Since the 1950s, Marin county waters have been home to a community of mariners. Now local authorities say they have to leaveFor decades, a group known as the “anchor-outs” enjoyed a relatively peaceful existence in a corner of the San Francisco Bay. The mariners carved out an affordable, bohemian community on the water, in a county where the median home price recently hit $1.8m.But their haven could be coming to an end – and with it, a rapidly disappearing way of life.Top: Anchor-out boats sit in Richardson Bay in Sausalito, California, last month. Bottom: Jeff Jacob Chase looks out the window of a friend’s boat. Continue reading...
The ghost story is enjoying a revival. No wonder – we’re hardly short of repressed fears to turn into fictionI’m not expecting to see a ghost tonight, but I will go in search of one. I’ve always assumed that any self-respecting spectre would run (float?) a mile from the lurid carnival trappings of contemporary Halloween revelries. And yet I still entertain a faint hope that, after the sticky children have been and gone with their plastic pumpkins and benign extortion, and I settle into a favourite chair with a book of ghost stories, there might be some corresponding fluttering of the curtains, a tap at the window, a shadow in the doorway, a sudden unexpected chill.I realise that in confessing my yearning for a haunting I risk my credentials as a good rationalist and proud patron of Humanists UK, but I suspect that this fascination with the idea of ghosts lies below the surface in all of us. I know several people – you probably do too – educated, sensible professionals, not given to histrionics, who quite calmly relate encounters with the unexplained that produce pleasing goosebumps. I want to believe them. As Dr Johnson observed about the existence of ghosts: “All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.” Continue reading...
Riding on big red buses makes great conversation wherever you are, according to my son‘Daddy…’ asks my son in that same voice I know from roughly 80% of our interactions. ‘Do you like going on big red buses?’ He asks me this a few times a day, even while we are literally on big red buses, deploying it as a sort of conversational chaff grenade entirely for subject-changing purposes, much the way you or I might say ‘Sooooooo… how are things?’ when faced with a person whose name you can’t remember at a party.‘Oh yes,’ I reply, ‘very much.’ His fascination with London buses is quite charming, but it is odd that he is asking this on an aeroplane. It’s our first boys-only trip and I’m quite excited; more so than my son who doesn’t appear to have any fascination with planes compared to the flashier, but altogether more earthbound, vehicles of the London transport network. Continue reading...
The author of a landmark book that challenges our view of history argues catastrophe is not foretold. We are freer to act than we thinkAs the Cop26 climate summit gets under way, scientists and activists are in broad agreement that our prevailing cultural system has placed us, and our planet, on a course to disaster. They agree that it is time to change course. Yet, at this critical moment, we find ourselves paralysed, with new horizons closed off by a false prospectus of human possibilities based on mythological conceptions of history.We need only look at the notion that underpins our idea of human development. In this story, our species originated in egalitarian bands of hunters and foragers, at one with their surroundings, only to somehow fall from grace into a state of inequality. In this “coming-of-age” fairytale, we humans began in innocence and then developed by way of a voyage of technological discovery – from foragers to farmers to fossil fuels – that enabled our “advancement”, but saw us relinquish our original freedoms. We became “civilised”, only to find ourselves locked in a tug of war with nature that now threatens the planet. Continue reading...
by Edward Helmore in Lynchburg, Virginia on (#5RBMS)
The conservative Christian institution, already rocked by scandal of former president Jerry Falwell, faces claims by dozens of women and questions about its political activity“I feel the Lord moving here,” remarks a visitor looking over Liberty University’s Disney World-tidy campus toward the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia.But other, more temporal matters, none godly, now hang over the once powerful evangelical institution founded in 1971 by the television preacher Jerry Falwell Sr, the Baptist minister who, eight years later, created the Moral Majority that mobilized the Christian right to the services of the Republican party. Continue reading...
The president won the state by 10 points but Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe has acknowledged Washington politics could hurt his campaignScott Knuth was dwarfed by the 16ft x 10ft flag that he waved to and fro on a street corner in Arlington, Virginia. “Trump won,” it falsely proclaimed, “Save America.”But Donald Trump was not coming to town. Instead his successor, Joe Biden, was about to take the stage in a campaign rally at a dangerous inflection point in his young presidency. Continue reading...
