Category Archives: US News

‘Constant and reassuring’: global media pay tribute after death of the Queen

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New York Times says Elizabeth II ‘projected stability’; Japan’s Asahi Shimbun says she ‘cared about post-war reconciliation’

Newspapers in the Commonwealth and beyond have led with the death of Queen Elizabeth II, with many paying tribute to her accomplishments during seven decades on the throne. Some speculated on how the monarchy might change under King Charles III.

The Washington Post’s Twitter account followed the sober format preferred by newspapers in the UK, its front page showing a black-and-white portrait of a smiling Queen against a black background.

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Revealed: Ginni Thomas’s links to anti-abortion groups who lobbied to overturn Roe

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Analysis of ‘amicus briefs’ shows how closely Clarence Thomas’s wife was entwined with rightwing effort to reverse 1973 ruling

Ginni Thomas, the self-styled “culture warrior” and extreme rightwing activist, has links to more than half of the anti-abortion groups and individuals who lobbied her husband Clarence Thomas and his fellow US supreme court justices ahead of their historic decision to eradicate a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.

A new analysis of the written legal arguments, or “amicus briefs”, used to lobby the justices as they deliberated over abortion underlines the extent to which Clarence Thomas’s wife was intertwined with this vast pressure campaign.

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‘You have to run’: Romney urged Biden to take down Trump, book says

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Gabriel Debenedetti, author of book on Biden’s relationship with Obama, reports call on night of 2018 midterms

On the night of the 2018 midterm elections, as a wave of anti-Trump sentiment swept Democrats to take control of the House, top Republican Mitt Romney urged Joe Biden to run for president.

“You have to run,” said Romney, the Republican presidential nominee Biden and Barack Obama defeated in 2012, speaking to the former vice-president by phone.

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Fires, heat … a hurricane? California’s ‘most unusual’ week of extreme weather

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A record heatwave added stress to the electrical grid and made firefighting difficult. Now a hurricane could bring flash floods

A collision of extreme weather events is bearing down on California as wildfires threaten communities, a record-setting heatwave is adding stress to the electrical grid, and moisture from a hurricane is expected to bring thunderstorms and flash floods.

Hurricane Kay, swirling off the coast of Mexico, is on its way north, bringing with it the chance of strong winds, severe rainstorms, and possibly dry lightning that could increase risks for new fire starts. It also could bring some welcome relief to the week of brutally hot weather.

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Justice department appeals special master ruling for Trump documents

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Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, had granted a request for an independent figure to review records from Mar-a-Lago

The US justice department has demanded that a federal judge restore its access to documents seized from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort that carried classification markings, saying that if not, it would appeal to a higher court.

The demands came in a three-page notice of appeal filed by the justice department on Thursday in the case involving Trump’s request for a so-called special master, and paves the way for the government to submit a detailed appeals brief to the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit.

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Los Angeles county is home to more than 69,000 unhoused people, count finds

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Number marks 4% increase since last count, in January 2020, but is believed to be an undercount

Los Angeles has experienced a 4% increase in its homeless population during the pandemic, with 69,144 unhoused people counted across the county this year, according to government data released on Thursday.

The Los Angeles homeless services authority (Lahsa), which conducted the count in February 2022 after skipping a year during the pandemic, said the growth of the unhoused population had slowed in the last two years, in part due to pandemic programs and funding. The previous count, conducted in January 2020, showed a 13% jump from 2019.

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Bernard Shaw, CNN’s first chief anchor, dies of pneumonia aged 82

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Trailblazing Black news anchor chronicled iconic moments in history from Tiananmen Square to the first Gulf war

The pioneering Black cable news anchor Bernard Shaw, who became a household name in the US with the launch of CNN, has died at the age of 82 after a bout with pneumonia unrelated to Covid-19, his family said Thursday.

When CNN debuted in 1980, Shaw served as the 24/7 news channel’s first chief anchor, and spent more than 20 years there before his retirement in February 2001. He reported on some of the biggest news stories from that era, including China’s deadly quelling of the Tiananmen Square student revolt in 1989, the first Gulf war in 1991 for which he went to Baghdad to report, and the 2000 presidential election, won by George W Bush following a controversial US supreme court ruling.

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Steve Bannon ‘stole millions of dollars to line his own pocket,’ New York attorney general says – as it happened

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Steve Bannon has now been formally indicted, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports.

Bannon was charged with money laundering and conspiracy in connection with his role in a fundraising effort to privately underwrite the construction of the US-Mexico border wall, according to the indictment unsealed on Thursday.

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FBI tracked Aretha Franklin’s civil rights activism, declassified file shows

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The 270-page unsealed file details several death threats and her friendships with Martin Luther King Jr and Angela Davis

The FBI has declassified its file on Aretha Franklin, the late “Queen of Soul” who died in 2018 at age 76. The 270-page document, which includes reports from over a dozen states, shows the bureau extensively tracked the singer’s civil rights activism and her friendships with Martin Luther King Jr and Angela Davis.

The file also includes several credible death threats against Franklin and a potential copyright infringement lawsuit stemming from a Yahoo! Groups message board in 2005. The case, involving a self-proclaimed “anti-fanatic” who sold pirated CDs and DVDs of her performances, never made it to trial.

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‘Unhinged’ Rudy Giuliani drank and ranted about Islam, new book claims

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Ex-mayor derailed ‘train wreck’ dinner with clients and colleagues, then was later considered for secretary of state

At a law firm dinner in New York in May 2016, an “unhinged” Rudy Giuliani, then Donald Trump’s suggested pick to head a commission on “radical Islamic terrorism”, behaved in a drunken and Islamophobic manner, horrifying clients and attorneys alike.

