Hundreds of pilots across the US have been volunteering the use of their small planes to fly people seeking the procedure from states that outlawed itAll Steven knew was what time and where. A part-time pilot from the Chicago area, he was picking up a total stranger in his single-engine plane, a passenger who needed to fly more than a thousand miles, across state lines, from the midwest to the east coast.“Within 15, 20 minutes of arriving and meeting the person, we were in the plane and I got the engine fired up, ready to go,” he said. Continue reading...

Attacks on the ethnic diversity of Tory cabinets have not been limited to the right; there is lack of nuance on all sides of the race debateAs a Briton of Indian heritage, I had mixed feelings when I saw the images of the new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, celebrating Diwali at a Downing Street reception. Who could fail to be moved by the fact the UK has its first prime minister of colour? But there is also much I abhor about Sunak’s politics.Because there’s more to me than my ethnicity, I don’t have any trouble holding both these thoughts in my head at once. Sixty years ago, racial discrimination was perfectly legal: of course it matters that children can today see that you don’t have to be white to lead this country. But like his Tory predecessors at the Treasury, Sunak is a fiscal hawk, making unnecessarily harsh spending decisions that have resulted in significant hardship. Like many Conservatives, he does not appear to place much stock in the idea of structural discrimination, through which too many young people are held back from achieving their full potential because of their race or class background. Continue reading...

The best horror movies thrill us with fear and pity – just the catharsis Aristotle looked for in tragedyI spent the past week in the mountains of western North Carolina, where the seasonal colour of the tree-covered Appalachians offers a fiery backdrop to small-town life. You can’t beat this place for autumnal vibes, with apple pies and cider on sale in every store, gourds and pumpkins in every layby. And then there are the Halloween decorations. People take them seriously here, their windows, lawns and roofs fantastically dressed in ways that range from the tastefully spooky to the unashamedly exhibitionist. My nearest neighbours have a menagerie of inflatables – a werewolf, a skeleton, a zombie – that blow up taller than their house.The folk I stay with, however, don’t construct ghosts out of bedsheets and brooms or hang up fake spiders’ webs on their porch. They have their own way of marking the season. For the whole of October, my friends Andrew and Carrie commit to watching a different horror film every day. To some, that will sound like psychological torture. But this is a couple who enjoy the genre so much that the first thing you pass on walking into their home is a floor-to-ceiling shelving unit of DVDs with names such as Chopping Mall and Slumber Party Massacre. Continue reading...

A century on, the epic masterpiece speaks to today’s anxieties about loss of traditionHe promised “a new start”.I made no comment. What should I resent? Continue reading...

The ex-president remains his party’s rock star and is touring key states to fire up voters – but his midterms record is far from flawlessShe never got to vote for him because she was too young. But when Barack Obama came to rally this week, Emma Berlage wouldn’t have missed him for the world. “It’s a Friday night, Halloween weekend no less, and everybody’s here,” the 24-year-old said. “After he was president he’s continued to stay cool and very popular with Democrats.”More popular than the current president, Joe Biden? “Yes. I mean, in terms of coolness, yes!” Continue reading...

The tech magnate’s purchase of the social media platform was the easy bit – now he must be responsible for toxic contentWhen the news broke that Elon Musk had finally been obliged to buy Twitter, the company he had tried – for months – to get out of purchasing, it reminded many observers of the 1979 commercial for Remington shavers in which the corporation’s president, Victor Kiam, proclaimed that he liked the electric razor so much “I bought the company.”This was a mistake: Kiam merely liked the business he bought, whereas Musk is addicted to his company, in the sense that he cannot live without it. In acquiring Twitter, he has therefore forgotten the advice given to Tony Montana in Scarface: “Don’t get high on your own supply.”Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading...

