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Now, within the next few weeks, the Supreme Court will enter the melee and weigh in on the scope of the Voting Rights Act in a way that could bolster efforts by Republicans in states like Georgia and Texas to limit access to the polls.

It's the first time the justices have considered the scope of the Voting Rights Act as it applies to the denial of the vote since Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a 5-4 opinion in 2013 effectively invalidating Section 5 of the law

Since the decision in Shelby County v. Holder, states have moved forward with new laws, an effort further fueled by former President Donald Trump's unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

The number of hospitalizations related to Covid-19 among adolescents in the United States was about three times as high as hospitalizations linked to influenza over three recent flu seasons, the study found.

Children have a much lower likelihood overall of becoming severely ill or dying from Covid-19, compared with adults, but the risks are thought to increase with age. According to the most recent data collected by the academy, nearly four million children have tested positive for the coronavirus since the pandemic began, compared with about 30 million cases among adults.

Still, about 16,500 children have been hospitalized for Covid-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 322 have died, making it one of the leading causes of death among children, Dr. Maldonado noted.

The nation's homeless population grew last year for the fourth year in a row. On a single night in January 2020, there were more than 580,000 individuals who were homeless in the United States, a 2% increase from the year before.The numbers, released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development Thursday, do not reflect the impact of the pandemic.

"And we know the pandemic has only made the homelessness crisis worse," HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge said

Among the report's more sobering findings: homelessness among veterans and families did not improve for the first time in many years.

There has been a perception that Black Americans are more hesitant than whites to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. But roughly equal proportions of Black and white respondents in a recent poll said they plan to get vaccinated.

25% of Black respondents and 28% of white respondents said they did not plan to get a shot.

misinformation and lack of access to health care are bigger impediments for Blacks than a hesitancy to get vaccinated.

Eight people were shot to death at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area on Tuesday evening, the authorities said, adding that a suspect was in custody.

who had earlier released a surveillance image of a suspect near a Hyundai Tucson outside one of the massage parlors.

Four people died in the first shooting, at Young’s Asian Massage near Acworth, a northwest suburb of Atlanta, said Capt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office. That shooting, in which a Hispanic man was injured, was reported around 5 p.m.

Tens of thousands of immigrants from Central America and Mexico, including thousands of unaccompanied minors, are journeying to the border. In February, the US Customs and Border Protection says it tracked over 100,000 migrants crossing the southern border, almost a 30% increase over January. Nearly 10,000 were unaccompanied minors, and more than 14,000 of those minors are now in US custody.

Yet White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Monday refused to characterize the situation as a "crisis," instead, calling it a "circumstance."

That's right -- kids tightly packed in detention facilities, sleeping on mats on the floor with aluminum-like blankets. For all of the hue and cry from the left hammering former President Donald Trump for keeping "kids in cages" at our southern border, Biden has now served in two administrations -- first as vice president and now as President -- in which migrant children are being held in terrible conditions.

Millions of white evangelical adults in the U.S. do not intend to get vaccinated against Covid-19. Tenets of faith and mistrust of science play a role; so does politics.

Stephanie Nana, an evangelical Christian in Edmond, Okla., refused to get a Covid-19 vaccine because she believed it contained “aborted cell tissue.”

Nathan French, who leads a nondenominational ministry in Tacoma, Wash., said he received a divine message that God was the ultimate healer and deliverer: “The vaccine is not the savior.”

A growing number of US colleges have said all students must be fully vaccinated before returning to campus, in a move likely to anger some state governors.

In late March Rutgers University became one of the first institutions to declare that having all students vaccinated will allow for an "expedited return to pre-pandemic normal."

Cornell has also created an online registration tool so students and staff can register their vaccination status

Just as aggressive treatment was necessary to save his life, Kendi proposes similarly aggressive treatment for the nation. The medicine, he says, is called antiracism.

Antiracism does not mean what you probably think it means. For most of our history, the term has been used sporadically to describe efforts or policies to oppose racism. Most Americans likely still understand it as such

But in the past decade, the term has taken on a different meaning—one that describes a very specific way of thinking about and confronting racism.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. tapped David S. Cohen to return as deputy head of the C.I.A., placing an official who knows the agency well alongside the veteran diplomat he chose to lead it, the Biden transition team announced on Friday.

In talks with transition officials, Mr. Cohen outlined an ambitious agenda for the C.I.A. to bolster its work in critical areas, including global climate change and health issues.During the Obama administration, Mr. Cohen was involved in the C.I.A. assessment that Russia sought to intervene in the 2016 election to aid President Trump’s election.

Mr. Cohen, according to people familiar with his views, believes the government must go beyond election interference to also scrutinize how foreign powers may be trying to provide support or influence extremist groups.

Kamala Harris will be sworn in Wednesday as the next vice president of the United States by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, according to a Harris aide.

"Mrs. Shelton would bring her Bible to church every Sunday," Harris wrote. "Sitting alongside her, I was introduced to the teachings of that Bible. My earliest memories were of a loving God, a God who asked us to 'speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves' and to 'defend the rights of the poor and needy.' This is where I learned that 'faith' is a verb, something we must live and demonstrate through our actions."

