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Lexi Rizzo, shift supervisor for seven years at one of the first stores to unionize, says company claims she was fired for tardinessTwo days after the Starbucks chairman and former CEO Howard Schultz was grilled during a Senate committee hearing on the company’s response to union organizing at its stores, Starbucks fired three union organizers and disciplined another organizer in the Buffalo, New York, area where the union campaign began.Among those to lose their jobs was Lexi Rizzo, a shift supervisor for seven years in Buffalo at one of the first stores to unionize and a leading founder of the union campaign. The union has characterized the actions as retaliation. Continue reading...

Many voters back the ex-president despite – or perhaps because of – his alleged crimes. A trial might only entrench that supportThe best reason for arraigning Donald Trump in New York this week is that he is guilty. It is possible that the jury might agree and he might go quietly to jail, thus being unable to return to the White House were he to be elected. That is a good reason, but it does not make it a wise one.American justice is not political but it can be highly politicised. We won’t know until Tuesday afternoon what exactly Trump has been indicted on, but many assume he will face charges of falsely concealing “hush money” paid to the former adult film actor Stormy Daniels. The case was brought by an elected Democratic district attorney, Alvin Bragg. It comes more than six years after the alleged offence occurred, and at the start of Trump’s campaign for the 2024 Republican nomination for president. At the very least, this does not look coincidental. Continue reading...

Washington Post report says first lady Jill Biden expected to lead US delegation for Westminster Abbey anointingJoe Biden is planning on skipping the coronation of King Charles III in early May, following the tradition of US presidents not attending such occasions.In his stead, first lady Jill Biden is expected to lead the US delegation to attend the event, the Washington Post reported. Continue reading...

Semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15 have become the weapon of choice for mass shooters. They’ve been banned before – yet countless gun owners are determined it will never happen againHogs are a big problem on Brandon Brown’s ranchland in the Texas panhandle. They tear up the ground, travel in droves and are a general nuisance, as they are in many other parts of the southern US. For some, hunting them is a combination of pastime and pest control.So when Brown wanted to find a rifle that was accurate, lightweight and fired bullets big enough to take out a feral pig, he chose the most popular rifle in the US: the AR-15. “It’s a great hunting gun. It’s great,” Brown says. “The AR overall is pretty much indestructible.” Continue reading...

The city will see continued heatwaves, but a new study says heat-damping urban vegetation is unevenly distributedEven as California grapples with the effects of an extremely wet winter, the threat of drought and heat lingers, especially for areas where vegetation is too sparse to blunt the dangers. The impacts are profound across these cityscapes, according to a new study that focuses specifically on Los Angeles, which also found they have a disproportionate effect on disadvantaged communities of color.Areas now flush with green will again brown, rearing familiar hazards brought about by warming weather. And when urban vegetation – which plays a key part in keeping cities cool – grows parched and shrivels against cooking concrete, residents pay the price. Rising temperatures spike higher without greenery, spurring the cycle of drying and heating that makes landscapes even less hospitable for the remaining plants to thrive. Continue reading...

Fast-food giant to reportedly notify corporate employees about staffing decisions a part of wider restructuring of companyA report says McDonald’s has closed its US offices for a few days as the company prepares to inform employees about layoffs.The Wall Street Journal cited an internal email from the fast-food giant – which is headquartered in Chicago – saying that US corporate staff and some employees overseas should work from home while the company notifies people of their job status. Continue reading...

Volunteers have increased efforts to support people in Arkansas after tornadoes tore through parts of the southern and midwestern US in recent days, leaving a trail of destruction. In Little Rock, the Arkansas capital, volunteers cooked and packaged meals to be distributed by the Salvation Army, Goodwill and other aid groups. A monster storm system struck at least eight states over the weekend, prompting at least 50 preliminary reports of tornadoes.The states affected include Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Delaware and Alabama

Stunned by indictment at first, ex-president indicates he wants to politically ‘rough ’em up’. Plus, Judy Blume on why it is time to fight back against censorship

