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Attorneys say duke’s reappearance following death of Queen could prove harmful for survivors of Epstein’s crimesSince the death of the Queen on 8 September, Prince Andrew has returned to the public sphere.The Duke of York’s prominence at events marking the death of his mother, such as the progress of her coffin through Edinburgh and London this week, is to be expected. Andrew is grieving personal loss during a national period of mourning. Continue reading...

It is time for liberal Americans, and all American women, to face this reality: there will soon be no safe statesRepublicans want to ban abortion nationwide, and they have the nerve to claim that this is a compromise. This week, Senator Lindsay Graham, of South Carolina, introduced a bill to ban all abortions everywhere in the United States at 15 weeks. Abortion is already banned before 15 weeks in 15 states.It is banned outright in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. Indiana’s ban on abortion went into effect just this Wednesday. It is banned at six weeks – in practice a total ban – in Georgia and Ohio. West Virginia passed an abortion ban, too. It won’t be the last.Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Meadows is reportedly the highest-ranking Trump official known to have responded to a subpoena in the federal investigationThe former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who served under Donald Trump, has complied with a subpoena from the justice department investigation into the events surrounding the January 6 attack on the Capitol, CNN reported on Wednesday.That makes him the highest-ranking Trump official known to have responded to a subpoena in the federal investigation, CNN said. Continue reading...

Television talkshows have huge power to influence what issues dominate American discourse. And that power demands responsibilityA few days ago, I received an email from an associate producer at the Dr Phil Show. They recently came across my film Inequality for All and wanted to know if I’d be “interested in joining Dr Phil as an expert guest for an upcoming episode”.Hey, why not? The Dr Phil Show is the No 1 rated daytime TV talkshow in America. It has over 2 million viewers. I have lots to say to those viewers about the perils of widening inequality.For this conversation we will be asking questions like: do college admissions enroll minorities over prospective Caucasian students? Are Caucasian teachers and professors being laid off to “make up for past discriminations” against minority educators, as seen in Minneapolis?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...

Recent analyses estimate that long Covid could be driving up to one-third of the US labor shortageWe’ve all seen the headlines about labor shortages, worker attrition, or – as many mainstream media outlets refer to it – “the Great Resignation”.It’s true: since 2020, a record number of people have quit their jobs. The trend is ongoing, and some argue quitting is contagious. But, there’s another contagion that’s probably causing people to leave the workforce in droves.Fiona Lowenstein is an independent journalist, the founder of Body Politic, and the editor of the forthcoming book The Long Covid Survival Guide.Ryan Prior covered the Covid-19 pandemic as a CNN features writer and is the author of the forthcoming book The Long Haul Continue reading...

Law in effect wipes out abortion access for 1.5 million people in the state, which was a safe haven for those seeking the procedure. Plus, how house music changed the world

The world is watching as the country comes to terms with the end of an era and the start of an uncertain futureSix years ago, France was sad to have lost a friend from our union of European nations. Now, we French republicans feel sorrow once more – this time, coude à coude with our close neighbours as we collectively grieve not the monarchy but the passing of la Reine and the closure of this chapter in our shared contemporary history.Agnès Poirier is a political commentator, writer and critic for the British, American and European press Continue reading...

Through the quarterback’s prism, the chance for the Ravens to lock in five years of elite play should have been viewed as a blessing, not a burdenAt what point on Sunday do you think Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti cast his eyes to the sky, Gob Bluth style, and admitted he’d made a huge mistake?Was it when Lamar Jackson hit Rashod Bateman in stride for a 55-yard score? Or when the quarterback dropped a 25-yard touchdown toss to Devin Duvaney, right in the bucket, the kind of throw that only the league’s upper-tier pocket passers can make? Or when Jackson rounded out his hat-trick of opening-week touchdowns against the New York Jets with a no-look pass? Continue reading...

As tourism surges, the desert region has become California’s hottest housing market. Now many can’t afford to live thereBusiness is booming at the Roadrunner Grab’n’Go deli outside Joshua Tree national park. Demand for sandwiches, mezze boxes and local vegan cheese has remained high through the summer, even as temperatures soar in a desert landscape that now attracts more than three million visitors each year.But the shop’s co-owner, Merilee Kuchon, has a problem. Her employees, many of whom grew up here, are struggling to afford to stay. Over the past year, she’s lost at least a dozen staff, driven out by local rental prices that have soared during the pandemic. Now, she’s worried about hiring enough employees to keep the shop going when even more tourists return in the fall. Continue reading...

