As San Francisco students headed back to school Wednesday, there was hope among parents, teachers and education officials that, for the first time in three years, the district would be laser-focused on student learning and free of scandals.

Teachers, parents, elected officials, police officers and many others stood outside the gates ringing cowbells and clappers while wishing students a great first day as they entered the campus on a red carpet.

Health teacher Ben Borelli said, despite recent controversies and struggles facing the district, none of that mattered when the students showed up.

“Certainly during the school day when the kids are here, the focus is on the learning and the kids,” he said.

The first day of classes for the district’s 49,000 students appeared to offer a greater sense of pandemic-era normalcy this year, with no mask mandate, limited coronavirus testing and more lenient exposure recommendations, although many students and staff continued to wear masks.

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Another day, another school board attempting to ban books that reference subjects like racism, LGBTQ+ rights, and the Holocaust. This time, a Texas school district near Fort Worth is removing and reviewing dozens of books that were previously “challenged” by parents, and are now being reviewed again per the school board’s new policy. The titles include the Bible, an illustrated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe, and more, according to The Texas Tribune.

All of this is due, in part, to the board adding three new conservative members, whose campaigns received unprecedented funding from the Christian political action committee Patriot Mobile Action and who ran on the over-hyped issue of critical race theory.

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In the days since the FBI seized classified and top secret documents from Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, the former President and his allies have claimed that Trump had a "standing order" to declassify documents he took from the Oval Office to the White House residence.

But 18 former top Trump administration officials tell CNN they never heard any such order issued during their time working for Trump, and that they believe the claim to be patently false. 

Several officials laughed at the notion. One senior administration official called it "bullsh*t." Two of Trump's former chiefs of staff went on the record to knock down the claim. 

"Nothing approaching an order that foolish was ever given," said John Kelly, who served as Trump's chief of staff for 17 months from 2017 to 2019. "And I can't imagine anyone that worked at the White House after me that would have simply shrugged their shoulders and allowed that order to go forward without dying in the ditch trying to stop it."

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The grinding megadrought that’s plagued the southwestern United States since 2000 plunged to a new level of seriousness on Tuesday, August 16, as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced that the first-ever Tier 2 water restrictions will take effect in January 2023 along the Colorado River. Generous monsoon rains over parts of the Southwest this summer have done little to blunt the grim longer-term prognosis. 

Based on the latest set of two-year projections (called the 24-month study), the water level at Lake Mead will drop to near 1048 feet by next January 1, putting it just below the Tier 2a threshold of 1050 feet. 

The Colorado River, and the 40 million people – plus billions of dollars in agriculture  – that draw on its water across the Southwest, were already in the midst of stringent cuts after a previous 24-month study, released in August 2021, that put into place Tier 1 restrictions (itself an unprecedented step at the time) starting in January 2022. The range that triggers Tier 1 for Lake Mead is 1050-1075 feet.

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Planned Parenthood, the nation's leading reproductive health care provider and abortion rights advocacy organization, plans to spend a record $50 million ahead of November's midterm elections, pouring money into contests where access to abortion will be on the ballot.

The effort, which breaks the group's previous $45 million spending record set in 2020, comes about two months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that created a constitutional right to have an abortion. It will be waged by the organization's political and advocacy arms and will focus on governor's offices, U.S. Senate seats and legislative races in nine states where abortion rights could be restricted or expanded depending on the outcome at the ballot.

Now, for the first time, Republicans who have long campaigned against abortion and Roe v. Wade will face voters on an issue that is no longer hypothetical and carries real life consequences.

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Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney is laying out her future political plans, including a possible run against Donald Trump in 2024, after conceding defeat in the primary election for her House seat. Her loss on Tuesday followed unyielding criticism since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capital of the former president and his efforts to subvert the 2020 election. 

"This primary election is over, but now the real work begins," Cheney said in her concession speech Tuesday night, noting that she had called opponent Harriet Hageman to congratulate her. 

Cheney acknowledged in a Wednesday interview on NBC's Today she was "thinking" about running for president in 2024.

For her 2022 House race, Cheney raised $14 million, a record for any primary in Wyoming's history, and she spent about half of it. The vast majority of donations came from out of state, and she has built up a network she could tap into in the future.

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I truly believe the 2020 election was stolen. Go see 2000 Mules, or real Mollie Hemmingway’s book, Rigged. 

I truly believe the FBI, the DOJ, and the Washington establishment, which includes many Republicans, will do anything to keep President Trump off the 2024 ballot. 

I truly believe the raid on Mar-a-Lago was illegal, and was designed to find something, anything, that could, and will, be taken to a Washington D.C. grand jury.

President Trump will be indicted on some charge; he will be convicted, and he will be sentenced to prison. 

If you think that eighty million voters, or whatever number you think voted for him in 2020, will just sit back and watch it happen, you are sadly mistaken. 

We are indeed in scary times. But the scary party is the democrat party, not the republicans. Dems will go to the end of the earth to retain power. 

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Tonight’s big news will be the fate of Representative Liz Cheney, whose latter-day conversion from dedicated Republican partisan to Donald Trump’s chief inquisitor in Congress has been one of the most compelling storylines of the last 18 months.

In just a few hours, we should know whether Cheney is able to retain her seat as Wyoming’s lone House member while helping investigate her own party’s leader — or whether her decision to do so has made her anathema to Republican base voters.

Surveys show Cheney well behind her primary opponent, a Trump supporter named Harriet Hageman, even though she has vastly outraised and outspent her challenger thanks to her much louder national megaphone. But it’s precisely her fame that has probably doomed Cheney with Trump’s core voters, who see her as an apostate and a traitor to their cause.

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For the second year in a row, Arizona and Nevada will face cuts in the amount of water they can draw from the Colorado River as the West endures more drought, federal officials announced Tuesday.

Though the cuts will not result in any immediate new restrictions — like banning lawn watering or car washing — they signal that unpopular decisions about how to reduce consumption are on the horizon, including whether to prioritize growing cities or agricultural areas. Mexico will also face cuts.

But those reductions represent just a fraction of the potential pain to come for the 40 million Americans in seven states that rely on the river. Because the states failed to meet a federal deadline to figure out how to cut their water use by at least 15%, they could see even deeper cuts that the government has said are needed to prevent reservoirs from falling so low they cannot be pumped.

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An agreement between the Minneapolis teachers union and the Minneapolis Public Schools which stipulates that White teachers will be laid off before teachers of color, regardless of their seniority, violates the Civil Rights Act, as well as the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, several critics warned.

In an effort to revise how the district hires and retains teachers of color, the new contract states that teachers will be subject to layoffs or job changes in “order of seniority,” unless the teacher is part of an “underrepresented group.” The Minnesota Reformer reported that MPS teachers of colors face job changes and budget cuts at a higher rate than their white counterparts. On top of that, 23 percent of teachers laid off in the 2020-21 school year were Black and brown while only making up 18 percent of the workforce.

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