The founder and leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group remained in jail after his first court appearance on Friday, a day after his arrest on charges he plotted with others to attack the U.S. Capitol to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.

The seditious conspiracy charges against Stewart Rhodes and 10 other Oath Keepers members or associates are the first to be levied in connection with the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. They’re also the first to be brought by the Justice Department in over a decade.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Kimberly Priest Johnson ordered Rhodes, 56, of Granbury, Texas, to be held in custody until a detention hearing next Thursday in the Dallas suburb of Plano.

Rhodes appeared in court wearing heavy boots, blue jeans, a faded black Carhartt T-shirt and a blue medical mask. He walked into the courtroom shackled at the wrists and ankles.

The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have increasingly become pariahs as their party moves in the opposite direction.

When the 10 GOP House members, along with seven of the party’s senators, joined Democrats on Trump’s impeachment, they said that the former president bore responsibility for inciting the mob of his supporters and was no longer fit for public office.

But a year later, those Republicans are finding themselves ostracized — and even facing death threats — for being out of step with a party that continues to embrace Trump.

Three of the 10 have decided not to run for reelection this year. The others are all facing Trump-allied primary challengers who accuse them of lacking fealty to the most influential figure in the GOP.

And Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), who was serving as the third-ranking House Republican, was unceremoniously booted from her leadership post last year for repeatedly pushing back against Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

President Joe Biden’s latest nominations to the Federal Reserve Board mark a major victory for lawmakers and other diversity advocates who have long pushed for new voices at the world’s most powerful central bank.

Biden on Friday tapped two Black economists — Lisa Cook and Philip Jefferson — for open seats on the board. He also named Sarah Bloom Raskin, an aggressive regulator and former Fed governor, for the top job overseeing the nation’s banks, which would make her the first woman to hold that post.

Biden’s move, which came after a lobbying campaign by lawmakers such as Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), House Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, would solidify the president’s influence over the Fed during a time of tremendous economic uncertainty for the country. He has already renominated Fed Chair Jerome Powell and picked Fed Governor Lael Brainard to be vice chair.

If confirmed, the president’s selections would change the makeup of the white male-dominated Fed board of governors. In its nearly 109-year history, the board has only had three Black members — with the last one, Roger Ferguson, leaving in 2006.

The US has information that indicates Russia has prepositioned a group of operatives to conduct a false-flag operation in eastern Ukraine, a US official told CNN on Friday, in an attempt to create a pretext for an invasion.

The official said the US has evidence that the operatives are trained in urban warfare and in using explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxy forces.

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said the Defense Department has credible information indicating Russia has “prepositioned a group of operatives” to execute “an operation designed to look like an attack on them or Russian-speaking people in Ukraine” in order to create a reason for a potential invasion.

The allegation echoed a statement released by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense on Friday, which said that Russian special services are preparing provocations against Russian forces in an attempt to frame Ukraine. National security adviser Jake Sullivan hinted at the intelligence during a briefing with reporters on Thursday.

Democrats are quietly preparing for life after Build Back Better.

With little progress on Joe Biden’s signature legislation, elected officials and operatives from across the president’s party are busy plotting how to run midterm campaigns without the benefit of a bill to bolster the social safety net and make generational investments to address climate change.

It’s far from the ideal position. And party leaders and campaign strategists are holding out hope that the White House may still be able to revive nascent talks around the initiative to at least salvage some popular elements. But in interviews with nearly two dozen Democrats involved in the upcoming election, there is an increasing sense that political inertia may well win out and that their party will be forced to radically adapt its core pitch to voters.

“I don’t think any of us are expecting anything else to pass,” said Colin Strother, a Democratic operative and veteran of House campaigns in Texas. Strother said the party in Washington has “underwhelmed, underachieved and undersold” it’s successes so far. “It has left our opponents emboldened, or supporters dejected and our prospects for 2022 dim if not dark. So we have a lot of work to do to dig out of this … We better have some golden fuckin’ shovels.”

The fierce backlash to the CDC’s recent decision to shorten the recommended isolation period for people who test positive for Covid-19 was the latest in a series of communications blunders so severe that they have now become a meme.

Communication is an essential part of any public health response. But US health agencies have struggled with it since the very beginning of the pandemic, when government officials initially advised against wearing masks in early 2020 before reversing themselves to recommend nearly universal masking.

It appeared the initial guidance may have been issued in order to preserve enough masks for health care workers. Government officials were warning at the time that hospitals’ supplies could be depleted at a critical moment if there was a run on masks. It was the first of the pandemic’s “noble lies,” The Week’s Ryan Cooper wrote in a blistering essay on the paternalistic treatment of the US public that has undermined the country’s Covid-19 response.

America’s public health institutions have failed to communicate effectively with the US public throughout the pandemic for two reasons: either they have been left trying to defend poor policies, or the messaging has taken the place of creating any kind of coherent policy at all.