Georgia’s Supreme Court on Monday dismissed an attempt from Donald Trump to shut down key parts of a probe from state officials investigating him for potential interference in the 2020 election. The high court found in a unanimous ruling that the former president hadn’t shown the kind of “extraordinary circumstances” that would require the Georgia Supreme Court to intervene in the case and toss out key portions of evidence. “(Trump) has not shown that this case presents one of those extremely rare circumstances in which this Court’s original jurisdiction should be invoked, and therefore, the petition is dismissed,” the ruling states. The judges also were not persuaded by Mr Trump’s arguments that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should be removed from the case. On 11 July, a new set of grand jurors were sworn in for the long-running investigation who could potentially be the ones to approve an indictment against the former president. Since February 2021, officials in Fulton County have been investigating the conduct of Mr Trump and his allies in the state during the hotly contested 2020 election, where Joe Biden narrowly carried the state. The investigation has focused on an infamous 2 January, 2021, call Mr Trump placed to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, urging the top official to “find” enough votes for him to overturn his defeat in the state, but has expanded to cover a wide-ranging influence campaign Mr Trump and his allies exerted in Georgia. Another key area of focus is a December 2020 plot, allegedly directed by Trump campaign officials and potentially the former president himself, to organize a slate of unauthorised Republican electors to cast the state’s Electoral College votes, rather than the Democratic slate Georgia voters had selected. The group of false electors included the chair of the Georgia GOP and Republican members of the state legislature. They’ve defended their efforts as a back-up in case the original election results were tossed out in court. Mr Trump has denied wrongdoing. Ms Willis has suggested a decision on charges against Mr Trump could come as soon as August. Charges in Georgia would join the other unprecedented sanctions against the former president, including felony charges in New York for a hush money scheme involving a porn star and federal charges against Mr Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents. Read More Trump news – live: Manchin run could help Trump as ex-president eyes two of his GOP 2024 rivals for VP Citing Trump case, Pentagon leak suspect Teixeira urges judge to release him while he awaits trial Senior ex-intelligence official warns second Trump term could fatally destabilise US, new book says Georgia's top court rejects Trump attempt to thwart prosecutor in 2020 election investigation 9th Circuit denies bid by environmentalists and tribes to block Nevada lithium mine Trump praises judge overseeing classified documents case: ‘She loves our country’

Jeremy Clarkson’s article professing his “hatred” of Meghan Markle in The Sun was sexist, “pejorative and prejudicial” against the Duchess of Sussex, the press regulator has ruled. The Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) said the newspaper broke press standards by running the article, in which Clarkson described how he hated her on a “cellular level”. Ipso ordered The Sun to publish a front-page statement explaining how Clarkson broke anti-discrimination rules, which also ran online. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter However, some people were left dissatisfied with the ruling. Catherine Mayer, co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party, said: “It’s so obvious that Jeremy Clarkson's diatribe against Meghan was sexist that it’s odd Ipso had to investigate to reach that conclusion. She added: “The real issue is how such pieces are commissioned and signed off and why journalism is getting shriller and more abusive.” Domestic abuse campaigner David Challen wrote on Twitter: “The real headline should be @IpsoNews takes 7 months to come to glaringly obvious conclusion. Yet another nail in the coffin of our toothless press regulator.” And Lawrence Davies, chief executive of nonprofit Equal Justice, added: “We won on sexism. Can’t see why it wasn’t racist though.” Clarkson wrote that he disliked Meghan more than the serial killer Rose West and dreamed of the day “when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant ‘shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her”. The Fawcett Society gender equality charity, which made the initial complaint to Ipso, said the ruling is a “landmark decision” about a “vile and offensive” column. The ruling is the first time a complaint to Ipso about discrimination relating to someone’s sex has been upheld, the regulator said. Clarkson’s article attracted more than 25,000 complaints when it was published in December, and was swiftly pulled from the internet. A spokesperson for The Sun said the company regretted publishing the column, pointing to high female readership at the newspaper, as well as its campaigns on domestic abuse and the cost of being a young mother. Ipso chairman Lord Faulks said the imagery used in the article was “humiliating and degrading” towards Meghan. Among the critics of the article at the time were Clarkson’s daughter, while the Duke of Sussex called it “horrific, hurtful and cruel”. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Madonna is recovering after falling ill with a "serious bacterial infection" that landed her in an intensive care unit for several days, her manager Guy...

Authorities face mounting questions about whether more could have been done to warn residents as wildfires devastated western Maui earlier this month, after Hawaii's siren warning system stayed silent while wildfires reduced the town of Lahaina to ashes.

Six days of Nobel Prize announcements are beginning with the unveiling of the winner of the medicine award

As it pushes out 12,000 UN peacekeepers, Mali will be relying ever more heavily on Russian mercenaries.

