u/IWasNotBriefed

For 50 years, Raju the elephant was chained day and night, forced to beg on India's streets while his owner pocketed the money tourists gave him, sometimes with nothing to eat but plastic and paper. When Wildlife SOS finally arrived for a midnight rescue, his owner tried to stop them by tightening Raju's chains and shouting to scare them off, but the rescuers held their ground.

It took 45 minutes to cut through the shackles wrapped so tightly around his legs. As they worked, tears rolled down Raju's face. "We knew in our hearts he realised he was being freed," said rescuer Pooja Binepal. "He felt hope for the first time," added fellow rescuer Kartick.

After the 350-mile journey to Wildlife SOS's Elephant Conservation and Care Centre, an exhausted Raju took his first free steps just after midnight. Five decades of suffering ended in a single night, and the elephant who once wept in chains is now free to simply be an elephant.

More than 1.2 million Texas voters, over six percent of the state's registered voters, now sit on the state's suspended voter list less than three months before a pivotal November election, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Suspended status means a county believes a voter's address is outdated or that the person has moved. It does not automatically strike someone from the rolls, and suspended voters can still cast a ballot, but they face extra hurdles. At the polls, they must fill out a "statement of residence" form, and if they've relocated to a new county, they either have to return to vote where they're still registered or accept a provisional ballot that may ultimately not count.

The suspensions stretch across the state and hit some of Texas's biggest counties hardest. Dallas County alone has more than 129,000 suspended voters, Tarrant County has over 73,000, and Collin and Denton counties each have roughly 56,000.

Voters have until October 5 to correct their registration, but with more than a million people affected, many may never get the message in time, especially those who don't realize their address is on file incorrectly.

The timing raises the stakes further. Texas is cooperating with the Trump administration's push to gain access to state voter rolls, a move that has alarmed voting rights advocates already concerned about ballot access. The suspended-voter numbers also land in the middle of a closely watched U.S. Senate race between Democratic state Representative James Talarico and Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Daily Beast editorial director Nick Hines revealed on a recent podcast that Trump is planning to funnel roughly $400 million from his personal super PAC into ads centered on himself, brushing aside Republican strategists who pushed for the money to go toward vulnerable local candidates instead.

Hines noted the funding comes mostly from crypto donors like the Winklevoss twins, which means Trump gets final say on how it's spent, whatever individual candidates might prefer.

Reporter Farrah Tomazin said this effectively turns the midterms into one giant referendum on Trump himself rather than hundreds of separate races, with his approval rating hovering around 33 percent.

Hines pointed to Maine as the clearest warning sign, where Susan Collins is left defending a Trump-driven trade war with Canada, evidence this strategy could end up sinking the very candidates Trump claims to be helping.

A federal judge in Boston has temporarily blocked the Trump administration's plan to overhaul how mail ballots are handled ahead of the November 3 midterms, and the timing is notable.

The same judge had just been forced to lift her own nationwide block on these exact USPS rules less than 24 hours earlier, after the Supreme Court ruled against her earlier this week. Now she's blocked it again, leaving election officials across the country scrambling to figure out which rules actually apply with the election barely ten weeks away.

Democratic-led states and voting rights groups sued to stop the newly finalized USPS rules, and late Thursday night, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani granted them a two-week restraining order.

In her ruling, she wrote: "the USPS is refusing to send mail ballots to eligible voters unless States or local election officials submit their mail ballot envelopes and return envelopes and receive advance approval from the USPS without regard to impending deadlines for the November 3, 2026 election." She found the challengers are likely to win, both on the argument that the rule is unconstitutional and that USPS lacked the authority to issue it in the first place.

Under the plan, states would have to hand over their lists of mail voters to USPS, and every ballot envelope would need a unique barcode for tracking. The administration says the requirements are meant to help law enforcement investigations.

State election officials told the court the mandate would force them to redesign and reprint millions of ballot envelopes on a timeline their own vendors said was unworkable before the midterms. The Justice Department, in its filings, argued the change was "modest" and within USPS's legal authority.

Talwani is scheduled to hold a hearing next Thursday, September 3, to decide whether to issue a longer-lasting injunction while the case continues.

A California ballot measure that would impose a 5% annual wealth tax on residents with assets exceeding $50 million is facing a $90 million opposition campaign, with Google co-founder Sergey Brin among its prominent backers. Brin's net worth has grown by an estimated $133 billion since Trump's election in November 2024. Supporters of the measure argue the revenue would fund healthcare, education and housing programs for millions of Californians, while opponents contend it would drive wealthy residents and businesses out of the state.