Influential musician who created Americana hits had recently been hospitalized with pneumonia
Todd Snider, the influential alt-country singer-songwriter who created Americana hits such as Alright Guy, has died at 59.
His passing was shared through announcements on his official social media accounts. Although no cause of death was provided, his family shared on Friday that he had recently been hospitalized with pneumonia.
Once escapees from the pet trade, Los Angeles’s feral parrots have become a vibrant part of city life, and could even aid conservation in their native homelands
A morning mist hung over the palm trees as birds chattered and cars roared by on the streets of Pasadena. It was a scene that evoked a tropical island rather than a bustling city in north-east Los Angeles county.
“It feels parrot-y,” says Diego Blanco, a research assistant at Occidental College’s Moore Laboratory of Zoology, nodding to the verdant flora that surrounds us: tall trees and ornamental bushes with berries.
From Texas and Iowa to Arkansas, faith leaders are wading into politics to counter the rise of Christian nationalism
He grew up on a farm in Indiana, the son of a factory worker and eldest of five children. He studied at Liberty, a Christian university founded by the conservative pastor and televangelist Jerry Falwell, and recalls wearing a T-shirt expressing opposition to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
Two decades later, Justin Douglas is running for the US Congress – as a Democrat.
Bangkok had earlier said it was suspending ceasefire, accusing Cambodia of laying landmines along the border
The US has put pressure on Thailand to recommit to a ceasefire with Cambodia, warning trade talks could be halted as Washington seeks to keep a Donald Trump-brokered truce agreement from falling apart.
Earlier this week, Thailand said that it was suspending the ceasefire deal, accusing Cambodia of laying fresh landmines along the border, including one it said wounded a Thai soldier on patrol, who lost a foot in the explosion.
Seemingly identical signatures appeared on clemency orders, which White House blamed on technical error
The Trump administration’s clemency drive is coming under scrutiny after the justice department this week replaced pardons posted online that bore strikingly similar copies of Trump’s signature with others that are distinctively variable.
The corrections came after online commenters seized on the similarities in the president’s signature granting “full and unconditional” pardons to seven men, including to former New York Mets player Darryl Strawberry, former Tennessee House speaker Glen Casada and former New York police sergeant Michael McMahon, on 7 November.
Venezuelan-born Jose Barco detained upon early release from prison following attempted murder conviction
An army veteran and Purple Heart recipient who served two tours in Iraq was deported on Friday morning from an immigration detention facility in Florence, Arizona.
Arizona state representative Raquel Terán told Fox 10 Phoenix that Jose Barco, a Venezuelan-born veteran whose family fled Cuba as refugees, was deported at 4am from Arizona.
The US government was shut down for weeks – and then Democrats shrugged their shoulders and gave up
Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, has a pair of very sweet imaginary friends. They’re a middle-class couple called Joe and Eileen Bailey and they live on Long Island. At one point the imaginary couple, who feature in Schumer’s 2007 book, Positively American, were called the O’Reillys. According to the Hill, one Schumer aide said the name then was changed because the publisher thought O’Reilly was “too ethnic” for mass consumption. Another aide said that claim was false, and Schumer just wanted a name that “sounded more national”. Naming strategy aside, the key point here is that Schumer has said he runs all his policy decisions by this completely fictional couple. He’s referred to them hundreds of times throughout his political career.
Pair devised responses to public outrage about Epstein’s criminal history, his treatment by the justice system and his friendships with powerful people
Hundreds of texts over almost a year show Maga influencer Steve Bannon and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein workshopping legal and media strategies to protect Epstein from the legal and publicity quagmire that enveloped him in the last year of his life.
The texts, released by the House oversight committee on Wednesday, show that as early as June 2018, the pair were devising responses to the gathering storm of public outrage about Epstein’s criminal history, his favorable treatment by the justice system, and his friendships with powerful figures in business, politics and academia.
Sydney Sweeney has become the poster child of a predicted rightwing cultural domination. So why is no one watching her films?
