An Oregon field research team has uncovered evidence that indicates humans roamed the state at least 18,000 years ago. This could be proof of North America’s oldest human-occupied site yet. Since 2011, the Bureau of Land Management and the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History Archaeological Field School have partnered to excavate the Rimrock Draw Rockshelter near Riley, Ore. According to the BLM, archaeologist Patrick O’Grady led the team that had a major discovery back in 2012. The archaeologists unearthed camel teeth fragments that were initially hidden by volcanic ash from a Mount St. Helens eruption roughly 15,000 years ago.

A farmer in Saskatchewan, Canada was fined a hefty sum for using the emoji after he was sent a contract by text message. Chris Achter argued it was to acknowledge receipt, but a judge ruled it amounted to a contractual agreement. He must now pay C$82,000 ($61,610; £48,310) for failing to fulfil the contract.

The Chicago Police Department acknowledged an internal investigation Thursday into allegations that an officer or officers assigned to a West Side patrol district engaged in sexual relations with migrants who were living in a police station. The department said in an email late Thursday that the bureau of internal affairs, as well as the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, had opened an investigation, but a department spokesperson did not address questions about when the investigation began or if any officers were stripped of their police powers. A representative for COPA did not respond to an inquiry Thursday night. The Police Department said the allegations concern an officer or officers assigned to the Ogden District, which covers the Little Village and Lawndale neighborhoods on the West Side. Few details were available late Thursday about the scope of the investigation. Also a focus was whether some of the migrants allegedly involved in the matter were minors, sources with knowledge of the internal review said.

The indictments from Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg did not implicate the mayor.

Wildlife in one of the country’s best-known rivers is under threat from a plague of fungus that attacks a precious water creature.

Biden must act now to make student debt relief a reality—no matter what the Supreme Court says.

Twitter sent Meta a cease-and-desist letter over the newly launched Threads app, sources familiar with the letter's existence told ABC News. The letter was sent by Twitter's legal team Wednesday, the sources said. The letter accused Meta of misappropriating Twitter's trade secrets and said Meta hired former Twitter employees who retained proprietary information, the sources said.

The measure (SB 1416) includes doing away with what is known as permanent alimony. DeSantis’ approval came a year after he nixed a similar bill that sought to eliminate permanent alimony and set up a formula for alimony amounts based on the length of marriage. The approval drew an outcry from members of the “First Wives Advocacy Group,” a coalition of mostly older women who receive permanent alimony and who assert that their lives will be upended without the payments. “On behalf of the thousands of women who our group represents, we are very disappointed in the governor’s decision to sign the alimony-reform bill. We believe by signing it, he has put older women in a situation which will cause financial devastation. The so-called party of ‘family values’ has just contributed to erosion of the institution of marriage in Florida,” Jan Killilea, a 63-year-old Boca Raton woman who founded the group a decade ago, told The News Service of Florida in a text message Friday.

Today Teamsters are erecting practice picket lines as the July 31 expiration of their contract with UPS rapidly approaches. After negotiations broke down yesterday, the largest strike at a single employer in US history is a real possibility.

REI did not voluntarily recognize the union. Since the SoHo store's vote, seven more stores across the U.S. have unionized; a ninth vote remains too close to call. Pro-union workers have formally accused the company of breaking labor laws — threatening and intimidating workers, disciplining and firing organizers — which REI denies. More than a year into it, workers and the company are nowhere close to a collective bargaining contract.

Arizona's unique method for awarding water to tribes was supposed to open up economic possibilities beyond farming for the Hopi Tribe. Instead, the tribe says it has dashed their dreams of building a thriving homeland. In September 2020, the Hopi Tribe’s four-decade effort to secure its right to water culminated in a court proceeding. The outcome would determine how much water the arid reservation would receive over the next century and whether that amount would be enough for the tribe to pursue its economic ambitions. Under rules unique to Arizona, the tribe would have to justify how it would use every drop it wanted. Court records show that at the trial, experts brought in by the tribe, state and corporate water users argued over how many Hopi had lived in the area going back centuries and how much water they had used for crops and livestock. They debated the correct fertility rate of Hopi women and the viability of the tribe’s economic projects. And the court examined lists of sacred springs — sites the Hopi traditionally kept secret to preserve them — to decide how much water could be drawn from them for future religious ceremonies. The legal battle, one of the tribe’s largest expenses in recent years, resulted in May 2022 with the court awarding less than a third of the water sought by the Hopi Tribe. That was the amount needed, the court said, “to provide a permanent homeland.” “I would define it as modern-day genocide,” Nuvangyaoma said. “Withholding water, which is life for the Hopis, until an undetermined time is really a position to kill off a tribe that’s been here since time immemorial.”

Tad DeLay writes on the futility of carbon offset programs. The exaggerated promises of carbon sequestration allow corporations like Delta Airlines, BP, and Tesla to make absurd claims of neutrality and launder ever-worsening emissions.

