Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Gen Mark Milley has said it was a mistake to have been present at Donald Trump's photo op in front of a church in Washington. 'I should not have been there,' he said in a pre-recorded video commencement address to the National Defense University.
Milley and the defense secretary, Mark Esper, were widely criticised for participating in the photo-op during George Floyd protests in Washington, with many former defence officials saying the two were helping Trump’s efforts to politicise the military
Dow Jones loses more than 1,800 points while S&P down 5% after US coronavirus infections hit 2m
Stock markets tumbled in the US and Europe on Thursday amid growing fears over the long-term economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
The sell off started after the US labor department announced another 1.5 million people had filed for unemployment benefits and the number of coronavirus infections passed 2m even as states across the US continued to relax their quarantine measures.
Biden says biggest fear is Trump will ‘try to steal the election’
Democratic challenger leads president in opinion polls
Joe Biden has predicted the military will escort Donald Trump from the White House should the president lose November’s election but refuse to leave office.
Biden, speaking to the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah, said that his single greatest concern is that the president will “try to steal this election”.
Another 1.5 million people in the US filed for unemployment benefits last week even as states continued to relax their coronavirus quarantine measures, writes Dominic Rushe and Amanda Holpuch in New York.
In just 12 weeks more than 44 million claims have been made for benefits as people lost their jobs. Rehiring appears to have started. Last week the labor department said the unemployment rate had dipped in May to 13.3% from 14.7% in April – although officials said difficulty collecting data meant the figure was probably 3% higher.
Nearly three-quarters of new cases of coronavirus are coming from 10 countries, mostly concentrated in the Americas and south Asia, the director general of the World Health Organization has said.
Speaking at the UN health agency’s member state briefing on Thursday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the global situation was deteriorating, even as Europe appeared to be over the worst of the outbreak.
More than 7 million cases of Covid-19 have now been reported, and more than 408,000 deaths.
Although the situation in Europe is improving, at the global level, it is getting worse. More than 100,000 new cases have been reported each day for the most part of the past two weeks.
This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam.
Trump’s most recent tweet that the National Guard troops who patrolled Washington amid the George Floyd protests “could hardly believe how easy it was” is at odds with recent reports about the troops.
The first days of June, a calamitous period for the Trump presidency, have been a debacle for the National Guard.
There has been a torrent of criticism from Congress, senior retired military officers and Guard members themselves since more than 5,000 Guard troops — from the District of Columbia and a dozen states — were rushed to the streets of the capital to help in the crackdown on mostly peaceful protesters and occasional looters after the killing of George Floyd in police custody. The D.C. Guard has halted recruiting efforts, and at least four National Guard troops have tested positive for the coronavirus.
Donald Trump is up and tweeting, and is straight on the attack against “Antifa”.
Our great National Guard Troops who took care of the area around the White House could hardly believe how easy it was. “A walk in the park”, one said. The protesters, agitators, anarchists (ANTIFA), and others, were handled VERY easily by the Guard, D.C. Police, & S.S. GREAT JOB!
Domestic Terrorists have taken over Seattle, run by Radical Left Democrats, of course. LAW & ORDER!
President announces rally in Tulsa, city with a history of deadly racial violence, even as Covid-19 cases continue to rise
Donald Trump will hold a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, next Friday – his first since since states began shutting down in response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 110,000 lives in the US.
The Black Lives Matter actions have given renewed impetus to the campaign against injustices in the Indonesian province
Student Eden Armando Bebari, 19, was allegedly shot and killed by Indonesian security forces while fishing in his home town in West Papua in April.
Indonesian media described Bebari as a member of an armed criminal group, a claim denied by his parents. Many residents in Papua, the eastern-most province of Indonesia, now fish and tend crops to ease food shortages brought about by coronavirus lockdowns.
Many have attempted to claim that ‘things are better here’ for black people than in the US. This ignores both Europe’s colonial past and its own racist present. By Gary Younge
In September 1963, in Llansteffan, Wales, a stained-glass artist named John Petts was listening to the radio when he heard the news that four black girls had been murdered in a bombing while at Sunday school at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
The news moved Petts, who was white and British, deeply. “Naturally, as a father, I was horrified by the death of the children,” said Petts, in a recording archived by London’s Imperial War Museum. “As a craftsman in a meticulous craft, I was horrified by the smashing of all those [stained-glass] windows. And I thought to myself, my word, what can we do about this?”
