Tag: taxes

Australian high school class explicitly explains bestiality as part of LGBTQ lessons

A high school in Australia is under investigation by the South Australia Department for Education after it hosted an unsupervised presentation for young girls that explicitly explained bestiality as part of a sex ed lesson about LGBTQ+.

Renmark High School’s principal, Mat Evans, issued a letter of apology to parents who heard that their children left in disgust during the session on March 22 given by a third-party presenter and put on by Headspace Berri.

The apology read that the school was “taking this matter very seriously” and had “raised concerns” with the speaker from Headspace located in Berri who has been suspended from operating in government schools while the Education Department investigates, per The Advertiser.

Evans also stated the school had launched an internal review due to the normal procedure of “notifying parents of specific presentations was not followed.”

“I apologise unreservedly for that,” he said in the letter sent on March 25.

“I acknowledge that some of the students felt uncomfortable with this content, and there have been a number of complaints from parents,” he said.

“I’d like to thank those parents for raising these concerns with me directly and apologise to those families.”

He said that the internal review would “ensure that processes around such notifications, and procedures with regard to third parties attending at our school are always met in future.”

Horrified parents learned that their daughters in year 9 at the school had been pulled from their regular lessons and placed in a separate classroom with the Headspace Berri facilitators and the speaker without the supervision of a teacher. They had not been notified of the presentation or had consented to it.

“We had a teacher that told us to grab a chair and sit in front of the board, and then the Headspace people came in and then [the teacher] left, so then we’re sitting in front of a board alone with no teachers, just the Headspace people,” 14-year-old student Courtney White said, according to Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The title slide of the presentation read “You can see queerly now. Now point in hiding.” 

14-year-old Emelia Wunderberg said all the girls felt extremely “uncomfortable” as the presenter went into graphic detail about their sexuality and then showed a slide about what each component in “LGBTQIA+” meant.

“There was a slide for what the ‘plus’ means, and they just started randomly saying words that no-one knew, like bestiality,” Emelia said. “They said [the queer community] just accepts all of it, even though … isn’t it illegal?”

“We’re all just sitting there like, ‘What the hell? What are we doing here? Why are we learning about animals having sex with humans?'” she said.

“It was really disgusting, it was really uncomfortable.”

Keep reading

Police Scotland Paying Officers Overtime To Deal With Slew Of ‘Hate Crime’ Reports

Following the passage of what is probably the most stupid law in history, Police Scotland are having to pay officers in their control room “hundreds of thousands” in overtime to deal with a deluge of ‘hate crime’ reports.

The Telegraph reports that David Kennedy, the general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, commented that the excess costs are already piling up as police try to deal with the influx of more than 6,000 complaints of “stirring up hatred”.

“Although there are lots of complaints coming in, a tiny percentage of that are turning into actual investigations. It will all be done within the control room, the control room will be paying extra overtime and using officers from the control room area to do it,” Kennedy stated.

Keep reading

Councillor dubs Boston the ‘most racist city in the country’ and seeks millions in reparations to help black residents buy organic food at farmers’ markets

A Massachusetts council woman has slammed Boston as the ‘most racist city in the country’ and called for a multimillion dollar reparations package so that black residents can improve their diets with organic food.

Julia Mejia, a Boston councilor-at-large, said the city had only spent $2.1 million to address the ‘historical trauma that’s been carried from generation to generation’ and that much more was needed.

Speaking at Harvard University, Mejia, called for a $300,000 maternity clinic for ‘birthing people’ and payouts, so the descendants of slaves could shop at farmers’ markets for organic syrup and other healthy items.

Reparations activists in Boston seek $15 million to repay black residents for injustices against their slavery-era forefathers — an eye-watering sum that’s nearly four times the city’s annual budget.

Keep reading

North Carolina city spends $300,000 on reparations expert DESPITE her posts about locals ‘romanticizing segregation’ and ‘White accommodation’

A North Carolina city has approved $300,000 for a reparations consultant with a record in online posts about ‘White accommodation’ and how her neighbors ‘celebrate and romanticize segregation.’

High Point City Council on Tuesday greenlighted $292,460 for Lea Henry and her team at the National Institute of Minority Economic Development, to lead its reparations efforts.

At least two councillors have queried the large sum — but there are few signs that members are aware of the hard-line views that Henry, a Harvard University graduate, posts on social media.

On Facebook, Henry has slammed her North Carolina neighbors for ‘celebrating segregation’ and railed against ‘White accommodation’, a term critical race theory (CRT) advocates use to describe a type of black oppression.

Whether taxes should fund cash payouts and other schemes for the descendants of slaves is a hot-button issue in America’s culture wars. For critics of them, reparations consultants are a drain on much-needed resources.

