California
The spread of the highly contagious COVID-19 variant first identified in Britain is sparking worry about a future surge in Southern California, one of the nation’s two hot spots of the strain…
Senator Padilla will serve on the U.S. Senate Committees on Budget; Rules and Administration; Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC); Environment and Public Works (EPW); and Judiciary…
On Monday, 2/2, the state Department of Finance formally notified lawmakers that California had received an unanticipated $1.7 billion in federal funds to help with its COVID-19 response and vaccination efforts…
Los Angeles County campuses that closed amid the COVID-19 pandemic should immediately reopen, according to a regional affiliate of the American Academy of Pediatrics, because the harms of keeping children out of school outweigh the risks of safely and carefully managed classrooms…
Coronavirus
President Biden is hoping Vice President Kamala Harris, the highest ranking and most visible person of color in the federal government, can sell communities of color on trusting and receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, particularly the African American community, which has been among the most skeptical of any about getting the vaccine…
COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. surpassed 450,000 on Thursday, 2/4, and daily deaths remain stubbornly high at more than 3,000 a day, despite falling infections and the arrival of multiple vaccines…
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is preparing to release new standards for COVID-19 vaccine booster shots, tests and drugs in the coming weeks — all aimed at preparing the country to beat back fast-spreading virus variants that are less susceptible to existing shots…
President Joe Biden said it’s unlikely the U.S. will reach herd immunity for COVID-19 before the end of the summer due to a shortfall in vaccine availability…
Johnson & Johnson (J&J) asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to clear its experimental COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use…
Regulators in the U.S. have begun to review certain data required for clearance of Novavax Inc.’s COVID-19 vaccine while final-phase clinical trials are still underway, the company said in a statement…
President and Administration
The Biden administration said it would release $1.3 billion in aid that Puerto Rico can use to protect against future climate disasters, and is starting to remove some restrictions put in place by the Trump administration on spending that was to help the island after Hurricane Maria in 2017…
President Joe Biden’s quest to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour as part of his $1.9 trillion pandemic-relief package may have hit a political and procedural roadblock in a new report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO)…
President Biden has offered Julie Su, who heads California’s Labor and Workforce Development Agency, the role of deputy Labor secretary, and she accepted…
Congress
House Democrats on Monday, 2/8, released the first draft text for key pieces of legislation that will comprise President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 relief bill…
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) will keep her job as the No. 3 House Republican after a resounding victory Wednesday, 2/3, easily beating back a conservative-led push to oust her as conference chair for voting to impeach Donald Trump…
On Thursday, 2/4, House Democrats stripped freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) of her committee assignments after Republican leaders refused to act unilaterally…
Education
The Center for Collegiate Mental Health, a research group made up of college counseling centers and based at Pennsylvania State University, released new data on Tuesday, 2/2…
A new report on California’s online charter schools says that the state is “wasting hundreds of millions of dollars a year by funding these schools at a level far above their costs”…
To help safely reopen America's schools and promote educational equity, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education announced the largest representative and highest-quality effort yet to gather vital data on the impact of COVID-19 on students and the status of in-person learning…
In a move intended to help college students who’ve lost their jobs during the pandemic, the Education Department wrote financial aid administrators on Friday, 1/29, reminding them they have the discretion to consider special circumstances in deciding whether students are eligible for federal student aid…