Hawaii makes period products free at all public schools
Story at a glance Hawaii passed a law requiring public schools to offer free period products to all students. It’s an effort to end period poverty, an issue that’s defined as lack of access to menstrual products and can cause physical and mental challenges. Nationally, about 16. 9 million people who menstruate in the U.S. are also li
Read MoreIRS says it’s making headway in clearing tax return backlog
The IRS says it is climbing out from under the unprecedented stack of tax returns that piled up after the agency had to scale back its operations and close facilities in 2020 following the onset of the pandemic. The agency announced Tuesday that by the end of this week it will have cleared all original individual tax returns that were filed in 2021 and that didn’t contain any major mistakes. “Due to issues related to the pandemic and staffing limitations, the IRS began 2022 with a larger than usual inventory of paper tax returns and correspondence filed during 2021,” the
Read MoreArizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers refutes Trump’s description of phone call: ‘That certainly isn’t it’
Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) refuted former President Trump’s description of a phone call between the two men after the 2020 presidential election, telling the members of the select House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol he never told Trump the election was rigged. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the Jan. 6 panel who took a leading role in Tuesday's hearing, began Bowers’s in-person testimony by asking the Arizona official about a phone call that took place between him and Trump after the 2020 presidential election. T
Read MoreRusty Bowers says Giuliani told him: 'We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence'
Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) on Tuesday said he repeatedly pressed Rudy Giuliani for proof of his claims of election fraud after the 2020 election, but that Giuliani failed to produce any. “My recollection, he said, ‘We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence,’” Bowers told the Jan. 6 House committee at Tuesday’s hearing. “And I don’t know if that was a gaffe or maybe he didn’t think through what he said, but both myself and others in my group… both remember that specifically, and afterwards we kind of laughed about it,” Bowers adde
Read MoreUS weapons technology can help Ukraine while reassuring Russia
Since the start of U.S. military assistance to Ukraine in the wake of the Russian invasion, the United States has sought to walk a fine line between helping Ukraine to defend itself and provoking a broader war with Russia. For this reason, the United States and the rest of NATO have refrained from engaging in direct military operations with Russian forces, opting instead for a strategy of providing substantial military assistance to Ukraine, largely though not exclusively in the form of weapons that would otherwise be unavailable to Ukrainian forces. Even here, the United St
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