Day: September 10, 2023

Major Environmental Group Is at War with Itself over Race, ‘Equity’

Virginia Star Staff

The Sierra Club has experienced major infighting recently after major layoffs and changes left minority staffers feeling snubbed, The Washington Post reported.

Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club since November 2022, let go more than two dozen workers, many of whom were people of color, in April and May of 2023 as part of a “reconstruction” effort and relabeled the nonprofit’s “People, Culture, and Equity Department” to just be the “People Department,” according to the Post. Employees at the Sierra Club protested these changes and wrote a letter on Thursday through the Progressive Workers Union, the union for the nonprofit, alleging that the organization’s moves were contrary to its stated goal of diversity.

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Gov. Youngkin Pardons Virginia Dad Who Protested after Daughter’s Sexual Assault by Transgender Student

Just the News

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin on Sunday pardoned Scott Smith, a father who was convicted for protesting the Loudoun County School Board after his daughter was brutally sexually assaulted at school by a boy with a skirt in the girl’s bathroom.

“Scott Smith is a dedicated parent who’s faced unwarranted charges in his pursuit to protect his daughter,” Youngkin said when issuing his absolute pardon to Smith. “Scott’s commitment to his child despite the immense obstacles is emblematic of the parental empowerment movement that started in Virginia.”

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Schools and Universities Nationwide Are Bringing Back Mask Mandates and Shutdowns

Virginia Star Staff

Schools and universities around the U.S. are bringing back mask mandates and shutdowns as COVID-19 numbers rise, according to public records reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Runge Independent School District (ISD) in Texas, Magoffin County (MC) Schools in Kentucky, Lee County School District in Kentucky and Rosemary Hills Elementary School in Maryland are all reimplementing some form of COVID-19 measures, according to public records reviewed by the DCNF. Some universities are reimplementing mask mandates, such as Dillard University in Louisiana and Morris Brown College (MBC) in Georgia, though MBC backtracked on its mandate.

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Chicago Mayor Tells Residents to Make ‘Sacrifices’ to Benefit Illegal Immigrants

Virginia Star Staff

Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago called on city residents to make “sacrifices” to address the thousands of migrants in the city who need shelter.

Johnson announced plans to move 1,600 migrants currently being sheltered in police stations to tent cities, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Residents protested and took legal action to prevent Chicago from housing migrants in a closed-down high school and two other locations on the South Side of the city in May, ABC7Chicago.com reported.

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Elon Musk’s X Sues California over Alleged First Amendment Violations

Virginia Star Staff

Elon Musk’s X Corp. sued California to block a law requiring social media companies to publish their content moderation policies, alleging it violates the First Amendment and coerces censorship.

X, formerly known as Twitter, asserted that California’s Assembly Bill 587 infringes upon its freedom of speech under the First Amendment and California’s state constitution, according to court documents. The law mandates social media companies release reports on how they moderate issues including hate speech, extremism, disinformation and misinformation.

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Amazon Web Services Plans to Build Two Data Centers in Virginia

The Center Square

After announcing in January that it was going to invest $35 billion over the next 17 years in bringing more data centers to Virginia, Amazon Web Services, the cloud services arm of Amazon, has chosen to invest about one-third of those funds in Louisa County to build two data centers by 2040. 

Northern Virginia – and Loudoun County in particular – is the data center capital of the world, with nearly 300 centers in the region and roughly 70% of the world’s internet traffic routing through Loudoun, according to news source Governing. Data centers house servers, data storage drives, network equipment and other IT infrastructure to store companies’ digital data. They play a vital role in cloud computing and artificial intelligence, necessitating increased storage capacity.

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Commentary: The Rise of Unapologetically Partisan News Reporting

Virginia Star Staff

The Huffington Post was envisioned from its inception as a progressive answer to conservative talk radio and various right-leaning voices being amplified by new technology. Most specifically, it was designed as a counterpoint to the Drudge Report, a widely read and highly profitable website with populist sensibilities. The players involved in planning the new venture belonged to a select clique of Hollywood liberals and political activists in Arianna Huffington’s orbit.

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Mexican Supreme Court Decriminalizes Abortion Nationwide

Just the News

The Mexican Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a sweeping ruling that decriminalized abortion nationwide, determining that to attach penalties to the procedure “violate[d] the human rights of women.”

Wednesday’s decision follows a 2021 ruling from the court that permitted state officials to regulate the procedure, according to the New York Times.

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Commentary: Parents Must Teach Their Kids Discernment

Virginia Star Staff

Entertainment today is extremely accessible. We can watch videos and read articles whenever we want. Each of these pieces of media, however, has its own ideology. But often, we do not even notice this ideology that is being presented to us, or the underlying assumptions of the creators.

As Frances Schaeffer explained: “The results of [people’s] thought world flow through their fingers or from their tongues into the external world. This is true of Michelangelo’s chisel, and it is true of the dictator’s sword.” Everything people create is the product of their worldview, so being able to recognize the underlying beliefs in media and entertainment is an important skill.

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‘Wake Up’: Congressman Warns of ‘Genocide,’ ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Against Christians in Armenia

Virginia Star Staff

Republican New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith called on his colleagues Wednesday to recognize that 120,000 Armenian Christians living in Nagorno-Karabakh are facing extinction.

“Delay is denial,” Smith, who chaired the emergency congressional hearing on Nagorno-Karabakh as co-chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, said in a statement to The Daily Signal. “The Biden Administration must say immediately that this is genocide—and stop it.”

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