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The letters obtained by the Akron Beacon Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, show people's concern over the tone of the Facebook post by Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski

At least 59 Ohio residents have complained to the state's attorney general over posts made by an Ohio sheriff suggesting that people should keep track of homeowners who have signs supporting Democrat Kamala Harris for president.

Bruce Zuchowski, the sheriff for Portage County just southeast of Cleveland, posted the suggestion to his social media account on Sept. 13, when he talked about Harris’ campaign and border policies.

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Some people said they were angry, accusing Zuchowski of voter intimidation and racism. Others, including people who live in Portage County, said the sheriff’s post made them afraid.

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Paywall removed https://archive.is/fYxrW

Free speech hero Elon Musk is yet again silencing his perceived opponents. This time, he is doing J.D. Vance’s dirty work.

Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein on Thursday reported on the leaked 271-page dossier on Vance, allegedly from the Trump campaign’s research team, which mainstream media outlets had refused to publish. Just hours later, Klippenstein was banned from X, where he’d shared a link to his reporting and to the dossier

Threads is following X's lead, blocking links to purportedly leaked documents about vice presidential candidate JD Vance.

Meta says the links could come from hacked or leaked sources — and it's blocking them because of the potential connection. The FBI and other intelligence agencies last month warned that Iran-backed hackers had sought to access information from the Trump campaign.

Purportedly hacked documents have been floating around various media outlets ever since, and while the existence of these documents has been reported, almost all outlets have refused to publish the details due to the potentially illicit way they were obtained.

It looks like a family holiday card except that the woman and children posing with Republican Derrick Anderson are not his wife or his offspring. 

Anderson, who running in a close race for Virginia’s seventh congressional district, was seen in another image seated around the dining table with the same woman and three girls.

The images came to light in an article by The New York Times, headlined “G.O.P. Candidates, Looking to Soften Their Image, Turn to Their Wives,” which reported how “male Republicans struggling to appeal to female voters concerned about their records on reproductive rights are unleashing their spouses to make the pitch on their behalf.”

However Anderson, who is childless, engaged to be married and lives alone with his dog, sought to borrow the wife and children from a longtime friend in an apparent effort to appear as a family man.

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has vowed to continue defending what he considers Texans' right to carry firearms on land owned or leased by governmental entities.

The Texas Supreme Court ruled Thursday night that it would not block a firearms ban at the State Fair of Texas. Paxton's office had sued claiming the city and the fair are violating state law by prohibiting most people from bringing firearms onto public property. 

A Dallas County judge declined to issue an injunction preventing the ban's enforcement. Neither the Fifteenth Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court intervened.

A Massachusetts woman pleaded guilty on Friday to running a high-end brothel network in the greater Boston area and the suburbs of Washington that served wealthy and well-connected clientele including politicians, corporate executives, lawyers and military officers.

Han Lee appeared in Boston federal court to plead guilty to charges that she conspired to persuade, induce and entice primarily Asian women to travel to Massachusetts and Virginia to engage in prostitution and committed money laundering.

She was the first to admit wrongdoing of the three individuals who prosecutors charged in November in connection with a sex ring run out of apartment complexes in Cambridge and Watertown, Massachusetts and Fairfax and Tysons, Virginia.

Lee, 42, faces up to 25 years in prison when she is sentenced Dec. 20. She stressed when addressing U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick that while she ran an illegal prostitution business, she did not force any women to engage in sex work.

The final three anti-abortion activists convicted of a 2021 Tennessee clinic blockade were sentenced this week, including the person considered to be the main organizer of the action.

Chester Gallagher was sentenced on Thursday to 16 months in prison, by far the longest sentence among 11 people convicted of various offenses. In addition to organizing the March 5, 2021, blockade of a Carafem clinic in Mount Juliet, Tennesse, a town 17 miles (27.36 kilometers) east of Nashville, prosecutors said Gallgher “exploited his specialized knowledge gleaned from his law enforcement experience to prolong the blockade as long as possible.”

Gallagher and a co-defendant stalled police with phony negotiations, prosecutors said. Their actions disrupted not only the Carafem clinic, but other medical offices that shared the same building.

A few dozen New Yorkers boarded a bus in Harlem on Friday with civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton and members of the group formerly known as the Central Park Five, bound for Philadelphia, where they toured the city hoping to energize the youth vote ahead of the 2024 election.

With less than 40 days until Election Day, the choice of a battleground state for a get-out-the-vote bus tour made sense: whichever presidential candidate wins Pennsylvania is likely to do so by a slim margin and with a lion’s share of the Black vote. But it was a strategic choice to recruit speakers who many first knew as Black and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted in a case that former President Donald Trump supported so vociferously, Sharpton said.

“There are polls saying that some Black men are moving toward Trump,” he told The Associated Press on Friday. “I don’t know if that’s true or not. But Black men need to hear some Black men saying, ‘Let me tell you about the Trump I know.’”

A Massachusetts woman accused of operating a high-end brothel network with wealthy and prominent clients in that state and the Washington, D.C., suburbs pleaded guilty in federal court Friday.

Han Lee and two others were indicted earlier this year on one count of conspiracy to persuade, entice, and coerce one or more individuals to travel in interstate or foreign commerce to engage in prostitution and one count of money laundering, according to prosecutors.

