Category: Tech Media

Associated Press Paid by Left-Wing Groups to Spin Global Warming Coverage

Virginia Star Staff

The widely-read Associated Press (AP) has received numerous donations from far-left groups, leading to the outlet’s reporting on so-called “global warming” from a clearly left-wing slant akin to the language used by such groups.

As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, the AP received $300,000 in 2022 from the Denmark-based KR Foundation, a nonprofit group which claims to be focused on the “rapid phase-out of fossil fuels,” as well as transforming journalists into “community activists for climate change.” KR further intends to force “U.S. banks out of fossil fuels,” and shut down “some existing [oil and gas] infrastructure.”

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Turkish Smugglers Use Social Media to Help ‘Citizens of Every Country’ Reach the U.S. Border

Virginia Star Staff
Illegal Immigrants

Turkish smugglers appear to be using social media platforms to help migrants from across the globe enter the U.S. illegally through the southern border, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of Telegram and TikTok posts.

The advertisements offer arrangements for travel, visas and transportation directly to the U.S.-Mexico border for migrants in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Border Patrol encounters of migrants crossing the southern border illegally have hit numerous records in recent years, with more than 2.2 million encounters in fiscal year 2022 and more than 2 million in fiscal year 2023, according to federal data.

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Bill Gates’ Foundation Poured Millions into Chinese Government Organizations in 2022

Virginia Star Staff

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid out or approved for future payment roughly $23 million in grants to Chinese government organizations during its 2022 reporting period, tax documents show.

The nonprofit listed grants to over 20 different Chinese entities, including Chinese government agencies, labeled as “foreign government” on its 2022 tax forms. The majority of the grants were for projects related to public health research and analysis, including several projects involving diseases and vaccine delivery.

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Leaked Donor List Confirms Far-Left Donors Backing Media Matters

Virginia Star Staff
Media matters

A leaked list of donors proves that the far-left group Media Matters for America is backed by numerous left-wing megadonors, despite the group claiming to be an independent media watchdog.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, while Media Matters is not required to disclose its donors due to its status as a “charity,” the group may have accidentally revealed its top five biggest donors in a public filing made with the New Mexico Attorney General’s office in November.

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Journalists, Medical Groups, Big Business Emerge as Biden Allies in Social Media Censorship Case

Just the News
Journalists Press

President Joe Biden’s administration is getting some big-name allies as it defends against a landmark free speech infringement lawsuit. Their argument: protecting Americans from indirect censorship by government officials undermines the First Amendment, national security, and public health.

Advocacy groups for journalists, academics, doctors, technologists, and big business, and a powerful senator, made various forms of these arguments in friend-of-the-court briefs to the Supreme Court in the days before and after Christmas. 

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New York Times Sues AI Giants for Alleged Copyright Violation

Virginia Star Staff

The New York Times sued artificial intelligence (AI) giants OpenAI and Microsoft on Wednesday for alleged copyright violation.

OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat are large language models that are trained on data from the internet and generate text based on prompts from users. The tech giants trained these chatbots with millions of the NYT’s copyrighted articles without permission, the outlet alleges in the complaint.

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TikTok Data Reveals Content Favors CCP Goals, According to New Study

Virginia Star Staff
TikTok China

The popular video app TikTok seems to be promoting content to align with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) goals, a Thursday study found.

Hashtag data showed that content sensitive to the CCP is far less popular on TikTok than on its rival, Instagram, accordingto the study by Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University. A comparison between Instagram and TikTok showed that the number of posts about non-sensitive hashtags in the realm of politics and pop-culture was fairly similar based on how many users each platform has, but the number of posts on hashtags for topics sensitive to the CCP was substantially higher on Instagram than on TikTok.

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University with Gender Clinic Funds Study to See if Puberty Blockers Causes ‘Lasting’ Brain Changes for Kids

Virginia Star Staff

The University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) approved a $600,000 grant for a study hypothesizing that puberty blockers used on children will lead to “lasting changes” in the brain, according to documents obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

In 2018, an American Academy of Pediatrics committee, which included a member of UW’s faculty, released a policy on transgender hormone treatments claiming that the effects of puberty blockers are reversible, a claim that has since been widely echoed by trans advocates. The university’s gender clinic already offers hormones to minors, but new documents obtained by the DCNF reveal that the study, which was approved for a $600,000 grant in July, hypothesizes that “short-term” transgender treatments will have “lasting changes” on the brain, internal organs and behavior.

