Those new laws are forcing every California community to follow through on planning for more housing, and while many communities are dragging their feet, Berkeley has recently granted a planning permit for a 25-story apartment building downtown — dwarfing the city’s current tallest high-rise. Berkeley also appears on track to approve two more towers of comparable size and another that, at 28 stories, will be taller than the university’s famous campanile, which, at 307 feet, has defined the city’s skyline for more than a century. All that new construction was on people’s minds, of course, at the meet-and-greet at North Berkeley BART. People my folks’ age, with faint traces of once-hippie identities still visible around their fuzzy, gray-haired edges, gathered facing a man named Jonathan Stern from BRIDGE Housing, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit developers of affordable housing and the lead on the BART project. Stern lives in Berkeley and dressed diplomatically for the occasion in a red Berkeley High School hoodie. He has also done this countless times, including at other BART stations. Stern reassured everyone that none of the current design plans include buildings taller than eight stories and that all the plans include at least some permanent supportive housing for the formerly homeless, as well as subsidized housing for people making less than $100,000 a year. The rest would be market rate — which could mean $6,000 a month, or even more, for a two-bedroom. What happened next could easily be rendered as a classic Northern California clown show: an older man with a white beard and Covid mask and sunglasses holding a protest sign saying, “Stop the BART High-Rises” and telling Stern that, because the environmental impact report was already one whole year old, the entire project ought to be paused for a new assessment; a woman in a similar Covid mask and sunglasses with a protest sign reading, “Parks Not High-Rises” yelling: “We need affordable housing for people! This isn’t going to be for people who really need it! I’m an advocate for the homeless and disabled! And there are people dying in our streets, and I just want to say my opinion. We need open space! Not high-rises! This is wrong!”

Italian authorities have partially solved the mystery of the substance that changed the color of Venice’s canal water. A patch of water in Venice’s famed Grand Canal turned a shocking—literally and figuratively—green over the weekend, sparking an investigation. Samples collected by firefighters and analyzed by the local environmental protection agency soon revealed there was no danger of pollution, as announced by Veneto’s governor Luca Zaia. The analysis of the water samples revealed the presence of a non-toxic tinting agent called fluorescein, which is most commonly used in eye tests. Fluorescein can easily be purchased online, and 250 grams is enough “to produce the effect seen on Sunday,” local newspaper La Nuova Venezia reported. “A person who pours a teaspoon, not seeing the result immediately, can dissolve an excessive dose.”

Authorities say a New York fertility doctor who was accused of using his own sperm to impregnate several patients has died in a plane crash

A journey into the Republican soul in 2023.

The OpenAI CEO is one of hundreds of experts to warn artificial intelligence's risk to humanity is on par with pandemics and nuclear war.

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes began serving her 11-year sentence Tuesday inside a minimum-security, female-only federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas. What will her new life look like? Days start early at FPC Bryan, which is located about 100 miles northwest of Holmes' hometown of Houston. Holmes, 39, has to wake by 6 a.m. and then report to work after she has breakfast, which starts at 6:30 a.m. Her attire most days will be a combination of khaki shirts and pants. Pay rates for her work will range from $0.12 to $1.15 per hour.

It was a groundbreaking smash, but things got so toxic behind the scenes that even co-showrunner Damon Lindelof now says: “I failed.” A powerful excerpt from the new book ‘Burn It Down.’

Defector in pursuit of a journalists’ utopia Deadspin, the influential sports and culture blog that all but imploded a few years ago, made its name by savaging those it deemed “assholes.” Founded in 2005 under Gawker Media, Deadspin used “asshole” as shorthand for anyone the staff disliked: Floyd Mayweather Jr., the boxer, who defended Donald Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” line; Dan Snyder, formerly the owner of the Washington Commanders—who, according to a whistleblower with the National Park Service, paid to have more than a hundred trees chopped down to improve the view from his mansion; Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, also known to readers as a “hypocritical shitstain.” That is to name just a few. Colorful barbs were a way of punctuating Deadspin’s journalism, the staff maintained. “A lot of people confuse that with being mean,” Megan Greenwell, a former Deadspin editor, told me. “But I actually don’t think that having fun making fun of people and also doing accountability reporting are mean at their heart.”

