Kenneth Walker claimed officers violated his rights when they burst into Taylor’s apartment and killed her in March 2020The city of Louisville will pay $2m to settle two lawsuits filed by the boyfriend of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman killed by police during a no-knock raid at her apartment two years ago, the Washington Post reported.Kenneth Walker filed the lawsuits against the Kentucky city in state and federal court, claiming plainclothes officers violated his rights when they burst into Taylor’s apartment while the couple was asleep and killed her on 13 March 2020, during the botched raid. Continue reading...
The monarchy’s link to slavery is glossed over in Britain. Despite their differences, William and Harry have a chance to do betterIn the Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan, the Duke of Sussex bemoans the racist element of the abuse suffered by Meghan on social media and in the UK press. He also addresses racism in wider British society and behind palace walls. “In this family,” he says, “you are sometimes part of the problem rather than part of the solution.”As a Black American living in London, I am often struck by the different ways in which Britain and America grapple with the question of race. In the US, despite living alongside enslaved people and their underserved descendants for four centuries, after the death of George Floyd in 2020 many white people were, or at least seemed, astounded to learn that structural racism still existed.Keith Magee is a writer and academic and chair of the Guardian Foundation. He is the author of Prophetic Justice: Race, Religion and Politics Continue reading...
Four quarterbacks went in the top 10 of the 2018 draft. Their varied fortunes have illustrated the difficulties of building the foundations for successFour quarterbacks were among the first 10 players selected in the 2018 NFL draft. Lamar Jackson, who went 32nd to the Baltimore Ravens, made it five first-round QBs, the second-most ever. The New York Times called it a “quarterback frenzy” in the next day’s paper.Of the four quarterbacks who went in the top 10 – expected to step right in and contribute – only Josh Allen, of Wyoming and the Buffalo Bills, is still with the team that drafted him. Josh Rosen, from UCLA, was released in October from his sixth NFL team (he still banked $18m in career earnings, more than $1m for each touchdown pass he has thrown in the NFL). Continue reading...
Portal said searches for the word increased by 1,400% after Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked to define it in her confirmation hearingThe website Dictionary.com has named its word of the year for 2022: woman.In a statement, the website said: “Our selection of woman … reflects how the intersection of gender, identity and language dominates the current cultural conversation and shapes much of our work as a dictionary.” Continue reading...
Ron DeSantis asks state supreme court to investigate undefined ‘wrongdoing’ related to vaccinationsThe Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, said on Tuesday he will petition the state supreme court to convene a grand jury to investigate “any and all wrongdoing” with respect to Covid-19 vaccines.The Republican governor, often mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2024, did not say what wrongdoing the panel would investigate, but he suggested it would be in part aimed at jogging loose more information from pharmaceutical companies about the vaccines and potential side effects. Continue reading...
Company founder was arrested and charged with running a ‘house of cards’ in ‘one of the biggest financial frauds in US history’It has been another crazy 48 hours in the collapse of FTX, once the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.On Monday, the company’s now-infamous founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was arrested in the Bahamas, a day before he was set to give testimony before Congress. On Tuesday US authorities issued damning charges that the 30-year-old former billionaire ran a “house of cards” and was behind “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history”. Continue reading...
Stressed out from multiple yuletide family visits, we fled to New York one year and returned with a new-found clarity about what was really importantChristmas is the most magical time of the year. But is it really? Now I’m no grinch. In fact, I absolutely love Christmas. Yet there was a stage when I needed to have a holiday from this popular holiday. So one year we decided to “skip Christmas” to simplify our Christmas Day.The festive season is overwhelming for many, especially with increased financial pressures and family obligations. A recent report revealed one in six people believe Christmas is the most stressful time of the year. Family conflict is often rife, with some sort of bickering over presents or food. And then there’s the family member who has too much to drink and thinks it is their duty to sing a “special” rendition of Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas. Unlike friends, we can’t choose our relatives! Continue reading...
The pair of jeans, recovered from an 1857 shipwreck, has sparked debate over whether they are a predecessor of the modern Levi’sPulled from a sunken trunk at an 1857 shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina, work pants that auction officials describe as the oldest known pair of jeans in the world have sold for $114,000.The white, heavy-duty miner’s pants with a five-button fly were among 270 Gold Rush-era artefacts that sold for a total of nearly $1m in Reno earlier this month, according to Holabird Western Americana Collections. Continue reading...
