The Wall Street Journal on Instagram: “AT&T, Verizon and other telecom giants have left behind a sprawling network of cables covered in toxic lead that stretches across the U.S., under the water, in the soil and on poles overhead, a WSJ investigation found. As the lead degrades, it is ending up in places where Americans live, work and play—from riverbanks across the U.S. to a popular fishing spot to a playground, according to WSJ’s tests of samples conducted by several independent laboratories. The U.S. has spent decades removing lead from well-known sources such as paint, gasoline and pipes. The Journal’s investigation reveals a hidden source of contamination—more than 2,000 lead-covered cables—that hasn’t been addressed by the companies or environmental regulators. Lead levels in sediment and soil at more than four dozen locations tested by the WSJ exceeded safety recommendations set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. For many years, telecom companies have known about the lead-covered cables and the potential risks of exposure to their workers, according to documents and interviews with former employees. They were also aware that lead was potentially leaching into the environment, but haven’t meaningfully acted on potential health risks to the surrounding communities or made efforts to monitor the cables. Doctors say that no amount of contact with lead is safe, particularly for children’s physical and mental development. Risks include behavior and learning problems and damage to the central nervous system in children, as well as kidney, heart and reproductive problems in adults, according to U.S. health agencies. In response to the WSJ’s reporting, AT&T, Verizon and other telecom companies said they don’t believe cables in their ownership are a public health hazard or a major contributor to environmental lead, considering the existence of other sources of lead closer to people’s homes. They said they follow regulatory safety guidelines for workers dealing with lead. The companies and an industry group representing them said they would work together to address any concerns related to lead-sheathed cables. Read more at the link in our bio. 📷: @george_etheredge for @wsjphotos”
Wall Street Journal Opinion on Instagram: “Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard exposed how Ivy League admissions favored not only blacks and Hispanics but also the children of affluent alumni and donors at the expense of others—especially Asian-Americans, writes Allysia Finley. According to a statistical analysis by Harvard, so-called legacy students enjoy a slightly greater admissions advantage than blacks, nearly twice that of Hispanics and 2.5 times that of low-income students. A trio of economists found that for high-school graduates between 2010-15, a legacy or a child of a donor or faculty who ranked in the top 20% of his high-school class was four to six times as likely to be admitted as other students with similar qualifications. Harvard claims its legacy preferences serve a “community-building function” and that scrapping the practice might jeopardize alumni “generous financial support.” In other words, Harvard dangles valuable admissions slots to solicit donations, which alumni might otherwise not be inclined to make because there are more worthy recipients of their philanthropy. Harvard’s system of racial and family preferences punishes middle-class white and Asian-American kids who don’t enjoy an inside track. Legacy preferences hurt the less well-off but aid what really matters to the university: its endowment. Read more at the link in our bio. #WSJOpinion Photo: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty”
Wall Street Journal Opinion on Instagram: “The global-warming industry has declared that July 3 and 4 were the two hottest days on Earth on record. The reported average global temperature on those days was 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, supposedly the hottest in 125,000 years, writes Steve Milloy. One obvious problem with the updated narrative is that there are no satellite data from 125,000 years ago. Calculated estimates of current temperatures can’t be fairly compared with guesses of global temperature from thousands of years ago. A more likely alternative to the 62.6-degree estimate is something around 57.5 degrees. The latter is an average of actual surface temperature measurements taken around the world and processed on a minute-by-minute basis by a website called temperature.global. The numbers have been steady this year, with no spike in July. Moreover, the notion of “average global temperature” is meaningless. Average global temperature is a concept invented by and for the global-warming hypothesis. It is more a political concept than a scientific one. The Earth and its atmosphere is large and diverse, and no place is meaningfully average. It isn’t plausible to characterize Earth’s warming in a single average number, especially when we don’t really know what that number is today, much less from 125,000 years ago. Read more at the link in our bio. #WSJOpinion Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty”
The Federalist on Instagram: ”“At the end of the film, Caviezel addresses the viewers and makes the point that this story isn’t about a movie production or even about Ballard. It’s about the children — lost, invisible children who suffer in the depths of hell every single day.” Tap the link in our story to keep reading 🗞”
Quillette on Instagram: ”“Critical Race Theory is full of unfalsifiable arguments. In White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism—perhaps the most famous CRT book in the world—DiAngelo argues that every single white person is racist. According to her, “racism is unavoidable and … it is impossible to completely escape having developed problematic and racial assumptions and behaviors.” She considers various reasons why white people might deny the fact that they are racist—such as that they “married a person of color,” “have children of color,” or “marched in the sixties”—and summarily rejects them. For DiAngelo, it doesn’t matter what you do or who you choose to associate with. It doesn’t even matter how you treat people of color. If you’re white, you’re racist. Full stop.” Read more at the link in bio.”
