News From Around the Web
#10 The Looming Electrical Power Shortage - Steve Goreham for The Washington Examiner and Steve Gorham on YouTube
People in developed nations take abundant electricity for granted. When asked where electricity comes from, most will point to their wall outlet. But many states in the U.S. are headed for a serious and prolonged shortage of electrical power not seen in decades, driven by rising demand from the artificial intelligence revolution and mandates to adopt green energy. For 20 years, U.S. electrical power policy has been dominated by efforts to try to “mitigate” global warming, believed to be caused by human greenhouse gas emissions. In 2021, President Joe Biden called for achieving a 100% carbon-free electric sector by 2035. Twenty-three states have enacted statutes or issued executive orders to achieve net-zero electricity generation by 2050...
#9 IRS Says Number of Audits About to Surge Who It Is Targeting? - Aimee Picchi for CBS News and Dennis Hendrix on X
The IRS says it is about to ramp up audits as it cracks down on tax cheats and seeks to deliver more revenue into the U.S. Treasury's coffers. But not every group of taxpayers will face more scrutiny, according to IRS commissioner Danny Werfel. The IRS has been bolstered by $80 billion in new funding directed by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which was signed into law in 2022 by President Joe Biden. The idea behind the new funding was to help revive an agency whose ranks have been depleted over the years, leading to customer service snarls, processing delays, and a falloff in audit rates... Passwords suck. If they’re easy to remember, they’re the simplest to guess. If they’re difficult to crack, they’re the hardest to recall. Even if you use the strongest passwords possible, they’re ineffective if they become known. Which is why I’ve stopped using them as much to log into my accounts. But I haven’t weakened my online security by doing so. In fact, I’ve improved it—and sped up my login times, too. How? I set up passkeys for my accounts. It takes just a few minutes, doesn’t cost anything, and can be done using your smartphone or PC. Using them is equally painless. When logging in, you choose the passkey option, then approve the login request with your thumbprint, face scan, or PIN. It’s fast. This authentication method is secure, too. A passkey improves on several password weaknesses... Two Republicans voted with Democrats in the Arizona Senate on Wednesday to repeal the state’s 1864 near-total abortion restriction. Republican State Sens. Shawnna Bolick and T.J. Shope joined Democrats to advance the repeal, which passed 16 to 14, CNN reported. The vote comes a week after three Republicans voted with all 29 Democrats in the state House to pass the repeal. The House Judiciary Committee, Chaired by Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), brought in several witnesses for an Apr. 16 hearing on COVID-19 accountability. One of the witnesses was Florida's Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo. Ladapo's recommendations were integral to many of the decisions to keep the state open during the 2020-2021 lockdowns. He was also the first to recommend a halt to the COVID-19 vaccines for children and males between the ages of 18 and 39. Ladapo's testimony is particularly important because he and Governor DeSantis were more open to data and evidence that contradicted federal mandates early in the pandemic. The other witnesses at the Apr. 16 hearing were Conservative Attorney Harmeet Dhillon, Claudine Geoghegan with the Independent Women's Forum, and Professor Michelle Goodwin. Goodwin is the Linda D. & Timothy J. O'Neil Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy at Georgetown University. Ending this tax perk for illegal immigrants would save taxpayers $25 billion over the next 10 years. Naturally, Democrats want to make it permanent This election year, illegal immigration has jumped to the very top of the list of voters’ most important issues. If you watch the news, you might not be surprised by that — because of chaos at the border, record-breaking numbers of border crossings under Joe Biden, and high-profile crimes committed by people who shouldn’t be here in the first place... Former President Donald Trump may be increasing his lead over President Joe Biden with each passing poll, but that does not mean he takes a single voter for granted. In an unprecedented move for any major party presidential candidate, much less the Republican party’s prospective nominee, Trump has accepted an invitation to speak at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention. President Joe Biden was also invited but is, so far, not expected to attend, according to The Hill. The Libertarian Party posted the announcement on its website, hailing Trump’s acceptance as a “historic” and “momentous” occasion and suggesting they feel privileged to have him address their event... MSNBC host Reverend Al Sharpton argued Thursday that chaos seen on college campuses by left-wing agitators is hurting Democrats politically. “How do the Democrats, how do all of us on that side say Jan. 6 was wrong, if you can have the same pictures going on on college campuses? You lose the moral high ground,” Sharpton said on “Morning Joe” as he and the program’s co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough watched footage from the clashes between pro-Palestinian, anti-Semitic protesters and police at the University of California, Los Angeles. Brzezinski interjected, “Good Lord, don’t make a parallel with Jan. 6!” A study published Monday detailed the discovery of a massive blue sinkhole discovered in the Chetumal Bay off the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. Scientists haven’t even reached the bottom of the Taam Ja’ Blue Hole (TJBH) but it is still the deepest known underwater sinkhole in the world, according to a study published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. The discovery was made on December 6, 2023, when a scuba expedition took measurements with a conductivity, temperature, and depth (CTD) profiler. The device probes and transmits data from the water to the surface in real-time, revealing the bottom of the hole was the largest.
#8 One Company Is Recording Tens of Millions of License Plates per Month Across 47 States - Sarah Kennedy for Motor Biscuit
Automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras are becoming more and more common on American roads, thanks to one company. Flock Safety is a tech company that provides surveillance products to a wide array of clients. Its largest customer is law enforcement. Namely, governing bodies use the company’s ALPR cameras to capture millions of U.S. driver plates all over the country. Many local citizens are unaware of the cameras. Chiefly, this is due to the quiet methods used to install them and utilize recorded data...
#7 I’m Ditching My Passwords—and You Should Too - Alaina Yee for PC World and Nano Nutrino on X
#6 Arizona Senate Votes to Repeal 1864 Near-Total Abortion Ban - Katherine Hamilton on Breitbart and The Chris and Joe Show on X
#5 Witnesses Testify on Effects of COVID-19 Policies for House Judiciary - Wendi Strauch Mahoney for UncoverDC
#4 Why Does America Give Billion-Dollar Tax Credits to Illegal Immigrants? Jonathan Ingram for Blaze Media and Adam Gibbs on X
#3 What Has Happened to Us? A Retrospective of the COVID Pandemic - Tracy Beanz for The HighWire
In 2020, a pandemic swept the globe. Every human being on the planet—even those in the womb—would be affected by it somehow. We could spend paragraph upon paragraph speaking about the ills of the day—the horror, the betrayal, the sadness, the loss, the grief, the heartbreak—and we certainly have and do on the pages of this publication. However, I have had some deep reflection over the past several months, and I am choosing to dissect this pandemic from another perspective—the positive. Yes, friends, the positives do exist, and I firmly believe we do ourselves no good obsessively and frantically, keeping ourselves in a state of fear...
#2 Trump to Attend Libertarian National Convention, Which May Give Him an Even Larger Advantage Over Biden - Rachel M. Emmanuel for Western Journal and Maga Elvis on X
#1 Sharpton Admits Truth on MSNBC: How Can Left Say Jan. 6 Was Wrong, But Not Anti-Semitic Campus Protests? Randy DeSoto for Western Journal and Real Cherokee Owl and Not the Bee on X
And Now for Something Special
Scientists Discover Unfathomably Large Blue Hole, And The Photos Are Epic - Kay Smythe for The Daily Caller and Sharif Khan on X
