US Politics

New York man charged with threatening to kill Donald TrumpThomas Welnicki expressed interest in killing then president in interview with Capitol police in July 2020, complaint says A New York man upset with what he perceived as Donald Trump’s threat to democracy was criminally charged on Monday with threatening to kill the former president, who he once referred to as Hitler.Congressman Jim Jordan refuses to cooperate with 6 January committeeRead moreAccording to an unsealed complaint, Thomas Welnicki, 72, from Rockaway Beach, expressed interest in killing the then president in an interview with US Capitol police in July 2020 and in several calls to the Secret Service the following year.Welnicki was charged with threatening to kill, kidnap and inflict bodily harm on Trump.“Mr Welnicki intended no harm to anyone,” said his lawyer, Deirdre von Dornum, attorney-in-charge of the federal defender’s office in Brooklyn.“He was expressing how distraught he was at what he saw as the threats to our democracy posed by former President Trump.”Lawyers and spokesmen for Trump did not respond to requests for comment.Trump was identified as “Individual-1” in the complaint, which was filed in Brooklyn federal court. A footnote said “Individual-1” was president from 20 January 2017 to 20 January 2021.Welnicki allegedly told Capitol police that if Trump lost the 2020 election and refused to leave office, he would “acquire weapons” and “take him down”.According to the complaint, in one voicemail left with the Secret Service, Welnicki said he would “do anything I can to take out” Trump.“Oh yeah, that’s a threat to come and arrest me,” he was quoted as saying. “I will do anything I can to take out [Trump] and his 12 monkeys … if I had the opportunity to do it in Manhattan, that would be awesome … tomorrow [Trump] will be in Georgia, maybe I will.”The complaint said the “12 monkeys” were unnamed members of Congress who Welnicki believed supported Trump. It also said Welnicki believed there would be a $350,000 reward for killing Trump.According to the complaint, the voicemail was recorded “on or about” 4 January 2021.Trump spoke in Georgia on 4 January, in support of two Republican senators in run-off elections and to advance his lie about electoral fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden.Two days later, on 6 January, Trump told supporters in Washington to “fight like hell” to overturn the election. Five people died in the ensuing attack on the US Capitol. More than 100 police officers were hurt.The complaint said Welnicki’s threats continued in the autumn of 2021, when he likened Trump to Adolf Hitler and referred to Trump’s children.On 2 December 2021, he allegedly told the Secret Service: “The new civil war could break out and taking up arms against the government is justified when ballots don’t matter.”Trump was given the codename “Mogul” by the Secret Service – and was the subject of security scares.In June 2016, for example, a British man was arrested at a rally in Las Vegas after trying to steal a police officer’s gun. The man told police his aim had been to kill Trump, then a candidate for president.In March 2017, an intruder who said he hoped to speak to Trump breached the White House walls via the US treasury.TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsNew YorknewsReuse this content More

The Guardian view on Joe Biden’s agenda: buried in a legislative graveyardEditorialAdvances for economic and political rights are dead on arrival in the Senate unless Mr Biden can rewrite its procedural rule book Joe Biden wants to go down in history as a transformative US president. He began his time in office by passing a popular economic stimulus and Covid-19 relief bill. The Biden White House basked in comparisons with Franklin Roosevelt’s country-changing presidency. With Democrats in control of the executive and legislative branches of government, the sky seemed the limit. However, in recent months Mr Biden’s agenda – most notably on climate change – has been buried in a legislative graveyard.This is in part because the US Senate is a rare law-making body: it needs a supermajority for ordinary business. Its rules require 60 senators to give the green light for a bill to go to the floor for passage with a straightforward vote. This is the hurdle required to beat a filibuster, where debate is extended so that no vote on a bill can take place. Frustrated and hamstrung, President Biden has cooled on such mechanisms. He’s right to think about ending this manoeuvre, which is used to block legislation a majority wishes to pass. The 41 Republican senators needed to defeat “cloture” motions – those required to end a debate – could represent less than a quarter of the US population.As EJ Dionne pointed out in the Washington Post last October, the filibuster “is now a barrier to normal governing … From 1917 through 1970 (53 years), there were only 58 cloture motions. From 1971 to 2006 (35 years) there were 928. From 2007 to now (14 years) there have