US Politics

Fox and the voting equipment company Dominion reached a $787.5m settlement in a closely watched defamation lawsuit, ending a dispute over whether the network and its parent company knowingly broadcast false and outlandish allegations that Dominion was involved in a plot to steal the 2020 election.The settlement came before scheduled opening statements and after an unexpected lengthy delay Tuesday afternoon just after the jury was sworn in. Neither party immediately disclosed the terms of the settlement other than the dollar amount, and attorneys for Dominion declined to answer questions about whether it requires Fox to issue a retraction or a formal apology.“The parties have resolved their case,” judge Eric Davis told jurors on Tuesday afternoon before excusing them from the courtroom.In a press conference outside the courthouse, Dominion attorney Justin Nelson said the more than $787m represented “vindication and accountability”. The settlement amount is less than half of the $1.6bn Dominion demanded in its lawsuit.“Truth matters,” he said. “Lies have consequences. The truth does not know red or blue,” he continued. “People across the political spectrum can and should disagree on issues, even of the most profound importance. But for our democracy to endure another 250 years and hopefully much longer, we must share a commitment to facts.”In a statement, Fox said the settlement reflects its “continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards”.“We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues,” the statement said.Opening statements were scheduled to start on Tuesday after a lunch break, but the judge and jurors did not return to the room until close to 4pm. During the more than two-hour delay, attorneys huddled and left the courtroom to convene in adjacent meeting rooms.After returning to the courtroom, Davis thanked the jurors for their service, and called the efforts by the lawyers on both sides “the best lawyering I’ve had, ever” in his career on the bench since 2010.The anticipated six-week jury trial was originally set to begin on Monday, but Davis, the judge overseeing the case, postponed the start of trial by a day as the sides worked to reach a settlement agreement.The trial in Wilmington, Delaware, was set to be a blockbuster media trial. Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old chief executive of Fox, was called to testify in the case, along with top Fox talent including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo.The lawsuit was seen as one of the most aggressive efforts to hold Fox, or any actor, accountable for spreading the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. It was a lie that led to threats against election officials across the country, and ultimately helped fuel the violent attack on the US Capitol on 6 January. Nine deaths have been linked to the event.Though the case was settled, Dominion had unearthed a stunning trove of internal communications from Fox laying bare how top talent and hosts knew the outlandish claims about Dominion and a stolen election were false. The extensive messages offered a remarkable insight into how some of the most powerful hosts in America did not buy the allegations they were broadcasting to their audience each night.Dominion, a relatively obscure company until the 2020 election, sought $1.6bn in damages in the case. It challenged repeated claims made on Fox’s air after the general election that Dominion switched votes, paid government kickbacks, and was founded in Venezuela to rig elections for Hugo Chávez.In the press conference Tuesday, Dominion CEO John Poulos called the settlement historic because of Fox’s admission that it was telling ties.“Throughout this process, we have sought accountability,” he said. “We believe the evidence brought to light through this case underscores the consequences of spreading lies. Truthful reporting in the media is essential to our democracy.”Even before trial, Davis had already concluded that Fox’s claims about Dominion were false. “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” he wrote in a ruling earlier this month.The question that would have been before the jury was whether Fox committed “actual malice” in airing the claims. That required Dominion to show whether key decision makers were aware the claims were false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth.Fox still faces several legal battles related to its decision to broadcast false claims. Smartmatic, another voting equipment company, is suing the company for $2.7bn. Abby Grossberg, a former Fox employee who worked for Bartiromo and Carlson, is also suing the company, alleging she was coerced into giving misleading testimony.The network also faces a separate lawsuit from a shareholder who is seeking damages and argues that executives breached their fiduciary duty to the company by causing false claims about the election to be broadcast.During the press conference, Stephen Shackelford, an attorney who was set to give opening arguments for Dominion on Tuesday, said that the company will continue seeking accountability.“Money is accountability,” he said. “We got that today from Fox. But we’re not done yet. We’ve got some other people who have some accountability coming for them.” More

