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      'Accountability, not yet justice': how the US reacted to the Chauvin verdict – video

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      Across many US cities, there were scenes of jubilation after Derek Chauvin was found guilty for the murder of George Floyd. Crowds gathered outside the court room in Minneapolis as well as at the scene of George Floyd’s death. Loud cheering erupted from Floyd’s family members watching in an adjacent courthouse room. But the elation was tinged with wariness and concern that while justice was done for one Black person, it would not be enough by itself

      ‘Just the beginning’: joy and wariness as crowds celebrate Chauvin verdict
      ‘My brother got justice’: George Floyd’s family praises guilty verdict
      ‘The work continues’: Black Americans stress that police reform is still needed More

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      ‘Enough of the senseless killings’: Biden calls Chauvin verdict ‘a start’ as Democrats demand action

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      Addressing the nation on Tuesday evening, Joe Biden said the guilty verdict for the former Minneapolis police office Derek Chauvin was “a start”. But, he said, “in order to deliver real change and reform, we can and we must do more”.“Protests unified people of every race and generation in peace and with purpose to say enough,” Biden said. “Enough. Enough of the senseless killings. Today’s verdict is a step forward.“The guilty verdict does not bring back George,” he continued, noting that he had called the Floyd family after the news had come. “George’s legacy will not be just about his death, but about what we must do in his memory.”Many lawmakers and public figures celebrated the verdict while also calling for more to be done, echoing years-long demands by Black Lives Matter activists for systemic change.Cori Bush, the Black Lives Matter activist who was elected last year to represent Missouri in the US House of Representatives, said the verdict “is accountability, but it’s not yet justice.”Kamala Harris, who spoke before Biden, said the administration would work to help pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill that Harris – as a senator – introduced last summer along with Senator Cory Booker and Representative Karen Bass. “This bill is part of George Floyd’s legacy,” she said. “The president and I will continue to urge the Senate to pass this legislation, not as a panacea for every problem, but as a start. This work is long overdue.”Democratic lawmakers echoed Harris, while Republicans, who have obstructed the bill’s passage for nearly a year, remained largely silent.[embedded content]Bass, a Democrat of California, said she hoped the verdict today would re-energize efforts to pass the police reform bill into law. The bill passed the House this year with no Republican support – and it faces a major hurdle in the Senate, where Republicans are expected to block it with a filibuster.“We need to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, and put it on President Biden’s desk,” she said, speaking with members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) on Capitol Hill. “Because that will be the first step to transforming policing.”In any case, she later told reporters, the Chauvin verdict “gives us hope” for some sort of policing bill. Bass has been in informal talks with Republican lawmakers to develop a bipartisan compromise and hopes a deal can be reached “by the time we hit the anniversary of George Floyd’s death” on 25 May, she told reporters.The rare guilty verdict came as a shock and a relief to many lawmakers and public figures. Following its announcement Bass hugged Gwen Moore, a Democratic representative of Wisconsin and fellow member of the CBC. “I was knocked off my feet,” Moore told Bass, as they embraced.Ilhan Omar, the US representative for Minneapolis, said the verdict represents a type of justice that feels “new and long overdue,” adding: “Alhamdulillah!”Remarks by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, however, raised some eyebrows. In an address from Capitol Hill, she said: “Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice. For being there to call out to your mom, how heartbreaking was that, call out for your mom, ‘I can’t breathe,’” she said.As many listeners and watchers pointed out, Floyd didn’t choose to sacrifice himself or to be a martyr – he was killed.“I know someone wrote this for her. Someone else edited the draft. Most likely yet another person approved it. And then she said it,” said the writer Mikki Kendall. “This is a long trail of fail.”Barack Obama praised the efforts of Black Lives Matter activists and people around the world protested in the aftermath of Floyd’s killing.“As we continue the fight, we can draw strength from the millions of people – especially young people – who have marched and protested and spoken up over the last year, shining a light on inequity and calling for change,” Barack and Michelle Obama said in a joint statement. “Justice is closer today not simply because of this verdict, but because of their work.”In a call to Floyd’s family, Biden reiterated his promise to enact meaningful change. “We’re going to stay at it until we get it done,” he said. More

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      Kamala Harris sidesteps question of her role to take Biden's message on the road

