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Florida governor’s moves spur Trump to lash out at him during low-key events over the weekend in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Plus, Sarah Michelle Gellar makes a comeback

ReAwaken America faces criticism from religious leaders as it pushes disinformation using Christian nationalist messagesA far-right project that has helped spread Donald Trump’s false claims about voting fraud in 2020, and misinformation about Covid vaccines, is trying to expand its mission, while facing new criticism from scholars and religious leaders about its incendiary political and Christian nationalist messages.ReAwaken America, a project of Oklahoma-based entrepreneur Clay Clark, has hosted numerous revival-style political events across the US after receiving tens of thousands of dollars in initial funds in 2021 from millionaire Patrick Byrne, and become a key vehicle for pushing election denialism and falsehoods about Covid vaccines. Continue reading...

There has been some debate about the identity of the best quarterback in the NFL in recent weeks. Events on Sunday night put that question to bedIt was the most pivotal of moments. Tied game. Seventeen seconds left. The Kansas City Chiefs with a 3 and 4 on the Cincinnati Bengals’ 47 in the AFC title game. In preordained fashion, it was Patrick Mahomes who willed his injured leg to join his healthy one and gain just enough yardage to eke out a first down. And then Mahomes was hit out of bounds by Bengals defensive end Joseph Ossai who, up until that gaffe, had played a tremendous game. The extra 15 yards given for the unnecessary roughness penalty was just enough for Harrison Butker to nail the 45-yard field goal and send the Chiefs to their third Super Bowl in four years and further cement Mahomes’s legend.Had this been a regular-season game, Mahomes probably would have sat it out. Or maybe not. Maybe he really is superhuman, as we have suspected for much of his career. When an actual human suffers a high ankle sprain – as Mahomes did less than 10 days ago against Jacksonville – they are typically sidelined for at least three weeks. But Mahomes is a different breed: there wasn’t a scintilla of doubt he would play against the Bengals. Continue reading...

Almost 20 years after Mum died, I find myself spoiling my son just like she spoiled me. Suddenly she feels very close

Fellow night owls, take comfort: our sleep-wake schedule is part of our genetic makeup, not a moral failingIt’s January, the month of new year’s resolutions and other doomed efforts at self-improvement. And what better way to make more of one’s life than rising earlier to seize the day?At least that’s what the voice in my head says as I hit the snooze alarm for the 10th time at 9.30am. Then it’s time to get up, racked with guilt at my laziness, as if sleeping in were some kind of ethical lapse. Continue reading...

Actor speaks of the retraumatization she endured after some news outlets published images of the scene of mother’s death and her push to reform the state law that gave media outlets accessEven if she could do it in anonymity and privacy, the actor Ashley Judd would be struggling to recover from the suicide of her mother last year.But a couple of sensational, insensitive and – experts say – dangerous tabloid media reports containing graphic details about Naomi Judd’s death forced the Grammy-winning country musician’s daughter to “double down” on the trauma counseling work that she’s done as she has grieved, she told the Guardian in an interview Friday. Continue reading...

Where is the tiny capsule now? It could be anywhere

Largest utilities spent billions on stock buybacks, dividend payments to shareholders and executive salaries, analysis findsSome of America’s largest utilities cut power to millions of struggling customers in recent years even as they spent billions of dollars on stock buybacks, dividend payments to shareholders and executive salaries, a new analysis of industry data has found.The report also reveals that companies could use just a tiny fraction of their investor and executive spending to forgive debt at all households where power was cut. Continue reading...

Moves spur Trump into attacking Florida governor during low key events over the weekend in Iowa and New HampshireAmerica’s 2024 presidential race is showing signs of kicking into gear amid reports that Florida’s rightwing Republican governor Ron DeSantis is now laying the groundwork for a White House bid as Donald Trump finally hit the campaign trail.DeSantis’s moves even spurred Trump into attacking him directly as the former US president held relatively low key events over the weekend in the key early voting states of New Hampshire and South Carolina. Continue reading...

