First lady tells authors of new biography she cut off push to recruit her husband to challenge George W Bush in 2004Feeling “burned” by her husband’s first run for the presidency, Jill Biden resisted advisers including Ron Klain, now White House chief of staff, who pushed him to mount another campaign in 2004.“All these men – and they were mostly men – coming to our home,” she said. “You know, ‘You’ve got to run, you’ve got to run.’ I wanted no part of it.” Continue reading...

California court rules that company made misleading and potentially harmful statements in hundreds of thousands of adsA California appeals court has upheld a lower court ruling that Johnson & Johnson must pay penalties to the state for deceptively marketing pelvic mesh implants for women.Johnson & Johnson had appealed in 2020 after superior court judge Eddie Sturgeon assessed the $344m in penalties against the US pharmaceutical company’s subsidiary, Ethicon. Continue reading...

Lawyer for man charged with stealing a coat rack from the Capitol has vowed to show Trump abused his power to ‘authorize’ attackMentions of Donald Trump have been rare at the first few trials for people charged with storming the US Capitol, but that has changed: the latest Capitol riot defendant to go on trial is blaming his actions on the former president and his false claims about a stolen election.Dustin Byron Thompson, an Ohio man charged with stealing a coat rack from the Capitol, doesn’t deny that he joined the mob on 6 January 2021. But his lawyer vowed Tuesday to show that Trump abused his power to “authorize” the attack. Continue reading...

Partygate, bullying ministers, groping MPs and insider lobbying: the Tories have polluted our entire system of governmentBoris Johnson was never going to resign if he didn’t have to. This is all about the Tory party’s view of him now. The party knows as well as you or I that Johnson lied about the lockdown parties. It knows that the lies hit middle Britain, conscientiously obeying the lockdown laws, in the gut. It knows the Tories will take a hit for it in the local elections and eventually the general election too. Yet, remarkably, when it weighs all this up, the Tory party thinks this does not matter all that much.The ostensible reason now being offered is that a prime minister is too important to be dumped during a war. Britain’s own history shows how specious this claim is. Margaret Thatcher was ousted during the build-up to the Gulf war in 1990; Neville Chamberlain during the second world war in 1940; and Herbert Asquith was pushed aside during the first in 1916. Actually, you could argue that a war is a good time to ditch a failing prime minister, not a bad one. Continue reading...

GlaxoSmithKline’s £1.5bn Sierra Oncology deal comes after pressure from Elliott to boost its pipelineThe UK drug company GlaxoSmithKline has agreed a £1.5bn deal to buy a US cancer treatment developer, Sierra Oncology, as it tries to fend off pressure from the activist shareholder Elliott Management.The deal will give Britain’s second-largest pharmaceutical company access to California-based Sierra Oncology’s momelotinib, a drug being tested on anaemic patients with a type of bone marrow cancer called myelofibrosis. GSK said the drug had “significant growth potential” and it expected sales to start next year, with one analyst predicting it could generate peak annual sales of about $1.7bn (£1.3bn). Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: we speak to the head coach of the newly-established team spearheaded by Natalie PortmanWelcome to Moving the Goalposts, the Guardian’s new (and free) women’s football newsletter. Here’s an extract from this week’s edition. To receive the full version once a week, just pop your email in below.I will not have been the only one in recent weeks to have turned my eyes to the west coast of America as one of the most eagerly-awaited arrivals to the NWSL seized centre stage. On 20 March, Angel City FC finally took to the field at the Titan Stadium in California under the guidance of the head coach, Freya Coombe. They emerged to a raucous reception as they made their much-anticipated professional debut. Continue reading...

