Today in History: President George H.W. Bush signs the Americans with Disabilities Act
Today in History:
On July 26, 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, prohibiting discrimination based on mental or physical disabilities.
Also on this date:
In 1775, the Continental Congress established a Post Office and appointed Benjamin Franklin its Postmaster-General.
In 1847, the western African country of Liberia, founded by freed American slaves, declared its independence.
In 1863, Sam Houston, former president of the Republic of Texas, died in Huntsville at age 70.
In 1945, Winston Churchill resigned as Britain's prime minister after his Conservatives were soundly defeated by the Labour Party. Clement Attlee succeeded him.
In 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act, which reorganized America's armed forces as the National Military Establishment and created the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 1948, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which desegregated the U.S. military.
In 1953, Fidel Castro began his revolt against Fulgencio Batista with an unsuccessful attack on an army barracks in eastern Cuba. (Castro ousted Batista in 1959.)
In 1971, Apollo 15 was launched from Cape Kennedy on America's fourth successful manned mission to the moon.
In 2002, the Republican-led House voted to create an enormous Homeland Security Department in the biggest government reorganization in decades.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be nominated for president by a major political party at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
In 2018, the last six members of a Japanese doomsday cult who remained on death row were executed for a series of crimes in the 1990s, including a gas attack on Tokyo subways that killed 13 people. Previously, seven other cult members were executed on July 6 of that year.
In 2020, a procession with the casket of the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, where Lewis and other civil rights marchers were beaten 55 years earlier.
Today's Birthdays: Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard is 86. Football Hall of Famer Bob Lilly is 86. Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Darlene Love is 84. The Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger is 82. Actor Helen Mirren is 80. Rock musician Roger Taylor (Queen) is 76. Olympic gold medal figure skater Dorothy Hamill is 69. Actor Kevin Spacey is 66. Actor Sandra Bullock is 61. Actor Jeremy Piven is 60. Actor Jason Statham is 58. Actor Olivia Williams is 57. Actor Kate Beckinsale is 52. Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is 45. Actor Juliet Rylance is 45. Actor Monica Raymund is 39. Actor Francia Raisa is 37. Actor-singer Taylor Momsen is 32. Actor Elizabeth Gillies is 32. Actor Thomasin McKenzie is 25.
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San Francisco Chronicle
7 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Photos: Hundreds in S.F. form human banner during ‘Families First' protest of Trump
Hundreds of people gathered at San Francisco's Ocean Beach to form a human banner Saturday morning as part of a nationwide 'Families First' day of action against the Trump administration. As an upside-down American flag flapped in the misty San Francisco summer air, the protesters stood in straight single-file lines near the Cliff House, forming 'FAMILIA!' below letters spelling 'WE ARE.' Children, parents and grandparents, many accompanied by dogs, protested what organizers from Indivisible SF called 'cruel cuts and attacks on our families' by President Donald Trump, including changes to social programs, food stamps and school lunches, 'all so a handful of billionaires can get tax giveaways.' The protest took particular aim at Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the budget he recently signed into law, which cuts nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade and is expected to mean millions of Americans will lose health coverage. Protesters also decried recent raids in the Bay Area and nationwide by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As a ukulele band played Woody Guthrie's 'This Land is Your Land' over speakers, Peter Hosey, 40, stood in a line of people forming the letter 'A' in 'FAMILIA.' 'The message today is 'We are familia,'' Hosey said. 'That certainly resonates for a lot of us when you see what ICE has been doing, deporting children, deporting mothers, putting people in camps.' 'This is not what our country should be,' added Hosey, who works in the tech industry. The crowd, which organizers estimated as 600, then headed to the ocean, raising hands and waving to the water. Protesters then walked back and formed a circle around a large American flag as Sister Sledge's 1979 hit 'We Are Family' played over the speakers. Micki Morales, a retired schoolteacher who lives in Cupertino, was standing in one of the human letter lines when a call went out over the speakers. They needed someone who could sing 'This Land is Your Land.' Morales didn't come to the beach expecting to sing Saturday, but has experience in choruses and decided to offer up her voice. The song took on special meaning for her in the age of Trump. 'It's almost a prayer versus a statement,' said Morales, 88. 