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    US grants Hungary one-year exception from sanctions over Russian oil and gas

    The United States has granted Hungary a one-year exemption from US sanctions for using Russian oil and gas, a White House official said on Friday, after Viktor Orbán pressed his case for a reprieve during a friendly meeting with Donald Trump in Washington.Last month, Trump imposed Ukraine-related sanctions on Russian oil companies Lukoil and Rosneft that carried the threat of further sanctions on entities in countries that buy oil from those firms.The Hungarian prime minister, a longtime Trump ally, met with the US president at the White House on Friday for their first bilateral meeting since the Republican returned to power and explained why his country needed to use Russian oil at a time when Trump has been pressing Europe to stop doing so.Orbán said the issue was vital for Hungary, which is a European country, and pledged to lay out “the consequences for the Hungarian people, and for the Hungarian economy, not to get oil and gas from Russia”.Trump, aiming to put pressure on Moscow to end its war with Ukraine, appeared sympathetic to Orbán’s position.“We’re looking at it, because it’s very different for him to get the oil and gas from other areas,” Trump said. “As you know, they don’t have … the advantage of having sea. It’s a great country, it’s a big country, but they don’t have sea. They don’t have the ports.”“But many European countries are buying oil and gas from Russia, and they have been for years,” Trump added. “And I said: ‘What’s that all about?’”The White House official noted that, in addition to the sanctions exemption, Hungary had committed to buying US liquefied natural gas with contracts valued at some $600m.Hungary has maintained its reliance on Russian energy since the start of the 2022 conflict in Ukraine, prompting criticism from several European Union and Nato allies.International Monetary Fund figures show that Hungary relied on Russia for 74% of its gas and 86% of its oil in 2024, warning that an EU-wide cutoff of Russian natural gas alone could force output losses in Hungary exceeding 4% of GDP.The two men also discussed Russia’s war with Ukraine.Trump said last month that he would meet Vladimir Putin in the Hungarian capital, but the meeting was put on hold after Russia rejected a ceasefire.Trump on Friday said Russia simply did not want to stop fighting. “The basic dispute is they just don’t want to stop yet. And I think they will,” he said.The president asked Orbán whether he thought Ukraine could win the war. A “miracle can happen”, Orban responded.Greater economic cooperation between the US and Hungary was also on the agenda. Orbán predicted a “golden age” between the two nations and made a point of criticizing Joe Biden’s administration, a sure way to garner favor with Trump, who continues to use Biden as a frequent foil.The Hungarian leader, who faces an election in 2026, has cultivated a strong personal rapport with Trump over the years, including on their shared hard-line immigration policies. Trump on Friday gave Orbán his support for the election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He has not made a mistake on immigration. So he’s respected by everybody, he’s liked by some … I like and respect him, I’m a double,” Trump said. “And that’s the way Hungary is being led. They’re being led properly, and that’s why he’s going to be very successful in his upcoming election.”The EU’s top court ruled last year that Hungary must pay a €200m ($216m) fine for not implementing changes to its policy of handling immigrants and asylum seekers at its border. It must also pay a daily fine of €1m until it fully implements the measures.Orbán referenced the fine during his meeting with Trump but said Hungary would handle its intra-EU disputes on its own.A tangible sign of Hungary’s improved ties with the US under the Trump administration came last month when the US fully restored Hungary’s status in its visa waiver program.Hungary has pushed back against plans by the European Commission to phase out the EU’s imports of all Russian gas and LNG by the end of 2027, deepening a rift with Brussels over relations with Moscow.Ratings agency S&P noted that Hungary has one of the most energy-intensive economies in Europe – and that its domestic refineries are built to process Russian Urals crude oil.While S&P said gas supplies from Azerbaijan and Qatar could help replace Russian supply, it warned that Hungary’s fiscal and external accounts remain vulnerable to an energy shock. More

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    Passengers start to feel bite of flight cuts amid US government shutdown