President and Antony Blinken woo nations at summit in Washington in hope they will align with west rather than Russia or ChinaDozens of African leaders have assembled in Washington for a summit aimed at rebooting US relations on the continent, which have languished in recent years.The US-Africa summit, the first since 2014, will be the biggest international gathering in Washington since the pandemic and the most substantial commitment by a US administration to boosting its influence in the region for almost a decade. Continue reading...
The 20-year-old is an avatar of US hopes as fans look forward to 2026. In the present he’s a useful tool for Gregg Berhalter’s many criticsGio Reyna admitted on Monday that he sulked after being told he would have a limited role at the World Cup.I know, I know. This is what passes for scandal in Gregg Berhalter’s America. Come back to me if your players butt or bite an opponent, get kicked out of the tournament for drugs, arrested for theft or indulge in a naked pool party. Continue reading...
Chat group on the platform Signal was reportedly used to send end-to-end encrypted information about FTX and its hedge fundSam Bankman-Fried and other members of the inner circle of the collapsed crypto exchange FTX allegedly formed a chat group on the encrypted platform Signal under the name “Wirefraud”.The Australian Financial Review reported that the Wirefraud chat group was used to send end-to-end encrypted information about FTX and its crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, in the run-up to the implosion of the exchange. According to the newspaper, members of the secret group included Bankman-Fried, his FTX partners Zixiao “Gary” Wang and Nishad Singh, and the CEO of Alameda Research Caroline Ellison. Continue reading...
More than 15 million people under winter advisory while several areas in midwest and Great Plains face intense snowstormsMore than 15 million people are under a winter advisory as of Tuesday, as several areas in the midwest and Great Plains face intense snowstorms, Axios reported.Storm warnings are in effect across a dozen states, including parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana and South Dakota. Continue reading...
As a miserable year limps towards its end, let’s talk about the silly trends that have cut through the gloom. Sorry if you came here for geopoliticsWant to play a fun end-of-2022 game? That was a rhetorical question, I’m afraid. You have no choice. They’re compulsory at this time of year. In this game you have to answer the question: “Is this the name of a trend widely discussed by the media in 2022, or is it a deranged combination of words that I just made up?” Four of the following are the former and one is the latter. Here we go: 1) frazzled Englishwoman, 2) goblin mode, 3) butter boards, 4) cabbage circles, 5) quiet quitting.Before I reveal the answer, I want to point out that this was a surprisingly difficult quiz to devise. I’d think of something ridiculous, then Google it and find out that it was an actual trend. (And by “trend” I mean a phrase that a TikToker coined and content-hungry media people, such as myself, wrote frantic thinkpieces about.) But the answer, before you all die of suspense, is number four. Yep, even the frazzled Englishwoman trend was real. Apparently an Australian TikToker went viral with an observation that her fellow Australians were suddenly dressing like middle-class Englishwomen in Richard Curtis films from the noughties: sensible, charity-shop-chic vibes, eclectic scarf collections, damp air of worry. Anyone who has ever met a middle-class Englishwoman will immediately recognise this aesthetic and wonder why it never had a name before.Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...
They say they’re seeking a new life but the Sussexes seem obsessed with their old one, and people enraged by them can talk about little elseOf all the charges laid at the door of Harry and Meghan, we can reasonably discount the idea that being paid by Netflix is the sin to end all sins. I’m not sure how people think the British royal family have historically accrued their vast wealth, but a contract with a streaming giant is right down the list of money-spinning horrors.Let’s face it, there are a lot worse ways to lay your hands on a reported £88m in today’s money. No one dissolved the monasteries, here. No one ran a foreign country as an extraction colony. Looting-wise, no one did much beyond taking a call from telly warlord Ted Sarandos and thinking: yes please. This is the market value of my truth. Continue reading...
A great deal of the media are concentrated in the hands of too few people, who are often too attuned to what their corporate owners or political benefactors would like emphasized
Domestic competition assigns state and regional team names in attempt to increase fan engagementIn 15-a-side rugby, the men’s US Eagles recently failed to reach the World Cup. But American sevens seems in contrasting health. On the HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series, the men’s and women’s national teams are on track to qualify for the next Olympics, in Paris.At home, Premier Rugby Sevens, a professional competition seeking to establish itself on the sporting map, says it is also well placed to progress. On Tuesday, it announced it will double (to 16) the number of men’s and women’s teams competing next year, its third, teams for the first time named for states and regions. Continue reading...
