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With 13 nods, Christopher Nolan looks almost certain to win best director, but fiercely divided fanbases mean best picture could still produce a real surprise

Couple are charged with creating and selling their cryptocurrency, known as INDXcoin', to Christian community in Denver, ColoradoA Colorado pastor who is charged with stealing more than $1m from his Christian community in a cryptocurrency scheme has admitted to the fraud but argued that God instructed him to carry it out.Eli Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn, are charged with creating and selling their cryptocurrency, known as INDXcoin", to Christians based in their home town of Denver, Colorado, allegedly telling would-be investors that the Lord had told him people would become rich if they invested, the state's division of securities announced in a press release on Thursday. Continue reading...

Union members to return to work on Tuesday after week-long walkout ended by tentative deal between faculty and managementCalifornia State University faculty members reached a tentative contract agreement with the university system, after nearly 30,000 professors, librarians, coaches and other workers struck at the nation's largest public university system.Members of the California Faculty Association will return to work Tuesday instead of continuing their planned week-long walkout to demand higher wages, the California Faculty Association said in a statement. Continue reading...

Megadonors and media coalesce around Trump as challengers fall by the wayside - and Nikki Haley faces pressure to drop outVivek Ramaswamy urged the crowd to end the primary right here. Doug Burgum told them to think of safety and prosperity. Tim Scott posed a series of questions that culminated with: How many y'all want me to stop talking so you can hear from your next president, Donald J Trump?"As the three failed US presidential candidates turned endorsers stood alongside Trump on stage in Laconia, New Hampshire, on Monday, the crowd chanted Four more years!" and the message to Republicans was clear: join us now or be cast into the political wilderness. Continue reading...

Kayak customers can exclude Max 9 aircraft after cabin panel blowout on Alaska Airlines flightA leading online travel agent has added filters to let users exclude flights that use Boeing's troubled 737 Max planes, after a piece of fuselage falling off an Alaska Airlines flight led to a surge of user interest in avoiding the airliners.Kayak first introduced an aircraft filter in March 2019, to add and exclude specific models of plane, but the company says it saw little use compared with the more prominent filters of the number of stops or airports. Continue reading...

Coco Gauff beat Marta Kostyuk and Aryna Sabalenka annihilated Barbora Krejcikova - they meet in the last four - before Jannik Sinner dispatched Andrey Rublev, setting up a semi against Novak DjokovicGauff breaks back to stay in the set.Another slow start to her service game from Kostyuk gives Gauff hope as the American edges in front at 15-30. Continue reading...

With box office takings down and viewing figures in freefall, the awards are consciously uncoupling from the film industryI call it the holy slap' now," purred Jada Pinkett Smith of her husband's decision to lamp Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars two years ago, because so many positive things came after it." God love 'em and everything, but aren't celebrities incredible? There really is nothing - no incident too blatantly ghastly and embarrassing - that cannot be folded into some kind of aspirational narrative of personal growth. Just as Gwyneth Paltrow's conscious uncoupling" offered an opportunity for Her Vajesty to get gorgeously divorced in a way normies could never, so Jada would have you believe that public assault lies on the other side of the glass against which the likes of us can only press our envious snotty noses.But look, the Oscar nominations are out today! The whole pageant is about to crank up once more, though the obvious sadness is that Will Smith was formally banned from the ceremony for 10 years, meaning attenders at the 10 March event will have to sit through approximately 27 hours of it, miserably safe in the knowledge that no outbreak of holy" low-level violence could occur.Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Business Insider reports employees let go for purchasing limited-edition mugs apparently in violation of company policySome Target workers have been fired for using their status as employees to buy highly popular limited-edition Stanley mugs, according to Business Insider.Earlier this year, Target sold a limited-edition pink quencher" that was a collaboration between Starbucks and Stanley. The $45 cups sold out almost immediately, causing stampedes at several stores and were resold online for hundreds of dollars. Target has since announced they are not restocking the cups. Continue reading...

Many agricultural laborers are parched at home and in the field, which can lead to serious health effects like kidney diseaseIt's easy to identify the residences of the farm workers who tend crops in the San Joaquin Valley, one of California's agricultural hubs. They tend to be small homes. Sometimes, location is a giveaway - a trailer set between a dust-choked highway and groves of pistachio trees. Sometimes, the tell is water.I see the difference between the green yards in east Fresno [a city in California] and the yellow yards in west Fresno," said Leticia Compan. The farm equipment operator is referring to the divide between the tonier, whiter part of the city on one side of Route 41 and the largely Latino, lower-income population on the other, where she lives with her family. Continue reading...