    A US government order to make drastic cuts in commercial air traffic amid the government shutdown has taken effect, with major airports across the country experiencing a significant reduction in schedules and leaving travellers scrambling to adjust their plans.The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has said the move is necessary to maintain air traffic control safety during a federal government shutdown, now the longest recorded and with no sign of a resolution, in which air traffic controllers have gone without pay.While airlines have started to reduce domestic flights, global hubs such as JFK in New York and LAX in Los Angeles will be affected, meaning delays and sudden changes that could have a cascading effect on international air traffic. The FAA said the reductions would start at 4% and ramp up to 10% by 14 November. The reductions are set to be in effect between 6am and 10pm and impact all commercial airlines.“We are seeing signs of stress in the system, so we are proactively reducing the number of flights to make sure the American people continue to fly safely,” said Bryan Bedford, the FAA administrator.As of Friday morning, more than 800 US-linked flights had been cancelled, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware. The data showed about four in five cancelations globally were related to the US.Transportation secretary Sean Duffy warned on Friday that cancellations could rise to 15% or 20%. “If the shutdown doesn’t end relatively soon, the consequence is that more controllers don’t come to work,” he told Fox News, as US airspace became a potent proverbial weapon in the political standoff.Since the beginning of the shutdown, which began last month after a breakdown between Republicans and Democrats over spending plans, air traffic controllers have been working without pay, which has already caused delays.A potential agreement between the parties to reopen the government appeared to crumble again on Friday after Democrats in the Senate, emboldened by Tuesday’s favorable election results for them, rejected an emerging proposal that would have linked a stopgap funding bill known as a continuing resolution to three full-year appropriations bills.The US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has announced 40 “high-traffic” airports across the country that would need to reduce flights. A 4% reduction in operations at those airports has taken effect but this will increase to 10% over the next week.Duffy has accused Democrats of being responsible for any “mass chaos” that ensues, even though the shutdown is the result of both Republicans and Democrats refusing to agree to a deal.The director of the National Economic Council​, Kevin Hassett, told Fox Business on Friday that he did not discount a broader impact on US economic activity from the air space restrictions.“Business travel is a really big, important part of air travel – and if business travel isn’t happening then those are deals that aren’t being cut and hotel rooms that aren’t being filled,” he said.“Travel and leisure is a place that’s really being heavily hit right now and if it continues to get hit, if the air travel thing goes south for another week or two, then you could say that they would have at least a near-term downturn,” Hassett added.View image in fullscreenThe cuts could represent as many as 1,800 flights and upwards of 268,000 seats combined, according to an estimate by the aviation analytics firm Cirium.With deep antagonism between the two political parties, Donald Trump’s government has beaten the previous record for the longest shutdown, which was set during his first term in 2018-19.United, Southwest and Delta airlines began cancelling flights on Thursday evening.Affected airports cover more than two dozen states including the busiest across the US – such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Denver, Dallas/Fort Worth, Orlando, Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco. Flight schedules will be reduced in some of the US’s biggest cities, including New York, Houston and Chicago.Scott Kirby, the United Airlines CEO, said in a statement that the airline “will continue to make rolling updates to our schedule as the government shutdown continues so we can give our customers several days’ advance notice and to minimise disruption”.Delta Air Lines said it would comply with the directive and “expects to operate the vast majority of our flights as scheduled”.The airspace disruption comes two weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday – typically the busiest travel period of the year – and raises the pressure on lawmakers to reach a deal to end the shutdown.Politically inspired flight chaos, with its potential to continue into or beyond the Thanksgiving holiday later this month, has exacerbated pre-existing structural issues in air travel scheduling, airspace constraints and safety considerations, including outdated air traffic control equipment and a long-term shortage of air traffic controllers.“The FAA is a slow-moving bureaucracy,” said Michael Taylor, a travel analyst at JD Power. “It has a daunting task keeping planes from colliding with each other, and they do a really good job with that, but it makes them ultra-conservative in terms of the technologies they could be using. It’s not like your living room where everything is digital. The FAA still relies on technology invented for the second world war.“Under-staffing is long-term problem and that’s not going to change with a political solution to the shutdown,” he adds. Coupled with underlying technological issues, politicians have learned that travel is an unique opportunity to apply pressure. “This is a leverage point that politicians can use to try to drive public opinion towards one party or the other. It’s a shame but that’s where we are today,” Taylor added.In a statement, American Airlines said most customers would be unaffected and long-haul international travel would remain as scheduled. Customers could change their flight or request a refund. “In the meantime, we continue to urge leaders in Washington to reach an immediate resolution to end the shutdown,” the airline said.The government shutdown has left shortages of up to 3,000 air traffic controllers, according to the administration, in addition to at least 11,000 more receiving zero wages despite being categorised as essential workers.“I’m not aware in my 35-year history in the aviation market where we’ve had a situation where we’re taking these kinds of measures,” Bedford has said. “We’re in new territory in terms of government shutdowns.” More

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    Republicans set to reject Democrats’ proposal to end longest shutdown in US history

