President Biden urged for an end to remote work, framing the much-delayed return to the office for millions of white-collar workers as necessary for the United States to move beyond the pandemic.

CEQA is the primary tool that empowers this ouroboros of inaction. And if you go back to what was happening when it was signed into law by then California Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970, it’s hard to imagine it wasn’t at least partially designed that way. Much like today, environmentalism in the late ’60s and early ’70s was defined by a doomsday ethos that posited the end of the world was nigh. Instead of concerns over climate change, however, Malthusian fears over the impacts of overpopulation dominated the day, stemming largely from the success of Stanford professor Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb.” Ehrlich posited the coming emergence of an overcrowded planet with more mouths than it was capable of feeding and cited the packed slums of New Delhi as a cautionary tale for what lay in store for most of human civilization. (Echoes of Ehrlich ring loud in Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods President Phillip Bokovoy’s warnings that his city will “end up like Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur” should it allow too many people to live there.) These concerns weren’t just limited to a coterie of Berkeley hippies; They were entirely mainstream. Just months before CEQA’s inception, the Republican Nixon administration created the U.S. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future to study, among other things, the impact of population growth on environmental pollution. The commission’s ensuing 1971 “Rockefeller” report pushed back on the American idea that growth was inherently good — and could in fact cause severe local harm. “Population stabilization” was trumpeted as a priority, which manifested in some good ideas (family planning and abortion rights) and some dubious ones (a de-emphasis on growth in large cities). A survey of prevailing attitudes in the report found that over 50% of Americans felt that governments should “discourage further growth of large metropolitan areas” and “try to encourage people and industry to move to smaller cities and towns.”

After striking a plea deal with prosecutors, a onetime Tennessee sheriff's deputy who was accused of repeatedly raping a 14-year-old girl over a period of 20 months will serve no time in prison and does not have to register as a sex offender.

WASHINGTON — The White House hasn’t publicly detailed exactly how it’s spent the more than $4 trillion Congress authorized for Covid-19 relief — and now, that lack of transparency could imperil its request for more money to fight the pandemic and buy therapeutics. Amid heated negotiations over a government funding bill, three dozen Republican senators including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are refusing to consider more Covid-19 relief funding unless the federal government provides a full accounting of how funds have been spent. The White House disputes the accusations that there has been a lack of transparency, and an administration official said the White House briefs Congress on a regular and bipartisan basis about details of the status of relief funding. If lawmakers aren’t able to reach a deal for more Covid-19 funding, that’s a big problem for the Biden administration. The White House on Thursday acknowledged its Covid-19 response money has nearly run out and it needs $22.5 billion more, or it won’t be able to secure treatments, vaccines and tests for the future. And the budget crunch is even more severe than the administration has let on. The White House has held off on buying millions of courses of Pfizer’s highly effective antiviral drug that the White House already committed to buy due to budget constraints, according to public contract disclosures and the Department of Defense, which issues the contracts. In January, the White House announced that it was doubling its order of Pfizer’s antiviral, named Paxlovid, committing to buy an extra 10 million courses. But according to public contracts, the White House has only actually contracted for 835,000 of those courses to date.

At this moment, the United States Navy is preparing to deploy a 10,000-ton warship carrying 320 officers and sailors, along with missiles, torpedoes, and a mounted artillery gun. This ship, known as a guided-missile destroyer, defends the United States and its allies on the seas. Although its next mission remains secret, it may bolster American military presence in Europe as Russian aggression pushes the continent into war. But the Navy cannot currently deploy this warship, because it has lost trust in its commanding officer, an anti-vaxxer who has repeatedly disobeyed lawful orders, misled superiors, and allegedly exposed dozens of his crew to COVID-19 due to a refusal to get tested. The Navy wants to remove this officer, whom I’ll call John Doe, from command of the destroyer. But it can’t, because a single federal judge in Tampa has forbidden it. This judge has overruled multiple admirals and captains who assert, under oath, that deploying the ship with Doe in charge would imperil national security. He instead ordered the Navy, under threat of sanction, to keep this disobedient officer in charge of a $1.8 billion warship.

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Finally, after months of fruitless negotiations, the government, the workers and the owners reached a deal. It was a better one than the workers ever thought they’d get: Paradiso (the executive the workers had had the most interactions with throughout this situation) promised to pay back half the amount they were owed. And better yet, the deal stipulated that if he didn’t pay up, he would have to give the workers the keys to the factory so they could run the business themselves. The deadline came and went, and Paradiso didn’t pay one single peso. And he didn’t hand over the keys to the factory either. The workers, exhausted and frustrated, wanted to get back to work, even if they had to take the factory over and start making and selling the cookies themselves. So that’s exactly what they did.

Wilson said he entered the lower west terrace tunnels after another member of the mob motioned him inside, telling the judge he got hit in the head during the chaos, and can recall very little of his conduct in the riot. "I didn't have a plan. There was no plan to do any of this," he said. "Some of the videos they showed me, I can't believe I was doing anything like that." The prosecution cast doubts on the assertion that Wilson did not remember his actions. "It just seems to be the parts where he is doing the worst things that he has the foggiest memory," Tortorice said.

