Durst died in a California hospital while serving a life sentence for the murder of Susan Berman, after appearing frail at his trial
Robert Durst, the convicted murderer and disgraced multimillionaire real estate heir, has died. He was 78.
Durst died in a California hospital while serving a life sentence for the murder of Susan Berman, his friend and confidante who prosecutors say helped him cover up the killing of his first wife.
Continue reading...Police in Los Angeles pulled a pilot from a plane that had crashed on to rail tracks near Whiteman airport in Pacoima just moments before it was hit by an incoming train.
Video showed the train ramming into the wreckage full force, sending debris flying across a fence and nearly hitting bystanders.
The pilot was treated at hospital for cuts and bruisesl and no one on board the train was injured, local media reported
Continue reading...Carlos Santana, Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young also appear in 26 minutes of home video at event that marked end of hippy dream
Twenty-six minutes of unseen footage of the vast and notoriously violent Altamont music festival held in northern California in 1969 have been unexpectedly uncovered.
The home-movie footage – which is vividly shot on 8mm film, but frustratingly silent – has been published by the Library of Congress on its website.
Continue reading...A baby was rescued from a massive fire in New York where at least 19 people were killed, including nine children, and dozens were injured.
A witness filmed the rescue attempts in the 19-floor apartment block in the Bronx after a fire that officials said started because of a malfunctioning space heater, spread smoke through the building
Continue reading...Jane Campion’s Netflix drama and HBO hit triumph as stars distance themselves from Hollywood Foreign Press Association
The Power of the Dog and Succession were the big winners at an unusual, stripped-back Golden Globes.
Traditionally, the ceremony is a glitzy telecast with A-listers in attendance but after a year of controversies surrounding diversity and amoral practices, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association lost its footing in the industry, with publicity firms, studios and celebrities choosing to distance themselves.
Continue reading...Sohail Ahmadi, who was being raised by a local Kabul taxi driver, will hopefully now travel to the US to live with his parents
An infant boy handed in desperation to a US soldier across an airport wall in the chaos of the American evacuation of Afghanistan has been found and reunited with his relatives.
The baby, Sohail Ahmadi, was just two months old when he went missing on 19 August as thousands of people rushed to leave Afghanistan as it fell to the Taliban.
Continue reading...Saget was found unresponsive in an Orlando hotel room on Sunday
Bob Saget, the actor and comedian most famous for his role in the much-loved 80s sitcom Full House, has died at the age of 65.
The Orange County sheriff’s office confirmed Saget’s death on Twitter on Monday, saying he had been found unresponsive in his hotel room at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, Florida on Sunday. The sheriff’s office confirmed that no cause of death had been determined, saying in a statement there were no signs of foul play or drug use.
Continue reading...The Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has tested positive for Covid-19.
In a statement on Sunday evening, the office of the New York progressive said she was “experiencing symptoms and recovering at home.
Continue reading...Nineteen people have been killed, including nine children, and dozens more injured in an apartment building fire in the Bronx borough of New York City. ‘The numbers are horrific,’ said New York City mayor Eric Adams. ‘This is going to be one of the worst fires that we have witnessed during modern times here in the city of New York’
• The figure in the headline of this article was corrected on 10 January 2022
Nineteen people have been killed, including nine children, and dozens more injured in an apartment building fire in the Bronx borough of New York City. ‘The numbers are horrific,’ said New York City mayor Eric Adams. ‘This is going to be one of the worst fires that we have witnessed during modern times here in the city of New York’
Continue reading...Secretary of state Tony Blinken says coming week of talks is moment of truth for Russian president
The US has told Vladimir Putin to choose between dialogue and confrontation on the eve of a critical week of diplomacy over Ukraine as Russian troops remained massed along its borders.
Senior diplomats and military officers from the US and Russia held a working dinner in Geneva on Sunday evening before Monday’s formal negotiations to discuss Moscow’s demands. Those were set out last month in two draft treaties, one with the US and one with Nato. Much of their content is unacceptable to Washington and the alliance, most importantly a pledge that Ukraine will never be a Nato member.
