College football, Mexican cola and muffins – UK prime minister has plenty to talk about in private hour at Aukus
It is common for British and American leaders to try to show the “special relationship” between their two countries extends to them personally.
When Rishi Sunak landed in San Diego for a flash visit to see Joe Biden, the world’s media were spared any such attempts verging on the grandiose.
Continue reading...Likely contender’s statement read on air by Fox News host Tucker Carlson aligns him with rival Donald Trump
Here’s Ron DeSantis’s full statement outlining his position on Ukraine, as posted by Tucker Carlson:
Other big Republican names responded to the Fox News commentator’s questionnaire, including Texas governor Greg Abbott, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, former vice president Mike Pence and, of course, Donald Trump.
Continue reading...Restructuring, as part of the company’s ‘Year of Efficiency’, also sees 5,000 unfulfilled job adverts closed without hiring
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is laying off another 10,000 people and instituting a further hiring freeze as part of the company’s “Year of Efficiency”, the chief executive announced in a Facebook post on Tuesday.
The restructuring, which also sees a further 5,000 unfilled job adverts closed without hiring, comes less than six months after the company announced another wave of 11,000 redundancies. At its peak in 2022, Meta had grown to 87,000 employees globally, with a substantial portion of that hiring occurring in the middle of the Covid pandemic.
Continue reading...President reveals he visited his Democratic predecessor, who is receiving hospice care at home in Plains, Georgia
Jimmy Carter – who entered home hospice care in February – has asked fellow Democratic president Joe Biden to eulogize him after he dies, Biden has revealed.
Biden told people at a fundraiser in Rancho Santa Fe, California, on Monday that he had recently visited Carter after the 98-year-old former president’s health had “finally caught up with him”, according to multiple reports on the remarks.
Continue reading...In this week’s newsletter: While its quick slip into financial hardship has left American bankers reeling, its UK division is surprisingly fine. But the tech sector isn’t out of trouble yet
Last week, if you had heard of Silicon Valley Bank UK, you probably worked in tech. The bank had only been spun out in to a separate entity last summer, after its few thousand corporate customers pushed it over a regulatory threshold, and while SVB had grown to almost hold £10bn of deposits, with £5.5bn of outstanding loans, it was very much a specialist player.
The bank’s selling point was that it understood the needs of the “innovation economy”, something that high street banks frequently failed to acknowledge. A startup might have zero revenue, yet hold £5m in the bank and have 10 employees, a profile fundamentally different from a typical small business. As a result, trying to get something as simple as a corporate credit card could be a surprising hassle, and when SVB arrived on the UK scene, it was enthusiastically adopted by founders and venture capitalists alike.
Continue reading...This year’s Academy Awards with Jimmy Kimmel at the helm drew an average TV audience of 18.7m – and a bigger share of younger viewers
The audience for the 2023 Academy Awards broadcast improved substantially on last year’s unimpressive figures, with a 12% jump on what was the second worst ratings performance in history.
Early ratings from Nielsen, supplied to the Hollywood Reporter, said that the show on ABC attracted an average of 18.7m viewers, compared to 16.6m in 2022. The audience share in the key 18-49 age demographic also improved, from 3.76 last year to 4.0.
Continue reading...Bank shares slide around world amid panic caused by SVB failure as its parent company and two top executives are sued by shareholders. Plus, what’s next for Escobar’s hippos?
Good morning.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is gripping the financial markets, as global bank shares slide despite reassurances from Joe Biden yesterday.
What has Biden said about the situation? “Americans can rest assured that our banking system is safe. Your deposits are safe. Let me also assure you, we will not stop at this. We’ll do whatever is needed,” he said yesterday.
Is the US response to SVB’s collapse a bailout? Given the antipathy towards Wall Street bailouts in the 2008 crisis, Biden and elected and appointed officials have been at pains to insist the emergency interventions to protect deposits in SVB and Signature Bank, a second bank that failed at the weekend – or, indeed, any further bank failures – won’t come at taxpayers’ expense.
What else is happening? Follow our live blog here.
What will Garland be asked to do? Biden will ask Garland to clarify the statutory definition of who is “engaged in the business” of dealing in firearms, the White House said. “Number one, to make it clear that those who are wilfully violating the law need to come into compliance with the law and, number two, to make it clear to people who may not realise that, under that statutory definition they are indeed in the business of selling firearms, they must become federally licensed firearm dealers and they must run background checks before gun sales.”
Continue reading...Beijing accuses US, UK and Australia of disregarding global concerns with plan to build nuclear-powered vessels
China has accused the US, UK and Australia of embarking on a “path of error and danger” in response to the Aukus partners’ announcement of a deal on nuclear-powered submarines.
“The latest joint statement from the US, UK and Australia demonstrates that the three countries, for the sake of their own geopolitical interests, completely disregard the concerns of the international communities and are walking further and further down the path of error and danger,” China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said during a regular press briefing on Tuesday.
Continue reading...The four-phase plan has made nuclear arms control experts nervous … here’s why
In a tripartite deal with the US and the UK, Australia has unveiled a plan to acquire a fleet of up to eight nuclear-powered submarines, forecast to cost up to $368bn between now and the mid-2050s. Australia will spend $9bn over the next four years.
From this year Australian military and civilian personnel will embed with US and UK navies, including within both countries’ submarine industrial bases. From 2027 the UK and the US plan to rotate their nuclear-powered submarines through HMAS Stirling near Perth as part of a push to step up training of Australians.
