Delaware, Connecticut, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island are holding their presidential primaries today. Polls close in all five states at 8 PM ET. We'll be liveblogging the results at Daily Kos Elections, and we'll also be live-tweeting the proceedings. Maryland and Pennsylvania are also holding down-ballot primaries, and Daily Kos Elections' Jeff Singer has put together a guide of what to watch. The biggest contest is in Pennsylvania, where national Democrats have spent millions to help Katie McGinty deny 2010 nominee Joe Sestak a second shot at Republican Sen. Pat Toomey. We also have a Senate primary in Maryland between Democratic Reps. Donna Edwards and Chris Van Hollen, as well as plenty of exciting House races, and the mayoral contest in Baltimore.
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Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is Algorithm blues:
• Chernobyl isn’t an historical event. It’s a living reality. Miami Herald reports the ruined plant will be a threat for 3,000 years:
It will be 30 years ago Tuesday that Pripyat and the nearby Chernobyl nuclear plant became synonymous with nuclear disaster, that the word Chernobyl came to mean more than just a little village in rural Ukraine, and this place became more than just another spot in the shadowy Soviet Union.
Even 30 years later—25 years after the country that built it ceased to exist—the full damage of that day is still argued.
Death toll estimates run from hundreds to millions. The area near the reactor is both a teeming wildlife refuge and an irradiated ghost-scape. Much of eastern and central Europe continues to deal with fallout aftermath. The infamous Reactor Number 4 remains a problem that is neither solved nor solvable.
• The stubborn persistence of Confederate monuments, memorials, namesakes:
For all the high-profile removals, there remains a stunning number of Confederate Civil War monuments, memorials, and namesakes in public spaces around the country, as a new inventory taken by the Southern Poverty Law Center makes clear.
Relying on federal, state, and local databases, the often-controversial liberal group took a tally of Confederate-related sites around the country and found more than 1,500 in 31 states.
• Mapping out the stores in American cities.
• Billy Paul, “Me and Mrs. Jones” singer, dead at 80:
Billy Paul, the Grammy-winning soul singer of the 1970s hit "Me and Mrs. Jones," has died, a statement on his official website said. He was 80.
• China backs off on some previously planned coal-fired plants:
In guidelines released on Monday, China halted plans for new coal-fired power stations in many parts of the country, and construction of some approved plants will be postponed until at least 2018.
The announcement, by the National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration, means that about 200 planned coal-fired power generators — those seeking approval and those approved but not yet under construction — may not be completed, said Lauri Myllyvirta, who analyzes China’s energy production for Greenpeace.
• Purple reign, forever. Or how Prince influenced rap music for all eternity.
• Mexican government uses Trump to distract from student murders:
An independent investigative panel of independent experts released its final report on the massacre in the state of Guerrero, which left 43 students of a rural teachers college in Ayotzinapa missing and presumed dead. Its findings were devastating.
The Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, whose work has led to high-profile prosecutions against the Colombian military, a Guatemalan dictator and American oil companies, not only provided the most chilling account of what the students had suffered one night in September 2014, but it also showed that the Mexican government had, at the very least, badly mishandled the investigation, and quite possibly attempted a cover-up.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Primary day, with its usual bumps in the road that aren’t fraud. Measuring the “Never X” vote. New 3rd party fantasy among worst ever. Stop trying to make Jackson defenses happen. More lessons in nuance from Maryland’s hotly contested primaries.
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