Eliana Willis

The US vice-president, Kamala Harris, said she had held ‘robust’ talks with the Guatemalan president, Alejandro Giammattei, as she sought to find ways of deterring undocumented immigration from Central America to the United States. Speaking during a news conference with Giammattei, Harris delivered a blunt message to people thinking of making the dangerous journey north: ‘Do not come’

Kamala Harris faces doubts over retooled US policy in Central America
Kamala Harris takes on a new role as she heads on her first overseas trip More

As Donald Trump digested news of a diminished online presence this week—a two-year suspension from Facebook for inciting the Capitol attack, and confirmation that his blog shuttered due to a “staggeringly small audience”—North Carolina’s Republican convention on Saturday night was poised to potentially strengthen an anaemic political operation.In the wake of his loss to Joe Biden, Trump’s political operation shrunk “to a ragtag team of former advisers who are still on his payroll, reminiscent of the bare-bones cast of characters that helped lift a political neophyte to his unlikely victory in 2016,” The New York Times reported. Most of these figures, The Times pointed out, “go days or weeks without interacting with Mr. Trump in person.”Meanwhile, Trump’s brash businessman persona seemed to have waned. While he travels to Manhattan from his New Jersey golf club to work out of Trump Tower “at least once a week,” his commute draws scant attention. In his Trump Tower office, he is “mostly alone, with two assistants and a few body men.” He no longer has the company of longtime cronies and staffers, nor his children, per this Times report. It’s unclear what Trump will say at this conference, which The Times described as being “billed as the resumption of rallies and speeches.” But Trump’s presence could show just how much sway he holds over the Republican party. It could also test the extent to which his day-to-day supporters remain loyal to him. Facebook announced on Friday that the company would suspend Trump for two years. This announcement follows the recommendation of Facebook’s oversight board. Trump was suspended from the social media site in January, for inciting supporters to attack the US Capitol building, in service of his lie that Joe Biden won because of electoral fraud. “Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr Trump’s suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols. We are suspending his accounts for two years, effective from the date of the initial suspension on January 7 this year,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, remarked in a statement on Friday.Suspension from Facebook would likely pose a devastating sucker-punch to most politicians’ aspirations—it’s a platform where beneficial disinformation can proliferate, not to mention an opportunity for direct access to voters. But Trump’s response to this ban might have teased his political future—namely, dropping a strong hint that he’d run for president again in 2024. “Next time I’m in the White House there will be no more dinners, at his request, with Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. It will be all business!” remarked Trump’s statement responding to this suspension. These comments came amid reports this week that Trump believes he will be reinstated to the White House by August. Trump did not say in his Facebook statement Friday whether he thought he’d resume his role due to reinstatement, or due to a successful presidential run in 2024. Regardless of these will he-or-won’t he vagaries, recent metrics showed that Trump’s hold on the Republican Party was strong. “Even in defeat, Mr. Trump remains the front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2024 in every public poll so far,” The Times noted.The extent to which Trump might attempt a comeback was further underscored by revelations about how much he tried to influence results in Arizona’s election. Emails were released this week in which the Republican president of the Arizona state senate said Trump called her after his election defeat last year, to thank her “for pushing to prove any fraud”.The emails add to understanding of the evolution of Trump’s “big lie”, that his defeat by Biden was the result of mass electoral fraud, and how it fuelled the deadly Capitol assault. The Arizona emails were obtained by American Oversight, a legal watchdog, via a Freedom of Information request. They showed how Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, pushed officials to act and how a controversial election audit in Arizona’s most populous county came to be set up.Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia are prominent among states which produced Biden victories Trump and his supporters insist won by fraud. They were not.The release of the Arizona emails showed how Trump pursued his claim of fraud after the election was called.Election day was 3 November. Biden was declared the winner four days later. The Democrat won by more than 7m votes and by 306-232 in the electoral college. That was the score by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, a result Trump called a landslide.Regardless, Trump went on the offensive with a frantic legal effort to prove fraud, led by Giuliani and almost entirely laughed out of court.In one Arizona email released on Friday, dated 2 December, Karen Fann, the Republican state senate president, told two constituents she had spoken to Giuliani “at least six times over the past two weeks”.Threatened later in the month with being recalled from office by “the new patriot movement of the United States”, Fann wrote that the state senate was “doing everything legally possible to get the forensic audit done”.Republicans in Maricopa county, the most populous county in Arizona, mounted a controversial audit of ballots. Most analysts view the audit as part of a concerted attempt by Republicans in state governments to restrict access to the ballot or produce laws by which results can be overturned.In the emails released by American Oversight, Fann told the constituent threatening action against her she had been “in numerous conversations with Rudy Guiliani [sic] over the past weeks trying to get this done”.She added: “I have the full support of him and a personal call from President Trump thanking us for pushing to prove any fraud.”Fann also told a constituent concerned about the use of taxpayers’ money: “Biden won. 45% of all Arizona voters think there is a problem with the election system. The audit is to disprove those theories or find ways to improve the system.”The emails also show the involvement of Christina Bobb. A reporter for One America News Network, a rightwing TV channel praised by Trump, Bobb has raised funds in support of the Maricopa audit.Another fringe rightwing network, Newsmax, has said it will show Trump’s return to public speaking on Saturday evening. More

