Here’s the moment from today where Joe Biden made clear that he considers Vladimir Putin a war criminal, and that the events uncovered in the Ukrainian town of Bucha warrant a war crimes trial.

John Bowden has the story.

After the sometimes acrimonious and bizarre hearings held a couple of weeks ago, the Senate Judiciary Committee is soon to vote on whether to send the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the full Senate for a confirmation vote.

With no Republicans coming out to support the nominee – even those who went out of her way to praise her have backed away – the committee is expected to return a tied vote, after which Chuck Schumer will use procedural measures to bring the vote to the floor.

The Independent’s Eric Garcia is monitoring the proceedings as the committee’s Senators say their piece. Follow him below:

Joe Biden has recently implored Congress to get on with passing a Covid-19 relief bill as the US recovers from the most acute pressures of the pandemic while the virus continues to circulate. It now seems that after a recent attempt to pass a funding package failed miserably, another is on the way – but it sounds set to fall short of the White House’s expectations.

The US’s ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, is calling for Russia to be ejected from the UN Human Rights Council. Her announcement comes as western allies consider how to increase pressure on the Kremlin after this weekend’s horrific revelations of mass murder and other atrocities committed by Russian troops in Ukraine.

The Biden administration is reportedly considering ramping up sanctions on Russia given the flood of reports of war crimes being committed by Russian forces in Ukraine – but the sanctions already in place are still being enforced, with a joint Spanish-American operation seizing a super-yacht belonging to billionaire oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

At the Marina Real in the port of Palma de Mallorca, a large group of Spanish Civil Guards and US federal agents boarded the boat, according to Associated Press reporters who were at the scene and saw the authorities early Monday morning.

Mr Vekselberg's US assets remain frozen and American companies have been forbidden from doing business with him and his entities.

Read more:

An upcoming book on the last weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency and the first year of Joe Biden’s includes a story about Mr Biden’s views on Fox News and its ultimate proprietor, billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch – whom the now-president is said to have described as “the most dangerous man in the world”.

“The Democratic president assessed Fox as one of the most destructive forces in the United States,” the authors write in This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, “and told an associate midway through 2021 that its corporate overlord, the Australian-born News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch, was even more toxic than that.”

Read more:

As the Senate Judiciary Committee prepares to vote on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s historic nomination to the US Supreme Court, more Republican senators are lining up with their party against her. The latest is Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, who is retiring at the end of this year. In his statement, he cites Ms Brown Jackson’s supposed “inability to define her own judicial philosophy” as a core reason for withholding his support.

So far, only one GOP senator, Susan Collins, has said she will support the judge. While Ms Brown Jackson is thought to be all but a dead cert for confirmation thanks to a united Democratic caucus, there are still two Republicans thought to be considering voting for her: Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney.

Barack Obama is reportedly set to make his first public appearance at the White House since leaving office. He will be speaking tomorrow at a public event to celebrate the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, which has survived more than a decade of Republican efforts to repeal it – and which the Biden administration is pouring money into as the US healthcare system tries to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Read more below.

Joe Biden yesterday released a statement on the mass shooting in Sacramento, which saw six people killed and 12 wounded. In the written remarks, he repeated what has become his standard call for concrete action to curb the US’s devastating gun violence problem.

Mr Biden campaigned heavily on gun safety reform, but like many of his other top priorities, the arithmetic of the US Senate has stymied his efforts to get the most ambitious of his plans passed into law.

Read more about the Sacramento shooting below.

As the Justice Department’s investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings and tax affairs heats up, ABC News reports that the Secret Service detail protecting the president’s son has spent more than $30,000 a month to rent a mansion in Malibu, California.

According to the story – which recalls various reports of Trump-owned businesses charging high rates to the agents assigned to protect the former president – the business of protecting presidents and their families is necessarily an expensive one, with agents obliged to rent housing near their protectees wherever they may be living or staying.

Read more below.