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      Biden supporters mostly back him in 2024 election because they oppose Trump, poll finds

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      More than half of Joe Biden’s supporters are primarily motivated to cast their vote for the president in order to prevent a return of Donald Trump to the White House, according to a new poll.Opposing Trump is the main reason to back Biden for 54% of the Democratic incumbent’s voters, the new CBS/YouGov poll found, up from 47% in a similar survey conducted in March, which was prior to the presumptive Republican nominee being found guilty of business fraud by a New York jury.A further 27% of Biden voters are supporting the president because they like him – down from 31% in March – while 19% say that they are backing him because he is the Democratic nominee for president.The poll comes as the Biden campaign has ramped up its rhetoric in attacking Trump directly in recent weeks, pointing to the former president’s felony conviction and string of past controversies. Last week, Biden said his predecessor is “reckless and dangerous” for complaining that his New York trial was rigged and claimed that he had been driven “crazy” by his 2020 election loss.The outcome of this year’s presidential election remains in the balance, with the new CBS poll finding Biden and Trump are essentially tied nationally and in key swing states. Trump is on 50% of support among likely voters, and Biden is on 49%, with these figures switched for likely voters in battleground states.Trump has enjoyed an edge over Biden in most polls taken in recent months, although there is some evidence of a slight shift towards the president in the wake of his predecessor’s felony conviction. Trump, who faces three other felony trials for hoarding classified documents and for trying to subvert the 2020 election, is tentatively scheduled to be sentenced in the New York case on 11 July.However, the CBS poll found that 55% of likely voters say that Trump’s conviction is not a factor in their choice for president, with 28% saying it will be a major factor. While Trump has enjoyed a fundraising surge from supporters following the trial, the poll found that just 14% of his voters are backing him because of his conviction, with the vast majority saying it isn’t a factor for them.Eight in 10 Trump voters believe, wrongly, that the former president was charged due to the actions of the Biden administration rather than local prosecutors, the poll found.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOverall, the main motivating issues for voters are the state of the US economy, inflation, the health of democracy and crime, according to the poll. More

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      Mayorkas insists immigration order not at odds with Biden’s campaign promise

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      The US homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, defended both the timing and substance of Joe Biden’s new executive order to restrict immigration at the southern border, as the president faces criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike over the measure.The order, issued on Tuesday, tells officials to shut down asylum requests once the average number of encounters between legal ports of entry reaches 2,500 or more. If the number of encounters falls to 1,500 or fewer for seven consecutive days, the border would reopen two weeks later.During an interview on ABC News’s This Week, host Martha Raddatz noted that crossings had never reached the threshold of falling to 1,500 or fewer during Biden’s presidency – and Mayorkas declined to say whether he expected it to happen before election day.Mayorkas declined to give a concrete timeline on when to expect border crossings to meet the targeted threshold. Mayorkas was impeached by House Republicans earlier this year over his handling of the border, but the charges were quickly dismissed by the Senate.“We are at a very early stage. Implementation, as you noted, has just begun,” Mayorkas told Raddatz on Sunday. “It’s early, the signs are positive. Our personnel have done an extraordinary job in implementing a very big shift in how we operate on the southern border.”Some Democrats have assailed the order as essentially a revival of the Trump administration’s asylum ban, which was struck down by federal courts. Biden also criticized the measure when he was a candidate for president.Mayorkas insisted on Sunday that the executive order was not at odds with Biden’s campaign promise.“What the president said then is what we are living today,” he said. “We are allowing individuals to access asylum through the ports of entry, pursuant to a program that we developed. We are allowing people to access asylum if they come from the countries of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.”Republicans have dismissed the policy as insufficient and an election-year stunt. “This is like turning a garden hose on a five-alarm fire. And the American people are not fools. They know that this play is too little, too late,” Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, said last week. But the Republican criticism comes after Republican senators twice blocked a sweeping bipartisan border security bill. Trump, who is the presumptive Republican nominee in November’s presidential election, had lobbied against the measure.Mayorkas defended the timing of the executive order, which came four months after the border bill first failed. He said the administration would have preferred for Congress to act.“The bipartisan deal was rejected once. We pressed forward again. It was rejected a second time. And then we developed this and have implemented it and we are at an early stage,” he said. “And let’s not minimize the significance of this move and the significance of operationalizing it. And it requires the cooperation of other countries which we have secured.” More

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      Could RFK swing enough votes from Trump and Biden to decide the election?

