Court: Sex Trafficking Victims Can Sue Facebook

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The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that sex trafficking victims may proceed with their lawsuits alleging Facebook violated state anti-trafficking laws.

While social media platforms like Facebook cannot be held responsible for everything published on their platform, they may be sued for knowingly allowing criminal activity to occur, according to the Texas Supreme Court decision issued Friday afternoon. The high court didn’t rule on whether Facebook was guilty of any of the trafficking victims’ allegations, but said they may pursue those claims in court.

“We do not understand section 230 to ‘create a lawless no-man’s-land on the Internet’ in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking,” wrote Justice James Blacklock who authored the court’s opinion.

“Holding internet platforms accountable for the words or actions of their users is one thing, and the federal precedent uniformly dictates that section 230 does not allow it,” he continued. “Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing.” (Read more from “Court: Sex Trafficking Victims Can Sue Facebook” HERE)

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Congressman Asks for Federal Investigation of Wells Fargo

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Rep. Paul Gosar, a Republican member of Congress from Arizona, is asking federal regulators at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to investigate Wells Fargo for allegedly closing a woman’s bank account for “political reasons.”

He points out that the response to Lauren Witzke when she questioned the bank when her account was without warning and summarily closed was that it also was for “business reasons” pertaining to her Christian beliefs and Christian advocacy.

“It is my understanding that regulated banks cannot discrimination against customers because of the customer’s religious beliefs,” the member of Congress wrote in a letter to Greg Coleman, deputy comptroller for large bank supervision.

Gosar pointed out that under the law, “it is illegal for a regulated bank to close an account on the basis of religion.”

“By closing her account due to her membership in a protected class, Wells Fargo may have engaged in discriminatory lending practice and public accommodations,” he wrote.

(Read more from “Congressman Asks for Federal Investigation of Wells Fargo” HERE)

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Biden DOJ Sues Georgia for ‘Racist’ Voting Law

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Announcing a Justice Department lawsuit against of Georgia over its voting law, Attorney General Merrick Garland charged that state lawmakers intended to prevent black people from voting.

“Recent changes to Georgia’s election laws were enacted with the purpose of denying or abridging the right of black Georgians to vote on account of their race or color, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” Garland said Friday at the Justice Department.

He told reporters it was “the first of many steps we are taking to ensure that all eligible voters can cast a vote, that all lawful votes are counted and that every voter has access to accurate information.”

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp defended the law, insisting it was designed to make it “easy to vote and hard to cheat in Georgia.”

The law requires ID for mail-in as well as in-person voting and expands early voting opportunities. It continues to allow voters to use absentee ballots without an excuse, allows observation of ballot counting and bars ballot harvesting. (Read more from “Biden DOJ Sues Georgia for ‘Racist’ Voting Law” HERE)

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Kamala Harris Doesn’t Actually Visit Border, Says Nothing of Substance, Leaves — It Was All Theater

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Kamala Harris went to the border Friday for the first time as vice president, some three months after President Joe Biden put her in charge of the ongoing (and worsening) migrant crisis. . .

But it doesn’t really matter where the vice president goes, or when. Her trip to El Paso, like her trip to Mexico and Guatemala, is pure theater. As soon as Harris’s plane landed, the show began. Asked on the tarmac why she decided now was the right time to make her first trip to the border as vice president, Harris repeated the awkwardly obvious lie that she has “been to the border many times,” before regurgitating the absurd talking points that she had to go to Central America first to understand the “root causes” of migration.

Things didn’t improve from there. For one thing, Harris didn’t even go to the actual border. She visited a Border Patrol station about nine miles from the Rio Grande, talked to some immigration activists and legal service providers, posed for press photos back at the airport, and departed for Los Angeles before 1 p.m. Even the choice of El Paso was pure theatrics. Instead of going to the epicenter of the crisis, on the other end of Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, Harris reportedly chose El Paso because that’s where the Trump administration first implemented its short-lived family separation policy. Politics, not the harsh realities on the border, was her motivation.

None of this comes as a surprise. By now we’ve come to expect cursory and substance-less border theatrics from this administration, along with reckless policy decisions like ending the “Remain in Mexico” program, which probably did more than anything else to stave off the migrant surge that was unleashed when Biden signed the order. (Read more from “Kamala Harris Doesn’t Actually Visit Border, Says Nothing of Substance, Leaves — It Was All Theater” HERE)

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Report: US Officials Confirm China Deleted Early COVID-19 Data

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The US government confirmed that Chinese researchers erased early COVID-19 data from a shared international database — after an American scientist discovered the quiet removal and sounded the alarm on a potential plot by China to cover up the virus’ origins.

The data, which detailed the genetic makeup of early samples of the virus found in Wuhan, were logged into the Sequence Read Archive last March but were “requested to be withdrawn” by scientists in China that June, the National Institute of Health said Wednesday, according to Bloomberg.

The Chinese scientists who logged the data, and then requested it be removed, said the sequence information had been updated and was being moved to another database and they wanted “to avoid version control issues,” the federal agency said.

“Submitting investigators hold the rights to their data and can request withdrawal of the data,” NIH officials told the outlet. (Read more from “Report: US Officials Confirm China Deleted Early COVID-19 Data” HERE)

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US Government Releases Long-Awaited UFO Report – Here’s What It Says

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. . .A long-awaited US government report on UFO sightings released Friday was largely inconclusive, describing the more than 140 strange objects seen by military personnel across the nation as a threat to flight safety and possibly national security, but adding that there was no “single explanation” for their appearance.

The nine-page public report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said the lack of “high-quality reporting … hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent” of the unidentified objects, but concluded they were likely physical in nature since they were picked up on radar and other sensors.

