Oil heads for biggest daily fall since pandemic as Iran says it will reopen strait of Hormuz under its management

Loyalists rush to defend president for outsmarting the critics' but others decry deal as a negative for our country'Donald Trump's acceptance of a two-week ceasefire in Iran has exposed fresh divisions in his Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, with some supporters expressing vindication and others accusing the US president of betrayal.The US and Iran both claimed victory after the two countries agreed to pause hostilities following more than a month of war. But the strait of Hormuz remained closed on Wednesday and fighting was still taking place as Israel launched its biggest attacks yet on Lebanon. Continue reading...

One of the great lessons of the Masters is money only goes so far, with strict rules designed to keep out ticket toutsJeffrey Epstein's web of influence stretched from European palaces to Ivy League universities and Wall Street banks, but there was apparently at least one little corner of the establishment that seems to have been beyond his reach: Augusta National. In July 2019, Epstein sent an iMessage to Steve Bannon asking for his help with a particularly difficult problem. Need to work magic to get brad Karp admitted to augusta golf club," Epstein wrote. The head of Paul Weiss Brad Karp?" Bannon replied. Yes."Karp, the former chair of the legal firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, stepped down from his position in February because of his ties with Epstein. Continue reading...

Spaniard is seeking his second Green Jacket at first Masters since 1994 without Tiger Woods or Phil MickelsonHalf a mile from the gates of Augusta National, at the foot of Washington Road, sits a keyboard and piano store. It closes on Masters week every year. Spring has sprung and so have we," reads a sign in the forecourt. Clearly there is insufficient correlation between golf fans and those with a tendency to tinkle the ivories (or similar) for the business to remain open.Masters mania is not for everyone. This feels a pity; almost nine months since the last putt dropped on the final major of 2025 and 27 weeks on from the Ryder Cup rumpus of Bethpage, golf is back at the forefront of the sporting world. Another date reference is significant. This Masters, the 90th edition, will be the first since 1994 without either one or both of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson on the draw sheet. Rather than cause for a golfing lament, this provides opportunity. The post-Tiger world need not be as scary a place as so many seem to believe. Continue reading...

The chasm between the two sides remains vast. A mega-deal remains the only path to averting a return to full-scale warDonald Trump styles himself as a peerless tough guy who never backs down. But he doesn't always make good on his threats. Consider his demand that Denmark hand over Greenland, or his threats to hike tariffs on trade partners. He has even found ways to extend his deadlines for Tehran to reopen the strait of Hormuz, claiming, without evidence, that Iran was begging" for a deal.On Monday, Trump outdid himself. He gave Tehran until Tuesday at 8pm ET to reopen the strait - or a whole civilization will die tonight". The president's public threat to commit genocide sent shockwaves through the United States. Some Democratic leaders concluded that Trump has lost his mind". More than 70 Democratic members of Congress called for his removal from office. Some politicians and media personalities sympathetic to Maga did the same or roundly rebuked him. Some commentators reminded soldiers that they were required to disobey flagrantly illegal orders. Never in American presidential politics has a spectacle matched this one. Continue reading...

Voters pick Clay Fuller for US House over Democrat who opposes Iran war, but by smaller margin than in the past

Architect admits to murdering eight women, whose remains were mostly found along Long Island's coast

Justice department says Bondi will not appear for House deposition since she was ousted as US attorney generalPam Bondi, the former US attorney general, will not appear next week for a scheduled deposition before the House oversight and government reform committee to answer questions about the justice department's handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and its release of the Epstein files, the committee said.In a statement on Wednesday morning shared with the Guardian, a spokesperson for the House oversight committee said the Department of Justice has stated Pam Bondi will not appear on April 14 for a deposition since she is no longer Attorney General and was subpoenaed in her capacity as Attorney General". Continue reading...

Nixon's Vietnam strategy appears at play in Trump's Iran threats, but he may want to ponder the ex-president's fateDonald Trump has made no secret of his admiration for Richard Nixon, Watergate and leaving office in disgrace be damned.But the president has taken his tribute act to new levels in threatening to erase Iran as a civilization, only to step back from the brink when the Tehran regime agreed - at a price - to reopen the economically vital strait of Hormuz. Continue reading...

Taylor defeated conservative rival Maria Lazar, providing another gauge of Democrats' durability in midtermsWisconsin voters sent another liberal justice to the state supreme court, with Chris Taylor beating the conservative Maria Lazar and giving liberals a 5-2 edge on the high court.The retirement of Justice Rebecca Bradley, a conservative, gave liberals a chance to further consolidate their hold on the high court ahead of the next presidential election, when the swing state is sure to see challenges to election results. Continue reading...

