John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, delivered an urgent message to Aleksandr V. Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s F.S.B. intelligence service this week in a secret visit to Moscow.
Jes Staley made the comments to US lawmakers investigating his links to Jeffrey Epstein
The former Barclays boss Jes Staley has denied having sex with a woman dressed as Snow White, after being questioned about an infamous email exchange about Disney princesses with Jeffrey Epstein.
The comments were detailed in newly released transcripts from a closed-door interview last month with US lawmakers as part of their investigation into Epstein, who died in prison in August 2019 while awaiting trial on child sex-trafficking charges.
A charity tied to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s wife received the money from a state Medicaid settlement and diverted it to political committees supporting a cause favored by the governor.
Exclusive: Experts and former officials say accounts are running dry, and funding a war with no clear endgame is the main challenge
Donald Trump’s war on Iran has driven the US military into a severe financial crisis, with the US navy forced to transfer money from its payroll and other sources to cover the costs of combat, according to documents obtained by the Guardian, and interviews with navy officials, contractors and defense analysts.
The US-Israeli operation, which has depleted US munitions stockpiles and prompted retaliatory Iranian strikes that have wrecked strategic bases across the Middle East, is piling pressure on budgets across the military.
The jury in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial has moved into deliberations as jurors decide whether the 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse is criminally responsible for fatally strangling her three children in January 2023.
One wonders when, if ever, a US broadcast can win the same plaudits presenting the English league with a more American voice
There they were again, signaling with their unchanging faces and voices and their unchanging studio backdrop that another Premier League season had begun. On Friday afternoon, and again on Saturday and Sunday morning, Rebecca Lowe welcomed American viewers to what is somehow already the 14th season of the world’s most popular sporting circuit to air on NBC.
She was flanked, as ever, by her merry band of pundits, her gang of fellow British expats. The Robbies and the other ones. Also, Tim Howard as the token American, albeit one who spent 13 seasons of his goalkeeping career in the Premier League, deemed sufficiently English by osmosis to join the crew.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.
Move from USPS comes amid Trump administration’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting in November’s midterms
The US Postal Service (USPS) said on Thursday that new requirements for mail-in voting are now in effect as Donald Trump seeks to crack down on the practice. The move is expected to trigger a new round of legal challenges.
The Trump administration has sought to impose new rules requiring state election leaders to submit their voter rolls for inspection as part of a broader bid to increase federal government oversight over voting and elections.
Judge ruled Jeanine John Taele, discovered with firearm days before Trump visit, was unfit to face felony charge
A judge in California has suspended criminal proceedings against a man found with a loaded gun near Donald Trump’s golf course in Los Angeles, and instead ordered him to undergo a mental health evaluation.
Jeanine John Taele, 38, of Downey, California, was arrested for weapons violations days before the president spoke at a 5 August Republican fundraiser at the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes.
Thai navy says ‘routine’ visit’ will allow personnel to rest and recuperate amid reports of poor conditions onboard
The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier is set to make a temporary stop in Thailand next week as it heads back to the United States, Thai navy officials said, after spending more than 250 consecutive days at sea supporting US operations against Iran amid recent reports of poor living conditions and low morale onboard the vessel.
The Lincoln left the Middle East several days ago after being relieved by the USS George Washington, and is now heading home to San Diego. A Thai navy official told Reuters this week that the carrier was expected to make a brief port visit in Thailand next week for the crew to rest and recuperate before continuing their journey home.
Flights to the Caribbean nation will increase from once a month to once a week now that the Supreme Court allowed President Trump to cancel a humanitarian program.
Many Republicans are hoping for financial support from President Trump, whose fund-raising power in the party remains unmatched despite his low poll numbers.
A cutout of President Trump in Cypress, Texas, during the Republican primary run-off for Senate between Attorney General Ken Paxton and Senator John Cornyn in May.
Nigerian soldiers took part in a search-and-rescue exercise at the Maiduguri Air Force Base earlier this month. Nigerian forces worked with the American military to kill one of the Islamic State’s highest-ranking leaders.
Burnham has nothing to hide as he prepares to meet president he once called poisonous. It may actually win him more respect
It makes a pleasant change. Not so long ago, Keir Starmer was falling over himself in his efforts to keep things sweet with Donald Trump. Offering the US president a second state visit within minutes of meeting him. Everyone knows you should never put out on the first date: it only makes the other person think you’re a pushover. Sure enough, The Donald banked the marching bands and the Windsor silver service, made polite conversation for three days and then went back to trash-talking him.
