Arizona law requires the county recorder to show the origins of and chain-of-custody documents for every drop box ballot obtained.

While the GOP and conservative media have largely moved on from Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and the systemic failures that occurred in Maricopa County on Nov. 8, court testimony and eyewitness reports from the Lake trial include allegations that Arizona's largest county violated state law by failing to implement chain-of-custody documentation for Election Day ballots, resulting in a mysterious 25,000 extra votes added to Maricopa County's official tally within a 24-hour period — more than the margin of victory between Lake and gubernatorial victor Katie Hobbs.

It was about 10:00 on election night when Maricopa County's ballot tabulation vendor, Runbeck Election Services, received its first truckload of Election Day drop box ballots. While Runbeck received seven truckloads total (the last was completed about 5 a.m. the following morning), Runbeck staff thought it odd the deliveries did not come earlier throughout the day. But that wasn't the only glitch. There were no chain-of-custody forms delivered with the ballots, a stark departure from typical procedure.

Authorities in southern Germany say efforts to put out a fire on a train turned into a spectacular chase early Friday after the driverless diesel engine began taking off toward Austria of its own accord.

Firefighters had been called to put out a train blaze near the village of Strass at about 3 a.m. (0200 GMT), the Bavarian Red Cross said. But shortly before they arrived the engine started moving downhill on the sloping track, picking up speed as it rolled several kilometers (miles) toward the town of Freilassing.

A video posted online by the Freilassing Volunteer Firefighting Company showed flames and smoke pouring from the train as it swept through the town.

With firefighters in hot pursuit, railway officials managed to switch the "ghost train" onto a side track near Freilassing station where it was stopped by a buffer before it could cross the border. The fire was extinguished and nobody was injured, the Bavarian Red Cross said in a statement.

Parents and conservatives in Scotland are outraged after the city council of Aberdeen launched what has been branded a "disgraceful" survey in 59 schools that asks pupils about their gender identity. The council is run by a coalition of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Liberal Democrats.

According to the Scottish Daily Mail, the survey, which is purported to be part of a sex and wellbeing study, asks schoolchildren to identify as "male, female, non-binary, transgender or other" and requires students to tick an answer before being allowed to proceed to the next page.

Critics of the survey have called it a blatant attempt to "indoctrinate" young children who do not know "if they want chicken nuggets or fish fingers for dinner."

To take up a matter that's been making me feel tired and irritable for two days, 'Sam Harris'. Other people have written about this, and I was hoping to talk myself into skipping it. But it can't be skipped.

Harris, a UCLA neuroscience PhD and (most famously) a critic of religious faith as an assault on rational thought, spent 2021 and 2022 attacking critics of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA products, like the biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. Listen to one of those attacks here. Now, finding his views wrong, he finds his views to be correct:

"Had Covid been worse, you know, just enough worse to really get our attention, to really be undeniable, we would have had a different political conversation around it."

If enormous numbers of children had died — "if kids were dying by the hundreds of thousands from Covid" — and if the vaccines had been extraordinarily effective, then anti-vaxxer sentiment wouldn't have been tolerated, and critics of the vaccines would not now be viewed as people who got the question right, and people like Sam Harris who were vicious critics of vaccine skeptics in 2021 and beyond would be vindicated and celebrated.

If all of reality had been completely different, Sam Harris would not have been wrong, so Sam Harris is therefore not wrong.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis 's administration has blocked the inclusion of an Advanced Placement class centered on African American Studies in high schools .

The Washington Examiner obtained a letter from the Florida Department of Education's Office of Articulation to the College Board stating that the course is "inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value." The letter did not elaborate on what particular parts of the course content they found to be questionable.

Florida Education Department Press Secretary Cassie Palelis, in a statement to the Washington Examiner, said:

"If the course comes into compliance and incorporates historically accurate content, the Department will reopen the discussion."

This is a significant win for DeSantis, who had several portions of his Stop WOKE Act that would restrict critical race theory instruction in public university classrooms scrapped. Judge Mark Walker, who struck it down, compared the legislation to George Orwell's authoritarian dystopian novel,1984.

