In her first town hall, Weiss expressed some regret over her decision to pull 60 Minutes segment at the last minute

During her first address to CBS News employees as editor in chief, Bari Weiss acknowledged that there had been “a lot of noise” about her tumultuous tenure and said that some staffers might decide they don’t support her or want to continue working at the company.

“I just want to start by saying: I get it. And I get why, in the face of all this tumult and noise, you might feel uncertain or skeptical about me and about what I’m aiming to do here,” Weiss said on Tuesday morning, according to an audio recording of her comments obtained by the Guardian.

Exercises described by President Trump as an ‘armada’ to be led by the USS Abraham Lincoln amid standoff

The US has announced plans to hold multi-day military exercises in the Middle East as it deploys what Donald Trump has called an “armada” led by the USS Abraham Lincoln to the region as part of a tense standoff with Iran.

The display of US air power was announced as the White House has suggested it could launch new strikes on Iran after the government’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters that has left thousands dead and many more in detention with their fates uncertain.

Ex-president avoids naming Trump but says ‘Minnesotans have suffered enough at the hands of this administration’

Joe Biden has joined other former Democratic presidents in condemning the fatal shooting of the 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, saying that it “betrays our most basic values as Americans”.

In a statement that alluded to the constitutional right to due process, Biden said: “We are not a nation that guns down our citizens in the street. We are not a nation that allows our citizens to be brutalized for exercising their constitutional rights. We are not a nation that tramples the fourth amendment and tolerates our neighbors being terrorized.”

Suit against Debra Lynch is latest from Texas’s Republican attorney general amid ongoing attacks on abortion pills

As part of its ongoing crusade against abortion pills, Texas sued a nurse practitioner on Tuesday, accusing her of shipping pills into Texas in defiance of the state’s abortion ban.

The nurse practitioner, Debra Lynch, operates a Delaware-based group called Her Safe Harbor, which mails abortion pills to women living in states with abortion bans. Now, Texas wants a court to block Lynch from “performing, inducing or attempting abortions” in Texas, on the grounds that Texas law only permits physicians to facilitate abortions in cases of medical emergencies.

Claudia Sheinbaum denied move was response to pressure from the US, after Trump said ‘zero’ oil would go to Cuba

Mexico has cancelled a shipment of oil to Cuba, the country’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, appeared to confirm on Tuesday, but she insisted the decision was “sovereign” and not a response to pressure from the US.

Fuel shortages are causing increasingly severe blackouts in Cuba, and Mexico has been the island’s biggest oil supplier since the US blocked shipments from Venezuela last month.

Defense in sexual abuse trial of property magnates Tal, Oren and Alon Alexander urges jurors to reject ‘monstrous story’

Three brothers, two of them real estate agents who catered to the jet-set crowd, used a playbook over a 12-year stretch that sometimes involved drugging women and girls before raping them, a prosecutor told a New York jury on Tuesday in an opening statement.

Assistant US attorney Madison Smyser said the brothers used “whatever means necessary” including luxury accommodations, flights, drugs, alcohol and sometimes brute force to lure women into situations where they could be raped.

Composer says values of Trump-dominated Kennedy Center ‘are in direct conflict’ with symphony’s message

Philip Glass, the celebrated US composer, has withdrawn the world premiere of his latest symphony at Washington DC’s John F Kennedy Center in protest of Donald Trump’s presidency.

In a statement on Tuesday, the 88-year-old composer said: “After thoughtful consideration, I have decided to withdraw my Symphony No 15 ‘Lincoln’ from the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Symphony No 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the symphony.

The man who sprayed her was swiftly tackled to the ground by security, but Omar insisted on continuing her remarks

Minnesota raids continue as DHS report indicates two agents fired guns at Pretti

Melania Trump has called for “unity” in the wake of the fatal federal law enforcement shootings of US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and widespread peaceful protests this month.

Asked about the tensions in Minneapolis on Fox News this morning, the first lady said:

We need to unify. I’m calling for unity. I know my husband, the president, had a great call yesterday with the governor and the mayor, and they’re working together to make it peaceful and without riots.

