A Scottsdale man is facing more than two dozen felony charges after he allegedly shot at several people and threatened others, including some teens, at Needle Rock Beach in the Tonto National Forest earlier this week. According to court documents, people at the recreation area "were able to subdue" Jacob Trey Valentino and "restrain him" until deputies got there.

It happened Monday, May 18. According to the probable cause for arrest statement, Valentino, 26, was fishing along the Verde River when he fired a Glock 42 handgun at a family that was nearby. Two kids younger than 15 and five who are older than 15 were part of that group. As the family ran to the parking area, Valentino, still armed, headed the same direction and got into his car.

A man who opened fire at Westgate Entertainment District in Glendale Wednesday night, injuring three people, told police he went to the shopping center to target victims "because he was bullied and wanted respect."

Police said at a Thursday briefing that a 19-year-old man who was shot and taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries remains in critical condition.

A 16-year-old girl was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, and a 30-year-old woman was also hurt.

The suspect, identified by police as 20-year-old Armando Hernandez Jr., was arrested at the scene and reportedly admitted to detectives that he had gone to Westgate "intending to harm 10 people."

See video of his initial appearance in front of a judge in the player below.

New York Post columnist David Marcus called out the risks of keeping New York City locked-down.

Facebook's fact checkers have been accused of bias and using the feature as a censorship tool.

Over the last couple of months, Facebook's fact checkers have made a series of controversial and erroneous decisions which have resulted in genuine posts being hidden behind a "False Information" notice.

And now, another disputed Facebook fact check has resulted in digital education platform PragerU having its Facebook page restricted and the reach of its posts reduced.

Facebook claims it is restricting PragerU's page for "repeated sharing of false news."

Nursing home residents continue to make up the vast majority of coronavirus-related deaths in Ohio, according to new Department of Health statistics.

At least 1,246 residents of Ohio's long-term care facilities have died as of Wednesday from the virus, or about 70% of the total COVID-19 deaths statewide, the data show.

As nursing home fatalities continue to rise, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has promised a plan to ramp up testing in long-term care facilities, including the deployment of 14 teams of Ohio National Guard members to assist with the testing.

The nursing home death toll includes 877 reported since mid-April in facilities identified in 38 counties. Those are on top of the deaths of 369 residents who died earlier when Ohio recorded only whether an individual had been in a nursing home.

Epidemiologists with the Washington State Department of Health believe COVID-19-related deaths are likely being undercounted in Washington.

In a virtual briefing with reporters Thursday, DOH officials said tracking COVID-19 death data is not an easy task.

"There are a number of nuances to the data that we report and often it is very difficult - especially quickly - to make an assessment on the cause of death," said Dr. Katie Hutchison, Health Statistics Manager for the Washington State Department of Health.

The state's current COVID-19 death count includes anyone that's tested positive for COVID-19, officials said.

"We currently do have some deaths that are being reported that are clearly from other causes. We have about 5 deaths less than 5 deaths that we know of that are related to obvious other causes. In this case, they are from gunshot wounds," Hutchison said.

Disturbing news is coming out of Oregon, as hundreds of people are reporting that their voter registration was switched from Republican to non affiliated without their knowledge or permission.

Oregon is entirely vote-by-mail, and ballots were sent out in the last week of April, and due this Tuesday at 8:00 PM. Many were shocked to open their ballot to find that they were no longer with the party they thought they were with, and they received non partisan ballots. As Oregon is a closed primary state, this effectively denies these people the right to vote in the party's primary that they thought they were registered as.

This is only reportedly happening to folks who were registered as Republican.

The UK government was one of many that reacted to the coronavirus outbreak based on worst-case scenario predictions. But the author of an alternative model has restated her position, saying the virus is already "on its way out."

Sunetra Gupta is a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the University of Oxford. Back in March, before the UK's lockdown, she and her team published a study suggesting that the coronavirus may have infected 50% of the British population back in early March, before the lockdown measures were put in place. The model concluded that continuing on a path toward herd immunity would be the most sensible course of action.

Boris Johnson's government originally chose to aim for a model like Prof. Gupta's, just as those notorious irrational hotheads the Swedes were. It soon, however, gave in to public (read: Twitter) pressure. Boris called in that professional harbinger of doom, Imperial College's Neil Ferguson, instead.


A tale of two models

Prof. Ferguson's model was nothing short of apocalyptic, featuring as it did half a million dead, and bodies piled up in car parks outside hospitals - everything but a yawning crevice in the ground and satyrs raining hell from the sky. So stark was the warning that he seemed to take it to heart, deciding to treasure a few moments with his married mistress while he could. For this small indulgence, he was eventually forced to resign from his post. But his thinking informs the government's coronavirus policy to this day.

Prof. Gupta's model, on the other hand, predicted that just 1 in 1,000 of those infected with Covid-19 would need to go to hospital, and possibly an order of magnitude less. This would have placed the true mortality rate at 0.1% or lower, something much more like the flu and much less like a Hollywood disaster movie. Today, almost two months on, the problem with all of this is pretty much the same as it was then: we just don't have enough information.

Feminists on the frontline of gender politics have seized on a poll they helped publish to push their agenda to the fore in a crisis that has wrecked everyone's economies and lives. Disproportionate male deaths got a side note.

A new poll by IPSOS Mori declares that UK women are bearing the emotional brunt of the coronavirus pandemic. Fair point, but is it sexist to mention that it's men who actually die more?

In fact, men are almost twice as likely as women to die from the coronavirus, but women, as the study has found, are about 15 to 20 percent more worried about various other aspects of the pandemic.

I get it. The poll was published in conjunction with the Fawcett Society, named for the iconic suffragette Millicent Fawcett, so with a touch of cynicism you'll see the goal here.

The parallels between coronavirus and climate change are striking. Pandemic models exaggerated the danger and insisted we must lockdown societies. Climate change models are being similarly distorted to demand zero emissions.

Covid-19 has provoked an enormous debate about the virtues of computer modelling. The scary numbers published by Professor Neil Ferguson's team in mid-March had an enormous impact on the lockdown policy in the UK and were influential around the world.

Ferguson's team suggested 500,000 people could die in the UK without government intervention. Even the original policy of isolating possible cases and members of the same household, along with advice on handwashing, would have led to 250,000 deaths - or so the models claimed.