Pretentious Word Nonsense

Target critics are also pointing to a 2011 article from Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) describing how the company created the Target Forensic Services Laboratory focused on investigating a range of crimes including shoplifting. The featured lab was located at Target’s Brooklyn Park campus in Minneapolis, and, according to MPR, it stayed busy “lending its high-end technology and professionals to law enforcement agencies free of charge.” The article points out that the Target lab carries the same certification used by any crime lab at a police department. “We ask for nothing in return. There’s no quid pro quo — we’ve never asked for video forensics services or anything else we’ve done for anything,” Target VP Brad Brekke said at the time. “We just offer it up as a commitment to them and the community.”

For decades, Target fostered partnerships with law enforcement unlike those of any other U.S. corporation. It became one of the most influential corporate donors to law enforcement agencies and police foundations, supplying money for cutting-edge technology and equipment. When it developed a network of forensics labs, it made them available to police across the U.S. Starting in the early 2000s, Target developed a program, called Safe City, that poured money into police and sheriff’s departments to install neighborhood surveillance systems and fund equipment. In Minneapolis, Target worked with the City Attorney’s Office to have petty criminals banished from the downtown business district through what are called geographic restriction orders. Eight out of 10 people expelled were Black or American Indian, according to an analysis of city data. In an article last summer, Aren Aizura, a professor who teaches courses on race and gender at the University of Minnesota, wrote that Target’s deep ties to the police made the company “an appropriate outlet for rage.”

A key question is how to handle a virus that’s become less threatening to most but remains wildly dangerous to a slice of the population. That slice is much bigger than many realize: Covid is still a leading killer, the third-biggest in the US last year behind heart disease and cancer. Unlike with other common causes of death such as smoking and traffic accidents that led to safety laws, though, politicians aren’t pushing for ways to reduce the harm, such as mandated vaccinations or masking in closed spaces.

Canada has set a target of protecting 30% of its waters by 2030, under the recent UN agreement on biodiversity. So far, it has 14 MPAs covering approximately 6% of the nation’s coastal and marine environments. Three are located in the Pacific Ocean, encompassing 8,610 sq km of protected waters, but the Kitasu Bay MPA’s modest 33.5 sq km are not listed among them.

These inspiring acts of mass solidarity show us what can happen when workers come together to demand fair conditions and an end to the oppression of themselves and others. But we should backtrack a little. Labor terminology can be confusing, and you’re probably not learning much about it in school, either. But as the class struggle continues to boil over around us, it’s important to know the difference between, say, a “boycott” and a “wildcat strike.” What exactly is “crossing the picket line?” What does it mean to “go out on strike” or to be a “scab”?

KENNEY: On one of those visits, Robin realized that the technician wasn't using some specialized device to change the settings. It was a smartphone app. She even found it on the App Store, but it was only available for authorized users.

In messages back and forth, some members of the group pushed Deutsch to make the bill even more restrictive. Vernadette Broyles, the president and general counsel of a Georgia-based law firm called the Child & Parental Rights Campaign, urged him to raise the age threshold to 18. Broyles, who is also affiliated with the conservative Christian legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), warned that other religious-right groups might not support the bill if “you start by giving away 16 and 17-year olds right from the outset.” Others, including Andre Van Mol—a member of a fringe, conservative doctors group that calls itself the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds)—raised concerns that the bill as written might backfire by accidentally blocking health care providers from “attempting to change…a child’s perception of their sex” when kids identify as transgender. Deutsch agreed to rewrite the section.

Now, as former rebels reincorporate, the FARC foodways are mutating. There is a tension, explains Paula Natalia Caicedo Ortiz, Fuenmayor Cadena’s thesis advisor, between their regained Colombian citizenship and what she describes as a sort of “FARC citizenship” that defined most of their lives. (Many joined, either voluntarily or forcefully, as teenagers.) For example, when former guerrilla members first arrived in the Comunidad Noble y de Paz Marco Aurelio Buendía area, where Semillas lives, they kept cooking together at the rancha the government built for them. But after the government built houses for each former FARC member and their families, everyone started cooking at home, where kitchen duties have fallen on the shoulders of women, unlike their time in the guerrilla, when men and women cooked as equals.

The Arizona Supreme Court has ruled that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can refuse to answer questions or turn over documents under a state law that exempts religious officials from having to report child sex abuse if they learn of the crime during a confessional setting.

Consider what’s happening in the private sector: BlackSky takes data from 25 satellites, more than 40,000 news sources, 100 million mobile devices, 70,000 ships and planes, eight social networks, 5,000 environmental sensors, and thousands of Internet-of-Things devices. In the future, it plans to have up to 60 of its own Earth-observing satellites. All of that information goes into different processing pipelines based on its type. From a news story, BlackSky may extract people, places, organizations, and keywords. From an image, it may map out which buildings appear damaged after an earthquake. All of that processed, but still disparate, data goes into what BlackSky CTO Scott Herman calls a “giant analytic fusion engine,” which tries to turn it into more than the sum of its parts, tells satellites what to do about it, and alerts human analysts when events meet certain predetermined criteria.

Openly gay, Shafer gave gay rights speeches at college campuses during a period of rampant LGBTQ discrimination in the United States. Back then, you could be arrested for simply “appearing” gay. Once, Shafer nearly lost his job after acknowledging he was gay on a Kansas City radio show.

Her recovery is remarkable for several reasons, her doctors said. The voices and visions have stopped. And she no longer meets the diagnostic criteria for either schizoaffective disorder or intellectual disability, Markx said.

COVID hospitalizations and deaths have so far not risen in India, though both are referred to as “lagging indicators”—meaning that such developments, if they occur, usually happen several weeks after a rise in cases.

Loftus connected McNaughton with a psychologist who specializes in helping patients with chronic digestive diseases. The psychologist, Tiffany Taft, said McNaughton was not an unusual case. About 1 in 3 patients with diseases like colitis suffer from medical trauma or PTSD related to it, she said, often the result of issues related to getting appropriate treatment approved by insurers.

In several since-deleted tweets from 2021 that resurfaced via screenshots this week, Szasz singled out Wonderland, writing she “will f— pay and I will show up to her LA apartment.” The musician was set to perform with DJ Illenium in Las Vegas in July.