The report found that 144 UFO sightings had been reported by government sources since 2004 and said it was likely that the objects fall into one of five categories: “airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena,” output from government or industrial “developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’ bin” for objects that have yet to be understood “pending scientific advances” — the closest the report came to addressing the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

Just one reported UFO was identified “with high confidence” as a “large, deflating balloon.” In 18 reported incidents, witnesses described “unusual … movement patterns or flight characteristics” while military pilots reported 11 near-misses with a UFO.

The report also tackled what it described as “[s]ociocultural stigmas” in the armed forces and intelligence community surrounding the reporting of UFOs. (Read more from “US Government Releases Long-Awaited UFO Report – Here’s What It Says” HERE)

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Rudy Giuliani Suspended From Practicing Law in New York State

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Rudy Giuliani, the former personal lawyer for former President Donald Trump who once held one of the legal profession’s most prestigious jobs, was suspended Thursday from practicing law in New York state by an appellate court that found he made “demonstrably false and misleading statements” about the 2020 election.

In a ruling released following disciplinary proceedings, the court concluded that “there is uncontroverted evidence” that Giuliani, the former Manhattan US attorney, “communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump’s failed effort at reelection in 2020.”

Giuliani’s “conduct immediately threatens the public interest and warrants interim suspension from the practice of law,” the court wrote.

The suspension of his law license marks a precipitous fall for the former New York City mayor, once considered an accomplished and formidable force in legal circles. In recent years, however, Giuliani’s reputation has suffered as he has come under criminal investigation by the office he used to lead, the Manhattan US attorney’s office, for possible illegal lobbying. He has denied wrongdoing. (Read more from “Rudy Giuliani Suspended From Practicing Law in New York State” HERE)

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Woke Tales: New ‘Equity’ Charges at Restaurants, Censorship at Large State University

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. . .A Colorado mayor’s ban on the pledge of allegiance has also been defied by citizens who engaged in a patriotic act of civil disobedience. More culture war skirmishes are playing out elsewhere, including in Northern Virginia. Meanwhile, some new stories on my radar: Woke restaurant owners are starting to levy “equity” charges on customers:

The restaurant’s second justification is that many tippers are racist and sexist, according to uncited research. “Studies have also shown that there is inequity and built-in bias in the way consumers give tips,” the statement reads. “In general, Black or Brown servers receive less tips than Caucasian servers. There is gender bias as well.” The final part of the statement says the new policy stems from wider racial injustice and is not a substitute for gratuity. “In the wake of racial injustice protests and the closures due to Covid, now is the time for Broders’ to reimagine its economics and provide fair pay across the company,” the statement reads. “Our Benefits & Equity Charge is applied entirely to employee compensation. This supplement helps us to set a $16 minimum hourly wage for customer facing employees, $18 minimum hourly wage for kitchen employees… Altogether this allows everyone in our company to earn a real living wage. The 15% Benefits & Equity Charge is not a gratuity.” … Out of curiosity, I looked around to see if other restaurants are adding similar charges. I quickly found one. Pizzeria Toro, a North Carolina restaurant, recently announced that it is introducing a 20 percent Living Wage Fee. The pizzeria’s owner, Gray Brooks, said this is the “equitable” thing to do. “In order for the bottom to rise up, the top has to come down a little bit,” said Brooks.

. . .A fraction of a fraction of Americans has enough knowledge of the race-fixated activist lexicon to have even the foggiest idea what this paragraph intends to communicate. It’s nuts that Miranda, who has made his artistic mark on society in a major way, feels compelled to apologize to such people. Out of that bastion of left-wingery, the University of…Oklahoma?

The woke army can spend much of its time pretending none of this stuff is happening, but the reality is obvious and relentless. (Read more from “Woke Tales: New ‘Equity’ Charges at Restaurants, Censorship at Large State University” HERE)

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Biden Complains About ‘Latinx’ Not Getting Vaccinated (VIDEO)

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On Thursday, President Joe Biden made an appearance in Raleigh, North Carolina, to promote vaccinations against the Wuhan coronavirus.

During his remarks, the president discussed issues of “equity” with vaccines, noting that of a team of doctors, they have one working solely on that “equity” issue. This is to do with, in part how, as Biden claimed “it’s awful hard as well to get Latinx vaccinated as well.” The president pronounced it in such a way that “Latinx” rhymes with “Kleenex.” The reason why, he explained, was because “they’re worried they’ll be vaccinated and deported,” suggesting the president was equating the “Latinx” community with illegal immigrants.

Minutes later, the president used the term “Hispanic communities.”

Despite such hesitation from certain demographics, the president shared that “across the nation, people of color accounted for more than half the vaccinations in the last month.” He was met with applause when declaring “the more we close the racial gap in vaccination rates, the more lives we can save.” (Read more from “Biden Complains About ‘Latinx’ Not Getting Vaccinated (VIDEO)” HERE)

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Harris Joins Ranks of Headache-Inducing Vice Presidents

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Vice President Kamala Harris keeps breaking the cardinal rule of a running mate and second-in-command: Do no harm.

Harris is under intense scrutiny, given she is President Joe Biden’s heir apparent, yet, she appears to be repeating the mistakes of her failed 2020 White House campaign, delivering an uneven performance as his No. 2. And it is proving to be a detrimental distraction for Biden’s administration.

Presidential historian and Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley compared Harris to former Vice Presidents Dan Quayle and Spiro Agnew, as “two men with both feet perpetually in their mouths.”

Quayle, for instance, earned a reputation for uttering unintelligible phrases, such as “I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.”

“When they were VPs, joke writers for late-night comedians never were lacking for material. They were made fun of for just getting out of bed in the morning,” Shirley told the Washington Examiner. (Read more from “Harris Joins Ranks of Headache-Inducing Vice Presidents” HERE)

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