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...Leaders scrambling to get infrastructure bill and the $3.5tn spending plan to Biden’s desk while trying to avoid a shutdown and raise the debt ceiling
House Democrats are moving forward with their plan to vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill next week, despite pushback from progressive lawmakers.
House majority leader Steny Hoyer confirmed this morning that the vote on the infrastructure bill will happen next Monday or Tuesday.
Vaccine mandates for the US military are meant to identify “sincere Christians … free thinkers” and “men with high testosterone levels”, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed on Monday night.
Related: Tucker Carlson claims US military vaccine mandate a ‘purity test’ for ‘men with high testosterone’
Continue reading...But president will contend with skepticism in wake of Aukus, disagreements over Israel and the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal
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.
Biden will however have to contend with hostility from China, an open rift with France and widespread scepticism among UN member states over his commitment to multilateralism following disagreements over Israel, a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and a nuclear submarine deal that took adversaries and allies by surprise.
Continue reading...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.
Related: House Democrats are scared to tax billionaires – that’s a costly mistake | Robert Reich
Continue reading...A decision not to recommend third-shot booster vaccinations for most Americans is “not the end of the story”, White House chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci insisted on Sunday, two days after a scientific panel appeared to turn the Biden administration’s plan for combating coronavirus on its head.
Related: Tate Reeves: Biden vaccine mandate an ‘attack on hardworking Americans’
Continue reading...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.
Related: Covid vaccinations among US Latinos are rising thanks to community outreach
Continue reading...The Republican senator Jim Risch pressed the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, over rumours someone in the White House has the ability to cut off the president's microphone when he speaks. While Blinken chuckled throughout the questioning, Risch continued to press his claims after an earlier video from the White House featuring Biden cut off during a briefing. 'It’s been widely reported that somebody has the ability to push the button and cut off his sound and stop him from speaking,' Risch said.
Blinken replied: 'Anyone who knows the president, including members of this committee, knows that he speaks very clearly and very deliberately for himself'
Continue reading...US justice department seeks temporary restraining order while lawsuit challenges the statute as unconstitutional
The Biden administration has formally asked a federal judge to block enforcement of a new Texas law that effectively bans almost all abortions in the state under a novel legal design that opponents say is intended to thwart court challenge.
The US Department of Justice’s 45-page emergency motion seeks a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction lifting the abortion ban while its lawsuit challenging the statute as unconstitutional proceeds through the courts.
Continue reading...US secretary of state pushed back against criticism of the military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Blinked said the Biden administration inherited Donald Trump's deal with the Taliban but no plan for carrying it out
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Joe Biden said in a Thursday afternoon statement that he was no longer proposing David Chipman, a 25-year veteran of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) who has worked to tighten gun laws, as the agency’s next director, confirming an earlier Washington Post report.
The gun reform group Brady says Biden’s decision to bow to National Rifle Association (NRA) pressure and withdraw his nominee, a strong gun control advocate, to lead the agency enforcing federal firearms laws is “a shameful day for our country”.
Related: Biden withdraws pick to run firearms agency after NRA pressure
“We have the tools. Now we just have to finish the job,” Biden said in his concluding remarks.
More details of his pandemic plan will be revealed in the coming weeks, he said. He ended his speech with a whisper: “Get vaccinated”.
Continue reading...The Biden administration sued Texas on Thursday over the state’s extreme abortion law, which amounts to a near total ban on abortion, calling the law “clearly unconstitutional”.
The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said the law that went into effect last week after the supreme court refused to block it and bans almost all abortions in the state was one “all Americans should fear”.
Continue reading...The US attorney general has announced that the Biden administration is suing Texas over the state’s 'clearly unconstitutional' abortion law, which amounts to a near-total ban on abortion. Senate Bill 8 bans abortion around six weeks after a pregnancy starts, and is enforced by private citizens being invited to report any woman seeking an abortion after this time, with a prize of $10,000 (£72,000) for each report.
Merrick Garland said the law that came into effect at the beginning of September was one 'all Americans should fear' because it opened the possibility for other constitutional rights to be put in danger by 'bounty hunting' private citizens
Continue reading...White House confirms that 11 Trump appointees were asked to step down – or be fired – including Conway and Spicer
The White House confirmed on Wednesday that 11 Trump appointees to military service academy advisory boards, among them former press secretary Sean Spicer and adviser Kellyanne Conway, were asked to step down – or be fired.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said: “The president’s objective is what any president’s objective is – to ensure you have nominees and people serving on these boards who are qualified to serve on them and who are aligned with your values. And so yes, that was an ask that was made.”
Continue reading...The president named one of the most diverse cabinets ever but efforts to reform voting rights and other priorities are bogged down by legislative and legal obstacles
Defying the punishing August heat, the Rev Al Sharpton recently led a gathering thousands strong through the streets of the nation’s capital on the 58th anniversary of the March on Washington, when Martin Luther King Jr delivered his immortal I Have a Dream speech on that day in 1963.
Now, as then, there was an urgency to their march. In statehouses across the country, Republicans are proposing – and passing – new voter restrictions that activists say amount to the greatest erosion of voting rights since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement.
Continue reading...Analysis of alleged anti-terrorist shootouts reveals security forces routinely suppressing opposition, claims Human Rights Watch
Egyptian security forces engaged in an extended campaign of extrajudicial killings of detainees, routinely masked as shootouts with alleged terrorists, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.
The report details what it alleges are a pattern of extrajudicial assassinations between 2015 and last year, a period in which the Egyptian interior ministry said publicly that 755 people were killed in alleged exchanges of fire with security forces, while naming just 141.
Continue reading...Move by US attorney general Merrick Garland comes after strictest anti-abortion law in US took effect last week
US attorney general Merrick Garland announced on Monday that the federal government will take action to protect those in Texas trying to obtain an abortion in the wake of the strictest anti-abortion law in the US taking effect last week.
The US justice department said that it will not tolerate violence against anyone seeking abortion services in the state and that federal officials are exploring all options to challenge the ban on almost all terminations, with new state law also empowering the public to enforce the law in a way critics decry as promoting vigilantism.
Continue reading...But they insist shots won’t be rolled out without health agencies’ authorization, leaving open possibility of delays
US officials have expressed optimism that Covid-19 booster shot delivery can start for all adults on 20 September, the goal set by President Joe Biden, as cases continue to rage across the country fueled by the highly transmissible Delta variant.
The officials insist, however, that boosters will not be rolled out without US health agencies’ authorization, leaving open the possibility of delays.
Continue reading...The president warned that ‘we need to act now’ as trail of destruction blighted west, south and north-east
The widespread destruction caused by extreme weather coast to coast, with Hurricane Ida spreading devastation from Louisiana to New York while record wildfires scorch California, prompted Joe Biden to level with America this week, saying it was “yet another reminder that … the climate crisis is here”.
“We need to be much better prepared. We need to act,” Biden said in a speech on Thursday at the White House.
Continue reading...‘This is not the first threat to Roe we've seen in a state across the country. It's an extreme threat,' the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said after one of the most restrictive state abortion laws went into effect in Texas. Psaki said the Biden administration would fight to protect the constitutional right to abortion as laid out in the landmark Roe v Wade case