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The Supreme Court wiped away a lower court opinion related to Black Lives Matter protests that critics argued would chill the speech rights of demonstrators and dismantle civil rights era precedent that safeguards the First Amendments' right to protest.

In an unsigned order, the justices sent the case back down to the lower courts to further review Louisiana law holding that before getting to important constitutional questions, more guidance from state courts is necessary.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not participate in the decision, the Supreme Court's public information officer said, because she was busy preparing for oral arguments. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.

The division and anxiety are evident in conversations among voters in long lines outside early voting places and across browning autumn lawns where warring yard signs pit neighbor against neighbor.

The coronavirus trends are especially pronounced in several battleground states, including Wisconsin and Michigan, which Joseph R. Biden Jr. is fighting to win back for the Democrats after President Trump’s victories there in 2016, and where infection rates were ticking up as the calendar wound down.

The future of America troubles them more than whether they may lose a job in this recession, whether they could become ill in this pandemic, whether they could personally be harmed by violent crim

SYDNEY — The Sydney Opera House has reopened. Almost 40,000 spectators attended the city's rugby league grand final. Workers are being urged to return to their offices.

Australia has become a pandemic success story.

The nation of 26 million is close to eliminating community transmission of the coronavirus, having defeated a second wave just as infections surge again in Europe and the United States.

Russia is actively pursuing a disinformation campaign against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr

A homeland security official has accused the Trump administration of soft-pedaling both the Russian and white supremacist threats because they would make “the president look bad.”

secretary of homeland security, Chad F. Wolf, who was ordered to testify but skipped the appearance, defying a congressional subpoena.

And she died shortly after 11 p.m. on Oct. 11, 2014, in a motel room in Olongapo, a port city about 100 miles north and west of Manila in the Philippines, at the hands of an American she had met earlier that evening at a nightclub, a Marine who was in the country for joint military exercises.

After discovering that Laude was transgender, Lance Cpl. Joseph Scott Pemberton, who was 19 at the time, choked her and pushed her head into a toilet bowl until she drowned. Then he took a taxi across town to Subic Bay, where his ship was docked, and, according to a shipmate who later testified in court, admitted what he had just done.

found guilty of homicide, a charge downgraded by the judge from murder, and was sentenced by the Olongapo Regional Trial Court to six to 12 years in prison, which was later reduced to a 10-year maximum on appeal.

Recent New York Times/Siena polling found that voters in Minnesota and Wisconsin — both states where violence has broken out — put Biden at parity or slightly above Trump to handle both violent crime and law and order, and a majority (51 percent to 42 percent) favor Biden to handle protests.

Political scientist Omar Wasow recently offered an explanation for all this. Wasow noted that during Richard Nixon’s 1968 “law and order” campaign, a supposed model for Trump’s, public sentiment was better classified as a tripartite set of opinions, as opposed to Trump’s binary.

Well, that polling also showed that majorities in Minnesota and Wisconsin believe Trump has encouraged violence in America. Meanwhile, national polls have shown that majorities see Trump as making things worse, not better.

But chief among those concerns is whether their commander in chief might order American troops into any chaos around the coming elections.

His hedging, along with his expressed desire in June to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to send active-duty troops onto American streets to quell protests over the killing of George Floyd, has incited deep anxiety among senior military and Defense Department leaders, who insist they will do all they can to keep the armed forces out of the elections.

the principle of an apolitical U.S. military,”

Day after day he produced boringly predictable pablum, the sort of average-vile stuff pumped out on Fox or Breitbart News all the time. The only thing remarkable about this writing is that Crews was doing it while simultaneously being employed by a government body whose most important task is to fight exactly the kinds of conspiracy theories he was producing. He may even have been doing both at the same time.

Recently, Michael Caputo, the Trump-appointed head spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, was caught meddling with scientific reports on the pandemic put out by the CDC, which, like Fauci’s agency, is part of HHS; he then posted a Facebook video claiming that scientists at the CDC were plotting “sedition” and worse

“You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going,” Caputo said. “There are hit squads being trained all over this country,” he continued: “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.”

For many years, I was skeptical about accusations of racism in the criminal justice system

Yes, I knew that blacks comprised only about 12 percent of the population yet represented 33 percent of the prison population. But those data alone did not prove that police are racists or that courts are tougher on blacks than others. The relevant criterion is not the percentage of the population, but the percentage of the criminal population, and when you consider the higher rates of offending among African Americans, the seemingly disproportionate rates of incarceration make sense. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks committed 52 percent of all homicides between 1980 and 2008.

some countered, if you look at who winds up on death row, you can see the racism at work. Less than half of murder victims in the U.S. are white, yet a 2003 study found that 80 percent of inmates on death row had killed white people

The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues

We’ve been taught to think they “catch the bad guys; they chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers,” said Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in an interview with Jacobin. But this is “a big myth,” he said. “The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re cop of the month.”

