A grand jury indictment announced on Friday supersedes initial charges brought by state prosecutors last month.

from BBC News https://ift.tt/cFxSiPl

Featuring an unlikely animal friendship, the commercial boasts enough patriotic iconography to verge on self-parody

Three years after its sister brand, Bud Light, faced a rightwing boycott over a transgender spokesperson, Budweiser’s new Super Bowl ad, American Icons, contains absolutely nothing that could be mistaken for social progress. Instead, it features an unlikely friendship between two animals whose blood runs red, white and blue: a bald eagle and a Clydesdale horse, the Budweiser icon. An adorable foal trots out of a barn, and the viewer is injected with a single minute of American iconography so pure that it would make Lee Greenwood nauseous.

The horse meets a struggling baby bird who gets caught in the rain, prompting the horse to stand over the bird as a roof. The pair become pals and grow up together, the bird riding on the horse’s back as it grows larger. It falls off a few times, but, like George Washington at Valley Forge, it never gives up. Finally, the horse jumps over a log while the bird spreads its wings above, and we get a slow-motion image of something like Pegasus. We realize the bird, now fully grown, is a majestic bald eagle, taking to the sky as Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird reaches its climax. Two farmers look on while drinking Budweiser, as the words “Made of America” appear on the screen. “You crying?” one asks. “The sun’s in my eyes,” says the other.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/7eBgrUf

As a treaty with Russia expires, the US president says he can get a better deal. Experts warn that could take years.

from BBC News https://ift.tt/PbO5LWf

Jen Dodds stars alongside Bruce Mouat to get Team GB's Winter Olympics off to a winning start in the mixed doubles curling against Norway.

from BBC News https://ift.tt/oepNtET

Attorney general Letitia James says observers will monitor if Trump enforcement ‘remains within bounds of the law’

New York is creating a team of legal observers that will don purple vests to monitor and record the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement officers as they seek to detain and deport migrants, the state’s attorney general said on Tuesday.

The announcement follows weeks of sometimes violent tumult in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump has deployed thousands of armed, masked agents as he tries to deport more migrants than any of his predecessors.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/qdsjyV6

The former first lady was married to William Stevenson for five years in the 1970s.

from BBC News https://ift.tt/5zSXm7P

The White House says the president is ‘not involved’ in running his businesses. Ethics experts remain concerned

Donald Trump has been accused of “corruption, plain and simple” after it was revealed that a member of the Emirati royal family was behind a $500m investment into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company.

Ethics experts say the deal – struck just days before the US president’s inauguration last January – amounts to a deep conflict of interest for the White House, amid calls for a congressional investigation into the transaction.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/UhuzYMK