The vice president-elect will take her oath of office using two Bibles; one that previously belong to a former neighbor and family friend of Harris,' Regina Shelton, and another that belonged to Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court, the aide said.

The Pew data, for instance, shows Mr. Trump faring even better among Latino voters than any previous estimate, with Mr. Biden winning the group by a 59 to 38 percent margin — a net 17 point decline from Hillary Clinton’s 66 to 28 percent victory in the same survey four years ago.

Mr. Trump’s breakthrough among Latino voters was the most extreme example of the broader inroads he made among Democratic constituencies. According to the data, Mr. Biden failed to improve his margins among virtually every voting group that backed Mrs. Clinton in 2016, whether it was young voters, women, Black voters, unmarried voters or voters in urban areas.

Many progressives even believed that mobilizing Democratic constituencies alone could oust the president, based in part on the assumption that Mr. Trump had all but maxed-out his support among white, rural voters without a degree.

Yet, thus far, most discussions of candidates’ economic policy proposals have been based more on feelings or ideology than rigorous analysis.

US economic performance will play a decisive role in the election. If the economy remains strong – unemployment is at a 50-year low for all workers, and its lowest-ever level for African-Americans and Hispanics – President Donald Trump stands a good chance of a second term.

be expected to pursue traditionally conservative economic policies

Joe Biden is ahead! By a lot! And by a lot more than he was just a few months ago!

That's the obvious takeaway from a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS examining the 2020 Democratic primary. The former vice president stands alone in first place with 34% followed by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 19% and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders at 16%. None of the other 15(!) candidates in the race made it into double digits.

Since I'm a good guy, I'll tell you the answer: Biden is ahead because he is consolidating his support among non-white voters, a key voting bloc among whom he already had a very clear edge over his primary rivals.

It is critical to bear in mind that the U.S. has a less generous social safety net than almost all of the other advanced countries to which we compare ourselves: Canada, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, etc. And yet we have higher rates of nonwork among prime-age men and women, and much worse socio-demographic outcomes: family stability, investment in children, educational attainment, life expectancy, rates of violent death, etc. It defies logic to assert that the relatively stingy U.S. social safety net has somehow lured the U.S. public into licentiousness and social decline whereas the much more comprehensive social safety nets in other wealthy democracies has failed to do so.

The white working class constituency that would seem to be most immune to the appeal of the cultural left — the very constituency that has moved more decisively than any other to the right — is now succumbing to the centrifugal, even anarchic, forces denounced by Barr and other social conservatives, while more liberal constituencies are moving in the opposite, more socially coherent, rule-following, direction.

now we are in a new social paradigm that has normalized nonmarital childbearing and child rearing among certain segments of the population, and it will take more than economic improvement to restore the stable two-parent family in the communities it which that norm has been steadily eroding.

There were few signs at Friends that Jackson harbored any hatred, according to interviews with a dozen classmates, teachers and administrators. Most agreed to talk about Jackson only if they would not be identified because they did not want to be connected with his crime.

Jackson’s arrest made front-page news across the country. But prosecutors were surprised at how quickly the story faded.

Jackson belonged to a small group of more conservative students who stood out on campus, she said. “It was a really liberal school, so people shared a lot of assumptions,” she said. “He liked to challenge those.”

More than a century ago, the German sociologist Werner Sombart predicted that widespread prosperity would forestall the development of socialism in the United States. As he memorably argued: “On the shoals of roast beef and apple pie, socialist utopias founder.”

million Obama-Trump voters in the last election were motivated more by economic anxiety than racial resentment, and were attracted to Trump’s economic populism and opposition to free-trade agreements.

Sanders faces serious obstacles to obtaining the Democratic presidential nomination. The gentle treatment he received in 2016 from the media and the Hillary Clinton campaign (which ran few negative television or media ads against him) means that many Democratic voters haven’t yet learned about the distinctly non-progressive positions he has taken on certain issues throughout his senatorial career.

The survey, released Friday, also finds that nine in 10 black Americans say they disapprove of Trump's job performance.

The black unemployment rate is at a record low at 5.5%, which Trump has frequently touted. But 77% of those polled say Trump deserves only some or hardly any credit for the American American unemployment rate.

Sixty-five percent of the black Americans polled feel it's a "bad time" to be a black person in America. At the same time, 77% of black Americans responded that it's a "good time" to be a white person in America.

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.

With President Trump touching down in North Georgia on Monday to court white rural voters and President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. rallying support from a diverse electorate in Atlanta, the high-stakes Senate runoffs are concluding with a test of how much the politics have shifted in a state that no longer resembles its Deep South neighbors.

Although Georgia still skews slightly to the right of America’s political center, it has become politically competitive for the same demographic reasons the country is closely divided: Democrats have become dominant in big cities and suburban areas but they suffer steep losses in the lightly-populated regions that once elected governors, senators and, in Georgia, a native-born president, Jimmy Carter.

After nominating a string of candidates for statewide office who they hoped would be palatable to rural whites, only to keep losing, Democrats elevated three candidates in the past two years whose views placed them in the mainstream of the national party and whose profiles represented the party’s broader coalition.