AFP

Police in the US state of Idaho have received death threats after arresting 31 members of a white supremacist group who were preparing to riot at a weekend Pride event, an officer said Monday.

The arrests were made Saturday after someone called 911 to warn about masked men who “looked like a little army” climbing into a truck and seemingly headed to the LGBTQ event at a park in the northwestern state.

The men — who police believe are linked to US far-right cell Patriot Front — were intercepted before they could reach Coeur d’Alene City Park.

They were armed with “shields, shin guards and other riot gear… including at least one smoke grenade,” and were arrested for conspiracy to riot, said Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White.

At a Monday press conference, White said half of around 150 calls received by his department since the arrests were from anonymous people wanting to “scream and yell at us” and “offer death threats against myself and other members of the police department, merely for doing our jobs.”

White attributed the abusive calls to “hate groups from outside” Coeur d’Alene, with one person phoning from Norway to “give us their opinions.”

The police chief said he and his department had been surprised by “the level of preparation that we saw” and by the “equipment that was carried and worn by those individuals.”

“It was very clear to us immediately that this was a riotous group” with “some ill intent,” he added.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a justice and rights body which tracks extremist organizations, has labeled Patriot Front a white nationalist hate group. 

White said the arrested men came from at least 11 different US states, and that he had not previously encountered the Patriot Front in the area.

The remote hills of northern Idaho were long associated with Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi group which hoped to establish a separate white-only region, and was tied to numerous violent crimes across the United States.

But Mayor Jim Hammond said the area was “not going back to the days of the Aryan Nations” and was “able to completely rid ourselves of that group and the kind of awful culture that they were trying to present to our community.”

An FBI spokeswoman told AFP that federal officers were assisting local authorities.

“If, in the course of the investigation, information comes to light of a potential federal violation, the FBI is prepared to investigate,” said Sandra Barker via email.

A wildfire was burning out of control Monday in forest outside Los Angeles after a weekend of record-breaking temperatures, and as forecasters warn of fire danger across the parched US West.

Almost 1,000 acres (400 hectares) had been charred by the Sheep fire since it erupted in the Los Angeles national forest on Saturday evening.

Thousands were warned to evacuate their homes in the community of Wrightwood, with the fire just five percent contained.

Firefighters battling the blaze said it was ripping through an area with thick vegetation. 

“The terrain is very steep — it’s a bad area,” Alison Hesterly of Cal Fire San Bernardino told the Los Angeles Times.

Over 200 firefighters were battling the blaze, including from the air.

“They’re really focusing hard on the edges on the northwest side and the south end to secure those edges, to hope that the wind won’t blow the fire out of the containment lines,” Hesterly said. 

“That’s a huge focus for today — securing those high-risk areas with hose lines and hand lines.”

Video on social media showed towering flames gripping trees and being fanned by strong winds.

The fire erupted as parts of California and the West were smothered in extreme heat, with temperatures in Palm Springs on Saturday hitting 114 Fahrenheit (45.5 Celsius), the highest for the day since records began.

The Southwest has been baked by a once-in-a-thousand-years drought that has left vegetation exceedingly dry and flammable.

Fire chiefs are warning that 2022 looks set to be a terrible year for wildfire.

“Given the fuel conditions, the fire conditions that we’re here talking about, I foresee a very tough four, five, six months in front of us,” Orange County Fire Authority Chief Brian Fennessy said last week.

The National Weather Service said Monday that fire danger was widespread across the region.

“An expansive area of critical fire weather conditions is expected across the Southwest into the southern and central Rockies and High Plains,” the NWS said on its website.

“Red Flag Warnings have been raised today for large portions of southeastern Utah, southwestern Colorado, northern and central Arizona and New Mexico today. 

“Dry and windy conditions will promote the rapid spread of fires across these areas.”

In New Mexico, hundreds of thousands of acres of forest have been consumed in wildfires that have been burning for months.

US President Joe Biden on Saturday flew over some of the blazes, before being briefed on efforts to combat the fires.

Temperature variations and wildfires are both expected parts of the natural cycle.

But global warming, driven chiefly by humanity’s unchecked burning of fossil fuels, has knocked the climate out of kilter.

Hot periods are hotter than they were and weather cycles are less stable.

This has exacerbated droughts and vastly increases the risk of disastrous wildfires.

Amazon plans to start flying some purchases to customers later this year, the e-commerce giant said Monday, announcing drone delivery that will debut in a California town.

Retail rival Walmart already offers drone delivery and in May announced it is dramatically ramping up the service, expanding to six states by year-end with the potential to drop off one million packages annually.

Amazon customers in the Northern California town of Lockeford will be able to sign up for free delivery by “Prime Air” drones, the company said in a post.

“Air-eligible” items ordered at the retailer’s website will be packed into drones that will fly to the delivery addresses, deposit packages outside from safe heights, then fly away, according to Amazon.

Amazon said it has created a sophisticated system to enable its drones to detect and avoid aircraft, people, pets and other obstacles.

