Blow to organizers who last month pulled off the first successful effort to unionize at different facility in company’s historyAmazon warehouse workers overwhelmingly rejected a union bid on Monday, dealing a blow to organizers who last month pulled off the first successful US organizing effort in the retail giant’s history.This time around, warehouse workers cast 618 votes or about 62% against the union, giving Amazon enough support to fend off a second labor win as the tech giant continues to try and overturn its first loss. Continue reading...

Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs and Ronny Jackson receive letters as panel looks to establish extent of role in Trump’s bid to overturn electionThe House select committee investigating the US Capitol attack on Monday asked three Republican members of Congress to assist its inquiry, as it seeks to establish the extent of their roles in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.The panel sent letters requesting voluntary cooperation to Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs and Ronny Jackson, three congressmen who strategised ways to stop certification of Joe Biden’s election win or appeared to have connections to elements involved in the Capitol attack. Continue reading...

Inmate Casey Cole White and Vicky White, assistant director of corrections, are both still missing after leaving jail FridayAuthorities issued an arrest warrant on Monday for a corrections official who they say helped an inmate arrested on a murder charge escape from an Alabama jail. The search for the pair continued.The inmate, Casey Cole White, 38, disappeared on Friday after he left the Lauderdale county detention center in the city of Florence with Vicky White, the facility’s assistant director of corrections. They have not been seen since.This article was amended on 2 May 2022 to correct the headline. The inmate has been charged with murder and will go to trial next month, rather than convicted as originally stated. Continue reading...

Boudin spent more than two decades in prison for her role in a fatal 1981 armored truck robbery north of New York CityKathy Boudin, a former Weather Underground radical who spent more than two decades in prison for her role in a fatal 1981 armored truck robbery and spent the latter part of her life helping people who had been imprisoned, has died at age 78.Boudin, who lived in New York City, died of cancer on Sunday surrounded by family, including her life partner David Gilbert, who was released from prison last year for his own role in the infamous Brink’s armored truck robbery. Continue reading...

Rachel Levine says LGBTQ Americans killing themselves ‘at a rate that should shock our conscience’The US government’s highest-ranking trans official has condemned political attacks on LGBTQ+ communities and accentuated the importance of gender-affirming care for trans youth.Speaking on Saturday in Fort Worth, Texas, the US assistant secretary of health Rachel Levine addressed fellow physicians about conservative politicians’ attacks on LGBTQ+ communities. Continue reading...

Any ending must be decisive – a long-term simmering conflict would be the same as a defeat for the Ukrainian peopleFor more than two months, Vladimir Putin has been violently trying to erase the modern Ukrainian state from the map of Europe. This means Ukraine needs to win. In fact, victory is imperative if the continent wants to stand the chance of being able to live in peace and work collectively to meet global challenges.It is clear that Putin has failed to compel Kyiv to capitulate. Russia’s plans to annihilate Ukraine and annex more of its territory have cemented Ukraine’s will to fight and win this war. So we need to ask: what does victory actually look like?Orysia Lutsevych is head of Chatham House’s Ukraine Forum Continue reading...

Unanimous ruling overturns appeals court decision on city’s refusal to let Camp Constitution fly flag featuring cross at eventThe city of Boston violated the free speech rights of a Christian group by refusing to fly a flag bearing the image of a cross at city hall as part of a program that let private groups use the flagpole while holding events in the plaza below, the US supreme court ruled unanimously on Monday.The 9-0 decision overturned a lower-court ruling that the rejection of Camp Constitution and its director, Harold Shurtleff, did not violate their rights to freedom of speech under the first amendment to the US constitution. Continue reading...

The stories of those who accuse Tim Westwood of abuse show how poorly Black women have been treated. The DJ denies all allegationsSome in the music industry were unsurprised when the allegations about the DJ Tim Westwood came to light last week. There had long been stories recounted by Black women of his alleged abuse of power – rumours that circulated among friends in Black nightlife and the music industry. An investigation by the BBC and the Guardian details the accounts of multiple Black women, some teenagers at the time – of alleged predatory behaviour and groping on the part of the veteran DJ. Some claim to have been groped at his shows, while others maintain that they were enticed to a flat on the promise of professional guidance, only to be abused.In 2020, a Twitter account was created, named Surviving Tim Westwood and a hashtag of the same name started to trend. Then the account disappeared, perhaps due to Westwood’s legal team, as he has denied all the allegations. However it was also possibly indicative of a deep-seated truth: that Black women’s voices are often silenced. This is just one example of how misogynoir, the term used to describe misogyny specifically directed at Black women, may have aided and abetted Westwood in avoiding accountability until now.

