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Does the ball really ‘kick itself’? Guardian US speaks to three veterans of football’s most uniquely pressured position to climb inside the mind of an NFL kickerAfter kicking a game-winning field goal to help the Baltimore Ravens overcome the Cincinnati Bengals in Week 5 of the 2022 NFL season, Justin Tucker was asked whether he enjoys being called upon to make such high-stakes kicks.“My feelings don’t matter,” Tucker said. “What matters is seeing the ball snapped with 12 o’clock laces from Nick Moore, seeing the ball spotted cleanly from Jordan Stout, his first first career game-winning hold, and then from there I’m just a system kicker. The ball kicks itself at that point.” Continue reading...

Facebook groups are outing male misconduct. But shouldn’t dating platforms be doing much more to help protect users?It had to happen. And now it has. Women are finally rising up against the pitfalls of dating app culture, and fighting back. Since March 2022, Are We Dating the Same Guy? Facebook groups have sprung up in almost every major American city, from New York to Little Rock, as a way for women to call out bad digital dating experiences.What started as small-scale communities are now spreading internationally and have grown to include hundreds of thousands of members. “Boys, frickin’ buckle up,” one TikTok user said in July. “If you mistreat a girl, or are doing some sketchy stuff, the time is over, ‘cause you’re getting caught.”Nancy Jo Sales is a writer at Vanity Fair and the author of American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

Who knew that a chat about drinks between actors Olivia Cooke and Emma D’Arcy could be so sexy and comforting?

A brutal war in East Africa is estimated to have claimed more than 600,000 lives. This Christmas, families like mine don’t even know if our loved ones are aliveA war is raging that has cost more than an estimated 600,000 lives. Its victims have borne witness to shocking human rights abuses and, tragically, civilians have been deliberately targeted. Tens of thousands of women have been raped. It has lasted two years and is happening today, yet the chances are you don’t even know where it is. Though it is far deadlier than the war in Ukraine, the western media have mostly ignored it.On 4 November 2020, when Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, a Nobel Peace prize winner, announced a military offensive in the disputed territory of Tigray, it was difficult to imagine how catastrophic it would become. A population of more than 6 million people, under a government blockade, has been pushed towards mass starvation – with young children dying of acute malnutrition. Tigray has become a centre of weaponised rape and an internet blackout that has added to the psychological torture faced by victims, and by families such as mine desperate to hear from our loved ones.Magdalene Abraha is a writer and publisher at Jacaranda BooksThis article was amended on 28 December 2022. The number estimated to have died in the war is at least 600,000 people. An earlier version said it was up to 600,000 livesDo 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...

Maxwell Frost places curbing gun violence at the top of his political agenda, along with addressing the housing crisisMaxwell Frost might not yet have a permanent address in Washington DC, but that hasn’t stopped the hate mail from reaching him. “I got a letter the other day,” he says. “And when I opened it, it just said: ‘Fuck you.’”Frost expected there would be a fair amount of negative reaction after he became the first member of Gen Z to be voted into Congress in last month’s midterm elections. Continue reading...

PwC, administrator of Lehman’s London arm since bank’s failure in 2008, secures three more years to finish processAdministrators will spend at least three more years winding up the London-based arm of Lehman Brothers, swelling the almost £1.1bn in fees that PwC has already raked in since the bank’s calamitous collapse in 2008.PwC has secured court approval to extend the administration process for the investment bank’s European hub to 2025, given the “complexity of unwinding the group’s affairs” after one of the biggest corporate failures in history. Continue reading...

While rest of US digs out from arctic blast, the Golden State sees welcome showers to mitigate dry days in coming new yearA major storm known as an “atmospheric river” is pummeling California with heavy rain and high winds, continuing a streak of weather whiplash that has jolted the state from unseasonal heat to downpours in a matter of days.The storm, spawned by a low pressure system off the Pacific north-west, delivered deluges across the San Francisco Bay Area as it made landfall on Monday night, prompting the National Weather Service to issue flood advisories and watches through large parts of central and northern California. The storm is forecast to soak the southern part of the state by Tuesday evening, although it will soften as it moves down the coast. Forecasters said California will experience unsettled weather through the week. Continue reading...

Erie county executive says ‘this is not the end yet’ as forecasters say 9in more snow could fall through TuesdayAs Buffalo, New York, reeled from a historic winter storm that left at least 34 dead, first responders charged with the grim task of looking for more victims battled snow drifts and sub-freezing temperatures.“We’ve had so many bodies that various hospitals are full and we’re just having to go through and determine if the individuals have died from a blizzard-related death,” Mark Poloncarz, executive of Erie county, told CNN. Continue reading...