Yet still, Starmer just sat there and took it. As if one word of criticism would be too much. Wittering on about the “special relationship” as if Trump gave a moment’s thought to the UK before he did anything. The rest of us wouldn’t have put money on the US president even being able to locate Britain on a map. It was only latterly, when The Donald chose to bomb Iran, that the penny finally dropped for Keir. And even then he looked pained by the apparent betrayal, as he resisted the calls of Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage to join in the war.
American talks life on the professional circuit and those making sacrifices for a pay cheque, often compromising physical and mental welfare
For Mackenzie McDonald the players’ push for greater prize money and welfare contributions from the grand slam tournaments could result in the difference between putting food on the table and making a decent living.
After 10 years on the ATP Tour the 31-year-old American is not pleading poverty, but knows that life on the professional circuit can be a hand-to-mouth existence, with players’ physical and mental welfare often compromised due to their desperation to get back on court.
Judge rules Christian Castro, accused of shooting man and lying about it, cannot be held pending extradition request
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer charged with shooting a man and lying about it during the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis was released from a Texas jail on Thursday, after a judge refused to order his return to Minnesota.
Christian Castro was released at the break of dawn from a detention center in Brownsville. He motioned his hand toward a few camera operators and a reporter crowding around him and quickly got into an SUV that drove off.
Adam Kalkstein compared administration’s order to ‘trying to teach the law’ without mentioning ‘the constitution’
The only climate scientist teaching at West Point, the US army’s military academy, was fired after he resisted an order to stop teaching about the human causes of the climate emergency, a lawsuit claims.
Dr Adam Kalkstein, a civilian professor of geography at the New York institution, was terminated after the spring semester this year, six months after a testy meeting with Brig Gen Shane Reeves, then dean of West Point’s academic board, the court filing said.
The state had sought to have the agent extradited from Texas to answer charges in Minneapolis related to an on-duty shooting that wounded an immigrant.
Letters obtained by Guardian and AP contradict testimony that 2019 visit to Samoa had ‘nothing to do with vaccines’
Newly obtained documents indicate that the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, lied during two congressional hearings last year, when he told lawmakers who held the key to his confirmation that a 2019 visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines”.
Letters obtained by the Guardian and the Associated Press contradict that testimony. In one he wrote to the Samoan prime minister before the trip, Kennedy explicitly said he wanted to study the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine in the Pacific island nation. In it, he used the words “vaccine” or “vaccination” eight times.
It’s about ‘kitchen-table populism’: focusing on Americans’ day-to-day economic struggles
This year’s Democratic primaries look and sound a lot more populist than usual. Brian Poindexter, a union iron worker running on a “workers first” message, won a House primary outside Cleveland. Sherrod Brown is mounting a Senate comeback in Ohio on the same “rigged system” message that has allowed him to outshine other Democrats in Ohio. Troy Jackson, a fifth-generation logger who built his career fighting corporate landowners, is the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine. And Josh Turek, a self-described “prairie populist”, is on the Senate ballot in Iowa.
In fact, according to research we’ve conducted through the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), more than 70% of 2026 Democratic candidates now rely on populist rhetoric in their campaigns, laying the blame for our broken system on rich elites of one kind or another.
Plane was headed for airport in Seldovia from Anchorage, and was submerged in water after the crash
A small plane carrying four people crashed into shallow waters next to a remote coastal town in Alaska on Wednesday, killing everyone onboard, according to officials.
The Piper PA-24 was headed for the airport in the small town of Seldovia after taking off from Anchorage, according to a statement from the Alaska department of public safety. Seldovia’s airport is about 136 miles (219km) south-west of Anchorage.
Good morning. Meta has agreed to significant changes to its Instagram and Facebook apps in a settlement that ended a landmark lawsuit. The agreement curtails a major trial in California and will require the social media company to pay up to $18bn. Meta agreed to establish safeguards for teenage users, including daily usage limits and blocks on night-time use nationwide in the US.
California and 28 other US states sued the $1.36tn (£1tn) company over allegations that Meta deliberately designed addictive products that hooked young people, leading to mental health issues, including anxiety, depression and suicide. As part of the settlement, the company denies wrongdoing.
What will be changing in the apps? The biggest alteration is that Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, is now required to make many of its safety limitations the default setting for accounts created by teenagers, a pivot from its previous opt-in approach to child safety. Nick Robins-Early and Johana Bhuiyan explain more in this piece: six key takeaways from the end of the Meta trial.
Will other companies be affected? Meta is putting the agreement forward as a precedent for other social media companies to follow. The company’s chief legal officer, CJ Mahoney, said: “Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution. We therefore call on our industry peers … to implement this new framework.” Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap face thousands more similar US lawsuits brought by families, individuals, school districts and other attorneys general.
