Gaza protesters wore keffiyehs as Biden tried to assure the crowd: ‘Your voices should be heard, I promise you I hear them’
It was, in the end, an artful compromise.
Joe Biden got to speak uninterrupted and renew his pitch to Black voters. Protesters got to make their point by wearing keffiyehs or raising a fist. Even the skies were merciful, hinting at but never quite unleashing rain.
Continue reading...Ex-air force captain Ed Dwight, passed over by Nasa in 1961, now oldest person to reach edge of space with Jeff Bezo’s space firm
Sixty-one years since he was selected but ultimately passed over to become the first Black astronaut, Ed Dwight finally reached space in a Blue Origin rocket – and set a different record.
At 10.37am on Sunday, Jeff Bezos’s space company launched its NS-25 mission from west Texas, marking Blue Origin’s first crewed spaceflight since 2022 when its New Shepard rocket was grounded due to a mid-flight failure.
Continue reading...Speech warmly received at historically Black college despite backlash from students in weeks leading to address over war
Joe Biden told graduating students of Morehouse College that American democracy has failed the Black community, but vowed to continue fighting “the poison of white supremacy”, in a widely watched speech to a historically Black college during an election year.
Despite a backlash from some students and alumni in the weeks leading up to Biden’s commencement address, including over the Hamas-Israel war and concerns that Biden would use the speech as a campaign event, the president’s address to the all-male school was warmly received. He used his speech to reaffirm his commitment to democracy in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, and to reiterate his call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Continue reading...A school district in Houston has voted to redact chapters on vaccines and climate change, and parents and educators are worried
The wave of book bans sweeping the US, typically reserved for works of fiction deemed controversial, has hit textbooks used in public schools, marking the next step in Republicans’ war on education.
The board of trustees for the Cypress Fairbanks independent school district in Houston voted 6-1 earlier this month to redact certain chapters in science textbooks, including those about vaccines, human growth, diversity, and climate change.
Continue reading...AI Overviews, announced this week, are the culmination of a long line of products dedicated to keeping you on Google.com
Google announced this week that it would begin the international rollout of its new artificial intelligence-powered search feature, called AI Overviews. When billions of people search a range of topics from news to recipes to general knowledge questions, what they see first will now be an AI-generated summary.
Google touted AI Overviews at its annual I/O developer conference as a way of delivering customers quick answers and simplifying the online search experience, but it also has another effect on the way that people engage with the internet: keeping users, and advertisers, on Google.com. It’s a new era in Google’s years-long quest for your attention.
Continue reading...PFAS chemicals present in air, rain, atmosphere and water in basin, which holds nearly 95% of US freshwater
Toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” are ubiquitous in the Great Lakes basin’s air, rain, atmosphere and water, new peer-reviewed research shows.
The first-of-its-kind, comprehensive picture of PFAS levels for the basin, which holds nearly 95% of the nation’s freshwater, also reveals that precipitation is probably a major contributor to the lakes’ contamination.
This story was amended on 18 May 2024 to clarify that Buffalo does not border Lake Ontario.
Continue reading...Pro-Palestinian students were attempting to take over a university hall to protest school’s refusal to negotiate in ‘good faith’
More than a dozen pro-Palestinian activists, including six students at the University of Pennsylvania, were arrested after attempting to occupy a hall on the university campus late Friday.
The protesters were arrested around 9pm after trying to take over Fisher-Bennett Hall but had been met with a response from university and Philadelphia police, according to reports. The Daily Pennsylvanian reported that protesters caused the evacuation of an alumni event at the Penn Museum.
Continue reading...Police were able to rescue child, who is in hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, before house caught fire with father still in it
A six-month-old baby is currently hospitalized after a man allegedly shot the infant several times during an armed home standoff in Surprise, Arizona, about 30 miles north-west of Phoenix.
At about 3am on Friday, the father of the child allegedly broke into the home where the child and mother lived, according to Surprise police. The child’s father did not live in the house, police said, adding that the man held the mother and child hostage for several hours before the mother managed to escape.
Continue reading...Republican Glenn Youngkin also vetoed bills related to maintaining access to contraception, saying they were ‘not ready’
Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin has vetoed two bills that would have stripped tax exemptions for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that has opposed the removal of statues of southern state generals during the US civil war and other markers of the southern states’ attempt to secede from the Union in defense of slavery.
The Republican governor vetoed several measures, including those related to maintaining access to contraception, saying in a statement they were “not ready to become law”.
Continue reading...At least two children have already been killed while working in Mar-Jac Poultry plants in the US south over the last year
A poultry plant in Jasper, Alabama, has been accused of hiring minors and could be shut down for 30 days, according to a newly released US Department of Labor lawsuit.