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Director of Internet Free Speech Nonprofit Says EU is Angling to Make X Purchase ‘Middleware’

Peter D'Abrosca
Elon Musk X EU

Mike Benz, the director of a nonprofit that advocates for free speech, is sounding the alarm on the European Union’s investigation into X, formerly known as Twitter, for what it claims are breakages of the multinational conglomerate’s hate speech laws. 

Benz, an attorney and the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), says that the EU’s plan is to force X into implementing a mandatory “disinformation compliance” service like NewsGuard. Such products have been termed “middleware.” 

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Research Finds COVID mRNA Vaccine Makes ‘Pfrankenstein’ Proteins, but Feds Seem Unfazed

Just the News

Three years after federal regulators granted emergency use authorization to COVID-19 mRNA vaccines for older teens and adults, mainstream scientific research is confirming suppressed warnings from two years ago that the novel technology has a problem with “translation fidelity.”

Translation: it tends to make a bunch of wacky “off-target” proteins whose effects and severity are unknown.

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YoungkinWatch: Governor Promises Bills Banning TikTok for Minors, Restricting Social Media Data Gathering for Kids

Tom Pappert
Gov. Glenn Youngkin

Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) said in a Friday news conference that he will introduce legislation to the Virginia General Assembly to ban TikTok for minors, restrict other social media from gathering data about children, and expand state-funded mental health initiatives in public schools and colleges.

Youngkin revealed four new legislative efforts he intends to champion during the upcoming legislative session, after first calling for an additional $500 million to address youth mental health in a Friday press release.

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Former New York Times Editorial Page Editor Writes Scathing Essay About Newspaper’s Culture and His Exit

Just the News
James Bennet

James Bennet, the former editorial page editor of The New York Times, has written a scathing column about his departure from the paper and criticizing the Times for what he sees as a shift away from its previous journalistic principles.

Bennet gave his version of the story of his departure in a 16,000-word article in The Economist, where he is currently a columnist. In the article, titled “When the New York Times lost its way,” he describes what he sees as the Times’ shift from traditional journalistic principles, according to The Daily Wire, and “courage,” to an “illiberal” philosophy of the news.

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Pew Research: Many Teens Use Social Media ‘Almost Constantly’

Virginia Star Staff

A new study from Pew Research Center reveals that 1 in 5 American teenagers are on social media websites “almost constantly.”

As reported by Axios, the Pew survey, an online poll with a sample size of 1,453 kids in the 13-17 age range, recorded a significant rise in social media use among that particular age group compared to a previous survey in 2014 and 2015.

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Chinese Drug Dealers Use Risqué Ads to Sell Narcotics, Fentanyl Ingredients on U.S. Social Media

Virginia Star Staff

Accounts claiming to represent Chinese drug manufacturers are using provocative images of women to advertise narcotics and fentanyl precursors on U.S. social media, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of hundreds of English and Chinese-language social media posts.

The DCNF identified several dozen LinkedIn accounts claiming to be saleswomen representing China-based manufacturers primarily located near Beijing or Wuhan. The accounts often featured images of women and teenage girls in advertisements for a wide variety of controlled substances including 4-piperidone, which is used to manufacture fentanyl.

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Commentary: Biden Administration Moves to Empower Government to Take Intellectual Property, Inventions, and Medicines

Virginia Star Staff

Inventors figure out how to create something that is better than what existed before, and then protect their rights to the idea/creation with a patent.  This is a fundamental principle of private property, one which our nation’s entire economic system is based.

The U.S. Constitution enshrines this basic idea into the DNA of our nation as Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 known as the Patent and Copyright Clause plainly states, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

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The Senate’s ‘No Section 230 Immunity for AI Act’ Would Exclude Artificial Intelligence Developers’ Liability Under Section 230

Virginia Star Staff

The Senate could soon take up a bipartisan bill defining the liability protections enjoyed by artificial intelligence-generated content, which could lead to considerable impacts on online speech and the development of AI technology.

Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Democratic Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal in June introduced the No Section 230 Immunity for AI Act, which would clarify that liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act do not apply to text and visual content created by artificial intelligence. Hawley may attempt to hold a vote on the bill in the coming weeks, his office told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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Commentary: The Liberal Media’s Desperate New ‘Trump Will Be a Dictator’ Narrative

Virginia Star Staff

The leftwing media recently got its orders from the Biden campaign on a new narrative to smear Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential campaign. Because their previous narrative of Trump colluding with Russia and Vladimir Putin has been discredited, they are promoting anew one: if Donald Trump wins the November 2024 presidential election, he will become a dictator similar to Hitler or Napoleon.

This fear-mongering theme appeared in similar articles within days of each other in The Washington Post and The New York Times. The Atlantic is promoting the theme in a January/February special issue with 16 essays where liberal elite authors warn how a dictatorial Trump presidency in 2025 would threaten America and the world on issues ranging from abortion, NATO, climate, the courts, immigration, etc. The Atlantic has posted online 16 of these anti-Trump essays and plans to add more.

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Commentary: A Way to Protect Kids Online That Passes Constitutional Muster

Virginia Star Staff

A bipartisan group of senators is about to take Big Tech CEOs to task on Jan. 31, 2024, by having them publicly address their failures to protect kids online. And the CEOs need to! The harms social media poses to children are well documented and, at this point, indisputable—even by the companies themselves.

YouTube admits that it hosts harmful content for children and even calls for legislation to address the problems it helps create. YouTube’s CEO indicated as much when he published his “principled approach for children and teenagers.”

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Kentucky U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie Says It Is ‘Economically Illiterate and Morally Deficient’ to Send More Money to Ukraine on Episode 45 of ‘Tucker on X’

Kaitlin Housler

In episode 45 of his newest production, “Tucker on X,” host Tucker Carlson interviewed U.S. Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY-04) who is against sending more aid money to Ukraine in the country’s fight against Russia.

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Prestigious Science Journals Confirm Censored Views: Masks at Best Don’t Reduce COVID Infection

Just the News

The best-case scenario for one of the most common COVID-19 interventions may be that it has no measurable effect on infection, recent studies suggest.

A systematic review of studies of mask mandates for children, published Saturday in the British Medical Journal’s Archives of Disease in Childhood, found “no association” with infection or transmission in 16 of the 22 observational studies and “critical” or “serious” risk of bias in the six countervailing studies. It got the attention of Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter.

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Michael Shellenberger Reveals Why Global Elites are ‘Against Humanity’ on Episode 44 of ‘Tucker on X’

Kaitlin Housler

In episode 44 of his newest production, “Tucker on X,” host Tucker Carlson interviewed author Michael Shellenberger on recent comments from President Joe Biden’s climate czar John Kerry, who called for the immediate global end of burning coal.

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Commentary: Forget the Media Doomsaying — the GOP Will Be Ok

Virginia Star Staff
Congress Building

If you follow politics and didn’t know that voters in Charleston, South Carolina, elected the city’s first Republican mayor in almost a century and a half, you can be forgiven. A lot of people missed it because, while it was covered, the legacy media failed, unsurprisingly, to recognize it for the landmark it is.

The scant attention paid to the outcome of that race compared to, say, the GOP’s failure to take over the Virginia Legislature is a discordant note that throws off an otherwise harmonious national narrative that has the Republican Party hopelessly divided and unable to win elections now that Bidenomics is working.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene Reveals What Made Her the ‘Biggest Threat to Republicans’ on Episode 43 of ‘Tucker on X’

Kaitlin Housler

In episode 43 of his newest production, “Tucker on X,” host Tucker Carlson interviewed U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA-14) about her outsider approach to handling her job in Congress.

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Tennessee U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett Discusses the Government’s Coverup of UAPs on Episode 42 of ‘Tucker on X’

Kaitlin Housler

In episode 42 of his newest production, “Tucker on X,” host Tucker Carlson interviewed Tennessee U.S. Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN-02) about the decades-long government coverup of UFOs, also known as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).