Governor, who ended White House bid on Sunday, vows to veto bill from state senator seeking $5m to help ex-president cover costsA day after ending his campaign for the White House and tepidly endorsing Donald Trump, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, sank an effort to use his state's funds to pay off the former president's legal expenses.DeSantis promised to veto a bill from the state senator Ileana Garcia, a Republican who sought to effectively dedicate up to $5m from Florida's state budget to help Trump cover his legal costs. The former president faces 91 criminal charges and assorted lawsuits in various jurisdictions. Continue reading...

After Javier Milei was elected president, threats to my safety forced me into exile. I fear the rise of anti-feminist extremismThe femicide of 14-year-old Chiara Paez, by her boyfriend, in May 2015 provoked national outrage in Argentina. Are we not going to do anything?" asked journalist Marcela Ojeda. And we did something. On 3 June, the first Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) women's march against femicide took place.

After Trump's victory in Iowa, his top rival Nikki Haley hopes to make a splash in the critical primaryNew Hampshire voters are headed to the polls on Tuesday. After Donald Trump's landslide victory in the Iowa caucus last week, his top rival for the Republican nomination - the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley - hopes to make a splash in the critical primary state.But the Republican primary is not the only contest being held in New Hampshire on Tuesday. New Hampshire Democrats are moving forward with their own primary, one with a major asterisk: Joe Biden's name will not appear on the ballot as the Democratic National Committee has said that the New Hampshire primary is meaningless" after party officials moved to make South Carolina the first voting state. Continue reading...

Democrats have stripped the state of its first-in-the-nation status, potentially jeopardizing its influence over US politicsEvery four years, for the past five decades, New Hampshire has found itself the center of both the media's and would-be presidents' attention.Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are among the Democrats who have committed weeks to campaigning in the state, which has long held the country's first presidential primary. Over the years, national and international media have spent tens of millions of dollars on hotel rooms, rental cars, food and booze. Continue reading...

From Ivan Toney's dramatic return to Alexis Mac Allister's impact on Liverpool, we hand out honours (and dishonours) from the Premier League weekend.After a month without victory, Arsenal bounced back with a 5-0 thrashing of a limp and uninspired Crystal Palace. Gabriel Magalhaes steered Arsenal into an early lead (and effectively ended the game in the 11th minute) when he nodded home Declan Rice's inswinging corner. It was almost as if the centre-back had enough of his team's strikers failing to find the net, so he took the goalscoring role upon himself. Why should Mikel Arteta bother to look for a new striker when he's got Gabriel to get the job done? Continue reading...

The granite state's primary may be the last chance Donald Trump's opponents within the Republican ranks have to stop the former president from securing the nomination again. Plus, the link between hypochondria and early death

Trump didn't do those bad things, according to GOP legislators, bankers, and Trump himself. And if he did, they didn't countOJ Simpson decided he could make some blood money", as he called it, by writing a hypothetical" book on the murders of his estranged wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman entitled If I Did It. When it was announced in 2006, the outrage was so overwhelming that the publisher, HarperCollins, owned by Rupert Murdoch, fired the editor, Judith Regan, and cancelled a scheduled Fox network special. The OJ book fiasco appeared to be a rare moment of Murdoch sensitivity, but he was concerned that the association besmirched his own reputation.A week after Donald Trump's attorney argued in the DC district court that he could not be prosecuted for his attempted coup culminating in the January 6 assault on the Capitol and could order the assassination of any opponent, Trump took to his Truth Social account on 18 January to insist that he MUST HAVE COMPLETE & TOTAL PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY" even for EVENTS THAT CROSS THE LINE'". If the glove fits, you must still acquit. Continue reading...

Why is the media making such a big deal of this? Trump will be the nominee, but the general election is a different matterThe mainstream media is flabbergasted at Trump's success in sweeping the Iowa caucuses, dominating the polls, and destroying all his rivals but Nikki Haley before Tuesday's New Hampshire primary.CNN is awestruck, calling Trump's landslide victory in Iowa" a stunning show of strength".Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com Continue reading...

