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Two votes in the Wisconsin state Capitol Thursday demonstrate Republicans' controversial efforts to shape election rules in the battleground state going into the 2024 election cycle.

The first vote saw GOP lawmakers move ahead with a complicated procedural attempt to oust the state's highest election official. The second seeks a complete overhaul of how Wisconsin's gerrymandered legislative maps are crafted in the future, and is seen as an effort to preempt action by the new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court.

Both moves have long-term implications for democracy in a coveted swing state where presidential races are often decided by less than a percentage point.

The new court will hear decisions about the 2024 election. In 2020, the Wisconsin Supreme Court heard challenges by former President Donald Trump and his allies to Joe Biden's narrow victory in the state — and came within one justice's vote of throwing out the outcome.

And the removal of the top elections official could mean chaos for the state's voting administration just months before the 2024 presidential primary.

Cannabis reform is moving one step closer to reality at the federal level, with a committee hearing on a bipartisan bill to expand banking services for legal marijuana businesses expected to take place at the end of the month, according to multiple people directly involved in the process.

The Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee is expected to hold a markup on the bill, known as the SAFE Banking Act, the week of Sept. 25, three sources familiar with the talks told NBC News. The markup process allows senators to debate and consider amendments for the legislation and is viewed as a key step in advancing the bill to the Senate floor.

Both Republicans and Democrats on the committee support the bill and expressed confidence that the bill would have enough support to pass the Senate when it comes up for a full vote, a step Majority Leader Chuck Schumer vowed to take as soon as this fall.

The SAFE Banking Act would make it lawful for legal marijuana businesses to access major financial and banking institutions. Under current law, banks and creditors could face federal prosecution if they provide services to legal businesses selling the drug, leaving business owners unable to utilize banks as the drug remains against the law on the federal level.

Link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mexican-drug-cartels-american-weapons-smuggled-across-border/

Mexican drug cartels have been smuggling a vast arsenal of even military-grade weapons out of the U.S. with the help of American citizens, a CBS Reports investigation has found.

Exclusively-obtained U.S. intelligence documents and interviews with half a dozen current and former officials reveal that the American government has known this for years but, sources said, it's done little to stop these weapons trafficking networks inside the United States, which move up to a million firearms across the border annually, including belt-fed miniguns and grenade launchers.

Dozens of cartel gunrunning networks, operating like terrorist cells, pay Americans to buy weapons from gun stores and online dealers all across the country, as far north as Wisconsin and even Alaska, according to U.S. intelligence sources. The firearms are then shipped across the southwest border through a chain of brokers and couriers.

When CBS News pressed the Justice Department about its findings, a senior official confirmed that "We absolutely recognize the problem here that … the lion's share of firearms trafficked to Mexican cartels are coming from the United States."

Yemen’s Houthi rebels will head to Saudi Arabia amid efforts to negotiate a permanent ceasefire to end the long-running war in Yemen, according to the Saudi state news agency, a Houthi official and reports quoting diplomatic and government sources.

The visit, expected on Thursday night, raises hopes of a breakthrough in the quagmire conflict that has left hundreds of thousands dead through direct and indirect causes such as famine.

Ali al-Qhoom, a member of the Houthi political council, had earlier said the rebels’ delegation would fly to Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, on an Omani plane. A delegation from Oman, which has played the role of mediator, arrived in Yemen’s Houthi-held capital, Sanaa, on Thursday, according to Yemeni government officials.

“Optimism exists regarding the mediation and the Omani efforts to achieve peace in Yemen,” he posted on social media.

Al-Qhoom said talks will be focused on a full reopening of Houthi-controlled ports and Sanaa airport, payment of wages for public servants from oil revenues, rebuilding efforts, and a timeline for foreign forces to quit Yemen, among others. Sources speaking to the Reuters news agency on condition of anonymity also said the same. The topics are long-standing Houthi demands.

Polling conducted in August by All In Together, in partnership with polling firm Echelon Insights found that 34 percent of women aged 18-39 said they or someone they know personally has “decided not to get pregnant due to concerns about managing pregnancy-related medical emergencies.” Put another way, poor or unavailable maternal health care post-Dobbs is leading people to alter some of their most important life choices.

