Nobel prize winner shaped medicine, crimefighting and genealogy, but later years marred by racist remarks
James Dewey Watson, whose co-discovery of the twisted-ladder structure of DNA in 1953 helped light the long fuse on a revolution in medicine, crimefighting, genealogy and ethics, has died, according to his former research lab. He was 97.
The breakthrough – made when the brash, Chicago-born Watson was just 24 – turned him into a hallowed figure in the world of science for decades. But near the end of his life, he faced condemnation and professional censure for offensive remarks, including saying Black people were less intelligent than white people.
Ticket sales at about 40% unsold compared with before president made himself chair of US performing arts center
The Washington National Opera (WNO) is considering moving out of the Kennedy Center, the company’s home since the US’s national performing arts center opened in 1971.
The possibility has been forced on the company as a result of the “takeover” of the center by Donald Trump, according to WNO’s artistic director, Francesca Zambello. The president declared himself chair of the institution in February, sacking and replacing its board and leadership.
Lando Norris, Oscar Piastri and Max Verstappen battle for the title, just as Juan Manuel Fangio, Nino Farina and Luigi Fagioli did 75 years ago
With no little pleasing symmetry, 75 years on from a three-way fight for the inaugural Formula One title, the championship is entering its decisive phase once more with three protagonists in the running and the promise of an enthralling denouement of the kind that has graced some of the sport’s greatest seasons.
Heading into this weekend’s São Paulo Grand Prix, McLaren’s Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen all remain in the hunt. Norris leads Piastri by one point, with the defending champion, Verstappen, 36 points back, after a late-season resurgence.
Strawberry hit 335 HRs and was eight-time All-Star
US president cites faith, sobriety, ministry work
Donald Trump has pardoned former New York Mets great Darryl Strawberry on past tax evasion and drug charges, citing the 1983 National League Rookie of the Year’s post-career embrace of his Christian faith and longtime sobriety.
Strawberry was an outfielder and eight-time All-Star, including seven with the Mets from 1983 through 1990. He hit 335 homers and had 1,000 RBIs and 221 stolen bases in 17 seasons.
Team’s participation in Vuelta was dogged by protests
The main sponsor of the Israel-Premier Tech (IPT) team of the four-time Tour de France winner Chris Froome has pulled out of funding the team, despite a pledge to rebrand and distance itself from its Israeli identity. The Canadian company Premier Tech, in a statement issued on Friday, said that it had decided to “step down as co-title sponsor of the team, taking effect immediately”.
“Although we took notice of the team’s decision to change its name for the 2026 season,” the statement said, “the core reason for Premier Tech to sponsor the team has been overshadowed to a point where it has become untenable for us to continue as a sponsor.”
Student, national and local groups across US organized day of action to condemn Trump’s assault on academic freedom
Students, faculty and staff at more than 100 campuses across the US rallied against the Trump administration’s assault on higher education on Friday – the first in a planned series of nationwide, coordinated protests that organizers hope will culminate in large-scale students and workers’ strikes next May Day and a nationwide general strike in May 2028.
The day of action was organized under the banner of Students Rise Up, a network of students including both local groups and national organizations like Sunrise Movement and Campus Climate Network. Students were joined by faculty and educational workers’ unions like the American Association of University Professors and Higher Education Labor United.
Tamahori was the outstanding director of Along Came a Spider and Die Another Day – but his first film was his greatest work
In 1994, the New Zealand film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a working-class Maori family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison is the boozing, brawling, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter Grace, who has talent as a writer. One son gets gang tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and self-respect. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit …”
Tamahori let rip with all this emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and verve. He created a gutsy, heartfelt picture with a very 90s streak of brash and trash. It was a hit with audiences and critics, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed industry executives in Hollywood who could see how Tamahori could bring this energy and flair to mainstream genre material.
Israeli PM, ministers and army chief accused of crimes against humanity ‘perpetrated systematically’ in Gaza
Turkey has issued arrest warrants for alleged genocide against the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and senior officials within his government.
Among 37 suspects listed were the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the army chief Lt Gen Eyal Zamir, said a statement from the Istanbul prosecutor’s office, which did not publish the complete list.
US president also praises Viktor Orbán’s hardline stance on immigration during White House summit
Donald Trump has suggested that he could exempt Hungary from sanctions on importing oil from Russia as he praised Viktor Orbán’s hardline stance on immigration during a cozy White House summit.
Trump also called on European leaders to show more respect to the Hungarian prime minister, who has clashed repeatedly with fellow EU heads of government over issues of migration, democracy and rule of law.
The Real Madrid midfielder is part of an attack-minded squad but the manager will be watching him carefully
One snub was enough. Another and it would have started to look vindictive from Thomas Tuchel, who is far too wily not to know that winning the World Cup is probably going to require help from Jude Bellingham, even if it is also on the midfielder to fit into the tactical structures and squad hierarchies required with England now that he is back in Tuchel’s warm embrace.
The manager wants Bellingham’s edge, his fire, but it is about using it in the right way. Individual quality matters but England know from bitter experience that there is a price to pay when celebrity takes over. Still, a point has been made.
In Marana, residents crowded into a town hall recently to learn the fate of a building that’s been closed for two years
In an Arizona town where farmers have long wrested a living off the arid land, reports that a former prison complex may be turned into an immigration detention center have sparked a fierce backlash, with residents seeing the potential transition as the latest undesirable symbol of the Trump administration’s massive escalation of immigration enforcement.
