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Woman was taking dog out when she was ‘charged by an adult female black bear’ and sustained non-life threatening injuriesA woman in Washington state survived a bear attack on Saturday after she punched the animal in the nose, an official said.The woman, who has not been named, was taking her dog out in the town of Leavenworth, in the middle of the state, when she was “charged by an adult female black bear”, the Washington department of fish and wildlife said. Continue reading...

Jury ordered Jones to pay $965m in damages to families subjected to harassment from Jones’s lies about Newtown school shootingConspiracy theorist Alex Jones has asked a Connecticut judge to throw out a nearly $1bn verdict against him and order a new trial in a lawsuit by Sandy Hook families, who say they were subjected to harassment and threats from Jones’s lies about the 2012 Newtown school shooting.Jones filed the requests Friday, saying Judge Barbara Bellis’s pretrial rulings resulted in an unfair trial and “a substantial miscarriage of justice”. Continue reading...

Voters take advantage of in-person and mail-in voting as more than 5.8 million people already cast their vote by FridayEarly voting in the midterm elections is on track to match records set in 2018, according to researchers, as voters take advantage of both in-person and mail-in voting in states across the country.More than 5.8 million people had already cast their vote by Friday evening, CNN reported, a similar total to this stage in the 2018 elections, which had the highest turnout of any midterm vote in a generation. Continue reading...

Until Democrats tell it like it is, their electoral majorities will continue to be fragileA milder version of Liz Truss’s economically induced vanishing act may be occurring on this side of the Atlantic.Despite the Federal Reserve’s most aggressive campaign in generations to slow the economy and bring price increases under control, prices continue to climb.Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, 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 Continue reading...

The tribally owned Mad River Brewing Company has partnered with the Giants to build an economic support system and back key causesThese days, you’ll see them sprinkled across Oracle Park, the stadium of the San Francisco Giants: bright blue cans with images of a steelhead fish flapping above a waterway, a deer with its head to the ground or a dam in the Klamath River.The cans are produced by the Mad River Brewing Company, owned by the largest federally recognized Indigenous nation in California, the Yurok Tribe. And in April, they became the first tribally owned craft beer sold in a major league sports stadium. Continue reading...

If you’ve done something wrong, admit your mistake and fix what you can. Otherwise, stand your groundRemember Anton Ego – the aptly-named villainous restaurant critic in the animated film Ratatouille? His scathing review of Chef Gusteau’s restaurant debatably contributed to the chef’s death. It was only the delicious food prepared by Remy – he was the rat – which saved the day for the celebrated Parisian eatery. Ego represented a cohort of food critics that dominated the restaurant industry for centuries. But where are those food critics today? Sure, there are still a few around. But most of them have been crowdsourced by review sites like Yelp.Yelp has become the place where people get their food reviews. And not just food. It’s retailers and services too. The site reportedly has logged 184m reviews worldwide and 178m unique visitor each month. Some 45% of people will check a Yelp review before visiting a business. That is great power. Continue reading...

Animal Collective, Bonobo and Mercury prize winner Little Simz among acts to cancel concertsMusicians are cancelling concerts and entire tours because the rising costs of staff and materials coupled with a drop off in ticket sales is making them too expensive to run.Earlier this month, US band Animal Collective cancelled forthcoming European dates as“not sustainable”. Within days, the UK downtempo producer Bonobo called time on future live shows in America, describing them as “exponentially expensive”. Then electronic musician Tourist rescheduled a US stint, saying “sometimes tickets just don’t get sold”. Continue reading...

As the leader enters his third term, there are increasing signs that the country is turning inwards, replacing the outside world with cyber ‘reality’In August, there was an unexpected stir in China about a scholarly article. The piece, published in a respected but specialist journal, argued that during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and Qing dynasty (1644-1911), China had been a country relatively closed off to the outside world. Most recent scholarship has assumed that this was a bad thing and that greater openness in the modern era had led to China’s rise in global standing and growth. But the article took a contrarian position, suggesting that there were economic and social advantages to the doors being closed in large part. The argument might have stayed in the realms of the academic. But it was then sent out on the social media feed of a thinktank closely linked to the Chinese Communist party (CCP). There was plenty of social media comment, mostly wondering whether the CCP was hinting that today, too, China should think about whether openness was quite such a good idea.At first glance, it might seem that the opening speech last Sunday by Xi Jinping at the 20th party congress was giving a very different message: indeed, there was a specific pledge praising the idea of openness in the next five years that will mark Xi’s third term. And attention at the end of the Congress has been on the sudden, still unexplained escorting of former president Hu Jintao out of the meeting, and the new Politburo standing committee whose members owe their standing almost entirely to Xi. But there are other signs that the China of the 2020s may be considerably less open than the one we have known for some four decades from the 1980s to 2020. China since the 80s has been defined by the idea that “reform” and “opening” have gone together. Yet that openness created an anomaly in the first two decades of the present century. China became a society highly connected with the outside world but also deeply controlled and monitored at home: open but illiberal, a combination that many theorists of democracy thought impossible. Unlike the old Soviet bloc, there was little sense that China tried to restrict its citizens, except political dissidents, from travelling abroad. The Chinese of the reform era studied in Britain, did deals in America, and saw the sights and bought luxury goods in Italy. Nobody stopped visitors from observing democracy in all its guises in the liberal world, but they understood that open discussion of the concept stopped when they arrived back at Beijing airport. Continue reading...