In his complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, Lochridge alleged he had raised concerns about the safety of the Titan with OceanGate and advised the company to conduct more testing of the the vessel's hull. Lochridge said he had disagreed with his employer about the best way to test the safety of the sub and that he objected to OceanGate's decision to perform dives without "non-destructive testing to prove its integrity." Non-destructive testing is a type of analysis used on materials to determine their integrity and reliability.

Researchers graded 20 police departments against international human rights standards, including the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, “the two fundamental international instruments protecting human rights, establish the rights to life, equality, liberty and security of person, freedom from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and freedom from discrimination”, the report says. Law enforcement relies on the UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials, the Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials, and a Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions on protection of the right to life during law enforcement, according to the report. But in a review of department policies from 20 American cities, the university survey found that none has a use-of-force policy that meets those standards.

Patriarch Daniel J. Beers, 60, lies at the center of the family network. He was a leading figure in a scheme in the 1990s involving a health care sharing ministry that fraudulently siphoned tens of millions of dollars from members, court records show. Two decades later, he played a key role in building Liberty into one of the nation’s largest sharing ministries, several of the nonprofit’s current and former employees told ProPublica. Four years after its launch in 2014, the ministry enrolled members in almost every state and collected $300 million in annual revenue. Liberty used the money to pay at least $140 million to businesses owned and operated by Beers family members and friends over a seven-year period, the investigation found. The family then funneled the money through a network of shell companies to buy a private airline in Ohio, more than $20 million in real estate holdings and scores of other businesses, including a winery in Oregon that they turned into a marijuana farm. The family calls this collection of enterprises “the conglomerate.”

When Motherboard used Koko’s peer support tool, one of the four options offered by the chatbot, it asked us if we needed help with "Dating, Friendships, Work, School, Family, Eating Disorders, LGBTQ+, Discrimination, or Other," then asked us to write down our problem and tag our "most negative thought" about it, then sent that information to someone else on the Koko platform. The advice that Koko gave about a non-communicative partner was, “You should just dump him if he’s not texting you. Just tell him he sucks.” Generally, people seeking help on the Koko platform are also asked anonymously give advice to other users on Koko. Immediately after asking for help ourselves, we were given the following conundrum to solve, posted by another user: "i feel so exhausted. im autoromantic and autosexual and struggling to cope. i keep going though periods of being comfortable with my sexuality and my relationship with myself, but right now im struggling. i feel disgusting and narcissistic for loving myself. only yesterday i was feeling happy that i knew i love myself and now im just tired and sad. ugh :(( I’m a loser."

This spring, a woman named Jessica Burgess and her daughter will stand trial in Nebraska after being accused of performing an illegal abortion — with a key piece of evidence provided by Meta, the parent company of Facebook. Prosecutors said Burgess helped her daughter find and take pills that would induce an abortion. The teenage Burgess also faces charges of illegally disposing of the fetal remains.

NGOs have repeatedly raised concerns over children going missing from accommodation and have offered to help the Home Office keep them safe, but the government has rejected these offers. Philip Ishola, the chief executive of the anti-child trafficking organisation Love146, which has been warning of the risk of placing unaccompanied children in hotels since the Home Office started using them, said the Home Office rejected an offer from a group of organisations to assess a hotel in Brighton.

Currently, 200 children are missing from hotels run by the Home Office. Where they might be is a topic of significant debate. The answer is further afield than most suspect. The Observer investigation reveals that some have even been found outside the UK.

Renew Oceans published targets on its website to collect 45 tonnes of plastic trash from the Ganges in 2019 and 450 tonnes in 2020. Neither the Alliance nor Renew Oceans has published any information on their progress in reaching those targets. Four people involved in the project told Reuters it collected less than one tonne of waste from the Ganges before it closed in March last year after less than six months in operation.

Renewlogy’s equipment could not process plastic “films” such as cling wrap, as promised, Boise’s Materials Management Program Manager Peter McCullough told Reuters. The city remains in the recycling program, he said, but its plastic now meets a low-tech end: It’s being trucked to a cement plant northeast of Salt Lake City that burns it for fuel. Renewlogy said in an emailed response to Reuters’ questions that it could recycle plastic films. The trouble, it said, was that Boise’s waste was contaminated with other garbage at 10 times the level it was told to expect. Boise spokesperson Colin Hickman said the city was not aware of any statements or assurances made to Renewlogy about specific levels of contamination.

None of the 11 pairs of footwear donated by Reuters were turned into exercise paths or kids’ parks in Singapore. Instead, nearly all the tagged shoes ended up in the hands of Yok Impex Pte Ltd, a Singaporean second-hand goods exporter, according to the trackers and that exporter’s logistics manager. The manager said his firm had been hired by a waste management company involved in the recycling program to retrieve shoes from the donation bins for delivery to that company’s local warehouse. But that’s not what happened to the shoes donated by Reuters. Ten pairs moved first from the donation bins to the exporter’s facility, then on to neighboring Indonesia, in some cases traveling hundreds of miles to different corners of the vast archipelago, the location trackers showed.

In a response to a tweet that reported "some celebrities have been offered a complimentary Twitter Blue subscription on behalf of Musk," the CEO responded that he's "paying for a few personally." Musk later confirmed that he was paying for the verification of actor William Shatner, NBA star LeBron James and King.

The “language nest” model of language revitalization began in New Zealand, where a movement to revive the Maori language began in the 1970s. In the 1980s, the government there began funding language nests, or Te Kōhanga Reo, which brought elders together with children and their parents.

People who had an active U.S. Facebook account between May 2007 and December 2022 have until Aug. 25 to enter a claim. Individual settlement payments haven’t yet been established because payouts depend on how many users submit claims and how long each user maintained a Facebook account.

A joint press release from Verso Books and Éditions la Fabrique condemned Moret’s treatment as “scandalous”. It said: “The police officers claimed that Ernest had participated in demonstrations in France as a justification for this act – a quite remarkably inappropriate statement for a British police officer to make, and which seems to clearly indicate complicity between French and British authorities on this matter.”

The “Writers Strike for Dummies” explanation of the current state of TV can be boiled down to this: profits are high and budgets are up, but writers are making less than ever. According to the WGA, half of all TV series writers are working for the guild’s Minimum Basic Agreement rate, regardless of their level of experience in the industry. And that MBA hasn’t been adjusted for inflation.

