hicago mayoral candidates sparred over public safety in a televised debate Thursday night ahead of the April 4 runoff, which has become the latest big-city mayoral race to test voters’ views on crime and policing.

Paul Vallas accused progressive rival Brandon Johnson of backing the “defund the police” movement, while Johnson charged that Vallas’ plans to ramp up hiring of police officers would be slow and unrealistic.

Vallas and Johnson, both of whom say they are Democrats and are competing in a nonpartisan contest, advanced to the runoff after the February 28 primary, when incumbent Lori Lightfoot finished third, dashing her reelection hopes.

Chicago is an overwhelmingly Democratic city: 83% of its voters backed President Joe Biden in the 2020 election. But Vallas and Johnson are on opposite sides of the party’s divide over police policies.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/16/politics/chicago-mayor-debate/index.html

During that quarter century without a newborn, the village population shrank by more than half to just 1,150 – down from 6,000 as recently as 40 years ago – as younger residents left and older residents died. Many homes were abandoned, some overrun by wildlife.

Kawakami is just one of the countless small rural towns and villages that have been forgotten and neglected as younger Japanese head for the cities. More than 90% of Japanese now live in urban areas like Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto – all linked by Japan’s always-on-time Shinkansen bullet trains.

That has left rural areas and industries like agriculture, forestry, and farming facing a critical labor shortage that will likely get worse in the coming years as the workforce ages. By 2022, the number of people working in agriculture and forestry had declined to 1.9 million from 2.25 million 10 years earlier.

Yet the demise of Kawakami is emblematic of a problem that goes far beyond the Japanese countryside.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — A new powerhouse of Dutch right-wing populism took political center stage Thursday after winning its first provincial elections, a victory that was seen as a resounding rebuke to Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s ruling four-party coalition.

With counting of ballots from Wednesday’s vote wrapping up, the Farmer Citizen Movement — known by its Dutch acronym BBB — was predicted to win 15 seats in the 75-seat upper house of the Dutch national parliament, level with the bloc formed by left-of center Labor and Green parties. The provincial lawmakers elected in Wednesday’s vote choose national senators at the end of May.

Losses suffered by members of Rutte’s coalition weaken the government but could also strengthen their resolve to sit out their four-year term in office that ends in 2025 rather than face an early national election. They also will compound problems for Rutte in his attempts to drastically slash pollution from the country’s agriculture, industry and transport sectors to protect vulnerable natural habitats.

Victories in provinces across the nation of nearly 18 million for a party whose leader Caroline van der Plas is its only national lawmaker underscore a deep-rooted resentment of mainstream politics in the Netherlands that spreads far beyond the party’s farming power base. With the count nearing completion, the BBB was forecast to become the biggest party in every province except the central province of Utrecht.

One day last year, Julie Gauthier went on Twitter with a confession to make. “Unpopular opinion: I don’t have zoom fatigue and I miss zoom happy hours and game nights,” she wrote. “I feel more isolated now than I did when friends all took time to chat online at the beginning of the pandemic.”

Ms. Gauthier, 30, had been scrolling through old photos and found a screenshot of one of the virtual happy hours she’d had with friends in the early days of Covid restrictions. At the time, living alone and working remotely as a software engineer in rural Coventry, Conn., the self-described extrovert seized every opportunity for human contact she could get.

Virtual trivia nights? She was in. Mask-making over Zoom with members of a local makerspace? Why not? She made a new best friend out of a stranger she met at an online meetup for tech workers, and when another friend’s band began broadcasting porch concerts over Facebook Live, Ms. Gauthier streamed the show on her TV and got all dressed up as if she were there.

...snip...

By the time she stumbled on the old Zoom screenshot — filled with the faces of friends she had scarcely seen since — it felt decidedly less so. It still does.

...snip...

Three years since the pandemic was declared, many of the apps, platforms and digital tools that Ms. Gauthier and millions of others relied on to stay connected are struggling, shrinking or shutting down. Zoom has slashed 15 percent of its work force. Epic Games killed off the group video app Houseparty in late 2021, and even Meta’s Portal devices, which after years of challenges surged in popularity in 2020, got the ax last year.

