A Tallahassee judge threw out a long-simmering dispute Monday over whether state legislators misspent billions of dollars in real estate taxes — funds that were overwhelmingly approved by voters, nearly a decade ago, to buy conservation land. In his ruling, Judge J. Layne Smith said conservationists had dragged their feet after having a victory overturned by an appeals court in 2018 and sent back to his court. “The record reflects Plaintiffs did not prosecute this action with any urgency and the appropriations they are contesting have long since expired,” he wrote. The Sierra Club, part of a coalition of conservation groups battling lawmakers, said they were “confounded” by the new order after filling hundreds of documents in the case. “Judge Layne Smith’s decision affords the Florida Legislature the ability to use the tax money for anything from 1,000 camouflage baseball hats gifted to farmers, DirectTV service, and computer monitors to tens of millions of dollars for salaries,” the Sierra Club said in a statement. Passed in 2014, the Land Acquisition Trust Fund would have provided up to $1.6 billion a year to buy and save disappearing wild lands. With an overwhelming 75% approval, voters agreed to spend a third of real estate taxes over a decade to purchase land. But the next year when lawmakers instead spent more than two thirds of the money on more mundane matters, including risk management insurance, Sierra Club and the other conservation groups sued.

This reportby the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) provides an overview and analysis of the shifts observed in domestic extremist movements since the 2021 Capitol attack.

More than 150 people have pleaded guilty for crimes committed on Jan. 6, 2021. POLITICO is analyzing and tracking every sentence handed down.

Grichka Bogdanoff reportedly succumbed to complications from COVID-19. Six days later, so did Igor Bogdanoff. Both had refused to get vaccinated.

Defense Ministry expects to have a bolstered intercept system by late 2020s

“Just read their bio, that’s all you need. Remove the name and tell me what you have." After looking through every team’s coaching staff as of March 2021, I found that Adam and Mike and Nate and Pete are among 111 NFL coaches who are related biologically or through marriage to current or former NFL coaches, out of a total of 792 coaches employed by NFL teams. That’s 14 percent of all coaches. (I hand-counted this total based on my own research parameters: coaches listed on team website and anyone with the coaching assistant title. The NFL’s official coach count is 822: They count all coaching contracts submitted to the league office, which includes all interns who may not be listed on a staff website.) Mike Zimmer and Pete Carroll are two of five head coaches entering this season who oversaw a relative they hired onto their staff. Belichick has sons Steve and Brian as his outside linebackers and safeties coach; Jon Gruden had his son Deuce, whose first NFL job was on uncle Jay Gruden’s Washington staff, as his assistant strength coach in Las Vegas; and Ron Rivera has his nephew Vincent on staff as a defensive quality control coach.

As COVID-19 deaths approach 19,000 in Indiana, the insurance industry has been processing claims at a record rate. Nationally, more than 824,000 people have died from the virus. “We’re seeing right now the highest death rates we’ve ever seen in the history of this business,” said Scott Davison, the CEO of OneAmerica, a $100 billion life insurance and retirement company headquartered in Indianapolis.  “The data is consistent across every player in the business.” Davison said death rates among working age people – those 18 to 64-years-old – are up 40 percent in the third and fourth quarter of 2021 over pre-pandemic levels. “Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three sigma or 200-year catastrophe would be a 10 percent increase over pre-pandemic levels,” Davison said. “So, 40 percent is just unheard of.”

A jury found the Silicon Valley ex-CEO guilty on four of 11 counts after seven days of deliberations.

Texas’s natural gas industry had almost a year to prepare for last weekend’s cold blast and avoid another loss of production. But yet again, instruments froze, output plunged and companies spewed a miasma of pollutants into the atmosphere in a bid to keep operations stable.

This source said the discussions have focused on how to preserve the character of the Senate: "No one wants the Senate to be a hundred-member version of the House."

Some governments more than made up for people’s lost labour income by sending them vast amounts of money. That was America’s strategy: although unemployment soared as the economy locked down, households received more than $2trn in government transfers in 2020 and 2021, in the form of topped-up unemployment benefits and stimulus cheques. Canada did something similar. Other countries, however, such as the Baltics, focused their fiscal firepower on protecting firms’ cashflow or expanding health-care capacity. Austria and Spain seemed neither to preserve jobs nor compensate the losers: in both countries real household income is still around 6% below its pre-pandemic level.

The US state department says giving up citizenship requires a face-to-face interview with a government official, and that it is too risky given coronavirus.

Fake Plan: And on his way out the door, according to the New York Times, Green is touting a plan to geoengineer Mars into a planet habitable for humans. Green’s plan, published in November, hinges on warming and thickening Mars’ atmosphere by using a giant magnetic shield between the Red Planet and the Sun, which would bring temperature and pressure levels above the point at which humans could walk on the surface without a space suit, without their blood boiling inside their bodies. Real Plan: $$$$ -> Jim Green

The debate was ostensibly over a stop-gap spending bill that would avert a government shutdown. But Chip Roy, a Republican congressman from Texas, seized the opportunity to accuse Democrats of supporting “unconstitutional” vaccine mandates, critical race theory, “woke gender ideology” and open borders. A vote to fund the federal government, he warned, was a vote to allow “tyranny over the American citizen”.

Ken Levine’s highly anticipated project was supposed to be out in 2017. People who worked on it explainhow things went awry.

The controversy has roiled the small district south of Salinas and east of Monterey, alarming advocates for LGBTQ youth and marking one of several recent incidents in which influential conservative voices have forced the hands of local officials. The episode raises broader questions about educators’ growing ability to monitor what students do online, which accelerated during the pandemic, and about what responsibility schools have to provide safe spaces such as gay-straight alliances for LGBTQ students who may not have support from peers and parents.

The long U.S. copyright period adopted in recent decades has meant that many works that would now become available have long since been lost, because they were not profitable to maintain by the legal owners, but couldn’t be used by others. “The fact that works from 1926 are legally available does not mean they are actually available,” Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, said in a post celebrating Saturday’s “Public Domain Day.” “After 95 years, many of these works are already lost or literally disintegrating (as with old films and recordings), evidence of what long copyright terms do to the conservation of cultural artifacts.”

Africa along with South America and the Caribbean were the regions with the greatest amount of deforestation, both losing more than 15% of their forests over the past 30 years. This is largely because these two regions have large amounts of forest area available, with the underlying land in high demand for agriculture and cattle-raising.

Always has been

“If they were really interested in making a difference in health, then they’d open the watch to work with Android,” Milanesi said. “But they’re not doing that.”