Usa

Lynching is set to become a federal hate crime in the US more than a century after the first attempt to criminalise it. The Emmett Till Antilynching Act, passed by the Senate in 2018 and by the House of Representatives with an overwhelming majority yesterday, adds the offence of lynching to the US c

New bodycam footage shows the moment an officer in Florida arrested a six-year-old girl as she cried. Kaia Rolle was taken to a police vehicle with her hands fastened behind her back because she had had a tantrum at her school in Orlando.

More than 1,110 former officials at the Justice Department have called on Attorney General Bill Barr to resign. The statement, signed mostly by former career prosecutors, but also by some political appointees, said: "Mr Barr's actions in doing the President's personal bidding unfortunately speak lou

All four US federal prosecutors who worked on the case against former Trump ally Roger Stone have withdrawn amid allegations of political interference in the sentencing process. Senior Democratic Party officials have accused President Donald Trump and the Justice Department of having "deeply damaged

California has introduced a ban on the sale and manufacture of new fur products, becoming the first state in the US to do so. The new law was brought into effect at the same time as legislation barring most animals from circus performances, The Guardian reports.

A police officer who arrested and handcuffed a six-year-old black girl for misbehaving at school has been suspended pending an internal investigation, US media reports. Another child, aged eight years old, was also arrested by Orlando police officer Dennis Turner on the same day, but only the six-ye

US President Donald Trump is not allowed under the First Amendment of the US Constitution to block his critics on Twitter, judges have ruled. A court challenge was brought by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and seven people who had been blocked by the president's fam

A judge in Minneapolis has sentenced lawyer Paul Hansmeier to 14 years' imprisonment for a scheme which saw him upload pornographic material to file-sharing networks before threatening to sue people who downloaded them, Ars Technica reports. “It is almost incalculable how much your abuse of tr

A judge in Utah has been suspended without pay for six months after he made critical comments about President Donald Trump in court and on social media, CNN reports. According to the ruling of the Utah Supreme Court, Judge Michael Kwan's Facebook posts were "laden with blunt, and sometimes indelicat

Washington has become the first US state to approve composting of human remains as an alternative to cremation. Governor Jay Inslee signed a new law allowing licensed facilities to provide “natural organic reduction”, which changes a body into roughly two wheelbarrows' worth of soil over

Tens of thousands of convictions for cannabis possession could be dismissed or reduced automatically under a pioneering scheme launched by prosecutors in California. District Attorneys Jackie Lacey of Los Angeles County and Tori Verber Salazar of San Joaquin County have jointly announced their parti

The governor of California has announced an immediate moratorium on the use of the death penalty in the US state. Governor Gavin Newsom, who was sworn in at the start of the year, will today sign an executive order granting a reprieve to prisoners on death row and closing down the execution chamber

The US federal courts have warned they will run out of money next Friday because of the partial shutdown of the US government. US lawmakers have been unable to agree a federal budget because Democratic Party representatives will not agree to President Donald Trump's demand for $5.7 billion to build