Good morning.
Donald Trump has said he will “permanently pause migration from all third world countries”, a day after two national guard members were shot in Washington DC in an attack that authorities suspect was carried out by an Afghan national.
The president said his administration would “end all federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens” and remove “anyone who is not a net asset to the United States”. It was unclear how he would carry out such a pause, as his previous attempts have been challenged by the courts and Congress.
Trump’s social media statement came after he announced the death of Sarah Beckstrom, one of the two guard members shot in the attack close to the White House on Wednesday. Authorities suspect the shooting was carried out by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who entered the US in September 2021 following the chaotic US withdrawal from the country. He was granted asylum in April this year, under the Trump administration, Reuters reported.
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What do we know about the other guard member? Andrew Wolfe, 24, is still fighting for his life, according to the president.
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What does Trump mean by ‘third world’? He did not identify the countries he intended to target or specify what he meant by the phrase.
US regulators ‘taking seriously’ allegations of bankers’ support for Epstein
US regulators say they are taking allegations that top banks may have facilitated Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal activity “very seriously”, as they faced calls to investigate executives including the former Barclays boss Jes Staley.
In correspondence seen by the Guardian, officials from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) said they had reviewed a letter from the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, which raised concerns over bankers’ alleged support for the convicted child sex offender Epstein.
Rescue efforts end at Hong Kong tower block fire as death toll reaches 128
The death toll from the Hong Kong apartment complex fire that began on Wednesday has risen to 128, with about 200 missing, officials have said, as rescue efforts ended.
Firefighters were searching for anyone alive in the complex after the inferno spread to seven of eight towers in one of the city’s deadliest ever blazes. The fire at the complex, which housed more than 4,600 people, began during building renovations, with authorities saying they believed a highly flammable styrofoam found in every elevator window drove the fire’s intensity.
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What do we know about the missing people? About 200 people remain unaccounted for, including 89 unidentified bodies. Officials said the fire was out but they needed to wait for the towers to cool down before entering some areas that remained above 200C (392F). It is estimated it would take three to four weeks to collect evidence.
In other news …
Stat of the day: Consuming political content on X for a week increases polarization by a degree that would have previously taken three years
Small tweaks to the tone of the political content fed to users of X over one week can drive political polarization by an amount that would have historically taken at least three years, research has found. An experiment to measure the power of Elon Musk’s platform to drive division found that when posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity were slightly boosted, Democrats and Republicans both experienced a significant increase in their unfavourable feelings towards the other.
Don’t miss this: ‘It felt dangerous. You got naggy’: Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater on their 32-year friendship
Ahead of the release of Blue Moon, their 11th movie together, Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater sat down and talked about the legacy of Philip Seymour Hoffman, having a healthy partnership, and how playing lyricist Lorenz Hart – who was bald and 5ft tall – gave Hawke a different outlook on the world.
Climate check: ‘There’s a catastrophic black hole in our climate data – and it’s a gift to deniers’
Climate deniers claim that more people die of extreme cold than extreme heat – and so argue that inaction on global heating is the correct course, though this position ignores the myriad other climate impacts, from flooding and fires to crop failures. George Monbiot set out to discover whether the claim about extreme cold is true – and found there are huge gaps in our data from most of the world’s hottest countries.
Last Thing: Can anyone get into free jazz, history’s most maligned music genre?
Guardian music critic Alexis Petridis describes himself as not being a listener “who requires music to be melodic or rhythmically straightforward”. And yet, a real appreciation of free jazz had long remained out of grasp for him – so he set out on a journey into the world of a much-reviled genre. He describes Machine Gun by the Peter Brötzmann Octet as “furious and completely unremitting, like a bomb that won’t stop going off for the best part of an hour”.
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