US news | The Guardian

Over the holidays, this column will explore next year's urgent issues. Today we look at the danger posed by the former president's bid for reelectionThe great spectre haunting 2024 is the threat of Donald Trump triumphing in November's election. A second stint in the Oval Office would have grim repercussions for the US and the world. He dominates the Republican race for the presidential candidacy, while recent polls showed him beating Joe Biden in five of the six key battleground states, and besting the president on issues including the economy and national security. The Biden administration has overseen a striking economic recovery in tough global conditions, but voters don't feel the improvement. The president's handling of the war in Gaza is alienating core supporters. He inspires littleenthusiasm.Democrats point out that there's a long way to go and that November's off-year election results point to a brighter picture. Mr Trump faces a dizzying array of legal cases, though the most significant may not move to a trial before the election. While they boost the belief of diehard admirers that he is being persecuted, some supporters say he should not stand if convicted. It's not impossible that he might run from a prison cell. Continue reading...

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley declined to say that the US civil war was caused by slavery when asked by a voter in Berlin, New Hampshire. Responding to the questioner, Haley said: 'I mean, I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are'

Owner of property donated it to the University of Idaho, which said that its demolition was a key step towards finding closureDemolition began on Thursday of the house where four University of Idaho students were killed last year, marking an emotional step for the victims' families and a close-knit community that was shocked and devastated by the brutal stabbings.The sounds of construction equipment pierced the early morning air as an excavator started tearing down the front part of the house. The former walls formed a large pile of crushed and smashed wood on the ground as debris was picked up and loaded into a dump truck. Continue reading...

Every tech company from Monzo to my bank is crunching my data. All the results tell us is how dull it is to reduce human experience to numbers.How was my 2023? Pretty good, thanks. I spent 60 hours at my local cinema and 51 days listening to music from 170 genres (chiefly art pop"). Plus, I made a respectable 46 transactions at M&S. How about you?December has always been a time to take stock: the highs, lows, memorable moments and best-ofs from the year just passed. But over the past half-decade or so, there has been a creeping, unmistakable shift in how we approach these informal annual reviews.Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist Continue reading...

The Rev William Barber says he was trying to use his own chair in the disabled section for a screening of The Color PurpleMovie theatre chain AMC has apologized to a North Carolina civil rights leader after he was kicked out of a screening of The Color Purple for trying to use his own chair in the disabled section.The Rev William Barber, a former president of the NAACP North Carolina chapter, who suffers from a form of arthritis known as ankylosing spondylitis and walks with two canes, said that he tried to use a special chair he brought to an AMC Cineplex in Greenville on Tuesday afternoon and was told by staff he couldn't. Continue reading...

Blanchard persuaded her boyfriend to kill her mother, who forced her to use a wheelchair and a feeding tube for yearsGypsy Rose Blanchard, the Missouri woman who persuaded an online boyfriend to kill her mother after she had forced her to pretend for years that she was suffering from leukemia, muscular dystrophy and other serious illnesses, was released on Thursday from prison on parole.Blanchard was released early in the day from the Chillicothe correctional center, said Karen Pojmann, a spokesperson for the Missouri department of corrections. Blanchard was granted parole after serving 85% of her original sentence, Pojmann said. Continue reading...

Republican presidential candidate discussed role of government in response to voter's question but walked it back on ThursdayRepublican presidential candidate Nikki Haley declined to specify that slavery was a cause of the civil war on Wednesday, wading into an area of history that continues to reverberate and in some ways define US politics nearly 160 years after it concluded.Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, where the first shots of the north-south conflict were fired by Confederate soldiers in April 1861, was asked by a New Hampshire voter about the reason for the war but didn't mention slavery in her response. Continue reading...

Judge ordered Lorna Green, now serving five years for the arson attack, to pay insurance company, building owner and clinic founderA judge has ordered a woman who set fire to Wyomings only full-service abortion clinic to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution, the full amount sought by prosecutors.Lorna Green is serving five years in prison for burning Wellspring Health Access weeks before the clinic was set to open in Casper in 2022. The fire gutted the building while it was being renovated for the new clinic and delayed its opening by almost a year. Continue reading...

