Powderhorn

Wisconsin voters sent another liberal justice to the state supreme court, with Chris Taylor beating the conservative Maria Lazar and giving liberals a 5-2 edge on the high court.

The retirement of Justice Rebecca Bradley, a conservative, gave liberals a chance to further consolidate their hold on the high court ahead of the next presidential election, when the swing state is sure to see challenges to election results.

Taylor, a liberal judge on the state’s court of appeals who previously served as a Democratic lawmaker, was running against Lazar, who is also on the court of appeals and a former deputy state attorney general.

Taylor’s win gives liberals a 5-2 bloc on the bench. Taylor is seen as friendly to voting rights, while Lazar’s views aligned more closely with Republicans, pushing for policies that could hinder voting access and impact. Lazar had continued to defend maps in Wisconsin that were gerrymandered to lead to more Republican victories, which have since been overturned.

With apologies to Betteridge, the jury is out. But this is scarcely a ragtag group.

The world, as we know, is in trouble. The last three years have been the hottest ever recorded. Global emissions are still at record highs. The planet is now consistently flirting with the 1.5C limit it promised not to cross. Increasingly, it feels as if we need a genuine miracle to stop us from sleepwalking into catastrophe. Could that miracle be an environmental warning from a woman in her pants?

For those of us on the other side of the pond, that means panties, not trousers.

This is the stated desire of Headline Newds, a new series of web videos by actor Megan Prescott, film-maker Bree Essrig and “climate narrative strategist” Jessica Riches. Released through the not-for-profit Yellow Dot Studios – belonging to Adam McKay, creator of movies The Big Short and Don’t Look Up – Headline Newds is made up of bite-size videos in which the climate emergency is broken down and raunchily explained to us by a variety of OnlyFans models.

It’s an interesting trick, and one that we have seen trialled elsewhere. When McKay made The Big Short in 2015, it was a gamble. As compelling as the story was, it hinged on an understanding of mortgage-backed securities and their integration into the broader credit markets underpinning the 2008 financial crisis. And rather than risk alienating audiences with a long, boring explanation, he hired Margot Robbie to talk us through the subject while wiggling around in a bubble bath.

There is a very short logical step from that to Headline Newds. And so we have the launch episode, The Sun is Daddy, in which Prescott slowly removes her clothes while explaining that solar energy could meet our global energy demands with less land than is being used by the fossil fuel industry. Or, in her words: “Daddy is a giver.”

I'm not really sure how entertaining this will be, but it didn't seem to fit anywhere else.

Film-making effects change. Director Rachel Dretzin, a former investigative journalist for Frontline, will testify to that.

“These films that I’m making,” says Dretzin, “that other documentarians are making, are often more effective than the legal system at effecting change; psychological change and also sometimes systemic and criminal change.”

But the impact film-making has in Trust Me: The False Prophet feels more immediate. The riveting four-part series follows a pair of documentary film-makers, turned FBI informants, who helped take down Samuel Bateman, a polygamous Mormon cult leader currently serving a 50-year sentence for luring minors into criminal sex acts.

Cult expert Christine Marie and her husband, Tolga Katas, embedded themselves among Utah’s Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) community. They earned the trust of typically guarded followers, and were eventually invited into Bateman’s home, where he presided over 20 “wives”, many of them underage.

Bateman’s so-called wives were (and some still are) so heavily indoctrinated that they believed their spiritual husband was a prophet, a gateway to heaven and the heir apparent to Warren Jeffs. The latter is the notorious FLDS leader whose 2007 imprisonment for similarly abhorrent sex crimes left a vacuum Bateman was eager to fill.

In Mathias Döpfner’s 2023 book Dealing with Dictators, the chief executive of the German media company Axel Springer SE proposed a fix for western democracy: states that respect the rule of law should stick together and prioritise trading with each other. Better that, he declared, than indulging the illusion that doing business will tame “self-styled strongman leaders”.

So it came as quite the surprise when last month Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, was given a prominent opinion article in Welt am Sonntag, less than four weeks before the riskiest elections of the rightwing populist’s career. “It caused a lot of strong irritation,” said a former editor at the Springer-owned broadsheet.

Long a powerful and polarising force in Germany’s postwar media landscape, Axel Springer is now aiming to become a major player in the transatlantic sphere. In 2021 it added the US-European outlet Politico to its large portfolio of German titles, and is buying the UK’s Daily Telegraph in a £575m all-cash deal.

Mergers and buyouts always end well.

Ah, so we finally have a reason for the timing of her dismissal and Trump's praise for her (when's the last time he fired someone and then gushed?).

Pam Bondi, the former US attorney general, will not appear next week for a scheduled deposition before the House oversight and government reform committee to answer questions about the justice department’s handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and its release of the Epstein files, the committee said.

In a statement on Wednesday morning shared with the Guardian, a spokesperson for the House oversight committee said “the Department of Justice has stated Pam Bondi will not appear on April 14 for a deposition since she is no longer Attorney General and was subpoenaed in her capacity as Attorney General”.

“The Committee will contact Pam Bondi’s personal counsel to discuss next steps regarding scheduling her deposition,” they added.

In a letter obtained by the Guardian, assistant attorney general Patrick Davis wrote to James Comer, a Kentucky congressman and chair of the House oversight and government reform committee, telling him that “the Committee issued the subpoena to Ms Bondi in her official capacity as Attorney General”.

“Ms Bondi no longer holds that office,” the letter reads. “As a result, because Ms Bondi no longer can testify in her official capacity as Attorney General, the Department’s position is that the subpoena no longer obligates her to appear on April 14.

