Lukas Gage tweeted clip of director saying ‘these poor people live in these tiny apartments’ without realizing he wasn’t muted
It appears the mute button is becoming harder to find these days.
Hollywood is now rallying its support for an actor who posted a video of an excruciatingly awkward Zoom encounter he had with a director who witheringly criticized his “tiny apartment” without realizing he hadn’t muted his microphone.
Continue reading...President-elect currently has 79,823,827 votes as he continues to rack up the highest number of votes in US history
Joe Biden’s popular vote lead over Donald Trump has now stretched to more than 6m as he continues to rack up the highest number of votes in American history.
The Democratic challenger, and now president-elect, currently has 79,823,827 compared to the president’s 73,786,905 – itself a record for a losing candidate in terms of sheer number of votes cast.
Continue reading...US president delivers boasts and falsehoods while other members focus on dealing with the pandemic
Donald Trump has taken his campaign to deny the results of the US presidential election global, telling world leaders at the G20 summit that he looks forward to “working with you again for a long time”.
The gathering of leaders of major world economies is being held online this year, because of the pandemic, but could have been an occasion for Trump to bid his peers goodbye and pledge American support to the battle against Covid-19.
Continue reading...President’s desperate efforts include pleas to Republican state lawmakers as states certify election results
Desperate efforts by Donald Trump and his Republican allies to overturn the result of the American election are facing an ever narrowing range of options as court cases and recounts have repeatedly failed to make any dent in the convincing victory of Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
Now that states are certifying their election results, it appears the president’s last-ditch efforts will entail desperate pleas to Republican state lawmakers in hopes they will ignore their state laws and somehow skew the election to favor his reelection in the all-important electoral college.
Continue reading...President’s eldest son, who tested positive for coronavirus, made remark in Instagram video
Donald Trump Jr, the president’s son who has tested positive for the coronavirus, has said he will pass the time in isolation battling with the virus by cleaning his collection of guns.
Trump Jr is now the fourth member of the Trump family to have become infected with Covid. The president, the first lady and their son, Barron, have recovered from the virus, as has Trump Jr’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Continue reading...The virus is on the rise so uniformly across the vast landmass of the US, that records are being shattered daily
The Disunited States of America are united once more. After a brutal election that exacerbated bitter partisan divisions and left the country feeling as though it had been torn in two, it has at last been thrown back together.
For all the wrong reasons.
Continue reading...Lying, paranoia and conspiracy are defining features of a totalitarian society. What hope is there for a brand new era, in the aftermath of an administration that has relied on all three?
“I WON THE ELECTION!” Donald Trump tweeted in the early hours of 16 November 2020, 10 days after he lost the election. At the same time, Atlantic magazine announced an interview with Barack Obama, in which he warns that the US is “entering into an epistemological crisis” – a crisis of knowing. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false,” Obama explains, “by definition our democracy doesn’t work.” I saw the two assertions juxtaposed on Twitter as I was finishing writing this essay, and together they demonstrate its proposition: that American democracy is facing not merely a crisis in trust, but in knowledge itself, largely because language has become increasingly untethered from reality, as we find ourselves in a swirling maelstrom of lies, disinformation, paranoia and conspiracy theories.
The problem is exemplified by Trump’s utterance, which bears only the most tenuous relation to reality: Trump participated in an election, giving his declaration some contextual force, but he had not won the election, rendering the claim farcical to those who reject it. The capital letters make it even funnier, a failed tyrant trying to exert mastery through typography. But it stops being funny when we acknowledge that millions of people accept this lie as a decree. Their sheer volume creates a crisis in knowing, because truth-claims largely depend on consensual agreement. This is why the debates about the US’s alarming political situation have orbited so magnetically around language itself. For months, American political and historical commentators have disputed whether the Trump administration can be properly called “fascist”, whether in refusing to concede he is trying to effect a “coup”. Are these the right words to use to describe reality? Not knowing reflects a crisis of knowledge, which derives in part from a crisis in authority.
Continue reading...I’m not obsessed with Doug, but he could probably be my pub quiz subject
There is much to say about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s historic win, but I’d like to focus on a man called Doug. Doug Emhoff is a lawyer and – more relevantly to your interests and mine – Harris’s husband, and unless you are part of the #DougHive, Doug’s devoted (and, one suspects, mainly female) fans, it’s likely you don’t know much about him.
This in itself is astonishing, given that women are generally discussed through the prism of their personal lives. I didn’t realise until last month that the young adults with whom Harris is occasionally photographed are not, as I’d assumed, her children, but rather Doug’s children and her stepchildren. Having children, or not, once defined a woman’s public image, as Theresa May could tell you, but I don’t recall a single discussion of Harris’s parental status during this campaign. Before we all celebrate this too ecstatically, Harris remains an anomaly; just try to find a single article about Amy Coney Barrett that doesn’t mention how many kids she has, and then imply that this has some bearing on her fitness for the supreme court. That Harris has largely swerved this is mainly down to her, but also down to Doug. (I know newspaper style dictates I should refer to him as Emhoff, but, really, he is such a Doug.)
