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A Ballarat woman who was charged with inciting others to breach a lockdown has had her case thrown out of court. Zoe Buhler was arrested in her Ballarat home in September 2020 while pregnant. The mother of three livestreamed her arrest showing police handcuffing her in a video that later went viral and sparked concerns from the Australian Human Rights Commission... In a statement Victoria Police said they withdrew the single charge following an assessment of the case, determining it was "not in the public interest to continue with the prosecution". Ms Buhler, now 30 years old, said she was...

On March 30, 2010, President Obama signed the reconciliation "fix" to the health care reform bill passed by Congress last week. Slipped into it was student loan legislation the President calls "one of the most significant investments in higher education since the G.I. Bill." Under the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA), the federal government will lend directly to students, ending billions of dollars in wasteful subsidies to firms providing student loans. The bill will save an estimated $68 billion over 11 years. Money for the program will come from the U.S. Treasury, which will lend it to the...

WASHINGTON — Ending one of the fiercest lobbying fights in Washington, Congress voted Thursday to force commercial banks out of the federal student loan market, cutting off billions of dollars in profits in a sweeping restructuring of financial-aid programs and redirecting most of the money to new education initiatives. The revamping of student-loan programs was included in — if overshadowed by — the final health care package. The vote was 56 to 43 in the Senate and 220 to 207 in the House, with Republicans unanimously opposed in both chambers.

Columnist Lee Smith, author of The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History, said colleagues and peers of his — whose judgment he trusts — speculate that the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, FL, was a search for documents related to its “Russiagate” surveillance operation of the 45th president. “I think the best way to understand this is in the context of a six-year-long operation targeting Donald Trump, Donald Trump’s aides, and Donald Trump’s supporters,” Smith said on...

Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is ripping President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan as unfair, politically motivated and “100% illegal.” “The president has no authority to just wave a magic wand and suddenly forgive billions and billions of dollars in student loan debt,” she told Fox News late Monday. “Congress has the power of the purse, not the president.” ... “It is totally unfair to all of those who have not taken out student loans,” she said. “And for those students who faithfully have been paying their student loans down, how does that work for them?” Ms. DeVos also said...

oreign states are seeking to uproot Western society through sophisticated cyberattacks on members of the public. The solution is to initiate a collective cyber-defense system; if we do not protect our data, then foreign governments will continue to chip away at our way of life, until all we are left with is the scattered remains of our freedom. As hard as it might be to believe, even the nosiest members of the Chinese government don't care that you just got back from Cancun or that you have a dog named Buddy—regardless of how unquestionably adorable you might think he is....

The Director of Russia’s National Guard has begun a campaign to reassure Russian President Vladimir Putin that Ukrainians are supportive of Russia seizing territory in Ukraine when the reality couldn’t be further off. “I would like to emphasize that we can feel that the population of the liberated areas is supporting us. They realize that we are defending their right to a peaceful life and their children’s happiness,” the director, Viktor Zolotov, told Putin, according to the Kremlin. In a video of the exchange, Putin looks visibly troubled and concerned, gripping the table, while Zolotov shares his thoughts.

While speaking in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday President Biden said, “The bullet out of an AR-15 travels five times as rapidly as a bullet shot out of any other gun.” Ironically, on June 30, 2022, Field & Stream did an in-depth look at the “Five Fastest Rifle Cartridges” and the two AR-15 rounds, .223 and 5.56, did not even make the cut.

Over the past several weeks, NASA's ultra-powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has allowed humankind some unprecedented glimpses into the farthest reaches of our universe. And unsurprisingly, some of these dazzling new observations have raised more questions than they've answered.For a long time, for instance, scientists believed the universe's earliest, oldest galaxies to be small, slightly chaotic, and misshapen systems. But according to the Washington Post, JWST-captured imagery has revealed those galaxies to be shockingly massive, not to mention balanced and well-formed — a finding that challenges, and will likely rewrite, long-held understandings about the origins of our universe. "The...

President Joe Biden screamed, “I am determined to ban assault weapons in this country!” during a Tuesday speech in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Biden segued to “assault weapons” by talking about passing Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-TX) gun control package this summer.

