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Gunman, 20, shot and killed two people at Central Visual and Performing Arts high school before police shot him deadA gunman broke into a St Louis high school on Monday and killed two people before police shot him dead.Several other people were wounded in a deadly intrusion that is certain to reignite debate about gun control in the US, even after Congress passed a bill earlier this year that tightened restrictions on access to firearms for some people who are considered to be at risk of carrying out violence. Continue reading...

Residents plan to ‘pay double’ in the Arizona metropolis, which has the highest inflation rate in the USJosé Beltrán wakes up at 4.45am, has a cup of coffee and lets his dog out before heading to the hospital for his 6.30am shift. For the next 12 hours, he works as a certified nursing assistant in a Covid unit, helping patients who are on mechanical ventilation. When he gets home, he has a couple of hours before bedtime – time he’ll spend having dinner with his family, then hitting the books as he studies to get into nursing school himself.It’s a grueling routine: last week alone, he was scheduled to work 57.5 hours at the hospital. The job can be harrowing and requires absolute focus: when there’s a code blue, a patient needs resuscitation and it’s up to Beltrán to help save a life. “It’s the highest thrill in my field,” he says. “It’s a privilege to be able to do that. I couldn’t do it if I didn’t love it.” Continue reading...

J Alexander Kueng to serve 3.5 years in prison to run concurrently with previous sentence he was given in federal trialOne of two former Minneapolis police officers charged with aiding and abetting the killing of George Floyd, the Black man whose violent death prompted street protests around the world, has pleaded guilty as part of an agreement with prosecutors hours before jury selection in his trial was to start.J Alexander Kueng pleaded guilty on Monday to aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s killing. As part of the deal, Keung will serve 3.5 years in prison to run concurrently with a previous three-year sentence he was given in a federal trial, though a more serious charge of aiding and abetting second-degree murder will now be dropped.The Associated Press contributed to this report. Continue reading...

Gory Halloween restaurant display called ‘disgusting’ and ‘sick’ in wake of controversial Netflix series about serial killerA Texas pizzeria is facing criticism for displaying a gory-looking pizza named after serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.Capital Pizza restaurant in Lubbock, a city in northwest Texas, introduced a store display featuring a pizza called the “Jeffrey Dahmer Special”. Continue reading...

The investigative journalist’s new audiobook, The Trump Tapes, digs deep into the threat the former president poses to democracyExplaining his decision to publish tapes of his 20 interviews with Donald Trump, renowned journalist Bob Woodward said he had finally recognized the “unparalleled danger” the former president poses to American democracy.His three books on the Trump presidency, Woodward said, “didn’t go far enough”. Continue reading...

Holga Castillo Olivares, 61, accused of concealing the fact that unnamed Sacramento teenager was staying at her homeFor nearly two years, a California teacher hid a boy who had been reported missing aged 15, authorities allege.Sacramento public school teacher Holga Castillo Olivares, 61, is accused of concealing the fact that the teenager was staying at her home despite a report that the boy was missing since the spring of 2020. Continue reading...

Ethan Crumbley, now 16, pleads guilty to all charges nearly a year after attack at Oxford high school in south-eastern MichiganA teenager pleaded guilty Monday to terrorism and first-degree murder in a Michigan school shooting that killed four students and put an extraordinary focus on the boy’s home life and the alleged role of his parents in the tragedy.Ethan Crumbley pleaded guilty to all 24 charges he faced nearly a year after the attack at Oxford high school in south-eastern Michigan. In the gallery, some relatives of the victims were weeping as assistant prosecutor Marc Keast described the crimes. Continue reading...

Texas senator wrote he ‘vehemently disagreed’ with colleagues’ call to allow certification of 2020 electionAs a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol during the January 6 attack in a desperate attempt to keep him in the Oval Office, Ted Cruz hid in a closet next to a stack of chairs, but he never thought twice about continuing to sow doubt about the former president’s electoral defeat, the Republican senator from Texas has revealed.Cruz revealed his whereabouts on the day of the deadly Capitol attack – which unsuccessfully aimed to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election – in a new book. The news was first reported by Newsweek. Continue reading...

The Tories have been feted for having minorities at the top, but that’s less of a panacea than you might think. Here’s why

Trump previously indicated he would agree to testify under live proceedings, but Pelosi says his lawyers will be unlikely to let him to speakAs jury selection begins in a criminal trial of the Trump Organization for tax fraud, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has taunted Donald Trump with being too cowardly to testify in another legal challenge bearing down on him.The House speaker goaded the former president in an MSNBC interview over the subpoena that was served on Friday, ordering him to testify under oath before the committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack. “I don’t think he’s man enough to show up,” Pelosi said. Continue reading...

