Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., has filed a petition with nearly 2,500 signatures to run for re-election as an independent, despite being on trial for federal bribery charges.The New Jersey Division of Elections lists Menendez as a candidate in the Nov. 5 election after he submitted a petition with 2,465 signatures. To make it onto the ballot, Menendez was required to collect 800 signatures.Menendez has served three terms as a senator and is now seeking a fourth.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. previously expressed support for higher gas prices for consumers, which he argued would force a market shift toward electric vehicles.

U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, announced Sunday night that she is being treated for pancreatic cancer, but assured her constituents that she will soon be back at full strength.Jackson Lee, 74, has been representing Texas’ 18th congressional district for 30 years.”My doctors have confirmed my diagnosis for pancreatic cancer,” Jackson Lee said in a statement.

The unprecedented criminal conviction of former President Trump has opened a dark chapter in the history of America’s criminal justice system, according to several legal experts.A New York jury on Thursday pronounced Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in what prosecutors called a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election. Trump is now the first former president to ever be convicted of a crime.

As the White House finalizes plans for a U.S.-Mexico clampdown that would shut off asylum requests and automatically deny entrance to migrants once a threshold is met, the Biden administration has continued to allow hundreds of thousands of migrants to remain in the U.S. with what amounts to amnesty, according to a report.

Voters in at least three rural South Dakota counties are set to decide Tuesday whether to return to counting ballots by hand, the latest communities around the country to consider ditching machine tabulators based on unfounded conspiracy theories stemming from the 2020 presidential election.The three counties, each with fewer than 6,000 residents, would be among the first in the U.S. to require old-school hand counts, which long ago were replaced by ballot tabulators in most of the country.