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It’s not just Putin or the refusal of the major powers to disarm. Unstable regimes in Israel and North Korea are also raising global nuclear tensionsLeaders of unstable nuclear-armed states do dangerous and foolish things when under stress. They miscalculate, provoke, overreach. Given the febrile state of bilateral relations, last week’s aerial military clash between Russia and the US over the Black Sea inevitably intensified fears of nuclear escalation. The incident dramatised how dangerous Vladimir Putin, cornered by his existential Ukraine blunder, truly is – and the risks he is increasingly prepared to run. But he’s not the only one.As often the case over the past year, Putin relied on American restraint. US forces could easily have gone after the offending Su-27 fighter at its Crimea base. Each time Russia’s president darkly hints at going nuclear, that once unthinkable prospect becomes a little less outlandish – and western leaders must steel their nerves. Russia’s repeated bombing of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant fits this pattern of minacious brinkmanship. Continue reading...

Former president says he expects to be arrested on Tuesday but there has been no official confirmation of the likelihood or timing of charges being broughtTop Republicans, including some of Donald Trump’s potential rivals for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, rushed to his defence after the former president said he expected to be arrested next week.On Saturday, Trump announced he would be arrested on Tuesday in a criminal case involving hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, but there has been no official confirmation on the likelihood that charges will be brought. Continue reading...

Ex-president makes remark on Truth Social without any official confirmation of the likelihood or timing of charges being broughtDonald Trump has posted on his platform Truth Social that he expects to be arrested on Tuesday in the criminal case in New York involving hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.Earlier this year the former US president called for protests by his supporters if he was indicted in any of the numerous criminal investigations in New York, Georgia and by federal authorities into various allegations involving illegal campaign payments, election interference, efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss and keeping top secret documents at home after leaving office. On Saturday he posted: “Protest, take our nation back!” Continue reading...

The days of having ‘cool’ musical taste are over. Owning up to guilty listening pleasures is a joy in itselfThere must be a circle of rock’n’roll hell full of people tangled up for all eternity in concepts of “cool” and “uncool”. Now along comes U2’s frontman, Bono, speaking on BBC Radio 2’s Piano Room, saying that, as a 16-year-old punk rocker, pressure to look “macho” meant: “I [didn’t] want to own up to [liking] Abba.”Bono eventually got over it: by 1992, U2 were bringing Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson on stage to perform Dancing Queen. Still, it’s interesting, where do all these self-imposed cultural vetoes, these uptight musical embargos, come from? What’s with the mid- to late-life urge to let it all hang out and ’fess up to past supposed sins against musical taste? Is any of this still a thing? Continue reading...

Bianca Clayborne and Deonte Williams’ case fits pattern of child welfare services fueling disparities in who gets to remain a familyNearly a month ago, Bianca Clayborne, Deonte Williams, and their five children were on their way from Georgia to Chicago for Clayborne’s uncle’s funeral when a highway patrol officer stopped them in Manchester, Tennessee.That moment – about 60 miles outside Nashville – has since upended their lives as Clayborne and Williams try to regain custody of their children after they say state authorities “kidnapped” them on account of a minuscule amount of marijuana in the car, the Tennessee Lookout first reported. Continue reading...

US president says Russian leader has clearly committed war crimes and move makes ‘a very strong point’

A Texas man is suing his ex-wife’s friends for helping her get an abortion – whether he wins or not, the lawsuit is sending a terrifying message to womenMeet Jonathan Mitchell. The former solicitor general of Texas is not a household name but you’ll be familiar with his work. He’s the architect of the dystopian Texas law that lets private citizens act as vigilantes and sue abortion providers or anyone who “aids or abets” the procedure. As the New York Times noted in a 2021 profile of Mitchell, he’s devoted much of the past decade to “honing a largely below-the-radar strategy of writing laws deliberately devised to make it much more difficult for the judicial system – particularly the supreme court – to thwart them.” In other words: he’s brilliant at finding sneaky ways to inflict his beliefs on everyone else. And he appears to have made it his life’s work to weaponize the law to terrorize and control women. Continue reading...

