All posts tagged "Socialandgovernance"

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Beginning Monday, California employers will be barred from discriminating against employees who use marijuana in their off hours. Assembly Bill 2188 requires employers to change how they test for marijuana use among employees, using tests that show current impairment and not just past usage. The law carves out some exceptions, such as for those who work in the construction trades. “Technology to test for marijuana impairment has actually advanced quite a bit, so basically employers can now just test for THC — the psychoactive component in cannabis — and that can show impai......

CHICAGO — Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s administration moved to officially scrap Mayor Brandon Johnson’s plan to build a migrant camp on a controversial Southwest Side lot, the state announced Tuesday morning while issuing a scathing rebuke of the city’s evaluation of the land’s potential environmental hazards. In a statement, Pritzker’s office said an Illinois Environmental Protection Agency review of the city’s environmental report — which was released late Friday evening — indicates “concerns related to insufficient soil sampling and remediation.” But because the time required for additional testing......

CHICAGO — President Joe Biden’s administration is moving to require utilities to replace every toxic lead pipe connecting homes to water mains during the next decade, though Chicago and several other cities likely will get more time to finish the job. Ingesting tiny concentrations of lead can permanently damage the developing brains of children and contribute to heart disease, kidney failure and other health problems later in life. One study estimated more than 400,00030025-2/fulltext) deaths a year in the U.S. are linked to lead exposure30025-2/fulltext). For decades dust from lead-based pain......

STETATTLE CREEK, North Cascades — Bubbles tumbled and danced on the surface of this creek as stones interrupted the flow of the aquamarine water, once home to spring Chinook and steelhead, below the bank where Scott Schuyler and his daughter Janelle walked in early November. Stetattle was derived from stəbtabəl' (stub-tahb-elh), or grizzly bear, in the Lushootseed language spoken by the Upper Skagit people who lived on these lands for at least 10,000 years. But grizzlies haven't lived here for decades. Today, federal agencies have offered up three potential plans for grizzlies' future in the N......

Over the course of 12 months, an area of Great Plains grasslands bigger than the state of Delaware was erased from the map. In 2021 alone, 1.6 million acres were plowed across the United States and Canada to make way for primarily row crop expansion, according to the World Wildlife Fund’s annual Plowprint Report, released Thursday.The report analyzed grasslands plow-up in North America using government data and satellite imagery from the past two years. Since 2012, the region has had 32 million acres of its landscapes destroyed. But the land most suited for farming in the Great Plains was plow......

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — It was 1990, and a self-identified city girl in a denim skirt and boots perched herself atop bales of hay near Los Banos in California’s farming heartland. Dianne Feinstein was running for governor and looking for votes. “I want to be a good governor for the agriculture industry of California,” she told the crowd, the Los Angeles Times reported. But the former San Francisco mayor lost the race to Pete Wilson, a more familiar face in the world of Central Valley agribusiness. Feinstein would win election to the Senate two years later and become a powerhouse, the longest serv......