Soul singer, songwriter, actor, philanthropist and all-around good guy John Legend tweeted his support for Pima County Attorney candidate Laura Conover this afternoon, July 8.

"I'm very genuinely and sincerely moved. I had no idea our race was on (Legend's) radar, but true reform candidates are obvious to other true reformers," Conover said. "I'm so glad he saw the meaning and authenticity behind our campaign."

The EGOT status entertainer said he is "closely following" the several district and county attorney races going on Arizona, Michigan and Florida at the moment because he would like to see a change in the county's criminal justice system, starting on a local level.

Legend observed Conover "will focus prosecution resources on the most serious cases as Pima County District Attorney, while redirecting those in need to the right services rather than jailing them" while noting how many endorsements she's received.

Protect Our Care, a nonprofit healthcare advocacy group, is launching a $2 million TV buy in three states, including Arizona, to hammer President Donald Trump for his response to the coronavirus crisis.

In one spot, "Left Behind," a family nurse practitioner, Tarik Khan, talks about how Trump failed to protect vulnerable older adults from the virus. In another, "Ignored," Dr. Risha Khetarpal says the president is ignoring experts and spreading false information, leading to unnecessary deaths.

The ad buy comes as Arizona continues to move into swing-state territory, with polls showing Trump trailing Democrat Joe Biden.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Click here to read their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Update, July 7, 2020: This story has been updated to include a statement from Peter Febo, chief operating officer of Kushner Companies.

Businesses tied to President Donald Trump’s family and associates stand to receive as much as $21 million in government loans designed to shore up payroll expenses for companies struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to federal data released Monday.

A hydroponic lettuce farm backed by Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., applied for at least $150,000 in Small Business Administration funding. Albert Hazzouri, a dentist frequently spotted at Mar-a-Lago, asked for a similar amount. A hospital run by Maria Ryan, a close associate of Trump lawyer and former mayor Rudy Giuliani, requested more than $5 million. Several companies connected to the president’s son-in-law and White House adviser, Jared Kushner, could get upward of $6 million.

There’s no ban on businesses connected to Trump’s orbit receiving money. Democrats added a provision to the CARES Act excluding government officials and their family members from receiving some bailout funds, but not those from the PPP.

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Today is the last day to register to vote in the Aug. 4 primary election.

Early balloting begins Wednesday, July 8.

To help you register, Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez will be open until 7 p.m. at both her downtown office (240 N. Stone Ave.) and her eastside office (6920 E. Broadway Blvd.).

“Fourth of July weekend is a busy time for many families, so we want to give everyone the opportunity to register to vote on Monday,” said Rodriguez.

You can also register to vote online by visiting servicearizona.com.

Voter registration forms are also available at all post offices and public libraries, as well as online at the Recorder's Office.

If you want to get a taste of in-person politics, Laura Conover, one of three Democrats running for Pima County Attorney, is teaming up with political group Enough Is Enough to host what's she's billing as the "nation's first-ever drive-in political address at 7:30 tonight at El Toro Flicks Drive In Cinema, 198 S. Granada Ave. The event will also include appearances by state Rep. Andres Cano and county supervisor candidate Adelita Grijalva. Temp checks at the entrance and masks required.

I deployed to Afghanistan in 2012 as a Civil Affairs Team Leader in Mazer-e Sharif. I patrolled the rural Afghan villages of Chimtal and Chahar Bolak, leading reconstruction projects in these communities during a time I thought was the twilight of the war. I was wrong about the war coming to an end, now an ongoing two-decade conflict and by far the longest in U.S. history.
I returned to Afghanistan in 2016, this time as the commander of a small detachment of Army Reserve Soldiers from Arizona conducting intelligence operations in support of counter-terrorism operations throughout the country.

When the New York Times reported that Russia was paying Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers I was not surprised. Sadly, I was also not surprised to learn that President Trump and the White House’s National Security Council have done nothing in response.

Russia is our adversary, virtually every elected member of Congress agrees on that. We can’t trust them, and we know they want to undermine our democracy. That’s why Congress sanctioned Russia for meddling in the 2016 election.

Congress, in the House and the Senate, needs to conduct a full investigation to understand the breakdowns at the highest level of our government that have failed to protect American troops serving overseas.

Martha McSally, a fellow veteran who was appointed to the late John McCain’s U.S. Senate seat, was asked about the New York Times report earlier this week, and her response was shocking and offensive.

McSally told the Arizona Republic “ I’m just concerned about the leaking here and the politicization of it.”

