US Politics

US Congress approves sexual harassment bill in #MeToo milestoneLegislation guarantees that people who experience sexual harassment at work can seek recourse in the courts Congress on Thursday gave final approval to legislation guaranteeing that people who experience sexual harassment at work can seek recourse in the courts, a milestone for the #MeToo movement that prompted a national reckoning on the way sexual misconduct claims are handled.Man upset over Canada mask mandates calls in bomb threat to police – in Ohio Read moreThe measure, which is expected to be signed by Joe Biden, bars employment contracts from forcing people to settle sexual assault or harassment cases through arbitration rather than in court, a process that often benefits employers and keeps misconduct allegations from becoming public.Significantly, the bill is retroactive, nullifying that language in contracts nationwide and opening the door for people who had been bound by it to take legal action.Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who has spearheaded the effort, called it “one of the most significant workplace reforms in American history”.Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York, said the arbitration process was secretive and biased and denied people a basic constitutional right: a day in court.“No longer will survivors of sexual assault or harassment in the workplace come forward and be told that they are legally forbidden to sue their employer because somewhere buried in their employment contracts was this forced arbitration clause,” she said.Gillibrand, who has focused on combating sexual harassment and sexual misconduct in the military, originally introduced the legislation in 2017 with the Republican senator Lindsey Graham.The legislation had uncommonly broad, bipartisan support in a divided Congress. That allowed the bill to be passed in the Senate by unanimous consent – a procedure almost never used for significant legislation, especially one affecting tens of millions of Americans. The House passed the bill this week on a robust bipartisan basis in a 335- 97 vote.The former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson, who accused the then network chief, Roger Ailes, of making unwanted advances and harming her career when she rejected him, testified in support of the legislation. Some employee contracts at the network included binding arbitration clauses.Carlson, who appeared with Gillibrand and other senators at a news conference after Senate passage of the bill, said she could never have imagined, after coming forward with her allegations five years ago, that it would lead to a change in the law that both Democrats and Republicans would get behind.“Marching in the streets can inspire us. Editorials can open our minds. Hashtags can galvanize, but legislation is the only thing that lasts,” Carlson said.An estimated 60 million American workers have clauses tucked into their employment contracts forcing them to settle any allegations of sexual misconduct in private arbitration proceedings, rather than in court. The widespread practice has come under fire in the wake of the #MeToo movement for forcing employees to seek recourse without a jury, a chance to appeal a decision or the sunlight of a public court process.The White House released a statement earlier this month in support of the bill.TopicsUS CongressUS politicsSexual harassmentnewsReuse this content More

Trump ally vows to block ‘the left’ from overseeing key Georgia electionsFormer senator David Perdue, now running for Georgia governor, repeats false election fraud claims on campaign trail A Republican candidate for governor in Georgia has said he would not let “any of the left” run elections in his state, adding repeatedly that it would happen “over my dead body” and underscoring the violent tone that has come to shape discourse around democracy in America.Former Senator David Perdue railed against his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, in a video of a speech given on 4 February in Fayette county. Abrams, a voting rights activist, would be the first Black governor in the state’s history if elected. Perdue, who has been endorsed by Donald Trump, told his supporters: “My vision for Georgia is this: over my dead body would I ever, ever turn an election process over to Stacey Abrams or any of that woke mob ever again.”At another campaign event in Alpharetta, Georgia, Perdue repeated the “over my dead body” line,saying: “Over my dead body will we ever turn over an election to any of the left that we saw happening in 2020.”The Purdue campaign did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.The Georgia governor’s race is among the most closely-watched elections this year and a likely key battleground in the upcoming 2024 election. It played a vital role in president Joe Biden’s 2020 victory as he flipped the state, and it was also crucial to winning Democratic control of the senate when the party won two run-off elections there.That outsized role has seen Georgia become a ground zero for the national fight over voting rights and for Republicans’ baseless claims that the state’s election process was somehow fraudulent. It has also sparked a fierce fight for the office of the secretary of state, which helps