"We were interested in the disparities between LGBT and non-LGBT youth in suicidal ideation, feelings of belonging, text-message bullying," he recalls. "One of our reviewers asked us, 'How do you know these kids are actually gay?' And giving some thought to it, we said, 'Let's figure out who those kids are.'" Robinson-Cimpian and his co-author came up with a clever test. They chose a set of answers on the survey — questions with responses that adolescents were likely to find funny, but ones that were statistically unlikely to be related to being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Their height, for example. The more of these way-off-base answers that someone gave on these questions, the researchers surmised, the more likely they were to be lying about being LGBT as well.

Trump said he would sign an executive order instructing federal agencies “to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age,” and vowed to punish healthcare professionals who provide gender-affirming care to minors.

“Right now, the vast majority of our department is ready to vote yes in a [National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)] election,” said YouTube Music generalist Sam Regan at a strike in Austin, Texas, viewed via Facebook livestream. “In an act of retaliation against our organizing efforts, our employer is forcing an end to remote work before the vote, which would dramatically interfere with the fair voting conditions mandated by federal law.” YouTube Music’s content operations team is expected to return to the Austin office on Monday. But according to the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), the majority of workers were hired remotely, and almost one quarter are not even based in Texas.

On Jan. 1, Curtis received a raise to $14.50 an hour, which is still lower than the $15 minimum hourly wage that Alphabet Inc. has established for its temporary, contractor and vendor workforce, commonly referred to as TVCs. Despite the raise, which was granted after raters combined forces and talked with their direct employer, Appen Ltd., her work hours are capped at 26 a week. That falls short of the required 30 hours a week that workers must make to be considered a Google TVC.

And then there are the thousands of people who would like to be married but can’t afford to be because additional income from a spouse would result in taking away the disability, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or child support benefits that make life sustainable. For them, marriage might be financially stabilizing down the line but not stabilizing enough to make up for the loss of other safety nets in the short term. Marriage is stabilizing, then, but largely for people who are already stable or on the route to it. It’s become a tool of class reproduction, benefiting those who’ve always benefited within the American class hierarchy: financially stable white men and the women married to them.

Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.

The Times of London reported that debt collectors obtained court warrants to enter the homes of people who had fallen behind on their energy bills. They installed meters that make customers pay upfront for their gas supply — if they don’t, they are cut off. The practice allows firms to get around rules that limit the circumstances in which they can cut off supplies to customers who are in debt.

Federal investigators probing the derailment have focused in part on the role of a possible mechanical malfunction, officials said Sunday. The train's crew said an alarm indicating such a malfunction sounded just before the accident, National Transportation Safety Board member Michael Graham said at a news conference. Additionally, two videos of the train obtained by NTSB investigators show one of the rail cars may have had a broken or malfunctioning axle, Graham said Sunday.

An air quality disaster resulted on Friday night after about 50 cars on a Norfolk Southern Railroad train traveling from Illinois to Pennsylvania derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Ten of those cars contained hazardous materials, five of which contained vinyl chloride, a highly volatile colorless gas produced for commercial uses.

NewsNation correspondent Evan Lambert was pushed to the ground, handcuffed and arrested for trespassing Wednesday while covering a news conference by Gov. Mike DeWine on the derailment of a train carrying toxic chemicals. The media outlet posted a video of the incident and later reported that Lambert was held for five hours before being released.

Some research and teaching assistants at the public school in Philadelphia received an email notice on Wednesday that their tuition remission had been revoked for the spring semester, "as a result of your participation in the [Temple University Graduate Students' Association union] strike." Tuition remission, a benefit offered by many schools to help finance employees' tuition costs, covers an average of $20,000 at Temple, according to the university. Temple is now requiring the graduate students to pay their tuition balance by March 9 to stay enrolled in classes, or else accrue a $100 late fee.

Sheep graze among the craters and regrown woods on the World War I battleground at Vimy Ridge, France. Unexploded ordnance remains a constant danger.

Spain's constitutional court last week rejected a challenge by the right-wing Popular Party against allowing abortions in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy.

To be enrolled at Red Lake an individual must have at least a quarter Red Lake blood. As time passes that's increasingly difficult to maintain. Critics say that's deliberate as the U.S. government has used blood quantum to limit tribal benefits.

Up to a dozen firefighters who tackled the blaze at Grenfell Tower have been diagnosed with terminal cancer. According to reports, the cancers are understood to be mainly digestive cancers and leukaemia. Firefighters and survivors from the disaster have called for medical screenings as a list of rescuers who went to the west London fire in 2017 and have cancer is being drawn up.

The return of an avowed neo-Nazi to Twitter under Musk’s guarantee to reinstate banned accounts reinforces the concerns brought forth by civil society groups and advertisers over his handling of content standards on the platform. Under Musk, prominent white nationalists including Patrick Casey and Richard Spencer have reportedly been reinstated or been able to verify their accounts through Twitter’s recently launched pay-for-verification scheme.

Last week, Musk announced a "general amnesty" for many suspended accounts (although he also suspended Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, on Thursday after Ye posted an image of a swastika inside a Star of David). This week, Twitter quietly updated its online rulebook to say it was no longer enforcing policies against misleading claims about COVID-19.

The legislation would not force any state to allow same-sex couples to marry. But it would require states to recognize all marriages that were legal where they were performed, and protect current same-sex unions, if the court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision were to be overturned. It’s a stunning bipartisan endorsement, and evidence of societal change, after years of bitter divisiveness on the issue.

Lesvos, who said she legally changed her given name more than two decades ago and is only known by her mononym, said her bar provides LGBTQ Koreans the type of identity-affirming space she longed for in her younger years. “I want this bar to be a place for all LGBTQ Koreans, not just lesbians,” Lesvos, 66, said. “It’s my way of giving back to our community.”

Following the tour, a Google scientist prepared a list of clinical, demographic and patient information it sought from the repository. The list included “must haves” — case diagnoses; pathology and radiology images; information on gender and ethnicity; and birth and death dates — as well as “high-value” patient information, including comorbidities, subsequent hospitalizations and cause of death. This troubled the JPC’s director. “We felt very, very concerned about giving too much data to them,” Simon told ProPublica, “because too much data could identify the patient.”

The researchers found that cacao plants take up cadmium from the soil, with the metal accumulating in cacao beans as the tree grows. That’s similar to how heavy metals contaminate some other foods. But lead seems to get into cacao after beans are harvested. The researchers found that the metal was typically on the outer shell of the cocoa bean, not in the bean itself. Moreover, lead levels were low soon after beans were picked and removed from pods but increased as beans dried in the sun for days. During that time, lead-filled dust and dirt accumulated on the beans. “We collected beans on the ground that were heavily loaded with lead on the outer shell,” DiBartolomeis says.

