Panel seeks documents and testimony from legal scholar said to have outlined scenarios for overturning electionThe House select committee investigating the Capitol attack has issued subpoenas to six of Donald Trump’s associates involved in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election from a “command center” at the Willard Hotel in Washington DC.The subpoenas demanding documents and testimony open a new line of inquiry into the coordinated strategy by the White House and the Trump campaign to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win, and whether it was connected to the 6 January insurrection. Continue reading...

Twenty months of travel restrictions ended on Monday as the United States reopened its land and air borders to foreign visitors fully vaccinated against Covid-19 Continue reading...

Eight people aged from 14 to 27 were killed and dozens were injured at the Astroworld festival in Houston on Friday night, when fans were crushed against the stage.Organisers of what turned out to be one of the deadliest live music events in US history are facing mounting questions about why the rapper Travis Scott continued performing when first responders were already dealing with a mass casualty event. Eyewitness accounts of how warnings were allegedly ignored could be features of at least two investigations, one of them criminal

British Airways flight BA001 and Virgin Atlantic flight VS3 performed a synchronised departure from Heathrow on Monday heading for New York JFK for the first time since the US travel ban was introduced due to pandemic Continue reading...

‘Covid is real,’ Jeff Hoverson says, after organizing protest against mandates and while taking controversial anti-parasitic IvermectinA North Dakota Republican who organized a rally to oppose Covid-19 vaccine mandates said he would not attend the event – because he was infected with Covid-19.The state representative, Jeff Hoverson, posted on Facebook on Sunday that he was “quarantining and each day is getting better”. Continue reading...

Gaige Grosskreutz was wounded after Rittenhouse fatally shot two men during racial protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year

Lawyer’s letter made public on Monday outlines possible defence strategy to criminal charges against Maxwell, 59Ghislaine Maxwell plans at her criminal trial to challenge prosecution claims that she “groomed” underage girls for the late financier Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse, and to offer testimony that her accusers might have faulty memories.A letter from the lawyer Jeffrey Pagliuca, made public on Monday, outlines possible defenses to charges that Maxwell helped recruit and groom four underage girls for Epstein to abuse from 1994 to 2004, and engaged in sex trafficking of the fourth girl. Continue reading...

During the mid-70s, photographer Reed Estabrook catalogued his travels through the US with a set of striking snapshots of roadside structures which he refers to as ‘quintessentially American’ monuments. His work is being shown at the Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla, California, until 27 November Continue reading...

Relying only on machismo, the prime minister has no alternative border mechanism for trade with the EUThis year, Boris Johnson craved the titles of champion of Cop26 and star of G7. He saw something called “global Britain” and hoped it would crown his Brexit triumph, leading the world into a new age of peace and prosperity like a 21st-century Churchill. Instead, Johnson now finds himself in a morass of sleazy MPs, dodgy peers and Covid contracts. More seriously, he is about to plunge once more into the messy issue of the Irish border. His Northern Ireland Brexit protocol was supposed to liberate him from such torments, yet it has bound him hand and foot.Two years ago, Johnson lied to unionists, telling worried exporters in Northern Ireland there would be no need to fill in extra paperwork when sending goods across the Irish Sea. He now wants to keep face by ditching the protocol altogether and presenting the EU with what amounts to a clear crisis: a permeable border drawn around the whole of Northern Ireland, which he knows is unacceptable to Brussels.Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

The Guardian’s picture editors select photo highlights from around the world Continue reading...

Split grows between the two Republicans as Trump says he told McConnell, ‘Why don’t you write it for me?’Donald Trump once described Mitch McConnell as his “ace in the hole” and wrote, in a foreword to the Senate Republican leader’s autobiography, that he “couldn’t have asked for a better partner” in Washington.Except, according to Trump, he didn’t. Continue reading...