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In a pre-dawn session on Tuesday, the Iowa state senate voted to allow children to work longer hours and serve alcohol, the latest move by Republican-controlled statehouses to combat a labor shortage by loosening child labor laws.The Iowa bill would expand the number of hours that children under 16 can work from four to six a day, allow minors to work in previously prohibited industries if they are part of a training program, and allow 16- and 17-year–olds to serve alcohol with a parent’s permission.It passed the state senate by a vote of 32-17, two Republicans joining every Democrat in opposition. The vote took place just before 5am, after protests and delay tactics by Democrats.“We do know slavery existed in the past but one place it doesn’t exist, that’s in this bill,” said Adrian Dickey, the Republican responsible for shepherding the bill to passage, according to the Iowa Capital Dispatch.“It simply is providing our youth an opportunity to earn and learn, at the same timeframe as his classmates do, while participating in sports and other fine arts.”Democrats and labor advocates decried the bill, which they say will endanger children by allowing them to work in dangerous fields such as roofing, excavation and demolition.“No Iowa teenager should be working in America’s deadliest jobs,” said Zach Wahls, the senate minority leader. “Iowa Republican politicians want to solve the … workforce crisis on the literal backs of children.”Labor unions have held protests against the bill. Charlie Wishman, president of the Iowa Federation of Labor, said efforts to loosen child labor laws around the US were “a lazy way of dealing with the fact that certain states don’t have enough workers”.In March, the Arkansas governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, signed legislation to roll back child labor protections. Lawmakers in Ohio, Minnesota and Wisconsin are also considering loosening regulations.“Can we let kids be kids?” Wishman asked. “It was about 120 years ago when we decided that we wanted to make sure that kids spent the majority of their time in school and not in a workplace, and especially not in a dangerous workplace.”Wishman cited research that has found serious adverse effects for teenagers working more than 20 hours a week.“These legislators don’t care about that because it’s not their kids,” he said. “This law is intended for somebody else’s kids.” More

The US authorities are investigating the leak of hundreds of secret US defence documents, some of which related to the war in Ukraine. The Guardian’s investigations correspondent, Manisha Ganguly, tells Hannah Moore how these documents migrated between different websites before being picked up by the press. Julian Borger, the Guardian’s world affairs editor, explains what we learned from the leak and how the US authorities have responded. On Friday, Jack Teixeira of the air national guard was charged on two counts under the Espionage Act. More

Joan Fleischman has always had people flying in from across the world to her private abortion practice in Manhattan. In the two decades her clinic has been open, she has seen clients from far-flung places, such as Ireland, the Bahamas and Mexico, who couldn’t get abortions in their home countries. In the last year, that changed. Since the US federal right to abortion was overturned in June 2022, she is now more likely to see patients flying in from her own country.Often they are from Texas, sometimes Ohio, or Florida. Some with links to the city, others with none.After years of providing abortion care, Fleischman, 60, still finds these trips shocking. “Usually if somebody needs unusual medical care, they are willing to fly around the world for it – like for advanced neurosurgery or something. It’s always struck me as incredible that people are flying to me for the most simple procedure.”There’s a reason people fly to see Fleischman. She provides abortions through manual uterine aspiration – using a small, hand-held device to remove pregnancy tissue. The device is gentle enough that the tissue often comes out almost completely intact. It is also a quick and discreet procedure where a patient might be in and out of the door in less than an hour.Fleischman is co-founder of the MYA Network, a network of primary care clinics and clinicians in 16 states. They believe the tool could be radical in the hands of more primary care clinicians – clinicians they are amping up to train.The time to do that, they say, is now. The future of mifepristone, a major abortion pill used in more than half the abortions in the US, is in question due to a lawsuit brought by anti-abortion groups seeking to overturn the FDA’s approval of the drug. It could be determined by the same supreme court that ruled last year to overturn Roe v Wade. Manual aspiration is not new: it is used by many big abortion clinics across the US. But those are are notoriously over-stretched. In 2020, before Roe v Wade was overturned, 38% of reproductive-aged women lived in counties with no abortion provider at all.Especially given the threat to mifepristone, the MYA Network believes that primary care clinicians, who are vastly more common than abortion providers, are well-placed to help.But while more than 73% of primary care doctors believe abortion care to be within their scope of practice, a tiny fraction – less than 10% – of primary care doctors actually provide it.The network is planning to unveil an online curriculum and in-person trainings for the procedure, which many of the clinicians and institutions in the network have already been doing in their own states.