The settlement between confectioners association and As You Sow, an organization that promotes corporate social responsibility, required both parties to undertake a multiyear study to understand the root causes of heavy metals in chocolate and strategies to reduce these levels. The report discussing findings from a three-year study was released in August.

In-person contact with foreigners was limited, too, thanks to travel controls. A racial-quota immigration system built in the 1920s—though borrowing heavily from earlier legislation that excluded Chinese immigrants—made it nearly impossible for Africans, Asians, and many Europeans to immigrate to the U.S., plunging immigration levels to historic lows and thereby severing potential ties with the rest of the world. In 1910, nearly 15 percent of the American population had been born overseas, but by 1960, that portion shrank to only 5.4 percent. Similarly, bureaucrats in the burgeoning national security state kept a variety of radicals from entering and leaving the country. Since World War I, foreign anarchists, Communists, and others—ranging from German spies and saboteurs to Black internationalists—found the gate to the U.S. bolt-locked. Likewise, Americans whom the State Department identified as holding so-called “alien” beliefs were barred from the exits. The border was a two-way ideological filtration device.

As we have already stated, we reject the stance of Lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are. As BIack women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. We must also question whether Lesbian separatism is an adequate and progressive political analysis and strategy, even for those who practice it, since it so completely denies any but the sexual sources of women’s oppression, negating the facts of class and race.

Speaking from the perspective and the tradition of lesbians of color, most if not all rationales for excluding transsexual women are not only transphobic, but also racist. To argue that transsexual women should not enter the Land because their experiences are different would have to assume that all other women's experiences are the same, and this is a racist assumption. The argument that transsexual women have experienced some degree of male privilege should not bar them from our communities once we realize that not all women are equally privileged or oppressed. To suggest that the safety of the Land would be compromised overlooks, perhaps intentionally, ways in which women can act out violence and oppressions against each other. Even the argument that "the presence of a penis would trigger the women" is flawed because it neglects the fact that white skin is just as much a reminder of violence as a penis. The racist history of lesbian-feminism has taught us that any white woman making these excuses for one oppression have made and will make the same excuse for other oppressions such as racism, classism, and ableism.

The Fontana teenager killed this week alongside her father in a shootout with law enforcement in Hesperia was likely unarmed as she ran toward deputies, according to a new report.

There is a tendency, especially when it comes to the über-rich and powerful, to assume and to fantasize about what we can’t see. We ascribe shadowy brilliance or malevolence, which may very well be unearned or misguided. What’s striking about the Musk messages, then, is the similarity between these men’s behavior behind closed doors and in public on Twitter. Perhaps the real revelation here is that the shallowness you see is the shallowness you get.

Multinational food and drink companies have “cheated and misled” shoppers in eastern Europe for years by selling them inferior versions of well-known brands, according to the European commission’s most senior official responsible for justice and consumers.

Boosters ramp up immune protection and reduce the likelihood of severe Covid-19 cases. The problem is that few people are getting boosted. Almost 80 percent of the US population has had at least one Covid-19 vaccine dose. Yet since regulators gave bivalent boosters the green light last month, less than 4 percent of eligible Americans have received the new shots. Even among people over the age of 65, one of the highest-risk groups for severe Covid-19, less than one-third have gotten the bivalent booster.

Unimpeded by human worries, YieldStar’s price increases sometimes led to more tenants leaving. Camden’s turnover rates increased about 15 percentage points in 2006 after it implemented YieldStar, Campo, the company’s CEO, told a trade publication a few years later. But that wasn’t a problem for the firm: Despite having to replace more renters, its revenue grew by 7.4%. “The net effect of driving revenue and pushing people out was $10 million in income,” Campo said. “I think that shows keeping the heads in the beds above all else is not always the best strategy.”

Johnson’s bill defines “sexually-oriented material” as depictions, descriptions or simulations of sexual acts, human genitals or “any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects.”

This year a wave of bills in states ranging from New Hampshire to Arizona have attempted to limit, ban or criminalize access to medical care for transgender and nonbinary youth. An Alabama law passed in February not only banned medication for transgender youth, but ruled that doctors who break it could face up to 10 years in prison.

"This sends two messages: The first is that the government is not going to do anything to solve the problem. This is their way of telling us that," Walder said. "The second is that us parents are now forced to have conversations with our kids that they may not be emotionally ready for. My daughter is 7. What do I tell her?"

The states argue that the debt relief program causes them economic injury in the form of lost tax revenue and other losses stemming from federal student loans that state-related entities manage, own, or invest in. But Autrey ruled that most of those alleged harms were too speculative.

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have identical policy positions on Section 230: they both want to repeal it. Do you know why? Because the First Amendment prohibits them from making explicit speech regulations, so they keep threatening to repeal the law that allows social networks to even exist in order to exert indirect pressure on content policy. It’s not subtle!

A 70,000-strong petition from Te Pāti Māori went to Parliament in June, gaining attention at home and internationally.

One counter-protester sprayed the rally with Silly String. Hoch responded with pepper spray and hit a different nearby counter-protester, Lorenzo Cervantes, in the face with the painful liquid.

The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a research group that analyzes social media content to predict emerging threats, said that use of the N-word on Twitter increased by nearly 500% in the 12 hours immediately after Musk's deal was finalized. The newspaper also noted that several online trolling accounts called on others to use racist language in the aftermath of the deal.

There are workarounds to this specific issue, however. Not least freeing yourself from the misery of such closed software, where ridiculous situations are able to breed like rabbits. There’s Free Software like Gimp, and free, open color schemes like Open Color. Of course, there are always introduced difficulties when stepping away from industry standards, but then, if we all did it, those problems would go away pretty fast.

With 99.9% of the votes tallied in the runoff vote, da Silva had 50.9% and Bolsonaro 49.1%, and the election authority said da Silva’s victory was a mathematical certainty. At about 10 p.m. local time, three hours after the results were in, the lights went out in the presidential palace and Bolsonaro had not conceded nor reacted in any way. Before the vote, Bolsonaro’s campaign had made repeated — unproven — claims of possible electoral manipulation, raising fears that he would not accept defeat and would challenge the results if he lost.