    Republicans are set to reject a proposal made on Friday by the Senate’s Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, which would end the longest government shutdown in US history by offering Republicans a deal to reauthorize funding in exchange for a one-year extension of tax credits that lower costs for Affordable Care Act (ACA) health plans.“Democrats are ready to clear the way to quickly pass a government funding bill that includes healthcare affordability,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “Leader Thune just needs to add a clean, one-year extension of the ACA tax credits to the CR so that we can immediately address rising healthcare costs.”He also proposed “a bipartisan committee that will continue negotiations after the government reopens on reforms ahead of next year’s enrollment period to provide long-term certainty that healthcare costs will be more affordable.”“Now, the ball is in Republicans’ court. We need Republicans to just say yes,” Schumer said.Senate majority leader John Thune appears unmoved by the offer, with his spokesperson Ryan Wrasse reiterating the demand that the government be reopened before the tax credit issue will be discussed.“Extending the COVID bonuses *is* the negotiation – something that can only take place after the government reopens. Release the hostage. End the pain,” Wrasse said.Any compromise would also need to be approved by the House of Representatives, which Republican speaker Mike Johnson has kept on recess since 19 September. That means the 38-day shutdown would not end immediately.Democrats made the offer as Americans faced unprecedented disruptions blamed by Donald Trump on the funding lapse, which began on 1 October.The Trump administration has attempted to pause payments under the government’s food aid program for the first time in history, but has been blocked by a court order. The Federal Aviation Administration also slashed commercial air travel, saying weeks of unpaid work by controllers had undermined capacity. About 800 US-linked flights had been canceled as of Friday morning, according to the tracking website FlightAware.Though Republicans control both chambers of Congress, any spending legislation needs at least some bipartisan support to clear the 60-vote threshold for advancement in the Senate. The Senate majority leader, John Thune, has tried 14 times to get Democrats to support a House-approved bill to continue funding through 21 November, butonly three minority lawmakers voted for it.Thune planned to hold 15th vote on Friday. He told Fox News that “we’re going to give them a chance to vote later today on paying people who are working”, but did not say if he was referring to a bill to reopen the government, or to pay some of the federal workers who had stayed on the job without pay over the past weeks.Democrats had for weeks insisted that any funding bill include an extension of the tax credits, which were created during Joe Biden’s presidency and will expire at the end of the year. People on ACA plans are expected to soon see their costs jump by an average of 26%, the Kaiser Family Foundation found.Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, told reporters at the White House that he expected the shutdown to cut GDP growth by approximately half in the current quarter, though much of that will be made up in the following quarter, assuming the shutdown ends and federal workers receive backpay.Trump has publicly mulled not giving federal workers, many of whom his administration has maligned, pay for the time the government was shut down.Democrats’ resolve to hold strong against the Republican funding proposal was boosted on Tuesday when the party’s candidates swept off-year elections in a number of states, which party leaders attributed to voters being on board with their demands.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Americans plagued by high costs fired a political torpedo this week at Donald Trump and Republicans,”Schumer, said on Thursday.“If Republicans were smart, they would get the message after Tuesday that their do-nothing strategy isn’t working. Even Donald Trump knows Americans hold Republicans responsible for this mess.”Recent polls have shown the GOP taking more of the blame for the shutdown than Democrats, and some in the party have warned that backing down from their demands now would turn off newly reenergized voters.“I think there will be some pretty substantial damage done to a Democratic brand that has been rehabilitated, if, on the heels of an election in which the people told us to keep fighting, we immediately stop fighting, if we surrender without having gotten anything,” the Democratic senator Chris Murphy told Punchbowl News.Trump appeared to acknowledge that dynamic, telling senators from his party on Wednesday that the shutdown was “negative for Republicans”.He has called for them to vote for scrapping the Senate’s filibuster, which allows the minority party to hold up most legislation that does not receive 60 votes. “If Republicans kill the Filibuster, they sail to Victory for many years to come. If they don’t, DISASTER waiting to happen!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday.Thune has said his lawmakers do not support doing that. More

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    Washington National Opera may move out of Kennedy Center due to Trump ‘takeover’

