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George Floyd died of a lack of oxygen from the way he was held down by police, a retired forensic pathologist testified on Friday at former officer Derek Chauvin's murder trial. The testimony of Lindsey Thomas, who retired in 2017 from the Hennepin county medical examiner's office in Minneapolis, bolstered testimony by other experts on Thursday that rejected the defence theory that Floyd's drug use and underlying health problems killed him

Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain recounts how Sackler, seven of her relatives and Purdue Pharma were suedBy the time a class-action lawyer asked Kathe Sackler whether her family’s firm, Purdue Pharma, and its prescription painkiller OxyContin bore any responsibility for the US opioid crisis, a shocking 450,000 Americans had died of opioid-related overdoses in the 23 years since the pills hit the market.But Sackler, after some hedging and deflecting, asserted not only that the family had nothing to be ashamed of or apologize for but that she deserved credit for coming up with “the idea” of OxyContin, which was a “very good medicine”, according to a forthcoming book by the journalist and author Patrick Radden Keefe. Continue reading...

Instead of vaccinating Palestinians, Benjamin Netanyahu tried to send thousands of doses around the world as rewards to countries that moved their embassies to JerusalemThe US media has widely lauded Israel’s vaccine success - as a country in a “post-pandemic future” of concerts and indoor dining; as a country that could teach the United States a few lessons in pandemic management; as a country that, despite being in the midst of a contentious election, leaned on its robust universal public health system to vaccinate as many people as possible. However, many of these vaccine success stories mention the issue of Palestinian vaccines in passing, as an unresolved “controversy,” “debate,” or just another instance of Palestinians and Israelis being unable to agree on anything.The difference couldn’t be more stark – two populations living under one regime, heading in opposite directions in the struggle with Covid-19. On the Israeli side, we see a country returning to normalcy: a re-opened economy; a vaccination certificate program that allows for entry into gyms, restaurants, and cultural venues; plummeting infection and hospitalization rates; a surplus of vaccines nearly seven times the small country’s population. On the Palestinian side, minimal vaccines, overwhelmed hospitals, and an economy in crisis. Including the 100,000 Palestinian workers with Israeli work permits that Israel finally agreed to vaccinate in March, Palestinians have received enough vaccines for just over 4% of the 5 million Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Continue reading...

Gene Suellentrop, the Kansas state senate’s majority leader, had twice the legal alcohol limit when driving in the wrong direction on the highway, police sayWhen critics of the party accuse Republicans of heading in the wrong direction, they don’t usually mean it literally. But that’s what happened with the Kansas senate majority leader, Gene Suellentrop, who was arrested early in the morning on 16 March after leading police on a chase that hit speeds of 90mph and saw the lawmaker travelling against the flow of traffic and narrowly avoiding striking other vehicles on the road.“They about hit me, but I’m OK, I’m fine,” one driver who called 911 on the night in question said, as reported by the Kansas City Star. Continue reading...

This week’s violence is an ominous sign that leaving the EU took a wrecking ball to the Good Friday agreementThe most powerful arguments against Brexit were never about trade and tariffs. They were about peace and war, about life and death. One was a general argument centred on the true, founding purpose of the European Union: to ensure that a continent mired in blood for centuries would not descend into conflict again. The other was more specific, peculiar to these islands: that shared membership of the EU had proved to be the key that unlocked peace in Northern Ireland after three decades of murderous pain.The logic was simple enough. So long as both the UK and Ireland were in the same EU club, the border between them could be blurred, allowing people in the north to identify as British or Irish or both without too much friction. That was the foundation on which the Good Friday agreement, signed 23 years ago tomorrow, was built – a foundation that would be broken if either country were to break from Brussels. Taken together, these were the life-and-death arguments for continued UK membership of the EU, and some tried valiantly to make them. But they were barely heard. Continue reading...

