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Which US firms have ditched the diversity and inclusion policies opposed by Donald Trump and will UK follow suit?

Experts' concern grows as communication breaks down among federal agencies responsible for tackling epidemicThe Trump administration has disrupted the US response to bird flu as the outbreak worsens, leading to confusion and concern among federal staff, state officials, veterinarians and health experts, 11 sources told Reuters.Since Donald Trump took office on 20 January, two federal agencies responsible for monitoring and responding to the epidemic have withheld bird flu reports and canceled congressional briefings and meetings with state health officials, the sources said. Continue reading...

Republican senator Lisa Murakowski introduces bill to require peak's name kept on US maps, laws and regulationsThe Alaska Republican US senator Lisa Murkowski has introduced legislation to officially rename North America's tallest mountain as Denali, a counter to Donald Trump's executive order to revert the peak's name to Mount McKinley.Murkowski's bill, which was co-sponsored by her fellow Republican senator for Alaska, Dan Sullivan, would require the peak to be referred to as Denali on any US maps, laws and regulations. Continue reading...

Jokes about the president's power grab at the Kennedy Center in Washington soon pale. This is a nakedly authoritarian moveDonald Trump's announcement that he was installing himself as the chair of the John F Kennedy Center, Washington DC's temple to the performing arts, might have been mistaken for something petty or trivial - another random, Pollock-esque splatter of the policy paintbrush against the canvas of the world. On his favoured social media site he posted an image, presumably AI-generated, of himself as a dinner-jacketed orchestral conductor - the macho maestro of the US. But this is more than personal: it is political, and points towards the president's wider project.To understand what is going on, it is necessary to consider Trump's favourite European authoritarian, Viktor Orban. Hungary's prime minister has chipped away at his country's constitution and judiciary. But a no less powerful tool has been his attention to parts of society often regarded as unimportant compared with a country's constitution. Alongside crushing independent media, Orban's government has co-opted the arts, appointing right-leaning directors to theatres, and instigating nationalist art exhibitions. Orban understands that culture creates the climate for emotion and memory, imprints national myths, and - often intangibly - acts on politics.Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian's chief culture writer Continue reading...

And despite having ample time to prepare for this moment, why do Europe and Britain's leaders seem so surprised?In the wake of Donald Trump's decision to instigate his Ukraine peace plan", it's great to hear from US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, that everything is on the table". Also: would President Putin like to keep the table? I get the feeling that Hegseth would be very willing to throw in the table, which is likely to be hewn by Saudi craftsmen. That's not a bone-saw euphemism: Trump says the putative peace talks could be hosted by the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. For now, the world had to settle for Hegseth popping into a Nato defence ministers meeting in Brussels to announce: Make no mistake, President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker." So this week offered an opportunity to watch Eisenhower quotes get Disneyfied by a defence secretary with a Crusades tattoo. Good times!Anyway: the peace plan. I expect this lesson is contained in Trump's seminal business text, The Art of the Deal, but one fairly reliable principle of negotiation is that if you say a number first, you end up negotiating down from it. If you get the other side to say a number first, you can negotiate up from that. For whatever reason, and supposedly before formal negotiations have even begun, Hegseth has already effectively surrendered most or all of the land taken by Russia since 2014, the possibility of Ukraine joining Nato, and the threat of any future European security being guaranteed by the US. I image Vladimir Putin will simply accept the terms by pointing at him and saying, You're hired!" Continue reading...

Organized labor could be Trump's kryptoniteCan anybody stop Trumpism? Progressives are understandably worried. Though federal judges may temporarily pause some of the new administration's most brazenly illegal executive orders, a hyper-conservative supreme court lies waiting in the wings. And looking ahead to 2028, it's hard to feel hopeful about defeating Maga given that the Democratic party continues to hemorrhage working-class voters.But there's no need to despair. A powerful force in our society has the legitimacy, resources and leverage to turn things around: organized labor. Unions can beat back Donald Trump's attacks, expose his sham populism, and - by uniting workers around their shared economic interests - help isolate his xenophobic scapegoating. Continue reading...

