MicroWave

X owner has spent tens of millions to fund conservative causes including anti-immigrant and anti-transgender ads

Elon Musk has given tens of millions of dollars to rightwing groups in recent years, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, revealing his backing for Republican groups began earlier than was previously known.

Musk endorsed Trump earlier this year and has been a prolific booster of misinformation in support of the president's re-election bid on X, the website he owns. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that Musk had said he planned to donate $45m each month to a Super Pac backing Trump (Musk has denied the report).

But the Wall Street Journal's reporting on Thursday revealed that Musk has already been spending tens of millions of dollars to back conservative causes. In 2022, he spent more than $50m to fund anti-immigrant and anti-transgender advertisements by a group called Citizens for Sanity. The group's officers are employees of America First Legal, a non-profit led by Stephen Miller, a close former Trump aide.

Musk also has donated millions to another rightwing group, Building America's Future, Reuters reported on Thursday. The outlet reported the timeline and exact amount he has given were not clear.

🗳️ Register to vote: https://vote.gov/

The death toll from Hurricane Helene has risen to 200 as rescuers continue to search for survivors from the storm that tore across the US south-east.

More than half of the deaths were in North Carolina, where entire communities were uprooted and devastated by the deadliest mainland storm since Katrina in 2005.

Hundreds of people are still missing and nearly a million homes are without power nearly a week after Helene made landfall.

New NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte visited Ukraine on Thursday in his first official trip since taking office and pledging the alliance’s continued support for Kyiv in its war with Russia.

Rutte met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv as air raid sirens twice went off in the Ukrainian capital.

The new head of NATO vowed when he took office on Tuesday to help shore up Western support for Ukraine, which has been fighting Russia's full-scale invasion since February 2022 and has for most of this year been on the defensive due to a relentless Russian army push in the country's eastern regions.

The Dominican Republic says it plans to deport up to 10,000 undocumented migrants a week to combat uncontrolled migration.

The plan was announced by President Luis Abinader's spokesman, Homero Figueroa, who blamed the international community's slow response to months of gang violence in neighbouring Haiti and its failure to restore stability.

Tens of thousands of Haitians have fled across the border into the Dominican Republic.

Trump is already laying the groundwork to dispute the results of another election, leveling baseless charges of interference as his own federal election interference case progresses.

Former President Donald Trump has never stopped propagating falsehoods that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. But now, he is increasingly turning his attention to pre-emptive claims the 2024 election is being rigged to prevent him from returning to the White House.

This year, Trump and his campaign have cited more than a dozen examples of so-called election interference activities by Americans to claim the coming election is being unfairly manipulated. But as general election voting begins around the country, the campaign has provided no evidence of actual cheating and no specific allegations related to potentially illegal efforts by Americans to tamper with this fall’s election proceedings.

🗳️ Register to vote: https://vote.gov/

• A federal judge will let expire a temporary restraining order against the Biden administration's sweeping new student loan forgiveness plan, which could deliver relief to tens of millions of Americans.
• The ruling means President Joe Biden may move forward with his administration's student loan forgiveness plan, just weeks before the November election.

🗳️ Register to vote: https://vote.gov/

The Federal Emergency Management Agency can meet immediate needs but does not have enough funding to make it through the hurricane season, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters Wednesday.

The agency is being stretched as it works with states to assess damage from Hurricane Helene and delivers meals, water, generators and other critical supplies. The storm struck Florida last week, then plowed through several states in the Southeast, flooding towns and killing more than 160 people.

Mayorkas was not specific about how much additional money the agency may need, but his remarks on Air Force One underscored concerns voiced by President Joe Biden and some lawmakers earlier this week that Congress may need to pass a supplemental spending bill this fall to help states with recovery efforts.

Charrise Lane said she chose to attend Florida A&M University to be surrounded by her own people. Now, because of her unpopular politics on campus, she feels alone.

Charrise Lane, a senior at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, wants to re-establish what would be the only active chapter of College Republicans at a historically Black college or university. There's just one roadblock: She can't find an adviser for the group to be recognized on campus.

According to FAMU guidelines, no student organization can become official without one.

"I've reached out to professors," said Lane, a 25-year-old public relations major and registered Republican.

“The two that responded said they couldn’t do it,” she said, adding, “So it’s not like I’m not trying.”

Agreement to hand back UK’s last African colony follows 13 rounds of negotiations and international pressure

The UK has agreed to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, ending years of bitter dispute over Britain’s last African colony.

The UK expelled the Chagossians in the 1960s and 1970s, in what has been described as a crime against humanity, when it retained possession of what it called the British Indian Ocean Territory, or BIOT, after Mauritius gained independence in 1968.

The agreement follows 13 rounds of negotiations that began in 2022 after Mauritian arguments for sovereignty were recognised by the international court of justice (ICJ), the UN general assembly and the international tribunal of the law of the sea (Itlos) in 2019 and 2021.

French president tells fellow European leaders the bloc is falling behind the US and China because of over-regulation and under-investment

The EU “could die” unless it makes itself more competitive with the US and China, Emmanuel Macron has warned.

The French president said the bloc was over-regulating and under-investing at the Berlin Global Dialogue event.

Washington and Beijing both outstripped the EU in economic output and investment, he said, before calling on the bloc to complete its banking union package of financial rules.

Member states also needed to press for global trade rules to be kept fair, he added, according to Bloomberg.

Authorities said when investigators searched the homes of the alleged gang members, they recovered firearms, drugs as well as Nazi paraphernalia.

Nearly 70 people who belong to or are associated with a white supremacist gang in the San Fernando Valley were indicted on federal charges, authorities announced Wednesday, saying the multi-agency operation was Los Angeles’ largest ever takedown of an extremist group.

The alleged criminal organization trafficked weapons and drugs, including fentanyl, while committing fraud and financial crimes for years, according to U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada.

“By allegedly engaging in everything from drug-trafficking to firearms offenses to identity theft to COVID fraud, and through their alliance with a neo-Nazi prison gang, (they) are a destructive force,” Estrada said.The group also allegedly set up a storefront, such as a fake drug treatment center, to make false documents to get their associates off probation or parole while defrauding Medicare and insurance providers.

U.S. authorities charged five Chinese nationals with lying and trying to cover their tracks, more than a year after they were confronted in the dark near a remote Michigan military site where thousands of people had gathered for summer drills.

The five, who were University of Michigan students at the time, were not charged for what happened at Camp Grayling in August 2023. Rather they are accused of misleading investigators about the trip and conspiring to clear their phones of photos, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court.

The FBI noted in the Tuesday court filing that there have been instances of college students from China taking photos of vital defense sites in the United States.