US news | The Guardian

John Weaver ‘led a secret life that was built on a foundation of deception at every level. He is a predator, a liar, and an abuser’

Prices of precious metal surges as Reddit posts and YouTube videos encourage interestSilver prices hit an eight-year high on Monday as the precious metal became the latest asset to be subject to a flurry of interest from small investors.Spot silver reached $30 an ounce for the first time since 2013 on Monday and the 10% gain put silver on track for its biggest one-day rise since 2008. Continue reading...

David Schoen also represented ‘all sorts of reputed mobsters’ while Bruce Castor declined to prosecute Bill Cosby in 2005One of two attorneys named to defend Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial represented Roger Stone, believes Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself and numbers among his clients “all sorts of reputed mobster figures”, including “a guy the government claimed was the biggest mafioso in the world”.Related: Donald Trump hires new impeachment defence team after lead lawyers quit Continue reading...

US secretary of state condemns actions against advocates for Alexei Navalny and speaks about denuclearizing Korean peninsulaThe Biden administration will consider new sanctions against North Korea as well as other possible actions against Russia said Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, in a television interview on Monday, as the administration continued its foreign policy review.Blinken told NBC News tools aimed at denuclearizing the Korean peninsula include additional sanctions in coordination with US allies, as well as diplomatic incentives he did not specify. Continue reading...

To protect the country’s democratic values, the international community will have to work with her elected partyMyanmar’s democratic transition in the years following 2009 was a near-miracle. To see it so callously rolled back is a tragedy, a sign that the army is nervous about giving up its power and privileges to rowdy civilian rule, as in neighbouring Thailand. With a state of emergency declared for a year and important civilian leaders detained, notably the state counsellor, Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s army will be tempted to turn the clock back and permanently hold on to power.That would be a strategic blunder because Myanmar in 2021 is not Myanmar circa 1962, when General Ne Win seized power, or even 1988, when generals Saw Maung and Than Shwe staged a putsch in the face of civilian protests and appointed themselves to run the country via the State Law and Order Restoration Council. Myanmar today is a flawed but flourishing democracy. The ruling National League of Democracy (NLD) enjoys broad popular support, evidenced by the overwhelming mandate it received in the November 2020 elections. Ordinary Burmese have enjoyed the democratic dividend and are not about to give it up. Continue reading...

The lion of North Broad Street – part philosopher, part humanitarian, part poet – leaves behind a towering legacy in Philadelphia that only begins on the basketball courtThe city of Philadelphia is poorer today for the passing of John Chaney, the legendary Temple University basketball coach, champion of the disadvantaged and lion of North Broad Street who died on Friday just eight days after his 89th birthday.Chaney transformed what was known primarily as a commuter school on the city’s rugged north side into an unlikely national power in the 80s and 90s, mostly by recruiting high school players from disadvantaged backgrounds who were overlooked, disregarded or unwanted by the sport’s traditional bluebloods. The Owls became a March Madness staple at his peak, reaching the NCAA tournament in 17 of 18 seasons, including five runs to the Elite Eight. He retired with 741 career wins, including 516 at Temple, earning induction to the Basketball Hall of Fame along the way. Continue reading...

Trump has brought in a new legal team, less than two days before they must outline his defense. Plus, a military coup in MyanmarGood morning.Donald Trump has hired a new legal defense team for his impeachment trial in the Senate next week, a day after his previous team resigned en masse. The new team will have very little time to prepare for the trial, in which Trump is accused of inciting a deadly insurrection at the Capitol, with Tuesday marking the deadline to submit a preliminary memo outlining the former president’s defense. According to CNN, all five of Trump’s previous team resigned after disagreeing with him over strategy. Continue reading...

The responsibility to implement public health measures is shared with state leaders – some of whom see the moves as a threat to the Republican partyJoe Biden inherited a country deeply divided over the coronavirus. A country where public health measures as simple as wearing a mask and social distancing have become symbols of political party affiliation. It’s a divide that may prove a significant blockage to the president’s roadmap to recovery.“Biden speaks to the aspiration of unity, and it’s nice to hope for that, but the pandemic has been understood by much of the country through deeply polarized and politicized lenses,” said Wendy Parmet, a professor of law and public policy at Northeastern University. Continue reading...

The non-binary progressive state representative explains why they refuse to keep putting their identity up for debateWhen 27-year-old Mauree Turner sat down at Holy Rollers, the queer-owned vegan Donut Shop in Oklahoma City in July 2020, it was under strange circumstances. Firstly, Turner, who uses non-binary pronouns, had just won Oklahoma’s 88th district by a mere 228 votes. Secondly, sitting opposite, was the man they just beat.Before being elected to office, Turner spent their days doing the behind-the-scenes gruntwork of community organizing as a regional field director with the ACLU: planning workshops, leading trainings on college campuses, coordinating with dozens of volunteers. Continue reading...

