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      Alaska man arrested over death threats made to supreme court justices

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      A man from Alaska has been arrested and accused of threatening to kill six of the nine US supreme court justices and some of their family members, authorities have said – as a judge in Kentucky was shot dead on Thursday amid rising concerns about violence against public officials.Panos Anastasiou, 76, has been indicted on federal charges for allegedly sending more than 465 messages to the supreme court through a public court website. The messages contained graphic threats of assassination and torture, along with racist and homophobic rhetoric, according to the justice department.The indictment does not specify which justices Anastasiou targeted, but the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said the man made the graphic threats as retaliation for court decisions he disagreed with.“Our democracy depends on the ability of public officials to do their jobs without fearing for their lives or the safety of their families,” Garland said.Anastasiou was released from detention late on Thursday with a list of conditions, including not contacting, directly or indirectly, any of the six justices or their family members.During the hearing, magistrate Kyle Reardon noted some of the messages Anastasiou allegedly sent between March 2023 and mid-July 2024, including calling for the assassination of two of the Republican-appointed justices so the current Democratic president could appoint their successors.Anastasiou received a visit from FBI agents last year and instead of toning down his rhetoric after receiving that visit, he increased the frequency of his messages and their vitriolic language, the judge said.Threats targeting federal judges overall have more than doubled in recent years amid a surge of similar violent messages directed at public officials around the country, the US Marshals Service previously said.Meanwhile, a judge in a rural Kentucky county was shot dead in his courthouse chambers by the local sheriff, the police said. The sheriff has since been charged with murder.According to CBS News, officials said the sheriff shot the judge in his chambers following an argument but did not give further details.A survey conducted this summer indicates an increase in support for political violence in the US. Leaders of gun safety groups have blamed the proliferation of firearms for the deadliness of such events.The rise in support for political violence in the US is happening at a time when there is widespread misinformation and heightened partisanship, leading to growing concerns regarding potential disruptions to the upcoming presidential election.Just this week alone, former president Donald Trump was the target of another apparentassassination attempt, only two months after he was shot at and injured during a rally in Pennsylvania, where an attendee was killed and two others were injured.Also this week, suspicious packages, some of which contained white powder, were sent to election officials in 16 states, marking the second time in a year that suspicious mail has been sent to election officials in multiple states.Over the summer, it was reported that Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who prosecuted Donald Trump in the hush-money case, received threats targeting him, and that Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing that case, also faced threats.Shenna Bellows, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, had her home swatted last year after she disqualified Trump from the presidential ballot, and justices on the Colorado supreme court faced death threats after making a similar decision.In preparation for the upcoming election, some jurisdictions, including some in Georgia, are ramping up security measures for election workers and voting locations by purchasing panic buttons for employees and hiring security guards for election offices.Axios reported that some jurisdictions are equipping voting facilities with bulletproof glass, better security cameras and a separate exhaust system for areas where mail-in ballots will be processed.Since the 2020 presidential election, election offices and the individuals who work at them have been targets of harassment and even death threats. The Associated Press reported that these threats mainly come from individuals who believe the false claims made by Trump that the 2020 election, which Joe Biden won, was stolen from him through widespread fraud and rigged voting machines.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      We live in an era of political violence. The rich and famous aren’t the primary targets | Moira Donegan

