State attorney general set 31 July deadline for documents relating to abuse of girls at Epstein-owned Zorro ranch

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) appeared to ignore a Friday deadline set by Raúl Torrez, the attorney general of New Mexico, to share information about the abuse of girls at a remote ranch formerly owned by the disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Torrez’s office asked the DoJ in February for unredacted files after he reopened a dormant criminal investigation into activities at Zorro ranch, a remote 10,000-acre property in desert scrub outside New Mexico.

Kaohly Her is accused of inappropriate conduct and creating a ‘sexualized work environment’ by senior officials

• US politics live – latest updates

A second senior police official in St Paul has alleged sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct by the Minnesota city’s Democratic mayor, Kaohly Her, following confirmation that an inquiry into her behavior was launched earlier this year.

The new claims were reported on Thursday by the Minnesota Star Tribune, which said it obtained further details of the mayor’s alleged actions that gave rise to the original complaint by Axel Henry, the police chief of St Paul.

Move seeking $3.25m in damages six months after mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie was last seen safe

Two men questioned early in the search for NBC’s Today Show host Savannah Guthrie’s missing mother said they will file a $3.25m wrongful arrest lawsuit against the sheriff who detained them, as the investigation passes the six-month mark this weekend.

Nancy Guthrie, 84, was last seen safe while at her Tucson, Arizona, home on 1 February. Authorities, including the FBI, believe she was kidnapped. But despite a number of leads and blood spatters at the house, no further trace of her has been found, and no suspects have emerged.

Trump’s overall approval rating slumps to 34%, according to new CNN poll, as midterms testing Republican power loom

Three-quarters of Americans believe Donald Trump is not paying enough attention to the country’s most important problems, and two-thirds think he places himself above the needs of the US, according to a new poll.

The CNN survey, conducted by the market research company SSRS, comes less than 100 days before November’s midterm elections in which the president’s Republican party is widely expected to lose control of one or both chambers of Congress.

Democrat Kaohly Her, Minnesota’s city’s first female mayor, allegedly sent inappropriate messages to employees

The first female mayor of St Paul, Kaohly Her, is reportedly under investigation for sexual harassment following a complaint filed by the Minnesota city’s police chief.

City leaders have contracted an outside law firm to conduct an independent inquiry into the allegations that Her, a Democrat who was elected in November, sent inappropriate messages to employees, including several members of the police department, the New York Times and NBC News said.

Lightning kills a New Jersey man as rescues, power outages and travel disruption hit region

Bands of deadly, extreme weather including torrential rain and high winds sparked flash flooding and tornado warnings in several north-eastern US states on Tuesday night and into Wednesday, knocking out power for hundreds of thousands of people and playing havoc with travel.

A 32-year-old man was killed on Tuesday afternoon in a lightning strike in Monroe township, New Jersey, authorities said.

Former rugby star Daniel Adongo allegedly overstayed visa but supporters say he needed mental health help

A former rugby star who became the first Kenyan to play in the NFL, was deported in June for a visa overstay and multiple arrests, according to federal immigration authorities.

Daniel Adongo, 37, spent two seasons as a linebacker for the Indianapolis Colts, playing twice, and was cut in 2015 after facing domestic violence allegations. His visa expired in 2016, but he remained in the US, a press statement from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said.

David Cifaldi slipped and his pole pierced him in the side, then walked back hours along the route he had climbed

A Montana man walked 10 miles to safety with a trekking pole speared through his torso after a fall during a hiking expedition on the state’s highest mountain.

David Cifaldi slipped on rocks close to the summit of the 12,803ft (3,902 meters) Granite Peak during the hike on 20 July with two friends. He fell on one of his two poles, and “by the time I rolled over, I kind of knew something wasn’t right”, he told CBS news affiliate KVTQ.

Astronauts for America liken effort to instill trust and faith back in constitution’s principles and democratic institutions to ‘making a course correction’

Orbiting 250 miles above the US in the international space station, astronaut Cady Coleman did not look down and see red or blue states, sanctuary cities or communities occupied by thousands of federal immigration enforcement agents in camouflage uniforms and automatic weapons.

What she saw was a single land, from Pacific to Atlantic, no borders or partitions, just a united America, and a population valuing its equality while convinced that what brought them together was far greater than anything that divided them.

Colt Gray, who was 14 at time of attack on Apalachee high school, admits 55 charges including four counts of murder

The wife of a teacher killed in a high school shooting in Georgia two years ago told a court on Friday that the families of the four victims had been handed “a life sentence of grief and trauma” by the teenage student who murdered them.

Shayna Aspinwall, whose husband Richard died at Apalachee high school, about 45 miles north-east Atlanta, on 4 September 2024, was speaking at the sentencing hearing for Colt Gray, 16, who earlier pleaded to 55 charges, including second-degree murder.

