Raw Story

The United States Geological Survey is showing a 7.0 earthquake off the cost of northern California that was severe enough for residents nearby to get a notification of a tsunami warning.

Yahoo News cited a National Weather Service social media post, which marked the quake at 7.3 on the Richter Scale.

At approximately 1:44 p.m. EST, the quake rumbled about 40 miles off the coast of Petrolia, CA, leading the state to issue tsunami warnings to those down the west coast.

However, it wasn't merely the 7.0 quake that was cause for concern. MSNBC reported that the quake happened along with several others, which are also indicated on the USGS quake map. They are all in the same area and range in severity form 3.3 to 4.2 on the Richter Scale.

ALSO READ: 'You are out of line!': Secret Service chief screams at GOP lawmaker for politicizing 9/11

Meanwhile, other quakes seem to be popping up on the land in northern California, such as a 2.5 quake 16 km from French Gulch, CA. A separate 2.5 also popped up on the map about 6 km northwest of Cobb, California.

“The National Weather Service has issued a TSUNAMI WARNING. A series of powerful waves and strong currents may impact coasts near you,” the alert read in the San Francisco Bay Area. “You are in danger. Get away from coastal waters. Move to high ground or inland now. Keep away from the coast until local officials say it is safe to return.”

One Bay Area resident said on X it was the first time he's ever gotten a tsunami warning.

Donald Trump has rewarded some of his biggest loyalists with top-level positions, but there's not enough government jobs to go around to his allies.

The former president has rewarded strategic persistence when choosing nominees for plum roles in his administration, but multiple advisers told Politico that he was turned off by rumors of presidential ambitions or past criticism of his behavior, and he was annoyed to learn if someone felt entitled to a role or tried to buy his favor – which may have cost Ric Grenell a shot at his dream job as secretary of state.

"An associate of Grenell had approached conservative social media influencers, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, offering paid contracts of as much as five figures to post favorably about Grenell," the website reported. "One such contract, obtained by Politico and not previously reported, outlined that the influencer would do so during 'peak posting times,' that 'content must appear genuine,' and it could not 'appear as an overt advertisement or promotional message.'"

ALSO READ: 'You are out of line!': Secret Service chief screams at GOP lawmaker for politicizing 9/11

The proposed social media campaign ever really took off, organizers said, but Grenell made clear in private conversations that he wanted to lead the State Department if Trump was re-elected, saying it was secretary of State “or bust," according to one source close to Trump – but the job eventually went to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL).

“People assume the president wants a big personality who is pushing the envelope," said a source familiar with the transition. "That’s not always the case. I think there were a lot of questions about whether Ric was diplomatic enough to be secretary of state,” said a person familiar with the transition."

"Ric was offered several positions that he turned down," that person added. "It’s not like he was shut out.”

Trump did reward some loyalists, like FBI director nominee Kash Patel and U.S. ambassador to NATO nominee Matthew Whitaker, with top jobs after they fought to remain in contention, but a person close to Grenell's situation said the president-elect didn't want to alienate his allies but didn't have enough high-ranking roles to go around.

“I think there is a need and a desire to keep these people close,” that person said. “They are loyalists who have been really successful at getting Trump elected. Where does Trump park these people?"

X CEO Elon Musk is scheduled to meet with congressional Republicans to pitch his drastic budget-cutting plans, and it's already causing concern for some on Capitol Hill.

An unnamed Republican Senate aide who spoke with Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman on Thursday predicted that Musk and fellow Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) leader Vivek Ramaswamy would create massive political headaches for Republicans in the coming weeks.

"Two people who know nothing about how the government works pretending they can cut a trillion dollars, both with decent pulpits to preach from, and the ear of an unpredictable president? Disaster," the aide said.

The aide then added that "the only good thing is that at some point they’ll overpromise and get bounced by Trump," before adding, "but until then... disaster."

ALSO READ: 'Sounding the alarm': Trump plan said to be getting 'surprise resistance' from Republicans

Sherman writes that the politics of DOGE are dicey for Republicans overall.