After eight years of populist chaos, Donald Tusk must rebuild trust in the state and resist the urge to simply turn the tablesEvolution or revolution?" The question being asked in Poland today captures the dilemma of trying to restore liberal democracy after eight years of populist state capture. Must one, for instance, break the letter of a specific law in order to restore the rule of law as an overall condition? The Polish experience will tell us something important about the future of democracy inside EU member states. It also prefigures a challenge the United States could face at the end of a second Donald Trump presidency.The last few weeks in Polish politics have been dramatic, angry and sometimes bizarre. Two former ministers of the previously ruling Law and Justice (PiS) government, convicted of the falsification of documents while in public office, take refuge in the palace of the president, their party comrade Andrzej Duda. While Duda is away at another meeting, the police arrest them in the palace and carry them off to prison. The president says they are political prisoners", talks of rule of law terror", and even makes a comparison with Bereza Kartuska, a notorious concentration camp in 1930s Poland. PiS launches a protest demo in the snow, deploying the iconography of the Solidarity movement that led Poland to freedom in the 1980s. PiS leader Jarosaw Kaczyski says the arrested politicians are heroes who should be awarded the country's highest honours. Poland's genuinely tragic and inspiring past is recycled as grotesque parody.Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Romeo Nance, 23, believed to have fatally shot himself after confrontation' with police, officials sayA man suspected of shooting and killing eight people at three locations in the Chicago suburbs fatally shot himself after a confrontation" with police in Texas, authorities have said.Police in the city of Joliet, Illinois said 23-year-old Romeo Nance had been located by US Marshals near Natalia, Texas on Monday evening at which time it is believed that Nance took his own life with a handgun following a confrontation with Texas law enforcement officials". Continue reading...

The Canadian director of In the Heat of the Night, Fiddler on the Roof and Moonstruck has died aged 97. We look back on his career

The US and the UK have carried out another round of strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen in an attempt to stop the rebel group targeting shipping in the Red Sea. US defence officials confirmed the strikes, the second time in a month the US and UK have conducted joint strikes against the Houthis

Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers president, reaffirms general strike on 1 May 2028, saying members need to come together'Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers president, criticized Donald Trump on Monday but declined to back Joe Biden as he reaffirmed plans to lead a general strike in the US in 2028.Speaking to union members at the UAW national political conference in Washington DC, Fain said it was time for union members to come together.Reuters contributed reporting Continue reading...

Justices grant emergency appeal from Biden administration in 5-4 vote while lawsuit over wire on US-Mexico border continuesThe Biden administration is allowed to cut the razor wire deployed by Texas at the border with Mexico, the US supreme court ruled on Monday.The concertina wire, deployed at the direction of the Republican Texas governor, Greg Abbott, runs roughly 30 miles (48km) along the Rio Grande river, near the border city of Eagle Pass. It is part of Abbott's broader fight with the Biden administration over immigration enforcement and what he calls Biden's reckless open-border policies".The Associated Press contributed to this report Continue reading...

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Congresswoman Nancy Mace announces support of ex-president despite saying we've got to start over' after Capitol attack in 2021The Republican South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace faced widespread accusations of hypocrisy after she endorsed Donald Trump - the presidential candidate she previously said she held accountable" for the January 6 attack on Congress.On Monday, Mace announced her endorsement, a day before the New Hampshire primary, in which Trump enjoys comfortable polling leads over the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, his only remaining opponent. Continue reading...

Coast Guard helicopter, airboats, local fire department and Ottawa sheriff's office assist people stuck on mile-long sheet of floating iceTwenty people were rescued from an ice floe in Lake Erie, the Coast Guard said Monday.The Coast Guard's ninth district Great Lakes station said it received a report at approximately 10.20am that the people were stuck on a mile-long floe about a half-mile off Catawba Island state park near Port Clinton in Ohio. Continue reading...

Fake robocall beginning What a bunch of malarkey' encourages Democrats to not vote in New Hampshire primaryA prominent New Hampshire Democrat said the makers of a robocall mimicking the voice of Joe Biden and encouraging Democrats not to vote in the primary on Tuesday should be prosecuted to the fullest extent" for attempting an attack on democracy" itself.I want them to be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible because this is an attack on democracy," Kathy Sullivan, a former state party chair, told NBC News, adding that as an attorney, she believes the call could break several laws. Continue reading...

