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The April showdown between Gervonta Davis and Ryan Garcia is one of the biggest fights that can be made today. It’s also a depressing reminder of boxing’s tolerance for criminalityGervonta Davis, the World Boxing Association’s lightweight champion and one of America’s most prodigiously gifted young athletes, is the type of homegrown talent with a rags-to-riches backstory, crowd-pleasing style and unvarnished authenticity that makes US television executives water at the mouth.The west Baltimore native came up the hard way through abject poverty, foster care and group homes, learned to box under the trainer who inspired the character of Dennis ‘Cutty’ Wise in The Wire and became the sport’s second-youngest world champion at just 22 years old. Since then, he’s moved the needle like few other US prizefighters in recent memory, capturing versions of world titles across three different weight classes and selling out arenas from coast to coast. A southpaw endowed with concussive power in both hands and a granite chin, Davis is unbeaten in 29 professional outings with 27 knockouts, his status as a crossover attraction only climbing with each successive fight. When his sixth-round TKO of Rolando Romero broke the live gate record at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center last year, Madonna watched from ringside. Continue reading...

Now in control of the House, Republicans are making light of the violence of the day and assailing the investigation into the Capitol attackIt might be thought that Republicans would prefer not to remind Americans of the day their president nearly destroyed US democracy.But the party’s right wing is going all in to rewrite the history of the 6 January 2021 storming of the Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters, and to make political martyrs of those imprisoned for assaulting police officers and sending politicians fleeing as the mob attempted to stop Congress from endorsing Joe Biden’s election victory. Continue reading...

Owner finds unruly visitor in place of chihuahua-dachshund, Squeakers, who narrowly survived encounter with wildcatAt first, Nikola Zovko thought the creature curled up in his dog Squeakers’s deluxe, heated dog bed was just one of his cats. “I said, ‘Fuzzerhead, what’re you doing in Squeakers’s bed?’” he said. And that’s when it registered. “Oh that’s not Fuzzerhead. That’s a real life bobcat.”In the week since, Zovko and his family lost and found their beloved pup Squeakers, a 10-year-old chihuahua-dachshund mix. After discovering that he had been mauled by the bobcat who stole his throne, they raised enough money for surgeries to restore him to health. The local game and fish department has used their story as an example of what to do when wildlife wander in to your home. Continue reading...

Deaths of two of four Americans kidnapped in Matamoros place spotlight on cartels’ impunity – and on medical tourismLatavia “Tay” Washington McGee had scheduled an abdominal operation that many mothers have, and she chose to have the operation done in Mexico, where medical costs are cheaper – and where she had previously gone for other cosmetic procedures.A cousin and a couple of friends joined her to share the 1,400-mile drive from her home town of Lake City, South Carolina, to Matamoros, Tamaulipas, just south of the US-Mexico frontier. Continue reading...

Rightwing governor of Florida – and most likely rival to Trump for the 2024 nomination – promotes his book in the early voting stateThe Republican Ron DeSantis greeted fans in Iowa on Friday, marking the Florida governor’s first visit this election cycle to the early voting state and intensifying speculation over when he might announce his 2024 presidential bid.DeSantis delivered remarks to a full crowd at a casino in Davenport on Friday morning, and later appeared in Des Moines with the governor of Iowa, Republican Kim Reynolds, to promote his new book, The Courage to be Free. Continue reading...

Zohreh Sadeghi, 33, and Mohammed Naseri, 35, found dead along with Texas trucker Ramin Khodakaramrezaei who died by suicideA Texas truck driver allegedly broke into the home of a woman who hosted a podcast to which he listened and killed her as well as her husband before dying by suicide in what authorities are describing as a stalking case.Authorities identified the victims as 33-year-old podcaster Zohreh Sadeghi and her husband Mohammed Naseri, 35, according to the Daily Beast. The suspect, meanwhile, is Ramin Khodakaramrezaei, a 38-year-old trucker. Continue reading...

State officials launch lawsuit against wealthy city of Huntington Beach to force it to build new homesCalifornia officials are suing Huntington Beach, a wealthy coastal city lambasted by the state’s governor as the “poster child for nimbyism”, in an attempt to force it to build more affordable housing.Defiant Huntington Beach officials have filed their own lawsuit in response, pledging to fight any attempt by the state to “urbanize” their affluent, majority-white community. Continue reading...

