On Monday, a Johnson County city unanimously voted to ban a living arrangement aimed at helping tenants decrease the amount of rent they pay. The Shawnee City Council voted 8-0 to ban co-living, becoming among the first Kansas City area municipalities to prevent the practice, which has gained popularity in recent years as rent and home prices have soared. The new ordinance defines a co-living group as a group of at least four unrelated adults living together in a dwelling unit. The ordinance stated that if one adult is unrelated to another adult, then the entire group will be classified as unrelated. The practice, which includes things like sharing a kitchen, living room and community areas, started to gain popularity as rental and housing prices continued to increase across the United States. “Co-living has become increasingly popular because of its cost effectiveness and greater flexibility in cities where rents are high for young professionals,” The Washington Post wrote in 2019. The City Council’s vote came despite a presentation from a Johnson County organization where a housing study showed that the average home price in the county rose 37% from 2017-2021, climbing from $324,393 to $443,700. The study also showed that wages did not rise at that same rate.

The undercover work of former U.S. government informants suspected of plotting to kill Haiti’s president has compelled Miami federal prosecutors to seal off evidence about their past activities in the interest of U.S. national security, saying the information is classified and cannot be turned over to the defense in the widening investigation. The decision means that the U.S. criminal case, which has run parallel to a faltering probe in Haiti, could become even more secretive in the United States and leave a trail of unanswered questions about how a group of Colombian commandos, a former FBI informant connected to a Miami-area security firm and two ex-Drug Enforcement Administration informants all came to be accused of participating in the deadly assault. The U.S. move to protect classified evidence comes as the separate case in Haiti has stalled: the mandate of the fourth investigative judge expired on Monday with no formal charges brought against any of the roughly 40 suspects still jailed in Port-au-Prince months after the Haitian president’s murder last July. But one suspect who is not in custody is Arcángel Pretel Ortiz, believed by Haiti National Police to be “one of the heads” of the presidential assassination plot. Pretel, a Colombian with reported links to his native country’s military dating back to the 1990s, is believed to be a former FBI informant — a potentially embarrassing relationship for U.S. authorities. Meanwhile, a former Haitian senator is set to be extradited from Jamaica to Miami to face U.S. charges in the high-profile assassination case. John Joël Joseph was cleared for extradition last week when a Jamaican prosecutor opted not to pursue charges that he illegally entered the English-speaking Caribbean nation. He, his wife and their two sons were arrested in early January at a house in a rural parish.

New research warns pressures of rising heat and loss of oxygen are reminiscent of ‘great dying’ that occurred about 250m years ago. Global heating is causing such a drastic change to the world’s oceans that it risks a mass extinction event of marine species that rivals anything that’s happened in the Earth’s history over tens of millions of years, new research has warned. Accelerating climate change is causing a “profound” impact upon ocean ecosystems that is “driving extinction risk higher and marine biological richness lower than has been seen in Earth’s history for the past tens of millions of years”, according to the study. The world’s seawater is steadily climbing in temperature due to the extra heat produced from the burning of fossil fuels, while oxygen levels in the ocean are plunging and the water is acidifying from the soaking up of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This means the oceans are overheated, increasingly gasping for breath – the volume of ocean waters completely depleted of oxygen has quadrupled since the 1960s – and becoming more hostile to life. Aquatic creatures such as clams, mussels and shrimp are unable to properly form shells due to the acidification of seawater. All of this means the planet could slip into a “mass extinction rivaling those in Earth’s past”, states the new research, published in Science. The pressures of rising heat and loss of oxygen are, researchers said, uncomfortably reminiscent of the mass extinction event that occurred at the end of the Permian period about 250m years ago. This cataclysm, known as the “great dying”, led to the demise of up to 96% of the planet’s marine animals.

