AMES — When Nick Drummond and Patrick Bakker heard the tall tales about the former owner of the house they were buying, they brushed it off as hearsay. They were in the process of purchasing a 1915 American Foursquare just on the edge of the village of Ames, Montgomery County, and a few people had mentioned the home was rumored to have once belonged to a bootlegger in the 1920s. "It was sort of the local urban legend that it was built by a bootlegger," Drummond said. "We went with it, but we also knew that this was totally made up." And the story still seemed fictional, at least until October when Drummond ripped off the rotting, wooden skirting on the home's mudroom and something tumbled out at his feet.

For those excited about Cyberpunk 2077 but are vulnerable to epileptic episodes, here are a few things you need to know.

US Air Force officer and test pilot Chuck Yeager, known as "the fastest man alive," has died at the age of 97.

New Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, seeking to revamp the nation’s largest prosecutor’s office with progressive policies, said Monday after taking office that cash bail will be ended for many offenses and sentences in thousands of cases will be reevaluated. Gascón, in remarks after taking his oath of office, took aim at his predecessors in recent decades — calling Los Angeles “a poster child for the failed tough-on-crime approach.” “The status quo hasn’t made us safer,” he said during a live-streamed ceremony.

Ivanov Sergey Nikolaevich, the scriptwriter for the survival-horror S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, has passed away. Born in Kiev in 1954, Ivanov was not drawn towards creative pursuits in his childhood or youth, surprisingly. He enjoyed science-fiction books and comics, and was a big fan of Boris Stern, a Soviet writer who penned a range of fairy tales, satire, social and realistic prose. "If they did not provoke a desire to take up the pen, then, at least, they made me look at writing from a slightly different angle," said Ivanov. "I don't consider myself, like many of those who write now, to be a writer (here, Stern was a real writer!)" At Donetsk National University, Ukraine, he trained and graduated in applied mathematics, and secured a role as a lecturer at the V. M. Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine from 1977 to 1992. At this point in time, video games were beginning to show promise and potential outside of simplistic yet entertaining puzzles. CD-ROMs were brand new inventions, and they revolutionised optical-based storage media, allowing for the arrival of three dimensional environments and characters in games.

This "Galactic Federation" has supposedly been in contact with Israel and the US for years, but are keeping themselves a secret to prevent hysteria until humanity is ready.

President Trump called the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives twice during the past week to make an extraordinary request for help reversing his loss in the state, reflecting a broadening pressure campaign by the president and his allies to try to subvert the 2020 election result. The calls, confirmed by House Speaker Bryan Cutler’s office, make Pennsylvania the third state where Trump has directly attempted to overturn a result since he lost the election to President-elect Joe Biden. He previously reached out to Republicans in Michigan, and on Saturday he pressured Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in a call to try to replace that state’s electors.

On one local Facebook group, a man described the couple as “liberal socialist democratic homosexual transvestites from Chicago” who “hate this country.”

Trump administration officials passed when Pfizer offered in late summer to sell the U.S. government additional doses of its Covid-19 vaccine, according to people familiar with the matter. Now Pfizer may not be able provide more of its vaccine to the United States until next June because of its commitments to other countries, they said.

Liberals who express dismay, or more bizarrely a fevered hope, about the corporatists and imperialists selected to fill the positions in the Biden administration are the court jesters of our political burlesque. They long ago sold their soul and abandoned their most basic principles to line up behind a bankrupt Democratic Party. They chant, with every election cycle, the mantra of the least worst and sit placidly on the sidelines as a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership betray every issue they claim to support. The only thing that mattered to liberals in the presidential race, once again, was removing a Republican, this time Donald Trump, from office. This, the liberals achieved. But their Faustian bargain, in election after election, has shredded their credibility. They are ridiculed, not only among right-wing Trump supporters but by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party that has been captured by corporate power. No one can, or should, take liberals seriously. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. The cost is too onerous. And so, the liberals do what they always do, chatter endlessly about political and moral positions they refuse to make any sacrifices to achieve.          

Company executives once said having cars that can drive on their own would be a salvation for their business. But the effort turned into a legal and financial headache.

