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    Trump’s DC takeover harkens back to a dark incident 33 years ago – when crime was far worse

    Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington DC’s police department and decision to deploy the national guard was sparked by the assault of a former Doge staffer who nicknamed himself “Big Balls”. Thirty-three years ago, a fatal attack on a congressional staffer also provoked an effort by the federal government to impose law and order on the nation’s capital – but in that case, it came from Capitol Hill.On Monday, Trump said he was taking “a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor and worse. This is liberation day in DC and we’re going to take our capital back.”In 1992, it was the death of 25-year-old Tom Barnes, a staffer for Senator Richard Shelby, a Democrat of Alabama, that prompted the senator to introduce legislation to legalize the death penalty in the district. Shelby, a conservative Democrat who would become a Republican two years later, acknowledged that many DC community leaders had historically been opposed to the death penalty, but argued that the tide had changed – using similar dystopian language as Trump.“The terror that comes with living in a war zone has prompted many residents to reconsider the appropriateness, ethically and legally, of a death penalty,” Shelby wrote in a March 1992 Washington Post op-ed. “… People are using guns to settle arguments about clothes and girlfriends. They are ‘smoking’ others because they feel like it. They will even ‘bust a cap in you’ if they don’t like the way you look at them.”In announcing the police takeover on Monday, Trump cited the attack on Edward Coristine, whom he said was “savagely beaten by a band of roaming thugs” and was “left dripping in blood”. He also referenced the June slaying of Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, an intern for the Republican representative Ron Estes, of Kansas, who was killed by crossfire in a drive-by shooting. Last week, his mother, Tamara Tarpinian-Jachym, told ABC News that she supported Trump’s idea of a federal takeover, which he had threatened in a social media post.There was one key difference between then and now: Trump is painting an exaggerated picture of crime in DC, where violent crime is at a 30-year low. But back in January 1992, Washington really was a crime-plagued city. It was coming off a year that saw 482 murders in 1991, earning it the ignoble title of the murder capital of the US. By contrast, there were 187 homicides last year and the city is on pace for a lower number this year.According to the book Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington DC by Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood, Barnes, the Shelby staffer, left his home on a Saturday night in January 1992 to go to the corner store to get coffee grounds for the next morning. A group of teenagers approached him and demanded his money or they’d “put a cap” in him. “Leave me alone,” Barnes replied, and turned up the street. One of them shot him in the head, landing him in a coma. He died four days later, marking the 22nd homicide of the new year.A Capitol Outrage, ran the headline on a Tuscaloosa News editorial two days later. “Beset by drug-related violence,” the newspaper declared, “Washington has become a national disgrace, an American embarrassment.”“Tom’s death was the catalyst for my involvement in trying to find solutions to the violent crime that plagues our city,” said Shelby, who had known Barnes since he was a toddler.His bill to impose the death penalty on DC failed, but he did get Congress to vote to force the city to hold a referendum on that fall’s ballot asking Washingtonians to authorize capital punishment. “The criminal justice system is out of control in this city and Congress is not going to turn its back on this issue,” Shelby said. Even some home-rule champions on the Hill voted with Shelby, such as Leon Panetta, a Democratic representative from California.“I really think the District of Columbia ought to handle its own affairs,” said Panetta, who would go on to serve as chief of staff to Bill Clinton, CIA director and defense secretary. “But crime continues to be a very serious problem in the district. Part of it is the urban crisis that is part of every city’s social and economic problems. But I don’t get the sense that the district has a strong commitment to confront this issue.”The DC council had repealed the death penalty in 1981, but the last execution in Washington took place in 1957, years before the city won home rule in 1973.This week, Washington leaders bristled at Trump’s takeover of the police. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a non-voting delegate representing DC in the House of Representatives, called it “an historic assault on DC home rule”, while the mayor, Muriel E Bowser, described it as “unsettling and unprecedented”.There was a similarly visceral reaction to Shelby’s death penalty referendum.“There is something approaching rage among the voters of the district about their disempowerment, about Congress forcing this on us,” said Norton, who was in her first term in Congress at the time. “When you mandate a death penalty vote, you engage that issue directly.”Leading up to the referendum, dozens of ministers denounced it at Sunday sermons, the Washington Post reported.On 3 November 1992 – the same day Democrat Bill Clinton won his first presidential election – Washingtonians rejected the death penalty referendum by a 2-1 margin.“Today the voters sent a powerful message to every member of the US Congress that we are citizens of this country,” the then mayor, Sharon Pratt Kelly, said after the vote, while Norton said the vote showed the city “will not tolerate this interference from the outside”.But the climate of fear around crime had won some support for capital punishment.“In neighborhoods across the city, among rich and poor, black and white, some residents have argued that violence has become so random and brutal that convicted killers should be punished with the ultimate act of retribution, regardless of whether it serves as a deterrent,” the Post reported. But others cited concerns that it would be used unfairly against Black defendants, or didn’t like Congress interfering in the city’s affairs, in their votes against it.Even the city council chair, John Wilson, who supported the death penalty, urged a no vote as a signifier of DC’s independence. (Today, the city hall is named for him.)“It’s not that they didn’t favor the death penalty,” Jaffe and Sherwood wrote of DC voters. “Many black Washingtonians are quite conservative, law-and-order advocates … They just resented a white senator from Alabama telling them that they needed a death penalty to make their streets safe.”Today, there is definitely some resentment at a white president from New York who says he wants to clean up the city streets. And Bowser is using it as a way to rally support for the long-held goal of DC statehood.“My message to residents is this: we know that access to our democracy is tenuous,” she said at a news conference after Trump’s takeover. “That is why you have heard me and many, many Washingtonians before me advocate for full statehood for the District of Columbia. We are American citizens. Our families go to war. We pay taxes, and we uphold the responsibilities of citizenship.”

