Only Republican to twice vote to impeach Trump gets hostile reception as censure motion narrowly fails
Mitt Romney was loudly booed at the Utah Republican party convention on Saturday – and called a “traitor” and a “communist” as he tried to speak.
Related: Bush: ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ideals show pro-Trump Republicans ‘want to be extinct’
Continue reading...After more than two decades of distinguished work in the US theatre as an actor, director and teacher, and appearances in a dozen or so films, Olympia Dukakis, who has died aged 89, became hugely famous overnight by winning the best supporting actress Oscar in 1988 for her performance as Cher’s mother in the romantic film Moonstruck (1987).
The course of her career suggests that her ambitions never lay in the direction of Hollywood. Her theatrical credits read like the canon of classic and modern plays: she had roles in plays by Euripides, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, Lorca, Pirandello, Brecht, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, on and off Broadway, as well as in various regional theatres across the country. In films, she took on several character roles, making an impression in scores of pictures for more than half a century.
Continue reading...Community and advocates in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, say police escalating peaceful protests and ‘trying to antagonize city’
Perched on a ladder, Ulysses “Bones” Edwards reached for another can of spray paint, adding a few deft strokes to the mural of Andrew Brown Jr that was slowly starting to take shape on the side of the house where Brown lived in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, a stone’s throw from where he was killed by law enforcement last week.
A crowd of marchers passed Edwards as he worked on Thursday. Dozens also gathered over the weekend, ahead of Brown’s funeral on Monday, with demonstrations on Saturday marking the eleventh straight day of peaceful protests in the coastal city. At least 16 people have been arrested since the city enacted a curfew earlier in the week.
Continue reading...Mitt Romney was loudly booed at the Utah Republican party convention on Saturday, and called a 'traitor' and a 'communist' as he tried to speak. 'Aren’t you embarrassed?' the Utah senator asked the crowd of 2,100 delegates at the Maverik Center in West Valley City. 'I’m a man who says what he means, and you know I was not a fan of our last president’s character issues.'
Continue reading...Capsule parachutes into Gulf of Mexico at 3am, the first night-time US crew splashdown since 1968
SpaceX safely returned four astronauts from the International Space Station on Sunday, making the first US crew splashdown in darkness since the Apollo 8 moonshot.
The Dragon capsule parachuted into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Panama City, Florida, just before 3am, ending the second astronaut flight for Elon Musk’s company. It was an express trip home, lasting just six and a half hours.
Continue reading...Finally, we have arrived, not at a clash of civilisations, but at the clash of civilisations. Or so President Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress would have you believe. The US versus China. The west versus the east. Democracy versus autocracy. Biden’s speech last week was rich in laying down markers for Washington in the contest of the century.
“They’re going to write about this point in history,” Biden told a gathering of US television news anchors before his speech, in remarks later released by the White House. “Not about any of us in here, but about whether or not democracy can function in the 21st century.”
Continue reading...When Mike Beck developed a rare form of Parkinson’s US intelligence concluded he was the victim of a hi-tech weapon
When the first reports surfaced of a mysterious disorder that was afflicting dozens of US diplomats in Cuba, Mike Beck’s reaction was one of recognition and relief.
Beck, a retired National Security Agency counterintelligence officer, was at his home in Maryland, scrolling through the day’s news on his computer when he spotted the story, and remembers shouting out to his wife.
Continue reading...With less than one-third of Americans fully vaccinated, health authorities switch from mass vaccination clinics to outreach campaigns
A decline in daily Covid-19 vaccination rates has left US public health authorities with a new problem – how to effectively shrink operations.
In the campaign to immunize all American adults against the coronavirus, most of the difficulties to date have involved overwhelming demand and restricted supply. Now, with less than one-third of Americans fully vaccinated, local public health authorities described a sense of whiplash as they pivot from mass vaccination clinics to outreach campaigns, all within a couple of weeks.
Continue reading...Olympia Dukakis, the Oscar-winning actor whose hit films included Moonstruck and Steel Magnolias, has died. She was 89.
Related: Olympia Dukakis: 'My character is described as a foul-mouthed lesbian Walther Matthau? I love that!'
Continue reading...A 39-year-old Colorado woman died in an apparent black bear attack, just the fourth fatal mauling in the state since records began in 1960, authorities said on Saturday.
