Kelly Brunner’s 15 minutes of unwelcome fame came courtesy of bare-knuckle Texas politics. She lost her job, went thousands of dollars into debt and saw her mug shot broadcast worldwide while the most powerful men in the state cast her as Exhibit 1 in an epidemic of election fraud. By last year, she at least could say the episode was finally behind her. She was wrong, though. A social worker at the State Supported Living Center in Mexia, a residential facility for people with psychiatric disorders, Brunner in 2020 was assigned to prepare clients for the upcoming election. The law is complicated, and Brunner acknowledges she made technical errors as she worked to identify who could and couldn’t vote among a complicated population. The mistakes were quickly caught; none of the center’s residents ever got close to casting an improper ballot. But the $35,000-a-year state employee became a prop in a political narrative that out-of-control voter fraud was tainting elections across the country. With the help of Attorney General Ken Paxton, who within weeks would assume a central role promoting Donald Trump’s decisively disproven claims of a rigged election, local prosecutors charged Brunner with 134 separate election crimes. The staggering number cast the small-town volunteer firefighter and Little League coach as one of the single biggest election criminals in Texas.

Attendees of a Yuga Labs’ ApeFest event on Nov. 4 in Hong Kong have reported burns, damaged vision and “extreme pain” in their eyes, which they attribute to the use of improper lighting. “Woke up in the middle of the night after ApeFest with so much pain in my eyes that I had to go to the hospital,” wrote one attendee, CryptoJune, in a Nov. 5 X (Twitter) post. “Doctor told me it was due to the UV from stage lights,” they added. “I go to festivals often but have never experienced this. I try to understand how it could happen… it seems like the lamps [were] not safe.” One attendee noted many of those reporting eye problems were those “up close” to the lighting display on the event’s main stage. Another ApeFest guest, who goes by the pseudonym Feld on X, described identical symptoms. “Anyone else’s eyes burning from last night? Woke up at 3am with extreme pain and ended up in the ER.” Of the hundreds of ApeFest attendees, at least 15 reports of vision damage have appeared on social media, suggesting the concerns were limited to guests who were in close proximity to the stage lighting. Yuga Labs did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Hong Kong partygoers have experienced medical issues following exposure to improper UV lighting at an event before. Related: Ryder Ripps ordered to pay Yuga Labs $1.6M in copyright lawsuit On Oct. 20, 2017, a number of attendees at a party thrown by streetwear brand HypeBeast reported painful burns and eye damage. It was revealed by the events’ DJ on Oct. 26 that the contractor tasked with setting up lighting at the party had used a series of Philips TUV 30W G30 T8 light bulbs, which, according to Philip’s website, emit 12 watts of UV-C radiation, mainly used for disinfecting surfaces. The reports of vision damage in both cases line up with a condition called photokeratitis, also known as “Welder’s eye.” The condition is caused by prolonged exposure to extreme levels of UV radiation, typically from artificial sources, such as welding lamps, but can also come from natural sunlight reflecting off bright surfaces such as snow, more commonly known as snow blindness.

She’s an eco-vengeance iconoclast who loves coyote pee and running at manic speeds. She’s an unstoppable chaos queen with a stink-nipple on her butt, who turns luxury Arizona golf courses into free range charcuterie boards for her grub-worm girl dinner. She’s a guerilla class-warfare legend whose mating call sounds like the hissing warb-garble of a cappuccino machine milk-steamer. She’s the internet’s most beloved trash-eating ungulate — the uncompromising, the indefatigable, the lovely javelina. And if you haven’t seen her species’ latest tour of havoc through a high-end Sedona golf course, you’re missing out. A massive herd of “between 100 - 150” wild javelina — a.k.a. skunk pigs — have been terrorizing the water-guzzling Seven Canyons Golf Club in the state’s Coconino National Forest, leaving club owners searching for solutions in the wake of the javelina’s destruction for the past six weeks.

The longshot primary challenger to Joe Biden had such a rough first outing that his campaign appears to have removed the event livestream from YouTube.

