by Nadia Khomami Arts and culture correspondent on (#5VC4H)
Producers said they received a complaint about the show’s star from Diane Davis, who plays Harry’s wifeAn actor has been fired from the Broadway production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child following a complaint about his conduct.James Snyder played Harry Potter in the Tony award-winning play, which was a huge success in London’s West End before transferring to Broadway, where it became the highest ever grossing non-musical in 2018. Continue reading...
Critics condemn ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, which seeks to ban discussion of sexuality and gender identity in Florida schoolsA Republican-led committee in the Florida state house has advanced a bill that would ban all discussion of sexuality and gender identity in schools, a move advocates say will “erase” LGTBQ+ students and history.The Florida house education and employment committee passed the Parental Rights in Education bill, also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, last week. Continue reading...
Biden administration’s latest effort to combat surge in cases caused by Omicron variantThe US government will begin distribution of 400m free N95 masks to pharmacies and community health centers this week, in the Biden administration’s latest effort to combat a surge in cases caused by the Omicron Covid-19 variant.N95 and KN95 masks are considered more protective against Covid-19 than surgical and cloth masks, which are still widely used. The free mask distribution comes alongside the launch of a federal government website where US residents can order four free at-home rapid Covid tests per household through the postal service. Continue reading...
Laura Spears, 55, has now added the lottery to her safe senders list in case of future jackpotsA woman in Michigan checked her spam email folder – and found out she had won a $3m lottery prize.“I saw an ad on Facebook that the Mega Millions jackpot was getting pretty high, so I got on my account and bought a ticket,” Laura Spears, 55 and from Oakland county, said in a release from the Michigan Lottery. Continue reading...
Institution criticized Kennedy for likening US government efforts to contain Covid-19 with vaccine mandates to the HolocaustThe official memorial of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration camp in which more than 1 million people were murdered, has accused the prominent anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr of “moral and intellectual decay”, after he compared vaccine mandates to laws in Hitler’s Germany and invoked the name of Anne Frank.The Auschwitz Memorial and Museum responded swiftly to remarks made at an anti-vaccine mandate rally in Washington DC on Sunday. Continue reading...
The so-called ‘world’s greatest deliberative body’ is deliberately and inherently undemocraticEnabled by Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, a united front of US Senate Republicans dealt American democracy a massive blow last week by blocking the Freedom to Vote: John R Lewis Act. The US Senate: a place where desperately needed federal voting rights legislation goes to die – a spectacle unworthy of what Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin called “the world’s greatest deliberative body”.Raskin was referring to the Senate’s reputation not necessarily in an affirmative, but in an aspirational way: he wanted to issue a challenge to the senators to live up to this glorious notion. Nevertheless, the mythical idea of the Senate as “the world’s greatest deliberative body” is widely held among the country’s political elite – the kind of American exceptionalism that still very much warps the perspective on US history and politics.Thomas Zimmer is a historian and DAAD visiting professor at Georgetown University, where he focuses on the history of democracy and its discontents in the United States. Continue reading...
Dependents of staffers have been told to leave Kyiv amid growing tensions over Russia’s military buildup. Plus, Jason Bateman on his lost decadeGood morning.As fears of a Russian invasion are heightening in Ukraine, the US and UK are withdrawing diplomats’ families.What’s happening in Ukraine? There are rising tensions about Russia’s military buildup on the Ukraine border that have not been eased during talks between the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in Geneva.What has the US embassy said? “Military action by Russia could come at any time,” a statement said. Officials “will not be in a position to evacuate American citizens in such a contingency, so US citizens currently present in Ukraine should plan accordingly”, it added.What has the once popular lawyer said? After his arrest, Avenatti stated in Twitter posts that no money related to Daniels was ever misappropriated or mishandled and that he mostly worked unpaid for Daniels with an agreement that he would receive a proportion of any book proceeds. He said he looked “forward to a jury hearing the evidence”. Continue reading...
