The state of Florida and plaintiffs challenging a parental rights law that critics have nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay” agreed Monday to a settlement that clarifies the scope of the legislation, which would require instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten up to and including the eighth birthday. figure.

The plaintiffs, a group that included students, parents, educators and LGBTQ advocacy groups, had blamed the law, which was signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022, for causing confusion and fear in public schools. The settlement says students and teachers in public schools can talk about sexual identity and gender orientation as long as it is not part of formal classroom education.

The plaintiffs claimed victory, saying it would end discrimination resulting from ambiguities in the law, officially called the Parental Rights in Education Act.

The administration of Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, also portrayed the settlement as a major victory, saying it confirmed that critics had deliberately misinterpreted the law as more broadly applicable than it actually was.

Opponents had argued that the law’s vague language made students think they couldn’t create art depicting same-sex parents, that teachers thought they couldn’t show a photo of a same-sex partner, and that schools thought they could no longer allow homosexual sex. theme books or student organizations that support gay students.

Roberta Kaplan, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, said in a statement that the settlement “provides protection against hate and bullying.” She added: “Simply put, the state of Florida has now made it clear that LGBTQ+ children, parents and teachers in Florida can actually say they are gay.”

In its own statement, Mr. DeSantis’ office said the settlement would ensure “children will be protected from radical gender and sexual ideology in the classroom” because the law remains on the books. The administration now expects the case to be dismissed, said Ryan Newman, the governor’s general counsel.

“We fought hard to ensure that this law could not be vilified in court as it was in the public arena by the media and major corporations,” Mr. Newman said in the statement.

The settlement, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, comes nearly two years after Mr. DeSantis signed the law. The measure became central to the image he built ahead of his failed presidential campaign of a Republican who would not succumb to the political left, which he derided as “woke.”

Mr. DeSantis has long defended the law as a popular, common-sense measure. Critics, he said, “essentially endorse a gender ideology awakening in first grade.”

But the nickname stuck. And the law, along with a slew of other controversial bills signed by Mr. DeSantis in recent years, prompted organizations such as Equality Florida, one of the plaintiffs, to issue travel advisories last year, citing concerns about declining rights and freedoms in the state. .

Cecile Houry, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said she and her partner, Rabbi Amy Morrison, filed a lawsuit because they feared the law could lead to their two young children being discriminated against in public schools because they are two mothers. to have. The legislation may not explicitly say, “Don’t say gay,” says Dr. Houry, grants manager for the city of Miami Beach, but that has had its practical effect.

“If you make everything a potential problem, a possible lawsuit and a possible dismissal, that’s what happens,” she said. “People either couldn’t or felt they shouldn’t, or felt they were in danger if they spoke up, which ultimately ended up muting or silencing a lot of things.”

The law allows parents to sue school districts for alleged violations.

The settlement’s language, which the state must share with Florida’s 67 public school districts, makes clear that the law does not restrict “literary references to a gay or transgender person or to a same-sex couple” in public school classrooms. It says LGBTQ references are not prohibited in literature, classroom discussions, student academic work, or the review thereof. Such references are also not prohibited when referring to teachers’ spouses or partners, or in any other context outside of instruction.

The settlement also says that education must be neutral when it comes to issues of sexual orientation or gender identity, meaning that teachers cannot, for example, teach that heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality or bisexuality.

It also clarifies that the law does not ban classes on or interventions to stop bullying, and does not require the removal of “safe spaces” in schools for LGBTQ people or the installation of stickers identifying such places.

And it makes clear that student-run organizations such as gay-straight alliances are allowed in Florida schools, along with book fairs, musicals or plays with LGBTQ references or characters, and expressions and clothing that do not conform to the perceived gender identity of a person.

The law does not apply to school library books as long as they are not used for instruction, the settlement states.

The Canadian government has reached a financial settlement with one of two Canadian men it says was arbitrarily detained by China for nearly three years in retaliation, the man’s lawyer said.

