President-elect Donald Trump has gone against media expectations by tapping Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem and a number of other Capitol Hill veterans to fill posts in his second administration.

The incoming Senate Republican Conference will meet Wednesday morning to elect the successor of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Texas lawmakers began filing bills for next year’s legislative session on Tuesday, submitting a record-breaking 1,500 in the first filing period.

Artasia Viges, 24, is facing multiple charges after police said she lied about her son being kidnapped after she left him unattended on a major roadway.

With hospitals facing a surge of coronavirus patients, Gov. Brian Kemp on Friday said the Georgia World Congress Center would again be utilized as an alternate hospital as more people in the state become sick with COVID-19.

A group of H1N1 swine influenza viruses have essential hallmarks of being highly adapted to infect humans and are of potential pandemic concern, health officials say. These viruses — referred to as G4 Eurasian (EA) avian-like H1N1 viruses — have been spreading in pigs in China since 2016 and are now the predominant set of genes that can be passed down from parents to offspring , according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is set to roll back the city's reopening plan back to phase one as COVID-19 continues to spread across the state, a spokesman said Friday. The first phase guidelines include encouraging residents to stay home except for essential trips, wearing a face covering in public and avoid in-person dining at restaurants.

Atlanta United is the first professional sports team from Georgia to return to play during the coronavirus pandemic. Major League Soccer suspended play in March less than a month into the season. GPB Sports' Jon Nelson joined GPB All Things Considered host Rickey Bevington to explain why Saturday night's soccer match will be anything but normal.

Atlanta police released images of a second person of interest in the July 4 shooting death of 8-year-old Secoriea Turner. The first person of interest has been cleared, attorneys for the family said. Her parents, Charmaine Turner and Secoriey Williamson, are pleading with the public to provide information about those responsible in the death of their child. The reward is up to $50,000, and anyone with information is asked to contact Crime Stoppers at 404-577-8477.

Monday on Political Rewind , the relationship between Gov. Brian Kemp and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has frayed, as both officials take opposing views on how to govern during the pandemic. A once productive and collegial relationship is now soured by open fighting. What brought us here? Listen here:

A federal judge is permanently blocking Georgia’s 2019 “heartbeat" abortion law, finding that it violates the U.S. Constitution. U.S. District Judge Steve Jones ruled against the state Monday in a lawsuit filed by abortion providers and an advocacy group.

Federal Judge Blocks Georgia's 2019 "Heartbeat" Abortion Law Family Of Secoriea Turner, 8-Year-Old Shot Near Atlanta Wendy's, Call For Action Augusta Joins List Of Georgia Cities With Mask Mandate, Clashing With Governor's Orders Atlanta Braves Officials Say They Won't Change Their Name June Tax Revenues Down 8.8% From Last Year

Secoriea Turner, the 8-year-old girl shot to death July 4 near the burned-down Wendy's in Atlanta, had nothing to do with ongoing protests against police brutality, her family's lawyers say. At a news conference Monday, Secoriey Williamson, the girl's father, begged for anyone with information to come forward. He even played to the conscience of his daughter's killer, pleading with the shooter to come forward.

According to Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter, Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law is rooted in medieval times and is an “outmoded concept” in this age of “increased police forces.” Porter made those remarks at a Georgia House Judiciary Non-Civil Committee hearing on Monday.

Tuesday on Political Rewind, conventional wisdom states that we are living through an unprecedented era of crisis in America today. As the country looks to recover and heal through these tough times, does our history have any answers or lessons? We discussed this topic with several top historians. Listen below:

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is taking up New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on his offer to send a team to conduct testing and contact tracing of people exposed to the coronavirus. Cuomo announced Monday that New York State will deploy coronavirus assistance to the capital of Georgia as the state continues to experience an increase in COVID-19 cases.

Actor Michael B. Jordan says “timing is everything. ” The SAG award winner marched in a Los Angeles Black Lives Matter protest last month demanding that Hollywood drastically increase its diversity in the executive ranks. Jordan, whose breakout “Fruitvale Station” role followed the events of a young Black man killed by a transit police officer, is channeling an urgency for change and healing into “A Night at the Drive-In.”

