United States | News & Politics

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29553959

‘To think the prime age for playing with dolls is 11 is almost impressively wrong,’ John Oliver noted on his Sunday night HBO program

The Trump administration suspended the use of military aircraft for deporting migrants to Guantanamo Bay on March 1.

Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing cities and counties to ban homeless encampments as he continues to press on a core voter concern.

“The time for inaction is over,” Newsom said in a statement. “There are no more excuses.”

Newsom’s release of a model ordinance prohibiting encampments builds on years of efforts to make cities and counties move people off the streets and into shelter. He’s also taking advantage of a political and legal landscape that increasingly favors clearing the tents that have proliferated in parks and on sidewalks across the state.

He embraced the Supreme Court’s 2024 reversal of a lower-court ruling that barred clearing encampments in the absence of sufficient shelter alternatives. His proposal comes amid rising voter support for tougher tactics, reflected by a recent proposal from San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan to arrest people who repeatedly refuse offers of shelter.

The proposed order attempts a balanced approach, with a memo from Newsom emphasizing the need to connect people to services and denouncing “inhumane” policies that “prohibit individuals from sleeping outside anywhere in the jurisdiction without offering adequate indoor shelter, effectively banishing homeless individuals from the jurisdiction’s borders.”

But it speaks to how the issue has vexed Democrats for decades. Six years after Newsom devoted his State of the State speech to California’s homelessness crisis, it continues to be a political hazard for elected officials across the state — and the governor has signaled he is losing patience.

He has doled out billions of dollars to help local governments clear encampments. He has also increasingly demanded cities and counties move more aggressively on the issue or risk losing out on state aid. Last week he excoriated a Central Valley city that refused to allocate a single dollar that would have unlocked state funding.

“Local leaders asked for resources — we delivered the largest state investment in history,” Newsom said in a statement. “They asked for legal clarity — the courts delivered.”

The bill text is a section of the budget reconciliation package that the GOP hopes to complete as soon as Memorial Day.

Republicans try to use the Budget Reconciliation bill to stop states from regulating AI entirely for 10 years.

Donald Trump hailed a “total reset” in relations between China and the US after the countries agreed a 90-day pause to the deepening trade war that has threatened to upend the global economy, with tariffs to be lowered by 115 percentage points.

“They’ve agreed to open up China,” the US president claimed at a press conference at the White House on Monday morning, having spent months escalating tensions with Beijing by ratcheting up tariffs on the country’s exports.

After talks in Geneva, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said both sides had shown “great respect” in the negotiations. “The consensus from both delegations this weekend was neither side wants a decoupling,” he said.

With weather catastrophes becoming more common in the United States these days, communities have counted on two facts.

The United States’ version of capitalism has systematically failed its population through corporate greed and manipulation of the legislature. But don’t lose hope.

"says"

• Lagging Results: Oregon and Washington trailed most states in adding renewable energy during the past decade, despite pledges to eliminate fossil fuels from power generation.
• Unique Barrier: The Bonneville Power Administration, whose approval is needed for most wind and solar work in the Northwest, has barely approved any big applications made since 2015.
• Missing Investment: Lawmakers were told of the need for better transmission, which Bonneville would have to finance, when they passed new mandates for green energy. They forged ahead anyway.

The White House is unveiling an aggressive drug pricing strategy targeting pharmaceutical companies, promising to dramatically cut prescription drug costs for American consumers.

Donald Trump condemned the current pricing system as a “redistribution” that has allowed drugmakers to exploit US patients and signed an executive order that he says will lead to matching lower drug prices abroad.

“We are subsidizing others’ healthcare, where they paid a small fraction of what we pay,” the president said in a press conference on Monday, flanked by health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and centers for Medicare and Medicaid services administrator Mehmet Oz.

In other news, The Onion has announced they're closing up shop, "Reality is just too much of a parody in of itself" /jk lol