The work of the French-Swiss director, who died this week, is playful – but deadly serious about what life is forAccording to Jean-Luc Godard, movies give us “truth at 24 frames per second”. If you watch the films of the French-Swiss director, who died this week aged 91, you’ll understand what he means, though not in the most obvious ways. His work taught me as much about how truths are messed about, obfuscated and subverted in our age of mass media as any academic writing has done, not least because I was able to watch it at home on television.I came to Godard’s films in my late teens, as a first-generation student raised on whatever was showing on The Four TV Channels. That very lack of choice made what was shown all the more significant. It helped that there was an evident attempt to avoid medium-brow sludge, and instead offer a little bit of everything.Lynsey Hanley is a freelance writer and the author of Estates: an Intimate History and Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide Continue reading...

As I stopped in a layby recently, the memories flooded back. No trip to Wales was complete without me throwing upIn order to free the dog from a tangle he had got himself into on the back seat, I stopped in a layby last weekend, on the A491 just off the M5. A strong memory stirred. Ah yes, I vomited here once. I was a kid, in the back of my dad’s car, on the regular drive from the West Midlands to our caravan in south Wales. I was always, but always, car sick. On a good day, I’d make it well into Wales, even surviving the then tortuous Heads of the Valleys road but, one way or another, before journey’s end, there would be an incident. A wail from me, a curse from Dad, a screech of brakes, a leap from Mum out of the front seat to open the back door for me to stagger out and heave. The whole operation was as slick as a Formula One pit stop. The A491 layby puke stuck in my mind because it was my quickest ever on that journey; we were barely five minutes into it. “Not already, surely,” moaned my dad. Oh yes. Curse, screech, door, heave and we were on the road again. It was good to get it out the way early doors, I suppose we thought.Whatever happened to car sickness? Is it still a thing? A doctor tells me that the meds are a lot more effective now. Kids these days don’t know they’re born. The tablets I was given – Sea-Legs, I think they were called – weren’t much help. All in all, the whole business blighted my kidhood. It got to the stage where the mere smell of my dad’s Volvo was enough to turn my stomach. My poor parents. One time we couldn’t safely stop, and all my mum had to hand was a paper bag. She got it to me just in time. We had two seconds to breathe sighs of relief before the sodden bottom of the bag gave way, depositing its cargo all over my lap. Where were you when Elvis died? I know where I was. I was bent double on a grass verge in the car park at Strensham services with my mum holding my forehead. Oh, the memories.Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist Continue reading...

John Kelly secretly consulted The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, according to new book by Peter Baker and Susan GlasserDonald Trump’s White House chief of staff secretly bought a book in which 27 mental health professionals warned that the president was psychologically unfit for the job, then used it as a guide in his attempts to cope with Trump’s irrational behavior.News of John Kelly’s surreptitious purchase comes in a new book from Peter Baker of the New York Times and Susan Glasser of the New Yorker. The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy. Continue reading...

All four of the Pew Research Center’s scenarios showed the Christian share of the population shrinking and the number of non-believers risingChristians in the US may become a minority group by 2070 if recent trends continue, according to data released by the Pew Research Center.To predict how the US religious landscape will change over the next 50 years, the center posed several questions: “What if Christians keep leaving religion at the same rate observed in recent years? What if the pace of religious switching continues to accelerate? What if switching were to stop, but other demographic trends – such as migration, births and deaths – were to continue at current rates?” Continue reading...

It is only proper that the new King pays no inheritance tax – says the state that makes citizens choose between heating or eatingDuring that soggy afternoon when the Queen was still said to be only ill, the BBC’s Clive Myrie was filling time. Only hours before, he noted, Liz Truss had been making “a rather important statement” on just how families would pay their heating bills this winter. All was now “insignificant”. It was, the usually excellent presenter later admitted, “a poor choice of word”.Except it wasn’t. If anything, it was painfully on the nose. The man on the TV unwittingly but precisely anticipated how the financial crisis engulfing millions of Britons would be treated in the coming days: as a matter of no consequence. In Tuesday’s Daily Mail, it took until page 28 to crop up. In that day’s Sun, page 20. The Times and the Telegraph yawned it off altogether.

The verdict is the latest legal blow for the R&B artist, who faced 13 countsA federal jury on Wednesday convicted R Kelly of several child pornography and sex abuse charges in his home town of Chicago, delivering another legal blow to a singer who used to be one of the biggest R&B stars in the world.

