Leaders say they hoped for more from G20 talks in Rome and chances of staying below 1.5C are fading. Plus, how to cure our addiction to trash

This is a once-in-a-generation ‘take this job and shove it’ moment – which gives workers an upper hand. Let’s demand better hours, pay and work-life balanceDespite quizzical think pieces on the motivations behind the Great Resignation, anyone who pays rent or a mortgage knows why this “labor shortage” is under way. After years of inflation and stagnant wages, the pandemic has revealed the value of labor, the worthlessness of commutes and office culture, and the importance of finding personal comfort in times of increasing precarity.In other words, we are living in what labor economist Lawrence Katz calls “a once-in-a-generation ‘take this job and shove it’ moment” – which gives workers a once-in-a-generation upper hand. Continue reading...

Former members of the Vancouver Whitecaps women’s team are demanding an investigation into Victor Montagliani’s handling of sexual misconduct allegations in CanadaFormer Vancouver Whitecaps women’s team players fear a proposed investigation by Major League Soccer into the club’s response to allegations of sexual misconduct will be a whitewash and fail to adequately address multiple instances of wrongdoing.The players, who represented Vancouver Whitecaps in the 2008 and 2011 seasons, are supported by Canada’s Professional Footballers Association (PFACan) in a call for key club executives to be fired. Continue reading...

A police narrative of people watching a man rape a woman was ‘not true’, but it still ran wild in the press – similar to a 1964 murder that prompted the ‘bystander effect’The news was horrifying, a parable of inhumanity so grim that it was destined to go viral.Two weeks ago, police said that passengers on Philadelphia’s elevated train watched a man rape a woman and did not intervene – and that some riders might have even recorded the 13 October attack with their cellphones. These onlookers did not call for help during the attack. The only person who dialed 911 was an off-duty transit worker, police alleged. Continue reading...

The New York Jets QB’s rise from obscurity to hero reminds us why, at its best, the NFL is such a compelling spectacleWhen the New York Jets needed one yard with two minutes left to secure a stunning 34-31 upset over the Cincinnati Bengals on Sunday, the football stayed in Mike White’s hands. It had to. White’s successful quarterback sneak was the perfect ending to a game that showcased how nothing in the NFL is certain.Two weeks ago, very few people outside of the Jets universe had even heard of White – quite frankly, I kept envisioning the former Raiders head coach. White erased any confusion over his identity with a brilliant performance, especially as far as Jets quarterbacks go. His 405 passing yards were the most by a Jets quarterback in 327 games. That dates back to the year 2000. His 37 completions (out of 45 attempts) are an NFL record for a player in his first start. White also tied Cam Newton as the only player to top 400 passing yards in his first start. Continue reading...

As Trump and allies falsely claim the vote was stolen, officials who uphold the election machinery say threats are the new normalBefore he leaves his house to walk his dog these days, Rick Barron’s 12-year-old-daughter reminds him that he needs to keep an eye out because she worries her dad could be the target of an attack.Barron, 55, is the director of voting and elections in Fulton county, which includes Atlanta and is the most populous county in Georgia. For the last year, he’s been subject to a barrage of voicemails and emails with threats, including some threatening violence and death, as Donald Trump and his allies have falsely claimed the election was stolen. Continue reading...

Psaki, who did not travel with the president to Europe, says her last contact with Biden was on TuesdayJen Psaki, Joe Biden’s White House press secretary, said on Sunday she had tested positive for Covid-19.Psaki, 42, did not travel with Biden to Rome for this week’s G20 summit. The president is also due to travel to Glasgow for the Cop26 climate talks. Biden has been accompanied in Europe by his principal deputy press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre. Continue reading...

New York senator led moves to push Franken out as Minnesota senator over allegations of sexual misconductAl Franken on Sunday ruled out mounting a primary challenge to Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York senator who four years ago led calls for his resignation as a senator from Minnesota over allegations of sexual misconduct.In a statement to Politico, Franken said: “Yes, I miss the Senate but I’m not going to run against Kirsten Gillibrand.” Continue reading...

