One person had made an emergency call after companion fell 500ft, but rescue copter couldn’t land due to high winds
A man and two of his companions are dead after high winds prevented rescue crews from responding to a report of an injured hiker near a southern California mountain trail, the San Bernardino county sheriff’s department announced on Monday.
The three bodies were discovered Monday evening along the Devil’s Backbone trail at Mount Baldy, which rises more than 10,000ft and sits just east of Los Angeles, according to a statement from the San Bernardino county sheriff’s department.
Schlossberg, 35, revealed in November diagnosis of mutation of cancer of blood and bone marrow
Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of the 35th US president, John F Kennedy, died on Tuesday after revealing in November she had been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. She was 35.
Her passing was announced in a social media post by the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. “Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” the post said. It was signed “George, Edwin and Josephine Moran, Ed, Carolina, Jack, Rose and Rory”.
In an unusual turn, the central bank’s board debated over monetary policy before the latest quarter-point cut
The US Federal Reserve agreed to cut interest rates at its December meeting only after a deeply nuanced debate about the risks facing the US economy right now, according to minutes of the latest two-day session.
Even some of those who supported the rate cut acknowledged “the decision was finely balanced or that they could have supported keeping the target range unchanged”, given the different risks facing the US economy, according to the minutes released on Tuesday.
Nearly a week after Donald Trump first announced what he said was the first US ground strike in a four-month-long military pressure campaign against Venezuela, details remain very thin on the ground.
CNN and the New York Times reported late on Monday that they had confirmed the CIA had used a drone to target a “port facility” allegedly used by the Tren de Aragua street gang. No casualties were reported, but the date, time and location of the attack remain unknown. Venezuela’s strongman leader, Nicolás Maduro, and his government have remained silent.
If confirmed, the first strike on land would mark a new phase in a campaign that since August has involved the deployment of a massive US naval fleet, airstrikes that have so far killed 107 people, a “total blockade” of sanctioned oil tankers, the seizure of two vessels and the pursuit of a third.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is at risk after Donald Trump vowed to shutter it since his return to office
A federal judge has ordered that the Trump administration must allow funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to continue.
The watchdog, which supporters say protects US consumers from financial harm by powerful banks, lenders and corporations, is at risk of collapsing after Donald Trump vowed to shutter it since he returned to office this year.
In a statement shared on Instagram, Nguyen says she faced a ‘tsunami of harassment’ after the all-female spaceflight
Amanda Nguyen, the Vietnamese-American astronaut who was part of the all-female Blue Origin spaceflight, has opened up about her depression after she experienced a “tsunami of harassment” after the trip, in which she became the first Vietnamese woman to go to space.
Nguyen, 34, was part of April’s historic 11-minute flight, whose crew included pop star Katy Perry, broadcast journalist Gayle King, and journalist and wife of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sánchez. The flight was heavily criticized for its environmental impact and critics questioned its purpose and use of resources.
Mamdani to take oath of office on New Year’s Eve in Gilded Age subway station beneath city hall
While tens of thousands of New Yorkers will be in Times Square for countdown to 2026, the city’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has said he will be sworn into office in an underground midnight private ceremony at an abandoned subway station built during the Gilded Age.
Mamdani, 34, plans to take the oath of office on New Year’s Eve in a disused subway station beneath city hall which acts as turnaround for the local 5 train. The unusual choice of venue for the ceremony, Mamdani said, is symbolically resonant of the “inauguration of a new era”.
Over the holiday period, the Guardian leader column is looking ahead at the themes of 2026. Today, how US foreign policy has dramatically – and alarmingly – turned towards Latin America and the Caribbean
Donald Trump is not generally noted as a student of history. Yet over the past year, his decisive reorientation of US foreign policy towards the Americas has revived a playbook dating back two centuries, to the fifth president, James Monroe. Now the 47th is doubling down. An anti-interventionist is having second thoughts. Remarks that sounded at first like bad jokes or random outbursts from the presidential id have become more sinister through repetition or accompanying actions. Only a fool would take all of Mr Trump’s comments literally – but they should certainly be taken seriously.
