On Monday, two federal court judges issued nationwide injunctions stopping the Biden administration from illegally canceling hundreds of billions of dollars in student debt. This scheme, the Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, plan, is the latest lawless loan redistribution attempt to fail in court. Background Biden finalized SAVE via an administrative regulation less than two weeks after the Supreme Court struck down his initial attempt at mass student loan cancellation through the HEROES Act. There, Biden had unlawfully attempted to cancel up to $10,000 each for borrowers earning less than $125,000 annually, or up to $20,000 if they had ever received a Pell Grant, a federal need-based aid grant, while in college. SAVE re-imagined the Department of Education’s income-based repayment plans. Under these plans, borrowers would see their monthly loan payment cut in half, from 10% to 5% of their discretionary income. The program also increased the threshold for income that is exempt from the calculation from 150% to 225% of the poverty line. In addition, borrowers could qualify for loan cancellation in as little as 10 years instead of 20 or more, depending on their loan amounts. The plan also waived accrued unpaid interest. Under the new SAVE plan, only 22% of undergraduate borrowers were expected to repay their loans, and it was estimated to cost American taxpayers $475 billion over 10 years. What Exactly Got Struck Down by the Courts? The Eastern District of Missouri judge’s order blocked the administration from handing out any additional debt cancellation under SAVE, which means that the administration will no longer be able to accelerate to 10 years its debt cancellation for borrowers with $12,000 or less in loans. Nor can Biden cancel the remaining balance of a borrower’s loan after 20 years of repayment under this reading of the authorizing statute. The debt remains collectible. The District of Kansas judge’s order prevented the department from implementing another aspect of SAVE: reducing the monthly loan payment from 10% to 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income, which was scheduled to take effect on July 1. The judge’s order also blocked a provision that would have prevented the department from automatically designating borrowers as in default. Both federal judges found that the department lacked the authority to make significant changes to the income-based repayment plan without explicit authorization from Congress. The Major Questions Doctrine, which helps judges see when an agency has gone far beyond its authority to make major rules without authorization from Congress, played a significant role in both decisions. This doctrine is also what helped stopped Biden’s earlier plan at the Supreme Court. What Remains? Neither judge’s orders reversed the $5.5 billion already canceled under SAVE, which had been canceled due to the Biden administration implementing some of the SAVE provisions ahead of schedule. The injunctions also did not affect other provisions of SAVE, such as increasing the income exemption threshold from 150% to 225% of the federal poverty line, excluding spousal income for married borrowers who file taxes separately, or limiting interest accrual. As a result, more than 4 million borrowers will still pay $0 under the SAVE plan while legal action is ongoing. What Happens Next? The Biden administration will likely appeal the injunctions, since debt cancellation has been a campaign promise. The future of the SAVE plan will likely be determined in further court battles and could end up in the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the department is barred from canceling the balances for any additional borrowers under SAVE, a result that should be broadly welcomed by American taxpayers. President Joe Biden should remember that none of his efforts at debt cancellation have offered a systemic answer for the rising cost of college. Instead, subsidizing loans and tuition only encourages more debt and higher tuition. Moreover, shifting the debt burden from those who willingly took out loans to attend college onto 100 million taxpayers—including the two-thirds of Americans who have not chosen to pursue higher education—is bad policy and bad economics. The post Courts Block Biden’s Student Loan Cancellation Plan: A Win for Taxpayers appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The one poker rule I taught my kids was: “Don’t cry when you lose, don’t gloat when you win.” Ideally, this would apply to our court system, though lower court decisions seem increasingly to be influenced by ideology and politics. The Supreme Court is our highest and last protection, and its justices should be the smartest lawyers and scholars and able to constrain themselves to their duty: to interpret the law and rule as to its constitutionality. One recent decision, in the case of Department of State v. Muñoz was a relief to me, U.S. consular officers, and even the Biden administration. The court ruled that a U.S. citizen “has no legal interest in the visa application of a third party, even a relative,” and, therefore, has no constitutional right to bring a noncitizen spouse to the United States. Like all foreign nationals, alien spouses must qualify for a visa under U.S. law to come here. In 2010, Sandra Muñoz married Luis Asencio-Cordero, and she later filed with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to get an immigrant visa for him. To get it, he had to leave the U.S. (where he was living