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The Syriza party did worse than most thought possible, despite a series of prime ministerial scandals and widespread povertyGreece’s election results were a big surprise for the winners, the losers and the pollsters. In a country where huge numbers of people are struggling every day, with almost a third of the population estimated to be at risk of poverty, the prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s rightwing New Democracy party managed to secure 40% of the vote – a remarkable victory that no polling agency predicted.The runner-up was the former prime minister Alexis Tsipras of the centre-left Syriza party, best known for its turbulent confrontation with the EU’s economic centres of power in 2015. He picked up only 20% of the vote, much lower than the pollsters had predicted and lower than most Greeks – friends and enemies of Syriza alike – thought possible. The lack of an outright majority for New Democracy makes the most plausible scenario a second election in June or early July – this round is designed to give bonus seats to the winner, increasing its chances of securing a majority. Continue reading...

Republican US senator expected to wade into battle so far dominated by Donald Trump and Ron DeSantisTim Scott is set to enter the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination on Monday, wading into a battle that has so far been dominated by two conservative favorites: Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.Scott, the only Black Republican US senator, is scheduled to make his official campaign announcement in his home town of North Charleston after filing papers for his candidacy last week with the Federal Election Commission. The late morning event is being hosted at Charleston Southern University, Scott’s alma mater and a private school affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. Continue reading...

Democrats suggest ex-FBI agent turned purported whistleblower Garret O’Boyle was not fully truthful about legal counsel fundingA key Republican witness is facing questions over whether he lied under oath about receiving financial aid from an ally of former US president Donald Trump.Garret O’Boyle, a former FBI field agent turned purported whistleblower, testified last week to a congressional panel investigating what Republicans assert is the “weaponisation” of the federal government against conservatives. Continue reading...

The two-time NBA champion has built a successful television career in his post-playing days. Now he has decided to share his experiences in a new bookIn his rookie year on the Sacramento Kings during the late 1980s, Kenny Smith experienced a frightening moment that had nothing to do with basketball. He was getting a ride home from his coach, when their car was pulled over. Raised in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Queens, New York, Smith had a wary view of the police. He worried about the traffic stop of two Black men by a white officer. In the end, nothing happened, thanks to the unflappability of his coach – Hall of Famer Bill Russell, who told the cop he could give a ticket or a lecture, but not both. The officer recognized the 11-time NBA champion and let him go on his way.“It was the first time, as an African American young man, that I had seen someone question authority that fast, that deliberate,” says Smith. Continue reading...

In second presidential bid, Williamson is running a more grounded campaign – as a political outsider appalled at how America’s political elites have ignored the needs of ordinary peopleA penthouse-gym in north-west Washington DC served as a campaign stage for the long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson last week. Athleisure-clad political consultants came and went, as if typecast from a political TV drama. The Washington monument poked between buildings in the distance.Williamson is far from an average political candidate, even in the modern era of American politics where it often feels much of what was once unthinkable has become a scary new normal. She is not a politician, but instead an author and wellness guru, whose quixotic first tilt at the White House four years ago was far from successful but saw her grace the Democratic debates and score a viral hit with her message to Donald Trump that she would “harness love” to defeat him. Continue reading...

Tensions over technology continue, after US ban on using TikTok on government phones

Exclusive: Unreported warning contained in notes taken by lawyer Evan Corcoran that prosecutors have viewed in recent monthsFederal prosecutors have evidence Donald Trump was put on notice that he could not retain any classified documents after he was subpoenaed for their return last year, as they examine whether the subsequent failure to fully comply with the subpoena was a deliberate act of obstruction by the former president.The previously unreported warning conveyed to Trump by his lawyer Evan Corcoran could be significant in the criminal investigation surrounding Trump’s handling of classified materials given it shows he knew about his subpoena obligations. Continue reading...

Sunday night phone call between president and Republican House speaker reported to have struck a more positive tone. Plus, how solar farms took over the California desertGood morning.Joe Biden and the House Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, have held a “productive” phone call on the continued impasse over the debt ceiling and promised to meet today after the president returned to Washington.What will happen if a deal isn’t struck? Less than two weeks remain until the 1 June deadline, upon which the Treasury department has said the federal government could be unable to pay all its debts. Without raising the debt limit, the US government will default on its bills, a historic first, with likely catastrophic consequences. Federal workers would be furloughed, global stock markets would crash and the US economy would probably drop into a recession.What has PNG’s prime minister said? James Marape denied that US staff would have legal immunity and said no amendments would be made to the constitution or laws of the country. He said the country faced significant security challenges. “I need to strengthen and protect my country’s borders and ensure the safety of my people,” he said. “So this has nothing to do with geopolitics, this cooperation will strengthen our defence and help build our capacity.” Continue reading...

