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President says he told Russian leader that the US would retaliate if cyber-attacks continued. Plus, California plane mystery solvedGood morningJoe Biden warned that the US would retaliate if Russia continued with cyber-attacks on American targets after “good and positive” talks in Geneva with Vladimir Putin. Continue reading...

A transformed global context and the rise of China put any decisions made at Biden’s meeting with Putin into perspectiveJoe Biden’s meeting with Vladimir Putin in Geneva looked like a summit, sounded like a summit, and in some genuine senses really was a summit. But it was not an east-west superpower summit in the 20th-century sense. It was a bilateral meeting between the leaders of two important countries whose relations are possibly more difficult today than they were in the cold war. Yet life on Earth did not seem to hang in the balance yesterday, as it sometimes could do back then.Throughout its history Russia has often been simultaneously strong and weak, at home and abroad. Now, in a century marked by growing Chinese power and the deep polarisation of its domestic politics, something similar can be said of the United States, too. Relative decline has not made either country less suspicious of the other. Perhaps the most significant thing about their meeting was therefore that it occurred at all. But these two countries no longer bestride the globe. Continue reading...

A recently released report found that Indigenous people in California have experienced sexual assault at high ratesThe last time Fochik Hashtali* spoke with her close friend Poe Jackson, he was telling her about his plans to start a mental health group for transgender people in Slab City, a section of southern California known for its community of squatters.

Glimpses of the deliberations behind closed doors suggest a case is being built against Trump’s CFO, Allen Weisselberg, which could be bad news for his bossFollowing a deluge of bombshell news about Donald Trump-related criminal investigations in New York, including the Manhattan district attorney’s convening of a special grand jury, more details have emerged that might suggest intensifying legal woes for one of the former president’s business lieutenants.The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the Manhattan district attorney’s office has apparently “entered the final stages of a criminal tax investigation” of Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer. Continue reading...

This summer, I can once again observe strangers in real life, instead of through my window and on social media• Chibundu Onuzo is author of The Spider King’s Daughter and Welcome to LagosLast week, I made a trip into central London, and spent the day gloriously, nosily, watching strangers. In no particular order, here are some of the things I observed. A sartorially bold man in a matching print shirt and face mask. Three women walking abreast, refusing to yield the pavement to anyone. Four teenagers shouting out rap lyrics on the underground concourse. As they walked past, an elderly man flinched and clutched his belongings. They’re not dangerous, I wanted to reassure him. Annoying, yes, and very bad rappers, but not dangerous.I’ve missed traditional people-watching during the lockdown. Of course, we all watched people from our windows. The delivery drivers who always seemed to go to the wrong address. The mothers (and it was mostly mothers in my neighbourhood) on their school runs, herding children to the school gates. And of course, the righteous runners, cyclists and power walkers, refusing to let a global pandemic stand in the way of their fitness goals. Continue reading...

It started 40 years ago, at school, when I was telling a story and saw a yawn begin stirring on my teacher’s face. I’ve been on red alert for stifled yawns ever sinceI have a visceral fear of boredom, not on my own account but on everyone else’s. I never get bored myself. This isn’t because I’m always super busy doing lots of interesting things. I’m not. It’s just that I can always fill the quieter minutes, hours and days, which could be boring, with dark thoughts of fury, anxiety, regret, sadness or outright panic about something or other. There’s so much rich material to draw on. I’m resourceful in these matters. It’s enervating, distressing and even crippling, but it has this much going for it: it’s never boring.My fear of boredom comes from a horror of being the source of anyone else’s boredom. I believe this started 40 years ago during a conversation with my history teacher, Miss Finney. I was banging on about something rather clever, I thought, when I saw the beginnings of a yawn stirring on her face. These stirrings soon hardened into a firm setting of her jaw. She had plainly resolved, bless her, to do everything in her power not to let this yawn out. I heard tedious words continue to tumble out of my mouth while I watched her face spasm in an ecstasy of desperate, tiny contortions. I wanted to scream: “Just yawn!” but I was too scared of her. Continue reading...

