World news

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Arizona Republican calls Trump ‘deleted database’ statement ‘unhinged’

      by

      The Republican who leads the Arizona county elections department targeted by a GOP audit of the 2020 election results is slamming Donald Trump and others in his party for their continued falsehoods about how the election was run.Maricopa county recorder Stephen Richer on Saturday called a Trump statement accusing the county of deleting an elections database “unhinged” and called on other Republicans to stop the unfounded accusations.“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country,” Richer tweeted.Richer became recorder in January, after defeating the Democratic incumbent.The Republican state senate president, Karen Fann, has demanded the Republican-dominated Maricopa county board of supervisors answer questions raised by the private auditors she has hired.The Arizona senate took possession of 2.1m ballots and election equipment last month for what was supposed to be a three-week hand recount of the presidential race won by Joe Biden.We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a countryInstead, the auditors have moved as a snail’s pace and had to shut down on Thursday after counting about 500,000 ballots. They plan to resume counting in a week, after high-school graduation ceremonies planned for the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, which they rented for the recount.Trump’s statement said, in part, that “the entire database of Maricopa county in Arizona has been DELETED! This is illegal and the Arizona State Senate, who is leading the forensic audit, is up in arms.”Richer and the board say that statement is just plain wrong. In recent days, both he and the board have begun aggressively pushing back at what they see as continuing falsehoods from Republicans who question Trump’s loss.“Enough with the defamation. Enough with the unfounded allegations,” Richer tweeted on Thursday. “I came to this office to competently, fairly, and lawfully administer the duties of the office. Not to be accused by own party of shredding ballots and deleting files for an election I didn’t run. Enough.”The board, led by Republican chairman Jack Sellers, have been aggressively using Twitter to push back, firing off messages slamming the private company doing the audit. The board plans to hold a public hearing Monday.“I know you all have grown weary of lies and half-truths six months after 2020 general elections,” Sellers said on Friday in announcing Monday’s meeting.Fann sent Sellers a letter on Wednesday requesting county officials publicly answer questions at the senate on Tuesday, but she stopped short of her threat to issue subpoenas.Fann repeated the senate’s demand for access to administrative passwords for vote-counting machines and internet routers. County officials say they have turned over all the passwords they have and have refused to give up the routers, saying it would compromise sensitive data, including classified law enforcement information held by the sheriff’s office.Fann proposed allowing its contractor to view data from the routers at county facilities under supervision of the sheriff’s office.“The Senate has no interest in viewing or taking possession of any information that is unrelated to the administration of the 2020 general election,” she wrote.The county says the passwords the senate is seeking are maintained by Dominion Voting Systems, which makes the vote-counting machines and leases them to the county.The company said in a statement on Thursday that it cooperates with auditors certified by the US Election Assistance Commission, and did so for two prior audits of 2020 results in Maricopa county, but won’t work with Cyber Ninjas.Fann has hired that company, a Florida-based cybersecurity firm, to oversee an unprecedented, partisan review of the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county. They are conducting a hand recount of all 2.1m ballots and looking into baseless conspiracy theories suggesting there were problems with the election, which have grown popular with supporters of Trump. More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Liz Cheney regrets vote for Trump but won’t say she’ll leave Republican party

