On Saturday night in Hanover’s main opera house, Marco Goecke, a renowned German choreographer, smeared dog feces from his aging dachshund, Gustav, on the face of a dance critic. Now, five days later, Mr. Goecke, 50, has lost his job as ballet director there. On Thursday at a news conference in Hanover, Laura Berman, the opera house’s artistic director, announced that Mr. Goecke was leaving his post “by mutual agreement.”

When COVID-19 was at its worst, many doctors wanted to go where they were most needed. Their bosses said no. Since the Federal Trade Commission opened the public comment period for its proposed ban on non-compete agreements in early January, the agency has received an outpouring of responses from medical workers, particularly physicians. An overwhelming majority of those public comments have supported the ban. They detail how these restrictive contracts impose a burden on medical staffers and impaired hospitals' response during the heights of the pandemic. Noncompetes both contributed to the early retirement or burnout of doctors and then dissuaded many out of work physicians from re-entering health services to help at hospitals in need during the pandemic. Across the economy, companies force workers to sign employment agreements that block them from leaving their jobs for competitor firms. First used for executive-level positions, these clauses spread down the economic ladder and have become especially ubiquitous in healthcare. A 2018 study looked at noncompetes in medical centers across five states and estimated that almost half of physicians were bound by these contracts. The FTC will hold a public forum on Thursday for employees bound by non-compete agreements and other affected parties to discuss the proposed ban. The forum will feature at least one physician on the panel to speak to the direct impact of these employment restrictions on the medical workers.

Dropping protections such as free tests and Medicaid continuous coverage will leave many uninsured and undocumented people without access to care for COVID-19.

I've written London Rental Opportunity of the Week for seven years, and this is what it all comes down to –trust me.

Gov. Kathy Hochul suffered a big political defeat Wednesday as the state Senate rejected her pick to lead New York's highest court.

The official decision to not charge the Florida congressman reportedly came Wednesday, months after investigators recommended against filing charges. Isabelle Kirshner, one of two attorneys representing Gaetz, told The Daily Beast in a statement that the Justice Department informed them of the decision on Wednesday. “We have just spoken with the DOJ and have been informed that they have concluded their investigation into Congressman Gaetz and allegations related to sex trafficking and obstruction of justice and they have determined not to bring any charges against him,” Kirshner wrote in the statement. The breadth and scope of the evidence makes it all the more frustrating that the feds won’t pursue the case, Greeberg’s lawyer said on Wednesday. “You’ve got multiple witnesses. You’ve got Venmos. You’ve got Uber receipts. You’ve got flight receipts and text messages,” Fritz fumed.

The Bing bot said it was "disappointed and frustrated" in one user, according to screenshots. "You have wasted my time and resources," it said.

The rail catastrophe in East Palestine, Ohio, is a case study in disaster capitalism.

A ruling citing the state’s parentage act could have substantial implications for marriage equality and LGBTQ+ parental rights nationwide, legal experts warn.

Deep inside the Earth, something strange is happening that scientists are trying to explain.

On Wednesday morning, a group of almost 200 journalists and writers released an open letter addressed to the New York Times, sharing their "serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people" and criticizing how the Times has "follow[ed] the lead of far-right hate groups in presenting gender diversity as a new controversy warranting new, punitive legislation." The open letter, whose signees include regular contributors to the Times and prominent writers and journalists like Ed Yong, Lucy Sante, Roxane Gay, and Rebecca Solnit, comes at a time when far-right extremist groups and their analogues in state legislatures are ramping up their attacks on trans young people; just yesterday, South Dakota became the sixth state to ban or restrict gender-affirming care for youth, efforts that one conservative activist recently acknowledged was merely the first step toward their goal of banning transition care altogether. In recent years and months, the Times has decided to play an outsized role in laundering anti-trans narratives and seeding the discourse with those narratives, publishing tens of thousands of handwringing words on trans youth—reporting that is now approvingly cited and lauded, as the letter writers note, by those who seek to ban and criminalize gender-affirming care.

