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      Janet Yellen confirmed as first female treasury secretary

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      Janet Yellen has been confirmed as the first woman to head the US Treasury.The former chair of the Federal Reserve and noted economist was approved by the Senate on an 84-15 vote. She sailed through a congressional hearing last week and had already been unanimously approved by the Senate finance committee and backed by all living former treasury secretaries.She faces a monumental task. Last week another 900,000 people filed for unemployment benefits – more than the population of San Francisco and four times the number of weekly claims made before the coronavirus pandemic struck.Businesses are closing across the US amid a surge in infections. The US reported more than 188,000 new cases for Thursday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, and close to 4,000 people are dying each day.At the hearing Yellen said it was imperative for the government to “act big” on the next coronavirus relief package and argued now is not the time to worry about the costs of a higher debt burden.Tackling the fallout of Covid-19 would be her top priority, said Yellen, and especially its disproportionately hard impact on communities of color. Black and Latino workers are still experiencing far higher rates of unemployment, at 9.9% and 9.3%, compared with their white counterparts, 6%.“We need to make sure that people aren’t going hungry in America, that they can put food on the table, that they’re not losing their homes and ending up out on the street because of evictions,” Yellen said. “We really need to address those forms of suffering, and I think we shouldn’t compromise on it.” More

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      Biden continues to unpick Trump's legacy as impeachment trial looms

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterJoe Biden has overturned Donald Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the US military, earning praise from LGBTQ+ activists as he attempts to turn the page on his predecessor.But Trump continues to cast a long shadow over Washington. On Monday the House of Representatives was poised to send an impeachment article to the Senate, setting the stage for a distractive and divisive trial of the former president.Sworn in last Wednesday, Biden has signed a blitz of executive orders aiming to undo what he regards as harmful and intolerant aspects of Trump’s legacy. Trump’s transgender ban was a reversal of Barack Obama’s decision in 2016 to allow trans people to serve openly and receive medical care to transition genders.When Trump announced the ban in 2017 on Twitter, he argued that the military needed to focus on “decisive and overwhelming victory” without being burdened by “tremendous medical costs and disruption”.Biden has brought back the Obama policy. Signing an executive order in the Oval Office, he told reporters: “This is reinstating a position that previous commanders and [defense] secretaries have supported.“And what I’m doing is enabling all qualified Americans to serve their country in uniform, and essentially restoring the situation as it existed before, with transgender personnel, if qualified in every other way, can serve their government in the United States military.”Biden was joined by retired Gen Lloyd Austin, sworn in by vice-president Kamala Harris as the defense secretary on Monday, who supported overturning the ban. A report last year by the thinktank the Palm Center, co-authored by former military surgeons general, concluded that the ban had hurt military readiness.Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters: “President Biden believes that gender identity should not be a bar to military service, and that America’s strength is found in its diversity. America is stronger at home and around the world when it is inclusive.”Trump allies condemned the order. Tony Perkins, a marine veteran and the president of the conservative Family Research Council, said: “President Biden is redirecting the military’s focus from where it has been and where it belongs – fighting and winning wars. Political correctness doesn’t win wars, but the president is indulging dangerous and unproven theories that have the potential to undermine national security.”LGBTQ rights groups welcomed the measure. The Human Rights Campaign noted that there are thousands of transgender members of the US military, making the Pentagon the biggest employer of transgender people in America. Alphonso David, its president, said: “The greatest military in the world will again value readiness over bias, and qualifications over discrimination.”Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and chief executive of GLAAD, said: “The American people, military leaders, and service members themselves, all overwhelmingly support transgender military service. They know that brave trans patriots have served throughout history and continue to serve honorably and capably, defending our country.”But while executive actions afford Biden some quick wins, the new president is facing Republican opposition to his $1.9tn coronavirus relief package. And his efforts to move on from the polarising Trump era are also running into ongoing fallout from the 2020 election.On Monday, the justice department inspector general announced an investigation into whether any officials “engaged in an improper attempt” to overturn the election. This followed a New York Times report that a former assistant attorney general, Jeffrey Clark, discussed with Trump a plot to oust the acting attorney general and falsely claim widespread voter fraud.In another development, Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit against Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, accusing him of waging “a viral disinformation campaign about Dominion” made up of “demonstrably false” allegations.Trump’s election denialism culminated on 6 January in a mob storming the US Capitol, resulting in his impeachment for “incitement of insurrection”. House Democrats were due to carry the charge across the Capitol on Monday evening, a ceremonial walk to the Senate by the prosecutors who will argue their case. The trial will start on 9 February at the earliest.A two-thirds majority of the Senate would be required to convict Trump. It is now split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, meaning 17 Republicans will be required to vote against the former president. This looks increasingly unlikely as a growing number of Republican senators appear to have cooled on the idea.Senator Marco Rubio of Florida told Fox News Sunday: “I think the trial is stupid, I think it’s counterproductive … the first chance I get to vote to end this trial, I’ll do it”.Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas said he did not believe the Senate had the constitutional authority to convict Trump after he has left office, telling Fox News “the more I talk to other Republican senators, the more they’re beginning to line up” behind that argument.Even so, the 6 January riot and series of election defeats have plunged the Republican party into internecine feuds. Arizona Republicans voted on Saturday to censure Cindy McCain, the former senator Jeff Flake and governor Doug Ducey because they were perceived as disloyal to Trump.Senator Rob Portman of Ohio announced on Monday that he will not seek re-election in 2022.“We live in an increasingly polarised country where members of both parties are being pushed further to the right and further to the left, and that means too few people who are actively looking to find common ground,” he said. “This is not a new phenomenon, of course, but a problem that has gotten worse over the past few decades.” More