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      It is not a good sign for US politics that an apparent second assassination attempt against the former president and current Republican nominee, Donald Trump, seems to be fading into the media’s background noise as a relatively minor story. In part, this might be because of the particulars of the incident at Trump’s Palm Beach golf club in Florida, not far from his resort home at Mar-a-Lago.For one thing, the suspect never fired a shot, though he was armed with an AK-47-style assault rifle with the serial number scratched off; having hidden in the bushes on the golf course for an estimated 12 hours, apparently waiting for Trump to appear, the would-be shooter was apprehended by Secret Service agents, who shot at him and missed.That makes this apparent second attempt somewhat less severe than the first, fewer than three months ago, at a Trump rally outside Pittsburgh, where a sniper on a nearby roof not only managed to fire shots at Trump, but was able to graze the former president’s ear.This time, the former president was never in real danger; he was hundreds of yards away at the time, and the Secret Service said on Monday that the alleged gunman did not have Trump in his sights. The golf course seems to have been relatively empty at the time; there have been no reports of other players being endangered by the plot. Unlike at most of Trump’s public outings, there were no crowds – which means that fewer people were at risk. And unlike most of Trump’s public outings, there were also no cameras – which means that his campaign will have a harder time spinning the incident into pro-Trump propaganda.In fact, no one seems to have been shot at all in Palm Beach. Though the Pittsburgh shooting injured several and claimed the life of one of Trump’s rally-goers, Corey Comperatore, a Butler county resident, in the Palm Beach shooting, not even the alleged assailant himself was harmed: though he fled the scene, he was captured later in a traffic stop as he headed north. That means he may well become one of those rare historical creatures: the would-be presidential assassin who lives long enough to stand trial. For that much, we can all breathe a sigh of relief: despite the gunshots that were fired and the powerful weapons that the suspect possessed, no one was hurt.Another reason why the apparent second attempt on Trump’s life this cycle may not make much of a dent in the media ecosystem is because the suspect appears recognizably unstable, rendering the case one of the US’s de rigueur tragedies in which profound mental illness mixes with easy access to guns. It’s true that Ryan Wesley Routh, the alleged gunman, did seem to have some degree of political agenda: he appears, oddly enough, to be a partisan of the Ukraine war effort. But Ruth’s long, checkered past and odd personal statements make it seem unlikely that his political motives were coherent.They were certainly not partisan. Routh voted for Trump in 2016 and has made public statements supporting other candidates since, seeming to mostly believe in a hawkish foreign policy. He has voiced support for Nikki Haley, for example; he seems to have hoped, during 2024’s abortive Republican primary, that she would run for vice-president on a ticket topped by the businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. His decades-long criminal record includes arrests for writing bad checks, a hit and run, resisting arrest, a concealed weapons violation and possession of a weapon of mass destruction – with that last charge, a felony, stemming from an incident in which he barricaded himself inside a house with an automatic weapon.Perhaps not the most lucid political thinker, Routh nevertheless followed his passion to Ukraine in recent years, when he was interviewed by several news outlets reporting on a minor trend of Americans traveling to eastern Europe to fight against the Russian invasion. He told the New York Times back in 2022 about a cockamamie scheme he cooked up there, in which Afghans who had previously fought the Taliban would be transported, somehow at his own direction, to Ukraine, to join the anti-Russian cause. The Times reporter who interviewed Routh said that at the time that he thought the man seemed out of his depth. That might be an understatement.Routh, then, does not appear to be a leftwing extremist or Democratic partisan, motivated by fear of what Trump would do to the country. He seems, rather, like an addled man, perhaps not entirely in possession of his own mind, with a penchant for violence and persistent fantasies of Rambo-like military heroism. Among the devices that the Secret Service discovered at the suspect’s hiding spot in the bushes at the Palm Beach golf course was a GoPro: whatever he imagined he was going to do there, it seems that he intended to stream it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn another country, Routh’s thin political understandings and ardent delusions of grandeur would make him marginal, an outcast or perhaps someone seen as in need of help. In ours, he is a public danger. Despite being a felon, Routh was able to get himself a weapon of war; despite having been violent and dangerous to others in the past, he was still free, without any apparent restraints on his movement or psychiatric care. We are all very lucky that it wasn’t worse.But living in the US, now, means taking a risk that the combination of a man’s grievance and insanity will collide with our dangerously lax gun laws in a way that will cost you your life. Immigrant Americans may be massacred in a Walmart by nativist scaremongers for having the temerity to come to this country. Black Americans may be gunned down in a grocery store by a white supremacist. Women may be slaughtered by husbands, boyfriends or exes who decide that their inability to control them is an insult that demands the sacrifice of their lives. These, too, are the product of our polarized, hateful and hierarchical culture, and yet these incidents do not get described as “political violence”. And yet our politics has become highly violent, and usually, the rich and famous are not its primary targets. Every American risks getting shot in public. Most of us do not get to face that risk with Secret Service protection.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Political violence and fearmongering bigotry have become too normalized | Robert Reich

