Gramma came to San Diego Zoo from Bronx Zoo in 1928 or 1931 and lived through 20 US presidents
After more than a century of munching on her favorite foods of romaine lettuce and cactus fruit, beloved Galapagos tortoise Gramma, the oldest resident of the San Diego Zoo, has died.
Gramma was born in her native habitat and was estimated to be about 141 years old, zoo officials said. She died on 20 November.
Discussions involving US, Russian and Ukrainian officials are taking place in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, the latest step in the Trump administration’s attempts to push through a peace deal to end the conflict in Ukraine.
The White House spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, put an optimistic spin on the talks, claiming the US had made “tremendous progress” on finding a resolution. There were “a few delicate, but not insurmountable, details” that needed to be ironed out which would require further talks, she said in a post on X.
The VP wouldn’t be where he is today without the patronage of the Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. But with voters becoming more and more concerned about the firm’s surveillance tech, could that relationship affect his chances?
The US is the land of the free and the home of the world’s most expensive, and most excruciatingly drawn-out, elections. In most democracies, the election cycle lasts just a few weeks or months. In most democracies there are strict laws regulating how long politicians can campaign, and how much money political parties can accept. But the US is not most democracies.
Pentagon said it was investigating Arizona senator Mark Kelly for violating military law by appearing in video in which lawmakers told military members to ‘refuse illegal orders’
Senator Mark Kelly has responded to the Pentagon’s announcement that it is investigating the Arizona lawmaker for possible breaches of military law after he joined five other Democratic members of Congress in a video calling for US troops to refuse illegal orders.
“I said something that was pretty simple and non controversial, and that was that members of the military should follow the law,” Kelly said in an MS NOW interview with Rachel on Monday. “And in response to that, Donald Trump said I should be executed.”
National spotlight, after video of violent fight went viral, has led residents to question just how safe their city is or isn’t – and who is responsible for sparking the debate
It took only a few days for footage of a violent brawl in downtown Cincinnati in July to catch the attention of some of the country’s most high-profile figures.
The fight, which saw a white woman punched in the face from behind by an African American man, among other incidents, took place when around 150,000 people were attending events in the city’s urban core.
CBP press release calls seized drugs and lettuce ‘a salad unfit for this year’s Thanksgiving table’
Officials at Texas’s border with Mexico seized roughly $10.3m worth of methamphetamine hidden in a lettuce shipment on Friday, according to US Customs and Border Protection.
A press release from CBP officials called the seized drugs and lettuce “a salad unfit for this year’s Thanksgiving table”, adding that the 500 packages of meth in question weighed about 1,153lbs.
The US health secretary’s ‘digital affair’ with Olivia Nuzzi doesn’t need sombre analysis. Take it from this Brit: sometimes laughter is the only option
Literally nothing on this earth takes itself as seriously as American journalism. There are rogue-state dictators it’s more permissible to laugh at than the endlessly hilarious pretensions of newsmen and newswomen in the United States. The crucial difference between the British press and US press is that at least we in the British press know we’re in the gutter. The Americans have always imagined – and so loudly – that they are involved in some kind of higher calling. Guys, I love you and stuff, but get over it, because you’re missing one of the great jokes of the century. Yourselves.
I don’t deny that everything’s bigger in America. Our former health secretary had a knee-trembler up against his office door in the pandemic; their current one apparently wrote felching … poetry, is it … felching poetry? … to a superstar journalist who was worrying about his brainworm, yet the story is being written up like it’s Dante, instead of X-rated Italian brainrot.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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Dutch writer Rutger Bregman says claim that Trump was ‘most openly corrupt president in US history’ was removed
The BBC has been plunged into a new row over its treatment of Donald Trump, after an academic accused it of censoring his remarks about alleged corruption by the US president.
Rutger Bregman, a Dutch author and historian, said the BBC had removed a “key line” from a flagship address he had been invited to give by the corporation.
Maybe. Let’s hope it is not too late for Democrats to win back the working class and Washington
Since the Democrats’ sweepingvictories on 4 November, a strange thing has happened among the party factions: a semblance of unity has emerged.
At first, “affordability” became the slogan of rapprochement. Moderates, populists and socialists agreed Democrats must campaign around the cost-of-living crisis and hang the broken economy around Donald Trump’s neck.
Trump puts US in unflattering company as lack of representative reveals disdain for climate progress
More than two decades ago, the US railed against the “axis of evil”. Now, after international climate talks spluttered to a meagre conclusion, the US finds itself grouped with unflattering company – an “axis of obstruction” that has stymied progress on the climate crisis.
Donald Trump’s administration opted to not send anyone to the UN climate summit in Brazil that culminated over the weekend – a first for the US in 30 years of these annual gatherings and another representation of the president’s disdain for the climate crisis, which he has called a “hoax” and a “con job.”
Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson are increasingly espousing Christian ‘values’, and a wealthy US legal group is becoming influential – this could have dire consequences
Earlier this year, not long after Tommy Robinson embraced evangelical Christianity while in prison, the thenConservative MP Danny Kruger spoke in parliament about the need for a restoration of Britain through the “recovery of a Christian politics”. Less than two months later, Kruger joined Reform, and shortly after that, James Orr, a vociferously conservative theologian who has been described as JD Vance’s “English philosopher king”, was appointed as one of Reform’s senior advisers. The party’s leader, Nigel Farage, now frequently invokes the need for a return to “Judeo-Christian” values.
The British right is increasingly invoking the Christian tradition: the question is what it hopes to gain from doing so.
Lamorna Ash is the author of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever (Bloomsbury Publishing, £22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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The 24-year-old was found dead in the early morning of 6 November, hours after being pursued by officers who had attempted a traffic stop in suburban Dallas. Police say Kneeland took his own life.
China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and Xi told Trump that its return was an ‘integral part of the post-war international order’
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has told Donald Trump that Beijing’s claims to Taiwan remain unchanged, in a phone call that came amid rising tensions over the self-governing island.
Xi told Trump on Monday that Taiwan’s return to China was an “integral part of the postwar international order” forged in the joint US-China fight against “fascism and militarism”, according to the Chinese foreign ministry.
Expecting to be financial advisers at the Fortune 500 firm, some hires say they were ‘gaslit’ into peddling ‘terrible’ life insurance to all their contacts
Northwestern Mutual likes to think of itself as a storied American institution offering specialized financial advice. The 168-year-old financial giant, ranked 109 on the Fortune 500, and regularly anointed one of the World’s Most Admired Companies by the magazine, describes its financial advisers as “expert listeners” or a “trusted partner who helps you continue to reach goal after goal”.
It also tops Forbes’s list of Best Employers for New Grads, a title that makes it attractive to hundreds of college students desperate for an internship that could launch them into a career in financial services. Each year they file into Northwestern’s glassy offices across the country for a three-month internship that they hope could change their lives. There, they are slotted in beside thousands of full-time “financial representatives”, many of them recent graduates themselves.
The 28-point plan outlined last week by the US would have delivered peace on Putin’s terms. EU leaders must help Kyiv resist the bullying
There was a grim familiarity to the unveiling of Donald Trump’s latest peace proposals for Ukraine last week. As in August, when the US president invited Vladimir Putin to a summit in Alaska, Kyiv and its European allies were excluded from discussions that ended up echoing Kremlin talking points. Yet again, Mr Trump publicly scolded Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not being more grateful for his ongoing mediation efforts. And as in the summer, Mr Zelenskyy and blindsided European leaders strove to stay polite while scrambling to limit the damage.
The salvage operation appears to have been relatively successful, following Sunday’s meeting in Geneva between the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and a Ukrainian delegation. The 28-point plan reportedly drafted by Mr Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, and the Kremlin adviser, Kirill Dmitriev, was in effect a repackaging of Mr Putin’s maximalist demands. A deal premised on the handing over of new territory in the Donbas region to Russia, restrictions on Ukraine’s sovereignty, and drastic limits on the size of its future army, could never be acceptable to Kyiv. Mr Rubio, suggesting a more “refined” framework was now being developed, seemed to at least acknowledge this fundamental difficulty.
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The US president has reportedly asked Paramount for a fourth instalment of the cop comedy starring Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. Whether he wants an acting credit or has suddenly come over all inclusive remains to be seen
It is said that by 328BC, having made empires kneel to him, Alexander the Great wept … for there were no more worlds to conquer.
Similarly, having solved the Middle East and Ukraine issues with only a couple of technicalities to iron out and put an end to so many other wars as well, Donald Trump may also be tempted to sob at having run out of important tasks. And yet, just as he is about to kneel in anguish on the Oval Office carpet, he is apparently perking up at the thought of one more mighty challenge.
Members of the groundbreaking, politically revolutionary group talk about the state of hip-hop and the US government’s attacks on people of color
For the first time in 35 years, Billboard’s Hot 100 chart does not include a rap song among its top 40 hit records. Anyone who’s been listening to the music for at least that long can list myriad reasons why that’s now the case: all the beats sound the same, all the artists are industry plants, all the lyrics are barely intelligible etc. For hip-hop forefather Abiodun Oyewole, though, it boils down to this: “We embraced ‘party and bullshit’, my brother.”
Fifty-seven years ago, on what would have been Malcolm X’s 43rd birthday, Oyewole cliqued up with two young poets at a writers’ workshop in East Harlem’s Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) to form what would become the Last Poets, a collective of bard revolutionaries. They outfitted themselves in African prints, performed over the beat of a congo drum and advocated for populism in their verses. The group has had many configurations over the years, but Oyewole, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin and Umar Bin Hassan abide as the standout members. The trio is all over the band’s self-titled first album – which was released in 1970 and peaked at No 29 on the Billboard 200. Their follow-up album, This Is Madness, made them ripe targets for J Edgar Hoover’s Cointelpro campaign against the emerging figures the then-FBI director deemed politically subversive. Notably, Oyewole could not contribute to that album because he had been incarcerated for an attempted robbery of a Ku Klux Klan headquarters, serving two and a half years of a three-year sentence. (He was trying to raise bail for activists who had been arrested for striking back at the Klan.)
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