Court questions plan to offer male hormone treatment to cisgender troops while denying it to trans service members

Pete Hegseth’s controversial plan to screen older soldiers for testosterone deficiencies and offer them more of the hormone faced scrutiny this week from a federal judge, who ordered the Trump administration to explain a discrepancy with the treatment of transgender troops.

The US defense secretary announced earlier this month that male service members aged 30 and above would be checked to ensure they have the “right testosterone levels” to perform in the military at an optimal level.

In interview, billionaire says instead of running ‘Doge’ he should’ve ‘worked on my companies’ and shares extreme predictions

Elon Musk has admitted he became too consumed by politics during his volatile alliance with Donald Trump and his brief appointment as the president’s financial axman, running the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).

The world’s richest person, and briefly its first trillionaire after his SpaceX company floated on the New York stock exchange in June, made the confession in a wide-ranging interview with the Economist published on Thursday. He shared his positions on subjects from foreign wars to AI, and made a number of eye-opening predictions for the future.

Committee accused of trying to ‘weaponize’ justice system via ‘laughably weak and vindictive criminal referral’

Democrats have accused the US House of Representatives judiciary committee of a “baseless” and “vindictive” attack on former special prosecutor Jack Smith after it referred him for criminal prosecution for allegedly lying to Congress over his investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The committee chair, Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, wrote to the acting US attorney general, Todd Blanche, on Wednesday night, asserting Smith “made willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact” during testimony about obtaining phone records of a number of Republican lawmakers.

The $3 purchase was authenticated as a rare piece from Chamberlain’s final NBA season

An Oregon teenager admitted “I got very, very lucky” after a basketball legend’s jacket he picked up at a thrift store for pocket change sold at auction for almost $90,000.

Quinn Brown said he was in a Goodwill store in Portland in January when he saw somebody throw the bright yellow jacket into a clothing bin.

In Kentucky and West Virginia, rescuers freed trapped residents as states face catastrophic floods and damage

Tropical storm Bertha made ‌landfall in ‌St Bernard parish, on the Gulf coast south-east of New Orleans, Louisiana, on Wednesday afternoon, the ⁠US national ⁠hurricane ⁠center said.

The Miami-based forecaster ‌added that maximum ​sustained winds were estimated ⁠to be ​45mph (75km/h) ‌with higher ​gusts.

Sgt Michael Emmanuel Swinton died during controlled detonation, bringing total of US personnel killed in war to 17

The US military has identified an army soldier killed recently during a “controlled detonation” of a downed Iranian drone in Iraq as Sgt Michael Emmanuel Swinton, of Fayetteville, North Carolina.

According to a press release from the US defense department on Tuesday morning, the 30-year-old Swinton was supporting overseas contingency operations in Iraq – and he was “killed in action during a controlled detonation of a downed One-Way Unmanned Aerial System” on Saturday at Erbil airbase in northern Iraq.

US health officials say source of Upper East Side cluster has probably been eliminated after 76 people fell ill

An outbreak of legionnaires’ disease in New York City has claimed a fourth life, officials have said, as they again expressed confidence the source of the exposure had been eliminated.

A statement from the city’s health department on Monday said the outbreak, which was traced to cooling towers in buildings in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, had sickened 76 people – with 53 discharged after hospital treatment, and 12 others managing their recovery at home.

Three people reported injured after incendiary device allegedly thrown at building also housing ICE field office

Authorities in New York City are investigating an explosion on Monday morning outside an FBI building in lower Manhattan that reportedly injured three people.

Investigators said a person who allegedly threw an incendiary device at the scene was taken into custody. The FBI later released the name in a press conference, identifying the suspect as Andrew Arrabaca.

Bald eagle found hurt in California after fight with other birds, says group, as eagle called Jackie not seen on cameras

A beloved female bald eagle missing for several days in California’s Big Bear Lake is believed to have been found alive but injured after a fight with other birds, according to the advocacy group that operates a live, viral nestcam.

Friends of Big Bear Valley said on Facebook on Sunday that observers first spotted the eagle on the ground last Thursday, then witnessed it involved a “short ground altercation with two other subadult eagles” on Friday.

Changes inside the Florida international airport are hardly evident as state and county hold back funds for full remodel

One of Donald Trump’s most grandiose vanity projects, a multimillion-dollar makeover of Florida’s Palm Beach international airport into a self-aggrandizing, gold-plated transportation hub, is running into turbulence, barely a week after the first plane’s wheels touched the runway.

At first glance, the rebranding of the airport less than 5 miles from his opulent Mar-a-Lago resort appears to be complete. Its website bears the name and oversized logo of the President Donald J Trump international airport, and state transportation workers were quick to erect highway signs leaving drivers in no doubt where they were heading.