The US does not have the same strict rules as Europe on the designation of origin for foods, said judges in the Richmond, Virginia-based US court of appeals for the fourth circuit. The US Food and Drug Administration does set some standards for gruyere cheese, such as the existence in it of “small holes” or that such cheese is aged at least 90 days. But it does not establish criteria on geographic origin. “Cheese – regardless of its location of production – has been labelled and sold as gruyere in America for decades,” the court said.

Hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage — enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, was spilled into the Hillsborough River, according to state environmental reports. More than six weeks later, we are getting a better picture of the extent of that sewage spill into the Hillsborough River, the main source of Tampa's drinking water. According to an investigation by the Environmental Protection Commission of Hillsborough County, the estimated 630,000-gallon spill began on Jan. 10 after Tampa Electric turned off the power to the lift station at Mirela North due to nonpayment. The lift station was without power for about a week, and the untreated sewage from Mirela North and Riverside Palms apartments emptied into the river.

PATERSON – Najee Seabrooks, a member of a Paterson violence intervention group, was fatally shot by a city police officer on Friday afternoon after a five-hour standoff while he was barricaded inside his home. Social justice activists and law enforcement sources agree on those basic facts. But they are at odds over whether the shooting was justified. Members of the Paterson Healing Collective condemned the shooting, accusing city police of preventing them from helping their friend and colleague. They said police should not have allowed the situation to escalate to the point where deadly force was used.

The company that makes Funko Pop! collectibles is in so much trouble it’s preparing to throw hundreds of thousands of its pop culture-inspired figurines into the garbage. Funko revealed the plans in a recent earnings call filled with so much bad news its stock price fell off a cliff the next day.

It's been confirmed Andrew Tate is battling lung cancer while stuck behind prison bars in Romania on accusations of sex trafficking and rape.

At 13, she was too young to be cleaning a meatpacking plant in the heart of Nebraska cattle country, working the graveyard shift amid the brisket saws and the bone cutters. The cleaning company broke the law when it hired her and more than two dozen other teenagers in this gritty industrial town, federal officials said. Since the U.S. Department of Labor raided the plant in October, Packers Sanitation Services, a contractor hired to clean the facility, has been fined for violating child labor laws. The girl, meanwhile, has watched her whole life unravel. First, she lost the job that burned and blistered her skin but paid her $19 an hour. Then a county judge sent her stepfather to jail for driving her to work each night, a violation of state child labor laws. Her mother also faces jail time for securing the fake papers that got the child the job in the first place. And her parents are terrified of being sent back to Guatemala, the country they left several years ago in search of a better life.ompany was fined for violating child labor laws. One of the minor workers has seen her life unravel.

Thirteen sources tell Rolling Stone that The Idol — Sam Levinson’s new show with The Weeknd and Lily-Rose Depp — has gone wildly, disgustingly off the rails

Dorsey High School students thought they were attending a march for Tyre Nichols, but ended up acting out various scenarios in a VR police simulator.

The ransomware attack against the city of Oakland appears to be getting worse. On Friday, Oakland acknowledged in an update on the city’s website that files were taken from the city during the cyberattack which began in February and that some of this data, possibly including sensitive personal and financial information, might be released publicly. “[W]e recently became aware that an unauthorized third party has acquired certain files from our network and intends to release the information publicly,” the city posted. “We are working with third-party specialists and law enforcement on this issue and are actively monitoring the unauthorized third party’s claims to investigate their validity. If we determine that any individual’s personal information is involved, we will notify those individuals in accordance with applicable law.”

Sidney Poitier walked among kings and earned Hollywood’s highest honors, but that didn’t stop the Federal Bureau of Investigation from keeping tabs on the actor and philanthropist via informants and surveillance tactics during the civil rights era, according to documents newly obtained by Rolling Stone. Poitier, who passed away at age 94 on January 6, 2022, had a career that lasted 75 years and was surveilled by the agency at the height of his fame. Poitier’s FBI file – requested via the Freedom of Information Act – is 13 pages long, covering 1959 to 1963, with some pages newly declassified in 2023 following Rolling Stone’s request. The documents, which are labeled Part 01, almost certainly don’t include everything the agency collected on the man who was the first Black performer to win an Academy Award for Best Actor. Yet its contents reveal an era that had the agency tracking the actor much in the way they did Aretha Franklin, as first reported by Rolling Stone. Focused largely on Poitier’s associations with civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., efforts to raise funds for underprivileged Black youth, pushes toward integration, and support of organizations like the NAACP and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the FBI files have many redactions and notably contain submissions by informants who had infiltrated the organizing efforts of civil rights groups.

President Yoon of South Korea is suing for libel over claims that he was influenced by a Rasputin-like soothsayer in his decision to abandon the presidential palace, his latest effort to quell rumours that his political judgement is clouded by superstition. Yoon has brought criminal libel complaints against seven people, including journalists, an MP and former spokesman for the defence ministry, who claimed that a self-styled prophet known as Cheongong was involved in the relocation of the presidential office and residence after three-quarters of a century.

