NewsMax.

The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability uncovered “the first example of evidence” that President Joe Biden directly benefited from peddling influence via his family’s foreign business dealings, said Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the committee chair.

Comer, speaking on the “Verdict” podcast hosted by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said his committee exposed the evidence during testimony by “the owner” of Americore Health.

“[The president’s brother, James Biden,] approached them [Americore] because he had heard they were financially distressed and said that because he’s a Biden, and because of his brother’s contacts in the Middle East, that he could help them acquire all the capital that they needed to get back on their feet from the Middle East, but they were going to have to pay Jim Biden first,” Comer told Cruz and co-host Ben Ferguson on Monday.

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The official UK COVID Inquiry will be ignored by the public and will do nothing to inform future pandemic responses unless it urgently works to change the impression that its mind is already made up on lockdowns, campaigners have warned.

Don’t hold your breath.

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This past weekend Washington Post reporter Michael Kranish worked up a detailed Sunday morning special on the Biden family business: “James Biden’s dealmaking caught on FBI tapes in unrelated bribery probe.” Subhead: “While Joe Biden campaigned in Mississippi, his brother planned to build a powerful consulting business — a deal that brought him to the periphery of a federal case.”

Kranish’s story on the Biden family business goes back to President Biden’s long service in the United States Senate. Deep are the roots.

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Ramaswamy’s call-out lit a powder keg that McDaniel had been sitting on for years. The Woke Inc. author was not the only one frustrated by the GOP’s recent inability to mitigate major losses in tough election seasons and take advantage when the winds were in their favor, leading to a series of disappointing cycles. And feelings toward McDaniel were especially sour that evening as Republicans were still reeling from a series of election losses the previous night, particularly in Kentucky and Virginia. Ramaswamy leveraged his viral moment into a data-collection website, FireRonna.com, and scores of conservative commentators and operatives echoed his calls. Republican operatives I spoke to acknowledge that although they are naturally skeptical of Ramaswamy and other right-wing grassroots attacks on McDaniel, there are legitimate reasons to be upset with her leadership.

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While it may once have been scandalous for employers to exclude white men from their recruitment process, fast forward to 2023 and most hiring panels appear to have decided it’s riskier to include them. Infuriated by the failure of equality to produce equal outcomes, our liberal culture demands a bogeyman, and in the straight, white male, it found the pantomime villain of its dreams. Whatever your grievance, the patriarchy will shoulder the blame because any alternative culprit is simply too ‘offensive’ to countenance—no matter how well the facts support their claim.

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Next month, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic will interview Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. After two days of behind-closed-doors interviews, the subcommittee will schedule a public hearing to take his sworn testimony.

Fauci’s testimony will doubtless cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from masking to vaccine mandates. But rest assured that congressional investigators will zero in on Fauci’s knowledge of, and response to, crucial information concerning the origins of the pandemic in China.

To secure a fully transparent accounting, House and Senate investigators are also pressing the administration to release key details about what Fauci and his colleagues knew about the origin of the pandemic, and when they knew it. But Biden administration officials continue to stall the release of relevant information, offering transparently lame excuses, to block congressional access and public disclosure of unredacted documents.

NewsMax.

Testing the limits of how far Texas can go to keep migrants out of the U.S., Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday signed into law sweeping new powers that allow police to arrest those who cross the border illegally and give local judges authority to order them to leave the country.

Opponents have called the measure the most dramatic attempt by a state to police immigration since a 2010 Arizona law — denounced by critics as the “Show Me Your Papers” bill — that was largely struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Texas’ law is also likely to face swift legal challenges.

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Gaza’s ‘terror tunnels’ are in some instances literally big enough to drive a truck through, as several social media clips to emerge over the weekend show.

Israel’s military has been releasing more information on the tunnels, even recently giving Western reporters a tour of a pacified wing of the tunnel network, to show the world what it’s up against. Currently the IDF is still seeking to flood the tunnels, or at least significant sections of them, by pumping in seawater.