Voters in battleground states said they trusted Donald J. Trump over President Biden on the economy, foreign policy and immigration, as Mr. Biden’s multiracial base shows signs of fraying.

Cincinnati voters are about to decide whether to privatize their city’s railroad by selling it to Norfolk Southern. A grassroots campaign is organizing to block the sale.

The second call, placed a few minutes after 5 a.m., at first sounded again like just a rude joke. Then it turned furious, the voice no longer mocking but menacing. The message was littered with transphobic language and threats. “I’ll kill you,” the man said. “Even though you know that 99.9% of people are just venting, it’s shocking to hear,” said Chelsey, whose last name the Chronicle agreed to withhold due to threats she faces for volunteering with the hotline. “And then you have to ask the question: What if this is the 0.1% who’s an actual threat?” The hotline had been set up in August for students of Chino Hills Unified in San Bernardino County, the first district in California to put in place a policy requiring teachers and other staff to inform parents if their children identify as transgender at school. Within days of going live, the hotline had taken dozens of calls — mostly from students who were scared, sad, confused and angry. Some said they no longer felt safe using their preferred pronouns or chosen name at school. But some callers were hostile. They taunted and hurled slurs. They raged... Further social media sleuthing turned up the same man on Facebook and LinkedIn. Chelsey found a video he’d posted on Facebook. At one point, the man spoke. She recognized his voice. The man is a San Francisco tech worker who’s developed at least two well-known and widely used apps. The Chronicle is not naming him because no police report has been filed. Rainbow Youth Project officials called San Francisco police to ask about filing a restraining order against the individual, but were told not much could be done because the hotline was based in another state. Indianapolis police also said they couldn’t act. Eventually, after consulting with lawyers, Rainbow Youth Project officials decided not to file a report.

Large demonstration in Washington, DC expresses anger at President Joe Biden’s unwavering support for Israel.

Covid-19 sick days were 20 per cent lower in schools with air-cleaning HEPA filter machines, researchers on an eagerly-awaited study have found. But why has it taken so long to discover how well they work, asks Clare Wilson

Mayo man in Gaza, who recently completed Leaving Cert, says he is waiting to travel to Rafah crossing

The all-white judges of Louisiana’s 5th Circuit Court of Appeal systematically ignored thousands of claims from prisoners, most of them Black, who said they had been wrongly convicted. Efforts to expose the decadelong injustice went unheard.

What's particularly interesting here is that aerobic exercise was shown to have similar positive effects to drugs like Viagra (aka sildenafil) and Cialis (aka tadalafil), and therefore could be used instead of these drugs or alongside them.

Thurston Lacalli from the University of Victoria in British Columbia described the starfish as “a disembodied head walking about the sea floor on its lips — the lips having sprouted a fringe of tube feet, co-opted from their original function of sorting food particles, to do the walking.”

Dozens of students walked out of a class taught by Hillary Clinton in New York on Wednesday in protest at their university’s alleged role in the “shaming” of pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

In a speech widely anticipated in the region, Hassan Nasrallah stopped short of announcing that Hezbollah had fully joined the Israel-Hamas war but warned that fighting on the Lebanon-Israel border would not be limited to the scale seen so far.

Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) and a group of far-right House Republicans want to revoke visas issued to Palestinians.

Facing displacement, overcrowded living conditions, and a lack of access to water and menstrual hygiene products such as sanitary napkins and tampons, women have been taking norethisterone tablets – ordinarily prescribed for conditions such as severe menstrual bleeding, endometriosis, and painful periods – to avoid the discomfort and pain of menstruation.

The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto has reversed its decision to change a travelling art exhibit about Palestinian-Muslimfunerary practices after protests that includedan 18-hour sit-in by the women who created it.

The measure effectively gives Israel a check to purchase $3.5 billion in arms in complete secrecy.

A white supremacist group bought up land in rural Maine for a headquarters. Months after their location was revealed, they’ve sold the property.