Governor Jay Inslee of Washington has ordered a new investigation into the death of Manuel Ellis, an African American man who died more than three months ago in police custody, following questions over the independence of the investigation.
Lane was released after posting bond. His bail was set for $1m.
Lane was one of the officers — including Derek Chauvin, Tou Thao and J. Alexander Kueng — who stopped George Floyd while responding to a call about the alleged use of a counterfeit $20 bill.
Manuel Ellis, an African American, died three months ago
Inslee says investigation will be ‘free of conflicts of interest’
Governor Jay Inslee of Washington has ordered a new investigation into the death of Manuel Ellis, an African American man who died more than three months ago in police custody, following questions over the independence of the investigation.
The move comes one day after a lawyer for the Ellis family released footage from the night of his death, which shows him screaming, “I can’t breathe sir. I can’t breathe,” followed by what sounds like an officer saying, “Shut the fuck up.”
President contradicts defense secretary who said he was open to discussing new names for military bases named after Confederates
Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would “not even consider” renaming US military bases that are named after Confederate military leaders,even though the Pentagon has indicated it is open to the idea.
The statement from the US president came amid widespread anti-racism protests that have convulsed the country and were triggered by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last month.
John Gleeson condemns department’s ‘highly irregular conduct’
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to FBI but then withdrew plea
A former federal judge appointed to review the justice department’s motion to dismiss criminal charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn has found that the government’s request should be denied because there is “clear evidence of a gross abuse of prosecutorial power”.
Philonise Floyd, the brother of George Floyd, described the pain of watching the video of his brother's murder - which showed a police officer kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes - during his opening remarks at a House judiciary committee hearing on police brutality. 'I can’t tell you the kind of pain you feel when you watch something like that,' he said: 'When you watch your big brother, who you’ve looked up to your whole life, die. Die begging for your mom'
Mekiya Hodges, who is African American and works as a social worker, says that pregnant women of colour often aren’t listened to by doctors. She had a traumatic experience giving birth to her previous children in hospital and, along with the additional risk of coronavirus, decided to have her daughter, Jordan, at home with the help of Natalie Watson, co-founder of Steel City Midwives. Mekiya, 25, lives in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an area that has a high death rate for new black mothers. Nationally, black women in 2018 were two and half times more likely than white women to die due to complications related to pregnancy or childbirth
Retailer paid $109m in dividends just weeks after cancelling clothing orders, leaving suppliers in Bangladesh facing financial crisis
Kohl’s, one of the US’s largest clothing retailers, cancelled millions of dollars worth of existing orders from Bangladeshi and Korean garment factories just weeks before paying out $109m (£85m) in dividends to shareholders, the Guardian can reveal.
The company cancelled orders of clothing worth approximately $100m from Korea and $50m from Bangaldeshi factories after the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and refused petitions from suppliers asking for the option to renegotiate payments.
Scrolling through Airbnbs in Brooklyn, one listing stands out. “IMMUNE HOST,” claims the heading in caps. Among photos of rooftop sunsets and interiors, lies something else unexpected – a picture of a positive antibody test.
The New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb captured best the sense of wonder at what is happening on the streets of America. He posted a tweet from Mitt Romney, the Republican senator from Utah, which showed the former presidential candidate marching alongside demonstrators under the banner Black Lives Matter.
“Ladies and gentleman,” Cobb remarked. “This is what you call uncharted territory.”
Protesters in New York have been unnecessarily arrested and detained for as long as 48 hours in “abysmal” conditions without access to masks, food and water, according to legal experts.
Since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis just over two weeks ago, tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets of New York City in protest over police brutality.
Japan’s lower house of parliament has approved an emergency budget worth nearly over £230bn, doubling the scale of measures to pep up the world’s third-biggest economy after the coronavirus tipped it into recession, AFP reports.
Their raucous clucking deprives residents of sleep. They leave the neighbourhood “wrecked”. And food left out for them attracts “rats the size of cats” to an otherwise peaceful, leafy suburb.
New Zealand’s national lockdown to quell the spread of Covid-19 appears to have vanquished the virus, but it has had one unintended consequence: the re-emergence of a plague – not of frogs or locusts but of feral chickens, a flock of which is once again menacing an area of west Auckland.