Carlos Ivan Mendoza Hernandez hospitalized after shooting in rural Patterson as officials say investigation under wayImmigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot a man in a vehicle in northern California on Tuesday.ICE agents conducted a vehicle stop in Patterson, a rural agricultural town in California's Central Valley about 80 miles east of San Jose, to arrest Carlos Ivan Mendoza Hernandez, ICE director Todd Lyons said in a statement. Continue reading...

Trump announces two-week conditional ceasefire after last-minute diplomatic intervention led by Pakistan - key US politics stories from Tuesday 7 April at a glanceIt appears Iran's whole civilization will not die tonight.With less than two hours before his self-imposed deadline for Iran to surrender or face annihilation, Donald Trump announced that the US and Iran had agreed to a two-week conditional ceasefire after a last-minute diplomatic intervention led by Pakistan. Continue reading...

I no longer wish to live in a country where performative cruelty has become the guiding principle of governmentWhen not firing off social media posts threatening potential war crimes against 93 million Iranians, Donald Trump is busy quietly killing the so-called American dream. With gasoline at US$4 a gallon, credit card debt hitting a record US$1.28tn, and stagnating wages, Americans are struggling to detect the prosperity their president promised them. Regardless, Trump plans to spend a record $1.5tn on the military in 2027 - a 40% increase for the Pentagon at a time when farm bankruptcies have increased by 46%.But if Trump's illegal war on Iran has taught us anything, it is this: Americans will pay any price for freedom, except if it increases the price of groceries or gasoline. People in the Maga heartlands tolerated the erosion of civil liberties, democracy and the rule of law during the first year of Trump's second presidency but they will be unforgiving if their standard of living declines. Continue reading...

The defending champion is a lot more relaxed but just as motivated' this year after finally winning at AugustaOn the Tuesday of last year's Masters, Rory McIlroy dined with Justin Rose in the clubhouse at Augusta. He arrived right around the time that all the guests at Scottie Scheffler's champions dinner were having cocktails on the balcony. I was pulling up Magnolia Lane," McIlroy says. And I'm like, well, do I go and park way over at the parking lot? Because I'm not going to park in the champions parking lot.'"Not when there's Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and everyone else looking down. I didn't want to get out and use a valet because they were going to see me and it was going to be weird. So I had this really awkward moment," McIlroy says with a laugh. Thankfully that was the last time that I needed to do that." Continue reading...

Benjamin Torres, son of Valerie Mack, files suit before Rex Heuermann reportedly set to change plea to guiltyThe accused serial killer Rex Heuermann is being sued along with his former wife and their daughter, by the son of one of his alleged victims.Benjamin Torres, the son of Valerie Mack, one the alleged victims in the case against Heuermann, claims his mother was tortured ferociously, and her body dismembered". Continue reading...

Lawmakers call for use of 25th amendment after president brazenly threatens to commit war crimes in IranAs Donald Trump unleashes curse-filled threats against Iran, Democrats are raising alarm over his mental stability and calling for his removal from office - while Republicans remain conspicuously silent.Democrats are escalating their rebukes as the 79-year-old president delivers rambling, incoherent speeches, hurls puerile insults at US allies and brazenly threatens to commit war crimes. He used an Easter Sunday social media post to warn Iran to Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell". Continue reading...

Donald Trump says the US will bomb Iran's power plants and bridges if Tehran fails to meet his latest deadline to reopen the strait of Hormuz. The US president says he is not at all' concerned that such attacks on civilian infrastructure could amount to war crimes and a whole civilisation will die tonight' if Iran doesn't agree to a deal.But will Trump follow through on the threat? And what could it mean for the war in the Middle East? Lucy Hough is joined by senior international correspondent Julian Borger Continue reading...

Reuters uncovers that the TSA shared more than 31,000 traveler records with ICE for immigration enforcement

Analysis shows developing economies more likely to experience higher interest rates and currency shocks

Upgrade to Brent Spence Bridge linking Kentucky and Ohio clouded by concerns about cost overruns, pollution and housingConnecting manufacturers in the industrial north to booming southern cities in Georgia and beyond in the south, the Brent Spence Bridge that spans the Ohio River is a debacle to all who know it.Built and designed in the early 1960s to accommodate a maximum of 85,000 vehicles a day, today twice as many cars and trucks traverse it along the Interstate-75, a 1,785-mile (2,873km) route that stretches from the border with Canada in the north to the Florida Keys. Its narrow lanes, curved approaches and absence of emergency access lanes meant that, following frequent accidents, drivers could find themselves stuck for hours. Continue reading...

