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The player who won four majors in three years was an ice-cool closer but he has not yet fully recovered from kneecap accidentIt was just gone four o’clock when Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka made it to Juniper, Augusta’s precipitous little par-three 6th. The sun had come out, the clouds had scattered and the mercury was finally rising. Koepka had only just given up the lead he had been holding since he made a birdie to pull one shot clear on Friday morning. He and Rahm were tied in first place now, 10 under par, four shots clear of the field, and the gallery all around was waiting for Koepka to come back at him. Rahm had the honour. His tee shot was off. It landed on the front lip of the green and rolled back off it, 25 yards shy.So this was Koepka’s opportunity. And he missed it. Koepka blew his tee shot way over the other way, off the back of the green and 10 yards on again. He watched Rahm swish a chip up to 6ft, settled himself for his – and pushed it five, 10, 15, 20, 25 feet from where he needed it to be. More often than not, Koepka scowls when he hits a bad shot. But after this one he just watched, dumbstruck, as the ball skittered further and further away from him, taking his hold on the 87th Masters with it. Continue reading...

Eight-week-old beige pup with one blue and one brown eye tossed out of moving vehicle in designer bag ‘miraculously’ OKA puppy that was thrown out of a moving pickup truck in Los Angeles during a high-speed police chase “miraculously” survived, according to authorities.In a statement released on Saturday, the Los Angeles police department announced that on 7 April, at about 12.10pm in a south-east part of the city, officers started a car chase in pursuit of a suspect who was wanted in connection to an attempted murder and carjacking which occurred on 26 March. Continue reading...

The former champion withdrew on Sunday morning but those watching on Saturday knew he would not be able to carry onThe only surprise was the timing. Confirmation that Tiger Woods was withdrawing from the 87th Masters arrived early on Sunday morning. It had been clear during the closing embers of play on Saturday that Woods would be unable to carry on.It felt sadly poetic that within hours of Woods’s enforced exit being announced, news broke that a ball he gave to a youngster at the 1997 Masters had sold for $64,000. Continue reading...

Agreement will increase wages by 30%, provide a $1,000 Covid bonus and expand family healthcare benefitsLos Angeles unified school district workers have approved a labor deal after a three-day strike last month over wages and staffing that halted education for students in one of the nation’s largest school systems.The agreement, which was voted on this week, would increase wages by 30% for workers who are paid an average of $25,000 a year, the Local 99 chapter of the Service Employees International Union – or SEIU – said on Saturday. It also includes a $1,000 bonus for employees who worked during the Covid-19 pandemic and expanded family healthcare benefits. Continue reading...

Democratic New York congresswoman says there is ‘extraordinary precedent’ for Biden to decline to enforce rulingThe New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday there was “an extraordinary amount of precedent” for the Joe Biden White House to ignore a Friday court ruling suspending federal approval of a drug used in medication abortion.Those remarks from the Democratic US House member quickly prompted a threat by the Texas Republican congressman Tony Gonzales to defund certain programs under the federal agency which oversees medication approvals if Biden’s administration did as Ocasio-Cortez suggested. Continue reading...

Papers shared on social media purported to contain data on Israel, South Korea and France obtained by US agenciesA large cache of what appear to be classified Pentagon documents circulating on social media channels is becoming a growing source of anxiety for US intelligence agencies, as numerous allies have been forced into denials over the purported leaks.Half a dozen photographs of printed classified documents, mostly pertaining to the state of the Ukraine war as of the beginning of March, started to be shared on Russian Telegram channels in the middle of last week, even though research by open-source intelligence organisation Bellingcat suggests they made the rounds on niche gaming image boards several weeks earlier. Continue reading...

Extreme weather has played its part at Augusta as we take a look back at some of our favourite images from this year so far Continue reading...

