Category Archives: US News

‘The Lord told us to’: US pastor says he stole $1m from Christians to remodel home

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Couple are charged with creating and selling their cryptocurrency, known as ‘INDXcoin’, to Christian community in Denver, Colorado

A Colorado pastor who is charged with stealing more than $1m from his Christian community in a cryptocurrency scheme has admitted to the fraud but argued that God instructed him to carry it out.

Eli Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn, are charged with creating and selling their cryptocurrency, known as “INDXcoin”, to Christians based in their home town of Denver, Colorado, allegedly telling would-be investors that the Lord had told him people would become rich if they invested, the state’s division of securities announced in a press release on Thursday.

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Netflix places $5bn bet on live streaming with WWE Raw deal

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Entertainment giant has dabbled with live events in bid to shore up its dominant position as world’s largest streaming platform

Netflix has unveiled a $5bn push into live television after striking a decade-long deal with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) to broadcast the hit wrestling show Raw.

The entertainment giant, which led the on-demand streaming revolution, has dabbled with live events in recent years in a bid to shore up its dominant position as the world’s largest streaming platform.

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Carriers sneak life-saving drugs over border as Mexico battles opioid deaths

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People forced to bring overdose-reversal drug naloxone from US, as critics accuse Mexican government of creating shortage

Every day, people cross the US-Mexico border with drugs – but not all of them are going north. Some head in the opposite direction with a hidden cargo of naloxone, a life-saving medicine that can reverse an opioid overdose but is so restricted as to be practically inaccessible in Mexico.

This humanitarian contraband is necessary because Mexico’s border cities have their own problems with opioid use – problems that activists and researchers say are being made more deadly by government policy.

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Chicago police search for suspect in fatal shootings of eight people

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Authorities are not aware of a motive for the killings, but warn that Romeo Nance, 23, should be considered armed and dangerous

A man shot and killed eight people at three locations since Sunday in the Chicago suburbs and remains loose, authorities said Monday.

Police in Will county and the city of Joliet said they did not know of a motive for the killings, but said the man knew the victims. The FBI’s fugitive task force was assisting local police in the search for the suspect, the Joliet police chief, William Evans, said.

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Facial recognition used after Sunglass Hut robbery led to man’s wrongful jailing, says suit

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Harvey Eugene Murphy Jr’s lawsuit claims he was misidentified as culprit of armed robbery and put in jail, where he says he was raped

A 61-year-old man is suing Macy’s and the parent company of Sunglass Hut over the stores’ alleged use of a facial recognition system that misidentified him as the culprit behind an armed robbery and led to his wrongful arrest. While in jail, he was beaten and raped, according to his suit.

Harvey Eugene Murphy Jr was accused and arrested on charges of robbing a Houston-area Sunglass Hut of thousands of dollars of merchandise in January 2022, though his attorneys say he was living in California at the time of the robbery. He was arrested on 20 October 2023, according to his lawyers.

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‘We want everybody walking out’: UAW chief outlines mass strike for May 2028

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Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers president, reaffirms general strike on 1 May 2028, saying ‘members need to come together’

Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers president, criticized Donald Trump on Monday but declined to back Joe Biden as he reaffirmed plans to lead a general strike in the US in 2028.

Speaking to union members at the UAW national political conference in Washington DC, Fain said it was time for union members to come together.

Reuters contributed reporting

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Louisiana court upholds air permits for petrochemical complex in Cancer Alley

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Decision helps clear path for Formosa Plastics to build US’s largest petrochemical complex of its time

A Louisiana appellate court has upheld air permits for a giant proposed petrochemical complex in a region known as Cancer Alley, enraging local advocates.

The decision, issued on Friday, will help clear a path for Formosa Plastics to build the nation’s largest petrochemical complex of its kind. The project has long faced staunch opposition from local and national environmental justice groups.

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US and UK strike Yemen in latest attempt to stop Houthis targeting ships

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US officials confirmed attacks amid footage of explosions around the capital city of Sana’a

The US and the UK have conducted a further round of strikes against the Houthis in an attempt to stop the rebel group targeting shipping in the southern Red Sea.

A joint statement from both countries said that they had conducted “an additional round of proportionate and necessary strikes” against eight Houthi targets, with the support of Australia, Bahrain, Canada and the Netherlands.

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Wall Street notches fresh records as S&P 500 and Dow Jones close at all-time high

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Record highs come amid hopes a cooldown in inflation will allow Federal Reserve to cut interest rates several times this year

Wall Street scaled fresh records on Monday, as the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones industrial average each closed at an all-time high.

The S&P gained 0.2% to 4,850.43. The Dow cleared 38,000 for the first time, rising 0.4% to 38,001.81.

Associated Press contributed reporting

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Norman Jewison, director of In the Heat of the Night, dies aged 97

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Canadian-born director of Moonstruck and Fiddler on the Roof was a three-time Oscar nominee

Norman Jewison, the acclaimed and versatile Canadian-born director whose Hollywood films ranged from Doris Day comedies and Moonstruck to social dramas such as the Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night, has died at the age of 97.

Jewison, a three-time Oscar nominee who in 1999 received an Academy Award for lifetime achievement, died “peacefully” on Saturday, according to his publicist Jeff Sanderson. Additional details were not immediately available.

