Omicron surge leads to event cancellations and lines at testing sites but health system not yet under serious strain

Advocates are critical of the immigration policy’s reinstatement, while asylum seekers see the plan as better than nothing from the USEvery day feels like a bad dream to Timoty Correas. He spent five months in a jam-packed tent camp before moving weeks ago to a roach-infested hotel full of migrant families in a neighborhood, blocks from the US border where, he said, during the night local crime cartels would load crowds of smuggled people in and out of houses used as hiding places.Like thousands of other people here, Correas and his eight-year-old son are stranded at the US border, always hoping that hardline pandemic-related restrictions will cease and the processing of asylum seekers by the US will resume. Continue reading...

Saving American democracy will require stopping these three powerful forces already on the way to destroying itWith the Senate adjourned for the holidays and Joe Biden’s Build Back Better social and climate package stalled, the president’s remaining agenda is at the mercy of the 2022 midterm election year. So the practical question is: what should be his, and the Democrats’, first priority when Congress returns in January?Biden obviously wants to get his spending package passed. But swift action on voting rights is essential. Republican state legislatures will soon begin drawing partisan congressional maps that federal legislation would outlaw. Several states have already changed election laws in ways making it harder for people in minority communities to vote and giving Republican legislatures greater power over election outcomes. Continue reading...

‘The beloved community bell helped to create’ remembers a teacher, friend, mentor and the impact her work will continue to haveI was asked to write about bell hooks’ life and legacy but I realized it would not be true to the spirit of how she lived for any one person to sum her up. Instead I have gathered a communal offering of memory, friendship, loss and love for the visionary we’ve lost.bell spent her life standing up against “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” – a phrase she said she didn’t much like but which connected all the forms of domination that are enslaving us in the world today. I watched her create, along with other women, a vision of Black feminism that invigorated an entire generation. She taught me personally about so many things: decolonization, the tyranny and trap of masculinity, how love must be our guiding principle in all that we do, the roles white women can and can’t play in this movement. Continue reading...

Maxwell’s attorneys tried to replace her image of a privileged socialite with one of being a kind and generous employerWhen Ghislaine Maxwell’s defense case started last Thursday, her team tried pulling off a near-impossible task – making the British socialite accused of sex trafficking seem likable.Indeed, the first defense witness in Maxwell’s Manhattan federal court sex-trafficking trial, former assistant Cimberly Espinosa, described her ex-boss in glowing terms. Continue reading...

Girls are barred from school, women can’t work. But too much reporting and diplomacy fails to note their absenceIn the days after the Taliban took Kabul, more than one correspondent shared clips from its streets, marvelling at how fast the city had returned to “surprisingly normal”, with shoppers back out and a sudden sense of quiet in a place that had been constantly braced for the next suicide bombing.The correspondents were men, who apparently didn’t register one stark difference; it was also largely men in their videos. Most of the city’s women had vanished into their homes, terrified of what Taliban rule would mean for them. Continue reading...

Voting rights activists say the country has not fully awakened to the threatA dry run. A dress rehearsal. A practice coup. As the first anniversary of the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol approaches, there is no shortage of warnings about the danger of a repeat by Republicans.But even as Donald Trump loyalists lay siege to democracy with voting restrictions and attempts to take over the running of elections, there are fears that Democrats in Washington have not fully woken up to the threat. Continue reading...

Rats, a group that has been hunting rats with dogs in New York since 1995, is summoned to infested neighborhoodsThis will come as no surprise to anyone but New York City has a rat problem.Two million rats call the city home, thriving on the streets, in sewers, in both abandoned and un-abandoned buildings, in the parks, in the subways, in shoe stores and in restaurants. Continue reading...

Covid has aggravated a crisis in the global humanitarian system, and an ineffective UN is being sidelinedIt’s hard to look beyond your own front door when a lethal disease threatens your family. Governments often exhibit similar introspection when facing emergencies beyond national borders. So what if the world is on fire? In the age of Covid the quest for protection and recovery is primarily, myopically, obsessively domestic. Charity, it’s said, begins at home.So look away now, if you wish, because much of the world beyond the inoculated shores of Europe and America presents a very disturbing picture. The pandemic has coincided with, and greatly exacerbated, a crisis in an already struggling international humanitarian system. Existing weaknesses and long-neglected problems are ruthlessly exposed. Continue reading...