The US constitution should make it possible to remove a president who's not fit for office. But we're going to need another way outFor the past few months, I have been waging a cold war with a neighbour who constantly puts out their rubbish on the wrong day. And by cold war" I mean complaining incessantly to my longsuffering wife while the neighbour goes about their business blissfully unaware that we are mortal enemies. But enough is enough. Last week I decided to end this situation via a strongly worded letter. Tuesday will be Explosions Day in your house, neighbour!" I wrote. There will be nothing like it!!! Put out your Fuckin' Rubbish properly, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah."I am sorry to drag Allah into this obviously imaginary exchange, but I'm just channelling the US president. I'm sure you've already seen Donald Trump's profanity-laden Easter Sunday warning to Iran, where he threatened to carry out the mass bombing of civilian infrastructure - but if you haven't, then go read it and weep. The days where Trump's outbursts were amusing (remember covfefe"?) are long gone. There is nothing funny about endless stream-of-consciousness screeds from a seemingly unwell man who is not just destroying the US, but dragging the whole world down with it. If a civilian acted like the president routinely does, they'd find themselves fired or institutionalised very quickly. Continue reading...

City released video of January shooting after charges against two Venezuelan men involved were droppedThe city of Minneapolis released a video on Monday that undermined the initial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) account of a shooting involving an agency officer and two Venezuelan men in January.The video, from a city-owned security camera, captured federal officers chasing one of the men to his residence. Another Venezuelan man who lives there was shot during the confrontation, which eventually led to the suspensions of two federal officers involved in the Trump administration's immigration crackdown in Minnesota, the so-called Operation Metro Surge. Continue reading...

Lawmakers led by Elizabeth Warren in scathing letter say system used to track detainees increasingly unreliable'A group of 36 lawmakers says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has created disappearances" on US soil, due to the increasingly unreliable" online system used to track people detained by immigration authorities, according to a letter shared with the Guardian.The lawmakers, led by Senators Elizabeth Warren, are urging that the DHS inspector general's office open an investigation into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) online detainee locator system" (ODLS), which has been used for years by family members, attorneys and journalists to track people in the federal immigration detention system. Continue reading...

The Trump library' and an attack on the Presidential Records Act have more in common than it might seemLast week, the Trump administration proudly published two pieces of news which, at first sight, could not be more different: one a dry 52-page legal opinion from the justice department declaring the 1978 Presidential Records Act unconstitutional; the other an AI-generated clip of Trump's planned presidential library", a waterfront skyscraper in Miami. Both sent the same message, though: the legal opinion - authored by a jurist heavily involved in attempts to overturn the 2020 election - leaves Trump free to destroy evidence of wrongdoing; the building envisaged for Biscayne Bay appears to be less of a library than a hotel complex. As the president reassured anyone suspecting that he might fill a glitzy edifice with boring papers and books: I don't believe in building libraries or museums." These are clear signals about wanting to avoid accountability; it is not too early to devise strategies to counter politically motivated amnesia.In what jurists widely saw as an opinion of breathtakingly bad faith, T Elliot Gaiser, the Ohio-based election denier and a former clerk of Samuel Alito, asserted that Congress had no right to ask the president to preserve records; the imperative to create and keep documents served no legislative purpose" and could impede" the day-to-day performance" of the head of the executive. The act had been crafted in the wake of the misdeeds of Richard Nixon, who had wanted discretion over which of his tapes and papers to destroy; in response, Congress first passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act in 1974, making the government take custody of Nixon's materials. Nixon sued; the supreme court rejected the view that the separation of powers had been violated; the justices also took the occasion to affirm the importance of the American people's ability to reconstruct and come to terms with their history". Congress then passed the more general Presidential Records Act, which no one up until Trump appeared to have experienced as remotely burdensome.Jan-Werner Muller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University Continue reading...

Eighty-five countries have sought a roadmap to phasing out fossil fuels. A conference this month offers hope they could unite

The astronauts of Artemis II flew further from Earth than any human beings before them, breaking Apollo 13's distance record at 1.57pm ET on Monday.Across a six-hour flyby, on the sixth day of a lunar mission that has reinvigorated Nasa's space exploration programme, the crew of the Orion spacecraft captured views of the moon's far side that have never been seen before

The actor whose husband is charged with child sexual abuse says she believes his side of the story' is the truth'

No phones, no littering, no cheering bad shots - patrons' face strict rules at Augusta, but what a contrast to last year's disgraceful Ryder CupIt is easy to poke fun at the prissy traditions of the Masters. Golfers, never mind spectators, enter a state of panic over what horrible fate may befall them should they break the rules inside Augusta National. It is preposterous in so many ways; adults consumed by fear over missteps at a golf tournament. People do not typically feel this way inside the Sistine Chapel.This year, there are reasons to be grateful for Augusta's unapologetic approach. The Masters provides a welcome break from the ear-bashing noise of the modern world. The United States is an especially fractious place. This major also offers a timely escape from the racket within golf itself. Brief serenity should be appreciated. Continue reading...

