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- Inside the Plan to Send 1,000 DOJ Monitors to the Polls
For more than 60 years, the Department of Justice has sent its attorneys and staff to polling places across the country to ensure that Americans can vote free of discrimination or intimidation. They’ve watched to see if Black voters were illegally hindered in any way, if those who use a wheelchair or walker could get into facilities, and if those who couldn’t read the ballot for any reason—blindness, lack of English proficiency, or simply not having the skill—had help. Officials selected locations that had had problems in the past or where people had reported concerns. When the feds would show up in the Tucson area of Arizona, where Spanish speakers and retirees are as numerous as the cacti dotting the Sonoran Desert, local officials considered the monitors partners in protecting the right to vote. But ahead of the primary election this past July, when Pima County Elections Director Constance Hargrove learned that DOJ was sending six representatives—most of whom were criminal prosecutors—she became worried. Would they just witness the vote, as in years past, or were they planning to gather evidence to later try to undermine the results? Would they know the basic rules? She told DOJ’s coordinator during a phone call: “Remind them that they cannot take a gun or weapon into the vote centers.”On Primary Day, the monitors’ activities seemed normal, Hargrove told us. But she’s still concerned about the plan to send 1,000 of them to polling locations in every state for Tuesday’s election. The number itself is “a tall order,” Hargrove told us, as most previous administrations—Republican and Democratic—have detailed far fewer. And then there’s this department’s track record on elections. DOJ under President Trump has taken up his years-long quest to prove that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. Officials have seized ballots in Georgia, gathered material from Arizona, and questioned election officials in Wisconsin—but still have not found evidence of the widespread voter fraud the president has alleged. In recent days, DOJ reminded all state election officials to preserve materials from their elections.“I’m not going to freak myself out before Election Day, or my poll workers, or the voters,” Hargrove said. She has reminded workers to follow their training should the monitors—or anyone else—be disruptive: “You can always call 911.”Her concerns and suspicions are widely shared among the dozen-plus local and state election officials we spoke with across the country. Some worry that… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - Can Scientists Make Football Safer?
Researchers are exploring novel ways to treat, even prevent, the brain disease C.T.E. One of the most surprising: near-infrared light. [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - These Patients Struggle With Runaway Bones. Finally There’s Hope.F.O.P., a rare genetic condition, causes uncontrolled explosions of bone. New drugs may slow or halt the process. [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago
- Stirring Beckett
If Mark Rothko’s paintings represent a visual approach to the condition of music, then Samuel Beckett’s poems, plays and prose are the literary equivalent. Not just the music of words: a music suggested by the words, beyond them yet intrinsic to their sounds and rhythms. Stirrings Still was Beckett’s last piece of prose: nine pages, about 2,500 words, written between 1983 and 1987, which means it was finished two years before his death. And that’s what it seems to evoke: a man quietly contemplating his own mortality, time and loss and things undone, summoning flawed memories. As it opens, he sits at a table, watching himself “rise and go”. Paul Griffiths reads Stirrings Still on a new album of that title, the words divided into 18 sections separated by music for string quartet written by the American composer Trevor Bača. Griffiths, whom I knew when he was the chief classical music critic for The Times in London throughout the 1980s, is a much decorated author (including three novels), librettist and lecturer. He is not an actor, which means that inflection of the text is limited, and mostly the better for it. His is an ordinary voice, suited to calm reflection, not drawing attention to itself and therefore a good fit for this Beckett piece. The quasi-incantatory repetitions are allowed to speak for themselves, while a little trouble with his Rs adds a touch of imperfection and character. A Bill Nighy or an Ian McKellen might “sell” the lines better but the result would not seem so true. What the speaker avoids in terms of drama and variety, Bača’s music supplies. The Jack Quartet — Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman (violins), John Pickford Richards (viola) and Jay Campbell (cello) — provide a repertoire of scrapes and swoops and sawing, unsettling harmonics, microtonal drones, hurtling zigzag patterns, and glissandi that judder like a train jumping its tracks, all laid out with beautiful timing and, in Manfred Eicher’s production, a sense of space and air. Only at the end do the narration and the music overlap, an understated effect to close a remarkable piece of work. * Stirrings Still is out now on the ECM New Series label. The text is available, along with that of Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho, in a volume published by Faber & Faber as Company… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - The Questions Adam Hamawy Won’t Answer