Paula Murray wasn’t thinking about the car she’d rented from Hertz in 2016 when she walked into a State Police station in January of 2021 to finalize her new job as a dispatcher. She’d filled out the paperwork for the required background check without hesitation. She’d even brought her grandchildren along to see her launch her new career. Instead, the children watched their grandmother be handcuffed; arrested for allegedly stealing a car she’d in fact returned to Hertz five years earlier. She’s now one of 230 plaintiffs suing Hertz for false arrest and in some cases prosecution. The lawyers for this cohort say they know there are more cases out there – warrants for arrest that people who rented from Hertz years ago don’t even know exist, like ticking time bombs waiting to explode their lives at any moment. In recently unsealed court documents, Hertz admitted it files an average of 3,365 police reports about stolen vehicles involving its customers each year. That means over the past seven years since false theft report cases have been known to occur, theft charges have been levied against more than 23,000 people. How many of them were innocent paying customers is unknown. According to court documents, the current group of claimants has spent a total of 2,742 days in jail or prison because of false arrests. That’s more than seven years. They’ve endured a collective 3,600 months of prosecution. Some took plea deals, admitting to stealing cars they didn’t steal, just to make the ordeal stop. Other cases are still pending, so those totals are evolving. uring a lawsuit in Philadelphia in 2017, before the Hertz bankruptcy, Hertz’s national vehicle control supervisor took the stand and admitted on cross-examination that police reports do not always contain accurate payment information, contacts with customers, and that Hertz does not correct or supplement reports that it knows are false or misleading. “Hertz is on record as saying that even when they learn information (in police reports) is inaccurate, they refused to correct it because it would hurt their relationship with the police and the police will no longer take their false police reports,” Malofiy said. Court records show that police at the Indianapolis and Louisville airports did just that. After multiple reports of stolen vehicles that ended up being located on Hertz's lots, those agencies reportedly said they wouldn't take new reports from the company.

Republicansare standing against a bill that aims to make hair discrimination a federal crime. The CROWN Act, legislation designed to protect Black people from being punished for their hairstyles at work or school, needed a two-thirds majority vote to pass the House on Monday. However, only 15 Republicans supported the bill, which failed with a 235-188 vote, Patch reports . New Jersey Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, who authored the bill, said Republicans are fueling a climate of “division and obstruction.” “Even though the exact same bill passed on a voice vote without objection in 2020, House Republicans have chosen to give into the climate of division and obstruction, and block the CROWN Act, a bill meant to end race-based hair discrimination, on the final day of Black History Month,” Coleman said in a statement, according to Patch. The bill, which will now return to the House, can still pass with a simple majority, according to NJ.com. “Despite this temporary setback — and while I regret that Republicans chose to miss an opportunity to show unity against race-based discrimination — we will bring the CROWN Act back and pass it with a simple majority,” Coleman said. Coleman said Black people continue to face discrimination because their hair does not “conform to White beauty standards.” She adds that “Black students are disproportionately suspended for unapproved hairstyles.”

Katie Meyer's parents, Steven Meyer and Gina Meyer, have set up a foundation in their daughter's name

Comfortably history's best leg-spinner, arguably history's best bowler and surpassed only by Sir Donald Bradman as Australia's greatest cricketer, Shane Keith Warne has died of a suspected heart attack at the age of 52.

The step could signal further restrictions against other tech companies such as Google, which owns YouTube, and Twitter. Both have also been under pressure by the Russian government.

Born in a cowshed in India, Siddhant now works for Meta in California. But he hides his background as a Dalit and fears he can never reveal his true self.

Even the gold letters of the ship's nameplate are still visible.

Instead of hoarding budget surpluses after the financial crisis, the EU could have weaned itself off of Russian energy supplies.

For a long time, Stewart was the guy people could trust to tell it like it was. But now it seems like maybe he didn’t understand how it was.

One of the world’s biggest blockchains is testing a new way to approve transactions. The move has been many years in the making but doesn’t come without risks. BLOCKCHAIN BLOCKCHAIN BLOCKCHAIN

A Russian businessman has offered a $1 million bounty for Vladimir Putin’s arrest - by posting a ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’ poster online. Alex Konanykhin said in posts on Facebook and LinkedIn that he would pay the money for the ‘arrest of Putin as a war criminal under international laws’ Konanykhin claimed that Putin was not the President of Russia because he ‘murdered his opponents’. The post included a mocked up poster which read: ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive. Vladimir Putin. For Mass Murder’. After Facebook banned the post, Konanykhin insisted he was not asking for people to kill Putin and wanted him ‘brought to justice’.

“The masks have been dropped. The West is not just trying to surround Russia with a new Iron Curtain,” Russia’s Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service Sergei Naryshkin said on Thursday. “We are talking about attempts to destroy our state — its ‘cancellation,’ as it is now customary to say in a ‘tolerant’ liberal-fascist environment.”