he campaign to bring ranked choice voting to Massachusetts seemed like it had a lot going for it: endorsements from the deep-blue state’s top elected Democrats, an enthusiastic base of support, a roughly 3,000-to-1 fundraising advantage over a last-minute opposition campaign. Pre-election polls even showed the ballot measure, Question 2, with a slight lead. But when it came down to it Tuesday, the initiative more than a year-and-a-half in the making could not overcome public skepticism about overhauling the state’s elections at a time when voting — and, perhaps more importantly, campaigns — across the country had been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. With nearly 99 percent of precincts reporting, the measure was rejected by a margin of 55 percent to 45 percent. “The idea behind it is a reasonable idea, but it’s complex, and many voters didn’t really grasp what it would mean for them,” Secretary of State Bill Galvin said at a press conference Wednesday, adding that the fact Massachusetts voters already had to learn about the expansions of early and mail-in voting this year probably didn’t help Question 2’s cause.

In 2019, a group of right-wing political operatives promoted a fundraising website to build a section of border wall, and the site later became the subject of a money-laundering investigation. Now those same operatives are behind a Facebook group dedicated to delegitimizing election results that don't favor President Trump, which went viral Thursday. On Thursday afternoon, Facebook took down the page, called “Stop The Steal.” As members of the group repeatedly called for violence and a civil war, leading to turmoil inside Facebook, the group expanded at a rapid pace Thursday morning, topping out at about 350,000 profiles. The group pointed users to organized events, including one in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Thursday afternoon with a “#StopTheSteal” branding. Facebook initially barred the group from appearing in searches involving the election, and even direct searches for “stop the steal,” but members of pro-Trump Facebook groups, as well as other social media networks and email lists, drove users directly to the Facebook group’s URL. Citing repeated “worrying calls for violence,” Facebook pulled down the group by 2 p.m. ET.

Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), Russia’s greatest comic writer, thoroughly baffled his contemporaries. Strange, peculiar, wacky, weird, bizarre, and other words indicating enigmatic oddity recur in descriptions of him. “What an intelligent, queer, and sick creature!” remarked Turgenev; another major prose writer, Sergey Aksakov, referred to the “unintelligible strangeness of his spirit.” When Gogol died, the poet Pyotr Vyazemsky sighed, “Your life was an enigma, so is today your death.”

Esper also plans to help Congress draft legislation to strip military bases of Confederate names, which could further alienate him from Trump.

Many of us recall the famous selective attention experiment, where subjects watch a clip of students passing a basketball to each other [3, 4]. If you have not seen it, we recommend watching it before continuing to read [5]. As you watch the two teams in action, your task is to count the number of passes made by the team in white. About halfway through, a person dressed up as a gorilla enters the foreground. The gorilla pauses in the center, pounding its chest with its fists, before exiting to the opposite side of the frame. Surprisingly, half of us completely miss the gorilla, as we are focused on counting passes, even though hardly anyone overlooks it when simply watching the clip without the assignment.

There's a lot of blame to go around, but two of the main problems are clear: Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.

“Nothing blossomed romantically,” says Oliver. “But our principles for raising a child were the same – fun and spontaneity; not too indulgent; education was important. It felt straightforward. Kate takes me as I am. She is compromising, undemanding and easy to deal with.”

She cited a government report which said the mutated virus had been found to weaken the body's ability to form antibodies, potentially making the current vaccines under development for Covid-19 ineffective.

Mississippi has voted to end a Jim Crow-era constitutional provision intended to dilute the Black vote and ensure white voters would be able to choose governors and other statewide officials. It created an electoral college-like system requiring candidates for statewide office to win, not only the popular vote, but also a majority of Mississippi House districts.

The Fox News decision left the president fuming, and his team complaining. Then he began casting aspersions on other states’ vote counts.

A team of researchers led by Osaka University and National Taiwan University created a system of nanoscale silicon resonators that can act as logic gates for light pulses. This work may lead to the next generation of silicon-based computer processors that bridge the gap between electronic and optical signals..."Silicon is expected to remain the material of choice for optical integrated circuits and optical devices," senior author Junichi Takahara says.