Judge challenges administration's dismantling of US foreign assistance and sets five-day deadline to prove complianceA federal judge has ordered Donald Trump's administration to temporarily lift a funding freeze that has shut down US humanitarian aid and development work around the world, and he has set a five-day deadline for the administration to prove it is complying.The judge's ruling late on Thursday cited the financial devastation that the near-overnight cutoff of payments has caused suppliers and non-profits that carry out much of US aid overseas. Continue reading...

Macron leads chorus of politicians demanding US adopt coordinated approach at security talks in Munich

Cameras are hidden in unmarked boxes on utility poles in a move residents and advocates call creepy' and corrosive'What appear to be cameras hidden in unmarked boxes have appeared on utility poles outside the Atlanta homes of some people connected to the movement against the police training center known as Cop City", raising constitutional concerns, the Guardian has learned.The development comes after several years of ongoing state surveillance of some Atlanta residents opposed to the $109m training center, including officers following people in patrol cars and blasting sirens outside bedroom windows at 3am. Continue reading...

European leaders to put pressure on US vice-president to involve them in talks over Ukraine's fate. Plus, Texas judge fines New York doctor for mailing abortion pillsGood morning.The US vice-president, JD Vance, is to meet the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and other European leaders in Munich, after widespread criticism of Donald Trump's statements on Ukraine.What's the reaction been in Ukraine? Anger and betrayal were common emotions among those the Guardian spoke to in Kyiv. Zelenskyy called the Putin-Trump call unpleasant" - but clearly cognizant of being unable to burn bridges, said the subsequent call he had with Trump was a very good conversation".How many hostages remain with Hamas? There are 76 people, though it is unclear how many are still alive. Continue reading...

The campaign against Claudine Gay, Harvard's first Black president, has become a blueprint increasingly wielded against women and scholars of colorJo Boaler, a professor of mathematics education at Stanford University, is not new to criticism of her work turning ugly. Boaler champions a reformist approach to teaching maths, arguing that strategies that emphasise reasoning over memorisation lead to more equitable outcomes. When she first moved to the US from Britain in the late 1990s, she was warned that her research would anger defenders of traditional methods. Backlash from some colleagues - including accusations of scientific misconduct" that the university dismissed - grew so personal that she briefly moved back to the UK.Back at Stanford two decades later, Boaler was tapped in 2019 by the California department of education with four other scholars to rewrite the state's mathematics pedagogical framework, a non-binding guide seeking to help educators improve outcomes for all students". Continue reading...

What happens when two comics artists meet on the page' to explore the tragedies of the Israel-Gaza war? Art Spiegelman, best known for his Pulitzer prize-winning Holocaust memoir Maus, and Joe Sacco, author of bestselling graphic reportage Palestine, grapple with the ongoing crisis Continue reading...

Homeland security chief Kristi Noem claims the US is shipping criminal alien murderers' to the Cuba naval base - but the immigrants' true stories remain enigmaticHandcuffed and shackled, the men appear in government propaganda photos being herded towards military cargo planes that will carry them to an uncertain future in an infamous land.These individuals are the worst of the worst that we have pulled off of our streets," Donald Trump's homeland security chief, Kristi Noem, thundered against the supposedly criminal alien murderers, rapists, child predators and gangsters" being packed off to Guantanamo Bay. Continue reading...

Trump's asylum offer to South Africa's white minority follows years of AfriForum lobbying on Elon Musk's behalfDonald Trump's offer of political asylum to South Africa's white minority, just days after blocking genuine refugees from travelling to the US, followed years of campaigning by an Afrikaner group that has promoted white genocide" conspiracy theories while also lobbying on behalf of Elon Musk's business interests.Last week, Trump issued an executive order that misrepresented a new South African law, the Expropriation Act, as a racist move to persecute white Afrikaners by seizing their farms without compensation. Continue reading...

We foresaw Kansas City getting to the Super Bowl but underestimated their superb opponents. One of us hit on the rise of a certain rookie though ...Congratulations to the 99% of NFL pundits and fans whose preseason predictions have long made their way through the garbage disposal. Unfortunately, the NFL writers for the Guardian have no such luck. Our villainous editors are forcing us to turn back the clock to early September to revisit our season predictions (you can read them in full here).While we'd love to take a victory lap and say we saw all the twists and turns coming, that's not exactly the case (though we did nail a few). So, let's rip off the Band-Aid and see how our prognostications panned out. Continue reading...

