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Unprecedented raid elevates concern that the president will seek to interfere in this year's midterm elections - key US politics stories from 10 February 2026 at a glanceWhen the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the Fulton county election office in Georgia last month, the decision was based on debunked claims from election deniers and came after a referral from a White House lawyer who tried to overturn the 2020 election, a search warrant affidavit unsealed on Tuesday reveals.The FBI's investigation originated" from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, an attorney who sought to overturn the 2020 election and contacted justice department officials to urge them to file a motion at the US supreme court to nullify the election. Olsen began working at the White House last year to investigate supposed election fraud. Continue reading...

Moderna requests meeting to discuss refusal as decision could have implications for all new and updated vaccinesUS regulators will not review Moderna's request to license a new, potentially more effective flu shot - even though the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) previously gave the green light to the project - in a decision that could have implications for all new and updated vaccines in the US.It's the latest move by the Trump administration against vaccines. Officials in January decided to stop fully recommending one-third of routine childhood vaccines, including flu vaccines. Continue reading...

Ronald Palmer Heath killed a traveling salesman in 1989; last year the state had a record 19 executionsA man convicted of killing a traveling salesman he and his brother had met at a bar has become the first person executed in Florida this year.Ronald Palmer Heath, 64, was pronounced dead at 6.12pm on Tuesday after a three-drug injection at the Florida state prison near Starke. Heath was convicted of first-degree murder, robbery with a deadly weapon and other charges in the 1989 killing of Michael Sheridan. Continue reading...

Three-year-old black coat female, known as BEY03F, crossed into LA county around 6am on 7 FebruaryA gray wolf wandered into Los Angeles county for the first time in more than a century on Saturday morning.This is the most southern verified record of a gray wolf in modern times," Axel Hunnicutt, gray wolf coordinator for the California department of fish and wildlife, said. Continue reading...

In a floor speech, Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative, revealed identities of six men after seeing unredacted filesRo Khanna, the US congressman, publicly revealed the names of six men whose identities were redacted from the Jeffrey Epstein files, including Leslie Wexner, a billionaire retail magnate, whom the FBI appeared to have labeled as a co-conspirator.The Democratic representative of California disclosed the names during a floor speech on Tuesday, following a visit to the Department of Justice, where he and Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, spent two hours reviewing unredacted documents. Continue reading...

Climate groups vow to fight rollback of 2009 finding determining CO and other greenhouse gases harm healthIn what is set to be its most audacious anti-environment move yet, the Trump administration on Thursday will roll back the mechanism allowing the government to regulate planet-heating pollution, the White House press secretary has told reporters.President Trump will be joined by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to formalize the recession of the 2009 Obama-era endangerment finding," Karoline Leavitt said at a press conference on Tuesday. This will be the largest deregulatory action in American history." Continue reading...

Elon Musk's younger brother and the woman were involved for about six months between 2012 and 2013Jeffrey Epstein engineered an intimate relationship between a woman in his network and Kimbal Musk, who is the brother of Elon Musk and on the board of directors at Tesla, according to emails from the Department of Justice's recent release of documents involving the convicted sex offender. The younger Musk and the woman were involved for around six months between 2012 and 2013, with Kimbal Musk describing them as dating".In the lead-up to Musk and the woman's first meeting, Epstein and his longtime associate Boris Nikolic labored to set them up and bring her to a birthday party Musk was throwing - with Nikolic telling Epstein: please prepare [the woman] -;)" Continue reading...

The Democratic congressman Ro Khanna read out the names of six wealthy men included in the Jeffrey Epstein files.In a post on X at lunchtime, Khanna, of California, named the six as Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze, Leonic Leonov, Nicola Caputo, Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem and Leslie Wexner. He said he and his Republican colleague Thomas Massie had forced the Department of Justice to disclose the 'hidden' names.Reading the names in the House of Representatives, Khanna availed himself of protection from any defamation lawsuit by the speech and debate clause of the US constitution.

Series of meetings is mandated by $305m settlement agreement for 600 survivors of decades-long abuse scandalA small number of victims of New Orleans' Catholic clergy abuse scandal filed into a local church office recently for the first of 10 group meetings with Archbishop Gregory Aymond.The New Orleans archdiocese agreed to the meetings as part of settling its six-year-old federal bankruptcy protection case in December. Such group and one-on-one meetings are some of the non-monetary terms of a settlement that is expected to otherwise pay about 600 abuse survivors $305m. Continue reading...

