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There are five weeks to go until Election Day, but almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.

Biden’s 2019 tax return shows taxable income of $944,737 and a federal tax bill of $299,346. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, reported $3,018,127 in taxable income and paid $1,185,628 in taxes.

There are five weeks to go until Election Day, but almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.

The Chicago Police Department routinely violates civil rights, uses unnecessary force, discriminates against minority residents, and fails to hold officers accountable — creating a climate of distrust, violence, and fear that makes residents and cops unsafe. That’s according to a massive new report that the US Department of Justice released on Friday.

The investigation followed the police shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014. Officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot McDonald, initially claimed that the black 17-year-old lunged at police officers and posed a dangerous threat. But a dashboard camera video released in 2015 showed that McDonald was at least 10 feet away from the officers and didn’t move toward police. The revelation worsened already-tense community relations with the police, leading the Justice Department to get involved in its biggest investigation of a local police department yet.

For example, raw statistics show that Chicago police officers use force almost 10 times more often against black residents than against their white counterparts.

America’s decline relative to a rising China has sparked interest among academics about power shifts in the international order—whether they can happen peacefully and under what conditions; what precedents exist and what they tell us. Now comes an important book, Twilight of the Titans, by Joseph M. Parent and Paul K. McDonald, who use quantitative analysis of power transitions to analyze the problem. What they find provides a warning to a rising China, and a road map for a declining United States to regain its standing.

The Harvard political scientist Graham Allison called the problem “the Thucydides Trap,” in which the country in relative decline so fears the rise of a challenger that it chooses to go to war to prevent it. And while Allison’s book Destined for War has its detractors, it served the worthwhile purpose of drawing us all back to Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian Wars and sounding the alarm that U.S. policies designed to confront China risked accelerating American decline.

History has really seen only one peaceful hegemonic transition: Britain to the United States in the late 19th century. It remains an open question whether nuclear weapons will stabilize hegemonic transition.

"Normally in a presidential election, we have anywhere from 68% to 73% turnout," Rodriguez told NPR. "We're expecting 80% turnout this year based on the voting numbers that have come in."

Among states that are reporting data, voters have requested 87 million mail ballots, according to McDonald, and roughly 41 million ballots have been returned by mail.

Democrats currently hold a roughly 2-to-1 advantage in returned mail-in ballots in states with party registration.

But while the ordering experience may not change, the labor market could feel an impact. During the Great Recession many consumers had to turn to McDonalds – one of the few employers still hiring – for employment.  McDonald’s itself recently held a “national hiring day” to fill 50,000 jobs company-wide. There may be some risk in rolling out a cashier-free system after touting the restaurant’s footprint as an employer.

cancel culture is not new. A brief accounting of the illustrious and venerable ranks of blocked and dragged Americans encompasses Sarah Good, Elijah Lovejoy, Ida B. Wells, Dalton Trumbo, Paul Robeson and the Dixie Chicks.

What was the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction, but the cancellation of the black South?

any sober assessment of this history must conclude that the present objections to cancel culture are not so much concerned with the weapon, as the kind of people who now seek to wield it

Voters returned nearly 64 million mail-in ballots before Election Day, a pandemic-driven record that is certain to make for a more complicated vote count this year but could also reshape American elections for years to come.

Some battleground states, like North Carolina, have been processing ballots for weeks. Elections officials there expect at least 97 percent of votes to be counted on Tuesday night. But in one of the most hotly contested states, Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign and Republican allies blocked counties from processing votes ahead of the election.

“I believe the usage of mail balloting in this election will continue a trend towards expanded mail balloting that we’ve seen across the country. In particular, states with permanent absentee ballot lists will likely see their numbers swell, which may eventually lead the way to all-mail ballot elections,” said Michael McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida.

NOT SO long ago, asylum seekers turned to the United States, seeking refuge from repressive states. Now the United States is one of those repressive states.

That’s the gist of a Canadian federal court ruling, which would scrap a 16-year-old bilateral treaty called the Safe Third Country Agreement, under which Canada and the United States each recognize the other as a safe place to seek refuge. Justice Ann Marie McDonald ruled that Canada’s practice of turning back third-country refugees who try to cross at official points of entry along the U.S.-Canada frontier — on the theory that they have already reached a safe harbor in the United States — no longer makes sense given the atrocious treatment to which they are subjected south of the border. Canada, she wrote, can no longer turn a blind eye to the reality that the United States denies decent and dignified treatment to asylum seekers.

