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      Queen to meet Joe Biden at Windsor Castle on 13 June

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      The Queen will meet Joe Biden when he visits the UK for the G7 summit later this month, Buckingham Palace has announced.The head of state will welcome the US president and the first lady, Jill Biden, to Windsor Castle on Sunday 13 June. Biden is due to attend the G7 gathering in Cornwall, which will be held in Carbis Bay from 11-13 June.The Queen met Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, when he made a state visit to the UK in June 2019, in the last days of Theresa May’s premiership.The president and first lady sent their condolences to the Queen after the death of the Duke of Edinburgh in April. The Bidens said they were keeping the royal family “in our hearts during this time”.Having taken up his post in the Oval Office, the coronavirus pandemic has limited opportunities for Biden to travel outside the US, so the G7 gathering will be his first foreign engagement in person.Buckingham Palace said in a short statement: “The Queen will meet the president of the United States of America and first lady Jill Biden at Windsor Castle on Sunday 13th June 2021.”There is speculation that the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall will also meet the couple at some point during their visit to the UK.There have been 14 US presidents during the Queen’s 69-year reign – from Harry S Truman to Biden. Biden will become the 13th American leader to meet the monarch – the only one the Queen did not meet was Lyndon B Johnson.After attending the G7 gathering, when world leaders are expected to discuss a range of issues from climate change to tackling the Covid-19 pandemic, Biden will head to Brussels to join a Nato summit.He is also scheduled to meet the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Switzerland on 16 June for talks on repairing relations between Washington and Moscow. More

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      US sets – and quickly suspends – tariffs on UK and others over digital taxes

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      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

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      Biden suspends Trump-era oil drilling leases in Alaska’s Arctic refuge

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      The Biden administration on Tuesday suspended oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, reversing a drilling program approved by Donald Trump and reviving a political fight over a remote region that is home to polar bears and other wildlife – and a rich reserve of oil.The interior department order follows a temporary moratorium on oil and gas lease activities imposed by Joe Biden on his first day in office. Biden’s 20 January executive order suggested a new environmental review was needed to address possible legal flaws in a drilling program approved by the Trump administration under a 2017 law enacted by Congress.After conducting a required review, interior said it “identified defects in the underlying record of decision supporting the leases, including the lack of analysis of a reasonable range of alternatives” required under the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock environmental law.The remote, 19.6m-acre refuge is home to polar bears, caribou, snowy owls and other wildlife, including migrating birds from six continents. Republicans and the oil industry have long been trying to open up the oil-rich refuge, which is considered sacred by the indigenous Gwich’in communities, for drilling. Democrats, environmental groups and some Alaska Native tribes have been trying to block it.Bill Clinton vetoed a Republican plan to allow drilling in the refuge in 1995, when he was president, and the two parties have been fighting over the region ever since.The US bureau of land management, an interior department agency, held a lease sale for the refuge’s coastal plain on 6 January, two weeks before Biden took office.Eight days later the agency signed leases for nine tracts totaling nearly 685 sq miles. However, the issuance of the leases was not announced publicly until 19 January, former president Donald Trump’s last full day in office.Biden has opposed drilling in the region, and environmental groups have been pushing for permanent protections, which Biden demanded during the 2020 presidential campaign.The administration’s action to suspend the leases comes after officials disappointed environmental groups last week by defending a Trump administration decision to approve a major oil project on Alaska’s north slope. Critics say the action flies in the face of Biden’s pledges to address climate change.The justice department said in a court filing that opponents of the Willow project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska were seeking to stop development by “cherry-picking” the records of federal agencies to claim environmental review law violations. The filing defends the reviews underpinning last fall’s decision approving project plans.Kristen Miller, acting executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League, hailed suspension of the Arctic leasing program, which she said was the result of a flawed legal process under Trump.“Suspending these leases is a step in the right direction, and we commend the Biden administration for committing to a new program analysis that prioritizes sound science and adequate tribal consultation,” she said.More action is needed, Miller said, calling for a permanent cancellation of the leases and repeal of the 2017 law mandating drilling in the refuge’s coastal plain.The drilling mandate was included in a massive tax cut approved by congressional Republicans during Trump’s first year in office. Republicans said it could generate an estimated $1bn over 10 years, a figure Democrats call preposterously overstated.Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Nation steering committee, thanked the president and interior secretary Deb Haaland and said that tribal leaders are heartened by the Biden administration’s “commitment to protecting sacred lands and the Gwich’in way of life”. More