It’s impossible to understand American politics without grappling in earnest with why Greene’s extremism is widely seen as justified on the rightEver since entering Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene has been making headlines for her long history of peddling conspiracy theories, her blatant embrace of anti-Muslim bigotry and white Christian nationalism, and her aggression against political opponents. The latest escalation came last week, when she smeared her Republican colleagues in the Senate, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney, as “pro-pedophile” after they voted to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US supreme court; Democrats, she added, “are the party of pedophiles.”There is a calculating quality to Greene’s polemics. Last fall, for instance, she recorded a campaign video in which she used a military-grade sniper rifle to blow up a car that had the word “socialism” written on it, promising to do the same to the “Democrats’ socialist agenda.” It was over-exaggerated campaign nonsense. But Greene knew the unsubtle insinuation of using violence against a political opponent would demand attention.Thomas Zimmer is a visiting professor at Georgetown University, focused on the history of democracy and its discontents in the United States, and a Guardian US contributing opinion writer Continue reading...

Nato was never serious about admitting Ukraine. The Russian invasion has lowered Ukraine’s chances even furtherAmid the debate over the war in Ukraine, there’s widespread agreement on one point: the carnage and destruction will continue – not just for weeks, but for months or, according to some western officials, years or even decades.Eventually, however, this war, like all others, will conclude, but not before Russia or Ukraine, perhaps both, become convinced that the losses – in blood and treasure – are unbearable and success beyond reach. Continue reading...

Challenging anti-union rhetoric and pro-union attitudes of younger workers are undermining highly paid consultantsThe nation’s anti-union consultants and lawyers – who have made millions of dollars fighting against union drives – have just been through some of their worst weeks ever as unions racked up wins at Amazon, Starbucks, REI, the New York Times, MIT and other places.These consultants and lawyers – often called “union busters” – have done so poorly that John Logan, a professor who has studied “union avoidance” efforts for two decades, says their anti-union kryptonite seems to have suddenly lost much of its power. “For decades, the consultants have seemed almost invincible. Many firms have boasted victory rates of over 95%,” said Logan, a professor at San Francisco State. But in Staten Island, “the Amazon Labor Union turned the tables on the company’s anti-union consultants” and showed they may have been “more of a liability than an asset”. Continue reading...

US president says Russian leader ‘trying to wipe out the idea of even being Ukrainian’. Plus, the first youth-led climate case to go to trialGood morning.Joe Biden has accused Russia of carrying out genocide in Ukraine, saying that Vladimir Putin is “trying to wipe out the idea of even being Ukrainian”.What did Biden say? “More evidence is coming out of the horrible things that the Russians have done in Ukraine. And we’re going to only learn more and more about the devastation. We’ll let the lawyers decide internationally whether or not it qualifies, but it sure seems that way to me.”What else is happening? Here’s what we know on day 49 of the invasion.Do we know anything about the suspect? As of late Tuesday night, officials had no one in police custody, but authorities named Frank James, 62, as a person of interest in connection to the shooting. A $50,000 reward has been offered for information. Continue reading...

Bombings, looting, atrocities – Chechens know what it’s like to suffer Russia’s aggressionI have found it almost impossible to look away from the images of the carnage unleashed by Russian troops on occupied Ukrainian towns. Overcome with numbness, I masochistically zoom in on the photos of victims, studying every face, or whatever is left of it. All I can think is: “They have done this before. They are doing it again.”The indiscriminate shelling, the looting, the evidence of rape, torture and executions, and, above all, the sense of enthusiasm with which these war crimes are being carried out are painfully familiar. In recent days, my mind has kept wandering to another photo, taken 18 years ago in Rigakhoy village in Chechnya by my mum, human rights activist Natalya Estemirova. It shows the corpses of five tiny, grey-faced children, all siblings, lined up according to height. The oldest is five years old, the youngest – twins – were not even 12 months old. The children and their mother, Maydat Tsintsayeva, were killed in a deliberate bombing by the Russians on 9 April 2004.Lana Estemirova is the host of Trouble with the Truth podcast and is currently working on her first book

Aidan Hutchinson and Kayvon Thibodeaux will feature as top picks later this month. But there are tantalising stories further down the boardThe 2022 NFL draft is a little over two weeks away. It’s time to look at five of the upcoming class’s most intriguing (rather than the best) prospects. Continue reading...

