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Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are among the scheduled speakers at the event, part of festivities for the nation's 250th birthday.
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U.S. President Donald Trump is in Beijing for a highly anticipated summit with his Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping. It is the first U.S. state visit to China since 2017, during Trump's first administration. Trade, the Iran war, artificial intelligence and the fate of Taiwan are some of the issues being discussed, although it's not clear if any new agreements are likely. Trump traveled to China with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, along with a delegation of top U.S. executives including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Elon Musk of Tesla and Jensen Huang of Nvidia.
The summit comes after years of rising hostility between the two superpowers, but leaders recognize the importance of improving the bilateral relationship, says Zhao Hai, director of international political studies at the Institute of World Economics and Politics in Beijing. "This is a very critical historical moment [at] a crossroad, and both sides now are working together to establish a stable relationship that will have a global ramification," he says.
We also speak with Jake Werner, a historian of modern China and director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He says the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the resulting economic chaos have strengthened China's position.
"China has ties to all the countries in the region. It has acted in the past to help broker the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran," says Werner. "So it has some experience in this realm, sort of acting as a broker towards peace."
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We speak with the acclaimed artist and author Molly Crabapple about her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. Although largely forgotten today, the Jewish Labor Bund was once a powerful secular, socialist revolutionary party that fought for freedom and dignity for Jews in Europe. The movement formed in the waning days of the Russian Empire in an atmosphere of intense antisemitism, but it "rejected, from the very start, calls to create a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine," Crabapple says. "They felt that Zionism was a capitulation to the same bigots that wanted to kick Jews out of Europe."
Bund members — known as Bundists — navigated profound historical changes from the founding of the movement in 1897 until its ultimate destruction in the Holocaust. But Crabapple, who learned Yiddish for the book, says the Bund is not just Jewish history.
"This is a history that belongs to all rebels. It belongs to everyone who believes in the necessity of human solidarity," she says.
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The finding was the second time in eight days that the Trump administration had targeted a major medical school over admissions policies.
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Thursday's vote was one of many in Southern states following the Supreme Court's recent decision to weaken the Voting Rights Act.
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Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, also asked lawmakers to delay changes to the state's election system that could cause disarray in the midterms.
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Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio and Mike Johnson will speak at the event, which centers on the idea that the founders wanted the U.S. to be explicitly Christian.
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(Third column, 3rd story, link)
Related stories:
White House to host nine-hour prayer festival...
Trump tells Jews to keep Sabbath!
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Salah Sarsour, a prominent Palestinian immigrant, green card holder and president of Wisconsin's largest mosque, the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, has been locked up in an ICE jail since late March. Despite his lawful permanent resident status, the government says he could be subject to deportation for failing to disclose a conviction by Israeli military authorities when he was a teenager in the occupied West Bank. Sarsour says he never understood the charges presented against him in Hebrew and that he was tortured in Israeli custody. Supporters view the case as an escalation of the Trump administration's crackdown on Pro-Palestinian speech. Munjed Ahmad, a member of Salah Sarsour's legal team, says, "Salah's case will be a litmus test. Will we allow the administration to gut those rights and to strip people from their free speech?"
Ahmad is joined by Sarsour's son Kareem, who calls Trump's federal immigration agents "kidnappers" and says his family initially had no idea what had happened to his father. While incarcerated, Salah Sarsour missed the birth of his ninth grandchild. "He's a community pillar," says Kareem Sarsour. "The entire thing shook us as a family."
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The U.S. Supreme Court has effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining major provision of the landmark 1965 law that was a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement.
In a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, a majority of justices ruled Wednesday that Louisiana must redraw a congressional map that was designed to create a second majority-Black district in the state, where African Americans have long faced racial segregation and barriers to voting. They said the electoral map "relied too heavily on race," an interpretation that is set to usher in another wave of redistricting across the South to help Republicans win more seats in Congress.
"This is central to whether or not we maintain a multiracial democracy in this country," says lawyer and civil rights activist Maya Wiley, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She calls Wednesday's ruling "a free pass to discriminate."
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