Evelyn Reynolds

Cars and RVs surged into Yosemite national park throughout the weekend, as visitors from around the world came to enjoy the crisp autumn weather, undeterred by a lack of park services and the absence of rangers.National parks have largely been kept open through the lapse in US federal funding that has left workers furloughed and resources for the parks system more scarce than usual. But as the US government shutdown enters its third week and legislators warn that their impasse could linger even longer than the one in Donald Trump’s first term – which currently holds the record at 35 days – concerns are mounting over how the nation’s treasured public lands will fare.Even with winter weather setting in along the Sierra, which will create more dangerous conditions, visitors continued to pour into the park, filling campgrounds and parking lots over the long weekend.Already, there have been widespread reports of illegal activity in Yosemite. People have been spotted Base jumping off high granite peaks, swimming in reservoirs where it is prohibited, camping and parking in unauthorized areas and climbing Half Dome’s cables without permits.The issues aren’t only affecting Yosemite. A fire ignited near a Joshua Tree campground on Sunday morning, forcing evacuations and closures in the park.Wildland firefighters are exempt from the shutdown and responded rapidly, according to a National Park Service spokesperson, and by Monday afternoon, crews had mostly contained the small blaze. But advocates voiced concerns that the fire – which is still under investigation but is believed to be human-caused, according to NPS officials – is a reminder of the increased risks posed by the public during staff shortages.In Yosemite, one of the limited park employees seen on duty during the holiday weekend, who spoke under the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to comment publicly, said it had been chaotic. “Then again, when is it not?” he added sardonically.Relying on funds pulled from entrance fees collected before the shutdown – a budget kept separate from federal appropriations – Yosemite has retained maintenance and emergency services to ensure bathrooms, trash and campgrounds are kept up and emergency operations continue. A concessionaire, Yosemite Hospitality, has also continued to operate.View image in fullscreenPrevious use of these fees, collected under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act, to support park operations during shutdowns was found to be a violation of the law by a 2019 Government Accountability Office analysis.And, even with trash cans emptied and toilets cleaned, the loss of key staff could be keenly felt.“It felt like you showed up to school and none of the teachers were there,” said Mark Rose, the Sierra Nevada & clean air senior program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, after spending a portion of last week at Yosemite. “You could tell the janitors had been there the night before and maybe there were hall monitors there – but we are missing this big piece.”Workers who provide other essential functions such as trail maintenance, those who offer support and monitor visitation at entrance gates, and staff responsible for ongoing conservation or maintenance projects have not been able to continue working. Half of all staff at Yosemite have been furloughed, according to the NPCA.On Saturday, as droves of vehicles rolled through entrances where fees typically would have been collected and guidance given, they were met with signs on the empty booths that read: “During this lapse in appropriations parks will remain as accessible as possible. We are doing our best to take care of your parks at this time, but some amenities and services may not be available.”In one booth, the sign was accompanied by a second: a hand-drawn bluebird with the familiar scrawl of a child pleading: “Put park rangers first.”Dangerous, damaging and illegal activity was a chief concern among advocates when the administration opted to keep parks accessible without adequate staffing. Before the start of this shutdown, national park leaders and advocates had pushed the Trump administration not to repeat its previous policies of 2018-19, when the parks were kept open and unstaffed, leading to widespread destruction.View image in fullscreen“National parks don’t run themselves. It is hard-working National Park Service employees that keep them safe, clean and accessible,” 40 former superintendents said in a letter issued to Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, in the week leading up to the lapse. “If sufficient staff aren’t there, visitors shouldn’t be either.”Irreversible damage was done at popular parks, including Joshua Tree in California, following a month-long shutdown in Donald Trump’s first term, when his administration demanded parks be kept open while funding was paused and workers were furloughed.Without supervision, visitors left behind trails of wreckage. Prehistoric petroglyphs were vandalized at Big Bend national park. Joshua trees, some more than a century old, were chopped down at Joshua Tree national park, as trash and toilets overflowed. Tire tracks crushed sensitive plants and desert habitats from illegal off-roading vehicles in Death Valley. There were widespread reports of wildlife poaching, search-and-rescue crews were quickly overwhelmed with calls, and visitor centers were broken into.“This is exactly what we warned about,” Emily Thompson, executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, said in a statement issued following the reports of how visitors were behaving in Yosemite. “This shutdown is making an already bad situation at national parks and public lands far worse. And the longer this goes, the worse it is going to get. The situation is dangerous and reckless for our parks, public lands, and the visitors who love them.”Burgum called the Yosemite incidents “misinformation” in a post on the social media platform X on Tuesday, and falsely claimed the park was “fully staffed”.“Yosemite has a full team working to uphold public safety and preserve the integrity of the park,” he said, before blaming Democrats for the shutdown. “Unauthorized camping, squatting, and illegal activities like BASE jumping are being addressed with firm, appropriate law enforcement action.”Katie Martin, Department of Interior’s communications director, echoed Burgum’s claims and disputed that there are unmonitored campgrounds and widespread squatting.“Our on-the-ground teams confirm that these reports do not accurately reflect current operations or visitor conditions,” Martin said, adding that all law enforcement rangers in the park remain on duty and have been handling both frontcountry and backcountry patrols.There are 1,545 campgrounds within the park, but the 13 major sites are staffed, according to Martin, who also said visitor disputes and etiquette issues are not unusual and are being handled as they typically would under normal operations.“Yosemite remains safely managed. Law enforcement, emergency response, and campground staff are on duty, and visitation levels remain well within normal ranges,” Martin added.According to a recent National Park Service contingency plan created to guide parks during the shutdown, more than 9,200 employees were furloughed system-wide, reducing NPS staff by roughly 64%. Only workers deemed necessary to protect “life and property”, were set to remain on duty.Even before the shutdown began, sharp reductions in staffing that came as part of the Trump administration’s plans to shrink the federal government left gaps in an NPS workforce already stretched thin. According to Rose of the National Parks Conservation Association, the long-term strain has only been exacerbated by the shutdown as advocates grow exceedingly concerned that more cuts could be coming.Close to $1bn in funding cuts have been proposed by the administration, and Rose said there were fears that the administration may argue operations were successful during the shutdown as a way to validate their calls for a smaller workforce. With toilets clean and law enforcement on patrol in popular places like Yosemite, visitor experience has been prioritized while other important NPS responsibilities, including conservation, science and education, remain on the chopping block.“This is a skeleton crew and we have been seeing this from the beginning,” Rose said. “But you can only keep up the facade for so long before major cracks start showing.” More