been 1,419.” As the use of the filibuster has become more frequent, so have the threats for “the nuclear option” to change the rules and impose simple majority votes. When Barack Obama was in the White House, Democrats eliminated the filibuster on presidential nominations other than those for the supreme court. In 2017, with Donald Trump as president, Republicans got rid of those too.On Tuesday, Mr Biden will give a major speech on voting rights in Georgia. The Republican party at a state level has been promoting suppression and gerrymandering legislation that targets minority voters and, in some cases, permits the takeover of the election administration to override an official count. The Democrats are pushing two bills to secure American democracy. This is a battle that Mr Biden cannot afford to lose. However he will struggle because of the filibuster. This could be abolished by a simple majority vote but, absurdly, two senators on the right of the party – Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona – won’t back him. The best Mr Biden can do with his one-vote Senate majority is negotiate a filibuster carve-out for voting rights.What the past year has taught Mr Biden is that advances for economic and political rights will be dead on arrival in the Senate unless he can rewrite its procedural rule book. He must do so, and convince holdout Democrats that unless they back the party agenda, they risk dooming every legislative expedition. Electing Mr Biden and Democratic majorities in Congress were meant to deliver the party’s agenda, not let it be obstructed by its opponents.TopicsUS politicsOpinionUS SenateJoe BidenRepublicansBiden administrationeditorialsReuse this content More

Seven ways Republicans are already undermining the 2024 electionDavid DaleyThe next attempted coup will not be a mob attack, but a carefully plotted and even technically legal one. Instead of costumed rioters, the insurrectionists are men in suits and ties American democracy suffered two brutal blows on 6 January.The first has been seared into the national psyche: costumed insurrectionists ransacking the US Capitol, attacking Capitol police, and interrupting the constitutionally mandated electoral college count. They got closer than anyone could imagine to Vice-President Mike Pence and other terrified leaders, some hidden behind makeshift office-furniture barricades.Then, with the marble corridors still stained with blood, 147 elected Republicans maneuvered across broken glass only to vote with the insurrectionists. Around 11pm, a majority of House Republicans voted to reject free and fair election results from Arizona; two hours later, as a weary nation slept, a similar number refused to accept results from Pennsylvania.One year later, it’s the second band of insurrectionists, the ones wearing suits and ties, that pose the most serious threat. The next attempted coup will not be a violent overthrow of the Capitol, but a carefully plotted and even technically legal one, subverting election machinery and exploiting various constitutional loopholes. It is well under way. Its plotters have learned important lessons from last year’s rushed and often-buffoonish dress rehearsal. New laws have been passed by state legislatures under the pretext of halting “election fraud” that will instead abet the next big lie. It’s frighteningly imaginable to see how it succeeds.These are the steps that Republicans are undertaking, now, to create a different outcome next time.1. Gerrymandering swing-state legislatures. It all begins here. Any effort to change election laws or to argue that legislatures have the power to appoint electors themselves requires Republican control of battleground state legislatures.2. Restricting access to the polls. In 2021, 19 states enacted 34 laws making it more difficult to cast a ballot. They included 2020’s fiercest battlegrounds, Arizona (decided in 2020 by just 10,457 votes) and Georgia.3. Capturing electoral administration. Republican legislatures in eight states, sometimes overriding the vetoes of Democratic governors, have claimed partisan control of crucial electoral responsibilities or shifted them away from elected secretaries of state. Georgia Republicans censured Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state who refused to be cowed by Trump’s attacks on the electoral process, then removed him as chair of the state election board – and seized that power for the legislature itself. Another law gives this board the power to claim control of the vote-counting process in individual counties, such as heavily Democratic Fulton county, home to Atlanta. Arizona barred its secretary of state from representing the state in litigation defending its election code – that is, until 2 January 2023, when the Democrat who currently holds the position leaves office. Texas now requires the governor, lieutenant governor and the house speaker each to sign off on any grants over $1,000 to local election boards, grants having been a popular method of expanding