run Georgia’s elections. The seat is currently held by Republican Brad Raffensperger. Perdue is one of 51 election deniers running for governor in 24 states, according to tracking by the States United Action , a non-partisan organization that monitors elections.Perdue lost his Senate seat in a runoff to Democrat John Ossoff last January. Now Perdue is running in the Republican primary against the incumbent Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who earned Trump’s ire after certifying Georgia’s election results, a process he was legally bound to uphold as governor.Perdue has earned Trump’s endorsement by expressing fierce loyalty and echoing the former president’s baseless claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election. In December Perdue went further and told Axios he wouldn’t have certified the state’s 2020 election results if he had been governor at the time.The same month, Perdue joined a lawsuit in Fulton county, Georgia, reviving unfounded allegations of voter fraud and seeking to review absentee ballots that he claimed would prove Trump won the 2020 election.Several recounts of the presidential vote affirmed Biden’s victory in Georgia. Raffensperger had also resisted pressure by Trump in an hour-long phone call in 2020 to “find” enough votes to overturn the election. Trump has now endorsed Raffensperger’s Republican opponent for secretary of state.Perdue is promising voters that if elected he will create “an election law enforcement division of the Georgia bureau of investigation”, the state’s criminal investigation agency, to ensure that only legal votes are counted.Trump falsely claimed 5,000 dead people voted in 2020 in Georgia, but a state review found only four cases of dead people voting. Perdue is already outlining how he would change the way elections are certified if he was elected. “I believe that before you can certify an election, whether it’s a president or a US senator, or a statewide basis, you have to have an outside third-party entity audit the results. Not the secretary of state,” Perdue told voters in Fayette, adding that he believed allowing the secretary of state to certify and audit elections was “sort of like you grading your own homework”.Perdue’s use of violent rhetoric comes on the heels of an unprecedented campaign of intimidation against election officials. A Reuters investigation found more 100 threats of death or violence to US election workers.It also comes as the Republican party increasingly embraces Trump’s “big lie” of a fraudulent election. In a recent poll only 21% of Republicans said they believed Joe Biden’s election was “legitimate”.Last week the RNC voted to declare the January 6 attack “legitimate political discourse’ and censured the Republican representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the House’s investigation into the attack.TopicsUS politicsRepublicansStacey AbramsGeorgianewsReuse this content More

African migrants deported in Trump era suffered abuse on return, report findsA Human Rights Watch report found Cameroonian asylum-seekers forcibly flown back home suffered imprisonment, torture and rape Cameroonian asylum-seekers deported by the Trump administration suffered imprisonment, torture and rape on their return, and many were forced in to hiding or fleeing the country once more, according to a new report.In the last months of the Trump administration, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency stepped up its deportations of African migrants, especially Cameroonians. Over 80 of them were flown to Cameroon in October and November 2020 alone, amid allegations of abuse, in which Ice detainees said they had been forced to sign or fingerprint documents believed to be waivers agreeing to their deportation.US Ice officers ‘used torture to make Africans sign own deportation orders’Read moreThe deportations took place despite warnings from lawyers and human rights groups that those being sent back would be in danger. A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report published on Thursday found that almost all of those deported in 2019 and 2020 faced reprisals of some sort on their return to Cameroon, from rape and beatings to detention and extortion or simply having their identity cards confiscated.West Cameroon is still in the grip of a conflict between the government and armed anglophone separatists, with frequent reports of arbitrary killings and military patrols in the streets. Anyone without an identity card faces the risk of detention.The 149-page HRW report, “‘How Can You Throw Us Back?’: Asylum Seekers Abused in the US and Deported to Harm in Cameroon,” says that between 2019 and 2021, Cameroonian security forces detained or imprisoned at least 39 people who had been sent back by the Trump administration. Many of those were held without due process and in inhumane conditions, some in solitary confinement.HRW found 14 cases of physical abuse, 13 by Cameroonian security forces and one by armed separatists. Three women were raped in custody by “state agents”, and other detainees were severely beaten during interrogation.The deportees had all fled Cameroon to escape the conflict, in particular the government’s brutal treatment of those suspected of involvement in the separatist movement. On being forcibly returned to Cameroon, they were additionally accused of having harmed the country’s reputation by seeking asylum.The HRW report found that Ice had failed “to protect confidential asylum documents during deportations, leading to document confiscation and apparent retribution by Cameroonian authorities”.One woman who was deported in October 2020 said she was tortured and raped by government soldiers over six weeks in detention in Bamenda, northwestern Cameroon.