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BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KBAK/KBFX) — The House of Representatives voted Thursday morning to block California from implementing plans to block new sales of gas-powered vehicles in a decade. The House approved House Joint Resolution 88, which seeks to withdraw a waiver granted by the Environmental Protection Agency to California. The vote was 246 to 164, with 35 Democrats and 211 Republicans in favor. Those who approved were Central Valley representatives Vince Fong and David Valadao. The House also approved two other measures, which withdraw waivers on the state's mandate that truck makers sell zero-emission trucks and implement nitrogen oxide engine emission...

Will Zelensky attack ther Victory Day parade and escalate the war to the maximum? On the one hand, we all know ‘talk is cheap’, so it may be that Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky is just posturing when he hints that his forces may well attack the May 9th Victory Day Parade in Moscow, Russia – an event that will gather thousands of people, including as many as 20 heads of state. This would amount to an especially damning escalation since Putin declared a 3-day truce from May 8-10 – a proposal that Kiev sneered at, but hasn’t publicly rejected. However,...

Explanation: The first to orbit inner planet Mercury, the MESSENGER spacecraft came to rest on this region of Mercury's surface on April 30, 2015. Constructed from MESSENGER image and laser altimeter data, the projected scene looks north over the northeastern rim of the broad, lava filled Shakespeare basin. The large, 48 kilometer (30 mile) wide crater Janacek is near the upper left edge. Terrain height is color coded with red regions about 3 kilometers above blue ones. MESSENGER'S final orbit was predicted to end near the center, with the spacecraft impacting the surface at nearly 4 kilometers per second (over...

Police shot and killed a death metal pioneer in San Francisco this week after an argument with a neighbor over tree clippings turned violent. Brian Montana, 60, guitarist for the band Possessed, died in a shootout with cops after he pulled a gun on a neighbor during an argument... One neighbor sustained non-life-threatening injuries in the shootout, during which Montana took cover behind parked cars and landscaping and used three different guns to shoot at cops for almost half an hour, according to authorities, per CBS Bay Area. “[Montana] fired multiple times at officers using a handgun, shotgun, and rifle...

What do you get when you take a 40 percent out-of-wedlock birthrate, mix it with a 25 percent absentee-father rate, and sprinkle some social media on top? You get feral kids. Raised by their devices and peers, and educated not in the school of virtue but of virality, most of them are in their late teens to early twenties. Anybody living in our nation’s largest cities has become acquainted with these kids in recent years — from the teen takeovers in Chicago and illegal house parties in Nashville to the drag racing in Florida and the storming of malls in...

In a majority of states across the union, gas prices are now higher than they were on the day of Donald Trump's return to the White House on January 20, while in a handful they are exactly the same and only in a few they have fallen, according to AAA data. The numbers show that, after more than 100 days in office, the U.S. president is still struggling to keep his promise to lower prices at the pump for American drivers, especially as his administration's tariffs threaten further turmoil in the global markets. Gas prices surged under Joe Biden, driven...

Russian Security Council Deputy Chair Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president, referred to Ukraine as "a disappearing country" in a post on Telegram. "But Trump has finally broken the Kiev regime into paying for American aid with minerals. Now they will have to pay for military supplies with the national wealth of a disappearing country," Medvedev said, according to a Google translation of part of his post. The Russian official also noted President Donald Trump's ratings have declined. "And the US Senate, led by Republicans, is preparing to introduce more ‘crushing sanctions’ against us. Let's see how the new administration...

Democrats nationally may be in turmoil, but liberals in San Francisco are hopeful the new mayor’s collaborative approach will help solve entrenched problems in a city recently known for its bitter infighting and chaotic streets. Daniel Lurie, an heir to the the Levi Strauss fortune and anti-poverty nonprofit founder with no elected experience, beat out incumbent London Breed in November after spending nearly $10 million of his own money. Voters embraced his promise to make government work again after years of San Francisco attracting national attention for its empty downtown, open-air drug use and sprawling tent encampments. In an interview...

President Donald J. Trump has secured over $5 trillion in new U.S.-based investments in his first 100 days, which will create more than 451,000 new jobs as he sets the stage for a new era of American prosperity. From advanced manufacturing to cutting-edge artificial intelligence infrastructure, these historic investments — spurred by President Trump’s unwavering commitment to revitalizing American industry — will reinforce the U.S. as the global leader in innovation and economic growth.The announcements keep coming. In recent days:IBM announced a $150 billion investment over the next five years in its U.S.-based growth and manufacturing operations.Thermo Fisher Scientific announced...

Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., who won a special election to replace national security adviser Mike Waltz in Florida's 6th Congressional District, ripped Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Wednesday for working with Democrats on a Senate resolution designed to rein in President Donald Trump's proposed tariffs.The Senate was poised Wednesday to vote on the resolution, which would end the national emergency Trump declared in an executive order to implement the tariffs on foreign imports. Paul and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who sponsored the resolution, used a special legislative procedure to force a vote. The resolution prompted House Republicans to add a...

