Tag: taxes

Dept. of Education Plans to Pull Federal Funds from Five Virginia School Districts over Transgender Policies

The Department of Education said it plans to cut federal funds to five Northern Virginia school districts that have refused to rescind their policies allowing students to use bathrooms and locker rooms based on “gender identity” rather than biological reality. 

The five school districts — including Alexandria City Public Schools, Arlington Public Schools, Fairfax County Public Schools, Loudoun County Public Schools, and Prince William County Public Schools — announced last week that they had rejected the Trump administration’s requests to change their transgender policies, Fox News reported. The Education Department announced in July, following an investigation, that the districts are allegedly in violation of Title IX for sex discrimination. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 bars discrimination on the basis of sex in any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.  

Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann told the outlet that the department will begin the process of suspending or terminating federal funding to the five districts. 

“The U.S. Department of Education generously granted an extension for five Northern Virginia School Districts to come into compliance with Title IX and follow federal law – unfortunately, the additional time did not result in a fruitful outcome,” Biedermann said. “The Agency will commence administrative proceedings to effect the suspension or termination of federal financial assistance to these divisions. The Virginia districts will have to defend their embrace of radical gender ideology over ensuring the safety of their students.”

Loudoun County was the first of the five districts to announce that it had rejected the Trump administration’s request. The board voted 6-3 in a closed-session meeting on Tuesday to keep Policy 8040, which allows students to used restrooms and locker rooms according to their subjective sense of “gender identity,” according to the report.

A spokesperson for the district said the federal interpretation of Title IX is at odds with state laws.

“After consultation with legal counsel, the Board voted 6-3 not to comply with this request due to the tension between the OCR position and current law. We will continue to monitor developments closely to ensure continued legal compliance and the protection of all students,” the spokesperson told the outlet on Wednesday. 

The other four districts reportedly asked the department to hold off on pilling funds until the courts clarify whether Title IX applies to gender identity. 

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Ukraine wants Europeans to pay $100bn for weapons deal with US

Ukraine has proposed that its European backers spend $100 billion providing it with American weapons, the Financial Times reported. Kiev continues to seek security guarantees from Washington. 

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky and the heads of several Western European states held talks with US President Donald Trump in Washington on Monday to discuss the ongoing conflict and diplomatic attempts to resolve it.

Trump, who has repeatedly questioned the previous administration’s unconditional aid to Kiev, announced last month that Washington’s NATO allies would effectively pay for the US-made weapons being sent to Ukraine.

In addition to the weapons procurement proposal, Ukraine is preparing a $50 billion deal to produce drones domestically, FT reported, citing four people familiar with the matter and a document Kiev reportedly shared with the US.

Although the document contains limited details, FT said Ukraine intends to purchase at least 10 Patriot air defense missile systems.

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California invested millions in STEM for women. The results are disappointing

Ten years ago, it seemed everyone was talking about women in science.

As the economy improved in the years after the Great Recession, women were slower to return to the workforce, causing alarm, especially in vital fields like computing. State and federal leaders turned their attention to women in science, technology, engineering and math, known by the acronym STEM.

Over the next few years, they poured millions of dollars into increasing the number of women pursuing STEM degrees. But the rate of women who attain those degrees has hardly improved, according to an analysis of colleges’ data by the Public Policy Institute of California on behalf of CalMatters.

“The unfortunate news is that the numbers haven’t changed much at all,” said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the institute who conducted the analysis of California’s four-year colleges using data from the 2009-10 school year and comparing it to the most recent numbers, from 2022-23. The share of women who received a bachelor’s degree increased from roughly 19% to about 25% in engineering and from nearly 16% to about 23% in computer science. In math and statistics, the percentage of women who graduate with a degree has gone down in the last five years.

“It’s not nothing, but at this pace it would take a very long time to reach parity,” Johnson said.

Girls are also underrepresented in certain high school classes, such as AP computer science, and while women make up about 42% of California’s workforce, they comprise just a quarter of those working in STEM careers, according to a study by Mount Saint Mary’s University. Fewer women were working in math careers in 2023 than in the five or 10 years before that, the study found.

“It’s a cultural phenomenon, not a biological phenomenon,” said Mayya Tokman, a professor of applied mathematics at UC Merced. She said underrepresentation is a result of perceptions about women, the quality of their education, and a lack of role models in a given field.

Science and technology spurs innovation and economic growth while promoting national security, and these jobs are often lucrative and stable. Gender parity is critical, especially as U.S. science and technology industries struggle to find qualified workers, said Sue Rosser, provost emerita at San Francisco State and a longtime advocate for women in science. “We need more people in STEM. More people means immigrants, women, people of color as well as white men. There’s no point in excluding anyone.”