Vice-president’s candid admission on Covid variants came in wide-ranging interview with the Los Angeles TimesKamala Harris has conceded that the Biden administration was blind to the emergence of the Delta and Omicron variants of Covid-19, and said she fears “misinformation” over vaccines will prolong the pandemic well into a third year.The candid admission came in a wide-ranging interview with the Los Angeles Times, which followed reports that the vice-president was “struggling” to make a mark as Joe Biden’s No 2 and was keen for a more prominent role. Continue reading...

Ex-Obama chief of staff will go to Japan after deal for vote on Russia pipeline sanctions ends Republican Senate resistanceThe former Obama White House chief of staff and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel was among more than 30 ambassadors and other Biden nominees confirmed by the Senate early on Saturday.The Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, broke a Republican-stoked logjam by agreeing to schedule a vote on sanctions on the company behind the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will deliver natural gas from Russia to Germany. Continue reading...

Charge conference unfolds without notable incident while jurors will start deliberating next weekProsecutors and lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell convened on Saturday in front of the judge in the Briton’s sex trafficking trial in Manhattan federal court, to discuss how jurors would be instructed.The attorneys and Judge Alison Nathan hashed out what Nathan will tell jurors before they start deliberating next week, such as which allegations against Maxwell correspond to specific counts against her. Continue reading...

The former socialite had nothing to say after the prosecution in her New York trial dispensed quickly with defence witnessesDefending a client charged with crimes modern society finds more terrible than murder, who might face the rest of her life in prison, Ghislaine Maxwell’s defence in New York opened with a nice lady who hadn’t seen anything, a travel agent who booked flights years after they mattered and a professor of BugsBunnyology – and none of them cut the mustard.At the end of the defence’s first day, Maxwell was seen holding her hands up in despair at her fancy attorneys who have cost her, according to her own estimate, some $7m. Juries in US federal trials must be unanimous and there are legal grounds for knocking out some of the charges, but it looks bleak for Maxwell. Continue reading...

Kennedy said his wife, Cheryl Hines, was behind it and that he is ‘not always the boss at my own house’

A vulnerability has been exposed in Minecraft, the bestselling video game of all time – and the security implications outside the world of gaming are vastIn one of those delicious coincidences that warm the cockles of every tech columnist’s heart, in the same week that the entire internet community was scrambling to patch a glaring vulnerability that affects countless millions of web servers across the world, the UK government announced a grand new National Cyber Security Strategy that, even if actually implemented, would have been largely irrelevant to the crisis at hand.Initially, it looked like a prank in the amazingly popular Minecraft game. If someone inserted an apparently meaningless string of characters into a conversation in the game’s chat, it would have the effect of taking over the server on which it was running and download some malware that could then have the capacity to do all kinds of nefarious things. Since Minecraft (now owned by Microsoft) is the best-selling video game of all time (more than 238m copies sold and 140 million monthly active users), this vulnerability was obviously worrying, but hey, it’s only a video game… Continue reading...

Neilia Biden and her daughter, Naomi, were killed just after Delaware voters elected Biden to the Senate in 1972Joe Biden on Saturday commemorated the 49th anniversary of the car crash that killed his first wife and infant daughter, visiting their graves at Saint Joseph on the Brandywine Roman Catholic church in Delaware, his home state.Neilia Biden and her daughter, Naomi, were killed just after Delaware voters elected Biden to the Senate in 1972. Their car was broadsided while they were en route to pick up a Christmas tree. Beau and Hunter Biden, aged four and three, survived serious injury. Continue reading...

Her candid admission might make it easier for parents to address the effects of such adult material on their childrenBillie Eilish has just turned 20. Last week, talking to the radio host Howard Stern on SiriusXM, she discussed the impact that viewing pornography online, at a young age, had had on her. She explained that she was about 11 when she first saw pornography, and that it had given her nightmares, and affected her understanding and expectations of what sex should be. “I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn,” she said.The statistics about the age at which children first see pornography online, and the speed at which watching porn becomes normalised, particularly for teenage boys, make for grim reading. In 2019, the British Board of Film Classification commissioned a survey that suggested 51% of 11 to 13-year-olds had seen pornography online. In the majority of cases, this was accidental, and for younger children, in particular, it was traumatic. The study also revealed a disparity between what parents and children understood about the culture of sexual content: only 25% of the parents surveyed thought their child had seen pornography online, while 63% of those parents’ children said that they had seen it. Continue reading...

