US news | The Guardian

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani says crews are working through extremely dangerous conditions' to find anyone trappedRescue crews have continued to search for survivors in the rubble of a collapsed building in Brooklyn, New York, as the death toll rose to eight.Authorities in New York City said at least 17 people were hurt when the three-storey residential building on the edge of a construction site in the borough's Flatbush neighbourhood collapsed at about 4pm on Wednesday. Continue reading...

We would like to hear your reaction to Colom's election win and your hopes for his leadershipDemocrat Scott Colom has unseated Cindy Hyde-Smith, the incumbent Republican senator, to become the first Black senator in Mississippi elected since Reconstruction.Colom had been written off by pundits as having no chance of winning when he announced his campaign last year. But his viral campaign ads created memorable slogans, while he made efforts to engage Mississippians where they were - from driving a truck that offered free tacos, to talking to students and alums at college homecomings, to chatting with voters queued to see Donald Trump. Continue reading...

Some advocates say it no longer makes sense for their movement to be so intertwined with the Republican partyAfter the Democrats' huge wins in the US midterm elections last week, gun rights advocates are updating their strategies in an attempt to cross the aisle and find allies on the left.While most of the biggest and most visible gun rights groups, such as the National Rifle Association (NRA), are already signaling that they will challenge any gun safety legislation brought by the new Democratic Congress, others say it no longer makes sense for their movement to be so deeply intertwined with the Republican party. Continue reading...

At a time when individual men wield massive power, the ramifications of the Nvidia CEO's affair could be enormousOne of the reasons you want to distribute power and responsibility in powerful organizations and high-stakes enterprises is so that the narcissism or myopia of one man do not come to carry outsized consequences.When power is spread out across multiple people, it matters less if one of those people is prone to flattery, or in the midst of a midlife crisis, or perhaps just a bit stupid; the limits on his power become limits on the fallout of his character flaws. Continue reading...

CEO says democratic approach' has helped brand outperform tough market, with big rises in China and USBurberry has returned to profit as its back-to-basics strategy drove strong sales of the British brand's coats, jackets and handbags over the summer.Joshua Schulman, the chief executive, said the luxury brand had outperformed a challenging luxury market" to achieve sales growth of 6%, helped by strong online and wholesale sales particularly in China and the US. Our strategy is working," he said. Continue reading...

Complaints about banks and other financial players keep rising as Trump officials squelch enforcement actions at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's affair must be the costliest fling in human history - and a preview of what awaits when the tech bubble burstsOne thing we all know about the tech billionaires is they are super-smart. We know this largely because they never stop telling us. The cognitive elite", to use their favoured phrase, are entitled to shape our future without our say-so. When Elon Musk goes hiring, he wants super-high-IQ small-government revolutionaries". Long before they got private jets, what fuelled these boys was faith in their own brainpower. As a teenager, Jensen Huang wooed his future wife, Lori, thus: If you do homework with me every Sunday, I promise you you'll get straight As."Lord Byron: I believe it's your move. Continue reading...

Rallies take place on more than US 40 campuses as workers seeking better pay and conditions decry stalled talksStarbucks baristas, students, elected officials and allies are holding rallies at over 40 college campuses across the US on Thursday to support the Starbucks Workers United boycott campaign as the union nears five years of deadlock with the company over contract negotiations.Starbucks Workers United is seeking better pay and stronger staffing levels, including a $17 an hour minimum wage for baristas and a minimum staffing of three workers per store. It has called on the public to boycott Starbucks until its first contract is reached. Continue reading...

Displaying Ten Commandments in class, whitewashing history and study of Bible verses drove many to vote blueMichelle Palmer has run for the Texas state board of education twice before, but this time felt different.I was hearing from day one from people who had not really been politically active before that they were worried about education," Palmer said. Continue reading...

Kerry decries president for ceding clean-energy dominance to China and says climate crisis still a key issue for votersDonald Trump is the biggest loser we've seen in a long time" for scrapping action on the climate crisis and ceding the clean energy race to China, former US secretary of state John Kerry has said.Kerry, speaking at the Cop31 climate summit in Turkey, criticized Trump for withdrawing the US from the international climate process and axing measures that reduced planet-heating emissions. Unlike almost all other countries in the world, the Trump administration has sent no delegation to the resort city of Antalya for the annual UN climate talks, which started on Monday. Continue reading...

Voters remembered Trump's many promises to avoid the same kind of regime-change wars started by his predecessorsFor much of his political career, Donald Trump ranted at past US presidents who got the US entangled in endless foreign conflicts. He used it as a cudgel to belittle his predecessors, calling George W Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003 the worst single mistake ever made in the history of our country". Trump also regularly derided the occupation of Afghanistan as a total disaster".Then Trump decided to launch his own disastrous war against Iran eight months ago. And that conflict may well have cost Republicans control of Congress in last week's midterm elections. Continue reading...

