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NEW YORK — A day after a mass of federal agents questioned street vendors and sparked protests on Manhattan’s Canal Street, sellers were scarce on the busy strip. Some who did venture out Wednesday, though, were disheartened or riled up by a sweep in which they said people, including U.S. citizens, were pressed to show their papers.

Federal authorities said 14 people, including immigrants and demonstrators, were arrested in Tuesday’s sweep. The Department of Homeland Security said it was a targeted operation focused on the alleged sale of counterfeit goods, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Todd Lyons said it was “definitely intelligence-driven.”

“It’s not random. We’re just not pulling people off the street,” he told Fox News on Wednesday.

But some vendors saw it as an indiscriminate and heavy-handed crackdown by masked agents who queried a wide swath of sellers.

Awa Ngam was selling sweaters Wednesday from a table at a Canal Street intersection where at least one of her fellow vendors was taken away the previous afternoon.

She said she also was asked for ID, showed it, and then for her passport, which she doesn’t carry around. Agents quizzed her about how she had come to the U.S., but they eventually backed off after her husband explained that she’s an American citizen, she said.

“They asked every African that was here for their status,” Ngam said.

She returned to the spot Wednesday unafraid but upset.

“I’m saddened because they should not walk around and ask people for their passport in America,” said Ngam, who said she came to the U.S. from Mauritania in 2009. She added that if not for her legal immigration status, she would be fearful: “What if they took me? What would happen to my kids?”

Some other sellers decried the sweep as harassment. Others were keeping a low profile and shied from speaking with journalists.

Signs freshly posted on streetlights mentioned Tuesday’s sweep and urged people at risk of detention to call an immigration law group’s helpline.

Separately, state Atty. Gen. Letitia James, a Democrat, asked New Yorkers to send in photos or videos of Tuesday’s immigration sweep so that her office could assess whether laws were broken.

Law enforcement raids aimed at combating counterfeiting are relatively frequent on Canal Street, which is known for its stalls and shops where some vendors hawk knockoff designer goods and bootlegged wares. Federal authorities often team up with the New York Police Department and luxury brands on crackdowns aimed at shutting down illicit trade.

But the sight of dozens of masked ICE and other federal agents making arrests drew instant protests.

Bystanders and activists converged at the scene and shouted at the agents, at one point blocking their vehicle. ICE, Border Patrol and other federal agents tried to clear the streets, sometimes shoving protesters to the ground and threatening them with stun guns or pepper spray before detaining them.

Nine people were arrested in the initial immigration sweep, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said. Four more people were arrested on charges of assaulting federal law enforcement officers, she said, adding that a fifth was arrested and accused of obstructing law enforcement by blocking a driveway.

McLaughlin said some of the people arrested had previously been accused of crimes, including robbery, domestic violence, assaulting law enforcement, counterfeiting and drug offenses.

The sweep came after at least two conservative influencers shared video on X of men selling bags on Canal Street’s sidewalks.

While clashes between immigration authorities and protesters have played out in Los Angeles and other cities, such scenes have been rarer on New York City streets, which Mayor Eric Adams has attributed in part to his working relationship with President Trump’s administration.

Adams, a Democrat, said city police had no involvement in Tuesday’s immigration sweep.

“Our administration has been clear that undocumented New Yorkers trying to pursue their American dreams should not be the target of law enforcement, and resources should instead be focused on violent criminals,” he said.

Peltz and Offenhartz write for the Associated Press.

Tension between Indiana University and its student newspaper flared last week with the elimination of the outlet’s print editions and the firing of a faculty advisor who refused an order to keep news stories out of a homecoming edition.

Administrators may have been hoping to minimize distractions during its homecoming weekend as the school prepared to celebrate a Hoosiers football team with its highest-ever national ranking. Instead, the controversy has entangled the school in questions about censorship and student journalists’ 1st Amendment rights.

Advocates for student media, Indiana Daily Student alumni and high-profile supporters including billionaire Mark Cuban have excoriated the university for stepping on the outlet’s independence.

The Daily Student is routinely honored among the best collegiate publications in the country. It receives about $250,000 annually in subsidies from the university’s Media School to help make up for dwindling ad revenue.

On Tuesday, the university fired the paper’s advisor, Jim Rodenbush, after he refused an order to force student editors to ensure that no news stories ran in the print edition tied to the homecoming celebrations.

“I had to make the decision that was going to allow me to live with myself,” Rodenbush said. “I don’t have any regrets whatsoever. In the current environment we’re in, somebody has to stand up.”

Student journalists still call the shots

A university spokesperson referred an Associated Press reporter to a statement issued Tuesday, which said the campus wants to shift resources from print media to digital platforms both for students’ educational experience and to address the paper’s financial problems.

Chancellor David Reingold issued a separate statement Wednesday saying the school is “firmly committed to the free expression and editorial independence of student media. The university has not and will not interfere with their editorial judgment.”

It was late last year when university officials announced they were scaling back the cash-strapped newspaper’s print edition from a weekly to seven special editions per semester, tied to campus events.

The paper published three print editions this fall, inserting special event sections, Rodenbush said. Last month, Media School officials started asking why the special editions still contained news, he said.

Rodenbush said IU Media School Dean David Tolchinsky told him this month that the expectation was print editions would contain no news. Tolchinsky argued that Rodenbush was essentially the paper’s publisher and could decide what to run, Rodenbush said. He told the dean that publishing decisions were the students’ alone, he said.

Tolchinsky fired him Tuesday, two days before the homecoming print edition was set to be published, and announced the end of all Indiana Daily Student print publications.

“Your lack of leadership and ability to work in alignment with the University’s direction for the Student Media Plan is unacceptable,” Tolchinsky wrote in Rodenbush’s termination letter.

The newspaper was allowed to continue publishing stories on its website.

Student journalists see a ‘scare tactic’

Andrew Miller, the Indiana Daily Student’s co-editor in chief, said in a statement that Rodenbush “did the right thing by refusing to censor our print edition” and called the termination a “deliberate scare tactic toward journalists and faculty.”