Alameda county coroner’s report that says ‘physiologic stress’ from being restrained contributed to Mario Gonzalez’s deathThe family of an Oakland man who died after police held him down filed a wrongful death lawsuit on Friday, contending officers asphyxiated him during a confrontation that drew protests and comparisons to the death of George Floyd.The lawsuit cites a report released last week by the Alameda county coroner’s bureau that said the 19 April death of Mario Gonzalez was a homicide. Continue reading...

Statue was taken down in September but on Friday governor said crews found box embedded in 2,000lb granite blockCrews working to remove the pedestal from which a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee towered over Richmond, Virginia, for more than a century believe they have found a time capsule buried there in 1887.The large bronze equestrian statue of Lee, erected in 1890, was taken down in September, more than a year after Governor Ralph Northam ordered its removal amid protests over racism and police brutality across the US following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Continue reading...

Misogyny is in Facebook’s DNA and little seems to have changed over the years – metaverse has already become another place that is hostile to womenWarning: this article contains multiple references to the “metaverse”, which is an extremely annoying buzzword that extremely annoying people love throwing around, normally in conjunction with “blockchain” and “NFT”. If you’re anything like me, then seeing the word “metaverse” makes you a die little bit inside, so I wanted to prepare you in advance. This article also contains multiple references to sexual harassment because, as was utterly predictable, the metaverse has already become yet another place that is deeply hostile to women.Arwa Mahdawi’s new book, Strong Female Lead, is available for order Continue reading...

From hot drinks to charming streetside cottages, restaurateurs are hoping to entice diners to Covid-safe winter diningBefore the pandemic, restaurants with outdoor seating were the exception in New York City. Sidewalk permits were prohibitively expensive, harsh winters were impractical, and muggy summers uncomfortable. But the social distancing rules that closed restaurant dining rooms across the country last year to curb the spread of Covid-19 had a devastating impact on the US restaurant and food service industry, which reported $120bn in lost revenue in the first three months of the pandemic alone (the running total is now $280bn).Outdoor dining emerged as a vital lifeline. To salvage the industry, the New York City government attempted to make it easier for restaurants to seat diners safely outdoors. Mayor Bill de Blasio launched the Open Restaurants initiative in June 2020, which legally permitted roadside dining and simplified the application process. Since then, more than 12,000 restaurants in New York City have been certified for outdoor dining. Continue reading...

Jonathan Greenblatt says that ‘insinuating that Israel or the Jews control Congress or the media is antisemitic’The chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League led condemnation of Donald Trump after the former president used antisemitic tropes in remarks about American Jews and Israel.“Insinuating that Israel or the Jews control Congress or the media is antisemitic, plain and simple,” Jonathan Greenblatt said. “Unfortunately, this is not the first time he has made these offensive remarks.” Continue reading...

Bayeté Ross Smith’s project on the Red Summer of 1919 reveals ‘uncanny’ likeness to today’s political violenceIn the past year, film-maker Bayeté Ross Smith has traveled across the country, trying to find the exact locations where Black people were brutally attacked and killed a century ago. He wanted to make films that showed his viewers that they are living on top of a history of racial violence that was rarely taught or discussed.He started by studying pictures of white mobs climbing buildings, destroying neighborhoods and killing Black people – all part of a white backlash to the progress Black Americans made after the first world war. Incidents of racial terror were so numerous in the summer of 1919 that it was given a name: Red Summer. Continue reading...

