Randy Smith’s resignation was part of plea deal after attack on podcaster Bobby Couvillion at a Madisonville restaurant

A suburban New Orleans sheriff who had held one of his community’s most prominent political offices for a decade has retired shortly after pleading guilty to battering a podcaster who often criticized him.

Randy Smith, 61, also agreed to serve more than a year of probation after admitting to a late May beating at a steakhouse where he had bought 18 alcoholic beverages on his tab on a Friday afternoon – which all but halted his four-decade policing career.

Smith had been sworn in as the elected sheriff of St Tammany parish, Louisiana, on 1 July 2016, succeeding a predecessor who eventually pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges and was separately convicted of serial child sexual molestation.

LSE analysis highlights litigation linked to energy sources, water consumption and air pollution

The proliferation of datacentres and AI is increasingly at the forefront of environmental litigation around the world, from the US and UK to Chile to Ireland, a report has found.

In an analysis of about 3,600 climate-related lawsuits filed since 2015, the latest annual review of climate litigation by the London School of Economics (LSE) found a growing number of cases challenging the energy sources, water consumption and air pollution of datacentres, all of which have related climate implications.

One of the first cases was filed in 2020 in Chile’s capital, Santiago, where Google was planning a huge datacentre in the Cerrillos area. A group of residents and the local council challenged permits given to Google, raising concerns about the impact of the development on the city’s already climate-stressed water supply.

Donald Trump’s campaign to rebrand the Pentagon as the Department of War won another victory on Wednesday when Republicans on the panel that controls military funding voted to formally endorse the renaming.

The House Appropriations Committee adopted the change during deliberations on its $1.1 trillion defense funding bill. The vote marks the third panel to agree to permanently ditch the existing nearly 80-year-old Department of Defense name.

Appropriators voted 32-25 along party lines to adopt a Republican-only slate of amendments to the Pentagon funding bill that also targeted diversity and inclusion efforts, abortion and other wedge issues that have spurred partisan rancor on the influential spending panel in recent years.

Iran’s IRGC warns that any new Hormuz shipping route announced without Tehran’s coordination is unacceptable and dangerous.

All vessels must contact IRGC Navy on the designated channel before transiting, or face enforcement action, Iran says.

Shipping traffic has remained far below prewar levels despite the U.S.-Iran interim agreement.

At least 164 people have died and 971 were injured after a pair of powerful quakes rocked Venezuela, Acting President Delcy Rodríguez said Thursday.

The acting president had said earlier that at least 32 people have died after Wednesday evening’s 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes, and that the toll was expected to rise.

The quakes were among the strongest to strike Venezuela in more than a century and could be felt throughout the region. Buildings were evacuated in places as far away as Brazil’s Amazon, about 1,700 kilometers (1,050 miles) from Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) says New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is going to have to smooth things over with congressional Democrats after backing several progressive candidates who ousted incumbents during Tuesday’s primary elections.

Asked if Mamdani’s endorsements were making him “enemies” with Democrats in Washington, D.C., Jeffries told CNN that he and Mamdani “strongly” disagreed over his primary picks ahead of Election Day.

Now, according to Jeffries, the mayor has serious “work to do in terms of the conversations that he’s going to have with members of Congress moving forward.”

The Pentagon said Wednesday that boot camps for all the military services are once again requiring the flu vaccination for all recruits after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the shot optional for the military at the end of April.

The development, confirmed to The Associated Press by a Pentagon official, comes amid a growing, weekslong, flu outbreak at the U.S. Air Force’s boot camp at Lackland Air Force Base that has sickened nearly 300 people. However, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details not cleared for public release, maintained that the permission to mandate the vaccinations was unrelated to the outbreak.

When Hegseth first announced the repeal of the flu vaccine mandate in April, citing “medical autonomy” and religious freedom, he allowed the services to ask for exceptions — or permission to keep the vaccine mandatory — within 15 days of the rollout.

China has a right to target people outside of its borders who contravene its new law on ethnic unity, a senior official said on Wednesday, adding that this was in line with international practice, and was legal and ‌necessary.

China passed the law in March to create a "shared" national identity among the country's 55 ethnic minority groups, which include Tibetans and Uyghurs, some of whom chafe under Chinese rule and have over the years often staged protests, some of them violent.

The new law, which goes into effect on July 1, includes a clause saying people and groups beyond ⁠the borders of the People's Republic of China can be held legally accountable for undermining "ethnic unity and progress or inciting ethnic separatism".

Outside Rep. Adriano Espaillat’s primary night party, four men on the sidewalk were dressed in full neon sequins, trying to get the party started. Inside, the bar had barely opened.

Espaillat spent 20 years trying to get to Washington and another 10 years in Congress. He arrived to give his concession speech and left in under 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, the real party was going on about three miles away. That’s where Zohran Mamdani was completing his victory lap of three celebrations with candidates who likely would not have gotten near Congress without his endorsements, just a year after he stunned the political world by beating Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary.