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‘Ireland is a Powderkeg:’ Steve Bannon Reacts to Dublin Riots in Episode 41 of ‘Tucker on X’

Kaitlin Housler
Tucker on X ep. 41

In episode 41 of his newest production, “Tucker on X,” host Tucker Carlson interviewed Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon on the riots unfolding in Dublin, Ireland following a recent stabbing incident that took place outside of a school.

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Commentary: Fentanyl Letters Show How Partisan Journalists Operate

Virginia Star Staff

The true danger to American democracy comes from the radical left. Just don’t expect to hear it from the mainstream media.

On Nov. 9, Americans learned that law enforcement intercepted a handful of fentanyl-laced letters intended for election offices across at least five states, including Georgia’s Fulton County. While alarming, fentanyl isn’t like anthrax – briefly touching it isn’t deadly. But ingesting it is – just ask the families of the 74,000 Americans who died from fentanyl in 2022 alone, much of it produced in China and smuggled in through President Biden’s wide-open southern border.

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Tucker Carlson Travels to Spain for Episode 40 of ‘Tucker on X’

Kaitlin Housler

In episode 40 of his newest production, “Tucker on X,” host Tucker Carlson traveled to Madrid, Spain, to attend a protest and sit down with the leader of the Vox political party, Santiago Abascal, described by the former Fox News anchor as “honest, principled, and completely unafraid.”

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Videos of People Sympathizing with Bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ Go Viral

Virginia Star Staff

Videos showing people reading Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter justifying the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon went viral Wednesday evening, prompting a media outlet to delete its translation of the document.

The Guardian deleted the letter Wednesday after it had been active on the site since being published on Nov. 24, 2002, directing readers to an article from that date about the letter. Videos on the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok showed users reading the letter, Rolling Stone reported.

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Meta Is Allowing Political Ads That Question the 2020 Election — But Censoring Doubts About 2024

Virginia Star Staff

Meta’s social media platforms now allow political ads questioning the 2020 presidential election, but will censor ads questioning the 2024 election, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

The company permits fraud claims about past elections but not current or future ones, according to its updated policy. Meta rolled out the policy after blocking certain Republicans during the 2022 midterm election primaries from releasing ads with assertions about the 2020 election being fraudulent, according to the WSJ.

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Commentary: NewsGuard Is a Surrogate the Feds Pay to Keep Watch on the Internet and Be a Judge of the Truth

RealClearWire

In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool. 

In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” – beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser – “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.

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Tucker Carlson Sits Down with Man Sentenced to Federal Prison for Sharing Hillary Clinton Memes

Kaitlin Housler

In episode 38 of his newest production, “Tucker on X,” host Tucker Carlson interviewed Douglass Mackey, the man sentenced to seven months in prison for sharing deceptive, anti-Hillary Clinton social media posts during the 2016 presidential election.

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Meta to Start Labeling Political Ads with AI-Generated Images Ahead of 2024 Election

Just the News

Facebook and Instagram will require political ads on their platforms to disclose if they were created with artificial intelligence so they can be labeled as such, Meta, the parent company of the social media giants, announced Wednesday.

The new policy, which will take effect worldwide Jan. 1, will place labels acknowledging the use of artificial intelligence on users’ screens when they click on the advertisements, according to The Associated Press. 

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Glenn Greenwald Discusses War in Ukraine, 2024 Presidential Election on Episode 37 of ‘Tucker on X’

Kaitlin Housler

In episode 37 of his newest production, “Tucker on X,” host Tucker Carlson interviewed Glenn Greenwald, host of “System Update” on Rumble, on the current war in Ukraine and the 2024 presidential election.

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Poll: Most Americans Believe A.I. Will Lead to More Misinformation in 2024

Virginia Star Staff

A new poll released on Friday shows that a majority of Americans believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will lead to more misinformation being spread on the Internet during the 2024 presidential election.

According to The Hill, the poll from AP-NORC and the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy found that 58% of Americans believe AI will lead to an increase in election misinformation. Among respondents who said they have “heard a lot or some about AI” 61% believed in the threat of more misinformation.

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Nigel Farage on Episode 35 of ‘Tucker on X:’ America is ‘Not Immune’ to ‘Massive Problem’ that Comes with Accepting Anti-Western Refugees

Kaitlin Housler

In episode 35 of his newest production, “Tucker on X,” host Tucker Carlson interviewed the head of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, on the effects “anti-Western” refugees bring to Western countries amid the current conflict in the Middle East.