The last remaining piece of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – section 2, which empowers the federal government to protect voters from racial gerrymandering meant to dilute Black political power – appears headed for an untimely end. At oral arguments in Louisiana v Callais on Wednesday, the US supreme court appeared ready to strike down section 2, effectively completing the gradual nullification of the Voting Rights Act that it has pursued for over a decade.The case stems from new congressional districting maps that were drawn in Louisiana after the 2020 census, which found both that the state was eligible for six seats in the House of Representatives and that its population was about one-third Black. The state initially drew maps that featured only one majority-Black congressional district, rejecting seven more racially fair maps; voters sued, and federal courts ordered Louisiana to comply with the Voting Rights Act by drawing new maps in which Black voters would be a majority in a second district, thereby reflecting their share of the population and giving Black Louisianans an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.But now, a group of people identifying themselves as “non-African-American voters” have sued to get those racially proportionate maps thrown out, arguing that enforcement of the VRA violates their own rights under the 14th and 15th amendments. They claim the maps drawn to remedy racial discrimination against Black people in fact constitute racial discrimination against non-Black (read: white) people. The court seems likely to side with them.If they do, it will mark the end of the Voting Rights Act, widely considered the crowning achievement of the civil right movement, which the supreme court, under John Roberts, has been dismantling for years. In 2013’s Shelby county v Holder, the court struck down much of section 5, which had required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get federal preclearance for changes to its voting laws.In subsequent cases, the court has repeatedly narrowed the conditions under which litigants can bring voting rights claims and expanded states’ leeway to make voting laws that would have previously been deemed discriminatory. Writing for the majority in Shelby, Chief Justice Roberts claimed that racial animus and inequality had diminished enough that such a regime was not necessary, and indeed violated the rights of states. As states imposed a slew of new voting restrictions in the aftermath, the gap between Black and white voter participation rates grew dramatically. It expanded twice as much in districts that had previously been subjected to the section 5 preclearance regime.On Wednesday, the court seemed determined to apply the same logic that it used in Shelby county to section 2, demanding that Janai Nelson, the head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, justify why section 2 should still be efficacious and should not be considered to have somehow expired. Justices Kavanaugh and Alito asserted that the racial gerrymander was justified if it was intended as a partisan gerrymander – that is, that the lawmakers’ stated or professed intentions was what mattered, and not the racially discriminatory impact of the gerrymander.Previous supreme court precedent, as well as ample evidence from the congressional record, has said that discriminatory impact, rather than intent, is sufficient to constitute illegal racial discrimination – but at oral argument, the Republicans on the court, along with those representing the litigants, did not seem to think that this should matter. As she rebutted these arguments in the guise of asking questions from the bench, one could hear the exhaustion in Ketanji Brown Jackson’s voice. The remedies, she sputtered, “are so tied up with race, because race is the initial problem!” Jackson has been the court’s most passionate and articulate advocate for the Reconstruction amendments and for the legacy of the civil rights movement, but she seemed to know that her colleagues were not listening to her.The case reflects two major trends of the Roberts court: hostility to racial justice claims brought by minorities, and a willingness to invert civil rights law and the Reconstruction amendments alike to create interpretations in which these legal traditions function to entrench, rather than challenge, historical hierarchies of race and gender. Louisiana’s attorney general – who has switched sides in the case since it was initially argued last year, joining an opposition to the Voting Rights Act – claimed that to assume that Black voters would vote differently than white voters – which in Louisiana, they overwhelmingly do – would be to unconstitutionally impose a racial stereotype. This facile fiction elicited exasperation from Justice Kagan.But the attorney general knew his audience. Roberts has long been an enemy of practices that attempt to remedy historical and ongoing racial discrimination, claiming that the law mandates that state and private actors alike take no interest in such projects and attempt facially race-blind policies in everything from voting rights enforcement to college admissions – no matter how racially discriminatory against Black Americans such practices prove to be in reality. “The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he once memorably said, “is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” – that is, to stop trying to account for or combat racism with official policy. The result will be that if the court rules in Louisiana’s favor, it will no longer be illegal, in practice, to racially gerrymander congressional districts to minimize and dilute Black voter power. But it will be illegal to use race to redistrict in such a way that restores Black voter power.It is apparently through this fanciful and motivated reasoning that Roberts and his colleagues have decided that any move to secure Black Americans’ voting rights and equality in fact violates the very constitutional amendments that were meant to secure their voting rights and equality. The Voting Rights Act does not violate the 15th amendment; it enforces it, and gave the United States, during the 60 years or so of its enactment, its only plausible claim to being a real democracy. To say that the VRA contradicts the 15th amendment is more than just bad reasoning. It is bad faith. But bad faith, increasingly, is what the supreme court operates under.If the supreme court rules in favor of the “non-African-American” voters and vacates what is left of the Voting Rights Act, as they are expected to, then a decision will probably come down sometime in June, just a few months before the November 2026 midterms. The resulting racial gerrymanders are expected to net Republicans 19 House seats.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