The parliamentary party must unite around the new prime minister to end the fiasco of the past six yearsThe comedy is over. The clowns have backed off. Boris Johnson raced from his Caribbean beach to revive his political potency, but for once it failed him. Those who knew him best recoiled in horror. He decided in his arrogance that this was “not the right time”. The money markets shuddered and this morning recovered. Britain is a parliamentary democracy, not a mobocracy. The grownups are taking back control.Now that the former chancellor Rishi Sunak will be the new prime minister, a greater question looms on the horizon. Has he the authority required to decontaminate Liz Truss’s brief essay in public finance? That she could do such damage in just six weeks shows the alarming fragility of a modern government. Sunak’s motto of “integrity, professionalism and accountability” could not be clearer. But stability depends on a brutal new round of spending cuts due on 31 October.Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnistCrisis at No 10: How long can the Tory government hold on? Join Hugh Muir, Polly Toynbee, John Crace and Jessica Elgot discussing another failed Tory prime minister and what the future holds for the government, in this livestreamed event. On Wednesday 26 October, 7pm–8pm BST. Book tickets at theguardian.com/guardianlive Continue reading...

While a whopping 71% of voters said that American democracy is at risk, just 7% named it as the most important issue in this electionThis much is clear: Democrats are in trouble in the midterms. After an initial bump from the widespread outrage at an extremist supreme court that stripped American women of our nationwide right to safe, legal abortion, voters are recalibrating, and falling into a familiar midterm routine: supporting the opposition party. Republicans, according to new polling, are leading with voters nationwide, and especially in a handful of crucial state races that will determine control of Congress.But there’s something bigger going on here than just the usual political churn, or even the idea that voters are more motivated by pocketbook issues than amorphous ones like a potential future need for abortion. Voters are adapting to authoritarianism. And that doesn’t just portend a bad outcome for Democrats in November; it suggests America’s democratic future is at acute risk.Jill Filipovic is the author of the The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness Continue reading...

The final public hearing has wrapped up – we asked our readers to give their thoughts on whether the evidence stacked upThe House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol ended its likely final public hearing last week by subpoenaing Donald Trump to give evidence.Here, Guardian readers in the US share their views of the hearings, what they thought of the evidence given and if it had changed their mind. Continue reading...

The far-right Republican who is running for governor in Pennsylvania has extremist views – and he hasn’t softened his stance. Plus, how Barbra Streisand rose above jabs at her appearanceGood morning.As Pennsylvanians prepare to vote for their next governor, it is no exaggeration to say the future of American democracy is at stake.What does Mastriano believe? As a state senator in Pennsylvania, he said women who violated a proposed six-week abortion ban should be charged with murder. Mastriano frequently attacks trans people, and has said gay marriage should be illegal and same-sex couples should not be allowed to adopt children.Ten years after Mitt Romney’s loss, Republicans are fighting their first election since the presidency of Donald Trump. But far from entering next month’s midterms as the party of tolerance, diversity and sincerity, critics say, it has shown itself to be unapologetically the party of hate.Did Boris Johnson get much support? The former prime minister claimed to have won the support of 102 colleagues – two clear of the threshold needed – but only about 60 had publicly stated their support for him, leading many to believe he was bluffing.Who else is in the race? Penny Mordaunt is the third candidate in the race. She had only 30 public backers by Sunday night – 70 short of the number needed to get on the ballot paper, and is under pressure to withdraw and accept that Sunak has the support of the parliamentary party. Continue reading...

The 45-year-old had nothing to prove and plenty to lose by coming back from retirement. And now he’s stuck with a team that looks unable to support himIt was midway through the third quarter in Carolina on Sunday, with the Buccaneers trailing 14-0. At the peak of the Tom Brady Era, the deficit would have felt surmountable. After all, this was a matchup the oddsmakers almost considered a lock for Tampa Bay, listing them as 13.5-point favorites. This was the game for Brady and his offense to take out their anger on the lowly Panthers after losing to Pittsburgh last week. After all, in Carolina they were facing an interim head coach, former XFL quarterback PJ Walker, and a franchise which had just lost its best player.But after yet another stunning loss, this one 21-3 and somehow worse than last week’s, it’s safe to declare the Tom Brady Era as we know it O-V-E-R. As Oliver Connolly pointed out in these pages last week, many of Tampa’s woes are not down to Brady. The wideouts continued to be a detriment on Sunday, starting with Mike Evans dropping what should have been a touchdown on the opening drive. According to ESPN Stats and Info, Evans had 10.9 yards of separation between himself and the nearest defender. It was the most wide-open drop on a pass traveling over 30 yards this season. Continue reading...