As public mood has shifted on Israel-Gaza and the Iran war, so has the manosphere's devotion to the US presidentEarlier this week, Donald Trump announced that the UFC president, Dana White, was to become his press secretary. The US president hoped the creator of Power Slap, a face-slapping league which one of the world's leading neurologists called a sport inconsistent with the intelligence of humans", might be the right man to deliver his daily rebuttals to the media.Trump later backtracked on the appointment, saying he was only kidding", yet it is easy to understand why he might be pining for White's muscles, trash talk and thirst for athletic violence. White is representative of the way Trump transcended politics in 2024 to become a celebrated figure in the manosphere, the loosely defined cluster of male content creators who have a direct line to America's bored and aggrieved young men. On the night of the 2024 election, White stood at the victory podium reading out thank yous" to the formerly heterodox podcast bros who came out for Trump: the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin' With The Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan". Trump ended up winning 63% of young white men that night, unheard of for a Republican politician. Continue reading...

A Long Shadow: Postwar Japan Through the Lens will be the first show of Japanese photography in more than three decades at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibit brings together 15 intergenerational artists as well as photographic prints, including more than 25 books and magazines and a video installation, all combining to show how photographers in Japan documented the country in the decades after the second world war. The exhibition runs until 2 May 2027 Continue reading...

When he finally arrived at his victory party, Colom walked out to T.I.'s Let Em Know. The audience, still galvanized even after hours of standing, roaredAbout a thousand people gathered on the Woodworth Chapel Lawn at Tougaloo College, a historic black college in Jackson. A DJ played classic southern line dance tunes and much of the crowd obliged, dancing while they waited for Scott Colom, Mississippi's new senate-elect, to arrive.All of the Divine 9, a nickname for the National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC), an umbrella organization of nine historically Black Greek-letter fraternities and sororities, were represented, their members proudly wearing paraphernalia bearing their organization's letters. Others were decked out in gear from some of the state's colleges and universities - Tougaloo College, of course, but also Alcorn State University, Millsaps College, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University and others. Continue reading...

Colom beat Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith after race was called eight days after midterm election day

SS United States, which set transatlantic speed record during maiden voyage in 1952, is sunk off coast of DestinThe historic SS United States has reached the end of its journey at sea, sinking Wednesday off the coast of Destin, Florida, where it will begin a new life underwater as an artificial reef.The nearly 1,000ft American-made vessel, once the fastest ocean liner in the world, was launched in 1952 and made history by setting a transatlantic speed record during its maiden voyage. The ship carried thousands of passengers across the Atlantic over 17 years of operation before being retired in 1969. Continue reading...

Animal that menaced residents was shot in October but then reappeared - and was shot for a second time and killedA coyote that California wildlife officials believed they had euthanized after it bit a toddler and menaced residential pets in a trendy Los Angeles neighborhood was seen alive recently, neighborhood residents said.Wiley, the name some Atwater Village residents gave to the coyote, had vexed the area with its increasingly aggressive and brazen behavior. The wild animal, which scampered through people's backyards, was reportedly being fed by an unidentified man. Wiley's presence drew local uproar after he bit a 16-month-old child. Continue reading...

Four critical in hospital as firefighters dig through rubble in Flatbush after building next to construction site collapsesFirefighters dug through the rubble of a three-story building in Brooklyn on Wednesday after it collapsed at the edge of a construction site, killing at least two people and trapping others beneath the wreckage.Firefighters were called to the scene in the borough's Flatbush section at about 4pm. News helicopter footage showed dozens of firefighters scouring the debris, with a group homing in on one area and appearing to use a saw to cut through the wreckage. Continue reading...

Colom takes victory by razor-thin margin in state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1982Democrat Scott Colom defeated Cindy Hyde-Smith, the incumbent Republican senator, to become the first Black senator in Mississippi elected since Reconstruction, in a stunning upset after more than a week of vote counting in one of the country's most reliably red states.All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this," Colom told a crowd of hundreds who on Wednesday had gathered at Tougaloo College for his victory party. I had the courage to believe in Mississippi. I had the courage to understand that we can show the country that Mississippi matters." Continue reading...

