"While it might sound like an excuse, the unfortunate reality is that there is a very limited pool of black talent to recruit from," Scharf said in the memo.

After the novel coronavirus first appeared in Africa in late February, Ghana’s government decided it would take no chances. Ghanaian citizens were soon put under lockdown, and travel between major cities was banned. Then President Nana Akufo-Addo announced the closure of the country’s land and sea borders. At the time, my dad was in Ghana visiting family, and he faced the prospect of being stuck until commercial flights resumed. As experts predicted how the pandemic would be a unique and devastating disaster in Africa, my siblings and I scrambled to get my father a spot on a State Department repatriation flight for U.S. citizens. We rushed to get him out because we thought he would be better off in the United States. But after he got back to Texas, the number of cases there started to rise, and I joked with him that he would have been safer in Ghana. “Ghana is doing much better with this than America,” he had said after I picked him up from the airport, amused that I sprayed down the entire car with disinfectant before making him sit in the back seat, away from me.

More than two millennia ago, 27 Egyptians were laid to rest in Saqqara, an ancient city of the dead. Their organs were removed, and their bodies wrapped in linens. Priests placed them inside wooden boxes adorned with hieroglyphics. The mummies stayed buried in those sarcophagi for 2,500 years — until their recent discovery by Egyptian archaeologists. The finding is one of Egypt's largest in over a century. It happened in two parts: In early September, Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced more than a dozen coffins had been found in a burial shaft under the ancient city of Saqqara. Then two weeks later, the shaft yielded a second set of sarcophagi. "Initial studies indicate that these coffins are completely closed and haven't been opened since they were buried," the ministry said in a Facebook post on Sunday. The photos below show how archaeologists found the sarcophagi,and other mummies buried beneath Saqqara.

Weeks after a 12-year-old Arkansas girl contracted the parasite while swimming in a sandy-bottom lake at a water park in Little Rock, the Florida Department of Health has confirmed a case in Glades County, Florida. A 12-year-old boy was hospitalized over the weekend, his family told CNN affiliate WBBH, after kneeboarding in a water-filled ditch near his house. This rare form of parasitic meningitis—primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM)—is caused by an amoeba called Naegleria fowleri. That microscopic amoeba—part of the class of life called protozoans—is a naturally occurring organism that normally feeds on bacteria and tends to live in the sedimentary layer of warm lakes and ponds. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), victims die from the amoeba after about 5 days. Since 1962 there has only been one survivor, yet the 12-year-old girl who was hospitalized last month has improved enough to be moved out of the intensive care unit at Arkansas Children's Hospital, hospital spokesman Tom Bonner told CNN.

The partnership is off to a rocky start.

Three years in, I had basically arrived—I had been transferred to the day shift. It was the premier shift. You wanted to get the day shift because those are the best hours, good days off. On my beat, they started telling me: “We really want you to start policing this section of Boulevard and Ponce de Leon Avenue, basically the Bedford Pines Apartments. We think there are dope boys in there. We think there’s a lot of illegal activity happening and we want to really focus there. So we’re gonna put up signs that say you can’t park on the street. I want you to go and write tickets on every single car that’s on the street and I want you to get those cars out of there; if they don’t move, tow ’em. I want you to start running checks on everybody standing on the street; if they have got warrants, I want you to lock ’em up.”

American city governments face a looming Covid-related budget disaster. And resulting austerity measures are likely to make the economy worse, not better.

The former president invited Ghislaine Maxwell to a cozy dinner in L.A. in 2014, years after she had been accused by a victim of procuring girls for Epstein’s sex ring.

Amy Coney Barrett, a favorite to be President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is affiliated with a type of Christian religious group that served as inspiration for Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. Barrett, a devout Catholic, and her husband both belong to the People of Praise group, current and former members have said, according to The New York Times. Their fathers have served as leaders in the group. The charismatic Christian parachurch organization, which was founded in South Bend, Indiana in 1971, teaches that men have authority over their wives. Members swear a lifelong oath of loyalty to one another and are expected to donate at least 5 per cent of their earnings to the group.

A federal judge in Wisconsin ruled on Monday that absentee ballots postmarked as mailed on Nov. 3—namely, Election Day—shall be counted up to six days later. U.S. District Judge William Conley issued a series of election-related orders that favored the Democratic National Committee plaintiffs while allowing the Commissioners of the Wisconsin Election Commission and Republican-appointed Secretary Marge Bostelmann time to appeal before the ruling goes into effect.

Ranked choice voting will be used for the first time in a presidential race in the U.S. under a ruling Tuesday by the Maine Supreme Court, which concluded a GOP-led petition drive intended to prevent its use came up short. The Supreme Judicial Court concluded the Maine Republican Party failed to reach the threshold of signatures needed for a “People’s Veto” referendum aimed at rejecting a state law that expands ranked choice voting to the presidential election. “This is a powerful moment for ranked choice voting supporters: Voters will, for the first time, use ranked choice voting to elect the highest office in the country,” said Rob Richie, president and CEO of FairVote, which advocates for the voting reform.

