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Pol Pot was a political leader whose communist Khmer Rouge government led Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. During that time, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians died of starvation, execution, disease or overwork.

The Khmer Rouge, in their attempt to socially engineer a classless communist society, took particular aim at intellectuals, city residents, ethnic Vietnamese, civil servants and religious leaders. Some historians regard the Pol Pot regime as one of the most barbaric and murderous in recent history.

In 1934, Pol Pot moved to Phnom Penh, where he spent a year at a Buddhist monastery before attending a French Catholic primary school. His Cambodian education continued until 1949, when he went to Paris on a scholarship. While there, he studied radio technology and became active in communist circles.

Perhaps the most surprising element of President Joe Biden’s first presidential speech on Thursday night was what it did not include.

The lion’s share of his talk was a detailed account of the effort to contain and control the coronavirus pandemic. Apart from a passing reference to the “denial” and “silence” of his unnamed predecessor, politics was not on the agenda.

The selling of his Rescue Plan is expected to begin any time, but Biden clearly decided it could wait a day or two.

In an interview on conservative talk radio, Sen. Ron Johnson, one of former President Donald Trump’s strongest supporters, said he didn’t feel threatened by rioters violently storming the Capitol. Instead, he said, he might have been scared if the participants were Black Lives Matter or Antifa supporters — a comment with strong racial overtones.

I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn't concerned,”

"Now, had the tables been turned — Joe, this could get me in trouble — had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned," Johnson said.

More than 64 million absentee ballots have been cast as of Tuesday out of more than 100 million total votes in the U.S., and more than 27 absentee ballots are outstanding, according to the U.S. Elections Project, leading some voters to wonder if they can check the status of their mail-in ballots

U.S. Mail may take up to two weeks to show up as ‘Received’ in the Track My Ballot tool.”

Google will present links directing users more information on how to check a voter’s mail-in ballot register status, how to register to vote, how to check a voter’s registration status and request an absentee ballot.

President Joe Biden has a plan to tackle the rush of migrants at the southern border. But the White House knows implementing it will be political torture, sparking anger from left, told-ya-sos from the right, and endangering any slim hope for immigration reform.

They are also considering placing Health and Human Services staff at the border to more quickly assist children, and looking for ways to more quickly vet adults who could take care of those kids, including waiving fingerprint requirements in lieu of background checks, those briefed on the plans said.

Already, the administration has asked for $4 billion over four years to tackle the root causes of migrations in Central American countries and restore a program that will allow some Central American children to apply for admission to the country

“I have the business, let’s call them talents, and I think I’ll probably go the political route,”

He has been one of the most visible Trump supporters on Fox News and reportedly met privately with Trump for 90 minutes last week.

Haley has publicly criticized Trump; Capito has not. The latter has more than 14 years of experience on Capitol Hill and hails from an economically depressed state that’s been receptive to Trump’s populist message.

Thousands of people are fleeing Puerto Rico as the island remains without power and the death toll continues to climb more than a month after Hurricane Maria. Even for those who can afford plane tickets and get to the airport, there’s another hurdle: evacuating with pets.  Leaving the island with animals in tow has become a huge challenge, said Sarah Barnett of the Humane Society of the United States, which has workers on the ground in Puerto Rico. The pet owners Barnett has spoken with have been “hysterical” with worry, she said.

Some pet owners stayed, remaining in dire conditions to care for animals. Others had to make gut-wrenching decisions. Claudia, a single mother who left for North Carolina with her baby and two dogs, left her other three dogs with a friend. She’s now desperately trying to bring those dogs to the mainland, too.

“They’re inundated with people wanting to fly their animals out in cargo,” Barnett said. American Airlines is accepting a limited number of pets per flight as checked baggage, and United is transporting animals through its PetSafe program.  Delta did not reply to a query about whether it is flying pets in cargo, though it previously waived fees for pets flying in the cabin from Puerto Rico. JetBlue and Southwest never transport pets in the cargo hold, though they both fly a limited number of small pets in the main cabin. A JetBlue spokesperson told HuffPost the airline has waived all in-cabin pet fees for flights out of Puerto Rico through Nov. 15, and doubled the number of pets per flight from four to eight.

Over the past few weeks, POLITICO has received a number of robocalls from generically named political groups asking for cash in order to help in very Trump-specific missions.

A donation of $100, for example, would help return Trump to Twitter. Or, for a similar amount, a potential donor can “stop Kamala Harris and socialism,” the calls claim. Other calls ask for money to ensure that congressional Democrats don’t dismantle the wall Trump started building along the U.S.-Mexico border.

