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. That January, after a pair of terrorist attacks in Paris, pundits and conservative officials propagated a discredited myth about Shariah-run zones in European cities off limits to non-Muslims.

Hashtags like #KillAllMuslims trended on Twitter. A month later, three Muslim youths were shot dead in their North Carolina apartment in what many people said was a hate crime.

An examination of anti-Muslim hatred in the last few years can easily devolve into a laundry list: armed demonstrators picketing at a mosque in Phoenix

Ben Carson compared Syrian refugees to “rabid” dogs. Ted Cruz called for allowing only Christian refugees to enter the United States. And Donald J. Trump, whose statements on Islam seem to be read directly off paranoid chain emails, first stated that American Muslims celebrated the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks (a discredited falsehood), then, after the San Bernardino, Calif., shootin

all Muslims should be barred from entering the United States

At a news conference, Hazem Bata, the Islamic Society’s secretary general, said: “I’m not here to focus on the negative, because once you start focusing on the negative, you start to take on a victim’s mentality. And as Muslims in America, we refuse to be victims in our own country.

e is a fine line between stoic resilience and irresponsible passivity. Muslims in America face a growing threat

. American officials have since been trying to get Cuba to return the laser-guided missile, which did not contain explosives

More than 70 small earthquakes rattling Oklahoma in the past week have raised concerns fracking is making the problem worse.

waste water.

An Islamic State militant has carried out a public execution of his mother because she asked him to leave the group, say the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Police found traces of explosives, three handmade belts and a fingerprint of fugitive Salah Abdeslam, a French national

Anti-North Korea messages and K-Pop music were broadcast from loudspeakers at 11 sites along the border.—

The Palestinian death toll since the beginning of the unrest late last year increased to 149, and at least 20 Israelis have also died

The company's one-wheeled boards were seized after a US rival filed a patent infringement claim.

Ben Carson asked a bunch of fifth-graders to point out the worst student in their class, before telling the boy to "start reading."

was planning to build a $9 million mansion inspired by Tony Stark.

Worse, though, are the Republican candidates competing for who can be the most against a woman exercising her Constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. And the Winners are...Marco Rubio who thinks there should be no exceptions to a ban on abortions, not even in cases when the pregnancy results from rape or would threaten the life of the woman, while Ben Carson and Ted Cruz agree that a victim of rape or incest can't have an abortion -- or maybe even the morning after pill.

In their budget, House Republicans voted almost unanimously to eliminate the federal program that funds family planning -- a remarkable position for people against abortion

I've tried to explain to my Republican colleagues that you can significantly reduce abortions by guaranteeing access to effective contraceptives, but they don't seem to grasp the connection.

I am thrilled to think that my President will be a smart woman who has been a tireless advocate for women and children her entire adult life, a person who has experienced pregnancy, who has had her period, and who declared in front of the whole world in Beijing in 1995 that "Women's rights are human rights."

A woman in the White House won't solve all these problems, you say, and you're right. But I guarantee you women's concerns will move up on the national agenda from day one of a Hillary Clinton Administration.

I am really sick of the attacks on women -- on our health care choices, on our pay checks, on our ability to raise healthy children, on our hopes for a secure retirement.

That's why I am going to do everything I can as a member of Congress, a mother, and a proud grandmother like Hillary Clinton, to make her President of the United States. My heart beats a little faster just thinking about it. You can say I'm excited.

“This is par for the course,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a supporter of the president who is writing a book about Trump’s America.

Gingrich said the normal concerns that presidents and other politicians have about their legacies and reputations don’t seem to apply to Trump

Former Ku Klux Klan leader and Louisiana legislator David Duke said on Twitter that the president “restores a lot of love in us by saying blunt but truthful things that no other President in our lifetime would dare say!”

Last March, at a meeting with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Trump asked his guests if they knew Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, the only African American in his Cabinet, NBC News reported Friday, citing sources who were in the room.

