US Politics

How free can any woman be in a country where her right to control her body and family depends on the jurisdiction where she happens to live? Republicans are looking to find out. Over the past few weeks, as Republican officials in anti-choice states seek to make their abortion bans enforceable and compel women into childbirth, a new front has opened up in the abortion wars: roads. The anti-choice movement, through a series of inventive legal theories and cynical legislative maneuvers, is now attacking women’s right to travel.In a court filing last month, the Alabama attorney general, Steve Marshall, wrote that he believed his office had a right to prosecute those who help women travel across state lines in search of an abortion. The filing comes in a lawsuit from two women’s health clinics and an abortion fund, which sued Marshall after he publicly stated his intention to criminally investigate organizations like theirs, which provide financial and logistical help to pregnant patients seeking to leave the state. In his response, Marshall unequivocally stated that Alabama, which bans all abortions with no rape or incest exemption, views any effort to help women cross state lines as a “criminal conspiracy”.“An elected abortion performed in Alabama would be a criminal offense,” Marshall’s office writes. “Thus, a conspiracy formed in the state to have that same act performed outside the state is illegal.” The filing goes on to dismiss the free speech, expression and association claims of the fund and the two clinics.Meanwhile in Texas, two counties and two cities have passed laws banning so-called “abortion trafficking” – that is, the transport or assistance of anyone seeking an abortion – on the roads that pass through their territories. The “trafficking” in this moniker refers to the fetus: “The unborn child is always taken against their will,” Mark Lee Dickson, the architect of these bills, told the Washington Post. Like Texas’s SB 8, the bounty-hunter ban that outlawed abortions in Texas at six weeks before the fall of Roe, these travel bans are also enforced via lawsuits by private citizens – the law is designed to allow those who are displeased by an abortion to sue the friends, feminists and allies of the pregnant patient who helped her to get one.Dickson and his political partner, the SB 8 architect Jonathan Mitchell, are pushing the provision in border cities and towns along major interstate highways. And like SB 8, the law is less likely to be used by strangers to prevent abortions than by abusers to punish ones that already happened. As an example of the ideal use of his bill, Dickson told the Washington Post that a husband who did not want his wife to get an abortion could use it to sue the friend who offered to drive her – thus somewhat giving away the game that the goal of such a provision is to ensure that men’s private domination and abuse of women is recognized as a right enforceable by civil law.Texas and Alabama are not alone. Earlier this year, Idaho became the first state to criminalize abortion-related travel when it enacted a law making it a felony to help a minor cross state lines for an abortion. Meanwhile, Missouri made headlines last year when Republicans introduced bills that would criminalize anyone helping state residents to obtain abortions elsewhere.Is any of this constitutional? No. But that doesn’t mean the laws will be struck down. The novel enforcement mechanism of the Texas laws, in particular, which are enforceable not by the state or municipality but only by the lawsuits of private citizens, make it hard for any pro-choice group to get standing to challenge them. That’s the point: the bills are constructed to evade judicial review. And though Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for one, has said that he would disapprove of anti-choice states’ attempts to prevent women’s travel, the supreme court, including Kavanaugh, has already blessed abortion ban by civil suit with its sanction of SB 8.But the point of these laws is not, exactly, to enforce them, except perhaps in the event when they are used by domestic abusers to further their control and torment of the women they’ve imprisoned – as is already happening. The real point is to chill legal conduct, and to prevent the people, mostly women – the sisters, friends, abortion fund staffers, colleagues and local feminists who any abortion patient might turn to for help – from acting on their own moral convictions.The law is punitive, not preventive: it is designed not to intervene in abortions before they happen so much as to punish them after the fact. It is designed, too, to frighten: the very vagueness of these laws, and the fear of punishments for violating them, will inevitably keep those who would assist an abortion from doing so. The point is to threaten with humiliating, ruinous lawsuits and life-altering criminal prosecutions any woman who might act on her conviction that another woman deserves to control her own body. The point is to punish and declare illegal women’s friendship, confidences and feminist solidarity itself.In their attempts to keep women walled inside anti-choice states, and to criminalize both friendship and flight, the abortion travel bans have been compared to the 19th century’s fugitive slave law. I for one believe that American chattel slavery does not make a good comparison; its horrors fail as metaphor. But one does not need to draw any moral equivalence to see the parallels of the emerging political divide. An untenable conflict is arising between states where women are free to control their bodies and states where they are not, and the latter group is not respecting the laws of the former.The nation cannot sustain this division, and it will not: either abortion will soon become legal nationwide, or it will soon be banned nationwide. For their part, the anti-choice movement seems very confident which direction we’re heading.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