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The science is simple. Localised hyperthermia stops pain. So you plug it into your phone, the app automatically opens, dial your preferred setting, and wait a moment for the device to heat up. Then you push it against the bite, wait a few seconds, and the pain stops. That’s it.

The American Mind.

Ever since anti-Trump forces began to weaponize the legal system to achieve political objectives through litigation rather than the ballot box, the former president has been attacked on multiple fronts. One major national effort has been to attempt to disqualify Trump from running as a candidate in Republican presidential primaries this year. Altogether there have been about a dozen such challenges, and more may be coming.

To date, these efforts have been unsuccessful. Trump has beaten back challenges in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. Most of those decisions have not reached the question whether Trump is, in fact, legally barred from running. The Minnesota Supreme Court, for instance, ruled only that the challenge was untimely and could be renewed at a later stage.

Only the Colorado case reached the merits. That case, therefore, is the most significant so far. And it gave the victory to Trump.

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Back in 2021, the University of Pittsburgh garnered national media headlines after reports were leaked that the school was using fetal tissue for research assignments.

Now, documents obtained through a FOIA request by the pro-life group Center for Medical Progress (CMP) and the conservative group Judicial Watch revealed that Pitt was at one point under federal investigation for harvesting baby parts.

There’ve been numerous public record requests by those two pro-life groups, and more and more information is corroborating the malicious ways that Planned Parenthood worked with the University of Pittsburgh to use the body parts of babies who were aborted late in gestation in what was called “The GenitoUrinary Development Molecular Anatomy Project,” (GUDMAP). While the GUDMAP Project was supposedly intended to research and develop therapies for diseases of organs like kidneys, the bladder, ureter and urethra, its methods were inhumane.

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In this environment, it would make sense for the Biden administration to look for ways to reduce deficit spending. However, the administration has instead gone out of its way to bend (or break) the law, use funds in ways Congress didn’t intend, and waste taxpayer dollars on boondoggles.

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On Monday, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) halted freight train activity on two railway bridges connecting Texas and Mexico. Smuggling organizations have rounded up tens of thousands of migrants, if not more, like cattle and packed them on train cars in Mexico as the best mode of transportation to the US southern border.

NewsMax.

A top law firm has decided to stop conducting on-campus interviews at Harvard due to the controversial congressional testimony of the school’s beleaguered president, Claudine Gay.

In testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee, Gay avoided questions about whether students who advocate for the “genocide of Jews” violate the school’s code of conduct.

As a result of her testimony, the law firm Edelson PC will no longer participate in on-campus recruiting at Harvard Law School, the firm’s CEO Jay Edelson announced.

Newsbusters.

It was a challenging task, but an esteemed panel of NewsBusters editors led by MRC President L. Brent Bozell and MRC’s Vice President for Research and Publications Brent Baker, boiled down all the biased outbursts from lefty hack hosts, anchors, reporters and pundits in 2023 and declared a winner. This year the winner is Joe Scarborough! The MSNBC host won for his absurd and dire prediction that if Donald Trump wins re-election he will “imprison” and “execute” his political opponents. The former Republican Congressman, on the November 21 edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe also claimed that the federal judiciary was the “only thing that stood between” Trump and “the destruction of American democracy” when he was in office.

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Wikipedia’s woke editors are scrambling to downplay recent scandals involving Harvard President Claudine Gay.

In recent days, editors have removed mention of the allegations from the intro to her article, eliminated detailed descriptions of the alleged plagiarism, and have attempted to minimize Gay’s handling of antisemitism on campus, Breitbart reports.

…

A fight over Harvard’s page ensued as well, with one attempt to mention Gay’s controversy rejected by editor Samuel Klein, who previously served on the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, which governs Wikipedia. He argued that the content was ‘undue,’ and suggested an alternative version which essentially avoided Gay’s issues.