Washington split with old allies in order to pursue its own interests in Iraq. Its support for Kyiv is equally conditionalIn the two decades since the second Iraq war, the United States appears like the Bourbon kings who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq was a story of geopolitical failure and domestic political disaster. To understand the foolhardy decision to launch the war, one must first understand the US grand strategy of global hegemony, which Washington has pursued since 1945.The “war on terror” provided political cover for the further pursuit of supremacy, despite threatening democratic government with lies, fraud and violence. George W Bush’s rash actions did provoke some murmurs of concern about the damage being inflicted but these faded from the corridors of power. Instead the US has refused to move on, believing that countries are “either with us or against us”.Randeep Ramesh is chief leader writer for the Guardian and author of The War We Could Not Stop: The real story of the battle for IraqDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

Fox pundits called mainstream journalists ‘leftwing media hacks’ and ‘cringing animals’. Now they’re eager for solidarityAs it tries to defend itself against the accusation that it knowingly spread lies about the 2020 presidential election, Fox News has touted some lofty notions about the role of journalism in a democratic society.“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners,” said a recent company statement, “but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v Sullivan.”Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture Continue reading...

The action is aimed at expanding last year’s bipartisan Safer Communities act, which strengthened background checksLast year the Georgia-based gun manufacturer Daniel Defense tweeted an image of a young child with a rifle – about the same size as the child himself – in his lap. “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it,” the caption read.The post came just eight days before an 18-year-old shot and killed 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas – using a weapon made by Daniel Defense. Continue reading...

For years after my Gordon’s death in Iraq, I campaigned for justice – until the 2016 inquiry and that encounter. A reckoning is overdueAlthough it’s 20 years since the Iraq war started, and coming up to 19 years since my son was killed, it still feels like yesterday to me. Anniversaries don’t mean much except another year without Gordon. It’s just as hard as it was in the beginning.Gordon never really had an ambition to join the forces. He was just a normal boy: full of fun, loved his sisters to bits, never got into trouble. He loved climbing, so if you were looking for Gordon you’d look up the nearest tree. He’d have his pals round every weekend, and they built a shed in a neighbour’s garden and nicknamed themselves the shed heads.Rose Gentle’s son, Gordon Gentle, was killed in Iraq in June 2004. As told to Katy GuestDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

Spring could bring some respite for the state in the grips of a dramatic weather u-turn from extremely dry to dripping wetThe sun beamed through a cloudless sky across parts of California on Thursday, offering a much-needed break from relentless rains that have drenched the state for weeks. The window of good weather wouldn’t last long. The 12th atmospheric river in mere months is expected to unleash a new set of hazards across the sodden state early next week.“[The storm] is going to exacerbate things further with the flooding and the other impacts going on unfortunately,” said Jon Gottschalck, who heads the operational prediction branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (Noaa) climate prediction center, noting that more heavy rainfall and higher elevation snowfall is in the forecast. “It is also going to hamper ongoing relief efforts.” Continue reading...

Indivisible is targeting little-known GOP House members in swing districts for the 2024 election. Co-founder Ezra Levin says: ‘They are basically Marjorie Taylor Greenes in how they vote’Juan Ciscomani. Tom Kean Jr. Brian Fitzpatrick. Marc Molinaro. David Schweikert. Brandon Williams … Many Americans would struggle to identify who these people are or what they do.They are all, in fact, Republican members of Congress. And progressive activists argue that their fate is more crucial to the future of American democracy than more high-profile rightwing political figures such as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Continue reading...

Tony Blair’s terrible decision inspired my tale of stupidity in the corridors of power – with a howl of frustration among the one-linersShortly before George W Bush and Tony Blair launched their war, the Arab League issued a statement declaring that invading Iraq would “open the gates of hell”. Of all the pieces of intelligence that the CIA and British agents were gathering at the time, this turned out to be the only accurate one.The invasion was launched on “evidence” about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that consisted mostly of whatever it was Iraqi informants knew our intelligence agencies most wanted to hear and would happily pay for. The biggest contributor to this self-fulfilling dossier was an alcohol-fixated defector called Curveball, who later admitted his improvisations about chemical weapons weren’t true.Armando Iannucci is a film and TV writer whose credits include The Thick of It, In the Loop and Veep Continue reading...

In true hypocritical manner, the ex-president has quickly forgotten why the two sectors are in shamblesWhen a fiery train derailment took place on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border last month, Donald Trump saw an opportunity. The former US president visited East Palestine, accused Joe Biden of ignoring the community – “Get over here!” – and distributed self-branded water before dropping in at a local McDonald’s.Then, when the Silicon Valley Bank last week became the second biggest bank to fail in US history, Trump again lost no time in making political capital. He predicted that Biden would go down as “the Herbert Hoover of the modrrn [sic] age” and predicted a worse economic crash than the Great Depression. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Apparent reversal of position adopted after invasion of Ukraine sends men fleeing Putin’s draft back to RussiaThe Biden administration has quietly resumed deportations to Russia, an apparent reversal of the position adopted after Russia invaded Ukraine just over a year ago, when such removals were suspended, the Guardian has learned.Immigration advocates were taken by surprise when a young Russian man, who came to the US fleeing Vladimir Putin’s efforts to mobilize citizens to fight in Ukraine, was abruptly deported at the weekend from the US back to Russia. Continue reading...

