For the first time in the city’s history, Mayor de Blasio announced Tuesday that the new mental health professionals and crisis workers will be the dispatched through 911, instead of the NYPD, to respond to mental health emergencies in two high-need communities -- calling the pilot program a "major innovation." According to the mayor, the ongoing pandemic "pointed out such horrible disparities that we have to address but it also brought issues to the fore in a new way and nowhere is that more true than on the topic of mental health." “One in five New Yorkers struggle with a mental health condition. Now, more than ever, we must do everything we can to reach those people before crisis strikes,” de Blasio said. “For the first time in our city’s history, health responders will be the default responders for a person in crisis, making sure those struggling with mental illness receive the help they need.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has rejected criticism of remarks he made Tuesday in which he said that the State Department would ensure "a smooth transition to a second Trump administration."

The far-right Proud Boys gang has long denied that it is a white nationalist organization and has instead claimed that it only exists to defend “Western Civilization.” However, Newsweek reports that some members of the group are ready to openly embrace being a racist organization and are dropping any pretenses of wanting support of non-white people. The civil war within the Proud Boys started when Kyle Chapman, the founder of the Proud Boys’ so-called “tactical defense arm,” sent out a message to supporters that he no longer wanted to pretend that he wasn’t a white nationalist.

A white politician named Dean Browning tweeted that he was "Black and gay," leading many to believe he posted on the wrong account. Suddenly, Patti LaBelle's son is involved.

If you’re eating a blue corn tortilla in Los Angeles and you’re not at a fancy Mexican restaurant, chances are that it is just a regular white corn tortilla dyed blue with artificial food coloring.

The Alabama Attorney General’s Office on Monday released new details in the indictment of Lee County District Attorney Brandon Hughes on ethics charges. Hughes, 46, is the district attorney for the 37th Judicial Circuit of Alabama. He surrendered Sunday evening to the Lee County Jail on ethics, theft, and perjury charges. The 46-year-old was indicted by a Lee County special grand jury, which charged him with violating the state ethics act, conspiracy to commit first-degree theft, and first-degree perjury. Hughes was indicted on five counts of violating the state ethics act for using his office for personal gain, including paying private attorneys with public funds to settle a matter that benefited himself and his wife, according to the AG’s office. He was also charged with the illegal hiring of his three children to work for the Lee County District Attorney’s Office. Finally, Hughes was charged with illegally using the authority of his office for his personal benefit by issuing a district attorney’s subpoena to a private business to gather evidence for his defense to potential criminal charges. In addition to the charges regarding violations of the state ethics act, Hughes was charged with conspiring to steal a pickup truck. That count of the indictment alleges that Hughes and others agreed to steal the truck from a business located in Chambers County, and that they carried out the plan by taking a Lee County search warrant into Chambers County and using it to force the business to release lawful possession of a 1985 Ford Ranger.

The firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper kicked off a rapid-fire series of high-level departures at the Pentagon on Tuesday, setting off alarms on Capitol Hill that the White House was installing loyalists to carry out President Donald Trump’s wishes during an already tense transition.

How pizza won the pandemic—and Sweetgreen got left behind

An odd little narrative sprung up around this malevolence, postulating that journalists had condescendingly told coal miners who had lost their jobs to “learn to code.” The scant evidence for this quickly debunked narrative was a collage of several articles covering programs to retrain jobless former coal miners in the rudiments of coding, and bipartisan job-training efforts. But as with “ethics in games journalism,” the narrative was just a means to deflect attention from the ultimate goal of adding distress to a terrible week for journalists.

Members of the far-right Proud Boys groups have been injured in a knife attack in Washington, D.C., according to reports. One of the victims is alleged to be Enrique Tarrio, chairman of the group. Activist Bevelyn Beatty is also said to have been stabbed.

Authorities pushing the order backtracked on Monday and conceded they could not legally order the killing of the animals outside areas considered to be high-risk.

Russian lawmakers want Putin to take advantage of Trump in the remaining weeks he’s in office.

Draft legislation puts specifics behind Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pledge to crack down on “violent and disorderly assemblies” in response to police-brutality protests.

A Pennsylvania postal worker whose claims have been cited by top Republicans as potential evidence of widespread voting irregularities recanted to U.S. Postal Service investigators.

Deputy Maricopa County Attorney Tom Liddy, son of chief Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, told a judge on Monday the 45th president’s entire theory was bunk and unsupported by the data culled from the voting machines themselves. “There were 155,860 votes voted in person on Election Day,” Liddy said, referring to the Maricopa County numbers. “Of those, the tabulator only identified 180 potential overvotes on the presidential line … 180, that’s it.”

Mike Pelley, aka Merman Mike, takes YouTube requests to recover cameras and wedding rings in the water near Sacramento. He does it all for free — and his success rate is shocking

Love it or hate it, a viral video about the election, based on a certain Marvel movie scene, might be a defining image of our quar-brained culture.

