Category Archives: US News

‘Warren’s to lose’: who won the first Democratic debate? | Panelists

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Bold ideas on the debate stage in Miami – and an unexpected breakout star. Here’s the verdict from our panelists

Generously speaking, Democratic presidential candidates tonight spent a little less than 10 minutes after nearly an hour and a half had gone by answering a handful of direct questions about a climate crisis that could make large swathes of the planet horrifically uninhabitable by the end of this century. (NBC’s technical difficulties took nearly as long.) The best you can say is that tonight’s climate bit was still longer than the time spent on climate during the entirety of the 2016 debates.

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Democratic debates get underway as 2020 candidates go head to head – live

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Ten Democrats begin debating each other tonight – will they attack the party’s frontrunner, Joe Biden, or sell their own vision for the future?

We’re less than ten minutes away! Here’s some things to know:

Related: Where do the 2020 Democratic candidates stand on the key issues?

Tonight, the first batch of 2020 presidential candidates will likely face questions about gun control. It’s an issue that many of them have been putting front and center.

So far, some gun violence prevention experts say, New Jersey senator Cory Booker has produced the most ambitious and comprehensive plan, including funding for local gun violence prevention strategies in communities burdened with daily gun violence, and endorsing federal licensing for gun ownership, a policy that Obama labeled out of the question just three years ago.

“The person that has had the most thoughtful approach, as well as the most robust approach, is Cory Booker,” said Dakota Jablon, director of federal affairs at the Coalition to Stop Violence, a gun violence prevention group.

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Reddit ‘quarantines’ its biggest pro-Trump message board

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Visitors to the subreddit The_Donald will see warning about its ‘encouragement of violence towards police and officials’

Reddit has taken steps to “quarantine” the largest pro-Donald Trump community on its site, The_Donald, due to “repeated rule-breaking behavior” and, in recent days, “encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon”.

Visitors to the The_Donald message board, which describes itself as “a never-ending rally dedicated to the 45th President of the United States, Donald J Trump” and has more than 750,000 subscribers, will be greeted with a message about the reasons for the quarantine before they can click through to the site. The quarantine also restricts the message board, known as a subreddit, from generating revenue and limits its popular posts from reaching an audience in other parts of Reddit.

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Jared Kushner’s ‘deal of the century’ fails to materialise in Bahrain

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Senior adviser to Trump found no interest in his proposals for ending Israel/Palestine conflict

In the end, the ‘deal of the century’ was little more than a failed clearance sale. Jared Kushner arrived in Bahrain touting bedrock principles at untenable discounts. And even then there were no buyers.

The conference that was supposed to offer a new way out of the malaise of the Israel/Palestine conflict provided little of the sort. Its central premise of prosperity as a precursor to a lasting solution barely appeared to register on either side of the separation wall.

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‘The river is treacherous’: the migrant tragedy one photo can’t capture

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The father and his toddler daughter pictured face down in the river were two of dozens who drowned this year while crossing the border to seek asylum

Under a hot sun beating down on the US border, a family of five can be seen mid-river, struggling against a cruel current of greenish-grey water threatening to sweep them off their feet. It appears to be a couple and their three children, risking their lives in the treacherous Rio Grande that divides Mexico from Texas.

The father clutches a black backpack in his hand, the family’s only luggage. On his back he’s carrying a small boy wearing a rainbow-striped T-shirt. A little girl is on the woman’s back, small arms clasped tightly around her mother’s neck.

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Creature comforts: has the US’s emotional support animal epidemic gone too far? – video

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Emotional support animals, or ESAs, have exploded across the US in recent years, with rising numbers of pet owners getting their animals certified online. Unlike in the UK, ESAs have legal status in the US on a tier below traditional service animals, but the backlash has begun – with critics complaining the system is being abused by regular pet owners who want to take their animals into unsuitable public spaces. The Guardian's Richard Sprenger – animal lover but pet sceptic – meets ESA owners and their animals across North America.

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Mueller to testify before House committees in July

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Special counsel agrees to testify in open session on 17 July, chairmen of judiciary and intelligence committees say

The special counsel Robert Mueller has agreed to testify before Congress next month.

Mueller agreed to testify before the House judiciary committee and House permanent select committee on intelligence in an open session on 17 July, the chairmen of the committees announced on Tuesday, in what is likely to be the most highly anticipated congressional hearing in years.

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Democratic debates 2019: everything you need to know

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20 presidential hopefuls go head-to-head in Miami on 26-27 June – but what will they discuss, and who needs it the most?

The Republican primary debates in 2015 featured 17 candidates – a number interpreted as unwieldy at best and, at worst, a bit ridiculous.

Well step aside, Republicans, because this year Democrats have gone one better. Or three better: over the evenings of 26th and 27th June, 20 presidential hopefuls will have it out on stage, as they attempt to sell themselves as the one Democratic candidate to take on Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election.

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Democratic 2020 candidates clash on healthcare, immigration and economy in first debate

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Ten candidates took the stage for the first of back-to-back debates, and cast themselves in sharp contrast with Trump

Ten Democratic presidential candidates cast themselves in sharp contrast to Donald Trump in the first primary debate of the 2020 election on Wednesday night, even as they disagreed on how far left the next US president should lean.

The Democratic hopefuls took to the stage at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami for the first of back-to-back debates over two nights, which see the 2020 race kick-off in earnest and give the 20 candidates who qualified for the events a national platform that could help to clarify the leaders in the enormous and unsettled field.

