President Biden on Wednesday awarded the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry to two Union soldiers who stole a locomotive deep in Confederate territory during the Civil War and drove it north for 87 miles as they destroyed railroad tracks and telegraph lines.

U.S. Army Pvts. Philip G. Shadrach and George D. Wilson were captured by Confederates and executed by hanging. Biden recognized their courage 162 years later with the country's highest military decoration, calling the operation they joined “one of the most dangerous missions of the entire Civil War.”

“Every soldier who joined that mission was awarded the Medal of Honor except for two. Two soldiers who died because of that operation and never received this recognition," Biden said. “Today, we right that wrong.”

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Students who enrolled at a fake Michigan university set up by immigration agents have the right to sue the U.S. government, a federal appellate court ruled.

A decision last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit means hundreds of students who paid tuition at the University of Farmington in Farmington Hills – created by undercover agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement – have a legal basis to continue pursuing their claims in court. Farmington Hills is about 20 miles northwest of Detroit.

In 2020, a lawsuit was filed against the U.S. government in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims by attorneys on behalf of Teja Ravi and other students enrolled at the University of Farmington, which was shut down by ICE after agents arrested about 250 of its students. The lawsuit said the government breached its contract with the students by stealing their tuition money, about $11,000 per year for each student. Students are asking for their money back and other punitive damages.

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Boeing’s public relations crisis is now out of this world: the company’s Starliner spacecraft with two astronauts onboard – are currently stuck in space.

After what started as an eight-day mission, US astronauts Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore have now spent the better part of a month in the International Space Station as engineers work out the problems with Starliner.

It remains unclear when exactly the astronauts will be able to make their return to Earth. A Boeing spokesperson said they have “adjusted the return of Starliner crew flight test until after two planned spacewalks on Monday 24 June and Tuesday 2 July” and that they “currently do not have a date for the return, and will evaluate opportunities after the spacewalks”.

The spokesperson also noted “the crew is not pressed for time to leave the station since there are plenty of supplies in orbit, and the station’s schedule is relatively open through mid-August”.

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CNN is coming under heavy criticism after two of its top anchors failed to offer real-time fact checks of false statements made by former President Trump and President Biden as they moderated Thursday night’s presidential debate.

During the highly-anticipated and nationally televised clash, both Trump and Biden made a number of misleading or false statements about topics ranging from crime to immigration to the economy.

Moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash on multiple occasions offered follow up questions when a candidate had not used up all of their allotted speaking time or had not answered a question directly.

But neither, however, offered any fact checks to the two men’s assertions during the 90-minute broadcast.

“CNN’s decision to abrogate its journalistic responsibilities by not fact checking Trump’s firehose of lies is unforgivable,” wrote former cable news host Keith Olbermann in one social media post.

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Taking a daily multivitamin does not help people to live any longer and may actually increase the risk of an early death, a major study has found.

Researchers in the US analysed health records from nearly 400,000 adults with no major long-term diseases to see whether daily multivitamins reduced their risk of death over the next two decades.

Rather than living longer, people who consumed daily multivitamins were marginally more likely than non-users to die in the study period, prompting the government researchers to comment that “multivitamin use to improve longevity is not supported”.

Nearly half of UK adults take multivitamins or dietary supplements once a week or more, part of a domestic market worth more than half a billion pounds annually. The global market for the supplements is estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars each year. In the US, a third of adults use multivitamins in the hope of preventing disease.

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The annual Muslim pilgrimage to the sacred city of Mecca that wrapped up last week became a death march for over 1,300 Hajj participants who died in temperatures that climbed above 124 degrees.

Saudi Arabia's health minister Fahad Al-Jalajel, who on Sunday announced a death total of 1,301, blamed the fatalities on pilgrims "walking long distances under direct sunlight without adequate shelter or comfort."

The 5-6 day odyssey of hiking and prayer drew almost 2 million pilgrims from around the world. Fatalities included a number of elderly people and those suffering from chronic diseases, A-Jalajel said. About  83% of the fatalities were among people who were not authorized to make the pilgrimage, he said.

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The US government, in a report published on Tuesday, acknowledged for the first time the harms that federal dams have inflicted on Native American tribes in the US Pacific north-west.

The report by the interior department details the “historic, ongoing and cumulative impacts of federal Columbia River dams on Columbia River Basin Tribes”, including how dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers have devastated salmon runs, inundated villages and burial grounds, and deprived tribal members of the ability to exercise traditional ways of life.

The Columbia River basin, an area roughly the size of Texas, historically supported abundant wild salmon, which play an important role in tribal identity and spirituality, as well as steelhead and native resident fish.

The construction of large hydroelectric dams throughout the basin at the turn of the 20th century impeded fish migration and flooded entire villages and towns, forcing people to relocate and transforming the ecosystem.

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One evening in 2019, Janice Blanock was scrolling through Facebook when she heard a stranger mention her son in a video on her feed. Luke, an outgoing high school athlete, had died three years earlier at age 19 from Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer.

Blanock had come across a live stream of a community meeting to discuss rare cancers that were occurring with alarming frequency in south-western Pennsylvania, where she lives.

Between 2009 and 2019, five other students in Blanock’s school district were also diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma. (The region saw about 30 overall cases of the cancer during that time.) In the video, health experts and residents were talking about whether the uptick in illnesses was related to fracking. Blanock was riveted.

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