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Angela Muhwezi-Hall and Deborah Gladney are pioneering a startup that links jobseekers to opportunities in the midwestThis year, sisters Angela Muhwezi-Hall and Deborah Gladney from Wichita, Kansas, became the first Black women entrepreneurs in the state to raise $1m in seed funding for QuickHire, an app that serves as a “career discovery platform” for frontline service economy workers.“It is really cool,” says Gladney “We pride ourselves on being underserved founders who are serving underserved workers in an underserved geographic region. We’re hoping to shed light on opportunities can arise outside of traditional areas. If we can help remove barriers for people, even by being the first or just being able to have people come alongside us, that is what we’re all about.” Continue reading...

We don’t have a right to know what happened in that car crash last February. Sifting through the wreckage doesn’t helpPress conferences will not define the career of Tiger Woods save, perhaps, the reference point provided by “Hello world” on the eve of his professional debut in 1996. For so many years thereafter, appearances by Woods before the media felt like an ordeal. Great moments arrived inside ropes, not via soundbite.That tetchiness has long since evaporated. The latter stages of Woods’s career have witnessed a more relatable and amenable side. Even if, it must be said, the 15-times major winner never has any apparent interest in being a journalist’s friend. Woods is just willing or able to play the game a little better than before. Continue reading...

Despite anti-discrimination policies ex-cadets say racism is rife in institutions that still honor Confederate generalsEight years after he graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, Geoffrey Easterling remains astonished by the Confederate history still memorialized on the storied academy’s campus – the six-foot-tall painting of the Confederate general Robert E Lee in the library, the barracks dormitory named for Lee and the Lee Gate on Lee Road.As a black student at the army academy, he remembers feeling “devastated” when a classmate pointed out the enslaved person also depicted in the life-size Lee painting. Continue reading...

Buffy Wicks speaks out about emergency procedure amid threat to Roe v Wade: ‘This story is not uncommon’Early one morning this fall, the California state assemblywoman Buffy Wicks felt a type of pain she had never experienced before.Wicks, 44, found herself doubled over in pain, barely able to walk or get her daughter ready for school. At her doctor’s shortly after, she learned that she was pregnant and having a miscarriage and would need an emergency abortion. Twenty-four hours later she had the procedure. Continue reading...

Ron DeSantis struck ‘a blow for freedom’ with his lax measures, but those could allow the new variant to circulate fasterBarely one month ago, Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis was on a victory lap. The state’s average rate of new Covid-19 infections was the lowest in the nation, and a lapdog legislature was about to sign into law his sweeping new coronavirus measures, including the outlawing of mask and vaccine mandates in pursuit of “striking a blow for freedom”.There was no mention of the 61,500 Floridians who have lost their lives to the virus. Continue reading...

A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to Manila Continue reading...

Oral arguments over the Mississippi abortion case this week showed the threat to Roe v Wade from an increasingly politicized courtAbout 11 minutes into this week’s hearing on abortion rights at the US supreme court, the floor was taken by Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three beleaguered liberal-leaning justices left on the court after its sharp rightward shift under Donald Trump.Sotomayor began by noting that in the past 30 years no fewer than 15 justices of all political backgrounds had supported the right to an abortion up to the point of fetal viability. Only four had objected. Continue reading...

Emergence of information suggests that this trial might reveal previously unknown details about Jeffrey Epstein’s worldThe first week of testimony in Ghislaine Maxwell’s child-sex trafficking trial has provided an extensive look into Jeffrey Epstein’s life of luxury, from jaw-dropping details on residences that rival royals’ estates, to his jet setting schedule. So curated was Epstein’s ostentation, he even demanded theater-quality audio for his workout music.The emergence of this information suggests that this trial might reveal previously unknown details about Epstein’s world, despite the disgraced financier’s suicide. At the very least, trial proceedings might contextualize how Epstein’s display of wealth so impressed people that it intimidated them. Continue reading...

Prosecution and defense argue about several photographs that might be presented at sex-trafficking trial in New York

The US president, Joe Biden, has said his coughing during a speech addressing the November jobs report on Friday is due to a cold.'What I have is a one-and-a-half-year-old grandson who had a cold who likes to kiss his pop,' Biden said, responding to a question from a reporter after the speech

Ex-president’s attorneys said he isn’t trying to dodge personal liability while in 2020 DoJ sought to replace Trump as defendantLawyers for Donald Trump appeared before a federal appeals court on Friday to argue that the US government should take his place as the defendant in a defamation lawsuit filed by writer E Jean Carroll, who has accused him of rape.The former president’s attorneys told the judges he was not trying to dodge personal liability in the lawsuit by Carroll, who has spoken publicly about her allegations. He just wants to keep future presidents from being burdened by legal claims, they said. Continue reading...