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      The second apparent attempt on Donald Trump’s life – on Sunday at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida – occurred just over two months after he was wounded during an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you,” the former president said after the first attempt. “I’m just standing in the way.”“They” should not be coming after anyone. There is no place in a democracy for violence, nor for threats of violence.Which brings me to Trump’s claim in last week’s debate that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the dogs … eating the cats. They’re eating – they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”It quickly became a vast internet joke, fueling thousands of hilarious memes and songs. But it’s no laughing matter. Trump’s claim has already provoked threats of violence.Last weekend, two hospitals in Springfield were locked down after bomb threats, police said. Other threats received by Springfield officials have forced government buildings to close, two elementary schools to be evacuated and the students moved to a different location, and a middle school to shut down altogether.After Republican VP nominee JD Vance first began spreading baseless rumors about Haitians in Springfield, members of the neo-Nazi group “Blood Tribe” marched into the city carrying guns, wearing body armor, and carrying Neo-Nazi flags. At a 27 August town hall meeting, one claimed that the city had been taken over by “degenerate third worlders”, blamed Jewish people for the influx, and warned “crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you allow in.”Springfield’s Haitian immigrants say they are afraid. Some have kept their children home from school, fearing violence. Others have reported harassment on the street, in their cars, and at stores.A Springfield family whose son died last year when a car driven by a Haitian immigrant accidentally collided with a school bus has pleaded for Trump and Vance to stop using their deceased son for political purposes.Yet Trump and Vance are doubling down. On Sunday, before the attempt on Trump’s life, Vance said on CNN that the claims about Haitians eating the pets of Springfield residents came from “firsthand accounts from my constituents”. When interviewer Dana Bash suggested that the claims had caused bomb threats, Vance called her a “Democratic propagandist”. But the connection is indisputable.Rather than offhand comments, Trump’s and Vance’s claims are calculated. Trump’s last two posts on Truth Social before the debate were AI images of cats – one depicting cats in military fatigues carrying assault rifles and wearing Maga hats, the other showing the candidate himself sitting on a plane amid a crowd of ducks and cats.Trump is now talking about holding a rally in Springfield. “We’re going to get these people out,” Trump said in a Friday news conference. Although Springfield’s Haitian immigrants are in the United States legally, he promised to stage “the largest deportation in the history of our country” if re-elected.Trump’s and Vance’s claims are completely bogus. Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, told CBS News on Wednesday: “These Haitians came in here to work because there were jobs, and they filled a lot of jobs. And if you talk to employers, they’ve done a very, very good job and they work very, very hard.”Another of Trump’s bogus claims is now threatening legal immigrants in Aurora, Colorado, a Denver suburb that Trump has repeatedly asserted is being “taken over” by Venezuelan criminals. “Simply not true”, Aurora’s Republican mayor and city council member wrote in a joint statement.As in Springfield, Trump’s baseless claims are harming innocent people in Aurora. Immigrants there say they have been told their nationality makes them ineligible for jobs or housing. Trump’s claims have led to threats and drawn armed groups to the city, claiming to offer vigilante-style protection.Trump and Vance are using the oldest of tyrannical ploys – fueling deep-seated fears by creating an “other”, depicted as subhuman, who “take over” towns and “devour” loved ones.In Springfield, the loved ones are peoples’ pets. But how far is this bogus claim from vicious Nazi claims of Jewish people devouring children? Substitute “Jew” for “Haitian” in Springfield or for “Venezuelan” in Aurora, and you’re back to the Nazis of the 1930s.In demonizing and dehumanizing migrants, Trump and Vance are not just seeking to win over a few wavering voters across the nation or making a play for control of the Senate. They are trying to scare America into becoming a more fearsome, more racist nation.“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said of immigrants at a rally in New Hampshire eight months ago – virtually quoting Adolf Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf: “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.”In a last-ditch effort to prevail in their campaign, Trump and Vance are encouraging the haters. On 10 September, Vance told his followers to “keep the cat memes flowing”, notwithstanding that they were endangering people in his own state.Meanwhile, members of Trump’s social media war room – including Trump confidante Laura Loomer, known for sexist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Muslim, and antisemitic posts – are busily spreading AI-generated images of dogs and cats being protected by Trump, along with other content promoting the claim that pets are being eaten by Haitians.Let me repeat: there no justification whatsoever for violence or threats of violence in our democracy. While utterly despicable, Sunday’s second apparent assassination attempt on Trump can be seen as a symptom of the hate-filled politics that he and Vance are peddling.This must stop.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Suspect said he knew why he was being arrested after Trump golf club incident, officials say

