US news | The Guardian

Ex-president blocked Shealah Craighead plan and then made up to $20m from publishing images in own memoir, New York Times saysDonald Trump blocked plans by his chief White House photographer to publish a book of pictures of his time in power – then published a book of such images himself, the New York Times reported.One former White House photographer told the Times that by using Shealah Craighead’s images for his own profit – with books selling for as much as $230, Trump is reported to have made $20m – the former president had dealt her “a slap in the face”. Continue reading...

Lauren Handy claims she gained access to organ bank at university in Seattle but authorities have not disclosed source of fetusesFive sets of human fetal remains were recovered from the Washington DC home of an anti-abortion activist after a raid, the capital’s Metropolitan police department confirmed to the Guardian on Thursday.The activist, a woman named Lauren Handy, 28, is a leader of the group Progressive Anti-Abortion uprising (PAAU) and has described herself as a “Catholic anarchist” in the past. Continue reading...

Federal judge Mark Walker says state’s discrimination against Black voters warrants extraordinary oversightFlorida cannot change certain voting laws without getting preapproval from a federal court for the next decade, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, saying the state has an ongoing and extensive history of discrimination against non-white voters that warranted extraordinary oversight.US district judge Mark Walker put the state back under preclearance on Thursday as part of a 288-page ruling striking down new voting restrictions in Florida limiting the availability of drop boxes, and making it more difficult for third-party groups to register voters. “Florida has repeatedly, recently, and persistently acted to deny Black Floridians access to the franchise,” he wrote in his opinion. Continue reading...

AFL-CIO in Oregon calls for urgent divestment from fund that owns Israeli spyware company alleged to have targeted union membersWhen labour organisers passed a resolution this month calling for Oregon’s $100bn state pension fund to divest from a fund that owns NSO Group, it pointed to ways in which the Israeli company’s intrusive spyware is alleged to have been used in the past to target union members.“It may seem like a cliche, but an injury to one is an injury to all, and we strongly stand behind that,” said Ira Erbs, a part-time professor at Portland Community College and member of the Oregon chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. Continue reading...

Republican raises politically controversial idea of cutting future benefits for younger generations before they reach retirement ageFormer presidential candidate Mitt Romney has addressed the vexing question of how the US copes with its ageing population, suggesting that retirement benefits may have to be cut for younger Americans.In comments to the Senate budget committee on Wednesday, the Republican senator from Utah said that the spiraling costs of retirement programs had to be tackled to bring national debt under control. Romney raised the politically controversial idea of cutting benefits, but only for younger generations before they reach retirement age. Continue reading...

It’s no secret the court has been hostile to voting rights recently – but what has changed is the ‘velocity’ that it is acting withHello, and Happy Thursday,In the fall of 2017, I was sitting in the cramped press area at the supreme court as a lawyer named Paul Smith urged the justices to strike down the districts for the Wisconsin state assembly. They were so distorted in favor of Republicans, he argued, that they violated the US constitution. As Smith started to lay out his case, Chief Justice John Roberts cut in and laid out what he feared would happen if the supreme court were to step in and start policing electoral maps based on partisanship.Anyone who isn’t in jail or prison for a felony can vote, a three-judge panel in North Carolina ruled on Monday. The decision could affect up to 56,000 people in the state, though election officials aren’t letting people with felonies register just yet.Arizona Republicans passed a law requiring new voters to prove their citizenship to vote in a presidential election, which is probably illegal.Ohio voting rights groups are fuming after Republicans did a bait-and-switch to try again and get the state supreme court to approve gerrymandered maps.A committee of Georgia lawmakers stopped a proposal, for now, that would have expanded the Georgia bureau of investigation’s ability to investigate voter fraud, among other measures. Continue reading...

Federal Election Commission had investigated alleged misreporting of expenditure by campaign during 2016 election

