Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is using her millennial’s instinct for social media and her star quality to get her message across
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Or talk up a storm about the minimum wage, healthcare and the existential struggle for democracy.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s latest Instagram live stream found the youngest woman ever elected to the US Congress standing at a chopping board with two lemons and a plastic jug as she expounded her political philosophy.
Amidst a ‘great awakening’, white Americans overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Are liberals really doing the groundwork they claim?
In the winter of 2018, Gwen Kansen, a 33-year-old self-professed liberal, met a man called Elias in a bar. Within minutes, she knew he was intense. His phone screensaver was of Pepe the Frog – a symbol of the alt-right movement. His style reminded her of a Confederate soldier, and he wore badges proudly proclaiming his hatred for political correctness.
It was not long before he disclosed he was a member of the Proud Boys, a far-right, male-only political organization. Still, Kansen didn’t put an end to the date. They drank rum and cokes; spoke about music, books, and exes; and that night, he walked her home. The two had a brief fling. Later,Kansen wrote an article about coming to terms with her so-called liberal beliefs while still choosing to entertain the affair.
The Democratic left rallied around the party’s nominee but are now warily surveying his picks for top administration positions
Joe Biden has long had a rollercoaster relationship with progressive organizations and the left wing of the Democratic party and there are signs that the relationship is again starting to fray now that his electoral triumph over Donald Trump is receding into the rear-view mirror.
When Biden entered the Democratic primary field progressive groups were quick to criticize the former vice-president for supporting the Iraq war and previously considering cuts to social security. The organizations cast Biden as an establishment Democrat who would fail to challenge a status quo that had created the conditions for the rise of Trump.
Donald Trump will return to the campaign trail on Saturday – not, notionally at least, in his quixotic and doomed attempt to deny defeat by Joe Biden, but in support of two Republicans who face January run-offs which will decide control of the US Senate.
Congresswoman says price was appropriate because garment was made by unionised workers in America – unlike ‘Trump’s merch’
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a swift response for conservatives criticizing her for selling a “Tax the Rich” sweatshirt for $58. The price was right, the leftwing New York Democrat said, because the campaign merchandise was made by unionised workers in the US rather than in China, unlike political wear sold by, for example, Donald Trump.
Senator Marsha Blackburn invokes Chinese stereotype a racist tweet
Republican senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee received swift backlash Thursday for a racist tweet invoking the history of China to allude to a stereotype of cheating.
China has a 5,000 year history of cheating and stealing. Some things will never change...
While recognizing Republican criticism, Donald Trump still refused to back down from earlier calls to repeal Section 230, a provision of the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that protects tech firms from liability over third-party content. In a tweet, the president called it a “must.”
Looks like certain Republican Senators are getting cold feet with respect to the termination of Big Tech’s Section 230, a National Security and Election Integrity MUST. For years, all talk, no action. Termination must be put in Defense Bill!!!
Another California politician, San Francisco mayor London Breed, is under fire after it was revealed that she attended a birthday party at the three-star Michelin restaurant in Napa Valley – just one night after governor Gavin Newsom did the same.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to shorten its recommendation for how long individuals should quarantine after being exposed to someone with Covid-19, the AP reports.
Since the pandemic began, the CDC has recommended that individuals quarantine for 14 days after exposure. The new recommendations, which could be released later tonight, will recommend that individuals quarantine for 10 days after exposure, or seven days if they test negative for the disease.
The president-elect has brought in a mix of experience and diversity – but more telling is who Biden hasn’t appointed
So far, Joe Biden has avoided one of the biggest potential pitfalls of the transition process that will end with him moving into the White House: infuriating the left wing of the Democratic party.
Conservatives relish the irony of Trump’s audacious reversal of the truth around rigging – because it distracts attention from their minority rule
The Republican establishment, despite being unfairly advantaged by the skewed composition of the electoral college, by over-representation in the House due to partisan gerrymandering and in the Senate due to equal State suffrage, has been in no hurry to reject Donald Trump’s ludicrous allegation that the American electoral system is rigged to favor Democrats. Sweating the make-or-break Georgia runoffs, the party’s leaders are apparently frightened to cross the mad king, who owns their voters, lest he cause their ratings to plummet as he is doing with Fox News. But Republican complicity with this unprecedented attack on American democracy is not a matter of short-term expediency or fear of reprisals. It is much worse than that. Mitch McConnell and the others are not merely humoring the president until his mania subsides. Trump’s voters are the Republicans’ voters and the Republican party cannot easily cut them, and their deranged conspiracy theories, loose even after 20 January.