“IU has no legal right to dictate what we can and cannot print in our paper,” Miller said.

Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, said 1st Amendment case law going back 60 years shows student editors at public universities determine content. Advisors such as Rodenbush can’t interfere, Hiestand said.

“It’s open and shut, and it’s just so bizarre that this is coming out of Indiana University,” Hiestand said. “If this was coming out of a community college that doesn’t know any better, that would be one thing. But this is coming out of a place that absolutely should know better.”

Rodenbush said that he wasn’t aware of any single story the newspaper has published that may have provoked administrators. But he speculated the moves may be part of a “general progression” of administrators trying to protect the university from any negative publicity.

Blocked from publishing a print edition, the paper last week posted a number of sharp-edged stories online, including coverage of the opening of a new film critical of arrests of pro-Palestinian demonstrators last year, a tally of campus sexual assaults and an FBI raid on the home of a former professor suspected of stealing federal funds.

The paper also has covered allegations that IU President Pamela Whitten plagiarized parts of her dissertation, with the most recent story running in September.

Richmond writes for the Associated Press.

It’s not my habit to preface my columns with “trigger alerts,” so this is a first:

If talking about circumcision makes you cringe, feel free to move along.

If, on the other hand, you wish to understand what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was talking about during a White House meeting Oct. 9 when he tried to connect circumcision with autism, follow along with me.

The offhand reference to circumcision’s possible role in autism by Kennedy, Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, is part and parcel of Kennedy’s documented assault on science-based medicine.

His campaign encompasses attacks on COVID-19 vaccines, which have been shown over the years to have saved millions of people from death, hospitalization or long-term disability; his firing members of professional advisory boards at his agency and replacing them with anti-vaccine activists; his promotion of unproven “cures” for vaccine-preventable diseases; and his inaction in the face of a nationwide surge in cases of measles, a disease that was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000.

Let’s pause for a few words about the broader consequences of the erosion of our public health infrastructure. It not only exposes Americans to more disease and more serious disease, but has profound economic effects.

That’s true worldwide, but especially in the U.S., which spends much more per capita on healthcare than other developed countries, for lower results. Undermining the existing system for partisan ends won’t make the picture look any lovelier.

“The U.S. health disadvantage threatens the country’s global competitiveness and national security, as well as the hopes and prospects of future generations,” according to a 2021 paper from the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that Kennedy now leads.

“U.S. employers depend on a healthy workforce to maximize productivity and minimize healthcare costs,” the paper stated. “Population health also affects the consumer market, whereby the demand for nonessential products and services suffers when families are struggling with illnesses and much of their disposable income is required for medical expenses.”

The chaos imposed on our public health system under the Trump administration only intensifies the damage.

On Friday, hundreds of employees at Kennedy’s agency, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, abruptly received layoff notices. Some were hastily informed that their firings were erroneous, but the experience rattled the CDC, an agency tasked with overseeing the national response to seasonal respiratory illnesses at a time when those illnesses typically spike.

“The damage is beyond repair,” Demetre Daskalakis, who resigned as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, a unit of the National Institutes of Health, over conflicts with Kennedy, told CNN. “Crippling CDC, even as a ploy to create political pressure to end the government shutdown, means America is even less prepared for outbreaks and infectious disease security threats.”

That brings us back to Kennedy’s preoccupation with autism. He has claimed that the autism rate is on the rise due to “environmental toxins” such as childhood vaccinations and the use of Tylenol — or acetaminophen, its generic name — by mothers during pregnancy.

As I’ve reported, however, the roots of the increase in reported autism rates in recent decades are well understood: They have much to do with a broader definition of autism, which is widely described today as “autism spectrum disorder,” and with improved access to screening and diagnostic services by formerly overlooked groups such as Blacks, Hispanics and other nonwhite cohorts.

Kennedy’s comment about circumcision came during a White House Cabinet meeting. At first, he and Trump traded misconceptions they had previously aired about Tylenol use by pregnant women — Trump asserting that “obviously,” the rise in autism rates is “artificially induced” and adding, “I would say don’t take Tylenol if you’re pregnant, and … when the baby is born don’t give it Tylenol.”

That advice dismayed physicians, who say that fevers during pregnancy are a greater risk for the unborn and that acetaminophen is safer than alternative fever-reducing medicines.

Kennedy then injected circumcision into the discussion. “There’s two studies that show children who were circumcised early have double the rate of autism,” he said. “It’s highly likely because they were given Tylenol.”

Unsurprisingly, Kennedy’s remark got extensive play in the news media, prompting him to try walking it back via a tweet on X. Rather than accept responsibility for his confusing words, he responded with Bondi-esque truculence, writing: “As usual, the mainstream media attacks me for something I didn’t say in order to distract from the truth of what I did say.”

He even took arms against the Murdoch-owned New York Post, which posted its story with the headline, “RFK Jr. says Tylenol after circumcisions linked to autism,” and proceeded to debunk the claim.

In trying to clarify his point, however, Kennedy dug himself a deeper hole. According to his tweet, the two studies he was referring to at the cabinet meeting were a Danish study from 2015 and a non-peer-reviewed preprint posted online in August, which refers to the Danish paper. Kennedy mischaracterizes both.

Contrary to Kennedy’s implication, the Danish study did not address the use of acetaminophen (called “paracetamol” in the paper) in connection with circumcision. The reason, its authors wrote, was that “we had no data available on analgesics or possible local anesthetics used during ritual circumcisions in our cohort, so we were unable to address the paracetamol hypothesis directly.”

They did note, however, that the acetaminophen theory had only “limited empirical support.” In other words, evidence was lacking. Anyway, the Danish study was criticized — in the same journal that had published it — for its reliance on a very small sample of children.

As for the preprint, contrary to Kennedy’s description, it did not identify the Danish paper as offering “the most compelling ‘standalone’ evidence” for an autism-acetaminophen link. That language referred to three studies, one of which was the Danish paper. Of the other papers, one was based on later interviews with parents. The other was a study of the effects of acetaminophen on 10-day-old mice, not human children.