The UK is expected to slash its contribution to a leading aid fund combating preventable diseases, with charities warning this could lead to more than 300,000 otherwise preventable deaths.If confirmed, the anticipated 20% cut in the UK contribution to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, would be announced on the sidelines of next month’s G20 summit in South Africa, which Keir Starmer is due to attend.Aid groups said such a reduction, on top of a 30% cut to the UK contribution at the previous funding round for the group three years ago, would further risk years of progress in combating the disease after Donald Trump slashed US aid.No decision has been publicly announced before the Global Fund’s “replenishment” summit, covering 2027-29, and one government official said this did not recognise the extent of the cut predicted.However, aid groups say a proposed reduction in UK funding from £1bn to £800m is being widely discussed by senior government officials.If confirmed, it would follow a 25% reduction in UK money towards another aid organisation seen as being highly efficient in saving lives, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi). The eventual £1.25bn commitment over five years to Gavi was nonetheless higher than many aid agencies had feared.The Switzerland-based Global Fund is credited with helping to save tens of million of lives in combating the three diseases. One aid agency estimated a £200m cut could lead to up to 340,000 avoidable deaths and nearly 5.9 million avoidable infections over the three-year funding period.Gareth Jenkins, an executive director at Malaria No More UK, said: “The world stands on the brink of a malaria resurgence, which will be so much more likely triggered if the UK makes a cut to its contribution to the Global Fund.“In this scenario many more children will lose their lives, health systems will be overwhelmed and economies dragged down – with huge knock-on effects for UK trade and health security.”Mike Podmore, the chief executive of StopAids, said the cut “would send a terrible message”, particularly as the UK is officially co-hosting next month’s funding event.Podmore said: “Not only did the UK already make a 30% cut three years ago, but to date no host has ever reduced their commitment from their previous pledge. This would represent a serious lack of leadership and undermine the UK’s reputation and soft power.”Adrian Lovett, the UK head of the development campaign One, said the cut would “put at risk decades of progress in the fight against Aids, TB and malaria – and as diseases do not stop at borders, it would jeopardise our own health security here at home too”.Monica Harding, the Liberal Democrats’ international development spokesperson, said cutting funding as co-host would be “an indictment of our global leadership in diplomacy and development”.She said: “Stepping back now and reducing our contribution to the fund at a time when the United States is abandoning vaccination programmes wholesale would be devastating to some of the world’s most vulnerable people. It would risk undoing much of the progress we have made in the global fight against disease.”A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “The UK has not yet decided what its pledge to the Global Fund will be. We will announce this in due course.” More

