Category Archives: US News

Supreme court rejects RFK Jr plea to remove name from battleground ballots

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Kennedy, who suspended campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, will remain on ballot in Michigan and Wisconsin

The supreme court on Tuesday rejected an emergency appeal to remove Robert F Kennedy Jr from presidential ballots in Wisconsin and Michigan.

Kennedy wanted to remove himself from the ballot in the two crucial swing states after dropping his independent bid and endorsing Donald Trump. He argued that keeping him on violated his first amendment rights by wrongly implying he still wanted to be elected president.

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UAW leader Shawn Fain makes final appeal to divided membership

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Fain asks members to vote for Harris in billionaire v working class framing in which Republicans ‘embraced’ theirs

The leader of the United Auto Workers (UAW) made a last plea to union members to vote for presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Tuesday night casting the election as a fight between the interests of the working-class and billionaires.

“I want you to know where your union stands. I want you to listen to how your UAW leadership thinks about this election and I want you to keep an open mind,” said Shawn Fain, president of the 391,00-strong union.

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Berlin summons Iran ambassador over execution of German-Iranian

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Daughter of Jamshid Sharmahd says family let down by US and German governments’ failure to save him

Germany has recalled its ambassador to Tehran and summoned the Iranian charge d’affaires in Berlin in protest over the execution of a German-Iranian dual national, Jamshid Sharmahd, accused of terrorism by Iran.

His daughter, Gazelle Sharmahd, who had pressed the German and US governments hard to save him, said she and her brother felt let down by the failure of both governments to do more. Sharmahd was executed on Monday.

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Sri Lanka’s Arugam Bay in shock after terror threat to Israeli tourists

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Israeli travellers told to evacuate area immediately as police set up patrols and roadblocks

The golden sands of Sri Lanka’s Arugam Bay are usually carefree, a place for tourists to surf the famous break and relax on the beach.

But last week, the slow rhythm of the bay was dealt a shock. The US embassy, followed up by Sri Lankan police and Israel’s national security council, warned of a serious terrorist threat in the area. Israeli travellers were believed to be the intended target of a planned attack and were told to evacuate immediately. Hundreds of police and senior intelligence officials descended on the small coastal town, setting up patrols and road blocks.

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Racist jokes about Puerto Rico at rally bring anger and disgust: ‘Truly how the Trump party sees us’

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Tony Hinchcliffe’s series of racist jokes at Donald Trump’s rally on Sunday were widely condemned

Some Americans, particularly those of Puerto Rican descent, said that the racist remarks aired at Donald Trump’s Sunday night rally at Madison Square Garden in New York helped them decide who to vote for.

The speaker and comedian Tony Hinchcliffe took aim at Puerto Rico, in a series of racist jokes including one in which he called it “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean”.

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Puerto Rico Republican chair demands Trump apology for rally’s racist remarks

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Angel M Cintrón, party’s chair on island, says he will not vote for Trump unless he says sorry for speaker’s comments

The president of the Republican party’s branch in Puerto Rico has said he will not vote for Donald Trump unless he apologises for racist remarks made at his rally referring to the US island territory as a “floating island of garbage”.

Outrage even among fellow Republicans is continuing to mount after the racist insult at the Republican nominee’s rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, with the podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe coming under fire for his inflammatory comments made about Puerto Rico in the opening speech.

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Kamala Harris delivers ‘closing argument’ in Washington – as it happened

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Most Americans are prepared to accept the election results as legitimate, according to a new ABC/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday.

The poll, conducted between 18 October to 22, 2024, states 83% of Americans surveyed and 86% of registered voters surveyed are prepared to accept the outcome of the presidential election as legitimate, regardless of which candidate they support.

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Steve Bannon released from prison early a week before US election

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Trump ally served four-month sentence for defying subpoena in investigation into 6 January attack

Longtime Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon has been released from prison early, after serving a four-month sentence for defying a subpoena in the congressional investigation into the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

Bannon left the federal correctional institution in Danbury, Connecticut, according to Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons. He planned to hold a news conference later in the day in Manhattan, his representatives said. He is also expected to resume his podcast on Tuesday.

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Harris seeks to rally youth vote in Michigan | First Thing

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Democratic presidential candidate campaigns in university city of Ann Arbor as polls show state on knife-edge

Good morning.

Appearing together in the home town of Michigan’s largest university, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz sought to burnish their credentials with young voters and soothe Democrats who had grown nervous as the apparent deadlock in the race for the White House has dragged on.

Is Kamala Harris alienating progressives as she courts anti-Trump Republicans? The vice-president is relying on support of high-profile GOP refuseniks as she moves to the centre despite warnings from progressives. “I don’t think having Liz Cheney on the team helps at all, because she doesn’t bring a flock of votes with her,” said James Zogby, a member of the Democratic National Committee.

What’s the latest at the Post? Editorial board members David Hoffman and Molly Roberts both resigned yesterday, with forceful letters indicating their reasons.

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Robert Downey Jr: ‘I will sue all future executives who make AI replicas of me’

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The actor who will be returning to the MCU as Doctor Doom said he believed Marvel would ‘never’ recreate him on screen without his permission

Robert Downey Jr has said he will instruct his lawyers to sue future executives who attempt to create digital replicas of him using AI.

Speaking on the On With Kara Swisher podcast, he said: “I would like to here state that I intend to sue all future executives just on spec.”

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CNN apologises for pager comment by conservative panellist to Mehdi Hasan

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Ryan James Girdusky removed from NewsNight show after telling fellow guest ‘I hope your beeper doesn’t go off’

CNN has apologised to its viewers after a panellist on its NewsNight programme made derogatory remarks implying that a fellow guest on the show, the broadcaster Mehdi Hasan, was a terrorist.

