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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
Yelp will cover the travel expenses of employees who must travel out of state for abortions, joining the ranks of major employers trying to help workers affected by new restrictions in Texas and other states. The benefit announced Tuesday covers all 4,000 employees at the online review service, but seems most likely to have its biggest immediate impact on its 200 workers in Texas, which has passed a law banning abortions within the state after six weeks of pregnancy. “We’ve long been a strong advocate for equality in the workplace, and believe that gender equality cannot be achieved if women’s health care rights are restricted,” said Miriam Warren, Yelp’s chief diversity officer.
Boeing has removed 141 airplanes from its backlog of pending orders, many of them because of what it termed geopolitical considerations including restrictions on sales because of sanctions like those imposed on Russia for its war against Ukraine. That means that Boeing now questions whether those sales will ever be completed because of sanctions. Boeing still has more than 4,200 undelivered orders.
A California appeals court has upheld a lower court ruling that Johnson & Johnson must pay penalties to the state for deceptively marketing pelvic mesh implants for women, but reduced the amount by $42 million to $302 million.
Inflation soared over the past year at its fastest pace in more than 40 years, with costs for food, gasoline, housing and other necessities squeezing American consumers and wiping out the pay raises that many people have received. The Labor Department said Tuesday its consumer price index jumped 8.5% in March from 12 months earlier, the sharpest year-over-year increase since 1981. Prices have been driven up by bottlenecked supply chains, robust consumer demand and disruptions to global food and energy markets worsened by Russia’s war against Ukraine. From February to March, inflation rose 1.2%, the biggest month-to-month jump since 2005. Gasoline prices drove more than half that increase.
Homebuyers in Spokane County can’t seem to catch a break as the median home price reached another all-time high in March. The median closing price for homes and condos on less than 1 acre soared to $429,998 last month, a 26.3% increase from the $340,550 median price in March 2021, according to data from the Spokane Association of Realtors.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday said Russia’s war in Ukraine amounted to genocide,” accusing President Vladimir Putin of trying to “wipe out the idea of even being a Ukrainian.” “Yes, I called it genocide,” he told reporters in Iowa shortly before boarding Air Force One to return to Washington. “It’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being a Ukrainian.” At an earlier event in Menlo, Iowa, addressing spiking energy prices resulting from the war, Biden had implied that he thought Putin was carrying out genocide against Ukraine, but offered no details. Neither he nor his administration announced new consequences for Russia or assistance to Ukraine following Biden’s public assessment.
Vladimir Putin vowed Tuesday that Russia’s bloody offensive in Ukraine would continue until its goals are fulfilled and insisted the campaign was going as planned, despite a major withdrawal in the face of stiff Ukrainian opposition and significant losses. Russian troops, thwarted in their push toward Ukraine’s capital, are now focusing on the eastern Donbas region, where Ukraine said Tuesday it was investigating a claim that a poisonous substance had been dropped on its troops. It was not clear what the substance might be, but Western officials warned that any use of chemical weapons by Russia would be a serious escalation of the already devastating war. Russia invaded on Feb. 24, with the goal, according to Western officials, of taking Kyiv, the capital, toppling the government and installing a Moscow-friendly regime. In the six weeks since, Russia’s ground advance stalled, its forces lost potentially thousands of fighters and the military was accused of killing civilians and other atrocities.
Russian military hackers attempted to knock out power to millions of Ukrainians last week in a long-planned attack but were foiled, Ukrainian government officials said Tuesday. At one targeted high-voltage power station, the hackers succeeded in penetrating and disrupting part of the industrial control system, but people defending the station were able to prevent electrical outages, the Ukrainians said. “The threat was serious, but it was prevented in a timely manner,” a top Ukrainian cybersecurity official, Victor Zhora, told reporters through an interpreter. “It looks that we were very lucky.”
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