Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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In response to the inordinate amount of time young Americans spend online, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing to curb students’ access to social media sites while at school. The goal of keeping students off TikTok during the school day is undoubtedly worthwhile, but policymakers would be better off taking a simpler and more effective approach: banning mobile phones from schools altogether. It’s by now indisputable that allowing kids to have phones in the classroom harms academic performance — even among those who d...
Regardless of your perspective, Harvard looks bad right now — and that’s good for America. The resignation of Claudine Gay as president has brought the university unwanted attention for lacking both academic standards and moral clarity. She made mistakes, but in many ways Harvard set her up to fail. Like all of America’s top universities, Harvard has taken on an unhealthy role in the U.S. economy and society. America’s best universities need to return to their original mission: producing academic excellence, not just signali...
Wind power may be having a difficult year, but it’s still many times cheaper than oil or gas and remains a core piece of the energy-transition puzzle. A single rotation of a 260-meter-tall offshore turbine — General Electric Co.’s Haliade-X 13 MW, to be precise — can produce enough energy to power a household for more than two days, emitting no carbon or other pollutants. Not everyone is a fan. NIMBYism is one of the biggest barriers to green energy installations, as local residents protest “view-ruining” turbines an...
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s announcement that he won’t seek reelection means the end of years of liberal Democrats blaming him for nearly everything that goes wrong. It will also end years of careful hand-holding and management by Senate Democratic leaders and Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. They’re going to miss him when he’s replaced by a Republican in 2025, worsening Democrats’ odds of maintaining their slim Senate majority. Manchin was once one of many less liberal Democrats but their ranks have thinned,...
Ask any parent about the time their kids spend on mobile devices, and you’ll likely hear the same refrain: It’s too much. Excessive use of smartphones and social media is linked to rising rates of teenage depression and self-harm, while also damaging students’ academic performance and exacerbating achievement gaps. At this point, the question isn’t whether phones should be banned from classrooms, but why more schools haven’t done so already. Evidence about the negative effects of mobile devices on learning is overwhelm...
When the revolution in higher education finally arrives, how will we know? I have a simple metric: When universities change how they measure faculty work time. Using this yardstick, the U.S. system remains far from a fundamental transformation. It is no accident that former college president Brian Rosenberg titled his new book, "‘Whatever It Is, I’m Against It’: Resistance to Change in Higher Education." Some background: Faculty at Tier 1 research universities (which includes my own employer, George Mason University) typic...
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is asking a federal judge in Washington state to explain how the government can comply with his order preserving access to the abortion pill in the face of a conflicting ruling by a federal judge in Texas. In filing Monday in federal court in Spokane, Wash., the Justice Department pointed out to U.S. District Judge Thomas O. Rice that the Texas ruling, which overturned FDA approval for mifepristone, was set to go into effect on Friday. “The result of that order appears to be in sig...
The average Tesla-driving, iPhone-using suburbanite isn’t spending a lot of time worrying about tractor software payloads. They should, though. Fixing a broken-down farm tractor used to take just a wrench set and some elbow grease. Now repairs might require a mobile-device interface, online diagnostic tools and secure software updates, too. And that stuff isn’t just sitting around in the barn. It’s mostly held at a shrinking number of manufacturer-authorized dealerships. As a result, simple breakdowns that in the past might...
Donald Trump has been indicted by a grand jury in Manhattan on charges related to the payment of hush money to a porn star during his 2016 campaign. The prosecution of a former president is unprecedented and certain to kick off a political firestorm and a fierce courtroom fight — but the case isn’t the only legal challenge facing Trump going forward. The indictment in New York won’t stop federal and state prosecutors in other jurisdictions from bringing their own charg...
No one sells the future more masterfully than the tech industry. According to its proponents, we will all live in the “metaverse,” build our financial infrastructure on “web3” and power our lives with “artificial intelligence.” All three of these terms are mirages that have raked in billions of dollars, despite bite back by reality. Artificial intelligence in particular conjures the notion of thinking machines. But no machine can think, and no software is truly intelligent. The phrase alone may be one of the most successful...
SEOUL, South Korea - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un oversaw tests of weapons designed to deliver nuclear strikes against the U.S. and its allies, including one his regime billed as a new underwater drone that can create a "radioactive tsunami." The tests from Tuesday through Thursday also included cruise missiles that were affixed with mock nuclear warheads, the official Korean Central News Agency reported Friday. The underwater drone cruised for nearly 60 hours off its east...
Amazon.com Inc.’s pause of its plans to expand its second headquarters in Northern Virginia reflects some deep underlying trends — not just for metropolitan Washington, where I live, but for regional development more generally. First, with the end of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy, many developments are being canceled or postponed. Long-term projects are less profitable than they used to be, and capital is harder to come by. As the major technology companies lose market value, their urban and subur...
