He will also announce new specifics on the $10 billion community revitalization fund included in his infrastructure proposal.

New competitive grants totaling $15 billion will target neighborhoods where people have been cut off from jobs, schools and businesses because of previous transportation investments, Biden is expected to announce. And the American Jobs Plan will also invest $31 billion to support minority-owned small businesses.

"I am 107 years old and have never seen justice. I pray that one day I will," Fletcher told lawmakers. Fletcher was seven years old when she witnessed the massacre.

He said the federal government needs to "acknowledge the role that it has played in stripping wealth and opportunity from Black communities."

The President said his administration is addressing longstanding racial inequalities by investing in programs to provide capital to small businesses in economically disadvantaged areas, and ensuring that infrastructure projects advance racial equity and environmental justice.

Almost all recent presidents have seen their approval ratings sink from their inauguration through the end of their first summer in office

Obama suffered more steady erosion through his first months; W. Bush bounced around the most (until his response to the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, catapulted him to an elevated approval rating he maintained for months), while Trump's numbers started very low (44% approval in his first Gallup survey) and edged into the thirties, a nadir that only Clinton also hit by the end of his first summer.

"Early in a president's term, media coverage and many politicians from both parties stay relatively positive (or at least less negative than later)," he wrote me in an email. "Opposition politicians tend to mute their criticism, at least a bit, in the wake of an election defeat

the most common thread in the summer slump for these presidents is a shift in focus from executive action, which typically comes across as crisp and decisive, to legislative negotiation, which is inevitably lengthy and messy.

Long legislative fights during their first year have weakened presidents in both parties. Even Trump's approval ratings reached some of their lowest points ever as he pushed his effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act in summer 2017.

With the economy steadily recovering from the pandemic, Biden is in a stronger position on that front than either Clinton or Obama. And Republicans so far have failed to mobilize against him anything like the grassroots resistance from the tea party or even the eventual uprising from gun owners, small business groups and conservative Christians that coalesced against Clinton.

Cutting a deal offers Biden the chance to notch a legislative victory and show progress on one of his core campaign promises -- proving he can bring the parties together -- but at the cost of what would likely be a significant retrenchment of his plans.

The fear among some Democrats is that if Biden also asks them to pass his infrastructure plan on a purely party-line vote, he might not be able to go back to that well on other issues for which bipartisan agreement is considerably less likely, particularly legislation to establish a national floor of voting rights that would override some of the restrictions on ballot access that red states are passing.

The new law, sponsored by Democratic lawmakers, also dictates that the technique be used only for serious crimes, such as murder and sexual assault. And it states that investigators may only use websites with strict policies around user consent.

The laws “demonstrate that people across the political spectrum find law enforcement use of consumer genetic data chilling, concerning and privacy-invasive,” said Natalie Ram, a law professor at the University of Maryland who championed the Maryland law

“This bill strikes a balance between this very important technology to identify people that do the very worst things to our Marylanders, yet it balances that against the privacy concerns and the trust that we need from the public,” John Fitzgerald, the chief of the Chevy Chase Village Police Department

For one thing, the law states that by 2024, genealogists working on such cases must be professionally certified — a credential that does not yet exist.

Investigators may use only genealogy companies that have explicitly informed the public and their customers that law enforcement uses their databases, and that have asked for their customers’ consent to participate.

“We know well that most people do not read these kinds of forms closely,” Ms. Ram said. “This is likely to generate unwitting inclusion rather than actual consent.”

Unlike 23andMe and Ancestry, which have kept their immense genetic databases unavailable to law enforcement without a court order, GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA are eager to cooperate

Investigators cannot use any of the genetic information collected, whether from the suspect or third parties, to learn about a person’s psychological traits or disease predispositions

These searches are “the equivalent of the government going through all of your medical records and all of your family records just to identify you,” said Leah Larkin

I discovered that Asian Americans had been writing and fighting in English since the late 19th century: the sisters Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston and many more.

