Analysis: Senators’ questions to military leadership a contest in sharing out responsibility for failures
The deeply partisan US Congress is rarely a conducive place for national introspection and Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the Afghanistan withdrawal did not provide an exception.
In the midst of the point-scoring and blame-shifting on display in the senators’ questions to the nation’s military leadership, it was clear that it was a contest to apportion shares in failure.
Continue reading...The withdrawal from Afghanistan and the evacuation of Kabul was “a logistical success but a strategic failure,” the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff has told the Senate.
Gen Mark Milley gave the stark assessment at an extraordinary hearing of the Senate armed services committee to examine the US departure, which also became a postmortem on the 20-year war that preceded it.
Continue reading...Former president says billionaires should ‘pay a little bit more in taxes’ to fund healthcare, childcare and the climate crisis fight
Barack Obama says wealthy Americans – including himself – can afford tax rises to help fund Joe Biden’s ambitious spending plan.
Related: Pelosi: Biden spending plan, infrastructure deal and funding ‘must pass’ next week
Continue reading...Before Christine Blasey Ford and Monica Lewinsky, there was Anita Hill, shamed for exposing the actions of a powerful man. She explains how she withstood the tumult
Anita Hill sits so still that, when she is not speaking, I worry that the screen through which we are talking may have frozen. Yet despite her lawyerly, academic poise, she exudes warmth: you would feel safe confiding in her. And that is what people have been doing for the past 30 years – telling her of their own experiences with sexual harassment and assault. “I was a symbol of so many people’s experiences,” she says.
In the pantheon of women shamed for exposing the actions of high-profile men – before Christine Blasey Ford in 2018 and Monica Lewinsky in 1998 – there was Anita Hill. In 1991, the US president, George HW Bush, nominated Clarence Thomas to the supreme court. Senate hearings for his confirmation were completed without incident, until an interview of Hill by the FBI was leaked to the press. In it, Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment while he was her supervisor in two separate jobs, at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Among other claims, Hill said that Thomas discussed women having sex with animals, and pornographic films depicting group sex or rape scenes, and described his own sexual prowess and anatomy. According to Hill, Thomas’s behaviour forced her to resign from her job.
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Earlier, the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, pleaded with healthcare workers to get vaccinated against Covid-19 before an end-of-day deadline which could bring staff shortages at hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities.
The Biden administration’s announcement of a new approach to protecting Dreamers from deportation is meant to “bulletproof” existing measures guarding against litigation, a leading expert said.
“Dreamers” are undocumented migrants living in the US who were brought to the country as children. Their fate has long been held in limbo by deadlock in Congress over immigration reform.
Continue reading...President receives public Covid jab after FDA and CDC carved out fewer categories than he hoped of Americans eligible for third dose
At the White House on Monday, Joe Biden donned a black surgical mask, rolled his shirt sleeve to his shoulder and received a third dose of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine as a “booster” shot.
Related: Judge rules in Wisconsin teen’s favor after sheriff threatened jail over Covid post
Continue reading...Speaker says she will work to build consensus on Biden’s separate $3.5tn social agenda, which has caused division within the party
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said on Sunday Democrats will pass a $1tn bipartisan infrastructure bill this week.
Related: ‘We couldn’t be more inconsistent’: discordant Democrats imperil Biden’s agenda
Continue reading...In a letter to Democrats on Saturday the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, set her sights high, saying Joe Biden’s $3.5tn spending package, a bipartisan infrastructure deal worth $1tn and a measure to expand government funding “must pass” next week.
Related: ‘We couldn’t be more inconsistent’: discordant Democrats imperil Biden’s agenda
Continue reading...Divisions between progressives and moderates in Congress are threatening to scuttle a $3.5tn social spending program and a $1tn infrastructure bill
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cannot have been surprised that wearing a “Tax the Rich” dress to New York’s Met gala would trigger performative outrage from the right. But it also earned blowback from closer to home.
Eric Adams, a Black police veteran who won the party’s mayoral primary by appealing to its centre, argued that “when you talk about just blanketly saying ‘tax the rich’ in this city”, it would potentially drive away firefighters, teachers and other taxpayers on whom the city depends. He advocated cutting wasteful spending instead.
Continue reading...Joe Biden has said there will be repercussions for border patrol agents over their harsh treatment of Haitian migrants at the southern US border between Texas and Mexico, calling it an embarrassment to the nation. Images of agents on horseback corralling migrants in Del Rio as thousands tried to enter the US drew international attention. The president said he bears ultimate responsibility for the situation
There are signs that previously struggling social democratic parties are drawing the right lessons from the pandemic
In the wake of the financial crash in 2008, hopes were high on the left that a bona fide crisis of capitalism would significantly shift the political dial in its favour. Isolated victories and movements aside, it didn’t really happen. Instead, in the early 2010s, the bailout of the bankers was followed by the imposition of austerity across Europe and in America as governments sought to balance the books.
