Nineteen people have been killed, including nine children, and dozens more injured in an apartment building fire in the Bronx borough of New York City. ‘The numbers are horrific,’ said New York City mayor Eric Adams. ‘This is going to be one of the worst fires that we have witnessed during modern times here in the city of New York’

Kinzinger asks if Trump ‘incompetent or a coward’ during 6 January riot while Raskin ponders 14th amendment to bar new run

Ice fishers among people brought back to shoreline of Lake Michigan by airboats after split possibly caused by bargeAuthorities rescued 27 people from a floating chunk of ice that broke away from shore in the bay of Green Bay in eastern Wisconsin, a sheriff’s office said.No injuries were reported in the incident that happened on Saturday morning north of Green Bay, in part of Lake Michigan, the Brown county sheriff’s office reported. Continue reading...

The United States National Labor Relations Board has accused the paper of undermining union activity. Are they any different to Amazon?One of the most useful qualities of labor unions is their ability to force Good Liberals to actually demonstrate their principles in a tangible way. It is easy for a self-proclaimed progressive business owner to say all the nice things about how they believe in equality and fair wages and worker rights – but when their employees unionize and come to claim those rights, those nice bosses must stop talking about how nice they are, and prove it. For limousine liberals, dealing with unions is where the rubber hits the road.Needless to say, many Good Liberals turn out to be charlatans. There is a saying in the union world: “A boss is a boss.” This is a more pithy way of saying: “A boss is kind of a greedy jerk, no matter how many ‘Nevertheless, she persisted’ bumper stickers they have plastered on their Volvos.” Continue reading...

As supreme court ponders workplace vaccine mandate, CDC director Rochelle Walensky seeks to set record straightFacing accusations of confusing messaging about the Omicron Covid surge, a senior Biden administration official was forced on to the back foot on Sunday by a supreme court justice’s mistaken remark about hospitalisations among children.During oral arguments over a vaccinations mandate for private employers, the liberal justice Sonya Sotomayor said on Friday the US had “over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators”. Continue reading...

Republican announces run for third term, delighting both his own party and Democrats seeking a win

Democrat answers criticism over police role for brother and appointment of scandal-hit former officer to public safety postEric Adams has promised to restore “swagger” to New York, the city he has run as mayor for barely a week. But even in that brief time he has attracted fierce criticism and flirted with scandal.On Sunday, the new mayor said a former police chief brought back into the administration despite having resigned seven years ago amid a corruption investigation had not done “anything that was criminal”. Continue reading...

A watershed moment for the most populous US city as opponents vow to challenge the lawMore than 800,000 non-citizens and “Dreamers” could vote in New York City municipal elections as early as next year, after Mayor Eric Adams allowed legislation to become law on Sunday.Opponents have vowed to challenge the law, which the city council approved a month ago. Unless a judge halts its implementation, New York is the first major US city to grant widespread municipal voting rights to non-citizens. Continue reading...

Newsletter reports supreme court justice dined with Democrats after incorrectly identifying Chuck Schumer’s wife as the justice

Four leading American authors assess the Covid-battered first year of Joe Biden’s presidencyRichard Ford is a novelist and short story writer best known for his quartet of novels featuring the protagonist Frank Bascombe, a failed sportswriter turned novelist, which includes The Sportswriter, Independence Day and the Pulitzer prize-winning The Lay of the Land. Ford’s acclaimed memoir, Between Them: Remembering My Parents, was published in 2017 and the following year his 1990 novel, Wildlife, was made into a widely praised film starring Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal. His most recent short story collection is Sorry for Your Trouble Continue reading...

Taskforce including civil rights leaders and attorneys scrutinizes legacy of centuries of injusticeDawn Basciano’s ancestors arrived five generations ago in Coloma, California, as enslaved people, forced to leave behind an infant son enslaved to another family in Missouri.Those ancestors, Nancy and Peter Gooch, were freed in 1850 when California joined the union as a free state, and 20 years later, their son and his family were able to join them in the fertile agricultural land north-east of Sacramento. Their journey west was funded by the sweat and hard work of Nancy, who grew and sold fruit, mended clothes and cooked for the local miners. Continue reading...

One-third of former prisoners sent to third countries are lacking legal status – unable to work or travel and at risk of human rights abusesAbout 30% of former Guantánamo detainees who were resettled in third countries have not been granted legal status, according to new analysis shared exclusively with the Guardian, leaving them vulnerable to deportation and restricting their ability to rebuild their lives.Of the hundreds of men released from Guantánamo since the prison first opened 20 years ago, about 150 were sent to third countries in bilateral agreements brokered by the US, because their home countries were considered dangerous to return to. Continue reading...