“The number of clinicians who could be trained would be limitless,” says Michele Gomez, one of the doctors in the MYA network of clinicians.“There are so many clinicians out there who want to do something to help but just don’t know how, and this information and support could be a gamechanger.”As a young woman, Joan Fleischman often felt compromised. She frequently traveled overseas as a teenager to do basic aid work with a volunteer group, and would feel fear and humiliation from the unwanted sexual attention she would receive. That was the beginning of her understanding, as she describes it, of the constant vulnerability women walk around with.By the age of 18, Fleischman had her first abortion – an experience she describes as routine, mundane even. The pregnancy came as she started her first year at the University of Chicago, and was the least of her concerns. “It was a no brainer. I was like, ‘Pregnant? Nope, I’m going to be a doctor.’ So I went to Planned Parenthood and took care of it,” says Fleischman.It wasn’t until she started providing abortions that she even thought about the experience again.Fleischman was in her 30s, living in New York and already trained as a family practice doctor, when she saw an advertisement offering to teach doctors how to do surgical abortions.“I realized that after all these years in training, I’d never got to even see an abortion. I had saved lives, helped people at the height of the Aids crisis. I had delivered babies. These are things a family doctor does,” she says. “I was like, ‘why? That’s ridiculous.’ That’s where the passion started.”Fleischman took up more training, learning to perform abortions at a Planned Parenthood, in 1995.Planned Parenthood – as Fleischman pointed out herself – is the place where people “go to get it done”. It is a vital lifeline for many people, providing hundreds of thousands of abortions every year, many to low-income and uninsured clients.But the efficiency of their service contrasted with Fleischman’s training as a family doctor – which emphasizes the importance of the doctor-patient relationship. She was used to that relationship entailing a level of intimacy – her work involved home visits with patients, and entering lifelong relationships with them and their families.Fleischman recalls her Planned Parenthood training:“Women went station to station. They got their blood drawn, and then they sat in a little waiting room with other people. They got their ultrasound; they sat in another little waiting room, always with paper gowns on. They had been fasting for the whole night before. They saw a counsellor. Then they were in a bigger waiting room. And then they got called by name, to come in for their procedure. The surgeon went from room to room to room, doing 50-60 abortions a day.”She wanted to personalize the experience. For patients to be able to come in with their partners, to be talked through their options and their concerns, fully. “I just felt so disconnected. It seemed to me that the doctor was really a technician emptying uteruses,” she continues.“I was like, ‘I want to create a different model. I want people to have a different experience going through this’.”As the US is learning, ethical quandaries always arise when abortion is banned: what to do for the woman who turns up septic after a failed, self managed abortion? How to deal with life-threatening pregnancies that require intervention but also require an abortion? What about cases of rape, incest or pregnant children?Essentially: how much pain is the state willing to impose on people when it restricts reproductive freedom?In Bangladesh, a sort of answer to some of these questions came following the 1971 civil war, during which soldiers abducted Hindu and Bihari Muslim women and set up rape camps. Pregnancy as a result of rape skyrocketed; in the following years, suicide and maternal mortality also shot up. Abortions, of course, did not stop happening. In 1978, while abortion remained illegal, an estimated 800,000 abortions took place in the country, resulting in around 8,000 deaths.“Menstrual regulation”, as it came to be known – using the same manual aspiration technique that Fleischman now uses – became a sort of legal loophole, allowing safe abortions for early pregnancies.By 1974, menstrual regulation was legal and by 1979, Bangladesh started providing the procedure through its national family planning program.Now, one might walk through a busy street in Bangladesh and find a sign advertising menstrual regulation in a country where, at least officially, abortion is only allowed in life-threatening situations. A woman simply comes in and explains she has missed her period. She doesn’t take a pregnancy test before the procedure, and nobody asks her to. As long as she sees the clinician before 12 weeks, they will “restore her period” for her.