John Eastman, linked to efforts to stop Biden certification, to invoke constitutional protection against self-incriminationFormer Trump lawyer John Eastman, who was connected to efforts to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election win on 6 January, will plead the fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination before the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack.The move by Eastman, communicated in a letter to the select committee by his attorney, is an extraordinary step and appears to suggest a growing fear among some of Trump’s closest advisers that their testimony may implicate them in potential criminality. Continue reading...

Wednesday brings hottest December weather on record for Montana, Wyoming, Washington state and North DakotaA record-breaking heatwave has swept large parts of the US, with much of the country experiencing balmy conditions even as Americans move into what is supposed to be meteorological winter.Much of the western half of the US has seen temperatures 35F (19C) above average for this time of year in the past days, with Wednesday bringing the hottest December weather on record for Montana, Wyoming, Washington state and North Dakota. Continue reading...

Death threats, gerrymandering and voter suppression are being normalised by America’s right to keep Trumpism aliveIt’s understandable if you thought the threat had gone. Donald Trump left office nearly a year ago, is no longer serving up daily outrages by tweet, and is reduced to appearing with Nigel Farage on GB News. But the menace he represented lingers, and not only because Trump remains the most likely Republican presidential nominee for 2024, a contest he could well win given the parlous approval ratings of the current incumbent.Trumpism lives on in the legacy he left behind, its most visible incarnation perhaps the three ultra-conservative judges he selected for the supreme court, who this week began hearing a case on abortion – one that many expect to result in the removal of American women’s constitutionally protected right to end an unwanted pregnancy.Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Money will cover legal costs of defending against the suit, which were over $153,000 for Detroit and nearly $22,000 for MichiganNine lawyers allied with Donald Trump were ordered on Thursday to pay Detroit and Michigan a total of $175,000 in sanctions for abusing the court system with a sham lawsuit challenging the 2020 election results.The money, which must be paid within 30 days, will cover the legal costs of defending against the suit, which were more than $153,000 for the city and nearly $22,000 for the state. Continue reading...

‘No governor should have his own handpicked secret police,’ says former Republican governor Charlie CristRon DeSantis, the Florida governor, has proposed an extraordinary plan to create a state paramilitary unit that he, rather than the federal government, would control.DeSantis, a Republican, has asked state lawmakers to fund the establishment of what he is calling the Florida state guard to assist with “state-specific emergencies”. Continue reading...

If the true scale of their wealth were revealed, taxpayers might question why they pay so much to fund themWhether it’s immunity from freedom of information requests or paying estate or corporation tax, the royal family enjoys a panoply of financial privileges denied to the general public. But nothing sets them more apart from the common citizen than their special position over sealed wills and their inherited wealth. This was first brought home last April with Prince Philip’s death and the palace’s high court application to seal his will.With the publication last Wednesday of a full list of more than 30 sealed royal wills, following a judgment in September – not to mention a legal challenge to the high court by the Guardian – we know more details of what was decided (Philip’s will and those of future deceased royals will be opened only after at least 90 years), and why it was decided (the tradition of sealed royal wills has lasted almost a century and in the court’s view there is no reason to end this practice that legitimately preserves their privacy). The president of the family division of the high court, Sir Andrew McFarlane, ruled that senior members of the royal family had to be exempted from the law requiring the publication of wills. That was “necessary to enhance the protection afforded to the private lives of this unique group of individuals, in order to protect the dignity and standing of the public role of the sovereign and other close members of her family”.David McClure is the author of The Queen’s True Worth Continue reading...

New initiatives could give bankers the tools to help their clients fund and manage the green transitionThe recent United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop26) in Glasgow was, it seems, a historic success. We have this on no lesser authority than that of the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, who happened to be the meeting’s host. The Cop26 president, Alok Sharma, also was upbeat afterward regarding the 2015 Paris climate agreement’s target of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. “We set out by saying we wanted to keep 1.5C within reach,” Sharma said. “We did do that.” And Johnson claimed that there was little difference between the proposed Cop26 agreement to “phase out” coal usage and the final text, which pledged only to “phase down” coal.Others took a different view. Perhaps predictably, the teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg described the conference categorically as “a failure”. Climate Action Tracker projects that even if all the Cop26 pledges stretching into the future are met, the planet is on track to warm by at least 2.1C. And India is phasing out in the particular sense of phasing in, with coal-powered electricity generation expected to increase by almost 5% a year this decade. The Financial Times’s Martin Wolf hedged his bets. For him, Cop26 “was both triumph and disaster”. Continue reading...

