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Lester: Businesses to lose $482M under patent proposal 

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:57:35 GMT

After years of decline, there are signs of a U.S. manufacturing rebound. Policymakers need to support this comeback, but new wide-ranging proposals from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and companion legislation introduced in Congress, would do the opposite.A bipartisan Congress modernized the patent system in 2011 with the America Invents Act (AIA). The AIA established a new USPTO patent quality review board – called the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) – designed to address the economic destruction and waste generated by baseless patent infringement lawsuits. The PTAB provides an alternative for resolving patent disputes that is much more efficient than lawsuits and is overseen by trained patent judges who are better equipped to determine patent validity than an untrained jury. Now, a package of so-called “reform” is being pushed by special interests that would favor lawsuits, promote legal exploitation, and take nearly half a billion dollars out of ou...

‘Bare Minimum Monday’ tackles stress at work

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:57:35 GMT

TikTok trends don’t lie: Whether they’re “quiet quitting” or adopting “Bare Minimum Monday” to combat the “Sunday scaries,” people are pulling back at work.In one sense, making work a smaller part of life is a permanent shift that people working from home experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Cristina Banks, an industrial and organizational psychologist and director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces at the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business.While working from home, people had more autonomy. They also had a clearer idea of the value of their time, which they could spend exercising or playing with their kids rather than sitting in traffic on their way to the office.After many workers had that experience and are now being pushed to return to pre-pandemic norms, Banks says it’s hard for them to give up control over when or how much they work.So, some workers embrace trends like Bare Minimum Monday, which suggests doing only the most ...

Editorial: Gas furnaces next on Biden’s ban list

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:57:35 GMT

Progressives get upset when critics accuse the Biden administration of trying to ban gas appliances. They would have a much better case if the Biden administration didn’t keep banning gas appliances.Late last month, the Department of Energy issued new regulations on residential furnaces. By 2028, non-weatherized gas furnaces and those used in mobile homes must have an “annual fuel utilization efficiency of 95%.” The move would effectively ban new non-condensing gas furnaces. The American Gas Association estimates that this rule would eliminate 60% of the residential furnaces currently on the market.To justify this regulatory intrusion, the department claims this will “cumulatively save consumers $24.8 billion on their energy bills over 30 years.”That sounds like a big number. It’s not. That’s an annual savings of around $825 million. In a country of 335 million people, that’s a per-capita savings of less than $2.50 a year. Keep in mind that government estimates such as this represen...

Dear Abby: BF slow-walking his way down the aisle

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:57:35 GMT

Dear Abby: I have been with my man for seven years and I keep asking him when we’re getting married. He said we would — “someday.”Then COVID came along. Now he says after the pandemic is completely over. He has admitted he’s scared to get married again because he doesn’t want to be hurt like he was when his ex cheated on him. I told him I’m not like her. He says he knows that, and I’m the kindest, sweetest woman he’s ever met.I love this man with all my heart. We get along fine. I have my wedding dress and shoes. I’m tired of his excuses. I’m almost ready to say the heck with it and sell my dress and shoes. Should I? Please give me some advice. — Never a Bride in New EnglandDear Never a Bride: The COVID problem, with the many variants that keep cropping up, is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. Tell your reluctant bridegroom you love him, but seven years is enough time for him to decide whether he ...

Muslim boy killed and woman wounded in Illinois hate crime motivated by Israeli-Hamas war

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:57:35 GMT

CHICAGO (AP) — A 71-year-old Illinois man accused of fatally stabbing a 6-year-old boy and seriously wounding a 32-year-old woman was charged with a hate crime Sunday. Police allege he singled out the victims because of their Islamic faith and as a response to the war between Israel and Hamas.In recent days, police in U.S. cities and federal authorities have been on high alert for violence driven by antisemitic or Islamophobic sentiments. FBI officials, along with Jewish and Muslim groups, have reported an increase of hateful and threatening rhetoric.In the Chicago-area case, officers found the woman and boy late Saturday morning at a home in an unincorporated area of Plainfield Township, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) southwest of Chicago, the Will County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement on social media. The boy was pronounced dead at a hospital. The woman had multiple stab wounds and was expected to survive, according to the statement. An autopsy on the child showed he h...

