Jim Hourdequin is one of the planet’s biggest sellers of carbon offsets—the widely used instruments that are supposed to act as a balm for the rapidly overheating climate. His company earned $53 million from these environmental transactions over the past two years. But now the 47-year-old timber executive is calling out the entire system, including some of his own projects, as broken and shortchanging the climate. Although critics for years have revealed how carbon markets fail to deliver their intended climate benefits, Hourdequin is likely the first major industry participant to admonish the market from the inside. By speaking out, he says, he hopes he can help repair the flawed system: “We don’t think that forest carbon markets can survive and grow if they do not deliver real climate value.”

A former southern Oregon resident plead guilty on Monday of violating The Lacey Act by illegally importing and exporting hundreds of live scorpions. According to court documents, between Sept. 4, 2017 and March 21, 2018, Drake imported and exported dozens of live scorpions to and from contacts in Germany without obtaining an import-export license from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. On one parcel intercepted by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Drake falsely labeled the scorpion package contents as ‘chocolates.’

A Portland church that kicked a preschool out of its building last year wants to put a Catholic all-boys middle school in its place. Last spring, WW reported that St. Stephen Catholic Church, located in the Sunnyside neighborhood, had terminated its lease with Childswork Learning Center, the largest preschool in Portland. Childswork vacated the building July 1, 2021. At issue, the preschool’s operators thought, was parking. The church tore down the playground and replaced it with freshly striped parking spaces. At the time, the parish’s attorney told WW the parish had plans for the space “more directly connected to its core ministry.” That replacement is the rare item that might prove even more contentious in Portland than parking: a religious school with hardline views on gender identity. “We plan for this school to be a force for good against evil, right against wrong, and in a local but significant way, the betterment of boys in the continuing national boys crisis,” the Columbia Boys School website reads. “Boys have been under attack from the broader American culture for quite some time.” The all-boys Catholic middle school will be run by Brian Burby, the president of the school’s board of directors. He says it will be independent of the Archdiocese of Portland, meaning it can’t call itself Catholic but can operate “in the Catholic tradition”—a move, Burby tells WW, that will shield the school’s values from any archbishop’s influence, either present or future. That’s because he believes Portland’s Catholic schools have become too progressive.

Attempting to defend Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, House Bill 1557, Christina Pushaw, the press secretary for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, accused the bill’s opponents of preying on children. “The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill,” Pushaw wrote on Twitter, ahead of a vote in the state Senate. If you are against the bill, she added, “you are probably a groomer.” Those opponents would include gay Florida state Representative Carlos Guillermo Smith, who called this out as a “bigoted attack,” to which Pushaw replied, “A hit dog hollers.” Last week, H.B. 1557 passed the state legislature and headed to DeSantis’s desk (where he will most likely—but hasn’t yet—signed it into law). The resulting scramble to defend the Florida bill to a national audience has led the “grooming” charge to circulate more widely and perhaps more explicitly than it has before. On Fox last week, Laura Ingraham threw in behind DeSantis and the bill, scolding Democrats for calling the bill “bigoted” when “the real controversy” is “schools peddling gender ideology,” and calling schools “grooming centers.” In the Fox pantheon, “grooming” is being teed up as the next “critical race theory.” The following day, Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel noted that a repurposed clip from a 2019 Pete Buttigieg documentary was “being passed around like samizdat” on right-wing social media, and commented, “I’m seeing the term ‘grooming’ thrown around more and more frequently to describe stuff like this: Adult gay teachers talking about sexuality to teens.” A few days after that, columnist Monica Hesse ran down these recent examples and asked, “Do people​ really​ believe talking about gayness and LGBTQ topics in any way​​ constitutes ‘grooming’ behavior​​?” That’s certainly part of it, but with legislation like the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, the imagined bogeyman threatening kids is more specific. Ingraham nailed it: The “real controversy” is what the right calls “gender ideology,” a term itself borrowed from “gender critical” anti-trans activists, who—it turns out—also helped popularize the specifically anti-trans “grooming” claim years before “Don’t Say Gay” made headlines.