Big wall climber Sasha DiGiulian hopes to be remembered for establishing a new baseline for female climbers, including how they are recognized, treated and paidIn August 2013, Sasha DiGiulian traveled to the Dolomites to attempt Bellavista, a dream years in the making. After two weeks of working on the crux pitches, she climbed the entire route in a single push, becoming the first woman to climb a 5.14b big wall, breaking a major barrier in the sport.Then a sport climber, DiGiulian was incredibly strong on single-pitch routes, but unaccustomed to the complexity of big walls. I had climbed 5.14d, so I thought the 5.14b pitches wouldn't be so hard, but I learned how much the logistics, weather, and fatigue add up," she says. Continue reading...

Experts are split between concerns about future threats and present dangers. Both camps issued dire warningsI was a technophile in my early teenage days, sometimes wishing that I had been born in 2090, rather than 1990, so that I could see all the incredible technology of the future. Lately, though, I've become far more sceptical about whether the technology that we interact with most is really serving us - or whether we are serving it.So when I got an invitation to attend a conference on developing safe and ethical AI in the lead-up to the Paris AI summit, I was fully prepared to hear Maria Ressa, the Filipino journalist and 2021 Nobel peace prize laureate, talk about how big tech has, with impunity, allowed its networks to be flooded with disinformation, hate and manipulation in ways that have had very real, negative, impact on elections.Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist Continue reading...

A superpower that once built alliances across the west is dramatically reorienting itself - and so too must its former alliesWrapped in a flag and clutching a beer, Marc Fogel looked understandably overwhelmed. The 63-year-old teacher from Pennsylvania was safe at last, freed via prisoner exchange from the Russian jail where he served three and a half years for possessing the marijuana his family says he took for back pain. His homecoming this week was just the kind of heartwarming scene Donald Trump needs to show ordinary Americans that cosying up to Vladimir Putin's murderous regime could pay off, and the president himself said he hoped it marked the beginning of a relationship where we can end that war" in Ukraine.Or to put it another way, hours later his new defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, was in Brussels dictating the effective terms of Ukraine's surrender, over Ukrainian heads and on terms that a former head of MI6 has called a golden opportunity" for Putin to walk away. Continue reading...

China could pick up the slack' and increase its influence in the region after Doge funding freeze

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National monument commemorates 1969 riot led by trans women of color outside historic New York City barThe National Park Service eliminated all references to transgender people from its website for the Stonewall national monument on Thursday. The monument commemorates a 1969 riot outside New York City's historic Stonewall Inn, led by trans women of color, that ignited the contemporary gay rights movement.The move comes as federal agencies across the country seek to comply with an executive order Donald Trump signed on his first day in office, calling for the US government to define sex as only male or female. Continue reading...

Crowds, including undocumented people, take to streets in fierce show of resistance against immigration crackdownsCrowds of demonstrators including undocumented people took to the streets of downtown Manhattan on Thursday in a fierce show of resistance against Donald Trump's anti-immigration policies.The rally, which started at Foley Square and in front of the field office of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice), came amid the Trump administration's nationwide immigration crackdowns. Continue reading...

Office of personnel management orders agencies to dismiss workers who had not yet gained civil service protectionThe Trump administration on Thursday intensified its sweeping efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce, the country's largest employer, by ordering agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees who had not yet gained civil service protection - potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of workers.In addition, workers at some agencies were warned that large workplace cuts would be coming. Continue reading...

New York's governor, Kathy Hochul, has rejected a request from Louisiana to extradite a doctor who was charged there with prescribing abortion pills to a pregnant minor. 'I will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana,' Hochul said at a news conference in Manhattan. 'Not now, not ever' Continue reading...

Mayor says plan to re-establish Ice office under discussion despite New York law prohibiting such a moveIn a sign of increasing cooperation with Donald Trump's anti-immigration plans, the Republican administration's hardline so-called border tsar", Tom Homan, met with New York's Democratic mayor Eric Adams on Thursday as the White House pushes for more detaining and deporting of immigrants, especially those accused of crimes.The two resumed discussions on a controversial topic they had talked about in a previous meeting in December - re-establishing an office for the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) at the city's notorious Rikers Island jail. Continue reading...

