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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Richard Luscombe

Biden tells Buffalo shooting mourners: ‘Evil will not win. Hate will not prevail’ – as it happened

Joe Biden and the first lady Jill Biden at the Delavan Grider Community Center in Buffalo.
Joe Biden and the first lady Jill Biden at the Delavan Grider Community Center in Buffalo. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP

Closing summary

We’re closing our live blog now, but it’s far from the end of our political coverage for the day. It’s primary day in several states, with prominent Republican Senate and governor candidates in Pennsylvania notably going head to head.

Please watch for my colleague Lauren Gambino’s coverage later, including TV doctor Mehmet Oz’s bid to advance his chase for a Senate seat and North Carolina extremist Madison Cawthorn’s efforts to hold on to his in the House of Representatives.

The day was otherwise dominated by Joe Biden’s visit to grieve with the families of victims and survivors of the weekend’s massacre of 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo.

“Evil will not win. Hate will not prevail,” Biden said, calling white supremacy “a poison” that had no place in America.

Here’s what else we followed:

  • Buffalo mayor Byron Brown said he saw Biden’s “sense of resolve” to get something done about gun reforms following the grocery store massacre.
  • Republicans in Wisconsin who submitted to Congress false ballots stating Donald Trump won the 2020 election in the state are facing a $2.4m lawsuit.
  • The food and drug administration approved a Covid-19 booster shot for children aged five to 11.
  • The FBI opened a federal hate crime investigation into a shooting at an Asian-American owned hair salon in Dallas that wounded three women.
  • Black students in Georgia who say they were blocked from protesting a rule that allowed Confederate flags on clothing but not Black Lives Matter materials are suing their school district.

Updated

Donald Trump has received a savage Twitter smackdown from George Conway, a constant bête noire of the former president as co-founder of the Lincoln Project, and husband to his former adviser Kellyanne Conway.

The Tuesday afternoon insult likening Trump to a caged monkey throwing feces came as part of a chain that began with news the 6 January committee was not expecting to call him as a witness in public hearings this spring.

Lawyer Elizabeth de la Vega decided it was not something she wanted to see:

And Conway followed up with this:

Thousands of ballots from several counties in today’s Pennsylvania primary election might not be able to be read “for several days”, the Associated Press reports, because of a printing error.

Officials in Lancaster county, the state’s sixth most populous, said the problem involved at least 21,000 mailed ballots, only a third of which were scanning properly.

The glitch will force election workers to redo ballots that can’t be read by the machine, a laborious process expected to take several days, the AP says. Officials in the Republican-controlled county pledged that all the ballots will be counted eventually.

“Citizens deserve to have accurate results from elections and they deserve to have them on election night, not days later,” Josh Parsons, Republican vice chair of the county board of commissioners said at a news conference.

“But because of this, we’re not going to have final election results from these mail ballots for probably several days”.

Updated

John Fetterman, frontrunner in today’s Democratic senate primary in Pennsylvania, is undergoing what campaign staff say is “a standard procedure” to install a heart pacemaker.

The state’s lieutenant governor announced on Sunday he had suffered a minor stroke two days previously, but said he was recovering and his campaign “isn’t slowing down one bit”.

“John Fetterman is about to undergo a standard procedure to implant a pacemaker with a defibrillator. It should be a short procedure that will help protect his heart and address the underlying cause of his stroke, atrial fibrillation (A-fib), by regulating his heart rate and rhythm,” the statement from his campaign said.

Fetterman tweeted that he used “an emergency absentee ballot” to cast his vote today (presumably for himself) from his bed in Penn Medicine Lancaster general hospital.

Buffalo mayor: gun controls in this country 'very elusive'

Buffalo’s mayor Byron Brown has just been talking about Joe Biden’s visit to his city today, and what he sees as the president’s “sense of resolve” to get something done about gun reforms following the grocery store massacre.

Brown told reporters that the president and first lady Jill Biden spent considerable private time with the families of the 10 killed by an alleged white supremacist, which he said he thought strengthened Biden’s “commitment to try to bring change”:

As it relates to gun control in this country change has been very elusive. There are those in Washington who have put the needs and the desires of the gun manufacturers ahead of the lives of Americans. That has to stop.

