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California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health filed a complaint against the city of San Francisco for “dangerous, inhumane treatment” of city employees. The Imminent Hazard complaint alleges that the city has failed to provide handwashing and toilet facilities, and failed to enforce COVID safety measures for its city workers. According to Cal-OSHA, nine workers at the Cesar Chavez St. Maintenance Yard facility have tested positive for COVID-19 in the the last three weeks of January. “We need action now to protect workers and the public from COVID-19,” said Theresa Foglio-Ramirez, Business Agent for Laborers’ Local Union 261, which represents...

Oh!!! Well now that we know THAT... https://twitter.com/MAJTOURE/status/1337201375151874049

Pope Francis has lamented that children are being taught at school that gender can be a choice, adding that his predecessor, Benedict XVI has labeled current times 'the epoch of sin against God the Creator'. Francis weighed in with his view on gender and what he said was that of the emeritus pontiff while meeting privately last week with bishops from Poland during his pilgrimage there. The pope said he wanted to conclude his remarks by reflecting on this: 'We are living a moment of annihilation of man as image of God.' Francis said: 'Today, in schools they are teaching...

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Researchers in the US have developed an implant to help a disabled brain encode memories, giving new hope to Alzheimer’s sufferers and wounded soldiers who cannot remember the recent past. The prosthetic, developed at the University of Southern California and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre in a decade-long collaboration, includes a small array of electrodes implanted into the brain. High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this...

Does it matter whether or not matter is eternal? Peter J. Leithart, who writes a regular blog on the web site of First Things, definitely thinks it does. According to Leithart , who is a Protestant theologian in the Reformed Presbyterian tradition in the United States, if matter is eternal, "creation can only be control, limitation, ordering." Then God could only be a master craftsman, working with already existing material to form the universe. If matter is eternal, "creation cannot be a gift; . . . cannot be the bestowal of existence, a grant of being." Finally, if matter is...

Following today’s report on the increase in applications for U.S. unemployment benefits, CNBC’s Rick Santelli decided to take on the Obama campaign and its claim that the president has created “five million jobs.” “You can slice it any way you want!” Santelli shouted in his inimitable style. “The president was sworn in in mid-January of ’09.” “If I go back and look at nonfarm — and I have all the data! — actual nonfarm payrolls, the establishment survey, the headcount survey, and I take the 818 minus thousand from January,” he added, referring to the monthly job loss numbers the...

Politics: A week ago, as the secretary of labor greeted grim job data by hailing the economy's "turnaround," the Dow fell 100 points in seconds — a vivid sign America is wising up to this administration's incompetence. Only minutes after her department reported that payrolls had shed another 131,000 positions in July, there was Secretary Hilda Solis speaking brazenly of the "strong and immediate action" the White House had taken to save or create "more than 2.5 million American jobs." But as the market action showed, investors could see she didn't know what she was talking about. But then, Solis...

Did Obama’s “Stimulus” Create or Save Jobs? The official line is that President Obama’s 2009 “stimulus” package (tax cuts and spending increases) “created or saved” more than 3.5 million jobs. Is that so? It depends on what you mean by created, saved, and jobs. It is certainly true that the federal government gave money to the states and localities, and some of that money was used to pay teachers, police officers, and firefighters. However, to say that this “saved” those jobs implies that they really would have vanished without federal money. In some cases, state and local politicians might have...

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said during a Twitter townhall today that the 2009 stimulus bill has created clean "thousands" of green energy jobs. Reid also promised that President Obama's latest jobs proposal, criticized as yet another roung of stimulus, would create "hundreds of thousands of jobs" if Republicans would pass the legislation. Speaking to a staffer moderating the debate, Reid said that "the economic recovery act we passed, the stimulus bill, has done a lot of that." Reid reiterated the claim on a live tweet issued by his staff, which also tweeted that viewers can

The jobs created and saved by the economic stimulus law that President Barack Obama signed on Feb. 17, 2009 cost at a minimum an average of $228,055 each, according to data released yesterday by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). ...a report released Wednesday-"Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output from October Through December 2010"-the CBO said it now estimates the stimulus law cost a total of $821 billion, up from CBO's original estimate that the stimulus would cost $787 billion. In the same report, the CBO estimated that in the fourth quarter of...

This morning’s predictably dejecting jobs report provided the GOP presidential candidates with an apt opportunity to cast the president in an unflattering light — and to contrast his approach with what their own would be. Memorably, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney framed his statement in a way that leaves voters displeased with the economy little choice but to vote Obama out of office. “When you see what this president has done to the economy in just three years, you know why America doesn’t want to find out what he can do in eight,” former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said. Importantly,...