The photo shows a Black teenager on a hospital gurney, blood seeping through his gray sweatpants. There are tears on his face, and he is sweating. His arms are handcuffed behind his back, and blue-gloved hands clutch at his sweatshirt. The widely-printed account of what happened to the young person in the photo, that this teenager who shot a police officer outrageously walked free because of lax bail laws, was a credulous transcription of the NYPD’s version of events, replete with racist tropes. Papers reported that the NYPD responded to an “unruly crowd” where the teen — a “gang member” — repeatedly refused to comply with orders to show his hands, resulting in a “battle” with cops that ended with the teen firing the gun he was holding, shooting an officer and himself. One article coolly described the bullet as merely “passing through” a “gang member” on its way to injuring a police officer. Mayor Adams wasted no time in calling for the incarceration of his teenage constituent and falsely blaming his release on modest pre-trial reforms. An official statement from Adams wrongly asserted that the teen was “accused of shooting at” an officer and suggested that existing law prevented him from being detained. This inaccurate framing, also advanced by officials like NYPD union head Pat Lynch, was especially resonant — and intentionally so — because two officers and their alleged shooter were in fact killed in an unrelated case that same week. Then, last week, Judge Naita Semaj determined that NYPD Officer Taulant Gjonbalaj and his colleagues lied in this case, finding the “incredible…self serving” police testimony “had no value.” “There was absolutely zero reason for any of those officers to approach this individual… He literally does everything you tell your child to do when they’re approached by cops,” said Judge Semaj, noting the teen kept his hands up, recorded, and answered all questions. Video fully discredited the police account. But the case and fearmongering coverage had already been used to denigrate the young person, undermine any presumption of his innocence, and mislead the public to believing that modest pre-trial reforms in New York were to blame. Adams and other officials, including members of the NYPD, also advanced the case as an argument for the so-called “dangerousness” standard, a nakedly racist proposed addition to a suite of pre-trial detention options for judges that are already used to make the city’s pre-trial jail population 92% non-white. Proof that police lied only underscored the need for the very pre-trial protections they seek to undermine.

One Senate source with knowledge of the situation said Sen. Tom Cotton vehemently opposes making daylight saving time permanent. “No comment,” Cotton told BuzzFeed News when asked if he opposed the bill. The source said that Cotton would have objected to the unanimous consent request except his staff never told him it was happening. “No comment,” Cotton told BuzzFeed News when asked why he didn’t object to the bill.

Amazon agreed in May to buy MGM to deepen its library of streaming content.

March 11 marks the one-year anniversary of the signing of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). This $1.9 trillion dollar relief package was both an emergency measure to help the nation through the worst pandemic in a century and an ambitious catalyst to jump-start efforts to redress the staggering economic inequalities in our economy. In its first year, ARPA helped the economy recover at a tremendous pace and aided working families through difficult times. In the year to come, state and local policymakers will have critical opportunities to use their substantial remaining ARPA funds to rebuild the public sector, support low-wage workers, and target systemic inequities.

KentOnline understands security teams were on-hand as staff left their posts - with replacement teams waiting them on the dockside. One source said "16 handcuff-trained security people" were involved The company employs around 4,000 staff nationwide. One woman, who does not want to be named, has a husband and son who lost their jobs on Dover ferries overnight. She said: "When P&O suspended sailings this morning crews were waiting on the ships with no idea what was happening - even the captains didn't know. "Then pictures emerged of three coach loads of foreign workers waiting at ports to take their jobs. They were already wearing P&O uniforms - yet the staff still hadn't been told they were being let go. "They were told they had five minutes to get their stuff and get off the ships. These guys are week on week off workers who have called these ships home for half of the year every year. They have personal effects in lockers which they can't get to - clothes, bedding, photographs and in some cases financial documents which will be taken out and thrown. "My son is an apprentice. With 350 people competing for jobs at sea, they're unlikely to be able to find a ferry company to take them on to finish their apprenticeships. Their coursework is on the ships waiting to be thrown out. It's highly immoral and another insult from P&O to East Kent. " All its cross-Channel services were cancelled this morning at short notice with travellers being diverted to alternative operators.