Bill gained enough Senate votes late on Thursday after failed bid to defund vaccine mandateA bill to fund the US government through mid-February gained the support of enough members of the Senate late on Thursday to win passage and prevent a partial shutdown of federal agencies at the end of this week after leaders defused a partisan standoff over federal vaccine mandates.The vote late evening came after some Republican senators threatened to block the process in order to voice their opposition to the Biden administration’s vaccine requirements. Continue reading...

Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently insisted otherwise but that’s now hard to claimIn mid-September, Clarence Thomas told a crowd of more than 800 students and faculty at Notre Dame University that the US supreme court should not be viewed in political terms, and that justices don’t base their rulings on “personal preferences”.But if not political or personal preferences, where exactly do they discover the law? Thomas never said. When asked whether the attorneys presenting oral arguments ever compel him to change his mind, Thomas said, “almost never”.Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at 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

The US must end all support for the Saudi war effort in Yemen. It is fueling the largest humanitarian crisis in the worldThe recent breaching of the United States’ embassy in Yemen’s capital city of Sanaa by rebel forces, and the detaining of Yemeni employees of the embassy, is the latest escalation in a war that has gone on for far too long. It is a war that the United States has supported and remains deeply involved in. It’s time for that complicity to end.For more than six years, Saudi-led military intervention into Yemen’s civil war on behalf of Yemen’s exiled government against Yemeni rebels has been a key driver of the largest humanitarian disaster in the world. “The country’s economy has reached new depths of collapse, and a third wave of the pandemic is threatening to crash the country’s already fragile healthcare system,” United Nations humanitarian relief coordinator, Martin Griffiths, said in September, with millions “a step away from starvation”.Bernie Sanders is a US senator, and the ranking member of the Senate budget committee. He represents the state of Vermont.Rohit Khanna is a US representative from California’s 17th congressional district Continue reading...

President lays out plan for winter months amid Omicron arrival in US; plus George Clooney on turning down $35m for a day’s work

This year MLB teams drafted two players who will not be able to compete on the Sabbath. But they are confident their religion can help their careersIn the 14 June 1939 edition of the New York Post, Hy Turkin wrote a story on Morris Arnovich, the Philadelphia Phillies left fielder leading the National League with a .398 batting average. Morris was “chock full of hustle,” Turkin wrote, and a “sure bet” to make that season’s All-Star team. Then, in the fifth paragraph, Turkin made reference to Arnovich’s religion: “Jewish,” Turkin wrote, plainly. “Orthodox.”Even if Arnovich, commonly referred to as the “Son of Israel” during his playing days, became less observant in his later years, as his family told the Guardian, he has long held a place in history as the most religious Jewish major leaguer. Continue reading...

Stock exchange decision comes as Beijing cracks down on technology firms listing overseasThe Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi is to move its listing from the New York stock exchange to Hong Kong, as Beijing cracks down on the country’s biggest technology companies.The company said it would start “immediate” preparations to delist in New York and prepare to go public in Hong Kong. Continue reading...

A new Netflix documentary chronicles the lengths Nirmal Purja went to as he attempted to break one of mountaineering’s toughest recordsAnother mountaineer might have scoffed. They might have raised a frostbitten thumb over their pack-strapped shoulder at the 8,000m peak in the distance and the set of tracks winding down from its snow-capped pinnacle to their soggy boots and huffed, Can I at least catch my breath? They might have waved off the notion of venturing back to that frozen hellhole to rescue a stranded climber, who doubtless would have been alert to the myriad risks of scaling the world’s 10th-highest point. On top of all that Nirmal Purja had other mountains to climb – and the clock was ticking. Loudly.But Purja, who goes by Nims for short, isn’t built like the rest of us. For a start, there’s something deep within him that simply won’t countenance the idea of leaving a person in peril. So even though a fresh cresting of Annapurna I, the giant in the Himalayan massif with a notoriously deadly legacy, had wrung him out physically and psychically, Nims was dutifully airlifted back up the peak with his crack team of Sherpas. As the pitch dark night and bitter wind pushed the already freezing temperatures even lower, Nims and his teammates had to slap themselves to stay awake to finish the mission in time for the next helicopter pass – which they made with five minutes to spare. Continue reading...

Abu Zubaydah has been held without charge for nearly 20 years accused of offences in Afghanistan – a conflict Biden says had endedAbu Zubaydah, the Guantánamo detainee who was tortured close to death by the CIA and who has been held without charge by the US for nearly 20 years, has petitioned a federal court for his release on grounds that America’s wars in Afghanistan and with al-Qaida are over.In a filing with the US district court in Washington DC, Zubaydah’s lawyers argue that recent White House declarations that the armed conflict in Afghanistan is over – combined with the complete destruction of the original al-Qaida group that carried out 9/11 – have removed any remaining legal justification for keeping him captive. The motion calls for his immediate release, describing Zubaydah’s treatment over the past two decades as a “parade of horribles”. Continue reading...

