US Politics

The New York City mayoral race exploded into life on Wednesday night, as the Democratic primary debate saw candidates clash over whether to rein in or bolster the city’s beleaguered police force, and the two centrist frontrunners found themselves variously attacked as Republicans or gun-toters.Andrew Yang and Eric Adams, who are leading the polls along with Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, were the focus of their rivals during the debate, as eight candidates pitched themselves to be mayor of the biggest city in the US – a role once dubbed the “second toughest job in America”.The winner of the Democratic primary later this month is expected to triumph in the mayoral election proper in November, lending an extra frisson to proceedings. But less than three weeks before New Yorkers go to the polls, the debate offered little hope for progressives seeking systemic change.Poverty and homelessness, which have continued to blight New York City under the last eight years of a Democratic mayor, were left by the wayside as law and order became an enduring topic.After a year where tens of thousands of New Yorkers called for the police department (NYPD) to be cut in size amid protests against police brutality and racism, it was Yang, a tech entrepreneur who ran a high-profile campaign for US president last year, who took the remarkable position of calling for the NYPD to expand.“We need to go on a recruitment drive” to hire more police officers, Yang, the early leader in the race said, in a statement which is an anathema to the progressives in the Democratic party. The NYPD is already the largest police force in the country, with a budget of $6bn and a staff 36,000 officers and 19,000 civilian employees.“Defunding the police is not the right approach for NYC,” Yang said – a direct effort to distance himself from candidates who have called for money to be taken from the police budget and spent on social programs and mental health treatment.He later called for “more cops on the subways” – and said the officers should not just be a presence on platforms, but should conduct regular “visual inspections” of carriages.Adams, a former police officer who with Yang and Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner for New York City, has emerged as one of three frontrunners in the race, also staked out his position in support of the NYPD, linking crime to New York City’s recovery.“No one is coming to New York and our multibillion-dollar tourism industry if you have three-year-old children shot in Times Square,” Adams said, an apparent reference to a four-year-old child who was shot in the center of Manhattan in May.He went on to appeal to the city’s wealthiest residents.“When you look at our high-income earners, 65,000 people pay 51% of our income tax. When you speak to them [about] leaving the city, they talk about public safety.”Shootings in New York City have spiked in 2021. In the first three months of the year 246 people were shot, Gothamist reported – the highest rate for the first quarter since 2012. Murders in the city rose to 462 in 2020, according to the NYPD, an increase of 45% from 2019.Yang has spent weeks as the frontrunner, but Garcia, who has been boosted by an endorsement from the New York Times, has been gaining momentum as she bids to become the city’s first female mayor. Since 1834, when the mayor of New York City began to be chosen by popular vote, it has elected 109 leaders, every one of them a man, and only one of them, David Dinkins, a person of color.The first debate, which was held virtually in May, proved relatively civil, but with less than three weeks to go until the primary, things have begun to hot up, as candidates have spent $37m in TV advertising.“I don’t think you’re an empty vessel,” Scott Stringer, New York City’s comptroller and a progressive voice, told Yang at one point, referring to a description of the candidate given by one of Yang’s high-profile supporters.“I think you’re a Republican who continues to focus on the issues that will not bring back the economy.”Adams later noted that Yang left New York City during the coronavirus pandemic, and had not voted in several previous New York elections.“How the hell do we have you become our mayor with a record like this?” Adams said. “You can’t run from the city if you want to run the city.”Adams was attacked over his support for “stop and frisk”, the widely loathed policing tactic which proliferated under Rudy Giuliani’s mayorship and disproportionately targeted people of color.He was later challenged over his self-confessed habit of carrying a gun, which he is entitled to do as a former police officer. Adams has said he has carried a gun to church and claimed he would carry a gun as mayor to help save money on his security detail.Dianne Morales, a progressive who would cut $3bn from the police’s budget if elected, presented the case for curtailing law enforcement.“We can’t actually decouple the increase in crime, whether its gun violence or other crime, from the increased insecurities that New Yorkers have faced and encountered over the last 15 months,” Morales said.“I guarantee you that if we actually provided jobs to these young people and we actually provided economic stability to our communities then the violence that we’re witnessing would be dramatically decreased.”Lurking in the background of the debate was the near collapse of a progressive element to the mayoral race.Morales had become a favorite of progressives, but has suffered a spectacular implosion over the past week, which culminated in some members of her staff holding an unprecedented public protest against her campaign, claiming that she had failed to recognize their demands for fair pay and benefits.Stringer had won the endorsement of a number of high-profile leftwing Democrats, but lost much of his backing after he was accused of sexual assault by a woman who volunteered on one of his past campaigns. Stringer denies the allegations.That has left Maya Wiley, a former counsel to the current New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, seeking to consolidate the left-leaning vote, and in an email sent to supporters after the debate she described herself as “the progressive candidate that can win this race”.The polling, however, suggests otherwise. In the two most recent mayoral polls, however, Wiley came fifth and joint fourth, several points behind Adams, Garcia and Yang, and with much to do if she is to be elected mayor. More