The climate crisis, the economy, Biden’s struggle to enact his spending agenda. The list goes on. The lesson? Be strongI often tell my students that if they strive to achieve full and meaningful lives, they should expect failures and disappointments. We learn to walk by falling down again and again. We learn to ride a bicycle by crashing into things. We learn to make good friends by being disappointed in friendship. Failure and disappointment are prerequisites to growth.The real test of character comes after failures and disappointments. It is resilience: how easily you take failures, what you learn from them, how you bounce back. Continue reading...
Anonymous sources outline ambitious timetable for spending plan so far stymied by centrist senatorsDemocratic leaders are hoping for House votes as soon as Tuesday on the two pillars of Joe Biden’s domestic spending agenda, two Democrats said Saturday, as the party mounted its latest push to get the long-delayed legislation through Congress.Top Democrats would like a final House-Senate compromise on Biden’s now $1.75tn, 10-year social and environment plan to be written by Sunday, the Democrats said. Continue reading...
As a doctor, I believe turning away from desperately ill kids – be they in Palestine or elsewhere – is a far greater crimeI have never walked away from a fight involving the wellbeing of children. I have never abandoned the right for Palestinian health workers to train in Israel for the benefit of those same children.Why is this something I need to speak about publicly now? Continue reading...
Sergio Furnari concedes he did not have permit for sculpture made with $4,000 grant from New York CityA giant sculpture installed this week at the south-eastern corner of Central Park in New York City as a tribute to healthcare workers and Covid-19 victims has been taken down – an apparent casualty of confusion and red tape.The Italian sculptor behind the large red heart, Sergio Furnari, said he was walking by Grand Army Plaza on Thursday afternoon with friends when he noticed that his Heroes Heart monument was gone. Continue reading...
University says school should not be placed in conflict with administration of Governor Ron DeSantisThe University of Florida (UF) is prohibiting three professors from providing expert testimony in a lawsuit challenging a state law critics claim restricts voting rights, saying the school should not be placed in conflict with the administration of the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis.Though the decision is being criticized as threat to academic freedom and free speech, the university said allowing Dan Smith, Michael McDonald and Sharon Austin to serve as paid experts for plaintiffs challenging the law would be “adverse to the university’s interests as a state of Florida institution”. Continue reading...
The first series was perfect on its own; the second seems to be about how much money everyone has madeThere is usually something a little off about a true-crime sequel. It either seems to be an admission of failure, a recognition that the original series could not come to a satisfactory conclusion – and I have been suckered into enough lengthy podcasts that promise a big reveal only to end with a shrug of the shoulders and a “so who knows, it could have been anyone” – or it stands as an admission that the makers have agreed to wring more out of the story because the story was a hit, even if the material might not be there to back it up.Joe Exotic’s story is far from dry, but it is being squeezed for every last drop. After being convicted of his role in plotting to kill Carole Baskin, Exotic, who is still in jail but never out of the headlines, will once again return to wider public consciousness in November, as Netflix prepares to release Tiger King 2. The official trailer for this true-crime saga arrived last week and it appears that the film-makers took one look at the original and thought perhaps they had not done enough with the murder for hire, black-market animal trading, drugs, politics and polyamory. Continue reading...
Terri Hill participated in a voting session while appearing in a video feed wearing ‘a surgical gown, face mask and surgical cap’A Maryland state lawmaker who is a plastic surgeon has been fined $15,000 and reprimanded for twice participating in legislative meetings via videoconference from an operating room during surgery.Terri Hill signed a consent order this month agreeing to the disciplinary actions from the Maryland board of physicians, which found the Democratic lawmaker guilty of “unprofessional conduct in the practice of medicine”. Continue reading...
Six weeks after the killing, the family of the aspiring food truck owner demands answers: ‘What are they hiding?’Jonathan Cortez was buying a packet of beef jerky, a bottle of Gatorade and a Snickers bar at his local corner store in Oakland, California, when an FBI agent stormed in, gun drawn.Seconds later, the officer opened fire, fatally shooting the 31-year-old. Continue reading...
There is something very, very wrong with a system that would rather recruit more kids instead of paying better wages and providing more benefits to adultsBack in the good old days American children didn’t sit around playing video games, making TikToks, and bingeing Netflix. They worked long hours in factories and sweatshops; they knew the value of hard graft. They didn’t take sick days either, they just died of diphtheria. It was a simpler time.Arwa Mahdawi’s new book, Strong Female Lead, is available for pre-order Continue reading...
