“I’ve had strange cars driving back and forth past my house. I get threatening messages from people saying they’re watching me. “They followed my family to the park and took pictures of my kids. How insane is that? “I know it’s my job to be out front talking about the importance of public health — educating people, keeping them safe. Now it kind of scares me. “The police here have been really great. The elementary school says they’re watching over my kids and they’re on high alert. I have a security system now at my house. “I locked down my email and took all my family photos off of Facebook, but you start wondering: Is this worth it? Could anything possibly be worth it? “I don’t go out in public very much anymore. It’s work and then back home. I don’t want to be recognized. I don’t want my kids to see any of that hate. “The one place where I had to draw the line was that my son plays baseball, and honestly, his games are the most normal I’ve felt all year. “But then, a little while ago, somebody took a photo at a game of me with my daughter. We were outside and social-distanced, so we weren’t wearing masks. “The photo got posted all over social media, and it was the usual comments. Bitch. Communist. Hypocrite.” – Missouri health official Amber Elliot, who resigned yesterday.

Federal appeals court Judge Merrick Garland is under consideration to serve as attorney general in the administration of President-elect Joe Biden, NPR has learned from two people closely following the process. Garland, 68, is the widely respected former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He launched his career at the Justice Department decades ago. Garland oversaw the prosecution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and gained significant management experience inside the sprawling department in the 1990s. More recently, Garland was nominated to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court by President Barack Obama, to fill the seat vacated by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

President Donald Trump is down in the dumps. As he gradually comes to term with election defeat, Fox News correspondent-at-large Geraldo Rivera has come up with a bright idea to cheer him up. Speaking on Friday morning’s Fox & Friends, Rivera suggested naming the COVID-19 vaccine after Trump so he doesn’t feel so bad about himself. Rivera said: “With the world so divided and everybody telling him he’s got to give up and it’s time to leave and time to transition and all the rest of it, why not name the vaccine ‘The Trump?’ Make it like, ‘Have you gotten your Trump yet?’ It would be a nice gesture to him, and, years from now, it would become just a kind of generic name.” Last week, Trump wrongly claimed full credit for Pfizer’s announcement that its COVID-19 vaccine was effective—it fact, the drug marker did not accept government money for the project.

...In recent weeks, FBI agents in New York contacted witnesses and asked new questions about Giuliani's efforts in Ukraine and possible connections to Russian intelligence, according to a person briefed on the matter. The FBI investigators, who have spoken to at least one witness previously months ago, came back to ask new questions recently about possible origins of emails and documents related to Hunter Biden that appear similar to those that the New York Post reported that Giuliani and others helped provide. CNN has previously reported that the ongoing probe is examining whether Giuliani is wittingly or unwittingly part of a Russian influence operation, according to people briefed on the matter.

Shawn Parcells made national news in 2014 after he helped with the private autopsy of Michael Brown, who was killed by a Ferguson police officer.

The president’s push to prevent states from certifying electors and get legislators to override voters’ will eclipses even the bitter 1876 election as an audacious use of brute political force.

Police have arrested a man suspected of sexually-motivated murder and cannibalism after a victim's bones were found in a park in northern Berlin. Forensic experts determined that the bones were the remains of a 44-year-old man who went missing two months ago. Sniffer dogs led police to the suspect's Berlin apartment, German media reported. He is reported to be a 41-year-old maths teacher. People strolling in the park in Buch found the bones on 8 November. A policeman told the Berlin daily BZ that one bone was "totally devoid of flesh" and there were other indications "which make us strongly suspect that Stefan T was the victim of a cannibal". The suspected killer - named only as Stefan R - had visited "relevant internet chatrooms", Germany's DPA news agency reported. It is customary under German privacy laws not to reveal surnames in police investigations.

To combat the awfulness of 2020, many people are decorating their homes for the holidays early this year—turning their living rooms into winter wonderlands. This is a story about a home that decided to go all in on that concept.

