Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
As expected, the newly released Nato summit communique indicates that leaders view China’s rising power as a security threat.
“China’s stated ambitions and assertive behaviour present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order and to areas relevant to Alliance security. We are concerned by those coercive policies which stand in contrast to the fundamental values enshrined in the Washington Treaty,” the Nato document says.
As Joe Biden prepares for his meeting with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Brussels, Kamala Harris has just arrived in South Carolina for an event to promote coronavirus vaccinations.
Driver arrested after being treated at an area hospital while police haven’t confirmed a motive for the attack
A woman is dead and three others injured after a car was driven into a crowd of anti-police brutality protesters in Minneapolis on Sunday night, Minneapolis police confirmed on Twitter.
The driver was arrested and is in police custody after being treated at an area hospital, according to police. The police have not confirmed a motive for the attack.
The Delta variant of Covid-19, first identified in India, has been detected in 74 countries and continues to spread rapidly amid fears that it is poised to become the dominant strain worldwide.
With outbreaks of the main Delta strain and several of its sub-lineages confirmed in China, the US, Africa, Scandinavia and the Pacific, concern increasingly is focusing on how it appears to be more transmissible as well as causing more serious illness.
Communique will be first time alliance will have asserted it needs to respond to China’s growing power
Nato leaders are expected to agree that China presents a security risk at their annual summit in Brussels, the first time that the traditionally Russia-focused military alliance will have asserted it needs to respond to Beijing’s growing power.
Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, promised ahead of a meeting that will be attended by Joe Biden that China “will feature in the communique in a more robust way than we’ve ever seen before”.
Wildlife manager discovers nearly 20 packages at Florida space force station
The mystery of more than 20 unidentified floating objects that washed up on the beach at Florida’s Cape Canaveral space force station was solved when the contents turned out to be more than 60lb of cocaine, apparently lost from a passing trafficker’s boat.
The discovery was made by a wildlife manager who was surveying turtle nests and spotted one of the square packages, bound tightly in plastic wrapping, lying on the sand.
Speaking at G7, president addresses autocracy and democracy, climate crisis and Donald Trump’s legacy
Joe Biden agreed on Sunday with Vladimir Putin’s latest assessment that US-Russia relations are at their lowest point in years but insisted that while the two countries may have fundamental disagreements, “we are not looking for conflict”.
The US president also addressed the issues of autocracy versus democracy, the climate crisis, future pandemics and problems caused by his predecessor Donald Trump, while holding a press conference to mark the end of the G7 summit in the English county of Cornwall.
Health experts emphasize need for even those who have had disease to get inoculated
New cases of Covid-19 are declining across most of the US, even in some states with vaccine-hesitant populations.
But almost all states where cases are rising have lower-than-average vaccination rates and experts warned on Sunday that relief from the coronavirus pandemic could be fleeting in regions where few people get inoculated.
House speaker says reported seizure of Democrats’ private phone data undermined ‘rule of law’
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said on Sunday it was “beyond belief” that the three top justice department officials of Donald Trump’s administration had been unaware of secret subpoenas seeking private data from the former president’s political opponents.
Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first pick as attorney general, his successor, William Barr, and the long-serving deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein have all claimed to have no knowledge of the alleged attempts by their department to harvest information covertly from leading Democrats during the investigation into whether Donald Trump and his campaign utilized links with Russia during the 2016 election, according to CNN.
US president gives insight into his discussions with monarch in short visit after G7 summit in Cornwall
Joe Biden revealed the Queen had asked him about his Russian and Chinese counterparts, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, during their 45-minute talk over tea at Windsor Castle, in the aftermath of the G7 summit on Sunday.
It was an exceptionally rare, if limited, insight into political discussions involving the British monarch: the contents of her regular weekly audiences with the British prime minister of the day are kept confidential.
The US president Joe Biden said: ‘America is back at the table’ as the G7 summit came to a close. Speaking in Newquay, southwestern England, after the three-day summit, Biden said democracies faced a threat from autocratic governments.
He said the US was in a ‘contest with autocrats’ and that he wanted a democratic alternative to China’s belt and road initiative
Engineers are working on a plan to quiet the ‘unbearable’ sound, which occurs when strong winds hit the bridge
Somewhere in a wind tunnel on the south-western side of Ontario, a group of the world’s leading bridge aerodynamics and acoustics experts are puzzling over a full-scale model of the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The experts have been contracted to solve the mysterious problem of a strange humming sound that has been emanating from San Francisco’s famous bridge for the past year, driving some nearby residents to a state of madness.