Top Democrats are making a renewed effort to press ahead with establishing a sweeping, central investigation into the 6 January attack on the Capitol in what could be the final opportunity to hold former US president Donald Trump to account for inciting insurrection.The move reflects the resolve of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, to pursue a comprehensive inquiry even without bipartisan support, after Senate Republicans, fearful of what a full accounting of the violence might uncover, last week voted down legislation for a 9/11-style commission to scrutinize the attack by a pro-Trump mob.Pelosi said on a Democratic caucus call on Tuesday that she was prepared to create a House select committee with subpoena power to replace the commission as the principal investigation by Congress into the assault, according to sources familiar with the matter.The select committee was one of several options raised on the call that included empowering one existing committee, such as the House homeland security committee, to take charge of the congressional investigation, the sources said.Also suggested on the call was the possibility of returning the bill to create a 9/11-style commission back to the Senate for a second vote, while Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic caucus chair, floated the idea of the Department of Justice appointing a special counsel.Pelosi did not endorse any particular proposal, but she did categorically rule out a presidential commission created by Joe Biden, in large part because such a panel would lack subpoena authority or funding without a statutory change.Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip, was supportive of empowering the House homeland security committee to take charge, the sources said, while the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, and the assistant speaker, Katherine Clark, were non-committal.It was not immediately clear how Pelosi might proceed. But rank-and-file House Democrats have agitated for weeks for Pelosi to seize the reins and adopt her longstanding fallback plan of empanelling a select committee.Select committees – among the top weapons for congressional oversight – have long been convened on issues relating to corruption and cover-up, from the investigation into presidential campaign activity during Watergate to the Benghazi terrorist attacks.The creation of a select committee could break the logjam that has persisted for months on Capitol Hill over disagreements between Democrats and Republicans over how to embark on a full accounting of the attack that left five dead and scores injured.Proponents of the select committee received a boost last week from Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, who seemingly extended his endorsement to the proposal saying it was “better to investigate with a select committee than not investigate”.Pelosi has previously suggested that a select committee would focus on lines of inquiry likely to have been explored by the commission.That kind of mandate would mean a forensic examination into the root causes of the attack, the former president’s conduct as his supporters stormed the Capitol and threatened to hang his own vice-president, as well as any potential ties between Trump and the rioters.But its work could still be stymied by Republicans, who have repeatedly resisted any comprehensive inquiry into the attack, afraid of being found complicit ahead of the 2022 midterm elections in inciting insurrection by amplifying Trump’s lies about voter fraud.The number of Republicans downplaying or even outright denying the reality of what transpired on 6 January, for instance, has only increased in recent months; Congressman Andrew Clyde described the deadly insurrection as a “normal tourist visit” to the Capitol.Likely opposition – especially from Republican leaders in Congress – could also make any new findings be viewed through a partisan lens and cause a substantial proportion of the country to reject any conclusions that cast Trump in a negative light.The last select committee convened by Congress to investigate Benghazi devolved into a partisan affair, even before the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, admitted it had been created to damage the 2016 election chances of the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.But House Democrats have remained largely undeterred. “If Republicans won’t join us to protect our democracy, we have an obligation to do it ourselves,” said Teresa Leger Fernández, a member of the House administration committee. More