Bill from Republican-controlled legislature comes as measures to crack down on abortion pills gather pace across the countryWyoming has become the first US state to outlaw the use or prescription of medication abortion pills after the governor, Mark Gordon, signed into law a bill that was passed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature earlier this month.The crux of the two-page Wyoming bill is a provision making it illegal to “prescribe, dispense, distribute, sell or use any drug for the purpose of procuring or performing an abortion”. Continue reading...

Several items given to the former president, including a life-size painting of him given by El Salvador, are still unaccounted forDonald Trump’s White House failed to report more than 100 gifts from foreign nations worth more than a quarter-million dollars, according to a US government report, and several of those gifts – including a lifesize painting of Trump given by the president of El Salvador and golf clubs from the prime minister of Japan – are still unaccounted for.The revelations came as part of a report on Friday from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. The report details numerous unreported items, among them 16 gifts from Saudi Arabia worth more than $45,000 in all, including a dagger valued at up to $24,000, and 17 presents from India that include expensive cufflinks, a vase and a $4,600 model of the Taj Mahal. Continue reading...

Evan Corcoran cannot invoke attorney-client privilege, judge rules, because advice could have been in furtherance of a crimeDonald Trump’s main lawyer involved in turning over classified-marked documents at the Mar-a-Lago resort to the justice department last year must provide additional testimony in the criminal investigation, a federal judge ruled on Friday, overriding his objections of attorney-client privilege.The ruling marks a major moment in the investigation into Trump’s unauthorized retention of national security materials and obstruction of justice that could open up new avenues of information to the special counsel overseeing the matter.

Ex-president also makes return to Facebook with video clip focused on 2024 campaignYouTube said on Friday it was lifting restrictions on Donald Trump’s official account which were imposed after the violent January 6 attack on Congress.Leslie Miller, vice-president of public policy, told Axios Trump’s “ability to upload new content is restored”. Continue reading...

Gavin Newsom wants to overhaul California’s oldest prison into a facility focused on training programs and educationThe California governor, Gavin Newsom, has announced a plan to transform the state’s oldest prison into a center for rehabilitation, education and training, modeled after Norwegian incarceration systems, which are much less restrictive than US facilities.Newsom told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday that his goal was “ending San Quentin [prison] as we know it” and working to “completely reimagine what prison means”. San Quentin, located on a peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area and established in 1852, houses nearly 4,000 people, including hundreds on its infamous death row, the largest in the US, which is on track to be dismantled. Continue reading...

President calls on Congress to expand FDIC’s authority to claw back compensation – including gains from stock sales

Intense storms highlight fragility of the state’s infrastructure, with 35 of 58 counties now under an emergency declarationAbout two dozen people in southern California were forced to flee from their oceanside apartment buildings, as the hill beneath them started to crumble in torrential rains.With more rainstorms coming, authorities in San Clemente said on Thursday there was no timetable for the residents to be allowed back into their homes. Continue reading...

Report commissioned by Trump campaign debunked former president’s claims that ballots came from dead votersThe Donald Trump election campaign’s efforts to show that thousands of ballots were cast in the name of dead people in the pivotal state of Georgia during the 2020 election resulted in a research report that in fact contradicted Trump’s claims that widespread election fraud cost him the presidency, according to a report on Friday.Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia in 2020 was key and the Trump team’s own information went against Trump’s subsequent denial of the legitimate win by his opponent, according to the Washington Post. Continue reading...

Irish leader meets US president at White House for traditional St Patrick’s Day event a day after making gaffeIreland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, has apologised for making an apparent joke about Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, during an event in Washington on the eve of St Patrick’s Day celebrations.Varadkar’s comment on Thursday risked overshadowing his meeting with Joe Biden at the White House on Friday for the traditional handing over of a bowl of shamrock to the US president, the most important day in the Irish-American political calendar. Continue reading...