When we started out, we didn't dare dream it would lead to this: expanded rainforest, a beaver release, and rewilding at BalmoralSid Rawle, the 1960s peace campaigner and infamous King of the Hippies", once remarked that if land ownership in Britain were to be divided equally, we would each get about an acre. Surprisingly, this thought experiment would just about hold true today.The UK measures 60m acres in total and is home to around 67 million of us. There is something rather beguiling about such extreme egalitarianism - impractical though it might be. One person, one vote, one acre. But there's also something about it that rather helps clarify the mind should you ever find yourself, as I have done recently, trying to reform the mind-bogglingly large amounts of land owned by the British royal family. Continue reading...

The Guardian's list of the 100 best male footballers for 2023 features players from Norway, Georgia and Canada, but there are no Americans in sight

Empiricism, algorithms and smartphones are out - astrology, art and a life lived fiercely offline are inCultural upheavals can be a riddle in real time. Trends that might seem obvious in hindsight are poorly understood in the present or not fathomed at all. We live in turbulent times now, at the tail end of a pandemic that killed millions and, for a period, reordered existence as we knew it. It marked, perhaps more than any other crisis in modern times, a new era, the world of the 2010s wrenched away for good.What comes next can't be known - not with so much war and political instability, the rise of autocrats around the world, and the growing plausibility of a second Donald Trump term. Within the roil - or below it - one can hazard, at least, a hypothesis: a change is here and it should be named. A rebellion, both conscious and unconscious, has begun. It is happening both online and off-, and the off is where the youth, one day, might prefer to wage it. It echoes, in its own way, a great shift that came more than two centuries ago, out of the ashes of the Napoleonic wars. Continue reading...

President faces pressure from Republican critics and Democratic allies as he struggles to address what both sides agree is a crisisHeading into the heat of the 2024 election season, Joe Biden is weighing major changes to US immigration policy that would toughen border enforcement and address an issue that has emerged as one of the president's biggest political vulnerabilities ahead of a likely rematch against his anti-immigration rival Donald Trump.But it is also a risk for Biden, who entered the White House in 2021 promising to restore humanity and American values to our immigration system" after Trump's four-year crackdown on immigration. Continue reading...

UN high commissioner for human rights says there is rapid deterioration' of rights in West Bank. Plus, how instant noodles took over the world

The conversation is stuck: you're either playing the race card' or in denial'. But here's a way to break throughThe national conversation on racism seems to be stuck in an endless loop. We all know the routine: a public debate is sparked by a news story that features a case of alleged bigotry. It might be reports that an Asian cricketer was nicknamed Bomber"; or that a member of the royal family is said to have questioned a baby's skin colour. Whatever it is, the inciting incident then sets the parameters of all the discussion to follow. An array of loud and angry voices appears on media panel shows or radio phone-ins, suggesting what might or might not have occurred (no one knows for certain), and whether or not any of it is racist (everyone is certain that it either is, or it isn't).And so, instead of the nuances of racial inequality being understood, the issue is portrayed as a simple matter of people saying or doing bad things to each other, and we get a tiresome to and fro between those playing the race card" and others in denial". Many of us just tune out, while the overall issue of racism in society - a real problem in need of an urgent solution - remains unaddressed. Continue reading...

Amid soaring rents, some are turning to the UK's many vacant properties for shelter. Could this be a return to the 70s and 80s?The postcode was an exclusive area of London and the four-storey, period building was something an estate agent might describe as magnificent" and imposing". A man escorted me to a side door in near darkness. The door opened and as soon as I was in, it closed quickly behind me.The inside of the property was vast, but there was barely any furniture and the walls and high ceilings had been graffitied. The inhabitants were initially suspicious of me, but seemed friendly enough. I had imagined them to be more disorderly, but instead some were busy with cordless drills, trying to make the cold, once palatial property more habitable. Continue reading...