Several flood advisories issued as governor declares states of emergency in 21 counties, with more snow set for higher areasThere is no end in sight for California’s brutally wet winter as yet another atmospheric river storm collided with the state on Friday, bringing torrential downpours, thunderstorms and wind. The National Weather Service issued a slew of flash flood warnings and watches for already inundated areas from the San Francisco Bay, to the central coast and the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, with more stormy weather expected through the weekend.Snow-covered mountain towns in the Sierra Nevada foothills braced for another round of heavy precipitation. So much snow has fallen across the ranges that residents are still struggling to dig out days after earlier storms; now, warmer rains are threatening more damage to towns and buildings by adding more weight to snow-heavy roofs that could cause them to crumple. Continue reading...

Queen Latifah and Pia Wilson take part in celebration of abolitionist in New Jersey cityNewark’s Mayor Ras Baraka, community leaders and celebrities including the musician and actor Queen Latifah and writer Pia Wilson led celebrations of a new monument to the abolitionist Harriet Tubman this week. The ceremony was a historic final step in replacing a Christopher Columbus statue that was removed from a square in the New Jersey city following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.Gone is an ode to Columbus, who engaged in the kidnapping, enslavement and killing of Indigenous people in the Caribbean. Instead is now a depiction of Tubman, a legendary racial justice activist. Known as the “Moses of her people”, Tubman, who escaped slavery herself, helped other enslaved people gain their freedom amid great danger, acting as what was known as a conductor of the Underground Railroad during the civil war. Continue reading...

E Jean Carroll can use tape of former president boasting of touching women’s genitals without consent in New York trialThe tape of Donald Trump boasting about sexual aggression towards women that detonated late in the 2016 election campaign but did not prevent him from winning the presidency will be permitted at a forthcoming civil trial in New York.A federal judge ruled on Friday that the columnist E Jean Carroll can use the 2005 remarks by Trump, caught on tape in conversation with an Access Hollywood TV show personality, in support of her lawsuit accusing Trump of raping her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Continue reading...

Jack Draper faces a test of his form and fitness against Dan Evans – Emma Raducanu and Andy Murray also in actionAs the best tennis players in the world converged on the California desert for the Indian Wells Masters last year, Jack Draper was not among them. He was making significant progress and had won three ATP Challenger events early in the season, but was scrapping in the lower levels of the sport, still waiting to make the definitive step up.This year marks Draper’s arrival at the top of tennis, his first full season on the ATP Tour, and the tests will keep on coming. On Saturday in Indian Wells he will take part in an all-British second-round battle against Dan Evans, the 24th seed. Continue reading...

Jewish American leaders urged US to block visit of Bezalel Smotrich, who has described himself as a ‘fascist homophobe’The Biden administration has granted a US visa to Israel’s extremist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, over the objection of Jewish American leaders who said he should be barred from the country for his call to “wipe out” a Palestinian town.The US state department gave Smotrich a diplomatic visa to speak at an investment conference in Washington DC on Sunday, and for meetings with the International Monetary Fund, after concluding that it would be highly unusual to refuse one to a member of the government of a close ally. But the White House said no US officials will meet him or attend the conference. Continue reading...

Number is lower than January’s 504,000 jobs but comes as Fed signals aggressive interest rate hikes in bid to tame inflationThe US’s hiring boom continued in February with employers adding another 311,000 jobs and the unemployment rate remaining close to its 50-year low at 3.6%.The number was sharply lower than the revised 504,000 new jobs the labor department announced were added in January, following months of slowed job growth. But it was far higher than the 220,000 economists had been expecting and comes as inflation has remained stubbornly high. The Federal Reserve has signaled it will continue to aggressively hike interest rates in its fight to cool the economy and bring down prices. Continue reading...

FDA to require information about density of breast tissue – which can make cancer harder to spot – to be given to patientsAll US women getting mammograms will soon receive information about their breast density observed during the test, which can sometimes make cancer harder to spot.The new requirements, finalized on Thursday by the Food and Drug Administration, are aimed at standardizing the information given to millions of women following regular scans to detect breast cancer. Continue reading...

By turning an armed invasion into a plucky underdog story, the classic war movie propagated a very dubious British mythologyThere’s an urban myth about a scene in Zulu in which a British officer in a red tunic is gruesomely struck in his throat by three successive spears: after a stunned silence in the cinema auditorium, a bloke is said to have shouted from the back: “One hundred and EIGHTY!” (Other versions of the story have an extra on location shouting it – and then getting fired – or even the star himself, Michael Caine.)Now the film is contending with more darts. Sir Michael Caine is furious at the news that Zulu, the 1964 film about the battle of Rorke’s Drift that made him an international star, has been named as something that could encourage far-right sympathies by the Research Information and Communications Unit, run as part of Prevent, the government’s counter-terror operation. Continue reading...

