Setback for Republicans in redistricting battle as court orders forbids maps from being used in November elections

The Missouri supreme court has unanimously blocked new congressional districts backed by Donald Trump from being used in the November election and ordered a statewide vote on whether to uphold or reject the new map.

The decision Thursday marks a rare setback for Republicans in a national redistricting battle. Republicans had hoped Missouri’s new congressional boundaries could help them win an additional seat and hold onto their slim House majority in the midterms. The ruling still could be appealed to the US supreme court.

Firefighters hollowed out a dumpster truck and lifted a man from trash and debris after bystanders alerted driver to screams

San Francisco fire officials manually hollowed out a garbage truck early on Wednesday to rescue a man trapped inside.

Firefighters were dispatched around 4.11am after receiving a report of an individual stuck inside a Recology dumpster truck, authorities said.

Supreme court ruled in June against president’s earlier order to change citizenship rules for babies born in US

A federal judge has temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s latest attempt to restrict birthright citizenship – the longstanding principle that all babies born in the US are guaranteed American citizenship.

The decision came nearly a month after the president tried for a second time to limit via executive order which people born in the US can become American citizens. The supreme court ruled in late June that Trump’s previous sweeping order denying birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors was unconstitutional.

Project that critics say will disrupt historic sightlines in Washington DC is facing a lawsuit

The Trump administration said on Thursday that excavation work will start over the next two weeks on the site where it plans to build a towering, gilded arch, a project that is facing a lawsuit and that critics say will disrupt historic sightlines in Washington DC.

The proposed arch is one of several projects the Republican president is pursuing to leave his lasting imprint on Washington, including renaming and renovating the Kennedy Center, building a huge new White House ballroom, refurbishing the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool and rebuilding a golf course in East Potomac Park that could significantly reduce the public’s access to running and biking paths.

US vice-president says he’s ‘extremely skeptical’ of Iran reports when asked whether US was responsible for deaths

The US vice-president, JD Vance, said “sometimes things happen” when asked on Thursday whether an American strike was responsible for killing four people, including a child, at a wedding celebration in southern Iran this week.

The strike hit Kuhestak, a town in Sirik county on the strait of Hormuz. The toll was reported not by the Iranian government but by the Iranian Red Crescent, a member of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement that operates independently of Tehran and is generally treated by international monitors as a credible source on casualty figures.

Deadlocked jurors to return on Friday to see if they can reach a decision after dramatic day of deliberations

• Analysis: how ‘forensic fandom’ threatens postpartum psychosis awareness

The deadlocked jury in the Lindsay Clancy trial went home without a verdict Thursday in a dramatic sixth day of deliberations.

Her defense lawyer told the judge that the panel’s foreperson said in a note that a single juror would not follow the court’s instructions about reasonable doubt and was holding up a verdict.

Julio Sosa-Celis, who was shot in the leg by Christian Castro and survived, was one of three people shot by federal immigration agents during Trump’s ‘Operation Metro Surge’

A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer has been indicted on charges of lying to investigators about the events leading up to the shooting of a Venezuelan man during the Minneapolis immigration crackdown earlier this year, according to multiple reports.

A source told the Associated Press that Christian Castro, the officer accused of shooting Julio Sosa-Celis in the leg in January, has been charged by US federal prosecutors with making false statements to federal investigators. He had been previously charged in state court.

Liz Oyer says department fired her after she refused to recommend restoring gun rights of actor and Trump ally

The former pardon attorney for the US justice department, Elizabeth Oyer, filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the department and attorney general Todd Blanche, accusing them of “unlawfully” firing her last year after she said she refused to recommend restoring actor Mel Gibson’s gun rights.

In the complaint, filed in the US district court for the District of Columbia, Oyer alleges that in early 2025, while she was serving as pardon attorney, she was asked to “disregard her duties and facilitate a political favor” for Gibson based on his “relationship with President Trump”.

GOP-backed bill mandates institutions receiving federal funds not impose restrictions on programs related to Israel

The US House of Representatives on Thursday passed a Republican-backed bill that would penalize universities that participate in boycotts of Israel, or attempt to prevent students from taking part in exchange programs with the country.

The Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act passed by a 237-169 vote, with 33 Democrats breaking with the rest of their party to vote in favor, and only two Republicans opposed. It now goes to the Senate for consideration.

