US Politics

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

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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

Sign up for the Guardian Today US newsletterMitch McConnell, the top Republican in the US Senate, has intensified pressure on the extremist Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, calling the “loony lies and conspiracy theories” that she endorses a “cancer for the Republican party”.In a statement to the Hill on Monday night, McConnell did not name Greene personally. But his excoriating attack was clearly targeted at the new member of Congress who is a fierce supporter of Donald Trump.Her embrace of the racist conspiracy theory QAnon and other extreme positions is causing turmoil among Republican lawmakers and across Congress.“Somebody who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr’s airplane is not living in reality,” McConnell said.In keeping with her defiant rejection of any criticism, Greene immediately fired back at McConnell through her Twitter feed. “The real cancer for the Republican party is weak Republicans who only know how to lose gracefully,” she said.The intervention of the Republican Senate leader raises the ante in the debate about what to do with Greene. Democratic leaders in the House have indicated that they are prepared to expel her from several congressional committees should Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, fail to do so first.Just weeks into her arrival in Congress, Greene’s bizarre and offensive stances on a range of subjects have created a rising chorus of calls for her to be censured. She was filmed in 2019 harassing David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting in Florida, which Greene has claimed was an “false flag” act of make-believe.A CNN review of her Facebook posts also showed that she expressed support for the idea of executing prominent Democratic leaders including Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.McConnell’s outspoken remarks on Greene can be seen as part of the delicate path he is trying to walk between the pro-Trump and post-Trump wings of the Republican party which are increasingly at loggerheads. Greene, a fervent member of the former group, has said that she recently talked with Trump and has his support.The spiraling controversy comes just a week before Trump himself is set to face his second impeachment trial, on a charge of “incitement of insurrection” relating to the 6 January storming of the Capitol building. McConnell is walking a tightrope on that issue too, having suggested that he might be open to convicting the former president while also voting with most Republicans to dismiss the case on constitutional grounds. More

Earl Washington came within nine days of being put to death by the state of Virginia. The date was set, the arrangements finalized. He would be taken to the death chamber, strapped into an electric chair, then jolted with 2,200 volts that would have paralysed his brain, stopped his heart and cooked his internal organs until his legs blistered and steam rose from his rigid and lifeless body.That was in 1985. Days before the execution Washington, a black man with severe learning difficulties who could barely read or write and had been assessed as having the developmental age of a 10-year-old, had a lucky break. He was contacted by a fellow death row inmate versed in the law who heard his story, sounded the alarm, and had the electrocution delayed.A feature of Washington’s disability was that he would defer to authority figures, readily agreeing to anything they said. In 1983, when he was picked up by police for an alleged burglary and quizzed about four other unsolved local crimes, he confessed to all of them.Three of the four crimes had to be dismissed because his account was so glaringly at odds with the evidence. But the fourth one stuck: the rape and murder of a woman the previous year.Here, too, Washington’s “confession” was profoundly suspect. It was concocted from his “yes” answers to detectives’ leading questions. When his account conflicted with forensic details, they corrected him.He said that his victim was a black woman, to which the interrogating officer replied, “Well that’s wrong, Earl, she was white.” Washington dutifully complied. “Oh, she was white,” he concurred.DNA testing eventually proved that Washington had nothing to do with the murder. In 2001 – 16 years after he came within days of execution – he was set free, an innocent man.Earl Washington is the only death row inmate in Virginia to have officially been exonerated. But the likelihood is that scores of other innocent black men were put to death by the commonwealth in the course of its grizzly 413-year history of capital punishment.This week, Virginia has the chance to make amends for what it did to Washington and to the hundreds of other African Americans it put on death row on the flimsiest of evidence. On Tuesday, the Virginia senate is expected to vote to abolish the death penalty, and by the end of the week the house of delegates is set to follow suit with its companion bill 2263.It would be hard to overstate the significance of this week’s votes. Were Virginia to end its four-century association with capital punishment, it would become the 23rd state in the union to do so.From the first execution in what is now the US, carried out in the Jamestown colony in 1608, until its most recent judicial killing in 2017, Virginia has taken the lives of more prisoners than any other state. Some 1,390 men and women have gone to their deaths.By far the largest racial group of the inmates who have been killed is African American. Which is no coincidence. The most significant aspect of abolition in Virginia, should it go ahead, is that it would be the first southern state from the old Confederacy to wean itself off a habit that was rooted in slavery and racial lynching.