Speaker’s husband underwent surgery for skull fracture as political figures unite in condemnation of violenceA man accused of clubbing the husband of the US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, over the head with a hammer and threatening his life while demanding “Where is Nancy?” now faces charges of attempted murder and other felonies a day after the violent break-in at the couple’s San Francisco home.Paul Pelosi, 82, underwent surgery for a skull fracture and injuries to his right arm and hands, though doctors expect a full recovery. The 82-year-old House speaker herself was in Washington with her protective detail at the time of the assault, but she flew back to San Francisco on Friday afternoon and went to the hospital. Continue reading...

Ordinance in Everett, Washington, requiring coffee servers to cover up is unconstitutional, judge rulesA Washington city’s dress code saying so-called bikini baristas must cover their bodies at work has been ruled unconstitutional by a federal court.The decision in a partial summary judgment this week comes after a lengthy legal battle between bikini baristas and the city of Everett, on the outskirts of Seattle, over the rights of workers to wear what they want, the Everett Herald reported. Continue reading...

Eighty-six people died in the 2016 tragedy, yet compassion and empathy have become exhaustedIn Paris, a trial is taking place concerning the 14 July 2016 attack in Nice when a man drove a truck into a crowd of families attending a firework display. The three-month trial, due to end in early December, is of eight associates of Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel accused of assisting him in the attack, when a 19-tonne cargo truck was deliberately driven into people celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais. A total of 86 people were killed, including 15 children. More than 450 were injured. You’d think it would be a big deal. You would be wrong.I’ve been reporting on the trial for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. In the church-like Palais de Justice, where the public can watch the trial on large screens, the average attendance is around six. One afternoon there were only two of us, me and a sweet-faced old lady whispering a melancholy but urgent commentary to herself. Continue reading...

JR Moehringer, the writer behind the Duke of Sussex’s book Spare, has previous form examining his own paternal issuesThe term “ghostwriting” was coined by Christy Walsh, whose agency for years controlled the literary output of American sports celebrities from Babe Ruth onwards. The agency had a series of rules. One suggested that a new ghostwriter “usually makes the mistake of thinking that he ought to write the way his celebrity talks. That is an error. He ought to write the way the public thinks his celebrity talks.”Prince Harry’s ghostwriter, JR Moehringer, wrote his own memoir before he started to write the lives of others. In that book, The Tender Bar, he describes how he was on an existential, drink-sodden search for surrogates for his absent father – a New York DJ – mostly among the regulars in his local boozer. That quest, he suggested, instilled in him a quality that has no doubt subsequently been prized by his celebrity subjects (who include Andre Agassi as well as Harry): “I was a master at ‘identity theft’ when that crime was more benign. The bar fostered in me the habit of turning each person who crossed my path into a mentor, or a character, and I credit the bar, and blame it, for my becoming a reflection, or a refraction, of them all,” he wrote. Continue reading...

Saifullah Paracha, 75, returns to Pakistan after being held, but never charged, over suspected al-Qaida tiesA 75-year-old Pakistani man who was the oldest prisoner at the Guantánamo Bay detention centre, has been released and returned home, the foreign ministry in Islamabad said.Saifullah Paracha was reunited with his family after more than 17 years in custody at the US base in Cuba, it said. Continue reading...

It seems inevitable he’ll allow more abuse and restore Trump’s account – but it’s still a niche platform most people don’t useAll hail Elon Musk! The world’s richest person has single-handedly saved free speech! After months of drama Musk has finally completed his $44bn acquisition of Twitter and become– in his own words – “Chief Twit”. Conservatives are ecstatic about this. “Let’s be honest, Elon Musk buying Twitter is the greatest thing that has happened to freedom of speech and therefore humanity in the last 20 years,” one conservative commentator gushed. Continue reading...

Eagle Pass has been a way station for undocumented immigrants for years, but recently their numbers have grown – and residents are dividedHector Guerrero tries to make it to the Eagle Pass public golf course once a week.By virtue of its location along the Rio Grande, the scenic but all too often deadly river that delineates the border between Texas and Mexico, the course is surrounded by different iterations of boundary fences and international bridges. Continue reading...