Facebook is suspending Donald Trump’s account for two years, the company has announced in a highly anticipated decision that follows months of debate over the former president’s future on social media.“Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr Trump’s suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols. We are suspending his accounts for two years, effective from the date of the initial suspension on January 7 this year,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, said in a statement on Friday.At the end of the suspension period, Facebook said, it would work with experts to assess the risk to public safety posed by reinstating Trump’s account. “We will evaluate external factors, including instances of violence, restrictions on peaceful assembly and other markers of civil unrest,” Clegg wrote. “If we determine that there is still a serious risk to public safety, we will extend the restriction for a set period of time and continue to re-evaluate until that risk has receded.”He added that once the suspension was lifted, “a strict set of rapidly escalating sanctions” would be triggered if Trump violated Facebook policies.Friday’s decision comes just weeks after input from the Facebook oversight board – an independent advisory committee of academics, media figures and former politicians – who recommended in early May that Trump’s account not be reinstated.However the oversight board punted the ultimate decision on Trump’s fate back to Facebook itself, giving the company six months to make the final call. The board said that Facebook’s “indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension” for Trump was “not appropriate”, criticism that Clegg wrote the company “absolutely accept[s]”.The new policy allows for escalating penalties of suspensions for one month, six months, one year, and two years.The former president has been suspended since January, following the deadly Capitol attack that saw a mob of Trump supporters storm Congress in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The company suspended Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts over posts in which he appeared to praise the actions of the rioters, saying that his actions posed too great a risk to remain on the platform.Following the Capitol riot, Trump was suspended from several major tech platforms, including Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat. Twitter has since made its ban permanent.The former president called Facebook’s decision “an insult to the record-setting 75m people, plus many others, who voted for us in the 2020 Rigged Presidential Election,” in a statement. “They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this censoring and silencing, and ultimately, we will win.” Trump received fewer than 75m votes in the 2020 election, which he lost. He also hinted at a 2024 run.Facebook also announced that it would revoke its policy of treating speech by politicians as inherently newsworthy and exempt from enforcement of its content rules that ban, among other things, hate speech. The decision marks a major reversal of a set of policies that Clegg and Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, once championed as crucial to democracy and free speech.The company first created the newsworthiness exemption to its content rules in 2016, following international outcry over its decision to censor posts including the historic “napalm girl” photograph for violating its ban on nude images of children. The new rule tacitly acknowledged the importance of editorial judgment in Facebook’s censorship decisions.In 2019, at a speech at the Atlantic festival in Washington, Clegg revealed that Facebook had decided to treat all speech by politicians as newsworthy, exempting it from content rules. “Would it be acceptable to society at large to have a private company in effect become a self-appointed referee for everything that politicians say? I don’t believe it would be,” Clegg said at the time.Under the new rules, Clegg wrote Friday, “when we assess content for newsworthiness, we will not treat content posted by politicians any differently from content posted by anyone else”.The newsworthiness exemption is by no means the only policy area in which Facebook treats politicians differently from other users. The company also exempts politicians’ speech from its third-party fact-checking and maintains a list of high-profile accounts that are exempted from the AI systems that Facebook relies on for enforcement of many of its rules.Facebook did not immediately respond to questions about whether those policies remain in effect. More

