The State Department has launched a new bureau aimed at making the battle against global outbreaks a lasting priority of U.S. foreign policy

By Daniel Trotta (Reuters) -A U.S. judge on Monday blocked the state of Idaho at least temporarily from prosecuting doctors

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants to meet with Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss her criticism of the state’s Black history school curriculum standards after she joined widespread outrage over newly approved guidelines that diminish the impact of slavery and racist violence. “In Florida we are unafraid to have an open and honest dialogue about the issues. And you clearly have no trouble ducking down to Florida on short notice,” the governor wrote in a letter on 31 July, referencing her recent remarks in the state. “So given your grave concern (which, I must assume, is sincere) about what you think our standards say, I am officially inviting you back down to Florida to discuss our African American History standards,” he added. The administration also has invited William B Allen, one of the members of the working group that developed the standards who has a long history of inflammatory remarks and partisan rhetoric. The Independent has requested comment from the office of Ms Harris. The vice president travelled to Orlando on Tuesday to deliver remarks at the 20th Women’s Missionary Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Quadrennial Convention. Her visit follows remarks in the state on 21 July to condemn the state’s “propaganda” and the “extremist, so-called leaders” who support it. Though she did not name him or any other Florida officials, the vice president’s speech was directly aimed at the governor, whose administration has sought to radically overhaul public education and establish a “parents’ rights” agenda that restricts honest lessons of race and racism, threatens discussion of LGBT+ people and events, targets libraries and reshapes local school boards. A new set of standards for African American history in Florida schools will teach middle schoolers how enslaved people “developed skills” that could be “applied for personal benefit”. Another guideline instructs high schoolers to be taught that a massacre led by white supremacists against Black residents in Ocoee to stop them from voting in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” Civil rights advocates, educators and lawmakers have warned that the guidelines present a distorted, revisionist picture of American history. “Adults know what slavery really was. It involved rape, it involved torture, it involved taking a baby from their mother, it involved some of the worst examples of depriving humanity of people in our world,” Ms Harris said in her remarks in Jacksonville. Members of the working group and the Florida Board of Education have defended the unanimously approved standards, assuring that they include comprehensive lessons on American history, including its darkest chapters. Mr Allen, a Black professor emeritus at Michigan State University who also sits on the national advisory board of the right-wing think tank Center for Urban Renewal and Education, has repeatedly defended the working group’s guidelines. A review of his past statements from Popular Information reveals a history of incendiary, contrarian remarks used to bolster and legitimise right-wing ideology. In 1989, he faced protests while participating in a panel titled “Blacks? Animals? Homosexuals? What is a Minority?” on which he claimed that special classes of protection for LGBT+ people and other minorities are a “fatal” mistake that heighten “tensions and antagonism”. Creating legal protections for minority groups “is the beginning of the evil of reducing American blacks to an equality with animals and then seducing other groups to seek the same charitable treatment,” according to prepared remarks. His speech was denounced by the US Civil Rights Commission – on which he was then serving as chair – as “disgusting” and “necessarily inflammatory”. That same year, he also was charged with kidnapping a 14-year-old girl from a Native American reservation in Arizona while she was the subject of a custody battle between her mother and a white couple who adopted her. Mr Allen also has opposed race-conscious admissions in higher education, including leading a campaign with a group that included members of the conservative Christian Hillsdale College and right-wing interest group the Heritage Foundation. He also has criticised The 1619 Project, which is explicitly banned from Florida schools, and has rejected concepts including “systemic racism, institutional racism [and] white privilege.” Mr DeSantis has routinely accused “the left” and Democratic officials of “indoctrinating” students in the state while he promotes an agenda that bans honest discussions of race and racism, sexuality and gender. The governor’s administration also recently approved materials from right-wing political advocacy group PragerU to be included in K-12 classrooms. The founder himself has said that those lessons are explicitly designed to indoctrinate. The campaign for Mr DeSantis, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president in 2024, has fired back at Black Republicans in Congress who have joined criticism of the African American history standards, including US Reps Byron Donalds and John James, as well as 2024 rival and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott. Both Mr James and Mr Donalds have endorsed Donald Trump. Read More Why Florida’s new curriculum on slavery is becoming a political headache for Ron DeSantis Most of Florida work group behind controversial new guidelines on African American history did not agree, report says The GOP primary is already decided. We’re just pretending it isn’t

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Barbenheimer is the cinematic event of the year, but not everybody is happy about the discourse surrounding both Barbie and Oppenheimer. In fact, there’s been a backlash on social media in Japan following the release of promotional material for both films, and it’s led to the #NoBarbenheimer hashtag trending. Things came to a head when a US account for the Barbie movie responded to a graphic of both Margot Robbie and Cillian Murphy in their respective movies with the caption: “It’s going to be a summer to remember.” The tweet now appears to have been deleted. This month marks 78 years since atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan remains the only country to have suffered the use of nuclear weapons during wartime. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Oppenheimer isn’t banned in Japan but it has yet to receive a release date, and the social media backlash has caused the Japanese arm of Warner Bros. to respond to the criticism [via South China Morning Post]. Warner Bros. Japan LLC posted a statement on the official Japanese account for Barbie saying it was “highly regrettable” that the film took part in the “Barbenheimer” discourse in an inappropriate manner. The company also stated it was not connected to the meme and added that it was seeking “an appropriate response” from its US parent company. It comes as the release of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer generated a flurry of interest in the man behind the atomic bomb, Julius Robert Oppenheimer. The film tells the story of the physicist and his role in the Manhattan Project, which was the codename given to the development of the A-bomb. The first bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. It killed tens of thousands of people. A second bomb fell days later on the city of Nagasaki. Historians believe more than 200,000 people died as a result of the events, with millions more severely affected. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Queen and Adam Lambert are returning to Japan next February for a series of Dome concerts.

Leaked photos from behind the scenes of 'Barbie' have revealed a scene cut from the final film that would have seen a character return.

Family and fans bade farewell to singer and actress CoCo Lee at her funeral in Hong Kong on Monday, celebrating a decades-long career that included dozens of successful albums, movies and television shows across the globe.