The judge found that the “accounts of the detainees demonstrate both physical and psychological suffering because of detention, and a real risk that they will not be able to assert asylum claims” in the United States.

a growing trend among Generation Z, loosely defined as people born between the years of 1996 and 2012. Equipped with ride-sharing apps and social media, “zoomers,” as they are sometimes called, are getting their driver’s licenses at lower rates than their predecessors. Unlike previous generations, they don’t see cars as a ticket to freedom or a crucial life milestone.

Those phases “are consistently getting later,” said Noreen McDonald, a professor of urban planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gen Zers are more likely to live at home for longer, more likely to pursue higher education and less likely to get married in their 20s.

The trend is most pronounced for teens, but even older members of Gen Z are lagging behind their millennial counterparts. In 1997, almost 90 percent of 20- to 25 year-olds had licenses; in 2020, it was only 80 percent.

Chicago police officer sues victim's family over shooting

A white Chicago police officer who fatally shot a black teenager last December is suing his family for $10m (£6.9m), claiming emotional distress.

The investigation is focusing on the use of force by officers and the department's accountability procedures.

Advisers to Hillary Clinton, including former President Bill Clinton, believe that her campaign made serious miscalculations by forgoing early attacks on Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and failing to undercut his archliberal message before it grew into a political movement that has now put him within striking distance of beating Mrs. Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire.

They have asked her advisers about the strength of the campaign’s data modeling and turnout assumptions in Iowa, given that her 2008 campaign’s predictions were so inaccurate.

As the Democratic rivals prepare for what is likely to be a contentious televised debate on Sunday night, the Clintons are particularly concerned that her “rational message,” in the words of an aide, is not a fit with a restless Democratic primary electorate

On Thursday, a judge released video of the deadly shooting. In its wake, a group of activists who have organized previous protests over shootings called for more on Friday.

The police department fired Davis, he said, after he ruled Officer Kevin Fry's shooting of 17-year-old Chatman, who was unarmed, unjustified. But he had been at odds with the department over the internal assessment of police use of force for a while.

"I pay most attention to Officer Fry. Mr. Chatman is simply trying to get away. He's running as fast as he can away from the officers. Officer (Lou) Toth is right behind him; he's doing the right thing. He's pursuing him. He's trying to capture him, while Officer Fry, on the other hand, has both of his hands on his weapon. He is in a shooter's position. He is looking for a clear shot."

The election is already setting records for turnout, and perhaps no two candidates are more at odds over the future of the country and the direction they want to take it in. This election is fundamentally about what it means to be an American.

Whoever wins could shape what America means for generations to come through social policy, the courts and by their own example.

This election is expected to have the highest voter turnout since 1908, north of 65% of eligible voters turning out, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Elections Project.

The Rosedale of the 1970s was a predominantly white working-class neighborhood of about 25,000, home to civil service workers, police officers and firefighters of mainly Italian, Irish and Jewish descent. But like much of New York City at that time, demographics were shifting as black and immigrant families moved in and, in response, some white families headed out.

Mr. Moyers, who served as press secretary to President Lyndon B. Johnson, said he was drawn to Rosedale as a journalist because he was interested in the societal ramifications of the Johnson administration’s efforts to put an end to segregation. Mr. Moyers and his camera crew set out to understand its impact and stumbled upon its real-world consequence on a street corner: the attack on their peers by children steeped in hate.

What he discovered in Queens, he said, was racism enmeshed with economic anxiety — a belief that the newcomers would bring waves of crime and slash property values. Plus, there was a toxic fear held by white residents of losing their dominance, he said, something he sees echoed in the politics of today.

More than 4.2 million people have already voted early in the presidential election, vastly exceeding the pace of 2016 as Democrats amass a commanding lead in returned mail ballots

The more their votes get cast early, he said, the less time Republican candidates have to reverse things "before all we're producing is regrets from people who already cast their ballots

The strong early voting turnout comes as Democratic nominee Joe Biden maintains a strong national polling lead over President Donald Trump

Americans have a hard time learning from foreign experience. Our size and the role of English as an international language (which reduces our incentive to learn other tongues) conspire to make us oblivious to alternative ways of living and the possibilities of change.

Unfortunately, any suggestion that Europe does something we might want to emulate tends to be shouted down with cries of “socialism.”

an under-discussed aspect of the current economic scene: Europe’s comparative success in getting workers idled by the pandemic back into the labor force.