The U.S. military had never shot down an object in American airspace before taking out a Chinese balloon off South Carolina earlier this month. Now it’s becoming a near-daily occurrence. The sudden spate of U.S. jets blasting unidentified objects of mysterious origin from the skies has provoked so much befuddlement — not to mention panic — that Pentagon officials were forced to field questions about the issue Sunday night, just as Americans were tuning into the second quarter of the Super Bowl. One reporter even asked if it w...
The field for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is expanding. Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is expected to announce her campaign in mid-February, and more contenders will likely follow. Although Donald Trump was the first to kick off the race by announcing his run just after last year’s midterm elections, he’s not dissuading ambitious Republicans. Here’s the slate as it stands now. Donald Trump Is he running? Yes. Trump announced his third bid for the White House in November, and he remains the front-...
Whether President Joe Biden’s misguided plan to forgive some $400 billion in federal student-loan debt goes forward will ultimately be up to the Supreme Court. For now, there’s more the federal government should be doing to rein in the costs of higher education — and thus reduce how much students borrow in the first place. In particular: It should insist that colleges stop hiding exactly how much students are expected to pay. Federal law requires colleges to list the cost of tuition on their websites and in other promo...
Applications for U.S. unemployment benefits unexpectedly fell this month, sliding to the lowest level since September and underscoring a strong jobs market where many businesses are reluctant to let go of workers. Initial unemployment claims decreased by 15,000 to 190,000 in the week ended Jan. 14, Labor Department data showed Thursday. The median forecast was for 214,000 applications, but the data can be particularly volatile and difficult to seasonally adjust in the winter...
The Treasury Department is beginning the use of special measures to avoid a U.S. payments default, after the federal debt limit was reached Thursday. The department is tapping the financial resources of two government-run funds for retirees, in a move that will give the Treasury scope to keep making federal payments while it’s unable to boost the overall level of debt. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen informed congressional leaders of both parties of the step in a letter on Thursday. She had already notified them of the p...
WASHINGTON - President Joe Biden's handling of classified documents erupted into a political crisis with potential legal repercussions Thursday after the attorney general appointed a special counsel to investigate the incident. Attorney General Merrick Garland named former U.S. Attorney for Maryland Robert Hur, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, to lead the inquiry after the White House confirmed that a second set of classified materials was uncovered inside a...
WASHINGTON — A House committee recommended Donald Trump be prosecuted for his role in the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, the first-ever such referral of a former U.S. president in the culmination of an investigation that began in July 2021. The committee voted unanimously Monday to refer Trump for prosecution for multiple offenses including insurrection, which Rep. Jamie Raskin said would disqualify the former president from holding office, if convicted. The U.S. is not a country where “foot soldiers go to jail and the...
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden signed legislation imposing a deal he negotiated between freight railroads and organized labor, averting a possible strike but risking a divide with rank-and-file union workers who opposed the settlement. “It was tough for me,” said Biden at a signing ceremony at the White House on Friday, while heralding the bill as the only option to avert a disastrous work stoppage that would have threatened key supply chains ahead of the Christmas holiday. “It was the right thing to do at the moment,...
Members of the nation’s two largest railway unions held conflicting votes on a key labor pact, muddying efforts by the Biden administration to avoid a strike when the labor peace agreement ends next month. The SMART Transportation division, the largest railway union under the tentative agreement with more than 37,000 members, narrowly rejected the deal while members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen voted to approve it. Four unions have now voted down the tentative deal while seven have approved it ...
Democrats’ prospects for holding onto Congress are fading a week before the U.S. election as voters focus on economic concerns rather than the rollback of abortion rights, bolstering Republicans who have made inflation a central issue in the race. Inflation is still high and a recession is a near certainty. Gasoline prices dipped but remain costlier than average and Democratic and independent outrage over abortion rights isn’t strong enough to overshadow that. Combine those factors with weak performances by Democrats in key...
Elon Musk wasted no time taking complete control of Twitter Inc. The billionaire appointed himself chief executive officer, dismissed senior management and immediately began reshaping strategy at one of the world’s most influential social media platforms as his $44 billion take-private deal closed. Musk, 51, is replacing Parag Agrawal, who was fired along with three other top executives, a person familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified discussing internal deliberations. The mercurial entrepreneur, who a...
A majority of almost 12,000 unionized railroad workers voted to reject a tentative labor agreement brokered in part last month by President Joe Biden, the first dismissal by members of a dozen labor groups that must accept the deal or risk a strike. More than 6,600 members of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees voted against the tentative agreement compared to 5,100 votes in favor, the division of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters said in a statement Monday. The vote results in a “status quo” period in wh...
Russian President Vladimir Putin has raised anew the possibility he might use nuclear weapons against Ukraine to prevail in a conflict going sideways. The smart money says he won’t, because doing so — or otherwise expanding the conflict drastically — wouldn’t make a bad situation any better. Yet the smart money might not have predicted the choices that set Putin down this path in the first place. Much of Putin’s televised speech last week was a repetition of the familiar. He again blamed the U.S., the North Atlantic...