Tablet Magazine on Instagram: ”“A great many working artists choose in their art to address ‘public problems.’ One difficulty is that, unlike in a time of civil war, the political issues of our day are not straightforwardly, collectively, diagnosable. If we were in want of consensus on how best to confront our problems—if it were merely solutions that eluded us—our society would be unrecognizable. So fierce are disagreements over our public problems that the simple outlining of a problem, rather than a proposal for how it might be responsibly tackled, strikes many as good politics. Hearing the statement, we feel we are not alone, going mad. Rarely are the politics of an artwork, even when it addresses political matters directly, any more penetrating than the statement of a problem. Rarely does art treat political subjects with the complexity found even in quality journalism. Expecting artists to contend with social scientific data, to carry out the work of think tanks or propose legislation, would be silly. Instead, what political art does proffer is the experience of recognition. For many, finding in art an expression of their political concerns asserted in a voice not their own can be terribly affecting, because it is validating.” Head to the link in bio to read.”
The Washington Times on Instagram: “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis raised $20 million over the first six weeks of his campaign for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. The DeSantis team announced the haul, saying it is “the largest first-quarter filing from any nonincumbent Republican candidate in more than a decade.” The campaign also pointed out the donations surpassed the $18.3 million that former President Donald Trump raised over the opening two quarters of his bid, which he announced in November.”
The Washington Times on Instagram: “According to Gallup, the decline has come amid a deepening partisan mistrust of institutions, with Republicans and Democrats disagreeing sharply on seven institutions. This year, Democrats were more likely by 39 percentage points than Republicans to express trust in the Democrat-controlled presidency and 34 percentage points more likely to trust the public schools. Democrats also voiced “substantially more confidence” in organized labor and newspapers, Gallup noted.”
Fox News on Instagram: ”‘PAINFUL TO WATCH’: @piersmorgan weighs in on debate over Biden’s cognitive abilities, says he wouldn’t trust the president to drive him down the interstate at 18 mph.”
Fox News on Instagram: ”‘DON’T F---ING BULLS--- ME!’: The carefully curated “Uncle Joe” persona is not as it seems, a new report claims. See why “no one is safe” from President Biden’s wrath at the link in bio.”
Newsmax on Instagram: “While Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are popular among Florida voters, the former president leads by 20 points in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, according to a new poll from Florida Atlantic University-Mainstreet PolCom Lab. The poll found that Trump captured the support of 50% of Republican primary voters; DeSantis, governor of Florida, received 30%. “The poll highlights Donald Trump’s quite durable support,” Florida Atlantic University political science professor Kevin Wagner said in the poll analysis. “He does especially well with white working-class voters, who have consistently formed a steadfast base for the former president. This persistent support continues to bolster Trump’s strong and steady position within the party.” For more info on this story, please visit the link in our bio or Newsmax.com.”