Even the few Republicans in Washington who opposed the worst excesses of Trumpism have been unwilling to fight attempts to subvert democracy at the state levelIt is often said that the US is the world’s oldest democracy. While that is not necessarily incorrect, depending on the definition of “democracy,” it tends to obscure more than it illuminates about the reality of American life. If we start from the assumption that America has been a stable, consolidated democracy for two and a half centuries, the current political conflict seems utterly baffling: where is the anti-democratic radicalization of the Republican party – and so many million Americans – coming from all of a sudden?Is it really plausible to assume that the people who remain united behind Donald Trump and are now openly embracing authoritarianism were fully on board with liberal democracy until recently, before they were driven rightward by the presidency of a moderately liberal politician whose sole “radicalism” consisted of being Black? That the election of a religious elderly white man who has always been a proud centrist pushed them to finally abandon their supposedly “consolidated” democratic convictions? Continue reading...

Former president seemed to mix up JD Vance with his rival Josh Mandel in Republican Ohio Senate primary at rally on Sunday• This Will Not Pass review: Dire reading for DemocratsSpeaking at a rally two days ahead of voting in a heated Republican Senate primary in Ohio, Donald Trump appeared to forget the name of JD Vance, the candidate he has endorsed.“You know,” the former president told a crowd in Greenwood, Nebraska, on Sunday, “we’ve endorsed Dr Oz.” Continue reading...

Informal alliances between progressive parties help win seats. There’s no shame in working togetherFaced with the ongoing Partygate scandal, a porn-watching MP and a potential rout at Thursday’s local elections, the Conservative party chairman Oliver Dowden has gone on the attack. A front-page Mail on Sunday splash accused Keir Starmer and Ed Davey of making a pact to give each other a free run in seats at this week’s polls. The Tories fear a progressive alliance, and Labour and the Liberal Democrats seem to fear saying openly that they want one. What’s going on here, and what could it mean for the next general election?From Dowden’s point of view, on one level this is straight distraction: make a loud noise and hope people look at your opponents, not you. But he is also on to something. In February the Financial Times ran a well briefed story that Starmer and Davey had an informal pact to avoid competing with each other in certain seats: they stand candidates, but make minimal effort in the campaign. It worked for the Liberal Democrats in the Chesham and Amersham and North Shropshire byelections, and for Labour in Batley and Spen. Not spending money you don’t have, in seats you can’t win, makes obvious sense.Neal Lawson is director of the cross-party campaign organisation Compass Continue reading...

Sandra Castaneda’s just one of many immigrants detained by the US for their criminal records – even when the cases were dismissedSandra Castaneda spent 19 years in prison for a murder she didn’t commit.But when the California courts overturned her conviction in July 2021, the 40-year-old Los Angeles woman did not walk free. Instead, she was picked up by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents and taken to a federal detention center where she is now facing deportation to Mexico, a country she left at age nine. Continue reading...

Zelenskiy said about 100 civilians who sheltered in steelworks would arrive in Zaporizhzhia today. Plus, the tense wait for a supernovaGood morning.Ukrainian authorities are planning to evacuate more civilians from Mariupol today, after dozens were finally brought to safety following weeks trapped under heavy fire in the strategic port city’s Azovstal steel complex.How many people are still trapped in Mariupol? As many as 100,000 people are believed to be in the blockaded city, which has endured some of the most terrible suffering of the Russian invasion. These include 1,000 civilians and 2,000 Ukrainian fighters thought to be sheltering underneath the Soviet-era steelworks.Will Biden’s Ukraine aid request be approved? Joe Biden’s $33bn request to Congress for more aid for Ukraine is likely to receive swift approval from lawmakers, a senior Republican said on Sunday, as the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, made a surprise visit to the war-riven country.What else is happening? Here’s what we know on day 68 of the invasion.What did Kinzinger say? The June hearings will involve laying out “what led to January 6, the lies after the election, fundraising, the 187 minutes the president basically sat in the Oval Office [as the Capitol was attacked] … the response by [the Department of Defense],” he said. Continue reading...