He has refused to rule out using military force to take control of Greenland and repeatedly floated the idea of making Canada the 51st state. He threatened to seize the Panama canal. He has imposed swingeing tariffs on key partners, and says he might abandon the Canada-Mexico trade pact signed in his first term. He has meddled outrageously in elections in Honduras and Argentina, and sought to interfere with Brazilian justice. He imposed sanctions on Colombia’s president in October. He has launched deadly attacks on alleged drug boats in international waters – extrajudicial killings that the administration has sought to legitimise by arbitrarily designating traffickers as terrorists – and threatened military strikes on Mexico, Venezuela and any other country he blames for drugs consumed in the US.
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Trump ratcheted up his questionable claims about the environment and how to deal, if at all, with the threats to it
In the past decade at the forefront of US politics, Donald Trump has unleashed a barrage of unusual, misleading or dubious assertions about the climate crisis, which he most famously called a “hoax”.
This year has seen Trump ratchet up his often questionable claims about the environment and how to deal, if at all, with the threats to it. In a year littered with lies and wild declarations, these are the five that stood out as the most startling.
Frigid temperatures in Great Lakes, north-east and midwest as tens of thousands face power outages and icy travel
A wild winter storm brought strong winds, heavy snow and frigid temperatures to the Great Lakes and north-east on Tuesday, a day after a bomb cyclone barreled across the midwest and left tens of thousands of customers without power.
The storm hit parts of the Plains and Great Lakes on Monday with sharply colder air, strong winds and a mix of snow, ice and rain, leading to treacherous travel. Forecasters said it intensified quickly enough to meet the criteria of a bomb cyclone, a system that strengthens rapidly as pressure drops.
The Cookers on Monday pulled out of a New Year’s Eve jazz gig at the controversially renamed ‘Trump-Kennedy’ center
A second jazz band has pulled out of performing at the controversially renamed “Trump-Kennedy” center in Washington DC, giving just two days’ notice before their New Year’s Eve gig was set to take place.
The Cookers, described as a Grammy-nominated, all-star septet of legendary post-bop jazz musicians, have not given an explicit reason for their decision but in a statement posted on their website said: “Jazz was born from struggle and from a relentless insistence on freedom: freedom of thought, of expression, and of the full human voice.”
While Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this year achieved his dream of dragging the US into a military confrontation with Iran, it came at a steep and unprecedented cost for Israel. Seeing Netanyahu beg Donald Trump to be bailed out from a quagmire, a rising number of Americans openly acknowledge that Israel is not an ally but a liability. In September, the US’s Arab allies also reached the conclusion that we Iranians have always underscored: Israel’s recklessness is a threat to all.
This reality is paving the way for whole new relationships that may transform our region. The US administration now faces a dilemma: it can continue writing blank cheques for Israel with American taxpayer dollars and credibility, or be part of a tectonic change for the better. For decades, western policy towards our region has been mostly shaped by myths originating from Israel. The war in June was momentous for a number of reasons, including how it exposed the cost for the west of mistaking mythology for strategy. Israel and its proxies claim a “decisive victory”, with Iran left weakened and deterred. Yet our vast strategic depth – the country covers an area the size of western Europe, and has a population 10 times that of Israel’s – meant that most of our provinces were untouched by Israel’s aggression. In contrast, all Israelis experienced the might of our military. The narrative of invulnerability – central to Israel’s myth-making machine – has been shattered.
Seyed Abbas Araghchi is the Iranian foreign minister
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When Elon Musk vowed late last year to lead a “department of government efficiency” (Doge), he claimed it would operate with “maximum transparency” as it set about saving $2tn worth of waste and exposing massive fraud.
Today, with Musk out of the White House, Doge having cut only a tiny fraction of the waste it promised, and dozens of lawsuits alleging violations of privacy and transparency laws, much of what the agency has done remains a mystery.
Aspirant Americans tell of exclusions from ceremonies by sudden policy introduced on ‘security’ grounds
The occasion should have been marked by the joy of reaching the destination of US citizenship following the long odyssey of immigration.
Instead, the ceremony at Boston’s Faneuil Hall – renowned as a “cradle of liberty” for its role as a protest hub in the run-up to the American revolution – felt like a nightmarish end of the road for some aspirant new Americans who had turned up full of hope.
We enter 2026 with radical uncertainty about the fate of the US – but also with the clarity that people have the power to determine what it will be
When we talk about opposition in politics, sometimes it’s just a policy disagreement – but in the current political crisis in the US, the opposition has become the opposite of the Trump administration in meaningful ways. It had to because this is not only a policy conflict.
