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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...

If you’re going to make fun of sensitive subjects, you’d better be clever about it. ‘Ha ha, she’s bald and looks like GI Jane’ just won’t cut itIt was the slap that launched a thousand hot takes. Here’s what Will Smith hitting Chris Rock at the Oscars tells us about the actor’s early childhood. Here’s what Smith’s violent outburst can teach us about the war in Ukraine. Here’s why the whole thing felt staged. Here’s the history of public slapping in 10 gifs. Here’s why the Academy is hypocritical for saying it doesn’t condone violence, when Michael Moore got booed during the 2003 Oscars for criticising the Iraq war – and you don’t get any more violent than war, do you?Look, you’ve probably had enough of people talking smackgate by now. I’m sure you’re over this whole thing. I get it. The sensible little voice in my head is telling me: “Arwa, don’t get involved. You don’t need to wade into this sordid story and turn a celebrity fracas into a lesson about life, the universe, and everything.” Alas, like Will Smith, I’m afraid I just can’t control myself. Just as he couldn’t repress his urge to slap, I can’t repress my urge to pundit. So I’d like to take a minute; just sit right there, and I’ll tell you why Chris Rock should never have made that stupid joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith’s, hair. Continue reading...

Viewing figures for the Academy Awards have been in decline for years and 2022’s ceremony looked like yet another snoozefest … until Smith slapped Chris RockWithout question, Sunday night’s Oscars were the ugliest in history. By physically assaulting a performer onstage, Will Smith managed to cause irreparable damage to the ceremony. And the outright failure of the show’s producers and guests to chastise Smith, or even fully acknowledge his attack, has thrown the entire Academy into disrepute. However, if you squint hard enough and look at it from just the right angle, it might have been just the thing that the Oscars needed.First, some perspective. This year’s Oscars needed to be a hit. Last year’s Covid ceremony was watched, by some degree, by far fewer people than any other Oscars in history. This was in part due to circumstance – no big films had been released due to Covid, and the big stars were understandably reluctant to all go and breathe on each other in an enclosed space – but also due to the event itself. Held in a train station, it was brisk and brief and shorn of all clips and jokes. It was not in any way fun to watch, so nobody watched it. Continue reading...

Ex-president issues lengthy statement after a judge says Trump likely committed felonies during his attempts to overturn electionDonald Trump has claimed to have hit a hole-in-one at his golf course in Florida while playing with a former world No 1, Ernie Els.The former president released a lengthy statement about the shot, which was said to have happened on Saturday, late on Monday. Continue reading...

The absence, to date, of mass death from hunger doesn’t mean that Russian forces are innocent of the war crime of starvationThe deputy mayor of Mariupol, Sergiy Orlov, describes people sheltering in basements trying to survive without food, medicine or a power supply, and drinking melted snow because the water has been cut off. In Chernihiv, March 16, a line of 10 civilians queuing for bread outside a grocery shop were killed by Russian troops. Ukrainian intelligence reports indiscriminate shelling and targeting of agricultural machinery, fields and grain stores; and civilians are being blocked from leaving besieged towns and cities or killed whilst fleeing. This is a playbook familiar to any monitoring similar starvation crimes in Syria, Yemen, Tigray or South Sudan.A few very elderly Ukrainians will remember the forced starvation of the Holodomor of 1932-33, when a combination of brutally enforced collectivization and punitive confiscation of food killed about three million Ukrainians through the resulting famine. It was the occasion for Stalin’s infamous remark ‘if only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy; if millions die, that’s only statistics.’ He was wrong: every Ukrainian knows the story, deeply carved into their collective memory. After Ukrainian independence, monuments to the victims of famine were constructed in Kiev and Kharkhiv.Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation, Boston MassachusettsCatriona Murdoch is a partner at Global Rights Compliance, an international foundation specialising in international criminal, humanitarian, and human rights law Continue reading...

Putin’s lies, and the lies coming from America’s extreme right, are mutually supporting. There’s a reason for thatIn a speech delivered last Friday from his office in the Kremlin, Putin criticized the west’s “cancel culture”, which, he charged, is “canceling” Russia – “an entire thousand-year-old country, our people”. It was the third time in recent months Putin has blasted the so-called “cancel culture”.Which is exactly what Trump, Tucker Carlson, and the Republican party have blasted for several years. Continue reading...

