Thanks treefrog!

Appreciate the recognition, Flying Squid. And I’ll try to make it easier for people who skim.

The rescue’s reason:

“LDCRF does not re-home an owner-surrendered dog with its former adopter/owner,” Floyd said in her written statement. “Our mission is to save adoptable and safe-to-the-community dogs from euthanasia.”

Yeah, even Homeland Security acknowledges it too:

“Fundamentally, our system is not equipped to deal with migration as it exists now, not just this year and last year and the year before, but for years preceding us,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in an interview with NBC News. “We have a system that was last modified in 1996. We’re in 2024 now. The world has changed.”

But guess who in Congress don’t want to change that?

The position of Mayorkas and the Biden administration is that these problems can only be meaningfully addressed by a congressional overhaul of the immigration system, such as the one proposed in February in a now defunct bipartisan Senate bill.

“We cannot process these individuals through immigration enforcement proceedings very quickly — it actually takes sometimes more than seven years,” Mayorkas told NBC News. “The proposed bipartisan legislation would reduce that seven-plus-year waiting period to sometimes less than 90 days. That’s transformative.”

These guys:

Now, after a hard-negotiated bipartisan Senate compromise bill has been released, Republicans are either vowing to block it or declaring it “dead on arrival,” in the words of House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Can confirm that Chichén Itzá is now roped off. And Yucatán is now the safest state in Mexico:

Mexico’s lowest-crime region is strengthening its reputation as an oasis of calm in a country roiled by drug killings. Yucatán, the southeastern state known for its Mayan ruins, has a homicide rate more than 90% lower than the national average.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-10/how-did-yucatan-become-mexico-s-safest-state

From the article, it’s likely because they live and work in lower income areas:

He said it’s hard to give one reason why Southeast Asians are feeling the brunt of this hate, but he thinks financial status might play a role. A 2020 report by the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center said that all Southeast Asian ethnic groups have a lower per capita income than the average in the U.S.

“It depends on socioeconomics,” Chen said. “Where these people are living, where they’re commuting, where they’re working. That may be a factor as well.”

According to ProPublica, it’s commonly done using Leahy Laws:

The recommendations came from a special committee of State Department officials known as the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum. The panel, made up of Middle East and human rights experts, is named for former Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chief author of 1997 laws that requires the U.S. to cut off assistance to any foreign military or law enforcement units — from battalions of soldiers to police stations — that are credibly accused of flagrant human rights violations.

…

Over the years, hundreds of foreign units, including from Mexico, Colombia and Cambodia, have been blocked from receiving any new aid. Officials say enforcing the Leahy Laws can be a strong deterrent against human rights abuses.

https://www.propublica.org/article/israel-gaza-blinken-leahy-sanctions-human-rights-violations

Oh you mean the post summary. Yeah, that’s the article’s verbatim linked URL. Check the article’s source and see for yourself.

In any case, thanks for pointing that out. I’ve stripped the tracker link and updated the post summary portion.

Huh? That’s the exact same link as the post’s.

Wow the ads. I assumed everyone was already using some sort of ad blocker.

It wasn’t me!

From the article:

No states have made such proposals or actions on restricting access to Opill, but the concern stems from the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, which reversed Roe v. Wade and overturned the constitutional right to an abortion.

and:

But these examples have not set a precedent for what type of authority states may have to restrict access to an FDA-approved medication, Gupta said.

When it comes to Opill, “many states also allow pharmacists to refuse to participate in ‘health care’ that they find morally objectionable. This could include providing individuals with Opill even though it is OTC,” she said. “Legal approval and actual access are two distinct issues, with the latter influenced by a broader set of factors including state policies, healthcare practices, and socio-economic determinants of health.”

And I appreciate your kind words!

The CNN article just updated to remove the part about the required 6% and I’ve updated the summary to match.

You may be right it’s negotiable, but this lawsuit happened because sellers felt they didn’t have a choice:

The NAR had required homesellers to include the compensation for agents when placing a listing on a multiple listing service. Although NAR has long said commissions are negotiable and that the structure helped making housing more affordable for buyers, critics have long argued that the fees were expected and homesellers felt they would lose buyers if they didn’t offer them.

…

Individual sellers often feel powerless to negotiate a better deal for themselves, given the risk that offering lower commissions could cause brokers to steer buyers to other properties, said Robert Braun, a partner in Cohen Milstein’s antitrust practice.

Can you elaborate? NY Times and Washington Post are reporting the same:

American homeowners could see a significant drop in the cost of selling their homes after a real estate trade group agreed to a landmark deal that will eliminate a bedrock of the industry, the standard 6 percent sales commission.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/realestate/national-association-realtors-commission-settlement.html

The real estate group, which represents 1.5 million real estate agents around the country, said it will pay $418 million over four years to settle several cases, along with agreements to change the rules that plaintiffs alleged supported 5 to 6 percent commissions paid by home sellers. The association said it continues to deny wrongdoing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/15/nar-real-estate-commissions-settlement/

You just made my day. Thanks @ptz@dubvee.org!

Oh yeah for sure. It was sued by the FTC for deceptive advertising of its free tax filing and had to pay a $141 million settlement in 2022.

ProPublica also had an article last month about its deceptive “free” service: https://www.propublica.org/article/ftc-intuit-turbotax-cease-deceptive-advertising-free-filing-taxes

Hilarious. He said it, therefore he said it.

It’s more of a loophole in certain jurisdictions. Judges are usually assigned randomly, but some districts have divisions with only one sitting judge.

The federal judiciary is divided into 94 different geographic districts, which normally encompass either all or part of a state. In many districts, newly filed cases are assigned randomly. So, for example, if a plaintiff files a lawsuit in a district with three Democratic appointees and three Republican appointees, they would have an equal chance of drawing a judge from either party (although some judges are partially retired and have a lighter caseload).

Some districts, however, have used different rules to assign cases — and one very notable example is the United States District Court of the Northern District of Texas. That district, like some others, is subdivided into multiple “divisions,” some of which only have one sitting judge. Any civil case filed in one of these Northern District of Texas divisions was automatically assigned to one judge: Kacsmaryk.

So this new rule will try to close that loophole.