She was able to touch so many people, at so many levels, across so many boundaries, because she was a brazen truth-teller and willing to be vulnerableI first met bell hooks in the late 1980s at a feminist conference where I, and a slew of other graduate students, slept on the floor of her hotel suite because the meeting was overbooked. For the next three-plus decades we were colleagues, intellectual comrades and interlocutors who sometimes disagreed, but shared a bond of mutual respect and solidarity. I will miss her words and her presence in our lives.bell hooks (AKA Gloria Jean Watkins), feminist writer, radical thinker and teacher, died on Wednesday, 15 December at the age of 69, at her home in Berea, Kentucky. She was the daughter of working-class parents born in a small town in the Jim Crow South. She eventually went to Stanford University on scholarship and worked as a telephone operator to cover her other expenses. Borrowing her nom de plume from her outspoken great-grandmother, hooks went on to become one of the foremost feminist intellectuals and radical writers of her time. Her writings spanned the spectrum from capitalism and imperialism, to education, masculinity, beauty and love. Her influence is vast and her death leaves a painful void for those who knew and loved her. The outpouring of respect and tributes are testimony to the reach, in breadth and depth, of her work and the power of her legacy.Barbara Ransby is a historian, writer and activist. She is the author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she directs the Social Justice Initiative Continue reading...

After the 1919 Elaine race massacre, the men on death row looked to the investigative journalist to use the power of the pen to save themThroughout the Red Summer of 1919 and beyond, no journalist did more to chronicle the lynchings and other forms of terror inflicted on Black people than Ida B Wells-Barnett. From East St Louis, Illinois, to Elaine, Arkansas, her pen was an instrument for justice.The 12 Black men had been tortured, smothered with rags soaked in chemicals, strapped to electric chairs, beaten with whips by white mobs trying to wring “confessions” out of them. The men had been arrested after the Elaine Massacre, during the Red Summer of 1919, when white mobs “with blood in their eyes” descended on the cotton fields of Elaine, Arkansas, killing more than 800 Black people.“Dear Mrs. Wells-Barnett,” he wrote. “This is one of the 12 mens which is sentenced to death speaking to you on this day and thanking you for your grate speech you made throughout the country in the Chicago Defender paper. So I am thanking you to the very highest hope you will do all you can for your collord race. Because we are innercent men, we Negroes. So I thank God that thro you, our Negroes are looking into this truble, and thank the city of Chicago for what it did to start things and hopen to hear from you all soon.” Continue reading...

Four year before the Tulsa race massacre, white mobs firebombed homes and decimated a Black community in IllinoisThe racial violence in East St Louis, Illinois, on 2 July 1917 holds a special place in US history. It’s not the white brutality against Black people that sets the incident apart – official counts claim that 39 Black residents were killed, though estimates range to the hundreds, and 7,000 were forced to flee the city. It’s not the silent march on New York City’s Fifth Avenue weeks later in support of the victims.East St Louis is notable because it was the first of a series of race riots that happened during and after the first world war, a period of peril and progress for Black Americans. The city, which sits across the Mississippi River from St Louis, Missouri, is a fitting place to end the Red Summers series, which began with the commemoration of the centennial of the Tulsa massacre of 1921. Continue reading...

US chief executive bullish about chances of an American men’s World Cup, even after 104-14 defeat by All Blacks in DCThe All Blacks’ visit to Washington DC in October only strengthened American hopes of staging a Rugby World Cup and the US will be announced as host for 2031 next May, USA Rugby chief executive Ross Young said – unless World Rugby decides to go “back to the drawing board” entirely.Young spoke to the Guardian following World Rugby’s announcement of England as preferred candidate to host the women’s event in 2025, the same status for Australia for the men in 2027 and “exclusive targeted dialogue” with the US regarding 2031 and a women’s event potentially two years earlier. Continue reading...

Trump’s former White House chief of staff has become a character of supreme interest to the Capitol attack committee, with a treasure trove of documents divulging golden nuggets of informationOn the morning of 29 December, eight days before hundreds of Trump supporters and far-right extremists stormed the US Capitol in the worst domestic attack on American democracy arguably since the civil war, the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows fired off an email to the head of the justice department.It was a strange message for Donald Trump’s right-hand man to send to Jeffrey Rosen, acting US attorney general, given that the material in it was written entirely in Italian. It attached a letter addressed to Trump from an Italian named Carlo Goria who said he worked for a US aerospace company and then went on to regurgitate a conspiracy theory that was doing the rounds, known as “Italygate”. Continue reading...