I didn’t learn about them before because racism isolates us, disempowers us and erases our history.

Against this racist and sexist fiction of the Oriental, we built the anti-racist, anti-sexist fiction of the Asian American. We willed ourselves into being, but as with every other act of American self-conjuring, we became marked by a contradiction between American aspiration and American reality.

On the one hand, Asian Americans have long insisted that we are patriotic and productive Americans. This self-defense often leans on the model minority myth and the idea that Asian Americans have succeeded in fields such as medicine and technology because we immigrated with educational credentials and we raise our children to work hard. But Asian Americans are also haunting reminders of wars that killed millions of people and generated many refugees. And Asian Americans have come to satisfy the American need for cheap, exploitable labor — from working on railroads to giving pedicures. We were and are perceived to be competitors in a capitalist economy fractured by divisions of race, gender and class and the ever-widening gap of inequality that affects all Americans.

As long as the United States remains committed to aggressive capitalism domestically and aggressive militarism internationally, Asians and Asian Americans will continue to be scapegoats who embody threat and aspiration, an inhuman “yellow peril” and a superhuman model minority.

“Asian American” has now morphed into a newer fiction: the “Asian American and Pacific Islander” community, or A.A.P.I. But again, there are contradictions inherent in this identity

Some QAnon followers are obsessed with the idea that the US military will somehow put Trump back into office. Some believed and hoped Trump would declare martial law on Inauguration Day to stop Joe Biden from entering the White House.

Powell, who has frequently pushed the falsehood that Trump was reelected, also appeared at the event and said Trump should be "simply reinstated" and that a "new inauguration day is set."

Talk among Trump supporters of a coup not only happens online, CNN spoke to followers of the former President in Ventura, California, in February who said they wanted to see a Myanmar-style coup happen here.

"Tulsa attracted these kind of dynamic, independent-thinking, strong-willed leaders, who were not going to sit idly by and be dictated to, but were going to push back," Rogers says.

"This was absolutely brutal what happened," he tells NPR. "I think what's very important to understand is the fear that Blacks had, that anything they had was fragile, because it could be taken away from them."

Insurers denied survivors' claims, and so did the government, which contributed to an erosion of trust by Blacks in the financial system. Duckett says that distrust has compounded over the last century.

When Black Wall Street burned, Stradford couldn't save his businesses. He was taken into custody, and charged with rioting. But he escaped, first to Kansas, then to Illinois.

The coalition would combine parties from across the political spectrum that normally disagree on many political issues but have apparently united on the need to move on from the Netanyahu era

But the simple fact that a right-wing party was willing to form a coalition with groups representing progressive, centrist and Arab voters, he said, already amounted to a revolution in a country where politics have been dominated by a single person for more than a decade.

Bennett and Lapid have until late Wednesday to secure the support of 61 members of the 120-seat Knesset, Israel's parliament

Their success may depend on the culturally conservative Arab party known as the United Arab List or Ra'am, which would be the first Arab-led party to participate in a coalition government in Israel.

Though Bennett's Yamina Party is considered more conservative than Netanyahu's Likud, hundreds of right-wing activists protested as reports about a possible coalition with left-leaning parties filled the Israeli media.

But for many Palestinians, Bennett — a former settler who once vowed to "do everything in my power to make sure [Palestinians] never get a state" – is viewed, at best, as unlikely to change Israel's stance toward the long-running stalemate.

Only five years ago, China officially ended its One Child policy, a raft of restrictions that for more than three decades strictly limited couples to only one child. Those who had two or more children in violation of the policy were fined heavily.

threatening to halt economic growth and bankrupt state pension funds

China's latest census figures released this year show the country's birthrate has dropped to 1.3 live births per woman, far below the rate of 2.1 most demographers agree is needed to sustain a population at its current level.

Pregnant women were sometimes effectively kidnapped by local family planning officials who cajoled, intimidated, or forced women to end the birth.