According to a new book by Geoffrey Berman, a former US attorney for the southern district of New York (SDNY), at one point Giuliani turned to a Jewish man “wearing a yarmulke [who] had ordered a kosher meal” and, under the impression the man was a Muslim, said: “I’m sorry to have tell you this, but the founder of your religion is a murderer.”

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Steve Bannon charged with money laundering and conspiracy in New York

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Former Trump adviser surrendered to authorities in Manhattan in connection with fundraising scheme for US-Mexico border wall

Top former Trump strategist Steve Bannon has been charged in New York with money laundering, conspiracy and scheme to defraud in connection with his role in a fundraising effort to privately underwrite the construction of the US-Mexico border wall, according to the indictment unsealed on Thursday.

The indictment includes two counts of money laundering in the second degree and conspiracy in the fourth degree. Bannon surrendered himself to the Manhattan district attorney’s office after being told in recent days that charges were imminent, sources familiar with the matter said.

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Boy Scouts to exit bankruptcy after $2.46bn sex abuse settlement approved

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Judge will allow the youth organization to exit Chapter 11 and settle decades of claims by more than 80,000 men

The Boy Scouts of America secured approval of a $2.46bn reorganization plan from a bankruptcy judge on Thursday that will allow the youth organization to exit Chapter 11 and settle decades of claims by more than 80,000 men who say they were abused as children by troop leaders.

US bankruptcy judge Laurie Selber Silverstein in Wilmington, Delaware, signed off on the restructuring proposal after the Boy Scouts made changes to address her previous ruling that had rejected portions of the settlement.

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Babel: the BookTok sensation that melds dark academia with a post-colonial critique

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Set at Oxford in the 1800s, Rebecca F Kuang’s new novel is a magic-infused allegory for structural oppression – and social media can’t get enough of it

A boy lies still beside the body of his mother. Her skin is blue and her eyes are open, wet and glassy. It is 1828, and a cholera epidemic has swept through Canton, China.

The boy is the only one left alive in the house and is on the brink of death when a quiet white Englishman brings him to London. There, the young Chinese boy is named Robert Swift and grows up in solitude, trained in English, Latin, ancient Greek and Chinese. For what reason, he does not yet know.

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Local official arrested after Las Vegas reporter Jeff German found dead

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Robert Telles, Clark county’s public administrator, had been the focus of several investigative stories by German

Four days after the investigative journalist Jeff German was found dead outside his Las Vegas home, police have arrested a local official who had been the focus of German’s reporting, on suspicion of murder, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

Robert Telles, an elected official who serves as the Clark county public administrator, was was wheeled out of his home on a stretcher and put into an ambulance about 6pm, just hours after officials had searched Telles’s home, according to the Review Journal.

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White House warns Truss over efforts to ‘undo’ Northern Ireland protocol

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Biden administration says undoing the protocol would not be ‘conducive’ to a trade deal between the UK and US

The Biden administration has sent Liz Truss a message on her second day in office warning against “efforts to undo the Northern Ireland protocol”.

The warning came from the lectern in the White House briefing room, where spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about new British prime minister Truss’s first phone call with Joe Biden and whether a US-UK trade deal was discussed.

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Memphis shooting: arrest made after reports of man firing at people while recording on Facebook

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Police arrest 19-year-old suspect in connection with multiple shootings after warning residents to take shelter

Tennessee law enforcement officials said a suspect had been arrested after a series of shootings in Memphis on Wednesday night.

Police had earlier warned residents to shelter in place as a man drove around the city shooting at people. Police said he was recording his actions on Facebook.

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Temperatures smash records in US west as brutal heatwave continues

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Records broken in Sacramento and Reno, while California close to ordering rolling blackouts to ease strain on power grid

A brutal heatwave enveloping the US west smashed records on Tuesday, as high temperatures and historic energy use strained California’s grid to the brink of its capacity and spurred fire behavior across the state.

Western states are struggling through one of the hottest and longest September heatwaves on record.

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Nuclear secrets reportedly found at Mar-a-Lago are ‘gamechanger’, experts say – as it happened

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Report appears to confirm security officials’ worst fears about the nature of the material Trump refused to hand back

Former Trump administration defense secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark Esper have joined a group of retired military officers who have written an open letter warning of an “extremely adverse environment” for the military – a thinly-veiled attack on the former president’s efforts to use servicemen and women to advance his political goals.

“Military officers swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not an oath of fealty to an individual or to an office,” the letter, published by the online security analysis website War on the Rocks, states.

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Hateful tweets multiply in extreme temperatures, US analysis finds

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Scientists logged rises of up to 22% in racist and misogynist tweets when temperatures rose above 42C

Hateful tweets multiply dramatically as temperatures become more extreme, an analysis of 4bn geo-located tweets in the US has found.

Scientists logged rises of up to 22% in racist, misogynist and homophobic tweets when temperatures rose above 42C, and increases of up to 12% when the mercury fell below -3C, according to a study by The Lancet Planetary Health.

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Baltimore residents urged to boil tap water after E coli detected

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City officials ‘taking this matter very seriously’ as detection comes amid water access problems in Jackson, Mississippi and New York

E coli has been detected in multiple locations across Baltimore in recent days, city officials have announced.

Residents have been urged to boil tap water for at least a minute after E coli samples were detected in West Baltimore over the weekend. Since then, over 1,500 people in the city of around 600,000 have been affected by the advisory, including multiple schools.

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