Few voters think children should undergo transgender interventions even with parental permission.
That’s according to The Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll of 2,500 registered voters across the U.S., conducted by Noble Predictive Insights. The poll found that 58% of those surveyed are against medical interventions such as gender-changing surgery or puberty blockers for children younger than 18 years old.
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The record number of “family units” attempting to cross into the U.S. at the border hit a record high at 91,000 in August, which immigration policy experts say was entirely predictable due to a Biden administration rule change.
August is now the highest month this year for overall U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) migrant encounters, based on a report of preliminary agency data.
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As public and private institutions resume or consider mask mandates in the wake of a small uptick in COVID-19 hospitalizations and new viral variants, an international research collaborative funded by the National Institutes of Health is facing new scrutiny for how it came to publicly downplay its 17 years of research finding that masks make “little to no difference.”
U.K-based nonprofit Cochrane, often described as the “gold standard” of evidence-based medicine, heavily redacted its internal discussions on how to respond to questions about alleged conflicts of interest that may have shaped its March statement deeming the systematic review’s results “inconclusive” without changing its content.
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A new report found that states with less restrictive marijuana policies have higher incidents of residents driving while high.
The Drug Free America Foundation released a new report showing that states that have legalized or weakened restrictions around high-THC marijuana, either for medical or recreational use, saw 32% more marijuana-impaired driving than states that have not adopted the same policies.
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Last week, a widely read study was published revealing that the “plant-based” drinking straws pushed onto diners by eco-activists may actually be more harmful to both the environment and public health than their plastic counterparts.
According to research published in the journal Food Additives & Contaminants, the “plant-based straws” in question contain “per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS),” which the scientists say are “not necessarily biodegradable and that the use of such straws potentially contributes to human and environmental exposure of PFAS.”
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More than 80% of surveyed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees said that they would experience “personal hardships” if the agency changes its remote work policies to align more with the White House’s push to get government employees back into their offices, E&E News reported.
The survey results indicate that there is a significant disconnect between rank-and-file EPA employees and senior Biden administration officials over the White House’s return-to-office push for federal employees who have enjoyed expanded remote work policies since the pandemic. About 66% of the survey’s respondents said that they would consider leaving the agency if remote work flexibility diminished, and more than 65% of polled EPA employees said that reductions to remote work would negatively impact “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility,” according to a summary of the survey’s results.
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A federal judge blocked an Arkansas law Thursday that requires age verification for social media users.
Arkansas’ Social Media Safety Act, which restricts minors from creating social media accounts without parental consent, was scheduled to take effect Friday. U.S. District Court Judge for the Western District of Arkansas Timothy Brooks, an Obama appointee, sided with NetChoice, a group that includes companies like Google and TikTok, and temporarily blocked the law from being enforced.
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Customs and Border Protection (CBP) authorities flagged 74,904 illegal migrants nationwide for potentially posing risks to national security between October 2022 and August, according to CBP data obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Certain illegal migrants are deemed to be “special interest aliens” because they may have travel patterns that “possibly have a nexus to terrorism” or may come from countries with such ties, according to a 2019 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) fact sheet. Border Patrol agents encountered 25,627 “special interest” illegal migrants in fiscal year 2022, compared to 3,675 encounters in fiscal year 2021, according to internal agency data previously obtained by the DCNF; however, this data doesn’t account for all CBP encounters of special interest aliens.
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The Alaska State Board of Education voted on Thursday to support a regulation banning boys from competing on girls’ high school athletic teams, according to The Associated Press.
The board delayed its initial vote on the issue in July after hearing hours of testimony and receiving 1,400 pages of written comments, according to the AP. The board voted 7-1 to support the measure in a special session, and the proposal now heads to Republican Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor for approval.
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The U.S. Department of Labor issued notice Wednesday of a proposal to increase the threshold for required overtime payments to salaried workers whose weekly or annual wages are considered low income.
If enacted, the proposed rule would guarantee overtime pay for most salaried employees earning less than $1,059 per week, or about $55,000 per year. It also calls for an “escalator” that automatically updates the salary threshold every three years to reflect current earnings data. The Labor Department estimates the rule could apply to about 3.6 million workers nationwide.
