Category Archives: US News

DC braces for Erdoğan’s visit 18 months after bodyguards assaulted protesters

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His bodyguards ran riot in the city as they punched and pushed Kurdish protesters and attacked American security officers

Police in Washington DC, the US state department and the Secret Service are girding themselves for the return of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Wednesday, 18 months after the Turkish president’s bodyguards ran riot in the city, assaulting protesters and American security officers.

Newly declassified state department documents provide fresh details of the aggression shown by the Turkish security detail towards their US counterparts both before and after the 2017 attack near the Turkish embassy in north-west Washington. Six officers from the US Secret Service, two from the diplomatic service and one from the Washington police required medical treatment.

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Trump fumes as Democrats get ready for ‘sober and rigorous’ public hearings

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  • TV crews move into halls of Capitol for first public testimony
  • Trump calls on Republicans to defend him from ‘total scam’

Only three times in the history of the American republic has Congress initiated public testimony that could result in the removal of the president by impeachment. The tally will rise to four on Wednesday.

Related: Lights, camera, impeachment: TV phase of inquiry carries pluses and pitfalls

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Google’s secret cache of medical data includes names and full details of millions – whistleblower

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Whistleblower tells Guardian of growing alarm over secret transfer of medical history data, which can be accessed by Google staff

A whistleblower who works in Project Nightingale, the secret transfer of the personal medical data of up to 50 million Americans from one of the largest healthcare providers in the US to Google, has expressed anger to the Guardian that patients are being kept in the dark about the massive deal.

Related: Mick Mulvaney drops impeachment lawsuit but will not comply with House subpoena – live

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Donald Trump plans to make foreign aid conditional on religious freedom

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President wants to apportion aid based on how countries treat religious minorities

White House officials are reportedly drafting plans to make US foreign aid conditional on how countries treat their religious minorities, in an effort that is seen as a sop to Christian evangelicals in Donald Trump’s base.

The move, which threatens to impose further constraints on a US foreign aid policy already heavily restricted under the Trump administration, was first reported by Politico after briefings from White House aides.

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Taliban prisoners released in bid to free western kidnap victims

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Afghan president Ghani hopes move will help secure release of American and Australian

Afghanistan’s president says he has ordered the release of three Taliban fighters in an effort to persuade the insurgent group to free a kidnapped American and Australian professor.

Timothy Weekes, an English teacher from Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, and Kevin King, from Pennsylvania, were abducted three years ago from outside American University of Afghanistan in Kabul by fighters in military uniform.

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‘We depend on the Tongass’: Alaskans fight to save US’s largest national forest

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Tribal leaders to testify before Congress in battle against Trump administration’s assault on environmental protections

Tribal leaders, fishermen and environmentalists from Alaska will testify before Congress on Wednesday in a bid to save America’s biggest national forest – the latest battle against the Trump administration’s assault on environmental protections.

The Tongass national forest, one of the world’s last intact temperate rainforests which plays a crucial role in fighting the climate crisis, is under threat of logging as Alaska seeks exemption from the Roadless Rule, which protects millions of acres of pristine forests across the US. The Tongass is considered the “crown jewel” of the national forest system, sequestering huge amounts of carbon dioxide to keep the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere.

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Lights, camera, impeachment: TV phase of inquiry carries pluses and pitfalls

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Televised hearings allow Democrats to put the case against Trump to the public but also gives Republicans a chance to muddy waters

The opening phase of the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump has required investigators to methodically depose witnesses behind the closed doors of a secure facility in the Capitol basement.

Related: 'A circus and a hoax': how rightwing media are covering impeachment

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San Francisco transit boss apologizes to rider detained over a sandwich

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Encounter between police officer and man eating on Bart platform prompts protests and allegations of racism

The head of a San Francisco Bay Area commuter train system apologized to a black rider who was detained and cited by police for eating a breakfast sandwich on a train platform. The official promised an investigation after an outcry from people who assailed enforcement of a no-food rule as racist.

More than two dozen people staged an “eat-in” at a Bay Area Rapid Transit (Bart) station over the weekend and others continue to protest the 4 November encounter, which ended with a 31-year-old man who was headed to work in handcuffs and unable to leave until he had told Bart police his name.

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Donald Trump Jr walks out of Triggered book launch – video

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Donald Trump Jr and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, were forced to cut short a launch event for his book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us, at the University of California, Los Angeles, because of loud booing from the audience.

The audience was angry that Trump Jr and Guilfoyle would not take questions.

Trump Jr tried to argue that taking questions risked creating soundbites that leftwing social media posters would distort

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Trump faces key test as week of impeachment hearings begins – live

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It’s Veterans Day, Donald Trump is back in Manhattan and Washington is getting ready for more momentous events

The announcement of Republican representative Pete King’s retirement once again throws a spotlight on the high number of departures and defeats in the House GOP caucus since Trump took office.