Nigel Farage’s obsession with free speech has become the mood music of his own party, the Conservatives and the BBC, so it shouldn’t have been shocking or troubling to learn that he’d testified in the US Congress on 3 September on the subject of this elemental liberty, and how profoundly at risk it is in the UK.His position we could recite in our sleep – it hasn’t deviated, and remains nonsense on stilts. Free speech is only at risk in the UK insofar as 80-year-olds can now be arrested for opposing genocide with homemade placards, and that’s quite a big “only”. But in Nigel’s upside-down world he is remorselessly censored, and a leftist cabal is still calling the shots – and will only get stronger. The troubling element wasn’t what he said, but who orchestrated his appearance.The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is a conservative Christian lobby group whose allies include JD Vance and speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who used to work as an ADF lawyer. While their focus, brokering Farage’s appearance in Congress (the formal invitation came from the House judiciary committee) is on free speech, the legal challenges they bring, both in the US and internationally, tend to use the issue instrumentally as a way to gain allies in their battle against reproductive rights.ADF UK has given legal support to people who’ve been prosecuted for protesting outside abortion clinics, breaching the UK’s “buffer zones”, and to the midwife who was suspended from her job for making anti-abortion statements on social media. It also uses the existence of legislation against this harassment as proof of a free-speech crisis in the country. The two issues are thus conjoined in a ratchet, where any victory in one becomes grist for the other.The buffer-zones debate works particularly well, appealing as it does to a progressive sense of fair-mindedness – come on, liberal, if you want to be allowed to call out a genocide, who are you to stop a Christian calling out a pregnant woman for murdering a baby? It’s an argument whose bad faith you can smell a mile off, but it’s enough to sow confusion and turn the wokerati against itself.When Farage was head of the Brexit party, it had no stance on abortion. The New York Times could find no record of his having done so, anyway, and knowing him as we all do, you can’t imagine it: it doesn’t chime at all with the smoking, pint-loving, British pound sterling and sovereignty guy, to be digging around in women’s business. Yet as if by magic, suddenly last November, he wanted to talk about rolling back the abortion time limit “given that we can now save babies at 22 weeks” (the time limit is 24). By May this year, the current limit was “absolutely ludicrous” , according to Nigel. Although he did say to New York Times reporters that it was “bollocks” to say he had found a new interest in the topic of reproductive rights.ADF lawyers have told journalists explicitly that their goal, long term, is to see abortion rights curtailed in the UK – to which one’s every synapse screams, “in your dreams, you hubristic fantasists”. But we’ve seen how fast the current Labour leadership and the Conservatives scramble to meet Reform UK halfway.We have already seen how influenced by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 the Conservatives are: from seeing renewable energy as a way to future-proof the economy to now seeing it as a woke conspiracy we can’t afford. Five years ago, it would have been considered tawdry to be interested in the physiology of whoever was in the toilet cubicle next to you, and now it is a matter for the UK supreme court. Attitudes to migration were becoming steadily more positive from 2015. However, in 2023, they flipped negative, and have since galvanised a hardcore of protesters whose aggression has since torched asylum hotels and left foreign-born carers scared to get out of their cars.Which politicians do you trust to stand up to what is basically authoritarian empire-building? Because the time to start supporting them is now, not five to midnight.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist More