The news that the government was now allowing three-child families was initially unclear in China. Popular Chinese social media site Weibo disabled the ability to read the thousands of comments left under news items about the family planning policy change due to what they alleged was "abnormal content".

She also made history as the first openly gay woman in her role

To put it in perspective, Smith was deputy press secretary for then-President George H.W. Bush — the first Bush president.

In 2015, a National Center for Truth and Reconciliation report estimated that more than 150,000 children attended these schools and more than 6,000 died, never returning home.

The report said the residential schools were "a systematic, government- sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples."

Americans who said they consume far-right news sources reported the highest rates of conspiracy theory acceptance; close to half said they believe in the tenets of QAnon

People without college degrees who responded to the survey were three times more likely to believe in conspiracy theories than Americans who had completed college.

"I do not believe the additional, extraneous commission that Democratic leaders want would uncover crucial new facts or promote healing," the Kentucky Republican said. "Frankly, I do not believe it is even designed to."

"A lot of our members ... want to be moving forward," the South Dakota Republican told CNN last week. "Anything that gets us rehashing the 2020 elections is, I think, a day lost."

The Washington, D.C., medical examiner said last month that Brian Sicknick died from a series of strokes, but the Capitol Police still consider his death one that came in the line of duty. The officer is one of five people who died either during the attack or shortly afterward.

A new Kaiser Health News analysis of the 42 states reporting racial and ethnic breakdowns of vaccine recipients offers a compelling portrait of the challenges ahead. Some populations hit hardest by Covid-19 still have among the lowest vaccination rates: only 22% of Black Americans and 29% of Hispanics have been vaccinated nationwide, compared with 33% of White Americans. Vaccination rates for Black Americans trail that of Whites in nearly every state.

Take my home state of New Jersey, for example, where 60% of the adult population is fully vaccinated. This is one of the highest percentages of any state in the country, but the number doesn't reflect conditions across different communities

It will not be easy balancing the freedoms of the fully vaccinated with our duty to protect those who are still unvaccinated, but we must be up to the task.

Too often, though, we take a simplistic and myopic view of health and progress in America, touting national numbers while neglecting community needs at the local level.

This kind of weakness, failure to speak out publicly and lack of legislative action on substantive policy matters created a political vacuum for extreme voices like Reps. Gaetz and Greene, who have gained a foothold in the GOP with their politics of grievance, conspiracy theories, nativism, nihilism and dishonesty

Owning the libs, whining about the transgendered in women's sports, promoting the discredited stolen election lie, and above all else, pledging fidelity to Trump have emboldened the extremists and given voice to their crackpottery.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted that while President Biden stated Israel has a right to defend itself, she asked, "But do Palestinians have a right to survive?" adding, "If so, we have a responsibility to that."

For the decades that followed, few American elected officials on either side of the aisle prioritized Palestinian human rights. Thankfully, Sen. Bernie Sanders changed that during the 2016 presidential campaign when he declared, "We are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity." Sanders, while defending Israel's right to exist, called for the United States to stop being "one-sided" in the conflict.

in Gaza, 95% of the residents don't have access to clean water and 80% of the population relies on international aid to survive. And Human Rights Watch recently released a 213-page report in which it accused the Israeli government of engaging in an "apartheid" system of polices that favor Israeli Jews over Palestinians in both Israel and the territories.

Not forgetting about the Palestinians is more than pushing for peace -- it's the United States taking a stand for Palestinian human rights.

Biden should declare he's willing to leverage the $3.8 billion in annual aid the United States provides to the Israeli government -- along with America's leadership role in the world -- to achieve that. This even-handed approach is step one in hopefully laying the foundation for a lasting, just peace deal.

Protasevich's detention came soon after the May 18 raid and shutdown of another major online media outlet, Tut.by. and detentions of at least 10 of its staff, including three journalists

Sviatlana Tikhanouvskaya, a Belarusian opposition leader and a 2020 presidential candidate, said in a tweet that Protasevich faced the death penalty.

