President Barack Obama says America’s racial history “still casts its long shadow” despite a half-century of progress toward a more perfect union.

Thousands of people have gathered in Selma, Alabama, ahead of a speech by President Barack Obama at the 50th anniversary of a landmark event of the civil rights movement.

Security officials are searching a vehicle near the White House after firefighters dealt with a fire.

The lack of a Bafta nomination for Martin Luther King Jr biopic Selma was not a “racist snub”, the head of the academy has said.

Barack Obama's firebrand minister said the US leader was "like any other president", in an appraisal of his former parishioner's short time in the White House.

Democrat rivals Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama today shifted their battle for the presidential nomination to Indiana, the Midwestern state where the former first lady faces yet another must-win vote in the opening days of May.

Reunited at last in death, Coretta Scott King was laid to rest beside the tomb of her husband after a stirring funeral with 10,000 mourners that was both lyrical and mournful, and at times political.