List of All Articles with Tag 'c'

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy called for cancelling Juneteenth after he had previously posted a video celebrating the holiday, NBC News reported. Mr Ramaswamy spoke in Vail, Iowa, about how to make elections more secure. In his speech, he called for Election Day to be made a national holiday. “Cancel Juneteenth or one of the other useless ones we made up,” he said. In addition, he called for paper ballots and voter identification cards despite the fact there is little evidence of widespread voter fraud. When asked if he considers Juneteenth a “useless” holiday, he said, “I basically do.” Juneteenth commemorates when Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas on 19 June 1865 and announced that enslaved people were officially freed. In the ensuing years, it became a day of celebration in Black communities across Texas. In 2021, Congress voted overwhelmingly and President Joe Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth a national holiday. But two months ago, Mr Ramaswamy posted a video celebrating Juneteenth. “We don’t just look back and flog ourselves, that’s beside the point,” Mr Ramaswamy said. “What we celebrate is how far we’ve come, and as a first-generation American myself, you better believe I’m proud of it. Happy Juneteenth, everybody.” When asked by NBC News whether he thought Veterans Day or Memorial Day were useless, Mr Ramaswamy deferred. “I stand with the presumption of time-tested traditions,” he said, calling Juneteenth “redundant” of Martin Luther King Jr Day and Presidents Day. “The reason for making it a holiday was under political duress. It was a political hostage situation on the back of the death of George Floyd,” he said. Read More Vivek Ramaswamy's Hindu faith is front and center in his GOP presidential campaign Republicans rage against Jack Smith after latest indictment of Donald Trump over 2020 election conspiracy Indictment ignored, Trump barely a mention, as GOP candidates pitch Iowa voters to challenge him Vivek Ramaswamy's Hindu faith is front and center in his GOP presidential campaign GOP presidential hopeful Chris Christie says 'inhumanity' of war is palpable during visit to Ukraine

The former head of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office is in talks to plead guilty to charges relating to work he allegedly did for a sanctioned Russian oligarch after leaving the government, according to a court order.

Tou Thao, the former Minneapolis police officer who held back a crowd of bystanders during George Floyd's fatal arrest in May 2020, was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison Monday for aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter.

MEMPHIS, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 7, 2023--

CBS' latest game show, “Superfan,” premiering Wednesday, gathers one musical act and their fans each week into a studio and gradually whittles the contestants down to two, giving online voters the final say on who will be crowned the ultimate superfan

Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis says his rival Donald Trump lost the 2020 election

Ron DeSantis continues to defend newly approved curriculum guidelines in Florida instructing students to learn that enslaved people “developed skills” that could be “applied for personal benefit”. “That means they developed skills in spite of slavery, not because of slavery,” the governor told NBC News in a recent interview that aired on 7 August. “It was them showing resourcefulness and then using those skills once slavery ended,” he added. Mr DeSantis, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president in 2024, has dismissed criticism from Vice President Kamala Harris and Democratic and Republican members of Congress urging Florida officials to amend the state’s African American history standards and reflect an honest history of race and racism in school curricula. The vice president has also rejected an invitation from Mr DeSantis to “discuss” the standards, telling a crowd in Orlando earlier this month that “there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact: there were no redeeming qualities of slavery.” Mr DeSantis had previously stated he “wasn’t involved” with the guidelines approved by the state’s appointed Board of Education. He said the standards are “probably going to show some of the folks” – enslaved people – “that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” The development of such “skills” would not have benefited the millions of enslaved people in the US in the decades before slavery’s abolition. Another controversial guideline instructs high schoolers to be taught that a massacre in the state led by white supremacists against Black residents to stop them from voting in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” “Adults know what slavery really was. It involved rape, it involved torture, it involved taking a baby from their mother, it involved some of the worst examples of depriving humanity of people in our world,” Ms Harris said in her remarks in Jacksonville last month. South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, echoed Ms Harris in his criticism of the standards, stressing that slavery was defined by “separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives”. “It was just devastating,” said Mr Scott, who is also seeking the 2024 Republican nomination. “So I would hope that every person in our country – and certainly running for president – would appreciate that.” Mr DeSantis told NBC in response: “Don’t take that side of Kamala Harris against the state of Florida. Don’t indulge those lies.” The new standards join the governor’s overhaul of public education and a “parents’ rights” agenda that targets honest lessons on race and racism and gender and sexuality, which the governor told NBC amounts to “indoctrination”. “Those standards were not political at all,” he added. “The legislature didn’t dictate any of that. [The] governor’s office didn’t dictate anything of that.” Last week, before thousands of high school students enrolled in advanced placement courses begin classes for the 2023-2024 school year, the DeSantis administration criticised the College Board’s warning that Florida education officials had “effectively banned” AP Psychology courses in the state under the Parental Rights in Education Act, what opponents have derided as the “Don’t Say Gay” law. Read More Ron DeSantis admits ‘of course’ Donald Trump lost the election DeSantis blasted for ‘un-American’ restrictions on AP psychology course under ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law Why Florida’s new curriculum on slavery is becoming a political headache for Ron DeSantis

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said "of course" Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, his the most direct comments on the matter in the nearly three years since the former president's defeat.

Elon Musk says he may need to get surgery before a proposed “cage match” with Mark Zuckerberg

Former president Donald Trump has again lashed out at the District of Columbia judge who will preside over his criminal trial and the prosecutor who brought the case against him for allegedly conspiring to disrupt certification of electoral votes following his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. Mr Trump on Monday wrote on his Truth Social platform that Jack Smith, the Department of Justice special prosecutor who has obtained two federal indictments against him since June, is “going before his number one draft pick, the Judge of his ‘dreams’ (WHO MUST BE RECUSED!)” in an effort to “take away” the ex-president’s First Amendment rights. The twice-impeached, thrice-indicted former president was referring to a series of court filings in which Mr Smith is seeking a standard protective order to prevent Mr Trump from disclosing information which the government is set to turn over to him and his defence team as part of the pre-trial discovery process. Prosecutors, citing Mr Trump’s penchant for “public statements on social media regarding witnesses, judges, attorneys, and others associated with legal matters pending against him,” asked Judge Tanya Chutkan to impose an order barring the former president from disclosing discovery materials “directly or indirectly to any person or entity other than persons employed to assist in the defense, persons who are interviewed as potential witnesses, counsel for potential witnesses, and other persons to whom the Court may authorize disclosure”. Mr Trump’s attorneys asked the judge for extra time to compose a response to the government’s motion, but Judge Chutkan quickly ordered the defence to respond by 5.00 pm along with a proposal for an alternative protective order. The former president has a history of disclosing sensitive materials so the names of people involved in court proceedings against him could be leaked to his supporters. After the FBI searched his Palm Beach, Florida home on 8 August 2022, an unredacted copy of a search warrant receipt that had been given to his attorneys was published by Breitbart News, allowing the names of FBI agents involved in the search to become public. According to subsequent court filings, the agents who were named on the document were innundated with death threats after their names became known to the ex-president’s supporters. Read More Ron DeSantis admits ‘of course’ Donald Trump lost the election A timeline of Donald Trump’s spat with Megan Rapinoe Ofcom investigates GB News programmes over due impartiality rules

Referendum results say 95% of voters back the changes but turnout is believed to be very low.

Japan has expressed concerns over Iran’s advancing uranium enrichment program and its suspected supplying of combat drones to Moscow for Russia’s war on Ukraine