    Frederic J Frommer, a writer and sports and politics historian, has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, History.com and other national publications More

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    ‘Censorship’: over 115 scholars condemn cancellation of Harvard journal issue on Palestine

    More than 115 education scholars have condemned the cancellation of an entire issue of an academic journal dedicated to Palestine by a Harvard University publisher as “censorship”.In an open letter published on Thursday, the scholars denounced the abrupt scrapping of a special issue of the Harvard Educational Review – which was first revealed by the Guardian in July – as an “attempt to silence the academic examination of the genocide, starvation and dehumanisation of Palestinian people by the state of Israel and its allies.”The writers note that the issue’s censorship is also an example of “anti-Palestinian discrimination, obstructing the dissemination of knowledge on Palestine at the height of the genocide in Gaza”.The special issue of the prestigious education journal was planned six months into Israel’s war in Gaza to tackle questions about the education of Palestinians, education about Palestine and Palestinians, and related debates in schools and colleges in the US, as the Guardian previously reported.“The field of education has an important role to play in supporting students, educators, and policymakers in contextualizing what has been happening in Gaza,” the journal’s editors wrote in their call for abstracts – which came against the backdrop of the devastation of Gaza’s educational infrastructure, including the shuttering of hundreds of schools and destruction of all of the territory’s universities.More than a year later, the special issue was just about ready – all articles had been edited, contracts with most authors had been finalized, and the issue had been advertised at academic conferences and on the back cover of the previous one. But late in the process, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, a division of the Harvard Graduate School of Education which publishes the journal, demanded that all articles be submitted to a “risk assessment” review by Harvard’s general counsel – an unprecedented demand.When the authors protested, the publisher responded by abruptly cancelling the issue altogether. In an email obtained by the Guardian, the group’s executive director, Jessica Fiorillo, cited what she described as an inadequate review process and the need for “considerable copy editing” as well as a “lack of internal alignment” about the special issue. She said that the decision was not “due to censorship of a particular viewpoint nor does it connect to matters of academic freedom”.The authors and editors flatly rejected that characterization, telling the Guardian that the cancellation set a dangerous precedent and was an example of what many scholars have come to refer to as the “Palestine exception” to academic freedom.“The decision by HEPG to abandon their own institutional mission – as well as the responsibilities that their world-leading stature demands – is scholasticide in action,” the dozens of scholars who signed the recent letter also wrote, using a term coined by Palestinian scholars to describe Israel’s “deliberate and systematic destruction” of Palestine’s educational system.“It is unconscionable that HEPG have chosen to publicly frame their cancellation of the special issue as a matter of academic quality, while omitting key publicly-reported facts that point to censorship.”Arathi Sriprakash, a professor of sociology and education at the University of Oxford and one of the letter’s signatories, told the Guardian that the special issue’s cancellation has mobilised so many education scholars “precisely because we recognise the grave consequences of such threats to academic freedom and academic integrity”.“The ongoing genocidal violence in Gaza has involved the physical destruction of the entire higher education system there, and now in many education institutions around the world there are active attempts to shut down learning about what’s happening altogether. As educationalists, we have to remain steadfast in our commitment to the pursuit of knowledge and learning without fear or threat.”‘Assault on academic freedom’The ordeal around the special Palestine issue played out against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s crackdown on US higher education institutions’ autonomy on the basis of combating alleged antisemitism on campuses.Harvard is the only university that has sued the administration in response to it cutting billions of dollars in federal funds and other punishing measures it has unleashed on universities. But internally, Harvard has pre-empted many of the administration’s demands, including by demoting scholars, scrapping initiatives giving space to Palestinian narratives and adopting a controversial definition of antisemitism that critics say is antithetical to academic inquiry.In conversations with the Harvard Educational Review editors, the journal’s publisher acknowledged that it was seeking legal review of the articles out of fears that their publication would prompt antisemitism claims, an editor at the journal said.Harvard is reportedly close to finalizing a settlement with the Trump administration along the lines of those reached by other top universities.Thea Abu El-Haj, a Palestinian-American anthropologist of education at Barnard College and one of 21 contributors to the cancelled special issue, criticized the university’s handling of the matter as yet another sign of institutional capitulation.“If the universities – or in this case a university press – are not willing to stand up for what is core to their mission, I don’t know what they’re doing,” she told the Guardian last month. “What’s the point?”A spokesperson for the Harvard Graduate School of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest letter but in an earlier statement to the Guardian wrote that the publisher “remains deeply committed to our robust editorial process”.Last month, the free speech group PEN America also condemned the special issue’s cancellation as a “blatant assault on academic freedom”.“Canceling an entire issue so close to publication is highly unusual, virtually unheard of,” Kristen Shahverdian, the program director for the group’s Campus Free Speech initiative, said in a statement.“Silencing these scholarly voices robs academics, students, and the public of the opportunity to engage with their insights. It also sends a chilling message in the context of the Trump administration’s unrelenting pressure on Harvard University and mounting political interference in higher education, including efforts that target scholarship on Palestine.” More

