CNN – National

By Brisa Colon, CNN As an extreme drought grips California, making water increasingly scarce, thieves are making off with billions of gallons of the precious resource, tapping into fire hydrants, rivers, and even small family homes and farms. State and local officials say water theft is a long running-issue, but the intensifying drought has driven

By Jacob Lev, CNN New York Jets assistant coach Greg Knapp has died, five days after being involved in a bicycling crash, the Knapp family announced on Thursday. He was 58. Nicknamed “Knapper,” he “was called back home to Heaven, where he will be reunited with his Dad,” the family said in a statement. “Those

By Elizabeth Stuart, Mallory Simon and Christina Maxouris, CNN The Virginia Beach school board voted against a motion which would make mask-wearing in school optional for the upcoming school year, during a heated Tuesday night meeting that lasted more than four hours. The board voted 6-4 against the effort, keeping masks mandatory for the district’s

By Josh Campbell, CNN A routine traffic stop in a Chicago suburb turned violent after a driver and two passengers allegedly assaulted the police officer by beating and strangling him. On Wednesday, Aurora, Illinois, officials announced that Sheba Taylor, 26, Jennifer Taylor, 24, and Paul Sherrod Taylor, 28, had been indicted by a grand jury

By Nicquel Terry Ellis, CNN For Texas State Rep. Jasmine Crockett, holding public office was not a goal she ever set. Neither was becoming a civil rights attorney. But after being the victim of racist hate mail while attending undergrad at Rhodes College and watching Black people face inequalities in the criminal justice system, both

By David Williams, CNN A family in Georgia is mourning after a 5-year-old boy — described as someone who had “nothing but pure love” — died just days after being diagnosed with Covid-19. Wyatt Gibson suffered a stroke and died on July 16 in a Chattanooga, Tennessee, hospital where he’d been intubated because he was

By Omar Jimenez, CNN Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been criticized as “racist” — even as a Black woman — and she’s been called “notoriously thin-skinned” but she remains determined to leave a legacy far beyond her time in office. Still navigating the Covid-19 pandemic and the record surge in violence that came with it,

By Scottie Andrew, CNN Staff at nursing homes in California are no longer prohibited from deliberately misgendering residents, a California district court ruled this month, saying the ban that was enshrined as part of a 2017 law was a violation of staffers’ freedom of speech. ​Equality California, a nonprofit that aims to protect LGBTQ Californians,

By Elizabeth Stuart, Rachel Clarke and Theresa Waldrop, CNN Atlanta Public Schools, one of the nation’s first districts to begin its school year next month, will require masks for all students and teachers in school and on buses, the district announced Thursday. The announcement comes despite Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s rolling back such measures in

By Neelam Bohra and Radhika Marya, CNN The Ponca tribe buried Chief Standing Bear more than a century ago in what is now Nebraska. But Standing Bear’s tomahawk, a symbol of protest against US government policies that didn’t define Native Americans as “people under the law,” has been sitting since 1982 in a glass case