Judge rejects effort to throwout votes
Afederal judge tossed out another last-ditchRepublican effort to invalidate nearly 127,000votes in Houston.
HOUSTON — A federal judge Monday rejected another last-ditch Republican effort to invalidate nearly 127,000 votes in Houston because the ballots were cast at drive-thru polling centers established during the pandemic.
The lawsuit was brought by conservative Texas activists who have railed against expanded voting access in Harris County, where a record 1.4 million early votes have already been cast. The county is the nation’s third largest and a crucial battleground in Texas, where President Donald Trump and Republicans are bracing for the closest election in decades on Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen’s decision to hear arguments on the brink of Election Day drew concern from voting rights activists and came after the Texas Supreme Court rejected a nearly identical challenge over the weekend.
Hanen said the opponents to drive-thru centers — whowere represented by former Harris County GOP Chairman Jared Wood fill— had no standing to bring a lawsuit. He added that people had already voted and that conservative activists had months to bring a challenge sooner.
But Hanen still expressed doubts about whether Texas law allowed anyone to vote from their car, even in a pandemic.
“If I were voting tomorrow, I would not vote in a drive-thru just out of my concern as to whether that’s legal or not,” Hanen said.
Woodfill said he would immediately appeal the decision.
The ruling came in response to a lawsuit by conservative GOP activists who have filed a battery of court challenges over moves to expand voting options during the COVID-19 pandemic. The challenges have not involved Trump’s campaign.
Nevada vote: A Nevada judge Monday rejected a bid by the Trump campaign and state Republicans to stop the count of mail-in ballots in Clark County, the state’s most populous and Democratic-leaning county, including Las Vegas.
An immediate appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court was being considered, said the Trump campaign’s Nevada co-chairman Adam Laxalt, and watchers are still at work under existing rules.
State Attorney General Aaron Ford, on Twitter, said: “So, keep counting, Clark.”
Snowden citizenship:
Former U.S. security contractor Edward Snowden said Monday that he and his wife intend to apply for Russian citizenship without renouncing their U.S. citizenship.
Snowden, a former contractor with the U.S. National Security Agency, has been living in Russia since 2013 to escape prosecution in the U.S. after leaking classified documents detailing government surveillance programs. He was granted permanent residency last month, his Russian lawyer said.
Snowden’s wife, Lindsay Mills, an American who has been living with him in Russia, announced last week that the couple are expecting a child. According to Snowden’s lawyer,
Anatoly Kucherena, the child, a boy, will be born in December and will have Russian citizenship.
“After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our son. That’s why, in this era of pandemics and closed borders, we’re applying for dual U.S.-Russian citizenship,” Snowden said in a tweet Monday.
Ethiopia massacre: Survivors of a massacre by rebels in western Ethiopia on Sunday counted 54 bodies in a schoolyard, the latest attack in which members of ethnic minorities have been deliberately targeted, Amnesty International said Monday.
Human rights groups are asking why federal soldiers left the area just hours before attackers moved in and targeted ethnic Am-haras.
Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, denounced the killing of people based on identity, adding that security forces had been deployed to the area and “started taking measures.”
Ethnic violence in Ethiopia is posing the greatest challenge yet to the prime minister, whowas last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner for his sweeping political reforms.
Ethiopia’s government blamed a rebel group, the Or o mo Liberation Army, for the attacks in the far western part of Oromia. Pandemic toll: Texas has surpassed California in recording the highest number of positive coronavirus tests in the country so far, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
As the coronavirus pandemic surges across the nation, the data from Sunday says that there have been 937,317 cases in Texas, the nation’s second-largest state.
California, the most populous state, has had 936,198 cases, followed by Florida with 807,412.
The true number of cases is likely higher because many people haven’t been tested, and studies suggest people can be infected and not feel sick.
In cases per 100,000 population, Texas ranks 19th.
The Johns Hopkins figures show that Texas’ sevenrolling average of the positivity rate has risen over the last two weeks from 7.12% to 10.72%, while the seven-day rolling average of daily new cases rose from about 4,470 new cases per day to about 6,070.
Texas health officials have reported more than 18,000 deaths from COVID-19.
Mourning in France:
French schools held a nationwide minute of silence Monday in honor of a teacher who was beheaded for opening a class debate on free speech by showing students caricatures of the prophet of Islam.
Invoking France’s cherished rights of expression and secularism, officials recalled the country’s Enlightenment past as they urged students and teachers alike to look to the future.
Samuel Paty was killed Oct. 16 outside his school in suburban Paris by an 18year-old refugee of Chechen origin to punish him for showing the caricatures published by the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which triggered a newsroom massacre by extremists in January 2015.
Since their republication in September at the start of the ongoing Paris trial over the killings, France has endured three attacks blamed on Muslim extremists: one by a Pakistani refugee that injured two people outside the newspaper’s old headquarters, the slaying of the schoolteacher and a deadly knife attack last week in a church in the Mediterranean city of Nice.
France’s anti-terrorism prosecutor has opened investigations into all three, and France is now at its highest level of alert.