Rapper and fashion mogul, legally known as Ye, gives details of mental health treatment and speaks of making amends with those in his personal life

Kanye West has elaborated on his mindset during manic episodes in which he made strongly antisemitic comments.

On separate occasions, the rapper and fashion designer, legally known as Ye, had said “There’s a lot of things that I love about Hitler” and “I’m a Nazi … I love Hitler”, had accused Jewish people of trying “to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda”, and designed clothing featuring swastikas.

First-of-its kind suit filed by civil rights attorneys on behalf of families centers on 14 October strike in Caribbean Sea that killed six

Civil rights attorneys filed a federal lawsuit against the United States government on Tuesday on behalf of the families of two men from a small fishing village in Trinidad who were killed in a US military airstrike on a small boat in the Caribbean Sea on 14 October.

The lawsuit, shared in advance with the Guardian, says that Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, both of Las Cuevas, Trinidad, were returning to Trinidad from Venezuela when they and four other people were killed in the strike. It was the fifth attack announced by the White House under Donald Trump’s campaign against the small go-fast boats the administration claims are connected to cartels and gangs.

Insurance practices in an age of climate volatility raise troubling questions about home ownership and housing affordability – the bedrock of the American middle class

For a few frenetic days last January, after losing their midcentury ranch home to the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles, Jessica and Matt Conkle thought they could see a glimmer of hope.

Their insurance company, State Farm, had sent emergency response teams to Altadena, where they lived, and they filed a claim right away. It wasn’t long before they received a check that covered four months of living expenses.

More than 800 employees sign petition calling for withdrawal of ICE agents and cancellation of contracts

More than 800 US tech workers have signed a petition calling for tech CEOs to demand the Trump administration remove US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from US cities and cancel contracts with the agency.

“We know our industry leaders have leverage: in October, they persuaded Trump to call off a planned ICE surge in San Francisco,” the petition reads. “Now they need to go further, and join us in demanding ICE out of all of our cities.”

Truly, I am the country’s biggest fan. But in the spirit of free speech its leaders apparently love, here’s a few things the rest of the world needs them to know

We in the rest of the world have had to hear a lot – such a lot – about what this US government and its hardcore fanbase thinks about us. So you know they’ll be super-relaxed and free-speechy about hearing some thoughts about how they look from the outside. Let’s use last Saturday as a single snapshot. In Minneapolis, they had the shooting by ICE agents of a protesting nurse who posed no threat – an event promptly, provably and blatantly lied about at the highest level by Donald Trump’s politburo. Then that evening in Washington, a lot of those same politburocrats turned out for the White House premiere of a ridiculous propaganda film about the president’s wife, also attended fawningly by bloodless Apple oligarch Tim Cook. And he’s not even the oligarch who paid an insane amount for the film. Top line, guys: all this makes you look like what your president likes to call a “shithole country”. Sorry! I assume it’s fine to use officially licensed vocabulary?

Obviously, it’s not a proper shithole country until the soft-skinned puppetmasters in the presidential palace cut some grizzled local warlord off at the knees for following orders, so it’s good to learn overnight that border patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino has been pulled out of Minneapolis, possibly locked out of his social media accounts, and may soon “retire”, presumably a fall guy for the likes of stage 4 homeland security tumour Stephen Miller. Bovino’s the guy who’s literally got the same haircut and outfit as the Sean Penn character in One Battle After Another. But hey, at least he wears a uniform. Again, what are international outsiders to make of the spectacle of ICE’s federal officers coming masked and frequently dressed in civilian clothes, while images from protests across the States show resisting civilians increasingly drawn to military-style clothing? Can Trump’s storm detachment not at least be issued with matching shirts? They don’t have to be brown, but Maga chic desperately needs to make even a first step to getting itself together. In the entire history of the movement, only one follower – the QAnon shaman – has ever had true style.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Paul Thomas Anderson’s antifa parable is queasily relevant to the times, but here’s hoping Tim Key and co can get some reward for their brilliant British film

• Combat intensifies as One Battle After Another takes 14 Bafta nominations
• Bafta film awards 2026: full list of nominations

The Bafta nominations list underscores the enormous award-season love being felt for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, his subversive vampire riff on America’s black experience – though it isn’t making history in quite the same way as it is at the Oscars, having 13 Bafta nominations, one behind Paul Thomas Anderson’s league-leader One Battle After Another with 14.

