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A Minnesota judge on Friday sentenced former police officer Kim Potter to two years for fatally shooting a Black motorist 10 months ago. Hennepin County Judge Regina Chu handed down the “significant downward” punishment for the former Brooklyn Center police officer after emotional courtroom statements from the victim's loved ones and the defendant herself. Chu ordered Potter to spend two-thirds of her sentence behind bars and one-third of it on supervised release. She's already served 58 days behind bars, which will go to her credit. Chu said Potter deserved a lesser sentence than the 86-month sentence sought by prosecutors because...

After renegotiating with Sinclair to continue providing access to regional sports networks earlier this year, YouTube TV has announced that the contract extension is expiring and the streaming service will drop FOX RSNs beginning this Thursday, October 1. YouTube TV shared the news on Twitter with this message: To bring you 85+ channels, we periodically renegotiate contracts with content owners. In February, we announced we had negotiated an extension with Sinclair to continue providing FOX Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) through the end of MLB, NHL and NBA seasons. Now that the seasons are over, that extension is expiring. Starting October...

Brian Kilmede is substituting for Tucker Carlson tonight. Is Tucker just taking a long weekend, or is there something else going on?

Last week the Democrats were touting the special election in North Carolina’s 9th District as the first major contest of the 2020 cycle, and the polls indicated that Democrat Dan McCready might win what should be a pretty safe GOP seat. By Wednesday morning, after Republican Dan Bishop had won, their focus had shifted and much commentary was devoted to his “thin margin of victory.” Little notice was taken of certain voting patterns that should frighten the Democrats. Specifically, McCready did far worse than expected in every county but one, and many of those counties are dominated by minority voters....

That a military display on Independence Day proved to be controversial should not be surprising, even if one discounts the partisan tone of much of the criticism. Americans tend not to favor displays of military power, except in the aftermath of successful wars: The Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the 1991 Gulf War were all followed by parades. Military displays nonetheless have the benefit of showing the American people what their investment in national defense has yielded. Contrary to President Donald Trump’s assertion that “our nation is stronger today than it ever was before,” the “Salute...

Dish Network Corp. has stopped carrying 22 regional sports networks owned by the Walt Disney Co. as negotiations over a new distribution contract broke down. The channels, which went dark Friday morning on Dish and its direct-to-consumer streaming platform Sling, are the sports networks that Disney acquired in its $71.3 billion acquisition of the bulk of entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox earlier this year. Disney is in the process of selling 21 of the regional sports networks to Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. in a deal valued at more than $10 billion. The one other channel—New York’s YES Network, which...

Pick a state, any state, and sue until it’s blue. That is the strategy of former President Barack Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder when it comes to redistricting. They’ve spent millions of dollars on their fight to gerrymander Democrats into permanent (or at least long-term) control of the U.S. House of Representatives. And along the way, they’ve fooled many in the media into believing that they are fighting for “fair maps” while pushing an agenda that puts redistricting into the hands of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats and life-time appointed, activist judges. Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court — just recently...

The jury in the military trial of Navy SEAL Chief Eddie Gallagher has found him not guilty of premeditated murder and attempted murder during a deployment to Iraq in 2017. He was, however, found guilty of unlawfully posing for a picture with a human casualty. The verdict was reached after about a day of deliberation. The government and defense attorneys both made closing arguments in the case on Monday, after presenting testimony from numerous witnesses over two weeks. Gallagher, 40, was charged with premeditated murder over an alleged stabbing of a wounded ISIS fighter in Mosul, and attempted premeditated murder...

The most important role of the federal judiciary, including the supreme court, is to check the political process by enforcing the constitution. At times, the court has performed this role admirably, as it did when it brought an end to the laws that created apartheid and required legal segregation of the races. At other times, the court has failed miserably – for example in continually upholding slavery before the civil war, and in allowing the government to intern 110,000 Japanese-Americans during the second world war. As the supreme court finished its term on Thursday, it once again had a mixed...

The Supreme Court made a painfully flawed decision yesterday on partisan gerrymandering. In fact, the decision has only one point in its favor: It is better than the alternatives. There was no good answer, but the Court chose the least bad one. If that sounds like a reluctant endorsement, it is. Like nearly every sentient American nowadays, I think partisan gerrymanders have gone too far. In the case before the Court, North Carolina Republicans gerrymandered their purple state so that in 2018 they won only half the statewide vote, but nine of 12 congressional districts. At least they were explicit...

Held: Partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts. Pp. 6–34.

Cadet Jacob Whisenhunt, originally a member of the class of 2019 at the academy in West Point, N.Y., was dismissed from the Army and removed from the school after he was convicted of raping a female cadet while she slept in her sleeping bag during a summer field training event on July 7, 2016. An appellate court threw out the conviction on Monday, citing a lack of evidence to prove the sex wasn’t consensual. A judge concluded the woman did not audibly struggle and Whisenhunt did not attempt to silence her, hide his identity or remove evidence. “The defense theory...

You wouldn’t normally associate the world of dutiful natural history preservation with sporadic bursts of all-caps letters and exclamation points – or at least not until last month, when the fossil of an infant Tyrannosaurus rex, potentially the only in existence, went on sale on eBay for the “buy it now” price of $2.95m. The listing reads: “Most Likely the Only BABY T-Rex in the World! It has a 15 FOOT long Body and a 21” SKULL with Serrated Teeth! This Rex was very a very dangerous meat eater. It’s a RARE opportunity indeed to ever see a baby REX…”...

The most immediate effects of the terminal-Cretaceous Chicxulub impact, essential to understanding the global-scale environmental and biotic collapses that mark the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, are poorly resolved despite extensive previous work. Here, we help to resolve this by describing a rapidly emplaced, high-energy onshore surge deposit from the terrestrial Hell Creek Formation in Montana. Associated ejecta and a cap of iridium-rich impactite reveal that its emplacement coincided with the Chicxulub event. Acipenseriform fish, densely packed in the deposit, contain ejecta spherules in their gills and were buried by an inland-directed surge that inundated a deeply incised river channel before accretion of...

As the pilots of the doomed Boeing jets in Ethiopia and Indonesia fought to control their planes, they lacked two notable safety features in their cockpits. One reason: Boeing charged extra for them. For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons. Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the...

A few hours ago Bloomberg broke a story, The Bloomberg story says that just one day before the fatal Lion Air accident, the very same airplane had suffered a similar pitch-control anomaly. But in this preceding case, an additional pilot, riding in the jump seat of the cockpit, recognized the problem and overrode part of the errant control system. The plane flew on to its destination. The Bloomberg story says: As the Lion Air crew fought to control their diving Boeing Co. 737 Max 8, they got help from an unexpected source: an off-duty pilot who happened to be riding...

The day before a brand new Lion Air jet crashed into the sea shortly after taking off from Indonesia's capital city last fall -- likely due to an equipment malfunction -- an off-duty pilot reportedly helped save the aircraft when it began to dive. The extra pilot was on the flight from Bali to Jakarta and was seated in the cockpit jumpseat when the crew of the Boeing 737 Max 8 struggled for control of the aircraft, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. During the flight, the jet displayed unusual variations in altitude and airspeed in its first several minutes, Reuters previously...

The flight control system on the Boeing 737 Max 8 is being eyed in Ethiopia crash investigation; Doug McKelway reports on the details.

The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past. In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam. In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Muhammad. The West prides itself in...