“Other unvaccinated staff were being told by the Newberg School District, administration leads, that we could not work with students unless we were six feet apart, starting right away, starting Thursday afternoon. And so, I was on my way to lunch. I took my lunch, I processed this, and I was thinking that this is segregation,” Pefferle said. “So on Friday, on Friday, Sept. 17, I showed up to school, and I put on some dark makeup on the parts that were showing my skin, including my hands, and I came in hopes to represent Rosa Parks, who I admire for standing up during her time when segregation was taking place, and I felt like I and others, who are unvaccinated, were starting to experience segregation.”

“Federal law enforcement agencies are tasked with finding and punishing criminals. But these findings suggest DHS airport currency seizure and forfeiture practices put innocent Americans at risk,” …

China's central bank on Friday said all financial transactions involving cryptocurrencies are illegal, sounding the death knell for digital currencies in China after a crackdown on the volatile trade.

An Alberta party where people intentionally tried to catch COVID-19 has landed several people in the hospital with the virus, sources have confirmed. And this was no ordinary party–it was a “COVID party”, where guests tried to intentionally get the virus to “build up natural immunity” without getting vaccinated. One source told CityNews that the Edson party, which happened about two weeks ago, had sent some people to the local hospital. A number of Edmonton ICU cases also come from the party.

Anti-vaccine Facebook groups have a new message for their community members: don’t go to the emergency room, and get your loved ones out of intensive care.

Tennessee is restricting the use of monoclonal antibody treatments to people who are not vaccinated against COVID-19.

The partisan review of Maricopa County's 2.1 million ballots cast in the 2020 election found a vote count nearly identical to what the county had previously reported, a draft report detailing its findings shows.

On paper, the deputies are scattered around the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in various assignments. One is supposed to be working patrol in Lancaster, another in West Hollywood. A third is assigned to a gang crime unit. In reality, though, the group of nine men and women make up a little-known team of investigators formed by Sheriff Alex Villanueva and other top sheriff’s officials. Much of what they do, by design, is a mystery to the public and even to most within the department. But as some of the investigations handled by the team have come to light, a common thread has emerged: Their targets are outspoken critics of Villanueva or the department. The unit, named the Civil Rights and Public Integrity Detail, has pursued a long-running investigation into one of Villanueva’s most vocal critics, L.A. County Inspector General Max Huntsman, and others despite sheriff’s officials being told by the FBI and state law enforcement officials that it appeared no crimes had been committed, a senior sheriff’s official said.

This week, a Texas lawmaker introduced a bill that would mandate third-party reviews of the 2020 election in the state's largest counties. In Wisconsin, a Republican overseeing a partisan investigation of last year's election results recently warned local election clerks of potential subpoenas. And in Pennsylvania, a legal battle has erupted over a Republican-led effort to demand the personal information of millions of voters as part of an election probe in the state. As Republicans in the Arizona Senate gear up to release the results Friday of a long-delayed and problem-plagued examination of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, calls for reviews of the 2020 election persist in other key battlegrounds. The demands to revisit the 2020 election are coming even in places where former President Donald Trump prevailed last November, as Republicans respond to pressure from Trump and his supporters to investigate discredited fraud claims and seek to erode the legitimacy of President Joe Biden's victory.

Diaz opposes vaccine mandates, but supports private business decisions on them.

After a private blessing and a prayer, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde invited gathered media to watch as an excavator tore into a wall of the old, abandoned paper mill that the tribe says has stood on its ancestral grounds for too long. The tribe held a symbolic demolition event at the old Blue Heron Paper Mill at Willamette Falls on Tuesday, representing a small step toward removing the industrial site and returning it to Indigenous hands.

