President Donald Trump on Tuesday authorized the Department of Justice to use classified information in grand jury proceedings connected to a special counsel’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe.
In a memo released through the White House, Trump authorized the attorney general “to use classified information as he deems necessary in connection with his review, including in a grand jury or other proceeding.”
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Dr Anthony Fauci has revealed that he and his wife won’t be spending time with their three adult children for Christmas this year and urged other Americans to do the same as coronavirus cases continue to surge in the U.S.
The nation’s alleged top infectious disease expert told The Washington Post it would mark the first Christmas not spent with his three daughters since they were born.
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The Virginia Beach City Public Schools (VBCPS) postponed its decision Tuesday on whether to cancel the divisions’ high school winter sports season this year because of current COVID-19 data of the area.
Last week, Virginia Beach Superintendent Aaron Spence wrote in a letter to families that if either the percent positivity or the 7-day daily average of cases – two indicators used in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s K-12 School Metrics – does not improve to the “yellow range” by Tuesday, the winter sports season would be cancelled.
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If you’re anything like us, there’s somebody on your Christmas list who you still need to buy a gift for. The Virginia Star spoke with local businesses across the state to see what their most popular gifts were. Here’s what they told us…
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Roughly 140,000 doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine are expected to arrive in Virginia on Wednesday after the state had initially placed an order with the company last week, the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) said in a news release.
Shipments of Moderna’s vaccine, approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration on Friday, as well as Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine are being delivered to healthcare facilities and health departments across the Commonwealth this week. The two vaccines are going to 96 “geographically diverse locations” in the state, according to the release.
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It is the policy of The Star News Network that we will publish no stories about calls for martial law in the United States by public figures or private individuals at any of our online news websites, which currently consist of The Tennessee Star, The Ohio Star, The Michigan Star, The Minnesota Sun, The Georgia Star News, and The Virginia Star.
At the federal level, the imposition of martial law is exceedingly rare. It has only ever been imposed once by a sitting President, by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, and even in that instance martial law was only applicable to Confederate soldiers.
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A group of Georgia voters filed a lawsuit in Fulton County Superior Court earlier this week against the individual members of the Fulton County Board of Elections and individually against Richard Barron, Fulton County Elections Director. The lawsuit focused on the security footage presented by Trump’s legal team during the Georgia Senate hearing, popularized as the “suitcase ballots” video.
The plaintiffs alleged that the group of workers seen on video illegally scanned thousands of mail-in ballots hidden underneath skirted tables. They also claimed that those ballots may be fraudulent. Voters Organized for Trusted Election Results in Georgia (VOTERGA), a nonpartisan and non-profit election integrity coalition, organized the aggrieved voters into a group of plaintiffs.
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In the weeks before he landed a deal with a Ukrainian gas company in 2014, Hunter Biden strategized with his business partner on how to leverage an upcoming official trip to Kiev by his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to clinch the lucrative arrangement, according to emails obtained a year ago by the FBI.
The communications reviewed by Just the News show that the younger Biden referred to his father as “my guy” and took credit for “adding value” because the vice president made comments to Ukrainian leaders about natural gas production that might benefit his new client.
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The New York Times bungled an attempted hit piece on The Star News Network and the Georgia Star News, and was forced to make several corrections within hours of the story’s publication on Tuesday.
The Times, however, failed to make all the factual corrections requested by Star News Digital Media, which owns and operates the Georgia Star News, part of its Star News Network.
“Misinformation ‘Superspreaders’ Target Georgia Senate Races,” said a hyperbolic headline in the once-serious “paper of record.”
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Joe Biden and his allies have condemned Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the election as an attack on democracy, the latest, most extreme violation of our most sacred “norms” by a tyrant and a party of traitors in his thrall.
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An anti-Trump group funded heavily by Reid Hoffman, a liberal billionaire tech titan who’s bankrolled political disinformation peddlers, contributed $620,000 to a legal fund for Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm behind the controversial Steele dossier, financial filings show.
According to IRS filings, The group Integrity First for America (IFA) made the contribution in 2018 for the legal defense fund of Bean LLC, the holding company for Fusion GPS.
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President Trump on Tuesday night threatened to veto a $900 billion COVID-19 relief bill adopted by the U.S. House and Senate, calling it an unfocused “disgrace,” loaded with foreign aid and unrelated expenses that go far beyond a narrow focus on relief for pandemic-related pain.
