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Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
California's Environmental Regulations Are a Mess. Why Won't Lawmakers Fix Them?
It's not that typical that an acronym for an arcane regulation would be a household word, but in California the term CEQA—pronounced see-kwa—is as well-known as terms such as OMG and LOL. Signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970, the voluminous statute provides a laundry list of terms and conditions on developers of every manner of construction project. CEQA has created a regulatory nightmare, although it still has defenders. LOL indeed. As the Planning and Conservation League explains, "The California Environmental Quality Act…is California's premier environmental law. It allows public agencies to make informed decisions about activities that could degrade public health and damage the environment. It also provides California residents with the legal framework to hold their public agencies accountable." That sounds so unobjectionable. Who doesn't want public agencies to make informed decisions and provide community members with tools to protect the environment and hold officials accountable? But the reality is far different than what these Pollyannaish civics-textbook explanations suggest. California lawmakers refuse to substantively reform the law, but what's the first thing they do whenever they want a particular project built? You guessed it—they provide a CEQA exemption or streamlining. When the Sacramento Kings wanted to build a new downtown arena and keep the team from leaving town, Senate President Darrell Steinberg (later elected the city's mayor) ushered through an exemption. We've seen multiple examples—or attempts—to reduce the application of CEQA to other professional sports projects, as well as other favored projects, including one tied to LA's effort to lure the Olympics. It's always the sign of a bad law when it constantly requires exemptions. That reminds me of Assembly Bill 5, which banned most independent contracting—but its supporters exempted more than 100 industries from its grip because it threatened so many people's livelihoods. A recent national example: Donald Trump's tariffs posed an existential threat to many businesses, so he's been exempting certain industries. All these regulatory edicts empower the politically well-connected, who have lobbyists who can secure special favors. So what's wrong with CEQA? Whenever the government has discretionary approval authority, the law requires the agency to conduct a review. It usually requires the developers to conduct an extensive environmental analysis. It triggers an initial study process and then often a costly, time-consuming full Environmental Impact Report. Agencies can then mandate remediation or reject the project. It gives any stakeholder the right to file a lawsuit challenging the agency's approval. As is now well documented, interest groups often file lawsuits that are not related to improving the environment. No-growthers file suits to stop—or reduce the size—of projects they don't like. Neighbors can file lawsuits because they don't want more traffic. Unions threaten suits as a way to gain leverage to secure project-labor agreements and other union-friendly conditions. As the law firm Holland & Knight reported in 2015, "64% of those filing CEQA lawsuits are individuals or local 'associations,' the vast majority of which have no prior track record of environmental advocacy." And if you think these cynical efforts to gum up the construction process help the environment, then consider this alarming point from that analysis: "Projects designed to advance California's environmental policy objectives are the most frequent targets of CEQA lawsuits." These include transit projects, multi-family housing, parks, schools and libraries. It notes that 80 percent of the CEQA lawsuits are in infill locations, which is where environmentalists want us to build. CEQA criticism has grown even on the political Left thanks largely to the law's stifling effect on new housing construction. As everyone here knows, California faces a severe housing crisis as the median home price statewide has soared above $800,000 and well over $1 million in many coastal metros. That has led to massive rent spikes and has exacerbated our homelessness situation. Lawmakers have—to their credit—passed targeted exemptions and streamlining provisions for particular types of housing projects (infill, multi-family, duplexes), but it's not enough. A 2022 report for the Center for Jobs and the Economy by Holland & Knight attorney Jennifer Hernandez notes that despite those new laws, "CEQA lawsuits targeting new housing production, in contrast, continue to expand—with 47,999 housing units targeted in the CEQA lawsuits filed just in 2020." The California Air Resources Board (CARB) "acknowledges that two-thirds of CEQA lawsuits allege violations of climate impacts." Look, if CEQA can be used to stop projects based on climate impacts, then it can be used against any project. It's been weaponized as a no-growth tool—constraining housing, energy projects, freeways, rail, you name it. Unless we're happy just grinding progress to a halt, we need to repeal—or significantly reform—this monstrosity and get beyond occasional exemptions for ballparks and public housing. We all know CEQA by name and deed, so why won't elected officials do anything about it? This column was first published in The Orange County Register. The post California's Environmental Regulations Are a Mess. Why Won't Lawmakers Fix Them? appeared first on
