US news | The Guardian

Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan agree to prop up troubled bank after its shares tumbled amid wider turmoilWall Street’s giants moved to end the US’s spiraling banking crisis on Thursday by agreeing to prop up troubled First Republic, a mid-sized bank whose shares have been pummeled amid a wider banking turmoil.Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and others will deposit $30bn in First Republic, which has seen customers yank their money following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and fears that First Republic could be next. Continue reading...

Cause of the incidents remains unknown even as teams head to Washington state to clean spilled diesel on tribal landTwo BNSF trains derailed in separate incidents in Arizona and Washington state on Thursday, with the latter spilling diesel fuel on tribal land along Puget Sound.There were no injuries reported. It was not clear what caused either derailment. Continue reading...

Senate finance committee holds hearing on bank’s collapse and the role relaxing banking regulations had in the crisis

Court officials estimate another 700 to 1,200 defendants could face charges as editor of New York Jewish newspaper arrestedFederal prosecutors in Washington have reportedly told court officials a thousand more people could be charged in relation to the deadly January 6 Capitol attack.Matthew Graves, the US attorney in Washington DC, sent a one-page letter to the chief judge of Washington DC federal court, apprising her of the potential deluge of defendants, Bloomberg News reported. Continue reading...

Nearly back-to-back storms have refilled reservoirs and built up snowpack, easing drought as residents reckon with destructionDrought-busting rainfall from California’s 11th atmospheric river has brought the end of water restrictions for nearly 7 million people, which imposed limits on activities such as outdoor watering as the state grappled with severe shortages. But the state is still picking up the pieces from the most recent brutal storm that pushed parts of the state from desperately dry to excessively wet.On Thursday, thousands remained under evacuation warnings or without power. Flooding also closed several miles of the Pacific Coast Highway, and 43 of the state’s 58 counties have been under states of emergency due to the storms. Dramatic drone footage showed saturated hillsides along the Orange county coast that crumbled this week, leaving homes lurching precariously over newly created cliffs. Continue reading...

Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo are among the banks discussing a lifeline for the San Francisco-based lenderSome of the US’s biggest banks are weighing a rescue bid for First Republic, a mid-sized bank whose shares have been pummeled amid a wider banking turmoil.Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo are among the banks discussing a lifeline for the San Francisco-based lender, according to the Wall Street Journal. Continue reading...

In the US, Biden has assured voters that no taxpayer money would go to at-risk banks, but trust in the system relies on such supportBanks are a special type of organisation. They take deposits and lend these funds to borrowers over long periods. It is pretty remarkable when you think about it. Banks make loans over many years, but you and I can withdraw the savings that banks use to fund the loans instantly.For banks to operate this franchise model profitably, they essentially rely on two ingredients. First, they need to earn a profit by charging higher interest on long-term loans than they pay on short-term deposits. This model has come under severe strain in recent years. Owing to high inflation now and lower expected inflation in the next few years, many banks currently pay more for deposits and other funds than they earn on long-term loans and other assets. This makes the traditional banking model loss-making and raises questions about what the assets of some banks are worth if they had to be sold now.Jens Hagendorff is professor of finance at King’s College London Continue reading...

Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans was the only best picture nominee this year shot on celluloid. It’s time to stop misnaming moviesFor more than 100 years, films have been made of film. Now, instead of a magazine being loaded on to the camera, a card is inserted that electronically records whatever the camera sees.Today, most “films” are made electronically. No film is used in the making of them – not the shooting, editing or projection. So they can’t – or shouldn’t – be called films. Continue reading...

#TikTokMadeMeBuyIt videos have been viewed more than 40bn times, as users share their experiences of the ‘infinite loop’“An infinite loop of shoppertainment.” That might sound like the premise for a new Black Mirror episode. But it’s actually marketing blurb from TikTok. As part of its sales pitch to brands, the Chinese-owned platform tells its clients it is “at the forefront” of persuading online consumers to part with their cash. It boasts of a unique business model that endlessly entices people to not only discover and buy new stuff but also become repeat customers.Of course, anyone who has spent any time on TikTok, which claims to have more than a billion active monthly users, will already know this. Its famously sophisticated algorithm creates hyper-relevant, personalised feeds that are designed to keep us consuming content. “The algorithm tries to get people addicted rather than giving them what they really want,” Guillaume Chaslot, the founder of Paris-based AlgoTransparency, a group that has studied YouTube’s recommendation system, told the New York Times.Iona Bain is a financial journalist, founder of the Young(ish) Money blog and author of Spare Change & Own It Continue reading...