Steele called it “disappointing as hell” that Republicans in Congress have not had “a more forceful rhetorical response to the president

The findings suggest that political efforts to cut welfare programs are driven less by conservative principles than by racial anxiety, the authors conclude

Those results show that the push to cut welfare programs is not driven by pure political motives, such as decreasing government spending or shrinking government bureaucracy, Wetts said.

Between 2008 and 2012 in particular, they found, opposition to welfare rose among all Americans -- but far more sharply among whites, who also began scoring higher on racial resentment scales during that period

These trends weren’t necessarily linked, however. So to determine if there was a connection, Wetts and Willer designed two more experiments: one in which they quizzed respondents on their feelings about welfare after seeing a graph about U.S. demographic change, and another in which respondents took a similar quiz after viewing information on average income by race and the demographics of welfare beneficiaries.

White Americans called for deeper cuts to welfare programs after viewing charts that showed they would become a racial minority within 50 years. They also opposed welfare programs more when they were told that people of color benefit most from them.

“My main hope here is that people take a step back, look at what these sorts of programs do for the poor, and think about what’s driving opposition to them.”

“We find evidence that these shifts [in sentiment against welfare programs] are specifically directed at programs people see as benefiting minorities instead of whites,” she added.

Wetts isn’t ruling out the possibility that alternate factors could also be at play, of course. Some researchers have found that people embrace more conservative politics during periods of rapid social change -- not necessarily because they fear their racial status is threatened, but because they fear change is happening too fast

Researchers have also shown that white Americans' racial prejudice affects their views on everything from healthcare policy to the death penalty to dogs

On the same day Wetts' paper published, a separate study in the journal Environmental Politics found that people with high levels of "racial resentment" are more likely to believe that the scientific consensus on climate change is false.

"More and more, white Americans use their racial attitudes to help them decide their positions on political questions such as whom to vote for or what stance to take on important issues including welfare and health care."

The Trump administration has begun allowing states to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, and has proposed tripling the rents for the poorest households receiving federal housing assistance. The House is also scheduled to vote again next month on a plan to cut $9 billion from food-stamp benefits over 10 years and require most adults to hold a job  to receive payments.

Figures from the federal government and the Kaiser Family Foundation show that white Americans make up 36 percent of food-stamp recipients, 43 percent of Medicaid recipients and 28 percent of recipients for cash welfare.

The Democrats’ message, Schrier said, should be clear and simple: All vaccines are good. And the best thing American can do to protect themselves and their loved ones is to get a shot.

Pelosi spokesman Henry Connelly said the Speaker was simply reflecting concerns in her diverse caucus about whether minority communities were being treated equitably in the aggressive push to vaccinate all Americans.

That disparity has been attributed, in part, to the fact that the earlier Moderna and Pfizer vaccines each require two shots and colder refrigeration, complicating storage and distribution. That’s created additional barriers for getting the vaccine to poorer, historically underserved populations and rural communities.

Black people are nearly three times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than white people and nearly two times more likely to die from the disease; Hispanics are more than three times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than whites and 2.3 times more likely to die. 

White people have been vaccinated for COVID-19 at two times the rate of Black people, according to a New York Times analysis. The figures are worse for Hispanics. 

The disagreement among Democrats comes during a pivotal moment in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic as states like Texas and Mississippi end their mask mandates and lift restrictions on businesses, and health experts worry about a surge in cases driven by COVID-19 variants.

Because the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine requires only one shot and regular refrigeration levels, some officials like New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) have ordered that shipments of that vaccine be prioritized for harder-to-reach Black and brown communities. 

But while Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have an overall efficacy of about 95 percent in preventing moderate to severe disease, that number for the Johnson & Johnson version is just 66 percent — though experts point out the J&J vaccine was being tested after more contagious variants had begun spreading in the U.S., unlike the Pfizer and Moderna versions. 

That's led to some in those minority communities voicing concerns in recent days that they are being given a less-effective vaccine than more affluent, white communities.

Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), another CBC member, noted that those suspicions have historic roots, pointing to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study — a deadly federal research project that targeted poor Black people in rural Alabama in 1930s — as evidence of the "painful history" of biomedical mistreatment of African Americans in the United States. 

