News

Hello fellow Lemmys. The mod team here at !news@lemmy.world has been in discussions about the best approach to ensure we stay unbiased with news during the U.S. Election Cycle.

While we can't say "don't point out flaws in candidates" - nor would we want to - we do believe that when you excessively post/comment/reply negative things in News about one person, instead of, say mixing it up about topics, this feels like you are using !news@lemmy.world as a propaganda machine.

While propaganda is a normal part of elections, by posting only one topic, about one person, you are abusing the NEWS community for politics, and this could even be seen as election interference. There are other communities that this would fit better.

Doing this will result in posts/comments being deleted (with the option to appeal, of course). Repeat offenders may see temporary bans. Keep doing after that, and you may reach our perma-ban list.

As of right now, this only apples to politics. We don't plan to extend this to other areas, but that will change as needed.

Gov. Ron DeSantis gave no explanation for zeroing out the $32 million in grants that were approved by state lawmakers.

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Leaders of arts organizations in Florida, many of whom have worked in the state for decades, cannot remember a governor ever eliminating all of their grant funding. Even in the lean years of the Great Recession, at least a nominal amount — say, 5 percent of the recommended total — was approved.

Established arts organizations usually know better than to overly rely on nonrecurring state dollars subject to the discretion of politicians, said Michael Tomor, executive director of the Tampa Museum of Art. But to cut funding at a time when arts organizations are still struggling to recover from the coronavirus pandemic sends a concerning message “that taxpayer dollars should not be used in support of arts and culture,” he added.

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Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, gave no explanation for zeroing out the arts grants. His office said in a statement that he made veto decisions “that are in the best interests of the State of Florida.”

In all, Mr. DeSantis vetoed nearly $950 million in proposed spending and proclaimed that the remaining $116.5 billion came in under the previous year’s budget.

Non-paywall link

Your favorite clothes, cookware, and even dental floss may contain toxic chemicals that are harmful to human health. Now, a new Colorado law is aiming to make those products safer.

The new law will affect all kinds of things Coloradans buy and use every day, that are made using something called per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

They are commonly called "forever chemicals," because of how durable they are, which makes them great ingredients in things like waterproof clothing and nonstick cookware.

The problem is, the more humans are exposed to PFAS, the more they can build up in the body, and can increase the risk of serious health problems, including cancer, heart disease, and infertility.

This week, advocates celebrated the passage of the new law in Broomfield.

The country’s aging population and low fertility rate jeopardizes the solvency of Social Security and the Medicare program, according to a new study by Brookings

The immigration crisis  has become a recurring theme in social gatherings and political debates, and is the main issue of the U.S. presidential election. Amid this discussion, one certainty stands out: while it’s well known that migrants have a need to live in the United States, a study has highlighted that the country needs them too.

Twenty percent of U.S. workers were not born in the United States, and it is expected that in the near future more than seven million more migrants will be needed for the labor market. That’s according to a study by Brookings, which warns about how the higher-than-expected increase in pensioners following the Covid-19 pandemic will affect the U.S. economy.

As the baby boomer generation approaches age 80, two challenges are facing the U.S. economy: providing staff to care for the elderly and ensuring the solvency of Social Security and the Medicare program.

>Kyle Rittenhouse's sister Faith is seeking $3,000 on a crowdfunding website in a bid to prevent the eviction of herself and her mother Wendy from their home, citing her "brother's unwillingness to provide or contribute to our family."

A dangerous heat wave is bringing sweltering temperatures to much of the US this weekend, including over parts of the Ohio Valley and mid-Atlantic. Meanwhile, a tropical system could develop this weekend through the southwest Gulf of Mexico.

A journalist shot by police during the 2020 Minneapolis unrest following the murder of George Floyd is dying from her injuries, friends say.

Linda Tirado was in Minneapolis from out of state covering the protests and rioting when police shot her in the face with a rubber bullet, also known as a "less-lethal" round. She suffered a traumatic brain injury and was blinded in one eye.

If the Supreme Court ultimately takes the case and overturns the pillar, this could have a widespread impact on out-of-pocket health care costs, including costs for the HIV-prevention pill, known as PrEP.

A federal appeals court on Friday found unconstitutional a key component of the Affordable Care Act that grants a health task force the effective authority to require that insurers both cover an array of preventive health interventions and screenings and refrain from imposing out-of-pocket costs for them.

The lawsuit centered on the objections of a coalition of small businesses in Texas to the requirement that they cover a drug for HIV prevention, known as PrEP, in their employee health plans. The appeals court did not, however, overturn the related ACA pillar; the practical, immediate impacts of its ruling apply narrowly to the plaintiffs in this case.

