Mexico has extradited 29 high-level organised crime operatives to the US, as it faces intense pressure from the Trump administration to show that it is tackling fentanyl trafficking.
Among the prisoners sent to the US was Rafael Caro Quintero, the drug lord who was convicted of the murder of an undercover US Drug Enforcement Administration agent in 1985.
The Trump administration has fired hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the US’s pre-eminent climate research agency housed within the Department of Commerce, the Guardian has learned.
On Thursday afternoon, the commerce department sent emails to employees saying their jobs would be cut off at the end of the day, in a move that one worker called “wrong all around”. Other government agencies have also seen massive staffing cuts in recent days.
Donald Trump has insisted that Vladimir Putin would “keep his word” on a peace deal for Ukraine, arguing that US workers extracting critical minerals in the country would act as a security backstop to deter Russia from invading again.
During highly anticipated talks at the White House with the prime minister, Keir Starmer, the US president said that Putin could be trusted not to breach any agreement, which could aim to return as much of the land as possible to Ukraine that was seized by Russia during the brutal three-year conflict.
World champion will be remembered for the ‘match of the century’ against American Bobby Fischer in 1972
Soviet chess grandmaster Boris Spassky, who was famously defeated at the height of the cold war, has died at 88, the Russian Chess Federation has announced.
“The tenth world champion Boris Spassky has died at 88,” the federation said in a statement on its website on Thursday, calling it a “great loss for the country”. The statement did not say when he died or from what cause.
The Women’s Super League is considering abolishing relegation as part of a radical proposal to grow the sport that will be discussed by the clubs at a meeting on Friday.
The Guardian has learned that the 23 WSL and Championship clubs have been called to a strategy summit by the newly formed company that runs both competitions, Women’s Professional Leagues Ltd, who will ask them to explore a range of options to increase the profile, sustainability and profitability of women’s football.
The PCC – First Capital Command – formed in a Sāo Paulo prison but is now spreading its tentacles around the world
In September 2020, the Australian Border Force intercepted 552kg of cocaine concealed in 2,000 boxes of frozen banana pulp that had arrived at the port of Sydney on a ship from Brazil.
Two years later, a diver was found floating dead next to 52kg of cocaine near the port of Newcastle, in New South Wales, Australia. Police later discovered that he was a Brazilian national who had been attempting to retrieve drugs from a cargo ship’s hull.
The 1890 National Scholars program gives full rides to HBCU students in fields like botany, forestry and food safety
Dr Marcus Bernard was shocked to learn last week that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) had suspended the 1890 National Scholars program that funds undergraduate students’ education in agriculture or related fields at about 20 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
Bernard is dean of the college of agriculture, health and natural resources at one of those institutions, Kentucky State University. At Kentucky State, close to 40 of the scholars have enrolled since the project’s inception in 1992. Nationwide, the program has supported more than 800 students, according to the USDA.
It has been a midweek of Premier League certainties being secured at both top and bottom. Place Leicester in the certainty category. Defeat at West Ham extended Leicester’s doomed, zombified lurch towards relegation to 11 defeats in 12, 11 from 16 since Ruud van Nistelrooy replaced Steve Cooper in November.
If Cooper was the wrong man at the wrong club then so is the Dutchman. Perhaps no manager had a chance with the squad Leicester assembled to attempt survival. Graham Potter, previously linked with Leicester, has meanwhile restored order to West Ham. Jarrod Bowen made things happen for both first-half goals, involved in the move for the first from Tomas Soucek, the second an own goal from Jannik Vestergaard the Hammers captain’s zest had enforced.
Hendricks plays a Hollywood producer who returns to her home town to shoot a show in this whimsical comedy drama – and she is not someone you want to cross
How much you enjoy Small Town, Big Story will depend on how you feel first about whimsy and second about genre mashups. If your appetite for both is large, then Chris O’Dowd’s creation (he wrote and directed) has plenty to make you happy. If not, you might find the whole thing a little too underpowered to keep you going.
Christina Hendricks, of Mad Men fame, plays hard-bitten TV producer Wendy Patterson. She is in charge of her first big Hollywood production and returns to her tiny home town of Drumbán in Northern Ireland (after 25 years in Los Angeles surrounded by fat-cat bosses and patronising colleagues) to shoot it there. This follows shenanigans by Drumbán’s more colourful and eccentric characters to keep the location scouts from choosing a more tax-advantageous site across the border; these shenanigans include a pig’s head on a stick and a sign saying “Death to the infidels”, which, you know … well, OK, all right. Not even so much from an offence-giving point of view but from an “Is this remotely credible in this particular world?” position.