"Unlike previous spending-reduction initiatives, DOGE has no statutory authority or fast-track floor process, and Hill leaders have no idea how they’ll handle any of the proposed spending cuts offered by Musk and Ramaswamy," he reports.

Musk has openly hinted that he plans to target Social Security with his budget cutting plans, despite the fact that President-elect Donald Trump vowed repeatedly that the program was off limits.

Musk also wants to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has returned billions of dollars to consumers from financial institutions.

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Missouri’s trigger law banning nearly all abortions remains in place. But at 12:01 a.m. Friday, Amendment 3 will go into effect.

The constitutional amendment, which received 51.6% of the nearly 3 million votes cast, prohibits the legislature from regulating abortion prior to the point of fetal viability — generally seen as the point at which a fetus can likely survive outside the womb without extraordinary measures.

Planned Parenthood officials said they have providers and staff prepared to start seeing patients for walk-in medication abortion appointments at three clinics — in Kansas City, St. Louis and Columbia — beginning Friday, followed later by scheduled surgical abortions.

But whether that happens depends on the outcome of a lawsuit that had its first hearing before a Jackson County judge Wednesday morning.

“What we don’t have are the abilities to overcome state restrictions and hurdles that were intended to deny care,” Emily Wales, President and CEO with Planned Parenthood Great Plains, said Wednesday evening.

Less than 24 hours after voters narrowly approved Amendment 3, the ACLU of Missouri, Planned Parenthood Great Plains and Planned Parenthood Great Rivers filed a lawsuit seeking to take down decades worth of overlapping restrictions and bans on abortion on the books in Missouri.

There was no disagreement between Planned Parenthood and the Missouri Attorney General’s office that Amendment 3 makes unconstitutional the trigger law that went into effect in June 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion.

The disagreement instead revolves around more than a dozen “targeted regulation of abortion providers” laws, also known as TRAP laws, that previously made abortions all but inaccessible in Missouri prior to the total ban taking effect.

Planned Parenthood is asking a Jackson County judge to grant a preliminary injunction which would immediately declare the current ban and the TRAP laws unconstitutional.

“Every single day that Missourians cannot access their constitutional rights, they’re being denied critical care,” Wales said.

Solicitor General Josh Divine, who argued Wednesday’s hearing on behalf of the state, characterized the lawsuit as “unusually aggressive,” saying it would be more appropriate for the plaintiffs to challenge each TRAP law individually rather than all together “on a very short fuse.”

He added that preliminary injunctions should only be granted in “drastic, extraordinary circumstances.” The lawsuit at hand, he contended, does not apply because Missourians are still able to access abortion in Illinois to the east and Kansas to the west.

“Nobody’s actually going to be materially affected by what this court does,” Divine added.

A decade ago, more than 5,000 abortions were performed in Missouri, according to data from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.

By 2020, two years before the abortion ban went into effect, that number dropped to 167 as a result of the TRAP laws.

Anti-abortion lawmakers, activists call on Missouri court to rule against Planned Parenthood

Sam Lee, a longtime Missouri anti-abortion activist and lobbyist, said he’s been pleased by the attorney general’s defense of Missouri’s anti-abortion laws.

If the TRAP laws remain in effect, as Lee is hoping, “it may severely affect Planned Parenthood’s ability to do abortions, because they weren’t doing abortions when those laws were in effect some years ago.”

Judge Jerri Zhang, who is overseeing the case, did not immediately rule on the injunction when the hearing concluded late Wednesday evening.

She did, however, deny the state’s request to remove Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker as a defendant and move the case to Cole County. Earlier this year, a Cole County judge struck Amendment 3 from the ballot, a decision that was quickly overridden by the Missouri Court of Appeals.

The attorney general’s office said they plan to appeal Zhang’s decisions, arguing that Peters Baker does not appropriately represent all statewide prosecutors because of her previous statements in support of abortion rights.

The Missouri Attorney General’s Office also posed a court challenge to the Planned Parenthood suit. This latest lawsuit, filed last week in Cole County, questions Planned Parenthood Great Plains’ ability to sue the state, claiming a 2010 settlement agreement prevents them from doing so.