      by

      Liz Cheney has become the figurehead of the Never Trumpers, Republicans seeking to loosen the former president’s grip on their party, but the Wyoming congresswoman was for him in the last election.Newly removed from Republican House leadership, Cheney spoke to ABC’s This Week in an interview to be broadcast in full on Sunday.Asked if she voted for Trump in 2020, she replied: “I did.”Asked if she regretted it, she said: “I was never going to support Joe Biden and I do regret the vote. I think that it was based on policy, based on sort of substance and what I know in terms of the kinds of policies [Trump] put forward that were good for the country. But that I think it is fair to say I regret the vote.”Cheney came out against Trump after the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, by supporters he told to “fight like hell” in service of his lie that his conclusive defeat by Joe Biden was the result of mass electoral fraud.Most of the congressional GOP has stayed behind Trump but Cheney was one of 10 Republicans in the House to vote for his impeachment, on a charge of inciting an insurrection. Trump was acquitted at trial after only seven Republican senators could be persuaded to follow suit.Cheney also told ABC that Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, should either voluntarily testify before any 6 January commission about his conversation with Trump as the attack happened, or be compelled to do so.Cheney is a staunch conservative and a daughter of Dick Cheney, a former congressman, secretary of defense and vice-president. As such she is a member of a party establishment either beaten into near-silence by Trump’s harangues, like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell; vilified by Trump’s supporters, like Utah senator and 2012 nominee Mitt Romney; or simply acquiescent.Trump remains excluded from social media over his role in the Capitol riot but on Saturday he issued statements replete with rants about supposed electoral fraud and “crooked, disgusting, and very dishonest media outlets”. In one, he called McConnell a “weak and pathetic leader”.On ABC, interviewer Jonathan Karl also asked if Cheney would stay in her party should Trump decide to run for president again – as he has hinted he might – and then win the nomination in 2024.“I will do everything that I can to make sure he’s not the nominee,” Cheney said. “And, you know everything necessary to make sure that that he never gets anywhere close to the Oval Office again.”But, Karl repeated, would she remain in the party if Trump were the nominee?“I will not support him,” said Cheney. “And we’ll do everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen.”Some Republicans outside Congress have mooted the formation of a new conservative party. Most observers think such a move unlikely to succeed.Nonetheless the brewing civil war in Republican ranks was set to dominate the US political talk shows on Sunday.Cheney was also due to be interviewed on Fox News Sunday. Another anti-Trump House Republican, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, was booked by NBC’s Meet the Press. NBC also booked the Texas representative Dan Crenshaw, a Trump loyalist.CBS’s Face the Nation was due to feature Joni Ernst of Iowa, the only woman in Republican Senate leadership, who this week criticised the House GOP for “cancelling” Cheney. CNN’s State of the Union booked Fred Upton, a Michigan representative and moderate who has been close to Biden.Cheney’s replacement as the No 3 Republican in the House, Elise Stefanik, was due to speak to Fox Business. The New Yorker is a former moderate who swiftly moved to the hard right and gained Trump’s support.Stefanik backed a formal objection to electoral college results in Pennsylvania, one of two states Republicans challenged on the day of the Capitol riot. She indicated a willingness to challenge other states but no senator followed suit.Cheney told ABC: “I think the issue really is Donald Trump and it really is the party and whether we’re going to be a party that’s based on the truth.“I think we’ve seen consistently since the election, certainly since 6 January and in ways it has increased since 6 January, the former president’s willingness to be very aggressive in his attacks on democracy and on our electoral process.” More

    • 200 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Republican Covid lies follow foreign strongmen’s lead – and are deadly for it | Robert Reich

