deconstruct

Grammy- and Oscar-nominated indie musician Sufjan Stevens is relearning how to walk after the autoimmune disease Guillain-Barre Syndrome left him immobile, representatives confirmed to The Associated Press.

On Wednesday, Steven shared the news on his Tumblr page. In the post, he explained that he has been hospitalized, which is why he has been unable to participate in the promotion for his forthcoming album, “Javelin,” his first since 2020’s “The Ascension.” “Javelin” will be released on Oct. 6.

“Last month I woke up one morning and couldn’t walk. My hands, arms and legs were numb and tingling and I had no strength, no feeling, no mobility. My brother drove me to the ER and after a series of tests — MRIs, EMGs, cat scans, X-rays, spinal taps (!), echo-cardiograms, etc.,” he wrote. Neurologists finally diagnosed with him Guillain-Barre Syndrome.

“Luckily there’s treatment for this — they administer immuno-hemoglobin infusions for five days and pray that the disease doesn’t spread to the lungs, heart and brain. Very scary, but it worked,” he continued, adding that he spent about two weeks “stuck in a bed, while my doctors did all the things to keep me alive and stabilize my condition. I owe them my life.”

On Sept. 8, Stevens says he was transferred to an acute rehab to undergo intensive physical and occupational therapy, and to learn how to walk again.

Washington is reaching a consensus: the government will shut down in 10 days — and Republicans will bear the brunt of voter disgust over it.

With House GOP leadership on Wednesday again showing little progress in moving a stopgap funding bill to prevent a shutdown, officials have begun a two-pronged effort to prepare for a shutdown that seems less avoidable every day.

There is the official side of government, where the Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget has been working with agencies to make contingency plans for when funding runs out. And there is the political arena, where party operatives are focused on a different goal: inflicting maximum pain on their Republican adversaries and seeking to pin them with blame for an interruption in federal services and paychecks for government workers.

While both sides will inevitably throw blame at the other, Republicans are feeling a keen sense of apprehension that their party will suffer badly should a shutdown transpire.

“We always get the blame,” said Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a senior appropriator. “Name one time that we’ve shut the government down and we haven’t got the blame.”

A Malaysian man who sold a dozen black rhino and white rhino horns to a confidential source was sentenced to a year and a half in a U.S. prison Tuesday, federal prosecutors in New York said. Teo Boon Ching, known as the "Godfather," had pleaded guilty to a count of conspiracy to commit wildlife trafficking, the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan said in a statement.

"As long as you have cash, I can give you the goods in 1-2 days," Ching, 58, told the confidential source during a meeting in Malaysia in 2019, according to prosecutors.

The Malaysia meetings lasted for two days, and during that time, Ching described himself as a "middleman" who buys rhino horns poached by co-conspirators in Africa and ships them to customers around the world, according to prosecutors. Ching also sent the source photos of rhino horns that were for sale.

Later that year, authorities directed the source to buy 12 rhino horns from Ching, which were delivered to the source in a suitcase. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lab confirmed two of the horns were from a black rhino, which the World Wildlife Fund considers to be critically endangered, and the other 10 horns were from white rhinos, which are not considered to be endangered but are instead "near threatened," according to the group.

Ching was arrested in Thailand in 2022 and eventually extradited to the U.S. According to prosecutors, he conspired to traffic approximately 480 pounds of poached rhino horns worth about $2.1 million.

Mango Dragonfruit Starbucks Refreshers are missing mango, Strawberry Açaí Starbucks Refreshers lack açaí and Pineapple Passionfruit Starbucks Refreshers have no passion fruit.

That's what two consumers who have sued Starbucks for consumer protection law violations say about the coffee giant's fruit-based drinks. This week, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled their case could move forward.

U.S. District Judge John Cronan said in his opinion that "a significant portion of reasonable consumers could plausibly be misled into thinking" that Starbucks Refreshers include the fruit in their names.

It's the latest example of a recent legal trend that's seen fed-up consumers taking major food and beverage companies to court over what they say is fishy advertising.

Plaintiffs typically argue that companies are going beyond simple marketing hyperbole and misrepresenting their food and drinks — whether it's promising ingredients that aren't there or displaying promotion images that don't match the real-life items.

