After Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill last year championed by the United Farm Workers union that would have allowed farmworkers to vote by mail in union elections, labor organizers decided to ramp up the pressure. Starting Aug. 3, a group of workers marched more than 300 miles north, from Delano in Kern County to the state Capitol in Sacramento, to urge Newsom to sign a new version of the bill. About 30 farmworkers completed the entire 335-mile journey through the state’s agricultural Central Valley, union spokesperson Elizabeth Strater said. Along the way, hundreds of other workers and supporters joined them for parts of the trek. When Newsom vetoed the earlier version of the bill last year, he said it contained “inconsistencies and procedural issues related to the collection and review of ballot cards.” The governor doesn’t support the new version of the bill, either, but negotiations are ongoing and there is still time to reach a deal before the end of session, said Erin Mellon, a spokesperson for Newsom. Lawmakers face a Sunday night deadline to amend the bill in time to pass it. It’s not clear if it will be amended again ahead of the deadline.

Three years before retiring from the U.S. Army in 2017, Donald Trump-backed Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano posed in Confederate uniform for a faculty photo at the Army War College, according to a copy of the photo obtained by Reuters.

After an investment firm bought St. Joseph’s Home for the Aged, in Richmond, Virginia, the company reduced staff, removed amenities, and set the stage for a deadly outbreak of COVID-19. Since the turn of the century, private-equity investment in nursing homes has grown from five billion to a hundred billion dollars. The purpose of such investments—their so-called value proposition—is to increase efficiency. Management and administrative services can be centralized, and excess costs and staffing trimmed. In the autumn of 2019, Atul Gupta, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, set out with a team of researchers to measure how these changes affected nursing-home residents. They sifted through more than a hundred private-equity deals that took place between 2004 and 2015, and linked each deal to categories of resident outcomes, such as mobility and self-reported pain intensity. The data revealed a troubling trend: when private-equity firms acquired nursing homes, deaths among residents increased by an average of ten per cent. “At first, we didn’t believe it,” Gupta told me. “We thought that there was a mistake.” His team reëxamined its models, testing the assumptions that informed them. “But the result was very robust,” Gupta said.

The City of Sausalito and the Sausalito Homeless Union reached a settlement agreement on Friday, ending more than 18 months of extremely contentious litigation. Under the terms of the agreement, Sausalito will pay $540,000 to the Sausalito Homeless Union. From that fund, 30 homeless people will receive $18,000 each to be spent on housing or housing related expenses. All the recipients are current or former residents of the city-sanctioned encampment, which is now located on the Marinship tennis courts. “It was difficult to pick 30 people,” Anthony Prince, attorney for the Homeless Union, said. “We had to systematically determine who is most in need of housing. Not everyone is going to get the assistance they deserve. But most of the people who were at Dunphy Park and then moved to Marinship Park are included in the settlement.”

This week's release of Stable Diffusion, a powerful open-source text-to-image AI model, raises hard questions about the ethics of AI art and its potential for abuse.

A Times reporter tried to get to the bottom of a nepotism allegation in the L.A. County Sheriff's Department. The obfuscation she encountered illustrates the challenges of reporting on the controversial department. People often ask me what it’s like to cover the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. There have been satisfying moments — when a story I wrote prompted a new privacy law in California or exposed a problem that would otherwise have remained hidden. And there was the not as pleasant time Sheriff Alex Villanueva named me a subject in a criminal investigation, then quickly took it back. But most days are more mundane. They often include phone calls with sources who pass on tips or small nuggets of information, many of which I then try to confirm with more phone calls, emails and yet more phone calls. When chasing a story, I eventually get to the point where I need to tell sheriff’s officials what I am working on and ask for an official response. It is here that things all too often turn frustrating. While Villanueva has anointed himself the most transparent sheriff in the department’s history, the truth is that he and officials under him routinely resort to obfuscation when dealing with me and other journalists seeking information about the inner workings of the department. The sheriff’s chief of staff, for example, once admitted to me that he was able to “wiggle out” of giving me information because of the way I had phrased a question. The same chief of staff on another occasion quite literally slammed a door in my face as I was trying to ask Villanueva questions. Last year, Villanueva and his staff refused to answer my questions about the department’s public corruption unit, claiming I had a conflict of interest, but refusing to explain what it was. And Villanueva has yet to sit down with me for a one-on-one interview, despite my many requests and his public invitation to do so a year ago.