Are campaigners satisfied with the result? Arturo Béjar, an ex-Facebook employee and whistleblower, said the outcome “is not an all-clear to say the product is safe. The limitations that are in the agreement are the equivalent of saying: ‘Well, you can smoke as many cigarettes as you can in two hours a day’. It doesn’t make the cigarettes any safer.”
How did it happen?As this visual guide explains, at 8.37am on Wednesday an enormous section of a glacier in the Himalayas sheared free and crashed on to the valley floor in Nepal’s Langtang national park, about 60km north of the capital, Kathmandu, near the mountainous Nepal-Tibet border.
Analysis by Institute for Policy Studies found that between 2019 and 2025, CEO compensation increased 41.4%
The average CEO of the US’s 100 largest, lowest-paying corporations earned 614 times more than their average worker last year, according to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
IPS’s latest executive excess report analyzed compensation at the 100 S&P 500 corporations with the lowest median worker pay. Between 2019 and 2025, CEO compensation increased 41.4%, unadjusted for inflation, twice as much as the median worker pay increased at these firms during the same period, at 20.7%.
As the US president struggles to end his war with Iran, and with his approval ratings hitting the lowest levels of his second term, he has in recent weeks posted a series of AI-generated images of himself alongside key historical American figures.
Ryan Mackenzie, running for re-election, is accused of ‘fabricating’ a career in the real estate industry
The Republican congressman Ryan Mackenzie has been accused of embellishing his résumé with private sector experience in real estate sales amid an acrimonious showdown over his Pennsylvania seat.
Mackenzie, who has previously been accused of lying about his age on Tinder, “was a real estate salesperson licensed in PA”, according to his LinkedIn profile, and biographies have consistently listed it has his former profession.
The senator’s remarks reflect a turning point in Democrats’ attacks on the president. What should we make of them?
Apparently, he likes to say her name with a French accent. “Na-tah-lee!” the president cries out, in that affected tone of faux-formality that one might use with a person they love but do not quite respect, and she comes running, her thin legs teetering on her heels.
Natalie Harp, Trump’s 35-year-old “executive assistant”, was an odd recurring character in the latest blockbuster Trump administration book, Regime Change, by the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. In the book, Harp features like a silent sentinel, ever present but eerily quiet as Trump rants and raves. It’s not exactly clear what the scope of her responsibilities are; though, as Jamelle Bouie points out, the fact that she evidently helps run the president’s social media accounts, which can sway markets and influence his foreign counterparts, makes her one of the most powerful people in the federal government.
On Wednesday, Trump officially signed a proclamation on Wednesday that suspends higher tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef imports for 90 days. This comes after backlash to the proposal – designed to lower grocery costs for Americans in the run-up to the November midterms.
Several Republicans – in states with sizable cattle farming industries – have criticized the policy, saying it is a short term solution that will stymie ranchers’ ability to rebuild their herds.
Four leading livestock and agricultural organizations also wrote a letter to the president on Wednesday urging him to reverse course.
“Flooding the market with discounted foreign beef is not the way to rebuild the American cattle herd, strengthen food security, or lower grocery bills in a lasting way,” the groups wrote.
Donald Trump will begin his day in Washington, before traveling to Houston, Texas where he’ll headline a Republican National Commitee (RNC) fundraiser, and help boost Ken Paxton — the state’s attorney general and Republican nominee for Senate.
A reminder that Paxton beat long serving Senator John Cornyn in the GOP primary earlier this year after receiving Trump’s endorsement. Paxton is set to face Democratic state lawmaker James Talarico in November.
Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is leading a group of Democrats seeking answers about violence against Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
A handcuffed Palestinian man being detained by Israeli border police officers during an army operation in the Qalandiya refugee camp in the West Bank on Tuesday.
The president’s pull with the party base has been clear and his resources are vast. But his low approval ratings make him a liability with swing voters.
President Trump campaigning with Representative Mike Lawler of New York in May. Republicans have to weigh Mr. Trump’s approval ratings against his popularity among his base.
The race was at its peak when American riders were regularly challenging for titles. Its return could help prompt a revival
After a decade-long absence, the beloved Philadelphia International Cycling Classic is set to return this weekend, with some of the world’s best bike-racing teams taking to the famous circuit around the city’s leafy Art Museum, Manayunk, and Roxborough areas on Sunday.
The race is one of just a handful of events on American soil sanctioned by UCI, cycling’s international governing body, and will feature squads such as EF Education EasyPost, Lidl-Trek, Lotto-Intermarché, and Jayco AlUla in the men’s race, and powerhouses CANYON//SRAM zondacrypto and Human Powered Health in the women’s event. It is classified as a 1.1 race, meaning it’s two levels below the top-flight WorldTour, whose races include the Tour de France, Paris-Roubaix, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
The Philadelphia Cycling Classic will be livestreamed on Channel 6 ABC, with the women’s race kicking off at 8.30am Eastern. The men will follow at 12.30pm. Of course, you could always trek to Philly and become part of the party yourself. I highly recommend snagging a spot somewhere along The Wall.
