Host dismisses Anti-Defamation League after organization urges network to drop him
After the Anti-Defamation League renewed its call for Tucker Carlson to be fired from Fox News for voicing the racist “great replacement” theory about immigration, the primetime host had a pithy response: “Fuck them.”
Related: ‘Rudy is really hurt’: Giuliani reportedly banned from Fox News
Continue reading...About 30% of California’s registered voters are Latino, and it appears they voted largely Democrat – but some say it was ‘about ensuring this state didn’t move backward’
Luis Sánchez worked overtime to rescue Governor Gavin Newsom in California’s recall race. His group PowerCA Action reached more than a quarter-million voters ahead of election day, encouraging young Latino Californians to head to the polls.
Related: ‘Study Newsom’s playbook’: what Democrats – and Republicans – can learn from California’s recall
Continue reading...A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Germany
Continue reading...Top voting official Brad Raffensperger dismayed that the former president uses his lies to fundraise
The top election official in Georgia, a Republican, said Donald Trump unequivocally lost the state in 2020, a day before a rally there on Saturday night at whih Trump is set to repeat baseless accusations of voter fraud.
Related: Arizona Republican ‘audit’ finds even bigger lead for Biden in 2020 election
Continue reading...Divisions between progressives and moderates in Congress are threatening to scuttle a $3.5tn social spending program and a $1tn infrastructure bill
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cannot have been surprised that wearing a “Tax the Rich” dress to New York’s Met gala would trigger performative outrage from the right. But it also earned blowback from closer to home.
Eric Adams, a Black police veteran who won the party’s mayoral primary by appealing to its centre, argued that “when you talk about just blanketly saying ‘tax the rich’ in this city”, it would potentially drive away firefighters, teachers and other taxpayers on whom the city depends. He advocated cutting wasteful spending instead.
Continue reading...Joe Biden meets leaders of Australia, India and Japan in latest effort to cement US leadership in Asia
US president Joe Biden and the leaders of Australia, India and Japan highlighted their Quad group’s role in safeguarding a stable, democratic Indo-Pacific in a veiled dig at rival China.
The first in-person summit of the Quad held on Friday marked Biden’s latest effort to cement US leadership in Asia in the face of a rising China.
Continue reading...There are signs that previously struggling social democratic parties are drawing the right lessons from the pandemic
In the wake of the financial crash in 2008, hopes were high on the left that a bona fide crisis of capitalism would significantly shift the political dial in its favour. Isolated victories and movements aside, it didn’t really happen. Instead, in the early 2010s, the bailout of the bankers was followed by the imposition of austerity across Europe and in America as governments sought to balance the books.
Premature predictions on the nature of post-Covid politics in the west are therefore to be avoided. But certain themes do seem to be emerging. Sketching out broadly communitarian territory, they chime with many people’s experience of how the pandemic played out and what it exposed; and there is some evidence that, in northern Europe, they might inform a revival and renewal of centre-left parties and movements.
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An extraordinary confrontation outside the Capitol today, between the Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell and Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far right Republican from Georgia.
As reported by Ben Siegel of ABC News, the confrontation developed as Democrats prepared to host a press conference on the Capitol steps about abortion rights, after voting to protect them in the face of concerted assault from Republican-run states.
Greene and Rep. Dingell are now shouting at each other.
“You should practice the basic thing you’re taught in church: respect your neighbor!”
Greene: “Church?! Are you kidding me? Try being a Christian!”
Dingell: “You try being a Christian and treat your colleagues decently.” pic.twitter.com/5aXtaU1dNK
Related: House Democrats vote to establish federal right to abortion
Here’s where the day stands so far:
Continue reading...Lawsuit alleges settlement in Cambridge Analytica case driven by desire to protect founder
Facebook paid $4.9bn more than necessary to the US Federal Trade Commission in a settlement over the Cambridge Analytica scandal in order to protect Mark Zuckerberg, a lawsuit has claimed.
The lawsuit alleges that the size of the $5bn settlement was driven by a desire to protect Facebook’s founder and chief executive from being named in the FTC complaint.
Continue reading...CDC advisory panel had only recommended boosters for elderly and some people with underlying medical conditions
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has broken with advice from its own internal advisory panel to back a booster shot of the Pfizer and BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for Americans aged 65 and older, adults with underlying medical conditions and adults in high-risk working and institutional settings.
The move came on Friday one day after an advisory panel to the agency did not recommend that people in high-risk jobs, such as teachers, and risky living conditions should get boosters. The panel had only recommended boosters for elderly and some people with underlying medical conditions.
Continue reading...Analysis: the west tried to impose its alien values and it is time to try a new approach, as Joe Biden has indicated
Some years ago, in Afghanistan, the anthropologist Scott Atran asked a Taliban fighter what it would take to stop the fighting, because families on both sides were crying. The fighter replied: “Leave our country and the crying will stop.”
