, critics increasingly demanded his resignation while the White House offered him full support.
Milley’s alleged actions include making secret calls to the top military officer in Beijing, and holding a clandestine gathering of military officers to demand that they only obey command orders that came through Milley, according to the authors of a forthcoming book.
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Special Counsel John Durham on Thursday secured an indictment against a prominent Democrat lawyer alleging he developed and fed information to the FBI during the 2016 campaign suggesting Donald Trump was colluding with Russia without disclosing he was being paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
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The Department of Justice asked a federal judge late Tuesday night to block Texas’ Heartbeat Act, which prohibits abortions after the baby’s heartbeat can be detected.
The DOJ called for a temporary restraining order or injunction against the new law, arguing that the Heartbeat Act intends “to prevent women from exercising their constitutional rights.”
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Princeton University is allegedly teaching freshmen that a current faculty member is racist for criticizing a defunct black student organization. What’s not clear is how many freshmen are paying attention to the lesson.
The Ivy League school included classics professor Joshua Katz in a “virtual gallery” about its history of systemic racism that was featured in a 50-minute orientation video for the class of 2025.
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Gov. Gavin Newsom won California’s recall election Tuesday, capitalizing on late momentum and sailing past the field of Republicans looking to oust him in what was considered a neck-and-neck race just weeks ago.
Newsom, first elected in 2018, survived the GOP recall effort with just over two-thirds of voters opting to keep him in office, according to initial results when the Associated Press called the race. Of the approximately 33% voters who chose to recall him, nearly 43% selected conservative radio host Larry Elder as their preferred candidate when the race was declared.
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The Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced a comprehensive ban on numerous practices in law enforcement, aimed at curbing tactics that some claim can lead to instances of so-called “police brutality,” according to Politico.
In a statement issued by Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, the department said it would be banning the use of chokeholds and carotid restraints by law enforcement officers, except in circumstances where “the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.” The department is also banning no-knock warrants, except in situations where an officer believes that announcing their identity could lead to physical harm.
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Attempts to sanction scholars for their speech, research or teaching practices has skyrocketed since 2015, with about three in four campaigns leading to some form of professional sanction – including termination – according to a new report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
Such attacks are “on the rise and are increasingly coming from within academia itself—from other scholars and especially from undergraduate students,” FIRE research fellows Komi German and Sean Stevens state in their report.
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Republican candidate Larry Elder conceded to Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California late Tuesday while telling his supporters to “stay tuned.”
Elder said “we may have lost the battle, but we are going to win the war,” according to the Associated Press. Newsom sailed to victory, securing nearly 64% of the vote through Wednesday morning.
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Online shopping prices have rapidly increased since the start of the pandemic as consumers rely more on e-commerce, according to an industry report.
While e-commerce prices trended downward between 2015-2019 as online shopping grew in popularity, the sector has seen unprecedented increases over the last year, the report published by Adobe Digital Insights on Wednesday found. At the same time, consumers are spending more purchasing goods and food online than ever before.
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The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sent a private warning to the chief of Afghan evacuation operations that measles is spreading among refugees and poses a “major public health threat” that includes the potential for “larger imminent outbreaks” in U.S. communities already reeling from the coronavirus.
CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky’s memo Tuesday night urged Operations Allies Welcome senior official Robert Fenton to take “urgent public health action” that includes mass vaccinations of refugees, revealing there are now six confirmed cases of measles in Afghan refugees, 17 suspect cases and hundreds of exposures in U.S. hospitals.
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Republican Sen. Rand Paul said Wednesday that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley “could have started an accidental nuclear war” if he indeed made unauthorized phone calls to China in the final weeks of the Trump presidency to assure Beijing that the U.S. would not attack the country.
The assertion that Milley made two such calls is reportedly included in an upcoming book titled “Peril” by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
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Facebook is aware that Instagram, an image-sharing social media platform it owns, has harmful effects on the self-esteem of teen girls, according to leaked research seen by The Wall Street Journal.
Internal research, documents and research reportedly show that Facebook has studied the harmful effects Instagram can have on its users, especially teen girls, according to the WSJ.
“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” one slide from an internal research report read, with another saying that “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression.”
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Gov. Tom Wolf recalled his nomination for acting Secretary of State Veronica Degraffenreid on Monday after alleging that Senate Republicans would not vet her fairly amid the chamber’s controversial election investigation.
