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Joe Biden is urging lawmakers to refill the coffers of disaster relief programs as the projected recovery and rebuilding costs related to Hurricane Helene are estimated to be as much as $200bn over 10 years.

In a letter sent to congressional leaders, the president said while the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and the Department of Defense is able to meet “critical life-saving and life-sustaining missions and will continue to do so within present funding levels”, they will need additional funding.

Biden said that a comprehensive disaster relief package would be necessary when Congress returns on 12 November – but said action on individual programs could be needed before then. But there are currently no plans for Congress to reconvene before the election.

Lobbyists for Britain’s biggest food brands successfully pushed for a £1.7bn packaging tax to be deferred, new documents reveal.

The fees for a new scheme to improve recycling rates and tackle plastic pollution were due to be imposed this month, but were delayed for a year by the last Tory government after the industry complained about the costs in a series of private meetings.

The extended producer responsibility (EPR) scheme aims to shift the costs of collecting and recycling waste on to the companies that make packaging for soft drinks, confectionery and other consumer goods. They would pay fees based on the amount of packaging they use, with lower fees for more sustainable options.

A dog saved her owner – who hurt his leg at home in rural Washington state, fell and couldn’t get up for hours – by walking to a road, sitting in the middle of it until a local sheriff’s deputy stopped, and leading the officer to him, according to authorities.

Gita, 13, had sat down in the middle of a road when a Stevens county deputy first encountered her. The deputy tried to get the dog into his patrol cruiser so he could then look for her owner, but she wouldn’t get in.

Gita at that point took off up a lightly traveled, unmarked path nearby when the deputy tried to get her off the roadway and away from potentially being hit by a motorist, the sheriff’s office said. The deputy followed Gita, who eventually led him to a small summer cabin.

The deputy soon heard an elderly man’s voice call out for help while on the ground a short distance from the cabin, according to the sheriff’s office. The man had medical conditions that required certain medications that he had not been able to take after falling and hurting his leg several hours earlier.

A year ago, Franky Dean, a 24-year-old documentary film-making master’s student, decided to make a phone call she’d been avoiding nearly half her life. She was sitting in a dark computer room in New York University’s journalism institute in Manhattan when she FaceTimed her parents. They were in the living room at her home in the UK, where she grew up. Franky told them she’d just filed a police report about something that had happened more than a decade earlier. When Franky was 12, she had been sexually abused by a close friend’s dad.

And then her mum said two words that would change her life, again, for ever: “We know.”

It was meant to be a climactic moment – a revelation that Franky had been building up to for years. Instead, it was the beginning of another story – the unravelling of a shadow narrative that spanned half of Franky’s life. It’s a story about what happens when police assume survivors of sexual abuse to be “unknowing victims” – a series of misinterpretations and missteps that amounted to Franky spending 12 years hiding her abuse from her parents while they spent 12 years hiding it from her.

Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have begun vaccination against mpox, nearly two months after the disease outbreak that spread to several countries was declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization.

Some of the 265,000 doses donated to the DRC by the EU and the US were administered in the eastern city of Goma in North Kivu province, where hospitals and health workers have been overstretched, struggling to contain the new and possibly more infectious strain of mpox.

The DRC, with about 30,000 suspected mpox cases and 859 deaths, accounts for more than 80% of all the cases and 99% of all the deaths reported in Africa this year. All of the central African country’s 26 provinces have recorded mpox cases.

Although most mpox infections and deaths recorded in the DRC are in children under 15, the doses being administered are only meant for adults and will be given to at-risk populations and frontline workers, the health minister, Roger Kamba, said this week.

The mayor of a middle-class Los Angeles County suburb said the city stands by its moratorium on homeless shelters and supportive housing even after facing state sanctions Thursday.

California’s housing department revoked approval of the state-mandated housing plan for Norwalk, a city of just over 100,000 people with a homeless population of at least 200 according to county data. The move — the latest escalation of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pressure campaign on cities to help solve the housing crisis — means Norwalk could lose eligibility for state housing and homelessness grants, and be forced to approve affordable housing projects even if they conflict with city zoning.

The city council passed the temporary but sweeping ban in August, in the process quashing a county effort to resettle dozens of people living in encampments to a local hotel. After the council doubled down on the ban last month, extending it through August 2025, Newsom clapped back.

“It’s beyond cruel that Norwalk would ban the building of shelters while people are living on the city’s streets,” Newsom said in a statement today.

The Supreme Court is taking up the case of an Ohio woman who claims she suffered sex discrimination in her employment because she is straight.

