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G.O.P. lawmakers whose leaders have pressed to roll back transgender rights around the country moved to bar Sarah McBride, the first transgender member of Congress, from women’s rooms on Capitol Hill.

In Washington this week for new member orientation, Ms. McBride was still sitting through mandatory cybersecurity trainings, setting up her payroll, selecting district offices and learning how to introduce a bill when her new Republican colleague, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, announced plans to introduce a measure to bar transgender women from using women’s restrooms and changing rooms in the Capitol complex.

Ms. Mace did not try to pretend that she was doing anything other than targeting one individual with her resolution, even though it would apply to all employees and officers of the House.

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say,” she told reporters on Monday night. “I mean, this is a biological man.” She said that Ms. McBride “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms — period, full stop.”

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President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to be the director of national intelligence has raised alarms among national security officials.

The day after Vladimir V. Putin began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ms. Gabbard blamed the United States and NATO for provoking the war by ignoring Russia’s security concerns.

She has since suggested that the United States covertly worked with Ukraine on dangerous biological pathogens and was culpable for the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany in September 2022. European prosecutors and U.S. officials say that sabotage was carried out by Ukrainian operatives.

Ms. Gabbard’s comments have earned her sharp rebukes from officials across the political spectrum in Washington, who have accused her of parroting the anti-American propaganda of the country’s adversaries. Her remarks have also made her a darling of the Kremlin’s vast state media apparatus — and, more recently, of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who this week picked her to oversee the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies and departments.

Her selection to be the director of national intelligence has raised alarms among national security officials, not only because of her lack of experience in intelligence but also because she has embraced a worldview that mirrors disinformation straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook.

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The former acting director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has criticized Robert F Kennedy Jr’s nomination by Donald Trump as secretary of the country’s health and human services (HHS), calling his false vaccine theories “cruel”.

In a new interview on ABC, Richard Besser, who led the CDC during Barack Obama’s administration, called Kennedy’s push to falsely link vaccines to autism a “cruel thing to do”, adding, “There are things we do for our own health, but there are things we do that are good for ourselves, our families and our communities and vaccination falls into that category.”

“Having someone who denies that in that role is extremely dangerous,” Besser said about Kennedy.

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Save for a few security guards at the Hindu temple, it would be hard to tell that this quiet residential neighbourhood was recently the site of violent clashes between Sikh activists and nationalist counterprotesters.

The confrontation drew condemnation from the city’s mayor, the premier of Ontario and Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau – and also from India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, who described the incident as an attack on the Hindu temple.

So far, local police have made five arrests and say more may come.

But as the dust settles, members of the local community say they fear further violence between Sikh separatist activists and Modi supporters, some of whom espouse Hindu nationalist ideologies.

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Teenager from Fraser Valley region in hospital as sample sent to lab for confirmation

British Columbia health officials are investigating what's believed to be Canada's first human case of avian influenza after a teenager tested presumptively positive for the disease, the Ministry of Health announced Saturday.

The teenager, who the ministry says is from the Fraser Health region, is currently receiving care at B.C. Children's Hospital, while officials work to confirm the diagnosis and trace potential sources of exposure.

. . .

B.C.'s provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, says the case marks the first time H5 avian influenza has been detected in a person in Canada, although there have been isolated cases reported in the U.S. and other countries.

Teenager from Fraser Valley region in hospital as sample sent to lab for confirmation

British Columbia health officials are investigating what's believed to be Canada's first human case of avian influenza after a teenager tested presumptively positive for the disease, the Ministry of Health announced Saturday.

The teenager, who the ministry says is from the Fraser Health region, is currently receiving care at B.C. Children's Hospital, while officials work to confirm the diagnosis and trace potential sources of exposure.

. . .

B.C.'s provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, says the case marks the first time H5 avian influenza has been detected in a person in Canada, although there have been isolated cases reported in the U.S. and other countries.

Canada is bracing for a surge of migrants to its southern border after Donald Trump doubled down on his pledge to conduct the largest mass deportation in American history.

