Category Archives: US Politics

Joe Biden cancels Australian visit amid US domestic debt deadlock

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President had been due to address parliament next week, the first US leader in 10 years to do so, as part of Asia tour

President Joe Biden has cancelled a visit to Australia, the second leg of his upcoming Asia trip, due to the slow-motion crisis building in Washington over the US debt ceiling.

Biden is to attend a three-day summit of G7 leaders that starts on Friday in Hiroshima, Japan, and will return to the US on Sunday.

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OpenAI CEO calls for laws to mitigate ‘risks of increasingly powerful’ AI

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Sam Altman says before Senate judiciary committee that he supports guardrails for technology to minimize harms

The CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for creating artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E 2, said “regulation of AI is essential” on Tuesday as he testified in front of a Senate judiciary committee panel.

In his first appearance in front of Congress, Sam Altman said he supported regulatory guardrails for the technology that would enable the benefits of artificial intelligence while minimizing the harms.

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Roger Ailes’s widow says Murdochs have ‘wreaked havoc’ on Fox News

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Wife of former CEO forced out over sexual harassment allegations says Rupert Murdoch lacks her husband’s ‘genius’

Rupert Murdoch’s family has “wreaked havoc” on Fox News, said the widow of Roger Ailes, the network’s former chief executive, adding that the 92-year-old media baron would “never come close” to her late husband’s “genius”.

Ailes died on 18 May 2017 at the age of 77. The former Republican operative built Fox News into a rightwing media giant but died less than a year after he was forced out over allegations of extensive sexual harassment.

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Silicon Valley Bank’s former CEO tells Senate he is ‘truly sorry’ for collapse

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Greg Becker tells banking committee that takeover of SVB was ‘personally and professionally devastating’

The former CEO of the collapsed lender Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has said he was “truly sorry” for what he called the “devastating” collapse of the bank that triggered the worst banking crisis since 2008.

Speaking at a Senate banking committee hearing on Tuesday, Greg Becker said he believed the bank was responsive to regulator concerns about managing risk and working to address issues before an “unprecedented” bank run led to its failure.

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Suspect named in baseball bat attack at Democratic congressman’s office

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Virginia congressman Gerry Connolly condemns ‘devastating and unconscionable’ assault on two staffers

Police in Virginia on Monday named the suspect in an attack in which two staffers at the district office of a Democratic congressman were assaulted with a metal baseball bat and required hospital treatment.

Xuan Kha Tran Pham, 49, was arrested after the attack at Gerry Connolly’s office in Fairfax. Held without bond, Pham faced charges of malicious wounding and aggravated malicious wounding.

Associated Press contributed to this report

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Border crossings reportedly decrease after Title 42 rules scrapped

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US homeland security secretary defended strict new immigration measures as volunteers pitched in to help migrants stuck at border

Crossings at the US border with Mexico have dropped 50% after Title 42 restrictions ended at the end of Thursday and the Biden White House implemented an arguably tougher immigration policy, US homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden on Sunday told White House pool reporters that the border situation immediately after Title 42’s elimination was “much better than you all expected”. The president said he did not plan to visit the border “in the near term” because to do so at this stage “would just be disruptive”.

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Florida teacher defends showing Disney movie: ‘I’m just being accepting’

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Jenna Barbee, who is under investigation, insists film is related to curriculum and warns investigators are traumatizing her students

A Florida teacher under investigation because she showed her class the Disney animated movie Strange World which features a gay character has defended herself on social media, insisting the film related to the curriculum and warning that state investigators were traumatizing her 10- and 11-year-old students.

Jenna Barbee, a teacher at Winding Waters school in Hernando county, Florida, released a six-minute TikTok video in which she gave her side of the story. She said she had been reported to the local school board by one of her students’ mother, who sits on the board and was on a “rampage to get rid of every form of representation out of our schools”, Barbee alleged.