In the United States today, at a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality, weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower than they were 50 years ago after adjusting for inflation. In other words, despite a massive increase in worker productivity, despite CEOs now making nearly 400 times more than what their employees earn, despite record-breaking corporate profits, dividends and stock buybacks, average American workers are worse off than they were 50 years ago.That morally grotesque and growing inequality is exactly what has been occurring in the automobile industry for decades. This time, however, under new union leadership, the members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) are fighting back. If the big three automakers (General Motors, Ford and Stellantis) do not provide reasonable contracts to address longstanding inequities in the industry, there will be a strike – and all of us should support the strikers.The UAW members will be fighting not only for themselves but against a corporate culture of arrogance, cruelty and selfishness causing massive and unnecessary pain for the majority of working families throughout the country. Their fight against corporate greed is our fight. Their victory will resonate all across the economy, impact millions of workers from coast to coast and help create a more just and equitable economy.What are some of the issues that are pushing UAW members to strike? At the top of the list is the extraordinary level of corporate greed shown by industry leaders.In the first half of 2023 the big three automakers made a combined $21bn in profits – up 80% from the same time period last year. Over the past decade, these same companies made some $250bn in profits in North America alone.Yet last year, the big three spent $9bn – not to improve the lives of their workers, not to make their factories safer, but on stock buybacks and dividends to make their wealthy executives and stockholders even richer.Further, while many of their workers are struggling to survive financially, last year the CEO of General Motors raked in about $29m in total compensation, the CEO of Ford approximately $21m and the CEO of Stellantis over $25m.Incredibly, over the last four years, CEO pay at the big three has increased by more than 40%.While auto industry CEOs and stockholders make out like bandits, the workers who build the vehicles earn totally inadequate wages and, over the last several decades, have fallen further and further behind. There was once a time when a union job in the automobile industry was the gold standard for the working class of this country. Those days are long gone.The average starting wage at the big three today is around $17 an hour – less than a number of non-union auto plants around the country. The top wage is $32.32 an hour. Unbelievably, over the last 20 years, the average wage for American autoworkers has decreased by 30% after adjusting for inflation. The reality is that autoworkers at the big three are earning less today than they did 15 years ago.What the UAW is fighting for is not radical. It is the totally reasonable demand that autoworkers, who have made enormous financial sacrifices over the past 40 years, finally receive a fair share of the record-breaking profits their labor has generated.What does that mean? It means that if the big three can afford to give a pay raise of more than 40% to their CEOs, they should be able to provide the same type of pay raise for the autoworkers who make their products.And let’s be clear. While decent wages are a key demand for the UAW, there are other important contract changes that the union has proposed.The union, quite appropriately, wants to get rid of the two-tier system under which newer workers earn lower wages and receive less generous benefits than others doing the same exact work. They want to end the use of “temporary workers” who are ruthlessly exploited and treated like second-class citizens.They want to make sure that all autoworkers receive a decent pension plan and retiree health benefits so that they can retire with the respect and the dignity they deserve.They want to make sure that autoworkers have the right to strike when the big three announce that they will be shutting down a plant. Over the past 20 years, the big three have shut down 65 factories and shipped tens of thousands of jobs overseas where they can pay workers starvation wages with no benefits.The union also wants to make sure, as the industry proposes to build 10 new electric vehicle battery plants, that the workers in these plants become part of the UAW and receive the same wages and benefits as union members.As we transition away from fossil fuels and move toward electric vehicles in the fight to combat the climate crisis, the UAW wants to make sure that the green jobs of the future are well-paying, union jobs.The CEOs of the big three and their masters on Wall Street must understand they cannot have it all. Decade after decade their greed has decimated the middle class, hollowed out communities throughout our country and caused massive economic suffering for the working class of America. These CEOs have created a destructive race to the bottom in a global quest for cheap labor and lax environmental standards.Enough is enough! Let us stand together to put an end to corporate greed and start rebuilding our struggling middle class. Let us stand in solidarity with the UAW and create an economy that works for all, not just the privileged few.
Bernie Sanders is a US senator and chairman of the health, education, labor and pensions committee More

Elon Musk backed away from a plan to recruit Rudy Giuliani as a political fixer to help him turn PayPal into a bank in 2001 after he and an associate found the then New York mayor “surrounded by goonish confidantes” in an office that felt “like a mob scene”.“This guy occupies a different planet,” Musk, who would become the world’s richest man, said of Giuliani, then approaching the peak of his fame.Giuliani left office at the end of 2001 after leading New York through the 9/11 attacks, then ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2008, a campaign which soon collapsed.He became an attorney and ally to Donald Trump but missed out on a cabinet appointment when Trump won the presidency in 2016.Trump’s first impeachment was fueled by Giuliani’s work in Ukraine, seeking political dirt on opponents. Now 79, Giuliani has pleaded not guilty to 13 criminal charges of racketeering and conspiracy, regarding his work to advance Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.The irony of the former mayor and New York US attorney being indicted on charges often used against figures in organised crime has been widely remarked. As a prosecutor, Giuliani made his name chasing down mafia kingpins.The latest picture of Giuliani as gangster is included in Elon Musk, a new biography of the 52-year-old Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) owner and sometime world’s richest man, by Walter Isaacson, whose other subjects include Leonardo Da Vinci and Steve Jobs.Isaacson’s book was widely excerpted in the US media before publication on Tuesday.The brief meeting between Musk and Giuliani came about, Isaacson writes, as Musk sought to turn PayPal, the online payments company he co-founded, into “a social network that would disrupt the whole banking industry” – a vision he now harbours for Twitter, which he bought in October 2022 and renamed as X this year.