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The former US president Barack Obama has paid tribute to Angela Merkel in a farewell video during what was expected to be the outgoing chancellor of Germany’s final meeting in Brussels. 'Thanks to you, the centre has held through many storms,' Obama said in the video aired in the summit room in the Europa building. 'So many people, girls and boys, men and women, have had a role model who they could look up to through challenging times. I know because I am one of them. Danke schön'

Who won again? Who scored again? Who created again? Continue reading...

After voting rights defeat, president expresses mounting frustration over rule that allows 41 senators to block legislationJoe Biden has given the strongest indication yet that he is willing to end or whittle down the Senate filibuster as a means of overcoming Republican intransigence and moving ahead with reforms to voting rights, the debt ceiling and possibly more.Speaking in Baltimore a day after Senate Republicans yet again blocked legislation designed to secure access to the ballot box for all Americans, Biden expressed mounting frustration at the filibuster, which effectively gives the conservative minority a stranglehold over large swaths of policy. Continue reading...

Health officials say millions more Americans can get a booster shot and choose a different vaccine for the extra doseMillions more Americans can get a Covid-19 booster and choose a different company’s vaccine for that next shot, federal health officials said on Thursday.Certain people who received Pfizer vaccinations months ago already are eligible for a booster and now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says specific Moderna and Johnson & Johnson recipients qualify, too. And in a bigger change, the agency is allowing the flexibility of “mixing and matching” that extra dose regardless of which type people received first. Continue reading...

The House voted to hold Trump’s former chief strategist in contempt of Congress over refusal to comply with committee investigating 6 January attackGood morning,In a 229 to 202 vote yesterday, the House found Donald Trump’s ally Steve Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress over his refusal to comply with a subpoena issued by the select committee investigating the 6 January attack on the US Capitol.With the House referral, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, and the Office of Legal Counsel are required by law to weigh a prosecution and present the matter before a grand jury.Bannon could face up to a year in federal prison and $100,000 in fines should the justice department secure a conviction – but even then that would not guarantee his compliance. Continue reading...

Everyone I know is sick, and in our house it’s every man for himselfIt’s a feature of single parenting that you have to outsource some aspects of your children’s education to people beyond the immediate family. Where a partner or spouse might fill in your gaps, friends must be called upon. My gaps are, among other things, maths, American history, effective confrontation, the interstate system and the turnpikes that lead to it, and some music stuff I thought I might get away with. Continue reading...

Aerial footage showed police at the scene of a film set in New Mexico, where a woman was killed and a man injured after the actor Alec Baldwin discharged a prop firearm. The Santa Fe sheriff's office said Halyna Hutchins, the director of photography for the film Rust, which Baldwin is producing and starring in, was shot, along with the director Joel Souza. Hutchins was airlifted to hospital, where she was pronounced dead by medical personnel

Our campaign finance system makes it nearly impossible to track money in politics or hold our representatives accountableJoe Biden’s Build Back Better reconciliation bill has been stuck in limbo – and conservative Democrats are in fundraising heaven.West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, who raised more than $400,000 from the oil and gas industry while the bill was being negotiated, is now poised to gut Biden’s clean-energy plan. Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema spent the summer and fall collecting checks from corporate groups and Trump donors who oppose the Biden agenda, then helped cut the size of the reconciliation package by approximately half. Continue reading...

As the pandemic showed their importance, across the US laws have sought to restrict public health actions: ‘It’s a pretty grim future’More than half of US states have introduced new laws to restrict public health actions, including policies requiring quarantine or isolation and mandating vaccines or masks. Between the new laws and the massive workforce departures during the pandemic, public health in America is now in crisis, experts say.The new restrictions and shortages not only affect responses to the coronavirus but also make it harder to contain outbreaks of the flu, measles and other health crises, and they put the US in a weaker position to combat future pandemics. Continue reading...

My pregnancy made no difference to the part, but insurers wouldn’t cover me. Talent is too often lost to discriminationThe entertainment industry likes to think it is a champion of diversity and inclusivity, jumping to call out those who are homophobic, racist, ableist and sexist. But as a queer black female actor I know all too well how far we still have to go. There is another prejudice infesting the industry, one that is kept in the shadows: pregnancy discrimination.I was recently offered a TV role unlike any I’d been given the opportunity to play before and I was thrilled. I was pregnant when cast, but I knew this wouldn’t pose any challenges for the production: the character spent most of the story sitting down, the setting meant clothing could cover my bump, or the character could be pregnant, especially as all the action took place over a matter of days.Jade Anouka is an actor who has appeared in His Dark Materials and on stage in the Donmar Shakespeare Trilogy Continue reading...