Second, a “safe” world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.

moderates had been trying to hold on to a studied neutrality, the arguments for which are twofold: First, in a complicated world, final judgment should be left as an exercise for the reader.

the audience for overt, left-wing activism is much smaller than the audience for mainstream fare with a distinct blue tinge. Abandoning any attempt at objectivity would diminish the work’s reach

as writer Jon Schwarz once noted in his “iron law of institutions,” people often care more about maximizing their power within their institutions than about maximizing the power of the institution

Many white Americans are quick to distinguish between everyday prejudice and radical bigotry, but it’s a false distinction. White nationalists make explicit ideas that are already coded or veiled in the wider white imagination. Hate is what many people would see if they looked in a fun-house mirror: a distorted but still recognizable reflection.

It is important to acknowledge this ugly truth if we hope to understand events now unfolding across the country.

There are questions about whether white lip service will translate into sustained anti-racist action, and about what the same people who condemn unlawful killings of Black Americans might have to say about less violent manifestations of racism, ones that benefit them

Americans today are far more racially diverse, less Christian, better educated, more urbanized, and less likely to be married. In polls, they are more tolerant of interracial and same-sex relationships, more likely to acknowledge the existence of racial discrimination, and less concerned about crime.

Almost all of these changes complicate Trump’s task in trying to rally a winning electoral coalition behind his alarms against marauding “angry mobs,” “far-left fascism,” and “the violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats.” The Americans he is targeting with his messages of racial resentment and cultural backlash are uniformly a smaller share of American society now than they were then.

The demographic shifts that have most reshaped politics since Nixon’s day sit at the crossroads of race, education, and religion.

“This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. Marshals killed him,” Trump said. “And I will tell you something — that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.”

During his interview with Pirro that aired Saturday night, the President also threatened militaristic crackdowns on any potential “riots” that break out on November 3 if he were to win reelection.

“We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that,” Trump told Pirro. “We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that, if we want.”

Four years ago, I wrote that whatever one thought about the Obama administration’s economic and foreign policy record, it had succeeded in at least one area. Based on Pew polling data, it was clear that President Barack Obama had convinced the world that even after the 2008 financial crisis, America was great again: Eight years after Obama’s inauguration, “the United States is looked upon more favorably in most (although not all) parts of the globe, and perceptions of American economic power have returned to pre-2008 levels. Americans themselves have greater confidence in the relative power of the U.S. economy than at any time in the post-2008 era.

Donald Trump ran in 2016 on the premise that this was not true, that only he could make America great again. He has repeatedly said that “America is respected again.” Just last week he claimed that before the pandemic hit, “we created the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

“In at least seven nations, including key allies like Britain and Japan, approval ratings for the United States plunged to record lows,” Tharoor notes, “Perhaps the most damning indicator is that the publics surveyed, on the whole, placed less confidence in Trump doing ‘the right thing regarding global affairs’ than autocrats like Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Trump Says ‘Unsolicited Ballots’ Will Be the Cause of Election Night Delays. They Won’t.

But two tweets from President Trump Thursday morning erroneously sought to blame states that are automatically mailing out ballots to registered voters for the likely delays and baselessly stated that the results “may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED,” an assertion dismissed by elections experts.

There is absolutely no evidence that states that automatically send out mail-in ballots to all voters have had issues with accuracy, and some such as Colorado, Washington and Oregon have been conducting their elections mostly by mail for years.

SARS, which stood for Special Anti-Robbery Squad, was supposed to be the elite Nigerian police unit dedicated to fighting crime, but it was really a moneymaking terror squad with no accountability.

SARS officers would raid bars or stop buses on the road and arbitrarily arrest young men for such crimes as wearing their hair in dreadlocks, having tattoos, holding a nice phone or a laptop, driving a nice car. Then they would demand large amounts of money as “bail.”

In 2012 Mr. Iloanya was 20 when SARS officers arrested him at a child dedication ceremony in Anambra State. He had committed no crime

Africa’s most populous country and biggest oil producer has been convulsed by protests that started with anger over police brutality and have now broadened, drawing worldwide attention.

Tens of thousands of Nigerians have been demonstrating for weeks against a notoriously brutal and corrupt police agency, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad — a show of popular anger, fueled by longstanding grievances over corruption and lack of accountability, that posed the biggest challenge to the government in years.

Commonly known as SARS, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad was created in 1984 in response to an epidemic of violent crime including robberies, carjackings and kidnappings. While it was credited with having reduced brazen lawlessness in its initial years, the police unit was later accused of evolving into the same problem it had been designed to stop: a criminal enterprise that acts with impunity.

The watch parties, the pantsuits, the balloons, the blue-tinted cocktails, the giddiness, the sense of history, the electoral projections showing that Hillary Clinton would surely defeat Donald J. Trump — to Democrats, these now look like quaint snapshots from some credulous prelapsarian world.

It’s hard to overstate the degree of anxiety in America right now, as the country confronts a Hydra of troubles: the pandemic, the economy, the fires, the protests, the violent plots against public officials, the assault on voting rights, the state-sponsored disinformation, the sense that democracy itself is on the ballot.

No one is happy in this strange and awful time. But there is a particular circle of unhappiness reserved for Democrats.

Many House Republicans have been freaking out, no exaggeration, over the installation of metal detectors along their paths to the House floor

Apparently, if you can’t pack heat in proximity to Nancy Pelosi, you’re living in a totalitarian state.

Lesko, an Arizona Republican, tweeted that the new security screening was proof that lawmakers “now live in Pelosi’s communist America.”