Greg Abbott on Thursday pardoned Daniel Perry, who has been serving a 25-year sentence since 2023 murder conviction

Governor Greg Abbott of Texas issued a full pardon on Thursday to a former US army sergeant convicted of murder for fatally shooting an armed demonstrator in 2020 during nationwide protests against police violence and racial injustice.

Abbott announced the pardon just minutes after the Texas board of pardons and paroles disclosed it had made a unanimous recommendation that Daniel Perry be pardoned and have his firearms rights restored. Perry has been held in state prison on a 25-year sentence since his conviction in 2023.

Former lawyer and fixer for Donald Trump is under fierce attacks on his credibility by the ex-presidentas legal team

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Donald Trumpas lawyer on Thursday attacked the core charge against the former president as he sought to undercut Michael Cohen, the former attorney whose $130,000 hush-money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels is at the heart of the criminal trial in New York.

The defense, led by the Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, had Cohen admit that technically Daniels entered into a legal contract to sell the rights of her story about a sexual encounter with Trump, apparently in an attempt to justify labelling the repayments as legal expenses.

Some allege harassment, one claims she was sexually assaulted. His lawyers deny the allegations

• Revealed: Magician David Copperfield accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women
• aI honest to God believe I was druggeda: magician David Copperfieldas alleged victims speak out

It was September 1991 in New York and the grand finale of Look of the Year, a prestigious modeling contest that had helped launch the careers of supermodels Cindy Crawford and Helena Christensen.

The celebrity magician David Copperfield, one of the judges, watched from the front row as 58 contestants paraded across the runway in their branded hot pink and sorbet yellow swimsuits. Nearly all the contestants were teenagers; some were as young as 14.

The behavior, documented in footage from researcher Chris Law, is most seen in females and sheds light on the threatened species

Floating on its back in the waters of Californiaas Monterey Bay, a sea otter takes a shelled animal and strikes it against a rock sitting on its chest to break open the prey.

This behavior, documented in footage from researcher Chris Law, is seen in relatively few animals and allows the otter to access food without damaging its teeth. A new study, which will be published in the journal Science on Friday, sheds light on the threatened speciesa tactics.

Lawyers urge international court of justice to issue urgent measures over assault on Gazaas southernmost city

South Africa has asked the international court of justice (ICJ) to urgently order Israel to end its assault on Rafah, halt its military campaign across Gaza, and allow international investigators and journalists into the territory.

In a court hearing, lawyers for South Africa expanded a written request for judges to issue an emergency order to stop the offensive into Rafah, Gazaas southernmost city.

Vote to confer was a 50-38 decision as students and alumni protest at Biden being commencement speaker over handling of Gaza war

Morehouse College faculty voted on Thursday to confer an honorary doctorate on Joe Biden during its upcoming graduation ceremony on Sunday, for which he plans to deliver the commencement address.

The vote to confer the honorary doctorate was a 50-38 decision, with about a dozen faculty members abstaining ahead of the planned visit, which has prompted protests from some students, faculty and alumni over the presidentas handling of the war between Israel and Hamas.

Tenth-grader who participated in social media challenge ingested too much chile pepper extract and died of cardiopulmonary arrest

A Massachusetts teen who participated in a spicy tortilla chip challenge on social media died from eating a large quantity of chile pepper extract and also had a congenital heart defect, according to autopsy results obtained by the Associated Press.

Harris Wolobah, a 10th grader from the city of Worcester, died on 1 September 2023 after eating the Paqui chip as part of the manufactureras aOne Chip Challengea.

Republicans opposed to plan from Bureau of Land Management affecting Powder River Basin area of Wyoming and Montana

The Biden administration on Thursday proposed an end to new coal leasing from federal reserves in the most productive coal mining region in the US as officials seek to limit climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions from burning the fuel.

The Bureau of Land Management proposal would affect millions of acres (millions of hectares) of federal lands and underground mineral reserves in the Powder River Basin area of Wyoming and Montana.

Republican Doug Skaff said he expects to be in hospital for a few days after bites in left leg and right foot by highway in Danville

A candidate for West Virginia secretary of state said he has been hospitalized for copperhead snake bites sustained while removing election campaign signs.

Doug Skaff said he was bitten in the left leg and the right foot on Wednesday near US Route 119 in Danville, news outlets reported.

A 91-year-old man made the donation to a struggling rural station in Missouri: aItas important to have a good fire departmenta

A 91-year-old man has donated $500,000 to a tiny rural volunteer fire department in Missouri in an act of generosity that will transform the fortunes of the struggling organization, whose members have been using equipment from the 1980s.

