Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Tesla CEO’s lawyers said ‘pedo guy’ is a common insult used when Musk was a child in South Africa and not meant to ‘accuse a person’
Elon Musk is continuing to try to wriggle his way out of a defamation lawsuit, claiming in a court filing on Monday that a tweet labeling a British diver “pedo guy” was not meant to actually accuse him of pedophilia.
The Tesla CEO is being sued over comments made in 2018 about Vernon Unsworth, a diver who helped rescue a team of young soccer players stuck in an underwater cave.
New York Times details new claims against supreme court judge
Harris, Castro and Sanders lead calls for constitutional action
Donald Trump came storming to the defence of Brett Kavanaugh on Sunday, after the publication of new allegations about the supreme court justice’s behaviour while he was a student at Yale led to renewed calls for his impeachment.
A new book says the actor was scared of going on the record at first but then encouraged other women to speak out
Gwyneth Paltrow has been named a key figure in the New York Times story that first catalogued a series of sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, and led to the film producer’s dismissal from his own company and subsequent prosecution.
In a new book titled She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey – the New York Times reporters whose story on 5 October 2017 triggered Weinstein’s downfall – Paltrow is said to have been “scared to go on the record but became an early, crucial source, sharing her account of sexual harassment and trying to recruit other actresses to speak”.
Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s attorney says picture said to have been taken at Ghislaine Maxwell’s home is authentic and unaltered
A woman who accused Jeffrey Epstein of forcing her to have sex with his powerful friends has denied a claim by allies of Prince Andrew that a notorious photograph of them together was faked.
Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s attorneys rejected the claim as a “troubling assertion” and reiterated a request to interview Andrew about the late wealthy financier Epstein, who killed himself last month while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
A controversial “straight pride” parade in Boston on Saturday drew more than 1,000 counter-protesters and a few hundred supporters.
The rightwing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was “grand marshal” of the event, for which a group calling itself Super Happy Fun America (SHFA) acquired a permit in June.
US charged the five with war crimes that include terrorism, hijacking and nearly 3,000 counts of murder for their alleged roles
A military judge has set a trial date for five men held at Guantánamo Bay and facing the death penalty for their alleged role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks – nearly 20 years after the atrocities took place.
Judge Col W Shane Cohen set a start date of early 2021 in an order setting motion and evidentiary deadlines on Friday. The five defendants include Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a senior al-Qaida figure who has portrayed himself as the mastermind of the 11 September 2001 attacks and other terrorist plots.
Alvin Kennard was imprisoned in 1983 with a disproportionately harsh sentence under the ‘three strikes law’
A man from Alabama who was sentenced to life without parole after stealing $50.75 from a bakery in his 20s is to be released after more than three decades in prison.
Alvin Kennard, who was convicted of first degree robbery following the bakery incident, was 22 when he was first imprisoned in 1983.
The financier is dead but the investigation has continued – and it’s possible any participants may have fled into hiding
Jeffrey Epstein is dead but the investigation that snared on sex trafficking charges has continued as authorities seek to make good on their promise not to let the convicted sex offender’s apparent suicide mark an end to their quest for justice.
Given the nature of the wealthy financier’s elite international social scene, it’s possible potential co-conspirators or other participants in the alleged trafficking would have the means to flee into hiding, in the US or abroad.
Move allows administration to redirect money despite lawmakers’ refusal to provide funding
The US supreme court cleared the way for Donald Trump to use billions in Pentagon funds to build a border wall.
The decision allows the Trump administration to redirect approximately $2.5bnapproved by Congress for the Pentagon to help build his promised wall along the US-Mexico border even though lawmakers refused to provide funding.
At a federal immigration court in El Paso asylum seekers wait in limbo as a result of Trump’s policies
Judge Sunita Mahtabfar, presiding over the El Paso immigration court in south-west Texas, kicked off the hearing by asking the 16 asylum seekers a question.
“Is anyone here afraid to return to Mexico?” she said.
