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The president of the Missouri school board that voted to revoke its anti-racism resolution now says the resolution could be kept, but revised. The Francis Howell School Board in 2020 adopted a resolution against racism at the height of the national reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Control of the board flipped over the past two years, with conservatives winning elections, and it voted 5-2 last week to let the resolution expire. But in a Facebook post Tuesday, board President Adam Bertrand said that although support for the 2020 resolution as written is unlikely, “there may be support of a rewrite or modification.” Bertrand said member Mark Ponder will seek input from other board members and the community, “to move towards a draft that he feels the majority of the current board feels the community could support.” Messages left Wednesday with Bertrand and Ponder were not immediately returned. Zebrina Looney, president of the St. Charles County NAACP, said she is hopeful that the resolution can be maintained and hopes that her organization can be involved in any revisions. “I think having all voices involved, including voices of people of color, would be beneficial,” Looney said. School board elections have become intense political battlegrounds in recent years, with political action groups successfully electing conservative candidates who promise to restrict how race and sexuality can be taught, remove books that some conservatives find offensive, and stop transgender-inclusive sports teams. The Francis Howell district is among Missouri’s largest, with 17,000 students in a mostly white suburban area of St. Louis. Several dozen people opposed to rescinding the resolution turned out for the school board meeting last Thursday, and the vote drew strong condemnation from the NAACP other civil rights groups. The 2020 resolution “pledges to our learning community that we will speak firmly against any racism, discrimination, and senseless violence against people regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, immigration status, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or ability." The board's vice president, Randy Cook, led the effort to remove the resolution, telling The Associated Press that the board “doesn’t need to be in the business of dividing the community.” Cook is among five board members who have been elected since April 2022 with the backing of the conservative political action committee Francis Howell Families. In 2021, the PAC described the anti-racism resolution as “woke activism” and drafted an alternative resolution to oppose “all acts of racial discrimination, including the act of promoting tenets of the racially-divisive Critical Race Theory, labels of white privilege, enforced equity of outcomes, identity politics, intersectionalism, and Marxism.” Cook said last week that he had no plans to push for a new resolution with that wording, or any other wording. In an email Wednesday, he said school boards are tasked with addressing the needs of their districts, “not to spend time writing and debating resolutions about all of the problems in the world today.” Racial issues remain especially sensitive in the St. Louis region, nine years after a police officer in the suburb Ferguson fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown during a street confrontation. Officer Darren Wilson was not charged and the shooting led to months of often violent protests, becoming a catalyst for the national Black Lives Matter movement. ___ Find more AP coverage of race and ethnicity issues: https://apnews.com/race-and-ethnicity Read More Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide African leaders condemn coup attempt against Niger’s president after his home is surrounded Whistleblower tells Congress the US is concealing 'multi-decade' program that captures UFOs Movie Review: Baby’s first horror? Disney’s ‘Haunted Mansion’ conjures up a story about grief

A group of major automakers on Wednesday said they were forming a new company to provide electric vehicle

Charles Robert Smith, a White man accused of fatally shooting three and injuring several others last month in Annapolis, Maryland, is now facing hate crime charges, according to a grand jury indictment.

Environmental groups warn the fire could harm an area of the North Sea that is a World Heritage site.

THG Plc, the online health, beauty and wellness retailer, has agreed to buy UK business newspaper City AM.