I asked Kennedy’s agency to clarify his claim and to explain the discrepancies between his words and the papers themselves, but received no reply.

To summarize, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top federal healthcare official, conjured up a connection between circumcision and autism via a relationship between circumcision and Tylenol that is unsupported by the research he cited. Indeed, the Danish paper describes the idea that boys undergoing circumcision invariably are given acetaminophen for pain as “a questionable assumption.”

In searching for empirical support for the acetaminophen theory, moreover, the Danish paper cited a 2010 paper funded by NIH that cautioned: “No evidence is presented here that acetaminophen in any way causes autism. … This hypothesis is largely based on multiple lines of often weak evidence.” Anyway, the paper was focused on a possible link between acetaminophen use and asthma, not autism.

Sadly, this sort of mischaracterization of research described as “a rigorous scientific framework” (RFK Jr.’s words) isn’t surprising coming from today’s Department of Health and Human Services. This is the agency, it may be recalled, that in May issued an “assessment” of the health of America’s children that cited at least seven sources that did not exist.

Nothing can stop unwary parents from relying on the judgment of Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to make healthcare decisions for their infants and children. But they should be warned: They do so at their own and their offsprings’ risk.

Edward Felten, professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University, demonstrates problems with a voting machine during a House Administration Committee Hearing on the reliability of voting systems in 2006, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. St. Louis-based Liberty Vote acquired Dominion Thursday. File Photo by Roger L. Wollenberg/UPI | License Photo

Oct. 9 (UPI) — St. Louis-based Liberty Vote has acquired Dominion Voting Systems, among the nation’s largest election technology companies and one that was wrongly accused of election rigging.

Liberty is the nation’s largest provider of electronic poll information technology and was founded by former Republican elections director Scott Leinendecker. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a statement Thursday, Liberty said the company would be 100% American owned, and that “as of today, Dominion is gone.”

“Liberty Vote signals a new chapter for American elections — one where trust is built from the ground up,” Leinendecker said. “Liberty Vote is committed to delivering election technology that prioritizes paper-based transparency, security, and simplicity so that voters can be assured that every ballot is filled-in accurately and fairly counted.”

Liberty’s stated goals align closely with those of the Trump administration’s efforts to restore paper ballot counting, require voter identification at the polls, restrict mail-in voting and restore trust in American elections.

Dominion was at the center of controversy and, ultimately, a series of lawsuits following during and after the 2020 presidential election, especially in states such as Georgia, where Joe Biden narrowly won the vote. Its election technology was used by millions of Americans in 27 states in last year’s elections. John Poulos, Dominion’s founder and CEO, confirmed the sale.

Liberty said facilitating third-party auditing of its election systems is among the company’s other priorities. Conservative election watchers have consistently called for such audits, most notably following the 2020 election in Arizona as a way to combat voter fraud.

Independent studies have shown that the practice is extraordinarily rare, and that a majority of states already conduct internal post-election audits.

“This announcement raises a lot of questions, questions that I’m sure a lot of states with current Dominion contracts are going to want answers to,” said David Becker, who oversees the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, and an election expert.

Liberty Vote, together with KNOWiNK, also founded by Leinendecker, will have voting systems in 40 states, a Liberty Vote official said.

When Friedia Niimura moved to the U.S. from Japan in her mid-20s, she shared a dream with many Angelenos: acting, or maybe fashion. A TV and media personality in Japan, it seemed a natural fit, only she didn’t take to the competitive pace of Los Angeles.

So she dove into one of her other passions: paper.

“When I came to L.A., I noticed there weren’t a lot of specialty stationery boutiques,” Niimura says. “When you’re in Japan, they’re everywhere and you take them for granted. That’s how I would spend my days off. I would go to the stationery and browse and take my notebook and draw.”

Niimura created a place where one can do just that. Chinatown’s Paper Plant Co. is her stationery outpost, made of two small storefronts that share a space with Thank You Coffee and boast outdoor seating. A communal destination since 2020, the shop has earned a reputation for specializing in notebooks, stickers and pens from Japan. Or, as Niimura describes Paper Plant’s aesthetic: “cute.”

“When we pick something and we all go, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so cute,’ then we know it’s going to do really well,” Niimura, 45, says. “I don’t know how in Japan they always come up with cute scenarios and cute scenes and cute gestures. It’s almost like there’s a school on how to draw dogs doing cute things, cats doing cute things.”

Paper Plant will on Oct. 11-12 play host to Bungu LA, believed to be the first proper stationery festival in the city. Niimura has handpicked Bungu’s 60 or so exhibitors, with the vast majority of them traveling here from Japan. Bungu is inspired by similar events Niimura has gone to in Tokyo or New York. Paper Plant, for instance, exhibited last year at a festival hosted by Brooklyn’s Yoseka Stationery.

“There was a line every day,” Niimura says, describing the New York fest. “It was just my store manager and I, and we were like, ‘How come L.A. doesn’t have one?’ And then who would do it? It always came back to us, since we have that relationship with Japanese creators.”

Like most everything Paper Plant-related, Niimura has been figuring it out on the fly. Paper Plant, for instance, was initially funded almost entirely by credit cards, a business plan Niimura wouldn’t recommend to others. Bungu will take over part of a concourse at downtown’s Union Station, and the hope is to make it an annual event. The goal for the first year is to simply break even, as Niimura jokes that she doesn’t yet know the final cost of staging a festival.

“We had to also rent out a front sidewalk, which was another $10,000 that I hadn’t added to the budget,” Niimura says.

The response, however, has been overwhelmingly positive. Popular Japanese firms such as Hobonichi will be in attendance, but Niimura says she made an effort to secure vendors that have never before sold in the U.S. Advance tickets of $25, for which about 1,500 were made available per day, have sold out. There will, however, be walk-up tickets sold each day of the show. Niimura is hoping to attract 2,500 people per day.

Niimura herself is still discovering new joys in the stationery world. She notes that only recently has she become smitten with fountain pens.