The far-right Republican, running for governor in Pennsylvania, has extremist views – and he hasn’t softened his positions one bitAs Pennsylvanians prepare to vote for their next governor, it is no exaggeration to say the future of American democracy is at stake.Doug Mastriano, a retired army colonel who has enthusiastically indulged Donald Trump’s fantasy that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, is the Republican candidate. If he wins, he plans to deregister every single one of Pennsylvania’s 8.7 million voters. In future elections, Mastriano would choose who certifies – or doesn’t – the state’s election results. Continue reading...

Poverty is stalking the streets of Britain – and that’s the big issue the people in charge continue to duckIt won’t be Boris Johnson, but whoever the new prime minister turns out to be, they will have been dragged into office by “economic orthodoxy” and its henchmen. Their mandate is pre-written in the data you have been deluged with about the impact of unfunded tax cuts, from the depreciation of the pound to rises in interest rates, and the untenable upward effect this has had on mortgages and rents. The charts have spoken – an ideological experiment has gone terribly wrong and must be reversed.But it is a tale of two crises, and only one is being told. Attracting far less fanfare is another set of statistics about cold and hunger. More than a million people are expected to be pushed into poverty this winter. Their slide into deprivation will test an informal support network already stretched to its limit. Last week, the food bank charity the Trussell Trust launched an emergency appeal for donations because need for food banks has now outstripped donations. Charities like this, private citizens and schools are mobilising to bridge the gap. Continue reading...

Nevada’s athletic commission voted to oversee league of the controversial sport that has already seen one competitor dieCue the Will Smith jokes: the much-maligned president of the UFC, Dana White, has the green light for a new venture – the Power Slap League.Though much remains uncertain about the new league, slap fighting is pretty much what it sounds like: two people face each other and take turns smacking one another on the side of the head with an open hand. Continue reading...

Woman was taking dog out when she was ‘charged by an adult female black bear’ and sustained non-life threatening injuriesA woman in Washington state survived a bear attack on Saturday after she punched the animal in the nose, an official said.The woman, who has not been named, was taking her dog out in the town of Leavenworth, in the middle of the state, when she was “charged by an adult female black bear”, the Washington department of fish and wildlife said. Continue reading...

Jury ordered Jones to pay $965m in damages to families subjected to harassment from Jones’s lies about Newtown school shootingConspiracy theorist Alex Jones has asked a Connecticut judge to throw out a nearly $1bn verdict against him and order a new trial in a lawsuit by Sandy Hook families, who say they were subjected to harassment and threats from Jones’s lies about the 2012 Newtown school shooting.Jones filed the requests Friday, saying Judge Barbara Bellis’s pretrial rulings resulted in an unfair trial and “a substantial miscarriage of justice”. Continue reading...

Voters take advantage of in-person and mail-in voting as more than 5.8 million people already cast their vote by FridayEarly voting in the midterm elections is on track to match records set in 2018, according to researchers, as voters take advantage of both in-person and mail-in voting in states across the country.More than 5.8 million people had already cast their vote by Friday evening, CNN reported, a similar total to this stage in the 2018 elections, which had the highest turnout of any midterm vote in a generation. Continue reading...

Until Democrats tell it like it is, their electoral majorities will continue to be fragileA milder version of Liz Truss’s economically induced vanishing act may be occurring on this side of the Atlantic.Despite the Federal Reserve’s most aggressive campaign in generations to slow the economy and bring price increases under control, prices continue to climb.Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com Continue reading...

The tribally owned Mad River Brewing Company has partnered with the Giants to build an economic support system and back key causesThese days, you’ll see them sprinkled across Oracle Park, the stadium of the San Francisco Giants: bright blue cans with images of a steelhead fish flapping above a waterway, a deer with its head to the ground or a dam in the Klamath River.The cans are produced by the Mad River Brewing Company, owned by the largest federally recognized Indigenous nation in California, the Yurok Tribe. And in April, they became the first tribally owned craft beer sold in a major league sports stadium. Continue reading...