Walter James Griffin was killed when train he was training on passed a stationary freight car with a protruding metal beamAn Alabama woman whose husband was decapitated when the Norfolk Southern train he was training on passed a stationary freight car with a protruding metal beam is suing for wrongful death. The lawsuit comes at a difficult time for the rail giant, which must contend with litigation over a recent toxic derailment in Ohio.Walter James Griffin III, 43, was training to become a conductor when he was killed in Bessemer, Alabama, on 13 December, al.com reported. Continue reading...

Drone footage shot above Monterey County in central California on Wednesday shows rural communities inundated by flood waters after a levee on the Pajaro River failed. The levee failed on 10 March, prompting evacuations from the area, which is about 90 miles (140km) south of San Francisco. The flooding is the latest disaster triggered by a string of winter storms to strike California

Pentagon released footage on Thursday of Russian jet making close passes of drone and spraying fuel before collisionA US drone entered the Black Sea after a collision with a Russian fighter jet on Tuesday, in what appears to have been the first direct encounter between the world’s leading nuclear powers since the Ukraine war began. Here is everything you need to know: Continue reading...

Pentagon says video has been edited for length but shows events in sequential order

Suit alleges that Broward county sheriff’s office used excessive force as Kevin Desir suffered mental health emergency in 2021The family of a Florida man who died after being violently restrained by jailers is filing a civil rights suit against the officers who were involved in the incident and the jail’s healthcare provider.According to a draft of the lawsuit shared exclusively with the Guardian, the family of 43-year-old Kevin Desir alleges that Broward county sheriff officials used excessive force against Desir while he was suffering from a severe mental health episode, violating his 14th amendment rights. Continue reading...

Torrential rainfall hit parts of California on Wednesday, forcing evacuations and causing power cuts and road closures. The west coast is experiencing an usually wet season after two decades of drought. Drone footage taken in the beachfront community of San Clemente shows a house and pool perched on a cliff edge after the rains caused a landslide

Ex-staffers of self-help author seeking Democratic nomination report ‘uncontrollable’ fury at odds with message of loveLess than two weeks into her second campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, the self-help author Marianne Williamson was hit by claims her public message of love and compassion is undermined by behind-the-scenes behavior including “foaming, spitting, uncontrollable rage”.Speaking to Politico, 12 former staffers painted a picture of unpredictable anger, tending toward verbal and emotional abuse, beneath the bestseller’s promotion of spiritual calm. Continue reading...

A dispiriting new survey has found that nearly a quarter of schools teach poetry only once a year or less. What a shame that is

The director’s last film is rumoured to centre on the life of New Yorker film writer Pauline Kael – if true, her 1970s face-off with Warren Beatty would make a thrilling plot lineHow intriguing to hear that Quentin Tarantino’s new film is going to be about a film critic – the news has sent all of us in the film-critic community into a nervy tizzy of pre-emptive gags and warily dismissive tweets about what this means for the discourse. And The Movie Critic (a working title?) is reportedly to be Tarantino’s final film, his signoff. It’s no surprise that this fanatically encyclopaedic cinephile wanted this film to be set within the film world – but it’s not about a movie actor or a movie producer or a movie director, but a movie critic, surely a hilariously marginal, impotent and parasitical figure, who deserves no more than a walk-on part at best?Well, the word is that this isn’t just any old film critic, but one based on the most famous film critic of all – Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s legendary star. If true, it means that Tarantino faces the male-gaze challenge of creating a film around a woman who isn’t sexualised in any way, an intellectual blackbelt who saw off condescension from entitled men, like rival critic Andrew Sarris with whom she clashed on the ostensible issue of auteurism, but also, she suspected, the issue of men having a hard time debating a woman. Pauline Kael isn’t going to be putting her bare feet up on the car dashboard in this film. At least I don’t think so. Continue reading...

