Category Archives: US News

Workers at US abortion rights groups seek unions to prepare for post-Roe care

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Clinic employees say more staffing and resources will be needed to manage an expected influx of out-of-state patients

As reproductive rights groups brace for an anticipated US supreme court decision to overturn Roe v Wade and strike down federal abortion rights in America, workers at these groups are organizing to unionize ahead of the expected legal changes.

About 400 workers at 28 clinics in five states in the midwest – Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota, announced in late May 2022 their intent to unionize with SEIU Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa. They have filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board after a majority of workers signed authorization cards and their request for voluntary recognition was turned down by management.

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TikTok moves to ease fears amid report workers in China accessed US users’ data

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The company has said that Oracle will store all private information and is limiting the number of employees with those privileges

TikTok has said that Oracle will store all the data from its US users, in a bid to allay fears about its safety in the hands of a platform owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

The move comes as a report from BuzzFeed news, citing leaked audio from TikTok in-house meetings, said ByteDance employees in China have repeatedly accessed private information about US TikTok users.

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US must re-examine risks of glyphosate, key Roundup weed-killer ingredient

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Appeals says EPA did not adequately consider whether glyphosate causes cancer and threatens endangered species

The US Environmental Protection Agency has been ordered to take a fresh look at whether glyphosate, the active ingredient in Bayer’s Roundup weed killer, poses unreasonable risks to humans and the environment.

In a 3-0 decision on Friday, the ninth US circuit court of appeals agreed with several environmental, farmworker and food-safety advocacy groups that the EPA did not adequately consider whether glyphosate causes cancer and threatens endangered species.

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‘It gives us great hope’: mom of missing US serviceman says video is authentic

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A video of Alexander Drueke expressing his love for his mother has not yet been validated by the state department

The mother of an American military veteran who volunteered to defend Ukraine from Russian invaders and was reportedly captured recently said a video of him expressing his love for her gave her “great hope”.

Lois Drueke told the Guardian on Friday that she believes the video of her son Alexander Drueke – distributed by Russian state media – is authentic because of a phrase he uttered in the clip with his distinctively deep voice.

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‘A one-sided witch-hunt’: angry Trump lashes out at January 6 hearings

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Former president attacks ‘disgraceful performance of the unselect committee’ and denies he bullied Mike Pence to overturn election

Donald Trump has launched an angry verbal attack on the congressional January 6 hearings, dismissing them as a “rigged deal” and “one-sided witch-hunt” that are “getting terrible ratings”.

In his first public appearance since the televised sessions began, Trump on Friday claimed without evidence that the House of Representatives panel has made its case using doctored videos and deceptively edited witness depositions.

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California Taiwanese church shooting suspect charged with hate crime for May attack

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David Wenwei Chou, 68, is accused of opening fire on a gathering at the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian church and killing one person

Authorities in California have added hate crime allegations to attempted murder charges filed against a 68-year-old who opened fire at a Taiwanese American church luncheon last month, killing one person and wounding five.

The gunman, David Wenwei Chou, is accused of attacking a gathering of members of the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian church in Laguna Woods in May. A 52-year-old doctor who took his mother to the event was killed.

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Ex-Trump adviser Peter Navarro pleads not guilty to contempt charges in January 6 case – as it happened

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President Joe Biden has cheered the Food and Drug Administration’s decision today to authorize Covid-19 vaccines for children younger than five years old, the last group of Americans that didn’t have access to the jabs.

“Today is a day of huge relief for parents and families across America. Following a rigorous scientific review, the Food and Drug Administration has authorized the first COVID-19 vaccines for kids under the age of five. As early as next week, pending recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), parents will finally be able to get their youngest kids the protection of a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine,” Biden said in a statement released by the White House.

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Monkey shot dead as Mexican cartels’ passion for exotic pets leaves bloody toll

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Spider monkey dressed up as gang mascot killed in shootout, and man dies in Michoacán after trying to pet captive tiger

Mexican narcos’ fascination with exotic animals has been on display this week after a spider monkey dressed up as a drug gang mascot was killed in a shootout, a 200kg tiger wandered the streets in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, and a man died after trying to pet a captive tiger in a cartel-dominated area of western Michoacán state.

Eleven suspected gang members died in the shootout on Tuesday in the state of Mexico, which surrounds the capital. Photos from the scene showed a small monkey dressed in a tiny camouflage jacket and a tiny “bulletproof” vest sprawled across the body of a dead gunman.

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‘Frankly quite stupid’: rights groups condemn Biden’s Saudi Arabia visit

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Critics question value of US president’s visit, raising fears it will endanger dissidents and legitimise regime’s human rights stance

Rights advocates fear Joe Biden’s decision to visit Saudi Arabia will endanger dissidents abroad and be seen by the authorities there as giving the green light to restrict civil liberties domestically.

Abdullah Alaoudh, of the thinktank Democracy for the Arab World Now and son of jailed cleric Salman al-Odah, said: “Right before inauguration, he [Biden] said he will be sure to protect Saudi dissidents – those were his words. We’re not protected by someone shaking hands with the same person who is threatening us every day and taking our families hostage due to our activism here in the US.”

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China launches third aircraft carrier in military advance

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Fujian unveiled amid heightened tensions with US over self-ruled Taiwan

China has launched its third aircraft carrier, the first designed and built entirely in the country, marking a significant military advance for the Asian superpower.