The US-run enclave has proved hard to dismantle over two decades, a legal anomaly and lead weight wrapped around America’s global reputationOn 4 January 2002, Brig Gen Michael Lehnert received an urgent deployment order. He would take a small force of marines and sailors and build a prison camp in the US-run military enclave on Cuba’s south coast, Guantánamo Bay.Lehnert had 96 hours to deploy and build the first 100 cells, in time for the first plane-load of captives arriving from the battlefield in Afghanistan on 11 January. The job was done on time: a grid of chain-link cages surrounded by barbed wire and six plywood guard towers manned by snipers. There were five windowless huts for interrogations. It was named Camp X-Ray. Continue reading...

America’s biggest city is seeing another winter spike, but with good vaccines and a new message many residents say this wave feels differentIn the spring of 2020, Hart Island, a mile from City Island in the Bronx, was a focal point of grief in New York. It was here, at the city’s public cemetery or potter’s field, the final resting place of more than a million people, that officials ordered trenches dug to accommodate those the coronavirus was expected to kill.The trenches were never filled. Many bodies were returned to funeral parlors or stored in mobile freezers on Randall’s Island, better known for music festivals and the Frieze art fair than cold storage of corpses. Continue reading...

With the country polarised and Republicans embracing authoritarianism, some experts fear a Northern Ireland-style insurgency but others say armed conflict remains improbableJoe Biden had spent a year in the hope that America could go back to normal. But last Thursday, the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol, the president finally recognised the full scale of the current threat to American democracy.“At this moment, we must decide,” Biden said in Statuary Hall, where rioters had swarmed a year earlier. “What kind of nation are we going to be? Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm?” Continue reading...

Attack on Yao Pan Ma, 61, drew attention amid rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and is now being treated as homicideA Chinese American man who was brutally attacked last April while collecting cans in East Harlem has died of his injuries and the case is now deemed a homicide, police in New York said on Saturday.Yao Pan Ma, 61, died on 31 December, police said. Continue reading...

Cheyenne Brown and Stephanie Harrison linked to Anthony Robinson, accused of using shopping cart to move victims’ bodiesAuthorities in Virginia have positively identified the remains of two women they say were killed by a man they believe is a serial killer who used a shopping cart to transport his victims’ bodies after meeting them on dating sites.Police said DNA analysis confirmed remains found in a container in Fairfax county on 15 December are those of 29-year-old Cheyenne Brown, of Washington DC, and 48-year-old Stephanie Harrison, of Redding, California. Continue reading...

Conservative Democratic senator has signalled privately he is not interested in supporting any Build Back Better package

He knew that his Oscar win wouldn’t suddenly open doors for others and became a formidable force for a generationThe death of Sidney Poitier is a moment of great sadness for many, but especially for people like my parents, who remember him being the first Black actor they ever saw on TV. Raised in the Bahamas by tomato farmers, he was the youngest of seven children and came from extreme poverty. He moved to New York aged 16, where he worked as a dishwasher, took acting lessons and taught himself how to read, write and enunciate by reading newspapers and listening to the radio. He was the definition of a self-made man.When he won an Academy Award for best actor in 1964, he was the first Black person to do so. He was proud of his victory but, admirably, wasn’t blinded by it. “I don’t believe my Oscar will be a sort of magic wand that will wipe away restrictions on job opportunities for negro actors,” he said in an interview. He wasn’t wrong. It would be 38 years before another Black person (Denzel Washington) would win a best actor Oscar. Continue reading...

Rilu, 11, began showing symptoms in November and the CDC says most animal Covid infections come from contact with humansA snow leopard at a zoo in Bloomington, Illinois, has died after contracting Covid-19.Miller Park Zoo announced the death of Rilu, 11, which the zoo previously said “began coughing and had a raspy respiration beginning on 20 November”, in an Instagram post on Thursday. Continue reading...

Authorities say 13-year-old son of Sarah Beam, a teacher, was found in her car’s trunk at a testing site in the Texas cityA Houston mother has been charged after allegedly placing her 13-year-old son in the trunk of her car in an attempt to isolate him after he tested positive for Covid-19, then took him to a drive-thru testing site.In a statement reported by KPRC, an NBC-affiliate, the Cyprus-Fairbanks school district said police were “alerted that a child was in the trunk of a car at a drive-thru Covid-19 testing site earlier this week. Continue reading...

The Republican senator was widely mocked after being forced to walk back his description of 5 January as a ‘violent terrorist attack’

While there are a bunch of factors at play, from social media to a decrease in alcohol use, one hypothesis can be worryingAnd just like that, nobody’s having sex any more. Middle-aged people aren’t having much. Young people aren’t having much. Japanese people aren’t having much. Nor are Brits or Australians or Americans. Over the past decade a number of studies have found a significant decline in sexual activity around the world, the latest example of this being a recent US-focused study showing declines from 2009 to 2018 in all forms of partnered sexual activity and a decline in adolescent masturbation. The researchers, by the way, looked at self-reported information from government surveys among people 14-49 years old; it’s possible that it’s a very different story when it comes to the over-50s.Arwa Mahdawi’s new book, Strong Female Lead, is available for order – and is far better value than a jar full of farts or an NFT of Melania’s head Continue reading...

