The once-thriving pharmacy chain Rite Aid might be going out of business for good. The company first filed for bankruptcy in October 2023 and closed more than half its stores. A year and a half later, Rite Aid filed for its second bankruptcy in a New Jersey court. “I think what we’ll progressively see is the stores will become more and more spartan,” retail analyst Neil Saunders told the Associated Press. According to its website, Rite Aid operates 1,245 locations in 15 states. Many locations are in New York, Pennsylvania, and California. The chain currently has 347 locations in California alone. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Rite Aid (@riteaid) Rite Aid Will Sell All Stores To A New Owner As Part Of The Bankruptcy The AP reported stores will remain open as Rite Aid seeks a new owner during the bankruptcy proceedings. Customers can continue to fill prescriptions, receive immunizations, and shop online and in-store as usual. “For more than 60 years, Rite Aid has been a proud provider of pharmacy services and products to our loyal customers. While we have continued to face financial challenges, intensified by the rapidly evolving retail and healthcare landscapes in which we operate, we are encouraged by meaningful interest from a number of potential national and regional strategic acquirors,” Matt Schroeder, Chief Executive Officer of Rite Aid, said in a statement.  “As we move forward, our key priorities are ensuring uninterrupted pharmacy services for our customers and preserving jobs for as many associates as possible.” He then thanks loyal Rite Aid customers for their support during the bankruptcy proceedings.  “I will be forever grateful to our thousands of associates for their commitment to Rite Aid and its mission. And I thank our entire team – from store associates to corporate employees – for their dedication to our customers and our company. With their support, we have played a critical role in supporting the healthcare needs of countless Americans across the communities that we are honored to serve.” This story’s featured image is by Colleen Michaels via Shutterstock. The post Major Drug Store Chain Decides What’s Next After Declaring Bankruptcy appeared first on InspireMore.

'This case holds profound national significance'

Trump is reportedly getting involved in college athletics

'I’m not for taking away people’s health care'

'The risk is the Dairy Association and their industry profits'

