US news | The Guardian

Agreement reached after the jury was sworn in on Tuesday morning after lengthy delay to start of opening statementsFox and the voting equipment company Dominion reached a US$787.5m settlement in a closely watched defamation lawsuit, ending a dispute over whether the network and its parent company knowingly broadcast false and outlandish allegations that Dominion was involved in a plot to steal the 2020 election.The settlement came before scheduled opening statements and after an unexpected lengthy delay Tuesday afternoon just after the jury was sworn in. Neither party immediately disclosed the terms of the settlement other than the dollar amount, and attorneys for Dominion declined to answer questions about whether it requires Fox to issue a retraction or a formal apology. Continue reading...

Federal judge has ordered Jamie Dimon to set aside two days for questioning with regards to the sex offender and former clientA federal judge on Tuesday ordered the JPMorgan Chase & Co CEO, Jamie Dimon, to set aside two days for depositions for what he knew about the bank’s relationship with the sex offender and former client Jeffrey Epstein.The largest US bank faces lawsuits seeking damages by women who claim that Epstein sexually abused them, and by the US Virgin Islands, where the late financier had a home. Continue reading...

In a move meant to combat a labor shortage, children under age 16 can now work six hours a dayIn a pre-dawn session on Tuesday, the Iowa state senate voted to allow children to work longer hours and serve alcohol, the latest move by Republican-controlled statehouses to combat a labor shortage by loosening child labor laws.The Iowa bill would expand the number of hours that children under 16 can work from four to six a day, allow minors to work in previously prohibited industries if they are part of a training program, and allow 16- and 17-year–olds to serve alcohol with a parent’s permission. Continue reading...

‘Curious young visitor’ wriggled through fencing on north side of the building, prompting brief security shutdownSecret Service agents acted fast on Tuesday to capture a fast-moving White House intruder: a two-year-old boy who wriggled through fencing on the north side of the building, prompting a brief security shutdown.The Secret Service chief of communications, Anthony Guglielmi, said the “curious young visitor” gained entry “along the … north fence line [and] briefly entered White House grounds. Continue reading...

Ex-president promoted the second edition of his digital playing cards on the platform after Meta lifted his ban in JanuaryDonald Trump returned to Instagram on Tuesday, posting for the first time since 5 January 2021, the day before the former US president incited the deadly attack on Congress which led to his suspension from major social media platforms.Trump, who is now running to regain the White House, used his return to Instagram to promote a second edition of his digital trading cards, a project widely mocked when he announced it in December but which sold out an edition of 44,000 in less than a day, netting $4.5m. Continue reading...

Amnesty urges president to grant clemency to Peltier, convicted of killing two FBI agents in trial rife with due process violationsAmnesty International has launched a new campaign calling on Joe Biden to grant clemency for Leonard Peltier, the Indigenous rights activist whose health is deteriorating after almost five decades in maximum security prison for crimes he has always denied.The international human rights group is urging Biden to release Peltier on humanitarian grounds – exactly 46 years after he was convicted for killing two FBI agents in a trial rife with irregularities and due process violations including evidence that the agency coerced witnesses and withheld and falsified evidence. Continue reading...

Florida governor’s campaign against entertainment giant shows he is no conservative, says former New Jersey governorRon DeSantis’s attacks on Disney and his struggles to bend the entertainment giant to his will show the Florida governor is both not a true conservative and should not be trusted to lead talks with the leaders of China and Russia, a potential rival for the Republican presidential nomination said on Tuesday.“I’ll tell you this much,” Chris Christie told Semafor. “That’s not the guy I want sitting across from President Xi [Jinping] and negotiating our next agreement with China. Continue reading...

Four-year-old’s father dropped off the stuffed bear at a Tennessee Goodwill, after which it was quickly soldA heartbroken four-year-old girl’s lost teddy bear, containing a recording of her late mother’s heartbeat, has sparked a desperate search in Tennessee after it was mistakenly donated to a thrift shop.The tie-dyed bear was dropped off by the girl’s father among other donations at the Goodwill Industries store in New Tazewell about 50 miles (80km) north-west of Knoxville, company officials say, and was quickly sold. Continue reading...