Beijing warns against interference, as US secretary of state also urges China to meet climate responsibilitiesThe US secretary of state has clashed with his Chinese opposite number, saying the US will provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself as China warned it must end its interference on the island.Antony Blinken also urged China to live up to its responsibilities on the climate emergency, pointing out it was the largest carbon emitter. Continue reading...

Too few leaders will arrive at Cop26 bearing any mandate for serious climate action, because hardly any have tried to get oneTo be facetious about it, they only have 12 days to save the Earth. As politicians and officials from 197 countries begin just under a fortnight’s work at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow, you can sense a strange mixture of feelings: expectation, cynicism, fatalism, anger and fragile hope.It will be easy to lose track of what is at stake and who is who – although anyone feeling confused should recall the report issued in August by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its bracing conclusion: that huge environmental changes triggered by global heating are now everywhere, and avoiding a future that will be completely catastrophic demands “immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions” in carbon emissions. The point is simple enough. But one familiar factor may well weaken the resolve of the key people at Cop26: the fact that too few politicians will arrive in Scotland bearing any mandate for serious climate action, because almost none of them have tried to get one.John Harris is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Though he crossed state lines with a semi-automatic rifle and shot three people, Rittenhouse has been treated with an alarming degree of graceIn the midst of the unrest following a police officer’s shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old boy from Illinois, shot and killed two anti-police brutality protesters and wounded a third. This week the presiding judge in Rittenhouse’s trial has decided that the men that Rittenhouse shot cannot be called “victims” during the trial.Despite purposefully crossing state lines armed with a semi-automatic rifle, Rittenhouse has been treated, before and after the act, with an alarming degree of grace. Rittenhouse’s case is about a lot more than just one armed vigilante seeking to protect the status quo at the expense of human lives: it is about an entire system that pushed him to violence.Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian Continue reading...

Nassar’s victims came forward to parents, coaches, doctors, psychologists, USA Gymnastics and local police – and were dismissed as less credible than Nassar’s preposterous claims of medical justification Continue reading...

School administrations seem to endanger survivors’ access to education more often than they hold their abusers accountableAn estimated 300 students walked out of their classes last week at Skidmore College, a small, private school located on a tree-lined campus in Saratoga Springs, New York. The students gathered on the campus and began speaking into bullhorns about their experiences of sexual violence, and the various forms of hostility and indifference they received from college administrators when they reported them. According to reporting by Rachel Silberstein in the Albany Times Union, the demonstration was sparked by a controversial decision by the Skidmore administration to ban a young female student from campus after she posted about her experiences of sexual violence online.The woman’s suspension comes as Skidmore students, disillusioned with their campus reporting system, have increasingly taken to social media to anonymously disclose their experiences of sexual violence within the Skidmore community. In the posts, many of which have been gathered on an anonymous Instagram account, young women describe experiences ranging from stalking to rapes to domestic violence. Some were allegedly cornered in dorms and forced to watch their classmates masturbate; others were groped late at night, by strangers at a party or while walking on the campus quad. The accounts vary in the character and severity of the gender violence that they describe, but the students seem united in their conviction that the school administration antagonizes survivors and endangers their access to education more often than it meaningfully intervenes to protect them or to hold their abusers accountable. As one post on the anonymous Instagram account put it, describing one student’s experience of reporting through the school administration: “Little has been done, and I fear retaliation from the college.” Continue reading...

Since the 1950s, Marin county waters have been home to a community of mariners. Now local authorities say they have to leaveFor decades, a group known as the “anchor-outs” enjoyed a relatively peaceful existence in a corner of the San Francisco Bay. The mariners carved out an affordable, bohemian community on the water, in a county where the median home price recently hit $1.8m.But their haven could be coming to an end – and with it, a rapidly disappearing way of life.Top: Anchor-out boats sit in Richardson Bay in Sausalito, California, last month. Bottom: Jeff Jacob Chase looks out the window of a friend’s boat. Continue reading...

