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.
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.
Republican tweets picture just of George W Bush after Trump pac sends out image that spliced Cheney with former leader
One of the less dignified spats in US politics has rumbled onwards as the Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney responded to a bizarre insult from Donald Trump.
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.
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.
One of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial warned on Sunday that the former president’s “bullying” of the party would lead to electoral defeat in next year’s midterms and beyond.
Mississippi has second-worst death rate in world, after Peru
Governor insists requiring shots for workers is tyranny
Joe Biden’s coronavirus vaccination mandate for federal workers is a tyrannical “attack on hardworking Americans”, Tate Reeves insisted on Sunday, even as the state he governs reeled under a death rate that if Mississippi were a country would make it the second worst-hit in the world, after Peru.
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.
Marking the first anniversary of the death of the supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Cecile Richards warned that after nearly 50 years, Republicans are on the brink of ending the right to abortion.
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
James Risch questioned the secretary of state about an official supposedly able to mute the president – ‘Who is that person?’
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, fought back laughter on Capitol Hill on Tuesday as the Republican senator James Risch relentlessly questioned him about a rumor that someone on the White House staff “pushes the button and cuts [Joe Biden] off mid-sentence” with a wireless device.
“Somebody in the White House has authority to press the button and cut off the president’s speaking ability and sound. Who is that person?” asked Risch, who was also former lieutenant governor of Idaho.
Joe Biden has been called ‘fascist’ and ‘tyrannical’ for his Covid prevention measures but the public appears to be on his side
When Joe Biden announced sweeping federal coronavirus vaccine requirements for 100 million Americans, the White House was braced for objections from Republican opponents.
But this being 2021, the rightwing backlash has gone way beyond mere political debate into the realm of incendiary language that, analysts fear, could translate into direct and violent action.
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.
No one quite knows if the former president will run again, but stoking the fire flatters his ego and keeps the cash rolling in
The date Saturday 9 October 2021 might go down in political history. Or at least that is what Donald Trump would like you to believe.
That night, Trump will hold a rally in Iowa, the celebrated launchpad for US presidential candidates, the state that goes first in the major parties’ selection process and that is already drawing potential contenders for the Republican nomination in 2024.