illegally) for an interview at the U.S. embassy in El Salvador. The consular officer who interviewed Asencio-Cordero found him ineligible for a visa under the Immigration and Nationality Act, suspecting he was a member of the MS-13 gang due to his distinctive tattoos. Muñoz sued the government, arguing that depriving her of her alleged right to live with her husband violated her Fifth Amendment rights. The Fifth Amendment states that no U.S. person can be “deprived of … liberty … without due process.” The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—notorious for siding with immigrants against the government—ruled that the State Department owed Muñoz an explanation for denying her husband’s visa. The government appealed to the Supreme Court, which overturned the Ninth Circuit and ruled that U.S. citizens can’t force a court to review a consular officer’s decision made abroad.  The online magazine The Federalist rightly called the decision an “immigration rebuke,” but the author was mistaken when he wrote that Asencio-Cordero “was denied a visa by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2015”—visa decisions overseas are made by consular officers, who are commissioned Foreign Service officers in the State Department. The Muñoz case was the latest round in a battle by immigration activists against the doctrine of “consular non-reviewability,” which holds that decisions made by consular officers overseas in visa cases can’t be challenged in U.S. courts. If they were, the system would crumble—much like the asylum system has under Biden’s flood of released and paroled inadmissible aliens. Most foreigners applying for visas—usually for tourism, business, or family visits—are required to prove to a consular officer that they are likely to do what they claim and then go home again. Failure to convince on that score is the reason for most visa refusals. Refusal rates vary widely by a country’s economy—it’s much harder to get visas in a very poor country than in one where people have stable governments and good jobs where they are more likely to return home. Consular officers make over a hundred yes-or-no visa calls every day in U.S. embassies all over the world. Having made over 200 such decisions in a single day myself, I can imagine how relieved my former colleagues will be at the Muñoz verdict. If each refusal were to be open to dispute by U.S. citizen relatives of the applicant, it would “usher in a new strain of constitutional law,” in the words of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, with the potential to tank our judicial system. The current backlog of Justice Department immigration cases—in the millions—would pale in comparison to the flood of challenges that would ensue from aggrieved aliens denied a visa by a State Department consular officer. Still to come as of this writing is a critical decision from the Supreme Court on so-called Chevron deference, which gives federal agencies in the executive branch the benefit of the doubt—way too much, according to conservatives—when making rules to interpret the laws Congress passes. The Biden administration has stretched its rule-making discretion beyond credibility to achieve policy aims, particularly in immigration. As former Citizenship and Immigration Services chief Joe Edlow testified to Congress in January, “Under the guise of removing barriers, DHS [Department of Homeland Security], along with DOJ [Justice Department], have engaged in several rulemakings purportedly aimed at creating efficiency and expediency at the border.” In fact, he writes, “the regulatory efforts undertaken by the Biden administration have reinterpreted unambiguous statutes and have imposed its own policy when clear congressional mandate exists”—using the broad cloak of Chevron deference to do so. One example is a rule from 2022 that stripped most of the teeth from the “public charge” ineligibility under U.S. immigration law that should keep out indigent foreign nationals instead of letting them access welfare benefits they haven’t earned. Another is the DHS asylum rule that shifted the responsibility for handling many asylum claims from the Department of Justice to DHS asylum officers, in violation of statute and practice, leading to massive increases in asylum case approval rates. A third rule, called “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways”—despite its pretense of enforcing the law—actually “allow[s] most aliens to arrive at or between ports of entry, make fraudulent claims of fear to enter the U.S. or continue to utilize unlawful mass parole programs to accomplish the same,” predicted Edlow, and experience is proving him right. Leftist “progressives” see the Supreme Court as an obstacle if it doesn’t advance their agenda. The legacy media has attacked Justice Clarence Thomas’ “ethics,” although he has not violated any rules governing Supreme Court justices. They have attempted to smear Justice Samuel Alito because he flew a Revolutionary War flag at his beach house and his wife flew the Stars and Stripes upside down in a dispute with a neighbor. An undercover activist secretly recorded Alito saying that “there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised” and tried to use the innocuous observation to spin him as tainted, rather than as someone simply acknowledging deep national divisions on policy that can only be resolved by elections. Conservatives see the Supreme Court’s job as protecting our God-given rights and ruling as to what is and is not constitutional. Progressives