Why is the Republican running for governor of Virginia going after Toni Morrison’s award-winning novel Beloved?Running for governor of Virginia as the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin appears to have a split personality – sometimes the generic former corporate executive in a fleece vest, the suburban dad surrounded by his sun-lit children and tail-wagging dogs, and sometimes the fierce kulturkampf warrior and racial dog-whistler. His seemingly dual personality has been filtered through a cascade of Republican consultants’ campaign images. His latest TV commercial attempts to resolve the tension by showing him as a concerned father who shares the worries of the ordinary Trumpster. In the closing hours of the campaign, he has exposed that his political identity can’t be separated from Republican identity politics in the decadent stage of Trumpism.The Republican party has long specialized in fabricating esoteric threats, from the basements of Pizzagate to the stratosphere of “Jewish space lasers”. Youngkin’s campaign, though, has contrived a brand-new enemy within, a specter of doom to stir voters’ anxieties that only he can dispel: the Black Nobel prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison and her novel Beloved. Continue reading...
The Pentagon has come to expect reliable, generous financial support that keeps them prosperous. Doesn’t the American public deserve the same?After months of negotiations, Congress is struggling to come up with a plan to fund the Build Back Better Act. Rather than forcing more cuts that would further limit the bill’s transformative potential, throughout the process legislators have been considering funding sources that just a few years ago would have been unthinkable. With progressive congressional power at a relative high and the experience of Covid-19 not quite behind us, it’s a perfect moment to look to the defense budget as a way to fund the recovery effort the US sorely needs.The Pentagon budget is the one area where massive, long-term government spending is not only considered totally normal, but suggestions to change the status quo are still mostly balked at. Negotiations over the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act are also ongoing, and the contrast between the range of alternatives being seriously considered is striking. Topline numbers are higher even than the president’s budget request, which itself is $13bn more than the final Trump military budget request, and it preserves the Trump administration’s nuclear weapons programs that the Democrats ran on cancelling only a few short months ago.Emma Claire Foley is Global Zero Research Associate Continue reading...
An ‘enthusiasm gap’ between Black Republican and Democrat voters could be the key in clinching a highly contested electionIn a vital election for Democrats this fall, veteran party stalwart Terry McAuliffe is unexpectedly being run to the wire by his Republican rival, a political newcomer, in the governor’s race in Virginia.One path to victory for McAuliffe is turning out enough Black voters – and he and the party leadership are keenly aware of it – but can they make it happen? Continue reading...
Glasgow has to be a turning point. There is no other optionNothing and everything and not nearly enough has changed in the six years since the Paris climate summit and agreement. The four players in our climate future – climate chaos, climate activism, climate solutions and climate finance – are still on a playing field filled with floods, flames and false solutions. Two of them are racing away from catastrophe, one is rushing toward it, and the fourth is undecided.Runaway climate change itself has gotten far worse: we’re seeing chaos and destruction, ice melt and early signs of systemic collapse of ocean currents, ice sheets and much else. Both the climate movement and the practical solutions have gotten far stronger, more ambitious, more capable, more diverse. Climate finance has run in both directions: far too much money is still pumped into the fossil fuel industry, but there have been significant successes getting governments, development banks, and private investors to cut financing and reframe the industry as fundamentally criminal.Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses Continue reading...
A startling memo, a surreal Oval Office encounter – just some of the twists in the unfolding story of Trump’s bid to cling to power, which critics say was no less than an attempted coupOn 4 January, the conservative lawyer John Eastman was summoned to the Oval Office to meet Donald Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence. Within 48 hours, Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election would formally be certified by Congress, sealing Trump’s fate and removing him from the White House.The atmosphere in the room was tense. The then US president was “fired up” to make what amounted to a last-ditch effort to overturn the election results and snatch a second term in office in the most powerful job on Earth. Continue reading...
Al-Qaida courier, who could be freed next year despite 26-year sentence, tells court of interrogators’ horrific treatmentFor the first time, a Guantánamo Bay prisoner who went through the brutal US government interrogation program after the 9/11 attacks has described it openly in court, saying he was left terrified and hallucinating from techniques that the CIA long sought to keep secret.Majid Khan, a former resident of the Baltimore suburbs who became an al-Qaida courier, told jurors considering his sentence for war crimes that he was subjected to days of painful abuse in the clandestine CIA facilities known as “black sites” as interrogators pressed him for information. Continue reading...