Emmy winner for Baretta was acquitted of 2001 shooting of Bonny Lee Bakley but found liable by a civil juryRobert Blake, the Emmy award-winning performer who was tried and acquitted in the killing of his wife, has died age 89.A statement released on behalf of his niece, Noreen Austin, said Blake died from heart disease, surrounded by family at home in Los Angeles. Continue reading...

US president expected to travel despite DUP’s boycott of power sharing and may also head to DublinJoe Biden is to visit Belfast to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement despite the Democratic Unionist party’s continued boycott of the power-sharing government that the peace pact established.The US president, who is of Irish heritage, is also expected to travel to Dublin as part of his wish to mark his family connection while in office. Continue reading...

Chancellor Olaf Scholz denounces ‘brutal act’ after suspected gunman found dead. Plus, the people who inherit hobbies from loved ones

It’s appalling to see the media lavish DeSantis with so much fawning coverage. Especially after all he has doneThe Florida governor Ron DeSantis likes to brag that he’s just getting started with his rightwing agenda.“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” was how he put it in one recent speech.Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture Continue reading...

The breadth of these bills is staggering, and many go beyond their purported goals of protecting children from obscenityWhen Bill Lee donned a cheerleader uniform, fake pearls and a wig as part of high school senior year antics, he probably didn’t think the goofy costume would come back to bite him. But, more than 40 years later, the now governor of Tennessee is at the forefront of efforts to ban the innocent costumes he and his friends once wore, waging a battle that strikes at the heart of our first amendment freedoms.Since the beginning of this year, at least 32 bills have been filed in Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia targeting drag performances, with more on the way. Continue reading...

Election could serve as a bellwether for how voters think about public safety as they choose between duelling approachesThere are few issues besides keeping a clean alley that most Chicagoans agree on. Yet, last week, a majority of the city’s voters ousted incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot in the city’s mayoral primary.With just under 17% of the vote, Lightfoot became the first mayor to fail to advance to the runoff election since Jane Byrne lost the 1983 primary. But the recent election was not a stunning rebuke of Lightfoot, who commanded third place with a loyal base of mostly Black voters on the city’s South and West Sides, but a demand for a radically different approach toward combating crime amid pandemic recovery, with one candidate focused on law and order and the other hoping to boost the social safety net. Continue reading...

Proliferation of bills in Texas, Kentucky and elsewhere ‘exposes fundamental lie of anti-abortion movement’, experts sayFor decades, the mainstream anti-abortion movement promised that it did not believe women who have abortions should be criminally charged. But now, Republican lawmakers in several US states have introduced legislation proposing homicide and other criminal charges for those seeking abortion care.The bills have been introduced in states such as Texas, Kentucky, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Some explicitly target medication abortion and self-managed abortion; some look to remove provisions in the law which previously protected pregnant people from criminalization; and others look to establish the fetus as a person from the point of conception. Continue reading...

Feelgood comedy Champions wins points for casting learning disabled actors – but Hollywood should be aiming higher than the way it treats their characters‘I wanna say the right thing but if I can’t call them the r-word, what can I call them?” Marcus (played by Woody Harrelson) is a basketball coach in court for drunk-driving and aggressive behaviour, and this is what he asks the judge rather pathetically at the beginning of his new movie Champions. “I suggest you call them by their names,” she replies tersely, sentencing him to 90 days’ community service coaching the Friends, a basketball team with learning disabilities. Wow – what a punishment! My heart bleeds.This is Marcus’s chance to redeem himself and ultimately, become A Good Guy. Within 90 days, he must halt his drink problem and stop resorting to violence when he doesn’t get his own way. Oh, and he’s a womaniser too – spending time with some disabled people will probably fix that as well, right? Yuck. Continue reading...

The lawn replacement – largely fallen out of favor in professional sports these days – contains large amounts of toxic chemicalsA report on a possible link between a rare brain cancer that killed six professional US baseball players and toxic chemicals in artificial turf is raising a new round of questions over whether synthetic sports fields pose a health threat to athletes and others who use them.The six athletes, who all died from glioblastoma, played most of their careers with the Philadelphia Phillies, a team that for decades competed on artificial turf in Veterans Stadium, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Continue reading...

