The former president spoke in a television interview that raised unsubstantiated questions about Hunter Biden’s dealings in RussiaThe White House sharply criticized Donald Trump on Wednesday over an interview in which the former president said that Vladimir Putin should release potentially damaging information about Hunter Biden.“What kind of American, let alone an ex-president, thinks that this is the right time to enter into a scheme with Vladimir Putin and brag about his connections to Vladimir Putin?” said Kate Bedingfield, a White House spokesperson, when asked by reporters. “There is only one, and it’s Donald Trump.” Continue reading...

Voting rights advocates say 200,000 people could be affected by measure, which legislature’s own lawyers call unconstitutionalArizona’s Republican governor on Wednesday signed a bill requiring voters to prove their citizenship to vote in a presidential election, drawing fierce opposition from voting rights advocates who say it risks affecting 200,000 people.The bill also requires anyone newly registering to vote to provide proof of their address. Continue reading...

CDC removes Covid ‘cruise ship travel health notice’ that was first imposed in March 2020 but expresses reservations about cruisingFederal health officials are dropping the warning they have attached to cruising since the beginning of the pandemic, leaving it up to vacationers to decide whether they feel safe getting on a ship.Cruise-ship operators welcomed Wednesday’s announcement, which came as many people thought about summer vacation plans. Continue reading...

The state’s taskforce voted 5-4 on Tuesday to base compensation plans on lineage rather than raceCalifornia’s reparations taskforce has recommended compensating the descendants of enslaved and free Black people who were in the US in the 19th century, bringing the state one step closer to becoming the first in the US to pay African Americans for the harms of slavery.The taskforce, established under state law to study reparations, voted on Tuesday in favor of a compensation and restitution plan that is based on lineage. The group for months has been tackling thorny questions about who should be eligible, and had considered recommending reparations based on race, which would mean a broader group of recipients. Continue reading...

El Shafee Elsheikh, 33, is accused of kidnap and murders of US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and aid workers Peter Kassig and Kayla MuellerProsecutors told a federal jury in Virginia on Wednesday that a British national on trial for terrorist acts that resulted in the gruesome deaths of four American hostages had a reputation for outsize brutality.Opening arguments began in the first trial on US soil of an alleged major figure in the Islamic State (IS) group – an accused member of the kidnap-and-murder cell of four men called the “Beatles” by their hostages. Continue reading...

Disposable phones may appeal to anyone trying to hide their identity – whether a criminal or an activistLet’s say you’re the president of the United States. You’re coordinating with a team of shady lawyers, elected officials, and political extremists to pull off a coup at the nation’s Capitol. And let’s just assume – in this hypothetical scenario – that you don’t want there to be a record of your highly incriminating calls. You’d probably want to use a burner phone.Investigators are now asking whether this matches what happened in the White House on 6 January 2021. The Washington Post and CBS News reported on Tuesday that a House investigation had found a seven-hour-and-37-minute gap in Donald Trump’s official call logs that day, during which hundreds of his supporters unleashed a deadly rampage at the US Capitol. Continue reading...

US president says ‘Covid-19 no longer controls our lives’ and asks Congress for more money to continue effort to fight the virusJoe Biden received a second booster vaccination against Covid on Wednesday and pleaded with Congress to approve more funding to fight any new wave of the virus, while asserting that although the pandemic is not over: “Covid-19 no longer controls our lives.”Speaking at the White House, the US president launched a new government website that he called a “one-stop shop” for accurate coronavirus information, covid.gov. Continue reading...

Decision has not been finalized, official tells Reuters, but rule known as Title 42 would end by 23 MayThe United States is planning to end a Covid-era order blocking asylum seekers and other migrants at the US-Mexico border by 23 May, a US official told Reuters.The decision has not yet been finalized, the official said. Continue reading...

Trump’s call to Republican senator should have been reflected in presidential call log on day of Capitol attack but wasn’tDonald Trump used an official White House phone to place at least one call during the Capitol attack on January 6 last year that should have been reflected in the internal presidential call log from that day but was not, according to two sources familiar with the matter.The former president called the phone of a Republican senator, Mike Lee, with a number recorded as 202-395-0000, a placeholder number that shows up when a call is incoming from a number of White House department phones, the sources said. Continue reading...

Maine senator says she will vote to confirm Joe Biden’s nominee: ‘There can be no question she is qualified’The Maine senator Susan Collins will vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US supreme court, giving Joe Biden’s nominee a rare Republican vote as she proceeds towards becoming the first Black woman ever to sit on the nine-judge panel.“I have decided to support the confirmation of Judge Jackson to be a member of the supreme court,” Collins, a Republican moderate, told the New York Times after meeting the nominee a second time. Continue reading...

