‘It’s Shameful:’ New Law Tackles Maternity Care for Female Veterans

The Department of Veterans Affairs will be able to invest more in maternity care for female veterans and the federal government will be required to study the health of active-duty and former service members who have had babies or are trying to get pregnant after Congress passed legislation Tuesday.

The Protecting Moms Who Served Act, passed by the House in a 414-9 vote and now heading to President Joe Biden for a signature, allows the VA to spend $15 million to improve coordination between the VA hospitals that treat female veterans and the community facilities that provide their obstetrics care.

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The Celebrity-Backed Green “Fintech” Company That Isn’t as Green as It Seems

Aspiration is among a group of companies that provide banking and financial services, and promise to help the environment. But so far its marketing is greener than its reality.

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You can save the planet with a swipe of your bank card. That’s the enticing proposition made by a company called Aspiration, which promises to take the leftover change from customers’ purchases and use it to plant trees around the world. Aspiration is on track to spend $149 million this year marketing that message, according to its financial documents, considerably more than the revenues the company expects to take in.

“Clean rich is the new filthy rich,” Aspiration proclaims on billboards across New York, Texas and California. Other ads, ubiquitous on social media, feature images of Aspiration’s debit card, which depicts a green treescape and is made from recycled plastic. The likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Robert Downey Jr. and Drake have invested in the company. Aspiration has received enthusiastic press coverage (with the exception of a critical dissection by New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway). And the company won further headlines in September for its reported $300 million, 23-year sponsorship deal with the Los Angeles Clippers, which will feature Aspiration’s name on signs inside the Clippers’ new arena, give the company a role in sustainability initiatives and put its logo on the jersey of every Clippers player.

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Back-and-forth battle between Southlake parents continues amidst civil rights investigation

As the Department of Education’s civil rights investigation into Carroll ISD in Southlake continues, passionate parents on both sides of the issue are speaking out.

“This is going to get worse. These guys are willing to do and say anything, but what can we do except stand up for the minority kids (and) the special needs kids in our town and insist that the issues that are being revealed get addressed?” Carroll ISD dad Bjorn Bennett said.

On Wednesday, the Department of Education’s Office for Civils Rights told WFAA it has opened three separate investigations into the district “related to discrimination based on race, color, national origin, or sex.”

But Carroll ISD’s headlines started years ago, after two separate videos of students chanting a racial slur went viral.

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Mass murder threat

On Nov. 12, 2021, late Friday evening, Lee County Sheriff Jim Johnson was in Memphis, when he got a call from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The tip from the FBI was in regard to a possible threat to a church in Lee County.

“It (the threat) was flagged by Google. When this post was made through a U-Tube video, the internet picked it up and there are certain sites who flag stuff,” Johnson said. “Just like our system here at the sheriff’s office, with the inmate telephone service, we can key in certain words of interest like ‘escape’ and it will flag us anytime that word is used.”

Search engines like Google and social media sites are to alert agencies like the FBI anytime “threats” are mentioned on their formats. The information received from the FBI was deemed credible, and the Lee County Sheriff’s Department immediately began investigating the threat. Upon further investigation it was determined an individual made a comment through a social media platform that he was planning “a mass murder” at his church the next Sunday, which would have been Nov. 14, 2021.

“The FBI was able to get the IP address of where the message was sent from. Once we had that information — it was more or less — this is exactly what the threat is, and here’s the address the threat came from. This is where the egg’s hid now go find it,” Johnson said. “It was a Saltillo address and he was there.”

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Investigators hunting for mafia-linked union boss Jimmy Hoffa – whose 1975 disappearance featured in The Irishman – dig up a New Jersey landfill

  • Hoffa was 62 when he vanished after a restaurant meeting on the outskirts of Detroit in July 1975, and his body has never been found
  • His death is widely believed to have been ordered by Anthony Provenzano, a capo with the Genovese crime family and head of a New Jersey teamsters union
  • The search for Hoffa has seen multiple sites dug up over the decades, mainly in the Detroit area
  • Several rumors over the years have also pointed to New Jersey locations but nothing has ever been confirmed
  • In 2019 a dying former worker on a landfill in Jersey City said that his father, in 2008, told him he was given Hoffa’s body and told to bury it
  • On October 25 and 26 this year FBI teams from Detroit and Newark dug part of the former landfill site in the hunt for steel barrels 
  • The FBI has not discussed their findings but finding Hoffa’s remains would end a mystery 46-years in the making 

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