Fat Bear Week is in jeopardy. If Washington gridlock pushes the country into a government shutdown on Saturday night, the people who run the popular online contest celebrating the burly Alaskan brown bears at Katmai National Park and Preserve will be among the federal employees furloughed... On Friday morning, Mike Fitz, a resident naturalist with Explore.org and a former Katmai ranger who came up with Fat Bear Week in 2014, wrote in the webcam’s live chat that the competition will likely be postponed, especially if the shutdown lasts more than a day or two. “While I remain confident that Fat Bear Week will happen this year, I am unsure if it’ll happen as currently scheduled,” he added.

Amid allegations of a corrupt adoption system in Seoul that falsified children’s records, those sent to Denmark as youngsters are desperate to find out their real stories. Since the 1950s, about 200,000 South Korean children have been adopted abroad, according to rights groups. More than half of all adoptions took place in the 1970s and 1980s under the dictatorships of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan – and 9,000 of them went to Denmark, which has one of the highest per capita transnational adoption rates in the world. Now adults in their 40s and 50s, a small but outspoken group of Danish Korean adoptees, such as Brynald, are demanding the truth about the adoption industry that sent them to predominantly white families in western countries. After years of emotionally charged searches for their birth parents – often hindered by falsified records and stonewalling from those agencies – the adoptees are pushing back against a long-sustained narrative that they should simply be grateful.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore announced Friday it filed for Chapter 11 reorganization days before a new state law goes into effect removing the statute of limitations on child sex abuse claims and allowing victims to sue their abusers decades after the fact.

Dianne Feinstein, whose three decades in the Senate made her the longest-serving female US senator in history, has died following months of declining health. She was 90.

Saudi Arabia is determined to secure a military pact requiring the United States to defend the kingdom in return for opening ties with Israel and will not hold up a deal even if Israel does not offer major concessions to Palestinians in their bid for statehood, three regional sources familiar with the talks said.

A young man wearing a pro-Trump hat shot someone attending a peaceful gathering on Thursday in Española. Native American activists held the event to celebrate Rio Arriba County’s postponement of putting back a statue of the war criminal and Spanish colonizer Juan de Oñate that officials removed in 2020.

His very cringe posts contain everything you need to know about the hate-filled emptiness at the heart of the supposed “intellectual” wing of the GOP.

Republican Kari Lake, a Donald Trump ally who has refused to acknowledge her loss in last year’s race for Arizona governor, will soon launch her campaign for the U.S. Senate seat held by independent Kyrsten Sinema, a senior adviser said Thursday. Lake’s entrance in one of next year’s top Senate contests likely complicates Republican efforts to nominate candidates with a broader appeal after a disappointing showing for the party in last year’s midterms. She will enter the race as the front-runner for the GOP nomination.

A series of documents released by the Utah Attorney General’s Office is revealing intimate details surrounding a criminal investigation into Tim Ballard and the nonprofit he founded, OUR.

Authorities late Wednesday night arrested a man accused of killing a Baltimore tech CEO, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.

Three years after Oregon voters elected to decriminalize drugs, a new study has concluded that the first-in-the-nation law has not led to increased drug use or drug overdoses. The conclusion counters an increasingly common narrative that Oregon’s drug problem is unique in the country — and that decriminalization is to blame.

China Evergrande Group's founder is being investigated over suspected "illegal crimes", the embattled developer said on Thursday, as creditors become increasingly concerned about the group's prospects amid an uncertain debt revamp plan and liquidation risk.

ALL OVER NEWFOUNDLAND — Martin Pond had just finished the flight back to the West Coast from the Easternmost of East Coasts when his wife and logistical supervisor Julie showed him a text message. He read it and broke out first into a wide smile and then a prolonged, profound laugh.

Bloomberg reports that Fortnite developer Epic Games is expected to lay off 16 percent of its workforce. In a statement from Tim Sweeney, Epic has confirmed the layoffs will impact around 830 employees. He wrote that the company intends to divest from Bandcamp — an independent music storefront company Epic acquired just last year — and spin off SuperAwesome, a “kid-tech” company that specializes in creating safe online experiences for kids. He also explains that the layoffs are a result of the company “spending way more money than we earn.” Notably, Sweeney does not apologize to his employees for making the business decisions that have resulted in the disruption of over 800 lives, saying only that his “optimism” that such spending would not result in layoffs was “unrealistic.”

The second Republican presidential debate of 2023 was rife with anti-transgender sentiment, with trans people being called mentally ill and promises from candidates to ban gender-affirming health care.

Librarians in public schools in Charlotte County, Florida, were instructed by the school district superintendent to remove all books with LGBTQ characters or themes from school and classroom libraries.

A Dutch court in Haarlem upheld an earlier decision to ban David Icke from entering the Schengen Area. State Secretary Eric van der Burg imposed a two-year ban on Icke shortly before he was scheduled to speak at a rally on Dam Square in Amsterdam in November 2022.

A 4Chan user already facing two murder charges has been indicted after police allege that he threatened to use lasers to kill or blind an anti-Nazi sheriff.

India’s BJP, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and affiliated Hindu nationalist groups have perfected using social media to spread of inflammatory, often false and bigoted material on an industrial scale, earning both envy and condemnation beyond India’s borders. At first, the WhatsApp messages touted roads paved, schools built, free food distributed to the poor — all the usual pitches from a government during election season. But as May drew closer, the messages turned darker. One viral post that landed in Sachin Patil’s iPhone listed the names of 24 local Hindu men it said were murdered by Muslims. Another mass message warned of Hindu girls being groomed by Muslim men to join the Islamic State. Yet another viral post that reached Patil made an urgent appeal to vote: “If the BJP is here, your children will be safe. Hindus will be safe.” By the time election day arrived here in south India’s Karnataka state, Patil, a 25-year-old bank teller in a sleepy village outside Mangaluru, said he was receiving 120 political messages a day in six WhatsApp groups. “They were definitely a reminder,” Patil said, to cast a ballot for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party that governs India.

The recipe of the famed Guerrilla Cookie may be lost forever. But the legacy of its idealistic and eccentric creator lives on in unlikely ways.