“It’s just a clever policy, a wink and a nod – everybody knows what’s going on. It’s kind of a recognition that women need this care,” says Bill Powell, a senior medical scientist at IPAS, an international organization that trains medical professionals across the world to use manual aspiration.It also gives doctors discretion without explicitly violating the law. “They say: ‘I know if I don’t provide this care, this woman is going to go off and do something that is unsafe, and she’ll be back to my facility ill, needing emergency care, so therefore, I am saving her life by providing this procedure’,” Powell explains.Fleischman, who worked in Bangladesh in her youth, and her colleagues in the MYA network are adamant they are only proposing manual aspiration be used legally in the US – for abortion care where it is legal, and miscarriage management where it is not. But its use in ordinary medical settings could still provide a radical opportunity in the US, she says, by expanding the number of clinicians who can easily perform the procedure up until 12 weeks.Others have touted this idea, in a slightly different way: anyone can learn to use a manual aspiration device, and manage their own abortions, some activists argue. All they need to learn to do is to insert a cannula, which is like a large straw, through the natural opening of the cervix, and then attach the aspiration device. The device is like a syringe, which creates a vacuum. Once the pressure is released, the contents of the uterus are gently removed. The self-management option has other advantages – like cutting out the middle man in a climate where doctors are increasingly scared to provide abortion care, and equipping people with self knowledge when the future of access to abortion is unclear.Fleischman understands the necessity of self-managed abortion, especially in places where the procedure is illegal. But she believes that after receiving care, people should always be able to follow up with a clinician who knows their case if anything goes wrong, or even if it doesn’t. It dismays her that people are living in a climate in the US where they might not have that option; where people might be too scared to look for help; and where they may suffer with complications alone in the rare instances when something does go wrong.In states where abortion is legal, manual aspiration provides the opportunity to treat abortion like mainstream medicine, rather than something that’s siloed into abortion clinics, which are visible, small in number and under constant threat.The case brought by anti-abortion groups against the FDA’s approval of mifepristone – which is one of two abortion drugs used in more than half of all abortions in the US – will almost certainly be decided by the supreme court. The uncertainly over its future, Fleischman argues, could make the expanded use of manual aspiration critical to preserving abortion and miscarriage care.Some providers may switch to abortions using only the second drug, misoprostol. But misoprostol-only abortions are slightly less effective, and more often require care for incomplete abortions. That could result in straining already stretched abortion clinics, which will likely have more people knocking at their doors for both surgical abortions and follow-up care.With manual aspiration on the other hand, doctors can be mostly certain that the procedure is complete before the patient leaves the state.And in states with bans, clinicians could be trained to use the device to treat miscarriages. “It’s useful even where you are not allowed to provide induced abortion care … [to treat] miscarriage, or spontaneous abortion,” explains Ian Bennett, a family planning doctor who is part of the MYA network and a professor at the University of Washington.Bennett trains several dozen students a year in manual aspiration, teaching them the procedure as part of their regular medical training, and says students are actively seeking out this instruction in the new, post-Roe environment.Students “are selecting programmes where abortion care is integrated into their training, even over some that might be more prestigious,” he says.Clinicians in areas that border states with bans, which have seen big increases in demand for abortion services as a result, are also a target for training, as are “red parts of blue states”, explains Gomez. Clinicians in states where abortion is legal, who want to do something to fight the war on abortion could easily do so by integrating abortion into their practices, Fleischman and her colleagues say.“It’s done in a couple of minutes,” explains Fleischman.“When it’s done, you know that it’s done. There’s very few bleeding issues. You walk into an office, and an hour later, it’s resolved. I have people flying in and out of Dubai for this procedure. They schedule the appointment, they come in, and they depart that afternoon,” she continues.“There’s absolutely no reason this shouldn’t just be part of regular medicine.” More

