By Clare Foran and Jessica Dean Legislation moved quickly through Congress this week to establish June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a US federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. The bill overwhelmingly passed the House on Wednesday after the Senate unanimously passed the legislation on Tuesday. But at the same
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By Ariane de Vogue and Chandelis Duster The Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to the Affordable Care Act on Thursday in a decision that will leave the law intact and save health care coverage for millions of Americans. The justices turned away a challenge from Republican-led states and the former Trump administration, which urged the justices to block
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By Chandelis Duster Stacey Abrams on Thursday praised West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s proposed changes to voting rights legislation, a notable statement of support from someone who is widely seen as a leader among progressives on the issue. “What Sen. Manchin is putting forward are some basic building blocks that we need to ensure that
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By Kevin Liptak and Phil Mattingly President Joe Biden said he had raised human rights and cyberattacks during a summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Wednesday that provided an early and critical test of his diplomatic skills in the highest-stakes talks of his long career. Both Biden and Putin afterward described the three-hour-long summit as generally
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By Harmeet Kaur For much of US history, Juneteenth has been a date observed mostly by Black Americans commemorating the symbolic end of slavery. Since the reckoning reignited by the killing of George Floyd last year, though, the tide has changed enormously. All but one state, as well as the District of Columbia, recognize the milestone of
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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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