voting access in cities and rural areas in 2020 when states cited financial reasons for shuttering precincts.4. Pressuring – and criminalizing – the work of election officials. Many new state laws don’t simply make it harder for citizens to vote, they make it tougher for non-partisan election workers to do their jobs. Georgia, Texas and Florida have created civil penalties and fines of up to $25,000 for minor, technical infractions – for the kind of help non-partisan officials offer when needed, or obstructing the view of partisan poll workers – and even opened them to criminal prosecution.According to a Brennan Center and Bipartisan Policy Center study, a third of election workers report feeling unsafe in their jobs. As many as 25% say the toxic, bullying climate could cause them to leave their jobs. Their replacements, in positions that had once been non-partisan, non-competitive and volunteer? The big lie’s truest believers, seeking the offices some believe stole the 2020 election from them. This is a “five-alarm fire”, the Michigan secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, told the New York Times.5. Targeting key elections in 2022. The only thing that has prevented Florida/Georgia/Texas-style omnibus voting restrictions in deeply gerrymandered Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania are Democratic governors with veto power. Should Republicans claim those offices in 2022, anything is possible. Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have previously proposed allocating electoral college by congressional district rather than statewide, which would exacerbate the impact of partisan gerrymanders and probably benefit Republicans in otherwise Democratic-leaning states. Under the Wisconsin proposal, Trump would have won eight of 10 electors even though Biden received more votes.Trump has endorsed a former Fox anchor as the next governor of Arizona who he said “will fight to restore Election integrity (both past and future!)”. The two leading Republican candidates for Arizona’s secretary of state, meanwhile, are two state representatives, one of whom attended the 6 January Capitol riot. The other sponsored a bill that would have allowed the legislature to reject the certification of electors, potentially overturning free and fair results.Nationwide, of the top 15 candidates for secretary of state in five crucial battleground states, 10 question the results of the 2020 race.6. Convincing the base. According to a new NPR/Ipsos poll, two-thirds of Republicans believe that “voter fraud helped Biden win the 2020 election”. In a new University of Massachusetts poll, 71% of Republicans said Biden was not legitimately elected president. A third of Trump voters told NPR they believe the conspiracy theory that the 6 January attack was a false-flag operation by “opponents of Donald Trump, including antifa and government agents”.Trump couldn’t overturn the 2020 results, but he achieved something perhaps nearly as damaging: The “big lie” not only took hold, but it has become sacred to large majorities of angry Republicans convinced that Trump was cheated out of a second term. If this same fealty to phony fraud claims drives Republican elected officials in Congress and state legislatures in 2024, it’s disturbingly easy to imagine competing sets of electors emerging from states won by a Democratic candidate but controlled by a Republican legislature, forcing a constitutional showdown and testing the powers of state legislatures over electors.7. Ensuring that the courts won’t save us. Beware the Independent State Legislatures doctrine (ISL). ​​Once a stealth effort in Federalist Society legal circles, this extreme reading of the US constitution has as many as four supporters on a US supreme court packed with conservatives. It argues that the constitution gives state legislatures the sole authority to set all election rules – including the assigning of electoral college votes – independently, and immune from judicial review. Taken to its furthest edge, it effectively concludes that there can be no possible checks and balances on state legislatures’ authority when it comes to election law. It might sound bonkers. But in February last year, when the US supreme court dismissed as moot a challenge to Pennsylvania’s absentee ballot extension, three justices dissented and cited the ISL.If 2020 repeats itself in 2024 – a Democratic candidate with a 7 million-vote edge in the popular vote, the same slender margins in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, and embittered Republicans controlling gerrymandered legislatures – it’s hard to imagine the system holding quite the way it did, just barely, a year ago.Of course, Republicans could always win the 2024 election outright. But make no mistake: with preparations like this, they’re ready either way. They have almost three years to perfect this playbook. Those of us who believe in American democracy have much less time left to prevent it – and a much more complicated road.
