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China Emits More Carbon In 2 Weeks Than Australia Does In One Year: Think Tank

China emits more carbon dioxide in 16 days than Australia does in one year, according to new research published by a free-market think tank.

Australia’s net-zero emissions target would therefore be cancelled out by China in just two weeks, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) said in a press release on Wednesday.

According to the report, China operates 57 times as many coal-fired power stations as Australia. This figure is set to increase with China currently constructing 92 coal-fired power stations.

The report also added that while Australia’s carbon emissions per capita have declined by 15.4 percent since 2004, China’s emissions per capita over the same period have increased by 83.5 percent.

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COVID Aid Bill Would Pay Federal Employees $1400 a Week if Kids Are Out of School

With thousands of schools still closed or partially closed across the country, millions of American families are struggling to find work-life balance while educating their children at home.

One part of American society may be receiving their own special COVID-19 relief package, however.

In Forbes, Adam Andrzejewski writes that a provision in the $1.9 trillion House bill—“the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021”—would allow federal employees to make up to $1,400 a week without working.

Buried on pages 305-306 of the legislation, the provision creates a $570 million fund for disbursements to federal employees who are not working because they are caring for others because of the coronavirus.

“Among those eligible are those who are ‘unable to work’ because they are caring for school-aged children not physically in school full time due to Covid-19 precautions,” writes Andrzejewski, the CEO and founder of OpenTheBooks.

Under the legislation, full-time federal employees are eligible for 600 hours in paid leave through September, receiving up to $35 an hour.

“That’s 15 weeks for a 40-hour employee,” he writes.

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Florida city fines woman more than $100K for parking incorrectly in her own driveway

Sandy Martinez and the Institute for Justice announced the lawsuit in a news conference Thursday, notifying the public that Martinez had been slapped with over a year’s worth of daily fines for the minor offense of parking her car partially on her front lawn in violation of town codes, WPTV-TV reported.

According to Section 6-30 of the Code of Ordinances of the Town of Lantana, “all off-street parking spaces, including driveways but not including parking spaces located in swale areas as permitted by section 17-34, shall be asphalt, concrete or block and shall be hard surfaced and in good repair in compliance with town codes.”

Martinez reportedly lives with her mother, her sister, and her three children — two of whom are now adults. Given the fact that, in total, the household contains four drivers, it is often the case that four vehicles need to be squeezed into the driveway as best they can. That predicament resulted in one of the four vehicles being parked partially on grass.

Martinez claimed that after she was first cited for the violation, she called the city, but an inspector never came to her residence. Then, more than a year later, she learned that she had been fined $250 a day for 407 days for the offense, totaling $101,750. On top of that, the city fined Martinez $65,000 more in fines for cosmetic violations, such as cracks in the driveway and a broken fence.

“I’ve been living here for 17 years now and I’m being fined over $160,000 for parking on my own property,” Martinez said during the press conference.

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So Long as You Carry a Cellphone, the Government Can Track You

Cell phones are convenient devices, handily connecting us with loved ones, paying bills, accessing information—and treacherously reporting on our every move. Worse, even after the Supreme Court weighed in, many government agencies still insist that they have the right to pull up that tracking data to see our whereabouts. It’s increasingly apparent that, if you have your phone in your pocket, you may as well have a GPS beacon strapped to your ankle. If you want anonymity from the government, leave the gadget at home.

That point was illustrated in the wake of the Capitol riot, when the authorities pulled cell phone records to see who was present.

“In the hours and days after the Capitol riot, the FBI relied in some cases on emergency orders that do not require court authorization in order to quickly secure actual communications from people who were identified at the crime scene,” The Intercept reported this week. “Investigators have also relied on data ‘dumps’ from cellphone towers in the area to provide a map of who was there, allowing them to trace call records — but not content — from the phones.”

The data collected by people’s phones and the apps they use, often compiled by marketing firms, is amazingly detailed. An individual “outraged by the events of Jan. 6” supplied data on participants in the day’s events to The New York Times, whose writers were thoroughly creeped out by the information.

“While there were no names or phone numbers in the data, we were once again able to connect dozens of devices to their owners, tying anonymous locations back to names, home addresses, social networks and phone numbers of people in attendance,” Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson wrote.

Marketing databases have become a favorite resource for government agencies, which purchase the information as an attempted end-run around Fourth Amendment protections. The theory has been that, since the data is “voluntarily” provided to a third party there’s no privacy from the government required.

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Coach Fired For Questioning Woke Curriculum

A new court case reminds us that having an opinion can be hazardous to your career.

David Flynn had been a winning football coach at Dedham High School in Massachusetts. His two children attended Dedham schools. Last fall he learned that his daughter’s seventh-grade history class, “World Geography and Ancient History I,” had been re-routed from discussing the classics and instead turned into a series of indoctrination sessions in the new woke ideology.

