Right-wing operative Jacob Wohl, who has a history of spreading conspiracy theories, was kicked off Facebook and Instagram late Monday night.

The Justice Department plans to bring an antitrust case against Google as soon as this month, after Attorney General William P. Barr overruled career lawyers who said they needed more time to build a strong case against one of the world’s wealthiest, most formidable technology companies, according to five people briefed on internal department conversations. Justice Department officials told lawyers involved in the antitrust inquiry into Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, to wrap up their work by the end of September, according to three of the people. Most of the 40-odd lawyers who had been working on the investigation opposed the deadline. Some said they would not sign the complaint, and several of them left the case this summer. Some argued this summer in a memo that ran hundreds of pages that they could bring a strong case but needed more time, according to people who described the document. Disagreement persisted among the team over how broad the complaint should be and what Google could do to resolve the problems the government uncovered. The lawyers viewed the deadline as arbitrary. While there were disagreements about tactics, career lawyers also expressed concerns that Mr. Barr wanted to announce the case in September to take credit for action against a powerful tech company under the Trump administration. But Mr. Barr felt that the department had moved too slowly and that the deadline was not unreasonable, according to a senior Justice Department official. A former telecom industry executive who argued an antitrust matter before the Supreme Court, Mr. Barr has shown a deep interest in the Google investigation. He has requested regular briefings on the department’s case, taking thick binders of information about it on trips and vacations and returning with ideas and notes.

Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren announced Thursday that the officers involved in the death of Daniel Prude have been suspended. “I am suspending the officers in question today against council’s advice, and I urge the attorney general to complete her investigation,” Mayor Warren said. “I understand that the union may sue the city for this, they shall feel free to do so — I have been sued before.” In total, seven Rochester police officers are suspended with pay: Officers Mark Vaughn, Troy Taladay, Paul Ricotta, Francisco Santiago, Andrew Specksgoor, Josiah Harris, and Sgt. Michael Magri. Prude, a 41-year-old Black man from Chicago, died after an encounter with Rochester police back in March, but news of the incident just came to light Wednesday, and now the case is being investigated by the New York State Attorney General’s Office.

Two Missouri men were arrested on firearm charges after a tipster warned law enforcement the pair were traveling to Kenosha, Wisconsin, with assault-style weapons, according to court documents. Michael M. Karmo, 40, and Cody E. Smith, 33, were arrested at a hotel near Kenosha on Tuesday and charged with illegal possession of firearms, the Department of Justice announced Thursday. According to the criminal complaint against them, they were found with a major cache of firearms and weapons in their vehicle and hotel room that included an AR-15, a shotgun, handguns, a dagger, a saw and magazines.

A Texas assistant attorney general sent dozens of tweets over the past several months threatening violence against progressives, spouting racist and transphobic rhetoric, casting doubt over the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic and sharing QAnon conspiracy theories. On Thursday, he lost his job with the state agency after national media reported on his social media activities. Nick Moutos, whose racist tweets were reported Thursday morning by Media Matters, threatened Black Lives Matter protesters and has regularly referred to the organizers as “terrorists.” He called Islam a “virus” and trans people an “abomination.” “As of today, this individual no longer works for the Office of the Attorney General,” Kayleigh Date, spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, told The Texas Tribune.

The NRA's former second-in-command has a message for the New York attorney general who has launched an investigation into the powerful gun lobby. It's worse than she thinks. "She's only at the tip of the iceberg," said Joshua Powell, former chief of staff to Wayne LaPierre, the longtime head of the National Rifle Association. "When she sees below the water line, what she'll find is decades of fraud, corruption, no-bid contracts to the tune of not tens of millions but hundreds of millions of dollars. It's far worse than, in my opinion, what she has on paper at this point." New York Attorney General Letitia James last month filed a lawsuit demanding the dissolution of the NRA, the nation's leading gun-rights organization and an influential ally of President Donald Trump. She also sued four current or former NRA executives, including Powell, seeking millions in restitution. 