Tampa Bay are back to attempt a third Stanley Cup win in a row. Can they do it, or will another team from Florida come to the fore?The NHL playoffs begin Monday evening after the first complete season since 2018-19. What stories will unfold over the coming weeks? Continue reading...

Uninvited guest surprised Naples homeowners when they opened door to garage after hearing a crashA gregarious Florida alligator seemingly could not wait for a family’s birthday party to begin, so it slipped into a garage where supplies were being stored and chugged down a slab of Diet Coke.The uninvited guest surprised Naples homeowners Karyn and Jamie Dobson when they opened the connecting door from their house after hearing a crash, WINK News reported. Continue reading...

Zelenskiy said about 100 civilians evacuated after weeks sheltering in the Azovstal complex would arrive in Zaporizhzhia on Monday

Republican Arkansas governor says he would not be deterred by former president in party in wrong over January 6 insurrection

Republican says House likely to approve $33bn but also says Democrats have not acted quickly enough

Casey Cole White, 38, being held on capital murder charge, and Vicki White left detention center on FridayThe US Marshals Service said on Sunday it was offering up to $10,000 for information about an escaped inmate and a “missing and endangered” correctional officer who disappeared on Friday after the two left a jail in north Alabama.Casey Cole White, 38, had been jailed on a capital murder charge in the Lauderdale county detention center in Florence, Alabama, about 75 miles west of Huntsville. Continue reading...

Members of Congress involved in attempt to overturn election have refused to testify voluntarily before June public hearings

Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas appears to have no problem with anti-LGBTQ+ policies but says private business should not be target

Homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas forging ahead with plans to ease Covid-related immigration restrictionsJoe Biden’s top border official said on Sunday he was unconcerned by threats from the top House Republican that the GOP could impeach him if it regains the majority after the midterm elections, as the Biden administration forges ahead with plans to ease a coronavirus-related immigration restriction.Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, addressed the remarks from the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy. Continue reading...

Boris Johnson’s ‘defining mission’ is nowhere to be seen. This is a huge opportunity for Labour to seize the initiativeAmid the scandal, farce and disarray enveloping Boris Johnson’s government, one sudden and glaring absence seems to have been rather overlooked. Levelling up was endlessly talked about between 2019 and early 2022. It was hailed as a daring Tory stride into Labour territory, honoured with a renamed ministry commanded by Michael Gove, and somewhat unconvincingly explained in the 330-page white paper that was finally published in February.Back then, Johnson insisted that levelling up remained his “defining mission”. But only three months on, ministers barely use the term. It received only the most glancing mention at the tail end of Rishi Sunak’s spring statement, and was entirely absent from the pre-Easter “government update” that Johnson gave to the House of Commons about a fortnight ago, assuring MPs of his regrets about Partygate and his determination to get on with the job, whatever that is. Though the idea is not quite dead, it now seems to have lost so much urgency and substance that it is quickly withering away. Continue reading...

Time will tell who got the best haul of players in Las Vegas this year, but there were encouraging signs from the Ravens, Jets and EaglesNew York Jets: Due to a slew of perplexing selections over the years, the New York Jets are often expected to fail on draft night. But on day one of this year’s draft, the Jets put the league on notice by selecting cornerback Ahmad “Sauce” Gardner (No 4), wide receiver Garrett Wilson (No 10), and defensive end Jermaine Johnson II (No 26). Continue reading...

