Category Archives: US News

Amazon US customers have one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

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Critics raise transparency fears over plan to turn all smart home devices into ‘mesh network’

Amazon customers have one week to opt out of a plan that would turn every Echo speaker and Ring security camera in the US into a shared wireless network, as part of the company’s plan to fix connection problems for its smart home devices.

The proposal, called Amazon Sidewalk, involves the company’s devices being used as a springboard to build city-wide “mesh networks” that help simplify the process of setting up new devices, keep them online even if they’re out of range of home wifi, and extend the range of tracking devices such as those made by Tile.

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Biden corporate tax plan could earn EU and UK billions, study shows

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EU forecast to reap extra €50bn per year with UK expected to gain €200m from BP alone

A proposal to be tabled by the US president, Joe Biden, at the upcoming G7 meeting for a 15% global corporate tax rate could reap the EU €50bn (£43bn) a year, and earn the UK nearly €200m extra alone from the British multinational BP, according to research.

Should the tax rate be set higher at 25%, the lowest current rate within the seven largest world economies, the EU would earn nearly €170bn extra a year – more than 50% of current corporate tax revenue and 12% of total health spending in the bloc.

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Texas Republicans plot to resurrect restrictive voting bill after Democrats’ walkout

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Governor Greg Abbott plans to call special session after Democrats block 11th-hour attempt to ram through bill to make voting harder

Republicans in Texas are already plotting to resurrect their fight for sweeping voting restrictions after Democratic lawmakers walked out of the state capitol and blocked an 11th-hour attempt to ram through legislation that would have made it harder to cast a ballot.

Texas governor Greg Abbott – who leads the state’s domineering Republican majority – has announced he will include the high-stakes issue on his agenda when he reconvenes the legislature for a rapid-fire special session. He called the failure of the bill “deeply disappointing”.

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From a forest in Papua New Guinea to a floor in Sydney: how China is getting rich off Pacific timber

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China is the major buyer of wood from Pacific nations like PNG and Solomon Islands, which are implicated in illegal or unsustainable logging

  • Read more of our Pacific Plunder series here

An illegally logged tree, felled in the diminishing forests of Papua New Guinea, may well end up becoming floorboards in a Sydney living room, or a bookcase in a home in Seattle.

Illegal logging contributes between 15% and 30% of the global wood trade, according to Interpol. China is a major buyer of the world’s illegal timber, according to environmental groups, especially from Pacific nations like PNG and Solomon Islands, which are implicated in illegal or unsustainable logging.

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Overconfident of spotting fake news? If so, you may be more likely to fall victim

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Study suggests people who are most sure of their ability to discern fact from fiction are less likely to do so

Are you a purveyor of fake news? People who are most confident about their ability to discern between fact and fiction are also the most likely to fall victim to misinformation, a US study suggests.

Although Americans believe the confusion caused by false news is all-pervasive, relatively few indicate having seen or shared it, something the researchers suggested shows that many may not only have a hard time identifying false news but are not aware of their own deficiencies at doing so.

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‘Democracy itself is in peril’: Biden delivers Memorial Day speech – video

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Joe Biden warned in a speech commemorating the US's war dead on Memorial Day that American democracy was 'in peril' and called for empathy among his fellow citizens.

Speaking at Arlington National Cemetery, the president, joined by the first lady, Jill Biden, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and her husband, paid tribute to America’s war dead

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Man in Black at 50: Johnny Cash’s empathy is needed more than ever

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The country star is not always remembered for his politics, but his about-face to withdraw support for Nixon and the Vietnam war may be his finest moment

“I speak my mind in a lot of these songs,” Johnny Cash wrote in the liner notes to the album Man in Black, released 50 years ago today. He might be better known now for the outlaw songs of his youth or the reckonings with death in his final recordings, but Cash used his 1971 album to set out his less-discussed political vision: long on feeling and empathy, and short on ideology and partisanship. The United States seemed hopelessly polarised, and Cash confronted that division head-on, demanding more of his fellow citizens and Christians amid the apparently endless war in Vietnam.

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1921 Tulsa race massacre remembered – in pictures

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One of the darkest chapters in the long and turbulent history of racial violence in America is commemorated in Oklahoma on Monday, the 100th anniversary of a rampage by a white mob that left an estimated 300 Black people dead. Hundreds of Black-owned businesses, churches and homes were burned, leaving about 8,000 homeless and a further 800 injured

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‘The loss is incalculable’: Descendants of the Tulsa massacre on what was stolen from them

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For many descendants, the past is still present. They explain how the legacy of the massacre, which was suppressed for so long, lives on today

Earlier this month, the three known survivors of the 1921 Tulsa massacre testified in Congress about the world they lost when a white mob burned their thriving community to the ground. “The neighborhood I fell asleep in that night was rich – not just in terms of wealth, but in culture, community and heritage,” said Viola Fletcher, who was visiting the US capital for the first time in her 107 years. “Within a few hours, all of that was gone.”