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    Man accused of throwing sandwich at US border agent charged with assault

    A man accused of throwing a sandwich at a US Customs and Border Protection agent in Washington DC has been charged with assaulting a federal officer – a felony that could result in up to a year in jail and significant fines.Captured in a now viral video, the man authorities have identified as Sean Charles Dunn, 37, could be seen yelling “Fascists!” and “Shame!” at a group of officers as they patrolled the district on Sunday night.Daina Henry, a local transit police detective detailed the altercation in a criminal complaint, alleging that Dunn pointed his finger in the officer’s face and yelled, “Fuck you! You fucking fascists! Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city,” minutes before “winding his arm back and forcefully throwing a sub-style sandwich”.The incident erupted as tensions simmered over Donald Trump’s looming takeover of DC and his administration’s use of force to brutally achieve his anti-migrant agenda.On Tuesday, the president deployed the first round of federal agents, including officers from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Department of Homeland Security, along with dozens of national guard troops, in an operation he said is only just beginning.Invoking a never-before-used clause that allows a temporary federal takeover of the district’s police department, Trump called on Congress to grant him the power for a long-term occupation, but told reporters there were other ways to extend his control. “If it’s a national emergency, we can do it without Congress,” he said, speaking on Wednesday during a visit to the Kennedy Center.Trump has threatened to send federal officers and military personnel into other US cities as well.Dunn’s case, filed in the US district court in Washington, was taken up by the US attorney’s office headed by former Fox News host and Trump appointee Jeanine Pirro, who threatened to prosecute him fully. She has been outspoken in her support for the president’s plan to crackdown on crime.“President Trump has vowed to make DC safe and beautiful again,” she said in a video posted to social media, championing the federal deployment. “The president’s message to the criminals was: if you spit, we hit,” she said.“This guy thought it was funny,” she continued, referencing the defendant’s alleged actions. “Well, he doesn’t think it’s funny today, because we charged him with a felony, assault on a police officer.”She added that she and her team were going to “back the police to the hilt”.Dunn has not publicly commented about the charges or the incident and court records do not yet list an attorney for him or any scheduled court hearings.In the video, the officer does not appear to be injured from the sandwich, which the video-taker zoomed in on to show it was still fully wrapped in a Subway wrapper, where it landed in the street.The agent and others with him could be seen chasing the man after he threw the sandwich. Henry, in the criminal complaint, alleges Dunn was apprehended soon after and later said: “I did it. I threw a sandwich.”Chris Stein contributed reporting More

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    Trump news at a glance: president eyes ‘long-term’ DC police takeover; warns Putin of consequences if no ceasefire reached

    After deploying the national guard to the streets of the American capital, Donald Trump is now eyeing longer-term powers over authorities, saying on Wednesday that he is seeking to extend his temporary powers over Washington DC’s police department.Trump earlier this week invoked a never-before-used clause of the law that sets out the federal district’s governance structure to take temporary control of the police department, but will need Congress’s permission to extend it beyond the 30 days allowed under the statute.“We’re going to need a crime bill that we’re going to be putting in, and it’s going to pertain initially to DC,” Trump said. He alluded to other options for extending control of the police department, saying “if it’s a national emergency, we can do it without Congress”.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump suggests other Democratic-led cities follow suit on crime legislationDonald Trump said on Wednesday he would ask Congress for “long-term” control of Washington DC’s police department and signaled he expected other Democratic-led cities to change their laws in response to his deployment of national guard troops and federal agents into the capital.The president’s comments came as the White House took credit for dozens of arrests overnight in Washington as part of Trump’s campaign to fight a “crime crisis”, which its leaders say does not exist.Read the full storyTrump: Putin to face ‘severe consequences’ if he doesn’t agree ceasefireVladimir Putin will face “very severe consequences” if he does not agree a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine at his summit with Donald Trump in Alaska, the US president said on Wednesday.Speaking after a call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders, including Britain’s Keir Starmer, Trump also suggested he would push for a second summit if his meeting with Putin goes well – this time including his Ukrainian counterpart.Read the full storyTrump says he will host Kennedy Center awardsDonald Trump announced on Wednesday that he will host the Kennedy Center honors this year and said he had been heavily involved in choosing who to nominate, rejecting people he thought were too liberal.Read the full storyTrump official led thinktank that promoted lies about Tren de AraguaA senior official appointed to the defense department led a thinktank that promoted fake news about the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, according to InSight Crime, a non-profit analyzing organized crime.Read the full storyHealth professionals call for RFK Jr to be removedA grassroots organization of health professionals has released a report outlining major health challenges in the US and calling for the removal of Robert F Kennedy Jr from the US Department of Health and Human Services.Read the full storyTrump revokes signature Biden order promoting economic competitionDonald Trump on Wednesday revoked a 2021 executive order on promoting competition in the US economy issued by Joe Biden, the White House said.Biden signed a sweeping executive order in July 2021 to promote more competition in the US economy as part of a broad push to rein in what his administration described as a pattern of corporate abuses, ranging from excessive airline fees to large mergers that raised costs for consumers.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

