US heads into a new week shaken by violence and frustration
The U.S. experienced its sixth day of unrest on May 31 as protests and riots continued in cities across the U.S., including Salt Lake and Provo. While many big cities enacted curfews and deployed the National Guard, demonstrations descended into violence again on Sunday.
The scale of the coast-to-coast protests has rivaled the historic demonstrations of the civil rights and Vietnam War eras. The Associated Press reported that at least 4,400 people have been arrested in connection to the protests.
Protests also spread to foreign soil, including Germany, London and New Zealand. U.S. national security adviser Robert O’Brien and President Trump have said much of the violence and looting that has took place over the weekend could be attributed to foreign adversaries and domestic extremist groups.
Trump signs executive order aimed at curbing protections for social media giants
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday, May 28 aimed at curtailing legal protections offered to media giants like Twitter and Facebook.
The order came just days after Twitter attached independent fact-checking to two of Trump’s tweets alleging mail-in voter ballots will increase voter fraud. The move by the social media platform was the first time Twitter had attached facts checks to non-coronavirus tweets. Facebook has taken a more hands-off approach than Twitter.
Critics have argued that the order will encourage censorship of speech as companies become pressed to worry about what they could potentially be liable for. Trump argues the order will end what he sees as politically biased censorship of conservatives like himself.
Trump’s fossil fuel agenda gets pushback from federal judges
Federal courts have delivered a string of rebukes to the Trump administration over what they found were failures to protect the environment and address climate change as it promotes fossil fuel interests and the extraction of natural resources from public lands.
Judges have ruled administration officials ignored or downplayed potential environmental damage in lawsuits over oil and gas leases, coal mining and pipelines to transport fuels across the U.S., according to an Associated Press review of more than a dozen major environmental cases.
SpaceX astronauts arrive at international space station
The SpaceX Dragon capsule completed a successful docking at the International Space Station for NASA on Sunday, May 31. Astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken embraced the station’s three other residents upon landing.
The event followed a historic launch on May 30 when the SpaceX Dragon took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The event marked the first time in nearly a decade that a space shuttle was launched from U.S. soil and the first time a private company launched a rocket with humans aboard into space.
