Category Archives: US News

Videos reveal harsh conditions inside Ice’s New York City confinement center

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Footage shows people sleeping on floor next to toilets in facility that agency says is not a detention site

Two videos have surfaced shedding light on what is happening behind closed doors at a New York federal building where people are being confined after being seized by officers on their way out of immigration court on the 12th floor, with the footage offering a rare look inside a controversial and closely guarded space that is part of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown.

The filming, shared by the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), captures one of several rooms at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, on the building’s 10th floor, where accounts have emerged of people being detained in wholly unsuitable conditions with few basic provisions, but there had been no public access to direct evidence.

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US Olympics officials quietly bar trans women from competing in women’s sports

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Olympic and Paralympic committee tells federations it has ‘obligation to comply’ with executive order issued by Trump

The US Olympic and Paralympic committee has in effect barred transgender women from competing in women’s sports, telling the federations overseeing swimming, athletics and other sports it has an “obligation to comply” with an executive order issued by Donald Trump.

The new policy, announced on Monday with a quiet change on the USOPC’s website and confirmed in a letter sent to national sport governing bodies, follows a similar step taken by the NCAA earlier this year.

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Trump announces Japan trade deal as doubt cast over future of PM Ishiba

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Tokyo’s failure to secure a US deal sooner had caused political unease and economic uncertainty in Japan

Donald Trump has announced a trade deal with Japan, potentially resolving weeks of fraught negotiations between the two allies which had caused economic uncertainty in Tokyo and mounting speculation about the future of the prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba.

“We just completed a massive deal with Japan,” the US president announced in a post online, adding: “Japan will invest, at my direction, $550 billion dollars into the United States.”

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Obama breaks silence on Trump’s ‘outrageous’ call to prosecute him

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Office of ex-US president breaks precedent and warns that allegations of attempted ‘coup’ are ‘attempt at distraction’

Barack Obama has broken his silence on calls from Donald Trump for him to be prosecuted by unequivocally rejecting his successor’s accusations that he tried to engineer a “coup” following Trump’s 2016 election victory by “manufacturing” evidence of Russian interference.

Obama’s office took the unusual step of issuing an emphatic refutation after Trump told reporters that his predecessor had “[tried] to lead a coup” against him and was guilty of “treason” over intelligence assessments suggesting that Russia had intervened to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the campaign.

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Judges end Trump pick Alina Habba’s tenure as New Jersey’s top prosecutor

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Justice department retaliates by removing career prosecutor named as Habba’s replacement

Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s defence lawyer during a defamation case brought by the writer E Jean Carroll, has lost her bid to become New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor, with the clock running out on her interim status on Tuesday.

According to an order from New Jersey’s district court, a panel of judges declined to permanently appoint Habba to be the state’s US attorney, signaling a rebuke against the Trump administration.

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Tucker Carlson channels Maga rage over Epstein files – and opens rift with Trump

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As Maga supporters revolt over the Epstein scandal, figures like Tucker Carlson are now a gadfly of the White House’s handling of the controversy

As Donald Trump tries to contain an ugly rift with his own supporters about the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking scandal, influential media personalities in the Maga movement face a tricky dilemma.

Should they close ranks with the US president – who has denounced demands for more information on Epstein as a “waste [of] Time and Energy” about “somebody that nobody cares about” – or pick at a political wound that the Trump administration desperately wants to scab over?

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‘Hero’ father pulls four-year-old child out of mountain lion’s jaws in Washington state

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Family was hiking when big cat attacked child, who was later airlifted to hospital and is in satisfactory condition

A mountain lion bit a four-year-old child on Sunday while the child hiked with family on Hurricane Ridge in Washington state’s Olympic national park, authorities said.

The child’s father reportedly saved the minor’s life by pulling the child from the creature’s jaws.

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Homeland security denies reports that Ice ‘secretly deported’ Pennsylvania grandfather

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The department said in a statement that Ice never arrested or deported Luis Leon to Guatemala, and that the reports were a ‘hoax’

Confusion swirled around the fate of a Chilean resident of the US after the Department of Homeland Security called reports of his deportation to Guatemala a “hoax”.

On 18 July, the Morning Call newspaper of Allentown, Pennsylvania, reported that the family of the man, Luis Leon, said he was handcuffed after showing up at to immigration office on 20 June to report a lost green card. They said he was first sent to a detention facility in Minnesota, then to Guatemala, where they said a Chilean relative informed them he was in a hospital.

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Trump’s border czar to target sanctuary cities in US: ‘We’re gonna flood the zone’

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Homan vows to escalate Ice operations after off-duty officer allegedly shot by undocumented person in New York City

The Trump administration is targeting sanctuary cities in the next phase of its deportation drive after labelling them “sanctuaries for criminals” following the shooting of an off-duty law enforcement officer in New York City, allegedly by an undocumented person with a criminal record.

Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s hardline border czar, vowed to “flood the zone” with Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents in an all-out bid to overcome the lack of cooperation he said the government faced from Democrat-run municipalities in its quest to arrest and detain undocumented people.

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Revealed: Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publication

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As Harvard’s feud with Trump escalated, so did tensions over an ‘education and Palestine’ issue of a prestigious journal. Scholars blame the ‘Palestine exception’ to academic freedom

In March 2024, six months into Israel’s war in Gaza, education in the territory was decimated. Schools were closed – most had been turned into shelters – and all 12 of the strip’s universities were partially or fully destroyed.

Against that backdrop, a prestigious American education journal decided to dedicate a special issue to “education and Palestine”. The Harvard Educational Review (HER) put out a call for submissions, asking academics around the world for ideas for articles grappling with the education of Palestinians, education about Palestine and Palestinians, and related debates in schools and colleges in the US.