“This would be earth-moving,” said Dale Brumfield, a historian of capital punishment who acts as field director for Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (VADP). “To have killed more people than any other state, and then say we’re not doing this any more – it doesn’t get more remarkable.”Local abolitionists hope that, should the bill pass, Virginia’s example could have a domino effect throughout the south. Former Confederate states still account for 80% of all present-day executions.For LaKeisha Cook, a Baptist minister who has been holding prayer vigils for an end to the death penalty through the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy, repeal would be a fitting culmination to last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. “This would make a profound statement that Virginia does indeed value black lives,” she said. “That we are acknowledging our ugly history of racism and taking steps to heal.”The abolitionist cause still faces a nail-biting vote in the House, with observers expecting a very slender majority for repeal in the 100-member chamber. Democrats, who took full control in Virginia last year for the first time in a generation, will side overwhelmingly in favor.But fewer than a handful of Republicans are expected to cross the aisle. Their opposition to abolition has stiffened in the wake of Donald Trump’s recent splurge of federal executions in which 13 prisoners were killed in quick succession, including Cory Johnson from Virginia.Despite last-minute jitters, hopes are riding high that the bill will pass. If it does, abolition would all but be assured as Governor Ralph Northam has come out strongly in favor of reform and has vowed to sign it into law, probably in April.“I firmly believe that 2021 will be the year that we eliminate the death penalty in Virginia,” Mike Mullin, the Democratic delegate who introduced House Bill 2263, told the Guardian.Mullin comes from an unusual background for an abolitionist – until he joined the general assembly five years ago, he spent his entire career as a criminal prosecutor. “I’ve handled many murder cases including one death case, and since a very young age I’ve always thought capital punishment amoral,” he said.One of his motivating principles, Mullin said, was that “justice isn’t vengeance”. Innocence also preyed on his mind, with 4% of all capital prosecutions estimated to end in wrongful convictions. “When people are executed you never have the opportunity to go back and take another look.”Arguably the most powerful argument for overturning capital punishment in Virginia relates to its long history of state-sanctioned racial terror. The theme resonates even in the location of the abolition vote at the Virginia state capitol in Richmond – during the civil war the exact same spot served as the capitol of the Confederacy.“Virginia has a very dark past that it has walked for the better part of 400 years,” Mullin said. “We have a lot to make up for from our history, and it’s high time we made a start.”The statistics tell the story. From 1800 to 1920, Virginia executed 625 black and 58 white people.Such an astonishing disparity was not accidental, it was baked into the judicial system. For hundreds of years, the death sentence was a form of punishment reserved almost exclusively for African American males.Under slavery, legislation allowed black Virginians to be put on death row for any offense for which a white man might receive a prison sentence of three years or longer. In 1894, a new law made attempted rape specifically of a white woman by a black man punishable by death.Lawmakers justified the move by saying that unless the commonwealth acted to protect its white women, white men would “take matters into their own hands” and turn to lynching.The 1894 law is clear-cut confirmation that the death penalty in the US was umbilically tied to lynching. In the words of Bryan Stevenson, the leading capital defense lawyer and racial justice campaigner, death row was the “stepson of lynching”.In Virginia, the connection was direct and unashamed. “Rocket dockets” were introduced that allowed black suspects to be arrested, tried and sentenced to death in a matter of hours. “Capital punishment in Virginia, by the way it was applied, was a legalized form of lynching,” Brumfield said.Take the case of Clifton Breckenridge. The 20-year-old black man was arrested in 1909 for the attempted assault of a white girl. That same day a grand jury returned an indictment within 45 minutes, the trial lasted one hour, and the all-white jury deliberated for 12 minutes before sentencing him to death.Breckenridge was executed 31 days later.Winston Green, who like Earl Washington had learning disabilities, was the second person to be killed in the electric chair after its introduction in 1908. He was executed for the crime at age 12 of “scaring a white girl”, whom he did not even touch.Perhaps the most notorious example was that of the Martinsville Seven. In 1951, seven black men were convicted of raping or aiding and abetting the rape of a white woman. The guilty verdicts were achieved with no forensic evidence against the men, who were each forced to make confessions in the absence of a lawyer.Four of the seven were executed in a single day. Then the electric chair was allowed to cool off for a day, before the remaining three were executed.When