Two Democratic senators expressed their frustration over the Biden administration’s shortage of senior Asian Americans — and were swiftly given assurances that things would change.

Frustrated with the White House’s slow movement, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D.-Ill.), the first Thai American woman elected to Congress, said she has repeatedly offered names to the White House of “many well-qualified” Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders for Cabinet positions. But those individuals in the AAPI community “never even got a phone call,” said the lawmaker, who was on the shortlist for vice president.

“I’ve been talking to them for months and they’re still not aggressive, so I’m not going to be voting for any nominee from the White House other than diversity nominees,” she told reporters. “I’ll be a 'no’ on everyone until they figure this out.”

Earlier this month, Los Angeles Times reporter James Queally wrote about an unusual case of police action against a journalist. As he noted, authorities in L.A. had charged a freelance reporter — but no one else — with failing to disperse from a protest scene last fall.

“We were looking at each other, asking, ‘Is it going to happen again?’ and of course, it did,” Queally told The Washington Post after his release from police custody. “The fact that it has to enter people’s minds is concerning.”

In September, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies violently tackled and arrested a reporter for the local NPR affiliate. A reporter for the Des Moines Register recently was taken to trial and acquitted after her arrest at a racial justice protest in Iowa last summer.

As he got closer, he realized it was a printout of Floyd’s toxicology report from his autopsy. And on the sheet of paper was a handwritten note suggesting that Floyd was to blame when he died in Minneapolis police custody last spring after an officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes.“Mix of drugs presents in difficulty breathing! Overdose? Good man? Use of fake currency is a felony!” read a note written in pink.

“I was really incredulous that someone would actually go to the effort of finding the report in its original form,” Mohn said. “It seemed almost more audacious than just writing a slur or putting up something more overtly hateful.”

Mohn found the note on Saturday inside a dorm that has a hallway bulletin board commemorating Black victims of police violence, including Philando Castile and Breonna Taylor. Just like Floyd’s post, each picture was accompanied by a summary of the incident related to their death.

The New York attorney general's office has partnered with Manhattan's district attorney to investigate Stephen K. Bannon for the alleged fundraising scam that prompted his federal pardon in the waning hours of Donald Trump's presidency, according to people familiar with the matter. The move adds prosecutorial firepower to a criminal case widely seen as an attempted end-run around the former president's bid to protect a political ally.

James has built a reputation, in part, around her promises to hold Trump and his associates accountable for alleged misdeeds, and she sued his administration several times over policy decisions that affected New Yorkers.

White House strategist, goes beyond his alleged role in what federal prosecutors characterized last summer as a lucrative ploy to defraud donors of a private effort to expand the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

“I want to get things done,” Biden said, while stressing his belief in “the art of the possible” and the importance of timing. He made clear that despite recent events tugging him in different directions, including two mass shootings, the country’s infrastructure needs are up next. Having a plan, and carrying it out despite inevitable distractions, are two admirable achievements for any new administration.

He seemed somewhat obsessed with his predecessor, invoking Donald Trump’s name several times without really being prompted.

He wants to pass the House’s election reform bill to counteract GOP efforts in the states. He offered conflicting signals on whether to keep the filibuster, indicating a preference for the old-fashioned “talk until you drop” style of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” but also noting that he has 50 votes and the tiebreaker, and he doesn’t intend to let that go to waste.

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday signed into law a sweeping voting measure that proponents said is necessary to shore up confidence in the state’s elections but that critics countered will lead to longer lines, partisan control of elections and more difficult procedures for voters trying to cast their ballots by mail.

President Donald Trump attacked without evidence the integrity of election results in six states he lost, including Georgia.

The 95-page law also strips authority from the secretary of state, making him a nonvoting member of the State Election Board, and allows lawmakers to initiate takeovers of local election boards — measures that critics said could allow partisan appointees to slow down or block election certification or target heavily Democratic jurisdictions, many of which are in the Atlanta area and are home to the state’s highest concentrations of Black and Brown voters.

In the days before the vote, there was a dress rehearsal of sorts, testing how quickly city council members could duck behind the dais, which had been made bulletproof before the occasion.

