More stories

  • in

    Trump says he has commuted sentence of George Santos in federal fraud case

    Donald Trump announced on Friday he had commuted the sentence of George Santos, the disgraced former New York representative and serial fabulist who had been sentenced to more than seven years in prison after a short-lived political career marked by outlandish fabrications and fraudulent scheming.Santos left the Federal Correctional Institution Fairton in New Jersey just hours later and was “on his way home”, his attorney Joseph Murray told Agence France-Presse by phone late on Friday.In a Truth Social post, Trump called Santos “somewhat of a ‘rogue’” but expressed sympathy for the New York Republican. Santos was sentenced in April after pleading guilty last year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.“I just signed a Commutation, releasing George Santos from prison, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump said in the lengthy post. “Good luck George, have a great life!”The United States pardon attorney tweeted a photograph of the signed commutation shortly after Trump’s post, writing that he was “honored” to have “played a small role” Trump granting Santos clemency.“Thank you, Mr. President for making clemency great again,” he wrote.Murray also thanked Trump, posting on Santos’s X account: “God bless President Donald J Trump the greatest President in US history!”Santos reported to a federal prison in New Jersey in July and began serving an 87-month sentence for charges that ultimately led to his expulsion from Congress in 2023. Trump’s post suggested he was moved by a letter penned by Santos that was published in a local Long Island newspaper this week. Santos wrote about his life in solitary confinement and made direct plea to the president for a “chance to rebuild”.Trump issued the commutation after a push from key Republicans allies, most notably Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene, a prominent former House colleague of Santos, had called his conviction a “grave injustice” and urged intervention after the sentence was handed down. She also sent a letter in August asking the justice department for a commutation.Asked at the time whether he might consider clemency for Santos, Trump, who has a history of rewarding supporters with pardons, did not rule it out, but said he had not been asked.“He lied like hell,” Trump told Newsmax, adding: “But he was 100% for Trump.”On Friday, Greene thanked the president for the commutation and said of Santos: “He was unfairly treated and put in solitary confinement, which is torture!!”Elsewhere in his post on Friday, Trump compared Santos with the Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. He made reference to the decades-old claims that Blumenthal “made up” aspects of his military record. Blumenthal admitted in 2010 that he misrepresented his military service after saying he had been “in” Vietnam. Blumenthal served as a Marine Corps reservist during the Vietnam War, but was not deployed in Vietnam.Trump, who never served in the military, has repeatedly attacked Blumenthal. His account of the senator’s past misstatements have even become increasingly exaggerated in recent years.“This is far worse than what George Santos did, and at least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” Trump wrote of Blumenthal on Friday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBefore and after entering Congress, Santos lied prolifically about his biography. Despite making history as the first out LGBTQ+ Republican elected in Congress, his fabulist tendencies caught up with him with the release of a damning report from the House ethics committee. That report detailed how Santos used campaign funds for things like travel, cosmetic treatments and luxury goods and helped fuel his spectacular fall.But Santos, who catapulted from relative anonymity to pop culture sensation almost overnight, shared Trump’s love of the national spotlight – even when trained on his misdeeds.“Well, darlings … The curtain falls, the spotlight dims, and the rhinestones are packed,” Santos wrote in a tweet pinned to the top of his X account. “From the halls of Congress to the chaos of cable news what a ride it’s been! Was it messy? Always. Glamorous? Occasionally. Honest? I tried … most days.”The judge overseeing Santos’s case sided with federal prosecutors, who argued the former congressman ​had failed to show genuine remorse​ despite his legal team’s insistence to the contrary. That lack of contrition, they said, warranted a tougher sentence.​S​antos’s commutation marks the latest in a string of high-profile ​interventions ​by Trump, who has resumed the use of presidential clemency to reward political allies since returning to the White House in January.Trump, in May, issued a pardon to Michael Grimm, a former Republican congressman from New York who admitted to concealing income and wages related to a Manhattan restaurant he owned. Also pardoned was John Rowland, the former Connecticut governor whose political ascent collapsed under the weight of a federal corruption case and two prison terms.​At the same time, Trump has directed his justice department to bring criminal charges against his political enemies, including his former national security adviser turned prominent critic John Bolton, who was indicted this week and has pleaded not guilty.​Trump last year became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes, stemming from a hush money case in New York that he continues to dismiss as a witch hunt. More