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The CEO of BioNTech, the German drug maker who partnered with Pfizer in developing the world’s first approved coronavirus vaccine, said that he was “confident” it will be effective against a mutated strain of the virus found in the United Kingdom.
“The likelihood that our vaccine works… is relatively high,” Uğur Şahin told reporters during a Tuesday press conference, explaining that the mutated strain still shares approximately 99% of the original strain’s spike protein.
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President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani said Tuesday morning that the Arizona legislature will attempt to pass a resolution this week demanding a joint session to certify President Trump as the winner of the 2020 election.
During an interview on Steve Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic” podcast, Giuliani noted that Arizona lawmakers did not have the votes to declare Trump the winner on Monday, but was hopeful that they would be able to do it on Wednesday.
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After winning the vote in the Electoral College last week, former Vice President Joe Biden said the election process “should be celebrated, not attacked.”
Biden derided what he called “baseless claims about the legitimacy of the results” of the presidential election and said, “Respecting the will of the people is at the heart of our democracy, even if we find those results hard to accept.”
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President-elect Joe Biden is poised to select Miguel Cardona, the current Connecticut education commissioner, to lead the Department of Education in his administration, CNN reported.
Miguel Cardona, who has served as head of the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE) since August 2019, will be President-elect Joe Biden’s choice to lead the federal government’s education department, multiple sources told CNN. Cardona would be the latest Latino to receive a high-ranking position in the incoming Biden administration.
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Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday that Alex Padilla, California’s Secretary of State, will succeed Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in the Senate.
Padilla, 47, will be the first Latino senator in California’s history. His selection was first reported by The Los Angeles Times.
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Zaosong Zheng, who worked in research at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, pleaded guilty to lying to customs officials about his attempt to take biomaterial to China.
According to a Department of Justice press release, Zheng was arrested in December 2019 at Boston’s Logan International Airport, where he had attempted to board a flight to China. Federal officers found 21 vials of biological research material stuffed into a sock in one of his bags.
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Few people realize that the Moderna vaccine against COVID-19—which the FDA has finally declared “highly effective,” and which is now being distributed to Americans—has actually been available for nearly a year.
But the government wouldn’t let you take it.
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Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano (D) announced Monday that he would not be seeking cash bail for non-violent offenders, formalizing a policy he and his prosecutors have been practicing since Descano took office in January 2020. “I’ve long said that the laws on the books should match the values…
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Planned Parenthood is preparing its wish list for former Vice President Joe Biden’s prospective administration, but pro-life forces are gearing up for a fight.
In a Roll Call interview, Planned Parenthood Action Fund President and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson said her organization’s top goal in 2021 is abolishing the Hyde Amendment, which for 40 years has prohibited federal funding for most abortions.
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The Virginia General Assembly 2021 regular session is right around the corner on January 13 and the Democrats will again be calling all the shots for the legislature thanks to their majority in both the Senate and the House of Delegates.
This means that the agendas and priorities of Democrats in the Senate – as well as their counterparts in the House – have quite a good chance of passing through each chamber if broadly supported. Yet, what exactly are Senate Democrats focusing on?
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Virginia is again ramping up its Checkpoint Strikeforce campaign, a program aimed at reducing drunk driving through increased police activity and sobriety checkpoints. Through December 8, 2020, there were 253 alcohol-related traffic fatalities in Virginia, up from 249 in the same period in 2019, according to a press release from Governor Ralph Northam’s office.
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Secondary students attending Arlington Public Schools (APS) are earning more failing grades during the coronavirus pandemic than in previous years, new data shows, further highlighting the negative impact virtual learning can have on certain students.
The data was presented in an internal report released online on Thursday that compared APS middle school and high school student’s quarter one grades from 2020-21 to quarter one grades from 2018-19 and 2019-20.
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The U.S. House of Representatives leadership gave legislators just hours to consider a 5,593-page omnibus spending bill incorporating over $900 billion of coronavirus relief and $1.4 in government funding for fiscal year 2021. The bill was made available on Monday afternoon, with voting beginning on Monday evening, where it passed just after nine p.m.
“After several delays and last-minute haggling, we finally began receiving text of the COVID relief bill at 11:30 am this morning. This bill is likely to be thousands of pages, so I’m canceling my afternoon appointments & digging into the bill. As Reagan said, “Trust, but verify,” Congressman Ben Cline (R-VA06) tweeted.
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New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland — a Native American through her mother’s lineage — is the newest addition to Biden’s identity politics bingo card. Haaland was tapped for Secretary of the Interior, a position with control over conservation and oil and gas drilling on public lands, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and a swath of other agencies like the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Indian Education.
