The government has indefinitely shelved its bid to overhaul religious freedom laws, leaving one of the Coalition's central 2019 election commitments hanging in uncertainty. After a marathon sitting of the House of Representatives, where proposed laws passed in the dawn hours of this morning, the government failed to bring the matter on for debate in the Senate, where the bill was set for a second showdown today. Coalition sources have confirmed the government is all but guaranteed not to bring it back for debate when the Senate next sits in March. That is because the government does not want further debate about religious freedoms to hijack its plans to sell a pre-election budget. The religious discrimination bill put before the lower house this week was a much-watered down version of what the government had initially proposed. Even so, several moderate Liberals said they were concerned with parts of the bill that remained, as well as a separate amendment introduced at the same time to protect school students based on their sexual orientation but not their gender identity. In the early hours of this morning, five Liberal MPs joined Labor and the crossbench to vote against the government and extend protections for transgender school students. In the wake of that defeat the government turned to religious groups to consult on the future of the contentious laws. The religious discrimination bill itself remains unchanged, but some religious groups have been adamant they do not support the transgender student protections passed alongside it. Assistant Minister to the Attorney-General Amanda Stoker said the amended bill was flawed. "It's not what the government designed," Senator Stoker said. "It's not what we thought had got the balance right." Conservative government members and some religious groups are advocating for the bill to be formally dumped. The Australian Christian Lobby said removing exemptions that allowed schools to discriminate against trans students "completely undermined" the bill. "[The exemptions] have enabled faith-based schools to teach their religion and conduct their schools according to their faith values," ACL director Wendy Francis said. "The loss of this protection would outweigh any benefits that could be obtained by the religious discrimination bill. "With the amendments so damaging to religious freedom, the government should immediately withdraw the bills." Senator Eric Abetz, a conservative member of the government, said he was "currently minded to encourage the government to withdraw the bill". The government had proposed to strike out existing laws allowing students to be expelled over their sexuality, a move supported by groups such as the Christian Schools Association (CSA). But extending that to gender identity created extra complications, Christian schools and the government argued. The CSA feared protections for transgender staff and students could hinder religious schools in teaching their faith, and raised issues around bathroom facilities and uniforms in single-sex schools, among other things. The government wanted that issue to be considered by the Australian Law Reform Commission and reported back on within the next 12 months. This morning government senators vowed to try and revert the changes, but within hours the Senate rejected bringing it on for debate, deferring it to a future date.

The ex-wife of jazz legend Miles Davis was years ahead of her time, only to disappear from the spotlight for decades

Last summer, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an internal presentation on the coronavirus, which was leaked to the press, called the Delta variant of COVID-19 “as transmissible as chicken pox.” Although the claim was found to be overstated, it’s easy to see why researchers may have been predisposed to draw parallels between the two diseases. Both varicella-zoster—the proper name for the chicken-pox virus—and the coronavirus are spread through the air, and both can be contagious before any symptoms are evident. Both have relatively mild impacts on most children, with a higher risk of more serious effects in adults. The mostly apocryphal tales of “COVID parties”—which almost always turn out to be unintentional spreader events—descend from those of “chicken-pox parties,” where parents knowingly exposed their children to symptomatic peers. There was also a kind of wistfulness in the comparison. A vaccine for varicella received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration in 1995, and within a decade forty states and the District of Columbia added varicella as a required immunization for enrollment in public elementary schools. Today all fifty states enforce this mandate. (Medical and religious exemptions vary state by state.) Near-universal mandatory immunization against chicken pox virtually eliminated the disease in the space of a generation. This past October, a coronavirus vaccine for children aged five to eleven received emergency-use authorization from the F.D.A.; since then, a little more than eighteen per cent of eligible children in the U.S. have received the two shots required for vaccination, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation report. (The F.D.A. is reportedly close to authorizing a vaccine for children under five.) Several of the nation’s biggest cities are now mulling COVID-vaccine mandates for their public-school systems; New York’s Mayor, Eric Adams, has spoken in support of student mandates. But across large swaths of the U.S.—including in states such as Georgia, Indiana, Montana, Tennessee, and Texas, where COVID-vaccine mandates for state employees and health-care workers are banned—any large-scale immunization effort is a nonstarter.