Domenic Broccoli, the IHOP kingpin of the Bronx, lives a good life. He drives a nice car, spends time with his six grandkids, and golfs often enough to have a tan for most of the year. He owns a four-bedroom home in Pelham Manor, a house upstate, and IHOPs throughout the borough where he grew up, each of which runs smoothly enough to give Broccoli the time and resources to devote himself, at the age of 66, to the animating force in his life: destroying his enemies. This mission came as a surprise to Broccoli, who had little reason to expect that trying to expand his pancake empire into upstate New York — and to build his grandest IHOP yet — would lead to such conflict. But sometimes that’s what happens when you find a dead body. On Memorial Day, Broccoli drove to his property in Fishkill, where a crowd was gathering to protest his planned development. These were the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the town’s Revolutionary War history and, in Broccoli’s view, to making his life hell. For more than a decade, the Friends have argued — based on some evidence, but not as much as they would like — that there are more Revolutionary War soldiers buried on Broccoli’s land than anywhere else in the United States. Broccoli argues that this is rubbish and accuses his foes — with some evidence, but not as much as he would like — of going so far as to plant human remains on his lot in their effort to make it seem more grave-stuffed than it actually is.

SubCom is laying deepwater internet cables to boost U.S. economic and military might, including a secret mission to a remote island naval base, Reuters found. SubCom, a company born out of a U.S. Cold War project to spy on Soviet submarines, is living a double life. Publicly, it is one of the world’s biggest developers of undersea fiber-optic cables for telecom firms and tech giants like Alphabet’s Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta Platforms. Behind the scenes, SubCom is the exclusive undersea cable contractor to the U.S. military, laying a web of internet and surveillance cables across the ocean floor, according to the four people with knowledge of the matter: two SubCom employees and two U.S. Navy staffers. The individuals asked not to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the operations.

Two Newark firefighters died and five were injured late Wednesday as they battled a blaze on a massive cargo ship carrying vehicles in the port of Newark, New Jersey, officials said.

Yet from a scientific perspective, there’s nothing surprising about record-breaking heat, dangerous as it may be. It’s actually exactly in line with what scientists have long predicted in a world warmed by climate change. Fossil fuel emissions heat up the planet, and hotter weather makes heat waves more extreme.

A new Senate report calls out the FBI for lying to Congress about its social media monitoring, pointing out the FBI’s hiring of ZeroFox.

More than 6,000 United Methodist congregations — a fifth of the U.S. total — have now received permission to leave the denomination amid a schism over theology and the role of LGBTQ people in the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination. Those figures emerge following the close of regular meetings in June for the denomination’s regional bodies, known as annual conferences. The departures began with a trickle in 2019 — when the church created a four-year window of opportunity for U.S. congregations to depart over LGBTQ-related issues — and cascaded to its highest level this year. Church law forbids the marriage or ordination of “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals,” but many conservatives have chosen to leave amid a growing defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches and conferences.

The list of shortcomings and failures associated with North Carolina’s decade-long experiment with private school vouchers (aka “Opportunity Scholarships”) is a long and sobering one. Though originally pitched and sold as a tool that would lift student performance and achievement by providing low-income families with a greater degree of “school choice,” there’s no evidence that kids attending voucher schools have experienced any such renaissance. The North Carolina schools that receive the funds are almost completely unaccountable and under no obligation to meet meaningful standards, so collecting and dissecting hard data is extremely difficult. A 2020 Duke University report, however, cast significant doubt on the program’s performance. Meanwhile, in states where thorough study has been possible — Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, the District of Columbia – voucher student performance and achievement have both lagged. There are other significant red flags associated with the program: Voucher schools frequently discriminate against children and families on the basis of their religious beliefs and sexual orientation. Many employ curricula grounded in religious fundamentalism and white supremacy that teach factually inaccurate lessons in science (denying the reality of evolution) and history (presenting a sanitized version of the enslavement of African Americans). Despite these problems and having already spent millions of dollars to no evident and measurable positive effect, state lawmakers are preparing to dramatically expand the program.

In Mayor Eric Adams’s first month in office, he was confronted with a tragic crisis: the deaths of two New York City police officers who were responding to a domestic disturbance in Harlem. Mr. Adams, a former police captain who campaigned as a Democratic crime fighter, quickly sought to humanize the killings. The loss of the officers, he said, reminded him of the 1987 line-of-duty death of a friend, Officer Robert Venable. “I still think about Robert,” Mr. Adams said at a news conference at City Hall. “I keep a picture of Robert in my wallet.” A week later, Mr. Adams posed for a portrait in his office, holding a wallet-size photo of Officer Venable after The New York Times had requested to see it. Mr. Adams has since repeated the moving anecdote in media interviews and at a Police Academy ceremony last June, where he again displayed Officer Venable’s picture. But the weathered photo of Officer Venable had not actually spent decades in the mayor’s wallet. It had been created by employees in the mayor’s office in the days after Mr. Adams claimed to have been carrying it in his wallet. The employees were instructed to create a photo of Officer Venable, according to a person familiar with the request. A picture of the officer was found on Google; it was printed in black-and-white and made to look worn as if the mayor had been carrying it for some time, including by splashing some coffee on it, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.