Joe Biden seeks to allay fears of shortages over Russian invasion of Ukraine

Any small gains will be spun as victory by the Kremlin. The west needs to support Ukraine to defeat Russian aggressionThe past week has seen ever stronger indications that Russia has recognised it cannot achieve its aim of conquering Ukraine by military force. Suggestions tied to peace talks in Ukraine that Russia was pulling back from its attempt to encircle Kyiv tie in with the earlier declaration that its war aims were limited to conquering the eastern part of the country. And even before that, both Russia and Ukraine had stated that peace negotiations were moving into a phase of substantive discussions instead of Russia simply presenting ultimatums.Russia’s claim that it is scaling back operations around Kyiv and focusing its offensive on the east of the country is one of those rare occasions when a statement from the Russian Ministry of Defence actually aligns recognisably with the truth. The reality gap arises not in what Russia is doing, but why it is claiming it is doing it. Russia has presented this withdrawal of units from around Kyiv as some kind of concession – to “boost mutual trust” around the peace talks. But it was already clear that its offensive there had stalled, and in some case been reversed, by dogged Ukrainian resistance. The pivot to operations in the east and the rotation out of battered Russian units from Ukraine’s northern flank is a recognition by Moscow that – as many military analysts had predicted before the current conflict – it simply does not have the deployable forces it would need to conquer all of Ukraine along multiple axes of advance.Keir Giles works with the Russia and Eurasia programme of Chatham House, and is the author of Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West Continue reading...

Women’s and men’s squads will compete for one trophy in expansion of groundbreaking professional competitionThe first US rugby union competition to offer professional contracts to women will hold tournaments in July in San Jose, Washington DC and Austin.Premier Rugby Sevens staged a pilot tournament in Memphis, Tennessee last October. This year, as in that event, women’s and men’s squads will compete for equal pay in one-day showcases of the Olympic form of the game. Continue reading...

Our film festival has had to move online, but our film-makers have gone behind the headlines to document the reality of life for Ukrainians

Gregg Berhalter’s men have helped erase the nightmare of the failed Russia 2018 campaign. But they still look like a team in progressThe master tactician Ben Affleck had it right.“Act as if,” his stockbroker character tells a room full of callow recruits in the 2000 film Boiler Room. “Act as if you are the fucking president of this firm.” Continue reading...

Russian forces continue to bombard Chernihiv and parts of Kyiv despite announcing their withdrawal. Plus, 500 ghost flights leave the UK monthly

Wilmington residents are no stranger to early death – either from air pollution or gun violence – often found in industrial corridorsThis story is published in collaboration with Grist.For Daniel Delgado, the Fourth of July marked a turning point in 2020. It was the first holiday after Covid-19 had kept much of America locked down. In nine days, he’d be entering his twenties. He planned to spend his birthday relishing the Arizona sun with friends, but in the meantime, the holiday offered him an opportunity to be celebrated by family and friends, surrounded by love and human connection — things that had been hard to come by that year. Continue reading...

Your essential guide to Friday’s draw in Qatar, including when it is happening and how the groups will be decidedOn Friday in Doha, Qatar, at 7pm local time (5pm BST). It will be broadcast live on fifa.com, and theguardian.com/sport will have coverage as it unfolds. Continue reading...

The broadcaster’s flagship show has had a rocky recent history. The company is looking for stability rather than fireworks from its new duo in the boothThe streaming wars have come for professional football. Amazon spent the better part of 12 months backing up the Brinks trucks to try to lure anyone and everyone away from the traditional NFL broadcasters to prop up its new Thursday Night Football vehicle – ultimately landing Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit for a reported $24m per year combined.And while Amazon was expected to be the great disruptor in the broadcasting arms race, it’s at one of the traditional networks that the merry-go-round has had its most transformative effect. ESPN pinched Joe Buck and Troy Aikman from Fox, handing over a Friday night college football game for the rights to pay the duo in excess of $100m over five years to rejuvenate its flagging Monday Night Football [shudders] brand. Continue reading...

Ruling throws out Wisconsin’s redrawn electoral map, which included a new district to account for Black population growthEven for experts who closely follow the US supreme court, there was something stunning about an emergency decision from the justices on Wednesday.In an unexpected move, the court decided to throw out new districts for the state legislature in Wisconsin that had been picked by the state supreme court. But what was even more surprising was that the court’s conservative majority seemed to go out of its way to attack the Voting Rights Act, one of the most important civil rights laws designed to prevent discrimination in US elections. “Extra headspinning,” was how Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, described it. “Bizarre,” observed Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine. David Wasserman, a redistricting expert at the non-partisan Cook Political Report, tweeted that the supreme court had entered “uncharted territory”. Continue reading...

Republican faces condemnation from House minority leader over podcast remarks but will not face immediate disciplineThe North Carolina congressman Madison Cawthorn will not face immediate disciplinary action over his claim to have been invited to orgies and to have seen Washington figures using cocaine.After meeting Cawthorn on Wednesday, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, told reporters the comments were “unacceptable”. Continue reading...

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...