Guardian reporters in Nepal have witnessed first-hand the scenes of destruction and grief after the flash floods. Plus, a not-to-be-missed interview with the legendary Mr T

Good morning. Thousands remain missing and the delivery of aid has been hampered by treacherous conditions in communities almost wiped out of existence by the flash flooding in Nepal and Tibet. A week after the disaster, survivors who fled up mountainsides are still being collected by army helicopters and evacuated.

The mountain village of Syabru Besi was among those destroyed, with even the road to the village gone. According to local government officials, at least 500 people there are missing, a quarter of the population. The village resembles nothing more than a muddy riverbed, with just one building left standing.

What have Guardian reporters witnessed? Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Gaurav Pokharel have been in the Betrawati and Rasuwa districts with the photographer Ahmer Khan. In this video, Ellis-Petersen explains what she has seen alongside haunting footage of the debris. They have spoken to multiple survivors in a region now full of human suffering.

Judge says US Postal Service has told her nothing about how it plans to regulate mail ballots for midterm elections

A federal judge in Boston said on Thursday the US Postal Service had told her nothing about how it would implement a plan to regulate mail ballots for the midterms as she considers whether to let the plan proceed in the weeks before election day.

US district court judge Indira Talwani is deciding whether to extend her prohibition on the proposed regulation of mail ballots, an effort undertaken as part of an executive order by Donald Trump. The hearing in the closely watched case came a day before the first state begins sending mail ballots to voters.

President said Howard Lutnick had Venezuela operation on his mind when he was discussing Iran war on CNBC

Donald Trump has claimed his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, erroneously stated that no Americans had been killed in the war with Iran because he was thinking about a previous US operation, in Venezuela.

The claim, at odds with the Pentagon’s count of 18 US service members dead in the US-Israel war on Iran, sparked a swift backlash as Trump struggles to end the conflict after six months.

Billionaire financier, who previously walked out of a deposition, instead launches lawsuit against the committee

The billionaire financier Leon Black did not appear on Thursday in front of the House oversight committee for a scheduled deposition about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and has instead launched a lawsuit against the committee arguing that it does not have the authority to compel him to turn over non-disclosure agreements.

Black was a top Epstein client over several years, and the committee is investigating the men’s relationship as well as the existence of any NDAs to which Black is a party.

Wildfire victims rebuilt their homes in Lahaina only to find USPS had ‘eliminated’ their addresses – while houses that didn’t burn receive mail as normal

Two months after a devastating wildfire whipped through Lahaina in August 2023, Pam Reader was allowed back to see what was left of her home. With a heavy heart, she returned to the Hawaiian oceanside town now filled with endless blocks of burned houses. As she rounded her corner, she saw the only thing remaining was her bright turquoise mailbox.

“It was an old crappy mailbox,” Reader said. “It was metal, though, which is why I think it survived.”

In rural America, guns are a fact of life. But even conservatives agree that properly locking them up is crucial in preventing deaths

I have six guns in my house.

The first was a vintage Winchester 12-gauge. It was the winter of 1990, and my husband and I had just moved from an urban block in north-west Philadelphia to a 100-year-old farmhouse in Appalachian Virginia, where my family goes back seven generations.

The writer, publisher and activist spent a lifetime advocating for greater rights for women around the world and brought feminist discourse into the mainstream

• Gloria Steinem, groundbreaking feminist campaigner, dies aged 92

Non-profits say requests for legal help and housing on rise amid Trump funding cuts for prevention and response

As cities and states across the US report historic drops in homicides, domestic violence killings remain alarmingly high.

In Chicago, where homicides fell from 805 in 2021 to 425 in 2025, killings tied to domestic violence increased by 15% between 2024 and 2025. In Kansas City, Missouri, homicides in general have dropped since 2023, but 2025 was the second deadliest year for homicides tied to domestic violence. In Ohio, too, 2025 was the deadliest year for domestic violence killings, while homicides in general followed the national decrease. Across the US, the share of violent crimes that involve domestic violence has increased from 25% in 2020 to 27.5% in 2024, according to a 2026 FBI report.

Cull of animals that eat native shrubs, causing spread of fast-igniting grasses, to go ahead despite fierce opposition

Locals and tourists have long fawned over Catalina Island’s mule deer population. For nearly a century, the ungulates have roamed the land’s waterfronts and woodlands, so comfortable around humans that it is not uncommon to spot deer roaming downtown Avalon.