    A US judge ordered the Trump administration to restore a part of the federal grant funding that it recently suspended for the University of California, Los Angeles.

    Veteran climate scientists are organizing a coordinated public comment to a US Department of Energy report which cast doubt on the scientific consensus on the climate crisis.
    Catching up? Here’s what happened on 12 August 2025. More

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    Trump revokes Biden order promoting competition in the US economy

    Donald Trump on Wednesday revoked a 2021 executive order on promoting competition in the US economy issued by Joe Biden, the White House said.The move by the Republican US president further unwinds a signature initiative by his predecessor, a Democrat, to crack down on anti-competitive practices in sectors from agriculture to drugs and labor.The justice department welcomed Trump’s revocation of the order, saying it was pursuing an “America first antitrust” approach focused on free markets instead of what it called the “overly prescriptive and burdensome approach” of the Biden administration.It said it was also making progress on streamlining the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act (HSR) review process of mergers and reinstating more frequent use of targeted and well-crafted consent decrees.Biden signed a sweeping executive order in July 2021 to promote more competition in the US economy as part of a broad push to rein in what his administration described as a pattern of corporate abuses, ranging from excessive airline fees to large mergers that raised costs for consumers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe initiative, which was very popular with Americans, was championed by top Biden economic officials, many of whom had previously worked for or with the senator Elizabeth Warren, who played a key role in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Barack Obama.Trump has attacked that agency since taking office, announcing plans to shrink its workforce by 90%.Those moves have cost Americans at least $18bn in higher fees and lost compensation for consumers allegedly cheated by major companies, according to an analysis released in June by the Student Borrower Protection Center and the Consumer Federation of America.Biden’s order said it aimed to “enforce the antitrust laws to combat the excessive concentration of industry, the abuses of market power, and the harmful effects of monopoly and monopsony”, focused on areas such as labor and healthcare. More

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    Trump to seek extension of DC police takeover past 30-day limit and touts Republican support – live

    At the Kennedy Center today, Donald Trump announced that he would host this year’s honors himself – scheduled for December. But some of the biggest news came out of the far-reaching press conference he held after announcing this year’s honorees (which include ‘Rocky’ star and fervent Trump supporter Sylvester Stallone).

    Trump promised ‘very severe consequences’ if Vladimir Putin doesn’t agree to ceasefire at their Friday meeting in Alaska. He didn’t, however, elaborate on what those penalties will be. He also floated the idea of a trilateral summit with Volodymyr Zelenskyy “almost immediately” after his individual meeting with Putin.

    The president said that he’s eyeing an extension of the initial 30-day limit for the federal takeover of the DC Metropolitan Police. “I don’t want to call national emergency. If I have to I will. But I think the Republicans in Congress will approve this pretty much unanimously,” Trump said. He added that any discussions about DC statehood are “ridiculous” and “unacceptable”.

    When it comes to the surge of federal law enforcement on DC streets, a White House official said 43 arrests were made on Tuesday night –twice the total of the previous evening. More than 1,450 officers participated, about half of which were from the city’s police department, while only 30 national guard troops were deployed of the roughly 800 that defense officials have said are expected to arrive for the mission.

    The city’s Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, has sought a cordial working relationship with the president since his return to the White House, but changed her tone on Tuesday, urging residents and voters during a social media event “to protect our home rule and get to the other side of this guy and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push”.

    At his Kennedy Center appearance today, the president continued to disparage Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. “He’s truly incompetent,” Trump said. He went on to reveal that he’ll be naming the nomination for Powell’s replacement “sometime in the next week”. He’s down to “three of four names,” he added. A reminder that Powell’s term ends in May.

    Additionally, on the foreign diplomacy front, the president took part in a virtual meeting with Zelenskyy and European leaders today which the German chancellor described as “very good” and “constructive”. Zelenskyy confirmed that Trump would call him straight after the Friday meeting with Putin to talk it through details.