Mispronouncing locations is something we’ve all done and heard, but which of our cities and towns do we garble the most?A suburb in Melbourne’s north has been giving Victoria’s top health officials some difficulty. It’s not Wollert, where the current outbreak originated, or Craigieburn, home to one of the most worrying exposure sites.It’s Reservoir. Keen watchers of Victoria’s daily coronavirus press conferences will have noticed that the state’s health officials, able to confidently rattle off extremely long updates about the latest cases and exposure sites, keep tripping over the pronunciation of this suburb by making it too fancy. The actual name is pronounced Res-er-vore, rhymes with door, with the -voir pronounced like the Latin term voir dire. It’s not Res-er-vwah – like the dam containing drinking water. Continue reading...

Joe Biden warned Russian president Vladimir Putin that the US has significant cyber capability as he looked to pressure his counterpart over cyberattacks. The US leader says Putin wasn't seeking to intensify confrontation with the west after the two held "good and positive" talks. "I think that the last thing he wants now is a Cold War,” Biden said

As preseason emerges on the horizon, we take a look at the most fascinating players coming into the new campaignThe NFL’s annual summer minicamps are underway and training camps are right around the corner. Now is as good a time as any to look ahead to the most fascinating players heading into the 2021 season, non-Aaron Rodgers division. Continue reading...

Workers initially thought the recovered plane was one involved in a 1965 crash in which the pilot and three passengers were killedThree bodies and a Piper Comanche 250 airplane remain missing in a California lake, despite hope that underwater surveyors had found the remains that have now evaded searchers for over half a century.Last week, Seafloor Systems workers came upon a mystery plane sitting at the bottom of Folsom Lake near Sacramento. They thought the plane matched the description of the one that crashed on New Year’s Day 1965, killing the pilot and three passengers onboard. Continue reading...

Advocates celebrated the move, which could facilitate those facing domestic or gang violence to be granted humanitarian protection

Moscow may not play fair, but observers can take solace in reaffirmed declaration against nuclear warOn the day that Joe Biden met Vladimir Putin in Geneva, the Russians held war games moving their nuclear missiles around, while Nato warplanes were scrambled to intercept Russian fighters over the Baltic.If Biden had wanted to illustrate his emphasis on the need for stability and dialogue between Washington and Moscow, he could not have arranged it better. Continue reading...

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

Joe Biden has responded to Vladimir Putin comparing his jailing of political opponents such as Alexei Navalny with the charges filed against those who carried out the Capitol Hill riots. 'I think that’s a ridiculous comparison,' Biden told reporters after meeting with the Russian president in Geneva. During his own press conference after the summit, Putin used that comparison to deflect a question about why so many of his critics are either imprisoned or dead

Speaking to reporters by Air Force One in Geneva, Joe Biden has expressed regret for some sharp words to a journalist who questioned him about the success of his summit with Vladimir Putin. Frustrated by a question from CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins at the end of his press conference, he told her she was 'in the wrong business'. Biden later apologised for being 'short', adding: 'To be a good reporter, you’ve got to be negative. You’ve got to have a negative view of life ... you never ask a positive question'

US president hails ‘good and positive’ talks but added ‘proof of the pudding is in the eating’The US will retaliate if Russia continues to carry out malicious cyber-attacks against American targets, Joe Biden said on Wednesday, after holding “good and positive” talks in Geneva with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.Speaking after their first face-to-face summit, Biden said he had made clear the Kremlin had to “abide by the rules of the road” or face unspecified consequences. Putin was aware the US possessed “unrivalled” cyber capacities, Biden stressed. Continue reading...

