Author: KnowledgeHippo

Kiyomi Lowe regularly hears people mispronounce her name, or sometimes forget it altogether. “I get Naomi, Kaiomi, sometimes Kimmy,” she said. It doesn’t bother her: “I’ll answer anything.”She is less forgiving when friends and acquaintances forget the name of her dog, a Shar-Pei. “I understand Bruno a lot,” he said. To which she replies: “No, it’s Brutus! The dog doesn’t care. But I care about the dog.”Ms. Lowe is a stylist at Al’s Barber Shop, a popular six-chair salon in Boulder near the University of Colorado campus. On a recent morning, she got into a heated discussion with her fellow…

A top general and allied members of the military tried to storm the presidential palace in Bolivia on Wednesday afternoon before quickly retreating in an apparently failed coup attempt.Hours later, the general was taken into custody on live television.Video on Bolivian television showed security forces in riot gear occupying the central square of the administrative capital La Paz, a camouflaged military vehicle banging on the palace door and soldiers trying to enter the palace.Then, just as quickly as they appeared, General Juan José Zúñiga disappeared and his backers in the armed forces withdrew and were replaced by police who supported…

For the past three years, US schools have been in an unusual position: they’ve had a lot of money to spend.The federal government has invested $190 billion in pandemic aid for schools. the largest chunk, $122 billion, came in 2021 to help students recover. Overall, it was the largest single federal investment in American education, but it came with a major question: Would it work?Two separate studies, released Wednesday, show the money helped, but not as much as it could have.”Money did contribute to the recovery,” said Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard University who helped lead one of…

Curious about electric vehicles but not ready to buy one? Renting one can help you see what it’s like — and some rental car companies offer discounts.But a smooth electric vehicle experience, especially if you rent for vacation, requires a fair amount of planning because fast-charging stations, while more available than they were four years ago, are still not as ubiquitous as gas stations.For now, an electric car might work better for a long weekend or a trip where you plan to stay in one place and take day trips, rather than an epic coast-to-coast trip.”A road trip across the…

The Supreme Court handed the Biden administration a major practical victory on Wednesday, rejecting a Republican challenge that sought to prevent the administration from communicating with social media platforms to combat disinformation.The court ruled that the states and users who had challenged those interactions had not suffered the kind of direct injury that allowed them to sue.The 6-3 ruling left open for another day fundamental questions about the limits the First Amendment places on the government’s power to influence the technology companies that are the primary gatekeepers of information in the Internet age.The case arose out of a barrage of…

The Supreme Court appears poised to temporarily allow emergency abortions in Idaho when a woman’s health is at risk, according to a copy of the opinion that appeared briefly on the court’s website Wednesday.The unsigned opinion dismissed the case on procedural grounds, saying the court would not, for now, consider the merits of the dispute, according to the 22-page document, which was published by Bloomberg News. Such a ruling would reverse a lower federal court’s ruling that had halted Idaho’s near-total abortion ban and said state hospitals could perform emergency abortions if necessary to protect the mother’s health.The case centers…

For much of my childhood in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I didn’t talk about the Housatonic River. Unlike the many lakes where my brother and I swam or skated, attended Boy Scout camps, or splashed around for family picnics, the shady and shadowy Housatonic seemed unfamiliar and sometimes downright eerie. The concepts for the banks of the River Eden came from my mom reading “The Wind in the Willows” aloud after dinner — not from encounters with the actual river that flowed 330 meters from our front door.Later, I came to associate Housatonic with sadness. An arched bridge over…

The sting of tear gas, the cracking of live bullets and images of wounded people sprawled on the ground accompanied mass protests on Tuesday in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, after Parliament approved a controversial tax hike bill despite criticism that it would intensifies economic despair.Crowds breached Parliament amid smoke as days of protests against the tax bill ended in clashes between police and protesters. Nearly a dozen people died in the violence, state and independent rights groups said.In recent days, the government has been accused of kidnapping critics, making mass arrests across the country to quell the unrest, and using…

After several years of the pandemic, school districts across the country are facing budget shortfalls, with the pressure coming on multiple fronts.A stream of federal dollars — $122 billion meant to help schools recover from the pandemic — dried up in September, leaving schools with less money for teachers, summer schools and other aid that has funded pandemic recovery efforts for the past three years .At the same time, declining student enrollment — a consequence of lower birth rates and the growing school choice movement — is looming in some districts.The result: Districts across the country must make tough decisions…

The immediate trigger for the raging protest that hit the Kenyan capital on Tuesday was a series of tax hikes – extra shillings that ordinary citizens would owe their government. The underlying cause, however, is the billions of dollars their government owes its creditors.Kenya has the fastest growing economy in Africa and a vibrant business hub. But her government is desperately trying to prevent bankruptcy. The country’s staggering domestic and external public debt of $80 billion represents nearly three-quarters of Kenya’s total economic output, according to a recent report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Interest payments…