Continue reading...In this excerpt from A Promised Land, the former president remembers the anxious run-up to the 2008 election. Scroll down to hear a clip of him reading from it
More than anything campaign-related, it was news out of Hawaii that tempered my mood in October’s waning days. My sister Maya called, saying the doctors didn’t think Toot [Obama’s grandmother] would last much longer, perhaps no more than a week. She was now confined to a rented hospital bed in the living room of her apartment, under the care of a hospice nurse and on palliative drugs. Although she had startled my sister with a sudden burst of lucidity the previous evening, asking for the latest campaign news along with a glass of wine and a cigarette, she was now slipping in and out of consciousness.
And so, 12 days before the election, I made a 36-hour trip to Honolulu to say goodbye. Maya was waiting for me when I arrived at Toot’s apartment; I saw that she had been sitting on the couch with a couple of shoeboxes of old photographs and letters. “I thought you might want to take some back with you,” she said. I picked up a few photos from the coffee table. My grandparents and my eight-year-old mother, laughing in a grassy field at Yosemite. Me at the age of four or five, riding on Gramps’s shoulders as waves splashed around us. The four of us with Maya, still a toddler, smiling in front of a Christmas tree.
Continue reading...The former US president recalls the excitement of the 2008 night he was elected, in a passage from A Promised Land
Continue reading...Two weeks after his defeat, Trump has gone from always present to effectively missing, behavior that many say is unprecedented and dangerous
There was one thing that even Donald Trump’s harshest critics were never able to accuse him of: invisibility.
The outgoing US president held endless campaign rallies, verbally sparred with reporters on the way to his helicopter and spent so long on the phone to Fox News shows that even pliable hosts had to gently but firmly hang up. He was the master of saturating every news cycle with his voice and image.
Continue reading...Countries emphasise potential for cooperation and future partnerships, which Beijing opposes
Taiwan and the United States have held their first high-level meetings under a new economic dialogue, inking a five-year agreement and pledging future cooperation on health, tech, and security.
The talks, held amid a contentious US presidential transition period and high regional tensions with China, did not advance Taiwan’s hopes for a trade deal with US, despite the two countries growing closer under Donald Trump and his pushback on Beijing.
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Evening summary
That’s all from me for the night. Here’s where the news stands as we head into the weekend.
Trump’s futile last stands to cling to claims of winning are getting even more futile
After Georgia officials certified the state’s recount on Friday, confirming Joe Biden as the winner of the state, Michigan also stuck to its election results, making it impossible for Donald Trump to win the presidency.
Continue reading...President met with Michigan’s Republican leaders at White House in desperate bid to subvert democracy
Donald Trump was on Friday making a futile but dangerous last stand, without precedent in modern American history, to overturn the result of the presidential election so he can remain in power.
Even as Joe Biden’s victory in the state of Georgia was confirmed, the president met with Republican leaders from Michigan at the White House in an increasingly desperate bid to subvert democracy after a series of courtroom defeats over allegations of voter fraud.
Continue reading...Donald Trump reiterated on Friday the false claim that he won the election and accused pharmaceutical companies of strategically delaying their announcements about a coronavirus vaccine because of his support for reducing medicine costs and in order to hurt his re-election efforts. 'We had big pharma against us,' Trump said at a news conference during which he accused Pfizer of waiting over a month to announce details about its coronavirus vaccine test results.
Continue reading...Authorities reportedly looking at consulting fees that may have gone to president’s eldest daughter
Authorities conducting fraud investigations into Donald Trump and his businesses are reportedly looking at consulting fees that may have gone to his daughter Ivanka Trump, prompting her to accuse them of “harassment”.
The New York Times said there were twin New York investigations, one criminal and one civil.
Continue reading...Some GOP governors who for months toed Trump’s line on coronavirus, are performing U-turns on mask-wearing
After Republicans won big on election night in the state of Iowa, in America’s heartland, Governor Kim Reynolds claimed vindication for her light-handed approach to the coronavirus pandemic.
Continue reading...Despite overall defeat, Trump boosted his support in the Iowa heartland and some say sounded the death knell for the ‘country club Republican’ party there
Just a few months ago, Neil Shaffer thought Iowa was lost to Donald Trump.
“I was worried. We were in the midst of Covid and the economy wasn’t doing so good and Trump wasn’t handling the Covid interviews very well, and I was thinking this is gonna be a bloodbath,” said the farmer and chair of a county Republican party in the north-east of the state.
Continue reading...The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among members of the 'Squad', a group of progressive Democrats, who spoke at a Sunrise Movement rally in Washington to push Joe Biden on tackling the climate emergency.
AOC said they would urge Biden to 'keep his promises' to working families, women, minorities and climate activists as he fills his cabinet.
In July, Biden outlined an ambitious climate plan that would spend $2tn over four years investing in clean-energy infrastructure while vowing to cut carbon emissions from electrical power to zero in 15 years
Obrador rejects criticism as political attacks; Canada fears big rise in cases could overwhelm hospitals; Italy records 37,242 new cases
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Marshall is asked if he admits there have been shortcomings in South Australia’s hotel quarantine system.
“Not at all. There will be a thorough investigation but what we have said since day one is this is a highly contagious disease ... we know that, very highly trained nurses and with all of their PPE, they have been able to contract the disease, so we know there is a risk associated with every time we bring somebody into this country,” he says.
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