Pollsters thought they had learned from the errors of 2016. It’s possible that they did, and that this election reflects new problems.

At a Supreme Court argument Tuesday, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh suggested that striking down one provision would not doom the balance of the law.

If Donald Trump won it was always going to be because a critical number of Americans, scattered just so across an electoral geography explicitly rigged to give them minority power over everyone else, prized his particular variety of asinine worthlessness. It would not have been because that asinine worthlessness amounts to a kind of brilliance. He’s a fucking moron. The people around him are fucking morons. The temptation is to say something would-be backhanded like, “The only thing they are good at is enriching themselves,” but that would be a fairly straightforward compliment in a society as broken as America’s, and anyway, more importantly, it isn’t true. They are bad at that. They are bad at everything. What a white person of means in America does, or can get away with, is to merely continue existing, as flabbily and with as little industry or self-examination as possible, and America takes care of the rest. Not to put too fine a point on it, but, well, that was the whole idea. Who knows what the verdict of history will be. The verdict of history was that Andrew Jackson belonged on the $20 bill. What it should be is that a society fitfully engaged in the long-term pursuit of equity and, at the very least, a certain disappointing boardroom diversity elected and then re-elected a black president. Then, in a spasm of reactionary grievance, a coalition of white bigots set out on a mission not only to restore an avatar of white manhood to the White House, but to prove to itself that it could elect the single most venal, most worthless, most flagrantly unqualified shit-for-brains failson imaginable to the highest possible office in the land. It needed to prove that it could not only elect him but then sneeringly, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, insist not only on his personal greatness, but that he was succeeding and winning at all times. This outcome would only deliver the desired fix if he were just an absolute shit-pile, if the only credible explanation for his election were that the arbitrary will of reactionary white people, alone, in the total absence of any justifying qualities of his person or his record, had selected him for no good reason at all. If he could be, in every conceivable way, the opposite of what a standard-issue milquetoast liberal meritocrat would look for in a president, and in no way anything else. He would have to be a fucking moron, is the thing, and surrounded by fucking morons. That way his ascendancy to the White House could not be attributed to him, but rather and entirely to the cross-section of white-identity voters who’d organized for the purpose of demonstrating their supremacy to themselves. The idea here is to think about what specifically you were afraid of. When it came time to execute precisely the invalidation of the electoral process for which the right had spent months preparing, it amounted to Trump’s campaign manager, son-in-law, and various inept lawyers crying that it’s not faaaaaair to say that somebody else has more votes than Donald Trump. It amounted to sending Rudy Giuliani to a landscaping company’s parking lot to tiredly free-associate some bullshit about how he heard there was one guy who wasn’t allowed to stand as close to the ballot-counters as he’d have liked, and this amounted to a massive left-wing conspiracy to steal the election. It amounted to some storefront loser lawyer in a banker’s collar trying not to cry while a judge in Michigan drop-kicked the Trump campaign’s nuisance lawsuit into the trash. It’s important to note that all of this is happening within systems designed by and for men broadly like these. Their ineptitude and amateurism is astounding, even relative to their dopey inbred class. Mitch McConnell is not some sinister genius. He is a guy who knows how to use tools and operate within systems literally made for guys like him. Next to Donald Trump and the assbrains he thus far has entrusted with the effort to preserve his presidency, that is enough to make McConnell an essentially supernatural figure. Because they are fucking morons! I have been having a series of “Oh, right, these people are morons” realizations since this past Tuesday. Or a more acute series of them, amid a longer one stretching back to 2016. These are, after all, the people whose early attempts at legislating via executive order collapsed when it became clear that their Dark Lord of Strategy, Steve Bannon, had no idea how to write a legally upstanding executive order; whose attempts at repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, a key campaign promise for literally every Republican, collapsed after a little over two weeks of negotiating with a then-friendly House and Senate; who airballed point-blank layups on infrastructure and pandemic relief; who are now living through the second COVID-19 outbreak inside the White House just in the past six weeks. They’re malign, sure, but they are not special in their malignity. They are special in their incompetence. The chronic fear that comes from knowing you live in a country that elected a serially bankrupt charlatan from reality TV to be its head of state never goes away. But this feels nice, anyway. I have been high on schadenfreude and relief since the incoming results made clear that however long it took, the vote counts eventually would deliver at least a declaration of victory to the people who’d organized and mobilized toward the ending of this awful presidency. That high has only gotten stronger since Trump’s elite guard of addled penny-ante divorce aficionados sprang into comical, feeble, immediately self-defeating action. Since it started to look like the election results might finally and for all time dispel the poisonous hashtag-resistance liberal fantasy of Donald Trump as some cunning mastermind capable of elaborate devious schemes. The world is a wreck, but the hope persists that we might all at least inhabit the same one someday. These people are morons. Right there where everybody can see it. It’s a start. Albert Burneko