Alexander and Andrea Campagna took in Korean travelers during deadly snowstorm in Buffalo last year – and got special thanks in returnA US husband and wife who sheltered 10 South Korean travelers in their home during a deadly snowstorm last Christmas have gone to Seoul and been feted as heroes.Alexander and Andrea Campagna went to South Korea’s capital as part of a 10-day tour of the city organized as a token of gratitude for the husband and wife who opened up their home in Buffalo, New York, to strangers in need. Continue reading...

The wife of Julian Assange is on her first trip to Australia. Stella Assange married the WikiLeaks founder in March 2022 in the Belmarsh high-security prison in south-east London. They first met in 2011 and have two children. Stella Assange, a lawyer and human rights advocate, has been campaigning for the Australian's release. During an appearance at the National Press Club in Canberra she called on the Albanese government to secure it Continue reading...

A Sunday night phone call between the president and Republican House speaker was reported to have struck a more positive toneUS president Joe Biden and House Republican speaker Kevin McCarthy have held a “productive” phone call on the continued impasse over the debt ceiling and promised to meet on Monday after Biden returned to Washington.McCarthy, speaking to reporters after the call, said there were positive discussions on solving the crisis and that staff-level talks were set to resume later on Sunday. Continue reading...

Chiasher Vue’s kids wanted to calm their mentally ill father, but police detained them in vehicle and killed him as he pointed a gunThe city of Minneapolis has agreed to a $700,000 settlement with family members who were locked inside two squad cars when police killed their father after officers refused their offers to try and help calm him down.A federal judge ruled that officers were justified in shooting 52-year-old Chiasher Vue after he pointed a rifle at them on 15 December 2019. The settlement will resolve a lawsuit his family filed arguing that police had illegally and unconstitutionally detained them that night. Continue reading...

Raymond Mattia of the Tohono O’odham Nation in southern Arizona was shot by agents after calling them for assistanceThe FBI and Tohono O’odham Nation police are investigating the fatal shooting of a tribal member by US border patrol agents in southern Arizona.Federal Customs and Border Protection officials said agents from the Ajo border patrol station “were involved” in a fatal shooting on the Tohono O’odham reservation near Ajo at about 10pm on Thursday. They haven’t released any additional information other than to say the encounter was under review by Customs and Border Protection’s office of professional responsibility, which investigates fatal shootings carried out by agents, among other cases. Continue reading...

Convicted sexual offender reportedly threatened to expose Gates’s relationship with Russian bridge player Mila AntonovaThe convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein appeared to threaten Bill Gates and tried to blackmail the multi-billionaire over his extramarital affair with a Russian bridge player, according to a new report published by the Wall Street Journal.Speaking to the Journal, sources familiar with the matter said that after Epstein found out about the Microsoft co-founder’s affair with Russian bridge player Mila Antonova, he threatened Gates into reimbursing him for tuition costs that Epstein had initially covered for Antonova to attend software coding school. Continue reading...

Neighbors of Christina Yuna Lee called police as she was attacked, but officers waited 80 minutes before entering apartmentThe family of a woman who was stabbed to death in her Manhattan apartment last year has sued New York City police, saying their inaction cost the victim her life.The lawsuit filed on Friday claims two officers stood outside Christina Yuna Lee’s apartment in Chinatown while she was being stabbed to death by an unhoused man who followed her into her building as she returned home in the early morning. Continue reading...

The confrontation between the country’s most popular politician, Imran Khan, and the generals threatens to paralyse the stateThe standoff between Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, and the country’s military is yet another sign that the political system created by the army is inherently unstable. Since independence, Pakistan’s generals have become ever more involved in running the country – and its civilian leaders ever more dependent on their backing. None of the nation’s 31 prime ministers has completed a full five‑year tenure. Politicians survive in office only if they do as they are told.Trying to regain power against the army’s wishes is a dangerous business. Mr Khan is pushing ahead regardless. With the economy in a mess, he calculates that his best chance of winning an election is for one to be held as soon as possible. He also faces terrorism and corruption charges, which were the pretext on which he ended up in custody earlier this month. Mr Khan was arrested by the National Accountability Bureau, an anti-corruption body headed by a retired general. He says the charges are baseless. But if convicted he risks being disqualified from politics, a fate that befell his recent predecessor Nawaz Sharif, who also clashed with the army. Mr Khan fears watching the elections scheduled for this October unfold from a jail cell – if they are held at all. Continue reading...