From very early in the pandemic, it was clear that SARS-CoV-2 can damage the heart and blood vessels while people are acutely ill. Patients developed clots, heart inflammation, arrythmias, and heart failure. Now, the first large study to assess cardiovascular outcomes 1 year after SARS-CoV-2 infection has demonstrated that the virus’ impact is often lasting. In an analysis of more than 11 million U.S. veterans’ health records, researchers found the risk of 20 different heart and vessel maladies was substantially increased in veterans who had COVID-19 1 year earlier, compared with those who didn’t. The risk rose with severity of initial disease and extended to every outcome the team examined, including heart attacks, arrhythmias, strokes, cardiac arrest, and more. Even people who never went to the hospital had more cardiovascular disease than those who were never infected. The results are “stunning … worse than I expected, for sure,” says Eric Topol, a cardiologist at Scripps Research. “All of these are very serious disorders. … If anybody ever thought that COVID was like the flu this should be one of the most powerful data sets to point out it’s not.” He adds that the new study “may be the most impressive Long Covid paper we have seen to date.”

It was on Sunday afternoon, Jan. 30, driving in Ballard, that Dave Welding entered the world of car computers gone amok. He drives a 2016 Mazda hatchback. It turns out that about the same time, the same thing was happening to other local Mazda owners who had this in common: They drove a 2014 to 2017 model Mazda, and they had tuned into KUOW, 94.9 on the FM dial, the NPR station. That’s all it took. Somehow the signal the station sent to the modern HD Radio that’s part of the Mazda infotainment center had, as Welding puts it, “fried” a major component. That frying made the radios only play KUOW. No chance of catching a little classic rock or some Dori soliloquies. KUOW. Forever. Mazda headquarters says the problem was that KUOW “sent image files with no extension.”

The report highlights how little is known about the cost of Amazon’s expansion to taxpayers around the planet.

Quiet title laws across the Midwest can disproportionately affect homeowners who don’t speak English, like Natalia Esteban, who emigrated from Mexico over 20 years ago.

“Our system isn’t broken — it’s designed to do what it’s doing: produce measurable inequity,” Gary Chambers Jr. says in the powerful spot

The couple may have attempted to use NFTs to launder some stolen Bitcoin, the Department of Justice complaint says.

Yesterday, superproducer Steve Albini sparked a social-media debate when he posted to Twitter that Juggalos (a nickname for Insane Clown Posse fans) are superior to Deadheads, after arguing that if ICP can learn from their problematic lyrics, Joe Rogan should be able to properly apologize for his use of the N-word. “Yes, I’m saying the Juggalos are good,” Albini wrote. “A non-judgmental, inclusive community for people on the fringe, built on a beautiful communion they call ‘family.’ They remind me of punk/queer chosen families and I love them. I haven’t heard much of the music, it’s atrocious. Who cares.”

The comedian threatened to pull his business interests from the village of Yellow Springs.

Attorney Mark Mueller promised a caring workplace. But at his Austin compound, some former employees say, his eccentricities veered into sexual harassment. The shaman lights a hand-rolled cigarette, inhales, and blows plumes of pungent Amazonian tobacco smoke onto the heads, chests, backs, and clasped hands of his acolytes. Next, he might move about the room while beating on a drum. Standing six foot four, with an unruly shock of platinum-blond hair, he’s accustomed to being the center of attention. These ceremonies have taken place nearly every week for years inside his downtown Austin compound. Some Indigenous Americans believe the tobacco, known as mapacho, possesses healing and protective qualities. But this self-professed shaman isn’t Indigenous. He’s a white, 69-year-old attorney named Mark Mueller, and his acolytes are lawyers, paralegals, and others who work for him. A Wisconsin native who earned his law degree from the University of Houston—and later graduated from the Power Path Seminars & School of Shamanism, in New Mexico—Mueller seems to revel in his eccentricities.