She said that recent cuts by the Trump administration to California’s research and education programs will stymie progress in science, technology and engineering — and hurt countless careers, including the women who aspire to join these fields.

Over the last eight months, the federal government has made extensive cuts to scientific research at California’s universities, affecting work on dementia, vaccines, women’s issues and on health problems affecting the LGBTQ+ community. The administration also ended programs that support undergraduate students in science. In June a federal judge ruled that the administration needs to restore some of those grants, but a Supreme Court decision could reverse that ruling.

More recently, the administration halted hundreds of grants to UCLA — representing hundreds of millions in research funding — in response to a U.S. Justice Department investigation into allegations of antisemitism. Now the Trump administration is asking for a $1 billion settlement in return for the grants. A California district judge ruled on Tuesday that at least some of those grants need to be restored.

‘The cultural conversation has changed’

In the past five years, attention has shifted away from women in science. Nonprofit leaders and researchers across the state say that many lawmakers and philanthropists turned away from women in STEM during the COVID-19 pandemic and focused more on racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd.

Since 1995, women have been outpacing men in college, and women are now much more likely to attain a bachelor’s degree. The unemployment rate for men is higher, too, and men without college degrees are opting out of the labor force at unprecedented rates.

On July 30 Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order saying the state needs to do more to address the “growing crisis of connection and opportunity for men and boys.” It’s not a “zero-sum” game, he wrote: the state can, and should, support everyone.

But some state investments for women’s education are lagging.

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Billionaires For Socialism: The $2 Billion “Grassroots” Operation Behind Zohran Mamdani

How the Working Families Party sells itself as “grassroots” — with IRS-documented, publicly admitted “common control” revealing it’s really a Soros-financed political money washer.

In New York politics, there’s one machine that towers above the rest. No, not the Democratic Party—it’s the Working Families Party, the most powerful minor party in America. Its name sounds wholesome enough—who doesn’t support “working families”? But behind that branding lies a $2 billion tax-exempt laundromat that’s anything but local, grassroots, or honest.

Take Zohran Mamdani, their current belle of the ball. 

After winning his race, he announced on NBC: “I don’t think we should have billionaires.” Hilarious considering Mamdani’s “grassroots” revolution was fueled by over $2 million in PAC and organizational spending, much of it courtesy of the very billionaire class he allegedly opposes.

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Europe Reveals Itself as Ridiculous in Ukraine

By Donald Trump’s transactional criterion, NATO has been a costly failure that needs fixing or needs to be cut lose. Europe has failed to pay the price and has left the U.S. with the financial and military burden of defending Europe. The war in Ukraine has proven the point.

But that was never the point of NATO. The point of NATO was never economic nor transactional. The point of NATO was, in large part, to keep Europe militarily coordinated with, dependent on and subordinate to the United States. The point wasn’t to extricate the U.S. from Europe, it was, as Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General of NATO explained, precisely “to keep the Americans in Europe,” while keeping the Russians out. By that criterion, NATO has been a massive success. The Ukraine war has proven that point too.

While it continues, with a loud voice, to make demands regarding the defense of Ukraine and the terms for ending the war, Europe has revealed to the world that it is unable to mount that defense without the U.S. and that it has been sidelined in the negotiations, leaving decisions about Europe to the Americans. 

Europe is unable to supply Ukraine with the weapons it requires and that Europe insists Ukraine must receive. The U.S. has reiterated that it will no longer be the font from which Ukraine’s weapons flow. On August 10, Vice President Vance said clearly again that the U.S. is “done with the funding of the Ukraine war business.” Europe does not have the stockpile to spare nor the capacity to manufacture a fraction of the weapons Ukraine needs. And though Europe has, by necessity, accepted the U.S. plan that Europe can send American weapons to Ukraine if they pay for them, that will not provide Ukraine with even close to the amount of weapons the U.S. was supplying. And even that was not enough.

Not only can Europe not supply the weapons, they cannot supply the troops. Europe has, to its embarrassment, publicly conceded that it cannot mount the number of troops needed to send to Ukraine as peacekeepers after a ceasefire.

The war in Ukraine has exposed Europe’s dependence on the United States. Europe can neither provide the weapons nor the troops to defend itself. Europe has been revealed as dependent on, and subordinate to, the United States.