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      White House aides and allies stress it’s still too early to define the type of portfolio Kamala Harris will have as vice-president. They bristle at the suggestion that Harris would be confined to one project or focus on just one subject area, as some previous vice-presidents were pegged to do.But over the last week, the former California senator has once again taken on an increasingly familiar mantle: top surrogate for promoting the Biden administration’s agenda.On the one hand that’s a powerful position: it puts Harris – the first female vice-president in US history and probably a strong future contender for its first female commander-in-chief – at the forefront of US politics. But on the other, it is the latest example of Harris being used on an ad hoc basis, lacking a defining mission or role.In the days since Joe Biden signed his $1.9tn stimulus package Harris has embarked on a cross-country tour to sell the impact of the new law. She made stops in Nevada, Colorado and then Georgia last week. She is expected to make more trips in the coming days.“I really believe that this will support our economy,” Harris said during her stop in Colorado.The vice-president’s tour, days after an administration passes a massive piece of legislation into law, is not entirely unusual. It’s in part a move to assuage fears that this stimulus could follow the same fate as the $800bn rescue law in 2009. After passage of that bill, critics argued that the Obama administration was not aggressive in responding to Republican attacks about the bill. At the same time, liberals have argued that law did not go far enough.So this time, the Biden administration is trying to pre-empt similar critiques about his rescue package.Roy Neel, who served as a chief of staff to the then vice-president, Al Gore, said it was clear the Biden administration wants to use Harris as a sort of “floater” – someone who isn’t consigned to one corner of the administration or its initiatives.“They’re saying basically what the president wants her to be which is sort of a floater, to work on anything that’s important at the time,” Neel said. “Right now, selling the stimulus is one of the most important things to him.”For Harris, though, the trip stacks on top of her undertaking a media campaign in West Virginia and Arizona while the stimulus bill was still making its way through Congress. But that push partially backfired on Harris and resulted in proxy sparring with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, one of the senators Harris ostensibly set out to win over.Harris’s trips over the last week suggest that the Biden team still see her as a potent salesperson and rather than assign her to run briefings with governors on Covid relief, as Mike Pence did when he served as vice-president to Donald Trump, or when Biden oversaw the Obama administration’s recovery efforts early on.Still, that has prompted multiple questions about Harris and how she will be involved in the Biden administration. Why not run the Covid meetings right now like Pence did, officials have been asked, instead of Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York?“We do know that she is a potent tool and it’s clear that the Biden administration is more than happy to deploy her in support of its signature initiatives so far,” said Yusef Robb, a veteran Democratic strategist. “Look, Kamala Harris is exciting, talented and can personally speak to people of color, women, parents and others who have been most affected by the pandemic.”At the same time Harris has also been visible on the foreign policy front, a move that might prove beneficial in the future if the current vice-president ever ended up running for president and needed to highlight her experience with world leaders. She has reportedly begun regular private lunches with the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, a meeting that other presidents have usually taken themselves. She has also had one-on-one conversation with a number of world leaders early on in the administration.That is really good for her because it doesn’t pigeonhole her into any one government function like the environment or healthcare or somethingNeel said that suggests that Biden is “comfortable including and relying on the vice-president to be involved in things where she doesn’t have much of a background”.Neel added: “That is really good for her because it doesn’t pigeonhole her into any one government function like the environment or healthcare or something. So he’s obviously using her everywhere it makes sense as part of the team.”Democrats stress the Biden administration is in its earliest days and the role Harris will play is still forming.Her rise has been extremely fast compared with previous vice-presidents. She did not finish her first term in the Senate before Biden picked her as vice-president and before that was attorney general of California. But her background as a prosecutor, which resulted in a viral moment or two in the Senate, has not been visibly utilized since she became vice-president – yet.Harris’s future, though, depends on the success of Biden’s administration. If Biden leaves office popular, Harris will be regarded as the heir apparent.“She is pushing forward Joe’s vision for America, just like she said she would,” Robb added. More

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      'Our community is bleeding': Asian American lawmakers say violence has reached 'crisis point'