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      Cellphone records associated with the man accused of trying to assassinate Donald Trump at his golf course in Florida on Sunday suggest he had been lying in wait nearby for nearly 12 hours before he was fired on by a Secret Service agent protecting the former president.Then, after authorities captured him as he made his hasty retreat, he allegedly told them he knew exactly why they were arresting him.Those details surfaced in a criminal complaint that was unsealed after the man alleged to have plotted the attempt on Trump’s life appeared in front of a preliminary federal court hearing Monday.The new records alleged that the suspect in the case, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, had previously asked his social media followers to contact him at a specific cellphone number. Investigators later determined that particular number was located at or near a tree line along Trump International golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, from about 1.59am to 1.31pm on Sunday, an FBI agent wrote in the unsealed papers.At the end of that time frame, a Secret Service agent walking the perimeter of the course while Trump golfed there noticed “what appeared to be a rifle poking out of the tree line”, the complaint said.The agent drew a gun and fired in the direction of the rifle. A bystander then saw a man later identified as Routh emerge from the tree line and flee in a Nissan SUV.Authorities said they soon found an SKS-style rifle equipped with a scope, a digital camera and at least three bags – including one containing food – in the area from which Routh fled. The serial number on the 7.62mm rifle had been “obliterated and [was] unreadable”, the FBI agent who wrote the complaint said.Deputies from two local sheriff’s offices later stopped Routh as he speeded northbound on Interstate 95 at about 2.15pm. “Routh was asked if he knew why he was being stopped,” the complaint said. “He responded in the affirmative.”The complaint noted that the license plate on the Nissan was not meant to be on the vehicle. Rather, it was registered to a white Ford truck that had been reported stolen.Authorities did not immediately charge Routh with attempting to assassinate the president. Instead, they charged him with possessing a firearm despite having prior felony conviction prohibiting him from legally doing so – as well as with illicitly having a gun with an obliterated serial.The first of those charges stemmed from Routh’s having been convicted in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 2002 of illegally possessing what a media report referred to at the time as a “fully automatic machine gun”. According to the Greensboro News & Record, in that instance Routh barricaded himself at his roofing company during a three-hour standoff before he led police on a car chase and ultimately surrendered.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA second felony conviction mentioned in Monday’s criminal complaint was for multiple counts of possession of stolen goods.The complaint does not address what may have motivated Routh to stick the barrel of a rifle into Trump’s golf course while the Republican presidential candidate played there. Routh’s son, Oran, told the Guardian on Sunday that Ukraine’s cause in its war against Russia was dear to him.Trump, as he seeks a second presidency in November, recently declined to answer a question at a televised debate about whether he wanted Ukraine to win that war, renewing fears that he might suspend American military aid to Ukrainian troops if voters return him to the White House. The former president also successfully lobbied lawmakers who are loyal to him to delay authorizing additional military support to Ukraine for months earlier this year.Routh’s hearing on Monday lasted eight minutes and saw federal prosecutors announce the initial charges against him. He could face 15 years in prison if convicted of possessing a firearm as a felon and five years in connection with the other charge.Trump survived a separate assassination attempt on 13 July at a political rally in Pennsylvania. The gunman shot one spectator dead and badly wounded two other rallygoers before he was killed by Secret Service snipers. More

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      Second Trump assassination attempt highlights ‘dangerous times’ for US