The president talked about gun control. He talked about his concern for the families here. There was talk about what could be done to end these mass shootings.

The president seemed very moved by what he saw here in this community. And I really felt a strong sense of resolve and commitment in the president to try to bring change as it relates to these kinds of situations.

I saw him steel himself during this visit to get something done. I felt it, I think it’s powerful, and I think it’s real.

Brown also paid tribute to police officers and fire fighters who responded to Saturday’s shooting, and credited Aaron Salter, the former police officer and Tops market security guard who lost his life in a firefight with the killer, for saving lives:

If not for the heroic actions of... Aaron Salter engaging the shooter and exchanging gunfire with the shooter that ultimately took his life, more people would probably have gotten killed inside the store.

Byron Brown (far left) with (from left) New York governor Kathy Hochul, senator Kirsten Gillibrand, senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, New York attorney general Letitia James and first lady Jill Biden in Buffalo today.
Byron Brown (far left) with (from left) New York governor Kathy Hochul, senator Kirsten Gillibrand, senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, New York attorney general Letitia James and first lady Jill Biden in Buffalo today. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

The US Congress held its first open briefing on UFOs in more than 50 years on Tuesday, but those seeking explanations for the numerous military sightings of unexplained objects were left disappointed, as defense officials appeared to hold their juiciest information for closed door hearings.

During a 90-minute briefing in Washington a highlight was the release of two new videos showing unidentified aerial phenomena, although one of them was immediately debunked by Scott Bray, the deputy director of navy intelligence.

Deputy director of US naval intelligence Scott Bray testifies about “unidentified aerial phenomena” on Tuesday.
Deputy director of US naval intelligence Scott Bray testifies about “unidentified aerial phenomena” on Tuesday. Photograph: Joey Roulette/Reuters

The hearing, the first of its nature since 1966, came after a bumper year for UFO enthusiasts. In 2021, US intelligence released a landmark report which found 144 reports of unidentified aerial phenomenon, only one of which could be explained.

The report followed US navy pilots publicly discussing their encounters with UAPs, with one retired lieutenant claiming he saw objects in the sky above the east coast “every day for at least a couple years”.

On Tuesday Bray sought to defend the government’s investigation of UAPs – following accusations that the Pentagon is not taking the issue seriously enough – but also showed members of an intelligence subcommittee videos of airborne objects.

One video, filmed during daylight, showed an object appearing to whiz past a military jet. The fleeting appearance of the object – it appeared on screen for less than a second – showed the difficulty in gathering data on some UAPs, Bray said.

Another clip, recorded at night from a military plane at some time in 2019, showed triangle shapes appearing to hover in the sky. Bray then played another video that captured the same phenomena, but followed it up with a mundane explanation: the objects were drones, rendered triangular in shape and other-worldly in motion because of a quirk in the way video was captured through night-vision equipment.

The debunking did little to counter accusations – including one leveled by Andre Carson, the committee chair – that the Pentagon has little interest in investigating the inexplicable.

Read more:

The US has taken control of Afghanistan’s embassy in Washington DC, and consulates in New York and Beverly Hills, California, the state department has said.

It moved to secure the properties Tuesday, according to the Associated Press, after determining Afghanistan “formally ceased conducting diplomatic and consular activities in the United States” at noon yesterday.

In reality, there have been no formal diplomatic ties between Washington and Kabul since the Taliban assumed power after the chaotic US withdrawal last summer. The US does not recognize the Taliban as a legitime government.

An official notice will be published in the federal register on Wednesday stating that the department had assumed responsibility for “protection and preservation” of the properties the AP said.

Nobody will be allowed to enter the buildings without state department official, it said.

Interim summary

The day has been dominated so far by Joe Biden’s visit to grieve with the families of victims and survivors of the weekend’s massacre of 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo.

The president and first lady Jill Biden met with the families, then he delivered a powerful address in which he called out the racial hatred behind the killings, and urged Americans to unite in the fight against “hateful and perverse ideology”.

“Evil will not win. Hate will not prevail,” Biden said, calling white supremacy “a poison” that had no place in America.

