Speaking at Comic-Con on Thursday, Trey Parker and Matt Stone revealed they spent days negotiating with producers to show the US president’s genitals
South Park co-creator Trey Parker had the briefest of responses on Thursday to anger from the White House over the latest season premiere, which showed a naked Donald Trump in bed with Satan.
“We’re terribly sorry,” Parker said, followed by a long, deadpan-comic stare.
Continue reading...Wall Street Journal reports ex-president’s letter, while New York Times reports Trump called Epstein ‘the greatest’
Donald Trump apparently isn’t the only president that sent a birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein. “The biggest name in the album” was Bill Clinton, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The ex-president’s letter appeared alongside nearly 50 others, including other prominent celebrities and executives.
Last week, the Journal reported that Trump had authored a “bawdy” letter to Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 after he was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges. The letter was included in an album Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell compiled on the occasion of his 50th birthday in 2003. Trump has sued Rupert Murdoch, two Wall Street Journal newspaper reporters and the newspaper’s publisher Dow Jones for libel and slander over the reporting.
Continue reading...Some slammed the agreement with the Trump administration to reinstate $400m in federal funds while others praised it as an ‘excellent outcome’
Columbia University’s long anticipated deal with the Trump administration after months of negotiations has drawn both condemnation and praise from faculty, students, and alumni – a sign that the end of negotiations will hardly restore harmony on a campus profoundly divided since the beginning of Israel’s war in Gaza.
The deal will reinstate $400m in federal funds the administration cut from the university after it accused it of allowing antisemitism to fester on campus. But it will cost Columbia some $220m in legal settlements, as well as a host of new measures that critics warn significantly restrict the university’s independence and will further repress pro-Palestinian speech.
Continue reading...Show begins 27th season covering Trump’s lawsuit against Paramount and cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s show, depicting Trump in bed with Satan
South Park has kicked off its 27th season with a blistering episode taking aim at Donald Trump and its newly minted parent company, Paramount, just one day after signing a $1.5bn deal with the network.
The premiere episode, “Sermon on the Mount,” sees Trump in bed with series regular Satan and covers topics including Trump’s lawsuit against Paramount, the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, wokeness, Trump’s attacks on Canada and more.
Continue reading...Court records show Pedro Arrupe, a candidate for sainthood, failed to stop Donald Dickerson being ordained. Plus, deadly clashes on Thai-Cambodian border
Good morning.
The former worldwide leader of the Jesuit religious order Pedro Arrupe acknowledged he was warned that one of his aspiring priests had been accused of sexually molesting two children and had admitted making sexual advances on a third, court documents reveal.
What is the claim in the Louisiana case? The lawsuit claims Dickerson raped a 17-year-old student at a Jesuit-run university in New Orleans.
Should we expect further developments? Yes. On Wednesday, the House oversight committee voted 8-2 to subpoena the justice department to release files related to Epstein, and subpoenaed Ghislaine Maxwell for a deposition.
Continue reading...Longstanding relationship between media mogul and US president is being tested amid Trump’s lawsuit over a WSJ story about his ties to Epstein
Rupert Murdoch had made up his mind. “We want to make Trump a nonperson,” he assured one of his former executives in a 2021 email, two days after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
Over seven decades, Murdoch has sought to charm, challenge and change prime ministers and presidents as he built one of the world’s most powerful media empires. In this particular endeavor, however, he failed.
Continue reading...Deal falls short of starkest measures, including consent decree and overhaul of university’s governance structure
Columbia University announced a much-anticipated deal with the Trump administration to pay more than $220m, an agreement meant to bring a resolution to the threat of massive funding cuts to the school, but certain to rankle critics given the extraordinary concessions made by the Ivy League university.
Under the agreement, the school will pay a $200m settlement over three years to the federal government, the university said. It will also pay $21m to settle investigations brought by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Continue reading...If regional utility is found responsible for January blaze, fund would pay claims and lawsuit settlements
Insurance claims from the Eaton wildfire could “fully exhaust” a state fund that was set up to protect customers when a wildfire is caused by a utility company.
The devastating wildfire in Los Angeles killed 17 people and destroyed more than 9,000 structures in January. One leading theory is that ageing equipment belonging to Southern California Edison, the primary electricity provider in the region, ignited the fire.
Continue reading...Crackdown on what the White House claims is bias echoes longstanding conservative grievances against tech
Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a trio of executive orders that he vowed would turn the United States into an “AI export powerhouse”, including a directive targeting what the White House described as “woke” artificial intelligence models.
The anti-woke order is part of the administration’s broader anti-diversity campaign that has also targeted federal agencies, academic institutions and the military. “The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models, and neither do other countries,” Trump said during remarks at an AI summit in Washington on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Owens has claimed that France’s first lady, Brigitte Macron, is a man, and that French president is controlled by CIA
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, and his wife, Brigitte Macron, are suing the rightwing commentator Candace Owens for defamation.