“So it was clearly more than just theoretical at that point,” Weaver said. “It was probably the most intense piece of council work I have ever done.”

The night this city banned assault weapons provides a vivid, frightening example of how hard corralling gun ownership and mass shootings has been in Colorado, where the killings at Columbine High School in 1999 and a movie theater in Aurora 13 years later have proved that gun violence here is far from theoretical.

President Biden’s first formal news conference will not be remembered as one in which major news was made. Instead, the session was revealing for how he thinks about and plans to approach his presidency, major issues and his opposition.

The president has one of the most ambitious agendas of any president in the last half century: pandemic, economy, climate, infrastructure, immigration, voting rights.

“All of the above,” Biden responded, but with a major caveat. “It’s a matter of timing,” he continued. “As you’ve all observed, successful presidents, better than me, have been successful in large part because they know how to time what they’re doing — order it, decide on priorities, what needs to be done.”

President Biden mentioned him early and often. He mentioned him overtly and obliquely. And he mentioned him on a range of issues, from immigration to human rights to Afghanistan.

“My predecessor, oh God I miss him,” Biden said at one point, seeming to channel the just-can’t-quit-him fascination with the former president. A reporter had asked if Biden planned to run again in 2024, noting that unlike Trump, “you haven’t set up a reelection campaign yet, as your predecessor had by this time.”

The current president mentioned the former one by name 10 times, and on more than half a dozen different occasions, sometimes in response to Trump-specific questions and other times unprompted.

Charges are set to be dropped against a Brandywine Hundred man who spent nearly two years in jail without a trial over accusations he threatened to kill his grandmother.

Skoranski said it was prosecutors' place to file that motion as he couldn't do something against the wishes of his client. The court ordered prosecutors to file the motion by the end of October 2017.

“The fact that the state has allowed Cooper to languish in jail on relatively minor charges — while it did nothing — is unacceptable and has forced the court’s hand,” Manning wrote.

The filibuster and the 60-vote threshold to invoke cloture are tried and tested measures in the U.S. Senate intended to "cool off" hot legislation that passes with a simple majority in the U.S. House.

For decades these important rules have become precedent because they encourage what the Senate is historically known for, consensus building and bipartisan compromise.  While at times a source of great frustration for the party in power -- and for me personally -- the filibuster has served our country well because it preserves rights for the minority party and limits the damage done by enacting legislation that creates unintended consequences that is detrimental to all Americans.

The American people did not vote for a radical agenda, one way or the other. To the contrary, the American people voted for consensus. President Biden was elected by just over 40,000 votes in three states; Democrats have a tiny five seat majority in the House; and the Senate is knotted at 50-50. 

What if the right to worship or not, to think as you wish, say what you think, to publish what you say, to associate -- or not -- with whomever you choose, to defend yourself using the same means as the government and bad guys, to enjoy the right to privacy, to keep the government off your property and back and out of your face, to travel wherever and whenever, to engage in commercial intercourse on private property freely and without the need for government permission are natural, personal rights that no government -- whether by edict, legislation or referendum -- can morally dismiss or discard?

What if the Fifth Amendment commands that the government cannot take property rights without paying the owner their fair market value?

What if state legislatures are utterly without power to interfere with our daily choices in the name of emergency and safety? What if those same state legislatures cannot give to governors powers that they do not have?

Invoking the mantle of science, politicians have undertaken destructive policies to combat a deadly pandemic. While initial measures taken in haste out of an abundance of caution may have been necessary, now, a year into the pandemic, the science is catching up.  

Despite low transmission levels and adequate hospital beds, blue state governors maintained lockdowns much longer than even the World Health Organization recommended, resulting in businesses being closed, high unemployment, trillions of dollars spent in relief packages and worsening mental health crises.  

Ultimately, there is no doubt that a properly fitted face mask and physical space between people can reduce viral transmission, however, mandating such actions have little benefit over educating and incentivizing the population.  

he Biden campaign and transition used the COVID restrictions to limit the number of reporters at press conferences, and then only called on reporters we would call "friendly."

