Donald Trump is increasingly agitated by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, according to sources familiar with the matter, and appears anxious that he could be implicated in the sprawling inquiry into the insurrection even as he protests his innocence.
The former president in recent weeks has complained more about the investigation, demanding to know why his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows shared so much material with the select committee and why dozens of other aides have also cooperated.
The portrait that emerges from interviews with multiple sources close to Trump, including current and former aides, suggests a former president unmoored and backed into a corner by the rapid escalation in intensity of the committee’s investigation.
The Omicron variant of Covid-19 has “extraordinary spreading capabilities”, the top US infectious diseases expert said on Sunday, and promises to result in a bleak winter as it continues “raging through the world”.
Dr Anthony Fauci’s warning came before the busy holiday travel period, which he said would elevate the risk of infection even in vaccinated people.
In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases urged Americans to get booster shots and wear masks.
Fauci also appeared to attempt damage control over Kamala Harris’s contention that the Biden administration “didn’t see” the Omicron or Delta variants coming. Harris’s comments on Friday were “taken out of context”, Fauci insisted, and referred to the “extraordinary number of mutations” of Covid-19 rather than any lack of readiness.
A photograph of Boris Johnson, his wife and up to 17 staff in the Downing Street garden during the first lockdown shows people “having a drink after a busy set of work meetings” and acting entirely within the rules of the time, the British justice secretary, Dominic Raab, has said.
Raab’s defence of the events of 15 May 2020, shown in a picture shared with the Guardian, appears to differ from the Downing Street version, which stated that the image showed people still taking part in work meetings.
The pictured emerged after a string of reports about similar alleged events in Downing Street and elsewhere during a subsequent lockdown last Christmas, and suggests rules may have been broken over a series of months.
On Friday the Conservative party was dealt a blow when it lost a byelection in a stronghold seat that it had held for all but two of the last 189 years. Johnson has since been put “on notice” by his own party and could be gone within a year unless he cleans up his act, senior aides have said.
An unusual item appeared recently in a newspaper in North Carolina: “A plus-sized Jewish lady redneck died in El Paso on Saturday,” the article announced, before careening through 1,000 words of one of the more outrageous obituaries ever written. Renay Mandel Corren, a “bawdy, fertile, redheaded matriarch” and “talented and gregarious grifter”, had “kicked it,” the obituary said. The rollicking, manic tribute delighted in subverting the respectful conventions of the small-town obituary.
Ice scientists meeting in New Orleans have warned that something alarming is brewing on the West Antarctic ice sheet, a vast basin of ice on the Antarctic peninsula. Years of research by teams of British and American researchers found that great cracks and fissures had opened up on top of and underneath the Thwaites glacier, one of the biggest in the world, and it was feared that parts of it may fracture and collapse, possibly within five years or less.