Decision reverses previous ruling but Republican officials say they will appeal measure to supreme courtA federal appeals court panel has allowed Joe Biden’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate for larger private employers to move ahead, reversing a previous decision on a requirement that could affect some 84 million US workers.The 2-1 decision by a panel of the 6th US circuit court of appeals in Cincinnati overrules a decision by a federal judge in a separate court that had paused the mandate nationwide. Continue reading...

The result, in her favor by 310 votes, clarifies how much of a polarizing figure she has remained in her districtSeattle socialist Kshama Sawant has narrowly avoided being ousted from her seat on the city council, following a widely watched recall election.By Friday afternoon, just over 41,000 ballots had been counted, with the no recall vote leading by 310. Though a recount request is possible, it is considered unlikely. Continue reading...

London Breed’s plan increases police presence in the Tenderloin district, a strategy that is at odds with the progressive city’s stanceThe mayor of San Francisco has declared a state of emergency in the Tenderloin district, an area with high levels of homelessness and devastating numbers of drug overdoses, in an effort to crack down on crime and reduce overdose deaths.“We are in a crisis and we need to respond accordingly,” said London Breed at a news conference on Friday. The plan will aggressively address issues on what she called the “nasty streets” in her city, including bolstering the budget for policing. Continue reading...

Maxwell’s defense team rested their case on Friday, with closing arguments set to begin on Monday

The police officer who said she mistook her gun for Taser is charged with manslaughter for fatally shooting Daunte WrightThe defense has rested in the trial of a Minnesota police officer charged in the fatal shooting of Black motorist Daunte Wright.Kim Potter, 49, is charged with manslaughter in Wright’s death during a traffic stop on 11 April in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center. Continue reading...

Of every 100,000 residents, 25 died of Covid in Trump counties in October, compared to the 7.8 in Biden-voting countiesNew data analysis has revealed that if US Democratic voters were to make up their own country, it would have one of the world’s most vaccinated populations, with more than 91% of adults having received at least one shot.Meanwhile, approximately 60% of Republican adults have received their first shot, according to data research by the New York Times. Continue reading...

Since its invention in the 1840s, photography has played an integral part in Indian art history. Although it is often said that India is the most photographed country in the world, the history of its representation is more complicated, and more political, than initially meets the eye. Visions of India: From the Colonial to the Contemporary is the first major survey of Indian photography in Australia and will be on show at the Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne until 20 March 2022

Wildlife officials and ecologists say urgent and drastic measures are needed to eradicate mice, a threat to island’s endemic speciesA plan to eradicate a “plague-level infestation” of invasive mice on California’s Farallon Islands by dropping poisoned bait from helicopters has been approved by state officials.After hours of impassioned debate, coastal commissioners voted 5-3 in favor of the long-controversial plan put forth by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). The approval comes despite the objections of local environmental activists who fear that rodenticide will kill not only the invasive mice, but also gulls and burrowing owls. Continue reading...

Negotiations for economic and climate package stall as the centrist senator Joe Manchin withholds supportJoe Biden has acknowledged that his $1.75tn economic and climate legislative package will miss the Christmas deadline for Senate passage and will not pass Congress in the waning weeks of this year.Negotiations for the president’s Build Back Better bill, for which the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, set a Christmas deadline, have stalled as the centrist Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has withheld his support for the bill in its current form, making him a key vote in the evenly split Senate. Continue reading...

Employers are pausing efforts to call remote workers back in amid a renewed push for strikes and unionizationLarge US companies are now pulling back on plans to return to in-person work in light of the Omicron variant’s rapid spread across America.Employers planning to call remote workers back into the office in the new year are now pausing those efforts, and they are wary of setting new return dates only to push them back once again in the face of continued uncertainty and risks from the pandemic. Continue reading...

Rebuilding hard-hit cities like Mayfield and Dawson Springs will take years after at least 74 in the state died in the stormsJimmy Galbreath counted his blessings too soon. His house in Mayfield, Kentucky, was battered but not broken last week by a tornado, and the 62-year-old former scrap iron worker planned to keep living there.Then on Thursday rain soaked the state, with another downpour forecast for Friday into Saturday afternoon. Continue reading...