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      View image in fullscreenThe Kennedy name looms large over American politics. John F Kennedy, despite serving only twoand a half years as president before his assassination, is frequently ranked among the top 10 US leaders; his brother, Robert F Kennedy, seemed set for his own spell in the White House until he too was killed in 1968.Enter: Robert F Kennedy Jr, nephew of the former, son of the latter and increasingly, persona non grata of the surviving Kennedy clan.Part-time environmental lawyer, full-time conspiracy theorist, an animal enthusiast who owned a pet lion at his elite boarding school and who, in his telling, had part of his brain eaten by a worm, Kennedy entered the 2024 presidential race as a Democrat running against Biden, before switching to an independent in October last year. The 70-year-old, who also has a history of associating with white supremacists, is an unknown quantity in the 2024 election race, with both parties worried about the havoc he could wreak.Five months out from perhaps the most consequential election in recent US history, Biden and Trump continue to be unpopular with the American public. Kennedy’s ability to be neither of those men, and his willingness to lean into his family name, have positioned him as a spanner in the works of American democracy.Both Democrats and Republicans fear that Kennedy, who is polling at about 10% nationally, could pull votes away from their men. Even a few Biden or Trump voters hopping on to the Kennedy train could be enough to influence what is expected to be a tight race. In an indication of the threat he poses, Trump has gone from praising Kennedy as a “very smart person” a year ago to recently posting a four-minute video attacking him on Truth Social.Plenty of people try to be president. In 2020 alone, 1,212 people filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission saying they were running for the White House. Yet it is Kennedy who is drawing all the coverage.Would he be getting as much attention – and pulling in millions of dollars in donations, some of it from former Trump supporters – if he had a different last name? Probably not.The world was introduced to RFK Jr early. His father, a supporter of Israel, was killed by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Palestinian-Jordanian man, as Kennedy Sr campaigned for president in Los Angeles. A 14-year-old Kennedy Jr was a pallbearer at his funeral: black and white photos from the funeral show a shaggy-haired Kennedy at the head of the coffin, looking numb and out of place among a crowd of grown men.Kennedy was the third of 11 children (the Kennedys were prodigious breeders), born to his father and Ethel Kennedy – a Chicago-born daughter of a coal magnate who remained a public presence way into the 1990s. Ethel made an appearance on the sitcom Cheers and was even named a tough tennis opponent in a Seinfeld episode.If Kennedy benefited from the family name, he benefited from the family wealth, too. Kennedy was raised in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, at the Kennedy compound – where his mother lives to this day.He studied at Millbrook school, a private boarding school in New York. At Millbrook, Kennedy was not universally liked, Jerry Oppenheimer wrote in a biography of the future presidential candidate.“[Kennedy] was viewed by some fellow students as egotistical and irresponsible for strutting around the campus and on the sidelines at home football games with a potentially dangerous young lion on a leash,” Oppenheimer wrote.Millbrook’s headmaster eventually banished the lion, who was called Toto, from campus, and the then 130lb big cat went to live at a safari park in Florida.Other interests, Oppenheimer reported, included “getting stoned” and, oddly, falconry. Kennedy was in a gang too: the Hyannis Port Terrors, who apparently “ran around and stole alcohol” during the summer months.(Kennedy’s parading around with a lion had apparently been forgiven by 1998: that year, he was the commencement speaker at the school.)His teenage years were difficult. In an interview in 2023, Kennedy said he started taking heroin when he was 15 years old, saying he “had a big empty hole inside”, and in 1983, when he was 29, Kennedy was charged with heroin possession after he “became ill”, the New York Times reported, “in the washroom of an airliner” which stopped in Rapid City, South Dakota.“All of a sudden everybody knew I was a drug addict and it gave me the freedom to get help,” Kennedy told an interviewer. “I could just be who I was and be honest.”Kennedy had hidden his addiction while graduating from Harvard University and earning a law degree from Pace University in New York, and after he had completed two years’ probation as a result of the heroin charge, he embarked on a career in environmental law.He worked for Riverkeeper, an organization which protects New York’s Hudson River, and sued polluters in an effort to protect waterways; his work earned him a place on the front cover of New York Magazine in 1995, which described him as “The Kennedy who matters”.But Kennedy – who during his campaign has criticized Biden for overspending on environmental issues – would become better known in the US as a conspiracy theorist.Kennedy spent years claiming, loudly and wrongly, that vaccines cause autism, while in 2023 alone Kennedy stated that wifi causes “leaky brain”, linked antidepressants to school shootings and said that chemicals in water were making children transgender.His history of embracing conspiracy theories meant Covid-19 was a perfect storm for Kennedy. His already-existing anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense became “an influential force that spreads false and misleading information”, Associated Press reported, with the group publishing books that falsely claim the Covid-19 vaccine caused a spike in deaths. A report in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2022 named Kennedy’s Twitter account as “the top superspreader” of misinformation about Covid-19.Kennedy was particularly criticized for a speech he gave at a rally against mandatory Covid vaccines in Washington in January 2022. Standing at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Kennedy told an animated crowd that unnamed figures were trying to control the American population in a way never seen before.“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did,” Kennedy said.