The omnibus voting, ethics and campaign finance bill would roll back barriers to voting enacted by Republican statehouses, but it faces an uphill battle in the Senate.

Alek Minassian, who has admitted killing 10 and injuring 16 others, claims he is not criminally responsible because of his mental state at the time.

Dozens of congresspeople are pressing Vice President Kamala Harris to ignore the Senate parliamentarian and fulfill her $15 minimum wage promise. The Biden administration has no one to blame but themselves for inaction.

Two years ago, the city of Stockton, California, did something remarkable: It brought back welfare. Using donated funds, the industrial city on the edge of the Bay Area tech economy launched a small demonstration program, sending payments of $500 a month to 125 randomly selected individuals living in neighborhoods with average incomes lower than the city median of $46,000 a year. The recipients were allowed to spend the money however they saw fit, and they were not obligated to complete any drug tests, interviews, means or asset tests, or work requirements. They just got the money, no strings attached. These kinds of cash transfers are a common, highly effective method of poverty alleviation used all over the world, in low-income and high-income countries, in rural areas and cities, and particularly for households with children. But not in the United States. The U.S. spends less of its GDP on what are known as “family benefits” than any other country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, save Turkey. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program spends less than one-fifth of its budget on direct cash aid, and its funding has been stuck at the same dollar amount since 1996—when the Clinton administration teamed up with congressional Republicans to turn it into a compulsory-work program. Those changes sliced into the safety net, allowing millions of people to fall through.

A New Jersey man has been charged with criminal mischief after police say he took a power tool to a sacrificial stone tablet at America’s Stonehenge in Salem in 2019

As Florida’s eldest residents struggled to sign up to receive their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, nearly all those aged 65 years and older in a wealthy gated enclave in the Florida Keys had been vaccinated by mid-January, according to an emailed newsletter obtained by the Miami Herald. The management of Ocean Reef Club, located in north Key Largo, also acknowledged in the Jan. 22 message to residents that the rest of the state was grappling to get its hands on the vaccine. Ocean Reef Club is an ultra-exclusive neighborhood that is arguably one of the highest-security private communities in the nation. According to Sotheby’s International Realty, it has more than 2,100 members who live there either full or part time. It is also where the very wealthy and where dignitaries, including President Joseph Biden, come to stay when they visit the Florida Keys. Republican donors live there It’s also home to many wealthy donors to the Florida Republican Party and GOP candidates, including Gov. Ron DeSantis. In fact, the only people from Key Largo who gave to DeSantis’ political committee live in Ocean Reef. All 17 of them had given the governor contributions of $5,000 each through December 2020, according to the Florida Division of Elections. But on Feb. 25, one resident of Ocean Reef, Bruce Rauner, the former Republican governor of Illinois and former chairman of the Chicago-based private equity firm GTCR, increased his contribution and wrote a $250,000 check. Since DeSantis started using the state’s vaccine initiative to steer special pop-up vaccinations to select communities, his political committee has raised $2.7 million in the month of February alone, more than any other month since he first ran for governor in 2018, records show.

How “computer girls” gave way to tech bros

The New York Times columnist has been using his perch to promote the Weave Project — without disclosing his potential conflicts of interest to his readers.

The football players said the athletics officials, in a meeting with the players after the Oklahoma game, referenced emails from donors who said the protests could impact their job prospects after graduating.

The band’s revolutionary tokens will unlock special perks like limited-edition vinyl and front row seats to future concerts