Premature predictions on the nature of post-Covid politics in the west are therefore to be avoided. But certain themes do seem to be emerging. Sketching out broadly communitarian territory, they chime with many people’s experience of how the pandemic played out and what it exposed; and there is some evidence that, in northern Europe, they might inform a revival and renewal of centre-left parties and movements.
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An extraordinary confrontation outside the Capitol today, between the Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell and Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far right Republican from Georgia.
As reported by Ben Siegel of ABC News, the confrontation developed as Democrats prepared to host a press conference on the Capitol steps about abortion rights, after voting to protect them in the face of concerted assault from Republican-run states.
Greene and Rep. Dingell are now shouting at each other.
“You should practice the basic thing you’re taught in church: respect your neighbor!”
Greene: “Church?! Are you kidding me? Try being a Christian!”
Dingell: “You try being a Christian and treat your colleagues decently.” pic.twitter.com/5aXtaU1dNK
Related: House Democrats vote to establish federal right to abortion
Here’s where the day stands so far:
Continue reading...Analysis: the west tried to impose its alien values and it is time to try a new approach, as Joe Biden has indicated
Some years ago, in Afghanistan, the anthropologist Scott Atran asked a Taliban fighter what it would take to stop the fighting, because families on both sides were crying. The fighter replied: “Leave our country and the crying will stop.”
The crying may not have stopped, but the Taliban have taken control of Afghanistan without an air force, heavy arms or expensive training, against US-backed Afghan government forces that outnumbered them four to one. In doing so, they have taken an important step closer to realising their stated goal, which is the creation of an Islamic emirate governed according to their interpretation of sharia law.
Continue reading...Australian PM hopes to speak with French president ‘when the time is right and the opportunity presents’
French president Emmanuel Macron has not yet taken a call from Scott Morrison amid continuing fury in Paris over the torn up submarine deal.
Morrison, the Australian prime minister, said he hoped to speak with Macron “when the time is right and when the opportunity presents” but he understood “the hurt and the disappointment” felt by France over the cancellation of the $90bn arrangement.
Continue reading...Analysis: Joe Biden has cleared the decks to focus on China. But how imminent is the danger?
It may have been an inelegantly, even ineptly, executed pivot, gratuitously alienating key allies, but by leaving Afghanistan and forming the Australian, US and UK security pact in the Indo-Pacific, Joe Biden has at least cleared the decks to focus on his great foreign policy challenge – the systemic rivalry with China.
Yet the concern now is how quickly this rivalry could escalate, especially in Taiwan. The linchpin of the US alliance system in south-east Asia, Taiwan is the biggest island in the “first island chain”, the group of islands that keeps China blocked in. It is China’s next target, and as the former British prime minister Theresa May pointed out, no one quite knows if the west is prepared to fight to save Taiwan or whether the new tripartite pact in some way places a new obligation on the UK to come to the country’s defence.
Continue reading...During the White House daily press briefing on Wednesday, press secretary Jen Psaki was asked for additional details about Joe Biden’s call with the French president Emmanuel Macron today, after which it was announced the French ambassador would return to Washington.
Psaki noted that the phone call between the two leaders lasted about 30 minutes, and she said it was a “friendly” conversation. “[Biden] acknowledged that there could have been more discussion,” she said.
Continue reading...Analysis: Fear and uncertainty of the Obama years could return as Kim Jong-un revives nuclear ambitions
North Korea’s recent missile launches signal that the regime has reverted to familiar tactics to attract the attention of the US. Although the rest of the world will take little comfort from this return to “normality”, after a six-month pause Pyongyang last weekend launched what it claimed were new long-range cruise missiles capable of hitting Japan, followed hours later by the test launch of two ballistic missiles into the sea, apparently from a train.
Then came the clearest sign since its last nuclear test in 2017 that the North is not about to abandon its project to build a viable deterrent, with satellite images showing it was expanding a uranium enrichment plant at its main Yongbyon nuclear complex.
Continue reading...Joe Biden has underlined the importance of ensuring peace in Northern Ireland is not jeopardised by post-Brexit tensions. Asked about a UK-US trade deal, the US president told reporters in Washington on Tuesday: 'There are two separate issues: on the deal with the UK, that continues to be discussed, but on the protocols, I feel very strongly about those. It was a major bipartisan effort made, and I would not at all like to see – nor, I might add, would many of my Republican colleagues – like to see a change in the Irish accords, and the end result having a closed border again'
Continue reading...US president outlines plan at Covid summit, bringing America’s global donation to over 1.1bn doses amid backlash over boosters
Joe Biden has announced that the US will donate an additional 500m Covid-19 vaccines to low- and middle-income countries around the world, bringing America’s total global donation to more than 1.1bn doses.
The US president outlined the plan on Wednesday at a virtual coronavirus summit where he urged world leaders to “go big” in tackling the pandemic and closing the vaccination gap with poorer nations.
Continue reading...Relationship between Biden’s US and Johnson’s post-Brexit UK remains complicated and inevitably transactional
What a difference a month makes.
In August Joe Biden was being denounced in the British parliament for a “shameful” retreat from Afghanistan that blindsided the UK and other allies. The US president reportedly took a day and a half to return prime minister Boris Johnson’s call.
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