The ghost story is enjoying a revival. No wonder – we’re hardly short of repressed fears to turn into fictionI’m not expecting to see a ghost tonight, but I will go in search of one. I’ve always assumed that any self-respecting spectre would run (float?) a mile from the lurid carnival trappings of contemporary Halloween revelries. And yet I still entertain a faint hope that, after the sticky children have been and gone with their plastic pumpkins and benign extortion, and I settle into a favourite chair with a book of ghost stories, there might be some corresponding fluttering of the curtains, a tap at the window, a shadow in the doorway, a sudden unexpected chill.I realise that in confessing my yearning for a haunting I risk my credentials as a good rationalist and proud patron of Humanists UK, but I suspect that this fascination with the idea of ghosts lies below the surface in all of us. I know several people – you probably do too – educated, sensible professionals, not given to histrionics, who quite calmly relate encounters with the unexplained that produce pleasing goosebumps. I want to believe them. As Dr Johnson observed about the existence of ghosts: “All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.” Continue reading...

Riding on big red buses makes great conversation wherever you are, according to my son‘Daddy…’ asks my son in that same voice I know from roughly 80% of our interactions. ‘Do you like going on big red buses?’ He asks me this a few times a day, even while we are literally on big red buses, deploying it as a sort of conversational chaff grenade entirely for subject-changing purposes, much the way you or I might say ‘Sooooooo… how are things?’ when faced with a person whose name you can’t remember at a party.‘Oh yes,’ I reply, ‘very much.’ His fascination with London buses is quite charming, but it is odd that he is asking this on an aeroplane. It’s our first boys-only trip and I’m quite excited; more so than my son who doesn’t appear to have any fascination with planes compared to the flashier, but altogether more earthbound, vehicles of the London transport network. Continue reading...

The author of a landmark book that challenges our view of history argues catastrophe is not foretold. We are freer to act than we thinkAs the Cop26 climate summit gets under way, scientists and activists are in broad agreement that our prevailing cultural system has placed us, and our planet, on a course to disaster. They agree that it is time to change course. Yet, at this critical moment, we find ourselves paralysed, with new horizons closed off by a false prospectus of human possibilities based on mythological conceptions of history.We need only look at the notion that underpins our idea of human development. In this story, our species originated in egalitarian bands of hunters and foragers, at one with their surroundings, only to somehow fall from grace into a state of inequality. In this “coming-of-age” fairytale, we humans began in innocence and then developed by way of a voyage of technological discovery – from foragers to farmers to fossil fuels – that enabled our “advancement”, but saw us relinquish our original freedoms. We became “civilised”, only to find ourselves locked in a tug of war with nature that now threatens the planet. Continue reading...

The conservative Christian institution, already rocked by scandal of former president Jerry Falwell, faces claims by dozens of women and questions about its political activity“I feel the Lord moving here,” remarks a visitor looking over Liberty University’s Disney World-tidy campus toward the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia.But other, more temporal matters, none godly, now hang over the once powerful evangelical institution founded in 1971 by the television preacher Jerry Falwell Sr, the Baptist minister who, eight years later, created the Moral Majority that mobilized the Christian right to the services of the Republican party. Continue reading...

The president won the state by 10 points but Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe has acknowledged Washington politics could hurt his campaignScott Knuth was dwarfed by the 16ft x 10ft flag that he waved to and fro on a street corner in Arlington, Virginia. “Trump won,” it falsely proclaimed, “Save America.”But Donald Trump was not coming to town. Instead his successor, Joe Biden, was about to take the stage in a campaign rally at a dangerous inflection point in his young presidency. Continue reading...

The climate crisis, the economy, Biden’s struggle to enact his spending agenda. The list goes on. The lesson? Be strongI often tell my students that if they strive to achieve full and meaningful lives, they should expect failures and disappointments. We learn to walk by falling down again and again. We learn to ride a bicycle by crashing into things. We learn to make good friends by being disappointed in friendship. Failure and disappointment are prerequisites to growth.The real test of character comes after failures and disappointments. It is resilience: how easily you take failures, what you learn from them, how you bounce back. Continue reading...