Attendant repeatedly dismissed Rose Wakefield as she attempted to get his service and told her, ‘I don’t serve Black people’An Oregon woman has been awarded $1m by a jury after facing racist discrimination at a gas station where the attendant told her: “I don’t serve Black people.”A jury in Multnomah county reached the decision after a four-day-trial in a case where Rose Wakefield from Portland claimed an attendant at the gas station had refused to serve her because of her race. Continue reading...

Two officers allegedly handcuffed Jose Ortega Gutierrez and took him to an ‘isolated’ location where they beat him unconsciousTwo Florida police officers are facing armed kidnapping and battery charges for allegedly assaulting a homeless man after handcuffing him without reason, and taking him to an “isolated” location where they beat him unconscious.The news has emerged as America is grappling with a reckoning over abusive policing in the US following the beating to death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee. Video of the beating of the 29-year-old Black motorist shocked the US and the world when it was released on Friday. Five officers have been charged with his murder. Continue reading...

Injuries not life-threatening after soldier fires at migrant in the shoulder as he was attempting to detain migrantA Texas national guard soldier has shot and wounded a migrant in the shoulder along the US-Mexico border.According to Texas military records reviewed by the Military Times and the Texas Tribune, the soldier fired at the migrant on 15 January as he was attempting to detain the migrant. Continue reading...

Call for release of information on all officers and an end to pre-textual traffic stops, such as pulling people over for loud musicAlong Main Street, just outside Memphis City Hall, a swarm of white and Black protesters and organizers gathered under the sprinkling rain to mark a significant victory: the city police department had just announced they would permanently disband the so-called Scorpion unit whose officers were involved in the beating death of Tyre Nichols.Still, they argued, that was just the first step in getting justice for Nichols, whose shocking death has stunned and angered much of America and reopened a debate over racism and police brutality. “We’re not done,” one organizer said through a megaphone. “We’ve got a long way to go.” Continue reading...

As a longtime fan, I’ve come to see that whatever she’s being criticized for, that’s what she’s asking us to examineI’ll never forget an interview with the singer Henry Rollins I saw years ago. He was talking about Madonna – he’s long been an outspoken fan – and he said: “When you’re sleeping, she is working.”Over the last 40 years of an amazing career, Madonna has gained a reputation as one of the hardest-working people in show business. Her intense work ethic was seen again recently when she put the cast of her now shelved biopic through a grueling “bootcamp”, which reportedly included training sessions lasting up to 11 hours a day. Continue reading...

I’m in London this month, and energy costs and inflation are hitting business owners hard. I don’t envy my UK counterpartsMy wife and I visit London a few times a year to see her family and our friends from university. We’re here again this time for the entire month of January living as Londoners, staying in a rented house, taking out the trash – sorry, rubbish – and buying our food at Waitrose. The stay has given me time to observe, talk to people and walk around, and here’s what I’ve learned: I need to stop complaining about how difficult it is to run a small business in the US. It’s much harder to run a small business in the UK. Particularly now.Imagine running a business where inflation isn’t 6.5%, as it is the US, but 10.5%. The cost of living here is pushing British consumers to buy less – so much so that, according to a recent poll, two-thirds of them are planning on cutting their spending in 2023. In a nation of shopkeepers this is not insignificant. Continue reading...

From police officers to politicians, people who are keen to occupy powerful positions should be treated with cautionAt some point near the end of the last millennium, I was shown around Rome by two Roman Catholic friends of mine. The experience was a blur of churches, statues, paintings, fountains and mouldering palazzos interspersed with large quantities of pizza so crispy that it has slightly spoiled my every subsequent encounter with the dish. As with heroin, sometimes it’s better not to know what you’re missing.It was an ecclesiastically skewed tour – the eternal city’s ancient and illustrious pagan republic barely got a look-in – but a lot of fun for someone like me who loves old stuff. I envied my friends their ability, in any given church, to identify the various saints by their telltale kit, like heroes from the Marvel universe. I swore I would develop the skill myself – it would make going around churches so much more fun – but all I seem to know now is that Saint Peter has keys and Saint Mark a lion, so I’m no closer to spotting Saint Boniface from his nunchucks or Saint Ethel from her basket of cheeses, or working out whether a stained glass window depicts the ascension, the annunciation, the transfiguration or the exfoliation.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...