John K. Phillips, who represents Michael Spavor, told The Associated Press on Wednesday evening: “All I can say is that the matter between Mr. Spavor and the government of Canada has been resolved.”

Mr. Spavor, a businessman who did extensive business in North Korea, and Michael Kovrig, then a Canadian diplomat on leave working for a Belgium-based foreign policy analysis group, were arrested in China in December 2018. They were accused of espionage.

Their detentions in separate prisons were, Canadian officials argued, retaliation for the Canadian arrest of Meng Wanzhou, then chief financial officer of Chinese technology giant Huawei. That arrest took place at the request of the United States.

China released the two men in September 2021 after the US Justice Department struck a deal allowing Ms Meng to return to China in exchange for admitting wrongdoing in a fraud case.

The arrests of Mr. Spavor and Mr. Kovrig underscored the apparent willingness of the Chinese government under Xi Jinping to use arrests and long prison sentences to pressure Western governments to make concessions. They also made clear that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s efforts to improve Canadian-Chinese relations, which had become hostile under previous administrations, had failed.

Last year, Mr. Phillips said he was seeking 10.5 million Canadian dollars for Mr. Spavor. The Globe and Mail reported late Wednesday, citing an unnamed source, that the settlement was about $6 million.

Global Affairs Canada, the country’s foreign ministry, released a statement that made no mention of a settlement.

“China’s arbitrary detention of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig was unjust and unacceptable,” the report said. “While the 1,019 days they were arbitrarily detained by China will never be erased, the Canadian government is committed to supporting them as they attempt to enter a new chapter in their lives, based on their individual circumstances and consequences. of their ordeal and suffering caused by their arbitrary detention by China.”

The ministry declined further comment.

In December, Mr. Kovrig told The Globe and Mail that he was also looking for a settlement of the government and said he would donate any amount in addition to his lost income and expenses to charity. He told the Toronto-based newspaper that the report that the government offered each of the men 3 million Canadian dollars, or $2.2 million, was “even beyond the scope of discussion.” According to him, the actual amount is ‘a lot lower’.

On Thursday, Mr. Kovrig declined to comment in an email on his talks with the government.

There is virtually no public information available about the settlement discussions, which were conducted privately and not through the courts. But a long article published last year by the Globe and Mail, and based largely on anonymous sources, said Mr. Spavor accused Mr. Kovrig of causing his detention by China.

According to the newspaper, Mr. Spavor claims that China singled him out because he unknowingly gave Mr. Kovrig information about North Korea that the diplomat then passed on to Canadian intelligence services. They in turn shared it with Canada’s allies.

In August 2021, Mr Spavor was sentenced to 11 years in prison after being convicted of espionage. Mr. Kovrig was awaiting sentencing when he was returned to Canada.

Canadian officials have repeatedly denied that either man was involved in espionage and alleged that China engaged in a form of “hostage diplomacy” to force Ms. Meng’s release.

From his base in Dandong, China, Mr. Spavor led an organization that promoted cultural travel to North Korea. He had several high-level contacts there and once met Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea. In 2013, Mr. Spavor helped organize a highly publicized visit to North Korea by Dennis Rodman, the former NBA star.

In his email, Mr. Kovrig said he was “never involved in espionage activities.” He said: “Any insinuation that I was anything but open and honorable in my interactions with Michael Spavor is false.”

At the time of his arrest in China, Mr. Kovrig was on leave from Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs, which lifted his diplomatic immunity, and was working as a senior advisor for the International Crisis Group.

In his email, Mr. Kovrig said that during his time as a diplomat and adviser, he worked to persuade China to convince North Korea to end its nuclear weapons and missile programs. That work, he said, “involved talking to people who had knowledge of the country, conducting analysis and making recommendations.”