Ali Alexander, the far-right activist who organized the "Stop the Steal" rally held just before the Capitol riot, is now egging on discussion of a coup in Brazil, calling on the Brazilian military to intervene in the election defeat of Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro.

Republicans, for the most part, remained quiet before Tuesday and wouldn't say how far they wanted to restrict abortion access if the amendment passed.

On July 8, 2015, 19-year-old Hampton student Stephen Smith phoned his mother to tell her he’d run out of gas. Later that night he was found lying in the middle of the road miles away from his truck. He’d died of blunt force trauma, and his body had been “laid out in the middle of the road like a snow angel,” according to his mother. Authorities with the South Carolina Highway Patrol initially assumed Stephen was the victim of a hit-and-run after leaving his truck and walking to get gas, and closed the case accordingly, despite numerous observations by police that suggested Smith’s death was a homicide. But police also later noted that the scene looked staged, and town gossip began to swirl that Smith, who was rumored to be dating Buster Murdaugh at the time, had been the victim of a hate crime or that the Murdaugh brothers had a role in his death.

Bankston outlined several days in 2018 in which Infowars made over $800,000 per day. Jones did not dispute the veracity of the emails or the dollar figures, but claimed some of their higher-profit days came during the week of CPAC, the conservative conference. Earlier in the trial, Jones said the highest figure his company made was $200,000 per day.

What they're saying: "Among the Trumpian core of the Republican Party, this has become mainstream," said Rick Hasen, the director of UCLA Law's Safeguarding Democracy Project. "It's exceedingly dangerous, because a democracy depends on losers’ consent." "If people believe the other side is consistently stealing elections, first of all, you completely delegitimize people in office ... but second, you create the conditions where people might be more willing to engage in fraud themselves as a way of trying to even the score," he said.

A 57-year-old California man has been sentenced to 60 days in jail and two years of supervised probation after threatening a family wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts in June of 2020.

Shelter-in-place hotels provide residents with a room plus on-site access to health services, including nursing support, routine wellness checks and health screenings, as well as harm-reduction services aimed at reducing drug overdoses.

Recently disclosed internal emails from that time help explain what Bash, Patrick, and the other U.S. attorneys couldn’t figure out—why the plan for reunifying families was faulty to the point of negligence. Inside DHS, officials were working to prevent reunifications from happening. Within days of the start of Zero Tolerance, Matt Albence, one of Tom Homan’s deputies at ICE, expressed concern that if the parents’ prosecutions happened too swiftly, their children would still be waiting to be picked up by HHS in Border Patrol stations, making family reunification possible. He saw this as a bad thing. When Albence received reports that reunifications had occurred in several Border Patrol sectors, he immediately sought to block the practice from continuing, contacting at least one sector directly while also asking his superiors—Tom Homan, Ron Vitiello, and Kevin McAleenan—for help. “We can’t have this,” he wrote to colleagues, underscoring in a second note that reunification “obviously undermines the entire effort” behind Zero Tolerance and would make DHS “look completely ridiculous.” Albence and others proposed “solutions” such as placing parents whose prosecutions were especially speedy into ICE custody or in “an alternate temporary holding facility” other than the Border Patrol station where their children were being held. This appears to have happened in some cases. Albence also suggested that the Border Patrol deliver separated children to HHS “at an accelerated pace,” instead of waiting for federal contractors to pick them up, to minimize the chance that they would be returned to their parents. “Confirm that the expectation is that we are NOT to reunite the families and release” them, Albence wrote. (Albence declined to comment for this article.)

“These four companies did not file eviction actions under financial duress, but rather did so while they were either experiencing record profits, making large investments in expansion, or obtaining significant government support,” the House report determined.

There’s evidence that Border Patrol agents vandalize food, blankets, and water jugs that volunteers leave in the desert, sometimes slashing the jugs so the water pours out. Volunteers have been arrested for leaving water jugs in the desert. Four No More Deaths volunteers were charged with operating a motor vehicle in a wilderness area, entering a wildlife refuge without a permit, and abandonment of property for leaving water in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.

But that extraction comes with serious consequences for local environments and nearby communities. In 2019, Tesla was named in a lawsuit over the deaths of children in the Democratic Republic of Congo who died mining cobalt at sites owned by British mining company Glencore. Despite talking about cobalt-free batteries, Musk proceeded to sign a deal with Glencore in 2020 to supply its Berlin and Shanghai factories. The lawsuit was dismissed in November 2021, but in April of this year, an investigation from Global Witness found that Tesla was among a number of companies that may be getting minerals from mines using child workers in the DRC.

The changes could have some of the biggest impact in K-12 schools. The guidance eliminates the strategy known as "test-to-stay" – a schedule of testing for people that were exposed to the coronavirus but not up to date with their vaccinations – that allowed them to continue in-person learning, so long as they continued to test negative and showed no symptoms.

In June 2020, the week after a police officer murdered George Floyd, Jeff Bezos endorsed Black Lives Matter. “I support this movement,” Bezos replied via email to a customer who’d complained about seeing a BLM banner on Amazon.com. A couple of days later, when Bezos received a fresh complaint that included a racist slur, he raised his commitment. “You’re the kind of customer I’m happy to lose,” he said. He posted the exchanges on Instagram, where each drew hundreds of thousands of likes. So it was strange that, at about the same time, store managers at Amazon-owned Whole Foods Market began telling workers not to wear clothes with BLM slogans, and punishing those who did.

A shocking number of kids in the United States can't read very well. A third of all fourth-graders can't read at a basic level, and most students are still not proficient readers by the time they finish high school.

The new Long Covid project began in late 2020, when Yale University immunologist Akiko Iwasaki teamed up with David Putrino, a neurophysiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who was caring for affected patients. The pair wanted to compare those patients with people who had never been infected—and those who had recovered. To Putrino’s surprise, “It was quite challenging to find people who were fully recovered from COVID.” Many post–COVID-19 volunteers described themselves as healthy but then admitted, for example, that their once-normal gym workouts were too exhausting to resume. In the end, the team signed on 39 COVID-19–recovered volunteers among a total of 116 controls.

The abortion search result problem, which has never before been publicly analyzed at this scale, is already the subject of political pressure and debate. In June, a handful of Democratic lawmakers urged the company to give accurate results to people seeking abortions. A month later, 17 Republican state attorneys general wrote a letter to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, demanding that the company “not discriminate” against CPCs in search results for people looking for abortion services.