For young people, the maternal healthcare crisis is deeply personal. More than a third of young people and 22 percent of young women say they have personally dealt with or know someone who has “faced constraints when trying to manage a pregnancy-related emergency.” And 23 percent of 18- to 39-year-old women say they have themselves or know someone else who has been unable to obtain an abortion in their state — a number almost three times higher than respondents in other age groups.

Perhaps most surprisingly however, these results are similar regardless of whether the respondents are living in states with abortion bans or states without restrictions on abortion access. The consistency between red and blue states suggests that the statistics on maternal mortality and the stories and struggles of women navigating the new normal on abortion access have penetrated the psyche of young people everywhere. The Dobbs decision, it seems, has fundamentally altered how people feel about having families and the calculus for getting pregnant.

In the wake of Dobbs, stories of women enduring horrific medical trauma in states where abortion is illegal have been widely reported. For instance, Carmen Broesder, an Idaho mom, documented her 19-day long harrowing miscarriage on TikTok – including her three trips to the emergency room. While only six weeks pregnant, she was denied access to a D&C (dilation and curettage) surgery because of Idaho’s abortion ban.

It goes almost without saying that this is not good news for the already declining birthrates in the U.S. According to research from Pew, birthrates in the U.S. had been falling since the early 2000s and plummeted during the Covid pandemic. Fertility rates briefly rebounded after the pandemic but now, post-Dobbs, they have dropped again.

Former President Donald Trump will be restricted on how and when he can look at, and talk about, classified information, a judge decided Wednesday after a sealed hearing the day before.

The decision appears to largely be in line with restrictions special counsel Jack Smith sought to protect classified information that may be evidence in the case against Trump, which accuses him of criminally mishandling sensitive national security secrets at his Florida club and residence after he left office.

The development is one of the first times the court has set terms around classified information in a case where Trump’s team has tried to downplay the seriousness of how records were handled. Trump’s legal team had wanted more leeway on the locations where they could discuss classified records with him, including at the Mar-a-Lago club and his Bedminster, New Jersey, residence.

Judge Aileen Cannon warned in her order of the consequences should any classified or otherwise sensitive information be improperly revealed to the public, pointing out such disclosures may violate the law.

She added that even if classified information “enters the public domain,” both Trump and his team will still be “precluded from making private or public statements” regarding the classified status of information or suggesting that their own access to information confirms or contradicts what’s in the public domain.

Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy on Wednesday laid out his ideas to shut down the FBI and fire more than 1 million federal workers, lining up with increasingly sweeping conservative proposals targeting the federal government and particularly law enforcement.

Candidates trying to beat former President Donald Trump have responded to growing anger among GOP primary voters about the indictments against Trump as well as federal investigations and policies seen as unfairly targeting conservatives.

Ramaswamy’s proposals are among the broadest in the field. Speaking at the America First Policy Institute in Washington, he said he would try to reduce the federal employee headcount by half in his first year in office and by 75% during his first term if he makes it to the White House.

He wants to shut down five federal agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Education. He said he would also eliminate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Food and Nutrition Service.

Ramaswamy is not the only Republican candidate to suggest slashing the federal workforce. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has said he would eliminate the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Education.

And there’s a larger effort to dismantle the federal government that is being fueled by conservative organizations along with former Trump administration officials. They have been working on drafting a plan for when Trump returns to the White House to oust federal employees and replace them with like-minded officials.

In the years following the 2013 debut of Adult Swim’s cartoon phenomenon “Rick and Morty,” its star and co-creator Justin Roiland became a titan of the animation and video game industry and a rock star of youth counterculture. His artistic style and caricatures became ubiquitous in cannabis culture, and his career expanded into producing other animated series, creating NFTs and leading a virtual reality gaming studio. In 2017, a “Rick and Morty” collaboration with McDonald’s led to such a viral frenzy that police had to be called to at least two locations.