Scammers last year stole about $11m from unsuspecting consumers by fabricating the voices of loved ones, doctors and attorneys requesting moneyEveryone seems to be worried about the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI) these days. Even technology leaders including Elon Musk and the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have signed a public petition urging OpenAI, the makers of the conversational chatbot ChatGPT, to suspend development for six months so it can be “rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts”.Their concerns about the impact AI may have on humanity in the future are justified – we are talking some serious Terminator stuff, without a Schwarzenegger to save us. But that’s the future. Unfortunately, there’s AI that’s being used right now which is already starting to have a big impact – even financially destroy – businesses and individuals. So much so that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) felt the need to issue a warning about an AI scam which, according to this NPR report “sounds like a plot from a science fiction story”. Continue reading...

Donald Trump is the first US president to be criminally charged, but across the globe, 78 countries have jailed or prosecuted leaders who left office since 2000Donald Trump may this week have become the first current or former president of the United States to be criminally charged, but ex-leaders in many other countries have long been investigated, prosecuted – and occasionally, yes, imprisoned.The world’s second biggest democracy seems to have been reluctant to pursue former presidents – despite, in one instance, clear evidence of criminality – mainly for fear prosecution would destabilise and divide even further an already polarised country. Continue reading...

Rather than celebrate this milestone of multiracial democracy, our leaders conspicuously ignore the occasionApril 9 should be a national holiday in the United States, but the wrong people are celebrating. On this day in 1865, Confederate Gen Robert E Lee surrendered to Union forces – marking the effective defeat of the Confederacy and the triumph of those who opposed the idea that this should be a white nationalist nation where Black bodies could be bought and sold on the open market. Yet rather than celebrate this seminal milestone in defending and creating a multi-racial democracy, the country’s leaders ignore the occasion, creating a vacuum into which the champions of white nationalism happily goose-step.Boiled down to its essence, the civil war began because the presidential candidate sympathetic to African Americans, Abraham Lincoln, won the election of 1860, and the losing side refused to accept the election results (sound familiar?). That defiance of democracy led to eleven states seceding from the Union and forming the Confederacy, which was founded, in the words of Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens, “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition”. The civil war was a truly existential conflict that raged for four years of killing and carnage that resulted in the deaths of 2% of the country’s residents – the equivalent of 7 million people, based on today’s population.Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good Continue reading...

The former US statesman came out with a phrase to get everyone licking their lipsIt takes a lot to nonplus my wife, but John Bolton managed it last week. The former US ambassador to the UN and US national security adviser was on Channel 4 News the day after Donald Trump appeared in a New York courthouse. In the course of the interview, he said: “There’s an old American saying – you can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.” “WHAT!” Bear in mind that this is a woman who has lived and worked in New York, yet she confessed to bewilderment. “Well, I’ve never heard it.” Me neither, but a quick internet search revealed all.“This phrase was originated by former New York State chief judge Sol Wachtler in a 1985 interview with the New York Daily News. He was making reference to his bid to eliminate the grand jury system from the New York judicial process. Judge Wachtler had said that grand juries are merely pawns of the district attorney’s office and are no longer a “shield for injustice” for citizens. He remarked that the prosecutors have so much influence over grand juries that they can get them to do their bidding.” Well, you do live and learn and I am delighted to have encountered such a colourful phrase, albeit useless for everyday discourse in the UK. Continue reading...

Witnessing equality before the law is surely reason enough to have had Donald Trump on cameraAfter the recent joys of the Boris Johnson interrogation, Donald Trump’s New York indictment could only be, for connoisseurs of extended demagogue-humbling, a two-star show.Delightful as it was to watch Trump fail to make something dashing of his entrance, the judge’s refusal to indulge broadcasters meant the public were denied even the sound of his historic contribution: “Not guilty.” His team had objected, as is sometimes convincing from lawyers whose famous clients are less like clowns, that it would “create a circus-like atmosphere”. Broadcasting permission, as demonstrated in the irresistible US footage of Gwyneth Paltrow’s jumpers, can depend on the judge and the state, as well as the country. In the UK, David Pannick KC was an early if unavailing enthusiast. “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to even formulate an argument against the admission of the television camera and the radio microphone into British courts if the parties do not object and there are no witnesses giving evidence who may be influenced by the broadcasting of proceedings.” That was in 1984. Continue reading...