Those who know the attorney general nominee from the 1995 case say the US could have no better ally in the battle against extremismThe message was a stark one. “America is in serious decline,” the person wrote. “Is a civil war imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that! But it might.”It reads like an entry on a message board popular with the insurrectionists who broke into the US Capitol on 6 January – expressing a sentiment at once shocking and shockingly routine in 2021 America. Continue reading...

A path forward for the GOP is unclear when the former president still holds power over many of its lawmakers

Kushner and his deputy Avi Berkowitz join Greta Thunberg and Alexei Navalny on the nominations listFormer White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and his deputy, Avi Berkowitz, have been nominated for the Nobel peace prize for their role in negotiating four normalisation deals between Israel and Arab nations known as the “Abraham Accords”.Kushner, who is Trump’s son-in-law, and Berkowitz, who was the Middle East envoy, were key figures in negotiating deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. Continue reading...

Lawyers David Schoen and Bruce L Castor will head up new legal team after Butch Bowers clashed with Trump over strategy, according to reportsDonald Trump has named new lawyers to lead the defense at his impeachment trial in the Senate next week on the charge that he unleashed a deadly insurrection upon the US Capitol on 6 January. The announcement comes just a day after his previous team fell apart.Trial lawyers David Schoen and Bruce L Castor will head up Trump’s new legal team, the former US president announced on Sunday evening. Continue reading...

North-east braces for storm that could dump well over a foot of snow and create blizzard-like conditions

Ten Republican senators pitched plan with a reported $600bn – less than a third of the $1.9tn package the Biden team has laid outRepublicans senators made a lowball offer on Sunday to cooperate with the Biden administration on a new coronavirus relief package, increasing the likelihood that the White House will seek to bypass Republicans to fund its proposal.A group of 10 Republican senators led by Susan Collins of Maine pitched Joe Biden a sketch of a relief plan with a reported $600bn total price tag – less than a third of the $1.9tn stimulus package the Biden team has laid out over the last days. Continue reading...

Leading infectious disease expert predicts that deadlier British strain will become dominant this springA leading infectious disease expert predicted on Sunday that the deadlier British variant of Covid-19 will become the dominant strain of the virus in the US and could hit the country like a hurricane.The worrying forecast came as the total of confirmed infections in the US passed the 26m mark, with the death toll advancing steadily towards the grim milestone of half a million after on Sunday surpassing the total of 440,000, by far the highest in the world according to data gathered by the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus research center. Continue reading...

Existing quiet cooperation has been under way for months, say authors of Guardian comment articleAn opportunity for a new beginning between Saudi Arabia and Iran has been presented by Joe Biden’s presidency, two leading Saudi and Iranians close to their diplomatic leaderships are proposing in an article in the Guardian today.The article is co-written by Abdulaziz Sager, the Saudi Arabian chairman and founder of the Gulf Research Center, and Hossein Mousavian, a former senior Iranian diplomat and now a nuclear specialist based at Princeton University. Continue reading...

The occupying power is responsible for the healthcare of the Palestinians, whose economy and medical systems are in ruins

We need sleep, rest, exercise, love and fun to remain passably human. But for many of us in lockdown, the most pressing job is to avoid conflict with our loved ones

Centralised approach was meant to underline Europe’s solidarity but has had opposite effectThe EU has made an almighty hash of procuring treatments for Covid-19. Vaccine centres are running short of supplies as a result. National governments want jabs rather than excuses for what has gone wrong. The search for scapegoats is on.Stripped of the legal wrangling between Brussels and AstraZeneca, the protectionist plan to ban exports of drugs and the now-abandoned plan to close the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, the EU has been incompetent – and no amount of bully-boy tactics can get away from that fact. Continue reading...

A recent study shows family money and background plays a crucial role for startups, and can be one of the primary sources of fundingWhat do Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk really have in common? Sure, they’re all tech billionaires, super smart people, savvy innovators and successful entrepreneurs. But there’s another thing: they all had families who helped them at the very beginning.Bill Gates’s mom introduced him to executives at IBM, which helped him forge a deal for his first operating system MS-DOS. Bezos’s parents were early investors in Amazon. Musk comes from a wealthy, South African background. Among other well-known entrepreneurs, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly took a $100,000 loan from his father to start Facebook. Michael Dell’s parents offered some seed money for his fledging computer business. Nike founder Phil Knight credits his parents for helping him start the company too. Continue reading...