The professional photographs posted on a property tour website last year show Moffy Yu's condo in downtown Toronto, a light-filled two-bedroom home with floor-to-ceiling windows framing sweeping views from the tallest residential tower in Canada.

Documents provided by Yu show the home was listed for $978,000 last May 11, then sold for $970,000 nine days later, near the height of the pandemic property boom. Ontario land title documents show ownership was transferred for that sum on June 15 to a new buyer who took out a mortgage with the Bank of Montreal.

But Yu, a former international student who now lives in China's Hubei province, said she never put her home in the Aura skyscraper on Yonge Street up for sale.

Instead, she said, it was stolen.

Two American medical doctors and a researcher wrote a study picking apart the methodology and key conclusions of two famous Dutch studies that are foundational to the development of modern gender medicine.

The Dutch studies, published in 2011 and 2015 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine and Pediatrics, respectively, by Dutch medical doctor Annelou de Vries and two teams of researchers in the Netherlands, tracked dozens of adolescents as they underwent puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries and concluded that patients' mental health and well-being improved; both studies were used as evidence in support of childhood cross-sex medical interventions and were widely cited throughout the medical establishment. Dr. Stephen Levine, Dr. Julia Mason and E. Abbruzzese found that methodological biases completely undermined that research in their Jan. 11 study published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, arguing that the Dutch researchers had skewed the data by only including the most successful cases in their results and failing to control for the confounding effects of psychotherapy.

Greece has defied the bloc's efforts to cut economic ties with Moscow.

Imports of Russian goods by Greece more than doubled in the first 11 months of last year compared to the same period in 2021, according to the national statistical service Elstat.

It reported on Tuesday that during that period the value of imports amounted to €8.465 billion ($9 billion), recording an increase of 125.3% in annual terms. The value of Greek exports to Russia during the same period was €148.1 million (over $161 million), down by 18.8%.

Data showed that, in November alone, the value of Greek imports from Russia jumped almost 30% year-on-year to €715.7 million ($779 million). The report highlighted that the main imported products by the EU nation from Russia in November 2022 included petroleum oils and gas, unwrought aluminum, herbicides, jams, as well as refractory cement, mortar, concrete, and so on.

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has resigned after months of rumours. Ardern, whose popularity has plummeted during the last six months, told us "she had nothing left in the tank".

The backstory to this resignation is a tale of woe. Ardern said she wants to be remembered as someone who tried to be kind. The subtext is: the country is in an unprecedented mess but don't blame me.

Last year school attendance was reported as running at just 67% on any given day. Machete wielding teenagers are ram raiding liquor outlets, vape shops, dairies, and jewelry stores daily in a frenzied crime wave. The health system is overwhelmed. Ardern's government promised to build 100,000 new homes over three years. It has delivered just 1500 to date.

Our tourist, farming, and hospitality industries have not recovered from lockdowns and border closures. It now takes weeks to get a visa to visit New Zealand (it used to take two days) and the government says it only wants rich people to come. No wonder, we are all poor now.

Ardern famously insisted on universal Covid vaccination mandates. There is a suspicion that our 90% vaccination rate has left everyone in a lethargic fog. Excess all cause deaths are still running 15% above the long term trends, and it is not Covid.

History will judge Ardern harshly, but don't blame her alone. This was a Parliament who woke up on all sides of the house to the weakness of our constitutional arrangements (there are none worth the name). The Bill of Rights was tossed aside, and no one in Parliament cared.

The leader of the National opposition Chris Luxon famously said pre-pandemic if he was in power, he would withdraw benefits from unvaccinated single mothers. David Seymour, leader of the ACT party wrote on his FB those losing their jobs through vaccine mandates only had themselves to blame. Labour's coalition partners, the Greens, led by example, encouraging mothers in labour to ride to hospital on a bicycle (yes they did).

French workers have gone on strike and joined nationwide marches on a day of protest against President Emmanuel Macron's very unpopular pensions reform plan.

Train drivers, teachers and refinery workers were among those who walked off their jobs in Paris and several other major cities on Thursday. "It's salaries and pensions that must be increased, not the retirement age," read one large banner carried by workers that opened the protest march in Tours, western France.

In Nice, southern France, a large banner read, "No to the reform."