A Kenosha County court commissioner set bail at $2 million for Kyle Rittenhouse at his first Wisconsin court appearance Monday, after being extradited from Lake County, Illinois, on Friday afternoon. Rittenhouse, 17, faces homicide charges from the Aug. 25 shootings during the civil unrest that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake, who was left paralyzed, two days earlier. Rittenhouse is charged with killing Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, of Kenosha and Anthony Huber, 26, of Silver Lake and wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, 22, of West Allis. His attorneys say he acted in self-defense. During a Zoom hearing, Court Commissioner Loren Keating said he considered Rittenhouse a flight risk, given the fact he faces decades or life in prison if convicted, and might have the help of thousands of supporters nationwide if he decides not to return to court.

A wave of suspicious robocalls and texts bombarded voters as they began to cast their ballots on Tuesday, sparking fresh concerns about the extent to which malicious actors might harness Americans’ smartphones to scare people from the polls. Across the country, voters have received an estimated 10 million automated, spam calls in recent days telling them to “stay safe and stay home,” according to experts who track the telecom industry. In Michigan, meanwhile, government officials on Tuesday sounded early alarms about additional attempts to deceive the state’s voters, including one robocall campaign targeting the city of Flint that told people to vote tomorrow if they hoped to avoid long lines today.

The U.S. Postal Service experienced some of its worst delays all year in the final week before the election, according to a Times project tracking first-class. An avalanche of late-arriving political pamphlets and advertisements appears to have added to backlogs for the Postal Service, after months of slowdowns. The Postal Service reported that its workers have prioritized election mail, and that most ballots that are easily tracked have been processed on time. But there are also signs in the official data that even some ballot processing has slowed as Election Day approached. The week beginning Oct. 26 was the slowest week recorded for local mail, which the Postal Service aims to deliver within two days. But a delay of even one day for ballots in the final stretch of the presidential election could make the difference between a vote that is counted and one that is not, especially as legal fights continue in crucial states over whether to count ballots that are postmarked before Election Day but arriving after it.

South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg was "distracted" before he drove onto a highway shoulder where he struck and killed a pedestrian in September, state Secretary of Safety Craig Price said Monday. Price said 55-year-old Joseph Boever was walking on the side of the road and displaying some type of light on the night of Sept. 12 when he was struck by Ravnsborg's 2011 Ford Taurus. Price did not describe what led Ravnsborg to become distracted. The final line in the "narrative" section of the state's report reads: "The specific distraction is still under investigation."  

A video showing the arrest of a Clearwater man during a political rally in Palm Harbor has raised concerns over a deputy’s use of force.  The video shows deputies punching a Joe Biden supporter in the head and elbowing him in the back multiple times as he’s being held to the ground.

Just a few scattered reports of alleged voter intimidation had been fielded by midday Tuesday, but the potential for disruption and violence at polling sites has perhaps never been greater as voters cast their ballots for president amid a global pandemic and threats of civil unrest. President Donald Trump, who has falsely claimed voter fraud is widespread, has called for an army of poll watchers to ensure the election is fair. Right-wing extremist groups have signaled they plan to heed the call. Left-wing groups have vowed to confront people they believe are engaged in voter suppression. Extremist groups have planned actions in key states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which has been tracking extremists on social media. Those states, along with Georgia and Oregon, face the highest risk of election-related activity by armed vigilante groups, according to a report by MilitiaWatch and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

A federal lawsuit is accusing police in North Carolina of voter intimidation after they deployed pepper spray during a get-out-the vote rally and hauled several participants to jail in a chaotic display of pre-Election Day discord. The complaint, filed late Monday against the police chief of Graham, a rural community west of Durham, and the Alamance County sheriff, says that protesters were not expecting conflict at Saturday's "I Am Change" march, but that the situation escalated "when deputies and officers planned and orchestrated the violent dispersal" of a peaceful crowd. The demonstration, attended by about 250 people, coincided with the last day North Carolina residents were allowed to sign up for same-day voter registration and vote early in person. Videos on social media showed the tense scene unfold as participants, some in Black Lives Matter shirts, clashed with deputies, seen spraying the crowd outside the county courthouse.

President Donald Trump on Monday created a “1776 Commission” to promote "patriotic education” and counter lessons that he says divide Americans on race and slavery and teach students to “hate their own country." On the eve of Election Day, Trump directed the commission’s creation, via executive order, to “better enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.”