“Every two days … they were using ropes, [rubber] tubes, their boots, military belts … They hit me all over my body,” she told HRW. “They said that I’ve destroyed the image of Cameroon … so I had to pay for it.”After initially being allowed home, another returnee was summoned to a police station two weeks later, supposedly to pick up his documents, but he was detained instead.“They said ‘you are the guys who go out there spoiling the name of the country’. That is when my second nightmare began,” he told the Guardian. He was held for five months until his family paid a CFA franc 2m ($3500) fine for his release. He has since fled the country and is hiding elsewhere in West Africa.Many of the returnees went into hiding to avoid arrest. In the case of seven of them, according to the report, the police or army targeted family members to try to force them to reveal their whereabouts. One returnee’s sister is alleged to have been shot and killed, another’s mother was severely beaten, and the 11-year-old son of another returnee was abducted and questioned by security agents.One of the deportees, known by the pseudonym Cornelius in the report, said he and others were interrogated on arrival in 2020.“Army officers were asking us why we had sought asylum, what we had told American immigration,” Cornelius told the Guardian. Some of the returnees on the same plane were arrested and taken away and Cornelius did not see them again (HRW has not been able to trace some of the deported Cameroonians). Cornelius and others were held in a detention facility for a few days and then released, but without their personal papers.Reuse this content More

National Archives reportedly asks DoJ to investigate Trump document handlingRequest follows reports of Trump tearing up documents and sending boxes of files to Mar-a-Lago property The National Archives and Records Administration (Nara) has asked the justice department to investigate whether the former US president Donald Trump violated federal law in the handling of documents, the Washington Post has reported. The Associated Press was unable to independently confirm the report.The referral followed several Washington Post stories chronicling how Trump dealt with documents, including tearing them up. In one report, confirmed by the archives, the agency arranged the transport of 15 boxes of documents from the Mar-a-Lago property in Florida after Trump’s representatives discovered them and notified the archives.The Washington Post says the referral is asking the justice department to investigate whether Trump violated the Presidential Records Act, which requires that all presidential records of an administration be turned over to the National Archives when a president leaves office.The archives did not return multiple messages seeking comment. The justice department declined to comment. In a statement, Trump said: “Following collaborative and respectful discussions, the National Archives and Records Administration (Nara) arranged for the transport of boxes that contained presidential records in compliance with the Presidential Records Act” from Mar-a-Lago that will one day become part of the Donald J Trump presidential library.The media’s “characterisation of my relationship with Nara is fake news. It was exactly the opposite. It was a great honour to work with Nara to help formally preserve the Trump legacy,” said Trump.The archive acknowledged this week that Trump representatives had been cooperating with Nara and had located records “that had not been transferred to the National Archives at the end of the Trump administration”. Nara arranged for them to be transported to Washington. “Nara officials did not visit or raid the Mar-a-Lago property,” the agency said.Nara said the former president’s representatives are continuing to search for additional records that belong to the archives.In a separate statement, David S Ferriero, the archivist of the United States, said: “Whether through the creation of adequate and proper documentation, sound records management practices, the preservation of records, or the timely transfer of them to the National Archives at the end of an administration, there should be no question as to need for both diligence and vigilance. Records matter.”Supreme court rejects Trump bid to shield documents from January 6 panelRead moreThe issue of presidential records, the Trump administration and the archives has been central to the investigation by the House committee investigating the insurrection on 6 January that sought to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. Trump tried to withhold White House documents in a dispute that rose to the supreme court.In an 8-1 ruling last month, the court let stand a lower court ruling that said the archives could turn over documents, which include presidential diaries, visitor logs, speech drafts and handwritten notes dealing with 6 January from the files of the former chief of staff Mark Meadows. At the time, the House committee agreed to defer its attempt to retrieve some documents, at the request of the Biden administration.A referral for potential criminal prosecution from a federal agency or from Congress does not mean the justice department is likely to bring charges or that it will even investigate the matter.Questions about Trump’s handling of records date back to 2018, when Politico reported that Trump aides, fearing he might violate the law, routinely pieced together documents with tape because of his habit of tearing them up.TopicsDonald TrumpUS supreme courtUS justice systemNational ArchivesLaw (US)US politicsnewsReuse this content More