At a rally in Georgia, Barack Obama commented on the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband. The former US president said Paul Pelosi was a 'good friend' and condemned politicians who 'stir up division to make folks as angry and as afraid of one another ... for their own advantage'.Pelosi was attacked with a hammer after an intruder entered his home in San Francisco, demanding to see his wife, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who was in Washington. The attack has prompted fears of growing political violence in the US before the midterm elections on 8 November

In this, one of a series of essays on the war in Ukraine from countries in or neighbouring the former Eastern bloc, a Hungarian historian asks how long the country can remain on the fenceThe invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 will go down in the annals of European history. Russia’s undeclared war has cast an almost apocalyptic shadow. And it has dramatically altered the relationships that had prevailed between east and west since the collapse of the USSR. Whenever or however this armed conflict ends, it will undoubtedly take a long time for a new peace-guaranteeing equilibrium to be established. At the very least, the European Union and Nato now have to reckon with a hostile power on their borders and to prepare for a new phase of the cold war.Hungarians voted in general elections just weeks after the invasion, in April, and it seems reasonable to assume that the war next door had an influence on the result. Given the climate of fear that the devastating “special military operation” created, Hungarians voted to keep Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in power rather than risk an untested six-party coalition. This assumption also underlies Orbán’s response, which is to stay out of the conflict to the point of being “exempted”, a position that has been condemned as a betrayal by Hungary’s western allies. Hungary refuses to allow arms shipments destined for Kyiv to transit Hungarian territory and blocks the extension of EU sanctions against Russia to the energy sector. This latter stance is intended to enable an already controversial Russian-Hungarian project to build a nuclear power plant on the Danube (Paks II) to go ahead unaltered. Continue reading...

Maurice Hastings cleared of murder charge after testing of long-held evidence points to another personA man who spent more than 38 years behind bars for a 1983 murder and two attempted murders has been released from a California prison after long-untested DNA evidence pointed to a different person, the Los Angeles county district attorney said.The conviction of Maurice Hastings, 69, and a life sentence were vacated during a 20 October court hearing at the request of prosecutors and his lawyers from the Los Angeles Innocence Project at California State University. Continue reading...

Josh Nalley specialized in pretending to be a lifeless body on social media – then CSI: Vegas came callingA man from Kentucky who plays dead on TikTok has finally caught the attention of CSI: Vegas after the crime show decided to cast him as an “un-alive body”.Josh Nalley from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, is the owner of the TikTok account @living_dead_josh where, since last October, he has featured hundreds of videos in which he mimics a corpse. Continue reading...

The rapper and fashion designer had it all – wealth, power, status, autonomy. But in the end it wasn’t enoughIn 2009, Kanye West was riding high. 808s & Heartbreak – his fourth studio album and a marked departure from his soul-based, hip-hop sound – proved a resounding critical and commercial triumph. A foray into clothing design had culminated in a Paris fashion week sneaker show with Louis Vuitton and a shoe line with Nike, the first for a non-athlete.No longer was West the dorky producer turned rapper agitating to break out of Jay-Z’s shadow. He had become something even bigger: a true star. The only person who could stop Kanye was Kanye – or Ye, as he’s preferred to be known of late. Continue reading...

The social media influencer is an expert at getting attention. But as he climbs in for his sixth pro fight on Saturday night, one of boxing’s most renowned trainers assesses his skillsThough many are deriding the fistic ambitions of the YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul ahead of his fight with former UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva on Saturday, one of the sport’s most renowned trainers is not one of them.Teddy Atlas, the Staten Island-born coach who trained Mike Tyson, Michael Moorer, Barry McGuigan and Alexander Povetkin among other champions, says Paul is respectful of what he calls boxing ‘fundamentals’. Continue reading...