These two men find themselves in the clutches of the very systems of justice that they believed they could flaunt with impunityLet’s not ignore the poetic justice: on 17 March, the international criminal court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin; a scant two weeks later, a grand jury in New York voted to indict Donald Trump. Admittedly, the two cases are quite different. Putin is wanted for his role in orchestrating devastating war crimes. Trump stands accused of relatively minor crimes involving the payment of hush money to a former porn star. But there is a sense that these two men, so recently bound in mutual admiration of their bullying contempt for democratic norms and legal process, now find themselves in the clutches of the very systems of justice that they believed they could flaunt with impunity.Of course, there is no guarantee that either man will ever be held fully held to account. Those looking forward to the day of Putin’s reckoning before the ICC in The Hague should bear in mind that the only reason the allies succeeded in trying members of the Nazi leadership in Nuremberg was because Hitler’s Germany lay in ruins. Putin remains very much in power and presides over an arsenal of 6,000 nuclear warheads that he continues to recklessly brandish. Unless Putin finds himself ousted from power, his arrest warrant will remain a symbolic reminder that in the eyes of international law, the Russian leader is a pariah and a fugitive. Continue reading...

AI-enhanced cameras can detect ‘objects of interest’ miles away, but critics say they will drive migrants deeper into dangerous desertA new map detailing the location of hundreds of surveillance towers is providing the most comprehensive public look yet at the growing virtual wall at the United States’ southern border.The map, published this month by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital privacy, free speech and innovation, tallies more than 300 existing and 50 proposed surveillance towers along the US-Mexico border. Continue reading...

The medical examiner ruled the death of Kelsey Carpenter’s baby an accident – yet she faces life in prison: ‘I mourn every day’Kelsey Carpenter was alone in her San Diego apartment when she went into labor on 14 November 2020.The mother of two had planned a home birth for her third child. But the baby came two weeks earlier than expected, so she delivered on her own, then passed out, records show. When she awoke, her newborn - whom she named Kiera - was not breathing. Despite her attempts at CPR, the baby did not survive. Continue reading...

Control of state’s supreme court will ultimately decide fate of 1849 abortion ban that was revived in June, after Roe was overturnedOne weekend in late March, McKenzie Schroeder offered to drive her friend across the Wisconsin border into Illinois to get an abortion. Abortion has been illegal in Wisconsin since June, when the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, reviving the state’s 1849 near-total abortion ban.“If you’ve never been in that situation, you can never understand how a woman feels if they’re pregnant and don’t know what to do,” said Schroeder, 30, who lives in Sun Prairie and works for a property management company and as a waitress. “I don’t think that any human being on the face of the earth should control what I do with my body.” Continue reading...

A former manager said company managers referred to themselves as ‘wardens’ as they sought to frustrate unionization effortA former manager at one of DHL’s largest facilities claims fellow managers referred to workers as “inmates” and themselves as “wardens” of a prison in conversations about how to stop a union organizing drive at the site.The revelations come as DHL is at loggerheads with the Teamsters over a union election to represent workers at the site. Continue reading...

Some believe that a 2015 law restricting entry to those who have traveled to Iraq or Iran – where Shias make pilgrimages – is to blameIt took the US consulate seven minutes to reject Nabil Ahmed Shabbir’s visa application.Shabbir, a British Shia scholar, had applied for his US visa to assist with the birth of his first child. His wife, an American Shia Muslim, wanted to have the birth in the US. Continue reading...

One of baseball’s largest broadcasters has filed for bankruptcy. But even with some revenue streams threatened, teams are rising in valueTucker Carlson didn’t stand a chance. In the battle for eyeballs in St Louis, the Fox News provocateur could never own primetime like Albert Pujols.St Louis Cardinals games during the beloved slugger’s farewell season last summer were watched by more than four times as many viewers in the MLB team’s home city as the next-most popular cable show, Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News. Continue reading...

If any anger is justified, it should be directed at those who create our throwaway culture and make people’s lives a miseryRubbish seems to be everywhere you look. As one of the leaders of a community wetlands group in north-west London, I’ve witnessed a cormorant diving into a bobbing flotilla of plastic, shores made up of plastic and a heron starving to death due to red nylon tangled around its beak.Last month, a new disease caused solely by plastics was discovered in seabirds. And in February, our group, Friends of the Welsh Harp, removed four tonnes of rubbish from a river and the surrounding woodland. Our rivers are not only open sewers, they’re also open dustbins that lead to the sea. Continue reading...

