Evelyn Reynolds

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    As Wyoming slides further to the right, legislators double down on trans bills

    When Wyoming legislators in 2022 passed a law banning trans girls from competing in middle and high school girls’ sports, the Cowboy State, by its governor’s own estimate, had a grand total of four transgender student athletes competing within its boundaries.Still, in this year’s legislative session, which wrapped up on Friday, trans athletes were again a focus of lawmakers. They introduced bills to extend the ban on trans women in athletics to intercollegiate sports and ban universities from competing against teams with trans women.Lawmakers also proposed legislation requiring public facilities from restrooms to sleeping quarters to correspond with assigned sex at birth, restrooms in public schools to have exclusive use designations by assigned sex at birth, prohibiting the state from requiring the use of preferred pronouns, and establishing legal definitions for “biological sex”, “man” and “woman”.Five of the seven bills made it through the legislature. The volume of proposals spotlights the new conservative vision of the role of government emerging in the state, as well as the Republican divisions on the issue.Debate on trans-focused bills isn’t new to this legislative session. In 2022, Mark Gordon, Wyoming’s governor, described the state’s trans sports bill as “draconian” but still let it pass into law. Last year, 10 bills were introduced on the topic, and the legislature enacted a ban on gender affirming care for minors.Wyoming politicians pushed controversy over the inclusion of a trans woman in a Wyoming sorority in 2022, and in 2024 over the University of Wyoming’s scheduled volleyball game against San Jose State University, whose team has a trans woman. Wyoming ultimately forfeited the game.But the intense focus on the issue comes as Wyoming, never exactly a liberal state, has slid further to the right in recent years, a trend evidenced by an escalation of social issue bills that wouldn’t be out of place in Washington DC or other red-state legislatures.For Santi Murillo, the first trans athlete at the University of Wyoming, the influx of bills has been dehumanizing.“I consider myself to be a good person who contributes back to my community. But because I’m trans, I’m being attacked,” Murillo, who is also the communications director for LGBTQ+ non-profit Wyoming Equality, said. “That’s what a lot of that fear comes from, is being labeled as Santi the trans person, not Santi the cheer coach, not Santi my neighbor.”Several Republican lawmakers who’ve introduced or sponsored trans bills this year said their proposals were aimed at protecting women and girls. “To protect safe spaces and to create level playing fields for women, biological women, that’s the sole intent of these types of bills,” said Republican representative Rachel Rodriguez-Williams, the chair of the state’s newly empowered Freedom caucus and the primary sponsor of “Biological Males in Women’s Sports”.It’s a topic legislators say they have found high on the minds of their constituents. “I have a very conservative rural district, and they just want to see these things addressed and some policies put out,” said Martha Lawley, a Republican representative who sponsored two related bills this session. She said that she heard more about the topic than any other from her constituents in the past year.That concern is new, said Murillo, now 27. Murillo said she didn’t see this level of fear in the Wyoming she grew up in. She transitioned while a cheerleader at the University of Wyoming, which put her squarely in the public eye.“I had a really positive transition experience for the most part. Especially doing so very publicly,” Murillo said. “UW games are huge, especially football games. There’s no hiding there.”Murillo views the current debate as driven by politicians, not people.So does Sara Burlingame, the director at Wyoming Equality. She believes that some see the spotlight on trans issues as an effective wedge issue to both motivate hardline voters to the polls, and split conservatives, much like efforts to ban gay marriage used to.“Far-right Republicans recognized that they used to be able to fundraise and campaign off of gay panic,” Burlingame said. “They’re looking at what hits that sweet spot of lighting up people’s amygdala and getting them all fired up. And they feel like, hey, if someone you know was carrying this message, I would go and vote for them. I would drive myself to the polls.”The focus on trans issues detracts from conversations about other major challenges ahead in the state, Burlingame said, like declining revenues in the gas and oil market that are leaving a gap in public funding. “I think they don’t have a solution for that,” Burlingame said of some Republican legislators. “So their solution is to attack trans kids.”Burlingame sees the hyper-focus on gender as a departure from decades of Wyoming politics that erred toward libertarianism and small government, a departure that sped up this year as Wyoming’s Freedom Caucus became the first chapter of the nationally-based Freedom Caucus to take control of a state house.