Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Congress passed a bill to fund the government into December. But questions remain over the debt ceiling and Biden’s agenda
The US government went into Thursday embroiled in a game of three-dimensional chess with time running out and trillions of dollars at stake.
The first dimension was a must-do: fund the government by midnight to avoid it shutting down. In a typical shutdown, hundreds of thousands of federal employees stop getting paid and many stop working; some services are suspended and numerous national attractions and national parks temporarily close.
Pelosi says talks moving ‘in positive direction’ as series of legislative and fiscal deadlines loom for Biden’s $1tn public works measure
With the fate of Joe Biden’s domestic agenda on the line, Democrats searched furiously for a path forward after negotiations over a once-in-a-generation expansion of the social safety net neared collapse and a vote on a smaller public works measure appeared increasingly unlikely.
With almost no margin for error and little time left to break an impasse that threatens to imperil its passage – and possibly the entirety of the president’s program – Democrats charged ahead on Thursday, even as a crucial Democratic holdout called for shrinking the $3.5tn plan in half. But assurances of progress offered little comfort to nervous Democrats on Capitol Hill, where a series of legislative and fiscal deadlines loom.
The southern US state of Alabama, which has the highest death rate from Covid-19 in America, is planning to use Covid relief funds to help construct three large prisons and renovate several others.
As Democrats remain at an impasse over the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation package, some have expressed concern that the American public could have been better informed about what the latter bill actually aims to achieve.
The White House has packaged the wide range of initiatives under the loose slogan of “Build Back Better,” but the bill has more commonly been labelled in the media by its headline price tag - $3.5 trillion - with Democrats also unable to say definitively what would be in it.
The package, now the subject of furious negotiations on Capitol Hill, would fundamentally transform the government’s relationship with its citizens and dramatically expand the social safety net.
It sets out to broaden well-known programs for example, adding dental vision and hearing aid benefits to Medicare and continuing the Obama-era health law’s temporary subsidies that helped people buy insurance during the pandemic [...]
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.
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.
Speaker sends letter to party at mercy of warring factions
One reporter observes: ‘Well, this is raising the stakes’
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.
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.
Hi all – Sam Levin in Los Angeles taking over our live coverage for the rest of the day.
Covid has now killed roughly as many US residents as the 1918-19 Spanish flu did – approximately 675,000 people. More from the AP:
The US population a century ago was just one-third of what it is today, meaning the flu cut a much bigger, more lethal swath through the country. But the COVID-19 crisis is by any measure a colossal tragedy in its own right, especially given the incredible advances in scientific knowledge since then and the failure to take maximum advantage of the vaccines available this time.
“Big pockets of American society — and, worse, their leaders — have thrown this away,” medical historian Dr Howard Markel of the University of Michigan said of the opportunity to vaccinate everyone eligible by now.
COVID-19 has now killed about as many Americans as the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic did — approximately 675,000. The 1918-19 influenza numbers are rough guesses. The population of the U.S. at the time was about one-third the size of what it is today. https://t.co/07AY1140fQ
Joe Biden will make his first speech to the United Nations as president on Tuesday, seeking to “close the chapter on 20 years of war” and begin an era of intensive diplomacy, our worlds affairs editor Julian Borger writes.
The president is about to embark on a legislative push with almost no room for error
In what could be the most consequential stretch of his presidency, Joe Biden faces an autumn sprint to advance a once-in-a-generation expansion of the social safety net.
The former Democratic congressman Beto O’Rourke is set to mount a third campaign for major political office with a run for governor in Texas, Axios reported on Sunday.
Pre-emptively branding as rigged an election you are likely to lose risks turning off GOP voters and undermining democracy
It was a pre-emptive strike against truth by some of the biggest names on the American right wing.
Former president Donald Trump warned that the ballot would be “rigged”. The Republican candidate Larry Elder predicted “shenanigans”. The conservative media star Tomi Lahren suggested that “voter fraud” was inevitable.
Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker of the US Congress, has likened the 6 January attack to 9/11, saying one had been an assault on US democracy from within and the other from the outside. Speaking at a Chatham House seminar in London on Friday, she also claimed the Republicans had been hijacked by a cult that believed neither in science nor government, making it hard for the US to be governed
California voters resoundingly reject choice to replace Democratic governor, who faced a battle for his political life
California’s governor, Gavin Newsom has prevailed in a historic recall election that had him battling for his political life. In a referendum on the governor’s leadership through the pandemic, voters resoundingly rejected the choice to replace him with a Trumpist Republican.
The Associated Press projected the results about 45 minutes after polls closed on Tuesday night. Newsom’s most popular challenger was Larry Elder, a rightwing radio host who drew comparisons to the former president and who attempted to sow baseless doubts about the election process.
Facebook has kept internal research secret for two years that suggests its Instagram app makes body image issues worse for teenage girls, according to a leak from the tech firm.
Joe Biden will reportedly propose a target for 70% of the world’s population to be vaccinated within the next year at a global vaccines summit he intends to convene alongside the UN general assembly in New York this month.
The US president’s target, reported by the New York Times, is in line with ambitions set jointly by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the WTO and the World Health Organization (WHO) but is more ambitious than current performance and the targets set at the G7 meeting in Cornwall chaired by the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson. The G7 agreed to donate 870m doses of Covid-19 vaccines directly, with an aim to deliver at least half by the end of 2021.
The Guardian’s David Smith has the full report on today’s commemorations so far:
Some wept. Some held photos of loved ones. At 8:46am, precisely two decades after a passenger plane became a new and deadly weapon here, all fell silent in remembrance.
Families of the victims gathered at the 9/11 memorial plaza in New York on Saturday to mark the 20th anniversary of terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and helped shape the 21st century.
Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden arrived in Pennsylvania earlier and walked out to the Flight 93 National Memorial, where they bowed their heads as they helped to place a wreath of white and red roses.
The law banned abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which typically occurs around 6 weeks into the pregnancy — often before many women know they are pregnant.
Appeals court strikes down Tennessee abortion restrictions, with Judge Thapar (a Trump appointee) writing lengthy partial dissent taking aim at Roe v. Wade: https://t.co/bZqizndvtJpic.twitter.com/J1kcQRDBMn
A group of parents in Iowa are filing a lawsuit against the state for its ban on mask mandates, says the law discriminates against students with disabilities that make them more susceptible to Covid-19.
The plaintiffs in the case are asking the federal judge to block the ban on mask mandates and order to allow the states to allow mandates.
In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal published yesterday, Democratic senator Joe Manchin said that he will not pass the $3.5tn spending bill that progressive members of the party want to pass through reconciliation.
Manchin said that Democrats looking to pass the bill have “no regard to rising inflation, crippling debt or the inevitability of future crises.”
The Northeast is flooded after torrential rain. The West Coast is on fire. The Gulf is still reeling from the hurricane.
This is no time to pause or pull back. We need to pass the President's Build Back Better agenda and invest in urgent climate action NOW. Lives are at stake.
White House’s @KJP46 on the Manchin op-Ed: “Senator Manchin is an important partner to our administration. The president firmly believes that critical investment in our future should be paid for and if we do, economists tells us that they should not increase the inflation risk.”