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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
Half a century later, Richard Dreyfuss still won’t go in the water. “I have never done it, not since the film,” the Oscar-winning actor says, “because you’re totally aware of what you’re not aware of and you’re not aware of anything underneath.”The film is Jaws, whose release 50 years ago on 20 June marked a turning point in both the history of cinema and public perception of sharks.
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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
Hollywood. Silicon Valley. An agricultural sector that grows more than three-quarters of fruits and nuts in America. All contributed to April’s news that California had officially overtaken Japan to become the fourth biggest economy in the world, its GDP of $4.1tn trailing only the entirety of the US, China and Germany. But two months later this superpower is locked in a bitter power struggle with Washington DC.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
“Do you hear the people sing? / Singing the song of angry men? / It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again!”When the rousing anthem of revolution filled the Kennedy Center on Wednesday night, Donald Trump may have had a Pavlovian response along the lines of “Get me Stephen Miller” or “Send in the marines”. We will never know.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
The trouble began when the ceiling above the toilet collapsed. The Bravo family lost hot water and heat – sometimes the temperature would drop to 20F – and they had to boil water to bathe. Nathan, the youngest in the family, has asthma and needs a machine to help him breathe. A doctor blamed mould and cockroaches. “It was because of a leak,” says his sister Samantha Bravo-Huertero. “When someone doesn’t fix it, it does start filling with mould. It’s disgusting to see.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Nour Haydar |David SMith |David Smith |Karishma Luthria |Ima Caldwell |Miles Martignoni
US President Donald Trump’s decision to deploy 2,000 national guard troops against demonstrators protesting widespread immigration crackdowns in Los Angeles has been criticised as the ‘act of a dictator’Washington DC bureau chief David Smith tells Nour Haydar why Trump’s involvement in the protests is a diversion from his feud with billionaire Elon Musk• You can support the Guardian at theguardian.com/fullstorysupport
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
This month marks exactly 10 years since Donald Trump coasted down an escalator at Trump Tower, declared his run for US president and accused Mexico of sending drugs, criminals and rapists into the homeland. The past decade has been exercise in normalising. When Trump threatened to terminate Elon Musk’s government contracts, and Musk linked Trump to the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, all because of a petty clash of egos, people were riveted but unsurprised.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
Donald Trump walked out to a thunderous standing ovation as Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass” boomed from the sound system. He watched martial artists slug it out behind a chain-link fence. A female champion let the US president try on her gold belt. It was a night of machismo, spectacle and violence.
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
“Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy,” Donald Trump observed in the Oval Office on Thursday. “They hate each other, and they’re fighting in a park, and you try and pull them apart. They don’t want to be pulled. Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.”The US president was referring to the war between Russia and Ukraine but could just as easily have been talking about himself.
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
Young people in the US are looking for Democrats to embrace economic populism and authentic candidates willing to fight for them, says the new leader of a group dedicated to youth voter mobilisation. Victoria Yang is the interim president and executive director of NextGen America, an organisation that engages young people through voter education and registration. She succeeds Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, who held the post for four years.
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3 weeks ago | 
yahoo.com | David SMith |David Smith
The far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has assembled a “rogues’ gallery of extremists, conspiracy theorists and C-team political operatives” to promote Donald Trump’s crackdown on non-government organisations (NGOs), a congressional watchdog has claimed. The House of Representatives’ Delivering on Government Efficiency (Doge) subcommittee, chaired by Greene, is due to hold a hearing on Wednesday entitled “Public Funds, Private Agendas: NGOs Gone Wild”.