Former police captain Eric Adams says ‘there are more Jordan Neelys out there’ but proposals criticized by civil rights groupsNew York mayor Eric Adams has warned that there are “more Jordan Neelys out there”, invoking the name of the unhoused man who was killed on the subway earlier in May as the Democratic mayor pushed his idea to force people with mental illness to access help.In an interview with MSNBC on Sunday, Adams called a dearth of such services – particularly for the city’s unhoused population – “a very real issue”. Continue reading...

Bill Cassidy, one of the few Republicans to vote to impeach Trump in 2021, says 2022 midterms showed Trump’s weaknessRepublican US senator Bill Cassidy predicted on Sunday that Donald Trump would fail to win the 2024 presidential race if his party nominates him to run again, citing the poor performance of his endorsed candidates during last year’s midterms.“We saw in all the swing states, almost all – Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona – the candidates for Senate that Trump endorsed all lost,” Cassidy said of the former president on CNN’s State of the Union. “If past is prologue, that means President Trump is going to have a hard time in the swing states, which means he cannot win a general election.” Continue reading...

The latest incident marks the third mass shooting over the weekend, bringing the US total for the year so far to 230Three people were killed and two more were wounded in a shooting at a Missouri nightclub early Sunday, marking one of at least three mass shootings in the US this weekend.The killings at the Klymax Lounge in Kansas City, Missouri, and a separate shooting in Birmingham, Alabama, helped bring the number of mass shootings in the US so far this year to about 230, data from the Gun Violence Archive shows. Continue reading...

The credo of Watergate is still relevant: find the best obtainable version of the truth. But doing so is only getting more complicatedWe all have moments in life when we know something big is happening, that we are stepping into a new and consequential experience, and our mind takes a mental Polaroid, an intensely clear snapshot of what that moment looks like and how it feels, and then stores it away in a file marked “important”.Well, my mind does anyway, and in my professional life so far there have been three. Continue reading...

ACLU says verdict of federal judge not to reverse decision in Gulfport, Mississippi, is ‘as disappointing as it is absurd’A transgender girl in Mississippi did not participate in her high school graduation ceremony on Saturday because school officials told her to dress like a boy and a federal judge did not block the officials’ decision, an attorney for the girl’s family said.Linda Morris, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project, said the ruling handed down late on Friday by federal judge Taylor McNeel in the Mississippi city of Gulfport “is as disappointing as it is absurd”. Continue reading...

The NatCon conference showed how a rightwing network is spreading toxic ideology – away from government, it will only escalateOblivion. Possibly even extinction. That’s where the Conservative party is headed, it would be safe to assume, after the local elections wipeout, persistently poor polling and the failure of any mythical “Sunak bounce” to materialise. Based on last week’s National Conservatism conference, it looks as though the extreme Brexit-addled wing of the party is all but guaranteeing the Conservatives’ obsolescence by swimming against the cultural tide, too. Tory MPs joined rightwing authors, journalists and cultural influencers for three days of broadly bonkers, anachronistic views on family values, white population decline and the merits of nationalism, much of which had seemingly racist and homophobic overtones. Marriage between a man and a woman was “the only possible basis for a safe and successful society”, said Tory MP Danny Kruger. Douglas Murray declared that nationalism shouldn’t be underrated simply because the Germans “mucked up twice in a century”.Weird? Yes. Out of touch? Definitely. But not entirely irrelevant. The fact that these conference attendees may soon not be in government or close to government doesn’t mean that their views hold little power, or that they are the preserve of some dangerous but quarantined “online right”. Theories about white replacement, the threat of multiculturalism, the death of Europe and of whiteness under siege have all been represented for some time in our politics and mainstream press, and among government advisers.Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

The new term makes being exhausted sound like a positive thing, but then the bog-standard ‘tired’ has to cover too many types of weariness. Let’s invent some new termsA new tiredness has dropped. According to the market researchers Mintel, 2023 is the year of “hyperfatigue” – which seems to describe a state of continual physical, emotional and mental exhaustion. It’s nice of them to enrich our weariness one-upmanship with this concept, even if it sounds like something a French teenager would have said in the 90s; my computer even keeps trying to add an accent.But they aren’t wrong: tiredness – possibly, yes, hyperfatigue – is the malaise of our age. Everywhere is too light and too loud to sleep properly, and our animal brains are overwhelmed by rolling news of hundreds of global atrocities and dangers, TikTok, deepfakes and monitoring 48 WhatsApp groups. In a recent survey, 35% of people said they were too tired to make healthy changes to their diet and activity levels, suggesting many are in a vicious circle of fatigue-induced self-sabotage, leading to more fatigue. We’re too tired to tackle our tiredness, basically. Continue reading...