If New York and Green Bay agree terms on a trade for the quarterback, it may be a success or a disaster. But it will definitely be entertainingThe long national nightmare is over. Aaron Rodgers has made his decision.After 15 seasons as the Green Bay Packers starter, the quarterback is set to be traded to the New York Jets. He confirmed as much on Wednesday afternoon, although the teams have not yet agreed on terms of the deal. Continue reading...

I’ve found so many life-enhancing kitchen utensils on Instagram that I’ll have to share them with you. It’s the thoughtlessness that countsSometimes, in pursuit of a better life, I turn to the ads on Instagram, because the world is always better there. It has the gloss you get off a coffee table that’s just had a polish after a spray of Mr Sheen. When you look at Instagram you hope to see your own face reflected back at you, only prettier. For here are an array of devices specifically engineered to make working in the kitchen a more blissful experience; a place where you can cook un-aproned in a white shirt and never get stained; where your hair will always be glossy, and your mood so serene that Buddhist monks will tap you up for wisdom. I trust Instagram. Perhaps, as Mother’s Day is upon us, you have considered having a browse here too for gifts. Because as we all know, it’s the thoughtlessness that counts.A chef friend of mine has a cast-iron rule that no gadget in his kitchen can have a single use. His rice cooker is also a slow cooker. The toastie maker can be used to grill vegetables. The frying pan can be used to smack intruders across the head, and so on. Continue reading...

Survey also reveals more than half of Republicans think January 6 was a form of legitimate political discourseMore than a quarter of Republicans approve of the January 6 Capitol attack, according to a new poll. More than half think the deadly riot was a form of legitimate political discourse.The Economist and YouGov survey said 27% of Republicans either strongly or somewhat approved of the riot on 6 January 2021, which Donald Trump incited in an attempt to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden. Continue reading...

Manuel Paez Terán’s family say other state agencies have also failed to release information about activist’s death. Plus, how the first Twitter-fuelled bank run played out• Don’t already get First Thing in your inbox? Sign up hereGood morning.Attorneys for the family of Manuel Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita, have disclosed to the Guardian that a medical examiner’s office in Georgia has still not completed an autopsy of the environmental activist nearly two months after he was shot dead by the police.What did an independent autopsy reveal? A separate, family-ordered autopsy appeared to show that the activist was sitting cross-legged, with his hands in front of his face, when he was hit by a hail of bullets. “Manuel was looking death in the face, hands raised when killed,” the civil rights attorney Brian Spears said.What has the impact of the flood been like? Three water systems have been identified as potentially contaminated, according to county officials. Eleven schools have had to close, and hundreds of people are being housed in shelters where beds are mostly full. County officials are bracing for more evacuations and new damage from the next big rain. Continue reading...

It took decades to force banks to abandon racist redlining. We don’t have decades to avert catastrophic climate crisisThe collapse of Silicon Valley Bank will bring many forms of fallout. One of the most obvious consequences is that the biggest banks – Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America – will probably get even bigger. That is why we’re joining protests across the United States outside hundreds of those banks’ branches on Tuesday, 21 March: if they’re going to hold that much power over the planet’s economy, we need them to recognize and help with our great crises. We need them not to do what they did last century, which is to ignore or exacerbate our deepest troubles.Beginning in the 1930s, the federal government mapped America, grading neighborhoods to decide which ones were worthy of investment, literally drawing red lines on maps to make it crystal clear. Many mainly Black and Brown neighborhoods ended up with low grades, and most US banks made sure money didn’t flow in their direction. Nearly a century later, these neighborhoods still suffer. Lacking trees and parks, they are degrees warmer than nearby leafy communities. Their residents are condemned to a myriad of health issues, from asthma to kidney stones.Ben Jealous is the executive director of the Sierra Club, the former executive director of the NAACP, and the author of Our People Have Always Been FreeBill McKibben is the founder of Third Act, which organizes Americans over the age of 60 for action on climate and democracy Continue reading...