    And finally, for now at least, a federal appeals court lifted a lower court’s injunction that required the state department to continue making payments to foreign aid contractors. In a 2-1 decision, the appellate panel effectively granted a Trump victory – allowing the administration to cut billions in congressionally appropriated funding for foreign assistance.
    Donald Trump named David Rosner chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Ferc), where he has served since June 2024 as a commissioner, the agency announced on Wednesday.The appointment of Rosner, a Democrat whose nomination to the commission was supported by then Senator Joe Manchin, is expected to be temporary. In June, Trump nominated two Republicans to the commission who are awaiting Senate confirmation.Ferc, which has a maximum of five members, regulates the power grid, liquefied natural gas projects and interstate transportation of oil and natural gas. It currently has just three members, after Mark Christie, a Republican, left last week.In June, Trump nominated Laura Swett to take Christie’s place and the president is expected to name her to become chair once the Senate confirms her.If both of Trump’s nomines are confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, Ferc would then have a 3-2 Republican majority.Rosner, who has worked in energy in and out of government for two decades, said he was honored to be named.Last year the environmental group Friends of the Earth ran a campaign calling on the Senate, then controlled by Democrats, to block Rosner’s nomination, calling him “a paid cheerleader for the LNG boom”.Trump has said he wants to open pipelines to bring natural gas from Pennsylvania’s gas fields to states in the Northeast. The projects have been opposed by states.A judge in Adams County, Illinois just rejected a request from the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, to order the arrest of Democrats from the Texas state legislature who left Texas to block a Republican plan to redraw congressional districts.In a petition filed last Thursday, Paxton had asked the court in a conservative county that overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump to to honor so-called quorum Warrants — civil arrest orders issued by Dustin Burrows, the Republican speaker of the Texas state house — and order Illinois police officers to “effectuate the civil arrest” of the Democratic lawmakers.In the ruling, which was posted online by Aarón Torres of the Dallas Morning News, the judge ruled that the Illinois circuit court “does not have the inherent power to direct Illinois law enforcement officers, or to allow the Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Representatives of the State of Texas, or any officer appointed by her, to execute Texas civil Quorum Warrants upon nonresidents temporarily located in the State of Illinois.”Today, a US federal judge struck down rules from 2018 that allow employers to not provide insurance coverage for birth control on religious or moral grounds, Reuters is reporting.During Donald Trump’s first term in office, the supreme court ruled that employers were eligible for religious exemptions when it comes to providing health insurance that covers women’s birth control.The Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, requires employers to offer health insurance with access to contraception, but stipulates that they can apply for religious exemptions. The 2018 rules, however, offered a blanket exemption.According to Reuters, Judge Wendy Beetlestone in Philadelphia said there was a gap between how vast the exception is, and the number of employers who would need it.Planned Parenthood clinics treated people who rely on Medicaid at more than 1.5m visits in 2024, new research published on Wednesday shows.But the reproductive health giant’s ability to treat those patients is now in jeopardy due to Republicans’ efforts to “defund” Planned Parenthood by kicking it out of Medicaid.Donald Trump’s tax and spending package, passed in July, bans Planned Parenthood from receiving reimbursements from Medicaid, the US government’s insurance program for low-income people. After Planned Parenthood sued over the ban, a judge temporarily stopped it from taking effect.If the ban moves forward, experts warn that it could cripple the entirety of the US healthcare social safety net.Republicans have long sought to defund Planned Parenthood over the organization’s commitment to providing abortions. But Planned Parenthood does not rely on Medicaid to fund its abortion provision as it is already illegal to use federal dollars, including Medicaid, to pay for the vast majority of abortions. The 1.5m visits documented in Wednesday’s research paper, which was published in the medical journal Jama, only include visits for reasons other than abortion.“Planned Parenthood has filled a very important role in the reproductive healthcare safety net for people living on low incomes,” said Kari White, executive and scientific director at Resound Research for Reproductive Health. White was the lead author on the research paper released on Wednesday. “Other providers have counted on them to do so. They just don’t have the capacity to step in and fill the place that Planned Parenthood has had in the safety net.”The state department has approved potential sales of munitions, precision bombs and precision rockets to Nigeria, according to a statement from the Pentagon. The estimated cost totals $346 million.Several Texas Democratic lawmakers are now speaking about their redistricting fight alongside Indiana Democrats. They’re joining the legislators to push back against the president’s push for Indiana governor Mike Braun to redraw the state’s congressional map – in a similar vein to Texas governor Greg Abbott.Today, state representative Gene Wu, who is also chair of the Texas House Democrats, said that “we need more people to join us”.He added that if Texas Republicans continue to “block the will of the people” Democrats will make to “nullify their actions”.A number of Indiana Democratic lawmakers said that they stand in solidarity with their Texas counterparts. “We need to support them and stand with them, otherwise our people will be subjected to ever changing districts, none of which are representative,” said Indiana state representative Ed DeLaney.