    The Washington National Opera (WNO) is considering moving out of the Kennedy Center, the company’s home since the US’s national performing arts center opened in 1971.The possibility has been forced on the company as a result of the “takeover” of the center by Donald Trump, according to WNO’s artistic director, Francesca Zambello. The president declared himself chair of the institution in February, sacking and replacing its board and leadership.Leaving the Kennedy Center is a possible scenario after a collapse in box office revenue and “shattered” donor confidence in the wake of Trump’s takeover, said Zambello.“It is our desire to perform in our home at the Kennedy Center,” she said. “But if we cannot raise enough money, or sell enough tickets in there, we have to consider other options.“The two things that support a company financially, because of the takeover, have been severely compromised,” she said.Ticket sales were about 40% unsold compared with before Trump declared himself chair, said Zambello. Many have decided to boycott the center. Every day she receives messages of protest from formerly loyal members of the audience, she says.“They say things like: ‘I’m never setting foot in there until the “orange menace” is gone.’ Or: ‘Don’t you know history? Don’t you know what Hitler did? I refuse to give you a penny,’” she said.“People send me back their the season brochure shredded in an envelope and say: ‘Never, never, will I return: while he’s in power.’”Before February’s coup, the opera performances were running at 80%-90% of capacity. Now, Zambello said, they were at 60%, with at times the appearance of fuller houses created by the distribution of complimentary tickets.Philanthropic giving to the company – an important source of its funding – was down, she said. “Donor confidence has been shattered because many people feel: ‘If I give to the Kennedy Center, I’m supporting Donald Trump,’” she said.“The building is tainted,” she said. It had been “politicized by the current management”.Previously, the board of trustees “was always a mix of Republicans and Democrats. It did not matter that someone was a Republican or a Democrat. What mattered was that they were leading a big, important institution.”She said that the new management of the institution “do not have experience in the arts”. Richard Grenell, the Trump-appointed president of the center, has previously served in various foreign policy roles, including US ambassador to Germany.In addition, staffing in key areas such as marketing and development had been hollowed out, both in terms of experience and numbers, she said. “There was a promise from the new management that they would help us find new donors, increase contributions – which they have not done for our benefit,” she said.The new management of the center had not vetoed any of Zambello’s programming choices, but “they have suggested that we produce more popular operas”, she said. “This season, we are producing The Marriage of Figaro, Aida and West Side Story … I don’t see how we can get more popular than that.”Zambello said that when she joined the company in 2012, she committed to 50% non-white casting.“The management has questioned some aspects of it, and we have explained these are the best people for the roles,” she said, adding: “America is an incredibly diverse country, and so we want to represent every part of this country on our stage.”They had also questioned, she said, singers’ fees: “They have said: ‘Could we consider less expensive artists?’ We’re a feeding ground for bigger companies in this country. So we’re already hiring people who are on the rise and whose fees will get a lot more expensive later.”Grenell had, said Zambello, issued an edict requiring all shows to be “net neutral”, that is, with costs fully covered by box-office returns and donor contributions. But, she said, “We’re at the point where now we can’t present a net-neutral budget without an epic amount of outside funding, or knowing that our patrons would come back.”The slump in ticket sales was reflected across the board at the center, including for its concert seasons and theater, according to an analysis published by the Washington Post last week, which showed the box office down by 40% compared with a 2018 baseline.According to Zambello, box-office figures have now ceased to be internally circulated among the center’s creative teams as part of the standard system of daily show reports.The president declared his intention to become chair of the institution on 7 February, firing its bipartisan board of trustees. He replaced them with those of his own choosing; they elected him unanimously to the position days later. The president of the center was removed and replaced with Grenell.The moves were widely condemned. Weeks later, when JD Vance and the second lady, Usha Vance, who was inserted on to the Kennedy Center board by Trump, attended a concert given by the National Symphony Orchestra in March, patrons booed them.Usha Vance was already a trustee of the WNO, which has an independent board and its own endowment. “She was a supportive board member when she was a senator’s wife, and she has been a supportive board member as second lady, and we are grateful to have her patronage,” said Zambello.“I believe that she is someone who is an equalizer,” she said. “We can’t turn our backs on half this country. We have to find a way to all communicate and function together. I don’t believe in ‘us’ and ‘them’.”Artists have by and large remained loyal to WNO, Zambello says. However, in March, the creative team behind the opera Fellow Travelers, a love story set amid Eisenhower’s purge of gay employees from federal jobs in the 1950s, withdrew their work from the programme.The show was replaced by a production of Robert Ward’s opera The Crucible, an adaptation of Arthur Miller’s allegory on the anti-communist witch-hunts of McCarthyism.WNO is an independent company, but it has an affiliation agreement with the Kennedy Center, meaning that it agrees to produce a certain number of shows in the building; shares back office functions such as marketing and development; and receives a subsidy from the center of about $2m-$3m per year.The affiliation agreement was made in 2011, soon before Zambello became artistic director, in order to stabilise the finances of the company. It was renewed shortly before Trump declared himself chair of the Kennedy Center.WNO is understood to be looking at alternative venues in DC for its forthcoming season, which runs from October 2026 to May the following year. Theaters of the scale required to produce main-stage opera are scarce, though auditoriums used by the city’s Shakespeare Theater Company could potentially be taken from time to time for smaller-scale works.The Kennedy Center declined to comment. More