Curtis, Kolenda and all other Afghanistan observers agree on a basic fact, if not its implications. The Taliban, which kept up attacks on Afghan forces after signing the U.S. accord, have put themselves in place for a massive offensive that the U.S., its allies and the Afghanistan government may not be able to repel. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that the Taliban have closed in on several of Afghanistan’s major cities and control the vital roads to many of them. Whatever Doha envisioned for a Taliban-Afghanistan government path to reconciliation, this is not that. The Taliban, having functionally defeated the U.S. at war, now appear on the horizon of outright victory. “They’re in position for a major offensive. That offensive will include mass-casualty attacks on Americans if we miss the deadline,” said Barnett Rubin, another longtime Afghanistan adviser to the U.S. and the United Nations. “They might be prepared to extend, but if we unilaterally say we’re not satisfied with you so we’re not leaving, that’s what they’ll do. And the muscle memory of the U.S. government is to do that.” Kolenda and other longtime Afghanistan observers argue that attempting to defer the pullout will have precisely the violent effect that Curtis and her side argues will follow the pullout. The Taliban, they argue, would likely see that the U.S. cannot be trusted to keep its word—friction between Washington and Kabul in 2012 doomed an earlier peace process in its infancy—ending any hope of a negotiated end to the war, to say nothing of a secure departure for the remaining U.S. troop presence. “If you’re the Biden administration, would you rather depart as agreed in a safe, orderly manner while leaning into a peace process, or would you prefer the optics of C-17s screaming out of Bagram on the heels of a Taliban offensive like Saigon 1975?” Kolenda said. “I don’t hear the stay-forever crowd talking about the possibility of a humiliating exit.”

Paul N. Miller, who’s amassed more than 40,000 followers on Telegram, was arrested in Florida early Tuesday. Some of his followers fear they could be next.

DEA officials learned Ibrahim had been outside the Capitol after he sent photographs from his phone to a group chat of fellow agents. The agency took his weapons and credentials while it decides how to proceed.

They can’t swim. But artificial mouse cells that resemble nearly mature sperm are the best test-tube sperm cells yet, meeting the elusive gold standard set in 2014. The cells resemble spermatids, the round cells that mature to form the familiar tailed sperm. Generated from embryonic stem cells, Jiahao Sha of Nanjing Medical University in China and his team have shown that, when injected using a method used in some forms of IVF, these cells can fertilise mouse eggs, and go on to produce pups that themselves grow up to be fertile.

Probably not, but Capitol Police don't intend to be caught flat-footed again.

The plan would phase out the $1,400 payments faster for higher-income individuals after moderate Senate Democrats pushed for more “targeted” spending. The change comes as the Senate prepares to move forward with an initial procedural vote on President Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief bill.

New data is confirming a baby boom that some doctors expected was actually a "baby bust." Health departments in more than two dozen states provided records to CBS News, showing a 7% drop in births in December — nine months after the first lockdowns began. Researchers say it continues a much bigger plunge in fertility in recent decades. The number of babies the average woman in the U.S. is expected to deliver has dropped from nearly four in the 1950s to less than two today. The drop could present an entirely different risk to society than one that was first warned about decades ago — when an apocalyptic fear gripped America in the 1960s and 1970s... "We need to have enough working-age people to carry the load of these seniors, who deserve their retirement, they deserve all their entitlements, and they're gonna live out another 30 years," he said. "Nobody in the history of the globe has had so many older people to deal with."

In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan surprised the world when he called upon American scientists to use their talents to render ballistic missiles “impotent and obsolete.” His speech would lead to the establishment of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derisively called “Star Wars.” It grew into a $30 billion effort to explore the technologies required for a multi-layered missile defense system with land, sea, air, and space-based interceptors. While SDI looms large in Cold War political histories, very little has been actually written about the system itself and how it evolved over time. Even less has been written about the involvement of foreign countries in SDI research and development.[1] Of all the foreign participants, the United Kingdom was the most significant in terms of its political value for the Untied States and its access to highly classified areas of SDI research.

A homeowner on Prospect Street put up massive sculptures of Optimus Prime and Bumblebee outside his home in January, fascinating children while angering neighbors who say they don't comport with the neighborhood's historic character.

A new test of cephalopod smarts has reinforced how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence. Cuttlefish have been put to a new version of the marshmallow test, and the results appear to demonstrate that there's more going on in their strange little brains than we knew. Their ability to learn and adapt, the researchers said, could have evolved to give cuttlefish an edge in the cutthroat eat-or-be-eaten marine world they live in. The marshmallow test, or Stanford marshmallow experiment, is pretty straightforward. A child is placed in a room with a marshmallow. They are told if they can manage not to eat the marshmallow for 15 minutes, they'll get a second marshmallow, and be allowed to eat both. This ability to delay gratification demonstrates cognitive abilities such as future planning, and it was originally conducted to study how human cognition develops; specifically, at what age a human is smart enough to delay gratification if it means a better outcome later.