“We have to decide whether we are going to aim big,” Musk told those who worked for him, Isaacson writes, adding that some “believed Musk’s framing was flawed”.Describing stymied attempts to rebrand, Isaacson writes: “Focus groups showed that the name X.com … conjured up visions of a seedy site you would not talk about in polite company. But Musk was unwavering and remains so to this day.”Such discussions, Isaacson reports, led Musk and an investor, Michael Moritz, to go to New York, “to see if they could recruit Rudy Giuliani, who was just ending his tenure as mayor, to be a political fixer and guide them through the policy intricacies of being a bank.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“But as soon as they walked into his office, they knew it would not work.“It was like walking into a mob scene,” Moritz says. Giuliani “was surrounded by goonish confidantes. He didn’t have any idea whatsoever about Silicon Valley, but he and his henchmen were eager to line their pockets.”“They asked for 10% of the company, and that was the end of the meeting. ‘This guy occupies a different planet,’ Musk told Moritz.”Giuliani succeeded in lining his pockets after leaving city hall, making millions as a lawyer and consultant and giving paid speeches around the world.That picture has also changed. Faced with spiraling legal costs arising from his work for Trump and other cases including a $10m lawsuit from a former associate who alleges sexual assault, lawyers for Giuliani have said he is struggling to pay his bills. In New York, his luxury apartment was put up for sale. More

From Ground Zero to small towns, Americans looked back Monday on 9/11 with moments of silence, tearful words and appeals to teach younger generations about the deadly terror attacks that struck the nation exactly 22 years before.“For those of us who lost people on that day, that day is still happening,” Edward Edelman said as he arrived at New York’s World Trade Center to honor his slain brother-in-law, Daniel McGinley. “Everybody else moves on. And you find a way to go forward, but that day is always happening for you.”Joe Biden spoke at a military base in Anchorage, Alaska, on Monday afternoon. The president’s visit, en route to Washington from a trip to India and Vietnam, was a reminder that the impact of 9/11 was felt in every corner of the nation, however remote.He noted that the al-Qaida terrorists “took 2,977 souls that day” – when they hijacked four passenger jets and crashed them, respectively, into the twin towers in New York, the Pentagon near Washington, DC, and into a field in Pennsylvania as passengers thwarted their goal of reaching the capital in the fourth plane.But the US president added that “those terrorists could never touch the soul of America”.The multi-pronged attack, the worst ever on US soil, reshaped American foreign policy and domestic fears.Biden also noted how the catastrophe helped to unite the US and urged Americans – now enduring times of acute political polarization – that “we must never succumb to the politics of division”.That sentiment was an echo of statements made earlier on Monday.On that day, “we were one country, one nation, one people, just like it should be”, Eddie Ferguson, the fire-rescue chief in Virginia’s Goochland county, said in an interview last week. “That was the feeling – that everyone came together and did what we could, where we were at, to try to help.”The predominantly rural county of 25,000 people is more than 100 miles (160km) from the Pentagon and more than three times as far from New York. But Goochland county has a local September 11 memorial and holds two public anniversary commemorations, one focused on first responders and another honoring all the victims.At Ground Zero in New York, Kamala Harris, the vice-president, joined other dignitaries at the ceremony on the National September 11 Memorial plaza. Instead of remarks from political figures, the event features victims reading the names of the dead and delivering brief personal messages.Some included patriotic declarations about American values and thanked first responders and the military. One lauded the Navy Seals who killed al-Qaida leader and 9/11 plotter Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. Another appealed for peace and justice. One acknowledged the many lives lost in the post-9/11 “war on terror”. And many shared personal reflections on missing loved ones.“Though we never met, I am honored to carry your name and legacy with me,” said Manuel João DaMota Jr, who was born after his father and namesake died.Jason Inoa commemorated his grandfather, Jorge Velázquez. The 20-year-old Inoa said speaking at the ceremony was “very nerve-racking”, but he did it for his grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s disease.“The one thing she does remember is her husband,” he said.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

From 53m agoIn a court filing on Monday, former president Donald Trump moved to recuse federal judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the 2020 election subversion case, citing her previous comments about his culpability.“Judge Chutkan has, in connection with other cases, suggested that President Trump should be prosecuted and imprisoned,” the motion for recusal reads. “Such statements, made before this case began and without due process, are inherently disqualifying.”The filing includes a reference to a statement Chutkan made during cases in 2022 before the special counsel issued findings:
This was nothing less than an attempt to violently overthrow the government, the legally, lawfully, peacefully elected government by individuals who were mad that their guy lost. I see the videotapes. I see the footage of the flags and the signs that people were carrying and the hats they were wearing and the garb. And the people who mobbed that Capitol were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man – not to the constitution, of which most of the people who come before me seem woefully ignorant; not to the ideals of this country; and not to the principles of democracy. It’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.”