The jurisdictions that help kleptocrats live in luxury on stolen assets must stop shielding corrupt elitesSeven years ago, an anonymous source who went by the name “John Doe” provided us with the data that became the Panama Papers – 2.6 terabytes of leaked documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The leak turned out to have quite an impressive Russian component. We found shell companies connected to Vladimir Putin’s judo friends, Boris and Arkady Rotenberg, to the oligarch Alisher Usmanov and the wife of the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. But, most significantly, we stumbled across Sergej Roldugin, a professional cellist and godfather of Putin’s eldest daughter, who had a central role in a network of secret offshore deals and vast loans worth $2bn, described at the time as the key to tracing Putin’s hidden fortune.All this hidden wealth mattered when we published the Panama Papers in 2016, two years after Russia had annexed the Crimean peninsula. Now, after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it matters more than ever. Lawmakers in the UK, the EU, the US and Canada have sanctioned Russian banks, Russian companies and individuals close to Putin. This includes Russian oligarchs, as well as Putin’s friends, supporters and admirers who have helped facilitate his kleptocracy by hiding his wealth in accounts under their own names or just championing his kleptocracy for their own illicit enrichment. Individuals like the cellist Sergej Roldugin, the Rotenberg brothers and Usmanov.Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer are investigative journalists with the German paper Süddeutsche Zeitung. They initiated the 2016 Panama Papers as well as 2017 Paradise Papers revelations and the 2022 Suisse Secrets. Obermaier is co-founder of the Anti-Corruption Data Collective (https://acdatacollective.org), Obermayer on the board of Forbidden Stories (https://forbiddenstories.org). Continue reading...

‘Fear makes you an accomplice,’ Zelenskiy tells world leaders before peace talks. Plus, bunker sales soar as anxiety over Russia rises

Congressional groups have drawn up lists of executive actions to further the Biden agenda while not giving up on legislationWhen Senator Joe Manchin announced in December that he would not support the Build Back Better Act, House progressives immediately got to work. As the Congressional Progressive Caucus continued to lobby for passing a social spending package, its members also started crafting a list of potential executive orders that Biden could sign to advance Democrats’ policy agenda.That list was released in mid-March after months of deliberations, and it outlines a specific strategy for Biden to combat the climate crisis and lower costs for American families with the flick of his pen. Continue reading...

Called ‘constitutional carry’ or ‘permitless carry’, the bills have been criticized by police and activists who say removing permits poses a safety riskAmerica’s relationship with guns will probably never be peaceful, but as a rash of new pro-gun laws spread across the country some fear it could soon be legal in as many as 25 US states to carry a concealed gun without a permit.To gun control advocates and law enforcement it’s a dangerous new development in America’s enduring, historic and highly politicized infatuation with personal firearms. Continue reading...

Companies will need to find a new model that works for them and their employees – many of whom prefer to work at home some daysIt can be hard to remember what work at the office was like before the pandemic forced millions of Americans to start working from home. That shift was monumental and seemingly implausible, until it happened. But people soon adapted to saying “sorry, you’re on mute” on Zoom calls and wearing sweatpants all day.This spring, workers are finally heading back to the office en masse and into another untested and ambitious experiment in work life: hybrid working. Continue reading...

Amid Russia’s war on Ukraine and a global pandemic, pressure is once again building to think about how people can protect themselves during a crisisGary Lynch is the CEO of Rising S Company in Texas. When I first visited his warehouse in 2018, I watched his crew assemble, deliver, and bury a handful of bunkers in people’s backyards every month. The bunkers are thick plate steel boxes that are welded together like a giant Lego set – the size of the bunker limited only by a client’s resources.Sales, he says, have spiked 1,000% since that time as anxieties around the pandemic, civil unrest, climate change and war have driven more buyers to his company. Continue reading...

The comedy legend’s cultural and commercial power have waned as he struggles to resist going lowbrowAt this point in his gilded career, Chris Rock doesn’t take an Oscars gig for the clout. He takes it for the check. And the 57-year-old funnyman made clear from the moment he took LA’s Dolby Theatre stage to present the prize for best feature documentary that he wouldn’t be sweating for it.Rather than launch into a meticulous bit that might remind the world why he was once so big that he hosted this program all by himself twice, he made fun of the crowd – hack moves. He singled out Jada Pinkett Smith, who has alopecia, maligning her with a near 30-year-old movie reference, and everyone in the room laughed on reflex – because he’s Chris Rock. For his brief guest spot to end with Will Smith slapping him on live television and then heckling him from a front-row seat in some ways speaks to how much the comedy legend has slipped. (Smith apologized to Rock in an Instagram post on Monday.) Continue reading...

Ayanna Pressley and others say comic’s joke about Jada Pinkett Smith was demeaning to 147m people worldwide with alopeciaCongresswoman Ayanna Pressley and others with alopecia have spoken out about Will Smith hitting Chris Rock at the Oscars, after Rock joked about Jada Pinkett Smith’s short hair.Pinkett Smith has talked about living with alopecia-related hair loss. Pressley, who in 2020 opened up about her own journey with alopecia, shared her thoughts on Twitter on Sunday night. Continue reading...

