Alabama says a new state law expanding the list of felonies that cause a person to lose their right to vote won’t be enforced until after the November election and asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit over the effective date.

The Alabama attorney general office wrote in a Friday court filing that the new law, which has a Oct. 1 effective date, cannot be used to block people from voting in the upcoming election, because the Alabama Constitution prohibits new election laws from taking effect within six months of the general election.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp Monday defended and doubled down on his signature Medicaid program — the only one in the nation with a work requirement — further dimming chances the state could adopt a broader expansion of the taxpayer-funded low-income health plan without a work mandate any time soon. 

Georgia Pathways requires all recipients to show that they performed at least 80 hours of work, volunteer activity, schooling or vocational rehabilitation in a month to qualify. It launched in July 2023, but has so far signed up a tiny fraction of eligible state residents.

Republican-controlled board adopts new rule that gives local officials more power to investigate votes after election

The Georgia state election board approved a new rule on Monday that gives local officials more power to investigate votes after election day, increasing concerns the Republican-controlled body is steamrolling a series of consequential changes that could pave the way for chaos this fall.

The rule approved Monday authorizes any member on a county board of election “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results”. Even though Georgia law still requires certification of the vote by 5pm the Monday after election day, experts are concerned that these maneuvers give election deniers significant leeway to slow down the certification process and create uncertainty.

“It provides no safeguards against requests unscrupulously designed to delay or obstruct the lawful certification process,” lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, the watchdog groups Citizens for Responsibilities and Ethics in Washington (Crew) and the Public Rights Project wrote in a letter to the board. “It would empower individual county board members to make unreasonable and vexatious demands for any election-related documents – even ones that have no bearing on certification – without providing any basis for their requests.”

The vice president is rolling out her first revenue-raising policy proposal as the Democratic presidential nominee and drawing a contrast with GOP opponent Donald Trump.

Vice President Kamala Harris is calling for raising the corporate tax rate to 28%, her first major proposal to raise revenues and finance expensive plans she wants to pursue as president.

Harris campaign spokesman James Singer told NBC News that she would push for a 28% corporate tax rate, calling it “a fiscally responsible way to put money back in the pockets of working people and ensure billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share.”

…

If enacted, the policy would raise hundreds of billions of dollars, as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has projected that 1 percentage point increases in the corporate rate corresponds to about $100 billion over a decade. It would also roll back a big part of former President Donald Trump’s signature legislation in 2017 as president, which slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%.

Trump, meanwhile, recently said he would cut taxes even further if elected president, including on businesses.

The president of the University of California has announced that the system would enforce bans on encampments as well as the use of masks to “conceal identity” in guidance that comes as schools across the US are planning for protests in support of Gaza similar to those that roiled campuses across the country.

Michael V Drake, the president of the 10-campus university system, said in a statement on Monday that the UC was taking steps to “ensure a safe, inclusive campus climate that fosters a free exchange of ideas”.

A Milwaukee woman has been jailed for 11 years for killing the man that prosecutors said had sex trafficked her as a teenager. 

The sentence, issued on Monday, ends a six-year legal battle for Chrystul Kizer, now 24, who had argued she should be immune from prosecution. 

Kizer was charged with reckless homicide for shooting Randall Volar, 34, in 2018 when she was 17. She accepted a plea deal earlier this year to avoid a life sentence.

Volar had been filming his sexual abuse of Kizer for more than a year before he was killed.

Kizer said she met Volar when she was 16, and that the man sexually assaulted her while giving her cash and gifts. She said he also made money by selling her to other men for sex.

Former Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., who was expelled from the House of Representatives after being indicted on 23 federal counts including fraud and misusing campaign funds, pleaded guilty Monday in federal court to two of the charges.

The Long Island Republican faces a mandatory two-year minimum sentence after pleading guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. But Judge Joanna Seybert estimated the term could range from six to eight years behind bars when he is sentenced on Feb. 7, 2025. Santos also agreed to pay nearly $374,000 in restitution.

Santos had faced trial in September on charges including laundering campaign funds to pay for his personal expenses, charging donors' credit cards without their consent, and receiving unemployment benefits while he was employed.

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The month after the presidential election in 2020, Democratic and Republican electors representing the candidate who won the popular vote in their states gathered across the country to formally cast electoral votes for president. 

But in seven states that Joe Biden won, Republican electors got together anyway and cast phony votes for Donald Trump. They've become known as fake electors. And according to federal prosecutors, they were part of a plan to overturn the election, orchestrated by pro-Trump attorneys with Trump's support. State criminal charges have been filed against fake electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada.

Since Israel's war on Gaza began in October, many Palestinians detained by Israeli forces have said they were sexually abused by troops at Sde Teiman.

However, no one had been arrested for the abuse until 29 July, when military police raided the facility, clashed with the soldiers and took them into custody.

On Sunday, the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) revealed that 65 percent of Israeli Jews thought that the five should be punished only by the army and not face criminal charges.

The same INSS poll on Sunday also revealed that 47 percent of Israeli Jews believed Israel should not obey international law during the course of the current war in Gaza.

Christian Dingus, 28, was with his partner when, he says, employees told the couple not to kiss inside, and the argument escalated outside.

A gay man accused a group of Washington, D.C., Shake Shack employees of beating him after he kissed his boyfriend inside the location while waiting for their order.

Christian Dingus, 28, was with his partner and a group of friends at a Dupont Circle location Saturday night when the incident occurred, he told NBC News. They had put in their order and were hanging around waiting for their food.