“In Japan, fountain pens are geared toward older gentlemen,” she says. “And they’re expensive. The really nice ones can be thousands of dollars. We have ones that are a couple hundred, but also beginner ones for about $20. I started off with those, but I recently got a couple hundred dollar ones, and it’s life changing — the way the ink comes out is so smooth. Once you have one, it’s hard to go back to a regular pen.”

As part of Bungu, Niimura is encouraging attendees to explore L.A.’s public transit and the walkability of Chinatown. Maps will be given out at Bungu for which guests can collect three stamps, one at the event, one at the Chinatown Metro Rail station and one at Paper Plant. Those who complete the mini scavenger hunt will be given a free gift at Paper Plant, which Niimura is keeping a secret.

With the rise of collage and zine-making workshops, younger generations are connecting with paper and Niimura notes that one-day planners and scrapbooking today have become especially popular.

“I feel like anything work-wise, people have on their phones,” Niimura says. “But there’s this trend of scrapbooking everything — receipts for the day, the coffee cup holder, stickers. They call it ‘junk journaling.’”

Junk journaling, says Niimura, is fueling in part the sticker trend of the moment. Paper Plant sells a wide array of stickers and also makes its own — a dog, for instance, wearing a Dodgers hat, or a man wearing a dog as a hat. “The mini stickers are for the journalers and the planners,” Niimura says. “They have really teeny-tiny ones. It’s for the calendar. You use a sandwich sticker for lunch with a friend.”

The charm of Paper Plant’s two storefronts, where one can find lamps shaped like bread, diaries with adorable cats on the cover and those fancy fountain pens, belies the fact that 2025 is a stressful time for the stationery business. Niimura sighs as she notes that she’s had to raise prices this year due to tariffs imposed by President Trump.

“Everything has kind of gone up,” Niimura says when asked how the tariffs have affected her business. “If its coming from China, it’s a lot. If it’s coming from Japan, it’s a little bit.”

And yet that doesn’t deter her optimism. Niimura notes that in a way, she’s living out one of her childhood dreams, as she once envisioned her retirement life including a gig at a stationery shop.

“I always thought I would do this later in life,” she says. “I thought I would be the old lady putting out a sign and being behind the register.”

And now, Niimura speaks of Paper Plant and Bungu as something of a mission.

“This analog style of things shouldn’t die just yet,” she says. “I think it’s important. Creativity starts with a pencil and a paper. Now my son, too, doesn’t have a cursive class. That hurts. You can recognize someone by their handwriting. My son calls cursive ‘fancy writing,’ and I don’t want that to die.”

Think of Paper Plant and Bungu, then, as a way to keep a lost art alive.

THE self-proclaimed President of Peace is at it again, unveiling his 20-point peace plan for the Gaza war.

In typically understated fashion, Donald Trump declared his meeting with Israel’s Netanyahu a “historic day for humanity”.

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And to be fair, convincing the hardman to sign up to a deal that could allow Hamas terrorists to walk free from their crimes was a big ask and an important moment.

Netanyahu is on board, with an oversight committee for Gaza lead by Mr Trump and an astonishing late career comeback from Tony Blair.

No Gazan will be forced out of their home, which was a major ask from European nations, while the cost of rebuilding the pummelled strip will be shared around the region.

On paper this looks like decent terms to end horrors.

But as we saw with Ukraine and Putin, these deals can come to nothing if one side doesn’t agree.

So now the world waits on Hamas to accept the terms.

They’ve said no before and collapsed talks and continued their butchery countless times.

But the given the Hamas leadership has been taken out three times now, and up to 20,000 dead fighters have been killed – the organisation is on its knees.

How long can they realistically keep fighting?

La Cañada High football coach Dave Avramovich said he has never heard anyone greet, question or call out running back Dash Paper by his last name. It’s always, “Dash!”

It’s an appropriate nickname (his real first name is Dashiell) for how he’s been performing on the football team for the 5-0 Spartans. In his latest game on Thursday night, Paper rushed for 189 yards and one touchdown in a 42-13 win over Maranatha.

The senior has gained 689 yards and scored six touchdowns.

“He’s awesome,” Avramovich said. “He’s grown up a ton. Last year he was the backup running back. He had a bunch of touchdowns called back because of penalties. We could see the explosiveness in practices and games. He’s running tough.”

La Cañada has wins over Crescenta Valley, La Salle and Maranatha, all neighboring schools. If they played and beat St. Francis, they could claim to be neighborhood champions.

“I don’t want to play St. Francis,” Avramovich said.

He’s become good friends with St. Francis coach Dean Herrington.

For now, it’s about watching Dash dash his way for touchdowns.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].

This article contains spoilers from the first season of “The Paper.”

The journey to spin off the U.S. version of “The Office” has, until now, been long and slow. (That’s what she said.)

While the unconventional workplace comedy about a humdrum band of paper company employees, adapted from a beloved British series of the same name, famously got off to a sluggish start on NBC with a low-rated six-episode first season, it became a rare case study of how a risky gamble can become a pop culture phenomenon and one of the most popular sitcoms in TV history. Talks of expanding “The Office” universe began as early as Season 3, when another office branch was introduced. “Parks and Recreation” was initially conceived as a spinoff but morphed into a standalone series. Another centered on socially awkward Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) would get dropped. The series eventually ended its nine-season run in 2013 with no offshoot. But it still managed to have an afterlife without one, as fans obsessively continued to watch it in syndication or on streaming platforms.

Once “The Office” began making headlines in 2020 for the being the most streamed show in America, Greg Daniels, who captained the U.S. adaptation and was initially concerned about tarnishing its legacy with offshoots, was coming around to the idea that it was safely insulated enough to withstand any attempt to find a way to build out its kooky world.

Finally, more than a decade after “The Office” went off the air, Peacock is hoping the spinoff series “The Paper” can recycle some of that show’s success while finding its own path.

This series shifts its focus to the staff at the Toledo Truth Teller, a struggling local newspaper in Ohio, which is being filmed by the same documentary crew that followed bumbling boss Michael Scott (Steve Carell) and his Scranton, Pa.-based Dunder Mifflin employees. (It’s a believable documentary subject when you consider the U.S. has lost more than one-third of its newspapers since 2005.) Daniels created the series with Michael Koman (“Nathan For You,” “How to With John Wilson”).

