Top Eight

Top eight stories for today including another billion-dollar California public works project is causing more problems than solutions; President Joe Biden told European leaders America is ready to work with Europe and other liberal democracies to fight against what he calls the autocratic threat of China and Russia; A federal judge blocked South Carolina’s ban on nearly all abortions, and more.

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National

1.) By invoking the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, the federal complaint against former President Donald Trump and his associates over the Capitol insurrection implicates far more reaching consequences than civil damages.

A cartoon threatening that the Ku Klux Klan will lynch scalawags (left) and carpetbaggers (right) on March 4, 1869, the day Horatio Seymour, a Democrat, will supposedly become President. Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Independent Monitor, Sept. 1, 1868. The cartoonist had actual local politicians in mind. A full-scale scholarly history analyzes the cartoonː Guy W. Hubbs, Searching for Freedom after the Civil War: Klansman, Carpetbagger, Scalawag, and Freedman ̈(2015) excerpt.]]

2.) No one has been appointed to a board that is supposed to facilitate the federal government’s release of records about civil rights-era cold cases. The students who helped write the law establishing the board hope a new administration will change that.

Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden pays his respect at the memorial to the four girls killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., after speaking at the Sunday service on Sept. 15. 2019. (Courthouse News photo/Daniel Jackson)

3.) Adding a second defeat this week to the pile of recent courtroom losses for Devin Nunes, a New York judge on Friday threw out the Republican congressman’s 2019 defamation suit against CNN.

Skies smoky from a nearby wildfire, campaign signs for Republican Congressman Devin Nunes sit on all four corners of an intersection off California Highway 99 in Tulare. (Courthouse News photo/Barbara Leonard)

Regional

4.) In the land of botched bullet trains, scrapped underwater tunnels and failed court docketing systems, another billion-dollar California public works project is causing more problems than solutions.

5.) Still sparring with lawmakers and unions over school reopening plans, California Governor Gavin Newsom said Friday the state will nonetheless start reserving 10% of future Covid-19 vaccines for teachers and child care workers.

Art teacher Cara Bailey attends a Utah Safe Schools Mask-In urging the governor's leadership in school reopening during a rally Thursday, July 23, 2020, in Salt Lake City. Parents and teachers rallied at the Utah State Capitol Thursday morning to urge schools to enforce mask wearing and to implement other safety policies recommended by health officials as the state prepares to reopen classrooms this fall. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

6.) A day after South Carolina banned nearly all abortions, a federal judge on Friday suspended the new law for 14 days.

Rep. Justin Bamberg, D-Bamberg, speaks against an abortion bill at a news conference in the Statehouse on Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2021 in Columbia, S.C. Democrats walked out during the debate. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Collins)

International

7.) In his first speech to European allies, President Joe Biden on Friday tried to dispel the cloud of uncertainty that descended during the Trump administration over the NATO and transatlantic alliances.

President Joe Biden participates in a virtual event with the Munich Security Conference in the East Room of the White House, Friday, Feb. 19, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

8.) Judges in The Hague heard an appeal Friday over the Netherlands’ nationwide curfew after a lower court struck down the coronavirus restriction just days before.

The leader of the coronavirus-skeptical group Viruswaarheid, or Virustruth, Willem Engel, and the group’s legal advisor, Jeroen Pols, left, enter the court building for an appeal hearing into the Dutch government’s curfew in The Hague, Netherlands, Friday, Feb. 19, 2021. The government is appealing a ban on the curfew imposed earlier this week by a judge in The Hague. (AP Photo/Mike Corder)

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