A man said he witnessed a California officer punching a K-9 repeatedly during training Monday, but police say the context tells a different story.

Dawn Wells, who helmed the iconic role of Mary Ann in Gilligan's Island, died on Wednesday from complications linked to COVID.

A tale of vampirism would have been shocking to readers at the time if was published, not because of its monsters, but its politics.

At the corner of West Pico Blvd. and South Genesee Ave. in west Los Angeles sits a tan, six-story building. It’s nothing much to look at: It’s set back from the street by a manicured lawn, lined by a row of trees on each side. An American flag flies out front. At a quick glance, it appears no different from any other office building; it looks like it could be home to medical practitioners, accounting firms, or insurance agencies. But sit outside of it for long enough, and you won’t spot many white collar workers coming in or out. Nor would you catch glance of any workers through office windows. That’s because the windows on this building are fake. In fact, the whole building is a facade; its top is open and inside of it is an active oil well site operated by Freeport-McRoran that produces thousands of barrels of oil per year.

A former mixed martial arts fighter has decided to found a far-right gang called the "Proud Girls" -- and the far-right Proud Boys gang is not happy about it. The Daily Beast reports that Tara LaRosa's effort to found her own "Proud Girls" chapter was met with scorn and derision on the Proud Boys' official Telegram channel earlier this month. "Don't ride our coattails," wrote one upset Proud Boy of LaRosa's initiative. "Want to support us? Get married, have babies, and take care of your family." A meme posted in the Oklahoma Proud Boys channel, meanwhile, made similarly sexist comments about LaRosa's fledgling group. "This is a men's club," the meme said. "If you're not in a relationship with a Proud Boy, at worst, you're a groupie." Another meme being passed around on Proud Boys channels bluntly states, "If you are a Proud Boy and you are involved in supporting Proud Girls you are fake and gay." But LaRosa, who literally once made a living beating people up, fired back by declaring she was "tougher than 99% of you alleged men," whom she described as "little crybaby Pecker Boys."

Some progressive Twitter activists and left-wing reporters couldn’t wait to begin their grave-dancing. Letlow deserved to die, they mused, because he didn’t take COVID seriously enough. They scoured his online presence to find any proof that he engaged in so-called “denialism.” Some, such as Vox’s Aaron Rupar, pointed to an October video where the then-candidate had the audacity to advocate for reopening the economy while maintaining state and federal precautions on coronavirus. Molly Jong-Fast of The Daily Beast also shared the video. Hundreds of their followers joined in, blaming Letlow for his own death and expressing that he was unworthy of pity because of his politics. For them, his death was further proof that those who dare propose policy prescriptions that differ from their own, no matter how rational or mainstream they may be, just have it coming to them. (Written by the former communications director and spokeswoman for Herman Caine!)

It’s happening all over again. For months, Americans who despaired about the country’s coronavirus-suppression efforts looked desperately to the arrival of a vaccine for a kind of pandemic deliverance. Now that it has arrived, miraculously fast, we are failing utterly to administer it with anything like the urgency the pace of dying requires — and, perhaps most maddeningly, failing in precisely the same way as we did earlier in the year. That is, out of apparent, near-total indifference. Almost as soon as the coronavirus arrived in the United States, public-health officials understood quite precisely the basic building blocks of a proper response: test, trace, isolate — in the three-beat mantra of those early months. There were, along the way, misunderstandings and miscalculations — about surface versus aerosol transmission, about mask-wearing, about the relative safety of outdoor socializing, among others. But the basic path was abundantly clear, as nearly every epidemiologist kept screaming, and yet the country failed spectacularly to walk down it. Within hours of receiving WHO guidance on January 13, scientists in Thailand began deploying a COVID-19 test, as the Washington Post recently recounted; it took the CDC 46 days to produce one that worked. By March 1, South Korea was administering 11,000 tests per day, a rapidly growing figure; in the U.S., a country about seven times larger, the number was 183. Early, low-end estimates suggested 500,000 to 700,000 tests each day were necessary to slow the spread of the disease, and high-end estimates ran to 3 million per day; the U.S. didn’t reach 700,000 daily tests until mid-June, and still hasn’t reached that threshold of 3 million per day. As recently as August, lab delays caused by pent-up demand meant it was taking so long to deliver results that the tests themselves were effectively meaningless. That is just the story of testing, but contact tracing and isolation were bungled just as badly. Early estimates for the number of contact tracers needed ran between 100,000 and 300,000 people working, nationwide, to alert the contacts of positive cases to encourage them to isolate. As of May, the number was under 8,000. Today, it is still just 70,000, and those who are reached by those tracers are overwhelmingly not responding. There has also been hopelessly inadequate support for those hoping to isolate, or quarantine, during periods of risk — not to mention insufficient protections for those who had to miss work to do so. And now here we are, nearly a year into the pandemic, making precisely the same mistake with the vaccine. That is to say, despite the horrible continuing brutality of this pandemic and the incredible efforts and good intentions of health-care workers, we are, practically speaking, at a social level, not even bothering to try to end it. How badly are we doing? In September, President Trump promised 100 million vaccinations by the end of the year. As a country, we have only 40 million doses, and had aimed, according to Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, to vaccinate 20 million by year-end. That’s bad enough. But we have administered only 2 million of those — barely 10 percent of the goal. At this rate, achieving sufficient vaccination to reach herd immunity and bring the pandemic to a close in the U.S. will take about seven years. In Israel, they are vaccinating about one percent of the population each day, meaning the full program of population-wide vaccination will be done by this March.