All 10 episodes of the first season were released Thursday on Peacock, and the show has been picked up for a second season. Daniels and Koman visited The Times earlier this month — and spoke in follow-up video calls — to discuss the comedy potential of a beleaguered industry, why Oscar is the obvious choice to be the crossover character in the spinoff and whether they plan to reference the president’s comments about the press. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

The series was originally going to launch with four episodes, then switch to a weekly drop. But it was recently announced that the full season is dropping at once. What happened? And do you have strong feelings about release models?

Daniels: Every company is different. I do know that they’re [NBCUniversal] being incredibly supportive and there’s a giant team gaming out every move. I trust that they have the best of intentions and have a lot of good strategy. My inclination was always to sneak on the air without any fanfare whatsoever, and then maybe advertise after — that is very naive, apparently. One possible nice thing about it being handled this way is our superfans will be able to watch at their own convenience, and maybe before they’ve seen too many promos. I’ve always felt like the show was cut to be the introduction to the show itself. And the more you know jokes you see from later in the seasons, the more you’re coming at it with an unintended awareness of what’s to come. It may play better, just clean for all the superfans. Actually, I thought at first, the pace-out model would be good because that was how “The Office” was on NBC. But they did point out to me that probably the majority of “The Office” fans have watched it on streaming, where they could binge the whole thing.

Koman: It’s not really my area, but that’s how I like to watch things. I’m always happy when it’s up to me — I can make my own schedule, and I tend to watch things quickly.

The crisis facing local journalism doesn’t feel like an obvious backdrop for comedy — and if you’re in it, it’s more of a can’t-help-but-laugh–to-keep-from-crying vibe. How did you arrive at a newsroom as your backdrop and what was the pitch?

Daniels: You wouldn’t think that selling stationary was a particularly hilarious or glamorous place to set a show. I think that there are some intentional differences with this show, and in the sense that we didn’t want to repeat aspects of “The Office.” For me, I was incredibly protective of the original show and the cast. I just waited a long time to do something like this. The original “Office” cast was very supportive by the time it came about. Since it’s a documentary, if you’re going to really commit to that device, you have to think all the time about [how] there’s really camerapeople in the room; they’re trying to cover something; they wouldn’t be there to just cover what they thought was a funny workplace. They’re there to cover an actual story. And the hollowing out of local newspapers is an interesting story that you could imagine a documentary crew from PBS being like, “Oh, this is a good story.” Of course, since it’s a comedy show, the stuff that’s happening in the background is really the point of the show — all the funny interactions with people as they try to do stuff. Another way that we wanted it to be different was the whole interaction between Michael Scott and his staff — he was not a very inspirational boss, and Ned Sampson, played by Domhnall Gleeson, comes in and he does manage to inspire the people working there. And the question is more: Is he biting off way more than he can chew and his staff can chew? Or should they be right and believing in him?

Koman: I just think reality always makes the best backdrop. And it’s good if your characters are facing a challenge and you have something to root for.

How did you land on Toledo?

Daniels: That was really about the alliteration of the Toledo Truth Teller. There’s something about the Cleveland Plain Dealer that I think is a super interesting thing. The name of it, I thought, has always been very intriguing. It kind of reminds you of the independence of these big Midwestern newspapers, which is different from now. It really feels like the big newspapers are L.A., New York, Washington, Dallas. I know the Cleveland Plain Dealer is still quite healthy, which is great. But there is something about the Midwest that feels nostalgic.

Koman: If I think of the heyday of print journalism, Ohio is just a place that comes to mind. They had so many really important newspapers and great journalists that came out of there, so it just seemed like … if somebody was going to try to revive something, that’s a state, and Toledo itself, is a place where you can see it happening.

Daniels: Toledo also has a certain “Office-y,” Scranton thing to it. There was a time where we were looking at where the other locations that Dunder Mifflin has offices. And the list is very funny. It’s like Yonkers and Nashua, New Hampshire. It’s all these words that are just kind of fun to roll off your tongue.

Greg, you had been resistant to the idea of expanding “The Office” universe. “Parks and Recreation” was originally meant to be a spinoff, but it eventually evolved away from that. Why now? What changed?

Daniels: There’s two questions. One is, why now? And part of that is that “Upload” [Daniels’ Prime Video series] is wrapping up. When we first started discussing it, I didn’t know what was going to happen with “Upload.” I had sold it and I was committed to being the showrunner and it kept getting picked up, so I kept having to put off thinking about any kind of [“The Office”] spinoff. But [the final season of] “Upload” is dropping Aug. 25. The other part of your your question — over the years, since the finale, the show had this enormous blow-up on Netflix. It just felt like this show is pretty bulletproof at this point. Even if we did a s— job with a spinoff, it’s not going to go back in time and mess up “The Office,” which was my concern. “The Office” was such a beautiful and rare confluence of the cast and the time and the format and the writers and everything — it seemed very arrogant to think you could pull that off again. But then after a while, it’s like, “Well, you got to try.” You can’t be intimidated out of ever doing anything.

How did you arrive at former Dunder Mifflin accountant Oscar Martinez (Oscar Núñez) being the connecting character between the two shows?

Daniels: When you look at the finale of “The Office,” everybody was going off in their own direction that had a lot of, in my view, meaningful wrap-up of their story. Jim and Pam were moving to Boston with Darrell; Toby was in England. But Oscar didn’t really have a big arc. He was pretty much Oscar the whole way through, and it didn’t feel like it was going to undo anything with “The Office” to keep Oscar involved.

Koman: It made sense, just on a business level, that if one company was acquired by another, that some people would move over into that company. He was the one person who, I think, would have stayed.

Daniels: He was maybe the most self-possessed. He had the most dignity, I think, of most of the characters. The idea that the crew has found him again just seemed appropriate. He did run for elective office at the end of “The Office,” so I feel like he is susceptible to being inspired and do something for his community, so he seems like a person who could buy into what Ned is selling.

