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      What does the US-China row mean for climate change?

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      What does the US-China row mean for climate change? Analysis: breakdown of cooperation between world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters over Taiwan could spell disaster for global warming targets China’s decision to halt cooperation with the US over the climate crisis has provoked alarm, with seasoned climate diplomats urging a swift resumption of talks to help stave off worsening global heating.On Friday, Beijing announced a series of measures aimed at retaliating against the US for the “egregious provocation” of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, visiting Taiwan. China, which considers Taiwan its territory and has launched large-scale military exercises near the island, said it will stop working with the US on climate change, along with other key issues.While the extent of China’s withdrawal from climate discussions is still not clear, the move threatens to derail the often fragile cooperation between the world’s two largest carbon emitters, with only a few months to go before the crucial UN Cop27 in Egypt this autumn. Experts say there is little hope of avoiding disastrous global heating without strong action by the US and China, which are together responsible for about 40% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.The rupture in relations has occurred amid a summer of climate change-fuelled disasters, with record heatwaves and wildfires sweeping the US and Europe, punishingly high temperatures scorching India and China, and ruinous flooding affecting the US, south Asia and Africa.Revealed: how climate breakdown is supercharging toll of extreme weatherRead moreThe US is on the brink of passing landmark climate legislation at home, but collectively the world’s governments are still not doing enough to avoid breaching agreed temperature goals. The goal of limiting heating to 1.5C is “on life support” with a weakening pulse, António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, warned last month.“US-China relations have always been a rollercoaster and we often witness flare-ups, but while you can freeze talks, you cannot freeze climate impacts,” said Laurence Tubiana, chief executive of the European Climate Foundation and a key architect of the Paris climate accords.“It’s in the self-interest of China and the US to act on climate and start talking. Indeed, China recognizes its own self-interest to act; it is still committed to Paris and is moving forward on domestic pledges around methane and coal phasedown.”The US and China have accused each other of not doing enough to cut planet-heating emissions at various points in recent years. China attacked US “selfishness” when then-president Donald Trump rolled back various environmental protections in 2017, while Joe Biden, Trump’s successor, last year claimed the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, had made a “big mistake” by not attending the Cop26 climate summit in Scotland.However, the two powers achieved a breakthrough at the same talks in Glasgow in November, agreeing a surprise plan to work together “with urgency” on slashing emissions. Xie Zhenhua, the head of China’s delegation, said both countries must “accelerate a green and low carbon transition”. John Kerry, the US climate envoy, acknowledged that the nations have “no shortage of differences” but that “cooperation is the only way to get this job done. This is about science, about physics.”This rapprochement on climate has helped foster collaboration between US and Chinese organizations, as well as providing leadership to other countries, according to Nate Hultman, a former aide to Kerry and now director of the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland.“The US and China working together is an important dimension of addressing climate change, it has the potential to motivate others to do more,” said Hultman.“The broader relationship is very complex but both countries understand this is not just a bilateral issue, there is a global dimension to this. That is what I hope will bring them back together. Hopefully this suspension is brief and they can get back to the table as soon as possible.”Hultman said that while high-level climate talks could now be curtailed, other bilateral collaboration may continue, although details on this are still scant. Regardless of the situation between the US and China, progress could still be made at the Cop27 talks in Egypt, he insisted.“This has been challenging and at times we are going to stall out,” Hultman said. “But Cop27 won’t just crash out if the US and China don’t iron out their differences. We would have to focus on what else can be done as an international community.”TopicsEnvironmentChinaClimate crisisUS politicsCop26Cop27analysisReuse this content More

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      Dick Cheney attacks Donald Trump as ‘greatest threat to our republic’