The Ravens have left the door open for rivals to discuss terms with their star quarterback. But the market is suspiciously quietSomething is off with the Lamar Jackson situation.This week, the Baltimore Ravens hit Jackson, a former unanimous league MVP, with the non-exclusive franchise tag after failing to secure a long-term deal. It’s unprecedented. We haven’t seen a team put the non-exclusive tender on a quarterback this century. Continue reading...

In an age of distortion, public figures have powerful tools and a responsibility. This is an object lesson in how that can go wrongIn 2014, the Guardian asked me to nominate my hero of the year. To some people’s surprise, I chose Russell Brand. I loved the way he energised young people who had been alienated from politics. I claimed, perhaps hyperbolically, he was “the best thing that has happened to the left in years” (in my defence, there wasn’t, at the time, much competition).Today, I can scarcely believe it’s the same man. I’ve watched 50 of his recent videos, with growing incredulity. He appears to have switched from challenging injustice to conjuring phantoms. If, as I suspect it might, politics takes a very dark turn in the next few years, it will be partly as a result of people like Brand.George Monbiot is a Guardian columnistDo 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...

Jeff Neil says he intervened after thinking of his wife who was sitting next to him on flight from Los Angeles to BostonA man who led the charge in subduing a fellow passenger who tried to stab an attendant on a flight from Los Angeles to Boston and attempted to open the aircraft’s emergency door has said he intervened after thinking of his wife – who was traveling with him – and his family.“Honestly, I did it for [them], first and foremost,” Jeff Neil told the Boston television news station WCVB. Neil, who is from the relatively nearby community of Exeter, New Hampshire added that he hopes the man with an apparent mental illness whom federal authorities charged with the attack on the flight “gets the help that he needs”. Continue reading...

In his thrilling book The Great Escape, Saket Soni tells the true story of a brutal labor camp in MississippiFew labor organizers tell stories as skillfully as Saket Soni.Originally from New Delhi, Soni enrolled in the University of Chicago at 18 to learn how to write plays. “I think my parents may have been the only ones in Indian history to let their son come to the United States to study theater,” he says. Continue reading...

They know our first sympathy must be with Ukraine, as is theirs. But they need our support in this time of repressionLast April, Masha Moskaleva, a 12-year-old girl from the Tula region south of Moscow, drew a picture in her school art class that upset the teacher. The teacher ran to the head; the head called the police; the police told the FSB, Russia’s state security service, which interrogated Masha. Her father, a single parent, was arrested, beaten, fined and placed under house arrest. His daughter was taken into state care.Moskaleva’s crime was “discrediting the military” – an offence passed into law after the invasion of Ukraine to criminalise dissemination of the truth. It carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Masha’s picture showed a woman and child, hand in hand, next to a Ukrainian flag. Missiles fly towards them from a Russian flag, on which is written “No to war”. Continue reading...

Investigators are looking at invoking an exception that can bypass attorney-client privilege if legal advice is used for furthering crimeFederal prosecutors involved in the criminal investigation of Donald Trump’s retention of classified documents argued to a US judge on Thursday that one of the former US president’s lawyers should answer more questions before a grand jury over objections of attorney-client privilege.US prosecutors have been seeking to invoke the so-called crime-fraud exception that allows them to compel testimony about communications between an attorney and a client when they have evidence to suggest legal advice was used in furtherance of a crime. Continue reading...

Proposal will creating ‘a little bit more breathing room’ for American families, Biden says – but Republicans dismiss his plansJoe Biden on Thursday unveiled his budget, a sprawling policy vision that the president says reflects his commitment to building a fairer economy while drawing a sharp contrast to Republicans who are demanding steep cuts to federal spending programs.Biden formally introduced his spending plan, which he has described as a “blue-collar blueprint”, in Pennsylvania, a battleground state that helped lift him to the White House in 2020. It was an unusually high-profile rollout for a budget proposal that is often greeted with a resounding thud on Capitol Hill. Continue reading...

Governor has 21 counties under emergency orders while 16m people in the state are under flood watch warningsAn impending atmospheric river and rapidly melting snow has put communities across California on high alert for flash flooding, mudslides and rockslides as the subtropical storm surge moves over the state. Rivers and streams could also quickly rise beyond capacity and breach, the National Weather Service warned. Overall, some 16 million people are under flood watch warnings.The state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has declared a state of emergency for 21 counties, including some mountain communities still digging themselves out from the snow. “The state is working around the clock with local partners to deploy life-saving equipment and first responders to communities across California,” Newsom said on Wednesday evening. “With more dangerous storms on the horizon, we’ll continue to mobilise every available resource to protect Californians.” Continue reading...