Parole board recommends Van Houten, 72, for release but Gavin Newsom says she’s still a ‘danger to society’The California governor, Gavin Newsom, on Tuesday blocked parole for Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten, reversing a panel’s recommendation that she be freed after spending a half-century in prison.Van Houten, 72, “currently poses an unreasonable danger to society if released from prison at this time”, Newsom said in his parole review. It was the fifth time that a California governor has rejected her release. Continue reading...

Ukraine has slipped down the news agenda, when so recently it was all we could talk about. But the media has to move on – and that has always troubled meFor more than a week after Russia invaded Ukraine, there was almost nothing else in the news. It was all we talked about on the radio, which felt right. Then I was on holiday for a week and off with Covid for a further week.When I was back presenting my programme on BBC Radio 5 live after this fortnight away, subjects other than Ukraine were in our running order. This was inevitable, I suppose, even though the situation in Ukraine was by then considerably more dire than it had been. Our coverage still dominated airtime, but, somehow, Ukraine could no longer have our undivided attention, because the story was no longer new. One atrocity followed another and steadily, appallingly, they lost the power to shock.news (n)late 14c, “new things”, plural of new (n) “new thing” … after French nouvelles, which was used in Bible translations to render medieval Latin nova “news”, literally “new things”. Continue reading...

Autopsy determined the man suffered a crushed skull as well as injuries to a large vein and died within minutesA bodyboarder was attacked by a great white shark in central California on Christmas Eve and died within minutes, official reports have concluded.Tomas Butterfield, 42, was bitten in the head, chest and shoulder in the Morro Bay attack and died from “complications of multiple penetrating blunt force traumatic injuries,” according to a coroner’s report, the Tribune of San Luis Obispo County reported on Tuesday. Continue reading...

For all their posturing about defending children from abuse, their record tells another storyRepublicans have kids on the brain. Over the course of the last year, conservative activists and Republican state lawmakers have been whipping up a set of interrelated moral panics over the supposed indoctrination of children in our schools and child abuse – from the notion that elementary school teachers are raising up junior divisions of the Black Panthers with critical race theory to the insistence that trans people, who today comprise less than half a percent of high-school athletes in the United States, might soon bring an end to girls’ sports. The word “grooming” is now in wide circulation on the right ⁠ – a dogwhistle that implies basic education on LGBT identity and sex is priming kids for predation, perhaps at the hands of the Satanic sex traffickers at the heart of QAnon’s conspiracy theories.All of this spilled into last week’s confirmation hearings for US supreme court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, which Senate Republicans did their best to derail by mischaracterizing her sentencing on cases on child sexual abuse images. As has been widely reported, those sentences had been entirely in keeping with sentences delivered by most federal judges in comparable cases, including sentences delivered by Trump judicial appointees with broad Republican support. But that mattered not a whit to Republicans on the Hill. “Every judge who does what you’re doing is making it easier for the children to be exploited,” Lindsey Graham told Jackson in a heated exchange. Ted Cruz accused Jackson of “a record of activism and advocacy as it concerns sexual predators that stems back decades”.Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist Continue reading...

Revelation from former national security adviser raises pressure on Trump as lawmakers investigate gaps in January 6 call logsJohn Bolton, the former national security adviser, has revealed that he heard Donald Trump use the term “burner phones” several times and that they discussed how the disposable devices were deployed by people as a way of avoiding scrutiny of their calls.Bolton’s intervention compounds Trump’s difficulties amid a billowing controversy relating to seven hours and 37 minutes that are missing in official call logs. The gap occurs in records made for 6 January last year – the day of the violent insurrection at the US Capitol. Continue reading...

Jones found liable for damages after victims said he defamed them by claiming 2012 mass shooting in Connecticut never happenedRelatives of the Sandy Hook school shooting victims have rejected an offer from Alex Jones, host of the conspiracy theory and rightwing disinformation website Infowars, to pay $120,000 per plaintiff to resolve their lawsuit. The families said he defamed them by asserting the massacre never happened.A Connecticut judge found Jones liable for damages in November, and a trial is planned to determine how much he should pay the families. Continue reading...