The awards-season prominence of Anderson’s epic antifa parable, inspired by the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland, with Leonardo DiCaprio as a dishevelled, clueless ex-revolutionary facing off against Sean Penn’s brutal honcho Colonel Lockjaw, is happening at a queasily appropriate zeitgeist moment. The grotesquely trigger-happy immigration officers of ICE are shooting people dead on US streets and this ugly fiasco is giving us a horribly familiar-looking new figure.

Hollywood Chamber of Commerce says it did not approve a promotional stunt linked to the actor, after lingerie was draped over the landmark’s letters

The Housemaid star Sydney Sweeney has been reprimanded by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce for a promotional stunt that involved draping bras over the celebrated Hollywood sign in Los Angeles.

Sweeney posted footage on social media of her and a group of people climbing up to the sign which is situated on Mount Lee, in the Hollywood Hills area of the city, and hanging dozens of strung-together bras over the sign’s 50ft-tall letters.

The internet has enabled a golden age of techno-vanity. But hating your looks is a time-honored tradition

Take a second before you read this to look in the mirror. Go on, it’ll be worth it. I’ll be here when you get back.

OK, how’d that go? Did you like what you saw? Probably not. Feeling a bit puffy? See a zit in a conspicuous area? Did you want to punch yourself for the sin of experiencing the natural course of ageing? These feelings are normal. Being disappointed in how you look is a time-honored tradition; it’s just that now, we have the means to fix all that. GLP-1s mean you can lose weight quickly, without doing much more than shoving a needle in your bum a few times a month. Plastic surgery, Botox, fillers, Turkish hair plugs. We live in the golden age of techno-vanity, where “self-improvement” can be had for a few bucks (and days and days of living in bandages like a hipster mummy). The odious trend of “looksmaxxing” is the natural nadir of our collective obsession with not being ugly.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

As the budding restaurateurs suffer 17th-century flashbacks, Jamie Campbell Bower – AKA Vecna in Stranger Things – saves director Chuck Russell’s remake from cheesy oblivion

Jamie Campbell Bower gave the standout performance as the big bad in the otherwise ho-hum fourth season of Stranger Things, and in this tawdry but fun occult-themed thriller, like Satan himself, he’s back to his same old scene-stealing tricks. Once again, he’s not the protagonist but a sinister figure first met literally in the shadows, making ominous pronouncements in that posh-boy accent. When finally revealed, he is dipping his chin and looking up with those uncannily blue eyes like a vogue dancer catching the spotlight. If he keeps at it with roles like this, he could be the Peter Cushing of modern horror, but with catwalk-queen hair, or the goth equivalent of the young Ralph Fiennes in his rent-a-villain era. What’s not to love?

When Campbell Bower’s creepy antiquities expert Alexander Babtiste isn’t around, though, Witchboard reverts to its cheap and doleful resting form, in which B- and C-list actors play doltish young people bewitched by a proto-Ouija board that summons the spirit of a 17th-century French witch (Antonia Desplat). Somehow, the board has found its way to today’s New Orleans, where main girl Emily (Madison Iseman) finds it in the forest while foraging for mushrooms with her hipster-chef boyfriend Christian (Aaron Dominguez). At the urging of Christian’s slinky ex-girlfriend, Brooke (Mel Jarnson), who crashes their party, Emily tries out the board, and is soon having flashbacks to a life she never lived.

Mother whose visa application was pending says she will send girl back to US soon accompanied by another relative

Five-year-old Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos misses her cousins, classmates and kindergarten teachers in Austin, Texas. Despite being a US citizen, she was deported on 11 January alongside her mother, Karen Guadalupe Gutiérrez Castellanos, to Honduras, a country Génesis had never known.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were acting on an administrative deportation order against Gutiérrez, 26, issued in 2019, before Génesis was born.

