Congress holds domestic terrorism hearing as Americans vote in primaries – live | usnews

Fox News will be the only major network not airing the January 6 committee hearing live on Thursday, the company confirmed.

The network said it would “cover the hearings as news warrants”. Once the hearing concludes, three Fox News hosts will “anchor a two-hour live special” with analysis of the testimony.

Instead, Fox hosts Brett Baier and Martha McCallum will anchor special coverage of the hearing on Fox Business Network, starting at 8pm ET. The hearing will also be livestreamed on Fox News Digital, Fox News Audio and Fox Nation.

Every other major network — including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC — is expected to show the primetime hearing in full.

Fox’s decision heightened concerns that the network and its anchors would attempt to discredit the findings of the January 6 committee, as donald trump and his allies prepare to launch a counterprogramming effort against the hearing.

Host Tucker Carlson, who will just be beginning his show as the hearing gets underway on Thursday night, recently mocked the January 6 committee as “grotesque.”

Chris McGreal

My colleague Chris McGreal has a look at an emerging strategy among survivors of gun violence: suing firearms manufacturers despite a federal law trying to prevent such claims.

With each slaughter of innocents, the gun industry offers its sympathy, argues that even more weapons will make America safer, and gives thanks for a two-decade-old law shielding the firearms makers from legal action by the victims.

Mike Fifer, the chief executive of one of the US’s leading handgun manufacturers, Sturm Ruger, once described the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) as having saved the firearms industry because it stopped in its tracks a wave of lawsuits over the reckless marketing and sale of guns.

But now victims of gun crime are following an alternative path forged by legal actions against cigarette makers, prescription opioid manufacturers and big oil in an attempt to work around PLCAA – and the lack of political will to act on gun control – to hold the firearms industry accountable for the bloody toll of its products.

Good morning, US politics blog readers. A Senate committee is holding a hearing today on domestic terrorism that will feature testimony from the son of one of the victims of last month’s racist massacre in Buffalo, New York, while voters in a handful of states are heading to the polls to choose candidates for the November midterm elections.

Here’s what’s on the agenda:

• The Senate judiciary committee’s hearingtitled “Examining the ‘Metastasizing’ Domestic Terrorism Threat After the Buffalo Attack” will include Garnell Whitfield, Jr, a former Buffalo fire commissioner whose mother was killed in the shooting. Elsewhere in Congress, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will testify before the Senate finance committee on Biden’s budget proposal.
• Voters are heading to the polls in California, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota to choose candidates for the upcoming midterm elections. At the local level, voters in San Francisco are weighing whether to oust District Attorney Chesa Boudin amid rising concerns about crime and homelessness in the city.
• President Joe Biden is signing nine bipartisan bills aimed at improving care for veterans.
• speaking of bipartisanship, Democrat and Republican senators are continuing talks about whether to enact new gun laws in the wake of mass shootings that left scores dead in Uvalde, Texas, Buffalo, New York and elsewhere. Yesterday, the Senate Republican leader said a deal could come “this week.”
• Former congresswoman and gun-control activist Gabby Giffords is setting up a memorial on the National Mall in Washington that displays 40,000 flowers – each representing an American who died from gun violence in the past year.