    At the Kennedy Center today, Donald Trump announced that he would host this year’s honors himself – scheduled for December. But some of the biggest news came out of the far-reaching press conference he held after announcing this year’s honorees (which include ‘Rocky’ star and fervent Trump supporter Sylvester Stallone).

    Trump promised ‘very severe consequences’ if Vladimir Putin doesn’t agree to ceasefire at their Friday meeting in Alaska. He didn’t, however, elaborate on what those penalties will be. He also floated the idea of a trilateral summit with Volodymyr Zelenskyy “almost immediately” after his individual meeting with Putin.

    The president said that he’s eyeing an extension of the initial 30-day limit for the federal takeover of the DC Metropolitan Police. “I don’t want to call national emergency. If I have to I will. But I think the Republicans in Congress will approve this pretty much unanimously,” Trump said. He added that any discussions about DC statehood are “ridiculous” and “unacceptable”.

    When it comes to the surge of federal law enforcement on DC streets, a White House official said 43 arrests were made on Tuesday night –twice the total of the previous evening. More than 1,450 officers participated, about half of which were from the city’s police department, while only 30 national guard troops were deployed of the roughly 800 that defense officials have said are expected to arrive for the mission.

    The city’s Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, has sought a cordial working relationship with the president since his return to the White House, but changed her tone on Tuesday, urging residents and voters during a social media event “to protect our home rule and get to the other side of this guy and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push”.

    At his Kennedy Center appearance today, the president continued to disparage Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. “He’s truly incompetent,” Trump said. He went on to reveal that he’ll be naming the nomination for Powell’s replacement “sometime in the next week”. He’s down to “three of four names,” he added. A reminder that Powell’s term ends in May.

    Additionally, on the foreign diplomacy front, the president took part in a virtual meeting with Zelenskyy and European leaders today which the German chancellor described as “very good” and “constructive”. Zelenskyy confirmed that Trump would call him straight after the Friday meeting with Putin to talk it through details.

    And finally, for now at least, a federal appeals court lifted a lower court’s injunction that required the state department to continue making payments to foreign aid contractors. In a 2-1 decision, the appellate panel effectively granted a Trump victory – allowing the administration to cut billions in congressionally appropriated funding for foreign assistance.
    We can soon expect to hear from Texas Democrats in Chicago, who will join several Indiana Democratic lawmakers who are pushing back against the president’s pressure campaign to redraw their own state’s congressional map.The White House said on Wednesday that law enforcement made dozens of arrests in Washington DC overnight after federal agents and national guard troops fanned out across the city as part of Donald Trump’s campaign to quell a “crime crisis” that local officials say does not exist.The national guard arrived on the National Mall late on Tuesday, while agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), FBI and Department of Homeland Security were seen in several neighborhoods , sometimes accompanied by local police officers.Video circulating on local media showed police and federal agents arresting at least one person that evening in Columbia Heights, home to the city’s largest Hispanic population. Other videos showed traffic stops near Kennedy street in Northwest Washington, which in years past has been the site of gang activity.A White House official said to expect a “significantly higher” presence of national guard troops over the days to come, as well as round-the-clock patrols by federal agents, which have thus far only been present in the evenings. The administration argues the steps are necessary to fight what Trump has called an “out of control” crime problem in the nation’s capital, but local officials have disputed that characterization.Data shows that crime rates plunged last year to the lowest levels in three decades, though the capital does have higher rates of some violent crimes compared with cities with similar populations.Democratic lawmakers have condemned Trump’s incursion as an authoritarian move intended to distract his supporters from outrage over his refusal to make public files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a one-time friend who has become a fixation of conspiracy theorists.The Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, has sought a cordial relationship with Trump since his return to the White House, but changed her tone on Tuesday, urging residents and voters during a social media event “to protect our city, to protect our autonomy, to protect our home rule and get to the other side of this guy and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push”.A White House official said a total of 43 arrests were made on Tuesday night, twice the total of the previous evening. More than 1,450 officers participated, about half of which were from the city’s police department, while only 30 national guard troops were deployed of the roughly 800 that defense officials have said are expected to arrive for the mission.The White House said a total of 19 teams of officers from various federal agencies are in the city “to promote public safety and arrest violent offenders”, while the national guard will “protect federal assets, provide a safe environment for law enforcement officers to make arrests, and deter violent crime with a visible law enforcement presence”.More than 40 Ice agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI, which does long-term investigations into transnational crimes) are working with the DC police, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal agencies this week as part of Trump’s takeover of the capital to mitigate crime, NBC News is reporting.Per NBC’s report, “they can make arrests of citizens with no nexus to immigration violations”. “Yesterday, HSI worked with other agencies in an operation near the DC Metro in Union Station; its agents told NBC News that they were not there for anything immigration related, but were surveying busy areas around DC.”Separately, Enforcement Removal Operations (ERO, which carries out operations like arresting immigrants for immigration crimes and detaining and deporting them) is increasing its operations in DC, according to NBC. The news outlet reports that “there was a ‘targeted enforcement operation’ to arrest immigrants in a Home Depot parking lot in DC yesterday, and there have been reports of other immigrant arrests in the DC area.”“The President was clear, he will make DC safe and beautiful again, and ICE is proud to be a part of the solution alongside our federal law enforcement partners,” an agency spokesperson told NBC about the operations. The agency is conducting both immigration enforcement operations and undertaking efforts to fight crime in support of the US Marshals Service, they said.They said the operations were intelligence-based, and the efforts at Union Station and the Home Depot resulted in arrests of criminal undocumented immigrants convicted of assault, theft and gang activity.“We will support the re-establishment of law and order and public safety in DC, which includes taking drug dealers, gang members, and criminal aliens off city streets,” they said.A senior official appointed to the defense department led a thinktank that promoted fake news about the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, according to InSight Crime, a non-profit analyzing organized crime.Joseph Humire was appointed this summer to be the head of policy focusing on the western hemisphere within the office of the under secretary of defense for policy. He was previously the executive director of a conservative thinktank focused on global security. Humire’s appointment comes as the Trump administration is ramping up its aggressive strategy against organized crime in Latin America and the Venezuelan government, which it accuses of working with TdA.Under Humire’s leadership, the Center for a Secure Free Society thinktank published the “TdA Activity Monitor”, tracking alleged crimes by accused members of the gang throughout the US. According to InSight Crime, at least five event entries in the tracker appeared to have been “completely fabricated”. InSight Crime found zero basis for the false entries, with local police departments telling researchers the purported crimes were nonexistent. InSight Crime analyzed more than 90 of the entries, finding many relied on unverified sources.“Some incidents are included multiple times, inflating the gang’s perceived presence and activities,” researchers found.Asked if he was confident he could get Putin to stop targeting civilians in Ukraine, Trump said:
    Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ve had that conversation with him. I’ve had a lot of good conversations with him. Then I go home and I see that a rocket hit a nursing home, or a rocket hit an apartment building and people are laying dead in the street.
    So I guess the answer to that is no, because I’ve had this conversation.
    He ended his briefing there. More