Without consulting or notifying parents, Dedham Public Schools loaded down the seventh-grade history class with contemporary topics on politics, race, gender, stereotypes, prejudices, discrimination and diversity. Naturally, these topics were presented from a progressive perspective and embedded with the usual biases and tropes that are accepted as gospel by left-wing educators.

For example, class materials labeled police officers and white people as “risk factors” to all black people and suggested that white people inherently see all black males as threats. A teacher used a cartoon character of herself wearing a BLM t-shirt, just in case some kids did not get the point.

Flynn did what any concerned parent might do when learning about his child being indoctrinated. He and his wife expressed their concerns to the history teacher and principal of the school – then later to Superintendent Michael J. Welch and three members of the Dedham School Committee. However, the school system had no interest in engaging in constructive dialogue. In October the Flynns removed their children from the school.

The issue came back to haunt Flynn in January when he was called into a meeting with Superintendent Welch, DHS principal Jim Forrest and athletic director Steve Traister. Welch confronted Flynn with one of the emails he had sent to the Dedham School Committee and asked him, “What are we going to do about this?” By the end of the meeting Flynn was informed that DHS was “going in a different direction” with their football program, and moments later a statement was released stating that Flynn was removed as head coach because of “significant, repeatedly expressed philosophical differences with the direction, goals and values of the school district.”

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Teacher Asked Students to List Their Political Party and Why, Then Publicized Their Responses, It Didn’t End Well

There’s been a lot of controversy over Joe Biden’s seeming reluctance to want all the public schools opening up as soon as possible. Obviously, that’s not making a lot of parents very happy.

But if they saw what just happened at Porter Ridge High School in Indian Trail, North Carolina, they just might not want to send their kids back.

A teacher, as part of an assignment, asked kids to list what political party they would choose and had them write it down, and explain why. The teacher then publicized to the rest of the class what each student had chosen and what they had written, with conservative students being bullied, according to WCNC.

One mother described how her daughter was bullied for being a Republican. She said that the daughter got threats, “These threats that, ‘we’ll show them!’ Or, ‘I can’t wait until I see her,’” the mother explained.

Students took pictures of the students’ answers with their names next to them and spread them throughout the school so kids from other classes were soon involved in the bullying and threats.

The mother said given the “climate” now, “people are too politically charged up” and she said it’s “just creating a toxic environment.” She blasted the teacher. “That teacher put a target, he outed these children.”

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Women Vaccinated For COVID-19 May Show Symptoms Of Breast Cancer As Side-Effect

According to Intermountain Healthcare doctors women who were recently vaccinated for COVID-19 may show symptoms of Breast Cancer as a side-effect of the vaccine.

New mammogram guidelines are announced by the Intermountain Healthcare doctors for women vaccinated for Covid-19 recently. This may be in response to the side effect of the vaccine.

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Report: Facebook a ‘Hotbed of Child Sexual Abuse Material’ with 20M Incidents

A recent report from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children claims that Facebook had 20.3 million reported incidents of child sexual abuse material. In comparison, Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek had only 13,000 reports. Facebook accounted for 95 percent of the incidents in the report.

The Daily Beast reports that according to new data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline, the vast majority of online child exploitation reports were linked to Facebook. The study found that over 20.3 million reported incidents related to child pornography or trafficking were linked to Facebook.

In comparison to the millions of incidents reported on Facebook, Google had 546,704 incidents, Twitter found 65,062, Snapchat reported 144,095, and TikTok found 22,692. Facebook accounted for almost 95 percent of the 21.7 million reports combined across all platforms.

MindGeek, the Canada-based parent company of multiple porn websites including Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn, reported far fewer incidents than Facebook. MindGeek reported 13,229 reports.

MindGeek participated in the study for the first time last year following a year-long campaign called #Traffickinghub which aimed to shut down Pornhub for its alleged role in promoting underage human trafficking by hosting content featuring minors.

It is noted that both Pornhub and Facebook alleged that the data they provided may include duplicates. Pornhub alleges that the 13,229 stat “includes several thousand duplicates, with most reports submitted multiple times in an abundance of caution.” They claim that the number of unique incidents is 4,171.

Facebook released a similar statement alleging that 90 percent of the failed incidents were “the same as or visually similar to previously reported content.” If this is correct, Facebook’s total number of unique reports would still be 2,030,722, the largest number in the data pool by far.

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Report: Flu Has ‘Virtually Disappeared’ From U.S.

AP suggests that it is also possible that “the coronavirus has essentially muscled aside flu and other bugs that are more common in the fall and winter.”

Lynnette Brammer of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged, “This is the lowest flu season we’ve had on record.”

AP noted that only one pediatric flu death has been reported so far this season, while 92 were reported at the same point last year.

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