Debra Hunter was arrested last June after she was recorded deliberately coughing on a customer in a Pier 1 storeA Florida woman whose image went viral when she coughed on a fellow customer at a store last year in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic has been sentenced to 30 days in jail.A judge in Jacksonville on Thursday also ordered Debra Hunter to pay a $500 fine, serve six months probation and participate in a mental health evaluation along with anger management, David Chapman, communications director for the state attorney’s office in Jacksonville, said in an email. She was also ordered to cover the costs of the victim’s Covid-19 test. Continue reading...

Biden officials allocate just 700,000 Johnson & Johnson doses for next week, down from 5m, after error in vaccine productionUS deliveries of the “one-shot” Johnson and Johnson vaccine are set to drop by 85% next week, in a setback to the government’s vaccination campaign.Related: Biden to lay out spending plans after assailing ‘epidemic’ of gun violence – US politics live Continue reading...

When Coca-Cola and Delta backed bigoted lawmakers, we organized, rose up, used our voices to make change – and it workedIn the last general election, Georgians delivered our country from the hands of fascism by securing Democrats in the White House and the Senate. As payback for doing so, Republicans are waging an unholy war against voting rights in the state, pushing Jim Crow-style measures like SB 202 into law, which will make it harder for hundreds of thousands of Georgians to cast their ballots. This dangerous bill impacts specific communities the most: Black, brown, young, and new voters in Georgia.Many voters don’t know that Republicans aren’t working alone to disenfranchise us. Their accomplices were some of the most powerful corporations in our state. In fact, Georgia-based companies like Delta, Coca-Cola and Home Depot previously bankrolled the backers of voter suppression bills to the tune of over $7.4m. Continue reading...

There must have been intense frustration at the limitations of his role, but he was a rock for his hardworking wife

President calls the violence an ‘international embarrassment’ after recent spate of mass shootings. Plus, Republican-controlled states spend huge amounts on potentially illegal executions

Much of the world’s cotton comes from the Xinjiang region, where the Chinese government is ethnically cleansing its Muslim minority. Fashion conglomerates know thisIn the era of conscious consumerism, it’s often the case that companies are quick to say the right thing, but slower to actually do the right thing. Yet for companies being asked to remove Uyghur forced labor from their supply chains, the opposite is true. Many of the world’s largest brands are willing to rearrange their operations in order to source products from areas that are not known – as the Xinjiang region in western China is – for atrocious human rights violations, but far fewer are willing to do so publicly. As it turns out, “easier said than done” does not apply when facing the rebuke of the Chinese government.Related: US in ‘close consultations’ with allies on possible action over Beijing Olympics Continue reading...

Increased attention on elections has come from unexpected corners offering significant grassroots power and money to efforts to make it harder to voteIn the months since Donald Trump lost his re-election bid, conservative groups traditionally focused on lobbying against abortion and LGBTQ+ rights have moved to support new restrictions on voting, offering significant grassroots power and money to efforts to make it harder to vote. Continue reading...

Redmond, Washington, saw visitor numbers plummet when the pandemic struck but its novel response is a hitMicrosoft’s hometown of Redmond, Washington, has turned to a very straightforward technique to jumpstart tourism more than a year after Covid-19 struck and the corporate travel it had come to rely on, dried up –pay people to visit.

The Ohio State quarterback is a perfect fit for the modern NFL offense but old stereotypes may be hurting his standingWith the draft less than a month away Justin Fields, once viewed as the consensus second-best quarterback in the class, is now on the slide. The nonsense swirling around the Ohio State star is disturbing, but it shouldn’t be surprising.Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence will go off the board to the Jacksonville Jaguars with the first overall pick in this month’s draft. BYU’s Zach Wilson is expected to go second to the Jets – a pick that was all but confirmed by the team’s general manager on Monday. With the third pick, the 49ers, who acquired the selection thanks to an expensive trade with the Dolphins, are expected to snap up Alabama quarterback Mac Jones. Fields, meanwhile, has slipped into a jumble of quarterbacks vying for the fourth spot. Continue reading...