Memories of life with my ex-boyfriend followed me around Stockholm. But day by day, it became easier

Former president and frontrunner for Republican 2024 presidential nomination also expected to file own appealThe Colorado Republican Party has asked the US supreme court to intervene after Colorado's top court disqualified former president Donald Trump from appearing on the state's Republican primary ballot, an attorney for the Republican group said.The appeal comes after the Colorado supreme court last week disqualified Trump because of his role in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters. The court barred Trump under a US constitutional provision prohibiting anyone who engaged in insurrection or rebellion" from holding public office. Continue reading...

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has said he wants US to reopen border crossings that were closed due to influx of arrivalsUS secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has met with Mexico's president, in an attempt to limit the surge of migrants reaching the US southwestern border.President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has said he is willing to help, but he wants to see progress in US relations with Cuba and Venezuela, two of the top sources of migrants, along with more development aid for the region. Continue reading...

The 14-year-old was then allegedly shot and wounded by his 15-year-old brother in retaliation; both are now in custodyA Florida woman holding her 11-month-old son in a baby carrier was fatally shot by her 14-year-old brother while trying to defuse an argument over Christmas gifts he was having with a 15-year-old brother who also was armed, authorities said.The 15-year-old brother then shot his 14-year-old brother, though not fatally, for killing their sister on Sunday in Largo, Florida, which is located in the Tampa metro area, the Pinellas county sheriff's office said in a news release. Continue reading...

The controversy over Hasan Minhaj's onstage storytelling was a sign of the shifting demands placed on standup comicsNo one gets into standup comedy expecting a routine factcheck. But that's what happened when a September profile of Hasan Minhaj in the New Yorker called out the former host of the Netflix series Patriot Act for misrepresenting his truth in two Netflix standup specials. In one, Minhaj described a white FBI informant infiltrating his mosque and an anthrax scare involving his young daughter (neither happened as Minhaj described them, the magazine found). In another, he recalled a white high school crush who jilted him on prom night for seemingly no other reason than his being of Indian descent (she denied it went down like that). The magazine said Minhaj's stories blur the lines between entertainment and opinion journalism", triggering an intense public debate about whether the comedian had stooped to claiming race-based victimhood to advance his career. Bill Maher likened Minhaj, a peer, to Jussie Smollett.In a 21-minute video rebuttal, Minhaj made a case for punching up his biography while poking holes in the New Yorker's hallowed vetting process. With everything that's happening in the world," Minhaj intoned, I'm aware even talking about this now feels so trivial. But being accused of faking racism is not trivial. It is very serious, and it demands an explanation." Continue reading...

Amid fears of authoritarianism, oldest US president likely to face off against first president to be criminally chargedThe 60th US presidential election, which will unfold in 2024, will be quite unlike any that has gone before as the US, and the rest of the world, braces for a contest amid fears of eroding democracy and the looming threat of authoritarianism.It will be a fight marked by numerous unwanted firsts as the oldest president in the country's history is likely to face the first former US president to stand trial on criminal charges. A once aspirational nation will continue its plunge into anxiety and divisions about crime, immigration, race, foreign wars and the cost of living. Continue reading...

Two men stumbled across the wreck of Matthew Reum's vehicle - and were surprised to find the injured driver insideTwo fishers discovered an Indiana man - alive - inside the wreckage of his car after it crashed on 20 December, leaving the man stuck for six days.On Tuesday, Mario Garcia and his son-in-law Nivardo De La Torre had been looking for fishing holes when they discovered a vehicle in a shallow creek beneath an Interstate 94 bridge in Portage, Indiana, they said during a press conference on Tuesday evening. Continue reading...

With four defeats in their last five league games, numerous injuries and a tough schedule, the manager is in a tricky spot

By finally delivering on their promises, Kyiv's European allies will find the benefits extend to them, too

Ex-president can participate in state primary despite accusations of insurrection stemming from the January 6 Capitol attackDonald Trump will remain on Michigan's state ballot after a ruling from the Michigan supreme court on Wednesday, which upheld a lower court order.The move sets the stage for the former president to participate in the Michigan primary despite accusations that he led an insurrection against the United States. Continue reading...