Vice-president is expected to announce support for more access to abortion as she begins tour in battleground state of WisconsinKamala Harris kicked off her much-vaunted abortion rights nationwide tour in Wisconsin on Monday as Joe Biden convened a meeting of his taskforce on reproductive healthcare access, in a tag-team effort to double down on what is likely to be a key campaign issue this year.The vice-president chose the 51st anniversary of the Roe v Wade ruling to begin the Reproductive Freedoms Tour, announced in December, in the battleground state of Wisconsin, which the president won in the 2020 presidential election by just over 20,000 votes. Continue reading...

California State University workers across 23 campuses start five-day work stoppage for higher pay and better working conditionsFaculty at California State University, America's largest public university system, began a historic weeklong strike on Monday as more than 30,000 workers walked off their jobs.Professors, librarians, plumbers, electricians and other workers demanding higher pay and improved working conditions are striking. The five-day faculty work stoppage is the first to take place systemwide across Cal State's 23 campuses.The Associated Press contributed reporting Continue reading...

Son of civil rights leader and Coretta Scott King died at his California home after battling prostate cancerDexter Scott King, the younger son of Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King, has died after battling prostate cancer.The King Center in Atlanta, which Dexter King served as chairperson, says the 62-year-old son of the civil rights leader died Monday at his California home after battling prostate cancer. His wife, Leah Weber King, said in a statement that he died peacefully in his sleep". Continue reading...

The inauguration of the temple erased divisions between politics and religion in a theoretically secular stateMonday's inauguration of the new Ram Mandir in Ayodhya by India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, was a moment decades in the making. Yet it also cametoo early. Despite the grand spectacle of the ceremony, with celebrities, tycoons and politicians inattendance, the temple is still incomplete. There is an obvious explanation for this rushed endeavour, andit is not religious. India will go to the polls in late spring and while Mr Modi is all but guaranteed to win athird term, he wants a large majority for his BharatiyaJanata party (BJP).Mr Modi rode to power, and has entrenched it, on the back of rightwing Hindu nationalism. On Monday he went beyond the exploitation of ethno-religious sentiment. He did not merely attend the ceremony; he carried out rituals. Religion and authoritarianism have proceeded hand-in-hand in recent years. But few strongmen have melded the political and religious to quite this degree. As his biographer, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, observed, the event cast him as the high priest of Hinduism", disquieting some religious leaders. Continue reading...

Records in divorce form basis of claims of improper relationship between Fulton county district attorney and Trump prosecutorA Georgia judge on Monday unsealed the divorce case involving a prosecutor at the center of allegations concerning an improper relationship with the Fulton county district attorney who brought the racketeering case against Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.The ruling by the Cobb county superior court judge Henry Thompson on Monday means the records in the divorce - that formed some of the allegations leveled by Trump's co-defendant and 2020 campaign elections day operations chief, Michael Roman - could be made public imminently. Continue reading...

High turn-out expected to favor Haley, who is relying on support from nearly 40% of registered voters who don't belong to a party

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We want our partners to help clean, cook, parent, and remind us to go to the gym. It's a lot to ask of one person - what if there were more than one?Our identical twins had been home from the hospital for just over a month when I saw a Facebook post from my friend Niko. He was also having a baby - but instead of doing it with two parents, he was doing it with three: himself (papa), his partner (mama), and her other partner (dada). In addition to having a mom and two dads, a fourth adult would also be living with the family - as the baby's bonus adult".I wasn't surprised by this unusual arrangement; Niko has been openly non-monogamous since I met him years earlier. I was excited for him and his growing family, but I also felt a sharp mix of envy and despair. Continue reading...

Issuing a safety alert, FAA recommends that airlines inspect the door plugs of Boeing 737-900ER jetsAnother Boeing jet faces scrutiny after the US aviation watchdog issued a safety alert and advised airlines to check that door plugs are secure.Boeing was already working to reassure carriers, regulators and passengers after a cabin panel blew off a brand-new 737 Max 9 jet during an Alaska Airlines flight earlier this month. Some 171 Max 9 jets have since been grounded. Continue reading...

Hafez Ajaq, father of Tawfiq Ajaq, says: They are using our tax dollars ... to kill our own children'The family of a New Orleans-area teenager who was reportedly shot dead by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank on Friday mourned the high schooler this weekend while also criticizing US military support for Israel.They are killer machines - they are using our tax dollars in the US to support the weapons to kill our own children," Hafez Ajaq, the father of late 17-year-old Tawfiq Ajaq, said of Israel's forces, according to the Associated Press. Continue reading...