Jordan Daniels has worked in the Atlanta film industry for years. Monday's court ruling, which reversed the controversial "heartbeat" abortion bill passed last year in Georgia, came as a relief. "We did have a few productions leave on the basis of HB 481, and I'm happy that more won't," she said. "Obviously, I'm dually relieved since I'm a woman who loves her job, and also wants the right to choose."

The Trump administration has rescinded a rule that would have required international students to transfer schools or leave the country if their colleges hold classes entirely online this fall because of the coronavirus pandemic. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced the decision as a court hearing was getting underway on a challenge to the rule by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ahead of President Donald Trump's visit to the Atlanta area on Wednesday, prominent Georgia Democrats have scheduled a news conference to "slam" what they call the president's "failed coronavirus response," the group announced in a press release. For state Republican leaders, the visit offers an opportunity to showcase Trump before the GOP base as the November election approaches.

The first vaccine against COVID-19 tested in the United States is moving into its final phase with promising results, according to results published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine . Moderna Inc. in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health started working together and within six weeks had a vaccine called mRNA-1273, said Dr. Nadine Rouphael, one of the authors on the study. "To be able to publish preliminary results three months later is really unprecedented," Rouphael said. "It had shown that the vaccine was well tolerated. It has also shown that the vaccine is able to induce a good immune response."

On this Special Edition of Political Rewind, it’s a look at the biggest political stories of 2019. A new governor put his unique stamp on Georgia, an unexpected resignation put the state front and center in the race for Senate, and two Georgia members of Congress announced their departures.

Cesia Baires knocks on the three apartment doors above her restaurant and a neighboring taqueria just before curfew. A woman opens the door. Her two young children are inside. "Remember," she says to them in Spanish. "Same thing as yesterday. I'm going to come check on you. If there's anything you guys need, give us a call right away." Meanwhile, a few men climb through the window and on to the roof to set up semi-automatic weapons as the curfew begins in Minneapolis. It's something Baires never thought she would have to do as a small-business owner, but then she found out these apartments were occupied. "Material things we can replace, that's true," she says. "But there are families up here. These aren't empty buildings." A car drives by boarded-up businesses as it crosses Lake Street in Minneapolis. Volunteers, sometimes armed, are working together to protect homes and businesses. Jim Urquhart for NPR As break-ins and fires raged in the first days of mass protests over the killing of

Updated at 7 p.m. ET In a move that possibly placed his job in peril, Defense Secretary Mark Esper publicly disagreed Wednesday with President Trump's threatened use of the 1807 Insurrection Act to quell widespread unrest over the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck. "The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now," Esper told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. "I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act." Esper added, "I've always believed and continue to believe that the National Guard is best suited for performing domestic support to civil authorities in these situations, in support of local law enforcement." The 1807 Insurrection Act authorizes a U.S. president to deploy the military in times of domestic emergencies. The law was updated in 2006 to include

Since a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd on Memorial Day, NPR has faced ethical challenges every hour of every day, including how to describe the killing, how to use the audio of Floyd's last words, how to document Floyd's life and how to describe the mass demonstrations. The best answer to every one of these questions is: embrace precision, be descriptive, use more words. The more this happens, the better the journalism. When news organizations, including NPR, sometimes fall short, it's usually because of an attempt to economize words. This week we received questions and complaints from a number of listeners about a variety of topics. I have summarized them across four general questions that I put to two senior editors and one host. Here's a breakdown of the most frequent questions and the answers I received: Why do hosts and reporters say, "George Floyd died in police custody?" It seems like an understatement. That phrase does feel incomplete, even weak, given that