      by

      A hospital in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, is being charged under the country’s National Security Act for sounding the alarm over a lack of oxygen that resulted in Covid deaths. The hospital’s owner and manager says police have accused him of “false scaremongering”, after he stated publicly that four patients died on a single day when oxygen ran out.Since Covid-19 exploded in India, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, seems to be trying to the control the news more than the outbreak. On Wednesday, India recorded nearly 363,000 cases and 4,120 deaths, about 30% of worldwide deaths that day. But experts say India is vastly understating the true number. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, estimates at least 25,000 Indians are dying from Covid each day.The horror has been worsened by shortages of oxygen and hospital beds. Yet Modi and his government don’t want the public to get the true story.One big lesson from the Covid crisis: lying makes it worse.Vladimir Putin is busily denying the truth about Covid in Russia. Demographer Alexei Raksha, who worked at Russia’s official statistical agency, Rosstat, but says he was forced to leave last summer for telling the truth about Covid, claims daily data has been “smoothed, rounded, lowered” to look better. Like many experts, he uses excess mortality – the number of deaths during the pandemic over the typical number of deaths – as the best indicator.Trump wants the credit for developing the vaccine. Then he also gets the blame for so few of his voters taking it“If Russia stops at 500,000 excess deaths, that will be a good scenario,” he calculates.Russia was first out of the gate with a vaccine but has fallen woefully behind on vaccinations. Recent polling puts the share of Russians who don’t want to be vaccinated at 60% to 70%. That’s because Putin and other officials have focused less on vaccinating the public than on claiming success in containing Covid.The US is suffering a similar problem – the legacy of another strongman, Donald Trump. Although more than half of US adults have received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, more than 40% of Republicans have consistently told pollsters they won’t get vaccinated. Their recalcitrance is threatening efforts to achieve “herd immunity” and prevent the virus’s spread.Like Modi and Putin, Trump minimized the seriousness of the pandemic and spread misinformation about it. Trump officials ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to downplay its severity. He declined to get vaccinated publicly and was noticeably absent from a public service announcement on vaccination that featured all other living former presidents.Trump allies in the media have conducted a scare campaign about the vaccines. In December, Fox News host Laura Ingraham posted a story on Facebook from the Daily Mail purporting to show evidence that Chinese communist party loyalists worked at pharmaceutical companies that developed the coronavirus vaccine.As recently as mid-April, Fox News host Tucker Carlson opined that if the vaccine were truly effective, there’d be no reason for people who received it to wear masks or avoid physical contact.“So maybe it doesn’t work,” he said, “and they’re simply not telling you that.”Why then should anyone be surprised at the reluctance of Trump Republicans to get vaccinated? A recent New York Times analysis showed vaccination rates to be lower in counties where a majority voted for Trump in 2020. States that voted more heavily for Trump are also states where lower percentages of the population have been vaccinated.The Republican pollster Frank Luntz says Trump bears responsibility for the hesitancy of GOP voters to be vaccinated.“He wants to get the credit for developing the vaccine,” Luntz said. “Then he also gets the blame for so few of his voters taking it.”Trump’s Republican party is coming to resemble other authoritarian regimes around the world in other respects as well – purging truth tellers and trucking in lies, misinformation and propaganda harmful to the public.This week the GOP stripped Liz Cheney of her leadership position for telling the truth about the 2020 election. At last week’s congressional hearing about the 6 January attack on the Capitol, one Republican, Andrew Clyde, even denied it happened.“There was no insurrection,” he said. “To call it an insurrection is a bold-faced lie … you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”Biden says he plans to call a summit of democratic governments to contain the rise of authoritarianism around the world. I hope he talks about its rise in the US too – and the huge toll it’s already taken on Americans. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Damon Weaver, who interviewed Obama as an 11-year-old, dies aged 23