But that sight will soon disappear, after a judge this week paved the way for the island’s conservancy to kill nearly all the island’s 2,000 deer.

The trillions in tax cuts going to the rich and corporations could have instead been used to address the affordability crisis

Dear reader, I recognize that your eyes might glaze over at any mention of the nation’s $40tn federal debt. But your reaction to this mind-boggling number shouldn’t be ennui; it should be outrage and dismay.

Outrage is in order because the nation’s debt has climbed to more than $40tn under Donald Trump, even though back in 2016, when the debt was less than half what it is today, candidate Trump insisted that he’d totally eliminate the debt within eight years. That was yet another example of the Demagogue-in-Chief’s willingness to say anything, no matter how insincere or untrue, to woo voters.

Mitchell Berman is among Democrats the party hopes can flip a Republican-leaning district in November’s midterms

Democrats are targeting vulnerable seats this midterm election with working-class candidates they hope will resonate with voters exhausted by the economy.

Some candidates are new to politics, and many have backgrounds as union members and leaders, which the party hopes will give them an edge over Republican incumbents as people have grown weary of Washington and the higher cost of living.

Marx’s All Things Possible Florida model uses private funds for cop pay and surveillance tools without public oversight

The All Things Possible ministry (ATP) is an unusual, and critics say potentially dangerous, operation. It has in the last year funded surveillance equipment and salaries for out-of-state law enforcement agencies, hired a range of private security and intelligence contractors, and is connected to a network of other self-appointed sex-trafficking rescue groups whose leading figures have attracted significant controversy.

And its founder is the man who wants to be Colorado’s next governor.

Justice department files emergency request seeking to have court lift Judge Indira Talwani’s order temporarily blocking postal service from implementing plan

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Republican oversight chair James Comer has also weighed in on Leon Black not sitting for a deposition about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. The billionaire financier, who has denied wrongdoing, filed suit against the oversight committee Thursday alleging the subpoenas were improper.

“It’s a shame Leon Black is hiding behind litigation rather than provide answers to the American people. Our investigation is examining how the federal government for decades failed survivors of Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s crimes and how Mr. Epstein sought to curry favor with influential individuals to avoid scrutiny,” Comer said in a statement. “Mr. Black’s testimony is crucial to our investigation as he was one of Mr. Epstein’s fee paying clients and has several nondisclosure agreements.”

Donald Trump posted his own presidential rankings to Truth Social last week, separating past US presidents into six categories from ‘greatest’ to ‘failures’

Donald Trump has declared himself to be the “greatest” US president ever, sharing a post on social media last week which graded him above the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D Roosevelt and George Washington. Experts take a different view.

Few presidential historians have previously suggested Trump holds such a place in the history books. After all, neither Lincoln, nor Roosevelt, nor Washington – the three leaders typically seen as America’s best – orchestrated an insurrection. None were impeached. And none of them were convicted of felonies over hush-money payments to a pornstar-turned-ghost hunter.

Trump administration has indefinitely stranded hundreds of kids and lawyers from over 50 organizations are fighting for their release

An army of attorneys is rallying to free hundreds of children from immigration custody, where they have been stranded indefinitely by the Trump administration without their parents or loved ones, the Guardian can reveal.

The effort is a counter strike to what critics see as unprecedented moves by federal officials to ride roughshod over children’s rights and increase deportations – while in the meantime corralling them in conditions that can allegedly lead to psychological harm.

As the Trump administration refuses to end its war in Iran, it is steering into the storm, not out of it

Russia hasn’t yet killed large numbers of Europeans outside Ukraine, but it’s getting closer. The night of 4-5 August, an airport bus driver discovered an armed drone lying near the tarmac of the Leipzig-Halle airport, which is a central hub of Europe’s logistical support to Ukraine’s war effort. A cargo jet, meanwhile, may have struck a second drone shortly after takeoff, forcing an abrupt landing, and investigators found a third drone laden with military explosives nearby.

In 2024, incendiary devices hidden in parcels ignited in DHL cargo at the same airport. Had these detonated in the air, a major air catastrophe and large-scale civilian casualties would have ensued, probably resulting in a broader war.

