Biden says he’s ‘all in’ on Africa’s future at leadership summit – as it happened

It’s time to close the blog on an eventful day in US politics. Joe Biden says he’s “all in” on Africa’s future after unveiling a package of investments and supports at a summit with the continent’s business leaders in Washington DC.

The president says infrastructure and the climate emergency are among his top priorities for Africa, as he seeks to build closer ties and limit Russian and Chinese influence in the region.

Here’s what else we’ve been watching:

• Survivors from mass shootings at gay nightclubs in Florida and Colorado gave harrowing testimony at a hearing of the House oversight committee looking into surging violence against the LGBTQ+ community. Democrats say Republicans have “stoked the flames of bigotry” with hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ laws nationwide.

• A new poll shows voters have little appetite for a presidential election rematch in 2024 between Biden and Donald Trump. Almost two thirds of registered Democrats and Republicans say they don’t want their 2020 nominees to run again.

• Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger said it was time to drop the general election runoff system that forced Democrat Raphael Warnock to beat Republican challenger Herschel Walker twice within weeks to retain his Senate seat.

• In a statement marking the 10th anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting that killed 20 children and six adults, Biden said the US should have “societal guilt” at taking so long to address the problem of gun crime.

Thanks for being with us! Please join us again tomorrow.

North Dakota has become the latest state to ban the popular social media app TikTok from devices owned by the state government’s executive branch, the Associated Press reports.

Governor Doug Burgum signed an executive order Wednesday afternoon, joining Republican colleagues from other states, including South Dakota and Texas, to have previously done so over concerns about the platform’s Chinese ownership and perceived data sharing and national security worries.

In addition to prohibiting downloads of TikTok on government-issued equipment or while connected to the state’s network, it bars visiting the TikTok website.

“TikTok raises multiple flags in terms of the amount of data it collects and how that data may be shared with and used by the Chinese government,” Burgum said in a statement, according to the AP.

In its own statement Wednesday, TikTok said it was “disappointed that so many states are jumping on the bandwagon to enact policies based on unfounded, politically charged falsehoods”.

Read more:

A hair-raising moment, literally, took place on the Senate floor at lunchtime when New Jersey senator Cory Booker rose to urge colleagues to progress the Crown Act, the acronym for a bill seeking to “create a respectful and open world for natural hair”.

It might sound frivolous, but the bill seeks to enshrine in federal statute a measure already passed in 19 states to prevent racial discrimination on the grounds of hair style or color.

“You go to my city right now and you’ll find hairstyles of different types, locks, cornrows with braids, Bantu knots, and of course what I once had, afros,” the famously bald Booker said.

“[But] there’s a decades-long problematic practice of discrimination against natural hair in this country.”

He cited the case of Andrew Johnson, an 18-year-old student in 2018 whose dreadlocks were cut off on the orders of a judge at a high school wrestling match before he was allowed to compete. The episode was caught on video.

“You can see the deep hurt and pain on the face of this young man,” Booker said.

“It’s the pain felt by many. Traumatic at times, hurtful experiences that make you question your very belonging in a community.

“The beauty of your hair, its natural style, your immutable characteristics, your cultural beliefs, your connection to your heritage. No person in America should have to deal with this pain.”

Opposing Booker’s plea to advance the bill, Kentucky Republican Rand Paul said it was not necessary. The bill, he said, might compromise the safety of workers who could have the legal right to refuse to wear a helmet in the workplace because of their hair.

“Using hairstyle as a pretext for racial discrimination is already illegal,” Paul claimed.

The state that prolonged November’s midterms until 6 December won’t be able to do it again, if a proposal by its top election official gets approved.

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, says it’s time to get rid of the runoff system that requires a revote any time that no candidate in a general election reaches 50% of the votes cast.

It’s the reason incumbent Democratic senator Raphael Warnock had to beat Republican challenger Herschel Walker for the second time in a month after coming close to, but not quite reaching, the 50% threshold in November.

“Georgia is one of the only states in country with a general election runoff. We’re also one of the only states that always seems to have a runoff,” Raffensperger said, according to Fox5 Atlanta.

“I’m calling on the general assembly to visit the topic… and consider reforms.”

He said the current system made it difficult for counties, especially those in rural areas with few staff, to handle two elections within weeks of each other, a period that includes Thanksgiving.

“No one wants to be dealing with politics in the middle of their family holiday,” he said.

Raffensperger was the recipient of an infamous telephone call from Donald Trump asking him to “find” enough votes in Georgia to reverse his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden.

A huge part of the Biden administration’s just-announced investment in Africa’s future will be a half-billion dollar investment in infrastructure, specifically the building and maintaining of roads linking ports to interior countries.

The money, Joe Biden says, will come from the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an independent government foreign aid agency with a brief to reduce global poverty.

The president said that MCC had made new investments of almost $1.2bn in Africa, and expected to commit an additional $2.5bn across the continent over the next four years:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}This compact will invest $500m to build and maintain roads, put in place policies that reduce transportation costs, make it easier and faster for ships to ship goods from the port of Cotonou [in Benin] into neighboring landlocked countries.

