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Efforts to legalize sports betting have sparked a $400m battle – and left voters scratching their headsThe campaign that could bring legalized sports betting to California is the most expensive ballot-initiative fight in US history, costing $400m and counting, and pitting wealthy Indigenous tribes against online gambling companies over a potentially multibillion-dollar marketplace.Californians have been bombarded with advertising for months, much of it making promises far beyond a plump payoff from a game wager. Some ads coming from the consortium of gambling companies barely mention online betting. Continue reading...

Letitia James accuses former president and his family of fraudulently inflating their net worth for financial benefits

Political leaders including Kamala Harris gathered to remember the British monarch in sombre event at National CathedralHer final gift to her many admirers in America was an hour and a half of ceremony, sanctity and peace in a city overrun by loud political acrimony.The Queen was remembered on Wednesday at a thanksgiving service at Washington National Cathedral, an elegant event that brought together Americans of all political stripes, obliged to park their rancour at the bronze gate. Continue reading...

Volodymyr Zelenskiy also spoke to the UN, saying Ukraine’s forces would continue their counter-offensive

Third outsized rate increase in a row as central bank struggles to fight runaway inflation, increasing the cost of everythingThe Federal Reserve announced another sharp hike in interest rates on Wednesday as the central bank struggles to rein in runaway inflation.The Fed raised its benchmark interest rate by 0.75 percentage points, the third such outsized rate increase in a row, bringing the Fed rate to 3%-3.25% and increasing the cost of everything from credit card debt and mortgages to company financing. Continue reading...

Letitia James, attorney general of New York state, has filed a civil lawsuit against Donald Trump and members of his family for doctoring their finances in order to obtain favourable borrowing terms.In a statement on Wednesday, James said: 'The lawsuit alleges that Donald Trump, with the help of his children Donald Trump Jr, Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump, and senior executives of the Trump Organization, falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to induce banks to lend money to the Trump Organization on more favorable terms.'Allen Weisselberg, a former chief financial officer for the Trump Organization, and Jeffrey McConney, a former controller, were also named in the suit.

Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian’s Unchecked reports the Senate Republican leader vowed never to speak to Trump againThe Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said Donald Trump was “crazy” and vowed never to speak to him again after the Capitol attack – then voted both to call Trump’s impeachment unconstitutional and to acquit the former president in his second Senate trial.McConnell’s deliberations are reported in a forthcoming book, Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump, by Rachael Bade of Politico and Karoun Demirjian of the Washington Post. An extract was published on Wednesday. Continue reading...

Thomas Lane is already serving a two-and-a-half-year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rightsA former Minneapolis police officer who pleaded guilty to a state charge of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter in the killing of George Floyd was sentenced on Wednesday to three years.Thomas Lane is already serving a two-and-a-half-year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights. In the state case, prosecutors and Lane’s attorneys agreed to a recommended sentence of three years, to be served at the same time, in a federal prison. Continue reading...

The president’s latest pledge to defend the island contradicts the US’s longstanding One China policyIn May 2001, the new US president told an interviewer that the United States was obligated to go to war with China if it attacked Taiwan. The United States would do “whatever it took” to defend the island, George W Bush vowed.Then-Senator Joe Biden was not impressed. Taking to the Washington Post to pen “Not So Deft On Taiwan,” Biden scolded the president. “Words matter, in diplomacy and in law,” he wrote. The fact was that the United States possessed no formal obligation to defend Taiwan. As Biden explained, the United States had purposefully abrogated such a commitment and adopted the Taiwan Relations Act, for which Biden had personally voted in 1979. True, the law required the United States to help Taiwan to defend itself and declared a threat to the peace and security of the region to be “of grave concern to the United States.” But it did not obligate American forces to fight on the island’s behalf.Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University. He is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy Continue reading...

For the first time since the welfare state was created, the food bank will be our safety net and charity our last line of defenceHaving been promised an energy price freeze, millions of hard-pressed families will be shocked and fearful when, on 1 October, they are hit with a 25% rise in their fuel bills.After a summer of doing nothing the government looked as if it had done a lot, but it has not done anywhere near enough. In 10 days’, the cap on energy bills will rise to an unprecedented £2,500 a year. This is an average increase of £10 a week, on top of April’s rise of £14 a week. Fuel costs will, according to Jonathan Bradshaw and Antonia Keung at York University, consume an unprecedented 20% of the income of 4.1 million families in October. By May, that figure could rise to 7.4 million. For 2.2 million families, energy bills will take up an unpayable 30% of their income, and this could rise to 3.8 million families by May.Gordon Brown was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010 Continue reading...