“Today the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run, none of us can hide.”The remarks caused uproar, not least from the Auschwitz museum, which tweeted: “Exploiting of the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured & murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany – including children like Anne Frank – in a debate about vaccines & limitations during global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay.”Kennedy later apologized for saying that people who wished to remain unvaccinated had fewer freedoms than Anne Frank. But he continued to dabble in Covid-19 misinformation, writing in a 2021 book that Anthony Fauci, the top US public health expert during the pandemic, had conspired with Bill Gates to suppress alternative medicine treatments for Covid-19.View image in fullscreenGiven his history, Kennedy’s declaration, as he announced his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in April 2023, that he was “not an ideal presidential candidate for normal times”, could seem like an understatement. But people barely had a chance to get to grips with his candidacy before, in October, he scrapped the idea of running as a Democrat, and announced an independent campaign, this time claiming that the “two-party establishment” was “leading us all over a cliff”.As an independent choice, Kennedy represents a still quite old, but not as old as Biden or Trump, candidate. He would be 71 by the time he took office, but Kennedy presents as younger than his two rivals: less jowly, more robust and with a more convincing head of hair. At a campaign stop in June 2023, he stripped to the waist to lift some weights at a gym in Los Angeles, revealing a fairly impressive physique.On the campaign trial, Kennedy looks the part: that thick silver hair, those big white teeth, that perma-tan. His voice, then, comes as a surprise. Kennedy has a strained, halting tone, owing to spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological condition which affects his voice.That condition is far from Kennedy’s only brush with ill health. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported on a deposition Kennedy had given during his divorce from his second wife, Mary Kathleen Richardson Kennedy. In the deposition, given in 2012, Kennedy said he had experienced memory loss, which “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”.“I have cognitive problems, clearly,” Kennedy said. “I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”After the Times article was published, Kennedy tweeted that he was willing “​​to eat 5 more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate”.Richardson Kennedy died by suicide in 2012, leaving behind her four children with Kennedy. Before Richardson Kennedy, Kennedy had two children with his first wife, Emily Black, one of whom is called Robert F Kennedy III. In 2014, Kennedy married Cheryl Hines, an actor best known for playing Larry David’s wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm. The pair live in Los Angeles.Hines, 58, has sought to distance herself from her husband’s campaign. She said in an interview with Fox News earlier this year that she did not always agree with Kennedy’s politics: “We’ve learned to talk through it. Talk it out. Listen to each other. Sometimes, agree to disagree or say: ‘Oh, I’m going to think about that and I hear what you’re saying,’ or: ‘I don’t like the way you’re saying it. I wish you’d say it in a different way.’”The fear for Biden and Trump is that Kennedy could be a Ralph Nader figure. Nader ran as the Green party candidate in the 2000 presidential election, and some Democrats still believe that it was his performance in Florida that swung the election away from Al Gore and towards George W Bush.Early predictions suggested Kennedy – as a scion of the most famous Democratic family in history – would draw support from Biden. Trump and other Republicans certainly seemed to think so, and spent months extolling his virtues – there was even suggestions among rightwing media that Kennedy could be a good vice-president to Trump.But conservatives might come to regret pumping him up. Polls have shown that Trump supporters are more drawn to Kennedy – with his vaccine skepticism and hardline policies on the border particularly popular – than Biden.Republican donors have flocked to Kennedy, too. Timothy Mellon, a Wyoming-based billionaire who has previously donated to groups supporting Trump, has given $25m to the Kennedy campaign, while Rolling Stone reported that other donors include regular Republican donors like John Schnatter, the disgraced former CEO of Papa John’s Pizza, and a financier who briefly supported Ron DeSantis’s bid for the Republican nomination.The support is enough for Kennedy to potentially make a nuisance of himself in terms of pulling votes away from Biden or Trump. But that doesn’t mean Kennedy is popular.Like Biden and Trump, more people dislike Kennedy than like him. According to FiveThirtyEight, 42% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Kennedy, with just 35% seeing him favorably: a favorability rating of -7%. (Trump has a favorability of -12%, Biden -16%.)He’s a bit less unpopular than his two main opponents, then, which can only be a good thing. But Kennedy has already shown himself to be a problematic figure on the campaign trail.Last July, he caused controversy when a video recording showed him falsely claiming that the Covid-19 virus had been “ethnically targeted” at Caucasians and Black people, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people had greater immunity.Members of the Kennedy family roundly criticized the candidate after his remarks were made public: Jack Schlossberg, a grandson of President Kennedy, called his cousin’s campaign “an embarrassment” in a video.Other family members have made it clear that they oppose their namesake’s candidacy. In April, more than a dozen members of the Kennedy family, including six of Kennedy’s siblings, endorsed Biden for president.That should be galling for Kennedy, who on the campaign trail repeatedly mentions his family history. His Kennedy 2024 website frequently references his uncle, who despite his short term ranked as the ninth best president in a 2022 Siena College poll of historians, and 10th in a similar survey of 154 historians and presidential experts this year. (Biden was placed 14th, Trump came last.)Kennedy’s uncle president may even have influenced his decision to run as an independent. In a speech in Maryland in 1958, when he was still a senator and was two years away from becoming the 35th president of the US, John F Kennedy said:“Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past: let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”Kennedy is hoping that Americans will agree with that quote – or at least the bit about not seeking Republican or Democratic answers – come November. More