The leaking? The politicization?

Senator McSally, how about you show some concern for your brothers and sisters in combat who are putting their lives on the line to create a safer world? How about you show some anger over a president and an administration who will turn a blind eye to naked aggression from a nation you yourself have called one of America’s top adversaries? How about you recognize that as a U.S. Senator you have the power to do something about it? Stand up to the President and call for the Senate investigation.

As someone trained in the collection, analysis, and reporting of intelligence I know what goes into corroborating information before briefing a commander. To make it into the president's daily brief, information must be deemed urgent and credible. The Commander in Chief and his National Security Council had this information and took no action.

I’m disappointed that Martha McSally is putting her political allies above the safety of American troops—the men and women that she served with. She should spend her Fourth of July weekend thinking about why she wants to serve Arizonans in the first place, what it means to defend democracy, and her oath to defend the Constitution against all foreign enemies.

Aaron Marquez is a member of the Individual Ready Reserve. The views expressed here are those of him only and not those of the Department of Defense.

That Mount Rushmore display last night—an alternately smirking and glowering Mussolini declaiming to howling hyenas—shook me to my toenails. Each time they chanted “USA! USA!” he paused with that look of self-adulation I’ve seen from Mobutu to Ceausescu to Qaddafi. They roared when he said anyone defacing a block of stone can be sentenced to a minimum of 10 years in prison. They booed when he labeled long-overdue protests enshrined in the Constitution as extremist leftwing terrorist acts, all the work of “liberal Democrats.” Unlike all those other despots I’ve covered, this man is deeply disturbed in a different way. And others were propped up by corrupt, coopted armies. We have no excuse. We put him there ourselves.

How many qualified voters, too sanctimonious to choose “the lesser of two evils,” voted for a no-chance also-run or sulked at home because Bernie Sanders wasn’t on the ballot? How many just stayed home, with something better to do than save America from what was blindingly obvious before November?

I’ve watched democratic states slip into shitholes since the 1960s. From time to time, I’ve covered Trump’s sociopathic, racist narcissism as he threw poor families out of their homes to build yet another Trump-Dump palace bound for bankruptcy. Before November 2016. I wrote about a coup d’etat attempt. In hindsight, I fell far short, never imagining that craven senators, greed-blinded tycoons and mindless morons would take us to this point. And now we learn that his fan-boy obsession with Putin now amounts to outright treason, shrugging off $100,000 bounties on the heads of U.S. troops he extols in speeches.

That speech, crafted by his Rasputin handlers, had none of the usual rambling and boastful asides. It railed against those “communists” in our streets, yet it was straight-up Stalin. He refused to meet first with Indian tribal leaders, whose spiritual grounds he desecrated. He insisted on lavish fireworks against the pleas of foresters who feared wildfire after years of a beetle infestation. His cults packed in tight, unmasked, simply to feed his insatiable ego.

WASHINGTON – There’s often not much agreement on news out of Washington, but Arizona business leaders were hard-pressed this week to come up with negatives about the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that took effect Wednesday.

The deal, which has been several years in the making, replaces the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement that created the three-country trading zone that economists say has been worth billions in trade and thousands of jobs in Arizona alone.

“USMCA cements this trilateral alliance – it’s really historic,” said Julie Pastrick, president and CEO of the Greater Flagstaff Chamber of Commerce and a member of the Arizona-Mexico Commission board.

And NAFTA was good for Arizona: A Business Roundtable fact sheet on the USMCA claims that trade with Canada and Mexico supported 228,300 Arizona jobs in 2017. The Arizona Chamber of Commerce estimated that 19,000 of those trade-related jobs were in manufacturing.

The numbers are similarly stunning when it comes to trade, with exports and imports between Arizona, Canada and Mexico topping $20 billion in 2017.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Click here to read their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans.

Tommy Fisher billed his new privately funded border wall as the future of deterrence, a quick-to-build steel fortress that spans 3 miles in one of the busiest Border Patrol sectors.

Unlike a generation of wall builders before him, he said he figured out how to build a structure directly on the banks of the Rio Grande, a risky but potentially game-changing step when it came to the nation’s border wall system.

Fisher has leveraged his self-described “Lamborghini” of walls to win more than $1.7 billion worth of federal contracts in Arizona.

But his showcase piece is showing signs of runoff erosion and, if it’s not fixed, could be in danger of falling into the Rio Grande, according to engineers and hydrologists who reviewed photos of the wall for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. It never should have been built so close to the river, they say.