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While the eyes of the world were focused on the impeachment efforts against President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Gov. Larry Hogan of neighboring Maryland did something extremely important in beginning the long process of unwinding our current political polarization.

The Republican governor announced that via executive order he had created an independent commission he will task with redrawing the state's congressional and legislative lines following the decennial reapportionment later this year.

"This commission is the first of its kind in the long history of our state," Hogan said in making the announcement. "Unlike the partisan, backdoor manner in which our state's political power brokers have conducted the state's redistricting process, we want to make sure that this time the people of Maryland are actually the ones drawing these lines—not the politicians or the party bosses."

Ebony Carter faced an uphill climb when she decided to run for the Georgia State Senate last year. Her deeply Republican district south of Atlanta had not elected a Democrat since 2001, and a Democrat hadn’t even bothered campaigning for the seat since 2014.

State party officials told her that they no longer tried to compete for the seat because they didn’t think a Democrat could win it. That proved correct. Despite winning 40 percent of the vote, the most for a liberal in years, Ms. Carter lost.

The president, who eked out a 12,000-vote victory in Georgia, received a small but potentially important boost from the state’s conservative areas if at least one local Democrat was running in a down-ballot race, according to a new study by Run for Something, an organization dedicated to recruiting and supporting liberal candidates.

The Electoral College has been a controversial topic over the past few years. People tend to have very strong opinions about the institution, which, in most instances, comes down to who citizens believe is advantaged or disadvantaged by it. Ideally, a good electoral system should be neutral, where no party, candidate or region is advanced at the expense of another. Yet, this is among the chief criticisms we hear about our system.

This has recently led many to call for the abolition of the Electoral College in favor of a national popular vote. Yet, critics realize how resilient the institution has been, surviving nearly 800 attempts to amend or abolish it over the course of our nation's history. Most changes that have occurred have happened at the state level.

First, it is important to recognize that the Electoral College process leads candidates to ignore a majority of states across the country

I tried to sketch out the essence of an actual conservative sensibility and politics: one of skepticism, limited government and an acceptance of human imperfection.

My point was that this conservative tradition had been lost in America, in so far as it had ever been found, because it had been hijacked by religious and political fundamentalism

I saw the fundamentalist psyche — rigid, abstract, authoritarian — as integral to the GOP in the Bush years and beyond, a phenomenon that, if sustained, would render liberal democracy practically moribund. It was less about the policy details, which change over time, than an entire worldview.

she told districts that were seeking guidance on how to operate during the coronavirus pandemic that it was not her responsibility to track school district infection rates or keep track of school reopening plans.

initiatives that rolled back civil rights protections for minority children

predatory for-profit colleges that saddle students with crushing debt while granting them useless degrees.

The 117th Congress, being sworn in Sunday, is historically diverse, with record-setting numbers of women, Black and Latino members and members who identify as LGBTQ.

There will be two vacancies in the House: New York's 22nd District will not have representation as legal challenges in the race continue, and Louisiana's 5th District will not have representation due to the death of Republican Rep.-elect Luke Letlow. I

Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler is also running in Georgia's dual runoff elections Tuesday. Perdue's term finished at the end of the 116th Congress, so he is not included in the new Congress' numbers. Loeffler's term will continue unless she is defeated Tuesday, so she is counted.

The Los Angeles Unified School District and its teachers’ union have reached a tentative agreement to restore in-person instruction, clearing the way for a mid-April reopening of some classrooms in one of the last large school districts to bring students back in substantial numbers.

“The right way to reopen schools must include the highest standard of Covid safety in schools, continued reduction of the virus in the communities we serve and access to vaccinations for school staff,” they said. “This agreement achieves that shared set of goals.”

Under the tentative deal, elementary school and high-need students — those with learning disabilities, problems accessing technology and other academic issues — will be brought back in about six weeks, to allow time for returning school employees to be fully vaccinated, according to officials familiar with district negotiations.

Polls show Democrats are favored to expand their control of the House on Tuesday night. Nonpartisan analysts predict Democrats will win a net of somewhere between five and 20 seats and GOP strategists said keeping Democrats’ gains in the single digits would be a victory for them.

Both parties are closely watching the race to replace retiring GOP Rep. Susan Brooks in Indiana. Donald Trump won this district, located in the northern Indianapolis suburbs, by 12 points in 2016, and a Democratic victory there could signal that his weakness with suburban women is weighing down Republicans lower on the ballot.