JD Vance sought to downplay the revelation that leaders of a group called the Young Republicans exchanged hundreds of racist, sexist text messages – including one in which rape was called “epic”, and another in which someone wrote “I love Hitler” – as youthful indiscretions.Vance, speaking on a new episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, the podcast run by colleagues of the late conservative activist, suggested that the participants in the leaked chats were much younger than they in fact are. Some of the participants are barely younger than the 41-year-old vice-president.“The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke – telling a very offensive, stupid joke – is cause to ruin their lives.”Politico obtained months of exchanges from a Telegram conversation between leaders and members of the Young Republican National Federation and some of its affiliates in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont.Mother Jones reports that public records indicate that eight of the 11 Republican operatives who took part in the offensive chat appear to range in age from 24 to 35.The revelations have prompted bipartisan calls for those involved to be removed from or resign their positions.The Young Republican National Federation, the GOP’s political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40, called for those involved to step down from the organization. The group described the exchanges as “unbecoming of any Republican”.Vance, however, scolded Democrats and the media for paying too much attention to “what a bunch of young people, a bunch of kids, say in a group chat, however offensive”.He suggested that the racist texts from Republicans were a distraction from offensive texts sent by a Democratic candidate for attorney general of Virginia, Jay Jones, who joked that he would prefer to kill a Republican colleague than Hitler or Pol Pot.Jones has since said he has taken “full responsibility” for his comments and offered a public apology to Todd Gilbert, who then was speaker of Virginia’s house of delegates.Vance expressed irritation at people he said had allowed themselves to be distracted from the Democrat’s “incredible endorsement of political violence … by focusing on what kids are saying in a group chat”.“Grow up,” the vice-president said to those people concerned more about the racism in his party than the joking about violence in the other party. “I’m sorry, focus on the real issues, don’t focus on what kids say in group chats.”Vance said he grew up in a different era where “most of what I, the stupid things that I did as a teenager and as a young adult, they’re not on the internet”.The father of three said he would caution his own children, “especially my boys, don’t put things on the internet, like, be careful with what you post. If you put something in a group chat, assume that some scumbag is going to leak it in an effort to try to cause you harm or cause your family harm.”“I really don’t want to us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive, stupid joke is cause to ruin their lives,” Vance said.Other Republicans demanded more immediate intervention. Republican legislative leaders in Vermont, along with governor Phil Scott – also a Republican – called for the resignation of Sam Douglass, a state senator, revealed to be a participant in the chat.Saying she was “absolutely appalled to learn about the alleged comments made by leaders of the New York State Young Republicans”, congressperson Elise Stefanik of New York called for those involved to step down from their positions. Danedri Herbert, chair of the Kansas GOP, said the remarks “do not reflect the beliefs of Republicans and certainly not of Kansas Republicans at large”.Democrats have been more uniform in their condemnation. On Wednesday, California governor Gavin Newsom wrote to James Comer, the House oversight committee chair, asking for an investigation into the “vile and offensive text messages”, which he called “the definition of conduct that can create a hostile and discriminatory environment that violates civil rights laws”.Speaking on the Senate floor, the Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York on Tuesday described the chat as “revolting”, calling for Republicans including Trump and Vance to “condemn these comments swiftly and unequivocally”.Asked about the reporting, New York governor Kathy Hochul called the exchanges “vile” and called for consequences for those involved.“Kick them out of the party. Take away their official roles. Stop using them as campaign advisers,” Hochul said. “There needs to be consequences. This bullshit has to stop.” More