The Academy-award winner has been emailing a ‘daily dose of truth’ to mobilize supporters of the party to vote in NovemberFor the past month, Academy Award-winning documentary maker Michael Moore has been emailing out a daily missive “Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truth” on why he believes Democrats will win big in America’s midterm elections next month.Moore calls it “a brief honest daily dose of the truth – and the real optimism these truths offer us”. It also – at this moment in time – flies in the face of most political punditry, which sees a Republican win on the cards. Continue reading...

The menopause market is worth an estimated $600bn – and producers are falling over themselves to target women with everything they might need, from underwear to scentsFor my birthday last week, the algorithm gave me perimenopause ads. Happy birthday Eva, here is a future of anxiety, mood swings, brain fog, hot flushes and irregular periods, no gift receipt available sorry bye I love you. To be clear – Instagram is being previous. I remain calm, cool and bleeding, but also a member of the first generation of women actively aware of our soon coming menopause. Which has obvious benefits but also, less discussed, irritations.The menopause revolution happened in stages. The first stage involved talking about it. People like Davina McCall started discussing the impact of menopause on her life – her body, her mental health – in ways that opened up conversations between women and their doctors, and their employers, and their families. Data emerged: one in three women were choosing not to go to their GP, despite 77% finding at least one symptom of menopause “very difficult”. Continue reading...

From Norwegian pipelines to French ocean floor cables, vital infrastructure is vulnerable to Russian attacks designed to destabilise Europe

Former CFO is expected to testify about off-the-books compensation scheme to evade paying payroll taxesThe Trump Organization is set to face criminal tax fraud charges on Monday in New York in a trial that could start to tease out the many allegations against the company and by extension its patriarch, Donald J Trump.It comes as the former US president faces a maze of legal troubles and mounting costs – by some estimates running at close to $4m a month to his leadership PAC – over his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss, the removal of government documents from the White House when he left office and a defamation case relating to a rape allegation. Continue reading...

Far from entering the midterms as the party of tolerance, diversity and sincerity, critics say, the Republican party has shown itself to be the oppositeRepublicans were in trouble. Mitt Romney, their US presidential nominee, had been crushed by Barack Obama. The party commissioned an “autopsy” report that proposed a radical rethink. “If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans,” it said, “we have to engage them and show our sincerity.”Ten years after Romney’s loss, Republicans are fighting their first election since the presidency of Donald Trump. But far from entering next month’s midterms as the party of tolerance, diversity and sincerity, critics say, they have shown itself to be unapologetically the party of hate. Continue reading...

Uncensored America, a conservative student group, has invited Gavin McInnes to speak at the school in late OctoberStudents at the prestigious US university Penn State are outraged that Gavin McInnes, founder of the far-right group the Proud Boys, is coming to speak at their Pennsylvania college on Monday.The Proud Boys, an often violent US extremist group, have been labeled a terrorist organization by New Zealand and Canada. Many of its members align with white supremacist, antisemitic or Islamophobic ideologies. And five of its members were charged for their actions during the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Continue reading...

The ‘fake heiress’ who also went by Anna Delvey speaks about her time in prison, being back in New York and what’s nextAnna Sorokin is sitting on a parapet on the roof of her fifth floor East Village walk-up, unperturbed by the sheer drop behind her – confidence, one might think, that came in handy during her rise from obscurity and then infamy as a fake New York City heiress known as Anna Delvey who captured Manhattan’s glitzy art scene.It has been six years since she was arrested in Malibu, California, and almost four since a jury found her guilty of second-degree grand larceny, theft of services and one count of first-degree attempted grand larceny. Now Sorokin is back in New York and making news again. Continue reading...