David Daley is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. He is a senior fellow at FairVote
TopicsUS politicsOpinionRepublicansUS Capitol attackUS voting rightscommentReuse this content More

InterviewBernie Sanders says Democrats are failing: ‘The party has turned its back on the working class’Steven GreenhouseIn an exclusive interview, the senator says it’s time to ‘step up and take on the greed of the ruling class in America’ Senator Bernie Sanders has called on Democrats to make “a major course correction” that focuses on fighting for America’s working class and standing up to “powerful corporate interests” because the Democrats’ legislative agenda is stalled and their party faces tough prospects in this November’s elections.The White House is likely to see his comments as a shot across the bow by the left wing of a party increasingly frustrated at how centrist Democrats have managed to scupper or delay huge chunks of Biden’s domestic policy plans.In an interview with the Guardian, Sanders called on Joe Biden and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, to push to hold votes on individual bills that would be a boon to working families, citing extending the child tax credit, cutting prescription drug prices and raising the federal hourly minimum wage to $15.Such votes would be good policy and good politics, the Vermont senator insisted, saying they would show the Democrats battling for the working class while highlighting Republican opposition to hugely popular policies.“It is no great secret that the Republican party is winning more and more support from working people,” Sanders said. “It’s not because the Republican party has anything to say to them. It’s because in too many ways the Democratic party has turned its back on the working class.”Sanders, who ran for the party’s nomination in both 2016 and 2020, losing out in fierce contests to Hillary Clinton and then Biden, is a popular figure on the left of the party. The democratic socialist from Vermont remains influential and has been supportive of Biden during his first year as the party tries to cope with the twin threats of the pandemic and a resurgent and increasingly extremist Republican party.But his comments appear to reflect a growing discontent and concern with the Biden administration’s direction. “I think it’s absolutely important that we do a major course correction,” Sanders continued. “It’s important that we have the guts to take on the very powerful corporate interests that have an unbelievably powerful hold on the economy of this country.”The individual bills that Sanders favors might not attract the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster, and a defeat on them could embarrass the Democrats. But Sanders, chairman of the Senate budget committee and one of the nation’s most prominent progressive voices, said, “People can understand that you sometimes don’t have the votes. But they can’t understand why we haven’t brought up important legislation that 70 or 80% of the American people support.”Sanders spoke to the Guardian on 6 January, the same day he issued a statement that the best way to safeguard our democracy is not just to enact legislation that protects voting rights, but to address the concerns of “the vast majority of Americans” for whom “there is a disconnect between the realities of their lives and what goes on in Washington”.He said millions of Americans were concerned with such “painful realities” as “low wages, dead-end jobs, debt, homelessness, lack of healthcare”. In that statement, he said, many working-class Americans have grown disaffected with the political system because “nothing changes” for them “or, if it does, it’s usually for the worse”.In the interview, Sanders repeatedly said that Democrats need to demonstrate vigorously and visibly that they’re fighting to improve the lives of working-class Americans. “The truth of the matter is people are going to work, and half of them are living paycheck to paycheck,” Sanders said. “People are struggling with healthcare, with prescription drugs. Young families can’t afford childcare. Older workers are worried to death about retirement.”Sanders has long been troubled by America’s increasing wealth and income inequality, but he made clear that he thinks it is time for Democrats to take on the ultra-wealthy and powerful corporations – a move he said vast numbers of Americans would support. “They want the wealthy to start paying their fair share of taxes,” he said. “They think it’s absurd that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk don’t pay a nickel in federal taxes.”He praised Biden for pushing for improved childcare and extending the child tax credit. But he said it would also be good to “show working people that you are willing to step up and take on the greed of the ruling class in America right now.” He pointed repeatedly to the high prices for prescription drugs as an example of “corporate greed”.