Elsewhere:

  • Republicans in Wisconsin who submitted to Congress false ballots stating Donald Trump won the 2020 election in the state are facing a $2.4m lawsuit.
  • The food and drug administration approved a Covid-19 booster shot for children aged five to 11.
  • The FBI opened a federal hate crime investigation into a shooting at an Asian-American owned hair salon in Dallas that wounded three women.
  • Black students in Georgia who say they were blocked from protesting a rule that allowed Confederate flags on clothing but not Black Lives Matter materials are suing their school district.

$2.4m lawsuit for Wisconsin Republicans who pushed Trump's big lie

Republicans in Wisconsin who attempted to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, by submitting false electoral ballots to Congress declaring Donald Trump the winner, are facing a lawsuit.

The legal action in Dane county circuit court says the decision by a Republican slate of electors to send the ballots saying Trump had won was “as legally baseless as it was repugnant to democracy”, the Associated Press says.

Biden won the state, and its 10 electoral college votes, by almost 21,000 votes.

The lawsuit, filed by three Democratic voters, names 10 Republicans and two attorneys it says were responsible and seeks up to $2.4m in damages, as well as disqualifying the Republicans from serving as electors in the future.

“It’s essential to have accountability and to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Jeffrey Mandell, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told the AP.

“We have heard in the more than a year since the fraudulent electors met the excuse that what they did was not wrong, it was totally fine. We want a court to make clear that is not true”.

Republican electors who have spoken publicly have argued they weren’t trying to change the Wisconsin result but attempting to “preserve legal options” if a court ruled in favor of Trump.

Wisconsin was among a number of heavily contested swing states that Biden won to deny Trump a second term in office.

The twice-impeached Trump has since expounded the big lie that the election was fraudulent and victory was stolen from him, and incited the 6 January Capitol riot by his supporters to try to cling on to power.

Numerous conservative groups pushing the big lie are facing legal actions is several states, the Guardian reported last week.

Read more:

A tweet from the president in Buffalo urges the nation “to find purpose to live a life worthy of those we lost. We must resolve that from tragedy will come hope and light and life”.

An emotional Joe Biden, who received several bursts of applause during his Buffalo address, closed with a powerful call for Americans to come together to defeat what he said was a “hateful minority”:

We’re the most multiracial, most dynamic nation in the history of the world. Now’s the time for the people of all races, from every background, to speak up as a majority in America and reject white supremacy.

These actions we’ve seen in these hate filled attacks represent the views of a hateful minority. We can’t allow them to distort America. We can’t allow them to destroy the soul of the nation.

And he widened his comments to include the divisiveness of the current political climate:

I travel the world all the time. Heads of state in other countries ask me, ‘What’s going on? What in God’s name happened on January 6th? What happened in Buffalo?’

We have to refuse to live in a country where black people going about weekly grocery shopping can be gunned down by weapons of war deployed in a racist cause.

We have to refuse to live in a country where fear and lies are packaged for power and for profit.

You must all enlist in this great cause of America. This is work that requires all of us, presidents and politicians, commentators, citizens, none of us can stay on the sidelines.

We have to resolve that here in Buffalo, that from this tragedy, will come hope, in light, in life. It has to. And not on our watch... the sacred cause of America will never bow, never break, never bend. The America we love will endure.

May the souls of the fallen rest in peace and rise in glory.

The president said Americans had a duty to call out the hatred and racial bigotry behind the massacre in Buffalo, and countless other mass shootings. Then he turned to gun laws, and a call for Congress to pick up the baton:

The venom of the haters and their weapons of war... the violence in the words and deeds that stalk our streets, our stores, our schools. This venom, this violence, cannot be the story of our time. We cannot allow that to happen.

Look, I’m not naive. I know tragedy will come again. It cannot be forever overcome. It cannot be fully understood either.

But there are certain things we can do. We can keep assault weapons off our streets. We’ve done it before. We passed pass the crime bill last time and violence went down. Shootings went down.

You can’t prevent people from being radicalized to violence but we can address the relentless exploitation of the internet to recruit and mobilize terrorism. We just need to have the courage to do that, to stand up.

Biden went on the address the peril he said the US is in, if urgent action is not taken:

The American experiment and democracy is in a danger like it hasn’t been in my lifetime. It’s in a danger this hour.

