Turkish student Rumeysa Ozturk was seized in Massachusetts by plainclothes agents and spirited to Louisiana detention centerA Turkish PhD student and former Fulbright scholar detained after co-authoring a campus newspaper op-ed about Gaza has been denied bond by an immigration judge, as her legal team continues to urgently petition a federal court in Vermont for her release.Rumeysa Ozturk, who had been studying at Tufts University, was seized by plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents on 25 March near her home in Massachusetts and shuttled through three states before landing in a Louisiana detention facility - all without being charged with any crime. Continue reading...

Elected leaders from across Europe should join us on the streets. It is critical to democracy - in Hungary, and the EU as a wholeHungary's parliament has given Viktor Orban the tools to do what he has long threatened: ban Pride, silence dissent and strip political critics of their citizenship. A constitutional amendment passed on 14 April allows the government to label LGBTQ+ gatherings a threat to children and to revoke the citizenship of dual nationals deemed a risk to national sovereignty".This is a purge disguised as law - another step in Orban's dismantling of democracy, where the constitution is degraded to a propaganda instrument. He calls it a spring clean-up" to root out bugs", targeting LGBTQ+ people, journalists, critics, civil society and now, dual nationals. As one myself, I could be among the targets.Katalin Cseh is a member of the Hungarian national assembly for the Momentum Movement and a former MEPDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

Democrats press Trump administration to follow supreme court order to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia

Probably illegal move against US's richest university is latest in Trump's attack on independence of higher education

Jennifer Vasquez Sura criticizes DHS's attempt to smear her wrongly deported husband over 2021 civil protective order

Live, rolling coverage of business, economics and financial markets as ECB reduces main interest rate from 2.5% to 2.25%, the seventh cut in a year

Arteta's side delivered a performance for the ages to knock out Real Madrid, while PSG held firm at Villa Park and Inter outlasted Bayern to set up a semi-final of contrastsArsenal Continue reading...

Actions by state department to terminate students' legal status place them at risk of deportation and detention

The son of Coach Prime has the production, pedigree and poise to lead a franchise. But he challenges the prototype of what an NFL quarterback is supposed to look and act likeNFL scouting is broken, and Shedeur Sanders is the proof. Everything about him screams future star quarterback, and yet teams would sooner assume the worst.Make no mistake: there is no prospect in this year's draft who is better equipped to turn around a struggling franchise than the 23-year-old Texan, a savior to not one but two college fanbases. The last four years saw him restore the proud football tradition at Jackson State and put Colorado back on the college football map. Sanders did this despite skeptics casting doubt on his ability to make the jump up from competing against small historically Black schools to playing against major college powers in the Pac 12 and Big 12 conferences. Last year he led a 9-4 turnaround at Colorado, the school's first winning season in seven years, while snapping a four-year drought of postseason bowl appearances. Continue reading...

The supreme court judgment is contradictory and confused. And there seems no prospect of the Labour government sorting this out

Too often, healthcare ignores our pain and fails to value our lives. But communities are banding together to meet our needsMaternal deaths have recently dropped in the US - that is, unless you're Black.Black women continue to face the highest rates of maternal mortality in our country. To be Black, pregnant and hopeful in the US is to hold on to life with a fierce and unyielding grip against devastating odds.Venice Haynes is a social and behavioral scientist with more than 17 years of public health experience. She is the senior director of research and community engagement for United States of Care Continue reading...

Dayton will host the alliance's parliamentary assembly 30 years after the Bosnian peace accords were signed thereWhen hundreds of Nato delegates and thousands of ancillaries, protesters and security forces descend on Dayton, Ohio, next month, the visitors will see a town that's clawed its way back from the brink.White flight in the late 20th century and the 2008 Great Recession saw thousands of jobs and residents leave. More recently, the pandemic forced many downtown businesses to allow staffers to work from home, erasing a key daytime customer base for cafes and restaurants. Continue reading...

The killings of paramedics and rescuers last month led to international outcry. Plus, police use stun guns on two people at Marjorie Taylor Greene event

These are just the US executioners we know. But they are a chilling indication of the executioners we don't knowBeing an executioner is not the sort of job that gets posted in a local wanted ad. Kids don't dream about being an executioner when they grow up, and people don't go to school for it. So how does one become a death row executioner in the US, and who are the people doing it?This was the question I couldn't help but ask when I began a book project on lethal injection back in 2018. I'm a death penalty researcher, and I was trying to figure out why states are so breathtakingly bad at a procedure that we use on cats and dogs every day. Part of the riddle was who is performing these executions. Continue reading...

Why are a quarter of a million people set to descend on Green Bay? I went to Wisconsin to find out ...I've just got back from a road trip in Wisconsin. The upper Midwest is not an obvious destination for a spring break, certainly not in early April. As my plane circled above Milwaukee, the brown and leafless landscape warned me I'd travelled back in time to midwinter.It was too cold to brave the beaches - the Lake Michigan shore was covered in snow and ice - but the bars at least were convivial. This is often the case in Wisconsin, the state with the highest alcohol consumption per capita. Many of my fellow drinkers were keen to point out that they were responsible for nearly all the brandy sold in the US (as a collective, not individually). Continue reading...

The administration dared China, Harvard and the supreme court to blink. They haven'tIt was bound to happen.Encouraged by the ease with which many big US institutions caved in to their demands, the Trump regime - that is, the small cadre of bottom-feeding fanatics around Donald Trump (JD Vance, Elon Musk, Russell Vought, Stephen Miller and RFK Jr) along with the child king himself - have overreached.Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com Continue reading...

Born in boxing's golden age and still swinging today, the BWAA has spent a century preserving the stories, sounds and spirits of the sportWhen the Boxing Writers Association of American holds its annual awards dinner in New York on 30 April, it will mark the organization's 100th dinner and the start of its 100th year of existence.The Boxing Writers Association of Greater New York (as the BWAA was originally known) was founded by Damon Runyan, Paul Gallico, Ed Sullivan, Nat Fleischer, Edward J Neil and Wilbur Wood with the stated mission of improving conditions at boxing events for New York writers and their visiting colleagues. Continue reading...

My book about disabled women grew in relevance as I wrote it, exposing the heartlessness of proposed harsh benefit cutsWhen I began to write a book four years ago about life for disabled women in Britain, I didn't bank on it being particularly topical. Stuck in bed with chronic fatigue and pain in my early 30s, I wanted to write something that would connect with other women navigating pillboxes and heat pads alongside careers and relationships. And so I decided to interview more than 70 women and non-binary people with physical and mental health conditions - from famous actors to legal experts, musicians to psychologists. The result was a vast and varied catalogue of disabled life: from stories about workplace microaggressions and good and bad dates on the apps, to finding freedom (and judgment) using mobility aids.What I didn't anticipate was that as the months went on, and my word count went up, the disabled cohort I was writing about would grow to include more and more women - many of them even younger than me. Continue reading...

Not only are TV-watching, book-reading, show-going, music-listening travellers declining to visit the US, we have started to cease to imagine itThis week, fresh data revealed the United States has seen its biggest drop in Australian tourists since Covid. It's hardly surprising. Innocent people are being snatched by authorities from American streets. Citizens of foreign countries are being stopped, shackled and detained. The EU is now sending its emissaries with burner phones, lest personal social media posts critical of President Trump be discovered by border agents and ... who knows what happens next? Forcible relocation to a Salvadorian supermax prison, seemingly without chance of release, is suddenly not out of the question.It all seems like something from Hollywood dystopia; the V series, maybe. Or Escape from New York. It's pretty much the plot line of the first season of Andor - which I strongly recommend that everyone watch before the Trump regime clocks what that show is advising and it vanishes faster than a copy of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl from an American high school library. Continue reading...

I'm not saying Britain should refuse every sort of free trade agreement with the US, but there may be options that better suit Labour's purposeIt's a deal. The words sound good. Most human beings are primed to think of a deal as desirable in itself. It isn't hard to see why. Agreement is generally better than disagreement. In most aspects of life, shaking hands under shared rules makes sense. So it takes a bit of effort to think more objectively. But it is important to do that now, especially in the case of the proposed UK trade deal with the United States.Even before Donald Trump became president again, and long before the US started its current tariff wars, there were already plenty of reasons for caution about what a free trade deal with the US might look like. In the wake of Brexit, these concerns centred on whether a deal could be struck - and sold at home - on bilateral trade issues such as pharmaceuticals, food products and digital regulation, on all of which very different standards and assumptions have long applied on the two sides of the Atlantic.Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Grant Shapps also compares calling Sumy strike a mistake' to statements by IRA terror group when it killed civiliansPronouncing himself disgusted" by Donald Trump's favorable attitude to Russia and Vladimir Putin, the former UK defence minister Grant Shapps said the US president calling a Russian missile strike that killed dozens in Ukraine last weekend a mistake" was an example of weasel language we used to hear ... from the IRA" terrorist group.All anybody needs Putin to do is get the hell out of a democratic neighboring country," Shapps told the One Decision podcast, regarding attempts to end the war in Ukraine that has raged since Russia invaded in February 2022. Continue reading...

This blog has now closed. You can read our latest story hereUS attorney general Pam Bondi on Wednesday unveiled legal action against Maine, in an escalation of Donald Trump's conflict with the state for refusing to ban transgender athletes from participating in women's and girls' sports.Reuters reports that the lawsuit comes five days after the administration tried to cut off all of Maine's federal funding for public schools and its school lunch program over the issue, following a 21 February meeting of Trump and a group of US governors where he clashed with Maine's Democratic governor, Janet Mills.Nothing in Title IX or its implementing regulations prohibits schools from allowing transgender girls and women to participate on girls' and women's sports teams. Your letters to date do not cite a single case that so holds.It was a compelling meeting. And toward the end, we actually came up with - I'm going to say finally,' but I don't mean it in the way that we were waiting, I mean it in the way that it took a while for us to get to this place - what Putin's request is to get, to have a permanent peace here. Continue reading...

Democrat Chris Van Hollen says El Salvador refused his request to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia; judge finds probable cause to hold Trump officials in contempt - key US politics stories from Wednesday 16 April at a glanceA Democratic senator who says El Salvador's government refused to allow him to visit his constituent wrongly deported to the country has condemned an unjust situation". Chris Van Hollen said its vice-president told him it would not be possible for him to speak with Kilmar Abrego Garcia in person or on the phoneThe senator's visit came as Democrats have seized on the deportation and the Trump administration's refusal to take any steps to return him, in apparent defiance of the supreme court, to argue that the president is plunging the US into a constitutional crisis. Continue reading...

A small Michigan community banded together to help a beloved local bookstore move its stock to a new storefrontResidents of all ages in a small Michigan community formed a human chain and helped a local bookshop move each of its 9,100 books - one by one - to a new storefront about a block away.The book brigade" of about 300 people stood in two lines running along a sidewalk in downtown Chelsea on Sunday, passing each title from Serendipity Books' former location directly to the correct shelves in the new building, down the block and around the corner on Main Street. Continue reading...

The US president has upset global norms in the space of weeks, spurring a flurry of defence spending, diplomatic overtures and offers to boost tradeDonald Trump's return to the White House has stoked fears over Washington's commitment to the security of its allies in the Asia Pacific at a time when tensions are running high in the region, home to several potential flashpoints.Countries across the region are urgently considering their options in a new era where the US president has sided with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, suggested cleaning out" Gaza in order to redevelop it, and unleashed punishing tariffs on allies and enemies alike. Continue reading...

Vera, an independent organization, says Musk's team demanded meeting as administration expands targetsStaff at Elon Musk's so-called department of government efficiency" (Doge) demanded to meet with an independent non-profit to discuss embedding a team within their organization, according to the non-profit, stating that refusal to take the meeting would mean a violation of Donald Trump's executive order empowering Doge.Doge staff member Nate Cavanaugh emailed the Vera Institute of Justice, a criminal justice reform non-profit that is independent from the government, on 11 April to demand the meeting, according to a copy of the email. Vera's staff was confused by the request, as its government funding had been canceled a week prior, but agreed to a call which they said took place on Tuesday. Continue reading...

Known for roles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gossip Girl, the actor was found dead in FebruaryMichelle Trachtenberg, a popular TV actor, died of complications from diabetes, according to the New York City medical examiner's office.Trachtenberg, 39, was found dead in February and had recently received a liver transplant, according to NBC News, but the cause of her death had been unclear at the time. Continue reading...

Value of Nvidia dropped by billions on Wednesday after president imposed new restrictions on the chip giantThe US Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, warned Donald Trump's tariffs were generating a challenging scenario" for the central bank and were likely to worsen inflation.Powell's comments on Wednesday came US stock markets had already been rattled by a new trade restriction on the chip designer Nvidia. The sell-off picked up as Powell spoke to The Economic Club of Chicago. Continue reading...

Indiana University leads the push for a pact among 18 institutions as Donald Trump targets diversity

Governor says import tariffs are wreaking chaos' on the state's families, businesses and economyCalifornia is preparing to ask a court to block Donald Trump's illegal" tariffs, accusing the president of overstepping his authority and causing immediate and irreparable harm" to the world's fifth-largest economy.The lawsuit, to be filed in federal court on Wednesday by California's governor, Gavin Newsom, and attorney general, Rob Bonta, is the most significant challenge yet to Trump's flurry of on-again-off-again tariffs. Continue reading...

Chris Van Hollen condemns unjust situation' and says vice-president blocked access to wrongly deported man

Parents can do inskolning as part of their 480 days of paid leave per child - as an American abroad, this was a foreign concept. But here's what the US could learnAbout a month ago, I sat on a tiny wooden chair, hand-embroidering a thick cotton pillowcase in dim candlelight. Eight Swedish children softly sang a good morning song over tiny cups of peach-colored herbal tea.This is not a tale of a tradwife textile artist living off the grid in the Swedish countryside or the opening of some eerie Midsommar-style folk horror scene. It was the first day of my three-year-old's inskolning, the introductory period to her new daycare/preschool. Continue reading...

Judge also warned he could name independent prosecutor if White House stonewalled contempt proceedings

Cody Balmer faces terror and arson charges after fire and 911 call voicing pro-Palestinian viewsThe man charged with setting fire to the Pennsylvania governor's mansion called emergency responders after the attack and made comments signaling support for Palestinians, the New York Times reports.According to a search warrant in the case, 38-year-old Cody Balmer identified himself by name in a 911 call and said that Pennsylvania's governor, Josh Shapiro, needs to know that he will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people'". Continue reading...

State department's R/Fimi hub closed after rightwing critics alleged it censored conservative American speechThe Trump administration is shuttering the state department's last remaining bastion to monitor foreign disinformation campaigns.Known as the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/Fimi) hub, the closure represents a huge victory for rightwing critics who had alleged that the office, despite only looking at foreign state-level disinformation attacks on other countries, was involved in censoring American conservative speech. It comes as part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to dismantle what it describes as government overreach in monitoring speech. Continue reading...

Illegal deportation of Maryland man has become a flashpoint as Trump tests limits of his executive powerThe ongoing legal saga of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, has become a flashpoint as Donald Trump tests the limits of his executive power and continues with his plans for mass deportations.On Tuesday, a federal judge sharply rebuked the Trump administration for taking no steps to secure Abrego Garcia's release despite a supreme court order last week ordering the administration to facilitate his return to the US. Continue reading...

Xiaofeng Wang was fired by Indiana University on the same day as an FBI raid - but he hasn't been charged with anythingWhen FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents descended recently on two homes owned by Xiaofeng Wang, a Chinese national and cybersecurity professor at Indiana University, many in the idyllic college town of Bloomington were shocked.In December, Wang had been questioned by his employers about allegedly receiving undisclosed funding from China on a project that also received US federal research grants. On the same day of the home raids, Wang was fired from his longstanding post at Indiana University over email - a move that goes against the university's own policy. Continue reading...

Heist took place at Love Jewels in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday after thieves bore through levels of concreteBurglars tunneled through a concrete wall to gain access to a Los Angeles jewelry store, making off with at least $10m worth of watches, pendants, gold chains and other merchandise, police said.The heist happened around 9.30pm on Sunday at Love Jewels on Broadway in the heart of downtown, according to officer David Cuellar with the LA police department. Continue reading...

I've loved watching people perk up as the weather improves. It lifts the heart as much as any spring flowerI've always thought seasonal affective disorder, what with its convenient acronym and all, to be a load of tosh. But that's because I don't live with Sad. It's shamefully easy to dismiss something when you don't feel it in your own bones. Sad, me? No, I can be grumpy whatever the weather. Also, just as without despair there is no joy, the staggering beauty of a blue sky over the British Isles would be less staggeringly beautiful if it was always there. Blue skies all year round? Nah, not for me.In fact, I find dismal winter weather somewhat liberating. When the weather's good, the opportunities it presents are overwhelming. A paralysis of choice takes hold. So many places to go and things to do with the sun on your back. That urgent need to be out there. Every sunny day leaves me with this feeling that I haven't quite made the most of it. And much as I love my job, being in an office or a studio, I love it a little bit less when the sun is shining outside. In a way, life is more straightforward when it's grey, windy and wet, as then I can forgive myself for staying at home and being still and calm, essentially doing bugger all for a bit without feeling bad about it.Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Justice department lawsuit escalates a battle over Title IX as Maine vows to fight federal funding cuts in courtThe Trump administration sued Maine on Wednesday for allowing transgender girls to compete in school sports, dramatically escalating a confrontation that has already seen threats to cut the state's education and school lunch funding.The attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced the lawsuit flanked by Riley Gaines, the former collegiate swimmer turned conservative commentator who has become the public face in opposition to transgender athletes. Continue reading...

UK schools are coming under pressure to remove titles from their shelves. It's not coming from the place you might thinkFor all its talk of free speech, the Trump administration seems remarkably comfortable with censorship. Earlier this year, children studying at Pentagon schools (serving US military families) were prevented from accessing libraries for a week while officials reviewed their shelves for titles that might be related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics". Trump's presidency has injected new energy into the book-banning movement that has been simmering for years on the US right. You might think that censoring school libraries would be totally unimaginable in Britain. You'd be wrong.I worked as a librarian for 10 years, and now I teach on the library and information studies master's programme at UCL. After the pandemic, I began noticing signs of an eerily similar trend. It erupted in the spring of 2022, when a Catholic school in Croydon invited Simon James Green, a prominent gay children's author, to give a talk. The US anti-LGBT website Catholic Truth ran a campaign encouraging readers to contact the school and protest against the event (one reader said, somewhat implausibly, that Green's visit to the school was 100% as much of an issue as the ongoing war in Ukraine"). The commission responsible for the school released a statement suggesting the event should be cancelled, teachers went on strike, and the story reached the national press.Alison Hicks is a lecturer in library and information studies at UCL Continue reading...

The dangers young people face online are all too clear. But the solution is pragmatism, not prohibitionThe latest hit Netflix show has surpassed 100m views and cracked the top five of the platform's all-time biggest English-language series - without CGI monsters, ornate gowns or Jenna Ortega. Instead, Adolescence is a four-episode limited series about a 13-year-old British boy accused of stabbing his female classmate to death. And as the story unfolds, the pernicious influence of cyberbullying and social media radicalization on the main character comes into focus.The show has sparked conversations about the much-discussed male loneliness epidemic and the pervasive influence of hypermasculine online personalities. It has set off public debate from India to Australia to the United States about how we raise boys in an era when social media increasingly serves as an endless trough of misogynist messaging. In the UK, where the series became the first streaming show to top the country's TV ratings, it has stirred intense conversations on news panels and in parliament. Even the prime minister jumped into the fray after watching the show with his teenage children.In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.orgKatrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and she has contributed to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times Continue reading...

Carl Cowling says there is no logic' in why there would be inflation as east Asian suppliers seek alternatives to the USDonald Trump's tariff war is more likely to lead to price cuts than inflation for many retailers in the UK, according to the boss of WH Smith, as east Asian suppliers seek alternatives to the US.Many economists including those at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have suggested that increased barriers to trade could fuel inflationary pressures across the globe. Continue reading...

Police used a stun gun on two people and made three arrests as Maga representative was repeatedly interrupted

Chinese restrictions could affect more than a dozen defence and aerospace firms and give Beijing crucial advantage'America's advanced weapons manufacturers are likely to face a critical shortfall of key rare-earth minerals that they import from China as a consequence of Donald Trump's escalating trade war with Beijing.New export licensing restrictions imposed by China on seven rare earths are like to cause disruptions in supply to more than a dozen US defence and aerospace companies involved in the production of everything from fighter jets to submarines and drones, the Center for Strategic and International Studies said in a commentary. Continue reading...

A number of arrests were made and at least one protester was Tasered by police after interrupting the Georgia representative as she addressed a crowd of supporters. The meeting, held in Acworth, was attended by about 150 people, some of whom cheered as demonstrators were escorted and wrestled to the ground by police officers. Acworth police sergeant Eric Mistretta said he believed officers had responded with appropriate force to people who yelled at the far-right congresswoman and resisted removal Continue reading...

Move comes in preparation for removal of materials that promote DEI, gender ideology and critical race theory

Donald Trump's budget could gut Medicaid, cut food assistance for millions and lead to 40,000 kids losing childcareWomen and children are under threat in America.Jocelyn Smith of Roswell, New Mexico, knows this too well. I'm disabled, taking care of my disabled daughter. I work, and I volunteer to help feed and house my community," she told me. Yet I need assistance affording meals for my family. Something is broken."Karen Dolan is a federal safety net expert and a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Continue reading...

Pop the Balloon or Find Love is a YouTube sensation - but in a mainstream form, it's terrible. Why does this keep happening?If you threw Blind Date, the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan and the auction block into a blender, what you'd get is Pop the Balloon or Find Love, a weekly hour-long Black dating show on YouTube.The show was created by Arlette Amuli, an African American of Congolese origins, and her husband, Bolia BM" Matundu, a Black Brit also of Congolese descent (he had a previous life as a UK rapper and then as a Ndombolo musician). It has become an international sensation in an age where our fried attention spans have us addicted to short videos. The format is minimalist to the point of brilliance: each week, a line of eight or so balloon-clutching love hunters line up to court and be courted by a singleton of the opposite sex they have never met before.Nels Abbey is an author, broadcaster and the founder of Uppity: the Intellectual PlaygroundDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...