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      ‘This has to stop’: Biden condemns attacks on Haitian US immigrants

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      Joe Biden on Friday said the hostile attacks on Haitian immigrants in the US “[have] to stop” after Donald Trump repeated a false and derogatory claim about a Haitian community in Ohio.“It is simply wrong that the proud Haitian community is under attack right now in this country,” Biden said. “There’s no place in America. This has to stop – what he’s doing. It has to stop,” the US president said at a White House event marking Black excellence.The mayor of Springfield, Ohio, earlier on Friday said that the bomb threat made on Thursday that forced the evacuation of the city hall, two schools and other buildings was explicitly anti-immigrant and hostile to the city’s Haitian community, following Donald Trump’s stoking of a rightwing conspiracy theory that some residents’ pets are being eaten.Rob Rue, the mayor, accused national Republicans who are amplifying wild rumors from a far-right provocateur that Haitian immigrants in Springfield are hunting and eating other people’s pets of “hurting our city”.The threat “used hateful language towards immigrants and Haitians in our community”, Rue told the Washington Post, and added that Springfield “is a community that needs help”.No bomb was found after the threat was made. But Rue told the local Fox outlet that, in the threat, “there was enough negative language toward immigrants, towards Haitian folks that would bring enough concern. And then when it followed up with … at the end, of a bomb threat … It was pretty much just the beginning of the conclusion that they’re going to threaten to harm people.”Springfield has been the subject of national attention in recent days after the false social media rumor about the Haitian community.Trump even referenced the conspiracy theory in Tuesday night’s debate with opponent Kamala Harris. Trump repeated the inflammatory falsehood, saying: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats … They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” His move triggered a wave of anger and ridicule.That same day, JD Vance mentioned the rumor on X (formerly Twitter), which has also been flooded with AI-generated images of Trump surrounded by dogs, cats and ducks.Rue on Tuesday condemned the rumors as totally false, with “zero” verified reports of such disparaging claims. ABC’s debate moderator David Muir made the same factcheck live on Tuesday night after Trump’s remarks.Rue told the Springfield News-Sun: “Rumors like this are taking away from the real issues such as issues involving our housing or school resources and our overwhelmed healthcare system.”Meanwhile, during a Springfield city commission forum, Nathan Clark, the father of an 11-year-old boy who was killed last year when a minivan driven by an immigrant from Haiti collided with his school bus, told Trump and Vance to stop using his son’s name for “political gain”.Reuters contributed reportingRead more about the 2024 US election:

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      ‘We’re all sitting ducks’ without more substantial gun control, Warnock says

