Domestic violent extremists have been planning to try to disrupt the U.S. power grid and will probably keep doing so, according to a Department of Homeland Security intelligence bulletin shared with law enforcement agencies and utility operators Monday and obtained by CBS News.

"DVEs have developed credible, specific plans to attack electricity infrastructure since at least 2020, identifying the electric grid as a particularly attractive target given its interdependency with other infrastructure sectors," the bulletin reads.

It warns that extremists "adhering to a range of ideologies will likely continue to plot and encourage physical attacks against electrical infrastructure."

Still, the bulletin notes that, "Absent significant technical knowledge or insider assistance, small scale attacks are unlikely to cause widespread, multi-state power loss but may result in physical damage that poses risks to operations or personnel."

A group of Kansas politicians tasked with steering public health policy are pushing to allow doctors to prescribe unproven treatments and preventives for COVID-19 without any potential for responsibility.

While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned against using ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19, some Republican senators want to shield doctors from legal liability and board discipline for prescribing the drugs.

Ivermectin is used to treat parasitic worms, especially in livestock. Hydroxychloroquine, sometimes abbreviated as HCQ, is a malaria drug that is also used to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. Neither drug has proven to be save and effective for treating or preventing COVID-19.

But that hasn't stopped the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee from advancing a bill making it easier for doctors to prescribe the drugs for off-label use. The bill would also require pharmacists to fill such prescriptions, even if they believe the drugs would be dangerous for patients.

Sen. Mark Kelly broke his silence over the censure of his Democratic colleague Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, with a campaign spokesperson saying he disagreed with it and she should not be singled out over her opposition to changing the Senate’s filibuster rules.

"Senator Kelly does not support the censure,” Sarah Guggenheimer of the Kelly campaign told The Arizona Republic Tuesday.

“While they came to different decisions on this vote, he looks forward to continuing to work with Senator Sinema on Arizona priorities, as they have done during his first year in the Senate to pass critical infrastructure investments that will create good-paying jobs," Guggenheimer said.

Kelly, D-Ariz., is in good standing with the party and his support of Sinema, D-Ariz., could help diffuse some of the animosity towards Sinema that is coming from progressives over an issue that the left often casts as key to the fate of President Joe BIden's agenda and fair elections across the country.

“Big Joe” Ellicott, a former Florida shock jock with potentially key information about the sex trafficking ring involving Rep. Matt Gaetz, has pleaded guilty in federal court, The Daily Beast has learned.

Ellicott is the long-time best friend of corrupt Florida tax official Joel Greenberg, who was Gaetz’s wingman in the underage sex operation, according to several sources with direct knowledge of their relationship. Last year, The Daily Beast revealed that Ellicott knew intimate details about the teenage girl who was paid for sex by the group—and actually texted what essentially amounted to a confession that they were scrambling to try and coverup details about their sex with a 17-year-old from the feds.

Ellicott was particularly legally exposed through his involvement with Greenberg, who ran the small Central Florida tax agency like a fiefdom where he hired his friends for no-show jobs. That appears to be what took Ellicott down.

In court documents last week, Ellicott was accused of fraud for agreeing to “pay bribes and kickbacks” to a public official and a separate drug crime: illegally selling the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder prescription medicine Adderall. On Jan. 18, Ellicott signed a plea agreement admitting to both crimes.

On one side of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard in Harlem, dozens of candles and bouquets of flowers were clustered outside the 32nd Precinct station house after a shooting that would leave two officers dead.

Across the boulevard was the apartment building where the officers were struck by gunfire as they responded to a report of a domestic incident.

And in between, the neighborhood’s new city councilwoman sat in a bare-bones office, trying to reconcile the need to comfort a grieving community with her firm belief that police departments should ultimately be abolished.

Councilwoman Kristin Richardson Jordan, 35, is a democratic socialist, but she is not a prominent member of New York City’s left wing — she is largely unknown even to like-minded elected officials. She has equated the policing system with slavery and emphasized her deep compassion for both the fallen officers and the man who the police said killed them — positions that are vastly out-of-step with many fellow Democrats.

