The visceral documentary “20 Days in Mariupol” about Russia’s early assault on the Ukrainian city will soon reach its widest audience yet

According to court documents, Steven Bertolino, Brian Laundrie's family's lawyer, sent what is described as a 'proposal of settlement' to Gabby Petito's parents

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 21, 2023--

BlackRock Inc. Vice Chairman Philipp Hildebrand said the International Monetary Fund should frame discussions this week around the

By Lewis Krauskopf NEW YORK A benign U.S. inflation report is bolstering the view that the Federal Reserve

Russian has fired a fresh wave of kamikaze drone attacks on the city of Kyiv and its wider region for a second night in row, Ukraine‘s military said today. “The 504th day of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine. The enemy launched another air attack on the capital,” Serhiy Popko, head of Kyiv’s military administration said on Telegram. The overnight attack came just hours before Volodymyr Zelensky was expected to meet Nato leaders at a summit that has backed Ukraine’s independence and military in the continuing war, but stopped short of offering a timeline for membership of the alliance. France said yesterday that it would join Britain in supplying Ukraine with long-range cruise missiles, a move that allows Ukrainian forces to hit Russian troops and supplies deep behind frontlines. In a new interview while the Nato summit takes place, Russia’s foreign minister claimed the war in Ukraine will continue until the West gives up plans “to dominate and defeat Moscow”. Western nations have called on Vladimir Putin to end the conflict by withdrawing his troops from the neighbouring country. Read More Ukrainian minister says he fears Russia has "no red lines" to prevent attacks on nuclear plant Biden will meet Zelensky at Nato summit in Lithuania as war with Russia rages on Why Ukraine’s plea for Nato membership is such a challenge for the West

The last time that a Democratic presidential candidate won North Carolina, Anderson Clayton could not vote. But now, the 25-year-old chairwoman of the North Carolina Democratic Party has a task that would overwhelm operatives twice her age: flip North Carolina blue for the first time in 16 years. “Like, I know that we either win in 2024, and we do amazing things and we go forward as a state and as a nation, or we regress backwards,” she told The Independent in an interview. “It really is now or never for North Carolina, in my opinion.” Republicans, for their part, know that the state is important. Last weekend, former president Donald Trump, former vice president Mike Pence and Florida Gov Ron DeSantis, three of the top contenders for the Republican nomination for president, descended on Greensboro for the state GOP convention. North Carolina is not an early primary state like Iowa, New Hampshire, or even neighbouring South Carolina. But the three candidates visiting the state shows the importance of the state, Ms Clayton told The Independent. “They have to win North Carolina,” Ms Clayton said, noting how the last time a Republican won the presidency without winning the Tar Heel State was Dwight Eisenhower’ in the 1950s. “And what’s at stake is that you have three candidates like Trump and Pence and DeSantis, who are coming in who are all three examples, in my opinion, of right-wing extremism each in their own right.” Democratic voters in the state have plenty of reasons to turn out and vote. Despite the fact that the state has a Democratic governor in Roy Cooper, Republicans in the state legislature have enough votes to override his veto, which they did recently when they passed a 12-week abortion ban, cutting off abortion access throughout a majority of the South. Mr Cooper, who is term-limited, will also see the end of his term in 2024, which means Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein will compete for his seat against Mark Robinson, who has a history of making inflammatory remarks. Ms Clayton said she is not taking anything for granted, especially against an incredibly well-organised Republican Party. “I think that Democrats have to take the energy that we have right now and the anger that we have right now and motivate it forward and use people to say how do we turn anger into action,” she said. “Because right now, there’s not a whole lot of things that we can change at the state level, because you know, you do have racial gerrymandering that is now legal ... that is racial gerrymandering to me.” Democrats in North Carolina were not always starting from such a disadvantage. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win North Carolina since Jimmy Carter in 1976, while Kay Hagan won the state’s US Senate seat. Democrats also controlled the governorship and both houses of the North Carolina General Assembly even as other Southern states moved rightward since the 1960s. But since Mr Obama’s 2008 victory, Republicans have run the table in the state. In 2010, as the state reeled from the Great Recession, Republicans took both houses of the General Assembly for the first time since 1898 and in 2012, they won the governorship, giving them the first trifecta in ages. Since then, Republicans flipped the state’s other Senate seat when Thom Tillis won it in 2014 and held it in 2020 when a sex scandal felled Democrat Cal Cunningham, and Joe Biden narrowly lost the state even as Mr Cooper won re-election. Last year, even as Democrats beat back two Trump-endorsed congressional candidates, Republicans gained seats in the state legislature, cleaned up in the Supreme Court, and Republican Ted Budd beat Cheri Beasley in the Senate race thanks in part to Mr Trump’s endorsement and tons of money from Senate Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund political action committee. The weak performance led to Ms Clayton’s election. She said Democrats have made many mistakes in those intervening years, which caused them to fall so far, suggesting the party appears to have mostly abandoned rural voters. “The majority of North Carolina lives in a rural community, you’ve got the highest or the second highest population of rural folks besides Texas in our state,” she said. “And to cede any of that ground to see these populations that have historically black and brown communities. And then in these rural counties that we have not tapped into, it’s just doing a disservice to our party.” She said that means going to every county in the state. “So in our Democratic governor candidate showing up in Cherokee County in North Carolina, my God,” she said. “When was the last time that, you know, Murphy saw a Democrat, like, it’s been a minute, to be honest with you.” She also added that Democrats could learn from Mr Obama’s victory in 2008, when he sent organisers throughout the South. President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee have begun to make a play for the state and Mr Biden visited North Carolina last week. Ms Clayton added that, for the most part, Democrats nationally have avoided supporting state parties in the South. “Georgia had to win an election before the national party came in and invested in them,” she said. “There’s a real aspect here of, we have underfunded the South for generations in this party. And you’re underfunding an area that is predominantly Black and brown communities that are, I think, a sleeping giant of the Democratic Party in the South.” North Carolina has eluded Democrats, unlike other southern states. Virginia has voted for a Democrat for president every election since Mr Obama’s first victory, though it elected a Republican governor in 2021, while Georgia voted for a Democrat for the first time since 1992 when Mr Biden won it in 2020 and it now has two Democratic Senators. Ms Clayton’s youth may befuddle some, and she said she never imagined she’d be a state party chairwoman. “It’s allowed me to be able to say everything that I’ve ever wanted to do on behalf of a Democratic Party,” she said. “And I think that that’s a really empowering place to be. And it’s going to inspire, I hope, more young people to realise that this world that we’re living in is ours to change the reality of.” Since assuming the leadership post, Democrats received a gut punch when Tricia Cotham, a Democratic state legislator, switched parties, giving Republicans a veto-proof majority in the legislature. At the state’s GOP convention last weekend, she was feted as a hero and Mr Pence gave her a shout-out. That enabled them to pass a 12-week abortion ban and override Mr Cooper’s veto. In addition, during the convention, Mr Trump touted how he won the state twice and continued to repeat his lies about a stolen election. Ms Clayton said that she wants North Carolina to be a firewall against election lies. “And for me, the case that I'm making is that, we don't want to give election deniers a two-week window to make that case. We want to make sure this election is wrapped up on the November night,” she said. Still, she added that she is not being a defeatist. “I know it feels like that right now, I know that the defeatist nature of or the Republican extremism is hard to come out of right now,” she said. “But we have to, and we have to snap back as a population and, and being able to say we need to run somebody everywhere.” Read More GOP senator Thom Tillis is pushing back on Trump on guns. Why the North Carolina Republican think it’s time to act ‘It’s making them angrier’: North Carolina Republicans rally around Trump after indictment ‘Everybody needs to support Trump’: Ex-president’s indictment overshadows DeSantis in North Carolina Ivanka and Jared split over attending Trump 2024 launch – follow live Why was Donald Trump impeached twice during his first term? Four big lies Trump told during his 2024 presidential announcement