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      Dick Cheney attacks Donald Trump as ‘greatest threat to our republic’Vice-president under George W Bush denounces, in campaign ad for daughter Liz, ‘coward … who lost his election, and lost big’ Dick Cheney has branded Donald Trump the greatest “threat to our republic”, in a new campaign ad for his daughter, Liz Cheney, who is running for re-election in Wyoming.“In our nation’s 236-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” said Cheney, who served as vice-president for two terms under George W Bush.Alex Jones: Sandy Hook family seeks punitive damages beyond $4.1m awardRead moreCheney said: “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.“He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big. I know it, he knows it, and deep down I think most Republicans know it.”Cheney went on to speak about how proud he was of his daughter “for standing up to the truth, doing what’s right, honoring her oath to the constitution when so many in our party are too scared to do so”.The one-minute ad featured the elder Cheney’s sharpest public attacks against Trump to date. Best known as the most powerful vice-president in American history, and a major figure in leading the US to war in Iraq, he has taken to defending his daughter in her fight against Trump.“There’s nothing more important she will ever do than lead the effort to make sure Donald Trump is never near the Oval Office. And she will succeed,” he said in the ad.The younger Cheney has been widely praised from liberals as vice-chairwoman of the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack. Cheney has been one of Trump’s most pointed critics, accusing him of violating the constitution for his role in the insurrection.In return, she has been largely ostracized from her party. Cheney faces an uphill re-election battle against the Trump-backed candidate Harriet Hageman, who maintains that the 2020 election was stolen.“Liz Cheney has long forgotten she works for Wyoming (or perhaps she never knew), not the Radical Democrats,” Hageman tweeted on Thursday. “Wyoming deserves a Congresswoman who will represent us AND our conservative values. It’s time to retire elitist Liz Cheney.”Though Cheney has at least a million dollars more in donations to her campaign against Hageman, she was 22 points behind Hageman in a July poll conducted by the Casper Star-Tribune.In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Cheney said she does not expect to lose on 16 August.“I really believe that the people of Wyoming fundamentally understand how important fidelity to the constitution is – understand how important it is that we fight for those fundamental principles on which everything else is based,” she said.TopicsRepublicansWyomingUS politicsDick CheneyDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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      Memphis prosecutor who charged Black woman over voting error loses re-election bid

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      Memphis prosecutor who charged Black woman over voting error loses re-election bidAmy Weirich stirred outrage for bringing criminal charges against Pamela Moses, whose conviction was subsequently overturned Amy Weirich, the Memphis prosecutor who stirred national outrage for bringing criminal charges against a Black woman for trying to register to vote, has lost her re-election bid.Republican candidates who deny 2020 election results win key primariesRead moreWeirich, a Republican who has been the district attorney general in Shelby county since 2011, lost to Democrat Steve Mulroy, a law professor at the University of Memphis and a former county commissioner.Weirich’s defeat marks a major victory for criminal justice reform advocates, who had pressured her office over its use of cash bail, diversity and decisions to try juveniles as adults.Earlier this year, Weirich trumpeted a criminal conviction and six-year prison sentence for Pamela Moses, who tried to restore her right to vote after a 2015 felony conviction. Tennessee’s rules for restoring voting rights are extremely confusing, and Weirich’s office brought charges against Moses even though a probation officer had signed off on a form saying she was eligible. Prosecutors argued she had deceived the officer into signing off on the form.But after the trial, the Guardian published a document showing that the Tennessee department of corrections had investigated the error and made no mention of deception. Instead, the department blamed the officer. Weirich’s office failed to turn over the document to Moses’ defense team before trial, leading a judge to take the extremely rare step of overturning her conviction and ordering a new trial. Weirich said her office was not to blame for the mistake because the department of corrections failed to give her office the document.It was not the first time Weirich had come under fire for failing to disclose evidence to a defendant – a 2017 study found her office had more instances of misconduct than any prosecutor in the state from 2010 to 2015. In 2017, she also accepted a private reprimand from the Tennessee board of professional responsibility for casting aspersions on a defendant’s decision not to testify during a murder trial.TopicsMemphisThe fight to voteUS politicsTennesseenewsReuse this content More

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      China not in control of US 'travel schedule', says Nancy Pelosi – video

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      US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said China ‘will not isolate’ Taiwan by preventing US officials from travelling there. Pelosi, who is currently leading a Congressional delegation to the Indo-Pacific region, with her last stop in Tokyo, said her visit was ‘not about changing the status quo’ but recognised China ‘made their strikes probably using our visit as an excuse’. Pelosi said the Chinese have tried to isolate Taiwan, adding, ‘we will not allow them to isolate Taiwan … They are not doing our travel schedule.’