Does fighting on the radical right’s turf help to steal its voters? Our research suggests it doesn’tAcross Europe, radical-right parties remain on the rise. In France, Marine Le Pen is again in the runoff for the French presidency against Emmanuel Macron. This time, polls suggest a much closer race than in the 2017 election. Just over a week ago, Viktor Orbán’s populist nationalist Fidesz party won a landslide in Hungary’s parliamentary elections.Parties of the far right not only have realistic chances of entering and leading governments in many countries, their success continues to spread across the entire continent. Even Spain and Portugal, long considered exceptional because of the absence of radical-right forces, have recently seen the emergence, respectively, of Vox and Chega.Werner Krause is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna; Denis Cohen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research; Tarik Abou-Chadi is associate professor of European politics at Nuffield College, University of Oxford Continue reading...

Governor seems eager to eliminate two congressional districts with large Black electorates giving Republicans a 20-8 edgeThe Florida legislature will allow Governor Ron DeSantis to take the lead on redrawing the state’s 28 congressional districts, a highly unusual move that will probably diminish Black political power in the state and allow Republicans to further distort the state’s map to their advantage.State legislatures, including Florida’s, usually draw a proposal for a plan that the governor approves or rejects. DeSantis vetoed the GOP-controlled legislature’s proposed congressional districts on 29 March after proposing his own map that would increase the number of GOP seats while eliminating two districts represented by Black Democrats. Leaders in the legislature said on Monday that they would not try to draft a new plan ahead of a special session next week, but instead were waiting for DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential candidate, to submit his own plan. Continue reading...

State legislatures using gerrymandering, voter suppression, misinformation and intimidation to make voting more difficultAn “insidious and coordinated” effort between lawmakers and extremist groups is under way to undermine American democracy, according to a new report.On Tuesday, the nonpartisan civil rights organization National Urban League released the annual report in its analysis series The State of Black America. The report, called Under Siege: The Plot to Destroy Democracy, outlines the “conspiracy and the urgent case for a national mobilization to protect and defend our most sacred constitutional right”. Continue reading...

Authorities identify person of interest in subway attack as Biden says ‘we’re not letting up until we find the perpetrator’

Deaths rise even as teen drug use drops overall, with researchers pointing to flood of deadly counterfeit pillsDrug overdose deaths among high school-aged US teens have more than doubled since 2019, driven by a rise in the deadly opioid fentanyl, a new study has found.Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, who analyzed mortality rates among 14- to 18-year-olds over the past decade, found that while drug use among this age group is actually falling, fatalities are on the rise, jumping from 492 in 2019 to 954 in 2020, then climbing to 1,146 in 2021. Continue reading...

Papini will plead guilty to lying to authorities and mail fraud over 2016 incident that led to three-week searchSherri Papini, the northern California woman charged last month with faking her kidnapping in 2016, accepted a plea bargain with prosecutors on Tuesday and acknowledged she had made up the story that prompted a frantic search and international headlines.Her defense attorney William Portanova said his client would plead guilty to charges of lying to a federal officer and mail fraud. Continue reading...

Democrat Brian Benjamin pleads not guilty to several charges, as arrest creates political crisis for governor Kathy HochulNew York’s lieutenant governor, Brian Benjamin, resigned on Tuesday in the wake of his arrest in a federal corruption investigation, the state’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, said.The development created a political crisis for Hochul seven months after she selected Benjamin as a partner to make a fresh start in an office rocked by scandal after Governor Andrew Cuomo resigned amid allegations of bullying and sexual harassment. Continue reading...