News of ‘stunning’ attempt to rescind dramatic election night call contained in The Divider, by Peter Baker and Susan GlasserThe Fox News anchor Bret Baier wanted the network to withdraw its famous call of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in 2020, citing pressure from Donald Trump’s campaign and saying the swing state should be “put back in his column”, a new book says.The news is contained in The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021, published in the US on Tuesday. Continue reading...

The Russian leader’s fantastical speech shows he recognises that his country is losing its war on UkraineThe Russian president Vladimir Putin’s speech this morning, announcing partial mobilisation and warning of possible retaliation for western actions against Russia, will renew fears of reckless nuclear blackmail. But overall, it should be seen as more reassuring than troubling.The good news here is that Putin’s announcement of emergency measures shows he recognises Russia is losing in its war of imperial expansion. The less good news is that if he believes even a tiny fraction of the lies and fantasies he reeled off during the speech, his grip on reality is even shakier than we previously suspected.Keir Giles works with the Russia and Eurasia programme of Chatham House; he is the author of Russia’s War on Everybody Continue reading...

Judge Raymond Dearie tells ex-president’s lawyers ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it’ over reluctance to declare documents’ statusThe independent arbiter tasked with inspecting documents seized in an FBI search of Donald Trump’s Florida home said on Tuesday he intends to push briskly through the review process and appeared skeptical of Trump lawyers’ reluctance to say whether they believed the records had been declassified.“We’re going to proceed with what I call responsible dispatch,” Raymond Dearie, a veteran Brooklyn judge, told lawyers for Trump and the Department of Justice in their first meeting since his appointment last week as a so-called special master. Continue reading...

Wishing to see Trump called to account need not make us champion a 100-year-old statute used to target whistleblowersLiberal pundits and Twitter accounts are cheering the investigation into Donald Trump for holding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. What they may not know is that they are also throwing their support behind one of the most pernicious and terrible laws that exists: the Espionage Act. Holding Trump accountable doesn’t mean we should all become cheerleaders for the often-abused law primarily used to prosecute whistleblowers and threaten journalists.Ever since the 100-year old Espionage Act was cited in the warrant for the search of Trump’s Florida residence, Twitter and cable news are rife with misinformation about the law and what it means. Those clamoring for Trump to be prosecuted under the act are spreading a ton of misleading statements in the process.Trevor Timm is executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation Continue reading...

Democrats hailed the Inflation Reduction Act as a climate crisis victory – so why the secrecy over an oil and gas pipelines bill?As climate change batters America with heatwaves, droughts and floods, lawmakers should be asking a simple question about any bill: does it increase or decrease the greenhouse gas emissions that are fueling the ecological emergency?Somehow, though, that query is still not being asked right now in Washington, even as Democratic leaders are promising to advance a bill to gut environmental laws and expedite oil and gas pipelines.David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at large at Jacobin, and the founder of The Daily Poster. He served as Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign speechwriterJulia Rock is a reporter for The Lever Continue reading...

Russian president announces partial mobilisation and makes threats on west, saying ‘we will use all the means at our disposal’. Plus, the Hollywood sign gets a facelift

Mass bussing has been called a political stunt, but New York non-profit groups have mobilized to offer a sense of humanityAlexander Rapaport carries multilingual greeting signs and cheers and waves when certain buses pull into the terminal in New York City from Texas and Arizona these days, carrying people sent by the Republican authorities there who don’t wish to assist them.“These people are seeking asylum. We welcome them. That’s what America stands for,” said Rapaport, who works with Masbia Relief, a crisis response non-profit in the city. Continue reading...