      China will not isolate Taiwan, Pelosi says, as second day of military drills set to begin – live
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      Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones ordered to pay $4.1m over false Sandy Hook claims

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      Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones ordered to pay $4.1m over false Sandy Hook claimsFar-right Infowars owner faced defamation trial for repeatedly saying the school shooting was a hoax The jury in Alex Jones’s defamation trial on Thursday ordered the far-right conspiracy theorist to pay $4.1m in damages over his repeated claims that the deadly Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.Jurors in Austin, Texas, gave their verdict after deliberating about one hour Wednesday and seven hours Thursday at the end of a nine-days-long trial which saw Jones apologize and concede that the 2012 massacre at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, was “100% real”. The verdict levied against Jones was far below the $150m or more that the plaintiffs have requested that jurors award them.In a separate phase Friday, jurors are to determine whether Jones owes any so-called punitive damages in addition to the penalty doled out Thursday.Thursday’s verdict follows a case set in motion by the parents of Jesse Lewis, a six-year-old boy killed during the mass shooting. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis sued Jones for defamation and inflicting emotional stress, and Jones lost by default because he failed to provide any documents in response to the plaintiffs’ lawsuit.That set up a trial whose sole purpose was to determine how much money Jones owed Jesse Lewis’ parents in compensation.Heslin and Scarlett Lewis took the witness stand during the trial that started with jury selection on 25 July and detailed the mental suffering, death threats and harassment they weathered from fringe conservatives after Jones went on the rightwing conspiratorial outlet Infowars and his other media platforms to trumpet lies that the 20 children and six adults murdered in the 2012 Connecticut school massacre never actually died.Instead, Jones claimed for years, the victims and their loved ones were “crisis actors” carrying out an elaborate ruse to force gun control.Jesse Lewis’s parents said they would need much more than an apology to be made whole and pleaded for jurors to hold Jones to account after they argued that he made it impossible for the couple to heal from their child’s killing.Jones’ falsehoods about the Sandy Hook murders form part of a larger body of misinformation and theories for which he has had to apologize – including his touting of the so-called “Pizzagate” conspiracy that falsely claimed a Washington DC pizzeria was home to a child sex-abuse ring. That myth, consumed by Jones’ millions of followers, prompted a man to go there with a high-powered rifle and fire shots inside in 2016.Prior to the trial, Jones sought to financially shield his media company, Free Speech Systems, which houses Infowars. Free Speech Systems recently filed for federal bankruptcy protection, prompting Sandy Hook families to file a separate lawsuit alleging that the company is using shell entities to protect Jones’s and his family’s millions.Jones’s attorney, Andino Reynal, tried to persuade jurors that it was unreasonable for them to expect that his client could foresee the abuse that Heslin and Scarlett Lewis would ultimately endure.Reynal asked jurors to limit his client’s damages to a single dollar, despite evidence during the trial that Infowars earned more than $800,000 daily some days. Jones, meanwhile, portrayed the case as an assault on the free speech rights guaranteed to him under the US constitution’s first amendment.Nonetheless, in an exchange with Reynal while on the witness stand, Jones acknowledged his positions on the Sandy Hook killings were reckless lies.“I’ve met the parents,” Jones said during the trial. “It’s 100% real.”For their part, the plaintiffs’ legal team subjected Jones to a withering cross-examination. In one of the trial’s most memorable episodes, the plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Bankston revealed to Jones that his legal team had “messed up” and provided “every text message” Jones had written in the past two years.Those messages included texts that contradicted claims Jones had made under oath in a prior deposition that he had nothing on his phone pertaining to the Sandy Hook massacre. Bankston said he notified Jones’ attorneys of the apparent error, but the defense never took steps to label the communications as “privileged,” which could’ve kept them out of court.Jones grumbled that Bankston had gotten his “Perry Mason moment” at his expense, alluding to the TV attorney who would win his cases by getting those he was questioning to dramatically confess to wrongdoing on the witness stand. Bankston punctuated the back-and-forth in front of the presiding judge, Maya Guerra Gamble, by asking Jones if he knew the definition of perjury – the crime of lying under oath.Jones did, he said, but he maintained that he never tried to hide anything on his phone, which explained how his attorneys had anything to send over inadvertently in the first place.Bankston on Thursday said the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol had requested that he provide the panel with the texts from Jones, a prominent supporter of former president Donald Trump.A pro-Trump mob carried out the Capitol attack, and the panel apparently wants to see what communications the ousted president’s team may have had with Jones.Bankston said he intended to comply with the request unless a judge ordered he do otherwise.A similar trial to the one in Austin looms for Jones in Connecticut. Other Sandy Hook parents are pursuing that case, which they won by default last year after Jones refused to produce any documents they demanded.TopicsUS politicsNewtown shootingTexasnewsReuse this content More