Blue states are rolling back mask rules – but experts warn it’s too soonThe lifting of mandates is coming at a time when the CDC says a vast majority of the country is still seeing high Covid transmission Several US states, many of them governed by Democrats, began rolling back mask mandates this week, a move public health experts warn could set back progress battling Covid.On Wednesday, Massachusetts, Illinois, New York and Rhode Island joined California, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey and Oregon in lifting mask mandates for some public places.The wave of relaxations comes after months of private meetings among state leaders and political focus groups after the November elections, according to reports. “Now, it’s time to give people their lives back,” Sean Maloney, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tweeted in support of New York suspending its indoor mask-or-vaccine mandate.Covid-era Americans are using public transit less and having more car crashes Read moreYet the lifting of rules has not been universally applauded and is coming at a time when the vast majority of the country (99%) is still seeing high transmission of the virus, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Public polls show consistent support for mask mandates and other precautions, and experts say the time to relax precautions is not here yet – and acting prematurely could prolong this wave.“In my view, it’s too soon. I feel like we’re anticipating too much,” said Justin Lessler, a professor of epidemiology at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. “We’re being too confident that things are going to keep going the direction that they have been going.”The CDC’s director Rochelle Walensky also recently said that “now is not the moment” to drop masks in public, although the agency is reportedly weighing changes to its guidance on masks.While Covid cases have dropped from Omicron’s record-shattering peak, the US still has an average of more than 230,000 cases each day – similar to the height of last winter’s wave – and more than 2,300 people are dying from Covid each day, according to the CDC. While hospitalizations are beginning to fall, 80% of hospitals are still under “high or extreme stress”.Treatments, including antivirals and monoclonal antibodies, that keep Covid from progressing to serious illness and death are still in short supply throughout the country. Children under the age of 5 are not yet eligible for vaccines, while less than a quarter of kids ages five to 11 are fully vaccinated.“We have hundreds of thousands of people dying, we have millions who’ve been hospitalized and we have an unknown number who have long Covid and who will get long Covid as we roll back what little mitigation we have,” said Julia Raifman, assistant professor at Boston University School of Public Health and creator of the Covid-19 US state policy database.“Saying things are normal undercuts us in getting more people vaccinated and in helping people wear masks, because transmission actually remains quite high,” Raifman said. “The best way to help people think things are more normal is to reduce the amount of virus with the mitigation measures that we have.”The failure to set measures on when to drop or reinstate precautions “starts from the top”, including the CDC and the White House, Raifman said. “The whole of the pandemic response is being mismanaged, and only better leadership can help us come together to better address it.”Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, says the US is leaving the “full blown” phase of the pandemic. In September, he said controlling the pandemic meant having fewer than 10,000 cases a day.“This is not a declaration of victory as much as an acknowledgment that we can responsibly live with this thing,” said the New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, who is also a key leader of the National Governors Association. Governors have reportedly urged Biden to “move away from the pandemic”.Many states – including Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Oregon, New Jersey and Rhode Island – are also set to lift school mask mandates. California is considering changes to the rules on school masks, while Illinois and New York will keep theirs for now. The governor of Pennsylvania lifted the school mask rule last month.Teachers’ unions have joined health experts in calling for science-based recommendations in order to keep educators and students safe, and to keep the virus from forcing further school closures caused by worker shortages.