Florida authorities arrested a Black man while he was staying in a homeless shelter and charged him with voting illegally in a case tied to Republicans’ drive to root out election fraud. But Kelvin Bolton’s arrest raises questions about the rollout of Amendment 4, passed by Florida voters in 2018 to restore voting rights to Floridians with felony convictions. The case is one of the first of its kind since Florida ended the Jim Crow-era voting policy that disproportionately affected Black citizens. Bolton’s arrest shows how the constitutional amendment now is being weaponized against poor people who may not realize they are committing a crime. When law enforcement found 55-year-old Bolton at the homeless shelter and arrested him for illegal voting, according to court records and as first reported by Fresh Take Florida at the University of Florida, he was on early release from jail but still serving two-and-a-half years for theft and simple battery. Bolton, who is being held in the Alachua County jail on $30,000 bail, is one of 10 people recently charged in the Gainesville area with third-degree felonies for illegal voting. Eight of the 10 are Black men. They all registered to vote while in jail or mailed ballots from jail, but had unpaid fines and fees from prior felony convictions that barred them from voting under a 2019 law, according to the state attorney’s office. Each faces a potential five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. Most of Bolton’s bills for court fees have been forwarded to collection agencies, according to court records. But Bolton’s sister said he hasn’t had a stable address or home for many years and may have been hard to track down. It’s unclear how Bolton could have determined that he owed unpaid fees while he was in the county jail, as he wouldn’t have been able to reach out to the clerk’s office to determine the total. Lloyd said that Kramer is developing an initiative with supervisors of elections so that citizens can verify their voting status if they’re unsure, but no such system exists now. “The state has an impenetrable system of records,” said Jonathan Diaz, a voting rights attorney with the Campaign Legal Center, which filed suit against Florida challenging the law requiring the payment of fines and fees. Even veteran county clerks have trouble figuring out who is eligible to vote, according to Diaz. This bureaucratic morass is “by design because that’s the system that Florida created for this,” he added. The arrests, he said, are “more an indictment of Florida than anything else.”

Do traffic safety interventions work? Hall and Madsen present evidence from a study in Texas showing that the number of crashes actually increases by a few percentage points when motorists are confronted with displays indicating the number of road fatalities in the area (see the Perspective by Ullman and Chrysler). The authors suggest that this counterintuitive finding results from a cognitive overload experienced by drivers when confronted with multiple notices and instructions on complex stretches of road, leading to distraction. They conclude that traffic safety “nudges” need to be carefully designed and positioned to avoid backfiring.

Among the Bitcoin Maxis in Miami Beach

Life-threatening heat waves arrived in India a month earlier than normal, shattering temperature records, with highs reaching over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) -- and it will only get hotter.

While some areas, such as San Francisco, saw rents decrease, rents in South Florida increased at a higher rate than anywhere in the country, according to new data. The median rent in the tri-county area now beats out even the New York metro region.

New Brunswick landlords and property managers facing a limit of 3.8 per cent on rent increases for 2022 have been discussing potential ways to escape the restriction. Ideas include asking tenants personally to agree to higher rents, introducing fixed-term leases that force tenants to move on when they expire and proposing renovations to rent-controlled units significant enough to require tenants to vacate, whether the renovations happen as planned or not. In an online talk posted to YouTube earlier this month by the Moncton Real Estate Investing Organization, more than two dozen apartment building owners and managers heard a discussion about ways to get around rent caps, an exercise they believe government knows about.

The MAGA stars both thumped their chests claiming they’d never back down to Twitter and delete the transphobic tweets that got their accounts locked. Surprise! They deleted.

Dr. Lucy Graubard recently welcomed two students from the University of Houston to her home with a surprise. “She made us bourekas, which was pretty amazing!” said one of the students, Miranda Ruzinsky, about the baked pastry that is very popular in the Sephardic Jewish gastronomy. She added that Graubard's food offering couldn’t have been more effective to break the ice for the specific purpose that brought them to her house. Ruzinsky and her classmate Carla Peterson Mora were part of a group of 16 University of Houston students participating in the “Sephardic Latinx Oral History Project” documenting histories of Latinos with that Jewish background in collaboration with the Holocaust Museum Houston, which on Monday launched a public display of the project. The project, directed by Mark Goldberg, a history professor at the university and director of the UH Jewish Studies Program, aimed to shed light on often overlooked communities in the intersection of being Latinos and Jewish, two heritages that many people don’t associate, he said.

Labourers at the one of the world’s largest egg factories arrived at the plant in Rembrandt, Iowa, early one morning in March to discover they were about to work themselves out of a job. As they gathered at the huge barns housing stacks of caged hens, the workers were told to forget about their usual routine of collecting eggs and feeding the birds. Overnight, the factory had begun slaughtering more than 5 million chickens using a gruesome killing method after detecting a single case of avian influenza. Even supervisors were assigned to the arduous task of dragging dead hens out of packed cages as Rembrandt Enterprises raced to contain the spread of the virus, amid the largest bird flu outbreak in the US in seven years. The culling has been repeated at chicken and turkey farms across Iowa and 28 other states from Maine to Utah. More than 22m birds have been killed in an attempt to contain the outbreak – the majority in Iowa, the US’s biggest producer of eggs. The slaughter of 5.3m hens at Rembrandt is the largest culling at any factory farm in the country. Workers spent nearly a month pulling the dead poultry from the cages and dumping them in carts before they were piled high in nearby fields and buried in huge pits. The killing over, about 250 people were summarily thrown out of work with just a few dozen skeleton staff remaining.