Sean Caddle, a longtime New Jersey Democratic political consultant and onetime aide to former state Sen. Ray Lesniak, pleaded guilty Tuesday to hiring two people to kill a former associate, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced.

The 44-year-old resident of Hamburg, Sussex County, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit murder for hire in the stabbing death of the unnamed victim. He is currently in home detention on $1 million bond and potentially faces life in prison.


“This was a callous and violent crime, and this defendant is as responsible as the two men who wielded the knife,” Phil Sellinger, the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, said in a statement. “There is no more serious crime than the taking of another person’s life. The defendant has admitted arranging and paying for a murder by two other people. His admission of guilt means he will now pay for his crime.”

Caddle admitted hiring two people from Connecticut and Pennsylvania to kill the victim in May 2014, according to the office. According to Sellinger’s release, the victim was stabbed to death and his apartment set on fire. Caddle met with the killers, who were not identified, the day after the murder in the parking lot of an Elizabeth diner and paid them “thousands of dollars in cash,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Americans are less confident in President Biden’s handling of the pandemic than they were nearly a year ago, according to results from a new Pew Research Center poll.

In a national survey conducted Jan. 10-17, 44 percent of Americans said they are very or somewhat confident in the president’s ability to handle the public health impact of the pandemic, a drop of 21 percentage points since March 2021. The public was nearly evenly split on whether they thought the worst of the pandemic was over, with 49 percent responding in the affirmative and 50 percent saying that “the worst is still to come.”

Biden touted his administration’s efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic at a news conference last week to mark the end of his first year in office. For one, the president highlighted that 210 million people are vaccinated today, versus 2 million when he was sworn in last year.

Even as covid cases fall in parts of the United States, hospitals remain short-staffed and overloaded with patients, and deaths nationwide are rising. The seven-day average for covid deaths in the United States reached 2,230 on Tuesday, its highest point since late February last year.

Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper, a 32-year veteran of Congress, will retire at the end of this year, after Tennessee Republicans shredded his Nashville-based seat into three pieces in redistricting.

He is the 29th House Democrat to leave the chamber to retire or seek higher office during this Congress.

“No one tried harder to keep our city whole,” Cooper wrote in a statement announcing his decision. “I explored every possible way, including lawsuits, to stop the gerrymandering and to win one of the three congressional districts that now divide Nashville. There’s no way, at least for me, in this election cycle.”

Cooper, a conservative Blue Dog Democrat, is part of a storied Tennessee family. His brother is the mayor of Nashville and his father was a governor of the state. He has sometimes gone after his own party, repeatedly voting against Nancy Pelosi as party leader, though he did back her for speaker in 2021, when she faced extremely narrow margins.

Before One America News Network host Dan Ball finished an interview with guest Jim Jordan this past week, he asked the Ohio Republican congressman for a favor.

“Please put some pressure on AT&T and DirecTV for us,” said Ball, whose “Real America” airs nightly on the right-wing cable channel. “OAN would love to continue broadcasting on that platform and we know for a fact it is all political behind the scenes on why they’re doing that to us.”

Earlier in the week, Ball solicited viewers to send him “dirt” on William E. Kennard, chairman of of the board at DirecTV parent AT&T, including any evidence of marital infidelity. OAN’s 80-year-old founder, tech entrepreneur Robert Herring, also went on camera to plead with viewers to ask other cable and satellite providers in their areas to add the channel to their lineups.

The desperate calls for help — which would be considered unseemly on a traditional cable news outlet — follow DirecTV’s Jan. 15 announcement that it will drop San Diego-based OAN from its service in April. DirecTV, which AT&T spun off last summer, accounts for nearly half of the 35 million homes that can receive OAN on cable or satellite TV. The channel is not broadly distributed enough to be measured by Nielsen.

The loss of DirecTV will deprive the channel of its major source of revenue and casts doubt on the future of the operation, where President Biden’s administration is called a “regime” and concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic are described as hysteria. OAN correspondents have promoted efforts to audit the vote counts in the 2020 election.