Tom Homan, the president’s so-called “border czar” is set to speak to reporters in Minneapolis shortly.
A reminder that Homan took over the immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota from senior border official Gregory Bovino, just days after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti and the mounting backlash in the Twin Cities.
The most popular mom content tends to be rightwing tradwife propaganda or just apolitical – pushing progressive creators out of the algorithm
For someone who doesn’t have a marble island in their kitchen I spend a disproportionate amount of time staring at marble kitchen islands, slack-jawed, brain turned half off. That’s because I consume a lot of videos from mommy bloggers, mom influencers, and the like. In kitchen “closing shift” videos, they wipe down their islands and reset by lighting luxury candles, the glow accentuating their respectable cosmetic procedures. Other times I watch them waltz through their morning routines: getting kids out the door, sweating it out in boutique fitness classes, showing off Amazon hauls, or explaining their children’s matching holiday photoshoot outfits.
For better or worse, this is how I have chosen to spend my one wild and precious life: consuming blissfully low-stakes motherhood content on my phone. It is domestically competent ASMR that also satiates my desire to peek into everyone’s bathroom cabinets. I nod in unsolicited approval as a TikTok mom I follow shares her green juice order. Fascinating. I should drink something like that. Another posts timestamps of her baby’s night-time sleep schedule. I, who lives between walls that have never heard the wail of an infant, ingurgitate the entire video.
Former Post executive editor blasts owner Jeff Bezos’s ‘sickening efforts to curry favor’ with Trump
TheWashington Post laid off hundreds of employees on Wednesday, which its former executive editor said “ranks among the darkest days” in the newspaper’s history. Approximately one-third of employees were affected.
Staffers at the Post have been on edge for weeks about the rumored cuts, which the publication would not confirm or deny. “It’s an absolute bloodbath,” said one employee, not authorized to speak publicly.
Film-maker Peter Ettedgui responded to BBC interview in which Reform leader apologised for any hurt caused
Nigel Farage has been accused of making a “non-apology” by a school contemporary who accused him of racist and antisemitic behaviour, after saying he was “sorry” if he had “genuinely” hurt anyone.
For the first time since the row broke after a Guardian investigation, the Reform UK party leader appeared to indicate some remorse for the impact of his alleged behaviour while at Dulwich college, a private school in south London.
The Valentine’s Day offerings begin with Amazon’s fast-paced, millennial-coded film that’s a fun enough watch even if its messaging is a little suspect
On its face, Relationship Goals is a classic romcom, calibrated for viewers of a certain generation. The perennially resplendent Kelly Rowland is Leah, a boss babe morning TV producer in line to replace her retiring boss (the omnipresent Matt Walsh) as showrunner. Just as she’s poised to break the glass ceiling, the network higher-ups stick her in a bake-off with Jarrett, a ringer from her romantic past played with devil charm by Method Man. The promise of one of Destiny’s Children playing the will they/won’t they game with the hunk of the Wu-Tang Clan could well prove too strong a lure to stop the scores who grew up on their music from clicking on the Prime Video thumbnail just out of nostalgic curiosity.
It’s a tractor beam made stronger by director Linda Mendoza’s extraordinarily fast pace. I mean, those 90 minutes just breeze by. Relationship Goals’s three-headed writer team – led by Michael Elliott, whose credits include Queen Latifah’s Just Wright and Beyoncé’s Carmen hip-hopera – are bracingly efficient with their paint-by-numbers setup. Leah’s besties – Treese, the tragically single makeup girl (Flamin’ Hot’s Annie Gonzalez); Brenda, the wistful morning anchor (A Black Lady Sketch Show’s Robin Thede), Roland, the omniscient assistant (Pose’s Ryan Jamaal Swain) – helpfully fast-talk through backstory points and punctuate scenes with snappy one-liners and winks at the audience. (Brenda titles her emergency engagement plan: Project Put a Ring on It.) Only Dennis Haysbert slows things down as Leah’s grieving father, but not enough to be a drag.