Actor tells reporter ‘this is a one-in-a-trillion episode’, in first remarks since fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins on film set

Anonymous sources outline ambitious timetable for spending plan so far stymied by centrist senatorsDemocratic leaders are hoping for House votes as soon as Tuesday on the two pillars of Joe Biden’s domestic spending agenda, two Democrats said Saturday, as the party mounted its latest push to get the long-delayed legislation through Congress.Top Democrats would like a final House-Senate compromise on Biden’s now $1.75tn, 10-year social and environment plan to be written by Sunday, the Democrats said. Continue reading...

Ex-president sued to stop the National Archives from transmitting documents to the House committee

As a doctor, I believe turning away from desperately ill kids – be they in Palestine or elsewhere – is a far greater crimeI have never walked away from a fight involving the wellbeing of children. I have never abandoned the right for Palestinian health workers to train in Israel for the benefit of those same children.Why is this something I need to speak about publicly now? Continue reading...

Photo in listing for Virginia house appears to have edited out a plaque referencing the Confederate general

Sergio Furnari concedes he did not have permit for sculpture made with $4,000 grant from New York CityA giant sculpture installed this week at the south-eastern corner of Central Park in New York City as a tribute to healthcare workers and Covid-19 victims has been taken down – an apparent casualty of confusion and red tape.The Italian sculptor behind the large red heart, Sergio Furnari, said he was walking by Grand Army Plaza on Thursday afternoon with friends when he noticed that his Heroes Heart monument was gone. Continue reading...

University says school should not be placed in conflict with administration of Governor Ron DeSantisThe University of Florida (UF) is prohibiting three professors from providing expert testimony in a lawsuit challenging a state law critics claim restricts voting rights, saying the school should not be placed in conflict with the administration of the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis.Though the decision is being criticized as threat to academic freedom and free speech, the university said allowing Dan Smith, Michael McDonald and Sharon Austin to serve as paid experts for plaintiffs challenging the law would be “adverse to the university’s interests as a state of Florida institution”. Continue reading...

The first series was perfect on its own; the second seems to be about how much money everyone has madeThere is usually something a little off about a true-crime sequel. It either seems to be an admission of failure, a recognition that the original series could not come to a satisfactory conclusion – and I have been suckered into enough lengthy podcasts that promise a big reveal only to end with a shrug of the shoulders and a “so who knows, it could have been anyone” – or it stands as an admission that the makers have agreed to wring more out of the story because the story was a hit, even if the material might not be there to back it up.Joe Exotic’s story is far from dry, but it is being squeezed for every last drop. After being convicted of his role in plotting to kill Carole Baskin, Exotic, who is still in jail but never out of the headlines, will once again return to wider public consciousness in November, as Netflix prepares to release Tiger King 2. The official trailer for this true-crime saga arrived last week and it appears that the film-makers took one look at the original and thought perhaps they had not done enough with the murder for hire, black-market animal trading, drugs, politics and polyamory. Continue reading...

Five members carried tiki torches at a campaign stop for Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for Virginia governor

Terri Hill participated in a voting session while appearing in a video feed wearing ‘a surgical gown, face mask and surgical cap’A Maryland state lawmaker who is a plastic surgeon has been fined $15,000 and reprimanded for twice participating in legislative meetings via videoconference from an operating room during surgery.Terri Hill signed a consent order this month agreeing to the disciplinary actions from the Maryland board of physicians, which found the Democratic lawmaker guilty of “unprofessional conduct in the practice of medicine”. Continue reading...

Six weeks after the killing, the family of the aspiring food truck owner demands answers: ‘What are they hiding?’Jonathan Cortez was buying a packet of beef jerky, a bottle of Gatorade and a Snickers bar at his local corner store in Oakland, California, when an FBI agent stormed in, gun drawn.Seconds later, the officer opened fire, fatally shooting the 31-year-old. Continue reading...