Growing up in St. Paul, Minn., Rashad Turner remembers playing cops and robbers. It was always a given which side he'd choose. "We'd ride our bikes," he says. "I'd always be the cop." He always knew. It was that way for years. He trained for it. He got a bachelor's in criminal justice. He enrolled in the police academy. All because he wanted to help. To him, the cops were the good guys. Turner is 35 now. When he was two years old, a man shot and killed his father in an alley during a dispute. No one should lose a parent that way, he thought. And policing was one way to protect a community. "I had this idea of the Officer Friendly that came to our school," he says. "Like, that was all cops." His friends didn't always get it, he says. Some of them quit him. In the African American neighborhoods he moved in, there had been too many bad run-ins with police. But back then, Turner was used to defending law enforcement. Not so much anymore. Five years ago, he founded a chapter of Black Lives

Editor's note: NPR will be continuing this conversation about Being Black in America online and on air. As protests continue around the country against systemic racism and police brutality, black Americans describe fear, anger and a weariness about tragic killings that are becoming all too familiar. "I feel helpless. Utterly helpless," said Jason Ellington of Union, N.J. "Black people for generations have been reminding the world that we as a people matter — through protests, sit-ins, boycotts and the like. We tried to be peaceful in our attempts. But as white supremacy reminds us, their importance — their relevance — comes with a healthy dose of violence and utter disrespect for people of color like me." For more than a week, tens of thousands of people have thronged cities nationwide, staging protests. The demonstrations were triggered by the death of 46-year-old George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis on Memorial Day. Floyd, a black man, died while a white police officer

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Police reform is the issue that made a lawyer named Lori Lightfoot a political presence in Chicago when she was head of the Chicago Police Board. Of course, she is now Mayor Lightfoot of Chicago and said this week that police misconduct and brutality, quote, "tarnish the badge." Mayor Lightfoot joins us now. Mayor Lightfoot, thanks for being with us. LORI LIGHTFOOT: It's my pleasure, Scott. SIMON: You've led investigations into brutality cases when you were head of the police board and the CPD's Office of Professional Standards. Must also be said that as an attorney in private practice, you represented some police officers. How difficult is police reform? LIGHTFOOT: Well, having seen this issue from a lot of different angles - I also prosecuted corrupt police officers when I was a federal prosecutor. So I've been around this issue for a long time, and really, it comes down to this. You can have all the policies that you want,

Rows of armed agents were deployed around the protests in Washington, D.C. this past week, but it was not obvious who they were: They had no name tags, no badge numbers and no emblems to identify which agencies they worked for. Their arrival sparked shock and alarm. Now, Democratic lawmakers are calling for legislation that would make it illegal for these officers to not identify themselves. In the Senate, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) are cosponsoring a bill that would require officers to identify themselves while "engaged in crowd control or arresting individuals involved in civil disobedience or protests in the United States." In the House, Virginia Democrat Don Beyer, whose district is just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., is working on similar legislation. "How do we tell these alleged federal police officers from white supremacist militia groups?" Beyer said in an interview Sunday with NPR's Weekend Edition . "How do you ever

Over the past two weeks, we've watched the country grapple with questions about race and policing. And while those questions might be new to some, they're ones we've been thinking about since the very beginning of Code Switch. As we said in a recent episode , it can be hard to find something new to say about the cycle of police brutality, black death and the resulting protests. To describe what's happening right now as a "moment" in the country's racial history doesn't feel right; the stories of black people killed by police have dominated news cycles before, as did calls for changes to policing. But it's also clear that what's happening right now— protests in all 50 states and around the world, and widespread calls for defunding police departments —feels different. As my colleague Karen Grigsby Bates wrote , the unique circumstances of a pandemic and historic recession have fomented tensions beyond anything she's seen before. To help explain how the United States got to this point, we

Although New Zealand is about as far — in miles, at least — as you can get from Minneapolis, protests have erupted there over the killing of George Floyd. The Indigenous Maori people in particular have pushed back against police use of force, which disproportionately affects them. At first glance, the context seems quite different. New Zealand police don't usually carry firearms. The reason goes back to the 19th century British aversion to creating a police force too much like a military. In general, if New Zealand police officers need to use a gun, there is one in a lockbox in their car that they can use with a supervisor's permission. But after a white nationalist gunned down 51 people in two mosques last March in Christchurch, New Zealand's police introduced a pilot program to send heavily armed police teams on patrol in three communities. One of these communities was around Christchurch. The other two were far away in counties near the city of Auckland. The police said it would