Experts are watching for how other countries will react as the ‘real economy’ shifts to cheaper, cleaner energy

The United States has officially exited the Paris climate agreement for the second time, cementing Donald Trump’s renewed break with the primary global venue to address global heating.

The move leaves the US as the only country to have withdrawn from the pact, placing it alongside Iran, Libya and Yemen as the only countries not party to the agreement. While it will not halt global climate efforts, experts say it could significantly complicate them.

Now the US is vying regional dominance, experts point to War Plan Red as proof its Canadian allyship has always been flimsy

First, American forces would strike with poison gas munitions, seizing a strategically valuable port city. Soldiers would sever undersea cables, destroy bridges and rail lines to paralyze infrastructure. Major cities on the shores of lakes and rivers would be captured in order to blunt any civilian resistance.

The multipronged invasion would rely on ground forces, amphibious landing and then mass internments. According to the architects of the plan, the attack would be short-lived and the besieged country would fall within days.

Leaders and voters who formerly applauded US president’s aims have been growing increasingly uneasy

Donald Trump’s attempted Greenland grab has driven a wedge between the US president and some of his ideological allies in Europe, as previously unstinting enthusiasm and admiration collides with one of the far right’s key tenets: national sovereignty.

Trump’s subsequent disparaging remark that Nato allies’ troops “stayed a little off the frontlines” while fighting with US forces in Afghanistan has only deepened the divide, piquing far-right patriotic sentiments and prompting an avalanche of criticism.

A chance encounter reminded me: there are two ways to look at what’s happened in Minneapolis

One of the few advantages of being as conspicuous as I am is that many people come up to me whom I don’t know, to talk about what’s happening in America. It’s like a free-floating focus group.

On Monday morning, I was at a restaurant counter finishing my breakfast when a middle-aged man sat down next to me and said he didn’t want to intrude. (He just had, so I put down my knife and fork, wiped my mouth with my napkin, and turned toward him.) He wanted me to know that although he’d been a lifelong Republican, the events of the past weeks had caused him to leave the Republican party.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now

A country where safety is under threat from federal violence on the streets is not fit to stage soccer’s showpiece event

Removing the United States as co-host of the 2026 World Cup would hurt for pretty much everyone. Fans would miss out on seeing the sport’s pinnacle in their home towns (or somewhere nearby). Cities and businesses small and large would lose the financial benefits they had banked on. It would be a logistical and political nightmare on an international scale, the likes of which have never been seen before in sports. It would be eminently sad. And it would be entirely justified.

It brings me no pleasure to say this. The United States has been eager to host a men’s World Cup for more than a decade and a half. The desire survived and even grew after 2010’s failure to out-bid Russia and Qatar (in public and behind closed doors) for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. With hosting rights for 2026 later secured alongside Canada and Mexico, the US soccer scene prepared to show off that the sport is now part of the nation’s fabric, 32 years after hosting the tournament for the first time in 1994. Soccer’s growing popularity in America has helped inspire other US sports to try new formats, encouraged us to engage more fully with the world in a sporting context, and has been at the center of conversations about our society and culture. The 2026 World Cup was seen as the best chance for the world to fully experience not just how much the US has improved at soccer, but how much soccer has improved the US.

Meta, YouTube and TikTok accused of making products intentionally addictive and harmful to young people

For the first time, a huge group of parents, teens and school districts is taking on the world’s most powerful social media companies in open court, accusing the tech giants of intentionally designing their products to be addictive. The blockbuster legal proceedings may see multiple CEOs, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, face harsh questioning.

A long-awaited series of trials kicks off in Los Angeles superior court on Tuesday, in which hundreds of US families will allege that Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube’s platforms harm children. Once young people are hooked, the plaintiffs allege, they fall prey to depression, eating disorders, self-harm and other mental health issues. Approximately 1,600 plaintiffs are included in the proceedings, involving more than 350 families and 250 school districts.