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Commentary: The Internal Revenue Service’s AI Announcement Is Really About Taxpayer Intimidation

RealClearWire

The IRS commissioner announced last month that the agency will now deploy artificial intelligence in pursuit of “wealthy tax cheats” who are using partnership structures to pay “little to no tax.” But the announcement’s logic doesn’t pass the smell test — the real intent seems to be to intimidate successful small businesspeople away from using legal tax minimization strategies.

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Commentary: Archaeology’s Absurd Woke Trend to Obtain Consent from Someone Who’s Dead to Study Their Bones

Virginia Star Staff

There’s an eerie new theory filling academia’s ivied walls – the living and the dead are the same. This latest argument against the use of human skeletal remains in research and teaching, which I’ve come across in person (from students who attended my talk at Brown University, an elite Ivy League college), proposes that the only ethical treatment of skeletal collections is to treat the dead like the living. I’ve seen this same argument, which is applied to prehistoric and historic anthropological collections used to reconstruct past peoples’ lives, in conference programs and on museum websites.

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Boston Children’s Hospital Received $1.4 Million in Taxpayer Dollars for ‘Gender Transition Services’

Virginia Star Staff

Boston Children’s Hospital was reimbursed $1.4 million by the state of Massachusetts for its “gender transition services” from January 2015 to May 2023, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation through a public records request.

Boston Children’s Hospital, which claims to have created the first pediatric and adolescent transgender health program in the country, was hit with heavy backlash in 2022 for performing gender transition surgeries on minors, including vaginoplasty, phalloplasty, chest reconstruction and breast augmentation, according to a since-deleted website. The Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) of Massachusetts told the DCNF on July 25 that it paid the hospital over $1.4 million for “Gender transition services (i.e., physician’s services, inpatient and outpatient, hospital services, surgical services, prescribed drugs, therapies, etc.)” from January 1, 2015, to May 1, 2023.

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Americans’ Distrust of Corporate Media Climbs to Record High: Poll

Virginia Star Staff

Distrust in corporate media among Americans has soared to a record high, according to polling published by Gallup.

The amount of Americans who trust legacy media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to cover the news “fully, accurately and fairly” plunged to 32%, tied for the lowest since 2016, according to the poll. The highest ever percentage of Americans — 39%— state they do not trust the media whatsoever, and this figure has consistently risen since 2018.

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Government-Funded News Outlet Orders Staff Not to Call Hamas ‘Terrorists’

Virginia Star Staff

Government-funded news outlet Voice of America (VOA) management has ordered its employees not to refer to Hamas as “terrorists” unless they are quoting statements, National Review reported.

VOA’s guidance originally distributed on Oct. 10 suggests that reporters and editors are allowed to refer to Hamas’ Oct. 7 assault on Israel as terrorist attacks or acts of terror but informed staff they should “avoid calling Hamas and its members terrorists, except in quotes,” according to emails National Review obtained. VOA’s associate editor responsible for news standards conveyed the publication’s guidelines regarding reporting on the initial attacks and the subsequent Israeli retaliation in an email to employees on Friday.

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‘Tucker on X’ Episode 33: Col. Douglas Macgregor Says, ‘Something as Bad or Potentially Even Worse Than 9/11 Could Happen Here’

Kaitlin Housler

In episode 33 of his newest production, “Tucker on X,” host Tucker Carlson interviewed U.S. Army Colonel Retired Combat Veteran Douglas Macgregor on whether the U.S. can engage in war with Iran.

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Supreme Court Takes Up Landmark Government Censorship Case

Virginia Star Staff

The Supreme Court on Friday took up Missouri v. Biden, the free speech case challenging the Biden administration’s efforts to censor content on social media, while issuing a pause on a preliminary injunction granted by a lower court.

Republican attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana sued the Biden administration over its communications with social media companies related to the suppression of online speech, arguing it violated the First Amendment. District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty issued an injunction in July blocking certain parts of President Joe Biden’s administration from colluding with social media platforms to censor content online. The Supreme Court paused the injunction, but agreed to take up the case, according to the court order.

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