With summer trips ending, students returning to classrooms and cooler weather approaching, Americans are settling back into familiar fall routines.

Health experts say one important item should be added to that autumn checklist: getting an annual flu shot.

The previous US respiratory season was marked by a “super flu” wave fueled by subclade K, a heavily mutated form of the Influenza A (H3N2) virus that triggered a swift and severe rise in cases across the country.

During the 2025-2026 respiratory season, there were at least 32 million flu illnesses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The virus was also linked to roughly 390,000 hospitalizations and 24,000 deaths.

Influenza, better known as the flu, is among the nation’s most widespread and contagious respiratory illnesses, affecting about eight percent of Americans annually.

It can bring on body aches, headaches, fever and coughing. In some cases, however, the infection can progress to serious complications, including pneumonia and influenza-associated encephalopathy (IAE), a severe condition involving brain dysfunction.

Doctors advise receiving a flu vaccine every year to reduce the risk of infection. But with flu season approaching, the question is when it begins — and whether it is possible to get vaccinated too soon.

According to the CDC, flu season typically starts in October, reaches its highest levels from December through February and declines by spring. As of September 5, flu activity remained minimal across the US.

Because the vaccine generally offers protection for around six to eight months, experts say the timing of a shot is important. Vaccination too early could mean that protection fades before the flu season has finished.

While pharmacies start stocking the vaccine in August and promoting it in September, doctors agree these months are still too early to get the shot. 

October is the ideal month to get vaccinated, with the CDC recommending vaccination by Halloween for the upcoming 2026-2027 respiratory season. 

‘October is when I recommend getting the vaccine as there is more actual influenza activity then – there is very little now,’ Infectious disease expert Dr Amesh Adalja, told Prevention.com.

‘The vaccine will last further into the season if administered in October,’ Adalja added.

One exception for an early flu shot is children under eight years old who have never received one – as they would need two doses spaced apart to build immunity.

Additionally, people at high risk of flu complications, such as those with asthma, may want to consider getting vaccinated earlier. 

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There are three different flu virus strains that cause illness: influenza types A, B and C.

Influenza type A can infect people and animals, while type B is usually found only in humans and is generally associated with less severe infections. 

Type C occurs much less frequently than A and B and causes minor illness in humans.

The seasonal flu shot, which is updated every year as the virus mutates, protects against influenza types A and B, as these are the most common and severe strains.

Symptoms of the flu include fever, cough, sore throat, stuffy nose, headaches and fatigue. While most people recover within a week, some may develop complications such as pneumonia, which can be life-threatening and require medical treatment.  

The flu shot is one of the most effective preventative measures against infection, reducing the risk of doctor visits by 34 percent and the risk of hospitalization by 30 percent per the CDC, but it can take up to two weeks for the body to develop antibodies after receiving the vaccination.

Because of this, doctors recommend getting the shot a few weeks before an event or gathering where large numbers of people will be indoors.

Anyone can catch the flu, but those most susceptible include people 65 years and older, those with chronic medical conditions, pregnant women, and children under five. 

Last year’s dominant strain, dubbed the ‘super flu,’ was brand new to people’s immune systems, making them highly vulnerable and at an increased risk of severe, hospitalizing illness. 

While symptoms were the same as other flu strains, experts warned the ‘super flu’ variant was causing more severe illness, especially in children, with signs including week-long fevers and a cough that led to trouble breathing. 

Super flu’s symptoms appear to be similar to previous influenza A strains, though doctors have noted they could be more severe.

Health officials recommend regular handwashing and avoiding contact with people who have flu-like symptoms.

Treatment includes rest, staying hydrated, taking over the counter medication such as Mucinex, or in severe cases, prescription antivirals such as Tamilflu. 

Community activists have launched a “DSA: Tell the Truth” campaign aimed at what they describe as hypocrisy within the Democratic Socialists of America, following The Post’s report questioning co-chair Gustavo Gordillo’s working-class image.

New York City public-housing residents and clergy members gathered in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Monday to criticize the DSA, branding it the “double standards of America.” Demonstrators also renewed demands that Gordillo resign, accusing him of presenting himself as the child of a working-class immigrant family despite what they say is a more privileged upbringing.

Gordillo, 38, is the son of a Miami millionaire who purchased him a $1.5 million townhouse, according to The Post.

“This is the launch,” civil rights leader Rev. Kevin McCall said during Monday’s rally. “This is the launch of more to come. Gustavo is not off the hook. DSA is not off the hook. We’re going to be in front of your houses. We’re going to be in front of your meetings to tell them that Gustavo got to go.”

“This is not about doxing anybody,” McCall added. “We don’t want liars.”

The Democratic Socialists of America has drawn increased attention since Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the left-wing organization, became the first socialist to take up residence at Gracie Mansion.