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      Asian American lawmakers and leaders warned that violence and discrimination targeting their community have reached a “crisis point” following the shootings in Atlanta this week that killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent.The hearing, the first to examine anti-Asian discrimination in more than three decades, had been scheduled weeks ago amid a surge in violence against the Asian community since the pandemic began. But it took on heightened urgency after the mass shooting that left Asian Americans in Atlanta and across the country shaken and afraid.“What we know is that this day was coming,” Judy Chu, chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, told a subcommittee of the House judiciary committee on Thursday. “The Asian American community has reached a crisis point that cannot be ignored.”Grace Meng, a Democrat of New York, said: “Our community is bleeding. We are in pain. And for the last year, we’ve been screaming out for help.”Meanwhile police in Atlanta revealed new details about the investigation. At a press conference, Charles Hampton, deputy chief of the Atlanta police, said “nothing was off the table”, including whether the killings were motivated, at least in part, by race or gender.“We are looking at everything to make sure that we discover and determine what the motive of our homicides were,” he said, adding that they were still determining whether the murders constituted a hate crime.The suspect, Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with eight counts of murder. Long, who is white, told police that he had a sex addiction and targeted the spas to eliminate “temptation”, denying any racist motivations.Hampton said on Thursday that Long had “frequented” two of the spas where four women of Asian descent were killed. Four more people were killed at Youngs Asian Massage Parlor, on the outskirts of the city.The Cherokee county sheriff’s department announced on Thursday that Capt Jay Baker had been replaced as the spokesman on the investigation.Frank Reynolds, the sheriff, expressed regret amid widespread outrage over comments Baker had made a day earlier. Baker drew criticism for saying Long had had “a really bad day” and “this is what he did”. Reynolds released a statement on Thursday acknowledging that some of Baker’s comments stirred “much debate and anger” and said the agency regretted any “heartache” caused by his words.“Inasmuch as his words were taken or construed as insensitive or inappropriate, they were not intended to disrespect any of the victims, the gravity of this tragedy or express empathy or sympathy for the suspect,” Reynolds said in a statement, adding that Baker “had a difficult task before him, and this was one of the hardest in his 28 years in law enforcement”.In response to the shootings, the White House announced that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were canceling a political event in Atlanta on Friday as part of their Help is Here tour to promote the administration’s $1.9tn coronavirus relief package. Instead, they will spend their visit meeting with local leaders and elected officials from the city’s Asian American and Pacific Islander community.Biden on Thursday ordered flags at the White House and all federal buildings to be flown at half-staff through sunset on Monday to honor the eight victims of the Atlanta spa shootings.At the hearing on Capitol Hill, Meng was joined by experts and advocates who told the panel that the rising tide of anti-Asian bigotry was fueled in part by rhetoric from Donald Trump and his allies, who referred to Covid-19 as the “China virus” the “China plague” and the “kung flu”.Nearly 3,800 hate incidents, spanning the spectrum of verbal harassment to physical assault, have been reported against Asian Americans nationwide since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, according to Stop AAPI Hate. Asian American women reported nearly twice as many incidents as men, at nearly 70%.During the hearing, the subcommittee chairman, Steve Cohen, recounted a number of brutal incidents that included a Filipino man being slashed across the face with a box cutter and an 89-year-old Asian American woman being lit on fire.“All the pandemic did was exacerbate latent anti-Asian prejudices that have a long, long and ugly history in America,” he said.In a particularly impassioned exchange, Meng confronted one of the panel’s Republican members, the Texas congressman Chip Roy, who said, after a lengthy exhortation of China’s handling of the coronavirus, that he was concerned the hearing amounted to a “policing” of free speech.“Your president and your party and your colleagues can talk about issues with any other country that you want,” Meng said through tears. “But you don’t have to do it by putting a bullseye on the back of Asian Americans across this country, on our grandparents, on our kids.”“This hearing was to address the hurt and pain of our community, to find solutions – and we will not let you take our voice away from us,” she said.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      Biden's make or break moment: president aims to build on success of relief bill