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      Americans “are all sitting ducks” unless Congress passes more substantial gun control, US senator Raphael Warnock said Sunday, four days after two students and two teachers at a high school in his home state of Georgia were shot to death, allegedly by a teenager wielding a military-style rifle.Warnock’s comments Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press came in direct response to statements from Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, who had previously said the killings at Appalachee high in Winder, Georgia, demonstrated how it was a “fact of life” that US schools present “soft targets” to a “psycho [wanting] to make headlines”.Vance added that US schools therefore must take steps to bolster their security, but such an approach would not eliminate the mass shootings in the US that have occurred in many other types of locales, Warnock – a Democrat – said both on Meet the Press as well as on CNN’s State of the Union.Of the nearly 390 mass shootings that had been reported in the US so far this year at the time of Warnock’s remarks, three of them were at schools, including the attack at Appalachee, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive and Education Week. Meanwhile, the killings at Appalachee were the only mass murder of 23 reported in the US so far to have happened at a school.The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are killed or wounded. A mass murder is one in which four or more victims are killed.Vance “talks about hardening our schools and making them secure – well the reality is this is happening in spas, in shopping malls”, Warnock said on CNN. “It’s happening in houses of worship, in medical clinics.“What are we going to do? Make the whole country into a fort?”He told NBC: “We’re all sitting ducks. And any country that allows this to continue without putting forward just common sense safety measures is a country that has – in a tragic way – lost its way.”Warnock alluded to an April 2023 Fox News poll which reaffirmed that the vast majority of Americans favored strengthening gun safety laws. And he said Congress took an encouraging first step toward treating such public support as a mandate when it enacted bipartisan legislation that expanded background checks for the youngest gun buyers while funding mental health and violence intervention programs.But what was the first major federal firearms safety bill to pass Congress in nearly three decades was “clearly not enough”, Warnock said, noting how the US continues recording a number of mass shootings that is disproportionate at the global level.Warnock said polls show most in the US overwhelmingly support universal background checks. Furthermore, Warnock said that large numbers of Americans support banning general access to assault-style rifles and semi-automatic firearms.Yet federal lawmakers have not been able to get enough votes to clear procedural hurdles preventing Congress from meaningfully consider either issue. Warnock on Sunday blamed that reality on congressmembers who – out of ambition or fear – accept financial support from the wealthy gun industry.“We are at an impasse because there are people in … politics … who are doing the bidding of the corporatist gun lobby even as they line their pockets with the blood of our children,” Warnock said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs if on cue, the National Rifle Association (NRA) on Sunday published a clip on its Twitter/X account showing Warnock answering a question about whether Kamala Harris should support a mandatory gun buyback program as she runs for the White House in November against Donald Trump.Warnock did not say “yes”, instead replying: “We’re not going to be able to get where we need to go without action in Congress. We’ve got to be able to pass some laws to deal with this.” Additionally, he repeatedly told CNN and NBC that he was not proposing to repeal the constitutional US right to bear arms.The NRA – which remains an influential lobbying group – nonetheless wrote Sunday that Warnock “wants to confiscate millions of guns from law-abiding Americans”.The shooter suspect at Appalachee faces murder charges over the slayings of two of his fellow 14-year-old students and a pair of mathematics teachers. The accused shooter’s father is also charged with second-degree murder for gifting his son the AR-15-style rifle used in the school attack.“Fourteen-year-olds don’t need AR-15s,” Warnock said. More

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      Hunter Biden pleads guilty in tax case after day of back and forth

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      Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to tax charges in federal court in Los Angeles on Thursday, after a day of legal wrangling and in a dramatic move that will avoid a potentially embarrassing trial for Joe Biden’s son.Biden, 54, pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges on a day of courtroom twists and turns, after prosecutors earlier objected to his surprise intention to enter an “Alford” plea, an unusual legal maneuver where a defendant pleads guilty but does not acknowledge wrongdoing. Following prosecutors’ objections, lawyers said Biden was ready to change course and enter an “open” plea, where a defendant pleads guilty to the charges and leaves his sentencing fate in the hands of the judge.In court on Thursday afternoon, Abbe Lowell, Biden’s attorney, told Judge Mark Scarsi: “Mr Biden will agree that the elements of each offense have been satisfied.”Biden quickly responded “guilty” as the judge read out each of the nine counts. The charges carry up to 17 years in prison, but federal sentencing guidelines are likely to call for a much shorter sentence.A sentencing hearing has been set for 16 December.The president’s only surviving son had previously pleaded not guilty. The surprise back-and-forth unfolded on Thursday morning as Biden entered a Los Angeles courthouse for the start of his tax-avoidance trial.After learning of Biden’s earlier plan to enter an Alford plea, US justice department prosecutors said that would not be acceptable. Alford pleas are usually negotiated in advance, because prosecutors must get high-level approval before agreeing to them.“It’s not clear to us what they are trying to do,” one prosecutor told Scarsi, the judge overseeing the case.“[Hunter Biden] is not entitled to plead guilty on special terms that apply only to him,” said prosecutor Leo Wise. “Hunter Biden is not innocent. Hunter Biden is guilty.”A trial, in the run-up to the November presidential election, could air embarrassing details of the younger Biden’s life. A defense attorney for Biden, Abbe Lowell, told the judge that the evidence against his client is “overwhelming” and that he wanted to resolve the case.The son of the president stands accused of failing to pay his taxes on time from 2016 to 2019, as well as two felony counts of filing a false return and an additional felony count of tax evasion.Hunter Biden walked into the courtroom for jury selection on Thursday morning holding hands with his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, and flanked by Secret Service agents. Initially, he pleaded not guilty to the charges related to his taxes from 2016 to 2019 and his attorneys had indicated they would argue he did not act “willfully”, or with the intention to break the law, in part because of his well-documented struggles with alcohol and drug addiction.A guilty plea will head off a weeks-long trial that would mark the second time in three months that the younger Biden sits in a federal courtroom as a jury of his peers is assembled to assess whether he is guilty of a slew of criminal charges.Hunter Biden was found guilty in Delaware on three felony counts relating to his purchase of a handgun in 2018 because he wrote on his gun-purchase form, falsely, that he was not a user of illicit drugs. The new trial takes place in the city where Biden has lived for years and where, according to the prosecution, he spent extensively on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes”.The most serious charges relate to his 2018 return on which, according to the prosecution, he sought to claim his children’s college tuition fees and more than $27,000 in online pornography as business expenses.The tax charges and the gun charges carry maximum sentences of more than 20 years in prison, although legal experts say that, as a first-time offender, Biden is likely to be punished far less harshly even if he were to be found guilty a second time.It has been a whirlwind of a summer for Joe Biden’s son, one in which he was convicted of felonies, rushed to Washington as pressure mounted on his father not to run for re-election, raised eyebrows by dropping into White House meetings – and, according to one report, acting as his father’s “gatekeeper” – then appeared on stage at the Democratic national convention to bask in his father’s reflected glory.Now that Joe Biden has abandoned his re-election ambitions and thrown his support behind his vice-president, Kamala Harris, the political stakes of Hunter Biden’s latest trial will be lower. Still, his legal troubles will take some of the sting out of Donald Trump’s constant complaints that he is the target of a political witch-hunt and that the president has “weaponized” the justice system against him.After Hunter Biden’s June conviction, Joe and Jill Biden issued a statement saying they would respect the judicial process and not consider a pardon for their son. The first lady attended court in Delaware most days, but it is not clear whether she would do the same in California. More