Missouri’s TRAP laws

For decades, Missouri legislators have passed laws restricting abortion access and regulating the procedure.

“The voters have now changed all of that,” Eleanor Spottswood, an attorney with Planned Parenthood, argued before the court Wednesday.

Amendment 3 states, in part, that “the right to reproductive freedom shall not be denied, interfered with, delayed, or otherwise restricted unless the government demonstrates that such action is justifiable by a compelling governmental interest achieved by the least restrictive means.”

The litigation challenges numerous current laws, including a mandatory 72-hour waiting period between an initial appointment and the abortion procedure; requirements that abortion clinics must have admitting privileges at a hospital roughly 15 minutes away; and a requirement that the same physician who initially saw the patient also perform the abortion.

The lawsuit is also challenging the current law criminalizing physicians who perform abortions.

Spottswood argued that a failure to immediately strike down the TRAP laws would cause “irreparable harm” to Missourians because “patients and providers have to do twice the work to access abortion.”

Meanwhile, the attorney general’s office argued that striking down such laws would cause more harm.

Divine on multiple occasions cited an FDA label for mifepristone, one of two medications used to induce a medication abortion, that shows that according to two U.S. studies of about 1,00 women, up to 5% of women who took mifepristone ended up in the emergency room. It did not specify if the emergency room visits were necessary.

The same FDA label says that across three studies of more than 14,000 women who took mifepristone, fewer than 0.6% were admitted to the hospital as a result of the medication.

Divine also noted that no individual women seeking abortions were named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, arguing that’s because women don’t actually want abortions once given more information. He said this is why the state’s requirements that those seeking abortions first be given the state’s informed consent booklet should remain.

“It’s against their moral beliefs,” Divine said. “But they’re being pressured, often by an abusive partner, by parents, things of that nature, so what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to create a situation where those women can in fact make the choice that they want to do, and we know most of the time that’s childbirth.”

About one in four women in the United States have an abortion before the age of 45, according to 2020 data. In 2021, around 94% of abortions occurred before 14 weeks gestation. Abortions later than 20 weeks account for fewer than 1% of all abortions in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Divine, in his final arguments Wednesday, characterized the state’s TRAP laws as incidental, much like speeding laws or road construction that could delay someone getting to an abortion. But he said the TRAP laws don’t fall under the strict scrutiny requirement and therefore don’t require an immediate ruling.

Solicitor General Josh Divine called Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit seeking to unravel Missouri’s abortion restrictions “unusually aggressive” while speaking to media Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024, outside the Jackson County Courthouse (Anna Spoerre/Missouri Independent).

Zhang asked if delaying an abortion through the required 72-hour waiting period would infringe on a patient’s autonomy, especially if the patient was a day or two shy of 10 weeks gestation, when procedures switch from medication to surgical abortions.

Divine responded that the attorney general’s office believes Amendment 3 gives Missourians the right to an abortion, but doesn’t give them the right to a certain abortion procedure.

He also noted that Amendment 3 doesn’t specifically mention the legalization of mifepristone, alluding to future attempts by the incoming GOP administration to enforce the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that bans mailing obscene material, including for the use of abortion.

WASHINGTON — Republican lawmakers railed against what they called “woke” curriculum in schools during a Wednesday hearing in a U.S. House education panel, the latest example of culture wars rocking public education policy.

The hearing brought “critical race theory” to the forefront. The academic framework focuses on the social construction of race and has drawn strong Republican opposition in states across the country.

Though critical race theory is used in college and graduate-level programs, GOP members on the U.S. House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education said the framework is also being taught in K-12 schools.

The federal government has no role in K-12 curriculum, which is set by states and districts across the country, leaving the House panel without any authority to legislate the matter.

Subcommittee Chairman Aaron Bean pointed to negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on educational outcomes and asked why schools “taught race-inspired ideology” instead of focusing on bouncing back from the pandemic-era setbacks.

The Florida Republican added that critical race theory is “now reshaping how young people interpret their identity, and it’s changing how they see themselves, each other, in our country.”

Rep. Jahana Hayes, a Democrat who was a public school history teacher for 15 years, said there was never any reference to critical race theory during all of her training and studies in education.