Baltimore City state’s attorney requests a new trial for Adnan Syed after an investigation points to alternative suspectsProsecutors have filed a motion to vacate the murder conviction of 42-year old Adnan Syed, a case that previously gained international attention after it was featured on the podcast Serial.In a motion filed by Baltimore City state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby, a nearly year-long investigation with Syed’s defense team revealed new information that points to alternative suspects, according to a statement from her office. Continue reading...

Charlotte Bennett’s lawsuit is at least the second to be filed by one of the women who accused the former New York governor of misconduct

Man who said he discovered package at Northeastern University may have staged incident, law enforcement officials sayFederal officials are now examining whether the employee who reported an explosion at Northeastern University may have lied to investigators and staged the incident, law enforcement officials said on Wednesday.Investigators identified inconsistencies in the employee’s statement and became skeptical because his injuries did not match wounds typically consistent with an explosion, said one official. Continue reading...

President is in Detroit to promote the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes incentives for buying electric cars

Judge calls lawyer ‘unprofessional’ after only a fraction of 80 expected witnesses called in death penalty trial of Nikolas CruzAttorneys for the Florida school gunman Nikolas Cruz suddenly and surprisingly rested on Wednesday after calling only a fraction of their expected witnesses, leading to a shouting match after the judge accused them of lacking professionalism.Attorneys for Cruz told the judge and prosecutors they would be calling 80 witnesses but rested after calling about 25. Continue reading...

Judge had ‘no other option’ but to impose restitution on human trafficking victim given probation with risk of 20 years’ prisonDonors to a GoFundMe appeal have raised enough money to pay the $150,000 restitution an Iowa court ruled a teenage human trafficking victim must pay to the family of her accused rapist, whom she stabbed to death.Pieper Lewis, 17, was originally charged with first-degree murder in the June 2020 killing of 37-year-old Zachary Brooks of Des Moines. She pleaded guilty to manslaughter and willful injury, both punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Continue reading...

Hard-right Don Bolduc, who has vowed to decertify results in 2024, edges out Chuck Morse for right to run in NovemberA far-right Republican who backs Donald Trump’s election fraud lie and has vowed to decertify results in 2024 will be the GOP candidate for US Senate in New Hampshire.Don Bolduc, a retired special forces general who has said he suffered from PTSD and a traumatic brain injury, edged out Chuck Morse, the state senate president, to face the incumbent Democrat, Maggie Hassan, in November. Continue reading...

The fall from 9.7% in 2020 to 5.2% in 2021 was largely due to enhanced child tax credits provided to low-income families during CovidThe US child poverty rate fell by nearly half in 2021, largely thanks to enhanced child tax credits, new census data shows.The child poverty rate fell to a low of 5.2% compared with 9.7% the year before. Continue reading...

Under the new laws, rape and incest victims would be able to end the pregnancy only after reporting to law enforcementThe West Virginia legislature passed a sweeping abortion ban with few exceptions on Tuesday, a bill members of the Republican supermajority said they hope will make it impossible for the state’s only abortion clinic to stay open.“It is going to shut down that abortion clinic, of that I feel certain,” Robert Karnes said on the senate floor, amid shouts from protesters standing outside the chamber doors. “I believe it’s going to save a lot of babies.” Continue reading...

Justice department court filing argues that judge’s special master ruling impedes its review of highly classified documentsDonald Trump’s lawyers are causing “irreparable harm” to the government and public by delaying the investigation into his hoarding of highly classified documents at his Florida mansion, the US Department of Justice said.The claim came in a strongly worded court filing urging a district judge, Aileen Cannon, to reconsider her ruling last week granting Trump’s request for an independent “special master” in the case. Continue reading...

Prominent proponent of Donald Trump’s stolen election lie says he was questioned about Colorado electoral official Tina PetersMike Lindell, the pillow salesman who became an enthusiastic mouthpiece for Donald Trump’s lie about a stolen election, has said he was forced to hand his phone to FBI agents who surrounded him at a fast-food drive-through.The incident happened on Tuesday as Lindell, chief executive of My Pillow, was in line at a branch of Hardee’s in Mankato, Minnesota, his home town, following a hunting trip. Continue reading...

