Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
State department inspector general Steve Linick was reportedly close to finishing his report before his dismissal on Friday
The government watchdog who was fired last week had been investigating the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, for sidestepping Congress to approve arms sales to the Gulf and using staffers for personal errands, according to congressional sources.
Donald Trump declared his intention to fire the state department inspector general, Steve Linick, in a letter sent to the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, late on Friday night. The White House said the decision was taken at Pompeo’s advice.
Donald Trump Jr says pedophile allusion was ‘joking around’
Eric Trump claims coronavirus is a political hoax
Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, the US president’s oldest sons, have attracted fierce criticism for attacking Joe Biden and Democrats in terms most observers considered beyond the pale even in America’s toxic political climate.
Climate breakdown means conditions that wrought devastation across Great Plains could return to region
The agricultural conditions known as a “dust bowl”, which helped propel mass migration among drought-stricken farmers in the US during the great depression of the 1930s, are now more than twice as likely to reoccur in the region, because of climate breakdown, new research has found.
Dust bowl conditions in the 1930s wrought devastation across the US agricultural heartlands of the Great Plains, which run through the middle of the continental US stretching from Montana to Texas. The conditions are caused by a combination of heatwaves, drought and farming practices, replacing the native prairie vegetation.
The electoral map does not favor Republicans and the pandemic has helped put them on defense in states they once thought safe
Just three months ago, centrist Democrats were panicking. After strong performances in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders appeared poised to sail away with the nomination for president. Some in the party feared the self-identified democratic socialist would wreak havoc down the ballot.
Daily death tolls fall in UK, Spain and Italy; South Africa reports highest daily increase; global infections pass 4.7 million. Follow the latest updates
Despite strong efforts, Taiwan did not get invited to this week’s meeting of a key World Health Organization body due to Chinese pressure, its foreign minister has said, adding they had agreed to put the issue off until later this year.
Non-WHO member Taiwan had been lobbying to take part in the World Health Assembly, which opens later on Monday.
Despite all our efforts and an unprecedented level of international support, Taiwan has not received an invitation to take part.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs expresses deep regret and strong dissatisfaction that the World Health Organization Secretariat has yielded to pressure from the Chinese government and continues to disregard the right to health of the 23 million people of Taiwan.
Understandably, countries want to use the limited time available to concentrate on ways of containing the pandemic.
For this reason, like-minded nations and diplomatic allies have suggested that the proposal be taken up later this year when meetings will be conducted normally, to make sure there will be full and open discussion.
Hungary’s government will submit a proposal to parliament on 26 May to end its special coronavirus emergency powers, hirtv.hu quoted prime minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff as saying late on Sunday.
Gergely Gulyas said parliament would take a few days to pass the bill, which will end the much-criticised emergency powers by early June.
After more than 50 years fighting for civil rights, the activist is now watching coronavirus ravage African American communities. But he has a warning for the rich and powerful
The Rev Jesse Jackson was born in the racially segregated south when Franklin Roosevelt occupied the White House and war raged in Europe. He was an eyewitness to the assassination of Martin Luther King, campaigned against the Vietnam war and twice ran for US president.
But, now an elder statesman of 78, he has never seen anything like the coronavirus pandemic, which has infected more than 1 million Americans and killed more in April alone than died in Vietnam over 15 years. The world’s most powerful and wealthy country also bears by far its biggest death toll: almost 90,000. It is enough to shake faith in American exceptionalism.
Unemployment in the United States could peak at 25% as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the chair of the Federal Reserve, amid warnings the June quarter economic figures will be “very, very bad”. The bleak prediction came as Japan slid into its first recession in five years, with forecasts that worse was to come.
In a sober assessment of the economic impact of coronavirus in the US, the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, estimated GDP contraction in the June quarter could be “easily be in the twenties or thirties”, as fallout from the global outbreak worsened.
Former president rebuked Trump administration’s response to pandemic, which has killed almost 90,000 Americans so far
Donald Trump has hit back at Barack Obama’s criticism of his administration’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, accusing the former US president of being “grossly incompetent” during his time in office.
The New York governor has received a Covid-19 test live on TV to show how quick and easy the process is. Cuomo welcomed a doctor dressed in PPE to conduct the test. 'I’m not in pain, I’m not in discomfort,' he said afterwards. 'Closing my eyes was a moment of relaxation. There is no reason why you should not get the test'
Sanders: Biden should focus on student debt relief, health insurance coverage, a living wage, climate change and racism
Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has said he thinks his supporters will vote for Joe Biden in November’s US election, despite a former aide’s warning that Biden was not consolidating Sanders supporters.