Kentucky State Police Commissioner Rodney Brewer is resigning from his position in the agency this week. Brewer, who was assigned to the post in January by Gov. Andy Beshear, will step down effective by the end of the day Wednesday, KSP spokesman Lt. Josh Lawson confirmed Monday evening.  Lt. Col. Phillip Burnett will serve as interim commissioner until the agency finds a permanent replacement, Lawson said.  Lawson said he did not have information regarding the reason for Brewer's resignation. The move comes three days after journalism students at Louisville's Manual High School revealed in a bombshell report that KSP had at one time used a training slideshow that quoted Adolph Hitler multiple times and advocated for troopers to use "ruthless violence."

Birds are good. In our internal work chat we were talking about some birds that we like. Then somebody had the good idea that for this day we should make a list of birds that we like! Below are some birds that we like. What are some birds that you like?

‘We shut it down, baby! We shut it down!’ man shouts in video of vehicle blockade

Two chimpanzees who escaped from their enclosure at Amersfoort’s DierenPark zoo have been shot dead, zoo officials have confirmed. My dick is out for these noble monkes. R. I. P.

Amid allegations of bribery and hiring prostitutes to urinate on a hotel bed, one of the Steele dossier’s most shocking claims was that Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, met secretly in Prague with Kremlin officials in August 2016 to discuss “deniable cash payments” to hackers loyal to Russia, paying them to cover up supposed ties between Moscow and the Trump campaign. (Cohen denies this accusation and Robert Mueller’s investigation did not corroborate claims that Cohen traveled to Prague.) Just last month, in October 2020, a source in the U.S. intelligence community finally revealed to the newspaper The Wall Street Journal that Christopher Steele’s information about Cohen’s alleged meeting in Prague came from a former RIA Novosti journalist named Olga Galkina. The name of the man who links Galkina to the Steele dossier — Igor Danchenko, a former senior research analyst at the Brookings Institution — had already leaked to the press earlier this year, when Republicans in the Senate Judiciary Committee published a summary of the FBI’s interviews with him from 2017. The report, declassified by President Trump’s attorney general, was redacted, but bloggers quickly used clues left visible in the document to identify Danchenko, whose lawyer now verifies that he collected opposition research for Christopher Steele and told the FBI what he knew about the report on condition of anonymity. Meduza explores how outing Igor Danchenko made it possible to identify the Steele dossier’s other sources. We then contacted these individuals to find out what they think now about their role in the report.

Milwaukee County Supervisor Ryan Clancy has apologized for promoting the Weatherizatiion Assistance Program with the rap song "WAP".

GTV, the media platform operated by Steve Bannon’s billionaire benefactor Guo Wengui (who also goes by Miles Guo), has fully embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory over the past week, carrying a YouTube series that The New York Times calls “core QAnon content” that “many QAnon believers have credited with spurring their interest in the group.”

Multiple suspects armed with rifles opened fire in Vienna on Monday, killing one and injuring several others across six locations in the city, local police said on Twitter. One of the suspects was fatally shot by officers, police said. Interior Minister Karl Nehammer called the incident an apparent terror attack and said another suspect was on the run, BBC News reported. "At the moment I can confirm we believe this is an apparent terror attack," Nehammer said. Police said the incident began near the Seitenstettengasse synagogue around 8 p.m. local time. It's unclear if the synagogue was a target of the violence. Police urged residents to keep away from the area and to avoid using public transit, saying shots were fired in the busy Inner City district.

In recent weeks, after Alma Bowman became a key witness for medical misconduct at an immigration jail, ICE moved to deport her.

A federal judge on Monday rejected another last-ditch Republican effort to invalidate nearly 127,000 votes in Houston because the ballots were cast at drive-thru polling centers established during the pandemic. The lawsuit was brought by conservative Texas activists who have railed against expanded voting access in Harris County, where a record 1.4 million early votes have already been cast. The county is the nation’s third largest and a crucial battleground in Texas, where President Donald Trump and Republicans are bracing for the closest election in decades on Tuesday. [But then Hanen has to Hanen] But Hanen still expressed doubts about whether Texas law allowed anyone to vote from their car, even in a pandemic. “If I were voting tomorrow, I would not vote in a drive-thru just out of my concern as to whether that’s legal or not,” Hanen said.

Can Cuomo kill the left’s best chance at its own political party?

J.D. Vance, the author of 'Hillbilly Elegy,' tweeted that 'daylight savings time reduces fertility' in a dog-whistle to white nationalists.