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We're highlighting people taking action on behalf of racial equality in their everyday life. That includes a woman who started a parody Twitter account centered around the neighborhood network Nextdoor.“I just found that Nextdoor brought so much levity to my day, at least in my neighborhood, because Glenn Park is a really quiet residential neighborhood in San Fran, so I had this one neighbor that would complain about someone rearranging her lawn gnomes every single day at 4 p.m. like on the dot,” said Jenn Takahashi, the creator of the @BestofNextdoor Twitter account.Takahashi says she basically started the twitter account to make other people laugh. She posted passive aggressive arguments between neighbors, people helping each other and other funny posts.However, she says she also got a lot of submissions that weighed heavy on her and highlighted what she described as racism running rampant.“I always struggled with that because I didn’t want to put that negative energy back out there, but at the same time, I feel like those stories need to be told also,” she said.Recently, Takahashi tweeted Nextdoor’s tweet saying “black lives matter” with another person's post that got taken down for the same thing. Since then, people have shared even more stories of unexplained censored or deleted similar posts.A petition was even started to get racial bias training for Nextdoor neighborhood leads or moderators, among other demands.“I did not realize how completely what a mess their lead program was,” said Takahashi. “These people don’t have any training at all.”Since all this, Nextdoor has said it will "better educate our neighbors on what is and is not allowed on the platform, drawing a firm line against racist behavior and removing comments and members who violate the rules.”Nextdoor also ended a feature that allowed users to forward their posts directly to a local police department. 1913

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski has tested positive for the coronavirus.Lewandowski recently traveled to Pennsylvania to assist the president’s efforts to contest the state’s election results. He said Thursday he believes he was infected in Philadelphia and he's not experiencing any symptoms.Lewandowski appeared with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani at an event last Saturday outside a landscaping company and lobbed unfounded accusations of voter fraud as the race was called for Trump’s challenger, now-President-elect Joe Biden.Lewandowski was also at the election night party at the White House last week linked to several virus cases.Numerous White House and campaign officials have tested positive in this latest wave of infections, including Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows.Republican and Democratic election officials nationwide have said publicly the election went well. International observers confirm there were no serious irregularities. 974

WASHINGTON, D.C. – One of the most contentious battles in politics isn’t just the current battle for the White House, it’s also the upcoming battle over who could ultimately end up in the halls of Congress and state capitols everywhere, in a process called redistricting.“The basic idea underlying that system is that we should form a constituency with people who live near us,” said Charles Blahous, a senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia.New district maps are created based on census population numbers every 10 years. Yet, those maps can end up getting distorted to favor one political party over another when gerrymandering comes in to play.“I think gerrymandering is of concern to most voters because it seems to violate the foundational principle of our representative system, which is that we are divided into districts geographically,” Blahous said.Geography is something gerrymandering throws out the window. Some of the unusual congressional district maps can end up looking like animals.There is Maryland’s Democratic 3rd district, which looks like a snake, stretching from Baltimore into counties south. There is also northern Ohio’s Republican 4th district, known as “the duck.”So, who designed these?“The Constitution gives the power to state legislatures to draw these maps,” Blahous said.Since politicians draw the maps, they can be skewed to favor a particular party or incumbent. However, they can also be used to favor people from a particular racial or ethnic group, who have often been under-represented in the halls of power, in order to comply with federal Voting Rights Act rules on representation.Still, there are now efforts to take the map drawing out of the hands of politicians.In Virginia, voters will decide this November whether an independent commission should be in charge of the process instead. There are other ideas emerging, too: like using artificial intelligence to make the maps.“It takes an enormous computer capacity, which was not there 30 years ago, and writing the programming to make that all happen is also not a trivial matter,” said political science professor Bruce Cain, director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University.Prof. Cain said he and a colleague, Prof. Wendy Tam Cho of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believe an algorithm they’ve developed might be the best alternative for making fairer maps.“What you want to be able to do is take every plan and classify it and say, ‘yeah, this one's better for minorities, this one's better for compactness,’ but is there something that combines both of them?” he said.It is all part of the ongoing effort to make sure America’s representative democracy remains truly representative of the people. 2801

