Gov. Gavin Newsom personally accompanied Caltrans officials to clear out a longstanding homeless encampment near the Berkeley Marina Monday morning. But while officials claim residents were offered alternate housing, several of them are in states of limbo as they search for another place to live. The camp, known as “downstairs” to the encampment on University Avenue at Frontage Road, is located underneath the Insterstate 80 underpass, accessed by stairs on the pedestrian bridge. Activists with “Where Do We Go Berkeley” have long maintained and fought for both camps, which have existed well over two years during a worsening, regional housing crisis in the Bay Area.

It is natural, on a day like this, to think about the deer. In the late autumn of 2016, a white-tailed buck took up residence at Jackie Robinson Park in Harlem. Locals dubbed him J.R, after the park he was found in, or Lefty, because he was missing most of his antler on that side. It was Manhattan, where such megafauna are rare, so Lefty became a mini-celebrity. But also, it was Manhattan. Lefty, like Mucky the Gowanus Dolphin before him, was a long-term impossibility, a guest living beyond the practical means of his environment, and so several weeks later, when Lefty escaped from the park into the grounds of a nearby housing complex, the city announced that it would have to put the deer down. That’s when Andrew Cuomo stepped in. Although the city had acted on the recommendations of the state’s own conservation agency, which had a policy of discouraging deer relocation, the New York governor swooped in to offer sanctuary to the buck. “We want to do everything we can to save the Harlem deer,” he announced. “We have told the city that the feds or we can transport it upstate today.” The city and the state went back and forth on this for two days, until finally, Lefty died in custody—evidently from all the stress. It’s hard to conjure a political fight less consequential. Why was the governor of New York wading into this? Why was this even a Thing? What exactly were “the feds” supposed to do? There was no reason it ever had to happen at all, except that it offered Cuomo a chance to humiliate New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio—which meant that there was no way in hell the governor was staying out of it. Brutish and unnecessary demonstrations of power, after all, are how Andrew Cuomo says hello.

A viral TikTok video of a woman taking umbrage with her neighbor's decorative Tigger flag tells us more than we want to know about ourselves.

From family gatherings to workplaces, vaccinated Americans are drawing sharper lines around who they choose to spend time with amid rising Covid-19 cases, while the unvaccinated are growing testy over being excluded and feeling judged.

Rich countries have gobbled up the vast majority of available doses, while less than 2 percent of Africa’s 1.3 billion people have been vaccinated.

Triantha occidentalis is picky: It won't eat insects heavy enough to be its pollinators.

Crustaceans in England are getting a little too excited by an additive released by underwater waste.

A new poll shows Newsom in big trouble in the September 14 recall election. But a little-known Democrat is leading the field of possible replacements.

Cases have been identified in Kansas, Texas, Minnesota, and Georgia. A fourth person in a fourth US state has mysteriously contracted a deadly South Asian bacterium without leaving the continental US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday. Two of the four cases have been fatal, including the latest one identified in Georgia late last month during a post-mortem exam. CDC investigators determined that all four cases are connected and they suspect a so-far-unknown imported product may be to blame. The CDC had released an advisory on June 30 about the three earlier cases. The first case was identified in an adult in Kansas in March, which was also fatal. In May, investigators identified a case in a 4-year-old Texas girl and another case in an adult in Minnesota. Both of those patients were hospitalized for extended periods before being released to transitional care facilities. The young girl in Texas reportedly suffered brain damage from the infection. Once again, the CDC is warning healthcare providers to be on the lookout for the rare and often difficult-to-diagnose infection, called melioidosis—even in people who haven't traveled. Meanwhile, the investigation continues into the source of the infecting bacteria, Burkholderia pseudomallei.

Talk about a self-own.

Giuffre has spoken publicly about her allegations against the royal family member for years

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday he was resigning after a withering report from the state's attorney general alleged he'd sexually harassed multiple women led to calls from top Democrats, including President Joe Biden, that he step down. He announced he'll leave office continuing to insist that he did nothing wrong.

Michael Cohen, a former lawyer for Trump, said that "this is the Trump modus operandi" and predicted things would "end badly for Rudy."

People with dissociative identity disorder have started presenting their selves on YouTube to rapturous fans.

As the majority of Florida's K-12 schools prepare to reopen campuses at full capacity this week — many of them on Tuesday — Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that the state Board of Education could withhold pay from school leaders who implement mask mandates for students. The move to potentially punish educators follows days of controversy during which school district superintendents and school board members seeking to comply with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines ignored an executive order from DeSantis banning school districts from requiring students to wear face masks.

The accuser says Mindless Self Indulgence singer-songwriter James Euringer began a two-year sexual relationship with her when she was 15

