Monkeypox cases appear to be declining in some large US cities

Experts say the trend in New York, Chicago and San Francisco appears to be linked to immunity and behavior changes

Monkeypox cases in some large US cities appear to be declining, matching trends seen in Europe, and experts are cautiously optimistic the outbreak may have peaked in places hit hardest by the virus.

The optimism comes just as US officials on Friday said there’s enough of a supply of monkeypox vaccine available now – though the shots aren’t getting to some of the people who need the protection the most.

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Trump search affidavit reveals potential for ‘evidence of obstruction’ at Mar-a-Lago – live

Heavily redacted document also says several documents contained what appears to be Trump’s handwritten notes

Three new sealed filings have appeared online in the federal court system related to the Mar-a-Lago case, Politico reports:

Since they are not public, it’s unclear what they are, but a federal magistrate judge gave the justice department until noon eastern time today to make the redacted affidavit justifying the search public.

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Dow plunges 1,000 points after Fed chief Powell warns of inflation ‘pain’

US stock markets nosedive as Jerome Powell says at top bank summit the ‘overarching focus is to bring inflation back down’

US stock markets nosedived on Friday after Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, warned of “pain” ahead as the central bank struggles to bring down inflation from a 40-year high.

Powell’s highly anticipated speech was more hawkish than had been expected, with the Fed chair pledging to do all he could to end rising prices. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost just over 1,000 points, 3%, the S&P fell 3.3% and the Nasdaq dropped almost 4%.

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Florida governor suspends school board quartet over Parkland shooting report

Ron DeSantis acts on recommendation in report from grand jury investigating 2018 shooting in which 17 people were killed

The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, on Friday suspended four members of the Broward county school board, acting on a recommendation in a report from a grand jury investigating the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting in which 17 people were killed.

In a statement accompanying his executive order, DeSantis said: “It is my duty to suspend people from office when there is clear evidence of incompetence, neglect of duty, misfeasance or malfeasance.”

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Washington state to ban sales of new gas cars by 2035, following California

Public will have chance to weigh in on details of plan, with transportation accounting for 40% of state greenhouse gas emissions

Washington state will follow California and prohibit the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035, Jay Inslee, the state governor, said.

California regulators on Thursday moved forward with a landmark plan to phase out the sale of gas cars over the next 13 years in the US’s largest auto market.

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Moderna sues Pfizer and BioNTech over coronavirus vaccine

Company is suing pharmaceutical rival and its German partner for patent infringement

Moderna is suing its US pharmaceutical rival Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech for patent infringement in the development of the first Covid-19 vaccine approved in the United States, alleging they copied technology that Moderna developed years before the pandemic.

The lawsuit, which seeks undetermined monetary damages, was being filed in US district court in Massachusetts and the regional court of Düsseldorf in Germany, Moderna said in a news release on Friday.

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Louisiana woman denied abortion despite fetus’s fatal abnormality to travel to North Carolina

Hospital feared loss of license as state law did not explicitly allow the procedure for this rare condition

An expectant Louisiana woman who is carrying a skull-less fetus that would die almost immediately after birth has cemented plans to travel to North Carolina to terminate her pregnancy, she said on Friday.

Nancy Davis, 36, has been facing a choice of either carrying the fetus to term or traveling several states away for an abortion after she says her local medical provider would not perform the procedure amid confusion over whether the state’s abortion ban outlawed it.

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US ship unable to get Solomon Islands’ permission to dock, says Washington

Honiara did not respond to request for coast guard vessel to refuel amid tensions over security pact with China

A United States coast guard vessel was unable to enter Solomon Islands for a routine port call because its government did not respond to a request to refuel and provision, a US official said.

The Solomons government did not immediately answer a Reuters request for comment. It has had a tense relationship with the US and its allies since striking a security pact with China in May.

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Judge orders Twitter to turn over to Elon Musk data from 2021 users audit

The company had said the information did not exist, but it sampled 9,000 users in order to estimate the number of spam accounts

Elon Musk may get access to Twitter data used in a 2021 audit of active users but other information the billionaire seeks in a bid to end his $44bn deal to buy the company were rejected as “absurdly broad”, a judge said on Thursday.

Twitter must turn over data from the 9,000 accounts sampled in the fourth quarter as part of its process to estimate the number of spam accounts.

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Federal judge orders release of redacted Trump search affidavit

Affidavit is expected to contain information about investigation into Trump’s retention of government secrets at Mar-a-Lago

A federal judge ordered on Thursday that the affidavit justifying the search warrant used to seize sensitive government documents from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida earlier this month should be partly unsealed according to redactions proposed by the justice department.

The order from Judge Bruce Reinhart, who approved the FBI search warrant and is overseeing the case, instructed the justice department to release a redacted version of the affidavit that he had reviewed before noon on Friday.

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US judge orders Trump Mar-a-Lago affidavit to be unsealed with redactions – as it happened

Bruce Reinhart gives US government until noon ET Friday to make the redacted document public

As midterm election campaigns hit the home stretch over the next two months, voters may start seeing a familiar Democratic face: Barack Obama.

Axios reports that the former president is scheduled to appear at two upcoming fundraisers for the party, one of which is focused on Democrats’ campaign to maintain their majority in the Senate, which they seem slightly favored to do.

The submission by the Justice Department is a significant legal milepost in an investigation that has swiftly emerged as a major threat to Mr. Trump, whose lawyers have offered a confused and at times stumbling response. But it is also an inflection point for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who is trying to balance protecting the prosecutorial process by keeping secret details of the investigation, and providing enough information to defend his decision to request a search unlike any other in history.

