First Thing: Capitol rioters came prepared for war, ex-police chief says

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The chief of the Capitol police, who resigned over the 6 January attack, said the pro-Trump mob “came prepared for war”, at the first congressional hearing about law enforcement’s response to the siege. Steven Sund said he was astonished at delays from the Pentagon after police appealed for reinforcements at the Capitol and the deployment of the National Guard. Washington’s metropolitan police chief said he remembered Sund “literally pleading” for backup.

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Capitol mob ‘came prepared for war’, US Senate hears testimony – video

It came a day after Merrick Garland, Joe Biden’s nominee for attorney general, said he would expand the criminal investigation into the Capitol attack. In a confirmation hearing that set up Monday’s session, Garland told Congress that domestic terrorism would be a focus of his time in office, and warned the events at the Capitol were “not necessarily a one-off”. The attack left five dead, including a police officer, and a further two officers have since killed themselves.

The officers involved in Daniel Prude’s death won’t face charges

The police officers filmed holding Daniel Prude down, naked and handcuffed, in a Rochester street until he stopped breathing will not face criminal charges, a grand jury announced on Tuesday. Prude’s death occurred last March but did not enter public knowledge until a video was released six months later, sparking nightly protests in Rochester.

The state attorney general, Letitia James, said the incident showed that “serious reform is needed, not only at the Rochester police department but to our criminal justice system as a whole”.

Seven police officers were suspended over Prude’s death, but their lawyers said the officers were simply following training. They claim that the drug PCP, which Prude had used and which they said caused his irrational behaviour, was the cause of death, but a county medical examiner said the manner of death was homicide caused by “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint”, with PCP a contributing factor.

Canada has welcomed Biden’s leadership … with a little jab at Trump

Justin Trudeau praised Joe Biden’s efforts on the climate and welcomed the end of the Trump era on Tuesday, saying that “US leadership has been sorely missed over the past years”. Speaking during their first bilateral meeting, the Canadian prime minister praised Biden’s swift rejoining of the Paris climate agreement and added: “I have to say as we were preparing the joint rollout of the communique on this, it’s nice when the Americans are not pulling out all the references to climate change and instead adding them in.” Biden returned Trudeau’s compliments, saying the US “has no closer friend than Canada”.

The pair talked for two hours by video link and said afterwards that they planned to work closely on tackling coronavirus and the climate crisis. Trudeau also expressed his thanks to Biden for his support for the release of two Canadians who are being held in China.

• Biden’s pick for interior secretary got a grilling at her confirmation hearing yesterday, coming under fire for a tweet in October 2020 in which she said that “Republicans don’t believe in science”. If confirmed, Deb Haaland would make history as the first Native American to hold a cabinet position in the US.

In other news …

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Tiger Woods badly hurt in car crash but ‘awake and responsive’ – video

• Tiger Woods is “lucky to be alive” after a car crash in California, after he had to be removed from his vehicle by firefighters. The golf star was said to be “awake and responsive” after undergoing surgery for multiple fractures on his right leg last night.

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a cultural icon in San Francisco, has died aged 101. A poet, publisher, painter and political activist, Ferlinghetti co-founded the City Lights bookshop in the city, where tributes had begun to accumulate by early afternoon yesterday, before a vigil last night. You can read Ferlinghetti’s obituary here.

• Ghislaine Maxwell has offered to renounce her foreign citizenship in exchange for bail. The British socialite, who is charged with helping the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein recruit teenage girls for sex, said she would renounce her UK and French citizenship to assuage fears she might try to “seek a safe haven” in either country. She is being held in a jail in New York and has been denied bail twice.

Stat of the day: only two of 195 countries are on track to meet the Paris climate agreement targets

It’s been nearly five years since the landmark Paris agreement, in which 195 countries agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5C”. But only two countries, Morocco and the Gambia, are on track to meet the 1.5C target: the largest emitters, including the US, are putting the world on track for 4C. According to Jojo Mehta and Julia Jackson, the answer is to make ecocide an international crime.

Don’t miss this: what the Texas freeze showed us about unregulated power

Some Texans report being stumped with bills of $500 a day, after the state’s power grid collapsed and the spot price of wholesale electricity hiked 10,000%. The prices are a “symptom of Texas’s largely deregulated energy market”, writes Alexandra Villarreal, as she explores how the costs were able to spiral and what needs to be done to prevent it happening again.

Last Thing: a woman has been given $7,700 in compensation for housework

A divorce court in China has ordered a man to pay his ex-wife the equivalent of $7,700 as compensation for housework during their marriage. The case fell under a new civil code in China that enables someone to seek compensation during a divorce if they were the primary carer for children or elderly parents, or shouldered a disproportionate burden of housework. The ruling sparked much furore online, with a large poll from one Chinese media outlet showing that 94% thought the ruling did not give the woman enough.

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