The Kremlin is putting up stiffer economic resistance than the G7 anticipated

Can the politician’s Reagan-esque optimism and rightwing principles convince the GOP to pick its first Black presidential candidate?About 45 minutes into his New Hampshire town hall, Tim Scott said he needed to reveal a secret to the Republican voters who had gathered to hear from the presidential hopeful.“Listen, this might surprise some of y’all,” Scott told attendees with subtle laughter in his voice. He paused briefly: “I’m Black.” Continue reading...

It sounds obvious, but it’s a fact that my very best small-business clients are always thinking aheadThe US is careening towards a debt crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since 2011 when Barack Obama faced off against the Tea Party. No one knows for sure if the federal government is going to default on its debt by the end of this month. But if Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on a compromise, it will have an enormous impact on small businesses around the country.Some 65% of small businesses believe they would be negatively affected by a default, according to a recent report from Goldman Sachs. This is very bad news. Small businesses accounted for 45% of all private-sector jobs in the first quarter of 2022. Continue reading...

Lawmakers in Nebraska and North Carolina shift to ‘common sense’ abortion laws that are more restrictive than they seemAfter repeated failed attempts to pass stricter bans, Republicans in some US states are changing their messaging, touting “common sense” abortion laws presented as more lenient than outright bans, but that are more restrictive than they seem when looked at in detail.Nebraska’s state legislature passed a 12-week ban on Friday, days after another 12-week ban cleared its final hurdle in North Carolina. Continue reading...

Former employees at Houghton University say administrators claimed pronouns in signatures violated new school policyA New York Christian university terminated two employees for putting pronouns in their respective email signatures, these former workers allege, according to reports.Raegan Zelaya and Shua Wilmot, who were residence hall directors at Houghton University, said that administrators told them to take the words “she/her” and “he/him” off of their email signatures. Continue reading...

Despite the cliche, going it alone is undoubtedly something that helps you ‘find yourself’ – be it a weekend, a month or a year. Hit the roadIt is the job of our parents to worry.Concern seeps out in their texts as we make our way home at night. They fret as we do things far less risky than anything they pulled when they were our age. No matter how old you become, their worry probably never stops. Not least when you announce you’re going travelling, without them, often halfway across the world. Continue reading...

Leader of non-profit organization accused of fabricating stories about veterans being kicked out of hotels in upstate New YorkRecent reports about how migrants displaced unhoused veterans from upstate New York hotels have turned out to be false after circulating widely among rightwing media outlets.In an odd saga involving apparently altered receipts and paid unhoused actors, the chief executive of Yerik Israel Toney Foundation (YIT) – a non-profit organization focused on housing military veterans – has been accused of fabricating stories about unhoused veterans getting kicked out of hotels to make space for migrants. Continue reading...

Moving golf’s most overlooked major to May means it’s no longer ‘glory’s last shot’, robbing it of its identity“Glory’s last shot” was never the most imaginative of marketing slogans but the US PGA Championship in August at least had an unmistakable identity. Golfers who had failed to make an impact at the Masters, US Open or Open had a redemption opportunity as autumn lurked.Those responsible for scheduling men’s golf have never had it so tough. The reintroduction of this sport to the Olympics added congestion which was eased slightly by the moving of this major to May. When there is not a Ryder Cup, there is a Presidents Cup. Continue reading...

I refuse to accept the historian’s equations of skin colour and cultureI loved David Starkey’s documentaries when I was a kid. His confident erudition, his capacity to sum up a person or idea in a wonderfully pithy phrase: he made history come alive to me more than any teacher I had at school. Then something happened in the summer of 2011.Starkey appeared on BBC’s Newsnight to discuss the riots that engulfed London that August. On it, he said that white working-class people in Britain “had become black”. By this, he meant “a particular sort of nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion”. Continue reading...

Owen Burns, 13, says he grabbed the closest thing after he heard his eight-year-old sister’s screams in Alpena Township, MichiganA Michigan boy who recently channeled his inner David and warded off his sister’s hulking, would-be kidnapper by shooting him with a slingshot has said he grabbed the unconventional weapon because he was “freaking out” at the unfolding danger and it was the closest thing.“It just felt like I was scared, and I had … to do” something, 13-year-old Owen Burns told CNN on Friday. “Cause if I didn’t … she would’ve been taken away or … worse.” Continue reading...