A US diplomatic convoy came under fire in Sudan in an apparent attack by fighters associated with Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has said, in an incident he described as “reckless” and “irresponsible”.The incident on Monday prompted a direct warning from Blinken, who separately telephoned the RSF leader Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, and Sudan’s army chief, Gen Abdel Fatah al-Burhan, to tell them any danger posed to American diplomats was unacceptable.Blinken said the convoy that came under fire was flying US. flags and all in the convoy were safe. “We have deep concerns about the overall security environment,” he said at a press conference in Japan where he attended a G7 meeting of foreign ministers.Fighting erupted on Saturday between army units loyal to Burhan, the head of Sudan’s transitional governing Sovereign Council, and Hemedti, the deputy head of the council. The UN envoy to Sudan says at least 185 people have been killed and more than 1,800 wounded. Many more bodies lay uncollected in the streets.A US state department official said Blinken had expressed “grave concern” over civilian deaths in his calls with the rival leaders, and urged them to agree to a ceasefire. Both had a responsibility to “ensure the safety and wellbeing of civilians, diplomatic personnel, and humanitarian workers”, the official said.Hemedti said he had discussed “pressing issues” with Blinken during their call and further talks were planned. “We will have another call to continuing dialogue and working hand-in-hand to forge a brighter future for our nations,” tweeted Hemedti, whose whereabouts have not been disclosed since the fighting began.Sudan’s rival factions both claimed to have made gains on Monday as violence cut power and water in the capital. Volker Perthes, the UN envoy to Sudan, said the two sides showed no signs of being willing to negotiate.The power struggle has derailed a shift to civilian rule and raised fears of a wider conflict.Clashes in Khartoum have centred on key sites such as the international airport, presidential palace and the army headquarters. In comments to Sky News, Burhan said he was secure in a presidential guesthouse within the defence ministry compound.Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, said the EU ambassador in Khartoum had been assaulted at his residency. Borrell did not say if the ambassador, the Irish diplomat Aidan O’Hara, had been badly injured, but called the attack “a gross violation of the Vienna convention”, which is supposed to guarantee the protection of diplomatic premises.The US national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, said the US was not, for the time being, planning an evacuation from the country.Burhan raised the stakes in the violence still further on Monday, ordering the dissolution of the RSF, which he called a “rebellious group”. For his part, Hemedti called Burhan “a radical Islamist who is bombing civilians from the air”.Military jets flew low over the capital through much of Monday as repeated bouts of firing and shelling continued there and in Omdurman, Khartoum’s sister city across the Nile. Witnesses have reported dozens of bodies in one central neighbourhood of the capital, and hundreds of students remain trapped in schools by the fighting.Hospitals have been particularly affected, with essential supplies badly disrupted by the fighting. Hundreds of patients have been evacuated, while medical staff attempt to move others from intensive care or dialysis units to places of safety.“We had to move them to the isolation centres along with 70 doctors and nurses, all have been trapped here with no oxygen for the chest patients and that’s really dangerous … The oxygen we have is from the time of the pandemic and it’s limited,” one nurse said.Aid workers in remote parts of Sudan also reported tensions or violence. One based in on the eastern border with Ethiopia described the regular army overwhelming a small RSF contingent and seizing their base amid sporadic shooting. Officials also reported fighting in the east, including the provinces of Kassala and El Gadaref.The conflict threatens to plunge one of Africa’s biggest and most strategically important countries into chaos. Analysts say only pressure from “heavyweight” intermediaries will have a chance of ending the fighting.In a speech broadcast by Egyptian state television late on Monday, President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi said he was in regular contact with the army and RSF to “encourage them to accept a ceasefire and spare the blood of the Sudanese people”.The African Union’s top council has called for an immediate ceasefire without conditions, while other Arab states with stakes in Sudan – Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – made similar appeals.Reuters contributed to this report More