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U.S. President Joe Biden faces possible impeachment by the United States Congress, while his son Hunter faces felony counts on several charges. Both cases are linked to Hunter’s business dealings—stretching back almost a decade—to when Biden senior served as vice president.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to formalise the impeachment inquiry into President Biden’s involvement in the foreign business dealings of Hunter Biden. One Chinese deal, which involved the company CEFC China Energy, saw the Chinese power conglomorate transfer around $4.8 million in payments to entities controlled by Hunter Biden or Joe’s brother James Biden between 2017 and 2018.

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The Feminist Majority Foundation, along with Feminist Campus, Equal Rights Advocates, Girls Inc, Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, Trust Women, United State of Women, and the National Organization for Women, and numerous feminist groups signed a letter attacking the federal ‘Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act’ for daring to protect women from suffering the way that Payton and other female athletes had.

A dozen organizations with “women”, “girl” or “feminist” in their names were dedicated to the proposition that womens’ sports should be eliminated and that any women or girls who play should be ready to suffer catastrophic injuries from 220-lb. ‘transgender’ male athletes.

Beating women and denying their existence is the new feminism. So is raping women.

In the wake of the Hamas rapes during the invasion of Israel on Oct 7, some have wondered where the feminist organizations are. The answer is that they’re supporting the rapists.

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Ola Metzger, 45, had planned to send her daughter on a Holocaust education trip to Poland. But on Oct. 7, days before the trip was to depart, a holocaust came to them.

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Two decades ago, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said the Council on American-Islamic Relations has “ties to terrorism” and called for the federal government to cut ties with the controversial anti-Israel group. Schumer, now the Senate majority leader, has flip-flopped since then on CAIR, which is back in the national spotlight after its founder said he was “happy to see” Hamas attack Israel.

Last year, Schumer said in a letter of support for CAIR that the United States is “fortunate” the organization is “fighting for the sake of our freedoms.” In 2015, he applauded CAIR for its “determination to continue to spread humanity” and to “cultivate and encourage mutual understanding amongst Americans of all backgrounds and cultures,” according to a letter CAIR cited in fundraising literature.

That’s a far cry from what Schumer said during a 2003 Senate hearing, when he slammed CAIR’s leaders for having “intimate connections with Hamas” and said the group was known to have “ties to terrorism.” In 2009, Schumer submitted a letter to the FBI that noted CAIR was an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation, a Hamas front group. Schumer said federal agencies ceasing work with CAIR “should be government-wide policy.”

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The large data sets on the cost of living and the cost of children are instructive. But nothing compares with the anecdotes you hear from people who once thought they were prosperous but now wonder if they can really get by while completely ruling out the idea of having and raising children. It’s a genuine shift and one that is devastating for the future.

LifeHacker

The thought of someone secretly living in your house and silently waiting in the closet for you to go to work so they can eat your food and pet your cat is terrifying, but it apparently happens often enough to have a name. It’s called “phrogging” and it differs from home invasion and robbery mainly in intent.

The phrog isn’t trying to steal your jewelry like a common burglar; they want to secretly live in your place for a few days before hopping off to someone else’s pad. It’s a risk-heavy but rent-free lifestyle, perfect for amoral thrill-seekers.

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The House Oversight investigation into President Joe Biden and his family’s influence peddling schemes digs all the way back to ties to the late-90s big tobacco settlement, including James Biden’s deal-working caught on FBI tapes in an unrelated 2008 bribery scheme.

James Biden’s deal-making getting picked up on FBI tapes in 2008, as The Washington Post reported Sunday, are resurfacing amid the House Oversight investigation and the official impeachment inquiry.

Mississippi trial attorney Richard Scruggs admitted to paying James and Sara Biden’s “consulting firm” $100,000 to help grease the wheels for the Senate to pass a 1997 big tobacco law that would ultimately fail. James Biden was key, because he was the brother of then Senate Judiciary Ranking Member Joe Biden.