An unclothed man floating down the Nolichucky River Wednesday on a pile of wood debris was eventually pulled out of the water unharmed and charged with indecent exposure and public intoxication. Troy D. Hunt, 52, of 1600 Ripley Island Road, was also found to have active arrest warrants issued in Greene County, Deputy Luke Fields said in a report. About 11 a.m. Wednesday, “a call was placed into 911 about a man floating down the Nolichucky River naked, clinging onto a log,” the report said. A multiple-agency countywide search ensued. Emergency personnel were stationed at every bridge downstream from the original sighting in the area of Ripley Island Road. Hunt was allegedly uncooperative with first responders as he passed under each bridge “and refused flotation devices, slapped ropes away from him that were thrown to him from the bridge, and at one point accepted a life vest but then threw it in the river,” the report said.

For years, the company’s contracted doctor failed to flag abnormal test results and provide the required follow-up.

Vancouver resident Wesley Harmer worries that the "mandatory" sign-up to a new utility company owned by his landlord means his utility costs will no longer be protected by provincial rent controls.

The European Union on Thursday said it will impose a universal charger for smartphones, setting up a clash with Apple and its widely used iPhone connector cable. The European Commission believes a standard cable for all devices will cut back on electronic waste, but Apple says a one-size fits all charger will stop innovation and create more pollution. The EU is a massive market of 450 million people, and the imposition of the USB-C as a cable standard could have a decisive effect on the global smartphone market. "European consumers have been frustrated long enough about incompatible chargers piling up in their drawers," said EU executive vice president Margrethe Vestager in a statement. "We gave industry plenty of time to come up with their own solutions, now time is ripe for legislative action for a common charger," she said.

A long-lost Far Side film, much less a live-action one, was news for many. As far as anyone knew, Gary Larson’s iconic one-panel comic strip had received only two official screen adaptations, both 30-minute animated specials: Tales From The Far Side, which aired on CBS in 1994, and Tales From The Far Side II, which aired on the BBC three years later. Just two months after Tales From The Far Side premiered, Larson brought the comic to a close, ending a 15-year run that had seen the strip syndicated in more than 1,900 daily newspapers. Until Larson announced a new Far Side website in late 2019, he’d all but stopped giving interviews and had worked only sporadically since 1995. But his retirement and withdrawal from the public eye didn’t cause The Far Side’s fanbase to wane. If anything, the dozens of collected anthologies and daily desk calendars garnered new legions of fans who loved the comic’s inimitable, heady surrealism and naturalist themes, motifs cultivated from Larson’s longtime interest in biology and environmentalism. And so, when Blocker posted the film stills earlier this year, Far Side lovers immediately peppered the actor with questions: Who else is that in the photo? Why was virtually no one aware of this until now? Which director was game, brave, and/or audacious enough to agree to such a project?

In Japan, gacha machines are those ubiquitous capsule vending machines that dispense random prizes. The concept hasn’t only evolved into video games, but also into the Japanese slang oya-gacha. What parents you get, like random items, is really the luck of the draw. Oya-gacha, or “parent gacha,” is currently a big buzzword in Japan. As Abema explains, the idea is that children do not get to choose their parents. Some might get ideal parents, and the slang would be, “I won the parent gacha,” while those who did not could say they lost it. Not everyone can get the super rare, powerful items in gacha games—or in real life.

The Biden administration’s special envoy to Haiti has resigned, protesting "inhumane" large-scale expulsions of Haitian migrants to their homeland wracked by civil strife and natural disaster, U.S. officials said Thursday.

How Haight Ashbury countercultural ideals were distorted by a tech "co-living" experiment, and a trans performance community was displaced.

DHS told NBC News it is not sending "and will not send Haitian nationals being encountered at the southwest border" to the Guantanamo Bay facility. The Biden administration is advertising for a new contract to operate a migrant detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with a requirement that some of the guards speak Spanish and Haitian Creole, according to government records. A little-known immigrant holding facility on the base has a capacity of 120 people, the records say, and it "will have an estimated daily population of 20 people," according to a solicitation for bids issued Friday by the Department of Homeland Security. According to the solicitation, formal bidding is expected to take place later this fall. "The service provider shall be responsible to maintain on site the necessary equipment to erect temporary housing facilities for populations that exceed 120 and up to 400 migrants in a surge event," the contract solicitation says.