“I worry about taking off measures just because cases are trending down,” Lessler said. “At least some of the rate of decrease has to do with what little we’re doing to try to control transmission, and by stopping these measures – both directly and in the message it sends about the risk of the virus – you slow that down-trend.”A new variant could also emerge and change the situation yet again, he said. “We’ve time and time again been surprised by new variants.”Lifting measures too early and slowing the decrease in cases can result in “a lot of unnecessary cases and deaths that you might have avoided simply by waiting a few weeks”, Lessler said.“And if we change what we’re doing substantially, we may not get there, or it may take us longer to get there than anticipated.”TopicsCoronavirusOmicron variantDemocratsUS politicsCaliforniaNew YorkOregonnewsReuse this content More

‘You’re treated like a spy’: US accused of racial profiling over China InitiativeTrump programme to ‘counter Chinese national security threats’ continues to spread fear among academics with links to China It was sometime before 7am on 21 May 2015 when Xiaoxing Xi, a physics professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, was woken by people pounding on his front door. Still not fully dressed, he opened the door to be confronted by about 12 armed FBI agents.The agents burst into Xi’s house, running about, shouting “FBI, FBI”. They pointed their guns at his wife and two daughters and ordered them to walk out of their bedrooms with their hands raised. Xi was handcuffed and arrested in front of his family. His alleged crime? Four counts of wire fraud for passing sensitive US technology to China, the country of his birth. “Overnight, I was painted as a Chinese spy all over the news and internet and faced the possibility of up to 80 years in prison and a $1m fine,” he wrote in a statement to the US House of Representatives last year.Four months after his arrest, the case collapsed before reaching trial. Xi, who came to the US from China in 1989 at the age of 32, was told through his lawyer that the US justice department (DoJ) had dismissed the case after “new information came to the attention of the government”.On Monday, nearly seven years after that raid, Xi, 64, asked a federal appeals court in Philadelphia to reinstate his claims for damages against the US government and the FBI. He and his family claim that they had been “wrongly” investigated and prosecuted in 2015.The Xi family also wants a declaration that the FBI violated their fourth and fifth amendment rights. They say they have “clear evidence” the FBI violated their constitutional rights, and that years later they are still dealing with the trauma of the ordeal.“If we can’t hold the government accountable now, there will be little to stop the government from profiling other Asian American scientists and ruining more innocent people’s lives in the future,” Xi said. “The government is not entitled to do what they have done to me and my family.”This is not Xi’s first attempt to take on the US government. Last April, a lower court dismissed nine of his 10 claims, which included allegations the FBI knowingly made false statement. The court also rejected his claim that the FBI’s action was “discriminatory”.But the lower court has yet to rule on Xi’s 10th claim, which challenges the US government’s surveillance of Xi and his family. The DOJ declined to comment on the lawsuit. The FBI has been contacted by the Guardian for comment on the Xi case.Xi’s ordeal occurred under the Obama administration, but his latest attempt to secure compensation comes amid a wide-ranging debate in Washington about how the US should compete with China. Stories like Xi’s have also been emerging as more American scientists – in particular those of Chinese origin – are being caught up in the geopolitical tensions. In 2018, the Trump administration launched a China Initiative to “[reflect] the strategic priority of countering Chinese national security threats and reinforce the president’s overall national security strategy”. The DoJ website boasts a series of examples – the latest, from 5 November, detailing an alleged attempt by a Chinese intelligence officer to steal trade secrets.Last week, the FBI’s director, Christopher Wray, alleged “there is just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, our innovation, and our economic security than China”. He claimed his bureau opens a counterintelligence case against China “about twice a day”.Opponents of the China Initiative argue it creates a pervasive atmosphere of fear among American academics who used to, or still have, links to China. Until recently, they were seen by many as a bridge between the two nations.Judy Chu, a California Democrat and the first Chinese American woman in US Congress, said the China Initiative is an instrument for “racial profiling”. “[The government] has turned it into a means to terrorise Chinese scientists and engineers. Something has gone dramatically wrong,” she told US media in December.Responding to concerns, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, said to Congress in October that the DoJ would review the programme. Opposition to the initiative