“We designed our sense-and-avoid system for two main scenarios: to be safe when in transit, and to be safe when approaching the ground,” the company said.

Feedback from the service in California will be used to expand the drone service.

A variety of companies ranging from new startups to major tech firms such as Google-parent Alphabet are working on autonomous drone delivery.

Alphabet’s drone project Wing completed its first real-world deliveries in 2014 in rural Australia where they successfully transported first-aid supplies, candy bars, dog treats, and water to farmers, according to the company’s website.

Two years after that, Wing drones were used to deliver burritos to students at a university in Virginia.

“The logistics industry is abuzz with all-things drones,” the Amazon team said.

Ukraine said Monday its forces had been pushed back from the centre of key industrial city Severodonetsk, where President Volodymyr Zelensky described a fight for “literally every metre”.

The twin cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk have been targeted for weeks as the last areas still under Ukrainian control in the eastern Lugansk region.

Regional governor Sergiy Gaiday said Monday Russian forces control 70 to 80 percent of Severodonetsk but had not captured or encircled it.

“They destroyed all the bridges, and getting into the city is no longer possible. Evacuation is also not possible,” he told Radio Free Europe.

Ukrainian forces in the area had two choices, “to surrender or die”, said Eduard Basurin, a representative for pro-Russian separatists.

The capture of Severodonetsk would open the road to Sloviansk and another major city, Kramatorsk, in Moscow’s push to conquer Donbas, a mainly Russian-speaking region partly held by pro-Kremlin separatists since 2014.

Ukrainian forces were fighting for “every town and village where the occupiers came”, Zelensky said on Monday in a message to mark the eighth anniversary of the liberation of Mariupol in the earlier conflict.

In May, Russian troops captured the port city in southern Ukraine after a weeks-long siege.

“We are once again fighting for it and all of Ukraine,” Zelensky said.

– ‘War crimes’ –

On Monday, Amnesty International accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine, saying that attacks on the northeastern city of Kharkiv — many using banned cluster bombs — had killed hundreds of civilians. 

“The repeated bombardments of residential neighbourhoods in Kharkiv are indiscriminate attacks which killed and injured hundreds of civilians, and as such constitute war crimes,” the rights group said in a report on Ukraine’s second-biggest city.

In Bucha, a town near Kyiv synonymous with war crimes allegations, local police said Monday they had discovered another seven bodies in a grave.

“Several victims had their hands tied and knees bound,” Kyiv regional police chief Andriy Nebytov said on Facebook.

Dozens of bodies in civilian clothing were found in the town in April after Russian troops withdrew from the area following a month-long occupation.

Elsewhere in northern Ukraine on Monday, Russian rocket strikes hit the town of Pryluky, local authorities said. 

Pryluky, which lies about 150 kilometres (90 miles) east of the capital, is home to a military airfield.

In Lysychansk, Russian bombardments killed three civilians in the last 24 hours, including a six-year-old boy, Lugansk governor Gaiday said Monday.

While in the city of Donetsk, separatist authorities said three people were killed and four wounded in Ukrainian shelling on a market.

– Weapons call –

Russia’s invasion of its neighbour has prompted Finland and Sweden to give up decades of military non-alignment and seek to join the NATO alliance. 

In terms of security, Sweden is now “in a better place now than before it applied”, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday, even though its application is in limbo with Turkey currently withholding its approval.

In a joint press conference with Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, Stoltenberg said NATO was working “hard and actively” to resolve Ankara’s concerns “as soon as possible” ahead of a meeting on June 15.

It was at the summit in Brussels that Kyiv said Monday it was hoping for a decision on further Western arms deliveries to support its war effort.

“Being straightforward — to end the war we need heavy weapons,” Ukrainian presidential advisor Mykhaylo Podolyak said on Twitter.

Podolyak listed items he said the Ukrainian army requires, including hundreds of howitzers, tanks and armoured vehicles.

– WTO meeting –

Away from the battlefield, World Trade Organization members gathered in Geneva Sunday, with the threat posed to global food security by Russia’s war top of the agenda.

Tensions ran high during a closed-door session, in which around three dozen delegates “walked out” before a speech by Russia’s deputy economic development minister Vladimir Ilichev, WTO spokesman Dan Pruzin told journalists.

Ukraine’s deputy agriculture minister on Monday said a quarter of his country’s arable land had been lost but insisted national food security was not threatened.

On a farm near the southern Ukrainian city Mykolaiv, the harvest has been delayed by the need to undo the damage done by Russian troops that passed through the area in March.

“We planted really late because we needed to clear everything beforehand,” including bombshells, Nadiia Ivanova, 42, told AFP.

The farm’s warehouses currently hold 2,000 tonnes of last season’s grain but there are no takers.

The railways have been partially destroyed by the Russian army, while any ship that sails faces the threat of being sunk.

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Amber Heard said the “hate and vitriol” she suffered on social media during her libel trial against Johnny Depp was not “fair,” but insisted in an interview released Monday she did not blame the jury for largely siding with her ex-husband.