Business groups warn of supply chain disruptions after Governor Greg Abbott orders checks for people and contraband smugglingMexican truck drivers have blockaded bridges at the border with the United States for a second day to protest against an order by the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, to increase safety inspections that has snarled traffic at ports of entry and led business groups to warn of supply chain disruptions.“Yesterday it took me 17 hours to cross into the United States and return,” said Raymundo Galicia, a Mexican driver participating in a protest at the Santa Teresa bridge connecting San Jerónimo, Chihuahua, to Santa Teresa, New Mexico. Continue reading...

Reported cases dropped in early months of Covid-19 pandemic but disrupted healthcare and diverted resources aided sharp riseAfter briefly dropping in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) then resurged beyond 2019 levels to finish the year at a record high, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).Researchers with the CDC said its report, 2020 Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance, shows how Covid-19 disrupted in-person healthcare and diverted scarce public health resources away from STIs, which had been on the rise for years. Continue reading...

Ten people were shot and a total of 16 injured in a subway shooting in New York City on Tuesday morning, a New York fire department spokesperson said.

Plea deal spares Miya Ponsetto of prison after charges from 2020 incident in which she tackled 14-year-old at Manhattan hotelA California woman who went viral in 2020 for wrongly accusing a Black teen of taking her phone at a New York City hotel has reached a plea deal to spare her prison if she avoids further trouble.Miya Ponsetto, 23, pleaded guilty on Monday to unlawful imprisonment as a hate crime, which is a felony, but will have a chance to re-plead to a misdemeanor aggravated harassment charge if she follows the terms of the agreement. Continue reading...

Bill makes it a felony to perform an abortion, unless it’s necessary to save a mother’s life, punishable by up to 10 years in prisonThe governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, signed a bill into law on Tuesday that makes it a felony to perform an abortion, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, as part of an aggressive push in Republican-led states across the country to scale back abortion rights.The bill, which takes effect 90 days after the state legislature adjourns next month, makes an exception only for an abortion performed to save the life of the mother. Continue reading...

They will be forever followed by tales of people who abided by the Covid rules and died alone – while Downing Street partiedThey broke the rules they set for everyone else. Then the prime minister lied and lied again to parliament. “Never before in history has a prime minister broken the law,” Chris Bryant, chair of both the standards and privileges committees, told me this afternoon. “These aren’t just rules; they broke the law.” Johnson’s chancellor, asked if he had attended two Downing Street Christmas parties, told the Commons: “No, Mr Speaker, I did not attend any parties.”Breaking the law and lying about it or misleading the house would have seen any other prime minister and chancellor resign instantly. But nothing can make them go if they cling to their posts. Only their own MPs can oust them, with a flurry of those famous letters to the backbench 1922 committee chair. There should be queues forming outside Sir Graham Brady’s door right now, but don’t hold your breath. Instead, you hear calculating perplexity: without them, who would be our winning leader? But for the sake of their reputations, these MPs should only consider the probity of their party.Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

A new survey highlights the abuse LGBTQ+ people suffer from family members. Britain’s anti-trans rhetoric will make things worseYou don’t need to have raised children to know that, at its core, parenthood is about unconditional love. We don’t get to choose them, and we may find friends and companions that we gel with better, but family is supposed to be that ultimate safety net. If your life is upended and all else seems lost, it should be a reserve of love that will never be depleted. Of course, parenthood also means disapproval, disappointment, even blind fury – but, for most, being rejected or abandoned by those who brought you into the world is unthinkable.For many LGBTQ+ people, however, it can be a grim fact of life. It has been more than half a century since same-sex acts were partly decriminalised, and 25 years since a Labour government was elected that commendably repealed anti-gay laws. But according to a new study by the charity Galop, a third of LGBTQ+ people have suffered abuse from relatives, mostly their parents. Among trans and non-binary people, that figure is even higher: more than four in 10.Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Few British waterways are in decent condition, with thousands of tonnes of sewage discharged into the environment. It is high time we demanded more from our leadersThere are certain phrases that deserve a nod of recognition when they prove to be literally true: anyone who’s ever dug such a big hole that they hit the rock bottom will know what I’m talking about. Or if you’ve ever stood at a ferry terminal realising that you have, in fact, missed the boat. Perhaps this Easter you will unpack your shopping, covered in a slimy, clear film, and understand the error of putting all your eggs in one basket. Personally, I have found myself swimming through actual shit.Not just once, either. Not by a long chalk. Over the past 37 years, I have probably swum through enough sewage to fill a river. Because, you see, it does fill our rivers. And seas. And lakes. And the little streams that snake behind housing estates, and the pools that have the audacity to sit beside poorly maintained pipes. Such is the problem that you would be hard pressed to find any body of water in Britain that a privatised water company hasn’t flushed with turds now and again in the quest for ever-greater profits. Continue reading...