There has been a smorgasbord of accusations in recent years: Barilla pasta isn't made in Italy. Burger King's Whoppers are smaller than they appear. The "boneless wings" served at Buffalo Wild Wings aren't actually chicken wings. Subway's "100% tuna" sandwiches either partially or completely lack tuna. Taco Bell skimps on the fillings in its Mexican Pizza, Crunchwrap Supreme and more.

"In general, companies can say great things about their product and make any kind of opinion claims they want to make about it. They can even say it's the best in the world," said Louis Tompros, an intellectual property attorney at the law firm WilmerHale in Boston.

"Opinion claims about a product are called puffery, and they're perfectly fine under false advertising law. What false advertising law does not allow is a false factual claim," he said.

Police in a quiet community outside Chicago who are investigating the shooting deaths of a family of four, including two children, in their home Sunday night say it wasn’t a random incident.

The two adults, their two children and their three dogs were found with gunshot wounds in their home in Romeoville, Illinois, about 30 miles southwest of Chicago, officials said.

Police do not consider the deaths a murder-suicide and are investigating the incident as a murder, Deputy Chief Chris Burne of the Romeoville Police Department, said during a news conference Monday.

Ramaswamy, who has called himself an environmentalist while also being a staunch proponent of fracking and using fossil fuels in addition to carbon-free energy like nuclear, explained his position on climate change and policies to address rising global temperatures, telling Davis in the interview on Monday night that he believes the "climate change agenda" is a "hoax ... more about pushing global equity" and deferring to China.

"I think that with due respect ... 'Do you believe in climate change?' is not really a meaningful question because climate change has existed as long as the Earth has existed," he said. "Do I believe it is a fact that global surface temperatures are rising over the course of the last century of the last half century? Yes, I think that that is an established fact."

But, as president, he would not take action to address the warming of the planet, he said.

Ramaswamy was pressed by Davis in light of past mass shootings by "self-identified white supremacists," such as the gunman who attacked a predominantly Black church in South Carolina in 2015.

He has been vocal about what he contends is a counteractive focus on race, including through affirmative action and race-conscious policies that seek to address longstanding disparities in areas like university admissions.

Ramaswamy said in Iowa in August that Juneteenth, which marks the emancipation of slaves in the U.S., is a "useless holiday" federalized "under political duress." Weeks earlier, he posted a video saying "Happy Juneteenth" and "we ought to celebrate how far we've come as a country."

A missing kayaker from Louisiana has been arrested for faking his own death by drowning in an apparent bid to dodge rape charges, according to the St. Charles Parish Sheriff's Office.

Melvin Phillip Emde, 41, was arrested by authorities in Georgia over a month after his son, Seth, allegedly reported him missing.

Emde's son allegedly told police his father fell out of a kayak and drowned while on the Mississippi River in Hahnville, Louisiana, according to the St. Charles Parish Sheriff's Office.

After he was reported missing, detectives learned that Emde had pending charges of indecent liberties with a child and statutory rape of a child by an adult in North Carolina. He was due in court just one day after being reported missing, authorities said.

A Texas prisoner accused of killing 22 older women over two years, preying on them so he could steal jewelry and other valuables, was slain Tuesday by his cellmate while serving a life sentence, prison officials said.

Billy Chemirmir, 50, who was convicted last year in the slayings of two women, was found dead in his cell at a prison in rural East Texas, Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesperson Hannah Haney said. He was killed by his cellmate who was also serving a prison sentence for murder, according to Haney.

Chemirmir’s death comes about two weeks after Texas’ 100 prisons were placed on a rare statewide lockdown because of a rise in the number of killings inside the facilities, which prisons officials have said were related to drugs.

Haney did not release the name of the cellmate, how Chemirmir was killed or what may have led to the slaying.

Democrat Lindsay Powell, a nonprofit worker and former staffer for the city of Pittsburgh, won a special election Tuesday and gave her party control of the state House of Representatives, The Associated Press projected.

Powell triumphed in a Democratic-leaning district in Allegheny County vacated by former state Rep. Sara Innamorato. Innamorato left office to run for Allegheny County executive and will be the Democratic nominee for that office in the November general election.

Powell’s victory was expected due to the blue hue of the open district, but it's still important because it tips the balance of power in the statehouse’s lower chamber back to Democrats, who will hold 102 seats after she is seated, compared to Republicans’ 101 seats.