I was on a walk around my local area in London when I was stopped in my tracks by a young man sauntering past me, wearing stone-wash jeans, a pair of shades and a “Reagan-Bush ’84” T-shirt. He gave off an incredibly smug air but, to be fair, he did look good. It’s a nice T-shirt, not like those garish Reform-branded football kits, so I could see why it might be appealing. A quick search informed me that for gen-Z rightwingers in the US, it has become the “conservative take on a band shirt or the once-ubiquitous Che Guevara tee”.
That casual display of conservative aesthetics reminded me of something else too: a much discussed cover of New York magazine from earlier this year, after Trump 2.0’s inauguration, which showed young rightwingers celebrating as they “contemplate cultural domination”.
President turns on ‘Wacky Marjorie’ after congresswoman criticizes effort to block release of key Epstein documents
Donald Trump announced Friday that he is withdrawing his support and endorsement of Republican lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene, a longtime ally and previously fierce defender of the president and the Maga movement.
Trump’s move away from Greene came just hours after she said in an interview she thought the president’s attempts to stop the release of the files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is “insanely the wrong direction to go”.
Donald Trump moved to lower tariffs on food imports, including beef, tomatoes, coffee and bananas, in an executive order on Friday as the White House fights off growing concerns about rising costs.
The new exemptions take effect retroactively at midnight on Thursday and mark a sharp reversal for Trump, who has long insisted that his import duties are not fueling inflation. They come after a string of victories for Democrats in state and local elections in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City, where affordability was a key topic.
Viral plush toy is heading to big screen after a deal was signed with details still unclear over whether it would be live-action or animated
Labubus could be headed to the big screen. Sony Pictures has acquired the screen rights to the plush toy sensation and is in early development of a feature film which, if successful, would anchor a new franchise.
The deal, first reported by the Hollywood Reporter, was signed this week between the Chinese toy makers and Sony Pictures, whose animation division is fresh off the global success of KPop Demon Hunters. No producer or film-maker is attached to the project yet, and it’s still unclear if the film would be live-action or animated.
Deal would also require multibillionaire family to give up ownership of the Connecticut-based firm
A federal bankruptcy court judge on Friday said he would approve OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma’s latest deal to settle thousands of lawsuits over the toll of opioids that includes some money for thousands of victims of the epidemic.
The deal overseen by US bankruptcy judge Sean Lane would require some of the multibillionaire members of the semi-reclusive Sackler family who own the company to contribute up to $7bn and give up ownership of the Connecticut-based firm.
Exclusive: Almost all Palestinians have been displaced to ‘red zone’ where no reconstruction is planned
The US is planning for the long-term division of Gaza into a “green zone” under Israeli and international military control, where reconstruction would start, and a “red zone” to be left in ruins.
Foreign forces will initially deploy alongside Israeli soldiers in the east of Gaza, leaving the devastated strip divided by the current Israeli-controlled “yellow line”, according to US military planning documents seen by the Guardian and sources briefed on American plans.
Donald Trump agreed to cut US tariffs on Switzerland from 39% to 15% as part of a new trade pact, lowering duties that strained economic ties and hit Swiss exporters.
The two countries have signed a “non-binding memorandum of understanding”, the Swiss government announced, following bilateral talks in Washington and intense lobbying by Swiss firms.
In attacking a vital broadcaster, the US president is once again holding others to standards he flouts. But the Maga faithful might not let his links to the disgraced financier go
To confront Donald Trump is to engage in asymmetric warfare. It is to enter a battlefield that is not level, where he enjoys an immediate and in-built advantage over those who would oppose him or merely hold him to account. That fact has cost Democrats dearly over the past decade – exacting a toll again this very week – but it has now upended an institution central to Britain’s national life: namely, the BBC.