The US president, Joe Biden, joked about his own low approval ratings and his predecessor Donald Trump, as he resumed a Washington tradition of speaking at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. The event had been cancelled for two years due to the Covid pandemic and was boycotted by Donald Trump during his presidency. 'This is the first time the president attended this dinner in six years. It's understandable: we had a horrible plague, followed by two years of Covid,' Biden quipped

Kentucky senator who has clashed publicly with Dr Anthony Fauci champions lab leak theory in remarks at rallyThe Kentucky senator Rand Paul promised on Saturday to wage a vigorous review into the origins of the coronavirus if Republicans retake the Senate and he lands a committee chairmanship.Speaking to supporters at a campaign rally, the senator denounced what he sees as government overreach in response to Covid-19. He applauded a recent judge’s order that voided the federal mask mandate on planes and trains and in travel hubs. Continue reading...

Manchin cites Biden Build Back Better spending plan he sank in ad for David McKinley, challenger to Trump-backed incumbent

Dan O’Dowd has bankrolled his own campaign to take a swing at what he calls Elon Musk’s ‘amazingly terrible’ technologyDan O’Dowd is hardly the first California tech titan to bankroll his own campaign for high political office. What makes him unusual is that he has no interest in winning the US Senate seat he is vying for, or even in challenging the other candidates competing in the 7 June primary.O’Dowd, a software entrepreneur with a 40-year history of working on military, aerospace and other commercial contracts, is running, rather, out of frustration at his fellow tech entrepreneur, Elon Musk, whom he accuses of endangering road safety with a driver assistance software package he’s put in his Tesla electric cars. Continue reading...

The few Republicans who rejected Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen have since embraced the Big Lie in order to avoid Trump’s wrathAs Trump’s big lie of a stolen election began ricocheting across America in November 2020, Arizona’s Republican attorney general, Mark Brnovich (pronounced “Burn-o-vich”), spoke out forcefully on national television. He told the public that Donald Trump was projected to lose the swing state, and “no facts” suggested otherwise. (At the time I thought to myself, “Good for him. Maybe more Republican attorneys general will show some spine.”)That was then. Recently, Brnovich – now running for US Senate from Arizona – came on to Steve Bannon’s far-right podcast with the opposite message: Brnovich said he was “investigating” the 2020 vote and had “serious concerns”. He went on: “It’s frustrating for all of us, because I think we all know what happened in 2020,” without explaining what he meant by “what happened.” (Bannon titled the podcast segment “AZ AG On Interim Report On Stealing The 2020 Election.”)Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com Continue reading...

Hearings with homeland security secretary about the US-Mexico border also revealed rifts within Democrat ranksFour years after Republicans embraced Donald Trump’s nativist and often racist playbook in an attempt to keep control of Congress, the party is once again placing the volatile politics of immigration at the center of its midterm election strategy.From the US-Mexico border to the US Capitol, in hearing rooms and courtrooms, Republicans are hammering the issue. At the forefront of the debate is a once-obscure public health order invoked by the Trump administration in March 2020 ostensibly as a means for controlling the spread of the coronavirus along the south-western border. Continue reading...

White House Correspondents’ Association dinner is first attended by a sitting president in six years after Donald Trump’s snubs, then pandemicJoe Biden celebrated the return of a flashy annual gathering of Washington’s political and media elites on Saturday with some humorous jabs at Donald Trump – and himself.The US president, sporting a tuxedo and slightly askew bow tie, spoke at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, which was cancelled in 2020 and 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic. Continue reading...

The urge to win at everything never left him, long after his sporting career was overLooking back on his young self, all that irrepressible boyish power, Boris Becker once observed: “When you are a teenager, you are looking for your own identity, and winning is a way of expressing yourself. And because I thought in victory I became somebody, in defeat, it followed I was nobody.”No doubt, as Becker negotiates his first weekend of a two-and-a-half year jail sentence in Wandsworth prison – just a couple of miles from his Wimbledon triumphs – he will have cause, at 54, to examine the true nature of those extremes. The highest level of sporting stardom is the closest contemporary life gets to Greek myth and fatal flaws never make easy viewing. Continue reading...

‘He’s been a huge danger to public health,’ says prominent medical ethicist Dr Arthur CaplanThe TV doctor Mehmet Oz’s move into politics appears to have been a step too far for administrators at Columbia University, who have quietly purged his presence from their website as the Republican seeks to represent Pennsylvania in the US Senate.For more than seven years, the private New York university has resisted calls to cut ties with Oz, a heart surgeon who has used his TV platform to push medicines ranging from ineffective diet pills to discredited Covid treatments. Continue reading...