The House ways and means committee confirmed that the former president’s tax records from 2015 to 2021 will be releasedDonald Trump’s redacted tax returns will be made public on Friday after a powerful congressional committee voted last week to release them.A spokesperson for the US House of Representatives ways and means committee confirmed the timing of the release in a statement to Reuters on Tuesday. Continue reading...

Agreement hailed as a new national standard, boosting wages and working conditions for students employed at public universitiesAcademic workers in California have ended a nearly six-week strike, described as the largest ever to hit US higher education, after approving a “landmark” agreement for higher wages on Friday.The strikes across the University of California (UC) system ground campus life to a halt, disrupting classes and exams as thousands formed picket lines and staged noisy protests to demand better pay. Continue reading...

The airline cancelled about 8,000 flights, stranding customers and leading to hours-long queues to speak with overworked staffThe US Department of Transportation will examine thousands of flight cancellations by Southwest Airlines over the holiday weekend, a massive disruption which left thousands of holiday travelers grounded, even in areas of the country not suffering from winter storms.In a tweet on Tuesday, Joe Biden said: “Thousands of flights nationwide have been canceled around the holidays. Our administration is working to ensure airlines are held accountable.” Continue reading...

Republican George Santos, elected to represent parts of Long Island and Queens, admits ‘embellishing résumé’George Santos, the New York Republican congressman-elect at the center of a storm over his apparently fabricated résumé, has admitted he lied about his job experience and college education during his successful US House campaign.Santos first ran for Congress in 2020. In November this year he was elected to represent parts of northern Long Island and north-east Queens. Continue reading...

The US has been grappling with a deadly winter storm, bringing record freezing temperatures that have left dozens dead. An arctic blast has brought in 4ft of snow over the Christmas period, with nearly another foot forecast. Footage shows extremely dangerous driving conditions, frozen lakes and neighbourhoods covered in a blanket of snow

The Republican election denier failed to overturn November’s election – and now may face a penalty for a ‘frivolous’ lawsuitThe Democratic governor-elect of Arizona, Katie Hobbs, asked a court on Monday to sanction her defeated Republican rival, Kari Lake, over her failed effort to overturn the election result.In legal filings, Hobbs also pointed to a now-deleted tweet from Lake in which the Republican suggested the judge overseeing her lawsuit had acted unethically. Continue reading...

Arthur Kaplan assigned to high-profile Sam Bankman-Fried FTX case after previous New York judge conflicted outA Manhattan federal judge known for swift decisions and a no-nonsense demeanor was assigned on Tuesday to the Sam Bankman-Fried cryptocurrency case.The case was relegated to Judge Lewis A Kaplan after the judge originally assigned recused herself because her husband worked for a law firm that did work related to FTX, Bankman-Fried’s collapsed crypto exchange. Continue reading...

Adam Fox was found guilty of conspiring to abduct Gretchen Whitmer and blow a bridge to enable an escapeThe leader of a foiled plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was sentenced on Tuesday to 16 years in prison.The sentence handed down to Adam Fox stemmed from his conviction at a second federal trial in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in August, for conspiring to abduct the Democrat and blow up a bridge so the kidnappers could escape. Continue reading...

The PM has a track record for being out of touch, but people with failed enterprises do end up homeless – and the problem may well get worseWhen Rishi Sunak asked Dean, a homeless man at a shelter, whether he was in business and wanted to get into the finance industry, many liberals were quick to ridicule him. Angela Rayner gleefully posted the video, calling it “excruciating”. The shadow levelling up secretary, Lisa Nandy, said: “How much more out of touch could this prime minister be?” Those of a more sympathetic disposition called the conversation “awkward”.Of course, Sunak has a well-earned reputation for not being in touch with the “common people”. In a 2001 BBC documentary, the then-21-year-old Sunak boasted of the breadth of his friendships. He said: “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper-class, I have friends who are, you know, working-class,” before correcting himself immediately. “Well, not working class.” Continue reading...

While only children are still outliers, the number of single-child families has almost doubled in 40 yearsIt is an age-old debate: is it good or bad being an only child? I would argue that the question is, in itself, a moot point. And while only children are no longer met with scorn, they are often still met with surprise. I know, because I am one.If you have a sibling, it may be hard to imagine life without them by your side. But as one myself, I know no different. Continue reading...