“Fairness and impartiality are the central tenets of our criminal justice system,” Trump’s legal team wrote in the filing. “Both a defendant and the public are entitled to a full hearing, on all relevant issues, by a Court that has not prejudged the guilt of the defendant, and whose neutrality cannot be reasonably questioned.”Though the filing only surfaced Monday, conservative calls for Chutkan to step down have been mounting in recent weeks. Republican congressman and Trump-loyalist Matt Gaetz filed a resolution to condemn and censure the federal judge for her comments in recent weeks.Just last night, Mark Levin, a conservative pundit and Fox News show host, took aim at Judge Chutkan on his program.Making the case that she is “unqualified” to preside over the case against Trump, Levin cited an investigation on Real Clear Politics, a right-leaning website largely funded by pro-Trump conservatives, that outlines many of the arguments used by the former president’s legal team to call for Chutkan’s recusal.But for all the crying-foul coming from conservatives, it will be difficult for the Trump legal team to succeed in getting her off the case. As New York University professor of law Stephen Gillers told Real Clear Politics: “Almost never will a judge be recused for opinions she forms as a judge – in hearing cases and motions. Judges are expected to form opinions based on these ‘intrajudicial’ sources. It’s what judges do.”Ultimately, Chutkan will be the one to rule on whether she is too biased to preside over the case. If she denies the recusal, Trump’s lawyers could petition an appeals court, but it’s still a long shot.This also isn’t the first time Trump has tried to get a new judge. He previously failed to get a new judge to preside over his New York State court case and also attempted to get the case moved to federal court.Trump has challenged the judge or jurisdiction in three of his four criminal cases this year, CBS News reports, excluding only Aileen Cannon – presiding over the 40 felony counts charged for “willful retention of national security information” – who he appointed.In a court filing on Monday, former president Donald Trump moved to recuse federal judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the 2020 election subversion case, citing her previous comments about his culpability.“Judge Chutkan has, in connection with other cases, suggested that President Trump should be prosecuted and imprisoned,” the motion for recusal reads. “Such statements, made before this case began and without due process, are inherently disqualifying.”The filing includes a reference to a statement Chutkan made during cases in 2022 before the special counsel issued findings:
This was nothing less than an attempt to violently overthrow the government, the legally, lawfully, peacefully elected government by individuals who were mad that their guy lost. I see the videotapes. I see the footage of the flags and the signs that people were carrying and the hats they were wearing and the garb. And the people who mobbed that Capitol were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man – not to the constitution, of which most of the people who come before me seem woefully ignorant; not to the ideals of this country; and not to the principles of democracy. It’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.”
“Fairness and impartiality are the central tenets of our criminal justice system,” Trump’s legal team wrote in the filing. “Both a defendant and the public are entitled to a full hearing, on all relevant issues, by a Court that has not prejudged the guilt of the defendant, and whose neutrality cannot be reasonably questioned.”President Biden marked the anniversary of 9/11 by speaking to service members, first responders, and their families in Anchorage, Alaska.Standing before an enormous American flag the president recounted memories of that tragic day while championing the acts of patriotism and courage performed in response.“Those terrorists could never touch the soul of America,” the President said resolutely. “Heroes, like all of you,” he added, “never faltered to defend our nation, our people an dour values in times of trial”.He used the speech to tell the gathered troops that his administration is working to ensure broader support for service members when they return home. Outlining the ways in which the US has fought terrorist foes over the last two decades, and noting that Osama Bin Laden was sent “to the gates of hell,” Biden turned toward the battles the country is still fighting – the deep-seated divisions that continue to threaten its future.To drive home the point, the President ended with an anecdote about his late friend, Senator John McCain.“John and I were friends. Like a lot of us we had differences,” he said, adding that the two, “disagreed like hell,” on the Senate floor but would always find time to lunch afterward.On their last meeting, Biden shared, McCain pulled him close, said he loved him, and asked Biden to perform his eulogy.“He put duty to country first,” Biden said. “Above party, above politics, above his own person.” The president invoked the American people, including the military members in attendance, to reflect on that during this day of remembrance.“We must never lose that sense of national unity,” he said. “Let that be the common cause of our time.”Five American prisoners being detained in Iran could soon be freed, thanks to a new deal the countries reached today. In exchange for the 5 US citizens, 5 Iranians held in the US will be released and the US will allow the transfer of $6bn in frozen Iranian funds from South Korea to Qatar without sanctions, the Associated Press reports.Congress was notified of the deal today, after it was signed off by the Biden Administration late last week. AP reports that significant sum cleared for use by Iran was a key aspect to the deal, encouraging foreign banks to perform the transfer intended to be used to purchase humanitarian supplies. The cnetral bank of Qatar will hold the funds, which will be controlled by Qatar’s government, to ensure its use is dedicated to aid, including medicine and food for the people of Iran.The American prisoners have also been transferred out of Iranian jails and are now in house arrest.The deal is the result of more than two years of negotiations between the two countries, according to the The New York Times, which reported on the tentative agreement in August.