A rape conviction at the centre of an award-winning memoir by Alice Sebold has been overturned amid concerns the wrong person was sent to jail in 1982. Anthony Broadwater, who spent 16 years in prison, sobbed as he was cleared by a judge of raping Sebold when she was a student – an assault she
US
A man has appeared in court charged with multiple homicides after a car plowed into a Christmas parade in the US – as a child became the sixth person to die after the incident. Darrell Brooks, 39, cried and rocked back and forth with his face in his hands as charges were laid against him.
After winning an Oscar earlier this year, Jon Batiste now leads the nominations for the 2022 Grammy Awards – with Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, H.E.R and Doja Cat also in the running for several prizes. Batiste’s nominations span several genres, including R&B, jazz, American roots music, classical and music video-film, and he is
A spacecraft has been launched from California this morning carrying with it humanity’s greatest hopes of being able to protect our planet from a cataclysmic asteroid impact. Fortunately the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission is only a test, and if anything goes wrong before it intercepts its target next September, then Earth won’t suffer
Three members of the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies group are among five people dead after a US Christmas parade turned to tragedy. The group had been performing in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on Sunday afternoon when Darrell E Brooks allegedly drove his Ford Escape into the parade. Virginia Sorenson, 79, LeAnna Owen, 71, and Tamara Durand, 52, were
A Florida judge has posthumously exonerated four black men wrongly accused of raping a white teenager in 1949. Known as the Groveland Four, Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Sam Shepherd and Ernest Thomas were accused of abducting and sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl near Groveland, Florida during the Jim Crow era of southern US racial segregation.
More than 20 people have been injured after a vehicle drove through a holiday parade in the US state of Wisconsin, according to police. The incident happened in Waukesha, which is about 20 miles west of central Milwaukee, just before 5pm on Sunday. In footage on social media, the red vehicle appeared to speed towards
A convicted felon who tried to board a flight from Atlanta with a gun fled the airport after it was accidentally fired in the security screening area. Three people suffered non-life-threatening injuries in the ensuing panic. The gun discharge happened when a screening checkpoint employee was conducting a bag search after it was flagged by
A Native American has been appointed for the first time to head the US National Park Service, which oversees more than 131,000 square miles of land, including the Grand Canyon. The nomination of Charles “Chuck” Sams III as director was approved unanimously by the US Senate. Some conservationists have hailed his confirmation as a commitment
Protesters hurled objects at police and broke windows amid anger following the acquittal of a teen who killed two people and injured another at a demonstration, in a verdict that has divided the US. Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty of all charges over the August 2020 shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin. President Joe Biden, who
For the past two weeks the steps in front of the grand courthouse in the small Wisconsin city of Kenosha have been a focal point for supporters of Kyle Rittenhouse as well as supporters of the two men he killed and the third who he injured. And as the verdicts came in there were cheers
Julius Jones’ death sentence has been commuted by Oklahoma’s governor just hours before his execution. Jones, who was convicted of killing Paul Howell, a businessman in the affluent Oklahoma City suburb of Edmond, in 1999, was scheduled to receive a lethal injection at 4pm on Thursday at the State Penitentiary in McAlester. The 41-year-old has
Tiger King star Carole Baskin has reacted to claims that her former husband is alive and well, having apparently been found in Costa Rica. Don Lewis went missing in 1997, after marrying Baskin six years earlier, and was later legally declared dead in 2002. In the first season of Netflix’s smash-hit Tiger King, producers explored
US rapper Young Dolph has been shot dead at a cookie shop in his hometown of Memphis, police have said. The 36-year-old star, real-name Adolph Roberton Thornton Jr, was gunned down outside Makeda’s Cookies near Memphis International Airport on Wednesday in the US state of Tennessee. Memphis Police said they had no information on the
A Rust crew member has accused actor Alec Baldwin of “playing Russian roulette” by failing to check the gun on set before firing it. Mamie Mitchell, the script supervisor who called 911 after Baldwin fatally shot cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, is suing the star and the film’s producers, alleging they failed to follow safety protocols on
One person is dead, several people are missing and thousands have been evacuated following severe flooding in the northwest of the US and parts of Canada. A storm has brought days of rain to western Washington and British Colombia causing flood damage described by officials as “severe”. The storms, which started on Sunday, wrecked roads,
A teenager has been found not guilty of the murders of two men and the attempted murder of a third at a demonstration in Wisconsin. Kyle Rittenhouse, 18, had pleaded self-defence after the widely publicised incident in Kenosha during protests sparked by the shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake, by a white police officer
Workers at Amazon’s warehouses in California were left “terrified” and “powerless” as the company concealed COVID-19 outbreaks from them, according to the state’s attorney general. The company has been ordered to pay a $500,000 (£370,000) fine to the State of California for failing to adequately notify its staff and health agencies of case numbers. Officials
US President Joe Biden has held a virtual meeting with China’s Xi Jinping and began on a positive note – saying their goal is to ensure competition “does not veer into conflict”. The two leaders met on a video call amid rising tensions between the US and China, which have long had a strained relationship.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has surrendered to the FBI to face criminal charges for refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the US Capitol riot. The former president’s longtime ally was dismissive of the allegations as he livestreamed the process of turning himself in. “We’re taking down the Biden regime,” he told his