Southern Brooklyn Assemblyman William Colton shared a post on his public Facebook page calling Black Lives Matter a "hate group" and equating it to the Klu Klux Klan — which, he said, started out as a group of “well intentioned people” before becoming the notoriously violent white supremacist institution that it is today.

The internal watchdog at the United States Postal Service is reviewing controversial policy changes recently imposed under Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, and is also examining DeJoy's compliance with federal ethics rules, according to a spokeswoman for the USPS inspector general and an aide to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who requested the review. Lawmakers from both parties and postal union leaders have sounded alarms over disruptive changes instituted by DeJoy this summer, including eliminating overtime and slowing some mail delivery. Democrats claim he is intentionally undermining postal service operations to sabotage mail-in voting in the November election -- a charge he denies. Agapi Doulaveris, a spokeswoman for the USPS watchdog, told CNN in an email, "We have initiated a body of work to address the concerns raised, but cannot comment on the details." Last week, Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, and eight other Democratic lawmakers asked the inspector general to launch an inquiry into DeJoy on a number of fronts, including the nationwide policy changes he's made since taking over in June, as well as whether DeJoy has "met all ethics requirements."

While President Donald Trump forthrightly acknowledged only yesterday that weakening the Post Office will help him obstruct mail balloting this fall, postal workers in the key swing state of Michigan say his mission has been clear for weeks. “It’s a fundamental effort to undermine people’s confidence in this agency and make it harder to vote by mail…There’s no other explanation.” Delayed mail, a consequence of battles over funding for the United States Postal Service and of the agency’s staffing shortages, affects many aspects of American life—the delivery of millions of prescriptions, paychecks, bills. But recent funding cuts, overtime reductions, and other changes imposed by Louis DeJoy, the man Trump recently appointed as head of the postal service, have left postal workers warning about new multi-day delays—and that a deliberate effort to slow down the mail and interfere with the election is underway. “I think it’s absolutely true,” said Steve Wood, a mail clerk who works at the Michigan Metroplex, a massive mail sorting center near Detroit. He says he was convinced in recent weeks as he and his colleagues saw the removal of almost a quarter of the facility’s mail sorting machines, a lack of substitute employees to replace workers missing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and a general lack of urgency to locate and send along ballots that have piled up in bins.

Residents of Portland and Eugene were alarmed this week to see some U.S. Postal Service mailboxes removed from neighborhood streets and hauled away in flatbed trucks. The sight of mailboxes being carted off caused concern in light of recent comments by President Donald Trump about cutting Postal Service funding. Trump has also criticized voting by mail. But a Postal Service spokesperson said declining mail volume means the Postal Service is removing “duplicate” boxes from areas that have multiple collection boxes. The USPS confirmed that four mailboxes were removed in Portland this week.

PORT HURON, MI – It is an event that has drawn hundreds of participants in recent years to float down the St. Clair River along the United States and Canadian border. But it’s an event that U.S. and Canadian police are strongly urging people to avoid this year. The 2020 version of the 7.5-mile unsanctioned Port Huron Float Down on Sunday, Aug. 16, comes in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has limited the number of people taking part in outdoor gatherings and closed the border between the countries until at least Aug. 21.

Whoops pro wrestlers are still dumb carnies.

The story of how two blood-covered, chainsaw-wielding men came to terrorize the public at Toronto's Cherry Beach on Sunday morning just keeps on getting weirder as witnesses come forward with additional details. Members of the anti-lockdown group MAD (Mothers Against Distancing) say that the two men wielding chainsaws destroyed roughly $4,000 worth of DJ equipment that had been set up on the beach for a late-night protest afterparty. Some background: The anti-lockdown / anti-face mask people have been hosting massive parties on Saturday nights at Cherry Beach following their weekly protests at Queen's Park.

Gov. Greg Abbott expressed his sympathy for Texans who are now unemployed following his order closing bars during a press conference on Thursday afternoon, but stressed that those areas cause some of the most “prolific spreading events.” “When you go to bars, you don’t go in there and go to an isolated location,” Abbott said. “People come together. When you’re drinking, you’re not wearing a mask, you’re taking your mask off. After you’ve had several drinks, some people become fairly intoxicated and less likely to use discipline that is needed to make sure they are avoiding spreading COVID-19.” Abbott said he’s read or talked with infectious disease doctors who rate bars a “leading transmission zone.” In late June, after a recent surge of Texas coronavirus cases, the governor shut down bars for a second time and scaled restaurant capacity to 50%.

Last month was an odd sort of anniversary at Microsoft. In the summer of 2015, Taylor Swift's Bad Blood and Wiz Khalifa's See You Again topped the charts while speculation about the iPhone 6S was running wild.  And that July, Microsoft announced one of its most spectacular fails -- ever. Satya Nadella, just a year into his tenure as Microsoft CEO, announced a $7.6 billion financial loss for Microsoft because of the company's failed acquisition of phone giant Nokia, announced in 2013. Worse, 7,800 workers would lose their jobs. Nadella pretty much said they'd step back from the smartphone market in the near future.

Just in from the Government Accountability Office: The Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 (Vacancies Reform Act) provides for temporarily filling vacant executive agency positions that require presidential appointment with Senate confirmation. 5 U.S.C. § 3345. GAO’s role under the Vacancies Reform Act is to collect information agencies are required to report to GAO, and GAO uses this information to report to Congress any violations of the time limitations on acting service imposed by the Vacancies Reform Act. 5 U.S.C. § 3349. As part of this role, we issue decisions on agency compliance with the Vacancies Reform Act when requested by Congress.