Belarusian authorities raided the studios of another prominent media outlet -- Belsat, a Poland-based satellite broadcaster, which has also been reporting on anti-Lukashenko protests.

Now, Pratasevich's life could be in danger and the survival of independent media as a whole is at stake. Many journalists who are not in jail fled Belarus and are trying to find ways and funding to continue journalism from abroad.

Belarus has strong political, economic and security ties with Russia, and some observers believe Russia's FSB helped Belarus' KGB in the operation to arrest Pratasevich.

Providing support to in-country and exiled media outlets, journalists, press freedom and human rights organizations is the only way to guarantee we can continue to receive objective information about media crackdowns and human rights violations in Belarus.

An investigation into the true origins of the virus is essential not only for scientific reasons, but also because policymakers around the world need this knowledge to better prepare themselves for future pandemics.

The lab leak theory has been judged by at least one US intelligence agency as the more likely explanation for Covid-19's origins, while two agencies think the virus was more likely spread to humans from an infected animal

It should be no surprise, then, that the WHO's own investigation into the origins of Covid-19 concluded that a lab leak was probably not the cause of the pandemic and that infection from natural sources was more likely. But investigators were only permitted to examine research conducted by Chinese state scientists and did not have full access to the data or facilities that would have allowed them to assess whether the virus that causes Covid-19 may have been present before cases of the disease were first confirmed in China in December 2019.

Beijing, for its part, considers the case closed and has argued that the attention should be turned to other countries for the role they may have played in the early days of the pandemic.

More specifically, the Biden administration is calling on the WHO to complete a second phase of its investigation in a way that allows "international experts the independence to fully assess the source of the virus and the early days of the outbreak."

Biden has been eager to redouble our engagement and work together with America's friends and allies around the world. Getting to the root cause of a pandemic that has already killed nearly 3.5 million people globally presents a golden opportunity to do just that.

Overall, since the election, the Brennan Center has identified at least 389 bills introduced in 48 states that include provisions that would restrict voting access.

In addition to the new laws, the Brennan Center's latest report identified 61 bills that were advancing through 18 state legislatures as of May 14.

More than half of the 61 advancing bills would restrict absentee and mail-in voting. About a quarter include provisions that target voter ID requirements and voter roll purges.

Texas is a key state to watch with the most restrictive voting bills introduced overall, though it has not yet enacted any of those 49 bills.

On the day his book deal was made public, Pence launched a political advocacy group called Advancing American Freedom, which touts the "successful conservative policies of the Trump-Pence administration" and champions "Conservative values and policy proposals," which the organization's website claims are under attack.

But will Pence -- who may have presidential ambitions of his own -- offer a modicum of truth and express his true feelings about the president who jeopardized his life?

If he is indeed keen on winning them over, however, it's likely he will produce a book that will disappoint a publisher interested in the kind of honest account that would draw in enough readers to justify a big advance payment.

Government-launched enterprises in both Russia and Europe also recently revealed plans to develop reusable rockets that are similar both in appearance and function to the Falcon 9 booster.

But what makes the Chinese efforts to emulate SpaceX particularly notable is the country's expansive ambitions in space and its vast resources to back up these long-term goals.

Earlier this month, the Chinese government signed an agreement with Russia to work together to build a Moon base. China has also begun planning to launch crewed missions to Mars and deploy a massive space-based, commercial-scale solar power plant by 2050.

As China advances in space, NASA has spent more than $20 billion building a large rocket, the Space Launch System, that could soon be obsolete. And flying this single-use rocket is so expensive that, in combination with its Artemis program, NASA could exceed its congressional funds by more than 43%.

Increasingly, the US' main advantage over China lies in its burgeoning commercial space industry, led by SpaceX. If America wants to compete, it should unleash the full potential of SpaceX and other commercial space companies that seek to go further in space, faster and for less money.

While SpaceX became a transformational space company, the US and China have been locked in an increasingly intense battle for influence and economic resources on Earth.