Eight police officers who fired dozens of rounds at Jayland Walker, a 25-year-old Black man, after a car and foot chase will not face criminal charges in his death because a US grand jury declined to indict them, Ohio’s attorney general announced on Monday. Akron's mayor and police chief urged residents to protest peacefully, acknowledging that many are angry because of the shooting last June that Walker’s family has called brutal and senseless. A small group of people held a demonstration outside the church afterwards, chanting Walker's name and anti-police slogans

The jury’s still out on whether vapes are better for us than smoking. So why is the UK government handing them out?I am vaping right now. It’s a watermelon one, which I bought from Sainsbury’s rather than from the vape shop that, unfortunately, is the nearest shop of any kind to where I live. The ones I normally buy are Triple Mango. “Oh, is one mango not enough?” people reliably joke when I tell them what flavour it is. No amount of mango could apparently be enough. If they brought out Quadruple Mango I’d be there banging my debit card on the counter. Earlier this week, the man who runs the vape shop took me through the new flavours he’d just got in, like I am a connoisseur of fine whisky. I’m not that. I am a silly little girl who likes her dummy.I have had my brain well and truly fried over the past nine months or so by vapes. Not the old-style vapes: unflavoured, nerdy-looking objects that were for a long time the preserve of morose ex-smokers. The dumb fruity ones you’ve seen everywhere, littering the pavements, clutched in the mitts of pub-goers and people waiting for the bus, called things like Blappleberry Blast or Dr Maniac’s Pinacoloco. Continue reading...

Alexis Dowdell pays tribute to older brother Phil, 18, who was shot dead on Saturday night along with three other teenagersA teenage boy who was killed in a mass shooting that erupted at his sister’s 16th party in Alabama over the weekend died as he pushed the birthday girl to safety, his sister said.In an interview with CNN, Alexis Dowdell described her final words to her 18-year-old brother, Philstavious “Phil” Dowdell, as he died on Saturday night along with three other teens. Continue reading...

Officials braced for nuclear threats and cyber-attacks as part of Russian response to predicted counteroffensive. Plus, what’s behind the disgusting food of TikTok?

Quite a few observers, including liberals, are anxious that a victory for Dominion could backfire. Those worries are misplacedOn Tuesday begins one of the most closely watched trials about press freedom in decades. Dominion, maker of voting machines, is suing Fox News for defaming the company during its coverage of the 2020 election. Fox hosts and plenty of more or less deranged guests had suggested that the election was stolen, spreading increasingly absurd theories about how the machines could flip votes from Trump to Biden.Quite a few observers, including liberals, are anxious that a victory for Dominion could backfire: if the case reaches the US supreme court, the latter’s radical right-wing majority, evidently willing to overturn precedents like Roe v Wade, could use the occasion to hollow out protections for news organizations (a category to which Fox evidently does not belong). Ron DeSantis is already busy tightening libel laws, explicitly targeting “legacy media.”. So, while Fox having to pay $1.6bn dollars to Dominion might be deeply satisfying for critics of a Republican party propaganda channel, democracy as a whole could turn out to be the loser. Yet this handwringing is misplaced.Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University. He is also a Guardian US columnist Continue reading...

Government aid programs, set up to favor corporate farms, are out of reach to those who supply farmers markets and restaurantsThe water came in a rush – tearing through planted rows of cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower before crashing into the tractors and farm equipment. Within hours, much of María Inés Catalán’s 41-acre (17-hectare) organic farm in Hollister, California, had disappeared under several feet of water.She had escaped just in time, as the flood waters gurgled into her trailer home. Now, three months after a series of storms, Catalán and her family are still counting their losses. Their dog, Flor, didn’t make it, nor did the bees that Catalán had been tending for two years. Continue reading...