see the court’s role as reading into the law—between the lines if need be—the outcomes and policies they want. They seem prepared to pack the court with more justices to dilute its current conservative majority, attack its existence, pressure justices, and protest the court until it bends to their will. Thanks to the media assault, public confidence in the Supreme Court is polling at around 40%, a historic low. But I’d argue that a popular Supreme Court today would not be doing its job properly. The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more. Read Other BorderLine Columns: Biden’s 5 Favorite Fudges on Immigration Law Illegal Immigration Crisis Drives European Voters to Conservatives Let’s Talk Some More About America’s Supposed ‘Rule of Law’ Videos Uncover Illegal Immigration Realities the Media Tries to Hide Unprecedented Surge in Chinese Illegal Immigration Raises Security Concerns The post Supreme Court Confirms No ‘Right’ for Foreigners to Enter US: The BorderLine appeared first on The Daily Signal.

America is “turning the corner” toward recognizing the harms to children of transgender ideology, says a Daily Signal journalist who recently published a bestselling book on the subject.  In an interview with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, Daily Signal senior reporter Mary Margaret Olohan shared what has encouraged her while reporting on the controversies surrounding child gender-reassignment procedures. Olohan is the author of “Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult,” which tells the stories of several young people who regret pursuing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even surgeries to try to live as the other sex.    “I’m amazed to see who has kind of coalesced to fight gender ideology,” Olohan said on “The Kevin Roberts Show” podcast. “The amount of activists who, I would say, are not conservative at all, but I’m interacting with on a daily basis, I’m constantly shocked.”  Olohan added, “It’s really beautiful to see who’s willing to set aside political differences and to fight for our kids in this day and age.”   The journalist also applauded the increased corporate media coverage of detransitioners, the growing number of lawsuits against the doctors who misled them, state laws banning the procedures for minors, and what she called “a huge tonal shift” in how Republican politicians message the issue. “So, I think we’re turning the corner when it comes to this issue, especially because most Americans don’t support these types of procedures,” Olohan said, “when you poll them accurately.” Watch the full episode of “The Kevin Roberts Show” and learn the truth about “gender-affirming care”: The post ‘We’re Turning the Corner’ in Fight Against Transgendering of Kids, Author Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. More internal documents originating from X have emerged, revealing some of the dynamics and ways used by the US government to, through one kind or another of roundabout pressure, nudge social platforms in the direction of censoring speech around Covid topics. How this happened on the now former Twitter is what the documents reveal, and it all goes back to 2021 when a former Biden administration “Covid response” adviser, Andy Slavitt (who was at the point of these interactions still using the White House email address), put major Covid vaccine-maker Pfizer’s board member Scott Gottlieb in touch with Todd O’Boyle. Alex Berenson, who has an active lawsuit against the Biden administration’s censorship attempts, has reported on this, suggesting that it was O’Boyle’s role was to, as a senior lobbyist for Twitter, interact with the White House. “I wonder if you would be open to a 20 minute call with Scott Gottlieb and me about a policy matter,” reads one email Slavitt sent to O’Boyle. All this was happening just as the debate around Covid vaccines was heating up. Specifically, there was rising skepticism about the effectiveness of these jabs, and this was the time when the infamous “booster shots” made their debut. This, according to the documents, sprung Pfizer (who clearly benefited from selling as many “boosters” as possible) to action, with Gottlieb at one point telling O’Boyle there was concern about “false narratives on key public health issues.” That’s one way of saying that criticism of the vaccine needs to be suppressed as misleading. Next in this particular chain of events – a part of a bigger controversy that some consider to be no less than a US government-Big Tech collusion – was O’Boyle letting Twitter’s US public policy head Lauren Culbertson know about Gottlieb’s sentiment. Culbertson then shared this with other Twitter execs, indicating that – although the Pfizer board member’s remarks, as well as those made by Slavitt, were carefully worded – they were in fact directly related to the Biden administration’s pressure to shut up vaccine skeptics on Twitter. But it wasn’t the only form of pressure social platforms were experiencing at the time. Some observers – and victims of censorship – see repeated threats of “reform” or “review” of Section 230 (which protects internet services from legal liability) as something the White House used to “prime” these companies to become susceptible to other kinds of pressure. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post New Documents Link White House Advisor Slavitt to Pfizer and Twitter Amid COVID-19 Speech Debate appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

SCOTUS: Down Goes Chevron!