Judge vacates administrations policies, finding actions of ICE and another government arm ‘arbitrary and capricious’

A federal ⁠judge in California vacated the ⁠Trump administration’s ​nationwide policies expanding arrests at immigration courthouses and the duration for detaining noncitizens in short-term facilities, finding the actions of US Immigration ⁠and Customs Enforcement and another government arm “arbitrary and capricious”.

US district judge P Casey Pitts of the northern district of California on Tuesday vacated ICE’s ⁠policies that had rescinded previous strictures on arrests at immigration courthouses and allowed detainees to ​be held in short-term cells for up ‌to 72 hours. He ‌did the same for a similar policy undertaken by the US Department of Justice’s ‌executive office for immigration review that removed limits on courthouse arrests.

The 71-page ruling, issued in a case brought by an asylum seeker arrested upon departing a routine hearing at a San Francisco immigration court, struck down key parts of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies. Judge Pitts, appointed by Joe Biden, in effect reinstated Biden-era policies ‌that limited arrests at immigration courthouses to narrow circumstances and capped detentions in short-term facilities to 12 hours.

China’s LineShine debuts at number one in Top500 – a list sometimes viewed as a national measure of global tech prowess

A supercomputer in China now outranks its US counterparts as the world’s most powerful. It is the first time since 2017 that a Chinese computer has topped a list sometimes viewed as a measure of a nation’s technological prowess.

The LineShine computer in Shenzhen displaced top-ranked US computer El Capitan in the Top500 rankings released on Tuesday. It was LineShine’s debut on the list.

China’s LineShine differs from other high-performance computers in that it runs entirely on conventional computer chips (CPUs), instead of the graphics processors (GPUs), commonly used for AI. It requires about 42.2 megawatts of electricity to operate, according to the list.

Donald Trump may be the head of the Republican Party, but when it comes to the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune is still in charge.

Trump, who will attend lunch with Senate Republicans at the US Capitol on Wednesday, is growing tired of hearing “no” from the Senate leader as he pushes certain controversial priorities, according to people familiar with his thinking.

But Thune is sitting on as much support as any leader could with less than five months until the midterms, and is surrounded by some emboldened colleagues who are more willing than they have been in years to take on the Republican administration.

A young south-eastern Louisiana man recently became the first person in his region to be functionally cured of sickle cell disease, clearing the way for him to continue pursuing his dream of a career as a commercial pilot, according to his medical team.

Daniel Cressy’s successful completion of curative gene therapy at Manning Family Children’s hospital in New Orleans on Monday generated a measure of optimism within his state, which produces more cases of sickle cell disease per capita than any other in the US, according to the medical center.

A statement attributed to Cressy, 23, said his story embodied “overcoming what seemed impossible” – and hoped it would be “inspirational for a lot of people”.

The Senate on Tuesday voted to block U.S. military action in Iran for the first time as the war approaches its fourth month.

The war powers resolution passed by a vote of 50–48. Sen. John Fetterman, again, was the lone Democrat to vote in the negative.

Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Dave McCormick, who was in his home state for a visit by President Trump to a Mack truck plant in the Lehigh Valley, was absent.

Four Republicans — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana — supported the measure.

A new data investigation says the paper of record increasingly framed transgender rights as a debate instead of a lived reality.

A new data investigation argues that The New York Times sharply changed the way it covers transgender people beginning in 2022, moving from rights-based framing toward more skeptical, conflict-driven coverage that elevated opponents of transgender rights and gave less prominence to transgender people themselves.

As The Advocate reported in May, an Assigned Media analysis found that the Times produced more transgender-related coverage than any other outlet examined but was the least likely to quote transgender people or trans advocacy organizations in stories primarily focused on transgender issues.

The report reviewed coverage from January 1 to April 25 across 10 major news outlets. Assigned Media found that the Times published 60 news stories centered mainly on transgender issues during that period, but only 12 included quotes from transgender people or representatives of transgender advocacy organizations, a rate of 20 percent.

Few qualities carry more weight for Donald Trump than loyalty, and few aides embody it as fully as his executive assistant, Natalie Harp.

A former TV presenter, Harp is a near-constant presence at Trump’s side — encouraging his Oval Office redesigns, typing up his Truth Social tirades and printing out online articles, a role that has earned her the nickname “the human printer.” She also leaves behind admiring notes for him to discover. Her devotion is so pronounced that the 80-year-old Republican once declared: “She’ll never leave me.”

These details about one of the most influential White House aides were revealed by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in their new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.

Much of France was set to experience temperatures of around 40C on Tuesday, after records were shattered on Monday

Forty people have drowned in France over the past days as they sought to cool down to escape record heat, the prime minister said on Tuesday, as a heatwave swept across much of Europe.

Speaking ahead of an emergency meeting on the heatwave, French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said: "A sad scourge when it comes to drownings, as the latest figures just reported to us show 40 deaths since June 18, most of them young people."

Across France, people have been jumping into canals and rivers to cool off. French sports minister Marina Ferrari said she understood the urge to escape the heat but warned against swimming in unauthorized or dangerous areas.