US military declares five alleged drug traffickers killed in Pacific Ocean

The US military said it killed on Thursday five more alleged drug traffickers aboard two vessels in the Pacific Ocean, bringing the divisive campaign’s death toll to over 100.

The Trump administration has carried out such strikes in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September but has provided no evidence that the boats are involved in drug trafficking, prompting debate about the operations’ legality.

Claudio Neves Valente, who was found dead in a storage facility, also killed an MIT professor at his Boston-area home

A man suspected of killing two and wounding nine others at Brown University, and then killing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, has been found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility where he had rented a unit, officials said.

Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national and a former Brown student, was found dead on Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Oscar Perez, the Providence police chief, said at a news conference. Perez said as far as investigators know, the suspect acted alone.’

Britt, whose marriage to Davis in 1960 provoked threats due to racism and anti-miscegenation laws in the US, has died of natural causes in Los Angeles

May Britt, the Swedish actor whose marriage to Sammy Davis Jr in 1960 was the subject of controversy due to US attitudes towards interracial marriage, has died at 91.

Her son Mark Davis confirmed the news to the Hollywood Reporter, saying his mother died on 11 December of natural causes at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana medical center in Los Angeles.

Deal will allow app to continue operating in US as Elizabeth Warren condemns Trump and his ‘billionaire buddies’

TikTok has signed a deal to sell its US business to three American investors – Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX – ensuring the popular social video platform can continue operating in the United States.

The deal is expected to close on 22 January, according to an internal memo seen by he Associated Press and Reuters. The TikTok chief executive officer, Shou Zi Chew, said in the memo that ByteDance and TikTok have signed binding agreements with the three investors.

Change will loosen limits on research and certain regulations but stops short of making marijuana legal

Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order to move cannabis out of the most restrictive drug category, a change that would loosen limits on research and certain regulations but stop short of making marijuana legal nationwide.

“I’m pleased to announce that I will be signing an Executive Order to reschedule marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III controlled substance with legitimate medical uses,” the president said from the Oval Office.

Proposal would prohibit Medicaid funds from being used to cover puberty blockers, hormone treatments or surgical procedures

• US politics live – latest updates

The Trump administration unveiled new actions aimed at eliminating transition-related medical care for minors across the US on Thursday, referring to such treatments as “sex-rejecting procedures”, a term used by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

As part of the effort, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will initiate a rule-making process that would prevent hospitals from offering puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or surgical procedures to minors if they wish to participate in Medicare or Medicaid.

People who signed up for a US ‘self-deportation’ scheme say their payoffs were delayed, misdirected or never arrived – leaving them empty-handed in their home countries

Germán Pineda, 32, just wanted to go home.

After his arrest by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in June, Pineda, a Honduran immigrant, spent four miserable days in immigration detention at Federal Plaza in Manhattan, sleeping on a concrete floor without sufficient food or a shower. Next, he was transferred to a detention center in Brooklyn, where staff treated him like a criminal, he says, though he’d lived in the country, working as a delivery driver, for 14 years. He couldn’t even call home.

Images, undated and uncaptioned, include Nabokov lines written on woman’s body and show Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky

• What we know so far about the Epstein files

Democrats on the House oversight committee have released a new batch of photos from the estate of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as the deadline for the justice department to release its files related to Epstein looms.

The images, released on Thursday, are undated and lack captions or context. Among them are photographs of what appear to be lines from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita written on different parts of a woman’s body.

Turner, appointed ambassador to UN in May, now replaces Peter Mandelson who was sacked over Epstein links

Keir Starmer has appointed the career diplomat Christian Turner as the UK’s ambassador to Washington, replacing Peter Mandelson who was sacked over his links to Jeffrey Epstein.

Turner, who was appointed ambassador to the UN in May, had previously been political director at the Foreign Office and had brokered a close relationship with the new Labour administration before taking up his UN role in New York.

Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, spoke candidly about Trump’s inner circle and the piece made even bigger waves with its unsparing photos

• US politics live – latest updates

Critics of the Trump administration have praised Vanity Fair’s interview with the White House chief of staff, and particularly the unvarnished photographs of Trump’s inner circle that accompanied it, as overdue scrutiny of a controversial cabinet even as his allies rallied to dismiss it as a hit piece.

Over what the magazine said was 11 separate interviews by reporter Chris Whipple, Susie Wiles spoke candidly about her colleagues, describing Trump as having “an alcoholic’s personality”, JD Vance, the vice-president, as being a “conspiracy theorist for a decade” and Russell Vought, the budget chief, as a “right-wing absolute zealot”.

Report on Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump would be a ‘distraction’ as party is ‘putting our learnings into motion’

The Democratic National Committee won’t release a review of its election loss in 2024, saying it would be a “distraction” from helping the party win going forward.

The party has been working on a so-called autopsy of 2024 since Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Donald Trump.

The plan to mobilise Russia’s frozen assets is morally compelling and ingenious. The problem is that its enemies will never see it that way

Morally, the decision facing the European Council in Brussels this week has been a no-brainer. Russia invaded Ukraine illegally and unilaterally. Moscow shows no sign of wanting peace. It actively threatens other countries too, including Britain. Ukraine is running out of money. Yet £184bn worth of Russian assets remain frozen in Europe, notably in Belgium. That money should therefore be mobilised to fund Ukraine. To many, this would be the enactment of a clear and present duty, proof positive that Europe can still be a heavy hitter.

