US supreme court justice Samuel Alito was reportedly taken to a hospital after becoming sick at a Federalist Society dinner in Philadelphia in March, further fueling speculation that Donald Trump could have more chances to shape the land’s highest court through new appointments.

A CNN report said Alito was checked by medical staff and given fluids due to dehydration. He later returned to his home in Virginia that same night with his security detail. In the weeks since, Alito has resumed his duties, including participating in oral arguments.

The supreme court’s public information officer, Patricia McCabe, confirmed the incident and shared a statement with the Guardian that said, “On the evening of Friday, [20 March], Justice Alito felt ill during an event in Philadelphia. Out of an abundance of caution, he agreed with his security detail’s recommendation to see a physician before the three-hour drive home.”

The statement said: “After that examination and the administration of fluids for dehydration, he returned home that night, as previously planned. Justice Alito was thoroughly checked by his own physician, and he returned to work the following Monday for oral argument.”

Thank god ... what we really need is The Heritage Foundation Trump appointing another younger justice who can fuck things up for decades!

With the unveiling of the prospective Trump presidential library, which, in its timing and substance looked for all the world like an April fool, the old adage that you can’t gild a turd but you can roll it in glitter has become bleakly redundant. It turns out that you can most definitely gild a turd.

At the heart of the proposed 47-storey skyscraper on Miami’s waterfront – 47 floors for the 47th President – is a giant golden statue of Trump giving off dictator-for-life vibes, his gilded fist triumphantly raised. Such an aureate monstrosity would not look out of place in Pyongyang or Ashgabat, though Turkmenistan’s former president Saparmurat Niyazov – another despot with a suspiciously luxuriant coiffure – went one better and had his $12m gold statue installed on a rotating pedestal so it would always face the sun.

The unveiling coincided with Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis renaming Palm Beach international airport, near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago bolt-hole, as the President Donald J Trump international airport. After a sticky month in the Strait of Hormuz and the recent No Kings protests, not to mention plummeting approval ratings, Trump clearly felt the need for some self-glorifying pushback.

A fascinating look at the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

Harvard’s faculty is set to vote next week on a faculty committee proposal to cap the number of A grades per course in an effort to curb grade inflation.

The proposal, which was first reported earlier this year by the Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, would cap A grades to 20% of students in a course, with an allowance for four additional As. It also would introduce a new internal “average percentile rank” system, which would rely on raw scores rather than grade point average (GPA) to determine honors and awards.

If approved, the policy would take effect in fall 2027, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The proposed cap has faced criticism from students, including those on the Crimson’s editorial board, which claimed it “falls flat” in trying to resolve concerns over grading.

It appears I've used this hed before. But there's a reason for that.

Look, I like to spend most of my day letting everyone know things they need to know. That's why I basically told the admins to just hand it to me when U.S. News was created.

Thing is, informing people never gets old. So I'm going to keep doing it.

When will these people get it through their thick skulls that Trump is mentally incapable of having "allies"?

Donald Trump has fired Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, dismissing a loyalist who reshaped the justice department but still failed to please a president fixated on prosecuting political enemies and frustrated with the politically explosive release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social: “Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year. Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900. We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future.”

The president added that Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, would serve as acting attorney general. Lee Zeldin, a former New York congressman who now leads the Environmental Protection Agency, is said to be a top contender to replace Bondi.

In a statement, Bondi said she was “thrilled” about “moving to an important private sector role”.

Two California lawmakers conducted an oversight visit Thursday at ICE’s Otay Mesa detention center, an immigrant detention facility that has faced allegations of overcrowding, poor conditions and sexual assaults.

The visit had been previously scheduled. But congressman Mike Levin, a Democrat, told the Guardian he planned to conduct more unannounced visits following a federal court ruling that struck down the Trump administration’s policy of forcing members of Congress to announce oversight visits seven days in advance.

“It’s really critically important that we continue to show up unannounced as often as feasible to make sure that basic human dignity is being adhered to,” Levin said in an interview after the visit. “I’m not one that’s just going to take the word of those involved. I’m going to go there and find out for myself.”

Otay Mesa is run as a for-profit business by CoreCivic, the country’s largest private prison contractor. Located in San Diego, near the US-Mexico border, the facility has the capacity to lock up 1,500 immigrant detainees.

Levin cited a long list of humanitarian concerns about the facility, including medical care, food, access to uninterrupted sleep, family visitation and access to legal counsel.

“We read all kinds of stories,” Levin said. “We hear from constituents.”

"There was no quid pro quo" was, I'm sure, claimed at some point.

The US has lifted sanctions on Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, in the latest step towards normalising relations between the two countries after US forces abducted her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.

The couple were taken to New York after their abduction in January to face charges of alleged drug trafficking, to which both have pleaded not guilty.

The lifting of the sanctions on Rodríguez, which was announced by the Treasury department on Wednesday, allows her to work more freely with US companies and investors. Without explicitly mentioning the sanctions targeting her, Rodríguez, in a statement, expressed hope for US-Venezuelan relations.