‘The girls wait for two or three hours to be introduced. The reason they’re sitting on the ground is because there weren’t any chairs in the waiting room’
My new book Social Season opens with a poem set in the mid-1800s, a time that marked the beginning of a period of increased financial prosperity for some African Americans. Cotillion dances have European origins, but in the poem, Black New Yorkers perform classic dances such as waltzes and quadrilles and are dressed in fine outfits. These Black debutante balls go back a long way, and are one example of African Americans trying to create a better life. Today, they continue to introduce young women into society and retain a strong emphasis on the participants’ education.
Initially, I had been working towards creating a book with a larger overview of Black subcultures in general. I’d photographed cheerleaders, churches, traditional rodeos and other intergenerational community gatherings. I wanted to include a debutante ball in a post-industrial city, and Detroit has a very rich Black history. When I first reached out to the city’s Cotillion Society, I only planned to attend one year’s event. But after that evening in 2022, I realised this was a project in itself and that I was really going to have to work for the images I wanted.
Gay porn in the 80s was home to beautifully moody synth music that is only now getting rediscovered – tragically too late for many of its creators
Michael Ely knew from the first moment he met James Allan Taylor that he had found someone special. The pair had separately hitchhiked to a gay bar, with fake IDs, in Sunset Beach, California. They connected, they danced and stepped outside for a kiss in the thick fog. “I was only 18 but I knew I had just met my soulmate,” says Ely.
The pair remained a couple until 2015 when Taylor, who was nicknamed Spider, died from liver cancer. A new collection of Taylor’s music, Surge Studio Music – electronic pieces he composed for gay porn films – has just been released. “I was like: wait, there’s a fanbase for 80s gay porn music?” laughs Ely. “I had no idea. When Josh contacted me, I found the cassette tapes in a box in the back of the closet. They’d been there for ever.”
Skeleton crew’s helmets ruled ineligible on eve of Games
Great Britain appeal to court of arbitration for sport
Great Britain’s best hopes of gold at these Winter Olympics have suffered a setback after skeleton’s governing body banned its new aerodynamic helmets for being the wrong shape.
Team GB’s Matt Weston and Marcus Wyatt have dominated skeleton all season, winning all seven of the World Cup races, and making them strong favourites to win gold and silver here in Milan.
The artist’s work resurfaces skills and knowledge that colonialism buried. She explains how her drawings and sculpture weave botanical illustration and traditional craft to engage with generational trauma
When the artist Charmaine Watkiss was a child, she frequently visited G Baldwin’s, a herbalist who sold natural remedies and essential oils in London’s Elephant and Castle, to pick up medicinal herbs and sarsaparilla for her mother. “They’ve had an apothecary for over 100 years,” she says. “It’s a place Black women used as a resource in the 1970s and 80s. You’d say: ‘I’ve got this ailment’ and they’d recommend something.”
Watkiss’s mother was part of the Windrush generation who migrated from the Caribbean to the UK, and these memories sparked a new area of research for the artist before her first gallery show in 2021, The Seed Keepers, which explored the botanical links connecting the Caribbean, the UK and the African continent in the context of the transatlantic slave trade. “While in my studio, I thought: all this knowledge must have travelled with the enslaved.” Thus began Watkiss’s large-scale illustrated portraits depicting women of African descent alongside medicinal plants. Evoking historical botanical illustrations, the artist traces how the enslaved relied on herbal knowledge for survival.
As anti-migration policies sweep the continent, the Spanish PM is going against the tide by announcing plans to legalise the status of undocumented migrants
You don’t need a degree in political science to understand why so many supposedly centrist European leaders have begun talking about immigration in terms that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago.
Far-right parties across the continent have fuelled their rise by seizing on the issue as a political cosh with which to beat their more mainstream and established rivals, whom they accuse of complacency, inaction and a failure to defend borders.