The city’s public finances are decimated – and though the risk of the virus is ebbing, new forms of pain are clearly on the wayI rediscovered a video this week, made by my kids’ kindergarten teachers and sent to parents last June, at the end of the school year. The first half featured scenes of pre-pandemic life, outlandish shots of kids participating, unmasked, in cooking classes, field trips and fun runs. The second comprised videos and photos sent in by the kids of homeschooling. Apart from the sheer lurch at the reminder of how much had been lost, the most striking thing about the video was how definitive the line was between before and after. Things were one way; and the next day they were, emphatically, another.The end of the pandemic won’t be like this. How to measure any ending at all feels like an increasingly impossible task, even as vaccination rates soar and death rates plunge. In the US at least, infection rates remain stubbornly flat, the risk level in New York is stuck at “very high”, and health officials talk of a “fourth surge” in the midwest. Things are much better than they were this time last year, but at this point, anticipating a second summer of disruption and no full return in September, the long tail of this pandemic seems endless. Continue reading...

The parents and children of doctors and nurses who died from Covid tell of how grief has affected themDr Reza Chowdhury was a beloved internist with a private practice in the Bronx and a trusted voice in New York’s Bengali community. His daughter, Nikita Rahman, said despite underlying health issues that put him at higher risk of developing Covid complications, he saw patients through mid-March when he developed symptoms. He died on 9 April.Nikita Rahman My therapist says grief is the final act of love. Every time I miss him, I think about how that is my love for him, showing up again. I like that framing of it. I think I only recently realized just how much I loved him. Continue reading...

State trooper wounded before arrest of suspect who worked at company, officials sayA man opened fire Thursday at a Texas cabinet-making company where he worked, killing one person and wounding five others before shooting and wounding a state trooper prior to his arrest, authorities said.Eric Buske, police chief for the city of Bryan, told reporters he believed the suspect, whose name was not immediately released, was an employee at the Kent Moore Cabinets location where the shooting happened. He said investigators believed the man was solely responsible for the attack, which happened around 2.30pm, and that he was gone by the time officers arrived. Continue reading...

Nike sued MSCHF Product Studio for trademark infringement over the black-and-red, devil-themed sneakersNike said on Thursday it has settled its lawsuit against the Brooklyn company that collaborated with Lil Nas X to produce his Satan Shoes, and that the shoes will be recalled. Continue reading...

The White House has expressed concern over a week of riots in Northern Ireland, with Joe Biden joining Boris Johnson and the Irish prime minister in calling for calm after what police described as the worst violence in Belfast for years. The president’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, said that Biden remained ‘steadfast’ in his support for a ‘secure and prosperous Northern Ireland in which all communities have a voice and enjoy the gains of the hard-won peace’

In his first gun control measures since taking office, Joe Biden announced a half-dozen executive actions aimed at addressing the proliferation of gun violence across the nation that he called an ‘epidemic and an international embarrassment’. Greeting the families of gun violence victims and activists in the Rose Garden, Biden thanked them for their presence and continued action. And he assured them: ‘We’re absolutely determined to make change.’ But the announcement underscores the limitations of Biden’s executive power to act on guns, facing as he is an evenly divided Senate, where Republicans remain near-unified against most proposals

Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Lidl, Morrisons and Aldi also traded strongly during the crisis, yet they coughed up“Principles [are] more valuable than profits,” says the headline on the Co-op Group’s description of its values, but the co-operators forget to mention the small print. The boast, it seems, does not apply to the principle that food retailers should pay business rates when their stores are open and trading strongly.In the absence of an asterisk, Allan Leighton, the chairman, attempted an elaborate defence of the refusal to repay £66m of relief from business rates. Financial support from the government was welcomed “on the basis that it was not a loan and we would not need to pay it back – and we took business decisions accordingly, he said. Fine, but that misses the point. Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons, Lidl and Aldi could make the same argument – but all coughed up. Continue reading...

