Author: Reporter

Over the past four years, judges at Washington’s federal courthouse have punished hundreds of rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol in an unprecedented assault on the nation’s democracy. On the cusp of the next presidential election, some of those judges fear another burst of political violence could be coming. Before recently sentencing a rioter to prison, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said he prays Americans accept the outcome of November’s election. But the veteran judge expressed concern that convicted felon Donald Trump and his allies are spreading the same sort of conspiracy theories that fueled the mob’s January 6,...

Convicted felon Donald Trump is stepping up his demands that the winner of the presidential race be declared shortly after polls close on November 5, well before all the votes are counted. Trump set the pattern in 2020, when he declared that he had won during the early morning hours after Election Day. That led his allies to demand that officials “stop the count!” He and many other conservatives have spent the past four years falsely claiming that fraud cost him that election and bemoaning how long it takes to count ballots in the U.S. But one of many...

The Rev. David Peck knows first-hand how divided communities wracked by violence can be gutted by that repeated devastation. In his previous work as an Anglican church representative for international development, Peck saw on his trips to Africa how religious groups could be part of the problem — but also part of the solution. Now, Peck is a pastor in the heartland of Pennsylvania — a state that is the epicenter of a bitterly contested presidential campaign that has stoked deep anxiety, conflicts among families and friends, even fears of election-related violence. Opposing groups can find reconciliation by drawing...

More than half of the foreign-born population in the United States lives in just four states, California, Texas, Florida, and New York, and their numbers grew older and more educated over the past dozen years, according to a report released in April by the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2022, the foreign-born population was estimated to be 46.2 million people, or almost 14% of the U.S. population, with most states seeing double-digit percentage increases in the last dozen years, according to the figures from the bureau’s American Community Survey. In California, New Jersey, New York and Florida, foreign-born individuals comprised...

Starting seventh grade at her first American school, facing classes taught entirely in English, Alisson Ramirez steeled herself for rejection and months of feeling lost. “I was nervous that people would ask me things and I wouldn’t know how to answer,” the Venezuelan teen said. “And I would be ashamed to answer in Spanish.” But it was not quite what she expected. On her first day in Aurora Public Schools in Colorado this past August, many of her teachers translated their classes’ relevant vocabulary into Spanish and handed out written instructions in Spanish. Some teachers even asked questions such...