Judge Chutkan to hear arguments over proposed gag order in Trump’s election interference case

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:57:35 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal prosecutors and lawyers for Donald Trump will argue in court Monday over a proposed gag order aimed at reining in the former president’s diatribes against likely witnesses and others in his 2020 election interference case in Washington. In pressing U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to impose the narrow gag order, special counsel Jack Smith’s team has accused the Republican of using increasingly incendiary rhetoric to try to undermine the public’s confidence in the justice system and taint the jury pool. Trump’s defense has called the proposal an unconstitutional effort to “silence” his political speech as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. “This desperate effort at censorship is unconstitutional on its face,” his lawyers wrote in court papers. The gag order fight underscores the unprecedented complexities of prosecuting the former president as he tries to retake the White House while fighting criminal charges ...

Few Republicans have confidence in elections. It’s a long road for one group trying to change that

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:57:35 GMT

SUAMICO, Wis. (AP) — Kim Pytleski could barely sleep the night before. She replayed the PowerPoint slides in her head, packed her notebook and took a deep breath.The clerk from a rural Wisconsin county north of Green Bay was preparing for a public meeting to explain the election process to residents. She didn’t know who she would encounter. Would some in the audience deny the results of the last presidential election? Would the conversation get combative? Most importantly, would she get through to anyone?They were questions Pytleski never expected to ask herself when she started the job in Oconto County more than 14 years ago. But since then, election conspiracy theories have taken root in the rural, heavily Republican county in northeastern Wisconsin. It’s among large swaths of the country where distrust of voting and ballot-counting, fanned by former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, maintains a stubborn grasp.Pytleski, who was born and raised in the coun...

European Union leaders to hold a summit with Western Balkans nations to discuss joining the bloc

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:57:35 GMT

TIRANA, Albania (AP) — Leaders from the European Union and the Western Balkans will hold a summit in Albania’s capital on Monday to discuss the path to membership in the bloc for the six countries of the region.The main topics at the annual talks — called the Berlin Process — are integrating the Western Balkans into a single market and supporting their green and digital transformation. The nations in the region are Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia. The senior EU officials attending the summit in Tirana are European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Council President Charles Michel. They will be joined by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron.The six Western Balkan countries are at different stages of integration into the bloc. Serbia and Montenegro were the first Western Balkan countries to launch membership negotiations a few years ago, followed by Albania and Macedonia last year, while Bosnia and K...

Urban battle from past Gaza war offers glimpse of what an Israeli ground offensive might look like

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:57:35 GMT

JERUSALEM (AP) — A battle that killed dozens of civilians and more than a dozen Israeli soldiers nearly a decade ago offers a glimpse of the type of fighting that could lie ahead if Israeli forces roll into Gaza as expected to punish Hamas for its rampage across southern Israel last week.It was July 19, 2014, during Israel’s third war against Hamas. The target was Shijaiyah, a densely populated neighborhood of Gaza City that the army said Hamas had transformed into a “terrorist fortress,” filled with tunnels, rocket launchers and booby traps. The battle came on the third day of a ground offensive that had been preceded by a 10-day air campaign. Then, as now, Palestinian civilians had been told to leave the neighborhood, Then, as now, many stayed, either because Hamas told them to or because they had nowhere else to go.As Israeli forces pushed into Shijaiyah, a jumble of squat concrete buildings and narrow alleys, militants unleashed a withering barrage of automatic gunfire, an...

Jim Jordan’s rapid rise has been cheered by Trump and the far right. Could it soon make him speaker?

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:57:35 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rep. Jim Jordan has such a reputation as a political brawler that former House Speaker John Boehner once said he had never met someone “who spent more time tearing things apart.”Now, nearly a decade after Boehner stepped down in the face a conservative revolt, it is Jordan who is trying to bring the Republican Party together to win the speaker’s gavel.He is a favorite of former President Donald Trump and a darling of the party’s rabble-rousing base. But his path to the U.S. government’s third-highest office is by no means certain in a House Republican conference riven by conflict following the ouster two weeks ago of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.To win, Jordan, R-Ohio, will need support from nearly every House Republican. There are few votes to spare in a chamber they only narrowly control. Should Jordan succeed, it would help cement the far right’s takeover of the Republican Party and trigger fresh conflict with Democrats over the size ...