Member of ‘the Squad’ on how her abortion experience, sexual assault and front-line fight in Ferguson, Missouri, affected her politicsHer new memoir is bracingly, sometimes painfully honest, but there is one passage that Cori Bush seriously considered striking out before publication.She had an abortion when she was 19. Walking into the white-walled room of a reproductive health clinic, Bush writes, she began to have reservations about the procedure. Twice she told a nurse, “I don’t want to do this,” but twice the nurse ignored her objections and carried on. Continue reading...

States like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania may determine who controls the US Senate, invigorating Unite Here’s effort to mobilize Democratic votesNene Diallo has already been knocking doors for a couple of hours, but she approaches each new home with fresh enthusiasm.Whenever someone opens a door, she explains she is canvassing with Unite Here, the union that represents Diallo and 300,000 other workers in the hospitality industry. She encourages voters to consider supporting Pennsylvania Democrats, particularly gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro and Senate candidate John Fetterman, in the upcoming midterm elections. Continue reading...

Beloved for his music but also known for his off-stage extremities, the late singer leaves behind a difficult legacyJerry Lee Lewis was waiting in the lobby of the William Morris Agency, New York, one day in 1958. The receptionist was very attractive and, as he loved to, he began to tell her of life on the road, of how he nearly pushed Paul Anka off the roof of a hotel, all kinds of wildness. After a while, he paused. “What if I told you that none of that was true?” he asked her.She looked crestfallen. “Please don’t tell me that. That’s the Jerry Lee Lewis I know. The one people love.” Continue reading...

Hammer assault on Paul Pelosi is latest in series of violent and threatening acts as midterm elections loomThe bloody hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has sparked increased fears over political violence in America just weeks before the country’s crucial midterm elections.The assault – by someone who reportedly entered the Democratic leader’s home specifically in search of her – comes amid an alarming rise in violent rhetoric and threats targeting US lawmakers. Continue reading...

Paul Pelosi underwent ‘successful surgery’ after he was attacked at his home early on Friday by an assailant with a hammerPaul Pelosi, husband of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was hospitalized with a skull fracture on Friday after he was attacked at the couple’s home in California with a hammer by an assailant who was reported to have shouted “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?”Paul Pelosi, 82, underwent “successful surgery” to repair a skull fracture and other “serious injuries” sustained during the assault and is expected to make a full recovery”, according to Nancy Pelosi’s longtime spokesperson, Drew Hammill. Continue reading...

Paul Pelosi was attacked at San Francisco home while House speaker was in Washington

David DePape, 42, was a hemp jewellery maker who posted conspiracy theories on FacebookThe man accused of breaking into US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco and beating her husband with a hammer grew up in Canada, became a nudist activist in the Bay Area, and spread far-right conspiracy theories before being linked to the attack Friday, according to relatives and various media reports.David DePape, the 42-year-old suspect booked with attempting to murder Paul Pelosi, grew up in Powell River, British Colombia, but left about two decades ago to maintain a romantic relationship that led him to California, his stepfather Gene DePape told CNN. Continue reading...

Reactions pour in after Paul Pelosi was violently attacked by a hammer-wielding intruderPoliticians from across the political aisle are reacting to the news that US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was injured during a break-in and attack at their California home.The White House released a statement on behalf of Joe Biden, confirming that the president had spoken to Pelosi, his fellow Democrat, and expressed his support for Paul Pelosi’s recovery. Continue reading...

Musk probably bought Twitter for the same reason billionaires throughout history have become press barons: to try to control the conversationTwitter is free. You can go on there and type your embarrassing little thoughts for the whole world to see any time you like. Millions of us have been doing this for years. Revealing to everyone how dumb your inner thoughts are may cost you your reputation, sure, but it won’t cost you any money. Not even if you’re the richest man in the country.So why spend $44bn to buy it? That’s a fair piece of change, even to someone whose net worth hovers above $200bn. It’s also much more than the company is actually worth, as evidenced by Elon Musk’s desperate attempt to get out of the deal almost as soon as he had gotten irretrievably into it. The price is too high to be a pure lifestyle purchase – if you want a media property just for the social cachet and party invitations, it can be had much cheaper. Fellow villainous mega-billionaire space tourist Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a mere $250m, less than 1% of what Musk just paid for a cacophonous global collection of weird, hollering self-promotion.Hamilton Nolan is a writer at In These Times Continue reading...