Gordillo, a Yale graduate, received a Brooklyn townhouse from his wealthy father, who also allegedly covered $1.4 million in renovation costs. His father, Gustavo E. Gordillo, founded and serves as CEO of DraftPros, a telecommunications company valued at $90 million whose clients include AT&T and Verizon.

Despite that background, critics say the DSA co-chair has cultivated a blue-collar identity while advocating for a $95,000 salary for himself and fellow co-chair Grace Mausser, arguing that the organization’s socialist agenda requires full-time work.

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Gordillo had described himself as having been raised by struggling Peruvian immigrants, saying his mother cleaned homes and his father worked flipping burgers at Wendy’s.

That portrayal came under scrutiny after reports surfaced detailing his family’s wealth and financial support.

Organizers of “DSA: Tell the Truth” accused the socialist party of hypocrisy, and said the group can’t credibly claim to be champions of public housing tenants, working-class residents or people of color.

“We want to make sure that Gustavo will not put us in the back of the bus by excluding black and brown people from policymaking,” McCall said. “When you’re talking about NYCHA residents, there are over 500,000 residents who live in New York City Housing Authority that the DSA have no regard for.

“There are black people, Latino people, Hispanic people that the DSA don’t have regard for,” he said. “He must resign. He must resign. He must resign.” 

Gordillo did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Additional reporting by Craig McCarthy

Taraneh and Romina Rahimi were 19-year-old high school students living with their mother when masked men allegedly arrived in the dead of night and took them away.

The twin sisters were pulled from their beds with bags placed over their heads roughly a month after participating in anti-regime demonstrations in Isfahan, according to their U.S.-based cousin. Their relatives said authorities offered no explanation, prompting the family to spend months searching courthouses, hospitals and government agencies for any sign of where the young women had been taken.

It was four months before their mother, Marzieh Nourmohammadi, was permitted to visit them at Dowlatabad Prison. By then, she could scarcely recognize her daughters.

Masoud Nourmohammadi, the sisters’ cousin, told The Guardian that Taraneh and Romina had severely bruised and swollen faces, along with injuries to their hands, elbows and feet. He said they had also lost substantial amounts of hair after guards allegedly pulled them by it while transferring them between cells. During the prison visit, their mother learned the twins had been kept in solitary confinement, he said.

Now 20, Taraneh Rahimi is facing execution over allegations tied to the January protests. Her twin, Romina, could remain behind bars for decades as Iran’s use of the death penalty rises sharply.

Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reported that Branch 1 of the Isfahan Revolutionary Court sentenced Taraneh to death, as well as 11 years in prison. Romina received a 36-year prison term. The rulings are preliminary and remain subject to further legal proceedings.

The sisters are among 16 people charged in the case known as the “Isfahan Shohada Square” case. According to HRANA, 10 defendants were handed death sentences, while the group collectively received 256 years of prison terms.

Their family maintains that the alleged mistreatment in custody was aimed at compelling the sisters to confess.

Nourmohammadi told The Guardian that Taraneh was threatened that prison guards would rape Romina in front of her unless she signed a confession. The outlet reported that Taraneh later told the court that admissions attributed to her had been obtained through torture. Her mother was not permitted to attend the trial, according to the family.

Radio Farda separately reported, citing Nourmohammadi, that the sisters suffered physical and psychological abuse and were forced to confess to accusations they deny. The Hana Human Rights Organization told News Media they have verified the torture allegations.

Concerns about torture extend beyond the sisters. HRANA reported that another defendant in the same case, Ahmadreza Saeidi, told judges during the hearing that the investigating judge personally used an electric stun gun on his neck and genitals. Defense lawyers also reportedly complained that they had not been given access to substantial portions of the case file or adequate time to examine evidence before trial.

The sentences come as rights organizations document a sharp rise in executions across Iran.

The Washington-based Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran documented 901 executions during the first seven months of 2026, including 56 people executed on political or national-security charges.

Behnam Ben Taleblu, Iran program senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told News Media that the executions should be viewed as part of a broader campaign by Tehran to suppress dissent at home.

“Despite the war in the region, despite the drone war, the missile war, the war over the Strait of Hormuz, the real war is the one that’s happening on a day-to-day basis inside the Islamic Republic,” Ben Taleblu said. “The Islamic Republic is quite literally cracking skulls, cracking down on civil society, on dissidents, on protesters.”

Among those imprisoned in Iran’s broader crackdown is Seyed Ahmad Seyedabdollahi, a 32-year-old psychologist whose case News Media reported in August.

Seyedabdollahi posted an English-language video on Jan. 4 appealing directly to President Donald Trump to support Iranian protesters, according to his relatives and News Media’s previous reporting. He was arrested 10 days later and ultimately sentenced to seven months in prison and barred from government and public services for five years.