Mike Pence has said he isn’t sure that he and Donald Trump will ever see “eye to eye” over what happened on 6 January, when a mob of the president’s supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn the election. Pence, speaking at a Republican dinner in the early voting state of New Hampshire, gave his most extensive comments to date on the deadly events, when rioters broke into the Capitol building, some chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” after the vice-president said he did not have the power to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.“As I said that day, Jan 6 was a dark day in history of the United States Capitol. But thanks to the swift action of the Capitol police and federal law enforcement, violence was quelled. The Capitol was secured,” Pence said.“And that same day, we reconvened the Congress and did our duty under the constitution and the laws of the United States,” Pence continued. “You know, President Trump and I have spoken many times since we left office. And I don’t know if we’ll ever see eye to eye on that day.”It was a rare departure for Pence, who spent four years standing loyally beside his boss amid controversy, investigation and impeachment. It comes as Pence considers his own potential 2024 White House run and as Republicans, some of whom were angry at Trump in the days after the insurrection, have largely coalesced back around the former president.Pence praised Trump several times during his nearly 35-minute speech at the Hillsborough county Republican committee’s annual Lincoln-Reagan awards dinner in Manchester. He also tried to turn the events of 6 January back around on Democrats, saying they wanted to keep the insurrection in the news to divert attention from Biden’s progressive agenda.Pence also hit upon several favorite themes of conservative Republicans, including pushing back against “critical race theory”, echoing a wider push on the right to limit how history and race are covered in America’s schools. His speech came as Georgia’s education board adopted a resolution insisting that students should be taught that racism and slavery are aberrations rather than the systemic norm.“America is not a racist country,” Pence said, prompting one of several standing ovations and cheers during his speech.“It is past time for America to discard the left-wing myth of systemic racism,” Pence said. “I commend state legislators and governors across the country for banning critical race theory from our schools.”His choice of states, including an April appearance in South Carolina, is aimed at increasing his visibility as he considers whether to run for the White House in 2024. His team said he plans more trips, including stops in Texas, California and Michigan. More

Manuel Gonzales, a New Mexico sheriff who is running for mayor of Albuquerque, was interrupted at a campaign event by a flying drone with a sex toy attached to it. A man tried to grab the item, swinging his fist and calling Gonzeles a tyrant.
The campaign group for Gonzales said the Democrat was unharmed and ‘will not be intimidated’

Kerfuffle after drone carrying sex toy disrupts Albuquerque mayoral event More

Four additional members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group that took part in the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January, have been indicted for participating in the event.Court documents unsealed on Sunday named three individuals living in Florida – Joseph Hackett, 51, of Sarasota, Jason Dolan, 44, of Wellington, and William Isaacs, 21, of Kissimmee. The three appeared last Thursday before US magistrates in Tampa, West Palm Beach and Orlando. A fourth person’s name was hidden.The four new defendants are charged with conspiring to obstruct Congress’s confirmation of the 2020 presidential election results in a joint session of Congress that was interrupted by the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Five deaths were ultimately linked to the attack.The four Oath Keepers are each accused of forcing entry through the Capitol’s East Rotunda doors after marching up the steps wearing combat uniforms, tactical vests, helmets and Oath Keepers insignia.The new indictment is part of a larger criminal conspiracy case that now includes 19 members of the far-right group. Members previously charged in the government’s case have pleaded not guilty.According to prosecutors, members of the group attended a 9 November meeting during which the Oath Keeper’s founder Stewart Rhodes, referred to in government documents as Person One, described the attack as an insurrection.“We’re gonna be posted outside DC, awaiting the president’s orders. … We want him to declare an insurrection,” according to documents.Prosecutors say the Oath Keepers is a loose federation of militia groups that targets law enforcement and military members for recruitment and promotes a totalitarian vision of the government that its members believes represents a threat to American citizens.Rhodes, who has not been charged, has claimed that the government is trying to build the action of a few members into an alleged organizational conspiracy. “I may go to jail soon, not for anything I actually did, but for made-up crimes,” Rhodes told Texas Republicans in March, according to the Washington Post.The new indictment alleges that Rhodes began developing plans to keep Donald Trump in office by force six days after the presidential vote. During an online meeting on 9 November, prosecutors claim, he told some of the Oath Keepers now under indictment:We want [Trump] to declare an insurrection, and to call us up as the militia,” Rhodes allegedly stated. More

