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After a week saturated with the endlessly repeated and parsed video of former President Donald Trump being shot at a Pennsylvania campaign rally, and the carefully choreographed four-day television show of the Republican National Convention that followed it, here was a dramatic news story that lacked the visual element in almost every way.

Because it was a summer Sunday afternoon, TV news’ first string wasn’t immediately available, giving opportunities to ABC’s Rachel Scott, CBS’ Kristine Johnson and NBC’s Hallie Jackson to anchor the initial reports.

Biden’s former White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, was in a studio after finishing her Sunday show, which put her in place to break the news about her former boss.

The networks quickly pivoted to talking about a Harris-Trump general election matchup, even before Harris announced — again, via a printed statement — about two hours after Biden’s endorsement that she would be a candidate.

That was a complete surprise, compared to the seemingly endless discussion that absorbed the political world during the past three weeks about whether the 81-year-old Biden could effectively continue as a candidate following his disastrous performance in a June 27 debate against Trump.

But Biden had repeatedly and emphatically insisted he was staying in the race, and the Sunday morning political talk shows featured surrogates pushing that line.

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Forty-eight hours is an aeon in American politics, especially if you are Joe Biden and the party that you lead, and a relentlessly growing number of your closest allies within it, are turning inexorably against you.

On Friday alone, at least 10 Democrats in Congress joined those who had publicly called for Biden to go, arguing that it was in the best interest of the party and the country given the threat to democracy posed by Trump.

Sending a message that would not have been lost on Biden and his team, top Californian lawmakers close to Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic speaker of the House, joined the chorus.

The Times reporter, Kenneth Vogel, disclosed on X that 30 minutes before the historic announcement was made, Biden re-election staffers were busily calling delegates pushing them to shore up his crumbling hopes by publicly declaring support for him.

We don’t know when exactly he made the decision, but it seems by late on Saturday Biden had finally come to the view that he had no choice but to repeat the words that so many Democrats had been telling him over these past exceedingly painful days: “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down.”

Members of the president’s family and some close aides were told that the end was coming on Saturday, but most of the campaign staff were only notified literally 60 seconds before the news broke.

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‘The tragedy of Trump’s candidacy is that, embedded in his furious exhortations against Muslims and Mexicans and trade deals gone awry is a message that America’s white poor don’t need: that everything wrong in your life is someone else’s fault.”

Vance may be an Ivy League-educated lawyer and venture capitalist, and a politician heavily backed by Silicon Valley billionaires, but he grew up in the decaying steel town of Middletown, Ohio, the descendant of hillbillies who had migrated in search of jobs.

Raised in poverty and within a dysfunctional family, Vance escaped by joining the marines, before studying law at Yale University, giving him entry into the highest echelons of American society.

The troubles tormenting working-class communities may partly be the product of globalisation and industrial decline but, Vance insists, speak much more to cultural and moral failings; workers given to indolence (“we choose not to work when we could be looking for jobs”) and a desire to play the victim.

That shift was emphasised by perhaps the most significant moment of the convention – not Trump’s coronation or Vance’s elevation but the speech by Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, the first address by a union leader to the RNC.

What is needed, rather, is an elite capable, unlike now, of inculcating the lower orders with an “understanding of what constitutes their own good” and ensuring, through cultural and religious constraints, that they don’t tumble into degeneracy.

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Democrats greeted President Biden’s departure from the presidential race with an avalanche of cash, donating more than $30 million online on Sunday and making it the single biggest day for online Democratic contributions since the 2020 election — with hours still to go.

The massive amount is based on a New York Times analysis of the online ticker of contributions maintained by ActBlue, the leading site processing Democratic donations.

With Mr. Biden gone and Vice President Kamala Harris building momentum to claim the nomination, Democrats went online to contribute at a startling pace.

The previous single biggest day for donations on ActBlue came the day after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away in September 2020.

The latest deluge is significant as the party seeks to recover from a month of political infighting and stalled momentum in the race against former President Donald J. Trump.

Party fund-raising had slowed considerably among major Democratic donors in the weeks after Mr. Biden’s poor debate performance.

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Parents of under-18s should be monitoring their children’s phones for nude pictures, according to the police chief for child protection, in order to tackle a “tidal wave” of online sexual abuse cases.

The new lead for child abuse investigations at the National Police Chiefs’ Council, assistant chief constable Becky Riggs, told the Sunday Times parents needed to report any intimate images of their children to police.

In October 2022, 16-year-old Dinal De Alwis killed himself after being blackmailed over naked images he had sent to a stranger, possibly in Nigeria.

While much of this abuse comes from adults targeting children, half of it is child-on-child crime and figures show the average age of an offender is 14.

In 2022, in England and Wales, about 5,000 cases involved children sharing naked photos of themselves.

We will work with parents and schools to avoid criminalising children where it comes with a degree of naivety, but we have to measure each case on its merits.”

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Along with the likes of the far-right media figures Alex Jones, VDare’s Peter Brimelow, and Milo Yiannopoulos, the white nationalist Richard Spencer was a prominent attendee that year, and he told the Washington Post that he and other extremists had enjoyed “one big, bourbon-fueled party” in unofficial side venues around the convention center.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s main stage convention speech on Monday night was full of falsehoods and distortions about immigrants and LGBTQ+ advocates and dog whistles about “globalists”, and it featured a gratuitous assertion that “there are only two genders, and we are made in God’s image”.

Just weeks earlier, Robinson told congregants at a church in the town of White Lake that “some folks need killing”, apparently with reference to perceived political adversaries , such as those who espouse “socialism and communism”.

The Guardian reported this week that one such speaker, the California lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, was greeted with a barrage of hateful tweets from Trump’s far-right supporters after performing a benediction with a Sikh prayer the same night.

His Turning Point Action Pac’s event last month hosted the likes of Candace Owens, the rightwing commentator with a lengthening history of antisemitic remarks; the Pizzagate conspiracy theory peddler Jack Posobiec, who has extensive links to extremists; and Alex Jones.

Blocks away from the conference, the Heritage Foundation, one of the richest and most influential conservative non-profits, reasserted its comprehensive Project 2025 plan to remake the US government in the radical right’s image, spelled out in 922-page document first issued in April.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — She’s already broken barriers, and now Kamala Harris could shatter several more after President Joe Biden abruptly ended his reelection bid and endorsed her.

A recent poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 6 in 10 Democrats believe Harris would do a good job in the top slot.

She spoke often about attending demonstrations in a stroller and growing up around adults “who spent full time marching and shouting about this thing called justice.” In first grade, she was bused to school as part of the second class to integrate Berkeley public education.

After graduating, Harris returned to the San Francisco Bay Area for law school and chose a career as a prosecutor, a move that surprised her activist family.

Months into her tenure, Harris declined to seek the death penalty for the killer of a young police officer slain in the line of duty, fraying her relationship with city cops.

In one memorable moment, she pressed now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on whether he knew any laws that gave government the power to regulate a man’s body.

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Microsoft has released a recovery tool that’s designed to help IT admins repair Windows machines that were impacted by CrowdStrike’s faulty update that crashed 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday.

The tool creates a bootable USB drive that IT admins can use to help quickly recover impacted machines.

While CrowdStrike has issued an update to fix its software that led to millions of Blue Screen of Death errors, not all machines are able to automatically receive that fix.

Some IT admins have reported rebooting PCs multiple times will get the necessary update, but for others the only route is having to manually boot into Safe Mode and deleting the problematic CrowdStrike update file.

Microsoft’s recovery tool now makes this recovery process less manual, by booting into its Windows PE environment via USB, accessing the disk of the affected machine, and automatically deleting the problematic CrowdStrike file to allow the machine to boot properly.

This avoids having to boot into Safe Mode or a requirement of admin rights on the machine, because the tool is simply accessing the disk without booting into the local copy of Windows.

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Soon after a Secret Service sniper killed the man who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, officers grabbed the AR-style weapon by the shooter’s body and started to record its make, model and any details they could glean.

The attempted assassination of a former president and current White House nominee gave the public a glimpse into “the time pressure that law enforcement, the ATF agents and our local police partners are under to solve these cases and advance the investigation,” said Steven Dettelbach, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The nation’s 80,000 or so operating licensed gun dealers are required to maintain their own records, with law enforcement agencies contacting the shops directly if they need to identify the buyer of a weapon used in a crime.

The identification of Crooks reflects a speeded-up version of the traces that occur hundreds of thousands of times each year when authorities find a gun potentially linked to a crime and discover it was purchased at a store that has since closed.

Last week, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) tacked an amendment onto the appropriations bill for the Justice Department, which oversees ATF, that would prevent the agency from using money to maintain digital copies of its out-of-business records.

Republican critics of ATF have proposed slashing its $1.6 billion budget by more than 10 percent, which Dettlebach said would impact efforts to maintain the trove of closed-business records and deploy agents to work with federal and local law enforcement agencies investigating gun crimes.

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The bodies of a couple who were on a sailing trip across the Atlantic Ocean have been found on a life raft that washed up on a remote Canadian island almost six weeks after they were last seen.