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    Students and faculty at over 100 US universities protest against Trump’s attacks

    Students, faculty and staff at more than 100 campuses across the US rallied against the Trump administration’s assault on higher education on Friday – the first in a planned series of nationwide, coordinated protests that organizers hope will culminate in large-scale students’ and workers’ strikes next May Day and a nationwide general strike in May 2028.The day of action was organized under the banner of Students Rise Up, a network of students including both local groups and national organizations such as Sunrise Movement and Campus Climate Network. Students were joined by faculty and educational workers’ unions like the American Association of University Professors and Higher Education Labor United.Protesters called on university administrators and elected officials to denounce the president’s months-long effort to force US universities to abide by its ideological priorities and urged them to reject Trump’s “compact”, which would give universities preferential access to federal funding in exchange for a commitment to advance the administration’s conservative agenda. Only one university, New College of Florida – a public school that state legislators have turned into a bastion of conservatism – has so far accepted it.“Universities should be a place of learning, not propaganda machines,” Alicia Colomer, managing director at Campus Climate Network, said ahead of the protests. “That’s why students, workers and alumni around the country are taking action.”As the day unfolded, hundreds of students across the country walked out of classes, unfurled banners and rallied on campuses, often joined by faculty and other staff. In addition to denouncing the compact, they called for a more affordable education and for the protection of all students – from transgender to international ones.At the University of Kansas, about 70 students demanded administrations divest from weapons manufacturers and Israel, refuse to collaborate with ICE, safeguard gender-affirming housing and meet faculty’s demands for fair contracts. At Duke University, in North Carolina, professors held signs demanding the university stand with immigrants, pay its workers a $25 hourly wage, and protect trans and international students. At Brown University in Rhode Island – one of the first institutions to reach a settlement with the Trump administration earlier this year – passersby were invited to endorse a banner listing a series of demands by dipping their hands in paint and leaving their print, while a group of faculty members nearby lectured about the history of autocracy.View image in fullscreen“Trump came to our community thinking we could be bullied out of our freedom,” said Simon Aron, a sophomore and co-president of Brown Rise Up. “He was wrong.”In New York City, students and faculty from multiple campuses gathered by the midtown headquarters of the investment firm Apollo Global Management to protest against its CEO, Marc Rowan, a billionaire Trump donor and key architect of the compact whom they say “has no business making policy for higher education”.They cited Rowan’s involvement with the online University of Phoenix, which they described as “the largest single producer of student debt in the country” and his role in paving the way for the ongoing abuse of civil rights legislation to target universities over students and faculty’s criticism of Israel.A spokesperson for Apollo did not respond to a request for comment but the firm reportedly instructed staff to stay home on Friday in anticipation of the protest. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Rowan defended the compact, writing that American higher education was “broken” and that “course correction must come from the outside”.Amy Offner, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Guardian that the campaign against Rowan is part of a broader effort to protect US higher education from the influence of ultra-wealthy individuals. “Billionaires should not control what can be taught and studied in the United States,” she said.The protests marked the first time that students, faculty and staff have staged such a large-scale response. “There is only one way forward in saving higher education and democracy writ large and that is students, faculty, staff united,” Todd Wolfson, the president of the AAUP, said on a call with protest organizers last week. “We have to become a new political force.” More

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    Virginia Republican who shared violent texts from prominent Democrat loses re-election

