ALAN BLINDER

A federal judge on Monday upheld sweeping Republican-backed changes to election rules, including a voter identification provision, that civil rights groups say unfairly targeted African-Americans and other minorities. The ruling could have serious political repercussions in a state that is closely contested in presidential elections.

Donald L. Blankenship, whose leadership of Massey Energy Co. transformed him into one of the wealthiest and most influential men in Appalachia, was sentenced Wednesday to a year in prison for conspiring to violate federal mine safety standards.

The momentum to force Confederate symbols from official display has often been slowed or stopped. In some states this year, including Alabama, lawmakers have been considering new ways to protect demonstrations of Confederate pride.

A white police officer in Montgomery, Alabama, has been charged with murder in the shooting death last week of Gregory Gunn, a 58-year-old black man, officials said Wednesday.

Gov. Robert Bentley, a second-term Republican, was renovating the home with up to $1.8 million that BP gave the state after the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Donald L. Blankenship, a titan of the nation’s coal industry whose approach to business was scrutinized and scorned after 29 workers were killed at the Upper Big Branch mine in 2010, was convicted Thursday of a federal charge of conspiring to violate mine safety that stemmed from the accident, the deadliest in U.S. mining in decades.

Through speeches, yard signs, T-shirts, banners and ads on TV, the radio and the Internet, opponents zeroed in on a narrow issue whose very relevance was disputed by political rivals: bathrooms, and access to them.

A shootout among members of several rival motorcycle gangs in a busy shopping plaza in the Central Texas city of Waco on Sunday left at least nine bikers dead and 18 others injured, creating chaos in a sprawling parking lot packed with afternoon shoppers, law enforcement officials said.

The police in Ferguson, Mo., broke their weeklong silence Friday and identified the officer involved in the fatal shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager, as demanded by protesters and the family of the victim.