New Orleans remembers mass lynching of Italians 134 years later
Some of the victims were acquitted the day before in the murder of the city's police chief.
Zoom out: Italy cut off diplomatic relations with the U.S in the aftermath and there was talk of war, according to the Washington Post.
Read the Italian consul's statement at the time.
The next year, President Benjamin Harrison, hoping to repair things, created Columbus Day to honor the Italian-born explorer.
The U.S. also paid Italy about $760,000 in today's currency to make amends, the paper wrote.
The bottom line: New Orleans officials formally apologized in 2019 for the lynchings.
No one was charged in the deaths. No one was convicted in the police chief's death either.
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Axios
12 minutes ago
- Axios
House "crypto week" could change how Americans use, save money
A few years ago crypto was mostly a pariah in the financial services industry. Now, at the urging of the "first crypto president," Congress is on the verge of remaking American finance to embrace it. Why it matters: "Crypto week" could change everything from how Americans make payments to how they invest. It would also grant further legitimacy to an industry that has made the president and his family sudden billions of dollars. State of play: House Republicans declared the next five days Crypto Week, sending a clear message on legislative priorities after passing President Trump's "big, beautiful bill." The agenda for next week consists of three bills. One is stablecoin legislation, and sources familiar with the plans tell Axios that the Senate-passed bill, known as the GENIUS Act, will get a straight-up vote next week. Stablecoins are how dollars go on blockchains, and they enable super-fast, super-cheap global payments. They started as liquidity for crypto traders, but now companies use them for global payroll. The bill would establish rules for who could issue stablecoins and how they manage them. It is expected to lead to a surge of new products and participation from traditional finance firms. How it works: The legislation would "spur more comfort among retailers and others to begin accepting stablecoins as payment," says Tony Tuths, tax principal in KPMG's alternative investment tax practice. Financial markets, meanwhile, could start to move funds in stablecoins — as opposed to cash — for faster settlements with less cost, he added. That could profoundly change how payments are made and processed in the U.S., putting pressure on traditional payment networks like Visa and Mastercard. Market structure legislation is the other big one the table. It would create a framework for regulating broader crypto issuance and trading. If passed — the Senate is currently drafting its own version — it would establish a new category of registered digital assets, flashing a green light for traditional finance. More crypto related products would be expected to enter the mainstream market through retail brokerage accounts, Tuths says, "thereby opening a floodgate of retail capital into the crypto trading ecosystem." The third bill slated for this week is to prevent the Fed from ever creating a digital version of official U.S. currency, or a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Conservatives oppose the concept because they think it would mean more government intrusion into peoples' private lives. What they're saying: "It's one of these industries that, for a very, very, very long time has sought legitimization, either through getting these activities regulated at higher levels around the world, or through, of course, proving their real world use cases," Dante Disparte, head of global policy for stablecoin issuer Circle, tells Axios. Zoom out: So why now? For lawmakers, pressure to move is coming from a couple of different places — the president promising to deliver wins for the industry, plus a trio of linked PACs with more than $100 million on hand keeping tabs on how lawmakers vote. It's a whole different world from when the nation's leading crypto company, Coinbase, requested rule making and got sued by the Biden administration instead. Friction point: Several Democrats will be pushing back next week. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the top Dem on the House Financial Services Committee, is calling next week"Anti-Crypto Corruption Week," calling all three bills "dangerous pieces of crypto legislation." At the center of many Democrats' resistance is President Trump himself, due to his family's considerable personal investments in cryptocurrency putting a the specter of corruption risks over the process. The bottom line: Republican leadership is likely to relish these votes, because they know 90% of their members will fall in line.