The key asymmetry can be spelled out simply. Trump pays little or no regard to the conventional bounds of truth or honesty. His documented tally of false or misleading statements runs into the tens of thousands: the Washington Post registered 30,573 such statements during Trump’s first term in the White House, an average of 21 a day. In a single interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes earlier this month, Trump spoke falsely 18 times, according to CNN.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
Guardian newsroom: Year One of Trumpism: Is Britain Emulating the US?
On Wednesday 21 January 2026, join Jonathan Freedland, Tania Branigan and Nick Lowles as they reflect on the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency – and to ask if Britain could be set on the same path.
Book ticketshere or at guardian.live
Marine Mammal Center in Morro Bay and local harbor patrol teamed up for mission to reunite pup with its mother
It was a foggy October afternoon on the central California coast when the Marine Mammal Center got a call on their public hotline: there were distressed cries coming from the frigid waters in Morro Bay.
The center’s experts were able to determine that the calls – which sounded almost like a human baby screeching – were coming from a roughly two-week-old sea otter pup that had been separated from its mother.
German far-right party urges Berlin and other European nations to also designate ‘antifa’ groups as terrorist organisations
Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party has welcomed the US government’s decision to classify a prominent German anti-fascist group and three other European networks as terrorist organisations, calling on Berlin and other European governments to follow the example.
But historians of anti-fascism warned that at a time when far-right groups were making electoral gains across the continent, the move set a dangerous precedent that could prepare the ground for a broader crackdown on leftwing activism.
Anthropic says financial firms and government agencies were attacked ‘largely without human intervention’
A leading artificial intelligence company claims to have stopped a China-backed “cyber espionage” campaign that was able to infiltrate financial firms and government agencies with almost no human oversight.
The US-based Anthropic said its coding tool, Claude Code, was “manipulated” by a Chinese state-sponsored group to attack 30 entities around the world in September, achieving a “handful of successful intrusions”.
Ipsos survey reveals fake news, lack of accountability, extremism and corruption seen as biggest threats
Satisfaction with democracy is below 50% in eight out of nine western countries surveyed in a poll, and majorities in all but one fear for its future, with fake news, lack of political accountability, extremism and corruption seen as the biggest threats.
An Ipsos survey of almost 10,000 people in Croatia, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US found satisfaction with democracy low in all except Sweden, with deep concerns about the future state of electoral politics.
Jonathan Jarvis, who led the agency from 2009 to 2017, laid out the dire consequences of not closing parks in shutdown
Americans should “raise hell” to protect US national parks through the “nightmare” of Donald Trump’s presidency, according to a former National Park Service director, amid alarm over the impact of the federal government shutdown.
Jonathan Jarvis claimed the agency was now in the hands of a “bunch of ideologues” who would have no issue watching it “go down in flames” – and see parks from Yellowstone to Yosemite as potential “cash cows”, ripe for privatization.
Stephen Bryant, 44, convicted over 2004 murder, was shot dead despite growing backlash against ‘barbaric’ method
South Carolina executed a man by firing squad on Friday, marking the third time the state has used gunfire to kill a person on death row despite growing backlash against the method.
Stephen Bryant, 44, had been sentenced to death for the October 2004 killing of Willard “TJ” Tietjen and pleaded guilty to two other murders. Bryant’s lawyers had argued in final appeals that the sentencing judge had been unable to consider his brain damage from his mother’s alcohol and drug use during pregnancy, but South Carolina’s supreme court declined to halt the execution on Monday.
The US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, said that the US has “essentially reached a deal with Switzerland”, after the country was hit with a 39% tariff on Swiss exports to the US.
“We’re really excited about that deal and what it means for American manufacturing,” Greer told CNBC today in an interview.
It is an intelligence relationship that predates even the Five Eyes: the UKUSA alliance that began, naturally enough, in secret in 1946. But this week the strain of trying to be the closest security ally to a freewheeling White House has begun to show.
Britain, it emerged, had quietly suspended intelligence cooperation with the US in the Caribbean because London does not consider the deadly US military campaign against ships accused of drug trafficking to be in line with international law.
Connexion