The cause of Gossip Girl and Buffy the Vampire Slayer actor Michelle Trachtenberg’s death will remain undetermined as her family has reportedly declined an autopsy.
According to Deadline, the actor’s family have chosen not to go forward with an autopsy because of religious reasons. As no foul play is suspected, the decision was not overruled by the medical examiner.
Todd Boehly has said the Premier League should consider selling its global TV rights to Netflix, as he shrugged off tensions with supporters and questions over his model of ownership in rare public remarks.
The Chelsea co-owner also called on Premier League executives to agree on priorities for the future of the competition, saying they should “pull together” in order to maintain its success. “Premier League content is so valuable because it’s so widely demanded,” Boehly said. “How many global platforms are there? Probably just Netflix. If you’re thinking about how do I launch a global product, you do it in partnership with content like this.
Donald Trump has strongly hinted that he will back a deal in which the UK hands sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, including the Diego Garcia military base, which is jointly used by the US.
“I think we’ll be inclined to go along with your country,” the US president told reporters during an impromptu press conference in the Oval Office with Keir Starmer, who is visiting Washington. He added: “I have a feeling it’s going to work out very well.”
Rhianan Rudd, 16, was referred to Prevent by her mother after becoming ‘fixated on Hitler’, inquest told
A teenager who killed herself after becoming the youngest person in the UK to be charged with terror offences had been groomed online by an American “neo-Nazi”, an inquest has been told.
Sixteen-year-old Rhianan Rudd, who was autistic, had been referred to the government’s Prevent counter-radicalisation programme by her mother, Emily Carter, the counsel to the inquest, Edward Pleeth, told the hearing.
The Trump administration is pushing for federal agencies to carry out a large-scale slashing of the federal workforce, demanding plans for hundreds of thousands of possible cuts within weeks.
A White House memo gave officials until 13 March to submit a plan identifying “agency components and employees performing functions not mandated by statute or regulation who are not typically designated as essential” during government shutdowns.
Geo Group, an Ice partner, is moving at ‘unprecedented speed’ to build out its monitoring, executive chair says
The Geo Group, the largest single private contractor to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), said it was building out its surveillance business to be able to monitor hundreds of thousands or millions more immigrants than it already does.
The Geo Group, a private prison corporation and parent company of BI Inc, has contracted with Ice for nearly 20 years to manage the agency’s electronic monitoring program. It currently tracks approximately 186,000 immigrants using devices such as ankle monitors, smart watches and a facial recognition app, according to public Ice data. Due to increasing demand from Donald Trump’s administration, which has promised mass deportations, company executives said that they expect that number to grow past its previous peak of 370,000 to 450,000 immigrants within the next year. The remarks were made during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday morning.
Canadian event loses three sponsors who also do business in the US to avoid being seen as supporting LGBTQ+ rights
Pride Toronto, one of the largest celebrations of LGTBQ+ people in North America, is reeling from the loss of three major sponsors who have pulled funding after Donald Trump’s purge of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in the US.
Kojo Modeste, the executive director of the Canadian event said that the sponsors who also do business in the US are seeking to avoidbeing seen as supporting LGBTQ+ rights.
Tourism and local officials in Mexico deny any knowledge of proposed follow-up to disastrous 2017 event
When tickets to the second Fyre festival went on sale this week, there was just one concrete detail: it would take place on Isla Mujeres, a tropical island off Cancún, Mexico.
But the festival seems to be repeating its own history as an improvised disaster after the local government in Isla Mujeres denied knowing anything about it.
Enron one of the largest bankruptcy cases in US history
La Liga alleges City distort EU’s internal market
Manchester City have been accused of an Enron-style financial deception by La Liga’s president, Javier Tebas.
Tebas said the Spanish league filed a complaint against City to the European Commission in the summer of 2023, which he says the Commission is investigating. City have not commented on Tebas’s allegations but club sources are aware of them, and strongly refute them.
Amazon Web Services enters emerging race against tech giants days after Microsoft revealed its quantum chip
Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Thursday announced Ocelot, its first-generation quantum computing chip, as it enters the race against fellow tech giants in harnessing the experimental technology.
Developed by the AWS Center for Quantum Computing at the California Institute of Technology, the new chip can reduce the costs of implementing quantum error correction by up to 90%, according to the company.
