Ervin Wyatt’s history behind the wheel spreads across two pages of a recent court filing: Fleeing police. Fleeing police again. Running a red light. Causing a traffic collision. Driving without a license, four times. A dozen speeding tickets.

Yet the California Department of Motor Vehicles issued him a license in 2019. Wyatt promptly got three more speeding tickets, court records show. Prosecutors say he was speeding again in 2023 when he lost control and crashed into oncoming traffic, killing three women. He’s now facing murder charges in Stanislaus County.

The DMV routinely allows drivers like these — with horrifying histories of dangerous driving, including DUIs, crashes and numerous tickets — to continue to operate on our roadways, a CalMatters investigation has found. Too often they go on to kill. Many keep driving even after they kill. Some go on to kill again.

The Encinitas City Council on Wednesday approved a $3.8 million paving contract and voted to keep existing striping on Birmingham Drive after residents opposed a proposed bike lane.

The agenda item included plans to restripe Birmingham Drive with a new eastbound, uphill bike lane, drawing strong opposition from several public speakers who raised concerns about safety and transparency.

“I find it disturbing that important restriping on an artery like this could be initiated more or less anonymously in a 400-page document on pavement maintenance,” said Ron Medak, speaking as a resident and commissioner on the Mobility and Traffic Safety Commission. “Birmingham is very dangerous … Liverpool (Drive), as somebody suggested, is a very good alternative, much less traffic.”

Several speakers, including representatives from Cardiff 101 Main Street and the Cardiff Town Council, argued that Birmingham’s narrow lanes and steep grade make it unsuitable for a bike lane.

“The proposed eastbound bi

In the public imagination, homelessness looks like the man in soiled clothes sleeping on top of a subway grate or the woman peering out of a tent from under a highway overpass. But in cities and towns that have the highest concentrations of homelessness, many — and sometimes a majority — of those who do not live in shelters are in cars, not on the streets, according to the annual census known as the “point in time count.”

In Los Angeles County, for example, two-thirds are living in vehicles. In San Mateo County, which includes part of Silicon Valley, its even more — 71 percent.

“The American dream of owning a home is dead unless you make a gazillion dollars,”

The Trump administration is freezing $790 million in federal funding to Northwestern University and more than $1 billion in funding to Cornell University, a White House official told CNN.

”The money was frozen in connection with several ongoing, credible, and concerning Title VI investigations,” a Trump administration official said, referring to a federal statute that prohibits discrimination in programs and activities that receive federal funding.

The 2023 law aims to improve street safety by making it easier to see pedestrians, since parking right up against a crosswalk blocks the view drivers have of people entering or approaching intersections. The law applies at all intersections, including those without painted crosswalks, as well as mid-block crosswalks. Cities were allowed to start writing tickets for violations on Jan. 1.

Instead of writing tickets, city spokesman Matthai Chakko said officials are encouraging drivers to comply with the law voluntarily.

“The most important thing is not about citations and tickets, but safety,” Chakko wrote in an email. “Avoiding parking within daylighting zones helps fellow motorists to uphold one of their principle responsibilities: yielding to pedestrians at a sidewalk. It improves their own line of vision as well as that of fellow drivers.”

A group of residents and businesses is raising money to oppose Menlo Park’s proposed affordable housing developments on downtown parking lots. The group, Save Downtown Menlo, launched a GoFundMe that has raised over $130,000 in less than a month.

“[Donations are] coming from visitors, people in Atherton, Woodside and Portola Valley that use downtown Menlo as their main business and shopping hub,” said Kevin Cunningham, a downtown property owner and an organizer for the legal fund.

Save Downtown Menlo hopes to raise $300,000 to ensure it has “ample resources available for a long legal process.” Funds raised by Save Downtown Menlo will be used in an effort to block the city council’s housing proposal.

This was the third such referendum in Paris in as many years, following a 2023 vote that approved a ban on e-scooters, and a decision last year to triple parking charges for large SUVs.

The referendum will eliminate 10,000 more parking spots in Paris, adding to the 10,000 removed since 2020. The city's two million residents will be consulted on which streets will become pedestrian areas.

Paris town hall data shows car traffic in the city has more than halved since the Socialists took power in the capital at the turn of the century.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/26116694

Even with the caveats about limited data and untangling causation and correlation, the statistics are striking: the first year of a scheme in Wales where the speed limit on urban roads was lowered to 20mph resulted in about 100 fewer people killed or seriously injured.