Exclusive: The University of Toledo’s failure to adequately address allegations against Brad Evans has led to multiple Title IX complaints following a Guardian investigation

Deafness, like any other attribute, comes with innate sporting benefits and cost. The Bison have spent years crafting football to their advantageAt first glance, it’s not obvious that nearly everyone on Gallaudet University’s football team, the Bison, is deaf or hard of hearing. In most ways, the game proceeds exactly as it would on a fall Saturday at any other small university in the US. Players bump chests animatedly after important plays. Cheerleaders try to pump up the crowd during timeouts. A fan of the away team loudly swears over the more polite cheers of those around him.Certain differences, however, eventually emerge. Five strikes of a resonant bass drum alert Gallaudet’s special teams units (many of whom are busy having sideline discussions with coaches) to upcoming punts and kicks. In lieu of using a headset, offensive lineman John Scarboro communicates with a coach standing far away atop the crowded stands via American Sign Language (ASL). And, instead of having someone sing the national anthem before kick-off, the cheerleading team performs it in ASL while standing at midfield. Continue reading...

After decades of activism, the neighborhood becomes the first Arab American enclave to get an official designationAmin Nash’s earliest childhood memory of Anaheim, California, was gripping his grandmother’s hand as they walked into Altayebat Market on Brookhurst Street. His grandmother, who had been visiting from Iraq, could not speak English. But at Altayebat, she could speak freely in her mother tongue, Arabic.“This is for you, it’s just a reminder to you, you are not too far from home,” Nash recalled the owner of Altayebat telling his grandmother as he handed her a prayer rug. Continue reading...

Tests performed for thousands of Chicago residents found lead, a neurotoxin, in amounts far exceeding the federal standardsOne in twenty tap water tests performed for thousands of Chicago residents found lead, a neurotoxin, at or above US government limits, according to a Guardian analysis of a City of Chicago data trove.And one-third had more lead than is permitted in bottled water. Continue reading...

The Inflation Reduction Act aims to reduce the cost of drugs, but the law’s limitations may not help the Democrats in the midtermsAt a Labor Day speech in Milwaukee, Joe Biden declared nothing less than victory over the pharmaceutical industry.“We beat pharma!” Biden said, leaning into the microphone. “We beat pharma this year, and it mattered. We’re going to change people’s lives.” Continue reading...

Michael Carneal was 14 years old in 1997 when he fired on a prayer group, killing three; his request has been delayed until MondayA Kentucky man who killed three students and wounded five in a school shooting 25 years ago told a parole panel on Tuesday he was still hearing voices like the ones that told him to steal a pistol and shoot into a high school lobby in 1997.The two-person panel hearing Michael Carneal’s testimony deferred a decision until Monday, when the entire state parole board could grant his parole request, defer his next parole decision or determine that he must spend the rest of his life in prison. Continue reading...

Forty-seven people have been charged in the ‘astonishing display of deceit’ over providing food for low-income childrenForty-seven people have been charged in what US authorities say is the largest case yet of pandemic fraud, accusing the defendants of a “brazen” scheme to swindle millions from a program intended for low-income children and using it to “enrich themselves”.Those charged in the scheme are accused of creating companies that claimed to be offering food to tens of thousands of children across Minnesota, then sought reimbursement for those meals through the US Department of Agriculture’s food nutrition programs. Prosecutors say few meals were actually served, and the defendants used the money to buy luxury cars, property and jewelry. Authorities say $250m was ultimately stolen from the federal program. Continue reading...

Carroll to file claim of battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress under new New York lawE Jean Carroll, the writer who accused Donald Trump of raping her more than two decades ago, plans to file a new lawsuit against the former US president.In a letter made public on Tuesday, a lawyer for former Elle magazine columnist said she planned to sue Trump for battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress under New York state’s Adult Survivors Act. Continue reading...

Suit says Venezuelans were ‘used as political pawns’ in a ‘fraudulent and discriminatory’ schemeAttorneys representing the Venezuelan migrants and refugees allegedly duped into flying to the wealthy island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts have filed a class-action civil rights lawsuit against the Florida governor and other state officials.Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR), a Boston-based legal advocacy group, filed the lawsuit on Tuesday challenging what it called the “fraudulent and discriminatory” scheme to charter private planes to transport almost 50 vulnerable people, including children as young as two, from San Antonio, Texas, via Florida, to Martha’s Vineyard last week without liaising to arrange shelter and other resources. Continue reading...

National security adviser makes remark while Biden will ‘rebuke Russia’ at UN summit

Letters – which initially read ‘Hollywoodland’ – to be repainted in process viewable on 24/7 webcamIn preparation for its 100th birthday next year, the Hollywood sign is getting a makeover.The giant letters on the hill are being cleaned and repainted, a process that’s estimated to take the next eight weeks. Freshening up the 45ft-tall letters will require about 250 gallons of paints and primer, and anyone who wants to watch the paint dry can follow along on the sign’s 24/7 webcam. Continue reading...