A long spell of extreme hot and dry weather is affecting energy, water supplies and food production across China

“I didn’t want to be alive anymore when all this happened. Shame like I had never experienced before — the kind of shame that you forget how to breathe.”

The offer to military veterans left unemployed by the coronavirus pandemic was tantalizing: A year of online courses courtesy of the federal government. Graduates would be set up for good jobs in high-demand fields from app development to graphic design. “I jumped at it,” said Jacqueline Culbreth, 61, an Air Force veteran laid off in 2020 from her job as a construction estimator in Orlando. “I was looking forward basically to upping my earning power.” But more than a year after enrolling at the Chicago-based Future Tech Career Institute, Culbreth is no closer to her goal of landing a job in cloud computing. Like many former service members enrolled at the for-profit trade school under a pandemic relief program run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, she soon found herself immersed in discouraging chaos. Schedules were disorganized and courses did not follow a set syllabus. School-provided laptops couldn’t run critical software. And during long stretches of scheduled class time, students were left without instruction, according to interviews with Culbreth and 10 other veterans who attended the school. In February, VA cut off tuition payments to Future Tech, leaving Culbreth and more than 300 other veterans in the lurch. The disarray at Future Tech is the most painful example of broader problems with the $386 million Veteran Rapid Retraining Assistance Program, or VRRAP. Many schools proved unable to attract students or deliver promised services. In addition to Future Tech, nearly 90 schools have had their approvals yanked, according to VA officials, including several that were actively serving about 100 veterans. Some schools were cut off amid allegations of predatory practices, while others simply went out of business.

His ability to blend the fun and the functional with the binder he invented brought order to the chaos of grade-school life in the 1980s and ’90s.

The wealthy upstate woman accused of throwing a racist Juneteenth party attempted to defend herself at a bizarre press conference Tuesday, insisting the event was meant to mock liberals — not black people — but admitting to being racist on Twitter. Mary Nicosia, who is white, set off a firestorm in Rochester, NY after reportedly decorating her lawn with buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken for a Juneteenth party where she served Hennessy. A black firefighter, Jerrod Jones, filed a notice to sue the city and its fire department earlier this month because his boss, Capt. Jeffrey Krywy, took him to Nicosia’s party while he was on duty. Krywy faced termination proceedings over the incident, but retired before he could be investigated.

Detailing the “really stupid” ideas in Peters’ script, Gaiman explained: “It had giant mechanical spiders in it… Lucifer, Morpheus and the Corinthian were identical triplets. They were a family of identical brothers, and it was all a race to see who could get the ruby, the helm and the bag of sand before midnight on 1999, before the new millennium started, because whoever got it would be the winner. That was the plot.” In order to kill the movie before it moved any further, Gaiman says he anonymously leaked the script to the press. “I sent the script to Ain’t It Cool News, which back then was read by people. And I thought, I wonder what Ain’t It Cool News will think of the script that they’re going to receive anonymously. And they wrote a fabulous article about how it was the worst script they’d ever been sent. And suddenly the prospect of that film happening went away. And instead Jon Peters turned his attention to ‘Wild Wild West.'”

Abigail Brocwell "did absolutely nothing wrong to warrant the treatment that she has received from the Bratwurst Festival board," the deposed queen's lawyer asserts in a news release issued on Wednesday.