President Donald Trump suggested Friday that people found guilty of attacking Tesla properties could serve their sentences in El Salvador prisons, sharply ramping up his rhetoric in defense of Elon Musk’s company amid an intensifying backlash.

The president’s threat on Truth Social added to his administration’s increasingly vocal support for Musk, the billionaire and Trump megadonor who is now leading the divisive government-slashing DOGE initiative.

“I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” Trump wrote in the social media post Friday morning.

“Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!” he wrote, referring to his administration’s controversial deportation of alleged gang members.

President Donald Trump's administration's response to a judicial request for more details on timing of deportation flights carrying hundreds of Venezuelan migrants was "woefully insufficient," a judge said on Thursday, accusing officials of evading their responsibilities under an order he issued.

Washington-based U.S. District Judge James Boasberg is weighing whether administration officials violated his March 15 order intended to temporarily block the expulsions. In a new order on Thursday, the judge told Justice Department officials to explain by next Tuesday why the administration's failure to bring the deported migrants back to the United States did not violate his order.

Boasberg's order on Thursday escalates his dispute with the administration that has raised concerns among Trump critics and some legal experts about a potentially looming constitutional crisis if the administration defies judicial decisions.

A controversial proposal from U.S Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to let bird flu naturally spread through poultry farms is raising alarms among scientists -- who say the move could be inhumane and dangerous.

A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém.

It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will host more than 50,000 people - including world leaders - at the conference in November.

The state government touts the highway's "sustainable" credentials, but some locals and conservationists are outraged at the environmental impact.

The Federation of Tampere Evangelical Lutheran Parishes wants to pump excess heat from its Valtiala furnace into the local central heating system to heat homes in the town as well as in nearby Kangasala.

If the parish union and Kangasalan Lämpö reach an agreement, the crematorium's excess heat could be warming homes in the area by next winter.

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has disbanded two expert committees that worked with the government to produce economic statistics, potentially affecting the quality of data.

The terminations by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick were effective February 28 and communicated on Tuesday via email to one of the panels, the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC), which assisted with inflation and employment gross domestic product (GDP) data.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a prominent Republican congresswoman and a staunch ally of Trump, suggested a return to "measles parties" for children. She criticized contemporary attitudes towards vaccination, stating, "Now, they demonize parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids."

The Liberal government announced in early 2023, that it would purchase 88 F-35s in a project costing $19 billion. DND officials also confirmed the full life-cycle cost for the F-35 project would eventually tally $70 billion.

The first of Canada’s F-35s will be first delivered to a U.S. military base in 2026 and then into Canada in 2028. Canada plans to operate the aircraft until 2060.

In recent days, some Canadians have voiced concerns online that the U.S. has installed a specialized kill switch that could disable the Royal Canadian Air Force’s F-35 fleet.

DND spokesperson Kened Sadiku said no such switch exists on the aircraft, but he did acknowledge that the U.S. is in charge of both software and hardware upgrades for the planes.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that government spending could be separated from gross domestic product reports, in response to questions about whether the spending cuts pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency could possibly cause an economic downturn.

Doing so could potentially complicate or distort a fundamental measure of the U.S. economy’s health.

Serbia was supposed to abstain from voting on the Ukrainian resolution, Vucic said.

"I believe that Serbia made a mistake today. I apologize to the citizens of Serbia for that, and I take the blame for that because I was probably tired and overwhelmed," he said. "I didn't have time to deal with this (issue) enough, maybe I'm too tired, maybe I have too many things (to deal with)."

UnitedHealthcare is in hot water again as the insurance giant grapples with a reported government investigation of its Medicare billing practices, pursues employee buyouts and potential layoffs, and clashes publicly with billionaire Bill Ackman.

Those developments in recent days extend a tumultuous past year for its parent company, UnitedHealth Group, marked by the killing of a top executive, a costly cyberattack against its subsidiary and high medical costs in its insurance arm. UnitedHealth Group is the biggest health-care conglomerate in the U.S. based on revenue and its more than $420 billion market cap, and UnitedHealthcare is the nation’s largest private insurer.

Shares of UnitedHealth Group have tumbled roughly 23% over the last three months.