Ella Jones will be sworn in as mayor of Ferguson, Mo., next week, becoming the first black mayor — and the first woman — to lead the city that gained national attention when police killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014. The protests that erupted in response helped establish the Black Lives Matter movement of today. Still, nearly six years after Brown's death, Jones says the protests against police brutality — this time in response to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis — feel the same. "I don't think they feel any different," Jones tells NPR's Mary Louise Kelly on All Things Considered . The officers who were involved in the shooting of Brown were not indicted . But his death drew the attention of the federal government and the city entered into a federal consent decree in 2016 that resulted in widespread policing and municipal court reforms. Jones thinks that despite the work Ferguson has done, her city — which has a population that is two-thirds black — still feels like the

French police say they are being stigmatized during protests in France against police violence in the wake of George Floyd's death. On Thursday, police gathered in front of precincts across the country and threw down their handcuffs in a symbolic gesture against what they say is unfair criticism. "The police in France have nothing to do with the police in the U.S., and we're not racist," said Fabien Vanhemelryck, the head of the main police union in France, as he joined dozens of police officers demonstrating Friday morning along the Champs-Élysées. Just days after Floyd was killed while in police custody in Minneapolis, more than 20,000 Parisians defied a ban on gatherings during the pandemic to demand the truth about the death of a black Frenchman named Adama Traoré while in police custody in 2016. The protesters said the French police, like their American counterparts, are endemically racist, a charge denied by many top officials in a country that likes to consider itself colorblind

The police killings of George Floyd , Eric Garner and other black men and women began with allegations of a minor offense, such as passing a counterfeit $20 bill or selling individual, untaxed cigarettes. Misdemeanors — these types of low-level criminal offenses — account for about 80% of all arrests and 80% of state criminal dockets, says Alexandra Natapoff, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine and author of Punishment Without Crime . "It's surprising to many people to realize that misdemeanors — these low-level, often chump-change offenses that many of us commit routinely without even noticing it — make up the vast majority of what our criminal system does," Natapoff tells NPR's Ari Shapiro on All Things Considered . "The offenses can include everything from traffic offenses to spitting, loitering, trespassing, all the way up to more serious offenses like DUI or many domestic violence offenses," she says. "It's ... the vast majority of ways that individuals

When protests erupted in Minnesota following the death of George Floyd — the black man who died after a white Minneapolis policeman kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes — many of the law enforcement agencies from the Twin Cities metropolitan area that responded were recent beneficiaries of free excess military materiel from a Pentagon program originally meant to support counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism operations. At least 10 police departments in the Minneapolis and St. Paul suburbs have obtained either all or nearly all of their Department of Defense military-grade equipment — ranging from $13.56 cartridge magazines to hulking personnel carriers with original price tags surpassing $700,000 — during the first three and a half years of the Trump administration. That haul was part of more than $1 billion worth of military equipment transferred to police and sheriff departments since 2016 under what is commonly known as the 1033 program, named for the section of a 1997

The growing calls for systemic reform of American policing follow years of rising anger at the ongoing deaths of African Americans at the hands of law enforcement, including the recent killing of George Floyd. The calls for change run the gamut from severely restricting police use of deadly force, creating a national database of abusive officers and re-directing taxpayer money away from police toward social programs that improve education and tackle crises including homelessness, poverty and mental health care . But one key problem has gotten less attention: the conflict of interest, real and perceived, between prosecutors and police unions. When district attorneys run for the office they get political donations from a range of interests including powerful, well-funded police unions who represent the officers that district attorneys will be called to prosecute in the event of officer brutality, corruption or even murder. "We need to do everything that we can in this moment to avoid not