“This is just the beginning of a process that I hope and expect will lead to their return home to the United States,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told reporters at the time. “There’s more work to be done to actually bring them home. My belief is that this is the beginning of the end of their nightmare.”The Biden administration is close to approving the shipment of longer-range missiles packed with cluster bombs to Ukraine, Reuters is reporting, citing four US officials.The US is considering shipping either or both Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) that can fly up to 190 miles (306 km), or Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) missiles with a 45-mile range packed with cluster bombs, the report says.If approved, either option would be available for rapid shipment to Kyiv, giving Ukraine the ability to cause significant damage deeper within Russian-occupied territory.The decision to send ATACMS or GMLRS, or both, is not final and could still fall through, according to the sources.The US has approved a series of Covid-19 booster vaccines amid rising cases of coronavirus around the country, the Food and Drug Administration said.The FDA said it had approved Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, which can be administered even to people who never previously received a Covid-19 vaccination.As with earlier vaccinations, the new round of shots are cleared for adults and children as young as age 6 months.Starting at age five, most people can get a single dose even if they have never had a prior Covid-19 shot, per the FDA. Younger children might need additional doses depending on their history of Covid-19 infections and vaccinations.Hospitalizations from Covid-19 have crept up in recent weeks, although the rise is lower than the same time last year. In the week ending 26 August just over 17,400 people were hospitalized from Covid-19, NBC reported, up 16% from the week before.In August, two hospitals in New York state re-introduced mandatory masking after an increase in Covid-19 cases, while the Lionsgate film studio reinstated a mask mandate for half its employees in its flagship Los Angeles offices.That same month, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that it had discovered a new Covid-19 variant and warned high-risk individuals to resume wearing masks.The variant, BA 2.86, was detected during monitoring of wastewater, the CDC said. It said it was too soon to tell if BA 2.86 could lead to more severe illness than other variants, but reported “reassuring” results of early research which showed that existing antibodies work against the BA 2.86 variant.Donald Trump urged supporters they need to “fight like hell” or risk losing their country during a speech at a South Dakota rally in which the former president used language resonant of the run-up to the January 6 US Capitol attack, according to a CNN report. “I don’t think there’s ever been a darkness around our nation like there is now,” Trump said on Friday, as he accused Democrats of allowing an “invasion” of migrants over the southern border and of trying to restart Covid “hysteria”, the report says.
The Republican front-runner’s stark speech raised the prospect of a second presidency that would be even more extreme and challenging to the rule of law than his first. His view that the Oval Office confers unfettered powers suggests Trump would indulge in similar conduct as that for which he is awaiting trial, including intimidating local officials in an alleged bid to overturn his 2020 defeat.
Here are some images from the news wires of how the US has been marking the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, which took the lives of nearly 3,000 people.Several people were arrested after entering the office of Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, during a protest for HIV/Aids funding on Monday.The US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), a widely bipartisan program, has since been reauthorized three times, and Joe Biden earlier this year indicated that he would work with Congress to extend it a fourth.But the program’s latest extension has been caught up in a partisan fight over abortion and is under threat amid Congress’s negotiations over a government shutdown.Some Republicans are opposing Pepfar’s reauthorization, arguing that current restrictions do not sufficiently prevent the funds from being used to support abortions, according to an August report by the Federation of American Scientists.New Jersey Republican Representative Chris Smith, who chairs the House foreign affairs subcommittee, in a letter to colleagues in June:
Any multi-year PEPFAR reauthorizing legislation must ensure that Biden’s hijacking of PEPFAR to promote abortion be halted.
The program was first established in 2003 by President George W Bush to prevent and treat HIV/Aids in developing countries worldwide, and it is overseen by the US Department of State.About 20 million people depend on the program globally, according to a White House statement in January.Smith was a co-sponsor of the 2018 bill extending Pepfar for five years but is now seeking to block its renewal after Biden in 2021 lifted Trump-era restrictions that barred Pepfar and other global programs receiving US funding from performing or promoting abortions.The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the green light to updated Covid-19 vaccine shots from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, but it is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that recommends who should get the shot, according to a Washington Post report. The CDC is leaning toward a broad recommendation that covers almost all ages, mirroring the FDA approach, the paper writes, citing federal officials.
But it is possible that some on the agency’s panel of outside experts, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, will push for a targeted recommendation focused on those at greatest risk — older Americans or people with weakened immune systems or other illnesses.
Experts interviewed by the paper said they would get the coronavirus shot as soon as possible amid a late-summer uptick in Covid cases across the USUpdated Covid-19 vaccinations could begin later this week, and the US hopes to ramp up protection against the latest coronavirus strains amid steadily increasing cases.The newest shots target an omicron variant named XBB.1.5, replacing combination vaccines that mixed protection against the original coronavirus strain and even older omicron variants.“Vaccination remains critical to public health and continued protection against serious consequences of COVID-19, including hospitalization and death,” said Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s center for biologics evaluation and research.
The public can be assured that these updated vaccines have met the agency’s rigorous scientific standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality. We very much encourage those who are eligible to consider getting vaccinated.
There has been a late-summer uptick in Covid cases across the US.Experts are closely watching two new variants, EG.5, now the dominant strain, and BA.2.86, which has attracted attention from scientists because of its high number of mutations.Experts have said that the US is not facing a threat like it did in 2020 and 2021. “We’re in a different place,” Mandy Cohen, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told NBC News last month.
I think we’re the most prepared that we’ve ever been.