Tim Curry was a versatile performer on stage and screen who made his name as the flamboyant Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Curry’s best-known roles often required a considerable physical transformation, to the extent that he was unrecognisable in some of them. As Frank-N-Furter, Rocky Horror’s eccentric scientist, he was daubed in garish makeup and dressed in stockings and suspenders. In Ridley Scott's fantasy Legend, he sported giant horns and scarlet skin as the Lord of Darkness, and, in 1990, Curry was transformed with full-face clown makeup to play Pennywise in the TV miniseries It, based on Stephen King's novel
Czech pair beat Bencic and Cobolli in deciding tiebreak
Revamped event draws strong crowds at Arthur Ashe
Singles stars dominate after doubles specialists exit
To many who came to the US Open grounds this week, the showpiece of the mixed doubles championship came Tuesday afternoon, with the returns of Serena Williams (after four years away from tennis) and Carlos Alcaraz (after four months out with a wrist injury).
To the players who remained in the field after Williams and Alcaraz exited in the quarter-finals, the real highlight was Wednesday night’s final at Arthur Ashe Stadium, with its $1m in prize money on the line. Karolína Muchová and Jakub Menšík made the most of the spotlight, beating Belinda Bencic and Flavio Cobolli 6-3, 1-6 (10-6) for the title.
Goodell confirms review after Ohio prostitution sting
York pleaded no contest to two misdemeanor charges
NFL has previously disciplined owners for misconduct
Commissioner Roger Goodell said the NFL is looking into whether San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York will be punished for violating the league’s personal conduct policy after he was caught in a prostitution sting in Ohio.
“It’s being reviewed under the personal conduct policy,” Goodell said Wednesday at the owners’ meetings in Atlanta. “We’ll do that and when there’s something to be reported we’ll talk.”
Jes Staley told US House committee he also was at one point named a trustee of convicted sex offender’s estate
Former JPMorgan Chase executive Jes Staley told US lawmakers he repeatedly shared confidential and market-sensitive bank information with Jeffrey Epstein and was at one point named as a trustee of his estate, according to a transcript released by the House oversight committee on Wednesday.
These admissions come as lawmakers investigate the late convicted sex offender’s ties with political and business elites. Staley appeared before the committee in July as part of its investigation into Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, his associate. Transcripts from the meeting were released on Wednesday.
Only original 88 selections will earn Pro Bowl status
Players to be honored at Super Bowl week in LA
The NFL is ending the Pro Bowl Games after repeated format changes to its annual all-star event.
Beginning with the 2026 season, 88 Pro Bowlers will be selected but the NFL no longer plans to stage an AFC-NFC game, a flag-football matchup or an accompanying series of competitions. The players chosen will instead be invited to next year’s Super Bowl site in Los Angeles for an in-person celebration in February.
If jurors find Ms. Clancy guilty in the strangling deaths of her three children, they will choose among first-degree murder, second-degree murder and manslaughter.
Mark Paoletta, also a close associate of Justice Clarence Thomas’s, has been named by President Trump to lead the National Capital Planning Commission.
As the chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, Mark Paoletta will be tasked with vetting President Trump’s planned arch and other construction projects.
Democrat Eric Hafner, to be released in 2036, also ran for seat in 2024, securing spot on that general election ballot
A man who is serving time in a federal prison in New York advanced on Wednesday from the primary for Alaska’s lone US House seat.
Eric Hafner, a registered Democrat, also ran for the seat in 2024 and secured a spot on the general election ballot that November despite a challenge brought by the Alaska Democratic party.
Then House candidate joined Democratic Socialists of America in 2018 but didn’t renew membership after a year
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has rejoined the Democratic Socialists of America after not renewing her membership for seven years, amid speculation that she might run for president in 2028.
The 36-year-old New York representative and one of the country’s most prominent democratic socialists renewed her membership in the group’s national organization after reports emerged earlier this month that it had lapsed. Ocasio-Cortez initially joined the group in 2018.
Cadets walking near Pershing Barracks at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 2014. A West Point climate professor says he was fired for refusing to “defy science.”
Will Scharf has proved his loyalty to President Trump, even filming a TV ad in which he blows away documents from the president’s legal cases. His new role will be to provide in-house legal advice.
The owner of Surro Connections is accused of stealing over $1 million from prospective parents and using it to pay off gambling debts, take trips and purchase luxury goods.
The agency’s top spokesman is among those on leave, according to two Trump administration officials. The agency said three people faced a misconduct investigation.
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