The city’s police department and mayor warn the public to stay away from the Loring Park neighborhood nearby

Two people were killed and the suspect was dead after a shooting at an apartment building in downtown Minneapolis on Wednesday afternoon, officials said.

One shooting victim died at the scene. A second died after arriving at Hennepin county medical center, a hospital spokesperson said.

Black called on to comply with subpoenas and appear as required to clarify connections to convicted sex offender

More than a dozen survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse have called on the billionaire Leon Black to appear before the House oversight committee in order to clarify his connections to the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender.

In a letter released on Wednesday, the survivors urged Black to comply with congressional subpoenas ahead of Thursday’s deposition before the House oversight committee.

• Team circumvented salary cap rules to sign star

• Owner Steve Ballmer lands one-year ban

The NBA has handed down one of the biggest punishments in the history of the league to the Los Angeles Clippers after finding that the franchise circumvented salary cap rules when it courted Kawhi Leonard as a free agent.

The league has stripped the team of five first-round draft picks, giving the team no natural pick in the draft from 2029 through 2033.

President’s order strips nearly 3m acres of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, sacred tribal sites, of safeguards

Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and gear company, has joined a lawsuit challenging Donald Trump’s decision to significantly reduce the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, removing protections from nearly 3m acres.

In July, the president approved the reduction of the sites by 90%, clearing the way to open the land to oil and gas companies. He argued in his proclamations that doing so would allow lands to be “put to a higher-priority use” and that they contained critical minerals important to “resource independence …[and] national security”.

Police officer who fatally shot unarmed 22-year-old Glenwood Pysher IV faces voluntary manslaughter charge

A Pennsylvania police officer was charged on Tuesday with voluntary manslaughter for last week’s fatal shooting of a college student who was looking for his friends late at night and went to the wrong house.

Police body-camera video reviewed by investigators showed the officer yelled: “Drop to the ground,” then: “Stop or I’ll ...”. Before he finished the sentence, he fired two shots at the man who was unarmed and had his hands in the air. He hit 22-year-old Glenwood Earl Pysher IV twice in the chest, killing him.

New DoJ opinion says entire state government has duty to report, not just agencies responsible for welfare programs

The US Department of Justice has ordered states to expand how they report undocumented immigrants to the federal government, according to a legal opinion from Tuesday that reverses a policy that has been in place for nearly 30 years.

Under the new opinion, issued by the department’s office of legal counsel, any state that takes federal money through support schemes for low-income Americans, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI), must now report undocumented immigrants across its entire state government, not just through the specific welfare office that runs the program.

President praises late queen and King Charles but says duke and duchess treated royal family ‘with great disrespect’

Donald Trump has weighed in on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s move back to Britain, declaring: “I’m happy about it.”

“I was not a fan,” the US president told reporters during a question-and-answer session after a press conference with travel executives on Wednesday. “I had a very good relationship with the queen, really good. I got to know her very well. A really good relationship with King Charles – I knew him as Prince Charles and King Charles. I’ve known him for a long time.”

Vice-president says on evangelical podcast he would feel ‘not shocked if the antichrist was walking among us’

JD Vance has said he is “doing as much of God’s work as possible” and that he is OK “if that leads to the end times”, which he says “are coming”.

The US vice-president made the comments during a Monday podcast interview with Bryce Crawford, a 22-year-old evangelical host with over a million YouTube followers and videos featuring sensationalist headlines including “Preaching the gospel in Chicago’s deadliest neighborhood” and “Debating a ‘gay’ pastor”.

Senatobia, where white officer shot and killed Kohen Wiley, terminates chief who reportedly used racist slurs in texts

Late Tuesday, the city of Senatobia, Mississippi fired its police chief, Harold Vanderford, after it was reported that Vanderford regularly used racist slurs against Black people in his text messages. The town, which is about 40% Black, made national news earlier this year after a white officer fatally shot and killed Kohen Wiley, a one-year-old Black baby, while responding to a shoplifting call at Walmart. Officers fired into a vehicle, shooting the driver and killing the toddler, who was being held in his mother’s arms.

Though Vanderford submitted a resignation letter earlier on 1 September, the city’s board of aldermen unanimously voted to reject it and to terminate the officer instead. Vanderford’s firing came just under a week after the city wrote in a statement that, despite the messages, he would “continue to serve the City with the confidence that was placed in him at the time that he was appointed as Chief”.

