US Politics

Colleen Echohawk, a Native American woman and key advocate in Seattle’s homelessness crisis, is running for mayor of the Pacific north-west city and laying the groundwork for it to potentially elect its first indigenous mayor.Echohawk, an enrolled member of the Kithehaki Band of the Pawnee Nation and a member of the Upper Athabascan people of Mentasta Lake, is a progressive Democrat, but one, she said, “with strong roots in pragmatism”.Her success in the race would be truly distinctive. It would mean the city that over 150 years ago approved an ordinance expelling the Native community, would be run by an Indigenous woman.As the founder of the Coalition to End Urban Indigenous Homelessness, she said she launched her campaign after recognizing over the summer that the city needed to do much more to help its homeless population amid the Covid-19 pandemic.“The status quo has been failing a lot of people in this city and we have to find ways to change, we need a fresh face up there in city hall and a prudent person who can make decisive visionary decisions because this is really a once in a generational chance,” said Echohawk, speaking to the Guardian from her campaign headquarters in the basement of her house.Echohawk is not Coast Salish, but she has lived in Seattle for 24 years. And before she announced her candidacy, she said she called the leaders of a few of the region’s tribes – Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, Suquamish Tribe and Tulalip Tribes – to let them know she was considering a run.“This is their territory and I will continue to lift them up in every way that I possibly can,” said Echohawk, who since 2013 has been the executive director of the Chief Seattle Club, a non-profit aimed at supporting the city’s Native American and Alaska Native residents, through food, housing assistance and healthcare.Echohawk is one of only a few people who has announced her candidacy after Jenny Durkan, Seattle’s mayor, revealed she would not seek a second term. But others are expected to join the race before the May filing deadline.Addressing homelessness, which has been at crisis-levels in Seattle for years, will be a key focus for Echohawk. She said she will look to ramp up affordable housing and permanent supportive housing. But she also hopes to employ more innovative ideas, while bringing together people of color, some of whom have been pushed out of the city because of soaring prices, to help develop alternative affordable housing solutions.The city’s police system is another important issue for Echohawk. At a time of nationwide reckoning over police violence and as some in the local community are calling to defund the police department altogether, she said she was prepared to start reimagining law enforcement in Seattle.She explained she has seen some great officers in the city. But added: “I’ve also seen some who have been completely brutal to some of my relatives out there experiencing homelessness. That means we have to have accountability, true accountability.”A revamp would probably involve removing some funds from the agency, and establishing a public safety department filled with mental health workers and neighborhood liaisons who could address mental health and homelessness issues. It would also mean taking law enforcement out of homeless encampment outreach.“A person who’s experiencing homelessness already has so much trauma and pain going on and then all of a sudden they’re expected to interact and try to get services from a uniformed police officer? It’s just not effective,” she said.Echohawk would also like to create an elder leadership group that, if she’s elected, she would be able to meet with every couple of weeks in an effort to receive feedback on her ideas.“That’s the traditional value that I’ll bring that other mayors might not bring because I’ve been taught to value and listen to elders and to hear from their wisdom,” she said.Echohawk’s own ancestors have been on her mind a lot since making the decision to run. She’s descended from the Pawnee people, who saw their numbers violently and dramatically reduced in the face of white expansion in the 19th century.“They suffered and they worked so hard so that I could be doing this work that I am right now,” she said. “And I hope that they’re really proud of me. I feel that they’re proud of me. I feel them with me.”This article was amended on 3 February 2021 to clarify that Echohawk is executive director, not founder, of Chief Seattle Club. More

Want to see a half-naked woman? Well, you’re in luck! The internet is full of pictures of scantily clad women. There are so many of these pictures online, in fact, that artificial intelligence (AI) now seems to assume that women just don’t like wearing clothes.That is my stripped-down summary of the results of a new research study on image-generation algorithms anyway. Researchers fed these algorithms (which function like autocomplete, but for images) pictures of a man cropped below his neck: 43% of the time the image was autocompleted with the man wearing a suit. When you fed the same algorithm a similarly cropped photo of a woman, it auto-completed her wearing a low-cut top or bikini a massive 53% of the time. For some reason, the researchers gave the algorithm a picture of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and found that it also automatically generated an image of her in a bikini. (After ethical concerns were raised on Twitter, the researchers had the computer-generated image of AOC in a swimsuit removed from the research paper.)Why was the algorithm so fond of bikini pics? Well, because garbage in means garbage out: the AI “learned” what a typical woman looked like by consuming an online dataset which contained lots of pictures of half-naked women. The study is yet another reminder that AI often comes with baked-in biases. And this is not an academic issue: as algorithms control increasingly large parts of our lives, it is a problem with devastating real-world consequences. Back in 2015, for example, Amazon discovered that the secret AI recruiting tool it was using treated any mention of the word “women’s” as a red flag. Racist facial recognition algorithms have also led to black people being arrested for crimes they didn’t commit. And, last year, an algorithm used to determine students’ A-level and GCSE grades in England seemed to disproportionately downgrade disadvantaged students.As for those image-generation algorithms that reckon women belong in bikinis? They are used in everything from digital job interview platforms to photograph editing. And they are also used to create huge amounts of deepfake porn. A computer-generated AOC in a bikini is just the tip of the iceberg: unless we start talking about algorithmic bias, the internet is going to become an unbearable place to be a woman. More