The climate emergency, Biden stressed, will be another top focus, with work already under way, funded by $80m in public and private finance, to replace 12 coal-fired power plants in South Africa with renewable energy sources, and to develop “cutting edge energy solutions” such as clean hydrogen.

He cited a $2bn deal to build solar energy projects in Angola, and a $600m high speed communications cable linking south Asia and Europe through Egypt, and $800m to help protect African countries against cyber threats.

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}One of the most essential resources for many entrepreneurs and small business owners who want to participate in the global economy is reliable and affordable access to the internet.

So today, I’m announcing a new initiative, the digital transformation with Africa. We’re here with Congress to invest $350bn, to facilitate more than almost a half a billion dollars in financing to make sure people across Africa participate in a digital economy.

Biden brought his speech to a close just before the kick-off of the France v Morocco World Cup semi-final.

Joe Biden has committed to strengthening Africa’s food supplies, tackling the climate emergency and partnering with the continent’s nations to take on the rising global power in the region of China and Russia.

In an address at the US Africa Business Leaders forum in Washington DC, the president says “the US is all in on Africa’s future”.

He’s outlining a multi-prong approach to strengthen those ties, including the signing of a memorandum of understanding that Biden says will “unlock new opportunities for trade and investment between our countries and bring Africa and the US even closer than ever”:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}It’s an enormous opportunity for Africa’s future, and the US wants to help make those opportunities real.

Included in the package are, he says, up to $370m from the US international development finance fund for new projects, including investing $100m for clean energy for sub-Saharan Africa.

Entrepreneurship and innovation are at the top of Biden’s list, he says.

And he wants $350bn from Congress for a “digital transformation” for Africa, which includes involving companies such as Microsoft to build networks and infrastructure to bring internet access to five million Africans who are currently not connected:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}When Africa succeeds, the United States succeeds and, quite frankly, the whole world succeeds as well,” Biden says.

Joe Biden is speaking now at the US-Africa leadership summit where he’s about to announce partnerships with African nations and a pathway to better ties and business relations.

But the president said he was aware of people knowing the France v Morocco World Cup game was starting at the top of the hour, and were thinking: “Make it short Biden. There’s a semi-final game coming up”.

We’ll bring you the best of Biden’s comments.

Earlier this month, the Guardian’s Joan E Greve travelled to Newtown, Connecticut to speak with Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden of Sandy Hook Promise, the parents of Dylan and Daniel, who were killed 10 years ago today.

For the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast, Joan also met teenagers from the Junior Newtown Action Alliance, who now go through terrifying lockdown drills as preparation for another shooting and who want to see more change in gun legislation, and spoke to Senator Chris Murphy, who helped draft the first significant gun control policy in the US in 30 years this year.

The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren is pressing Congress to adopt bipartisan legislation which would force crypto firms to abide by the same regulations as banks and corporations, in an attempt to crack down on money laundering through digital assets. Ed Pilkington reports…

Warren is pushing for the new controls on the crypto industry in the wake of the spectacular collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. On Tuesday its founder and former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, was charged with eight criminal counts including conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Warren’s bill is being co-sponsored by the Republican senator from Kansas Roger Marshall. The Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act would essentially subject the world of crypto to the same global financial regulations to which more conventional money markets must conform.

Under current systems, crypto exchanges are able to skirt around restrictions designed to stop money laundering and impose sanctions. Should the bill be enacted into law it would authorize the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen) to reclassify crypto entities as “money service businesses” which would bring them under basic regulations laid out in the Bank Secrecy Act.

In a statement to CNN, Warren said “commonsense crypto legislation” would protect US national security.

“I’ve been ringing the alarm bell in the Senate on the dangers of these digital asset loopholes,” she said, adding that crypto was “under serious scrutiny across the political spectrum”.

Bankman-Fried, 30, was indicted by prosecutors at the southern district of New York and is being held in custody in the Bahamas. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has also brought civil charges against him, accusing him of creating a firm that was a “house of cards”

Some news out of Oregon that came later yesterday, which we wanted to record: the outgoing Democratic governor Kate Brown has commuted the sentences of all 17 of the state’s death row prisoners to life without parole.

“I have long believed that justice is not advanced by taking a life, and the state should not be in the business of executing people – even if a terrible crime placed them in prison,” Brown said in a statement released by her office.

“Since taking office in 2015, I have continued Oregon’s moratorium on executions because the death penalty is both dysfunctional and immoral.

“Today I am commuting Oregon’s death row so that we will no longer have anyone serving a sentence of death and facing execution in this state. This is a value that many Oregonians share.”

Brown’s order will also see the closure of the state’s execution chamber. Oregon’s most recent execution was in 1997, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Governor John Kitzhaber first declared a moratorium on executions in 2011, which Brown has kept in place ever since.

Full story:

Voters have little appetite for a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump for the presidency in 2024, a poll released Wednesday lunchtime has found.

Roughly six in 10 Republicans, and the same margin in the Democratic party, don’t want their respective 2020 nominees to run again, according to the CNN poll conducted by SSRS.