Updated 7:41 p.m. ET Mourners came to pay their respects to Rayshard Brooks at a public viewing in Atlanta Monday. The Black man was shot and killed during an encounter with white police officers earlier this month after he was discovered asleep in a car at a fast-food restaurant. The viewing was held at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was a co-pastor. The funeral service, scheduled for 1 p.m. ET on Tuesday, will also take place at the church. Brooks' death on June 12 added to the fury and anger already felt by demonstrators protesting against systemic racism and police brutality in Atlanta and across the nation. Many of the protests were prompted by the death of George Floyd in custody of Minneapolis police in May. Atlanta-based movie and television mogul Tyler Perry is reported to be covering funeral costs for the family. As NPR reported over the weekend , Clark Atlanta University has also offered full scholarships for his

A New York City police officer has been suspended after apparently using a chokehold during an arrest in Rockaway, Queens. NYPD commissioner Dermot Shea said the department is investigating the incident, which happened Sunday. Cellphone video shot by a bystander shows several police struggling to subdue a Black man, including one officer who had his arm around the man's neck. One bystander shouts, "Stop choking him!" Police body-cam footage, which Shea said was released in a spirit of transparency, shows a group of police watching three men on a boardwalk who are shouting invective and slurs at passersby and the police. After more than ten minutes, one of the men picks up a plastic bag and gets closer to the police, asking, "Are you scared?" The officers then tackle him, and one officer appears to use a chokehold. A voice is heard saying, "He's out," before the officers move off the man, who moments later walks away in handcuffs with police. The man, who has been identified by his

The New York police officer accused of using a chokehold in an incident captured on video Sunday has been charged with strangulation. The officer, 39-year-old David Afanador, was suspended the same day the cellphone video appeared to show him choking a Black man on a Queens boardwalk. Now he's been arrested and charged with felony strangulation and attempted strangulation. Afanador pleaded not guilty and was released Thursday afternoon without bail. Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz noted that New York state had criminalized chokeholds just days earlier. "The ink from the pen Gov. Cuomo used to sign this legislation was barely dry before this officer allegedly employed the very tactic the new law was designed to prohibit," Katz said in a statement. "Police officers are entrusted to serve and protect — and the conduct alleged here cannot be tolerated." Afanador could face up to seven years in prison if convicted. Sunday's incident began when police responded to complaints about

As mysterious displays of fireworks continue to be set off across the country – in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles – residents in New York City say the nightly cacophony is driving them nuts. "It's kind of been a bit all-consuming to be honest," said Brooklyn resident Eric Anderson, 33. "I go to bed hearing it. I get woken up hearing it, and then on my Twitter feed all anybody is doing is talking about it." In New York City, the police department said there were 54 fireworks complaints in the first half of last year. In the same period this year, there have been more than 11,000. It's illegal to set off your own fireworks in New York, and Mayor Bill de Blasio has said the city is going to crack down on suppliers. "We're going to start a huge sting operation to go and get these illegal fireworks at the base," he said. Last week he appointed a task force made up of officers from the New York City Police Department, fire marshals and members of the Sheriff's Bureau of Criminal

Philando Castile, Eric Garner and George Floyd. The deaths of these Black men at the hands of police have fueled outrage over police brutality and systemic racism. Men make up the vast majority of people shot and killed by police. But the names of Black women who were also killed are generally missing from Americans' collective memories, says Kimberlé Crenshaw, co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum . The Say Her Name campaign, created by Crenshaw's group in 2014, is meant to include women in the national conversation about race and policing. A few women's names and stories, such as Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed by Louisville, Ky., police executing a no-knock search warrant in March, have been part of the Black Lives Matter movement. But others have not — women such as Michelle Cusseaux and Kayla Moore. In 2014, Cusseaux was shot by police in her Phoenix home while they were attempting to take her to a mental health facility. In 2013, police

Officials in Allentown, Pa., have released a roughly ten-minute surveillance video showing officers subduing and arresting a man in front of a local hospital on Monday evening. The man ends up face-down on the ground, and as two officers pin the man's arm behind his back, a third officer kneels on his neck. The release of the footage by Allentown police came days after activists tweeted a shorter, 26-second video , which has been viewed hundreds of thousand of times. Police say the man was taken into the hospital and, after treatment, was released. His name and medical details were not disclosed. Police also didn't release the names of the officers. Reaction to the video has sparked comparisons to what happened to George Floyd, the Black man who was killed by Minneapolis police on Memorial Day. Derek Chauvin, the white officer who was filmed kneeling on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes, has since been fired and faces a second-degree murder charge. Three other officers were also

The 100 Best Film Noirs of All Time ...just what it says on the tin.

