Political Wire: “A judge invalidated seven new Georgia election rules Wednesday, including requirements for a ‘reasonable inquiry’ before elections are certified, hand counts on election night and additional access for partisan poll watchers,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports. CNN: “Among the rules Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox said violated state law are two that would…

NY Times: “Ashwin Ramaswami, a Democrat running for a Georgia State Senate seat, grew up in a wealthy stretch of Atlanta suburbs transformed by the tech industry and waves of Indian American immigrants, like his parents, who have settled there. It is a part of the American South where the percentage of adults with a…

NY Times: “The Texas Supreme Court on Thursday halted the execution of Robert Roberson, a Texas man convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter, after a roller-coaster series of legal maneuvers initiated by an unusual intervention from a bipartisan group of Texas House members. The decision by the state’s highest civil court related to a procedural…

NY Times: “Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas sued a Dallas pediatrician on Thursday, accusing her of providing gender transition treatment to minors in violation of a 2023 state law. Mr. Paxton described the suit as the state’s first enforcement action under the new law. The doctor, May C. Lau, is an associate professor in…

Democracy Now!: “In Texas, two people were killed and nearly three dozen treated for chemical exposure Thursday following a leak of toxic hydrogen sulfide gas at a Houston-area oil refinery operated by Pemex, the Mexican state-owned petroleum company. Authorities issued a shelter-in-place order for Deer Park and neighboring Pasadena for several hours, telling residents to…

USA Today: “Voters in Georgia turned out in record numbers as the battleground state opened early voting for the Nov. 5 presidential election between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, state officials said on Tuesday. At least 252,000 voters had cast ballots at early-voting sites as of 4 p.m. EDT, nearly double the 136,000 who participated in the first…

WaPo: “Lilly Ledbetter never stopped fighting, never kicked back on her porch in Alabama, sipped a glass of sweet tea and savored her victory…. But when she died on Saturday at 86 of respiratory failure, the wage gap she spent decades trying to close remained. … She was paid less than the lowest-paid male newbie…

WaPo: “Before it’s too late, say a prayer for Robert Roberson. Barring a miracle, he will be killed on Thursday in the death chamber at Texas’s Huntsville Prison. Roberson has spent the past 22 years on death row for a crime that perhaps never occurred, and now Texas is hellbent on executing him. The death…

WaPo: “Threats against federal emergency response personnel have hampered relief work in parts of western North Carolina hard hit by Hurricane Helene, prompting disaster workers to relocate because of safety concerns and feeding a cycle of fear and anxiety. On Monday, the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that it had arrested William…

The Tulane Hullabaloo: “On June 19, 2024, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed a bill making Louisiana the first state to require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in all public classrooms, which will be enforced starting Jan. 1, 2025.  The bill states that there must be a four-paragraph “context statement,” which states, among other things, that the Ten Commandments…