In the state of Missouri, a high school athlete who signs with an in-state college, such as the University of Missouri, can begin earning compensation for their name, image and likeness before enrolling at the school. Soon in Texas, Texas A&M donors will earn priority points through the school’s fundraising arm for donations that eventually funnel to athletes. For months now in Arkansas, college athletes have been paid for charity appearances through a nonprofit organization that is owned by the school’s fundraising foundation. Meanwhile, on the Florida Gulf Coast, where the SEC’s most powerful officials gather this week in Destin for their annual league meetings, none of the above is permitted. If the University of Florida carried out those actions, it would be in violation of NCAA rule and its own state law. The same can be said for a handful of other SEC schools in Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee.

Seven women say that a star columnist groped them or made unwanted sexual advances. But Britain’s news media has a complicated relationship with outing its own.

After Iowa protesters decried the imminent demolition of a partially collapsed apartment building – saying some residents might still be trapped inside – Davenport city officials appeared to reconsider plans to topple the building Tuesday morning.

The amount of sodium coming out of the tap is now more than twice the World Health Organization recommendation and 10 times normal levels. When the headaches began, María Sosa thought back to breakfast a few days earlier. She had been boiling eggs in their kitchen. Her husband, drinking water, asked if she thought it tasted off. “A looked at the pot and it was white, tainted with salt,” said Sosa, 62. “I knew right there: This was going to be a problem.” Uruguay, beset by high temperatures and drought, is running out of freshwater. Montevideo, the capital, is down to just a few days’ supply. This small, affluent South American nation is not alone in its suffering. Historically hot, dry conditions are harming crops and shaking economies across the Southern Cone. Amid global climate change, the region is warming more rapidly than the rest of the world. Precipitation during the last four months of 2022 fell to half the average, the lowest level in 35 years.

The 20 articles of impeachment filed against Paxton include charges ranging from bribery to obstruction of justice to making false statements.

Moms for Liberty learned motherhood is a potent force. So too have their opponents.

The latest installment of ESPN’s celebrated “30 for 30” series skirts conventional sports doc tropes, telling the wild origin story of the famed reality-competition show.

A beluga whale that turned up in Norway in 2019, sparking speculation it had been trained by the Russian navy because of a man-made harness it was wearing, has reappeared off Sweden’s coast, an organisation tracking his movements has said. When he first appeared in Norway’s northern Arctic region of Finnmark, marine biologists from the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries removed an attached harness with a mount suited for an action camera and the words “Equipment St Petersburg” printed on the plastic clasps. Directorate officials said at the time that the whale may have escaped an enclosure, and may have been trained by the Russian navy, as it appeared to be accustomed to humans. Norwegians nicknamed the beluga “Hvaldimir” – a pun on the word “whale” in Norwegian, hval, and “dimir”, a nod to its alleged association with Russia.

The library, located at 16th and Pond near Market, has been limiting after-hours internet access since August 2022, following complaints from residents and pressure from District 8 supervisor Rafael Mandelman. The change is one of a raft of measures taken to make the sidewalk directly across from the library – which for years had been the site of an encampment – less inviting. “It was the worst spot in the district,” said Jackie Thornhill, legislative aide to Mandelman. She said that residents had frequently complained about loud music, crime, and “antisocial behavior” associated with the 16th and Market encampment. As well as limiting the library’s Wi-Fi, the supervisor’s office advocated for a mural behind the tents to be repainted and for a nearby trash can storage area to be dismantled. Sections of the sidewalk were also transformed into spots to grow plants, reducing potential camping space.

The old-school technology has been around for more than a century. In lieu of smartphones and laptops, ham radio operators use handheld or larger “base station” radios to communicate over radio frequencies. The retro devices can range from the size of a walkie-talkie to the heft of a boxy, 20th-century VCR.

In May, the United Nations warned that it is near-certain that 2023-2027 will be the warmest five-year period ever recorded, as greenhouse gasses and El Nino combine to send temperatures soaring.

Mexico’s populist president should instead be spending more on furthering U.S. interests, according to a leaked intelligence document.