Sam Sloan, a resident of Calhoun, Missouri, donated the lump sum to the struggling department, KMBC first reported.

American Museum of Natural History says Dr Lorenzo Prendini was working on research project and ahas arrived safely homea

A curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who was detained in Istanbul on Monday while allegedly attempting to smuggle spider and scorpion samples out of Turkey has been released.

In statement on Thursday, a spokesperson for the museum said Dr Lorenzo Prendini, curator of arachnida and myriapoda, had arrived back in New York.

Friends in town of Levice say 71-year-old showed no signs of planning attack, while Slovakian president says climate of hate is collective work

Mile Laudovit, like other residents of the unassuming grey apartment block on the outskirts of the sleepy central Slovakian town of Levice, considered Juraj Cintula a reliable neighbour and friend.

Having lived side by side with him for more than 40 years, Laudovit could never have imagined the 71-year-old former security guard and amateur poet would be suspected of perpetrating the worst political attack in Slovakian modern history a shooting the prime minister multiple times at point-blank range.

In the wake of campus protests, some say proposals are part of of a broader effort to silence criticism of Israel

Against the backdrop of demonstrations against Israelas war in Gaza on college campuses, the White House and Congress have announced a string of policies and commitments aimed at addressing what Joe Biden warned was a aferocious surge of antisemitisma in the United States.

Antisemitism was on the rise in the US before Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking another 250 hostage. But the ensuing war has exacerbated the problem, with the law enforcement officials recording a spike in threats against Jewish Americans.

Ukraine accuses invaders of killing civilians and setting up human shields; sanctions over North Korean arms supply to Russia. What we know on day 814

Russia does not have sufficient forces on the ground to make a major breakthrough in Ukraine after launching its offensive in the Kharkhiv region, Natoas supreme allied commander for Europe, Christopher Cavoli, said on Thursday. aMore to the point they donat have the skill and the ability to do it,a said the US general. aIave been in very close contact with our Ukrainian colleagues and Iam confident that they will hold the line.

Ukraine said on Thursday it was trying to astabilisea the frontline in the Kharkiv region. Moscow has seized 278 sq km (107 sq miles) of Ukrainian territory between 9 and 15 May, based on data from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). It represents the largest territorial gain in a single operation since mid-December 2022. Cavoli said Ukraineas forces were abeing shipped vast amounts of ammunition, vast amounts of short range air defence systems and significant amounts of armoured vehicles right nowa.

Dan Sabbagh writes that Russiaas rapid advances in Kharkiv raise serious questions about Kyivas ability to defend itself. Russia had telegraphed the operation in advance and Ukraine was warned by western intelligence, Sabbagh writes a though military analysts stress there are explanations for why Ukraine has been forced back. aItas suicidal for Ukraine to have its main line of defence on the border, where the Russians can hit you with artillery and glide bombs and the Ukrainians donat have weapons available like Himars rocket artillery to hit back because of US restrictions,a said George Barros, an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War. As a result, Russian forces were able to mass across the border in a relatively safe space, then mobilise into a lightly populated agrey zonea of Ukraine.

Ukraine accused Russia of capturing and killing civilians in the border town of Vovchansk and of keeping about 35 to 40 people as ahuman shieldsa. aAccording to operational information, the Russian military, trying to gain a foothold in the city, did not allow local residents to evacuate,a said the interior minister, Igor Klymenko. aThey began abducting people and driving them to basements.a Sergiy Bolvinov, head of the Kharkiv regionas police investigation department: aThe Russians keep them in one place and actually use them as a human shield, as their command headquarters is nearby.a There was no immediate response from Moscow to the allegations.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy met military leaders in Kharkiv city and said: aThe situation in the Kharkiv region is generally under control, and our soldiers are inflicting significant losses on the occupier. However, the area remains extremely difficult. We are reinforcing our units.a

A protracted air raid alert in most of the Kharkiv region was lifted early on Friday. The regional governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said at least five drones struck Kharkiv. The public broadcaster Suspilne said an air raid alert had been in effect for more than 16 1/2 hours in Kharkiv city, the longest recorded since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Ukrainian attacks have destroyed one or more Russian warplanes and infrastructure at the Belbek airbase in occupied Crimea, according to reporting based on satellite imagery and other resources. The pro-Ukrainian partisan force Atesh said a warehouse at Belbek was hit, destroying ammunition for Russian warplanes. Multiple fires at the Belbek complex have been detected by Nasaas satellite fire tracking service, Firms, in recent days. Ukrainian strikes using Atacms missiles were characterised by occupation authorities as having been repelled, in line with standard Russian official language playing down Ukrainian operations.

