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Washington Democrats’ controversial income tax bill emerged from a state House panel Friday looking much different than when it arrived. The House Finance Committee stripped out a proposed tax break for large companies, sped up repeal of a new sales tax on services, and eliminated the sales tax on diapers. Those are among the most […]

Le ministère de la Santé a confirmé, vendredi 27 février, la fuite de données personnelles, dont certaines médicales, concernant 15 millions de Français. Cette fuite a fait suite au piratage, fin 2025, d'une entreprise spécialisée dans l'hébergement de données de santé. Les faits ont été révélés jeudi par la chaîne France 2.

The board appointed longtime school administrator Andres Chait as interim superintendent.

EAST CAMDEN — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth praised Arkansas’ munitions industry Friday during the final stop on his Arsenal of Freedom speaking tour at the L3Harris arms manufacturing campus. Speaking before hundreds of L3Harris employees, Hegseth called the workers “patriots” and said the U.S. military “must unleash our warfighters with the lethal tools only you […]

Tarifas foram zeradas para 105 produtos eletrônicos; outros 15 tiveram as taxas de importação reduzidas Fonte

Jamario Sanford, 38, pleaded guilty Friday to charges involving the transportation and distribution of cocaine across several counties.

OKLAHOMA CITY — A tense final day of witness testimony brought an unusually lengthy preliminary hearing to a close for the co-founders of Epic Charter School. Now, Oklahoma County Special Judge Jason Glidewell must determine whether the prosecution of David Chaney, 46, and Ben Harris, 50, can advance toward trial. He is expected to rule […]

The two online bookies who financed the campaign to legalize sports wagering in Missouri have won $120 million from bets placed in the state but so far have not had to pay any tax on those profits. FanDuel and DraftKings handled 73% of the $928 million wagered in Missouri during the first two months of […]

A ministra Cármen Lúcia, do Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF), liberou nesta sexta-feira (27) a participação da atleta transgênero Tiffany Abreu nos jogos das semifinais da Copa Brasil de vôlei feminino, que serão realizados neste final da semana em Londrina (PR). A decisão da ministra foi proferida após a Confederação Brasileira de Voleibol (CBV) recorrer ao […] Fonte

The commission's recommendations will go to the City Council, which must decide whether to place the on the June ballot.

A North Dakota judge officially ordered Greenpeace to pay $345 million to the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline following a nearly yearlong tug-of-war over a Morton County jury’s verdict. The jury in March 2025 originally ordered Greenpeace to pay Energy Transfer about $667 million, finding the environmental group at fault for harming the company […]

วาไรตี้โชว์ ฟังสบายๆ สำหรับวันหยุดสุดสัปดาห์ เริ่มด้วยการประมวลข่าวในรอบสัปดาห์ รายงานเกี่ยวกับชุมชนไทยในอเมริกา หรือเรื่องน่ารู้ต่างๆ ส่งท้ายด้วยรายการบันเทิง วิจารณ์ภาพยนตร์และเพลง