Sayfullo Saipov was convicted for the 2017 New York City truck attack and now awaits a decision on whether he lives or diesOn 31 October 2017, Sayfullo Saipov went to a Home Depot in New Jersey and rented a truck. Saipov, who at the time was 29, then drove into Manhattan, traveling south on the West Side highway, as countless motorists have done without incident.But as Saipov approached Houston Street, he hit the gas, speeding onto a bike path alongside the Hudson River. He smashed into cyclists and pedestrians, killing eight people – the worst terror attack in New York since 9/11. Continue reading...

In shifting our gaze from equality, we lose sight of the most marginalised“There is no primary poverty left in this country,” Margaret Thatcher told the Catholic Herald in 1978, five months before she became prime minister. “There may be poverty because people don’t know how to budget, don’t know how to spend their earnings” but such poverty is the product not of social policy but of “personality defect”. Almost two decades later, in her 1996 Nicholas Ridley Memorial Lecture, six years after she had been pushed out of No 10 by her own MPs, she insisted again that “poverty is not material but behavioural”.In between those two speeches, during her 11 years in power, the reality of Thatcherite policies, of reducing the top rate of taxation while cutting benefits, of devastating manufacturing industry and destroying trade unions, led to a huge increase in both poverty and inequality though the 1980s. Continue reading...

From Kaia Gerber to Lily-Rose Depp, celebrity offspring are making a mockery of meritocracyWhy are we so outraged by nepo babies? This is a question of particular interest to nepotism babies themselves who, since a recent New York magazine article on the children given a leg-up by their famous parents, have been attracting a level of opprobrium they are finding both unnecessary and unfair. After all, they say, they might get a foot in the door, but then they have to work twice as hard and be twice as good or at least prove themselves equal to the task. Kaia Gerber, the model daughter of Cindy Crawford, was last week the latest to make a variation on this point, which has been repeated so many times by nepo babies down the decades that it has become a sort of proverb.Let’s first take issue with this maxim. It’s just not true. The sons and daughters of the famous are helped all the way along. The forces that propel them into their first job – members of the industry wanting to please their parents – are still present at the second and the third. No one sacks or under-promotes the child of someone very important if it can possibly be helped: why risk torpedoing your own career? Instead, thresholds are lowered, sometimes literally (Lily-Rose Depp, daughter of Johnny, is just 5ft 3in but a stupendously successful model). And far from having to work extra hard to prove themselves, nepo babies have the scope to fail upwards, repeatedly. Björk’s daughter, Ísadóra, had her big break at 17 with the film The Northman, which flopped. Yet she signed a major modelling contract just two months later. Give a nepo baby a second or third chance and earn even more gratitude from those influential parents.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...

Officers were not in danger and brutality had no justification, advocates and experts say

Governor’s latest shot in his war on woke is the shock appointment of rightwing trustees to progressive New CollegeNew College of Florida started making history from the day it opened its doors to its first incoming class of 101 undergraduate students in 1964. It was the first institution of higher education in Florida – which was once part of the slave-owning Confederacy – to pioneer an open admissions policy committing the school not to discriminate based on “race, creed, national origin, or cultural status”.The founding principles of the college emphasized freedom of inquiry and the eminent historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee was lured out of retirement to join the fledgling institution’s charter faculty. New College – which became a public institution when it joined Florida’s state university system in 1975 – soon established itself as one of America’s premier liberal arts schools. Continue reading...