Embedded personnel and port visits: Australian military and civilian personnel will embed with the the allies’ navies. US nuclear-powered submarines will increase their visits to Australian ports, with Australian sailors joining US crews for training.
Submarine rotations: From 2027 the UK and the US plan to rotate one UK Astute class submarine and up to four US Virginia class submarines through HMAS Stirling.
Sale of US Virginia-class submarines: From the early 2030s – pending approval by Congress – the US intends to sell Australia three Virginia-class submarines, with a potential option for two more if required.
SSN-Aukus: A combination of UK submarine design and US defence technology will contribute to the development of the new SSN-Aukus submarine – intended as the future attack submarine for both the UK and Australia. Both Australia and the UK intend to start building SSN-Aukus submarines in their domestic shipyards before the end of this decade. The first such boat may enter into UK service in the late 2030s, but the Australian navy will receive its first Australian-built SSN-Aukus submarine in the early 2040s.
Continue reading...This blog is now closed.
Daniel Hurst is out of the Aukus lockup – here is his first take.
The main phases of the plan:
Continue reading...Two Johns Hopkins professors say loanDepot lowballed them by nearly $300,000 on their Baltimore home due to their race
The Department of Justice on Monday intervened in a federal lawsuit alleging that an appraiser and a mortgage lender discriminated against a couple who are both Johns Hopkins University professors by significantly lowering the value of their Baltimore home and denying a loan because they are Black.
In response to a pending motion to dismiss the lawsuit by the mortgage lender, loanDepot, justice department civil rights attorneys filed a “statement of interest” in a federal district court in Maryland arguing that the case raised significant questions about appraisal racial bias, noting that President Joe Biden had identified the issue “as a priority for the federal government”.
Continue reading...Launch comes days after Pyongyang fired two ‘strategic’ missiles in an apparent protest over Washington-Seoul military drills
North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles Tuesday, Seoul said, Pyongyang’s second launch in three days and the first since South Korea and the United States began their largest joint military drills in five years.
Washington and Seoul have ramped up defence cooperation in the face of growing military and nuclear threats from the North, which has conducted a series of increasingly provocative banned weapons tests in recent months.
Continue reading...Senate Republican leader fell and was injured last week, and will now receive physical therapy at inpatient rehabilitation facility
Mitch McConnell was released from the hospital on Monday after the Republican leader of the Senate received treatment for a concussion, and he will continue to recover in an inpatient rehabilitation facility, a spokesman said.
McConnell’s office said his doctors discovered over the weekend that he had also suffered a “minor rib fracture” after he tripped and fell at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Washington on Wednesday evening.
Continue reading...Ex-president’s remarks come after his former vice-president said that history will hold Trump accountable for the violence
Donald Trump on Monday responded to Mike Pence’s contention that history will hold him accountable for the January 6 attack on Congress, saying the deadly attack was his former vice-president’s fault.
“Had he sent the votes back to the legislatures, they wouldn’t have had a problem with January 6, so in many ways you can blame him for January 6,” Trump told reporters on a flight to Iowa for a campaign appearance.
Continue reading...US president said he intended to visit Northern Ireland and Irish Republic in meeting with Rishi Sunak
Joe Biden has confirmed he plans to visit Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement.
He was told by Rishi Sunak “we’d love to have you” when the pair held a face-to-face bilateral meeting on the fringes of the Aukus summit.
Continue reading...Since Christmas the state has faced an exceptionally wet winter after being plagued far more by drought in recent years
Californians are bracing for the arrival of another “atmospheric river” storm on Monday after a weekend of heavy rainfall and flooding forced thousands to evacuate, washed out roads and knocked out power.
Rains are expected to ramp up on Monday night, and “impact increasingly sensitive portions of central California that were hit hard by the rainfall on Friday and early Saturday”, according to the national weather prediction center.
Continue reading...Scheme allowing nuclear materials in Australian submarines worries experts about precedent of safeguard removal
The Aukus scheme announced on Monday in San Diego represents the first time a loophole in the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has been used to transfer fissile material and nuclear technology from a nuclear weapons state to a non-weapons state.
The loophole is paragraph 14, and it allows fissile material utilised for non-explosive military use, like naval propulsion, to be exempt from inspections and monitoring by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). It makes arms controls experts nervous because it sets a precedent that could be used by others to hide highly enriched uranium, or plutonium, the core of a nuclear weapon, from international oversight.
Continue reading...Former vice-president took aim at transportation secretary for taking maternity leave and joked about postpartum depression
The White House rebuked the Republican former vice-president Mike Pence on Monday, for making jokes about US transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, maternity leave and postpartum depression that it said were homophobic and offensive to women.
“He should apologise to women and LGBTQ+ people,” said Joe Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre.
Continue reading...A Vermont school that refused to play against an opposing basketball team with a trans player won’t be able to participate in future tournaments, the Vermont Principals’ Association announced on Monday.
Mid Vermont Christian School forfeited a game on 21 February in an out-of-state tournament against Long Trail school.
Continue reading...Mexico’s president pushes back against US critics of his security record after kidnapping near the border that left two dead
Mexico’s president has asserted that his country is safer than the United States, pushing back against US critics of his security record following a deadly kidnapping near the border that claimed the lives of two Americans.
The 3 March attack on four Americans in the Mexican city of Matamoros and their subsequent abduction was covered closely by US media and sparked recriminations from politicians in the US, particularly Republicans.
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