(The Center Square) – Proponents and opponents of a property tax reform bill had their say Friday morning at a public hearing before the Washington State House Finance Committee. Senate Bill 6162, which passed the Senate earlier this month on a 41-8 vote, would expand and streamline property tax relief for senior citizens, individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in Washington. Key provisions of SB 6162 include increasing income thresholds for exemption programs by 10 to 15 percentage points, consolidating state school levies, and introducing a standard deduction option for income calculation. The bill is designed to be revenue-neutral, shifting approximately $200 million per year in taxes from qualified individuals to the rest of the tax-paying public. It is estimated to expand property tax exemptions to approximately 30,000 additional people. Sen. Deb Krishnadason, D-Gig Harbor, is the prime sponsor of the bill. “Really, at the core of this legislation, it’s bringing and strengthening critically important property tax exemptions to our most vulnerable, our low income, fixed-income seniors, disabled persons and disable veterans,” she told the committee. “And it will help so many … so that they can stay in their homes where they raise their children and see their grandchildren take those first steps.” Pierce County Assessor-Treasurer Marty Campbell said simplifying the application process will help him do his job. “I surge support of Senate Bill 6162, and thank you for your time,” he told the committee. He was not troubled by the potential loss of local revenue under the bill. According to the legislation’s fiscal note, there will be a decrease in local revenues, estimated at $4.6 million in fiscal year 2027 and $8.8 million in fiscal year 2028, which would be the first full year of impact, assuming the bill passes. “As far as the local revenue, I think it all evens out as we go forward, but that would be more for the [Pierce County] Council side to manage as far as process and how we manage in our office,” Campbell said. “This is a huge step forward in both internal processes and making sure that we are expanding needed deductions.” Others weren’t so sure about SB 6162. Eric Lundberg is a pastor at Living Word Lutheran Church in Graham who described himself as a “fifth-generation taxpayer.” He told the committee his father, a 78-year-old disable Vietnam War combat veteran, moved to Arizona where property taxes are much cheaper, noting the proposed legislation does not exempt combat veterans from all property taxes, “only excess property taxes” and then went on to say that “our state is so out of control in their spending …” Anti-tax activist Tim Eyman was similarly unimpressed by the bill. “The property tax is a unique tax,” he said. “You’re going to get a fixed amount of money, and every time you take somebody off, you’re making everybody else pay more. It is just so maddening that you can’t just reduce taxes on your own.” Eyman then got in a not-so-veiled reference to House Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon, D-West Seattle, who admitted he was intoxicated during a Wednesday House Appropriations Committee meeting. “For the record, I’m Tim Eyman, and I’m not a bot and I’m not drunk,” he told the committee.

If you’ve found yourself staying up late thinking about your finances or just feeling anxious overall about your financial future, you’re not alone. The sources of stress may look different for everyone, but identifying the underlying causes and setting goals accordingly may help you feel more confident about your financial future. The post Financial Wellness and Mental Health: Tips on Managing Money Stress  appeared first on Montana Free Press.

In a new report that outlines a dozen high-risk pollutants given new life thanks to weakened, delayed or rescinded regulations, the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group of hundreds of former Environmental Protection Agency staff, warns that the EPA under President Donald Trump has abandoned the agency’s core mission of protecting people and the […]

Significant increases in short-term rental properties may be adding pressure to local housing supplies, especially in high-value tourism areas of the state near Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. That’s according to a report by the University of Montana’s Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research published this month on the State of Short-Term Rentals, which looked […]

Grassroots Waco is preparing to start site work for Renaissance at Sanger Heights, featuring 25 homes and interior green space. The post Ceremony kicks off “pocket neighborhood” at old Sanger school site appeared first on The Waco Bridge.