In the messy reaches of the real world, however, things have not been straightforward. Law, economics and politics all managed to insinuate themselves, sometimes venomously, into the intense buildup to Brussels. Reparations can have lethal political consequences. Seizure of assets will undoubtedly face legal challenge. It is also bitterly opposed by Donald Trump, who wants the unfreezing of assets to form a key part of his pro-Russian peace plan. Mr Trump is pressing hard for a quick deal, and US and Russian negotiators are poised to meet again in Miami at the weekend.

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Ronald Hicks, who endorsed message condemning ICE raids, to lead one of biggest US archdioceses

Pope Leo XIV has named a fellow Chicagoan as the next archbishop of New York, one of the biggest US archdioceses, in a signal that the church will continue its stance against the Trump administration on immigration.

The US-born pope chose 58-year-old Ronald Hicks, the current bishop of Joliet, Illinois, to lead the church in New York, replacing retiring Cardinal Timothy Dolan who has served for 16 years after being selected by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012.

Package includes medium-range missiles, howitzers and drones, and has drawn an angry response from China

• The maps that show how China’s military is squeezing Taiwan

The Trump administration has announced a massive package of arms sales to Taiwan valued at more than $10bn that includes medium-range missiles, howitzers and drones, drawing an angry response from China.

The state department announced the sales late on Wednesday during a nationally televised address by president Donald Trump, who made scant mention of foreign policy issues and did not speak about China or Taiwan at all. US-Chinese tensions have ebbed and flowed during Trump’s second term, largely over trade and tariffs but also over China’s increasing aggressiveness toward Taiwan, which Beijing has said must unify with the People’s Republic of China.

Lawsuit alleges that Larry Bushart’s first amendment rights were violated when he was arrested and jailed for 37 days

A former law enforcement officer in Tennessee is suing his county and sheriff after he was jailed for more than a month for posting a meme on Facebook related to the 10 September assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

According to the new 30-page lawsuit filed this week, 10 days after Kirk’s killing, Larry Bushart, 61, shared a post in the comments of a Facebook post about a vigil for Kirk in Perry county, Tennessee.

Justice department must release most documents by Friday, and failure to do so would provoke a firestorm

In less than 48 hours, Donald Trump’s justice department must release most of the files related to Jeffrey Epstein in its possession. Last month, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the release of those materials by 19 December, except in narrow cases where they would jeopardize current investigations, harm national security or foreign policy goals, or reveal information about Epstein’s victims.

Since Trump signed the legislation, his administration has been silent on its progress. Earlier this month, a bipartisan group of lawmakers asked Pam Bondi, the attorney general, for a briefing on the department of justice’s progress, but she did not provide one. Two Democratic senators among that group subsequently pledged to block some civilian nominees, because they were concerned the administration “is gearing up to disregard the law we led the fight in the Senate to pass, which overwhelmingly passed both chambers of Congress”.

Americans told ‘time to get vaccinated is now’ as concerning mutation of influenza virus circulates in US

Officials are urging doctors to vaccinate their patients and provide flu antivirals after deaths among children reached record highs and as a concerning mutation of the virus circulates in the US.

“Influenza activity is increasing in the US. The time to get vaccinated for this season is now,” Timothy Uyeki, the chief medical officer of the influenza division at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said in a call with clinicians last week.

Learning Resources is suing the administration, claiming the president’s tariffs are illegal – and millions of dollars are on the line

The conveyors whir in the massive warehouse, boxes gliding at fast clip, filling up with toys ready to be shipped out for holiday gifts across the country. They make their way to shipping trucks, nearly full with hundreds of boxes by the afternoon of a recent Thursday.

The 364,000 sq ft warehouse in the suburbs outside Chicago is just one of Learning Resources’ investments in the US. The company and its affiliated brands employ more than 500 people. They make about 2,000 different products, mostly educational toys such as children’s binoculars, cash registers and learning games.

Class Action, a grassroots network formed after the affirmative action ruling, seeks to be critical of universities in their current form

Last spring, as the Trump administration was freezing billions in federal research funding for universities and threatening the visas of thousands of international students, Emily Hettinger, a senior at Yale, joined a campus protest in defense of higher education.

It was a strange place to be for Hettinger, who had been growing disillusioned with Yale over what she saw as its elitism and disinterest in the disadvantaged community surrounding its Connecticut campus. “I remember feeling this sort of dissonance,” Hettinger said. “I wanted to defend higher education, but I didn’t want to defend it in its current form.”

Study author says tech companies are reaping benefits of artificial intelligence age but society is left to pay cost

The AI boom has caused as much carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere in 2025 as emitted by the whole of New York City, it has been claimed.

The global environmental impact of the rapidly spreading technology has been estimated in research published on Wednesday, which also found that AI-related water use now exceeds the entirety of global bottled-water demand.

The president’s appearance and schedule have sparked speculation – perhaps fueled in part by his political fortunes

Is Donald Trump OK?

Recently, he’s looked tired. His famous fake tan is a bit more sallow than usual and seems painted on more thickly and clumsily than it was before. He appears to nod off in front of cameras more and more often, including in cabinet meetings and press events in the Oval Office. His public schedule is light: he is often at his golf clubs, has traveled around the country less frequently than at this point in his first term, and now only rarely holds the stadium rallies that once defined his preferred style of politics. He tends to sit, even when others are standing, and has shortened his daily schedule, often not conducting official duties before noon. A New York Times report found that his public appearances have declined by nearly 40% compared to his first year in office. He sometimes disappears from public view for days as he did in the late summer, and he and his administration have released unclear and conflicting information about his health. His right hand seems to be experiencing frequent injury or discoloration – it will often be covered with a band-aid or smeared with makeup; the White House has claimed, implausibly, that he is bruised from shaking too many hands. In some images, his ankles are visibly swollen.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist