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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg shifted part of the blame for the recent derailment of a train carrying toxic chemicals in Ohio on the Trump administration reversing a little-known safety rule. Buttigieg noted Tuesday evening that his agency had taken a series of steps to improve rail safety through "historic investments," but said it was constrained by the Trump administration action. In 2018, the Department of Transportation (DOT) withdrew a rule proposed three years earlier requiring trains carrying certain dangerous chemicals to utilize electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes, saying the technology's benefits were inconclusive.

(Last Updated On: February 13, 2023) NATIONAL GUMDROP DAY Observed on February 15th, National Gumdrop Day recognizes a favorite candy of many; the gumdrop! There’s no question as to what to do. Eat gumdrops and eat as many as you want! #NationalGumdropDay Gumdrops are a tasty, colorful, chewy candy that is made with gelatin and then coated with sugar. They come in a variety of flavors and can either be fruity or spicy. These little candy treats make terrific embellishments for decorating gingerbread houses and other baked goods. The classic board game, Candy Land, features both a Gumdrop Pass and...

Nikki Haley, NIKKI HALEY Here’s who is running for president in 2024 Haley calls for US to move on from ‘faded names of the past’ Trump attacks Haley on Medicare, Social Security cuts MORE(NIKKI HALEY) the newly minted Republican presidential candidate, called on Wednesday for mandatory “mental competency tests” for politicians older than 75, an implied dig at President Biden and her onetime boss, former President Trump. Speaking at a rally in Charleston, S.C., kicking off her 2024 White House bid, Haley ran through a litany of political promises, including enacting term limits for members of Congress and cracking down...

If Valentine’s Day yesterday wasn’t enough of a blow, it’s going to cost you a pretty penny to be by your lonesome in the Big Apple. New York City has been marked as the most expensive place to live as a single person, according to a new study by the real estate firm Zillow. The heartbreaking truth, the study says, is that singles pay on average $19,500 more across all boroughs a year for a one-bedroom, compared to someone living with a partner in the same area. In Manhattan, this figure rises even higher, to $24,000 — making it the...

Raising money to finance illegal activity is illegal for anyone - so why do the rules not apply to the Left? Antifa, like the Democrat Party, is built on the model of nonprofit support infrastructure. In the party, that means everything except the most direct campaign activities are outsourced to networks of nonprofits that use tax-deductible donations for everything from voter registration and outreach, media and messaging, to funding election infrastructure ‘Zuckerbucks’ style. Unlike its Black Lives Matter allies, the Antifa networks aren’t funded by a single nonprofit. Antifa’s illegal activities and the radical tendencies of its participants, many of...

She's back! But you have to be on Fox Nation, which is ok. I don't join things, but she's back is good news, anyway.

Kraus’ daughter Virginia Guinan said in a deposition that he was asleep when she dropped by that day and she didn’t want to wake him because he was in ill health and also upset that his dog had died. Alerted about the bloodbath later, Guinan rushed back to his home, where she saw paramedics performing CPR on her dad as he lay in a pool of blood. A trail led to the chicken house, where she saw one of the birds with blood on its claws and suspected it was the same one that had been sent to live on...

A Russian journalist was sentenced to six years in a penal colony on Wednesday for accusing the Russian air force of bombing a theater in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol last April where women and children were sheltering. The Lenin district court in the Siberian city of Barnaul also banned Maria Ponоmarenko from working as a journalist for five years, according to a court service statement. State prosecutors had asked for a nine-year sentence.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on the Senate floor Wednesday that President Joe Biden and Democrats are engaging in ‘demographic box-checking” regarding their judicial nominees. “Yesterday, President Biden and the Senate Democratic Leader took time to boast about their judicial confirmations. There was something interesting, strange, and telling about their statements,” the Senate Republican leader said. “Both the President and the Democratic Leader focused their comments overwhelmingly on identity politics and demographic box-checking.”

The Bureau of Labor and Statistics released the January consumer price index today .. reflecting what you already know. The overall inflation rate stands at 6.4%, after the anniversaries of the first two waves of price increases have now tolled. Inflation is the measure of price increases over time. Following two years of massive jumps in price, we are now cycling through and comparing current prices to the previous period when prices had already skyrocketed. This gives a false impression of price moderation (hindsight inflation); however, the price of goods and services is significantly higher, and those prices will not...

Explanation: This unusual sky was both familiar and unfamiliar. The photographer's mission was to capture the arch of the familiar central band of our Milky Way Galaxy over a picturesque medieval manor. The surprise was that on this January evening, the foreground sky was found glowing in a beautiful but unfamiliar manner. The striped bands are called airglow and they result from air high in Earth's atmosphere being excited by the Sun's light and emitting a faint light of its own. The bands cross the entire sky -- their curved appearance is due to the extremely wide angle of the...