From the civil war to the January 2021 insurrection, the white nationalist response to democratic defeat has been to attempt to destroy US institutions and our national agreements. We shouldn’t tolerate thisThe current social contract in America is not an expression of our deepest values, greatest hopes and highest ideals. Quite the contrary, it is the result of a centuries-long series of compromises with white supremacists.In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson included a forceful denunciation of slavery and the slave trade, condemning the “execrable commerce” as “cruel war against human nature itself”. The leaders of the states engaged in the buying and selling of Black bodies balked at the offending passage, and Jefferson explained the decision to compromise, writing, “The clause … was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and a Guardian US columnist. This is an extract from his latest book, How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good (New Press, October 2022) Continue reading...

From Van Morrison to Latin pop, music is the signpost that takes me to far-flung places and home againWe’ve all said it (or indeed screamed it) when a song from our past comes on: “What a throwback!”Music soundtracks our lives. It becomes ingrained in our memory alongside our biggest milestones, from weddings to funerals, summer lovin‘ to heartbreak. Continue reading...

Randy Cox was arrested by Connecticut law enforcement and en route a detention center when he was knocked against a van wallA man who was left partially paralyzed while in police custody has had all criminal charges against him dropped.On 19 June, 36-year-old Randy Cox of New Haven, Connecticut, was arrested on charges of illegal handgun possession. Cox was put into a police transport van without any seatbelts and was en route to a detention center when the officer behind the wheel, Oscar Diaz, suddenly braked. Video footage released by Cox’s family and published by CNN shows a handcuffed Cox sliding across the bench and hitting the van’s wall with his head. Continue reading...

Hervis Rogers, who drew national praise, was arrested by state attorney general Ken Paxton for voting illegally while on paroleA Texas judge has dismissed voter fraud charges against Hervis Rogers, the Houston man who drew national attention – and praise – for waiting seven hours in line to vote in the March 2020 presidential primary.Rogers, who is Black, became a symbol of tenacity when news of the circumstances surrounding his voting experience surfaced. He stuck around – despite working two jobs, including one beginning at 6am – and was among the last, potentially the last, Texas resident to vote, according to KERA news. Continue reading...

Federal appeals court temporarily halts Biden’s cancellation of student debt after motion brought by six Republican-led statesThe Biden administration is urging student loan borrowers to continue applying for debt relief despite a federal appeals court order late on Friday that temporarily halted this program.“[This] temporary order does not prevent borrowers from applying for student debt relief,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement following the eighth circuit court of appeals’ temporary stay. Continue reading...

Women are consistently held to higher ethical standards than men, so the allegations about Corden’s nasty behavior likely won’t destroy himIt’s not been a terribly good week to be British, has it? It’s been pandemonium in the country itself and one of Britain’s more famous exports has been making a disgrace of himself. I speak of James Corden, of course. The comedian, an English immigrant in LA, has been making headlines for some egg-ceptionally mean-spirited behaviour. He turned up to eat at Balthazar, a fancy New York restaurant, and was nasty to the waitstaff, according to Balthazar’s owner, Keith McNally. In one incident he was extremely mean after he found a hair in his meal. In another he became apocalyptic because the staff got his wife’s order of an egg yolk omelet wrong. There was a little bit of egg white in it apparently and we can’t be having that can we? Continue reading...

Unlimited challenges to eligibility and poorly trained poll workers cause frustration in key gubernatorial and US Senate contestsJennifer Jones, a Morehouse School of Medicine PhD student, showed up to her precinct in Fulton county, Georgia, on the second day of early voting for the midterm elections. She was excited to cast her ballot for her chosen candidates in the gubernatorial and Senate races, Stacey Abrams and Senator Raphael Warnock. However, when she reached the check-in station at the polling site, she was informed that she would be unable to cast a regular ballot because her validity as a voter was challenged.“When I handed in my ID, the poll worker said I was being challenged,” said Jones. “They said I had to complete a provisional ballot, but I wasn’t really comfortable doing that, so I didn’t get to cast my ballot that day.” Continue reading...

Nevada has an acute shortage of affordable housing – but do Republicans or Democrats have practical answers to curb one of America’s most pressing issues?Claudia Lopez, 39, is worried for her children.As her curly haired seven-year-old daughter bounced around a play area inside El Mercado, a shopping center within the Boulevard Mall in Las Vegas where the smell of arepas and tacos hovers over the shops, Lopez soaked in her day off from knocking on doors and talking to residents about the upcoming election. Continue reading...

