Update 12:40 am: Some three hours after he first opened fire, the suspect in the Michigan State University mass shooting has died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police reported at a 12:25 am press conference. Per police scanner traffic, he shot himself as police approached him at an off-campus street location. WDIV reported that location is about five miles from campus, in northeast Lansing. 

Police say they’re confident there was only one shooter and that the threat is over. They lifted the directive for students and staff to shelter in place, but all campus activities have been cancelled for 48 hours. 

Three people are dead, and five wounded. Fatalities occurred both at Berkey Hall — an academic building — as well as the MSU student union building. 

Beyond his previous description as a “black male, shorter in stature,” the shooter has not yet been identified, nor do police know if he has any affiliation with the university. Police have not yet said what type of firearm or firearms were used in the attacks. 

* * *

A Monday night mass shooting at Michigan State University has reportedly resulted in multiple casualties — and it may not be over, with the perpetrator still at large and reports of shots fired still being relayed by dispatchers more than two hours after the rampage began.

With the manhunt underway, police held a press conference, announcing that “initial information is that the suspect is a black male, shorter in stature, wearing red shoes, a jean jacket and a ball cap.” 

Associated Press reports three people are confirmed dead and five wounded in an attack that started at 8:18pm local/Eastern Time. Soon after it began, the university urged students and staff to “Secure-in-Place immediately.” Videos circulating on social media show large groups of students fleeing danger, and police forces rushing past them to locate the shooter. 

🚨#BREAKING: Chaotic scenes at Michigan State University as heavily-armed police search for active shooter⁰⁰📌#EastLansing | #Michigan

Watch as terrifying video as dozens, of Students run for their lives as a Active shooter fires multiple rounds around the Michigan State… https://t.co/SctzoIFFzY pic.twitter.com/mNnWKLzN2N

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) February 14, 2023

The shooting appears to have spanned multiple locations on campus. On a live feed of Greater East Lansing Public Safety police radio, dispatchers were heard passing on reports of shots heard at various buildings around the campus, which is about 90 miles northwest of Detroit. 

A dispatcher was also heard reporting multiple casualties in at least two different classrooms, and that students reported that the shooter was in the hallway of Berkey Hall and that they were attempting to flee the building by jumping out the classroom windows. Shooting was also reporting at the student union.

One tweeted video appears to show a body on a sidewalk being moved to a gurney: 

#BREAKING MSU Active Shooting:
– At least 1 dead, multiple injured, after shooting at Michigan State University campus in East Lansing
– Shooter is wearing a mask and is at large
– Multiple shooting scenes on campus
– FBI and ATF responding #ActiveShooter #MSU #MassShooting pic.twitter.com/UoJQdhh286

— That Guy Shane (@ProfanityNewz) February 14, 2023

Early on, MSU police tweeted that the suspect has been described as a “short male with a mask, possibly Black.”

UPDATE: The suspect description is a short male with a mask, possibly Black. Please continue to shelter in place. We are still receiving multiple calls of an active shooter on campus. pic.twitter.com/7imm32DhAA

— MSU Police and Public Safety (@msupolice) February 14, 2023

On social media, some people echoed claims that multiple shooters were involved in the attack. However, an MSU police tweeted that “it appears there is only one suspect at this time.”

In the initial police radio reports, shots were reported at Berkey Hall, which is home to MSU’s College of Social Science, Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, and the Department of Sociology. 

🚨#BREAKING: This is the initial ‘shots fired’ call on Michigan State University campus captured on @Broadcastify. pic.twitter.com/roBl89R2Rs

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) February 14, 2023

Compounding the mayhem, a dispatcher announced that a caller to 911 claimed that explosives had been placed on the campus.  

This article will be updated as the story develops…

Authored by Allen Stein via The Epoch Times,

Nowadays, online dating seems less a game of hit or miss than medical truth or dare, given the deal-breaker question, “Are you vaccinated?”

Businesswomen Shelby Thomson and Heather Pyle of Maui, Hawaii, found the online dating game a frustrating experience for the un-jabbed at the height of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in 2021.

