Closing summary
The US politics blog is closing now and will resume tomorrow. It’s been a busy day in news from Washington, DC, and beyond of a political nature, finishing with US president Joe Biden’s speech in Pennsylvania on gun safety and law enforcement.
Here’s how the day went:
Joe Biden said he is “determined” to achieve an assault weapons ban in the US. The push to reenact such a ban formed a centerpiece of the Safer America Plan that the president laid out in an address this afternoon in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
The US president made a case for how funding the police – a deliberate rebuffing of the progressive cause of defunding the police (switching funds from policing to a spectrum of social services) – provides “peace of mind” to the American public.
The Biden administration announced it is sending more monkeypox vaccines to certain states and cities in an effort to combat further spread of the disease.
Victor Madrigal-Borloz, United Nations independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity, warned that LGBTQ+ equality in the US ‘not yet within reach’ because of states that have passed legislation restricting LGBTQ+ rights.
The DoJ tightened rules around some staff attending election events when attorney general Merrick Garland issued a memo saying that political appointees at the US Department of Justice will be barred from attending election campaign events or fundraisers.
And the public still awaits the DoJ’s legal response to Donald Trump’s request for a “special master” to oversee its review of classified documents seized by the FBI in a raid on his Florida home. The deadline for the latest filing in federal court in West Palm Beach is today.
Updated
We’ll be closing this US politics blog shortly. By now you will probably have heard or read that former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has died. The Guardian has launched a separate live blog to cover details and reaction, which you can follow here.
And here is the current main news story. There will be a lot more coverage on this huge event from the Guardian.