The Wall Street Journal on Instagram: “Workers in unexpected jobs are clocking more time from home than before the pandemic. It isn’t just white-collar workers logging in from bedrooms instead of boardrooms. Lower-income, less-educated and service-industry workers spent more time working from home, on average, last year than before the pandemic. The broad-based gains suggest that while much of American life has reverted to prepandemic norms, remote work persists and is subtly reshaping many professions. Americans who worked any time from home spent an average of 5 hours and 25 minutes a day working from their residences in 2022. That is about two hours more than in 2019, the year before Covid-19 sent millions of workers scrambling to set up home offices, and down just 12 minutes from 2021, according to the Labor Department’s American Time Use Survey. Those figures reflect the average amount of time spent working from home among all employed Americans who did some work from home. Work done at home can include one minute checking a company email or a 12-hour shift. It strictly includes work done at home and excludes assignments done at a place such as a coffee shop. About 8.4% of job postings on Indeed.com advertised remote or hybrid work at the end of May, up threefold from the same period in 2019. Still, the share of remote job postings on Indeed fell from a peak of over 10% in February 2022, reflective of a steep decline in tech and other white-collar job openings with high concentrations of remote work. Read more at the link in our bio.”
Washington Examiner on Instagram: “Even as mosquito populations are on the rise, public health experts suggest that the cases of malaria found in both Texas and Florida may not be cause for widespread panic. DETAILS: https://trib.al/yesUow7”
New York Post on Instagram: “European drug-safety regulators are probing popular weight-loss drug #Ozempic after patients reported that the medicine triggered thoughts of #suicide and self-harm. Click the link in bio for more information on the dangerous side effects. 📸: REUTERS”
Wall Street Journal Opinion on Instagram: “Canada has a new idea: Hold the poutine and eat America’s lunch on immigration, writes Elliot Kaufman. Canada will offer flexible work permits with a clear path to permanent residency to America’s H-1B visa holders—skilled legal aliens the U.S. doesn’t seem to want. I know the uncertainty of the H-1B process. After graduating from a U.S. university and working for a year for an employer who wanted to keep me, I had to enter a lottery. A lawyer advised that the odds of success in the H-1B visa lottery were less than 1 in 3. If I lost, I’d get the boot. The typical H-1B visa holder works in technology, where his skills are in demand. He isn’t taking an American job; he is helping keep that job in the U.S. He commands an impressive salary and pays his fair share in taxes—and more, since he likely works in California or New York. The U.S. limits how much such people can contribute by chaining them to single employers and making it cumbersome and dangerous to start their own businesses. These tech workers would otherwise be precisely the kind of risk-takers most likely to start new companies, create wealth and employ others. The U.S. holds itself back. The annual cap for H-1B visas has stayed static for nearly two decades at 85,000, well below demand. Many graduates are deterred from even trying to stick around. It makes you wonder who has a better chance of staying in this country—foreign graduates of U.S. universities or every Tom, Dick and Harry who can make it across the southern border? Read more at the link in our bio. #WSJOpinion Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto”
Breitbart on Instagram: ”🔴🔴 You can always count on the Establishment GOP @gop to sell out conservatives and put Americans last. 🔴🔴 House Republicans have slipped a massive foreign worker expansion into their Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending bill, a blow to the GOP’s promise to protect the nation’s working class from powerful special interests. After markups and hearings, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee approved the DHS spending bill which would blow the lid off blue-collar migration caps to the United States, spurring an influx of foreign visa workers in the labor market with whom working class Americans would have to compete for jobs. “Who represents the working class? This bill suggests it’s not necessarily Republicans,” Jeremy Beck of NumbersUSA @numbersusa told Breitbart News. Specifically, the $91.5 billion funding measure would loosen H-2A visa rules so that more industries related to the agricultural sector could import foreign workers and rewrites the program so that jobs do not have to be seasonal or temporary. The H-2A visa program, as currently implemented, allows U.S. farms to annually outsource an unlimited number of American agricultural jobs to foreign workers, who can extend their stay for up to three years. Fraud and abuse are widespread across the program, with one recent lawsuit accusing a western Michigan farm of trafficking foreign H-2A visa workers into blueberry picking jobs where they were paid slave wages and housed in egregiously poor conditions. Most notoriously, earlier this year, black Americans scored a settlement against two U.S. farms along the Mississippi Delta after they were fired and replaced with foreign H-2A visa workers from South Africa. Beck called the H-2A visa program a “medieval system” that relies on “cheap back-breaking labor while other countries are mechanizing and workers are being paid high wages to man machines.” “This is a way to push off mechanization indefinitely when you have relatively compliant, affordable labor,” he said. “The people who broker these visa programs advertise it as ‘It will save you money.’””