Until his arrest, Mr. Kovrig said, “the Chinese government gave me no indication that it objected to my work or travel to China.” Chinese officials, he said, regularly invited him to meetings and conferences, including an invitation from the People’s Liberation Army to appear as a panelist at a forum it organized about two months before his arrest.

“The People’s Republic of China has wrongfully held me as a political hostage to blackmail the government of Canada,” he wrote, referring to the People’s Republic of China. “It is incorrect to suggest that I was detained for any other reason, and it reinforces the Chinese government’s propaganda.”

The federal government is likely to win in its lawsuit against Strategic Financial Solutions, a debt negotiation firm that was included in a Times investigation last month, under a magistrate’s preliminary injunction issued this week that bars the company from operating.

For years, Strategic Financial Solutions has collected fees from thousands of low-income customers who signed up with the company to negotiate their debts. In January, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – along with the attorneys general of New York, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, North Carolina and Wisconsin – has sued Strategic and its operatorsincluding its CEO, Ryan Sasson, on civil fraud charges.

In interviews with former employees and former customers of Strategic, many described the company as predatory and said its services often left people worse off financially. The firm works with a national network of complicit law firms. Customers think they are paying those companies to represent them in the risky debt settlement process, but instead they are often funneled to call center agents with no legal training, and are sometimes left unrepresented in legal proceedings.

This week, a federal judge in the Western District of New York said that the debt relief program of Strategic and its affiliated law firms does not provide “an appreciable economic benefit” to its clients, and that many who sign up for the program “are negatively impacted.”

Federal law requires law firms that promote telephone debt settlement services to close the deal in person, through a face-to-face meeting with a representative, if they want to charge an upfront fee. The regulators’ case hinges on whether Strategic’s member companies violated this law by relying on gig worker notaries to meet with clients in person.

The federal judge wrote that the notary meetings “do not result in consumers being better informed about the” debt relief program of Strategic and its legal partners.

Mr. Sasson filed an appeal Tuesday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. “This decision rests on a very narrow interpretation of the telemarketing rules,” said Dennis Vacco, an attorney representing Strategic. “We are confident that we will prevail.”

Former Strategic customers celebrated the preliminary injunction. “Anything to prevent other families from going through what we had to go through,” said Anne Barsch, a former client who testified at the Strategic trial in Buffalo last month.

The state of California last week settled a lawsuit that had been brewing for more than three years, since the height of the debate over pandemic school closures. The case was nationally notable; there are few others like it. And the settlement included an eye-popping number: $2 billion.

Several families in Oakland and Los Angeles had sued, accusing the state of failing to meet its constitutional obligation to provide equal education to all children in the state because lower-income black and Hispanic students tended to have less access to education at distance in the state. the spring and fall of 2020 than other students.

It is important to note that the state – that is, the taxpayers – will not be paying out any new money under the settlement. Instead, it will take money already set aside for pandemic recovery — as much as $2 billion of it — and schools will be directed to use it to help students who need it most catch up to get. There will be demands to spend the money on interventions that have a proven track record. You can read more about the settlement here.

Why does this matter?

Because new national data released last week, in a study led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard, made clear that students across the country are nowhere close to catching up on the learning gains lost during the pandemic .

This applies to students of all backgrounds, but especially to poor students. Schools in poor communities tended to remain closed longer than those in more affluent areas, and when they did, students lost more ground. When schools reopened, students from wealthier families tended to catch up faster than students from poorer families in the same districts, the new data shows.

Still, there have been some surprising variations.

In California, Compton unitednear Los Angeles, And Delano united, north of Bakersfield, are examples of lower-income school districts that have recovered remarkably well, at least judging by standardized test scores. You can read more about bright spot districts, including Delano Unified, in an article I wrote with my colleagues Claire Cain Miller and Francesca Paris.

Some more affluent districts have seen moderate recoveries in reading, math or both Santa Monica-Malibu united, Menlo Park City in the Bay Area, and Arcadia united in the San Gabriel Valley, northeast of Los Angeles.