Daily Mail
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Miley Cyrus stuns in plunging cream dress before changing into an edgy in a black hooded maxi coat as she steps out on the streets of Paris
Miley Cyrus stunned in a plunging cream dress before changing into an edgy look later on while stepping out in style in Paris on Sunday. The pop legend, 32, looked radiant in the sleeveless number, which featured a racy thigh-high split and rope detailing across her midriff. The Grammy-winning singer beamed from ear to ear while stopping to greet some lucky fans and sign a few autographs in the French capital. The Flowers hitmaker completed her stylish look with black high boots and dark cat-eye shades, styling her light brunette locks in a high bun. Later on in the day, Miley stepped out in the French capital in another eye-catching but more Gothic ensemble. Miley Cyrus stunned in a plunging cream dress before changing into an edgy look later on while stepping out in style in Paris on Sunday The pop legend looked radiant in the sleeveless number, which featured a racy thigh-high split The songwriter turned heads in a black hooded maxi coat, which she dressed up with dark squared shades, while keeping the same boots. The American star appeared in great spirits as she once again made a pause to meet some dedicated fans before heading inside her hotel. Continuing to put on a fashionable display while in Paris, Miley was seen on Saturday in Saint Germain de Pres in an off-the-shoulder black minidress with sheer black hose and black pumps. The long-sleeved frock was reminiscent of the 80s and looked great on Miley's fit frame. She wore her hair down and in loose waves during that outing. She wore a pair of black sunglasses. Later in the day, the Hanna Montana alum wore a long black puffer coat that was belted at the waist with the same Wayfarer style sunglasses. This time, Miley's hair was pulled back into a sleek ponytail. The sighting comes after the news broke that her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, 63, is dating English actress Elizabeth Hurley, 59. The LOL actress flaunted her slender physique in the stylish look The songwriter turned heads in a black hooded maxi coat, which she dressed up with dark squared shades It also comes as Miley is getting ready to release her new album, Something Beautiful on May 30. Miley and Billy Ray are estranged and the timing of his going public with his romance could hurt her album release. Miley's rarely-seen boyfriend Maxx Morando made a surprise appearance in the music video for her latest single End Of The World which dropped on Thursday. The Grammy winner - who is preparing to drop her ninth studio album Something Beautiful next month on May 30 - has been dating the drummer of the rock band Lilly since 2021. The video accompanying the upbeat track showed the star performing on a stage that was backlit with various golden lights. While holding a microphone in her hand as she belted out lyrics to the song, Cyrus also made her way over towards Morando, 26, playing the drums and whose face was never clearly shown. At one point, the former Disney channel star could be seen laying in front of the drum set during the performance. Cyrus and Morando first began dating after they went on a blind date back in 2021 and their romance was officially confirmed the following year. During an interview with British Vogue in 2023, the actress expressed: 'Well, it was blind for me and not really for him. I thought, "The worst that can happen is I leave."' The couple mainly keep their relationship out of the public eye, but have been spotted at a few recent events. Last month, Miley and Maxx were seen walking the red carpet together at the 97th Annual Academy Awards in Hollywood. Later that evening, the pair also stopped by Vanity Fair Oscars Party. The two stars also attended the SNL50: The Anniversary Special in NYC in February as well as the Homecoming Concert alongside Miley's mother Tish Cyrus. Miley has been open about their six-year age gap and told Harper's Bazaar last year, 'He looks at life really differently than I do. 'He grew up with a laptop. I had a desktop computer that I shared with my brothers and he's raised our dog off Reddit.' The Flowers hitmaker added, 'I'm like, "Are you sure we're supposed to be doing this?" And he's like, "On Reddit it says blah, blah, blah." He's very similar to me. We just don't take life too seriously.' Cyrus was previously married to actor Chris Hemsworth from 2018 until their divorce in 2020. Miley and her dad have been estranged for a few years Miley is counting down the days until she drops her upcoming ninth studio album Something Beautiful on May 30. In late March Miley dropped the tracks Prelude and Something Beautiful that are also from the LP along with accompanying music videos. Miley announced that the music video for End Of The World dropped by sharing a snippet to her main Instagram page. The caption read: 'Miley Cyrus unveils "End of the World," the first official single off of her highly anticipated album, Something Beautiful, out May 30 via Columbia Records. The new single "End of the World" out now.' Something Beautiful will contain a total of 13 tracks and follows her 2023 album titled Endless Summer Vacation.