Members of Congress seek to bring sanity' to system but decline to give details on plans to reform or abolish agencyA group of congressional Democrats on Wednesday pushed for immediate efforts to rein in the Trump administration's sweeping immigration enforcement operation and bring sanity" to an immigration system that Donald Trump said, after his party's midterm drubbing, had been too tough" in certain aspects.Just over a week after the midterm elections in which the US president's harsh crackdown on immigration fueled a voter backlash against Republicans, some sitting and newly elected Democrats gathered outside the US Capitol in Washington to advocate for a bipartisan approach to reforms - even as they gear up to take control of both legislative chambers next year. Continue reading...

Democrat chatted up people at hair salons, colleges and at Trump rallies to become Mississippi's first Black senator since ReconstructionThe ad is simple, less than half a minute long, but many say it was the moment the nation took notice of Mississippi's US Senate race.In it, the incumbent Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, a cattle farmer, answers a reporter's question about the rising price of beef: You know, you have so many proteins to choose from," she says. Continue reading...

Black women and girls represent an outsized share of LA homicide victims - frustrated with police and legislators' failures, they're stepping up and speaking out to stop the violenceAs a child, Tioni Theus was a ball of energy. After school she liked to play golf and dance. On weekends, she'd go to the movies and the mall with her older cousin. Driving back home at the end of the day to her family's apartment in South Los Angeles, California, she'd ask: What are we doing next?"Everything changed when Tioni was 13. Her mother was hit by a car and critically injured, leaving her unable to take care of her daughter. While her mom recovered, Tioni lived with other family members. But the accident left Tioni angry, her older cousin Nafeesah Kincy said, and she struggled to understand that her life had permanently changed. Continue reading...

Group attending Veterans Day ceremony sharply reminded by sentinel to maintain silence and respect' at sacred siteA US army sentinel guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier loudly reprimanded the embattled US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and his top staffers on Wednesday, after some in the group were heard laughing and talking near the memorial following a Veterans Day ceremony.According to video captured by the TV network pool, Hegseth was with his wife, Jennifer, chief of staff Ricky Buria, deputy chief of staff Patrick Weaver and senior adviser and deputy assistant Tami Radabaugh walking up the steps in front of the memorial after posing for pictures. A laugh is audible, prompting the guard to yell: All visitors will maintain an atmosphere of silence and respect at all times." Hegseth looked over his shoulder in the direction of the soldier as he continued walking up the steps. Continue reading...

Eleven Democrats missed the key procedural vote on the impeachment effort, which failed by just seven votes

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth and members of his team were reprimanded by a US sentinel at Arlington national cemetery after the Veterans Day commemoration that Donald Trumped attended on 11 November Continue reading...

Voters in Providence, Rhode Island, chose to pull foreign investments from countries that profit from genocideThe tectonic blue wave that washed over the country in last week's midterms also brought about a historic night for the pro-Palestine movement.Up and down the ballot, candidates who demanded an end to Israel's war in Gaza resoundingly defeated opponents funded by the pro-Israel lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). Continue reading...

The SS United States will sink off the coast of Destin, Florida to become an artificial reef, ending long-running wrangle over its fate

He has survived blame for the US midterms disaster and dodged an impeachment vote, but it will be one battle after another now - and he can't win them allLike the brief, wondrous cycle of the mayfly, we may come to look back on the career of Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defence who cheekily rebranded himself secretary of war, as the defining appointment of the Trump era: that is, one in which extraordinary power was handed to a man of cartoonish inappropriateness and which, despite this week's shelved attempt to impeach him, may still turn out to have been luminously short-lived. In January, the Democrats will assume a majority in both chambers and are likely to have another crack at impeaching Hegseth. In the meantime, we can only look on and wonder at his meaning.It is quite something, in the context of Trump cabinet appointments that have included Robert F Kennedy Jr and Kristi Noem, to be the most glaringly underqualified person in the West Wing, but since being sworn in almost two years ago, Hegseth has comfortably seen off any rivals to his crown. This week, eight articles of impeachment, or high crimes and misdemeanours" as the official rubric has it, were levied against him by Thomas Massie, an outgoing Republican congressman from Kentucky, who accused Hegseth of illegal acts including violating the constitution by conducting an unauthorised war with Iran and effecting regime change in Venezuela.Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnistDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

Trump has already made history as the only president to be impeached twice. After the Republicans' thrashing in the midterms, could there be a third attempt?The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting longer and some Republicans are getting nervous. After a long stretch of impunity, it's impeachment season in the US. While the attempt to impeach the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, failed yesterday, Donald Trump may be worried he's next.In January, the president warned Republicans that they had better win the November elections or he would be in big trouble. If we don't win the midterms ... they'll find a reason to impeach me," Trump said. He repeated this plea to voters during an October rally in Oklahoma: Pretend I'm running, please. Just pretend. 'Cause I am on the ballot. And if we don't win, they'll end up impeaching me." Continue reading...

