California
The California legislature has sent Gov. Gavin Newsom two major housing bills…
The California Community College system is investigating an admissions and financial aid scam involving “bot” students enrolled in courses and fraudulent financial aid applications…
Last week, Gov. Newsom announced that 80 percent of eligible Californians are at least partially vaccinated against COVID-19…
The first batch of about 600,000 payments totaling some $354 million was directly deposited Friday, 9/3, and California will send out checks to other taxpayers every two weeks…
On 8/23, California Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman ordered the University of California–Berkeley to temporarily freeze the number of students it admits every year under the California Environmental Quality Act, putting crowded classrooms in the same category as heavy infrastructure like highways and airports…
The latest Public Policy Institute of California poll shows that 61 percent of Californians support Newsom’s policy of requiring proof of COVID-19 vaccination to attend large outdoor gatherings or certain indoor activities…
Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to California on Wednesday, 9/8, to campaign for Newsom in the closing days of his recall election fight…
With fires raging across the state, the USDA Forest Service has closed all 20 million acres of California’s national forests to public access for two weeks, which began last Tuesday, 8/24…
Major gambling players intend to ante up $100 million for an online sports betting initiative that would fund homelessness and mental health efforts, adding a new wrinkle to the 2022 battle over California's lucrative gaming future…
Coronavirus
Since the school year kicked off in late July, at least 1,000 schools across 31 states have closed because of COVID-19…
The number of COVID-19 patients in hospitals in the U.S. has more than doubled since last Labor Day, a sobering statistic that illustrates how the delta variant has hampered progress in curbing the pandemic even as vaccines became widely available…
More than seven million out-of-work people across the U.S. lost all of their jobless benefits as three federal programs expired on Monday, 9/6, in what several experts described as one of the largest and most abrupt ends to government aid in U.S. history…
President and Administration
The Health and Human Services Department is creating a new office to address climate change as a public health issue, part of an effort to tie growing environmental concerns to the administration’s broader health equity agenda…
President Biden is considering using his clemency powers to commute the sentences of certain federal drug offenders released to home confinement during the pandemic rather than forcing them to return to prison after the pandemic emergency ends…
Congress
Committees continue what started last week: markups to debate and assemble their slices of the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package…
Secretary of State Antony Blinken will appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, 9/14 to testify about the administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan…
Education
The Department of Education will not be targeting its federal aid verification process for the 2022-23 award year, ending a temporary change put into place during the COVID-19 pandemic to alleviate challenges students face in accessing financial aid…
In a recent press release, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) offered a number of health tips for a successful school year for students, teachers, school staff, and their families…
As part of its interactive Return to School Roadmap, the Education Department released “Strategies for Using American Rescue Plan Funding to Address the Impact of Lost Instructional Time,” a resource to support educators as they work to continuously improve their instructional strategies…
While more Black students in California are earning college degrees, concerning equity gaps in graduation rates remain, with differences based on gender, according to a new report which examines college completion rates for Black men and women in the state’s three public higher education systems: California Community Colleges, California State University and the University of California…