“There is no issue that people care more about than that we pay the highest prices for prescription drugs in the world,’’ he said, adding that the pharmaceutical industry has 1,500 lobbyists in Washington who “tried everything to make sure we don’t lower the cost of pharmaceuticals”.The senator said: “I think the Democrats are going to have to clear the air and say to the drug companies – and say it loudly – we’re talking about the needs of the working class – and use the expression ‘working class’. The Democrats have to make clear that they’re on the side of the working class and ready to take on the wealthy and powerful. That is not only the right thing to do, but I think it will be the politically right thing to do.”Last Wednesday evening, Sanders did a nationwide live stream in which he talked with the leaders of three long strikes: Warrior Met Coal in Alabama, Special Metals in West Virginia and the Rich Product Corporation’s Jon Donaire Desserts subsidiary in southern California. Noting that hedge funds or billionaires own large stakes in all three companies, he railed against those companies for offering modest raises or demanding that workers pay far more for health coverage even though the owners’ wealth has soared during the pandemic thanks to the booming stock market.“These entities, where the people on top have done phenomenally well, are squeezing their workers and lowering the standard of living for workers who are striking,” Sanders said. “It’s unacceptable.”In December, Sanders went to Battle Creek, Michigan, to support 1,400 Kellogg’s workers who were on strike at cereal factories in that city as well as in Memphis, Tennessee; Omaha, Nebraska; and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In the interview, Sanders said, “I think the Democratic party has to address the long-simmering debate, which is, Which side are you on? Are we prepared to stand with working families and take on powerful corporate interests?”Sanders voiced frustration with the lack of progress on Biden’s Build Back Better legislation, which the Democrats sought to enact through budget reconciliation, a process that requires only a simple majority to pass. That effort was slowed by lengthy negotiations with the centrist senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona – and then blocked when Manchin said he opposed the $2tn package, sparking leftwing fury and deep frustration in the White House.“We have tried a strategy over the last several months, which has been mostly backdoor negotiations with a handful of senators,” Sanders said. “It hasn’t succeeded on Build Back Better or on voting rights. It has demoralized millions of Americans.”He called for reviving a robust version of Build Back Better and also called for holding votes on individual parts of that legislation that would help working-class Americans. “We have to bring these things to the floor,” Sanders said. “The vast majority of people in the [Democratic] caucus are willing to fight for good policy.”Sanders added: “If I were Senator Sinema and a vote came up to lower the outrageously high cost of prescription drugs, I’d think twice if I want to get re-elected in Arizona to vote against that. If I were Mr Manchin and I know that tens of thousands of struggling families in West Virginia benefited from the expansion of the child tax credit, I’d think long and hard before I voted against it.”Sanders also called for legislation on another issue he has championed: having Medicare provide dental, vision and hearing benefits. “All these issues, they are just not Bernie Sanders standing up and saying this would be a great thing,” he said. “They are issues that are enormously popular, and on every one of them, the Republicans are in opposition. But a lot of people don’t know that because the Republicans haven’t been forced to vote on them.”TopicsBernie SandersDemocratsUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More

Georgia Republican who resisted Trump insists he stands for ‘integrity and truth’Brad Raffensperger says opponent for key post ‘should know better’ as pastor but dodges questions about election restrictions

Is the US really heading for a second civil war?