News18
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- News18
Bharti Singh Reveals She Is Planning For Second Child In 2025
Bharti Singh and Haarsh Limbachiyaa tied the knot on December 3, 2017, in a dreamy destination wedding in Goa. Bharti Singh and Haarsh Limbachiyaa recently reconnected with fans through an AMA session on their YouTube channel, LOL (Life of Limbachiyaa's). The beloved duo, known for their game shows, podcasts and vlogs, addressed fan questions with their signature charm. Bharti opened up about plans for a second child, shared light-hearted memories with Haarsh, and responded to fun, playful queries from their followers. Bharti Singh addressed a fan's question about her pregnancy with her signature humour. She clarified that she isn't pregnant at the moment but revealed plans to try for a second baby in 2025, calling it the 'right time." Bharti, whose son Golla is now three, shared her heartfelt wish to welcome another child—be it a boy or a girl—and asked fans for their blessings. Later, when a fan jokingly suggested that Haarsh Limbachiyaa should cook for her, Bharti burst into laughter and quipped, 'No, ek saath hospital mein nahi admit ho sakte! He doesn't know how to cook, if he tries, we'll all be in trouble!" Another fan asked Bharti Singh if she would ever bring back her iconic character Lalli on their vlog. With her trademark wit, Bharti admitted that motherhood had mellowed her energy levels. 'Now that I'm a mom, I just don't have the same energy for Lalli anymore," she said with a laugh. She joked that if she even tried to channel Lalli at home, she'd lose all authority. 'Even Manisha and Rupa didi (our staff) won't take me seriously. And Golla? He definitely won't listen!" When a fan asked what it takes to find a husband like Haarsh, he cheekily turned to Bharti and asked, 'How many solah somwar fasts did you keep for me?" Bharti promptly replied, 'None!" But Haarsh playfully insisted, 'Without those fasts, you wouldn't have found someone like me!" In another hilarious moment, a fan asked Haarsh, 'Why do you always keep ordering things? Do something yourself!" Bharti, clearly entertained, responded, 'Sending you all the love—I feel like I wrote this question myself." Haarsh, unfazed, gave a classic comeback: 'Apne kaam se kaam rakha kijiye." Bharti and Haarsh's love story is straight out of a rom-com. The couple tied the knot on December 3, 2017, in a dreamy destination wedding in Goa. Haarsh, a comedy show scriptwriter, had been working with Bharti for over seven years before love blossomed. They welcomed their baby boy, Laksh, fondly called Golla, on April 3, 2022. First Published:
WIRED
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- WIRED
4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere
Apr 22, 2025 10:40 AM It's likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again. But everything now—from X and YouTube to global politics—seems to carry its toxic legacy. Photo-Illustration:My earliest memory of 4chan was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOL cat memes, which were brand new at the time. Back then a photoshop of a cat saying "I can haz cheezburger" or an image of an owl saying, "ORLY?" was, without question, the funniest thing my 14-year-old brain had ever laid eyes on. So much so, I woke my dad up from laughing too hard and had to tell him that I was scrolling through pictures of cats at 2 in the morning. Later, I would become intimately familiar with the site's much more nefarious tendencies. It's strange to look back at 4chan, apparently wiped off the internet entirely last week by hackers from a rival message board, and think about how many different websites it was over its more than two decades online. What began as a hub for internet culture and an anonymous waystation for the internet's anarchic true believers devolved over the years into a fan club for mass shooters, the central node of Gamergate, and the beating heart of far-right facism around the world. A virus that infected every facet of our lives, from the slang we use to the politicians we vote for. But the site itself had been frozen in amber since the Bush administration. It is likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again—which is, likely, a very good thing. But it had also essentially already succeeded at its core project: chewing up the world and spitting it back out in its own image. Everything—from X, to Facebook, to YouTube—now sort of