Joe Biden plans to create a taskforce to reunify families separated at the US-Mexico border by the Trump administration, as part of a new series of immigration executive actions signed at an Oval Office ceremony on Tuesday.Biden condemned Donald Trump’s immigration policies as a “stain on the reputation” of the US.The president pledged to “undo the moral and national shame of the previous administration that literally, not figuratively, ripped children from the arms of their families, their mothers, and fathers, at the border, and with no plan – none whatsoever – to reunify”.The two other orders announced on Tuesday call for a review of the changes the Trump administration made to reshape US immigration, and for programs to address the forces driving people north.A briefing document released before the president’s executive orders said Biden’s immigration plans were “centered on the basic premise that our country is safer, stronger, and more prosperous with a fair, safe and orderly immigration system that welcomes immigrants, keeps families together, and allows people – both newly arrived immigrants and people who have lived here for generations – to more fully contribute to our country”.A central piece of the Tuesday actions is the family reunification taskforce, charged with identifying and enabling the reunification of all children separated from their families by the Trump administration.The government first made the separations public with an April 2018 memo, but about a thousand families had been separated in secret in the months prior. Administration officials said children in both groups would be included in the reunification process.Biden officials said they could not say how many children had to be reunified because the policy had been implemented without a method for tracking the separated families. In an ongoing court case, a reunification committee said in December that the parents of 628 children had not been located.The taskforce will consist of government officials and be led by Biden’s nominee for secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, who was confirmed by the US Senate earlier on Tuesday.A senior administration official said the family separation policy was a “moral failure and national shame” and that reversing the policies that made it possible was a priority.The second action on Tuesday is intended to address the driving forces of migration from Central and South America. Senior administration officials said this included working with governments and not-for-profit groups to increase other countries’ capacities to host migrants and ensuring Central American refugees and asylum seekers have legal pathways to enter the US.It also directs the homeland security secretary to review the migrant protection protocols (MPP), better known as Remain in Mexico, which require asylum seekers to await their court hearings in Mexican border towns instead of in the US, as before.The Biden administration also plans to use this action to bring back some Obama-era policies, such as the Central American Minors (CAM) program, which allowed some minors to apply for refugee status from their home countries.The Trump administration made more than 400 changes to reshape immigration, according to the Migration Policy Institute, and Biden’s third action includes a review of some of these recent efforts to restrict legal immigration.This includes a review of the public charge rule, which the Trump administration expanded to allow the federal government to deny green cards and visas to immigrants if they used public benefits. Though the rule was suspended repeatedly because of lawsuits, its initial introduction created a chilling effect in immigrant communities, with families disenrolling from aid programs out of concerns about its effect on their immigration status.Administration officials said changes to US immigration would not happen “overnight” and that there would be more executive orders.Advocates are still waiting for policies that address immigration detention and Title 42, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bar on asylum seekers and refugees during the Covid-19 outbreak. An estimated 13,000 unaccompanied migrant children were deported under the order before it was temporarily blocked by a court in November.On Biden’s first day in office, he signed six executive actions on immigration, including to rescind the travel ban on people from Muslim-majority countries and halt funding for constructing the border wall. He also rolled back Trump’s policy that eliminated deportation priorities.Since taking office, Biden has also introduced a comprehensive immigration reform bill to Congress, put a 100-day moratorium on deportations – which has since been blocked in federal court – and rescinded the “zero tolerance” policy that allowed for family separations.On Monday, the Biden administration asked the US supreme court to cancel oral arguments in two forthcoming cases filed by Trump about the border wall and Remain in Mexico. The cases could effectively be moot because of Biden’s actions. More

In a damning summary of the case against Donald Trump to be made at his impeachment trial next week, prosecutors from the House of Representatives on Tuesday submitted an 80-page memorandum documenting how the then president called supporters to Washington and set them loose on the US Capitol.