Ukraine is now facing a crisis on the battlefield. Russia’s military efforts were long dismissed as not rapidly gaining ground. But keeping the media focus on that criterion kept the public in the dark about the real criterion. Russia’s war of attrition was devouring and exhausting Ukraine’s weapons and, more importantly, manpower. The shrinking Ukrainian armed forces is running out of weapons to defend itself against the massive and still growing Russian army. There are not enough soldiers to fill the front line. That leaves gaps in the line. As Ukraine moves troops from other places to fill those gaps, it leaves even bigger gaps in those places. Russia’s war of attrition was setting up this moment. And now, Russian troops are breaking through those gaps in the lines. 

For the first time in the war, the Russian armed forces have broken through key defensive lines and their rapid move west is now measured in miles and not inches. Logistical hubs critical for the Ukrainian armed forces to supply their troops in the east have been partially infiltrated and surrounded. Russian positions are being consolidated and roads that are lifelines to Ukrainian soldiers have been partially cut. There is also reliable reporting from both Russian and Ukrainian sources that the rapid advance has brought the Russian army all the way to the heavily fortified second Donbas fortification line, which they have now breached. Beyond that defensive line is largely open fields with no organized line of defense. The Russian armed forces may then be free to rapidly advance, making the Russian goal of control of the entire Donbas a real possibility. For the first time in the war, the Ukrainian armed forces face the very real possibility of collapse. 

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Trump IRS seeks to block whistleblower trial that alleges Clinton Foundation tax irregularities

AU.S. Tax Court judge has tentatively scheduled a Dec. 1 trial allowing two whistleblowers to show they were wrongly denied an award for identifying alleged tax irregularities inside Bill and Hillary Clinton’s foundation, but the case is meeting resistance from an unexpected source: the Trump administration. 

The Internal Revenue Service under Trump filed a motion last week in the case brought by retired federal agent John Moynihan and private fraud expert Larry Doyle seeking to dismiss the case. Judge Alina I. Marshall set a deadline of September 15 for the petitioners to respond to that motion. The IRS also filed leave for an extension of time to file the Administrative Record with the court.

IRS says plaintiffs lack standing to sue

The agency argued that, as a matter of administrative and procedural law, the judge should not let the case proceed to trial because after an initial review, the IRS declined to look into the whistleblower complaint and, therefore, the plaintiffs don’t have standing to sue.

“In this case, the Whistleblower Office denied petitioners’ claims because the petitioners’ claims were never considered in an IRS action. Here, the Whistleblower Office forwarded petitioners’ claims to a classifier,” the IRS motion to dismiss argued last week “Following the classifiers’ preliminary review, the Classifier declined to forward petitioners’ claims to exam and recommended that it be forwarded to the CI [criminal investigation] division.

“The IRS did not proceed with any potential action when it investigated petitioners’ claims,” the IRS added. 

Obama’s Deputy Attorney General: “Shut it down”

The effort by the IRS to thwart the whistleblower case from going to trial was filed the same week Just the News reported that a bombshell memo recently uncovered by FBI Director Kash Patel shows the Obama Justice Department and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe roadblocked three separate probes into possible pay-to-play corruption allegations against the Clinton Foundation.

“Shut it down,” Obama Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates was quoted as saying in March 2016 in the memos.

You can read that memo here:

FBI Memos – Classified Leak Investigations – Declassified

Spokespersons for the IRS, the Treasury Department and the White House did not immediately return requests for comment on Sunday.

The Clinton Foundation has long denied it did anything wrong and said any suggestion of wrongdoing was politically motivated.

Doyle told Just the News the latest twist is just another example of the resistance the government has displayed to investigating the Clinton Foundation over many years.

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The US Has Given Ukraine The Most Aid To Date

To date, the United States has been the biggest supporter of Ukraine in terms of aid, according to data from the Ukraine Support Tracker compiled by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).

EU institutions (including the European Commission and the Council), followed by Germany and the United Kingdom have been the next biggest contributors.

As Statista’s Anna Fleck shows in the following chart, financial assistance (such as loans and grants), humanitarian aid (like food and medical supplies), and the value of weapons and equipment delivered is enormous.

This included in-kind donations to the Ukrainian military and financial support tied to military purposes.

When looking solely at military aid, including weapons and defense-related financial support, Germany ranks second, contributing an estimated €16.5 billion.

The United States remains the largest military backer, however, having delivered weapons and military funds totaling approximately €115 billion between January 24, 2022 and June 30, 2025.

In early March 2025, U.S. military aid was briefly paused, but resumed on March 11 after Ukraine signaled openness to a potential ceasefire.

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Congress Spent At Least $27,500 on Poster Displays in 2 Months. Here Are 4 Ridiculous Examples and 1 Good One.

Congress can’t even debate a bill without wasting money. In the first two months of this year, it spent at least $27,500 “on printing charts, props, and posters, sticking them on easels (or making staff hold them up) and giving speeches about them,” according to FloorCharts, which has been archiving congressional charts and posters since 2012.