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      Is the US economy doing well? It depends if you ask a Democrat or a Republican

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      When he delivered his State of the Union address in March, Joe Biden framed the state of the American economy as a true success story, pointing to the historically low unemployment rate and falling inflation as signs of the country’s robust recovery from the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.“I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now, our economy is literally the envy of the world,” the US president said. “And it takes time, but the American people are beginning to feel it.”As Biden frequently boasts, 15m jobs have been created since he took office, and the unemployment rate now stands at 4% after 41 consecutive months of job gains, following the longest stretch of sub-4% unemployment since the 1960s. Inflation has also cooled, after the annual consumer price index hit a peak of 9.1% in June 2022. Stock markets have hit new highs, with the Dow Jones industrial average passing 40,000 points for the first time ever. The International Monetary Fund predicted last month that the US economy was on track to grow at double the rate of any other G7 nation this year.But so far, many Americans are not buying what Biden is selling. According to a Harris poll conducted for the Guardian last month, 56% of Americans wrongly believe that the US economy is in a recession, even though the country’s GDP has grown in recent months. Republicans were more likely to hold that belief, with 67% of them saying the economy is in a recession compared with 49% of Democrats and 53% of independents.The survey continued a trend of Republicans reporting higher levels of pessimism about the nation’s finances since Biden took office. But the relationship between political identity and consumer sentiment has actually been documented for decades, intensifying alongside partisanship in recent years.This political bias offers a partial – although far from complete – explanation for Americans’ persistently dour opinions of the nation’s finances. In recent weeks, the Guardian has dispatched reporters to key swing counties in battleground states, and voters representing a wide array of political views expressed disappointment with the higher cost of living.As LeMario Brown, a former city council member in Fort Valley, Georgia, and local pecan farmer, said: “It doesn’t matter if we’re Republican or Democrat, we all got to eat.”With less than five months left before election day, Biden must find a way to break through the gloom and sell his vision of economic success.A partisan splitThe partisan skew in perceptions of the economy dates back at least to the Reagan administration, as the University of Michigan’s national consumer confidence data shows. With a Republican in the White House, Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to say the economy is strong, and the same principle applies when a Democrat takes office.Though the correlation between political identity and consumer sentiment has long been recognized by economists, it appears to have grown stronger in recent years. One study from the University of Florida, based on decades of data from the Florida Consumer Attitude survey, found that state residents reported notably higher levels of consumer confidence after their preferred party regained control of the White House. In the fall of 2016, after Trump won the presidential race, Republicans started expressing much more optimism about their personal finances.View image in fullscreen“Over time, [these shifts] have gotten bigger and bigger* … It’s true that, somehow, this kind of partisanship has been increasing,” said Hector Sandoval, director of the economic analysis program at the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research.Sandoval noted that, in 2016, the shift in sentiment can be observed in the immediate month after Trump won the election in November, even though he did not take office until January.“That’s even kind of striking because nothing has really happened [by this time],” Sandoval said. “The change in power isn’t until the next year, in January. But already by then you see how the consumer sentiment is changing a lot.”Although Democrats’ consumer attitudes have also been found to vary depending on the national political environment, Sandoval’s research found this shift to be particularly pronounced among Republicans, a finding that has been corroborated by other studies. Ryan Cummings, who previously worked for Biden’s council of economic advisers, and Neale Mahoney, who served as an adviser to the Biden administration’s national economic council, refer to this pattern as “asymmetric amplification”.According to an analysis by Cummings and Mahoney, the magnitude of the partisan bias on consumer sentiment is roughly two and a half times larger for Republicans compared with Democrats. In a phone call, Mahoney, now an economics professor at Stanford University, summarized the finding by saying that Republicans “cheer louder and boo harder” when their party controls the White House.Cummings and Mahoney found that this asymmetric amplification accounts for roughly a third of the gap between predicted consumer sentiment, based on current economic conditions, and observed consumer sentiment. In the Harris poll, Republicans were indeed more likely to incorrectly say that the economy is in a recession, but notably, nearly half of Democrats believed the same.So even when accounting for partisan bias, about two-thirds of the consumer sentiment gap remains. That has left economists – and many frustrated members of Biden’s team – searching for answers.Beyond the politicsPotential explanations for consumers’ lingering pessimism have abounded as election day nears. Greg Ip, a Wall Street Journal columnist, has attributed the pessimism to what he calls “referred pain”, meaning Americans are casting their broader doubts and fears about the state of the world on to the economy.“Just as one part of your body can hurt because of injury to another, pessimism about the economy may reflect dissatisfaction with the country as a whole,” Ip wrote in November. “Lately, there has been a lot to be dissatisfied about: intensifying political and cultural conflict and intolerance, the pandemic, the border, mass shootings, crime, war in Ukraine and now the war in the Middle East.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnother explanation touches on the role of the media, with some experts arguing that coverage of the economy has become skewed toward bad news. One recent study from Ben Harris and Aaron Sojourner of the Brookings Institution concluded that “economic news has become systemically more negative beginning in 2018, with the negative bias growing over the past three years”.A third school of thought addresses the long-term pain and general psychology around inflation. Although the most recent CPI data found that prices rose by 3.4% over the past 12 months, prices have increased by roughly 20% since 2019. So even as the rate of inflation has fallen, Americans are still adjusting to the overall rise in the cost of living over the past few years. Prices also show no sign of significantly decreasing, a phenomenon known as deflation that is generally associated with times of severe economic distress.View image in fullscreenA separate analysis from Cummings and Mahoney found that “the impact of inflation on consumer sentiment fades out with a decay rate of about 50 percent per year,” meaning it takes a few years for the sting of a high inflationary period to substantially dissipate.“The impact of inflation this year is half as big as the impact last year, which is half as big as the impact in the year beforehand, so it has a half-life of basically one year,” Mahoney said. “But it takes two to three years for most of the impact of inflation to no longer show up in an analysis which connects inflation to consumer sentiment.”That lingering effect can dramatically alter views on the economy because, to put it bluntly, consumers really hate high inflation. Research by Stefanie Stantcheva, an economics professor at Harvard University, found that high inflation triggered feelings of anger, fear and injustice. Respondents expressed a widespread belief that their wages were not keeping pace with inflation, resulting in decreased buying power for their households.Respondents do report receiving wage increases as the inflation rate rose, but people tend to associate those raises with their own job performance or career progression, rather than the higher cost of living, so they often feel like inflation is robbing them of their hard-won earnings. Interestingly, people also tend to believe that the salaries of higher-income individuals are better able to keep up with inflation, amplifying feelings of unfairness.“As a result, when you ask people about the emotions that are triggered when they see prices rise, it’s a lot of stress, fear, anger,” Stantcheva said. “[That anger] tends to be directed at businesses [and] quite a lot at the government.”The way forward?Behind Americans’ doubts about the health of the economy are statistics that go beyond jobs and inflation rates. Understanding those metrics could be key to moving beyond some of the partisan perspectives.Despite the overall economic improvement, persistently high interest rates have increased the cost of carrying debt, adding to the burden of credit card bills and auto loans. Credit card debt hit a record high of $1.1tn in the final quarter of 2023, although that figure slightly declined in the first quarter of this year. Mortgage rates have come down marginally since last fall, when they reached a 23-year high, but their elevation has added to Americans’ existing concerns that the goal of homeownership has moved permanently out of reach.Underlying these statistics is the grim reality of how they disproportionately affect lower-income families. Stantcheva’s study found that lower-income Americans report being most adversely affected by high inflation, with some saying they have even delayed buying essentials to cope with rising prices. Her work builds on existing research suggesting that, though high inflation is loathed by all, the burden of the rising cost of living is not equally shared.Stantcheva’s research also offers some insight into Americans’ thoughts on building a fairer economic system. Like other recent surveys, respondents displayed broad support for a number of policy proposals that might address some of those concerns, including raising taxes on corporations and the wealthiest households. Biden has called for such changes to the tax code, although he has struggled to get them approved by Congress, and he has incorporated his support for tax reform into his campaign messaging.The messaging could help Biden bridge the divide between his story of economic success and the reality that many Americans are not yet feeling the benefit of the recovery.“We don’t know each person’s situation, and the statistics just don’t capture this very well,” Stantcheva said. “So I think these feelings should not be dismissed at all. They should be taken quite seriously.” More