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    ‘Severe’ staff shortages at US veterans’ hospitals, watchdog finds

    The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is experiencing “severe” staff shortages at all its hospitals, with the number of shortages increasing by 50% this fiscal year, according to a new report from the agency’s independent watchdog.The report, released on Tuesday, came a day after the Guardian revealed the department had lost thousands of healthcare professionals deemed “core” to the system under Donald Trump, without which, the agency said, “mission-critical work cannot be completed”.The inspector general found 94% of VA facilities faced a “severe” shortage of doctors, while 79% faced a severe shortage of nurses. Psychology was “the most frequently reported clinical occupational staffing shortage”. A majority of VA facilities also reported severe shortages of police officers, who keep veteran patients and staff safe.The VA operates the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, serving 9 million veterans annually. The report is required under two laws, one signed by Trump in 2017, which require the agency’s inspector general annually to determine the extent of staffing shortages within each medical center.In a statement, Congressman Mark Takano of California, the ranking Democrat on the House committee on veterans’ affairs, said the report “confirms our fears” that shortages of medical staff were leading to “decreased access and choice for veterans”.The VA press secretary, Peter Kasperowicz, told the Guardian the congressionally mandated watchdog report was “not a reliable indicator of staffing shortages” and that it was “completely subjective, not standardized and unreliable”.The report is based on a survey of VA medical centers in April. Since then, a Guardian review of agency staffing records found, the VA has continued to lose doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers and other frontline medical professionals.Kasperowicz did not dispute the fact that the agency had lost thousands of “mission-critical” healthcare workers under Trump – including after the watchdog’s survey period concluded.The VA is in the midst of a department-wide reduction of 30,000 workers, which the secretary of veterans affairs, Doug Collins, said could be accomplished by September through a combination of attrition, a hiring freeze and deferred resignation program.The staff cuts, Collins said, would not affect patient care, but were “centered on reducing bureaucracy and improving services to veterans”.In May, the Guardian reported that staff losses at the VA had led to unit closures, reduced hours of operations and exam backlogs across the hospital system. More

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    And here is your host … Trump casts himself for Kennedy Center honours