Environmentalists were titillated to see a Native American nominated to take charge of land conservation and Native affairs, especially after President Trump authorized oil drilling, pipelines, and the border wall on land considered by some Native activists to be sacred.
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Virginia’s statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee was removed from its place in the National Statuary Hall of the United States Capitol by a crew of workers overnight.
Every state is allowed to have two statues on display in the hall and Lee has stood along with President George Washington as representatives of the Commonwealth since 1909.
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The Bedford County Board of Supervisors (BOS) unanimously passed a resolution repudiating efforts to repeal qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that provides extra protection to law enforcement officers from personal liability while on-duty unless they commit willful misconduct. An effort to repeal qualified immunity was defeated in the Virginia Senate during the recent special session.
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The two coronavirus vaccines that have been approved for emergency use authorization in the U.S. will be able to combat a new, more contagious strain of the virus in the U.K., experts said Monday.
Vaccines made by pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna will be effective against the new strain, which is “very similar” to previous strains at the genetic level, University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation affiliate assistant professor Vin Gupta told CNBC. The Food and Drug Administration has approved both vaccines for emergency use authorization after large-scale human trials showed efficacy of more than 90%.
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Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Monday that “faith-oriented” people in Congress have told her they “don’t believe in science.”
The California Democrat spoke Monday on the house floor where she discussed coronavirus relief and the recently approved vaccines, accusing the White House of spreading “quackery” notions of herd immunity.
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Activist members of the student government at Cornell University are waging an ideological war against fellow Cornell Student Assembly members who recently voted against disarming campus police.
From launching recall petitions and rallying against their fellow representatives in November, to earlier this month ousting some of them from subcommittees or the entire assembly, these activist student government members say they are motivated to set right what a “white-cis-het” group of their peers did in voting down the disarmament resolution.
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The nurse who appeared to faint after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine in a viral video has recovered, according to a statement issued by her employer. Tiffany Dover, a nurse at CHI Memorial Hospital, reportedly came close to passing out due to a medical condition unrelated to the vaccination.
The hospital also cited information from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website, which stated that fainting sometimes occurs after all types of vaccinations.
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Students across America are taught an origin of life story that goes a little something like this: billions of years ago, energy from the sun, lightning, and Earth’s heat combined with the planet’s early atmosphere of hydrogen, methane and other gases, creating chemical reactions that formed molecules in a primordial soup that eventually produced a cell, in other words, life.
But one prominent professor argues that that simplistic explanation is not only unproven, it’s highly improbable.
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Forty churches, schools, and businesses have signed a letter to Governor Ralph Northam, asking him not to enforce the Virginia Values Act (VVA), which was passed by the General Assembly and signed by Northam last April. In Northam’s press release, proponents of the bill said it would protect LGBTQ Virginians from workplace discrimination, but religious leaders warn that the bill threatens a $100,000 fine if religious organizations refuse to hire someone who doesn’t agree with their beliefs on marriage or sexuality.
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Since March, the Left has proclaimed itself the guardian of science in dealing with the COVID-19 epidemic. Its champions are the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Dr. Fauci. All in the past have rendered valuable service to the public, and often life-saving aid.
Yet the mixture of COVID-19, the first national quarantine, and Trump Derangement Syndrome have combined to give us reason to question their judgment. These authorities variously have issued conflicting recommendations to wear, then not to wear, and finally to wear masks. Or they have both criticized and then advised travel bans.
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A student at Mercer University in Macon has been ordered to spend four months in jail in Cayman Islands for breaking the British territory’s COVID-19 lockdown rules, according to several reports.
“Skylar Mack and her boyfriend, Cayman Islands-based competitive Jet Skier Vanjae Ramgeet were jailed immediately after their sentences were handed down on Tuesday,” Fox News said last week.
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Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN-05) has introduced a “bold resolution” asking President-elect Joe Biden to federally remove $50,000 of student loan debt per person.
The congress member introduced the resolution alongside Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Maxine Waters, and Alma Adams. The resolution outlines a path for Biden to use “excessive authority” to remove student loan debt while simultaneously ensuring there are no tax liabilities for federal student loan borrowers.
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The Athens-Clarke County Board of Elections struck down a challenge to remove nearly 8,000 voters from the the county’s rolls before Georgia’s January 5 U.S. Senate runoff election.
