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      Two dead after vehicle explosion at US-Canada border checkpoint

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      A speeding car crashed in flames on the bridge linking New York state and Ontario at Niagara Falls on Wednesday, killing two people in the vehicle and sparking a security scare that closed four US-Canadian border crossings.Hours later, federal and state authorities said investigators had found no evidence of an act of terrorism, though circumstances surrounding the crash on the Rainbow Bridge remained murky, leaving it to be determined whether it was accidental or intentional.Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, said there was “no indication of a terrorist attack” in the explosion which happened on the US side of the Rainbow Bridge, which connects the two countries across the Niagara River.“Based on what we know at this moment,” she said, “there is no sign of terrorist activity in this crash.”The FBI said in a statement it had concluded its investigation. “A search of the scene revealed no explosive materials, and no terrorism nexus was identified,” the FBI said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.Video of the crash caught on security camera and posted online by the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency showed the car traveling from the U.S. side at high speed, then hitting an object and flying into the air before crashing to the ground and exploding in flames. A CBP officer suffered minor injuries in the incident. He was treated at a hospital and released, an agency official said later.Chuck Schumer, the senior senator from New York, tweeted: “I was just briefed by the FBI on the incident at Rainbow Bridge. Initial reports indicate the two people killed were in the car but nothing’s been determined on their identity or motive. They continue to investigate – law enforcement remains on heightened alert over Thanksgiving,” he wrote.Justin Trudeau excused himself from question period in Canada’s House of Commons to be briefed further, saying: “This is obviously a very serious situation in Niagara Falls.”“We are taking this extraordinarily seriously,” the Canadian prime minister added.The Rainbow bridge and three other crossings at Lewiston, Whirlpool and Peace Bridge – were closed soon after the blast, although the other three were reopened later on Wednesday.The White House said it was “closely monitoring the situation at the US-Canada border crossing”, and that law enforcement officials were on the scene and investigating.Photos and video taken by news organizations and posted on social media showed a security booth that had been singed by flames.Videos showed the fire was in a US Customs and Border Protection area just east of the main vehicle checkpoint.Speaking to WGRZ-TV, Mike Guenther said he saw a vehicle speeding toward the crossing from the US side of the border when it swerved to avoid another car, crashed into a fence and exploded.“All of a sudden he went up in the air and then it was a ball of fire like 30 or 40ft high,” Guenther told the station. “I never saw anything like it.”Ivan Vitalii, a Ukrainian visiting Niagara Falls, told the Niagara Gazette that he and a friend were near the bridge when they “heard something smash”.“We saw fire and big black smoke,” he told the newspaper.From inside Niagara Falls state park, Melissa Raffalow said she saw “a huge plume of black smoke” rise up over the border crossing, roughly 50 yards (45m) away from the popular tourist destination. Raffalow told AP in a message that police arrived soon after, urging visitors to disperse as they began cordoning off the street.Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, which borders New York state, said: “Our provincial law enforcement is actively engaged in assessing the situation. They are working with local law enforcement and are providing support as required.”About 6,000 vehicles cross the Rainbow Bridge each day, according to the US Federal Highway Administration’s National Bridge Inventory. About 5% is truck traffic, according to the federal data.With Reuters More

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      House speaker Mike Johnson likened abortion to ‘American holocaust’