Mar-Jac Poultry, the largest employer in Walker county, is accused of violating federal labor laws when it hired four minors as young as 16 who were allegedly discovered working overnight at the company’s slaughterhouse.
Continue reading...Judge declines to remove Darrell McClanahan, who claims one-year honorary membership in terror group, from GOP primary race
A long-shot Missouri gubernatorial candidate with ties to the Ku Klux Klan will stay on the Republican ticket, a judge ruled on Friday.
Cole county circuit court judge Cotton Walker denied a request by the Missouri GOP to kick Darrell McClanahan out of the August Republican primary.
Continue reading...The dog-killing South Dakota governor’s VP hopes are in tatters. But she’s not the first politician to flame out with an own goal
She could have been a contender. But then she wrote a book. And suddenly Kristi Noem was caught like a rabbit – or a rambunctious puppy – in the headlights.
The governor of South Dakota found herself insisting that a false claim she met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un had been put in her book by accident. Wait, said Elizabeth Vargas of NewsNation, you recorded the whole audiobook version and read this passage out loud. Why didn’t you take it out then?
Continue reading...Hotel surveillance cameras at InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles captured incident Combs had vehemently denied
A newly released video shows Sean “Diddy” Combs manhandling and kicking singer Cassie Ventura – his former girlfriend – in plain view of hotel surveillance cameras in 2016, before the rapper, music producer and businessman rapidly settled a lawsuit that she brought against him this past November, according to footage exclusively obtained by CNN.
The video in question illustrates in the most graphic nature possible one of the beatings alleged and described in Ventura’s lawsuit, which Combs had vehemently denied.
Continue reading...Coleman, known for his ample mustache, won a Golden Globe for The Slap Maxwell Story and also appeared in Boardwalk Empire
Dabney Coleman, the mustachioed character actor who specialized in smarmy villains like the chauvinist boss in 9 to 5 and the nasty TV director in Tootsie, has died. He was 92.
Coleman died on Thursday, his daughter, Quincy Coleman, told the Hollywood Reporter. No other details were immediately available.
Continue reading...Supporters gather enough valid signatures to put measure – that would enshrine abortion rights into constitution – on to ballot
Voters in Colorado will have a say on abortion rights this fall after supporters collected enough valid signatures to put a measure on the ballot, part of a national push to pose abortion rights questions to voters since the US supreme court removed the nationwide right to abortion.
The Colorado measure officially made the ballot on Friday and would enshrine abortion rights into the constitution in a state which already allows abortion at all stages of pregnancy despite the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade.
Continue reading...New Hampshire employees of day care arrested after six-month investigation and each face 10 charges of endangering children
Four New Hampshire daycare employees allegedly spiked children’s food with the sleep supplement melatonin and were arrested on Thursday.
The arrests stem from a November 2023 investigation at a daycare in Manchester, New Hampshire, about 30 minutes outside the state capital of Concord.
Continue reading...Workers in Tuscaloosa vote against bid to unionize, as UAW president Shawn Fain hails impact of campaign despite defeat
The United Auto Workers has failed in its effort to unionize workers at two Mercedes-Benz plants in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in a blow to the union’s plans to build its membership in the southern states.
The loss on Friday comes amid the UAW’s ambitious union-organizing campaign to organize 150,000 non-union auto workers around the US.
Continue reading...Samantha Power says barely 100 trucks of aid a day enter Gaza, far less than 600 needed to address threat of famine
Humanitarian assistance has begun to arrive in Gaza along a US-made pier, but the US aid chief said the new sea corridor could not be a substitute for land crossings, and warned that deliveries of food and fuel entering Gaza had slowed to “dangerously low levels”.
The White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, confirmed on Friday that truckloads of humanitarian aid, including food from the United Arab Emirates, sent by ship from Cyprus, had been unloaded on the Gaza coast and handed over to the control of the UN.
Continue reading...DePape, a rightwing conspiracy theorist, broke into the Pelosis’ San Francisco home in 2022 and hit Paul Pelosi with a hammer
David DePape, a rightwing conspiracy theorist who broke into Nancy Pelosi’s northern California home in 2022 and bludgeoned her husband with a hammer, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.
A federal jury convicted him of attempted kidnapping of a federal official and assault on the immediate family member of a federal official in November 2023, just over a year after the attack in the former House speaker’s San Francisco home.
Continue reading...In texts received in Spanish and translated to English, the girl tried to describe her location, though she did not know where she was
Authorities rescued a 17-year old girl after she was trafficked to Ventura county, California, from Mexico two months ago and texted 911 for help.
On Thursday, the Ventura county sheriff’s office announced that on 9 May authorities rescued the girl after she sent messages to 911. The text message correspondence began with a call taker at a 911 communication center, according to the sheriff’s office, which added that the messages were received in Spanish and translated into English.
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