The US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, said he met the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein twice after his 2008 conviction, backtracking on his previous claims that he had cut ties after 2005.Lutnick admitted he had lunch with Epstein on his private island in 2012 in testimony on Tuesday before the Senate appropriations committee.Democrats, including House members Ro Khanna, Ted Lieu, Melanie Stansbury, as well as Senator Adam Schiff, have called for Lutnick to step down

Democrat Ro Khanna and Republican Thomas Massie reveal names they say DoJ redacted for no apparent reason'

Kalshi says incredible weekend' after $145m in bets on Bad Bunny's opening song and guests during half-time showOnline prediction market Kalshi hit a daily record on Super Bowl Sunday, surpassing $1bn in trading volume, the company announced on Tuesday.Kalshi's CEO, Tarek Mansour, called it an incredible weekend", telling CNBC that Kalshi was the biggest brand of the Super Bowl this year, without running a Super Bowl ad". Continue reading...

Churches in Springfield provide networks of support as Haitians face uncertainty over the future of TPS legal protectionsAt morning services at Central Christian Church in Springfield, Ohio, on Sunday, congregants greeted one another with hugs and expressed gratitude for a rare piece of good news. Nearly a week before, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration's attempt to end legal protections for 350,000 Haitians in the US.The church is one of several in Springfield that provide services in Haitian Creole and has opened its doors to thousands of Haitians living in the small city in south-western Ohio. Addressing the ruling, pastor Carl Ruby explained in his sermon that during times of suffering, the silence of God doesn't mean the absence of God. Continue reading...

Collins is expected to face tough re-election battle as Democrats seek to flip seat in this year's midterm elections

Former police chief Michael Reiter claims Trump also said thank goodness you're stopping' Epstein in 2006 phone callDonald Trump slammed Jeffrey Epstein about two decades ago, claiming everyone has known he's been doing this", a former Palm Beach police chief claimed.Michael Reiter's account of a conversation with Trump, contained within the justice department's release of 3m Epstein files, dramatically contrasts with the US president's public statements. After Epstein's arrest in July 2019, Trump said I had no idea" when asked if he knew about his former friend's abuse of teenage girls. Continue reading...

From Pennsylvania to Montana, the White House's war on woke' has targeted US monuments that address topics like racism and Indigenous historyBlank spaces now exist where a series of panels about enslavement once appeared on the walls of the President's House in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The site, which honors the home of George Washington and John Adams, is a major landmark that bore artwork and informational signs for more than a decade. But on 22 January, National Park Service (NPS) workers used hand tools to pry off 34 panels to comply with a presidential executive order designed to reframe the national narrative. The panels that highlighted the lives of people enslaved by George Washington when Philadelphia was the US capital in the 1790s are now in storage.The removal is one of several across the nation, as NPS staff aim to conform with Trump's executive order Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" issued on 27 March 2025. Public markers, monuments and statues that the Trump administration considers disparaging to past or current Americans have been flagged at more than a dozen parks. Two exhibits at Montana's Little Bighorn battlefield national monument that discuss Indigenous history and the Battle of the Little Bighorn have been targeted and deemed noncompliant. Additionally, signage about climate change at Muir Woods national monument in California and visitor brochures at Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home national monument in Mississippi that referred to Medgar Evers's killer as racist were also removed. Continue reading...

The Puerto Rican star's vision of American identity moved beyond colonial tropes to span an entire hemisphereBy now, many of us have a favorite part of Bad Bunny's Super Bowl half-time performance. It's a dense, rich set that invites rewatching to take in every thoughtful, exuberant detail - even though it's barely 14 minutes long.My most beloved part occurs a little more than nine minutes into the homage, when the cuatro puertorriqueno appears. The stringed instrument has its own moment in the spotlight, shown in the talented hands of the cuatrista Jose Eduardo Santana just before Ricky Martin performs. Continue reading...

I glimpsed the monks on their 2,300-mile pilgrimage across America - their message of loving-kindness had me in tearsI'm obsessed with the monks," my friend Sam told me. It's the only thing getting me through the violence of this second Trump administration. The monks, and my meds."I nodded. I'd first heard about the monks walking for peace after my brother and sister-in-law traveled to hear them in Alabama, returning with stories of stillness and a grounded sense of hope. Continue reading...

Trump administration seeks to remove illegal aliens' but Uline's past employment practices reveal a different realityWhen JD Vance delivered a speech about the US economy late last year at a Uline facility in Allentown, Pennsylvania, he talked up the Trump administration's key goals: removing illegal aliens" from the country, rewarding companies that keep jobs in the US, and paying Americans good wages.We're going to reward companies that build here in America and give good wages to do it," Vance said. Continue reading...

The California governor has a record of failed pledges on housing, healthcare and more as he mistakes theatrics for leadershipGavin Newsom has stumbled upon the perfect slogan for his likely upcoming presidential campaign: Strong and Wrong." In a recent interview, California's governor said Americans prefer crude politicians like Donald Trump over leaders who cling to niceties and norms.Given the choice ... the American people always support strong and wrong versus weak and right," he said.Gil Duran is a California journalist and author of the forthcoming book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and The War On Democracy. He was an adviser to several Democratic politicians Continue reading...