As the US government shutdown grinds into its third week, a federal court has approved a temporary injunction blocking the Trump administration from sacking thousands of federal employees.The judge ruled the president may have exceeded his authority to try to take advantage of the shutdown.The decision came after Russ Vought, the director of the office of management and budget (OMB) at the White House, said that more cuts were coming, claiming the firings could be “north of 10,000” workers.The lawsuit alleged that the OMB, through Vought, violated the law by making firing threats and instructing federal employees to carry out work related to the firings during the shutdown.Here are the key US politics stories from Wednesday:Judge temporarily blocks Trump from firing federal workersA federal court has granted a temporary injunction blocking the Trump administration’s firings of federal employees during the government shutdown. The ruling by Judge Susan Illston of the US district court’s northern district of California came in response to a lawsuit filed by labor unions representing federal workers.Read the full storyUS supreme court looks inclined to weaken pillar of Voting Rights ActThe conservative majority on the US supreme court appeared poised to weaken a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act after a lengthy oral argument, paving the way for a significant upheaval in American civil rights law.Read the full storyChinese company gives Eric Trump crypto firm preferential accessA private Chinese company is giving preferential access to its technology and providing unusually beneficial payment terms on hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of specialized equipment to a firm partially owned by Donald Trump’s son Eric Trump, according to industry sources and Securities and Exchange Commission records.Read the full storyTrump confirms he authorized covert CIA operations in VenezuelaDonald Trump confirmed reports on Wednesday that he authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela, marking a sharp escalation in US efforts to pressure President Nicolás Maduro’s regime.The US president said he authorized the action for two main reasons, claiming that first, Venezuela had been releasing large numbers of prisoners into the US, and second, a large amount of drugs was entering the US from Venezuela, much of it by sea.Read the full storyMan wrongfully imprisoned detained by IceA Pennsylvania man who was recently exonerated after spending more than four decades behind bars has now been taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and faces possible deportation to India.Earlier this month, Centre county’s district attorney dismissed murder charges against 64-year-old Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam. However, shortly after his exoneration, Vedam was detained by Ice based on a 1988 deportation order tied to his now-vacated convictions.Read the full storyYoung Republicans face backlash after racist chats leakedSome leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country are facing a major backlash after Politico revealed 2,900 pages of leaked chats of some of their racist and highly offensive messages.The Young Republican National Federation called on those involved in the chat to “immediately resign from all positions” within the organization.Read the full storyOutcry after US strips visas from six foreigners over Kirk remarksCivil liberties advocates are warning that the Trump administration’s decision to strip visas from at least six foreign nationals over social media posts about Charlie Kirk’s killing represents yet another example of dangerous government crackdowns on protected speech.Read the full storyHegseth’s plane forced to land due to crack in windshieldA plane carrying Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, on Wednesday made an unscheduled landing in the United Kingdom due to a crack in the aircraft’s windshield, the Pentagon said, adding that Hegseth was safe.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

For the first time in two decades, the US has dropped out of the world’s top 10 most powerful passports, marking a significant dethroning for the global superpower.

The mayor of Boston implied the city was ready for a face-off with Donald Trump over his claim he could order Fifa to remove World Cup games from its suburb.

Brown University became the second higher education institution to turn down an invitation from Trump to sign on to his administration’s 10-page college compact that would overhaul university policies in return for preferential access to federal funding.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 14 October 2025. More

Donald Trump confirmed reports on Wednesday that he authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela, marking a sharp escalation in US efforts to pressure President Nicolás Maduro’s regime.The New York Times first reported the classified directive, citing US officials familiar with the decision.The US president said he authorized the action for two main reasons.First, he claimed Venezuela had been releasing large numbers of prisoners, including individuals from mental health facilities, into the United States, often crossing the border due to what he described as an open border policy. Trump did not specify which border they were crossing.The second reason, he said, was the large amount of drugs entering the US from Venezuela, much of it trafficked by sea.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I think Venezuela is feeling heat,” Trump added, but declined to answer when asked if the CIA had the authority to execute Maduro. More