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Once nearly impenetrable for migrants heading north from Latin America, the jungle between Colombia and Panama this year became a speedy but still treacherous highway for hundreds of thousands of people from around the world.

Driven by economic crises, government repression and violence, migrants from China to Haiti decided to risk three days of deep mud, rushing rivers and bandits. Enterprising locals offered guides and porters, set up campsites and sold supplies to migrants, using color-coded wristbands to track who had paid for what.

Enabled by social media and Colombian organized crime, more than 506,000 migrants — nearly two-thirds Venezuelans — had crossed the Darien jungle by mid-December, double the 248,000 who set a record the previous year. Before last year, the record was barely 30,000 in 2016.

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Elon Musk’s revolutionary satellite internet service, Starlink, is spreading across Africa, flying in the face of repressive and corrupt regimes that are trying to block it.

Young Democrats.

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In November 2020, Oregon passed Measure 110, decriminalizing non-commercial drug possession. The state also significantly increased funding for recovery and harm reduction programs. It sounded like a great plan to voters, so it passed with 60 percent approval.

What has occurred though over the last three years is nothing short of tragic. When Measure 110 passed, fentanyl was starting to take over our streets. For homeless addicts it began as a general curiosity, which quickly devolved into the widespread use of the deadliest drug in history. Fentanyl is fifty times stronger than heroin, and with two major competing cartels (China and Mexico), the price has now dropped to an all-time low. Three years ago, a blue fentanyl pill cost about $6-7. That has now dropped to $1-2. Due to its addictive properties, low cost, and the fact that almost all other street drugs are laced with it, nearly all street-level addicts are using fentanyl — whether they want to or not. This is what has turned the city of Portland into the largest open-air drug zone in state history.

As for the promised recovery programs, it took thirty-four months for the first medical detox facility to open with Measure 110 money, and in that time, we have had a record number of overdoses and deaths that have increased each year since the measure passed.

Think of it as evolution in action. Natural selection works whether you want it to or not.

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France will consider reintroducing uniforms in state schools following a worrying rise in harassment and violence, and the growing number of controversies surrounding the wearing of the Islamic abaya. The measure has received strong support from the French public, as well as from some teachers. A number of schools are to carry out experiments before the scheme is extended.

There are many well-known arguments in favour of the return of uniforms: an end to competition between children over clothing, and the associated bullying; the disappearance of social differences; making life easier for parents; and an end to demands from different religious communities.

The subject of wearing uniforms regularly crops up in French politics, but until now, no education minister has taken the plunge and put it into practice. The return of the uniform was, for example, part of Éric Zemmour’s programme, but he believes that it should be “imposed” rather than “experimented with.” Les Républicains party chairman Éric Ciotti was also in favour. In January, the Rassemblement National put forward a bill to reintroduce uniforms, arguing that they would solve two problems: “Brand competition and pressure from Islamists on children attending school.” The bill was rejected because it was proposed by Marine Le Pen’s party. The President’s wife, Brigitte Macron, explained that she was in favour too. Today, it is someone close to Emmanuel Macron who has decided to break the taboo and support the wearing of uniforms.

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For decades, statins have been heralded as the reliable heroes in the battle against heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States and globally. However, this seemingly flawless reputation has been called into question.

A new expert review suggests that long-term use of statins may be inadvertently aiding the enemy by accelerating coronary artery calcification instead of providing protection.

As is common in modern medicine, the commonly-accepted treatment merely makes things worse. Read The Clot Thickens: The Enduring Mystery of Heart Disease.

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Whether one supports the presidential candidacy of Vivek Ramaswamy or not, it’s impossible to deny that some of the best red pill moments of the election cycle so far have been his debates with establishment spin doctors. During a Town Hall discussion in Iowa hosted by CNN, anchor Abby Phillip tried a new tactic to defuse Ramaswamy and disrupt his ability to convey the facts: She simply kept talking over top of him, contradicting his statements and then refused to give him an opportunity to answer back.