“It is clear that instead of providing advice and consent on my nominee for Secretary of the Commonwealth, they instead plan on using her confirmation as an opportunity to descend further into conspiracy theories and work to please the former president [Donald Trump] by spreading lies about last year’s election, instead of working together to address real issues facing Pennsylvanians,” Wolf said in an emailed statement to reporters on Monday.
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Marijuana use among college students has surged while alcohol use dropped, according to a recent National Institute of Health and National Institute of Drug Abuse study.
The “Monitoring the Future” study found that 44% of college students said they used marijuana in 2020, an increase from 38% in 2015. More, “daily” or “near daily” marijuana use among college students increased from 5% to 8% over the last five years.
The number of college students who said they consumed alcohol, on the other hand, dipped from over 62% in 2019 to 56% in 2020, according to the report. Binge drinking among college students, defined as having five or more drinks in one outing, decreased from 32% in 2019 to 24% in 2020.
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The New York Times quietly removed its assertion that the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop prior to the 2020 election was “unsubstantiated” from a story published Monday about a Federal Election Commission complaint related to the matter.
The Times reported Monday that the FEC ruled in August that Twitter did not violate any laws by temporarily blocking users from sharing the Post’s Oct. 14 story on a “smoking gun” email from Hunter Biden’s laptop showing that an executive of a Ukrainian gas company had thanked him for an introduction to then-Vice President Joe Biden. The Times called the story “unsubstantiated” when its article on the FEC’s decision was first published early Monday afternoon.
“The Federal Election Commission has dismissed Republican accusations that Twitter violated election laws in October by blocking people from posting links to an unsubstantiated New York Post article about Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter Biden, in a decision that is likely to set a precedent for future cases involving social media sites and federal campaigns,” Times reporter Shane Goldmacher stated in its original version of his report Monday.
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House Democrats will consider nearly $3 trillion in tax hikes over the next decade in an attempt to pay for their $3.5 trillion budget that includes most of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda and would overhaul the nation’s social safety net.
The hikes are predominantly focused on wealthy Americans and large corporations. Among the increases is a top income tax bracket of 39.6%, up from 37%, which Democrats say would raise $170 billion in revenue over the next decade.
A summary of the proposals leaked Sunday, and was first reported by The Washington Post.
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Senate Democrats are set to release their new, trimmed down voting bill, but despite unanimous support from their caucus it faces a steep climb to become law.
The bill, titled the Freedom to Vote Act, is Democrats’ response to a series of voting restrictions passed in Republican-controlled states across the country. But despite its framework, constructed around a compromise plan proposed by West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, it must still clear a filibuster to pass the Senate, meaning at least 10 Republicans would have to sign on in support.
The legislation, introduced by Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, drops some of the more contentious provisions included in the For the People Act, Democrats’ previous legislation that fell to a GOP filibuster in June. While the new bill would no longer restructure the Federal Election Commission and requires a nationwide voter ID standard, it includes automatic registration provisions and would make Election Day a national holiday.
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New polling shows that the majority of Americans do not approve of President Joe Biden’s new vaccine mandate.
Biden announced the mandate last week, which includes requirements that any business with more than 100 employees ensure they are vaccinated or be tested weekly. Biden’s announcement included a range of other federal rules that are estimated to affect 100 million Americans.
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Wisconsin Representative Thomas Tiffany (R-07-WI) wrote a letter to the Biden Administration demanding full membership to the United Nations for Taiwan. In a tweet about the letter, Tiffany said, “America doesn’t need a permission slip from Communist China to support our allies.”
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In a terse essay titled “Science and Dictatorship,” Albert Einstein warned that “Science can flourish only in an atmosphere of free speech.” And on his deathbed, Einstein cautioned, “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted in important affairs.”
With reckless disregard for both of those principles, powerful government officials and big tech executives have corrupted or suppressed the central scientific facts about face masks. The impacts of this extend far beyond the issue of masks and have caused widespread harm and countless deaths.
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After an investigation into Special Agent Richard Trask, accused of beating his wife after the pair attended swingers’ party in July, the FBI agent who once lead the investigation into the plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has been fired.
“Trask was fired, according to a source familiar with his case, while awaiting trial on a charge of assault with intent to do great bodily harm and allegations he smashed his wife’s head against a nightstand and choked her after a dispute stemming from their attendance at a swingers’ party in July,” The Detroit News reported.