Legal experts expect that the case, Braidwood v. Becerra, will ultimately advance to the Supreme Court, given that it poses crucial questions about the constitutionality of the health task force’s effective authority and that of other federal health bodies. Additionally, the current court has demonstrated interest in cases concerning the delegation of congressional authority to agencies and experts.

Texas law bans abortion, except when a doctor, in their “reasonable medical judgment,” believes it is necessary to save the life or protect the health of the pregnant patient. Doctors have struggled to know when they can safely intervene without risking their medical license, as well as potentially up to life in prison and a $100,000 fine.

The guidance was criticized as both overly vague and overly prescriptive. At a stakeholder meeting in May, Steve Bresnen said the board shouldn’t “be afraid to start with a blank slate.”

A family in Naples, Florida, whose home was struck by debris that fell to Earth from outer space and punched a hole in the roof is pursuing $80,000 from Nasa in compensation for damages.

The law firm Cranfill Sumner said in a press release that it filed a claim on behalf of plaintiff Alejandro Otero and his family.

A metallic cylinder slab from a cargo pallet that had been released by the International Space Station in 2021 hit the Otero family home on 8 March 2024 while their son Daniel was home. No one was injured, though it created a hole in the roof and floor.

Otero told Wink News that the object almost hit his son, who was two rooms over.

The US space agency later confirmed the debris was from its flight support equipment. A section of the debris remained intact rather than disintegrating after it entered Earth’s atmosphere before falling to the surface.

The federal judge presiding over the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump is hearing arguments Friday on a long-shot defense effort to get the indictment thrown out based on the claim that the prosecutor who brought the charges was illegally appointed.

The arguments over the legality of special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment kick off a three-day hearing that is set to continue next week and bring further delays to a criminal case that had been scheduled for trial last month but has been snarled by a pileup of unresolved legal disputes. The motion questioning Smith’s selection and funding by the Justice Department is one of multiple challenges to the indictment the defense has raised, so far unsuccessfully, in the year since the charges were brought.

Even as Smith’s team looks to press forward on a prosecution seen by many legal experts as the most straightforward and clear-cut of the four prosecutions against Trump, Friday’s arguments before U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon won’t involve discussion of the allegations against the former president. They’ll center instead on decades-old regulations governing the appointment of Justice Department special counsels like Smith, reflecting the judge’s continued willingness to entertain defense arguments that prosecutors say are meritless, contributing to the indefinite cancelation of a trial date.

After a year of funding uncertainty in Congress, agencies are struggling to recruit and retain firefighters.

As the first major heat wave of the year swept through the Western U.S. last week, placing the region on high fire alert, dozens of federal fire engines sat unstaffed in the midst of a firefighter exodus.

Across the federal government, wildland firefighters are walking away, frustrated by low pay, lack of support and congressional inaction, according to firefighter advocates.

“Hiring numbers this year are deplorable,” said Riva Duncan, vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an organization advocating for federal firefighters. “Agencies are struggling, again, to fill positions in dispatch and on engines, Hotshot crews, helicopters and jump planes”

Firefighters face a Sept. 30 funding deadline, when a $20,000 or 50% retention bonus established by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021 could expire.

Should the funding expire, starting wages would revert to the federal employee minimum of just $15 an hour, a rate the Government Accountability Office said in a report “does not reflect the risk or physical demands of the work.”

The men made millions of dollars streaming stolen copyrighted content to tens of thousands of paid subscribers, the Justice Department said.

Five men were convicted by a federal jury in Las Vegas this week for running a large illegal streaming service called Jetflicks, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Kristopher Dallmann, Douglas Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Jaurequi, and Peter Huber began operating the subscription service as early as 2007, the Justice Department said in a release Thursday. They would find illegal copies of content online that they then downloaded to Jetflicks servers, the release said.

The men made millions of dollars streaming this content to tens of thousands of paid subscribers, according to the Justice Department.

Hadley Duvall of Owensboro, Kentucky, first told her story publicly last fall in a campaign ad for the governor’s race in her home state, discussing the consequences of abortion restrictions, particularly those without exceptions for rape or incest.

In the ad supporting Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, Duvall spoke of how she was raped by her stepfather at age 12, became pregnant and miscarried. Her stepfather was convicted of rape and is in prison.

In the ad, Duvall called out the anti-abortion Republican candidate by name and said that “anyone who believes there should be no exceptions for rape and incest could never understand what it’s like to stand in my shoes.”

Rights activists have noted that, although prosecutions under the "sodomy" and "unnatural sexual offences" laws were infrequent, these laws have fostered ongoing discrimination against the LGBTQ community and instilled fear of arrest among gay men.

