The court filing said the billionaire was under investigation but it did not explain why.

NBC News found one example of a school district keeping cat litter on campuses for students to use — but it had nothing to do with accommodating children who identify as animals. In Colorado, GOP gubernatorial nominee Heidi Ganahl insisted in several recent interviews that students were dressing and identifying as cats, disrupting class, and the state’s schools were tolerating it. Some children, she alleged, would only communicate in barks and hisses. Her campaign declined to answer questions about Ganahl’s claims, but in one interview with a local Fox affiliate, she suggested “there’s a lot of this going on” in Jefferson County. The Jefferson County school district disputed Ganahl’s claims and said its dress code prohibits costumes at school. The district — where Columbine High School is located — has been stocking classrooms with small amounts of cat litter since 2017, but as part of “go buckets” that contain emergency supplies in case students are locked in a classroom during a shooting. The buckets also contain candy for diabetic students, a map of the school, flashlights, wet wipes and first aid items.

The family says the QAnon “queen” has voided the rental contract and is not answering their requests to return it.

A Texas sheriff says the 49 migrants who were flown to Martha’s Vineyard were crime victims, opening the door for them to apply for special visas to remain in the country legally.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina mayor announced that five people, including a police officer, were killed in a shooting in a residential area. Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin told reporters that multiple people were shot on the Neuse River Greenway around 5 p.m., and that the police department told her around 8 p.m.

Elizabeth Huffner thinks it is obvious: A full-term, healthy pregnancy results in a birth. “When your due date has come and gone, you’re expecting a baby any minute,” Huffner said. So she was surprised to discover she was an “unknown accident”—at least from a billing standpoint—when she went to the hospital during labor. Her bill included a charge for something she said she didn’t know she’d ever entered: an obstetrics emergency department. That’s where a doctor briefly checked her cervix, timed her contractions, and monitored the fetal heartbeat before telling her to go home and come back later. The area is separated from the rest of the labor-and-delivery department by a curtain. The hospital got about $1,300 for that visit—$530 of it from Huffner’s pocket. In recent years, hospitals of every stripe have opened obstetrics emergency departments, or OBEDs. They come with a requirement that patients with pregnancy or postpartum medical concerns be seen quickly by a qualified provider, which can be important in a real emergency. But it also means healthy patients like Huffner get bills for emergency care they didn’t know they got. “It should be a cautionary tale to every woman,” said Huffner, of Rockford, Illinois. Three of the four major companies that set up and staff OBEDs are affiliated with private equity firms, which are known for making a profit on quick-turnaround investments. Private equity has been around for a long time in other medical specialties, and researchers are now tracking its move into women’s health care, including obstetrics. These private equity-associated practices come with a promise of increased patient satisfaction and better care, which can help the hospital avoid malpractice costs from bad outcomes.

Australian company Appen claims to have a network of more than 1 million global workers who label the data that AI systems are trained on. But some of these people are speaking out about low pay, late payments and ill treatment.

A Massachusetts police officer attended the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, five years ago and acted in key security and planning roles, HuffPost has confirmed. He also used an alias to post racist and antisemitic comments online. The officer, John Donnelly, was still an active-duty member of the police force until Thursday, shortly after HuffPost inquired about his status with the department and role in the deadly white supremacist rally. Donnelly, 33, was a patrolman for the Woburn Police Department near Boston, where he has been employed since 2015. But on the morning of Aug. 12, 2017, Donnelly could be seen on video arriving at the Charlottesville rally with Richard Spencer, a prominent white supremacist for whom Donnelly was apparently acting as a security guard. Spencer, Donnelly and a coterie of other suit-and-tie fascists worked their way into a city park where they held court beneath a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, posing for photos and talking into livestreams.

A former Louisville police officer who was facing a felony civil rights charge for shooting and killing a man in June 2020 could possibly avoid jail time.

After nearly three years of patchwork rules, as school districts attempted to manage the coexistence of public education and public disease, this was finally the year to get back to normal for millions of American students. Where I live, in Philadelphia, getting back to normal meant the resurfacing of normal public-school troubles: in the first week of the new school year, school officials announced that more than a hundred schools would be closing early. There were no outbreaks of disease or illness sending kids home. Instead, getting back to normal meant returning to classrooms that cooked in the August heat, making it unsafe to keep students inside. Philadelphia is no stranger to hot summers, nevertheless, only forty-three per cent of schools have sufficient air conditioning. The district predicts that it won’t reach its goal of outfitting all schools with air-conditioning until 2027. The hot air closing Philadelphia public schools was only one snapshot of the troubles that came with the resumption of normalcy. In Columbus, Ohio, for the first time in nearly fifty years, teachers authorized their union to strike the school district over issues ranging from building conditions to class size and pay. In the largest district in the state, more than four thousand teachers and education workers formed picket lines demanding district commitments to air-conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter, to decreased class sizes, to guaranteed art and music instruction, and, of course, to improved pay. In Seattle, the first days of school were also delayed when teachers struck to demand expanded mental-health and multilingual services for students, a smaller ratio of students to teachers in special-education classes, smaller class sizes in general, and, of course, improved pay. Those who have tried to wield learning loss as a cudgel to bash teachers’ unions or to score other political points haven’t been nearly as creative in offering solutions. A real plan for recovery from the devastation of the pandemic in public education can be found in the strikes initiated by teachers and their unions. Their demands—for smaller class sizes, better conditions within school buildings, more resources to attend to students’ mental health, and higher pay for teachers and teacher assistants—have created a map for how to boost learning achievement.

