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Two days after the public meeting, Lucia Villa Sebastian, Loudoun County Public Schools interim assistant superintendent for human resources and talent development, informed Cross in a letter that he was being put on administrative leave with pay as the district investigated allegations of "conduct that has had a disruptive impact on the operations of Leesburg Elementary School."

At the public meeting, Cross rose in opposition to draft policy 8040, a proposal that would allow transgender and gender-expansive students to use names and pronouns outside their legal names and "regardless of the name and gender recorded in the student's permanent educational record."

The proposal would also amend an existing school district policy by allowing students to participate in activities such as sports "in a manner consistent with the student's gender identity."

Several states including Idaho, Florida and Tennessee have recently enacted laws restricting the ability of transgender athletes to participate in sports based on their gender identity rather than their sex assigned at birth.

Byard, the Loudoun County Public Schools public information officer, said the proposal would align district policy with the Code of Virginia and the Virginia Department of Education's guidelines for the treatment of transgender students.

Conservatives, who have a visceral understanding of the inherent conflict among the basic human aspirations for freedom, justice, and equality, personal security, self-expression, spirituality, and the rights of the individual versus societal cohesion, are in the difficult position of having to find the right balance among them, which in turn requires uninspiring compromises.

The progressive left, meanwhile, vehemently insists that this or that form of inequality or injury is unacceptable, and never bothers to explain how its vision of greater equality would be compatible with freedom, or how extensive individual freedoms for some do not interfere with the freedom or personal safety of others.

Chief U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia, of the Western Judicial District of Texas, was notified about the death from the U.S. Marshals Service.   

"I was told it was this morning," Biery said of Scalia's death. "It happened on a ranch out near Marfa. As far as the details, I think it's pretty vague right now as to how," he said. "My reaction is it's very unfortunate. It's unfortunate with any death, and politically in the presidential cycle we're in, my educated guess is nothing will happen before the next president is elected."

The U.S. Marshal Service, the Presidio County sheriff and the FBI were involved in the investigation.Officials with the law enforcement agencies declined to comment. A federal official who asked not to be named said there was no evidence of foul play and it appeared that Scalia died of natural causes.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott released a statement Saturday afternoon, calling Scalia a man of God, a patriot and an "unwavering defender of the written Constitution." "He was the solid rock who turned away so many attempts to depart from and distort the Constitution," Abbott said. "We mourn his passing, and we pray that his successor on the Supreme Court will take his place as a champion for the written Constitution and the Rule of Law. Cecilia and I extend our deepest condolences to his family, and we will keep them in our thoughts and prayers."

Students are expected to complete a similar assignment when learning about China, according to the News Leader

"Neither these lessons, nor any other lesson in the world geography course, are an attempt at indoctrination to Islam or any other religion, or a request for students to renounce their own faith or profess any belief," Bond added in the statement. "Each of the lessons attempts objectively to present world religions in a way that is interesting and interactive for students."

The Virginia Department of Education told the News Leader that LaPorte's assignment is in line with the "Standards of Learning and the requirements for content instruction on world monotheistic religions.

Kimberly Herndon, the parent who organized the event, said that the assignment amounted to "indoctrination." "If my truth can not be spoken in schools, I don't want false doctrine spoken in schools. That's what keeps it even across the board," she said, according to the News Leader

"She gave up the Lord's time," Herndon continued, referring to LaPorte's lessons. "She gave it up and gave it to Mohammed."

McLaughlin said he has not been in touch with Pete Arredondo, the embattled head of the Uvalde school district’s police department, who served as the incident commander during the shooting and has been criticized for not sending officers in sooner.Arredondo has not spoken publicly about the incident, telling CNN on Wednesday that he would do so after more time has passed and the victims of the massacre are buried.

Last week, Abbott said he was “misled” by law enforcement authorities about the series of events that took place.

“Why should any of us be afraid of expanding background checks? There’s nothing wrong with that, I don’t have anything to hide,” said McLaughlin, who has also long pushed to build a psychiatric hospital in Uvalde.

During the interview on Wednesday, however, McLaughlin took a much more conciliatory tone, urging compromise between Republicans and Democrats to find a set of laws that “work for everyone.”

“The briefing that the governor and the lieutenant governor and everybody else in that room [had] ... was given by the DPS, not local law enforcement,” McLaughlin said.“They’ve had three press conferences,” he added. “In all three press conferences, something has changed.”