Feedback Taken: Tractor Supply Company Ends All “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” Programs

“Roger!” has become a go-to expression to acknowledge a message, most often uttered over the phone or a radio transmitter when doing something vaguely important. However, the origin of this cool sign-off is less well-known. And no, it doesn’t have anything to do with a guy named Roger.The term can be traced back to the early days of radio when crackly lines and muffled voices meant communications had to be short and sweet. Particularly in World War 2, when two-way radio communications had a big break, “Roger” was widely used by the British and Americans to acknowledge a command or statement. This is because “R” was represented by the word “Roger” in the old phonetic alphabet. To say “R” was shorthand for saying “received,” as in “message received.” Simply, “Roger” is much easier to hear in the heat of battle than “Received” or even just “R.” Additionally, as explained in a blog post by Jakub Marian, the tradition of using “R” as an abbreviation for “received” has some link to a time before World War 2 when Morse code was the most widely used form of communication. During the Second World War, the most common phonetic alphabet used by the British and American militaries was: “Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox, George, How, Item, Jig, King, Love, Mike, Nan, Oboe, Peter, Queen, Roger, Sugar, Tare, Uncle, Victor, William, X-ray, Yoke, Zebra.”Since the 1950s, however, the phonetic alphabet has changed. The standard one used by NATO operators goes as follows: “Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu.”It’s not crystal clear why “Roger” stuck around and wasn’t replaced with “Romeo,” but it perhaps has something to do with the way the Second World War had a profound and lasting influence on culture. It was also used prolifically in the transcripts of the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, an event that was beamed across every corner of planet Earth. It's estimated that around 650 million people watched the first Moon landing, approximately a fifth of the world’s population at the time. Countless humans must have sat around their television screens or radio sets and heard the phrase, embedding it in their brains as a symbol of cool, calm, and collected communication. With that level of exposure, it's no wonder the expression didn't sink into obscurity. 