Democrats took back many GOP-held suburban seats in the 2018 midterm election and are hoping to clean up the rest on Tuesday night.

For President Donald Trump, the vacancy offers an opportunity to further reshape the court and bolster his legacy by installing a third conservative justice during his first term in office.

Of the 35 Senate seats up for grabs in November, 23 are held by Republicans and 12 by Democrats. For the 2020 cycle, CNN is featuring race ratings for Senate and House contests from Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales, who is a CNN contributor.

According to Inside Elections, six Republican-held Senate seats currently rate as Tilt Democratic or Toss-up. In Arizona, Sen. Martha McSally is running against Democrat Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and the husband of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, meanwhile, is facing off against former Gov. John Hickenlooper in a Democratic-leaning state. Both contests are rated Tilt Democratic.

“The central weakness of our political system now is the Republican Party,” Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard, said in an interview with Vox on Jan. 13, a week after the storming of the Capitol.

“The American Republican Party looks like a European far-right party,” Ziblatt continued. “But the big difference between the U.S. and a lot of these European countries is that the U.S. only has two parties and one of them is like a European far-right party. If the G.O.P. only controlled 20 percent of the legislature, like you see in a lot of European countries, this would be far less problematic — but they basically control half of it.”

A central question, then, is how distant from the rest of the American electorate the voters who align themselves with the radical wing of the Republican Party are.

The district’s graduation rate was 91 percent in 2011, up from 80 percent in 2008. On state tests in reading, math and science, an average of 88 percent of students across grades and subjects met proficiency standards, compared with 73 percent three years ago. Attendance is up, dropouts are down. Mooresville ranks 100th out of 115 districts in North Carolina in terms of dollars spent per student — $7,415.89 a year — but it is now third in test scores and second in graduation rates.

“Other districts are doing things, but what we see in Mooresville is the whole package: using the budget, innovating, using data, involvement with the community and leadership,”

Mooresville’s laptops perform the same tasks as those in hundreds of other districts: they correct worksheets, assemble progress data for teachers, allow for compelling multimedia lessons, and let students work at their own pace or in groups, rather than all listening to one teacher. The difference, teachers and administrators here said, is that they value computers not for the newest content they can deliver, but for how they tap into the oldest of student emotions — curiosity, boredom, embarrassment, angst — and help educators deliver what only people can. Technology, here, is cold used to warm.

The turbulent district of Andar has been caught in one kind of crossfire or another for years: between American forces and insurgent leaders, between warring militant factions, between those hostile to the national government and those courting it.

Government officials hailed the news as a triumph for Afghan democracy in a place where only three valid votes were recorded across the whole district in the 2010 parliamentary elections.To a degree, that judgment was justified.

But as always in Andar, there is another side. A review by The New York Times found that polling centers in more than half of the host villages were either closed or saw little to no activity on Election Day, even though they submitted thousands of votes.

The boy's death happened at about 6:25 a.m. on the tracks just south of the city's Churchill Avenue, near the elegant century-old high school on an oak-studded Spanish Mission campus, directly across the street from Stanford University, in a ZIP code synonymous with success. Two student suicides earlier this school year at neighboring Gunn High School led to a flurry of community meetings and teen outreach, and the district has been working to overhaul its teen mental-health policies since a much-publicized cluster of student suicides in 2009.

the very life of the school district has been altered in ways large and small. Social studies classes start with meditation. Teachers and staff have been taught to help identify teens struggling with depression or in distress. The district is accelerating construction of a student wellness center at Gunn High School, where students can talk to counselors and mental health professionals and nutritionists to decompress.To reduce stress, the school district -- home to the progeny of top Stanford faculty and many of Silicon Valley's tech titans -- reformed its homework policy in 2012, but the plan was never fully implemented. Now it is back on the school board's agenda. The district also recently contracted with a data-analysis firm called Hanover Research Group to analyze homework, grading practices and curriculum.

Both Gunn and Paly have convened sessions to listen to students. A similar communitywide gathering was held last week, and another is scheduled. Teachers offer academic accommodations -- like not collecting homework, or delaying tests -- and Paly economics teacher Alexander Davis created a "Gratitude Wall" in his classroom for students to write what they are grateful for on sticky notes.Paly, many students say, is a place where teachers care about their well-being. But the causes of suicide are complex.The school offers an array of electives and resources. "There's journalism, glassblowing, theater -- there may be a little more pressure, but a lot more opportunity here," said senior Jack Brook. "People are happy when they find a passion, and there's a lot of opportunity to find a passion here."