A state audit of five law enforcement agencies in California found bias among officers toward people of color, immigrants, women and LGBTQ people, as well as a smattering of support for far-right extremist organizations such as the Proud Boys and Three Percenters. The audit also found the agencies had insufficient policies in place to safeguard against such attitudes within their ranks, to investigate them when they are alleged or to address them once identified, according to a report issued by the state auditor’s office this week. “As a result, these departments are at a higher risk of being unaware of and unable to effectively address the ways in which their officers exhibit bias,” the audit found. The audit was conducted at the request of state lawmakers. It comes amid rising concerns nationally about far-right extremism among police and other law enforcement officers, as well as evidence that bias complaints against California officers are overwhelmingly dismissed after internal investigations. On the national level, attention to the problem increased after it was revealed that police officers were among those involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In California, a recent Times investigation found that police agencies across the state upheld just 49 racial profiling complaints from 2016 to 2019, or less than 2% of the roughly 3,500 allegations filed. The Los Angeles Police Department has been accused of showing sympathy to far-right protesters at demonstrations in L.A., and L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva recently said 80% of his workforce was “conservative and far right.”

A British cryptocurrency expert accused of breaching North Korea sanctions by speaking at a conference in Pyongyang is facing a £1 million fine and 20 years in jail in the United States. Christopher Emms, 30, from Reigate, Surrey, allegedly “advised members of the North Korean government on cutting-edge cryptocurrency”.

Two South Koreans have been arrested on charges of stealing military secrets on behalf of a suspected North Korean spy agent who paid them in cryptocurrency, the police said on Thursday. A 38-year-old executive at a cyber-currency company met the agent through an online cryptocurrency community six years ago and has been paid $600,000 in cryptocurrency since February last year to work for him, the South Korean national police said. Together, the executive and the agent tried to hack into the South Korean military’s command communication system, but failed. They succeeded, however, in recruiting a 29-year-old South Korean military officer, who helped steal classified military data by taking pictures with a smartphone, the police said. The police did not provide details about the stolen data, but said that the officer was paid about $38,000 in cryptocurrency by the agent. The two South Koreans were arrested earlier this month and now face criminal charges of breaking the country’s National Security Act. The South Korean police said they could not arrest the agent, who was operating from abroad, but said that they believed he was a hacker working for the North Korean government. South and North Korea have remained technically at war since 1950. For decades, the two Koreas have waged intelligence and counterespionage campaigns. In recent years, the war has increasingly shifted into cyberspace.

Some insurers pocketed ‘eye-popping’ overpayments, billing records show.

Illinois law bans schools from fining students. So local police are doing it for them, issuing thousands of tickets a year for truancy, vaping, fights and other misconduct. Children are then thrown into a legal system designed for adults.

The U.S. military is actively discussing an initiative, proposed by a defense contractor, to fund athletic scholarships for tens of thousands of college athletes each year in exchange for their mandatory service. Over the last seven months, the proposal, which would not include football and basketball players, has reached military and civilian leaders throughout the Department of Defense and key members of Congress. It has been pitched as a solution to inefficient recruiting within the armed forces—which spend billions on recruits who fail basic training—and financial unease in college sports, where athletic departments face increasing cuts to non-revenue teams like tennis and wrestling. Needless to say, the proposal would require a massive rethink for both intercollegiate athletics and the Department of Defense, two American institutions often criticized for their lack of innovation. It would almost assuredly draw pushback from some key stakeholders, such as the NCAA and its members. That’s before the task of convincing high school athletes, an attractive demographic to military recruiters, that a college athletic scholarship is worth a commitment to years of military or alternative civilian service once they have completed their schooling.

The Minnesota Department of Human Rights found there is probable cause that the city of Minneapolis and Minneapolis Police Department “engage in a pattern or practice of race discrimination in violation of the Minnesota Human Rights Act,” according to a report released Wednesday.The Department of Human Rights relied on hundreds of interviews, a review of 700 hours of body worn camera footage and nearly 480,000 pages of city and MPD documents to come to that conclusion.Tucked inside the 72-page report are some astonishing findings, statements and anecdotes.

A new generation of fitness instructors teaches simple skills that make a difference, writes @amandamull. Why is beginner-level exercise treated like a niche?