Conservatives have long harnessed the extremist, far-right energies of their base to animate the partyIn the days and weeks after the attack on the Capitol, Republican leaders publicly acknowledged Donald Trump’s culpability. Last week’s January 6 hearings presented footage of House minority leader Kevin McCarthy declaring Trump should have “immediately denounced” the attack, and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell accusing Trump of ignoring his duty as president. It was a striking reminder that immediately after the insurrection, elected Republicans as well as some of Trump’s allies in the rightwing media were rattled by what had happened, uncertain of how to continue.But the moment quickly passed. January 6 obviously wasn’t enough for Republicans in Congress to actually impeach or for conservatives to break with Trump in any meaningful way. Instead, they closed ranks and rallied behind Trump: Republicans first acquitted him, then they started obstructing every attempt to hold him accountable, and now a majority of GOP candidates are running on the Big Lie, denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election. The few who broke with Trump have been fully marginalized or even ostracized from the party. Republicans did not come to see January 6 as the end of the line, the outrageous conclusion of the Trumpian experiment – they have come to see it as a blueprint: never concede an election, never accept defeat at the hands of what they see as a fundamentally “un-American” enemy. Continue reading...

The Just Stop Oil protest shocked the world, but we must take disruptive action on the climate crisis before it’s too lateTwo climate activists who threw soup on the protective glass covering of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting have captured the attention of the world. While some have ridiculed the activists, as a funder of climate activism, I am proud of the bigger conversation they have started.When I saw the video, my first reaction was shock. Throwing soup on a beloved painting was a desperate move. What could possibly motivate a young person to do such a thing? This is where we find ourselves after decades of mostly incremental activism which has brought us to the point of a collapsing planet, engulfed in flame and drought, and burning to the ground. Activists are trying everything they can to get our attention. How far is too far to get the attention of people in immediate danger? Continue reading...

Jess and Annie Nichol want to undo the harsh criminal laws passed after their sister was abducted: ‘We don’t want our pain to be used to punish anyone else’Annie Nichol was seven years old on 19 March 1994 when she was brought to the White House to talk to Bill Clinton.With a stuffed dolphin by her side, the girl spoke to the president about her 12-year-old sister, Polly Klaas, who had been abducted five months earlier from the family’s home in Petaluma, California, while Annie was sleeping nearby. Continue reading...

From abortion rights to climate action, the Minnesota congresswoman outlines the work ahead for DemocratsThe snow is already falling in Minnesota and with less than three weeks until election day, the priority for congresswoman Ilhan Omar and the state Democrats is getting people out to vote early before enthusiasm – and the temperature – dips.“The number one concern for a lot of people I am talking to is Roe – it’s reproductive rights,” Omar said. “There’s also concern about inflation and what that means for people. We’re seeing a lot of enthusiasm. I hope it holds … We can pay attention to the polls, but if we don’t get the people out to vote, nothing else matters.” Continue reading...

Nihilist, anarchist, idealist, troubled young transperson crying out for help: when a 22-year-old US military analyst leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents, everyone thought they knew why. They were wrong, she says. This is what really happenedChelsea Manning’s memoir opens like a Jason Bourne novel with a scene in which the then 22-year-old, on the last day of two weeks’ military leave, tries to leak an enormous amount of classified data via a sketchy wifi connection in a Barnes & Noble in Maryland. Outside, a snowstorm rages. Inside, Manning, a junior intelligence analyst for the US army, freaks out as the clock ticks down. In 12 hours, her flight leaves for Iraq. Meanwhile she has half a million incident reports on US military activity to upload from a memory stick to an obscure website called WikiLeaks. The military would later argue she didn’t have the clearance even to access these files – “exceeded authorised” as Manning puts it, in army parlance – but the fact is, she says, “It was encouraged. I was told, ‘Go look!’ The way you do analysis is you collect a shit-ton of data, a huge amount, in order to do the work on it.”Everything about Manning on that afternoon of 8 February 2010 – her name, her gender, her anonymity, her freedom – is provisional and shortly to change. Three months later, she’ll be in a cage in Kuwait. Three years after that, she’ll be starting a 35-year prison sentence at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Meanwhile, the wider consequences of her actions that day will, depending on your view, topple governments; endanger lives; protect lives; uphold democracy; compromise global diplomacy; change the world in no measurable way whatsoever; or – Manning’s least favourite interpretation – boil down to a cry for help from a troubled young transperson seeking the care she required. Today, sitting across the table from me in an office in Brooklyn, Manning is tiny, fierce, dressed all in black with long blond hair, and vibrating with enough nervous energy to power the lights. “Are we recording?” she says as her eyes skim the room. For the space of our 90-minute encounter, she will seem only partially present, each question yanking her back to some unseen site of contest where she must defend herself against endless and wide-ranging charges. Continue reading...