The Freedom to Vote: John R Lewis Act would restore key voting rights provisions and protect American democracy. We can’t give upAmerican democracy is in a state of emergency. Without federal voting rights legislation, discriminatory voting laws will continue to pass unchallenged and harm millions in their wake. Following the US Senate’s recent failure to pass the Freedom to Vote: John R Lewis Act, civil rights leaders urged senators to continue pressing for the bill. But understanding how deeply the absence of its protections will continue to affect voters is key to the bill’s success.Arguably the most crucial measure of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was section 5’s pre-clearance requirement that states with a recent history of voter discrimination get approval from the justice department before implementing voting changes. However, the US supreme court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder struck down the pre-clearance requirement claiming that voting conditions for racial minorities had improved and that its use was outdated. Since then, numerous states passed laws they had previously abandoned due to the threat of pre-clearance. Other states continued to enact laws restricting voting that were already under way before Shelby. These statutes are so restrictive they would have never seen the light of day if pre-clearance was still intact. New voter suppression laws in Texas, Georgia and Florida are the most recent examples of these efforts.Jared Evans is a policy counsel at NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Continue reading...
Barring a surprise injury, the Philadelphia Flyers defenseman will break a 36-year-old NHL record this weekConsistency often gets overlooked. We can be as oblivious to the employee who comes to work on time and performs tasks without complaint as we are to a member of a theater’s backstage crew.Yet Tuesday night, when he takes the ice in Elmont, New York against the New York Islanders, Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Keith Yandle will get his moment in the spotlight. Continue reading...
Experts say trend is accelerating as groups push for bans of works that often address race, LGBTQ issues and marginalized peopleConservative groups across the US, often linked to deep-pocketed rightwing donors, are carrying out a campaign to ban books from school libraries, often focused on works that address race, LGBTQ issues or marginalized communities.Literature has already been removed from schools in Texas, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming. Librarians and teachers warn the trend is on the increase, as groups backed by wealthy Republican donors use centrally drawn up tactics and messaging to harangue school districts into removing certain texts. Continue reading...
Nato’s treatment of Russia almost guaranteed a chauvinistic reflex. The way forward is to implement the Minsk settlementThe movement of troops round the Ukrainian border now clearly heralds a crisis. Russia’s level of provocation is grotesque, but nothing on the ground poses any strategic threat to Britain or any other western government, or even to Europe’s security as a whole.Ukraine’s relations with Russia have been fraught since the toppling of the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in a coup in 2014. The country is split. When Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine rebelled, it was aided by Russia. Moscow seized Crimea. The longstanding ties with Russia were one reason why Nato left Ukraine out of its reckless post-Soviet rush to advance its security boundary as near as it could to the Russian border during the 1990s.Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...
On Sunday night Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes were close to flawless. And fans across the world were left breathlessMoments after Josh Allen’s 19-yard strike to Gabriel Davis deep in the fourth quarter, television crews cut to the quarterback’s family celebrating in a box at Arrowhead. The Bills led 36-33 and the champagne was about to be popped. Tears of joy streamed down Joel Allen’s face as he watched his son, who was having a perfect postseason, punch his ticket to the AFC Championship.Or so we thought. Continue reading...
The damage done by this prime minister’s misrule goes way beyond him, his inner circle and even his partyAs Boris Johnson and the Conservative party anxiously tread political water while repeatedly being pulled under by strife and disgrace, two plotlines are unfolding. One is about the immediate moment, and will reach another key juncture with the imminent report by the senior civil servant Sue Gray, which may finally focus wavering Tory minds on the impossibility of the prime minister’s position. Meanwhile, amid new allegations of blackmail, rumours of yet more illicit gatherings and Dominic Raab’s characteristically clever insistence that his boss is “like a seasoned prizefighter” who has “taken some knocks”, another story is in danger of being lost: the dire implications of Johnson’s antics for people’s trust in politics, and a gap between Westminster and the country that may now be bigger than ever.All those Downing Street and Whitehall parties – along with the prime minister’s evasions, half-apologies and desperate attempts to shore himself up – have been reported in terms of shock-horror revelation. But for many voters, they will confirm longstanding ideas about the kind of people who run the country, or aspire to.John Harris is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...
Omicron wave has led to staff shortages, meaning hospitals that would normally release patients into care homes are backed upCovid cases are rising rapidly among US nursing home residents and staff, causing shortages in admissions, exacerbating bed shortages at hospitals in turn, and in some cases requiring the national guard to be called in.The Omicron wave has sent many staff home sick at care facilities and rehabilitation centers that offer round-the-clock medical care. As a result, hospitals that would normally release patients into such stepped-down care are now holding off, creating a backlog of patients stuck in hospital. Continue reading...