The 1988 Masters champion, now 65, will be the sole representative from the home of golf at this year’s tournamentIn the coming days there will be a flurry of tributes paid to Sandy Lyle. The 65-year-old’s confirmation that he will no longer play on the Champions Tour suggests at the very least that the Masters this week will be the last sight of Lyle in a competitive domain. Lyle is tired of the road and no wonder. Augusta National, where he famously triumphed in 1988, seems a fitting place for goodbye.Lyle’s slide towards well-earned retirement gives cause to ponder another, less illuminating theme. What has become of the great Scottish golfer? Continue reading...

On TikTok, thousands of men suggest monasticism will make us more effective human beings. But there is something melancholy about all the self-optimisingThey’re hard at work in the TikTok productivity mines, which is more than can be said for me. Among the things I have done that were not my intended work recently, I listened to a podcast where I discovered a colleague writes more in a “bad week” than I manage in a month. It didn’t make me work harder, but my inner critic redoubled its attacks: “[Nameless colleague] would have written 4,000 words in the time it took you to Google ‘DIY skin tag removal’, you dolt.”Time to dip back into Hack-tok, where the fire-emoji bros have rediscovered “monk mode”. It’s not a new idea – apparently people have been Googling it since 2004 – but got a boost in 2020 from Jay Shetty’s How to Think Like a Monk, which applied the principles Shetty learned in his time as a novice monk in an ashram (meditation, visualisation, “transformational forgiveness”) to contemporary capitalism.Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Recently discharged from hospital for depression, lawmaker says he wants to be ‘the kind of senator that Pennsylvania deserves’Having just been discharged from a hospital which treated him for mental depression for six weeks, the US senator from Pennsylvania John Fetterman has said he is committed “to start making up [for] any lost time”.“My aspiration is to take my son to the restaurant that we were supposed to go [to] during his birthday but couldn’t because I had checked myself in for depression,” the first-term Democratic senator said in an interview with CBS News that was aired Sunday. “And being the kind of dad, the kind of husband and the kind of senator that Pennsylvania deserves.” Continue reading...

Most UK patients can’t access their records online. As a result, the end of Henry’s life was made needlessly traumatic

The former president was stunned by the indictment at first, but after 24 hours he indicated he wanted to politically ‘rough ’em up’Donald Trump has told advisers and associates in recent days that he is prepared to escalate attacks against the Manhattan prosecutor who resurrected the criminal prosecution into his hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016 now that a grand jury has indicted him.The former president has vowed to people close to him that he wants to go on the offensive and – in a private moment over the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida that demonstrates his gathering resolve – remarked using more colorful language that it was time to politically “rough ’em up”. Continue reading...

Monster storm system struck at least eight states over the weekend, prompting at least 50 preliminary reports of tornadoesAt least 32 people have been killed after a slew of tornadoes tore through parts of the southern and midwestern US in recent days, leaving immense destruction and debris in its path, according to officials.A monster storm system struck at least eight states over the weekend, prompting at least 50 preliminary reports of tornadoes. The states affected include Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Delaware and Alabama. Continue reading...

CNN analyst Joan Biskupic cites unnamed justices saying a White House celebration of Trump’s pick turned overtly politicalSitting justices of the US supreme court felt “tricked” and used by Donald Trump when the then president assured them a White House celebration of the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh would not be overtly political, then used the event to harangue those who questioned Kavanaugh’s fitness to sit on the court.“Most of the justices sat stone faced” as Trump spoke at the ceremonial swearing-in, the CNN correspondent Joan Biskupic writes in a new book, Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court’s Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences. Continue reading...