Kevin Monahan charged with second-degree murder of Kaylin Gillis after opening fire on carA woman looking for a friend’s house in upstate New York was shot dead after the car she was riding in mistakenly went to the wrong address and was met with gunfire in the driveway, authorities have said.Kaylin Gillis, 20, was travelling through the rural town of Hebron with three people on Saturday night when the group made a wrong turn on to the property. Continue reading...

Along with the arrival of Babe Ruth, the Yankees’ move from Manhattan to the Bronx started a journey that would turn them into world-famous winnersA century ago on Tuesday, the New York Yankees came out of the shadow of their Manhattan landlords to christen the ballpark that would be known as “The House That Ruth Built” in the Bronx.On 18 April 1923, 60,000 fans jammed into “The Yankee Stadium,” as it was originally called, to see the American League defending champions take on their rival Boston Red Sox. Batting third for the Yankees and playing right field on the historic Opening Day was their star slugger, Babe Ruth, just a few years after New York had acquired him from Boston in December 1919. Continue reading...

Growing up near the border there was no physical barrier. Now war has forced citizens of both sides to choose their identitiesWhere do you call home? I’ve travelled and lived in so many places that the question sometimes confused me. Being eastern Ukrainian doesn’t make it easy to look for your roots, either.Two world wars, the Holodomor, Stalin’s red terror, the collapse of the USSR, decades of isolation from the outside world. But I know from tracing my family tree – as best I could – back to the 18th century that the place I was born into is my ancestral home. A small town called Dvorichna and the villages around it in Kharkiv Oblast, only 19 miles from the Russian border. Since the war, that home has become a frontline, my parents’ house has become a lair for the occupiers, my school has become a shooting range and my entire village has become a battlefield.Artem Mazhulin is a Ukrainian journalist based in KyivDo 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...

The Chinese government used the pandemic to accumulate ever more power. The result was a totalitarian, anti-scientific humanitarian catastropheIn one week last December, five members of Guan Yao’s family in Beijing died, including his father, his father-in-law and his grandmother. In an interview with a journalist, Guan, who lives in California, appeared powerless and dejected. Yet – for reasons that anyone from China understands – he chose his words carefully. Avoiding directly mentioning the Chinese government, he referred only to an ambiguous “them”. “It is difficult to understand,” Guan said, “why they abruptly lifted all restrictions.”If you choose to believe official Chinese government documents, the deaths of Guan’s five relatives had nothing to do with Covid. They may have been infected with Covid, but government rules – rules that can’t be made public and can’t be questioned – required that doctors who issue death certificates come up with other causes of death. Guan’s uncle died of Parkinson’s, his grandmother of kidney failure. Continue reading...

Josiah Garcia reportedly told undercover agent he was an excellent shot and willing to torture people and cut off fingers or earsFake website RentAHitman.com has snagged another would-be killer-for-hire after a US soldier applied to be an assassin and accepted his first (fake) mission apparently believing it to be real.Josiah Garcia, a Tennessee air national guardsman, was arrested after federal agents said he responded to an online ad through the parody website. Continue reading...

Thirteen-year-old was rescued and banned from North Carolina amusement park for one year for attempted theftA 13-year-old boy had to be freed from a claw machine after he climbed inside hoping to score a prize, according to an official at a North Carolina amusement park.Carowinds officials were alerted just before 2pm on Sunday that the boy was inside the Cosmic XL Bonus Game, which contained plush prizes, according to Courtney C McGarry Weber, a spokesperson for the park south of Charlotte. Continue reading...

London Stock Exchange should try to create stepping stone between private ownership and quoted statusHere it is then: private equity’s long-predicted raid on the UK’s ranks of mid-sized quoted companies. Last week, Dechra Pharmaceuticals, a veterinary medicine group, said it had received a potential cash bid of £4.6bn from EQT, the Swedish private equity firm. Then Network International, a payments processor in the Middle East and Africa, said it was in talks with the European private equity titan CVC plus Francisco Partners from the US.On Monday, the Aberdeen-based oilfield services group John Wood, after putting up stout resistance for weeks, said it was open to talks with Apollo of the US. And Apollo popped up again mid-morning with a tentative approach to THG, the headline-hogging e-commerce retailer formerly called The Hut Group. Continue reading...

