Abolishing voter protections because they’ve successfully stopped discrimination, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in 2013, “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Despite Ginsburg’s now-famous warning, her five conservative colleagues took a wrecking ball to a key provision of the Voting Rights Act—but insisted that the damage was limited. The court’s 5–4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder nullified preclearance, a requirement that historically racist states secure approval from the federal government before changing their election laws. Now, the courts are primed to deal another, possibly fatal, blow to the landmark civil rights law. At the time, Chief Justice John Roberts said that “things have changed dramatically” in the South since the VRA’s passage in 1965, questioning the persistence of racial voter suppression. But the damage from Shelby County emerged immediately, and it has spiraled each year since. Jurisdictions previously covered by the now-defunct preclearance provision have closed at least 1,688 polling places and have purged voters at a rate 40 percent higher than that in other jurisdictions. Stringent, discriminatory voter ID laws have cropped up in these states too. It is no overstatement to say that the right to vote is under relentless assault in much of the United States today.

The ex-Fox News host and current Trump campaign staffer allegedly showed an assistant nude photos and tried to buy her silence.

Very cool.

"I'm working ... my a** off on the Christmas stuff, that you know, who gives a f*** about the Christmas stuff and decorations? But I need to do it, right?" ... She continued, "OK, and then I do it and I say that I'm working on Christmas and planning for the Christmas and they said, 'Oh, what about the children that they were separated?' Give me a f****** break. Where they were saying anything when Obama did that? I can not go, I was trying get the kid reunited with the mom. I didn't have a chance -- needs to go through the process and through the law." The policy Melania Trump was referring to was different from that of her husband, President Donald Trump. Under former President Barack Obama, children were separated from parents only when authorities had concerns for their well-being or could not confirm that the adult was in fact their legal guardian, but not as a blanket policy as was done under Trump -- until a judge forced the administration to stop.

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump tested positive for coronavirus, the President announced early Friday morning, an extraordinary development coming months into a global pandemic and in the final stretch of his reelection campaign.

This is the local hero who used to go every bar he could and sell tamales late at night

"The 8-Bit Guy" came under fire for his teardown of a seemingly rare old computer, but followers started unearthing much older, more controversial content of his in the backlash.

American authorities brought criminal charges on Thursday against the owners of one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency trading exchanges, BitMEX, accusing them of allowing the Hong Kong-based company to launder money and engage in other illegal transactions. BitMEX is far from the first cryptocurrency company to be suspected of facilitating criminal activity. But it is the largest and most established exchange to face criminal charges.

The president is harnessing the power of the government, from the Department of Homeland Security to the Postal Service, to disrupt the election. Read the magazine’s five-month investigation.

LANSING – Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has filed charges today against two political operatives for allegedly orchestrating a series of robocalls aimed at suppressing the vote in the November general election.  Jack Burkman, 54, and Jacob Wohl, 22, are each charged with:  One count of election law – intimidating voters, a five-year felony; One count of conspiracy to commit an election law violation, a five-year felony; One count of using a computer to commit the crime of election law – intimidating voters, a seven-year felony; and Using a computer to commit the crime of conspiracy, a seven-year felony. 

At issue are Guston’s paintings that feature hooded Ku Klux Klan figures. The exhibition was set to have featured 25 drawings and paintings from that body of work, representatives from the museum told Artnet News. “Because they are an important part of Guston’s oeuvre, we sought to find a way to include them while being mindful of the context that would be required for viewers to better understand why Guston made them,” said a joint email from seven representatives of the four museums. “As issues of race and social justice have become increasingly part of public dialogue over the last several months, it became apparent we needed to rethink our interpretation of these works.”

The leader of the Proud Boys, the 'white supremacist' group at the center of the presidential debate furor, is a state director of Latinos for Trump and ran for Congress as a Republican, DailyMail.com can reveal. Donald Trump told the Proud Boys to 'stand back and stand by' after he was asked to denounce their alleged white supremacist views during the presidential debate Tuesday night. Afterwards Trump's son and spokesman both tried to downplay the comment, calling it a 'misspeak'. The president backpedaled on Wednesday telling reporters he had never heard of the group.

Senior officers of the Southern Baptist Convention reaffirmed the denomination’s repudiation of white supremacy as a “scheme of the devil” Wednesday after a controversial call by President Donald Trump to far-right activists to “stand back and stand by” during the presidential debate on Tuesday. “When asked to condemn white supremacy, every single one of us should be ready to do so. Racism is, sadly, not extinct, and we know from our Southern Baptist history the effects of the horrific sins of racism and hatred,” SBC President J.D. Greear said on Twitter Wednesday afternoon. “We denounce and repudiate white supremacy and every form of racial and ethnic hatred as a scheme of the devil intended to bring suffering and division to our society. We re-affirm what Southern Baptists said to this in 2017.” 

