Domenico Montanaro

As pro-Trump insurrectionists poured into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a Black Capitol Police officer passionately testified Tuesday that he faced racist epithets, the likes of which he had never heard while serving in uniform.

"You hear that, guys, this n***** voted for Joe Biden!" a woman in a pink MAGA shirt yelled toward Capitol Police Pfc. Harry Dunn, he recounted, after Dunn said he voted for President Biden.

Violent crime is on the rise in urban areas across the country.

Many small cities that typically have relatively few murders are seeing significant increases over last year. Killings in Albuquerque, N.M., Austin, Texas, and Pittsburgh, for example, have about doubled so far in 2021, while Portland, Ore., has had five times as many murders compared to last year, according to data compiled by Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided a major case on voting rights that essentially gutted what's left of the Voting Rights Act.

The court upheld two Arizona laws — one of which banned the collection of absentee ballots by anyone other than a relative or caregiver, otherwise known as "ballot harvesting." the other threw out any ballots cast in the wrong precinct.

A majority of Americans believe ensuring access to voting is more important than rooting out fraud, the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey finds.

At the same time, there was broad agreement that people should have to show identification when they go to the polls.

Two-thirds of Americans also believe democracy is "under threat" but likely for very different reasons.

Normal is not easily defined.

The past 15 months, though, have certainly been anything but.

Americans are starting to believe a "sense of normal" is approaching fairly soon, however, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey. The poll also found that with the coronavirus receding in this country, mask-wearing is declining and Americans are going out more. But they remain cautious about being in large crowds.

As former President Donald Trump steadily ramps up public events, he held his first rally since leaving office on Saturday night in Ohio.

"We're gonna take back the House, we're gonna take back the Senate," Trump said, speaking before a crowd of thousands at a fairground in Wellington, a town southwest of Cleveland, in a county and state he won in 2020. "My fellow Americans, our movement is far from over. In fact, our fight has only just begun."

The country will narrowly miss President Biden's goal of having 70% of the U.S. adult population at least partially vaccinated by July 4, according to a White House official who did not want to get ahead of the public announcement.

But the official also noted that 70% of those 30 and older have already been vaccinated a week and a half ahead of Independence Day and that those 27 and older are expected to also reach the 70% mark by July 4.

An important election takes place Tuesday in New York City.

But beyond who wins the mayoral primaries there, what happens could have consequences for how millions of Americans vote in the future.

The U.S. Park Police did not clear protesters from a park outside the White House so then-President Donald Trump could take a photo-op at a nearby church, an Interior Department inspector general's report found.

A day after being suspended from Facebook for a total of two years, former President Donald Trump returned to the political arena Saturday night, furthering election lies and returning to a cynical and dark view of America.

Michael Flynn, a onetime national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, was videotaped in Texas over the weekend pushing talking points of the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory and also seeming to endorse a coup in the United States, though he later said he doesn't back one.

Census data out recently shows that Asian Americans increased their turnout rate by more than any other racial or ethnic group between the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections.

Their turnout jumped 10 percentage points, while Hispanic and white voters each increased by 6 percentage points, and Black voters ticked up 3 points.

With Twitter taken away from him, former President Donald Trump has been largely out of the spotlight and unable to drive news narratives the way he did when he was president and on social media.

But Trump continues to have great influence with Republican elected leaders because of his continued popularity with the GOP base.

White and Black Americans have very different views of race in America and have had very different experiences when it comes to dealing with discrimination and trusting police, a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll details.

President Biden continues to get good marks for his handling of the most pressing issue of the day — the coronavirus pandemic. He also remains on average above 50% for his handling of the economy, which is closely tied to COVID-19.

Facebook's Oversight Board on Wednesday essentially punted the decision back to the company on whether to eventually allow former President Donald Trump back on Facebook and Instagram. What the social media giant decides in the coming months will likely have major consequences for Trump's political power.

"It could be a make-or-break moment for Trump's political future," said Eric Wilson, a Republican political technologist.

Before being elected president, Joe Biden promised he could accomplish a lot of things in his first 100 days in office.

We gathered a number of those priorities here, two days after he was declared the winner of the 2020 election.

President Biden and his team have been making a simple case for why Republican elected officials should support his roughly $2 trillion infrastructure plan: Lawmakers might not like it, but their voters do.

"Overwhelmingly, the majority of the American people — Democrats, Republicans and independents — support infrastructure investments that meets the moment," Biden said last week. "So, I urge the Congress: Listen to your constituents and, together, we can lay a foundation for an economy that works for everyone and allows America to remain the world leader."

When Major League Baseball decided to move its All-Star Game out of Georgia because of the state's new restrictive voting law, it became the latest in a line of political boycotts.

President Biden's infrastructure train is leaving the station.

In remarks Wednesday pushing for his sweeping $2.3 trillion plan, Biden said he wants to meet with Republicans about it and hopes to negotiate in "good faith" — a political tenet that hasn't been practiced much in Washington, D.C., in recent years.

But Biden is not waiting around.

"We will not be open to doing nothing," the president said. "Inaction, simply, is not an option."

Translation: Get on board or step aside.

The country's infrastructure is badly in need of repair, both major parties agree. But for years they haven't been able to agree on a proposal, or how to pay for it.

Americans say President Biden is faring well when it comes to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and, to a lesser extent, the economy, a new NPR/Marist poll finds. But immigration looks like it will continue to be a thorn in the president's side.

Two months into office, President Biden will give his first news conference as president on Thursday.

In recent days, Biden and other members of the first families have toured the country, touting his newly signed $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

Relevance is important in politics — and it can be fleeting.

That presents a challenge to a former president who might be seeking a return to the office but is banned from some of the largest social media platforms in the world, including Twitter and Facebook.

So it's perhaps no surprise then that Donald Trump is teasing the possibility of launching his own social media platform.

Many Democrats hope President Biden's endorsement of changing the Senate filibuster, to one in which a senator actually has to talk for potentially hours on end, could mean greasing the wheels for major progressive priorities.

"You have to do it," Biden, a former longtime senator, said during an ABC interview that aired Tuesday night.

Republicans and supporters of Donald Trump are the least likely to say they will seek a COVID-19 vaccine when one becomes available to them.

That has led to calls for the former president to speak out more forcefully to encourage his supporters to get vaccinated.

"I think it's very important for former President Trump, as well as the [former] vice president [Mike Pence], to actively encourage all of their followers to get the vaccine," Adm. Brett Giroir, who was the coronavirus testing czar in the Trump administration, said Monday afternoon on CNN.

President Biden is aiming for the country to begin to find a degree of normalcy and begin to move on from the coronavirus pandemic by the July Fourth holiday, Biden announced in his first prime-time address Thursday night from the White House on the one-year anniversary of the pandemic.

There is no more pressing issue for the U.S. — or the world — right now than the COVID-19 pandemic.

And politically, how President Biden is perceived to be handling it over the next year or so could define his presidency and his chances for reelection, if he runs.

The latest Trump-versus-The-Establishment skirmish is over one of the things couples fight about most.

Money.