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      Thousands gather at White House for pro-Palestinian protest

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      Thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside the White House on Saturday to protest Joe Biden’s response to Israel’s ongoing military strikes on Gaza.Footage posted to social media showed police using pepper spray on protesters, who faced arrest at the mass demonstration.At least one demonstrator also held a canister that released green and white smoke near the southern side of the White House.The demonstrator, who was dressed as the superhero character Spiderman, shouted along with a crowd: “Biden, Biden, we can’t wait! We’ll see you at the Hague!”The Hague is the Dutch city that is home to the international criminal court that prosecutes war crimes.The protest comes after criticism aimed at the president over his handling of Israel’s continued strikes on Gaza in response to the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas.Saturday’s demonstration featured a coalition of groups including Code Pink and the Council on American Islamic Relation, Reuters reported.Biden has claimed that Israel’s latest attacks on Rafah do not violate the US’s red line – or, limit – with respect to support for its ally.The Biden administration has continued to provide American weapons to Israel, even as the Israeli military launched an airstrike against a tent city in Rafah two weeks earlier that killed at least 45 people.Saturday’s protest also comes days after Biden told Time magazine that there is “every reason” to believe that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is prolonging the war in Gaza for his own political gain – accusations the Israeli government has criticized.On Saturday, protesters held a red banner around the perimeter of the White House to symbolize the US’s red line with respect to Israel.They also held up Palestinian flags and protest signs decrying what they describe as a genocide in Gaza.“Biden, you got blood on your hands,” read one protest sign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnother sign simply read: “Free Palestine.”Demonstrators shouted slogans that condemned the president’s response, including: “Biden, Biden, you’re a sellout. Pack your bags and get the hell out!”Protesters will reportedly be surrounding the White House all day.Saturday marks eight months since Israel’s current war against Gaza began, after Hamas killed 1,200 people in Israel and took 250 people hostage during the 7 October attack.Since the war began, more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s military attacks.Gaza has also been pushed into a humanitarian crisis amid widespread hunger and disease within the territory. More

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      Clarence Thomas discloses travel paid for by rightwing billionaire five years later – as it happened