Wall Street Journal Opinion on Instagram: “My country faces a trial. Neither illiberalism from the left nor the right will deliver justice and peace, writes @bernardhenrilevy. However unjustifiable the killing of Nahel Merzouk was, nothing justifies this “mad fury” that, as Hannah Arendt said in “On Violence,” is turning into a “nightmare for us all.” But without minimizing the gravity of what is happening, we have to remember that, from the Watts riots in Los Angeles in August 1965 to the Bristol riots in Britain in the 1980s and the violence in Stuttgart in 2020, France isn’t the first democracy to undergo this sort of trial. Once peace has been restored and the spiral of retaliation broken, we will have to work toward a significant strengthening of mutual tolerance. This cannot come from President Emmanuel Macron alone; to make a difference, it will have to come from all of us. Much more is involved: Working to restore the dialogue between young people and the police. Confronting the problem of mass unemployment in disenfranchised neighborhoods. Repairing the social bond where it has been broken. Keeping our banlieues from remaining ghettos, accursed areas of our urban landscapes born as much of the willfulness of the gangs as of government negligence. If we wish to prevent the desert from encroaching, and the two forms of populism from sweeping the table, these must be France’s priorities in the coming years. Read more at the link in our bio. #WSJOpinion Photo: Pascal Rossignol/Reuters”
The Washington Times on Instagram: “Several FBI whistleblowers told the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that the bureau’s leaders failed to take steps to abide by a U.S. District judge’s temporary injunction against the Biden administration working with social media companies to censor speech. ”
Fox News on Instagram: ”‘ZUCK IS A CUCK’: The Twitter CEO is ramping up his attacks on Mark Zuckerberg... and this time, he’s not holding back. The latest on the tech titans’ rivalry at the link in bio.”
Fox News on Instagram: “CELL SHOCK: The convicted serial child molester was reportedly stabbed 10 times. The update on Nassar’s condition is at the link in bio.”
The Washington Times on Instagram: “Republican attorneys general from 25 states are warning the Biden administration that a proposal to force carmakers to go electric in the name of fighting climate change is unlawful, a precursor for what the GOP officials tell The Washington Times is a looming legal battle.”
The Washington Times on Instagram: “Ben & Jerry’s called on the U.S. to return “stolen indigenous land” to American Indians during its Independence Day message last week. Now a tribe in Vermont is asking the famous ice cream company to personally partake in that effort. Don Stevens, chief of the Nulhegan Band of The Coosuk Abenaki Nation, told the New York Post on Friday that Ben & Jerry’s headquarters in South Burlington is located on Western Abenaki land. If the company is “sincere,” Mr. Stevens told the newspaper, then he “looks forward to any kind of correspondence with the brand to see how they can better benefit Indigenous people.””
Campus Reform on Instagram: “Earlier this year, members of a Kappa Kappa Gamma chapter in Wyoming filed a lawsuit after the sorority admitted a man who identifies as a woman named Artemis Langford into the house. Link in bio. #transgender#conservativepolitics#kappakappagamma”
The Babylon Bee on Instagram: ”“You go through all this trouble to make a film about child sex trafficking, and then you end up making the traffickers out to be the bad guys?”″
July 10, 2023
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