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      Texas Democrats say Republican voting bill marks ‘dark day for democracy’

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      Texas Democrats called Sunday “one of the darkest days” for American democracy, after Republicans pushed one of the most restrictive voting measures in the US to the cusp of law, rushing the bill through the state Senate in the middle of the night.Senate Bill 7 was passed on party lines around 6am, after eight hours of questioning by Democrats who had virtually no path to stop it. It was due to receive a vote in the House later on Sunday before reaching Governor Greg Abbott, who was expected to sign it.In closed-door negotiations, Republicans added language that could make it easier for a judge to overturn an election. They also pushed back the start of Sunday voting, when many Black churchgoers go to the polls. The measure would also eliminate drive-thru voting and 24-hour polling centers, both of which Harris county, a Democratic stronghold, introduced last year.Critics say such measures suppress turnout among minorities likely to vote Democratic. On Sunday morning Hakeem Jeffries of New York, a member of Democratic leadership in the US House, called SB7 “shameful”.“Republicans clearly in Texas and throughout the country want to make it harder to vote and easier to steal an election,” he told CNN’s State of the Union. “That’s the only way that I can interpret the voter suppression epidemic that we see working its way from Georgia to Arizona to Texas and all across the country.”At a press conference held by the Texas Democratic party, national figures including former congressman Beto O’Rourke, former housing secretary Julián Castro and his brother Joaquin Castro, a serving congressman, sought to raise the alarm.“This is gonna make it harder for the average Texan to get out and cast their ballot whether they’re Republican or Democrat,” said Julián Castro. “But it is clearly aimed at people of colour, at Black and Hispanic Texas.“The Republican party is running scared because they know that this state is changing. Senate Bill 7 is an attempt by the Republican party to hold on to their power at the expense of everybody else. And we can’t let it stand.”Michael McCaul, a senior US House Republican from Texas, told CNN he thought the law “may be more of an optics issue, restoring confidence with the American people. In my state you actually do believe that there was tremendous fraud.”There was not. Texas has only one pending voter fraud case arising from the 2020 election. Nonetheless it is the last big battleground in Republican efforts to tighten voting laws, driven by Donald Trump’s lie that the presidential election was stolen. Joe Biden on Saturday compared the Texas bill to election changes in Georgia and Arizona, as “an assault on democracy”.Since Trump’s defeat, at least 14 states have enacted restrictive voting laws, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. It has counted nearly 400 bills nationwide.The vote in the Texas Senate came a short time after a final version of the bill was made public. Republicans suspended rules that normally prohibit taking a vote on a bill that has not been posted for 24 hours. Democrats protested.The bill would empower partisan poll watchers by allowing more access to polling places and threatening criminal penalties against officials who restrict their movement. Another provision allows a judge to void an election outcome if the number of fraudulent votes could change the result, regardless of whether it was proved that fraud affected the outcome.Election officials would face penalties including felony charges for sending mail voting applications to people who did not request one. The Texas District and County Attorneys Association counted at least 16 new, expanded or enhanced crimes.Republicans are also moving to prohibit Sunday voting before 1pm, which critics call an attack on “souls to the polls”, a get-out-the-vote tactic used by Black congregations nationwide and dating back to the civil rights movement. Asked why Sunday voting couldn’t begin sooner, Texas Republican Bryan Hughes said: “Election workers want to go to church too.”State representative Nicole Collier, chair of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus, was one of three Democrats picked to negotiate the final bill. None signed it. She said she saw a draft around 11pm on Friday which was different than one received earlier and was asked to sign the next morning.Colin Allred, a US representative from Dallas, told the press conference Sunday was “one of the darkest days” for democracy in America.“This isn’t legislation,” he said. “It’s discrimination.”Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader in the US Senate, has said he will bring the For the People Act, a federal measure to protect voting rights, to the floor next month. But it has little chance of beating the filibuster, the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome the Republican minority.In an emotional appeal in support of the For the People Act, O’Rourke cited the example of civil rights legislation under President Lyndon Johnson, a Texan, in the 1960s.Calling the new federal bill “a Voting Rights Act for our day”, he said passing it would “protect the sanctity of the ballot box and make sure that no state legislature can keep us from voting. So I hope after this good fight is fought in Texas, that we direct all of our energy and all of our focus on our friends in Washington DC, who like they did in 1965 can save American democracy.”With centrist Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona opposed to filibuster reform, that seems unlikely. More