The Wellcome Collection’s show has art and history, biology and ecology, public health, politics – and the dangers of ice-creamIt’s good, sometimes, to think long and hard about the really basic things in life – or, at least what may seem like the really basic things in life – and at Milk, a (free) exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, this happens seemingly without any effort on the part of the visitor. Suck it up quickly, as if through a straw! For here, in a (metaphorical) pint bottle, are art and history, biology and ecology, and public health and politics. I guarantee you’ll never think the same way again about your morning cup of tea, nor even – if you’re of a certain age – about those memories, almost a cliche now if written down, of the milk you were forced to drink at school as a child (ugh).It opens with a huge udder, as vast and foreboding as a black cloud (a hanging sculpture by the contemporary German artist, Julia Bornefeld), and an irresistibly cheery collection of 18th- and early 19th-century Staffordshire cow-shaped creamers – a pairing that sets the tone for the peculiar combination of comfort and anxiety ahead. People are ever more fundamentalist about food, but its production is complicated, and so, increasingly, are its effects, whether on the land or our bodies. If I felt mournfully admiring of a 20th-century Ministry of Health that improved infant mortality rates via a promotion of milk – if only our present government were half so proactive in the matter of the obesity crisis – equally, the Wellcome’s displays forced me to think about some of the ethical problems associated with dairy farming, several of which, I will admit, I hadn’t really considered before. Continue reading...

As carmakers warn that London must renegotiate its deal with Brussels, a lack of government policy is also plaguing the sectorThere is no hope for Britain’s car industry … or at least no hope of maintaining the scale and productive capacity that this bedrock of the UK manufacturing sector could boast before the Covid-19 pandemic.It’s downhill from here. Continue reading...

New Mexico 18-year-old killed three women and injured six others in mass shooting on Monday in FarmingtonThe family of an 18-year-old high school student who took three of more than a dozen guns to which he had access and killed three elderly women without provocation in New Mexico on Monday has claimed he was struggling with his mental health before the attack.The shooter, who was armed with at least three guns and wore body armor before police killed him, “was fighting a battle of mental illness that he lost”, his family asserted on Friday in a statement, according to the Albuquerque Journal. Continue reading...

City council to vote on giving taxpayer money to controversial project as state characterizes opposition as work of ‘terrorists’Pressure is growing on Atlanta politicians to vote against giving $31m to a police and fire department training center known as “Cop City”, even as the state continues to characterize opposition to the project as the work of “terrorists”, and the city’s mayor doubles down on the notion it is needed for “public safety”.Atlanta’s city council will soon vote on giving taxpayer money to the controversial scheme, which is months behind schedule due to protests. The Atlanta Police Foundation, the organization behind it, is also apparently coming up short in sought-after $60m in corporate funding. Continue reading...

Mabel Alvarez Benedicks says eight-year-old daughter ‘cried and begged for her life’ but did not receive hospital care for influenzaThe mother of an eight-year-old girl who died in US border patrol custody said on Friday that agents repeatedly ignored pleas to hospitalize her medically fragile daughter as she felt pain in her bones, struggled to breathe and was unable to walk.Agents said her daughter’s diagnosis of influenza did not require hospital care, Mabel Alvarez Benedicks said in an emotional phone interview. They knew the girl had a history of heart problems and sickle cell anemia. Continue reading...

Four more people injured in deadly collision on Interstate 5 on Thursday after truck hit passenger vanA semi-truck driver who slammed into a passenger van in western Oregon and killed seven people on Thursday in one of the state’s deadliest crashes in recent years has been arrested on suspicion of being drunk behind the wheel, police said.Investigators on Friday arrested Lincoln Clayton Smith, 52, of North Highlands, California, on counts of driving under the influence of intoxicants, reckless driving, manslaughter and assault. Continue reading...

The star athlete, Hollywood pioneer and civil rights icon, who died on Thursday aged 87, was the paragon for an unflinching brand of masculinity that remained undiluted to the end100 Rifles is a spaghetti western that begs for judgment in its own time. Burt Reynolds smirks through his starring role as a biracial Native American hero. Raquel Welch, the full-blooded indigenous damsel in distress, adopts a horrific Mexican accent. But the thing that really offended sensibilities was Jim Brown getting top billing as the swashbuckling hero who not only gets the girl, but roughs her up in a squally love scene.This was heady stuff for 1969, a time when Black actors could scarcely appear on screen with white peers without sparking a national controversy. But Brown would not be chastened by Hollywood’s open racism or Martin and Malcolm’s assassinations or Jim Crow-era laws explicitly designed to keep him in place. He was resolute, uncompromising, always his own man and the most intimidating presence in the room, to boot. If Friday’s announcement of his death at age 87 came as a shock, it’s because most figured the Grim Reaper didn’t even stand much chance of taking the football great down. Continue reading...