Police superintendent says department ‘will not rest’ until killer of Melissa Ortega, a recent arrival from Mexico, is foundA gunman targeting someone else on Chicago’s south west side instead shot an eight-year-old girl in the head, killing her, police said.The Cook county medical examiner’s office identified the victim on Sunday as Melissa Ortega, whose family recently moved to Chicago from Mexico. Continue reading...
Jason Rivera, 22-year-old officer, killed and another wounded after attending domestic dispute in HarlemA rookie New York City police officer was hailed as an inspiration to his community on Sunday, as investigators sought to make sense of his death, shot while attending a domestic dispute in Harlem.Another officer shot on Friday night was said to be still “fighting for his life”. Continue reading...
A fish rots, it is said, from the head down. With claims of blackmail, bullying and racism, it seems so too does a political partyIf a British minister knowingly misleads parliament, they are expected to resign as a constitutional convention. Should a minister refuse, then they could legally carry on in office, but it would be unconstitutional. Boris Johnson seems not to care. Last week, he brazenly refused to accept that the political principle should apply to him. What are the consequences of lying to lawmakers? The answer could be nothing much. That highlights a far bigger problem.Britain is governed by a political – rather than a legal – constitution that relies heavily on conventions, and leaders with a sense of decency, to work. The dishonest and deceitful Mr Johnson is uniquely unsuited for the top job. A fish, it is said, rots from the head down. With claims of blackmail, bullying and racism, it seems so too does a political party. Continue reading...
Hundreds of people in California were told to evacuate because of a new blaze as authorities were forced to shut one of the state's main highways. Firefighters were battling the blaze that broke out in rugged mountains in Big Sur on Friday night and quickly spread toward the sea, fanned by strong winds of up to 50mph. The blaze burned at least 2.3 square miles of brush and redwood trees
On Russia and Putin, the president said the quiet part loud. Re-engagement has been welcomed but the exit from Afghanistan was a disaster. Analysts see much to do to rebuild US credibilityJoe Biden marked his first anniversary in office with a gaffe over Ukraine that undid weeks of disciplined messaging and diplomatic preparation.The president’s suggestion that a “minor incursion” by Russia might split Nato over how to respond sent the White House into frantic damage limitation mode. Continue reading...
Paul Vernon Hoeffer, 60, also pleads guilty in federal court to threats against Kim Foxx, a prominent district attorney in IllinoisA Florida man has pleaded guilty to threatening to kill Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi, two leading Democrats in Congress, and Kim Foxx, a prominent district attorney in Illinois.The US attorney’s office for the southern district of Florida said Paul Vernon Hoeffer, 60, entered his plea in federal court in Fort Pierce on Friday. Continue reading...
The Colorado fire grew to more than 2.3 sq miles while, earlier in the day, the vice-president outlined a response to reduce riskAs Vice-President Kamala Harris visited California to highlight new funding for fighting wildfires, hundreds of residents in the Big Sur area in the north of the state were told to evacuate due to a new blaze as authorities were forced to shut its main roadway.Harris visited on Friday. On Saturday, firefighters were battling the blaze that broke out in rugged mountains along Big Sur on Friday night in a steep canyon and quickly spread toward the sea, fanned by strong winds up to 50mph. Continue reading...
A shorter week could attract employees to your small business – as well as increase productivity and moraleEvery small business owner I talk to has the same problem: we can’t find enough people to do the work we need. Well, I have an answer: perhaps we should be offering a four-day workweek.“What? A four-day workweek?” I’ll often hear when I propose this. “I need my people to work more, not less!” Continue reading...
The Philadelphian’s journey from college basketball to US Olympic bobsledder could land her on the podium in BeijingThree years ago, Sylvia Hoffman tried out for NBC’s second season of The Next Olympic Hopeful for one last shot at becoming an Olympic athlete. After tryouts, she laid on a foam roller, stretching out, when she heard two other athletes next to her talking: “The show last year was so great,” they said to each other.Hoffman perked up. A show? She thought this was just a scouting camp. When she asked the two athletes, they told her, “Yeah, they’re going to make this into a documentary.” Still confused, Hoffman Googled what she had just signed up for. Sure enough, it’s a show with one season out already. “Wow. OK, cool,” she thought to herself. She had been so focused on the word “Olympics” that she didn’t care about anything else, much less that this was a documentary. “Well, good thing I tried my best,” she said. Continue reading...