Trucking used to offer good pay, decent benefits and normal hours. A few years ago, Jon Knope was standing in a rainy parking lot littered with smashed soda bottles in Cartersville, Ga., learning the finer details of how to park a Class 8 combination tractor-trailer. He was in his early 20s, somewhat rootless, and needed a job that would beat hustling on ride share apps in his mother’s station wagon. He liked driving fine, so he went through trucking school. He could make a lot more money, largely because he was allowed to work much more than Uber or Lyft would let him. In the next few years, he would spend more than 900 nights on the road, drive at least 350,000 miles, and, while he was technically alone in his truck cab watching every sunrise and sunset fly by, he was never really by himself. While many associate trucking with freedom, he was, like every trucker, hemmed in by low wages, long hours and an unbelievable level of automation and surveillance. Today, long-haul truckers are some of the most closely monitored workers in the world. Cameras and sensors dot their trucks, watching the road, the brakes and even the driver’s eye movements. Once, when his truck’s cabin heater broke, Mr. Knope was forced to sleep in freezing temperatures for several days while traveling across northern Ohio and New York because an automated system made sure his engine was turned off at night. The company told him there was no way to override the system. Just imagine finishing 10 hours at a desk job, only to return to your apartment to find the heat didn’t work. That’d be quite frustrating. Then imagine your apartment was your office and most nights dinner was a microwaveable burrito or a bag of fast food. And then imagine your desk job required you regularly press a little pedal, you couldn’t stand up, you had essentially no face-to-face contact with co-workers, and if a bathroom didn’t easily present itself you were forced to use a plastic jug — all while a computer or a person at a desk hundreds of miles away monitors your every move. Trucking is a supremely dangerous job, with large trucks involved in 10 percent of fatal crashes in the United States in 2019. Mr. Knope often described tractor-trailers as “40 tons of death.” One wrong move and your truck could easily kill the family in the minivan next to you. Much of the surveillance truckers experience is in the name of safety, and truckers agree that safety is paramount. However, experts say the fatigue that leads truckers to be unsafe — to fall asleep at the wheel or lose focus — is a direct result of low wages that encourage drivers to spend too much time on the road. While we often think of automation and A.I. as developments that will eventually replace workers (think of Tesla’s partly automated tractor-trailer), those tools are already in heavy use in the workplace. And they haven’t replaced workers; they’ve simply been brought in to manage declining working conditions.

Speaking at a conference of oil and gas executives last week, Senator Manchin outlined his views on fossil fuels and politics. “We haven’t been good at … you know, I say, ‘we,’” Manchin said, stumbling a bit, seeming to count himself among the assembled fossil fuel executives. “The energy—the leadership of energy in our country. We haven’t told our story. There’s an old story in politics: Tell your story before someone tells one on you. It’s hard to play defense. It’s much easier to run an offensive play, then make your adjustments.” It makes sense that Manchin would refer to himself as a member of the energy industry, having founded a number of coal companies in the 1980s. Last year Manchin made roughly three times his salary as a senator in dividends from those businesses, now controlled by his son. (His own ownership stake is reportedly being held in a blind trust.) Since coming to the Senate in 2010, Manchin has collected more than $4.5 million off two companies he founded. As The Intercept reported from Manchin’s financial disclosures, he has stock options valued between $1 million and $5 million in one of those firms, Enersystems Inc. He exhorted CERAWeek attendees to provide leadership in Washington and look for a “return on investment” from politicians who solicit campaign donations from them, or “mother’s milk,” as he called it. “There’s not one of us,” he said, now apparently referring to his fellow politicians, “that doesn’t come to you, ‘Will you help me, can you help me get the finances I need right now?’ … You all have been very successful. You make great decisions, and you’ve done very well in life for yourself and your family and those around you. Use the same type of approach, when you have politicians that come and ask for support, that you do when you make a financial decision for yourself and your family: You want a return on investment.” Manchin added that fossil fuel executives should “demand more. If you do that, you all can turn this around. You’ll get some people in Congress that basically are there for the right reasons. There’s a difference between public service and self-service, and there’s not one of you that don’t have the instincts to pick that up immediately. Just use it when you pick it up, and throw ’em the hell out of the room.” A spokesperson for Manchin’s office did not respond to a request to clarify what he meant when he suggested fossil fuel executives throw members of Congress out of the room. His office declined to comment on whether he had met with industry representatives in Houston about Raskin’s nomination.