“In the past, we had old, white, rancher Republican men who had no fondness for different gender identities or sexual orientation,” she said. “But they had a very specific belief in the role of government, and they wouldn’t vote to take anybody’s rights away because they just didn’t believe that was the role of government.”Senator Cale Case is one of those Republicans outspoken in his opposition to the trans bills. Case, in the legislature since 1993, questions what problem they aim to solve, and said their sponsors are driven by fear.“They don’t like to hear the word tolerance. They talk about freedom, and they have lots of bills with freedom in the title, but their bills restrict freedoms,” Case said.Within supporters of the bills, there are divisions, too.Jayme Lien, the representative who brought the What is a Woman Act, said she has not spoken with LGBTQ+ Wyomingites about the bill. Lien pointed towards testimony from the national group Gays Against Groomers, designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a far-right extremist group of self-identified LGBTQ+ people engaged in anti-trans organizing, in support of her legislation and argued that the safety concerns of LGBTQ residents were misplaced.“I just want them to know that this is to protect them as well. And I think in the long run, once it’s implemented into law, they will see that this also protects them and their culture and community,” Lien argued.Republican senator Wendy Schuler brought the state’s 2022 bill limiting trans girls’ access to certain sports team, and she introduced “Fairness in Sports – Intercollegiate Athletics” in this year’s legislative session.Schuler, who competed in five varsity athletics at the University of Wyoming said that she “doesn’t know what the answer is” for transgender athletes in Wyoming, but that her priority is “making sure our biological girls were all taken care of in terms of their access to athletics”.“I understand the trans athletes here, she said. “I totally get where they’re coming from, because I had to sit on the sidelines while I was playing baseball with my brothers.”Schuler said that she consulted with teenagers and some transgender Wyomingites in writing her bills, which lead to exemptions for non-contact sports.While standing firm behind sports bills, Schuler derided the bills focused on bathroom usage and the legal definitions as an ineffective use of legislative time, and indicative of national theatrics meeting Wyoming politics.“In terms of the bathroom stuff, and you know what is a woman and some of these other bills that have come through the pipe this year, I just think we had lots more important things we should have been focusing on,” Schuler said. “But that’s what the social issues of the day seem to be.”In what she owned as a “contradiction”, Schuler voted yes on all three bills that came before her.Schuler said she “thinks the world” of Murillo, and Murillo and Burlingame also spoke kindly of Schuler.For Murillo, having friendships with people she views as infringing on her rights is complicated, but is a sort of necessity when advocating for LGBTQ+ rights in deep-red states.“It’s a totally different kind of ball game,” Murillo said. “Doing this work in a red state, you have to be willing to have those conversations. You have to be willing to set aside those things, find that common ground.”If current political trends continue, Burlingame and Murillo fear that there will be less legislators willing to work out compromises. Wyoming’s 2024 summer primary saw complete Republican upheaval and a glut of mailers, often accusing politicians of a “radical gender agenda”. Case said that there is pressure on elected officials in Wyoming to toe the line, or else.“Some of my colleagues who still have a longer career ahead of them, and also have aspirations, are in agony on every one of these votes. These are good people, friends of mine,” Case said. “I’m not doing that. I’m gonna get pounded for this. It might cost an election. But honestly, I don’t think it’s right and I feel so much better inside.”Murillo said in light of rhetoric surrounding the flood of legislation, she no longer considers Wyoming a safe place to be transgender.“I definitely used to feel safe here, but no, not any more. I feel like the air has just shifted here,” Murillo said. More