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      ‘Real compromise’ possible on Biden infrastructure plan, key Republican says

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      Negotiations with Joe Biden over a potentially massive infrastructure investment package are inching forward even though disagreements remain over the size and scope of such legislation, Republican senator Shelley Moore Capito said on Sunday.“I think we can get to real compromise, absolutely, because we’re both still in the game,” Capito told Fox News Sunday.Capito leads a group of six Republicans in regular contact with Biden and White House aides over a bill the administration wants to move through Congress promptly.The Republicans have proposed $928bn to improve roads, bridges and other traditional infrastructure projects. Much of the funding would come from money already enacted into law for other purposes.The administration’s latest offer in negotiations is for $1.7tn and would include spending on projects that go beyond traditional infrastructure, such as homecare for the elderly.The transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, told ABC’s This Week: “There’s movement in the right direction, but a lot of concern … We need to make investments over and above what would have happened anyway.” He also highlighted the need for using the infrastructure bill to address climate change and indicated opposition to shifting Covid-19 relief money to infrastructure accounts.Capito said that following a White House meeting which Republicans viewed as productive, Biden aides stepped away from some ideas Republicans pushed.“We have had some back and forth with the staff that sort of pulled back a little bit but I think we’re smoothing out those edges,” said the West Virginia senator, whose state stands to benefit significantly from infrastructure investment.Republicans continued to balk at raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations to help finance the projects.“I’m not going to vote to overturn those,” Capito said when asked about rolling back some tax cuts enacted during the Trump administration.She also held the line against including new funding for projects that go beyond physical infrastructure, saying those could be considered in other measures.Talks are expected to continue this week even though Congress is on a break, with the Senate returning on 7 June. When lawmakers return to Washington, Biden will be under pressure from Democrats to sidestep Republicans if talks do not show signs of significant progress.Buttigieg told CNN’s State of the Union there needed to be a clear direction on the infrastructure bill. “The president keeps saying ‘Inaction is not an option’ and time is not unlimited here,” he said.The New York Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand told CNN: “I think waiting any longer for Republicans to do the right thing is a misstep … I would go forward.”The Senate could use the “reconciliation” process that requires only a simple majority to advance legislation, instead of the usual 60-vote threshold. The Senate is split 50-50 with Vice-President Kamala Harris having the power to break deadlocks.It is not clear if all Democrats would go along with such a process. More

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      Trump allies herald Biden investigation of Covid origins in China