“And while we were back there — kind of briefly — we began to kiss,” Dingus said. “And at that point, a worker came out to us and said that, you know, you can’t be doing that here, can’t do that type of stuff here.”

The couple separated, Dingus said, but his partner got upset at the employee and insisted the men had done nothing wrong. Dingus’ partner was then allegedly escorted out of the restaurant, where a heated verbal argument occurred.

I don't know why anyone thinks this guy is weird.

Also, is pissing off the Swifties the best of plans, Donnie?

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — Kern County Sheriff’s deputies accused of using a cat as target practice have been disciplined and they’re back at work.

The incident happened at the Hart Park training facility back in March.

A woman walking in the park said she saw the deputies shoot a cat and kill it.

The woman didn’t capture the shooting on camera, but she did record her confrontation with the deputies in a video that went viral, sparking rage from animal rights groups.

A lot of you are probably too young to remember Donahue, but he was there every single day on TV. Sometimes his topics were trivial, sometimes they were vital, but he always tried to push a progressive angle.

I guess that's a fair line of attack that definitely won't come back to bite them in the ass.

After all, being compared to Jeffrey Epstein is so much worse than being good friends with the actual Jeffrey Epstein.

And definitely nowhere near as bad as inviting him to parties at your Florida resort.

When you hear “startup”, you might think of the millions of entrepreneurs who have founded new businesses over the past few years. But these are mostly freelancers, contractors and people with full-time jobs who can accommodate a side gig. The real startup story is quietly happening elsewhere: trillions of dollars of wealth are slowly being transferred to a younger generation by boomers selling their businesses to those looking to build their own.

According to a new report from BizBuySell, a business brokerage and research site, the number of small businesses being sold has not only recovered to pre-pandemic levels, but is quickly rising. And the market for would-be entrepreneurs is hot. Business owners who sold their companies in the second quarter of this year are getting 20% higher prices than those who sold their businesses the same time last year.

Boomers are selling at a furious pace and they’re just getting started. This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. According to the US Small Business Administration, more than half of the nation’s small-business owners are over the age of 50, and approximately 21% of the US population were born before 1964. As of February 2024, according to one study, baby boomers owned about 51% of the privately held businesses in the United States, which is about 3m businesses valued at $10tn.

The nearly 300-page report is a summary of the investigation conducted by the House Oversight, Judiciary and Ways and Means committees over the past year and a half, nearly all of which has already been made public.

It argues that Biden enriched himself through his family’s business ventures and concealed his mishandling of classified information in office, the subject of the investigation conducted by special counsel Robert Hur, who declined to press charges this year.

In addition, the committees say that the Justice Department mishandled its investigation into his son Hunter Biden’s tax problems and that the White House has withheld key documents and witnesses from the impeachment investigation.

...

The investigators put the total at $27 million, according to the bank records they received. But the investigators failed to turn up evidence that Biden himself received money from those companies or participated in the foreign business deals beyond the occasions when Hunter Biden called him on speakerphone to exchange pleasantries while in the company of foreign business associates or when he saw them at his son’s birthday dinner.

Someone remind me... didn't Joe Biden drop out of the race? Wouldn't that mean that this transparent political hit job was a colossal waste of time on the part of the Republicans?

The Republican National Committee is urging the Supreme Court to intervene in an Arizona election dispute this week and block up to 40,000 of the state’s registered voters from casting ballots in the presidential race.

Republican state lawmakers say these voters did not provide proof of their citizenship when they were registered and now they should be barred from from voting in person or by mail.

...

Danielle Lang, a voting rights attorney for the Campaign Legal Center who worked on the case, said she found that argument to be surprising.

“They are trying to upend the law as it has been in Arizona at least since 2018,” she said. “The voters who registered using the federal form were not asked to provide proof of citizenship.”

She said the Republican lawmakers and their attorneys who brought the case “didn’t cite a single example of a noncitizen who was enrolled. Not one. Why would someone who is not a citizen try to register? It’s a felony and would get you deported, just to cast one ballot.”

Early this year, the contents of a WhatsApp group for Jewish creative professionals and academics, set up in Australia after the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, leaked and fell into the hands of pro-Palestinian activists.

The WhatsApp group whose contents Frost leaked was created in late October 2023, and was intended to provide support in an environment of heightened antisemitism following the Oct. 7 attacks. It is made up of people with varying political, cultural and religious leanings. Some consider themselves Zionists, a word often used to describe Jews who are staunch supporters of Israel, while others don’t, according to members. Frost, who was invited to the group in early November, was among its earliest members.

While a group administrator indicated in the chat that it wasn’t intended for political debates, there were instances when chat group members veered into advocacy. That included discussions on how to bring comments made by pro-Palestinian activists to the attention of their employers or publishers, when they were deemed by members to be antisemitic.

In December, some members of the group shared a call-to-action to challenge the impartiality of Antoinette Lattouf, a writer who had been given a five-day gig hosting a radio morning show for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Members of another WhatsApp group, for Jewish lawyers, also engaged in a similar effort.

Check your freezer. Perdue Foods is recalling more than 167,000 pounds of frozen chicken nuggets and tenders after some customers reported finding metal wire embedded in the products.

According to Perdue and the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, the recall covers select lots of three products: Perdue Breaded Chicken Tenders, Butcher Box Organic Chicken Breast Nuggets and Perdue Simply Smart Organics Breaded Chicken Breast Nuggets.

FSIS and Perdue determined that some 167,171 pounds (75,827 kilograms) of these products may be contaminated with a foreign material after receiving an unspecified number of customer complaints. In a Friday announcement, Maryland-based Perdue said that the material was “identified in a limited number of consumer packages.”