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Rutgers University will require students who are enrolling for the 2021 fall semester to show they've received a COVID-19 vaccine. The New Jersey state school says the requirement will help it make "a full return to our pre-pandemic normal" on campus for the next school year.

Rutgers is believed to be the first large university in the U.S., and possibly the first college of any size in the country, to initiate a COVID-19 vaccine requirement.

The school is also urging all faculty and staff to get immunized as soon as they can. The message cited President Biden's recent comments in which he said every adult in the U.S. should be able to get at least one vaccine shot by early summer.

Abbott on Tuesday issued an executive order allowing Texas businesses to operate at full capacity and revoking a statewide mask mandate. The order also curtailed local officials’ ability to impose tougher restrictions in their communities, by barring countywide mask mandates and removing jail time and other penalties for those who do not follow local coronavirus rules.

The Republican governors’ decisions to lift covid restrictions was warmly embraced by many conservatives. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) said in a statement that reopening businesses without restrictions would “help us restore the livelihoods of millions of Texans even faster.” And Texas Speaker of the House Dade Phelan (R) said people should “exercise personal responsibility” to prevent further spread of the coronavirus while the state reopens

“It puts a lot of businesses in a tough spot, I think,” San Antonio Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich told KSAT. “Basically you’re saying, ‘If you get infected, you die, that’s the way it goes. We got to open up.’ That’s not the way to do it. This is really ridiculous.”

Beth Moore, a popular evangelical Christian and Bible teacher, says she is no longer a Southern Baptist and is parting ways with the denomination's publishing arm.

"I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists," she told the news agency. "I love so many Southern Baptist people, so many Southern Baptist churches, but I don't identify with some of the things in our heritage that haven't remained in the past."

The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the US.

The Three-Fifths Compromise, an agreement reached during the negotiations in 1787 to create the United States Constitution, found that, for the purposes of representation and taxation, only three-fifths of a state’s enslaved people would be counted toward its total population. It is regarded as one of the most racist deals among the states during the country’s founding.

Yet in a speech in the Tennessee General Assembly on Tuesday, one representative defended the compromise, arguing that it was “a bitter, bitter pill” that was necessary to curtail the power of slaveholding states and that helped clear the way to ending slavery

— remarks that were rebuked by critics, including Black colleagues, as insulting and demeaning

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday afternoon that he would not resign, despite mounting pressure from prominent New York U.S. representatives calling for him to step down.

His announcement followed a cascade of statements Friday morning from Democratic members of the state's congressional delegation asking for his resignation in the face of multiple sexual misconduct allegations and an ongoing investigation into the state's reporting of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes.

Just hours earlier, at least a dozen of the state's prominent House Democrats, including Rep. Jerry Nadler, said the challenges the governor faces make him unable to lead effectively.

A man was arrested Wednesday afternoon near the Naval Observatory and charged with several counts related to weapons and ammunition, according the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department.

Paul Murray, 31, of San Antonio was first detained by the U.S. Secret Service based on an intelligence bulletin originating from Texas. He was later formally arrested by Washington police. A rifle and ammunition were recovered from his vehicle.

The arrest comes as the district is in a state of heightened security following the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt at the U.S. Capitol. Violent pro-Trump extremists, fueled by the idea that President Biden and Harris had stolen the election from Donald Trump, stormed the Capitol, threatening lawmakers and law enforcement.

As an artistic endeavour, drawing is almost as old as mankind. In an instrumental, subordinate role, it developed along with the other arts in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Whether preliminary sketches for mosaics and murals or architectural drawings and designs for statues and reliefs within the variegated artistic production of the Gothic medieval building and artistic workshop, drawing as a nonautonomous auxiliary skill was subordinate to the other arts.

In the West, the history of drawing as an independent artistic document began toward the end of the 14th century. If its development was independent, however, it was not insular.

Drawing became an independent art form in northern Italy, at first quite within the framework of ordinary studio activity. But with nature studies, copies of antiques, and drafts in the various sketchbooks (those of Giovannino de’Grassi, Antonio Pisanello, and Jacopo Bellini, for example), the tradition of the Bauhütten studio workshop changed to individual work: the place of “exempla,” models, reproduced in formalized fashion was now being taken by subjectively probing and partially creative drawings.

Tensions continue to rise on the streets of the Bolivian administrative capital La Paz, with angry crowds accusing authorities of fraud in Sunday's presidential election.

Protesters and the opposition claim electoral authorities manipulated the vote count in favor of President Evo Morales, the nation's longtime socialist leader.

But opposition groups and international observers grew suspicious after election officials stopped the count for 24 hours Sunday without any explanation. When counting resumed, Morales's lead had jumped, making him certain to be an outright winner.

The incident took place in Texas on Friday as the campaign bus was traveling from San Antonio to Austin as part of a push to urge Biden supporters to cast their ballots on the state's last day of early voting. A Biden campaign official described the motorists' actions as an attempt to slow down the bus and run it off the road.

People in vehicles that were part of a "Trump Train" began yelling profanities and obscenities and then blockaded the entire Biden entourage, according to a source familiar with the incident.At one point they slowed the tour bus to roughly 20 mph on Interstate 35, the campaign official said. The vehicles slowed down to try to stop the bus in the middle of the highway. The source said there were nearly 100 vehicles around the campaign bus. Biden staffers were rattled by the event, the source said, though no one was hurt.

Neither Biden nor his running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, were on the bus. Multiple sources told CNN that Wendy Davis, a former state senator who is challenging Republican Rep. Chip Roy for Texas' 21st Congressional District, was on the bus. Davis' campaign declined to comment to CNN on Saturday.

People of color in some of America’s wealthiest cities are significantly more likely to live in houses without indoor plumbing essential for running water, new research reveals.