In a memo released last week, former Sanders adviser Jeff Weaver said Sanders supporters were “currently unsupportive and unenthusiastic” about Biden and “there is a real and urgent need to help Biden consolidate Sanders supporters”.
Former justice department officials and legal experts have pointed to Barr’s intervention in cases involving Trump associates
Legal experts and and alumnae of the US Department of Justice have begun sounding the alarm about Donald Trump’s attorney general, William Barr.
Recently Barr’s justice department withdrew charges against Michael Flynn, the former Trump administration national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to federal law enforcement officials about his dealings with Russia’s ambassador over sanctions, just before Trump took office.
The former US president attacked the Trump administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic during a virtual commencement ceremony for historically black colleges and universities on Saturday. Barack Obama told graduates: ‘More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing. A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge’
George Barnhill eventually recused himself from Arbery case
Prosecutions include woman wrongfully imprisoned for murder
The local prosecutor who argued two white men were legally justified in chasing down and killing Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed black man, has been at the center of aggressive and flawed prosecutions of at least two black women in recent years.
One of the women was wrongfully imprisoned for over a decade on a murder conviction secured by later discredited forensic evidence, and another woman was unsuccessfully tried twice for helping people vote.
If Boris Johnson is mishandling the pandemic, he is not alone. Falsely claiming everything is under control, dodging responsibility, hiding from public view, exploiting the crisis for political gain, mounting artificial distractions and blaming the media: these are common behaviour patterns exhibited by some of the world’s most powerful – and shifty – leaders.
Will they pay a price for their lethal incompetence and cynicism? It’s possible some will, though it may take a while. The pandemic is changing political calculations around the globe. Leaders who looked invulnerable suddenly appear less so. That in turn could shift the strategic calculus and alter the balance of power between countries in ways both unexpected and permanent.
Fire department says 230 firefighters responded to blaze
An explosion in downtown Los Angeles has injured 11 firefighters, with scores more sent to put out the blaze in what was described as a factory making cannabis oil.
Captain Erik Scott of the Los Angeles fire department said “one significant explosion” shook the neighborhood around 6.30pm on Saturday and as first responders arrived they saw firefighters emerge from the building with burns and other injuries. Some of their uniforms were on fire.
There are few images of the 86,000 deaths and many of the Covid-19 hotspots - prisons, nursing homes, meat packing plants - are off limits. What is the impact of this hidden toll?
John Delano was six years old when the contagion struck his neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut. There was a morgue just down the road. Coffins began spilling on to the sidewalk. It made the perfect stage for an exciting new game.
“We thought, ‘Boy, this is great,’” he recalled. “‘It’s like climbing the pyramids.’ Then one day, I slipped and broke my nose on one of the coffins. My mother was very upset. She said, didn’t I realize there were people in those boxes who had died?”
Two Kansas City officers face charges after footage that appears to show woman’s head being slammed into sidewalk during arrest last year
Two Kansas City police officers face assault charges for allegedly slamming a transgender woman’s face into a concrete sidewalk during an arrest that was captured on video.
A grand jury in Missouri indicted Matthew Brummett, 37, and Charles Prichard, 47, on one misdemeanor charge each of fourth-degree assault related to the encounter, the Jackson county prosecutor’s office announced on Friday.
The comments on Saturday were a rare rebuke of a sitting president from one of his predecessors, and come in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 88,000 people in the United States, a death toll far higher than any other country, and had devastating and disproportionate effects on communities of color.
Willard, whose career was reinvigorated by his work on the mockumentaries of Rob Reiner and Christopher Guest, was a beloved and ubiquitous presence in US comedy
Fred Willard, an actor whose career was dotted with innumerable indelible cameos playing genial buffoons in unfortunate roles of authority, has died aged 86.
The news was first broken by Jamie Lee Curtis, the wife of Christopher Guest, in whose mockumentaries – including Best in Show and A Mighty Wind – Willard won a new army of fans.
Unveiling the flag for his new space force, Donald Trump said the US was developing a 'super-duper missile' to outpace its military adversaries. 'We have no choice, we have to do it with the adversaries we have out there. We have, I call it the super duper missile and I heard the other night [it’s] 17 times faster than what they have right now,' the US president said on Friday