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      Clarence Thomas, the conservative supreme court justice, has belatedly acknowledged that he went on two trips paid for by rightwing billionaire Harlan Crow, NBC News reports.The admission comes in an amended financial disclosure covering 2019:Last year, ProPublica broke the story of the entanglements between Thomas and other conservative supreme court justices, including Samuel Alito, and rightwing figures with interests before the court such as Crow.It drew objections from Democrats, who called for the supreme court to adopt an enforceable ethics code. But their efforts to hold the conservative-dominated body to account have been stymied by a lack of cooperation from the justices, and the fact that they do not have the votes to pass legislation addressing the court.In a speech on the Normandy coastline, Joe Biden honored the US soldiers who stormed the strategic Pointe du Hoc on D-day, and likened the war against Nazi Germany to today’s struggle against Vladimir Putin. The day before, Biden gave a rare sit-down interview to ABC News, and hit back at Donald Trump’s comment that his executive order on immigration was “weak and pathetic”. “Is he describing himself?” Biden quipped. In Washington DC, supreme court justice Clarence Thomas returned to the news when he belatedly disclosed that he had gone on two trips with conservative activist Harlan Crow – which generated much controversy among Democrats when they were first revealed last year.Here’s what else happened today:
      Trump raked in big bucks at a fundraiser hosted by tech figures in San Francisco.
      Late-night hosts cracked wise about Biden’s age as the president visited D-day veterans who were even older than him.
      The supreme court may issue more opinions next Thursday. Trump’s immunity petition and two major abortion cases remain pending before the conservative-dominated court.
      Rudy Giuliani is looking to sell his apartment as he goes through bankruptcy.
      More GOP senators are pledging not to work with the Democrats over Trump’s felony convictions.
      Meanwhile, the ranks of Republican senators who have signed a pledge vowing not to work with Democrats on issues like spending bills and confirming judges in protest of Donald Trump’s conviction have grown.Eight Republicans initially signed on after a jury found Trump guilty of felony business fraud charges last week, and the number has now grown to 14, Utah’s Mike Lee announced:Donald Trump’s felony conviction may have been a boon for his fundraising, but as the Guardian’s Joan E Greve reports, it may be costing him support in his general election rematch against Joe Biden:After a Manhattan jury found Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts last week, Republicans rallied around the former president, insisting the verdict would only damage Joe Biden’s standing in the presidential election.But some new polling data casts doubt upon that argument, as a small but crucial number of Americans in key voting blocs appear to be moving toward Biden in the aftermath of the verdict.According to a post-verdict analysis of nearly 2,000 interviews with voters who previously participated in New York Times/Siena College surveys, Trump’s advantage over the president has narrowed from three points to one point. That shift may seem insignificant, but it could prove decisive in a close presidential election, as is expected in this year’s contest. In 2020, just 44,000 votes across three battleground states prevented a tie in the electoral college.Perhaps more worrisome for Trump is the specific areas where he appears to be bleeding support. According to the Times analysis, disengaged Democratic-leaning voters and those who dislike both Trump and Biden were more likely to say that the verdict made them reconsider their options in the election.Donald Trump may be raking in the dough, but the same cannot be said for some of his closest allies.His attorney Rudy Giuliani is moving to sell his Manhattan apartment, after he late last year filed for bankruptcy:Giuliani’s financial woes intensified in December, when two Georgia election workers won a massive defamation judgment against him after he falsely claimed they tampered with ballots in the swing state after the 2020 election:San Francisco is known for its liberal politics, but Donald Trump yesterday brought in $12m from a fundraiser in the city hosted by tech and crypto entrepreneurs friendly to his campaign to the White House, Reuters reports.Trump has seen a fundraising surge following his conviction last week on felony business fraud charges in New York. Here’s more from Reuters about how yesterday’s fundraiser, which brought Trump-flag waving supporters to San Francisco’s chilly, foggy streets, came about:
      Venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya, as well as Sacks’ wife Jacqueline, held the reception and dinner with Trump at the Sacks’ swanky mansion in the Pacific Heights neighborhood, according to an invitation seen by Reuters.
      The gathering – where top tickets were $500,000 per couple – was sold out, a source with knowledge of the fundraiser told Reuters. It raised some $12 million, according to Republican National Committeewoman Harmeet Dhillon and another source.
      While San Francisco is heavily liberal – Democrat Joe Biden won 85% of the city’s vote in the 2020 election against then-President Trump – a growing number of high-profile local venture capitalists and crypto investors have thrown their support behind Trump ahead of his November rematch against Biden.
      “President Trump is relaxed, happy, and cracking jokes about AI,” Dhillon, a conservative lawyer, posted on X from the event.
      Executives from crypto exchange Coinbase, crypto investor twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss and other crypto leaders were in attendance, Dhillon added. Trump talked about how Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has warned about crypto being used by scam investors and criminals, is “going after crypto,” according to Dhillon.
      Biden last week vetoed what he described as a Republican-led resolution that would “inappropriately constrain the SEC’s ability to set forth appropriate guardrails and address future issues” relating to cryptocurrency assets.
      Trevor Traina, a San Francisco-based tech executive and former Trump ambassador to Austria, said business regulations implemented during Biden’s presidency had alienated some people in the tech industry.
      Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has just released a television advertisement slamming Donald Trump for comments it characterizes as derogatory towards the US military and its veterans.Its release comes after the president spent the last couple of days marking the 80th anniversary of D-day, including with a speech earlier today about the importance of democracy. See the ad here:The supreme court may issue another batch of opinions on Thursday, 13 June, when it will next convene for a non-argument session.The conservative-dominated body has a number of high-profile matters it has yet to weigh in on. These include Donald Trump’s petition for immunity from federal prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election, and two cases dealing with abortion access. One deals with whether abortion pill mifepristone can remain available, and the other over whether the Biden administration can require federally funded hospitals carry out abortions in emergencies, even in states with bans on the procedure.And despite the demands of Democrats, conservative justice Samuel Alito is poised to consider Trump’s immunity case, even though reports emerged that flags supporting rightwing causes were displayed at his properties.Other justices cashed in on book deals.Conservative justices Brett Kavanaugh, collected $340,000 in royalties from the Javelin Group and Regnery Publishing for a book that has not yet been published and Neil Gorsuch, reported $250,000 from royalties for his book “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law,” which will be published by HarperCollins.Also included in newly released annual reports of the finances of the supreme court justices are details surrounding Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who collected nearly $900,000 last year for her upcoming memoir and was gifted four Beyoncé concert tickets by the singer valued $3,700.Thomas belatedly reported the trips paid for by Crow, including a hotel room in Bali, Indonesia as well as food and lodging in Sonoma County, California, a region known for its fine wine.Thomas’s amendments to include Crow’s gifts are part of the financial disclosures of almost all nine supreme court justices that were released on Friday. (Justice Alito received a nearly three-month extension to release his).Clarence Thomas’s acknowledgement of travel with conservative billionaire Harlan Crow comes after Democrats recently demanded supreme court justice Samuel Alito recuse himself from cases dealing with the 2020 election after two flags linked to rightwing causes were reported to have flown at his properties. Last week, Alito declined to that, the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington reports:Justice Samuel Alito is rejecting calls to step aside from supreme court cases involving the former president Donald Trump and January 6 defendants because of the controversy over flags that flew over his homes.In letters to members of Congress on Wednesday, Alito says his wife was responsible for flying an upside-down US flag over his home in 2021 and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his New Jersey beach house last year.Neither incident merits his recusal, he wrote.“I am therefore duty-bound to reject your recusal request,” he wrote.The court is considering two major cases related to the 6 January 2021 attack by a mob of Trump supporters on the Capitol, including charges faced by the rioters and whether the former president has immunity from prosecution on election interference charges.Alito has rejected calls from Democrats in the past to recuse on other issues.The New York Times reported that an inverted American flag was seen at Alito’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, less than two weeks after the attack on the Capitol.Clarence Thomas, the conservative supreme court justice, has belatedly acknowledged that he went on two trips paid for by rightwing billionaire Harlan Crow, NBC News reports.The admission comes in an amended financial disclosure covering 2019:Last year, ProPublica broke the story of the entanglements between Thomas and other conservative supreme court justices, including Samuel Alito, and rightwing figures with interests before the court such as Crow.It drew objections from Democrats, who called for the supreme court to adopt an enforceable ethics code. But their efforts to hold the conservative-dominated body to account have been stymied by a lack of cooperation from the justices, and the fact that they do not have the votes to pass legislation addressing the court.In attendance for Joe Biden’s speech earlier at Pointe du Hoc was John Wardell, a 99-year-old veteran who came ashore about a week-and-a-half after D-Day.For late-night talkshow hosts, Biden’s visit with World War II veterans was the perfect opportunity to crack wise about the president’s advanced age. Here’s our round-up of their zingers:Before he began speaking at Pointe du Hoc, Joe Biden was given a tour of the site by its superintendent, Scott Desjardins.The White House pool reporter covering the president today spoke to Desjardins, who said Biden was impressed by the bravery of the US army rangers that scaled the promontory and fought off German counter attacks for two-and-a-half days.“He was impressed of course. This is an impressive story. It’s hard not to be impressed,” said Desjardins, who noted Biden saw a link to the importance of Nato:
      He made it very clear that this is required. No one can go at this alone anymore.
      Joe Biden spoke from atop a former German bunker at Pointe du Hoc, a promontory that was a site of a fierce battle on D-Day:Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan spoke from the very same spot:When it comes to marking D-day’s anniversary, times have certainly changed, as C-SPAN points out.Joe Biden’s speech today was mostly about the importance of democracy, though he did name drop Vladimir Putin, and liken the threat he poses to Europe to that of the Nazis.Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy joined Biden and other western leaders for the commemoration in France, but when Barack Obama marked the occasion 10 years ago, Putin was in attendance: More