Tech company submits to controversial Trump order to rename body of water amid US trade spat with Canada

Apple has renamed Lake Ontario as “Lake America” for US users of its Maps app, after an executive order from Donald Trump to change the name of the Great Lake amid his trade spat with Canada.

The Apple Maps app now displays the controversial new name for the lake, which sits between New York state and the Canadian province of Ontario, for users in the US. Apple users outside the country will still see the Lake Ontario name.

Experts have expressed deep concerns that the practice runs afoul of the fourth amendment’s right to privacy

Federal prosecutors have declined to say whether they secretly obtained phone records for the journalist Don Lemon using an unusual administrative summons, his lawyers said in a Monday court filing, highlighting concern about a controversial legal authority the government has claimed to gather information as it charged Lemon and dozens of others with civil rights crimes in connection to a January protest at a church in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

In January, officials served Verizon with an administrative summons for a log of Lemon’s phone records between 19 December and 20 January. The subpoena did not come from a grand jury, as is typical in criminal investigations, and also was not a court-approved search warrant. Instead, it was a unilateral request from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which said it was requesting the information under 19 USC 1509 – an obscure law that gives the department power to investigate records related to customs issues. Experts say the government is abusing that authority to gather records on journalists, activists, unions, non-profits and online critics, and have expressed deep concerns that the practice runs afoul of the fourth amendment’s right to privacy.

Paul Miller, an openly racist fighter, derided Ben Azoulay, and a spectator was ejected for waving a swastika flag

Democrats in Florida have condemned a professional mixed martial arts event in Orlando at which an openly racist fighter derided his beaten opponent as “a short little fucking Jew prick”, and a spectator was ejected for waving a giant swastika flag.

Anna Eskamani, a Democratic state representative running to become the city’s mayor, said Saturday’s event, and the assertion by city officials that they were compelled to host it, were unacceptable.

Jury to return for more deliberations on Thursday in case of mother accused of murdering her three children

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The jury in the Lindsay Clancy trial was dismissed for the evening on Wednesday without reaching a verdict, after nearly 30 hours of deliberations over five days.

Addressing the 12-member jury – made up of nine women and three men – Judge William Sullivan said: “I know it’s been a long day.”

In the US, the national maternal mental health hotline is 1-833-852-6262. In the UK, the Pandas foundation offers support via WhatsApp on 07903 508334. In Australia, the national maternal and perinatal mental health hotline is 1300 726 306

Various laws and 250 years of tradition prevent the likeness of living people from appearing on currency. Donald Trump and Scott Bessent don’t want you to worry about that

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Two hallmarks of Donald Trump’s second-term: the president’s enthusiasm for putting his name and face on things, and his cavalier approach to established law.

Today the president is once again combining both those interests, as the government releases a $1 coin bearing his image, an item of currency that scholars say should be illegal, but which is happening anyway. How many times have you heard that in the last 18 months?

While leaders focused on Hasan Piker, two of the party’s more conservative members salvaged a GOP measure that was poised to fail

House Democratic leaders have spent the past few weeks waging a bitter campaign against their own left flank over a leftwing streamer. On Tuesday, it was the party’s center-right who blindsided them.

Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, announced late on Tuesday that he had asked the Democratic caucus’s committee on caucus rules to consider punishing the retiring Jared Golden of Maine and Blue Dog Coalition leader Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington after the pair sided with Republicans on a procedural vote that had appeared doomed.

Top medical groups band together to ease confusion from Trump administration’s changing immunization advice

Leading US medical groups are urging people to get updated flu and Covid-19 vaccinations this fall, banding together on Wednesday to issue shot guidelines – and highlight the science behind them – saying they hope to ease confusion caused by the Trump administration’s changing advice.

Flu vaccinations are beginning and the latest coronavirus shots are starting to arrive after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved this year’s updated versions last week. Winter also brings another vaccine-preventable risk called RSV.

Climate experts warn that US Kalshi and Polymarket users are ‘gamifying disasters’ as they bet on events like heatwaves and daily temperatures

Online prediction markets, saturated by money staked on sport, crypto and politics, have now set their sights on a promising new area of growth: betting on the future livability of the planet itself.

The rise of gamified predictions on the unfolding climate crisis, and shorter-term weather forecasts, has been underscored by a new deal that allows Kalshi, a leading online financial exchange, to access data from the Weather Company, owner of the Weather Channel, to verify weather-related betting outcomes.

