HellsBelle

President Donald Trump was asked at a press conference this month if there were any federal agencies or programs that Elon Musk’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency wouldn’t be allowed to mess with.

“Social Security will not be touched,” Trump answered, echoing a promise he has been making for years. Despite his eagerness to explode treaties, shutter entire government agencies and abandon decades-old ways of doing things, the president understands that Social Security benefits for seniors are sacrosanct.

Still, the DOGE team landed at the Social Security Administration this week, with Musk drawing attention for his outlandish claims that large numbers of 150-year-old “vampires” are receiving Social Security payments. DOGE has begun installing its own operatives, including an engineer linked to tweets promoting eugenics and executives with a cut-first-fix-later philosophy, in multiple top positions at the Social Security Administration.

Their first wave of actions — initiating the elimination of 41 jobs and the closing of at least 10 local offices, so far — was largely lost in the rush of headlines. Those first steps might seem restrained compared with the mass firings that DOGE has pursued at other federal agencies. But Social Security recipients rely on in-person service in all 50 states, and the shuttering of offices, reported on DOGE’s website to include locations everywhere from rural West Virginia to Las Vegas, could be hugely consequential. The closures potentially reduce access to Social Security for some of the most vulnerable people in this country — including not just retirees but also individuals with severe physical and intellectual disabilities, as well as children whose parents have died and who’ve been left in poverty.

When some of the mind games and manoeuvres that turned a Murdoch family “retreat” into an ordeal appeared in Succession, the TV drama about squabbling family members of a right-wing media company, members of the real-life family started to suspect each other of leaking details to the writers. The truth was more straightforward. Succession’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, said that his team hadn’t needed inside sources – they had simply read press reports.

Future screenwriters have been gifted a whole load of new Murdoch material in the past few days, after two astonishing stories in the New York Times and the Atlantic lifted the lid on the dysfunction, paranoia and despair at the heart of the most powerful family in global media.

The stories followed the end of the secret trial involving the fate of the Murdoch family trust. The mogul’s four eldest children – Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence – were set to inherit the family firm following Rupert’s death. But four years ago, just after turning 90, Rupert had tried to cut James, Liz and Prue out of their inheritance and hand the businesses over to Lachlan, his favoured heir who also happens to share his increasingly right-wing politics.

The lawsuit was brought by the three errant offspring, and in December a Nevada commissioner ruled in their favour, accusing Rupert and Lachlan of acting in “bad faith”. The trial took place in secret, but the fallout – thanks to the New York Times investigation and a 13,000-word Atlantic interview with James – has been anything but.

Now Litherland has told the Observer he believes he has identified the location of a second tomb belonging to Thutmose II. And this one, he suspects, will contain the young pharaoh’s mummified body and grave goods.

Archeologists believe this second tomb has been hiding in plain sight for 3,500 years, secretly buried beneath 23 metres of limestone flakes, rubble, ash and mud plaster and made to look like part of the mountain.

“There are 23 metres of a pile of man-made layers sitting above a point in the landscape where we believe – and we have other confirmatory evidence – there is a monument concealed beneath,” he said. “The best candidate for what is hidden underneath this enormously expensive, in terms of effort, pile is the second tomb of Thutmose II.”

Donald Trump’s shocking and mendacious attack this week on the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as a “dictator” while cozying up to the Russian president and indicating that traditional US security support for Europe is waning may have alarmed US allies abroad but has prompted a more starkly divided response among Americans at home.

Reflecting the country’s deeply partisan attitude to the new president and his “America first” foreign policy doctrine, polling suggests that Republicans are much more likely to oppose additional help for war-torn Ukraine. A Pew Research Center survey earlier this month found that 47% of Republicans but just 14% of Democrats thought the US was providing too much support to Ukraine – views that have changed dramatically since the war began three years ago, when just 7% of all American adults (9% of Republicans and 5% of Democrats) said the US was providing too much support to Ukraine.

“It is an outrageous denial of the truth and shows his allegiance to Russia and to Putin especially,” said Carla Bayles, a voter from Washington state who supported Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election. “We are alienating our allies and getting us closer to a world war.”

The world’s glaciers lost ice at the rate of about 255 billion tons (231 billion metric tons) annual from 2000 to 2011, but that quickened to about 346 billion tons (314 billion metric tons) annually over about the next decade, according to the study in this week’s journal Nature.

And the last few years, the melt has accelerated even more, hitting a record 604 billion tons (548 billion metric tons) lost in 2023, the last year analyzed.

The study drew on an international effort that included 233 estimates of changes in glacier weight. In all, the world’s glaciers have lost more than 7 trillion tons of ice (6.5 trillion metric tons) since 2000, according to the study.

There were gasps and cries in the courtroom when Judge Kirstin Hamman said, “And the judgement and sentence is vacated and the defendant is ordered to be released from custody,” before a Zoom feed broadcasting the hearing suddenly turned off.

She ruled that new evidence, including DNA test results, would likely change the outcome of another trial against Gordon Cordeiro.

Maui County Prosecuting Attorney Andrew Martin said he was disappointed in the ruling and “None of the judge’s findings exonerate him in any way.”

