A Houston area student who was allegedly harassed and bullied by her teachers for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance has won a $90,000 settlement, according to the civil rights organization American Atheists. The Texas Association of School Boards paid to resolve the case after the Klein Oak High School student's 12th-grade sociology teacher agreed to settle before things went to trial, the organization announced in a Tuesday news release, which was first reported by the Houston Chronicle's Rebecca Hennes. In the 2017 suit, the nonreligious student says she was discriminated against and harassed by several teachers after choosing to abstain from saying the pledge out of objection to the words "Under God" and her belief that "liberty and justice for all" is not guaranteed for people of color in the U.S.

The reservoir level fell below that target elevation earlier this month. It can only drop by 34 more feet before hydropower production becomes impossible. Lake Powell’s elevation dropped by 44 feet over the last year.

The state Public Works Board is considering changes after private internet companies successfully objected to local government initiatives.

President Joe Biden had taken a shine last fall to a Senate proposal that would raise hundreds of millions of dollars for his sweeping economic agenda through a tax on the mega rich. So had many of his top aides, who had pushed for such a tax since the beginning of his administration. Senate Democrats and their fragile majority seemed on board — even the holdouts, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), in their own enigmatic ways. So the White House went to work on a tax that would target the earnings of the richest Americans — one that anticipated the criticisms of a noisy class of economists who had poured cold water on the idea before. On Monday, Biden unveiled the plan as part of the White House’s annual budget. It took mere hours for Manchin to rain on the president’s parade. “There are other ways for people to pay their fair share, and I think everyone should pay,” Manchin told Bloomberg Monday afternoon. He deemed the proposed tax a “tough one” and dismissed it as an existential quandary, questioning how one could be taxed “on things you don’t have.”

Watching congressional Democrats these days feels like a painful, slow-motion car wreck. They are sleepwalking into a health care disaster that’s entirely of their own making. With little debate or media focus, Democrats are on the verge of dooming millions of Americans to huge new health care bills, which will in turn serve to ruin any hope Democrats have of winning the midterms. And that will effectively destroy any chance of real health care reform for at least another decade. In 2021, as part of the American Rescue Plan, Democrats improved the Affordable Care Act subsidies for the insurance exchanges. For the first time, this created a situation where all American citizens qualified to get health insurance at a legally defined “affordable” premium. Despite its flaws, it was a big ideological statement, and a serious improvement for the 14 million with exchange coverage. While the bill only improved subsidies for two years, almost everyone assumed Democrats would eventually make the change permanent, since it had support across the entire Senate caucus, and allowing enhanced subsidies to expire would be politically idiotic. It turns out, though, that one should never underestimate the collective incompetence of the Democratic Party. Making the enhanced subsidies permanent was supposed to be part of the Build Back Better plan, but Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) killed that. Now, Manchin is talking about a new, much smaller reconciliation package, which notably does not include these subsidies or any other social-program improvements. All of the spending in Manchin’s proposed package would be on energy programs.

Portland police officer Chris Burley was stationed at the sound truck parked atop a Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office building as a protest swelled along East Burnside Street below. It was a Monday night in September 2020, weeks after the departure of federal agents who faced off with the “Wall of Moms” and tear-gassed the mayor in downtown Portland. The feds were gone, but the protests were not. Burley looked on as a burning object flew through the air like a shooting star and landed within 15 feet of the truck. He exited the sound truck and inspected the yellow glass bottle, which was still intact. It resembled a beer growler, save for the yellowish-green liquid inside and a burnt rag stuffed in its mouth. On the bottom of the Molotov cocktail bottle: a price tag from the Goodwill store in McMinnville. About two weeks earlier, after another protest, police had found a baseball bat with a price sticker from the same Goodwill. The store’s security footage from Sept. 4, 2020, showed a young couple purchasing baseball bats and growlers. From the footage, police recognized the man who wore a black cowboy hat and jeans and was far from his home in Marion, Ind.: 23-year-old Malik Muhammad, a U.S. Army veteran. “Muhammad’s trip to Portland does not appear to be an isolated event,” federal prosecutors later wrote. Within weeks of purchasing the baseball bats and growlers in McMinnville, Muhammad was arrested at another Portland protest, dubbed the “Indigenous Peoples Day of Rage.” Plainclothes FBI agents alleged they witnessed Muhammad smash windows at the Oregon Historical Society, Portland State University and a Ben Bridge Jeweler using a baton. Muhammad fled as police tried to arrest him. After a foot chase, police detained Muhammad, who allegedly carried a 9 mm pistol and 30 rounds of ammunition. In the five-odd weeks that transpired between the Goodwill shopping excursion and his arrest, state and federal prosecutors allege, Muhammad attended four Portland protests. During some of those events, he threw Molotov cocktails toward police—including one that “seriously burned” a protester, and another that caught an officer’s pant leg on fire—and handed out baseball bats to incite property damage, prosecutors say. Now, a year and a half later, Muhammad faces what appears to be the longest sentence handed down to a Portland protester after the 2020 uprising: 10 years in prison.