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      In the White House Rose Garden, where for four years Donald Trump raucously celebrated political wins with his allies, it was now the turn of Democrats to take a victory lap – masked and physically distanced, of course.Kamala Harris, the vice-president, heaped praise on Joe Biden for signing a $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill, the biggest expansion of the American welfare state in decades. “Your empathy has become a trademark of your presidency and can be found on each and every page of the American Rescue Plan,” Harris said.Democrats this week passed the plan into law; now they have to sell it. Friday’s event with members of Congress fired the starting gun for Biden, Harris and their spouses to mount an aggressive marketing campaign, travelling the country to tell Americans directly how the hard won legislation will improve their lives.Salesmanship was always seen as Trump’s forte but this is a golden opportunity for Biden, a once unlikely saviour. The oldest president ever elected – at age 78 – is riding high in opinion polls. His rescue plan is endorsed by three in four citizens. His opposition is in disarray with Republicans struggling to find a coherent counter- narrative, squabbling over Trump and obsessing over culture wars.But Biden’s long career will have taught him the laws of political gravity: presidents and prime ministers who start on the up inevitably take a fall. He has also spoken of the need to avoid the fate of Barack Obama who, having intervened to stave off financial disaster in 2009, was repaid with a “shellacking” for Democrats in the midterm elections.Politics is about momentum and, with vaccines coming fast, the economy set to roar back, and spring in the air, Biden has it for now. Ed Rogers, a political consultant and veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush administrations, said: “In politics, good gets better, bad gets worse. Biden is on something of a roll right now and so it’s good for him to be a little more aggressive and be seen out and about.“They do want to take credit and he should. The tides will turn; there’ll be periods when they look like they can’t do anything right.”In what the White House calls a Help is Here tour, first lady Jill Biden is set to travel to Burlington, New Jersey, on Monday, while the president will visit Delaware county, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will go to Las Vegas on Monday and Denver on Tuesday. Emhoff will remain out west and make a stop in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Wednesday.At the end of the week, Biden and Harris will make their first joint trip in office to Atlanta where Democrats’ victories in two Senate runoff elections in January were pivotal to getting the relief package passed against unyielding Republican opposition.The White House has acknowledged that the public relations offensive is an attempt to avoid a repeat of 2009, when the Obama administration did not do enough to explain and promote its own economic recovery plan. Biden, who was vice-president at the time, told colleagues last week that Obama was modest and did not want to take a victory lap. “We paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility,” he said.That price included a backlash in the form of the Tea Party movement and rise of rightwing populism. But there were important differences in substance as well as style. Obama’s $787bn bill, which followed the bailout of the banks, delivered a recovery that felt abstract and glacial. This time the impact is more immediate and tangible: some Americans will receive a $1,400 stimulus payment this weekend, with mass vaccinations and school reopenings on the way.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “I underestimated the extent to which the experience of 2009 has seared itself into the memory of senior Democrats: the interpretation of going too small and paying the price in a painfully slow recovery, spending too long at the beginning negotiating with members of the other party who were never going to agree and never going to compromise, not telling the American people what they had accomplished for them.“The list of lessons learned is a very long one and, to an extent that I find surprising, the administration is refighting and winning the past war.”Despite preventing financial meltdown, Democrats lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections, the biggest shift since 1948. That fit a pattern in which the incumbent president’s party tends to fare badly in the first midterms, and so Republicans are upbeat about their chances of regaining both the House and Senate next year.Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Obama, argues that the Covid relief bill is the start of the battle for the 2022 midterms and warns that Democrats cannot take the credit for granted since Americans “currently have the long-term memory of a sea cucumber”.He wrote in the Message Box newsletter last week that despite Obama’s speeches and visits to factories, “it was nearly impossible to break through the avalanche of bad news”. But “this plan’s benefits are more specific, more easily understood, and likely to be broadly felt before too long”.Pfeiffer urged grassroots supporters to join Biden and Harris in the messaging effort via social media. “I spent much of 2009 and 2010 banging my head against the proverbial wall because not enough people knew about how Barack Obama had helped prevent the economy from tumbling into a second Great Depression,” he added. “Let’s not do that again.”The plan will also require strict oversight to ensure money is not misspent or wasted. Donna Brazile, a former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “It is a massive bill with massive consequences but it requires not just the president and vice-president and cabinet but state and local governments to also work together to ensure that the vaccines are rolled out in an equitable way and ordinary citizens are able to take advantage of some of the wonderful initiatives that are in the bill.”There has been a striking contrast between Biden and Harris’s disciplined focus on passing historic legislation and Republicans’ fixation on “cancel culture”, from Dr Seuss, after the children’s author’s publishing house announced it was discontinuing several books that contained racist imagery, to confusion over whether the Mr Potato Head toy will still be a “Mr”.The issue, which often gets more coverage on conservative media than coronavirus relief, is seen as a way of animating the base in a way that attacks on Biden do not. The president is not Black like Obama, nor a woman like Hillary Clinton, nor a democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders, all of which seem to have inoculated him against demonisation by the rightwing attack machine.And despite its popularity with the public, every Republican senator opposed the American Rescue Plan, offering Biden’s team a chance to score political points. Lanhee Chen, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said: “It’ll be interesting to see how much they make it about the benefits of the plan versus about Republicans not having voted for the plan.”Chen, policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, added: “The challenge for Democrats is going to be as elements of this come out that will be unpopular, is it going to be defined by the things that are unpopular or the things that would appear to be politically quite favourable?” The OECD predicts that the rescue plan will help the US economy grow at a 6.5% rate this year, which would be its fastest annual growth since the early 1980s. But as Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Tony Blair discovered, all political honeymoons come to an end.Republicans are already exploring a new line of attack by accusing the president of ignoring the burgeoning crisis of a surge in children and families trying to cross the southern border. The rare outbreak of unity among Democrats – in the Rose Garden, Biden thanked Sanders for his efforts – is not likely to endure. And the next major item on the legislative wishlist, infrastructure, is likely to be even tougher.But it is the American Rescue Plan, and the political battle to define it, that could make or break Biden’s presidency. Michael Steel, who was press secretary for former Republican House speaker John Boehner, said: “They’re making a bet on economic recovery and I hope they’re right because I want the US economy to recover swiftly.”But, he added, “I think that people will continue learning more about the things in this legislation that are not directly related to Covid relief or economic stimulus. There’s definitely a real risk of blowback.”Steel, now a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, a public affairs consulting firm, added: “We could be on the on the verge of a new Roaring Twenties with a booming economy and so much pent up demand for people to travel and live and spend money. We could also be priming the pump for a devastating wave of inflation. The economy is generally the number one issue going into an election and there’s a very real chance that we have a tremendous upside or some dangers ahead.” More

