WASHINGTON (AP) — The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has given new urgency to Vice President Kamala Harris’ tour of southeast Asia, where she will attempt to reassure allies of American resolve following the chaotic end of a two-decade war. The trip, which begins Friday and includes stops in Singapore and Vietnam, will provide a forum for Harris to assert herself […]

Republican governors canceled federal unemployment benefits earlier this summer to prod the unemployed into taking jobs, but new research suggests most people who lost benefits remained unemployed. In the Republican-led states that ended federal benefits in June, only one out of every eight workers found a job by early August, according to an academic analysis of thousands of workers’ incomes.  […]

Members of Congress introduced the Native American Voting Rights Act last week amid an ongoing wave of voter suppression bills in Republican-run states that make it harder for Native people to vote. The bill was introduced in the House on Aug. 13 by Reps. Sharice Davids (D-Kan.) and Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who are both Native American, and in the Senate […]

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has provided a secret safe house for a Colorado county clerk amid an FBI investigation into a leak of vote machine passwords in the county to a QAnon leader, Vice News reported Thursday. Lindell told Vice that he initially took Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters to Texas after she spoke at his bizarre Cyber Symposium last week in […]

ANALYSIS The emergence of at least two cases in Wellington this morning makes an extension of alert level 4 almost certain. Level 4 was initially put in place for three days for the whole country, which is set to expire at midnight tonight, with an expected seven day timeline for Auckland and the Coromandel. The Wellington cases, the lessons from […]