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      Hungary’s far-right PM Viktor Orbán speaks at CPAC summit – as it happened

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      Orban has opened his speech in Texas by saying that “Hungary is the Lone Star state of Europe”.He described Hungary as “under the siege of progressives, liberals day by day”, and noted that he was “the only anti-migration political leader on our continent”, which was greeted with applause.The Senate will meet this weekend to begin considering Democrats’ marquee spending plan to fight climate change and lower healthcare costs, which is the culmination of more than a year of fitful negotiations. Meanwhile in Texas, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban pitched his far-right vision of America and Europe’s future to an audience of conservatives.Here’s a rundown of what else happened today:
      The justice department has filed charges against four current and former Louisville police officers over the death of Breonna Taylor.
      A court in Russia sentenced American women’s basketball star Brittney Griner to nine years in prison after finding her guilty of drug smuggling. President Joe Biden said Griner is “wrongfully detained”.
      Alex Jones’s defamation trial continued after yesterday’s shock revelation that his attorneys shared Jones’ phone data with lawyers for the people suing him.
      The White House declared monkeypox a public health emergency as the virus spread across the United States.
      House speaker Nancy Pelosi visited South Korea, as China expressed its rage at her stop in Taiwan by launching military exercises.
      New York Democratic House representative Carolyn Maloney continues to do damage control after suggesting Biden won’t stand for a second term, although she apparently hasn’t completely backed down from the comment.
      It looks like the Senate will convene this weekend to vote on Democrats’ plan to fight climate change, lower healthcare costs and tweak the tax code, CNN reports:Schumer says the Senate will vote on the motion to proceed to the reconciliation bill on Saturday afternoon— Manu Raju (@mkraju) August 4, 2022
      After that, 20 hours of debate. After debate time or if time is yielded back, it’s vote-a-rama time. Then final passage. All at simple majority— Manu Raju (@mkraju) August 4, 2022
      The bill, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, has no support from Republicans, and will require the votes of every Democrat to pass the evenly divided Senate. The House of Representatives, where the party has a slim majority, will then need to approve it before it goes to Joe Biden for his signature.Orban wrapped up his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference by declaring, “We must take back the institutions in Washington and in Brussels”, and saying the two capitals “will define the two fronts in the battle being fought for Western civilization”.After defeating Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, “Now the West is at war with itself,” Orban said. “We have seen what kind of future the globalist ruling class has to offer. But we have a different future in mind. The globalists can all go to hell, I have come to Texas.”A who’s who of American conservatives will appear at CPAC over the next two days, before Donald Trump makes the event’s closing remarks on Saturday evening.Orban didn’t mention Joe Biden directly, but appealed to the audience of conservatives for “strong leaders” – by which he presumably was not referring to the Democrats in control of the White House and Congress.He cited the impacts of the war in Ukraine on Hungary, which he notes has received one million refugees.“In my view, the globalist leaders’ strategy escalates and prolongs war and decreases the chance of peace. Without American-Russian talks there will never be peace in Ukraine. More and more people will die and suffer and our economies will come to the brink of collapse,” Orban said.