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When the Taliban assumed control of Afghanistan last month, the group took possession of a U.S.-funded weapons stockpile worth tens of billions of dollars.
The U.S. invested nearly $83 billion in bolstering the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), more than $24 billion of which went to funding weapons, vehicles and other equipment, according to a Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report published in July. The amount of funding for weapons, vehicles and equipment is based on a 2017 Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimate that roughly 70% of the investment went towards other budget items like training.
In the aftermath of the shocking collapse of the Western-backed Afghan government last month, U.S. defense officials estimated that Taliban militants took dozens of aircraft including Blackhawk helicopters and thousands of vehicles, communications equipment and weapons. Republican lawmakers demanded the Biden administration provide them with a full accounting of the equipment that was in the Taliban’s possession while GOP members of the House Armed Services Committee introduced a bill requiring the White House to share the information with Congress.
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A student senator at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri was filmed tearing out and throwing away nearly 3,000 American flags featured in a 9/11 memorial on campus, as reported by the New York Post.
The student, Fadel Alkilani, was captured on video Saturday as he tore the flags out of the ground and stuffed them into multiple large garbage bags. The student filming the incident, Nathaniel Hope, confronted Alkilani; Hope said that Alkilani falsely claimed that the memorial was “in violation of school rules,” and “was also saying profanity.” In the video posted to Twitter, Alkilani, who is wearing a face mask, stops for a few moments when he realizes that he is being filmed, then quickly walks away with the bags, calling Hope “weird” before leaving the scene.
The 2,977 flags were placed in the grass on the campus’s Mudd Field for the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks in 2001, with each flag representing one of the victims of the attacks in New York City, Arlington, Virginia, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania on that day. This has become a common tradition around the country every year since 2001, often organized by conservative student groups.
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Anew poll on the recall election for California Gov. Gavin Newsom shows voters appear essentially locked into their position on whether to remove the embattled Democrat lawmaker.
The poll released Thursday by the nonpartisan The Public Policy Institute of California found 58% of likely voters surveyed oppose removing the governor from office, compared to 39% who support recalling him.
The numbers are largely consistent with those the pollsters collected in March and May – 40% to 56% and 40% to 57%, respectively, in the largely Democrat-leaning state.
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A majority of Democratic voters believe that supporters of former President Trump and unvaccinated Americans pose a bigger threat to the nation than the Taliban or China, according to a new Scott Rasmussen poll.
Among Democrats, 57% believe that Trump supporters are a serious threat to the nation, and 56% believe the same about unvaccinated individuals.
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Professors from the University of Arizona and the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs are arguing that “success and merit” are “barriers” to the equity agenda.
“Admitting that the normative definitions of success and merit are in and of themselves barriers to achieving the goals of justice, diversity, equity and inclusion is necessary but not sufficient to create change,” professors Beth Mitchneck and Jessi L. Smith recently wrote for Inside Higher Education.
Mitchneck and Smith attributed those definitions to a “narrow definition of merit limited to a neoliberal view of the university.” Specifically, they express concern that universities receive funding and recognition based on the individual performances of professors’ own work such as peer reviewed journals and studies.
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There is no real vetting of Afghan refugees entering the U.S., according to Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.).
“The backstories that I’m hearing is that there’s really basically no vetting going on,” Biggs told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Friday.
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Health officials delayed a decision Thursday on whether e-cigarettes made by Juul and other top companies can stay on the U.S. market.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it needs longer than the Thursday deadline to determine if Juul and other select companies’ products can continue to be sold in the U.S., according to a press release.
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Facebook is spending $100 million to buy up the outstanding invoices of small businesses owned by women, racial minorities, veterans, disabled people and LGBTQ+ people, the company announced last week.
The Invoice Fast Track Program allows certain “small, midsize and diverse-owned businesses” to submit outstanding invoices to Facebook. The tech giant then buys the invoices, giving the business cash immediately, and the business’ customers pay Facebook instead.
The program is designed to help “diverse-owned” businesses improve their cash flow and hire more employees, according to the program’s description.
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Alaska Airlines fired flight attendants for questioning its support of a proposed federal law that would open women’s spaces to biological males, according to complaints filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Their union, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, allegedly refused to defend their Title VII employment rights against religious discrimination during the proceeding and “disparaged” the employees’ Christian beliefs.