Extreme heat is already creating “non-survivable” conditions for humans in heatwaves that have killed thousands and likely many more, according to new research that warns people are more susceptible to rising temperatures than first thought.

Scientists re-examined six extreme heatwaves between 2003 and 2024 and found that when temperature, humidity and the body’s ability to stay cool were accounted for, all were potentially deadly for older people.

The absolute limit for humans to survive had been assumed to be a six-hour exposure to a wet bulb temperature of 35C – a measure that accounts for temperature and humidity but has rarely been observed on the planet at that level.

Heatwaves in Mecca (Saudi Arabia, 2024), Bangkok (Thailand, 2024), Phoenix (United States, 2023), Mount Isa (Australia, 2019), Larkana (Pakistan, 2015) and Seville (Spain, 2003) had seen thousands of deaths despite none approaching that wet bulb limit, the research found.

But when scientists applied a new model of human survivability that takes into account the body’s ability to function and stay cool depending on age, they found all six events had seen non-survivable periods for older people who could not find shade.

You have to be pretty shady to get a "claims" hed.

JD Vance has pushed back against claims that the US is interfering in Hungarian politics, describing the accusations as “darkly ironic”, as a set of polls suggested the opposition Tisza party could win a supermajority in the forthcoming elections.

After spending his first day in Budapest excoriating the EU and accusing it of being behind one of the “worst examples” of foreign interference, the US vice-president spent part of Wednesday morning speaking at a thinktank and educational institution linked to Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orbán.

With four days to go until Hungarians cast their ballots – and with Orbán trailing the opposition in most polls – Vance acknowledged the singular nature of his visit.

“It’s unprecedented for an American vice-president to come the week before an election,” he said. But he said he had decided to come because of what he described as the “garbage happening against” Orbán in the election.

“We had to show that there are actually lots of friends across the world who recognise that Viktor and his government are doing a good job and they’re important partners for peace,” he said.

Ah, yes, the old "many people say" trope the Nazis love to use.

In a war where there have been no winners, Israel’s prime minister looks set to be the biggest loser entering a fragile and vague ceasefire with Iran.

After years of Benjamin Netanyahu’s threats against Iran, his stunts at the UN’s general assembly, the dodgy dossiers endlessly wafted under the noses of the world’s media, and diplomatic pressure on successive US presidents to agree to a war against Iran, Israel’s conflict has turned out to be a bust.

The US intelligence community’s verdict that Israeli predictions of regime change and revolution in Iran were “farcical” turned out to be correct. The Israeli assessment that the war would last at best a handful of days, at worst a handful of weeks, was woefully wide of the mark.

Even two days ago, according to Israel’s Channel 12, Netanyahu was pushing Donald Trump not to agree to a ceasefire. For a day, the US president issued his genocidal warnings to Tehran and then buckled, by some accounts sidelining Israel in his deliberations.

“There has never been a political disaster like this in our entire history. Israel was not even close to the table when decisions were made concerning the core of our national security,” Israel’s main opposition leader, Yair Lapid, wrote on X.

The fate of the two-week ceasefire in the Iran conflict looked uncertain on Wednesday as both sides gave divergent versions of what had been agreed, Israel intensified its bombing campaign in Lebanon and Iran halted the passage of oil tankers because of an alleged Israeli ceasefire breach.

Iran and Pakistan, which brokered the 11th-hour truce, both asserted that the ceasefire included Lebanon. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, disagreed and Israeli forces unleashed their heaviest attack of the war so far on more than 100 targets and killing at least 254 people.

Iran’s Fars news agency said oil tankers passing through the strait of Hormuz had been stopped as a result of Israel’s “ceasefire breach”. Iran was due to have reopened the strait during the two weeks of the ceasefire, and the oil price had dropped sharply below $100 a barrel in the hours after the truce was announced, prompting a global stock market surge.

No less than Stephen Pinker claiming this is news?

This happened with a fresh-out-of-college designer (god forbid copyeditors had editing skills) in 2015. In Austin. I was there that night.

I was on a different team, but come morning, yeah, we were all mocking her for her lack of a hyphen. At the same time, I was the only designer exempt from running a site's heds verbatim. Of course something like this was going to happen.

To claim this recently happened with a nonsensical upside-down folio is ... I usually reach for "absurd" here, and as I've already burned "nonsensical," I'll just go with "unhinged."

Pinker knows better, and I'm slightly inclined to point out the provenance that claims a local paper we neither owned nor designed (already an ethical violation) was responsible for what I saw happen in real time in Austin.

God, I hated those stylesheets, but they're rather damning when it comes to proving A) this was designed at the hub; and B) you're claiming local reporting -- complete with byline -- you didn't do.

Anyone still confused about why I walked away?

With 22 minutes to spare, we once again have a TACO retreat. But in two weeks, it'll still be Tuesday.

The US and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire on Tuesday evening after a last-minute diplomatic intervention led by Pakistan, canceling an ultimatum from Donald Trump for Iran to surrender or face widespread destruction.

Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire agreement came less than two hours before the US president’s self-imposed 8pm Eastern time deadline to bomb Iran’s power plants and bridges in a move that legal scholars, as well as officials from numerous countries and the Pope, had warned could constitute war crimes.

Just hours earlier, Trump had written on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” B-52 bombers were reported to be en route to Iran before the ceasefire agreement was announced.

But by Tuesday evening, Trump announced that a ceasefire agreement had been mediated through Pakistan, whose prime minister Shehbaz Sharif had requested the two-week peace in order to “allow diplomacy to run its course”.