Trump’s lawyer falsely claimed two men as fellow directors of Defending the Republic in an apparent effort to attract donorsA federal grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s former attorney Sidney Powell has uncovered evidence that Powell filed false incorporation papers with the state of Texas for a non-profit she heads, Defending the Republic, according to sources close to the investigation.In the incorporation papers, Powell – who filed lawsuits across the US questioning the 2020 election result which Trump lost to Joe Biden – listed two men who she said served with her on the organization’s board of directors, even though neither one of them gave Powell permission to do so. Continue reading...

Participants lament apparent lack of strategy from Biden to address filibuster and get voting rights bills passedLeading voting rights activists came away frustrated and alarmed from what they hoped would be a breakthrough meeting last month at the White House to discuss a strategy to pass federal voting rights legislation.There were high hopes for the 15 November teleconference between the White House and the leaders of the hundreds of groups that comprise the Declaration for American Democracy (Dfad), many of which have been campaigning hard for federal voting rights legislation. Kamala Harris had agreed to stop by the meeting. Continue reading...

Officials say positive tests suggest variant is undergoing ‘community spread’ in the city but say there’s no cause for alarmMultiple cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant have been detected in New York, health officials said Thursday, including a man who attended an anime convention in Manhattan in late November and tested positive for the variant when he returned home to Minnesota.In addition to the conventioneer, health officials said tests showed five other people recently infected with Covid-19 had the variant. They included a person in the city’s Long Island suburbs who had recently traveled to South Africa, residents of Brooklyn and Queens and another case possibly linked to travel. Continue reading...

Juan Alessi was told he should speak to his boss only when spoken to and should look away when addressing him

Dozens of homes and four historic grain elevators burned as fire agencies continue to battle wind-driven blazeA late-season wildfire that came amid unseasonably warm weather and was pushed by strong winds ripped through a tiny central Montana farming town overnight, burning 24 homes and four grain elevators that had stood for more than a century.Officials were assessing the damage in Denton on Thursday morning while crews continued to fight the fire. Continue reading...

Democrat Chris Murphy had sought unanimous supporter for new background checks and expanded 10-day review of purchasesThe Iowa senator Chuck Grassley, the leading Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, blocked a request on Thursday to proceed on gun control legislation in the Senate following the Michigan school shooting this week.Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut and leading gun control advocate, requested unanimous consent on Thursday to pass the Enhanced Background Checks Act of 2021, which would require new background checks for gun transfers between private parties, as well as expand a 10-day review for gun purchases and transfers. Continue reading...

Aariel Maynor was arrested by Beverly Hills police on Thursday afternoon after reports of a burglary at another houseA 29-year-old man has been arrested in the death of Jacqueline Avant, a prominent Los Angeles philanthropist who was fatally shot this week at the Beverly Hills home she shared with her husband, the legendary music executive, Clarence Avant.The Beverly Hills police department announced the arrest of Aariel Maynor on Thursday afternoon. Continue reading...

President lays out pandemic battle plan for the winter months, including expanded pharmacy availability for vaccinesJoe Biden announced new actions to combat the coronavirus in the US, including a nationwide campaign encouraging vaccine boosters, an expansion of at-home tests and tighter restrictions on international travel.Buffeted by the emergence of the Omicron variant and a political backlash from Republicans, the US president visited the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, on Thursday and laid out a pandemic battle plan for the winter months. Continue reading...

Biden called the policy inhumane after Trump administration used it to return over 60,000 asylum seekers across the borderAsylum seekers looking to enter the US from its southern border will again be sent to Mexico while their claims are assessed, with the Biden administration announcing the reinstatement of the controversial “Remain in Mexico” policy on Thursday.The US and Mexican governments haver agreed to a resumption of the program, put in place by Donald Trump in 2019, following its previous suspension by Joe Biden after he became president. It will initially begin in San Diego and in the Texas cities of Laredo, Brownsville and El Paso next week. Continue reading...

