Joe Biden

A US IT company urged customers to shut down their servers Friday after cyberattackers smuggled ransomware onto its network platform.

Kaseya said Friday evening that it had limited the attack to "a very small percentage of our customers" who use its signature VSA software, "currently estimated at fewer than 40 worldwide."

Two more victims were found in the rubble of a partially collapsed apartment building in Florida on Friday, bringing the death toll from last week's tragedy to 22, with 126 people still unaccounted for, officials said.

The rise in number of victims came as Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said she had signed an order authorizing the demolition of the part of the building that still stands, citing safety issues.

In the wake of the latest failure by the G7 nations to take meaningful steps to combat the climate emergency and record-breaking heatwaves on multiple continents, Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg on Friday accused world leaders of hypocrisy for persecuting climate activists while "pretending" to take the threat seriously.

"Young people all over this planet are no longer falling for your lies."
—Greta Thunberg to world leaders

Donald Trump is under investigation in Georgia for his caught-on-tape efforts to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" 12,000 votes to overturn the election in the Peach State. A bombshell new report by The Arizona Republic documents a parallel effort to overturn the election results in Arizona.

"Then-President Donald Trump tried to speak directly with the chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors in the weeks after the November 2020 election as his allies sought to change the election results in a state he narrowly lost to Democrat Joe Biden. New records obtained by The Arizona Republic reveal the behind-the scenes efforts by Trump, his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, and state GOP Chair Kelli Ward to pressure the county supervisors, who make up the elected body that oversees elections in the state's most populous county," the newspaper reported.

On July 1, right-wing "Hillbilly Elegy" author J.D. Vance announced that he is seeking the GOP nomination for Ohio's 2022 U.S. Senate race, and some pundits have mentioned him as a possible presidential candidate for 2024. When it came out in 2016, "Hillbilly Elegy" was widely read — even by liberals and progressives, who wanted to hear what Vance had to say about social and economic problems in rural Appalachia. But recently, the 36-year-old Vance has been sounding more and more like a Trumpian culture warrior, and Never Trump conservative Tim Miller notes how much of a "culture war it boy" Vance has become in a hilarious but scathing video posted on YouTube and The Bulwark on July 1.

Although Miller is conservative, he isn't far-right and has been a blistering critic of former President Donald Trump. In 2020, Miller left the Republican Party after many years and endorsed now-President Joe Biden in the presidential election. And his Vance video slams the "Hillbilly Elegy" author right away, with Miller asking, "Did Hollywood help propel a new race-baiting, culture-war 'it boy' to political stardom?"

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) appeared on Fox News this Thursday and compared the Carter administration of the late 1970s to the current Biden administration, calling Biden "Jimmy Carter 2.0."

"...there's an analog in relatively recent history, and that's to Jimmy Carter," Cruz said. "And I believe Joe Biden is Jimmy Carter 2.0. We're five months into the Biden administration. We — we already have a gas crisis, gas lines, an inflation crisis, war in the Middle East. And the same sort of ideology and incompetence that the — that characterized the Carter regime, characterizes now the Biden-Harris regime, and it took Jimmy Carter to give us Ronald Reagan."

The Biden administration is pushing back in Vice President Kamala Harris' (D) defense amid the latest onslaught of leaks alleging internal dysfunction in her office.

Speaking out on Thursday, July 1, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain and President Joe Biden's senior adviser Cedric Richmond offered their take on the leaks from Harris' office. In a statement released to Axios, Klain said, "The President's trust and confidence in her is obvious when you see them in the Oval Office together."

The US rebound from the Covid-19 crisis picked up speed in June as the economy added 850,000 new jobs, new government data released Friday revealed, cementing the evidence of a broad recovery.

The uptick was better than expected and came after two months of disappointing results, with big increases in the hard-hit leisure and hospitality sector, the Labor Department said in its closely-watched monthly report.

The United States added 850,000 new jobs in June in a sign that the American economy is making a rapid recovery after the recession brought on by the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Despite the fact that this blow-out jobs report came in the sixth month of President Joe Biden's tenure, however, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) gave credit for last month's massive job creation to former President Donald Trump.

Praise extended to President Joe Biden by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) for the U.S. government's assistance with recovery efforts in the wake of the collapse of a condo building in Surfside will likely come back to haunt the Florida governor, according to a CNN panel on Friday morning.

On Thursday, DeSantis told the Democratic president, "You recognized the severity of this tragedy from day one and you've been very supportive," before adding, "You guys have not only been supportive at the federal level, but we've had no bureaucracy."

Trump-loving Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro this week set the stage for a January 6th-style coup attempt in his country by saying that he would not step down from the presidency if he loses next year's election due to "voter fraud."

As Reuters reports, Bolsonaro said this week that he would "hand over the presidential sash to whoever wins the election cleanly" but "not with fraud."

When a violent mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6 in the hope of stopping Congress from certifying Joe Biden's Electoral College victory, some of the rioters were carrying Confederate flags. Historian Heather Cox Richardson, in a Substack article published this week, outlines some parallels between Confederate insurrectionists of the American Civil War and the Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol Building almost half a year ago.

And from her point of view, history doesn't bode well for the Trumpists — including former Attorney General Bill Barr, who is trying to rehab his reputation.

Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

When Gov. Greg Abbott announced in May that his office will build a wall at the Texas-Mexico border — and again on Wednesday when he visited the border with former President Donald Trump — he said a rising number of apprehensions by Border Patrol agents and seizures of the drug fentanyl made building a state-funded border wall necessary.