AI chatbots have a tendency to exaggerate, but their verbose nature feels well-suited to the highly associative task of dream analysisSome say that talking about your dreams is boring, but personally I think otherworldly nocturnal escapades provide far richer fodder for small talk than the footy season or this unseasonal weather. Sadly, not everyone agrees. That's why, when I hear about an AI dream interpretation app, I'm seduced by the potential for a captive, preternaturally intelligent assistant to help me decipher the more baffling corners of my psyche.AI chatbots such as ChatGPT have a well-known tendency to riff and exaggerate with alarming confidence, but their verbose nature feels well-suited to the free form and highly associative task of dream analysis. Admittedly, trading little understood fragments of our slumbering minds to a tech startup in return for spiritual guidance sounds like the foreboding premise of a terrifying sci-fi horror movie. But the app's fine print promises that dreams are stored safely and privately". Who am I to let an intuitive aversion to welcoming the machine into the last private vestiges of my consciousness get in the way of a good story? Continue reading...

The US president does not care who controls east Ukraine, so long as he can access the rare earth minerals underneathIn Donald Trump's world, everything has its price.There is no place for sentiment in his politics. Common values cannot secure loans for military aid. And the US president does not care who controls the blood-soaked soils of east Ukraine, so long as he can access the rare earth minerals that lie beneath. Continue reading...

President's directive placed on hold after families and medical providers sue over access to gender-affirming careA federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked Donald Trump's recent executive order aimed at restricting gender-affirming healthcare for transgender people under age 19.The ruling was a victory for trans and non-binary youth and their families who filed a lawsuit after their healthcare was abruptly canceled due to the president's order. Trump's policy, one of a slew of anti-LGBTQ+ orders during his first month in office, dictated that federal funding should be revoked from hospitals and clinics that provide gender-affirming care to youth under the age of 19. Continue reading...

Senate voted on Thursday to confirm the controversial anti-vaccine campaigner's nomination as health secretary. After taking the oath, Kennedy said Trump had been sent to him by God and called him a 'pivotal historical figure'

The US president has repeatedly threatened to tax imports at the same rate those countries impose on US goodsDonald Trump has once again threatened to impose a wave of tariffs on US imports, stepping up his bid to overhaul the global economic order.On Thursday, the US president said he plans to introduce reciprocal" tariffs, ensuring the US imposes the same taxes on its imports from the rest of the world that American goods face in other countries. Continue reading...

We're all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things,' the US president saidDonald Trump said that he wants to restart nuclear arms control talks with Russia and China and that eventually he hopes all three countries could agree to cut their massive defense budgets in half.Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump lamented the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in rebuilding the nation's nuclear deterrent and said he hopes to gain commitments from the US adversaries to cut their own spending. Continue reading...

Danielle Sassoon, Republican who was interim US attorney in New York, leaves post in face of justice department orderThe top federal prosecutor in Manhattan resigned on Thursday rather than obey a justice department order to drop corruption charges against the New York City mayor, Eric Adams.The resignation of Danielle Sassoon, a Republican who was the interim US attorney for the southern district of New York, was confirmed by a spokesperson for the office. Continue reading...

President says US will impose reciprocal' duties but no new specific tariffs were announced

Vaccine skeptic now leads US's vast healthcare system after gaining backing of key Republican senators

Republican attorney general files suit claiming - without evidence - coffee chain's hiring policies cause higher pricesMissouri has sued Starbucks for discrimination because its workforce has become more female and less white".Filed on Tuesday by the state's Republican attorney general, the lawsuit accuses the coffee chain of engaging in systemic racial, sexual, and sexual orientation discrimination" through its diversity, equity and inclusion policies, including hiring quotas, advancement opportunities and board membership. Continue reading...

The Ukrainian president has said peace negotiations cannot be left to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin alone, after the two leaders had a phone conversation on the future of the war on Wednesday. He said it was 'unpleasant' that Trump had spoken to Russia before Ukraine

Ruling reinstates Hampton Dellinger to office of special counsel as president targets bureaucrats with mass layoffsA judge blocked Donald Trump's attempt to fire the head of a body that protects whistleblowers and investigates corruption.Late on Wednesday Judge Amy Berman Jackson reversed the White House order sacking Hampton Dellinger as head of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), and reinstated him in his post pending a court hearing set for 26 February. Continue reading...

