Author: Grace Thompson

Washington On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will decide whether to overturn a Texas statute that forbids minors from accessing pornographic material on the internet. A case brought by the Free expression Coalition, a group representing the pornography industry, claims that the 2023 law, which aims to limit children' access to sexual material, infringes upon the right to free expression of adults who choose to see the same content. The law mandates that pornographic websites check the ages of all users, typically by looking at official documents like driver's licenses. The opponents, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, claim that the statute restricts adults' freedom of speech in a content-based manner, which is a violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution. They ...

Early Wednesday marked the start of a new year of lunar exploration as two robotic landers and a tiny rover set out for the moon. Two independent, uncrewed missions to the lunar surface were launched by a SpaceX rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:11 a.m. ET. One of those projects, created by Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based business, intends to place a lander named Blue Ghost in the Martian Crisium, a 340-mile-wide basin on the moon believed to be the location of an old asteroid impact. The other project, which is being operated by iSpace, a Japanese business, uses a mini rover named Tenacious and a lander named Resilience. Their intended landing spot is in the far north of the moon, in an area known as Mare Frigoris. This was the second time iSpace had tried to land a...

Next week, President-elect Donald Trump will return to the White House in the face of a more difficult economic environment than when he was initially inaugurated in in 2017, beginning with the inflation threat. Data on consumer price increases for December was scheduled to be released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday. While the so-called core rate, which takes into account more volatile factors, was predicted to have stayed the same, forecasters polled by Dow Jones predicted that inflation had reaccelerated in December. The information would provide more proof that efforts to lower inflation have stopped. The BLS announced on Friday that the nation added 256,000 jobs last month, which was much higher than anticipated and suggests that U.S. economic growth is not just stable ...

Rebuilding America's second-largest city is a significant new challenge that the people attempting to plan a successful first half of Trump's second term must face and embrace just days before Washington formally returns to the Trump era. The fact that the best-laid plans of a new (or just re-elected) president have all fallen apart quite fast due to unanticipated catastrophes is a defining characteristic of every presidency I've discussed. Presidencies rarely go as planned, whether it's due to a pandemic, a hurricane that almost completely destroys a major city, a terrorist attack in the country's largest city, an oil leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, an economic collapse, or, more recently, uncontrolled fires encroaching on a vast urban population. Donald Trump is frequently blam...

A Philadelphia sports fan will never be permitted to attend another Eagles home game after launching into a sexist tirade against a female Green Bay Packers fan in a widely shared video. During Sunday night's Eagles triumph at Lincoln Financial Field in South Philadelphia in the NFC wild-card round, the unpleasant scene was caught on mobile phone footage. According to a person with knowledge of the situation, the "individual will not be permitted to attend any future events at Lincoln Financial Field," In the widely circulated video, a man wearing an Eagles jacket was seen stooping, covering his mouth with his hands, and verbally assaulting the female fan in the row ahead of him. He did not seem to get a response from that admirer. According to NBC Philadelphia, she is Ally Keller, who wen...

Following a visit to his family's hometown of Jacksonville, North Carolina, T.D. Gribble last saw his parents on Thursday. He added that everyone he had seen there, including the jeweler and his former karate instructor, had advised him to embrace his parents. When he got back to their Greenville home, he did just that, kissing his father's forehead and embracing his mother. By phone on Tuesday, 51-year-old Gribble stated, "The next time I saw them was Friday afternoon around 2 p.m., after they had been murdered." Pitt County Sheriff Paula Dance told reporters Monday that after arriving at his parents' house, Griffin detained the alleged shooter, a real estate broker, at gunpoint until authorities arrived. The suspect is accused of carrying out a string of shootings in Greenville last week...

On Wednesday, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi will begin two days of confirmation hearings, marking the start of senators' public discussions over President-elect Donald Trump's selection to head the Justice Department. As the first woman to hold the position, Bondi served as Florida's top law enforcement official for eight years, focusing on topics such as preventing drug abuse, fighting human trafficking, and opposing the Obama administration's centerpiece health care plan. Having been a member of Trump's opioid and drug misuse task force and later joined the defense team during his first Senate impeachment trial, she has also been a longtime ally of the president. Additionally, Bondi made a false claim that Trump "won Pennsylvania" in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 presid...

On Tuesday, a Dallas congressman and his boyfriend got engaged at the Texas State Capitol in Austin. After being sworn in on the opening day of the legislative session, state representative Venton Jones, a Democrat and one of the first out Black homosexual men ever elected to the Texas Legislature in November 2022, proposed to his partner, Gregory Scott Jr. During Tuesday's state House recess, Jones proposed to Scott and proposed marriage. According to a video posted on social media by WFAA-TV reporter Jason Whitely, Scott answered yes and brushed away his emotions as Jones presented him with an engagement ring. I made a new oath today to serve my community with love, courage, and conviction. In a statement to local news agencies, Jones stated, "I made a promise to the person who has stood...

In the first confirmation hearing for President-elect Donald Trump's prospective Cabinet nominees on Tuesday, Pete Hegseth positioned himself as a "change agent" to lead the Defense Department, but Democrats criticized him as unsuited for any military leadership position. On Capitol Hill, the Senate Armed Services Committee has generally been one of the least partisan. But on Tuesday, as Democrats questioned Hegseth about his remarks toward women in the military and claims of sexual misbehavior and excessive drinking, its members clearly divided along party lines. Hegseth, a former Fox News personality and combat veteran in the Army, was hailed by Republicans as a crucial disruptor of the vast military bureaucracy. The new chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss...

Following his performance at Tuesday's confirmation hearing, Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, who had been viewed as a major Republican critic of Pete Hegseth's candidacy to head the Defense Department, declared her support for him. Pete Hegseth was chosen by our next commander in chief to fill this position, and following our discussions, listening to Iowans, and carrying out my duties as a US Senator, I will back President Trump's choice for Secretary of Defense," Ernst said in a statement. As a member of the Armed Services Committee, she continued, "I will work with Pete to build the most deadly fighting force and hold him accountable for his pledges to audit the Pentagon, provide women with combat opportunities while upholding high standards, and appoint a senior official to address and preven...