Describing scenes of violence inside the Capitol in previously undisclosed detail, the prosecutors accused Trump of creating a “powder keg” of discontent among supporters who on 6 January became an “armed, angry, and dangerous” mob.
Lawyers for Trump issued a thinly argued 14-page document that said his speech did not amount to a call to storm the Capitol, and argued his trial was unconstitutional because he has left office.
In their memo, the House impeachment managers said Trump’s supporters had arrived in Washington “prepared to do whatever it took to keep him in power. All they needed to hear was that their president needed them to ‘fight like hell’. All they needed was for President Trump to strike a match.”
They placed the blame for the violence that followed – five died, hundreds were injured, members of Congress and staff were terrorized and the building was left with “bullet marks in the walls, looted art, smeared feces in hallways” – squarely at Trump’s door.
“President Trump’s responsibility for the events of 6 January is unmistakable,” the prosecutors charged.
The document cleared the way for a dramatic showdown next week, prosecutors indicating they will use new footage and witness accounts, thought to include police officer testimony, to make their case in the eyes of the public – and to extract the maximum political price from Republicans set to refuse to convict Trump no matter what the evidence against him.
Trump is charged with incitement of insurrection. If convicted, Trump could be barred from political office. But it seems unlikely Democrats will find the 17 Republican votes they need.
Trump’s lawyers said: “It is denied that President Trump incited the crowd to engage in destructive behavior.
“It is denied that the phrase, ‘If you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore’ had anything to do with the action at the Capitol, as it was clearly about the need to fight for election security in general, as evidenced by the recording of the speech.”
The Trump strategy was the result of a late personnel shift. After five lawyers resigned at the weekend, the former president announced two new lawyers, frequent Fox News contributor David Schoen and former county prosecutor Bruce Castor, as replacements.
Schoen told Fox News that “President Trump has condemned violence at all times” and “this has nothing to do with President Trump”. That assertion appeared to wither next to dozens of pages of footnoted Trump quotations going back six months that peppered the document submitted by the House managers. The document culminated with a description of Trump’s speech to supporters before he sent them to the Capitol.
“Surveying the tense crowd before him, President Trump whipped it into a frenzy, exhorting followers to ‘Fight like hell [or] you’re not going to have a country anymore’,” the memo said.
“Then he aimed them straight at the Capitol, declaring: ‘You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.’
“He summoned a mob to Washington, exhorted them into a frenzy, and aimed them like a loaded cannon down Pennsylvania Avenue,” the prosecutors charged.
The nature of Trump’s defense had been in question for weeks, amid reports he was insisting lawyers build their case around the central lie the election was stolen. A team, led by South Carolina lawyer Butch Bowers,resisted the strategy but the relationship fell apart over fees, according to multiple reports. The memo filed on Tuesday said Trump could not be tried because he had already left office.
“The 45th president believes and therefore avers that as a private citizen, the Senate has no jurisdiction over his ability to hold office,” it said.