In retrospect, shoveling snow onto the hood of a pick-up truck blocking a Park Slope bus stop wasn’t the best decision Tony Melone made last Monday. But that provocation seems quaint compared to what followed. “I’m gonna kill you, Melone,” an unidentified man told him over the phone an hour later — one of five threatening calls Melone would receive that day. “I’m gonna fuck you and your wife,” a caller said later. Nearly as unsettling to Melone as the threats was the question of how the caller, or callers, knew his name and phone number in the first place. Melone had filed a 311 complaint to the NYPD earlier that day about the illegally parked truck and included his own name and number on the report. The city says it keeps that information confidential. Somehow it made its way to the furious caller. “The 311 system is supposed to be a way for people to report problems,” Melone, 45, said later about the ordeal. “If it’s getting used to harass the people that are reporting the problems, that’s really disturbing.” The episode fits into a broader pattern of harassment that New Yorkers have faced after filing 311 complaints to the NYPD, a pattern now under city investigation following a Streetsblog report. But the calls received by Melone were by far the most extreme of any documented by Streetsblog, as they included death threats and violent and vulgar references to Melone’s wife and children, according to Melone, who shared recordings of the calls with Streetsblog.

The bill, which would bar the 'discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity' in primary schools, passed the Florida Senate Education Committee on Tuesday. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis voiced his support for a bill that would prohibit the discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in the state's primary schools. Asked by reporters at a Miami event Monday, he said it was "entirely inappropriate" for teachers to be having conversations with students about gender identity, citing instances of them telling children, “Don’t worry, don’t pick your gender yet," and also "hiding" classroom lessons from parents.

He campaigned for reelection claiming he'd banned the type of no-knock warrants Minneapolis Police used to kill Amir Locke. After Minneapolis Police killed Amir Locke, Frey had an opportunity to step up. He chose to hide behind the same old excuses instead. On January 31, Vogue Magazine ran a glowing profile of recently re-elected Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, citing his “boyishness” and dubbing him an “elder millennial” whose time in office, per the article’s framing, was akin to running a marathon. Marathons, coincidentally, are Frey’s favorite pastime, and the impetus for moving to Minnesota to begin with (his first time in Minneapolis was for a race, where he noticed “the sun was shining, the music was playing,” and the city’s Lake Nokomis “was just sparkling with colors”). Frey’s time in office, of course, has been defined by the murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis Police Office Derek Chauvin. In the days following Floyd’s death, as a protest movement erupted in Minneapolis and spread across the nation, Frey tried and utterly failed to connect with the furious residents of his city, preferring appearances on MSNBC to managing the situation the ground. In last month’s profile, he mused to Vogue that running a city is in many ways more difficult than other elected roles. “If this was just takin’ a vote — That ain’t how it works here…you can’t hide as mayor,” he said. But it certainly looks like Frey is hiding again.

The hospital industry is lobbying the White House to help drive down wages for health care workers across the U.S. after many travel nurses saw a rise in wages during the covid-19 pandemic, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. And despite a critical shortage of nurses in the U.S., hospitals are doing everything they can to make sure they earn less money. Travel nurses, which are used to temporarily supplement existing staff during times of crisis, have seen their wages rise from about $1,706 in December 2019 to $3,290 a week in December 2021, according to the WSJ and Vivan Health. What can the U.S. government do to stop wages from rising? Hospitals argue that wages for travel nurses have gone up due to an influx of federal money from covid-19 relief funds and FEMA grants for natural disasters. But staffing agencies that connect nurses with hospital systems across the country argue that it’s simply a matter of supply and demand.

A powerful magnetic storm takes out most of a batch of Starlink satellites the day after launch.

Transgender people have been contacted by the Gender Unity Project for a documentary that's actually being made by transphobic Matt Walsh.

The jumble of misinformation, online fundraising groups and amplification from right-wing political figures suggests there’s more to these protests than meets the eye.

Convinced that sissy hypno porn has ‘manipulated’ them into liking men, cross-dressing and becoming trans, guys are turning to the problematic ‘feminization recovery’ industry for help