Transgender activists in Pakistan said they plan to appeal to the highest court in the land an Islamic court’s ruling that guts a law aimed at protecting their rights.

The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act was passed by Parliament in 2018 to secure the fundamental rights of transgender Pakistanis. It ensures their access to legal gender recognition, among other rights.

Many Pakistanis have entrenched beliefs on gender and sexuality and transgender people are often considered outcasts. Some are forced into begging, dancing and even prostitution to earn money. They also live in fear of attacks.

The Federal Shariat Court on Friday struck down several provisions of the landmark law, terming them “un-Islamic.”

It ruled that a person cannot change their gender on the basis of “innermost feeling” or “self-perceived identity” and must conform to the biological sex assigned to them at the time of birth.

The Shariah court has the constitutional mandate of examining and determining whether laws passed by Pakistan’s parliament comply with Islamic doctrine.

Around a dozen activists protested in the southern port city of Karachi on Saturday against the ruling.

Lawyer Sara Malkani, who was speaking at an event organized by the Gender Interactive Alliance, denied the legislation was un-Islamic. She said the existence of two genders did not limit the concept of gender identity and that Islamic texts, including the Quran, did not associate specific behavior to specific genders.

Twitter has removed the verification check mark on the main account of The New York Times, one of CEO Elon Musk’s most despised news organizations.

The removal comes as many of Twitter’s high-profile users are bracing for the loss of the blue check marks that helped verify their identity and distinguish them from impostors on the social media platform.

Musk, who owns Twitter, set a deadline of Saturday for verified users to buy a premium Twitter subscription or lose the checks on their profiles. The Times said in a story Thursday that it would not pay Twitter for verification of its institutional accounts.

Early Sunday, Musk tweeted that the Times’ check mark would be removed. Later he posted disparaging remarks about the newspaper, which has aggressively reported on Twitter and on flaws with partially automated driving systems at Tesla, the electric car company, which he also runs.

Other Times accounts such as its business news and opinion pages still had either blue or gold check marks on Sunday, as did multiple reporters for the news organization.

“We aren’t planning to pay the monthly fee for check mark status for our institutional Twitter accounts,” the Times said in a statement Sunday. “We also will not reimburse reporters for Twitter Blue for personal accounts, except in rare instances where this status would be essential for reporting purposes,” the newspaper said in a statement Sunday.

A Florida man has been sentenced to four years and seven months in federal prison for three felony charges related to the insurrection and storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mitchell Todd Gardner II, 34, of Seffner, Florida, was sentenced Thursday in federal court in the District of Columbia, according to court records. He pleaded guilty last year to civil disorder, obstruction of an official proceeding, and assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers with a dangerous weapon.

Gardner was arrested in Tampa in June 2021.

According to court documents, Gardner joined with others in objecting to Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory over then-President Donald Trump. A mob attacked the Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying election results for Biden over the Trump, a Republican, authorities have said. Five people died in the violence.

According to the criminal complaint, Gardner was part of a mob just outside the lower west terrace tunnel of Congress and used a pepper spray device against officers within the tunnel area. The contents hit one officer directly in the face shield and splattered onto two other officers, officials said.

Gardner also urged other rioters to use a ladder to break into a window, prosecutors said. When the ladder was not used, Gardner stood on a window ledge outside of a Senate terrace room and damaged the window with the pepper spray device.

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Friday authorized adding former President Jair Bolsonaro in its investigation into who incited the Jan. 8 riot in the nation’s capital, as part of a broader crackdown to hold responsible parties to account.

According to the text of his ruling, Justice Alexandre de Moraes granted the request from the prosecutor-general’s office, which cited a video that Bolsonaro posted on Facebook two days after the riot. The video claimed President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wasn’t voted into office, but rather was chosen by the Supreme Court and Brazil’s electoral authority.

Prosecutors in the recently formed group to combat anti-democratic acts argued earlier Friday that although Bolsonaro posted the video after the riot, its content was sufficient to justify investigating his conduct beforehand. Bolsonaro deleted it the morning after he first posted it.

Legal analysts consulted by The Associated Press said investigating Bolsonaro was overdue and justified.

