Predominantly white New Hampshire reportedly could be scheduled later with South Carolina tipped to move up to firstDemocrats are poised to shake up the way in which they nominate presidential candidates, after Joe Biden said the primary process should better represent the party’s non-white voters.Biden has reportedly told Democrats that Iowa, the state that has led off the Democratic voting calendar since 1976, should be moved down the calendar, with South Carolina instead going first. Continue reading...
Whistleblower is ‘happy and thankful to the Russian Federation’ for his citizenship, lawyer saysEdward Snowden has received a Russian passport after swearing an oath of allegiance to the country that has sheltered him from US authorities since 2013, his lawyer has said.Snowden, 39, a former intelligence contractor who leaked secret files that were reported on by the Guardian, was granted Russian citizenship in an order signed by Vladimir Putin in September. Continue reading...
Infowars host and conspiracy theorist ordered to pay $473m in damages on top of nearly $1bn verdict handed down in OctoberRightwing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones filed for personal chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Texas on Friday, according to a court filing, as he faces nearly $1.5bn in court judgments over conspiracy theories he spread about the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre.Jones was ordered by a Connecticut court last month to pay $473m in punitive damages on top of a nearly $1bn verdict handed down in October for his defamatory lies that the shooting was faked. Continue reading...
Coach’s Oranje can be scintillating but going into the last-16 tie with the USA they are yet to dazzle for a full 90 minutesWhat is cute game management and what is boring football? This has become the existential question of Louis van Gaal’s third Netherlands tenure as he plots a route to the World Cup final.It was the narrative before and after Tuesday’s 2-0 victory over Qatar that sealed a serene passage to Saturday’s last-16 showdown with the USA and, frankly, it is annoying him. When one inquisitor wondered if fans deserved more sparkling fare the man known as the Iron Tulip showed his metal. “Why don’t you write it’s boring? I don’t think things are as bad as you say,” he countered. Continue reading...
The Out Loud Men’s Chorus, queer-affirming clergy and LGBTQ+ spaces have provided support after the Club Q shootingBelow the vaulted dome and dark wood beams of a church in Colorado Springs, a gay men’s choir rehearsed for a concert that’s taken on new meaning after an LGBTQ+ nightclub became the site of a gruesome shooting that killed five and wounded 17 last month.“There is no peace on earth, I said,” the chorus sang. “For hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth.” Continue reading...
Jobs market remains strong even as Fed imposes biggest series of rate rises in decades in effort to tame inflationThe US added 263,000 jobs in November, the labor department announced on Friday, another strong month of jobs growth. The unemployment rate remained at 3.7%, close to a 50-year low.Employers hired 284,000 new positions in October and 269,000 in September and the latest figures show hiring has remained resilient despite rising interest rates and the announcement of a series of layoffs at technology and real estate companies. Continue reading...
Irreverent job posting seeks candidate to lead long-running battle against rats, which have increased in number post-pandemicHate rats? Are you a “somewhat bloodthirsty” New Yorker with excellent communication skills and “a general aura of bad assery”? Then you might have what it takes to be the city’s new rat tsar.Mayor Eric Adams’s administration posted a job listing this week seeking someone to lead the city’s long-running battle against rats. The official job title is “director of rodent mitigation”, although it was promptly dubbed the rat tsar. Salary range is $120,000 to $170,000. Continue reading...
Amid zero-Covid protests, crackdown on VPNs used for banned social media. Plus, Senate rejects paid sick leave for rail workersGood morning.Chinese authorities have initiated the highest “emergency response” level of censorship, according to leaked directives. It includes a crackdown on virtual private networks (VPNs) and other methods of bypassing online censorship after unprecedented protests demonstrated widespread public frustration with the zero-Covid policy.“Freedom in China is precious”: Tiananmen Square protest veteran salutes new generation. Activists have despaired for decades as Beijing has hardened its grip. Now they see a turning tide.Winnie the Pooh joins Chinese Covid lockdown protests. Disney stores in Japan are selling a line of merchandise featuring a frowning Pooh looking at a blank sheet of white paper – a symbol of ongoing protests in China.Biden defends contract deal. He noted the wage increases it contains. “I negotiated a contract no one else could negotiate,” Joe Biden said. “What was negotiated was so much better than anything they ever had.” Continue reading...