If you’ve done something wrong, admit your mistake and fix what you can. Otherwise, stand your groundRemember Anton Ego – the aptly-named villainous restaurant critic in the animated film Ratatouille? His scathing review of Chef Gusteau’s restaurant debatably contributed to the chef’s death. It was only the delicious food prepared by Remy – he was the rat – which saved the day for the celebrated Parisian eatery. Ego represented a cohort of food critics that dominated the restaurant industry for centuries. But where are those food critics today? Sure, there are still a few around. But most of them have been crowdsourced by review sites like Yelp.Yelp has become the place where people get their food reviews. And not just food. It’s retailers and services too. The site reportedly has logged 184m reviews worldwide and 178m unique visitor each month. Some 45% of people will check a Yelp review before visiting a business. That is great power. Continue reading...

Animal Collective, Bonobo and Mercury prize winner Little Simz among acts to cancel concertsMusicians are cancelling concerts and entire tours because the rising costs of staff and materials coupled with a drop off in ticket sales is making them too expensive to run.Earlier this month, US band Animal Collective cancelled forthcoming European dates as“not sustainable”. Within days, the UK downtempo producer Bonobo called time on future live shows in America, describing them as “exponentially expensive”. Then electronic musician Tourist rescheduled a US stint, saying “sometimes tickets just don’t get sold”. Continue reading...

As the leader enters his third term, there are increasing signs that the country is turning inwards, replacing the outside world with cyber ‘reality’In August, there was an unexpected stir in China about a scholarly article. The piece, published in a respected but specialist journal, argued that during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and Qing dynasty (1644-1911), China had been a country relatively closed off to the outside world. Most recent scholarship has assumed that this was a bad thing and that greater openness in the modern era had led to China’s rise in global standing and growth. But the article took a contrarian position, suggesting that there were economic and social advantages to the doors being closed in large part. The argument might have stayed in the realms of the academic. But it was then sent out on the social media feed of a thinktank closely linked to the Chinese Communist party (CCP). There was plenty of social media comment, mostly wondering whether the CCP was hinting that today, too, China should think about whether openness was quite such a good idea.At first glance, it might seem that the opening speech last Sunday by Xi Jinping at the 20th party congress was giving a very different message: indeed, there was a specific pledge praising the idea of openness in the next five years that will mark Xi’s third term. And attention at the end of the Congress has been on the sudden, still unexplained escorting of former president Hu Jintao out of the meeting, and the new Politburo standing committee whose members owe their standing almost entirely to Xi. But there are other signs that the China of the 2020s may be considerably less open than the one we have known for some four decades from the 1980s to 2020. China since the 80s has been defined by the idea that “reform” and “opening” have gone together. Yet that openness created an anomaly in the first two decades of the present century. China became a society highly connected with the outside world but also deeply controlled and monitored at home: open but illiberal, a combination that many theorists of democracy thought impossible. Unlike the old Soviet bloc, there was little sense that China tried to restrict its citizens, except political dissidents, from travelling abroad. The Chinese of the reform era studied in Britain, did deals in America, and saw the sights and bought luxury goods in Italy. Nobody stopped visitors from observing democracy in all its guises in the liberal world, but they understood that open discussion of the concept stopped when they arrived back at Beijing airport. Continue reading...

The Academy-award winner has been emailing a ‘daily dose of truth’ to mobilize supporters of the party to vote in NovemberFor the past month, Academy Award-winning documentary maker Michael Moore has been emailing out a daily missive “Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truth” on why he believes Democrats will win big in America’s midterm elections next month.Moore calls it “a brief honest daily dose of the truth – and the real optimism these truths offer us”. It also – at this moment in time – flies in the face of most political punditry, which sees a Republican win on the cards. Continue reading...

The menopause market is worth an estimated $600bn – and producers are falling over themselves to target women with everything they might need, from underwear to scentsFor my birthday last week, the algorithm gave me perimenopause ads. Happy birthday Eva, here is a future of anxiety, mood swings, brain fog, hot flushes and irregular periods, no gift receipt available sorry bye I love you. To be clear – Instagram is being previous. I remain calm, cool and bleeding, but also a member of the first generation of women actively aware of our soon coming menopause. Which has obvious benefits but also, less discussed, irritations.The menopause revolution happened in stages. The first stage involved talking about it. People like Davina McCall started discussing the impact of menopause on her life – her body, her mental health – in ways that opened up conversations between women and their doctors, and their employers, and their families. Data emerged: one in three women were choosing not to go to their GP, despite 77% finding at least one symptom of menopause “very difficult”. Continue reading...