Before the onslaught of end of the year Best-Of lists, here is a solid top 100 for your palaver pleasure.

Big bonus points to Paste Magazine for publishing it on a single web page, rather than over a 25 page ad-filled link schmozzle.

What businesses do you avoid because they have values you disagree with? Please give your rationale in your answer. This question is inspired by reaction to Trump. But please give answers from anywhere in the world, for various values.

A Distant Shore has just been released in an expanded version by Cherry Red Records, along with demos for songs that would eventually be released on Everything but the Girl's debut album. Tracey Thorn's classic 1982 indie album has long been a favorite of artists from Björk to Massive Attack, and is constantly rediscovered. In 2013 Thorn spoke about the album to the Guardian [archive link] and also wrote about the circumstances of its writing in her memoir Bedsit Disco Queen, excerpted here.

October was the 150th anniversary of Charles Ives's birth (in 1874). It's always a good time to reconsider him.

Although famously an insurance executive, Ives had studied music at Yale and continued to work as an organist and to compose music even as he developed life-insurance packages for wealthy customers. He suffered from many ailments, real or mysterious, and after 1926, he stopped composing, saying "nothing sounds right". He continued to revise old compositions, however, retiring from business in 1930 and dying of a stroke in 1954 at the age of 80. Early on, his compositions did not attract much interest, but later, by the 1940s and 50s, composers and conductors began to champion him, and he was sometimes considered a pioneer of modernist American music; in the 70s, his music was inescapable on concert programs. However, his tinkering with old compositions led to questions of whether he made his old works appear more innovative than they actually had been. Today he may be best known for his symphony #3 "The Camp Meeting"(1908-10) (with different folk tunes battling it out in the second movement) , his transcendentalist orchestral piece "The Unanswered Question"(1908; revised 1934, in a splendid performance by Leonard Bernstein and the NY Philharmonic) and the "Concord" sonata (1909–47) [The third movement called "The Alcotts" played by Pierre-Laurent Aimard). His songs are loved for their mixture of avant garde and Americana. They are usually heard sung by trained operatic singers (as in this wonderful clip of Donald Gramm introduced by Aaron Copland), but it is revealing to hear this recording of Ives singing one of his own compositions, the World War I song "They Are There!" (1917; revised for WWII). He's not a good singer, but his untrained voice combined with the raucous jumble of the song sounds original and utterly American.

Hidden changes are warping the already broken ecosystem that determines how many citizens—particularly in America—construct their sense of reality. (slSubstack)

Y'all, I know there are folks who don't like Substack/NYT links but here we are and I thought this was worth posting in the aftermath of a disastrous election.

It's dark, it's late, you're drunk, and you're ready to admit to MetaFilter that you're really a famous cult filmmaker. But if you're not sure, follow this handy flowchart by Adam Fromm: Which Contemporary Film Snob Director Are You? It's funny, it's clever, it's easy to navigate, it's a giant JPG image.

Here's a discussion on the Criterion Collection subreddit about an earlier version of this flowchart.

P. S. I am Agnès Varda.

But making a breakfast cereal was not the original intention of Charles William Post, the founder of the Postum Cereal Company (better known these days as Post). After a stint at the Kellogg sanitarium in Battle Creek, Post started his own local company to sell health drinks, namely the caffeine-free coffee substitute called Postum. Grape-Nuts were actually intended to become a beverage, as well. But Post decided that Grape-Nuts would instead be marketed as the most super of all superfoods. from The Unlikely Popularity of Grape-Nuts Ice Cream [Atlas Obscura]

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