The announcement comes as tensions between China and the US have ramped up in recent weeks over Beijing’s sabre-rattling towards self-ruled Taiwan, which it views as a breakaway province to be seized by force if necessary.

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‘System nearly failed’: US democracy was left hanging by the thread of Pence’s defiance

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If the vice-president had acquiesced to Trump’s demand, the country could have plunged into an unprecedented crisis

The January 6 select committee showed on Thursday that Mike Pence withstood an intense pressure campaign from Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Trump’s advisers repeatedly tried to convince Pence to disrupt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory on January 6, even after they themselves acknowledged that there was no constitutional basis for the vice-president to do so.

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Capitol attack prosecutors press January 6 committee for transcripts

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Attorneys general say material is needed for criminal cases but congressional inquiry says it must be left to do its work

Tensions between the US justice department and the House of Representatives January 6 select committee have escalated after federal prosecutors complained that their inability to access witness transcripts was hampering criminal investigations into rioters who stormed the Capitol.

The complaint that came from the heads of the justice department’s national security and criminal divisions and the US attorney for Washington Matthew Graves showed a likely collision course for the parallel congressional and criminal probes into the Capitol attack.

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Pence the ‘hero’ who foiled Trump’s plot – could it lead to a 2024 run?

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The former VP rejected the plot to overturn the election – the death knell for Trump and Pence’s marriage of convenience

Mike Pence was described as the hero of the hour, the man who stood his ground to Donald Trump’s coup plot and saved America from a violent “revolution”.

Yet among the rows of committee members, witnesses, reporters, congressmen and women and young citizens at Thursday’s January 6 hearing into the attack on the Capitol, the former vice-president was nowhere to be seen. Pence was 500 miles away in Ohio to promote “American energy dominance”.

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Jay-Z’s bitcoin school met with skepticism in his former housing project: ‘I don’t have money to be losing’

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The hip-hop mogul loves to rap about his roots in Brooklyn’s Marcy housing projects. But classes in cryptocurrency show the billionaire is out of touch, residents say

Marcy Houses, the 28-acre public housing development in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, is best-known as a pillar of rapper-turned-mogul Jay-Z’s New York persona. Built in 1949 as part of a push by the New York City Housing Authority to house the city’s low-income residents, Marcy had fallen into a state of dangerous disrepair by the 1970s when Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, was growing up there.

“Where I’m from, Marcy son, ain’t nothing nice,” he raps in “Where I’m From”. “Marcy me, just the way I am always gonna be,” he declares in 2017’s Marcy Me.

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Shooting at an Alabama church leaves two dead and one in hospital

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Police confirmed a suspect had been taken into custody after the attack at St Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Birmingham

A shooting at a church in a suburb of one of Alabama’s major cities left two people dead and two others wounded on Thursday, police said, adding a suspect was quickly taken into custody.

The shooting erupted inside St Stephen’s Episcopal church in the Birmingham suburb of Vestavia Hills.

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US agency aware of photograph showing two Americans captured by Russians

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The state department told a relative of one of the men they were working to verify the image which was circulated on social media

The US state department is aware of a photograph appearing to show two missing Americans volunteering to defend Ukraine from Russian invaders in the back of a military truck with their hands tied behind them, seeming to offer evidence that they have been captured, a relative of one of the men said Thursday.

At least one copy of the photograph in question depicting Alexander Drueke and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh was circulating on the social media platform Telegram, which is popular in Russia and Ukraine. An accompanying caption in Russian appeared to mock both men, saying something to the effect of a trip to Ukraine “for easy money” had ended badly, according to an approximate translation provided by Google.

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Biden Saudi visit is ‘presidential pardon for murder’, says ex-spy chief’s son

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President ‘made it clear that there won’t be any direct consequences’ for Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, says Khalid Aljabri

Joe Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia and meeting with its de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is “the equivalent of a presidential pardon for murder”, according to Khalid Aljabri, the son of the exiled former senior Saudi intelligence officer Saad Aljabri.

The US president once vowed to make Saudi Arabia “a pariah” after the death of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist whose 2018 murder was ordered, according to US intelligence. But this week the White House announced that Biden will meet the crown prince in Jeddah at the end of a four-day trip in July – a development described by Saudi human rights activists as a “betrayal”.

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Proud Boys developed plans to take over government buildings in Washington DC

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Document reveals plans for entering buildings and blocking traffic to prevent law enforcement access

A document revealed in court on Wednesday has exposed a detailed plan by the Proud Boys to occupy government buildings in Washington DC, including the supreme court.

The document, titled “1776 Returns”, laid out the plans for which buildings to target, the number of members required for each building, and tactics, including instructions to use the pandemic as an excuse for wearing masks and face shields without raising suspicion.

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Revlon files for bankruptcy in US after supply chain trouble and surging costs

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Cosmetics company hopes to refinance and keep trading, saying demand for products remains strong

Revlon, the 90-year-old multinational beauty company, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US, weighed down by debt load, disruptions to its supply chain network and surging costs.

The New York-based company said that on court approval, it expects to receive $575m (£469m) in financing from its existing lenders, which will allow it to keep its day-to-day operations running.

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Retired judge to testify on Trump’s ‘well-developed plan’ to overturn election at any cost – live

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The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell explain why the January 6 committee has opted to make today’s hearing about the actions of Mike Pence, who played a major role in torpedoing Trump’s plan to stop Biden from taking office:

The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack intends to outline at its third hearing on Thursday how Donald Trump corruptly pressured then vice-president Mike Pence to reject the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election and directly contributed to the insurrection.

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