Former tax collector Joel Greenberg apologizes in court for ‘shameful conduct’ after pleading guilty to six federal crimesA former Florida tax collector whose arrest led to a federal investigation into US congressman Matt Gaetz has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for sex trafficking of a minor and other offenses.Joel Greenberg, former tax collector for Seminole county, was accused of stalking a political opponent, public corruption, making fake licenses and scheming to submit false claims for a federal loan. Continue reading...
University of California campuses come to a standstill as 48,000 student workers strike for better payThree weeks of strikes by university academics has brought campuses across California to standstill. Labs are closed, assignments go ungraded. Graduate students have walked off the job, professors have cancelled class, and even construction staff have put down their tools in solidarity.The strike is groundbreaking – the largest in the history of US higher education and part of a wave of organizing at college campuses across the country. It has brought together 48,000 graduate workers, academic researchers and postdoctoral scholars within the nine-campus University of California system who say the low wages they are paid make it impossible to live in the cities where they work. The most common salary for graduate workers is $23,247, according to the academic workers unions. Continue reading...
LeBron James has questioned the media over their failure to ask him about a controversial photo featuring Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. The Washington Post recently unearthed a photo from 1957 in which a teenaged Jones is in the crowd while a mob of white boys blocks six Black students from entering Arkansas’ North Little Rock High. The photo was taken in a period when schools had started to desegregate in the United States. 'It seems like to me that the whole Jerry Jones situation, the photo, and I know it was years and years ago, and we all make mistakes, I get it. It seems like it's just been buried under,' he said.
I grew up loving Dutch football but from what I’ve seen so far in Qatar, the US are more than capable of making the last eightThe first time I realized that soccer was the world’s game was in 1978. I came home one day from playing soccer and I saw my father standing on the living room table and screaming at the television. He was wearing an orange shirt, drinking a bottle of something and eating what looked like herring in a jar. I realized he was watching the World Cup final, Argentina against his beloved Netherlands (we have Dutch roots). My father wasn’t a big drinker, but he was intoxicated both with what he was drinking and watching. My mother was in the other room shaking her head, as if to say, “I can’t condone this.”In the course of the game, my father’s demeanor went from elation to sorrow to depression to “get away from me.” It wasn’t until a month later at dinner that my mother finally slammed her hand down on the table and said to my father: “David, talk to your son”, meaning my brother. See, the problem was my brother’s name is Brandt. And Ernie Brandts was the Dutch center-back responsible for one of Argentina’s goals. My father has not spoken to my brother for the entirety of that summer until my mother finally begged him. My brother smiled, my father realized his behavior was completely outlandish, he hugged my brother and it was over. But in that moment, I realized that this sport can touch people deeply, beyond reason and comprehension. Continue reading...
The Dutch boast youth and experience along with a few exceptional individual talents. The Americans will need to be at their best to make the quarter-finalsThe Dutch were comfortable Group A winners in Qatar courtesy of 2-0 wins over Senegal and Qatar and a 1-1 tie with Ecuador. They have reached the tournament 11 times, though shockingly didn’t qualify for Russia 2018 (sounds familiar). The nation lost on penalties to Argentina in the 2014 semi-finals and were runners-up in 1974 and 1978 during the Johan Cruyff Total Football era (though Cruyff didn’t play in ’78, when he was nearly kidnapped, lost his fortune investing in a pig farm then joined the NASL), and in 2010 during the Nigel de Jong Kung Fu era. Continue reading...
House judiciary committee account contained cryptic post - ‘Kanye. Elon. Trump’ – that seemingly expressed support for YeLeading Republicans in the US Congress have deleted a tweet that seemingly expressed support for Ye, a rapper formerly known as Kanye West, after he praised Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.Since October, a Twitter account run by Republicans on the House of Representatives’ judiciary committee has contained a cryptic post that said: “Kanye. Elon. Trump” – apparently claiming Ye, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and former president Donald Trump as their own. Continue reading...
The city is looking for ‘somewhat bloodthirsty’ applicants to a new role designed to tackle its very old rodent problemHate rats? Are you a “somewhat bloodthirsty” New Yorker with excellent communication skills and “a general aura of badassery”? Then you might have what it takes to be the city’s new rat czar.Mayor Eric Adams’s administration posted a job listing this week seeking someone to lead the city’s long-running battle against rats. The official job title is “director of rodent mitigation”, although it was promptly dubbed the rat czar. Salary range is $120,000 to $170,000. Continue reading...