Koman: Also, he has kind of a cosmopolitan personality. The city is like a third larger than Scranton.

Greg, you gave us one of the great will–they/won’t–they relationships in TV history with Jim and Pam. There are a couple of office romances brewing on “The Paper.” The season ends with Ned and Mare (Chelsea Frei) kissing. Is there a specific challenge with crafting a slow burn in the streaming era? How did you want to approach things this time around?

Daniels: You need to have stakes in stories. If you’re going to be very realistic and relatable, the stakes in people’s stories are mostly romantic because most people don’t battle aliens to save the world or whatever. So, the highest stakes a normal person usually has is who they’re going to marry or who they’re seeing, or what drama they’re in in their personal lives. There’s a column the New York Times does about people who are getting married, how-they-met kind of thing, which I love, and you realize that there’s hundreds and hundreds of stories of how people meet. It’s not all Sam and Diane or Pam and Jim. My aim would be to not have the audience be like, “Who’s the next Pam and Jim? Is that Pam and Jim?” That’s their relationship. Those two actors were brilliant. You can’t replicate it, but it doesn’t mean that other characters aren’t going to be romantically interested in each other.

We had a sense, at least through Kelly Kapoor and her pop culture references, that “The Office” took place in our shared reality, but it didn’t directly comment on real world matters. But considering the show’s setting and Ned’s idealism about the profession, with President Trump’s ongoing remarks about the press, can you see a day where those remarks or ideas are more directly referenced in some form? Or do you want to stay clear of that?

Daniels: I think there’s so many voices that [are] constantly talking about that, just from a comedy standpoint; I’m very tired of it. There’s also so many opinions that are so strong. My inclination is to do the fundamentals — it’s a character comedy. These are characters. They’re in a world of journalism [and it] has a lot of bumping between human beings and ethics, and to tell those stories is valuable. No matter what side you’re on, you can look at it and, hopefully, if there’s truth in what’s being presented, you can take something valuable away.

Koman: It’s important to think of this as a local paper. Their struggle is to credibly tell local stories, which is what I think the city needs, more than anything — a voice to just tell people what’s going on. Beyond that, I think the way that a culture will seep into a show like this — you should always have a sense of reality and that this is taking place in the present. I think of their minds as being focused on: How can we be a good news source for Toledo?

The impulse when you hear about a spin-off or a reboot is to compare and to see who fits into what archetypes. Tell me about the types of characters you wanted to fill out in this newsroom.

Daniels: We tried to avoid that. What’s the point of doing something where everybody can go, “Oh, that’s the new Dwight”? They’re working in journalism and they have a very romantic, idealistic boss. He’s extremely interested in getting to the bottom of stories and being super rigorous and ethical, but he’s come in and replaced the temporary managing editor, Esmeralda, played by Sabrina Impacciatore, who has a very different view. She doesn’t really drill down that hard. She’s more about getting eyeballs.

Koman: What makes newspapers different than other businesses or other jobs is that people do arrive with a sense of enthusiasm for what they’re going to do. It seemed important that many of these people could have started their jobs like this, but now we’re meeting them at a point where that’s been tamped down enormously. Morale is low. In terms of who this group of people was, you could feel like that’s been dampened enormously and somebody new can come in who, either out of naivety or just optimism, thinks that he can revive it.

Daniels: That quality of morale being low is very “Office”-like. The tone is intended to be similar without having the characters be similar.

The title sequence is a montage of the various ways people make use of newspapers — rather than reading it. How would you describe your relationship to print journalism?

Daniels: When I first moved out here, I had a subscription to the L.A. Times, and the volume of papers was so gigantic, and it would come with these white ties to hold it all together. I built furniture in my apartment out of stacks of L.A. Times because they were so big. So it’d be like two weeks of them, I could make a stool and make a table with a full week’s worth stacked up.

Koman: Yes, I would say that digital media is all well and good until you need to pack glasses, then you hunt for a newspaper.

Daniels: One of my earliest memories is my parents trying to read the newspaper on their bed, and I wanted their attention, so I would roll onto the newspapers and look up at them, which would really irritate them. They were a big newspaper household.

Much like the news media, your industry is confronting budget constraints and technological disruption that is forcing changes to business models and programming strategies. What are your concerns about your industry right now?

Daniels: One of the big themes is the return to advertising. The streamers have all added ad tiers and that naturally is going to change the programming a bit. I don’t think, necessarily, [that] it’s bad. When you look at the heyday of Netflix, a lot of their biggest stuff had been developed under the old advertising model. I sometimes think about the French movie business, where it seems like they don’t care if something makes money or not. It’s just, if you’re in the club, you get to make movies over and over again. I’ve always felt like that there’s something more democratic about: You actually have to get people to watch your thing somehow.

Koman: The strangest thing about this industry is that it might change a lot, [but] the thing you’re making is a timeless product. You’re telling a story. There’s the part of it that is like, “Well, this will eventually be finished and will be presented somewhere” — and you have no control over how that’s going to change. But what you’re actually trying to make would have to hold up under any conditions.

“The Paper,” premiering Thursday on Peacock, is a belated spinoff of “The Office,” much as Peacock is a sort of spinoff of NBC, where the former show aired on Thursdays from 2005 to 2013. In the new series, Dunder Mifflin, the office in “The Office,” has been absorbed into a company called Enervate, which deals in office supplies, janitorial paper and local newspapers, “in order of quality.” The newspaper at hand is the Toledo Truth Teller, sharing space with the toilet paper division.

Created by “Office” developer Greg Daniels with Michael Koman, “The Paper” is shot in the same documentary style, ostensibly by the same fictional crew, and imports “Office” player Oscar Núñez as head accountant Oscar Martinez, not at all happy to be back on camera.