Engineers at Northwestern University have found a new concrete manufacturing process that stores carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere by using a carbonated solution. The concrete is just as strong and durable as traditional versions and is easy to make.When it comes to types of water – still or carbonated – you probably think about the options offered by a waiter in a restaurant. However, these two options also play a role in the construction industry.Traditionally, concrete is made through a mix of cement and water, which makes a paste. This paste is then mixed with aggregates in the form of sand and gravel. As these ingredients mix, they harden and bind with the aggregate to create the solid mass that we use in construction.However, this is not a green industry. The ordinary production of Portland cement, the most common type, is a massive contributor to CO2 emissions. In fact, the global production of cement is the third-largest source of anthropogenic carbon emissions (8 percent), only behind fossil fuels and land-use change.But there are alternative options. In fact, carbonated concrete has a high potential to store CO2 because of its inherent alkalinity, which can turn the greenhouse gas into solid crystals consisting of mostly calcium carbonate (CaCO3). These crystals have a longer lifespan than structures made of cement, so they represent an ideal way to store CO2.  The idea of using this solution was first posited in the 1970s but received limited attention until recent years.The process of storing CO2 in such a way comes in two forms: hardened concrete carbonation or fresh concrete carbonation. In the former, solid concrete blocks are injected with CO2 gas at high pressures, and in the latter process, the gas is injected into the mixture when water, cement, and aggregates are combined.However, the techniques for achieving these processes have their limitations. They have both had low carbon capture efficiency despite how often they are used, and the process also weakens the concrete. That is, until now.In laboratory experiments, Northwestern University engineers achieved a CO2 sequestration efficiency of up to 45 percent. This means that nearly half of the CO2 injected into the concrete during manufacturing was both captured and stored.“The cement and concrete industries significantly contribute to human-caused CO2 emissions,” said Northwestern’s Alessandro Rotta Loria, who led the study detailing the solution, in a statement.“We are trying to develop approaches that lower CO2 emissions associated with those industries and, eventually, could turn cement and concrete into massive ‘carbon sinks.’ We are not there yet, but we now have a new method to reuse some of the CO2 emitted as a result of concrete manufacturing in this very same material. And our solution is so simple technologically that it should be relatively easy for industry to implement.”So how did they do it? In their approach, the engineers used the fresh concrete process but, rather than injecting the gas into the mix at the same time, they injected it into the water alone with a small amount of powder. By adding this carbonated suspension to the rest of the ingredients, they had created a concrete that absorbed CO2 during its manufacturing.“The cement suspension carbonated in our approach is a much lower viscosity fluid compared to the mix of water, cement and aggregates that is customarily employed in present approaches to carbonate fresh concrete,” Rotta Loria added.“So, we can mix it very quickly and leverage a very fast kinetics of the chemical reactions that result in calcium carbonate minerals. The result is a concrete product with a significant concentration of calcium carbonate minerals compared to when CO2 is injected into the fresh concrete mix.”If this wasn’t an achievement in itself, further analysis showed that the new concrete could rival the strength and durability of regular concrete.“A typical limitation of carbonation approaches is that strength is often affected by the chemical reactions,” said Rotta Loria. “But, based on our experiments, we show the strength might actually be even higher. We still need to test this further, but, at the very least, we can say that it’s uncompromised. Because the strength is unchanged, the applications also don’t change. It could be used in beams, slabs, columns, foundations — everything we currently use concrete for.”“The findings of this research underline that although carbonation of cement-based materials is a well-known reaction, there is still room to further optimize the CO2 uptake through better understanding of the mechanisms tied to materials processing,” study co-author Davide Zampini concluded.The study is published in Nature.

Unless someone happens to have had an unusually extreme early bedtime for the entirety of their life, we’ve all seen plenty of sunsets in our time. Given the wealth of them that end up on Instagram stories, they look pretty great too – but have you ever wondered what they look like from space?It’s not like most of us can pop up there and find out (although you never know) but thankfully, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) like to snap a few pictures whilst they’re there, giving us a brand-new perspective on a regular part of day-to-day life on the planet.One of the most spectacular images of a sunset from space was captured by European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut and geophysicist Alexander Gerst, during his second stint on the ISS as part of the Horizons mission.Sunset from space is as dreamy as it comes.Image credit: ESA-A.Gerst via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)In the image, taken on October 18, 2018, clouds in Earth’s atmosphere can be seen illuminated in that classic sunset pink-ish orange, though the dark night sky is also visible creeping up close behind them.But that’s not the only view possible – an image snapped by a member of NASA’s Expedition 49 crew back in 2016 also shows a fiery perspective of the layers of Earth’s atmosphere during sunset over South Atlantic.Aboard the ISS, sunset can also be viewed sideways.Image credit: ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space CenterThe bright orange-red line is within the troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere and home to clouds, smoke, and dust particles. It’s the latter two that give sunsets their distinctive color, which explains why the red seen in this image is quite so vivid.Though the ISS was halfway between South America and South Africa at the time, from the station’s altitude astronauts are able to see over 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) to the horizon. Easy enough, then, to capture the influence of Patagonian Desert dust, which is blown out towards the ocean by strong winds.Since the ISS orbits the planet once every 90 minutes, that means those onboard can witness 16 such striking sunsets a day – and the same goes for sunrises, though most of the time they’re missed by astronauts because of sleep or work.Thankfully, Gerst’s photography steps up to the plate once again to show what others can’t see. During the Horizons mission, the astronaut captured a timelapse of a sunrise, with two photos taken every second.The result is somewhat reminiscent of an eclipse at first (at least, the view we have of one on Earth), with a faint line of light growing across the screen until a big burst of light (aka the Sun) comes into view and begins to light up the land below. And there you have it, now you know what a sunset and sunrise look like from space. Everybody say “thank you astronauts!”