Mohammed Abouagela Masud accused by US of preparing the bomb that destroyed Boeing 747, killing 270 people in 1988. Plus, the oldest university student graduatesGood morning.A former Libyan intelligence operative accused of preparing the bomb that brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 was taken into US custody after being abducted from his home by a notorious warlord and then detained by armed militia for two weeks, the Guardian has been told.What have the White House said? Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, told reporters: “Today is a good day because Masud will be facing justice for his alleged role in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. I will say that this was done in a lawful manner according to established procedures. For more specifics on how it happened I would refer you to the justice department because they’re best positioned to be able to speak to that.”What did the justice department say? In a statement, Michael H Glasheen, the acting assistant director in charge of the FBI Washington field office, said: “The lawful arrest and presentment in court of the alleged bombmaker … is the product of hard work and partnerships across the globe.”How restrictive will those bans be? It remains to be seen. Conservatives across the country embroiled in conflicts over which exceptions – if any – should be allowed for abortion. “Exceptions in the case of rape and incest, we realise, are sometimes a necessary political reality. And we would not block a bill or oppose a bill that would prevent 95% of abortions,” explains Glenn. Continue reading...
Without a plan in place to minimise infection, a ‘moving on’ strategy leaves vulnerable people behindAs the season of Christmas work parties and drinks with friends begins, it feels a distance from the December of two years ago, at the height of the pandemic. We will hug our grandparents, hardly remembering a time when that was anything remarkable. Perhaps that’s why the news that Covid infections in the UK have passed 1m cases again has barely raised a murmur.Months of lockdowns and the grief of losing our loved ones, often without being able to say goodbye, was a collective trauma, and one that we have not dealt with as a nation. The ease of Matt Hancock’s rehabilitation suggests a public keen to bury the pain, keep calm and carry on. There is a noticeable – and understandable – urge to “move on” from the pandemic, even as it still happens around us. Ministers hardly help, talking of “post-Covid” just as ICU beds fill up again.Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...
LeBron James joined an exclusive club when he started his 20th season this year. That type of longevity requires talent, interpersonal skills and a little luckKevin Willis remembers encouraging Tim Duncan to keep going. The two former All-NBA players, who won a championship together in San Antonio in 2003, chatted when Duncan’s career was winding down in 2016. “The Big Fundamental” was to retire after his 19 season, and Willis practically pleaded with Duncan to give it one more year so that he could enter one of the few NBA “clubs” that’s eluded him. The 20-plus-seasons club.Willis had been one of only eight members of the club, alongside Vince Carter, Jamal Crawford, Robert Parish, Kobe Bryant, Dirk Nowitzki, Kevin Garnett and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. That was it – until this season. Two more players are adding their names to that vaunted group. One is the undrafted Miami Heat lifer Udonis Haslem. And the other is maybe the greatest hooper of all time: LeBron James. Continue reading...
Dramatising the latest watercooler story doesn’t guarantee you box-office success. The stiffest competition may come from reality’s own high dramaJust before the curtain came up on Vardy v Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial, producer Eleanor Lloyd spoke to the audience about its breakneck transposition from real-life courtroom drama to stage show and the “high-wire act” that such theatre becomes. The part-verbatim show dramatises the case that was detonated soon after Coleen Rooney dropped her Instagram grenade and Rebekah Vardy filed for libel.Having run in the high court and been reported in the media only a few months earlier, here it was again, reprising the best lines, from chipolata-gate to Davy Jones’s Locker. Laying its public interest debate aside, it was indisputably the watercooler story of the spring and summer, its incredible WhatsApp turns holding us rapt. Continue reading...
Joyce DeFauw gets bachelor’s degree from Northern Illinois University over seven decades after she first stepped on campusJoyce DeFauw of Illinois has given a whole new meaning to the term super senior, used for students who take longer than the usual four years to get their undergraduate degrees.On Sunday, the 90-year-old received a bachelor’s of general studies from Northern Illinois University more than seven decades after she first stepped on campus, becoming what officials believe to be the eldest person to ever graduate from the school. Continue reading...
Well-known cougar was tranquilized by officials in the back yard of a Los Feliz home after showing signs of distressLos Angeles’ most famous mountain lion, known for roaming across freeways and making a sprawling urban park his home, was captured Monday by wildlife officials who want to examine the big cat after he killed a dog that was being walked in the Hollywood Hills.The cougar, dubbed P-22, wears a GPS tracking collar as part of a National Park Service study and is regularly recorded on security cameras strolling through residential areas near LA’s Griffith Park, a wilderness and picnic area. Continue reading...
by Kari Paul and Dominic Rushe and agencies on (#66S0B)
Arrest just 24 hours before founder of cryptocurrency exchange was to testify before US CongressThe Bahamas police have arrested former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, the country’s attorney general said in a statement on Monday, adding that the Bahamas has received formal notification from the US of criminal charges against him.Bankman-Fried is expected to be extradited to the US, the attorney general’s office for the Bahamas told Reuters, but declined to comment on what the charges were. Continue reading...