“Based on our personnel policies, we cannot terminate them,” Latimer said. That policy, Latimer and the city attorney said, required two formal complaints and a verbal warning before a city employee could be terminated. In the session, Latimer said that dissolving the police department was “the only way” the city could stop paying the officers, explaining that the officers would then be laid off and not fired for cause. He added the text message issue had uncovered a “flaw” in the personnel policy and the policy would need to be amended.

Florida will soon bar transgender residents from using Medicaid to pay for gender-affirming care, according to the state's Agency for Health Care Administration. The rule goes into effect Aug. 21. Several accredited medical institutions, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, alongside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services say gender-affirming care can improve the mental health and overall well-being of gender-diverse people.

Chriss said Florida’s ban will affect up to 9,000 of the state’s Medicaid enrollees who are transgender. Florida joins nine other states that have already banned Medicaid dollars from going to gender-affirming care, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit research think tank.

Gietzen, who funded the recount, told The Star after the recount was completed that he would not pay for the Sedgwick County recount because of the delay. Gietzen said he would file a lawsuit Monday calling for a full statewide hand recount.

$10,000 in student loan forgiveness for most borrowers would eliminate the student debt for 16 million borrowers, according to the Center for American Progress. Nearly one in three student loan borrowers would have their student debt completely wiped out through this initiative.

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany. The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism. His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

Flash floods triggered by destructive monsoon rains across much of Pakistan have killed more than 1,000 people and injured and displaced thousands more since June, officials have said. The new death toll came a day after the prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, asked for international help in battling deadly flood damage. More than 33 million people have been displaced.

Of the 368,000 college students who received the voluntary survey, 8,835, a measly 2.4%, completed it, according to the report presented Friday to the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees the State University System of Florida.

Libs of TikTok, run by a Brooklyn woman named Chaya Raichik, has 1.3 million followers on its biggest platform, Twitter. It's gained prominence and influence in right-wing circles over the last year as conservatives increasingly try to use anti-LGBTQ sentiment to gain support.

Hinkle also picked up on a loophole in the bill exempting companies which also own theme parks in Florida, saying the exclusion deserved "strict scrutiny."

"Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely," Walker continued. "But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely."

On Wednesday, Cloudflare terminated its content delivery network services for an alternative, decentralized social media platform called Switter. Developed by the Australia-based organization Assembly Four, the weeks-old Switter served as a home for thousands of sex workers and their fans and clients after they were kicked off or preemptively removed themselves from mainstream internet platforms because of FOSTA.

Cloudflare has previously stopped providing services to neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer and 8chan. “Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy,” says the blog post, which was written by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince and Alissa Starzak, the company’s vice president, global head of public policy. “To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again.”

“I found out they had been paying me $20 an hour, but they were telling Google they were paying me $30.08 an hour,” Mylius says. “That was in the middle of March, and basically they haven’t done anything about it.” Applied over his six-month term at Artech, the discrepancy added up to more than $10,000.

This comes after the school and city received a series of bomb threats related to the Title IX investigation. Police never found any bombs. Most recently, Kiel police warned of a threat stating they'd target multiple locations in Kiel if the school district didn't drop the Title IX investigation by Friday, June 3.

Not all the victims were found dead when officers finally went inside: one teacher died in an ambulance and three children died at nearby hospitals, according to the records obtained by the Times, which included a review of law enforcement documents and video that have been gathered as part of the investigation. The family of Xavier Lopez, 10, said the boy had been shot in the back and lost a lot of blood as he waited for medical attention. "He could have been saved," Leonard Sandoval, the boy's grandfather, told the newspaper. "The police did not go in for more than an hour. He bled out."

A Times analysis of surveillance footage in the building found that officers didn’t return to the classroom door for 40 minutes after first arriving and attempting to enter the classroom. By the time the room was breached by law enforcement, 60 officers had assembled at Robb Elementary, according to the Times.

Raters' working situations are unusual at best. The raters Yahoo Finance spoke to work from home, but they have no clue who their direct boss is, or if they have one boss or many bosses. They don’t even know their boss’ (or bosses’) name. RaterLabs confirmed this is true for many projects, though not all, they say. “There are projects that provide transparency to who the project manager is for each project they select to do work on and are provided with the project managers’ contact information,” a spokesperson for Appen, RaterLabs’ parent company, said. “For other projects, a Quality Team alias is provided for communications.” Across the board, the raters Yahoo Finance spoke to worry about waking up to a pink-slip-email, and two said they know of instances where people haven’t received an email at all — the worker’s account was just deactivated.

Despite producing nearly $11 billion worth of goods and services each year, incarcerated workers in the U.S. earn an average of just between 13 cents and 52 cents per hour across the country, according to a new report.

“That was the first time I met people in involuntary service or slavery. They didn’t want to go public with it because some of them were still employed by those same people and feared retaliation,” she said. “I promised not to betray their confidence and would not give out their names to anyone.”

The sisters say that's how it happened them. They were born in the 1930s and '40s into a world where their father, Cain Wall, now believed to be 105 years old, had already been forced into slave labor.

Mae’s father, Cain Wall Sr., she says, was born into peonage in St. Helena Parish, La. Census records place the date around 1902, though the family says he is even older. Now in frail health and bed-bound, he married when he was 17 (his wife died in 1984) and by the mid-1930s, the family says, was living across the Mississippi border in Gillsburg, working the fields for white families who lived near each other or attended the same church—the Walls (a common name in the region), the McDaniels and, mostly, the Gordons.

National and statewide GOP operatives were frantically trading texts Tuesday night as ad buys posted from Democratic Colorado, a left-wing super PAC that is spending at least $800,000 this week alone to meddle in the Republican primary. The group is currently running an ad burnishing state Rep. Ron Hanks’ conservative credentials — a spot that GOP strategists say will undoubtedly boost his underfunded effort in the June 28 Republican primary.

A South Florida Jewish congregation has challenged a new state law that blocks abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, contending the measure violates privacy and religious-freedom rights.

In a 2016 presidential debate, Trump plainly stated that his Supreme Court nominees would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. He said, “If we put another two or perhaps three justices on, that is really what will happen. That will happen automatically in my opinion. Because I am putting pro-life justices on the court.” Six years later we are on the precipice of that plan becoming a reality.

A door to a classroom where the Uvalde school shooter was holed up was unlocked while police searched for a key to get in, a top Texas official said Tuesday, describing law enforcement's response to the rampage as an “abject failure.”