Namibia inherited the laws when it gained independence from South Africa in 1990, though same-sex acts between men were initially criminalised under colonial rule.

South Africa has since decriminalised same-sex sexual activity and is the only country on the African continent to allow LGBTQ couples to adopt children, marry and enter civil unions.

Jacob Riis Beach hosts the day of body positivity and fun, in the city at the heart of the fat acceptance movement

Fat Beach Day events are springing up across the US in an effort to fight back against fat-phobia, reclaim safe spaces for the community and honor plus-size culture. Today, one of these celebrations is being held to coincide with Pride month at Jacob Riis Beach in New York, a location deeply ensconced in the city’s activism space.

Exclusive: if ex-president succeeds, prosecutors could be left with only a sliver of evidence for obstruction charge

Donald Trump is expected next week to ask the federal judge presiding in the criminal case over his retention of classified documents to revoke prosecutors’ access to memos made by his ex-lawyer that became key evidence of his efforts to obstruct the investigation, according to sources familiar with the plans.

The request will be made before US district judge Aileen Cannon at a sealed hearing Tuesday. The former president last month challenged prosecutors’ access to transcripts of voice memos made by ex-lawyer Evan Corcoran, but what Trump will seek behind closed doors has not been reported.

Trump’s lawyers are expected to argue that none of the memos should have been given to prosecutors on the crime-fraud exception, which allows prosecutors to see privileged communications between a defendant and a lawyer, if their legal advice was used in furtherance of a crime.

On Tuesday, a Virginia appeals court fully absolved Marvin Grimm Jr. of the 1975 crime, saying that new evidence had dismantled the state’s original case against him.

On a Saturday afternoon in 1975, a 3-year-old boy wandered into the woods behind the apartment complex where he lived in Richmond, Va.

Four days later, the toddler’s body was found floating in shallow water in the James River, fully clothed, arms folded across his chest, nine miles from home.

From there, the horror only grew: Forensic experts told the police that the boy had a gob of semen in the back of his throat and determined that he had been strangled during a sexual assault. Alcohol and a muscle relaxant were found in his blood, according to court documents.

About a month later, in December, the police arrested Marvin Leon Grimm Jr., a 20-year-old Navy veteran, picking him up after his shift at a carpeting company and questioning him for nine hours. Mr. Grimm, who had no criminal record, lived across the hall from the boy’s family and had argued with them over minor issues like toys that were damaged by his lawn mower. He was married, and his first child, a son, had been born 10 days before his arrest.

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Much of the key evidence that linked Mr. Grimm to the killing was the work of Mary Jane Burton, a senior analyst at Virginia’s crime lab who died in 1999.

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But in a recent podcast investigation of Ms. Burton’s work, a whistle-blower revealed that she had tried to alert officials that Ms. Burton was cutting corners and falsifying results, and an independent expert said that the serology evidence that Ms. Burton had analyzed in one of her own cases excluded the man who went on to be convicted of the crime. The podcast also noted that there were several accounts of shoddy work by Ms. Burton, and a perception that she favored the prosecution.

The podcast, “Admissible: Shreds of Evidence,” has triggered state reviews of about 4,800 cases handled by Ms. Burton. But the Grimm case was still jarring, said Tessa Kramer, the journalist who produced it.

Joseph Komrosky, who decried critical race theory and called Harvey Milk a pedophile, was recalled by 51% of Temecula voters

Voters in Temecula, California, have ousted the local school board president who thrust the political body to the forefront of rightwing culture wars seeking to eliminate discussions of race and gender identity from the classroom.

Joseph Komrosky on Thursday lost a recall vote with 51% of voters favoring his removal.

Temecula – a predominantly white city of 100,000 residents – was a hotbed of the culture wars that conservative Americans have mounted in an attempt to censure how schools teach racism, gender and American history.

In June of 2023, Komrosky presided over the Temecula school board’s banning of critical race theory – which examines how racism was embedded into American law – as well as attempts to purge elementary school textbooks of any reference to Harvey Milk, the openly gay politician from San Francisco who supported LGBTQ+ rights before his 1978 assassination.

Rep. William Timmons (R-S.C.) introduced a resolution Friday urging the Supreme Court to “intervene” in the hush money case against former President Donald Trump before the 2024 election — a move that experts say is a political stunt that faces significant legal obstacles.

Citing the “All Writs Act,” by which the court “may issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law,” the resolution calls on SCOTUS to intervene in the case “with all deliberate speed and possible urgency.”

The resolution argues for the court’s intervention on the basis that Americans need to make “informed decisions” in the upcoming election. It also echoes Trump’s oft-used complaint that the trial — and ultimately conviction — stemmed from the “politically motivated prosecution by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.”