The argument was anticipated and forcefully rebutted by the House prosecutors, who wrote, “That argument is wrong. It is also dangerous … There is no ‘January Exception’ to impeachment or any other provision of the constitution. A president must answer comprehensively for his conduct in office from his first day in office through his last.”
The article of impeachment was approved in a bipartisan House vote. Many constitutional scholars agree there is debate to be had over whether Trump’s speeches amount to “incitement” as charged.
“The rights of speech and political participation mean little if the president can provoke lawless action if he loses at the polls,” the House managers wrote. “President Trump’s incitement of deadly violence to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power, and to overturn the results of the election, was therefore a direct assault on core first amendment principles.”
The document underscored how narrowly the lawmakers trapped in the Capitol on 6 January and the country escaped more calamitous violence.
“Rioters chanted, ‘Hang Mike Pence!’” the memo said, noting that the vice-president had informed Trump he would fill his ceremonial role of counting the electoral vote in favor of Joe Biden. “Another shouted, ‘Mike Pence, we’re coming for you … fucking traitor!’ Others shouted, ‘Tell [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi we’re coming for that bitch’.
“To protect our democracy and national security – and to deter any future president who would consider provoking violence in pursuit of power – the Senate should convict President Trump and disqualify him from future federal officeholding,” the memo concluded.
“Only after President Trump is held to account for his actions can the nation move forward with unity of purpose and commitment to the constitution.” More

Kamala Harris has been criticised for wearing clothes by Dolce & Gabbana, a luxury fashion brand which has attracted controversy over clothing and advertising seen to be racially offensive.The new US vice-president wore a polo-necked wool jumper from the Italian fashion house during a lunch with President Joe Biden; a grey checked blazer and trouser suit when swearing in the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen; and a chevron jumper when Biden signed executive orders in the White House.In a series of posts on Instagram, Vittoria Vignone, who runs the popular Kamala’s Closet, a website which has charted Harris’s outfit choices, asked: “Was it an oversight on the part of her team?“It’s possible but also incredibly sloppy. They could and should be better, especially after the triumphs of last week. The timing of this so soon after her inaugural choices championed lesser-known American designers of colour is awful no matter how you look at it.”Harris was praised for wearing clothes by three black-run labels (Pyer Moss, Christopher John Rogers and Sergio Hudson) during inauguration events.Commenters on the Kamala’s Closet feed echoed Vignone.“Someone seriously needs to tell her team about Dolce and their problematic issues with race,” wrote one. “I’m stunned she would wear them.”The label had a close relationship with Melania Trump, dressing her in all black to meet the pope and attend a G7 summit. Designers including Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs said they would not dress her.“I don’t think it’s a good idea for Kamala to wear so many new expensive items during her first week in office,” Vignone added. “I also don’t think she should be wearing non-American designers, especially when there are so many American brands to choose from … she and her team should care about the impact her choices have. For example she could lift up a smaller or more affordable business instantly.”Vignone told the Guardian she had “received more messages and comments than I could respond to” after she shared the D&G images.“So many people shared my thoughts by saying I articulated something they felt themselves but couldn’t put into words,” she said.Harris is the first south Asian, black and female vice-president. During the election she was described as an “angry black woman”; called “nasty” by Trump (who also purposely mispronounced her name); and called “a cop” by the left.Newsweek printed an op-ed which suggested that Harris might not qualify for the vice-presidency – for which it apologised – while some questioned if she was black enough to represent her community. Last month, a Vogue cover featuring Harris was thought “disrespectful” by some.Dolce & Gabbana did not offer comment. More