When President Trump took office in January 2017, there were 241 Republicans in the House.

Since then, 101 have either been defeated/retired/otherwise left office or are retiring in 2020. (h/t @Dchinni)

One name under discussion for Rep. Peter King's seat: Democratic Suffolk County District Attorney Tim Sini.

Demonstrators who protested Trump’s Veterans Day speech in New York criticized the president’s treatment of veterans and called for his impeachment.

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Trump, the whistleblower and the comic: key players in the Ukraine scandal

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Trump’s request that Ukraine help find dirt on Joe Biden has led to an impeachment inquiry – and drawn in multiple people

Democrats announced an official impeachment inquiry into Trump on 24 September following a whistleblower’s complaint about Trump’s interactions with the president of Ukraine. A White House summary of a 25 July call shows Trump pressed Volodymyr Zelenskiy to work with the US attorney general and Rudy Giuliani, to investigate his political rival Joe Biden in the run-up the 2020 US election. Trump told Zelenskiy to look into unfounded and debunked allegations that Biden helped remove a Ukrainian prosecutor who investigated a company tied to his son Hunter.

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UK government delay of Russia report is shaming, says Clinton

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Ex-secretary of state says it is unacceptable to keep report from public before election

Hillary Clinton has called Downing Street’s suppression of a report into potential Russian infiltration of British politics “damaging, inexplicable and shaming”.

The 2016 US presidential candidate told the Guardian it was “incredibly surprising and unacceptable that in your country there is a government report sitting there about Russian influence and your current government isn’t releasing it”.

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Uber chief tries to backpedal after calling Khashoggi murder ‘a mistake’

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Dara Khosrowshahi scrambles after saying Saudi Arabia’s murder of dissident was a ‘mistake’ similar to self-driving car accident

Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive of Uber, has attempted to limit the damage after calling the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi “a mistake” similar to a fatal accident that occurred during tests of his company’s self-driving car.

Related: The Killing in the Consulate by Jonathan Rugman review – a dark fable of unaccountable power

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Trump impeachment inquiry: a timeline of key events so far

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Pelosi launched inquiry on 24 September over allegations that Trump sought the help of a foreign country to harm a political rival

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, announced an impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump on 24 September.

Since then, House committees have been taking witness testimony about an alleged plot by Trump to use the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country, Ukraine, in the 2020 election.

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Nikki Haley: Tillerson and Kelly tried to block Trump to ‘save country’

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Nikki Haley, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, has claimed former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and former White House chief of staff John Kelly tried to recruit her to work around Donald Trump in an effort to “save the country”.

Related: Trump impeachment: whistleblower will not testify in public, Democrats say

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Trump impeachment: whistleblower will not testify in public, Democrats say

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The whistleblower who sparked the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump will not testify in public, House intelligence chair Adam Schiff said.

Related: Watergate to Ukraine: how TV will dictate Trump's impeachment fate

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US will keep 500 or 600 troops in Syria to counter Isis, chief says

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  • Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff gives Veterans Day interview
  • Turkish president Erdoğan due at White House this week

About 500 or 600 US troops will remain in Syria to counter Islamic State, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Sunday.

Related: 'Secure the oil': Trump's Syria strategy leaves Pentagon perplexed

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‘US creates monsters’: Trump talk of war on Mexico cartels echoes past failures

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After the massacre of a US family, the president offered to help ‘cleaning out these monsters’ but previous interventions have brought little peace

After nine members of a Mormon family with US/Mexican citizenship were slaughtered by gunmen, Donald Trump reacted by urging his Mexican counterpart to let him sort out the drug cartels.

“If Mexico needs or requests help cleaning out these monsters, the United States stands ready, willing & able to get involved and do the job quickly and effectively,” the US president tweeted on Tuesday, after news broke of the massacre – the latest in a series of extremely violent events across the country.

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‘We need to hear the evidence’: swing voters give their view on Trump

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In this Kansas City suburb, voters who went for Trump in 2016 have their doubts about impeachment – but say the president has questions to answer

Steve Isley sees no reason not to believe what Donald Trump has to say about Congress’s impeachment investigation.

Related: Woman who gave Trump the finger elected in Virginia

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Father of black woman killed by police in her Fort Worth home dies

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Marquis Jefferson, whose daughter Atatiana was shot dead by police during a welfare check, has died from a heart attack

The father of a black woman fatally shot by a white police officer inside her Fort Worth, Texas, home has died.

A spokesman for Marquis Jefferson, Bruce Carter, told the Dallas Morning News that the father of Atatiana Jefferson suffered a heart attack and died Saturday night at a Dallas hospital. Carter told KDFW that Jefferson “just couldn’t get back from what happened with his daughter”.

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