Despite such reservations, the broad consensus in the caucus appears to favor efforts to maximize vaccinations in the shortest possible time, regardless which shot is available in a given community.

On Wednesday, Kelly is set to join Rep. Joyce BeattyJoyce Birdson BeattyDemocrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy Black Caucus backs Biden's pick to head DOJ Civil Rights Division Sole GOP vote on House police reform bill says he 'accidentally pressed the wrong voting button' MORE (D-Ohio), head of the Black Caucus, in an online forum with medical experts designed to educate minority communities on best vaccine practices. 

Rep. Anthony BrownAnthony Gregory BrownOvernight Defense: Pentagon chief to press for Manchin's support on Colin Kahl | House Dems seek to limit transfer of military-grade gear to police Democrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy 140 lawmakers call for Biden administration to take 'comprehensive' approach to Iran MORE (D-Md.) said officials should monitor the distribution of vaccines to identify “patterns” that might indicate prejudices in the dispensation. But he’s also encouraging all of his constituents to get whatever vaccine is available first, and he highlighted the advantages of the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot, particularly in hard-to-reach populations like the homeless. 

one ordering the new education secretary to review those policies, and the other establishing a gender-focused White House policy council — Mr. Biden, an author of the Violence Against Women Act, waded into an area that has been important to him but has been politically charged for more than a decade.

“We’re looking for a process that does not turn us into courts, that allows us to treat both sides fairly and equally, and does not attempt to micromanage campus proceedings,” said Terry W. Hartle

The Trump administration’s rules have been in effect since August, and lawsuits that sought to overturn them — including one to delay them as colleges grappled with the coronavirus pandemic — have failed

Victims’ rights groups hailed the Obama-era rules for reversing longstanding practices on college campuses of sweeping sexual assault claims under the rug, and for extending wide-ranging protections from obstacles that had long stymied reporting of sexual assault. The guidance instituted a broad definition for what qualified as sexual harassment, discouraged cross-examination and required schools to use the lowest evidentiary standard in adjudicating claims.

The guidance, however, was also criticized by school administrators and due-process activists, who said it amounted to an illegal edict that incentivized schools to often err on the side of complainants. Hundreds of federal and state lawsuits have been filed by students accused of sexual misconduct since 2011, when the Obama administration issued its guidance, and dozens of students have won court cases against their colleges for violating their rights under those rules.

Civil liberties groups that endorsed those rules said they were concerned about how the Biden administration’s efforts would shake out for survivors and accused students alike.The Trump administration took into account more than 120,000 comments and several changes that victims’ rights groups pressed for, such as a dating violence definition, “rape shield” protections and mandating “supportive measures” for victims, even if they did not file a formal complaint.

“There are students who are raped on college campuses, and there are students who are wrongly accused, and we should not be choosing between which of those groups we wish to give justice,” Mr. Cohn said. “The one-sided rhetoric doesn’t lead us to have confidence at this point that the rights of the accused will seriously be taken into account.”

Ms. DeVos strongly criticized Mr. Biden’s objections to the rule last spring, when he was the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, telling The Washington Examiner that she was “disgusted” by his position.

The Biden administration’s decision to review Title IX policies also comes as states around the country introduce their own legislation to bar transgender female athletes from competing on sports teams that do not match their biological sex at birth.

“We have the tools that we have,” Ms. Klein said, “which are federal laws and the bully pulpit and clarity about our policy and values.”

The Obama administration issued guidance to schools, colleges and universities that critics in and out of academia said leaned too heavily toward accusers and offered scant protections or due process for students and faculty accused of sexual harassment, assault or other misconduct. The Trump administration swept those aside and delivered the first-ever regulations on sexual misconduct, which many saw as swinging too far the other way, offering the accused too much power through guaranteed courtlike tribunals and cross-examination of accusers.