The strategy did not work quite as well as she might have hoped, as Vivek trampled her expertly.

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It was nine years ago (December 17, 2014) that President Barack Obama chose to establish formal relations with the Communist dictatorship in Cuba, claiming the step was aimed at improving the lives of the subjugated Cuban people. “The United States wants to be a partner in making the lives of ordinary Cubans a little bit easier, more free, more prosperous,” Obama promised.

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LGBT groups were quick to rejoice in Strasbourg Thursday as an overwhelming majority of MEPs backed a hotly contested law establishing a new “ European Parenthood Certificate” and enforcing liberal surrogacy laws and gay adoption across the bloc.

While the legislation still requires the consent of individual member states at an EU Council level, the legislation would require states to grant recognition to families “irrespective of how a child was conceived, born or the type of family they have.”

Ostensibly meant to close legal loopholes in family law caused by the Ukrainian refugee crisis, the legislation has been lambasted by Catholic groups in particular as a direct legislative assault on the traditional family at the same time as opening the door to liberal surrogacy laws.

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There may be around a 1 in 10 chance that Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 vaccines will not generate spike proteins but something else, a new Cambridge study finds, raising concerns about autoimmune response among experts.

The study authors found that 8 percent of the time, Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are mistranslated, leading to the formation of unintended proteins.

“Our work presents both a concern and a solution for this new type of medicine,” said leading author Anne Willis in the study’s press release.

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Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s office sent out an email earlier this week announcing an “Electeds of Color Holiday Party” to the Boston City Council. Seven of the council’s 13 members are white, which apparently meant they weren’t welcome at the party.

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A majority of Palestinians support Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, according to a poll from a research organization based in the West Bank.

Seventy-two percent of Palestinian respondents to a poll the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research released Wednesday said they believe the attacks were the correct decision given the outcome. Support was more prominent among West Bank residents, 82 percent of whom said the attacks were correct. In Gaza, 57 percent said the attacks were the correct decision, compared to 37 percent who said it was incorrect.

Researchers said the poll does not indicate support for atrocities Hamas committed during the attacks. Majorities of Palestinians in both Gaza and that West Bank correctly said attacking or killing civilians in their homes violated international law. Eighty-five percent, however, said they did not see videos of Hamas terrorists committing those atrocities, and only 7 percent said they believe Hamas committed them.

There are no ‘innocent civiliams’ in Gaza.

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The Biden administration is poised to funnel millions of dollars in taxpayer cash to aid groups inside the Gaza Strip but is keeping the identities of those organizations a secret, making it difficult for congressional appropriators to determine if the money will enrich Hamas or other terror entities known to steal American aid dollars.

The White House earmarked at least $34 million in U.S. taxpayer funds for “confidential” nonprofits and United Nations agencies operating in the Gaza Strip, according to a review of U.N. funding channels by NGO Monitor, a watchdog group that tracks the international organization.

“This lack of transparency prevents congressional oversight and independent assessment of the ultimate recipients of U.S. government funding,” the watchdog group wrote in a briefing document earlier this week. “The potential for abuse in the Palestinian context is acute and indisputable.”

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San Francisco Democrat Mayor London Breed cut the funding for the city’s first-ever Office of Reparations due to a massive budget deficit, the San Francisco Examiner reported.

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Funny how that works.

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In a hilarious repeat from 2016, ivory tower leftists are absolutely freaking out about the prospect of Donald Trump getting back into the White House, now that multiple polls show that Trump isn’t just on track to sweep the GOP primary field – but he’d smoke Biden if a malarkey-free 2024 election were held today.

“Criminal are a superstitious cowardly lot, so my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts.” — Batman

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Another COP, another call to have meat removed from our diet. The further we depart from what we evolved to do, as individuals and as a society, the less efficient we become. We didn’t evolve to be vegetarian. Quite the contrary, humans are one of the most carnivorous animals on the planet, surprisingly so.

