Six months later, in July, Fife launched a campaign to represent West Oakland on the Oakland City Council. She’s again following in the footsteps of her grandfather, who she later learned was one of Muskegon Heights’ first Black city councilors. Yet her run is also quite radical. As a perpetual thorn in the side of moderate progressives on the council, Fife is very clear about one thing: She does not believe that institutions can be changed from the inside. “It’s like those people who go and say, ‘I’m going to go become a cop, and I’m going to change the culture,’” she scoffs. “Shut the fuck up. No, you’re not.”

NEW YORK (AP) — Andrew Orkin was taking a break from his evening jog to sit by Prospect Park Lake when he turned around and was startled to see a tangle of wriggling snakes. “And quite a big...

There’s no reason why a rigged Supreme Court should have the final say on the law of our land. It is an almost entirely foregone conclusion that Amy Coney Barrett will be seated on the Supreme Court, cementing a 6–3 conservative majority that will serve as an obstacle to the Biden policy agenda should he and the Democratic Party win full control of government in November. As everyone by now knows, that’s a majority Biden and Democrats could conceivably do something about. Progressives have been pushing court-packing for years at this point—it’s one of the major items of a structural reform agenda that also includes eliminating the Senate filibuster and adding new states. In recent days, a number of more moderate voices have joined in, backing court-packing as a strategy for rebalancing the judiciary specifically justified by Barrett’s nomination. The most prominent members of this camp include Quinta Jurecic and Susan Hennessey of Lawfare, who wrote a piece for The Atlantic arguing that court-packing—an idea they had initially dismissed as “institutionally corrosive and politically unserious”—could force Republicans into making stabilizing concessions, provided Democrats add just two justices capable of winning bipartisan support, preserving a 6–5 conservative majority. “This would change the political environment from a situation in which one party routinely plays hardball and the other party gets rolled, to a situation in which both parties have an incentive to cooperate in order to avoid the disaster of an ever-expanding Supreme Court flipping back and forth between parties as power changes hands,” they wrote. “It also corrects the imbalance of a Court stacked with Republican appointees, returning both parties to something closer to an even playing field.” Joe Biden, no procedural radical himself, has notably refused to reject court-packing outright as an option if Barrett is confirmed, despite having opposed the idea during the Democratic primary. All of this has incensed conservatives, few more so than National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke, who contends that court-packing would amount to an embrace of the authoritarianism Democrats have seen and decried in Donald Trump. “If the coverage of the Trump era has featured a prominent theme, it has been that destructive ideas must be countered before they take hold, regardless of whether they are again presented or likely to be brought to fruition when broached,” he wrote. “Irrespective of the era, there are few more destructive ideas than Court-packing, and none so keenly in need of ubiquitous condemnation.” If so, indignant conservatives are late to the game. As Arizona political analyst Hank Stephenson recently noted for Politico Magazine, at least 10 states have seen efforts, led mostly by Republicans, to change the size of their courts over the last 10 years. Additionally, the Supreme Court’s size has been altered seven times in our history; partisan politics influenced most of those occasions, including the very last change—when pro-Reconstruction Republicans who tried to shrink the court under Andrew Johnson expanded it to the current nine seats under Republican President Ulysses S. Grant in 1869.

A year after former Bolivian president Evo Morales was ousted in a military coup that installed a brutal far-right regime, Morales ally Luis Arce declared victory in the South American nation's high-stakes presidential election early Monday after exit polls showed the socialist candidate with a large advantage over his two main competitors. "Democracy has won," Arce, who served as Morales' finance minister, said in an address to the nation after one exit poll showed him leading the race with 52.4% of the vote and former president Carlos Mesa in a distant second with 31.5%. Right-wing candidate Luis Camacho—an ally of unelected interim President Jeanine Añez—won just 14.1% of the vote, according to the survey. The Washington Post reported that "if the exit poll numbers are confirmed by the official count, which was being tabulated slowly late Sunday, it would be more than enough to avoid a November runoff and claim outright victory." Arce characterized his apparently decisive victory, which even Añez was forced to acknowledge, as a mandate to continue the policies of the Morales government, which lifted millions of Bolivians out of poverty and expanded the nation's economy.

