Category Archives: US News

Panel says Confederate memorial at Arlington cemetery should be dismantled

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The commission presented its final report on Confederate-honoring military bases and assets that should be renamed

An independent commission is recommending that the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery be dismantled and taken down, as part of its final report to Congress on the renaming of military bases and assets that commemorate the Confederacy.

Panel members on Tuesday rolled out the final list of ships, base roads, buildings and other items that they said should be renamed. But unlike the commission’s recommendations earlier this year laying out new names for nine Army bases, there were no suggested names for the roughly 1,100 assets across the military that bear Confederate names.

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Ken Starr, who investigated Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky affair, dies at 76

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Starr’s Whitewater investigation, which uncovered Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky, led to US president’s impeachment in 1998

Ken Starr, the lawyer who relentlessly pursued Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, has died at the age of 76, according to a statement issued by his family.

Starr was a prosecutor whose Whitewater investigation led to the impeachment of former Democratic president Clinton, in 1998. He died on Tuesday at Baylor St Luke’s medical center in Houston, of complications from surgery, the statement said.

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Democrats condemn Lindsey Graham’s nationwide abortion ban proposal – live

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Indiana to ban abortion on Thursday

As the news cycle today has focused on senator Lindsey Graham’s proposals for a national abortion ban from 15 weeks, its worth remembering that Republican-controlled Indiana will bring in its almost total ban on Thursday.

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Mudslides hit Los Angeles mountain area as thousands told to evacuate

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Heavy rains are remnants of tropical storm that brought badly needed rainfall to drought-stricken southern California last week

Thousands of residents of a mountain area east of Los Angeles were under evacuation and shelter-in-place orders after heavy rains unleashed mudslides, sending boulders and other debris across roads.

Firefighters went street by street in the community of Forest Falls on Monday night to make sure no residents were trapped. Eric Sherwin, spokesperson for the San Bernardino county fire department, said crews hadn’t found anyone who needed to be rescued and no one was reported missing. Crews would canvas the neighborhoods again and begin cleanup efforts after sunrise, he said.

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Twitter whistleblower tells Senate of ‘egregious’ security failings by company

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Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko, former head of security, says ‘any employee could take over the accounts of any senator in this room’

A Twitter whistleblower who accused the company of “egregious” security deficiencies testified in front of Congress on Tuesday, expanding on accusations of corporate failings he filed to federal agencies in August.

Former hacker Peiter “Mudge” Zatko worked as head of security at Twitter from 2020 until he was fired in 2022, and says in that time he witnessed “extreme, egregious deficiencies by Twitter in every area of his mandate”.

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Republican Lindsey Graham proposes nationwide 15-week abortion ban

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Hardline South Carolina senator plans for new bill on national abortion restrictions, with fewer than 60 days until midterms

Senator Lindsey Graham was proposing legislation on Tuesday for a nationwide 15-week abortion ban, a politically risky strategy as a backlash grows to the supreme court ruling earlier this summer overturning federal protections for the procedure.

Polling shows that 57% of Americans disapproved of the court’s June reversal of the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling guaranteeing access to abortion, and 62% say the procedure should be legal in all or most cases.

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Senate panel to investigate Trump allies’ alleged meddling in prosecutions

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Judiciary committee notifies justice department of investigation into claims made by fired US attorney Geoffrey Berman

The US Senate judiciary committee has said it will investigate claims made in a recent book that allies of Donald Trump politically interfered with a prominent US attorney’s office.

William Barr, Donald Trump’s second attorney general, fired Geoffrey Berman from the powerful southern district of New York (SDNY) five months before the 2020 election. In a memoir – Holding the Line: Inside the Nation’s Preeminent US Attorney’s Office and its Battle with the Trump Justice Department – which is published in the US on Tuesday, Berman alleges interference both on behalf of Trump allies and against Trump enemies.

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Covid caused huge shortages in US labor market, study shows

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At least 500,000 people have permanently disappeared from the workforce, analysis says

Research into the lingering effects of Covid-19 on the US workforce has confirmed what anybody who has waited an extended time for a delivery – or been unable to get a restaurant table – already knows: the pandemic has caused massive shortages in the labor market.

On top of the quarter-million people of working age who have died from coronavirus, at least twice that number across all ages have permanently disappeared from the workforce, the analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows.

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Trump threatened not to leave White House after election loss, book says

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Defeated president told aide ‘we’re never leaving’ despite Biden’s win, according to new book Confidence Man

In the days after Joe Biden defeated him in the 2020 election, Donald Trump told an aide he was “just not going to leave” the White House, according to a new book on his presidency and its chaotic aftermath.

“We’re never leaving,” he vowed to another aide, says the book from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman titled Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. “How can you leave when you won an election?”

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Air quality plummets as smoke from roaring wildfires chokes US west

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Blazes in California, Washington and Oregon cause widespread damage as plumes travel across states and into Canada

California firefighters are battling large blazes across the state as the west’s fire season heats up, covering swaths of Oregon, Washington, California and Canada in heavy smoke that has also traveled across the US.

Rain from tropical storm Kay brought relief to firefighters in southern California after a punishing heatwave gripped much of the state for more than a week and sent some crews to the hospital.

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Trump lawyers reject US government’s arguments against special master – as it happened

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Democrats have grown increasingly upbeat about their prospects in the upcoming midterms, pointing to the outrage over the end of nationwide abortion rights, declining gas prices and the passage of major pieces of legislation intended to help Americans.