My friend and former colleague at the University of Essex, Gordon Brotherston, who has died aged 83, was a scholar in the field of Native American literature.Born in Chester, Gordon was the son of Percy Brotherston, an insurance agent, and Isabel (nee Smith), and went to Birkenhead school in Merseyside. After studying Spanish at the universities of Leeds, where he met his first wife, Gisela Langsdorf, and Cambridge, he joined the newly established department of literature at the University of Essex in 1965, working there for more than two decades before moving in 1990 to Indiana University and then Stanford University. Continue reading...

The 2024 presidential field widens although Senator Joe Manchin remains evasive about his own possible White House runThe former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson announced on Sunday that he plans to run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, saying the US needs “leaders that appeal to the best of America, and not simply appeal to our worst instincts” while also calling for Donald Trump to drop out the race.Meanwhile, on the other side of the political aisle, the centrist Democrat and West Virginia senator Joe Manchin evaded a question during an interview on CNN about a potential run challenging his party’s Oval Office incumbent, Joe Biden, fueling speculation about his own ambitions. Continue reading...

The industry has not delivered what it promised, and critics are right to be scepticalThe emerging carbon offsets market is chaotic and dysfunctional. Problems need to be addressed openly, and resolved as quickly as possible. A joint investigation by the Guardian, the German weekly Die Zeit and SourceMaterial revealed in January that the vast majority of rainforest offset credits from the leading certifier – which are sold to companies that then use them to make claims about their overall emissions – do not offer the environmental benefits that they claim. Since then, scrutiny has only increased, with more questions being asked of the western businesses behind projects such as Kariba, a huge offset-promoted forest in Zimbabwe.Recognising the urgent need to rebuild flagging confidence, if the carbon-trading system is not to collapse as it did once before, the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market last week announced that new rules for offset issuers will be announced in May. A separate process overseen by a different body is reviewing the claims that businesses make, based on their offset purchases. While all this might sound remote from the concerns of most people, the stakes could hardly be higher. Many environmentalists would prefer governments to oversee a transfer of resources from rich countries to the forested nations that need incentives to conserve precious carbon sinks. The reality is that due to the way our global economic system is organised, we all depend on market mechanisms. Continue reading...

Belfast optometrist goes to Augusta with hopes of making the cut in a year that will be pivotal to his prospects of turning proIt started in an Airbnb in rural Wisconsin. Matt McClean’s journey will continue with a Thursday tee time at Augusta National. At the age of 29 McClean is determined to relish rubbing shoulders with the world’s best at the 87th Masters.McClean’s victory at the US Mid-Amateur Championship last September earned him a Masters spot. The Belfast player – McClean is attached to Malone Golf Club – travelled to Erin Hills with his fellow Irishman Hugh Foley. The pair ended up meeting in the final for the highest of stakes; McClean is also now eligible for June’s US Open. Continue reading...

Cindy ‘CiCi’ Peak, 61, was among six victims who were shot to death at the Covenant SchoolA substitute teacher who was known for her devout Christian faith before she and five others were shot to death at an elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, was buried Saturday.The funeral of Cindy “CiCi” Peak, 61, was the second held for a victim of the massacre last Tuesday at the Covenant School. Evelyn Dieckhaus, one of three nine-year-olds killed during the shooting, was buried Friday. Continue reading...

Joe Tacopina says former president plans to plead not guilty to charges stemming from hush money payments to Stormy DanielsAn attorney for Donald Trump has said he hopes the proceedings can stay “painless and classy” at the court hearing scheduled for Tuesday where the former president plans to plead not guilty to charges filed against him after an investigation into hush money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels.Joe Tacopina told CNN’s State of the Union show on Sunday that many of the particulars of the arraignment set for Tuesday were still “very much up in the air” besides the fact that the ex-president would “very loud and proudly say not guilty”. Continue reading...

This supposedly intangible, romantic thing is in fact rooted in something concrete and quantifiable: our material conditions

The race for a place on Wisconsin’s supreme court could have major implications for abortion, democracy and the 2024 electionMore than $37m has already been spent in an election that will this month determine control of Wisconsin’s supreme court, easily making it the most expensive judicial contest in US history.Spending in the race easily shatters the $10m spent in the 2020 Wisconsin supreme court race, the previous record in the state. It also easily surpasses the previous national record, $15m spent on an Illinois supreme court race in 2004. The race has national implications – it will probably ultimately determine the legality of abortion in the state as well as play a key role in setting voting rules for the 2024 election in one of America’s most competitive states. Continue reading...