Eight police officers who fired dozens of rounds at Jayland Walker, a 25-year-old Black man, following a car and foot chase will not face criminal charges in his death because a grand jury declined to indict them, Ohio’s attorney general announced Monday.Walker’s death last June sparked protests in Akron after police released body camera footage showing him dying in a hail of gunfire. Police said he had refused to stop when they tried to pull him over for minor equipment and traffic violations, though they haven’t specified further. Police say Walker fired a shot from his car 40 seconds into the pursuit.Officers chased the car on a freeway and city streets until Walker bailed from the still-moving vehicle, ignored officers’ commands and ran into a parking lot where he was killed while wearing a ski mask, body cam video showed. Authorities said he represented a “deadly threat”. A handgun, a loaded magazine and a wedding ring were found on the driver’s seat of his car.Walker took at least one shot from his vehicle at police and then after jumping out of his car he ignored commands to stop and show his hands, Yost said. “There is no doubt he did in fact shoot at police officers,” Attorney General Dave Yost of Ohio said.Walker reached for his waistband as officers were chasing and raised his hand, Yost said. The officers, not knowing he left his gun in the car, believed he was firing again at them, Yost said.Yost said it is critical to remember that Walker had fired at police, and that he “shot first”.Walker’s family called it a brutal and senseless shooting of a man who was unarmed at the time and whose fiancee recently died. Police union officials said the officers thought there was an immediate threat of serious harm and that their actions were in line with their training and protocols.The blurry body camera footage did not clearly show what authorities say was a threatening gesture Walker made before he was shot. Police chased him for about 10 seconds before officers fired from multiple directions, a burst of shots that lasts 6 or 7 seconds.The eight officers, whose names have been withheld from the public, initially were placed on leave, but they returned to administrative duties three and a half months after the shooting.A county medical examiner said Walker was shot at least 40 times. The autopsy also said no illegal drugs or alcohol were detected in his body.City leaders have been meeting with community leaders, church groups, activists and business owners ahead of the grand jury meeting while also preparing for potential protests.Walker’s death received widespread attention from activists, including from the family of the Rev Martin Luther King Jr. The NAACP and an attorney for Walker’s family called on the justice department to open a federal civil rights investigation.President Joe Biden responded during a trip to Ohio last summer by saying the DoJ was monitoring the case.Separately, another grand jury has refused to indict a former northern Virginia police officer after he fatally shot an unarmed shoplifting suspect outside a busy shopping mall in February.Authorities presented the case to a grand jury for an indictment against Wesley Shifflett, who shot and killed Timothy McCree Johnson outside Tysons Corner Center on 22 February.The shooting occurred after Shifflett and another Fairfax county police officer chased Johnson on foot from the mall after receiving a report from security guards that Johnson had stolen sunglasses from a Nordstrom department store.Dimly lit body camera video shows the chase and the shooting. The officer is heard saying “Get on the ground” and later saying “stop reaching” as shots are fired. After the shooting, Shifflett tells another officer that he saw Johnson “continually reaching in his waistband”.A search of the grounds after the shooting turned up no weapons.Shifflett was fired last month for what Fairfax county police chief Kevin Davis called “a failure to live up to the expectations of our agency, in particular use of force policies”.A lawyer for Johnson’s family likened the shooting to an execution. Johnson’s mother, Melissa Johnson, said officers shot her son when all they knew at the time was “that he was Black and male and had allegedly triggered an alarm from a store for some sunglasses”. More

Disgraced Republican congressman George Santos, who has admitted to fabricating parts of his résumé in his successful bid for a seat in the House of Representatives, has announced he will stand for a second term representing his New York district.Santos, whose district is focused on New York City’s suburbs, is the subject of an inquiry by the House ethics committee, as well as complaints alleging sexual harassment and campaign finance violations.Shortly after he admitted to lying during his election campaign last year, Santos stepped down from all House committees. He is expected to face many challengers in the Republican primary for the district, which leans Democratic.Santos was characteristically forthright in his re-election announcement, ignoring the multiple scandals that have repeatedly emerged in the US media that range from puppy theft to lying about being a producer on a Broadway musical about Spider-Man and making claims to have lost family in the Holocaust.“Since the left is pushing radical agendas, the economy is struggling, and Washington is incapable of solving anything, we need a fighter who knows the district and can serve the people fearlessly, and independent of local or national party influence,” he said in a statement.He added: “Good is not good enough and I am not shy about getting the job done.”Santos has long faced calls to quit from fellow New York Republicans and voters in his Queens and Long Island district. Democrats are hopeful they will be able to grab the seat. More