feels like 4chan. Which makes you wonder why it even needed to still exist. "The novelty of a website devoted to shock and gore, and the rebelliousness inherent in it, dies when your opinions become the official policy of the world's five or so richest people and the government of the United States," The Onion CEO and former extremism reporter Ben Collins tells Wired . "Like any ostensibly nihilist cultural phenomenon, it inherently dies if that phenomenon itself becomes The Man." My first experience with the more toxic side of the site came several years after my LOL cat all-nighter, when I was in college. I was a big Tumblr user—all my friends were on there—and for about a year or so, our corner of the platform felt like an extension of the house parties we would throw. That cozy vibe came crashing down for me when I got doxxed the summer going into my senior year. Someone made a "hate blog" for me—one of the first times I felt the dark presence of an anonymous stranger's digital ire, and posted my phone number on 4chan. They played a prank that was popular on the site at the time, writing in a thread that if you called my phone number was for a GameStop store that had a copy of the ultra-rare video game Battletoads . I received no less than 250 phone calls over the next 48 hours asking if I had a copy of the game. Many of the 4chan users that called me mid- Battletoad attack left messages. I listened to all of them. A pattern quickly emerged: young men, clearly nervous to even leave a message, trying to harass a stranger for, seemingly, the hell of it. Those voice mails have never left me in the 15 years I've spent covering 4chan as a journalist. I had a front row seat to the way those timid men morphed into the violent, seething underbelly of the internet. The throbbing engine of reactionary hatred that resented everything and everyone simply because resentment was the only language its users knew how to speak. I traveled the world in the 2010s, tracing 4chan's impact on global democracy. I followed it to France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil, as 4chan's users became increasingly convinced that they could take over the planet through racist memes, far-right populism, and cyberbullying. And, in a way, they did. But the ubiquity of 4chan culture ended up being an oddly Pyrrhic victory for the site itself. Collins, like me, closely followed 4chan's rise in the 2010s from internet backwater to unofficial propaganda organ of the Trump administration. As he sees it, once Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, there was really no point to 4chan anymore. Why hide behind anonymity if a billionaire lets you post the same kind of extremist content under your real name, and even pays you for it? "[4chan's] user base just moved into a bigger ballpark and started immediately impacting American life and policy," Collins says. "Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government. Its usefulness as an ammo dump in the culture war was diminished when they were saying things you would now hear every day on Twitter then six months later out of the mouths of an administration official." But understanding how 4chan went from the home of cat memes to a true internet bogeyman requires an understanding of how the site actually worked. Its features were often overlooked amid all the conversations about the site's political influence, but I'd argue they were equally, if not more important. 4chan was founded by Christopher "Moot" Poole when he was just 15. A regular user on slightly less anarchic comedy site Something Awful, Poole created a spin-off site for a message board there called 'Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse.' Poole was a fan of the Japanese message board 2chan, or Futaba Channel, and wanted to give Western anime fans their own version, so he poorly translated the site's code, and promoted his new site, 4chan, to Something Awful's anime community. Several core features were ported over in the process. 