Jim Crow-era election laws are getting a facelift in Florida. Senate Bill 524, which Republican lawmakers passed last week, would establish Florida’s Office of Election Crimes and Security, a new state office staffed with law enforcement meant to investigate election crimes. The bill would also give Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to sign the legislation, unprecedented authority to initiate criminal investigations of election-related matters. At the same time, SB 524 would make it a felony punishable by up to five years in prison for volunteers to drop off more two people’s ballots, and dramatically ratchet up penalties for grassroots organizations and other get-out-the-vote groups who make mistakes on forms for voter registration and mail ballot applications, raising the fine from $1,000 to $50,000. While Florida’s bill mirrors a wave of similar legislation in GOP-controlled states that restrict and complicate voting processes, it goes the furthest in establishing a state agency dedicated to policing the vote. DeSantis initially called for $5.7 million to fund an office employing a staff of 52, though by the time it landed on DeSantis’s desk the budget shrunk to an estimated $3.7 million. DeSantis pushed for the new law despite saying the state’s voting systems are secure and passed the test of the 2020 presidential election with “flying colors.” But DeSantis, alongside other Florida Republicans, has also invoked vague claims of widespread voter fraud to justify new restrictions on voting. Advocates for voting rights worry that an election police force will now crack down on voters in the name of investigating baseless claims. They say policing the elections process more heavily will further alienate Black and Latinx voters, who already face disproportionately high barriers to the ballot box because of previous voting restrictions passed by Florida Republicans. “It makes voting sound like something criminal,” Steven Lance, policy counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), told Bolts. “If you were looking for messaging to intimidate Black and brown voters without accountability, this is the kind of thing you’d want to use.”

The complaint came just one day before Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson announced that he’s stepping down.

NFTs have been a contentious topic around the internet, but big tech companies have been embracing them. It should come as no surprise that Instagram, a Meta company, will soon be incorporating NFTs. As reported by Engadget, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed at SXSW that NFTs would be coming to Instagram in the near future. He hinted that users would be able to bring in existing NFTs as well as mint new ones. Zuckerberg said, "I'm not ready to kind of announce exactly what that's going to be today. But over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in [will be added, and], hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment." Zuckerberg explained that NFTs would play a part in Meta's vision of the metaverse, saying, "I would hope that you know, the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the metaverse, you know, can be basically minted as an NFT and you can take it between your different places." However, he also mentioned that there were technical aspects that still needed to be worked on before the process would be seamless.

Marina Ovsyannikova, a Russian state television employee, burst onto the set of a live news show on Monday to denounce the invasion of Ukraine.

“I didn’t want to tell anybody at Disney because I didn’t want anyone to freak out," the "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" star said.

Ukrainian politics were full of conflict. Fist-fights in the Rada were common and protests were a fact of ordinary life. There were massive protests against Kuchma, for example, in 2000, when a recording surfaced of him apparently ordering the murder of the journalist Georgiy Gongadze, whose headless body had been found in the woods outside Kyiv.

The Oregon secretary of state’s office is calling for swift changes to a 99-year-old tax policy that auditors found benefits primarily white, wealthy homeowners in urban counties while leaving thousands of low-income, rural and Oregonians of color to fight for housing assistance. The state mortgage interest deduction, mirroring the version for federal income taxes, allows homeowners to deduct from their taxable income interest payments on mortgages up to $750,000, including mortgages on vacation homes. It’s Oregon’s largest housing subsidy, with an estimated cost of $1.1 billion to the state’s coffers this biennium. Auditors from Secretary of State Shemia Fagan’s office this month finished their first audit of the tax policy in its nearly century-long history in Oregon. They said they found the policy to disproportionately benefit seven counties, all considered urban by state definitions: Clackamas, Columbia, Deschutes, Multnomah, Washington and Yamhill. The audit also found that Black, Latino and Native American residents received disproportionately less benefit from the program than white Oregonians, and the top 1% of beneficiaries of the policy received more money back than the more than 700,000 Oregonians in the bottom 40% of people eligible for the tax benefit.

In the more than two weeks since Russia’s war began, two AP journalists have been the only international media present in Mariupol, chronicling its fall into chaos and despair.