Mary Williams isn't budging. The former GOP state representative from northern Wisconsin who was appointed by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker to the Technical College System Board continues to serve despite her term expiring in May 2021 and Gov. Tony Evers naming her replacement months ago. “All you have to do is see what the Supreme Court did,” she said. Williams and two other holdovers on the board whose terms expired in May 2021 — Associated Builders and Contractors vice president Kelly Tourdot and Rio dairy farmer Becky Levzow — are emboldened to stay since the state Supreme Court ruled this summer that it's OK for political appointees to continue serving beyond their terms. The court said the expiration of a term doesn't create a vacancy until the state Senate holds a confirmation hearing. The actions of Williams, Tourdot and Levzow mirror Fred Prehn, a Wausau dentist and Walker appointee to the Natural Resources Board who has similarly disregarded his term's end date, remaining on the board to prevent a Democratic majority from forming.

A former Louisville Metro Police Department officer used law enforcement technology as part of a scheme that involved hacking the Snapchat accounts of young women and using sexually explicit photos and videos they had taken to extort them, federal prosecutors said in court documents filed on Tuesday. According to a sentencing memorandum, Bryan Wilson used his law enforcement access to Accurint, a powerful data-combing software used by police departments to assist in investigations, to obtain information about potential victims. He would then share that information with a hacker, who would hack into private Snapchat accounts to obtain sexually explicit photos and videos. If sexually explicit material was obtained, Wilson would then contact the women, threatening to post the photos and videos online and share them with their friends, family, employer and co-workers unless more sexually explicit material was provided to him. In June, the DOJ announced that Wilson, 36 at the time, had pleaded guilty to a cyberstalking charge as well as to a charge related to what LMPD has called “Slushygate,” a series of incidents in which Wilson and other officers assaulted pedestrians by throwing beverages out of unmarked patrol vehicles, sometimes filming their exploits.

The clue lies in the man who imposed the “shock therapy” experiment on Russia. Called Yegor Gaidar, he was at the heart of the communist establishment. His grandfather was the most famous writer of children’s books in the Soviet Union, and Gaidar had married the daughter of one of the Strugatsky brothers, science-fiction writers who wrote the novel the film Stalker was based on. This economist who would become acting prime minister set out to create a perfect capitalist system in Russia. He had to do it fast, he said, to stop communism from ever returning. Overnight, he removed all controls over prices, while the government gave up on any attempt to manage the system. The aim, said Gaidar, was to create a new zone of perfect freedom in which, despite initial pain, the system would find its own natural equilibrium.

The young patients, one in middle school, were forced to travel “at least two, three states away” for an abortion, according to Planned Parenthood.

A former Starbucks Corp. store manager in New York said he was instructed to single out and discipline pro-union employees for unrelated reasons, such as wearing purple pants.

Prosecutors tell judge that defendant Paul Bellar is flirting back, smiling and gesturing as the female juror looks his way and smiles.

What happens in an artist’s private life? In public, Duncan Grant was a charismatic and influential painter, a member of the Bloomsbury group of artists and intellectuals who flourished in London during and after the World Wars. In private, he was equally charismatic, and involved with a series of male lovers—erotic dalliances that he kept hidden to avoid criminal prosecution. Born in 1885, when Queen Victoria still ruled, Grant was a hearty octogenarian when private acts of homosexuality were largely decriminalized in England, in 1967. By then, he was a man of considerable experience, adept at picking up men at the National Gallery and Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner. For decades, Grant, a compulsive sketcher, kept hundreds of explicit drawings—scribbled on the backs of paper scraps and grocery lists—out of the public eye. Playful and inventive, they were fuelled by memories of his trysts and his freewheeling imagination. “I can’t speak for anyone else,” he said, in 1970, “but I had relations with anyone who would have me.” [article includes a probably NSFW drawing]

This is a new sexual harassment lawsuit. Not like the last one. Or the one before that.

Latin America and the Caribbean region – including the Amazon – has seen the steepest decline in average wildlife population size, with a 94% drop in 48 years.

People are rediscovering that Randy Johnson is an amazing photographer, and it’s delightful.