Embassy builder sues State Department for $461M



An Alabama special needs teacher who was once "teacher of the month" is facing child abuse charges after allegedly pouring hot sauce on a student's tongue as a form of punishment.
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Justin Pearson is playing a game in which the cards were marked in favor of his opponent after play had already begun. Pearson is the Democratic candidate for Congress in Tennessee’s ninth district (TN-9), one of three in the U.S. South that Republicans rushed to redraw in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling in April that curtailed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The decision dealt a fatal blow to one of the major gains of the civil rights era. It banned consideration of race when drawing electoral districts, but the court’s conservative majority approved doing so for political reasons.

© George Walker IV (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

The U.S. midterm elections come after aggressive efforts by both Democrats and Republicans to redraw district maps in their favor, a practice known as gerrymandering.

The mobilization of American voters in the midterm elections is already making an impact with fewer than two weeks to go until Election Day on November 3. Early voting, which has begun in more than 30 states, is setting records in some of them. More than 16 million voters have already cast their ballots, most of them by mail.

© Jonathan Ernst (REUTERS)
In mid-August, The New York Times lost a defamation lawsuit in Alabama. It’s the first such case the paper has lost in more than half a century. Back in 2023, the Times reported that a University of Alabama basketball player named Kai Spears was at the scene of a fatal shooting—information that turned out to be false, and based on a single anonymous source. A jury found the paper liable for damages to the tune of $9.25 million. Ryan Phillips, the only reporter to attend the duration of the defamation trial, describes the experience:
Chief among the post-publication issues was the Times‘ reluctance to issue a correction or retraction when it became immediately clear that Witz’s anonymous source had been wrong in their assertion that Spears was in Miller’s car during the shooting.
The jury heard lengthy testimony about how the newspaper published “updates” in the form of “Editor’s Notes” to the online story to reflect each new denial coming from the University of Alabama, UA Director of Athletics Greg Byrne, Spears’ father, and then the Alabama walk-on himself in an Instagram post.
Apart from the updates, which the Times argued were tantamount to a correction when applying Alabama law to the evidence, the story remained unchanged until an official correction was eventually published by The New York Times on June 3, 2023.