President-elect Joe Biden says his presidency would not be 'a third Obama term' after announcing a slew of cabinet nominees that included many former Obama administration staffers. In his first sit-down interview since the election, Biden said the appointments reflected the spectrum of the American people and the Democratic party. 'This is not a third Obama term. We face a totally different world than we faced in the Obama-Biden administration,' he told NBC's Lester Holt, adding that Donald Trump's 'America first' approach meant 'America alone'. He also said he would consider appointing a Republican in upcoming appointments.
A look at the history of US voting rights and what the changing demographics of the country mean for Republicans
Black and Latino voters overwhelmingly favoured the Democrats in the 2020 US election. Without their huge margins in key states, Joe Biden could not have won, the journalist Gary Younge tells Anushka Asthana. By 2045, white voters will be in the minority. These changing demographics are a concern for the Republican party. In 2013, just a year after turnout rates for black voters surpassed those for white voters for the first time, the supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which affected poor, young and minority voters.
It’s important to remember, Gary tells Anushka, that the US was a slave state for more than 200 years; and an apartheid state, after the abolition of slavery, for another century. It has only been a non-racial democracy for 55 years. And that now hangs in the balance. If Biden does not produce something transformative, the disillusionment among voters may grow and people may once again look for someone who can disrupt the status quo, which is how Donald Trump won in 2016.
The president-elect knows that he will always be able to call on his old boss for advice – but he has big shoes to fill and could suffer by comparison
He’s back with a vengeance. After four years lying low as Donald Trump occupied the White House, Barack Obama is suddenly everywhere again – on TV, on radio, online and in bookshops.
The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among members of the 'Squad', a group of progressive Democrats, who spoke at a Sunrise Movement rally in Washington to push Joe Biden on tackling the climate emergency.
AOC said they would urge Biden to 'keep his promises' to working families, women, minorities and climate activists as he fills his cabinet.
In July, Biden outlined an ambitious climate plan that would spend $2tn over four years investing in clean-energy infrastructure while vowing to cut carbon emissions from electrical power to zero in 15 years
Senior House Democrat says Trump ‘views truth as his enemy’
Campaign seeks recounts and investigations in key states
Donald Trump was condemned by opponents on Wednesday for firing the senior official who disputed his baseless claims of election fraud, as the president pressed on with his increasingly desperate battle to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.
If they’re going to achieve anything the next two to four years, Democrats must not fall for the trap of ‘bipartisanship’
For four years, Donald Trump and the Republican party have been riding roughshod over long-established norms of American democracy. They have pushed to the legal limits of what they can do (and sometimes beyond). They have not so much ignored any opposition as declared it illegitimate. In response, and in the face of intense national polarization, politicians and pundits have appealed to moderation, civility and the common good. One of the biggest proponents of that attitude is President-elect Joe Biden, who, in his victory speech, said, “We must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.” Now that Trump has lost, the political survivors of the Republican party may rush to join that chorus.
Removing far-right president is top priority for many Brazilian leftists – but can they build the united front needed to defeat him?
When glad tidings of Donald Trump’s undoing reached Flávio Dino’s 18th-century palace in north-eastern Brazil, he felt delight.
“Trump was such a toxic figure,” said the Communist party governor of Maranhão state, a leading light of the Brazilian left. “Trump’s defeat is a victory for humanity.”
According to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, if Donald Trump wants a statewide recount, he will have to pay $7.9m.
The president lost the state by more than 20,000 votes - which means a recount is very unlikely to change the fact that he lost. Even if a recount, miraculously, left Trump ahead in the state, Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes are not enough to change the election outcome.
Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, told the Washington Post that senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina was among several members of his party who pressured him to toss out legally cast ballots so that Trump could win the state.
From the Post:
In a wide-ranging interview about the 2020 election, Raffensperger expressed exasperation with a string of baseless allegations coming from Trump and his allies about the integrity of the Georgia results, including claims that Dominion Voting Systems, the Colorado-based manufacturer of Georgia’s voting machines, is a “leftist” company with ties to Venezuela that engineered thousands of Trump votes not to be counted.
The atmosphere has grown so contentious, Raffensperger said, that both he and his wife, Tricia, have received death threats in recent days, including a text to him that read, “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.”
If Joe Biden is going to accomplish anything, we need to start thinking differently about power and our political system
One thing we have learned from this election is just how crazy our democratic system is. Many crucial victories came down to slim margins in swing states and the idiosyncrasies of the electoral college.
Moving forward, progressives need to rally around serious democracy reform. Every issue we care about, from heathcare to climate justice, flows from that. Without a major intervention – and even with radical candidates winning office here and there – our political system is becoming less and less representative and responsive.