That ’70s Show star faces three counts of sexual assault in case that also shines spotlight on Church of ScientologyThe trial of actor Danny Masterson began this week with emotional testimony from one of the women who has accused the TV star of rape – marking the latest of several high profile cases now under way in Hollywood, and one in which the Church of Scientology has come under scrutiny.Inside a Los Angeles courtroom, just down the hall from the trial of disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, the first of Masterson’s accusers took the stand on Tuesday and Wednesday. She tearfully recounted a 2003 incident when she says that the actor, best known for his role in That ’70s Show, raped her. Continue reading...

Program has been paused as the court considers a motion filed by six Republican-led statesJoe Biden’s plan to cancel billions of dollars in federal student loans has been temporarily halted by a federal appeals court as it considers a motion from six Republican-led states to block the program.The eighth circuit court of appeals issued the temporary stay on Friday, ordering the Biden administration not to act on the program while it considers the appeal. Continue reading...

Capitol attack committee makes sweeping requests for documents and testimony and dramatically raises stakes of investigationThe House January 6 select committee has formally transmitted a subpoena to Donald Trump, compelling the former president to provide an accounting under oath about his potential foreknowledge of the Capitol attack and his broader efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The subpoena made sweeping requests for documents and testimony, dramatically raising the stakes in the highly charged congressional investigation and setting the stage for a constitutionally consequential legal battle that could ultimately go before the supreme court. Continue reading...

For fans of the food giant, Down and Out in Paradise is an ill-informed and reckless attempt to get to the bottom of a tragedy that can never be explained“We actually can learn a lot from celebrities,” blithely begins Charles Leerhsen’s unauthorised biography of the late Anthony Bourdain, Down and Out in Paradise. But what this unnecessary book teaches the reader is that the unauthorised celebrity biography is an inherently flawed project of which there are always new depths to plumb. In this one, for instance, someone who didn’t know him picks apart a dead man’s life and legacy, publishing intimate text messages sent between him and his lover in the last days of his life – and without her permission.Recently released in the US, the book has already stirred strong criticism. Bourdain, who died in 2018 by suicide, was a giant of the food world, who came late in life to an unlikely career as a roving traveller and storyteller chronicling the culinary culture and politics of the farthest reaches of the planet. For those of us who were fans of his sometimes ribald but always open-hearted take on life, Bourdain has left behind hundreds of hours of carefully produced television, and a number of books – not least his down and dirty memoir of working as a chef in New York City, Kitchen Confidential, which sent him stratospherically to a level of fame for which he later said he was not wholly prepared. Continue reading...

The former media entrepreneur, naval officer and investment banker was at Trump’s side during his ascent and some of his most divisive momentsMoments after being convicted of contempt of Congress in July, Steve Bannon, a former media entrepreneur, naval officer, investment banker and Trump administration aide, walked out of a Washington courthouse and made a declaration that summed up what the better part of the last decade of his life had been about.“I stand with Trump and the constitution, and I will never back off that, ever,” Bannon declared. Continue reading...

Car was discovered Thursday morning by landscapers in affluent town of Atherton with unused bags of concrete inside itPolice are investigating why someone buried a car in the yard of a multimillion-dollar northern California home in the 1990s – and left unused bags of concrete inside.The car was discovered on Thursday morning by landscapers in the affluent town of Atherton in Silicon Valley, police said in a news release. Continue reading...

Victim was able to alert contacts via smartwatch after attack by estranged husband, then escape from early grave to seek helpA woman in Washington state managed to escape after allegedly being bound, stabbed and buried alive by her estranged husband.Thurston county police officers were dispatched to a home around 1am local time on Monday, where they found a distressed woman hiding behind a shed screaming, “My husband is trying to kill me,” reported NBC News, citing a court document. Continue reading...

