Emma Hurt

BERLIN — The club culture of Germany's capital city is world-renowned. Pre-pandemic, one could spend literal days hopping between 24-hour dance floors.

But indoor dancing in Berlin has been banned since last March, and with the summer weather slipping away, club owners are looking for safe ways to re-open this winter.

One answer could lie in the results of a state-sponsored club crawl this week.

"Club culture is a part of the Berlin culture. And so we have to try to support it," said Berlin Senator Klaus Lederer.

The increase in violent crime that has hit cities across the country has dominated the non-partisan November race to be Atlanta's city's next mayor.

Farmers of color are set to get some unprecedented debt relief starting this month from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The latest federal COVID aid package includes an estimated $4 billion for the USDA to wipe away these farmers' debts.

In his first months in office, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock is sticking with the strategy that got him elected — and helped give Democrats the Senate majority.

At an early May stop at Blue Bird Corporation, a leader in electric school bus manufacturing in Fort Valley, Ga., Warnock insisted it is time for the federal government to invest in clean energy jobs and a "sustainable future" for the country.

About a year after the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery became national news, and nearly 15 months after he was shot while jogging down a street, Georgia has repealed the vague law being used to defend the men charged with murder in his killing.

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed the overhaul he championed at the Georgia Capitol on Monday, alongside a bipartisan group of state lawmakers as well as Arbery's mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, and sister, Jasmine Arbery.

Three weeks after it was signed into law, local election officials in Georgia are still trying to understand all the implications of the state's controversial election overhaul.

In a series of interviews, election officials said that while the Republican-led measure has some good provisions, many felt sidelined as the legislation was being debated, and believe that parts of it will make Georgia elections more difficult and expensive.

Georgia Republicans have seen their fortunes change quickly.

Their recent losses in presidential and U.S. Senate contests have revealed some problems: First, robust Democratic organizing in the state has engaged younger and more diverse voters at a large scale. And more recently, false claims of widespread voter fraud by some Republican leaders have sown doubt among many of the party's voters about the system's trustworthiness.

It's been about a month since Democrats flipped Georgia's two Senate seats in high-profile January runoffs, sending Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to Washington, D.C., and handing the party narrow control of the chamber.

One key to the stunning upsets were the roughly 225,000 new voters who didn't vote in November but turned out in January, a disproportionate number of whom were people of color.

"That's just the math," said Bernard Fraga, a political scientist at Emory University who has studied the turnout data.

The Georgia Senate runoffs were the first test of outgoing President Donald Trump's ability to bring his most fervent supporters to the polls without his name on the ballot. And after Republicans lost the seats and their U.S. Senate majority, in Georgia Republican circles, much of the blame has centered on the former president.