US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has said he believed luxury trips taken with a billionaire Republican donor followed guidelines. A ProPublica report earlier this week said Mr Thomas had accepted vacations from real estate mogul Harlan Crow nearly every year for two decades. Supreme Court justices are required to file annual disclosures of gifts. Mr Thomas said that he had been led to believe that “this sort of personal hospitality” did not apply. According to ProPublica, the trips included several on Mr Crow’s luxury yacht and private plane, as well as a week spent every summer in the Adirondack mountains. One trip, to Indonesia in 2019, may have cost as much as $500,000 (£403,000), according to the non-profit news website. In a statement on Friday, Mr Thomas said that he had sought “guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary” and was told that “that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable”.(BBC)…[+]

A man has been jailed for 13 years and six months for abducting a four-year-old girl from a remote Western Australia (WA) campsite. Terence Kelly, 37, pleaded guilty last year to taking Cleo Smith from her family’s tent in October 2021. After a huge police search, Cleo was found alive 18 days later at Kelly’s house, minutes from her own home. Kelly was arrested and later admitted child stealing in a case which attracted global attention. Handing down the sentence at Perth District Court, Chief Judge Julie Wager said the crime displayed “the highest level of seriousness”. Kelly will serve more than 11 years before being eligible for parole. The court heard how Kelly kept Cleo at his house for the entire 18 days, in a bedroom with a door modified to be lockable from the outside. He turned up the radio to drown out the noise of Cleo pleading for her mother, the court was told.(BBC)…[+]

Johnson & Johnson has proposed to pay almost $9bn to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits it faces in North America that claim its baby powder and other talc-based products cause cancer. The healthcare giant said it still believed the claims were “specious” but was hoping the new settlement offer would help conclude its legal battle. The figure marks a big boost over the $2bn it had proposed previously. The new offer has significant support from people tied to the case, it said. The company is facing more than 40,000 lawsuits from former customers who say using its talc-based baby powder caused cancer, including some who allege the product contained cancer-causing asbestos. It stopped US sales of its talc-based baby powder in 2020, citing “misinformation” that had sapped demand for the product, applied to prevent nappy rash and for other cosmetic uses, including dry shampoo. Last year, it announced plans to end sales globally. Before that decision, the company had sold the baby powder for almost 130 years. It continues to sell a version of the product that contains cornstarch.(BBC)…[+]

As so often in the past, the latest scenes of violence at Jerusalem’s most important holy site for Muslims and Jews are igniting widespread anger. In one social media video, heavily armed Israeli police apparently use a rifle butt and sticks to beat Palestinian worshippers who had barricaded themselves inside the al-Aqsa mosque. Israeli police have released their own footage which seems to show fireworks thrown by Palestinians, lighting up the prayer hall. Pictures of the aftermath show overturned furniture and prayer mats scattered across the carpet. With tensions already running high in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, for months, officials and diplomats have been warning about the risk of a new round of violence in this sacred spot at a highly sensitive time.(BBC)…[+]

Finland has become the 31st member of the Nato security alliance, doubling the length of member states’ borders with Russia. The Finnish foreign minister handed the accession document to the US secretary of state who declared Finland a member. Then in bright sunshine in front of Nato’s gleaming new headquarters, Finland’s white-and-blue flag joined a circle of 30 other flags. Finland’s accession is a setback for Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He had repeatedly complained of Nato’s expansion before his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said by attacking his neighbour, the Russian leader had triggered exactly what he had sought to prevent. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that Russia would be “watching closely” what happens in Finland, describing Nato’s enlargement as a “violation of our security and our national interests”.(BBC)…[+]

