Month: January 2024

Federal Diversity Trainings Cost Taxpayers in 2023 Millions of Dollars

South Carolina Sun Staff

The Biden administration spent millions on diversity trainings for federal agencies, including some for the armed forces, in 2023.

Taxpayers were on the hook for the more than $16.3 million the federal government spent on diversity trainings taking place in 2023, according to a government spending database. Past government diversity trainings have instructed federal workers that asking an Asian colleague for help with a math problem could be racist, that men can become pregnant and that “social pain” can be the same as physical pain.

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Utah Gives Taxpayer-Funded Health Care to Illegal Immigrant Children

South Carolina Sun Staff
Utah Bill

Utah is giving taxpayer-funded health insurance to illegal immigrant children, according to a law that went into effect Jan. 1.

Roughly 6,500 illegal immigrant children in Utah will qualify for care under the program, Thaiss Del Rio, a health policy analyst at Voices for Utah Children, told Axios of the new law. Utah’s move follows a decision by the state of California to provide health care for illegal immigrants up to the age of 49.

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Cincinnati Children’s Internal Training Tells Doctors Ways to Avoid Parental Consent for Trans Procedures

South Carolina Sun Staff
Cincinnati Children's

Hospital staff at Cincinnati Children’s in Ohio explained ways for doctors to work around parental consent for transgender minor patients in an internal training video obtained by the Daily Wire.

Steve Davis, the president and CEO of the hospital, testified in December against several bills that would have banned all transgender procedures for minors, arguing that parental consent was always obtained for any treatment and that the legislation would harm families. Dr. Lee Ann Conard, director of the hospital’s Transgender Health Clinic, said, however, that if a child is reluctant to tell their family that they identify as transgender there are things that doctors and hospital staff can do to conceal treatment from the parents, according to the video.

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Commentary: Post-Election Audits Should Be the Norm for Every State

South Carolina Sun Staff

I may be dating myself, but the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

We can get much more than an ounce’s worth of prevention by engaging in post-election process audits. It is much easier to fix process problems early before they blow up and become problems that require litigation and other nasty fixes. Ahead of the 2024 election, state legislatures should require full process audits to ensure transparency and build trust in our elections.

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More Generation Z Candidates Filing to Run for Congress

South Carolina Sun Staff
Gen Z Congress Candidates

The current youngest generation may soon elect more of its members to the United States Congress.

According to The Hill, several more members of Generation Z, also known as “Zoomers,” are attempting to expand their ranks in Congress after the first Zoomer was elected in 2022. The age group, the next in line after Millennials, is generally considered to start with those born in 1997 or later. Currently, the sole Zoomer in Congress is Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), who was elected in 2022 at the age of 25.

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Nation’s Capital Devastated by Crime Spike in 2023

South Carolina Sun Staff
DC Skyline

The District of Columbia experienced a 39% increase in violent crime in 2023, according to data published by its Metropolitan Police Department (MPD).

The District has long experienced issues with crime and property theft, despite having the most police officers per capitaof any jurisdiction in the country, due to the significant presence of federal law enforcement to protect the seat of the government of the United States. In 2023, overall crime increased by 26% over 2022, with 34,414 instances of violent and property crime reported to police, with property crime alone rising by 24%.

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Massive Chinese Wealth Management Firm Files for Bankruptcy amid Real Estate Crisis

South Carolina Sun Staff
Chinese Homes

Top wealth manager Zhongzhi Enterprise Group declared bankruptcy on Friday after failing to pay its debts due to its heavy investment in the country’s struggling real estate market.

Zhongrong International Trust, a subsidiary of the company, told investors in November 2023 that it had at least $31 billion more in liabilities than in assets, previously having around $108 billion in assets at the end of 2022, according to The Wall Street Journal. The trust held around 11% of its assets in the property sector in 2022, with numerous developers defaulting amid a real estate crisis that began following the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Commentary: Educational Collapse and the Definition of Truth

South Carolina Sun Staff
College Students

It’s no secret that America’s students are struggling. The latest Nation’s Report Cards have not been flattering, with average scores in both math and reading declining over recent years.

It’s also no secret that pandemic restrictions have only exacerbated the learning decline in the U.S. However, scores have been falling since before the pandemic, signaling that there are more systemic problems holding back young people. In fact, this educational decline comes from a deeper philosophical brokenness about the notion of truth itself.

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Commentary: A Clean Future Does Not Exist Without Nuclear Energy

RealClearWire

On the heels of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, it’s clear that nuclear energy’s role in achieving a clean energy future cannot be overlooked or understated. 

At COP28, we heard from dozens of top minds in-person and from afar who echoed the same message: Transitioning to cleaner energy sources cannot come at the price of an unreliable power supply, and that is where nuclear energy comes in. Not only is it a reliable, proven technology, but it is also clean, producing zero carbon emissions. Already, the United States’ 94 nuclear power reactors generate around 18% of all U.S. electricity.  

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Federal Employees’ Political Donations Largely Went to Biden, Other Dems in 2023

South Carolina Sun Staff
Government Workers

Over 60% of political donations to prominent political committees made by employees of the federal government’s 15 cabinet-level departments flowed to President Joe Biden and other Democrats in 2023, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of Federal Election Commission records.

The DCNF filtered donations in calendar year 2023 by individuals who listed their employer as one of 15 cabinet agencies, and who donated to the Biden campaign, the Biden Victory Fund, the Trump campaign, Save America PAC, and the respective congressional and senatorial fundraising committees for each party.

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