      by

      Damon Weaver, who was 11 when he attracted national acclaim by interviewing President Barack Obama at the White House in 2009, has died.Weaver died on 1 May, his sister, Candace Hardy, told the Palm Beach Post. He was 23. Hardy said he died of natural causes.Further details were not immediately released. Weaver was studying communications at Albany State University in Georgia.On 13 August 2009, he interviewed Obama for 10 minutes in a conversation posted to YouTube. Weaver largely focused on education, including what could be done to improve school lunches.“I remember when I used to get school lunches, sometimes they didn’t taste so good, I’ve got to admit,” Obama said. “We are actually seeing if we can work to at least make school lunches healthier. Because a lot of school lunches, there’s a lot of french fries, pizzas, tater tots. All kinds of stuff that isn’t a well-balanced meal.”Weaver said: “I suggest that we have French fries and mangos everyday for lunch.”Weaver also told the then-president he appeared to get “bullied a lot” and asked how Obama handled it.“I think that when you’re president, you’re responsible for a lot of things,” Obama said. “A lot of people are having a tough time and they’re hurting out there. And the main thing I just try to do is stay focused on trying to do a good job, and try to be understanding that sometimes people are going to be mad about things.”Weaver had also interviewed then-vice-president Joe Biden and basketball legend Dwyane Wade. He told Obama the sports star promised to play a one-on-one match with the president if he agreed to sit for his questions.“Would you be willing to play him on a one-on-one basketball game?” Weaver asked.“I would play Dwyane Wade,” Obama said. “I’ve got to admit, though, Dwyane Wade’s a little bit better at basketball than I am.”Obama told Weaver he was once able to dunk, but no longer could.Weaver also asked the former president to be his “homeboy”, noting that Biden had already agreed.“Absolutely,” a smiling Obama responded, shaking Weaver’s hand.“He was just a nice person, genuine, very intelligent,” Hardy said of her brother. “Very outspoken, outgoing. He never said no to anybody.”She said the interview with Obama was “a one-in-a-lifetime experience … it was life-changing for him.”Weaver started in journalism in grade five, volunteering for the school newscast at KE Cunningham/Canal Point Elementary, in an agricultural community on Lake Okeechobee in Florida.“Damon was the kid who ran after me in the hall to tell me he was interested,” Brian Zimmerman, his teacher, told the Palm Beach Post in 2016. “And right away, I just saw the potential for the way he was on camera. You could see his personality come through. He wasn’t nervous being on camera.” More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Joe Biden’s Venmo account discovered in ‘less than 10 minutes’ – report

      by

      Venmo accounts for Joe Biden and Dr Jill Biden were removed on Friday after BuzzFeed News said it easily found the US president on the payment app – a discovery it said raised national security questions.The website went looking for Biden’s account after it was mentioned in a New York Times report on White House conditions and working practices.Under the headline “Beneath Joe Biden’s Folksy Demeanor, a Short Fuse and an Obsession With Details”, the Times reported lengthy policy debates, angry outbursts at advisers and officials – and plenty of time spent with grandchildren.“They have been known to show their grandfather apps like TikTok,” the story said. “One adviser said he had sent the grandchildren money using Venmo.”The Trump administration wrestled unsuccessfully with the popularity of TikTok, an app for sharing short videos, over its ownership by a Chinese company, ByteDance.Venmo, which is owned by PayPal, enables simple payments between contacts. Transactions are public by default. They can be made private but contact lists remain visible. Biden’s payments were private. BuzzFeed did not publish names of his contacts.Reporters commonly scan Venmo for leads. The scandal engulfing the Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, for example, has included reporting on payments to women, allegedly for sex, made by a former associate.One recent Daily Beast headline read: “Gaetz Paid Accused Sex Trafficker, Who Then Venmo’d Teen”. Gaetz denies all such accusations.BuzzFeed said it took “less than 10 minutes” to find Biden’s account, “using only a combination of the app’s built-in search tool and public friends feature”.“In the process,” it said, it “found nearly a dozen Biden family members and mapped out a social web that encompasses not only the first family but a wide network of people around them, including the president’s children, grandchildren, senior White House officials and all of their contacts on Venmo.”The White House did not immediately comment. By late Friday, BuzzFeed said, accounts for the president and first lady had been removed.A Venmo spokesman said: “The safety and privacy of all Venmo users and their information is always a top priority, and we take this responsibility very seriously.“Customers always have the ability to make their transactions private and determine their own privacy settings in the app. We’re consistently evolving and strengthening the privacy measures for all Venmo users to continue to provide a safe, secure place to send and spend money.”In a 2018 Guardian report, Christine Bannan, then of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said: “Venmo is an unusual app because it combines social media with financial transactions.“One of those is usually fairly public and one is usually very private, so it’s hard to gauge consumer expectations of privacy.”Gennie Gebhart, acting activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told BuzzFeed: “Venmo’s privacy failures are already a big problem for everyday folks who use Venmo, and that’s been the case for years.“All of those problems are magnified when we’re talking about a major public figure.” More

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Can ‘Never Trump’ Republicans gain party control – or is it a lost cause?