Faced with discrimination and censorship, many unvaccinated people lost jobs and relationships because they chose to remain unvaccinated. The un-jabbed “didn’t have the option to say they were unvaccinated” to potential online dating partners, Thomson said.

A health worker draws out Moderna vaccine during a drive-through COVID-19 vaccine clinic at St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ont., on Jan. 2, 2022. (The Canadian Press/Lars Hagberg)

“They were only allowed to be vaccinated. And you had to have this badge in your [online] profile.”

Too often, the unvaccinated would hear on dating sites, “Swipe left”—move on.

In May 2021, the two business partners, moms, and best friends launched “Unjected,” a dating app for the unvaccinated, on the Google and Apple stores.

“We started seeing people wanting to find partners,” Thomson said of their unvaccinated friends.

However, soon after the app’s launch, Thomson and Pyle started receiving hate emails, then negative publicity in the media. Apple decided to remove “Unjected” from the app store, claiming it provided medical disinformation.

“We tailored everything and played this chess game until it [met] Apple standards,” Thomson recalled. But it still wasn’t enough.

“It took us until July 31 to get banned.”

When Google threatened to follow suit, Thomson and Pyle pulled the plug on both media giants, and Unjected.com went live using the web domain host GoDaddy in August 2021.

“We decided—OK—the big-tech world is not our friend. They don’t want us to exist in this realm. They’ll always go out of their way to ensure we’re censored or taken down.”

Thomson said “Unjected” is more than a dating service for the unvaccinated. It’s also a blood bank database and a fertility bank for the unvaccinated.

The dating service alone boasts 110,000 subscriptions in 85 countries and 3,000 to 5,000 new clientele every month, Thomson said.

Pandemic of Censorship

“Unjected was founded to help us easier connect in a world of medical discrimination and censorship,” according to Unjected’s online introduction.

“We all have a lot in common when it comes to being conscious about our choices, and we think that there are great connections to be made when like-minded people gather in the same social space.”

Thomson said 2021 was the fastest-growing year for the new dating site because so many unvaccinated people had lost their jobs in the pandemic.

“The [vaccine] mandates were heavily enforced. Now, we’re seeing the trend differently. People are starting to realize things they didn’t before,” Thomson said.

…

Ironically, “Unjected” clients include conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, and many others concerned about the safety of mRNA vaccines.

“It’s such a melting pot—also politically speaking, it’s authentic people coming together,” Thomson said. “We have 70-year-old grandmas looking for friends. Many members said they used to be die-hard liberals.”

Like everything else, Thomson said it’s about making choices free of coercion.

…

Read more here…

The U.S. Army is coming off its worst recruiting performance in decades, and says young Americans’ fear of death and mental illness are the biggest reasons they won’t sign up.  

That conclusion comes from surveys of 16- to 28-year-olds conducted last spring and summer, officials say. The Army shared general findings with the Associated Press, but not the full details of the survey results, methodology or questions posed.  

The Army had ambitions to recruit 60,000 soldiers in 2022, but fell a whopping 25% short of the objective. Trying to put a dent in its growing deficit — and ignoring its 2022 results — the service implausibly aspires to recruit 65,000 in 2023.

“I would say it is a stretch goal,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth tells Associated Press, apparently with a straight face. Wormuth never served in the military but has held a variety of Defense Department posts, along with a revolving-door swing at the RAND Corporation. 

According to the Army’s surveys, the top four reasons young people reject the idea of Army service: 

1. Fear of death

2. Worries about falling victim to post-traumatic stress disorder

3. Leaving friends and family

4. The feeling that Army service would amount to “putting my life on hold” 

After those reasons, there was a steep drop-off. Other deterrents included concerns about discrimination against women and minorities, a general distrust of the military, misgivings about living conditions on bases, being stuck in an unwanted job, the now-rescinded Covid vaccine mandate and feelings that Army is going “woke.” 