Users complained of ‘not safe for work’ videos in feeds despite some having enabled setting to filter such content
Meta Platforms said on Thursday it had resolved an error that flooded the personal Reels feeds of Instagram users with violent and graphic videos worldwide.
It was not immediately clear how many people were affected by the glitch. Meta’s comments followed a wave of complaints on social media about violent and “not safe for work” content in Reels feeds, despite some users having enabled the “sensitive content control” setting meant to filter such material.
Israeli team heads to Cairo as end of deal’s first phase approaches, but big differences remain between two sides
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has announced that he has instructed a delegation to depart for Egypt for talks on continuing the ceasefire in the war with Hamas in Gaza, two days before the first stage of the fragile agreement expires.
The Israeli team is scheduled to leave Cairo, Egypt’s capital, late on Thursday, a statement from the prime minister’s office said. The announcement was made a day after Hamas handed over the bodies of four Israeli hostages, the last due to be released under the terms of the six-week first phase of the deal agreed in January.
About 112 people held in immigration center deep in the jungle are unable to communicate with their attorneys
Lawyers for immigrants from around the world who were deported from the United States and moved to a remote jungle camp in Panama say they have been unable to communicate with their clients since they arrived there.
About 112 deported people are being held in the “San Vicente” immigration center deep in the dense jungle that separates Panama from Colombia, according to Panamanian authorities. Their future is uncertain as they wait to see whether they will be granted asylum in Panama or elsewhere.
Trial-monitoring committee in Dakota Access lawsuit have shared concerns of judicial bias and due-process violations
More than half the jurors selected to hear a case brought by a major energy company against Greenpeace have ties to the fossil fuel industry, and most had negative views of anti-pipeline protests or groups that oppose the use of fossil fuels.
The closely watched trial against Greenpeace in Mandan, North Dakota, showcased the difficulty in seating a jury in oil country, where many make their living in the industry. Greenpeace again on Wednesday sought to move the trial to another venue in the state.
Dream of going from LA to San Francisco in three hours is past deadline, over budget, and after 16 years, incomplete
Californians know their state is a punching bag for Donald Trump’s administration, a “paradise lost” that the president intends to wrest back from the “radical left lunatics”. But when Trump took aim at the state’s much-delayed high-speed rail project earlier this month, saying it was “the worst managed project” he’d ever seen, some of those leftwingers – and more moderate voters – found themselves in the unusual position of conceding he might have a point.
California’s beautiful dream of a bullet train whisking passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than three hours has been more than 16 years in the making, approved by voters but dogged by so many delays, broken deadlines and cost overruns that it has only just reached the initial stages of laying down track.
The jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) has called on the group to disarm and dissolve, a major development that paves the way towards ending the 40-year conflict between militant Kurdish groups and the Turkish state and has far-reaching implications for the rest of the Middle East.
“I am making a call for the laying down of arms and I take on the historical responsibility for this call,” Abdullah Öcalan was quoted as saying in a letter read out by political allies in Istanbul. “All groups must lay down their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself.”
The London-born US actor on having Richard Attenborough as a mentor, why she loves starring in horror films, and hanging out with the Killers on the set of The OC
Richard I loved because he was like a mentor to me. He’s probably single-handedly done more for my career than anyone else. Just taking me under his wing, putting me in Rada, especially coming off the back of my crazy run on television. I couldn’t tell you how he found me. I don’t think he ever really told me.
Fresh out of jail, does it matter that his 2017 festival was one of the biggest social-media-driven deceptions of our time? Not a bit
“Since 2016, Fyre has been the most talked about festival in the world,” organiser Billy McFarland told a US broadcaster when tickets for Fyre 2 went on sale this week. McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison for wire fraud in 2018, related to his organisation of the first Fyre (he served only four). Whatever you think about the first Fyre – with its limp cheese sandwiches, its disaster-relief-tent accommodation, the absence of advertised headliners, the $26m of unpaid debt, the rats (were the rats influencer hyperbole? Perhaps, but on the other hand the festival happened on the parking lot of an abandoned resort development, and where else is a rat supposed to live?), you have to admit it lived up to one promise: it was legendary.
Wire fraud is any swindling that happens electronically, whether by text, email, phone or social media. It’s so easy to fall on the wrong side of that – you could commit it just by sending a round robin, asking for a million dollars. Really, all that is standing between so many of us and jail is the sucker who will give us a million dollars. It’s really the suckers who belong in prison, if you think about it. Anyway, back to McFarland. “Obviously, a lot of that [talk] has been negative … but if it’s done well, I think Fyre has the chance to be this annual festival that really takes over the festival industry,” he said.