President says positive signs from talks ‘do not drown out the explosions of Russian shells’. Plus, meet the new generation of stoners

I was a fit 30-year-old, and long Covid has destroyed my life. It’s frustrating how little action there has beenHi. My name is Charlie, and long Covid has destroyed my life.Before my “mild infection”, I was a healthy, fit 30-year-old, biking 10 miles a day with no prior health issues, the type of person the CDC says should bounce back after two weeks. Well, it’s been two years and I’ve yet to bounce back. I can’t work or leave the house, and I rely on my partner as a full-time caretaker. I still can’t breathe right. It is a living nightmare. Writing this piece would have taken me an evening before I was sick, but now this level of cognitive exertion takes an entire week to complete.Charlie McCone is a 32-year-old long Covid patient and advocate based in San Francisco Continue reading...

A spectacular lightning display illuminated the night sky over Wichita, Kansas, during a thunderstorm on Tuesday. The national weather service issued a tornado warning over the Kansas City area as hail and gusty winds moved into the region Continue reading...

As Joe Biden pushes to ‘fund the police’, data from Mapping Police Violence shows high rates of deaths at the hands of law enforcement persistPolice officers in America continue to kill people at an alarming rate, according to a data analysis that has raised concerns about the Biden administration’s push to expand police investments amid growing concerns about crime.Law enforcement in the US have killed 249 people this year as of 24 March, averaging about three deaths per day and mirroring the deadly force trends of recent years, according to Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group. The data, experts say, suggests in the nearly two years since George Floyd’s murder, the US has made little progress in preventing deaths at the hands of law enforcement, and that the 2020 promises of systemic reforms have fallen short. Continue reading...

More than half of pregnancies worldwide are unintended, with stigma and misinformation leading factors in lack of family planning, says UNFPAMyths and misinformation surrounding the use of contraception are putting women off using modern family planning methods, the UN population fund has warned, as figures showed that nearly half of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended.With more than 250 million women estimated to be not using effective contraception despite wanting to avoid getting pregnant, the UNFPA said that lack of access to family planning was no longer a leading reason for it not being taken up. Continue reading...

The Blue Devils and Tar Heels play each other in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in a century-long rivalry. And a storm is gatheringOn Saturday, Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke will face the University of North Carolina in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament for both the first and the last time. It sounds improbable but it’s taken until the final season of Coach K’s illustrious career for these two bitter rivals to face each other on college basketball’s biggest stage.It doesn’t feel that way because the two schools – separated by a mere 10 miles – have played each other 257 times, with every game treated as an epic clash between two giants. Duke-North Carolina has been called the biggest rivalry in college sports and has a genuine claim to being one of the most storied in all of US sports. The accompanying hype can become quite overwhelming, particularly when the athletes who decide it are largely unpaid teenagers. Continue reading...

The Lummi Nation, on the US west coast, has faced addiction issues for decades. Now they are utilizing a combination of culturally-based healing and western approachesHarold Plaster had been awake for nine days when he noticed his face in the mirror. It was January 2017, and he was on his latest heroin binge inside a red house on the Lummi Reservation in north-western Washington state. The windows were covered in garbage bags and there were rats scurrying around.As he looked at himself, dangerously thin, he said he began thinking about his six children, all either adults or in foster care, and about his mother, who he had promised his late father he would look after. Continue reading...

Americans who rarely, if ever, smoked marijuana before the pandemic now say they’re turning to weed to help them copeThree years ago, Ricardo Capuano, 32, didn’t know how much a gram of marijuana cost. Now, after years of lockdown and an extended period of overwhelming anxiety, he has become something of a weed connoisseur.Capuano was never a stoner; sure, he dabbled in high school, but beer and mezcal were always his “weapon of choice”. It wasn’t until the summer of 2020, in the pits of Covid despair, that he found himself reformed as a proud, regular toker. In fact, Capuano found himself actually proselytizing about the splendor of cannabis to his friends during their weekly online poker games. “I was starting to become an advocate,” he laughs. Continue reading...

Student workers often earn ‘below the minimum living wage’ for helping teach courses and assisting with researchThousands of graduate student workers around the US at private and public universities have gone on strike over the past few years, from Ivy League institutions like Harvard University and Columbia University to public state universities in California.Graduate workers at even more colleges have organized unions in spite of staunch opposition from their administrations. Among the most pressing unifying themes among graduate student workers organizing unions and holding protest actions and strikes is the low pay, an issue plaguing graduate student workers around the US. Continue reading...