Support from registered Republicans for Trump, especially, has plummeted, a reflection of the former president’s burgeoning legal troubles and, perhaps, the rising star of rightwing Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

In January, CNN found, 50% said they hoped Trump would be the nominee and 49% wanted someone else. By July, 44% wanted Trump to be the party’s nominee, and now, only 38% say the same.

Trump announced last month his third run at the White House as a Republican.

There’s slightly better news for Biden. 40% of registered Democrats want the president to run again in 2024, the poll says, up from only 25% in the summer. But both figures are a drop from the 45% support he received in January.

You can read about the poll here.

The former Trump campaign chair and White House counselor Kellyanne Conway has repeatedly praised the Republican National Committee on Fox News while failing to disclose that it has paid her firm more than $800,000 since last year, Media Matters reports.

Eric Hananoki, an investigative reporter for the liberal media watchdog, writes: “The lack of disclosure about Conway’s financial ties goes against the ethics-challenged network’s purported policy”. He adds:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}A Fox News spokesperson told the Washington Post in 2019 regarding work Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer did with the RNC that ‘Fox News requires contributors to disclose ties related to any topic he or she discusses on the air in which the contributor may have a financial interest.’ The spokesperson added that such a rule would apply when talking about ‘the RNC on air.’

Elsewhere, the Daily Beast adds that “Karl Rove, another Fox News contributor with deep ties to the GOP, was allowed to keep his paid network gig while overseeing Senate Republicans’ fundraising efforts in 2020”.

As Hananoki notes, the RNC and its chair, Ronna McDaniel, have faced fierce criticism since the midterm elections, in which Republicans took back the House but by a slim majority and failed to win back the Senate – a disappointing performance widely blamed on former president Donald Trump, who endorsed a string of defeated candidates.

Conway, Hananoki writes, “has used her Fox News platform to praise the RNC and play defense for McDaniel”.

According to Media Matters, the RNC “has paid KAConsulting $829,969.38 since 2021 for a variety of expenses. The RNC’s most recent payment was on 4 November for ‘political strategy services’. The organisation recently announced that Conway would serve on a Republican Party Advisory Council ‘to inform the Republican Party’s 2024 vision and beyond’.”

Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The final witness testimony before a Q and A session at today’s House hearing into anti-LGBTQ violence was a chilling account of inside Orlando’s Pulse nightclub as a gunman murdered 49 mostly gay and transgender patrons in 2016.

“There were gunshots, endless gunshots; the hair standing up on the back of my neck; the stench of blood and smoke burning the inside of my nose,” said Brandon Wolf, a survivor who lost his two best friends in the massacre, and who has now become a prominent gun control and LBGTQ+ advocate.

“A nervous huddle against a wall; a girl trying desperately so hard not to scream. I could feel her trembling on the tiles underneath us.

“There was a sprint to the exit, all atop this bang, bang, bang, from an assault weapon. A man filled with hate an armed with a Sig Sauer MCX charged into Pulse, an LGBTQ safe space, and murdered 49 of those we loved.”

Wolf called out the bigotry and hatred of extremists who have fomented violence against the LBGTQ+ community, and spread hateful narratives that have resulted in attacks, threats and clampdowns on everything from drag shows, to donut shops to school libraries.

“For years cynical politicians and greedy Grifters have joined forces with right wing extremists to pour gasoline on anti LGBTQ hysteria and terrorize our community,” he said.

“My own governor Ron DeSantis has trafficked in that bigotry to feed his insatiable political ambition and propel himself toward the White House.

“We have been smeared and defamed. Hundreds of bills have been filed in order to erase us; powerful figures have insisted that the greatest threats this country face are a teacher with they-them pronouns, or someone in a wig reading Red Fish, Blue Fish.”

Barack Obama has called the Sandy Hook massacre “the single darkest day of my presidency”.

In his own statement marking the 10th anniversary of the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, the former president also said he believed “the tide is turning” on gun violence.

His administration was unable to renew a nationwide assault weapons ban, lamenting that inaction on gun safety laws was the “biggest regret” of his time in office.

Here’s Obama’s statement today:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The news from Sandy Hook Elementary was devastating, a visceral blow, and like so many others, I felt not just sorrow but anger at a world that could allow such things to happen.

Even then we understood that mere words could only do so much to ease the burden of the families who were suffering. But in the years since, each of them has borne that weight with strength and with grace. And they’ve drawn purpose from tragedy – doing everything in their power to make sure other children and families never have to experience what they and their loved ones did.

The journey hasn’t always been easy – and in a year when there hasn’t been a single week without a mass shooting somewhere in America, it’s clear our work is far from over. But of late, I’ve sensed that slowly, steadily, the tide is turning; that real change is possible. And I feel that way in no small part because of the families of Sandy Hook Elementary.

Ten years ago, we all would have understood if those families had simply asked for privacy and closed themselves off from the world. But instead, they took unimaginable sorrow and channeled it into a righteous cause – setting an example of strength and resolve.

They’ve made us proud. And if they were here today, I know the children and educators we lost a decade ago would be proud, too.