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      Kamala Harris promises federal relief for Texas victims of winter storms

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      Kamala Harris has sent a message to residents of Texas and other states hit by power outages and prolonged winter conditions that help is on the way.“I just want to mention all of those folks in Texas and the mid-Atlantic,” the vice-president said in a live interview on Wednesday morning on NBC’s Today show, her first national network interview since taking office.“I know they can’t see us right now, because they’re without electricity, but the president and I are thinking of them, and really hope we can do everything that is possible through the signing of the emergency orders to get federal relief to support them.”Biden signed a declaration of emergency for Texas on Sunday, opening the way for state officials to move more quickly to tap a larger share of federal aid.Harris also echoed a promise made by Joe Biden on Tuesday night that the United States would have enough doses on hand to vaccinate “all Americans” by July. “We have a vaccine now, and that is great, but we need to get it in the arms of all Americans,” Harris told the Today show host Savannah Guthrie.“And as the president said last night, we expect that that will be done in terms of having the available supply by the end of July, and so we are very excited about that.”Harris touted the speed with which the federal government is sending vaccine doses to states, a rate the White House pegs at 13.5m doses a week or a 57% increase since the inauguration.“As quickly as we’re producing it, we’re getting it out,” she said.Challenged on a guideline issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying teachers could return to work without being vaccinated, Harris said the White House felt strongly that teachers should be bumped up in line for vaccine doses.“Teachers should be a priority,” she said. “We think they should be a priority, and the states are making decisions individually.”Teachers’ unions have expressed concern that Biden’s plan to reopen most elementary schools in the next three months could expose teachers to health risks.While the federal government issues recommendations about who should receive vaccine doses in what order, each state maintains its own priority list.Harris said that a $1.9tn Covid relief and economic stimulus package the Biden administration is trying to guide through Congress would help make schools safer by providing funds to improve ventilation, erect social distancing barriers and other measures.“Our goal is that as many K-8 schools as possible will reopen within the first 100 days,” Harris said. “Our goal is that it will be five days a week. And so we have to work to achieve that goal.”To respond to complaints from states that there remained a lack of coordination on federally supplied aid, Harris said the Biden administration had begun to put national protocols in place to support states “that need that kind of coordination and support”.As part of its vaccine initiative, federal agencies have doubled direct shipments of vaccine doses to pharmacies, Harris said, and expanded a program to ship doses to community health centers serving vulnerable populations.“We just want to say to everybody, just please get vaccinated,” Harris said. “And in the interim, wear a mask, social distance and make sure you wash your hands and do that frequently.”Harris deflected a question about whether Donald Trump should face criminal charges after being acquitted in his Senate impeachment trial earlier this month.“You know, right now Savannah I’m focused on what we need to do to get relief to American families,” Harris said. “And that is my highest priority, it is our administration’s highest priority, it’s our job, it’s a job we were elected to do, and that’s our focus.“I haven’t reviewed the case through the lens of being a prosecutor, I’m reviewing the case of Covid in America through the lens of being vice-president of America.” More