On the evening of February 20, 1939, the marquee of Madison Square Garden was lit up with the evening's main event: a "Pro-America Rally." The organizers had chosen the date in celebration of George Washington's birthday and procured a 30-foot-tall banner of America's first president for the stage. More than 20,000 men and women streamed inside and took their seats. The view they had was stunning: Washington was hung between American flags...and swastikas.

Last week, reports surfaced of a new videotape showing singer R. Kelly engaging in sex acts with an underage girl. This is not the first time the R&B superstar has been accused of sexual abuse. Allegations have circled Kelly for decades; in 2002, a videotape surfaced that purportedly showed Kelly engaging in sexual acts with a teenage girl.

We know their names, and where they were. But no one has given a public explanation for what several former elite U.S. service members were doing in Haiti — and why they were driving without license plates, carrying an assortment of automatic rifles, drones and other gear.

The men face charges of being part of a criminal conspiracy, the Haitian Times reports, after being intercepted at a routine police roadblock.

For the fourth year in a row, The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks hate groups, reports that hate and domestic extremism are rising in an unabated trend. The center found a 30 percent increase in U.S. hate groups over the past four years and a 7 percent increase in hate groups in 2018 alone, according to the center's annual Year in Hate and Extremism report. The group designated 1,020 organizations as hate groups in 2018, a high of at least 20 years.

Out of 16, just five remain.

The Aspen Words Literary Prize, now in its second year, has trimmed its longlist of 16 nominees to just five finalists. The books on the shortlist unveiled Wednesday, according to Aspen judges, all manage to "illuminate a vital contemporary issue and demonstrate the transformative power of literature on thought and culture."