Ryan James Girdusky, a conservative commentator, told Hasan, a Guardian US columnist and former host on MSNBC, who is Muslim, that he hoped his “beeper doesn’t go off”, in an apparent reference to Israel’s targeting of Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon with exploding pagers last month. The wave of coordinated explosions killed 12 and injured thousands.

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Kamala Harris calls for a ‘new generation of leadership’ in Washington speech

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Vice-president strikes hopeful tone in remarks delivered from site of Trump’s speech before deadly January 6 attack

With the White House illuminated behind her, Kamala Harris asked the vanishing slice of undecided Americans to elect a “new generation of leadership”, likening Donald Trump to a “petty tyrant” who had stood in the very same spot nearly four years ago and, in a last-gasp effort to cling to power, helped incite the mob that stormed the US Capitol.

The choice between her and Trump in the deadlocked presidential contest was “about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division”, Harris said, from the Ellipse near the White House’s South Lawn, where tens of thousands of supporters gathered one week before the final votes of the 2024 election are cast.

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US election live: outcry grows over ‘hateful’ Trump rally remarks; Harris says Puerto Ricans ‘deserve better’

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Congressional Hispanic caucus hits out at ‘shameful’ rhetoric; vice-president releases ad condemning Trump and comedian’s remarks

Here’s our story of the resignation of Washington Post columnist Michele Norris, the latest high profile writer to leave the newspaper in protest at its decision not to endorse a candidate in next week’s presidential election.

Norris says the Post’s non-call was a “terrible mistake & an insult to the paper’s own longstanding standard of regularly endorsing candidates since 1976”.

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Outcry over Trump’s hint at ‘little secret’ with House Republicans

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Critics condemn ‘sinister’ remark that suggests potential Trump-Mike Johnson plot to settle contested election

Donald Trump faced mounting suspicion of hatching a plot to steal next week’s presidential election as Democrats and commentators focused on his references to a “little secret” at Sunday night’s tumultuous Madison Square Garden rally.

The allusions initially attracted little notice amid the angry backlash provoked by racist jokes and incendiary rhetoric from a succession of warm-up speakers, including an offensive comment about Puerto Ricans that even Trump’s own campaign felt obliged to disavow.

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Anita Hill empathizes with ‘irritatingly familiar’ insults against Harris in op-ed

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Professor who was impugned for allegations against Clarence Thomas says the sexist, racist remarks ‘must sting’

Anita Hill, former clerk to US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, has said “racist, misogynist and sexist insults” aimed at Kamala Harris “must sting”.

In a New York Times opinion piece published Monday, the Brandeis University professor who was famously brought before Thomas’s confirmation hearings only to have her sexual harassment allegations against him picked apart by sitting senators, wrote that she sympathizes with the US vice-president.

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Inmate Steve Bannon reportedly hangs with the white guys and teaches civics

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Former Trump White House aide set to be released after serving four months for contempt of Congress

Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist under the Trump administration, is set to be released from prison on Tuesday and details have emerged of his life behind bars, in which he gravitated to hanging out with other white prisoners.

The news website Notus posted an investigation in which it corresponded with several of Bannon’s fellow inmates at a prison in Connecticut.

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Early ballots burned in suspected attacks in Washington and Oregon

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Hundreds of ballots damaged in fires that police believe are linked and vehicle involved has reportedly been identified

Hundreds of early ballots cast for the US presidential election have been burned in two suspected attacks in Washington and Oregon, exacerbating tensions ahead of next Tuesday’s knife-edge contest.

Police said Monday that the fires in the two states were believed to be connected and that a vehicle involved had been identified, according to the Associated Press.

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Therapy-speak and 80s hairstyles: will Harris’s Brené Brown sit-down swing white female voters?

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The Democrat’s cozy chat with the vulnerability expert was largely apolitical – which could play well with a key demographic

In the quest to win over white female voters – 53% of whom showed up for Donald Trump in 2020 – Kamala Harris made her case on a podcast hosted by one of their beloved avatars, the vulnerability researcher Brené Brown. The episode, released on Monday, was a mostly fluffy discussion about leadership, trauma and the notion of voting as agency in an uncontrollable news cycle.

Brown, a University of Houston professor and bestselling author who has spent two decades studying social sciences, became an overnight celebrity after giving a 2010 Ted Talk called “the power of vulnerability”. One could argue the talk, which birthed Brown’s Oprah-approved speaking empire, also spawned our culture’s current obsession with therapy-speak.

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Trump fills Madison Square Garden with anger, vitriol and racist threats

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Marking final stretch of campaign in New York, Trump and cabal of surrogates attack Harris and mock Puerto Rico

Anger and vitriol took center stage at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, as Donald Trump and a cabal of campaign surrogates held a rally marked by racist comments, coarse insults, and dangerous threats about immigrants.

Nine days out from the election, Trump used the rally in New York to repeat his claim that he is fighting “the enemy within” and again promised to launch “the largest deportation program in American history”, amid incoherent ramblings about ending a phone call with a “very, very important person” so he could watch one of Elon Musk’s rockets land.

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Trump repeats ‘enemy from within’ rhetoric at Madison Square Garden rally as speakers give racist remarks – live

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Tucker Carlson among speakers to take jabs at Harris, Puerto Rico and trans people after vice-president rallies in Philadelphia

Following her appearance at a predominantly Black church in Philadelphia this morning, Kamala Harris has just visited Philly Cuts, a barbershop not far from the west Philadelphia church.

From a barbershop chair, Harris answered questions from several young Black men, including about student loan debt, in a conversation moderated by Pennsylvania state representative Jordan Harris.

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