Secretary of state condemns apparent attack by fighters linked to paramilitary RSF after days of deadly clashes

After being humiliated by its outgoing board, the Florida governor has hit upon another idea to punish the companyRon DeSantis has unveiled the latest act of retaliation against Disney for speaking out against his “don’t say gay” law: he’s threatening to build a new state prison next to the company’s central Florida theme parks.The Republican governor dropped the suggestion at a hastily convened Monday lunchtime press conference, at which he laid out steps the state legislature would take to try to regain control over Florida’s largest private employer. Continue reading...

Ralph Yarl, 16, is in stable condition as outrage spread over the police’s initial decision to release the homeowner without chargesA white homeowner in Kansas City, Missouri, has been charged with armed assault after he shot a Black teenager who rang his doorbell by mistake, authorities announced on Monday.Andrew Lester, 85, is also facing a charge of armed criminal action after shooting Ralph Yarl, 16, twice on Thursday. The teenager, a high school junior, was going to pick up his younger twin brothers from a play date when he went to the wrong address. Zachary Thompson, the prosecuting attorney, announced the charges late on Monday after intense local protests and widespread outrage over the police’s decision to briefly detain Lester before releasing him without charges. Continue reading...

A homeowner shot a Black teenager twice when the youth knocked at his door by mistake to pick up his siblings from a play date in Kansas City, Missouri. Ralph Yarl, a high school junior, was seriously injured but in stable condition on Monday, his family said. The homeowner, who Yarl’s family say is white, was detained but released within 24 hours by Kansas City police. Demonstrators took to the streets in protest against the decision by city authorities, who insisted they could not take further action until they had spoken to the seriously injured boy. The homeowner has since been charged with armed assault.

Vote is seen as an opportunity to reverse the trend of poorly compensating writers as studios report blockbuster profitsWriters in Hollywood represented by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike if union leadership decides to call for one amid contract negotiations with major studios.The strike vote was approved, with 97.85% of members voting in favor and 2.15% voting against. More than 9,200 ballots were cast in the vote, with nearly 80% of all members participating in the vote. The results surpass the union’s strike vote results in 2017, when 6,310 ballots were cast with 96.3% voting in favor. Continue reading...

Grand jury declines to indict eight officers who fatally shot Walker last June in Akron, Ohio, during an attempted traffic stopEight police officers who fired dozens of rounds at Jayland Walker, a 25-year-old Black man, following a car and foot chase will not face criminal charges in his death because a grand jury declined to indict them, Ohio’s attorney general announced Monday.Walker’s death last June sparked protests in Akron after police released body camera footage showing him dying in a hail of gunfire. Police said he had refused to stop when they tried to pull him over for minor equipment and traffic violations, though they haven’t specified further. Police say Walker fired a shot from his car 40 seconds into the pursuit. Continue reading...

The disgraced Republican congressman, who is the subject of a House ethics panel inquiry, is expected to face many challengersDisgraced Republican congressman George Santos, who has admitted to fabricating parts of his résumé in his successful bid for a seat in the House of Representatives, has announced he will stand for a second term representing his New York district.Santos, whose district is focused on New York City’s suburbs, is the subject of an inquiry by the House ethics committee, as well as complaints alleging sexual harassment and campaign finance violations. Continue reading...

Attack at teenager’s birthday party in Dadeville left 28 people injured on weekend of more shootings in AmericaStudents at a small-town Alabama school, its flag flying at half-mast Monday, returned to class as investigators worked to piece together what happened at a Saturday night shooting that killed four people, including two Dadeville high school students.The 485-student school is a center of civic life in Dadeville, population 3,200, where “Home of the Tigers” is painted on the water tower. The attack at the teenager’s birthday party also injured 28 at the Mahogany Masterpiece dance studio, where the teenage sister of one of the victims was celebrating her Sweet 16 birthday party. Continue reading...