GB News is chasing Fox down a path of being economical with the facts, culminating in assertions last week that a liberal elite is running the UKThe United States is a grim warning of what happens when a society dispenses with the idea of truth. Fragmentation, paranoia, division and myth rule – democracy wilts. Fox News, we now know from emails flushed out by a lawsuit from the voting machine company Dominion, feared it would lose audiences if it told the truth about the 2020 presidential election result. Instead, it knowingly broadcast and fed Donald Trump’s lie that the election had been stolen – in particular the known unfounded allegation that Dominion had programmed its voting machines to throw millions of votes to the Democrats. Fox could have been instructed to tell the truth by its owner, as this month’s Prospect magazine details, but as Rupert Murdoch acknowledged under oath: “I could have. But I didn’t.” There was no penalty for lying, except being on the wrong side of a $1.6bn lawsuit.But the culture of truth denial is no accident; it was a key stratagem of the US right as it fought to build a counter-establishment in the 1970s, 80s and 90s that would challenge and even supplant what it considered an over-dominant liberal establishment. Unalloyed facts, truthful evidence and balanced reporting on everything from guns to climate change tended to support liberals and their worldview. But if all facts could be framed as the contingent result of opinions, the right could fight on level terms. Indeed, because the right is richer, it could even so dominantly frame facts from its well-funded media that truth and misinformation would become so jumbled no one could tell the difference. “Stop the steal” is such a fact-denying strategy. Ally it with voter suppression and getting your people into key roles in pivotal institutions and there are the bones of an anti-democratic coup. Continue reading...

High farce in a Manhattan courtroom has left America’s friends and foes wondering if the US has lost the plotFrom the country that gave the world Hollywood movies, Broadway musicals, and TV soaps, sitcoms and talk shows such as Dallas, Friends and Oprah comes more sensational mass entertainment: real-time political farce. The Donald J Trump Show, a tragicomedy-cum-courtroom drama, opened in Manhattan last week. This one will run and run.Trump plays himself: sulky, entitled, vindictive. Other cast members include Stormy Daniels, his leading lady, a former porn star who teasingly refers to her breasts as Thunder and Lightning; an ex-Playboy model; a doorman in the know; a publisher rejoicing in the name of Pecker; and a shady, turncoat lawyer. Continue reading...

US president’s heritage is a form of soft power as he travels to Belfast and Republic of Ireland to mark Good Friday agreementIt was a line guaranteed to raise a smile. “As we know, every American president is a little bit Irish on St Patrick’s Day,” Leo Varadkar, the Irish taoiseach, observed during last month’s celebration at the White House. “But some are more Irish than others.”Joe Biden is as Irish as it gets. On Tuesday he travels to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the peace accord that helped end decades of deadly sectarian violence, then on to the Republic of Ireland for stops including Dublin, County Louth and County Mayo for what will feel almost like a homecoming. Continue reading...

The former president paid hush money to an adult film star and a Playboy model and faces looming trials over a rape allegationIn August 2015, at Trump Tower in New York, Donald Trump met with Michael Cohen, then his lawyer and fixer, and David Pecker, then chief executive of American Media, owner of the National Enquirer. According to the indictment of the former president unsealed in New York this week, Pecker agreed to help with Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination, “looking out for negative stories” about Trump and then alerting Cohen.It was a “catch and kill” deal, a common tabloid practice in which Pecker would buy potentially damaging stories but not put them in print. Continue reading...

Joanne Segovia, 64, dismissed following internal investigation into charges filed against herThe director of the San Jose police union who was charged with attempting to import synthetic opioids has been fired from the organization.On Friday, the San Jose Police Officers’ Association fired Joanne Segovia after it completed the first phase of the internal investigation that it launched into the charges filed against her. Continue reading...