Leaders from both parties had initially agreed to include roughly $15 billion in COVID-related funding as part of the more than $1.5 trillion government spending package that Congress passed last week. Republican leaders agreed to support the emergency spending because Democrats chose to cover some of the cost by reallocating money Congress had already approved but has not yet been spent. A number of House Democrats objected to that plan because as many as 30 states would lose access to money that was promised but had not yet been spent, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to removed that funding from the broader package. Democrats say they will try to pass a standalone COVID-19 funding bill in the coming days, but Republicans broadly oppose the plan, meaning there is little chance the measure can overcome a GOP filibuster in the Senate.

The story is perfect for our harrowing times. But we’ve been reading it all wrong.

Oh, and the chamber thinks you should smile more.

Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, known as the Taoiseach, tested positive for Covid-19 Wednesday while attending a gala in Washington, DC, that had just been addressed by President Joe Biden.

The actor exited the show following an HR investigation into on-set conduct.

The federal investigation provides details on the incel who shot multiple women at a hot yoga studio in Florida, and warns about the systemic failures of every person and organization around him

In 2020, a United States naval engineer and his wife made the fateful decision to try to sell some of America’s most closely guarded military secrets, the technology behind the nuclear reactors that power the U.S. submarine fleet. Then the couple faced another important choice: To which foreign government should they try to peddle the stolen secrets? The engineer appeared to believe that soliciting American adversaries like Russia or China was, morally, a bridge too far, according to text messages released in court. Instead, Jonathan and Diana Toebbe thought of a country that was rich enough to buy the secrets, not hostile to the United States and, most importantly, increasingly eager to acquire the very technology they were selling: Brazil. The identity of the nation approached by the Toebbes has until now remained shielded by federal prosecutors and other government officials. But, according to a senior Brazilian official and other people briefed on the investigation, Mr. Toebbe approached Brazil nearly two years ago with an offer of thousands of pages of classified documents about nuclear reactors that he had stolen from the U.S. Navy Yard in Washington over the course of several years. The plan backfired almost as soon as it began. After Mr. Toebbe sent a letter offering the secrets to Brazil’s military intelligence agency in April 2020, Brazilian officials handed the letter over to the F.B.I. legal attaché in the country. Then, beginning in December 2020, an F.B.I. undercover agent posed as a Brazilian official to win Mr. Toebbe’s trust and persuade him to deposit documents in a location chosen by investigators. Mr. Toebbe eventually agreed to provide documents and offered technical assistance to Brazil’s nuclear-submarine program, using classified information he had learned from years working for the U.S. Navy. Mr. and Ms. Toebbe, who lived in Annapolis, Md., were arrested in October and pleaded guilty to espionage charges last month. He faces up to 17 and a half years in prison; she faces up to three. Brazil has continued to struggle with its submarine nuclear reactor program, and has approached Russia to seek a partnership on the nuclear-reactor design, said a Russian military official who, like all the people interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified material and delicate diplomacy involved.

Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, has been temporarily put on an Instagram time out after apparently violating the company’s policies. Content from his account, @kanyewest, has been deleted for violating policies on hate speech, bullying and harassment, a Meta spokesperson confirmed to NBC News on Wednesday night. Earlier in the day, the musician reportedly posted a photo of comedian Trevor Noah and captioned it with racial slurs. TODAY has not seen the original posts — which have since been deleted — though several media outlets have screenshots. 

Former Washington state Rep. Matt Shea, the far-right Republican who was found by a House-commissioned investigation to have planned and participated in domestic terrorism, is in a small town in Poland with more than 60 Ukrainian children, trying to facilitate their adoption in America. Shea has said his group helped rescue 62 children and their two adult caregivers from an orphanage in Mariupol, the city in southeastern Ukraine that has been bombarded by Russian forces. But international agencies say, with the chaos and confusion of war, now is not an appropriate time for international adoptions from Ukraine. And Shea’s presence, and the lack of information surrounding the American group he’s with, has raised concerns among some residents of Kazimierz Dolny, the small Polish town where the children are staying at a hotel-guesthouse. “I asked him many times, ‘What are you going to do with these children?’ and he told me that it’s not my business,'” Weronika Ziarnicka, an aide to the mayor of Kazimierz Dolny, said of Shea. “I got the feeling in my gut that something’s wrong with this guy; he didn’t want to tell me his last name.”