US spy agencies had picked up intelligence in mid-June that Wagner mercenary group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin was planning armed action, said a report. There were enough signals to be able to tell leadership [in the US] something was up”, reported The Washington Post, citing an unnamed US official. “So I think they were ready for it.” Mr Prigozhin and his troops won’t face criminal charges over his attempted coup in Russia, the Kremlin said. He will be moved to Belarus, a close ally of Russia, after his mercenary army captured army bases in two Russian cities but called off their advance on Moscow at the 11th hour to “avoid bloodshed”. The move marked a humiliating climbdown for Vladimir Putin after he earlier vowed to take revenge on those behind the mutiny. Wagner’s forces were about four hours away from Moscow when news of the dramatic turnaround came. Earlier on Saturday, Mr Putin’s whereabouts had come into question after an aircraft belonging to the presidency was spotted flying from Moscow to St Petersburg. Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denied Mr Putin had fled. Read More Who is Yevgeny Prigozhin? The Wagner mercenary chief urging a ‘civil war’ against Putin Furious Putin calls Wagner coup ‘treason’: ‘This is a stab in the back to everyone in Russia’ Military vehicles on streets of Rostov-on-Don as Wagner chief claims control of HQ Who are Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner mercenary group

An announcement of the investment to create two new research centres expected later today.

Women at a prison in Honduras had complained for weeks that gang members were threatening them

Voters in Ohio will likely decide if the state’s constitution should enshrine the right to abortion care, after abortion rights advocates collected tens of thousands of signatures on a petition to put the issue on ballots this fall. If certified, those 710,000 signatures – roughly 300,000 more than required by state law – will place a proposed constitutional amendment asking whether “every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s reproductive decisions.” A statewide vote for abortion protections follows a wave of anti-abortion laws in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down a constitutional right to care last year. More than a dozen states, mostly across the entire US South, have effectively outlawed most abortions. But the Supreme Court decision to overturn the half-century precedent under Roe v Wade also fuelled efforts to protect abortion rights across the country, including in neighboring Michigan and Kentucky, where voters in both states voted to support abortion rights in ballot measures last year. After the Supreme Court’s ruling, Ohio lawmakers swiftly outlawed most abortion after roughly six weeks of pregnancy, a law that is currently suspended by a state court injunction but could be reinstated by the Ohio Supreme Court. A vote to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution would effectively overrule any such law. Abortion rights advocates and providers have warned that Ohio’s ban, which does not include exceptions for pregnancies from rape or incest, ignited a healthcare crisis that endangered patients and their families across the state, forcing people to seek care hundreds of miles out of state and navigate complicated legal and medical minefields while experiencing pregnancy complications. The petition launched by Ohioans for Reproductive Freedom and Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights will head to the secretary of state, which has until 25 July to determine the validity of the signatures. The campaign launched with an open letter on 7 July of last year signed by hundreds of physicians rejecting the state’s anti-abortion law. “Over the past year, support for the amendment has grown exponentially thanks to our partners at [Ohioans for Reproductive Freedom], the thousands of volunteers who gathered signatures in communities across the state, and the hundreds of thousands of people who added their names to our petitions,” according to a statement from Dr Lauren Beene and Dr Marcela Azevedo, co-founders of Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights. “Today, the message we and they are sending is loud and clear: ‘let the people decide,’” they said. The campaign will magnify the role of Ohio – a state that voted for Donald Trump by more than 8 percentage points over Joe Biden in 2020 – in the 2024 presidential campaign and the renewed battle for abortion rights surrounding it, as Republican candidates and members of Congress weigh federal legislation that would outlaw or severely restrict abortion access nationwide. President Biden and Democratic candidates have signalled the central role that abortion rights protections will play in upcoming campaigns, alongside their warnings of a GOP-controlled White House and Congress legislating on abortion at the national level. Last year, a record number of voters in Kansas – a state that Mr Biden lost by more than 15 percentage points in 2020 – turned out for an election to reject a Republican-drafted amendment that would strip abortion rights from the state’s constitution, the first test for abortion rights put directly to voters after the ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. That measure was shot down by nearly 20 percentage points, sending a resounding message that underscored the immense unpopularity of the Supreme Court’s decision. The president has repeatedly invoked that election victory in remarks supporting abortion rights in the months that followed, stating that the Supreme Court “practically dared women in this country to go to the ballot box and restore the right to choose,” and that anti-abortion lawmakers vastly underestimated how Americans would respond. Following the outcome in Kansas, Mr Biden pointed to the justices’ own writing in the Dobbs decision: “Women are not without electoral or political power.” “They don’t have a clue about the power of American women,” he said. “In Kansas, they found out women and men did exercise their electoral political power with a record turnout.” Read More Man sentenced to life in prison for rape of 10-year-old girl in Ohio abortion case that drew national attention Senator who once worked at a Planned Parenthood warns that Republicans are planning a national abortion ban One year after Roe v Wade fell, anti-abortion laws threaten millions. The battle for access is far from over

Matthew Perry first romance with a big Hollywood star was with Julia Roberts, whom he dated for around a year

The rally sweeping across global bond markets received a boost on Wednesday amid mounting signs price pressures are