Meeting goes as well as could be expected as Biden and Putin speak language of diplomacy – but hardly one of affectionJoe Biden and Vladimir Putin hadn’t even sat down before tensions boiled over at the 18th-century Villa La Grange, a fine Swiss manor house besieged on Wednesday by a 21st-century press pool. The two men looked cordial enough as they shook hands for the first time as leaders. But the sun-struck journalists behind them pushed and shouted, some knocked to the floor, as they fought to get in to the leaders’ only joint appearance of the day.“The media scuffle was the most chaotic your pooler has seen at a presidential event in nine years,” wrote a US reporter from inside the melee, which erupted as the press pack tried to follow the two leaders into the villa. “Russian security yelled at journalists to get out and began pushing journalists. Journalists and White House officials screamed back that the Russian security should stop touching us.” Continue reading...

Academics join groups including Black Lives Matter and Sunrise Movement following Mitch McConnell’s remarks on Biden nomineesA group of 18 legal academics has issued an extraordinary joint letter urging the US supreme court justice Stephen Breyer to retire so that Joe Biden can name his successor.The intervention came after Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, warned that Biden would not get a supreme court nominee confirmed in 2024 if Republicans regain control of the chamber and a vacancy arises. Continue reading...

Cool normality helped exorcise ghost of 2018’s disastrous Helsinki summit but what else was achieved?1) The weird and unpredictable Trump era is over. In 2018 Donald Trump held a disastrous summit with Putin in the Finnish capital Helsinki. The then US president said he believed Putin’s assurances that Moscow did not interfere in the 2016 US election with a joint press conference that was so humiliating for America that Trump’s senior adviser Fiona Hill considered bringing it to a close by whacking a fire alarm or faking a medical emergency.In Geneva, by contrast, cool normality was on display. Biden was well prepared for the US-Russia summit. He cut a relaxed figure, telling Putin he wanted a “predictable” relationship after a period defined by rogue Kremlin behaviour. The summit flowed along conventional diplomatic lines: a handshake, several hours of intensive talks and separate press conferences afterwards. The ghost of Helsinki was exorcised. There will be an agreed record of what was discussed, unlike in 2018 when Trump met Putin alone, without aides or even Trump’s own interpreter. We don’t know what was said. Continue reading...

We knew Trump sought to use the neutral administration of justice as a tool for settling scores with enemies. But the scope of the operation is disturbingIn 1941, the German Jewish lawyer and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel published a slender volume called The Dual State. One of the first scholarly treatments of the Third Reich, Fraenkel understood Hitler’s state to be characterized by an unusual “dual” character. In large measure, the state operated by arbitrary decree – something Fraenkel called rule by “prerogative”. This “prerogative state” essentially functioned as a form of institutionalized lawlessness. At the same time, the Third Reich also maintained elements of a “normative state” – that is, an administration of justice that remained, at least formally, bound by operative law.Without drawing any false equivalence with the Nazi state, we can say that the Trump administration likewise demonstrated this dual aspect. This emerges with disturbing clarity in recent reports documenting the lengths Donald Trump went toward turning the Department of Justice (DoJ) into a partisan tool. The Department of Justice, we must bear in mind, is a vast agency with more than 100,000 lawyers, many of whom are exceptionally skilled and principled civil servants dedicated to upholding the rule of law. Yet the reports of the past week make clear how loyalists installed in key positions can rather radically deform the administration of justice while remaining within the formal confines of the law. Continue reading...

Attorney for the British socialite, who is fighting sex trafficking charges, says Maxwell also faces ‘hyper-surveillance’ from guardsGhislaine Maxwell, the British socialite fighting federal sex trafficking charges in New York, remains subjected to raw sewage, water deprivation, “hyper-surveillance” by overbearing guards and other unacceptable treatment in jail, according to her lawyer.Maxwell, 59, is preparing for a possible November trial on charges she procured four underage girls for the late financier Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse. Maxwell has pleaded not guilty and faces up to 80 years in prison if convicted. Continue reading...

For fair-weather supporters tournaments offer a taste of the pain – as well as the joy – of being a seasoned followerFootball is about pleasure and pain, a zero-sum ball game. The level of joy we feel at a goal or a victory is mirrored precisely in the pain of others. This pain is, in a sense, at the heart of football fandom; for without despair, there can be no joy.I recall Colin Moynihan, as minister for sport in the last years of the Thatcher government, saying something well-meaning, but specious about football. It was along the lines of the game being a good thing for the economy because when their team won, its supporters’ productivity would improve. Didn’t they have spads in those days? Surely someone should have explained that the opposite would also apply for the productivity of supporters of the losing side. If he had been a passionate fan of a club, he would have known this to be true. Continue reading...

