Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has already left at least 40 Russian soldiers and “a few” Ukrainian civilians dead as of Thursday, multiple sources reported.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation” in Ukraine early Thursday as air strike sirens rang in Kyiv and Russian missiles reportedly struck multiple cities across the country.
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The Senate Finance Committee killed a bill that would have blocked the City of Richmond from holding another casino referendum, after voters voted against a casino proposal in 2021. The bill would have granted the opportunity to build the casino to nearby Petersburg instead, and some committee members expressed a desire to study the potential implications of a Petersburg casino. The February 10 vote against the bill left the door open for Richmond to try again, and take the last of five casino licenses in Virginia. Now, Senator Joe Morrissey (D-Richmond) is pushing to block Richmond through a budget amendment.
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A study released last week has found more than one in three children in grades K-3 are unlikely to be reading on grade level by the end of the current school year unless they receive major remedial help.
Curriculum and assessment company Amplify analyzed data from more than 400,000 students in kindergarten through fifth grade and found that, while students have begun to rebound from the learning loss suffered during school closures amid the coronavirus pandemic, considerable gaps remain in basic reading skills, Education Week reported.
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There is always a tweet, so says the online aphorism, developed during the chaotic Trump years, that now seems to hold true across administrations and perhaps even with increased significance after a Russian strongman decided to invade an eastern European neighbor over the holiday weekend.
The Russian in question is Vladimir Putin. The country invaded, Ukraine, or more specifically the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics that Russia recently recognized diplomatically. And the tweet, well, that came from Joe Biden.
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Connecticut Senate Republicans are proposing measures to help stem the tide of drug overdose deaths, particularly from fentanyl.
Senate Republican Leader Kevin Kelly, R-Monroe, told the The Center Square the opioid epidemic is a public health and safety crisis in the state.
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The Los Angeles Association of Deputy District Attorneys (ADDA), a union which represents the vast majority of Los Angeles County prosecutors, voted overwhelmingly to support the recall of District Attorney George Gascon.
Gascon, who received over $2 million in financial backing from left-wing financier George Soros according to The Los Angeles Times, is currently facing a recall petition spurred by backlash to his perceived lenient stance on crime.
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Newly uncovered federal grant documents show that the U.S. Department of Education awarded roughly $2.5 million in taxpayer dollars to a Florida-based education program that trains future teachers and other professionals in, among other things, critical race theory.
The funding came through two grants, one in 2017 and another in 2021. Both grants went to faculty at Florida State University, which has partnered with Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University.
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According to Hans Rosling “Critical thinking is always difficult, but it’s almost impossible when we are scared. There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.” The American Psychological Association indicates the use of fear to influence behavior is effective, especially among women. For fear to be a successful change agent, it must be viewed as a legitimate warning about what will happen if behavior does or does not occur.
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President Joe Biden suggested that Americans may be negatively impacted at the pump as a result of a sanctions package targeting Russia he unveiled Tuesday.
“As we respond, my administration is using every tool at our disposal to protect American businesses and consumers from rising prices at the pump,” the president remarked at the White House on Tuesday. “As I said last week, defending freedom will have costs for us as well and here at home. We need to be honest about that.”
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Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib will deliver a response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Tuesday on behalf of the left-wing Working Families’ Party.
News of her speech, first reported by Politico, comes weeks after Democratic moderates have slowed much of Biden’s domestic agenda, much to the chagrin of their colleagues further to the left. According to a summary of the remarks obtained by the outlet, Tlaib is expected to hammer the moderates responsible for the obstruction, which all but killed Biden’s plan to boost domestic spending and fight climate change.
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Election integrity issues from the 2020 presidential election have yet to be resolved, “so we are not ready for 2024,” Phill Kline, Director of the Amistad Project, warned on Monday.
Kline was asked by “Just the News, Not Noise” TV show cohosts John Solomon and Amanda Head if election integrity issues had been solved after the 2020 election. “No, we still have many of the same problems,” he replied, explaining that this is “because the legislatures have not taken the time to understand the problem.”
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Mortgage applications plummeted to their lowest level in three years as rates continued to edge higher, hitting home buyers and refinancers.
Mortgage applications decreased 13.1% in the week ending Feb. 18, the lowest level since December 2019, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Application Survey. The survey, which measures mortgage loan application volume, found refinancing activity decreased 15% on a weekly basis and was 56% lower than the same period one year prior.
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Democrat-controlled Senate committees have been killing House Republican bills, blocking policy changes on elections, guns, and the environment. More bills on education, abortion, and taxes are set to be heard in committees that have already killed similar Senate bills. However, even if those bills are killed, some of them still have a chance to be included in the budget.
“There’s still a lot of time left, we got the budget document we’re working on. A lot of our funding opportunities are in the budget,” House Majority Leader Terry Kilgore (R-Gate City) told The Virginia Star. “A lot of these bills that we’re talking about are in the budget. We took out RGGI [Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative] in our budget.”
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