Dolly Parton twice turned down the highest US civilian honour when Donald Trump offered it – but isn’t sure she’ll accept the presidential medal of freedom from Joe Biden, because it might seem political to do so.“I couldn’t accept it because my husband was ill,” the country music star, 75, told NBC’s Today of Trump’s first offer, “and then they asked me again about it and I wouldn’t travel because of the Covid.”In April last year, Parton donated $1m to help research and development of the Moderna vaccine against Covid-19.Then, she told the BBC: “I’m sure many, many millions of dollars from many people went into that but I felt so proud to have been part of that little seed money that hopefully will grow into something great and help to heal this world. Lord knows we need it!”Speaking to NBC, she said she had heard from the Biden administration but added: “Now I feel like if I take it, I’ll be doing politics, so I’m not sure.“I don’t work for those awards. It’d be nice but I’m not sure that I even deserve it. But it’s a nice compliment for people to think that I might deserve it.”Parton’s charity work spreads far wider than the battle against Covid, including work to boost childhood literacy. She told Today she was “just happy that anything I do can help somebody else, and when I donated the money to the Covid fund, I just wanted it to do good. Evidently, it is.”Despite a troubled start to the US vaccination campaign the Moderna shot and another from Pfizer BioNTech are in circulation as Biden looks to tackle a problem bequeathed by Trump. As of Monday morning, the US had recorded nearly 26.3m coronavirus cases and more than 443,000 deaths. Biden has said the final death toll could reach 660,000.The presidential medal of freedom is the highest US civilian honour. Trump gave it to one musician, Elvis Presley, but made headlines late in his term by bestowing it on close political allies Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan, Republican congressmen who backed the president through impeachment and other scandals.In November, the CBS Late Show host, Stephen Colbert, asked former president Barack Obama, who honoured musicians including James Taylor, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen, “How does Dolly Parton not have a presidential medal of freedom?”Obama said: “That’s a mistake. I’m shocked. Actually, that was a screw-up, I’m surprised. I think I assumed that she’d already got one and that was incorrect. I’m surprised, she deserves one.”Obama said he would “call Biden”. It seems he did. More

[embedded content]
As researchers around the world scramble to understand the dangers of several newly discovered variants of the deadly coronavirus, the US remains woefully behind in its ability to track the mutations, scientists say.
The federal government has had its “head in the sand”, failing to develop a coordinated surveillance system for tracking the genetic footprints of the virus, according to academic researchers, scientific panelists and private entrepreneurs, who say they have been urging US officials for months to make better use of the hi-tech resources already sitting in labs around the country.
Genomic sequencing looks at the entire genetic code – or genome – of viruses obtained from samples from infected patients. The technique allows researchers to watch for dangerous mutations and to track movements of specific variants, like detectives following footprints.
Most genetic variations are inconsequential. But to discover those with functional differences, like more transmissible variants first identified in the UK (B117) and in South Africa (B1351), the research is essential. Yet by Friday the US had only plotted and shared the genetic sequences of 0.3% of its coronavirus cases, ranking 30th in the world, behind countries including Portugal, Latvia and Sierra Leone, according to a tracker developed by scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Some US states have had virtually no surveillance at all.
“We’re used to being No 1 and this technology is all over the country,” said Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Shreveport, who heads a coronavirus sequencing effort there. Instead, he said, when alarms were raised about the new mutation spreading rapidly in the UK, “we were in the dark. With so few samples, the detective work becomes more like seeing a mirage in the desert.”
‘A failure of leadership’
As viruses replicate, small copying errors lead to changes in their genetic material. These mutations are one of the central features of how viruses function, mutating as they infect more and more hosts. Following the different changes can be like tracking fingerprints or footprints for homicide detectives. By watching for a sudden increase in a certain version of the virus, researchers can raise an alarm if one particular variant appears to be more transmissible than the dominant strain, as happened in December with the variant discovered in the United Kingdom, known as B117.
The UK has been a world leader in the field of genomic sequencing, budgeting £20m ($27m) at the beginning of the pandemic to fund and coordinate research by a large network of laboratories around the country. So far, it has examined 186,000 genetic samples of its coronavirus cases – more than twice as many as the US, despite a caseload that’s one-seventh the size of that of the US, according to data from the worldwide open repository of genetic information, known as Gisaid.
The US offered its scientists no such budget and coordination.
In December, as scientists around the world scrambled to understand the potential dangers of the new variant rapidly spreading around London, the US had no way of knowing whether it was also thriving there, as many states had done no genetic sampling at all. More