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      Before he became speaker of the US House of Representatives, the Louisiana Republican congressman Mike Johnson likened abortion to “an American holocaust”.“The reality is that Planned Parenthood and all these … big abortion … they set up their clinics in inner cities,” Johnson told a radio show in May 2022, in comments aired by CNN on Tuesday. “They regard these people as easy prey.”But while these remarks may sound stunning, anti-abortion activists often refer to abortion in the United States as a “holocaust”. This isn’t even the only time that Johnson has made the comparison.“During business hours today, 4,500 innocent American children will be killed,” Johnson wrote in a 2005 op-ed for the Shreveport Times, which was recently resurfaced by CBS News. “It is a holocaust that has been repeated every day for 32 years, since 1973’s Roe v Wade.”In that op-ed, Johnson also said the judicial philosophy that undergirded Roe – and allowed for the removal of the feeding tube of Terri Schiavo, a womanwith severe brain damage who became a cause célèbre among anti-abortion activists – to be “no different than Hitler’s”.Johnson went on to add that abortion had led to a dearth of “able workers” and a crisis for social security, a claim he would repeat at a House hearing years later.Comparisons between US abortion and the Holocaust date back decades, with anti-abortion advocates writing books in the 1980s with titles such as The Abortion Holocaust: Today’s Final Solution. Although the mainstream United States may have grown less tolerant of the comparison, it has never disappeared from anti-abortion circles, which are predominantly Christian.In fact, it’s sometimes used as a recruitment tool. One prominent anti-abortion group even claims anyone born after the supreme court decided Roe in 1973 is a “survivor of the American abortion holocaust” and invites young people to become “boots on the ground” in recognition of their aborted peers. In 2019, Texas Right to Life – a powerful anti-abortion group in Texas – held a training for young anti-abortion activists where leaders screened documentaries about the Nazi Holocaust and urged the activists to “write down three similarities between the Holocaust and abortion”.These kinds of comparisons have even made their way into law. In a 2019 abortion case, the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion claiming that abortion was on the verge of becoming “a tool of modern-day eugenics”. Alabama’s near-total abortion ban, which was first passed in 2019 and took effect after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last year, suggested abortion was worse than famous 20th-century atrocities.“More than 50 million babies have been aborted in the United States since the Roe decision in 1973,” the ban reads, “more than three times the number who were killed in German death camps, Chinese purges, Stalin’s gulags, Cambodian killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide combined.” More

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      Prominent conservative lawyers band together to fight Trump threat

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      Three prominent US legal thinkers have announced a new organisation to champion conservative legal theory within the rule of law, to fight the threat of a second Donald Trump term.“Our country comes first,” the three wrote in the New York Times, “and our country is in a constitutional emergency, if not a constitutional crisis. We all must act accordingly, especially us lawyers.”The authors were George Conway, an attorney formerly married to Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s White House counselor; J Michael Luttig, a retired judge and adviser to Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, who became a prominent January 6 witness; and Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia.The authors also rebuked prominent rightwing groups including the Federalist Society for not resisting the former president and his authoritarian ambitions.Their new group, the Society for the Rule of Law Institute, would “work to inspire young legal talent … focus on building a large body of scholarship to counteract the new orthodoxy of anti-constitutional and anti-democratic law … [and] marshal principled voices to speak out against the endless stream of falsehoods and authoritarian legal theories … propagated almost daily,” they said.The Federalist Society and its chair, Leonard Leo, played a key role in Trump’s judicial appointments, installing three hardliners on the supreme court who helped hand down rightwing wins including removing abortion rights and loosening laws on gun control, affirmative action, voting rights and other progressive priorities.Conway, Luttig and Comstock emerged among prominent conservative opponents of Trump, warning of his authoritarian threat before and after January 6, when rioters attacked Congress in an attempt to block Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.Ninety-one criminal charges and assorted civil threats notwithstanding, Trump is now the clear frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination while polling strongly against Biden in battleground states.“American democracy, the constitution and the rule of law are the righteous causes of our times, and the nation’s legal profession is obligated to support them,” Conway, Luttig and Comstock wrote.“But with the acquiescence of the larger conservative legal movement, these pillars of our system of governance are increasingly in peril. The dangers will only grow should Donald Trump be returned to the White House next November.”Trump, they said, would stock a second administration “with partisan loyalists committed to fast-tracking his agenda and sidestepping – if not circumventing altogether – existing laws and long-established legal norms.“This would include appointing … political appointees to rubber-stamp his plans to investigate and exact retribution against his political opponents; make federal public servants removable at will by the president himself; and invoke special powers to take unilateral action on first amendment-protected activities, criminal justice, elections, immigration and more.”Saying Trump tried such attacks when in power but was blocked by lawyers and judges, the authors said the former president would if re-elected “arrive with a coterie of lawyers and advisers who, like him, are determined not to be thwarted again”.Though they said the Federalist Society had long been “the standard-bearer for the conservative legal movement”, they said it had “failed to respond in this period of crisis.“That is why we need an organisation of conservative lawyers committed to the foundational constitutional principles we once all agreed upon: the primacy of American democracy, the sanctity of the constitution and the rule of law, the independence of the courts, the inviolability of elections and mutual support among those tasked with the solemn responsibility of enforcing the laws of the United States.“This new organisation must step up, speak out and defend these ideals.” More

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      Appeals court weighs narrowing Trump gag order in election subversion case