Cannes film festival
Francis Ford Coppolaas question a can the US empire last forever? a may be valid but flashes of humour cannot rescue this conspiracy thriller from awful acting and dull effects

Everyone who loves cinema owes Francis Ford Coppola a very great deal a| including honesty. His ambitious and earnestly intended new film, resoundingly dedicated to his late wife Eleanor, has some flashes of humour and verve. Jon Voightas scene with his bow-and-arrow shoots a witty dart. The filmas heavily furnished art deco theatricality sometimes creates an interestingly self-aware spectacle, like an old-fashioned modern dress production of Shakespeare. And certainly a Coppola failure is a whole lot more interesting than the functional successes of lesser directors a the middleweights who aim low and just about hit the targetas bottom rim.

But for me this is a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film, full of high-school-valedictorian verities about humanityas future. Itas simultaneously hyperactive and lifeless, lumbered with some terrible acting and uninteresting, inexpensive-looking VFX work which achieves neither the texture of analogue reality nor a fully radical, digital reinvention of existence. Yet this sci-fi conspiracy drama-thriller, avowedly inspired by the Catiline plotters of ancient Rome, does ask a valid question. The US empire, like the Roman empire, like any empire, canat last for ever. Has Americaas decline-and-fall moment arrived?

Some couples relish new ways to discuss their feelings by using the language of the workplace. For others itas alienating

The language of relationships seems to have donned a blazer recently a or at least a fleece vest.

If youare single and looking to meet someone, you might want to diversify your life portfolio and develop arobust relational codea. If you have a partner, donat forget to make enough love deposits into your emotional bank account, ensure your relationship contracts are overt instead of covert and feel free to use agile scrum as you go.

The Generation X punk turned arena rocker answers your questions on near-misses in Hollywood, his overlooked electronic period and how Marc Bolan helped launch his career

Is it true that you stole the master tapes to the Rebel Yell album during a spat with the record label? VerulamiumParkRanger
It was because of the cover. I was saying: aThereas a flaw in this picture, and if we blow this up it will get worse.a The record company started to say: aWeare leaving it. Itas not that bad.a I just thought: aIam just not going to let this happen. Itas so silly. They just need to reprint the picture. Iam not listening to what the record company guys say. In fact, Iam gonna blackmail them.a So I went down to Electric Lady in the middle of the night and got to where I knew the tape boxes were. I took them and left the studio and gave them to my heroin dealer. And then I phoned the record company and said: aThis guy Iave given them to, heall have them out on the street bootlegged in a couple of days if you donat change this picture.a And they relented. Donat let them walk all over you.

Your 1990 motorbike smash prevented you from starring as the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (although somewhat ironically your post-accident surgery saw you fitted with your own steel framework). Do you still suffer regular aches and pains as a result of the LA crash? McScootikins
Not too bad. Thereas something going on with my right foot. Itas not the same as my left foot. So there are ramifications from it, but you can fix them by wearing certain insoles in your shoes and things like that. The injury was in the middle of the lower part of my right leg, so it was something they could fix. I loved [director] Jim Cameron. I just know he would have got the performance out of me. I would have done whatever he said. It might have opened a lot more doors and itas such a shame. But sometimes drug addiction messes things up. Thatas what led to the motorcycle accident, really.

Confucius and other ancient Chinese philosophers believed the feeling isnat all bad a and can lead you toward your best self

What was the last thing that you felt shame about? Perhaps you couldnat afford a new outfit for your friendas wedding, and felt chagrined around those in more chic attire. Maybe you hid your homemade lunch while your co-workers ate takeout, or you didnat call your mom on her birthday and felt bad to have missed it.

Shame can emerge in everyday situations like these, or can be a more pervasive emotion that darkens your view of who you are. The British clinical psychologist Peter Fonagy called shame the afeeling that destroys the selfa. Itas unsurprising, then, that when a person is more shame-prone, they can be at higher risk for anxiety or depression. aOne thing that shame often does is prompt people to want to hide, to escape, to essentially want to sink into the floor and disappear,a said shame researcher June Price Tangney, in an interview with the American Psychological Association.

