Category Archives: US News

Maryland doctors transplant pig’s heart into human patient in medical first

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Patient is doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery, doctors say, though it’s too soon to know if it is a success

In a medical first, doctors in Maryland have transplanted a modified pig’s heart into a human patient in a last-ditch effort to save his life.

Doctors at the University of Maryland medical center said Monday that the patient was doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery, though it is too soon to know if the operation has been a success.

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US CDC warns against travel to Canada amid rising Covid numbers

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Agency elevates recommendation to ‘level four: very high’ and says Americans should avoid travel to northern neighbour

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has warned against travel to Canada as Covid-19 cases surge across the country and rampant infections threaten to once again overwhelm fragile healthcare systems.

The CDC on Monday elevated its travel recommendation to “level four: very high” for Canada, telling Americans they should avoid travel to its northern neighbour. The CDC currently lists about 80 destinations worldwide at level four.

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New York man charged with threatening to kill Donald Trump

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Thomas Welnicki expressed interest in killing then president in interview with Capitol police in July 2020, complaint says

A New York man upset with what he perceived as Donald Trump’s threat to democracy was criminally charged on Monday with threatening to kill the former president, who he once referred to as Hitler.

According to an unsealed complaint, Thomas Welnicki, 72, from Rockaway Beach, expressed interest in killing the then president in an interview with US Capitol police in July 2020 and in several calls to the Secret Service the following year.

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US-Russia talks over Ukraine ‘useful’ but no progress made

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Diplomats stress they have not made progress towards resolving fundamental disagreements

US and Russian diplomats have emerged from a day of negotiations in Geneva over the fate of Ukraine, describing the talks as “useful” and “very professional” – but also stressing they had not made progress towards resolving fundamental disagreements.

The two sides largely spent the eight hours of talks presenting their points of view on the situation in Ukraine, currently hemmed in by some 100,000 Russian troops, and on European security in general, and deferred further debate on them to a meeting in Brussels on Wednesday between Russia and all Nato members.

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Robert Durst, convicted murderer and disgraced real estate heir, dies at 78

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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.

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Train smashes into crashed plane seconds after pilot is rescued – video

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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

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Lost footage of Rolling Stones at notorious Altamont festival uncovered

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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.

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Bronx fire: baby rescued from burning New York building – video

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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

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Golden Globes: The Power of the Dog and Succession win at celebrity-free ceremony

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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.

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Joy as baby given to US soldier during Afghan withdrawal is reunited with relatives

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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.

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Bob Saget, Full House actor and comedian, dies aged 65

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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.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announces positive Covid test

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  • Progressive congresswoman ‘experiencing symptoms’
  • Office says political star had booster vaccine shot last year

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.

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‘The numbers are horrific’: New York City apartment building fire kills 19 – video

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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

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‘The numbers are horrific’: New York City apartment building fire kills dozens – video

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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’

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US tells Putin to choose confrontation or dialogue over Ukraine

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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.

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Fire in Bronx building leaves 19 people dead, including nine children

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  • More than five dozen people injured and 13 in critical condition
  • City fire commissioner says space heater caused the blaze

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.

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‘If not us, then who?’: inside the landmark push for reparations for Black Californians

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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.

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‘It’s a huge political albatross’: Guantánamo Bay, 20 years on

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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.

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Omicron drives Covid surge but New York a long way from pandemic’s early days

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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.

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Is the US really heading for a second civil war?

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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?”

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