Category Archives: US News

Man in Black at 50: Johnny Cash’s empathy is needed more than ever

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The country star is not always remembered for his politics, but his about-face to withdraw support for Nixon and the Vietnam war may be his finest moment

“I speak my mind in a lot of these songs,” Johnny Cash wrote in the liner notes to the album Man in Black, released 50 years ago today. He might be better known now for the outlaw songs of his youth or the reckonings with death in his final recordings, but Cash used his 1971 album to set out his less-discussed political vision: long on feeling and empathy, and short on ideology and partisanship. The United States seemed hopelessly polarised, and Cash confronted that division head-on, demanding more of his fellow citizens and Christians amid the apparently endless war in Vietnam.

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1921 Tulsa race massacre remembered – in pictures

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One of the darkest chapters in the long and turbulent history of racial violence in America is commemorated in Oklahoma on Monday, the 100th anniversary of a rampage by a white mob that left an estimated 300 Black people dead. Hundreds of Black-owned businesses, churches and homes were burned, leaving about 8,000 homeless and a further 800 injured

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‘The loss is incalculable’: Descendants of the Tulsa massacre on what was stolen from them

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For many descendants, the past is still present. They explain how the legacy of the massacre, which was suppressed for so long, lives on today

Earlier this month, the three known survivors of the 1921 Tulsa massacre testified in Congress about the world they lost when a white mob burned their thriving community to the ground. “The neighborhood I fell asleep in that night was rich – not just in terms of wealth, but in culture, community and heritage,” said Viola Fletcher, who was visiting the US capital for the first time in her 107 years. “Within a few hours, all of that was gone.”

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Covid summer: Fauci warns US has ‘a ways to go’ despite lowest rates in a year

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‘We don’t want to declare victory prematurely,’ expert tells the Guardian while 2021 has seen more global cases than all of 2020

Dr Anthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases expert in the US, has warned it is too early to declare victory against Covid-19 as cases fall in the country to the lowest rates since last June.

“We don’t want to declare victory prematurely because we still have a ways to go,” Fauci told the Guardian in an interview. “But the more and more people that can get vaccinated, as a community, the community will be safer and safer.”

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Two dead and more than 20 injured in Florida banquet hall shooting

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  • Three people open fire indiscriminately on concert crowd
  • Police lament ‘despicable act of gun violence’

At least two people were killed and more than 20 injured in Miami early on Sunday as attackers opened fire on concertgoers outside a banquet hall. It was the city’s second deadly mass shooting in little more than 24 hours.

A police spokesman said the shooting happened in the Hialeah area. Three people got out of a white SUV and began firing on a line outside the El Mula banquet hall. The attackers used assault rifles and a handgun, authorities said.

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‘They didn’t talk about it’: how a historian helped Tulsa confront the horror of its past

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In 1921, a white mob attacked Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, killing an estimated 300 people, but it wasn’t talked about until recently

There was no memorial to it in town. Teachers made no mention of it, not even during a half-semester devoted to local history. The white schoolboy Scott Ellsworth of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was left to wonder what the city’s darkest secret could be.

Related: The Ground Breaking review: indispensable history of the Tulsa Race Massacre

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Daughter of writer Michael Lewis and Tabitha Soren killed in car crash

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Dixie Lewis, 19, was in a car that was travelling on State Route 89 in California when it crossed into the path of an oncoming truck

Dixie Lewis, the 19-year-old daughter of the writer Michael Lewis and former MTV correspondent Tabitha Soren, has been killed in a highway crash in northern California.

Lewis was a passenger in a car driven by her friend and former Berkeley High School classmate, Ross Schultz, 20, who also died in accident on Tuesday afternoon, according to her family and authorities.

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11 Texas sheriff’s office employees fired after death of inmate

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Six were also suspended after three-month investigation into death of Jaquaree Simmons, which was ruled a homicide

Eleven employees of a Texas sheriff’s office have been fired and six suspended following the death of an inmate who was hit multiple times in the head by detention officers, authorities said on Friday.

The Harris county sheriff, Ed Gonzalez, said he was “very upset and heartbroken” after a three-month investigation into the death of Jaquaree Simmons, 23, in February. Medical examiners ruled Simmons’ death a homicide from injuries to his head.

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How Mitch McConnell killed the US Capitol attack commission

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The story of how Republicans undermined the 6 January inquiry is informed by eight House and Senate aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity

Days before the Senate voted down the creation of a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, was adamant: he would oppose the bill, regardless of any amendments – and he expected his colleagues to follow suit.

The commission that would have likely found Donald Trump and some Republicans responsible for the insurrection posed an existential threat to the GOP ahead of the midterms, he said, and would complicate efforts to regain the majority in Congress.

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Joe Biden seeks Republican buy-in but how long before patience snaps?

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Talks continue on a compromise over infrastructure but GOP intransigeance on a Capitol riot commission does not bode well

It’s become a familiar process in the Joe Biden era.

Biden and Democrats say they will work with Republicans. Republicans say they want a seat at the negotiating table. Then the prospect of Democrats going alone begins to hover over the negotiations.