'I don't know how we got to this position, how people could be so fooled. But here we are, and hopefully we will dig our ways out.' Several related events were held around the Bay Area, including an afternoon rally at Snow Park in Oakland commemorating the anniversaries of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Medicaid program and the Social Security Administration. The event featured speeches from Medi-Cal recipients, health care workers, caregivers and community members. One of the featured speakers in Oakland, Jazmine Arreola of the grassroots group Parent Voices Los Angeles, said she has fibromyalgia and is severely impacted by the federal cuts. 'How is it fair that families like mine up and down the state of California have lived our whole lives trying to move up and move forward for our kids, and we just can't?' Arreola, the mother of three children, said in a news release before the protest. 'My closest family members are on Medi-Cal: my dad and my grandparents. My daughter needs eye surgery. These cuts put our lives at risk.' In San Jose, health care workers, patients, community leaders and educators gathered Saturday afternoon at Discovery Meadow to highlight the effect of immigration raids and corporate tax breaks on working families. The Bay Area protests were organized by a coalition of unions, advocacy groups, faith leaders, and families. Events were also planned in San Mateo, Colma and Novato. The 'Families First' day of action included hundreds of rallies in all 50 states, highlighted by a livestreamed mobilization in Washington, D.C. The Washington demonstration included a 60-hour vigil at the National Mall to protest cuts to federal programs benefiting families. The events follow anti-Trump rallies that drew tens of thousands of people around the Bay Area and nationwide, including No Kings Day in June and 'Hands Off' in April. The San Francisco protest was organized by the same people who spelled out 'No King' on Ocean Beach during the nationwide No Kings protests this year. Several drones hovered overhead to capture their latest message. When it came to keeping the participants in orderly lines to spell their message clearly for the drones overhead, the job largely fell on Brad Newsham, 73. Newsham, a writer and former longtime cabdriver in the city, has been organizing protests like this one since 2007. Their causes have spanned the eras, from calls to impeach President George W. Bush, to support for Occupy Wall Street and now opposition to Trump. 'This is No. 28,' Newsham said. 'This has been incredible.' Newsham walked around the sand in a bright yellow jacket Saturday, delivering orders to the crowd via bullhorn. His injured ankle didn't hold him back. 'It's cool when you get a shot from the sky of all these people,' he said. When a group of protesters wearing purple union shirts bunched up in a line that was supposed to be single file, Newsham whipped them into shape. 'Hey SEIU, squeeze in!' he shouted into the bullhorn. 'It makes a better picture, you can do it.' Newsham seemed to get a kick out of it. 'It's an awesome responsibility,' he said. The demonstrators spelled out 'FAMILIA' to protest what Newsham's co-organizer, Travis Van Brasch, called ICE's 'completely illegal, cruel, stupid, unnecessary' raids. 'We are saying it in Spanish because that's where most of the trouble is,' said Van Brasch, 72. Warren Pederson contributed to this report.
Boston Globe
37 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Trump's trip to Scotland echoes an earlier visit, when he applauded Brexit
Yet in Britain, history has diverged from Trump's vision in important respects. Polls show that close to 60 percent of Britons now believe Brexit was a mistake. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has made mending relations with the European Union one of the priorities of his Labour government. The populist wave that Trump predicted would wash across Europe has ebbed and flowed, leaving a fragmented political landscape with a handful of populist leaders whose fortunes are mixed. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy is on the rise, but Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary is struggling. Advertisement 'Populism is still a relatively limited phenomenon,' said Kim Darroch, who was Britain's ambassador to the United States during Trump's first term. 'Brexit happened, but it's very hard to argue, even by its most ardent proponents, that it has been anything other than a comprehensive disaster.' Still, in retrospect, he said, Trump's 2016 visit came at a 'turning point in history, and we haven't seen how it's all going to work out.' Advertisement On Saturday, as Trump played golf at his course, protesters around Scotland took to the streets to decry his visit and accuse United Kingdom leaders of pandering to the American. Trump and his son Eric played with the US ambassador to Britain, Warren Stephens. Security was tight, and protesters kept at a distance and unseen by the group during Trump's round. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered on the cobblestone and tree-lined street in front of the US Consulate about 100 miles away in Edinburgh, Scotland's capital. Speakers told the crowd that Trump was not welcome and criticized British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for striking a recent trade deal to avoid stiff US tariffs on goods imported from the UK. Nine years ago, trade was paramount in British politics. Darroch recalled that British officials were nervous that Trump, who had long been vocal about his support for Brexit, would land in Scotland before the vote rather than after it. With the polls showing a narrow margin, they worried that he would throw his support to the Vote Leave campaign at a critical moment. As it happened, the Brexiteers did not need Trump, winning by 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent. On that Friday morning, as a dazed Britain digested the implications of Brexit, he played the role of cheerleader and political analyst. 