Representative Cori Bush was among hundreds of pro-abortion rights protesters demonstrating in front of the supreme court on 1 December as a large number of pro-life protesters also filled the square. A majority of justices appeared willing to significantly curb abortion rights, as the supreme court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, widely regarded as the most important abortion rights case in nearly five decades.The case before the court pits Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi’s last abortion clinic, also known as the Pink House, against the state health director, Dr Thomas Dobbs. A decision is expected in June

Parents may also be charged in another unusual move for failing to secure the handgun their son usedA prosecutor in Michigan has explained why the teenage suspect in a deadly high school shooting this week was unusually charged with the crime of terrorism, along four first-degree murder counts and numerous other offenses.Charges are also being considered against the shooter’s parents, prosecutor Karen McDonald said, which would be a rare move in cases of school shootings and would probably be linked to access to firearms. Continue reading...

Richard Lee Richards, 61, was shot in the back multiple times after being accused of stealing a toolbox from WalmartAn Arizona police officer has been fired amid outrage over the killing of a suspected shoplifter who was in a motorized wheelchair and moving slowly away from officers when he was shot in the back multiple times.Surveillance videos released by the police department showed Officer Ryan Remington of the Tucson police department slowly walking behind 61-year old Richard Lee Richards through a parking lot outside a Walmart on Monday evening. Continue reading...

Departure is second high-profile exit in two weeks after resignation of vice-president’s communications directorSymone Sanders, chief spokesperson and a senior adviser to Kamala Harris, is to leave the White House at the end of the year, Politico has reported, renewing speculation of chaos and dysfunction within the vice-president’s office.The departure of Sanders is the second high-profile exit from Harris’s staff within two weeks, following the resignation of communications director Ashley Etienne. Continue reading...

Republicans in Ohio recently enacted new maps that would give them a supermajority in the state legislature – completely ignoring reforms that prevent thisHello, and Happy Thursday,Over the last few months, we’ve seen lawmakers in several states draw new, distorted political districts that entrench their political power for the next decade. Republicans are carving up Texas, North Carolina and Georgia to hold on to their majorities. Democrats have the power to draw maps in far fewer places, but they’ve also shown a willingness to use it where they have it, in places like Illinois and Maryland.Few places better encapsulate the new Republican effort to undermine American elections than Wisconsin. Some Republicans there are calling for the removal of the non-partisan head of the state’s election commission.Georgia saw a jump in the percentage of rejected mail-in ballot requests in one of the first elections after Republicans imposed new requirements. Many of those who had their ballot requests rejected didn’t ultimately vote in person, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.The Justice Department on Tuesday filed a statement of interest in voting rights lawsuits in Arizona, Texas and Florida. All three filings significantly defend the power and scope of section two of the Voting Rights Act, one of the most powerful remaining provisions of the 1965 civil rights law. Continue reading...

As Europe outsources its border policing to Libya, rescue operations by NGOs are hampered by criminal inquiries in ItalyEarlier this year, in June, somewhere in the vast expanse of the central Mediterranean, a Médecins Sans Frontières team on board a rescue vessel received a distress call. The motor of a small boat carrying asylum seekers from Libya had broken down, and the vessel was taking in water.These are the first dramatic scenes in Unsafe Passage – a Guardian Documentaries film by Ed Ou for the Outlaw Ocean Project, released today – but they are also the first moments in a race against time that repeats itself again and again in the stretch of sea separating Europe from Africa. Continue reading...

Baseball league management hopes lockout ‘will jumpstart negotiations and get us to an agreement that will allow the season to start on time’Major League Baseball plunged into its first work stoppage in a quarter-century when the sport’s collective bargaining agreement expired Wednesday night and owners immediately locked out players in a move that threatens spring training and opening day.The strategy, management’s equivalent of a strike under federal labor law, ended the sport’s labor peace after 9,740 days over 26 and a half years. Continue reading...

Our analysis shows that almost two-thirds of articles paint Muslims in a negative light.• Miqdaad Versi is the founder of the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media MonitoringLast week, the Labour MP Naz Shah observed that “Islamophobia has now passed the ‘mainstream media test’”. The report published this week by the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring shows that she’s right.Consider some of the most egregious cases cited in the report. There was the Times, Telegraph, MailOnline and Express libelling a Scout group leader, Ahammed Hussain, in 2019, using a laundry list of anti-Muslim tropes; these included “allegations about using the Scout group to promote extremism, segregation of children, extensive links to antisemitic groups, and inviting banned preachers to the Mosque”. Or take the Mail on Sunday, which called council worker Waj Iqbal “a fixer” for paedophile taxi drivers in Rochdale. As he put it, his whole world crumbled, he lost his job, his “marriage ended and [he] couldn’t see [his] kids”. The impact of this kind of reporting cannot be overstated. While nothing can repair the harm caused, in both cases, the publishers had to pay very substantial libel damages and print apologies.Miqdaad Versi is the founder of the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring Continue reading...