Biden was once touted as the ‘New FDR’. That ambition is fast dying – as are Democrats hopes of remaining in powerCongress’s passage on Friday of Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill would ordinarily have been a cause for celebration. But there is a good chance it was the beginning of the end of his presidency. After all, the bill’s final days marked a new consensus around a centrist set of economic remedies, chosen out of fears of what will supposedly happen when progressives with a transformative agenda exercise too much influence on the Democratic party agenda.Only 10 months ago, Biden came into office with great expectations – but greater terrors. Even more apparent at the start than now, Biden’s presidency has been defined by fear rather than hope. With the assault on the Capitol earlier in the month, the culmination of a four-year deathwatch for American democracy, the emergency could hardly evaporate overnight. With Donald Trump temporarily ousted, his replacement also drew 1930s comparisons. The question “is he or isn’t he?” had been asked of Biden’s predecessor for four years. To redeem the country from the fascist, was Biden going to be Franklin Roosevelt?Samuel Moyn is a professor of law and history at Yale and the author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

Lawsuits launched after eight people killed and dozens injured at music event in Houston. Plus, Cop26 legitimacy questioned by indigenous groupsGood morning.Organisers of what turned out to be one of the deadliest live music events in US history are facing mounting questions about why the rapper Travis Scott continued performing when first responders were already dealing with a mass casualty situation.Who were the victims? Franco Patino, 21, John Hilgert, 14, Brianna Rodriguez, 16, Rudy Peña, 23, Jacob E Jurinek, 20, Axel Acosta, 21 and Danish Baig, 27, have been named so far.Were many people injured? Hundreds of people, including a 10-year-old child, suffered injuries. Seventeen people were taken to hospital, including 11 in cardiac arrest while more than 300 people were treated in a field hospital.“The level of restrictions was unprecedented,” said Sébastian Duyck, from the Centre for International Environmental Law. “It’s alarming, because the relationships we build at the start of Cop are crucial to the work we do after.”“Without our voices this risks the creation of rules that will continue to violate human, territorial and spiritual rights of indigenous peoples,” said Eriel Deranger, an observer for Indigenous Climate Action. Continue reading...

Infrastructure bill’s passage opens a path to victory in 2022. Democrats should be encouraged by this breakthroughThe infrastructure deal struck late on Friday evening gave Biden a desperately needed win. It represents an opportunity to regain control of the political narrative that the Afghanistan debacle in August had stripped from his grasp. Since that time, his presidency has taken a series of damaging hits, culminating in the party’s dispiriting losses in Tuesday’s elections. The deal reached between the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic party had to happen for the party to have any chance of keeping its congressional majorities in 2022.The passage of the billion-dollar-plus infrastructure bill is the largest appropriation of its kind since the Eisenhower Congress gave America its interstate highway system in the 1950s. Infrastructural improvements in the country are urgently needed and, if handled well, will be greeted with enthusiasm by Democrats and Republicans alike. The size of this bill, in combination with Biden’s $1.9tn American Rescue Plan passed last spring, and the likelihood that some version of the social infrastructural bill will pass Congress before the end of the calendar year, puts Biden’s ambition in New Deal-second world war territory. It will quiet critics of the FDR-Biden comparisons, at least for a time.Gary Gerstle is Mellon Professor of American history at Cambridge and is writing The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022). He is a Guardian US columnist. Continue reading...

Parents-to-be sometimes worry they will lose touch with their friends. They should really worry I’ll prefer their children’s company to theirsI stopped by my friend Rashi’s house yesterday, but she was asleep. She still lives with her parents, and they were delighted to see me and hear news of the outside world. Honestly, I kind of got stuck talking to them for twenty minutes until Rashi woke up and we could hang out. I didn’t mind too much. I’m a millennial, and a lot of my friends still live with their parents. In fact, I’ve met many new friends, including Rashi, through their parents. By new, I mean extremely new. Rashi, for example, is five months old. Though we are decades apart in age, we have the best time. We sit down, or we walk around the room, and she stares at me with big, curious eyes and laughs at the slightest eyebrow move. She is pleasant company, with her bold fashion choices, consistent snacking and napping habits, and general lack of trying. It’s hard to describe why it’s so easy to love being around her and my other baby friends, except to say that Rashi just kind of … is.Parents-to-be have confided in me more than once that they worry about their social lives and relationships in the early and notoriously hectic years of a child’s life. They agonize over their friendships changing and growing distant when they become a parent. They fret that they may even lose those friends in a haze of childcare and sleepless nights. I tell them what they should worry about is that I will prefer their children’s company to theirs. It’s a fair warning, you see, because that is what keeps happening. My friends create these very odd and completely charming little people that are dependably easy and fun companions. Meanwhile, the kids’ poor old parents continue to get more depleted and world-weary as life does its thing. Life’s “thing”, as you already know, is coming up with an ever-increasing number of ways to grind us all down to dust.Maeve Higgins is the author of the forthcoming book Tell Everyone on This Train I Love Them Continue reading...

