Californians will have a new way to verify their vaccination status soon, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday.
Later this week, the state is expected to announce details of electronic versions of COVID-19 vaccine cards, Newsom said at a news conference in San Francisco.
“It’s not a passport. It’s not a requirement. It’s just the ability now to have an electronic version of that paper version,” he said. “And so you’ll hear more about that in the next couple of days.”
Newsom was asked about vaccine verification as California prepares to fully reopen Tuesday. California will no longer require physical distancing and will allow full capacity for businesses.
The state’s indoor mask mandate will also go away, although there will be some places, including hospitals and public transportation, where Californians are expected to continue to mask up indoors.
FORT WORTH, Texas – Texas Christian University has replaced the word “freshman” with “first-year student” in order to be “more gender-inclusive,” FOX 4 KDFW reports.
The change will take effect at the start of the fall semester, and the term will apply to students with less than 24 credit hours, no matter how long they’ve been attending the university.
“Just by speaking more inclusively, we are able to behave more inclusively as well,” TCU junior Matt Gill told FOX 4.
“It’s also people who are transferring from other schools, or people who didn’t just come out of high school. For example, military veterans,” Gill explained.
Rep. Thomas Suozzi (D-N.Y.), a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said that he’s exploring the idea of a one-time tax on the wealth of the richest Americans as Democrats seek to increase taxes on the rich in order to pay for spending priorities.
In an interview with The Hill on Friday, Suozzi said he’s in the early stages of looking at what he called a “patriot tax.” This would be a one-time surcharge of 2.5 percent on wealth between $50 million and $100 million and a 5 percent tax on wealth above $100 million. Wealthy people would be able to pay the tax over five years.
Research provided by Suozzi’s office estimates that such a tax could raise about $450 billion.
President Biden said Monday that Ukraine had yet to meet standards required to join NATO but would receive the necessary support from the alliance amid rising tensions with Russia.
The president addressed his stance on Ukraine following a meeting with NATO leaders on the eve of his scheduled summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has strongly opposed their potential membership with the alliance. Biden indicated Ukrainian leaders would need to deal with corruption within the government and combat the influence of powerful oligarchs to demonstrate their commitment to democratic values.
“It depends on whether they meet the criteria. The fact is, they still have to clean up corruption. The fact is, they still have to meet other criteria to get into the action plan. You know, school’s out on that question. It remains to be seen,” Biden said.
Residents were ordered to evacuate their homes after a chemical fire broke out Monday morning at the Chemtool Inc. plant in Rockton, Illinois.
The city fire department ordered a mandatory evacuation for all residents and businesses in a one-mile radius of the plant, police said in a message on Twitter.
Rockton Fire Chief Kirk Wilson said the city hopes to avoid “an environmental nightmare” that could occur if any of Chemtool’s oil-based lubricants ran off into the nearby Rock River, about 300 meters (330 yards) west.
Speaking at a news conference, Wilson said the department’s water-based firefighting suppression has stopped inside the building, and they’re now letting the product “burn off.”
One of their main concerns is product spilling into the Rock River, he said
Another concern is the large plume of smoke moving south and southeast from the explosion site. Wilson said that the city’s hazmat team has performed air quality analysis and determined there’s no compromise of air quality at ground level at this time.
As Democrats are trying to quell internal tensions over remarks Rep. Ilhan Omar made last week apparently comparing the U.S. and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban, Republicans are re-upping their push to condemn Omar and her allies over comments about Israel.
Leading the way are Reps. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., who are introducing a resolution to censure Omar, D-Minn., and her three closest allies in the “Squad.” The resolution alleges that Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Omar have said things that “publicly support the actions of a recognized terrorist organization.”
The resolution also says “Omar accused the United States of backing crimes against humanity,” notes that “Ocasio-Cortez accused the Government of Israel of committing ”human rights abuses,’ says “Tlaib accused the Government of Israel of ‘ethnic cleansing’ against Palestinians,” and accuses Pressley of equating support of Israel to “supporting oppression, violence, and apartheid.”
A driver believed to have been drunk or high plowed into demonstrators protesting the shooting of a black man in Minneapolis and killed a woman.
The man – who is white, and who police think was under the influence – was pulled from his car and beaten by the crowd before being taken away in handcuffs by police late on Sunday in the Uptown area of Minneapolis.
He struck two people, including the woman, with one eyewitness claiming that he seemed to be doing 100mph shortly before the impact. The female victim was rushed to hospital in a ‘very critical’ condition and died in the early hours of Monday. Her identity has not been released. Another unidentified protester is said to have sustained non life-threatening injuries.
NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Mayor Bill de Blasio is following through on a promise he made last year to celebrate the city’s health care heroes and essential workers with a ticker tape parade.
The event honoring New York City’s “hometown heroes” will be held Wednesday, July 7 up the Canyon of Heroes.
“This year that we’ve been through, it has literally been the greatest crisis in the history of New York City. We were knocked down, but we got back up and that’s something to celebrate about this city,” de Blasio said at his daily briefing Monday.
Apple Inc. plans to drop its mask requirement for vaccinated customers at many U.S. stores beginning next week, a move that will mark yet another major retailer moving away from the Covid-19 safety protocol as states ease restrictions.
The technology giant has begun informing retail employees of the impending change in impacted markets, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who declined to be identified discussing policy changes that haven’t been announced. The change will go into effect as early as Tuesday, and employees have been told that they won’t be required to ask customers for verification of vaccination.
The US government has spent the past week assessing a report of a leak at a Chinese nuclear power plant, after a French company that part owns and helps operate it warned of an “imminent radiological threat,” according to US officials and documents reviewed by CNN.
The warning included an accusation that the Chinese safety authority was raising the acceptable limits for radiation detection outside the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant in Guangdong province in order to avoid having to shut it down, according to a letter from the French company to the US Department of Energy obtained by CNN.
Despite the alarming notification from Framatome, the French company, the Biden administration believes the facility is not yet at a “crisis level,” one of the sources said.
While US officials have deemed the situation does not currently pose a severe safety threat to workers at the plant or Chinese public, it is unusual that a foreign company would unilaterally reach out to the American government for help when its Chinese state-owned partner is yet to acknowledge a problem exists. The scenario could put the US in a complicated situation should the leak continue or become more severe without being fixed.
House Republicans are backing an effort to censure members of the far-left “squad” for their anti-Israel rhetoric amid Hamas’s rocket attacks against the Jewish state last month.
The resolution, which Reps. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.), Claudia Tenney (R., N.Y.), and Jim Banks (R., Ind.) introduced on Monday, accused the far-left lawmakers of providing cover for Hamas by equating Israel’s self-defense to terrorist attacks launched from Gaza.
Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) emerged as Israel’s loudest critics during the crisis as more than 4,000 rockets rained down on the country, killing 12 civilians and injuring many more. During a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in June, Omar compared Israel to the Taliban and Hamas, saying all three have committed “crimes against humanity” during wartime. Tlaib has accused Israel of “war crimes,” while Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez joined their fellow squad members in calling Israel’s treatment of minorities a form of “apartheid.”
When he’s not guest hosting MSNBC’s The Cross Connection, Jason Johnson is a politics and journalism professor at Morgan State University, which does not inspire confidence in the next generation of journalists as he warned on Saturday of “catastrophic implications” of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative balance and condemned Sen. Mitch McConnell for not allowing President Biden to pack the Court.
Johnson’s monologue was the result of a question from a viewer wondering what “we” have to do to make the Court more “fair and balanced” and representative of the “diverse country in which we live.”