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      Republican-led House panel subpoenas Tim Walz over $250m Covid relief fraud

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      A Republican-led US House committee sent a subpoena to Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, seeking documents and communications related to a vast fraud scheme conducted by a non-profit that used pandemic relief funds meant for feeding kids.NBC News first reported the subpoenas, which were sent to Walz; Minnesota’s commissioner of education, Willie Jett; the US agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack; and the agriculture inspector general, Phyllis Fong.The US House committee on education and the workforce wrote to Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, to say it had been investigating the US Department of Agriculture and the Minnesota department of education’s oversight of federal child nutrition programs and Feeding Our Future, the group that is alleged to have stolen more than $250m in pandemic funds.The subpoena does not seek an in-person appearance from Walz before the committee. It sets an 18 September deadline for turning over documents.Five of the people involved in the scheme were convicted for their roles earlier this year in a trial that included an attempt to bribe a juror with a bag full of $120,000 in cash left at her home. In total, 70 people have been charged in relation to the scheme.Walz’s increased prominence in national politics has brought fresh scrutiny of his role as Minnesota’s top executive and whether the state education department, which is under his purview, should have caught the fraud.The committee’s Republican chairwoman, Virginia Foxx, wrote to Walz: “You are well aware of the multimillion-dollar fraud that has occurred under your tenure as governor.”A spokesperson for Walz said the Feeding our Future case was “an appalling abuse of a federal Covid-era program”.“The state department of education worked diligently to stop the fraud and we’re grateful to the FBI for working with the Department of Education to arrest and charge the individuals involved,” the spokesperson said.Walz has previously defended the department but acknowledged there were improvements to be made in oversight, after a state audit found the department’s lacking oversight “created opportunities for fraud”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“There’s not a single state employee that was implicated in doing anything that was illegal. They simply didn’t do as much due diligence as they should’ve,” Walz said after the audit report.Foxx claimed the committee had made voluntary requests to Minnesota’s education department for documents but “has been unable to obtain substantive responsive materials”.Walz’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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      Illinois governor calls for resignation of sheriff whose deputy killed Sonya Massey