His office intends to appeal and file a motion seeking to impose bail on Cordeiro’s release, Martin added, saying there is a flight risk because a murder charge is involved.

The Jefferson County Coroner’s Office issued a statement late Friday identifying the victims from earlier in the day as ranging in age from 18 to 33 years old. Officers who responded around noon Friday found one man dead at the scene and two wounded women, who later died after being taken to a hospital, according to Louisville Metro Police Department.

The coroner’s statement said that the man, 18-year-old Leslye M. Harbin Jr., died of multiple gunshot wounds at the scene, while the two women, 33-year-old Antwanette Chillers and 29-year-old Raysa Pacios Valdes, each died of a gunshot wound at a hospital.

Authorities have not said whether the victims knew each other or knew whoever was responsible for the shooting.

“I don’t think that this ‘peace process’ is for Ukrainians’ sake. It is laughable that they pretend it is,” said Iryna, 26, a lawyer from Kyiv.

Iryna was among thousands of Ukrainians who got in touch with the Guardian to share how they felt about the Trump administration-led peace talks with Russia, which exclude Ukraine.

“It doesn’t seem like a negotiation to me, more like a cruel auction. My main concern is that we are being sold for someone else’s gain. I am afraid that the USA sees us as just an asset to sell and move on, while Europe is too concerned about itself.”

The Pentagon announced plans Friday to fire 5-8% of its civilian workforce, starting next week with layoffs of 5,400 probationary workers, a Department of Defense official said in a statement.

The initial civilian layoffs will be followed by a Department of Defense hiring freeze to analyze the military’s personnel needs in compliance with Donald Trump’s political goals, Darin Selnick, the acting under-secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said in the statement.

“We anticipate reducing the department’s civilian workforce by 5-8% to produce efficiencies and refocus the department on the president’s priorities and restoring readiness in the force,” Selnick said.

“It is simply not in the public interest to retain individuals whose contributions are not mission-critical. Taxpayers deserve to have us take a thorough look at our workforce top-to-bottom to see where we can eliminate redundancies.”

In a clip from ESPN sports talkshow Get Up that went viral last week, former National Hockey League player PK Subban weighed in on the differences between the culture in the NHL and NBA. Usually, comparing the two is a game of numbers: revenue, viewers, salaries, that kind of thing. But over the past 10 days, passion has emerged as a differentiator. “You can step on to an NBA floor and go through the motions,” Subban said on ESPN. “You can’t do that in hockey – you can’t. Like, the culture of our sport, you have to play it with passion. You have to be willing to fight. You have to be willing to leave it on the ice. That’s what fans are investing in.”

That investment has paid off most recently with the 4 Nations Face-off tournament, which wrapped up on Thursday night in Boston. The thrilling final between Canada and the US was a rematch of last Saturday’s marquee round-robin clash, a contest marked by three fights in the opening nine seconds. The rest of the game was pretty good, too, ending with a US win. On Thursday, the tables turned. It was Canada that scored first – again – and last. Canada won the game narrowly 3-2, after the US left Connor McDavid, the best player on the planet, open in the slot in sudden-death overtime. He made no mistake.

Yet, at the same time, hockey is one of Canada’s most effective tools of soft power. It would be overstating it to say that the x-factor Subban was talking about – that thing that most agree after watching the 4 Nations Face-off seems to be missing from other North American sports cultures – is Canadians (after all, there are Canadian teams in the NBA, MLB and MLS). But it would not be wrong to suggest that what all those other leagues might lack is Canadian-ness. The tenacity and drive to compete against all odds – to literally fight when called to. This thing that hockey has and others don’t could only have come from up here, somewhere along this northern territory. Trump can try to co-opt hockey into his skewed vision of America, but the reality is that no matter where you’re from, when you step on to the ice, something about you will always be Canadian.

US President Donald Trump's remark that his country spent $21m to boost voter turnout in India's elections has triggered a political slugfest in the country.

He made the remark days after a team led by Elon Musk said it had cancelled the payout as part of its crackdown on a US agency providing foreign aid.

India's governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called the payout an "external interference" and accused the opposition Congress party of seeking this intervention.

The Congress denied the allegation, calling Trump's claims "nonsensical". The US has not provided any evidence to support its claim.

Not content with spending more than a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Donald Trump and Republican candidates in 2024 and then taking a wrecking ball to the federal government, Elon Musk is now trying to flip the balance of power on the top court in one of the country’s most important swing states.

Building America’s Future, a dark money group backed by Musk, is spending at least $1.6 million in support of Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel, a conservative judge in suburban Milwaukee who is running for an open seat in an April election that will decide whether progressives or conservatives control the court. The group began running ads across the state on Thursday.

“Elon Musk is buying off Brad Schimel,” his opponent, Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, responded. She is backed by Democrats and progressive groups.

To a remarkable degree for a state supreme court justice hopeful, Schimel is running as a MAGA-aligned candidate who wants to export Trump’s radical agenda to Wisconsin. He attended Trump’s inauguration, welcomed the president’s endorsement, and pledged that “we’re going to nationalize” the race.