Republican presidential hopeful insists campaign is advertising on other media as Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary loomVivek Ramaswamy, the Republican presidential nomination contender and biotech billionaire, has stopped spending on TV ads, it was reported on Wednesday.According to his campaign and analysis from an ad-tracking firm obtained by NBC News, the candidate spent just $6,000 on TV ads last week compared with $200,000 in the first week of December. Continue reading...

The Chelsea co-owner walked into the Premier League talking of All-Star games and playoffs. His tenure has so far been defined by expensive misstepsRemember Todd Boehly? There was a time when Chelsea's chairman and co-owner was a near-omnipresent figure in English football. Not only were Chelsea spending $1bn of transfer money in record-breaking fashion while attempting to rewrite accounting principles, but Citizen Todd was only too happy to tell the world of his exciting plans for the Premier League.He hasn't disappeared completely. Baseball-capped, dressed for the cold, he attended Chelsea's match with Brighton in early December, but it has been some time since the football public heard from him. Club politics, wider football politics and perhaps most of all, Chelsea's rather embarrassing slide, have each served to reduce the need for the Marylander to hold forth in the manner that quickly made his name. Continue reading...

When she forgets words, or entire life events, I don't correct her. I try to enter her realityMy mum has got a lot nicer as she has got older. Growing up, she had an unpredictable temper. I tried not to give her reasons to be mad at me, but she was not rational in her rage, lashing out when she had a particularly bad day (she struggled with a gambling addiction), or when bills were (over)due.Now 87 years old, she is smiling whenever I visit her. Mum has been diagnosed with dementia and recently moved into an aged care facility. When I see her, I always tell her who I am. So far, she has always responded, I know." Continue reading...

Lee, who has died aged 48, was a homegrown star who graduated to global fame in the multi-award-winning Parasite

Detroit have lost a league-record 27 consecutive games. With no offense, defense or sense of direction, they're on pace to win only five games this seasonThe Detroit Pistons finally, formally made history on Tuesday night. Detroit lost their single-season record 27th consecutive game, the latest coming at home by a 118-112 score against the Brooklyn Nets. By falling to 2-28, the Pistons built more cushion in a perhaps inexorable quest to become the worst team in league history.To put their woeful run in context: The 2011-12 Charlotte Bobcats won 10.6% of their games, netting out to 7-59 record in a lockout-shortened season. The 1972-73 Philadelphia Sixers won an even 11%, setting the standard for terribleness over a typical 82-game slate at 9-73. The Pistons, with a 6.6% win rate, are pacing to go 5-77. Whether it's possible for an NBA team in the modern era to be that bad for so long remains to be seen, but the Pistons seem intent on giving the sporting world a definitive answer. Continue reading...

Strikes by autoworkers, actors and writers brought wins in 2023, but analysts worry labor laws could undo progressLabor experts see more wins ahead in 2024 for US unions after a year of attention-grabbing strikes and surging public support but worry gains may be stymied by the US's broken" labor laws.Strikes by autoworkers, writers, actors and nurses and a threatened strike by UPS workers all led to significant wins in 2023. The big challenge for labor in 2024 will be to take that momentum and turn it into new organizing and getting first contracts where workers have organized," said Ken Jacobs, the co-director of the UC Berkeley Labor Center. That's going to be a real challenge because labor law in the US is broken." Continue reading...

We have more than enough to go round, yet large proportions of the population lack the basic necessities of lifeWhat causes a famine? It isn't a lack of food. Nor does lack of food cause the kind of food insecurity, just short of a famine, that Britain is facing. In analyses of specific famines, the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen showed that social organisation and a lack of access to food for socially deprived people were the real causes of starvation.As 2023 ends, Britain may not be facing a famine, as people are in north-eastern Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen or Somalia, but that is a low bar. The UK's current levels of food insecurity will damage physical and mental health and increase health inequalities for years to come.Michael Marmot is professor of epidemiology at University College London, director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity, and past president of the World Medical Association Continue reading...