The facility in Marana, a town of about 63,700 people located north of Tucson, sprawls across a flat expanse of desert studded with scrubby bushes and hardy trees. It was shuttered almost two years ago, and the Management and Training Corporation, the private company that owns it, informed the town manager of company plans to operate a detention center in the prison.
Zohran Mamdani, Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill focused their messages on the economy, but structural problems endure
On Tuesday, Democrats won right, left and center.
In purple Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, the staunchly anti-socialist former CIA official won handily over her Republican counterpart. Meanwhile, Mikie Sherrill, a poster child for centrist Democrats, won big in light-blue New Jersey. And in ultra-progressive New York, the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, predictably, took the mayoralty. With such varied success, what could be the common lesson?
Dustin Guastella is the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia, and a research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics
The retirement of the former speaker of the House was long-anticipated, and two Democrats had already declared their intent to run. Saikat Chakrabarti, a former tech executive who previously served as the chief of staff to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Scott Wiener, a state senator, kicked off their campaigns this year.
Dozens of US state and local leaders will be at talks in Brazil with president’s team expected to send no representatives
The Trump administration appears to be sitting out this month’s United Nations climate talks known as Cop30, telling the Guardian it will not deploy any high-level representatives to the negotiations.
But dozens of US subnational leaders attend to promote their climate efforts.
In documentary Coexistence, My Ass!, Noam Shuster Eliassi uses humor and honesty to turn a one-woman show into something politically radical
In the late 2010s, Noam Shuster Eliassi was working at the United Nations, the latest step in a lifelong effort to build peace between Israelis and Palestinians, when she had an epiphany. In Ukraine, a Jewish comedian named Volodymyr Zelenskyy had made the improbable leap from sitcom about accidentally becoming president to actually becoming president. Perhaps, if she were to take her political career seriously, she should start writing jokes.
It worked. As an Israeli Jew fluent in Hebrew, Arabic and English, Shuster Eliassi could nimbly weave between different audiences, and what started as short comedic videos on social media soon became an invitation from Harvard to develop a full-on stand-up routine skewering the idea of coexistence as it’s often used in the Israeli-Palestinian context. The show would riff on her upbringing in one of the only joint Israeli-Palestinian communities in the country, threading a fine needle with self-deprecating humor and an activist’s edge. The aim, she told the Guardian, was to “unpack” the idea of coexistence, “and say, like, ‘this is how I grew up, there are so many funny kumbayah moments, and I propose something else.’”
Viktor Orbán will visit the White House today as Hungary’s far-right prime minister tries to broker another summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin that Orbán’s advisers claim could help end the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Authorities say suspect is 17-year-old male student and warn against terrorist attack speculation after Jakarta blasts
At least 54 people have been injured in explosions that shook a mosque at a high school during Friday prayers in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. Authorities later said the suspect was a 17-year-old male student who had been injured and was undergoing surgery.
Witnesses told local television stations that they heard at least two loud blasts at about midday, just as the sermon had started, from inside and outside the mosque at SMA 72, a state high school within a navy compound in Jakarta’s northern Kelapa Gading neighbourhood.
The increasing ferocity and frequency of tropical storms imposes an unbearable burden on countries including Jamaica
The geographically uneven risks from increasingly extreme and dangerous weather grow ever starker. As Jamaica and other Caribbean countries clear up after Hurricane Melissa, and Typhoon Kalmaegi heads west after killing nearly 200 people in the Philippines and Vietnam, the case for more international support to countries facing the most destructive impacts from global heating has never been stronger.
Last week’s five-day rainfall in Jamaica was made twice as likely by higher temperatures, according to initial findings from climate attribution studies. The current death toll across the Caribbean is at least 75. The economic and social costs are hard to quantify in a region that is still recovering from 2024’s Hurricane Beryl. Crucial infrastructure has been destroyed before the loans used to build it have even been paid off. Andrew Holness, Jamaica’s prime minister, estimates that the damage there is roughly equivalent to one-third of the country’s gross domestic product.
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Typhoon Kalmaegi, hunger in Gaza, displacement in Sudan, and Zohran Mamdani in New York: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
Upstate New York institution is the fifth university under government investigation to bow to White House demands
Cornell University announced a settlement with the Trump administration on Friday, becoming the fifth university under investigation by the US government to do so.
The agreement will see more than $250m in federal research funding restored. In exchange, the university will share admissions data with the government, pay $30m and invest $30m more in research programs benefiting farmers – a reflection of the university’s longstanding record of agricultural research. The university also agreed to continued to “evaluate the campus climate”, particularly for Jewish students and affirmed the Trump administration’s interpretation of civil rights laws, which views diversity initiatives as unlawful race-based discrimination.
Chatbot was first used for ‘general help’ with schoolwork or research but ‘evolved into a psychologically manipulative presence’, plaintiffs say
ChatGPT has been accused of acting as a “suicide coach” in a series of lawsuits filed this week in California alleging that interactions with the chatbot led to severe mental breakdowns and several deaths.
The seven lawsuits include allegations of wrongful death, assisted suicide, involuntary manslaughter, negligence and product liability.
Karolis Peckauskas of Drogheda and Garrett Pollock of Annalong in Northern Ireland charged with possession of explosives
Irish authorities have charged two men with possession of explosives in relation to an alleged planned terrorist attack by a far-right extremist group.
Karolis Peckauskas, 38, of Drogheda, County Louth, and Garrett Pollock, 35, of Annalong, County Down, Northern Ireland, appeared at Portlaoise district court on Friday after being arrested in a cross-border police operation.
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