Preservationists worry board may seize on incident ‘to make the point that the whole thing needs to be shut down’

Falling debris from a ceiling in the grand foyer of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts may have complicated a battle over renovations of the Washington DC arts center that could result in the building being demolished.

A portion of the ceiling collapsed on Friday evening after heavy rain swept through the area, prompting officials to temporarily close the Edward Durell Stone-designed building. No one was injured by the debris.

Judge issues order as part of discovery process in lawsuit brought by non-profit into now defunct compensation fund

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to reveal who set up the structure of a controversial $1.8bn “anti-weaponization fund” to recompense victims of so-called political lawfare that was reportedly dropped by the justice department last month.

Ivan Davis, the US magistrate judge for the eastern district of Virginia, issued the order compelling discovery materials from the government as part of a lawsuit brought by the Democracy Forward non-profit on behalf of plaintiffs including a fired prosecutor and a college professor acquitted of assaulting federal agents at a protest against an immigration raid in California.

Donald Trump’s business ally and son-in-law now heading from Moscow to Kyiv to meet Zelenskyy

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are heading to Kyiv for the first time in their roles as Donald Trump’s peace envoys to Ukraine, after talks on Saturday in Moscow.

The White House said Witkoff and Kushner had “discussed substantive plans for next steps” towards ending the war between Ukraine and Russia during their meeting on Saturday in Moscow with Vladimir Putin.

Todd Blanche’s remarks are part of a totally-not-invented moral panic that stretches the limits of the imagination

Being a public school teacher in the US these days is tough. You’ve got to pay for a lot of your own supplies, deal with smartphone-addicted children and perform gender-affirming surgeries on your lunch break.

Luckily our intrepid attorney general, Todd Blanche, is on the case. Blanche appeared on Fox News this week to decry a “pandemic” of gender transitions in schools across the US. “There’s not a parent in America, no matter where you live, that would want their school to change and call their child by a different name and not expect to be told about that. We partnered with the Department of Education recently to combat this very trend and, really, pandemic that’s happening in some school districts around the country,” Blanche said. He seemed more concerned with name changes than with surgery, but the president himself has suggested on several occasions that schools are furtively doing surgery on children. During a campaign speech in 2024, for example, Donald Trump said: “Can you imagine … your son leaves the house and you say: ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this?”

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Activists are calling on the state attorney general to take action against hospitals that have ended gender-affirming care programs after Trump retook office

A group of trans activists from across Massachusetts brought their needles, hormone gels, pills and sharps containers to Boston on Wednesday to send a message to state attorney general Andrea Campbell.

Organizers with the youth-led group Protect Trans Futures (PTF) took their hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in the lobby of her office building, then occupied the space, refusing to leave without a commitment to protect civil rights for trans kids.

The US defense secretary faces internal dissent and discord at the Pentagon, accused of focusing on culture war issues and his own political ambitions as the Iran war drags on

In a different Washington, under a different president, a return to the well-worn playbook of all-out sanctions to counter Iran might have been the signal for a publicity-hungry US secretary of defense to adopt a lower profile.

But these are no ordinary times. And Pete Hegseth is no ordinary defense secretary.