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Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and two-term governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson has passed away at age 75.
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Several hospital systems in the United States are slowly bringing back mask mandates as fears over COVID-19 reemerge, according to public websites and reports reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
United Health Services in New York, Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center in California, Auburn Community Hospital in New York, UMass Memorial Health in Boston, Massachusetts and University Hospital in Syracuse, New York, have all reinstated mask mandates in the past several weeks, with some requiring staff only to wear masks and others requiring everyone to wear masks, according to public websites and reports reviewed by the DCNF. Moreover, several doctors are calling for renewed masked mandates, despite evidence suggesting that mandates may not be as effective as their proponents claim.
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Illegal migrant encounters at the southern border increased in August, despite the Biden administration’s claims that it is controlling the situation, according to The Washington Post.
Illegal migrant encounters increased to more than 177,000 in August at the southern border after surging to roughly 132,000 in July, the Post reported. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has repeatedly asserted that the situation is improving, and that the flow of migrants into the country is being stopped.
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In states like California, Colorado, Washington and Arizona, cities this summer are spending millions buying hotels and converting them to shelters for the homeless.
In Los Angeles, there is a ballot initiative in 2024 to require hotels to use vacant rooms to house homeless people besides paying customers. The American Hotel & Lodging Association has objected to the proposal.
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Americans are constantly debating policing and gun control. But to discuss these issues, we have to depend on government crime data. Unfortunately, politics has infected the data handling of agencies such as the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control.
Last year, the CDC became the center of controversy when it removed its estimates of defensive gun uses from its website at the request of gun control organizations. For nearly a decade the CDC cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report showing that the annual number of people using guns to stop crime ranged from about 64,000 to 3 million. The CDC website listed the upper figure at 2.5 million.
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The Biden administration deported fewer than 100 illegal migrant family members after promising to increase penalties at the southern border, CBS News reported Thursday.
The Biden administration announced the program, which is known as Family Expedited Removal Management (FERM), the day before the Trump-era public health order used to expel migrants expired on May 11, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). More than 2,600 migrants have been enrolled in the program, including 1,500 heads of household, while only 80 parents and children have been removed as of last week, according to CBS News, which cited DHS data and a U.S. official who requested anonymity.
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Americans who already own homes find themselves in an enviable position presently, particularly if they have little/no debt on them, or mortgages locked-in at super low rates that dominated the pre-lockdown years. But for the aspirational strivers in society – newlyweds or parents having more children, or the upwardly mobile entrepreneur seeking a better house – the present housing crisis presents a conundrum.
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The oceans director of Greenpeace told USA Today that groups attempting to link offshore wind to whale deaths are part of a “cynical disinformation campaign.”
– Whale carcasses on Martha’s Vineyard fuel speculation about wind turbines, New Bedford Light, June 22, 2023
If you want to know just how far the environmentalist movement has fallen in recent years, the destruction of marine life off the coast of Massachusetts in 2023 provides a disgraceful example. Greenpeace, an organization that not only led the earliest vanguard of the modern environmental movement, but was specifically formed to save the world’s whales, is actively denying what is likely the most egregious massacre of whales by Americans in more than a century.
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Just days after the House and Senate budget committees reached a deal, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin called a General Assembly Special Session for Wednesday, Sept. 6, to pass amendments to the state’s biennial budget.
Budget negotiations have been fraught with difficulty this year, with the Republican-led House and the Democrat-led Senate unable to compromise on the governor’s proposed tax cuts and other big-ticket items like K-12 education.
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Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on Wednesday unveiled a plan to “shut down the FBI,” an institution that has drawn considerable scrutiny from Republicans amid allegations of political bias at the bureau.
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The Biden administration is seeking to hammer out a long-term Ukraine aid agreement with European allies in hopes of both preventing Russia from gaining an edge on the battlefield and hamstringing a future president’s ability to scale back U.S. commitments, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The scheme emerged during sideline talks among Group of Seven leaders at a NATO summit in July, and so far involves negotiations between the U.S. and Ukraine, and between the United Kingdom (U.K.) and Ukraine, according to the WSJ. It’s an attempt, in part, to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin he can simply wait until a new American administration, as several top GOP political contenders have expressed intention to reduce or eliminate U.S. aid that makes up the brunt of Western support.