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      JB Pritzker, Illinois governor, has called for the resignation of the sheriff whose deputy fatally shot Sonya Massey in her home last month after the Black woman had called 911 for help.Pritzker, a Democrat, said on Wednesday that the sheriff, Jack Campbell, should step down.“He has failed to explain how he ended up hiring this deputy sheriff who has been fired from other departments,” Pritzker said. “He failed to put forward reforms that clearly need to be made – training and other reforms – and still has failed to meet with the Massey family.”The former sheriff’s deputy, Sean Grayson, who has since been fired, faces three counts of first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct in the 6 July shooting death of Massey.Records have shown that prior to becoming a law enforcement officer, Grayson was kicked out of the army for the first of two drunken driving arrests within a year. Campbell had been aware of Grayson’s drunk driving convictions, though he has said that a record of DUI does not disqualify a candidate.During Grayson’s law enforcement career, he received some reviews that indicated he needed more training and had one disciplinary problem. A psychological evaluation from March 2023 found him fit to serve but noted: “He knows he can move too fast at times. He needs to slow down to make good decisions.”Campbell, who hired Grayson for the Sangamon county sheriff’s department in May 2023, reiterated his intent on Wednesday to stay in the job.“I was overwhelmingly elected to lead the sheriff’s office through both good times and bad,” Campbell said. “I am fully prepared to continue leading my office and serving the residents of Sangamon county through this difficult period, ensuring we learn from this tragedy and work toward a better future.”Pritzker met with Massey’s family two weeks ago, alongside the lieutenant governor, Juliana Stratton, and has faulted Campbell for not meeting with Massey’s family members.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCampbell has said that he has requested meetings with the family four times through family-designated intermediaries, but none have been accepted, and that he would still like to meet.Joe Biden, the US president, and his vice-president, Kamala Harris, have both reiterated calls for policing reforms following the killing.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      in Elections

      First conviction in Arizona fake electors case as Republican activist pleads guilty

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      A Republican activist who signed a document falsely claiming Donald Trump had won Arizona in 2020 became the first person to be convicted in the state’s fake elector case.Loraine Pellegrino, a past president of the group Ahwatukee Republican Women, has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of filing a false document, the Arizona attorney general’s office spokesperson, Richie Taylor, said on Tuesday, declining to comment further. Records documenting her guilty plea have not yet been posted by the court. Still, court records show Pellegrino was sentenced to unsupervised probation. Before the plea, she faced nine felony charges.Seventeen other people had been charged in the case, including 10 other Republicans, who had signed a certificate saying they were “duly elected and qualified” electors and claimed Trump had carried Arizona in the 2020 election. Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes. Joshua Kolsrud, an attorney representing Pellegrino, said in a statement that his client has accepted responsibility for her actions. “Loraine Pellegrino’s decision to accept a plea to a lesser charge reflects her desire to move forward and put this matter behind her,” Kolsrud said.On Monday, Jenna Ellis, former Trump’s campaign attorney who worked closely with his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, entered a cooperation agreement with prosecutors who have asked for her charges to be dismissed. The remaining defendants, including Giuliani and Mark Meadows, Trump presidential chief of staff, have pleaded not guilty to conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges.Pellegrino and 10 other people who had been nominated to be Arizona’s Republican electors had met in Phoenix on 14 December 2020 to sign the false document. A one-minute video of the signing ceremony was posted on social media by the Arizona Republican party at the time. The document was later sent to Congress and the National Archives, where it was ignored.Prosecutors in Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin have also filed criminal charges related to the fake electors scheme.Arizona authorities unveiled the felony charges in late April. Overall, charges were brought against 11 Republicans who submitted the document falsely declaring Trump had won Arizona, five lawyers connected to the former president and two former Trump aides.Trump himself was not charged in the Arizona case but was referred to as an unindicted co-conspirator in the indictment. More

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      Pakistani man with alleged ties to Iran charged in foiled plot to kill US leaders