In his letter to Patrick, who presides over the Senate, and House Speaker Dade Phelan (R), Abbott asked that both chambers form committees to explore five issues: school safety; mental health; social media; police training; and firearm safety.“As leaders, we must come together at this time to provide solutions to protect all Texans,” Abbott said in his letter.

Abbott also announced new instructions for the Texas School Safety Center, a research center focused on campus safety and security that is statutorily responsible for auditing schools for safety processes and establishing best practices.

According to a letter Abbott sent to education officials, the governor said the San Marcos-based safety center should start conducting “random intruder detection audits,” designed to find weaknesses in campus security systems.

McLaughlin said he could not imagine the school returning to normal operations.“I hope we tear it down to the ground,” he said. “I would never expect a teacher, a student, anyone to go walk back in that building.”

They both marveled that amid the chaos, the result was as intended: The attacker was stopped before he could hurt anyone else

The FBI examined 160 shootings between 2000 and 2013 and found that most of the violence ended when the assailant stopped shooting, committed suicide or fled. Unarmed citizens successfully restrained shooters in 21 of those incidents, according to the FBI.

Two attacks stopped when off-duty officers shot and killed the attackers. Five ended in much the way the attack at Louie’s did — when armed civilians, mostly security guards, exchanged fire with the shooters.

“How is the officer going to discern who is the Good Samaritan and who is not?” Serpas said. “They don’t have placards on the front of their shirts that say ‘I’m the good guy’ or ‘I’m the bad guy.’ 

In videos, Tilghman complained that he was “under hardcore demonic attack,” noting in one recording: “I’m not doing well . . . doing really, really bad right now.

Gerald Konkler, general counsel of the Oklahoma Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training, confirmed that Tilghman was licensed to carry a weapon and had been through training that would have included a psychological evaluation. Tilghman’s relatives could not be reached for comment.

“It is what it is,” Whittle said. “You’d better be damn sure that what you are doing is right, because you’ll pay the consequences if you are wrong.

In the weeks since the shooting, he has replayed in his head different endings to the incident. What if instead of retreating to the grassy bank, the gunman had followed his initial shots through the broken glass door into the restaurant? And what if Whittle had followed the gunman inside? “Bryan would have entered the front,” Nazario said. “I would have entered the back.” There they would have been, two good guys with guns, face to face. “He could have thought I was the shooter,” Nazario said. Or vice versa. And if Nazario had asked — and Whittle refused — to drop his weapon, Nazario said, “I would have had to take action.”

“Its efficacy is very low, especially when you consider over years — which a lot of contraception health advocates want to start women in their adolescent years, when they’re extremely fertile, incidentally, and continue for 10, 20, 30 years. The prospect that contraception would always prevent the conception of a child is preposterous,” Manning said

Some have directly blamed the anti-China rhetoric of former President Donald Trump, who often made mention of the pandemic as the "China virus" or the "kung flu".

The coronavirus hit the state hard and early, grinding its bustling cities and businesses to a halt. The virus has already claimed over 50,000 Californian lives.From March to May 2020 alone, over 800 Covid-related hate incidents were reported from 34 counties in the state, according to a report released by the Asian Pacific Policy Planning Council.

Those numbers have since intensified in Orange County, where anti-Asian hate incidents are up by an estimated 1200%, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.In neighbouring Los Angeles County, hate crimes against Asian Americans are up 115%, CBS News reported.

The bill designates an official at the US Justice Department to expedite reviews of violence and hate crimes related to Covid-19. It also provides grants for state and local governments to improve their own reporting systems.

"We are in a moment of reckoning right now," Ms Nguyen adds. "We have been systematically erased on every single level and people can start to combat that by educating themselves about us.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo appeared to support Mayor Bill de Blasio in his desire to keep schools open, announcing on Monday that the state would not stick with its plan to close schools if the positivity rate hit 9 percent by the state’s metrics, and would instead leave the decision to local leaders.

But the teachers’ union quickly poured cold water on that plan by saying it wanted schools closed if the city hit the 9 percent state mark.

As the virus has spread in the broader New York City community — and a rapidly rising number of schools have been closed when two or more positive cases emerged in the building, and no link could be established between them — the Department of Education decided to change its quarantine policy.

The change is most likely intended to prevent the situation the city found itself in last month, when as many as 201 school buildings were closed for two weeks at one point. The students in the 103 schools that are temporarily closed are learning remotely.

One faction of the United Federation of Teachers called on the union and the city to immediately close all schools for in-person learning, rather than waiting to see if the numbers worsen. “Too many students, families and staff will become sick,” if schools remain open, U.F.T. Solidarity, a left-leaning caucus within the union, said in a recent statement.