  • in

    Alaska governor asks Trump for federal aid after typhoon displaces 1,500 people

    Mike Dunleavy, the governor of Alaska, has asked Donald Trump to declare a major disaster after a powerful storm devastated villages in the state’s south-west, displacing 1,500 people and prompting large-scale air evacuations.The state’s senators and congressman urged the president to approve the declaration to allow additional federal resources into the region to repair housing and utilities before winter. The scale of the disaster has surpassed the state’s ability to respond, Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, and Nick Begich, the Alaska congressman, wrote.“This significant storm affected thousands of miles of coast, spanning the Aleutian Islands to the North Slope,” the letter to Trump states. “Immediate federal assistance is needed to support Alaskans recovering from the damage of this storm and to mitigate the impact of future severe weather events.”The remnants of Typhoon Halong hit remote Alaska Native communities in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta over the weekend, battering the area with fierce winds, rain and record-breaking storm surge that sent water into homes and caused some to float off their foundations. At least one person was killed and two others remain missing.The state established makeshift shelters that soon swelled to hold about 1,500 people, an extraordinary number in a sparsely populated region where communities are reachable only by air or water this time of year. Before evacuees were transported to larger shelters, as many as 1,000 people were being housed in just two local schools, Alaska Public Media reported earlier this week. But conditions were challenging, with limited power and bathroom access, and the state began evacuating people via plane to larger shelters in Anchorage, about 500 miles (805km) away.Authorities are still evaluating the full scale of the damage, and destruction was extensive. Residents reported that the storm caused chaos, rocking communities on the south-west like an earthquake and sending waves into their houses.In the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk, Alexie Stone, who was with his brothers and children, said over the weekend he could look outside and see under the water, like an aquarium. A shed drifted toward them, threatening to shatter the glass, but turned away before it hit.The house came to rest just a few feet away from where it previously stood, after another building blocked its path. It remains uninhabitable, along with most of the village.“In our village, we’d say that we’re Native strong, we have Native pride, and nothing can break us down. But this is the hardest that we went through,” Stone said on Thursday outside a shelter in the Alaska Airlines center in Anchorage. “Everybody’s taking care of everybody in there. We’re all thankful that we’re all alive.”Stone’s mother, Julia Stone, is a village police officer in Kipnuk. She was working last weekend when the winds suddenly picked up and her police cellphone began ringing with calls for help from residents – some who reported that their houses were floating. She tried to reach search and rescue teams and others to determine if there were available boats to help, but the situation was “chaos”, she said.“It’s a nightmare what we went through, but I thank God we are together,” she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKipnuk and Kwigillingok, the hardest-hit communities, saw water levels of more than 6ft. In Kipnuk, a village of about 700 people and about 121 homes were destroyed and in Kwigillingok, three dozen homes drifted away. In the village of Napaskiak, water, sewer and well systems are inoperable.The disaster has brought renewed attention to Trump administration cuts to grants aimed at helping small, mostly Indigenous villages prepare for storms or mitigate disaster risks.Earlier this year, the administration canceled a $20m US Environmental Protection Agency grant to Kipnuk, which was inundated by floodwaters in this weekend’s storm. The grant was intended to protect the boardwalk residents use to get around the community, as well as 1,400ft (430 metres) of river from erosion, according to a federal website that tracks government spending.In the aftermath of the storm, Alaskans have raised more than $1m to support evacuees. More