Naloxone, an overdose-reversing ‘miracle drug’, can let people with an opioid addiction walk away from a near-death experience within minutesThe police chief of the small Kentucky city of Vine Grove knew from heart-rending experience why he needed a vending machine outside his office.Kenneth Mattingly’s daughter was twice brought to the brink of death by heroin and twice pulled back by paramedics carrying an antidote, naloxone. Then Mattingly responded to an opioid overdose call early last year at which a woman saved a friend’s life because she was carrying a naloxone spray, often known by its brand name Narcan. Continue reading...

The death of Nichols, 29, after being beaten by police in Memphis, Tennessee, during a traffic stop has prompted outrage

Speech to Republicans in New Hampshire as ex-president becomes first to hit the 2024 campaign trailDonald Trump, the former US president, tried to get his spluttering White House bid off the launchpad on Saturday, declaring himself “more angry” than ever as he became the first candidate to hit the 2024 election campaign trail.Trump swung through New Hampshire, which holds the first-in-the-nation Republican primary, and South Carolina, looking to shake off concerns about a lacklustre campaign and “Trump fatigue” among voters. Continue reading...

The Scorpion unit has been deactivated after video was released of the brutal beating of the 29-year-old at the hands of officers

Benjamin Obadiah Foster is wanted for attempted murder, kidnapping and assault of a female found severely beaten and boundOregon police are currently on the hunt for a suspect who has been accused of torturing a woman, warning that he is currently using dating apps in attempts to find individuals who can assist him in avoiding authorities and securing more victims.On Friday, Grants Pass police in south-west Oregon announced in a news release that they are searching for 36-year-old Benjamin Obadiah Foster who is wanted for attempted murder, kidnapping and assault. The manhunt for Foster follows the discovery by Grants Pass police officers on Tuesday of a female victim found at a residence, bound, severely beaten and unconscious. The victim was hospitalized in critical condition. Continue reading...

The incident occurred at a short-term rental home in the upscale neighborhood of Beverly Crest, police saidThree people were killed and four others were wounded in a shooting at a short-term rental home in California early Saturday morning, police said.The shooting occurred about 2:30am in Beverly Crest, an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood. Continue reading...

A man was shot in the torso shortly after 1am Saturday morning after a dispute and taken to the hospitalNew York City police are searching for a gunman who shot a man on a subway in the Chinatown neighborhood.The victim, 34, was shot early Saturday morning shortly after 1am while riding the train on the N line, reported the New York Times. Continue reading...

The grisly footage, released in four parts, indicates an ambulance did not arrive for more than 20 minutes after the vicious beating

After video of the brutal beating was released, people gathered to decry the violence and abuse of power

The queen of clean says she’s ‘kind of given up’ on keeping her home tidy as she enjoys time with her familyMarie Kondo, the queen of clean, has always been rather more aspirational than relatable. Looks like that’s changed: the organizing guru has sparked widespread joy, and a touch of schadenfreude, after announcing that she’s happily succumbed to the chaos of having kids. “My home is messy, but the way I am spending my time is the right way for me at this time at this stage of my life,” Kondo said (via an interpreter) at a recent media webinar. “Up until now, I was a professional tidier, so I did my best to keep my home tidy at all times … I have kind of given up on that in a good way for me. Now I realize what is important to me is enjoying spending time with my children at home.” Continue reading...

The death of the 29-year-old Black man after a traffic stop is not the first such fatality attributed to city law enforcement officersAs Nyliayh Stewart marched along Interstate 55 alongside protesters on Friday night, the moment of sorrow and anger felt familiar. Nearly a decade ago, in 2015, Stewart had been a teenager in Mississippi when she received word in the middle of the night that her cousin Darrius had been killed by a white Memphis police officer during a traffic stop while he was running away, according to witnesses at the time.They had grown up like siblings. Stewart, now 24, heard the chants calling for justice for Tyre Nichols, the latest Black man killed by police in America, and felt the anger and anguish for his family. Unlike the five Black Memphis officers charged with Nichols’s killing, the cop who shot and killed Darrius, who retired from Memphis police, was never indicted. Continue reading...