      by

      Sixteen minutes and out. The purging of Liz Cheney from Republican leadership in the House of Representatives did not even go to a secret ballot. Instead a voice vote was all it took to confirm the party’s capitulation to Donald Trump and his “big lie” about a stolen election.But Cheney went down swinging, vowing to reporters on Capitol Hill: “I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office,” then using a high-profile TV interview to say of would-be challengers for her seat in Wyoming: “Bring it on.”The public defiance instantly turned Cheney into one of the leaders of the “Never Trump” movement of disaffected Republicans. But it also raised strategic questions over the future direction of that movement and whether it can still regain control of the party – or should now abandon it as a lost cause.Some insist that the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan was their home long before Trump’s populist-fantasist invasion and they will fight to drive him out. Others believe that it is time to abandon ship and their future lies as independents or Democrats or even, perhaps, in a breakaway party.“We’re torn,” said Joe Walsh, a former congressman from Illinois. “I left the Republican party a year ago. Liz Cheney isn’t there yet. [Congressman] Adam Kinzinger, who I know well, isn’t there yet. They want to still try to reform and save the Republican party; I don’t think it can be saved.“So there’s a split in the Never Trump world and most Never Trumpers still agree with Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger: let’s try to reform the party from within. I just don’t think it’s reformable. They still harbour ideas that the Republican party can be wrestled away from Trump; it can’t be.”Walsh, who mounted a long-shot challenge to Trump for the Republican nomination last year, believes that a third party is now the only solution. “We’re at a weird moment in American history where, because the Republican party has become a cult, there’s an opportunity to start something new. I think eventually that’s where everybody’s going to get to.”On Thursday a coalition of more than 150 anti-Trump Republicans started a “political movement” urging the party to turn its back on extremism and lies. Members of A Call for American Renewal include lawyer George Conway, husband of former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, and Anthony Scaramucci, ex-White House communications director, as well as 27 former members of the House.The group stopped short of proposing a new party – for now. Co-organiser Evan McMullin, who ran for president as an independent in Utah in 2016, said: “We definitely don’t rule it out but our preference is to reform the Republican party, not necessarily from within. I think most of us believe that the only way to reform the Republican party at this point is to act independently of it.“It means that we will support good Republicans who are upholding the rule of law and defending and promoting truth and the constitution, but we’ll also support viable independents where they exist. If we have to support a unifying Democrat in order to defeat an extremist Republican, we’re going to do that. If it’s Senator Mark Kelly in Arizona running for re-election against extremist Kelli Ward, then we’re going to be for Captain Mark Kelly.”McMullin, a former CIA operations officer, added: “I think in this next cycle we’ll have people who will run under our banner, people who are in office now, people who are capable of mounting credible campaigns for public office. We will invite all to associate with our principles regardless of their party registration and to run as a part of this effort.”Other initiatives in the Never Trump universe include the Lincoln Project, Principles First, the Republican Accountability Project and the Bulwark website. Kinzinger, who with Cheney was among 10 House Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment after the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol, launched a group called Country First to recruit and back anti-Trump Republican candidates.Cheney herself now has a platform guaranteed by her family name (her father was George W Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney) and looks set to be a more prominent voice than retired senators such as Bob Corker and Jeff Flake. She is reportedly planning more travel and media interviews and a political operation to support candidates who share her contempt for Trump’s false claims of election fraud.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “Liz Cheney has positioned herself to be a prominent spokesperson for the old style Republican but also a very conservative party that does not kneel before an authoritarian, which is what the others are doing.“She deserves the position that she has has just earned. Now, that’s not to say she’s going to be elected president: she’s pretty far to the right. But how can you not admire her for sacrificing the power she has now and maybe her seat?”I think most of us believe that the only way to reform the Republican party at this point is to act independently of itThere are some signs that Trump’s sway over the party is not what it was. His favourability rating among Republicans in December was 91%, with 74% holding a very favourable view, an Economist/YouGov poll found. This month the same survey showed him at 78% favourability, with 58% very favourable. But congressional Republicans appear to have concluded they cannot fight next year’s midterm elections without him.Kevin Madden, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, now a senator for Utah and outspoken Trump critic, is in no doubt that a long haul lies ahead for Never Trumpers. “What is the plan to mobilise and grow that movement and is that best done inside the party or outside the party?” he asked. “What is the calendar of action on that?“Anybody who thinks that this is going to be waged between now and the midterms or now and 2024 is probably being very unrealistic. The more realistic scenario is that, if Liz Cheney is to be believed about her dedication in this respect, today is the first day of what is probably a decades-long battle for the direction of the party.”A breakaway remains unlikely with the odds stacked against anyone trying to shake up America’s two-party system. Competing with Democrats and Republicans’ vast fundraising machines would be daunting. In the first-past-the-post electoral system, a third party would struggle to convince people that their vote would be not be wasted in hundreds of districts.Madden, who became an independent last year and wrote in the name of Lynne Cheney, mother of Liz, on his presidential election ballot, added: “The work of building the infrastructure to compete across 50 different states or 435 different congressional districts? That is a monumental undertaking.” More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Democrats and Republicans agree on US Capitol attack commission