  • in

    Trump claims Maduro willing to give ‘everything’ to ease US tensions

    Donald Trump used an expletive to threaten the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, on Friday, claiming that the leftist autocrat had offered major concessions to appease the US.The US president was speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday during a meeting with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.Asked about reports that Maduro offered “everything in his country, all the natural resources” to ease tensions, Trump agreed: “He’s offered everything; you’re right. You know why? Because he doesn’t want to fuck around with the United States.”Maduro, who came to power in 2013, has recently shored up his security powers and deployed tens of thousands of troops around the country. He also accused Trump of seeking regime change, an allegation the US president has downplayed.Last week the New York Times reported that Maduro offered a stake in Venezuela’s oil and other mineral wealth in recent months to stave off mounting pressure from the US.Meanwhile, Venezuelan government officials are said to have floated a plan in which Maduro would eventually leave office. The Miami Herald newspaper reported that Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez and her brother Jorge, who is president of the national assembly, had funneled proposals through intermediaries in Qatar to present themselves to Washington as a “more acceptable” alternative.The US has acknowledged carrying out at least five strikes on vessels near Venezuela that it says were transporting drugs, killing at least 27 people.A sixth strike targeted a suspected drug vessel in the Caribbean on Thursday, and in what is believed to be the first such case, there were survivors among the crew, who were reportedly rescued and are being held on a navy ship.One source told Reuters that the vessel struck on Thursday moved below the water and was possibly a semi-submersible, which is a submarine-like vessel used by drug traffickers to avoid detection.Trump confirmed to reporters: “We attacked a submarine. That was a drug-carrying submarine built specifically for the transportation of massive amounts of drugs – just so you understand.”He added: “This was not an innocent group of people. I don’t know too many people that have submarines and that was an attack on a drug-carrying loaded-up submarine.”The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who was also present, did not dispute that there were survivors and repeatedly said details would be forthcoming.The US has described some of the victims in the first five strikes as Venezuelans, while the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, has suggested some were from his country. In Trinidad, family members of one man believed killed in a strike this week have demanded proof he was a drug trafficker.Venezuela’s government has said the strikes are illegal, amount to murder and are an aggression against the country.Trump has justified the strikes by asserting that the US is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, relying on the same legal authority used by the George W Bush administration when it declared a war on terror after the September 11 attacks.But legal scholars have warned that the president’s use of overwhelming military force to combat the cartels, along with his authorisation of covert action inside Venezuela, possibly to oust Maduro, stretches the bounds of international law.Juanita Goebertus Estrada, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said the attacks violated international human rights law and amounted to extrajudicial executions.“The US is not engaged in an armed conflict with Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, or with alleged criminal groups involved. Under human rights law standards, officials engaging in law enforcement must seek to minimize injury and preserve human life. They may use lethal force only when strictly unavoidable to protect against an imminent threat of death or serious injury,” she said.The strikes have caused unease among Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, with some Republicans saying they had not received sufficient information on how the strikes were being conducted.Friday’s outburst was not the first that Trump has peppered the language of diplomacy with profanities. In June, frustrated with Israel and Iran attacking each other after a ceasefire, he told a group of reporters that the countries had “been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing”. More

  • in

    Trump administration freezes $11bn for infrastructure in Democratic states

    The White House budget director, Russell Vought, said on Friday that the Trump administration will freeze another $11bn worth of infrastructure projects in Democratic states due to the ongoing government shutdown.Vought said on social media the US army corps of engineers would pause work on “low priority” projects in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Boston and Baltimore. He said the projects could eventually be canceled.The White House office of management and budget (OMB) said Donald Trump “wants to reorient how the federal government prioritizes Army Corps projects”.The Trump administration has already frozen at least $28bn meant for transportation and energy projects in Democratic-controlled cities and states, as the president pressures his opponents in Congress to end the shutdown, which began on 1 October.Trump has also vowed to cut “Democrat agencies” and has sought to eliminate 4,100 federal jobs as he looks to inflict pain on his political opposition.The army corps of engineers projects include a waterfront park in San Francisco, bridge expansions in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and water and wastewater systems in New York City, the OMB said. New York projects account for $7bn of the total.Other affected projects are in Illinois, Maryland, Oregon, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Delaware, the OMB said.All of these states voted against Trump in the 2024 presidential election.The OMB said many of the projects sit in “sanctuary jurisdictions” that have resisted the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.The army corps of engineers did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

  • in

    At least 11 detained after protesters and police clash outside Chicago Ice center

