Author: Reporter

Donald Trump has won plaudits from his base of conservative Christian supporters for establishing multiple faith-related entities, including the White House Faith Office, a task force to eradicate anti-Christian bias, and a religious liberty commission. “We’re bringing back religion in our country,” Trump said at a recent Rose Garden event, on the National Day of Prayer, when he announced the creation of the Religious Liberty Commission. “We must always be one nation under God, a phrase that they would like to get rid of, the radical left.” But others, including some Christians, are alarmed by these acts, saying Trump...

Bluesky has seen its user base soar since the U.S. presidential election, boosted by people seeking refuge from Elon Musk’s X, which they view as increasingly leaning too far to the right given its owner’s support of President-elect Donald Trump, or wanting an alternative to Meta’s Threads and its algorithms. The platform grew out of the company then known as Twitter, championed by its former CEO Jack Dorsey. Its decentralized approach to social networking was eventually intended to replace Twitter’s core mechanic. That is unlikely now that the two companies have parted ways. But Bluesky’s growth trajectory — with...

The world may be rethinking the American dream. For centuries, people in other countries saw the United States as a place of welcome and opportunity. Now, Donald Trump’s drive for mass deportations of migrants is riling the streets of Los Angeles, college campuses, even churches — and fueling a global rethinking about the virtues and promise of coming to America. “The message coming from Washington is that you are not welcome in the United States,” said Edwin van Rest, CEO of Studyportals, which tracks real-time searches by international students considering studying in other countries. Student interest in studying in...

Growing up in the former Soviet Union, Pedro Spivakovsky-Gonzalez’s father and grandparents would listen to Voice of America with their ears pressed to the radio, trying to catch words through the government’s radio jamming. The U.S.-funded news service was instrumental in helping them understand what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain, before they moved to the United States in the 1970s. “It was a window into another world,” Spivakovsky-Gonzalez said. “They looked to it as a sort of a beacon of freedom. They were able to imagine a different world from the one they were...