Daily Stormer publisher incited his readers to contact Tanya Gersh, who received threatening emails, texts and voicemails
The publisher of a neo-Nazi website, who organized a “troll storm” to target a Jewish woman and her family with months of abusive messages, should have to pay more than $14m in damages and remove all posts that encouraged his readers to contact her, a US judge has recommended.
The US magistrate judge called the harassment campaign, launched by the Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin a month before Donald Trump’s inauguration, “egregious and reprehensible”. Anglin targeted Tanya Gersh, a Jewish real estate agent in Whitefish, Montana, a town where the prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer and his family have sometimes lived.
Forty-nine years ago, on the first anniversary of the riots outside the Stonewall Inn, thousands of “young men and women homosexuals” from all over the north-east marched from Greenwich Village to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. As Lacey Fosburgh put it on the front page of the New York Times, they proclaimed “the new strength and pride of the gay people”.
Court expected to hear arguments late this year, with a decision on Dreamers likely to come before 2020 election
The supreme court will review the constitutionality of an Obama-era program allowing undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children to get temporary deportation relief and work permits.
Trump ended the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), but the decision was challenged in several lawsuits. The program protected about 700,000 people known as Dreamers.
The big question around the citizenship/census ruling: will the Trump administration have the time / organization to mount a new effort to put the question in place before 2020 Census season (and it’s unclear just when the cutoff here is)?:
This seems like the same “unring the bell” logic of the Muslim ban decision. “Come back and lie to us about your motives more convincingly, please.” https://t.co/LjgGeyc6Xx
More reactions:
This ruling on gerrymandering is exactly why it is not enough to just win the next election. The Supreme Court is helping Republicans *rig* the elections. Democrats need a *proactive* plan to confront the partisan capture of the Court.
On the census, the Trump administration’s lies went so far that even this Supreme Court had to say no. If this leads to a result with no citizenship question, that would be a very welcome outcome, and it would also preserve the status quo. This should have been an easy case, and in the end, it was.
But Chief Justice Roberts’ ruling that no federal court can ever consider claims of extreme and unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering is truly appalling for the long term health of our democracy. It’s a judicial green light for egregious partisanship, a permission slip for politicians to entrench themselves without fear of judicial intervention.
This is a victory for all New Yorkers who refuse to be undercounted, discriminated against, or driven into the shadows. The Trump administration must not be allowed to weaponize the census in its war on immigrants, people of color, and the poor. From the very beginning, the administration has hoped to add a citizenship question in order to undercount, marginalize, and limit the political power of immigrant communities. The justices saw through the Trump administration’s absurd excuses for the addition of the question. We will do everything we can with our partners to ensure that all New Yorkers are counted.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh said Flowers’ trial record showed ‘relentless effort’ by prosecutor to rid jury of black individuals
The supreme court has thrown out the murder conviction and death sentence of a black man in Mississippi because of a prosecutor’s efforts to keep African Americans off the jury.
The justices ruled 7-2 that the removal of black prospective jurors had deprived Curtis Flowers of a fair trial.
As Donald Trump opened fire on Justin Amash, the Michigan representative who became the first Republican in Congress say he had engaged in “impeachable conduct”, Mitt Romney declined to join the fight.
Actor provokes storm with call to regain ‘bodily autonomy’
GOP-held legislatures in quest to overturn Roe v Wade
The actor Alyssa Milano ignited a social media storm with a call for women to join her in a sex strike, to protest against strict abortion laws passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures.
Unofficial results show citizen initiative on psilocybin passed, following path of decriminalized cannabis
Voters on Tuesday made Denver the first US city to in effect decriminalize psilocybin – the psychoactive substance in “magic mushrooms” – adding a new chapter to the city’s role in shaping wider drug policy.
The citizen initiative on the ballot followed the same tack taken by marijuana activists to decriminalize pot possession in 2005 in the city. That move was followed by statewide legalization in 2012. A number of other states have since broadly allowed marijuana sales and use by adults.