    At least 11 people were taken into custody outside the Broadview Ice detention center in the Chicago area after heated confrontations between Illinois state police and protesters on Friday.Authorities had instructed demonstrators to remain in designated “protest zones”, but tensions escalated when officers moved to clear the roadway.According to the Chicago Tribune, at about 8am, protesters advanced toward the building. Within minutes, dozens of troopers equipped with helmets and batons moved in to push the crowd back. Officers tackled and dragged several individuals. Much of the clash was captured on video and posted to social media.At one point, protesters tried to intervene as a fellow demonstrator was detained. Later in the day, groups blew whistles at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents entering and leaving the facility.As arrests took place, chants of: “Who do you protect?” echoed through the crowd during tense exchanges with police, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.Protester and congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh voiced frustration over the restrictions. “A free speech zone implies that everywhere else is not a free speech zone,” she told the Associated Press. Abughazaleh said she was struck in the face with a baton and witnessed an officer push a woman to the ground.The Broadview facility has been the scene of recurring unrest in recent weeks. Federal agents have previously used teargas and other chemical agents on protesters and journalists. Illinois state police reported that some participants blocked a nearby street on Friday and refused to move to the authorized protest area.Local officials have faced mounting challenges managing hundreds of demonstrators who gather outside the detention center, mainly on Fridays and Sundays. Federal agents have repeatedly used chemical irritants and so-called “less-lethal” rounds to disperse crowds.Protests began around 8am Friday, appearing to violate the recent directive of Broadview’s mayor, Katrina Thompson, limiting demonstrations to the hours between 9am and 6pm.Thompson has been outspoken in her criticism of federal agents’ conduct, saying, “This is not Putin’s Russia,” and calling on federal officials to cooperate with ongoing criminal investigations.On Monday, Thompson reduced the size of the designated protest area, an arrangement previously coordinated with state and county law enforcement, citing that last week’s demonstrations “degenerated into chaos” and disrupted the village’s 8,000 residents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFriday’s clash followed a court order issued a day earlier requiring federal agents in Illinois to wear body cameras during immigration operations, after multiple incidents involving pepper balls, smoke grenades and teargas against protesters and local police.JB Pritzker, Illinois’s governor, who has criticized the deployment of federal forces to the state, praised the ruling.“The idea that there’s any justification for people tossing teargas in the context of people’s protests, I think the judge reacted to that properly by ordering that now the federal agents are required to have body cameras on them because they clearly lie about what goes on,” Pritzker said.The Trump administration targeted Chicago with federal law enforcement in August, falsely claiming there had been a rise in crime in the city in recent years. Since then, there have been reports of Ice increasingly aggressive enforcement in communities, including helicopters hovering over apartment raids. More

  • in

    Donald Trump claims to be the president of peace, but at home he is fomenting civil war | Jonathan Freedland