“For the reasons I will discuss, I don’t believe there is probable cause to challenge these voters,” Athens-Clarke County Attorney Judd Drake said to open deliberations.
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CVS announced Monday that it has formally launched its program to administer COVID-19 vaccines to residents and staff of long-term care facilities and will begin its efforts in Virginia on December 28th, according to a press release.
The company said that its teams will start administering doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine this week across 12 states – including Ohio, Connecticut, Florida and Oregon, among others – and expects to vaccinate a total of four million residents and staff at over 40,000 long-term care facilities through the program.
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As the 2021 elections inch closer and begin to dominate almost all political talk in the Commonwealth, Sen. Emmett Hanger (R-Augusta) is still exploring a potential run to become the 74th governor of Virginia.
Hanger, 72, recently discussed the gubernatorial election and the difficulty of securing the GOP nomination in an interview with The Virginia Star.
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We fight because we must fight. Because if our elections are so tainted that they would make a third world dictator the blush, the consent of the governed is thwarted and the very legitimacy of our government is questionable. That is why we fight until Inauguration Day. Because to do anything else, would be to give up on the American experiment
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Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday he plans to make new criminal referrals to the Justice Department following the release of internal FBI messages from the account of Peter Strzok, the top FBI investigator on Crossfire Hurricane.
In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Nunes said the messages, which the Justice Department and FBI declassified earlier this month, should have been provided to Congress years ago when Republicans began investigating whether the FBI abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in order to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
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The National Basketball Association is remaining quiet on the issue of Chinese slave labor, despite new revelations about the nature and sizeUighur Muslim labor camps.
In 2018, three Uyghur regions alone mobilized at least 570,000 laborers into cotton-picking through the government’s forced labor training and transfer scheme, according to a new Center for Global Policy report. When BBC reporters tried to visit the region to document its “huge industrial expansion” a number of unmarked cars followed them as they filmed the perimeter of the complex when officials stopped them from filming and they were forced to leave.
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Congress agreed on a $900 billion coronavirus relief package Sunday, overcoming several last-minute stalemates over the Federal Reserve’s lending powers and direct cash payments, Senate leaders announced.
“At long last, we have the bipartisan breakthrough the country has needed,” Senate Majority Leader McConnell said Sunday on the Senate floor. “I hope we can do this as promptly as possible.”
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Earlier this year, President Trump’s often embattled Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, established new rules on handling sexual assaults on campus to strengthen protections for accused students, almost all of them men.
Joe Biden, who was the Obama administration’s point man for the policies DeVos upended, has made his displeasure clear.
“The Trump Administration’s Education Department … is trying to shame and silence survivors,” the Biden campaign platform declared. “Instead of protecting women,” it has “given colleges a green light to ignore sexual violence and strip survivors of their civil rights.”
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Conservatives face all kinds of censorship from the private sector. Big Tech will ban your account and employers will fire you just because of your political beliefs. This free market suppression could escalate into conservatives losing their bank accounts and credit cards due to their political views. For some people, it’s already happened.
We could very well see this nightmare scenario under a President Joe Biden. That’s why it’s imperative for the Trump Administration to do something right now to protect ordinary Americans from the depredations of liberal corporations.
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Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley on Friday compared Republican Georgia Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to “the Bonnie and Clyde of corruption.”
Pressley criticized “this GOP-led Senate” on MSNBC host Joy Reid’s “The ReidOut” for sticking with the Trump administration’s policies and criticized them for being distant from challenges Americans face due to COVID-19. Pressley criticized President Donald Trump and said he permitted the economic challenges.
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Richmond Public Schools (RPS) has tightened content filtering restrictions on school computers after Janet Kelly discovered she could access explicit YouTube content on her elementary-aged son’s computer. Kelly is pleased that the school responded to her concerns, but she’s worried about long-term harms linked to having children in front of computers constantly for virtual learning.
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Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring (D) formally launched his re-election bid for a third term as the Commonwealth’s top lawyer last week.
Herring, 59, officially announced his campaign for the 2021 race through a video on Twitter where he described himself as “the people’s lawyer” and highlighted several legal wins while in office.
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Often during spring training, the Hall of Fame baseball manager of the Reds and Tigers, Sparky Anderson, was asked about how his team would fare in the upcoming season. To put off the question without appearing rude, the skipper would say, “we’ll know after the first 40 games.” Interestingly, the jury is still out on whether Sparky actually believed this, because after the first 40 games he slyly put off the question for more and more games until his team had patently proven its competitive mettle (or lack thereof) to reporters and fans.
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