Author: Reporter

David Rasavong’s cultural pride is evident all throughout his restaurant. It is on the wall of family portraits and where a stunning mural depicts his family’s journey from Laos to California. It is on the menu filled with Lao and Thai dishes like the crispy coconut rice salad of Nam Khao and the stir-fried rice noodles of Pad See Ew. And it is in the fact that Love & Thai in Fresno, California, restaurant is open at all. A baseless accusation grounded in a racist stereotype about Asian food using dog meat brought a six-month barrage of harassment so...

Julian Assange’s lawyers opened a final U.K. legal challenge on February 20 to stop the WikiLeaks founder from being sent to the United States to face spying charges, arguing that American authorities are seeking to punish him for exposing serious criminal acts by the U.S. state. Lawyer Edward Fitzgerald said there was a risk Assange “will suffer a flagrant denial of justice” if he is sent to the U.S. At a two-day High Court hearing, Assange’s attorneys are asking judges to grant a new appeal, his last legal roll of the dice in Britain Assange himself was not in...

The Palestinian foreign minister on February 19 accused Israel of apartheid and urged the United Nations’ top court to declare that Israel’s occupation of lands sought for a Palestinian state is illegal and must end immediately and unconditionally for any hope for a two-state future to survive. The remarks came at historic hearings into the legality of Israel’s 57-year occupation. The case opened against the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas war, which immediately became a focal point of the day — even though the hearings were meant to center on Israel’s open-ended control over the occupied West Bank, the Gaza...

Like the other Founding Fathers, George Washington was uneasy about the idea of publicly celebrating his life. He was the first leader of a new republic, not a tyrant. And yet the nation will once again commemorate the first U.S. president on Monday, 292 years after he was born. The meaning of Presidents Day has changed dramatically, from being mostly unremarkable and filled with work for Washington in the 1700s to the consumerism bonanza it has become today. For some historians the holiday has lost all discernible meaning. Historian Alexis Coe, author of “You Never Forget Your First: A...

Lower-income families with school-age kids can get help from the federal government paying for groceries this summer, unless they live in one of the 14 states that have said no to joining the program this year. The reasons for the rejections, all from states with Republican governors, include philosophical objections to welfare programs, technical challenges due to aging computer systems and satisfaction with other summer nutrition programs reaching far fewer children. The impact falls on people like Otibehia Allen, a single mom of five in Clarksdale, Mississippi, who makes too much to qualify for some public assistance programs. She...