President condemned gun violence as an ‘international embarrassment’ after series of recent shootings around the US

‘Seismic’ plan to get big tech and multinationals to pay their fair share could be in place by mid-2021President Joe Biden has proposed sweeping global tax reforms that would limit the ability of multinational corporations to shift profits overseas, while taking steps to forge a landmark agreement on a worldwide minimum tax rate.The proposals are designed to tackle the very low rates of tax paid by the digital giants Google, Facebook and Apple, and major brands like Nike and Starbucks, which have become adept at using complicated webs of companies to shift profits out of major markets like the UK, where most of their revenues are earned, and into low-tax jurisdictions like Ireland and the Caribbean. Economists estimate that the sums lost to exchequers around the world from profit-shifting have risen as high as $427bn (£311bn) annually. Continue reading...

George Floyd died from a lack of oxygen, which damaged his brain and caused his heart to stop, a medical expert testified on Thursday at the former police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder trial. Floyd’s breathing was too shallow to take in enough oxygen while he was pinned face down with his hands cuffed behind his back for nine and a half minutes as Chauvin knelt on his neck and back, said Dr Martin Tobin, a lung and critical care specialist at the Edward Hines Jr VA hospital and Loyola University’s medical school in Chicago

Rolling live coverage of business, economics and financial markets as US stocks hit record high

Thousands of protesters were arrested last year. Some face harsher punishments than the officers who killed TaylorIt has been over a year since Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old ER technician, was killed by police officers in her home. It has been nearly a year since George Floyd, a former rapper and father of five, was killed by officer Derek Chauvin in broad daylight. And it has been some 300 days since the subsequent uprisings in their names. Thousands of protesters were arrested, and while the vast majority have had their flimsy charges dropped, there are many still facing harsher punishments than the officers who killed Taylor face. There is legislation being passed in the name of the slain and a handful of cities have made modest cuts to police budgets due to the hard work of local organizations. At the same time, many local governments have doubled down on their support for violent policing, and the system that necessitated a movement to defund the police remains pretty much entirely intact and murderous.Related: Minneapolis promised change after George Floyd. Instead it's geared up for war | Akin Olla Continue reading...

Victims include two children and a prominent doctor who treated Adams, source tells APThe gunman who killed five people including a prominent doctor in South Carolina was former NFL pro Phillip Adams, who killed himself early Thursday, according to a source who was briefed on the investigation.The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, said Adams’ parents live near the doctor’s home in Rock Hill, and that he had been treated by the doctor. The source said Phillips killed himself after midnight with a .45 caliber weapon. Continue reading...

The project counted more than 3,600 healthcare worker deaths, with the majority of people who died under the age of 60Lost on the frontline has counted more than 3,600 healthcare worker deaths. The first fatalities that we recorded occurred in mid-March 2020, and we finished our count on 7 April 2021. Continue reading...

Our investigations revealed the disproportionate burden on healthcare workers of color and government undercounts of deathsLost on the Frontline is an interactive, public-facing database that aims to count and honor every US healthcare worker – whether doctors or custodians, nursing home aides or paramedics – who died after contracting the coronavirus on the job in the first year of the pandemic. It is the most comprehensive accounting of US healthcare workers’ deaths in the country as of April 2021. Continue reading...

The B117 variant of coronavirus first detected in the UK is now the most dominant in the US, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday.During the White House coronavirus response team’s briefing, Dr Rochelle Walensky warned the rising number of coronavirus cases in dozens of US states is probably attributable to the spread of variants

A strained social safety net, rising tensions and mistrust between police and communities of color played part, experts say

A small but determined group rise early to take their spot outside the Minneapolis courthouse – and they stay all dayBehind the Hennepin county courthouse in downtown Minneapolis, which is heavily fortified for the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, a small but determined core of seven protesters gathers every day.Sometimes there are many more protesters, sometimes not so many. But always this group, there hoping to witness justice for George Floyd, who died under the knee of Chauvin in south Minneapolis last May. Continue reading...