President Trump is set to meet with a group of Republican state attorneys general about revising a law that gives tech companies a legal liability shield for content posted by third parties. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — which also gives platforms the ability to do good-faith content moderation — has increasingly come under fire from Republicans, who baselessly claim it allows the censoring of conservative viewpoints. "Online censorship goes far beyond the issue of free speech, it’s also one of protecting consumers and ensuring they are informed of their rights and resources to fight back under the law," White House spokesperson Judd Deere said in a statement to The Hill.

A company collecting signatures to strip Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of her emergency powers coached paid petition circulators on giving voters false information, illegally collecting signatures without witnessing them, trespassing on private property, and even lying under oath, a secretly recorded videotape shows. The video showing Erik Tisinger, a trainer for the California signature company In the Field, Inc., was secretly recorded Sept. 4 by a representative of Keep Michigan Safe — the group opposing the Unlock Michigan effort — and made available to the Free Press.

For 18 months, residents of a village in Wales have been mystified as to why their broadband internet crashed every morning. Now engineers have finally identified the reason: A second-hand television that emitted a signal that interfered with the connection. A crack team of engineers-turned-detectives have become heroes in the village of Aberhosan after finally finding the source of the problem, according to a press release from Openreach, the company that runs the UK's digital network, published Tuesday. Staff had visited the village repeatedly and found no fault with the network. They even replaced cables in the area to try and solve the problem, but to no avail. Then local engineer Michael Jones called in assistance from experts at the Openreach chief engineer team. After carrying out a plethora of tests, engineers had a theory that the problem could be caused by a phenomenon called single high-level impulse noise (SHINE), in which an appliance emits electrical interference that impacts broadband connectivity. Engineers used a device called a spectrum analyzer and walked up and down the village "in the torrential rain" at 6 a.m. to see if they could locate an electrical noise, Jones said in a statement. At 7 a.m. -- "like clockwork" -- the device "picked up a large burst of electrical interference in the village." "The source of the 'electrical noise' was traced to a property in the village. It turned out that at 7 a.m. every morning the occupant would switch on their old TV which would in-turn knock out broadband for the entire village." Jones said the resident was "mortified" by the news and "immediately agreed to switch it off and not use again." Since the old TV was retired there have been no more problems with the connection, said Openreach. Suzanne Rutherford, the company's chief engineer's lead for Wales, said that this kind of problem is more common than people think. "Anything with electric components -- from outdoor lights to microwaves to CCTV cameras can potentially have an impact on your broadband connection," said Rutherford, who advised the public to check if their appliances are certified and meet current standards. Earlier this year, UK telecoms regulator Ofcom warned that microwaves could reduce Wi-Fi signals. Ofcom issued several tips on how to keep households connected as millions of people started working from home at the start of lockdown.

Sen. Mitt Romney said Tuesday he would support a floor vote to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, essentially clinching consideration of President Donald Trump’s nominee this year despite the impending election. Just two Republican senators have asked for the party to put the brakes on the confirmation. And with a 53-seat majority, Senate Majority Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) now has the votes he needs to move forward with a nominee. The move is a striking blow to Democrats’ hopes of keeping the seat vacant for the next president, potentially Joe Biden. But Romney said he had no qualms about Democrats' charges of hypocrisy or about strengthening the high court’s conservative majority. “My liberal friends have over many decades gotten very used to the idea of having a liberal court but that's not written in the stars,” the Utah Republican told reporters after this decision. He called it “appropriate for a nation that is … center-right to have a court which reflects center-right points of view.”

One officer is heard on the footage asking why they should be doing an “approach” into Linden’s home for a “psych problem.” “We could call sergeant,” she said, according to the body camera footage. “And tell him the situation. Because I’m not about to get in a shooting because he’s upset.” “Yeah,” another officer, who later shot Linden, replied. “Especially when he hates cops, it’s going to end in a shooting.”

The US is the worst hit country in the world and cases are still continuing to rise, data shows.

Police in Louisville, Kentucky, said that they were restricting access to the downtown area in preparation for the state attorney general’s announcement about whether he will charge officers in Breonna Taylor’s shooting death.

IN THE YEARS AFTER THE FALL OF COMMUNISM, the economies of Eastern Europe floundered, whiplashed by swift conversions to capitalism. While reformists shredded safety nets and GDPs tanked, inflation and unemployment rose to perilous heights, leaving young men from Hungary to Belarus desperate for work. Many of them thus found themselves reluctant laborers in one of the few booming export businesses: gay porn.

Allegations of dealings with the Russian government have plagued Donald Trump’s presidency since before he took office. Now even Moscow’s most infamous global media outlet — Russia Today — is having some fun at Trump’s expense. On September 22, RT shared a deepfake video parodying the 45th U.S. president’s options after his potential defeat by Joe Biden this fall. “November 3: Donald Trump loses U.S. election to Joe Biden,” says the caption for RT’s YouTube video. “November 5: Trump flies to Moscow to sign a contract with RT.”