Clifton McHale, a 23-year BPD veteran with family ties to the department’s upper ranks, was accused in 2005 of sexually assaulting an intoxicated woman while in uniform in a police vehicle and agreed to serve a one-year, unpaid suspension following an investigation.

Roughly 90% of people incarcerated at Goose Creek Correctional Center have contracted COVID-19 since the virus began spreading in the Mat-Su prison in early November.

Over the weekend, a particularly awful pair of words started trending on social media: super gonorrhea. That’s because the World Health Organization recently warned that the pandemic is helping fuel the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including the bacteria that cause gonorrhea. Unfortunately, the situation is only likely to get worse. Antibiotic resistance has been a slow-brewing crisis for decades, but the effects are finally becoming hard to ignore. Currently, so-called superbugs are thought to kill around 35,000 Americans annually, as well as 700,000 people globally.

Detective Myles Cosgrove will be terminated along with Detective Joshua Jaynes, who was involved in planning the deadly raid.

The Senate vote on Wednesday was a major victory for Latin America’s growing feminist movement, and its ripple effects are likely to be widespread.

In a study published in September, researchers from Ohio State University found that out of more than two dozen athletes from the university who tested positive for COVID-19, 30% had cellular heart damage and 15% showed signs of heart inflammation caused by a condition known as myocarditis. After mapping the hearts of 26 Ohio State University athletes using a process known as cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR), researchers found that not only 15% of students exhibited the rare heart condition but 30% showed cellular damage.

Nashville police got a report 16 months before a bomb exploded in the city on Christmas that a man named in the blast was building a device in his RV. ... According to the police report and Throckmorton, the woman was experiencing a mental health crisis at the time. Officers called their mobile crisis division, and after talking with the woman, she agreed to be transported by ambulance for a psychological evaluation, Aaron said.

The newsletter service is a software company that, by mimicking some of the functions of newsrooms, has made itself difficult to categorize.

A handful of Georgia counties have cut down on early in-person voting sites since the 2020 general election

Confined mostly to tiny cabins, crew members found themselves forced to stay aboard—sometimes without pay—and struggling to cope with a months long lockdown.

President Donald Trump has come out on top as Americans’ most-admired man for 2020, according to Gallup’s annual survey, ending former President Barack Obama’s 12-year run with the title. This year’s poll results mark the first time Trump has won most-admired man on his own, after last year tying with Obama for the title. Former first lady Michelle Obama still ranks as the most-admired woman in 2020, earning the title for the third year in a row, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in second place. 18 percent of the U.S. adults surveyed named Trump when asked which man “living anywhere in the world they admire most,” while 15 percent named Obama. President-elect Joe Biden was third.

The unique discovery was three or four years old when it died at least 20,000 years ago.

Rep.-elect Luke Letlow (R-La.) has died from coronavirus, multiple sources confirmed Tuesday evening. He was 41.