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    The left needs its own version of techno-optimism | Amana Fontanella-Khan

    Today we live in an era defined by crisis. Indeed, we are facing multiple overlapping threats at once: from accelerating climate breakdown to the rise of authoritarianism across the world, we are in a situation that the historian Adam Tooze calls “polycrisis”. It is no wonder that hope is scarce, pessimism is high and despair is pervasive. As one meme that captures the grim, morbid mood of our age reads: “My retirement plan is civilisational collapse.”But not everyone shares this gloomy outlook. On the extreme other end of public sentiment sit Silicon Valley billionaires: they are some of the most optimistic people on earth. Of course, it’s easy to be optimistic when you are sitting on enough money to sway national politics. And yet, the source of their optimism isn’t simply money. It is also a deep-seated faith in unfettered technological advances.The left is rightly skeptical of the rosy “techno-optimism” advanced by the likes of Elon Musk, far-right mega-donor Peter Thiel and hedge fund billionaire Marc Andreessen. To tech oligarchs, technological advancement is best delivered by unfettered free market capitalism. The democratic state is a hindrance to be opposed, dismantled and destroyed – a set of goals that they now enjoy the power to achieve. Their ideology ignores inequality and glosses over the material harms their companies wreak on workers and the environment. Silicon Valley’s billionaire techno-optimism is clearly incompatible with leftwing values and should be rejected.But can and should the left advance its own techno-optimism? Can it put forward a vision of a brighter future that can compete with the grand visions of space exploration presented by Musk? Can it make the case that science and technology ought to be harnessed to deliver breakthroughs, abundance, sustainability and flourishing of human potential? And what would a progressive, leftwing techno-optimism look like? A techno-optimism that the 99% could get on board with, especially communities of color, and Black people who have historically been excluded, or even harmed, by scientific and technological breakthroughs? These are some of the questions that this new series, Breakthrough, launched by the Guardian examines.The left used to embrace technology. Indeed, the most leftwing prophet of all, Karl Marx, was so pro-technology that he is often described as “Promethean”, a reference to the Greek god who stole fire to give to humans. And it was feminist Shulamith Firestone who in the 1970s envisioned a day where we might have artificial wombs and be liberated from housework, thanks to automation: a feminist utopia delivered by technology.Some of the most groundbreaking sci-fi imagery that we encounter in books and movies like the Matrix, such as people living virtual lives entirely untethered from their bodies, were first popularized by JD Bernal, the Marxist scientist and futurist who designed the so-called Bernal spheres, for permanent space settlement, in 1929. Writing of Bernal’s influential book, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, Arthur C Clarke, considered one of the fathers of sci-fi, wrote that it was “perhaps the most remarkable attempt to predict the future of scientific possibility ever made, and certainly the most stimulating”. And it was all rooted in a firmly leftwing – and specifically, socialist – world view. And, of course, Star Trek, one of the most successful sci-fi series of all time, is widely considered to be depicting a socialist post-scarcity utopia.Today, however, the left is either fearful, agnostic or hostile towards technology. The green “degrowth” movement, for example, views industry and technology as the root of our climate crisis. For them, the solution to the climate crisis is not more technological growth and innovation, but less. As Kohei Saito, the author of the bestseller Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, said in an interview: “I was initially more optimistic about the development of technology” but, after reading degrowth theories, “[I] abandoned the possibility of green growth.”Saito goes on to say: “If we want to have more, in today’s sense, it will simply bring about ecological catastrophe.” Reducing consumption and production – austerity and retreat, in other words – is the only path forward for the degrowth movement. But this ignores the fact that technology can help us replace fossil fuels with other sources of clean, affordable and scalable energy that would allow for continued growth and advancement, without harming the environment.Meanwhile, leftwing leaders such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are very good at the necessary and essential task of confronting tech monopolies and billionaires, who concentrate economic and political power in their hands. But what is often lacking is a positive, bold vision for what a science and technology agenda for the 99% would look like – how technology in the right hands might help provide abundance for all.This is a lost opportunity. For all the pessimism and decline that we are witnessing – declining rates of graduation, declining birth rates, declining rates of homeownership and a rise in deaths of despair and skyrocketing rents – we also may well be on the brink of unprecedented breakthroughs and advances that could create record levels of wealth to be enjoyed by all, if these breakthroughs are accompanied by a political system that favors the wellbeing of all over billionaires. It may be hard to imagine such a system at the moment, given that corporate interests have seized nearly all levers of power, but it is nonetheless critical to do so. Do we have a political vision of how tech and science might work for us all?In 2024, artificial intelligence (AI) was recognised with not one, but two, Nobel prizes. Google’s DeepMind discovered 2.2m entirely new materials – 800 years worth of science in a few months. Last year saw the first time that sickle cell disease, a disease that was hitherto incurable and predominantly affects people of African descent, was reversed in a novel Crispr gene-editing therapy. Cancer and heart disease vaccines could be ready within the next five years. And now, for the first time, AI is solving the intractable protein-folding problem – one of biology’s greatest challenges – and designing new proteins, which is essential for discovering new drugs and understanding why certain diseases occur.View image in fullscreenSo why is it that technology is almost never invoked by the left as a solution to polycrisis in general, or the climate crisis in particular? Why is it that the only people who offer bold, inspiring visions for the transformative role of technology are the likes of reactionaries like Musk?There are, of course, reasons for this. Technology alone is no panacea. Nor does technology guarantee progress. In fact, periods of technological advancement have almost always been accompanied by violence, dispossession and war. Many leftwing philosophers in the post-war period, having witnessed the ravages of fascism and Nazism, equated technology – and even the very idea of progress itself, with violence.As the Frankfurt school philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer – both of whom were Jewish intellectuals forced to flee Nazi Germany – argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Technology … aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital.”And Black artists such as Gil Scott-Heron, witnessing the advances of the space age, asked what benefit the Apollo mission might have for those struggling to make ends meet back on Earth. In Whitey on the Moon, Scott-Heron writes:“A rat done bit my sister Nell.(with Whitey on the Moon)Her face and arms began to swell.(and Whitey’s on the Moon)I can’t pay no doctor bill.(but Whitey’s on the Moon)Ten years from now I’ll be paying still.(while Whitey’s on the Moon)”Those critiques continue to resonate with many today. Especially as we witness one billionaire after another fly into space, as life on Earth grows more perilous by the day. And as billionaires push not simply the frontiers of space, but of the human body itself, it is right to remind ourselves of the legacy and history of eugenics. We can only benefit from warnings – such as those made by Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres – that the pursuit of longevity and eternal life, as well as transhumanist projects such as Neuralink, risk perpetuating eugenicist ideals in the 21st century.Perhaps, though, we would do well to adopt the position of the Frankfurt school philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, who accepted many of the critiques that his colleagues made of the Enlightenment, but who also left space for the possibility that it could go either way. In a 1941 essay on technology, he wrote: “[Technology] can promote authoritarianism as well as liberty, scarcity as well as abundance, the extension as well as the abolition of toil.”He envisioned a world in which technological progress might allow human flourishing and self-realization. In a world that is technologically advanced enough, “everyone could think and act by himself, speak his own language, have his own emotions and follow his own passions” once we are “no longer chained to competitive efficiency”.Perhaps the most important condition for us to flourish is to address our climate crisis. Today, to warm our homes and cook our meals, we still set fire to things. Those who cook on gas stoves heat their food over literal flames, as cavemen once did. If we are to move out of the fossil fuel era into a new, cleaner and sustainable era – while still maintaining our freedom to travel and fly and enjoy the material comforts that we do today – this will require a combination of political will and technology. Whether fusion energy, fission or a host of renewables, the path to a new era of energy production requires new technologies and breakthroughs. Right now, for example, Silicon Valley billionaires are investing billions in chasing the holy grail of limitless, clean fusion energy to power AI. Can and will the state match those efforts? And should the left make the case that it should?There is no inherent value in technology. It is neither good nor bad. It is up to us how machines are used. And indeed, who makes those machines, how, and to what ends are all political questions. While we push to change our political system and direct it towards a more equitable, inclusive and liberatory path, let us also, at the same time, push for technology to move in that direction, too.We live in dark, depressing and – frankly – terrifying times. Our planet’s fragile ecosystem is fast spiraling out of control. Our democracies are fracturing. And billionaires are seizing for themselves all of the spoils of the digital era. Technology might well be the thing that pushes us over the edge. But it could also, if we play our cards right, allow us to exit our era of polycrisis. But that won’t happen on its own. The path towards better technology – tech for the 99% – can only be achieved through a politics of the 99%. And it must start with a vision.It is time that the left deploy all of our energies and powers towards a political vision of abundance. Abundance that is delivered by a movement for the 99% that pushes for technological growth and development for the benefit of all.We hope this series might be a place for that political vision to be discussed, debated and laid out so that optimism about the future – in particular, techno-optimism – is no longer just something that the very rich in this world can have.