Declaration comes as Bass, first female mayor of Los Angeles, was sworn in by Kamala Harris and feted by Stevie WonderKaren Bass, the new mayor of Los Angeles, began her first day in office by declaring a state of emergency to grapple with the city’s homelessness crisis, bidding to move swiftly to help thousands of unhoused people off the streets.Bass called the declaration “a sea change in how the city tackles homelessness”, making good on a campaign pledge to call the emergency the day she took power. The issue dominated her mayoral race against the billionaire developer Rick Caruso and the crisis has continued to worsen despite vast public spending increases. Continue reading...
‘Gate of the Exonerated’ will be inscribed in sandstone at the northern end of the park following a three-year effortNew York City is naming a gate in Central Park in honor of the five men who, as teenagers, were wrongfully convicted of the 1989 rape of a jogger and spent years in prison before being exonerated. The city’s public design commission unanimously approved the project on Monday.“Gate of the Exonerated” will be inscribed in sandstone at the northern end of the park following a three-year effort that grew out of discussions within the community, John Reddick of the Central Park Conservancy told the board. Continue reading...
The effort to remove Gen AP Hill’s monument was complicated as his remains were interred beneath itThe city of Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy for most of the civil war, removed its last city-owned Confederate statue on Monday, more than two years after it began to purge itself of what many saw as painful symbols of racial oppression.It took just minutes to free the statue of Confederate Gen AP Hill from its base, before a crane using yellow straps looped under the statue’s arms lifted it on to a bed of tires on a flatbed truck. After the statue was removed, the crew got to work removing the base. Continue reading...
Kevin de León, who has resisted resigning after the debacle, was involved in an altercation in which he appears to push an organizerKevin de León, the embattled Los Angeles city council member involved in a racism scandal that threw city hall into upheaval, is facing criticism again after video footage captured him in a physical fight with an activist.De León, who has resisted calls to resign, made his first in-person appearance at a council meeting in nearly two months on Friday. Hours later he was involved in an altercation at a holiday toy giveaway in which video appeared to show him shoving a local organizer. Continue reading...
Army veteran Steven Pringle turned his life around with bike shop where he fixed bikes, sold new ones and gave many awayA Michigan army veteran who turned his life around with a bike shop died in a crash while delivering free bikes to children in Florida affected by Hurricane Ian, his family said.Steven Pringle, 57, was killed in Punta Gorda, Florida, on 23 November, a few weeks after a profile in the Detroit Free Press described how his passion for fixing bikes had touched many people in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Continue reading...
Joseph Kromelis, nicknamed the ‘walking man’ as he was often spotted in the city on foot, died after being set on fire in MayChicago’s famed “walking man” has died nearly seven months after authorities said an unprovoked attacker set him on fire in a horrifying example of a crime aimed at the homeless.Joseph Kromelis, 75, died after being set on fire in May, said the local medical examiner’s office, the local news station ABC7 reported. Continue reading...
Viktor Bout says he has become a member of the Liberal Democratic party of Russia (LDPR), which is pro-Kremlin and has a long history of recruiting controversial figures. His announcement comes just days after he was exchanged for the US basketball star Brittney Griner in a prisoner swap.Speaking to reporters, Bout said he joined the LDPR 'because the party stands for the Russian world' and 'our great motherland. It was a natural choice'
New evidence from Proof disputed prosecution’s case that Darrell Lee Clark and Cain Joshua Storey murdered with premeditationTwo Georgia men were released from prison – and one of them was completely exonerated – after spending more than two decades behind bars, when a true crime podcast revealed new evidence that all but destroyed the case authorities had built against them.Darrell Lee Clark and his co-defendant Cain Joshua Storey were released from custody last week, after spending more than 25 years imprisoned for the 1996 shooting death of 15-year-old Brian Bowling, a friend of the pair, according to a press release from the Georgia Innocence Project. Continue reading...
Interest rate hikes mean that workers and consumers take the hit. Here are other tools to address inflationThe Fed is meeting on Tuesday. This week, presumably, it will announce that it’s raising interest rates once again in its continuing attempt to stem inflation by slowing the economy.But shouldn’t it be obvious by now that higher interest rates aren’t doing the trick?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...
Far-right congresswoman says the violent crowd would have won on January 6 if she and Steve Bannon had planned itThe far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has bragged that had she and the former Donald Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon been in charge of organizing the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, the violent crowd would have won, and everyone in it “would’ve been armed”.The notorious provocateur made her comments about the deadly January 6 attack during a speech to a gala of the New York Young Republicans Club on Park Avenue in Manhattan on Saturday night. Hatewatch monitored the event on behalf of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Continue reading...