Senate Republicans have blocked the creation of a special commission to study the deadly 6 January attack on the Capitol, dashing hopes for a bipartisan panel amid a Republican push to put the violent insurrection by Donald Trump’s supporters behind them.Republicans killed the effort to set up a 9/11-style inquiry into the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob despite broad popular support for such an investigation and pleas from the family of a Capitol police officer who collapsed and died after the siege and other officers who battled the rioters.In a procedural vote in the Senate on Friday, six Republican senators broke ranks to back the commission, which was more than expected, but four fewer than the 10 needed to overcome a filibuster and for it to advance.The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, condemned Republican colleagues for blocking a bipartisan commission. “Shame on the Republican party for trying to sweep the horrors of that day under the rug because they’re afraid of Donald Trump,” Schumer said in a Senate floor speech immediately after the vote.The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, argued the vote on the commission bill brought “shame” to the Senate and would make the country less safe. She indicated that House committees, which are under Democratic leadership, would continue to investigate the attack. “Democrats will proceed to find the truth,” Pelosi said.The insurrection was the worst attack on the Capitol in 200 years and interrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s win over Trump.But the Republican party remains firmly in the grip of Trump who had made his opposition to the commission very clear. Observers believe that senior party figures do not want to anger the former president or his legion of supporters and may also fear what the commission might uncover in terms of links between some of the rioters and Republican lawmakers.Though the commission bill passed the House earlier this month with the support of almost three dozen Republicans, Republican senators said they believe the commission would eventually be used against them politically.Trump has called it a “Democrat trap”.While initially saying he was open to the idea of the commission, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, turned firmly against it in recent days. He has said he believes the panel’s investigation would be partisan despite the even split among party members. McConnell, who once said Trump was responsible for provoking the mob attack on the Capitol, said of Democrats: “They’d like to continue to litigate the former president, into the future.”The Republican opposition to the bipartisan panel has revived Democratic pressure to do away with the filibuster, a time-honored Senate tradition that requires a vote by 60 of the 100 senators to cut off debate and advance a bill.With the Senate evenly split 50-50, Democrats needed the support of 10 Republicans to move to the commission bill, because Republicans invoked the filibuster. The episode has sparked fresh debate over whether the time has come to change the rules and lower the threshold to 51 votes to take up legislation.On Friday, the Democrats only got 54 votes by the time the vote was gaveled out.Friday’s vote marked Senate Republicans’ first official use of the filibuster to defeat a bill, and Schumer said he hoped this was not the beginning of a trend of Republicans blocking “reasonable, commonsense legislation”.The six Republicans who voted for the commission to proceed were Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Rob Portman of Ohio.A spokesperson for the Republican senator Pat Toomey told HuffPost that he was not in Washington for the commission bill vote because of a family obligation However, the spokesperson said, Toomey would have voted in favor of starting debate on the bill.Senator Elizabeth Warren said on Twitter: “If Senate Republicans can block an independent commission investigating a deadly armed attack on the Capitol because it might hurt their poll numbers with insurrectionists, then something is badly wrong with the Senate. We must get rid of the filibuster to protect our democracy.”The Republicans’ political arguments over the violent siege – which is still raw for many in the Capitol, almost five months later – have frustrated not only Democrats but also those who fought off the rioters.Michael Fanone, a Metropolitan police department officer who responded to the attack, said between meetings with Republican senators that a commission is “necessary for us to heal as a nation from the trauma that we all experienced that day”. Fanone has described being dragged down the Capitol steps by rioters who shocked him with a stun gun and beat him. “So I don’t understand why they would resist getting to the bottom of what happened that day and fully understanding how to prevent it. Just boggles my mind,” she said. Video of the rioting shows two men spraying Sicknick and another officer with a chemical, but the Washington medical examiner said he suffered a stroke and died from natural causes. More