The 38-year-old was largely unfamiliar with weightlifting five years ago. Now she is one of the strongest people on the planetThe Chiseled Life gym in Columbia, Maryland, is buzzing with a soundtrack of weights clanging and lifters grunting. Then Tamara Walcott paces in front of the deadlift bar and the room stills. The men by the bench bar stop and turn, ready to see a world-record holder in action.Walcott faces the bar and sets one foot in position, kicks back the other and places it a hip’s width apart. She flicks one wrist out in front of her, and then the other, showing off her long nails, painted yellow, a different design on each finger. Holding a squat briefly, she then stands up straight and bends over to take a grip on the bar. She starts pulling. “Let’s go!” the men shout. “Come on!” yells a woman leaning on the squat rack. Walcott pauses with the 455lbs load by her shins before lifting it up to the level of her hips. She sets the bar back down … then repeats the motion five more times. Continue reading...

Our own crisis of truth is responsible for some of the world’s biggest problemsTo the Syrians who have suffered its attacks, the Kremlin’s lies about Ukraine must sound horribly familiar. Insisting that the victims of bombings are “crisis actors”, spreading falsehoods about chemical weapons, justifying the mass murder of civilians by claiming that anyone who resists is a “Nazi” (in Ukraine) or a “head-chopper” (in Syria): its disinformation tactics have been tested and honed.This organised lying has more or less destroyed the US left, and severely damaged the European left. As the activist Terry Burke documented in 2019, effective leftwing opposition to Donald Trump collapsed amid furious internal disputes about Syria and Russian interference in US politics, triggered by prominent figures reciting Kremlin falsehoods. Some of them turned out to be paid by the Russian government.George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist. He will discuss Regenesis at a Guardian Live event on Monday 30 May. Book tickets in-person or online here Continue reading...

The former president’s daughter has announced she helped deliver more than a million meals to Ukrainian refugees in Poland. How things have changed since the Abramovich party daysIs it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Ivanka Trump swooping in to save Ukraine. Nato may not be giving Volodymyr Zelenskiy the no-fly zone he wants, but he can at least take solace in the fact that he has the full force of Saint Ivanka by his side.If you haven’t heard about the former first daughter’s latest selfless humanitarian exertions, it’s not because she has been modest about them. Ivanka has kept a low profile since her father lost the 2020 election, but has recently stepped back into the spotlight to ensure her good deeds don’t go unnoticed. On Friday, Ivanka updated her Instagram account for the first time since January with a post trumpeting the fact that she has helped deliver more than a million meals to Ukrainian refugees in Poland. Fox News also published a long puff piece full of adoring quotes from anonymous sources and a Florida pastor she is working with about how a plane full of food destined for refugees would never have got off the ground “if it weren’t for [Ivanka’s] immediate involvement”. Continue reading...

The photographer’s seminal Redheads explored his fascination with the hair colour – and a forthcoming edition features new and previously unseen images Continue reading...

Landmark group votes to base compensation plan on lineage rather than race after day of debateCalifornia’s first-in-the-nation taskforce on reparations for African Americans has voted to direct state compensation to the descendants of enslaved and free Black people who were in the US in the 19th century.The group said that a compensation and restitution plan based on lineage – as opposed to one based on race, which would have opened the possibility of reparations to a broader group – had the best change of surviving a legal challenge. They also said that Black immigrants who had chosen to migrate to the US in the 20th and 21st centuries did not share the trauma of people who had been kidnapped and enslaved. Continue reading...

Kamala Harris and relatives of Ida B Wells and Emmett Till attend ceremony marking Emmett Till Antilynching ActThe first federal legislation making lynching a hate crime, addressing a history of racist killings in the United States, became law on Tuesday.The bill, passed by the Senate this month, is named for Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy who was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955. Joe Biden signed the bill surrounded by Kamala Harris, members of Congress and top justice department officials. He was also joined by a descendant of Ida B Wells, a Black journalist who reported on lynchings, and the Rev Wheeler Parker, a cousin of Till. Continue reading...

Prime minister Manasseh Sogavare’s proposed agreement with Beijing would affect regional security and may jeopardise relationships with existing partnersThe proposed security deal between Solomon Islands and China may appear to be all about security, but it is in fact counterproductive to the security interests of Solomon Islands and the Pacific Islands region. Prime minister Manasseh Sogavare seems to be oblivious to the issues surrounding the draft deal and may see it as a move that would cement his grip on political power.The Solomons has never been threatened by external forces, nor does it expect any such threats in the foreseeable future. Its security interests are predominantly domestic. And in that respect there is already an agreement with China on policing support. This new deal therefore has to be seen in light of China’s reach into this part of the Pacific. Continue reading...

