Chuck Schumer and Lizzo made appearances before the presidents talked onstage in event that widens fundraising lead over Trump
Joe Biden and his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, headlined a star-studded fundraiser with Bill Clinton on Thursday that organizers said raised more than $25m for the US president’s re-election campaign.
Such a haul, which Politico called an “NYC money bomb”, will widen Biden’s lead over Donald Trump in fundraising for the November election.
Continue reading...List could be released as soon as Tuesday after deadline for objections to unsealing of names passes midnight Monday
Nearly 200 names connected to the Jeffrey Epstein-Ghislaine Maxwell sex trafficking conspiracy could be released by a New York judge as soon as Tuesday, exposing or confirming the identities of dozens of associates of the disgraced financier that until now have only been known as John and Jane Does in court papers.
A deadline for objections to the unsealing of name passes at midnight on Monday, nearly nine years after victim Virginia Giuffre filed a single defamation claim against Maxwell, daughter of the late British press baron Robert Maxwell, in 2015, that in turn produced the names in legal depositions.
Continue reading...Jimmy Carter, 99, left hospice care at home for service for his late wife, but Trump, Obama and Bush did not attend
A tribute service for Rosalynn Carter took place on Tuesday, as politicians and public figures gathered to celebrate the former first lady’s life following her death last Sunday.
Former president Jimmy Carter, 99, attended the tribute for his late wife of 77 years, traveling from his hospice care at home to the Glenn Memorial church in Atlanta. His attendance marks a rare public appearance for the former president, who has been in home hospice care for 10 months.
Continue reading...Revelation raises questions about whether US and Europe should have been more prepared for 2014 invasion
Vladimir Putin told Bill Clinton three years before his 2014 attack on Ukraine that he was not bound by the Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing the country’s territorial integrity, according to the former US president.
The revelation raises questions about whether the US and its European allies should have been more prepared for the 2014 attack, when Russia annexed Crimea and attacked the Donbas.
Continue reading...This live blog has now closed, you can read more on this story here
PMQs is starting in five minutes.
The Cabinet Office has just published the revised list of ministers’ interests. This is the document that is supposed get updated every six months, but which has not been updated for around a year – partly because it’s the job of the No 10 independent adviser on ministes’ interests (aka, the ethics adviser), and for months the post was empty because two of Boris Johnson’s resigned, and then he gave up trying to find a replacement.
The prime minister’s wife is a venture capital investor. She owns a venture capital investment company, Catamaran Ventures UK Limited, and a number of direct shareholdings.
As the prime minister set out in his letter to the chair of the liaison committee on 4 April 2023, this includes the minority shareholding that his wife has in relation to the company, Koru Kids. The guide to the categories of interest (section 7, pages 4-6) sets out the independent adviser’s approach to the inclusion of interests declared in relation to spouses, partners and close family members within the list. The prime minister’s letter of 4 April is available at https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/38992/documents/191876/default/
Continue reading...Irish leader meets US president at White House for traditional St Patrick’s Day event a day after making gaffe
Ireland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, has apologised for making an apparent joke about Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, during an event in Washington on the eve of St Patrick’s Day celebrations.
Varadkar’s comment on Thursday risked overshadowing his meeting with Joe Biden at the White House on Friday for the traditional handing over of a bowl of shamrock to the US president, the most important day in the Irish-American political calendar.
Continue reading...Archives reveal PM’s early attempts to establish personal relationship with president after 2000 US election
Tony Blair moved swiftly to place his relationship with George W Bush on a personal footing after the Republican won the 2000 US presidential election, asking him “early on” in their first telephone call if he could call him by his first name.
“Bush warmly assented (but stuck himself with addressing the prime minister as ‘Sir’),” according to a note of their call, which is among government files released to the National Archives. Blair was the first foreign leader to call to congratulate the president-elect. Michael Tatham, a British diplomat, noted that the eight-minute conversation had established “as good a rapport as one could hope for” from such a short call.
Continue reading...Starr’s Whitewater investigation, which uncovered Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky, led to US president’s impeachment in 1998
Ken Starr, the lawyer who relentlessly pursued Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, has died at the age of 76, according to a statement issued by his family.
Starr was a prosecutor whose Whitewater investigation led to the impeachment of former Democratic president Clinton, in 1998. He died on Tuesday at Baylor St Luke’s medical center in Houston, of complications from surgery, the statement said.
Continue reading...Bill Clinton has said in a video after his release from hospital that he has been touched by an 'outpouring of support'.
The former US president was hospitalised in California for a urological infection last week. He advised people on his Twitter to take care of themselves to fulfil their 'important role to play in life and in the immediate future'
Former US president was admitted to California hospital on Tuesday with an infection unrelated to Covid
Bill Clinton was released Sunday from the Southern California hospital where he had been treated for an infection.