Eating meat is more efficient. Carnivores spend less time feeding than similar-sized herbivores. For example, one of our primate relatives, baboons (Papio cynocephalus), devote almost all their daylight hours to feeding while adult males of hunter-gatherer Ache (eastern Paraguay) and Hadza (northern Tanzania) tribes spend only a third of the day in food acquisition, preparation and feeding. Acquiring and consuming medium-size animals, at a return rate in the range of tens of thousands of calories per hour, is an order of magnitude more time-efficient than plant-gathering.  In nature, for humans, plant-sourced calories cost ten times the price of meat if it is available.

Newsbusters.

Liberal media are declaring Bidenomics a success – but, hard numbers tell a much different story, regardless of whether the measure is how much Americans are paying, earning or saving.

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A former top FBI official who led the agency’s New York counterintelligence division, and played a key role in the Trump-Russia collusion probe, has been sentenced to 4 years in prison for colluding with Russia – and he may face an even longer sentence under a second indictment for hiding $225,000 in payments from a former Albanian intelligence officer.

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In a gratifying win for religious freedom and free speech, the Virginia Supreme Court concluded Thursday that embattled Virginia high school teacher Peter Vlaming, who had been fired over his refusal to use a student’s preferred pronouns because of his religious faith, was protected by the free exercise and free speech clauses of the Virginia Constitution.

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It’s no secret that regulation hits the poorest Americans the hardest. Academic research has long demonstrated that environmental regulations impose a higher cost on low-income Americans than they do on the general population.

The phenomenon is most visible in the automobile sector, where the average price for a new car was $48,008. Even the least expensive new cars available in 2023 averaged over $20,000. With a third of American households earning under $50,000 per year and nearly a quarter earning less than $35,000, a new car is out of reach for too many American families.

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As businesses push forward on hitting diversity goals, a major insurance company in the U.K. is telling its 22,000 strong workforce that senior white male new hires must be personally approved by none other than the CEO.

Aviva’s boss Amanda Blanc said the policy forms part of the company’s efforts to stamp out sexism in the financial services industry.

Speaking at the Sexism in the City inquiry, Blanc, who became the blue-chip company’s first female chief executive in 2020, told a parliamentary committee that there was “no non-diverse hire at Aviva without it being signed off by me and the chief people officer.”

Racism and sexism, straight up.

The American Mind.

On Tuesday, December 5, more than 12,000 foreigners crossed the U.S. border illegally—the highest daily total of illegal immigrants ever recorded. We are currently witnessing the greatest illegal immigration crisis in American history.

In October, the House Committee on Homeland Security reported that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered a record-breaking 269,735 illegal immigrants in the previous month, “marking another unprecedented milestone under…President Joe Biden’s open border policies.” This represents “an 86% increase” from June 2023. “Since President Biden took office there have been 7.5 million encounters nationwide” with illegal migrants, millions of whom have been “processed” and transported (often at taxpayer expense) across our country.

“[I]n addition,” the House Committee reports, “there are 1.7 million known gotaways” who have snuck into the United States by evading border patrol agents while they are distracted and overwhelmed with paper work. Illegal immigration has increased “more than 100% compared to FY 2019.” According to the New York Times, the illegal migrants come not simply from Latin America but from “more than 160 countries,” including Iran, China, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Somalia, as well as large parts of Africa and the Middle East.

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Democrat lawmakers in Washington State want to jail residents for using gas-powered landscaping tools such as leaf blowers and edgers.

State Rep. Amy Walen (D-Kirkland) has pre-filed legislation which would radically alter the state’s Clean Air Act, according to Jason Rantz of MyNorthwest, who reports that HB 1868 would ban “gasoline-powered and diesel-powered landscaping and other outdoor power equipment” for “contributing to climate change.”

As Rantz further explains, the bill contains a laundry list of unintended health consequences tied to the tools as well, including a claim that they cause asthma.