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Benito the giraffe begins long journey for better weather in central Mexico

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Conditions at Ciudad Juárez zoo on US-Mexico border not suitable so container takes Benito to conservation park 1,000 miles away

A giraffe named Benito has started a 50-hour road trip to leave behind the cold and loneliness of Mexico’s northern border city of Ciudad Juárez to find warmth – and maybe a mate – in his new home 2,000km (1,200 miles) to the south.

A campaign by animal rights activists won the four-year-old giraffe a transfer to an animal park in Puebla state in central Mexico, where he will join a group of resident giraffes and enjoy a more suitable climate.

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Families condemn Koch brothers over ploy to avoid asbestos compensation

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Georgia-Pacific, owned by Koch Industries, employ controversial legal tactic to circumvent paying millions to sickened workers

Asbestos victims, their families and attorneys are claiming a Koch Industries-owned company and its lawyers are using a controversial bankruptcy maneuver to avoid paying millions in compensation to its former employees.

Workers at Georgia-Pacific, a paper and building products company, have been locked in a years-long battle with a company over claims asbestos in its products caused fatal cancers.

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OpenAI bans bot impersonating US presidential candidate Dean Phillips

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Company removes account of developer saying ChatGPT bot violated policies on political campaigning

OpenAI has removed the account of the developer behind an artificial intelligence-powered bot impersonating the US presidential candidate Dean Phillips, saying it violated company policy.

Phillips, who is challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic party candidacy, was impersonated by a ChatGPT-powered bot on the dean.bot site.

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Two US Navy Seals declared dead after raid to seize Iranian weapons bound for Houthis

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Seals from USS Lewis Puller went overboard during mission off coast of Somalia to seize Iranian weapons, according to US military

Two US Navy Seals who went missing during an operation to seize Iranian weapons bound for Yemen’s Houthi rebels have been declared dead after a 10-day search failed to locate them, the US military has said.

US Central Command (Centcom) had previously said that two Seals who were reported as lost at sea were involved in the 11 January operation, in which the elite special operations personnel boarded a dhow off the coast of Somalia and seized missile components made in Iran.

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‘Burn, beetle, burn’: South Dakotans torch an effigy of destructive bug

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Hundreds of people set fire to a giant wooden beetle in the annual festival to raise awareness of the harmful pine beetle

In what’s become an annual winter tradition: hundreds of people carrying torches set fire to a giant wooden beetle effigy in Custer, South Dakota, to raise awareness of the destructive impact of the mountain pine beetle on forest land in the Black Hills.

Custer firefighters prepared and lit the torches for residents to carry in a march to the pyre Saturday night in the 11th Burning Beetle fest, the Rapid City Journal reported.

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Ron DeSantis put nearly all his eggs in the basket of a ‘war on woke’

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The Florida governor, once billed as Trump without the baggage, ended up making a series of bad gambles

It began in a glitch-filled disaster on Twitter. It ended with a misattributed quotation on X. Just like Elon Musk’s social media platform, efforts to rebrand Ron DeSantis’s US presidential election campaign could not mask its fundamental flaws.

When in May the Florida governor announced his run during a chat with Musk on Twitter Spaces, the platform’s audio streaming feature, there were technical breakdowns that drew comparisons with one of Musk’s space rockets blowing up on the launchpad.

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Ron DeSantis drops out of Republican presidential race

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Hard-right Florida governor at one point thought to be future of party ends campaign to be GOP nominee

Ron DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, has ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and endorsed Donald Trump.

“It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” he said in a statement posted on X. “He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackaged form of warmed over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents.”

Adam Gabbatt contributed reporting from New Hampshire

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Biden abortion ad marks campaign shift to emphasize reproductive rights

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Campaign ad, titled Forced, is designed to tie Donald Trump directly to the abortion issue

The Biden re-election campaign rolled out a new campaign ad Sunday, signaling a shift in emphasis to reproductive rights that the White House hopes will carry and define Democrats through the 2024 election cycle.

The campaign ad, titled Forced, is designed to tie Donald Trump directly to the abortion issue almost 18 months after his nominees to the supreme court helped to overturn a constitutional right to abortion enshrined in Roe v Wade, which would have turned 51 this week.

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‘I’m not ready, brother’: US man to be put to death months after botched execution attempt

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Kenneth Smith, to be executed in Alabama by untested gas method, tells Guardian of nightmares from failed lethal injection

On Tuesday morning, Kenneth Smith will be moved within the Holman correctional facility in Alabama to the “death cell”, the bluntly named holding unit where condemned prisoners are placed two days before their appointed execution.

Smith knows the cell well. He knows its dimensions and the feel of the place. He knows that it sits only about 20 feet from the death chamber where, barring a last-minute reprieve, he will be escorted in handcuffs and leg irons on Thursday before being strapped to a gurney to await his fate.

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Newspapers stolen after a story about rape charges at Colorado police chief’s house

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Theft occurred on day the Ouray County Plaindealer published story about alleged sexual assault at party at police chief’s house

Nearly all the copies of a small-town Colorado newspaper were stolen from newspaper racks on the same day the Ouray County Plaindealer published a story about charges being filed over rapes alleged to have occurred at an underage drinking party at the police chief’s house while the chief was asleep, the owner and publisher said Friday.

Mike Wiggins vowed to get to the bottom of it, posting Thursday on X, formerly Twitter: “If you hoped to silence or intimidate us, you failed miserably. We’ll find out who did this. And another press run is imminent.”

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