“We value President Donald Trump’s decision as a step toward normalising and strengthening relations between our countries,” she said on her Telegram channel after the Treasury’s announcement. “We trust that this progress will allow for the lifting of current sanctions against our country, enabling us to build and guarantee an effective bilateral cooperation agenda for the benefit of our people.”

This is something that has been so well hidden from doomscrollers that when the switch finally flips, they will plead ignorance. Which is accurate, but aren't these the same people who "do their own research"?

The US-Israel war on Iran is expensive. It’s expensive in terms of human lives, first of all. It’s expensive too, in pure currency – about $12bn a week for the US. And it’s expensive in how it’s causing the tectonic structures that underpin our global economy to shift. De-dollarization, the name given to the process countries undertake in unwinding their reliance on the dollar, promises to reorder the world, reducing American power globally. Its impact will be felt domestically in what we pay to borrow and whether we can afford to borrow at all.

Iran’s near-total blockade of the strait of Hormuz has had a dramatic impact on the prices of oil and natural gas, which puts major inflationary pressure on the economy of every country in the world. Practically, inflation makes people and businesses poorer, a process that reinforces itself if it’s not stopped (which is partly why central banks exist).

But not all boats are blockaded. In March, about 100 vessels passed through the strait, roughly the number that passed through the waterway each day before the Americans and Israelis started the war. According to the Guardian, the Iranian government is requiring some ships to pay a toll of roughly $2m. But it’s the currency in which the toll has been collected – Chinese yuan – which may suggest a concrete challenge to American power in the world.

For those who came in late, Church Night is exactly the opposite of what you'd expect.

And this week? Well ... this is the week where we're finishing the effigy. I wrote my own piece on one of the pieces of wood, and I have to say, some of the others were just this side of heartbreaking. But I have no art of it because as I was trying to grab one to send to my ex, the project lead came up to me and asked if I'd received permission to take that photo.

Burners, amirite?

Now that I've completely confused you, this is a warehouse where burners create things. The meeting room was full of people turning aluminum cans into art, while the effigy itself was being worked on in the main space.

Out in the parking lot, I was initially being lazy. A couple of chicks (let's not play that game when they refer to themselves as such) seem to be spending entirely too much time on a painted wooden board.

As one does, I asked what the fuck they were doing. And upon getting closer, the issue was self-evident. These are message boards used annually at the regional burn, and, well, they've accrued a lot of staples.

And there are seven of them. And they're double-sided.

I worked on three sides before another participant asked me to tend to her burn-barrel fire while she was feeding the people working on the art in the conference room.

I get that this sounds weird if you're still clinging to corporate America, but the person who asked me to watch the fire actively hated me only two months ago. When we work together, it's amazing what we can overcome.

Also, I'd misgendered them and their partner and was a bit of an asshole about it. Not my finest hour.

Tonight, she provided food and weed. I gave her shit for "stealing" one of my beers from the communal fridge where once you put it in there, it's fair game. Like, she literally used the burn barrel to do veggie hot dogs, crappy hot dogs, chicken and pork.

This, my friends, is what a resilient mutual-aid community looks like.

"Hey, I really didn't like you, but can you do me a favour?"

"Sure."

"Thanks. Would you like some weed?"

Oracle is cutting thousands of jobs as the US technology company seeks to reassure investors that its bet on AI infrastructure will pay off.

The $420bn (£315bn) company, which is headquartered in Austin, Texas, started making employees redundant on Tuesday, with thousands of its 162,000-strong workforce expected to leave.

About 10,000 people have lost their jobs so far, the BBC reported, citing an unnamed employee at the company, which is chaired by Larry Ellison, the billionaire ally of Donald Trump. Ellison is worth $189bn and is the world’s sixth richest person, Forbes estimates.

Michael Shepherd, a senior manager at Oracle, who was not affected by the cuts, posted on the social media site LinkedIn that there had been a “significant reduction in force” at the business.

Shepherd said the decision had affected “senior engineers, architects, operations leaders, program managers, and technical specialists with deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, government and sovereign cloud environments, and enterprise-scale systems”.

That's just what we need. More senior tech workers out of work in Austin. Thank god we now have a fresh supply!

There will no doubt be shenanigans as this proposal eventually moves forward. Must be nice to get a paid two-week Easter break in a secular country.

An end to the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may be in sight, after Congress’s Republican leaders on Wednesday agreed to advance legislation that would fund most of the agency’s operations, with the exception of those involved in immigration enforcement.

The pact may conclude the longest such funding lapse in US history, which last month caused security lines to stretch for hours at some airports as employees of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), a subagency of DHS, quit their jobs or called out of work after going weeks without pay.

Wait times eased earlier this week, after Donald Trump signed an order for TSA employees to receive paychecks.

Let's just pause here and remember that Trump does not have the power to rule by diktat, but here we are. If that word looks foreign, change the "k" to a "c," and ... er, it looks awfully familiar.

In a joint statement, Mike Johnson, House speaker, and John Thune, Senate majority leader, said they would move to pass a measure, approved by the Senate unanimously last week, which would fund DHS while excluding money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and parts of Customs and Border Protection.

They would also abandon an attempt pushed by House Republicans to fund all of the DHS for 60 days, which Senate Democrats vowed to block with a filibuster.