Critics say Republican Doug Ducey’s scheme is illegal because makeshift barrier is being erected on tribal and federal land. Plus, California’s new wolf pack
The neighborhood is home to 4,400 unhoused people. Its restroom options fall short of the UN standard for refugee campsThis story was supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting ProjectThe sun is rising over Skid Row as a crane slowly lifts a shiny, two-unit toilet from the back of a truck and on to the sidewalk. The new bathroom – rectangular and off-white with a ventilated roof – is replacing another unit that has stood on this corner for over 15 years. Continue reading...
Kroger and Albertsons seek deal through FTC but employees say previous merger experience has them deeply concernedThousands of workers at two of America’s biggest supermarkets are warning of potential mass layoffs as the giant firms push for a merger.Kroger, the second largest grocery chain in the US, and Albertsons, the fourth largest, are pushing for a merger through the Federal Trade Commission, which is reviewing the proposal. Continue reading...
Since the sea was enclosed in 1982, it has been ravaged by profiteers – many of whose lobbyists are circling in MontrealThe sea covers 71% of the world’s surface. Two out of every five people live near to or depend on the sea for their livelihood. If the sea were a country, it would be the sixth biggest economy. Ocean-based activities, including offshore energy, shipping, tourism and fishing, account for more than 5% of global GDP, while the World Bank claims that future economic growth will be led by “blue growth”.Yet the “blue economy” receives little attention from politicians or economists. A waffling section in the first draft of the Cop27 agreement in Egypt, mentioning informal meetings, quickly disappeared. Another United Nations circus is taking place Montreal this week, known as Cop15, which seeks to protect biodiversity. The danger is that ministers and diplomats will again be diverted from the economic causes of the crisis and let capital and finance continue to plunder nature. Continue reading...
On Sunday the 45-year-old had to watch a man half his age – and with an even more remarkable origin story – thoroughly outplay him in his native Bay AreaIt was a surreal Bay Area homecoming for Tom Brady, to say the least. There was the most successful quarterback in history, on the field for the entirety of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ 35-7 blowout loss to the San Francisco 49ers, still competing long after the game had effectively been decided. Sunday will be remembered as the day one of the all-time greats was thoroughly outplayed by Mr Irrelevant.As the meme puts it, you can never count out Touchdown Tom. We were all reminded of this just last week when Brady engineered his 44th fourth-quarter comeback win. That was a league record, one of the many that he owns, and maybe the most fitting. Brady is the football version of a superhero (or supervillain, depending on one’s rooting interests) who always jumps back to life soon after being declared dead. Heck, despite the loss, the 6-7 Bucs are still on top of the NFC South and penciled in for another playoff appearance. Continue reading...
I’ve reported on conflicts for 20 years, and I’m not afraid to be blunt about Russia’s disgusting war of aggression on UkraineI took quite a lot of photos on my phone when I was in Ukraine this year, but this one jumped out at me as I was scrolling through them. Here we have Dante – the Italian poet, philosopher, writer – with his marble head poking up out of the sandbags. It’s in a park on Volodymyr Hill in the centre of Kyiv.It’s not just an arresting image. Dante is a harbinger of the Renaissance; he’s a symbol of culture and learning. And that is the opposite of war, which is a regression to dark times. This is what Ukraine and Kyiv are having to labour under – and so Dante finds himself stifled by sandbags. Of course, one also thinks of the Divine Comedy and the seventh circle of hell, which is violence. That’s what the people of Ukraine have been enduring: a modern circle of hell.Clive Myrie is a journalistDo 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...
You’d have to ignore the hair-clogged plughole for a start. But I guess that’s where pheromones come inHome alone last week, I did what I only do in private: flipped open my laptop and surreptitiously signed up to another unnecessarily complex streaming service to watch the romcom series The Flatshare. It’s not that I think enjoying romance is shameful; I just live with someone whose comfort viewing skews to stuff exploding and Kevin McCloud raising an eyebrow at architraves.I adore a good romcom, but the reviews were adamant: The Flatshare is not that. I switched off my limited critical faculties and surrendered to a fondue-gooey viewing experience. It has a sketchy plot, damp-squib sexual chemistry and supporting characters limited to one personality trait, as if rationed. Then there’s the loopy premise: the leads share a flat and a bed (one gets it during the day, the other at night) without meeting. Fine by me. Continue reading...
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