The US Food and Drug Administration has rejected a submission from Phoenix Biotechnology Inc. to market oleandrin as a dietary supplement ingredient, citing "significant concerns" about the safety evidence the company presented. Last month, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who recently joined the board of Phoenix Biotechnology and has a financial stake in the company, said he had participated in a July meeting at the White House with President Donald Trump regarding the use of oleandrin as a potential therapeutic for the coronavirus. The extract comes from the Nerium oleander plant; the raw oleander plant is highly toxic and consuming it can be fatal. There are no peer-reviewed, published studies on the impact of oleandrin on Covid-19, and there's no public evidence it has been studied in patients with Covid-19.

Amazon’s top reviewers in the UK appear to have engaged in fraud, leaving thousands of five-star ratings in exchange for money or free products. The company took down 20,000 product reviews following an investigation by the Financial Times. Justin Fryer, the number one Amazon reviewer in the UK, left a five-star rating once every four hours on average in August, according to the FT’s analysis. Many of these reviews were for products from random Chinese companies. Fryer then seems to have resold the products on eBay. Scams like these typically start on social networks and messaging apps such as Telegram, where companies can meet potential reviewers. Once the connection is made, the reviewer chooses a free product, then waits a few days to write a five-star review. After the review is posted, they get a full refund, and, at times, an extra payment.

Photos of members of an anti-government group carrying long guns, a pipe wrench, and an inert rocket launcher into a Subway restaurant in Raleigh went viral in May. Now, one of those people has been accused of trying to sell weapons to undercover federal agents. Benjamin Ryan Teeter, 22, from Hampstead, NC, and Michael Robert Solomon, 30, from New Brighton, Minn., were arrested and charged with conspiring and attempting to provide material support to Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group.

He's shaming us," said the man, who identified himself only as David (a police spokesperson declined to provide their full names)."Because we can't wear a mask, we're being discriminated against." His wife went a step further, suggesting that they were specifically targeted because they are white. "If we were fucking Black, I can guarantee you that guy would never come out and tell us put a mask on," she huffed to a Gothamist reporter. “Right, because Black Lives Matter,” the husband agreed.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to overwrite key parts of the Brexit withdrawal deal he agreed with the EU last year as he insists that leaving all existing trade arrangements without a fresh deal at the end of the year would be a "good outcome" for Britain. The Financial Times reported on Monday that the prime minister intends to "eliminate the legal force of parts of the withdrawal agreement," citing three sources familiar with the plan. The government will on Wednesday table legislation called Internal Market Bill which if passed would effectively overwrite sections of the Withdrawal Agreement relating to Northern Ireland's relationship with Great Britain. Johnson's official spokesman confirmed on Monday that the government will move to "clarify specific elements" of the deal. "We are taking limited and reasonable steps to clarify specific elements of the Northern Ireland Protocol in domestic law to remove any ambiguity and to ensure the government is always able to deliver on its commitments to the people of Northern Ireland," the spokesman said.

Trump fancied several of the pieces in the U.S. ambassador’s historic residence in Paris, where he was staying, and on a whim had them removed and loaded onto Air Force One, according to people familiar with the matter. The works -- a portrait, a bust, and a set of silver figurines -- were brought back to the White House. The decision to cancel Trump’s visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery outside Paris is under new scrutiny after the Atlantic magazine on Thursday published a bombshell report that Trump belittled the American servicemen buried there, part of a broader history of disparaging certain people who’ve served in the military. Trump has vehemently denied making the comments about “suckers” and “losers” in the armed forces. Never previously reported is Trump’s spur-of-the-moment art caper before leaving the ambassador’s residence.

Leading Ukrainian religious figure Patriarch Filaret has contracted coronavirus, after blaming gay people for the disease. The 91-year-old, who is the Patriarch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Kiev Patriarchate, is currently in a stable condition being treated in hospital, with Ukrainian website 11.2 international also reporting he has pneumonia. Filaret’s church, which is said to have more than 15 million followers among Ukraine’s 42 million population, confirmed the COVID-19 diagnosis in a Facebook post. “We inform that during planned testing, His Holiness Patriarch Filaret of Kiev and All Rus-Ukraine tested positive for COVID-19,” the statement said. “Now His Holiness Bishop is undergoing treatment at a hospital.”