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      Allies of Donald Trump took the unusual step of speaking out on Sunday in support of Joe Biden, regarding efforts to pinpoint the source of Covid-19 and find out if China knows more about the origins of the pandemic than it is letting on.Biden said on Thursday he was expanding an investigation into the outbreak, following a departure from previous thinking by at least one US intelligence agency now leaning towards the theory that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.Michael McCaul, a Republican congressman from Texas, and Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s former deputy national security adviser who persuaded him to start using the controversial term “Wuhan virus”, both welcomed the development.“It’s absolutely essential to find out what the origin of this thing is, it’s essential for us to head off the next pandemic, it’s essential for us to better understand the variants of the current pandemic that are emerging,” Pottinger told NBC’s Meet the Press.“Both of these hypotheses that President Biden spoke of are valid, it could have emerged from a laboratory, it could have emerged from nature. Neither is supported by concrete evidence but there’s a growing amount of circumstantial evidence supporting the idea that this may have leaked from a laboratory.”The Wuhan lab theory was dismissed by many scientists and the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Trump’s advisers was that the weight of evidence supported natural origins. The World Health Organization said in February it was “extremely unlikely” Covid-19 began in a laboratory.But the theory has gained traction. On Thursday, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said: “The US intelligence community does not know exactly where, when or how the Covid-19 virus was transmitted initially but has coalesced around two likely scenarios: either it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals or it was a laboratory accident.“While two elements of the IC lean toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter – each with low or moderate confidence – the majority of elements within the IC do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.“The IC continues to examine all available evidence, consider different perspectives, and aggressively collect and analyze new information to identify the virus’s origins.”On Sunday, a WHO-affiliated health expert speaking to the BBC said the lab theory was “not off the table” and called on the US to share any intelligence.Pottinger said he believed researchers in China had more to say. “If this thing came out of a lab, there are people in China who probably know that,” he said. “China has incredible and ethical scientists, many of whom in the early stages of the pandemic suspected that this was a lab leak. [A researcher at] the Wuhan Institute of Virology said her first thought was, ‘Was this a leak from my lab?’“These people have been systematically silenced by their government. Now that the world knows how important this is, that might also provide moral courage to many of these ethical scientists for whom I think this is weighing on their consciences. I think that we’re going to see more information come out as a result of this inquiry.”The Wall Street Journal reported last week that three members of staff at a laboratory in Wuhan became sick with Covid-like symptoms before the first Covid patient was recorded in December 2019.McCaul, a former chair of the House homeland security committee, told CNN’s State of the Union he believed Biden’s 90-day intelligence review would likely be inconclusive because Chinese authorities “have destroyed everything in the lab”. But he said he welcomed the new investigation.“It more likely than not emerged out of the lab, most likely accidentally,” said McCaul, who has long argued that China and the WHO are culpable. More

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      Supreme court justice Stephen Breyer: Democrats must ‘get Republicans talking’

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      The supreme court justice Stephen Breyer has told young Americans Democrats facing Republican intransigence, obstruction and outright attacks on democracy should “get ‘em talking”, in search of compromise and progress.Breyer was speaking to middle- and high-school students on Friday, in an event organised by the National Constitution Center.The same day, Republicans in the Senate deployed the filibuster, by which the minority can thwart the will of the majority, to block the establishment of a 9/11-style commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump on 6 January.Thomas Kean, who led the 9/11 panel, told the Guardian the Republican move was “democracy’s loss”.From the White House, Joe Biden faces Republican reluctance to engage on his plans for investment in infrastructure and the pandemic-battered economy. Amid concerted attacks on voting rights in Republican states, federal bills to protect such rights seem unlikely to pass the Senate.“You need that Republican’s support?” Breyer told the listening students. “Talk to them … You say, ‘What do you think? My friend, what do you think?’ Get ’em talking. Once they start talking eventually they’ll say something you agree with.”Democrats do not agree with Trump’s lie that his election defeat by Biden was the result of electoral fraud, which fuelled the deadly attack on the Capitol. Nor do they agree with Republican attempts to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 supreme court ruling which safeguards a woman’s right to abortion.The court has a 6-3 conservative majority, after Republicans ripped up precedent to block Barack Obama’s final appointment then installed three justices under Trump, in the last case reversing their own position on appointments in the last year of a presidency.Breyer was speaking less than two weeks after the court agreed to hear a major challenge to abortion rights.The case, which the justices will hear in their next term, beginning in October, involves an attempt by Mississippi to revive a law that bans the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy.In 2019 the conservative Clarence Thomas, who has backed abortion restrictions, urged the court to feel less bound to upholding precedent. Asked about the value of adhering to past rulings, Breyer said the court should overturn precedent only in the “rare case where it’s really necessary” and said law is about stability.“The law might not be perfect but if you’re changing it all the time people won’t know what to do, and the more you change it the more people will ask to have it changed, and the more the court hears that, the more they’ll change it.”Many on the left seek change on the court, in the form of Breyer’s retirement. After the death of the progressive champion Ruth Bader Ginsburg at 87 last September, Breyer, at 82, is the oldest judge on the panel. Ginsburg was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, a strict Catholic widely seen as likely to favour overturning precedent on abortion.Brett Kavanaugh, another conservative justice, was installed by Republicans after Anthony Kennedy retired, a move supported by the Trump White House. Kennedy was conservative but a swing vote on key rulings regarding individual rights. Kavanaugh, once an aide to President George W Bush, is more reliably rightwing.Breyer told the students, aged between 11 and 18, that as part of his daily routine he watches reruns of M*A*S*H, a hit sitcom that ran from 1972 to 1983. He also rides a stationary bike and meditates.Questioned about deepening polarisation some fear may tear the US apart, Breyer said he was “basically optimistic”. For all of its flaws, he said, American democracy is “better than the alternatives”.He also urged his listeners to put “unfortunate things” in historical context.“It’s happened before,” he said. “This is not the first time that people have become discouraged with the democratic process. This is not the first time that we’ve had real racism in this country. It used to be slavery before that.” More

