Siobhan Kennedy , Washington Correspondent

At the ongoing trial of Ghislaine Maxwell in New York, the jury has been hearing from the man who ran the mansion in Palm Beach once owned by her former friend and lover Jeffrey Epstein.

In New York, at the trial of the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, the alleged victim identified only as ‘Jane’ is giving testimony for a second day.

The trial of the British socialite Ghislane Maxwell has been continuing in New York City today. 

The trial of the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell is getting underway in New York City, where she’s accused of recruiting and grooming underage girls for Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse over a period of ten years.

Jeffrey Epstein is dead, but in a few days his one-time lover and friend, Ghislaine Maxwell, is due to go on trial in New York. But the case would most likely never have come to court at all – were it not for the work of Julie Brown, a journalist in Florida whose groundbreaking investigation led to Epstein’s arrest in 2019.

A jury in Wisconsin has found 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty on all counts of the shooting of three men, two fatally, during an anti-racism protest sparked by a police shooting in the city of Kenosha last August. 

The Canadian province of British Columbia has seen a month’s worth of rain in just two days. 

China’s President Xi has warned President Joe Biden that encouraging Taiwanese independence would be “playing with fire”, adding for good measure that “those who play with fire get burned”. 

There has been a shock election result in the United States, where the Republicans have won the governorship in Virginia for the first time in more than a decade, while the race in New Jersey is still too close to call. 

President Biden has declared “it’s good to be back”, as he met the Pope at the Vatican. During a 90-minute audience, Mr Biden praised the Pope’s leadership on environmental issues, calling him the “most significant warrior for peace I’ve ever met”. But as Mr Biden heads into a flurry of diplomatic meetings before the COP26…

President Biden has appealed to Democrats to push through his $1.75 trillion environment and economy bill, which included plans to slash climate pollution and put the US on track to halve harmful emissions by 2030.

President Biden is preparing for his visit to Europe before the COP26 summit in Glasgow, amid warnings from his political allies that he’s running out of time to push through his ambitious climate agenda. 

The COP summit is the world’s best and, many say, last chance to get runaway climate change under control. 

Today US Vice-President Kamala Harris is travelling to Lake Mead in Nevada to talk up the President’s climate agenda. It’s the biggest reservoir in the US, but it’s drying up because of the twin effects of the heat and the drought, both of which are exacerbated by climate change. 

In the US, President’s Biden’s climate agenda is under renewed threat from inside his party.