“We in the neighborhood of Ukraine are desperately in need of strong leaders who are capable of negotiating a peace deal. Mayday, mayday, please help us. We need a strong America, with a strong leader.”Texas is a major crossing point for undocumented immigrants entering the United States, which Republicans have said is a “crisis” that president Joe Biden deserves blame for.Orban must realize this. He’s giving examples of “how to fight back by our own rules” and detailing to the conservative audience his own hardline policies against migrants, particularly from Syria.“We were the first ones in Europe who said no illegal migration and stop the invasion of illegal migrants,” he said. “We believe that stopping illegal migration is necessary to protect our nation.”Orban went on to attack American liberals, saying they tried to stop his speech and calling for unity between conservatives in the United States and in Hungary.“They hate me and slandered me and my country as they hate you and slander you and America’s transformation. We all know how this works. Progressive liberals didn’t want me to be here because they knew what I will tell you,” Orban said. “I’m here to tell you that we should unite our forces… because we Hungarians know how to defeat the enemies of freedom on the political battlefield.”Orban appears to be responding to the recent news of a top adviser resigning and accusing him of using “pure Nazi” rhetoric by arguing that his administration is misunderstood.Hungary “introduced a zero-tolerance policy on racism and antisemitism. So accusing us is fake news, and those who make these claims are certainly idiots. They are the industrial fake news corporation,” Orban said. Orban has opened his speech in Texas by saying that “Hungary is the Lone Star state of Europe”.He described Hungary as “under the siege of progressives, liberals day by day”, and noted that he was “the only anti-migration political leader on our continent”, which was greeted with applause.Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán is minutes away from starting his speech to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, held this year in Texas.According to its agenda, Orbán will give a talk titled “How We Fight”. The leader has faced intensifying criticism for his far-right rhetoric, and last month, one of his longtime advisers resigned in protest over what she called his “pure Nazi” speech. Alarm grows as Orban prepares to take ‘pure Nazi’ rhetoric to USRead moreArizona Republican Rusty Bowers has lost his primary and won’t return to his post as speaker of Arizona’s House of Representatives after defying Donald Trump’s efforts to meddle in the state’s election results. As Martin Pengelly reports, Bowers has no regrets about how it ended:Rusty Bowers, the Arizona Republican who defied Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat in the state then testified to the House January 6 committee, has no regrets despite losing his bid for a state senate seat.“I would do it again in a heartbeat,” he told the Associated Press. “I’d do it 50 times in a row.”Term limits meant Bowers could not mount another house run. On Tuesday he was trounced in a primary by David Farnsworth, a Trump-endorsed former state senator.Trump was the first Republican to lose a presidential race in Arizona since Bill Clinton won there in 1996. Clinton was re-elected anyway. Trump wasn’t.Arizona Republican who defied Trump and lost primary: ‘I’d do it again in a heartbeat’Read moreAfter departing Taiwan following a visit that enraged China, House speaker Nancy Pelosi went to South Korea, where she visited the demilitarized zone separating it from North Korea.It was a special honor to engage with General LaCamera and other @USForcesKorea servicemembers on the ground at the DMZ/JSA and Osan Air Base. pic.twitter.com/Yi2u8YMXyS— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) August 4, 2022
      We conveyed the gratitude of the Congress and the Country for the patriotic service of our servicemembers, who stand as sentinels of Democracy on the Korean Peninsula. pic.twitter.com/SIz284fSWh— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) August 4, 2022
      Beijing has meanwhile started a series of live-fire drills in the waters around Taiwan, underscoring its fury over Pelosi’s trip to an island it considers a breakaway province. The Guardian has is keeping a live blog covering the ongoing spike in tensions:US watching Chinese military drills ‘very closely’ as ballistic missiles fired into Taiwan strait – liveRead more More