EPA scientists assessed a dioxin cancer risks threshold in 2010, but a federal cleanup is only triggered at far higher levelsNewly released data shows soil in the Ohio town of East Palestine – scene of a recent catastrophic train crash and chemical spill – contains dioxin levels hundreds of times greater than the exposure threshold above which Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientists in 2010 found poses cancer risks.The EPA at the time proposed lowering the cleanup threshold to reflect the science around the highly toxic chemical, but the Obama administration killed the rules, and the higher federal action threshold remains in place. Continue reading...

Video from state mental hospital of brutal treatment of Irvo Otieno recalls death of George Floyd, lawyer saysVideo from a state mental hospital shows a Black Virginia man who was handcuffed and shackled being pinned to the ground by deputies who are now facing second-degree murder charges in his death, according to relatives of the man and their attorneys who viewed the footage on Thursday.Speaking at a news conference shortly after watching the video with a local prosecutor, the family and attorneys condemned the brutal treatment they said Irvo Otieno, 28, was subjected to, first at a local jail and then at the state hospital where authorities say he died on 6 March during the admission process. Continue reading...

We have a saying that captures the devastation of our country: ‘Saddam has gone, but 1,000 more Saddams have replaced him’Twenty years ago, around this time, the US-led military operation to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein’s regime finally seemed inevitable for Iraqis. With it, the idea of leaving started to sink in.By leaving, I do not mean fleeing the country. That was not even an option. After the 1990s Gulf war, and the international sanctions that followed it, Iraqis were isolated from the rest of the world. For many, there was no exit. Leaving meant departing schools, universities or workplaces, saying goodbye to friends and colleagues, and moving to relatively safer places within the country, away from the areas targeted by strikes and bombings. But my parents decided to stay at home in Baghdad. “If we were meant to die, it would be better to die at home” – that was our logic. Continue reading...

SVB Financial Group files for chapter 11 protection but failed Silicon Valley Bank, now under FDIC control, is not part of itSilicon Valley Bank’s parent company filed for bankruptcy protection on Friday, a week after the tech lender was taken over by federal regulators following a 36-hour surge of depositor withdrawals that triggered the worst bank collapse since the financial crisis.SVB Financial Group filed for chapter 11 protection on Friday in New York bankruptcy court where administrators will set about selling off assets to meet creditors claims. Continue reading...

Family of Tom Benson had argued businessman had been manipulated into cutting them out of succession planGayle Benson inherited control of New Orleans’s NFL and NBA teams when her husband and the multibillion-dollar organizations’ owner, Tom Benson, died five years ago. Ever since then, her ownership of the NFL’s Saints and the NBA’s Pelicans had been under threat from Tom’s daughter and grandchildren from a previous marriage. Until Thursday they had the option of filing a lawsuit challenging the validity of the will that cut them out of his succession plans and installed Gayle as the inheritor of the sports teams.That deadline passed without Tom Benson’s daughter Renee or her children Rita and Ryan LeBlanc apparently having taking any such action, however. The time limit’s lapse would mean Gayle Benson has officially consolidated her ownership of the teams, which she has promised will be sold only after her death on the condition that they remain in New Orleans. Continue reading...

Democratic presidential candidate says: ‘If I can be a bitch at the office at times, I don’t think anybody’s happy about that’Marianne Williamson, a 2024 Democratic presidential candidate, has responded to claims she was verbally and emotionally abusive during her 2020 White House run, calling the accusations a “hit piece” and a “distraction technique”.Williamson, a self-help guru who is the only declared Democratic candidate challenging incumbent Joe Biden for the party’s nomination for the presidency, rejected claims made by former campaign staffers that she had episodes of “foaming, spitting, uncontrollable rage” during the campaign and threw her phone at staff. Continue reading...

Two 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. The derailments came amid heightened attention to rail safety nationwide after a fiery derailment last month in Ohio where a freight train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed near the Pennsylvania border, igniting a fire and causing hundreds of people to be evacuated

The Gamecocks’ center of attention and soon-to-be No 1 WNBA draft pick opens up about South Carolina’s quest for a perfect season and why Dawn Staley won’t be the NBA’s first female coachAliyah Boston, the frontcourt phenomenon for the University of South Carolina’s women’s basketball team, comes across as a genuinely humble person in conversation. A polished speaker (she is a communications major who plans on going into broadcast journalism once her playing days are over), Boston redirects much of the praise surrounding her own success toward her family. “My mom told us, my sister and I, that we need to pick what we wanted to do,” Boston tells the Guardian. “She talked to us a lot, even when we were younger, about going to college and coming out without any student loans. So, she wanted us to get really good at something … so we picked basketball.”What started as a method for securing university scholarships, however, has since morphed into the start of a potentially great basketball career. Boston’s future in professional basketball is promising – she is the consensus No 1 pick in next month’s WNBA draft – but, as she and her teammates begin their NCAA tournament title defense on Friday against Norfolk State, it’s worth taking the time to appreciate everything Boston has accomplished at the college level over the last four years. In March 2023, Boston is the Everything Everywhere All at Once of women’s college basketball – she has won just about every award there is. Continue reading...

