The city of San Francisco took a dramatic step Wednesday in its effort to get children back into public school classrooms, suing its own school district to try to force open the doors amid the coronavirus pandemic.

As President Biden takes the helm, conservation groups take stock of the border wall’s environmental impacts. In the last year and a half, crews have raced to complete the border wall promised by President Donald Trump. By the time his term ended, many of the construction projects across Arizona’s Borderlands were complete. As President Joe Biden takes office, environmental groups are taking stock of the environmental destruction caused by the wall as they make the case for restoration. Much of Arizona’s international border with Mexico is made up of public lands, places set aside by the federal government for special protection because of their unique ecological value — Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the San Pedro National Riparian Conservation Area, and Cabeza Prieta and San Bernardino national wildlife refuges, among others. So when the Trump administration released its first plans for new border wall construction in Arizona in May 2019, environmentalists were horrified to see that nearly all the proposed wall segments were on those public lands. “(The administration) really started to push out into remote, rugged terrain on public lands all across the borderline in Arizona, where the ecological value of those places is so much higher that the damage done by this construction is much more egregious,” said Randy Serraglio, Southwest conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity. For months now, construction crews have been dynamiting, drilling, pumping, excavating and clear-cutting public land. In places like Guadalupe Canyon in far eastern Arizona, simply building roads to bring in construction equipment involved blasting mountainsides and sending the rubble down to clog drainages. Previously wide-open landscapes where wildlife and water could move freely have been severed by the huge steel barrier. The Sonoran Desert’s iconic saguaros, protected by law, have been found lying in heaps next to construction sites. “This is damage that will not ever be remediated or mitigated,” Serraglio said. “This is permanent.”

In recent days, the message from the former president, his advisers, and his MAGA diehards still on Capitol Hill was clear: Liz Cheney’s career implosion is a top, vital priority. People close to Trump say he views Cheney’s immediate fortunes as one of the first tests of his lasting influence on the party and conservative movement. But due to Twitter’s banning of the @realDonaldTrump account following the Capitol riot that Trump instigated, he has not been able to personally trash Cheney via his once widely read tweets. He has written out insults and observations, several of them about Cheney, but with no ability to tweet them himself, he has resorted to suggesting put-downs for others to use or post to their own Twitter, according to a person with direct knowledge of this new habit.

Public Safety Minister Bill Blair announced today that the federal government will designate 13 groups as terrorist entities, adding some white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups to a list already populated with militant Islamist organizations.

Newly unearthed documents have shed new light on the FBI’s role in the murder of the 21-year-old Black Panther leader Fred Hampton on December 4, 1969, when Chicago police raided Hampton’s apartment and shot and killed him in his bed, along with fellow Black Panther leader Mark Clark. Authorities initially claimed the Panthers had opened fire on the police who were there to serve a search warrant for weapons, but evidence later emerged that told a very different story: The FBI, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and the Chicago police had conspired to assassinate Fred Hampton. FBI memos and reports obtained by historian and writer Aaron Leonard now show that senior FBI officials played key roles in planning the raid and the subsequent cover-up. “It was approved at the highest level,” says attorney Jeff Haas. We also speak with attorney Flint Taylor. Both are with the People’s Law Office and were the lead lawyers in a landmark civil rights case over the deaths of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.

The Starship SN9 that blew up on its final descent, like the SN8 before it, was a test model of the heavy-lift rocket being developed by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s private space company to carry humans and 100 tons of cargo on future missions to the moon and Mars. The self-guided, 16-story-tall rocket initially soared into the clear, blue South Texas sky from its Gulf Coast launch pad on what appeared from SpaceX’s livestream coverage to be a flawless liftoff. Reaching its peak altitude of about 10 km (6 miles), the spacecraft then hovered momentarily in midair, shut off its engines and executed a planned “belly-flop” maneuver to descend nose-down under aerodynamic control back toward Earth.

On Tuesday, the House instated new rules to issue a $5,000 fine to any lawmakers who refuse to go through the metal detector that was installed outside of the Congressional chamber four days after the January 6 insurrection. A second refusal will result in a $10,000 fine. The rules were passed by House Democrats as part of a measure setting floor debate parameters for a budget resolution, according to The Hill. Democrats are expected to use a budget resolution to pass a coronavirus stimulus bill without Republican support. The new rules require the House Ethics Committee to publicly announce any fines incurred by non-compliant lawmakers. Lawmakers won't be able to pay fines with campaign funds or congressional office budget funds, but they will be allowed to appeal the fines within 30 calendar days or five legislative days, whichever is later. The House Ethics Committee will have the same time-span to consider a appeal.

Senate leaders reached a deal to transfer control of committees to Democrats, two weeks after the party took control of the chamber, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday. The New York Democrat came to a deal with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on how to share power in a Senate split 50-50. The two wrangled for weeks over how to structure Senate rules, technically leaving Republicans in control of committees that decide when to move ahead with nominations and legislation. Schumer said the Senate will pass the organizing resolution later Wednesday. Approval will mean “committees can promptly set up and get to work with Democrats holding the gavels,” he added.

Support for a 2024 run by former President Donald Trump has cratered by 20 points since December, in a stunning poll that illustrates the political bind many Republicans find themselves in. The new survey from Echelon Insights found that only 45 percent of Republicans would “like to see Donald Trump run for president in 2024,” down from 65 percent in December.

The Royal Canadian Navy will be moving ahead with releasing a sailor who was found to be advertising the sale of foreign arms deals in a notorious neo-Nazi forum.

The Biden administration is opening an overflow facility for unaccompanied migrant children apprehended at the US-Mexico border, the federal agency tasked with the children's care told CNN in a statement.

432 Park, one of the wealthiest addresses in the world, faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high-rises may share its fate.

The Proud Boys’ former lawyer says he’s taking the name back.

Wood, who claimed the presidential election was stolen, told an Atlanta-based reporter that he has lived in South Carolina "for several months."

It is the first major legal test of a 2018 law that makes it a crime to falsely accuse the Polish nation of crimes committed by Nazi Germany.

The marquee sign at a shuttered Sunnyside movie theater was altered over the weekend with the perpetrator taking aim at the landlord. “Death by Speculation, Starring Limpdick Landlord,” the sign reads, which appears to have gone up in the past 24 hours. The vacant cinema, located at 42-17 Queens Blvd., closed in January 2015 after its operator Rudy Prashad was unable to renew the lease. The landlord, John Ciafone, who bought the property off Dime Savings Bank at the end of 2012, decided that he wanted to develop the property. Ciafone, who still owns the building, was subject to heavy criticism at the time since a theater had been located at the Queens Boulevard site for more than 40 years.

The Frontier, a huge Fallout: New Vegas mod that was pulled last week after one of its artists was found to have posted “animated pedophillic content” online, is now back. The work of that contributor—which reportedly amounted to “the vast majority of pip-boy icons”—has been removed, but so too have some other things that had got people’s attention since downloading the mod, along with the work of some contributors who, in the wake of all this, no longer wished to be associated with The Frontier.

The biggest factor for how much pain people report is their age. Carrying the Neanderthal variant of the ion channel, however, makes a person experience more pain -- similar to if they were eight years older, researchers explained in a paper published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

In December, Sara Carstens, a model and creator on social media, reached for a brownish lipstick and swiped it beneath her eyes where she would typically apply concealer, posting the footage to TikTok. “The entire goal is to normalize dark circles,” Ms. Carstens, 19, said in an interview. She wants them to be considered not ugly but “normal.” (none of this bullshit matters and I submitted the article because it contains the first recorded use of the word "femboy" by the New York Times)

Looks like it's no more Mr. Nice Guy.