Even in non-election years, improving election integrity is a winning issue for state legislators. Proof of their interest is in the laws adopted by several states in the early months of 2025, laws that have produced considerable improvements in how those states secure and manage their elections. Since 2021, The Heritage Foundation has been tracking the laws of every state (and the District of Columbia) governing the conduct of elections—local, state, and federal—and ranking them in its Election Integrity Scorecard. With the latest round of updates, recognition is due to Arkansas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming for their legislative improvements. Utah made the largest strides, improving by a total of eight points. Utah’s legislature addressed several important issues affecting the accuracy of the state’s voter rolls. The state now uses the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement Program and jury questionnaires to identify non-citizens who have registered to vote. It also adopted procedures for investigating anomalies in the number of individuals registered at a single address and the validity of a voter registration when an absentee ballot is returned as undeliverable.  Importantly, Utah has moved away from the practice of automatically mailing absentee ballots. By 2029, voters who are eligible for mail-in ballots will have to request them. Wyoming’s new legislation earned it an impressive five-point gain on the Election Integrity Scorecard. Like Utah, Wyoming has adopted the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement Program to help officials identify non-citizens who register to vote. Additionally, Wyoming passed a ban on all private funding of the elections, a practice that certain well-heeled groups have used as a partisan device for driving voter turnout in urban districts. The state also passed a formal ban on ranked choice voting, the controversial practice of instructing voters to pick multiple candidates and then reallocating the votes to produce an artificial majority. West Virginia, for its part, directed state election officials to remove a registration from the state’s voter rolls when comparisons with other state agency databases reveal that the registration is duplicative or otherwise invalid. Finally, Arkansas earned a point for requiring an additional witness whenever a care facility administrator assists a resident of that facility with marking a ballot. That brings Arkansas’s total improvement on the year to two points, putting the state among the nation’s best performers at number six overall.   Happily, no state has declined in its overall score through this point in 2025, though it should be remembered that we cannot award a state any less than zero points per question even if the state persists in making counterproductive choices.  States with part-time legislatures will soon be winding down their sessions. But time remains for legislators to make the security of future elections a present priority. Given the progress of the last few months, we can reasonably hope to see more such improvements this year. The post Early Returns Show Wins for Election Integrity in 2025 appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures does not say that the government cannot search your house. Instead, it lays boundaries that officials are supposed to stay within to conduct such a search. It’s all built on the judicial premise of “innocent until proven guilty.” Lately, Virginians are worried about surveillance on the roads known as “Flock cameras” (Flock is the brand name). These cameras are, according to the manufacturer’s marketing, “solar-powered, motion-activated, and infrastructure-free cameras which are used for license plate reading and can identify and categorize details of vehicles that pass by, including make, vehicle type, color, license plate, state of the plate, and unique features.” The cameras are colloquially known as license plate readers. Flock camera systems operate under contract with law enforcement agencies, neighborhood associations, and private property owners, and as of 2024, the company claims to operate in over 5,000 communities across at least 42 states. Two months ago, the cameras were credited for helping locate a missing girl and apprehend her kidnapper in Texas. And here in Virginia, they were used to locate an estranged mother who took her kids from a Fishersville bus stop to Georgia. This past week, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin amended a bill to create restrictions on the use of videos taken by the cameras as well as the length of time they could be kept. Under his proposal, law enforcement would only hold onto images for 21 days, down from 30. The restrictions would also bar Virginia police agencies from sharing Flock data with police in other states without a warrant, subpoena, or court order. The governor’s proposal also withholds expansion of the deployment of these cameras until 2026, after a new General Assembly session convenes in January and passes the bill. If the bill passes in 2026, the Virginia State Police propose to install 5000-plus units on the highways they patrol. Defense attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union and civil liberties law firm The Rutherford Institute argue that the cameras are a form of “warrantless surveillance.” But law enforcement counters that observing a citizen in public places does not require a warrant. The governor’s amended bill tries to, though in many more words, do what the Fourth Amendment does: acknowledge that sometimes law enforcement needs to search for something or someone, while at the same time, it puts restrictions on that authority so as not to trample rights. The bill tries to define the proper steps that have to be taken to use that authority as well as defines the punishments for police officers caught misusing the data. One can be charged with a misdemeanor for abusing the technology. The Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police asked the governor to veto the original bill, House Bill 2724, sponsored by Del. Charniele Herring, D-Alexandria. That bill would have limited the use of images captured by the cameras to specific criminal investigations or searches for missing persons and children. Rather than veto the bill, the governor amended it. John Whitehead of the Charlottesville-based Rutherford Institute said why he opposes the use of the cameras: “Although preemptive precrime programs, driven by surveillance cameras and fusion centers, are popping up all across the country, they are not necessarily making communities any safer, but they are endangering individual freedoms. As such, the threats posed by these license plate readers to First and Fourth Amendment rights cannot be understated.” The interesting thing is, given the fact that many people have heard about highway cameras and many may have an opinion, little public policy polling has been done on the overall pro-or-con sentiment. Perhaps pollsters feel that public sentiment about such technology, given its already ubiquitous nature, would be a moot point.   