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      House January 6 panel asks lawyer for Alex Jones’s accidentally leaked texts

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      House January 6 panel asks lawyer for Alex Jones’s accidentally leaked textsTwo years of messages were inadvertently sent by Infowars host’s attorney to lawyer for Sandy Hook victim’s family The House January 6 committee has asked the attorney for a family suing Alex Jones for defamation to turn over up to two years’ worth of text messages from the far-right conspiracy theorist’s phone that he inadvertently received from the defense ahead of the trial.The request from the select committee – and another from federal law enforcement – was confirmed in an Austin, Texas, courtroom on Thursday by Mark Bankston, the lawyer for the parents of a child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, which Jones has falsely claimed was a hoax.Damaging Alex Jones texts mistakenly sent to Sandy Hook family’s lawyersRead moreNotably, Bankston said he had identified texts between Jones and Roger Stone, a far-right political operative and adviser to former president Donald Trump thought to be connected to the Capitol attack. He also said he intended to comply with the requests unless a court order instructed him not to.The inadvertent transfer of the texts to Bankston, as well as his readiness to turn them over, could mark an extraordinary stroke of luck for the January 6 panel after Jones invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination in a deposition earlier in the committee’s investigation.Bankston has said in court that Jones’s texts cover a roughly two-year period dating back to 2019, which if true would include his communications from the weeks after the 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden and leading up to the Capitol attack the defeated president’s supporters carried out in early 2021.But the Infowars host disputed that the texts to which Bankston has referred would contain anything of interest to the January 6 committee, saying on his show on Thursday that they actually covered a six-month period from 2019 to early 2020.The texts are potentially significant because Jones has claimed that on 3 January 2020 he was asked by the Trump White House and the Secret Service to lead a march from the Ellipse to the Capitol three days later. Just such an action by Trump supporters on 6 January disrupted the congressional certification of Biden’s presidential victory. The texts could shed light on the extent – if any – of that coordination.Jones’s claim that he was asked asked to lead that march is striking because the panel has heard that Trump later told an adviser he was unaware about such plans, according to a source familiar with the matter.Details about that supposed request from the Trump White House have been scarce. The committee has struggled to verify the Infowars host’s claims through records from the Secret Service after agents’ texts from January 6 were unlawfully erased.A committee spokesperson declined to comment on Jones’s texts.The confirmation from Bankston on Thursday that he was prepared to turn over the text messages was the latest twist in a bizarre saga that could have far-reaching consequences for Jones, particularly as the justice department steps up its criminal investigation into January 6.Bankston revealed he was in possession of the texts a day earlier, when he told Jones – while he was on the witness stand – that his legal team had “messed up” and provided “an entire digital copy of your entire cellphone with every text message” from the past two years.Those messages included texts that contradicted claims made under oath that Jones had nothing on his phone pertaining to the Sandy Hook shooting.Bankston said he immediately alerted Jones’s attorneys to the apparent error but they never took steps to keep the communications out of court by labeling them as privileged.Jones’s attorney, Andino Reynal, requested a mistrial on Thursday, over the purportedly accidental leak. The attorney argued that he feared the text message leak was introduced in court simply to create more press coverage, the Associated Press earlier reported.The emergency motion from Reynal sought the return and destruction of the documents, saying the defence had told Bankston to disregard the link to the files with the text messages, which also included messages from Robert Barnes, Jones’s other lawyer with ties to Stone.But the trial judge, Maya Guerra Gamble of Travis county, denied the motion.Reynal also asked Guerra Gamble to block the release of materials on Jones’s phone to anyone, including the January 6 committee. Guerra Gamble said she would let Reynal indicate what he wants to keep confidential, and then she would review that request, adding that she wasn’t sure she could block a subpoena, according to the Austin American-Statesman newspaper.Jurors in the defamation case brought against Jones by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis – the father and mother of Jesse Lewis, a six-year-old murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting – began deliberations late on Wednesday afternoon.They resumed on Thursday, the ninth day of a trial which saw Jones apologize and admit that the 2012 shooting at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, was “100% real”.Jones previously spent years claiming that the 20 children and six adults murdered at Sandy Hook were not killed and instead – along with their grieving loved ones – were “crisis actors” carrying out an elaborate ruse to force gun control reform.Heslin and Lewis sued Jones for defamation and inflicting emotional stress, saying they suffered mental distress, death threats and harassment. They have demanded at least $150m, saying an apology would not be enough.Jones lost on the merits of the case by default, because he failed to provide any documents in response to the lawsuit. The jury is deciding how much he owes Lewis and Heslin in compensation. In a later phase, it will determine whether he should pay punitive damages.TopicsUS newsUS politicsUS Capitol attackNewtown shootingnewsReuse this content More