But the calls aren’t being made by Trump’s Save America political action committee. In fact, it’s not entirely clear who’s behind them. The telemarketers on the line said they were volunteers working for the Campaign to Support Republican Leaders, which is not registered with the Federal Election Commission and doesn’t have any online presence.

isgraced former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens is moving closer to a 2022 Senate bid, alarming top Republicans who worry he will jeopardize the party’s grip on the seat and imperil their prospects of seizing the majority.

The maneuvering, which follows Republican Sen. Roy Blunt’s surprise retirement announcement last week, is giving Republicans nightmarish flashbacks to 2012, when they nominated a problematic Missouri Senate candidate, Todd Akin, who went on to lose the election.

ranging from members of the Missouri congressional delegation to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s political operation — have been united in their worry about the former governor and spent the week having conversations about the situation, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Disturbingly, the boogaloo movement is at least the third example of a mass of memes escaping from 4chan to become a real-life radical political movement, the first being the leftist-libertarian hacktivist collective Anonymous, which emerged in 2008; the second was the far-right fascist group of angry young men called the alt-right, which formed in 2015. (The conspiracy theory QAnon might be considered a fourth, but it is more than a political movement.)

their arrival can be explained by tracing their online origins. Similar to other right-leaning extremist movements, they are the product of an unhappy generation of men who compare their lot in life with that of men in previous decades and see their prospects diminishing. And with a mix of ignorance and simplicity, they view their discontent through the most distorted lens imaginable: internet memes.

The birthplace of the boogaloo movement, 4chan’s /k/ section, is ostensibly devoted to the ownership and purchase of weapons. But in practice, it is a space where weapons discussions combine with 4chan’s politicized male anger.

“We aren’t a nation rooted in blood. We aren’t a nation based in ethnicity . . .  America was an idea that was about something much bigger than what tribe you come from.”

That message was entirely absent — and remains absent — in the xenophobic, nativist ramblings of Trump and his followers. Trump’s supporters rallied to his cry of white resentment and anti-immigrant blame-mongering. His authoritarianism and contempt for the First Amendment were of no concern.

the right, for all its Constitutional veneration, has become proudly ignorant about our founding principles and instead has adopted the worst aspects of the left: race obsession and class resentment. In the hands of misogynistic and xenophobic opportunists, the right now seems to be all about getting even, getting what some Americans imagine was taken from them.

Obama is staging a political comeback

Former President Barack Obama is staging his political re-debut, Politico reported on Tuesday. 

Ultimately, the goal for Democrats is to fix what they see as a party disadvantage — congressional districts that are overwhelmingly dominated by one party. The concept is better known as "gerrymandering."

The 14 Republicans in California’s congressional delegation are demanding a government plan to capture, store and transport the water expected from this winter’s El Niño.

"It's either, or. You show us how you're going to get the water or you show us the impacts and how we're going to deal with the impacts," Nunes added.

Mike Honda said outside the Capitol on Tuesday morning that he is proud Silicon Valley has reached out to the 14-year-old Texas student arrested after bringing a homemade clock to school.

Analysis Too late to stop Trump? As he glides, other candidates fall back in debate

Donald Trump sailed above the other candidates, who mostly engaged in round-robin fighting that left each of them wounded and him largely unscathed.

the sixth in a nomination contest that has defied predictions, left a GOP establishment that fears disastrous repercussions from a Trump nomination no closer to finding a way to head him off, with the first balloting now a little more than two weeks away.

Fortunately, his father, who was California governor at the time, saved those letters in his own archives. The Jesuit values that the novice tried to explain to his parents remain central to his worldview decades after he renounced the religious order, frustrated in particular by the vow of obedience. Among other things, the Jesuits shaped his ascetic tastes, aversion to embellishment and determination to resist the cult of personality — to the extent he refused to sign autographs for school children during his early terms as governor.

An overriding theme that emerged in his writings and in our conversations was the importance of community. In different forms throughout his life, the introvert found communal life in the Society of Jesus, at International House in Berkeley, at the Yale Law School dorms and at the Zen Center of San Francisco, where he recruited key staff members during his first years in office. He enjoyed campaigns because the group activity was “very tribal.” As Mr. Brown plotted his return to power in the 1990s, he created his own commune in Oakland, banning refrigerators in the living units in an effort to push people to eat together.

This nonconformist, gruff conversationalist who grills his grandnephews on why they don’t read T.S. Eliot is also a sentimentalist who places great weight on tradition. He became the first governor to live in the Executive Mansion since his father. He invited childhood friends to birthday parties there and used the house to woo recalcitrant legislators to close complex deals. “It has a life,” he said recently. “Everything is not disruption and change. There has to be continuity, rootedness and memory. That’s also part of who we are as a people.”