Investor advisory firm highlights bank’s support for Jes Staley in 2020-21 despite investigation over his connections with disgraced financierThe Barclays board should face questions about its decision to back former boss Jes Staley despite his connections with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a leading corporate governance service has said.Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) told investors in Barclays that questions “can be posed now” about the board’s judgment in continuing to support Staley between 2019 and 2021 when he was subject of regulatory investigations into the nature of his relationship with the disgraced financier. Continue reading...

The court said that Trump himself ‘provoked’ some of the publicity and cannot claim prejudice to delay next week’s trial startDonald Trump’s rape trial will begin next week as scheduled after a federal judge rejected a request for a one-month delay, saying the former president cannot make public statements to promote pre-trial publicity and then claim it is prejudicial to him and reason to delay.Lewis A Kaplan, a federal judge in Manhattan, said the civil trial on claims against Trump by the columnist E Jean Carroll will begin as scheduled on 25 April. Trump denies the rape or knowing Carroll. Continue reading...

This latest cache of secret documents is yet another own goal by a pathologically confused security serviceSo far this century, there have been three major public “compromises” of US intelligence material. The first – the WikiLeaks series initiated by Chelsea Manning – revealed the mayhem at the heart of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Edward Snowden’s vast cache uncovered the US state’s campaign of unlawful surveillance against its own people. Over the past week, we have seen yet another collection of secret documents ruffle the feathers of US intelligence.Of the three sets of leaks, the most recent is, in itself, the least politically damaging. But what they demonstrate again is the dangerous self-created and continuing rot at the heart of the US intelligence system: the combination of over-classification and the widespread availability of access to secret material. Continue reading...

Ex-police officer is serving 22-and-a-half-year sentence for the murder of George Floyd in May 2020The Minnesota court of appeals on Monday upheld the most serious murder conviction against the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, for the killing of George Floyd.Chauvin is serving a 22-and-a-half-year sentence on the second-degree murder count, arising from the death of Floyd on 25 May 2020. Continue reading...

Juan Williams calls supreme court justice ‘my old friend’ but says ‘smell of financial corruption’ has damaged institutionThe supreme court justice Clarence Thomas must be investigated over allegations of corruption, his friend, the Fox News analyst Juan Williams, wrote on Monday.Williams, who said he enjoyed a close multi-decade friendship with the controversial conservative justice, wrote that Thomas “always represented the best ideals of what Black men … could achieve in modern America” but that growing scandal over his relationship with the rightwing mega-donor Harlan Crow was worthy of investigation. Continue reading...

Substitute teacher at Kimbrough middle school in Mesquite helped coordinate fights during class, officials sayA substitute teacher at a Texas middle school was fired for encouraging students to fight in class.The unnamed teacher at Kimbrough middle school in Mesquite was fired last Thursday, after district officials obtained video of in-class fights from the previous day. Continue reading...

Rupert Murdoch’s channel sued for knowingly or recklessly broadcasting outlandish lies about voting equipment after Trump lost electionThe trial in the closely watched $1.6bn defamation lawsuit between Dominion Voting Systems and Fox will begin a day later than scheduled, the judge overseeing the case announced on Sunday evening, hours before opening arguments were set to begin on Monday and amid reports of settlement talks.The trial was rescheduled to begin on Tuesday. Eric Davis, the Delaware superior court judge overseeing the case, did not say why the trial was being delayed. “The court has decided to continue the start of the trial, including jury selection, until Tuesday, April 18, 2023 at 9am. I will make such an announcement tomorrow [Monday] at 9am in Courtroom 7E,” he said in a statement released through a court spokesperson. Continue reading...

High-profile trial over Fox’s airing of false claims of election fraud begins, and could see Rupert Murdoch testifyOne of the most-watched media trials in decades gets under way on Tuesday, after a delay, as Fox News, and potentially Rupert Murdoch, find themselves forced to reckon with the channel’s airing of false claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential race.Dominion Voting Systems, which provided election machines to 28 states in the 2020 presidential election, claims Fox News damaged its business when it aired conspiracy theories that those machines were used to rig the election in favor of Joe Biden. Continue reading...