Maj. Gen. Alex Fink, who holds the corporate-sounding title of “Chief of Army Enterprise Marketing,” emphasizes to AP that Army “wokeness” — though frequently invoked by GOP legislators — was cited by only about 5% of young people surveyed.

Young people “just don’t see the Army as something that’s relevant,” says Fink. “They see us as revered, but not relevant in their lives.”

To fill its emptying ranks, the Army’s rolling out new programs and incentives. Increasingly under pressure to lower the standards for who’s deemed service-worthy, one program cultivates the bottom of the barrel by helping academic- and fitness-impaired recruits overcome their weaknesses, via up to 90 days of extra academic or fitness training. 

The Army is also going to throw extra financial incentives at recruiters, with bonuses of up to $4,500 a quarter for beating their individual goals. One thing that’s sure to incentivize: recruiters plumbing new depths of unethical behavior — they already carry a well-earned reputation for dishonesty. 

One pilot program is particularly cringeworthy: Privates and privates first class can actually score a promotion in rank for convincing someone to enlist. (Limit: One promotion per soldier.) 

Judging from the article, AP and senior military officials spent little or no time discussing how the Army will try to overcome the top two turn-offs: death and PTSD.

If researchers dove deeper into these concerns, they’d probably find many young people particularly dread the idea of being maimed, killed or mentally ravaged in a war that has no moral or national-interest justification…which is pretty much the only kind of war the Pentagon wages anymore. 

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), the largest gas importer in the country, is in the late stages of finalizing a huge long-term LNG import deal with Qatar, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday.

This would be a second such massive agreement of a Chinese energy giant with QatarEnergy in just a few months.  

“CNPC has agreed on the major terms with Qatar in a deal that will be very similar to Sinopec’s,” a Beijing-based state energy official told Reuters.

In November, Qatar’s state firm QatarEnergy signed the longest-term contract in the history of the LNG industry in a deal to supply LNG to Chinese state energy giant Sinopec for 27 years.

QatarEnergy will supply China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec) with 4 million tons per annum (MTPA) of LNG to China from the North Field East (NFE) expansion project.

“This is the first long-term SPA from the NFE project to be announced, and marks the longest gas supply agreement in the history of the LNG industry,” Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi, Qatar’s Minister of State for Energy Affairs and President and CEO of QatarEnergy, said at the time.

The QatarEnergy-Sinopec agreement was also the first long-term LNG offtake agreement from the NFE Expansion project. Qatar’s North Field East and North Field South (NFS) projects are expected to come online in 2026 and 2027, respectively.

Now CNPC is reportedly finalizing a similar deal with the Qatari state energy firm to buy LNG from the North Field expansion project.

A major deal for China with Qatar, a large LNG exporter, comes at a time when Chinese-U.S. relations are at a low point again. The U.S. is a major LNG exporter competing with Qatar and Australia to be the world’s number-one LNG seller.

A huge long-term deal with Qatar would also give China more contracted supply to reduce exposure to the volatile spot LNG prices.  

With traders hunkering down and freaking out ahead of tomorrow’s CPI report, which will either be a Valentine’s day massacre or happy ending (which we will preview shortly), another macro event is shaping up as potentially even more consequential.

As a reminder, the reason why so many are transfixed on tomorrow’s CPI is because it only feels like yesterday that US inflation prints were seen as last year’s news given the recent falls. In addition, forecasts and breakevens suggested we were on a glide path to normality over the next few months and quarters. However, as DB’s Jim Reid warned this morning, that view has been jolted in the last 10 days for 4 reasons:

• i) First we had payrolls print which raised the prospect that core services ex-shelter could stay stronger for longer;
• ii) Then we had lots of hawkish central bank speak that the market had previously ignored but was now slowly waking up to;
• iii) Then Manheim suggested US used cars (+2.5% mom in January) climbed at their fastest rate for 14-months, and finally
• iv) we had US CPI revisions on Friday that have rewritten the last year of history and in turn reduced core inflation by around a tenth each month leading up to June and have increased it by an average of around a tenth in each month since August. As such the trend in core CPI hasn’t fallen as much as expected and we now haven’t seen any month less than +0.3% MoM. In addition 3m annualised core CPI ran at 4.3% in December rather than the 3.1% reported at the January 12th release. So although year on year hasn’t changed the momentum is notably different.