Local official tells panel of chaotic response Ohio derailment and operator’s chief executive makes first appearance before CongressNorfolk Southern’s decision to call for the burning of five derailed train cars in East Palestine, Ohio, was “jaw-dropping” and a consequence of poor communication by the railroad, a local emergency management official told a Senate panel on Thursday.Eric Brewer, director and chief of hazardous materials response for the emergency services department in Beaver county, Pennsylvania, just over the state line from East Palestine, described to the chamber’s environment and public works committee an initially chaotic response to the 3 February derailment. Continue reading...

Republican Senate leader ‘tripped at a hotel during a private dinner’ and is receiving treatment, according to a spokespersonThe Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, was taken to hospital in Washington DC on Wednesday night after he tripped and fell at a hotel, a spokesperson said.David Popp said McConnell, 81, fell “during a private dinner”. Continue reading...

People once hoped the two powers could forge a better relationship. Now the best hope is stopping deteriorationLooking back, it is hard to believe that in the Obama era there were serious discussions about whether a “G2” could emerge – with the US and China coming together, never easily but earnestly, and in good faith, to tackle the world’s great problems.The costs of mutual hostility are now greater and clearer than they were back then: the risk of global economic recession, a failure to tackle the climate crisis, and even of military conflict in the future. Yet far from strengthening, bilateral relations have nosedived. The relationship between China and the US is not only at its lowest point for years, but appears to be trapped in a downward spiral. For now Beijing, in particular, seems to be giving up on fixing it. Its support for Moscow has contributed to the deterioration, but is also driven by its belief that the partnership helps to buttress it against US hostility. How and when the war in Ukraine ends could prove critical for US-China relations. Continue reading...

CDC says animal-to-human transmission is rare but study’s lead investigator calls for closer look at virus in rats for new strainsNew York City rats may be renowned for carrying pizza through the subway but according to a new study, they can also carry the virus behind Covid-19.The study released on Thursday in mBio, an open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, concluded that New York rats among a population of roughly 8 million are susceptible to three Covid variants. Continue reading...

In an aggressive confrontation at a Senate health, education, labor and pensions committee, Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator, clashed with Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, a US labor union. 'You need to shut your mouth,' said Mullin after a testy interaction in which Mullin asked the union head what he did to earn his salary. 'You’re out of line,' O’Brien retorted. Bernie Sanders attempted to mediate between the two men, to little avail

Military members and veterans of the Afghanistan war offered harrowing eyewitness testimonies of the chaotic and deadly withdrawal from the country’s longest conflict, during an hours-long congressional hearing on Wednesday.They also pleaded with Congress to help the Afghan allies left behind.

Baseball games are getting shorter as pitchers and batters are forced to quicken play. It may help bring in the younger fans the game cravesMajor League Baseball’s hottest new star is the talk of spring training. No, it’s not some big-name prospect. It’s not a human being at all, in fact, but rather a timekeeping device. Yes, the buzz is all about how baseball is incorporating the pitch clock into its everyday routine, as those behind the scenes attempt to revitalize a game struggling to keep pace with the modern world.For years, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has been tweaking the rules to shorten the length of games – presumably to attract younger fans as contests have become longer over the years – without alienating the traditionalist bent of its core audience, a feat akin to a hippopotamus trying to walk a tightrope. The most notable “innovation” prior to this offseason had been the introduction of an additional baserunner in extra-inning games as way to avoid extended stalemates. Most fans have not warmed to the idea – but those actually working games like it, so it’s here to stay for the foreseeable future. Continue reading...

Markwayne Mullin, a former MMA fighter, argues with union’s Sean O’Brien as Bernie Sanders seeks order in Senate hearingA Republican senator who once had to reassure voters he didn’t think he was “Rambo” and was a mixed martial arts fighter before entering politics got into a vocal brawl with a union boss during a public congressional hearing, saying: “You need to shut your mouth.”Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma exchanged verbal fire with Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, during a hearing staged on Wednesday by the Senate health, education, labor and pensions committee. Continue reading...

Carlson has been caught out of character. Is it over for him? Somehow, I don’t think so“I hate him passionately.”Thanks to new court filings in a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against Fox News we now know exactly how the network’s star host, Tucker Carlson, really feels about Donald Trump. Two days before the insurrection at the Capitol, around the same time that Carlson was publicly singing Trump’s praises to his audience of millions, he was also sending private texts to members of his staff about how much despised the guy. It’s almost like Carlson doesn’t believe a single word he says on TV.Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...