The decade-long hunt captured the world's attention, but when it finally ended in June, everyone still wanted to know: Who had solved the mystery? This week, as legal proceedings threaten his anonymity, a 32-year-old medical student is ready to go on the record.

Bruce MacGillis, on the excruciating wait for a vaccine inside a covid-infected nursing home

The Supreme Court declined Monday to take up an appeal from parents in Oregon who want to prevent transgender students from using locker rooms and bathrooms of the gender with which they identify, rather than their sex assigned at birth. The case came from a school district near Salem, Oregon’s capital city. The federal appeals court in San Francisco had upheld a Dallas, Oregon, school district policy that allows transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity. Parents sued over the policy in 2017, saying it caused embarrassment and stress.

A Michigan sheriff who suggested the men accused of plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer may have been attempting a citizen's arrest has filed a federal lawsuit alleging voter fraud and seeking to preserve records related to the Nov. 3 election. Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf alleges in the lawsuit filed Sunday, without providing evidence, that "multifaceted schemes and artifices ... resulted in the unlawful counting, or manufacturing, of hundreds of thousands of illegal, ineligible, duplicate or purely fictitious ballots in the state of Michigan."

Officials have declared an outbreak of COVID-19 at a mink farm in B.C.'s Fraser Valley, east of Vancouver, after eight people with connections to the site tested positive for the disease. Fraser Health said in a written statement Sunday the farm operators and staff who tested positive are isolating, as are their close contacts. Officials did not identify the farm or the community in which it operates. The statement did not say how the virus was transmitted, but employees are undergoing screening and officials are conducting contact tracing. Animals at the farm are also being tested for the virus. In the meantime, the mink farm has been ordered to restrict the transport of its animals, products and goods, the statement said.

Behind the lab coats and the academic degrees, some of the country's top epidemiologists are lonely, grieving, and stressed.

The tears of a clown may not get this street performer anywhere, but a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress might. A psychiatrist told jurors yesterday that park clown Alexander Alhovsky suffers from the syndrome after cops knocked him off his bike and held a gun to his head because a battery-powered balloon pump he left in an Upper East Side Starbucks was mistaken for a bomb. Alhovsky, 40, had been painting faces and twisting balloons in a nearby park in June 2006 just before he left the pump behind. Timothy Gaven, one of the arresting officers, testified that the device looked like a bomb to him. “He kept saying, ‘I’m just a clown!’ ” Gaven said. “That didn’t mean anything to me.”

Hefty bills will come due in early 2021 for rent and utilities. Economists warn many unemployed families won’t be able to pay without more stimulus aid from Congress. Millions of Americans who lost their jobs during the pandemic have fallen thousands of dollars behind on rent and utility bills, a warning sign that people are running out of money for basic needs. Nearly 12 million renters will owe an average of $5,850 in back rent and utilities by January, Moody’s Analytics warns. Last month 9 million renters said they were behind on rent, according to a Census Bureau survey. The numbers were especially high for families with children, with 21 percent falling behind on rent, and among families of color. About 29 percent of Black families and 17 percent of Hispanic renters were behind, the Census Bureau reported. A separate analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, looking at people who had jobs before the pandemic, found 1.3 million such households are now an average of $5,400 in debt on rent and utilities, after those people had lost jobs and their family’s income plunged. Economists say these data points show the failure of the U.S. safety net during this crisis, which is inflicting economic pain that will hurt families for years.

For more than 10 hours last Monday, President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, convened in a Phoenix hotel ballroom with more than a dozen current and future Arizona Republican lawmakers to hear testimony from people who supposedly witnessed election fraud. Giuliani and other attendees were shown maskless and not social distancing, and the Arizona Republican Party tweeted an image of Giuliani and lawmakers flouting guidelines to restrict transmission of the novel coronavirus. That defiance of public health advice came to a head on Sunday when Trump announced on Twitter that Giuliani had contracted the coronavirus. Hours later, legislative staff in Arizona’s Capitol abruptly announced a week-long closure of the state Senate and House starting on Monday.