The Seattle-based air carrier, which once decorated a plane with the logo of Nirvana’s first music label Sub Pop, did not respond to queries from Just the News about the allegations and why employees shouldn’t fear official retaliation for expressing their views.
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N.D. Wilson loves nature documentaries, but one element of the genre always gets under his skin.
The God-fearing producer calls it the “grinding, empty atheism” found in every sequence.
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A White House senior advisor said Thursday that Joe Biden is prepared to “run over” Republican governors who “stand in his way” on vaccine mandates.
Following Biden’s shocking, widely-panned authoritarian speech Thursday afternoon, multiple Republican-led states announced plans to sue the Regime over its “unconstitutional” mandate forcing businesses with more than 100 employees compel vaccinations.
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Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law Thursday preventing social media companies from banning users for their political views.
The law, known as HB 20, prohibits social media platforms from banning or suspending users, and removing or suppressing their content, based on political viewpoint. The bill was introduced by state Sen. Bryan Hughes partly in an effort to combat perceived censorship of conservatives by Facebook, Twitter, Google-owned YouTube, and other major tech companies.
“Social media websites have become our modern-day public square,” Abbott said in a statement. “They are a place for healthy public debate where information should be able to flow freely — but there is a dangerous movement by social media companies to silence conservative viewpoints and ideas.”
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North Korea was likely always going to restart its nuclear reactor regardless of which presidential administration was in office, an expert on the region told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in late August that North Korea had restarted a plutonium-producing 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon in July 2021, after previously shutting it down in 2018.
Bruce Klingner, the senior research fellow for Northeast Asia at The Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF that while it’s unclear whether the timing of the restart was meant to send a message, North Korea probably was planning for the reactor to become operational again for a while.
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Justice Stephen Breyer issued a stark warning to those pushing to pack the Supreme Court: “what goes around comes around.”
Breyer made the remark during an interview with NPR published Friday, ahead of the release of his new book, “The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics.” He has pushed back on calls to add seats to the court — and on progressives urging him to retire — on multiple recent occasions.
“What goes around comes around,” he said. “And if the Democrats can do it, then the Republicans can do it.”
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President Joe Biden’s controversial vaccine mandate has sparked major pushback and talks of legal challenges, likely setting up a tense court battle that could go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Biden announced the new mandates in a speech Thursday, saying his executive changes will affect 100 million Americans. Notably, his new rules would require all federal employees to get the vaccine and require that any employers with 100 or more employees ensure their employees are vaccinated.
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The last missile fired by the United States Military in the 20-year war in Afghanistan struck only an innocent Afghan man and his family in Kabul— not ISIS militants, the New York Times reported on Friday.
The blast killed ten members of the extended family of a civilian aid worker, Zemari Ahmadi, and three of his children, Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 10; Mr. Ahmadi’s cousin Naser, 30; three of Romal’s children, Arwin, 7, Benyamin, 6, and Hayat, 2; and two 3-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya.
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BioNTech, the vaccine maker collaborating with Pfizer, is set to seek worldwide approval for its COVID-19 vaccine for children between the ages of 5 and 11 within the coming weeks, according to company executives.
“Already over the next few weeks, we will file the results of our trial in five to 11-year olds with regulators across the world and will request approval of the vaccine in this age group, also here in Europe,” Chief Medical Officer Oezlem Tuereci told Der Spiegel, according to Reuters.
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The University of Texas at San Antonio is no longer using “Come and Take It” as a football chant.
In August, university President Taylor Eighmy expressed concern that “Come and Take It” is inseparably linked to political debates, including those over gun rights.
The chant is emblazoned on a flag waved at UTSA’s football games and also used as a rallying cry during the fourth quarter.
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Amazon will begin paying college tuition for hundreds of thousands of its employees in an effort to attract more workers, the company said Thursday.
More than 750,000 hourly Amazon employees nationwide will be eligible to have their full college tuition paid for at one of hundreds of partner universities, according to the announcement. The billion-dollar online retailer said it would also pay for employees’ associate degrees and high school tuition.
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A textbook assigned to students at a North Carolina community college states that COVID-19 protocols “saved tens of thousands of lives” while Americans who disagreed with those restrictions caused deaths.
“Most Americans responded to the pandemic by limiting their social contact, covering their faces when going out, and washing their hands thoroughly after they did,” the passage begins and then continues with, “yet lives were lost because some Americans held beliefs that were at odds with the facts.”
The textbook appeared in the POL 120: American Government course at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte.
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