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Through a special application and lottery process in September, Arlington, Virginia, is opening up the waitlist for its Housing Choice Voucher Program for the first time in more than 10 years.
The process will add 5,000 people to the housing voucher waitlist, likely keeping the list full for years to come, according to the local agency that manages the Arlington Housing Choice Voucher Program.
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A new poll shows that residents in the state of Oregon now want to repeal a law that they previously passed which led to the decriminalization of drug use in the state.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the Emerson College reveals that a clear majority of 56% want a full repeal of the law, while 64% said they would prefer a partial repeal over simply leaving it in place.
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President Joe Biden’s climate agenda is handicapping America’s ability to source key raw materials to build green technologies that the agenda simultaneously requires, a reality that experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation makes America more dependent on China in the long-term.
The Biden administration has blocked several domestic opportunities to mine raw materials for which China is the global leader in extraction, refining or both, according to a 2022 report on electric vehicles (EVs) by the International Energy Agency (IEA). Many of the minerals and materials that Biden’s agenda is restricting domestically are essential components for green technologies that his climate agenda depends upon at the same time, such as electric vehicles and solar panels, according to a different report by the IEA.
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by Greg Piper Governments and private entities are using a small rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations and new viral variants to juice interest in bivalent boosters that only 1 in 6 Americans have taken and to urge a return to routine masking, if not outright mandating new jabs and face coverings. What they aren’t…
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The Internal Revenue Service lost millions of taxpayer records and federal employees don’t know where they have gone.
Lawmakers want answers and accountability for the IRS over those documents, which could be used by nefarious actors to steal Americans’ identity.
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According to a new analysis from the Los Angeles Times, California’s ban on thin plastic bags is a failure, as thicker, “recyclable” replacement bags are largely unable to be recycled in California, and the majority of consumers still opt not to bring their own bags to reuse for shopping.
Additional analyses have also found increases in purchases of plastic trash bags chip away at the plastics savings from single-use plastic bag bans, the pounds of plastic bags per-capita placed in landfills has increased since the ban, and many of the alternatives to single-use plastic bags typically end up being worse for the environment. Nonetheless, a major decrease in grocery bag litter suggests at least a partial success.
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Monday over $800 million in federal funds to improve electric infrastructure and water systems in rural communities, of which Virginia is set to receive nearly $6 million in loans and over $3.8 million in grants.
The Wise County Public Service Authority will receive the lion’s share of Virginia’s USDA dollars in this round of funding. A loan of $1.2 million and a grant of more than $3.5 million will be used to replace more than 29,000 linear feet of water line, install 12 gate valves, and assemble 10 fire hydrants, among other things, to address a current health hazard.
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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is deliberately not releasing the monthly totals of all illegal migrants who wind up getting released into the U.S. after they are encountered by U.S. authorities at the border, a former U.S. immigration judge says.
Andrew Arthur, who served for eight years as an immigration judge at the now-closed immigration court in York, Pennsylvania, told Just the News that DHS does track the total number of migrants released after an encounter with border agents, but making that data available to the public would paint the Biden Administration in a negative light.
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An overwhelming majority of Americans support the idea of tearing up regulations to boost domestic energy production and independence, according to a new poll by Power the Future (PTF) obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Of those surveyed, 90% found at least somewhat convincing the argument that permitting reform would strengthen U.S. energy independence, enhance national security and allow the country to stand tall in the face of geopolitical challenges, with 64% of respondents saying that the idea was extremely or very convincing to them, the PTF poll found. Eighty-eight percent of the poll’s respondents support improvements to the federal permitting system for energy infrastructure projects in order to keep energy affordable and reliable.