Joe Biden, whose Build Back Better bill has been slashed by the two holdouts, said with ‘50 Democrats, every one is a president’Joe Biden recently summed up his problems getting things done.In an America where the US Senate is split 50-50, then effectively any single senator can hold a veto over the president’s entire agenda. “Look,” laughed Biden at a CNN town hall, “you have 50 Democrats, every one is a president. Every single one. So, you got to work things out.” Continue reading...
Pelosi forced to postpone infrastructure vote on Thursday ahead of Biden’s meeting with world leaders in RomeJoe Biden’s nearly $3tn domestic agenda remains unrealized after an 11th-hour push to rally Democrats around a pared-down package that he framed as historic, failed to close the deal in time for his meeting with world leaders in Rome at the G20 summit.But after a dramatic Thursday of bold promises and dashed hopes, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was forced to postpone a vote on a $1tn infrastructure bill for a second time in a month, as progressives demanded more assurances that a compromise $1.75tn social policy plan would also pass. Continue reading...
Witnesses describe gruesome scenes as John Grant, 60, put to death on Thursday in state’s first judicial killing for six yearsOklahoma is coming under sharp criticism after witnesses to the state’s first judicial killing for six years described gruesome scenes of the dying prisoner convulsing and vomiting as he was administered the lethal injections.John Grant, 60, was pronounced dead at 4.21pm on Thursday at McAlester state penitentiary after he was injected with a triple cocktail of midazolam, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride. Later, the department of corrections said the killing had gone “in accordance with protocols and without complication”. Continue reading...
Yes, there have been compromises. But this is the biggest ever plan to curb emissions and, ahead of Cop26, will send a signal to the worldMove aside, Donald Trump: there’s a new American for the world’s progressives to hate. What’s more, he’s not even a Republican, but rather a member of Joe Biden’s Democratic party. He’s Joe Manchin, who represents West Virginia in the US Senate – the body that’s split 50-50, and which Democrats only control if every single senator stays onside. It’s thanks to him – aided and abetted by the Arizona’ Democrat senator Kyrsten Sinema – that Biden cannot take his place at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow proudly pointing to a raft of measures, signed and sealed, by which the US government will tackle the climate crisis.Biden had a whole plan worked out, and most Democrats backed him. But Manchin refused to say yes. He insisted that Biden drop perhaps the most powerful element of his climate programme: rewards for energy companies that shift to renewable sources, and fines for those that stick with fossil fuels. Manchin killed that off, perhaps because he represents a state that still has some coal mining, perhaps because he has big personal investments in coal, perhaps because he has received fat donations from the fossil fuel industry. Or maybe just because West Virginia voted by an almost 40-point margin for Trump last year and so, to keep winning, Manchin has to look more like a Republican than a Democrat. Continue reading...
In a CNN interview, seven jurors reflect on the trauma of seeing the cellphone recording and how they arrived at their decisionJurors in the landmark George Floyd murder trial spoke about the life-altering case and how the experience still affects them, in an interview with CNN on Thursday.Seven jury members, out of a total 12, sat down with CNN’s Don Lemon for their first and only interview since the trial, where Derek Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in April 2021. Continue reading...
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed’s attorneys blame producers for ‘unsafe’ set and say 24-year-old ‘devastated’ over death of Halyna HutchinsLawyers representing the crew member in charge of weapons on the film set where actor Alec Baldwin fired a gun while rehearsing that killed the cinematographer last week have blamed the producers for an “unsafe” set.The crew member, armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, has “no idea” how live bullets became present on the set near Santa Fe in New Mexico where the desert western Rust was being filmed. Continue reading...
Schools warn parents against allowing kids to wear outfits inspired by Netflix series over ‘violence depicted in the show’A trio of elementary schools in upstate New York banned Halloween costumes inspired by the sinister Netflix hit show Squid Game.In a note to parents, the schools noted that teachers have noticed students talking about the show and playing games that mimic some of the show’s disturbing concepts at recess. Continue reading...
Bills like TX HB 25, which was just signed into law by Texas governor Greg Abbott, are blatantly discriminatory and are part of a broader effort to erase trans people from public lifeSports are a concept almost as old as civilization itself. From the Olympics of ancient Greece, to the games of lacrosse and pitz played by indigenous peoples of the Americas, humanity has engaged in sport. Throughout history, sport has always been an integral part of our social experience. Participation in these physical pursuits has served many purposes, from simple exercise and play to forging and strengthening social bonds. Sports strengthen and inspire us. They encourage us to grow. Sport can be a battleground, both literally and figuratively, and in sport, conflict is resolved and statements are made.There are many people today that bemoan the perceived politicization of sport – but politics and sports are inextricably intertwined and have been since their inception. When athletes make political statements, we listen to them. Politicians, coaches and commissions steer the conversation about what place sport holds in society, who benefits and how, and who is allowed to participate. The New York State Athletic Commission suspended the license of Muhammad Ali and stripped him of his heavyweight title for his stand against participation in the Vietnam war. More recently, the NFL blacklisted Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee during the national anthem as a form of protest to police killings of Black Americans.Alana McLaughlin is a mixed martial arts athlete Continue reading...