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S. A much-anticipated report on the future of federal education research makes a strong case for the value of the Institute of Education Sciences and calls for significant changes to make research more useful for educators and policymakers. The report released Friday by the U.S. Department of Education praises IES for significantly improving the rigor of education research and contributing to a strong body of evidence about what works in schools. But it also says too much previous work by IES hasn’t been put to practical use, has failed to address high-priority issues, or is redundant. Although the department shared the recommendations, the Trump administration has not committed to adopting them. The administration wants to dismantle the Department of Education and has been parceling out key functions to other agencies in pursuit of that goal. The Institute of Education Sciences was devastated during the early months of the Trump administration, when the U.S. DOGE Service cost-cutting initiative abruptly canceled contracts and eliminated more than 100 positions. Education research is one of the Education Department functions required by law and is widely considered one of the most important roles played by the federal government. Many researchers and advocates fear states would not make their own investments in education research and that research would not be as widely disseminated without federal involvement. IES directors are appointed for six-year terms that, like those of Federal Reserve chairs, are intended to straddle administrations and insulate the agency from partisan pressures. The Department of Education hired Amber Northern, senior vice president for research at the center-right Thomas B. Fordham Institute, to look at the work IES had been doing and talk to researchers, state schools chiefs, and others about the best path forward. “These are not nips and tucks, as IES is struggling in multiple ways to remain relevant and responsive,” Northern wrote in “Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences.” But the report also offers a vigorous defense of the value of a strong federal role in education research, and argues that research must remain independent from political influence. “It is not an exaggeration to say that IES’s dogged commitment to high-quality empirical studies has transformed the field of education research, shifting it away from less to more rigorous methods and practices,” the report says. As the administration seeks to dismantle the Department of Education, the report argues that a reinvigorated IES would support larger goals of giving states and parents the tools to improve how schools serve students. IES is an “entity worth redemption and revitalization, precisely because its work has the potential to empower those who deliver education to the American people, meaning state and local leaders, school leaders, teachers, and the broader public, including parents,” the report says. The report lists out research projects that have helped educators support struggling readers, improve students’ math skills, and steer high school students to higher education. Practice guides related to literacy and math instruction are downloaded tens of thousands of times each year. The basic data sets that the National Center for Education Statistics, or NCES, maintains on student demographics, school finance, and more provide a foundation for public and private research. And the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as NAEP or the nation’s report card, provides essential information about student learning across states and over time. But too often, research doesn’t make it into the classroom or answer the most urgent questions in education, the report said. And some data collection projects are duplicative or unwieldy and cost too much for the value of data produced. The report includes numerous recommendations focused on making research easier for schools to use. For example, it says researchers should produce one-page summaries, infographics, and short videos as a condition for funding. The report also emphasizes funding research that can quickly drive change at the classroom level. There is often tension, however, between speed and determining whether an intervention makes a difference for students years later. The report’s recommendations include: Focusing on fewer problems in education and addressing those problems from multiple angles and across the offices within IES. Streamlining data collection and focusing on core functions. Prioritizing multi-state projects over requests from individual states and jurisdictions. Directing research toward “practicality, innovation, and relevance.” Narrowing the scope of the What Works Clearinghouse to practice guides and other tools educators are likely to use. In its press release, the Education Department thanked Northern for her work and noted the IES “too often delivered research that is slow, siloed, and disconnected from classroom realities.” The press release did not include a commitment to implementing the recommendations. However, in a blog post, acting IES Director Matthew Soldner described his takeaways: prioritizing needs expressed by states and school districts, supporting rapid research and data collection, and focusing on practices that work. “The challenge that lies ahead is operationalizing elements of Reimagining while ensuring that IES’s unique role in the education sciences isn’t just continued, but elevated,” he wrote. Report on reshaping IES gets outside support In an interview, Northern said one of her first questions when the department approached her about the job was how serious officials were about reinvigorating IES. She said she was impressed with how many people, including those within the administration, wanted to engage on the future of IES. “Too much research was suited to what researchers wanted to know rather than what the field needs to know,” said Northern, who is continuing in an advisory role through June. “We had no real strategy.” Mark Schneider, who served as director of IES from 2018 to 2024, said the cuts made by DOGE have opened up an “amazing opportunity” to rebuild the agency. Schneider has described being frustrated in making big changes during his tenure by entrenched interests. Schneider said he supports the report’s focus on addressing urgent education problems and changing how NCES collects long-term data. “The statistical data collections were old, creaky,” he said. “They weren’t using modern techniques. They didn’t care enough about timeliness.” Rachel Dinkes, president of the Knowledge Alliance, a national education research coalition, said the report represents a “positive step forward” overall because it promotes the idea that IES is important to federal infrastructure. “There is a real critical mass of people that feel that IES is a really important agency,” she said. The report includes important recommendations on connecting research to practice, said Cara Jackson, an education researcher and past president of the Association of Education Finance and Policy. But she worries that in practice, they could lead to more correlational studies and less rigor around causality. Jackson, who participated in one of the working groups that contributed to the report, said she doesn’t want to open the door to vendors making misleading claims about their products. She also wonders who will turn the recommendations into policy change. “They’ve let so many people go,” she said. “I’m worried we’ve done tremendous damage to our ability to recruit people into government work.” Read the full report here. Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor covering education policy and politics. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org. Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

AP tells us in bold letters, “There are many questions about how the board will work.” That implies that AP will be asking them, or care about the answers.