Related: Montana guide mauled to death in grizzly bear attack outside Yellowstone
Continue reading...Mexica’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said on Friday the US will probably send his country 5m more doses of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine, as the company admitted production in Central and South America had suffered multiple setbacks.
Related: US cites Indian variant in implementing travel ban from Tuesday
Continue reading...A New Jersey high school teacher was suspended with pay for making profanity-laced comments to students about George Floyd.
Related: Teargas, flash-bangs: the devastating toll of police tactics on Minnesota children
Continue reading...Former president speaks as lone anti-Trump Republican seeks House seat in Texas special election
Ahead of a special election on Saturday to replace a Texas congressman who died after contracting Covid-19, former president George W Bush said the ascendancy of supporters of Donald Trump suggest Republicans “want to be extinct”.
Related: George W Bush on Trump’s Republicans: ‘Isolationist, protectionist, nativist’
Continue reading...The president has sought bipartisan support but not at the cost of delay and dilution of his bold policies
Joe Biden started his presidential campaign with promises to be a unifying force in Washington who would help lawmakers come together to achieve bipartisan reform. But over his first 100 days in office, Biden’s message to Republicans in Congress has been closer to this: get on board or get out of my way.
This willingness to go it alone if necessary appears to be a hard-won lesson from the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, when Democrats negotiated with Republicans on major bills only to have them vote against the final proposals.
Continue reading...Commercial beekeepers in the US say counterfeit honey from Asia is forcing down prices and pushing them to financial collapse
Imports of cheap, fake honey from Asia are pushing American beekeepers to financial collapse, according to a lawsuit.
Thousands of commercial beekeepers in the US have taken legal action against the country’s largest honey importers and packers for allegedly flooding the market with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of counterfeit honey.
Continue reading...Apple, Google owner Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft raked in money in first quarter
Big tech is on a roll. In every minute of the first three months of 2021, Apple, Google owner Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft sold products and services worth about $2.5m (£1.8m) combined. Profits before tax for the period came in at $88bn – more than $1bn of profit for every working day.
After a year of shifting to online work and leisure across the global economy, financial results published this week by most of US tech’s biggest names were bound to be strong. But even more bullish analysts on Wall Street were surprised by how fast they raked in money in the quarter, auguring even greater profits in the years ahead.
Continue reading...Former US secretary of state says strained relationship is world’s ‘biggest problem’, as he warns of Beijing’s economic and military might
Former US diplomat Henry Kissinger has said that US-China tensions threaten to engulf the entire world and could lead to an Armageddon-like clash between the two military and technology giants.
The 97-year-old former US secretary of state, who as an adviser to president Richard Nixon crafted the 1971 unfreezing of relations between Washington and Beijing, said the mix of economic, military and technological strengths of the two superpowers carried more risks than the cold war with the Soviet Union.
Continue reading...Defense department will cancel all construction paid for with military funds originally intended for other purposes
The US Department of Defense said on Friday it was cancelling the construction of parts of former president Donald Trump’s border wall with Mexico that were being built using military funds.
All unobligated money was being returned to military, the Pentagon said.
Continue reading...A petition, signed by more than 54,000 people, calls on Biden to return the garden to its ‘former glory’ as Jacqueline Kennedy designed
Efforts to erase the Trump family legacy have reached the White House potting sheds and nurseries with Jill Biden being urged to restore the mansion’s garden to a state that predates ex-First Lady Melania Trump’s 2019 makeover.
An online petition calling on the first lady to return the Rose Garden to its “former glory” has been signed by more than 54,000 people. The petition says Biden’s predecessor “had the cherry trees, a gift from Japan, removed as well as the rest of the foliage and replaced with a boring tribute to herself”.
Continue reading...State officials will truck the young fish to the ocean, with the waterways they use to travel downstream historically low
California officials will truck more than 15 million young salmon raised at fish hatcheries in the state’s Central Valley agricultural region to the Pacific Ocean because projected river conditions show that the waterways the fish use to travel downstream will be historically low and warm due to increasing drought.
Officials announced the huge trucking operation on Wednesday, saying the effort is aimed at ensuring “the highest level of survival for the young salmon on their hazardous journey to the Pacific Ocean”.
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