Jeffrey Keene says he has no regrets about the assignment, casting a spotlight on decisions made in state’s public education systemA Florida teacher who was fired from his school after asking his students to write their own obituaries in advance of an on-campus active shooter drill says he has no regrets about the assignment that cost him his job.“It wasn’t to scare them or make them feel like they were going to die, but just to help them understand what’s important in their lives and how they want to move forward with their lives and how they want to pursue things in their journey,” the dismissed psychology teacher, Jeffrey Keene, told NBC News. Continue reading...

Texas governor moves to pardon Daniel Perry, who was convicted of shooting Garrett Foster during rally in 2020A US army sergeant and ride-share service driver has been found guilty of the murder of a protester during a Black Lives Matter rally in 2020 in Austin, Texas.After an eight-day trial and two days of verdict deliberations, a jury in Travis county, Texas, found 33-year-old Daniel Perry guilty of murdering air force veteran Garrett Foster, 28. Perry is white, as was Foster. Continue reading...

Democrats including Senate majority leader warn of ‘dangerous new precedent’ set by ruling and vow to fight itDemocratic lawmakers are doubling down on outrage against Friday’s ruling that threatens access to a widely used abortion medication, saying the ruling sets a “dangerous new precedent” that could harm future medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration.“Make no mistake, the decision could throw our country into chaos,” said the Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer on a call with reporters on Saturday. “Republicans have completely eviscerated the FDA as we know it and threatened the ability of any drug on the market to avoid being prohibited. Continue reading...

Harlan Crow, closely linked to judge, has a signed copy of Mein Kampf and dictator’s paintingsThe Republican megadonor whose gifts to the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas have come under the spotlight has a private collection including a garden of statues of dictators, including Mussolini and Stalin; Nazi memorabilia; and paintings including two works by Adolf Hitler, the Washingtonian reported.“I still can’t get over the collection of Nazi memorabilia,” the Washingtonian quoted an anonymous source as saying, regarding a visit to Harlan Crow’s Texas home. “It would have been helpful to have someone explain the significance of all the items. Without that context, you sort of just gasp when you walk into the room.” Continue reading...

Farmington officers on paid administrative leave after shooting Robert Dotson while responding to call from across the streetOfficers with the Farmington police department of north-western New Mexico shot and killed a homeowner when they showed up at the wrong address in response to a domestic violence call this week, according to state authorities.The shooting happened about 11.30pm Wednesday. New Mexico state police released more details late on Thursday, and Farmington police confirmed on Friday that the three officers involved were on paid administrative leave pending a review of the case. Continue reading...

Former champion is modest to the end despite his chip to win a playoff in 1987 being regarded as the greatest seen at AugustaIt was raining when Larry Mize came to the 18th on Saturday morning and if that wasn’t exactly how he had pictured it when he was thinking about the end of his 120th, and final, round here in the Masters, he may reflect it was for the best anyway. If nothing else it meant you couldn’t quite tell whether or not those were tears he was brushing off as he stood in the tee box.Mize watched as his playing partners, Min-Woo Lee and Harrison Crowe, each clobbered mighty drives up the hill, then wiped his club on his calf and set himself for one last tee shot … which he sent skittering into the trees 150 yards away. “There’s a reason why this is my last Masters,” Mize said. Continue reading...