Last week, a bad landlord story to rule all bad landlords went viral on multiple news outlets, with content so appalling and creepy I have not been able to shake off accompanying photos of said bad landlord (technically a property manager in this case) grinning in an orange Hawaiian shirt. The news item went as follows: Allan Rothstein, a Las Vegas–area broker, manager, and landlord, was being sued in federal court for including a “sexual intercourse” clause in a tenant’s lease. The tenant was a formerly homeless single mom of five in Las Vegas using a Section 8 housing voucher; after she had refused Rothstein a hand job, he added a stipulation in her lease that she was signing over “Direct Consent for Sexual Intercourse and/or Fellatio or Cunnilingus” for five years, as well as agreeing not to have a partner that was “larger, meaner, and more physically aggressive” than Rothstein. He had even banned her from using “intoxicants” in a bizarre list including “sea cucumber, strawberries, lobster, dark chocolate, Cocaine,” and “LSD.”

Students returning to nine elementary schools in East Portland will see a new face this fall. That person’s job is to keep kids from being sent home. Every elementary school in the David Douglas School District has added a new staffer called the assistant principal of restorative practices. Their job? To get student retention up by finding ways to talk with, rather than punish, kids who misbehave. The assistant principals will focus in particular on students of color who have historically been more severely disciplined in schools. The aim is to end racial disparity before it begins to show up in data during high school. “If a student doesn’t behave, we send them home. But in any other scenario, if a kid doesn’t know how to read, we teach them how to read,” says Florence Protopapas, assistant director of student services for the district. “We want to bring that into behavior, as well. Ultimately, our end goal is to get all of our kids to graduation.”

Pfizer's COVID-19 pill appears to provide little or no benefit for younger adults, while still reducing the risk of hospitalization and death for high-risk seniors, according to a large study published Wednesday. The results from a 109,000-patient Israeli study are likely to renew questions about the U.S. government's use of Paxlovid, which has become the go-to treatment for COVID-19 due to its at-home convenience. The Biden administration has spent more than $10 billion purchasing the drug and making it available at thousands of pharmacies through its test-and-treat initiative. The researchers found that Paxlovid reduced hospitalizations among people 65 and older by roughly 75% when given shortly after infection. That's consistent with earlier results used to authorize the drug in the U.S. and other nations. But people between the ages of 40 and 65 saw no measurable benefit, according to the analysis of medical records.

Ahead of the primary, Frost -- a gun violence prevention activist who this summer disrupted conservative talk show host Dave Rubin's public interview with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis with calls to end gun violence -- generated considerable buzz. He told Coates that he intends to be a "vocal champion on ending gun violence in Congress," adding that the country "needs folks who are going to be bold leaders on it and I intend to join the group of great advocates in Congress to work to build a world that we deserve to live in and that's one that we're safe in." Frost was endorsed by notable progressives such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, as well as the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, and he had raised $1.5 million through August 3, more than any other candidate in the field, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Dugongs (Dugong dugon) experienced a serious population decline in China during the twentieth century, and their regional status is poorly understood. To determine their current distribution and status, we conducted a large-scale interview survey of marine resource users across four Chinese provinces and reviewed all available historical data covering the past distribution of dugongs in Chinese waters. Only 5% of 788 respondents reported past dugong sightings, with a mean last-sighting date of 23 years earlier, and only three respondents reported sightings from within the past 5 years. Historical records of dugongs peak around 1960 and then decrease rapidly from 1975 onwards; no records are documented after 2008, with no verified field observations after 2000. Based on these findings, we are forced to conclude that dugongs have experienced rapid population collapse during recent decades and are now functionally extinct in China.

The gooch often gets overlooked as the liminal space between the butthole and the genitals, but a growing volume of research suggests its size is related to everything from fertility to orgasmic function

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the world’s first mission to test technology for defending Earth against potential asteroid or comet hazards, will impact its target asteroid—which poses no threat to Earth—at 7:14 p.m. EDT on Monday, Sept. 26.