19 minutes ago
Humanitarian system struggles to fill US void in Sudan, where the world's most dire crisis rages
Humanitarians in Sudan, where a two-year civil war has given rise to the world's most acute needs and made assistance increasingly difficult, warn that a vacuum left by cuts to U.S. funding for aid programs cannot be filled. The civil war between the country's army and a paramilitary group has displaced 11 million people internally and 4 million more are refugees in other countries. It's the only place [country?] in the world where famine conditions have been confirmed in multiple locations, and the United Nations says 30 million Sudanese require assistance -- or 60% of the country's population. The U.S. last week shuttered its arm for foreign assistance, formerly the U.S. Agency for International Development, folding it under the State Department in a move Secretary of State Marco Rubio said marked the end of an 'era of government-sanctioned inefficiency.' 'Moving forward, our assistance will be targeted and time limited,' Rubio wrote on Substack, adding the U.S. 'will favor those nations that have demonstrated both the ability and willingness to help themselves and will target our resources to areas where they can have a multiplier effect.' The months-long drawdown of USAID reduced its staff by 83% -- down from 10,000 employees to a few hundred -- and resulted in stop-work orders for grantees of its funds, including in Sudan. The State Department says the life-saving work of the agency, which distributes grants to aid implementers, is continuing, and said its new 'America First' foreign assistance policy would be accountable to policymakers in Washington instead of global entities like the United Nations. A senior State Department official last week called the end of USAID and the institution of a new overarching office at State 'a milestone for American engagement in the world,' saying U.S. assistance abroad would be 'linked up diplomatically' with U.S. interests. The British medical journal Lancet found that in the absence of USAID's funds and works, 14 million more people would die in the next five years, a third of those children under senior State Department official downplayed the study. 'You can go back and relitigate all these little decisions. That's not our focus. That's not the secretary's focus,' the official said. 'We are excited about what sort of the America First foreign assistance agenda is going to look like, and how much impact we can have moving forward.' Meanwhile, in the world's most dire humanitarian crisis, where access for emergency food and medical workers has been made increasingly difficult by warring parties, people are fleeing violence on foot, children are malnourished, and Sudanese are dying from treatable conditions. Pietro Curtaz, an emergency logistics coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF) said children he sees crossing Sudan's border are malnourished at a rate of 29%. The cuts to USAID -- and the chaos that followed -- have 'come with a body count' in Sudan said Tom Perriello, the U.S. special envoy to Sudan in the last year of the Biden administration from 2024 to 2025. There were 29 USAID employees in Sudan in 2023, at the outset of the war, according to then-administrator Samantha Powers. The July 1 reprogramming of USAID into the State Department cut two additional U.S. staffers dedicated to Sudan, leaving just nine remaining in the region, said Andrea Tracy, a former USAID Sudan official who now runs her own humanitarian funding mechanism for the country. Tracy saw colleagues lose their jobs on a daily basis as USAID wound down the programs it funded in the country, she told ABC News in a June phone call. 'I was talking to one of the regional directors the other day, and just that morning, she got an email saying another 40 programs are going to be cut,' she said. 'So we haven't found the floor yet.' The dramatic reorientation of U.S. aid abroad comes as the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Germany have announced a scaling down of their own foreign assistance budgets and as humanitarian crises in places like Sudan -- where the civil war has stretched into a third year -- deepen. According to data from the U.N., USAID provided 44% of the world's humanitarian funding in 2024 for Sudan. A U.N. spokesman told ABC News that 'food aid, nutrition support and essential health services' have been cut back as the U.N.'s annual fund for Sudan is funded at only 14%. 'Without urgent additional support, the risk of famine and further deterioration remains high,' said Dan Teng'o, a spokesperson for the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The State Department did not respond to requests by ABC News for the current data on its assistance commitments to Sudan after foreign aid freezes and layoffs. But it said in a statement that 'foreign assistance continues to arrive in Sudan,' citing a $56 million donation to the World Food Programme and a wheat grain delivery under USAID that would feed 'as many as 3.2 million people for an entire month.' It also said emergency assistance continues for refugees of Sudan who have been displaced to 'seven neighboring countries due to the conflict.' Important dollars for refugee assistance are in jeopardy, too, as humanitarians brace for the impacts of a proposed $1.7 billion cut to U.S. refugee assistance. As a part of Rubio's reorganization, the State Department proposed a 50% reduction for aid to the world's refugees in its 2026 budget request to Congress. Chain reactions and health care at the brink Humanitarians, who are legally protected under international law, have not been spared from the violence of the civil war, which has deprived people of the chance to stave off starvation and made access increasingly difficult. Five humanitarians in June died when a U.N. convoy came under attack, the U.N. said. In the void, small, grassroots organizations began to sprout when war broke out two years ago. A coalition known as Mutual Aid stood up emergency clinics and soup kitchens that became 'a lifeline' for Sudanese, Tracy said. The coalition was backed by nearly 80% funding from USAID, organizers have the White House on President Donald Trump's first day in office froze all U.S. assistance abroad, Tracy said, some 1,500 of the kitchens in Sudan closed almost immediately. Perriello, whose role as the special envoy in Sudan has been left vacant by the Trump administration, said the Mutual Aid coalition was among a group of 'edgy efforts … redefining approaches to aid.' These programs suffered the first and 'deepest' cuts, he said. Tracy said the pain from the cuts has been felt most acutely in the health sector, where medicine is not moving the way it used to and a 'chain' of 'different components that rely on each other' are not in place. 