More and more women are taking up leadership roles in the ‘hyper-masculine’ field of community violence preventionFor more than two decades, Elena Bolds has worked to keep young people far away from the gun violence that has afflicted her home town of Richmond, California, for decades.She has organized gunfire safety drills for kids, turned her home into a snack store and safe haven for neighborhood youth, and sung at dozens of funerals for young people. As an official neighborhood change agent for the Office of Neighborhood Safety, she chaperoned trips to local jails so young men could hear from incarcerated people and drove program participants to their court dates to ensure they would show up. Continue reading...

An American teenager’s victory against the world champion has sent chess into uproar. We answer the key questionsAllegations of cheating – including wild speculation involving vibrating anal beads – have rocked chess to its core. A fortnight ago, the world champion, Magnus Carlsen, pulled out of a tournament for the first time in his career and then, on Monday he stunned the sport again by resigning a game after just one move. Both times Carlsen was faced with the same opponent, the 19-year-old American Hans Niemann. Continue reading...

Texas county sheriff says it seems evident that asylum seekers had been ‘lured’ to travel to Martha’s Vineyard ‘under false pretenses’A criminal investigation has been launched in Texas into whether dozens of asylum seekers were illegally flown from the state to Martha’s Vineyard, as new evidence continues to emerge suggesting they were misled.The Bexar county sheriff, Javier Salazar, said on Monday that his office was investigating the flights, chartered on behalf of the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, which brought dozens of migrants to the island in Massachusetts. Continue reading...

A powerful typhoon that hit the western coastline of the US over the weekend has left residents in remote villages without access to aid. Locals were without power and sustained severe water damage to their homes, prompting concerns over how they would survive the coming winter without provisions.On Monday, authorities made contact with residents in areas only accessible by plane to determine the need for food and water. No deaths have so far been reported but the flooding has affected 21,000 people who live along the coast

Elana Bolds, Tina Padilla and Claudia Bracho are leaders in the gang violence intervention field – from active shooter drills with children in Richmond to bringing in gang members to help with food distribution in Los Angeles. The Guardian follows their work in the community Continue reading...

Douglas Ramsey allegedly punched a motorist and bit his nose so hard that it tore flesh, police report saysA top executive at one of America’s biggest makers of alternative meat products has been arrested for biting another man on the nose during a road rage confrontation, US media have reported.Douglas Ramsey, 53, who is chief operating officer of Beyond Meat, allegedly punched a motorist and bit that man’s on the nose so hard that it tore his flesh, according to a police report obtained by NBC affiliate TV station KNWA. Continue reading...

Lawyers tell special master reviewing Mar-a-Lago case he should not have to say which documents he may have declassifiedDonald Trump’s legal team has acknowledged the possibility that the former president could be indicted amid the investigation into his retention of government secrets at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.Despite claiming days earlier that Trump couldn’t imagine being charged, his lawyers made the stark admission in a court filing on Monday proposing how to conduct an outside review of documents that were seized by the FBI in August. Continue reading...

It’s easy to believe anything when it comes to the ex-president, but #Casketgate shows how liberals are just as happy as their opponents to embrace far-fetched conspiracy theoriesPoor Ivana Trump: even in death she hasn’t been able to escape her ex-husband’s drama. After being found dead at the bottom of her stairs in July, Donald Trump’s first wife suffered the ignominy of being laid to rest near the first hole of Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey. Burying someone on a golf course is weird – even for a Trump – and theories immediately began to swirl. New Jersey exempts cemetery land from taxes, so was this a creepy form of tax avoidance? (Short answer: possibly, but it doesn’t make much business sense and seems unlikely.)The Ivana conspiracy theories did not go gentle into that good night. Instead, they grew stranger and stranger, stoked by the feverish imaginations of #ResistanceTwitter: a collection of liberal activists who have built large social media followings by tweeting obsessively about Donald Trump. When the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago home to recover classified documents, #ResistanceTwitter went into overdrive trying to find connections between Ivana’s death and Trump’s legal troubles. There is zero evidence that Ivana was cremated, but many high-profile #ResistanceTwitter accounts suddenly decided she definitely had been and, from there, concluded that Ivana’s casket must have been stuffed with classified documents. Jon Cooper, a Joe Biden superfan who has 1.1 million Twitter followers and whom Politico once described as “prone to outlandish statements that rack up retweets”, bears much responsibility for spreading this theory. “Seriously, is else anyone [sic) wondering – just a bit – what other stuff may be buried inside Ivana’s casket …?” Cooper tweeted on 9 August. Continue reading...