The meeting got off to a frosty start as Putin told Biden in front of a chaotic press pool jostling to put questions to the leaders that their two countries had 'a lot' of issues that required talks at the highest level. 'I think it's always better to meet face to face,' Biden said, adding that he hoped they could find 'predictable and rational ways to disagree'

Alabama pastor who worked to bridge racial divides won 52% of the vote in runoff against Mike StoneThe Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) tamped down a push from the right at its largest meeting in decades on Tuesday, electing a new president who has worked to bridge racial divides in the church and defeating an effort to make an issue of critical race theory.Ed Litton, a pastor from Alabama, won 52% of the vote in a runoff against Mike Stone, a Georgia pastor backed by a new group called the Conservative Baptist Network that has sought to move the already-conservative denomination further right. Continue reading...

After shaking hands for the cameras, the US president, Joe Biden, and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, plunged into hours of face-to-face talks on Wednesday at a lush lakeside Swiss mansion. It was a highly anticipated summit at a time of heightened tensions between the two countries Continue reading...

Close the loopholes, crack down on the havens: there are plenty of ways to make billionaires do the right thingIn June 2016, while researching an article for Vanity Fair, I asked Donald Trump if he was using tax havens to escape tax. “I know a lot about tax havens, but I don’t use them,” he told me. “There is greater incentive in many ways to keep your money in the United States.”Fellow billionaires may chuckle, because they know this too, following decades of attacks by special interests on the US tax system. Their goal, as the Texas Republican congressman Bill Archer once said, has been to pull it “out by its roots and throw it away so it can never grow back”. Continue reading...

Correspondence reveals how the former president tried to enlist officials to overturn the election. Plus, a Fox reporter goes off-script to attack her employer

America loves adversity porn about ‘thriving’ from hardship – and even a deadly global pandemic is apparently no exception

After years of government corruption, repression and violence, many Iranians are expected to boycott Friday’s electionsRap and K-pop aren’t music genres you’d expect an Iranian presidential hopeful to be familiar with. And yet, during the second televised debate ahead of the countrywide poll on 18 June, one of the candidates displayed an impressive knowledge of the contemporary musical landscape.“They play rap on their own programmes, but they have banned rap. Our teens have moved on to K-pop or Korean pop. Our own rap [music] is still underground,” said centrist Abdolnaser Hemmati, the former governor of the Central Bank of Iran. Continue reading...

Democrats are pushing for investigations into Trump’s justice department for data seizures from Eric Swalwell and Adam SchiffTop Republicans are moving to block a Senate inquiry into the Trump justice department’s secret seizure of data from Democrats to hunt down leaks of classified information, fearing a close investigation could damage the former president.Trump, who is facing a mounting crisis of legal problems and political criticism, still wields huge power among Republicans, and has hinted recently at a return run for the White House. Continue reading...

Ever since same-sex marriage became legal across the US, there has been a baby boom in the gay community – from New York City to Utah – as these touching images show Continue reading...

Crew of lawyers including L Lin Wood and Sidney Powell battling federal inquiries and defamation suits that threaten their careersA crew of conservative lawyers still pushing disinformation that echoes Donald Trump’s false claim that the election was rigged are now battling federal inquiries, defamation lawsuits and bar association scrutiny that threaten to cripple their legal careers.Former justice department officials say Trump’s legal loyalists are weakening trust in the American electoral system via persistent repetition of his baseless claims. They note that some are actively backing Republican drives in key states to change election laws seen as undermining voting rights for communities of color. Continue reading...

