Good morning.
A federal judge in Washington has ruled that hundreds of pages of White House records from the Trump administration can be turned over to the House committee investigating the deadly 6 January attack on the Capitol, defying objections from Donald Trump.
The decision, handed down late on Tuesday by the US district judge Tanya Chutkan, clears the way for the National Archives to start transmitting the records requested by Congress as early as Friday, though attorneys for Trump immediately vowed to appeal the ruling.
“The court holds that the public interest lies in permitting – not enjoining – the combined will of the legislative and executive branches to study the events that led to January 6,” Chutkan wrote in a 39-page opinion that delivered a major win to the select committee.
What kind of records are they? They are among the most sensitive: visitor logs, telephone records, and other documents from the files of Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as well as the former deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin.
How much is there? The National Archives has indicated Trump was invoking executive privilege protections to block the release of at least 750 pages of records.
What else has the panel done this week? They have issued 10 new subpoenas to Trump administration officials, including Trump’s former senior adviser Stephen Miller and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Jury watches drone footage of Kyle Rittenhouse shooting man dead
The jury at Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trial on Tuesday watched drone footage that showed Rittenhouse shooting Joseph Rosenbaum at close range during a night of protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last August.
The video, zoomed in and slowed down by a forensic imaging specialist, was played as the prosecution finished presenting its case, after a week of testimony in which some witnesses seemed to bolster Rittenhouse’s claim of self-defense.
Rittenhouse is a former police youth cadet from Antioch, Illinois. On the night in question, he went to Kenosha with an AR-style semi-automatic rifle and a medical kit, in response to a militia that called for protection for businesses against protesters supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.
The 18-year-old is charged with two counts of homicide, one of attempted homicide and two of recklessly endangering safety, for firing his weapon near others. He is also charged with possession of a dangerous weapon by a minor, as he was 17 at the time. He has pleaded not guilty.
What dis the drone footage show? It showed Rosenbaum, 36, following Rittenhouse before Rittenhouse suddenly turned and fired his rifle. Rosenbaum was shown to fall as Rittenhouse ran around a car.
Theranos lab chief says Elizabeth Holmes offered ‘implausible’ explanation for odd findings
The former lab director of Theranos has testified that Elizabeth Holmes gave “implausible” excuses for apparent failures in the company’s tests and personally pushed back against his concerns about its signature blood testing machines.
Kingshuk Das testified on Tuesday in the high-profile case as the government heads into its 10th week of arguments against the former CEO, who faces accusations that Theranos knowingly defrauded clients and investors about its capabilities.
Speaking in the courthouse in San Jose, California, Das recounted how his discovery of unusual test results met with resistance from the Theranos founder.
In one particularly telling incident, Das said he found tests were turning up prostate-specific antigens for female patients. Holmes offered an explanation that a rare form of breast cancer could be behind the irregular results – an excuse Das said he said “seemed implausible”.
What else did he say? “I found these instruments to be unsuitable for clinical use,” he said of the the company’s proprietary Edison devices. He also said: “These instruments were not performing from the very beginning.”
US must rethink attitude to parental leave, Pete Buttigieg says
The US needs a fundamental rethink of its attitudes towards parenting, according to Pete Buttigieg, who was the target of criticism from conservatives for taking leave to care for his newborn children.
Buttigieg, the US transport secretary, came under attack after he took time to help care for his newborn twins, a boy and a girl, in August.
Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, said Buttigieg was “absent during a transportation crisis” while Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, told his audience: “Pete Buttigieg has been on leave from his job since August after adopting a child. Paternity leave, they call it, trying to figure out how to breastfeed – no word on how that went.”
Carlson’s remarks were widely seen as a homophobic attack on Buttigieg, who is gay.
Buttigieg told the Guardian that the US “has got some catching up to do” on paid parental leave. “We still have to contend with the view that the only justification for parental leave is for women to physically recover from pregnancy and childbirth, which is of course one very important reason, but it’s far from the only one,” he said.
What else did Buttigieg say? He said he found the reaction to his parental leave baffling. “Leaving aside the hospitalization, part of me just wondered: how do they think my kids eat? They have two dads – do they think I just leave them with a can opener and directions to the fridge?”
In other news …
The activist and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai announced she had got married on Tuesday in a small ceremony in Birmingham, UK. The campaigner for girls’ education and the world’s youngest winner of the Nobel peace prize said on social media she had married her partner, Asser Malik.
The Oklahoma supreme court on Tuesday overturned a $465m opioid ruling against drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, finding that a lower court had wrongly interpreted the state’s public nuisance law in the first case of its kind in the US to go to trial.
Chile’s president, Sebastián Piñera, has been impeached by the lower house of congress, setting up a trial in the nation’s senate over allegations he favored the sale of a family property while in office. The vote to impeach passed with the bare minimum of 78 votes needed in the 155-member chamber of deputies.
The EU has condemned the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, for acting like a “gangster”, amid a worsening humanitarian crisis at the country’s border with Poland. He’s been been accused of sending refugees to the EU’s external border in an attempt to punish the bloc for criticism.
Stat of the day: Food system responsible for between 21% and 37% of total global greenhouse gas emissions
The UN climate talks at the Cop26 summit in Scotland are in a crunch final week, with countries under pressure to act amid warnings of disastrous global heating. But one source of emissions that is often overlooked is literally in front of us every day: our food. The steps it takes to bring food to our tables – everything from production to processing to food waste – are responsible for between 21% and 37% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2019 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Here are nine charts that show why the US needs to tackle food emissions.
Don’t miss this: Tom Ford on veganism, his new book and how the clothes he makes are not meant to be thrown away
Tom Ford talks to The Guardian about his latest project, a coffee-table book charting the past 15 years of his career – or “post-Gucci”, as those familiar with luxury fashion prefer to describe the era that has followed Ford’s departure from the Italian super-brand. Work on the book meant that Ford spent lockdown sifting through thousands of images. “It was an interesting thing to spend so much time looking back,” he tells me, “it is not something I do often.” His reluctance to take stock is a hangover from his days at Gucci, when there was no time to pause for reflection, a period that led to burnout and a “midlife crisis”.
Climate Check: Youth activists petition UN to declare ‘systemwide climate emergency’
Greta Thunberg and youth climate activists from around the world are filing a legal petition to the UN secretary general urging him to declare a “system-wide climate emergency”. As Cop26 enters its final days, climate campaigners were due to file a legal document on Wednesday calling on António Guterres to use emergency powers to match the level of response adopted for the coronavirus pandemic by pronouncing the climate crisis a global level 3 emergency – the UN’s highest category.
Want more environmental stories delivered to your inbox? Sign up to our new newsletter Down to Earth to get original and essential reporting on the climate crisis every week
Last thing: why the US right loves to hate Sesame Street
It’s not unusual for Ted Cruz to levy a dyspeptic jeremiad against “government propaganda” or denigrate his political enemies as “petty authoritarians who would deny you the right to make your own medical choices” or “puppet[s] … with a hand inserted up their backside”. But the Republican senator’s target this time was an actual puppet – the 8ft 2in (249cm) beloved yellow Big Bird, whose innocuous tweet about inoculations inspired a round of puppet-sneering from America’s conservative culture warriors.
Sign up
First Thing is delivered to thousands of inboxes every weekday. If you’re not already signed up, subscribe now.
Get in touch
If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@theguardian.com