Anniversary depicts a rightwing takeover of the US inspired by a book of essays. But it’s fuzzy on the bits in between
As we all know from history and the current news cycle, autocracy is bad. But it can also be boring. For every explosive confrontation in Minneapolis, there is a quieter, less tangible threat in the form of Kash Patel’s FBI seizing voting records from Fulton county, Georgia – a state Donald Trump lost by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020 – or the steady implementation of 900-page manifesto by the influential rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation, neither of which lend themselves to blockbuster treatment. And so we have a problem: how to animate the quiet part of what’s happening in the US to reflect a dangerous but tedious reality – namely, that this thing ends not with a bang, but a combination of voter manipulation and federal electoral interference that undermines faith in the democratic process.
I bring this up after a week of watching popular movies that resonate in Trump’s US, most of which go heavy on the firefights and light on the details of how we arrive at them. The latest, Anniversary, which launched this week on Netflix – a streamer increasingly uninterested in the subtleties of any situation, let alone this one – depicts a US in which an evil rightwing genius in the shape of a beautiful young woman talks the country into ditching democracy via the medium of (I love this detail; the sheer optimism of it) a stirring book of essays.
A new painting by the maestro of Trumpian kitsch offers a fever dream of musical unity – and fundamentally misunderstands orchestras and conductors. And where are the music stands?
Events in the United States of Trumpland continue to reveal staggering new dimensions to the possibilities of orchestral music. Trump’s announcement that his “Trump Kennedy Center” is to be shut for a refit is a brilliantly cynical way to stop the noise when artists try to cancel their appearances during the rest of his presidential tenure: it’s shut already! Bigly losers, all of you!
But that’s not the new dawn for the artform I’m talking about. I mean the inspirational painting unveiled by the maestro of Trumpian kitsch, Jon McNaughton (and stamped with the presidential seal of approval – ie a post on Truth Social).
The USMNT manager said players should stay out of conversations that don’t deal with soccer
Last week, Mauricio Pochettino began a World Cup year with an unforced error.
At the tail-end of a virtual press conference that covered a wide range of ongoing USMNT business, the 53-year-old Argentine – who has made himself commendably available to the American soccer press – was asked about recent comments by Tim Weah.
Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out on 12 May. You can preorder it here. He teaches at Marist University.
Satellite images and witness testimony show destruction as IDF claims it was forced to take defensive measures
Israeli forces have bulldozed part of a Gaza cemetery containing the war graves of dozens of British, Australian and other allied soldiers killed in the first and second world wars, satellite imagery and witness testimony reveal.
Satellite imagery of the Gaza war cemetery in al-Tuffah, a district of Gaza City, shows extensive earthworks in the southernmost corner of the graveyard. Bomb craters can be seen around the cemetery, but in this area the destruction appears to have been more systematic.
Company publicly denied allegations that primary forests were being cut down to fuel UK’s biggest power plant
Senior executives at Drax raised concerns internally about the validity of the energy company’s sustainability claims while it publicly denied allegations that it was cutting down environmentally important forests for fuel, court documents have revealed.
Britain’s biggest power plant assured ministers and civil servants of the company’s green credentials as it scrambled to defend itself against claims in a BBC Panorama documentary that it had burned wood sourced from “old-growth” forests in Canada.
An Australian 13-year-old who swam 4km (2.49 miles) to shore and then ran 2km (1.24 miles) to get help for his stranded family has been described as “superhuman”.
Experts say Austin Appelbee’s feat of endurance exceeded the limits of what is normally perceived as possible. So how was the teenager able to save the day, and is there any precedent for it?
The first time I saw gay people on TV, it was during an ABC news package about Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. My Egyptian parents were chomping through a bag of dried pumpkin seeds when the assault on our eyeballs took place.
Muscle bears in backless chaps, shirtless lifesavers in tiny budgie smugglers, chunky women with buzzcuts and saucer-plate nipples revving their Harley-Davidsons down the strip. It was too much for my father, who announced: “Atstaghfurallah: they should not show such things.” Mum just sucked her teeth in dismay. But the sight of all the handsome, gleaming men sent a hot flush of excitement up my 12-year-old cheeks.
A new United States congressional report openly contemplates not selling any nuclear submarines to Australia – as promised under the Aukus agreement – because America wants to retain control of the submarines for a potential conflict with China over Taiwan.
