Tag: National

Person in white shirt, walking into Gap store

A consumer price measurement used by the Federal Reserve to track inflation spiked again in June and hit its highest level since 1991, government data showed.

The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index increased 4% over the 12 months between July 2020 and June, according to a Bureau of Economic Analysis report released Friday. Excluding volatile energy and food prices, the index spiked 3.5% in that same 12-month period.

The index increased 0.5% in June, in line with economists’ forecasts, CNBC reported.

“Inflation has increased notably and will likely remain elevated in coming months before moderating,” Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell said during a press conference this week. “As the economy continues to reopen and spending rebounds, we are seeing upward pressure on prices, particularly because supply bottlenecks in some sectors have limited how quickly production can respond in the near term.”

Report: 1.9 Million Households Owe $15 Billion in Back Rent as Eviction Moratorium Expires

July 31, 2021July 30, 2021 The Center Square

Up to 1.95 million households across America will owe a collective $15 billion in back rent when the eviction moratorium expires Saturday, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia estimates.

That number will reach 2 million by December, according to the report released Friday. In Pennsylvania, about 60,000 renter households will owe $412 million come August.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made one final 30-day extension of the Emergency Rental Assistance Program through July 31. President Joe Biden’s administration said its “hands are tied” by the courts on the matter and any further relief must come from Congress itself.

Suni Lee Wins Individual All-Around Gold

American gymnast Sunisa “Suni” Lee won gold in the women’s individual all-around competition at the Tokyo Olympics on Thursday, ESPN reported.

Lee received a total score of 57.433, beating out Brazilian Rebeca Andrade’s score of 57.298 and becoming the sixth American to win the women’s individual all-around at the Games, ESPN reported.

“The waiting game was something I hated so much, but when I saw my score came out on top, it was so emotional,” Lee said after winning, according to ESPN. “It doesn’t feel like real life.”

Health Officials Less Confident in COVID Vaccine Efficacy with Rise of Delta Variant

Public health confidence in the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine appears to be waning as officials warn of enhanced danger — even for vaccinated individuals — from the “Delta variant” of the SARS-Cov-2 virus.

For most of the past year officials have claimed that vaccinations are the only viable path back to normalcy and away from lockdowns and other aggressive mitigation measures. “Look at the folks in your community who have gotten vaccinated and are getting back to living their lives — their full lives,” President Joe Biden said at a May press conference, arguing that the vaccine was “going to help them and their loved ones be safe, get our businesses open again, and get us back to normal.”

The rollout of the vaccines starting last year and continuing throughout the spring and summer of this year has been hailed as the driving force behind the reopening of the economy and the ending of masking mandates and similar restrictions.

In Suppression of First Amendment, Biden Forbids Immigration Judges from Using the Term ‘Alien’

The Biden Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) issued an order last week demanding that immigration judges no longer use the term “alien” when referring to illegal aliens in court or in their written opinions, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

The order, first issued on July 23rd, came from a DOJ official named Jean King. King’s order applies to all 539 immigration judges in the country, and orders them to instead use more politically correct terms, such as “respondent, applicant, petitioner, beneficiary, migrant, noncitizen, or non-U.S. citizen.” “Alien” has been the correct terminology for anyone who enters the United States illegally ever since the Immigration and Nationality Act, which defines an alien as “any person not a citizen or national of the United States.”

In the order, King admitted that the DOJ decision was influenced in part by the mainstream media, citing the fact that the Associated Press first decided back in 2013 to drop the use of the term “illegal immigrant,” which led to a left-wing trend to replace the word “illegal” with “undocumented.” Since taking office in January, Biden has taken steps to remove the use of the phrases “alien” and “illegal immigrant” through several executive orders. Some radical Democrats, including Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), have advocated for passing a law to ban the use of such phrases. And in New York City, a recent law was passed to make it a crime to use the phrases “illegal” and “illegal alien.”

PayPal Teams Up with Far-Left Anti-Defamation League to Target Right-Wing Users

On Monday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a far-left hate group, announced a new initiative in conjunction with the online payment processor PayPal, aimed at targeting so-called “extremist and hate movements” on the platform, the Daily Caller reports.

The partnership is led by the ADL’s “Center on Extremism,” and will involve the ADL studying the use of PayPal’s services by alleged “extremists,” and sharing their findings with politicians and law enforcement, for the purpose of disrupting “the financial pipelines that support extremist and hate movements.” PayPal’s Chief Risk Officer Aaron Karczmer released a statement celebrating the new program as having the potential to make “an even greater impact than any of us could do on our own.”

PayPal has frequently and exclusively targeted conservatives in recent years, while ignoring actual extremism from the Left. Following the peaceful protests at the United States Capitol on January 6th, PayPal suspended its services for several organizations and individuals that paid for travel expenses for people attending the march, which was in protest of the widespread voter fraud that took place in the 2020 election. PayPal also banned the anti-terrorism website Jihad Watch in August of 2017, after Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters attacked a peaceful right-wing protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, leading to the death of one left-wing protester.