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      A federal appeals court appeared inclined at a hearing on Monday to keep some form of a gag order against Donald Trump preventing him from assailing potential trial witnesses and others in the criminal case related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.The court expressed concern, however, that the order was too broad and left open the possibility of restricting its scope – including allowing the former US president to criticize the prosecutors in the office of the special counsel Jack Smith who brought the charges.The trial judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the case in federal district court in Washington, entered the order in October that prohibited Trump from making inflammatory statements and social media posts attacking prosecutors, potential witnesses and court staff in the case.It allowed Trump only to criticize the case in general terms – such as broadly attacking Joe Biden, the Biden administration or the justice department as bringing politically motivated charges against him – and to criticize the judge herself.Trump appealed to the US court of appeals for the DC circuit, arguing the order unconstitutionally infringed on his first amendment rights and protected core political speech as he campaigns to be re-elected to the presidency next year. The order was paused while he appealed.On Monday, at the hearing, which lasted more than two hours, the three-judge panel repeatedly suggested they found untenable Trump’s position that there could be no “prophylactic” provision to ensure Trump was restricted from prejudicing the case until after it had already taken place.Trump’s lawyer John Sauer argued that prosecutors had not met their evidentiary obligations – that Trump’s statements directly led to threats to witnesses, for instance – to get a gag order. The legal standard, Sauer said, should be proof of an “imminent threat”.But the panel interjected that there was a clear pattern with Trump stretching back to the post-2020 election period that when he named and assailed individuals, they invariably received death threats or other harassment from his supporters.The pattern has included the trial judge Chutkan, who received a death threat the very next day after Trump’s indictment when he posted “If you go after me, I’m coming after you” on his Truth Social platform, even if Trump had not directly directed his ire at her.“Why does the district court have to wait and see, and wait for the threats to come, rather than taking reasonable action in advance?” the circuit judge Brad Garcia pressed Sauer.The Trump lawyer responded that posts from three years ago did not meet the standard required for a gag order, as he argued the supreme court has held that a “heckler’s veto” – gagging a defendant merely because of fears about how a third party might act – was not permissible rationale.What has complicated Trump’s case is the scant legal precedent to guide the courts in how to balance the constitutional needs of the criminal justice process and Trump’s right to political speech, even as he uses his 2024 campaign to shield himself from legal exposure.The circuit judges on multiple occasions wrestled with the question of when Trump might be engaged in political speech to defend himself during the campaign, and when he might be engaged in political speech “aimed at derailing or corrupting the criminal justice process”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStill, the panel was also unconvinced that Trump should not be able to complain about the special counsel’s office, and sharply questioned the government’s lawyer Cecil Vandevender why Trump’s attacks against prosecutors would cause prejudice to the case.If Trump made an actual threat, the circuit judge Patricia Millett said, that would be a crime and a violation of Trump’s pre-trial conditions of release. But she suggested the special counsel surely had thick enough skin to withstand jibes from the former president.The panel appeared to conclude in general that some of the language in the gag order, such as Trump being prevented from making statements that “targeted” prosecutors, or the lack of distinctions between threats to prosecutors and threats to witnesses, needed to be refined.Millett questioned the government’s position that Trump calling a potential trial witness a “slimy liar” was not permissible, but calling the same witness an “untruth speaker” would be. Vandevender struggled to articulate a line of demarcation.It was unclear how soon the panel would issue a ruling, and whether they would make adjustments to the gag order or rescind it. The three-judge panel were all Democratic appointees: Garcia was appointed by Biden, while Millett and Cornelia Pillard were appointed by Barack Obama.Regardless of the outcome, either Trump or the government could appeal to the supreme court. But even if the order is ultimately upheld and returned to Chutkan, also an Obama appointee, she faces the tricky task of what to do with potential future violations.A gag order violation is typically treated as criminal contempt of court, which requires punishment for defying the order. Chutkan could not rule on a sanction herself, however: it would require prosecutors to take it up as a new charge and seek a separate trial. More

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      ‘Congratulations, birds’: Biden brings the jokes as he pardons Thanksgiving turkeys

