Schools in Bend, Oregon, will be closed on Friday after a 16-year-old shooter opened fire at an elementary school in the city on Thursday, killing three children and a teacher before he was shot dead by a community member.
The children killed at Silver Rail elementary school were aged five, eight and 11, officials said.
Katie Zacharia faces mounting questions over her legal credentials after admitting she did not pass the bar exam
Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary says it is “unknown” how much she will engage with the press, amid mounting questions over her legal credentials after admitting she did not pass the bar exam.
In a brief interview with the Guardian, Katie Zacharia detailed the whirlwind sprint to replace her predecessor Karoline Leavitt as the US president’s chief spokesperson.
UK defence secretary says he has been ‘reassured directly’ counterpart Pete Hegseth that Starlink system has been restored as he seeks to cool tensions
Wes Streeting urged the US to stand by Ukraine on his visit to the American capital and sought to cool tensions between the two countries in the wake of the Starlink row that is threatening to set back Kyiv’s war effort.
The British defence secretary, giving a speech before a meeting with his US counterpart, Pete Hegseth, argued that supporting Ukraine was in the long-term interests of Washington, and a business opportunity.
Jane Does allege ex-congressman and two others coordinated ‘payments, drugs and travel’ for sexual acts
The Republican former congressman Matt Gaetz has been accused of participating in the sex trafficking of two young women in a civil lawsuit filed on Thursday in district court in Florida.
The allegations, which Gaetz denied in a statement to the Guardian, are the latest developments in a long-running sexual abuse scandal involving the politician who resigned from Congress in November 2024.
Rewritten indictment accuses ex-Venezuela president and wife Cilia Flores of leading campaign of torture
Nicolás Maduro insisted on Thursday during an appearance in a New York court that torture allegations in a rewritten drug trafficking indictment against the deposed Venezuelan president and his wife were “false accusations”.
Maduro, shackled at the ankles, was brought to court to face the new charges accusing the couple of leading a state-sponsored campaign of repression that tortured scores of victims, including three Americans.
Soldier who killed 13 people in 2009 will still be executed, but president said ‘people would rather not watch him die’
Donald Trump has shelved a widely condemned plan to livestream the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, who was convicted of killing 13 people at a military base at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009.
In a social media post on Thursday, Trump argued that broadcasting such an execution “might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan” but said that “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device”.
Authors withdraw book planned for young readers after disputes with editors over characterizations of 7 October
A book on Palestine for young readers was pulled at Penguin Random House just before its scheduled release, following editorial disputes between the publisher and the book’s Palestinian American authors over their account of Palestinian history.
In November 2024, Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House, signed the book deal with Alana Hadid, a philanthropist, activist and older sister of models Bella and Gigi, and Jenan Matari, an author and communications strategist. The book was promoted for release in September this year.
Move comes as Senator Elizabeth Warren condemns Barclays response to questions over ex-boss’s ties to sex offender
US lawmakers have unveiled a new bill to hold Wall Street’s “Epstein-connected” bosses to account for helping finance the late sex offender’s crimes.
It came as top Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren condemned the UK bank Barclays for “dodging responsibility” over its failure to vet former boss Jes Staley and his ties to the once well-connected billionaire.
It’s indisputable that the political polarization of our time has reduced (and confused) the influence of economic conditions on US elections.
In September of 2024, in the waning weeks of the Joe Biden presidency, 65% of Republicans believed the US economy was getting worse. About six months later, as Donald Trump launched a trade war on the rest of the world with his “liberation day” tariffs, the share of Republican pessimists had dropped to 33%.
Exclusive: Aleksandar Vučić personally intervened to push plans for controversial $500m Trump Tower in Belgrade, which sparked protests and a criminal case
Serbia’s authoritarian ruler personally intervened to advance an allegedly illegal scheme to hand over a protected site in Belgrade for a Trump tower, the Guardian can reveal.
Aleksandar Vučić summoned officials to a meeting at his presidential offices about the project, which has culminated in a landmark indictment of senior figures from his regime on charges of abuse of public office.
The president is used to bullying his media targets. The quagmire that is his libel actions shows the broadcaster is working to a different script
For the greatest account of the BBC’s finest hour, one must turn to Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, Human Voices, written in 1980 and set 40 years earlier, at the corporation’s Portland Place wartime HQ. Flanked by sandbags and infused with a smell of cooking “from the deep hold that suggested more strongly than ever a cruise on the Queen Mary”, the organisation that Fitzgerald describes is at once noble and deeply eccentric. “Broadcasting House stood headed on a fixed course south,” she writes. “With the best engineers in the world, and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster.”
In other words, a formidable foe, one that in the spring of 1940, in the face of anticipated Nazi invasion, decided “without prompting, that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective”. I bring this up in respect to the gathering storm of Donald Trump versus the BBC, a fight triggered by the US president’s $10bn defamation lawsuit – $10bn! It’s a wonder he didn’t go for $10 gazillion – brought against the corporation at the end of last year in response to a poorly edited episode of Panorama. The BBC was at fault, editing together comments made by the US president at a rally on 6 January 2021 to give, as the corporation’s apology put it, “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”. But it is fighting the lawsuit.
As the midterm elections loom, Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone travel to rural West Virginia, a Republican party stronghold, to explore how soaring gas prices, war in the Middle East and datacenter expansion are affecting Donald Trump's popularity among his base. Although the state remains staunchly Republican, there are signs of a new politics emerging – and local Democrats are looking to capitalize on it
While anglers cannot take endangered sand tiger sharks, a loophole lets private firms catch the fish to sell abroad, profiting from Delaware Bay’s conservation success
Shortly after 12.45pm, what remains of a 300-metre line goes taut. Somewhere beneath the murky green surface of Delaware Bay, on the eastern US coast, a sand tiger shark has taken the bait of a mackerel chunk. Marine researchers at the University of Delaware haul the line towards a small boat as the shark’s grey-brown outline emerges.
It is a large animal: 225cm (7ft) long with a 90cm girth. Its mouth hangs open, revealing rows of jagged teeth. The researchers work quickly, measuring the shark, recording its sex, and taking blood and muscle samples. A tag is then fastened beneath its dorsal fin, through its thick sandpapery skin.
I was in my early 20s when the classic series debuted and I recognised so much. I can’t wait to see how the reboot takes on a new – equally messy – stage of life
HBO’s Girls is coming back, Lena Dunham and her fellow cast members announced this week, and the internet is already abuzz. Women of a certain age, myself included – approaching, turning or having turned 40 – are genuinely thrilled, if also slightly trepidatious. When you’ve loved, loathed and most importantly grown with characters in the way many of us did with Girls, you feel protective of a show’s legacy. But with Dunham, I’m confident it is in good hands.
Girls means a lot to me, in part because it was the topic of my first ever column for this newspaper: in 2012, shortly after the show premiered, it was already generating a bananas amount of internet discourse and I was on work experience. I was in my early 20s and not long off the dole. I didn’t share the privilege of Dunham’s characters, which is perhaps why I so enjoyed how she skewered it. (I never understood the criticism that the show was about spoilt rich girls. So many people missed the satire.) Yet there were aspects of it that I related to, as I wrote at the time:
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
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