Michelle Trachtenberg, who has died aged 39, is most famous for two very different roles in two very different shows that both loom large in the millennial consciousness. She was a fifth season addition to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, taking on the role of Buffy’s mysterious sister Dawn, a complicated, maturing young woman who came to occupy a central role in the series’ mythology. Four years later, she began a recurring role on Gossip Girl, as the Cruella-squared pot-stirrer Georgina Sparks, whom Trachtenberg once described as “basically the evil bitch from hell”.
With their very different aesthetics and intended audiences, Trachtenberg’s two hit series speak to very different parts of her fanbase: Buffy has a campy, B-movie charm, whereas Gossip Girl is as slick and indulgent as a delicious dessert. As those two shows indicate, her career defied easy generalisation – what to say of the woman who had her breakout role aged 11 in Harriet the Spy, before moving on to the racy teen raunchfest EuroTrip and the wholesome Disney banger Ice Princess?
Synechococcus elongatusis soaks up carbon dioxidefor its photosynthesis and stores more than other strains
Chonkus may sound like a champion Sumo wrestler but it is the nickname for a superpower strain of microbe that absorbs lots of CO2 relative to its size and stores it in its large cells.
Chonkus’s real name is Synechococcus elongatus, and it is a large and heavy strain of blue-green alga that soaks up CO2 for its photosynthesis, grows fast in dense colonies and stores more carbon than other strains of this microbe.
5 min West Ham are starting to get on the ball. You’d expect them to dominate possession tonight, and for much of Graham Potter’s time at the club given his methodology.
Group storms building with dean’s office over expulsion of two students last month who interrupted a class on Israel
A group of pro-Palestinian student protesters stormed a Barnard College building on Wednesday to protest against the expulsion last month of two students who interrupted a university class on Israel.
The demonstrators, who numbered in the dozens, staged a sit-in outside the office of Barnard’s dean, Leslie Grinage, in the college’s Milbank Hall, the Columbia Spectator reported.
Elimination from the Champions Trophy will surely end Jos Buttler’s tenure as white-ball captain, but is the lack of 50-over domestic cricket the biggest problem?
The diagnosis after England’s Test team hit rock bottom during that wretched Ashes winter of 2021-22 was a pretty shrewd one by Rob Key. Newly hired as director of men’s cricket, Key recognised that the players, good enough but grossly underperforming, had been ground down by the pandemic and its joyless treadmill of fixture fulfilment.
In came Brendon McCullum as the antipodean antidote to their negativity on and off the field. He was not a technical hire – although he analyses more information than the golf-bro image suggests – rather a relentlessly positive one who would double down on the aggressive outlook of Ben Stokes, his new captain, and not meet fire with ice.
Prada’s roomy dresses are an answer to restrictive women’s fashion, while Max Mara aims for ‘the corridors of power’
Backstage after the Prada show, someone asked Miuccia Prada if the four loose black dresses with which it began were a comment on fashion’s obsession with the Little Black Dress.
The designer laughed. “No. We are in a very black moment. This is a very difficult time. It is not my job to be political but, every time you open a newspaper – oh my God! My job is to think about what clothes a woman can wear. About what kind of femininity makes sense in a moment like this.”
Harlequins playmaker has been switched from fly-half
Fin Smith has become first choice in No 10 role
Marcus Smith can become a better full-back than fly-half according to the England assistant coach and brains behind his positional switch, Kevin Sinfield, who has insisted the experiment is worth persevering with.
Sinfield came up with the idea of shifting Smith to the No 15 jersey in the buildup to the 2023 World Cup where the Harlequins playmaker started against Chile, Fiji and Argentina in the bronze medal match.
The ‘misogynist influencer’ and his brother Tristan were held in Romania by a travel ban after being arrested in late 2022
The self-styled “misogynist influencer” Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan, both charged with human trafficking and other offences in Romania, have flown to the US after a travel ban was lifted.
Local authorities said prosecutors had approved a request from the brothers, who are dual British-US nationals, to travel. A Romanian court ruled in favour of an appeal from the Tates to lift a precautionary seizure on multiple assets, a representative for Andrew Tate said on Thursday.
As Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk alter US media, the connections between wealth and power are in plain sight
One of the unacknowledged advantages of the horrendous era we’ve entered is that it is revealing the putrid connections between great wealth and great power for all to see.
Oligarchs are fully exposed and they are defiant. It’s like hitting the “reveal codes” key on older computers that let you see everything.
Connexion
