World News

>Far-right groups are rallying in the north-western US city of Portland, Oregon, amid fears of clashes with left-wing counter-protesters.

>Police are mounting a major operation to keep the two sides apart.

>The stated aim of the far-right gathering is to urge that the antifa (anti-fascist) movement be declared a domestic terror organisation.

>Proud Boys - which The Southern Poverty Law Center, a major US civil rights organisation, has classified as a hate group - have been involved in previous far-right rallies, and violent street clashes, in Portland.

>“Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.” That phrase appears repeatedly in a trove of private emails and documents recently obtained by The Spokesman-Review through multiple sources. Shea, R-Spokane Valley, has used it to sign messages to his associates on the far right, including militia members who took part in the 2016 armed standoff at an Oregon wildlife refuge.

>Last year, at the Marble religious compound in northern Stevens County, Shea described a brewing civil war in the United States, telling a crowd: “Liberty must be kept by force.” He later acknowledged writing a manifesto titled “Biblical Basis for War.”

>Shea and some of his closest supporters have made physical preparations for a holy war, one that would help them establish their long-envisioned 51st state, their Redoubt, their Christian homeland. Leaked emails published this week reveal that Shea has had close ties with a group that conducted “patriotic and biblical training on war for young men.”

>In addition to running “background checks” on liberal activists and supporting military-style training for boys and young men, Shea has in recent years sought to purchase GPS tracking devices, compiled dossiers on local progressive leaders and kept a blacklist of suspected informants in his network.

>By January 2017, Shea had developed suspicions about a new group of associates, and he sent Pounder a list of four names. “Please get with Scout and add these names to the confirmed informants list,” Shea wrote. Scout was a code name for one of Shea’s most trusted lieutenants, Anthony Bosworth, who’s known for bringing guns to the federal courthouse in Spokane and physically abusing his 17-year-old daughter in a videotaped public altercation in Yakima.

>In a fall 2017 group chat on the encrypted messaging app Signal, Pounder shared the address and contact information of an activist who had opposed a right-wing occupation of federal land in Nevada in 2014, and who was now pushing legislation to protect wolves in Washington. Bosworth suggested sending the activist the severed tail and testicles of a wolf from North Idaho. Shea then chided Bosworth – not for the wolf-parts proposal, but for creating an electronic record of the conversation. Such things should be discussed face-to-face, Shea wrote.

>That was the same chat in which Bosworth and Jack Robertson, who hosts a far-right radio show using the pseudonym John Jacob Schmidt, proposed acts of violence against liberal demonstrators and Shea offered to conduct background checks.

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>Météo-France said it recorded the new record-high in Gallargues-le-Montueux, a town about 25 kilometers (16 miles) northeast of Montpellier, at 4:20 p.m. on Friday. In Villevieille, also in southern France, the official temperature peaked at 45.4°C (113.7°F).

>The temperature in Gallargues-le-Montueux easily broke the country’s all-time record, which was set during the European heat wave in August 2003, when the temperature in southern France reached 44.1°C (111.4°F). The 2003 record was broken in at least 12 different places on Friday.