The longer Conservative MPs prevaricate about removing him, the more they become complicit in this scandalThe magic number is 54. This is how many Tory MPs have to write a secret letter to the chairman of their 1922 Committee in order to trigger a vote of no confidence in Boris Johnson. There are easily more than 54 Conservative MPs who think their leader is a busted flush, who appreciate the risk his attempts to hang on to the premiership will inflict lasting reputational damage on their party and who understand that Britain won’t return to anything resembling seemly and orderly government until he is gone. One senior Tory ended a conversation with me by quoting François Rabelais: “Bring down the curtain, the farce is over.”Quite a lot share the public revulsion with the lockdown-busting of the prime minister and his staff. Some agree that he lied to MPs and that it is critical to the integrity of our politics that deliberately misleading parliament is always treated as a resignation offence. More are agitated about what leaving Mr Johnson in place means for their electoral prospects. All can read the opinion polls. His personal ratings have plunged to depths not even plumbed by Theresa May at her lowest point. This strongly suggests we are witnessing the implosion of the Cult of Johnson that I wrote about at the time of the last Tory party conference. And yet Sir Graham Brady, the man who keeps count of the letters, has not announced that the magic number has been reached. Tory MPs scheme, gossip, brief, speculate and plot. With a few exceptions, what they have not done is act. Continue reading...
No western leader wants to lock horns over Ukraine – but they need to declare the Russian leader a pariahThe term “rogue male”, denoting a rampaging bull elephant, is also used figuratively to describe a dangerously out-of-control, cold-hearted loner. It may be that Vladimir Putin has a cuddly side. If so, it’s well-hidden. Russia’s president fits the rogue male profile to a T – unscrupulous, vicious, cunning, and ever ready to trample on other people and countries.Much recent effort has been expended trying to understand and explain Putin’s motives in threatening a wider war in Ukraine. Does he hope to restore past Soviet glories or crush Kyiv’s pro-western trajectory? Is it about his historical legacy or his need for a repeat electoral “Crimea bounce”? Such theories carry weight, but they all miss the essential point. Continue reading...
The two Democratic senators chose to wreck American democracy, simply to feed their sense of their own importanceWhat can possibly explain Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s decision to sink voting rights protections? Why did they create a false narrative that the legislation had to be “bipartisan” when everyone, themselves included, knew bipartisanship was impossible?Why did they say they couldn’t support changing Senate filibuster rules when only last month they voted for an exception to the filibuster that allowed debt ceiling legislation to pass with only Democratic votes? Continue reading...
One cynomolgus monkey remained on the loose overnight after the truck transporting 100 of them crashed near DanvilleThe last of the monkeys that escaped from a truck after it had crashed on a Pennsylvanian highway have been accounted for and three have been euthanised.Several monkeys had escaped following Friday’s collision between the pickup truck transporting them and a dump truck, but only one had remained unaccounted for as of Saturday morning, prompting the Pennsylvania Game Commission and other agencies to launch a search for it in frigid weather. Continue reading...
Incident occurred in Harlem, as four officers have now been shot in New York City in as many daysThe 22-year-old New York City police officer who was shot dead while responding to a call in a Harlem apartment on Friday night came from an immigrant family and grew up in a community with strained police relations, but once wrote that he joined the force to make a difference in the “chaotic city”.“I know that something as small as helping a tourist with directions, or helping a couple resolve an issue, will put a smile on someone’s face,” Jason Rivera wrote to his commanding officer in 2020, when he was a probationary police officer. Continue reading...
Corrections center staff will not be charged in Cedric Lofton’s death in September due to Kansas’ ‘stand your ground’ lawSurveillance video shows a Black 17-year-old struggling with staff at a Wichita juvenile center last fall before his death, which followed being restrained facedown for more than 30 minutes.Late on Friday, Sedgwick county released 18 video clips of what happened before Cedric Lofton was rushed to a hospital on 24 September. He died two days later. Continue reading...
At a board meeting on Covid mitigation strategies, the woman said, ‘My children will not come to school with masks on’A Virginia mother was charged with making a threat on school property after she told local board members she would bring “every single gun loaded” if the district instituted a mask mandate.Renewed mask fights were touched off this month after the new Republican governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, issued an executive order making masks optional for students, subject to the preference of parents. Continue reading...
Public workers trained in use of tourniquets credited with saving life of man injured while operating band sawA man who stumbled along a street in Maine carrying his own severed arm was saved by two public workers who saw him and happened to be trained in the use of tourniquets, authorities said.“It had to be divine intervention because two of my best guys just happened to be there sanding sidewalks,” said Mary Ann Brenchick, director of Lewiston Public Works. “It couldn’t have been better guys for this kind of situation.” Continue reading...
