Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan has stepped down shortly after apologizing for accepting a payment of $10,000 per month from a consultancy firm for a marijuana company. While Fagan initially resisted state Republicans' calls for her to resign, she conceded on Tuesday that the situation was distracting from her work.
“While I am confident that the ethics investigation will show that I followed the state’s legal and ethical guidelines in trying to make ends meet for my family, it is clear that my actions have become a distraction from the important and critical work of the Secretary of State’s office,” Fagan said in a statement. “Protecting our state’s democracy and ensuring faith in our elected leaders — these are the reasons I ran for this office. They are also the reasons I will be submitting my resignation today.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping signaled that China will send new pandas to the United States, calling them “envoys of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.
A jury on Thursday convicted the man who broke into former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home seeking to hold her hostage and attacked her husband with a hammer of federal charges of attempted kidnapping and assault.