Brumfield investigated the case of the Martinsville Seven, he found that in the same year three white men had been convicted of raping black women. None of the perpetrators went to prison – one of the white men was found guilty of raping a “feeble-minded” black woman and fined $20.There are many other cases in similar vein, extending even into the modern era. From 1900 to 1969, Virginia put to death 68 men for rape or attempted rape and in all cases the perpetrators were black – no white man was ever executed in the commonwealth for rape.Today, shocking disparities live on. Murder of a white person in Virginia remains three times as likely to end on death row than murder of a black person.Two inmates are currently awaiting execution in the commonwealth: Anthony Juniper, 50, and Thomas Porter, 46. Both are African American. Both will have their lives spared if abolition goes through, though they will remain incarcerated on life sentences with no chance of parole.Advocates of holding on to the death penalty often cite the rights of victims and their families. Even here, though, there are powerful voices for change.Rachel Sutphin’s father, Cpl Eric Sutphin of the Montgomery county sheriff’s office, was taking part in a manhunt in 2006 when he was shot and killed by an escaped prisoner, William Morva. Rachel was nine years old when her father was murdered.In the run-up to Morva’s lethal injection in July 2017 – the last execution to have taken place in Virginia – she pleaded with the then Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, to spare the life of her father’s murderer. “I knew his execution wouldn’t bring me any solace or fulfillment. Now his death is just another date in the calendar that brings me great sadness.”Sutphin is hoping bill 2263 will pass. “In this world, in 2021, we should be beyond the point of killing people for killing people,” she said. “It’s so archaic.” More

The Wall Street billionaire who has been heralded for giving Oxford University its largest donation “since the Renaissance” gave campaign contributions during the election cycle to seven of the Republican lawmakers who later voted to overturn the 2020 election results and backed candidates late last year even as they disputed Joe Biden’s victory.Stephen Schwarzman, the founder and chief executive of Blackstone Group, also financially supported a campaign group – Georgians for Kelly Loeffler – that is alleged to later have published a Facebook ad that darkened the skin of Loeffler’s Democratic opponent, Raphael Warnock.While Schwarzman has been praised for his philanthropy, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to Oxford, Yale University, MIT, and the New York Public Library, the financial support billionaires like Schwarzman, Richard Uihlein, and Jeffrey Yass gave to Trump and other rightwing Republicans is facing fresh scrutiny in light of the violent insurrection by Trump supporters on the US Capitol on 6 January.In the months before November’s election of Joe Biden, Trump would not commit to a a peaceful transfer of power or promise to respect the election results. The former president was impeached – for a second time – in the House of Representatives for inciting the violence that engulfed the Capitol on 6 January.Hours after the riot, in which five people died, including a police officer, 147 Republicans voted to invalidate the 2020 election.Public records show that Schwarzman donated about $33.5m to groups supporting Republicans in the 2020 election cycle, including $3m to Trump’s America First Action Pac, a donation he made in January 2020. Schwarzman also donated funds to political action committees supporting seven Republicans who, months later, voted to invalidate results in Pennsylvania and Arizona, a move that was seen as a direct affront to the votes of Black and other minority Americans whose support were critical to Joe Biden’s victory.According to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, Schwarzman was the third largest individual donor to Republican “objectors”, and the eight largest mega-donor in the 2020 election cycle. The late Sheldon Adelson topped the list of mega-donors, followed by two liberal donors: Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer.Asked about Schwarzman’s record, Steve Schmidt, a former Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump campaigning group that has sharply criticized major Republican donors, said: “There are few people that have financed more directly to candidates who engaged in the poisoning of American democracy.”Schwarzman himself is not a stranger to controversy. In 2010 the CEO apologized for making an “inappropriate analogy” when he likened Barack Obama’s plan to tax private equity firms to the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.In response to questions from the Guardian, a spokesperson for Schwarzman emphasized that the CEO’s last donation to Trump’s presidential campaign was in January 2020, long before the former president was accused of inciting an insurrection, and that the two have not spoken “in over six months”.Schwarzman’s spokesperson also emphasized that his assistance was “purely about matters related to economic policy and trade, not politics”.But Trump engaged in controversial and racist rhetoric long before January 2020. Documented incidents include the former president’s embrace of birtherism, his initial defense of far-right protesters in Charlottesville, his Muslim ban on immigrants, his contention that migrants from African nations and Haiti come from “shithole countries”, his statement that four progressive Democratic congresswomen of color “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came”, and his close association with advisers who embrace white supremacy.A spokesperson for Schwarzman said: “Of course Steve finds these statements objectionable and disagrees with them. As has been publicly reported, Steve did not hesitate to weigh in on areas where he disagreed with President Trump.” The spokesperson said Schwarzman supported Trump during the Democratic primaries because he believed his “policy and economic agenda were the best path forward”.While some billionaires – like Richard Uihlein of the Uline packaging company – have a record of donating to the most rightwing Republican groups, Schwarzman’s record is mixed. Public records show he donated most to Republicans who did – eventually – acknowledge and certify Biden’s win, including Joni Ernst and Rob Portman. He has also made campaign donations to Liz Cheney, one of 10 Republican members of Congress who voted in the House of Representatives to impeach the president.A spokesman for Schwarzman pointed out that the CEO’s donations to other Republicans vastly outweighed his donations to Trump.But Schwarzman also donated in the past to some of Trump’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill, including: Devin Nunes and Andy Harris, who was recently stopped by police from bringing a concealed firearm on the floor of the House of Representatives.Seven of the Republicans whose campaigns Schwarzman financially supported in 2020 ultimately voted to overturn the election results. Those donations were made early in the 2020 cycle.In September 2020, Schwarzman also donated $5,600 to Georgians for Kelly Loeffler, the former Republican senator’s political action committee. Months later, in December, as Loeffler faced a special election against her Democratic opponent, Raphael Warnock, the group published an ad on Facebook in which it is alleged that Warnock’s skin was darkened. The issue was reported at the time by Salon. Loeffler’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.There is no evidence that Schwarzman had any role in the ad or that he was aware of it, or approved or endorsed it.Schwarzman’s steadfast loyalty to Trump was described in a recent New York Times article, which pointed to the access the Wall Street financier got to world leaders in his former role as an adviser to the president, including an investment commitment from Saudi Arabia. The article also noted that Schwarzman weighed in on policy areas where he disagreed with Trump and, according to Blackstone colleagues, sought to talk him out of his more extreme positions. He reportedly called for the continuation of Daca, the immigration program that Trump sought to end, and argued but failed to convince Trump to stay in the Paris climate accord.A report in the Financial Times in the days after the US election in November alleged that Schwarzman was privately defending Trump even as others grew alarmed by the former president’s claims that the election had been stolen.At the time, Blackstone told the FT that “[Schwarzman] believes the electoral system is sound and that the democratic process will play out in an orderly and legal manner, as it has throughout our nation’s history”.After the November election, it became clear that control of the US Senate would be determined by two runoff elections in Georgia, where Loeffler and fellow Republican David Perdue faced off against two Democratic opponents.On 9 November, as Georgia tipped in Biden’s favor days after the November election, the two Republican senators in Georgia called for the resignation of Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, making unfounded claims that the official, Brad Raffensperger, had failed to deliver “honest and transparent elections”.Billionaires, including Rupert Murdoch, began pouring donations into the Republican-controlled Senate Leadership Fund to try to bolster Loeffler and Perdue’s campaigns. Among the largest was Schwarzman’s $15m donation, which was recorded in public documents as being made on 12 November, three days after Loeffler and Perdue’s unfounded challenge to Raffensperger. Loeffler would later appear on stage with the rising rightwing star Marjorie Taylor Greene, a newly elected congresswoman from Georgia who believes QAnon conspiracy theories.Then, on 23 November, three weeks after the election, Schwarzman released a statement acknowledging that Biden had won. He said: “In my comments three days after the election, I was trying to be a voice of reason and express why it’s in the national interest to have all Americans believe the election is being resolved correctly. But the outcome is very certain today, and the country should move on.”He pledged to help the new Democratic president “rebuild our post-Covid economy”.On 6 January, Schwarzman issued a further public statement in response to the riot at the Capitol, saying he was “shocked and horrified by the mob’s attempt to undermine our constitution … the outcome of the election is very clear and there must be a peaceful transition of power”.A spokesperson for Schwarzman said: “Steve made it crystal clear in a November public statement, long before the January electoral college certification, that President Joe Biden won the election and that he was ready to help the new president in any way he could. This was followed by a deeply personal statement expressing his horror and disgust at the appalling insurrection that followed President Trump’s remarks on January 6.”The spokesperson added: “Steve has been a lifelong Republican and his last donation to the campaign was January 2020, before President Biden won a single primary. As Steve’s previous statement makes clear, he strongly condemns the appalling attempts to undermine our constitution.”The Guardian asked Oxford, Yale, and MIT, to comment on Schwarzman’s record of support for Trump and his political donations. Only one institution – Yale, where Schwarzman attended university and donated $150m – defended Schwarzman’s political activity.