Author: Reporter

Recent revelations about Republican election strategies targeting minority communities in Wisconsin’s biggest city came as no surprise to many Black voters. A Wisconsin election commissioner bragged about low turnout in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods during last year’s elections. Weeks later, an audio recording surfaced that showed then-President Donald Trump’s Wisconsin campaign team laughing behind closed doors about efforts to reach Black voters in 2020. Many people who voted this past week in the state’s primary election said they had long felt targeted by Republicans. The difference now is the public display of strategies that at best ignore the...

Republican lawmakers who have spread election conspiracy theories and falsely claimed that the 2020 presidential outcome was rigged are overseeing legislative committees charged with setting election policy in two major political battleground states. Divided government in Pennsylvania and Arizona means that any voting restrictions those GOP legislators propose is likely to fail. Even so, the high-profile appointments give the lawmakers a platform to cast further doubt on the integrity of elections in states that will be pivotal in selecting the next president in 2024. Awarding such plum positions to lawmakers who have repeated conspiracies and spread misinformation cuts against...

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers made a plea for bipartisanship with the unveiling of a nearly $104 billion state budget on February 15 that includes a new paid family leave program for most public and private-sector workers, tax cuts for the middle class, a plan to keep the Milwaukee Brewers in their stadium until at least 2043, and higher spending for public schools. “Let’s not allow our work together to be hindered by partisanship,” Governor Evers said in his speech to the GOP-controlled Legislature. “Let’s dispose of the notion that the priorities in this budget are somehow extreme or far-fetched....

The U.S. economy expanded at a 2.9% annual pace from October through December, ending 2022 with momentum despite the pressure of high interest rates and widespread fears of a looming recession. The estimate from the Commerce Department showed that the nation’s gross domestic product — the broadest gauge of economic output — decelerated last quarter from the 3.2% annual growth rate it had posted from July through September. Most economists think the economy will slow further in the current quarter and slide into at least a mild recession by midyear. The economy got a boost last quarter from resilient...

Lore Mayerfeld was 4 years old when she escaped from the Nazis in 1941. Together with her mother, the little Jewish girl ran away from her German hometown of Kassel with nothing but the clothes she wore and her beloved doll, Inge. Mayerfeld found a safe haven in the United States and later immigrated to Israel. Her doll, a present from her grandparents who were killed in the Holocaust, was always at her side until 2018 when she donated it to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. More than 80 years later, the doll has returned to Germany. It will...