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The USA is imprisoning people it finds undesirable. Australia has already lived this nightmare | Jason Wilson

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To disestablish these camps anywhere, we need to oppose them everywhere

Australia’s economy is increasingly in the doldrums, but our leaders can point to a successful export of their own devising. In the US, the Trump administration is bedding down and expanding its network of punitive refugee camps. Like Australia’s, they have a dual function: as a deterrent to pursuing the right of political asylum, and as a political weapon.

Australia’s nightmare, like the USA’s, has been long in the making. It is a bipartisan creation. Labor, under Paul Keating, instituted the policy of mandatory detention. John Howard did much of the work of shaping it into permanent nightmare, and of turning the issue of refugees into a cudgel with which to smite political opponents.

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‘They wanted the American dream’: reporter reveals story behind tragic photo

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Julia Le Duc gives details of the father and his toddler daughter who died trying to cross the Rio Grande Warning: graphic images

Julia Le Duc is a reporter for La Jornada in Matamoros, the Mexican city directly across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas.

Her shocking photographs showing the bodies of Salvadoran migrant Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter Valeria cast a fresh spotlight on the migration crisis at America’s southern border. Here she describes how the images came into being.

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Synthetic opioid use booms worldwide amid Africa ‘crisis’, UN says

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Death in US are still rising due to fentanyl addiction, but report highlights alarming take-up of painkiller tramadol in Africa

Synthetic opioid use is booming around the world, acccording to a United Nations report that showed deaths in the United States from overdoses are still rising and a “crisis” of tramadol use is emerging in parts of Africa.

The estimated number of people using opioids – an umbrella term for drugs ranging from opium and derivatives such as heroin to synthetics like fentanyl and tramadol – in 2017 was 56% higher than in 2016, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said in the report published on Wednesday.

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Shocking photo of drowned father and daughter highlights migrants’ border peril

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The toddler’s arm was still draped around her father’s neck after bodies were found in the Rio Grande as they sought asylum

  • Warning: contains graphic images

The grim reality of the migration crisis unfolding on America’s southern border has been captured in photographs showing the lifeless bodies of a Salvadoran father and his daughter who drowned as they attempted to cross the Rio Grande into Texas.

The images, taken on Monday , show Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, 26, and his daughter Valeria, lying face down in shallow water. The 23-month-old toddler’s arm is draped around her father’s neck, suggesting that she was clinging to him in her final moments.

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Kushner plan leaves Middle East deal seeming further away than ever

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Plan demands Palestinians put a price on their surrender or risk losing even more ground

In the long, lamented history of Israeli-Palestinian peace plans, rarely have expectations been so low. As Jared Kushner took to the stage in Bahrain to effectively lay waste to decades of doctrine on how to solve the conflict, a solution seemed more out of reach than ever.

Kushner’s proposal has been put together by hardliners who have tossed out the rulebook and written a formula of their own serving the interests of the Israeli rightwing.

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Phase one of US Middle East peace plan greeted with scepticism

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No Israelis or Palestinians present for launch of plan that shreds decades of diplomacy

The first phase of the Trump administration’s long-awaited peace plan for Israel and Palestine has been rolled out to scepticism, anger and outright derision.

A conference hall of regional officials – with no Israelis or Palestinians present – was the first to hear details of the US-brokered deal, an economic blueprint that shreds decades of diplomacy and which even its mooted financial backers seemed reluctant to embrace.

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Trump’s toadyism to Saudi Arabia: a new moral low | Richard Wolffe

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The Saudis are good customers, Trump says – which evidently outweighs the fact they murdered and carved up a Washington Post journalist

It’s that time of a presidency when every incumbent pretends to be what he isn’t, or to do what he hasn’t. With a re-election year kicking off, everyone wants to know if the candidate can fill in the gaping holes in his record, to give voters some reason to hope or believe.

Related: Mike Pompeo didn't raise Jamal Khashoggi murder in meeting with Saudi king

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Austria approves US extradition of Ukrainian tycoon

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Supreme court clears way for Dmytro Firtash to face trial on bribery charges

Austria’s supreme court has upheld a decision granting a request by the US to extradite the Ukrainian tycoon Dmytro Firtash on bribery charges.

A US grand jury indicted Firtash in 2013, along with a member of India’s parliament and four others, on suspicion of bribing Indian government officials to gain access to minerals used to make titanium-based products. Firtash denies wrongdoing.

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Donald Trump says sexual assault accuser E Jean Carroll ‘not my type’

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Writer claims Trump forced himself on her in New York department store in 1990s

Donald Trump has said a New York-based advice columnist who accused him of sexually assaulting her in a department store in the mid-1990s is not his “type”.

“I’ll say it with great respect: number one, she’s not my type; number two, it never happened,” the US president told the political newspaper the Hill in an interview at the White House on Monday.

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Iran says ‘idiotic’ new US sanctions have closed path to diplomacy

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Foreign ministry spokesman accuses Trump administration of destroying peace and security

Iran says the US decision to impose sanctions on its supreme leader and other top officials is “idiotic” and has permanently closed the path to diplomacy between Tehran and Washington.

Donald Trump imposed new sanctions on Monday against the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and top military chiefs, in an unprecedented step designed to increase pressure on Iran after Tehran’s downing of an unmanned American drone. Khamenei is Iran’s utmost authority who has the last say on all state matters.

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