A federal judge is poised to restrict mifepristone – even though the drug has been safely and effectively used in the US for more than 20 yearsThis week a Republican-appointed federal judge weighed whether to grant an injunction that could remove mifepristone, the drug used in most American abortions, from the market nationwide. And the hearing almost happened in secret.US district court judge Matthew Kacsmaryk had initially planned to keep Wednesday’s hearing in the case – in which a group of rightwing anti-abortion groups are suing the FDA to reverse its 20-year-old approval of mifepristone – quiet. In a conference call with lawyers for the anti-choice groups and the Department of Justice, Kacsmaryk asked attorneys not to disclose the existence of the hearing (“This is not a gag order,” he said repeatedly), and said that the event would only be made public late on Tuesday to minimize popular awareness. “It may even be after business hours.” The judge’s courtroom in Amarillo, Texas, is hours away from any major city. It was only because of a press leak that the hearing was known to the public at all.Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist Continue reading...

Republicans in Cochise county who undermined midterm election gain control in critical swing state for 2024The 2022 election ended months ago, at least in most of the country.In a rural county on the US-Mexico border in Arizona, though, the election and its fallout linger, causing heated divisions and offering a view into how conspiracy theories could upend elections across the country. Continue reading...

Manuel Paez Terán’s family says several other state agencies have also failed to release information regarding the death of the activistAttorneys for the family of Manuel Paez Terán, known as “Tortuguita”, have disclosed to the Guardian that a local Georgia medical examiner’s office has still not completed an autopsy of the 26-year-old nearly two months after the environmental activist was shot and killed by the police.Among the issues at stake in the high-profile case is the question of whether Terán fired a gun first at officers, although it remains unclear if the autopsy would provide this information. Paez Terán died as police raided a camp in a forest near Atlanta, Georgia, near the construction site of a massive police and fire department training facility known as “Cop City”. Continue reading...

The Aussie dog cartoon expertly mirrors aspects of children’s internal life, its language is silly and divine, and it’s just so soothingFor British people of a certain generation (mine), it may be the Australian accents that soothe us into a state of pure happiness. It may be the quality of the animation, or the gentle, low-stress storylines. Or it may be that it just caught us at a particularly vulnerable time.Whatever it is, whenever my children ask what we should watch on TV, I lobby hard to veto Nailed It!, (cake reality show), shouty cartoon Teen Titans, or tween sitcom, Bunk’d, in favour of one of my top viewing pleasures of the moment. My kids lightly protest; at eight, they have almost outgrown Bluey, the Aussie cartoon about a blue dog and her little sister. But I, apparently, have not.Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

In rural northern California, residents feel neglected by officers – especially after they canceled daytime patrolsIn Rancho Tehama Reserve, residents are used to getting by without everything they need. The price, or the perk, of living among the oak trees and rolling hills where cattle graze in this rural northern California community is its isolation.People typically come to the Ranch, as residents call it, looking for space and quiet – they only got proper cellphone and internet service three years ago. The settlement is at the end of a two-lane road that meanders through the hillsides of California’s Sacramento Valley and offers glimpses of the snow-capped peaks of Mounts Lassen and Shasta. The gas station has snacks, propane and phone chargers, and the hardware store carries alfalfa pellets, kerosene and bolts, but most anything else requires at least a 30-minute drive. Continue reading...

An anti-woke commentator short-circuited when asked to define the term, which the right has turned into a catch-allTired of hearing conservatives go on and on about “wokeness”? Me too. So I have a cunning plan: let’s establish a moratorium on people throwing around the word “woke”, one of the most used and abused terms in recent memory, until we have all agreed on a precise definition of it.Before the right co-opted the term and used it to describe everything from BlackRock to Disney World, “woke” had an actual meaning. The term comes from African American Vernacular English and, originally, was broadly defined as being “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”. Americans who aren’t suffering from Fox News-induced brain worms still understand that to be its meaning. According to a recent USA Today/Ipsos Poll, 56% of Americans surveyed say they think that being woke means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices”. Thirty-nine per cent of people surveyed (and 56% of people who identified as Republican), meanwhile, said it meant “to be overly politically correct and police others’ words”. Continue reading...