Big questions loom over the upcoming back-to-school season: Should children be required to wear masks? Should children go to in-person classes at all? If we send children to school without masks, we increase their risk of acquiring Covid-19. Some could suffer illness or die. If we close schools, millions of children will suffer learning loss, and many of them may suffer lifelong effects on their physical and mental health. For more than a year, we’ve worked with North Carolina school districts and charter schools, studying the rate of new Covid cases, the efficacy of mitigation measures such as masking and the increased risks of participating in school-sponsored sports. We have learned a few things for certain: Although vaccination is the best way to prevent Covid-19, universal masking is a close second, and with masking in place, in-school learning is safe and more effective than remote instruction, regardless of community rates of infection. Vaccination is the strongest method for preventing the ill effects of Covid, but students under 12 years of age are ineligible for the vaccines. Masking, then, is one of the best, most readily available methods to protect them from the disease, with universal masking being one of the most effective and efficient strategies for preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission in schools. Universal masking in schools can save lives. Voluntary masking in schools will likely be much less effective and could lead to school closures and community transmission. This summer, we’ve seen that voluntary masking has failed in some schools in Missouri and North Carolina, which saw increases in Covid-19 cases and days missed because of quarantines, prompting several districts to reinstate mask mandates. How do we know that masking helps prevent spread among unvaccinated people in schools? In July 2020, we and our colleagues developed the ABC Science Collaborative to pair scientists with school and community leaders to make sure that school leaders had the most up-to-date, scientific information pertaining to Covid-19 and K-12 schools. In conjunction with North Carolina, the ABC Science Collaborative collected data from more than one million students and staff members in the state’s schools from March to June 2021. Certain school districts in North Carolina were required, by bipartisan legislation, to submit infection data to the ABC Science Collaborative as a trusted third party. During that time, more than 7,000 children and adults acquired the coronavirus and attended school while infectious. Because of close contact with those cases, more than 40,000 people required quarantine. Through contact tracing and testing, however, we found only 363 additional children and adults acquired the coronavirus. We believe this low rate of transmission occurred because of the mask-on-mask school environment: Both the infected person and the close contact wore masks. Schools provided this protection without expensive screening tests for the coronavirus or massive overhauls in ventilation systems. Because North Carolina had a mask mandate for all K-12 schools, we could not compare masked schools to unmasked schools. To understand the preventive impact masks can have, we looked outside North Carolina for comparisons. Data from our research and from studies conducted in Utah, Missouri and Wisconsin shows that school transmission rates of coronavirus were low when schools enforced mask mandates. By contrast, one school in Israel without a mask mandate or proper social distancing protocols reported an outbreak of Covid-19 involving 153 students and 25 staff members. Recent outbreaks at youth camps in Texas, Illinois and Florida show how quickly Covid-19 can spread among adolescents and adults who are largely unmasked and mostly unvaccinated, with the possibility of spreading into surrounding communities. The potential for this kind of community spread was the reason schools closed their doors in March 2020. Editors’ Picks My Sister Won’t Accept My Same-Sex Partner. What Should I Do? Why Do American Grocery Stores Still Have an Ethnic Aisle? How to Unlock the Equity in Your Home Continue reading the main story With the evidence now clear that universal masking is linked to lower spread, why not require universal masking? Why seek to gather hundreds of unvaccinated, unmasked individuals in an enclosed space for several hours a day, five days a week? Schools that do not require masks will have more coronavirus transmission. And while mortality from Covid was only two per 100,000 school-age children as of April, with more than 50 million public school children in the United States, that could still mean many avoidable deaths of children in a year. Once vaccination is available for all children, districts can serve their students best by creating incentives to encourage masking and vaccination. For example, if universal masking is enforced or a student is vaccinated, it’s reasonable for schools to decide not to require quarantining or testing after exposure for asymptomatic children and adults. Similarly, schools may consider allowing vaccinated students who participate in extracurricular activities to continue even if they’ve been exposed to someone who tested positive. School districts that do not have universal masking should keep using strategies like ventilation and social distancing and continue to perform routine testing for unvaccinated students. In schools that choose to open without mask mandates and with limited vaccine uptakes, increased Covid is likely. Until all children can get vaccinated, masks remain a well-researched solution for lowering the risk of getting Covid. Children should be in school, and we should embrace the measures that can keep them safe.

Unvaccinated people are eager to travel again. But increasingly, the rules make that harder.

Charles H. Loeb defied the American military’s denials and propaganda to show how deadly radiation from the strike on Hiroshima sickened and killed. “Loeb Reflects On Atomic Bombed Area,” read the headline in The Atlanta Daily World of Oct. 5, 1945, two months after Hiroshima’s ruin. In the world of Black newspapers, that name alone was enough to attract readers. Charles H. Loeb was a Black war correspondent whose articles in World War II were distributed to papers across the United States by the National Negro Publishers Association. In the article, Mr. Loeb told how bursts of deadly radiation had sickened and killed the city’s residents. His perspective, while coolly analytic, cast light on a major wartime cover up. The Page 1 article contradicted the War Department, the Manhattan Project, and The New York Times and its star reporter, William L. Laurence, on what had become a bitter dispute between the victor and the vanquished. Japan insisted that the bomb’s invisible rays at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had led to waves of sudden death and lingering illness. Emphatically, the United States denied that charge. But science and history would prove Mr. Loeb right. His reporting not only challenged the official government line but also echoed the skepticism of many Black Americans, who, scholars say, worried that race had played a role in the United States’ decision to drop the experimental weapons on Japan. Black clergy and activists at times sympathized openly with the bomb’s victims. “They were willing to question the main narrative,” said Alex Wellerstein, a historian who glimpsed this skepticism while researching his recent book, “Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States.” Mr. Loeb’s questioning never got the recognition it deserved. While hailed as a civic leader in Cleveland, his hometown, and more widely as a pioneering Black journalist, he was unappreciated for having exposed the bomb’s stealthy dangers at the dawn of the atomic age. His insights, until now, were lost to history.

A centuries-old tradition in which women declared themselves men so they could enjoy male privilege is dying out as young women have more options available to them to live their own lives.