Butts was senior pastor at Abyssinian Baptist church in Harlem for decades and worked with many different political leadersThe Rev Calvin O Butts III, who fought poverty and racism and skillfully navigated New York’s power structure as pastor of Harlem’s historic Abyssinian Baptist church, died on Friday at age 73, the church announced.“The Butts family and entire Abyssinian Baptist church membership solicit your prayers for us in our bereavement,” the church said on its website. No cause of death was given. Continue reading...

Of recent artists only Drake, Kanye West and Beyoncé have the same cultural vitality as Taylor Swift, and I am nowhere hip enough to be part of the Beyhive

For any American who is thinking of voting Republican out of anger about inflation, here’s some advice: look before you leapVoters are angry. America’s 8.2% inflation rate sucks and has taken a big bite out of their paycheck. And $4-a-gallon gas hurts, too.Many Americans are angry and blame Joe Biden for today’s high inflation. Indeed, polls show that many people plan to vote for Republicans in November because they’re upset with Biden over the economy. (Unfortunately, many Americans forget that there’s been more job growth – 10 million jobs – during Biden’s first 20 months in office than during any previous president’s first 20 months.) Continue reading...

The globally agreed target of 1.5C is on track to be missed. For those working to prevent disaster, the only option is to keep tryingThe world is falling into an “abyss of risk”, said Prof Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Reports published this week by three UN agencies all point to the failure of governments to make – and keep – sufficient commitments to ensure that global temperatures will not rise by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, which was the target in the 2015 Paris agreement. This is the worst possible news, and arrives just a week before this year’s round of climate talks, Cop27, is due to open in Egypt.So far human activities have raised the temperature by around 1C on average. If current pledges on emissions are fulfilled, that figure is expected to rise to 2.5C. That would – and probably will – mean destruction on a scale that is hard to imagine, even after what we have already witnessed, most recently with devastating floods in Pakistan but also record-breaking heatwaves and other extreme weather elsewhere. Continue reading...

Rishi Sunak can begin to make Britain a serious country again by trying to make the NI protocol work. But will he?Last week, amid all the turmoil in the Tory party, there was a brief flurry of interest in the emergence as a candidate for prime minister of the man more than one British reporter referred to as “the Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis”. Lewis was not the Northern Ireland secretary. He wasn’t even the previous holder of the office – he was the one before that.Likewise, when Rishi Sunak was eventually selected, at least one distinguished British commentator proclaimed him the first person of Asian heritage to become prime minister of a European country. Actually, the first such leader was Leo Varadkar, who became taoiseach in Dublin five years ago. Continue reading...

Michael McGuire hurried after work to watch game, still wearing his uniform and covered in sootPictures of a Kentucky coalminer and his family went viral after an image shared widely showed the he had rushed straight from a shift in the mine to take his young son to the university’s basketball game – so as not to miss the boy’s first live basketball experience.Michael McGuire hurried after work to watch a University of Kentucky scrimmage game with his young son in Pikeville, in the eastern part of the state. Continue reading...

Criticism grows over the university’s role in violence and chaos around planned speeches from Alex Stein and Gavin McInnesNick Ribaudo, a student at Penn State, was attending a protest at his university earlier this week when he heard sudden screams. He and about 300 other students were protesting against their college hosting Gavin McInnes, founder of the violent Proud Boys group, and Alex Stein, another far-right figure, on campus that evening.Ribaudo was standing on a pillar, trying to get a vantage point of the action, when a group surged towards him, shrieking. One of their friends, a student at the university, had just been pepper-sprayed. Continue reading...