'I said this was going to happen, and I think it's great thing,' Trump said, as he emerged from a helicopter to the serenading of bagpipers. 'Basically, they took back their country,' he told an audience that included journalists and greenskeepers from the resort. 'People want to take their country back, they want to have independence in a sense, and you're going to have more than just, in my opinion, more than just what happened last night. You're going to have many other cases where people want to take their borders back.' Advertisement Trump said he saw a 'big parallel' between Brexit and his candidacy. That view has been endorsed by political analysts, who regard the referendum as a canary in a coal mine for Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton. In many ways, Scotland was the wrong place for Trump's message. Scots voted by a wide margin to remain in the European Union. Two years earlier, in 2014, they had voted in a referendum to stay part of the United Kingdom. 'He was talking to the nonconverted,' Darroch said. Today, the regret about Brexit extends beyond Scotland. Britain cycled through four Conservative prime ministers in the upheaval that followed the vote. Last July, the Tories were swept out of power by Starmer's Labour Party. Trump remains stubbornly unpopular in Britain, particularly in Scotland, where he is viewed as an unreliable investor who clashed with neighbors at his other resort, Trump International Scotland, north of Aberdeen. But having returned to power, he is a commanding figure on the world stage. King Charles III has invited him to make a rare second state visit in September. And Starmer has assiduously cultivated him. He will visit the president at Turnberry on Monday before flying with him to Aberdeen. Trump has said little about the waning popularity of Brexit, preferring to focus on the trade deal he struck with Starmer in May. The president will even roll out the welcome mat for the European Union this time around, meeting Sunday with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, to discuss trade negotiations between the United States and the EU. Advertisement It was not clear whether Trump would meet with Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-immigrant party, Reform UK, during this visit. Farage is his most conspicuous political ally in Britain and has ridden Trump's antiestablishment mantra to new prominence. Regardless of whether that prompts Trump to take another victory lap this weekend, his defenders argue that the rise of Reform UK shows that the essence of his populist message has been validated in Britain. 'All the push-polls in Christendom won't change the fact that the UK has its sovereignty back and they will never rejoin the EU,' said Steve Bannon, a former chief strategist to Trump. Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Tulsi Gabbard fires back at Obama: ‘absolute failure'
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired back at former President Barack Obama, accusing him of deflecting from his administration's 'absolute failure' to vet intelligence reports used to fuel narratives of Russian collusion with the 2016 Trump campaign. 'The treasonous conspiracy that we have now released to the American people — the complicity, the deflection, and the silence of politicians, of the mainstream media, and of those directly implicated into this speaks volumes,' Gabbard said on Fox & Friends Saturday. 3 Gabbard fired back at Obama Saturday on Fox. MediaPunch / BACKGRID Advertisement On Tuesday, President Trump called for criminal charges against Obama, 63, for allegedly ordering an intelligence report saying Russia meddled to help him win the White House in 2016. Trump was referring to documents Gabbard declassified last week. Obama's office responded, calling the claims an attempt at distracting from the scandal over the administration's handling of the Epstein files. Advertisement 'Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,' Patrick Rodenbush, a spokesman for Obama said. 3 Obama called the claims against him 'bizarre.' Corbis via Getty Images 'But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction,' he said, referring to the mounting pressure on Trump to release the Epstein files. 'Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes.' Advertisement 3 Gabbard released documents last week about Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Anna Wilding / Gabbard lashed out at Obama's answer during her Fox appearance. 'President Obama's very carefully worded response that came from his office, again, deflects away from addressing any of the truth that was revealed,' she said. 'They would have to admit and actually address the details of their complicity in this or their absolute failure in conducting the most basic responsibilities of, again, asking, where is this intelligence coming from? Advertisement Gabbard sent a criminal referral to Attorney General Pam Bondi Friday against Obama.