A research team in the LSU Department of Biological Sciences led by Assistant Professor Adam Bohnert has published a landmark study linking greater metabolic health—achieved through a natural plant extract—with longer lifespans in C. elegans, commonly known as roundworms. Although worms and humans don’t appear to have much in common, the researchers say there is good reason to assume the results could be replicated in people, as the study builds on previous work on metabolic health in mice, conducted at LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center under Professor Jacqueline Stephens.

Close the blinds, draw the curtains and turn off all the lights before bed. Exposure to even moderate ambient lighting during nighttime sleep, compared to sleeping in a dimly lit room, harms your cardiovascular function during sleep and increases your insulin resistance the following morning, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study

Meta has repeatedly allowed -- and profited from -- ads pushing a false conspiracy theory about biolabs in Ukraine which has been linked to both Russian propaganda and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory. The ads, which have run on Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta, violate the platforms’ misinformation rules.

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The Belfry operation will provide between 5 and 10 full-time jobs, Rogers said, paying $23 an hour - nearly three times the minimum wage.

Documents show the trainer brought his personal high-powered weapons to the training, then nailed a student in the shin with a blank while he was trying to flee.

The Portland Police Association filed a grievance against the city following the March 1 termination of Portland Police Bureau Officer Brian Hunzeker, the former PPA president who resigned from the union nearly a year ago after he leaked information from a confidential incident report that incorrectly named Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty as a suspect in a hit-and-run crash. Through a public records request, WW obtained a copy Tuesday afternoon of the March 4 letter that PPA president Aaron Schmautz addressed to PPB Chief Chuck Lovell. “The discipline was not for just cause, is not supported by proven policy violations, is disproportionate to any offense committed by Grievant, is out of keeping with the standards of discipline in the Bureau, fails to take mitigating circumstances into account, violates the principles of progressive discipline, is untimely, and amounts to disparate treatment,” Schmautz said. “The City also failed to discipline Grievant in a manner least likely to embarrass Grievant before other officers or the public.” As for the requested remedy, Schmautz wrote the following: “That the discipline be rescinded; that all reference of this matter be removed from Grievant’s personnel files; that the Grievant be made whole for all lost wages and benefits, together with interest; and that such other relief be awarded as may be appropriate under the circumstances.”

The Tennessee Comptroller issued an unusual appeal last week to residents of this small, majority Black town, which occupies fewer than two square miles in rural west Tennessee. “In my opinion, it’s time for Mason to relinquish its charter,” Comptroller Jason Mumpower wrote in a letter mailed to each one of Mason’s 1,337 property owners. Mumpower urged local residents to “encourage your local officials to do what’s necessary to allow Mason to thrive. There is no time to waste.” State comptrollers, responsible for financial oversight of local government, typically communicate directly with elected local leaders and not their constituents. “We have not issued a letter to citizens like this before,” Comptroller spokesman John Dunn said, noting it is “unprecedented for us to publicly call for a town charter to be relinquished.” But the Comptroller’s unprecedented public callout comes at an unprecedented time not only for Mason, but for the state. Mason, located in the southeastern corner of Tipton County, now finds itself with some of the most coveted real estate in Tennessee. It’s one of the nearest towns to the massive new site to be built for Blue Oval City, a key component in Ford Motor Co’s multibillion-dollar pivot to electric vehicle manufacturing. Newly-elected Tennessee Comptroller Jason Mumpower. Mumpower’s letter has infuriated Mason’s part-time elected officials, who insist they have no intention of ceding their town’s 153-year-old charter – which would subsume the largely African-American, majority Democratic community under the governance of Tipton County, which is predominantly white and Republican.

Evdokia Nikolova filed a federal lawsuit in September 2019 alleging that UT denied her tenure because she was pregnant.

Popular Patreon creators are being hit with unexpected Vimeo price hikes as Vimeo shifts corporate strategy.

Who was Thomas Buchler, the late creator of beloved Torah program 'TropeTrainer'? And can anything be done to revive his life’s work?

The U.S. Senate on Tuesday passed legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent starting in 2023, ending the twice-annual changing of clocks in a move promoted by supporters advocating brighter afternoons and more economic activity.