Protesters took to the streets across the US late on Friday after police released video of Tyre Nichols' fatal beating in the state of Tennessee. Hundreds of people closed the Interstate 55 bridge in Memphis where the arrest took place and demonstrators called for justice for the 29-year-old who died on 10 January, three days after his arrest. At a rally in Times Square in New York City at least one person was arrested after protesters jumped on top of a police car and attempted to smash its windscreen

Middle-aged and elderly immigrants come to the studios for exercise, socializing and to meet new friendsFor Chris Cho, Star Ballroom dance studio in Monterey Park was more than a place where he learned the foxtrot, cha cha and waltz – it was also a second home.As a kid in the early 2000s, he went to the studio after school everyday, at first to watch his older siblings compete and carry their shoes around, later to learn from renowned dancers from Europe. At 18, he became an instructor, teaching mostly Chinese students who were the same age as his parents and grandparents. Continue reading...

Dark obsession dominates in films about music. By contrast Spielberg captures the playfulness of cinema and storytellingFor a film that has, if you want to be blunt about it, tanked at the box office, Tár has provoked a disproportionate amount of conversation. It’s possible that the discourse around the film – about a powerful, highly successful and extremely problematic conductor called Lydia Tár, played by Cate Blanchett – is as interesting as the film itself.I’ve heard multiple, conflicting interpretations of Tár: that it’s a disgraceful misrepresentation of the field of classical music; that it’s all too real; that it’s all too surreal; that it carries an intellectual heft that is rare at the movies; that it’s not half as clever as it thinks it is; that it’s not about conducting, it’s about power; that it’s not about power, it’s about narcissism; that it’s about a clash of ethics between the generations; that it’s about third-wave feminism; that its central character, in all her “unlikeability”, is arrestingly complex; that its central character is irredeemably hateful; that it’s a fascinating, even-handed anatomisation of “cancel culture”; that it is actually a “regressive” movie that takes “bitter aim” at identity politics. Then there is an extensive online debate devoted to decoding its eerie final act. There’s something exciting about a film that is such an open text, that demands so much discussion. Continue reading...

System whereby government classifies 50m documents a year threatens national security and democracy, says Jameel JafferDonald Trump was caught with classified documents and Democrats were outraged. Joe Biden was caught with classified documents and Republicans were outraged. Mike Pence was caught with classified documents and it became clear that there might be a bigger problem here.America has a crisis of “overclassification”, critics say. Since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington has been overzealous in defining government secrets. Politicians and officials can too easily fall foul of this secrecy-industrial complex but the biggest losers are the American people denied democratic accountability. Continue reading...

Despite a Soviet-style clampdown, we can help the exiles who are preserving independent journalism for Russians back home

The extremist who has supported QAnon is firmly on her way to becoming a senior figure in the party as a key ally of the House speaker, Kevin McCarthyWhen Marjorie Taylor Greene was elected to America’s House of Representatives in 2020, she became one of the most visible of a wave of extremists to enter the Republican party whose often bizarre utterings stretched the bounds of what had previously been the norm of US politics.The Georgian congresswoman, who has suggested Jewish space lasers are responsible for wildfires, speculated whether 9/11 was a hoax and supported the QAnon conspiracy theory, was part of a new wave of Trumpian Republicans and was mocked, ridiculed and reviled in equal measure – including by some in her own party. Continue reading...

Investigators accuse Hyejeong Shin of providing fake birth certificate to enroll in New Brunswick high schoolA 29-year-old woman who allegedly enrolled in a New Jersey high school and posed as a student has been arrested, authorities said this week.The woman – identified by police as Hyejeong Shin – faces a charge of providing a false government document with the intent to lie about her age in a case which again demonstrates that officials in real life do not respond kindly to the plots of movies such as 1999’s Never Been Kissed and 1987’s Hiding Out being carried out under their watch. Continue reading...