White House warns Democratic pledges to investigate president may cross line into blatant criminality'The incoming Democratic chair of the powerful congressional oversight committee said it appears Donald Trump has something to hide" after the White House threatened criminal investigations over the party's planned scrutiny of the administration.Robert Garcia, ranking member of the oversight committee in the House of Representatives, vowed to press on in the face of what he Continue reading...

Naresh Bhatt, 28, said he dismembered wife's body after she took her own life, a claim prosecutors called ridiculous'A Virginia man who claimed he dismembered his wife's body after she took her own life is facing a life sentence after a jury convicted him of first-degree murder.Prosecutors in Manassas called it ridiculous" that Naresh Bhatt insisted that he woke to find Mamta Kafle Bhatt, 28, dead from suicide in their bedroom in July 2024, then panicked because he thought he would be held responsible. Continue reading...

A selection of images from the famous US highway, which was established on 11 November 1926 Continue reading...

Country is in the middle of worst measles outbreak since 1991, with more than 5,400 cases nationallyThe United States could lose its measles elimination status this week, an event likely to cement health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr's legacy of meddling in vaccine policies amid the worst outbreak of the virus in the US in 35 years.If the US loses its measles-free status, it would join Canada and several European and Asian nations that had eliminated the disease only for it to return. Continue reading...

House Republicans block impeachment resolution that cited US military actions in Iran, Yemen and Venezuela. Plus, SS United States to be sunk to create artificial reef

But, says one expert, it would be misleading to say that gerrymandering did not work at all in this electionIf there was one obvious conclusion from Democrats' sweeping victories in the mid-term elections on Tuesday, it seemed to be that the Republican effort to redraw congressional districts in their favor backfired.Starting last summer, Trump and Republican allies undertook an aggressive effort to redraw congressional districts, reconfiguring the lines to give Republican candidates an advantage. Ahead of the midterms, Republicans redrew 15 seats to their advantage. After Tuesday's election, they appear poised to lose all but two of them. It was definitely the wrong move," an unnamed House Republican told Fox News. One of the truisms in politics is never to overreach. We did and that was part of the reason for the backlash." Continue reading...

Richard Trahant says accusers have been vindicated after Catholic church officially classifies Paul Hart as sex abuserAn attorney who was fined more than $400,000 after getting an abusive Roman Catholic priest removed as a New Orleans high school's chaplain says it was worth it" now that the church has officially classified the cleric as a clergy molester.That remark from Richard Trahant came days after the archdiocese of New Orleans, having waited years, added Paul Hart on 6 November to a list of Catholic priests and deacons faced with credible claims of clergy abuse while serving in the area. Continue reading...

Estranged father of Duchess of Sussex was arrested for keeping child sexual abuse material, authorities sayThe estranged father of Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, has been jailed after US authorities said he cut an electronic monitoring device off his ankle, days after his arrest for keeping child sexual abuse material in storage units in California.Thomas Markle, 82, was in custody awaiting a hearing in federal court in Tampa, Florida, first assistant US attorney Bill Essayli said. He was arrested shortly after he cut off the ankle bracelet at 1.45am on Tuesday, Essayli said. Continue reading...

Hundreds of datasets and websites that contradict government's ideology have been altered or wiped - a tactic taken straight from Heritage Foundation's policy blueprintEven amid Donald Trump's failures - the Iran war, soaring prices and a sharp rebuke in the midterm elections last week - there's still at least one area his administration continues to carry out adeptly: its mass public information censorship campaign.In less than two years, the Trump administration has done staggering damage to US data and information infrastructure. Hundreds of federal datasets have been terminated or altered, and thousands of government webpages that address diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), the climate crisis and other issues have been quietly revised or completely wiped. Continue reading...

The former Tottenham manager is always going to be a subject of interest, but United's job carries a rare powerAs Mauricio Pochettino left the podium to close his final press conference of the last international window, he offered an ambiguous farewell.See you next ..." Pochettino began as he headed to the tunnels of Allianz Field in Saint Paul, before cutting his sentence short. Then, a bit of a sing-song: See you next, see you next." Continue reading...

Bessent, driving force behind US push to cripple Iran's economy, relocates over alleged threat to his lifeThe US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has relocated from his home in the Washington area to a military base after an Iranian threat against his life, the New York Times has reported.Bessent has spearheaded a US push to cripple Iran's economy since the start of the Middle East war, vowing economic asphyxiation" of the Islamic republic through a web of sanctions. Continue reading...

Teams with championship aspirations tooled up at the deadline. Most, but not all of them, have improved their chances