has grown louder in recent months. In December one former DoJ official said it had “drifted and, in some significant ways, lost its focus”.In a statement to the Guardian, a DOJ spokesperson said: “Consistent with the Attorney General’s direction, the Department is reviewing our approach to countering threats posed by the PRC government. We anticipate completing the review and providing additional information in the coming weeks.”Zhigang Suo, a Chinese-born Harvard academic who, like Xi, is also a naturalised US citizen, said the heated atmosphere was having an adverse affect. “Of course people are upset about China, but I can see it takes two people to bicker. And I’m not a fan of the juvenile behaviour on either side,” he said. “In the past, very few fellow Chinese Americans would even think of leaving the US. But now, I can tell you some of the top Chinese American scientists have either left or are thinking about leaving.”For most of the three decades since settling in the US, Suo was not interested in politics. “My wife is a political junkie, but I wasn’t interested in it at all,” he said. But on 14 January 2021, the arrest of his best friend, Gang Chen, a fellow Chinese American scientist, changed that. Chen, a Chinese-born mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was charged with hiding his links to China. The charges were later dismissed, but the incident turned Suo from an apolitical science nerd into a political activist. “Before [the China Initiative], you were innocent until proven guilty. Now, you are guilty until you prove you are innocent,” Suo said. “I fear this is the start of a slow process of brain drain for America. Historically, brain drain precedes the decline of great nations.”In a recent interview with the New York Times, Chen, who has now been released, said: “You work hard, you have good output, you build a reputation … The government gets what they want, right? But in the end, you’re treated like a spy. That just breaks your heart. It breaks your confidence.”Supporters of the China Initiative argue that this China-focused programme is not completely without merit. They point to the recent case of a Harvard chemistry professor, Charles Lieber, who, in December,was found guilty of six felony counts, including failure to disclose his associations and funding from a China-based university and the country’s controversial talent programme.But that same month, a Bloomberg analysis showed that among 50 indictments announced or unsealed since the programme’s inception, “only 20% of the cases allege economic espionage, and most of those are unresolved. Just three claim that secrets were handed over to Chinese agents.”Xi said the nightmare experience seven years ago interrupted his “American dream”. Although the charges were quickly dropped and his university position reinstated, his career has been damaged nevertheless, he said. “My research programme is now much smaller… I’m scared of applying for funding because as long as I do anything imperfectly, it could one day come back to haunt me.”Yet, despite the ordeal, Xi said he had also learned an important lesson. “If we – Americans of Chinese descent – want our environment improved, we need to speak out and fight for our rights. This is how democracy operates.”TopicsUS newsChinaUS politicsUS foreign policyRaceAsia PacificfeaturesReuse this content More

‘Gazpacho police’: Nazi gaffe lands Republican congresswoman in the soupMarjorie Taylor Greene appears to confuse Hitler’s secret police with popular Spanish cold tomato soup The extremist Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene triggered a wave of viral jokes on Wednesday after ranting about the “gazpacho police” patrolling the Capitol building in Washington DC.Greene was apparently mixing up the famously cold Spanish soup gazpacho with the Gestapo – the brutal Nazi-era secret police in Germany.Marjorie Taylor Greene apologizes for comparing House mask rule to the HolocaustRead moreThe Georgia congresswoman has made numerous bigoted statements and her spreading of Covid misinformation has seen her ousted from Twitter. She made the most recent comments in an interview on Real America with Dan Ball, produced by the rightwing One America News Network television channel.“Not only do we have the DC jail which is the DC gulag, but now we have Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work that we do, spying on our staff and spying on American citizens,” she said, referring to the Democratic speaker of the House.Greene did not explain why she thought Pelosi would form a police force inspired by gazpacho soup, nor why it would then carry out such extensive surveillance at the heart of American democracy.Predictably, Greene’s apparent gaffe prompted a wave of internet hilarity and jokes.“Gazpacho is a cold tomato soup. Gestapo is the Nazi police force. Neither of these things are right,” tweeted political journalist Jake Sherman.“How dare MTG blame Gazpacho, when we all know that Vichyssoise Violence is the real culprit,” quipped podcast host Emily Brandwin.Sarakshi Rai, a senior journalist at the Hill, added: “I was wondering why everybody in DC was tweeting about gazpacho and now I’m just craving some for dinner.”TopicsRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More