Economists Praveen Chakravarty and Vivek Dehejia certainly believe so. They acquired images grabbed by satellites from the US Air Force Defence Meteorological Satellite Programme. These satellites circle the earth 14 times a day and record lights from the earth's surface at night with sensors. They superimposed a map depicting India's districts on their images, allowing them to develop a unique data set of luminosity values, by district and over time.

"This is a level of regional inequality unprecedented in large federal states in contemporary world economic history."

Using data generated by the night lights, they studied of 387 of 640 districts in 12 states. These districts account for 85% of India's population and 80% of its GDP. Some 87% of parliamentary seats are in these districts. Using the novel methodology, the economists documented income divergence in India.

Democratic state Rep. Melanie Stansbury will win the special election to represent New Mexico's 1st Congressional District, CNN projected Tuesday, securing the seat left vacant when Interior Secretary Deb Haaland joined the Biden administration.

The central New Mexico district, which includes most of Albuquerque, was considered favorable ground for Democrats

Democratic presidential nominees have won the district in every election since 2004. Joe Biden defeated then-President Donald Trump there by 23 percentage points last year.

Cincinnati Public Schools is on the verge of settling a wrongful death lawsuit with the parents of Gabriel Taye, attorneys for both parties said in a joint press release Friday.

Gabriel was 8 years old in 2017 when he hanged himself with a necktie in his Cincinnati home. His family subsequently filed a federal lawsuit against the district, the school's principal and assistant principal, and a school nurse, alleging that the school did not adequately respond to the boy being bullied, and did not inform them of a bullying incident that took place two days before Taye's death.

The proposed settlement announced Friday includes paying $3 million to Gabriel's family and a commitment on behalf of the district to a slew of anti-bullying measures, though the district admits no guilt.

The Atlanta-area district attorney investigating former President Donald Trump, Fani Willis, is beefing up her office with a new evidence expert, according to a source familiar with the situation.

The Atlanta-area district attorney investigating former President Donald Trump, Fani Willis, is beefing up her office with a new evidence expert, according to a source familiar with the situation.

While Carlson was not hired explicitly to work on the probe into Trump, his expertise on the rules of evidence and criminal procedure is sure to be seen as a valuable addition for an office investigating a former President.

In their quest to win the 23 seats that would give them control of the House of Representatives, Democrats are targeting the seven Republican-held districts in California that were won by Hillary Clinton in 2016. There are high-profile female Democrats in several of those districts, all hoping the trend will carry them over the finish line Tuesday night.

In the wild race for retiring Rep. Ed Royce's district in California-39, the attention has focused on the slugfest between Gil Cisneros and Andy Thorburn — who are competing against two Republicans for the No. 2 slot. But pediatrician Mai Khanh Tran got the backing of EMILY's list and could draw a significant share of the vote.

"There are so many young people who are excited to see someone who looks like them," Jacobs says. Her youth and gender have also brought valuable financial support for Jacobs in this highly competitive district, which covers portions of Orange and San Diego counties. The super PAC for EMILY's List, Women Vote!, has spent $2.4 million to support her campaign. (Jacobs' grandfather, Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, has given more than a $1 million to Women Vote! this campaign cycle).

There is no federal effort to monitor coronavirus cases in schools, and reporting by school districts is uneven. One independent effort has counted more than 21,000 cases this school year.

Without knowing what local health authorities have found through contact tracing, we cannot know if students or school employees who have tested positive were actually infected in school or outside of it.

Nationally, thousands of districts — including nearly all of the largest ones, and some of the districts The Times surveyed — started the academic year with fully remote instruction.

As the nation draws closer to the 2020 election, the conversations that I'm having now remind me of the surge of energy and purpose that I witnessed in 2016. North Carolina voters, particularly Democrats, are motivated by the change that they've created and by the work that still needs to be done.

quality and well-funded public schools, expansion of Medicaid -- long overdue in our state -- to cover roughly 500,000 currently uninsured people, and a reckoning with the racism that has permeated our gerrymandered districts and the fabric of our everyday lives.

She quickly got busy mobilizing her community around the inequities she saw in the public school system and among the children she adored. These inequities included a lack of resources for teachers and students and a targeted effort that many say would effectively resegregate schools based on race and income, primarily through actions proposed by the state's Joint Legislative Study Committee