In this weekas Down to Earth newsletter: what the Guardianas Sirin Kale saw when reporting on environmental disasters in Germany, Belgium and the UK

aC/ Donat get Down to Earth delivered to your inbox? Sign up here to get the newsletter in full

This is an extract of this weekas Down to Earth newsletter, to get more exclusive environmental journalism in your inbox every Thursday sign up here

Itas common to think about the climate crisis as something that will happen in the future, in the global south.

Brutal heatwaves and submerged cities: what a 3C world would look like

I understand climate scientistsa despair a but stubborn optimism may be our only hope | Christiana Figueres

What are the most powerful climate actions you can take? The expert view

Fast fashion is wasteful, and thrifting is flawed. The solution: swap!

Herd of 170 bison could help store CO2 equivalent of almost 2m cars, researchers say

aItas unbelievable the difference a path has madea: how volunteers are building a cycle network a yard at a time

aThe stakes could not be highera: world is on edge of climate abyss, UN warns

Four kids left: The Thai school swallowed by the sea

aIt just didnat worka: how businesses are struggling with reuseable packaging

Marija Kavtaradzeas new film is a love story with a truly radical approach to intimacy. She reveals how she made a will they/wonat they tale that strays into little-known territory

They meet cute in a dance rehearsal studio. Sheas a contemporary dancer teaching a class of deaf teenagers. Heas the sign language interpreter. When he walks into the room and takes off his shoes, they both look down at his odd socks and smile, something clicks. Like so much of the Lithuanian film Slow, the moment is romantic and feels true to life a as if someone is secretly filming real people with invisible cameras.

The pair start hanging out. Then one day, in her bedroom, just as you think this is it, he suddenly blurts out: aIam asexual.a She splutters a giggle and asks what he means. aIam not attracted to anyone sexually. Never was.a

The Chiefs kicker thinks women are best advised to stay at home. He wonat be happy that female employees have become a crucial part of the NFL

There is Kirsten Krug, the Kansas City Chiefsa executive vice-president of administration. She oversees player services and, during the height of the Covid pandemic, ensured the Chiefs were healthy and safe while serving double-duty as one of the clubas infectious control officers. There is Tiffany Morton, an assistant athletic trainer who keeps the players stretched, iced, and taped up so they can maximize on-field performance. Thereas also Rosetta Shinault, a security officer who helps keep the peace so the players can do their jobs without incident. These three employees of the Chiefs are just a handful of the many women who keep the organization thriving. They are pieces of the framework that has helped the Chiefs win three Super Bowls in five seasons and allow Harrison Butker to do what he does best: kick a football.

Unfortunately, sometimes Butker also opens his mouth.

(Darkroom/Interscope Records)
On this deeply involving third album, Eilish once again breaks the rules for arena-filling artists: itas subtle and understated, yet jars the listener with eerie show tunes and explosive noise

Billie Eilishas third album opens with a track called Skinny. It features a hushed electric guitar figure supporting a lyric filled with very Billie Eilish topics: bitter recriminations about a failed relationship, body dysmorphia, depression and the pressures of finding vast global fame while barely out of your teens. The latter was a theme that preoccupied Eilishas last album, 2021as Happier Than Ever, a grimly believable depiction of adolescent stardom in a world of constant online commentary and confected controversy. With its marked shift in image and sound, it succeeded in creating yet more commentary and controversy. That albumas reception is another topic that seems to haunt Skinny. aAm I acting my age now?a she wonders aloud. aAm I already on the way out?a

Itas presumably a reference to the fact that Happier Than Ever sold noticeably less than Eilishas debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?: it only went platinum in 10 countries as opposed to 16. And perhaps also to the idea that, with its relative lack of the kind of electro-goth bangers that had propelled her to fame, and her accompanying transformation from baggy skateware-clad sulker to vampy 50s blonde, Happier Than Ever had lost the room.

Mike Lee told students that Sonoma State would become first US university to refuse to work with Israeli academic institutions

A public university in California has placed its president on leave for ainsubordinationa after he agreed to student demands for an academic boycott of Israel.

Mike Lee was suspended from Sonoma State University following an announcement on Tuesday that the liberal arts college north of San Francisco had agreed with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) to become the first US university to refuse to work with Israeli academic institutions.

Exclusive: Paul Raffile held webinar where he said app failed to protect children, and his offer was rescinded hours later

Meta revoked a job offer to a prominent cyber-intelligence analyst immediately after he criticized Instagram for failing to protect children online.