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Patrick Byrne: pro-Trump millionaire pushing election conspiracy theories

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Weekend rallies with Roger Stone and Michael Flynn show key influence of libertarian helping to fund Arizona election audit

This Memorial Day weekend, several prominent conservative allies of Donald Trump, who have promoted almost nonstop his false narratives about the 2020 election results, are slated to hold rallies in Florida and Texas endorsed by the wealthy libertarian Patrick Byrne.

Billed as featuring the Trump confidant Roger Stone, the retired general Michael Flynn, Byrne and other pro-Trump stalwarts, the dual events underscore that Byrne – who has been leading private fundraising for the politically driven vote audit now under way in Arizona’s largest county – seems intent on funding and pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 elections.

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Zero Fail review: US Secret Service as presidential protectors – and drunken frat boys

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Pulitzer-winner Carol Leonnig anatomises an agency that has never truly lived up to its steely professional image

At times, the US Secret Service has resembled a bunch of pistol-toting frat boys on a taxpayer-funded spring break. In the words of a drunken supervisor speaking to his men in the run-up to a 2012 summit in Cartagena, Colombia: “You don’t know how lucky you are … You are going to fuck your way across the globe.”

Related: Trump family members got ‘inappropriately close’ to Secret Service agents, book claims

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‘From hearsay to hard evidence’: are UFOs about to go mainstream?

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Unidentified aerial phenomena are getting serious attention on TV and from Barack Obama and Marco Rubio and next month the Pentagon is set to release a major declassified analysis

Nick Pope spent the early 1990s investigating UFOs for the British ministry of defence. Sequestered in a rarely visited government office – the “metaphorical basement” – he well remembers how his field of work was regarded.

“I would walk down the corridor and people would whistle the theme music to either Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the Twilight Zone,” Pope told the Guardian.

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California governor pardons formerly incarcerated firefighters

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Bounchan Keola and Kao Saelee were facing deportation to Laos after spending decades in prison for teenage convictions

California’s governor has issued pardons to two formerly incarcerated firefighters who had been threatened with deportation to Laos after spending most of their lives in the US.

Gavin Newsom on Friday announced the pardons for Bounchan Keola, 39, and Kao Saelee, 41, who were both sent to US immigration authorities last year after spending decades in prison for teenage convictions and had battled wildfires as incarcerated firefighters.

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San Jose gunman stockpiled weapons and 22,000 rounds of ammunition

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Officials say the guns Samuel James Cassidy used to kill nine of his coworkers at a California rail yard appear to be legal

A gunman who killed nine of his co-workers at a rail yard in San Jose, California, had stockpiled weapons and ammunition at his home, including 12 guns and 22,000 rounds of ammunition, authorities said on Friday.

Investigators found the cache of weapons at the home of Samuel James Cassidy, the Santa Clara county sheriff’s office said in a news release. They also turned up multiple cans of gasoline and suspected molotov cocktails. Authorities have said that Cassidy set his house on fire using a timer or slow-burn device to coincide with his attack.

The guns he used to open fire on his co-workers appear to be legal, officials said. They have not said how he obtained them.

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Joe Biden stakes out position against discriminatory abortion rule

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President’s budget proposal seeks to end Hyde amendment that limits insurance coverage of terminations for nearly 8m women

For the first time in nearly 30 years, a US president has released a budget that doesn’t ban federal funding for abortion.

On Friday, Joe Biden released his full budget proposal for fiscal year 2022, and in keeping with his campaign promise on abortion access, Biden did not include the Hyde amendment, an annual budget rider that bans federal Medicaid money from being used for almost all abortions. (There are exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest or that would threaten the pregnant person’s life.)

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Republicans’ blocking of the Capitol commission shows how deep the rot is

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Analysis: one of America’s two major parties now falls outside the democratic mainstream but are Democrats taking the existential threat seriously?

The question now is not so much whether the Republican party can be saved any time in the foreseeable future. It is what Joe Biden and the Democrats should do when faced with a party determined to subvert democracy through any means necessary, including violence.

On Friday Republicans in the Senate torpedoed an effort to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the deadly insurrection by Donald Trump’s supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January, deploying the procedural move known as the filibuster to stop it even being debated.

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Senate Republicans block creation of US Capitol attack commission

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Republicans killed effort to set up a 9/11-style inquiry into the 6 January attack despite broad support for such an investigation

Senate Republicans have blocked the creation of a special commission to study the deadly 6 January attack on the Capitol, dashing hopes for a bipartisan panel amid a Republican push to put the violent insurrection by Donald Trump’s supporters behind them.

Republicans killed the effort to set up a 9/11-style inquiry into the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob despite broad popular support for such an investigation and pleas from the family of a Capitol police officer who collapsed and died after the siege and other officers who battled the rioters.

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US taking ‘very close look’ at vaccine passports for international travel

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Homeland security chief Alejandro Mayorkas says ‘any passport that we provide for vaccinations … [must be] accessible to all’

The Biden administration is taking “a very close look” at the possibility of vaccine passports for travel into and out of the United States, the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, said on Friday.

The Transportation Security Administration, which safeguards the nation’s transportation systems, is housed under Mayorkas’s department.

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