In a world first, scientists have grown 3D brain organoids using cells from more than one person. Called “Chimeroids”, the intricate systems contain cells from up to five people; but future versions could push this into the hundreds, allowing scientists to create models that capture the wealth of human genetic diversity.Organoids, often referred to as mini versions of an organ, are cell clusters created to mimic a 3D organ as closely as possible. Brain organoids have previously been grown from human stem cells and, in a recent advance, from fetal brain tissue. In the past, 2D “cell villages” have been cultured using cells from 44 different human donors. But translating these chimeric cell clusters into a 3D organoid has proven a challenge – until now.The reason organoids are so useful for research is that they mimic all the complex conditions inside a living organ in a way that simply can’t be achieved by looking at a flat sheet of cells grown in a dish. There’s even been a suggestion that they could be used to replace animal testing for vaccine research.This becomes even more clear when we’re talking about the brain. As Aparna Bhaduri explains in a News and Views piece to accompany the new study, the human cortex – the outermost layer of brain tissue – is very different from that of animals, so even our best model species can’t really help us understand its nuances.A Chimeroid, created using donor cells from multiple people, not only brings all the benefits of an organoid, but captures more of the diversity that exists within the human species. In the case of the brain Chimeroids, the authors suggest that an important use could be in researching how different people react to a particular drug.“This is a really good advance,” Robert Vries, who was not involved in the work, commented to Nature News. Vries heads up HUB Organoids, a Utrecht-based company that performs organoid research.The team behind the new study had to take a novel approach to culturing the organoids. Adding lots of different donor stem cells together at the same time, as was done for the 2D cell villages, doesn’t work here – you end up with one cell line overpowering the rest. Instead, they learned that the key was to create separate organoids from each stem cell line first, then at a certain growth stage break them up and recombine them into a Chimeroid.After around 3 months of growth, the Chimeroids had reached a size of around 3-5 millimeters (0.1 to 0.2 inches) and contained the same cell types that would be present in a developing fetal brain.To explore their idea about testing drugs on the Chimeroids, the team used ethanol and valproic acid, both of which can negatively impact brain development. Ethanol was selected to model fetal alcohol syndrome, which presents very differently in different children. Valproic acid is a medicine used to treat epilepsy and bipolar disorder, but it is not recommended for use in pregnancy due to its effects on the developing brain.When the Chimeroids were exposed to these two drugs, the researchers found that cells from different donors responded in different ways. Further work is now needed to ensure that these differential effects are down to the diverse genetic makeup of the cells, but some other scientists have already started their own experiments using these methods.“It’s a really powerful technology, and a powerful approach,” biologist Tomasz Nowakowski, who was not on the study team but is now testing out their methods, commented to Nature News. “It’s a technical tour de force.”Meanwhile, senior author Paola Arlotta from Harvard University explained what the next steps could be: “What if one day we could use Chimeroids as avatars to predict individual responses to new therapeutics before testing these in a trial? I like to imagine that future.”The study is published in Nature.