Scoop: Beto plans Texas comeback in governor's race  —  Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke is preparing to run for governor of Texas in 2022, with an announcement expected later this year, Texas political operatives tell Axios.  —  Why it matters: O'Rourke's entry would give Democrats a high-profile candidate …

Trump Looks for Challenger to Depose Mitch McConnell as Split Widens  —  GOP's most influential figure and its top elected official are divided on policy, politics and who should lead the party in the future  —  WASHINGTON— Mitch McConnell's record-long reign as Senate Republican leader …

Fox News Poll: Majorities favor mask and vaccine mandates as pandemic worries increase  —  Three-quarters of registered voters are ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ concerned about the pandemic  —  Fox News Flash top headlines for September 19  —  Majorities support mask and vaccine mandates advocated …

Taliban-run Kabul municipality to female workers: Stay home  —  KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Female employees in the Kabul city government have been told to stay home, with work only allowed for those who cannot be replaced by men, the interim mayor of Afghanistan's capital said Sunday …

Republicans caught in California's recall trap  —  Even after California Gov. Gavin Newsom's blowout victory in the Tuesday's recall vote, Democrats are re-considering the Golden State's 110-year history with the direct democracy device.  Democrats have good reason for their concern …

What if Covid Were 10 Times Deadlier?  —  “I think I've come to believe that even if the Covid death toll was 10 times what it currently is,” the MSNBC host Chris Hayes wrote a few days ago on Twitter, “the politics of all of it wouldn't be appreciably different.”

The Look of Gentrification  —  If you think of gentrification as coffee shops and bike lanes then you don't understand gentrification at all.  It's about what's inside, not outside.  —  My grandparents' house was located in a nice neighborhood in Berkeley, California filled with bungalows, Victorians and a few dingbat apartments.

How Accounting Giants Craft Favorable Tax Rules From Inside Government  —  Lawyers from top accounting firms do brief stints in the Treasury Department, with the expectation of big raises when they return.  —  For six years, Audrey Ellis and Adam Feuerstein worked together at PwC …

The Trump Prophets Regroup  —  When you are in the business of prophecy, what do you do when prophecy fails?  —  This spring, the media mogul Stephen E. Strang made an unusual apology to readers in the pages of his glossy magazine.  —  Mr. Strang presides over a multimillion-dollar …

Did Donald Trump Make the Church Great Again?  —  How unchurched Evangelicals are helping create a God-and-country lifestyle brand.  —  From the very beginning of the white Evangelical embrace of Donald Trump, there have been a series of raging debates about how that embrace would affect the church.

Georgia Is How American Democracy Falls Apart  —  Through a bevy of bills and rule changes, Georgia Republicans are trying to codify the essential goal of the Jan. 6 riots: a rigged system in which Democrats can't win elections.  —  ATLANTA ― David Dreyer just needed a nap.

Kellyanne Conway told Trump that he didn't have ‘swagger’ in 2020 and said his campaign resembled Hillary Clinton's 2016 bid: book  — Kellyanne Conway was brutally honest with Trump about his 2020 campaign missteps, per a new book.  — “What you didn't have this time was the hunger and the swagger,” she said of Trump's 2020 run.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves attacks vaccine mandates, downplays state's high death toll  —  WASHINGTON — Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves downplayed the severity of the coronavirus pandemic in his state on Sunday, while challenging the legitimacy of vaccine mandates rolled out by the Biden administration.

Covid-stricken Alabama had more deaths than births last year, a first in its recorded history.  —  For the first time in Alabama's known history, the state had more deaths than births in 2020 — a grim milestone that underscores the pandemic's calamitous toll.

Border Patrol hiring civilians as “processing coordinators” while Biden border crisis escalates  —  The Border Patrol is hiring and training up to 1200 civilians to assist them with processing the surge of illegal migrants flooding the southern border.  The first class of “processing coordinators” …

Trump's ‘Waning Influence’ Shown in ‘Very Small Crowd Size’ at ‘Justice for J6’ Rally: Ted Lieu  —  As a sparse crowd gathered in Washington D.C., to support the January 6 Capitol rioters on Saturday, Representative Ted Lieu said the “Justice for J6” rally's poor attendance shows …

The ‘JusticeForJ6’ Rally Wasn't a Joke — It Was A Warning  —  Support for the Capitol insurrectionists has taken root firmly inside the GOP  —  After the nation's capital spent weeks girding for a repeat of the insurrection, the small crowd who came to the national mall in the shadow …

Boxer-senator Manny Pacquiao to run for Philippine president  —  MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Philippine boxing icon and senator Manny Pacquiao says he will run for president in the 2022 elections.  —  Pacquiao accepted the nomination of his PDP-Laban party at its national convention on Sunday …

Why A Transformation Of Caregiving Could Be Biden's B.F.D.  —  It would cost a lot of money.  But there's a reason for that.  —  Democrats in Congress are feverishly putting together what could be the most ambitious piece of domestic legislation in several decades.

Sunday morning talking heads  —  It's booster week in the USA and no one's sure what's going on thanks to Joe Biden and his scientific brain trust having made a hash of the policy.  The Sunday shows will try to make sense of it with America's top two public-health bureaucrats, Anthony Fauci and his boss at NIH, Francis Collins.

Former Joint Chiefs chair: Nothing unusual about Milley's contacts with China  —  Michael Mullen, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Sunday said there was nothing abnormal about the reported conversations between Gen. Mark Milley and his counterparts in China.