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      He had his turn at the White House, made all the right noises and now, getting on a bit, is heading for a quiet retirement.Sadly for the millions of voters who tell opinion pollsters they want him to make way for someone younger, it is not Joe Biden, but a turkey named Liberty who is about to put his feet up.The US president spent part of his 81st birthday on Monday observing the White House tradition of pardoning Thanksgiving turkeys. Liberty received executive clemency along with another gobbler named Bell.After their moment in the sun, Liberty and Bell will be returned to their home state to be cared for by the University of Minnesota’s College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resources Sciences. Biden, meanwhile, will continue to wrestle with two intractable wars, turmoil at the border and a bitterly divided nation.While past presidents have used this occasion to tell dad jokes, Biden did grandad jokes. His seven-minute remarks on the White House south lawn on a crisp Monday were light on the puns favoured by Barack Obama that made his daughters cringe, or the funny-not-funny gags about pardons made by Donald Trump that made the nation cringe. But they were heavy on self-deprecating references to Biden’s age, enough to elicit groans from any campaign aides who still believe the subject can be dodged.The president thanked the chair of the National Turkey Federation and said when he met him and his family earlier, they sang “Happy Birthday”. America’s first octogenarian president quipped: “I just want you to know it’s difficult turning 60. Difficult.”He laughed at his own joke.The tradition dates to 1947 when the federation, which represents turkey farmers and producers, first presented a National Thanksgiving Turkey to President Harry Truman. Biden joked: “This is the 76th anniversary of this event. I want you to know I wasn’t there [for] the first one; I was too young to make it up.”He laughed at his own joke again and then, a little uneasily, laughed some more. This was not vintage comedy.The president had rambled about being used to chickens in Delaware. Nodding to the derivation of their names from the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, he suggested the 20-week-old, 42lb birds have a new appreciation for the words “Let Freedom Ring”. Turning to the turkeys’ home, Minnesota, he said he would like see them play ice hockey.Things really went downhill when Biden said the turkeys beat tough odds and competition to reach the White House, comparing the feat to getting tickets to Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour or Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour but calling the latter Britney, presumably confusing Swift with Britney Spears.“They had to work hard to show patience and be willing to travel over a thousand miles. You could say it’s even harder than getting a ticket to the Renaissance tour or – or Britney’s tour. She’s down in … it’s kind of warm in Brazil right now.”In short, this is a president who flies into war zones but he failed the Swiftie test.There was mystified silence from Biden’s audience, including a group of schoolchildren, who might have been thinking there goes grandpa again. The internet may have crashed as Republican operatives and rightwing media types scrambled to post the clip. Things could only have got worse if the president’s bitey German shepherd, Commander, had shown up with a taste for turkey.One of the gobblers was then brought to a podium decorated with pumpkins and autumnal colours. “That’s a big bird, man, I’m impressed,” Biden observed, raising his right hand and declaring: “I hereby pardon Liberty and Bell! All right. Congratulations, birds.”There were cheers from a crowd of a couple of hundred people including transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg and family. Biden concluded “on a serious note” about Thanksgiving – “we have so much to be thankful for as a nation” – and went to greet the schoolchildren as a band played jolly festive tunes. Asked by a reporter if a hostage deal is near in Israel, he replied, “I believe so,” and crossed his fingers.A few minutes later he broke into a half-trot and went inside, back to a world of cares and likely election rematch with Trump. No one seemed to have thought about bringing him a birthday cake. Perhaps they feared it would look bad for Biden in those corners of the media where 81 candles are an impeachable offence but 91 indictments? Not so much. More

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      Cardi B drops support for Biden over military aid to Ukraine and Israel