“The policy of this administration is that every individual, every student, is entitled to a free — a fair education free of sexual violence, and that people — all involved — have access to a fair process,” said Ms. Klein, a former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton when she was the first lady.

When the Trump administration’s rules were proposed, Mr. Biden said they would “return us to the days when schools swept rape and assault under the rug, and survivors were shamed into silence.”Ms. DeVos strongly criticized Mr. Biden’s objections to the rule last spring, when he was the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, telling The Washington Examiner that she was “disgusted” by his position.

As vice president, Mr. Biden was integral to President Barack Obama’s efforts to overhaul Title IX, in part by issuing guidance that led to aggressive investigations of schools that had mishandled sexual assault complaints and threatened them with funding cuts. Rules proposed in 2018 by Betsy DeVos, the education secretary under President Donald J. Trump, wiped those out and cemented procedures that bolstered the due process rights of accused students.

“We’re really seeing it used as a way for schools to confuse and manipulate survivors, which is really what we’ve seen for decades,” Ms. Carson said of the DeVos rules. “Now it’s this really scary process on the books, and it gives the schools a way to say, ‘Do you really want to go through this?’”

“We have the tools that we have,” Ms. Klein said, “which are federal laws and the bully pulpit and clarity about our policy and values.”

CPS also agreed to two years of ongoing oversight of the anti-bullying program.

In January, a three-judge panel from the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected CPS' motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

The boy's parent's provided "multiple examples of specific instances" in which school officials "withheld information regarding Taye's safety and wellbeing" and failed to punish the students that attacked Taye,

"This Court finds their behavior, as alleged, to be egregious and clearly reckless, thus barring them from the shield of government immunity," Bouie Donald wrote.

At the center of the suit was security footage from two days before Taye's death, in which the boy is seen falling unconscious at school.

The lawsuit alleged that the school knowingly withheld the bathroom incident from the boy's parents.School officials maintained that a school nurse called his mother to pick Gabriel up from school and take him to the hospital.

If agreed to, the settlement will require the district to improve its efforts to track individuals involved in repeat incidents of bullying, as well as locations in the school where repeat instances of bullying take place.

The proposed settlement also calls for "placing an appropriate memorial" to Gabriel at Carson Elementary School.The Cincinnati Board of Education is expected to hold a vote Monday night that, if it passes, will finalize the proposed settlement.

In Nevada, water levels have dropped so drastically in Lake Mead that officials are preparing for a serious shortage that could prompt major reductions in Colorado River water deliveries next year. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has placed 41 counties under a state of emergency.

Here in Oregon, conservationists, Native American tribes, government agencies and irrigators are squaring off, and local leaders fear that generations of tensions could escalate in volatile new ways.

During a drought in 2001, the federal Bureau of Reclamation initially planned for the first time to fully cut off water for farmers over the summer. That order spurred an uprising of farmers and ranchers who used saws, torches and crowbars to breach the facilities and open the canal head gates.

Ammon Bundy, who led an armed takeover of an Oregon wildlife refuge in 2016, said he was ready to bring in allies to help keep the gates open, saying that people need to be prepared to use force to protect their rights even if law enforcement arrives to stop them.

The region has a deep history rooted in violence and racial division. In 1846, U.S. War Department surveyors, led by John C. Frémont and Kit Carson, slaughtered more than a dozen Native Americans on the shores of Klamath Lake.

For the United States, the Klamath Project became a keystone for settling and developing the region. Homestead opportunities for veterans after the two world wars helped to stimulate the economy and to build a new kind of community.

Some landowners have openly talked about breaching the fence surrounding the dam property and forcing open the irrigation gates. Already, they have purchased property adjacent to the head gates and staged protests there.

“These are not things that are going to get better if climate change continues to give us more uncertainty and less reliable supplies of water,” said William Jaeger, an economics professor at Oregon State University who specializes in environmental, resource and agricultural policy issues.