Joshua Vining and Colton Whitler, both 17, were arrested for the death of Christopher BroadOne teen was killed and two jailed after a pair of boys put on body armor and took turns shooting each other, local authorities in Florida said.In some quarters the death of Christopher Broad, 16, and the arrests of two of his friends were held up as examples of a permissive gun culture, particularly in the US south, that has driven calls for meaningful gun control reform. Continue reading...

Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, argues in a mock trial hosted by the Shakespeare Theatre Company and presided over by Stephen Breyer“I haven’t been in court for a few years, so excuse me if I’m a bit rusty,” said Doug Emhoff. “You know, not too much has changed in my life – except for the Secret Service, Air Force Two, the selfies, the cameras following me everywhere, and oh: my wife is the vice-president of the United States.”The theatre erupted in whoops and clapping. Kamala Harris, sitting in the fifth row with her sister Maya, blew kisses through a black face mask and applauded her husband. Continue reading...

Animal jumped in car to get a bag of Cheetos, and then knocked car into neutral causing it to roll down driveway and across the streetA hungry javelina ended up going for a drive in Arizona when it became trapped inside an empty car and bumped it into neutral.Javelinas are pig-like animals that are native to desert environments. Deputies in Yavapai county responded to a call last week in Cornville, a community 10 miles south of Sedona, about a javelina stuck in a Subaru station wagon. Continue reading...

Thomas Robertson was found guilty of all six counts he faced stemming from his participation in the 6 January 2021 riotsA federal jury convicted a former Virginia police officer of storming the US Capitol with another off-duty officer to obstruct Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.Jurors on Monday convicted former Rocky Mount police officer Thomas Robertson of all six counts he faced stemming from the 6 January 2021 riot, including charges that he interfered with police officers at the Capitol and that he entered a restricted area with a dangerous weapon – a large wooden stick. Continue reading...

Valerie Biden Owens, who has worked on all her brother’s campaigns, also says ‘no there there’ on her nephew HunterDonald Trump is “very intent on bringing my brother down”, Joe Biden’s sister said.“The only race I wasn’t enthusiastic about Joe getting involved in was the 2020 presidency,” Valerie Biden Owens told CBS News. Continue reading...

State department cites risk of children and parents being separated as EU warns zero-Covid strategy eroding investor confidence

Musk has long advocated a libertarian vision of an ‘uncontrolled’ internet. That’s also the dream of every dictator, strongman and demagogueThe Russian people know little about Putin’s war on Ukraine because Putin has blocked their access to the truth, substituting propaganda and lies.Years ago, pundits assumed the internet would open a new era of democracy, giving everyone access to the truth. But dictators like Putin and demagogues like Trump have demonstrated how naive that assumption was.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...