Lawyers understood to have argued that payments would have been made regardless of presidential run and did not use campaign fundsDonald Trump’s legal team recently urged the Manhattan district attorney’s office not to indict the former president over his role in paying hush money to a porn star, arguing that the payments would have been made irrespective of his 2016 presidential candidacy, sources familiar with the matter have said.The lawyer who represented the Trump team at the meeting with the district attorney’s office, Susan Necheles, also argued that campaign funds had not been used for the payments to the porn star, known as Stormy Daniels, and were therefore not a violation of campaign finance laws. Continue reading...

Mayor and city council agreed to partnership with nonexistent nation invented by Indian fugitive Swami NithyanandaThe city of Newark, New Jersey, has confirmed that it was duped over five days in January when Mayor Ras Baraka invited what he believed to be a delegation from the Hindu nation of Kailasa to join into a sister city partnership.A signing ceremony was held at which Baraka told a Kailasa delegate: “I pray that our relationship helps us to understand cultural, social and political development and improves the lives of everybody in both places.” Continue reading...

Sidney Holmes, who served 30 years, released after new inquiry found eyewitness identification was likely ‘misidentification’A man who served more than 30 years of a 400-year prison sentence has been freed after he was exonerated for armed robbery charges.On Monday, 57-year-old Sidney Holmes was released from prison in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, after the state decided to reinvestigate a 1988 armed robbery in which Holmes was accused of being the getaway driver. Continue reading...

Adult film star was paid $130,000 in hush money to keep her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with the ex-president under wrapsThe adult film star Stormy Daniels met with investigators on Wednesday to discuss the former president’s role in a hush money payment made ahead of the 2016 election in exchange for her silence about claims of a sexual liaison.The news emerged as Michael Cohen, a former Trump attorney who orchestrated the payment, was giving a second day of testimony before a New York grand jury looking into the matter. Continue reading...

Former Los Angeles mayor takes diplomatic post after weathering doubts about his truthfulness in a sexual harassment scandalEric Garcetti, the former mayor of Los Angeles, was confirmed on Wednesday as the nation’s next ambassador to India, 20 months after he was first nominated by Joe Biden and after weathering doubts about his truthfulness in a sexual harassment scandal involving a top adviser during his time at City Hall.The 52-42 vote in a divided Senate gave the administration a long-sought victory in filling one of the country’s highest-profile diplomatic posts. Continue reading...

Federal judge in Texas holds hearing on status of mifepristone, which a far-right group claims is unsafe despite FDA approval

US attorney says Wengui, also known as Miles Guo and Ho Wan Kwok, used stolen money to buy a $3.5m Ferrari and finance a $37m yachtGuo Wengui, a self-exiled Chinese tycoon with close links to prominent Trumpist Republicans including Steve Bannon, has been indicted on 12 counts relating to an alleged $1bn fraud.The charges announced by the US attorney for the southern district of New York on Wednesday include wire fraud, securities fraud, bank fraud and money laundering. Continue reading...

US says any recovery operation in such deep water would be difficult and unlikely to yield useful intelligenceMoscow has said it intends to recover the wreckage of a US drone brought down on Tuesday following an interception by Russian fighter jets, but US officials said the debris could be in such deep water that recovery is impossible, and would have no real intelligence value.“I don’t know if we can recover [it] or not, but we will certainly have to do that, and we will deal with it,” said Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s security council, on Wednesday. “I certainly hope for success.” Continue reading...

Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator, revealed the ex-president’s state of mind after 2020 loss to the Georgia grand jurySuch was Donald Trump’s troubled state of mind after the 2020 election that he would have believed aliens had stolen his ballots if anyone had told him so, a leading Republican senator said, according to a member of the special grand jury in the investigation of the former president’s attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in Georgia.According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, an unnamed juror described Senator Lindsey Graham, from South Carolina and a close Trump ally, as saying: “During that time, if somebody had told Trump that aliens came down and stole Trump ballots … Trump would’ve believed it.” Continue reading...

Stallion zebra, which was behaving ‘erratically’, shot dead by police after attacking Ronald Clifton, 72A midwestern farmer called emergency services, shouting: “Come before it gets me again!” after he was attacked by his pet zebra at a farm in Circleville, Ohio.The zebra, which bit Ronald Clifton, 72, on the arm, partially severing it, was the only stallion in a small herd of four or five mares. Continue reading...