On June 15, Starbucks also said all partners who are enrolled in the health care plan would have access to the benefits, including those who are unionizing. But it added that it could not “make promises of guarantees about any benefits” for unionized stores.

The Michigan Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out charges against former Gov. Rick Snyder and others in the Flint water scandal, saying a judge sitting as a one-person grand jury had no power to issue indictments under rarely used state laws.

The knights, squires, show cast and stablehands of Lyndhurst will vote July 15 on whether or not to unionize under an election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board. Around 40 workers would be included in the union. (Food and administrative workers appear to be employed under a separate corporate entity and would not be part of the bargaining unit.)

By a 6-3 vote, with conservatives in the majority, the court said that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that contribute to global warming.

Dickey, who has been playing the games for about 10 years and writing them since 2019, decided to gather other game designers and create a bundle of games to sell on Itch.io to benefit two small groups in Texas that support trans people, the Transgender Education Network of Texas and the Organización Latina de Trans en Texas.

Then Harrison Ford steps in, in what sounds like a real-life version of a movie scene: “Pardon me,” he tells a crew member who claims Fisher wants to get a little air, “but the lady doesn’t seem to be very aware of what she wants.” An argument breaks out, and Ford yanks Fisher away from the party and into a car — and starts making out with her. He is married and has two kids. He is 14 years older than her. She is drunk, and he just finished saying she isn’t aware enough to make rational decisions.

SEC disclosure punishments are historically modest — often about $100,000. Musk’s net worth, according to Forbes, is about $300 billion. A $100,000 fine amounts to .00003% of his wealth. The median net worth of a U.S. household is about $122,000. An equivalent fine to a median American household would be about 3 cents.

And we have very little wiggle room when it comes to our addiction to oil, gas, and coal. The amount of fossil fuel infrastructure that currently exists or is planned worldwide is enough to push us into levels of warming that are over the goals set out in the Paris Agreement, the report finds.

Senior Biden health officials have increasingly relied on hospitalization numbers, rather than case counts, to determine how to respond to the virus as well as the efficacy of the vaccines. Lower hospitalization rates could inform the administration’s thinking on public health measures such as masking. More accurate Covid-19 numbers also could provide a better picture of the strain on hospitals and which resources they might need during surges.

Not every Democrat is echoing the centrists who welcome eased mask mandates. Many in the party still insist they can’t simply declare victory when the number of virus cases is still higher than it was under Covid’s Delta wave. These Democrats point out that rules should not simply vanish while the Covid vaccine remains unavailable to children under five years old.

In an announcement Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services said it had redefined COVID-19 hospitalization to include only patients being treated with remdesivir or dexamethasone, drugs used for hospitalized patients with moderate to severe illness. Those hospitalized with milder symptoms or primarily for another cause are no longer included – even if they continue to take up a hospital bed because they are too ill to be discharged. The change is part of a national trend and one backed by the Biden administration in February.

In 2020, Trump’s EPA responded to these objections by drastically cutting back state and tribes’ authority to modify or deny certifications. The agency’s unprecedented rule limited these governments’ review of potential pollution as well as their ability to incorporate new conditions into the permit. It also slashed the amount of information companies must turn over, leaving states and tribes in the dark about the dangerous environmental impact of new projects. The rule caused substantial disarray in a number of states, including Washington, whose aquaculture industry nearly collapsed. A coalition of 20 states, three tribes, and six conservation organizations sued to block the rule, while eight red states and three industry trade groups intervened to defend it. In 2021, Joe Biden’s EPA announced that it would “reconsider and revise” the rule.

According to Victor Fausto, the GSA’s president, the infrequent meetings draw just five to 10 students. The remaining GSA faculty sponsors are no longer allowed by the administration to participate in club meetings, Latin said. School-issued computers block the website for the national GSA Network, along with several other LGBTQ advocacy organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign, GLSEN and The Trevor Project, despite multiple requests from staff to allow access.

People in similar situations need to know how to present themselves to doctors, Yanow said. “They can say they’re having a miscarriage, or they’re bleeding and they don’t know why,” she explained. According to Paul Blumenthal, a professor emeritus of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford University, it is safe for patients to self-report this way; a medication abortion is clinically indistinguishable from a spontaneous miscarriage and treated in the same fashion.

While some may think of dysentery as a disease of the past, or something to reference when discussing old PC games, diarrhoeal disease kills over 500,000 children per year according to the WHO. There’s no vaccine for it, but Eberts and his fellow brave study participants are forging the path towards the development of one.

The CDC continues to track case transmission levels — to see the level of transmission where you live, look up your county below.

Thing is, brokers group people in far less fanciful ways — according to their medical ailments, for instance. Or as “Suffering Seniors” and “Help Needed—I Am 90 Days Behind With Bills.” Last year, Epsilon, one of these ghoulish companies, was forced to pay $150 million in penalties because they’d knowingly sold the data of 30 million people to scammers targeting seniors.

But some experts working on the response believe the undercounting is more severe than has been publicly acknowledged, with one administration official estimating that the government is only recording one out of every six new cases. The data gap has fed internal concerns over how exactly the government should publicly message the seriousness of the situation. “They’re like, ‘We don’t know if this is something to be worried about or not,’” said one person close to the White House. “But you can’t tell the public that.”

Casey Wasserman, CEO of the Wasserman Media Group, is a director at Activision Blizzard, according to the company’s website, and sits on the board of directors and the board’s nominating and corporate governance committee. Just weeks after the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed the July suit against the company, alleging a “frat boy” culture of rampant sexual harassment and discrimination against women, Wasserman donated $100,000 to the Stop the Republican Recall of Governor Newsom campaign, according to campaign finance records.

Melanie Proctor, the assistant chief counsel for California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, said in an email to staff Tuesday night that she was resigning to protest the fact that her boss at the agency, Chief Counsel Janette Wipper, had been abruptly fired by the governor. Both lawyers had already stepped down from the Activision lawsuit earlier this month without explanation. A representative for the two attorneys confirmed that Proctor had resigned and Wipper was fired.

In Florida, DeSantis signed a bill last year requiring the state's public universities to survey students and faculty on their political beliefs, to ensure students aren't being "indoctrinated," with the implication that schools where too few students or staff express conservative viewpoints might end up losing funding. In mid-February, after professors at the University of Texas passed a resolution in support of the academic freedom to teach CRT, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick vowed to end tenure for all new hires in the state, and to strip the protection from current faculty who do teach the theory.