After a six-week legal tussle between the former Hollywood power couple, a US jury awarded Depp more than $10 million in damages for defamation, in contrast to just $2 million for Heard who had counter-sued.

The case, live-streamed to millions, featured lurid and intimate details about the celebrities’ private lives, and Heard was targeted by countless social media posts and internet memes throughout.

“I don’t presume the average person should know those things,” Heard told NBC in her first major interview since the verdict. “And so I don’t take it personally.”

“But even somebody who is sure I’m deserving of all this hate and vitriol, even if you think that I’m lying, you still couldn’t look me in the eye and tell me that you think on social media there’s been a fair representation.”

“You cannot tell me that you think that this has been fair,” she said in a clip from the interview, which airs in full on NBC News’ Dateline on Friday.

Depp sued Heard over a Washington Post op-ed in which she did not name him, but described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” Heard counter-sued after Depp’s lawyer described her abuse claims as a “hoax.”

Online public opinion during the trial appeared to come down heavily on Depp’s side, and Heard’s lawyers accused his legal team of working to “demonize” her.

Heard’s attorney Elaine Bredehoft has said the “Aquaman” star wants to appeal the verdict.

“How could they make a judgement, how could they not come to that conclusion?” Heard asked in the interview.

“I don’t blame them. I actually understand he’s a beloved character. And people feel they know him. He’s a fantastic actor.

When interviewer Savannah Guthrie suggested it was the jury’s duty to not be swayed by Depp’s A-list status, Heard responded: “Again, how could they (not be) — after listening to three and a half weeks of testimony about how I was a non-credible person, not to believe a word that came out of my mouth?”

Donald Trump ignored repeated warnings from top aides against claiming the 2020 election was stolen, according to testimony unveiled Monday by the congressional panel probing the 2021 assault on the US Capitol.

The second of a series of June hearings was shown videotaped accounts from the former president’s aides, including campaign manager Bill Stepien, saying they advised him not to declare victory on election night because he hadn’t won — but that Trump went ahead anyway.

“He thought I was wrong, he told me so, and that they were going to go in a different direction,” Stepien said.

Monday’s hearing followed a prime-time session last week in which the panel began making its case that the January 6, 2021 insurrection was the culmination of a conspiracy by Trump and his aides to overturn his defeat to Joe Biden.

“This morning, we will tell the story of how Donald Trump lost the election — and knew he lost the election — and as a result of his loss, decided to wage an attack on our democracy,” Democratic panel chairman Bennie Thompson said in his opening remarks.

Trump’s closest campaign aides, his attorney general Bill Barr and White House officials revealed in video testimony shown to the hearing how they had repeatedly warned Trump his election voting fraud narrative was bogus.

“I told him that it was crazy stuff,” Barr said.

– ‘Far flung conspiracies’ –

Thompson’s Republican deputy Liz Cheney said Trump instead listened to the advice of “apparently inebriated” Rudy Giuliani, a former mayor of New York and one of the former president’s closest allies, “to just claim he won, and insist that the vote counting stop — to falsely claim everything was fraudulent.”

After crucial swing states were called for Biden, Giuliani and his associates pushed a campaign of debunked theories about massive voter fraud that put them at odds with the White House lawyers that Stepien referred to as “Team Normal.”

“The Trump campaign legal team knew there was no legitimate argument — fraud or irregularities or anything — to overturn the election,” said Cheney.

The Wyoming congresswoman highlighted “far-flung conspiracies” — pushed by Giuliani and lawyer Sidney Powell, but dismissed as “nonsense” by Barr — of fraud involving voting machines “with a deceased Venezuelan Communist allegedly pulling the strings.” 

The claims are the subject of a multibillion-dollar lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.

The committee had planned to hear in-person testimony from Stepien but he canceled an hour before the hearing after his wife went into labor. 

Trump started pushing what came to be known as his “Big Lie” around 2:30 am on November 4, 2020, making baseless allegations of fraud and prematurely declaring victory on the night of an election he ultimately lost to Joe Biden by seven million votes.

Barr told the committee in previously unseen video testimony that Trump claimed there was major fraud underway “right out of the box on election night… before there was actually any potential of looking at evidence.”

– Conspiracy –

The committee says that initial claim grew quickly into a conspiracy to cling to power by Trump and his inner circle — and a fundraising campaign that raised $250 million between election night and the insurrection.

The panel hopes to demonstrate that the clips from Stepien, Barr and others prove Trump should have known that what he was being told by Giuliani and Powell wasn’t true. 

But legal analysts are split on whether that is sufficient to argue intent, as Trump would likely argue in his defense that he took extreme measures to cling to power because still genuinely believed he had won.

Zoe Lofgren, a Democratic committee member, said the defeated president laid the groundwork for spreading his false allegations about the election months in advance.

“As early as April 2020, Mr Trump claimed that the only way he could lose an election would be as a result of fraud,” she said.

“We’ll also show that the Trump campaign used these false claims of election fraud to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters who were told their donations were for the legal fight in the courts but the Trump campaign didn’t use the money for that,” Lofgren added.

“The big lie was also a big rip-off.”