Pentagon whistleblowers shared explosive claims of alien technology defying laws of physics and pushback from military leadership against those reporting such sightings. The House Oversight Committee held a hearing titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency” on Wednesday. Three witnesses took part in the hearing – David Grusch, a former intelligence official and whistleblower who said last month that the US has “intact and partially intact” alien vehicles, David Fravor, an ex-Navy commander who reported spotting seeing an object flying across the sky during a 2004 training mission, and Ryan Graves, a retired Navy pilot who appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2021 saying that he had spotted unidentified aerial phenomena off the Atlantic coast “every day for at least a couple years”. Mr Grousch claimed that individuals have been injured while working on reverse engineering UFOs, but he said he couldn’t get into specifics of how that happened, adding that that “non-human biologics” were found along with recovered crafts. Mr Graves said that he estimates that 95 per cent of UFO sightings by pilots go unreported, citing fear of repercussions. Read More Republican lawmaker claims US is ‘hiding evidence’ of UFOs which ‘defy physics as we know it’ Why a Harvard professor thinks he may have found fragments of an alien spacecraft An Area 51 blogger was raided at gunpoint by federal agents. He says the US Government is trying to silence him Congressman asks UFO whistleblower if anyone has been ‘murdered’ to maintain alleged coverup Whistleblower tells Congress the US is concealing 'multi-decade' program that captures UFOs

President Joe Biden has nominated former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley to lead the Social Security Administration

Panthers officially name Bryce Young their starting signal-caller

Federal prosecutors and attorneys for President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, are at loggerheads and appear to have scrapped a deal for the lawyer and lobbyist turned artist to plead guilty to tax misdemeanour charges and enter into a diversion programme on a gun-related charge after the judge overseeing a plea hearing questioned whether the deal would preclude the government from pursuing other charges against him. US District Judge Maryellen Noreika ordered Mr Biden’s lawyers and prosecutors to confer further after Mr Biden said he would not accept the agreement if it did not provide that the government could not charge him for any crimes currently known to prosecutors if he successfully completes the terms of the deal. Prosecutors had agreed to ask Judge Noreika to impose a term of probation on Mr Biden for not having paid taxes on time in 2017 and 2018. Mr Biden was also expected to enter into a diversion deal under which he’d plead guilty to charges that he’d lied on a gun background check form when he said he wasn’t a user of drugs when he bought a pistol during that same time period, but would withdraw the plea after completing the terms of the diversion agreement, which often requires community service and continued sobriety verified by drug tests. During the court hearing, he told Judge Noreika that he’d been sober since 2019 but had been in and out of drug treatment for roughly two decades. The sticking point in the proceedings appeared when the judge asked prosecutors and defence counsel whether they understood the hearing to conclude any criminal proceedings against Mr Biden, and when prosecutors said that was not their understanding, she ordered prosecutors and defence counsel for the president’s son to confer on whether they still have an agreement. More follows... Read More Is Donald Trump going to prison? Trump begs Congress to help with legal troubles as possible Jan 6 charges loom – live Congressman asks UFO whistleblower if anyone has been ‘murdered’ to maintain coverup

Russia's annual inflation crept back above the central bank's 4% target in the week to July 24 for

By Tim Hepher PARIS (Reuters) -Europe's Airbus on Wednesday posted higher-than-expected underlying operating profit for the second quarter and reaffirmed

Vladimir Putin’s troops are being pushed back by Kyiv’s forces in eastern and southern Ukraine, where 1,700 drones will be sent to the frontline to help their counteroffensive “All of [the drones] are now going to the front to protect the lives of our soldiers, to make our artillery even more accurate, to destroy the enemy,” Mykhailo Fedorov, a deputy prime minister, said. The deputy defence minister, Hanna Maliar, reported advances towards the southern occupied cities of Melitopol and Berdyansk which is on the Sea of Azov. She said Kyiv’s troops were also successfully attacking in the east on the flanks of occupied Bakhmut – a city that has gained symbolic importance to both Kyiv and Moscow after months of bloody clashes. While “successes” in the southeast, she added, include an area near the village of Staromayorske which is located by a cluster of hamlets recaptured by Ukraine in the Donetsk region this summer. “Battles continue near Staromayorske, our defenders have successes, they were gaining a foothold on the reached frontiers,” Ms Maliar added. Read More Putin ‘looked paralyzed and unable to act’ as Wagner coup unfolded African leaders arrive in Russia for summit with Putin, as Kremlin seeks allies in Ukraine war China and Russia to join North Korea’s Korean War celebrations in a first after pandemic ‘Our own front line’: Ukrainian surgeons see wave of wounded soldiers since counteroffensive began