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On Monday, the House Freedom Caucus (HFC) struck a blow in the fight for fiscal displume. In a 431-word statement, the conservative House Republicans put Official Washington on notice that when Congress returned in September and took up the seemingly annual short-term spending bill known as a “Continuing Resolution,” the HFC would not vote to fund business as usual. Instead, HFC members would only support a short-term spending bill to keep the government open if it also included several of their key policy priorities – policy priorities that would represent significant shifts in key areas of government policy.
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The U.S. federal program formerly known as food stamps had peak spending levels in 2023 that were more than double pre-pandemic times.
Now, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is set to be reauthorized as it reaches the end of its five-year budgeting cycle.
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A new proposal from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) could require paid time off for women to get abortions and may even require employers to pay for travel related to the procedure, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The EEOC proposed new guidelines in August to enforce the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) that was signed into law in December 2022, with the new guidelines classifying abortion as a related medical condition, according to the proposal from the EEOC. While the rule can’t require employers to pay directly for an abortion, the classification could open the door for employers to be required to give paid time off for an abortion and possibly even for employers to pay for travel expenses if the woman’s state does not permit an abortion, experts told the DCNF.
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After a ruling in its favor from the Supreme Court at the end of July, it appeared that construction on the 303-mile natural gas Mountain Valley Pipeline could continue unhindered in Virginia. Not so.
The Supreme Court decision settled objections to a provision congressional Republicans had slipped into the debt ceiling bill passed in June. The provision directed government agencies to grant the needed permits for the pipeline’s completion. It moved jurisdiction over the pipeline from the Fourth Circuit Court – which had ruled against it in several cases – to the D.C. federal court.
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A new study shows that during the period between 2016 and 2019, the number of “transgender surgeries” in the United States nearly tripled, due in large part to policies enacted by the Obama Administration.
As reported by the New York Post, the number of Americans who pursued surgical operations to “transition” to the opposite gender was around 4,500 in 2016. In 2019, that number rose dramatically to over 13,000. The study revealing these statistics was published on Wednesday by the Journal of the American Medical Association’s (JAMA) Network Open.
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Working as a reporter and now as a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, you have done a lot of “shoe leather” reporting at the U.S. southern border — covering the Mexican drug wars and, in the last years, immigration. Unlike so many immigration reporters who rely on second hand reports, you have personally interviewed at least 1,000 immigrants. Why do you do this and how does what you learn differ from the prevailing narrative?
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Virginia’s Attorney General Jason Miyares issued an opinion this week, arguing that the governor’s model policies comply with federal and state nondiscrimination laws and that “local school boards are required to adopt policies that are consistent with them.”
The opinion comes at the request of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who has been advocating since the release of the latest version of the Virginia Department of Education’s “Model Policies on Ensuring Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for All Students and Parents in Virginia’s Public Schools” for their adoption — to strong resistance from some districts in the commonwealth.
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In order to facilitate electric vehicle (EV) production, the U.S. is seeking to spend taxpayer dollars to develop cobalt supply chains from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a country which is known for high prevalence of unsafe child labor in its mines, many of which are controlled by Chinese interests, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Labor (DOL) are jointly committing $23 million in taxpayer funds to U.S. firms and other mining companies to integrate local Congolese operations and “artisanal” mines into their supply chains, as well as to improve labor standards for miners in the DRC, which are essentially non-existent in most cases, according to the WSJ. Chinese-controlled interests dominate the DRC’s cobalt industry, refining about 75% of the global cobalt supply and manufacturing approximately 70% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries, which are cobalt-intensive products that power EVs.
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The Biden administration issued a final notice Wednesday for the lease of 67 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for offshore energy activity, a figure which represents a 6.4 million acre reduction from the initial proposal, Bloomberg News reported.
The 6.4 million acre reduction amounts to 9% of the initially proposed lease area from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), according to Bloomberg. The reduction follows the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) July decision to settle with environmentalist groups and move to introduce protections for the Rice’s whale species in a nearly 11 million acre swath of the Gulf.
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U.S. Customers and Border Protection’s “nationwide encounters” of illegal migrants have gone up almost 300% since 2020, which was former President Trump’s last fiscal year in office, according to a Just the News review of the latest CBP data.
Nationwide encounters of illegal migrants in FY2022 were 2.7 million, the highest total since FY2020, when nationwide encounters stood at 646,000.