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      Biden administration revives plan to put Harriet Tubman on $20 bill

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      The US treasury is taking steps to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, as was planned under Barack Obama.Harriet Tubman was a 19th-century abolitionist and political activist who escaped slavery herself, then took part in the rescues of hundreds of enslaved people, using the network of activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad.In 2016, Obama decided Tubman should replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, leading to celebrations that an escaped slave would be honored instead of a slaveowner president.Donald Trump, who placed a portrait of Jackson, who also directed genocidal campaigns against Native Americans, prominently in the Oval Office, blocked the Obama plan.Joe Biden has now revived it, White House press secretary Jen Psaki telling reporters on Monday the treasury was “exploring ways to speed up” the process and adding: “It’s important that our money reflect the history and diversity of our country.”The president has replaced the Jackson portrait in the Oval Office with one of Benjamin Franklin, the founder who appears on the $100 bill. Such bills are known to some as “Benjamins”. Obama once said he hoped the new $20 bills would come to be known as “Tubmans”.Tubman is the subject of recent biographies and a 2019 film.In 2019, biographer Andrea Dunbar Harris told the Guardian she hoped Tubman’s presence on a new $20 bill would “drive a conversation about the value of black life, period, from slavery to the present. I don’t think we can have her on the bill without us having that conversation.” More

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      US returns to global climate arena with call to act on 'emergency'

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      The US has returned to international climate action with a focus on helping the most vulnerable on the planet, Joe Biden’s climate envoy announced at a global climate summit, promising financial assistance for those afflicted by the impacts of climate breakdown.John Kerry told world leaders at the virtual Global Adaptation summit on Monday: “We’re proud to be back. We come back with humility for the absence of the last four years, and we’ll do everything in our power to make up for it.”He called on countries to “treat the crisis as the emergency that it is” by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and warned that the costs of coping with the climate change were escalating, with the US spending more than $265bn (£194bn) in one year after three storms. “We’ve reached a point where it is an absolute fact that it’s cheaper to invest in preventing damage or minimising it at least than cleaning up.”Current greenhouse gas emissions, he said, put the world on track to experience, “for the most vulnerable and poorest people on earth, fundamentally unliveable conditions, so our urgent reduction in emissions is impelled by common sense”.Kerry said the climate was a top priority for Biden. “We have a president now, thank God, who leads and tells the truth … and he knows that we have to mobilise in unprecedented ways to meet this challenge that is fast accelerating, and we have limited time to get it under control,” he said.He said the US was working on a national plan, known as a nationally determined contribution to be submitted to the UN under the Paris agreement, for emissions reductions to 2030. That would be published “as soon as practicable”, he promised.There would also be financial assistance to the poorest and most vulnerable, he promised. “We intend to make good on our climate finance pledge,” he said.Financial assistance from the US to poor countries suffering the impacts of climate-related disasters all but dried up during the Trump administration, as the US refused to continue payments into the global Green Climate Fund.The UN secretary general warned, in an interview with the Guardian last December, that without the $100bn a year in climate finance which has long been promised to flow to poor countries by 2020, the developing world would lose trust.A sizeable slice of that $100bn is expected to come from the US, directly through overseas and indirectly through development institutions and businesses.The Climate Adaptation summit, hosted by the Netherlands, included contributions from the UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel, the UK’s Boris Johnson and India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, as well as former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, and Kristalina Georgieva, head of the International Monetary Fund.Kerry warned that adaptation to the impacts of extreme weather must go along with drastic reductions in emissions. “There is no adapting to a 3C or 4C world, except for the very richest and most privileged,” he warned.“Some of the impacts are inevitable, but if we don’t act boldly and immediately by building resilience, we will see dramatic reversals in economic development for everybody, and the poorest and most vulnerable communities will pay the highest price,” he warned.Kerry called for all countries to come forward to the forthcoming UN Cop26 climate summit, in Glasgow this November, with commitments to reach net zero emissions by mid-century and national plans to reduce greenhouse gases in the next decade. More