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      Hunter Biden gun trial: key takeaways from the first week

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      Federal prosecutors rested their case against Hunter Biden on Friday morning after days of testimony that revealed deeply personal and grim details about his struggles with drug addiction.Hunter Biden, the only surviving son of Joe Biden, faces three felony charges tied to a 2018 firearm purchase while using narcotics. He is accused of making false statements on a gun-purchase form when he said he was not illegally using or addicted to drugs, and then unlawfully possessing the gun for 11 days.Hunter Biden has pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he could face up to 25 years in prison, though such a sentence would be highly unusual given that he would be a first-time offender. It is unclear whether the presiding judge, Maryellen Noreika, would give him time behind bars. Hunter Biden also faces a separate federal trial in California on charges of failing to pay $1.4m in taxes.Here are some key takeaways from the trial’s first week’s proceedings:1. Jury selection centered on the toll of the US drug epidemicA jury of 12 – six men and six women– and four alternates was seated from a pool of more than 60 people on Monday. Potential jurors were quizzed individually by Noreika about their knowledge of the case and views on gun ownership to determine whether they could be fair and impartial.Among the questions asked of potential jurors was whether they, or anyone close to them, had struggled with substance abuse or addiction. Many said they did, as stories of loved ones’ battles with addiction unravelled over the course of the day. One said they had a childhood best friend who died from a heroin overdose, one had a daughter who was a recovering addict, and another had a brother addicted to PCP and heroin.Drug addiction plays a central role in the case, as prosecutors have delved into Hunter Biden’s battle with drug use after the death of his older brother, Beau Biden, as they seek to prove that he knowingly lied on a form to buy a Colt Cobra revolver at a Wilmington gun store in October 2018.Hunter Biden has been open about his battle with crack cocaine, and the defense is hoping that the jury will see in him a familiar and sympathetic story reflected in their own lives. A study published this month found that one in three Americans know someone who has died of a drug overdose; nearly 20% said the person they knew who died was a family member or close friend.2. Prosecutors used Hunter Biden’s memoir against himThe jury heard long excerpts from the audiobook of Hunter Biden’s 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things, narrated by the president’s son himself, detailing his descent into drug addiction leading up to and after the gun purchase.Hunter Biden and his family listened for more than an hour on Tuesday as a lead prosecutor for the special counsel, Derek Hines, played extracts from the memoir detailing how crack cocaine plunged the president’s son into the “darkest recesses of your soul”, including a story of how he tried to buy drugs from a homeless woman in Franklin Park in Washington DC.Prosecutors pointed to how Hunter Biden detailed his four-year addiction to crack cocaine that would cover the time period when he bought the firearm to argue that he was a high-functioning drug addict who lied to friends and family and ultimately broke the law. “Addiction may not be a choice, but lying and buying a gun is a choice,” Hines said. “Nobody is above the law.”Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, argued that his client did not “knowingly” lie when filling out forms to buy a weapon. Pointing to a two-week rehab visit in August 2018, Lowell suggested that Hunter Biden was not using drugs at the time he bought the gun.3. Witnesses called to the stand included Hunter Biden’s exes and daughterProsecutors said part of their case would come from the testimony of several women from Hunter Biden’s past, including his ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, and two girlfriends, Zoe Kestan and Hallie Biden, who is also the widow of Hunter Biden’s brother Beau.Buhle was married to Hunter Biden for nearly 25 years and shares three daughters with him. Buhle testified about her ex-husband’s long battle with addiction, and how his drug use and infidelity fueled the collapse of their marriage.Kestan, who was involved with Hunter Biden around 2017-2018, told jurors about his near-constant crack cocaine use at lavish hotels. “He would want to smoke as soon as he woke up,” she testified, and described meetings with a “scary” drug dealer and hunting for instructions on the internet to cook powder cocaine into crack.Hunter Biden’s daughter, Naomi Biden, gave emotional testimony on Friday as the defense’s witness, telling jurors that she was “proud” to see her father in rehab in 2018. As she left the stand, she stopped to give her father an embrace and was seen wiping her eyes.4. Widow of Beau Biden testified about finding gun in Hunter Biden’s truckThe prosecution’s most important witness, Hunter Biden’s sister-in-law turned girlfriend, Hallie Biden, took to the stand on Thursday. The pair had a brief romantic relationship after Beau Biden, Hallie Biden’s husband and Hunter Biden’s brother, died of brain cancer in May 2015.Hallie Biden is a central part of the prosecution case because she discovered the gun that Hunter Biden had bought and threw it out. The purchase of the Colt revolver by Hunter Biden – and Hallie Biden’s disposal of it – are the fulcrum of the case against him.Hallie Biden told jurors that she “panicked” when she discovered the gun and ammunition in his truck, and described how she put it into a leather pouch, stuffed it into a shopping bag and tossed it into a trash can outside a market near her home. “I didn’t want him to hurt himself, and I didn’t want my kids to find it and hurt themselves,” she said.Early in her testimony, Hallie Biden testified to using drugs, saying that Hunter Biden introduced her to crack cocaine in 2018. She testified she stopped using drugs in August 2018, but that Hunter Biden continued smoking crack cocaine. “It was a terrible experience that I went through, and I’m embarrassed and ashamed, and I regret that period of my life,” she said.5. Biden family turned out for trialHunter Biden’s family and close friends have attended the trial en masse to show their support, even as their father’s presidential campaign and the White House strive to distance themselves out of fear of handing political grist to Republicans searching for a distracting issue in the wake of Donald Trump’s 34-count conviction last week.The first lady, Jill Biden, was seated in the Delaware courtroom behind her stepson for the first three days of the trial until leaving late on Wednesday to attend a D-day commemoration ceremony in France. Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, flew in from the west coast to take the first lady’s seat in court on Thursday, next to Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen-Biden. Hunter Biden’s sister, Ashley Biden, has appeared in court as have several of his close friends.In contrast, several members of the Trump family steered clear of the New York courthouse during the former president’s hush-money trial. Most notably, Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, and daughter, Ivanka Trump, were conspicuously absent.Joe Biden, who is in France this week for the 80th anniversary of the D-day landings, has indicated he will not pardon his son if he is convicted at his federal gun trial. “Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today. Hunter’s resilience in the face of adversity and the strength he has brought to his recovery are inspiring to us,” Biden said in a statement on Monday. More