US defense secretary faces backlash for attempting to mock Canada’s armed forces amid trade war

A social media post by Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defense, body-shaming female members of a Canadian youth development program remained online on Wednesday despite a furious backlash on both sides of the border.

On Monday night, Hegseth posted on X a photograph of two people in uniform with a Canadian flag and the caption “this is real”, an apparent attempt at mocking the country’s armed forces amid the Trump administration’s trade spat with its northern neighbor.

Whether or not US president fits the definition of a Russian asset, his actions align closely with the Kremlin’s interests

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Could Donald Trump be a Russian asset? The headline on a review in the Guardian of my new book Betrayal has provoked heated international debate. Written by the historian Lawrence Freedman, the piece generated thousands of comments from across Europe and beyond on social media. Many people responded with a single word: “Duh!”

Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin is the biggest mystery in international politics. In 2017 I wrote a book called Collusion, which set out Moscow’s operation to support and cultivate Trump, going back decades. The US president, of course, denies links with Russia. But in his second term, his behaviour towards Putin has been as weird and perplexing as during his first.

‘Where the wealthiest country in the world allocates money has always been a question of political will over political way’

The United States once led most other nations on resettling refugees from all over the world. But in the fiscal year 2025- 2026, except for three people from Afghanistan, all of the 10,258 people admitted through resettlement were white South Africans.

But admitting en masse the beneficiaries of South African apartheid, while simultaneously cancelling temporary protected status (TPS) for 350,000 Haitians, and making a spectacle of detaining and shackling them, is just the tip of the racist iceberg: the Trump administration is reportedly using this moment to double the initial resettlement support that refugees receive to $4,500 per person.

Providers like Project:Camp offer emergency education and care to families in Washington state as climate change brings more destructive weather

One week after evacuating from the wildfires that devastated parts of this eastern Washington city, Mareesha Backman handed over her youngest son to a stranger and took her first deep breath of relief.

Spokane public schools was hosting what has become a growing part of disaster response: a day camp for children of survivors. Backman showed up that first day feeling “stunned,” she said: hot, poorly showered and underslept. Thanks to the camp’s volunteers, she was able to go to a doctor’s appointment, run errands and simply sit in the air-conditioned quiet of a friend’s home.

New law requires cosmetology classes to give instruction on all hair types from the kinkiest to the straightest

As of 1 September, a new law in New York state requires hairdressers studying cosmetology to be trained to work with all hair types.

“This is about equal access to service,” assembly member Michaelle Solages, who sponsored the law, said in a statement earlier this year. “No New Yorker should ever walk into a salon and be turned away or receive substandard care because of their hair texture. Now, with the adoption of this legislation, they won’t have to.”

US Central Command has released footage that purportedly shows missile and drone strikes being fired at Iranian military targets. Footage of some of the aftermath of the US attacks was shared on social media, showing shrapnel damage on a home in Sirik, southern Iran, where a wedding celebration was taking place. Since publication of this video, Iranian state media has revised the death toll to four people. Iran retaliated shortly afterwards, with video shared by Iranian media said to show missiles being fired towards Jordan.

A US Central Command spokesperson said the US was aware of reports of civilian casualties, but that the 'US military never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps]'

• Iran accuses US of ‘war crime’ after missile blast kills five people at wedding

Woman from Reno was swimming near Hidden beach when river otter attacked her, Tahoe’s second incident in a month

A swimmer at Lake Tahoe in Nevada was bitten by a river otter and needed to get 38 stitches for her wounds as well as rabies shots, local media have reported.

Lynnette Bellin from Reno was swimming near Hidden beach on the Nevada side of the popular tourist attraction on Sunday when she was attacked by the creature.

US energy department warns of potential for outages in PJM Interconnection, serving 67 million from DC to Chicago

The risk ⁠of power outages ⁠is expected to ​escalate across a broad swath of the United States on Wednesday as intense heat will test the capacity of electricity supplies ⁠serving millions of homes and businesses from the midwest through the mid-Atlantic.

The US Department of Energy warned of the potential for heightened blackout risks in ⁠the PJM Interconnection, the largest US electric grid, which serves 67 million people in ​a territory stretching from Washington DC to ‌Chicago.