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Death of Malcolm-Jamal Warner shocks fans: ‘We saw ourselves in him’

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Actor’s Theo Huxtable provided an entire generation of Black youth and teens a relatable character

For Black youth and teens growing up in the mid-1980s, The Cosby Show offered something rarely seen on television up until that time: a sitcom that placed characters who looked like them in a positive light.

And Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s Theo Huxtable was the character generation X most related to. Fans took quickly to social media on Monday as news of Warner’s accidental drowning in Costa Rica spread.

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Trump officials release FBI records on MLK Jr despite his family’s opposition

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About 200,000 pages of surveillance records released despite objection from slain civil rights leader’s family

The Trump administration has released records of the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr, despite opposition from the slain Nobel laureate’s family and the civil rights group that he led until his 1968 assassination.

The release involves an estimated 200,000 pages of records that had been under a court-imposed seal since 1977, when the FBI first gathered the records and turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.

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Britain told US that invading Iraq could cost Blair his premiership, papers reveal

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Adviser to former PM said Bush’s pursuit of regime change in Baghdad could also cause ‘regime change in London’

The stark terms in which the US was warned that invading Iraq without a second UN security council resolution could cost Tony Blair his premiership have been revealed in newly released documents.

Blair’s foreign policy adviser, David Manning, warned Condoleezza Rice, the then US national security adviser: “The US must not promote regime change in Baghdad at the price of regime change in London.”

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Harvard to ask court to declare Trump’s $2bn funding freeze unlawful – US politics live

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Top US university returns to court to fight against funding freeze that halted major research efforts

Ever since Donald Trump began his second presidency, he has used an “invented” national energy emergency to help justify expanding oil, gas and coal while slashing green energy – despite years of scientific evidence that burning fossil fuels has contributed significantly to climate change, say scholars and watchdogs.

It’s an agenda that in only its first six months, has put back environmental progress by decades, they say.

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Harvard heads to court to argue Trump administration’s $2.6bn in cuts were illegal

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Ruling in the university’s favor would reverse funding freezes that became cuts as Trump administration escalated fight

Harvard University will appear in federal court Monday to make the case that the Trump administration illegally cut $2.6bn from the storied college – a pivotal moment in its battle against the federal government.

If US district Judge Allison Burroughs decides in the university’s favor, the ruling would reverse a series of funding freezes that later became outright cuts as the Trump administration escalated its fight with the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university. Such a ruling, if it stands, would revive Harvard’s sprawling scientific and medical research operation and hundreds of projects that lost federal money.

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‘It’s really theft’: the Republican plan to redraw Texas maps – and grab more power

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Democrats are livid over the governor’s plan to redraw districts at a time when Texas officials are supposed to be focused on recovery from the floods

A plan for Texas to redraw its congressional districts and gain five additional Republican seats barrels through flimsy legal arguments and political norms like a rough-stock rodeo bronco through a broken chute.

But the fiddly process of drawing the maps to Republicans’ advantage for 2026 may require more finesse than cowboy politics can produce.

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Pope condemns Gaza war’s ‘barbarity’ as 93 reported killed by Israeli fire while waiting for food | First Thing

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Israeli forces open fire on Palestinians in one of bloodiest incidents involving aid seekers. Plus, Ellen DeGeneres confirms she moved to the UK because of Donald Trump

Good morning.

Pope Leo XIV has condemned the “barbarity” of the war in Gaza and the “indiscriminate use of force” as Gaza’s civil defence agency said at least 93 Palestinians had been killed queueing for food, and Israel issued fresh evacuation orders for areas packed with displaced people.

What has Israel said about the killings? Israel’s military said soldiers had shot at a gathering of thousands of Palestinians in northern Gaza who it claimed posed a threat, and it was aware of some casualties. But it said the numbers reported by officials in Gaza were far higher than its initial investigation found. It did not immediately comment on the incidents in the south.

Why else is Ice in the news? An 82-year-old man in Pennsylvania was secretly deported to Guatemala – a country to which he has no connection – after visiting an immigration office last month to replace his lost green card, according to his family, who have not heard from him since and were initially told he was dead.

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‘It’s a madhouse’: US state department workers reeling after Trump’s firings

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About 3,000 workers have left the agency through firings and buyouts in a move Democrats and staff call ‘unlawful’

Workers at the US state department say firings, resignation buyouts, a proposed budget cut of 48%, and reorganization under the Trump administration has left staff with low morale and will likely have long-term impacts.

Foreign programs and services aimed towards LGBTQ+ communities, maternal and reproductive health, and minority groups have been removed or cut in place of far-right ideological policies being pursued by a 26-year-old senior adviser and Trump appointee at the agency.

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Zelenskyy accuses Russia of ‘assault on humanity’ after latest drone barrage

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Germany vows to expedite delivery of Patriot systems as drone strikes Kyiv metro station sheltering civilians

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of “an assault on humanity” after a barrage of drones and missiles hit Ukraine, as Germany promised to supply five Patriot air-defence systems to help an under-pressure Kyiv.

Ukraine’s president said Moscow had launched more than 420 drones and more than 20 missiles in its latest overnight attack, killing at least two people and targeting a metro station in the capital where people were sheltering.

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Pat Tillman’s brother arrested for driving into California post office – report

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Late NFL star’s brother, Richard Tillman, taken into custody as suspect after crash causes building to go up in flames

Police are investigating a car that crashed into a post office in San Jose, California, early on Sunday, causing the building to go up in flames, authorities said. Police reportedly took a Richard Tillman – brother of NFL star turned army enlistee Pat Tillman – into custody as a suspect.

The crash happened shortly before 3am at the office located in a strip mall south of downtown, according to the San Jose police department. No injuries were reported.

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