By Harmeet Kaur, Franceli Chapman knows what Washington Heights looks like. The uptown Manhattan neighborhood where Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical “In the Heights” takes place is where Chapman, an Afro-Latina actress with roots in the Dominican Republic, played on street corners as a child and where she hung out on rooftops as a teenager. Chapman cried when she saw
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By Taylor Romine and Rachel Janfaza The Michigan Senate on Wednesday passed three bills that would restrict voting rights in the state as part of a larger Republican-led package intended to overhaul election laws, despite Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s all-but-certain veto of the measures. The state Senate advanced the measures — part of a 39-bill
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By Jack Guy Hollywood star Jada Pinkett Smith has posted a never-before-seen poem written for her by deceased rapper Tupac Shakur, who would have turned 50 on Wednesday. The pair were close friends, and Pinkett Smith uploaded a video showing the poem to her Instagram account. “Tupac Amaru Shakur would have been 50 midnight tonight! As we prepare to
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By Charles Riley, Tina Burnside and Alexandra Meeks Airlines, banks, stock exchanges and trading platforms suffered brief website outages early Thursday after a key piece of internet infrastructure failed, sparking the second major interruption of the past 10 days. Virgin Australia said in a statement on Thursday that it had resolved an IT outage caused
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By Jessica Dean and Manu Raju Bipartisan talks on overhauling America’s policing practices are hung up on a key issue: Whether Congress should include new standards for when officers can be charged with crimes. The issue has dogged the two sides for weeks — and it’s far from clear how the matter will get resolved or
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By Michael Warren Alabama pastor Ed Litton will be the next president of the Southern Baptist Convention following a narrow election win Tuesday — a victory for the more moderate establishment against a conservative insurgency in an ongoing fight within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. The vote comes as the SBC has been grappling with questions
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By Gregory Wallace US officials are seeking a $25 million fine from Air Canada, accusing the airline of failing to provide timely refunds to more than 5,000 passengers during the coronavirus pandemic. The formal complaint is the first enforcement action that the Department of Transportation has announced against an airline since the pandemic upended the
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By Ted Barrett, Ali Zaslav and Alex Rogers The Senate unanimously passed a resolution on Tuesday establishing June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a US holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. The legislation has gained momentum since the massive Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the police killing of George
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By Fredreka Schouten This week, voting right activists Cliff Albright and LaTosha Brown will board a 53-foot bus and kick off a tour through the South. Their task: Rally public support for federal legislation to combat the raft of new state laws aimed at restricting voting rights. They face big obstacles. Among them: Democratic Sen.
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By Jasmine Wright and Veronica Stracqualursi Vice President Kamala Harris held a private dinner Tuesday night for the female US senators, a show of bipartisanship among a deeply divided Congress. It was the first known time that Harris hosted lawmakers in the vice-presidential residence at the Naval Observatory since moving in April, a process that was
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