Updated Covid-19 vaccine shots made by Pfizer and Moderna are expected to be available in the coming days, according to Moderna. A third shot, by the vaccine maker Novavax, is still under review by the FDA, according to the company.Advisers from the US centers for disease and protection (CDC) are due to meet on Tuesday to recommend who should receive the shot. An endorsement by the CDC’s director should clear the way for millions of doses to be shipped nationwide within days.As part of the FDA’s update, the original Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines are no longer authorized for use in the US.The US health regulator on Monday authorized updated Covid-19 vaccines that closely match the Omicron variants that are circulating, starting the process to deploy the shots this month, Reuters reports.The Food and Drug Administration authorized the shots, which target the XBB.1.5 subvariant, from manufacturers Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech SE, and US pharma company Moderna.More details to follow.A trial began Monday over a sweeping Texas voting law that sparked a 38-day walkout by Democrats in 2021 and were among the strictest changes passed by Republicans nationwide following former US president Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, the Associated Press reports.The AP further notes:
The lawsuit was brought by a coalition of voting rights groups after Republican governor Greg Abbott signed the changes into law. The trial in San Antonio federal court could last weeks and it is unclear when US district judge Xavier Rodriguez might rule. Potentially at stake are voting rules Texas will use for the 2024 elections, although any decision is likely to be appealed.
The challenge, from the American Civil Liberties Union, (ACLU) the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund and others, has not stopped the measures from taking effect, including a ban on 24-hour polling places and drive-thru voting.
Many changes targeted Harris county, which includes Houston and is where a slate of Republican candidates are challenging their defeats last year.
During the hurried rollout of the law last year, more than 23,000 mail ballots in Texas were rejected during the March 2022 primary elections as voters struggled to navigate the new rules. By November’s general election, the rejection rate fell significantly, but was still higher than what experts consider normal.
In August, Rodriguez separately struck down a requirement that mail voters provide the same identification number they used when they registered to vote.”
Joe Biden is up in the air literally and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s future as House Speaker is likewise, but metaphorically. It’s been a busy day in Vietnam for the US president post-G20, but he’s now on his way back to the US and is due to address the public during a stopover in Alaska en route to Washington, DC.Here’s where things stand:
Mark Meadows, the former Trump White House chief of staff, appealed a judge’s ruling last Friday denying his bid to transfer his Georgia 2020 election interference case from state to federal court.
Jury deliberations for the impeachment trial of the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, could start late Thursday or Friday, according to the presiding officer Dan Patrick.
Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the House, reportedly doesn’t have the votes to move forward with an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden being clamored for by the right wing of his House caucus.
Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican congressman, said that there was a “perfect storm” brewing in the House over government spending and on impeachment of the president that could pose a threat to Kevin McCarthy’s speakership. More on this by Politico.
Joe Biden will address the nation late on Monday afternoon on the 22nd anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. On Monday morning, US vice president Kamala Harris attended the annual memorial ceremony in New York at the spot where the al-Qaeda hijackers destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
In the months before the supreme court handed down Citizens United, the 2010 ruling which unleashed a flood of dark money into American politics, the wife of a conservative justice worked with a prominent rightwing activist and a mega-donor closely linked to her husband to form a group to exploit the decision.So said a blockbuster report from Politico, detailing moves by Ginni Thomas – wife of Justice Clarence Thomas – and Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society chief who has worked to stock the court with rightwingers, leading to a series of epochal decisions, including the removal of the federal right to abortion.Half a million dollars in seed money, Politico said, came from Harlan Crow, the Nazi memorabilia-collecting billionaire whose extensive and mostly undeclared gifts to Clarence Thomas have fueled a spiraling supreme court ethics scandal.Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island and champion of ethics reform, said the report laid out “the creepy intermingling of dark billionaire money, phoney front groups, far-right extremists and the United States supreme court”.Politico noted that the ruling in Citizens United was widely expected after justices “took the unusual step of asking for re-arguments based on a sweeping question – whether they should overrule prior decisions approving laws that limited spending on political campaigns”.Noting that conservative groups moved to capitalise faster than others, the site quoted an anonymous source as saying Ginni Thomas “really wanted to build an organisation and be a movement leader. Leonard was going to be the conduit of that.”The justice department has dropped its five-year-old criminal case against Bijan Rafiekian, a one-time business partner of the former national security adviser Michael Flynn who had been charged with illegally lobbying for Turkey during the 2016 US presidential election.Rafiekian, who also goes by the name Bijan Kian, was indicted in 2018 on charges including failing to register as a foreign agent. Prosecutors had accused Rafiekian of illegally lobbying to have the cleric Fethullah Gülen extradited from the US to Turkey.The move wraps up a long-running tangent of the Mueller-era Russia investigation that originally had been used as leverage to pressure Flynn, CNN reported. Prosecutors had planned on calling Flynn to testify against Rafiekian at his trial to solidify their evidence of a connection between Flynn’s lobbying group and the government of Turkey.In 2019, a jury convicted Rafiekian on charges of conspiracy and acting as a foreign agent. But the judge who presided over the trial later set aside the verdicts, citing insufficient evidence. The case then went into appeals, hanging in the criminal justice system for years.In a court filing on Monday, the justice department said it sought to dismiss the charges against Rafiekian. Prosecutors wrote:
After carefully considering the Fourth Circuit’s recent decision in this case and the principles of federal prosecution, the United States believes it is not in the public interest to pursue the case against defendant Bijan Rafiekian further.