Norma Thornton, 78, files lawsuit against Bullhead City in north-west Arizona over law about food-sharing events in public parkA woman who was arrested for feeding homeless people in north-west Arizona is suing over a local ordinance that regulates food-sharing events in public parks, accusing the authorities of criminalizing kindness.Norma Thornton, 78, became the first person arrested under Bullhead City’s ordinance in March for distributing prepared food from a van at Bullhead community park. Her lawyer said the lawsuit filed this week is part of a nationwide effort to let people feed those in need. Continue reading...

New book by Arkansas senator, a Republican presidential hopeful, also suggests president did not understand military proceduresIn January 2020, the rightwing Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton said he would vote to acquit Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial because despite senators having “heard from 17 witnesses … and received more than 28,000 pages of documents”, Democrats had not presented their case correctly.According to Cotton, the senators who sat through so much evidence would “perform the role intended for us by the founders, of providing the ‘cool and deliberate sense of the community’, as it says in Federalist 63”. Continue reading...

The Sussexes draw more ire than genocidal dictators – from people who struggle to articulate exactly what their problem isThe interior designer and social commentator Nicky Haslam has just released the latest annual version of his fabled tea towel, on which he lists some more of the things that he “finds common”. (This year’s entries include Bond Street, coriander, divorce, porn, Stanley Johnson, hydrangeas, foundations and side plates.) Far be it from any of us to suggest culprits for the next one, but I do think “being angry with Meghan and Harry” should be a contender. Let’s be honest: there really isn’t much more desperately naff than allowing oneself to be conversationally infuriated by the commercial behaviour/comings-and-goings/mere existence of “the Sussexes”. It is hugely infra dig.And yet the couple continue to drive swathes of people quite mad. For a huge throng of the vicariously enraged, this week’s release of the cover of Harry’s forthcoming memoir has once again proved a ticket to near-apoplexy. The book is to be called Spare – a hilarious and brilliant title, despite kneejerk criticism of it from people whose own books are called perfectly gopping things like “Diana’s Babies: Kate, William and the repair of a broken family”. Given Spare isn’t out till January, we’ve no idea yet of the quality of its content, though I note Harry has benefited from Andre Agassi’s ghostwriter. So we could be in for more unforgettable and award-winning sections on hair loss in the public eye. Continue reading...

Oil company’s third-quarter result smashes Wall Street forecasts – as does Chevron’s £11.2bnThe US oil supermajor ExxonMobil has reported a quarterly profit of nearly $20bn (£17.3bn), $4bn more than analysts had forecast, almost matching the earnings of the tech giant Apple.Exxon’s $19.7bn profit for the third quarter outstripped the record $17.9bn it reported for the previous quarter, as it became the latest fossil fuel producer to enjoy soaring earnings, a day after Shell announced global profits of $9.5bn between July and September. Continue reading...

The US and its allies condemned Russia for wasting the time of the UN security council and spreading conspiracies by again accusing the US of having 'military biological programmes' in Ukraine.'How much more of this nonsense do we have to endure?' the UK's ambassador to the UN, Barbara Woodward, asked the council.Russia has previously raised at least twice at the security council the issue of biological weapons programmes in Ukraine – while both Washington and Kyiv say they do not exist. Russia is pushing for a formal inquiry

Musk ‘fires top executives’; $44bn deal will give world’s richest person control of platform with 230m users. Plus, world close to ‘irreversible’ climate breakdown• Don’t already get First Thing in your inbox? Sign up hereGood morning.Elon Musk has completed his takeover of Twitter, taking control of the company and reportedly firing several top executives, including the chief executive, Parag Agrawal.Why did Musk buy Twitter? He said in a statement: “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilisation to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. That is why I bought Twitter. I didn’t do it because it would be easy. I didn’t do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love.”What will he do with the social media platform? Expect concerns about freedom of speech to be addressed, costs to be cut, revenues to be raised and bot accounts to be tackled. Oh, and Donald Trump might be allowed back on.What else is happening in Ukraine? Here’s what we know on day 247 of the invasion. Continue reading...