Travel between jurisdictions creates ‘unfair opportunities’ and disrupts infrastructure, experts say – though the impulse may be understandableWith more than 50 unique vaccination plans across the United States, one’s access to the Covid-19 vaccine depends in large part on where one lives. In Wisconsin, mink farmers are being considered for the next phase of vaccine prioritization. In New Jersey, smokers can get priority access to the vaccine. In Colorado, journalists fall under the category of frontline workers.This complex system has given rise to a new type of pandemic travel – dubbed “vaccine tourism” – in which people cross state or even country lines to get earlier access. Without standardized protocol, and because of the fractured American health system, tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people have gotten vaccines outside their home states. Continue reading...

Abandoned by her parents at age three, she was raised by nuns and built a life from nothing. The mismanaged pandemic claimed her life too soonA few days before Christmas, I dropped groceries at my grandma Debbie’s door and stood in the middle of her lawn. It was our pandemic ritual that we had perfected after nine months of lockdown. Continue reading...

The financial titans silenced the ‘retail investors’ who sought to boost an unloved video store chainFor those of us who are as intimate with the inner workings of the stock market as we are with the circuitry of the Large Hadron Collider, the brouhaha over GameStop has been illuminating. While the story may seem esoteric, it is highly revealing of the way economic and political power operates today, laying bare both the irrationality of the market and the reach of corporate privilege.For those who don’t know, GameStop is a US video game retailer that has lost much of its market share to online trade and whose stock plummeted from $56 (£40) a share in 2013 to about $5 in 2019. It is set to close 450 shops this year. Some big hedge funds decided that they would cash in on GameStop’s misery by shorting its shares. A short is a bet that an asset, such as a share, will decline in price. It’s a manoeuvre that can generate huge profits. But if the asset price doesn’t fall, investors can also lose a lot of money. Continue reading...

In fighting the battle for hedge fund elites, Steven Cohen revealed his true coloursAnyone who still associates the ownership of art with the possession of virtue must have woken from their fanciful trance last week. Collectors have shown their true colours. On Thursday, the multibillionaire financier Steven Cohen was lambasted across America for his involvement in the notorious shorting of GameStop shares. Teaming up with a former protege, he fought the battle for hedge fund elites against ordinary investors – a dirty great Goliath trying to oppress all the Davids on Reddit.Related: The GameStop affair is like tulip mania on steroids | Dan Davies Continue reading...

With bagel shop trips and visits to local restaurants, the president and vice-president have signalled they intend to engage with the city – unlike the previous administrationIt was just like any other Sunday, recalls Andrew Dana, owner and founder of the Call Your Mother deli in Washington DC. “I was at the Georgetown store until about noon and then I left because we close at 2pm and I said, how much can happen in the next two hours? By the time I got home, my phone had exploded.”Dana’s staff were eager to tell him about the deli’s newest and most famous customer: the president of the United States. Joe Biden had waved from his extensive motorcade as his son, Hunter, and a member of the Secret Service collected four bagels and left a tip of more than 50%. The publicity boost was instant: sales at Call Your Mother’s locations in Washington are up almost 80% over the past week. Continue reading...

Despite national failures at the ballot box, radicalised state parties are fighting for Trump’s election lies and defending QAnon followersIn Arizona and Oregon, they rebuked opponents of Donald Trump’s assault on democracy. In Hawaii, they defended followers of the QAnon conspiracy movement. And in Texas, they adopted a slogan with dark historical connotations: “We are the storm.”To understand the future of the Republican party, start with the army of increasingly radicalised foot soldiers who shape it at state level. Continue reading...

PBS documentary on 9to5 shows how women’s organizing efforts in 1970s to better working conditions echos many of today’s social justice movementsIn the early 1970s, a group of female clerical workers in Boston, Massachusetts, began organizing for better wages, advancement opportunities, and an end to sexual harassment. Their organizing efforts spurred a nationwide movement called 9to5, formed to improve working conditions for women across the board, and eventually toward the goal of forming unions within the workplace.Related: American Factory review – a sobering documentary by the Obamas Continue reading...

Many have dreamt of making linemen into props and tight ends into locks. In ‘RugbyTown USA’, they think they’ve found a way“To be honest,” says Garrald McDowell, “I thought it was, like, a scam.”Related: Major League Rugby faces a pandemic – and corrosive politics Continue reading...

The new president can achieve huge and vital reform and relief without the party of Trump – and they know itIf there were ever a time for bold government, it is now. Covid, joblessness, poverty, raging inequality and our last chance to preserve the planet are together creating an existential inflection point.Related: Trump may be out of office, but Republicans are still angry and ready to do his bidding Continue reading...

Jen Ellis, a Vermont elementary school teacher, joins forces with the Vermont Teddy Bear Company to meet demandThe teacher who created the recycled wool mittens that Bernie Sanders wore to the presidential inauguration and which triggered endless social media memes is now partnering with the Vermont Teddy Bear Company to meet soaring demand.Some of the proceeds will go to the Make-A-Wish Vermont charity. Continue reading...