A controversial sheriff in Florida was reportedly given two choices: immediately resign his position and never seek another elected office or face felony charges. Clay County Sheriff Darryl Daniels made national headlines earlier this year when he threatened to make “special deputies of every lawful gun owner in this county” in order to “handle” Black Lives Matter protesters who showed up in his community. On Thursday, Daniels was charged with three felony counts–two for allegedly lying to law enforcement and one for alleged tampering with evidence. The sheriff was also hit with a misdemeanor charge for knowingly giving false information to law enforcement. Eighteen deputies looked on as Daniels made the remarks about deputizing gun owners.

A proposed new rule would allow poultry plants to process diseased chickens. That’s the last thing Americans need.

In the mid-1970s, more often than not, the news coming from Washington was dreary. TV screens filled with images of the Watergate hearings, the war in Vietnam and an economy turning cold. But under the shadow of the Capitol, the city’s thriving Black community — making up three-fourths of its population — was in the midst of a renaissance. Listen to “Soul Love Now: The Black Fire Records Story 1975-1993,” and you’ll quickly get a sense of what it might have felt like to live through some of the headiest years of the Black Power movement in a town also known as “Chocolate City.”

Back in May, we wrote about a group of gun enthusiasts who love taking pictures of loaded weapons pointed at their dicks. On a long enough timeline, one of them was inevitably going to accidentally discharge their weapon, and on Tuesday, that appears to be exactly what happened to one member in the San Diego area. A member of a Facebook group dedicated to taking pictures of loaded weapons pointed at dicks finally shot himself in the balls, according to bloody pictures and video he posted on social media and the Imperial County Sheriff's Office, which confirmed the incident to Motherboard. Rather than step back and start questioning whether the practice is wise, the group made him an administrator and are now celebrating him as their king. On August 11, a member of the group "Loaded Guns Pointed at [B]enis" posted a video of himself pointing a loaded 1911 handgun at his junk. There’s a brief pause before the gun discharges.

Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine successfully restored some functions to pig brains that had been dead for hours. They hope the technology, called BrainEx, will advance our understanding of the brain, potentially developing new treatments for debilitating diseases and disorders, but their research raises many ethical questions.

The United States Postal Service warned Pennsylvania that mail ballots may not be delivered on time to be counted because the state’s deadlines are too tight for its “delivery standards,” casting fresh doubt on Pennsylvania’s ability to conduct much of the 2020 election by mail. The warning came in a July 29 letter from Thomas J. Marshall, general counsel and executive vice president for the Postal Service, to Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, whose department oversees elections. That letter was made public for the first time late Thursday in a filing the Pennsylvania Department of State submitted to the state Supreme Court, in which it asked the court to order that mail ballots be counted as long as they are received up to three days after the Nov. 3 election.

The Scottish government u-turn follows an outcry over the downgrading of 125,000 results.

Eighty-four per cent of Wales high school’s 130-plus A-level students had at least one grade moderated down by the regulator Ofqual. The comprehensive of nearly 1,200 pupils has a relatively large sixth form. It sits south-east of Rotherham, in one of Yorkshire’s less affluent boroughs. Pepe Di’lasio, the headteacher, said there was “an injustice and unfairness that is clinically cold” in the government’s “absolutely chaotic” handling of this year’s A-levels. His students had been disproportionately affected, he said, because of where the school is, its larger class sizes, and because its results last year were only average.

Yale University’s undergraduate admissions process “illegally discriminates” against White and Asian students, the Department of Justice said Thursday. A two-year investigation into the Ivy League school found that “race is the determinative factor in hundreds of admissions decisions each year,” in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the DOJ said in a press release. The department said Yale must agree not to use race or national origin as criteria in its next admissions cycle, and that if it plans to consider race in the future, “it must first submit to the Department of Justice a plan demonstrating its proposal is narrowly tailored as required by law, including by identifying a date for the end of race discrimination.”

This August—normally a bountiful month in which tomatoes ripen on the vine, hydrangea bushes sag with extravagant blooms, and the sunsets can be nearly psychedelic—I have found it difficult to hold on to a good feeling. For a lot of Americans, this particular summer has been a season of fear and concern—or, at best, a kind of endless, anxious boredom. But one small, pure, reliable pleasure remains: the giddiness of hearing a completely awesome song for the very first time. For almost a year, Tim and Fred Williams, twenty-one-year-old twins from Gary, Indiana, have made videos of themselves listening to famous songs, and then uploading the videos to their YouTube channel. They sit in elaborate, side-by-side desk chairs, situated in front of a sometimes-unmade bed. Posters of the rapper Tupac Shakur and the boxer Deontay Wilder are taped to a wood-panelled wall behind them. Most of the songs that they choose to play have been suggested by subscribers, and they range from very recent hits to genuine oldies. When I was a teen-ager, certain songs were simply inescapable—they were played endlessly on the radio, or at the mall, or on boom boxes at the community pool—but now listening has become a far more individual and bespoke experience. It’s not unusual for a young person never to have heard a hit that people in their thirties or forties might believe to be ubiquitous. (Earlier this summer, a TikTok video of two young women unable to identify pop singles, mostly from the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, caused a brief explosion of consternation and pearl-clutching on Twitter.)