The report by the US Congressional Research Service, Congress’s policy research arm, posits an alternative “military division of labour” under which the submarines earmarked for sale to Australia are instead retained under US command to be sailed out of Australian bases.
In the 2012 film adaptation of the Dr Seuss book The Lorax, a fable about capitalist greed, air is a commodity.
The mayor of Thneedville deprives the city’s residents of trees so a company he heads can sells bottles of air. He has, as one advertising lackey puts it, “gotten rich selling people air that’s ‘fresher’ than the stinky stuff outside”.
Donna Lu is an assistant editor, climate, environment and science at Guardian Australia
Antiviral is a fortnightly column that interrogates the evidence behind the health headlines and factchecks popular wellness claims
Like the first cluster of snowdrops, a burst of white is a reminder to focus on the positive – just don’t go full snowman
Everyone knows that the prettiest scraps of winter are the precious snow days. At this time of year, when it feels like we’ve been scurrying around in near-constant darkness like moles for as long as we can remember, we crave the brightness you get with snowfall – and the glamour of it, too. The disco-ball sparkle of frost is a counterpoint to chapped lips and three-week sniffles that won’t budge.
We can’t make it snow, but we can create our own little flurry. A pop of snowy white is the best boost you can give an outfit right now. White is to January what rust and orange are to October: a colour pulled from nature to remind us of the best bits of the season. After all, autumn has grey skies and muddy puddles too, but we ignore them and lean into its gorgeous falling-leaf colours instead.
The Games’ newest sport combines the seemingly impossible task of ascending a mountain on skis with hikingand then a rapid descent
No one could suggest that the Winter Olympics are lacking in challenge. Skiers zipping down the slopes and flying through the air. Skeletons hurtling around at more than 100km/h. Ice skaters, metal-bladed, spinning, leaping and twisting. Slopestyle athletes pulling off the most outrageous tricks while landing the biggest air. But everyone from recreational skiers to the most extreme sports enthusiasts knows there is always room for more.
Enter the new kid on the ice block at Milano Cortina 2026: ski mountaineering. The new challenge? How about going up the mountain, hiking a bit, followed by a rapid descent on the tiniest skis possible. Before you ask, “why”? Cast your mind over the other disciplines on the schedule and remember that the answer is almost always, “why not”?
She’s just 24, but Maya Cumming has won the Hottest 100, survived LA, played with Cyndi Lauper – and is only now releasing her first album, which ‘was driven by spite’
At just 24, the Australian singer-songwriter Maya Cumming – known to fans as May-a – has already experienced the promise and heartache of Los Angeles as a star-making town. In 2021, she signed with Atlantic Records in the US ahead of her debut EP, Don’t Kiss Ur Friends – a moment she described at the time as “a dream”. The following February, she featured on Flume’s precision-made festival anthem Say Nothing, which went on to win the 2022 Triple J Hottest 100.
Amid that whirlwind period, Cumming was flown back and forth to LA for arranged studio sessions with producers and artists she felt little connection to, ultimately relocating there in 2024. What should’ve felt like a career arrival was instead a dispiriting eye-opener.
Keir Starmer has confirmed for the first time he knew about Peter Mandelson’s longer-term relationship with Jeffrey Epstein before appointing him US ambassador, saying the former peer had “lied repeatedly” about the extent of his contact with the child sex offender.
Questioned repeatedly at prime minister’s questions, Starmer said Mandelson had “betrayed our country” in his dealings with Epstein.
Citadel hedge fund boss, Republican donor and vocal Trump critic says administration has made ‘distasteful’ choices not in the public interest
The billionaire investor Ken Griffin has accused Donald Trump’s administration of “enriching” its families, and criticised its interference in American businesses as “distasteful”.
Griffin, who is the chief executive of the hedge fund Citadel and a large Republican donor, rebuked the Trump administration, saying it “has definitely made missteps in choosing decisions or courses that have been very, very enriching to the families of those in the administration”.
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