The crying may not have stopped, but the Taliban have taken control of Afghanistan without an air force, heavy arms or expensive training, against US-backed Afghan government forces that outnumbered them four to one. In doing so, they have taken an important step closer to realising their stated goal, which is the creation of an Islamic emirate governed according to their interpretation of sharia law.
Continue reading...An arrest warrant shows unauthorized charges worth more than $1,000 were made during the time his girlfriend was missing
The boyfriend of Gabby Petito has been charged on Thursday with unauthorized use of a debit card as the search for him continued in a Florida swampland.
An arrest warrant has been issued for Brian Laundrie, who was indicted by a federal grand jury on Wednesday for allegedly using a Capital One Bank card and someone’s personal identification number to make unauthorized withdrawals or charges worth more than $1,000 during the period in which Petito went missing. The indictment does not say who the card belonged to and the nature of the charges have not been disclosed.
Continue reading...Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon and Dan Scavino among advisers called to testify over president’s connection to 6 January events
The House select committee scrutinizing the Capitol attack on Thursday sent subpoenas to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and a cadre of top Trump aides, demanding their testimony to shed light on the former president’s connection to the 6 January riot.
The subpoenas and demands for depositions marked the most aggressive investigative actions the select committee has taken since it made records demands and records preservation requests that formed the groundwork of the inquiry into potential White House involvement.
Continue reading...Ancient tracks found in New Mexico are believed to be between 21,000 and 23,000 years old, study says
New scientific research conducted by archaeologists has uncovered what they believe are the oldest known human footprints in North America.
Research done at the White Sands national park in New Mexico discovered the ancient footprints, with researchers estimating that the tracks were between 21,000 and 23,000 years old, reported Science.
Continue reading...Immigration authorities seek bids for contractors to run center on naval base. Plus: Republicans could trigger $28tn default
Good morning.
A US migrant detention camp on Guantánamo Bay in Cuba is preparing for reopening. Under the White House’s plans, hundreds of people would be housed in the facility in exceptional circumstances.
Continue reading...Many workers feel stonewalled by elected officials and scapegoated for the high US Covid death toll
Alexandra was working in the public health emergencies unit in a major north-eastern American city when the first wave of the pandemic hit. Although her job was in public health policy research, and not treating Coovid-19 patients on the frontlines of the healthcare system, she recalls the spring of 2020 as a blur of 24-hour shifts.
Related: ‘We’re trying to survive’: workers face cuts as US public sector lags in recovery
Continue reading...Australian PM hopes to speak with French president ‘when the time is right and the opportunity presents’
French president Emmanuel Macron has not yet taken a call from Scott Morrison amid continuing fury in Paris over the torn up submarine deal.
Morrison, the Australian prime minister, said he hoped to speak with Macron “when the time is right and when the opportunity presents” but he understood “the hurt and the disappointment” felt by France over the cancellation of the $90bn arrangement.
Continue reading...Immigration authorities seek bids for contractors to run migrant operations center on naval base
The Biden administration is preparing to reopen a migrant detention camp on Guantánamo Bay in the wake of a surge of migrants and asylum seekers on the southern border.
Related: How thousands of Haitian migrants ended up at the Texas border
Continue reading...Analysis: Joe Biden has cleared the decks to focus on China. But how imminent is the danger?
It may have been an inelegantly, even ineptly, executed pivot, gratuitously alienating key allies, but by leaving Afghanistan and forming the Australian, US and UK security pact in the Indo-Pacific, Joe Biden has at least cleared the decks to focus on his great foreign policy challenge – the systemic rivalry with China.
Yet the concern now is how quickly this rivalry could escalate, especially in Taiwan. The linchpin of the US alliance system in south-east Asia, Taiwan is the biggest island in the “first island chain”, the group of islands that keeps China blocked in. It is China’s next target, and as the former British prime minister Theresa May pointed out, no one quite knows if the west is prepared to fight to save Taiwan or whether the new tripartite pact in some way places a new obligation on the UK to come to the country’s defence.
Continue reading...Dr Joseph Ladapo attacked concern over the pandemic as ‘Covid mania’
A medical professor who is opposed to mask and vaccine mandates, attacked concern over the pandemic as “Covid mania” and likened the eating of fruit and vegetables to the benefits of vaccination has been named as Florida’s new surgeon general.
Dr Joseph Ladapo has been appointed to the role by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor who has railed against restrictions placed upon day-to-day life to dampen the Covid-19 pandemic and has sought to block funding for schools in the state that have attempted to make students wear masks to stop the spread of the virus that has killed more than 675,000 people in the US since the pandemic began.
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