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The South Carolina Supreme Court ruled Wednesday the state’s pro-life law that prohibits most abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected is constitutional and may be enforced.
“The Supreme Court’s ruling marks a historic moment in our state’s history and is the culmination of years of hard work and determination by so many in our state to ensure that the sanctity of life is protected,” said Governor Henry McMaster (R) in a statement. “With this victory, we protect the lives of countless unborn children and reaffirm South Carolina’s place as one of the most pro-life states in America.”
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The Biden administration is expelling a lower percentage of migrants to Mexico compared to the month before Title 42, the Trump-era expulsion order, ended, NBC News reported Wednesday.
An average of roughly 1,000 migrants, which is about 14% of illegal migrants crossing the southern border daily in July, are being returned to Mexico each day since Title 42 ended May 11, according to NBC News. That number is down from roughly 3,000 expulsions, which is a daily average of 32% of illegal migrants, per day in April.
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A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit unanimously reversed a district court’s temporary halt to enforcement of an Alabama law that prohibits minors from obtaining puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries for treating gender dysphoria.
In Eknes-Tucker v. Marshall, the appeals court on Monday rejected the plaintiffs’ arguments, described in the opinion as “a group of transgender minors, their parents, and other concerned individuals” who challenged the constitutionality of Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act.
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The Biden administration is expected to officially approve a massive new offshore wind farm development off of the Rhode Island coast on Tuesday, despite reported economic troubles for other developers and mounting suspicion that East Coast offshore wind developments may be responsible for a surge in whale deaths, The Washington Post reported.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is set to approve the project, which will feature 65 turbines and be 15 nautical miles off the coast of Point Judith, Rhode Island, to become the fourth commercial wind development approved by the Biden administration off of the East Coast, according to the Post. Although government agencies have not identified any causal link between offshore wind construction and harm to whales, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has declared “unusual mortality events” for humpback whales and North Atlantic right whales since 2016 and 2017, respectively, a timeline which generally coincides with the beginning of offshore wind development off of the East Coast, according to NOAA’s website.
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The vast majority of Americans are concerned about the situation at the U.S. border, according to new polling.
The Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll, conducted in conjunction with Noble Predictive Insights, asked 2,500 registered voters, including 1,000 registered Democrats, 1,000 registered Republicans, and 500 independents: “How concerned are you about the situation at the border?”
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Last week, President Joe Biden said during an interview that his administration “already” declared a national emergency over climate change, before starting to clarify that he practically — not actually — had.
CNN called the statement “incorrect” but there is widespread speculation he will declare one soon. Citing anonymous White House sources, The Washington Post reported in July that Biden is considering whether to declare a national climate emergency in the coming weeks.
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The company responsible for a controversial electric vehicle battery plant in Michigan is registered under U.S. law as a foreign entity, filings show.
While the energy company Gotion, Inc. is based out of Fremont, Calif., Foreign Agents Registration Act documents filed by the corporation earlier this year show that it “is wholly owned and controlled” by Gotion High-Tech, which is based out of Hefei, a city in eastern China.
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The House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative lawmakers in the House, outlined Monday what conditions would need to be met for them to vote for a new spending bill.
The group is calling for spending bills to include provisions on border security, the “unprecedented weaponization” of the Justice Department and FBI, and the Pentagon’s “cancerous woke polices.” The lawmakers also oppose “any blank check for Ukraine in any supplemental appropriations bill.”
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The U.S. Customs and Border Protection smartphone app known as “CBP One” is “facilitating illegal immigration” and has become a “boon for alien smugglers” as migrant encounters surge at the border, according to an immigration policy expert.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, noted that the app was initially being developed during the Trump administration as a way to prevent the spread of COVID-19 among workers who were linked to companies doing business at the border. CBP rolled out the app in January 2023 for migrant asylum appointments and expanded it in May.
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The International Chess Federation has barred transgender individuals who are biological men from competing in its women’s only events pending “further analysis.”
The decision will not affect the open play tournaments, CNN reported. The majority of FIDE’s events are open play, while only a handful of events are exclusive to women.
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