Beth Roper had already sold her husband Doug’s boat and his pickup truck. Her daughter sends $500 a month or more. But it was nowhere near enough to pay the $5,950-a-month bill at Doug’s assisted-living facility. So last year, Roper, 65, abandoned her own plans to retire.

To the public school librarian from Poquoson, Va., it feels like a betrayal of a social contract. Doug Roper, a longtime high school history teacher and wrestling coach, has a pension and Social Security. The Ropers own a home; they have savings. Yet the expense of Doug’s residential Alzheimer’s care poses a grave threat to their middle-class nest egg. At nearly $72,000, a year in assisted living for Doug, 67, costs more than her $64,000 annual salary.

“It’s devastating,” she said. “You can’t wrap your head around it.”

A wave of Americans has been reaching retirement age largely unprepared for the extraordinary costs of specialized care. These aging baby boomers — 73 million strong, the oldest of whom turn 77 this year — pose an unprecedented challenge to the U.S. economy, as individual families shoulder an increasingly ruinous financial burden with little help from stalemated policymakers in Washington.

After more than two months of testimony, prosecutors in the Proud Boys sedition trial called their final witness on Friday, ending a lengthy presentation based on hours of violent videos, reams of encrypted text messages and legal theories that have repeatedly tested the boundaries of conspiracy law.

While the government was waiting until Monday to formally rest its case, the conclusion of its jury presentation was a signal moment in the trial — one of only three so far in which allegations of sedition have been brought in connection with the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021.

The proceeding, in Federal District Court in Washington, has already run much longer than expected, with a prosecutor complaining to the judge this week that the two sides had been “burning so much of the jury’s time” with constant arguments about the proper use of evidence and witnesses.

From well before the trial began, prosecutors faced a dilemma. Videos collected from the police, surveillance cameras and the rioters themselves clearly showed that a large group of Proud Boys led by some of the defendants was exceptionally violent on Jan. 6, taking the lead in pushing through barricades, assaulting officers, riling up the crowd and ultimately breaching the Capitol.

Asking an FBI agent to name cereals. Making wild claims of government plots and executions. Near daily, calling for a mistrial.

As the federal seditious conspiracy trial of top members of the Proud Boys group grinds into its third month, attorneys for some of the five men have often turned what the Justice Department sees as a deadly serious proceeding into a farce.

The moves have succeeded at chopping up and slowing down the government’s presentation. They have also appealed to an audience outside the courtroom, where former president Donald Trump and his supporters continue to re-litigate whether the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack was as bad as prosecutors say it was. But the freewheeling questioning of government witnesses by the Proud Boys’ attorneys has also tied the defendants to conspiracy theories about Jan. 6 and exposed some of the far-right group’s ugliest rhetoric and beliefs.

One defense attorney began his opening remarks by thanking “the audience,” prompting an admonition from Judge Timothy J. Kelly, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, to ignore spectators and focus on the jury.

The Donald Trump election campaign’s efforts to show that thousands of ballots were cast in the name of dead people in the pivotal state of Georgia during the 2020 election resulted in a research report that in fact contradicted Trump’s claims that widespread election fraud cost him the presidency, according to a report on Friday.

Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia in 2020 was key and the Trump team’s own information went against Trump’s subsequent denial of the legitimate win by his opponent, according to the Washington Post.

Prosecutors investigating Trump’s role in the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 by his supporters attempting to overturn the certification by Congress of Biden’s victory obtained the campaign research, the Washington Post reported.

Trump’s insistence that thousands of ballots came from dead people became especially infamous following revelations that he had urged the Georgia secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes so he would win, during a 2 January 2021 call. The Trump-commissioned study refuting this very claim “was dated one day prior” to this call, per the Post.

Local, state and federal law enforcement and security agencies are preparing for the possibility that former President Donald Trump will be indicted as early as next week, according to five senior officials familiar with the preparations.

Law enforcement agencies are conducting preliminary security assessments, the officials said, and are discussing potential security plans in and around the Manhattan Criminal Court, at 100 Centre Street, in case Trump is charged in connection with an alleged hush money payment to Stormy Daniels and travels to New York to face any charges.

The officials stress that the interagency conversations and planning are precautionary in nature because no charges have been filed.

The agencies involved include the NYPD, New York State Court Officers, the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, the officials said.