Indeed, polls in recent battleground states have shown Democratic Senate candidates ahead of their Republicans challengers, including in closely divided races such as those in Wisconsin, Nevada and Georgia.

The apparent Democratic edge in Senate races in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Ohio would evaporate. To take the chamber, Republicans would need any two of Georgia, Arizona, Nevada or Pennsylvania. With Democrats today well ahead in Pennsylvania and Arizona, the fight for control of the chamber would come down to very close races in Nevada and Georgia.

Regardless of who was favored, the race for Senate control would be extremely competitive. Republican control of the House would seem to be a foregone conclusion.

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NSA analyst jailed for life for selling US secrets to Soviets dies aged 80

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Ronald Pelton, convicted of espionage in 1986, said he accepted money from America’s cold war enemy because he was desperate

A former National Security Agency analyst who was arguably its most damaging traitor and became famous for aiding the Soviets during the cold war died last week, according to an obituary posted on the website of a Maryland funeral home.

Ronald William Pelton was 80.

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Coinbase employee mired in first insider trading case involving cryptocurrency

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Rohan Wahi, the brother of a former product manager at the company, has pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy charges

The brother of a former Coinbase Global Inc product manager pleaded guilty on Monday to a wire fraud conspiracy charge, in what US prosecutors have called the first insider trading case involving cryptocurrency.

Nikhil Wahi, 26, admitted during a virtual court hearing before US district judge Loretta Preska in Manhattan that he made trades based on confidential Coinbase information.

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‘We’ve experienced an anomaly’: Bezos’s latest Blue Origin launch fails

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New Shepard rocket fails shortly after launch, but uncrewed capsule jettisons successfully

An uncrewed rocket belonging to Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, failed shortly after launch in Texas on Monday morning, a potential setback for the Amazon founder’s wider ambitions of sending humans into orbit.

The malfunction of the New Shepard booster, a type of rocket that is similar to the one Blue Origin has used this year to send three crews of up to six people on suborbital flights, came 1min 4sec after launch and just as the vehicle was reaching its maximum dynamic pressure, known as “max q”.

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Anthony Varvaro, MLB player who joined New York police, dies in car crash on way to September 11 memorial

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Pitcher who played for three major league teams before becoming Port Authority officer, was going to work at 9/11 ceremony in Manhattan

Anthony Varvaro, a former US Major League Baseball pitcher who retired in 2016 to become a police officer in the New York City area, was killed in a car accident Sunday morning on his way to work at the September 11 memorial ceremony in Manhattan, according to police officials and his former teams.

Varvaro, 37, was an officer for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He played baseball at St John’s University in New York before a six-year career in the majors as a relief pitcher with the Seattle Mariners, Atlanta Braves and Boston Red Sox.

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Kamala Harris says ‘everything on the line’ in midterm elections

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Vice-president warns that the elections will determine whether ‘age-old sanctity’ of right to vote would be protected

Kamala Harris warned on Sunday that the midterm elections in November would determine whether the “age-old sanctity” of the right to vote would be protected in the US or whether “so-called extremist leaders around the country” would continue to restrict access to the ballot box.

With just 56 days to go until the elections, and with the paper-thin Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress, the vice-president said that “everything is on the line in these elections”.

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Senate intelligence chair urges judge to allow briefing on Trump Mar-a-Lago search

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Democrat says clarification from judge urgently needed and the mishandling of state secrets could have disastrous consequences

The Democratic chair of the US Senate intelligence committee has demanded that a federal judge allows the committee to be briefed on the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago and the potential damage caused by Donald Trump hoarding top secret documents at his private club.

Mark Warner, the US senator from Virginia, said that there was confusion over whether the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the FBI were allowed to brief the Senate committee on their review of classified documents held at the former president’s club-resort and residence in Palm Beach, Florida.

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John Roberts defends supreme court as Kamala Harris lashes out at Roe ruling

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Chief justice warns against linking contentious decisions with court legitimacy as vice-president attacks ‘activist court’

US supreme court chief justice John Roberts has defended his conservative-leaning bench from attacks over its decision in June to overturn federal abortion rights, as US vice-president Kamala Harris launched a fierce attack on what she called today’s “activist court”.

Roberts, in his first public appearance since the bombshell ruling to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade decision, warned against linking contentious decisions with court legitimacy, saying at an event on Friday night: “The court has always decided controversial cases and decisions have always been subject to intense criticism, and that is entirely appropriate.”

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Hillary Clinton laments US extremism and calls for unity on 9/11 anniversary

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Former US secretary of state makes an impassioned attack on turn towards extremism and divisiveness in American politics

Hillary Clinton seized the opportunity presented by Sunday’s 21st anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington to make a thinly-veiled attack on the extremism and divisiveness stoked by Donald Trump, as she called for a return to national unity.

The former US secretary of state and first lady invoked the bipartisan mood of the country in the wake of the 9/11 attack in which almost 3,000 people were killed.

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Ban Bain & Co from US government contracts, Joe Biden is urged

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Exclusive: Labour peer calls on US president to follow UK in banning firm over misconduct in South Africa

Joe Biden should follow the UK in banning the global management consultancy firm Bain & Company from future government contracts, the Labour peer Peter Hain has said.

In a letter shared with the Guardian, the former minister and anti-apartheid campaigner urged the US president to “act on this matter and establish a clear precedent that will signal to all US global companies, consultancies, lawyers, auditors and financial advisers that collusion with corrupt politicians and their business cronies in other countries will not be tolerated”.

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