"They didn't know the questions we were gonna ask, but they certainly knew who we were, all the reporters were known quantities. So there was no chance that they were gonna call on, you know, some local reporter from some unnamed newspaper who was gonna ask Joe Biden a potentially difficult or uncomfortable question."

So they knew they would face nothing about Hunter Biden’s corruption. Nothing about Tara Reade’s accusations of sexual assault. Nothing about Democrats being soft on rioting – or a "racial reckoning," as the media like to call it.

It has been exactly one year since New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued a directive that has led to critics blaming him for thousands of nursing home deaths during the coronavirus pandemic.

Cuomo's order required nursing homes to take in residents who had been hospitalized with COVID-19 after being declared "medically stable" and forbade them from turning people away for being infected.

"No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19," the order said. "[Nursing homes] are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission."

Massachusetts health officials announced findings Wednesday linking contaminated water in the northeastern area of the state to a cluster of child cancers in the 1990s, though officials say the water no longer poses a health risk.

The study conducted by the state’s environmental health bureau specifically looked at Wilmington, Mass., and found expectant mothers’ exposure to contaminants like n-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) and trichloroethylene (TCE) from the public water supply was associated with an increase of cancers like leukemia and lymphoma in children born in the 1990s. The association, said to be "statistically significant," was upheld even after accounting for factors like family history and possible household exposures. 

"There was no evidence of increased odds of cancer for children who were exposed to NDMA or TCE during childhood," a press release states.

"David Shafer did a phenomenal job as Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, recruiting and training a record number of volunteers," Trump said in a statement released Wednesday. "No one in Georgia fought harder for me than David! He NEVER gave up! He has my Complete and Total Endorsement for re-election." 

A contentious battle is brewing for the position after the Peach State faced a blue wave in the last election, voting for a Democrat president for the first time since 1992. At the same time, two Democrats beat out Republican incumbents for Georgia’s Senate seats. 

Shafer has remained closely tied to Trump, casting doubt on election transparency in Georgia and signing on as a plaintiff to the former president’s election fraud lawsuits in the state that challenged President Biden’s victory.

The United States is experiencing a "peaceful invasion" at its southern border, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told "The Ingraham Angle" Wednesday. 

"It is very clever of Biden, on the eve of the press conference, to turn it over to her [Vice President Kamala Harris], so with every question tomorrow about the border, he can say, 'That is Vice President Harris' job and you need to talk to her about it, next question'," Gingrich said. "In that sense, he ducks all responsibility for what is not a crisis, but a disaster. It is getting worse."

"We go through all of these things at the airport, all of these tests at the airport, then we have a policy under Biden that allows people to come in here," said Gingrich, who added that the surge means "the poorest Americans will have their wages suppressed by this competition ... every taxpayer will get hit. We will provide shelter, food, we will provide education. Then we will provide health care. We are taking on ... billions and billions of dollars in additional costs."

Gov. Doug Ducey, the Arizona Republican, didn’t mince words Wednesday shortly after he learned that President Biden was tapping Vice President Harris to oversee the effort to resolve the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Ducey, who was in Tucson, told reporters that Harris is "the worst possible choice" for the job. He also said that Harris’ selection is evidence that Biden has trivialized the situation. He said Harris just "flat out" doesn't care.

It notified Congress on Wednesday that it will open a new 3,000-person facility in San Antonio and a 1,400-person site at the San Diego convention center. HHS is also opening a second site in Carrizo Springs and received approval from the Defense Department Wednesday to begin housing teenagers at military bases in San Antonio and El Paso, Texas.

Sen. Ted Cruz on Wednesday requested that Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration grant media access to U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities at the Texas border. 

On Tuesday, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released photos of the temporary facilities in Texas that are being used to process migrant children after the White House and CBP were pressed over why the media had not been given access to those facilities.

The Biden administration has come under scrutiny for the surge of migrants arriving at the border. Capacity at temporary holding facilities has become stretched after the administration said it would no longer expel unaccompanied minor children last month.