But for many, the man standing beside her, Alejandro Giammattei, embodies the challenge in a region where past and current presidents have been accused of misdeeds ranging from embezzlement and bribery to authoritarianism and drug trafficking.
The former strategic analyst says the culture of official secrecy is worse today but urges whistleblowers: ‘Don’t wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying’
When the police arrived, a 13-year-old boy was photocopying classified documents. His 10-year-old sister was cutting the words “top secret” off each page. It seemed their dad, Daniel Ellsberg, had been caught red-handed.
But the officers were responding to a false alarm and did not check what Ellsberg and his young accomplices were up to. “It was a very nice family scene,” the 90-year-old recalls via Zoom from his home in Kensington, California. “It didn’t worry them.”
Labor’s Penny Wong says it’s disappointing the Australian prime minister did not secure a private meeting with the US president
Scott Morrison has met with Joe Biden on the sidelines of the G7 summit and agreed to work closely on challenges in the increasingly contested Indo-Pacific region including China.
Regional issues dominated the Australian prime minister’s first face-to-face meeting with the US president late on Saturday – but the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, also attended in what became a trilateral engagement.
Incident occurred in early hours in entertainment district
Two victims in critical condition as one more suspect sought
Police in Austin, Texas, say they have arrested one man and are searching for another in connection with a shooting early on Saturday that injured 14 people in the city’s downtown entertainment district.
The Austin police department said in a news release that the US Marshals Lone Star fugitive task force assisted in making the arrest, but it provided no other details other than to say it is continuing to follow up on leads for the suspect still at large.
Storage tank maker knew of defect before California incident
Case likely to increase calls for regulation of $37bn industry
Five patients of a California fertility center have been awarded a total of $15m after a freezing tank failed, rendering some of more than 3,500 frozen human embryos and eggs unviable.
While the extent of the damage from the accidental thaw is unclear, jurors awarded the sum to clients of the Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco after finding that the storage tank maker, Chart Industries, knew about a defect that prevented accurate temperature monitoring and had not warned the center about the problem.
Michael Packard, 56, was spat out after half a minute but expert says experience would have been ‘totally freaky’ for the whale
A New England lobsterman has described the moment he realised he was trapped in the mouth of a humpback whale off the coast of Cape Cod.
“Oh my God, I’m in a whale’s mouth and he’s trying to swallow me. I thought to myself, ‘hey, this is it. I’m finally going to die. There’s no getting out of here,’’’ Michael Packard told a local news station in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Biden will speak to press alone after Geneva meeting
Trump caused outcry by accepting Putin denials at Helsinki
Joe Biden will give a solo news conference after his meeting next week with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, the White House has said.
Putin and Biden will meet in Geneva on Wednesday. The White House has said Biden will bring up ransomware attacks emanating from Russia, Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine, the jailing of dissidents and other issues that have irritated the relationship.
The Cape Cod fisherman estimates he was in the beast’s mouth for 30 seconds; experts say the encounter was a fluke
A commercial lobster diver who got caught in the mouth of a humpback whale off the coast of Cape Cod on Friday morning said he thought he was going to die.
Michael Packard, 56, of Wellfleet, told WBZ-TV after he was released from Cape Cod hospital that he was about 45ft (14 meters) deep in the waters off Provincetown when “all of a sudden I felt this huge bump, and everything went dark”.
The Duchess of Cambridge and US first lady Jill Biden have written a joint article on the importance of early childhood, following their visit to a primary school in Cornwall, where the G7 is taking place.
The two women met for the first time on Friday at Connor Downs Academy in Hayle, where they took part in a round-table discussion with experts on the importance of the early years of childhood for future outcomes.
In the article, published by CNN, they say there must be a fundamental shift in how the UK and US approach the earliest years of life. “If we care about how children perform at school, how they succeed in their careers when they are older, and about their lifelong mental and physical health, then we have to care about how we are nurturing their brains, their experiences and relationships in the early years before school,” they write.
The European Union has been urged to back down in a dispute with the UK over Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit trading arrangements.
Boris Johnson was holding talks with the EU’s key players on Saturday as the dispute threatened to overshadow his hosting of the G7 summit.
The prime minister was meeting European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, European Council head Charles Michel, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the margins of the gathering in Cornwall.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab urged the EU to take a more “pragmatic” approach to the Northern Ireland issue. The main summit agenda will see the leaders of the UK, the US, Canada, Japan, France, Germany and Italy commit to a new plan aimed at preventing a repeat of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Johnson also faces a potentially tricky series of meetings with the EU’s senior representatives. Downing Street has indicated the UK would be prepared to unilaterally delay the full implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol to prevent a ban on chilled meats crossing the Irish Sea from Great Britain.