A New Mexico sheriff who is running for mayor of Albuquerque was interrupted at a campaign event by a flying drone with a sex toy attached to it and a man who called him a “tyrant” while swinging his fist.The campaign group for the Bernalillo county sheriff, Manuel Gonzales, said the Democrat was unharmed and “will not be intimidated”.A video posted on Facebook shows Gonzales answering questions from the audience while standing on a stage at an events centre, when the drone bearing the sex toy starts buzzing near the stage.A sheriff’s office report said the owner of the event centre grabbed the device and that a 20-year-old, Kaelan Ashby Dreyer, also tried to grab it.The report said Dreyer then turned his attention to Gonzales, swinging his fist and calling him a tyrant. A deputy wrote that Dreyer punched Gonzales’ hands and was then removed from the event.Gonzales said at a news conference on Wednesday he believed Dreyer was with several companions and spotted someone standing on the other side of a fence who he believes was flying the drone. “It became so distracting from the sound and everything I couldn’t really get my point across,” Gonzales said.Dreyer has been charged with petty misdemeanor battery and misdemeanor resisting, evading or obstructing an officer. According to a deputy in the report, Dreyer said he did not intend to hit Gonzales but was upset at the way the sheriff answered a question and intended to swing his fist through the air.Gonzales suggested on Wednesday that the stunt with the drone might have been sent by the rival campaign of the incumbent mayor, Tim Keller, also a Democrat.Keller’s campaign condemned the stunt as “disruptive, rude and immature” and denied any involvement. “To suggest we were behind it is pathetic and the kind of desperation that has marked Manny’s troubled campaign,” Keller’s campaign manager, Neri Holguin, said.Dreyer denied he was working for Keller’s campaign and said he was not a fan of the incumbent either, the Albuquerque Journal reported. He declined to comment further. More

The justice department under Donald Trump secretly obtained the phone records of four New York Times reporters as part of a leak investigation, the newspaper has reported.The case announced on Wednesday is the third instance in the past month in which a news media organisation has disclosed that federal authorities seized the records of its journalists in an effort to identify sources for national security stories published during Trump’s administration.President Joe Biden has said he would not allow the department to continue the practice of obtaining reporters’ records, calling it “simply, simply wrong”.A department spokesman, Anthony Coley, said it notified the four reporters on Wednesday that it had obtained their phone toll records last year and that it had sought to obtain non-content email records as part of “a criminal investigation into the unauthorised disclosure of classified information”.The newspaper said the records that were seized covered a nearly four-month period in 2017 and belonged to reporters Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael S Schmidt. Lichtblau has since left the newspaper.The journalists are neither the subjects nor the targets of the investigation, Coley said.Coley added: “Forthcoming annual public reports from the department covering 2019 and 2020 will indicate that members of the news media have now been notified in every instance in this period in which their records were sought or obtained in such circumstances.”The department did not disclose which article it was investigating, according to the newspaper.The period covered by the phone record seizure encompasses an April 2017 story from the four journalists that described the decision-making of then-FBI director James Comey during the conclusion of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and that referenced a classified document obtained by Russian hackers.Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, said in a statement published by the newspaper that seizing reporters’ phone records “profoundly undermines press freedom”.“It threatens to silence the sources we depend on to provide the public with essential information about what the government is doing,” Baquet said.The Washington Post disclosed last month that the justice department had last year obtained phone records belonging to three of its journalists who covered the investigation into 2016 Russian election interference. CNN later revealed that the department had seized phone records of its Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr.After those disclosures, Biden told a reporter he would not allow the department to persist in obtaining reporter phone records. That would mark a break from Democratic and Republican predecessors alike, whose administrations have seized reporter call logs in an effort to identify sources of classified information.The justice department under former attorney-general Eric Holder announced revised guidelines for leak investigations, requiring additional levels of review before a journalist could be subpoenaed – though it did not end the practice.Jeff Sessions, who served as Trump’s first attorney-general, announced in 2017 an aggressive government crackdown on leaks. More