Democrats won the state House majority in 2022 for the first time since 2010, running on maps that were drawn by a state court. But they soon lost full control over the chamber due to vacancies in three seats. In February, after three special elections in Allegheny County, Democrats took back the majority.

House GOP hardliners blocked debate on their party’s defense spending bill on Tuesday, making Pentagon funding the latest casualty of a civil war between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his conservative critics.

Republican rebels blocked the annual defense appropriations bill in a procedural vote, delivering a stunning loss to McCarthy and hawks who’d sought to break an impasse over federal spending that forced leaders to yank the legislation last week.

House GOP lawmakers are still at odds over an upcoming spending confrontation with the Senate just 12 days out from a government shutdown. Many conservatives withheld their votes on the Pentagon bill to force Republican leaders to take a harder line on a stopgap to keep the lights on.

Ultimately the procedural vote on the $826 billion defense spending bill, known as a rule, failed in a 212-214 vote on Tuesday. Five Republicans defected on the procedural vote, which almost always falls along party lines.

For years, ERIC, or the Electronic Registration Information Center, worked in relative obscurity. Member states, which at ERIC’s peak last year reached 34, including key presidential battlegrounds, shared information about their voter rolls in a central exchange. The program revealed voters who were registered in two states, unregistered citizens who were nonetheless eligible to vote, and, occasionally, evidence of illegal double voting.

The system appealed to both Republicans and Democrats, offering data to help keep voter rolls up-to-date and also ease the process of registering eligible voters. Then, the far-right attacks came.

In January last year, Gateway Pundit, a site that’s pushed anti-vaccine and election lies in the past, falsely accused ERIC of being a George Soros-funded effort to help Democrats.

Within days, Louisiana’s secretary of state announced he would withdraw his state from ERIC, citing “media reports about potential questionable funding sources” among other reasons, and becoming the first ex-member in ERIC’s decade-long history. Then, this January, Alabama followed suit. In March, Donald Trump called ERIC a “terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up.” That same day, Missouri, Florida and West Virginia announced their departures. By July, Texas joined what had become an exodus, following Ohio, Iowa and Virginia in announcing its departure. (Texas’ resignation goes into effect next month.)

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, the former ERIC members are now struggling to replace the organization.

On Thursday, Ohio announced individual data-sharing agreements with Florida, Virginia and West Virginia, and West Virginia announced similar deals Friday with the same states. But several of those agreements, reviewed by HuffPost, fell well short of ERIC’s capabilities.

Some secretaries have acknowledged the difficulty of trying to replace a multi-state organization on their own.

“There are still some limitations because we’re not getting other states’ data,” Jay Ashcroft (R), Missouri’s secretary of state who pulled his state from ERIC in March, told HuffPost in an interview, referring to the fact that non-ERIC-members can’t automatically check their voter rolls against ERIC’s remaining 25 member states.

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said on Friday that he will seek the help of government experts on extremism in the wake of a series of school arsons. Officials believe the attacks are connected to a controversial sexual education school program.

De Croo spoke just hours after a sixth school in the French-speaking Wallonia region was torched this week. Signs protesting the so-called Evras program were discovered in some of the schools, according to authorities.

The program is a required four hours of training for students aged 11 to 12 and 15 to 16, intended to help them develop their relational and sexual lives. The program had been around and available for all age groups for years, but was not compulsory until now.

De Croo said he has asked the body in charge of processing intelligence on “terror, extremism and radicalization” to analyze the situation, and Verlinden said she’s asked the federal police to provide support to local forces in the affected region.

No one has claimed responsibility for the fires set to the six schools, and no suspect have been arrested. This year, around 100,000 students in the Wallonia-Brussels federation are required to attend the two sessions for a total of four hours of training.

Protests, with a few hundred people taking part, have also been organized in Brussels.

Several Islamic groups have also condemned the program in a joint statement, fearing it will favor “hypersexualization” of children.

Rumors about the nature of Evras have also been spreading on the internet.

De Croo said that sexual education has been provided in Belgium for half a century and warned that the country will not take steps backwards.

“It’s not new, it’s the basis of sexual health, but also the basis for our children to be are aware of their rights and (physical) integrity,” he added.