In the first episode, Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), a starry-eyed journalism school graduate turned cardboard salesman turned toilet paper salesman, arrives as the new editor in chief of the Truth Teller, not exactly taking charge of a staff that consists entirely of narcissistic interim managing editor Esmeralda Grand (Sabrina Impacciatore), whose sole prior media experience is as a contestant on a dating reality show called “Married at First Sight”; ad salesman Detrick Moore (Melvin Gregg); subscriptions person Nicole Lee (Ramona Young); compositor Mare Pritti (Chelsea Frei), who wrote for “Stars and Stripes”; accountants Adam Cooper (Alex Edelman) and Adelola Olofin (Gbemisola Ikumelo); and Duane Shepard Sr. as Barry Stokes, the only official reporter, whose beat consists of high school sports and falling asleep. In the sitcom logic of the show, they will all be drafted as volunteer journalists, joined by Travis Bienlien (Eric Rahill), from the toilet paper division.

Times television critic Robert Lloyd and news and culture (and former television) critic Lorraine Ali have worked in many newspaper and magazine offices between them, and come together here to discuss how “The Paper” compares to “The Office,” its journalistic veracity and whether or not it’s funny.

Ali: I’ll start with my favorite quote about journalism from “The Paper”: “The industry is collapsing like an old smoker’s lung.” Hack, hack, cough, I say from inside the beast. This half-hour comedy offered so many great moments of spot-on commentary about the state of legacy journalism that I wasn’t sure if I should weep or laugh. I chose the latter, most of the time. The first couple episodes are clever, funny and charmingly clumsy — if not too close to the bone for folks like us. I’ll get to the rest of the series in a minute, but how did the satire about a contracting newsroom strike you, Robert?

Lloyd: There are a couple of moments in the pilot episode where it flashes back to an old black-and-white documentary on the Truth Teller in an earlier age when 1,000 people worked for the paper, before the internet destroyed print journalism and the newspaper, which once occupied a whole building, and was eventually reduced to sharing a corner of a floor with the toilet paper division. It gave me a little shock. I feel like I caught the end of that analog era, at the L.A. Weekly, when it was a thin, then a fat alternative paper, and the Herald Examiner, where there were typewriters that must have been sitting there since the ’30s, a sort of piratical “Front Page” energy and tons of talent. (Much of which migrated to The Times when the Herald folded.)

Ali: I felt a tinge of sadness and loss watching those flashback scenes. Then they cut to present day, and the marbled halls of the once-great Truth Teller newspaper are empty. What struck me is how much the fictional paper’s lobby looked like the old Globe Lobby of the L.A. Times’ building downtown. I also got a lump in my throat when they went down into the basement where the old giant presses sat frozen. We had those relics in the old Times building too. For readers who don’t know, the L.A. Times hasn’t been in that landmark building since 2018. We’re now in El Segundo. Sounds like a great setup for a sitcom joke, right?

Lloyd: Most — all? — newspapers have felt the stress of shrinking staffs and resources, of doing more with less. But the Truth Teller starts with almost nothing — that it comes out at all, apparently daily, is something of a joke in itself; at least Ted Baxter was the only knucklehead working at WJM on “Mary Tyler Moore,” but there are more than a few of them here. “The Office” wasn’t about the work, but about surviving the environment. It didn’t really matter what did or didn’t get done. But this is a show about a business — a noble institution, however ignobly served — with deadlines, some of which one would rightly regard as impossible, having met hundreds, if not thousands, in one’s life — even without a skeleton crew that has no idea what it’s doing. But it just sort of wishes them away. Then again, it is a sitcom.

The jokes are well-timed and reliably funny, but like “The Office,” it’s all down to the characters, which are wonderful company. Oscar, of course, we already know and love. But I especially liked Gregg as the soft-edged Detrick, with an awkward crush on the wry Nicole. Ned, whom the Irish Gleeson plays like someone out of a Frank Capra pastiche, can be a little competitive, but he’s no Michael Scott; neither is he exactly Jim to Mare’s Pam, though obviously they occupy a similar position, being relatively normal and attractive. But as the One Who Needs to Be Noticed, Impacciatore’s Esmeralda does have more than a little Michael Scott in her, though turned up to 11, insanely glamorized and in an Italian accent. It’s a hilarious performance. Her delighted scrolling through a thicket of ads on a clickbait article on a tip Brad Pitt left someone is a little comic gem. It’s not unlike the way Janelle James pops out as Ava on “Abbott Elementary.”

Ali: It’s impossible not to compare “The Paper” to “The Office.” It’s unfair yet inevitable, and “The Office” wins, though my favorite version of that show was the British version with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. But I do like what Gleeson does in “The Paper” with Ned Sampson, portraying him as an enthusiastic editor in chief born about 50 years too late to experience the Woodward and Bernstein glory days of print journalism. The deflated expression on his face is priceless when he advises his lost “reporters” to rely on the Five Ws of reporting, and one asks, “Is that a gang?” Gleeson has an impressive range. He was haunting as the conflicted foodie/serial killer in psychological thriller “The Patient,” where he co-starred, ironically, with Steve Carell. I also really like Young as Nicole, who I admittedly had an affinity for as a drama club nerd in “Never Have I Ever.”

My issue with “The Paper” isn’t the cast, but the pacing. It starts off strong. The first two episodes are filled with sharp writing and build a strong foundation for what we expect to see: the hilarity of an inexperienced, underdog staff turning a local rag into a real source of news. But the momentum doesn’t quite sustain. I felt myself losing interest in the story as the series progressed because their ensuing assignments, setbacks and interpersonal trajectories weren’t all that compelling.

I do, however, appreciate that “The Paper,” like “Abbott Elementary,” mines the tragic humor of a crumbling American institution while also pointing out that this thing is happening under our noses, and shouldn’t we do something — anything — to save it? Turning that tragedy into a sitcom is one answer.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday announced that people who receive paper checks from the federal government must switch to electronic deposits, with some exceptions, by the end of September. Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo

Aug. 14 (UPI) — People who receive federal checks in the mail will have to switch to an electronic payment method by the end of September or risk experiencing payment delays.

Most people already receive federal checks digitally, but a few still rely on paper checks that are mailed each month, the Treasury Department announced on Thursday.

“Reducing paper checks has been a longstanding bipartisan goal that our administration is finally putting into action,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

Switching to all-digital payments “will help reduce fraud and theft” and “remove delays that prevent hardworking Americans from receiving their vital payments,” Bessent added.