A majority of Virginians approve of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin in his first year in office, while President Joe Biden’s approval is still underwater in the Commonwealth, according to a survey. The recent Policy and Opinion Research at Roanoke College survey showed that 55 percent of the 640 respondents approve of Youngkin’s job as governor, while only 35 percent disapprove.

CLAIM: During his speech Tuesday in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, President Joe Biden claimed, “There is a mass shooting every single day in this country.” VERDICT: False, when mass shootings are defined in the traditional way used by law enforcement for years

CLAIM: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won a U.S. Supreme Court case against “all the pharmaceutical lobbyists” in which the court ruled that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines cause “irreparable” damage. AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. There has been no such Supreme Court ruling, according to the court’s comprehensive online archive of opinions. Kennedy, a lawyer who has advocated against vaccines, told The Associated Press in 2021 that articles sharing similar claims were false. At the time, he said he had been involved in dozens of lawsuits regarding vaccine safety, but none had reached the Supreme Court. THE FACTS: The baseless claim about Kennedy winning...

Robert Langer, ScD, is the David H. Koch Institute professor at MIT and a co-founder of Moderna, the pharmaceutical company behind a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine. In this Q&A, he tells us about the present and future of these versatile vaccines. GEN: The technology behind mRNA vaccines has been available for decades, but it was only with the pandemic that we first saw a publicly available mRNA vaccine. Why didn’t this happen sooner? Langer: While it is true that over the last thirty years hundreds of scientists have worked on developing mRNA vaccines and therapeutics, real breakthroughs in making an effective...

At the outset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, most experts expected that Kyiv would fall quickly. Ukrainian forces were fighting against a military that was bigger and better armed. Russia’s troops had more combat experience and funding. The question was not if Moscow’s forces would depose the Ukrainian government but when regime change would happen. Of course, Kyiv didn’t fall. Instead, the Ukrainian military stopped Russia’s assault on the capital and forced a retreat. Russia downsized its initial mission from wholesale conquest, and the war now mostly consists of grinding offensives and counteroffensives in Ukraine’s east and south. The question...

"Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing." "This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you." "If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out...

The Fulton County (Atlanta) District Attorney Fani Willis issued a warning to rappers about confessing to crimes through lyrics in songs. Her remarks came during a press conference announcing the indictment of the “Drug Rich Gang”. This gang originates from DeKalb County but committed a lot of crimes in Fulton County where Willis has jurisdiction. The gang is accused of targeting celebrities and social media influencers who flaunt expensive items online. Household names like Mariah Carey have been targeted. The gang is accused of committing violent crimes like home invasions, armed robberies, and kidnapping. Willis has been the target of...

Former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway criticized conservative pundits Brit Hume and Ben Shapiro for advocating that the Republican Party should move on from former President Donald Trump Tuesday on FNC’s “America’s Newsroom.” Reacting to tweets from Hume and Shapiro, Conway said, “This is very simple for me. When Trump is the leader of the party, when he is involved in the conversation and the election, like in the 2018 midterms, you had four pickups from blue to red, it is the first time since John Kennedy in 1962, that a president’s party in power picked up a single Senate seat,...

MSNBC anchor Ari Melber said Monday on his show “The Beat” that former President Donald Trump and his allies were fomenting political violence.In an interview with Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Night in America,” Graham said, “If they try to prosecute President Trump for mishandling classified information after Hillary Clinton set up a server in her basement, there will be riots in the street. I worry about the country.”Melber said, “A Trump ally is directly threatening riots and unrest if prosecutors do go forward and eventually indict Donald Trump.”He continued, “That is what the escalation sounds like now. It’s an apparent...

On Monday, NASA failed in its first attempt to launch the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission, with engineers struggling to resolve an engine cooling issue. It’s a wholly unsurprising result, given that NASA was unable to complete a single wet dress rehearsal, of which four were attempted earlier in the year. The space agency appears to be winging it, with the botched launch attempt effectively serving as the fifth wet dress rehearsal, in what is a troubling sign. NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) was supposed to take flight on Monday morning, but instead we’re left wondering about the state of the...