But while a hotter than expected inflation print will surely have an adverse impact on risk markets as it will prompt concerns of an even higher for longer Fed (read the full JPM scenario analysis which sees the S&P sliding if the headline CPI prints at 6.4% or higher tomorrow vs median consensus of 6.5% of higher), a more tangible indicator of economic overheating is looming and will be revealed exactly 24 hours after the CPI print, in the form of January’s retail sales which, if the latest Bank of America card spending numbers are accurate, will be nothing short of a “knock your socks off” blowout scorcher.

According to BofA economist Aditya Bhave, total card spending per household (HH), as measured by BAC aggregated credit and debit cards, was up a blistering 5.1% year-over-year (y/y) in January, which would make it the biggest annual jump since the summer of 2022.

It’s not just the annual jump: card spending per HH also surged by 1.7% month-over-month (m/m) in January on a seasonally-adjusted (SA) basis; this leads BofA to forecast an above-consensus 2.2% m/m increase in the Census Bureau’s ex-autos retail sales figure for January.

Additionally, BofA’s economists expect core control sales (retail sales ex autos, gas, building materials and restaurants and which feeds directly into the GDP bean count) to rise by 2.6% in January.

As further shown in the table below, card data show a strong pickup in spending across most categories on both a y/y and m/m SA basis, including general merchandise, clothing and airlines.

Some of the YoY increase reflects “base effects” as the Omicron wave in January 2022 weighed on services spending, particularly travel. Consequently, BofA expects this part of the YoY rise to unwind fairly quickly. However, the bank economists also see signs of real strength in services spending in January 2023: Bank of America card spending per household was up 3.5% MoM SA on airlines and by 1.8% on restaurants and bars. International spend rose too, particularly in Asia, compared with the prior two years, due to further reopening and Lunar New Year celebrations.

So what’s behind the blowout surge in spending which would translate into a roughly 3-sigma beat to core retail sales? BofA attributes the expected strength in January retail sales to three factors:

The first is a statistical distortion: last month the bank flagged that since the start of the pandemic, holiday spending has become more front-loaded, and so the spike in spending in December has become smaller on a not seasonally adjusted (NSA) basis. As a result, the NSA decline in spending in January has also become smaller. However, seasonal adjustments are still largely based on pre-Covid spending patterns. Therefore, on a seasonally adjusted basis, January retail sales have been exceptionally strong since the start of the pandemic. Translation: just like the blowout jobs report was entirely due to seasonal adjustments, so too the red-hot retail sales report will be largely a function of various excel data transformations.

The second driver of strong spending in January was the increase in disposable personal income (DPI) due to robust labor market gains and various inflation-related adjustments. The most notable of these was an 8.7% cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) to social security benefits, which alone likely raised DPI by around 0.5% in January. The COLA was announced last October. Starting in November, spending has been meaningfully stronger among older HHs than younger HHs.

There is no similar pattern in the pre-Covid data

The outperformance of older households was concentrated in retail in November…

… but spread to some services categories in December-January.

In Bank of America’s view, it is likely that some older households boosted spending over the holidays in anticipation of receiving the COLA in January. Others might not have been aware of the COLA until it went into effect. Therefore, the uptick in spending for the older HHs could extend into at least February.

A third and final reason for the pickup in spending in January could be that consumers were holding back on spending in anticipation of large post-holiday clearance sales. This ties in with the fact that some of the weakest categories in December – furniture, clothing, general merchandise and department stores – saw significant payback in January.

In conclusion, there are good and bad news. First, the good news: as BofA’s Bhave writes, the factors discussed above support the bank’s forecast that consumer resilience will help the  US avoid a recession in the first half of 2023 (if not in the second half). However, the bad news is that – similar to the January payrolls report – the underlying drivers of strong January data (in this case spending) are mostly one-off factors or level-shift effects that will not lead to an extended acceleration in economic activity.  Therefore BofA still expects the economy to slip into a recession in the second half of the year.