From Norwegian pipelines to French ocean floor cables, vital infrastructure is vulnerable to Russian attacks designed to destabilise Europe

Former CFO is expected to testify about off-the-books compensation scheme to evade paying payroll taxesThe Trump Organization is set to face criminal tax fraud charges on Monday in New York in a trial that could start to tease out the many allegations against the company and by extension its patriarch, Donald J Trump.It comes as the former US president faces a maze of legal troubles and mounting costs – by some estimates running at close to $4m a month to his leadership PAC – over his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss, the removal of government documents from the White House when he left office and a defamation case relating to a rape allegation. Continue reading...

Far from entering the midterms as the party of tolerance, diversity and sincerity, critics say, the Republican party has shown itself to be the oppositeRepublicans were in trouble. Mitt Romney, their US presidential nominee, had been crushed by Barack Obama. The party commissioned an “autopsy” report that proposed a radical rethink. “If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans,” it said, “we have to engage them and show our sincerity.”Ten years after Romney’s loss, Republicans are fighting their first election since the presidency of Donald Trump. But far from entering next month’s midterms as the party of tolerance, diversity and sincerity, critics say, they have shown itself to be unapologetically the party of hate. Continue reading...

Uncensored America, a conservative student group, has invited Gavin McInnes to speak at the school in late OctoberStudents at the prestigious US university Penn State are outraged that Gavin McInnes, founder of the far-right group the Proud Boys, is coming to speak at their Pennsylvania college on Monday.The Proud Boys, an often violent US extremist group, have been labeled a terrorist organization by New Zealand and Canada. Many of its members align with white supremacist, antisemitic or Islamophobic ideologies. And five of its members were charged for their actions during the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Continue reading...

The ‘fake heiress’ who also went by Anna Delvey speaks about her time in prison, being back in New York and what’s nextAnna Sorokin is sitting on a parapet on the roof of her fifth floor East Village walk-up, unperturbed by the sheer drop behind her – confidence, one might think, that came in handy during her rise from obscurity and then infamy as a fake New York City heiress known as Anna Delvey who captured Manhattan’s glitzy art scene.It has been six years since she was arrested in Malibu, California, and almost four since a jury found her guilty of second-degree grand larceny, theft of services and one count of first-degree attempted grand larceny. Now Sorokin is back in New York and making news again. Continue reading...

From the civil war to the January 2021 insurrection, the white nationalist response to democratic defeat has been to attempt to destroy US institutions and our national agreements. We shouldn’t tolerate thisThe current social contract in America is not an expression of our deepest values, greatest hopes and highest ideals. Quite the contrary, it is the result of a centuries-long series of compromises with white supremacists.In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson included a forceful denunciation of slavery and the slave trade, condemning the “execrable commerce” as “cruel war against human nature itself”. The leaders of the states engaged in the buying and selling of Black bodies balked at the offending passage, and Jefferson explained the decision to compromise, writing, “The clause … was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and a Guardian US columnist. This is an extract from his latest book, How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good (New Press, October 2022) Continue reading...

From Van Morrison to Latin pop, music is the signpost that takes me to far-flung places and home againWe’ve all said it (or indeed screamed it) when a song from our past comes on: “What a throwback!”Music soundtracks our lives. It becomes ingrained in our memory alongside our biggest milestones, from weddings to funerals, summer lovin‘ to heartbreak. Continue reading...

Randy Cox was arrested by Connecticut law enforcement and en route a detention center when he was knocked against a van wallA man who was left partially paralyzed while in police custody has had all criminal charges against him dropped.On 19 June, 36-year-old Randy Cox of New Haven, Connecticut, was arrested on charges of illegal handgun possession. Cox was put into a police transport van without any seatbelts and was en route to a detention center when the officer behind the wheel, Oscar Diaz, suddenly braked. Video footage released by Cox’s family and published by CNN shows a handcuffed Cox sliding across the bench and hitting the van’s wall with his head. Continue reading...

Hervis Rogers, who drew national praise, was arrested by state attorney general Ken Paxton for voting illegally while on paroleA Texas judge has dismissed voter fraud charges against Hervis Rogers, the Houston man who drew national attention – and praise – for waiting seven hours in line to vote in the March 2020 presidential primary.Rogers, who is Black, became a symbol of tenacity when news of the circumstances surrounding his voting experience surfaced. He stuck around – despite working two jobs, including one beginning at 6am – and was among the last, potentially the last, Texas resident to vote, according to KERA news. Continue reading...

Federal appeals court temporarily halts Biden’s cancellation of student debt after motion brought by six Republican-led statesThe Biden administration is urging student loan borrowers to continue applying for debt relief despite a federal appeals court order late on Friday that temporarily halted this program.“[This] temporary order does not prevent borrowers from applying for student debt relief,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement following the eighth circuit court of appeals’ temporary stay. Continue reading...