British Airways and Virgin Atlantic planes depart more than 600 days after US travel ban began

Without overhauling the market-driven system, reducing high fees will only benefit the governmentThe government is said to be considering reducing university tuition fees in England from £9,250 to £8,500. The reason? Not concern for the plight of students or struggling young graduates. That would be uncharacteristic, to say the least. No, it is interested in cutting them because it wants to save money.On the face of it, this sounds strange. How can cutting fees, paid by students to universities, be a way to cut government spending? The answer is worth spelling out, as it touches on an abiding myth about England’s system of university funding. Most people assume that making students pay for their education must save public money. The introduction and subsequent hiking of fees was rationalised using the language of economic “sustainability” and “fairness”: why should ordinary taxpayers bear the cost of an education from which graduates derive the primary benefit?Lorna Finlayson teaches philosophy at the University of Essex Continue reading...

Divided reaction to mandate requiring that large companies either vaccinate staff or administer tests mirrors vaccine rollout in USBiden administration plans to get US companies with more than 100 or more workers to vaccinate their staff or bring in regular tests have been welcomed by public health groups but slammed by Republicans and trade groups, who claim government overreach with negative economic consequences.Such divided reaction to the rules announced last week mirrors much of America’s problematic vaccine rollout, where social and political headwinds have seen vaccination take-up slow down worryingly. US vaccination rates are some of the lowest in industrialized countries where the vaccine is readily available. Continue reading...

On Sunday Jordan Love made the first start of his career against the Kansas City Chiefs. It appears the the decision to draft him was not worth the dramaKansas City’s 13-7 win over the Green Bay Packers on Sunday was filled with hollow victories.The Chiefs’ offense continues to cough and wheeze. The Chiefs’ defense, so dismal all year, was finally able to put together a complete performance, albeit against a quarterback who looked in over his head in his first NFL start. The Packers, with a talented defense and a warlock-level coach capable of scotch-taping over even the worst holes, were competitive, even in defeat. Continue reading...

Will Smith stars as the father of the precocious tennis talents in a movie depicting their improbable journeyThe story of Venus and Serena Williams’ rise to greatness, two legendary tennis careers propelled by the foresight of their father, has often been likened to a Hollywood movie. Now, with the release of King Richard on 19 November, it will be.Will Smith stars as Richard Williams, the sisters’ father, in a film depicting how he guided his two daughters from the public courts of Compton, California, to becoming two of the most accomplished tennis players in the history of the sport. Continue reading...

Delegation aims to portray party as engaged even as Republicans back home have downplayed and dismissed climate changeA handful of Republican members of Congress have arrived at the UN climate talks in Glasgow in an attempt to portray the party as engaged on the climate crisis, with this message already badly undermined by colleagues back in the US who have downplayed and even dismissed the impacts of global heating during the summit.A delegation of five Republican lawmakers arrived at the talks, known as Cop26, on the weekend and will depart on Tuesday. Garret Graves, a Louisiana Republican, said that the politicians were “not going there just to drink” and will hold a number of meetings to stress a different approach to climate change than Joe Biden. Continue reading...

Documents show how data-driven policing programs reinforced harmful patterns, fueling the over-policing of Black and brown communitiesThe Los Angeles police department has been a pioneer in predictive policing, for years touting avant-garde programs that use historical data and software to predict future crime.But newly revealed public documents detail how PredPol and Operation Laser, the department’s flagship data-driven programs, validated existing patterns of policing and reinforced decisions to patrol certain people and communities over others, leading to the over-policing of Black and brown communities in the metropole. Continue reading...

Gesture used to indicate distress has become popular on social media platform TikTokA missing teenage girl was rescued in the US after using a hand gesture that signals distress or domestic violence to capture the attention of a passing driver.The 16-year-old was spotted travelling inside a silver Toyota near London, Kentucky, about 150 miles south-east of Louisville, on 4 November. Continue reading...

First transatlantic flights since Covid travel ban in March 2020 will take off from Heathrow at same time

Two investigations launched after eight people killed at event in Houston on Friday nightOrganisers of what turned out to be one of the deadliest live music events in US history are facing mounting questions about why the rapper Travis Scott continued performing when first responders were already dealing with a mass casualty event.Eight people ranging in age from 14 to 27 were killed and dozens were injured at the Astroworld festival in Houston on Friday night, when fans were crushed against the stage. Continue reading...