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      A US Secret Service spokesperson summed up an extraordinary afternoon at the Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach, Florida, in five chilling words: “We live in dangerous times.”The spokesperson made his assessment at a press conference on Sunday afternoon, just hours after an individual had been spotted with an AK-47-style semi-automatic rifle just a few hundred yards from where Donald Trump was playing golf.The incident is being treated by the FBI as the second attempted assassination on the former president in as many months. Pictures released by law enforcement appeared to show a rudimentary sniper’s nest and pointed security questions are sure to be asked about how someone was able to get so close to Trump.Details released at the press conference underlined how close Trump came to being shot at – yet again – so soon after a shooter grazed his ear at a rally in Butler county, Pennsylvania, on 13 July. Asked by reporters how far away the gunman spotted on Sunday was to his apparent target, the sheriff of West Palm Beach, Ric Bradshaw, replied: “Probably between 300 and 500 yards – but with a rifle and scope like that, that’s not a lot of distance.”The security emergency began at 1.30pm on Sunday when the Secret Service reported that shots had been fired. At the time, Trump was golfing with his friend and real estate Republican mega-donor Steve Witkoff between the 5th and 6th holes of the 18-hole course.Bradshaw explained that the area was surrounded by dense shrubbery – a security agency’s waking nightmare – allowing the suspected would-be assassin to place himself on the edge of the course largely out of sight. Federal agents divulged that in addition to his AK-47-style rifle and scope, the suspect had two backpacks as well as a GoPro filming device, which Bradshaw said indicated that he intended to record his actions.In the immediate aftermath of the incident, the initial analysis suggested a story of two conflicting narratives.The first narrative focused on how exposed Trump was, even after security had been ramped up after the Butler incident, and how easy it appeared to have been for a heavily armed individual to gain entrance to the golf course and hide there ensconced in the bushes.As Bradshaw put it, had Trump been a sitting president at the time he would never have been allowed by the Secret Service to play golf in such an open environment. But “he is not the sitting president, and so we are limited to what the Secret Service deems possible”.The second narrative is more positive. Unlike the attempted assassination on Trump in Butler county, in which the Secret Service has faced serious questions about its competence leading to the resignation of its then director, Kimberly Cheatle, Sunday’s incident appears to paint the agency in a much rosier light.The suspected gunman was spotted by a Secret Service agent who was acting as forward guard, going ahead of Trump by a hole or two to stake out potential threats. Despite the thick greenery flanking the course, the agent caught sight of a rifle barrel peeking through and engaged the suspect, firing four to six rounds of ammunition.“The Secret Service did exactly what they were supposed to do, and their agent did a fantastic job,” Bradshaw said.From there, the apprehension of the suspect also went like clockwork. As he was being fired upon, the suspect dropped the rifle and fled through the bushes, jumping into a black Nissan that he had presumably left strategically located for a fast getaway. Also remarkably in the circumstances, a passerby saw him flee and had the wits to take a photograph of the vehicle including its license plate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSuch is the power of surveillance technology in Florida that within minutes the number plate was being run through the state’s license plate readers. The escaping suspect was quickly tracked to the I-95 highway and promptly detained at gunpoint.As William Snyder, sheriff of neighboring Martin county where the arrest was made, noted, the suspect was unarmed and appeared “relatively calm, he was not displaying a lot of emotion”.The exemplary way in which federal and local law enforcement worked together to prevent what could have been a catastrophic event, followed by the consummate apprehension of the suspect, will take a lot of heat out of the situation as the inevitable blame game gets under way. But that other initial narrative also glares out and will demand answers.How, after Trump came so close to being shot in Pennsylvania, was it possible for him to be out playing golf in a setting that appears to have been impossible to secure? What is happening in a country with as painful a history of successful assassinations as America’s when it sees a former president targeted not once but twice in such short order?A beady-eyed Secret Service agent spared the US a potentially unconscionable disaster. Is that security enough?“The threat level is high,” said the Secret Service spokesperson. “We live in dangerous times.” More

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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:

      Fears mount that election deniers could disrupt vote count in US swing states

      Microsoft billionaire fights US election disinformation

      Palestinian advocacy groups pressure Harris as election looms

      Presidential poll tracker More

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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