The US military says a senior leader of the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) who was responsible for planning attacks in Europe has been killed in a strike in Syria. Khalid Aydd Ahmad al-Jabouri died in an undisclosed location on Monday, according to US Central Command. No civilians were said to have been killed or injured in the attack. First responders said a man was killed in a drone strike on Monday in opposition-held north-western Syria. The White Helmets organisation tweeted that an unidentified drone fired a missile at the man on the outskirts of the town of Kili, in Idlib province. “Our teams responded and took the injured person to Bab Al-Hawa Hospital, where he died,” it added. Pro-opposition Step News cited local sources as identifying the man as Khalid Abdullah al-Khulaif and saying that he was likely to have been a senior jihadist from the eastern province of Deir al-Zour.(BBC)…[+]

One person was killed and 19 passengers taken to hospital when an inter-city train collided with a crane and derailed outside The Hague. Emergency services said the train was carrying about 50 people when the train derailed near the village of Voorschoten. The accident was the worst on Dutch railways for years and King Willem-Alexander later visited the scene. Residents looked after some of the passengers with minor injuries. The crash happened at about 03:25 local time (01:25 GMT) on Tuesday, tearing apart the NS passenger train and bringing down one of the overhead power lines. A goods train also collided with the crane, which was being used for repairs to two of four railway tracks near Voorschoten. The person who died had been working for construction company BAM, a spokesperson confirmed. Some of the 19 passengers were in a serious condition. The passenger train driver was also hurt, but the goods train driver was safe.(BBC)…[+]

Malaysia’s parliament has voted to remove the country’s mandatory death penalty, potentially sparing more than 1,300 prisoners on death row. The country has had a moratorium on executions since 2018. But lawmakers on Monday overwhelmingly voted to remove the death penalty as the mandatory sentence for 11 serious crimes, including murder and terrorism. Judges will retain discretion to impose capital punishment in exceptional cases.  But for the most serious crimes, the courts will now hand down life imprisonment sentences of up to 40 years, or corporal punishment such as caning, lawmakers said. The reforms still need to clear the country’s upper house but are widely expected to pass. Speaking in parliament on Monday, Malaysia’s deputy law minister said capital punishment was irreversible and had not worked as a deterrent to crime. “The death penalty has not brought the results it was intended to bring,” said Ramkarpal Singh. There are 34 criminal offences punishable by death in Malaysia – 11 of which before Monday carried the mandatory death penalty. The new laws once enacted will apply retrospectively, allowing those on death row 90 days to seek a review of their sentences. There are currently 1,341 such prisoners in the country, more than 60% of whom had received a mandatory sentence according to an Amnesty International assessment. The legislative process of overturning the country’s death penalty began last June, when the former government under Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob announced it would abolish the death penalty as a mandatory punishment.(BBC)…[+]

Russian investigators have detained a woman in their hunt for the killers of pro-war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky in Sunday’s blast at a St Petersburg cafe. In video released by authorities – most likely recorded under duress – Darya Trepova is heard admitting she handed over a statuette that later blew up. But the 26-year-old does not say she knew there would be an explosion, nor does she admit any further role. Investigators said they had evidence the attack was organised from Ukraine. However, Kyiv officials said it was a case of Russian infighting. More than 30 people were wounded in the bombing in Russia’s second city. Tatarsky (real name Maxim Fomin), aged 40, had been attending a patriotic meeting with supporters in the cafe as a guest speaker late on Sunday afternoon. A video circulating on social media showed a young woman in a brown coat apparently entering the cafe with a cardboard box.(BBC)…[+]

The US space agency Nasa has named the four astronauts who will take humanity back to the Moon, after a 50-year gap. Christina Koch will become the first woman astronaut ever assigned to a lunar mission, while Victor Glover will be the first black astronaut on one. They will join Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen to fly a capsule around the Moon late next year or early in 2025. The astronauts won’t land on the Moon, but their mission will pave the way for a touchdown by a subsequent crew. The three US citizens and one Canadian were presented to the public in a ceremony in Houston, Texas. They will now begin a period of intense training to get themselves ready.  In selecting a woman and a person of colour, Nasa is keeping its promise to bring greater diversity to its exploration efforts. All the previous crewed missions to the Moon were made by white men.(BBC)…[+]