    The Virginia Republican politician who shook up multiple statewide elections by disclosing text messages in which a prominent Democratic candidate fantasized about a rival receiving “two bullets to the head” has conceded defeat in her own bid to retain office.Carrie Coyner was seeking a third two-year term in Virginia’s house of delegates when she publicly shared the text messages that she had previously received from Jay Jones, a former Democratic colleague who ran in the state’s attorney general election on Tuesday.Some projected that the controversy that erupted surrounding the texts would derail Jones’s campaign while also complicating his fellow Democrat Abigail Spanberger’s run for Virginia governor.But Spanberger and Jones won the Republican-held offices that they targeted while Coyner lost to Democratic challenger Lindsey Dougherty by a margin of 52.5% to 47.3%, according to voting returns.The district from which Coyner was ousted was considered competitive. It broke in favor of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election that the then Democratic vice-president lost to her Republican counterpart, Donald Trump.Coyner’s loss also unfolded as the president registered low public approval ratings, and his party endured a number of decisive defeats on Tuesday in elections across the US.She issued a concession statement on social media after her defeat saying she would spend “much-needed time” with her family and refocus on her law practice. Calling it “the greatest honor” to have served in Virginia’s legislature and previously on a local school board, the statement added: “I know God’s got new plans for me – and I can’t wait to see what’s ahead.”The text messages that rocked Jones’s campaign were sent by him to Coyner in 2022 while they coincided in the Virginia state house of delegates. In them, Jones speculated on what he would do if he had a pair of bullets and was faced with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, Cambodian authoritarian Pol Pot and the then Republican house of delegates speaker Todd Gilbert.“Gilbert gets two bullets to the head,” Jones wrote, as first reported by the National Review. “Spoiler: put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time.”In a subsequent text to Coyner, Jones said Gilbert and his wife, Jennifer, were “evil” and “breeding little fascists”.The texts show Coyner responding: “Jay. Please stop.” After disclosing the texts in October, she issued a statement arguing that “what [Jones] said was not just disturbing but disqualifying for anyone who wants to seek public office.“It’s disgusting and unbecoming of any public official.”Jones published a statement in which he said his texts left him “embarrassed, ashamed and sorry”.“I cannot take back what I said,” Jones’s statement said. “I can only take full accountability and offer my sincere apology.”Nonetheless, Republicans – including Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance – seized on them. Trump dismissed Jones as “a radical left lunatic”, and Spanberger’s opponent – the lieutenant governor, Winsome Earle-Sears – sought to associate her with the texts while demanding that she drop out.Spanberger condemned Jones’s texts but said voters should determine his candidacy’s fate.Republicans were particularly irked by Jones’s victory on Tuesday, including Congress member Brandon Gill of Texas, who argued that the outcome of the Virginia attorney general’s race amid the US’s ongoing dialogue of political violence was “truly demonic”.Others, though, experienced schadenfreude over Coyner’s loss and the hand she had in throttling Jones’s campaign. For instance, one social media user posted an image of former Democratic president Joe Biden raising his arms theatrically along with the words: “Carrie Coyner is dead and Jay Jones is alive!”Political violence has become a recurring topic in the US’s public discourse in part after Trump survived two assassination attempts while running for a second presidency in 2024.Other such cases were the firebombing in April of the home of the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro; the murders in June of the former Minnesota state house speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark; and the shooting death in September of staunch Trump ally Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA.Jones late on Thursday invited another round of national media attention by announcing that he had named Ralph Northam – Virginia’s Democratic governor from 2018 to 2022 – to lead his transition team. In 2019, Northam resisted widespread calls to resign when a racist picture in his 1984 medical school yearbook page resurfaced depicting someone in blackface next to another person in a Ku Klux Klan hood and robe.Northam apologized but denied being in the photo, though he acknowledged wearing blackface decades earlier to look like Michael Jackson for a dance contest. More

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    Leftist and centrist Democrats won on Tuesday. So what’s the party’s lesson? | Dustin Guastella