Global shares rise as $30bn lifeline for US bank eases fears of imminent collapse and Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, says US banking system ‘is sound’. Plus, a 5,000-mile stinking blob of seaweed heads to Florida• Don’t already get First Thing in your inbox? Sign up hereGood morning.Some calm has returned to financial markets at the end of a turbulent week, but investors remain wary. Asian shares have risen as help for struggling banks, such as the $30bn lifeline for First Republic Bank in the US, has eased banking crisis fears.What is happening with Credit Suisse? US investors in Credit Suisse have hit the beleaguered Swiss bank with legal action, claiming it overstated its prospects before this week’s share crash. The lender suffered a rapid sell-off, with shares plunging on Wednesday by as much as 30% at one point after comments from Credit Suisse’s largest shareholder, Saudi National Bank. Credit Suisse shares shed earlier gains this morning and fell 4%.What is the US government saying about the crisis? Before the latest news Yellen assured Congress on Thursday that the US banking system was “sound”. She told the Senate finance committee: “I can reassure the members of the committee that our banking system is sound, and that Americans can feel confident that their deposits will be there when they need them.”Who knew about where the money came from? According to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian and interviews with several people familiar with the payments, the knowledge about the $8m being potentially problematic stretched across a number of top executives at Trump Media. Continue reading...

Student debts and underwater mortgages are private burdens, but corporate losses are matters of urgent public interestSilicon Valley Bank was supposedly the type of institution that would never need a government bailout – right until its backers spent three days on social media demanding one, and then promptly receiving it, after the bank’s spectacular collapse last week.Eight years ago, when the bank’s CEO, Greg Becker, personally pressed Congress to exempt SVB from post-2008 financial reform rules, he cited its “low risk profile” and role supporting “job-creating companies in the innovation economy”. Those companies include crypto outfits and venture capital firms typically opposed to the kind of government intervention they benefited from on Sunday, when regulators moved to guarantee SVB customers immediate access to their largely uninsured deposits. Continue reading...

JP Morgan to depose ex-employee as part of lawsuit claiming he hid key information about sex trafficker client

In framing the Ukraine war as a fight between democracy and autocracy, Biden shows that the US hasn’t learned from IraqTwo decades ago, the United States invaded Iraq, sending 130,000 US troops into a sovereign country to overthrow its government. Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, voted to authorize the war, a decision he came to regret.Today another large, world-shaking invasion is under way. Biden, now the US president, recently traveled to Warsaw to rally international support for Ukraine’s fight to repel Russian aggression. After delivering his remarks, Biden declared: “The idea that over 100,000 forces would invade another country – since world war II, nothing like that has happened.”Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University. He is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy Continue reading...

Complaint claims bank made ‘materially false and misleading statements’ in 2021 annual report

Barely 8% of its inductees are female. The canon-making doesn’t just reek of sexist gatekeeping, but also purposeful ignorance and hostilityI got into this business to write great songs and have fun. I was a quick learner. I read every music magazine I could get my hands on and at 12, after digesting many issues of Creem, I decided to base my personality on Lester Bangs, the rock critic raconteur; his abiding belief in the transformative power of a great rock song matched mine. (I also obsessed over his running arguments with Lou Reed – they confounded me, but I loved it.) Artists and their songs shaped my life, my beliefs, my self-conception as a musician – Patti Smith’s growling Pissing in the River, Heart’s Barracuda, the Runaways’ Dead End Justice, which I still know every word of. But what no magazine or album could teach me or prepare me for was how exceptional you have to be, as a woman and an artist, to keep your head above water in the music business.The magnificent Chuck D rapped: “Elvis is a hero to most, but he doesn’t mean shit to me.” I concur. Big Mama Thornton first sang Hound Dog, written for her (and possibly with her) in 1952, which later put the King on the radio. Sister Rosetta Tharpe covered it, too, hers being the fiercest version. Her song Strange Things Happen Every Day was recorded in 1944. It was these songs, and her evangelical guitar playing, that changed music for ever and created what we now call rock’n’roll. Continue reading...