Look up your school district and see how it compares to nearby areas and the rest of the state. (Note: This data includes scores for students in third through eighth grades in most public school districts; some minor ones are not included. The graphs show math scores only.)

Lakisha Young, the founder of Oakland REACH, a parent organization that worked closely with some of the families involved in the lawsuit, told me that the plaintiffs would receive no personal compensation from the settlement.

She said she hopes the settlement will ensure more students across the state get the help they need.

“We have a lot of families who don't open the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times — they'll never know this lawsuit happened,” she said. But when those parents see their children making progress in reading and math, she said, “then they've won.”

Sarah Mervosh is an education reporter for The Times, focusing on primary schools.

Tell us

The new Sixth Street Bridge in LA The Sundial Bridge in Redding. The exceptionally long San Mateo-Hayward Bridge.

Which bridge in California is your favorite, and why?

Tell us at CAtoday@nytimes.com. Please include your name and the city in which you live.

And before you go: good news

A recent study in the scientific journal Nature found that sea otters have helped slow erosion in marshes near Monterey. This is reported by the Associated Press.

The study measured the impact sea otters had on erosion in a tidal estuary called Elkhorn Slough, where the once dwindling otter population began to recover in recent decades thanks to habitat restoration efforts.

The study compared erosion rates in the estuary before the otters' return with more recent data and found that the animals had helped reduce erosion significantly by eating crabs that burrow deep into the wetland and make the banks less resistant to storms and rough water.

A man who spent 44 years in prison after a North Carolina jury wrongly convicted him of raping a woman in 1976 has settled a lawsuit against state and local law enforcement officials for $25 million.

The settlement included a public apology to the man, Ronnie Long, 68, of the city of Concord, N.C., who acknowledged that “significant errors of judgment and intentional misconduct” by former city employees led to his wrongful conviction and prison sentence.

“We deeply regret the past mistakes that have caused tremendous harm to Mr. Long, his family, friends and our community,” the Concord City Council said in a statement announced the settlement on Tuesday.

“As a result of this conviction, he has long suffered the extraordinary loss of his liberty and a substantial part of his life,” the statement said. “He has wrongly spent 44 years, 3 months and 17 days in prison for a crime that he did not commit. While there are no measures in place to fully return to Mr. Long and his family all that was taken from them, through this agreement we are doing everything in our power to right the wrongs of the past and to take our responsibility.’

Mr. Long had pushed for the public apology along with the monetary settlement, which includes $22 million from the city and $3 million from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, one of his lawyers, Jamie T. Lau, said Wednesday.

“One of the biggest things for him, even during those 44 years, was to clear not only his name but that of his family, to make it known that he was not involved in the attack that led to his conviction and to to announce this. that he came from a good working-class family in Concord,” said Mr. Lau, a supervising attorney at the Duke Law School Wrongful Convictions Clinic, which represented Mr. Long.

Mr. Long was a 21-year-old cement mason with a 2-year-old son when he was convicted on Oct. 1, 1976, of breaking into a home in Concord, about 25 miles northeast of Charlotte, and raping a 54-year-old man. year-old woman earlier that year. He was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, even though there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime, his lawyers said.

Mr. Long’s lawyers said that Concord police were under pressure to close the case in part because the victim’s late husband had been an executive at a local textile company, Cannon Mills, which had offered a $10,000 reward for information led to an arrest.

The victim identified Mr. Long as her attacker, but only after police brought her into a courtroom wearing a wig and glasses to watch Mr. Long accused of trespassing in a city park, according to court documents, a lawsuit which, according to his lawyers, was highly suggestive.

Mr. Long, who is black, has a dark complexion, and the victim, who was white, had previously described her attacker as a “black man with yellow or very light skin,” Mr. Long’s lawyers said.

Police hid evidence from Mr. Long’s lawyers that would have undermined the identification in court, according to a lawsuit Mr. Long filed against the city in 2021. That evidence included hair and more than 40 fingerprints found at the crime scene that did not match. matches Mr. Long’s, the lawsuit said.