But as he partied with Los Angeles’ superstars and traveled the country for conventions, he also found he could use his fame to strike up conversations and develop relationships with young fans, including some who were underage. This is according to interviews with 11 women and nonbinary people who shared thousands of messages with Roiland from 2013 to 2022 — with nine of the people saying he turned the exchanges sexual. Of those nine people, three said they were 16 when they started talking to Roiland. To corroborate their stories, the 11 women and nonbinary people also shared pictures, videos, social media posts, emails, and plane ticket and Uber receipts with NBC News.

Warning: Lengthy and graphic details

Coca cultivation reached an all-time high in Colombia last year, the U.N. said, as the administration of President Gustavo Petro struggles to reduce poverty in remote areas and contain armed groups that are profiting from the cocaine trade.

The new findings on coca growing were published over the weekend by the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime, which said 230,000 hectares (nearly 570,000 acres) of farmland in Colombia were planted with coca in 2022, a 13% increase from the previous year.

The South American nation is the world's largest exporter of cocaine, which is made from coca leaves. Colombia provides 90% of the cocaine sold in the United States each year.

Colombia's government said Monday that the amount of land planted with coca is increasing at a slower pace than in previous years. It hopes new programs that provide greater economic incentives for farmers to adopt legal crops will help reduce cocaine production in coming years.

Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope may have discovered tentative evidence of a sign of life on a faraway planet.

It may have detected a molecule called dimethyl sulphide (DMS). On Earth, at least, this is only produced by life.

The researchers stress that the detection on the planet 120 light years away is "not robust" and more data is needed to confirm its presence.

Researchers have also detected methane and CO2 in the planet's atmosphere.

Detection of these gases could mean the planet, named K2-18b, has a water ocean.

Prof Nikku Madhusudhan, of the University of Cambridge, who led the research, told BBC News that his entire team were ''shocked'' when they saw the results.

"On Earth, DMS is only produced by life. The bulk of it in Earth's atmosphere is emitted from phytoplankton in marine environments," he said.

But Prof Madhusudhan described the detection of DMS as tentative and said that more data would be needed to confirm its presence. Those results are expected in a year.

''If confirmed, it would be a huge deal and I feel a responsibility to get this right if we are making such a big claim.''

It is the first time astronomers have detected the possibility of DMS in a planet orbiting a distant star.

A handful of hardliners were already watching for cracks in the 81-year-old McConnell’s command over Senate Republicans after he faced his first-ever leadership challenge following last year’s elections — Rick Scott (R-Fla.) ran against him and lost. McConnell’s apparent health problems could embolden insurgents to go after the minority leader again.

“There has been an effort on the part of some to replace him already,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), a vocal McConnell backer. “And I think he wisely recognized that any opportunity would present a window for them to try it again.”

McConnell confronted the moment in the way he knows best: by rallying his supporters to his side. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), one of McConnell’s top deputies, recalled the leader ringing him just minutes after the August freeze to say, dryly as ever, “I just had another one of those.”

The Biden administration has cleared the way for the release of five American citizens detained in Iran by issuing a blanket waiver for international banks to transfer $6 billion in frozen Iranian money from South Korea to Qatar without fear of U.S. sanctions. In addition, as part of the deal, the administration has agreed to release five Iranian citizens held in the United States.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed off on the sanctions waivers late last week, a month after U.S. and Iranian officials said an agreement in principle was in place. Congress was not informed of the waiver decision until Monday, according to the notification, which was obtained by The Associated Press.

The outlines of the deal had been previously announced and the waiver was expected. But the notification marked the first time the administration said it was releasing five Iranian prisoners as part of the deal. The prisoners have not been named.

The waiver drew criticism of President Joe Biden from Republicans and others who say the deal will boost the Iranian economy at a time when Iran poses a growing threat to U.S. troops and Mideast allies.

The waiver means that European, Middle Eastern and Asian banks will not run afoul of U.S. sanctions in converting the money frozen in South Korea and transferring it to Qatar’s central bank, where it will be held for Iran to use for the purchase of humanitarian goods.