IN APRIL 2018, a video appeared on YouTube that changed everything. It was recorded on a cellphone at the Silicon Valley Comic Con, a comic book convention where Stan Lee was a star attraction. In the grainy video, the 95-year-old creator of Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man, Hulk, Black Panther, X-Men and others appears unable to sign his name. Which is important to note, because Lee and his handlers were there to sell his signature for $120 a pop. A dark-haired man in his 40s, dressed like an MTV gangster, in a black skinny suit, black fedora and sunglasses, coached the barely cognizant writer through the task. The man, later identified as Lee’s former business associate Keya Morgan, spoke to Lee as if he were a child, schooling him on how to spell his name. “Stan Lee. S-T-A-N …” Morgan spelled it out again and again as comic book after comic book was slipped in front of the white-haired Lee. In the video, Lee looks unsteady, propped up in a chair, while a line of fans snakes out of the frame, each waiting for a chance to meet their hero. Though only 58 seconds long, the video is painful to watch. In the dark humor of the internet, it came to be known as “Weekend at Stan’s,” after the 1980s cult-comedy film Weekend at Bernie’s, in which two low-level insurance guys drag their dead boss’s body around to persuade his friends he is still alive. Fans who observed this tragedy took to the event’s Facebook page in outrage. “That man is a legend and you shuffled him around like he was a bag of money!” one wrote.

If you’ve noticed an uptick of male frontal nudity in TV and in movies in recent years, you’re onto something.

Aaron Sorkin knows the weight of last words, and his last words to me, as we walk-and-talk out of the HBO press room, are: "Write something nice." He says this in the "Smile, honey" tone of much less successful jerks. It's not advice the Oscar-winning, show-bossing Jonathan Franzen of screenwriting would take himself, thank what gods there be. In Sorkinville, these gods are men. At the short end of a TV season dominated, if not by shows about girls and women, by talk about shows about girls and women, Sorkin's new drama The Newsroom arrives with a "Hey, remember how great America was when it wasn't just a man's world, but a man's man's world?"

The state of California appears to be backing off legal threats against the California Republican Party over its use of unauthorized ballot drop boxes. On Monday, California's secretary of state and attorney general sent a cease-and-desist order to the California GOP and several county party offices, ordering they remove unauthorized boxes to collect ballots, some of which were labeled "official." At a press conference Friday, Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Secretary of State Alex Padilla, both Democrats, didn't announce any additional enforcement action against the party, saying the California GOP agreed to modify how they were collecting ballots.

Nuke Bizzle rapped about getting rich from unemployment claims. On Friday, he faced federal charges of defrauding the government of more than $1.2 million in jobless benefits

“It was Trump’s election that drove me to tweet like a maniac,” he says.

"As a former public official, I believe we have not treated Americans as adults, who understand truth, sacrifice and responsibility," Christie said in a statement. ... Christie, a longtime Trump ally, said he has recovered from his illness, and he thanked his doctors and "the manufacturers of Remdesivir and the Eli Lilly monoclonal anti-body cocktail for giving me access to their extraordinary treatments."

Yarmouth County RCMP said in a statement Saturday morning that the fire is considered "suspicious" and an investigation is ongoing.

It's safe to say that online shoppers like the promise of easy — and even better, free — returns. But it may surprise consumers to learn what can actually happen to all those unwanted items. A Marketplace investigation into Amazon Canada has found that perfectly good items are being liquidated by the truckload — and even destroyed or sent to landfill. Experts say hundreds of thousands of returns don't end up back on the e-commerce giant's website for resale, as customers might think. Marketplace journalists posing as potential new clients went undercover for a tour at a Toronto e-waste recycling and product destruction facility with hidden cameras. During that meeting, a representative revealed they get "tons and tons of Amazon returns," and that every week their facility breaks apart and shreds at least one tractor-trailer load of Amazon returns, sometimes even up to three to five truckloads. "We're not the only ones. We couldn't handle all of Amazon. There's no way. It is so — it's like cockroaches, it multiplies. It's incredible," said the operations manager.