The US Postal Service has become an unlikely flashpoint of the upcoming elections due to President Donald Trump's refusal to fund the cash-strapped agency, despite the outsized role it will play as millions of Americans turn to mail-in voting during the pandemic. But even as Trump continues to make false claims attempting to link mail-in voting to fraud, the USPS has been working on new ways to make elections more secure and transparent, even if voters opt for mail-in ballots. The US Patent and Trade Office made a patent filing from the USPS public last week, Forbes first reported on Friday, that would utilize blockchain technology to help verify voters' identities, allow them to cast ballots online, and record results via a tamper-proof ledger.

Working America, an AFL-CIO community-based political program, finds ‘persuadable’ voters are open to at least some progressive policies. TL;DR: Many working class Trump voters thought he'd actually help make healthcare more affordable.

The share of 18- to 29-year-olds living with their parents has become a majority since U.S. coronavirus cases began spreading early this year.

LONDON -- A key opposition leader in Belarus has disappeared in the country's capital, Minsk, after another weekend of mass protests against the rule of embattled President Alexander Lukashenko. Maria Kolesnikova, the central opposition figure inside the Eastern European nation, was seen being bundled into a vehicle by men in plainclothes, according to independent Belarusian news outlet Tut.By. Kolesnikova’s press representative, Gleb German, confirmed to ABC News that their team had had "no contact" with her Monday. Her whereabouts, along with that of two other leaders involved in the opposition's Coordination Council, Anton Ronenkov and Ivan Kravstov, are unknown and their lawyers are looking for them, according to German.

In the summer of 2017, Nina Jankowicz, a twenty-eight-year-old American, was working in Kyiv as a communications adviser to Ukraine’s foreign ministry as part of a yearlong Fulbright fellowship. Jankowicz had an interest in digital diplomacy and in countering disinformation that was matched by a passion for musical theatre: in Washington, D.C., where she lived for several years before moving to Ukraine, she played Sally in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” and Audrey in “Little Shop of Horrors.” So when she came across a Facebook page for a White House protest that called on “resistance activists, show-tune lovers, and karaoke fans,” her curiosity was piqued. She later spoke with Ryan Clayton, a progressive organizer involved in the protest. On July 4th, a man dressed in a waistcoat and a tricornered hat kicked things off. “Hear ye, hear ye, citizens,” he said, ringing a bell. “Resist the rule of the treasonous King Donald!” Protesters waving American flags performed musical numbers calling for Trump’s impeachment, including “Do You Hear the People Sing?,” the anthem from “Les Misérables.” Clayton told Jankowicz that he was impressed with the turnout. He suspected that it had something to do with a last-minute Facebook message from a user named Helen Christopherson, who offered to pitch in cash to buy ads in exchange for administrator access to the event page. “I got like $80 on my ad account so we can reach like 10000 people in DC or so,” the message read. “That would be Massive!” In fact, Christopherson’s ad spend reached as many as fifty-eight thousand people in the D.C. area.

More than 150,000 people shared a single-sentence tweet from someone named King Randall, I: “How is finding 39 missing children in a double wide trailer here in Georgia NOT the biggest news story in America?” Well, to answer a one-sentence question with a one-sentence answer, 39 kids being rescued from a trailer in Georgia is not the biggest news story in America because 39 kids were not rescued from a trailer in Georgia.  “This is not the big trafficking bust everyone thinks it is,” said Erin Albright, a human trafficking and law enforcement consultant who works with cities to develop anti-trafficking strategies. “Any time a child is being harmed and is connected with meaningful support, that’s good. But at the same time, we have to recognize that these stories are not what they look like at first.” 

President’s move to free Joseph Scott Pemberton condemned as ‘shameless mockery of justice’.