To call the Republican supermajority of the Tennessee General Assembly extremist is merely to state a fact. These legislators have refused to expand Medicaid, a decision that is opposed by 63 percent of Tennesseans. They are considering a bill that would allow people to carry a gun without a permit, though a new poll shows that 93 percent of recent Tennessee voters support permit requirements. The General Assembly has also just reappointed a secretary of state who opposes expanding access to absentee ballots, never mind that Tennesseans shattered records by taking advantage of temporary absentee voting options during the pandemic. It almost seems like Republican legislators don’t care what their constituents want. In at least one respect, however, the General Assembly is in lock step with the rest of us: We love Dolly Parton, and our lawmakers love her, too. John Mark Windle, a Democrat from Livingston, is sponsoring a bill to erect a statue of Dolly Parton on the Capitol grounds at a site that faces the Ryman Auditorium, known here as the Mother Church of Country Music. “She accepts everyone. She’s nonjudgmental,” Mr. Windle said. “She is the example of what I think a Christian ought to be.”

Basically, Texas has its own grid to avoid dealing with — you guessed it — the feds. But grid independence has been violated a few times over the years — not even counting Mexico's help during last week's blackouts.

Republican lawmakers want to ban trans girls from sports, and here's how they're going to enforce it...

A controversial project returns under new leadership, but there's every reason to be skeptical of its vision.

Researchers only drilled through an Antarctic ice shelf to sample sediment. Instead, they found animals that weren't supposed to be there.

Three months after the Trump administration rejected her, former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is set to receive unanimous backing on Monday to become the first woman and first African director-general of the World Trade Organization.

A review of thousands of emails obtained by Spotlight PA reveals the program was doomed to fail from the start, depriving desperate tenants of relief as they lived in fear of losing their homes.

Hundreds of thousands of Texans are without power early Monday as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the agency that oversees the state’s power grid, initiated rotating outages after declaring that the state had reached emergency conditions amid extreme weather conditions. The outages began at 1:25 a.m. Monday, ERCOT said in a press release. At its highest point, the agency said it removed 10,500 megawatts of power from the load — enough to power about two million homes. There is now more than 30,000 megawatts of generation that has been forced off the system. The outages are controlled, temporary interruptions of electrical service that rotate through different parts of the electric grid.

Americans' post-election sentiments, beliefs in conspiracies, attitudes toward political violence, political segregation, and feelings toward the US. Political conspiracy theories, including QAnon, have not disappeared after Trump’s defeat, and a significant number of Americans condone the use of violence in the face of political failures. At the same time, most Americans remain committed to the idea that the US is special and unique, even as pride in the country has fallen.

Los Angeles residentLen Martin was convinced Tessica Brown of Louisiana was lying or exaggerating about Gorilla Glued, and tried the Gorilla Glue Challenge.

We tracked how six men associated with the far-right Oath Keepers went from providing security for Roger Stone to participating in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

There is often talk of teaching people “critical thinking” thinking skills, and that’s certainly something worth doing. A mistake, though, is to think that such critical thinking skills are independent of knowledge: that there is a recipe, or a way of interrogating conclusions, that can turn into “critical thinking.” In reality, the process by itself isn’t where the magic happens.

Huwe Burton was wrongly convicted because of deceptive interrogation techniques. How many more cases were “solved” the same way?

This is a bizarre movie, one that parades confused ideas about care, fantasy and disability with a pride that reads as vanity. It is audacious, in the sense that making it certainly took some audacity.

Hours before a predicted historic winter storm is set to hit Tulsa, Okla., the City of Tulsa and members of the Tulsa Fire Department descended on the well-known Maybelle Encampment to uproot the unsuspecting community. When The Black Wall Street Times arrived on scene, city grappling trucks were nearly done removing a large pile of donated chopped wood from the edge of the camp.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — For weeks after he opened a daytime shelter for the homeless, Jae Bennett was fairly rigid about the building’s 37-person capacity. The last thing he wanted was for a lapse in social distancing to cause the deadly coronavirus to spread among a population in which many people were in frail health. But then temperatures in Kansas City, Missouri, plunged into the single digits a little more than a week ago and stayed there, the coldest arctic blast of the season. And Bennett looked into the eyes of people waiting outside because the squat, brown building was full. “I said, ‘Screw it, just come in,’” said Bennett, who founded a nonprofit organization, Street Medicine Kansas City, six years ago. “What’s the option? Follow the health code for COVID, or put them in the cold and let them die?” Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New...

Scientists from the University of California San Diego have inserted Neanderthal DNA into clusters of human brain tissue. Their work could shed light on how our brains evolved and how they differ from those of ancient human ancestors.

Here’s what it’s like to lose the person who raised you to a far-right cult.

It was well below zero on a February night nearly 100 years ago when 175 members of the Industrial Workers of the World rallied in the streets of Greenville following a clash with the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan. Twenty-one-year-old union leader Bob Pease, of Bangor, told the Portland Press Herald the IWW had come to organize the loggers. But the hooded vigilantes had been “bought” by local merchants and lumber interests to violently remove the Wobblies, threatening them with “stake and torch.” “We are going to stick,” Pease told the Press Herald, “and if the Klan starts anything, the I.W.W. will finish it. The slave drivers, the Great Northern Paper Company and Hollingsworth and Whitney people do not want us here, but we are too strong for them.” “Why are they against you?” the reporter asked. “Because we want good wages, eight hours a day in the lumber camps and clean linen on our bunks,” replied Pease. “The day of the old logging camp and the lumberjacks is about over with.” The disturbance began after 40 Klansmen marched to a boarding house where union organizers were lodging and demanded they immediately leave town, or they’d be forced out. The next night, Sheriff Roscoe Macomber had a guard posted at the house to protect the Wobblies. He instructed his deputies to arrest anyone starting trouble.

On a cold April morning in 1919, hours before sunrise, three white University of Maine freshmen broke into the dorm room of two African-American brothers named Roger and Samuel Courtney in an attempt to “haze” the two students. Around 60 other white students gathered in front of Hannibal Hamlin Hall, on the Orono campus, waiting for their classmates to deliver the Courtneys to the mob. There are varying accounts of what happened next, but the Chicago Defender reported that the Black students “refused to submit to humiliation” and knocked the three assailants out cold. The brothers then escaped down a rope ladder and fled the town. Shortly thereafter, the white students discovered their unconscious classmates and flew into a rage. The mob quickly grew to several hundred men from all classes — including at least one faculty member, according to one account — and broke into groups to search the Bangor area for the two young men.