The town of Monroe, Georgia, is home to views on everything from education to vaccines that are untethered from factsIt’s a gray afternoon, promising rain and with temperatures in the 50s, people have taken their jackets out of the closet.The streets of downtown Monroe, Georgia, a town of about 14,000 residents 45 miles due east of Atlanta, are quiet for a Saturday. It’s the county seat of Walton county and a monument honoring Confederate veterans stands tall outside the county courthouse. The soldier carved from granite looks across Broad Street to the town’s police station and is flanked to the south by the Walton Tribune’s office and a district office for representative Jody Hice. Continue reading...

The flattery of participation has worn off. Still, I keep taking the diversity jobs, either because I’m hopeful, foolish, or brokeI think it started in 2017, or 2016, the year identity stuck to our ambitions. In a litany of newly profitable labels, I had a full deck: Latina, woman, poor, trans. I was part of the think-piece boom, and everyone had a story to sell. Plucked from Tumblr by a new crop of feminist media, I was assigned the futile task of representation. People called me “brave”. I wrote personal essays, bravely. I modeled for magazines, bravely. At first I was happy to share, even proud of my participation in this anti-Trumpian effort of branding. It felt urgent, because it was. We learn about ourselves through images, and the inclusion of marginalized people was a beginning.I played along. The personal was political, and monetizable. “Doors” had been “opened” – we had no clue what we’d let out. I didn’t intend to step before a camera, but it happens if you’re at enough parties. These were the decadent years, when everything required a “launch”. Every look, tweet and interaction was an audition. Casting directors circled dance floors searching for their next It girl.Devan Diaz is a writer from Jackson Heights, New YorkAn earlier version of this essay originally appeared in CR Fashion Book Continue reading...

Governments have the right to buy up land for the common good – but what about the business owners forced to move?As communities expand, so do eminent domain cases – and the trend is causing big problems for small businesses.Simply put, eminent domain is the right of a government to require the compulsory sale, or in extreme cases expropriation, of land by a property owner so public officials can put that private property to public use. Continue reading...

The infrastructure bill makes for an impressive first year for Democrats. But the party can’t rest on its laurelsNancy Pelosi has done it again. The most successful Speaker of the House in modern history has notched up another win by sending a bipartisan infrastructure package to Joe Biden for his signature. The bill is the biggest investment in America’s infrastructure since President Eisenhower created the interstate highway system in the 1950s, and has been a long-standing goal of both parties. Donald Trump’s promise to bring home similar legislation during what his White House dubbed “infrastructure week” became a running joke as his presidency imploded. Pelosi, given the space she needed to operate by a very different type of president, actually did it.There is a great deal to celebrate in the package, which independent economists say may create over half a million jobs. As well as investing in America’s physical infrastructure like road, rail and broadband networks, it also makes the country’s first major investment in helping communities prepare for extreme weather events caused by climate change. There’s also chunks of money to upgrade the electrical grid and protect it from extreme weather, to expand the nation’s network of electric vehicle charging stations, and to invest in experimental forms of clean energy.Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University, and host of the podcast America Explained Continue reading...

Climate-related disasters have killed more Americans from flooding and wildfires than the 2,996 people who died in the 9/11 attacks. Let’s treat the climate crisis with equal seriousnessLarge government bureaucracies are often slow to adapt to changing realities, such as the catastrophic threats we face in a warming world. The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is no exception. New research from Brown University’s Costs of War Project shows that the DHS has been overly focused on foreign and foreign-inspired terrorism, while violent attacks in the US have more often come from domestic sources. A combination of willful ignorance and institutional inertia caused the agency to miss the rise in white supremacy and domestic terrorism that led to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol.The new data from Dr Erik Dahl, Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, show that just one of the 46 failed terror plots in the US from 2018 through 2020 was directed by a foreign organization. In contrast, 29 plots were planned or carried out by domestic groups. In 2019, DHS finally acknowledged the growing threat of targeted violence and domestic terrorism borne mainly of far-right ideology and white supremacy and issued its first strategy document identifying these threats.Heidi Peltier is a senior researcher at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and director of programs for the Costs of War Project Continue reading...