For razzle-dazzle they can’t be beaten and we could all do with more of it these daysIt is too easy to fall down rabbit holes of old festival sets on YouTube. I’ve revisited the ones I first saw on TV – PJ Harvey in a pink catsuit, singing Down by the Water at Glastonbury, broadcast on Channel 4 in 1995 into my childhood front room, changing my tastes forever – and later, the ones where I can try to see if I was in the crowd, while suspecting it’s probably best to not know.There is something that almost every one of the shows that took place before, roughly, the mid-00s, has in common: they are strikingly un-produced. Nirvana at Reading festival in 1992 is music history, but watch it again now: it’s three blokes playing their instruments on a vast, open stage. The razzle-dazzle, arena-show-style spectacles we’ve grown used to, the big screens, light shows, costume changes, fireworks that put New Year’s Eve to shame, are relatively new. Continue reading...
A tweet from a professor at Wharton School reveals students in one class believed the average American makes over six figuresIt costs over $100,000 a year to attend the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. I don’t know what you get for that money exactly but insights into the everyday economy clearly aren’t on the syllabus. Nina Strohminger, an assistant professor at Wharton School recently asked her students how much they reckoned the average American makes a year. A quarter of the class, she reported in a viral tweet, thought it was over six figures; one student thought it was $800,000. The real figure? Around $53,838, according to figures from the Social Security Administration (SSA) last year. Continue reading...
We don’t realize how important physical contact is in building and facilitating and servicing relationshipsEarlier this fall, in the quaint days when our variants had progressed only an eighth of the way through the Greek alphabet, I made a seemingly impractical trip: I unstuck myself from the couch where I’d been working the previous 18 months, kissed my husband and three children goodbye, and traveled to a DC suburb where, for 10 waking hours, I sat next to my friend on her couch, and worked, and hung out with her three children. Then I commuted six hours home.After months apart, during which we’d communicated almost solely in sentence fragments on WhatsApp, we had a single hour of child-free chatting over a bottle of wine – at 9 o’clock, we were both too tired to stay awake, so crawled into beds in adjacent rooms. And when the sun rose, we teamed up to shove tiny feet and hands into boots and gloves while, perhaps a little too on-the-nose, Elton John’s I’m Still Standing blasted over the living room speakers, then drove the girls to school. On the relaxation scale, it clocked in closer to “gut renovating your apartment” than “spa”. But those measly 10 hours, full of random, unprompted hugs and the knowledge that we could just exist, in the same place, with no real agenda – Eating takeout! Chatting in a car! Or while doing the dishes! Blowing raspberries on the one-year-old’s tummy as the other one plowed through emails! – replenished a part of my social life that has languished perhaps more than any other lately: a type of socializing that falls under the heading of hanging out. Continue reading...
What defenders of the filibuster want is minority rule – and a government unable to deliver anything meaningful to its peopleOn Joe Manchin’s US Senate website, you can click on “Help from Joe”. American democracy (not to speak of another Joe) desperately needed his help this week. What it got instead was notes cribbed from constitutional law 101, selective and self-serving worship of a distant deity known as “the Founders”, and sanctimonious invocations of bipartisanship.The battle to secure free and fair conditions for voting through a simple Senate majority seems lost for the moment; and Republicans – who call for bipartisanship only when they happen to be in the minority – are gloating. But we should not move on so quickly. Otherwise, like dirt, the deeply misleading claims about the filibuster preventing a “tyranny of the majority”, advanced by Manchin and commentators thinking the point of politics is moderation for its own sake, might come to stick. Continue reading...
The city’s biggest arthouse cinema may become a live entertainment venue just shy of its 100th birthdayFor years, the San Francisco underground drag performer and cinephile Peaches Christ has filled the city’s renowned Castro Theatre with her Midnight Mass series, juxtaposing cult film screenings with live, drag-parody re-enactments and onstage interviews. These loving but irreverent late-night events have been a staple of LGBTQ+ culture at the city’s pre-eminent arthouse theater, itself one of the most visible landmarks in San Francisco’s most famous gayborhood.As Peaches Christ puts it: “Cinema has been my religion, and the Castro is our Vatican.” Continue reading...
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