Third-quarter hauls raise hopes of transforming a body in which only 11 African American senators have ever satAfrican American candidates running for the US Senate smashed campaign fundraising records over the past three months, raising hopes of transforming a body that remains overwhelmingly white.There have only been 11 Black senators since the chamber first convened in 1789 and only two were women. Senator Kamala Harris’s ascent to the vice-presidency means there are currently no female members who are Black. Continue reading...

Around 50,000 fans are expected at the home of the Washington Football Team for what the host union hopes will be a taste of men’s and women’s events to come“I cannot overstate how important it would be to see women’s rugby matches from the World Cup in NFL stadiums. That’s just unheard of.”So said Phaidra Knight, former US Eagle and member of the World Rugby Hall of Fame, at an event this week to formally introduce the US bid to host the women’s Rugby World Cup in 2029 and the men’s in 2027 or 2031. Continue reading...

Deaths of couple, their daughter and their dog in August during hike in Sierra national forest had baffled investigators for monthsThe California family that died in August while hiking in Sierra national forest was killed by extreme heat and probable dehydration, law enforcement officials announced on Thursday, providing some answers to a mystery that had baffled investigators for months.The Mariposa county sheriff’s department believes 45-year-old Jonathan Gerrish, originally from the UK, his wife, 30-year-old Ellen Chung, their one-year-old daughter, Miju, and their dog, Oski, died while on a hike on the Hites Cove trail on 15 August. Temperatures were as high as 109F (42.8C) that day, and the majority of the eight-mile trail has little shade or trees. Continue reading...

The presentation outlining the ex-president’s new company, Trump Media & Technology Group, is rich with hyperbole, but low on detail. Here’s the gistThe TRUTH is out there, according to known factualness provider Donald Trump. On Wednesday the former president, who has been banned from the major social media platforms since January, announced that he will be launching his own social media company called Truth Social. Although, in typical Trump style, it’s styled TRUTH Social.The network, which from the Apple App Store screengrabs looks suspiciously like a clone of Twitter, will open to “invited users” next month and be rolled out to the public early next year. The app is apparently part of a wider media network called Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) that aims to take on the “liberal media consortium”. Continue reading...

When a night out involves the risk of getting ‘spiked’, it’s male violence that’s the problem

Mohamed Noor gets maximum sentence allowed for manslaughter after murder conviction was overturned last monthA Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot an unarmed woman after she called 911 to report a possible rape happening behind her home was sentenced on Thursday to nearly five years in prison – the maximum allowed for manslaughter after his murder conviction was overturned.Mohamed Noor was initially convicted of third-degree murder and manslaughter in the 2017 fatal shooting of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a 40-year-old dual US-Australian citizen and yoga teacher who was engaged to be married. But the Minnesota supreme court tossed out Noor’s murder conviction and 12 1/2-year sentence last month, saying the third-degree murder statute didn’t fit the case because it can only apply when a defendant shows a “generalized indifference to human life”, not when the conduct is directed at a particular person, as it was with Damond. Continue reading...

Revealed: documents released after six years of legal tussles uncover over 160 cases of misconduct and abuseShocking instances of sexual and physical abuse of asylum seekers at the southern US border by federal officers have been uncovered by Human Rights Watch, after a years-long battle to wrestle the information from the Department of Homeland Security under freedom of information laws.A stash of redacted documents released to the human rights group after six years of legal tussles uncover more than 160 cases of misconduct and abuse by leading government agencies, notably Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Border Patrol. The papers record events between 2016 and 2021 that range from child sexual assault to enforced hunger, threats of rape and brutal detention conditions. Continue reading...

The former secretary of state worked for administrations most Black people opposed, yet many African Americans respected himPerhaps the most revealing analogy for blackness can be found in the first section of the standard obituary. Most of these life synopses follow a straightforward template, with the first paragraph spelling out the bare facts. This person was born. This person was alive for this number of years. This person is no longer alive.The second paragraph usually summarizes the person’s most notable accomplishments, good or bad. Ronald Reagan ended the cold war in the second stanza of his postmortem poem. Fox News founder Roger Ailes’s obituary notes that he turned the American presidency into the television show that eventually produced Donald Trump. But before former secretary of state Colin Powell’s obituary notes that he left office as “one of America’s least successful diplomats”, one fragment of one sentence explains why the four-star general was so well regarded by many, in life and death. Buried in the first paragraph is the reason a man who played an integral part in perpetuating the lie that led to a catastrophic war is lauded by Black progressives like Hakeem Jeffries and Karen Bass, who opposed the things Powell actually did. Continue reading...