(The Center Square) – Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock has issued another chastisement, this time against the State Commission on Judicial Conduct. He did so in a response clarifying that judges in Texas are not violating the law when they refuse to marry same-sex couples. At issue before two courts, the Austin Court of Appeals in Texas and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, is whether Texas judges can legally refrain from performing a same-sex couple’s wedding because of their sincerely held religious beliefs. The Texas Supreme Court provided a response to the Fifth Circuit last month in a case before it stating they are not violating the law if they refrain from doing so. Two judges sued the SCJC after it officially reprimanded them for declining to marry same-sex couples, arguing the reprimand was unconstitutional. State law does not require judges to officiate marriages. As the cases proceeded, the Texas Supreme Court issued an order last October clarifying that judges are permitted from refraining to officiate such marriages, The Center Square reported. All eight justices signed the order to add a comment to Canon 4 of the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct, stating, “It is not a violation of these canons for a judge to publicly refrain from performing a wedding ceremony based upon a sincerely held religious belief.” The SCJC also filed motions for partial summary judgment, asking the courts to dismiss lawsuits filed against it, arguing the Texas Supreme Court’s comment didn’t apply to its reprimands. The Fifth Circuit asked the Texas Supreme Court to clarify. The court replied stating, “the answer to the certified question is no.” The SCJC wasn’t satisfied with the answer and filed a Motion for Clarification. The Texas Supreme Court denied the motion instead of dismissing it as out of order, Blacklock explained. He then ripped into the commission in his response. “I gather from the motion that the Commission must believe the Court did not carefully read and understand the question certified by the Fifth Circuit. Rest assured, we did. The certified question, which we reproduced verbatim in our per curiam opinion, was: Does Canon 4A(1) of the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct prohibit judges from publicly refusing, for moral or religious reasons, to perform same-sex weddings while continuing to perform opposite-sex weddings?” he said. “The answer to this question, which we gave as directly and as plainly as can be given in the English language, is ‘no.’ … (‘Accordingly, the answer to the certified question is no.’). Only a lawyer could fail to appreciate the decisive clarity of so simple and useful a word as ‘no.’” His chastisement continued. “The insufficiency of a court’s explanation of its answer in the mind of the losing party has nothing to do with the clarity of the court’s answer. There is no clearer answer than ‘no.’ In any event, the Court obviously thinks its explanation sufficient to justify its answer. Otherwise, we would not have given it,” Blacklock wrote. “The Court’s one-word answer to the certified question (yes, the entire certified question) is as far from needing clarification as it is possible for any answer to be.” Blacklock was reelected in 2024 after issuing another chastisement to former Attorney General Eric Holder. At the time, an organization led by Holder began targeting Texas Supreme Court justices after taking credit for flipping the Wisconsin Supreme Court as part of its 2031 redistricting project, The Center Square reported. Holder, the first U.S. attorney general in history to be held in criminal and civil contempt by Congress, began targeting Blacklock and two other Republican justices up for reelection. He argued Republicans in Texas are racist and Democrats need to be in control of redistricting. The Texas Supreme Court is the highest court in Texas that rules on civil cases. Every general election, three seats are on the ballot. In response to being targeted, Blacklock told The Center Square, “Eric Holder apparently wants judges who will not follow the laws passed by our legislature if he doesn't like those laws. He seems to want judges that will amend our constitution by judicial decree rather than allowing the people of Texas to amend their constitution if they choose to, but that's not how this works, and he should know that. “A judge's job is to follow the law passed by the legislature, not to change the law. A judge's job is to follow the constitution, not to change it. The legislature can change the laws that it has passed, and the people of Texas can change the constitution but that's not a judge's job.” Blacklock also said Holder was insulting all justices serving on the bench as well as Democratic challengers “because it suggests that a judge's job is to deliver results for a political party and that is absolutely not a judge's job. “That is not what anybody on the Texas Supreme Court is doing. Our job is to apply the law fairly and equally for all Texans regardless of who they are, regardless of their background, regardless of their political party. The court's job is to deliver equal justice for everybody.” Blacklock was first elected in 2018. He and the Republican justices Holder targeted were reelected with nearly 60% of the vote in 2024, The Center Square reported. Blacklock became chief justice last January.