    On Tuesday, Democrats won right, left and center.In purple Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, the staunchly anti-socialist former CIA official won handily over her Republican counterpart. Meanwhile, Mikie Sherrill, a poster child for centrist Democrats, won big in light-blue New Jersey. And in ultra-progressive New York, the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, predictably, took the mayoralty. With such varied success, what could be the common lesson?First, all of these candidates took the economy seriously. Mamdani has long been praised, even by moderates, for making his campaign all about affordability. But this was no less true for Sherrill and Spanberger, who moved in a decidedly populist direction with their campaigns. At times, centrist Sherrill even sounded like Bernie Sanders. That’s good.Second, all of these candidates successfully distanced themselves from unwise (and unpopular) progressive positions on crime and the fringier elements of the social justice brigade. As a result, they broadened their appeal. Also good. And suggestive that a commonsense populism can serve as the path back to power for Democrats.To be sure, enduring structural problems remain; for one thing, all of these candidates are rich. That’s not good. Sherrill was hammered on the campaign trail about the millions she made while in Congress. But Mamdani, too, is the son of elites; his mother is a world-famous millionaire moviemaker with homes on three continents. These aren’t great credentials for Democrats trying to demonstrate their everyman qualities to working-class voters who have turned their backs on the party.Still, Mamdani was the big star of the night. And for good reason. Not only was Mamdani the only outsider candidate, facing down long odds and big money; he alone offered the inspirational vision that Democrats so desperately need. He has a compelling theory of society, one that helps voters make sense of the madness that is our new Gilded Age, and a political program that flows naturally from that theory. As a result he offers a more persuasive political vision than the establishment’s poll-tested “popularism” – which amounts to asking voters what they already like and then insisting that Democrats conform to the survey results. Voters want to elect leaders, and leaders have to have a vision of the way society ought to look. Mamdani does. The Democrats, by and large, do not.The cruel political irony is, of course, that candidates such as Mamdani, who have the far-reaching vision to propose a new economic model, who have the bravery to challenge the political establishment and who have the charisma to inject some life into the political scene, tend to win in the kinds of places where they have the least leverage – uber-progressive, rich, global cities. This, in turn, threatens to limit their appeal, and their power, to the level of government least capable of winning the world they want.Municipal government – even in a city that is home to Wall Street – is simply not fit to fuel real economic change. It’s not that Mamdani has promised policies far beyond the scope of feasibility. His program was limited. And given that New York City is very rich, from a budget perspective, his policies are affordable. But class politics aren’t like accounting: it’s not whether the government can afford it, it’s whether the rich will allow it.Billionaires have long been threatening that a Mamdani election would send the rich packing. An exodus of well-to-do New Yorkers, who feel they are already overtaxed, would starve the budget and force a conservative turn at city hall. The flight of the rich isn’t particularly likely, but it is a danger. This is why so much of social policy must be decided at the national, and not the local, level. Just look at the exodus of California residents to low-tax red states such as Texas and Florida, which has been a boon for those states and headache for California. With the continued allure of remote work, it’s not something Mamdani can afford to ignore. Which is why he went out of his way to assure the elite that he won’t be soaking the rich so much as splashing them.This structural challenge is compounded by the nature of liberal urban politics and the perceptions of voters in a nationalized political environment. Of course, Mamdani made great efforts to broaden the left’s base. He steered his campaign away from wrongheaded activist slogans about defunding the police or abolishing prisons. He very intentionally projected a sense of respectability and responsibility – he was almost exclusively pictured in a suit and tie. And as a result he was able to win voters well beyond the narrow confines of New York’s “commie corridor” and reach deep into working-class outer-borough neighborhoods.Yet, as Woody Allen said in Annie Hall: “The rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re leftwing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers.” And despite his clear moderation on a whole host of liberal cultural crusades, Mamdani does advocate a soft touch on drugs, crime and sex work. Again, this is fine … for New York. But for their political program to succeed, populists like him need federal power and for that they need national appeal. Mamdani’s supporters need to confront a real danger. As the mayor-elect is catapulted to the unofficial position of leader of the American left, progressive populism risks being even more tightly associated with the views and values of Park Slope’s young professionals.National Democrats have a lot to learn from Mamdani. If they want to retake Congress, they need to learn what it is to have conviction and a vision that goes beyond tinkering with the tax code. At the same time, if populists are to have a hope of implementing their program, they must break out of the political confines of deep-blue cities.

    Dustin Guastella is the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia, and a research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics More

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    An Arizona town is dreading plans to turn its prison into an ICE facility: ‘It’s morally objectionable’