No one is surprised by the Republican effort to block the measure – but the higher-stakes fight is what Democrats do next with the filibusterHello, and happy Thursday,Senate Republicans on Wednesday again blocked Democrats from advancing sweeping federal voting rights legislation, escalating one of the most important fights for the future of US democracy. Continue reading...

Nicholas Burns calls Beijing an ‘aggressor’ and says US responsibility is ‘to make Taiwan a tough nut to crack’US president Joe Biden’s nominee to be ambassador to Beijing said on Wednesday that China was aggressive and untrustworthy, insisting that boosting Taiwan’s defences against the threat of Chinese invasion should be a US priority.Speaking to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, which is due to confirm his appointment, Nicholas Burns denounced recent Chinese warplane incursions into Taiwan’s air defence zone, calling them “especially objectionable”. Continue reading...

Amazon Labor Union bids to create independent group – but workers say the company has openly opposed their effortAmazon workers plan to file for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board next Monday, after months of organizing and collecting over 2,000 union authorization cards from employees at a warehouse in New York City.The move will be the latest bid to organize a union at Amazon – which has opposed unionization of its huge workforce – by a labor movement seeking to flex its muscles as the US economy emerges from the pandemic. Continue reading...

The justices are vulnerable to public pressure in support of court reform. That’s why we must continue to push for changeOur highest court is facing a legitimacy crisis and is in desperate need of reform. And yet, due to the deadlock that seems to be Congress these days, I too often hear the rebuke to US supreme court reform, “None of these reforms will happen, so what is the point of talking about them?”This defeatist argument fails to recognize a pivotal audience who surely hears the growing public calls for urgent reform – the supreme court itself. Continue reading...

Unlike many Black military men before him, Powell behaved just as the white leaders had: waging war when and where he was told to do soI cannot think of Colin Powell without thinking of my own father, who, like Powell, served in the US military. My dad was only a generation older than Powell, but that gap was the difference between serving in a segregated or integrated military. A second world war veteran, my midwestern father was stationed at a southern military base in a segregated marine corps.In those days, a Black man could be demoted for failing to show “proper deference” to white officers, a fate that befell my father, who I never saw defer to anyone. My father never spoke of his time in the military, seemingly indifferent to it, not ashamed exactly, but not proud either. I suspect that he, like many Jim Crow era Black men, enlisted because of the GI Bill, which paid for college and then law school, degrees that would have otherwise been out of reach for my father. Continue reading...

Investigators also found items believed to belong to Gabby Petito’s fiance. Plus, Trump to launch social media platform

Former US president releases video thanking staff at California hospital where he was treated for infectionBill Clinton has released a video saying he is on the road to recovery after being hospitalised in southern California for six days to treat an infection unrelated to Covid-19.Clinton, 75, who arrived home in New York on Sunday, said he was glad to be back and that he was “so touched by the outpouring of support” he had received while in hospital last week. Continue reading...

Bill Clinton has said in a video after his release from hospital that he has been touched by an 'outpouring of support'.The former US president was hospitalised in California for a urological infection last week. He advised people on his Twitter to take care of themselves to fulfil their 'important role to play in life and in the immediate future'

The team developed a plan to rip apart the roster and build for long-term success. But that success doesn’t look any closer to being realisedIt’s not yet November and the Miami Dolphins have lost five of their six games and their season is effectively over – again.It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Midway through last season, it looked like the Dolphins may have finally have cracked this whole football thing. They hoarded first-round draft picks and cap space like a squirrel preparing for winter. They moved on from Minkah Fitzpatrick and Laremy Tunsil, high draft picks with top-five-at-their-position type talent, in the name of culture. They were happy to be bad in the short term for the hope of tomorrow. Continue reading...

Bland ceremonies avoid the difficult questions of imperialism, power and class that have divided the countryToday in Armagh a church service is marking the centenary since the partition of Ireland. Though the event is hosted by the five main Christian churches on the island of Ireland, it has been shrouded in controversy since it emerged in September that the Irish president, Michael D Higgins, had declined an invitation to attend.The president objected that the title and structure of the “Service of Reflection and Hope” to “mark the centenaries of the partition of Ireland and the foundation of Northern Ireland” were political in nature; though he insisted it wasn’t a boycott. Tánaiste Simon Coveney is now representing the Irish government, with Boris Johnson also attending – the Queen’s attendance was cancelled yesterday on health grounds. Members of the DUP, and former taoiseach John Bruton, were quick to criticise Higgins’ decision, but it was an entirely logical move. Partition was imposed on Ireland a century ago, against the wishes of the majority of its people. The border was opposed not only by republicans, but also by the so-called “constitutional” nationalists of the Home Rule party, the labour movement and indeed many southern unionists. The birth of the border came as part of a violent process with what was to become the minority community in the new Northern Ireland effectively battered into submission.Brian Hanley is a historian and author of The Impact of the Troubles on the Republic of Ireland Continue reading...