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      Three years after supporting Joe Biden’s victorious 2020 campaign, the straight-talking rap superstar Cardi B has ditched her backing of the president after public service cuts in her home town of New York.The Grammy winner, whose legal name is Belcalis Almánzar, said in an Instagram live stream she was done with Biden. Her tirade highlighted what she portrayed as contradiction between US domestic and foreign policies, saying the White House was helping Ukraine fight Russia and Israel fight Hamas while the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, announced a 5% municipal budget cut last week.Adams said the cuts would affect schools, libraries, the New York police department and the sanitation service, among others.As Cardi B said: “In New York, there is a $120m budget cut that’s going to affect schools, public libraries and the police department.“And a $5m budget cut in sanitation … We are gonna be drowning in … rats.”Adams warned last week that more cuts would be necessary without additional funding from Washington to manage New York’s increase of migrants.“Migrant costs are going up, tax revenue growth is slowing and [Covid-19] stimulus funding is drying up,” Adams said in a statement.“No city should be left to handle a national humanitarian crisis largely on its own, and without the significant and timely support we need from Washington, today’s budget will be only the beginning.”But the Biden administration has not agreed to meet Adams’s funding plea amid growing domestic anger over the multi-billion-dollar funding of the Ukrainian defense against Russia’s invasion and Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza.An NBC poll released on Sunday showed that Biden’s approval rating has declined to 40%, the lowest level of his presidency. And the survey showed that strong majorities of all voters disapprove of his handling of foreign policy.The steepest declines of support came among voters aged 18 to 34 – 70% said they did not approve of Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza.Cardi B, who memorably helped promote Biden’s candidacy as he successfully ran for the White House in 2020, vowed that she would no longer endorse political candidates in the future.“I’m endorsing no presidents no more,” Cardi B warned. “Joe Biden is talking about, ‘Yeah, we can fund two wars,’ … talking about, ‘Yeah, we got it, we’re the greatest nation.’ No … we’re not. We don’t got it, and we’re going through some shit right now. So say it!”She added: “We are really, really, really fucked right now. No, we cannot fund these … wars.”Cardi B asked whether the US was going broke and then answered: “Yes, it is. We ain’t got McDonald’s money.”In a final rebuke to Biden’s economic and foreign policy management, she said: “Feed that … to somebody else, twinkle, but don’t feed it to me.” She then promised “to get to the bottom of it”. More

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      Rosalynn Carter: a life in pictures

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      Former US ambassador to Thailand Morton Abramowitz (left) and former US first lady Rosalynn Carter, a baby in her arms, speak to the child’s mother at the Sa Kaeo refugee camp, Prachinburi Province (later Sa Kaeo), Thailand, on 9 November, 1979.

      Photograph: Diana Walker/Getty Images More

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      Rosalynn Carter, wife of Jimmy Carter and former first lady, dies aged 96

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      Rosalynn Carter, wife of the 39th president Jimmy Carter, has died at the couple’s Georgia home aged 96.Carter, who became one of the nation’s leading mental health advocates during and after her husband’s time in the White House, was diagnosed with dementia in May.On Friday, her family announced she had entered hospice care at home, joining her 99-year-old husband in end-of-life treatment in the Plains one-story residence they shared since before Jimmy Carter was elected a Georgia state senator in 1962.The former president has been in hospice care there since February after declining further medical intervention for his own health issues.“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” Jimmy Carter said in a statement released Sunday afternoon by the Carter Center.“She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”The statement said Mrs Carter “died peacefully, with family by her side” at 2.10pm ET. An online tribute book is open at www.rosalynncartertribute.org.Chip Carter, the couple’s middle son, said: “Besides being a loving mother and extraordinary first lady, my mother was a great humanitarian in her own right. Her life of service and compassion was an example for all Americans.“She will be sorely missed not only by our family but by the many people who have better mental health care and access to resources for caregiving today.”The former first lady was born Eleanor Rosalynn Smith in August 1927, in Plains, a small rural town of fewer than 600 people where her husband was also born and raised.She was a fiercely loyal ally throughout his political career, both in the White House and during his years as a respected international diplomat after his single term in office ended in 1981. But she also forged her own identity for her mental health advocacy and as a social justice activist.She founded the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers in 1987, and remained active in the organization into her later years.The Carter Center, a human rights non-profit founded by the couple, paid tribute to her work in its statement earlier this year announcing her dementia diagnosis.“Mrs Carter has been the nation’s leading mental health advocate for much of her life. We recognize, as she did more than half a century ago, that stigma is often a barrier that keeps individuals and their families from seeking and getting much-needed support,” it said.“We hope sharing our family’s news will increase important conversations at kitchen tables and in doctor’s offices around the country.”Rosalynn Carter and her husband were also supporters of Habitat for Humanity, raising awareness and funds for the Carter Work Project named for them, and frequently tackling projects themselves as “some of our best hands-on construction volunteers”.One of the couple’s final public appearances was at the Plains Peanut Festival in September, days before Jimmy Carter’s 99th birthday, when they rode the parade together in the back of an SUV.Their families were already known to each other when they met while Jimmy Carter was at the US naval academy in Maryland during the second world war. They married in 1946, and helped run the Carter family’s peanut farm together until his political career took off.She wore the same gown to Carter’s 1977 presidential inauguration as she had when he was elected Georgia governor in 1970.The couple, who celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary in 2021, had four children, Jack, Chip, James and Amy. Their sons were adults by the time Carter was elected president, but Amy, aged nine, was the subject of massive media attention and became one of the most famous child residents of the White House. More