HELENA, Mont. — A Republican-backed effort to qualify Montana Green Party candidates for the general election has been rejected by the Montana Supreme Court.

Justices on Wednesday upheld District Judge James Reynolds’ Aug. 7 ruling that granted the requests of about 560 people to remove their names from the petitions after they learned the Montana Green Party did not support the effort.

It was later learned the Montana Republican Party had bankrolled the $100,000 signature-gathering effort and violated campaign finance laws by not properly reporting the expenditure.

Green Party candidates are believed to draw votes away from Democratic candidates. The court said it would issue its full opinion later.

Within the first week after the call to action, Communist Party enforcers had launched investigations into at least 21 police and judicial officials, according to a media tally cited by the party’s top law-enforcement commission. Dozens more have since been taken down, including the police chief of Shanghai, the most senior target thus far, and cadres who have won awards for good performance.

The rash of investigations marks the first time that Mr. Xi has unleashed a sweeping and systematic clean-up of the country’s powerful domestic-security apparatus. His push to forge police, prosecutors and judges who are “absolutely loyal, absolutely pure and absolutely reliable”—as officials running the campaign have demanded—points to thorny concerns that Mr. Xi faces at home even as he seeks to slow a downward spiral in relations with the U.S.

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Mr. Xi has targeted senior law-enforcement officials in the past, including retired security chief Zhou Yongkang—who was jailed for life in 2015 for corruption and abuses of power—as well as two vice ministers of public security felled in disciplinary probes over the past two years.

In launching a wider effort, some analysts say, Mr. Xi appears keen to tighten his grip over agencies vital to maintaining social stability and upholding his personal authority, which could prove critical as he confronts a pandemic-ravaged economy and rising tensions with the U.S. that could kick up social ferment and fuel dissent against his leadership.

So where is the COVID-cure buzz coming from? A July 2020 study out of Texas showed that, in test tubes, oleandrin could inhibit the coronavirus in monkey kidney cells. But this study has not been peer-reviewed or published yet. And while Phoenix Biotechnology exec Whitney also told Axios on Saturday that “we have provided” human clinical evidence to the FDA, he would not share what that evidence is. The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) also conducted some preliminary testing of oleandrin against SARS-CoV-2 (the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19). The results were “inconclusive,” a spokesperson told Axios.

“You’d certainly want to see more work done on this before even contemplating a human trial,” Professor Sharon Lewin, the director of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity at the University of Melbourne, told Axios.

What’s more, one of the authors of the Texas study, Robert Newman, is the chairman of the Phoenix Biotechnology advisory board — the company developing the oleandrin product.

ATLANTIC CITY — The process of eliminating the former Trump Plaza casino from the Atlantic City skyline will still end with the boom of an implosion sometime next year.

But this month, a demolition crew from Pennsylvania arrived and began the slow work of gutting the interior and taking down portions of the building itself in preparation for the implosion, tentatively scheduled for early 2021.

On Monday, a small group of evangelical marchers, urging people to repent, noisily walked by along their route on Pacific Avenue with signs and bullhorns, an event apparently unrelated to the demolition of the once-iconic casino.

Demolition equipment from Haines & Kibblehouse and large mounds of dirt were on the property. Demolition had begun at part of a lower level next to one of the towers.

North Carolina Presidential voting history

Only *2* Democrats have received NC electoral votes going back to 1972.

Check out the polling in NC right now: Biden is ahead or tied in most polls over the last 3 weeks

The company plans to shutter the factory in the Crosspointe office park near Interstate 295 by mid-next year, putting 280 employees out of work, a spokesman for Rolls-Royce North America confirmed Saturday.

The job losses come on top of 120 layoffs at the factory — the first Rolls-Royce manufacturing facility built from the ground up in the U.S. — that took place in June.

The factory, which opened in 2011 on a 1,000-acre site in Prince George, had reached peak employment of about 400 people last year. It makes precision aircraft components such as rotative discs and turbine blades.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a historic collapse in civil aviation, which will take several years to recover. As a result, we’ve had to make difficult, but necessary, decisions to protect the future of our business,” Rolls-Royce North America spokesman Don Campbell said in a statement.