Many years ago, long before I became an architecture critic, I was a 14-year-old stuck in the back of a Buick crossover whose driver, my mother, had taken a wrong turn while looking for the Goshen, New York, Dunkin Donuts. We ended up in the parking lot of the most extraordinary building I had ever seen—Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center, more commonly known as the Goshen Building. In 2009, the Goshen Building was in rather dire straits in ways immediately apparent (the concrete exterior bore the sad traces of rain and snow, the parking lot sprouted grass) and not (the roof leaked inside). Despite the outward signs of disrepair, the breath seized in my chest and as my eyes drifted over the compression and expansion of the building’s extruded masses, I realized that I had stumbled upon something extraordinary. I asked my mother, who grew up in Goshen and was visiting relatives there, if she knew what the building was. She rolled her eyes and said, “Ugh, that’s the DMV.” When we returned home to North Carolina from our family reunion, I took to the computer and searched for the Goshen, New York Department of Motor Vehicles. Some clicking got me through to the Wikipedia page for Paul Rudolph, a mid-century architect who was once the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture. It was at that point I fell in love and became obsessed—not only with Rudolph’s work, but with architecture as a whole. My life is marked by a threshold of before and after Paul Rudolph. I spent a good deal of my bizarre and lonely adolescence sitting in my bedroom, listening to Steve Reich and browsing Skyscraper City threads and Flickr archives devoted to Brutalist architecture. Wanting to become a classical musician and composer, I wrote entire pieces for strings commemorating individual buildings. I drew doodles of extruded cubes in the margins of my notes. In 2010, I had stumbled on a news article about the pending demolition of the Goshen Building. I was devastated.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) mishandled the distribution of aid in Puerto Rico after two devastating 2017 hurricanes, the agency’s Office of Inspector General said in a report released Thursday. In the report, the watchdog said goods could take an average of more than two months to reach the island. FEMA lost track of close to 40 percent of shipments to Puerto Rico, according to the report, and nearly all of the shipments were food and water. The goods shipments were delayed 71 days for water and 59 days for food, according to the report. “Although we understand FEMA’s priority on expediting commodity shipments to disaster survivors, the extent of the deviations from established operating procedures significantly increased the risk for fraud, waste, and abuse. Some flexibility and adaptation of normal processes is expected during disaster responses, but controls necessary to safeguard commodities cannot be altogether ignored,” the report states. “FEMA’s emphasis on delivering commodities to disaster survivors overrode the importance of following sound inventory management practices. When combined with poor acquisition planning prior to the hurricanes, FEMA’s management of the commodity distribution process did not function properly.”

Gov. Greg Abbott issued an order Thursday requiring counties to close multiple locations where voters can drop off completed mail-in ballots. As an election security measure, counties will be limited to one dropoff site where poll watchers — designated by political parties and candidates — must be allowed to observe ballot deliveries by voters, Abbott said. The new order takes effect Friday and modifies Abbott’s July 27 order that acknowledged the pandemic’s danger by adding six days of early voting and waiving a state law that limits mail-in ballot dropoff to Election Day only. Democrats blasted the move as a thinly veiled effort to suppress votes in a tight election. “Republicans are on the verge of losing, so Gov. Abbott is trying to adjust the rules last minute,” said Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party.

According to Rukmini Callimachi, the extremism correspondent for The New York Times who has earned wide praise for her work reporting on ISIS, her moment of journalistic epiphany came in 2013, in a former Al Qaeda building in Mali. In a 2016 interview with Wired, in which she was dubbed “arguably the best reporter on the most important beat in the world,” Callimachi described standing in the remains of an office used by Al Qaeda during its rampage through Timbuktu. The floor was littered with documents in Arabic. Suddenly, she realized, some of them might be able to tell a better story of what happened there than any government official’s report. She started scooping up documents and filling trash bags. Callimachi’s subsequent series of articles earned her a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize, the first of four. More than that, it catalyzed in her a belief in the power of original documentation to tell stories that otherwise go untold. It also convinced her that jihadist groups were far more sophisticated than she realized. As she told Wired, “I had wrongly assumed that these were just a bunch of guys in a cave in a desert, very primitive and wedded to an ideology for no good reason.” Along with careful study of jihadist social media, original documents became one of the guiding lights of Callimachi’s journalism. But they also led her to do work that critics describe as credulous, sensationalist, and even reckless. While she occupies a high-profile position sure to garner criticism, Callimachi’s work has been the target of routine objections by scholars, subject matter experts, and Iraqis and Syrians, some of them frustrated that she depends so heavily on original sources without speaking any Arabic. Callimachi’s most recent scandal concerns the subject of Caliphate, her Peabody Award–winning podcast. The main interviewee, a Canadian man with the nom de guerre Abu Huzayfah, claimed to be a returned ISIS killer, dispensing lurid stories about his experiences. But more than two years after Huzayfah’s interviews aired, Canadian authorities arrested him on a terrorism hoax charge. It turns out that this self-proclaimed ISIS soldier never visited the Islamic State at all, much less carried out murders on its behalf. His supposed expertise on the inner workings of ISIS was all secondhand, if not made up.

Robert E. Murray, the former CEO and president of the now-bankrupt Murray Energy, has filed an application with the U.S. Department of Labor for black lung benefits. For years, Murray and his company fought against federal mine safety regulations aimed at reducing the debilitating disease. “I founded the company and created 8,000 jobs there until the move to end coal use. I am still chairman of the board,” he wrote on a Labor Department form that initiated his claim obtained by the Ohio Valley ReSource. “We’re in bankruptcy, and due to my health could not handle the president and CEO job any longer.”

The saying “may you live in interesting times,” usually attributed as a Chinese curse, correlates peace with boredom, and upheaval with stimulation. If an era...

Florida, in the best of times, looks like another country, one completely removed from the standards and strictures of the rest of us here in America. Tampa, then, is another planet. It is a subtropical paradise where normalcy goes to die. It is the home of the Stanley Cup–winning Lightning, who on Wednesday held the first large championship celebration since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic seven months ago. The world has changed since then, but Tampa and St. Petersburg have tried their damndest not to change with it, a corrupted offshoot parallel universe where masks are for pussies and social distancing is for losers, and where you can just go to a crowded restaurant—inside!—and sit down and eat, and where fear and concern for fellow man may not exist. So it was an extreme bummer to see what some of the Lightning did and said at their celebration. I know, hockey players are golden retrievers, and since we aren’t surprised by dumb guys saying dumb things, maybe we can’t technically be disappointed by it either. But still: come the fuck on.