Quake registered at 7.5 magnitude on anniversary of earlier tremors. Plus, the rise and fall of PelotonGood morning.A magnitude 7.5 earthquake has struck western Mexico on the anniversary of two earlier devastating tremors, killing at least one person and causing flooding on the Pacific coast.Was anyone killed? President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Twitter that the secretary of the navy told him one person was killed in the port city of Manzanillo, Colima, when a wall at a mall collapsed.Did the quake cause a lot of damage? Michoacán authorities said there were no immediate reports of significant damage in that state beyond some cracks in buildings in the town of Coalcomán.What was wrong with the original trial? An assistant state attorney Becky Feldman described details that undermined the conviction including unreliable witness testimony and a potentially biased detective. Feldman said: “I understand how difficult this is, but we need to make sure we hold the correct person accountable.”What have Lee’s family said? They haven’t responded yet, but in 2016 they said: “It remains hard to see so many run to defend someone who committed a horrible crime, who destroyed our family, who refuses to accept responsibility, when so few are willing to speak up for Hae.” Continue reading...

The Florida governor’s use of vulnerable migrants as props is disgusting and criminalIn recent months, Republican governors in Texas, Arizona and Florida have been transporting immigrants northward to cities such as New York, Washington and Chicago. This included bussing about a hundred people to the vice-president’s residence and dumping them on the street.The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, took this despicable practice of using vulnerable men, women and children as political props to a new low this week when he paid for two planeloads of Venezuelan migrants to be sent to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. As has been reported, the Venezuelans that DeSantis paid to transport were actually recruited by a co-conspirator in San Antonio, Texas, not in Florida. As reported, this co-conspirator, “Perla”, promised the migrants transportation to Boston and expedited work permits. All of it was a lie.Jeff Weaver is a political strategist who served as campaign manager for the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign and as an adviser for the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaignThis article is reprinted from Jacobin magazine Continue reading...

We cannot simply stand back and hope that the elite will give away their wealth to tackle the climate emergencyMaking bold statements about addressing the climate crisis has become de rigueur in the corporate world over the past few years. But this was taken to a whole new level when the founder and owner of the outdoor clothing company Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, announced that his family was transferring 98% of the company’s stock to a newly created not-for-profit organisation dedicated to combatting climate breakdown.Chouinard was applauded for “giving away” his company for the planet. He himself claimed that it was “turning capitalism on its head”. The widespread admiration of Chouinard is a telling sign of popular dissatisfaction with the excesses of the global corporate economy and its billionaire bosses. But the question remains: does this giveaway mark any fundamental change to the system?Carl Rhodes is a professor of organisation studies at the University of Technology in Sydney Continue reading...

The life stories of enslaved people are crucial to a legal battle over a Louisiana petrochemical facility that could triple residents’ exposure to carcinogensAt the age of nine, Rachel was one of many forced to live in enslavement on a plantation in southern Louisiana. As well as dozens of adults, there were other children, such as Susanne, age three, and Reuben, age 11.The details of Rachel’s existence have been lost to time. But historians say that even at that young age, enslaved children likely would have been expected to work in some capacity, possibly weeding, looking after chickens or bringing food and water to adults in the fields. Continue reading...

The populist playbook blames the dislocation faced by many men on mythical ‘others’. Progressives should take these problems seriouslyWe need to talk about the troubles of men.No, really. Even if the thought of being asked to sympathise with the modern male struggle makes you roll your eyes or turn the page, it’s worth examining that irritable kneejerk reaction more closely. Progressives should be able to acknowledge some real and serious problems – boys underachieving at school, high suicide rates among middle-aged men in particular, the online radicalisation of an angry fringe drawn to violent ideologies – without making women and girls feel guilty about their achievements or pretending that feminism has somehow gone too far. But that balance can be surprisingly hard to achieve in practice, as a thoughtful new book by the former Downing Street staffer Richard Reeves makes clear.

When Brad Evans resigned from the University of Toledo allegations of sexual misconduct effectively disappeared, allowing him to continue coaching