Some candidates are making public health a central part of their midterm campaigns amid Trump's war on scienceAs public health has become increasingly politicized in the US, with a particularly chaotic year under the Trump administration, some political candidates are pushing back by making public health a central part of their campaigns - and the grassroots organization Defend Public Health has ideas about how to do it.On Monday, the group launched guiding principles for campaigns to prioritize public health, called the People's Health Platform, highlighting the importance of ensuring healthcare for all, protecting and expanding sexual, reproductive, and gender-affirming healthcare, preparing for the climate crisis and the next pandemic, and taxing billionaires, among other tenets. Continue reading...

Trump to speak to media at 1pm ET after threatening Iran on Easter Sunday over the closure of the strait of Hormuz

The president has boasted about cutting prices of drugs, housing, food and gasoline. It's grossly exaggerated nonsenseIn recent months, Donald Trump has made some absurd comments about inflation, saying the affordability crisis is a hoax" and I won affordability," a clumsy, questionable claim meaning that he somehow conquered inflation. Trump recognizes that affordability is a huge issue, and with his war against Iran proving to be a big political loser, he seems eager to score some political points by telling Americans that he's moving boldly to cut living costs. But as with everything Trump says, people shouldn't be tricked by his slick salesmanship.Trump has boasted about cutting prescription drug prices, housing prices, food prices and gasoline prices. All that might be great public relations for Trump, but it's grossly exaggerated nonsense. Trump's much-ballyhooed efforts to fight inflation are essentially diddlysquat. Many of them are mini efforts that have had mini effects in reducing prices. They're as meaningful as a degree from Trump University.Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues Continue reading...

Tennessee leads way but experts say offender registry could provide a false sense of security - and identify victimsWhen Amanda Martin started dating Christopher Cendroski, whose family has described him as big-hearted", she had no idea he had been arrested for domestic assault. Had she known, she said she never would become involved with him.A few months into their relationship, which began in 2011, Cendroski started beating Martin, and in May 2012, he nearly choked her to death, she said. Police arrested Cendroski and helped both Martin and her children get to a shelter. Continue reading...

Kaija Saariaho's Innocence delves into guilt, grief and anger over a phenomenon largely thought of as distinctly AmericanGun violence, particularly the high-profile incidents that take place on school campuses, are often seen as a uniquely American phenomenon, one that exemplifies the nation's deep history and complicated relationship with guns.But an opera set around a mass shooting at a Finnish international school 10 years ago approaches this topic through a global lens. Innocence, which opens at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on Monday, is performed in nine different languages including English, Swedish and Spanish, and delves into themes like guilt, grief, anger and how time doesn't always heal the damage done by violence. Continue reading...

Mayor's decision to appeal court order that the city must expand its housing voucher program has angered advocates for the homelessNew York City mayor Zohran Mamdani's decision to appeal a court order that the city must expand its housing voucher program, despite his campaign pledge to implement it, has angered advocates for the homeless population.Mamdani, who must figure out how to close a $5.4bn budget deficit, explained his decision by citing the cost of the City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement (CityFHEPS) program, which helps people staying in shelters or at risk of homelessness find permanent housing. Continue reading...

Market volatility caused by Middle East conflict exposes energy traders to heavy losses and rumours of insider trading at the highest levelOn the weekend that US-Israeli drones first began to rain down on Tehran, energy traders across the world's major financial centres began to redraw their strategies.When they returned to their trading desks on that March Monday morning, they found oil and gas prices spiking amid a market nightmare made real: the unprecedented shutdown of the vital trade route through the strait of Hormuz. Continue reading...

An emergency motion argues that the pause on construction leaves the White House open and exposed'. Key US politics stories from Saturday 4 April at a glanceA judge's order to stop construction work on the White House ballroom poses security risks, the Trump administration argued in an emergency motion that seeks to set aside the ruling.The emergency motion argues that US district judge Richard Leon's decision has left the executive mansion open and exposed" and is threatening grave national-security harms to the White House, the President and his family, and the President's staff". Continue reading...

Crimson, seen alone in Santa Monica mountains for days, gets care in Oakland zoo after mother nowhere to be foundIt was an unusual scene. A lion cub alone for days in southern California's sprawling Santa Monica mountains, emitting a noise that sounded like a cross between a purr and a light squeal, perhaps calling out for his mother.Where was his mother? Continue reading...

US National Park Service lawyers cite materials that will be installed to make heavily fortified' facilityDonald Trump's administration is arguing that a judge's order to halt construction of a $400m White House ballroom creates a security risk for the US president as his team asks a federal appeals court to pause the ruling.In a motion filed on Friday, US National Park Service (NPS) lawyers say that the federal judge's order to suspend construction of the new facility is threatening grave national-security harms to the White House, the president and his family, and the president's staff". Continue reading...