Police sent patrols to stop people around The Marathon Clothing store, records show, as Hussle’s brother tells the Guardian: ‘Everybody would get harassed’The Los Angeles police department targeted the late rapper Nipsey Hussle’s street corner and his The Marathon Clothing store before his death in 2019, labeling the intersection a “hot spot” for crime and sending special patrols that stopped and questioned people in the area, according to records reviewed by the Guardian.Hussle, whose name became synonymous with the corner of Crenshaw Boulevard and Slauson Avenue, spent years investing in projects in the area until he was fatally shot at the intersection in March 2019. City leaders publicly mourned the artist and entrepreneur, but it was revealed soon after his death that LA law enforcement leaders had been quietly targeting his businesses with a criminal investigation, alleging it was a site of gang activity. Continue reading...

The former Chicago Bulls star renews his criticism of Jordan, which first emerged in response to Netflix’s The Last DanceDuring the 1990s, the Chicago Bulls dominated US basketball, winning six championships, never losing a final, and helping to propel the NBA into becoming a multibillion-dollar global business.But behind the scenes, the dynastic partnership of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, presented at the time as harmonious and brotherly, was anything but, Pippen reveals in an unusually bitter memoir, Unguarded, published this week. Continue reading...

More than a dozen accused of civil rights violations related to racist mayhem in trial that has driven judge to exasperationTwo blocks from the oak and boxwood trees slowly turning amber in the downtown Charlottesville park that saw one the most violent political confrontations of the Trump era is the tightly-secured federal courtroom where the origins of the racist mayhem that struck over that mid-August weekend in 2017 are now being forensically examined.Close to four years after the event, a sprawling civil lawsuit alleging a conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence against nine residents of Charlottesville during the white-supremacist Unite the Right march and rally is drawing together some of the most notorious figures of America’s alt-right movement. Continue reading...

Hugs and handshakes have survived the pandemic. Not so much shared lipsticks and formal business attireThe coronavirus pandemic has proved an experiment in educated guesses. Experts in nearly every field, from public health and real estate to economics and labor, have offered predictions about how the virus would affect the world, well-meaning prophecies that were all but assured to transpire.The first, in April 2020 came from Dr Anthony Fauci, the United States’ leading infectious disease expert, when he forecast the end of handshakes: “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you.” Physical greetings were only the beginning. As the pandemic wore on, experts predicted the end of hugs, offices, cities, office wear, in-store cosmetic samples, co-working, ball pits, blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. While some conjectures have come to pass – Covid-19 would be a years-long battle and not a two-weeks-to-flatten-the-curve speed bump in the annals of human history – but others (see: the downfall of handshakes) have shown otherwise. Continue reading...

Despite Friday’s win in Congress, little is going right. But with the ex-president around, anything is possibleIf there is one truism of modern American politics, it’s that good fortune is a fleeting thing. Almost a year to the day after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, his Democratic party was dealt a body blow on election day 2021.In Virginia, former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe lost to Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, as the Republicans won every statewide race and took control of the state’s house of delegates. In New Jersey, incumbent governor, Phil Murphy, barely held on in a state that went for Biden by 16 points. Meanwhile, the powerful Democratic president of New Jersey’s state senate was defeated by a Republican truck driver who spent a mere several thousand dollars on his campaign.Michael Cohen’s most recent book, co-authored with Micah Zenko, is Clear and Present Safety Continue reading...

The socialite as innocent martyr? Try telling that to one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victimsIn the long run-up to Ghislaine Maxwell’s now imminent trial on charges of procuring teenage girls for her late friend, Jeffrey Epstein, her lawyer has repeatedly objected to the accused’s living conditions.Last week, Bobbi C Sternheim returned, again, to similarities between the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and conditions invented by Thomas Harris for his imaginary psychopath. “The surveillance,” she wrote, in another bid for bail, “rivals scenes of Dr Hannibal Lecter’s incarceration as portrayed in the movie, Silence of the Lambs, despite the absence of the cage and the plastic face guard.” Continue reading...

Results in Virginia and New Jersey do not make Republican dog-whistle politics the future. The left must do more to helpAfter Tuesday’s Democratic loss in the Virginia gubernatorial election and near-loss in New Jersey, I’m hearing a narrative about Democrats’ failure with white working-class voters that is fundamentally wrong.In Thursday’s New York Times, David Leonhardt pointed out that the non-college voters who are abandoning the Democratic party “tend to be more religious, more outwardly patriotic and more culturally conservative than college graduates”. He then quotes a fellow Times columnist, the pollster Nate Cohn, who says “college graduates have instilled increasingly liberal cultural norms while gaining the power to nudge the Democratic party to the left. Partly as a result, large portions of the party’s traditional working-class base have defected to the Republicans”. Continue reading...