After defending the integrity of US elections from an onslaught of threats over the last several years, secretaries of state across the US are now turning to a new high-stakes question: is Donald Trump eligible to run for president?Several secretaries are already working with attorneys general in their states and studying whether Trump is disqualified under a provision of the 14th amendment that bars anyone from holding public office if they have previously taken an oath to the United States and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same”.That language clearly disqualifies Trump from running in 2024, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two prominent conservative scholars, concluded in a lengthy forthcoming law review article. They write in the article:
If the public record is accurate, the case is not even close. He is no longer eligible to the office of Presidency, or any other state or federal office covered by the Constitution. All who are committed to the Constitution should take note and say so.
A flurry of challenges to Trump’s candidacy are expected – one was filed in Colorado on Wednesday – but the legal issues at play are largely untested. Never before has the provision been used to try to disqualify a presidential candidate from office and the issue is likely to quickly come to a head as soon as officials make their official certifications about who can appear on primary ballots.Secretaries are studying who has the authority to remove Trump from the ballot and what process needs to occur before they do so. They also recognize that the issue is likely to be ultimately settled by the courts, including the US supreme court.Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat in her second term as Michigan’s secretary of state, said she had spoken with another secretary of state about the 14th amendment issue “nearly every day”.
The north star for me is always: ‘What is the law? What does the constitution require?’ To keep politics and partisan considerations out of it. And simply just look at this from a sense of ‘what does the 14th amendment say?’ We’re in unprecedented, uncharted territory.
Read my colleague Sam Levin’s full report. More

Several people were arrested after entering the office of Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, during a protest for HIV/Aids funding on Monday.The US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), a widely bipartisan program, has since been reauthorized three times, and Joe Biden earlier this year indicated that he would work with Congress to extend it a fourth.But the program’s latest extension has been caught up in a partisan fight over abortion and is under threat amid Congress’s negotiations over a government shutdown. Some Republicans are opposing Pepfar’s reauthorization, arguing that current restrictions do not sufficiently prevent the funds from being used to support abortions, according to an August report by the Federation of American Scientists.“Any multi-year PEPFAR reauthorizing legislation must ensure that Biden’s hijacking of PEPFAR to promote abortion be halted,” wrote New Jersey Republican Representative Chris Smith, who chairs the House foreign affairs subcommittee, in a letter to colleagues in June.At McCarthy’s Washington DC office, Capitol police handcuffed six activists and escorted them away, according to Politico reporter Alice Ollstein, who shared videos from the scene at the Rayburn House office building, which is connected to the US Capitol.Demonstrators were seen sitting and chanting in McCarthy’s office, demanding the Republican leader reauthorize key provisions of Pepfar, which are set to expire at the end of the month unless an agreement is reached.The program was first established in 2003 by President George W Bush to prevent and treat HIV/Aids in developing countries worldwide, and it is overseen by the US Department of State.About 20 million people depend on the program globally, according to a White House statement in January.Smith was a co-sponsor of the 2018 bill extending Pepfar for five years but is now seeking to block its renewal after Biden in 2021 lifted Trump-era restrictions that barred Pepfar and other global programs receiving US funding from performing or promoting abortions.While Pepfar can continue operating without congressional reauthorization, advocates say a failure to do so would signal diminishing US support for HIV/Aids prevention.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Pass Pepfar now, McCarthy,” protesters chanted in the speaker’s office on Monday morning.The demonstrators were members of NYC-based HIV/Aids nonprofits Health Gap (Global Access Project) and Housing Works, according to social media posts by the two advocacy groups.The House returns to Capitol Hill from its summer recess on Tuesday as it races to reach a deal to keep federal agencies and programs afloat through December. The Senate returned last week. More

In the months before the US supreme court handed down Citizens United, the 2010 ruling which unleashed a flood of dark money into American politics, the wife of a conservative justice worked with a prominent rightwing activist and a mega-donor closely linked to her husband to form a group to exploit the decision.So said a blockbuster report from Politico, detailing moves by Ginni Thomas – wife of Justice Clarence Thomas – and Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society chief who has worked to stock the court with rightwingers, leading to a series of epochal decisions, including the removal of the federal right to abortion.Half a million dollars in seed money, Politico said, came from Harlan Crow, the Nazi memorabilia-collecting billionaire whose extensive and mostly undeclared gifts to Clarence Thomas have fueled a spiraling supreme court ethics scandal.Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island and champion of ethics reform, said the report laid out “the creepy intermingling of dark billionaire money, phoney front groups, far-right extremists and the United States supreme court”.Politico noted that the ruling in Citizens United was widely expected after justices “took the unusual step of asking for re-arguments based on a sweeping question – whether they should overrule prior decisions approving laws that limited spending on political campaigns”.Noting that conservative groups moved to capitalise faster than others, the site quoted an anonymous source as saying Ginni Thomas “really wanted to build an organisation and be a movement leader. Leonard was going to be the conduit of that.”It also published a timeline of Thomas and Leo’s moves.A nonprofit, Liberty Central, was incorporated with $500,000 from Crow on 31 December 2009, three and a half months after the close of oral arguments in Citizens United.The Citizens United decision was handed down on 21 January 2010, with Clarence Thomas objecting to disclosure rules.On 18 February 2010, Ginni Thomas told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) she