Every time you hear someone say it’s time to ‘live with the virus’, remember that doesn’t mean doing nothing about itSo, is that it? After wave upon wave of infections, the combination of vaccination and Omicron’s comparatively mild (though still serious) properties has led the UK to declare the pandemic, essentially, over.After two lockdowns, a huge burden on healthcare and at last an extremely prompt and effective vaccination campaign, the UK has still registered more than 160,000 lives lost to the pandemic, roughly half of them in the Alpha wave. Continue reading...

Select committee unanimously agrees to advance contempt of Congress citations against Peter Navarro and Dan ScavinoThe House select committee investigating the Capitol attack voted on Monday to recommend the criminal prosecution of two of Donald Trump’s top former White House aides – Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino – for defying subpoenas in a bid to undermine the January 6 inquiry.The select committee unanimously approved the contempt of Congress report it had been examining. The citations now head for a vote before the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, which is expected to approve resolutions for referrals to the justice department. Continue reading...

Joe Biden said his remark in Warsaw that Vladimir Putin should not remain in power reflected his own moral outrage, not an administration policy shift. 'I wasn’t then nor am I now articulating a policy change. I was expressing moral outrage that I felt and I make no apologies,' he said, noting that he had just visited with families displaced by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Biden added that he was 'not walking anything back' by clarifying the remark. Asked whether the remark would spur a negative response from Putin, Biden said: 'I don’t care what he thinks ... He’s going to do what he’s going to do'

Tax on households over $100m aims to ensure wealthiest Americans no longer pay lower rate than teachers and firefightersJoe Biden proposed a new tax on America’s richest households when he unveiled his latest budget on Monday.The Biden administration wants to impose a 20% minimum tax on households worth more than $100m. The proposal would raise more than $360bn over the next decade and “would make sure that the wealthiest Americans no longer pay a tax rate lower than teachers and firefighters”, according to a factsheet released by the White House. Continue reading...

Measure bars teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third gradeThe Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, has signed into law a bill that forbids instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, a policy that has drawn intense national scrutiny from critics who argue it risks marginalizing LGBTQ+ people.LGBTQ+ advocates, students, Democrats, the entertainment industry and the White House have denounced what critics have called the “don’t say gay” bill. The issue has led to a clash between DeSantis and Disney, a major player in the Florida tourism industry. Continue reading...

President says he was not calling for regime change but was expressing personal ‘moral outrage’ over Russia’s invasionJoe Biden on Monday defended the unscripted remarks he made at the end of an important speech in Poland at the weekend, in which he said that Russian president Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power”, which had prompted hurried efforts by other senior figures in the administration to play down the comment in the face of international criticism.The US president, when questioned on Sunday after attending church following his return to the White House, denied that he was seeking “regime change” as a new policy. Continue reading...

Local advocate says ‘events like this remind us that there is no safe space’ for the homelessFour people died and several were injured after a driver in Salem, Oregon, crashed a car into a homeless encampment early Sunday morning.Police arrested Enrique Rodriguez Jr, 24, on Sunday evening. He was charged with four counts of first-degree manslaughter, second- and third-degree assault and six counts of reckless endangerment. Continue reading...

Zelenskiy is a master of mobilising his nation’s defence. But his plight must not become a plaything of western politicsAn iron maxim of war is to imagine what your enemy most wants you to do, and not to do it. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is floundering. He has lied to the Russian people to justify it. He has told them it is not Ukraine but Nato and the west that seek their defeat and his overthrow. That is why they must support him in his fight. To a large extent they have done so.Nato has so far been scrupulous in not playing Putin’s game. It has stood aloof from active military support to Ukraine’s President Zelenskiy, as have its individual member countries. Continue reading...

The actor cited the father of Serena Williams as another man who protects his family. But there is no comparison: Smith has no excuseWill Smith has spoken. Chris Rock has spoken. The Academy has spoken. Even the Los Angeles Police Department has spoken. But the person I really want to hear from has remained silent.What does Jada Pinkett Smith think of her husband slapping the Oscars host? What was it that caused Smith to switch from laughing at Rock’s joke about her “GI Jane” look to, less than 10 seconds later, striding onstage, slapping him, marching back to his seat and shouting to the stage, “Keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth”. After which, in case anyone watching might still have thought it was some kind of pre-rehearsed skit, he shouted the same thing again, and twice as loud.Joseph Harker is the Guardian’s senior editor, diversity and development. He is a former editor and publisher of the weekly newspaper Black Briton Continue reading...