“Bolsonaro’s positioning, in general, is being investigated as an incitement method. The fact that the video was published after the attacks doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved previously in inciting the acts,” said Georges Abboud, a constitutional law professor at Sao Paulo’s Pontifical Catholic University.

A woman who brought a wild raccoon into a bar earlier this year will spend a year on probation.

On Tuesday, Erin Christensen of Maddock, 38, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of providing false information to law enforcement, tampering with evidence and unlawful possession of a live furbearer, reported the Bismarck Tribune.

Northeast District Judge Donovan Foughty gave her a suspended six-month jail sentence and a year on probation. He also ordered her to pay $1,100 in fines and fees.

She faced a maximum sentence of about two years in jail and $7,500 in fines.

According to court documents, Christensen said her family found the raccoon, nicknamed Rocky, on the side of a road and was nursing it back to health when she brought it into the bar on Sept. 6. A bartender said Rocky didn’t got loose nor did he bite anyone but state health officials still issued a warning about potential rabies exposure.

Authorities arrested Christensen on Sept. 14 after serving several search warrants in and around Maddock to find her and the raccoon. According to court documents, she wouldn’t disclose Rocky’s location.

Keeping a wild raccoon as a pet is illegal under state law — as is keeping a bat or skunk because they are known carriers of rabies, according to North Dakota’s Game and Fish website. Authorities ultimately euthanized the racoon, who tested negative for rabies.

Christensen has said Rocky’s fate has left her family traumatized.

Work to relocate Richmond’s final city-owned Confederate monument should start this week after a judge refused a request to delay the removal of the statue of Gen. A.P. Hill from its prominent spot in Virginia’s capital, an official said.

Richmond Circuit Court Judge David Eugene Cheek Sr. last week rejected a motion from four indirect descendants of Hill, who was killed in the final days of the Civil War, to stop the city’s removal plans.

Though the process of removing the monument from a busy intersection should start Monday, it’s unclear if it would be removed entirely by the end of the week, city deputy chief administrative officer Robert Steidel told WRIC-TV.

The city, a onetime capital of the Confederacy, began removing its many other Confederate monuments more than two years ago amid the racial justice protests that followed George Floyd’s murder. Among the notable monuments removed was an imposing statue of Gen. Stonewall Jackson, which was taken down from a concrete pedestal in 2020 along Richmond, Virginia’s famed Monument Avenue.

Richmond officials decided to convey the monuments to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia. But efforts to remove the Hill statue have been complicated because the general’s remains were buried beneath the monument in 1891.

The indirect descendants and the city have agreed that Richmond’s plan to move Hill’s remains to a cemetery in Culpeper should be allowed to move forward. But these descendants contend they have control over the statue and want it relocated to Cedar Mountain Battlefield, near the cemetery, instead of to the museum. Cheek ruled against them in October.

In the most recent hearing, Cheek denied their motion to stay the removal of the Hill monument while the descendants press an appeal with the Virginia Court of Appeals.

The city has spent at least $1.8 million removing other city-owned monuments, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. Cheek determined that delaying the removal would result in additional cost and retain a potential traffic hazard.

Protesters opposed to the Supreme Court’s decision overturning abortion rights briefly interrupted arguments at the court Wednesday and urged women to vote in next week’s elections.

It was the first courtroom disruption since the court’s decision in June that stripped away women’s constitutional protections for abortion after nearly a half-century under Roe v. Wade.

Three people stood up in the courtroom in the first few minutes of Wednesday’s session to denounce the abortion ruling, which came in a case from Mississippi, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

“Our right to choose will not be taken away,” one protester said. “Women, vote for our right to choose.”

The justices did not appear to react to the disruption. The protesters did not resist when police led them away.

The protesters, identified as Emily Archer Paterson, Rolande Dianne Baker and Nicole Elizabeth Enfield, were charged were violating a law against making a “harangue” in the Supreme Court building and another barring interference with the administration of justice, court spokeswoman Patricia McCabe said by email.

The justices heard arguments Wednesday in a case involving reporting requirements under the Bank Secrecy Act. After a 19-month closure because of the coronavirus pandemic, the courtroom was reopened to the public in October.