. Yet access to running water is not universal in the United States, ostensibly the richest country in the world.

Nationwide, almost half a million homes do not have piped water, with the majority – 73% – located in urban areas. In fact, almost half the houses without plumbing are located in the country’s top 50 cities.

AUSTIN, Texas — Multiple vehicles bearing Trump flags and signs surrounded a Biden-Harris campaign bus heading from San Antonio to Austin on Friday, forcing campaign officials to scrap two campaign events, according to reports by Democratic officials on Saturda

Katie Naranjo, chair of the Travis County Democratic Party, tweeted that Trump supporters also “ran into a person’s car, yelling curse words and threats.”

The bus was occupied by campaign staff workers, who notified local law enforcement, which assisted the vehicle in reaching its destination, party officials said.

A Texas man who appeared to claim on social media accounts to be the “Trump train” driver who rammed a vehicle last week in a Joe Biden campaign caravan also had been videotaped driving through Black Lives Matter protesters in Texas this summer.

President Donald Trump has hailed the harassing drivers as “patriots.” Cisneros retweeted Trump’s message “I love Texas” over a video of the highway confrontation.

The black Ford F-150 pickup that collided with the Biden campaign car appears to be the same one Cisneros drove through a group of Black Lives Matter protesters in San Antonio in June. 

AUSTIN, Texas — The past week had been a nightmare. A winter storm, one of the worst to hit Texas in a generation, robbed Lanita Generous of power, heat and water in her home. The food she had stored in her refrigerator and freezer had spoiled. She was down to her final five bottles of water.

The storm and its devastation have tested a notion of independence that is deeply ingrained in Texas, a sense that Texans and their businesses can handle things on their own without the intrusion of outsiders or the shackles of regulation.

But for many Texans, H-E-B reflected the ways the state’s maverick spirit can flourish: reliable for routine visits but particularly in a time of disaster, and a belief that the family-owned chain — with the vast majority of its more than 340 locations inside state lines — has made a conscious choice to stay rooted to the idea of being a good neighbor.

Coronavirus cases continued to spread in parts of the American south and west in the past week as experts warn that packed protests could exacerbate the pandemic.

In Arkansas on Tuesday, Gov. Asa Hutchinson said there were 375 new positive coronavirus tests, the highest single-day number of new community cases. There are currently more people hospitalized with Covid-19 there than at any prior point.

Arizona added 1,127 new positive Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, the state's highest single-day total in the pandemic. Texas, too, has seen over 1,000 new positive coronairus cases in six out of the last seven da

the pandemic has pushed all of the country’s problems to the center of American life. It has also highlighted how our political class, disproportionately wealthy and white, dithers for weeks, only to produce underwhelming “rescue” bills that, at best, do no more than barely maintain the status quo.

The median wealth of a U.S. senator was $3.2 million as of 2018, and $900,000 for a member of the House of Representatives. These elected officials voted for one-time stimulus checks of $1,200 as if that was enough to sustain workers, whose median income is $61,973 and who are now nearly two months into various mandates to shelter-in-place and not work outside their homes. As a result, a tale of two pandemics has emerged.

The crisis spotlights the vicious class divide cleaving through our society and the ways it is also permeated with racism and xenophobia.

The Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's order to limit mail-in ballot drop box locations to one site per county, a decision that largely affects the Houston and Austin areas.

The court ruled that Abbott's order "provides Texas voters more ways to vote in the November 3 election than does the Election Code" and that it doesn't "disenfranchise anyone."

"The plaintiffs complain that limiting early hand-deliveries of mail-in ballots to one office per county requires more travel time for some voters. But this ignores the other options for casting their ballots that these voters have," the opinion read

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

1. Before invading Mexico, the U.S. tried to buy some of its territory. In late-1845, President James K. Polk sent diplomat John Slidell on a secret mission to Mexico. Slidell was tasked with settling a longstanding disagreement about the border between the two countries, but he was also authorized to offer the Mexicans up to $25 million for their territories in New Mexico and California. 

Nevertheless, on May 13, 1846, Congress voted to declare war on Mexico by an overwhelming margin.

3. Santa Anna used the war to reclaim power in Mexico. Most Americans considered Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna a mortal enemy for his actions at 1836’s Battle of the Alamo, but the charismatic general returned to power during the Mexican-American War thanks to a surprising ally: James K. Polk. 

Johnson also demanded a more aggressive strategy for combating violent crime — which was delivered by his new police chief, Eddie Garcia, who took over the department in early 2021. Parts of it involved tactics such as deploying “violence interrupters” to resolve street-level conflicts and guide those who need them to social services, and cleaning up blighted areas, such as trash-filled vacant lots and dilapidated buildings, where crime can breed.

The plan that Garcia developed, working with criminologists at the University of Texas at San Antonio, also refocused policing in Dallas on “hot spots.”

They divided the city into 101,000 “microgrids” — areas roughly the size of two football fields side-by-side — and discovered that crime was heavily concentrated in relatively few — an apartment complex here or a nightclub parking lot there. Just 50 of these hot spots accounted for almost 10 percent of violent street crime in Dallas.

now we are at one of those defining moments in Jewish history when we find ourselves at a moral disconnect with much of the international community. As we struggle to absorb the enormity of the October 7 massacre and to confront a global wave of antisemitism, the trauma of aloneness has returned.

One typical tweet in my feed reads: “First they came for LGBTQ, and I stood up, because love is love … Then they came for the Black community, and I stood up, because Black lives matter. Then they came for me, but I stood alone, because I am a Jew.”

Surely those who had played down Israel’s security fears would now understand the nature of the threat we face on our borders. After all, this was no “ordinary” terror attack but a pre-enactment of Hamas’s genocidal vision. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – free, that is, of Jews.