This year, The Store is offering that same dignity of choice to parents looking for gifts for the holiday season. During a two-day event starting Friday, selected families will shop at a free toy store, stocked with brand new toys, video games, stuffed animals, scooters, clothes, makeup and musical instruments.

“The emotional aspect of being able to give your child something your child wanted versus just something to sort of get you through the holidays, that’s such a load off the minds of somebody who maybe didn’t think they were going to be able to do that,” Paisley said.

The Paisleys got a sneak peak on Thursday before the free toy store opened, marveling over the stacks of gifts, wrapping station, Christmas trees and holiday decorations. Volunteers and staff from Belmont University and The Store spent hours unpacking and organizing all the donated toys into sections and decorating while listening to Christmas music.

The celebrity couple brought the idea of a free grocery store to Nashville after seeing the concept years ago at the Unity Shoppe in Santa Barbara, California. When The Store launched in early 2020, it was just weeks after a tornado hit the city and before the global pandemic made food access an immediate problem.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9320220

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9315190

I received a lot of flack in my other posts for providing this data in conjunction with his efforts to raise money. I separated this post in order to comply with the rules. https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/musks-spacex-approaches-investors-another-tender-offer-bloomberg-news-2023-12-06/

To verify the satellite data click the bottom left box that shows the fireball.

Idk how this news isn't mainstream. A loss of 1,000 satellites before the lifespan of 5 years is a major story.

One in five patients crossed state lines to obtain an abortion in 2023, compared with one in 10 patients in 2020

Abortion providers witnessed a record surge in out-of-state patients since Roe v Wade was overturned last year, according to newly released data from the Guttmacher Institute. The report, offering the first analysis of abortion-related travel since the supreme court decision, revealed that one in five patients crossed state lines to obtain an abortion in 2023, compared with one in 10 patients in 2020.

As abortion bans have rippled across the country, providers in the states such as Illinois – where the procedure is protected by the state constitution – have been inundated with appointment requests. Illinois’s clinics doubled the proportion of abortions provided to out-of-state patients, according to the Guttmacher report – in 2020, 21% of the patients who received abortion care in Illinois came from out of state; in 2023, the figure jumps to 42%.

The US representative at the UN, Robert Wood, has said that they wouldn’t support an immediate ceasefire.

"While the United States strongly supports a durable peace, in which both Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace and security, we do not support calls for an immediate ceasefire."

"This would only plant the seeds for the next war because Hamas has no desire to see a durable peace," he told the UN Security Council.

The US is one of the permanent members which has the right to veto resolution.

President Joe Biden is heading to Las Vegas to showcase $8.2 billion in funding for 10 major passenger rail projects across the country, including to spur work on high-speed, electric train routes that could one day link Nevada and California, as well as Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The administration says the 218-mile (350.8-kilometer) train route linking Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga, California, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) east of downtown Los Angeles, may one day serve more than 11 million passengers annually.

The administration hopes the investment through federal and state partnership programs will help to boost prospects for the long-discussed project, which supporters say could revitalize travel in the American West and critics argue is too costly.

One month after Mississippi’s November statewide election, voting rights groups say election officials in the state’s largest county have failed to provide enough information about the problems that led to polling precincts running out of ballots.

The coalition of statewide and national civil rights organizations has requested meetings and more details about why Hinds County Election Commissioners ordered the wrong ballots, leading to shortages at several polling locations on the day the state was deciding a competitive governor’s race and a full slate of down-ballot races. Those queries have largely been met with silence, the groups said at a joint news conference Thursday.

“While we recognize and respect the commissioners have taken responsibility for the ballot shortages, Hinds County voters still have questions,” said Amir Badat, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Approximately seven mortar rounds landed in the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad during an attack early on Friday, a U.S. military official told Reuters, in what appears to be one of the largest attacks against the embassy in recent memory.

It also marked the first time the U.S. embassy had been fired on in more than a year, apparently widening the range of targets after dozens of attacks on military bases housing U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since mid-October amid fears of broadening conflict in the region.

No group claimed responsibility, but previous attack against U.S. forces have been carried out by Iran-aligned militias which have targeted U.S. interests in Syria and Iraq over Washington's backing for Israel in its Gaza war.

The electric vehicle producer faces a backlash in the Nordic region from unions and some pension funds over its refusal to accept a demand from Swedish mechanics for collective bargaining rights covering wages and other conditions.

Norges Bank Investment Management, which operates the Norwegian fund, is Tesla's 7th biggest shareholder with a 0.88% stake worth some $6.8 billion according to LSEG data.

"We expect companies in which we invest to respect fundamental human rights, including labour rights," NBIM said in a statement to Reuters when asked about Tesla's conflict with its Swedish workers.

"In 2022 we supported a shareholder proposal at Tesla that asked the company to introduce a policy to respect the right to organise," it added.

The 2022 proposal, which NBIM said was supported by 32% of those who voted, called on Tesla to adopt a policy of respecting labour rights such as freedom of association and collective bargaining. The company's board recommended a 'no' vote.

A federal lawsuit filed by a group of states alleges the NCAA’s transfer rule for college athletes violates antitrust law.

The lawsuit, filed in West Virginia’s northern district, challenges the NCAA’s authority to impose a one-year delay in the eligibility of certain athletes who transfer between schools. The suit said the rule “unjustifiably restrains the ability of these college athletes to engage in the market for their labor as NCAA Division I college athletes.”

The lawsuit filed by West Virginia and six other states alleges violations of the Sherman Act.

NCAA rules allow underclassmen to transfer once without having to sit out a year. But an additional transfer as an undergraduate generally requires the NCAA to grant a waiver allowing the athlete to compete immediately. Without it, the athlete would have to sit out for a year at the new school.