Ditch the phone, ignore the emails, don’t touch the biscuit tin … and settle down for the recommended seven hours of zzzzzHow much do you get every night? There are people in this world – and I might have been one before I bedded more comfortably into middle age – who are attracted to headlines about how much sex we all have. These days, though, as I approach my half-century, nothing excites me as much as a juicy discussion about sleep.How to fall asleep, how to stay asleep and when we should wake up. I love it all, and the more granular detail on offer the better, so I was well stuck in last week to research that suggests that seven hours is the-optimal amount for cognitive wellbeing. The study had nearly 500,000 participants aged 38 to 73 and used brain imaging and genetic data on 40,000 of them. My own research methodology might not be so scientific – I start my diary every day with a reflection on the previous night – but my results tally. Seven hours is the sweet spot. Continue reading...

By many measures, Nato is already at war with Russia. The allies must now act decisively or stop stoking the fire

Shareholders reject proposals for independent chair and greater disclosure of company’s climate-related risksBerkshire Hathaway Inc shareholders on Saturday rejected proposals to have an independent chair replace Warren Buffett, and require his company to disclose more about its climate-related risks and efforts to improve diversity.Shareholders supported letting Buffett keep both the chairman and chief executive roles by a nearly 6-to-1 margin, Berkshire said at its annual meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. Buffett, 91, has run Berkshire since 1965. Continue reading...

What does it say that you can prettify to such levels and still be made paranoid about how you look?

Argument made in federal court filing in Washington, where Trump’s chief of staff sued to invalidate subpoenasDonald Trump’s last White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has accused the congressional committee investigating the US Capitol attack of leaking all the text messages he provided in what he says is an effort to vilify him publicly.The argument was made in a filing on Friday in federal court in Washington, where Meadows sued in December to invalidate subpoenas issued for his testimony and to Verizon for his cellphone records. Continue reading...

Teacher put on leave after allegedly telling class of mostly Black students to pick seeds out of cotton during lessons on slaverySchool officials in Rochester, New York are investigating allegations that a white teacher told his class of mostly Black students to pick seeds out of cotton and put on handcuffs during lessons on slavery in a seventh-grade social studies class.“It made me feel bad to be a Black person,” one School of the Arts student, Jahmiere O’Neal, told reporters. Continue reading...

Vicki White disappeared while escorting an inmate being held on capital murder charges, and inmate Casey White also missingA prison official from Alabama was missing after escorting an inmate to a courthouse for a hearing.The Lauderdale county sheriff’s office said in a Facebook post on Saturday that Vicki White, an assistant director of corrections, disappeared while escorting an inmate being held on capital murder charges. The inmate was also missing. Continue reading...

New state law makes it a felony to provide transgender children with certain kinds of medical careThe US justice department has joined an effort to strike down a new Alabama law that makes it a felony to provide transgender children with certain kinds of medical care.The ban is discriminatory, violating the equal protection clause embedded in the 14th amendment to the US constitution, the federal government argued in a court filing on Friday. Continue reading...

The hedge fund billionaire helped rebuild the Dodgers in one of the most dramatic turnarounds in North American sportsIt was announced on Friday that a consortium led by Los Angeles Dodgers part-owner Todd Boehly has been selected as the preferred bidder in the race to buy Chelsea from Roman Abramovich. If the 46-year-old hedge fund billionaire can repeat the rescue job he has pulled off with the Dodgers over the past decade, it is an outcome that will suit Blues supporters just fine.In 2011, the Dodgers were among the most badly mismanaged teams in North American sports under Frank McCourt, the Boston real estate developer who had bought the franchise and the surrounding Chavez Ravine land from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Entertainment Group seven years earlier. Continue reading...

Recently proposed 9% hikes for rent stabilized apartments stoke panic as residents call on Eric Adams to roll it backAt 64, Chen Renping has lived in New York City’s Chinatown neighborhood for more than 20 years.But after a back injury forced him to retire from construction work in 2018, Renping can only afford rent if he works multiple part-time jobs – and that’s with his unit being rent stabilized. Continue reading...