The American won gold in Rio but his preparations for Tokyo were hit when his running partner, Jerome Avery, was hit by injuryDavid Brown was running through Manhattan’s Central Park when he heard a familiar voice.“Is that you, baby?” asked the woman. Continue reading...
We need products we can repair, reuse and recycle – not ones deliberately built to become obsoleteNever have we wanted, owned and wasted so much stuff. Our consumptive path through modern life leaves a wake of social and ecological destruction – trainers barely worn, ignored AI-powered digital assistants gathering dust, and forgotten smartphones languishing in drawers. By what perverse alchemy do our newest, coolest things so rapidly transform into meaningless junk?Related: From fashion to field: shredded cotton clothing used to help grow future crops Continue reading...
US viewers have been able to see everything at any given moment while understanding fundamentally nothing about what’s going onIf there’s one message the Olympics unfailingly conveys, it’s that elite competition is all about making the right choices. At a certain point every athlete needs to make the decision not to do certain things: the fencer lunging for the head rather than the body, the trampolinist starting their routine on the third jump instead of the fourth, the whitewater slalom all-rounder choosing to focus, early in their career, on the kayak over the canoe.In 2014 NBC paid $7.75bn for the rights to broadcast the Olympics in the US until 2032. For these Olympics, faced with an inhospitable timezone for US viewers, the host broadcaster has taken the competing athletes’ message of elite discipline in the heat of battle, thrown it out the window, and instead tried to show a bit of everything to every viewer on every available platform all at once. Fitting perhaps for a tournament held in 2021 but still stuck with the previous year’s label, a frazzled atmosphere has suffused American coverage of Tokyo 2020. Continue reading...
The ex-president has built an arsenal of groups staffed with ex-officials and loyalists seemingly aimed at sustaining his political hopes for a comebackDonald Trump’s penchant for turning his political and legal troubles into fundraising schemes has long been recognized, but the former US president’s money hustling tricks seem to have expanded since his defeat by Joe Biden, prompting new scrutiny and criticism from campaign finance watchdogs and legal analysts.Related: Revealed: the people who signed up to the Magacoin Trump cryptocurrency Continue reading...
by Alexandra Villarreal in Austin, Texas on (#5MVR2)
Beto O’Rourke and the Rev William Barber among speakers in Austin as fight to protect ballot access goes onWhen a legion of Texans descended on their state capitol on Saturday morning, the signs they carried conveyed raw terror about the erosion of their democracy.Related: Trump tries to defend ‘just say the election was corrupt’ demand Continue reading...
Shawn Michael Chock charged with murdering 58-year-old Jeremy Barrett after allegedly driving his truck into bike race participants in ArizonaAn Arizona man already facing assault charges for allegedly driving his pickup truck into people participating in a bike race nearly six weeks ago has been charged with murder.An indictment made public Wednesday adds a murder charge against Shawn Michael Chock in the death of 58-year-old Australian Jeremy Barrett. Continue reading...
Early this summer, we seemed ready to get back on the mic – but now the Delta variant is complicating mattersWhen New Orleans lifted Covid-19 restrictions for bars, restaurants, and music venues this past May, Ruston Henry Jr, 30, went to Kajun’s Pub. He had a mission: to sing at a karaoke night for the first time since the pandemic started. His comeback song was the ‘90s ballad Kiss from a Rose by Seal.“Normally I’m very reserved, but when I do karaoke I feel like I can show a different side of me,” he says. “I missed it so much.” Continue reading...
Progressive is angry her party allowed the clock to run out on renewing measure that lapsed Saturday nightDemocrats who control the House of Representatives cannot blame Republicans for a looming crisis over evictions, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, after a federal moratorium lapsed on Saturday night.Related: Fauci backs new masks guidance as Florida reports highest one-day Covid case total Continue reading...
US-based airline aims to tread where other have failed – and in the teeth of the Covid pandemicA low-cost airline service with a brand new business class cabin, flying London to New York? As Frank Sinatra might have said: if you can make it there, in the teeth of a global pandemic when the US bars British citizens and advises its own to stay put … well, you can make it anywhere.On 11 August, nonetheless, JetBlue will launch transatlantic flights that could rattle one of aviation’s normally most lucrative markets. The airline, one of the biggest in America but without the global presence of the “big four” US carriers, will launch its first services to the UK with the promise of driving down fares, particularly for the business traveller. Continue reading...
Nina Turner and Shontel Brown will square off Tuesday in Ohio race that has turned nasty and could foreshadow midterm risksA hip-hop rendition of I Gotta Feeling on electric violin got the crowd jumping. The first glimpse of a 79-year-old democratic socialist got them whistling and whooping. But this time Bernie Sanders was not running for president.Related: Republicans will defend their Caesar but new revelations show Trump’s true threat | Lloyd Green Continue reading...
USA’s fencers have found themselves in the news over protests, coronavirus and reports of an unwanted teammate. They still performed on the pisteThough soccer and rugby teams have taken a knee before matches at the Tokyo Olympics to protest racial injustice, how the authorities would react to a demonstration during a medal ceremony remains to be seen.Should the American hammer thrower Gwen Berry finish in the top three later this week, it seems likely the question will arise. Continue reading...
The ongoing doping war of words has continued after Lilly King said that 'a lot of people here that should not be here'. King made her statements seated next to Ryan Murphy, another US swimmer who appeared to take aim this week at Russia, who have run afoul of doping rules. King later added: 'I wasn't racing anyone from a country who should have been banned and instead got a slap on the wrist and rebranding of their national flag.' Continue reading...