    Donald Trump had better hope the members of the Nobel committee are not paying attention to what’s happening inside the United States. If they did take a look, they’d notice a jarring pattern. While the US president likes to play the peacemaker abroad, at home he is Trump, bringer of war.It’s easy for the first fact to conceal, or divert our attention away from, the second. This week was a case in point. It began with Trump travelling to Israel, where he was hailed as a latter-day Cyrus, a mighty ruler whose name would be spoken of for millennia to come, the man who had brokered what he himself boasts is an “everlasting” peace.Never mind that Trump’s success, for which he certainly deserves some credit, was in pushing Hamas and Israel to agree a ceasefire and release of hostages and prisoners, a fragile arrangement that does not address, let alone solve, the underlying Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He presented it as a triumph of the ages and one more notch on his peacemaker’s bedpost, taking the tally of wars he claims to have ended to eight.Indeed, buoyed up by his success, he is having another go at the one he thought would be easy but which, to his irritation, has proved as complex as all the hated experts and deep state naysayers warned it would be: Russia’s war on Ukraine. On Thursday he announced his plan to meet yet again with Vladimir Putin, this time hosted by Viktor Orbán in Budapest (which has the happy side-benefit of trolling the EU).Unfazed by the failure of their last meeting in Alaska, and by his own failure ever to stand up to Putin, Trump clearly believes he has pacific momentum and that the healing magic his touch brought to Gaza will similarly unite Moscow and Kyiv.But what undermines this new, Nobel-ready look of Trump’s is not only the absurd braggadocio, or even the confusion of the style and optics of peacemaking for the substance and hard graft it requires. It is the fact that he is fomenting war at home on his own citizens. I am not speaking metaphorically. Increasingly, serious analysts not prone to hyperbole are warning that Trump seems bent on provoking a second American civil war. The evidence is piling up.The most obvious is Trump’s deployment of US troops on the streets of America’s cities. He claims that his original decisions to send in the National Guard to Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, Portland and Memphis were motivated solely by concern over crime. In his telling, these places were “overrun” by violence and local police needed his help. But that doesn’t stack up.The data shows that most of the cities Trump has targeted have lower rates of violent crime than other large cities that have remained untouched. (Of the 10 major US cities with the biggest crime problems, Trump has hit only one: Memphis.) So why would Trump be sending in the troops?One explanation is that he lives in such a closed filter bubble, his sources of information so narrow, that he is not in possession of the actual facts. Earlier this month, he described Portland, Oregon as a “burning hellhole”, adding that “You see fires all over the place. You see fights, and I mean just violence. It’s just so crazy.” The people of Portland – cycling or taking their kids to the park, as normal – were bemused. It seemed Trump had been watching Fox News, confusing footage from the riots of 2020 with today.But none of this is a mistake. For what the likes of Chicago, LA and Portland have in common is not imagined rates of runaway crime but something that angers Trump much more: they are Democrat-run cities in Democrat-led states. (The giveaway is that Cleveland, Ohio and Kansas City, Missouri have higher rates of violent crime but are under Republican governors. So they have been left alone.)This is a political act by Trump, designed to intimidate potential strongholds of opposition. Some critics suspect the administration hopes to provoke violence from those whose cities now feel like occupied territory. Perhaps a riot or an attack on the military that can be instantly spun, as the assassination of Charlie Kirk was, as an act of leftist terrorism that merits a further crackdown, seizure of emergency powers or suspension of liberties.Others believe this is about normalising the presence of troops on the streets before next year’s midterm elections, a crucial contest that could see Republicans lose the House of Representatives, handing Democrats a serious check on Trump’s power. In this view, troops will be in place either to scare away minorities and others who might usually vote for the Democratic party, or for the battle after polling day, to enforce an attempt by the White House to void results that don’t go their way. Think of a re-run of 6 January 2021 – except this time with the armed forces on hand to ensure Trump’s will is done.The obvious objection to this scenario is that the US military would surely refuse to let itself be used as a partisan political instrument. But that is to miss what Trump and Pete Hegseth – now rebranded not as secretary of defence, but as secretary of war – are doing to the US military. Witness last month’s jawdropping meeting of hundreds of top US admirals and generals, gathered from across the globe. Trump could not have been clearer, instructing them that they now faced an “enemy from within”, that their job was to deal with “civil disturbances” and that they should regard America’s “dangerous cities as training grounds”. At one point, Hegseth said that any officer who disagreed with the new, Trumpian conception of the US military should “do the honorable thing and resign”.All of this comes in the context of a president who is nakedly using the justice system to punish his critics – note the indictment issued on Thursday against his former national security adviser John Bolton – whose chief adviser called the Democratic party a “domestic extremist organisation” even before the Kirk killing; that sends masked agents to snatch people, including US citizens, off the streets; that is using the government shutdown to eliminate “Democrat agencies”, meaning those pockets of the independent civil service that might act as a restraint on presidential whim, while cutting funds to institutions, from the universities to public broadcasting, that might do the same; and that is imposing ideological orthodoxy on the entire federal bureaucracy, with the FBI’s firing of an employee who had displayed the pride flag only the latest example.Trump likes talking the peace talk when it comes to Palestinians and Israelis or Russians and Ukrainians. But inside the US, where red meets blue, he does not see a contest between rivals but rather a conflict with an enemy he admits he hates – one that has to be fought by any means necessary, even to the very end.

    Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

    Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

  • in

    US anti-vax stance to blame for continent-wide surge in measles, say experts

    Governments across Latin America are stepping up efforts to vaccinate their populations against measles, as outbreaks in North America drive a 34-fold increase in the number of cases reported in the region this year.Measles cases have surged worldwide to a 25-year high, due to low vaccine coverage and the spread of misinformation about vaccine safety. However, there is added concern in parts of Latin America over unequal access to healthcare and the worrying situation in the US, which is facing its worst measles outbreak in decades following a reversal of vaccine policy led by Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.“The US’s political position in relation to health and vaccination is an outrage,” said Rosana Richtmann, an infectious disease doctor and coordinator of the Brazilian Society of Infectious Disease’s immunisation committee. “It’s a problem for us.”View image in fullscreenMeasles was successfully eliminated from the Americas in 2016, and then again in 2024, but the continent is now at risk of losing its measles-free status. There have been 11,668 cases reported across 10 countries in North and Latin America, according to the latest data from the Pan-American Health Organization (Paho).More than half of these cases are in the US and Canada, with three deaths in the US and two in Canada so far.Mexico is the hardest-hit country in Latin America, with more than 4,800 cases and 22 deaths, followed by Bolivia with 354 cases. Other countries, including Brazil, Belize and Paraguay, are dealing with a few dozen infections linked to imported cases.Concern over high numbers of cases in North America has led the Brazilian health ministry to focus more on the highly contagious disease with a nationwide vaccination campaign launched for children and teenagers in October. Adults who did not have the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine as children are also being offered the jab.View image in fullscreenBrazil also has protocols in place to respond swiftly to individual cases. When a nine-year-old tested positive for measles on 7 October in Várzea Grande, health authorities were swift to act. Nurses kitted out in protective gear visited the child’s school and worked quickly to implement “ring vaccination”, inoculating everyone who had been in contact with her.The city’s health teams have also been going from door to door to identify unvaccinated people and holding vaccination drives in a shopping centre and the international airport.Richtmann said the biggest fear was imported cases. “We are much more worried about Brazilians travelling to Europe, to the US or Canada [catching measles and bringing it back], than about those who live here,” she said.Amira Roess, a professor of global health and epidemiology at Virginia’s George Mason University, agreed that the outbreaks in the US posed a threat to neighbouring countries.“Now suddenly, you’re more likely to run into someone who has some kind of infectious disease [in the US]. You visit the US, you go home with souvenirs – and you might also go home with measles,” she said.Mexico’s first measles case in February was imported from Texas by an unvaccinated Mennonite boy. Bolivia’s first cases also spread through pockets of unvaccinated people living in Mennonite settlements.Mennonites are Anabaptist Christian communities of European descent who reject many aspects of modern life, including vaccines.Daniel Salas, executive manager of Paho’s special programme for comprehensive immunisation, said: “Having close-knit communities that are often reluctant to receive vaccinations and having large flows [of people] from country to country through the region are aggravating factors.”View image in fullscreenHealth authorities should identify communities resistant to vaccination and target their efforts there, Salas said.There is no cure for measles, which can lead to serious complications and even death, but it is easily preventable with two doses of the MMR vaccine, which provides 97% protection.MMR vaccination rates in Latin America fell during the Covid pandemic and the years leading up to it but have recovered since 2022, reaching 86% last year, according to the World Bank. However, this remains below the 95% threshold needed for herd immunity, with a lag in uptake of second doses and significant disparities between countries and within them.View image in fullscreenLack of information and access to heathcare has contributed to lower vaccination rates, but doctors also blame the influence of the growing anti-vaxxer movement in the US.“A lot of South American countries look to the US,” said Carlos Paz, head of infectious diseases at the Mario Ortiz Suárez paediatric hospital in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where 80% of the country’s cases have been reported.“The population sees what a US minister says about vaccines, and some people start to say, ‘well, we shouldn’t get vaccinated here either’,” he said.While the US health secretary did endorse the MMR vaccine after an outbreak in Texas in April, Kennedy has also spread misleading information about it and misinformation about measles treatment.This month the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, now led by a biotech investor, suggested the MMR vaccine should be given as three separate jabs, even though the safety and efficacy of combined shots have been demonstrated by decades of research and going against the CDC’s own longstanding advice.Bolivia declared a national health emergency in June, extended school holidays to avoid contact between children, and launched a widespread vaccination drive, relying partly on donations from Brazil, India and Chile. But coverage in October had still only reached 45%, while the government still has 1.6m doses available.“We’ve been campaigning to increase the vaccination rate. Each doctor, each paediatrician, is a soldier advocating for vaccination,” said Paz. More

  • in

    Maga is painting Saturday’s protests as violent treason. Prove them wrong | Judith Levine