“There are clearly opposed poles here,” said Daniel C. Richman, a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at Columbia University, who said it might be difficult, even impossible, for Mr. Garland to strike the right balance.

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Duo plead guilty to plot to sell Biden daughter’s stolen diary to Project Veritas

Aimee Harris stole items from Ashley Biden’s room and conspired Robert Kurlander to sell them to activist group, prosecutors say

Two people have pleaded guilty in a scheme to peddle a diary and other items belonging to Joe Biden’s daughter to the conservative group Project Veritas for $40,000, prosecutors said Thursday.

The two, both from Florida, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property, Manhattan US attorney Damian Williams’s office said.

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Arkansas cannot enforce ban on gender-affirming care for trans kids, court rules

Federal appeals court affirms ruling stopping state enforcing 2021 law before trial on possible permanent block in October

A federal appeals court on Thursday said Arkansas cannot enforce its ban on transgender children receiving gender-affirming medical care.

A three-judge panel of the eighth US circuit court of appeals affirmed a ruling temporarily stopping the state enforcing the 2021 law. A trial is scheduled in October before the same judge on whether to permanently block the law.

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How an Indigenous Australian artist ‘astonished’ a giant of American art

Sol LeWitt never met Emily Kame Kngwarreye, who began painting in her 80s, but he was blown away by her work. A new AGNSW show celebrates their unlikely link

He was one of the 20th century’s pioneers of modern American art; she was the Anmatyerre artist who put Australian desert painting on the world stage.

Sol LeWitt and Emily Kame Kngwarreye never met, yet one had a profound effect on the work of the other, and led to one of the largest collections of Utopia art outside Australia. LeWitt became a huge fan of Kngwarreye, and of the distinct style produced by the Indigenous Australian artists working in Utopia, Northern Territory.

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California bans sales of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035 in milestone step

Move to electric vehicles hailed as ‘monumental’ but challenges in consumer affordability and charging infrastructure lie ahead

California has approved a ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035 as the state takes dramatic steps to reduce emissions and combat the climate emergency.

In a vote on Thursday, state regulators moved forward with a plan to phase out the sale of gas cars over the next 13 years in America’s largest auto market.

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‘Secret’ screenings of cancelled Batgirl movie being held by studio – reports

It remains unlikely the public will ever see the scrapped $90m film, with the directors saying ‘it cannot be released in its current state’

Warner Bros Discovery are reportedly holding a series of discreet “funeral screenings” for their never-to-be released DC film Batgirl, starring Leslie Grace, Michael Keaton and Brendan Fraser.

The Hollywood Reporter confirmed with multiple sources that a select few who worked on the film, including cast, crew and studio executives, would be attending the screenings this week on the Warner Bros lot in California. One source described them as “funeral screenings”, as it is likely the footage will be stored forever and never shown to the public.

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Uvalde police chief fired for fumbled response to worst school shooting in US history

Pete Arredondo defended the police response to the massacre in a 17-page letter that also lashed out at state officials

The Uvalde school district fired police chief Pete Arrendondo on Wednesday, making him the first officer to lose his job over the hesitant and fumbled response by law enforcement at a Texas elementary school as a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers in a fourth-grade classroom.

In a unanimous vote held after months of angry calls for his ouster, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s board of trustees fired Arredondo in an auditorium of parents and survivors of the 24 May massacre. His firing came three months to the day after one of the deadliest classroom shootings in US history.

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Law firm sues Ghislaine Maxwell, saying it’s owed $878,000 for defense

Haddon, Morgan and Foreman say Maxwell put brother in charge of paying legal fees but he only covered a fraction

A law firm that helped defend Ghislaine Maxwell, the socialite convicted of helping the financier Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse underage girls, is suing her, her brother and her husband, saying it was never paid for more than $878,000 for its work.

Denver-based Haddon, Morgan and Foreman alleged in a lawsuit filed on Monday that Maxwell put her brother Kevin Maxwell in charge of paying her legal fees after she was arrested in 2020 but that he only paid a fraction of what they had charged leading up to and during her trial. Kevin Maxwell urged the firm to keep working on appeal issues after she was convicted despite the unpaid bills and had blamed Maxwell’s husband, Scott Borgerson, for getting in the way of making payments, according to the lawsuit filed in Denver.

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US says clashes with Iran-backed militias won’t affect Tehran nuclear talks

Nuclear negotiations under way, as US-led mission against the Islamic State exchanges fire with armed groups in Syria and Iraq

US-led forces and Iran-backed militias exchanged fire for the second day in a row, but the Biden administration said the fighting would not affect nuclear negotiations with Tehran.

US Central Command said the two bases, Conoco and Green Village, used for the US-led mission against the Islamic State (IS) had come under rocket attack on Wednesday evening, but there were no serious injuries. The US struck back with attack helicopters, killing “two or three suspected Iran-backed militants conducting one of the attacks” and destroying vehicles.

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Trump officials tried to ‘bully’ FDA over Covid treatments, House panel says

Congressional investigation finds new evidence of efforts to override health decisions early in pandemic

Officials in the Trump White House tried to pressure health experts to reauthorize a discredited Covid treatment, according to a congressional investigation.

A report published on Wednesday by the Democratic-led House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis contained new evidence of efforts to override Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decisions early in the pandemic.

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