Investigation says personal information of nearly 200,000 people was released as officials didn’t understand their websiteCalifornia’s department of justice mistakenly posted the names, addresses and birthdays of nearly 200,000 gun owners on the internet because officials didn’t follow policies or understand how to operate their website, according to an investigation released Wednesday.The investigation, conducted by an outside law firm hired by the California department of justice, found that personal information for 192,000 people was downloaded 2,734 times by 507 unique IP addresses during a roughly 12-hour period in late June. All of those people had applied for a permit to carry a concealed gun. Continue reading...
The Cochise county board of supervisors voted 2-0 to approve the results after threat of lawsuitsA rural Arizona county finally certified its election results on Thursday after a judge ordered the county’s board of supervisors to do their jobs just a couple of hours earlier.The Cochise county board of supervisors voted 2-0 to approve the midterm results, allowing the statewide canvass of the election to continue as planned on 5 December. A third member of the board who had spearheaded the effort to delay certification, Tom Crosby, did not attend the vote. Continue reading...
Decision marks decisive defeat as judges opine the request should never have been granted in the first placeA federal appeals court on Thursday terminated the special master review of documents seized from Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago property, paving the way for the justice department to regain access to the entirety of the materials for use in the criminal investigation surrounding the former president.The decision by the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit marked a decisive defeat for Trump in a ruling that said a lower-court judge should never have granted his request for an independent arbiter in the first place and is unlikely to be overturned in the event of appeal. Continue reading...
Bill goes to Biden’s desk for his signature after legislation that binds rail firms and workers to settlement plan passes 80-15The Senate moved quickly on Thursday to avert a rail strike that the Biden administration and business leaders warned would have had devastating consequences for the nation’s economy.The Senate passed a bill to bind rail companies and workers to a proposed settlement that was reached between the rail companies and union leaders in September. That settlement had been rejected by some of the 12 unions involved, creating the possibility of a strike beginning 9 December. Continue reading...
US president promises ‘tweaks’ to Inflation Reduction Act that has led to French and European concern over state subsidiesJoe Biden has sought to heal a rift with France’s President Emmanuel Macron and other European leaders over trade, admitting there are “glitches” in $739bn legislation that he says can be fixed.The US president was speaking on Thursday while hosting Macron for the first state visit of his presidency. The leaders expressed unity on support for Ukraine’s war against Russia but faced questions about their differences on trade. Continue reading...
I witnessed the racist remarks, but blaming one person alone distracts from the depth and breadth of racism in that institutionI generally avoid news about the royals. So it was a real eye-opener to find myself at the centre of a royal story. At a reception on Tuesday to honour those working to end violence against women and girls, I witnessed racist remarks from a member of the royal household directed at my friend and fellow activist, Ngozi Fulani. Lady Hussey’s prolonged interrogation about where Ngozi was really from, what her nationality was and where her people were from, was not – as many people have insisted to me over the past 24 hours – the kind of well-meaning curiosity that all of us experience from time to time (though it’s possible that Hussey believed that it was).“Hackney” was Ngozi’s answer, but Hussey refused to accept this. Her response implied that Black and brown people couldn’t really be British. It implied that we were trespassing – and it made me reflect on the increasingly hostile environment of this disunited kingdom.Mandu Reid is leader of the Women’s Equality party Continue reading...
by Martin Pengelly in New York and agencies on (#66CMF)
Democratic-led House ways and means committee does not have long to decide what to do, with majority to change in JanuaryA US House of Representatives committee has a little more than a month to decide what to do with six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns, after a years-long court fight ended late on Wednesday with the records handed to Congress.The supreme court ordered the release of Trump’s returns to the House ways and means committee last week, rejecting the former president’s plea. Trump has consistently accused the Democratic-led committee of being politically motivated. Continue reading...
Worry after agency spreadsheet was erroneously posted online ‘while performing routine updates’ and was up for about five hoursUS Immigration and Customs Enforcement said on Wednesday that it had inadvertently posted to its website the personal information of more than 6,000 people in its custody.The information included names, nationalities, detention centers where the people were held and unique numbers used to identify them in government records, according to Human Rights First, an advocacy group that discovered the leak on Monday. Continue reading...
