pelespirit

Males of the four Ptiloris species, a group within the birds of paradise native to Australia and New Guinea, have long fascinated biologists as well as female birds with their courtship displays. A male repeatedly fans out dark satiny wing feathers into a curved arc. He sways his head rhythmically and opens his mouth to a soundtrack of short, sharp thwacking sounds.

“We have actually emerged nationally with a pretty fair map,” he said. “I certainly think that there are ample opportunities for either party to win.”

Democrats, meanwhile, say they emerged in a stronger position after wielding the nearly 60-year-old Voting Rights Act to prevail in legal fights in deep-red Alabama and Louisiana. Federal judges ordered lawmakers in those states to give Black residents more opportunities to elect House candidates of their choice.

“Alabama and Louisiana are just two states once thought to be unreachable in the fight for fairness that have quickly become more representative” as a result of the legal actions, John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement. “I’m confident the House map will remain highly competitive going into 2024.”

The appeal from two “educational organizations,” alleged that the 52-year-old independent consumer protection agency violates the Constitution because its five-member board can only be removed by the president for cause.

A federal appeals court had ruled against the groups and so the Supreme Court’s decision to deny the case leaves the agency’s structure in place.

The case is the latest stop in a years-long legal battle over independent agencies Congress creates and attempts to insulate from politics and the whims of a president. Critics say those independent agencies, whose boards cannot be easily removed, raise significant separation of powers concerns.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission can “ban products, file enforcement suits, and secure eight-figure penalties,” the groups told the Supreme Court. “But it does all of this outside the lines of political accountability.”

Although he had never participated in any discussions about the letters, Wilson sent them anyway, he wrote, setting off a firestorm that led to a federal judge last week granting a temporary restraining order against the state.

Wilson abruptly quit on Oct. 10, writing in his resignation letter that “A man is nothing without his conscience.” The letter, first reported by the Herald/Times, did not explicitly say he was resigning over the controversy. But in his affidavit, Wilson said the decision was made to avoid sending out more letters.

“For every good day, there’s three bad days,” said Nichols, who has been in the service industry since she was a teenager. “You have no security when it comes to knowing how much you’re going to make.”

That uncertainty exists largely because federal labor law allows businesses to pay tipped workers, like food servers, bartenders and bellhops, less than the minimum wage as long as customer tips make up the difference. Voters in Arizona and Massachusetts will decide in November whether it’s good policy to continue to let employers pass some of their labor costs to consumers.

The lawsuit focuses on the Sept. 10 debate in Pennsylvania, where Trump said that the five men — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise — pleaded guilty when they were tried in connection with the assault and rape of a woman who had been running in Central Park on April 19, 1989, and that the victim had died.

During the debate he said: "They admitted — they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately. And if they pled guilty -- then they pled we’re not guilty."

At the time of the trials, each had pleaded not guilty and the victim of the attack survived.

An internal whistleblower complaint at Trump Media calls for CEO Devin Nunes to be fired, alleging he has “severely” mismanaged the company and opened it to “substantial risk of legal action” from regulators, according to a copy reviewed by ProPublica.

The letter also says that former President Donald Trump’s company is hiring “America Last” — alleging that Nunes imposed a directive to hire only foreign contractors at the expense of “American workers who are deeply committed to our mission.”

“To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid,” Walker wrote, granting a request for a temporary restraining order. A hearing for a preliminary injunction is scheduled for later this month.

The ruling puts a temporary halt to one of DeSantis’ most brazen attempts to defeat Amendment 4, which would overturn the six-week abortion ban he signed into law.

On Oct. 3, the Florida Department of Health sent letters threatening to criminally prosecute television stations if they did not stop running an ad that features a woman named Caroline who was diagnosed with brain cancer two years ago while pregnant with her second child. In the ad, the woman says Florida’s six-week abortion ban would have prevented her from receiving a potentially life-saving abortion.

Today, federal safety investigators opened a new investigation aimed at Tesla's electric vehicles. This is now the 14th investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and one of several currently open. This time, it's the automaker's highly controversial "full self-driving" feature that's in the crosshairs—NHTSA says it now has four reports of Teslas using FSD and then crashing after the camera-only system encountered fog, sun glare, or airborne dust.

Of the four crashes that sparked this investigation, one caused the death of a pedestrian when a Model Y crashed into them in Rimrock, Arizona, in November 2023.

NHTSA has a standing general order that requires it to be told if a car crashes while operating under partial or full automation. Fully automated or autonomous means cars might be termed "actually self-driving," such as the Waymos and Zooxes that clutter up the streets of San Francisco. Festooned with dozens of exterior sensors, these four-wheel testbeds drive around—mostly empty of passengers—gathering data to train themselves with later, with no human supervision. (This is also known as SAE level 4 automation.)

"If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute - or appear to be - election interference," she wrote in her ruling.

Much of the newly-released evidence is heavily redacted - but it does include then Vice-President Mike Pence's formal announcement that he would not overturn the 2020 election results.

This new tranche of documents comes after a separate 165-page evidence brief was released earlier this month by special counsel Jack Smith. That contained a trove of new information about Trump's alleged activities during the US Capitol riot on 6 January 2021.

Read: Jack Smith’s redacted evidence in Trump's Jan. 6 case (almost 2000 pages)

The lawsuits have been flooding in for months from the Republican National Committee—now part of the family firm under the co-chairmanship of Trump’s daughter-in-law—and allied groups. The list includes lawsuits to purge voting rolls, disqualify significant numbers of absentee and mail ballots, and to make it easier for local officials to refuse to certify elections.

On the other side, a coalition of nonpartisan national voting rights groups—including the Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center for Civil Rights, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, the Fair Elections Center, and the Southern Poverty Law Center—have been coordinating and preparing for two years to protect people’s right to vote and to have their vote counted.

A Texas judge has blocked the execution of the first man to be put on death row in the US for murder charges related to "shaken baby syndrome", less than two hours before the capital punishment was due to be carried out.

Robert Roberson, 57, was sentenced to death in 2003 for the death of his two-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, after a post-mortem examination concluded she died of injuries from abuse.

Roberson and his lawyers have long maintained the child died of complications from pneumonia.

Roberson's lawyers have also argued that his autism - which was undiagnosed at the time of Nikki's death - was used against him after police and medical staff became suspicious at the lack of emotion he displayed.

Autism can affect how a person communicates with others.