For decades the sheriff was a popular and unapologetic immigration enforcer, but as Arizona’s electorate changed not even a pardon could redeem him

The White House has announced several executive actions on gun violence after recent mass shootings. Plus, more than 3,600 US healthcare workers died in the first year of the Covid pandemicGood morning.The White House announced several executive actions against gun violence yesterday, after mass shootings in the US in recent weeks. Continue reading...

Bill would protect removing or renaming monuments unless first approved by state’s historic preservation centerNearly 158-years after its founding West Virginia – a state forged from the fires of America’s civil war – remains stuck between north and south. Now lawmakers are considering a bill that would protect Confederate monuments from removal or renaming. Supporters claim they are protecting everyone’s history. Opponents call the bill “traumatic and mentally exhausting”.At a moment of national reckoning on race, the debate is fierce. “We were the Union. West Virginia was born out of seceding from Virginia, if i’m not mistaken,” said Delegate Sean Hornbuckle, one of the state’s few Black lawmakers. “We’re advocating for people who wanted to kill us.” Continue reading...

Our golf correspondent on the pin positions and pitfalls that await the field this week at Augusta NationalTommy Fleetwood’s hole-by-hole guide to Augusta

This week’s roundup also features an Alec Stewart bouncer, late MotoGP drama and Grand National fun1) The Masters starts on Thursday, less than five months on from the 2020 edition, delayed by Covid-19. Here’s a film on the 1997 competition, when Tiger Woods won by a barely comprehensible 19 strokes. More Augusta memories: the story of Gene Sarazen’s double eagle in 1935, “the shot heard around the world”; Larry Mize talking us through 1987’s famous chip-and-run (here’s the shot itself). In 1986, Jack Nicklaus surged through an all-star field to claim his 18th major. Back in 1971, Nicklaus was beaten to the green jacket by Charles Coody – his final PGA Tour victory.2) The Grand National returns this weekend after a two-year break (although there was a virtual race in 2020). Here’s Jenny Pitman’s Corbiere winning in 1983, the first time a female trainer won the Aintree classic. Mr Frisk took the 1990 edition in the fastest-ever time, while Esha Ness ‘won’ the race that wasn’t in 1993 (with bonus news report). Continue reading...

The Los Angeles police sergeant Jody Stiger, a use-of-force expert, told jurors at the trial of the former officer Derek Chauvin: 'My opinion was that the force was excessive,' referring to Chauvin's restraint of George Floyd. The Minneapolis police department's coordinator on the use of force, Lt Johnny Mercil, told jurors the neck restraint applied by Chauvin was unauthorised and that officers were trained to use the least amount of force necessary.Chauvin, 45, who is white, has denied charges of second- and third-degree murder, and manslaughter, over Floyd’s death last May, which prompted mass protests for racial justice across the US and other parts of the world. The trial continues

It’s not just ‘old school’ thinking – a recent study found two-thirds of workers ‘craving’ more in-person time with their teamsI have a client who runs a business that was not considered to be “essential” and therefore had to shut his doors during the height of the pandemic and send his employees home to work. This went on for a few months. When, last summer, things started to relax, he called everyone back to the office. No exceptions.“Working from home isn’t an option in my business,” he told me. “I don’t buy into it. I want my people here.” Continue reading...

The incandescent Wizards star and future Hall of Famer plays not for his legacy, but for the moment. The reward is the workThe hot-take ecosystem in sports is unforgiving and relentless. There can be no waffling or clinging to the fence. There can only be cannonballing into one side of an argument or another – hard and fast enough to break the sound barrier, ideally. In this land of fever and fury Stephen A Smith is like that volcano churning away in Iceland, constantly on fire, always popping off.Last week ESPN’s king of scream looked primed to go full Vesuvius when a recent game between the Indiana Pacers and the Washington Wizards was broached for discussion on his weekday morning shout show, First Take. The main takeaway from that game, the Wizards’ third victory in 11 tries, was this stat line: 35 points, 21 assists and 14 rebounds in 39 minutes played; only Magic Johnson and Oscar Robertson have come close to that performance – and even so, they never scored or rebounded quite that much. Continue reading...