Local police assisted federal immigration agents by repeatedly searching school cameras that record license plate numbers, data showPolice departments across the US are quietly leveraging school district security cameras to assist Donald Trump's mass immigration enforcement campaign, an investigation by the 74 reveals.Hundreds of thousands of audit logs spanning a month show police are searching a national database of automated license plate reader data, including from school cameras, for immigration-related investigations. Continue reading...

Moltbook, a social media site for AI agents, is nothing new. Still, the marriage of big tech and politics demands we take a standOn a recent trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, I was shocked by the billboards that lined the freeway outside of the airport. The singularity is here," proclaimed one. Humanity had a good run," said another. It seemed like every other sign along the road was plastered with claims from tech firms making outrageous claims about artificial intelligence. The ads, of course, were rife with hype and ragebait. But the claims they contain aren't occurring in a vacuum. The OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, recently said: We basically have built AGI, or very close to it," before confusingly qualifying his statement as spiritual". Elon Musk has gone even further, claiming: We have entered the singularity."Enter Moltbook, the social media site built for AI agents. A place where bots can talk to other bots, in other words. A spate of doom-laden news articles and op-eds followed its launch. The authors fretted about the fact that the bots were talking about religion, claiming to have secretly spent their human builders' money, and even plotting the overthrow of humanity. Many pieces contained suggestions eerily like those on the billboards in San Francisco: that machines are now not only as smart as humans (a theory known as artificial general intelligence) but that they are moving beyond us (a sci-fi concept known as the singularity).Samuel Woolley is the author of Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity and co-author of Bots. He is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Continue reading...

Jamie Raskin, House judiciary ranking member, says mysterious redactions' obscure abusers' names. Plus, RFK Jr accused of misleading Senate

The Seahawks' Legion of Boom terrorized opponents in the 2010s. Now a new unit has taken up the mantle - and delivered another titleSuper Bowl LX was a two-score game with less than five minutes remaining. New England had the ball on the Seahawks' 44-yard line and - after reaching the end zone in the fourth quarter, finally - that familiar sense of possibility. But that quickly vaporized when Devon Witherspoon knifed in on a corner blitz and jarred the ball loose from the Patriots quarterback, Drake Maye, mid-throw. Uchenna Nwosu snatched it in stride and rumbled 45 yards to the end zone, sealing Seattle's 2913 victory.That the league's top defense was able to punctuate this moment, more than a decade in the making, with an interception as the Super Bowl XLIX hero Malcolm Butler looked on made the Seahawks' revenge all the sweeter. They lived up to the Dark Side today," the Seattle head coach, Mike Macdonald, said of his defense. It's going to go down in the history books." Continue reading...

Small businesses across the Twin Cities are suffering and owners say Metro Surge' could be worse than Covid-19A man walked into Soleil Ramirez's restaurant last month and started to ask strange questions: How many people do you have on staff? Why are you so small? Stuff nobody asks," she said.The man then started talking loudly into his phone. I'm here doing a dip in a restaurant. There's not a lot of people here, so I don't know if it's worth coming," Ramirez recalled him saying. The encounter left her unnerved. Continue reading...

Some athletes at the Milano Cortina Games speaking out on the complications of representing the US abroad are facing hostility from homeSome US athletes at the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina are speaking more openly than at any point since Donald Trump returned to the White House, describing a complicated mix of pride and discomfort about representing the country while political tensions at home and abroad spill into the Games.The comments - and the fierce reaction they have triggered from political figures, online influencers and the president himself - have exposed a widening gap between how some athletes view their Olympic role and how parts of the political establishment believe they should use it. Continue reading...

Travel company reports lower demand for US amid signs Trump immigration crackdown is deterring travellers

Maxwell invoked the fifth amendment of the US constitution, granting her right to remain silent, as she appeared at a US congressional hearing on Monday. After the hearing, the House representative for New Mexico Melanie Stansbury said the Epstein associate was 'campaigning for clemency' after her attorney, David Markus, said Maxwell was 'prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency'. The US Department of Justice released millions of internal documents related to Epstein last month

Netherlands-based site uses public information and tips to reveal identities of agents involved in crackdowns across USIt started as a cheeky response on social media to the US secretary for homeland security. Months later, however, a Europe-based project to unmask US immigration and custom enforcement (ICE) agents has racked up millions of views and mobilised hundreds of volunteers.What we're doing is a reaction to a problematic regime," said Dominick Skinner, the Netherlands-based Irish national behind the website ICE List, of its mission to remove the anonymity that many of the armed federal agents operate under while deployed to US cities. Continue reading...

Other countries benefit from the Trump brain drain as administration wages war on academia and researchWali Malik no longer has to worry that a rightwing bureaucrat - or influencer - will decide his research is woke".He doesn't have to fear government retaliation for speaking his mind or following the science wherever it may lead. And like others who have left a polarized United States for the calmer pastures of Austria, he need not fear his lab being decimated because the president decided he wants to deport the people who work there. Continue reading...

