Call me cynical, but I have a feeling the National Garden of American Heroes announced by President Trump on Friday will never get off — or into — the ground, even if he doesn’t put his son-in-law in charge of it. Establishing an official United States Hall of Fame will secure the reputations of Betsy Ross and Benjamin Franklin from the changing political winds, no less than the one in Cooperstown, N.Y., preserves for the ages the memories of Ted Williams and Roberto Clemente.
For more than a hundred years, the U.S. Navy has been using naval wargames to test ships, tactics and strategy.
Chinese authorities on Monday detained a law professor who published essays criticising President Xi Jinping over the coronavirus pandemic and accusing him of ruling "tyrannically", according to friends of the man. Xu Zhangrun, a rare outspoken critic of the government in China's heavily censored academia, was taken from his home in suburban Beijing by more than 20 people, one of his friends said on condition of anonymity. Xu published an essay in February blaming the culture of deception and censorship fostered by Xi for the spread of the coronavirus in China.
The Iraqi military said Sunday that a rocket aimed at Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, home of the U.S. Embassy, struck a residential house and injured a child. Iraqi officials said the embassy's recently installed C-RAM air defense system may have attempted to intercept the rocket as the system was operational late Saturday. A recent spate of rocket attacks have struck close to the U.S. Embassy and targeted American troops in Iraqi bases.
A predominantly Black group of heavily armed protesters marched through Stone Mountain Park near Atlanta on Saturday, calling for removal of the giant Confederate rock carving at the site that civil rights activists consider a monument to racism.
The Florida Department of Health had to issue a warning for residents to avoid nasal contact with tap water.
The agency says its China office found out about the "viral pneumonia" cases from reading an online press release from the Wuhan health commission.
Two people have died and eight have been injured after a shooting at a nightclub in South Carolina in the early hours of Sunday, a sheriff's official said.A pair of Greenville County sheriff's deputies noticed a disturbance at Lavish Lounge just before 2am, and saw a large crowd running out of the building, Sheriff Hobart Lewis said at a press conference.
A Seoul court says the man behind a massive child sexual abuse website could help future investigations.
Senator Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.) said that “we should listen to the argument for removing George Washington statues” in an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday. Statues of slave-owning historical figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have become the latest target of the nationwide racial reckoning sparked by the death of George Floyd in police custody this summer.When asked by CNN’s Dana Bash if she supported taking down monuments of leaders who were slave owners, as she has expressed support of changing military bases named after Confederate leaders, Duckworth instead initially took aim at President Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech on Friday.The senator, who the Washington Post reported Sunday is a serious contender in Joe Biden’s search for a running mate in the 2020 presidential election, called Trump’s priorities “all wrong.”“He should be talking about what we're going to do to overcome this pandemic,” she said. “What are we going to do to push Russia back? Instead, he had no time for that. He spent all his time talking about dead traitors.”After further pressing by CNN’s Bash, Duckworth said she thinks we should have a national dialogue over the historical monuments at some point and “listen to everybody.”“I think we should listen to the argument there, but remember that the president at Mount Rushmore was standing on ground that was stolen from Native Americans who had actually been given that land during a treaty,” she said.Trump has defended such monuments, and did so again in his speech Friday, saying, “By tearing down Washington and Jefferson, these radicals would tear down the very heritage for which men gave their lives to win the Civil War, they would erase the memory that inspired those soldiers to go to their deaths,” he said. “They would tear down the principles that propelled the abolition of slavery and ultimately around the world ending an evil institution that had plagued humanity for thousands and thousands of years.”