    Amana Fontanella-Khan is the Guardian US opinion editor More

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    The left needs to abandon its miserable, irrational pessimism | Aaron Bastani

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    View image in fullscreenAt the start of the millennium it was widely presumed each successive generation would achieve a higher level of prosperity than the last. Today that is no longer the case. Just 19% of Americans expect their children’s lives to be better than their own, while two-thirds believe their country will be economically weaker by 2050.So our zeitgeist is increasingly one of pessimism, from anxiety about the climate crisis to concern over rising inequality. According to the historian Adam Tooze, we are living through a “polycrisis” – where such challenges are not only simultaneous but mutually reinforcing.Yet there is one sliver of society where optimism still reigns supreme: Silicon Valley.For a long time technological utopianism was a leftwing idea. Its patron saint was Edward Bellamy whose 19th-century novel, Looking Backward, was more influential among the American left than Marx and Engels. In Britain this perspective was best represented by Fabian socialism. Its rationale was alluringly simple: human progress was a corollary of technological development, with both needing scientific management. Over time, more complex technologies would require a larger state. And a larger state would require socialism.Today such thinking has been inverted, with supporters of market capitalism, and a minimal state, most optimistic about the future. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, even penned a “techno-optimist manifesto” last year – in part to counter the prevailing winds of despair. If nothing else it reveals how Silicon Valley thinks, with Andreesen expressing this with particular clarity when he writes how “there is no material problem   … that cannot be solved with more technology”.As the magazine Current Affairs observed, no evidence is forthcoming alongside such bombastic claims. For instance, when Andreessen writes how “central planning is a doom loop”, he conveniently omits how the development of the internet, solar cells, lithium batteries, the jet engine and nuclear power all relied on state-backed R&D. But while his screed is bizarre, uninformed and in parts even dangerous, he is right about one thing: our instinctive miserabilism, increasingly pervasive on the left, is unwarranted.Take recurrent arguments against having children. Choosing to have kids is a personal matter. Yet in recent years I’ve repeatedly encountered the claim that having descendants is immoral because of climate change. Even if you agree that ours is an age of polycrisis, this is absurd.After all, 100 years ago the average person, in one of the the world’s wealthiest societies, could expect to live until 40. Today global life expectancy is 73. In 19th-century England, between 40 and 60 women died in childbirth for every thousand births. Today that figure is seven for every 100,000. As Ezra Klein has noted, no serious climate models suggest a return to the world of 1950, let alone 1150. Taking this argument to its logical conclusion, nobody should have had children before our grandparents – in which case humanity should have long been extinct.Such irrational pessimism inflects how we view technology too. Yes, there are moral questions surrounding innovations like gene-editing and Crispr, but these same tools could eliminate thousands of inherited conditions – from sickle cell to Huntington’s disease. The 2030s may well be a decade of inflationary shocks and extreme weather events, but it could also herald the arrival of real-time language translation and cancer vaccines used by billions.View image in fullscreenIn their defence many pessimists acknowledge such developments – they are simply aware that any benefits will be unequally shared. This is particularly relevant for machine learning and the world of work. AI could add as much as $13tn to the global economy between 2017 and 2030. Given recent technological changes have, according to the World Bank, meant that “advanced economies face increasingly polarized labour markets and rising inequality”, concerns around who benefits from an innovation as potentially disruptive as the steam engine make sense. While some will get rich from its commercial applications, many more will lose jobs or see their wages squeezed. Ignoring that, and maintaining technology as somehow neutral, is a covert form of class war.The philosopher Alfred Whitehead once declared that the greatest invention of the Victorian age was the idea of invention itself. Yet as humanity mastered how to innovate, we progressively lost touch with why we should. This now seems to have reached its apogee with “effective accelerationists”, whose answer to every challenge is simply more technology. I can think of no idea more ill-suited for a world of polycrisis.So what is the alternative from the left if mindless tech optimism will only deepen problems heading our way?As with the right it should be a project of individual freedom. But such freedom should be understood as meaningless, or even destructive, if it generates unfreedom elsewhere. The economist Amartya Sen defined unfreedom as constraints beyond our control which undermine our ability to pursue lives of meaning. Inadequate access to food is a source of unfreedom, as is being homeless or not having an education. Franklin Roosevelt put it best when he said that “necessitous men are not free men”.If eliminating unfreedom is the end, then the creation of Universal Basic Services (UBS), is the means. These UBS comprise housing, healthcare, transport and education, should be free at the point of use, and funded by progressive taxation. Accessing them should be viewed as necessary for any citizen to fully participate in economic life. Indeed they are just as fundamental to a life of freedom as legal and political rights.Markets would still exist for things like cars, or silk ties, but the logic of profit wouldn’t apply to UBS. So rather than machine learning creating the conditions for the world’s first trillionaire, as gleefully predicted by Mark Cuban, it could provide the basis for a post-carbon, autonomous transport infrastructure, or free adult education throughout one’s life.Alongside UBS, the dividend of technological progress would also make possible a four-day week. After all, countries with a shorter working week enjoy higher levels of social capital, more volunteering and greater gender equality. What is more, those who work less report greater feelings of personal satisfaction. To be clear: this isn’t a post-work society, not least because, in our lifetimes at least, there will be enough work to go around with an ageing population and climate adaptation. But a four-day week should be to the 2030s what the eight-hour day was to the late 19th century.For all the extraordinary inventiveness of recent decades, perhaps our greatest technology remains the state – that unique vehicle for collective action. To create UBS, and expand leisure time for all, means believing in it once again. Indeed meaningful optimism about technology requires political demands and a specific vision for our collective future. Without that we are always at the whim of the 0.01%.