All of America’s economic peers have a paid family leave policy. Why would a Democrat oppose such a basic measure?Americans will remain some of the last people on the planet to have no right to paid leave when they have children, and for that, you can thank Joe Manchin.Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, tanked the paid leave portion of an increasingly narrow domestic policy package. Manchin had already gotten Democrats to make what was once a sweeping and ambitious bill smaller and less effectual. Even though the Democrats control the House, the Senate and the White House, and are not expected to maintain control of Congress after this year’s midterm elections, they still can’t get it together to deliver what the American people put them in office to do. And that’s because of Manchin, as well as his fellow centrist holdout, Kyrsten Sinema. Continue reading...
President faces hurdles in reasserting US credibility at the summit. Plus, Texas stand-your-ground laws thrown into spotlight• Don’t already get First Thing in your inbox? Sign up hereGood morning.Joe Biden is heading to Glasgow for the critical Cop26 global summit, where he will fight to reassert the United States’s credibility after Donald Trump’s presidency, as his spending and climate bill remains unsigned into law.Phasing out fossil fuels from the gridMaking oil and gas producers pay to emit methaneIntroducing a CO taxWhat are stand-your-ground laws? The controversial laws oppose the idea that faced with danger, you should retreat, and offer provision for homeowners to use deadly force to justifiably defend themselves.When were these laws introduced? The first law in the US was enacted in Florida in 2005, after lobbying from the National Rifle Association. Opponents say they result in unnecessary deaths and are often a pretext for racism. Continue reading...
Questions about Trump’s role in 6 January may go unanswered unless House investigators can secure a breakthrough to obtain documents and testimonyThe House select committee investigating the Capitol attack is confronting a pivotal moment as resistance from top Trump administration aides threatens to undermine their efforts to uncover the extent of the former president’s involvement in the 6 January insurrection.The select committee remains in the evidence-gathering phase of the investigation that now encompasses at least five different lines of inquiry from whether Donald Trump abused the presidency to reinstall himself in office or coordinated with far-right rally organizers. Continue reading...
On 16 August 1920, Indians shortstop Ray Chapman was struck by a pitch and killed. His death is still remembered in Cleveland to this dayIt takes an instant for a baseball to travel from the pitching mound to home plate. In that short span, disaster unfolded during a game between the Cleveland Indians and New York Yankees over a century ago.On 16 August 1920, with the two teams locked in a pennant race, the Indians’ star shortstop Ray Chapman faced Yankees pitcher Carl Mays at the Polo Grounds in New York. Mays sought to intimidate batters by pitching inside. This time, his high pitch struck Chapman in the head and the batter fell to the ground. He was eventually taken to St Lawrence Hospital, where he underwent surgery, but died. He was 28. Of the tens of millions of pitches thrown over the history of Major League Baseball, this was the only one that killed someone. Chapman’s death is the subject of a new documentary film, War on the Diamond, directed by Andy Billman. Continue reading...
President faces challenges to reassert US credibility after Trump but critics say Biden’s actions have yet to match his wordsWith no major climate legislation firmly in hand and international allies still smarting after four bruising years of Donald Trump, Joe Biden faces a major challenge to reassert American credibility as he heads to crucial UN climate talks in Scotland.The US president, who has vowed to tackle a climate crisis he has described as an “existential threat” to civilization, will be welcomed to the Cop26 talks with a sense of relief following the decisions of his predecessor, who pulled his country out of the landmark Paris climate agreement and derided climate science as “bullshit”. Continue reading...
Genealogists looking for standout ancestors proud to claim connection to 17th-century ‘witches’What do Hollywood actor Humphrey Bogart, Senator Mitt Romney and half the US presidents have in common?They are all alleged descendants of someone involved the 1692 Salem witch trials, in which an infamous outbreak of religious hysteria resulted in 19 early settlers hanged and one pressed to death. Continue reading...
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