Six months after the arrest of a college student caused an uproar in the Newton community and spurred furious online discussions, the police department is now being sued over the traffic stop for false arrest and civil rights violations, among other allegations; in turn, the officers are countersuing for defamation. Filings from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa Central Division on Feb. 2 show Tayvin Galanakis, 19, and his Des Moines-based attorneys Mathew Boles and Adam Witosky, are suing the City of Newton, police chief Rob Burdess, officer Nathan Winters and lieutenant Christopher Wing. Shortly after Galanakis filed his suit, the city filed counterclaims alleging he made defamatory statements, intentionally inflected emotional distress, invaded the privacy and filed false complaints against Winters and Wing, whose legal counsel is represented by the city’s law firm Brick Gentry, P.C.

Perhaps the greatest success of the American health care system these last few benighted years is this surprising fact: The uninsured rate has reached a historic low of about 8 percent. That’s thanks in part to the pandemic — or, more precisely, the slew of emergency provisions that the government enacted in response to the Covid crisis. One policy was likely the single largest factor. Over the past three years, under an emergency pandemic measure, states have stopped double-checking if people who are enrolled in Medicaid are still eligible for its coverage. If you were enrolled in Medicaid in March 2020, or if you became eligible at any point during the pandemic, you have remained eligible the entire time no matter what, even if your income later went up. But in April, that will end — states will be re-checking every Medicaid enrollee’s eligibility, an enormous administrative undertaking that will put health insurance coverage for millions of Americans at risk. The Biden administration estimates upward of 15 million people — one-sixth of the roughly 90 million Americans currently receiving Medicaid benefits — could lose coverage, a finding that independent analysts pretty much agree with. Those are coverage losses tantamount to a major economic downturn: By comparison, from 2007 to 2009, amid the worst economic downturn of most Americans’ lifetimes, an estimated 9 million Americans lost their insurance.

As the Elon Musk-owned social media service encounters interruptions and bugs, Chinese dissidents and activists said they feared they were being muzzled.

Late last year, the tech companies Stripe, Amazon, Facebook, Cisco, and Twitter laid off workers en masse. Come the new year, Google, Microsoft, Amazon (again), Salesforce, Dell, IBM, SAP, Zoom, and PayPal did the same. Sure, many of those firms have seen their revenues and profits decline in the past year; the tech sector as a whole has been hit hard by shifting consumer behavior, falling advertising spending, and rising interest rates. Yet each of them, except Twitter, is making money—some of them wildly so. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, made $23 billion last year. Microsoft made more than $70 billion, placing it second in profitability among Standard & Poor’s 500 companies, behind Apple. Those firms, in other words, did not need to let so many workers go; they chose to. And they did so because other tech firms were making the same choice. Laying off employees turns out to be infectious. And that makes it all the more insidious.

“They really wanted a Class A experience for their employees,” he said. “If you’re familiar with the building they've been officing in, in Near Southside, it’s an old building. They had a lot of folks at home, so they wanted to have the culture back in the office together.” ---- Everything is made in China, so why do you need employees in an office? Delusional

It hasn't been all roses in the Biden animal kingdom, but ultimately, Willow has muscled her way to the top.

Taylor Schabusiness, facing a first-degree homicide charge, attacks attorney Quinn Jolly as lawyers, judge were scheduling a postponement of the case

The mother of Anthony “Tony” Mitchell, a Walker County man who died in police custody in January, has filed a federal lawsuit against multiple jail officials, including Sheriff Nick Smith, alleging that authorities deprived the man of his constitutional rights by leaving him in the jail’s walk-in freezer “or similar frigid environment” for hours. Only with the release of an internal surveillance video recorded by a correctional officer did what happened to Mitchell begin to come to light, according to Jon Goldfarb, a lawyer representing Mitchell’s family. That correctional officer was later fired by the sheriff’s department, according to the lawyer. A surveillance video obtained and first reported by CBS 42 shows what the family says appears to be their loved one being carried into the loading area of the Walker County Jail. In it, Mitchell is limp, his head and feet dangling as uniformed personnel — “Sheriff” emblazoned on one of their vests — lay his body just outside a marked police SUV. In total, four uniformed officials then work to put him into the police vehicle. The video contradicts an earlier statement from the Walker County Sheriff’s Office claiming Mitchell was “alert and conscious” when he left the jail for transport to a local hospital.

The raids took place in New Delhi less than a month after Narendra Modi's government censored a BBC documentary deemed critical of the prime minister.