The bigger question is how will markets respond: this may be contingent on what the BLS reports in tomorrow’s CPI report. If we get signs of inflationary overheat just days after a blowout payrolls report, and then couple this with a red-hot retail sales report, even if the Fed will be hard pressed not to make it clear that much more rates pain is coming to cool down the overheating economy. On the other hand, a cooler than expected inflation print Tuesday coupled with strong retail spending data may be just what the “soft landing” (or no landing) narrative needs to push stocks to a new 2023 high thanks to a benign macro environment where households are busy spending money without inflating prices.

More in the full reports available to pro subs here and here.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in The Hill on the recommendations for reparations by two appointed bodies in California. After years of declaring this a moral imperative, the bill has come due for leaders like Gov.  Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed. The collective demand is for trillions in California alone with additional trillions demanded from Congress in a national reparations program. California Democrats will now have to render a decision on committing real money on reparations to show that this was not mere virtue signaling. That decision could be coming soon.

Here is the column:

A long-awaited meeting of San Francisco’s board of supervisors was set this week to discuss the recommendation of its African American Reparations Advisory Committee to give $5 million to each eligible Black resident as reparations. The meeting was postponed, but the city and the state soon must make a decision on a bill that has come due for Democratic politicians.

The city council voted unanimously to create the reparations committee in 2020. Even though California was a free state without slavery before the Civil War, the committee’s “particular focus has been the era of urban renewal, perhaps the most significant example of how the City and County of San Francisco as an institution played a role in undermining Black wealth and actively displacing the city’s Black population.” That could be viewed as only a partial payment for race-related injuries.

In the meantime, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) created his own Reparations Task Force, which just reached its own recommendations for $223,000 per person. Others have insisted the figure should be $350,000 for individuals and another $250,000 for Black-owned businesses. One California politician insisted the figure needs to be $800,000 per person, reflecting the average cost of a home in the state.

As these numbers rise, so do the calls for payments in both politics and the media. Even Disney has gotten into the act with a controversial children’s episode in which cartoon children demand reparations.

Notably, California’s law expressly states that this money should not be treated as compensation for federal reparations. That raises the question of whether a resident could receive $5 million from San Francisco, $223,000 from the state, and additional payments from the federal government.

Some congressional Democrats have pushed for similar federal reparations and passed a bill out of the House Judiciary Committee in 2021 that failed to receive a floor vote.

BET founder Robert Johnson has called for $14 trillion in federal reparations.

These reparations measures have a remarkable range of focus, from slavery to housing discrimination to wealth inequities. In California, there was a sharp disagreement on the purpose, with many advocates arguing that it was wrong to limit the money to descendants of slaves. Task force member Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D–Los Angeles) insisted that, “at the end of the day, people who are prejudiced against us are prejudiced against all of us.”

Ultimately, advocates like Jones-Sawyer lost a close vote on extending state reparations to all Black Americans. The state task force voted to limit it to descendants of slaves; there are almost 3 million potentially eligible Californians.

The two reparation bodies were tasked with calculating reparation awards — and both the city and the state will now be pressed to make good on their commitments.

The costs of such policies — condemned by critics as virtue-signaling — are being faced by some other jurisdictions as well.

For example, New York and numerous other cities have declared themselves to be “sanctuaries” for undocumented immigrants yet, in recent months, have protested increasing transfers of such immigrants to their jurisdiction.

The cost of California’s statewide reparations is estimated to be $569 billion. The state’s annual budget is roughly half that amount, at $268 billion.

Making things even more difficult, the state faces a $22.5 billion deficit and is seeking spending cuts to cover the shortfall.

This may not be a bill that can be politically postponed, given past statements by the governor and other Democratic politicians.

That leads to the question of such programs’ constitutionality. Even after the political approval of payments, it is not clear that this money will ever be paid.