Lake levels fell below the minimum thresholds set by federal scientists, prompting litigation and spurring fears that algae blooms this summer could devastate the imperiled fish populations above the dam

Farmers generally have been split on how aggressively to push back against this year’s water shut-off. Ms. Hill said she disliked the idea of forcing open the gates, saying that option would do little to help. Other farmers have also called for ratcheting back the threats.

But on Friday night, about 100 people gathered under a large tent next to the head gates on property bought recently by two farmers, Dan Nielsen and Grant Knoll, who say they have a legal entitlement to the water behind the gates in Upper Klamath Lake under state water law.

Facing a similar standoff two decades ago, in 2001, the federal government relented with a limited delivery of water to farmers, but there was no sign that agencies, facing an already depleted lake, would budge this time.

In the early 1900s, Minden — and the rest of Douglas County — required Native Americans to leave town by 6:30 p.m. Some residents say the siren sounded at 6 p.m., as it does today, as a warning for not-so-welcome visitors, alerting them to leave within the next 30 minutes.

However, as of Friday, Nevada now prohibits counties, cities and unincorporated towns from sounding a siren, bell or alarm "at a time during which the siren, bell or alarm was previously sounded on specific days or times in association with an ordinance enacted by the city which required persons of a particular race, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin or color to leave the city by a specific time," the law reads.

. A former assistant principal, Jeffrey McKenzie, found Gabriel but did not call 911

"Every state has bullying legislation, but if it's not enforced (by schools), it doesn't do any good."

The settlement involves training and supervising staff and includes two years of oversight of its anti-bullying plan.

Pautsch said many school districts don't track bullying

She said she trusts schools to educate kids but not so much when it comes to bullying.

"I hate to sound so cynical, but we have been doing this for 15 years,

They "ultimately prevented (Gabriel's) parents from fully understanding (his) horrifying experience at Carson Elementary until it was too late,

In the settlement, district and school officials deny the allegations

"The defendants strongly believe that neither CPS, its employees, nor the school nurse were responsible for the tragic death of Gabriel Taye,

Why are so many Americans consistently missing in action on Election Day?

For many, it’s a choice. They are disillusioned with government, or they feel their vote doesn’t matter because politicians don’t listen to them anyway.

This strategy has become a central pillar of the G.O.P. platform. It is behind the party’s relentless push for certain state laws and practices — like strict voter-identification requirements and targeted voter purges — that claim to be about preserving electoral integrity but are in fact about suppressing turnout and voting among groups that lean Democratic.

Just in the past four years, tens of thousands of absentee ballots have been sent to the wrong addresses, and hundreds of thousands of voters have been wrongly purged from the rolls.

But across the country, the group most responsible for making voting harder, if not impossible, for millions of Americans is the Republican Party.

“As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

For many more, the main obstacle is bureaucratic inertia.

The strategy also is behind the partisan gerrymandering that Republican state lawmakers have mastered over the past decade

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has greenlit the Republicans’ anti-democratic power grabs. In 2013, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, giving free rein to states with long histories of racial discrimination in voting.

Republicans are battling from coast to coast to ensure that casting a ballot is as hard as it can be.

In Nevada, the Trump campaign and the state Republican Party have sued to stop counting mail-in ballots until observers can more closely monitor the signature-matching process.

The effort has been turbocharged by President Trump, who has spent the past year falsely attacking the integrity of mail-in ballots.

When that tactic fails, Republicans turn to another tried-and-true one: voter intimidation. Frightening people, particularly Black people, away from the ballot box has a long history in the United States. Modern Republicans have done it so consistently that in 1982 a federal court barred the national party from engaging in any so-called anti-voter-fraud operations.

Representative democracy works only when a large majority of people participate in choosing their representatives. That can happen only when those in power agree that voting should be as easy and widely available as possible. Yet today, one of the two major political parties is convinced it cannot win on a level playing field — and will not even try.

What would a level playing field look like? For starters, it would have more polling places, more early-voting days and shorter voting lines.

Black neighborhoods wait 29 percent longer to cast ballots than voters in white neighborhoods.

A fair election would mean giving all states the necessary funds to implement automatic voter registration and to upgrade old voting machines.