NHL plans to conduct a full investigation after Anna Kane posts: ‘How does the NHL let a compulsive gambling addict still play?’The San Jose Sharks forward Evander Kane has denied allegations his wife made on social media that he bet on NHL games, including against his own team.Kane responded on Sunday morning to allegations made the previous day from the Instagram account of his wife, Anna. Continue reading...
by Edward Helmore in New York and agencies on (#5MV3T)
Gun store owners say bullets are selling out as pandemic fuels public fears around safety and crimeThe coronavirus pandemic in the US has been accompanied by soaring gun sales attributed to fears around social unrest and crime and, in some cases, people having more time for hunting.Related: ‘We have to break through that wall’: inside America’s battle for gun control Continue reading...
Fans across the world enjoy complementing their Olympic viewing with some research. We meet the man who wants everyone’s story toldIn 1992, 11-year-old Guy Fraser spent his summer vacation fiddling with a radio. He was searching, sometimes in vain, for an English-language broadcast of the Olympics in Barcelona. He was trapped in France. Oblivious to the Olympics – and her son’s devotion to them – Fraser’s mother had booked a two-week break that coincided almost perfectly with the Games. Fraser was heartbroken, but he made the best of it. He found French broadcasts he could mostly understand as he sussed out how his favourite athletes were faring in Spain.Nearly three decades later, the Englishman is just as enthusiastic about the Games, especially after more than a year of Covid-19 lockdowns. So in the leadup to Tokyo, he began to do some research. Fraser is an equal‑opportunity viewer – “Once you properly understand the rules and tactics, any sport is inherently fascinating,” he told the Guardian in an email – and he wanted to be as informed as he could be. So he scrolled his phone from his home in Bath perusing rosters, trying to learn a thing or two about the people who’d earned spots on teams across the world. Continue reading...
The PM’s talk of ‘fluorescent-jacketed chain gangs’ had a similar effect to that of a misfiring new Oxford Street attractionEarlier this week a pile of mud was dumped at the west end of Oxford Street. Then some squares of grass were stuck on the mud. Then people were charged £8 to go up it. Visitor Emma Wright tweeted that going up the mud was “the worst thing I have ever done in London”. But I believe it was Dr Johnson who wrote: “A woman who thinks going up some mud is the worst thing she has ever done in London has not visited the ladies’ toilets in Crystal Palace park. And neither have I.”The mud’s purpose is to promote Oxford Street, where 17% of shops have closed since March 2020. But in the long term, the best way to save shops is to force Amazon to pay proper tax, so it cannot undercut them. Making people pay £8 to go up mud will not do this. Though British Amazon goods are delivered from British Amazon warehouses to British Amazon customers on British roads by British drivers, the sales of those goods are processed in lightly regulated Luxembourg. Can it be a coincidence that as the net tightens on Amazon, its founder, Jeff Bezos, is lobbying Nasa to put Amazon in charge of outer space? Continue reading...
The 1980s child abuse scandal reminds us that now, as then, being ‘on the side of the angels’ has to be backed with actionA council’s most important job is not emptying the bins or filling in potholes, the stuff most people see day to day. It has by far and away one of the most important jobs anyone could have: to be a parent. Local authorities, between them, have parental responsibility for more than 100,000 children in care in the UK. These are some of society’s most vulnerable children, removed from their parents’ care because they have experienced or are at risk of abuse and neglect. Anybody disinclined to take that responsibility seriously should come nowhere near elected office or senior management at a local council.How, then, did Lambeth council in south London get itself into a position where members and senior managers, at best, looked the other way while children in its care were subject to the most depraved sexual, physical and emotional abuse and, at worst, were complicit? The report of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA) into Lambeth, published last week, sets out the horrific scale and nature of what went on over several decades from the 1960s. More than 705 former residents of Lambeth children’s homes have come forward with complaints of sexual abuse; the inquiry says the true scale will be significantly higher. Continue reading...
Political liberty has been overturned – with majority support. That will delight authoritarians everywhereImplicit in US and western support for pro-democracy movements and transitions around the world is an assumption that, given a free choice, a system of elected, representative government is what people will always naturally prefer. But what if this assumption is wrong? What if a majority believes democracy doesn’t work for them?Emerging testimony from Tunisia, the latest country to face a crisis over how it is run, suggests many citizens welcomed the forceful suspension of a democratically elected parliament that had failed to address people’s problems and was widely reviled as a self-serving oligarchy.
We need to decarbonise and fast. But ‘adaptation’, the ways in which we protect people from the crisis, is not a dirty wordIt won’t be enough. It can’t be. From here, even an astonishing pace of decarbonisation will still deliver us a warmer world than we have today, full of more eye-opening extremes and more deeply disruptive disasters of the kind, we are learning this summer, that even the wealthiest and most climate-conscious countries are unprepared for. No one is.That is what Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, meant when he wrote, with the capital inundated, that the city was now on the frontline of the climate emergency and it is the central lesson of the Met Office’s annual report on the state of the UK climate, which found that mild British weather was already a relic of a bygone era. The Climate Crisis Advisory Group, led by Sir David King, recently declared that greenhouse gas levels were already so high that they foreclosed a “manageable future for humanity”. “Nowhere is safe,” King said, provoking a host of headlines. Continue reading...
I lost my comrade Kevin in battle. His sacrifice must not have been in vainWas it worth it? That is what many of us who served in Afghanistan are quietly asking as we watch with bewilderment and horror at what is unfolding.Four hundred and fifty-seven British servicemen and women never made it home from the war. Among them was Corporal Kevin Mulligan, a fearless young Scot with whom I had the honour of serving. He was the epitome of a paratrooper and one of our best and brightest commanders. At the time of his death, Kev’s fiancee was carrying their unborn child. One of countless tragedies borne out of that bloody conflict. Continue reading...