    In an Arizona town where farmers have long wrested a living off the arid land, reports that a former prison complex may be turned into an immigration detention center have sparked a fierce backlash, with residents seeing the potential transition as the latest undesirable symbol of the Trump administration’s massive escalation of immigration enforcement.The facility in Marana, a town of about 63,700 people located north of Tucson, sprawls across a flat expanse of desert studded with scrubby bushes and hardy trees. It was shuttered almost two years ago, and the Management and Training Corporation, the private company that owns it, informed the town manager of company plans to operate a detention center in the prison.During a town hall meeting on 23 October, residents crowded into a school auditorium to learn more from representatives of local government and advocacy organizations about the plan. Many attenders spoke against the jailing of immigrants amid Donald Trump’s crusade to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible.Karla Jones, one of the attenders, said she abhorred the idea of having a nearby detention center to hold immigrants – whose only crime in many cases is lacking US legal status, a civil offense – for extended periods of time. “That’s breaking up families,” she said. “And it’s people who are paying taxes, it’s people who are working. So I don’t want my community to support that.”Federal legislation passed in July provided $45bn for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to build more detention centers for adults and children as part of a larger $75bn, four-year package for the federal agency. To vastly increase detention capacity, the federal government is relying heavily on for-profit private companies that run prisons.The Utah-based Management and Training Corporation (MTC) is one of those companies. MTC built the Marana prison in the mid-1990s, when the population in the then largely farming community was about 2,000. It was the first private prison in the state.In 2013, Arizona bought the prison for $150,000. In December 2023, the state – citing high costs and a decreasing incarcerated population – closed it. This past summer, after Arizona lawmakers rejected a bill that would have leased the prison for $1 a year to the federal government for use as an immigration detention center – MTC paid the state $15m to get it back.View image in fullscreenMarana’s town manager, Terry Rozema, said there was little the town could do to prevent the use of the building complex as a detention center. “The facility is privately owned by MTC and is already properly zoned for use as a prison or an ICE facility. As such, the town doesn’t have authority to restrict its future use as long as it meets current zoning,” Rozema said in an emailed statement.Emily Lawhead, MTC’s director of communications, declined an interview but wrote in an email that the company was “in discussions with several public agencies that may have a need for additional bed space”. ICE did not respond to questions regarding plans to use the onetime prison, but an agency spokesperson cited the need for “greater detention capacity” due to “a significant number of arrests”.MTC already operates five immigration detention centers in California, New Mexico and Texas.Its record in Arizona is spotty. In 2015, the state canceled a contract with the company after a riot at a prison it operated in the town of Kingman left more than a dozen incarcerated people and guards injured. A subsequent investigation by the Arizona department of corrections concluded that the company had “a culture of disorganization, disengagement and disregard” for state policies. MTC did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about those allegations, but the company has previously described the investigation’s findings as flawed.Jennifer Allen, a member of the board of supervisors for Pima county, where Marana is located, said that given reports about the poor conditions facing ICE detainees across the country, she and her constituents were concerned about the treatment of people in the Marana facility if it were to be converted and about oversight of the facility. She criticized the federal government for showering immigration enforcement with resources while simultaneously cutting funding for social safety net programs for older adults, children and other vulnerable populations.At the town hall, the federal government received plenty of criticism for its aggressive immigration agenda. Many attenders spoke against not just having a detention center in the vicinity, but also about the impact of social harms of the crackdown. Some residents brought signs bearing the slogan “Stop the kidnappings, protect your neighbors”, alluding to forceful arrests of immigrants in their homes, at work and in the streets.Speaking to the crowd, Tucson resident Maximiliano Torres likened the Trump administration’s detention and deportation campaign to Arizona’s 2010 Senate Bill 1070, commonly known as the “show me your papers” law that empowered police to conduct immigration enforcement. Although police can still inquire about immigration status, it’s no longer required because courts have largely struck down the law as unconstitutional.Recalling the law’s impact, Torres told the crowd: “They turned [crossing the border without authorization] into a criminal act, so they could justify putting those people in prison and forcing the federal government to pay private prisons.”While Trump has repeatedly promised immigration enforcement efforts would be focused on undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, statistics show that those being held in detention are primarily people without criminal convictions. As of September, 71.5% of the 59,762 immigrants in detention had no criminal conviction, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Many convictions involved traffic violations and other minor offenses.Under the Biden administration, immigrants with strong community ties and no serious brushes with the law would generally be released and be asked to check in with ICE periodically, since the government prioritized deporting people with criminal convictions, said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center. “Now everybody gets arrested, everybody gets detained,” she said.The Trump administration has significantly expanded mandatory detention to keep immigrants in confinement during proceedings to remove them from the country, she said. “More and more often, people are just giving up and agreeing to be deported instead of sitting in jail trying to fight their case,” the attorney said.In Marana, resident Tom Flynn left the town hall clutching one of the protest signs. He detests the possibility of an immigrant detention center in his town. “No 1, it’s morally objectionable,” he said. “No 2, it’s a detriment to the overall economy; it reduces the number of people who have been in the area, it depresses home values. And it’s so obviously politically driven.”Marlis Dinning said what she heard at the town hall about the possible detention center was disturbing. “It seems like all of this has happened behind closed doors,” she said. She’s against the detention of immigrants, many of them asylum seekers who entered the country legally, and who now “have no way to get citizenship”, she said.After the town hall, Jones was feeling quite unsettled by the overall discussion. But she vowed to participate in the mounting community pressure to keep the detention center at bay. “I really hope we can stop it from opening,” she said. More