Hate and fear are being given too much oxygen by those who pretend to love America but who don’t understand America.

To confront the ideology of hate requires caring about all people, not making distinctions.

Biden: 'White supremacy a poison that has no place in America'

Joe Biden attacked the “hateful and perverse ideology” behind the Buffalo massacre as he and first lady Jill Biden visited the city and paid tribute to the victims.

In an emotional but powerful address to mourners, officials and first responders, the president called on Americans to “enlist” in the fight against racial hatred:

In America, evil will not win. I promise you. Hate will not prevail. White supremacy will not have the last word.

What happened here is simple and straightforward terrorism, domestic terrorism, violence inflicted in the service of hate, and a vicious thirst for power.

The media, and politics, the internet, have radicalized angry and lost and isolated individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced. That’s the word. Replaced by other people who don’t look like them.

I call on all Americans to reject the lie, and those who spread the lie for power, political gain, and for profit.

Biden condemned years of racially-based attacks across the country.

We’ve seen the mass shootings in Charleston, South Carolina; El Paso, Texas and Pittsburgh. Last year in Atlanta, this week in Dallas, Texas. Now in Buffalo... Buffalo, New York...

White supremacy is a poison. It’s a poison running through our body politic that’s been allowed to fester and grow right in front of our eyes. No more. No more. We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can, that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America.

Updated

Biden to Buffalo families and survivors: 'We've come to grieve with you'

Joe Biden has just begun his remarks at the scene of the mass shooting in Buffalo that claimed 10 lives on Saturday.

“We’ve come to grieve with you,” the president said, after being introduced by first lady Jill Biden.

“The feeling like there’s a black hole in your chest, you’re suffocating, you’re unable to breath. The anger, and the pain, the depth of a loss that’s so profound”.

Biden is naming the victims one by one, and telling his audience a little about them.

He is expected to move on shortly to a call for Congress to tighten gun laws.

Updated

My colleague Ed Helmore is at the site of Saturday’s mass shooting in Buffalo, and sent this dispatch about the importance to the predominantly Black community of the supermarket where it happened:

Tops Friendly on Jefferson Avenue in East Buffalo was more than just a grocery store. It served as community center, a place to hang out, a source of employment – and a spot for healthy sustenance unavailable at bodega stores in an area described as the oasis in a food desert.

In the three days since Tops became the carefully targeted site of a mass shooting and was closed indefinitely, community groups, local advocates, western New York’s emergency food network, corporate donors, churches and even Tops staff have scrambled to fill the gap.

“It was everything to us. It was the heart of Jefferson,” said Jeanette Simmons, a former Tops cashier who said she had left Tops on Saturday when she heard the first gunshots. Ever since, she was finding it hard to cope. “It’s been difficult to sleep, eat, shop – everything. He took everything from us.”

Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York.
Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York. Photograph: John Normile/Getty Images

Simmons was standing in line at an emergency food distribution center run by the Resource Council of WNY and Feedmore WNY on Ferry Street, 10 minutes from Tops – which, although shuttered, had also set up a food distribution and counselling center nearby, and was offering a bus service to another location.

Simmons said she was worried about the store remaining closed, in part because of the stimulating effect it had on other local businesses. “They paved the way for us to have things on Jefferson. I loved everything about Tops. Some people can’t afford to go way out to get food.”

The site is currently an FBI crime scene. Given the death and devastation allegedly caused by the suspect Payton Gendron, some regular Tops clientele may not want to return.

“I don’t want to go back in there. I knew most of the people who worked there,” said Erma Ecford. “Friday he [Gendron] was in the store. He was right there by the water when I was getting my pop. If he did it then he would have taken a lot more people out, because the store was crowded.”

Read more:

The FBI has opened a federal hate crime investigation into last week’s shooting at an Asian-American owned hair salon in Dallas that wounded three women.

The Dallas FBI field office is working with the US attorney’s office for the northern district of Texas, and the US justice department’s civil rights division, the Associated Press reports.

Last Wednesday’s shooting, at the Hair World salon in the city’s Koreatown neighborhood, occurred three days before Saturdays racist massacre of Blacks at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and four days before one person was shot dead and five others wounded at a Taiwanese church in California.