'Once you break one of those components, it all breaks,' she said. MSF, which provides emergency medical care in Sudan, is operating in a country where the World Health Organization estimates only 20 to 30% of health facilities are operational. 'Wherever we look in Sudan, you will find humanitarian and medical needs. All those needs are overwhelming, urgent, and unfortunately, unmet,' Claire San Filippo, MSF's emergency coordinator for Sudan, said. A 'case study' for impact of cuts At the Tine border point in Chad, east of the violence-plunged Darfur region of Sudan, Curtaz, the emergency coordinator for MSF, told ABC News the cuts are impossible to miss. 'Clinically … we tend to see people that are in much worse condition than before because of all of that,' he said. MSF is independent and donor-funded, taking no dollars from the U.S. government and therefore not directly affected by the cuts and shutdown of USAID. Sudan has become a 'case study' for the 'impact of those cuts,' Curtaz said. 'One of the examples you can touch first,' he said, is the lack of shelter for refugees under a 110-degree sun. People arrive by foot in Chad having spent the day with no form of shelter, he said. The 18,000 people hosted in Tine should have had at least 350 toilets, meeting a standard in acute situations of one toilet for every 50 people, Curtaz said. But for a group surging toward 20,000 people, it had only nine toilets. Asked whether the large, interconnected humanitarian system is neglecting Sudan, Curtaz agreed. 'A majority of the weight is lying on us, on the host community and on grassroots organizations that are doing their best to support the population,' he said. 'So, yes.' 'For the first time in my life,' Tracy said, MSF doctors and administrators told her, ''We really need the USAID money…to come back online, because we're carrying way more of a load than we can handle. We're falling apart here.''
Yahoo
32 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Pam Bondi Hanging on by Her Fingertips Amid MAGA Firestorm
Pam Bondi is clinging to her job as she faces a firestorm of criticism from MAGA loyalists over her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. It's hard to find a Trump official who has faced more wrath than Donald Trump's attorney general, as the president's supporters pile on after the Justice Department indicated this week there was no more information to release on the convicted sex offender and denied the existence of an Epstein 'client list.' Across social media, the president's supporters have been accusing Bondi of lying to the American people. They're calling for the president to fire her or for her to resign. Some have even thrown around the word 'impeachment.' Some of the biggest conservative activists have added fuel to the burning outrage with their heated takedowns of the attorney general. 'She can say whatever she wants to say. She also said she is committed to 'combatting human trafficking.' Do you really believe her? I don't,' posted far-right activist Laura Loomer. Alt-right podcaster Jack Posobiec skewered her on his show for calling the Epstein case closed and saying that's 'not how you treat the American people.' 'I feel very angry, upset, used… from having gone to the White House and receiving this binder full of baloney that was completely publicly available information already that we were told was new information on Epstein. It wasn't,' he said. 'We were told that more information was coming. It wasn't.' He was referring to influencers being invited to the White House in February, where they were handed binders marked 'Phase 1' and 'Declassified' that contained Epstein material that was largely already public knowledge. Megyn Kelly suggested on Tuesday that Bondi was 'too lazy' to check if any of the information was new before handing it over to influencers earlier this year. 'She's either lazy and incompetent or she willingly humiliated some of the president's most loyal supporters,' Kelly said on her show. 'Pam Bondi should resign—not because of a cover-up, but for incompetence,' wrote Glenn Beck. The attorney general did herself no favors as she fiercely attempted to defend herself at the White House on Tuesday when asked a question about Epstein while sitting just two seats down from Trump. Bondi claimed she never said there was a client list waiting on her desk during a February Fox News interview, and what she was referring to was the overall Epstein file. She also claimed the files not released were child porn which would not be made public after she previously teased 'truckloads' of evidence. Trump seemed frustrated that the question about Epstein was posed during his Cabinet meeting, cutting in to call it 'unbelievable' and a 'desecration' before letting Bondi even answer. However, MAGA world blasted the attorney general for what she had to say about Epstein, her explanation of the missing minute of the 2019 prison footage and claiming not to know whether he was an agent. While Bondi is taking fire from MAGA world for not following through on her promise to release new Epstein files, it remains to be seen whether the president will turn on her, too. Speaking at the White House surrounded by his top officials on Tuesday, Trump signaled he was still happy with his team. But while the president lavished praise on the FBI's Kash Patel and Dan Bongino in a social media post on Tuesday, notably absent was any mention of Bondi. The president is no stranger to firing the attorney general. He did so during his first term in 2018 after becoming frustrated with then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions over the Russia collusion probe. But Bondi, who previously served as Trump's personal attorney, has remained a key ally of the president when it comes to carrying out his agenda at the Justice Department.