Roland Codrington, 35, accused of murdering two men three days apart in apparently random encountersA suspect was named on Monday in two seemingly isolated and random outdoor murders in New York City at the height of the holiday season.Roland Codrington, 35, is accused of murdering two men who were slashed to death in night-time killings three days apart. Continue reading...

Ex-president calls magazine reporter who likened him to Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard a ‘shaky and unattractive wack job’Rejecting a New York Magazine story which said his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 was all but moribund a little more than a month after he announced it, Donald Trump subjected the writer to misogynistic abuse.Olivia Nuzzi, Trump said, was “a shaky and unattractive wack job”. Continue reading...

To live for 41 years in a small cage in concrete is to be profoundly sensorily deprived. Recently my friend Jarvis Masters asked me to describe mossI have one friend whose calls I always take no matter where I am or what I’m doing. Jarvis Masters calls me collect from death row, when he can get the phone – I’ve never seen quite how this works, but the prison guards haul some kind of apparatus to the small cage in which he’s been confined for the past 30-something years and he dials out. I keep a fund topped up for these calls. The calls, which a voice reminds us may be monitored, are automatically terminated after 15 minutes. If they don’t take the phone away for someone else to use, he can call back.We laugh and joke a lot and talk about everything under the sun, but not much about daily life on death row in San Quentin state prison. That’s usually not what he wants to talk about, although, during a recent in-person visit, he told a very funny story about Charles Manson from when Manson had the cell next to him. To live for 41 years in a small cage in a concrete structure is to be profoundly sensorily deprived, and that’s made him eager for secondhand evidence of the outside world. Continue reading...

The New York state governor, Kathy Hochul, has warned that what she described as 'the blizzard of the century' is 'still a dangerous situation' for residents of the north-eastern US. 'We know the storm is coming back, we’re expecting another six to 12 inches, and in the south towns, the southern part of Erie county, a little bit south of here, they had 30 to 40 inches overnight,' Hochul said at a press conference in Buffalo in the west of the state on Monday

Without journalists, the future will be shaped by the whims and wants of the mega-rich. By supporting Guardian journalism, you can help us continue to get on their nervesThe year is 2033. Elon Musk is no longer one of the richest people in the world, having hemorrhaged away his fortune trying to make Twitter profitable. Which, alas, hasn’t worked out too well: only 420 people are left on the platform. Everyone else was banned for not laughing at Musk’s increasingly desperate jokes.Still, it’s not all doom and gloom for the car salesman and space cadet. Musk did lobby Congress to pass the landmark Protect Our Precious Billionaires Act, which turns high-net-worth individuals into a protected class. Anyone who makes fun of someone with more money than them is rounded up and thrown into a pauper’s prison by the Monetary Morality Police. Continue reading...

Indifference among politicians is still rampant, but thanks to new research and technology 2023 could be much brighterIt is two years since I first wrote about long Covid, prompted by my utter dismay and frustration at the lack of help people like me were getting.A lot has changed since then, with more clinics, more funding for research and major trials under way. But the statistics remain stark: the latest ONS data suggests 2.2 million people in the UK are living with long Covid (3.4% of the UK population), and nearly 600,000 of them (27%), like me, have had it for more than two years. Most of us have seen a significant impact on our day-to-day activities, and 17% struggle with basic daily tasks such as cooking and hanging up the washing. Continue reading...

Drone footage shows a neighbourhood in Buffalo, New York state, blanketed in thick snow amid an intense blizzard on 26 December. Emergency crews in New York were scrambling to rescue marooned residents from what authorities called the 'blizzard of the century', a relentless storm that has left 27 dead in the state and taken at least 60 lives nationwide, according to an NBC News tally. In New York state, authorities described ferocious conditions, particularly in Buffalo, with hours-long whiteouts

The doubters are plentiful, but in a season filled with improbable wins, maybe, just maybe, the stars are finally aligning for the star-crossed franchiseThe default expectation for the Minnesota Vikings is that, somehow and to varying degrees, the season will end in disappointment.That fatalism has been nurtured over several decades of playoff pratfalls. The Vikings appeared in four Super Bowls during the 1970s, lost each one and haven’t been back since. In the last 25 years, they have made it to four NFC championship games, two of which ended in humiliating blowouts and two that rank among the most heartbreaking postseason losses ever. It is a franchise congenitally disposed to choking, with a litany of agonizing miscues recognized by their shorthand: Roger Staubach’s Hail Mary; Darrin Nelson’s drop; Gary Anderson’s miss; Brett Favre’s pick; Blair Walsh’s shank. Continue reading...