U.S. immigration politics have shifted on their axis over the last 10 days. Former President Trump and his administration spent years arguing that people who cross the border without permission should not be able to easily apply for asylum in the United States. That decades-old practice no longer works, Trump and his team insisted. On Feb. 21, President Biden proposed a plan that amounts to an endorsement of his predecessor’s position. International and U.S. law has long allowed people who cross borders to seek protection from persecution. But if implemented, Biden’s proposal would make it very difficult for migrants who travel through another country on their way to the U.S. and then cross the border without permission to win asylum here. The policy would roll back America’s longstanding commitments to people seeking asylum, placing strict limits on where and how those who flee persecution can apply for protection. “We are moving toward a system where it is going to be much more difficult for anyone who crosses the border without authorization to get asylum,” said Yael Schacher, director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International. “We will never go back to what it was before Trump,” she said. “That’s what it feels like.” Public outcry about the new policy has been muted, even among Democrats. Most of the public opposition to the plan has come from immigrant advocates who have consistently criticized Biden’s moves at the border. Some Republicans have backed the proposal.

Her propaganda canonized white supremacist murderers as "saints." She may have helped inspire a shooting at a gay bar. Now she's been unmasked.

If you only read conservative and centrist pundits, you’d think the District of Columbia is about to embark upon a frightening experiment to weaken or abolish criminal penalties for violent crime. Fox News has devoted frenzied coverage to the claim that D.C. is “softening” its criminal laws. Republican politicians like Sen. Tom Cotton have seized on the story, as have conservative commentators like Erick Erickson, who cited it as evidence that Congress should abolish self-governance in the District. The Washington Post editorial board opined that a new “crime bill could make the city more dangerous,” claiming it would “tie the hands of police and prosecutors while overwhelming courts.” This coverage all repeats the same two claims: that D.C. is poised to slash prison sentences for violent offenses, and that these reforms will lead to more crime. Neither of these claims is true. The legislation that D.C. passed in January is not a traditional reform bill, but the result of a 16-year process to overhaul a badly outdated, confusing, and often arbitrary criminal code. The revision’s goal was to modernize the law by defining elements of each crime, eliminating overlap between offenses, establishing proportionate penalties, and removing archaic or unconstitutional provisions. Every single change is justified in meticulous reports that span thousands of pages. Each one was crafted with extensive public input and support from both D.C. and federal prosecutors. Eleventh-hour criticisms of the bill rest on misunderstandings, willful or otherwise, about its purpose and effect. They malign complex, technocratic updates as radical concessions to criminals. In many cases, criticisms rest on sheer legal illiteracy about how criminal sentencing actually works.

The woman had a stillbirth in 2021 in South Carolina, which explicitly criminalizes self-managed abortion. She was arrested this week.

From writing sci-fi and horror to writing one of the most lauded video games in history, Marc Laidlaw tells us what it was like working on Half-Life at Valve.

In rural Alaska, where food costs can be astronomical and food banks or pantries are rare, residents are experiencing particularly dire consequences from the unprecedented backlog, advocates say.

The nation’s second-largest pharmacy chain confirmed Thursday that it will not dispense abortion pills in several states where they remain legal — acting out of an abundance of caution amid a shifting policy landscape, threats from state officials and pressure from anti-abortion activists. Nearly two dozen Republican state attorneys general wrote to Walgreens in February, threatening legal action if the company began distributing the drugs, which have become the nation’s most popular method for ending a pregnancy. The company told POLITICO that it has since responded to all the officials, assuring them that they will not dispense abortion pills either by mail or at their brick-and-mortar locations in those states. ... The group of Republican attorneys general, who argue that the Biden administration is misinterpreting the laws around mailing and dispensing abortion pills, also wrote to CVS, Albertsons, Rite Aid, Costco, Walmart and Kroger demanding they, too, refuse to dispense the medication.

These days, to my surprise, people want to talk to me about evil. In an essay last year, and in my book The Bodies of Others, I raised a question about existential, metaphysical darkness. I concluded that I had looked at the events of the past three years using all of my classical education, my critical thinking skills, my knowledge of Western and global history and politics; and that, using these tools, I could not explain the years 2020-present. Indeed I could not explain them in ordinary material, political or historical terms at all. This is not how human history ordinarily operates. I could not explain the way the Western world simply switched, from being based at least overtly on values of human rights and decency, to values of death, exclusion and hatred, overnight, en masse — without resorting to reference to some metaphysical evil that goes above and beyond fallible, blundering human agency.

The 13-year-old girl was in gym class when she said she heard a boy tell another classmate, “Don’t come to school tomorrow.” She didn’t think much of it at first. But by the end of the school day, the eighth-grader couldn’t stop turning those words over in her head. After all, her childhood has been punctuated by shootings: Newtown when she was a toddler. Parkland when she was in elementary school. Uvalde, last year, when 19 children and two teachers were gunned down 384 miles from her school... Police quickly determined the boy alleged to have made the comment did not have access to a gun, according to a Jan. 26 incident report. There was no threat to campus. Relieved, Youngblood’s daughter felt OK when she went to school the next morning. Then, as her first-period science class discussed the periodic table, she was called to the office. The assistant principal determined the girl had made a false accusation about school safety. Her punishment would be three days of suspension followed by 73 days — the rest of eighth-grade — in an alternative school.