His relatives told News Media that Iranian authorities later pressured him to record another video insulting Trump and Americans and alleged that he was subjected to solitary confinement and torture.

The Hana Human Rights Organization reported Aug. 9 that Seyedabdollahi had been held in Borujen Prison since July 7 and that authorities opened a second case against him on a charge of “propaganda against the system of the Islamic Republic.” Hana also confirmed that he was serving a seven-month sentence and had received a five-year disqualification from public and governmental services.

His relatives confirmed to News Media that authorities have continued pressuring him to say he was a “foreign agent” paid by the U.S. government. They also said authorities revoked his professional license, adding financial pressure on his family.

Ben Taleblu said Tehran has followed a similar pattern after previous periods of external conflict, turning its attention inward against perceived opponents.

“We saw this trend in the aftermath of the 12-day war as well,” Ben Taleblu said. “Lose a war abroad, come home and pretend like you’re the victor.”

“Simply here, the Islamic Republic is continuing the longest war it’s ever fought, which is the 47-year war against the Iranian people,” he added.

Wednesday marks four years since the Sept. 16, 2022, death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who was detained three days earlier by Iran’s morality police over what authorities described as “improper hijab.” Her death sparked nationwide protests that became known internationally as the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. The U.N. said reports that Amini had been beaten in custody warranted an independent investigation, while Iranian authorities maintained that she died of “natural causes.”

The 2022 uprising was itself part of a longer cycle of unrest. Nationwide demonstrations beginning in December 2017 rapidly spread across Iran and represented the largest challenge to the government since the 2009 Green Movement. The 2017-18 protests were followed by another major nationwide wave in 2019 and then the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising.

Ben Taleblu argued that whenever another major protest movement emerges, Western governments should be prepared to help Iranians communicate with one another and the outside world, particularly when authorities shut down internet access.

“We know every single time another major protest is happening, the way the regime cracks down is to first turn off the internet,” he said. “That means the regime fears what comes of coordination between Iranians and fears what comes of when the Iranians are able to send their message outside to the international community.”

“The partners of the Iranian people, America, Israel, the West, these are largely all cyber superpowers,” Ben Taleblu said. “We should not let the Iranian people continue to die in the darkness.”

Investigators examining the death of Hayden Panettiere have reportedly uncovered a large number of messages exchanged between the actress and a man suspected of being her longtime drug supplier before she allegedly died after taking a fentanyl-contaminated pill.

Sources told TMZ that the former child actress had asked the alleged dealer to obtain “black market pills” in the period before her reported sudden death last month, aged 36.

People familiar with the investigation said the two exchanged multiple texts concerning drugs. The Drug Enforcement Administration is now said to be reviewing those communications as part of its inquiry.

Panettiere had previously spoken publicly about her battle with substance addiction, while sources claimed the messages between her and the suspected dealer stretched back several years.

Earlier reports stated that Panettiere carried a bag containing a mix of pills when she flew from Los Angeles to South Carolina for a vacation on the day she died.

The actress traveled to Hickerson’s home state with her on-and-off boyfriend, real estate agent Brian Hickerson. Detectives reportedly believe she overdosed shortly after arriving after taking an oxycodone pill laced with fentanyl.

Police said Hickerson administered Narcan, a drug designed to rapidly reverse opioid overdoses, after finding Panettiere unresponsive at the apartment they had rented.

Investigators are now reportedly trying to identify the source of the fatal pill and determine whether it can be traced to the dealer alleged to have supplied it.

No arrests have been made in connection with Panettiere’s death, and the official toxicology report has not yet been released. Police say the investigation is ongoing.

Hickerson reportedly met with investigators from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) last week as they continued their probe into her death.

He reportedly gave police a bag of Panettiere’s medications when she was found dead, which sources told TMZ could ‘reveal other pills laced with the deadly drug’ fentanyl.

Neighbors of the mother-of-one also told the outlet that they had seen three suspicious people coming and going from Panettiere’s apartment for years before her death. 

The people would reportedly arrive individually, often with a small bag, and they would see Panettiere quickly open the door, take the bag, and then the person would leave.

The neighbors allegedly suspected that the three people – two women and a man – were drug dealers. 

On the week that Panettiere died, the neighbors said they saw the man arrive at her Los Angeles home.

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The actress’s death came after a long struggle with alcohol and opiates, which saw her spend eight months in rehab in 2020 after contracting jaundice. She wrote in her memoir that a doctor told her she would be ‘dead within five years’ if she didn’t stop drinking.

Hickerson was at the scene along with his brother Zachary when she was pronounced dead, according to a police report.

Panettiere and Hickerson had a turbulent on-off relationship for years, including Hickerson facing multiple domestic violence charges. 