The former US president was released around 8am from the University of California Irvine medical center.
Continue reading...Then US leader also turned down Chequers dinner because he wanted to ‘be a tourist’, archives show
Bill Clinton turned down tea with the Queen and dinner at Chequers because he wanted to “be a tourist” and try out an Indian restaurant during his first official visit to the UK with Tony Blair as prime minister, formerly classified documents reveal.
Downing Street wanted to pull out all the stops for a visit seen as crucial to “establishing a good working relationship” between the new prime minister and the then US president. Buckingham Palace contacted No 10 to say “HM the Queen would be very pleased” to invite the Clintons to tea at 5pm on their brief one-day detour from summits in Paris and The Hague.
Continue reading...Former US presidents Barack Obama, George W Bush and Bill Clinton spoke together at the inauguration of Joe Biden and underlined the importance of a peaceful transfer of power.
The former leaders highlighted the importance of listening to people with different opinions and recognising our common humanity
Continue reading...Former US presidents Barack Obama, George W Bush and Bill Clinton have pledged to get vaccinated for coronavirus on television to promote the safety of the vaccine.
Related: US sets records for Covid deaths and hospitalizations as it nears 14m cases – live updates
Continue reading...I’m not obsessed with Doug, but he could probably be my pub quiz subject
There is much to say about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s historic win, but I’d like to focus on a man called Doug. Doug Emhoff is a lawyer and – more relevantly to your interests and mine – Harris’s husband, and unless you are part of the #DougHive, Doug’s devoted (and, one suspects, mainly female) fans, it’s likely you don’t know much about him.
This in itself is astonishing, given that women are generally discussed through the prism of their personal lives. I didn’t realise until last month that the young adults with whom Harris is occasionally photographed are not, as I’d assumed, her children, but rather Doug’s children and her stepchildren. Having children, or not, once defined a woman’s public image, as Theresa May could tell you, but I don’t recall a single discussion of Harris’s parental status during this campaign. Before we all celebrate this too ecstatically, Harris remains an anomaly; just try to find a single article about Amy Coney Barrett that doesn’t mention how many kids she has, and then imply that this has some bearing on her fitness for the supreme court. That Harris has largely swerved this is mainly down to her, but also down to Doug. (I know newspaper style dictates I should refer to him as Emhoff, but, really, he is such a Doug.)
Continue reading...Activist groups work towards improving labor conditions in textile factories but abolishing the industry’s ‘norms’ is an uphill battle
Mehedi Mehedi, a 36-year-old Bangladeshi garment worker who had spent 14 years working in Jordan, left the country forever last December. It was not an easy decision to make: Mehedi had met his wife in Jordan, he had no guarantees of finding a job back in Bangladesh, and he was desperate to work in order to support his chronically ill father.
In Jordan, Mehedi had been working for a subcontracting factory that supplies apparel to brands like Ralph Lauren, Under Armour, and American Eagle. But after spending his last six months without regular pay, he had reached a breaking point.
Continue reading...Democrats formally nominated Joe Biden for president during an emotional second night of their party’s virtual convention, warning that Donald Trump was an 'existential threat' to America who had failed to get a grip on the coronavirus pandemic. Here are the key moments from the evening
Second night of Democratic convention saw 17 rising stars in party deliver the keynote and an elevator operator nominate Biden
Democrats formally nominated Joe Biden for president during an emotional second night of their party’s virtual convention, warning that Donald Trump was an “existential threat” to America who had failed to get a grip on the coronavirus pandemic.
The official nomination elevates a historic ticket that includes his vice-presidential running mate Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to be nominated for national office by a major party.
Continue reading...Former US presidents Barack Obama, George W Bush, Bill Clinton and House speaker Nancy Pelosi have delivered eulogies for congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis. Hailing him as founding father for 'a fuller, fairer, better' America, Obama praised Lewis's influence on his own path to the presidency. Clinton said Lewis believed 'none of us will be free until all of us are equal', while Bush said he lived in a better and nobler country because of the congressman
Tripp, whose secret recordings of conversations with Monica Lewinsky blew the whistle on Clinton, was terminally ill
Linda Tripp, whose secretly recorded phone conversations with Monica Lewinsky led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the 1990s, has died. She was 70 years old.
Tripp’s lawyer, Joseph Murtha, confirmed Tripp’s death to the Guardian earlier today, but did not provide further details.
Continue reading...Monica Lewinsky has moved on – but the former president just can’t let his relationship with the then intern go
Back when Bill Clinton was in office, CBD oil wasn’t yet on the market. The president, therefore, it seems, took to some unusual methods to manage his anxiety. In a new Hulu docuseries about Hillary Clinton, the former president says his affair with 22-year-old intern Monica Lewinsky (he was 49 at the time) was “to manage his anxieties”.
Related: Hillary review – did the US presidential hopeful take the wrong road?
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