Henry’s posts raise questions about whether she’s the right woman for the job.

Keep reading

Biden Administration Made $236 Billion in ‘Improper Payments’ Last Year: GAO Report

An estimated $236 billion in improper or incorrect payments was made under the Biden administration last year, with Medicare and Medicaid accounting for $100 billion of that total, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

“For fiscal year 2023, 14 agencies reported a total estimated $236 billion in improper payments across 71 programs,” said a March 26 GAO report. Improper payments refer to payments “that should not have been made or were made in the incorrect amount.” The $236 billion calculation does not include certain government programs that agencies determined were “susceptible to significant improper payments.”

As such, GAO believes the $236 billion estimate “potentially does not represent the full extent of improper payments.”

The group pointed out that improper payments suggest a “material deficiency or weakness in internal controls” at the agencies. “The federal government is unable to determine the full extent of its improper payments or to reasonably assure that appropriate actions are taken to reduce them.”

Medicare accounted for the largest percentage of government incorrect payments, totaling $51.1 billion.

This was followed by Medicaid at $50.3 billion, Federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance at $43.6 billion, Earned Income Tax Credit at $21.9 billion, and the Paycheck Protection Program Loan Forgiveness at $18.7 billion.

Keep reading

Another Government Bureaucracy That Can’t Do Their Job: Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency

The 150 million dollar Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) was created to replace the scandal plagued Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC).

More than 81,000 Americans remain missing from WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Gulf Wars/other conflicts.

Before quitting after less than a year on the job, the “new director” simply reassigned the previous JPAC Scientific Director to be in charge of “partnering with private groups”.  What this “partnering” turned out to be was the giving away of millions of taxpayer dollars in annual contracts to “non-profits to do DPAA’s primary job: recover remains of MIA’s.  With no apparent ethical oversight by DPAA, some of these same government contractors actively continue to solicit contributions claiming to be “non-profit” charities.  Huge multi-million dollar contracts are farmed out. This obvious unethical practice is just another example of the past arrogance and abuse by this same old group of poor leaders and managers who continue to remain in functional control of the “new” organization.

And, in “deja vu all over again” the Department of Defense appointed a former JPAC commander as the “new, new” director of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.  This is the very same person who had steered the agency, known by its employees as “Dysfunction Junction”, into its final demise and lost his own job under a torrent of Congressional criticism.

Keep reading

‘Everyone does it’: media pilfering from Air Force One prompts clampdown

A White House staffer recently met a reporter for a covert assignment by the statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square.

But the House of Cards-esque rendezvous was not staged to hand over state secrets, or leak presidential gossip, or even to spread dirt on Joe Biden’s opponents. The item handed over – an embroidered pillowcase from Air Force One – was handed back, by the reporter involved.

So said Politico, reporting an attempt to clamp down on theft of branded items from the presidential plane.

The meeting by the Jackson statue, Politico said, came about after US air force crew members alerted the White House travel office that a west coast trip in early February ended with “several [items] missing from the press cabin”.

An email went out, described by one of no less than six anonymous sources as saying: “Hey, if you inadvertently wound up taking something off the plane by mistake, we can help facilitate a quiet return.”

The reporter who took the pillowcase had done so “probably not by accident”, Politico said. And so the meeting was arranged, the item “changed hands, and that was that”.

According to Politico, the White House press pack has long seen Air Force One as a source of souvenirs.

One unnamed current White House reporter said: “On my first flight, the person next to me was like, ‘You should take that glass.’ They were like, ‘Everyone does it.’”

Several unnamed sources, meanwhile, described to Politico a “former White House correspondent for a major newspaper” hosting a dinner party using “gold-rimmed Air Force One plates, evidently taken bit by bit over the course of some time”.

“Reporters recalled coming down the back stairs after returning to Joint Base Andrews in the evening with the sounds of clinking glassware or porcelain plates in their backpacks,” the site said.

Nor is such light-fingeredness a new phenomenon.

Keep reading

Wuhan on the Rockies? Biosafety committee found dozens of accidents at NIH-funded lab in 3 years

Bats and hamsters and cats, and mice!

Fort Collins, Colorado, could have become the next Wuhan, China, with dozens of lab accidents just this decade involving outbreak-prone pathogens in animals including coronaviruses, Zika and tuberculosis, according to a group that fights taxpayer-funded animal testing.

The “incident reports” from Colorado State University’s Institutional Biosafety Committee minutes, obtained by Colorado Open Records Act request, detail 64 lab accidents from 2020 through 2023, the White Coat Waste Project said this week.

The National Institutes of Health chipped in more than $8 million in 2021 and 2023 to build a new CSU bat lab and import bats with Nipah virus and SARS-related coronaviruses via the EcoHealth Alliance, WCW discovered last fall, dubbing the campus “Wuhan West.”

