Sacramento, California - Today, California Governor Gavin Newsom unveiled the second challenge his $100 billion California Comeback Plan will confront – homelessness. Governor Newsom’s $12 billion plan to tackle the issue of homelessness will be the largest investment of its kind in California history. This investment will provide 65,000 people with housing placements, more than 300,000 people with housing stability and create 46,000 new housing units.

Washington, DC - Staff from the Federal Trade Commission, Canada’s Competition Bureau, the European Commission Directorate General for Competition, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, and Offices of State Attorneys General has issued a notice seeking public comment to inform their review of how to best update their approaches to analyzing the effects of pharmaceutical mergers. 

Washington, DC - Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated seven individuals in connection with Hizballah and its financial firm, Al-Qard al-Hassan (AQAH).  AQAH, which was designated by OFAC in 2007, is used by Hizballah as a cover to manage the terrorist group’s financial activities and gain access to the international financial system.  Ibrahim Ali Daher (Daher) serves as the Chief of Hizballah’s Central Finance Unit, which oversees Hizballah’s overall budget and spending, including the group’s funding of its terrorist operations and killing of the group’s opponents.  The other six individuals designated today used the cover of personal accounts at certain Lebanese banks, including U.S.-designated Jammal Trust Bank (JTB), to evade sanctions targeting AQAH and transfer approximately half a billion U.S. dollars on behalf of AQAH.

Transylvania - Tourists visiting Dracula’s Castle in Transylvania are coming out with distinctive puncture marks. Not to worry, says the Association of Mature American Citizens, the marks are being inflicted on them by qualified medical personnel-- not by the fangs of Bram Stoker’s fictional, neck biting Count. 

Washington, DC - In an essay titled “The end of artefacts, ” Nobel laureate and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) fellow William D. Phillips details how scientists came to realize the original vision of the metric system, or the International System of Units (SI) — a system of units “for all times, for all people.” With the redefinition of the kilogram in 2019, the new SI was rightly celebrated as a unifying achievement toward the democratization of science, with NIST and its international partners having collectively led the charge.

Tehachapi, California - “The Birds” in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie with the same name were pretty scary when they flocked and attacked the hapless heroine. So, you can imagine how scared Cinda Mickols, who lives in Tehachapi, was when a flock of Giant California condors targeted her home recently.