In a suit filed on Wednesday in Delaware against Owens and her businesses, the Macrons say Owens has engaged in ongoing defamatory attacks against them in order to elevate her media platform, gain more audience and make money.
Continue reading...‘Active clubs’ that use martial arts to espouse far-right, fascist ideologies are proliferating in the US and abroad
More than a dozen men wearing black masks and sunglasses – obstructing any open source investigators from easily identifying them – appeared in a Telegram video in front of city hall in London, Canada, in June.
“Mass deportations now,” the men yelled in unison, holding up banners with the same slogan. “No blood for Israel.”
Continue reading...Footage shows people sleeping on floor next to toilets in facility that agency says is not a detention site
Two videos have surfaced shedding light on what is happening behind closed doors at a New York federal building where people are being confined after being seized by officers on their way out of immigration court on the 12th floor, with the footage offering a rare look inside a controversial and closely guarded space that is part of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown.
The filming, shared by the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), captures one of several rooms at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, on the building’s 10th floor, where accounts have emerged of people being detained in wholly unsuitable conditions with few basic provisions, but there had been no public access to direct evidence.
Continue reading...Olympic and Paralympic committee tells federations it has ‘obligation to comply’ with executive order issued by Trump
The US Olympic and Paralympic committee has in effect barred transgender women from competing in women’s sports, telling the federations overseeing swimming, athletics and other sports it has an “obligation to comply” with an executive order issued by Donald Trump.
The new policy, announced on Monday with a quiet change on the USOPC’s website and confirmed in a letter sent to national sport governing bodies, follows a similar step taken by the NCAA earlier this year.
Continue reading...Tokyo’s failure to secure a US deal sooner had caused political unease and economic uncertainty in Japan
Donald Trump has announced a trade deal with Japan, potentially resolving weeks of fraught negotiations between the two allies which had caused economic uncertainty in Tokyo and mounting speculation about the future of the prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba.
“We just completed a massive deal with Japan,” the US president announced in a post online, adding: “Japan will invest, at my direction, $550 billion dollars into the United States.”
Continue reading...Office of ex-US president breaks precedent and warns that allegations of attempted ‘coup’ are ‘attempt at distraction’
Barack Obama has broken his silence on calls from Donald Trump for him to be prosecuted by unequivocally rejecting his successor’s accusations that he tried to engineer a “coup” following Trump’s 2016 election victory by “manufacturing” evidence of Russian interference.
Obama’s office took the unusual step of issuing an emphatic refutation after Trump told reporters that his predecessor had “[tried] to lead a coup” against him and was guilty of “treason” over intelligence assessments suggesting that Russia had intervened to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the campaign.
Continue reading...Justice department retaliates by removing career prosecutor named as Habba’s replacement
Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s defence lawyer during a defamation case brought by the writer E Jean Carroll, has lost her bid to become New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor, with the clock running out on her interim status on Tuesday.
According to an order from New Jersey’s district court, a panel of judges declined to permanently appoint Habba to be the state’s US attorney, signaling a rebuke against the Trump administration.
Continue reading...As Maga supporters revolt over the Epstein scandal, figures like Tucker Carlson are now a gadfly of the White House’s handling of the controversy
As Donald Trump tries to contain an ugly rift with his own supporters about the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking scandal, influential media personalities in the Maga movement face a tricky dilemma.
Should they close ranks with the US president – who has denounced demands for more information on Epstein as a “waste [of] Time and Energy” about “somebody that nobody cares about” – or pick at a political wound that the Trump administration desperately wants to scab over?
Continue reading...Family was hiking when big cat attacked child, who was later airlifted to hospital and is in satisfactory condition
A mountain lion bit a four-year-old child on Sunday while the child hiked with family on Hurricane Ridge in Washington state’s Olympic national park, authorities said.
The child’s father reportedly saved the minor’s life by pulling the child from the creature’s jaws.
Continue reading...The department said in a statement that Ice never arrested or deported Luis Leon to Guatemala, and that the reports were a ‘hoax’
Confusion swirled around the fate of a Chilean resident of the US after the Department of Homeland Security called reports of his deportation to Guatemala a “hoax”.
On 18 July, the Morning Call newspaper of Allentown, Pennsylvania, reported that the family of the man, Luis Leon, said he was handcuffed after showing up at to immigration office on 20 June to report a lost green card. They said he was first sent to a detention facility in Minnesota, then to Guatemala, where they said a Chilean relative informed them he was in a hospital.
Continue reading...Homan vows to escalate Ice operations after off-duty officer allegedly shot by undocumented person in New York City
The Trump administration is targeting sanctuary cities in the next phase of its deportation drive after labelling them “sanctuaries for criminals” following the shooting of an off-duty law enforcement officer in New York City, allegedly by an undocumented person with a criminal record.
Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s hardline border czar, vowed to “flood the zone” with Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents in an all-out bid to overcome the lack of cooperation he said the government faced from Democrat-run municipalities in its quest to arrest and detain undocumented people.
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