Guitarist Christian Nolen plays the Deftones and System of a Down on doctors' instructions while undergoing awake craniotomyA Florida man recently helped surgeons remove a tumor from his brain by playing 1980s and 90s rock music.Christian Nolen, a professional guitarist in the south Florida community of Coral Gables, was instructed by doctors to play several songs on his guitar while undergoing an awake craniotomy meant to take a tumor out of the right side of his frontal lobe, WSVN Miami reported. Continue reading...

Two polls released on eve of state's primary put ex-president at 19 points and 18 points ahead of his former UN ambassadorThe ignominious end of Ron DeSantis's presidential campaign is unlikely to boost Donald Trump's last challenger, Nikki Haley, to the Republican nomination , according to two New Hampshire polls released on the eve of the primary in the north-eastern state.DeSantis also endured a round of scathing critiques of his campaign which started off being seen as a major source of opposition to Trump. But his White House bid never fully took off and fizzled into failure and a major blow to the rightwing Florida governor's political reputation. Continue reading...

Forest say they will write to PGMOL, the body that governs the officiating of Premier League games, after Ivan Toney's controversial goal. To what end?

Built on the site of a razed mosque, the Ram temple represents the culmination of the Hindu right's century-long project

Vaughn Hillyard excluded a day after pressing Republican Elise Stefanik on whether Trump had sexually assaulted E Jean CarrollDonald Trump's presidential campaign reportedly blocked an NBC News journalist from covering campaign events in New Hampshire on Sunday.Sunday's exclusion of NBC News correspondent Vaughn Hillyard came when he was set to serve as a pool reporter. Instead of having a pack of reporters follow a candidate everywhere, campaigns will often allow television, print, and radio news organizations to send a single pool reporter to travel with them - and those reporters in turn then send a readout to other news outlets. Continue reading...

From Guns N' Roses to Pete Doherty, being on time is too lowly a concern for some artists - and there are limits to our patience

Ron DeSantis has ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and endorsed Donald Trump. The Florida governor's withdrawal leaves Nikki Haley as the last remaining challenger to Trump for the party's nomination. 'He's been a good governor and I wish him well,' Haley said of DeSantis at a campaign event on Sunday. 'Having said that, it's now one fella and one lady left.' Trump set aside months of criticism of DeSantis and welcomed his onetime rival as his newest supporter

Life in Grenada, the island my grandparents once left for the UK, is safe and caring. Here, I feel that freedom is my birthrightAs falls from grace go, spending your 38th birthday packing boxes in an Amazon warehouse is pretty high up there. If that sounds terribly snobbish or ungrateful, forgive me. Let's put it down to being peddled the Thatcherite dream at the home counties girls' school I attended in the 90s: if I worked hard enough, the message was, I could do anything.My parents, who arrived in the UK from Grenada in the 1960s, did a pretty good job of making me into the right kind of immigrant. I did well at school, attended great universities (undergrad and postgrad) and was writing for national papers by my late teens. I truly believed the idea that, as a black person, if I just worked twice as hard as my white colleagues, as the old adage goes, success could be mine. Continue reading...

The president's absence opens a window for Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson to mount longshot presidential bidsWhile Donald Trump and Nikki Haley might draw focus, a shadow presidential primary is taking place in New Hampshire, where Joe Biden could stumble at the first hurdle of his bid to run for president again in 2024 following an internal Democratic party feud.As a consequence of the party scrap, Biden's name will not even appear on the ballot in the Granite state on Tuesday. While the president remains the favorite to win his party's overall nomination, his absence here has opened a window for Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, and Marianne Williamson, an author and self-help guru who ran for president in 2020, to mount longshot presidential bids. Continue reading...

Georgia-Pacific, owned by Koch Industries, employ controversial legal tactic to circumvent paying millions to sickened workersAsbestos victims, their families and attorneys are claiming a Koch Industries-owned company and its lawyers are using a controversial bankruptcy maneuver to avoid paying millions in compensation to its former employees.Workers at Georgia-Pacific, a paper and building products company, have been locked in a years-long battle with a company over claims asbestos in its products caused fatal cancers. Continue reading...