The 2023 grant came months after the Agriculture Department found CSU committed animal cruelty by subjecting rabbits to temperatures above “the humane endpoint” and failed to report “a protocol for [26] rabbits that required the withholding of anesthetics and analgesics for scientific purposes.”

Keep reading

Speaker Johnson Wants to Pass Bill Sending Billions in Arms to Ukraine and Israel

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) says he will work to pass a massive military aid bill for Ukraine and Israel once Congress returns to session next week, a move that could trigger a backlash from his party. House Democrats have vowed to shield the speaker from a GOP rebellion should he support the legislation.

Johnson has underscored the urgency of providing aid to Ukraine and Israel, declaring it a top priority upon the House’s return from Easter recess. “We’ll turn our attention to it and we won’t delay on that,” he told reporters last week.  

Sending billions more in aid to Ukraine is a volatile issue within the Republican Caucus. Johnson won his role as leader of the House, in part, because of his past votes opposing aid to Ukraine. However, since taking over as speaker, Johnson has repeatedly stated that he supports President Joe Biden’s $61 billion aid package for Kiev. 

The issue facing Johnson is how the aid to Ukraine is currently packaged. Initially, the GOP sought to include the funding in a bill that would also supply arms to Israel and Taiwan, as well as devote billions to border security. Last month, the Senate stripped the border funding and immigration reform from the legislation and passed a $95 billion foreign aid bill, including $61 billion for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel. 

After passing the Senate over a month ago, Johnson has prevented the legislation from coming to a vote in the House. Some Republicans in the chamber say if Johnson brings the bill to the floor, they will vote to remove him as speaker. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he spoke with the speaker by phone on Thursday and pressed Johnson to pass the bill. “In this situation, quick passage of US aid to Ukraine by Congress is vital. We recognize that there are differing views in the House of Representatives on how to proceed, but the key is to keep the issue of aid to Ukraine as a unifying factor,” Zelensky wrote on X.

To overcome the threat from a small number of Republicans, Democrats in the House have hinted that they would support Johnson’s continued role as speaker if he brings the bill for a vote. “If the choice is between Ukraine aid and providing a vote to stop a motion to vacate, or no Ukraine aid, I think there’s a lot of Democrats who would be willing to assist in getting it done,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) told the Hill. 

Keep reading

Taxpayers Will Soon Find Out if They’ll Have To Finance Fancy Stadiums for the Chiefs and the Royals

Professional sports team owners are at it again. This time, it’s the Kansas City Chiefs and the Kansas City Royals who want fans—along with their fellow taxpayers who may be indifferent toward sports—to help with their business expenditures. Early voting has already begun as Jackson County prepares to decide whether to partially fund the teams’ stadium plans or potentially lose the teams to another city.

The Chiefs proposed $800 million in renovations to the GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, of which the owners will only pay $300 million. The Royals, meanwhile, announced in February plans for a brand new stadium estimated to cost $2 billion, only half of which is expected to be paid by the Royals in private funds.

The vote, which will conclude April 2, either will have residents opt to get rid of an existing sales tax that pays a portion of stadium operation fees or replace it with a new one—totaling approximately $2 billion and scheduled for over the course of 40 years—in order to pay a portion of the price. Each team would receive $27 million of tax money annually.

So what will happen if voters reject it? “We’d have to look at all our options,” said Mark Donovan, the president of the Chiefs. “I think they’d have to include leaving Kansas City.” His appeal may very well sway voters, considering there is a long history of these threats working in the city.

The Royals echoed Donovan’s thought: “There’s lots of cities that would love to have these franchises,” said John Sherman, the majority owner of the Royals. And the Committee to Keep the Chiefs and Royals in Jackson County noted that “if the vote doesn’t pass, both teams will consider all options.”

But even though they insist these taxes are necessary, it’s difficult not to see their threats as a way to scare voters into coughing up taxpayer dollars so both teams can save private funds. Leaked documents indicate that taxpayers could end up paying up to $5.1 billion over four decades—far more than the teams’ estimate.

The sports giants are in fact so keen to save every penny that a $1 million request by Jackson County Executive Frank White Jr. to pay for the elections, in order to avoid taking funds from the city’s emergency reserve, has so far gone ignored by the teams. The initiative “poses a significant dilemma,” said White, “given our commitment to safeguarding the county’s financial stability.”

It’s worth noting that the Hunt family, who owns the Chiefs and whose fortune stems from oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, is worth nearly $25 billion, according to Forbes. Putting aside the questionable ethics of weaponizing local sports enthusiasm to save private funds, there is no clear reason why the owners can’t pay for the renovations themselves.

Keep reading