    Aaron Bastani is the co-founder of Novara Media. He is also the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism More

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    Trump administration briefing: President downplays market volatility; US placed on civic decline watchlist

    Donald Trump has refused to rule out the possibility the US economy will head into recession this year and that inflation will rise, as his chaotic trade tariffs policy caused uncertainty and market turbulence.The US president predicted that his economic goals would take time and a period of transition to bear fruit. But when asked in an interview with the Fox News show Sunday Morning Futures “are you expecting a recession this year?” he demurred.“I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big. We’re bringing wealth back to America. That’s a big thing. And there are always periods of, it takes a little time. It takes a little time, but I think it should be great for us,” Trump said.‘I hate to predict things’: Trump doesn’t rule out US recession amid trade tariffsTrump downplayed recent stock market volatility that followed his ducking and weaving over tariff policy on exports from Canada, Mexico and China and similar threats to other countries, despite his usual fixation with market performance in relation to the politics of the day and an appetite to claim credit when stocks rise on his watch.“You have to do what’s right,” he said.Read the full storyUS added to watchlist for countries seeing rapid decline in civic freedomsThe United States has been added to the Civicus Monitor Watchlist, which identifies countries that the global civil rights watchdog believes are currently experiencing a rapid decline in civic freedoms.Civicus, an international non-profit organization dedicated to “strengthening citizen action and civil society around the world”, announced the inclusion of the US on the non-profit’s first watchlist of 2025 on Monday, alongside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia.Read the full storyKristi Noem names new Ice leadership and vows to punish media ‘leakers’Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem on Sunday announced new leadership at the agency tasked with immigration enforcement as she also pledged to step up lie detector tests on employees to identify those who may be leaking information about operations to the media.Read the full storyIce arrests Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia protests, lawyer saysA prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s student encampment movement was arrested on Saturday night by federal immigration authorities who claimed they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card, according to his attorney. Mahmoud Khalil had become one of the most visible faces of the pro-Palestinian movement at Columbia.Read the full storyTrump golf trips cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollarsIt has become a familiar routine for the Palm Beach county sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, and his deputies. Almost every Tuesday in recent weeks, the Federal Aviation Administration has posted to its website a formal “notice to airmen” advising of upcoming flight restrictions over south Florida, signaling once again to those who must protect him that Donald Trump is on his way to Mar-a-Lago for another weekend of golf.Read the full storyJust how toxic is Elon Musk for Tesla?Globally renowned brands would not, ordinarily, want to be associated with Germany’s far-right opposition. But Tesla, one of the world’s biggest corporate names, does not have a conventional chief executive.After Elon Musk backed Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – calling the party Germany’s “only hope” – voters are considering an alternative to Tesla. Data released on Thursday showed that registrations of the company’s electric cars in Germany fell 76% to 1,429 last month. Overall, electric vehicle registrations rose by 31%.Read the full storyAndrew Cuomo enters race for New York mayor as frontrunner Cuomo’s long history in New York politics and name recognition has helped him storm to a lead in a field featuring an incumbent – Eric Adams – whom many see as corrupt, and a large number of lesser-known candidates who are struggling to get much traction.Read the full storyCan Stephen A Smith lead Democrats back to the White House?The View, one of the US’s most popular daytime television programmes, was a vital campaign stop last year for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. This week, it played host to a cable sports channel personality who might be nurturing political ambitions of his own.Stephen A Smith was asked by co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin what he makes of hypothetical polls that show him among the leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. “I make of it that citizens, particularly on the left, are desperate,” Smith said in characteristically forthright style. “And I mean it when I say it: I think I can beat them all.”Read the full storyAmy Coney Barrett attacked as ‘DEI judge’ by right after USAid rulingAmy Coney Barrett, the Donald Trump-appointed conservative supreme court justice, has been branded a “DEI judge” by furious rightwing figures, after she voted to reject Trump’s attempt to freeze nearly $2bn in foreign aid.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

    Crews continue to battle wind-driven brush fire on New York’s Long Island. Officials have warned that high wind gusts threatened to ignite further blazes.

    Gene Hackman’s final days were marked by isolation, authorities have indicated, with the actor alone in the house for days, disoriented and too frail to seek help. His pacemaker last recorded his heartbeat on 18 February, about a week after the death of his wife.