Asked in the Oval Office if the US is considering strikes on suspected drug cartels inside Venezuela, after lethal strikes on suspected drug smugglers at sea, Donald Trump just said that the administration is “looking at land”.The president also claimed, without citing evidence, that every strike on a suspected drug smuggling speedboat saves thousands of lives in the US. “Every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 lives,” Trump said.Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, on Wednesday urged the Republican-led House oversight committee to launch an investigation into the “vile and offensive” text messages exchanged between leaders of Young Republican groups.The request follows a report in Politico that revealed more than 28,000 Telegram messages sent between Young Republican leaders over the course of seven months, in which they refer to Black people as monkeys, praise Hitler, and repeatedly make glib remarks about gas chambers, slavery and rape.“Calling for gas chambers. Expressing love for Hitler. Endorsing rape. Using racist slurs. This is not a ‘joke’, and it is not fringe,” Newsom said in a statement. “If Congress can investigate universities for failing to stop antisemitism, it must also investigate politicians’ own allies who are openly celebrating it.”With Republicans in control of the House, the oversight committee is unlikely to act.In the letter addressed to James Comer, the Republican committee chair and an ally of the president, Newsom notes that while House Republicans have made combating antisemitism a priority, few party leaders have publicly condemned the messages revealed in the report.Democrats such as the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, expressed outrage over the messages, and some GOP groups, like the Young Republican National Federation, have called for resignations.But the vice-president, JD Vance, said that he refused to “join the pearl clutching” over what he inaccurately described as “a college group chat”.Vance recently expressed support for the effort to track down, intimidate and harass people who voiced criticism of Charlie Kirk after his assassination.Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday that he might go to the supreme court next month when it hears his administration’s appeal of two prior court rulings against his imposition of sweeping tariffs under an economic emergency that appears to exist only in his mind.A trade court and an appeals court have both found that Trump exceeded his authority by imposing global tariffs citing provisions of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.On Wednesday, Trump also claimed that he had used the threat of tariffs to stop the escalation of fighting this year between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed nations.Indian officials have said that Trump’s intervention had nothing to do with the end of hostilities.Donald Trump has finished speaking in the Oval Office. After he recited a long series of previously aired grievances, he confirmed, for the first time, that he authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela, marking a sharp escalation in the administration’s apparent effort to drive the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, from power.Donald Trump just claimed that the number of Hamas fighters killed by Israel, with US support, exceeds the entire estimated death toll in the Gaza Strip in the past two years.“We, meaning Israel, but I knew everything they were doing, pretty much, I knew most of the things they were doing,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, “they’ve killed probably 70,000 of these people, Hamas.”As the United Nations reported last week, there have been 67,183 fatalities and 169,841 injuries reported to the Gaza ministry of health since 7 October 2023.The dead included 20,179 children, 10,427 women, 4,813 elderly people and 31,754 adult men.In May of this year, a joint investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call found that Israel’s military intelligence database of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters had 47,653 names. Of them, 8,900 were marked as killed or probably killed.Trump went on to claim that Hamas had agreed to surrender its weapons, but, while Hamas leaders said earlier this year that they would consider giving up the group’s heavy weapons, such as rockets and missiles, on Saturday a senior Hamas official told Agence France-Presse that disarmament was “out of the question”, adding: “The demand that we hand over our weapons is not up for negotiation.”Nevertheless, Trump said on Wednesday: “We want the weapons to be given up, sacrificed, and they’ve agreed to do it. Now they have to do it, and if they don’t do it, we’ll do it.”Asked by a reporter if that meant the US military might be directly involved in disarming the Palestinian militants, Trump replied, again apparently referring to US support for Israel’s military: “We won’t need the US military … because we’re very much involved.”To defend lethal US military strikes on suspected drug smugglers, Donald Trump just repeated his familiar but baseless claim that Venezuela “emptied” its prisons and “insane asylums” by sending incarcerated people into the United States as undocumented immigrants during the Biden administration.“Many countries have done it,” Trump claimed.As the Marshall Project reported a year ago, before the 2024 election, Trump had already made this claim more than 500 times without a shred of evidence.Asked in the Oval Office if the US is considering strikes on suspected drug cartels inside Venezuela, after lethal strikes on suspected drug smugglers at sea, Donald Trump just said that the administration is “looking at land”.The president also claimed, without citing evidence, that every strike on a suspected drug smuggling speedboat saves thousands of lives in the US. “Every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 lives,” Trump said.Kash Patel, the FBI director, is speaking to members of the press now.“In just a three-month span, you had 8,700 arrests of violent criminals. You had 2,200 firearms seized off the streets permanently, to safeguard our communities. You had 421kg of fentanyl seized. Just to put that in perspective, that’s enough to kill 55 million Americans alone,” Patel said.He then compared the number of arrests since Trump returned to the White House with the yearly arrests of violent criminals during the Biden administration.“You have 28,600 arrests of violent criminals in just seven months alone, because of your leadership,” Patel said, praising the president in the process.“It’s a mess, and we have great support in San Francisco,” Trump said of the city and California governor Gavin Newsom’s home town.“Every American deserves to live in a community where they’re not afraid of being mugged, murdered, robbed, raped, assaulted or shot, and that’s exactly what our administration is working to deliver.”Trump touted the success of federal law enforcement in Washington DC.“It’s been so nice because so many people, they’re going out to dinner, and they’re having dinners they wouldn’t, they didn’t go out for four years, and now they’re going out three times a week,” he said.He went on to complain that the only thing in his way in other major cities is “radical left governors”.The president begins his press conference saying that he’s here to talk about “Operation Summer Heat”. He’s flanked by the FBI director, Kash Patel.“Over the past few months, FBI offices in all 50 states made crushing violent crime a top enforcement priority. That’s what they did, rounding up and arresting thousands of the most violent and dangerous criminals,” Trump said.Brown University is the latest institution to reject the White House’s offer to join a “Compact of Academic Excellence” – the controversial agreement which would provide preferential treatment to colleges that carry out several of the administration’s education policies, including ending diversity initiatives and capping international student enrollment.In a letter to the education secretary, Linda McMahon, Brown’s president. Christina H Paxson, said she’s concerned the compact would “restrict academic freedom and undermine the autonomy of Brown’s governance”.She added:
A fundamental part of academic excellence is awarding research funding on the merits of the research being proposed. The cover letter describing the compact contemplates funding research on criteria other than the soundness and likely impact of research, which would ultimately damage the health and prosperity of Americans.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) became the first university to reject the invitation to join the compact, before the White House extended the option to all higher education institutes across the country.The Senate has rejected a House-passed funding bill to reopen the federal government, as the shutdown enters its 15th day.With a vote of 51-44, this is the ninth time that the funding extension has failed to meet the 60-member threshold needed to advance in the upper chamber.According to Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, the plane carrying the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, back from a meeting of Nato ministers in the UK had to make an unscheduled landing “due to a crack in the aircraft windshield”.Parnell added: “The plane landed based on standard procedures and everyone onboard, including Secretary Hegseth, is safe.”