Former Trump strategist also fined $6,500 for refusing to comply with subpoena issued by Capitol attack committeeDonald Trump’s top former strategist Steve Bannon was sentenced Friday to four months in federal prison and $6,500 in fines after he was convicted of criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to comply last year with a subpoena issued by the House January 6 select committee.The punishment – suspended pending appeal – makes Bannon the first person to be incarcerated for contempt of Congress in more than half a century and sets a stringent standard for future contempt cases referred to the justice department by the select committee investigating the Capitol attack. Continue reading...

Case is one of the 19 voter fraud prosecutions, and involves man who says he registered to vote in 2020 without knowing he was ineligibleA Miami judge on Friday dismissed one of the 19 voter fraud prosecutions loudly trumpeted by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a significant development that comes as the cases draw scrutiny.The case on Friday involved Robert Lee Wood, a 56-year-old Miami man who registered to vote in 2020 and voted in the presidential election last year. State prosecutors indicted Wood, who is Black, saying he registered and voted knowing he was ineligible. He was ineligible because he was convicted in 1991, but Wood said he did not know that. He registered in 2020 when he was approached by a canvasser and was sent a voter registration card by the state. Continue reading...

Who would think a lying, hypocritical degenerate was the answer to this crisis? A large number of Conservatives, apparentlyIf you feel physically breathless at the current state of British politics, that’s just Boris Johnson immediately sucking all of the oxygen out of the room again. Is the dignity vampire coming back? Unclear. But I know we’re all big fans of lettuces now, so be advised there could be a monstrous 16-stone slug waiting to crawl out of this one and burrow straight into your brain stem.With a poll this morning putting them just the 39 points behind Labour, a genuinely tragic number of Conservative betas seem to think that only Johnson can fix this/save their jobs. They desperately, desperately need you to think of the UK government as a state-of-the-art technology that only functions when unlocked with Boris Johnson’s unique biometric pass. And yet, does it? Does it operate only when Johnson’s eyes meet its retinal scan? Does it crave to recognise his handprint (like so many spirited but troubled young women before it)? On the vanishingly outside chance that this is the case, can we not simply do as the movies have taught us: forcibly borrow or cut off the relevant Johnson body part, and just get things working that way? Continue reading...

A new generation of fans enthused by younger drivers and the Netflix series Drive to Survive has reinvigorated the sportAttracting young fans was once dismissed as an irrelevance by Formula One, but now the sport seems to have finally accepted that the kids are alright. Formula One has enjoyed an explosion in popularity in recent years, unthinkable a decade ago. Attracting a swathe of fresh fans, the boom has been driven by the grid’s young guns who are connecting with a new generation and reinvigorating the sport.Nowhere is this more evident than in the resurgence of interest in F1 in the USA, an audience it craved for decades. This weekend’s US Grand Prix is expected to be a sellout with 440,000 in attendance across three days, 10% up on 2021. Continue reading...

In 1948, the US initiated the Marshall plan to invest $13bn ($115bn in today’s dollars) in western Europe. We need a similar plan for AfricaThe continent of Africa has over 1.3 billion people – more than double the size of Europe. By 2050, that population is expected to double, giving it more than a quarter of the world’s population – many of them of young working age.And its economies are poised for more growth. The Centre for International Development projects that seven African countries will be among the 15 fastest growing over the next five years. Improving education systems and increased trade are already improving the lives of hundreds of millions of Africans. The poverty rate continues to plummet and migration is increasing as well – spurring the spread of ideas, entrepreneurship and investment. Africa has more than 60% of the globe’s arable uncultivated land. And a new trade agreement is expected to create Africa’s first continent-wide free trade area, generating economic benefits for the country.Ilhan Abdullahi Omar is an American politician serving as the US representative for Minnesota’s fifth congressional district since 2019Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com

Congresswoman makes remark after former vice-president says there will be ‘pro-life majorities’ in House and SenateAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a simple message for Mike Pence on abortion, after the former vice-president predicted “pro-life majorities” in both houses of Congress after the midterm elections.“I’ve got news for you,” the Democratic New York congresswoman wrote. “Absolutely no one wants to hear what your plan is for their uterus.” Continue reading...

Magic Johnson joins in with citywide denunciations of De León and Cedillo, but council is powerless to expel themThe Los Angeles city council appears to be headed for a long and bruising power struggle, as two councilmen resist widespread calls for their resignation amid a racism scandal and state investigation.A week since the president of the city council, Nury Martinez, resigned over crude and racist remarks she made during an October 2021 meeting with other Latino leaders, two other councilmembers present at the meeting have refused to step down, despite Democratic leadership – up to President Joe Biden – calling on them to do so. Continue reading...