The Republican official who famously resisted Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his election defeat in Georgia has said he will run for re-election on a platform of “integrity and truth”, against an opponent who as a churchman “should know better” than to advance the former president’s lies.Capitol attack: Trump not immune from criminal referral, lawmakers insistRead moreBrad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, became a household name after he turned down Trump’s demand that he “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have [to get]” in order to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the southern state. It was the first victory by a Democrat in a presidential race in Georgia since 1992.This year, Raffensperger will run for re-election against Jody Hice, a pastor, US congressman and Trump acolyte.“Congressman Hice, he’s been in Congress for several years,” Raffensperger said on Sunday, on CBS’s Face the Nation. “He’s never done a single piece of election reform legislation.“Then he certified his own race with those same machines, the same ballots [that were used for the presidential election]. And yet for President Trump, he said you couldn’t trust that.“That’s a double-minded person. And as a pastor, he should know better. So, I’m going to run on integrity and I’m going to run on the truth. I don’t know what he’s going to run on.”Hice played a key role in legal and political attempts to overturn the 2020 election result.Writing for the Guardian to mark the anniversary of the 6 January Capitol attack, in which Trump supporters failed to stop Congress certifying the election result, the former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal said that as the riot unfolded, Hice “raced by a Democratic colleague, who told me Hice was screaming into his phone: ‘You screwed it up, y’all screwed it all up!’”Hice, Blumenthal wrote, “was tasked to present a challenge to Georgia’s electors … as part of the far-rightwing Republican faction, the Freedom Caucus, directed by Congressman Jim Jordan, of Ohio, who was in constant touch that day with Mark Meadows, the Trump chief of staff and former Freedom Caucus member, and a watchful Trump himself.“Just as the violent insurrection launched, and paramilitary groups spearheaded medieval style hand-to-hand combat against the police and burst into the Capitol, Hice posted on Instagram a photo of himself headed into the House chamber with the caption, ‘This is our 1776 moment.’”Hice deleted that post and said he condemned the violence at the Capitol. But he formally objected to results in Arizona and Pennsylvania and voted against investigation of the attack. The select committee is reportedly interested in his own phone records as Hice remains a vocal proponent of the lie that Trump lost due to electoral fraud, a lie believed by clear majorities of Republicans.Hice announced his run to be secretary of state in Georgia, last March, later gaining Trump’s endorsement. Should he win, he will be in charge of state election counts.Many outside the Republican party fear the prospect of Trump allies filling such posts in battleground states, preparatory to another attempt to overturn a presidential election.“It’s certainly not by accident that we’re seeing individuals who don’t believe in democracy aspire to be our states’ chief election officers, particularly in the states that were under the greatest spotlight in 2020,” Jocelyn Benson, Michigan secretary of state, told the Guardian earlier this month.Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp, however, have placed Georgia among Republican-run states which have implemented election laws which critics say aim to restrict Democratic turnout.Democracy under attack: how Republicans led the effort to make it harder to voteRead moreAsked about visits to Georgia this week by Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, to promote federal voting rights protections, Raffensperger told CBS: “6 January was terrible, but the response doesn’t need to be eliminating photo ID and then having same-day registration.“If you don’t have the appropriate guardrails in place, then you’re not going to have voter confidence in the results.”Pressed on claims by figures including the Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights campaigner Stacey Abrams that state election law is skewed against people of colour, Raffensperger heralded provisions for early voting and said: “I think that we have shown that Georgia has fair and honest elections. We have record registrations. We have record turnout.”He also said he was confident Hice would not take over the elections process.“The results will be the results,” Raffensperger said, “and those will be the results that will be certified. You cannot overturn the will of the people and so that won’t matter.“But at the end of the day, I will be re-elected, and he will not be.”TopicsUS voting rightsUS midterm elections 2022US elections 2024US politicsRepublicansGeorgianewsReuse this content More

Five great reads: smart supermarkets, Biden’s first year and a gaming empire built by childrenGuardian Australia’s daily round-up of compelling reads as selected by lifestyle editor Alyx Gorman Grab a piece of fruit and a beverage of your preference and settle in for Five Great Reads: your morning tea wrap of great writing, curiosity and usefulness, lovingly selected by me – Alyx Gorman, Guardian Australia’s lifestyle editor (cold brew and blueberries, in case you’re wondering).If you’d rather be reading the news as it unfolds, hop over to our live blog; and if you just want a quick hit of something other than Covid, read about this badger that discovered a trove of 209 Roman coins in Spain.If you’re reading this on our website and fancy getting it in your inbox instead, you can sign up to receive Five Great Reads as an email by popping your address in the box above. Go on, do it!Now, on to the rest of the reads.1. Big-name writers on Biden’s first yearFour leading American authors – SA Cosby, Richard Ford, Margo Jefferson and Joyce Carol Oates – share their thoughts on Biden’s leadership through 12 months of political polarisation and the pandemic.Notable quote: “The other day, someone was talking about the DW Winnicott idea of the good enough mother,” writes Pulitzer-prize winning critic and author Margo Jefferson. “She’s not a saint, she has her own problems, but she’s good enough for the child to grow up reasonably well. With Joe Biden, it’s a case of the good enough president.”How long will it take me to read? About 10 minutes.2. The rise of the sentient supermarketWell, OK they’re not really sentient, but they’re smart. AI-powered shops in the UK, Scandinavia and the US could spell the end of the grocery store as we know it.The bit that’s good for you: You never have to queue again.The bit that’s good for the supermarket: These stores have no shoplifting (and very few staff).The bit that’s a Black Mirror episode: All this is achieved by thousands of cameras tracking shoppers’ every move, and sending the bill to their phone as they walk out.How long will it take me to read? About five minutes.3. A video game empire built on child labourRoblox – a platform which allows people to not only play games, but build and make money from them – is the most valuable video game company in the world. “It is an empire built on the sale of virtual boots and hats,” Simon Parkins writes. “And considering that almost half of its users are aged 13 or under, the creativity and labour of children.”Notable quote: “It began to have a negative effect on my mental health,” says Regan Green, who spent two years working as a developer on a Sonic the Hedgehog Roblox game. “I was constantly trying to find ways to improve the project, but [the game’s creator] always wanted more out of me and I became incredibly burned out.”Yeah, but everyone is burning out at the moment. Did I mention that he was working on the game between the ages of 12 and 14?Oh. Then: “The pressure caused me to break.”4. Hanya Yanagihara on her new novel and America’s brattinessThe A Little Life author’s new book To Paradise – a work of alternative history that spans three centuries – has already been called “as good as War and Peace” (by fellow author Edmund White). Here Yanagihara talks about the book and the American ideals it explores and critiques.Yanagihara on writing very big books, while holding down a very fancy job (as editor of T Magazine): “I’m not the smartest or hardest-working or most educated person, but I am the best at time management.”I guess I need to get better at time management then. Same.So how long will it take me to read this? Five well-managed minutes.5. Exercising with a heart conditionThe latest in our How to Move series tackles fitness with a difficult ticker.Notable quote: “The importance of exercise is to increase the efficiency of the muscles to de-load the heart,” says exercise physiologist Bridget Nash. “A strong muscle is an efficient muscle.”TopicsAustralia newsFive Great ReadsUS politicsGamesfeaturesReuse this content More

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announces positive Covid testProgressive congresswoman ‘experiencing symptoms’Office says political star had booster vaccine shot last year The Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has tested positive for Covid-19.Biden health chief endures Fox News grilling over mixed Covid messagingRead moreIn a statement on Sunday evening, the office of the New York progressive said she was “experiencing symptoms and recovering at home.“The congresswoman received her booster shot this fall and encourages everyone to get their booster and follow all Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance”.New York is experiencing a huge surge of Covid cases linked to the Omicron variant, placing strain on hospitals and public health resources.The city has posted high rates of vaccination.Earlier, in an interview on Fox News Sunday, the director of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, was asked about the severity of the Omicron variant compared to the Delta variant.Walensky said: “We are starting to see data from other countries that indicate on a person-by-person basis it may not be. However, given the volume of cases that we’re seeing with Omicron we very well may see death rates rise dramatically.”According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 837,000 people have died of Covid-19 in the US. Around two-thirds of the eligible population is considered fully vaccinated but resistance to public health measures stoked by conservative politicians and media has dogged the federal response.Walensky also emphasised the importance of vaccination and booster shots, saying: “We have seen with the Omicron variant that prior infection protects you less well than it had … with prior variants.“Right now, I think the most important thing to do is to protect Americans. We do that by getting them vaccinated and getting them boosted.”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezCoronavirusNew YorkUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More