A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from carrying out layoffs during the ongoing government shutdown. In a lawsuit brought by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) challenging the reductions in force that the Trump administration enacted last week, Judge Susan Illston said that the mass firings across agencies, which amounted to more than 4,000 layoffs, are an example of the administration taking “advantage of the lapse in government spending, in government functioning, to assume that that all bets are off, that the laws don’t apply to them any more”. Illston blocked the administration from laying off any federal employees because of, or during, the shutdown, and has stopped them from taking action on the already issued reductions in force for at least two weeks.

While that hearing was under way, the White House budget director maintained that the firings are far from over. Russell Vought, the director of the office of management and budget – has said that the current reductions in force are just a “snapshot”. He added that the total amount could end up being about 10,000.

The supreme court heard two and a half hours of oral arguments today in a case that could thwart a key provision of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The conservative majority on the bench seemed sympathetic to the case, made by lawyers for Louisiana, a group of “non-African American voters” and the Trump administration. They all argue that a 2024 congressional map, which created a second majority-Black district in Louisiana, violates the constitution. If the court rules in their favor, it could ultimately diminish section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits electoral practices that dilute the voting power of minority groups. It would also limit the ability of legislatures from drawing maps with racial demographics in mind, and could cost Democrats several House seats in Republican-led states.

Also in Washington, the government shutdown enters day 15, with no end in sight. Republicans and Democrats in Congress held press conferences at the US Capitol, and continued to exchange barbs – blaming the other party for the lapse in funding. The House speaker, Mike Johnson, said that he spoke with Donald Trump on Tuesday, adding that Republicans are “forlorn” and not taking “any pleasure” in the length of the shutdown and the mass layoffs implemented by the White House budget office. Meanwhile, Hakeem Jeffries slammed the administration for offering a $20bn cash bailout to Argentina, but not “spending a dime on affordable healthcare for Americans”. CSPAN also reported that Johnson and Jeffries have both accepted an invitation to debate on the network. The date has yet to be announced.

Today, Johnson also accused a group of Democrats of “storming” his office, showing “disdain for law enforcement” and playing “political games”. On Tuesday evening, a group of Democrats including Adelita Grijalva, the Democratic representative-elect for Arizona, marched to Johnson’s office, chanting “swear her in” and demanding that she be seated after she won a special election in her state over three weeks ago. Arizona’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, has threatened legal action against Johnson for failing to seat Grijalva, and Grijalva said she has also been exploring her legal options for officially claiming her seat.
In her order, Judge Illston has temporarily blocked the administration from laying off any federal employees because of or during the shutdown, and has stopped them from taking action on the already issued reductions in force for at least two weeks.She’ll lay out further details in her written ruling later today, but said that the administration will need to provide a plan outlining how they have complied with her order within two business days. Illston said that she will schedule a preliminary injunction hearing in roughly two weeks’ time. “It would be wonderful to know what the government’s position is on the merits of this case,” Illston added. “My breath is bated until we find that.”Judge Susan Illston has issued a temporary restraining order, blocking the firing of federal workers during the ongoing government shutdown. More