In 2021, he served 13 days in custody for allegedly injuring her, and she had described enduring several bouts of physical abuse in her 2026 tell-all memoir, ‘This Is Me: A Reckoning.’

Following Panettiere’s death, Hickerson’s brother Zachary was arrested for disorderly conduct over a bar fight after he and his brother were reportedly heckled over her overdose. He was released on bond on Sunday. 

Details of Panettiere’s death inside the South Carolina apartment are still unfolding, with detectives previously confirming to the Daily Mail that they responded to an apartment block in Greenville after they received a 911 call from an ‘acquaintance’ of Panettiere, describing her as ‘unresponsive’.

In the dispatch audio of the call made at 1.51pm, a female dispatcher described Panettiere as suffering a ‘cardiac arrest.’ A few moments later, a male dispatcher could be heard saying that she had suffered a suspected overdose.

Greenville County Sheriff’s Office said that the actress’s autopsy had been completed and that no signs of trauma were found on the star’s body.

The former child star was known for her role as cheerleader Claire Bennet on the hit NBC series Heroes and Juliette Barnes in Nashville.

Her appearance in the musical drama saw her receive two nominations for best supporting actress at the 2013 and 2014 Golden Globes.

Panettiere also appeared in the Scream franchise as Kirby Reed, and lent her voice to the video games Until Dawn and Kingdom Hearts.

Her brother Jansen died in February 2023 from ‘an enlarged heart’ at the age of 28.

Panettiere said that she felt like she ‘lost half of her soul’ following his death, and revealed that the stress of his loss resulted in her body ‘ballooning out,’ which left her in a ‘really bad’ and ‘destructive’ place.

A masterpiece stolen amid the horrors of World War II is finally headed home, after an unlikely clue on a property-listing website helped unravel an 80-year mystery.

An Argentine federal judge has approved the return of “Portrait of a Lady,” an 18th-century work by Italian Baroque artist Giacomo Ceruti, also known as Il Pitocchetto, to the heirs of Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker.

The decision concludes an extraordinary, decades-long case involving Nazis who fled Europe, a suspected South American refuge and a real estate photo that exposed a long-hidden painting.

Before German forces invaded the Netherlands in 1940, Goudstikker had assembled one of Europe’s finest private art collections, comprising more than 1,100 works.

He died while escaping the country, after which Nazi officials systematically looted his gallery.

Friedrich Kadgien, a Nazi financial operative, was among the officials involved. Like many Nazis after the war, he fled to South America and eventually settled in Mar del Plata, the Argentine resort city on the Atlantic coast.

Decades later, Kadgien’s daughter, Patricia Kadgien, was living there when a real estate agency advertised her home online. One interior image showed a green sofa in the living room and, hanging above it, a painting listed on international databases of missing art for 80 years.

A Dutch journalist investigating leads tied to the Goudstikker collection noticed the apparent match and later contacted attorney Yael Weitz of the New York law firm Freedman Normand Friedland. Weitz took the matter to Argentine authorities. Police then searched the Kadgien home, but found that both the artwork and the revealing property-listing image had already been removed.

Authorities nevertheless recovered important evidence, seizing mobile phones, unregistered firearms and a collection of documents dating to the 1940s that helped support the case.

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The Ceruti painting was among hundreds of works taken from Goudstikker’s collection. Goudstikker had helped fellow Jews flee mainland Europe after the Nazis seized control of the Netherlands. According to the Telegraph, Hermann Goering, the Luftwaffe commander and one of the Third Reich’s most powerful figures, acquired roughly 800 works from the collection.

Kadgien and her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, were charged with concealment, but ultimately cut a deal, surrendering all claims to the painting and agreeing to donate roughly $3,200 to a Mar del Plata children’s hospital in exchange for having the criminal case against them suspended.

Attorney Juan Ignacio Pascual, who represents the Goudstikker heirs, called the outcome a watershed moment for a country with a complicated postwar history.

“As far as we know, this is the first time that the Argentine justice system has recovered and restituted a painting looted by the Nazis during the Second World War,” Pascual told the Art Newspaper.

The painting had long been misattributed to fellow Italian artist Giuseppe Ghislandi, but a court-ordered examination by Argentina’s National Academy of Fine Arts determined Ceruti was the true creator. The painting is valued at $288,000.

For Goudstikker’s family, the recovery is one small victory in a fight that has stretched across generations. More than 200 works from his collection were returned by the Dutch government back in 2006, but hundreds of other pieces remain scattered around the globe, their locations unknown.

Marei von Saher, Goudstikker’s daughter-in-law and sole heir, said the ruling carries weight far beyond the canvas itself.

“I am thrilled with the court’s decision to restitute this important artwork,” von Saher told the New York Times.