Bezos Offers to Waive $2 Billion in Fees to Secure Lunar Landing Contract

Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos offered to waive $2 billion in payments to secure his spaceflight company Blue Origin a NASA contract.

Bezos asked NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in an open letter Monday to award Blue Origin a contract to construct a Human Landing System (HLS), a lunar-landing vehicle, as part of the Artemis program, offering to waive up to $2 billion in fees. Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX had been awarded the $2.9 billion contract in April, beating out Blue Origin’s bid, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Artemis program is intended to return human astronauts to the Moon, with a manned mission to Mars planned as well. Though the program was initially planned as a joint contract, it was awarded solely to SpaceX due to budgetary constraints which Bezos’ offer sought to alleviate, according to the letter.

“Blue Origin will bridge the HLS budgetary funding shortfall by waiving all payments in the current and next two government fiscal years up to $2 billion to get the program back on track right now,” Bezos wrote in the letter.

Hawley, Cruz, Lee Call for Supreme Court to Overturn Roe v. Wade

Leading Republican senators filed an amicus brief Monday urging the Supreme Court to overrule its decisions in two major abortion cases.

Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Mike Lee of Utah, and Ted Cruz of Texas filed the brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which the court is scheduled to hear beginning in October, calling on the court to revisit its rulings in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.

The senators pushed the Court to return questions of abortion legislation to the states and challenged the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence as unconstitutional.

‘The Time Has Come for ‘Gaytheism’:’ Library Promotes Radical, Anti-Christian Books

Rider University is promoting a book in their online library that, according to the publication description, “Argues that homophobia will not be eradicated in the United States until religion is ended.”

“Slouching Towards Gaytheism: Christianity and Queer Survival in America,” written by W.C. Harris, a professor at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, can be found in Rider’s library research guide for “Christian and Religious Privilege.”

The “Christian and Religious Privilege” guide is a subcategory of Rider’s “Privilege and Intersectionality” web page.

Critics Denounce New CDC Guidance Urging Mask Usage, Vaccine or Not

July 28, 2021July 27, 2021 The Center Square

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed course Tuesday, reversing its previous COVID-19 guidance by urging Americans to wear masks, regardless of their vaccination status. Critics quickly denounced the reversal, saying it undermines vaccine confidence.

The CDC said all students and teachers should wear masks, even if they are vaccinated, and that all Americans, including those with the vaccine, should wear masks in public places where the virus has a significant presence. The agency cited the delta variant of COVID, which is more transmissible.

The CDC had previously announced in May that vaccinated individuals did not have to wear masks. The White House fended off questions from reporters at the White House press briefing on the reasoning behind that reversal.

Biden’s Department of Justice Drops Charges Against Chinese Soldiers Who Lied to Acquire Jobs at American Universities

Department of Justice building, street view

The Biden Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) announced last week that it was dropping charges against five members of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who had lied about their histories to obtain jobs at American universities, Breitbart reports.

The five soldiers were seeking visas in order to apply for jobs and doctoral positions at several universities in the states of California and Indiana. They had all been arrested in the summer of last year as part of a wider crackdown on Chinese infiltrations into American upper education. All five of them sought either J-1 or F-1 visas in order to apply to positions at the University of California, San Francisco, the University of California, Davis, Stanford University, Indiana University, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

However, officials revealed the stunning decision to drop the charges in statements to the Wall Street Journal last week, claiming that since “the defendants had all been detained or under other restrictions in the U.S. since their arrest a year ago,” the agency had determined “that further litigation in the group of cases would unnecessarily prolong their departure from the U.S., and that their situations since their arrests amounted to sufficient punishment and deterrence.”

Judicial Watch Continues Lawsuit as Chicago Mayor Says She Would ‘Absolutely’ Deny Interviews with White Reporters Again

Judicial Watch announced Tuesday that it has amended its lawsuit against Democratic Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who claims to be “unapologetic” about her previous policy to only grant interviews to journalists of color.

Lightfoot told the New York Times in a podcast released Monday that she “would absolutely” implement the interview policy again. “I’m unapologetic about it because it spurred a very important conversation, a conversation that needed to happen, that should have happened a long time ago,” Lightfoot said.

Judicial Watch, which sued Lightfoot on behalf of the Daily Caller News Foundation and its reporter Thomas Catenacci, said the mayor’s office has ignored calls to sign an agreement to not use race-based criteria for interview requests for the remainder of her term.

Big Tech’s Anti-Terrorism Task Force Adds Far-Right Militias to List of Extremist Groups It Tracks

A member of the "Proud Boys" waves a flag at a "Stop The Steal" rally outside the Minnesota Governor's mansion on November 14th, 2020.