    Tree loss from hurricane Helene has left the city of Asheville and its surrounding areas vulnerable to floods, fires and extreme heat. Thousands of trees that provided shade and protection from storms were uprooted, with the extent of the tree damage described as “extraordinary and humbling” by research ecologist Steve Norman. More

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    US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms

    The United States has been added to the Civicus Monitor Watchlist, which identifies countries that the global civil rights watchdog believes are currently experiencing a rapid decline in civic freedoms.Civicus, an international non-profit organization dedicated to “strengthening citizen action and civil society around the world”, announced the inclusion of the US on the non-profit’s first watchlist of 2025 on Monday, alongside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia.The watchlist is part of the Civicus Monitor, which tracks developments in civic freedoms across 198 countries. Other countries that have previously been featured on the watchlist in recent years include Zimbabwe, Argentina, El Salvador and the United Arab Emirates.Mandeep Tiwana, co-secretary general of Civicus, said that the watchlist “looks at countries where we remain concerned about deteriorating civic space conditions, in relation to freedoms of peaceful assembly, association and expression”.The selection process, the website states, incorporates insights and data from Civicus’s global network of research partners and data.The decision to add the US to the first 2025 watchlist was made in response to what the group described as the “Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms and global cooperation”.In the news release announcing the US’s addition, the organization cited recent actions taken by the Trump administration that they argue will likely “severely impact constitutional freedoms of peaceful assembly, expression, and association”.The group cited several of the administration’s actions such as the mass termination of federal employees, the appointment of Trump loyalists in key government positions, the withdrawal from international efforts such as the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, the freezing of federal and foreign aid and the attempted dismantling of USAid.The organization warned that these decisions “will likely impact civic freedoms and reverse hard-won human rights gains around the world”.The group also pointed to the administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters, and the Trump administration’s unprecedented decision to control media access to presidential briefings, among others.Civicus described Trump’s actions since taking office as an “unparalleled attack on the rule of law” not seen “since the days of McCarthyism in the twentieth century”, stating that these moves erode the checks and balances essential to democracy.“Restrictive executive orders, unjustifiable institutional cutbacks, and intimidation tactics through threatening pronouncements by senior officials in the administration are creating an atmosphere to chill democratic dissent, a cherished American ideal,” Tiwana said.In addition to the watchlist, the Civicus Monitor classifies the state of civic space in countries using five ratings: open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed and closed.Currently, the US has a “narrowed” rating, which it also had during the Biden administration, meaning that while citizens can exercise their civic freedom, such as rights to association, peaceful assembly and expression, occasional violations occur.For part of Trump’s first term, Tiwana said, the US had been categorized as “obstructed”, due to the administration’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests and restrictive state laws that were enacted limiting the rights of environmental justice protesters, and other actions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnder Joe Biden, the classification went back to “narrowed”, Tiwana, said, but as of Monday, the US has been placed on the watchlist as the group says it sees “significant deterioration” in civic freedoms occurring.Tiwana noted that the US is again seemingly headed toward the “obstructed” category.While the Trump administration often say they support fundamental freedoms and individual rights, like free speech, Tiwana believes that the administration seem “to be wanting to support these only for people who they see as agreeing with them”.Historically, Tiwana said, the US has been “considered the beacon of democracy and defense of fundamental freedoms”.“It was an important pillar of US foreign policy, even though it was imperfect, both domestically and how the US promoted it abroad,” he added.But Tiwana believes that the recent actions and statements made by this US administration could empower authoritarian regimes around the world, undermine constitutional principles, and embolden those who “want to accumulate power and increase their wealth and their ability to stay in power for as long as possible”.Tiwana says that he and the organization want to draw attention to the fact that those in power in the US are, in his view, engaging in a “zero-sum politics game” that is eroding “constitutional principles and frankly, engaging in, anti American behavior”.“We urge the United States to uphold the rule of law and respect constitutional and international human rights norms,” said Tiwana. 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    Kristi Noem names new Ice leadership and vows to punish media ‘leakers’

    Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem on Sunday announced new leadership at the agency tasked with immigration enforcement as she also pledged to step up lie detector tests on employees to identify those who may be leaking information about operations to the media.Noem confirmed, in addition, that the government will expand immigration detention operations further into the military sphere, following reports of the intention to use the huge Fort Bliss army base close to the US-Mexico border in Texas for that purpose.“There is, yes, a plan to use the facility at Fort Bliss for detention,” she said.The secretary also warned that her department has “just weeks” before running out of money for its mass deportation mission unless Congress ups funding.“The authorities that I have under the Department of Homeland Security are broad and extensive, and I plan to use every single one of them to make sure that we’re following the law, that we are following the procedures in place to keep people safe and that we’re making sure we’re following through on what President Trump has promised,” Noem told Face the Nation on CBS.While these polygraph exams are typically not admissible in court, they are frequently used by federal law enforcement agencies and for national security clearances.White House officials have previously expressed frustration with the pace of deportations, blaming it in part on recent leaks revealing cities where authorities planned raids.This despite the department’s publicity blitz about raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), invitations to journalists to accompany agents and also witness deportation flights and questions about the facts Ice is issuing and the justifications they are using for arresting, detaining and deporting some of those affected.Todd Lyons, the former assistant director of field operations for the agency’s enforcement arm, will serve as acting Ice director. Madison Sheahan, secretary of the Louisiana department of wildlife and fisheries and Noem’s former aide when she was governor of South Dakota, has been tapped to be the agency’s deputy director.The leadership changes come after Ice’s acting director Caleb Vitello was reassigned on February 21 for failing to meet anti-immigration expectations, Reuters reported. Two other top immigration enforcement officials were reassigned February 11.The Trump administration deported 37,660 people during the president’s first month back in office, DHS data first reported by Reuters last month show, far less than the monthly average of 57,000 people removed from the US in the last full year of Joe Biden’s administration.Arrest rates were higher than usual in the first few weeks of the Trump administration, a Guardian analysis showed, but arrests and detentions do not always translate into removals and, at the same time, the numbers of people crossing the US-Mexico border without authorization has dropped dramatically since last summer, first under new Biden restrictions and now further under Trump.Noem said on Friday that the agency planned to prosecute two “leakers of information”.On Sunday, she said these two people “were leaking our enforcement operations that we had planned and were going to conduct in several cities and exposed vulnerabilities”. She said they could face up to 10 years in federal prison. A DHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

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    ‘I hate to predict things’: Trump doesn’t rule out US recession amid trade tariffs

    Donald Trump on Sunday refused to rule out the possibility that the US economy will head into recession this year and that inflation will rise, as his chaotic trade tariffs policy cause uncertainty and market turbulence.The US president predicted that his economic goals would take time and a period of transition to bear fruit. But when asked in an interview with the Fox News show Sunday Morning Futures “are you expecting a recession this year?” he demurred.“I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big. We’re bringing wealth back to America. That’s a big thing. And there are always periods of, it takes a little time. It takes a little time, but I think it should be great for us,” Trump said.When asked whether he thought his tariffs on US imports would fuel inflation, he said: “You may get it. In the meantime, guess what? Interest rates are down.”He downplayed recent stock market volatility that followed his ducking and weaving over tariff policy on exports from Canada, Mexico and China and similar threats to other countries, despite his usual fixation with market performance in relation to the politics of the day and an appetite to claim credit when stocks rise on his watch.“You have to do what’s right,” he said.Last week the Atlanta Federal Reserve suggested that the US economy is on course to contract in the first quarter, triggering fears a recession could hit the world’s largest economy if weakness persisted and fueling stock market jitters.In 2018 Trump posted on Twitter, now X, that “trade wars are good, and easy to win”, a view that is not widely shared by financial and economic experts.On Sunday, however, he was cautious overall after boasting throughout his election campaign of the swift gains his policies would bring for the US economy and ordinary Americans’ finances.Fox News Sunday Morning Futures anchor Maria Bartiromo introduced the topic of recession by telling Trump “look, I know you inherited a mess”, even though most experts agree that predecessor Joe Biden, a Democrat, left the Republican president a stable economy where inflation, although painfully high for a long time, was continuing to come down and international trading conditions for the US were steady.Meanwhile, also on Sunday morning, NBC’s Meet the Press TV politics show was interviewing US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick.He pushed back on concerns that the prospect of Trump’s global tariffs would cause a recession in the US. “Absolutely not,” he said. “There’s going to be no recession in America.”Lutnick added: “Anybody who bets against Donald Trump, it’s like the same people who thought Donald Trump wasn’t going to win a year ago … you are going to see over the next two years the greatest set of growth coming from America … I would never bet on recession, no chance.”

    Reuters contributed reporting More