The lie that the election was ‘stolen’ from Trump is building its monuments in ludicrous stories, and codifying them in laws to make the next elections easier to pilferAmerican democracy is in peril and nearly everyone paying attention is trying to find the best way to say so. Should we in the intellectual classes position our warnings in satire, in jeremiads, in social scientific data, in historical analogy, in philosophical wisdom we glean from so many who have instructed us about the violence and authoritarianism of the 20th century? Or should we just scream after our holiday naps?Some of us pick up our pens and do what we can. We quote wise scribes such as George Orwell on how there may be a latent fascist waiting to emerge in all humans, or Hannah Arendt on how democracies are inherently unstable and susceptible to ruin by aggressive, skilled demagogues. We turn to Alexis de Tocqueville for his stunning insights into American individualism while we love to believe his claims that democracy would create greater equality. And oh! how we love Walt Whitman’s fabulously open, infinite democratic spirit. We inhale Whitman’s verses and are captured by the hypnotic power of democracy. “O Democracy, for you, for you I am trilling these songs,” wrote our most exuberant democrat.David W Blight is sterling professor of American History at Yale and author of the Pulitzer-prize winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom Continue reading...

President strikes different tone in tacit admission that ignoring the most powerful force in the Republican party is riskyIn the first moments of his presidency, Joe Biden called on Americans to set aside their deep divisions inflamed by a predecessor he intentionally ignored. He emphasized national unity and appealed to Americans to come together to “end this uncivil war”.Nearly a year later, as a divided nation reflects on the first anniversary of the 6 January assault on the US Capitol, the uncivil war he sought to extinguish rages on, stronger than ever. In a searing speech on Thursday, Biden struck a different tone. Continue reading...

The illusion of a successful, free-market economy is shattered – and now Tokayev’s violent crackdown bodes ill for dissentersAlmaty, the commercial capital of Kazakhstan, is the kind of mirage that oil-rich nations so often produce. It has all the trappings of comfort and consumer excess: swanky shopping malls, luxury car dealerships, high-end hotels.This is the image of prosperity that the country’s rulers enjoy projecting to the world. For decades, Kazakhs have been encouraged to take out expensive loans to experience their share in the dream: to buy flats, cars and even holidays they can barely afford.Peter Leonard is Central Asia editor at the news and analysis website Eurasianet Continue reading...

Revealed: Fewer than 200 of those affected have been able to regain their voting rights in the last quarter-centuryThe Mississippi officials met in the heat of summer with a singular goal in mind: stopping Black people from voting.“We came here to exclude the Negro,” said the convention’s president. “Nothing short of this will answer.” Continue reading...

Best case scenario: a scaled down plan that saves popular programs and a billionaire tax to pay for itDemocrats were already facing a bleak landscape for this year’s midterm elections, with Joe Biden’s approval rating languishing in the low 40s and his party holding narrow majorities in both the House and the Senate.Now, with Senator Joe Manchin’s refusal to support the Build Back Better Act, the chances of Republicans regaining control of the House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate as well, appear higher than ever. Continue reading...

A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to Hong Kong Continue reading...

Messages between Mark Meadows and others suggest the Trump White House coordinated efforts to stop Joe Biden’s certificationThe House select committee investigating the Capitol attack is examining whether Donald Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy on 6 January that connected the White House’s scheme to stop Joe Biden’s certification with the insurrection, say two senior sources familiar with the matter.The committee’s new focus on the potential for a conspiracy marks an aggressive escalation in its inquiry as it confronts evidence that suggests the former president potentially engaged in criminal conduct egregious enough to warrant a referral to the justice department. Continue reading...

Hunter Lewis spent years creating the adventure, but it ended tragically when he didn’t return from preparing the final clueHunter Lewis left his father’s home on California’s far northern coast last week with a plan. The adventurous college student, 21, had spent years creating an elaborate treasure hunt for his friends and family. Now it was time to hide the final prize.On 30 December, Lewis is believed to have launched a 15ft green canoe into the frigid Pacific waters to hide the treasure that would complete the journey. Continue reading...

Judge rules William ‘Roddie’ Bryan can seek parole after 30 years while Travis and Gregory McMichael cannotA judge in Georgia sentenced Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan to life in prison on Friday for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was running through their mostly white neighborhood in February 2020 when they chased him down and killed him.Under Georgia law, murder carries a mandatory life sentence unless prosecutors seek the death penalty. For the judge, Timothy Walmsley, the main decision was whether to grant father and son Greg McMichael, 66, and Travis McMichael, 35, and their neighbor, Bryan, 52, a chance to earn parole. Continue reading...