Hard to keep track of all the racist, unhinged, authoritarian comments by the former president? Don't worry, we've got you coveredIn 2015, the man who coined Godwin's law, a famous maxim about argument on the internet, wrote a column for the Washington Post. Its headline: Sure, call Trump a Nazi. Just make sure you know what you're talking about."By the lawyer and author Mike Godwin's own definition, his law reads thus: As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches one." Since Republicans fell under Trump's thrall, the law has often been invoked. Why? See our list of the 10 worst things Trump said in 2023:We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.Nobody has ever seen anything like we're witnessing right now ... It's poisoning the blood of our country.I love this guy. He says, You're not gonna be a dictator, are you?' I say, No, no, no - other than day one.' We're closing the border. And we're drilling, drilling, drilling. After that I'm not a dictator, OK?In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.... an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!If you go after me, I'm coming after you!If I happen to be president and I see somebody who's doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them, mostly they would be out of business. They'd be out. They'd be out of the election.He is a Soros-backed animal who just doesn't care about right or wrong.And I swear and I've never done that ... I have no idea who the hell - she's a whack job.That's why it was one of the great presidencies, they say. Even the opponents sometimes say he did very well ... but we've been waging an all-out war on American democracy. Continue reading...

A new male pill is about to begin UK trials - while women are rethinking the long dismissed side-effects of oral contraceptionI feel the same about the pill as I do about the Beatles," one woman in her 30s told the Times earlier this year. If I'd been around at the time they first came out, maybe I'd appreciate them more." This distils so much about the dynamic between doctors, pharma, patients and society in constructing the acceptable trade-offs of contraception: when the pill became available on the NHS in 1961, side-effects simply weren't relevant. The calamity of unwanted pregnancy, which had beset the species since the dawn of time, had been solved, by raw ingenuity. In terms of the difference it made to the human experience, and this was very much framed as the female experience, the pill was considered one of medicine's most seismic advances. So what if it gave you mood swings, headaches, acne, or caused you to gain weight? That would be like complaining you were travel sick on the Apollo 13.Scrolling forward 60 years, the pill is still the most popular form of birth control in the UK (in 2018, 28% of women took it; 27% used a condom) and the progestogen-only pill is now available over the counter. Yet those early assumptions, that no amount of adverse effects couldn't be weathered, appear to be increasingly rejected by young women. Earlier this year, Davina McCall continued her crusade for more openness around women's health with a documentary about the pill, in which she surveyed 4,000 women who were on it. An incredible 77% of them had experienced some side-effects, including depression and loss of libido, and one third had stopped taking it as a result. That polling data has not been replicated, and a new mood of distrust towards oral contraception has yet to show up in the data. It reveals itself instead in TikTok content, where women decry the paucity of research into hormonal contraceptives: there were 20 to 25 clinical trials between 2017 and 2020, set against more than 3,000 for cancer drugs in 2019 alone. Continue reading...

The coolest person on earth is a 65-year-old woman, without whom life might be very different and definitely not as funThere's a moment in the Celebration tour when Madonna participates in a simulated orgy. Wearing a red-and-black teddy and high leather boots, she sits with her legs spread wide as half-naked dancers of different genders attend to her in a writhing huddle, to the strains of Justify My Love.Watching this, it was interesting to think about how, 40 years ago, when Madonna was just starting her career, having something like this in a pop concert would have been considered incredibly shocking, offensive or downright illegal. In fact, in 1990, during Madonna's Blond Ambition world tour, the same sort of moves almost got her arrested, and Pope John Paul II denounced the show as one of the most satanic shows in the history of humanity". Continue reading...

I don't believe a toy will solve society's problems, but finding a doll that looked like me sent the wordless message, You belong'

After years of reliance on alcohol, going sober was terrifying. But losing my addiction has brought unimaginable rewardsIt is an unusually cold December morning. The thermometer says it is -21C. The sky is dark blue. Here and there a star flickers. It has been more than 16 years since my last drink - my wife and three children have never seen me touch alcohol - but still I remind myself every morning that waking up refreshed, relaxed and with the people I love is not something to take for granted.Everything is white. The trees seem to be covered in icing. I hold my five-year-old boy's hand and lead him to the car. We are on our way to preschool. This is all perfectly ordinary to him. The snow squeaks under our feet. It sounds like we are walking on potato starch.Gunnar Ardelius is a Swedish author Continue reading...