Justin Welby is the latest in a long line to link his state of mind to the residents of Hundred Acre WoodDuring a series of lectures for passion week, the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, opened up about his mental health. In confessing how he had long relied on antidepressants to “restore me to Eeyore status from something much worse”, he noted how his predecessor, Dr Rowan Williams, once advised him “there is almost no human situation that cannot be explained with the hermeneutical tools of Winnie the Pooh”. Certain psychologists have, in recent years, concurred with this observation, writing academic papers on how the characters in the Hundred Acre Wood are expressions of disorders: Tigger suffers from ADHD, Rabbit is a narcissist, Piglet has an anxiety complex and Pooh displays obsessive compulsive maladies associated with eating honey.AA Milne himself tended to be dismissive of such readings and certainly would have been amused by the idea of archbishops swapping sermons about his nursery tales. After serving at the Somme, he was not convinced by religion – for all his “hush, hush listen who dares, Christopher Robin is saying his prayers”, he never had his son baptised, unpersuaded that he was born in sin. Continue reading...

Party members call on Biden to do more to protect reproductive rights amid conflicting judicial rulings on mifepristoneDemocrats angrily denounced as “dangerous” and “draconian” a decision by a Texas judge that threatens access to a widely used abortion medication, while demanding the Joe Biden White House do more to protect reproductive rights.Nearly a quarter-century after the Food and Drug Administration approved the abortion pill mifepristone, the federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk on Friday sought to invalidate the agency’s decision, handing down an unprecedented order that – if upheld – would severely restrict access to one of the most commonly used methods of terminating a pregnancy. Continue reading...

Matthew Kacsmaryk issued a ruling on Friday aiming to suspend the FDA’s approval of abortion drug mifepristoneTexas-based federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk on Friday issued a ruling aiming to suspend the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, a common abortion drug approved for use 23 years ago that has been consistently found to be safe and effective.It is widely believed that the anti-abortion groups who brought the case challenging the FDA’s authorization of the drug did so in Amarillo, Texas, so that it would be certain to land on the desk of this particular judge. Kacsmaryk, who was appointed by Donald Trump, is known for disregarding precedent and for weighing in on the far-right side of culture war issues. Continue reading...

US vice-president shows support for Democrats ousted by Republicans from state house as scandal rages onAbout 500 people packed the chapel at Fisk University, a historically Black college in Nashville, Tennessee, and sang the civil rights anthem This Little Light of Mine while they waited for US vice-president Kamala Harris to appear. When she did, the crowd erupted in cheers.Harris and her listeners were there to show support for her fellow Democrats and state lawmakers Justin Jones, Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson – Jones and Pearson were ousted from the Republican-controlled Tennessee house of representatives after joining a protest in favor of gun control at the capitol in Nashville, and Johnson narrowly survived an expulsion vote. Continue reading...

When it comes to trans people playing sports, the people pushing anti-trans legislation dress up their bigotry in the language of women’s rightsAccording to the Kansas State High School Activities Association, about 106,000 students participate in the organization’s sports and activities. Guess how many of those students are transgender girls? Three. That’s right, just three. Continue reading...

Victories in Chicago and St Louis, plus a key judicial race in Wisconsin, argue against tacking to center, leftwingers sayProgressives in the midwest had three reasons to celebrate on Tuesday. In Wisconsin, the liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz delivered a resounding victory in the state supreme court race, flipping control of the court for the first time in 15 years. In Chicago, the progressive mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson prevailed over Paul Vallas, a more conservative Democrat who ran on a tough-on-crime message. And in St Louis, progressives won a majority of seats on the board of aldermen, the lawmaking body for the city.As they took their victory lap, progressives made clear that they viewed the wins as merely the beginning of a broader trend in America’s elections. Continue reading...

The tech executive’s killing shouldn’t be used to push forward punitive measures and a ramp-up of mass incarcerationThis story was published in collaboration with Mission Local.Robert Harold “Crazy Bob” Lee died on the pavement in the wee hours last Tuesday after being stabbed while he walked through an abandoned street of downtown San Francisco. Continue reading...

Reactions to the former president’s court appearance on hush money charges were diametrically opposite depending on political persuasionIf the US needed a reminder that a rather large group of Americans completely disagree with another very large group of Americans, it got one this week.Donald Trump’s arrest in New York City on Tuesday, when he was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in relation to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, was marked by diametrically opposed rallies, commentary and media coverage. Continue reading...

