Lauren Boebert, who pushed for Epstein files release, points to bill’s unanimous passage through US House and Senate

Republican representative Lauren Boebert has fired back at Donald Trump for vetoing a bill that would have funded a drinking water project in her Colorado district, implying the president was playing at political retaliation.

The bill was aimed at funding a decades-long project to bring safe drinking water to 39 communities in Colorado’s eastern plains, where the groundwater is high in salt and wells sometimes unleash radioactivity into the water supply.

Ex-special counsel testified in front of judiciary committee about aborted federal prosecution of Donald Trump

Jack Smith, the former justice department special counsel who led the aborted federal prosecution of Donald Trump, told a congressional committee that he never spoke to Joe Biden about his cases, according to the transcript of a deposition released on Wednesday.

In his behind-closed-doors testimony to the House judiciary committee earlier this month, Smith defended the charges he brought against Trump for allegedly possessing classified documents and attempting to overturn the 2020 election, while warning of the consequences of allowing election meddling to go unpunished.

Decision comes after DoJ stopped contesting California court’s ruling to return control of guard to state’s governor

Donald Trump has staged a sudden climbdown from his attempts to impose federal troops in law enforcement roles on Democratic-run cities, announcing on Wednesday that he was ending attempted deployments from Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland.

The unexpected shift came after justice department lawyers said they were no longer contesting a California court’s ruling that returned the national guard troops to the authority of Gavin Newsom, the state’s governor. It also followed a rare rebuke from the US supreme court, which blocked the White House’s efforts to deploy national guards in Illinois.

Resisted at first, the replacement for the subway token became an indelible symbol of the city

First, New Yorkers saw the elimination of subway token, which lasted for half a century. Now, its successor – the swipeable MetroCard, which lasted barely more than three decades – has seen its demise.

At midnight on 1 January, the flexible credit card-sized pass used by millions of New Yorkers to get through subway turnstiles is being terminated from sale just as a new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, takes office.

I’ve spent six years writing about environmental justice. The uncomfortable truth is that we’re not all in it together – but people power is reshaping the fight

It’s been another year of climate chaos and inadequate political action. And it’s hard not to feel despondent and powerless.

I joined the Guardian full time in 2019, as the paper’s first environmental justice correspondent, and have reported from across the US and the region over the past six years. It’s been painful to see so many families – and entire communities – devastated by fires, floods, extreme heat, sea level rise and food shortages. But what’s given me hope during these six years of reporting as both an environmental and climate justice reporter are the people fighting to save our planet from catastrophe – in their communities, on the streets and in courtrooms across the world.

Demonstrations against deteriorating living conditions have widened to include criticism of how Iran is governed

Alborz, a textile merchant in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, decided he could no longer sit on the sidelines. He closed his shop and took to the streets, joining merchants across Iran who shuttered their stores and students who took over their campuses to protest against declining economic conditions.

The sudden loss of purchasing power pushed Alborz and tens of thousands of other Iranians into the streets, where protests are now entering their fourth day. Students have paralysed university campuses, traders have shut down their stores and demonstrators have blocked off streets in defiance of police. Protests have spread from the capital, Tehran, to cities across Iran.

Just eight billionaires accounted for a quarter of the gains, led by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Larry Page

The richest 500 individuals in the world added a record $2.2tn to their wealth in 2025, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with just eight billionaires accounting for a quarter of the gains.

The gains increased their collective net worth to $11.9tn, bolstered by billionaire Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory and booming markets in cryptocurrencies, equities and metals.

In Eating Behind Bars, author Leslie Soble details how food is used to further punish incarcerated people in the US

At best you get “mystery meat”. Or “sour-smelling heaps” of macaroni. In the worst cases, it’s undercooked chicken, spoiled milk and maggot-infested produce.

In prisons and jails across the US, people are routinely fed unhealthy, tasteless or inedible meals. Many are left hungry and malnourished, with devastating long-term health consequences. The hidden crisis affecting millions of incarcerated people is the subject of Eating Behind Bars, a new book offering a disturbing account of how correctional institutions punish their residents through the food they provide and withhold.

Fifty-two black bears were killed in three-week hunt state officials said was necessary to reduce ursine population

Wildlife officials in Florida say the slaughter of dozens of black bears during a controversial three-week hunt this month was a success, despite the opposition of protesters who condemned the “heartbreaking, bloody spectacle”.

The Florida fish and wildlife conservation commission (FWC) on Tuesday announced that 52 bears were killed between 6 and 28 December, and promised to release a “full harvest report” in the coming months that will provide details about where and how the animals died.

Bylaws that would limit voting to Trump-appointed trustees appears to reveal long-held renaming plan

The Kennedy Center reportedly adopted bylaws earlier this year that would limit voting to Donald Trump-appointed trustees – a controversial move that appears to reveal the long-held plan to install Trump’s name to the center.

The bylaws, in a possible breach of the institution’s charter, were revised in May and specified that board members appointed by Congress, known as ex-officio members, could not vote or count towards a quorum, according to the Washington Post.

Tesla endured tough year in part thanks to some consumers’ distaste for Elon Musk’s embrace of rightwing politics

Tesla has taken the unusual step of publishing sales forecasts that suggest 2025 deliveries will be lower than expected and future years’ sales will be well below targets set by its chief executive, Elon Musk.

The US electric vehicle maker published figures from analysts suggesting it will announce 423,000 deliveries during the fourth quarter of 2025, in a new “consensus” section on its investor website. That would represent a 16% decline from the final quarter of 2024.

Guardian US readers share how global heating and biodiversity loss affected their lives in ways that don’t always make the headlines

The past year was another one of record-setting heat and catastrophic storms. But across the US, the climate crisis showed up in smaller, deeply personal ways too.

Campfires that once defined summer trips were never lit due to wildfire risks. There were no bites where fish were once abundant, forests turned to meadows after a big burn and childhood memories of winter wonderlands turned to slush.

Figure represents significant expansion on earlier estimates as Democrats accuse Trump officials of ‘hiding something’

The US justice department is believed to be reviewing more than 5m pages of documents relating to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein – an effort that is drawing resources away from existing cases, according to the New York Times.

The figure represents a significant expansion on earlier estimates, which drew on calculations based on 300 gigabytes of data, papers, videos, photographs and audio files held within FBI archives that relate to investigations in Florida and New York.

The US president and his allies spent 2025 attacking the Federal Reserve amid a rollercoaster year for the US economy

In the bowels of the US Federal Reserve this summer, two of the world’s most powerful men, sporting glistening white hard hats, stood before reporters looking like students forced to work together on a group project.

Allies of Donald Trump had spent weeks trying to manufacture a scandal around ongoing renovations of the central bank’s Washington headquarters and its costs. Now here was the US president, on a rare visit, examining the project for himself.