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      Joe Biden says he will not pardon son Hunter if convicted in gun trial

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      Joe Biden has indicated that he will not pardon his son Hunter if he is convicted at his federal gun trial, where the prosecution rested its case on Friday in Delaware and Naomi Biden took the stand in defense of her father.When the US president was asked in an interview with ABC News on Thursday if he is prepared to accept whatever outcome arises from Hunter Biden’s trial, he replied: “Yes.”The president is still in France to make a speech on democracy in Normandy on Friday, as part of the events to mark the 80th anniversary of D-day, the allies’ turning point in the war against Nazi Germany in 1944.The first lady, Jill Biden, returned to the US on Thursday after having accompanied her husband in France and arrived in court to support her stepson, as federal prosecutors began wrapping up their gun case against him.Two more witnesses testified on Friday as prosecutors continued their effort to prove to jurors that Hunter Biden lied on a mandatory gun purchase form when he said he wasn’t “an unlawful user of, or addicted to” drugs.Prosecutors called an FBI forensic chemist, Jason Brewer, who tested a residue found on the leather pouch that contained Hunter Biden’s gun. It came back positive for cocaine, though the amount was minimal, he told jurors.A Drug Enforcement Administration agent testified about text messages Hunter Biden sent to alleged dealers.It came towards the end of a week that has been largely dedicated to highlighting the seriousness of his drug problem, which escalated out of control after his elder brother, Beau Biden, died of brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46.But on Friday afternoon, Hunter Biden’s daughter Naomi testified in her father’s defense that he seemed to respond well to drug treatment in the weeks before he bought a gun. Prosecutors say he obtained it illegally by failing to disclose his addiction on forms applying for a Colt Cobra revolver in 2018 and illegally possessing the weapon for 11 days.Naomi Biden, 30, told the jury she saw her father in California around that time and “he seemed really great”.On cross-examination, she was shown that she had been messaging and calling Hunter Biden and unable to reach him.“I can’t take this,” she texted her father several days after he purchased the gun. “I miss you so much and I just want to hang out.”Hunter Biden has been charged with three felonies: lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the application by saying he was not a drug user and illegally having the gun for 11 days. It would be more usual for such an offense to be settled with a plea deal if the defendant admits it occurred, but an earlier deal for Hunter was unexpectedly thrown out last summer.He was subsequently indicted on the three felony gun charges, which he denies. He also faces a trial scheduled for September on felony charges alleging he failed to pay at least $1.4m in taxes over four years.The court finished its work on Friday afternoon and will resume on Monday when the defense will announce whether Hunter Biden, 54, will testify.The Associated Press contributed reporting More