Good morning.Senate Republicans are expected to stymie the Democrats’ efforts on Friday to set up a bipartisan, 9/11-style investigative commission into the 6 January Capitol attack.Debate on legislation to form the commission was set to begin late on Thursday, but work on another bill pushed consideration to Friday after the Senate adjourned at 3am. Friday is set to be another long day, with the Republicans expected to filibuster the House-approved commission.
If successful, “Filibuster Friday” will be the first filibuster in the Biden presidency to halt Senate legislative action, with the Senate evenly split 50-50 and a filibuster requiring a vote of 60 to cut off debate.
Today’s vote comes as a Guardian analysis found that at least 70% of people charged over the 6 January attack had been released as they wait for trial, in stark contrast to the 25% of federal defendants who are typically released before their trial.
Legal experts believe the disparity indicates a likelihood that many of the alleged rioters may not serve any prison time at all, even if they are convicted or plead guilty.
US investigating if Ukraine interfered in 2020 electionFederal prosecutors in New York are investigating whether Ukrainian officials attempted to undermine Joe Biden and help Donald Trump win the 2020 presidential election, according to a report from the New York Times.Part of the investigation includes looking into whether the officials used Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal lawyer, to spread misleading claims about Biden.Arizona preparing to start killing death row inmates againArizona has “refurbished” its gas chamber after 22 years of disuse as the state prepares to restart executions.The move comes seven years after the botched lethal injection of Joseph Wood in 2014, and after the Guardian revealed last month that Arizona had spent $1.5m on a batch of pentobarbital, a sedative which it intends to use as its main lethal injection.10 dead in mass shooting in San Jose, CaliforniaMore details have emerged about the shooting at a San Jose rail yard this week that left 10 people dead, including the shooter.
Authorities have identified the victims as bus and light rail operators, mechanics, linemen and an assistant superintendent: Paul Delacruz Megia, 42; Taptejdeep Singh, 36; Adrian Balleza, 29; Jose Dejesus Hernandez III, 35; Timothy Michael Romo, 49; Michael Joseph Rudometkin, 40; Abdolvahab Alaghmandan, 63, and Lars Kepler Lane, 63. A ninth victim, Alex Ward Fritch, 49, was transported to a local hospital in critical condition and died on Wednesday evening, the coroner’s office said.
The county sheriff has identified the shooter as a longtime maintenance worker at the facility. The shooter’s ex-wife said he had talked about killing people at work more than a decade ago.
In other news…
Three Washington state police officers charged in killing of Manuel Ellis: Moments before his death, the 33-year-old Black father of two called out: “I can’t breathe.” The charges filed against three Tacoma police officers mark the first time first time the state attorney general’s office has filed criminal charges against police officers for unlawful use of deadly force.
California launches a $1.5m Covid vaccine lottery, becoming the latest state to incentivize people to get vaccinated with the country’s largest single prize draw.
Whistleblower known to speak out about UFOs claims Pentagon tried to discredit him: Luis Elizondo, who headed the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, lodged a complaint with the defense department’s inspector general alleging that his former agency threatened to tell people he was crazy.
Vaccination rate patterns in Wisconsin reflect those nationwide in that they vary widely between rural and urban areas and political, religious and racial groups.
The Biden administration is facing criticism for backing a Trump-era oil drilling project in Alaska.
Texas Democratic lawmakers killed a transphobic bill intended for student athletes by stalling until it passed its deadline.
Bill Cosby’s parole petition was denied after he refused therapy for sex offenders.
Stat of the day: 89% of new tobacco smokers are addicted by the age of 25The number of smokers worldwide has reached an all-time high of 1.1 billion, with 8 million killed in 2019, according to a new study.Don’t miss this: a conversation about American colonialism and sovereigntyJacqueline Keeler, founder of the #notyourmascot hashtag that highlighted the way sports teams use Native American mascots to perpetuate racist caricatures, spoke to the Guardian about her new book, Standoff, which explores the differences between two recent attempts to assert sovereignty on American soil: the Bundy clan’s far-right interpretation of Oregon’s constitution, and the Standing Rock Sioux protest over the Dakota Access pipeline.Last Thing: A glass case of emotionAmazon was torn apart on the internet on Thursday after sharing a video of “AmaZen”, a booth installed in an Amazon warehouse for employees to go focus on their mental health. “I feel like liveable wages and working conditions are better than a mobile Despair Closet,” writer Talia Levin tweeted.Sign upSign up for the US morning briefingFirst Thing is delivered to thousands of inboxes every weekday. If you’re not already signed up, subscribe now.Get in TouchIf you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email [email protected] More