Through Fleetwood Mac’s most turbulent times, she held the line – and wrote some of their most beautiful, bittersweet songs. We pay tribute to Christine McVieAccording to a handwritten note Stevie Nicks posted on social media on Wednesday, Christine McVie’s bandmates in Fleetwood Mac hadn’t even known she was ill until a few days before her death. “I wanted to be in London; I wanted to get to London,” Nicks lamented. “But I was told to wait.”It’s a sad story, but it somehow seems very Christine McVie. She gave every impression of being unfailingly modest and understated while playing a vital role in one of the most successful rock bands in history, maintaining a remarkably clear-eyed view of their strengths and failings: she bluntly dismissed the last two albums she made with the band, 1990’s Behind the Mask and 1995’s Time, as “terrible”. She appeared to sail through the soap opera that was Fleetwood Mac in the mid- to late 70s – a broiling mass of failed personal relationships, cocaine-fulled egotism and excess – with such a degree of equanimity that Nicks took to calling her Mother Earth. Somehow, she pulled off the not-inconsiderable feat of seeming to be at one remove from the band’s madness while in reality being in the thick of it. Continue reading...
Former president to rally for Raphael Warnock against Trump-backed Republican as early voting closes in Senate runoffBarack Obama will campaign for Raphael Warnock in Georgia on Thursday night, as early voting in the US Senate runoff closes and as Herschel Walker, the Republican challenger to the Democratic incumbent, faces yet more controversy.On Thursday, a former girlfriend told the Daily Beast that in 2005, when she caught Walker with another woman, he “grew enraged, put his hands on her chest and neck, and swung his fist at her”. Continue reading...
The youngest skipper at the Qatar World Cup has starred in midfield for the Americans while winning praise for his wisdom and leadership off the pitchAs the youngest United States men’s national team in generations plotted their return to soccer’s biggest stage after an eight-year absence, manager Gregg Berhalter relied on a captaincy-by-committee approach. More than a dozen different American players took on the role of captain over the past three and a half years as Berhalter rotated the armband across a leadership collective drawn from the team’s senior players.But when the time finally arrived to select a World Cup captain, the question was put to a player vote. To no one’s surprise, Tyler Adams got the call from his peers. Continue reading...
US president and first lady to treat French counterparts with Oregon blue cheese and American sparkling wine at lavish dinnerIt’s a bold gambit by the Americans, to meet the French in an arena over which they have long been masters par excellence: wine and cheese.But such is Jill Biden’s sang-froid that she will offer America’s best to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, his wife, Brigitte Macron, and their entourage at a lavish White House dinner on Thursday – just one of the elaborate details and valuable gifts forming part of the diplomatic dance surrounding this state visit. Continue reading...
US railway workers threatened to strike until they got paid sick leave. The president’s administration chose political cowardiceIt’s sad, really. The beleaguered labor unions of America thought that they had finally found a true friend. In Joe Biden, they had a man who was the most pro-union president in my lifetime – a low bar to clear, but something. Yet this week we found out that when the fight got hard, Biden had the same thing to say to working people that his Democratic predecessors have for decades: “You’ll never get anything you want if I don’t win; but once I win, I can’t do the things you need, because then I wouldn’t be able to win again.”At the same time that thousands of union members are fanned out across the state of Georgia knocking on doors to get Raphael Warnock elected and solidify Democratic control of the Senate – to save the working class, of course! – Biden decided to sell out workers in the single biggest labor battle of his administration. Rather than allowing the nation’s railroad workers to exercise their right to strike, he used his power to intervene and force them to accept a deal that a majority of those workers found to be unacceptable.Hamilton Nolan is a writer at In These Times Continue reading...
Opponents of meaningful action are trying to sidestep the immediacy of the threat to our planetExpert opinion is settled and public opinion united on the urgency of climate action. If our politics or our discourse were in any way functional, there would be no confusion, no debate. We would simply be proceeding from one bold practical action to the next, following the blueprints laid out by the Climate Change Committee.Instead, we have energy policies stitched together from reheated cliches, which on the one hand doesn’t matter, since no prime minister has been stable or focused enough to iterate them since Brexit, but on the other hand does matter. There is nothing more depressing than to go back to Amber Rudd’s “energy reset” speech of 2015: what if, instead of dismissing renewables incentives as “Blairite”, she’d actually taken them seriously and built on them? What if she’d pushed energy-efficient homes instead of the “unfettered market”, what if she’d made a plan to reduce dependence on gas from Vladimir Putin rather than increase it? “Spoiler alert,” wrote the renewables entrepreneur Bruce Davis at the time: “this doesn’t end well for bill payers.” And nor has it. Continue reading...
Wave of illness caused by RSV, influenza and other infections has seen more than three-quarters of pediatric hospital beds fullWhen his son was born seven weeks early, weighing only 2.5lbs, RH watched as the little boy stayed in the neonatal intensive care unit for 37 days.When they finally left the hospital, RH, who asked to use his initials for health privacy, breathed a sigh of relief. The baby, despite his difficult start, was perfectly healthy. But only a few months later, the child landed back in the hospital with a dangerous virus, RSV. Continue reading...