Under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, race-based classifications trigger strict scrutiny requiring a showing of both a “compelling state interest” and “narrowly tailored” means. In City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469 (1989), the Supreme Court struck down a set-aside for minority businesses due to a lack of evidence of specific injuries. The court ruled that general past discrimination was not enough and added that “the dream of a Nation of equal citizens in a society where race is irrelevant to personal opportunity and achievement would be lost in a mosaic of shifting preferences based on inherently unmeasurable claims of past wrongs.”

Then-Justice John Paul Stevens added his liberal voice against such programs, noting that Richmond’s law “encompasses persons who have never been in business in Richmond as well as minority contractors who may have been guilty of discriminating against members of other minority groups.”

The reparations given in 1988 to Japanese Americans who survived World War II internment camps posed an easier issue, since the recipients were directly injured by the government and the money was meant to compensate them for their injuries.

The decision to narrow programs like focusing on the descendants of slaves or on housing deprivations will certainly be better for constitutional review than a general reparations measure. However, even liberal scholars like Erwin Chemerinsky seem to concede that these reparation measures would face series legal headwinds in the courts. The likely legal challenges are not often considered in discussions of reparations — but they could create a highly combustible situation, if large reparations guarantees were suddenly negated.

That legal fight, however, must await a moment of truth for California legislators.

Democratic politicians have insisted for years that reparations are essential to address systemic racism. But politicians like Gov. Newsom now face demands to put their money where their mouths have been. The years of calls for reparations have created a greater expectation, even an urgency.

One well-known California activist declared: 

“It’s a debt that’s owed, we worked for free. We’re not asking; we’re telling you.”

That expectation is reflected in recent polling, showing a massive shift in the Black community on the question: 77 percent of Black Americans now support reparations — but, overall, nearly seven-in-ten (68 percent) of all respondents oppose such payments.

Thus, after defining reparations as a moral obligation, politicians may find it difficult to say this is an inopportune moment.

For Newsom and for San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, the bill is now due.

By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com

Gasoline demand in the United States rose by 1.7% last week, and was also 3.7% higher than the four-week moving average, GasBuddy reported as quoted by Reuters.

“For the first time since June, U.S. gasoline demand was not only up every day over the week ago period but also over the four week average,” GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, Patrick De Haan, said in a tweet.

Interestingly, demand seems to be on the rise while prices are on the rise, too.

Still, they were a lot lower than last year’s peaks in early summer, with wholesale gasoline futures going up from $2.32 per gallon on February 3 to $2.50 per gallon on February 10.

While demand may increase in the short term, over the longer term there are expectations for a decline. This would be caused by greater fuel efficiency and less car use as more people opt to work from home. Growing EV adoption will also undermine gasoline demand, according to a Financial Times report.

The United States consumed an average of 8.78 million barrels of gasoline last year, which was 6% below the record achieved before the pandemic. Gasoline sold on the U.S. market accounts for 9% of global oil consumption, the report noted.

Meanwhile, the price for gasoline saw its first weekly decline two weeks ago, averaging $3.44 per gallon on February 5th. This was down by 4.4 cents from the previous week but up by 17.5 cents on a month earlier, the report showed.

The increase in demand for gasoline, if sustained, could help alleviate concern about the immediate future of oil demand in the world’s biggest consumer as the market processes the growing prospect of a recession.

Although indicator data seems to be contradictory, most commentators from the financial industry appear unanimous in their expectation of an economic slowdown. The question seems to be not if but when a recession will manifest.

Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The National Archives on Friday apologized for telling visitors that they must cover up or remove their pro-life attire while being in the chamber where the original copy of the Bill Of Rights is on display.

“As the home to the original Constitution and Bill of Rights, which enshrine the rights of free speech and religion, we sincerely apologize for this occurrence,” said the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which maintains the National Archives Museum in Washington.

The apology comes after conservative law group American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ), on behalf of four March for Life participants from three states, sued NARA for First Amendment violations. According to the complaint (pdf), each of them “separately and uniquely decided to visit the National Archives to view our nation’s founding documents” on the morning of Jan. 20 while wearing various clothing with pro-life messages.