There is something very, very wrong with a system that would rather recruit more kids instead of paying better wages and providing more benefits to adultsBack in the good old days American children didn’t sit around playing video games, making TikToks, and bingeing Netflix. They worked long hours in factories and sweatshops; they knew the value of hard graft. They didn’t take sick days either, they just died of diphtheria. It was a simpler time.Arwa Mahdawi’s new book, Strong Female Lead, is available for pre-order Continue reading...

Why is the Republican running for governor of Virginia going after Toni Morrison’s award-winning novel Beloved?Running for governor of Virginia as the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin appears to have a split personality – sometimes the generic former corporate executive in a fleece vest, the suburban dad surrounded by his sun-lit children and tail-wagging dogs, and sometimes the fierce kulturkampf warrior and racial dog-whistler. His seemingly dual personality has been filtered through a cascade of Republican consultants’ campaign images. His latest TV commercial attempts to resolve the tension by showing him as a concerned father who shares the worries of the ordinary Trumpster. In the closing hours of the campaign, he has exposed that his political identity can’t be separated from Republican identity politics in the decadent stage of Trumpism.The Republican party has long specialized in fabricating esoteric threats, from the basements of Pizzagate to the stratosphere of “Jewish space lasers”. Youngkin’s campaign, though, has contrived a brand-new enemy within, a specter of doom to stir voters’ anxieties that only he can dispel: the Black Nobel prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison and her novel Beloved. Continue reading...

The Pentagon has come to expect reliable, generous financial support that keeps them prosperous. Doesn’t the American public deserve the same?After months of negotiations, Congress is struggling to come up with a plan to fund the Build Back Better Act. Rather than forcing more cuts that would further limit the bill’s transformative potential, throughout the process legislators have been considering funding sources that just a few years ago would have been unthinkable. With progressive congressional power at a relative high and the experience of Covid-19 not quite behind us, it’s a perfect moment to look to the defense budget as a way to fund the recovery effort the US sorely needs.The Pentagon budget is the one area where massive, long-term government spending is not only considered totally normal, but suggestions to change the status quo are still mostly balked at. Negotiations over the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act are also ongoing, and the contrast between the range of alternatives being seriously considered is striking. Topline numbers are higher even than the president’s budget request, which itself is $13bn more than the final Trump military budget request, and it preserves the Trump administration’s nuclear weapons programs that the Democrats ran on cancelling only a few short months ago.Emma Claire Foley is Global Zero Research Associate Continue reading...

An ‘enthusiasm gap’ between Black Republican and Democrat voters could be the key in clinching a highly contested electionIn a vital election for Democrats this fall, veteran party stalwart Terry McAuliffe is unexpectedly being run to the wire by his Republican rival, a political newcomer, in the governor’s race in Virginia.One path to victory for McAuliffe is turning out enough Black voters – and he and the party leadership are keenly aware of it – but can they make it happen? Continue reading...

Glasgow has to be a turning point. There is no other optionNothing and everything and not nearly enough has changed in the six years since the Paris climate summit and agreement. The four players in our climate future – climate chaos, climate activism, climate solutions and climate finance – are still on a playing field filled with floods, flames and false solutions. Two of them are racing away from catastrophe, one is rushing toward it, and the fourth is undecided.Runaway climate change itself has gotten far worse: we’re seeing chaos and destruction, ice melt and early signs of systemic collapse of ocean currents, ice sheets and much else. Both the climate movement and the practical solutions have gotten far stronger, more ambitious, more capable, more diverse. Climate finance has run in both directions: far too much money is still pumped into the fossil fuel industry, but there have been significant successes getting governments, development banks, and private investors to cut financing and reframe the industry as fundamentally criminal.Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses Continue reading...

A startling memo, a surreal Oval Office encounter – just some of the twists in the unfolding story of Trump’s bid to cling to power, which critics say was no less than an attempted coupOn 4 January, the conservative lawyer John Eastman was summoned to the Oval Office to meet Donald Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence. Within 48 hours, Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election would formally be certified by Congress, sealing Trump’s fate and removing him from the White House.The atmosphere in the room was tense. The then US president was “fired up” to make what amounted to a last-ditch effort to overturn the election results and snatch a second term in office in the most powerful job on Earth. Continue reading...