Paul Raffile had been offered a job as a human exploitation investigator focusing on issues such as sextortion and human trafficking. He had participated in a 24 April webinar on safeguarding against financial sextortion schemes, during which he criticized Instagram for allowing children to fall prey to scammers and offered possible solutions.

Read more from The DIY Climate Changers, a new series on everyday peopleas creative solutions to the climate crisis

Beverly Loftonas home in south Los Angeles used to have a water-guzzling grass lawn. Today, itas a verdant microfarm that uses solar power and recycled water to grow carrots, beets, potatoes and more, with the bounty distributed to her neighbors. The 67-year-oldas switch was a bold move in a city ruled by cars and concrete, and where the impact of extreme heat and water shortages are acutely felt. Itas also a powerful rebuttal to food insecurity and big agriculture, in a neighborhood considered a afood deserta.

***

Funds from plan, designed to build treatment centers and clinics, made available early as state grapples with homelessness crisis

The California governor, Gavin Newsom, announced on Tuesday that $3.3bn would be made available from the stateas new mental health bond ahead of schedule to build more behavioral health treatment centers and homeless housing as the state grapples with a growing homelessness crisis.

It is the first pot of money from a ballot measure designed to help cities, counties, tribes and developers build or renovate treatment centers and clinics, among other things. Voters passed it by a razor-thin margin in March after Newsom threw all of his political weight behind it, touting it as linchpin of the stateas efforts to reduce homelessness.

I was struck by the mystery of why so many intelligent and admirable people remained so loyal for so long to a fundamentally flawed movement

Iall leave it to future historians to puzzle out the reasons why, but in the second decade of the 21st century, in the unlikely setting of the most thoroughly capitalist country in world history, large numbers of Americans, mostly young, displayed a new interest in socialist ideas, values and policy proposals, and in turn in the often neglected history of socialism and communism in the United States.

Having written three books early in my scholarly career dealing with one or another aspect of the tangled history of American communism, the last appearing in 1990, I figured Iad said all I had to say on the subject, and turned to other topics. Enough time had passed by the time of the 2010s socialist revival that the several score ageing communists and ex-communists whom Iad interviewed for my early books were now long dead.

Maurice Isserman teaches history at Hamilton College. His most recent book is Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism

The shock of an assassination attempt could heal the deep divisions that Fico exploited, but the omens are not promising

A few years after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993, known as the avelvet divorcea, the newly independent Slovakian state to the south was already a cause of concern. The US secretary of state at the time, Madeleine Albright, called it athe black holea of Europe.

Eventually, in 2004 Slovakia joined the EU and Nato. The assumption then in the west was that the country, finally, had a settled identity and a settled set of alliances.

John Kampfner is an author and broadcaster, and made the BBC World Service documentary Slovakia Divided

OpenAIas updated chatbot GPT-4o is weirdly flirtatious, coquettish and sounds like Scarlett Johansson in Her. Why?

aAny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,a Arthur C Clarke famously said. And this could certainly be said of the impressive OpenAI update to ChatGPT, called GPT-4o, which was released on Monday. With the slight caveat that it felt a lot like the magician was a horny 12-year-old boy who had just watched the Spike Jonze movie Her.

If you arenat up to speed on GPT-4o (the o stands for aomnia) itas basically an all-singing, all-dancing, all-seeing version of the original chatbot. You can now interact with it the same way youad interact with a human, rather than via text-based questions. It can give you advice, it can rate your jokes, it can describe your surroundings, it can banter with you. It sounds human. aIt feels like AI from the movies,a OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a blog post on Monday. aGetting to human-level response times and expressiveness turns out to be a big change.a

The assassination attempt has shocked the country, but reflects deep divisions there and across Europe

Slovakiaas prime minister, Robert Fico, is an immensely divisive figure who has helped polarise his country. But Wednesdayas assassination attempt has rightly united figures from across the political spectrum and the world in condemnation. The shooting was not only an attack on the prime minister but, as his domestic opponents stressed, an attack on democracy itself.

The background and motivation of this attack are not yet fully known. Ministers have suggested that the suspect now in custody was a alone wolfa who disagreed with the governmentas justice and media policies. But the case is widely seen as a shocking manifestation of the deep ruptures in Slovakian society. aWhat happened yesterday was an individual act. But the tense atmosphere of hatred was our collective work,a warned the outgoing president, Zuzana AaputovA! a an opponent of Mr Fico who is stepping down after herself receiving death threats. It will also fuel concerns about extremism and attacks on politicians elsewhere in the continent.

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