Republicans vying for the party’s nomination have taken the ex-president’s midterm losses as a sign for them to step upPotential rivals to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination will this week be reading the runes of political fortune with their families ahead of the New Year – typically the time that nomination contenders begin to make themselves formally apparent.Amid a lackluster start to Trump’s own campaign and a string of scandals and setbacks to hit the former US president due to his links to far-right extremists and his own legal problems, a field of potential rivals is starting to emerge for a contest that only a few months ago many thought was Trump’s alone for the taking. Continue reading...

South Carolina congressman says Biden delivered for the country and put it back on track, making him a powerful contender for 2024He was described as the most important politician of 2020. James Clyburn’s endorsement performed a political defibrillation on Joe Biden’s flatlining campaign, reversing his fortunes and sending him on his way to the White House.Midway through Biden’s first term, the South Carolina congressman has no regrets. On the contrary, as America’s first octogenarian president spends the holidays deciding whether to run for re-election in 2024, Clyburn is backing him all the way. Continue reading...

Rescue crews struggle to reach stranded residents in Buffalo, New York, where dozens have been killed in winter stormsEmergency crews in New York were scrambling to rescue marooned residents from what authorities called the “blizzard of the century,” a relentless storm that has left 27 dead in the state and taken at least 60 lives nationwide, according to an NBC News tally.In New York state, authorities have described ferocious conditions, particularly in Buffalo, with hours-long whiteouts, bodies being discovered in vehicles and under snow banks, and emergency personnel going “car to car” searching for more motorists, alive or dead. Continue reading...

Buffalo and surrounding area in western New York hit especially hard as power knocked out and many travelers strandedFreezing conditions from a deadly winter storm in the United States will continue into the week as western New York deals with massive snowdrifts that have snarled emergency vehicles, and travelers across the country see cancelled flights and dangerous roads.The storm has killed at least 48 people and is expected to claim more lives after trapping some residents inside houses and knocking out power to tens of thousands of homes and businesses. Continue reading...

Amid a deadly winter storm, heart-warming tales spring forth of neighbors assisting stranded tourists and helping deliver babiesAs the US reels from a winter storm that has killed nearly 50 people nationwide, stories of hope and resilience have nonetheless emerged from America’s hardest hit region, western New York state.This storm, which has resulted in 27 deaths around the city of Buffalo, brought hurricane-force winds and nearly four feet of snow in parts of the region, thwarting first responders’ emergency response and rescue efforts. “This is a war with mother nature, and she has been hitting us with everything she has,” New York’s governor Kathy Hochul said. Continue reading...

In an interview with AP on Monday, Ukraine's foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said all wars come to an end through a mixture of battlefield developments and diplomacy, and his government was hoping for a UN summit to kick off a peace process by the end of February. 'The United Nations could be the best venue for holding this summit because this is not about making a favour to a certain country. This is really about bringing everyone onboard,' he said.

The elite military school is taking down monuments from its Hudson Valley, New York, site in accordance with Pentagon ordersThe elite US military academy at West Point is removing Confederate monuments from its Hudson Valley campus in New York state, in accordance with a congressional review and orders set in motion by the Pentagon.The removal, which includes a portrait of Gen Robert E Lee in Confederate uniform, began on 18 December. The academy, America’s oldest, said the operation to either take down or modify displays memorializing the Confederacy would be a “multi-phased process”. Continue reading...

The owner of Polaris decided to journey onward from San Francisco after paperwork difficulties arose for the young canineOne very good boy finally has a very loving home.A puppy abandoned at the San Francisco International airport was adopted by an air pilot just in time for the holidays. Continue reading...

As the storm hits vast parts of the US, outdoor workers are pushing for greater protections and compensationAs millions of Americans around the country experienced the effects of a winter storm, thousands of workers in essential and emergency jobs had no choice but to work outdoors in blizzards and record low temperatures.Over 200 million Americans were placed under winter weather alerts heading into Christmas weekend. Regions throughout the west and midwest were hit by record-breaking low temperatures. In the south, Florida experienced its coldest Christmas in decades. Hundreds of flights were canceled and thousands of Americans in hard-hit areas lost power. Continue reading...

Democratic congressman says recent changes to electoral college laws are unlikely to stop another January 6Recent reforms to the laws governing the counting of electoral college votes for presidential races are “not remotely sufficient” to prevent another attack like the one carried out by Donald Trump supporters at the Capitol on January 6, a member of the congressional committee which investigated the uprising has warned.In an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Maryland House representative Jamie Raskin on Sunday renewed calls echoed by others – especially in the Democratic party to which he belongs – to let a popular vote determine the holder of the Oval Office. Continue reading...

