The Biden administration is moving toward lifting a de facto ban on American military contractors deploying to Ukraine, four US officials familiar with the matter told CNN, to help the country’s military maintain and repair US-provided weapons systems.

The change would mark another significant shift in the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy, as the US looks for ways to give Ukraine’s military an upper hand against Russia.

The policy is still being worked on by administration officials and has not received final sign-off yet from President Joe Biden, officials said.

Taking a daily multivitamin does not help people to live any longer and may actually increase the risk of an early death, a major study has found.

Researchers in the US analysed health records from nearly 400,000 adults with no major long-term diseases to see whether daily multivitamins reduced their risk of death over the next two decades.

Rather than living longer, people who consumed daily multivitamins were marginally more likely than non-users to die in the study period, prompting the government researchers to comment that “multivitamin use to improve longevity is not supported”.

Nearly half of UK adults take multivitamins or dietary supplements once a week or more, part of a domestic market worth more than half a billion pounds annually. The global market for the supplements is estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars each year. In the US, a third of adults use multivitamins in the hope of preventing disease.

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The entire Bakersfield chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle club has been arrested in California on various violent charges.

The Kern county sheriff’s department said on Tuesday that six members of the motorcycle club’s Bakersfield chapter were arrested, including its president and vice-president.

All suspects have been charged with kidnapping, first-degree robbery, criminal threats, false imprisonment, assault with a firearm, participation in a criminal street gang, criminal conspiracy and intimidating a witness or victim, as well as elder abuse.

Gusty winds fueled a rapidly growing wildfire in central Oregon, the latest blaze to erupt in the US west as high temperatures envelop the region.

The fire broke out just outside the community of La Pine, in central Oregon, on Tuesday and rapidly grew to 2,415 acres (9.7 sq km) by Wednesday morning. Fire crews were able to get 30% containment on the blaze, officials reported on Wednesday, but winds continued to threaten progress.

Evacuation alerts were sent to more than 1,000 homes and businesses as a billowing plume of black and grey smoke loomed over local businesses. La Pine, located about 30 miles south of Bend, is a popular destination area best known for its microbreweries, hiking, river rafting and skiing on nearby Mount Bachelor.

Jodi Kerr, the owner of a home decor and gift store in La Pine, was packing up her store on Tuesday afternoon so she could evacuate. “It’s part of the risk of living in an area like this. It’s beautiful, but it’s wild,” said Kerr.

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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson took her conservative colleagues to task Wednesday over a ruling weakening a federal statute that prevented public officials from receiving bribes in the form of gratuities.

In her dissent, Jackson issued a brutal smackdown of the majority opinion, penned by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who read the statute as a ban on all “gratuities,” meaning gifts including lunches, plaques, and gift cards. Kavanaugh and the other conservative justices ruled 6–3 that the responsibility to regulate gratuities should rest with state and local governments.

Jackson wrote that the ruling relied on an “absurd and atextual reading of the statute” that “only today’s Court could love.”

She argued that the ruling had ignored the plain text of the statute, which targeted officials who “corruptly” received bribes and gratuities “intending to be influenced or rewarded,” and that the court had instead decided the statute did not criminalize gratuities at all.

The 6-3 decision, led by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was a response to a suit that came during a hot-button period when social media was thick with contentious posts over COVID-19, vaccines, top government scientist Anthony Fauci, and other emotional topics. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented.

Barrett, writing for the majority, said the challengers argued that unfettered speech on social media is critical to their work as scientists, pundits and activists.

“But they do not point to any specific instance of content moderation that caused them identifiable harm,” Barrett wrote. “They have therefore failed to establish an injury that is sufficiently ‘concrete and particularized.’”

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President Joe Biden is issuing a proclamation pardoning thousands of U.S. veterans who were convicted under a military law that banned gay sex, making them eligible to apply for previously withheld benefits.

In a statement early Wednesday announcing the clemency actions, Biden said he was "righting an historic wrong" to pardon former service members "who were convicted simply for being themselves."