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Covid summer: Fauci warns US has ‘a ways to go’ despite lowest rates in a year

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‘We don’t want to declare victory prematurely,’ expert tells the Guardian while 2021 has seen more global cases than all of 2020

Dr Anthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases expert in the US, has warned it is too early to declare victory against Covid-19 as cases fall in the country to the lowest rates since last June.

“We don’t want to declare victory prematurely because we still have a ways to go,” Fauci told the Guardian in an interview. “But the more and more people that can get vaccinated, as a community, the community will be safer and safer.”

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Two dead and more than 20 injured in Florida banquet hall shooting

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  • Three people open fire indiscriminately on concert crowd
  • Police lament ‘despicable act of gun violence’

At least two people were killed and more than 20 injured in Miami early on Sunday as attackers opened fire on concertgoers outside a banquet hall. It was the city’s second deadly mass shooting in little more than 24 hours.

A police spokesman said the shooting happened in the Hialeah area. Three people got out of a white SUV and began firing on a line outside the El Mula banquet hall. The attackers used assault rifles and a handgun, authorities said.

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‘They didn’t talk about it’: how a historian helped Tulsa confront the horror of its past

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In 1921, a white mob attacked Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, killing an estimated 300 people, but it wasn’t talked about until recently

There was no memorial to it in town. Teachers made no mention of it, not even during a half-semester devoted to local history. The white schoolboy Scott Ellsworth of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was left to wonder what the city’s darkest secret could be.

Related: The Ground Breaking review: indispensable history of the Tulsa Race Massacre

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Daughter of writer Michael Lewis and Tabitha Soren killed in car crash

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Dixie Lewis, 19, was in a car that was travelling on State Route 89 in California when it crossed into the path of an oncoming truck

Dixie Lewis, the 19-year-old daughter of the writer Michael Lewis and former MTV correspondent Tabitha Soren, has been killed in a highway crash in northern California.

Lewis was a passenger in a car driven by her friend and former Berkeley High School classmate, Ross Schultz, 20, who also died in accident on Tuesday afternoon, according to her family and authorities.

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11 Texas sheriff’s office employees fired after death of inmate

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Six were also suspended after three-month investigation into death of Jaquaree Simmons, which was ruled a homicide

Eleven employees of a Texas sheriff’s office have been fired and six suspended following the death of an inmate who was hit multiple times in the head by detention officers, authorities said on Friday.

The Harris county sheriff, Ed Gonzalez, said he was “very upset and heartbroken” after a three-month investigation into the death of Jaquaree Simmons, 23, in February. Medical examiners ruled Simmons’ death a homicide from injuries to his head.

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How Mitch McConnell killed the US Capitol attack commission

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The story of how Republicans undermined the 6 January inquiry is informed by eight House and Senate aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity

Days before the Senate voted down the creation of a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, was adamant: he would oppose the bill, regardless of any amendments – and he expected his colleagues to follow suit.

The commission that would have likely found Donald Trump and some Republicans responsible for the insurrection posed an existential threat to the GOP ahead of the midterms, he said, and would complicate efforts to regain the majority in Congress.

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Joe Biden seeks Republican buy-in but how long before patience snaps?

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Talks continue on a compromise over infrastructure but GOP intransigeance on a Capitol riot commission does not bode well

It’s become a familiar process in the Joe Biden era.

Biden and Democrats say they will work with Republicans. Republicans say they want a seat at the negotiating table. Then the prospect of Democrats going alone begins to hover over the negotiations.

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Patrick Byrne: pro-Trump millionaire pushing election conspiracy theories

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Weekend rallies with Roger Stone and Michael Flynn show key influence of libertarian helping to fund Arizona election audit

This Memorial Day weekend, several prominent conservative allies of Donald Trump, who have promoted almost nonstop his false narratives about the 2020 election results, are slated to hold rallies in Florida and Texas endorsed by the wealthy libertarian Patrick Byrne.

Billed as featuring the Trump confidant Roger Stone, the retired general Michael Flynn, Byrne and other pro-Trump stalwarts, the dual events underscore that Byrne – who has been leading private fundraising for the politically driven vote audit now under way in Arizona’s largest county – seems intent on funding and pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 elections.

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Zero Fail review: US Secret Service as presidential protectors – and drunken frat boys

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Pulitzer-winner Carol Leonnig anatomises an agency that has never truly lived up to its steely professional image

At times, the US Secret Service has resembled a bunch of pistol-toting frat boys on a taxpayer-funded spring break. In the words of a drunken supervisor speaking to his men in the run-up to a 2012 summit in Cartagena, Colombia: “You don’t know how lucky you are … You are going to fuck your way across the globe.”

Related: Trump family members got ‘inappropriately close’ to Secret Service agents, book claims

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‘From hearsay to hard evidence’: are UFOs about to go mainstream?

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Unidentified aerial phenomena are getting serious attention on TV and from Barack Obama and Marco Rubio and next month the Pentagon is set to release a major declassified analysis

Nick Pope spent the early 1990s investigating UFOs for the British ministry of defence. Sequestered in a rarely visited government office – the “metaphorical basement” – he well remembers how his field of work was regarded.

“I would walk down the corridor and people would whistle the theme music to either Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the Twilight Zone,” Pope told the Guardian.

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