Good morning.
The House committee investigating the January 6 attack has accused Donald Trump of inciting the “American carnage” he once warned against when he summoned a mob to Washington in a last-gasp attempt to stay in power.
The session, the seventh in a series of public hearings to present the findings of the committee’s year-long investigation, concluded with a disclosure from the committee vice-chair, the Republican Liz Cheney.
Trump had attempted to contact a witness cooperating with the investigation, Cheney said, adding that the witness did not answer and the committee had alerted the justice department. “We will take any efforts to influence witness testimony very seriously,” Cheney said.
Meanwhile, a former spokesperson for the Oath Keepers militia, Jason Van Tatenhove, appeared at a Tuesday hearing in Washington alongside Stephen Ayres, a former Trump supporter from Ohio who participated in the attack.
What did the committee present on Tuesday? The evidence showed that Trump, increasingly desperate after the states confirmed Joe Biden’s victory in December, sought to seize a second term and began fixating on 6 January, when Congress would meet to certify the election results.
What did Van Tatenhove say? In powerful testimony, he said Americans needed to recognise that Trump attempted to mount “an armed revolution” in order to stay in power, adding that people died that day and a gallows was set up. “This could have been the spark that started a new civil war,” he said.
Twitter sues Elon Musk over effort to exit $44bn takeover deal
Twitter has begun suing Elon Musk in an effort to force him to complete his $44bn takeover of the social media company after he announced on Friday he would withdraw his bid.
“Musk’s exit strategy is a model of hypocrisy,” the lawsuit said, accusing the billionaire of making “bad faith” arguments against Twitter and carrying out “public and misleading attacks” on the company.
The suit has kicked off what could be a long legal saga regarding the failed merger. The Tesla chief executive, who is the world’s richest person by net worth, had reached a deal to buy Twitter on 25 April, offering to purchase all of the company’s shares for $54.20 each, but he began to back out over allegations of “spam” accounts on the platform.
“Musk entered into a binding merger agreement with Twitter, promising to use his best efforts to get the deal done,” according to the lawsuit. “Now, less than three months later, Musk refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests.”
What would happen if Musk loses? He could be ordered to pay $1bn for walking away, a penalty he indicated in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission he is seeking to avoid.
Emmanuel Macron ‘proud’ of supporting Uber’s lobbying drive in France
Emmanuel Macron has said he was proud of supporting the US cab-hailing company Uber and would “do it again tomorrow and the day after tomorrow”, after revelations of his efforts to help the firm lobby against France’s closed-shop taxi industry.
Several French political figures from the left to the far right, as well as the leader of the CGT trade union, have called for a parliamentary inquiry into reports that Macron had secret undeclared meetings with Uber when he was economy minister from 2014 to 2016 and that he had told Uber he had brokered a “deal” with the bitterly divided Socialist cabinet then in power under François Hollande.
The revelations are contained in the Uber files – a cache of 124,000 company documents leaked to the Guardian and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
On the sidelines of an event to mark the building of a new semiconductor factory in Crolles, south-east France, Macron was questioned by a Le Monde journalist about meeting Uber officials between 2014 and 2016.
What else did he say? “I was a minister and I did my job,” he said. “We’ve seen too much of a kind of atmosphere where meeting business heads, particularly when they are foreign, is seen as bad.” Macron added: “I’m proud of it. If they have created jobs in France, I’m very proud of that, and you know what, I’d do it again tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.”
In other news …
Joe Biden will arrive in Tel Aviv on Wednesday afternoon for his first visit to the Middle East as president. His main goal is to convince Saudi Arabia of the need to increase global oil supplies to ease an energy crisis made worse by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but his visit comes at an interesting time for the region.
Three men have been charged in the US for possessing handwritten notes worth over $1m (£840,000) belonging to one of the Eagles founding members Don Henley, including the lyrics to the band’s best-known song, Hotel California.
Surveillance footage that captured the gunman in the Uvalde school shooting entering the building with a AR-15-style rifle later showed officers in body armor milling in the hallway outside the fourth-grade classrooms where 19 children and two teachers were killed.
An Australian woman who planned to house-sit in Canada during a holiday has said she was detained, fingerprinted, interrogated about her abortion history and quickly deported during a stopover in the US. Madolline Gourley says she was treated like a criminal during her transit through Los Angeles on 30 June.
French health authorities have confirmed a link between nitrates added to processed meat and colon cancer, dealing a blow to the country’s ham and cured sausage industry. The national food safety body Anses said its study supported similar conclusions as those from the World Health Organization.
Don’t miss this: Angels and demons: exposing the dark side of Victoria’s Secret
The current resurgence of Y2k fashions has prompted recent documentary reappraisals of that era’s biggest brand names, from Von Dutch to Abercrombie & Fitch. Now the mother of them all – Victoria’s Secret – receives the docuseries treatment. The multibillion-dollar lingerie juggernaut was an inescapable cultural phenomenon in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But behind the glitz and glitter lay allegations of bullying and harassment; executives dismissive of casting more diverse and inclusive models; and billionaire chief executive Les Wexner’s disconcertingly close ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Climate check: dangerous heatwaves engulf parts of China, US and Europe
Dangerous heatwaves are engulfing parts of China, Europe, south-west and central US this week, as dozens of cities have found themselves dealing with soaring summer temperatures. By Tuesday afternoon, at least 86 Chinese cities had issued heat alerts with forecasts in some topping 104F (40C) in the next 24 hours. In the US, a high of almost 108F was recorded in Waco, Texas. This was among more than a dozen daily temperature records broken at the weekend in cities in Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma and Arkansas.
Last Thing: Tulsa’s futuristic ‘Jetsons house’ flies off the market
The Jetsons hailed from Orbit City in the year 2062 – but they might have felt right at home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 40 years earlier. Tulsa hosts a building that looks a lot like George and Jane Jetsons’s home in the cartoon, or perhaps a squat version of Seattle’s Space Needle – shaped like a wheel on its side perched on a stick. The house recently hit the market, with an asking price of $415,000. But unfortunately for any time travelers, it has already been snapped up.
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