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      Arizona Republican who defied Trump and lost primary: ‘I’d do it again in a heartbeat’

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      Arizona Republican who defied Trump and lost primary: ‘I’d do it again in a heartbeat’Rusty Bowers, who refused to help overturn Trump election loss, says he has no regrets despite losing bid for state senate seat Rusty Bowers, the Arizona Republican who defied Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat in the state then testified to the House January 6 committee, has no regrets despite losing his bid for a state senate seat.“I would do it again in a heartbeat,” he told the Associated Press. “I’d do it 50 times in a row.”On the chopping block? Ron Johnson denies threatening social securityRead moreTerm limits meant Bowers could not mount another house run. On Tuesday he was trounced in a primary by David Farnsworth, a Trump-endorsed former state senator.Trump was the first Republican to lose a presidential race in Arizona since Bill Clinton won there in 1996. Clinton was re-elected anyway. Trump wasn’t.Bowers refused to help efforts to overturn Trump’s defeat in Arizona – including a partisan audit which ended with Joe Biden’s margin of victory slightly increased.Bowers also angered Trump and his supporters by testifying in June before the US House committee investigating the deadly attack on Congress.Bowers told the panel how his faith motivated his defiance of the attempt to subvert democracy, and described threats from Trump supporters while his daughter lay mortally ill.Censured by the state party, Bowers was given a Profile in Courage award by the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.He initially said he would vote for Trump if he ran for president in 2024.“If he is the nominee,” Bowers told the Associated Press, “if he was up against Biden, I’d vote for him again. Simply because what he did the first time, before Covid, was so good for the country. In my view it was great.”But Bowers seemed to change his mind, telling the Deseret News: “I don’t want the choice of having to look at [Trump] again. And if it comes, I’ll be hard pressed. I don’t know what I’ll do.“But I’m not inclined to support him. Because he doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the morals and the platform of my party … That guy is just – he’s his own party. It’s a party of intimidation and I don’t like it.”He also told Business Insider: “Much of what [Trump] has done has been tyrannical, especially of late.”After his own defeat, Bowers said Trump had soiled the Republican party.“President Trump is a dividing force that has thrashed our party,” he told the AP. “And it’s not enough to disagree. You have to disagree and then stomp on people and ruin their reputations and chase them down and thrash them and you just keep beating them up. That’s the Trump model.”He said the Arizona Republican party now had a similar “bully mentality … and I think you’re going to find out as all these people leave this party, that someday there’s going to be a hard reckoning. And I have a feeling it can be later this year.”Farnsworth won the state senate seat, since no Democrats entered the primary.Trump backers did very well up and down the Arizona ballot, with his candidate for governor leading and endorsees for US Senate, attorney general and secretary of state winning. Trump-backed candidates succeeded in several other Arizona races.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsnewsReuse this content More