A suspect is in custody, the Dallas police department said.

Updated

FDA approves Covid-19 booster for children 5-11

The food and drug administration (FDA) has approved a Covid-19 vaccine booster shot for children aged five to 11, the agency announced Thursday.

The FDA already recommends boosters for those 12 and older, and the authorization of a booster for young children on top of their recommended two-shot dose is expected to help improve protection against the virus as the BA.2 and other subvariants send case numbers upwards again nationwide.

The agency says the third shot for elementary-age children kids is recommended at least five months after their most recent dose.

The shots, however, are not immediately available. Final approval must come from the federal centers for disease control and prevention (CDC), whose regulators meet on Thursday.

The only Covid-19 vaccine currently available for children of any age in the US is Pfizer, with those five to 11 receiving one-third of the adult dose, the Associated Press says.

The Pfizer vaccine for children, right, and the vaccine for adults, left.
The Pfizer vaccine for children, right, and the vaccine for adults, left. Photograph: Rogelio V Solis/AP

Updated

A group of Black students suspended for attempting to protest Confederate flag displays at their high school in Georgia are suing their school district, the Associated Press reports.

The district and its board members allowed “overt bigotry and animosity by some white students and teachers against African American students,” the lawsuit alleges.

The planned protest at Coosa high school in Rome was stifled last fall, when administrators suspended four Black students who tried to organize it.

The lawsuit claims that students in the conservative district, which is represented in Congress by the extremist Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, were permitted to wear Confederate flags on their clothing, but prohibited from displaying Black Lives Matter material.

It further states that the school’s principal threatened one of the Black students with jail for “instigating a riot” if the protest went ahead.

School board officials say they will defend the lawsuit, the AP says, but would not comment further.

Senior Democratic figures and gun reform activists are weighing in with calls for Congress to tighten gun restrictions in the wake of the Buffalo massacre. Joe Biden will use his lunchtime speech today at the site of Saturday’s mass shooting to press politicians for action.

Here’s former president Barack Obama, who in 2013 declared as “shameful” lawmakers’ refusal to act after the slaughter of 20 children and six educators in the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting:

From California congressman Eric Swalwell, a vocal gun reform supporter:

From Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was among the 17 victims of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting in Florida:

From Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren:

From former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg:

Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden have arrived in Buffalo, where they laid flowers at a makeshift memorial for the 10 victims of Saturday’s grocery store massacre.

They are about to meet privately with families of the victims, survivors, and first responders. Also present are New York’s governor Kathy Hochul, senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Buffalo mayor Byron Brown and state and local officials, the White House says.

The president will deliver an address at about 1pm.

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden visit the scene of Saturday’s supermarket shooting to pay respects and speak to families of the victims.
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden visit the scene of Saturday’s supermarket shooting to pay respects and speak to families of the victims. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP

An alleged white supremacist cited the racist “great replacement” theory in a manifesto posted online attempting to justify his massacre of the 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.

Here, my colleague Ed Pilkington takes an in-depth look at the discredited conspiracy theory that has found favor with numerous Republican figures, including congresswoman Elise Stefanik and Fox News host Tucker Carlson:

On Saturday, a white man armed with an AR-15-style rifle entered a supermarket in Buffalo in New York state and killed 10 people, almost all of whom were African American. The gunman is suspected of having posted a 180-page racist diatribe in which he repeatedly referenced the extremist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement”.

The Buffalo shooter drew heavily on the white supremacist rantings of the gunman in the 2019 massacre at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 51 people were killed. His similarly hate-filled statement was titled “The Great Replacement”.

At its heart, the theory claims falsely that white people are being stripped of their power through the demographic rise of communities of color, driven by immigration. The lie has been integral to many of the most horrifying recent acts of white supremacist violence in the US.

Far-right protesters at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to the killing of a woman, chanted “You will not replace us”. Replacement theory featured in the rants of mass shooters at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 in which 11 people were murdered; a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in which 23 were killed in 2019; and a synagogue in Poway, California, the same year in which one person died.