Bruce Willis is “stepping away” from his acting career after being diagnosed with aphasia, which leads to the loss of ability to understand or express speech, his family said in a statement posted to social media.

Thanks to a mysterious 1986 law, credit reporting on student loans is mandatory. For millions of Americans, that’s meant financial disaster.

Cawthorn appeared on a podcast last week and was asked whether the TV show “House of Cards” is realistic. The 26-year-old lawmaker said he couldn’t help but marvel at the “sexual perversion” of his older colleagues. “I look at all these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life, I’ve always paid attention to politics,” Cawthorn said. “Then all of the sudden you get invited to, ‘Well hey, we’re going to have kind of a sexual get together at one of our homes, you should come.’ I’m like, ‘What did you just ask me to come to do?’ And then you realize they are asking you to come to an orgy.” He added that some members of Congress have done “key bumps” of cocaine in his presence.

Former President Trump is leading President Biden in a hypothetical 2024 match-up, according to a new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey released exclusively to The Hill on Monday.

In February, Etsy CEO Josh Silverman had good news to share with investors: sales and revenue were at an all-time high, sending Etsy stock soaring. At the same time, Silverman had less welcome news for sellers, delivered via email: transaction fees were going up, from 5 percent to 6.5 percent, or a 30 percent increase, beginning April 11th. Sellers are calling for a shopping boycott beginning April 11th.

Two years ago, a whistleblower in Clark Township came forward with explosive allegations: He’d secretly recorded the mayor, the police chief, and a supervisor in internal affairs referring to Blacks with racial slurs. Yet Clark officials hid those accusations by preemptively agreeing to pay $400,000 to the whistleblower and his attorney to avoid a lawsuit that would have thrust them into the public eye, an NJ Advance Media investigation has found. Under the settlement, the whistleblower, police Lt. Antonio Manata, turned the recordings over to the township. And Clark allowed him to remain on the payroll without working until he retired at the rank of captain last month with his full pension.

Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, has outlined an agenda that would transform the American workplace.

A new Texas law disenfranchised one of every six El Paso mail-in voters in the March 1 primary. Most of those were regular voters who had been registered for decades, an El Paso Matters analysis found. El Paso County’s rejected mail-in ballots came from voters ranging in age from 20 to 103 years old. The average age was 77. About 75% of these voters identified themselves as Hispanic and 57% were women. Nearly 82% of the rejected ballots came from regular voters who participated in the 2016, 2018 and 2020 general elections; 98% voted in the 2020 general election.

Police reports and body-cam images obtained by the Reader and South Side Weekly shed new light on a 2020 incident in which a Chicago police officer attacked activist Miracle Boyd at a Grant Park protest, knocking out her front tooth. The images, which were attached to the Civilian Office of Police Accountability’s (COPA) investigation of the incident, are stark. As another cop looks on, officer Nicholas Jovanovich, facing the camera, runs toward Boyd and swings his fist at her as she backs away. When the blow lands, her cell phone flies to the pavement and she stumbles away, bent double. Jovanovich has been with the department since September 2005. Last May, COPA concluded its investigation of the incident and recommended he be fired for excessive force and other violations. Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown objected, suggesting he be suspended for a year instead.

Ian Smith, who is running for Congress, spent 5 1/2 years in prison for a drunk driving crash that killed a 19-year-old in 2007.

Jason Ravnsborg is now not likely to face any consequences after a special investigative committee of the South Dakota House of Representative voted against his impeachment.

Over the past decade, ultrarunning has gone from a fringe pursuit for distance freaks to a hypercompetitive sport attracting big-time sponsors. But a mysterious training condition is suddenly plaguing its ranks, robbing a generation of top athletes of their talents and forcing victims to wonder: Is it possible to love this sport too much?

Targeted Victory pushed local operatives across the country to boost messages calling TikTok a threat to American children. “Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger,'" one campaign director said. Campaign operatives were also encouraged to use TikTok’s prominence as a way to deflect from Meta’s own privacy and antitrust concerns. “Bonus point if we can fit this into a broader message that the current bills/proposals aren’t where [state attorneys general] or members of Congress should be focused,” a Targeted Victory staffer wrote. One trend Targeted Victory sought to enhance through its work was the “devious licks'' challenge, which showed students vandalizing school property. Through the “Bad TikTok Clips” document, the firm pushed stories about the “devious licks” challenge in local media across Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. That trend led Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) to write a letter in September calling on TikTok executives to testify in front of a Senate subcommittee, saying the app had been “repeatedly misused and abused to promote behavior and actions that encourage harmful and destructive acts.” But according to an investigation by Anna Foley at the podcast network Gimlet, rumors of the “devious licks” challenge initially spread on Facebook, not TikTok. In October, Targeted Victory worked to spread rumors of the “Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge” in local news, touting a local news report on the alleged challenge in Hawaii. In reality, no such challenge existed on TikTok. Again, the rumor started on Facebook, according to a series of Facebook posts first documented by Insider.

The U.S. Coast Guard prepared a second attempt to free a stranded container ship Wednesday, more than two weeks after it ran aground in the Chesapeake Bay.