The US journalist arrested last week is the first to be accused of espionage in Russia since the cold warHours before Russia’s federal security service, the FSB, came for him, my best friend, Evan Gershkovich, sent me a text. How will Arsenal, the football team we both passionately supported from childhood, perform after the international break? he asked. Was Gabriel Jesus finally ready to start his first game after injury? I texted back. Evan’s reply never came. His phone had gone silent.Hours later, he would be arrested on a bogus espionage charge in Ekaterinburg during a reporting trip for his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal. Continue reading...

Wisconsin parmesan and an academic’s claims over culinary purity have caused an outcry in the countryFood in Italy is an emotive, even metaphysical, subject. It’s through food (and wine) that Italians understand who they are and where they are from. Food is the central sacrament of family and of companionship, its simplicity providing an unbroken link to ancestors and soil. Its excellence proves that Italians really do have the best taste in the world.That connection between Italians and their food has been cemented in popular culture. Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino) in Goodfellas slices prison garlic with a razor blade; Joey Tribbiani in Friends loves nosh so much that he “doesn’t share food”. “Leave the gun, take the cannoli,” is one of the most famous lines in 20th-century cinema (from The Godfather) and TV schedules are full of presenters such as Stanley Tucci drooling over Italian food. Continue reading...

Poll shows Atlanta divided on racial lines over planned police and fire department training centerNearly two years into protests against a controversial $90m police and fire department training center in Georgia known as “Cop City”, recent weeks saw the first academic, Atlanta-area public opinion poll about the issue.Top-line results of the recent Emory University poll included: more white residents are for the project than against it, and more Black residents are against it than for it. The numbers add up to a portrait of a city divided in the face of a protest movement – still stunned by the shooting death of one its members at the hands of the police – that has created global headlines. Continue reading...

Finishing with a holed-out bunker shot at Augusta in 2022 fired up McIlroy but he can still keep life and golf in perspectiveA reasonable case could be made that the breathtaking major moment of 2022 was not produced by a champion. Rory McIlroy’s club toss and leap for joy as his ball rolled, rolled and rolled into the hole from a greenside bunker on the 18th during last year’s Masters reverberated far beyond the grounds of Augusta National. McIlroy’s reaction was of an exuberant, care-free child as opposed to a globally famous sportsman.Scottie Scheffler won the 86th Masters, but four-putted when doing so. Justin Thomas eased home in a playoff to claim the US PGA Championship. Matt Fitzpatrick’s fairway bunker shot at the 72nd hole of the US Open was sensational and Cameron Smith breezed through the Open field on a St Andrews Sunday. Continue reading...

Putin thought he could get away with his invasion. Xi Jinping must be deterred from making a similarly fatal miscalculationIt is generally acknowledged that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, drawing in the US and possibly Japan, Australia and Britain, could dwarf the Ukraine crisis both in scale and danger. Top US generals and officials have repeatedly warned an attack is becoming more probable and more feasible. And yet it remains spectacularly unclear what the Biden administration would actually do in response.The longstanding US policy of “strategic ambiguity”, designed to leave Beijing guessing about Washington’s intentions, has helped keep a lid on cross-strait tensions. But the dynamic has changed radically with the rise of China’s president, Xi Jinping, to a position of supreme power and the advent of his aggressive approach to Taiwan and international relations as a whole. Continue reading...

James Craig fed his wife cyanide-laced shakes, police say, as his suburban respectability hid multiple affairs and $2m in debtAs James Craig’s wife lay dying in a hospital, two days before the Colorado dentist was arrested for her alleged murder, he made an unusual request of his church. He asked if volunteers from the local branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon church, would be able to help clean and organize the basement and mudroom of his house.The summons may have seemed a bit frivolous, but members of the church – aware that Craig’s wife and the mother of his six children, Angela Craig, had recently been struck by a sudden, unexplained illness – were sympathetic. Later people wondered if they had almost been unwitting accomplices to murder. Continue reading...