In the April 6 print edition of the Washington Post, Jerusalem correspondent Joel Greenberg blames Israel for creating the Palestinian refugee problem. Palestinian families, he writes, were "pushed out of what is now Israel when the Jewish state was created in 1948." Thus, it was Israel's establishment that was responsible for the Palestinian refugee problem. However, on the April 6 Washington Post website, Jerusalem correspondent Joel Greenberg offers a completely different explanation for the Palestinian refugee problem. Some Arab families, he writes, were "displaced in the war that followed the establishment of Israel in 1948. So, it wasn't Israel's cration...

During his 2008 campaign, President Obama famously mocked blue-ribbon panels and commissions: "A commission. You know, that's Washington-speak for 'we'll get back to you later.' " He couldn't have been more correct in the case of a panel that his longtime friend, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, D, ordered up in late 2008 to address the state's job market. The panel hasn't even met yet, the Boston Herald reports, because the commissioners have only just recently taken their jobs on it. A jobs commission ordered almost two years ago by Gov. Deval Patrick and the Legislature to find ways to create...

On Tuesday's Situation Room, CNN's Jack Cafferty used the term "Obama-nation," a pun on the word "abomination," which is used on many conservative blogs, to slam the "sprawling bureaucratic giant...that seems to be the result of President Obama's new health care law." Cafferty admitted during his commentary that ObamaCare is "shaping up to be exactly what the critics were afraid it would be." The CNN commentator devoted his regular Cafferty File segment 12 minutes into the 6 pm Eastern hour to the recent report from the Congressional Research Service that, as Cafferty put it, "says it's 'impossible' to estimate the...

Stimulus-related construction spending is up in the city of Portland -- but it's not clear how many jobs have been created from that uptick, according to a city audit released Monday. City Auditor LaVonne Griffin-Valade said a key reason is the city did not require contractors to track the number of people hired for projects. In 2009, state lawmakers borrowed $172 million for "Go Oregon" public works projects, and required contractors to submit forms detailing the number of people hired and for how long. As a result, state officials boasted that more than 7,500 jobs were "created or retained" with...

WASHINGTON – The economic stimulus law added between 1 million to 2.1 million workers to employment rolls by the end of last year, a new report released Tuesday by congressional economists said. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office study also said the $862 billion stimulus added between 1.5 to 3.5 percentage points to the growth of the economy in 2009. The controversial stimulus law combined tax breaks for individuals and businesses with lots of government spending. The report reflects agreement among economists that the measure boosted the economy. But the wide range of estimates means it won't resolve the debate over...

An electromagnetic "black holeMovie Camera" that sucks in surrounding light has been built for the first time. The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity. A theoretical design for a table-top black hole to trap light was proposed in a paper published earlier this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alexander Kildishev of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Their idea was to mimic the properties of a cosmological black hole, whose intense gravity bends the surrounding space-time, causing any nearby...

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez attacked Israel Thursday during his visit to Syria, calling it an imperialist nation that annihilates other people. Venezuelan President Hugo... Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez speaks during a joint press conference with his Syrian counterpart Bashar Assad at al-Shaab presidential palace in Damascus, Chavez comments came during a news conference with his Syrian counterpart Bashar Assad after a one-hour meeting at the hilltop presidential palace. "Israel has become a country that annihilates people and is hostile to peace," he said, according to the Arabic translation of his remarks to reporters

Created or Saved I’ve been a bit skeptical on how Obama keeps saying he’s “created or saved” different numbers of jobs, but the media seems credulous so I guess “created or saved” is a perfectly fine formulation. Thus we might as well apply the phrase to lots of different things. * I decided not to be bloodthirsty against common nuisances today and created or saved three squirrels. * By not going to McDonalds, I created or saved two cheeseburgers and a large fry. * Deciding against serial killing, i created or saved upwards of 33 people (I’m very smart and...

« Irradiate a millimeter-thick gold target with the right kind of laser and you might get a surprise in the form of 100 billion positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons. Researchers had been studying the process at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where they used thin targets that produced far fewer positrons. The new laser method came about through simulations that showed a thicker target was more effective.And suddenly lasers and antimatter are again making news. Hui Chen is the Livermore scientist behind this work: “We’ve detected far more anti-matter than anyone else has ever measured in a laser experiment....