To help ensure that voting is easier for everybody, the federal government needs to take action. Currently, there are two comprehensive voting-rights bills in Congress, the Voting Rights Amendment Act and H.R. 1, also known as the For the People Act.

The second bill would, among other things, create a national voter-registration program; make it harder for states to purge voting rolls; and take gerrymandering away from self-interested state legislatures, putting the redistricting process in the hands of nonpartisan commissions.

That’s why, if either of these laws is going to pass, it will require, at a minimum, voting out Republicans at every level who insist on suppressing the vote.

That’s about two-thirds of the total number of people who voted in 2016, and there are still two days until Election Day.

That’s about two-thirds of the total number of people who voted in 2016, and there are still two days until Election Day.

Republicans have been saying it themselves for ages. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a leader of the modern conservative movement, told a gathering of religious leaders in 1980.

Last year, the court, again by a 5-to-4 vote, refused to block even the most brazenly partisan gerrymanders, no matter how much they disenfranchised voters.

2020 is the first election in which Republicans can intimidate with abandon.

All the while, Mr. Trump happily plays the part of intimidator in chief. He has urged his supporters to enlist in an “Army for Trump,” monitoring polls. “A lot of strange things happening in Philadelphia,” Mr. Trump said during a recent campaign stop in Pennsylvania. “We’re watching you, Philadelphia. We’re watching at the highest level.”

He is only repeating what most Republicans have believed for decades: When more people vote, Republicans lose.

after Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, used an executive order on Nov. 13 to institute precisely such a mandate, a poll showed that a significant majority of North Dakotans favored it.

the state definitely should have taken that step last spring or summer — before the number of coronavirus cases skyrocketed, before hospitals were so overrun that sick North Dakotans had to be sent to neighboring states and before his own mother tested positive and died in early October.

Until recently, Governor Burgum was loath to exert much pressure on North Dakotans and steered clear of the social-distancing orders put in place by so many other states. But he did invest heavily in testing and never merrily shrugged off the threat of the coronavirus the way his Republican counterpart in South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem, did.

South Dakota, in contrast, was No. 1. Still no mask mandate there, and no leadership at all from Noem, who didn’t just welcome but beckoned President Trump to Mount Rushmore for that enormous Independence Day rally, the one at which his perpetually maskless entourage clustered near a similarly maskless crowd

Just before Thanksgiving, Noem announced the passing of her 98-year-old grandmother, one of 13 residents of a South Dakota nursing home who died in a two-week period. The home’s administrator told The Daily Beast that the other 12 residents, along with many of the nursing home’s workers, had tested positive for the coronavirus, but not Noem’s grandmother. (Hmmm …) While Noem publicly mourned her lost family member, she drew no particular attention to Covid-19’s rampage among her grandmother’s companions.

wrote to him to share a famous quotation from Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

They “scream at you for a magic medicine” and warn that Joe Biden will ruin America even as they’re “gasping for breath,” she wrote. She added: “They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that ‘stuff’ because they don’t have Covid because it’s not real.”

“They stop yelling at you when they get intubated,” she wrote. “It’s like a horror movie that never ends.”

The truth is that the Dakotas are as emblematic as they are exceptional

In resisting the lockdowns, slowdowns and sacrifices that many other states committed to, they indulged and encouraged a selective (and often warped) reading of scientific evidence, a rebellion against experts and a twisted concept of individual liberty that was obvious all over the country and contributed mightily to our suffering.

“North Dakotans will come to each other’s aids in a heartbeat, but when asked to give up personal freedom for an amorphous common good — that’s difficult,

When I said “horror story,” I was cribbing. That was a description used in a series of mid-November tweets from a South Dakota emergency room nurse, Jodi Doering, that went viral. Doering was reeling from tending to dying Covid-19 patients who continued to insist that the coronavirus was some kind of hoax.

“We maybe believed that our rural nature sheltered us from what cities like yours were experiencing,” Carson said. “Then we found out, very brutally, that was wrong.”