Severe weather conditions from a storm in the US have caused snowdrifts to immobilise emergency vehicles in New York state, left homes and business across the north-east without power, forced thousands of flights to be cancelled and made roads too dangerous to travel on.The storm, which stretched from Great Lakes on the Canadian border to Rio Grande along the Mexican border, has killed at least 34 people

I’ve been toying with giving up my chronic chronicling, perhaps even deleting the evidence – but something always stops meUnder an awning at night with the rain coming down. On the top deck of a bus travelling between parties at opposite ends of London. Leaning against the cubicle door of a pub toilet. These are some of the places I have written Google Docs diary entries in the past week. Mostly I do so via the Google app on my phone in a document titled Written Version of 2022. It contains everything you might imagine – slipshod accounts of nights out and lists of everything I recall drinking, lines from poems and films and songs, screenshots of paintings, recipes, scraps of news, seasonally dependent paeans or fury directed towards the weather, honest accounts of my emotional state, less honest accounts of my emotional state.At the time of writing, Written Version of 2022 is 52,000 words and 85 pages long. Sometimes I’ll augment it with new events two or three times per day. As things happen to me, I am already speculatively ordering them into a narrative, my so-called version of events becoming overlaid with their real-time unfurling. All this is to say, I’m worried my chronic diary-writing habit is starting to get in the way of me actually living my life.Lamorna Ash is the author of Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town Continue reading...

Bold campaign promises to reform criminal justice are stymied at the state level and amid partisan point-scoring in CongressTwo years to the day since George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Joe Biden stood in the White House and signed an executive order he argued should instill optimism and hope among reform advocates across the country.It was late afternoon in the spring of this year, and among the attendees were members of Floyd’s family and the family of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Black woman killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky, shortly before Floyd’s death. Continue reading...

From Djokovic’s deportation to the arrival of the future of the sport via farewells to two of the greatest players of all timeRoger Federer and Serena Williams were born one month apart and having built legendary careers that redefined the concept of longevity in the sport, this year they departed within three weeks of each other. Continue reading...

Former prosecutors say exhaustive report from Capitol attack committee ‘amounts to a detailed prosecution memo’After 18 months of investigating Donald Trump’s drive to overturn his 2020 election loss, the House committee on the January 6 insurrection has provided the Department of Justice with an exhaustive legal roadmap as it pursues potential criminal charges against the former US president.Amid reports the committee is already co-operating with DoJ by sharing evidence garnered from 1,000 witness interviews and thousands of documents, former federal prosecutors say the panel’s work offers a trove of evidence to strengthen the formidable task of DoJ prosecutors investigating the former US president and his top loyalists. Continue reading...

Ben Wikler, Wisconsin’s Democratic party chair, on midterm success that means ‘democracy is going to survive in our state’Ben Wikler spent so much time poring over polls ahead of the midterm elections that it eventually became too much to bear.“I was throwing up with anxiety,” Wikler, the chair of Wisconsin’s Democratic party, confessed to the Guardian. Continue reading...

As pressure grows on athletes to turn in elite performances, another side of human nature emerges, experts sayAltogether, it was quite a plunge for Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky, two stars of the professional fishing world. In a matter of weeks they went from nearly sealing top team honors to facing prison time.Their alleged crime? Filling the insides of their five Lake Erie walleyes with stones and supermarket filets at a north-east Ohio angling tournament. The tournament director, Jason Fischer, sounded the alarm after gutting their catch, screaming: “We got weights in fish!” The alleged perpetrators could only sit sheepishly behind the cops who had come to arrest them as an angry spectator mob closed in. Continue reading...

Yes, the Jaguars are peaking at the right time as they close in on a playoff berth. But their recent success drives home just how much the dark days of this franchise are in the pastAs fanbases go, no one had a more joyous last few weeks than Jacksonville. It wasn’t just following the Jags’ astonishing Week 15 overtime win over Dallas by taking care of the Jets 19-3 on Thursday night. It wasn’t just because that was the team’s third win in a row. Or that at 7-8 they now sit atop the AFC South and can clinch a home playoff game in Duval County with a Week 18 win over the reeling Titans.Yes, Jacksonville are peaking at the right time. But their recent success drives home just how much the dark days of this franchise are over. It’s kind of a miracle, really. To excel in the present, one must learn from the past. For a while, it wasn’t clear if Jags owner Shad Khan was capable of turning around the franchise he purchased in 2012. Continue reading...