Ellis Brown III, who was found guilty of beating a restrained and prostrate suspect, had been forced out of a neighbouring forceA former St Louis police officer with a track record of violence, including the killing of a mentally disturbed Black man that was condemned as amounting to an execution, has been convicted of beating a suspect as he lay restrained and prostrate on the ground.Ellis Brown III was found guilty by a federal jury last week after an internal police inquiry cleared him over a car chase in 2019 which ended with the then detective severely kicking Steven Kolb after he surrendered. Continue reading...

Donald Trump’s oldest son is flogging videos of himself online, while Ivanka is keeping an unusually low profileMy father, you won’t be surprised to hear, is not a billionaire who, until a few months ago, served as the 45th president of the United States. But if he was, do you know what I would be doing right now? Swigging champagne on a yacht in the Med with the internet off, I reckon. You know what I would absolutely not be doing? Selling sad little videos of myself saying “Hello!” and “Happy birthday!” for $500 a pop on a video messaging service called Cameo. And yet, according to recent reports, it seems Donald Trump Jr is spending his days doing exactly that.What gives? Is the former president’s eldest child desperate for attention or desperate for money? Continue reading...

Those who bear a disproportionate share of a carbon tax will mobilise against it … unless they are given reason not toIn his classic book, The Logic of Collective Action, the late great Mancur Olson explained that the hardest policies to implement are those with diffuse benefits and concentrated costs. Olson’s argument was straightforward: individuals bearing the costs will vigorously oppose the policy, while the beneficiaries will free ride, preferring that someone else take up the cudgels.Olson’s insight applies to the single most pressing policy challenge facing humanity today, namely the climate crisis. The starting point for addressing it, economists agree, is a tax on carbon. The resulting reduction in emissions would deliver benefits to virtually everyone on the planet. But specific segments of society – Olson’s concentrated interests – will bear a disproportionate share of the costs and mobilise in opposition. Continue reading...

The 10 richest dynasties, such as those behind Walmart and Mars, grew their net worth by $136bn during the pandemic, report findsSelf-made billionaires including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk made huge profits during the Covid-19 pandemic but a new report shows there’s no beating family money when it comes to getting – and staying – really, really rich.Ten of the US’s richest families, including the Walmart family and the dynasties behind industries including candy and cosmetics, also saw their assets balloon over the pandemic, with a shared increase in their combined net worth of over $136bn in 14 months, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) published on Wednesday. Continue reading...

The untitled memoir by the president’s son-in-law will be published in 2022Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former president Donald Trump and a senior adviser in his administration, has secured a book deal to recount Trump’s presidency.Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, announced that Kushner’s book will come out in early 2022. Kushner has begun working on the memoir, currently untitled, and is expected to write about everything from the Middle East to criminal justice reform to the pandemic. Financial terms were not disclosed. Continue reading...

More than a year after shutting down, the Golden State rolled back social distancing and mask requirements on TuesdayBars at full capacity. No masks for vaccinated Disneyland goers. Fans sitting side-by-side at Giants and Dodgers games.California rolled back its major public health restrictions on Tuesday, 15 months after it became the first state in the US to shut down to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Continue reading...

Her appointment would be a win for progressives who have pushed for laws to govern monopolies and growing corporate powerJoe Biden reportedly plans to name Lina Khan, an antitrust researcher who has focused on the immense market power of big tech, as chair of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a key win for progressives who have pushed for tougher laws to tackle monopolies and growing corporate power.The Senate confirmed Khan as a commissioner to the FTC earlier on Tuesday, with strong bipartisan support. Biden intends to tap her as chair of the commission, sources told Reuters, a decision that follows the selection of fellow progressive and big tech critic Tim Wu to join the National Economic Council. Continue reading...

Andy Slavitt under fire from the right for saying Americans should have been prepared to ‘sacrifice a little bit’The US death toll in the coronavirus pandemic passed 600,000 on Tuesday. As it did so, a former White House Covid adviser, Andy Slavitt, was under fire from the right for saying Americans could have avoided such severe losses if they had been prepared to “sacrifice a little bit for one another”.Related: Telemedicine companies seeking to cash in on Covid pandemic boom Continue reading...