United States | News & Politics

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.”

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

"says"

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.

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

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.

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.

• 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.

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

PLAINVILLE, Conn. (CNN Newsource/WFSB/WKRC) - A middle school student was hospitalized and will face charges after carrying out a popular social media trend.

Plainville Middle School has officially been added to the list of schools who have had students take part in a dangerous TikTok trend that involves Chromebooks. The trend involves students putting items in the laptop's USB port to cause a fire. Several videos of this trend have gone viral online.

According to police, the student who did this trend caused the laptop to short-circuit after sticking scissors in the USB port. The student was subsequently hospitalized due to smoke inhalation.

"To put a metal object in a USB port is absolutely dangerous. [It's] like the Tide Pod challenge they had years ago, and they were eating them, and I'm like, 'What are kids doing nowadays?'" said parent Natasha French.

The popularity of the trend has led schools across the country to crack down on the trend.