It’s the word of the year, according to one dictionary publisher, and after 84 years it deserves its spot in the limelightOf all the words that have, over the last few years, entered mainstream usage to describe the malevolence of others, by far the most powerful is the term gaslighting. I use it a lot, and find myself thinking each time that this is what it must have been like when the term “sexism” took off in the late 1960s, giving shape to an amorphous sense of unease latterly denied. As with other, relatively new descriptors – primarily “toxic” and “boundaries” – accusations of gaslighting are a quick and effective way to end any discussion, since denial of gaslighting is the primary signifier of gaslighting. Set and match!Credit where it’s due: we have Donald Trump to thank for this state of affairs, and such is his hubris it would be entirely in keeping with the man to claim as victory the fact that a term popularised to describe his appalling behaviour was this week unveiled by Merriam-Webster, the dictionary publisher, as its word of the year. It was Trump’s ability to deny, with absolute certainty and total indignation, something he had moments earlier said or done that pushed a marginal term invented in 1938 fully into the mainstream. Now it is available to all of us to use and enjoy.Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...
Eric Salata faced investigation over claims he assaulted two women at his clinic after incapacitating themA doctor in Florida who was accused of drugging and raping his patients has been found dead, according to local authorities.Investigators could not immediately determine how Eric Salata, 54, died when his body was discovered in woodland on Monday. But they said he had a gunshot wound to the head, was lying next to a pistol, and that they did not suspect he had been the victim of a crime. Continue reading...
Britain’s cost of living crisis is disastrous for one of us and will barely touch the other. The best answer is a wealth taxThe two of us are from very different worlds. One of us is a millionaire investor, the other a care worker and trade union member. We have totally different experiences of the economy, but we share a fundamental belief that it is broken – and the government in its autumn statement did nothing to fix it. Continue reading...
England needed to ‘play better with the ball in the attacking third’, according to team captain Harry Kane. But what on earth does that mean?I started out in journalism presenting programmes about financial matters. I tried to take this often complicated subject matter and make it as simple as possible. When I moved into presenting football on television, it often felt as if we were endeavouring to do the opposite – take something as simple as football and make it as complicated as possible. Don’t get me wrong: the analysis of the best ex-footballers in the business, as long as they use the most accessible language, can be fascinating. My favourite to work with was the former Arsenal and England player Lee Dixon. To make sure what he was saying was intelligible, he used to run it past me first. He called me, very few might say unkindly, his idiot filter. But I was very proud to perform this function for him because I was very good at it.Working Lunch was the business programme I co-presented with Adam Shaw, who was as expert on matters financial as Lee was on football. And, like Lee, Adam used me as a bit of an idiot filter, too. Interestingly, Adam used to say of football that he’d like to be more into it but found a lot of the language around it baffling. This made him feel excluded, as if he was a guest at the wrong party. Continue reading...
Aerial images show Hawaii's Mauna Loa, the world's largest active volcano, spewing lava and sending glowing streams across its surface. The volcano is erupting for the first time since 1984, ending its longest quiet period in recorded history. Hawaii officials say the 2022 eruption does not pose any threat to property, though unpleasant volcanic gases and fine ash may drift downslope. Mauna Loa rises 13,679ft (4,169 meters) above the Pacific Ocean and dominates the Island of Hawaii, also known as the Big Island
The jury said they could not come to a consensus over the allegations after a month-long trialA judge declared a mistrial Wednesday after jurors said they were hopelessly deadlocked at the trial of That ’70s Show actor Danny Masterson, who is charged with three rapes.Los Angeles judge Charlaine F Olmedo had ordered the jurors to take Thanksgiving week off and keep deliberating after they told her on 18 November that they could not come to a consensus about the rape allegations after a month-long trial in which the Church of Scientology played a supporting role. Continue reading...
Lawmakers vote to impose tentative contract deal on a dozen unions as Bernie Sanders calls for sick-day amendmentThe House of Representatives on Wednesday voted to approve a bill to block a potentially crippling US rail strike – but also to mandate paid sick time for the workers.In the US Senate, Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats, announced that he would object to fast-tracking Joe Biden’s proposal that Congress impose an industrial settlement, until he can get a roll-call vote on the amendment that would guarantee seven paid sick days for rail workers. Continue reading...
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