On Tuesday, Democrats in the New Mexico House of Representatives voted 43-24 for H.B. 31 to allow children under 14 to change their legal name without parental consent or public notice. “If the court finds that notice to one or more legal parents or legal guardians of a child who is under fourteen years of age will jeopardize the child’s or the applicant’s personal safety, the court shall not require notice,” the bill reads. The bill, however, does not say what would constitute “jeopardizing” the child’s safety. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Christine Chandler (D-Los Alamos), said during the debate that...

The West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources contracted with a company in 2017 to develop a system, known as WV PATH, to help the agency better manage programs including Medicaid, food assistance and its child welfare system. With less than four years left on the contract, the project still isn’t complete. Senate Finance Committee Chair Eric Tarr, who has questioned DHHR about the missing database, said the project has cost $173 million as of July 2022 based on information from DHHR. “The first risk is harm to kids,” Tarr, R-Putnam, said. “The larger risk is that the feds...

MONROE COUNTY, FLa.- Two suspected members of the Pagans motorcycle gang were arrested in separate incidents — one for having an outstanding warrant and another for illegal weapon possession. “Anyone who comes to the Florida Keys and commits crimes will be on my radar,” said Sheriff Rick Ramsay. “I am committed to the safety of this community.” • Nicole Marie Fortier, 45, Springhill, Florida, was arrested for possession of methamphetamine (.4 grams), possession of a concealed weapon without a permit (a 9mm pistol), and possession of drug paraphernalia following a traffic stop on U.S. 1 near 17th Court in Marathon....

In the wake of the latest shootdown of an unidentified object over North American airspace, we now have audio recordings of the in-cockpit communications from the two F-16 fighter jets involved in yesterday afternoon’s intercept over Lake Huron. What’s immediately striking on listening to them, is that the pilots in question also seem to be perplexed as to what they are actually observing and the precise nature of the craft that they ultimately dispatched. The object was “decommissioned” over Lake Huron by a pair of 148th Fighter Wing “Bulldogs” F-16CMs. The fighters launched out of Madison, Wisconsin at around 10:30...

Laura Rosenberger, President Joe Biden’s top adviser on matters related to China and Taiwan, will step down in March, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing White House officials. Rosenberger serves as a special assistant to the president and senior director on the National Security Council and has guided the president amid Washington’s increasing tensions with Beijing and will see out her term as the administration grapples with fallout from the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon in America’s coastal waters on Feb. 4. However, Rosenberger’s plans to step down preceded the balloon invading U.S. airspace and sparking bipartisan concern in Congress...

Despite recently passing legislation that will impose hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes on America’s job creators, my Democratic colleagues are using a new Government Accountability Office report as justification for a push to raise taxes even further on businesses they think aren’t paying their “fair share.” But the report, which examines the average effective tax rates of large corporations before and after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, argues more in favor of the GOP reforms than Democrats admit.Issued on the request of the Democratic leaders of the Senate Finance and Senate Budget committees, the report...

"We now estimate 97% of the whole Russian army is in Ukraine," Wallace told the BBC on Wednesday. "We haven't actually seen this massing of a single force to punch through in a big offensive," Wallace told BBC. "We've just seen an effort to advance, and that has come at a huge cost to the Russian army."...Western officials are skeptical of Russia forging an all-out offensive next week, partly because it has already activated the vast majority of ground forces inside Ukraine territories.

Flaco, a Eurasian eagle owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo in New York earlier in February, has been seen hunting and eating his own food, officials said. Photo courtesy of the Central Park Zoo Feb. 14 (UPI) -- A Eurasian eagle owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo in New York earlier this month is now hunting for his own food, officials said. Flaco, an owl that escaped from his enclosure at the zoo after his exhibit was vandalized in early February, has been spotted in the park on numerous occasions since his escape, but has evaded...

Chinese state media continued having a field day with the Ohio train disaster on Tuesday and Wednesday, crowing that the calamity has become a viral sensation on Chinese social media because it exposes the corruption, incompetence, and hypocrisy of the U.S. government. “Many netizens, when criticizing the U.S. for not properly handling the disaster, also questioned if the U.S. government is trying to deliberately withhold information, and hype a balloon incident involving China to divert domestic media attention,” the state-run Global Times said on Tuesday, hammering Beijing’s favorite new talking point about how President Joe Biden’s administration targeted China’s harmless...