TX Observer: “California-based journalist Kirk Wallace Johnson was driving through the Sierra Nevadas in December 2018 to fish in a river when that “Springsteen song came on about a white shrimper planning to kill a Vietnamese refugee in Galveston Bay over turf. It was such a strange premise for a song that it stuck with me,” he…

HuffPo: “Few details have been made public as to why, exactly, the FBI and Department of Justice felt the urgent need to raid former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort on Monday. Reports indicate Trump had been holding onto materials that were supposed to have been turned over to the National Archives. But officials have not commented on what was…

The Assembly: “Ride through downtown, past the Old Guilford County Courthouse and under the 21-story Lincoln Financial tower, and there it sits: a 158,000-square-foot monument to Brutalist architecture, all sharp angles and skinny windows.  “News & Record, Greensboro, North Carolina,” the sign out front of 200 East Market Street declares, though the paper hasn’t been…

NC Policy Watch: “Legal complaints are stacking up against Florida’s 15-week abortion ban, all of them arguing that the law imposes a narrowly sectarian definition of when life begins upon other elements of the faith community that hold markedly different ideas about the matter. The trend began in early June, when Barry Silver, a South…

AP: “A Mississippi grand jury has declined to indict the white woman whose accusation set off the lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till nearly 70 years ago, most likely closing the case that shocked a nation and galvanized the modern civil rights movement. After hearing more than seven hours of testimony from investigators and witnesses,…

Political Wire: “John Tilley, former secretary of Kentucky’s Justice and Public Safety Cabinet, was arrested in downtown Lexington and charged with first degree rape Monday morning,” the Lexington Herald Ledger reports. “An arrest citation alleges that Tilley had sex with a victim who could not consent due to their level of intoxication. The alleged rape occurred on…

MSN: “Travis McMichael, who fatally shot Ahmaud Arbery and is serving life in prison for murder, on Monday was again sentenced to life in prison plus 10 years on federal hate crime charges. His father, Gregory, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, who were also convicted of murder, were set to be sentenced Monday afternoon. A jury in February found that the three…

AL Political Reporter: “The Anne E, Casey Foundation released its annual Kids Count databook Monday and Alabama remains in the bottom five states for child wellbeing. In the state rankings, Alabama moved up from 47th to 46th, ahead of Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Nevada. The ranking is based on 16 key indicators that span…

NC Policy Watch: “North Carolina Green Party Senate candidate Matthew Hoh says he’s ramping up his campaign now that a federal judge has ordered that the party’s nominees be placed on the 2022 ballot. “From the very beginning, we have worked towards a speedy resolution to being placed onto the ballot; this is something that…

Slate: “After two years, we have finally seen the most significant step toward anything resembling accountability for the death of Breonna Taylor in March 2020. On Thursday, Merrick Garland announced that the Department of Justice has indicted four of the officers involved with securing and executing the search warrant that ultimately led to Taylor’s death. Even more surprising…