Continue reading...Nineteen people including nine children were killed in an apartment fire in the Bronx in New York on Sunday, one of the worst fire disasters in the city in 30 years.
Thirteen people remained hospitalised in critical condition, authorities said late on Sunday afternoon. In all, more than five dozen were hurt.
Continue reading...Taskforce including civil rights leaders and attorneys scrutinizes legacy of centuries of injustice
Dawn Basciano’s ancestors arrived five generations ago in Coloma, California, as enslaved people, forced to leave behind an infant son enslaved to another family in Missouri.
Those ancestors, Nancy and Peter Gooch, were freed in 1850 when California joined the union as a free state, and 20 years later, their son and his family were able to join them in the fertile agricultural land north-east of Sacramento. Their journey west was funded by the sweat and hard work of Nancy, who grew and sold fruit, mended clothes and cooked for the local miners.
Continue reading...The US-run enclave has proved hard to dismantle over two decades, a legal anomaly and lead weight wrapped around America’s global reputation
On 4 January 2002, Brig Gen Michael Lehnert received an urgent deployment order. He would take a small force of marines and sailors and build a prison camp in the US-run military enclave on Cuba’s south coast, Guantánamo Bay.
Lehnert had 96 hours to deploy and build the first 100 cells, in time for the first plane-load of captives arriving from the battlefield in Afghanistan on 11 January. The job was done on time: a grid of chain-link cages surrounded by barbed wire and six plywood guard towers manned by snipers. There were five windowless huts for interrogations. It was named Camp X-Ray.
Continue reading...America’s biggest city is seeing another winter spike, but with good vaccines and a new message many residents say this wave feels different
In the spring of 2020, Hart Island, a mile from City Island in the Bronx, was a focal point of grief in New York. It was here, at the city’s public cemetery or potter’s field, the final resting place of more than a million people, that officials ordered trenches dug to accommodate those the coronavirus was expected to kill.
The trenches were never filled. Many bodies were returned to funeral parlors or stored in mobile freezers on Randall’s Island, better known for music festivals and the Frieze art fair than cold storage of corpses.
Continue reading...With the country polarised and Republicans embracing authoritarianism, some experts fear a Northern Ireland-style insurgency but others say armed conflict remains improbable
Joe Biden had spent a year in the hope that America could go back to normal. But last Thursday, the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol, the president finally recognised the full scale of the current threat to American democracy.
“At this moment, we must decide,” Biden said in Statuary Hall, where rioters had swarmed a year earlier. “What kind of nation are we going to be? Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm?”
Continue reading...The Republican senator was widely mocked after being forced to walk back his description of 5 January as a ‘violent terrorist attack’
Ted Cruz used Twitter on Friday to accuse Joe Biden of signaling “weakness and surrender to Putin” over Ukraine – but the Texas senator could not escape a crisis of his own, stoked by widespread accusations of weakness and surrender in the face of the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, over remarks about the deadly Capitol attack.
On Wednesday, a day before the first anniversary of the attack by supporters of Donald Trump attempting to overturn the election, Cruz described “a violent terrorist attack on the Capitol, where we saw the men and women of law enforcement demonstrate incredible courage”.
Continue reading...President strikes different tone in tacit admission that ignoring the most powerful force in the Republican party is risky
In the first moments of his presidency, Joe Biden called on Americans to set aside their deep divisions inflamed by a predecessor he intentionally ignored. He emphasized national unity and appealed to Americans to come together to “end this uncivil war”.
Nearly a year later, as a divided nation reflects on the first anniversary of the 6 January assault on the US Capitol, the uncivil war he sought to extinguish rages on, stronger than ever. In a searing speech on Thursday, Biden struck a different tone.
Continue reading...Best-case scenario: a scaled down plan that saves popular programs and a billionaire tax to pay for it
Democrats were already facing a bleak landscape for this year’s midterm elections, with Joe Biden’s approval rating languishing in the low 40s and his party holding narrow majorities in both the House and the Senate.
Now, with Senator Joe Manchin’s refusal to support the Build Back Better Act, the chances of Republicans regaining control of the House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate as well, appear higher than ever.
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to Hong Kong
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