We were sitting together in her living room, while she scripted a video, when her new boyfriend emerged from the bedroom. George Hutcheson, who was 30 at the time, runs a Canadian group called Students for Western Civilization, which works to “advance the interests of European peoples.” Her most recent boyfriends had also been adherents of far-right ideologies. She had nearly gotten engaged to a prominent conspiracy theorist, and had had an on-again-off-again fling with a Croatian neo-Nazi. “Maybe I’m too picky,” she’d mused before Hutcheson joined us on her IKEA couch. In appearance, Hutcheson is the caricature of the Aryan ideal. His undercut haircut, known in the alt-right as the fashy (short for fascist), and his fit, thick, soldier-like frame give him a Teutonic air. He and Southern decided to go out to dinner, and to let me film them. Hutcheson refuses to eat food originally from nonwhite countries, such as ketchup, whose origins are in China, so the two, facing limited restaurant options, chose the British-style Oxley Public House in Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood.

In a reversal, the White House has approved California's request for federal disaster relief for wildfire recovery, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday.

Earlier this week, Top That allegedly posted to Facebook it would offer a 10% discount to anyone who came in and said “Happy Columbus Day,” an apparent pushback to the Indigenous Peoples Day movement. The post went onto say: “And as always 10% off for no masks!! Merica!!”

US presidential candidate Joe Biden is debuting his own island on the hit Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

IWhile much of California shut down this spring, Robbie Hall stitched masks for 12 hours a day in a sewing factory at a women’s prison in Chino. For several weeks, Hall and other women said, they churned out masks by the thousands but were forbidden from wearing them. The incarcerated seamstresses at the California Institution for Women grew increasingly worried: The fabric they used came from the nearby men’s prison, where an outbreak ended up killing 23 inmates. And their boss regularly visited both institutions. “Are we safe with her going over there and coming back here?” Hall remembered asking her co-workers as they sewed. Then it happened. In early May, COVID-19 broke out in the sewing factory, sickening at least four incarcerated workers, including Hall. She spent weeks in the hospital struggling to breathe. California’s prison system has taken drastic measures to combat the coronavirus, halting rehab programs, religious services and educational classes. But correctional authorities kept one type of operation running through much of the last six months: prison factories. Hall was one of thousands of incarcerated workers who stayed on the job in high-risk positions during the pandemic, making wages that ranged from 8 cents to $1 an hour. They cooked the food. They walked from cell to cell delivering meals. They cleaned everything from communal showers to COVID-19 units in prison hospitals. And they labored in prison factories making products, such as masks, hand sanitizer and furniture, that were sold to state agencies for millions of dollars.

The Trump administration this week abruptly rejected California’s request for federal disaster relief funds to help residents affected by the Creek fire and a string of other devastating blazes that have ravaged the state. State officials received a rejection letter that gave no explanation for the rebuff, a spokesperson for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services said Thursday. The state plans to appeal. The Trump administration previously approved similar requests for other wildfires, though President Donald Trump has threatened to cut aid to the Democratic-led state for partisan reasons. On Friday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which administers disaster funds, said the agency “determined that the early September fires were not of such severity and magnitude to exceed the combined capabilities of the state, affected local governments, voluntary agencies and other responding federal agencies.” Yet by Friday afternoon, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), a Trump ally, claimed that the president had “committed to reverse FEMA’s decision to deny the request.”

Eight days after Embrace’s statement was posted online, Barron County voted to strip the organization of $25,000 in funding for 2021. The county’s director of health and human services resigned from Embrace’s board of directors. Since then, a majority of the 17 law enforcement agencies that work with Embrace have indicated that they will no longer partner with the domestic violence organization, including all law enforcement in Washburn County. That means women who call the police for help, for instance, may not be referred to Embrace for help with safety planning, counseling and support.