“I never had any professional development that separated me by race and taught this because it is just not taught or discussed at the K-12 level, so not really sure why it’s a part of this hearing today — it is a legal theory taught in law school,” the Connecticut Democrat said.

Ian Rowe, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, pointed to “specific practices undergirded by the ideology driving critical race theory.”

Rowe, who is also a senior visiting fellow at the nonprofit Woodson Center, offered examples, such as learning exercises where children are in a line and a teacher says: “Take two steps forward if you’re white, take three steps backward if you’re Black.”

He did not specify where this occurred.

Civics knowledge lacking

Bean brought in panelists from organizations and initiatives he said were built to “emphasize the importance of civics, understanding America’s founding principles and promoting a free exchange of ideas.”

Civics has become a hot-button issue within education culture wars, and the 2024 Republican Party platform called for promoting “love of country” through “authentic civics education.”

Jed Atkins, who serves as dean and director of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, said civic knowledge “is lacking among our college students, the majority of whom lack elementary knowledge of our democratic institutions.”

Atkins said the school “ensures that the serious work of educating citizens to live and thrive in our pluralistic democracy will get done.”

Funding bigger concern, Dems say

Ranking member Suzanne Bonamici, who echoed Hayes in saying critical race theory is not a K-12 issue, directed the focus of the hearing to school infrastructure.

The Oregon Democrat touted legislation introduced last year by Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott, ranking Democrat of the full House education panel, and New Jersey Democratic Rep. Donald Norcross, that would spend billions of dollars on schools’ physical and digital infrastructure.

Bonamici said school infrastructure “is not just about walls and ceilings of school buildings” but also “the entire environment in which our children learn.”

“Right now, far too many of these environments are unsafe, outdated and desperately in need of repair,” she said.

Fox News co-host Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump's embattled nominee for U.S. Secretary of Defense, was back on Capitol Hill Wednesday to try to convince senators to support his confirmation, vowing to not withdraw despite numerous media reports alleging sexual misconduct, alcohol abuse, financial mismanagement, a possible Christian nationalism affinity — and a possible replacement.

Hegseth, walking through the halls of Congress Wednesday morning, was asked by CBS News congressional correspondent Nikole Killion (video below) if he has had any conversations with Trump about his rumored replacement, Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

"I spoke to the president-elect this morning," Hegseth replied. "He said, 'keep going, keep fighting. I'm behind you all the way.'"

"So you're in this all the way?" Killion pressed.

READ MORE: ‘Standards Have Evolved’: Senator ‘Leaning Yes’ on Hegseth Despite Misconduct Allegations

"Why would I back down? I've always been a fighter. I'm here for the fighters. This is personal and passionate for me," Hegseth insisted.

"So you not withdrawing your name from consideration, just to be clear?" Killion asked.

"I'm meeting all day with senators," Hegseth, not directly answering her question, replied.

Hewseth's mother spoke with her son's colleagues in a Fox News interview Wednesday morning, urging "female Senators" to ignore the media reports and confirm Pete to lead the world's most lethal military.

But despite the full-frontal blitz by Hegseth and his mother, and his claims that Trump is still behind him, the Trump transition team may not be.

The Wall Street Journal in an overnight exclusive reported Trump is considering Florida governor Ron DeSantis to replace Hegseth as even Republican senators and growing concerned over the "mounting allegations" about Hegseth.

CNN reports Hegseth's nomination is "in trouble," and the Trump transition team is apparently angered by Hegseth.

READ MORE: Trump Lining Up Billionaire Defense Investor and Megadonor to Be Number Two at Pentagon

“He has not been forthright with the Transition team staff and the President-elect and Vice President-elect,” a senior Trump transition source said of Hegseeth, CNN reported Tuesday night. “He has hurt a lot of people as a result. He didn’t disclose anything.”

“There are significant concerns more accusations are going to come out from his time at Fox News, about his behavior there, where he had an affair with his now-wife who was his executive producer,” the source also said.

Watch the video below or at this link.

READ MORE: How Democrats and Republicans Look at Hunter Biden’s Pardon and One for J6ers