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A Republican policing bill has hit a roadblock as Senate Democrats voted against it Wednesday and called it inadequate.That leaves leaving the parties to decide whether to take on the hard job of negotiating a compromise or walk away despite public outcry over the killings of Black Americans.Democrats want greater changes in police tactics and accountability. They're backed by leading civil rights groups. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says Democrats are engaging in “political nonsense.” The impasse threatens to turn the nationwide protests over the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others into another moment that galvanizes the nation but leaves lawmakers unable to act. Common ground is not out of reach though. A new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll shows almost all Americans support some degree of criminal justice changes.“This is a profound moment, it is a moral moment,” said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., a co-author of the Democrats’ proposal. “The call is for us to act.”Yet Congress, as it has so many times before when confronted with crisis — on gun control or immigration changes supported by broad segments of the population — has stalled out, for now. Lawmakers are hesitant to make moves upsetting to voters as they campaign for the fall election. And President Donald Trump, facing his own reelection, is an uneven partner with shifting positions on the types of changes he would accept from Capitol Hill.Ahead of Wednesday’s vote, Trump tweeted his support for the GOP bill. He said it would be “great for both people of color and police.” Trump tweeted, “Hope to sign it into law ASAP!”Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged Wednesday’s vote tally may fall short. He has vowed to try again, hoping to pass legislation before a July 4 holiday recess.“This is not about them or us,” said Sen. Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate and author of the GOP bill.He said it’s about young people and others, “who are afraid to jog down the street or get in their car and drive.” During a GOP lunch Tuesday, Scott played for colleagues the racist voice mail messages he has recently received, according to a Republican granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting.The GOP’s Justice Act would create a national database of police use-of-force incidents, restrict police chokeholds and set up new training procedures and commissions to study race and law enforcement. It is not as sweeping as a Democratic proposal, which mandates many of the changes and would hold police liable to damages in lawsuits. There are similarities on some issues, lawmakers say, but also vast differences.The Democrats are lining up high-profile and wide-ranging support for their bill. Hundreds of celebrities, actors, musicians and industry leaders including Rihanna, RZA, Elon Musk and mayors from cities nationwide signed on to a support letter obtained by The Associated Press and being released Wednesday.Civil rights leaders and the Congressional Black Caucus urged a no vote on the GOP bill.Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and top Democrats signaled they would oppose the Republican bill as “not salvageable,” as they demand negotiations on a new, bipartisan package with more extensive changes to law enforcement tactics and accountability aligned with their own Democratic bill.As talks potentially continue, Democrats are trying to force Republicans to the negotiating table to strengthen Democrats’ hand. The House is set to approve the Democrats’ bill later this week, likely Thursday. The two bills, the House and Senate versions, would ultimately need to be the same to become law.Neither bill goes as far as some activists want with calls to defund the police and shift resources to other community services.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indicated she is eager to enter talks with the Senate, a signal the door is not closed to compromise.But in a CBS News Radio interview Tuesday, Pelosi said Republicans need to step up with a better bill. “They were trying to get away with murder, actually — the murder of George Floyd.”The comment drew sharp rebuke and calls from Republicans for her to apologize.“We’re ready to make a law, not just make a point,” McConnell said as he opened the Senate on Tuesday. He said Americans “deserve better than a partisan stalemate.”Political risks of inaction are high, as the public wants to see policing changes after nearly a month of constant demonstrations nationwide, in cities large and small, forcing a worldwide reckoning over law enforcement and racial injustice. 4628

WASHINGTON (AP) — Winter hit U.S. honeybees hard with the highest loss rate yet, an annual survey of beekeepers showed.The annual nationwide survey by the Bee Informed Partnership found 37.7% of honeybee colonies died this past winter, nearly 9 percentage points higher than the average winter loss.The survey of nearly 4,700 beekeepers managing more than 300,000 colonies goes back 13 years and is conducted by bee experts at the University of Maryland, Auburn University and several other colleges.Beekeepers had been seeing fewer winter colony losses in recent years until now, said Maryland's Dennis vanEngelsdorp, president of the bee partnership and co-author of Wednesday's survey."The fact that we suddenly had the worst winter we've had ... is troubling," vanEngelsdorp said.Some bees usually die over winter, but until the past couple decades, when a combination of problems struck colonies, losses rarely exceeded 10%, he said.Bees pollinate billion worth of U.S. food crops. One-third of the human diet comes from pollinators, including native wild bees and other animals, many of which are also in trouble, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture."We should be concerned on multiple levels," said University of California, Berkeley, agricultural social scientist Jennie Durant, who has a separate study this week on loss of food supply for bees.Year-to-year bee colony losses, which include calculations for summer, were 40.7%, higher than normal, but not a record high, the survey found."The beekeepers are working harder than ever to manage colonies but we still lose 40-50% each year... unacceptable," Swiss bee expert Jeff Pettis, who wasn't part of the survey, said in an email.For more than a decade, bees have been in trouble with scientists blaming mites, diseases, pesticides and loss of food.This past winter's steep drop seems heavily connected to the mites, vanEngelsdorp said. Beekeepers report that chemicals that kill mites don't seem to be working quite as well and mite infestation is worsening, he said. Those mites feed on the bees' fats and that's where the insects store protein and center their immune response.Durant's study in this week's journal Land Use Policy found that changes in food supply in the Midwest's Prairie Pothole Region, a hot spot for honeybee colonies, has been a major factor in losses. That area has lost wetland areas with clover bees feed on.Other areas have been converted to corn and soy crops, which don't feed bees, she said.As bad as the survey numbers are, vanEngelsdorp said, "We're not really worried about honeybees going extinct... I'm more worried that the commercial beekeepers will go out of business." 2695