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      ‘Wrong and un-American’: Biden blasts Texas Republicans’ SB7 voting bill

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      Joe Biden has condemned as “wrong and un-American” a Texas state bill set to pass into law which the president said “attacks the sacred right to vote”, particularly among minorities.The bill, known as SB7, clamps down on measures such as drive-through voting and voting on Sundays. It would also empower partisan poll-watchers. Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, has said he will sign it. Democrats have said they will challenge it in court.The bill follows moves in other Republican-controlled states which sponsors insist merely seek to guard against voter fraud but which are seen by most analysts to be aimed at restricting voting by sections of the population which tend to vote Democratic.According to the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice, nearly 400 such bills have been filed this year across the US, in 14 states.Biden has already blasted such measures, for instance calling laws in Georgia “Jim Crow in the 21st century”, a reference to the system of racist segregation which remained in place for 100 years after the civil war.As in other states, major corporations have warned Texas that SB7 could harm democracy and the economy. Republicans have shrugged off such objections and in some cases ripped business leaders for speaking out.The two Republicans who put SB7 together, Texas senator Bryan Hughes and representative Briscoe Cain, called the bill “one of the most comprehensive and sensible election reform bills” in state history.In a joint statement, they said: “Even as the national media minimises the importance of election integrity, the Texas legislature has not bent to headlines or corporate virtue signalling.”Biden countered: “Today, Texas legislators put forth a bill that joins Georgia and Florida in advancing a state law that attacks the sacred right to vote. It’s part of an assault on democracy that we’ve seen far too often this year –and often disproportionately targeting Black and brown Americans.“It’s wrong and un-American. In the 21st century, we should be making it easier, not harder, for every eligible voter to vote.”Republicans have acted to tighten voting laws as the man Biden beat in the presidential election, Donald Trump, continues to dominate GOP politics and to claim his defeat was the result of mass electoral fraud, a lie repeatedly thrown out of court.On Saturday, Biden said Congress should pass two federal measures, the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Both face failure in a Senate split 50-50 and where key Democrats have said they will not support moves to abolish the filibuster, the 60-vote threshold by which the minority can block legislation.Trump’s lies about the election fuelled the deadly attack on the US Capitol by his supporters on 6 January. On Friday, Senate Republicans used the filibuster to block the formation of a 9/11-style commission to investigate that riot.Regarding the Texas bill, Biden said he “continue[d] to call on all Americans, of every party in persuasion, to stand up for our democracy and protect the right to vote and the integrity of our elections”.Prominent Texas Democrats were equally quick to register their dismay.Julián Castro, a former US housing secretary and candidate for the presidential nomination, said: “The final draft of Texas Republicans’ voter suppression bill is as bad as you can get.”SB7, he said, “restricts registration, absentee, weekend voting and polling hours … ends curb-side voting and discourages rides to polls” and includes a “disability check” for mailed ballots.“We must defeat SB7,” Castro said.The former congressman and Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, who also ran for the presidential nomination and like Castro is seen as a potential candidate for governor, thanked Biden for supporting voting rights in the state.“As you said, we should be making it easier, not harder, for every eligible voter to vote,” he wrote. “The only way to do that now is by passing the For the People Act.”Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, has said he will force a vote on that measure in June.The Texas Democratic party called SB7 a “Frankenstein’s monster”. In an emailed statement, Rose Clouston, the party’s voter protection director, said: “A bedrock principle of our democracy is that voters pick their leaders. However, right now, Texas Republicans are trying to hand pick their voters.”Sarah Labowitz, policy and advocacy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, told the New York Times SB7 was “a ruthless piece of legislation”, as “it targets voters of colour and voters with disabilities, in a state that’s already the most difficult place to vote in the country.” More