NEWS OF THE DAY
From Across the Nation
➊ Absentee ballots: A federal appeals court on Thursday blocked a decision to extend the deadline for counting as many as 2 million absentee ballots by six days in battleground Wisconsin, in a win for Republicans who have fought attempts to expand voting across the country. If the ruling stands, absentee ballots will have to be delivered to Wisconsin election clerks by 8 p. m. on Election Day if they are to be counted. The ruling makes it more likely that results of the presidential race in the pivotal swing state will be known within hours of poll closing. Democrats almost certainly will appeal the decision to the U. S. Supreme Court.
➋ Holocaust controversy: A Florida high school principal who was fired last year after telling a student’s mother “not everyone believes the Holocaust happened” was rehired after a recommendation by an administrative law judge. The Palm Beach County school board voted 43 on Wednesday to reinstate former Spanish River High School principal William Latson and give him $ 152,000 in back pay, the Palm Beach Post reported. Refusal to rehire him could lead to a lawsuit and a costly court battle. The district has already spent more than $ 106,000 defending Latson’s termination in administrative court.
➌ Faked death: A West Virginia woman who conspired to fake her death has pleaded guilty to a federal charge, authorities said. Julie M. Wheeler, 44, of Beaver faces up to five years in prison when she is sentenced in January for conspiring to obstruct justice, news outlets reported, citing a statement Wednesday from the U. S. attorney’s office. Prosecutors said Wheeler admitted to conspiring with her husband, Rodney Wheeler, to fake her death at the New River Gorge by pretending she plummeted from an overlook as part of a scheme to keep her out of having to go to prison in a health care fraud case.
➍ Officer fired: A white police officer charged with murder in the fatal shooting of a Black man in a small East Texas city was fired Thursday. A statement from the City of Wolfe — located 70 miles northeast of Dallas — said Officer Shaun Lucas, 22, was fired for “his egregious violation” of city and police department policy. Lucas remained jailed Thursday on $ 1 million bond. Jonathan Price, 31, was killed over the weekend after Lucas arrived at a convenience store to check out a report of a fight. In a statement Monday announcing that Lucas had been charged, the Texas Rangers said that Price “resisted in a nonthreatening posture and began walking away,” and that the officer’s actions weren’t “reasonable.”
➎ GOP fundraiser charged: Elliott Broidy, a prominent fundraiser for President Trump and the Republican Party, has been charged in an illicit lobbying campaign aimed at getting the Trump administration to drop an investigation into the multibilliondollar looting of a Malaysian state investment fund. Broidy is the latest person accused by the Justice Department in the covert lobbying effort, which also sought to arrange the return of a Chinese dissident living in the U. S. A consultant, Nickie Lum Davis, pleaded guilty in August in Hawaii.