Election News and Coverage

After nearly six months of watching Republicans relentlessly make it harder to vote in the US, Democrats suffered a major blow on Tuesday after GOP senators used a legislative maneuver to halt a sweeping voting rights and ethics bill. The vote doesn’t kill the bill, but it marks one of the most significant setbacks for…

Key events Show 8.00pm EDT 20:00 Summary 5.46pm EDT 17:46 Civil rights groups oppose Joe Manchin voting rights compromise 2.42pm EDT 14:42 US Covid deaths below 300 a day 12.32pm EDT 12:32 Biden to miss target of 80m vaccine doses by end of June 12.15pm EDT 12:15 White House announces which countries will receive 55m…

Joe Biden’s far-reaching domestic agenda in the US is facing serious setbacks on a range of issues as the political quagmire of a tightly contested Senate is seeing Democratic ambitions sharply curtailed in the face of Republican obstruction. On a number of key fronts such as pushing election reform and voting rights, efforts to curb…

George Packer’s incisive, deftly argued book about the moral and political quandary of the United States begins and ends with his declaration: “I am an American.” The statement is self-evident but also self-congratulatory: Americans regard their citizenship as a spiritual credential, a gesture of faith in the country that has always claimed to be the…

They were pointed questions, not personal criticisms. But they will have conveyed a warning to Joe Biden that the patience of the left of the Democratic party and its leaders in ‘the Squad’ of progressive politicians is not infinite. “Are we passing the deal that helps working people the most?” asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the firebrand…

Andy Slavitt’s Preventable is a 336-page indictment of Donald Trump, Trumpworld, America’s lack of social cohesion, greed and big pharma. He laments needless deaths, hyper-partisanship and populist disdain of experts and expertise. The word “evil” appears. So does “privilege”. Slavitt, recently departed as a senior adviser to Joe Biden on Covid response, is himself a…

The US will officially recognize Juneteenth as a federal holiday on 19 June after Joe Biden signed a bill into law which commemorates the end of slavery in the country. The president described a day to remember the moral stain of slavery but also to celebrate the capacity to heal. Before signing the bill, Biden…

Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene apologised for comparing Covid-19 mask requirements and vaccinations to the Nazi Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews. ‘I have made a mistake and it’s really bothered me for a couple of weeks now, and so I definitely want to own it,’ Taylor Greene said. Her apology on Monday came amid…

The US vice-president, Kamala Harris, said she had held ‘robust’ talks with the Guatemalan president, Alejandro Giammattei, as she sought to find ways of deterring undocumented immigration from Central America to the United States. Speaking during a news conference with Giammattei, Harris delivered a blunt message to people thinking of making the dangerous journey north: ‘Do not come’…

Manuel Gonzales, a New Mexico sheriff who is running for mayor of Albuquerque, was interrupted at a campaign event by a flying drone with a sex toy attached to it. A man tried to grab the item, swinging his fist and calling Gonzeles a tyrant. The campaign group for Gonzales said the Democrat was unharmed and ‘will…