A Washington State woman who has refused to receive treatment for tuberculosis for more than a year remains at large three months after a civil warrant was issued for her arrest, officials said this week.

The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department said on Monday that the woman, identified as V.N. in court documents, was still refusing treatment and that a judge on Friday extended the civil warrant he had issued in February authorizing law enforcement to detain her.

Sometime after that, the woman was seen leaving her home and taking a city bus to a local casino, according to a court filing in April. A lawyer for V.N. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

The Health Department said this was only the third time in the past 20 years that it had had to seek a court order to detain a patient refusing treatment for TB, the second-leading infectious killer worldwide after Covid-19. TB, a disease caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which spreads from infected people through the air, killed 1.6 million people in 2021, according to the World Health Organization.

A key political group supporting Ron DeSantis’s presidential run is preparing a $100 million voter-outreach push so big it plans to knock on the door of every possible DeSantis voter at least four times in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — and five times in the kickoff Iowa caucuses.

The effort is part of an on-the-ground organizing operation that intends to hire more than 2,600 field organizers by Labor Day, an extraordinary number of people for even the best-funded campaigns.

Top officials with the pro-DeSantis group, a super PAC called Never Back Down, provided their most detailed account yet of their battle plan to aid Mr. DeSantis, whom they believe they can sell as the only candidate to take on — and win — the cultural fights that are definitional for the Republican Party in 2024.

The group said it expected to have an overall budget of at least $200 million, including more than $80 million to be transferred from an old DeSantis state political account, for the daunting task of vaulting the Florida governor past former President Donald J. Trump, who has established himself as the dominant early front-runner.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday filed paperwork to run for president ahead of an unorthodox announcement planned this evening with Twitter CEO Elon Musk launching a long-expected campaign that many Republicans view as the most formidable 2024 primary challenge to Donald Trump.

DeSantis filed with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday, a spokeswoman confirmed, and plans to state his intentions on Twitter in a 6 p.m. virtual conversation with the social media platform’s billionaire executive, before joining Fox News for an interview. The launch underscores DeSantis’s embrace of conservative influencers as he looks to bypass the mainstream media he derides. It also aligns him with one of the world’s richest people — a polarizing figure who shares DeSantis’s disdain for the media and liberal critics and has quickly become one of the most prominent, provocative voices on the right.

The governor’s entrance comes after some upheaval in the Republican primary. Trump, the former president, has strengthened his position since the start of the year, even as he faces increasing legal peril. Other Republicans have entered the race, but all are mired in single-digits and have failed to make a dent in Trump’s commanding polling lead. And the Florida governor, once seen as a potentially dominant force in the party, is trying to regain his footing after falling well behind Trump, even as he has maintained a clear grip on second place.

DeSantis, 44, became a GOP star as a first-term governor who derided pandemic-driven shutdowns and vaccine mandates and cast himself as an enemy of what he calls “woke ideology” in the news media, major companies such as Disney and schools, where he has worked to restrict discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity.

The research team of Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates (FM3), EVITARUS and HIT Strategies recently conducted a survey of 1,380 likely California primary voters to assess their views of the race for U.S. Senate.1 The survey results show a wide-open race, with no candidate attracting the support of more than about one-quarter of voters. In addition, after voters are presented with positive biographical statements about the three leading Democratic candidates, based on materials on their websites, the three Democrats are in a statistical dead heat.

Initial Vote
Eric Early (R) 27%
Katie Porter (D) 24%
Adam Schiff (D) 21%
Barbara Lee (D) 11%

After Positive Bios
Eric Early (R) 26% (-1)
Katie Porter (D) 24% (0)
Adam Schiff (D) 20% (-1)
Barbara Lee (D) 20% (+9)

In particular, given that she starts out with a lower level of name recognition than her Democratic opponents, Congresswoman Barbara Lee shows a remarkable potential to expand her support once voters learn more about her – nearly doubling her backing from 11% to 20%. The survey data confirm that the race will be highly competitive, and that once voters learn more about all three candidates they are all competitive in a race for a spot among the top two candidates that will head to a November runoff.

1 Methodology: From May 13-21, 2023, the research team of FM3, EVITARUS and HIT Strategies conducted 1,380 interviews with California voters considered likely to cast ballots in the March 2024 primary election. Interviews were conducted on landline and wireless phones, and online through invitations delivered by email and text message. The margin of error for the sample as a whole is +/- 4.0%; the margin of error for subgroups within the sample will be higher.

https://mcusercontent.com/31b479dbea5973b27a9d19670/files/6e00dc0b-88a5-afa0-6c4c-aa46d4eafc72/220_6784_Lee_for_US_Senate_Poll_Findings_Draft_1.docx_1_.pdf

Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake lost in court yet again this week, and now Maricopa County wants to make her and her attorneys pay for it.