That figure was obtained by estimating the average cost of a chart at $50 and totaling the number of charts used by the House and Senate (550) over the two-month period. This number doesn’t include all committee charts, but the analysis found that Republicans “used about 20 more charts than Democrats.” FloorCharts notes that “this is napkin math, because there is no line item in the office budgets for ‘printed charts, props, and posters.'”

That total is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the national debt, but any wasteful government spending should be eliminated. And when you look at the posters the legislators came up with, you’ll see that this spending could be very wasteful indeed. Here are four of the most ridiculous posters—and one that we have to admit is pretty good.

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Texas Crime Labs Say They Don’t Have Enough Resources To Test Hemp Products For THC As Lawmakers Consider Ban

As Texas lawmakers debate whether to regulate or ban THC products, officials with the state’s crime labs say they don’t have the resources currently to enforce whatever law is passed.

“From a crime lab perspective, mercifully, we don’t have a dog in that fight. I really don’t care. Just tell me what I need to test, and then I need resources to be able to provide that result,” Peter Stout, president and chief executive officer for the Houston Forensic Science Center, told The Texas Tribune after he testified before the House Public Health Committee on Wednesday. “Otherwise, I become the reason the wheel falls off this wagon, which has basically been the last six years now.”

Wednesday’s committee hearing centered on House Bill 5, which would create a blanket ban on products containing any “detectable amount of any cannabinoid” other than cannabidiol and cannabigerol, better known as CBD and CBG, non-intoxicating components of cannabis. This bill would eliminate the majority of hemp products, including those that are legal under the federal definition.

”There’s been countless reports of artificial and synthetic cannabinoids and their effects on the consumer, and these products have become readily available,” said Rep. Gary VanDeaver, R-New Boston, the committee’s chair and HB 5’s author. “Some of these products are marketed in a way that is attractive to children, for example common food products, like candy.”

The Senate’s version of the bill also calls for a ban, but since Gov. Greg Abbott (R) earlier this year vetoed similar legislation that would have banned THC, some lawmakers have signaled they’d support more regulations over a ban.

Kim Carmichael, spokesperson for House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, told The Texas Tribune that the House hasn’t committed to a ban.

“HB 5 was filed as a similar bill to what the House passed in the regular session, because that’s the most logical starting point for negotiations,” Carmichael said. “Since it passed in that form, members believed they should resume debate where it ended up. It would still go through the process of a public hearing and floor debate, so where it ends up is unknown at this time.”

Experts invited by lawmakers on Wednesday to talk about THC largely focused on the health dangers of THC, the possible criminal networks that underlie the industry, and the impossible task of enforcement.

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Massachusetts State Police spent $217,000 on luxury hotel stays, international flights, and more

Mass State Police shelled out more than $200,000 on stays at 4- and 5-star hotels from Aruba to Florida, along with international flights and other expenses during the last fiscal year.

The Herald is sifting through state agencies’ taxpayer-funded credit card expenditures — finding that Mass State Police racked up $217,957 in procurement card (P-card) expenses in fiscal year 2025.

That includes stays at Aruba’s Manchebo Beach Resort & Spa for a total of $6,050, and Aruba’s Bucuti & Tara Beach Resort for a total of $4,344. MSP also had a $1,320 bill for a rental car in Aruba.

Some of the other biggest hotel bills from the last year were at Champlin’s Hotel, Marina & Resort in Rhode Island for a total of $9,179; Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile for a total of $8,475; and Harborside Inn on Martha’s Vineyard for a total of $5,062.

Mass State Police, which has been emphasizing the importance of transparency as the embattled agency tries to restore trust following a string of scandals, will not provide details on these expenditures and the purpose for these pricey trips.

“We do not have a comment to provide on these State Police operational matters,” a Mass State Police spokesperson said in a statement.

Recently, the Herald shed light on the P-card bills for Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office and Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins, who was indicted last week on federal charges.

Some of the MSP charges are related to the governor’s executive protection, but not all of them.

“The Massachusetts State Police takes seriously our solemn obligation to keep elected officials safe during their tenures in office,” the MSP spokesperson said. “Constitutional Officers in Massachusetts and across the country have long had Executive Protection that travels with them.

“This is essential for ensuring the safety and security of our state’s top leaders, while also ensuring the safety of the general public,” the spokesperson added. “This security is all the more important in this moment when political violence is on the rise, with several recent and tragic attacks on elected officials. Due to operational concerns, we do not comment on resource allocations of protective details.”

The timing of Gov. Maura Healey’s office purchasing hotel stays in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere line up with some of MSP’s fancy hotel expenditures.

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