Politics

Updated at 11:30 p.m. ET

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey has fended off the highest-profile Democratic primary challenge of his decades in federal office, defeating the rising Rep. Joe Kennedy III, a member of the state's legendary political dynasty.

Kennedy conceded the contest nearly two and a half hours after polls closed Tuesday night. The Associated Press projected Markey as the winner a short time later.

Updated at 10:18 a.m. ET Wednesday

Facing lawsuits and mounting scrutiny for making last-minute changes that cut 2020 census counting a month short, the U.S. Census Bureau is now ending in-person counting in the San Diego area and some other parts of the country as early as Sept. 18 — nearly two weeks before the expedited end date of Sept. 30 that NPR first confirmed.

President Trump visited Wisconsin on Tuesday despite calls from officials, including Gov. Tony Evers and Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, to stay away.

Facebook and Twitter said Tuesday that they had removed accounts linked to Russian state actors who tried to spread false stories about racial justice, the Democratic presidential campaign of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and President Trump's policies.

Updated 2:50 p.m. ET Wednesday

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it will no longer pay for some safety measures related to COVID-19 that it had previously covered.

Keith Turi, FEMA assistant administrator for recovery, announced the changes during a call Tuesday with state and tribal emergency managers, many of whom expressed concerns about the new policy.

The U.S. Postal Service's inspector general has outlined a number of ongoing concerns about the agency's ability to manage the influx of mailed ballots for the 2020 election — separate from the recent controversial actions by the postmaster general.

The internal watchdog said in a report that it found several potential problems in the way mail was being processed, including ballots mailed without bar code mail-tracking technology and out-of-date voter addresses.

Updated at 4:20 p.m. ET

President Trump visited Kenosha, Wis., on Tuesday, a city roiled by unrest following the police shooting of Jacob Blake last month in a state seen as crucial to Trump's reelection prospects in November.

Trump went to an emergency management center, met with police and toured a section of the city damaged by rioting that followed the shooting of the 29-year-old Black man.

With the start of a new month, some workers may get a boost in their take-home pay. The Trump administration has given employers the option to stop collecting payroll taxes for most workers through the end of this year.

President Trump announced the move three weeks ago, after failing to reach a deal with Congress on a more comprehensive pandemic relief package.

"This will mean bigger paychecks for working families as we race to produce a vaccine," Trump said.

A central promise of last week's Republican National Convention was a pledge that President Trump would use a second term to build on elements of his first term, with very few updates and changes.

The four days of convention programming showed a Republican Party whose policies are bound to Trump. But GOP divisions over many of those policies prevented much of the 2016 Trump agenda from ever becoming law. And that dynamic was in place well before the coronavirus pandemic changed politics.

Three months after becoming San Francisco's district attorney in 2004, Kamala Harris faced a trial by fire.

Harris had just won her first run for office by positioning herself slightly to the right of her liberal predecessor and by promising to run a more professional office as the city's top prosecutor. She pledged to tackle domestic violence and sex trafficking and stand up for those who had felt ignored.

Update at 10:40 p.m. ET: Sen. Ed Markey has topped Rep. Joe Kennedy, while Rep. Richard Neal beat Alex Morse. Read more about Markey's win here.

Massachusetts voters are to cast ballots Tuesday in one of the last state primaries of the year.

President Trump on Monday declined to condemn the actions of the 17-year-old suspect in the shooting of three protesters against police brutality in Kenosha, Wis., claiming, without evidence, that it appeared the gunman was acting in self-defense.

When it comes to the violence that has occurred in the streets of some American cities, authorities with different political bents are pointing to the same culprit: outside agitators.

A federal appeals court has declined to order a criminal case against Michael Flynn dismissed. Instead, it ruled Monday that a judge can hear arguments about the Justice Department's motivations for dropping the case against President Trump's former national security adviser.

The 8-2 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, keeps alive a Department of Justice case that Attorney General William Barr had ordered dropped in May. The court also refused to remove U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who has been overseeing the case.

Updated at 4:44 p.m. ET

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Monday forcefully pushed back against President Trump's campaign message that voters wouldn't be safe under a Biden administration.

"The simple truth is Donald Trump failed to protect America. So now he's trying to scare America," Biden said in remarks at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Biden called Trump power hungry and lambasted the president for what Biden sees as a lack of moral leadership — a common refrain from the former vice president on the campaign trail.