As a farmer I produce meat and cheese from animals that graze in my orchard on diverse, carbon-sequestering grasslandsLast week, I went to the funeral of an old farmer named Brian. Until he died, Brian managed his farm, with its traditional orchards, hedgerows, and meadows, as an ecosystem. I could see from the age of the farmers who came to pay their respects that this way of farming was dying out and being replaced by a farming system that is one of the greatest contributors to the climate and nature crisis we face. However, there is hope. My husband and I, like the many new farmers emerging, learned our approach from these old farmers, who have been through drastic changes in the farming industry, yet have managed to keep alive their knowhow.Our family-run farm in Dorset produces meat, cheese, vegetables and apple juice, using many of these same agroecological farming methods. Agroecological farming means we nurture the soil, insects, grassland, plants, animals and trees on our land to provide healthy affordable food for our local community. For us, farming isn’t just a business, and it isn’t just about feeding human beings – it’s about feeding all living things on the planet.Jyoti Fernandes is a farmer based in Dorset Continue reading...

The former president, who remains banned from Facebook and Twitter, has a goal to rival those tech giantsDonald Trump has announced plans to launch a social media platform called TRUTH Social that will rolled be out early next year.The former president, who was banned from Facebook and Twitter earlier this year, says his goal is to rival the tech companies that have denied him the megaphone that was paramount to his rise. Continue reading...

CDC will consult panel this week before finalizing recommendations for who should get boosters and whenUS regulators on Wednesday signed off on extending Covid-19 boosters to Americans who got the Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine and said anyone eligible for an extra dose can get a brand different from the one they received initially.The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decisions mark a big step toward expanding the US booster campaign, which began with extra doses of the Pfizer vaccine last month. Continue reading...

The supply chain crisis continues to overwhelm US ports as the Biden administration has vowed to expand operationsThe backlog of cargo ships in southern California reached an all-time high this week as a supply chain crisis continues to overwhelm America’s busiest port complex.On Tuesday more than 100 ships were waiting to unload thousands of containers outside the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The backlog has seen dozens of ships idling in the waters outside the ports for weeks, and the bottleneck is expected to continue into next year. Continue reading...

The protest comes a day after Joe Biden appeared ready to settle for a smaller environmental proposal ahead of the COP26 summitWith little more than sun hats, placards and folding chairs, five young activists have begun a hunger strike in front of the White House urging Joe Biden not to abandon his bold climate agenda.The protest came a day after the US president threatened to water down his $3.5tn social and environmental legislation and with Washington’s commitments about to face scrutiny at the COP26 summit in Glasgow. Continue reading...

Dispute with UK competition watchdog offered a near-perfect illustration of corporate arroganceContain your excitement over Facebook’s possible renaming of itself for the coming age of “the metaverse”, and consider Wednesday’s other story about the social media group. Facebook’s quarrel with the UK competition watchdog offered a near-perfect illustration of corporate arrogance and entitlement in action.The case is extraordinary for the fact that the stakes were so low: Facebook’s $400m (£290m) purchase last year of Giphy, a software firm that specialises in Gifs, the essential visual aid for social media meme-peddlers, can barely have registered on Mark Zuckerberg’s radar. The purchase price equated to less than 0.5% of Facebook’s global revenues. Continue reading...

City officials made move on 14 October after the burger chain it wouldn’t force staff to check if customers were fully vaccinatedIn-N-Out burger has become the first restaurant in San Francisco to be temporarily closed for failing to enforce the city’s vaccine mandate. City officials made the move on 14 October after the burger chain said it won’t force staff to check that customers were fully vaccinated before allowing them to dine inside the restaurant.Restaurants in San Francisco, as well as a number of US cities including New York and New Orleans, are legally required to make customers show proof of vaccination before dining indoors. Health officials in the city, who have been carrying out checks on restaurants, say they made numerous requests to In-N-Out to enforce these checks but have not seen improvement after weeks of spot checks. Continue reading...