Latest disclosure includes claims that social media platforms detect false accounts only 1% of the timeRussia has increased the effectiveness of its disinformation campaigning on social media and boasts that vast amounts of fake accounts are escaping detection, according to a report on leaked US intelligence documents.The latest material disclosed on the Discord chat platform contains claims by Russian operators of false social media accounts that they are detected by social media platforms only 1% of the time. The Russian disinformation network is known as Fabrika, according to the leak. Continue reading...

Thomas Peterffy says Florida governor ‘seems to have lost some momentum’ in undeclared bid for 2024 presidential nominationA top Republican donor said he had paused plans to fund Ron DeSantis’s expected presidential run because of the Florida governor’s “stance on abortion and book banning”.Thomas Peterffy, founder of Interactive Brokers, a digital trading platform, told the Financial Times: “I have put myself on hold. Because of his stance on abortion and book banning … myself, and a bunch of friends, are holding our powder dry.” Continue reading...

I thought the party couldn’t sink lower than Boris Johnson, but the awful rhetoric now must make it intolerable for people of colourI have been a politics junkie since 1960. Accordingly, I remember the Labour party introducing the Race Relations Act 1965, while Conservatives regularly made and defended racist remarks, the worst being Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in 1968. My future wife’s Pakistani origin family in Romford experienced racist attacks for the first time after that speech.Despite this, in 1983, as a new convert to free-market capitalism, I joined the Conservative party because I considered that Margaret Thatcher was transforming Britain for the better. I still do.Mohammed Amin is a former chair of the Conservative Muslim ForumDo 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...

Mexican authorities have filed charges against the head of the country’s National Immigration Institute over conditions at the centerWhen Isidro’s phone rang past his bedtime, he knew it could only mean a fire had started somewhere in Ciudad Juárez. The man on the other end of the line told him to head to the immigration detention center near the bridge that connects the Mexican border city with El Paso, Texas.At around 10.20pm on 27 March, Isidro didn’t know he was on his way to an epic tragedy. Continue reading...

Brazen judicial overreach to curb abortion access proves the right wing will abandon their principles to get their wayBefore the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last June, the conservative line on the American judiciary was fairly consistent: judges should be careful interpreters of the rules, not activists; legislatures should decide policy, while courts should simply enforce the law.That was, of course, never true – conservatives have always been thrilled with judicial activists, as long as those activists moved the law to the right. But our post-Roe era has showed just how bankrupt conservative claims to judicial continence are. And perhaps no case – other than Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned Roe – has revealed this rank hypocrisy as much as the decision by a rogue Texas judge to ban mifepristone nationwide.Jill Filipovic is the author of the The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness Continue reading...

In the richest country on earth, if you work 40 hours a week you shouldn’t have to live in povertyCongress can no longer ignore the needs of the working class of this country. At a time of massive and growing income and wealth inequality and record-breaking corporate profits, we must stand up for working families – many of whom are struggling every day to provide a minimal standard of living for their families.One important way to do that is to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage. In the year 2023, nobody in the US should be forced to work for starvation wages. It should be a basic truism that in the US, the richest country on earth, if you work 40 hours a week you do not live in poverty. Raising the minimum wage is not only the right thing to do morally. It is also good economics. Putting money into the hands of people who will spend it on basic needs is a strong economic stimulant. Continue reading...

Thenmozhi Soundararajan has spent her life battling for equity. Now California could pass a landmark law protecting itThenmozhi Soundararajan had one of her earliest encounters with India’s ancient caste ladder when she was 10, during a playdate at a friend’s house not long after immigrating to the US.When Soundararajan revealed that she belongs to a caste once known as “untouchables” – also known by the Sanskrit term “Dalit” – her friend’s mother, with a disgusted look, asked her to eat communal snacks on a separate plate so she could not taint the rest of the family. Continue reading...