Between the administration and the opposition are actual opposites of principle: among those committed to inclusion and those to exclusion; truth and lies; kindness and cruelty; the protection and destruction of systems that in turn protect the climate or public health.
If the DNC isn’t open and transparent about why they lost, then how can we be sure they will learn their lesson this time?
The Democratic National Committee’s decision to block the release of its own autopsy report on the 2024 election is stunning but not surprising. Averse to unpleasant candor, the Democrats’ governing body functions more like a PR firm than a political organization devoted to grassroots capacities for winning elections. The party’s leaders pose as immune from critique, even if they have led the party to disaster.
Unwilling to depart from the party establishment’s culture of conformity, the DNC has remained under the Biden-Harris shadow throughout 2025. Release of an official autopsy might have shown that party leaders actually want to encourage public discourse about the missteps that enabled Donald Trump to become president again. But the DNC is proceeding as if there’s nothing to be learned from the tragic debacle of 2024 that its leaders don’t already know – and they don’t need to share their purported wisdom with anyone else.
Voter disenchantment: Losing 6.8 million voters who supported Joe Biden in 2020 proved pivotal in the close 2024 election. Harris’s inability to mobilize those pro-Biden voters was a massive failure.
Biden’s betrayal: Biden’s stubborn decision to seek re-election, and his refusal to step aside until very late in the process, robbed Democratic voters of open primaries and undermined Democrats’ chances.
Abandoning the working-class base: With millions of Americans feeling desperate because of rising costs, the Harris campaign lost this Democratic base by bowing to corporate donors’ interests and failing to challenge the impact of corporate greed in escalating inflation.
The Gaza effect: Harris lost many voters – especially young people, Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans, with sizable consequences in Michigan and other swing states – due to her refusal to indicate any openness to shifting her policy position on Israel and Palestine.
Losing young voters: Extensive evidence shows a huge drop-off in Democratic support among young voters aged 18-29.
As the billionaire retires, he leaves memorable advice from his annual letters that include pithy takes on bubbles, discipline and long-term goals
Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor who is retiring at the end of 2025, has entertained and educated shareholders in his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate for many years with his pithy annual letters outlining the firm’s performance.
Every year since 1965 he has updated his investors on the journey as Berkshire morphed from a “struggling northern textile business” with $25m of shareholder equity when he took over, to an empire worth more than $1tn.
Though the price I paid for Berkshire looked cheap, its business – a large northern textile operation – was headed for extinction.
My error caused Berkshire shareholders to give far more than they received (a practice that – despite the biblical endorsement – is far from blessed when you are buying businesses).
Woody Allen once explained why eclecticism works: ‘The real advantage of being bisexual is that it doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.’
When such a CEO is encouraged by his advisers to make deals, he responds much as would a teenage boy who is encouraged by his father to have a normal sex life. It’s not a push he needs.
Andrew destroyed a few small insurers. Beyond that, it awakened some larger companies to the fact that their reinsurance protection against catastrophes was far from adequate. (It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.)
In our view, however, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.
Participants seeking to dodge troubles face the same problem as someone seeking to avoid venereal disease: it’s not just whom you sleep with, but also whom they are sleeping with.
From this irritating reality comes the first law of corporate survival for ambitious CEOs who pile on leverage and run large and unfathomable derivatives books: modest incompetence simply won’t do; it’s mind-boggling screw-ups that are required.
When downpours of that sort occur, it’s imperative that we rush outdoors carrying washtubs, not teaspoons. And that we will do.
Naturally, I was delighted to attend Mrs B’s birthday party. After all, she’s promised to attend my 100th.
She sold me our interest when she was 89 and worked until she was 103. (After retiring, she died the next year, a sequence I point out to any other Berkshire manager who even thinks of retiring.)
The candidates are young to middle-aged, well-to-do to rich, and all wish to work for Berkshire for reasons that go beyond compensation.
(I’ve reluctantly discarded the notion of my continuing to manage the portfolio after my death – abandoning my hope to give new meaning to the term ‘thinking outside the box’.)
In documentary I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, the actor and his family revealed that doctors told them to ‘prepare yourselves for the worst’
Chevy Chase suffered “near fatal” heart failure which led to him being placed in an induced coma during the pandemic in 2021, according to a new film about the American actor and comedian.
As documented in I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, the star of films such as Caddyshack and the National Lampoon movies, who hosted the Oscars twice, spent a total of five weeks in hospital.
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