According to sources, there was no 'overlap' between Taylor Swift's two romances

The court ruling came after a Belgian employee was told she could not wear an Islamic headscarf.

An accord signed a year ago between the rivals in Ethiopia's Tigray war has brought peace to the shattered region, but ignited yet another conflict...

Elon Musk has revealed the names of the twin children he shares with Shivon Zilis. In an excerpt of Musk’s upcoming biography, published by Time Magazine, author Walter Isaacson wrote that the Tesla CEO, 52, and the Neuralink executive, 37, named their 16-month-old twins, Strider and Azure. On X, formerly known as Twitter, the author also shared the first photo of the family together, with Strider seen pictured sitting on his mother’s lap while Azure was perched on her father’s. Musk and Zilis reportedly welcomed twins Strider and Azure in November 2021, but the news didn’t make headlines until July of the following year. According to Isaacson, although Zilis has been Musk’s “intellectual companion on artificial intelligence since the founding of OpenAI eight years earlier” and shares children with the X owner, the duo are not in a romantic relationship. Reuters reported that Zilis had allegedly confided in colleagues that the twins were conceived via in-vitro fertilisation. Earlier in 2021, Musk also welcomed a baby girl named Exa Dark Sideræl, who goes by Y, with ex-girlfriend Grimes. The couple secretly welcomed the child via surrogate. The “Oblivion” artist and Musk also share a three-year-old son, X AE A-XII, whom they welcomed in May 2020. X’s initial name, X AE A-12, did not follow California guidelines so the couple was forced to comply and made the change. According to Page Six, after three years together, the pair reportedly “semi-separated” in September 2021 before Exa’s arrival. In addition to the children he shares with Zilis and Grimes, Musk also fathered 19-year-old twins Vivian Jenna Wilson and Griffin, along with triplets Kai, Damian, and Sax, with his first wife, Justine Wilson. The triplets were born in 2006, while the twins were born in 2004. According to court documents obtained by TMZ, Vivian, who is transgender, publicly disavowed her father in a petition that asked for a new birth certificate to be issued by the state. In the documents, she wrote that the reason behind her name change was not only her new “gender identity” but also because of “the fact that [she] no longer lives with or wish to be related to [her] biological father [Elon] in any way, shape or form”. According to Musk’s biographer, the tech entrepreneur “was generally sanguine” about his daughter’s transition, but political ideology is what ultimately divided them. "I’ve made many overtures," Musk told Isaacson about his alleged atempts to mend his relationship with his daughter. "But she doesn’t want to spend time with me." Read More First photo emerges of Elon Musk and his baby twins with Neuralink director Elon Musk thwarted Ukrainian drone attack on Russian ships, book claims

Switzerland’s Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter denied government responsibility for the near-collapse of Credit Suisse Group AG in March,