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I want to save up $20,000 in the next 4 years to buy a house. If my bank offers me a savings plan with an APR of 2.5% when I make monthly payments, how much will I need to save each month?

A private school in Miami is warning its staff against getting a COVID-19 vaccine. Centner Academy said its school policy, to the extent possible, not to employ anyone who has gotten a coronavirus vaccine until further information is known. “Here we have one of the most powerful tools in our arsenal to protect ourselves and prevent this problem and they are discouraging the use of it. It’s tragic,” said Dr. Aileen Marty, a FIU infectious disease expert. A letter was sent to parents of students at Centner Academy, saying the school discourages teachers and staff from getting the COVID-19 vaccines...

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill expanding felon voting rights on Tuesday, according to the state legislature, allowing for people on parole in the state to be eligible to vote as soon as they leave prison. The law codifies a 2018 executive order that allowed for Cuomo to individually pardon parolees. According to the bill text, Department of Corrections officials are required to provide a voter registration form as the felon is leaving the facility. Previously, parolees would have to wait a period of four to six weeks to receive a pardon and then must register to vote...

House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that Facebook upheld its ban on former President Donald Trump because he was “pathologically” continuing to “endanger our democracy.” Mitchell said, “I want to ask you about the decision by Facebook this morning. The oversight board acknowledging that Donald Trump created an environment it called a serious risk of violence on January 6 with his posts. They opposed an indefinite suspension of his accounts. The former president issued a statement in response saying that free speech was taken away from the president of the United...

LAST WEEK, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, two of America's most prominent Black elected officials affirmed that the United States is not a racist nation.The first was Senator Tim Scott, the conservative South Carolina Republican who delivered the GOP response to President Biden's address to Congress on Wednesday."Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country," Scott said. He acknowledged that racial bigotry has not been eradicated — indeed, he said, he has himself "experienced the pain of discrimination." But he insisted that race not be deployed as "a political weapon" and that "it's wrong to try to...

President Biden said “I don’t understand the Republicans” on Wednesday when he asked about a GOP push to oust Rep. Liz Cheney from her No. 3 leadership post. Biden made the brief comment to reporters — the first time he has weighed in on the Cheney leadership issue — as he returned to his motorcade from a Cinco de Mayo stop at a Washington, DC, taqueria. Cheney (R-Wyo.) is all but certain to lose her position as chair of the House Republican Caucus over her continued denunciations of former President Donald Trump.

Philip Klein notes that Fauci couldn’t stop himself from laughing here while half-heartedly spinning the new rules, which have been attacked even by experts as absurdly onerous. He knows they’re garbage so he’s keen to reassure Savannah Guthrie that they’re constantly being updated and relaxed as more data is gathered. Just be patient! The CDC might acknowledge they’re ridiculous soon enough! But a health bureaucrat is still a bureaucrat. Forced to choose between dissenting on the science and standing by an agency he works with, he opted to present a united front. Better that Americans receive unanimous bad advice from...

Angel Hernandez has certainly lived up to his reputation in the first month of the 2021 MLB season. During the Indians-Royals game in Kansas City Tuesday night, Hernandez admitted that he essentially guessed on a play in the bottom of the third that had to be overturned due to his mistake, which he said was a result of getting “blinded by the outfield scoreboard.” With runners on second and third, Royals catcher Salvador Perez hit a deep fly ball to right-center that landed between two outfielders on the warning track. But Hernandez, who was stationed at first base, signaled that...

The White House has signaled privately to lawmakers and stakeholders in recent weeks that it supports taxpayer subsidies to keep nuclear facilities from closing and making it harder to meet U.S. climate goals, three sources familiar with the discussions told Reuters. New subsidies, in the form of "production tax credits," would likely be swept into President Joe Biden's multi-trillion-dollar legislative effort to invest in infrastructure and jobs, the sources said. Wind and solar power producers already get these tax rebates based on levels of energy they generate. Biden wants the U.S. power industry to be emissions free by 2035. He...

Who made more accurate predictions about the course of the COVID-19 pandemic—experts or the public? A study from the University of Cambridge has found that experts such as epidemiologists and statisticians made far more accurate predictions than the public, but both groups substantially underestimated the true extent of the pandemic. Researchers from the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication surveyed 140 UK experts and 2,086 UK laypersons in April 2020 and asked them to make four quantitative predictions about the impact of COVID-19 by the end of 2020. Participants were also asked to indicate confidence in their predictions by...

