The standoff between two factions of the Multnomah County Republican Party—one of which has openly aligned itself with the Proud Boys—is growing increasingly bizarre. The two sides plan to hold rival meetings June 3 to separately elect a party chair at two hotels 2 miles apart near Portland International Airport. On May 6, then-chairman Stephen Lloyd was recalled by the more radical faction of the party after Lloyd said he wanted the Multnomah County GOP to be more inclusive. At the recall meeting, WW learned, self-described Proud Boy Daniel Tooze provided security with 10 or so of his associates. Since that meeting, more moderate members of the party have distanced themselves from those who signed a security agreement with Tooze, which WW obtained. The county party fully splintered May 17, when Lloyd’s supporters stormed out of a party meeting at a Gresham church and attempted to vote Lloyd back in as chair in the church parking lot. Since that split, it has remained unclear who is actually chair. After WW asked vice chair Alan Conner and secretary Sean Yates about the May 17 meeting, an anonymous emailer responded aggressively, saying the other faction’s attempt to reelect Lloyd wasn’t legal.

Peru's Pedro Castillo has come a long way to be on the cusp of winning the Andean nation's presidential election. The son of peasant farmers, who lives humbly as a teacher in Peru's north and tends animals on his land, is the narrow favorite ahead of Sunday's run-off vote that has become a referendum on wealth and poverty in the copper-rich country. Castillo, 51, who represents the socialist Peru Libre party, shot to prominence in April when he shocked analysts and pollsters to win the first-round vote. He even caught some major news outlets off guard, as they did not have a caption photo for him. His rise has been driven by widespread discontent of the traditional political parties and spiking poverty in the country of some 33 million people, which has been hammered by the world's deadliest coronavirus outbreak. read more "Never again a poor man in a rich country!" is a key refrain at his rallies, where he often sports a wide-brimmed hat, sometimes dances and carries a huge inflatable pencil - the symbol of his party and echo of his background in education. "How it is possible that in such a rich country there is so much misery, so much inequality," he said at the final pre-election debate in late May against conservative rival Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori who is in prison for human rights abuses and corruption. The two are neck-and-neck in the polls.

A management services firm in Texas is asking a federal court to grant it a religious exemption to discriminate against LGBTQ people because the owner says he runs a “Christian business.” And if they’re not allowed to summarily fire all LGBTQ people, then they’re asking the court to at least be allowed to fire bisexuals.

Will Daly, a local labor leader and city commissioner, faced a City Council colleague, George Baker, in the election.

It still sucks to get sick, but the common cold probably won't kill you.

At the Big Squeeze, the state’s most talented teen accordion players are keeping a historic Texas tradition alive.

“Just received this from the GOP. They are asking me to potentially gather the ’boys and all the patriots and lead a literal (non violent) charge on the County Elections office.”

Nicholas Wallace’s graduation degree was in jeopardy over a satirical email he shared about the Federalist Society.

After waiting months, the Biden administration says it will ship 80 million doses to countries in need.

In a concession to Republicans, President Joe Biden proposed that instead of raising the corporate tax rate to pay for a bipartisan infrastructure package totaling at least $1 trillion, they'd work to ensure corporations don't exploit tax loopholes. Biden's latest infrastructure counteroffer, proposed to Republican senators this week, would keep intact President Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts that they oppose unwinding, calling it a "red line" in their negotiations with the White House. Biden reduced the cost of his American Jobs Plan to $1.7 trillion from $2.25 trillion last month to get closer to an amount Republicans could support. In their counterproposal last week, Republicans upped their offer to $928 billion from $568 billion. Their proposal contains $290 billion on top of baseline funds. Psaki did not say whether Biden is willing to go below $1 trillion. "We're going to keep optionality on the table, and we'll see how the conversation goes tomorrow," she said.

The war on eggs started back in the ’70s, not with the company formerly known as Hampton Creek, but with a little cafe-grocery store in Los Angeles.

The largest warship in the Iranian navy caught fire and later sank Wednesday in the Gulf of Oman under unclear circumstances. Also one of their major oil refineries had a major fire on the same day—cause unknown!

Political commentator Ben Shapiro admitted today that he doesn’t like the paintings of renowned artist Georgia O’Keeffe because her works “look like absolutely nothing.”

A bankruptcy judge cleared a plan for final vote by creditors of Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, that would release the Sacklers and their financial empire from liability for the opioid crisis.

Floyd Mayweather’s decision to fight YouTuber Logan Paul was an “easy” one. “I believe in working smarter, not harder. So if it’s something easy like [the Paul fight], a legalized bank robbery, I gotta do it. I have to do it,” Mayweather said during Showtime’s pre-PPV show “Inside Mayweather vs. Paul,” released on May 29. “My nickname is ‘Money’ for a reason… I worked extremely hard for years and years to get to a certain level. A level where we can start calling everything an event,” the 44-year-old retired boxing legend explained.

Etsy is profiting from COVID-19 misinformation, this time in the form of illegal fake vaccination IDs and other merchandise with misleading or inaccurate anti-mask and anti-vaccine slogans. The company has struggled to take down listings that violate its misinformation policies during the coronavirus pandemic, and the rising interest in forged COVID-19 vaccination cards shows this is a recurring problem that the company has yet to solve.

Although some Republican leaders deplored their violence, most have come to support the rioters’ claim that Trump’s defeat meant the election was inherently illegitimate. Republicans say they would like to move on from the 2020 election. “A lot of our members, and I think this is true of a lot of House Republicans, want to be moving forward and not looking backward,” John Thune, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, told CNN on May 19. “Anything that gets us rehashing the 2020 elections I think is a day lost on being able to draw a contrast between us and the Democrats’ very radical left-wing agenda.” After Thune and 34 of his Republican colleagues used the filibuster last week to block a vote on creating a bipartisan commission to investigate the Capitol riot, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer accused Republicans of fearing the wrath of former President Donald Trump. “Shame on the Republican Party for trying to sweep the horrors of that day under the rug because they’re afraid of Donald Trump,” Schumer said on the floor. But Republicans are not blocking a bipartisan January 6 commission because they fear Trump, or because they want to “move on” from 2020. They are blocking a January 6 commission because they agree with the underlying ideological claim of the rioters, which is that Democratic electoral victories should not be recognized. Because they regard such victories as inherently illegitimate—the result of fraud, manipulation, or the votes of people who are not truly American—they believe that the law should be changed to ensure that elections more accurately reflect the will of Real Americans, who by definition vote Republican. They believe that there is nothing for them to investigate, because the actual problem is not the riot itself but the unjust usurpation of power that occurred when Democrats won. Absent that provocation, the rioters would have stayed home.

Giglio letters warn that a prosecutor won't accept testimony from certain law enforcement officers. DAs are going along with guidance from the state court system that says those letters aren't public records. But is that what the law says?

Doctors use the term "crisis" to refer to the crossroads where the patient improves or goes into terminal decline. In that sense, we are living through a major crisis, a juncture revealed by the pandemic that we have yet to traverse. For 40 years, the gospels of market efficiency and shareholder value have demanded that we dismantle the state (because markets are efficient, while states are not) and hollow out companies ("trimming fat" to serve the almighty shareholder). Thus state capacity has waned while companies themselves became more brittle: their employees turned into contractors, their cash-reserves liquidated as dividends and buybacks, their supply chains stretched over impossible distances with multiple critical points of failure. Human civilization became increasingly fragile, while the threats it faces increased in suddenness and severity.

Once again proving furries are the actual internet MVPs, this time with the story of a scientist who developed the Moderna vaccine continually pissing off a bunch of doomposters who never want COVID-19 to end.