🔙The historic nature of Kamala Harris’s election as the first female vice president of the US seemed to creep up quietly.
Then, resplendent in suffragette purple, Harris drew every eye at the ceremony, Biden relegated to the role of supporting actor telegraph.co.uk/women/politics…
⭐️If this woman, the child of immigrants, the first black and south-Asian vice president elect, could go all the way to the top of US politics so could any little girl, anywhere
Harris is the most important vice president since Franklin D. Roosevelt because Biden is so old.
As the second in command to a near-octogenarian, it seems not just a possibility but almost a probability that America could soon have its first female Commander-in-Chief
✅When Biden was choosing a running mate, Harris seemed to tick every box – her centrism chimed with his, and her ethnicity and gender appealed to voters an old white bloke could not reach.
🗳️According to reports, the president was initially reluctant to invite her on to his ticket.
Having been persuaded of the electoral sense of the move, some now see an element of revenge in the task the new president gave her once they were in office: immigration
📰Months passed with the VP failing to materialise at the border, or do or say anything of substance: newspapers mocked her apparent inaction.
Misstepping on an issue as controversial as this would be catastrophic. Yet her track record to date has been both patchy and poor
Where once the spin was that the presidency was a “joint Biden-Harris administration” the last two months have seen her and Biden together at just two events; at ceremonies marking the anniversaries of 9/11 and the Martin Luther King Jr memorial on the Mall in Washington DC
For those around the world who believed the vice president was a beacon of hope for the future – the woman who could – her absence over the past year has spoken the volumes her actions should have.
🪖It was once used by a platoon of Austro-Hungarian soldiers, but in the decades since was surrounded by a glacier.
The ice preserved everything – even scraps of paper, shreds of clothing and the hay that the soldiers used for bedding telegraph.co.uk/world-news/202…
A century on, the glacier that once entombed the bunker in the Italian Alps has largely melted as a result of global warming.
This frozen depository of the past now carries a stark warning for the future as leaders at #Cop26 deliberate how to try to put a brake on climate change
🇺🇸Exercise Green Dagger took place at the US Marine Corps' Twentynine Palms base in the Mojave Desert in southern California.
The US forces asked for a “reset” half way into the five-day war fighting exercise, having suffered significant simulated casualties
➡️At one point, the commandos’ “kill board”, an intelligence assessment of the level of damage inflicted upon enemy equipment and units, had a tick against almost every American asset telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/11/0…
London was uniquely positioned to take the lead on Sudan's transition to democracy - but unwisely ceded the initiative to Washington, writes @mutazamd.
Vaccine passes are gaining traction around the world as countries introduce greater freedoms for the immunised.
🇳🇿New Zealand’s Covid policy has hit the headlines - with PM Ardern admitting that new covid restrictions risked turning the country into a “two-tier” society
Under the "traffic light" policy, those who are vaccinated will be able to move around and use services relatively freely, while the unjabbed will not.
🔴A long-brewing crisis caused by drought, war and poverty has now been accelerated by the Taliban's shock takeover in August.
The militants' resumption of their Islamic emirate has been accompanied by a suspension of aid and now economic collapse telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…
The World Food Programme estimates nearly 23 million of the country's 39m population are now unable to get regular access to enough food.