Sunday, May 19th
Last update08:13:53 AM GMT
The US Senate has approved a $95bn (£76bn) foreign aid package that includes military support for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
President Joe Biden is expected to sign the legislation into law on Wednesday.
The Senate on Tuesday evening backed the measure passed by the US House of Representatives on Saturday.
It includes $61bn in military aid for Ukraine, which the Pentagon says can start being delivered to the war-torn nation "within days".
It passed in a bipartisan vote of 79-18.
A Kentucky man charged for using pepper spray against law enforcement officers and who carried a Confederate flag while storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was sentenced Monday to over two years in prison.
Israel James Easterday, 23, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and 500 hours of community service. He was also ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution, according to a release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
Easterday traveled from Kentucky to the nation’s capital because he was upset with the results of the 2020 presidential election and then joined the mob to storm the Capitol building, per the release. He was among the group of rioters outside the East Rotunda doors of the Capitol building.
Rep. Summer Lee has won the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District, according to Decision Desk HQ, fending off a primary challenge amid frustrations over her views on the Israel-Hamas war.
A first-term member of the Squad and a rising star within the progressive coalition, Lee will go on to compete in the blue district in the general election, having withstood Edgewood Councilmember Bhavini Patel’s primary challenge.
Lee was a top target this cycle of Democrats and Republicans alike looking to oust the left-wing congresswoman from her western Pennsylvania seat. Her positions on the Israel-Hamas war, including calling for a cease-fire throughout the conflict and expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments, made her more vulnerable than other House progressives.
Ultimately, David Pecker decided to broker an agreement with Dino Sajudin, the former Trump Tower doorman.
“How did that come about?” Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass asked.
“I asked Dylan to negotiate a price a number, to buy the story and take it off the market,” Pecker said.
Dylan went ahead and there was two parts to this. The first part was our normal procedures is we have the source, the tipster, take a polygraph test…“Please don’t tell us any polygraph results,” Steinglass warned. “We pursued the story,” Pecker said.
The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, has said he was “horrified” by reports of mass graves containing hundreds of bodies at two of Gaza’s largest hospitals.
Palestinian civil defence teams began exhuming bodies from a mass grave outside the Nasser hospital complex in Khan Younis last week after Israeli troops withdrew. A total of 310 bodies have been found in the last week, including 35 in the past day, Palestinian officials have said.
“We feel the need to raise the alarm because clearly there have been multiple bodies discovered,” said Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for human rights.
She described bodies “buried deep in the ground and covered with waste”, adding that “among the deceased were allegedly older people, women and wounded”, including some bound and stripped of their clothes.
A 92-year-old retired Catholic priest charged with strangling a teenager and raping him in a New Orleans church in 1975 has short-term memory loss that prevents him from assisting in his defense, according to a team of forensic psychiatrists whose findings could influence whether one of Louisiana’s most prominent cases of clergy abuse is ever tried.
In a report which has not been publicly released but was reviewed Tuesday by WWL Louisiana and the Guardian, the psychiatrists said the priest – Lawrence Hecker – should not be tried for now on rape, kidnapping, crimes against nature and theft charges until he is re-evaluated later.
However, the report found Hecker’s mental health is good enough that he could recover his competence to stand trial after a relatively short time. It called for him to be re-evaluated in a matter of months, after he is given a chance to recover from various physical ailments and to be given treatment by the state’s mental health hospital.
The 68-28 vote in favor of the bill sent it to Republican Gov. Bill Lee for consideration. If he signs it into law, it would be the biggest expansion of gun access in the state since last year’s deadly shooting at a private elementary school in Nashville.
Members of the public who oppose the bill harangued Republican lawmakers after the vote, leading House Speaker Cameron Sexton to order the galleries cleared.
An associate of former President Trump told the FBI of advising Trump to return documents the National Archives was seeking nearly a year before agents searched his Mar-a-Lago home, according to newly unsealed filings.
The big picture: The summary of the unnamed associate's FBI interview was among a trove of documents that the judge handling Trump's classified documents case released with redactions on Monday.
Driving the news: The associate, identified in the filings only as "person 16," told the FBI that they had said to Trump while at Mar-a-Lago in Florida: "Whatever you have, give everything back. Let them come here and get everything. Don't give them a noble reason to indict you, because they will."
A Russian missile strike that broke in half a 240-metre (787-foot) television tower in Kharkiv on Monday is part of a deliberate effort by Moscow to make Ukraine's second largest city uninhabitable, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.
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