Only three people have a US national holiday observed in their honor: Christopher Columbus, George Washington, and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is celebrated on the third Monday in January each year (near his Jan. 15 birthday) to honor his legacy in battling for civil rights. The fight to create a national holiday was a massive struggle, one that required the same commitment as the movement to guarantee the rights of all Americans: community organizing, long-term determination, and relentless persistence.
King was assassinated in 1968. The legislation designating the federal holiday in his honor wasn’t passed for another 15 years, and the day wasn’t officially commemorated until 1986. And even as King’s work continues to inspire generations of leaders, the fight for universal recognition of the holiday in the US still isn’t over.
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King never stopped fighting, and neither did his supporters. (Associated Press)
White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly told Democratic lawmakers Wednesday that some of the hard-line immigration policies President Trump advocated during the campaign were “uninformed,” that the United States will never construct a wall along its entire southern border and that Mexico will never pay for it, according to people familiar with the meeting.
The comments were out of sync with remarks by Trump, who in recent days has reiterated his desire to build a border wall that would be funded by Mexico “indirectly through NAFTA.”
The mixed signals underscore the difficulty congressional Republicans have faced as they have tried to decipher what the president wants in an immigration deal. And they have contributed to tensions over how to resolve the legal status of immigrants, known as “dreamers,” brought to the country illegally as children.
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White House Chief of Staff John Kelly arrives at the Capitol on Wednesday for a meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. (Susan Walsh/AP)
In this remote outpost in Siberia, the cold is no small affair.
Eyelashes freeze, frostbite is a constant danger and cars are usually kept running even when not being used, lest their batteries die in temperatures that average minus-58 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, according to news reports.
This is Oymyakon, a settlement of some 500 people in Russia’s Yakutia region, that has earned the reputation as the coldest permanently occupied human settlement in the world.
It is not a reputation that has been won easily. Earlier this week, a cold snap sent temperatures plunging toward record lows, with reports as extreme as minus-88 degrees Fahrenheit. The village recorded an all-time low of minus-98 degrees in 2013.
Though schools in the area remain open as temperatures dip into the minus-40s, they were closed on Tuesday, the Associated Press reported.
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The coldest village on Earth reached minus -88 degrees. Here are three of the coldest places on Earth to live.(Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)
A couple days before Christmas 1995, then-Senate Majority Leader Robert J. Dole grew fed up with his negotiating partners in Newt Gingrich’s House of Representatives and the Clinton White House.
“It’s time for adult leadership,” the Kansas Republican declared during a Senate floor speech.
Using a favorite phrase of his tenure as one of Washington’s most prominent figures, Dole emerged as the leader in talks to reopen the federal government amid a budget standoff pitting the House speaker, Gingrich (R-Ga.), against President Bill Clinton.
That “adult leadership” made a rare appearance Wednesday in the Capitol. President Trump and the bipartisan leadership awarded Dole, 94, with the Congressional Gold Medal, and it served as a stark contrast to today’s partisan toxicity, the whiff of another shutdown in the air.
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President Trump and congressinoal leaders pay tribute to former Senate majority leader Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) on Wednesday. In a ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, Dole received the Congressional Gold Medal. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
With more than 2 billion users, Facebook’s reach now rivals that of Christianity and exceeds that of Islam. However, the network’s laser focus on profits and user growth has come at the expense of its users, according to one former Facebook manager who is now speaking out against the social platform.
“One of the things that I saw consistently as part of my job was the company just continuously prioritized user growth and making money over protecting users,” the ex-manager, Sandy Parakilas, who worked at Facebook for 16 months, starting in 2011, told NBC News. During his tenure at Facebook, Parakilas led third-party advertising, privacy and policy compliance on Facebook’s app platform.
As Facebook transitioned from a Harvard dorm-room project into one of the world’s most valuable companies, its power grew in ways that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg never could have anticipated.
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Facebook is a ‘living, breathing crime scene,’ says one former tech insider
North and South Korea agreed on Wednesday to march their athletes together under one flag at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics next month and to field a joint women’s ice hockey team. It was the most dramatic gesture of reconciliation between them in a decade.
South Korea, host of the games, has said it hopes such a partnership in sports could contribute to a political thaw after years of high tensions. It came even as the prospect of war over the North’s nuclear and missile tests has grown especially acute.
The Games will begin on Feb. 9 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and the women’s ice-hockey squad will be the first combined Korean team for the Olympics, and the first unified team since their athletes played together for an international table-tennis championship and a youth soccer tournament in 1991.
The two countries’ delegations will march at the opening ceremony behind a “unified Korea” flag that shows an undivided Korean Peninsula, negotiators from both sides said in a joint news release after talks at the border village of Panmunjom. The North will send 230 supporters to the Games, and negotiators agreed that supporters of both Koreas would root together for athletes from both countries.
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North and South Korean athletes marched together during the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.CreditAmy Sancetta/Associated Press
The private school had a welcoming name. The principal was scientifically minded. But the Sandcastle Day School was a nightmare for the six students enrolled there.
David A. Turpin created the school inside his nondescript stucco home southeast of Los Angeles. But the only ones enrolled there were the six of his 13 children who were school age. And what took place inside was not teaching but torture, the authorities said, after they raided the house over the weekend and found a horrifying scene of emaciated children chained to furniture. The putrid smell overwhelmed them.
By creating such a school of horrors, Mr. Turpin had kept the authorities at bay. His children were never seen by teachers or counselors. Their absences never raised suspicions. On Tuesday, state and local officials were on the defensive as they tried to explain how such things could have occurred in a private school the state had sanctioned.
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Members of the news media were parked outside the home of David A. Turpin and Louise A. Turpin in Perris, Calif.CreditMike Blake/Reuters
A fresh layer of snow blanketed the ground on the night of Dec. 31, 1967, and revelers in Times Square and Central Park seemed to look to the future with some hope. “World Bids Adieu to a Violent Year” was the Jan. 1 headline in The New York Times.
But 1968 would be tumultuous, too.
Even from the distance of a half-century, the moment feels familiar. From January to December, people demonstrated against racial injustice and economic inequality. Abroad, the United States military slogged through a seemingly interminable war. And after two terms with a Democrat in the White House, a Republican presidential candidate campaigned on a promise of law and order, and won.
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An American lieutenant carried a wounded South Vietnamese Ranger to an ambulance in February 1968, during the Tet offensive.Dang Van Phuoc/Associated Press
A green, military-style Humvee drove along the shore here, the beach on one side, the shuttered Four Seasons Hotel on the other. Up in the hillsides, a no-go zone for civilians, multimillion-dollar mansions are flooded with mud, and cars, tossed about like playthings, are now just hunks of twisted metal, jammed against trees.
On the facades of the big homes are orange markings. An X denotes the house was checked and cleared by rescuers. A V indicates a victim was pulled, alive, from the wreckage. A V with a slash through it indicates a dead body was found.
Unimaginable tragedy struck this small, exclusive enclave, nestled between the mountains and the ocean and home to many celebrities, last week when a torrential downpour — a “once in 200 years” storm, officials are quick to say — set off deadly mudslides in a landscape that, just last month, was scorched from the state’s largest wildfire on record.
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Mansions in Montecito, Calif., were destroyed in last week’s mudslides. Residents are familiar with the inherent dangers of living in the area, but for many, its appeal is undimmed.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times
‘I think we can call this the lowest day in Trump’s presidency … What he did was fulfill every description of him in the Michael Wolff book.’ — Even Ann Coulter is questioning Trump’s mental fitness.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
James' World 2 