The organizers, who have dubbed themselves “Fruit Stand Workers United,” say they voted Feb. 21 to affiliate with Workers United, a national labor union that has supported the successful unionization efforts of Starbucks employees around the country, according to the site. People involved in the organizing effort told The Washington Post that they have endured months of efforts by Apple to convince employees that unionizing is a bad idea, accusing the company of “union busting” tactics. Now, they are handing out signature cards to would-be union members.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is urging state governments to impose price caps on prison phone calls, three years after Pai helped kill Obama-era FCC rules that limited the price of such calls.

The stories coming from Activision Blizzard workers have been truly repellent, but this latest story shared by former Blizzard producer Stephanie Krustick might just top them all. According to Krustick, who worked at Blizzard Entertainment between 2006 and 2020, she had several bags of breastmilk stolen while she was working in the building.

The Transportation Security Administration will not enforce the Covid-19 mask mandate on planes and other public transportation, after a federal judge in Florida on Monday struck down the requirement, ruling that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had overstepped its authority.

But to have access to carefully mitigated gatherings is, unfortunately, a huge privilege, as is having the means to deal with the fallout should you get sick. The attendees of the Gridiron dinner happen to be some of the most powerful people in the country. We can assume they all have access to high-quality health care, and therefore tools like PCR tests and Paxlovid (it needs to be taken within five days of symptom onset and isn’t always easy to get). The government also employs contact tracing for cases among its ranks—another way to help quickly figure out if you’re infected. Meanwhile, funding for vaccines, tests, and treatments has run out and Congress has yet to pass a bill funding these things, which means even simple tools like tests are no longer necessarily available for free. If you get admitted to the hospital and you’re not insured, you’re on the hook for the bill. In essence, there’s a huge gap between the reality of navigating risk for the political class and the rest of us.

The company said in its blog post that two of the animals were euthanized “at planned end dates” in order to gather key data that could only be obtained by autopsy. The other six animals, it said, were euthanized on the advice of UC Davis veterinary staff after developing a variety of complications, including four cases of infection related to having the device implanted, one complication that involved a bad reaction to the surgical glue used to seal the incision, and one case where the brain chip failed after implantation.

A mother in Louisiana is struggling to pay her bills and decides to apply for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, better known as food stamps. She starts to fill out the state’s 26-page, 8,350-word application. Page one instructs her to distinguish between SNAP and two other programs, the Family Independence Temporary Assistance Program and the Kinship Care Subsidy Program, providing a schematic on what to fill out depending on which she wants to apply for. Page three lets her know that she needs to collect paperwork or data in up to 13 different categories—pharmacy printouts from the past three months, four pay stubs, baptismal certificates, proof of who lives in the home. Page six includes details on drug court and “alternatives to abortion”; page seven outlines the penalties if she misuses her benefits by, for example, spending them on a cruise ship or at a psychic. Page 15 asks her to detail her income from 24 different sources; page 16 asks about 14 different housing expenses; page 19 asks about 10 types of assets members of her family might own. The process is invasive, time-consuming, and confusing. She might never finish the application. If she does, she could be rejected for doing the paperwork wrong.

In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes. Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.

At one point, the city asked St. Timothy's to allow people who needed to sleep in their cars to use its parking lot, and the church agreed, the filing says. But the services for homeless people began to rankle residents living near St. Timothy's, who complained of trespassing, littering and noise in their neighborhood, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported. The residents sent the city a petition in April asking for the church's homeless services to end.

That prompted an immediate backlash from locals, lawmakers and social media users, with the Rotterdam Historical Society pointing out that city officials had promised never to dismantle the bridge again after completing a major restoration in 2017.

Legislators are the only public workers who have an automatic cost-of-living increase for their salaries. Most of the U.S. territory’s other public employees have not gotten pay raises in more than a decade — sometimes two — as the cost of living has risen and the island has suffered a lengthy economic crisis and a government bankruptcy in the aftermath of deadly hurricanes, earthquakes and the pandemic.

What is more astonishing is the fact that parents will strip themselves of everything, will sacrifice everything for the physical well-being of their child, will wake nights and stand in fear and agony before some physical ailment of their beloved one; but will remain cold and indifferent, without the slightest understanding before the soul cravings and the yearnings of their child, neither hearing nor wishing to hear the loud knocking of the young spirit that demands recognition. On the contrary, they will stifle the beautiful voice of spring, of a new life of beauty and splendor of love; they will put the long lean finger of authority upon the tender throat and not allow vent to the silvery song of the individual growth, of the beauty of character, of the strength of love and human relation, which alone make life worth living.

In a deal struck in late 2020, Marathon, a bitcoin “mining” company, became the sole recipient of the power station’s electricity. It established an elongated data center on 20 acres of land beside the facility that is packed with more than 30,000 Antminer S19 units, a specialized computer that mines for bitcoin. Such thirst for power is common in crypto – globally bitcoin mining consumes more electricity than Norway, a country of 5.3 million people.

The bill, sponsored by Republican Rep. Joe Harding, states that “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” A parent could sue a district for violations.

But LGBTQ nonprofit organization The Trevor Project says access to gender-affirming medical care is useful in addressing mental health issues for young people. The group cited a study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, which found that hormone therapy is "significantly related to lower rates of depression, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary youth."

The former head of the Texas power grid testified in court Wednesday that when he ordered power prices to stay at the maximum price cap for days on end during last year’s frigid winter storm and blackout, running up billions of dollars in bills for power companies, he was following the direction of Governor Greg Abbott.

Second Sight didn’t inform any of its patients of the company’s collapse. “No letter, email, or telephone call,” Ross Doerr wrote on Facebook after weeks of fruitlessly trying to contact the company. “Those of us with this implant are figuratively and literally in the dark.” The implications of Second Sight’s implosion would soon strike home for Doerr. While using the Argus II for more than a few hours had always caused him to feel a little dizzy—a well-known side effect—early in 2020 he started to experience severe vertigo. Doerr’s doctor scheduled an MRI scan to rule out a brain-stem tumor. But because an MRI’s intense magnetic fields can interact with the Argus II, MRI providers are instructed to contact Second Sight before performing any scans—and Second Sight wasn’t picking up the phone. Doerr eventually got a CT scan instead, which found nothing. “I still don’t know if I have a brain-stem tumor or not,” he tells Spectrum.