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Judge rules that law discriminates against federal government because it does not apply to state authoritiesA federal judge on Monday blocked a California law from going into effect that would ban federal immigration agents from covering their faces, but they will still be required to wear clear identification showing their agency and badge number.California became the first state to ban most law enforcement officers from wearing facial coverings under a bill that was signed by Gavin Newsom, the governor, in September, following last summer's high-profile raids by ICE officers in Los Angeles. Continue reading...

Investigation in apparent abduction enters second week as deadline for purported ransom note demanding $6m loomsTelevision host Savannah Guthrie issued a desperate plea for anyone who might know anything about her missing mother to contact law enforcement on Monday, as the search for Nancy Guthrie entered its ninth day.We need your help," said Savannah Guthrie, eight days after her mother was first reported missing. Investigators returned to search Nancy Guthrie's Arizona home this weekend. They appear no closer to finding her, or identifying an alleged abductor. Continue reading...

President says Gordie Howe Bridge will open only when US is fully compensated' - and makes bizarre hockey claimAs Democrats prepare to force a vote in the US House this week on Donald Trump's tariffs on Canada, the president posted a lengthy diatribe on his social media platform in which he threatened to block a bridge connecting the US and Canada and made a bizarre false claim that increased trade between Canada and China would include a ban on Canadians playing ice hockey.Trump began his latest screed against the US's second-largest trading partner by claiming that everyone knows, the Country of Canada has treated the United States very unfairly for decades". Continue reading...

Report prepared by Munich Security Conference warns of suicide of a superpower' under Trump - key US politics stories from Monday 9 February at a glanceEurope has come to the painful realisation that it needs to be more assertive and more militarily independent from an authoritarian US administration that no longer shares a commitment to liberal democratic norms and values, a report prepared by the Munich Security Conference asserts.Polling commissioned for the report shows Europeans are increasingly willing to operate without US leadership and say it is no longer necessary. Continue reading...

Officials say rescuers searching for lone survivor after latest attack on what Pentagon says are suspected drug smugglersThe US military's Southern Command, which oversee operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, announced that it carried out another deadly strike on Monday, killing two suspected drug smugglers in the eastern Pacific.The statement said that the latest in what legal experts have called a series of extrajudicial killings by the Pentagon was carried out at the direction of" the Florida-based combat unit's new commander, Gen Francis L Donovan, who was sworn in at a Pentagon ceremony last Thursday. Donovan takes over after a US navy admiral, Alvin Holsey, chose to retire over reported disagreements over the boat-strike policy. Continue reading...

Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested as part of the government's targeting of students protesting against Israel's war on GazaAn immigration judge has rejected the Trump administration's efforts to deport Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University PhD student, who was arrested last year as part of its targeting of pro-Palestinian campus activists, her lawyers said on Monday.Lawyers for the Turkish student detailed the immigration judge's decision in a filing with the New York-based second US circuit court of appeals, which had been reviewing a ruling that led to her release from immigration custody in May. Continue reading...

Ranking member of House judiciary panel said mysterious redactions' in files obscured names of abusersA top House Democrat on Monday accused the justice department of making mysterious redactions" to documents related to Jeffrey Epstein that obscured the names of abusers, while also allowing the identities of the disgraced financier's victims to become public.Jamie Raskin, House judiciary ranking member, criticized the department after reviewing the unredacted Epstein files at a government facility in Washington DC on the first day they were made available to lawmakers. Continue reading...

Democratic representative says Epstein associate's decision to invoke fifth amendment points to White House cover-up'Ghislaine Maxwell refused to answer questions during a closed-door congressional deposition on Monday, prompting criticism from a House representative backing efforts to release Jeffrey Epstein investigative files.Robert Garcia, ranking member of the committee on oversight and government reform, said in a statement that Maxwell invoked the fifth amendment and refused to testify during her scheduled deposition. Maxwell's attorney, David Oscar Markus, also said that she invoked her fifth amendment right. Continue reading...

Former Trump adviser convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before House January 6 committeeDonald Trump's Department of Justice moved to dismiss a criminal case against his former aide Steve Bannon, connected to his refusal to testify before Congress relating to the investigation into the January 6 insurrection.The controversial hard-right strategist, an ally of Trump, was convicted in 2022 on two counts of contempt of Congress after refusing to appear for a deposition before the House committee that investigated the 2021 attack on the Capitol and declining to produce documents requested by the committee. Continue reading...

Today show host Savannah Guthrie posted a new video message on social media on Monday, saying she believes her missing mother Nancy Guthrie is 'still out there', and asked the public to report anything 'strange' to law enforcement. The 84-year-old has been missing for more than a week