Briton Sarah Packwood, 54, and her Canadian husband, Brett Clibbery, 70, are thought to have abandoned their yacht and died before washing up on Sable Island – known as the “graveyard of the Atlantic” – east of Nova Scotia in Canada on 12 July.

One theory investigators are exploring is that the yacht was struck by a passing cargo ship that did not notice the collision, according to Canadian news website Saltwire.

Brett proposed to me in the main cabin of the boat.” The couple then married on Theros in 2016 and Packwood moved to Canada in 2018, purchasing land with Clibbery on Salt Spring Island.

In a video posted to their YouTube channel, Theros Adventures, on 12 April the pair named the trip the Green Odyssey, and explained how it would rely on sails, solar panels, batteries and an electric engine repurposed from a car.

In what would be their final post, the pair wrote on Facebook: “Captain Brett and First Mate Sarah set sail on the 2nd leg of The Green Odyssey on board Theros – GibSea 42 foot sailboat.

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JD Vance regaled the attendees of the Republican national convention on Wednesday with stories of his childhood – a life of poverty and struggle, surrounded by people who he said had found themselves at the mercy of economic downturns and forgotten by the country’s governing elites.

It was a remarkable departure from his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, in which Vance recounted childhood hardships but also laid out the bracing argument – articulated in the opening pages of his book – that “culture” and laziness, not economic circumstance, “encourages social decay instead of counteracting it”.

The steel mill, which remains a major local employer in the city of 50,000, once drew thousands of workers who migrated from the coal country of Appalachia, which encompasses mountain towns from south-western New York to northern Mississippi, to the industrial midwest throughout the 1900s.

The day after Trump shocked the world by winning the presidential election in 2016, Vance founded Our Ohio Renewal, a charity with the mission of working “with like-minded organizations” to “enhance economic opportunities [and] the common good of the community”.

On one hand, Vance has lined up alongside far-right firebrands such as the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on a bill that would see certain gender-affirming care for minors criminalised, and another banning the federal government from instituting mask mandates in places such as schools or public transportation.

“Vance’s description of a Jackson, Kentucky, where ‘people are hardworking, except of course for the many food-stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work,’” Neema Avashia wrote last week, “allowed liberals and conservatives alike to write Appalachia off as beyond saving, and its problems as self-created, and thus, deserved.”

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“Our view of the length and severity of the economic downturn has deteriorated considerably from the assumptions used last quarter.” – Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Sharf, Tuesday.

Quick reminder: This was a press conference, ostensibly, to talk about Trump signing executive orders about Hong Kong and China.

Quick reminder: This was a press conference, ostensibly, to talk about Trump signing executive orders about Hong Kong and China.

Quick reminder: This was a press conference, ostensibly, to talk about Trump signing executive orders about Hong Kong and China.

Quick reminder: This was a press conference, ostensibly, to talk about Trump signing executive orders about Hong Kong and China.

Quick reminder: This was a press conference, ostensibly, to talk about Trump signing executive orders about Hong Kong and China.

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“The North is launching another batch of rubbish-carrying balloons,” the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said in a statement, advising people not to touch the objects and report them to nearby military or police authorities.

The latest balloons from North Korea come after South Korea announced on Thursday that it had resumed loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts directed at the North.

The broadcasts were restarted for the first time in nearly 40 days as a response to Pyongyang’s previous balloon activities.

Seoul had earlier cautioned that it would broaden the scope of its broadcasts if the North continued floating the trash-carrying balloons.

“As we warned several times, the military will carry out loudspeaker broadcasts in full scale and on all fronts starting 1 pm today,” the JCS said on Sunday, deeming the North’s launch of balloons vulgar and shameful.

South Korea’s broadcasts — which contain propaganda, world news and K-pop music — irk the isolated North Korea, which tries to limit access to outside news for its 26 million people.

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Microsoft says it estimates that 8.5m computers around the world were disabled by the global IT outage.It’s the first time that a number has been put on the incident, which is still causing problems around the world.The glitch came from a cyber security company called CrowdStrike which sent out a corrupted software update to its huge number of customers.Microsoft, which is helping customers recover said in a blog post: “we currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices.”

The post by David Weston, vice-president, enterprise and OS at the firm, says this number is less than 1% of all Windows machines worldwide, but that “the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services”.The company can be very accurate on how many devices were disabled by the outage as it has performance telemetry to many by their internet connections.The tech giant - which was keen to point out that this was not an issue with it’s software - says the incident highlights how important it is for companies such as CrowdStrike to use quality control checks on updates before sending them out.“It’s also a reminder of how important it is for all of us across the tech ecosystem to prioritize operating with safe deployment and disaster recovery using the mechanisms that exist,” Mr Weston said.The fall out from the IT glitch has been enormous and was already one of the worst cyber-incidents in history.The number given by Microsoft means it is probably the largest ever cyber-event, eclipsing all previous hacks and outages.The closest to this is the WannaCry cyber-attack in 2017 that is estimated to have impacted around 300,000 computers in 150 countries.