The Law Commission has gone too far in its proposed guidelines for surrogate parentsInfertility can be deeply painful. There is a lot a compassionate society can – and should – do to make fertility treatment available to those who can be assisted to have a child with medical intervention. Few would disagree though that there are ethical boundaries to this, shaped by children’s interests, not just adult desires.Last week, the Law Commission drove a coach and horses through that moral frontier – which it framed as an overdue modernisation of the law – by publishing draft proposals to reform the UK’s surrogacy framework. Implicit in them is the, I suspect controversial, assumption that a single man seeking to have a child alone through surrogacy, because he doesn’t want or can’t maintain a committed relationship, presents no greater moral quandary than a couple seeking IVF. How controversial is anyone’s guess: the Law Commission hasn’t canvassed public attitudes. Continue reading...

The former president has responded to his indictment with invective and dire warnings amid an already polarised situationDonald Trump understands the camera. He is particular about angles, lighting and his inimitable orange hair. But come this Tuesday, in a New York courthouse, the camera will become his tormentor as Trump, once the most powerful man in the world, is told to provide a mug shot like a common criminal.The first reality TV star to be elected US president, and the first US president to be twice impeached and attempt the overthrow of an election, is now the first US president to be charged with a crime. The 76-year-old faces the humiliation of being photographed, fingerprinted and entering a plea to charges involving a 2016 hush money payment to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels. Continue reading...

Corgi Beach Day features corgi limbo, corgi musical chairs and an attempt for a world record photo of ‘most corgis in a carrier’A swarm of corgis descended upon California’s Huntington Beach on Saturday in a sandy celebration of their fluff, speed and cuteness.Corgi Beach Day is a biannual festival held in southern California which welcomes corgis and “honorary corgis” for a day of activities that includes selfie stations, corgi races, costume competitions. This year, it perhaps provided a palate cleanser to a US news cycle dominated by Donald Trump’s hush payment indictment and the shooting deaths of three children and three staffers at a Nashville, Tennessee, elementary school. Continue reading...

The United States was founded on the rule of law. It must not now flinch from upholding itIn the tumultuous, multifaceted case of Donald J Trump versus the people of the United States, the biggest question is why this former president, political con artist and serial offender is not already in jail. Trump will be charged this week in Manhattan over alleged “hush money” payments to a former porn star. This action, both welcome and overdue, makes him the first US president to be criminally indicted. Yet twice-impeached Trump stands accused of a string of infinitely more serious, well-documented crimes, including a violent attempt to overthrow the government. The continuing mystery is why justice is so long in coming.The full Trump charge sheet reads like a horror novel in which democracy is murdered. In the weeks following his clear-cut defeat by Joe Biden in November 2020, Trump did everything he could to subvert the result, legally and illegally, by making baseless accusations of fraud. This is not in dispute. Not disputed, either, is a taped telephone conversation on 2 January 2021 between Trump and Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, in which the then president pressed the latter “to find 11,780 votes” – sufficient to cancel Biden’s victory in the key swing state. Continue reading...

Tornadoes leave devastation across Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa and Oklahoma, including theatre roof that collapsed during concertAt least 26 people died and as many as 900,000 places were without power after a monster storm system tore through the southern and midwest US, spawning deadly tornadoes that shredded homes and shopping centers, and collapsed a theatre roof during a heavy metal concert in Illinois.More than 50 preliminary reports of tornadoes were recorded across eight states in storms that hit Friday night, with twister-producing conditions continuing into Saturday as the storm system threatened a broad US swath which is home to 85 million people. Continue reading...

Trump said to be buoyed by favorable polling after chargesDonald Trump huddled with his closest advisers on Saturday at his Mar-a-Lago resort over political strategy after being caught by surprise about the news that a Manhattan grand jury had indicted him on criminal charges connected to hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016.The former president was buoyed, according to a source familiar with the matter, over new post-indictment polls that placed him far ahead of his expected 2024 rival, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and other Republican primary challengers. Continue reading...