For fluent speakers, there are clear benefits - for others, there are huge costs. Here are some ways to boost linguistic justiceAnyone spending their Christmas holidays on the European mainland will likely have observed that it is quite common to meet staff in shops and hotels who can hold a conversation in English, and to read signs and menus in the language. This fact should come as no surprise, and it is no accident: the spread of English skills in Europe is largely the result of educational policies that have intensively promoted its teaching in public schools over the past decades.The reasons are diverse and well known. English is a major language of culture, and it is the third most spoken language in the world as a native language, after Chinese and Spanish. Native speakers of English number about 373m (roughly 5% of the world population), mostly concentrated in six advanced industrialised democracies (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the US), which together produce 33% of the world's gross domestic product in nominal terms. As a result of the colonial legacy, English is an official or co-official language in many countries of the world, mainly in Africa.Michele Gazzola is a lecturer in public policy and administration at Ulster University, Belfast, and editor of the journal Language Problems & Language Planning Continue reading...

Court voted 4-3 last week that ex-president was ineligible to run for White House again under US constitution's insurrection clauseColorado police are working with the FBI to investigate threats directed at justices of the state's supreme court after its decision to remove Donald Trump from the presidential primary ballot.The court voted 4-3 last week that the former president was ineligible to run for the White House again, citing a rarely used clause in the US constitution and his role in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Continue reading...

Republican convicted over false statements about payment from billionaire should not have been tried in Los Angeles, court saysAn appellate court on Tuesday reversed a 2022 federal conviction against former Nebraska congressman Jeff Fortenberry, ruling that the Republican should not have been tried in Los Angeles.Fortenberry was convicted in March 2022 on charges that he lied to federal authorities about an illegal $30,000 contribution to his campaign from a foreign billionaire at a 2016 Los Angeles fundraiser. He resigned his seat days later after pressure from congressional leaders and Nebraska's Republican governor. Continue reading...

Freezing weather affecting more than a million people expected in parts of South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and ColoradoSnow, freezing rain and high winds are hitting the northern plains and upper midwest states, with the National Weather Service warning that blizzard conditions for central South Dakota into parts of Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado [are] resulting in difficult to near impossible travel" soon after Christmas.Parts of South Dakota were expected to receive up to 13in of snow, with wind gusts as high as 55 mph, according to the weather forecasting agency. The conditions affecting more than a million people could last through early Wednesday, forecasters said. Continue reading...

Becky Hill, who Murdaugh's lawyers accuse of jury-tampering, alleged to have plagiarized passages in memoir from BBC articleThe court clerk who helped steer the murder trial of South Carolina's Alex Murdaugh and has since been hit with accusations of jury-tampering - potentially leading to a retrial - is now embroiled in a plagiarism controversy.Soon after the trial, in which Murdaugh was convicted of killing his wife and son near a dog kennel at their Low Country home, Becky Hill published a book named Behind the Doors of Justice: the Murdaugh Murders. Continue reading...

Legalization advocates say reclassifying drug to schedule III from schedule I doesn't resolve state and federal law conflictsThe US government appears poised to announce next year the most sweeping changes in decades to how it handles marijuana, the psychoactive drug dozens of states allow to be sold from storefronts, but which federal law considers among the most dangerous substances.Evidence suggests that Joe Biden's administration, responding to a policy the president announced last year, is working on moving marijuana to schedule III of the Controlled Substance Act (CSA), a change from its current listing on the maximally restrictive schedule I. That would lessen the tax burden on businesses selling the drug in states where it is legal, and potentially change how police agencies view enforcement of marijuana laws. Continue reading...

Congresswoman said hoaxer tried to trigger police response while Colorado justices who ruled against Trump face threatsThe political became personal over the Christmas holiday as the homes of politicos and judges were targeted by threats, protests and swatting" hoaxes by pranksters who call in fake emergencies to authorities in the hopes of prompting a forceful police response.A swatting hoax targeted the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Authorities said they were investigating threats against the Colorado supreme court justices who ruled that Trump could not appear on the state's ballots in the 2024 presidential election because he incited an insurrection on the day of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Continue reading...