In some places the enemy has abandoned positions, guns and even roubles. Elsewhere, resistance is fiercerIt’s a liberation – something Ukrainians have been awaiting for half a year now. According to President Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian army has taken more than 6,000 sq km from the Russian occupation – including a few towns in the Donbas, which took months for the Russian army to capture.Any image appearing from a newly liberated town is watched with fascination. I was glued to a short video showing the Ukrainian army entering Balakliya – the first of the larger towns liberated in the Kharkiv region. The ladies in the town emerged from basements, hugging the military and suggesting they stay and eat. “Boys, we have some pancakes left,” they said. The soldiers begged off: “We can’t now, please, perhaps a bit later,” they replied, in the tone children usually reserve for their mothers. “We need to go on, and it’s dangerous here – you need to be evacuated.”Nataliya Gumenyuk is a Ukrainian journalist specialising in foreign affairs and conflict reporting, and author of Lost Island: Tales from the Occupied Crimea Continue reading...

Some are complaining that Biden’s student debt relief doesn’t go far enough. But we must understand that change takes timeThese days I think of myself as a tortoise at the mayfly party. By that, I mean I try to see the long trajectory of change behind current events, because it takes time to see change, and understanding change is essential to understanding politics and culture, let alone trying to participate in them. The short view generates incomprehension and ineffectuality.Events, like living beings, have genealogies and evolutions, and to know those means knowing who they are, how they got there, and who and what they’re connected to. If you follow them either in real time or the historical record, you can often see power that emerges from below and ideas that move from the margins to the center. You can see how it all works. And yet these trajectories and genealogies are often left out of the news, the conversation and apparently the conception of how something came to pass. Continue reading...

Jay Jordan’s criminal record barred him from job after job, leaving him in poverty. Now he’s helping California take a transformative stepWhen Jay Jordan was getting out of prison in 2012, he had an ambitious plan to turn his life around. He was going to sell life insurance, restore old cars, get a real estate license, and establish a community barbershop.There was one problem: his criminal record barred him from every single industry. Continue reading...

White House says South Carolina senator’s proposed bill ‘wildly out of step with what Americans believe’. Plus, how YouTube got swamped with creepy content for kids

Marsch is applying the same theories of togetherness and holism that he refined with New York Red Bulls while busting preconceptions about American managers abroadPre-season, 2016. New York Red Bulls head coach Jesse Marsch has arranged a training camp in Tucson, Arizona, for both his own squad and the club’s second team. Rather than separate the two groups and focus his attention of the first-teamers, Marsch brings everyone together, delivering a training session for 45 players of varied ages and experience levels.On the sideline, Marsch pauses mid-session. Wearing a contented smile, he turns to a colleague. “This,” he says, “I love.” Continue reading...

If you can’t tell the difference, I have a horrible punishment in mind for you – whether you’re the boss of Apple TV or the president of the USHope you have got some sensible shoes on because I am about to take you on a hike up a hill I am prepared to die on. Ready? Here we go: anyone who uses the word “humbled” when they really mean “honoured” ought to be immediately thrown into solitary confinement and not allowed out until they have read a dictionary.That may sound harsh but desperate times call for desperate measures: an epidemic of humbled-bragging appears to be sweeping the world. Every time a celebrity or sportsperson or LinkedIn thought-leader accepts an award or announces a new job these days, they trot out a line about how “humbled” they are. Just this week, Apple TV boss Zack Van Amburg responded to Ted Lasso’s Emmy wins by saying: “We’re so grateful and humbled.” Even heads of state aren’t immune. When Joe Biden won the 2020 US election he announced he was “honoured and humbled”. Respectfully, Mr President, becoming the most powerful person in the world is very much the opposite of being humbled.Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

In the short term, the Queen’s passing will boost support for the monarchy. But that could soon fade awayOur monarchy, however restrained and “constitutional” it is always said to be, is actually a totalising system. We are all the monarch’s subjects. Ministers, members of parliament, military personnel and police officers in England and Wales all swear oaths of allegiance to the crown. All our mainstream media are preoccupied by the monarchy, as the days since the Queen’s death have relentlessly made clear. Whenever there is a big royal occasion, most journalists, politicians and other public figures speak about it with one approving voice. These rituals are so familiar that their strangeness in a society that is supposed to be a diverse, irreverent democracy – and their particularity to this country – is not much noticed and even less discussed.One consequence of our monarchy’s half-hidden domineering quality is that, at moments of great royal drama and ceremony like now, this country suddenly finds little room left for anything else. Since the Queen’s death much of public life has been suspended: strikes, football matches, parliament, party politics, the Lib Dem and TUC conferences, key decisions by the new government and the Bank of England, even a “festival of resistance” planned in London by the usually fearless and single-minded climate activists of Extinction Rebellion. A country which, by general agreement, is in the middle of one of its worst peacetime social, economic and political crises, with much of its population terrified about how they will get through the winter, has prioritised more than 10 days of elaborate mourning instead.Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

As Biden’s recommendations fall flat, negotiations between management and unions are at an impasse – and workers are prepared to walkUS freight railroad workers are close to striking over claims that grueling schedules and poor working conditions have been driving employees out of the industry over the past several years.Heated negotiations over a new union contract between railroad corporations and 150,000-member-strong labor unions have been ongoing for nearly three years. A “cooling off” period imposed by the Biden administration after it issued recommendations to settle the dispute ends on Friday. If no deal is reached, unions are threatening industrial action – the first since 1992 – and workers say they will quit an industry already facing staff shortages. Continue reading...