Trump made history by becoming the first former US president to be criminally charged but his successor has studiously avoided the subjectThe biggest news story in the US this week was Donald Trump’s unprecedented appearance at the defendant’s table in a Manhattan courtroom – an event that Joe Biden took pains to appear blissfully unaware of.On the day Trump learned he was facing 34 charges related to falsifying business records in the first-ever indictment of a former American president, Biden spent his day talking on the phone with the French leader, Emmanuel Macron, and Britain’s King Charles III, and presided over a meeting with his science and technology advisers at the White House. And, despite the best efforts of the reporters who follow him around on a daily basis, he ignored all questions about the allegations made by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. Continue reading...

25 years on from the Good Friday agreement, the Iron Lady’s implacability and its unintended consequences are a lesson in humilitySeldom did a nickname feel so apt. Margaret Thatcher bent her foes – Tory sexists, trade union leaders, Argentine generals, Irish republicans, Soviet premiers – to her will. Armoured with a conviction she was right, she charged into one battle after another, slaying orthodoxy and precedents. What was this if not the work of an Iron Lady?Thatcher unleashed a revolution in the 1980s that transformed Britain’s political economy, jolted Europe’s left-leaning consensus and emboldened her great ally Ronald Reagan. She widened the Great Man theory of history to include women, and fortified it. Epochal events bore her stamp.Rory Carroll is the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent and author of Killing Thatcher: the IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown (which in the US is titled There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA and Two Minutes That Changed History) Continue reading...

Calcea Rujean Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson’s achievement was not the first time trigonometry has been used to prove the theoremCompelling evidence supports the claims of two New Orleans high school seniors who say they have found a new way to prove Pythagoras’s theorem by using trigonometry, a respected mathematics professor said, even if the students’ “really important and fantastic” achievement is not the first time trigonometry has been used to prove the theory, as their school apparently touted.Álvaro Lozano-Robledo, of the University of Connecticut, spoke this week in a series of TikTok videos, addressing international reports about Calcea Rujean Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson. Continue reading...

GOP-controlled state house voted to expel Black lawmakers Justin Jones and Justin Pearson while sparing Gloria JohnsonKamala Harris made an urgent trip to Nashville on Friday to meet with two Black Democratic lawmakers expelled from the state legislature for their role in in a peaceful protest calling for gun control in the aftermath of a school massacre, an unprecedented act of retaliation that sparked accusations of overt racism.The Republican-controlled legislature voted on Thursday to expel representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, but to spare a white Democratic lawmaker, Gloria Johnson, who participated in the same protest but narrowly avoided being kicked out. Continue reading...

Vice-president visiting lawmakers at Fisk University as Republican-controlled house’s move condemned as racist

The move will test whether the former Democrat can build a centrist base – and also risks splitting votesThe Arizona US senator Kyrsten Sinema is preparing for an independent re-election campaign in a move that will not only test whether the former Democrat can build a centrist base apart from her former party – but may also risk splitting votes among Democratic supporters.Earlier this week, Sinema gathered her team in Phoenix and discussed re-election strategies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing anonymous sources. Part of the meetings involved Sinema and her team reviewing slideshows that laid out a timeline of her potential run, as well as timing details, according to the Journal which reviewed the slides. Continue reading...

American came close to giving up the game after difficult recovery from knee injury but is in relentless form at AugustaTwelve months ago Brooks Koepka finished the Masters by trying to put his fist through a car window round the back of Augusta National’s caddie hut. He had just signed for a score of 75, which meant he missed the cut and finished in a tie for 59th. “I don’t even know if I should be saying this,” he admitted on Friday, “but I tried to break the back window with my fist.”First time it bounced right off again. So then he tried again, and it still did not break. “Yeah,” he said with a chuckle, “I guess Mercedes makes a pretty good window.” Continue reading...