There was a similar costly and disruptive attack called NotPetya a month later.There was also a major six-hour outage in 2021 at Meta, which runs Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.

But that was largely contained to the social media giant and some linked partners.The massive outage has also prompted warnings by cyber-security experts and agencies around the world about a wave of opportunistic hacking attempts linked to the IT outage.Cyber agencies in the UK and Australia are warning people to be vigilant to fake emails, calls and websites that pretend to be official.And CrowdStrike head George Kurtz encouraged users to make sure they were speaking to official representatives from the company before downloading fixes.

“We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” he said in a blog post.Whenever there is a major news event, especially one linked to technology, hackers respond by tweaking their existing methods to take into account the fear and uncertainty.According to researchers at Secureworks, there has already been a sharp rise in CrowdStrike-themed domain registrations – hackers registering new websites made to look official and potentially trick IT managers or members of the public into downloading malicious software or handing over private details.Cyber security agencies around the world have urged IT responders to only use CrowdStrike’s website to source information and help.The advice is mainly for IT managers who are the ones being affected by this as they try to get their organisations back online.But individuals too might be targeted, so experts are warning to be to be hyper vigilante and only act on information from the official CrowdStrike channels.

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Found in Utah by North Carolina State University researchers and paleontologists, the Fona herzogae was a small-framed, plant-eating dinosaur that lived in the Cenomanian age — about 100-66 million years ago.

“If you took, like, a Komodo dragon tail and attached it to the back of an ostrich, that’s kind of what Fona would have looked like,” researcher Haviv Avrahami told NPR.

Avrahami is a Ph.D student at North Carolina State University and was part of the team that identified this new dino.

Avrahami and his team also believe this new dino was a burrowing species, spending at least part of its life underground.

“Their family tree is, basically, like a giant black hole in paleontology knowledge,” Avrahami said.

Avrahami hopes that from his team’s discovery springs more knowledge about this small burrowing dinosaur and the life that it led millions of years ago.

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Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system has largely protected Tel Aviv and other population centers from the thousands of rockets fired by Hamas out of Gaza and by Hezbollah from Lebanon.

But an Israeli military official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said no alert was sounded because the detection system had not been activated.

The Houthis, the most powerful group in Yemen, claimed responsibility and said this was a new type of drone "capable of bypassing the enemy’s interception systems and undetectable by radars.

The Israeli military official said the initial evidence suggested the drone was launched from Yemen, but Israel was investigating a range of possibilities.

The Houthis say they are acting to show solidarity with the Palestinians over the war in Gaza, though the civilian shipping traffic involves vessels from around the world.

Tel Aviv came under heavy rocket fire from Hamas in the early weeks of the war last fall, but the attacks have long since stopped.

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There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.

The ABC is experiencing a major network outage, along with several other media outlets.

Crowd-sourced website Downdetector is listing outages for Foxtel, National Australia Bank and Bendigo Bank.

Follow our live blog as we bring you the latest updates.

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There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.

The ABC is experiencing a major network outage, along with several other media outlets.

Crowd-sourced website Downdetector is listing outages for Foxtel, National Australia Bank and Bendigo Bank.

Follow our live blog as we bring you the latest updates.

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At the 2024 NATO Summit in Washington, commemorating the alliance’s 75th anniversary, leaders offered Ukraine a fresh round of false hope in its war against Russia — which is worse than doing nothing.

Whether by military commitment or intensified support, the pretension that NATO could currently deliver a Ukrainian victory, or secure one later, encourages the country’s leaders to postpone reckoning with their dire circumstances.

The underwriter of the alliance, the U.S., has already clearly demonstrated it won’t fight and risk nuclear war on Ukraine’s behalf, even when the latter’s survival is at stake, as the U.S. doesn’t have a vital interest in doing so — a point former President Barack Obama made explicitly in 2016.

As with the draft treaties Russia submitted in December 2021 and the Istanbul negotiations conducted in March and April 2022, any resolution will inevitably be conditioned on Ukraine not joining NATO.

Western aid may help Kyiv hold its front lines and harass Russian targets for a time, but it cannot substitute for Ukraine’s ultimate lack of manpower, particularly while the West’s own industrial base is under strain to provide sufficient firepower to match Russia’s.

In recent weeks, Ukraine has already used its own indigenous capabilities to strike Russian radar stations, which are designed to provide early warning in case of an American nuclear attack.

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