Before the trial, the Cabarrus County sheriff, Concord police chief and some of his officers also personally vetted jurors to rule out “undesirables,” according to Mr. Long’s lawsuit. As a result, there were only four black people in the pool of 99 potential jurors that Mr. Long’s trial team reviewed, the lawsuit said. Nobody was sitting.

Three members of the all-white jury worked for Cannon Mills, and a fourth was married to a Cannon Mills employee, Mr. Long’s lawsuit said.

Mr Long “was targeted by the police, the police empaneled a jury to ensure his conviction and when the evidence showed they had the wrong person they simply lied about it or made him disappear,” Mr Long said Lau.

In August 2020, days after a federal appeals court ruled that Mr. Long’s due process rights had been violated during his trial, a judge threw out Mr. Long’s conviction on charges of rape and burglary.

Mr. Long, who had spent more than 40 years trying to prove his innocence, was released from the Albemarle Correctional Institution in New London, NC.

In December 2020, Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina, a Democrat, decided pardoned Mr. Long. The pardon qualified Mr. Long to receive $750,000 from the state, which he used to buy a house with his wife, Ashley Long, whom he met and married while in prison, Mr. Lau said.

The two now plan to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary, said Sonya Pfeiffer, one of Mr. Long’s lawyers. While the settlement will help them financially, “what it doesn’t give him is any of the life he lost,” Ms. Pfeiffer said, including time spent with his parents, who died while he was in prison.

“He wanted to repair what had been done to him and restore the legacy that had been damaged and ripped from the family,” she said. The settlement, she added, “is a critical step toward healing and a start to restoring the name.”

Some Verizon customers may be entitled to a share of a proposed $100 million settlement that the wireless carrier has agreed to pay to resolve a class action lawsuit, according to a claims website established by a settlement administrator.

The lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of New Jersey, argued that Verizon’s administrative fees were unfair and not adequately disclosed to customers. The court in New Brunswick, NJ, approved the settlement on December 15.

Court-appointed lawyers for the plaintiffs sent emailed advisories and postcards, which were sent to customers on Wednesday to customers who were eligible to file a claim.

Stephen DeNittis, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, said in an interview that the $100 million settlement was one of the largest against a company for charging administrative fees.

What was the complaint?

The case stemmed from a lawsuit filed in California in 2021 complaintwhich brought together four separate lawsuits and was filed on November 10, accused Verizon, the New Jersey-based wireless communications giant, of misleading customers by “prominently advertising certain monthly rates for postpaid wireless service plans.”

However, after customers sign up for the company’s service, the lawsuit alleges, “Verizon uniformly charges them higher monthly rates than advertised and promised by adding what Verizon calls an ‘administrative charge’ to the bill.”

Verizon has denied the claims.

Rich Young, a spokesman for Verizon, said in a statement that the company “identifies and describes consumer wireless administration charges multiple times during the sales transaction, as well as in marketing, contracts and billing. Mr. Young said that as part of the agreement, Verizon had “made some changes to the way the charge is described.”

President Biden has urged Congress to pass laws banning “surprise fees” charged by businesses, including hotels and service providers.

How do I file a claim?

Those eligible for a portion of the settlement include U.S. customers with postpaid wireless phone or data plans – that is, those who signed up for services that are paid monthly – to whom between January 1, 2016 and November 8 2023 administration costs have been charged. .

An affected customer can receive a payment of $100 at most. The amount may be lower depending on the length of time a customer has used Verizon’s services and the number of customers filing a claim, according to a claim form.

To file, clients must two-page form and indicate your preferred payment method: check, bank transfer or digital payment service. The deadline for filing a claim is April 15, 2024.

Customers can also choose not to participate in the settlement class and retain the right to sue Verizon individually over the matters outlined in the class action lawsuit filed in New Jersey.