4chan users were anonymous, threads weren't permanent and would time out or "404" after a period of inactivity, and there were dozens of sub-boards you could post to. That unique combination of ephemerality, anonymity, and organized chaos proved to be a potent mix, immediately creating a race-to-the-bottom gutter culture unlike anything else on the web. The dark endpoint of the techno-utopianism that built the internet. On 4chan you were no one and nothing you did mattered unless it was so shocking, so repulsive, so hateful that someone else noticed and decided to screenshot it before it disappeared into the digital ether. "The iconic memes that came out of 4chan are because people took the time to save it, you know? And the fact that nobody predicted, nobody could predict or control what was saved or what wasn't saved, I think, is really, really fascinating," Cates Holderness, Tumblr's former head of editorial, tells WIRED . Still 4chan was more complicated than it looked from the outside. The site was organized into dozens of smaller sections, everything from comics to cooking to video games to, of course, pornography. Holderness says she learned to make bread during the pandemic thanks to 4chan's cooking board. (Full disclosure: I introduced Holderness to 4chan way back in 2012.) "When I switched to sourdough, I got really good pointers," she says. Holderness calls 4chan the internet's "Wild West" and says its demise this month felt appropriate in a way. The chaos that defined 4chan, both the good and the very, very bad, has largely been paved over by corporate platforms and their algorithms now. Our feeds deliver us content, we don't have to hunt for it. We don't have to sit in front of a computer refreshing a page to find out if we're getting a new cat meme or a new manifesto. The humanness of that era of the web, now that 4chan is gone, is likely never coming back. And we'll eventually find out if that's a good thing or a bad thing. "The snippets that we have of what 4chan was—it's all skewed,' Holderness says. 'There is no record. There's no record that can ever encapsulate what 4chan was."
Ammon
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Ammon
Surprising baby names that are BANNED around the world
Ammon News - When you're expecting a little one, one of the most exciting parts is choosing the perfect some choices might raise a few eyebrows, most are usually pretty some baby names have been seen as so controversial they've been banned in certain countries, according to experts from language learning marketplace several – such as the name 'Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116' – it's relatively obvious some don't seem too bad – for example Fraise or in one country, even the name Linda has been is a common name here in the UK, but in Saudi Arabia it's off the France, meanwhile, the name Fraise has been 'strawberry' in French, it may seem like a sweet, innocent baby name. But its slang connotations have led to it being common French phrase 'ramène ta fraise' loosely translates to 'get your butt over here' and, because of this crude association, authorities deemed It in France have also banned the name Nutella due to the risk of north, in Sweden, the name Metallica isn't metal band has millions of die-hard fans across the globe and, in 2007, one couple took their devotion to the next Swedish government rejected the pair's request to name their daughter Metallica, citing that it was inappropriate due to trademark concerns and potential hope is not lost for Swedish metal-lovers, however, as names like Mayhem, Gojira, and Opeth are all above board.A separate Swedish couple incurred a fine for failing to register a name for their child before their fifth protest they chose 'Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116', supposedly pronounced 'Albin'.The name was swiftly rejected by Swedish authorities in 1996 and has been on the no-go list ever in the UK, the word 'rogue' might make you think of a charming rule-breaker or even a as a baby name, it's registrars previously rejected it on the grounds that it suggests unlawful or dangerous behaviour, which is an association they felt was inappropriate for a child's first name 'Cyanide' is also banned here, because a court determined it would likely cause significant emotional harm to the child and it was unacceptable to name a child after a 'notorious poison'.Over in Australia, both the name LOL and the name Spinach aren't naming your child after a leafy green might sound unique and health-conscious, it was blocked on the grounds it could cause name LOL – short for 'laugh out loud' – was ruled out by authorities who said it could undermine the seriousness of legal documents and lead to identification in New Zealand, officials had to step in to prevent parents naming their twins 'Fish and Chips' out of concern it could lead to taunting from their peers. Daily mail