The U.S. Justice Department Thursday said it had filed a complaint against three of the country's biggest health insurance companies, Aetna Inc. and affiliates, Elevance Health and Humana, under the False Claims Act.The action also affects three large insurance broker organizations: eHealth, GoHealth and SelectQuote, it said."The United States alleges that from 2016 through at least 2021, the defendant insurers paid hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks to the defendant brokers in exchange for enrollments into the insurers’ Medicare Advantage plans," the Justice Department said in its release.The DOJ also said that Aetna and Humana conspired with the...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hailed the much-anticipated deal with the United States involving rare-earth minerals on Thursday, saying the agreement is "now truly an equal partnership." "All our representatives did a good job. The agreement has changed significantly during the preparation process. It is now truly an equal partnership - one that creates opportunities for substantial investment in Ukraine, as well as significant modernisation of Ukraine's industries and, equally importantly, its legal practices," Zelenskyy posted on X. The fundamentals of the agreement are said to give the U.S. preferential access to new minerals deals in Ukraine, which will also be...

Workers throughout China are flooding the streets in revolt as U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs slam the fragile Chinese export economy. From the cramped streets of Sichuan in the southwest to the cold outskirts of Inner Mongolia in the northeast, furious workers are demanding back pay and protesting mass layoffs as factories shutter under pressure from Trump’s tariffs. Outside a LED light manufacturing plant near Shanghai, thousands of unpaid workers shouted furiously at company managers over wages that haven’t been paid since January. In central China’s Dao County, a similar scene unfolded outside a sporting goods store after the company...

The moves are part of the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign on Iran to help weaken its terrorist activities in the Middle East, including through its use of proxy forces. President Donald Trump on Thursday announced the United States will impose secondary sanctions on all countries or individuals that purchase oil or petrochemicals from Iran. The announcement comes a day after the State Department sanctioned seven entities it accused of trading Iranian oil and petrochemical products. The president confirmed the new secondary sanctions in a post on Truth Social, warning countries they would not be allowed to do business with...

Information Processing: An Unnatural Attribute of LifeResearchers have long recognized information (CSI) as a prime descriptor of living systems, in comparison to the low levels of information in non-living systems. Skeptics, however, seem to have remained convinced that natural processes can gradually ratchet up information, even in opposition to established laws of physics and observable operations of nature.Recently, researchers have put forward a corollary attribute of living systems, namely that living organisms process and manipulate information. Decision-making based on information processing appears as a ubiquitous biosignature.Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to...

A business in Illinois, owned by a vocal critic of controversial Democratic mayor Tiffany Henyard, was destroyed in a fire deemed “suspicious” by authorities earlier this week. “The fire is suspicious in nature,” Dolton Deputy Fire Chief John Calhoun told WGN. “We do have the fire marshal out here currently with our [mutual aid] arson team.” The blaze erupted around 6 a.m. Tuesday, escalating to a three-alarm fire. No injuries were reported, but the building was a total loss, according to FOX 32 Chicago. A smaller fire occurred at the same site the previous week, WGN noted. The property, owned...

Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas has started pitching fellow Democrats on a run for the party’s top Oversight Committee position, according to two people familiar with the situation. Crockett’s entreaties — playing out in phone calls, text messages and floor conversations — mark the beginning of a contested race to succeed Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) as Oversight’s ranking member. Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts is also seeking the job, though Connolly — who announced plans to step aside after suffering a recurrence of esophageal cancer — has not yet formally done so. Crockett has told other lawmakers that she’s “made...

A growing number of transgender musicians have cancelled events in the U.S. over President Donald Trump’s transgender policies even as the U.K. Supreme Court rules that transgender women are not legally biological women. Over the last few weeks, two Canadian singers have cancelled concert appearances in the U.S. claiming that they fear being “targeted” due to the president’s policies. Last month, Halifax trans non-binary pop artist T. Thomason announced that he was pulling out of All Roads Festival in Belfast, Maine, scheduled for May 16, because he is upset over the Trump administration’s policy that the U.S. government will only...

Republicans are trying to lock in Trump’s tax cuts and Democrats are resisting. We now know that DOGE is trying to end the wasteful spending in DC. But I would really like to see tax rates on the middle class fall. The wealth gap between the top 1% of taxpayers and the bottom 50% of taxpayers is enormous. And has gotten worse since 1990. Meanwhile. to fight off the temporary effects of the tariff war, Trump is urging Fed Chair Powell to cut rates. Powell will likely NOT cut rates. But what does “Lunatic Liz” Warren say about rate cuts??

President Trump announced a major shakeup in his national security team on Thursday, tapping Mike Waltz to be his United Nations ambassador while Secretary of State Marco Rubio will fill the national security adviser post on an acting basis. “I am pleased to announce that I will be nominating Mike Waltz to be the next United States Ambassador to the United Nations,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “From his time in uniform on the battlefield, in Congress and, as my National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz has worked hard to put our Nation’s Interests first. I know he will do the...