The Biden administration announced 25% tariffs on over $2bn worth of imports from the UK and five other countries on Wednesday over their taxes on US technology companies, but immediately suspended the duties to allow time for negotiations to continue.The US trade representative, Katherine Tai, said the threatened tariffs on goods from Britain, Italy, Spain, Turkey, India and Austria had been agreed after an investigation concluded that their digital taxes discriminated against US companies.The move underscores the US threat of retaliation, first made under the Trump administration, over digital-services taxes on US-based companies including Alphabet, Apple and Facebook, that has sparked an international row over which countries should have taxing rights over some of the world’s largest companies.The US trade representative’s (USTR) office published lists of imports that would face tariffs if international tax negotiations fail to reach a solution. Goods from Britain worth $887m, including clothing, overcoats, footwear and cosmetics, would face a 25% charge as would about $386m worth of goods from Italy, including clothing, handbags and optical lenses. USTR said it would impose tariffs on goods worth $323m from Spain, $310m from Turkey, $118m from India and $65m from Austria.The potential tariffs, based on 2019 import data, aim to equal the amount of digital taxes that would be collected from US firms, a USTR official said. The news came as finance leaders from G7 countries prepare to meet in London on Friday and Saturday to discuss the state of tax negotiations, including taxation of large technology companies and a US proposal for a global minimum corporate tax. US tariffs threatened against France over its digital tax were suspended in January to allow time for negotiations.Tai said she was focused on “finding a multilateral solution” to digital taxes and other international tax issues.“Today’s actions provide time for those negotiations to continue to make progress while maintaining the option of imposing tariffs under Section 301 if warranted in the future,” Tai said.Tai faced a Wednesday deadline to announce the tariff action, or the statutory authority of the trade investigations would have lapsed.A British government spokesperson said the UK tax was aimed at ensuring tech firms pay their fair share of tax and was temporary. “Our digital services tax is reasonable, proportionate and non-discriminatory,” the spokesperson said. “It’s also temporary and we’re working positively with international partners to find a global solution to this problem.”Reuters contributed to this article More

Donald Trump has discontinued the blog-type website he launched in a fanfare less than a month ago as “a beacon of freedom” and “a place to speak freely and safely”.Jason Miller, a senior aide to the former US president, confirmed the closing of the “From the Desk of Donald J Trump” online communication tool in a statement to CNBC on Wednesday, just weeks after billing the venture as “a great resource” for his boss’s musings.Miller offered no explanation for the closure, and it remains unclear if it was a voluntary move or was imposed by a third party of some kind, like Trump’s removal from social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook for inciting the deadly 6 January Capitol insurrection.But in a tweeted reply to a Republican activist questioning if the move was “a precursor to him joining another social media platform”, Miller said: “Yes, actually, it is. Watch this space.”In the statement to CNBC, Miller attempted to paint the short-lived project as “auxiliary to the broader efforts we have and are working on”.The Trump blog, a mouthpiece for his false claims about a rigged 2020 presidential election, failed to gain traction and on 21 May the Washington Post reported it had attracted a “staggeringly small audience”.Last weekend, the website mysteriously crashed after Trump posted more falsehoods about the bizarre election “audit” in Arizona that the former president says provides proof that Joe Biden’s victory was “stolen”, despite the failure of many dozens of lawsuits challenging the result, and local, state and national officials declaring that 2020’s was the most secure election in US history.Meanwhile, without evidence, Trump insisted that there were “broken seals on boxes, ballots missing, and worse” in Arizona. Shortly after the entry was posted, the website reported a URL processing error, and the blog page went dark completely.Visitors to the donaldjtrump.com website on Wednesday found only an archive of Trump’s media statements dating back to January and a link to an online shop for Trump merchandise.Trump and his acolytes have long railed against social media platforms for their perceived bias against him, and despite the apparent one-time popularity of his posts. When Trump’s account was permanently suspended from Twitter he had almost 90 million followers.Facebook’s oversight committee, meanwhile, ruled last month that his ban should not be lifted, but left the door open for “a final decision” within six months.The closure of his blog comes as Trump, who is mulling a second presidential run in 2024, prepares to return to campaign-style rallies for the first time since he incited a mob of supporters to overrun the US Capitol building on 6 January in an attempt to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory.On Saturday he will speak at the North Carolina Republicans’ state convention in Greenville, and is planning a series of public events over the summer in other battleground states, including Florida and Ohio. More

Joe Biden has announced a national “month of action” to try to get at least 70% of Americans vaccinated against coronavirus before the Fourth of July holiday.
The president said the vaccines would allow the public to enjoy “a summer of freedom” where they could safely gather with loved ones without fear of the virus

Biden promises ‘summer of freedom’ as he urges more Americans to get vaccinated – live More