. . .

During Trump’s first term in office, tens of thousands of Haitians fled to Canada after he ended temporary protected status for the group (it was later restored). Many passed through the Roxham Road crossing, a rural country road that served as funnel for refugees attempting to safely traverse the world’s longest land border.

. . .

The RCMP says it has plans to deal with a fresh increase in crossings that has been “several months” in the making. A spokesperson for the federal police said officers had the “tools and insight” to deal with another increase, including a scenario in which hundreds of people cross every day.

If those crossing claim asylum, the RCMP cannot send them back to the United States. Instead, their claims are entered into a system with an estimated backlog of 250,000 cases. The average processing time for a case is 44 months, a parliamentary committee heard on Thursday.

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Kamala Harris’s resounding defeat affirmed the worst of what many Black women believed about their country, even as some looked to the future with a wary determination.

Black women could see the mountaintop.

Across the country, they led an outpouring of Democratic elation when the vice president took over the top of the presidential ticket. But underneath their hope and determination was a persistent worry: Was America ready, they asked, to elect a Black woman?

The painful answer arrived this week.

It affirmed the worst of what many Black women believed about their country: that it would rather choose a man who was convicted of 34 felonies, has spewed lies and falsehoods, disparaged women and people of color, and pledged to use the powers of the federal government to punish his political opponents than send a woman of color to the White House.

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Two recent videos have sought to undermine confidence in the security of the vote.

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia is behind a video that appeared on social media this week falsely claiming that Haitians illegally voted multiple times for Vice President Kamala Harris in Georgia.

The U.S. government issued a new warning on Friday, one that followed another video that began circulating a week ago falsely claiming that ballots in Pennsylvania were destroyed.

Officials say foreign powers are working to undermine faith in the election, and government agencies in charge of protecting the vote have said the torrent of false claims is greater than before.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the F.B.I. released a joint statement on Friday saying the video was the work of Russia.

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Ukrainian American Sophika Lashchyk-Tytla says she can’t understand why her brother plans to vote for Republican nominee Donald Trump given his open hostility to continuing U.S. support for Ukraine.

Hours after unconvincing arguments with her brother, the Philadelphia native carried a kit of campaign information as she canvassed in the city’s suburbs with fellow Ukrainians who’ve rallied around Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

Just ten days before the election, nearly a dozen went door-knocking in Montgomery County, where one of the country’s largest Ukrainian populations now has voter material available in Ukrainian for the first time. The county includes non-voting recent emigres from President Joe Biden’s post-full-scale invasion Uniting for Ukraine parole program and thousands more with U.S. citizenship who arrived in the 1990s.

. . .

“I feel like I’m trying to save Ukraine and our country and I can’t listen to your (Trump) stuff,” Lashchyk-Tytla told her brother as she departed for a weekend of rallying Ukrainian support for Harris.

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Deterioration of the Washington Post’s subscriber base continued on Tuesday, hours after its proprietor, Jeff Bezos, defended the decision to forgo formally endorsing a presidential candidate as part of an effort to restore trust in the media.

The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik.

A day earlier, 200,000 had left according to the same outlet.

The numbers are based on the number of cancellation emails that have been sent out, according to a source at the paper, though the subscriber dashboard is no longer viewable to employees.

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Illicit snacks mimicking real-life candies include 'Reefers' and 'KushKat' chocolates

As Halloween approaches, police on Vancouver Island are urging the public to use caution after officers seized more than 120,000 cannabis-laced edibles, including chocolate and candies with packaging that mimics recognizable treats.

RCMP shared photos showing illicit cannabis snacks with names such as "Reefers" for cannabis-infused peanut butter cups in yellow and orange packaging similar to Reese's Pieces, as well as "KushKat" chocolates in a red wrapper like a KitKat bar.

A statement from the Mounties says the contraband candies resemble professionally manufactured products, but investigators found they were produced in "highly unsanitary and heavily contaminated" modular trailers.

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