The justices on Friday agreed to review an appellate ruling that upheld the dismissal of the discrimination lawsuit filed by the woman, Marlean Ames, against the Ohio Department of Youth Services. Arguments probably will take place early next year.

Ames, who has worked for the department for 20 years, contends she was passed over for a promotion and then demoted because she is heterosexual. Both the job she sought and the one she had held were given to LGBTQ people.

The Canada Border Services Agency acted "deceitfully" when it fired a woman without a proper investigation — while shielding others from liability — after the border agency failed to collect roughly $26 million in duties, says the federal public service labour board.

"In all, the employer's egregious conduct in this matter consisted of bad faith," the Federal Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board said in a recent decision.

"The employer deceitfully disguised its failure to conduct a proper investigation, to give it the appearance of due process."

The case was brought forward by Anne Kline. She was fired by the CBSA in 2018 after the agency accused her of negligence resulting in the loss of about $26 million in import duties it could have imposed against a company.

The Supreme Court will begin a new term on Monday, in which it is set to hear pivotal cases for transgender and LGBTQ rights, for our environment, and gun violence. But the term’s biggest blockbuster could be a case that not only hasn’t yet been filed, but is still just a concept.

That’s because in the next three months, the justices may be asked to inject themselves into the late stages of the 2024 election. If presented with such an opportunity, this could be the term that the Supreme Court elects Donald Trump.

The high court has already been a player in this election. Last term, the justices ensured that Trump’s attempt to steal 2020’s election could not disqualify him from the presidency, issuing a decision assuring he would appear on every ballot. The court delayed Trump’s criminal trial over his attempted coup, then granted him broad immunity from criminal prosecution, preventing damaging courtroom revelations from emerging before voting. In August, the court used its shadow docket to allow Arizona, a key swing state, to require proof of citizenship with voter registration forms at the request of the Republican National Committee.

But perhaps least known—and yet, most important—was Moore v. Harper, a 2023 ruling in which the court set the stage for the next Bush v. Gore scenario by holding that the justices themselves would have the last say when it comes to questions over state-level election rules and disputes.

Donald Trump’s campaign billed the event at a Michigan manufacturing plant as an address by the Republican presidential candidate on the local economy. Residents of the battleground state, aides noted in advance, were being hit hard by inflation.

But with rolls of insulated building materials as a backdrop and workers in the audience, Trump spent the first 25 minutes of the speech on Sept. 27 railing about border security and migrants streaming into the country. His words grew increasingly graphic as he did so.

Migrants who had come across the U.S. border were slaughtering people across the country, he falsely claimed.

“These are people at the highest level of killing that cut your throat and won’t even think about it the next morning,” Trump told the crowd. “They grab young girls and slice them up right in front of their parents.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to questions on what evidence Trump had to support those statements.

As Israel pounded northern Gaza with air strikes last October and ordered the evacuation of more than a million Palestinians from the area, a senior Pentagon official delivered a blunt warning to the White House.

The mass evacuation would be a humanitarian disaster and could violate international law, leading to war crime charges against Israel, Dana Stroul, then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, wrote in an Oct. 13 email to senior aides to President Joe Biden. Stroul was relaying an assessment by the International Committee of the Red Cross that had left her “chilled to the bone,” she wrote.

Reuters reviewed three sets of email exchanges between senior U.S. administration officials, dated Oct. 11 to 14, just days into the crisis. The fighting has led to more than 40,000 deaths in Gaza and spurred U.S. protests led by Arab-Americans and Muslim activists.

The emails, which haven’t been reported before, reveal alarm early on in the State Department and Pentagon that a rising death toll in Gaza could violate international law and jeopardize U.S. ties in the Arab world. The messages also show internal pressure in the Biden administration to shift its messaging from showing solidarity with Israel to including sympathy for Palestinians and the need to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza.

In late August, less than a week before federal agents arrived at his home with a search warrant, New York Police Department Commissioner Edward Caban cleared three officers found to have engaged in misconduct during a raid on a Brooklyn bar.

It would be one of his last official acts before resigning under a cloud of suspicion, as federal prosecutors probe allegations of influence peddling within the police department and City Hall.

The previously unreported move might be unremarkable for a leader who routinely ignored recommendations for disciplinary charges against officers, but for one fact: The owner of the same Brooklyn bar recently came forward to publicly accuse the former police commissioner’s twin brother, James Caban, of trying to “extort” him in exchange for his help in smoothing relations with local police.

The bar owner, Shamel Kelly, says he is now speaking with prosecutors as a potential witness.