    “There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts,” are among the words inscribed in marble at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. The age of Elizabeth was the age of Shakespeare, it says.The age of Donald Trump is the age of Trump’s ego. Trump the president, commander-in-chief and master builder. Trump the supremo of the upcoming Olympics, football World Cup and America’s 250th birthday. Trump whose self-aggrandisement is the size of a planet: on Wednesday not even the Kennedy Center’s cavernous Hall of Nations could contain it.The president announced that he will host this year’s Kennedy Center Honors – after all, he used to be on The Apprentice, so how hard can it be? He unveiled this year’s honourees – screened by him to veto “wokesters” – and grumbled that he had never been one. He reminded everyone that he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Nearby, the giant bust of Kennedy may have shed a tear or two as Trump, wearing dark suit, white shirt and red tie, strode into the marble-walled, red-carpeted Hall of Nations to continue his hostile takeover of the nation’s capital – and the country’s cultural life.The 100ft-high arts complex on the banks of the Potomac River and its annual arts awards might seem trivial in the scheme of Trump’s authoritarian crusade. But there are few better measures of how his second term is proving more ambitious, intentional and effective than his first.View image in fullscreenTrump 1.0 never set foot in the Kennedy Center. Each year the Honors took place without him, with recipients including his critics such as as Cher, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Sally Field. And there were diverse lineups: Gloria Estefan, LL Cool J, Lionel Richie, Debbie Allen, Berry Gordy, Gladys Knight and Queen Latifah.Trump 2.0 has been a very different proposition in his targeted approach to immigration and crime, his vendettas against political opponents and his bullying of law firms, media companies and universities. Suddenly the Kennedy Center, like the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, finds itself in the line of fire of Trump’s war on woke.Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, who feigns reluctance to take the throne as a tactic to appear more virtuous, Trump claimed he didn’t really want to take on hosting responsibilities when his staff asked.“I said: ‘I’m the president of the United States! Are you fools, asking me to do that?’ ‘Sir, you’ll get much higher ratings.’ I said: ‘I don’t care, I’m president of the United States. I won’t do it.’”But then, in his telling, his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, intervened. “I said, OK, Susie, I’ll do it. That’s the power she’s got. So I have agreed to … They’re going to say: ‘He insisted.’ I did not insist but I think it will be quite successful actually. It’s been a long time. I used to host The Apprentice finales and we did rather well with that.”The Kennedy Center Honors were established in 1978 and recipients have included George Balanchine, Warren Beatty, Aretha Franklin, Tom Hanks, Arthur Miller, Stephen Sondheim and Barbra Streisand. Trump remarked: “I wanted one. I was never able to get one.”A group of Trump lackeys sitting stage left burst into laughter then realised he wasn’t joking and fell silent. “It’s true, actually. I would have taken it if they would have called me. I waited and waited and waited and I said: ‘To hell with it, I’ll become chairman and I’ll give myself an honour. Maybe next year we’ll honour Trump, OK?”All right, now that time he was joking. Wasn’t he?Trump announced a characteristically white male-heavy list for this year’s honourees: actors Michael Crawford and Sylvester Stallone, singers George Strait and Gloria Gaynor, and members of the rock band Kiss. As he spoke of each, a curtain was pulled back on their photo in very retro, low-tech style.Crawford, he noted, was born in England in 1942 and made his Broadway debut in 1967. “I was there. I shouldn’t say that but I was there. It seems like a long time ago, and he became an international sensation in the 1980s for his original portrayal of the Phantom of the Opera – one of the greatest ever, ever, ever, ever.”It was hardly surprising from a man whose cultural tastes refuse to acknowledge the existence of the 21st century, though there was no mention of the 70s British sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em in which Crawford played accident-prone Frank Spencer, known for the catchphrase “Ooh Betty!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStallone’s characters Rambo and Rocky are more Trump’s style: macho, muscular, primal, violent, taking no prisoners. The kind of great white hopes that he would now like to see policing the streets of Washington. The president mused: “Rocky, Rambo – if you did one, you’re good. You do two?“I’ll never forget I was a young guy and I went to see a thing called Rambo and it had just come out. I didn’t know anything about it but I was in a movie theatre – like we used to go to movie theaters a lot – and I said: ‘This movie is phenomenal! What the heck?’ And that turned out to be a monster.”Trump described Stallone as one of the biggest names on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but then remembered this is supposed to be all about him. “In fact, the only one that’s a bigger name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, they say, is a guy named Donald Trump. I’m on the Hollywood Walk of Fame too, if you can believe that one.”Strait, Gaynor and Kiss met with his approval too. Trump might have stopped five wars in the past six months, by his own estimate, but he still had time to handpick the Kennedy Center honourees and make sure no agitators, dissidents or subversives slipped through the net. The role of the artist is the worship of Trump.“I would say I was about 98% involved,” he remarked. “They all went through me … I turned down plenty. It went too woke. I turned I had a couple of wokesters. Now, we have great people. This is very different than it used to be. Very different.”The Oscars, he said, now gets “lousy ratings” because “it’s all woke” and “all they do is talk about how much they hate Trump.”Just as he is vowing to make Washington DC beautiful again, Trump has big plans for the Kennedy Center, which at least one Republican in Congress has proposed renaming after him. Trump promised to “fully renovate” the entire infrastructure, ripping out and replacing all the seats, and make it a “crown jewel” of arts and culture in the US. “The bones are so good,” he cooed.But if his White House desecration is anything to go by, expect the Kennedy Center to become a monument to dictator chic, dripping in rococo gold and festooned with garishness. Another Kennedy quotation inscribed on the exterior marble wall says: “This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.” More