      by

      House Democrats and Republicans have agreed to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the 6 January attack on the US Capitol, lawmakers said on Friday.But the terms of the proposed commission fell short of Republican demands, casting doubt on whether the GOP will vote for its creation.The Democratic chairman of the House homeland security committee, Bennie Thompson, from Mississippi, and the ranking Republican on the panel, John Katko, of New York, said the new body would be modelled on the 9/11 Commission.That panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was created in late 2002 and published its report in 2004.Authorities are still examining videos and photos from 6 January.Told by Donald Trump to “fight like hell” in service of his lie that his electoral defeat was the result of mass voter fraud, hundreds of supporters of the then president broke into the Capitol. Some looked for lawmakers, including Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, to capture and possibly kill. Five people died.More than 440 people have been arrested in connection with the attack and charged with crimes including use of a deadly or dangerous weapon and assaulting a police officer. Prosecutors have said they expect to charge about 100 more.Maj Christopher Warnagiris, a US Marine Corps officer, was arrested on Thursday. He is the first active-duty service member to be charged. At least 52 military personnel, law enforcement or government employees have been arrested.A vote on the National Commission to Investigate the 6 January Attack on the United States Capitol Complex Act, legislation necessary to create the 6 January panel, could happen as early as next week.The Republican House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, did not immediately back the deal as announced.The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, proposed a commission in February but the process stalled amid disagreement.Democrats wanted the commission to focus on the 6 January attack. Republicans wanted to include violence during protests over police brutality last summer, which they attribute to leftwing groups.There was also disagreement about the makeup of the commission and its powers of subpoena.Thompson was asked to negotiate directly with Katko, who was one of 10 House Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment over the events of 6 January, on a charge of inciting an insurrection. Trump was not convicted, as only seven Republican senators voted for his guilt, short of the super-majority needed.Should the panel be voted into existence, it will only investigate the events of 6 January.It will include 10 members. Five including the chair will be selected by Pelosi and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer. Five including a vice-chair will be appointed by the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, and the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell.The commission will have the power to issue subpoenas but that action will require either agreement between the chair and vice-chair or a majority vote.The members will have “significant expertise in the areas of law enforcement, civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, intelligence and cybersecurity”. Current government employees will not be appointed.A final report on the events of 6 January will be required, outlining facts and causes and providing recommendations to prevent future attacks.Thompson said: “There has been a growing consensus that the 6 January attack is of a complexity and national significance that what we need is an independent commission to investigate.“I am pleased that after many months of intensive discussion, Ranking Member Katko and I were able to reach a bipartisan agreement.”Pelosi said: “It is imperative that we seek the truth of what happened on 6 January with an independent, bipartisan 9/11-type commission to examine and report upon the facts, causes and security relating to the terrorist mob attack.” More