The technology genie is not going back into the bottle, so as in 1789 when the Framers created the Fourth Amendment, we need strong guardrails and punishments for people who cross them. The post Get the Flock Out appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Venezuelan government was facilitating the illegal immigration of dangerous gang members into the United States according to multiple intelligence reports and the legacy media is trying to portray this as bad news for the Trump administration. On Monday The New York Times ran a story with a headline “Declassified Spy Memo Contradicts Trump on Venezuela Gang Ties.” Other legacy media outlets ran with similar headlines. The stories are referring to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang that the Trump administration has designated a terrorist organization. If you just read the headlines, you might think that the declassified intelligence report says the Venezuelan government had nothing to do with the exportation of Tren de Aragua gang members to the U.S. as President Donald Trump has said. However, not every outlet ran with these headlines. The New York Post had a very different angle.  “Corrupt Venezuelan officials ‘facilitated’ Tren de Aragua gang’s reign of terror in U.S.” read their headline on Monday. So why the enormous discrepancy? What’s the intelligence report actually say? According to the report titled “Venezuela: Examining Regime Ties to Tren de Aragua,” intelligence officials think the Venezuelan socialist regime led by President Nicolas Maduro has “facilitated” the illegal migration of gang members into the U.S. “to advance what they see as the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing governments and undermining public safety.” According to the assessment, Venezuela has been doing this for years and during the peak years of illegal border crossings—the Biden years—the intelligence report concludes that there were likely Tren de Aragua members slipping into the country. “From 2021 to 2024 there was a spike in Venezuelan encounters at the US-Mexico border, in which some TDA members could have been present as they have generally moved with Venezuelan migrant communities and profit from human trafficking and migrant smuggling,” the report said. No kidding. Here’s where the legacy media says the “gotcha” comes in. The New York Times argued that the report doesn’t draw a direct connection between the Venezuelan government and Tren de Aragua. As in, the government doesn’t literally give the gang marching orders. So, this undermines the Trump administration’s legal case to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport illegal aliens on a mass scale, they argue. Again, if you read the report, it is ambiguous as to what level of confidence the intelligence sources have that there is no connection between the gang and the government. It only says that the Maduro government “probably” doesn’t direct Tren de Aragua in part because doing so with such a decentralized crime organization would be difficult. A month ago, the FBI assessed, according to Fox News, that “some Venezuelan government officials are likely using Tren de Aragua members as proxies for the Maduro regime in an effort to destabilize Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and the United States.” This intelligence report is simply a watered-down version of what the FBI said. And it doesn’t contradict the most important aspect of the whole affair. Both reports say that the Maduro regime was eager to drop Tren de Aragua gang members on the United States and did what it could to clear the path for them to do so. This new assessment even says that harm to the U.S. might have been the “principal intent” of the policy. Whatever Maduro’s intent, the effect was the same. The Venezuelan government cleared the way for potentially huge numbers of Tren de Aragua gang members to come to the United States. “Whether [Tren de Aragua] exclusively murders, smuggles drugs, and traffics illegal immigrants over our borders on the orders of Venezuelan leaders, or freelances for self-enrichment is beside the point,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in a Fox News op-ed last week. “It has killed on behalf of a hostile foreign government, that government has fostered its growth, and that government has encouraged it to invade the United States to advance its interests.” Despite the excellent work the Trump administration has done to put a halt to new arrivals, Tren de Aragua continues to cause mayhem in our country. The gang has taken over hotels, terrorized residents of Aurora, Colorado, and has seemingly put down roots in New York City. On Friday, a group of 11 suspected Tren de Aragua members allegedly attacked two NYPD officers in Times Square. NEW: A mob of about 12 individuals, allegedly part of the violent foreign gang Tren de Aragua, attacked two NYPD officers who were attempting to stop an assault.How long till Democrats defend this? pic.twitter.com/nS2alyjwvl— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 6, 2025 A former resident of Aurora who had been a victim of Tren de Aragua pleaded with the federal government at an April House Judiciary hearing to step in and do something. This is the evil that Maduro’s government and the Biden administration hath wrought. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, is correct here. Tren de Aragua is a hostile, invading force. They have caused enough suffering in their country of origin, and they need to be stamped out here in the U.S. Tren de Aragua is an invading force that must be forcibly—and immediately—removed from the U.S. https://t.co/4xzXlKNKVk— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) May 7, 2025 Nothing in this recent intelligence report suggests that we should act otherwise. It’s being used to create a bogus media narrative directly at odds with the reality on the ground and the sentiments of the American people. The post Media Spins Report on How Venezuela Facilitated Violent Gang’s Invasion of US appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Washington Declares War On Faith; Seattle Archbishop Warns Priests to Remain Firm

It serves several purposes.