In Colorado, there was gun-loving, QAnon- and militia-friendly Lauren Boebert’s victory. Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, an unabashed racist and noted conspiracy theorist, cruised to a win, all but a given after her opponent dropped out of the race. And 25-year-old Madison Cawthorn, whose defining characteristics are a penchant for misogyny, (alleged) sexual assault, lying about his resume, an affinity for white nationalist symbols, and making wildly racist comments, won his race in North Carolina. They’re all mini-Trumps in the making, hitching their campaigns to a full-throated support of the president and relying on the same playbook that Trump perfected—rants about “fake news” and “antifa” and the Squad, red meat that conjures up a bloodthirst among the Republican base. “Cry more, lib,” Cawthorn crowed in a tweet on Tuesday night after his victory.

The Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump cash cow for veteran Republican consultants, has raised $40 million from MSNBC-watching Brunch Liberals in just the last few months, and is now set to launch a media brand off the idea that its GOP operatives are political geniuses.  Their ads focused on trying to court disaffected Republican voters and attack Trump’s character, as Biden loaded up the Democratic convention with GOP speakers. When polls during the summer showed that the strategy wasn’t working, galaxy brain Rahm Emanuel defended it to a national televised audience, insisting that 2020 would be “the year of the Biden Republican.”  Now survey data show the strategy epically failed, as Trump actually garnered even more support from GOP voters than in 2016. Indeed, Edison Research exit polls on Tuesday found that 93 percent of Republican voters supported Trump — three percentage points higher than in 2016, according to numbers from the same firm.

An ancient squid-like animal with a shell like a 1.5-metre-long paperclip may have lived to be 200 years old

U.S. President Donald Trump's campaign says it has filed a lawsuit trying to halt the vote count in battleground Michigan. The latest count gives Trump's Democratic challenger Joe Biden a small lead, but the race is still too early to call. Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said in a statement Wednesday that the campaign "has not been provided with meaningful access to numerous counting locations to observe the opening of ballots and the counting process, as guaranteed by Michigan law." He says a suit was filed Wednesday in the Michigan Court of Claims "to halt counting until meaningful access has been granted."

Stung by their party’s disappointing showing at the polls Tuesday, two moderate House Democrats say they and other centrists are privately discussing a plan that was unthinkable just 24 hours earlier: throwing their support behind a challenger to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).  The two Democrats told The Hill on Wednesday that they were reaching out to their colleagues about backing one of Pelosi’s top lieutenants, Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), for Speaker.  “He’s the only one prepared and positioned” to be Speaker, said one of the Democratic lawmakers. “He bridges moderates and progressives better than anyone. And most importantly, he’s not Nancy Pelosi.”

Joe Biden took the lead in Michigan this morning, and once the early absentee votes are counted in Pennsylvania, he’s likely to take the lead there, at least if those votes fit the prevailing trend. That would be more than enough, even if Nevada flips. In fact, if Biden wins every one of the too-close-to-call states (not Alaska, which is just waiting on absentees and will likely go to Trump), my map prediction would be 100 percent accurate. Of course, we may end up in recount territory in a couple of states, and the president is frantically trying to shut down the counting. Winter of Our Discontent, anyone?

Social media platforms are sucking a generation into a misinformation rabbit hole.

But when polls closed hours later, it remained unclear just how many others did. After funneling some $10.3 million into the campaign, West appeared on the ballot in just 12 states. The Late Registration rapper missed the filing deadline in most states and lost several legal battles in a handful of others. Of the states where he did make the ballot—listed under the “Birthday Party”—most were Republican strongholds: Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Utah, Idaho, and Tennessee. West appeared on the ballot of just three competitive states: Colorado, Iowa, and Minnesota. The 12th was Vermont. The math was never on West’s side—no combination of votes in those states would get him to the 270 electoral votes needed to take the Oval Office. The most recent polling on West’s campaign forecast he’d capture 0.0 percent of the vote.

- In a case pitting LGBT rights against religious rights, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday is set to hear arguments in a dispute over the city of Philadelphia’s refusal to place children for foster care with a Catholic Church-affiliated agency that excludes same-sex couples from serving as foster parents.