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Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley downplays federal abortion ban

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The former South Carolina governor – far behind Donald Trump in the polls – says nationwide ban is currently unviable

Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who is vying for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has distanced herself from calls for a federal abortion ban, saying that to promise such a universal barrier to terminations would be to lie to the American people.

In an interview with CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Haley declined to follow some of her other potential Republican rivals for the presidency by backing a nationwide ban through congressional legislation. Instead, she said she supported the right of each state to set its own abortion limits.

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US senator denounced as ‘profoundly ignorant man’ over remarks on Mexico

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John Kennedy’s comments about Mexicans ‘eating cat food’ came as he urged the US military to enter country to ‘stop the cartels’

Mexicans “would be eating cat food out of a can and living in a tent behind an Outback” Steakhouse restaurant if it were not for their nation’s proximity to the US, and their country should be invaded because of the presence of drug cartels there, the US senator John Neely Kennedy said.

The Louisiana Republican’s racist remarks drew a strong condemnation from Mexico’s foreign affairs secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, who called Kennedy “a profoundly ignorant man”. Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, meanwhile, urged the 37 million Americans of Mexican descent – along with other Latinos in the US – “not to vote for people with this very arrogant, very offensive and very foolish mentality” in the future.

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Stark warning over Republicans’ ‘dehumanizing’ rhetoric on crime

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Experts say party’s ‘tough-on-crime’ approach for 2024 could spark rise in violence and worsen US mass incarceration

Republican and rightwing rhetoric over the state of crime in the US could spark a rise in violent incidents and worsen the country’s mass incarceration problem, experts say, as “tough-on-crime” political ads and messaging seem set to play a large role in the 2024 election.

Violent crime was a huge focus for Republican candidates during the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans spent about $50m on crime ads in the two months leading up to those elections, the ads pushing a dystopian vision of cities ridden by murder, robbery and assault, and of Democratic politicians unwilling to act.

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CNN’s Trump debacle suggests TV media set to repeat mistakes of 2016

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Network’s own reporters criticise decision to give ex-president platform in ‘town hall’ format that allowed him to spout freely

Donald Trump and CNN were in rare agreement: the former president’s hour of free prime-time television on Wednesday evening, dressed up as a “town hall” with Republican voters, was a triumph.

“America was served very well by what we did last night,” CNN’s chief executive, Chris Licht, told skeptical members of his own staff at the network’s daily news conference the following morning.

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Trump rages after sexual abuse verdict but legal woes have only just begun

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Investigations are mounting, making it harder for the former president to spin his troubles as persecution by liberal elites

If the outcome of Donald Trump’s sexual assault trial wasn’t a foregone conclusion, his response to a jury finding he attacked the writer E Jean Carroll was all too predictable.

The former president lashed out at the judge as biased and the jurors as “from an anti-Trump area”, meaning liberal New York, after they believed Carroll’s account of the millionaire businessman attacking her in a department store changing room in the mid-1990s. The jury ordered him to pay $5m in damages for “sexual abuse” and for defaming Carroll by accusing her of “a made-up SCAM” for political ends.

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DeSantis secures endorsements on visit to Iowa in preparation for likely 2024 bid

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Florida governor lands in crucial early-voting state in Republican nomination process after weeks of lagging behind Trump

Florida’s rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, has rolled out a hefty list of endorsements from Iowa lawmakers as he visited the crucial early-voting state on Saturday in an attempt to garner support for his potential Republican presidential campaign.

The pro-DeSantis Super Pac Never Back Down announced endorsements from 37 Republican Iowa state senators and representatives, including the Iowa senate president, Amy Sinclair, and the state house majority leader, Matt Windschitl.

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Oregon Republican boycott threatens key bills on abortion and gun control

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Walkout lasting more than a week has thrown statehouse into disarray and jeopardized Democrats’ legislative agenda

Oregon Republicans boycotted the statehouse for a ninth day on Thursday, denying lawmakers the quorum necessary to pass legislation, in a protest that could derail hundreds of bills, including proposals on gun control and abortion rights.