PYNQ alleged that FedEx violates laws governing contractors by exercising the same level of control over those service providers as it would over employees.

Using contractors enables Ground to shift employee and other expenses to those service providers. It also helps FedEx control labor costs by thwarting union organizing efforts, which are more complex at many small companies than at one large company.

PYNQ, owned by former airline pilot Tara Wright, in 2021 spent $1.13 million to buy two FedEx Ground delivery areas with routes serving northern California's McKinleyville and Crescent City. FedEx sent termination letters on both service areas in May and sold one of them without her consent and without compensation. There was not time to sell the second area, leading to a loss, PYNQ's attorney Possinger said.

"Ethan Crumbley will be sentenced in a hearing Friday for killing four students and wounding seven others when he opened fire at Oxford High School in Michigan in November 2021. Live news updates."

U.S. businesses and other employers added a healthy 199,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate fell, fresh signs that the economy could achieve an elusive “soft landing,” in which inflation would return to the Federal Reserve’s 2% target without causing a steep recession.

Friday’s report from the Labor Department showed that the unemployment rate dropped from 3.9% to 3.7%, not far above a five-decade low of 3.4% in April. The jobless rate has now remained below 4% for nearly two years, the longest such streak since the late 1960s.

Last month’s increase was inflated by the return of about 40,000 formerly striking auto workers and actors, who were not at work in October but were back on the job in November.

The gambit by the former U.S. president and frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination may succeed, legal experts said -- not necessarily by persuading higher courts of the merits of his case, but simply by bogging down the system and keeping him free to campaign against Democratic President Joe Biden.

Trump's lawyers on Thursday said they'd appeal a ruling by the federal judge overseeing his upcoming Washington, D.C., trial on federal election subversion charges denying Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution related to official actions he took as president.

That ruling may be the last one Trump will be able to appeal before the start of his trial, currently scheduled to begin in March.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20231208133526/https://chicago.suntimes.com/2023/12/6/23989776/chicago-taxpayers-nearly-700-million-lawsuits-framed-police

Petryshen, who works for the conservation group Wildsight, is on a detective mission of sorts. He’s about to bushwhack into the Nagle Creek Valley, 150 kilometres north of Revelstoke, B.C., to ground-truth provincial government logging maps he obtained in May. The maps outline the government’s plans for new clearcuts in the disappearing inland temperate rainforest, in core habitat for an endangered caribou herd.

According to BC Timber Sales, the provincial government agency responsible for planning and auctioning off the cutblocks, the cedar and hemlock trees slated for logging are between 224 and 336 years old. Petryshen, who’s been scrolling through forest inventory data and cross-matching maps, isn’t so sure. “We question whether this is a reliable estimate,” he says. Forests above 400 years old are classified as ancient, meaning this forest would automatically meet provincial government criteria for old-growth logging deferrals.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20231208134308/https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/12/07/opinion/harden-sjc-fall-river-police-shooting-court-case-bristol-county-da-quinn/

On a November evening in 2021, Anthony Harden, a 30-year-old Black man, was shot to death in his bedroom by one of two Fall River police officers called in to investigate a domestic dispute that had occurred two days earlier.

Those are among the few facts not in dispute.

A month later Bristol County District Attorney Thomas M. Quinn III issued a report concluding that, “The fatal shooting of Mr. Harden by a Fall River police officer was justified and was the result of Mr. Harden’s violent and armed assault on the male police officer. There is no basis to conclude that either Fall River police officer committed a crime.” Harden’s brother Eric B. Mack, an attorney, isn’t so sure about that and has been fighting for the past two years to get photographs, videos, and other evidence collected by State Police attached to Quinn’s office during the course of their investigation. Even the names of the two officers, including the female officer identified as the shooter, were redacted in Quinn’s final report — although they are identified by name in Mack’s court filing.

A superior court judge has already ruled that nearly all of the materials Mack is looking for are matters of public information to which he is entitled.

Quinn, however, is not only fighting to keep those records from the public but has now invoked the state’s landmark 2020 Police Reform Act to help do so. His interpretation of the very law legislators passed to bring transparency to allegations of police misconduct would instead allow it to be used as a shield by every police department in the Commonwealth to protect their own investigations of potential wrongdoing from public scrutiny.

The state’s Supreme Judicial Court, which heard the case Wednesday, is being asked to decide, in part, whether in fact lawmakers meant what they said when they passed a law aimed at achieving “justice, equity, and accountability in law enforcement in the Commonwealth

A salmonella outbreak tied to tainted cantaloupe has now killed eight people — three in the U.S. and five in Canada, health officials reported Thursday.

Dozens more illnesses were reported by both countries. In the U.S., at least 230 people have been ill in 38 states and 96 have been hospitalized since mid-November, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The tainted cantaloupe was also shipped to Canada, where 129 cases have been reported, including 44 hospitalizations, health officials reported.

Many of the people who fell ill reported eating pre-cut cantaloupe in clamshell packages and trays sold in stores. Consumers should not buy, eat or serve cantaloupe, if they don’t know the source, the CDC said.

A trip to the doctor’s office comes with a bit of preparation for most, maybe even an internal pep talk to prepare for being told to get more exercise or calm a simmering fear of needles.

But dressing well in hopes of warding off unfair treatment – or even bracing for being insulted?

A newly released poll by KFF, a health policy research group, found many patients of color — including 3 in 5 Black respondents — take such steps at least some of the time when seeing a doctor.

The poll found that 55% of Black respondents said they feel like they must be very careful about their appearance to be treated fairly at medical visits. That’s similar to the rate for Hispanic and Alaska Native patients – and nearly double the rate for white patients.