When Trump won the 2016 election—while losing the popular vote—the New York Times seemed obsessed with running features about what Trump voters were feeling and thinking. These pieces treated them as both an exotic species and people it was our job to understand, understand being that word that means both to comprehend and to grant some sort of indulgence to. Now that Trump has lost the 2020 election, the Los Angeles Times has given their editorial page over to letters from Trump voters, who had exactly the sort of predictable things to say we have been hearing for far more than four years, thanks to the New York Times and what came to seem like about 11,000 other news outlets hanging on the every word of every white supremacist they could convince to go on the record. The letters editor headed this section with, “In my decade editing this page, there has never been a period when quarreling readers have seemed so implacably at odds with each other, as if they get their facts and values from different universes. As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters.” The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that. Paul Waldman wrote a valuable column in the Washington Post a few years ago, in which he pointed out that this discord is valuable fuel to right-wing operatives: “The assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow. This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive.” He notes that the sense of being disrespected “doesn’t come from the policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and it doesn’t come from the things Democratic politicians say. Where does it come from? An entire industry that’s devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them. The right has a gigantic media apparatus that is devoted to convincing people that liberals disrespect them, plus a political party whose leaders all understand that that idea is key to their political project and so join in the chorus at every opportunity.” There’s also often a devil’s bargain buried in all this, that you flatter and, yeah, respect these white people who think this country is theirs by throwing other people under the bus—by disrespecting immigrants and queer people and feminists and their rights and views. And you reinforce that constituency’s sense that they matter more than other people when you pander like this, and pretty much all the problems we’ve faced over the past four years, to say nothing of the last five hundred, come from this sense of white people being more important than nonwhites, Christians than non-Christians, native-born than immigrant, male than female, straight than queer, cis-gender than trans.

The science left a sliver of doubt when the question went viral earlier this year, so I decided to run one final experiment

Here’s the problem: the townships and precincts listed in paragraphs 11 and 17 of the affidavit are not in Michigan. They are in Minnesota. Monticello, Albertville, Lake Lillian, Houston, Brownsville, Runeberg, Wolf Lake, Height of Land, Detroit Lakes, Frazee, Kandiyohi–these are all towns in Minnesota. I haven’t checked them all, but I checked a lot of them, and all locations listed in paragraphs 11 and 17 that I looked up are in Minnesota, with no corresponding township in Michigan. This would have been obvious to someone from this state, but Mr. Ramsland is a Texan and the lawyers are probably not natives of either Minnesota or Michigan.

The embattled royal’s friendship with financier David Rowland lent cachet to Banque Havilland.

The living legend on his life, legacy, and Motown.

At first, President Donald Trump's refusal to concede an election he clearly lost appeared to many of his allies a temporary stage of grief. Give it a few days, some shrugged. A week, tops. Now, thirteen days have passed since Joe Biden was declared the President-elect.

I’ve always been very partial to the whole genre of Moog music. Late 60s and early 70s Moog records sound like white molded plastic chairs look. Fifty years on and those albums still sound futuristic. And totally artificial. To my mind, the sound of analog synthesizers make the perfect soundtrack for one’s aesthetic life, or at least mine. No really, if I go into a record store that has a selection of vintage Moog and exotica albums, I’m drawn to that first. It’s not like there’s many Moog albums I don’t already have,but hope springs eternal that I will find a “Switched On” something or other that I didn’t know existed. My Moog bonafides are deep. Given an opportunity to do a compilation via Sony 20 years ago, I pitched a CD titled Best of Moog and they went for it. (Sadly six of what I considered absolute must-have key...

by Erin Brockovich The president-elect has tapped a former DuPont consultant to join his Environmental Protection Agency transition board

Rudy Giuliani started quoting My Cousin Vinny at a press conference today as hair dye leaked through his sweat, forcing the film's director to respond.

What is Barack Obama Book? As Nelson tweeted, it’s not a book, exactly. It’s an SEO ploy by a shadowy company that has scores of $2.99 knockoffs ready to be downloaded, from quickie biographies of au courant figures like Obama, Harris, and Dolly Parton, to obvious bestseller ripoffs like Caste: A Brief History and Ready Player 3, 2, 1: A Brief History (?). But it’s also not not a book, in the sense that it is words on pages, bound by covers or delivered to your Kindle. I know, because I read every word on every page of Barack Obama Book. It took about 20 minutes. I don’t think Barack Obama Book was written by a human being, but I do think the AI that excreted it made some decent points about Barack Obama.

Following a review of engineering assessments that found damage to the Arecibo Observatory cannot be stabilized without risk to construction workers and staff at the facility, the U.S. National Science Foundation will begin plans to decommission the 305-meter telescope, which for 57 years has served as a world-class resource for radio astronomy, planetary, solar system and geospace research. The decision comes after NSF evaluated multiple assessments by independent engineering companies that found the telescope structure is in danger of a catastrophic failure and its cables may no longer be capable of carrying the loads they were designed to support. Furthermore, several assessments stated that any attempts at repairs could put workers in potentially life-threatening danger. Even in the event of repairs going forward, engineers found that the structure would likely present long-term stability issues. "NSF prioritizes the safety of workers, Arecibo Observatory’s staff and visitors, which makes this decision necessary, although unfortunate," said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. "For nearly six decades, the Arecibo Observatory has served as a beacon for breakthrough science and what a partnership with a community can look like. While this is a profound change, we will be looking for ways to assist the scientific community and maintain that strong relationship with the people of Puerto Rico."

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