Replacement theory is a set of racist and antisemitic paranoid lies and delusions that has cropped up around the world in the past decade. In the US it is expressed as the false idea that an elite cabal of Jews and Democrats is “replacing” white Americans with Black, Hispanic and other people of color by encouraging immigration and interracial marriage – with the end goal being the eventual extinction of the white race.

Read the full story here:

The White House says Joe Biden will host Sweden’s prime minister Magdalena Andersson and Finland’s president Sauli Niinisto in Washington DC on Thursday as the two Nordic nations pursue membership of Nato.

European security in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the two nations’ application to join the mutual defense alliance, will be on the agenda, according to a White House statement just released.

The summit will take place before Biden embarks on a four-day trip to South Korea and Japan.

Biden to call for stronger gun laws during Buffalo visit

Joe Biden will visit a makeshift memorial at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York, this morning before meeting privately with survivors and families of the 10 people killed in a mass shooting on Saturday.

The president and first lady Jill Biden also plan to speak with first responders and local officials before Biden delivers remarks at a nearby community center at lunchtime calling on Congress to pass stricter gun laws, as well as urging Americans to reject racism.

Talking to reporters aboard Air Force One just now, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden was outraged by the shooting, and gave a preview of his address:

The president will call this despicable act for what it is, terrorism motivated by a hateful and perverse ideology that tears at the soul of our nation.

He will call on all Americans to give hate no safe harbor and to reject the lies of racial animus that radicalize and divide us and led to the act of racist violence we saw on Saturday that took the lives of 10 Americans.

President Biden will call on Congress to take action to keep weapons of war off our streets and keep guns out of the hands of criminals and people who have a serious mental illness that makes them a danger to themselves or others.

It remains to be seen if there is renewed appetite in the Senate for stronger gun laws in the wake of the Buffalo shooting and similar recent deadly hate attacks, including one at a California church on Sunday.

Republicans have repeatedly blocked efforts to introduce measures overwhelmingly popular with the US public. Jean-Pierre said:

We’re going to continue to call on Congress to expand to expand background checks, renew our ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and confirm Steve Dettelbach to head the ATF [bureau of alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives].

Biden made gun controls a plank of his election campaign, but has been frustrated by a divided Congress. Last month, he announced plans to crack down on so-called “ghost guns”.

Derrick Johnson, president of the national association for the advancement of colored people (NAACP) said the president’s visit to Buffalo was more than an exercise in grieving:

It’s important for him to show up for the families and the community and express his condolences. But we’re more concerned with preventing this from happening in the future.

We’ll bring you plenty more from the Bidens’ visit to Buffalo as it happens.

Biden heads to Buffalo to meet victims' families

Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday’s US politics blog.

Joe Biden is on his way to Buffalo, New York, to meet families of the victims of Saturday’s racist attack at a grocery store that claimed 10 lives.

The president has called the mass shooting by an alleged radicalized white supremacist “terrorism motivated by a hateful and perverse ideology”. He and first lady Jill Biden will meet victims’ families, local officials and first responders this morning, and deliver remarks at lunchtime.

Meanwhile in Congress, Democrats are resurrecting efforts to pass the domestic terrorism prevention act in the wake of the Buffalo shooting and other recent hate crimes. The law would give the justice department more tools to tackle white supremacy in particular.

Here’s what else we’re watching today:

  • It’s primary day in several states, and Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican party will be tested in several key races, notably in Pennsylvania. His choice for Senate nominee, TV doctor Mehmet Oz, faces a stiff challenge from an even more extremist candidate, Kathy Barnette, and one from the mainstream, David McCormick.
  • Voters in Idaho, Kentucky, Oregon and North Carolina are also at the polls, and my colleague Lauren Gambino will have coverage of the day’s events later this evening.
  • Homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas will visit the US-Mexico border in Texas amid uncertainty over the Biden administration’s efforts to terminate the Trump-era Title 42 policy that blocked refugees because of Covid-19.
  • Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis will address a joint meeting of Congress, with vice-president Kamala Harris in attendance.
  • The House intelligence subcommittee will hold a public hearing this morning to investigate UFOs, or, more accurately, “unexplained aerial sightings” by the US military. Two Pentagon officials will give testimony.
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