While Democrats control the capital in the Pacific north-west state, Republicans have leveraged rules requiring two-thirds of lawmakers be present to pass legislation, which means Democrats need a certain number of Republicans to be there too.

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‘The border is not open’: US immediately replaces Title 42 with strict new rules

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Title 42 carried no legal consequences, but now migrants will face being barred from entering the US for five years

The US late on Thursday ended pandemic-era restrictions at the US-Mexico border that blocked many migrants from their right to claim asylum in the US – but immediately replaced the so-called Title 42 restrictions with sweeping new policies designed to deter or even physically prevent people from crossing the border without permission.

In an increasingly hard line from the Biden administration, the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, said on Thursday evening that 24,000 border patrol agents and officers had been sent to the border to enforce US laws, adding: “The border is not open.

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US Covid emergency status ends as officials plan ‘new phase of managing’ virus

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Vaccines and medication will remain available for free ‘while supplies last’ but most Americans will have to pay for testing

Thursday marked the end of Covid-19’s public health emergency status in the US, concluding more than three years of free access to testing, vaccines, virtual accommodations and treatment for the majority of Americans.

The end of the emergency designation comes just weeks after the World Health Organization declared an end to the global health emergency. But the nation’s leading health officials also wanted to be sure Americans don’t confuse this marker for the end of Covid-19 concerns.

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US authorities ‘seeing large numbers of migrants at border’ before Title 42 expiration – as it happened

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Homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warns people against crossing border illegally in White House briefing

We’re a few minutes away from the daily White House press briefing, where homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas will appear ahead of the midnight expiration of Title 42, the rule put in place under Donald Trump that has allowed US authorities to turn away most asylum seekers over the past three years.

Immigration authorities and some communities at the border are bracing for a potential surge of new migrants once the measure expires, and Mayorkas is likely to use his appearance to warn people against trying to cross into the US illegally, and outline steps Washington will take to stem the flow. He may also be asked about the possibility Republicans will follow through on their threats to impeach him over the situation at the border.

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‘We’re living in madness’: George Santos’s constituents on federal charges

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Residents of the congressman’s New York district say they’re fed up with a system that enables his behavior

“It’s like we’re living in madness,” said Danielle Gentile at a Brazilian restaurant in Long Island’s Westbury, one of a cluster of towns close to the eastern border of the fabulist Republican congressman George Santos’s third congressional district.

“I know politicians lie all the time, but you’ve got to at least try to keep up,” Gentile added. “But what’s he going to say? I didn’t mean to lie? He’s like the Brian Williams of politics.”

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Biden to make public appeal on US federal debt limit fight – live

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US president will speak in New York on why Congress must avoid default, following a difficult debt ceiling extension meeting at the White House

We’re heading towards Joe Biden’s main public engagement of the day, a speech in New York about “why Congress must avoid default immediately”.

The president is due to speak at 1.30pm ET, at SUNY Westchester Community College. The speech comes after a difficult Tuesday debt ceiling extension meeting at the White House.

McCarthy read aloud old quotes from Democrats including Biden and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi about the need to negotiate around the debt limit.

Biden, in turn, asked McCarthy why House Republicans’ Limit, Save and Grow Act – which extended the debt limit by $1.5tn while slashing agency outlays – cut veterans funding by 22%. McCarthy then told the president that was a lie. That exchange stunned some in the room.

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Donald Trump rages at sexual abuse verdict after being told to pay E Jean Carroll $5m in damages – live

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Jury finds that former president defamed advice columnist, awarding $3m in damages in addition to the $2m in damages for battery

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has come out in favor of the GOP’s strategy on the debt ceiling, which involves pushing Joe Biden to accept spending cuts in exchange for increasing the limit:

During his time in the House of Representatives five years ago, DeSantis – who is expected to soon announce a campaign for president – was among the lawmakers who voted to raise the ceiling. And while the federal debt has indeed increased over recent years, that is because Washington has had to borrow to pay for spending approved under Democratic and Republican presidents alike.

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