New Hampshire Democrats zeroed in on abortion rights during their annual convention here Saturdayannual convention here Saturday, bringing in Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to prop up the campaigns of Sen. Maggie Hassan and governor candidate Tom Sherman, who will likely ease through September’s primary but face tough races heading into November’s general election.

“The Republican Party is so afraid of the power and influence women have achieved in our society that they are seeking to shame and criminalize your very autonomy,” said Pritzker, who leads a state that has a law that codifies Roe v. Wade.

It’s a subject that generated the most applause throughout the day, including during a speech by Marty Walsh, Secretary of Labor and the former mayor of Boston (Massachusetts also has codified Roe). For the record, Walsh told the crowd, he’s not running for president.

Pritzker’s name, on the other hand, has popped up repeatedly as a potential future presidential candidate, most recently when it was announced he’d be speaking Saturday in New Hampshire. But the Democratic governor’s political team says Pritzker is only focused on his reelection and on helping elect Democrats across the country who support abortion rights.

BERLIN — Germany will restart coal-fired power plants in order to conserve natural gas, the country’s economy minister announced on Sunday, amid concerns about a looming supply shortage after Russia cut gas deliveries to Europe this week.

The move was part of a series of measures, including new incentives for companies to burn less natural gas, announced by Germany as Europe takes steps to deal with reduced energy supplies from Russia.

Since European countries imposed sanctions to punish Moscow following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, Russia has responded by cutting off gas supplies to several European countries. Last week, the Russian energy giant Gazprom also reduced flows through the Nord

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“The situation is serious,” Robert Habeck, the economy minister who is also Germany’s vice chancellor, said in a statement on Sunday, laying out the steps that would be taken to ensure that more gas is available to divert into storage so the country has enough to get through the winter. They include bringing back online coal-fired power plants that had been drawn down to reduce carbon emissions, although the statement did not specify how many plants would be affected.

Midwestern states are battling to be bumped up to a coveted early slot in the Democratic presidential nominating calendar, jump-starting what election watchers say could be a big shake-up ahead of the 2024 election.

Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois are among the states hoping to exert more influence and help diversify a lineup — led by the largely rural and predominantly white states of Iowa and New Hampshire — that many Democrats say doesn’t represent the party’s true strength.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has announced 17 finalists to be among the first four or five, including Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois and all four current early primary states. State party officials began drafting proposals earlier this year and are set to make their cases to the body’s regulatory committee later this month.

Proponents of Michigan and Minnesota point to them being critical swing states that helped elect President Biden. Geography matters too, they say. If Iowa gets the boot from its traditional role as the first-in-the-nation caucus state, either state would provide an alternative in the Midwest.

Consumer spending, which makes up more than two-thirds of the U.S. economy, has held strong through April even with inflation at historic highs. But there are growing signs that the spending streak could be ending.

Retail sales slowed last month for the first time this year, driven by a 4 percent drop in car sales. U.S. flight bookings dipped 2.3 percent in May from a month earlier, according to data from Adobe Analytics. And both high- and low-income Americans have begun pulling back, particularly on services, in the past four to six weeks, according to an analysis of credit card data by Barclays. The slowdown in spending is now concentrated in services, not goods, the bank found in a new analysis of credit card data.

“All through 2022, the narrative has been that as COVID faded, households would ramp up spending on services,” Barclays analysts wrote in a note this week. “And indeed, that narrative has been true for much of this year. But … services spending seems to be slowing considerably.”

Spending on services like travel and restaurants, which was growing more than 30 percent from 2021 rates this year, has now slowed to half that pace, according to the Barclays analysis.

A federal judge will draw a new Louisiana congressional map with a second Black district after the Legislature failed to draw new boundaries of its own in a Special Session that ended Saturday without the passage of any bill.

Louisiana Middle District U.S. Judge Shelly Dick will now draw her own map for the state from the bench.

Dick, who ruled June 6 that the congressional map passed by lawmakers in February violated the Voting Rights Act because it kept just one majority Black district, had given the Legislature a deadline of June 20 to pass new boundaries or she would take over.

Republican House Speaker Clay Schexnayder of Gonzales and Republican Senate President Page Cortez had unsuccessfully argued the Legislature needed more time to create a new map, a motion Dick denied in court Thursday.

I was reminded of Cyclops and the work it inspired this week when word flashed around the world that Chinese astronomers had detected a radio signal that had the characteristics of being from an extraterrestrial civilization — namely, it had a very narrow bandwidth at a frequency of 140.604 MHz, a precision nature doesn’t usually achieve on its own.

They made the detection using a giant new telescope called the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, or FAST. The telescope was pointed in the direction of an exoplanet named Kepler 438 b, a rocky planet about 1.5 times the size of Earth that orbits in the so-called habitable zone of Kepler 438, a red dwarf star hundreds of light years from here, in the constellation Lyra. It has an estimated surface temperature of 37 degrees Fahrenheit, making it a candidate to harbor life.

Just as quickly, however, an article in the state-run newspaper “Science and Technology Daily” reporting the discovery vanished. And Chinese astronomers were pouring cold water on the result.

Zhang Tong-jie, the chief scientist of China ET Civilization Research Group, was quoted by Andrew Jones, a journalist who tracks Chinese space and astronomy developments, as saying, “The possibility that the suspicious signal is some kind of radio interference is also very high, and it needs to be further confirmed or ruled out. This may be a long process.”

Rep. Dan Crenshaw and his staff were violently confronted at the Republican Party of Texas convention a short time ago, when far-right social media activist Alex Stein and others whom witnesses described as Proud Boys began shouting “eyepatch McCain” at him – an attempted insult coined by Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson.

A witness to the incident tells Mediaite that in addition to Stein and others being escorted out of the building, some arrests were made at the scene.

“They got physical with multiple people, including hitting them with cameras,” a witness at the scene said. “His campaign manager was assaulted by being pushed aggressively into a pillar.”

You can see that part in the video above, which was shared by Stein and his blog. That version included a clip from Tucker Carlson’s show, in which the host refers to Crenshaw as “Eyepatch McCain” while speaking with Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.

James G. Blaine, Sr. readied himself for the political battle of his already contentious career. The secretary of state would challenge Benjamin Harrison — the sitting president and a member of Blaine’s own party — for the 1892 Republican nomination. James was a seasoned campaigner and a gloves-off political brawler; he had vied for the presidency three times in the previous two decades. But he was not prepared for his true opponent that election year: an aspiring actress named Mary Nevins Blaine.

When the two had first met in 1886, Mary was not a threat to James’ political ambitions, merely a nuisance: At the age of 19, after an 18-day courtship, she had eloped with James’ 17-year-old son, Jamie, a boy he described as the “the most helpless, least responsible” of his children. The union, which both families publicly objected to at first, had been a source of much tittle-tattle as James toured the country that fall rallying support for Republican candidates. But soon, the public embraced the handsome young couple, even if James’ wife, Harriet, never had.

The impulsive marriage could, perhaps, be forgiven, but Mary’s decision to seek a divorce five years later — with a presidential election looming — could not be. That was a scandal that could torpedo a presidential campaign. James’ political brand was predicated on an unassailable private life. Faced with the scandal, he considered his options and chose silence. The family would not feed the media frenzy.

But James had underestimated Mary as a foe; the young woman knew how to use the newspapers to her advantage as well as any political pro. When he finally recognized her skills, he launched his own PR offensive in response. Their front-page fight reveals a lesson that is even more pertinent in the social media era than it was at the time: Once a story has been aired publicly, there is no way to know who will seize control of it. And the winner is often the one you least expect.