Investigator whose cases include Jonestown mass suicides and political scandals suffered head injury in San FranciscoJack Palladino, the private investigator who has worked on high-profile cases ranging from the Jonestown mass suicides to celebrity and political scandals, has been placed on life support after suffering a head injury during an attempted robbery.Palladino, 70, had just stepped outside his San Francisco home on Thursday to try out his new camera when a car pulled up and a man jumped out to grab it from him, police and the detective’s stepson Nick Chapman told the San Francisco Chronicle. Continue reading...

Officials work to pinpoint doses in pipeline between federal distribution and administration by statesThe Biden administration has spent its first week in office attempting to manually track down 20m vaccine doses in the pipeline between federal distribution and administration at clinic sites, when a dose finally reaches a patient’s arm.The Trump administration’s strategy pushed the response to the coronavirus pandemic to individual states and omitted pipeline tracking information between distribution and when the shot is actually administered, Biden administration officials told Politico. Continue reading...

The story of the disgraced doctor and MMR tells us much about the spread of fearYou should always ask the hard questions and the hardest one to ask about Covid and free speech is why does the law tolerate anti-vaccine propaganda? The liberal exemption offered by John Stuart Mill’s harm principle does not apply. However unpopular it is to say it on the identitarian left, the harm principle holds that free societies must tolerate speech that is offensive and unpopular as long as it does not incite the physical harm of others.Related: Facebook removes Save Our Rights UK Covid denial videos Continue reading...

Australian of the Year Grace Tame helped change the law for sexual assault survivors – but more needs to be doneOn Monday sexual assault survivor Grace Tame was named 2021 Australian of the Year for her extraordinary bravery and advocacy raising awareness about child sexual abuse and the warning signs of grooming.Grace, who was groomed and repeatedly raped by her 58-year-old maths teacher at age 15, rose to prominence via the #LetHerSpeak campaign after it was discovered she could not reveal her own name in the media due to an archaic victim “gag-law” in her home state of Tasmania. Continue reading...

Extremist congresswoman says she had ‘great’ phone call with Donald Trump and hails his supportRepublican party leaders will meet with extremist Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene next week as an ongoing crisis over her racist and bizarre political views continues to roil American politics.Meanwhile, Greene tweeted on Saturday that she had had a phone call with Donald Trump which she described as “great” and that she was “so grateful for his support” – probably cementing her position as a champion of the far-right Trumpist wing of the party. Continue reading...

Associated Press analysis of 17 US states and two cities finds Black people inoculated at disproportionately low levelsA racial gap has opened up in the United States’ Covid-19 vaccination drive, with Black Americans in many places lagging behind whites in receiving shots, an Associated Press analysis shows.An early look at the 17 states and two cities that have released racial breakdowns through 25 January found that Black people in all places are getting inoculated at levels below their share of the general population, in some cases significantly below. Continue reading...

The ‘people’s trading app’ at the heart of the GameStop gamble has flourished thanks to Wall Street investmentRobinhood is the amateurs’ share trading platform at the heart of the attempt by an army of small investors to outsmart Wall Street by buying shares in companies such as GameStop, costing hedge funds billions in the process.The company has upset the applecart of US stock investing by waiving the commission that traditional brokers charge customers to play the markets. That, plus its user-friendly app, has made trading much cheaper and easier for ordinary people, regardless of their experience, enticing more than 13 million users at the last count. Continue reading...

The dramatic struggle over video game chain’s shares suggests markets must now contend with a breed of angry, young, networked investorsWhen Ben, 28, a software engineer from Leeds, bought two shares in US games retailer GameStop for £460, it was for one reason, he says: “When they make the film about this in years to come, I’ll know I was there at the frontline with a bunch of idiots on the internet, trying to bring down Wall Street.”For Emma Rivers from East Sussex, who invested £1,400 in the same company – having known little about it a few weeks ago – it has all been about sending a message that capitalism has had its day. Continue reading...

The conspiracy theory mouthpiece in Congress from Georgia constituency has ripped off the GOP’s mask of respectability Continue reading...

Children in the US will ‘hopefully’ start to be vaccinated against Covid-19 by late spring or early summer, said Dr Anthony Fauci.Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, the head of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, was speaking at a White House coronavirus briefing, an event re-instituted by the new president after falling away during the last months of the Trump administration

Remains of 227 migrants found last year, said Humane Borders, while at least 7,000 have died along US-Mexico border since 1998When the remains of two undocumented migrants were found in the desert of south-western Arizona last July, one body lay next to an arrow drawn in the sand, pointing north, with the word “HELP” written beneath.The men had perished while attempting to cross into the US from Mexico, according to border patrol. Out of a group of three, one survived and told the federal agents their human smuggler had left the other two behind in the remote wilderness area. Continue reading...