The tech industry’s anti-terrorism alliance announced Monday it would begin tracking content from far-right organization in a shared counter-terrorism database used by major tech companies.

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), a non-profit organization founded by Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, will add manifestos, posts and links from far-right militias flagged by U.N. anti-terrorist group Tech Against Terrorism to a shared database, GIFCT told Reuters. The organization will also share content flagged by Five Eyes, a global partnership between intelligence agencies in the U.S. and other countries, Reuters reported.

The database, established in 2017 and shared exclusively by the tech giants, aggregates hashes, or digital signatures, of images, videos and URLs, allowing tech companies to easily remove logged content, according to the GIFCT website. The database was previously focused on content primarily from Islamic terror organizations, according to Reuters.

Studies on COVID-19 Vaccine Effects on Fertility Are ‘in the Works,’ CDC Says

Studies on how COVID-19 vaccines affect fertility are “in the works,” but some are still in the planning stages, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Anxieties over whether the COVID-19 vaccines impact fertility have discouraged some U.S. women from obtaining the vaccines, though the CDC has not found evidence that coronavirus vaccines “cause female or male fertility problems.”

After the Food and Drug Administration issued the first Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the COVID-19 vaccine in December 2020, researchers found that the five “most queried terms” on Google were “COVID Vaccine Fertility,” ” COVID Vaccine and Infertility,” “COVID Vaccine Infertility,” “COVID Vaccine Fertility CDC,” and “COVID 19 Vaccine Infertility,” according to a June 2021 study.

After Testing Positive for COVID, Olympic Athletes Summarily Expelled

Five U.S. athletes have tested positive for coronavirus prior to the start of the Tokyo Olympics, crushing their dreams of competing in the world’s largest sporting event.

U.S. men’s basketball player Bradley Beal tested positive on July 15 which made him unable to travel to Tokyo, USA basketball announced in a tweet.

U.S women’s tennis star Coco Gauff announced on twitter that she tested positive for COVID on July 18. Gauff, 17, received her positive test in Tokyo, and has been barred from competing in the Olympic games, according to the tweet.

Surging BBQ Companies Go Public, Signaling Continued Post-Pandemic Shift to Home Cooking

Multiple home barbecue companies are going public after a successful year and a half amid the COVID-19 crisis, an apparent reflection of increasing consumer orientation toward home cooking after many months during which dining out was sharply curtailed.

Traeger — a manufacturer of automated wood-pellet smokers — this week announced an initial public offering of 23,529,411 shares of common stock at as much as $18 per share. The company was expecting to realize around $400 million in the IPO.

The company in its IPO prospectus said it “more than doubled revenue from $262.1 million in 2017 to $545.8 million in 2020,” with huge surges in social media followings last year

Budget Watchdogs Project Democrats Infrastructure Plans to Cost up to $5.5 Trillion – $2 Trillion More Than Advertised

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has estimated that President Biden’s infrastructure proposals will cost up to $2 trillion more than Democrats are projecting.

The White House and Democratic congressional leaders are preparing a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that includes policies in Biden’s Build Back Better agenda such as universal pre-K, tuition-free community college and financial support for childcare. Democrats have referred to the reconciliation bill has a “human infrastructure” budget bill. It could also include the creation of a Civilian Climate Corps.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have said they won’t pass a separate, bipartisan $1.2 trillion physical infrastructure framework until a filibuster-proof reconciliation spending bill gets passed.

Congressman Clay Higgins Gets COVID for a Second Time

Louisiana Republican Rep. Clay Higgins said Sunday that he, his wife and his son all tested positive for COVID-19.

“I have COVID, Becca has COVID, my son has COVID,” Higgins wrote on Facebook, adding that he and his wife had already tested positive for the virus early in 2020.

“Becca and I have had COVID before, early on, in January 2020, before the world really knew what it was,” Higgins wrote. “So, this is our second experience with the CCP biological attack weaponized virus… and this episode is far more challenging.”

REPORT: Biden’s Education Department Has Closer Ties to Critical Race Theory Group Than They Admit

The Biden administration called it an “error” to promote a critical race theory (CRT) activist group’s guide in a Department of Education (DOE) handbook meant for use in over 13,000 public school districts on reopening recommendations and policies, Fox News reported.

The activist group, Abolitionist Teaching Network (ATN) has connections to at least two high-ranking officials in the Biden administration’s DOE, Fox News reported. It is unclear why ATN was mentioned in the April 2021 handbook and who added the link.

The Biden administration DOE backtracked on the promotion and its link to the group in a statement to Fox News Wednesday which said, “The Department does not endorse the recommendations of this group, nor do they reflect our policy positions. It was an error in a lengthy document to include this citation.”

France Warned the U.S. in 2015 About the Wuhan Lab It Helped Build, Former COVID-19 Investigator Claims