On a moral crusade, the former prime minister believes that anyone who opposes him is corrupt and an American puppetLast weekend, Pakistanis saw something they never expected to see: their prime minister, Imran Khan, in tears. He was addressing the nation on TV after being sent back to the national assembly by the supreme court to face a vote of confidence that he would go on to lose, to be replaced by Shehbaz Sharif.Earlier he had refused to face the vote and had dissolved the assembly, but the court declared his actions illegal. Khan refused to accept the rules of the national assembly, tried to evade a ruling by the highest court in the land and only relented a few minutes before the midnight deadline imposed by the court. He turned a banal parliamentary procedure into a nerve-racking, edge-of-the-seat thriller. He behaved like a child who realises for the first time that other children have birthdays too. Because he believed that if he wasn’t in charge of the house, he might as well burn it down.Mohammed Hanif is the author of the novels A Case of Exploding Mangoes and Red Birds. He is based in Karachi Continue reading...

Some Republicans are calling for Ohio supreme court chief justice Maureen O’Connor’s impeachment because she is refusing to let them distort electoral districts to their advantageIn one of the final acts in a 24-year political career, the Republican chief justice of the Ohio supreme court is defying her party and refusing to let them distort electoral districts to their advantage, a move that has some fellow Republicans calling for her impeachment.Since January, Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor has served as the decisive vote on three separate occasions blocking Ohio Republicans from enacting proposed state legislative maps. She also sided with Democrats to block an initial GOP proposal for congressional districts before going into effect in January. Those decisions have prompted chatter among Republicans about impeaching O’Connor, 70, who will leave the court after nearly two decades at the end of this year because she has reached the mandatory retirement age for judges in Ohio. Continue reading...

Product recalls after illnesses and deaths linked to powdered infant formula products combine with supply chain problemsStores across the US have started to ration baby formula while some others are reporting increasing shortages.The nationwide shortage in baby formula comes two months after a huge manufacturer recall which occurred as a result of illnesses and deaths among infants. Continue reading...

Anti-tank missiles and RPGs are being supplied through undercover networks via Iraq, militia there say. Plus, how sonic pollution hurts marine life

Pork belly at 2,500 calories, with a side of cauliflower cheese at nearly 500? Printing calories on menus forces people to either stay at home or stop caringIt was a sunny Saturday and my first experience of calories on menus. I can now tell you that prawns are low in calories, chorizo is high , and salt and pepper squid is surprisingly energy-rich – though this is not surprising to me because I am a woman of a certain vintage, and we can all tell you how many calories are in absolutely everything, so long as it was in common usage by 1985, in other words, not seitan.The calories in/calories out model – the fitness industry now calls calorie counting “If It Fits Your Macros”, which conveys something huge about modern life – tyrannised my youth. Even if you pretended not to care, or actually didn’t care, you could still rate any given food item at 50 paces. You could name everything that looked healthy but was highly calorific, everything that was more or less calorie neutral, all the miracle foods that did high satiety for low energy load, all the foods that were discreetly low calorie (cottage cheese was so obvious). There were so many numbers and properties all neatly filed away in millions of brains. Continue reading...

Covid-19 cases have risen more than 50% in 10 days, the threshold at which city’s guidelines call for masking indoorsPhiladelphia on Monday became the first major US city to reinstate its indoor mask mandate after reporting a sharp increase in coronavirus infections, with the city’s top health official saying she wanted to forestall a potential new wave driven by an Omicron sub-variant.Confirmed Covid-19 cases had risen more than 50% in 10 days, the threshold at which the city’s guidelines called for people to wear masks indoors, said Dr Cheryl Bettigole, Philadelphia health commissioner. Continue reading...

A judge also granted a restraining order to the pair accused of terrorizing students who ‘provoked extreme fear and anxiety’A pair of YouTubers are facing a lawsuit and a restraining order after allegedly filming themselves disrupting classes at the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles and uploading footage of the staged pranks online.The University of Southern California sued Ernest Kanevsky and Yuguo Bai over the incidents, USC Annenberg Media reported last week. A judge granted a restraining order banning Kanevsky and Bai, who are not USC students, from campus after university attorneys said the pranks had terrorized “students to the point where they are running out of lecture halls for fear of their lives”. Continue reading...