Termination notices sent to Department of Education and CFPB as Musk pushes to delete entire agencies'

School district says expanded immigration enforcement diverts resources and causes decreased attendanceThe Denver public school system (DPS) on Wednesday became the first US school district to sue the Trump administration over its policy of allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents in schools.Colorado's largest public school district argues in the federal lawsuit that the policy has forced schools to divert vital educational resources and caused attendance to plummet. Continue reading...

We would like to hear from people who have been denied access to care as a patient with the UnitedHealthcare Medicare advantage planAn October 2024 investigation by the US Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations found that UnitedHealthcare had ramped up its denials of post-acute care coverage for seniors following strokes, falls and injuries.We would like to hear from you about your experience, or the experience of a loved one, of having been denied coverage or access to care at a nursing home facility as a patient with the UnitedHealthcare Medicare advantage plan. We are interested in hearing about the experiences of short- and long-term nursing home residents. You can share your story below. Continue reading...

The knockout stages are here, and there were plenty of storylines to digest. We hand out honours and dishonours from the latest round of actionFeyenoord Continue reading...

As the US and its European allies head to the Munich security conference, Europe must learn from its tragic history and oppose appeasementDonald Trump's appeasement of Vladimir Putin makes Neville Chamberlain look like a principled, courageous realist. At least Chamberlain was trying to prevent a major European war, whereas Trump is acting in the middle of one. Trump's Munich" (synonymous in English with the 1938 deal in which Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany) comes on the eve of the big security conference in today's Bavarian capital, where his emissaries will meet western allies. That Munich security conference must be the beginning of a decisive European response, learning from our own tragic history in order to avoid repeating it.The next step Trump proposes is in effect a new Yalta" (referring to the February 1945 US-Soviet-UK summit in the Crimean resort of Yalta, which has become synonymous with superpowers deciding the fate of European countries over their heads). In this case, his proposal is that the US and Russia should decide the fate of Ukraine with marginal if any involvement of Ukraine or other European countries. But this time the occupants of the White House and the Kremlin should meet first in Saudi Arabia, then in their respective capitals, while it seems the actual Yalta, in the Crimea, is to be ceded to Russia. For in the brave new world of Trump and Putin, might is right and territorial expansion is what great powers do, be it Russia to Ukraine, the US to Canada and Greenland - or China to Taiwan.Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Social media driving demand for US products containing banned additives linked to cancer and behaviour issuesIllegal imported sweets that contain banned additives linked to cancer and behavioural problems are flooding UK high streets", councils have said.The warning first came from the Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI), which said that demand for American confectionery was being driven by influencers on social media platforms. Continue reading...

There's no sign of the mass protests of his first term - but Democrats are building a less flashy politics of oppositionIn January 2017, the day after Donald Trump was first inaugurated as US president, hundreds of thousands of protesters descended on Washington for a Women's March" that was actually a broader-based vessel for popular rage. Not that the atmosphere was uniformly angry: I covered the march for a US radio network and found pockets of joy among the crowd. It's really exciting," a teenager from New York told me. It's democracy in action."The march, and parallel events around the country, was emblematic of what came to be known as the #Resistance, a loud liberal movement in opposition to Trump that took the form not only of mass protests, but court fights, adversarial media coverage (and increased consumption thereof) and grassroots organising. The movement made cult figures (not to mention merchandise) of figures seen as standing up for institutions, from the Trump-probing special counsel Robert Mueller to the supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR's newsletter The Media Today Continue reading...

On top of the human cost, the US's soft power and influence is disappearing. Russia and China will fill the voidAmid the daily troubling news coming from the United States are the ongoing and increasingly damaging efforts by President Donald Trump, supported by secretary of state Marco Rubio and Elon Musk, to shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAid). Musk has called it a criminal organization" and said that it was time for it to die". The agency website is down, so little official information is available. But in the week since funding to the agency was frozen, and the majority of staff placed on leave, thousands of public health and development programmes worldwide have been thrown into turmoil, and now face an uncertain future.USAid is the main federal agency that works to provide foreign aid assistance to the poorest countries and people in the world. On Friday, a US judge prevented around 2,000 USAid employees from being placed on leave, and ordered the reinstatement of about 500 more. But Trump and Musk appear to want to move forward with a plan that would see its global workforce reduced from about 10,000 staff and contractors, to just over 600.Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh