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Advice columnist’s lawyer says in closing arguments jurors can believe 10 witnesses or ex-president who declined to testifyDonald Trump is a habitual liar and sexual abuser who destroyed E Jean Carroll’s reputation in order to protect his own after she accused him of rape, a New York jury heard on Monday.In closing arguments in Carroll’s civil lawsuit against Trump for sexual battery and defamation, the advice columnist’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, told jurors they could believe the evidence of 10 witnesses for her client or the former president who declined to testify. Continue reading...

On Europe Day, we say great strides have been made towards a new relationship. We all want a strong EU and a strong UK

Korean American family and security guard also among those killed in Saturday attack near DallasDetails are emerging about those who were killed in a mass shooting at a shopping center in Allen, Texas, near Dallas, on Saturday afternoon. Nine people were killed, including the gunman, and at least seven others were injured.Authorities have yet to provide details about the exact series of events and publicly release the identities of the victims, but families, friends and organizations have released some information. Those killed include an engineer from India, a security guard, a Korean American family and two young children. Here is what we know so far: Continue reading...

Police in Brownsville, Texas named George Alvarez, 34, a resident of the city on the US-Mexico border, as a suspect in the incident on Sunday morning in which a car ploughed into a group of people waiting at a bus stop outside a migrant shelter. They put up his mugshot and an image of what they described as an extensive rap sheet – details of a long criminal history including assault and burglary. Alvarez was arraigned in court on Monday on eight counts of manslaughter and 10 counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He is being detained on bail of $3.6m

Statement issued by attorneys for Daniel Penny was ‘a character assassination’, Neely’s family saysThe family of Jordan Neely, the Black man who died on a New York subway train after being placed in a chokehold by another passenger, criticised the rider for offering neither “an apology nor an expression of regret” in a statement released through lawyers.The statement issued by attorneys for Daniel Penny, a white 24-year-old former US marine from Long Island, was “a character assassination and a clear example of why he believed he was entitled to take Jordan’s life”, the Neely family said in their own press release on Monday. Continue reading...

First-of-its-kind committee gives final approval to long list of proposals including cash to descendants of enslaved peopleA California taskforce on reparations voted this weekend to approve recommendations on how the state may compensate and apologize to Black residents for generations of harm caused by discriminatory policies.The committee, the first of its kind in the United States, gave final approval to a hefty list of proposals, including cash payments to descendants of enslaved people. Continue reading...

Airlines would have to offer cash compensation and accommodation vouchers for cancellations and delaysAhead of what promises to be a busy summer for the travel industry, the US Department of Transportation is proposing new rules that would require airlines to compensate passengers for cancellations and disruptions caused by the airlines.Airlines for now are required to issue refunds to passengers if flights are canceled or significantly delayed due to factors within an airline’s control, including staffing shortages and maintenance issues. But the proposed rules, if approved, would require airlines to offer cash compensation and accommodation vouchers in addition to those refunds. Continue reading...

Witnesses says a driver yelled slurs towards those outside the shelter after driving into a group of people, killing eightNeighbors held a small vigil Sunday night on a dirt path along a busy road in Brownsville, at the eastern end of the US-Mexico border, where eight people were killed and 10 were injured at a bus stop that morning.A small display of flowers and a row of candles grew as shaken people visited the dimly lit curb where the appalling crash occurred. Continue reading...

Both families, fictional and real, give off the same sad vibe. In the game of succession, the winners end up bored and overwhelmed by their wealth while the losers are lit up by an inferno of injusticePoor King Charles. And yet, on the other hand, daft King Charles: he’s served a 50-year apprenticeship for this gig. You’d think he’d have learned, sometime between the invention of the moving image and now, that when all eyes are upon you, if you tell your wife you’re bored, people are going to notice. “But I’m in my gold coach!” he must have thought. “In my gold coach, no one can hear me whinge.” And so, fatefully, he said to his queen: “This is boring.”He spoke for the nation. There was his grandson, yawning his damn head off outside Westminster Abbey. There was his wife, on the balcony for the historic wave, unable to really focus on the crowds in front of her because she was too busy shepherding her swarm of ceremonial minions, probably more grandchildren, plainly too bored to remember where they were supposed to stand. People in the crowd – and these, you had to assume, were the most fervent royalists the nation could produce – did not seem that wild. A small group of protesters on their way out of Trafalgar Square seemed more exercised about the arrests that had been made earlier in the day than they were about the monarchy itself. I agreed with them; the anti-protest bill probably is more consequential than the existence of a working royal family, but still.Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

In conservative towns like Allen, where a shooter killed eight people Saturday, guns are handed down from generation to generationFour years ago, the city council governing Allen, Texas, was asked to approve construction of a large gun range in the town. Only one member of the council, Lauren Doherty, voted against it.Doherty said that vote cost her seat on the municipal body when she ran for re-election two years later. Continue reading...

Ashok Kolla, with the Telugu Association of North America, had the grim task of calling relatives thousands of miles awayAshok Kolla walked past the news cameras at the Allen Premium Outlets on Sunday, phone to his ear, trying to find the woman from Hyderabad who was unaccounted for after the deadly mass shooting at the mall a day earlier.“Can you tell me which hospital she is at?” Kolla said into the phone. Continue reading...

Senator ‘should advocate for gun controls rather than invoking prayer after mass shootings’. Plus, King Charles’s ‘moans’

Former president, who has declined to testify, denies rape of advice columnist in Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1996The jury in E Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuit accusing Donald Trump of rape and defamation is to hear closing arguments in New York on Monday.The three women and six men who have listened to seven days of testimony, including three by Carroll herself, will then retire to consider whether they believe the advice columnist’s account of the alleged sexual assault in a New York department store dressing room in 1996. Continue reading...

Government leaders are advancing hardline policies to keep migrants out as pandemic-era Title 42 restrictions are expected to liftThe right to seek asylum in the United States is in the balance as migrants fleeing violence and instability at home anxiously await a chance at safety – amid a major policy shift at the US’s southern border.The Title 42 public health order – which has allowed officials to quickly expel migrants without giving them access to asylum for years now – is expected to finally end on 11 May. What does this mean for the US’s historic commitment as a beacon for freedom from persecution?Alexandra Villarreal is a policy and advocacy associate at the National Immigration Forum. Continue reading...

Drivers call for federal action to address what they say are decreasing pay and rampant fraudUS truck drivers are pushing for federal action to address what they say are deteriorating working conditions, decreasing pay and rampant fraud.Caleb Fernandez, a long-distance truck driver since 2017, said he often spends hours waiting to load or unload his truck’s cargo without getting paid for the time. It can be drawn out to several hours, which will often disrupt his entire schedule for the week and he doesn’t receive any compensation for those hours. Continue reading...

The small, agricultural town of Planada was inundated amid a wave of intense storms this winter. Residents, many of whom are undocumented, say they have been neglectedNearly four months after the waters washed through Planada, most of Samuel Gomez’s one-bedroom house has been stripped back to the studs. He was still sleeping in a small room at the back of the house – the only one that hadn’t been completely wrecked.“Yeah, I’ll get sick from all this,” said Gomez, 80, gesturing at the mould-marred corners and sludge-soaked floorboards. “But where do I go?” Continue reading...

Years ago, Putin lifted much of the censorship that haunted the Soviet Union. Now it’s back with a vengeance, and Russia’s artists are fleeingAs much as Russia is the country of Tolstoy and Rachmaninov, it is also the country of Stalin and the Lubyanka prison – a nation built as much on beauty as it is on the blood of its people. Russians cherish their cultural history just as strongly as people cherish ours in Britain. And yet historically, to be creative in Russia is to incur a significant risk, for an act of creation is also an act of freedom.In the years of the Soviet Union, speaking one’s mind might mean being taken to a windowless room and then to Siberia. Today, Russians can – and do – face the same kind of danger for speaking out against Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. In the words of Pyotr Stolypin: “In Russia, every 10 years everything changes, and nothing changes in 200 years.”William Fear is a writer based in London Continue reading...

Federal prosecutors’ investigation into possible crimes involving taxes and gun purchase appears near completionThe White House is bracing for political fallout from a looming decision by federal prosecutors over whether to charge Joe Biden’s son Hunter with tax crimes and lying about his drug use when he bought a handgun.In a signal that the investigation is nearing completion, Hunter’s lawyers last month held a meeting with David Weiss, the top federal prosecutor in Delaware, at the justice department in Washington, the Washington Post said. A separate report by CNN noted that Hunter’s longtime lawyer Chris Clark was among those entering the department headquarters. Continue reading...

Abdullah al-Derazi and Youssef al-Manasif have appealed to secretary of state Antony Blinken as their cases are being reviewedTwo Saudis who were arrested and allegedly tortured for crimes they were accused of committing as minors are facing an imminent threat of execution, in what human rights experts say is a sign of the kingdom’s violation of its own promise to end death penalty cases against child defendants.In a letter to US secretary of state Antony Blinken, a family member of one defendant, Abdullah al-Derazi, describes how Abdullah was swept off the street and disappeared for three months in August 2014 for protest crimes he is alleged to have committed when he was 17 years old. Continue reading...

Authorities are stumped after seven cows are mutilated in three counties within weeksTheir tongues were cut off, but there was no spilled blood. No signs of struggle. No footprints or tire tracks were found. Investigators were stumped: who is going on a murderous rampage of cows in Texas, and how are there no clues surrounding their deaths?It seemed a scene straight out of The Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch, the reality TV show on the History Channel about the Utah ranch that is supposedly the site of unexplained supernatural phenomena. Continue reading...

Tech CEOs want us to believe that generative AI will benefit humanity. They are kidding themselvesInside the many debates swirling around the rapid rollout of so-called artificial intelligence, there is a relatively obscure skirmish focused on the choice of the word “hallucinate”.This is the term that architects and boosters of generative AI have settled on to characterize responses served up by chatbots that are wholly manufactured, or flat-out wrong. Like, for instance, when you ask a bot for a definition of something that doesn’t exist and it, rather convincingly, gives you one, complete with made-up footnotes. “No one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problems,” Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, told an interviewer recently.Naomi Klein is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer. She is the bestselling author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine and Professor of Climate Justice and Co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia Continue reading...

There is no other mainstream sport where carnage and indifference occur so regularly – and are as toleratedI was 18 when I first saw a racehorse break down. It was the late 1990s and I was an exercise rider galloping horses at Del Mar racetrack, the Pacific Ocean glistening in the distance. Seared into my memory is the image of a petite dark bay horse on the inside rail just by the wire in the bleached light of a southern California morning. The rider, who had escaped injury, stood tugging at the reins fighting to keep the horse still. The horse had suffered a clean break of the right front ankle and his foot dangled and swung from the bottom of his leg. He turned and staggered on the stump in panic – euthanasia would soon follow. I averted my eyes and felt instantly sick as I jogged my filly by, the siren that blares across the backside when there is an accident ringing through my head. At that time I could not have known it would be the first of many such scenes I would see over the years of my life on the track.Decades later the deaths roll on. Seven racehorses lost their lives in the days leading up to this year’s Kentucky Derby. Four breakdowns, a broken neck in the paddock, and two yet-to-be-explained collapses paint a grim picture of horse racing in America. Continue reading...

Rightwing lawyer Cleta Mitchell faces criticism after comments to GOP donors urging new rules to make voting harder for studentsRightwing election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, a key ally of Donald Trump as he pushed bogus claims of fraud to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 win, is facing intense fire from voting watchdogs and bipartisan criticism for urging curbs on college student voting, same day voter registration and absentee voting.The scrutiny of Mitchell, who runs the Election Integrity Network at the pro-Trump Conservative Partnership Institute to which a Trump Pac donated $1m dollars, was sparked by recent comments Mitchell made to Republican donors, and a watchdog report criticizing her advisory role with a federal election panel. Continue reading...

Those who opposed it must be portrayed as radical, or the whole rotten system it represents might come crashing downThe biggest illusion – and utility – of royal events such as the coronation is that we are somehow a part of them. We are, of course, in a way; we need to be for the institution of monarchy to have any meaning at all. But not as equals. We have the worst of both worlds: the royal family gives us nothing, and we in turn legitimise it, give it meaning and audience and pay, through subsidies and tax exemptions, for its ability to wow us. The monarchy does provide a service, but not to us. It is to an entire system of political decline and economic inequality that cannot withstand closer scrutiny, and so it must be embellished and cloaked in ceremony.And it was ever thus. The historian David Cannadine, in an essay on the “invented traditions” of royal ceremonies, wrote: “in a period of change, conflict or crisis”, unchanging ritual “might be deliberately unaltered so as to give an impression of continuity, community and comfort, despite overwhelming contextual evidence to the contrary.” That evidence to the contrary cannot be more overwhelming than reports that money for food banks has been diverted to pay for coronation events. What those funds bought was a coronation, much like the screens assembled to hide King Charles as he derobed, that for a moment erected an ornate cover that hid the nation’s hunger. Continue reading...

Senate majority whip and judiciary committee chair Dick Durbin ups pressure on chief justice Roberts to impose new ethics rulesUS supreme court justice Clarence Thomas’s ties to conservative political figures is an American embarrassment, and the question is whether that is shameful enough to the country’s highest-ranking judge to do something about it, the Senate judiciary committee’s chairperson said on Sunday.“This tangled web around justice … Thomas just gets worse and worse by the day,” Illinois’s senior Democratic senator, Dick Durbin, said on CNN’s State of the Union. “I don’t know what is going to come up next. I thought I heard it all, but disclosures about his activities just embarrass me.” Continue reading...

Police say crash may have been intentional, and driver was arrested for reckless driving and could face other chargesEight people have been killed and 10 others were injured after a car plowed into a crowd outside a shelter serving migrants and homeless people in Brownsville, Texas, on Sunday, and investigators believe it may have been intentional, according to authorities.The car careened into the crowd of people who were sitting on the curb at a bus stop near the Ozanam Center at about 8.30am, the police department in Brownsville, which is near Texas’s border with Mexico, said. That came four days before the scheduled expiration of Title 42, the Covid-19 era policy that allows border patrol agents to swiftly expel migrants at the US’s southern border. Continue reading...

An SUV has slammed into a crowd, killing at least seven people and injuring at least 10 who were waiting at a bus stop outside a migrant shelter in the border city of Brownsville, Texas, police said. The driver was taken to the hospital for injuries sustained when the car rolled over and police also retrieved a blood sample and sent it to a Texas Department of Public Safety lab to test for intoxicants.

Federal agents reportedly examining social media history of alleged shooter Mauricio GarciaUS federal officials are looking into whether the gunman who killed eight people at a Dallas-area mall expressed an interest in white supremacist ideology, as they work to try to discern a motive for the attack, a law enforcement official has told the Associated Press.The official cautioned that the investigation was in its early stages. Continue reading...

The Dutchman started ninth on the grid but still came away with victory in Florida as his Red Bull teammate Sergio Perez finished secondLap 2/57: Miami-area native Logan Sargeant is already in the pit, and it’s a long stop of nearly 30 seconds.Lap 1/57: Verstappen is playing the long game, opting for hard tires, but he’s already up one place to eighth. Continue reading...

The former Democrat says she speaks frequently with White House but ‘rejects party politics’ and stays mum on re-electionUS senator Kyrsten Sinema has vowed to never join the Republican party after she changed her party affiliation from Democrat to independent late last year.In an interview aired on Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Arizona senator said that she is “absolutely” done with the country’s two-party political system. Continue reading...

Critics say the Republican senator should advocate for meaningful gun control rather than invoke prayer after mass, deadly violenceTexas US senator Ted Cruz’s comment that he was “praying” for families of the eight victims killed in a shooting at a shopping mall in his state has sparked outrage as many critics say the Republican should advocate for meaningful gun control rather than repeatedly invoke prayer after mass, deadly violence.The backlash came as President Joe Biden called on Congress to pass gun control bills in the wake of Saturday’s attack, in which the gunman was also killed, in Allen, Texas. Continue reading...

Shoppers flee in panic after gunman steps out of silver sedan and opens fire at Premium Outlets mallWitnesses have described a scene of terror and chaos after a gunman killed eight people and wounded seven others at a shopping mall outside Dallas, Texas on Saturday.Hundreds of terrified shoppers fled in panic after a man stepped out of a silver sedan and opened fire at the Premium Outlets mall, a sprawling outdoor shopping centre in Allen, a community of about 100,000 people. Continue reading...

A gunman killed at least eight people at a mall outside Dallas, Texas, before being fatally shot by police at the scene. Witnesses describe seeing the shooter and walking past bodies, including those of children. Video footage from outside the shopping centre in the city of Allen shows the moments of panic as gunshots were heard inside the building. Mass shootings have become commonplace in the US, with at least 198 so far in 2023, the most at this point in the year since at least 2016, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The nonprofit group defines a mass shooting as any in which four or more people are wounded or killed

Xi Jinping’s aggressive stance and ‘wolf-warrior’ diplomacy drive the Philippines and other vulnerable countries into Washington’s armsUS efforts to counter Chinese military expansionism and political influence in the Indo-Pacific took another significant step forward last week with an agreement to deepen defence and security ties with the Philippines.Yet US president Joe Biden’s success in developing bilateral and multilateral alliances may have more to do with growing wariness across the region about Beijing than a sudden desire for closer partnership with Washington. Continue reading...

Other European royals would never have risked a display on this scale. From his much-mocked pledge of allegiance onwards, Charles’s gamble has gone terribly wrongThe king never said: “Who will rid me of this troublesome republican?” Of course he didn’t. No doubt he wrung his hands with woe at the sheer idiocy of the police arresting the head of Republic, Graham Smith, and others as they unloaded harmless “Not My King” placards on the morning of the coronation. What a gift to their cause. A letter from the Met had warned them “tolerance will be low”, but it never said it would be at absolute zero under the new anti-protest laws.The homemade sign that may have captured the mood of many read simply: “Don’t you think this is a bit silly?” Oh, but this is what we do so well! We invite the world to see us in our lavishly gilded splendour; parading the largest military display for 70 years, as the commentators boasted over and over, so that no visitors would guess our army is a fifth of its size at the last coronation. Continue reading...

An adopted woman travels from France to South Korea in search of her roots in Davy Chou’s star-making second filmThe Cambodian-French film-maker Davy Chou, a longtime champion of “lost” Cambodian cinema, made a splash in Cannes in 2016 with his dramatic feature debut, Diamond Island, a prize winner in the international critics’ week strand. For the lead role in his follow-up feature, Return to Seoul, about an adoptee who travels from France to Korea in search of her roots, he turned to Korean-born visual artist Park Ji-min, who had moved to France as a child but had no acting experience. An intense period of collaboration followed, and the result is this remarkably intimate and very affecting drama – an episodic odyssey (inspired by script consultant Laure Badufle) spanning the best part of a decade. It became Cambodia’s entry for this year’s 95th Academy Awards, and confirms both Chou and Park as major talents to watch, in whatever field.We first meet Freddie (Park) when she ships up in Seoul as if by accident; we later learn that she was bound for Tokyo, but all the flights were grounded. Hotel clerk Tena (Guka Han) seems to spy a lost soul and takes Freddie under her wing, although it soon becomes clear that this new arrival is also an agent of chaos, overturning polite social mores with an exuberance that suggests deep well-springs of buried anger and confusion. Continue reading...

The names in legal documents and fresh details of his daily itinerary present a picture of how Epstein tried to rebuild his reputationLike a Hollywood zombie, the scandal surrounding the late sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is resurfacing to infect the reputations of the living, as names once again emerge from legal documents amid fresh details of his daily itinerary of meetings with prominent government, financial and cultural figures.The latest boldface names to emerge from a series of Wall Street Journal reports include the director of CIA, Williams Burns, and Kathryn Ruemmler, White House counsel under Barack Obama, alongside lesser figures including the leftwing professor and activist Noam Chomsky, billionaire venture capitalist Reid Hoffman and Lawrence Summers, former Harvard president and director of the National Economic Council under Obama. Continue reading...

As the world’s fastest female pitcher, 18-year-old Genevieve Beacom is smashing norms and fielding interest from US collegesAn Australian baseball prodigy believed to be the fastest female pitcher on the planet is fielding interest from US colleges and quietly dreaming of becoming the first woman to pitch in Major League Baseball.Genevieve Beacom, 18, a left-hand pitcher with a 138kph [85.9mph] fastball and mean curveball, who last year became the first female to play for a professional team in Australia, has just returned home to Victoria after a three-month stint at Tread Athletics, a private US-based baseball development facility. Continue reading...

Bruno Le Maire isn’t the only politician to try his hand at an erotic novel, but one passage has been singled out for attentionSex in novels is frequently terrible and occasionally so excruciating as to verge on the actionable; indeed, a legal precedent that would penalise writers for scorching their readers’ retinas with the sheer heat of embarrassment might function as a useful deterrent. Literature needs all the fans it can get; protect us from the throbbing gristle and heaving mammaries of a thousand overheated imaginations. Institute a particular ban on the word moist, and freedom of speech be damned. Alas, it would be too late to curb the creative enthusiasms of Bruno Le Maire, the French economy minister whose most recent novel, Fugue Américaine, has erm, risen to prominence courtesy of a dilated anus. Protect your eyes and do not enquire further.Naturally, much of the truly gripping stuff is going on beyond the page. Le Maire stands accused of fiddling while Paris burns, amusing himself on his typewriter as France’s citizens stand on the barricades protecting their pension rights and railing against the callousness of the Macron administration. This feels harsh: everyone has a right to a life outside work and writing about an anus seems small beer compared with eating one on national television in a celebrity game show, or hosting frothing rightwing debates, were one, say, to be a sitting member of parliament.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading...

‘Fifteen wheelbarrow loads’ of uncooked spaghetti and macaroni mysteriously left in Old Bridge creekResidents of a New Jersey town are stumped after they found about 500lbs of pasta inexplicably dumped next to a local brook.Last month, Nina Jochnowitz – a former candidate for a seat on the Old Bridge township council – posted pictures on to her Facebook page that showed heaps of spaghetti and macaroni preposterously dumped alongside a bank of Iresick brook. Continue reading...

In honouring the late Chanel designer, New York’s annual extravaganza overlooked his many faultsThe Met gala has come and gone in a brief cacophony of internet clicks. Like many people, I balance ignorance of its purpose (it’s an annual fundraiser for the Met museum’s Costume Institute) with needing to know what everyone wore. The men triumphed this year, what with Taika Waititi’s unstructured bluish-grey housecoat, Bad Bunny’s seductive white backless blazer, Barry Keoghan in retina-sizzling electric blue plaid and Pedro Pascal’s bare knees, cheeky scout grin and scarlet overcoat.Every Met gala has a theme, and this one honoured the late Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld. Lagerfeld’s designs were peppy and sellable. But the monochrome palette, the bouclé wool, the pearls, the silk jersey, the uncorseted black dress, the neat little shoulders and narrow silhouette, the androgyny and uniform aesthetics, the quilting and tweed, the chains and braids, the camellias, the handbag, the logo and – above all – Chanel No 5 perfume, whose sales keep the business running? Those were invented by one woman, the genius Coco Chanel. Continue reading...

Scott Fetgatter proposes legislation aimed at halting early release of certain sex offenders after mass killingAn Oklahoma state lawmaker is planning to introduce new legislation aimed at halting the early release of certain sex offenders after a convicted rapist killed six people – including five children – at his home the night before he faced another criminal trial.The proposal from state representative Scott Fetgatter would come after the killings in his district by 39-year-old Jesse McFadden, who authorities say murdered his wife, her three children and two of their friends before he died by suicide and their bodies were discovered on Monday. Continue reading...