The photograph, from April 1993, shows a burly sheikh sitting on a couch wearing a gray kaftan, a white-and-crimson turban, and black sunglasses. His beard is thick and white. Reporters crowd into his Jersey City tenement apartment, waiting to hear him speak.Omar Abdel-Rahman—the man newspapers called the Blind Sheikh—by then had a reputation throughout the Muslim world as the religious leader of Egypt’s largest jihadist group. In 1981, his words inspired the assassins of President Anwar Sadat. His rhetoric could be unremitting, as in a speech in Brooklyn in early 1993: “We must be terrorists, and we must terrorize the enemies of Islam and frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.” By spring of that year, law enforcement was investigating Abdel-Rahman’s possible involvement in at least two killings, including that of a prominent extremist rabbi. And that March, the FBI and foreign agencies had arrested several of Abdel-Rahman’s close followers, among them a man reported to be the sheikh’s part-time driver, on charges of helping carry out the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six people but had aimed for far more.Adam Hamawy, who will almost certainly represent New Jersey’s Twelfth Congressional District come January, was at the press conference in the sheikh’s apartment the day the photograph was taken. He has said that he went there to translate something for Abdel-Rahman. Hamawy had met Abdel-Rahman two years earlier and became something of an acolyte, going to mosques across New Jersey to hear him speak, visiting the sheikh at home, and traveling with him to an Islamist conference in Detroit, where Abdel-Rahman and other speakers held forth on the necessity of violent jihad. In that photo, a bearded young man who resembles Hamawy kneels in front of reporters, his eyes trained on Abdel-Rahman. I asked Hamawy’s campaign multiple times whether that man is the candidate; the campaign did not reply.Najlah Feanny / Corbis / GettySheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman speaks at a press conference in Jersey City, New Jersey, in April 1993.Two months after that press conference, in June 1993, Abdel-Rahman would be arrested for plotting what would have been another catastrophic day of terrorism in New York City; the plan included blowing up two Hudson River tunnels and the United Nations, and assassinating the Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak. Hamawy would testify as a defense witness at Abdel-Rahman’s trial in 1995, and Abdel-Rahman… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - 2026 Rider Motorcycle of the Year—The Buell Super Cruiser
The motorcycle industry doesn’t need another cruiser. It doesn’t need another superbike. It needs something like this. For 36 years, Rider has asked a decidedly difficult question: Which motorcycle best represents where the industry is going? The Motorcycle of the Year award is reserved for the machine that does more than simply perform well. It has to represent something meaningful about the future of motorcycling. That could mean an entirely new chassis, a breakthrough in suspension design, a significant change in engine performance and technology, or sometimes a combination of familiar ideas assembled in a way that changes what riders expect from a production motorcycle. This year, we chose the Buell Super Cruiser. At first glance, that might seem like an odd choice. After all, the Super Cruiser doesn’t introduce some never‑-before‑-seen technology. It doesn’t have an electric powertrain, radar‑-guided cruise control, or a TFT display that requires a computer science degree to operate. What it does have is 175 horsepower – and a cruiser chassis. Rolling on 17‑-inch wheels with serious suspension, the Super Cruiser is outfitted with Brembo brakes and a liquid‑-cooled 1,190cc V‑-Twin, and it weighs less than 500 pounds. In other words, somebody finally asked a very good question: What happens if you take the basic proportions and attitude of an American cruiser, give it the chassis dynamics of a sportbike, and then bestow it with enough power to make the whole thing completely ridiculous? The answer is the Super Cruiser. The silhouette of an ’80s FXR with the accoutrements of a modern day superbike. Photos by: Buell Familiar, Not Retro The Super Cruiser looks familiar for a reason. Its silhouette recalls one of the most beloved performance‑-oriented American motorcycles ever built: Harley‑-Davidson’s FXR. The compact chassis, triangular under-seat frame section, low‑-slung stance, and relationship between the seat, tank, and engine immediately trigger that familiarity. But this isn’t an FXR with a modern engine dropped into it. Roland Sands Design developed an entirely new steel‑-tube chassis around the Buell powerplant, drawing inspiration from the FXR while creating something designed for modern performance. The Super Cruiser isn’t trying to recreate the past, but it is borrowing one of the better ideas from it. It’s nostalgic and modern at the same time. The Super Cruiser’s 1,190cc, 72‑-degree V‑-Twin produces a claimed 175 horsepower and 94 lb‑-ft of torque. The engine is derived from the same family of… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago
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