Israel killed Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in a powerful airstrike in Beirut, dealing a huge blow to the Iran-backed group as it reels from an escalating campaign of Israeli attacks.

The Israeli military said on Saturday it had eliminated Nasrallah in the strike on the group's central command headquarters in Beirut's southern suburbs a day earlier. Hezbollah confirmed he had been killed, without saying how.

His death is not only a major blow to Hezbollah, but also to Iran, removing an influential ally who helped build Hezbollah into the linchpin of Tehran's constellation of allied groups in the Arab world.

WASHINGTON COURT HOUSE, Ohio (AP) — Stubborn drought in Ohio and the shifting weather patterns influenced by climate change appear to be affecting North America’s largest native fruit: the pawpaw.

Avocado-sized with a taste sometimes described as a cross between a mango and banana, the pawpaw is beloved by many but rarely seen in grocery stores in the U.S. due to its short shelf life. The fruit grows in various places in the eastern half of North America, from Ontario to Florida. But in parts of Ohio, which hosts an annual festival dedicated to the fruit, and Kentucky, some growers this year are reporting earlier-than-normal harvests and bitter-tasting fruit, a possible effect of the extreme weather from the spring freezes to drought that has hit the region.

Take Valerie Libbey’s orchard in Washington Court House, about an hour’s drive from Columbus. Libbey grows 100 pawpaw trees and said she was surprised to see the fruit dropping from trees in the first week of August instead of mid-September.

“I had walked into the orchard to do my regular irrigation and the smell of the fruit just hit me,” said Libbey, who added that this year’s harvest period was much shorter than in previous years and the fruits themselves were smaller and more bitter.

‘I believed things he told me that I now understand to be … lies,’ Dave Hancock says in new Rittenhouse documentary

A former spokesperson for Kyle Rittenhouse says he became disillusioned with his ex-client after learning that he had sent text messages pledging to “fucking murder” shoplifters outside a Chicago pharmacy before later shooting two people to death during racial justice protests in Wisconsin in 2020.

Dave Hancock made that remark about Rittenhouse – for whom he also worked as a security guard – on a Law & Crime documentary that premiered on Friday. The show explored the unsuccessful criminal prosecution of Rittenhouse, who killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

As Hancock told it on The Trials of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 90-minute film’s main subject had “a history of things he was doing prior to [the double slaying], specifically patrolling the street for months with guns and borrowing people’s security uniforms, doing whatever he could to try to get into some kind of a fight”.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — U.S. Peace Corps volunteers returned to El Salvador Friday for the first time since the American force left in 2016 because of violence in the Central American country.

It was the latest sign of a thaw in U.S. relations with El Salvador, whose President Nayib Bukele was once shunned because of his harsh crackdown on street gangs.

It was also a sign of how much Bukele’s widespread arrests of suspected gang members - which also jailed a considerable number of apparently innocent young men - has reduced the country’s once-fearsome homicide rate.

The Peace Corps said the first nine volunteers would work on community economic development, education, and youth initiatives. All nine had previously worked two-year stints in other Central American countries.

“Today is not just a celebration, it’s a commitment to continue building on the decades-long partnership with the people of El Salvador,” said Peace Corps Director Carol Spahn.

More than 2,300 Peace Corps Volunteers had worked in El Salvador since 1962. The Peace Corps volunteers left after El Salvador’s gang-fueled homicide rate reached a high of 106 murders per 100,000 inhabitants on 2015. That year there were 6,658 killings in the country of 6.3 million.

Under a state of emergency originally declared in 2022 and still in effect, Bukele’s government has rounded up about 81,900 suspected gang members in sweeps that rights groups say are often arbitrary, based on a person’s appearance or where they live. The government has had to release about 7,000 people because of a lack of evidence.

New indictment leaves Anthony Odiong facing seven sexual assault charges – all in connection with three women

A grand jury in Texas has handed up more felony sexual assault charges against a Roman Catholic priest accused of preying on women whom he met while ministering to them in that state as well as in south-east Louisiana, officials said.

Anthony Odiong is now facing a total of five charges of sexual assault in the first degree and two more such counts in the second degree – all in connection with three separate women – after a new indictment was handed up against him on Thursday in the McLennan county, Texas, state courthouse.

There’s no romance in being a child bride. And whether the “groom” is R. Kelly, with his marriage to 15-year-old Aaliyah, your great-grandmother, or Justine (name changed for protection)—a minor married to a man twice her age in the state of Maryland—more often than not, these marriages are a form of child abuse ... government-sanctioned child abuse, in some states.

Child marriage remains legal in well over half of all U.S. states, with over 300,000 minors married between 2000 and 2018. Every year, hundreds of children of every gender, ethnicity and religious background are married, with no regard for their consent. “Groom” might be the technical term in these marriages, but “grooming” is more accurate.

In August, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen announced a plan to remove noncitizens from the voting rolls, citing 3,251 individuals who had registered to vote who were not American citizens.

The Justice Department is asking a federal court to reinstate eligible voters and require Alabama to inform anyone impacted that their ability to vote has been restored.

As the conflict in Sudan rages on, UN Women is drawing attention to the devastating impact of the fighting on women and girls. Among the consequences are an increased risk of sexual violence, and reduced access to health services including for childbirth, for more than 160,000 pregnant women.