“Mr Schwarzman did not stand by Trump through his rejection of the election results. On November 23, Mr Schwarzman stated that the election outcome was clear and that he was ready to help President Biden and his team to rebuild our economy. On January 6, like other heads of corporations, he condemned the violence at the Capitol,” the Yale spokesperson said.A spokesperson for Oxford declined to comment specifically on Schwarzman’s record of political donations.The Oxford spokesperson said: “Mr Schwarzman has been approved by our rigorous due diligence procedures which consider ethical, legal, financial and reputational issues. All decisions about donations are made by the University’s Committee to Review Donations and Research Funding, whose members include Oxford academics with expertise in relevant areas like ethics, law and business.”Schwarzman’s £150m gift to Oxford, unveiled in 2019, will be used to create the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, including a building that will bear the private equity executive’s full name.A spokesperson for MIT, which has received $250m from Schwarzman, did not comment on questions about Schwarzman’s values or his political donations, but said: “What brings our community together is mutual respect and a commitment to science, technological innovation, and the pursuit of knowledge.” More

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterTen Republican senators have agreed to continue talks with the White House in an attempt to negotiate a bipartisan coronavirus relief package, after a two-hour meeting with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on Monday night ended short of a breakthrough.The meeting lasted much longer than expected, providing a visible example of the president’s stated ambition to reach across the aisle. But the group of senators who emerged from the Oval Office shortly after 7pm did so empty-handed.The leader of the Republican pack, Susan Collins of Maine, described the meeting with the president and the vice-president as “excellent”, and “frank and very useful”. But she was clear about the huge gulf that still exists between Biden’s proposed $1.9tn package and the alternative posed by the 10 senators, which is less than a third of that size.“It was a very good exchange of views,” Collins told reporters as the meeting came to a close. “I wouldn’t say that we came together on a package tonight – no one expected that in a two-hour meeting.”She added that they did agree to “follow up and talk further on how we can continue to work together on this very important issue”.After the meeting, the White House put out a statement that bluntly underlined Biden’s unwillingness to allow his relief efforts to be delayed. “While there were areas of agreement, the president reiterated his view that Congress must respond boldly and urgently, and noted many areas which the Republican senators’ proposal does not address.”The lack of any major advance between the two sides means that Democrats are likely to continue to press ahead quickly with plans to push through Biden’s much larger package without Republican support. Hours earlier, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, filed a joint budget resolution, a step towards passing a relief package without Republican backing.That 10 Republican senators were prepared to enter into such a high-profile interaction with Biden and Harris in the first formal meeting held in the Oval Office under the new administration was significant in itself. That is the number who would be needed to vote in favor of any package to reach the 60-vote threshold in the Senate able to resist a filibuster.The gap between the Democrats’ proposed package and what the Republican senators envision remains enormous – not only is the Republican alternative small by comparison at $618bn, but it contains no funding for state and local governments and differs in other key regards.The Republican package would offer direct stimulus checks of $1,000 per individual, phasing out for anyone earning above $40,000 a year. By contrast, the Biden plan would offer $1,400 and begin phasing out above $75,000 a year.Biden’s package is also more generous in extending enhanced unemployment insurance.Reporters were allowed to witness the start of the Oval Office gathering. Biden and Harris sat on either side of a fire, with Collins on a sofa to Biden’s left and Mitt Romney of Utah to Harris’s right.The White House made efforts through the day to lower expectations about the discussions. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, indicated in the daily press briefing that there was no intention to “make or accept an offer”.She emphasized that Biden was determined to move swiftly to address the multiple crises posed by the pandemic and its economic consequences. She added: “The president believes that the risk is not going too small, but going not big enough.”Nine of the senators were physically present at the Oval Office. In addition to Collins and Romney, they included: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Todd Young of Indiana, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Rob Portman of Ohio, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia.Mike Rounds of South Dakota attended by phone. More