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      Mitch McConnell 'plays the long game' to retain some power as it slips away

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      Out of power in the chamber, the Republican now faces unruly politicians and pressure over how to handle Trump impeachmentFor Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, the first few days of Joe Biden’s presidency has not been about fighting the new Democratic majority in government, it’s been about gaming out how much power he now has.McConnell, the leader of Senate Republicans for over a decade, now finds himself in the position every caucus leader dreads: out of power in the chamber, in charge of a somewhat unruly bunch of politicians, and under pressure over how to handle the impeachment of the last Republican president. Continue reading… More

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      'Racism is in the bones of our nation': Will Joe Biden answer the 'cry' for racial justice?

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      Activists are hopeful but cautious as president acknowledges ground shifted in the US after the police killing of George FloydIn his first few minutes as America’s new president, Joe Biden made a promise so sweeping that it almost seemed to deny history. “We can deliver racial justice,” Biden pledged to his factious nation. It wasn’t a commitment presented in any detail as he moved on to asserting that America would again be the leading force for good in the world, a claim that draws its own scrutiny.But Biden acknowledged that the ground has shifted over demands for racial justice in the US following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last May and the violent white nationalism of Donald Trump.“A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer,” said Biden. “And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.” Continue reading… More

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      Defense secretary Lloyd Austin demands US military sexual assault reports

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      In his first directive since taking office, US defense secretary Lloyd Austin has given his senior leaders two weeks to send him reports on sexual assault prevention programs in the military, and an assessment of what has worked and what hasn’t.Austin’s memo, which went out Saturday, fulfils a commitment made to senators last week during confirmation hearings. Joe Biden’s pick, a retired army general, vowed to immediately address the problems of sexual assault and harassment in the ranks.“This is a leadership issue,” Austin said in his two-page memo. “We will lead.”Senator after senator demanded to know what Austin planned to do about the problem. Reports of sexual assaults have steadily gone up since 2006, according to department reports, including a 13% jump in 2018 and a 3% increase in 2019. The 2020 data is not yet available.The 2018 increase fueled congressional anger and lawmakers have repeatedly called for action, including changes in the Code of Military Justice.“You do agree that we can’t keep doing the same thing that we’ve been doing for the past decade?” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, said during Austin’s confirmation hearing. “Do I have your commitment to be relentless on this issue until we can end the scourge of sexual violence in the military?”Austin agreed, telling senators: “This starts with me and you can count on me getting after this on day one.”Austin arrived at the Pentagon on Friday but spent his first hours in meetings with key leaders. He was in the Pentagon again on Saturday, making calls to counterparts around the world, and he signed the memo.In his hearing and in the memo, Austin acknowledged that the military has long struggled with the problem, but must do better.The directive calls for each leader to submit a summary of the sexual assault and harassment measures taken in the last year that show promise, and an assessment of those that do not. And he asked for relevant data for the past decade, including efforts to support victims.“Include in your report the consideration of novel approaches to any of these areas,” he said, adding that “we must not be afraid to get creative.” Austin said he plans to host a meeting on the matter with senior leaders in the coming days.Nate Galbreath, acting director of the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, said last April that he was cautiously optimistic that the lower increase in 2019 suggested a trend in declining assaults. But he also said sexual assaults are vastly under-reported.Galbreath and military leaders have rolled out new programs, including increased education and training and efforts to encourage service members to intervene when they see a bad situation. Last year officials announced a new move to root out serial offenders.Many victims don’t file criminal reports, which means investigators can’t pursue alleged attackers. Under the new system, victims who don’t want to file a public report are encouraged to confidentially provide details.Galbreath and others also have contended that the increase in reports was a good sign in that it showed that victims were more willing to come forward. More