When the coronavirus death toll approached 100,000, this fact was largely absent from Fox prime-time programming. Now that it’s approaching 150,000, Fox personalities are claiming the original lockdowns were a plot to harm Trump and that things are actually going far better than expected thanks to his towering leadership.

studies suggest misinformation from Fox and other right-wing media outlets might be making audiences more prone to believing coronavirus conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, even as too-rapid reopenings are a big reason the coronavirus is surging again, his Fox propagandists continue to push the idea that hesitation to reopen schools is pure politics.

Yet according to Trump’s own advisers, these failures are now putting his reelection at risk.

Meanwhile, Trump is mainlining from Fox a daily picture of the protests that is highly distorted and narcotically numbing.

This is surely why Trump is sending in law enforcement in the first place — he believes inciting violent civil conflict will help his reelection. As one GOP strategist candidly tells the Times, Republicans are hoping to define Democrats “as being on the side of the anarchists in Portland.”

The crucial point here is that what Trump sees on Fox is surely persuading him that he’s succeeding in doing just that.

Fox personalities are claiming that electing Joe Biden will make civil violence “a staple of American life everywhere.” They are relentlessly doctoring Biden quotes to paint him as anti-police. And they are suggesting that Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech, which conflated protests with “far-left fascism” to justify sending in more law enforcement, represented the greatest oratory since Cicero.

But in the Fox narrative of the protests, there is no room for any acknowledgement that Trump is functioning as a primarily inciting and destructive force, or that this fact might be further alienating the educated white suburban voters who are supposed to find Trump’s authoritarian displays reassuring.

a recent Yahoo News-YouGov poll found that a larger percentage of suburban voters say the country will become less safe if Trump wins (48 percent) than say the same about Biden (37 percent). Among women, it’s even worse for Trump (50 percent and 33 percent, respectively).

Republicans focused primarily on two politically charged investigations from the Trump era: a federal tax investigation into Mr. Biden’s son Hunter Biden, and the work of a special counsel, John H. Durham, to determine whether Obama-era officials erred in 2016 when they investigated Trump campaign officials and their ties to Russia.

Judge Garland has sterling legal credentials, a reputation as a moderate and a long history of service at the Justice Department. After clerking for Justice William J. Brennan Jr., he worked as a federal prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington under President George H.W. Bush and was chosen by Jamie Gorelick, the deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton, to serve as her top deputy.

Judge Garland was for the most part measured and even-tempered, but he became emotional when he described his family’s flight from anti-Semitism and persecution in Eastern Europe and asylum in America.

During the hearing on the bill, state lawmakers also questioned the legality of all AP courses, comparing them to Common Core, which Oklahoma has repealed. According to the Tulsa World, lawmakers were concerned that College Board courses could be seen as an effort to create a national curriculum.

In the past, when I’ve made the ‘where do you draw the line?’ argument to woke teachers, they dismiss the notion that any child might identify as an animal as a ‘red herring’. But it turns out, if you encourage kids to part company with biological reality, there’s nothing to stop them believing they’re cats or dinosaurs – or, indeed, red herring

Will doctors nod along enthusiastically when a teenage girl insists she’s a grub and then pack her off to surgery to have her arms and legs removed? Will a Labour government pass an act of parliament enabling ‘furries’ to marry cats and dogs?

due to limited capacity, until now testing in the U.S. has largely been used diagnostically

In addition to diagnostic testing, the new funding will enable schools to use frequent testing as a screening tool, which can "identify asymptomatic disease and prevent clusters before they start,"

The CDC released additional guidance that focuses on testing in specific settings, including correctional and detention facilities, non-health care workplaces, higher education institutions, and homeless shelters and encampments.

the investments and guidance are intended to clear the way toward schools opening.

"The question I think for the administration, and for schools in the country, is not whether they can open, but how,"

Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former senior adviser on immigration in both the Bush and Obama administrations, said the comparisons to the Trump administration are unfair and not accurate.

This is not "kids in cages," she said, which referred to detention facilities run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The Carrizo Springs facility is operated by the Department of Health and Human Services, and it includes educational services and medical care.

"A government agency is not a parent for children," she said. "The reality is that children who are alone need to be accommodated for their safety while the government identifies and reunites them with appropriate sponsors. We don't want to endanger children, and we don't want them held in detention or in facilities that don't meet their best interests."