Nancy Davis suffered ‘unspeakable pain’ due to the poorly worded law that meant a hospital in her home state refused to terminate the pregnancyAn expectant Louisiana woman who was carrying a skull-less fetus that would die within a short time from birth ultimately traveled about 1,400 miles to New York City to terminate her pregnancy after her local hospital denied her an abortion amid uncertainty over the procedure’s legality.Nancy Davis, 36, told the Guardian that she had her pregnancy terminated on 1 September after traveling from her home town of Baton Rouge to a clinic in Manhattan whose staff had agreed to complete the procedure. Continue reading...

The commission presented its final report on Confederate-honoring military bases and assets that should be renamedAn independent commission is recommending that the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery be dismantled and taken down, as part of its final report to Congress on the renaming of military bases and assets that commemorate the Confederacy.Panel members on Tuesday rolled out the final list of ships, base roads, buildings and other items that they said should be renamed. But unlike the commission’s recommendations earlier this year laying out new names for nine Army bases, there were no suggested names for the roughly 1,100 assets across the military that bear Confederate names. Continue reading...

Though Elizabeth II outlasted and undid our republican impulses, it’s astonishing to see the nonstop public piety in operationThere is an undeniable power to monarchy. The monarch is an archetype on our collective unconscious, along with the deity, the prophet, Christ figures and the princesses little girls seek stories of, even in the new world of women’s power. Kingship is there with all the rest of our psychic paraphernalia. The Anglican church is still locked into believing the late Queen and her monarchy is, holus-bolus, God’s will, and will be in the embarrassing situation of having to pretend that the universe and its deity intended every nuance of her life.The mystique, the voodoo, derives – for my generation – from the surfaces of money, from black-and-white film sequences of her and her sister Margaret (a mythic role-player herself as wild Dionysian princess), and from the freshly minted marriage the young Queen brought all the way to Australia in 1954. These images have a religious force. She was omnipresent. Continue reading...

Starr’s Whitewater investigation, which uncovered Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky, led to US president’s impeachment in 1998Ken Starr, the lawyer who relentlessly pursued Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, has died at the age of 76, according to a statement issued by his family.Starr was a prosecutor whose Whitewater investigation led to the impeachment of former Democratic president Clinton, in 1998. He died on Tuesday at Baylor St Luke’s medical center in Houston, of complications from surgery, the statement said. Continue reading...

Heavy rains are remnants of tropical storm that brought badly needed rainfall to drought-stricken southern California last weekRescuers searched for a person missing in a mudslide Tuesday after flash floods swept dirt, rocks and trees down fire-scarred slopes, washed away cars and buried buildings in small mountain communities in southern California.With thunderstorms forecast and more mudslides possible into Wednesday, evacuation orders remained in place in parts of the San Bernardino Mountains while a wildfire raging 500 miles (805 km) to the north forced residents to abandon their homes. Continue reading...

White House says South Carolina senator’s proposed bill ‘wildly out of step with what Americans believe’Senator Lindsey Graham proposed legislation on Tuesday for a nationwide 15-week abortion ban, a politically risky strategy as a backlash grows to the US supreme court ruling earlier this summer overturning federal protections for the procedure.Polling shows that 57% of Americans disapproved of the court’s June reversal of the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling guaranteeing access to abortion, and 62% say the procedure should be legal in all or most cases. Continue reading...

Judiciary committee notifies justice department of investigation into claims made by fired US attorney Geoffrey BermanThe US Senate judiciary committee has said it will investigate claims made in a recent book that allies of Donald Trump politically interfered with a prominent US attorney’s office.William Barr, Donald Trump’s second attorney general, fired Geoffrey Berman from the powerful southern district of New York (SDNY) five months before the 2020 election. In a memoir – Holding the Line: Inside the Nation’s Preeminent US Attorney’s Office and its Battle with the Trump Justice Department – which is published in the US on Tuesday, Berman alleges interference both on behalf of Trump allies and against Trump enemies. Continue reading...