After entering the museum, however, the pro-life visitors were approached by security guards who took issue with their pro-life apparel.

Wendilee Lassiter, a law student at evangelical Christian Liberty University in Virginia, was wearing a black sweatshirt that read: “I am the post-Roe Generation: Law Students for Life” when she visited the National Archives Museum with a group of fellow students. Two security guards approached her, saying that she was “disturbing the peace” because her sweatshirt “will incite others” and “cause a disturbance.”

When Lassiter asked, “I can’t come in here unless I take my sweatshirt off?” One security guard replied by stating: “No, you can’t.” She ended up removing her sweatshirt for fear that she would be thrown out of the museum if she did not comply. Her fellow students also complied with the order.

The law student also alleged that she saw that morning at least two other visitors “freely walking around” while wearing what appeared to be pro-abortion apparel, with statements to the effect of “My Body, My Choice,” and “Pro-Choice.”

Another visitor, identified in the lawsuit as L.R., is a Catholic high school student from Michigan. A security guard “specifically instructed” L.R. that she “could not be wearing anything pro-life” and that she must cover her shirt reading “Life is a HUMAN RIGHT” until she left the chamber. She was also told to take a “Pro-Love is the New Pro-Life” button off her bag.

“L.R. immediately believed her constitutional rights were being violated by the very government officials tasked with protecting them,” the complaint stated.

In response to the lawsuit, NARA emphasized that its policy “expressly allows all visitors to wear t-shirts, hats, buttons, etc. that display protest language, including religious and political speech.”

“We are actively investigating to determine what happened,” the federal agency said. “Early indications are that our security officers quickly corrected their actions and, from that point forward, all visitors were permitted to enter our facility without needing to remove or cover their attire. We have reminded all of our security officers at our facilities across the country of the rights of visitors in this regard.”

The National Archives wasn’t the only Washington museum trying to censor March for Life participants on Jan. 20, according to the ACLJ, which brought a First Amendment lawsuit against the Smithsonian for the same reason.

In that case, a group of Catholic students and parents from South Carolina tried to enter the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, only to be mocked by museum staff, who allegedly declared the facility to be a “neutral zone” where they could not wear pro-life hats.

According to the complaint (pdf), the students put their hats back on after passing through the entry point. This prompted museum staff to confront them and demand that they either “take them off or leave,” with one of the staff members yelling at a student, “You need to take off your hats. We are a museum that promotes equality, and your hats do not promote equality.”

The Smithsonian, likewise, apologized for the incident, admitting in a statement that “a security officer mistakenly told young visitors that their pro-life hats were not permitted in the museum.”

“Asking visitors to remove hats and clothing is not in keeping with our policy or protocols. We provided immediate retraining to prevent a re-occurrence of this kind of error,” the taxpayer-funded research institution said. “The Smithsonian welcomes all visitors without regard to their beliefs. We do not deny access to our museums based on the messages on visitors’ clothing.”

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

The US Navy and Marines Corps are conducting drills in the South China Sea amid heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing over the Chinese balloon incident.

The US Navy’s Seventh Fleet said in a statement that the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and its strike group conducted the drills on February 11 with the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit. The Seventh Fleet did not say when the drills started or when they would end.

The US has stepped up its military activity in the South China Sea in recent years and has formally rejected most of Beijing’s claims to the waters. China, the Philippines, and several other Southeast Asian nations all have overlapping claims to the South China Sea.

The US has involved itself in the dispute, and starting under the Obama administration, the US began sailing warships near Chinese-controlled islands in the South China Sea.

The Biden administration is looking to expand the US presence in the region and recently signed a deal with the Philippines that will give the US access to four more military sites in the country.

The current exercises come after China declined a call from Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin following the US downing of the Chinese balloon. Washington claimed the balloon was a spy device, while Beijing insisted it was a weather balloon only used for civilian purposes.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a planned trip to China when the balloon was first announced by the Pentagon. Since the incident, the US military has shot down at least two unidentified objects, but the White House says they didn’t look like Chinese balloons.