Those who receive Social Security, veterans’ benefits or other federal benefits and still receive paper checks can enroll in direct deposit to receive the funds in their bank accounts.

They can enroll in direct deposit by calling the respective agencies, visiting GoDirect.gov or by calling the Electronic Payment Solution Center at 800-967-6857 Monday through Friday between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. Eastern time.

Those who might not have bank accounts can open an account at FDIC: GetBanked or at MyCreditUnion.gov.

Individuals also can obtain a Treasury-sponsored Direct Express Debit Mastercard to receive electronic payments.

The change comes after President Donald Trump earlier signed an executive order to end paper check disbursements by the end of September, with some limited exceptions.

Such exceptions include those who do not have banking or electronic payment access, certain emergency payments, certain law enforcement activities and other special cases.

The change helps to “modernize how the government handles money” by “switching from old-fashioned paper-based payments to fast, secure electronic payments,” according to a White House announcement.

Payments to the federal government likewise must be made electronically, with limited exceptions.

Nathan Fillion straddles the line between everyman and hunk — and he’s built a career out of it. He’s a natural in roles that require both charisma and a touch of self-awareness, whether he’s solving crimes, commanding a spaceship or enforcing the law.

Fillion played the wisecracking mystery novelist Richard Castle in ABC’s crime drama “Castle” and stars in ABC’s “The Rookie” as John Nolan, a forty-something who navigates his midlife crisis by joining the LAPD. Of course, to sci-fi fans, Fillion will always be Captain Mal Reynolds from “Firefly,” the short-lived but beloved space Western that has kept him a staple at comic conventions for over two decades. Though “Firefly” lasted just one season in 2002, its cult status has endured, cementing Fillion as a fan-favorite in the genre world.

Now he’s stepping into an even bigger universe: the DC Universe. Fillion plays the role of the Guy Gardner / Green Lantern (complete with the iconic bowl cut) in James Gunn’s “Superman,” a highly anticipated reboot hitting theaters on today.

“You got to be really lucky,” he says of his 30-year career. “It’s just not up to you whether or not you stay relevant and popular and on TV and in movies.”

Living close to the hills in Hollywood, Fillion’s ideal Sunday involves relaxing at home, catching up with his favorite people and some late-night gaming. Here’s how he’d spend a perfect day in the city.

7:30 a.m.: Greet my cat and make some art

I much prefer waking up to sunlight than an alarm. I like having open curtains so the sun comes in, I wake up and feel awake, whereas if an alarm goes off in the dark, I don’t. My cat doesn’t sleep in my room, but every morning when I wake up, he’s at the foot of my bed. This is Bowie. I named him Bowie because he has heterochromia: one blue eye, one gold. He’s massive, 25 pounds, a Norwegian Forest Cat and Turkish Angora. He’s great about not waking me up, which I appreciate. Then he follows me around while I make my coffee — creamy and sweet, like my cat. I’ll sit in my kitchen — I’ve got nothing but birds chirping and the sun’s coming in — doodling for hours if I’m allowed. I say “doodle” instead of “draw” because my work is abstract, just black ink on paper, but only with the right pen, ink and paper. It’s an ASMR thing.

9 a.m.: Eggs benny at Sweet Butter

I love eggs for breakfast. I will do a classic scramble and toast with a little bacon or some sausages. But if I really want to be treating myself, it’s eggs Benedict. There’s a place called Sweet Butter down on Ventura Boulevard, and they do a real nice eggs benny.

10 a.m.: A hike with a view (and a rainy day contingency plan)

After breakfast? A hike. I live close to the hills in Hollywood. You’re up there, you’re in nature, you’re seeing animals, you’re seeing the birds. You’re just out there, looking out over the city. It’s better for your body to move a little bit after you’ve got some food. If it’s a rainy day, all bets are off. You’ll find me at the IPIC Theaters because of their luxurious seats and their incredible food, seeing a matinee.

12 p.m.: Nothing beats a backyard hang

I love having friends over. I’ve got a really beautiful backyard. I just had some friends over and their three-year-old twins. We threw them in the pool, and we made pork ribs. We had an incredible salad with some roasted tomatoes. We made corn on the cob. It was perfect weather. We found some shade, and we just sat there for hours and ate and laughed. And that’s a fantastic way to spend a Sunday, with people that you don’t get to see very often. Los Angeles is a beautiful city, but it’s rather spread out and gathering can be a little bit difficult. So when people make the time, it’s really nice.

4 p.m.: Channel my inner Marie Kondo

My house has too much clutter, so lately I’ve been trying to pick out a room or a closet or a drawer, and I’m organizing everything and getting rid of anything I don’t use or don’t like. Just trying to declutter the house — that’s something I’ve been engaging in in the last month. Do I enjoy it? I don’t enjoy the process. I do enjoy the results. And also just the inventory, knowing what you have. Oh, I’ve got these. I don’t need to buy any more of these. I got five of them in the back here.

6 p.m.: Sushi and streaming

Sunday nights are for ordering in. There’s a pho place, a ramen place and Iroha Sushi, my favorite sushi in the city. And LALA’s Argentine Grill. And [Sunday nights are also] for binging television. And right now we just finished binging “From.” [Editor’s note: Fillion is notoriously private and didn’t state who “we” is.] Super scary, and we love being judgmental of the parenting done by the one couple that have their kids there with them. They really let their kids run around unsupervised in this horror town. Also “Invincible” and “Landman.” We’re making our way through those.

9 p.m.: Answer the “Call of Duty”

In the very late evening, I have a group of about 25 guys who have been playing Xbox Live together for about 20 years. We do “Destiny 2,” “Halo” and “Call of Duty.” Some different games get sprinkled in now and again, but it’s mostly just those top three. There’s a text thread, and you’ll just say, “Hey, I’m jumping on for about an hour.” Or sometimes we’ll play late into the evenings, and we catch up, we laugh, we chat and maybe twice a year, we gather. I say, “This is my last game because I’m getting tired,” and I just roll into bed and wait for the next Sunday.