    “They have a ‘Hate America’ rally that’s scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said on Fox News on Friday. “It’s all the pro-Hamas wing and, you know, the antifa people. They’re all coming out.”The Republican Minnesota congressman Tom Emmer said the party’s “terrorist wing” was holding the “Hate America” rally. “Democrats want to keep the government shut down to show all those people that are going to come here and express their hatred towards this country that they’re fighting President Trump,” said the House majority leader, Steve Scalise. The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, embellished the story on Fox, referring to the demonstrations’ “paid protesters” and adding: “It begs the question who’s funding it.”These people are, of course, slandering the second round of No Kings marches, following those on 14 June, which dwarfed Trump’s pitiful birthday party military parade. This time the events – more than 2,500 of them, according to organizers, planned for every state – promise to be even larger.Trump’s allies are trying to overwrite the patriotic, historically resonant words “No Kings” with insinuations of treasonous violence.Everyone participating in the protests must prove them wrong. Nonviolence, both rigorously disciplined and open-hearted, must define 18 October.The stakes are bigger than anything that happens tomorrow. Because these politicians are not just talking. This smear campaign is one skirmish in the all-fronts war on a vaguely defined leftwing entity the administration calls “antifa”. This war – declared in the 25 September national security presidential memorandum, Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence – is not just supported by propaganda. Disinformation is its essence.The national security reporter Ken Klippenstein published a restricted-circulation FBI/homeland security bulletin on “domestic violence extremists” (DVE), released on 1 October, that links attacks on Ice buildings to peaceful anti-Ice demonstrations. Since June, it says, “small groups of threat actors, some of whom are DVEs, have leveraged large, lawful protests” in California and Oregon “to engage in violent activity” against Ice facilities and “violent confrontations with law enforcement”.Last week, at a White House “antifa roundtable”, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, claimed: “Antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as [Tren de Aragua], as Isis, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them.” The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, thanked the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, “for getting to the bottom of these funding mechanisms and individuals who are perpetuating [sic] this violence on our American cities”.Commentators on the “Hate America” blitz, including some of the events’ organizers, have called it an attempt to silence dissent by scaring would-be marchers into staying home. My hunch is that diminishing the crowds is just half of the strategy. The other half is more pernicious. With Ice and the military already dispatched to terrorize Black and blue cities, such language may inspire civilian paramilitaries – many of them armed, organized and trained – to go into the streets and cause mayhem.These militias took action on 6 January 2021. They are itching for another opportunity to attack the “enemy within”, and they don’t need explicit orders to do so. “Hate America” is the phrase that could impel them to act.In larger cities like New York and San Francisco, the marchers will far outnumber any counter-protesters. In the cities occupied by federal troops, where local police don’t relish the optics of teargas wafting through crowds of elderly baby boomers and babies in strollers, there’s no guarantee the feds will restrain themselves. The national guard and Ice have already gassed and pepper-sprayed demonstrators apparently doing nothing more aggressive than standing around and yelling, or, like the Chicago pastor shot in the head with a pepper ball canister, nothing aggressive at all.Enter the freelance enforcers. And it’s in the red states, where gun laws are lax and progressives constitute a small minority, that the odds of aggression and goading to aggression by Maga loyalists are highest.Maga wants nothing more than violence at the marches. Any violent clash, no matter who starts it, will be a green light to the administration to step up the policing crackdown, including on Saturday. The White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has been tossing around the word “insurrection” to describe peaceful opposition to the Trump agenda. The president could use anything construable as chaos to invoke the Insurrection Act.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNonviolence is not the same as passivity; it’s the antithesis of surrender. It is not mild, not even friendly. Contradictory as it sounds, steadfast nonviolent resistance against a violent state is the most righteous expression of rage.It’s reassuring that the national non-profit Indivisible, which is also reportedly in Trump’s sights, is among the groups at the helm of the No Kings events. Since its founding in 2016, the organization has been committed to nonviolence. “We reject all forms of political violence and intimidation, no matter the source or the target,” reads its website. “That’s not just a moral stance – it’s a strategic one. Movements that create lasting change do so by building trust, forging solidarity and demonstrating discipline, even in the face of threats or attacks.”Almost all of the 250 partner organizations that appear on NoKings.org are as politically vanilla as progressives can get: the ACLU, Faithful America, the Sierra Club, the Feminist Majority.Alert to the administration’s provocations, Indivisible provides detailed information on running legal, safe and peaceful events. “We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values,” it says. Weapons of any kind are always prohibited.The good news is that nonviolence is the 21st-century US left’s default behavior. With few exceptions, it is not just nonviolent; it is anti-violence. Prison abolition, disarmament, the feminist politics of care, pacifism – these are leftwing movements. By contrast, extreme-right causes, institutions and tropes – gun rights, the carceral state, the “warrior ethos” – spell out a politics of coercion, cruelty and punishment.On 18 October, tens of millions of people in the streets, peacefully exercising the democratic rights that the Trump regime is laboring to eliminate, will give the lie to Maga’s hallucinatory network of bomb-throwing traitors. No Kings will show America who the real haters are.

    Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More