AZFamily.com reports that the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office has made a filing arguing that Lake and her lawyers should face sanctions for having "repeatedly made demonstrably false statements to this Court" in their failed attempts to overturn the results of the 2022 gubernatorial election.

The county's attorneys in particular cited her lawsuit challenging the signature verification procedures for containing "several demonstrably false statements intended to confuse the Court and expand the remand proceedings," while adding that "the claim that ‘no signature verification was conducted’ was entirely frivolous, and Lake and her counsel knew it.”

Lake, a political protégé of former President Donald Trump, narrowly lost her election last year to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and has refused to concede the race despite losing multiple court challenges attempting to overturn the results.

President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have put together a 50-state joint fundraising strategy in a bid to give him an overwhelming financial edge over his potential Republican challenger.

Biden’s joint fundraising committee, the Biden Victory Fund, is now raising campaign cash with all 50 state Democratic Party committees, along with Washington D.C.’s local committee, the president’s campaign told CNBC.

The nationwide effort is shaping up to be larger than the strategy used during Biden’s 2020 run for president, when the same fundraising operation raised over $600 million and doled out millions of dollars to 47 Democratic state parties, according to data from the nonpartisan OpenSecrets. The Biden committee also helps raise money for the Democratic National Committee.

A senior DNC official told CNBC that the Biden Victory Fund, in addition to all of the state committees they worked with in 2020, will also be fundraising with committees from Iowa, California, South Dakota and Illinois. Those four state committees did not fundraise with the Biden Victory Fund in 2020, according to OpenSecrets.

little over a year ago, I wrote a long feature story on Ron DeSantis. Even at that early date, it was easy to discern his blueprint for wresting the Republican nomination from Donald Trump’s hands. DeSantis was pitching himself to the party’s base as a more competent and ruthless vehicle for their agenda. He had courted and won over far-right activists who had thrilled to Trump: J-6ers, anti-vaxxers, Putin fans. His message would combine complete refusal to disavow any extremist within his coalition — when a small pack of white supremacists harassed Jewish people in Orlando, DeSantis’s spokesman called it a false flag — with a total refusal to acknowledge the mainstream media. He was already amassing overwhelming support from the party’s donor class and media barons, and could count on overt support from the Murdoch media empire.

Everything I laid out in the piece about DeSantis’s plan has turned out to be correct, except one: I thought it would work.

It still might work, of course. But the de facto rollout of DeSantis’s campaign, in advance of the de jure announcement, has undeniably failed. DeSantis’s polling numbers, after rising smartly, went the wrong way. Crucially, the phalanx of party-elite support he was amassing has begun to crumble. Trump has won several endorsements from Republicans in Congress, and numerous presidential candidates have jumped into the race. DeSantis’s early weakness has produced responses that have made him even weaker.

There’s no easy diagnosis for the stumbling rollout. As my story observed, DeSantis cuts an uninspiring figure on the stump, with his irritating nasal speaking voice and aversion to human contact. But mediocre orators (Harry Truman) and introverts (Richard Nixon) have won presidential elections before. And just last November, these drawbacks did not stop DeSantis from crushing an opponent who was neither unqualified nor ideologically extreme.

A man who was paralysed in a cycling accident in 2011 has been able to stand and walk with an aid after doctors implanted a device that reads his brain waves and sends instructions to his spine to move the right muscles.

Gert-Jan Oskam, 40, was told he would never walk again after breaking his neck in a traffic accident in China, but has climbed stairs and walked for more than 100 metres at a time since having the operation.

“A few months ago, I was able, for the first time after 10 years, to stand up and have a beer with my friends,” said Oskam, who is from the Netherlands. “That was pretty cool. I want to use it in my daily life.”

The “digital bridge” is the latest from a team of neuroscientists in Switzerland who have a longstanding programme to develop brain-machine interfaces to overcome paralysis. The project aims to use wireless signals to reconnect the brain with muscles that are rendered useless when spinal cord nerves are broken.

In the year since the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde, Tex., much of the blame for law enforcement’s decision to wait more than an hour to confront the gunman has centered on the former chief of the school district’s small police force.

But a Washington Post investigation has found that the costly delay was also driven by the inaction of an array of senior and supervising law enforcement officers who remain on the job and had direct knowledge a shooting was taking place inside classrooms but failed to swiftly stop the gunman.

The Post’s review of dozens of hours of body camera videos, post-shooting interviews with officers, audio from dispatch communications and law enforcement licensing records identified at least seven officers who stalled even as evidence mounted that children were still in danger. Some were the first to arrive, while others were called in for their expertise.

All are still employed by the same agencies they worked for that day. One was commended for his actions that day.