had been “called to the frontlines”.Ginni Thomas’s work on the hard right of US politics has already contributed to controversy surrounding her husband, not least through her support for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and Clarence Thomas’s refusal to recuse himself when investigations reached the supreme court.Politico also noted how a Leo-linked group, the Judicial Education Project, paid Ginni Thomas up to $100,000 before transforming into a generator of amicus briefs to the court and becoming involved in the push to overturn Trump’s defeat as he sought a second term as president in 2020.Connections between Leo and Ginni Thomas have made headlines before. The Washington Post reported how, in January 2012, Leo told the political strategist Kellyanne Conway – later White House counselor to Trump – to direct money to Ginni Thomas while urging: “No mention of Ginni, of course.”Politico also noted that Ginni Thomas’s current entity, Liberty Consulting, is “a focus of interest from congressional committees”, with Senate Democrats demanding “Leo and Crow provide a list of ‘gifts, payments, or other items of value’ they’ve given Thomas and her husband”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionClarence Thomas has said he did not declare gifts from Crow, including holidays, travel, school fees and a property purchase, because he was advised he did not have to. Crow has said he did not discuss politics or business before the court with his friend.Leo and Crow have resisted congressional disclosure demands. The chief justice, John Roberts, has rebuffed requests to testify about ethics matters. Supreme court justices are nominally subject to the same ethics regulations as all federal judges but in practice govern themselves. Senate Democrats have advanced supreme court ethics reform but it has next to no chance of passing, given Republican opposition.Leo, Crow and Ginni Thomas did not comment to Politico. Lawyers for Leo have complained of harassment by Congress and dismissed a reported investigation of his work by the attorney general of Washington DC as politically biased.Receiving business and funds from groups connected to Leo would be legal if Ginni Thomas provided services commensurate with such payments. Laura Solomon, a tax attorney for charitable groups and donors, told Politico: “The real question then is, ‘What is Ginni Thomas qualified to do, what did they pay her to do, and was it fair market value?’”Politico’s report made a splash among court watchers.Norman Ornstein, emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said: “This stinks to high heaven. We need the Internal Revenue Service and the justice department to investigate. It looks like tax offenses, criminal ones, not to mention the sheer corruption. Leonard Leo and Ginni Thomas are despicable.”The New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer – co-author of Strange Justice, a biography of Clarence Thomas, and author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right – simply posted a fire emoji. More

An ex-Secret Service agent who was feet away from John F Kennedy when the former president was shot dead has broken his decades-old silence to cast doubt on the single-bullet theory held by the commission which investigated the assassination.In an interview published by the New York Times over the weekend, Paul Landis said that he long believed the official finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he killed Kennedy.But, based on discrepancies between things he saw on the day of the assassination and the report from the commission, “I’m beginning to doubt myself,” Landis said. “Now I begin to wonder.”Landis’s recollection of Kennedy’s death is bound to fuel those who believe multiple shooters killed the late president in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Yet his remarks – coming about a month before he releases a memoir – differ from two written statements which he turned in shortly after the assassination, surely keeping one of the darkest chapters in US history shrouded in mystery.Landis was on the running board of a car trailing the open-top limousine that Kennedy was riding when – as he tells it – he heard a barrage of gunshots and a bullet struck the president from behind. The Warren commission, convened to examine the investigation, concluded that one bullet then continued forward, striking fellow passenger and Texas governor John Connally in his back, thigh, chest and wrist.As the New York Times noted, the main reason for that conclusion was because the bullet was found on a stretcher used to move Connally around a hospital afterward.Enter Landis’s new interview and his upcoming memoir, The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years. Landis told the New York Times that he was the person who discovered that bullet, which he remembers being stuck in the limousine seat behind Kennedy’s seat after the president had been brought to the hospital.Landis also said he did not think the bullet went too deeply into Kennedy’s back before “popping back out” prior to the president’s removal from the car he was in. Worried someone would try to pocket it as a souvenir, Landis said he took the bullet and placed it next to a stretchered Kennedy.“It was a piece of evidence that I realized right away [was] very important,” Landis said. “And I didn’t want it to disappear or get lost. So it was, ‘Paul, you’ve got to make a decision’ – and I grabbed it.”Realizing in 2014 that the location of the bullet’s recovery cited by him was different than the one cited by the Warren commission, Landis checked with multiple officials, according to the New York Times’s story. He was generally met with skepticism, largely because of two written statements that he filed himself.Neither statement mentioned his finding the bullet in question, and he reported hearing only a pair of gunshots at the time of the assassination, the Times wrote.Landis said he was in shock and suffering from sleep deprivation at the time he filed those reports. He said he expected those reports to have mistakes and omissions because his focus at the time was on supporting the first lady Jacqueline Kennedy through her grief.Going public with his contradictions of the official Kennedy assassination narrative was not an easy decision, as his lengthy wait to do so suggests, Landis said.“I didn’t want to talk about it,” said Landis, who left the Secret Service about six months after the Kennedy assassination. “I was afraid. I started to think, did I do something wrong? There was a fear that I might have done something wrong and I shouldn’t talk about it.”The Final Witness is set to be released on 10 October. Its scheduled arrival comes less than a year after Biden’s White House directed the National Archives to publish about 12,000 documents pertaining to Kennedy’s assassination – a move that more than 70% of Americans favored, according to a new poll at about that time. More