With government taking a wild west approach to law-breaking, Labour chose to focus instead on Evgeny Lebedev’s peerageThe denial was near total. You’d have thought that Boris Johnson would have had plenty of time to prepare a response to the Metropolitan police’s decision to issue the first bang-to-rights 20 fixed-penalty notices. After all, they can hardly have come as a surprise. Only it seems that everything is a surprise to the Suspect – or the Criminal as we may soon have to call him – these days.So much so that he’s still not sure if he actually went to a party during lockdown even though the police have concluded that loads of people did. Even now he’s swearing blind that no one did anything wrong in No 10. The police must have made a mistake. If it wasn’t already before, it really is now one rule for him and another for the rest of us. Continue reading...

The US president has said it remains to be seen if Russia will follow through on its pledge to scale down its military operations in northern Ukraine, saying Washington and its allies will maintain sanctions and continue providing aid to Ukraine in the meantime. 'I don’t read anything into it until we see what their actions are,' Biden said of Russia at a White House press conference following his meeting with Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong

State attorney general Letitia James says her office has every right to question Trump and his two oldest children over possible fraudThe attorney general of New York state is asking an appeals court to uphold a lower-court ruling requiring Donald Trump to answer questions under oath, after a civil investigation uncovered evidence he may have misstated the value of assets like golf courses and skyscrapers on financial statements for more than a decade.In papers filed late on Monday, the office of Letitia James said it had every right to question Trump, who is appealing against the lower-court ruling, as it seeks to determine whether the misrepresented values shown to lenders, taxing authorities and other business interests constituted fraud and, if so, who committed that fraud. Continue reading...

Prosecutors show jurors social media posts which defense says do not show plot to snatch Michigan governorJurors on Tuesday saw provocative social media posts written by a key figure charged in a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, including a photo of a noose and a question: which governor would be “dragged off and hung for treason first?”Federal prosecutors were close to finishing their case after 12 days of trial in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They are trying to show that four men charged with conspiring to kidnap the governor, Gretchen Whitmer, in 2020 were committed to a plan without influence by informants or undercover FBI agents. Continue reading...

Panel reportedly investigating ‘possible coverup’ of records, with unexplained gap of seven hours as Capitol insurrection took placeThe House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol is reportedly looking at a “possible cover-up” of White House records focusing on Donald Trump’s phone logs from that fateful day, which bear an unexplained gap of seven hours and 37 minutes covering the period when the violence was unfolding.Documents obtained by the Washington Post and CBS News put flesh on the bones of one of the great mysteries of January 6: why White House phone logs contain holes in the record despite evidence the then president busily made calls at the height of the insurrection. Continue reading...

Nebraska’s Bruce Bostelman apologises for repeating rumor that schools accommodating children who self-identify as catsA Nebraska state lawmaker apologized on Monday after he publicly cited a persistent but debunked rumor alleging that schools are placing litter boxes in school bathrooms to accommodate children who self-identify as cats.State senator Bruce Bostelman, a conservative Republican, repeated the false claim during a public, televised debate on a bill intended to help school children who have behavioral problems. His comments quickly went viral, with one Twitter video garnering more than 300,000 views as of Monday afternoon, and drew an onslaught of online criticism and ridicule. Continue reading...

It is said that compared to the crisis in Ukraine, N0 10’s offences were trivial. But the PM must pay for this abuse of powerNow that the Metropolitan police have issued 20 fines to government officials for violating the Covid rules they were tasked with drawing up, there are two things we can conclude about Boris Johnson. Either, when he declared less than four months ago that “all the guidelines were observed”, he was completely ignorant about the laws he was directly responsible for – or he repeatedly and shamelessly lied. There is a third possibility – he had no idea what was going on in the prime minister’s official residence – that is too insulting to anyone’s intelligence to even bother indulging.Which of the two options is true is interesting as an academic debate, but both provide the same answer to the basic question: “Regardless of your political standpoint, is this person fit for high office?” Let’s indulge it anyway. Johnson is, notoriously, not known as a details man. If the phrase “educated beyond his intelligence” could sprout arms, legs and a contrived untidy mop, it would be him. Oxbridge does not, unfortunately, lack his type: mediocre youngsters ensconced in privilege, whose pretentious vocabulary and unnecessary use of Latin disguises a lack of depth and knowledge. Continue reading...

‘It is absolutely essential for our democracy that we win,’ speaker of the House says in interviewThe Democratic speaker of the US House, Nancy Pelosi, said she “fears for democracy” if Republicans retake the chamber in November.“It is absolutely essential for our democracy that we win,” Pelosi said in an interview during the 2022 Toner Prizes for political journalism on Monday night. Continue reading...