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      A Pakistani man with alleged ties to Iran has been charged over a foiled conspiracy to carry out political assassinations on US soil, the justice department said on Tuesday as it disclosed what officials say is the latest murder-for-hire plot to target US public figures.Asif Merchant, 46, sought to recruit people in the United States to carry out the plot in retaliation for the US killing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ top commander, Qassem Soleimani, in 2020, according to a criminal complaint.Merchant, who prosecutors allege spent time in Iran before traveling to the US from Pakistan, was charged with murder for hire in federal court in New York’s Brooklyn borough. A federal judge ordered him detained on 17 July, according to court records.“For years, the justice department has been working aggressively to counter Iran’s brazen and unrelenting efforts to retaliate against American public officials for the killing of Iranian General Soleimani,” attorney general Merrick Garland said in a statement.FBI investigators believe that Donald Trump, who approved the drone strike on Soleimani, and other current and former US government officials were the intended targets of the plot, CNN reported, citing a US official.Court documents do not name the alleged targets of the plot. Merchant told a law enforcement informant that there would be “security all around” one target, according to the criminal complaint.A justice department spokesperson declined to comment further. Avraham Moskowitz, a lawyer for Merchant, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Trump’s presidential campaign could not immediately be reached for comment.Trump, the Republican candidate in the 5 November presidential election, was wounded in an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania last month. Garland said on Tuesday that investigators have found no evidence that Merchant had any connection to the shooting, which officials have said was carried out by a lone 20-year-old gunman.Law enforcement officials thwarted Merchant’s plan before any attack was carried out. An individual Merchant contacted in April to help assist with the plot reported his activities to law enforcement and became a confidential informant, according to the complaint.Merchant told the informant his plans also included stealing documents from one target and organizing protests in the US, prosecutors allege.After the failed assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, US officials said that a threat from Iran had prompted the US Secret Service to boost protection around Trump.At the time, Iran’s mission to the United Nations dismissed the allegations as “unsubstantiated and malicious”. More

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      Chinese American man convicted in US of spying on dissidents for China

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      A Chinese American scholar was convicted on Tuesday in the US on charges of using his reputation as a pro-democracy activist to gather information on dissidents and feed it to his homeland’s government.A federal jury in New York delivered the verdict in the case of Shujun Wang, who helped found a pro-democracy group in the city.Prosecutors said that at the behest of China’s main intelligence agency, the ministry of state security, Wang lived a double life for more than a decade.“The defendant pretended to be opposed to the Chinese government so that he could get close to people who were actually opposed to the Chinese government,” assistant US attorney Ellen Sise said in an opening statement last month. “And then, the defendant betrayed those people, people who trusted him, by reporting information on them to China.”Wang was convicted of charges including conspiring to act as a foreign agent without notifying the attorney general. Faced with up to 10 years in prison, he pleaded not guilty.Wang’s attorneys did not immediately return a request for comment.Wang came to New York in 1994 to teach after doing so at a Chinese university. He later became a US citizen.He helped found the Queens-based Hu Yaobang Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, named for two leaders of the Chinese Communist party in the 1980s.According to prosecutors, Wang composed emails – styled as “diaries” – that recounted conversations, meetings and plans of various critics of the Chinese government.One message was about events commemorating the 1989 protests and bloody crackdown in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, prosecutors said. Other emails talked about people planning demonstrations during various visits that Xi Jinping, Chinese president, made to the US.Instead of sending the emails and creating a digital trail, Wang saved them as drafts that Chinese intelligence officers could read by logging in with a shared password, prosecutors said.In other, encrypted messages, Wang relayed details of upcoming pro-democracy events and plans to meet with a prominent Hong Kong dissident while the latter was in the US, according to an indictment.During a series of FBI interviews between 2017 and 2021, Wang initially said he had no contacts with the ministry of state security, but he later acknowledged on videotape that the intelligence agency asked him to gather information on democracy advocates and that he sometimes did, FBI agents testified.But, they said, he claimed he did not provide anything really valuable, just information already in the public domain.Wang’s lawyers portrayed him as a gregarious academic with nothing to hide.“In general, fair to say he was very open and talkative with you, right?” the defense attorney Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma asked an undercover agent who approached Wang in 2021 under the guise of being affiliated with the Chinese security ministry.“He was,” said the agent, who testified under a pseudonym. He recorded his conversation with Wang at the latter’s house in Connecticut.“Did he seem a little lonely?” Margulis-Ohnuma asked a bit later. The agent said he did not recall.Wang told agents his “diaries” were advertisements for the foundation’s meetings or write-ups that he was publishing in newspapers, according to testimony. He also suggested to the undercover agent that publishing them would be a way to deflect any suspicion from US authorities.Another agent, Garrett Igo, told jurors that when Wang found out in 2019 that investigators would search his phone for any contacts in the Chinese government, he paused for a minute.“And then he said: ‘Do anything. I don’t care,’” Igo recalled. More