The Labor Department under the Biden administration blocked a Trump-era rule Wednesday that would’ve made it easier for companies to classify workers as independent contractors instead of employees under federal law. The move comes one week after Labor Secretary Marty Walsh told Reuters that many gig workers should be classified as “employees” who deserve company benefits. His boss, President Biden, is a big supporter of labor unions. Gig workers are independent contractors who perform on-demand services, such as childcare providers and drivers working for companies like Uber and DoorDash. The rule under the Trump administration would have made it harder...

A 25-year-old mother who was expecting to give birth to an already jaw-dropping seven babies was shocked to find two more babies tucked in her womb during labor — making her one of the few women in history to birth nonuplets. Halima Cisse, from Timbuktu, was told by doctors in Mali’s capital, Bamako, that she’d be having seven babies. A second opinion from doctors in Morocco confirmed the shocking news. Cisse’s pregnancy had already made national headlines before she went into labor. So invested were Malians that the nation’s president, Bah N’Daw, ordered that Cisse be sent to North Africa...

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) criticized Republicans seeking to oust Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) as Republican Conference Chair, calling the Wyoming lawmaker both “principled” and devoted to “truth.” “I think Liz Cheney’s greatest offense apparently is she is principled and she believes in the truth,” Hoyer told the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty on Wednesday.

the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border is worsening. A dozen Texas counties, many of them not directly situated on the border, have declared emergencies due to the explosive increase in human trafficking that the open border is facilitating. ... the open border is facilitating an additional outbreak of lawlessness. The opioid fentanyl is now flooding across the border. ... The open border has created a massive economic boom for the cartels, which were already far better funded than Mexico’s police and military combined. Fentanyl is one of the primary drugs flooding across the border. The majority of fentanyl and its...

Los Angeles sheriff deputies frequently harass the families of people they have killed, including taunting them at vigils, parking outside their homes and following them and pulling them over for no reason, according to a new report from the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The LA sheriff’s department (LASD), which has faced national scrutiny for its corruption scandals and killings of young Black and Latino men, has routinely retaliated against victims’ relatives who speak out, the groups said in the report released on Tuesday. The authors collected detailed accounts of alleged harassment from the...

One week after Apple carried out its largest iOS and iPad update since September 2020's version 14.0 release, the company has followed up with a new patch for two zero-day vulnerabilities that let hackers execute malicious code on fully updated devices. Additionally, the new release of 14.5.1 also mitigates issues with a bug in the recent App Tracking Transparency feature included in the previous version. Both of these vulnerabilities are located in the browser engine Webkit, which provides web content for App Store, Mail and Safari as well as other various apps running on iOS, Linux and macOS. Apple described...

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) has decreed that voters must wear a mask to the polls or they won't be allowed to vote. "I think that if you refuse to wear a mask, we're not letting you in, it's that simple," he said. "I know that voting is the most sacred right in a democracy, but health and safety must come first. I mean, what use is a right to vote if you are exposed to infection from those who insist on shunning the mask President Biden says is our patriotic duty?" Murphy denied that his decree was an...

MEDINA, WA—According to anonymous sources, Melinda Gates filed for divorce from her husband Bill after discovering a shocking video of him dancing on stage to "Start Me Up" by The Rolling Stones during the Windows 95 launch. "Oh my gosh- my husband is a total dork," said a shocked Melinda Gates, according to one witness. "How could he have hidden this from me for so long? How could I have been so blind? Why did Bill hide this dark secret from me?" Friends of the family say she quickly filed for divorce citing "irreconcilable differences", likely due to Bill's dark...

The National Institutes of Health’s refusal to make public documents related to research the agency is funding on pandemic viruses is “grossly irresponsible,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of Center for Food Safety which filed the lawsuit.

Flood Legends from the Americas, Part 1: Continental United States by Nick Liguori on April 13, 2021 Do you know who the original inhabitants of the United States were? They are known as the First Nations peoples, and they include many tribes spread across this vast land—including the Cherokee, Navajo, Lakota, Delaware, Spokane, Apache, and so many more tribes. Did you know that all of these tribes had historical traditions describing the great flood recorded in Genesis? Remarkably, traditions of this global flood have been among over 120 tribes from the continental United States—to say nothing of the rest of...