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Dick Durbin won’t seek re-election after nearly three decades in US Senate
23 April 2025, 16:06
Dick Durbin, the second-highest ranking Democrat in the US Senate, announced he will not seek re-election in 2026, bringing an end to a Senate career that spans nearly three decades.The 80-year-old Illinois senator, who has served since 1996, posted on social media that he plans to leave office in 2027 when his term expires – meaning there will be an open primary for his replacement in the midterms.“I truly love being a United States Senator, but in my heart, I know it’s time to pass the torch,” Durbin said in a video statement on X.As Senate Democratic whip and ranking member on the judiciary committee, Durbin’s departure represents a significant loss of clout for Illinois. His exit will vacate one of the most powerful positions in Washington and end a career marked by his influence over national policy and directing federal funding to his home state.The veteran lawmaker cited his age as a primary factor in the decision, noting that he would be 88 by the end of a potential sixth term. The news of his retirement was first reported by WBEZ and the New York Times.“It’s time,” Durbin told WBEZ. “You observe your colleagues and watch what happens. For some of them, there’s this miraculous ageing process where they never seem to get too old.”It is not a total surprise, as speculation of his retirement began to trend in Washington earlier this month after his federal financial report showed he raised just north of $42,000 this first quarter of this year, a paltry sum for a politician interested in holding his position in the midterms.Still, Durbin’s announcement is expected to trigger intense competition among Illinois Democrats eager to take his seat. The potential list of successors includes the former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, Illinois lieutenant governor Juliana Stratton and Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, who has pooled a $19m campaign fund. Representatives Lauren Underwood and Robin Kelly are also considered possible candidates.His departure could provide an opening for Republicans to contest the seat, though Illinois has trended Democratic in recent elections. The last Republican senator from Illinois was Mark Kirk, who lost his re-election bid to Tammy Duckworth in 2016. More
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How idea of charging women with murder infiltrated the anti-abortion movement
23 April 2025, 16:05
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View image in fullscreenSo far this year, lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people and leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide – a charge that, in several of these states, carries the death penalty.Once seen as politically toxic, this kind of legislation has become more popular in the years since Roe v Wade fell, erasing the national right to abortion. This likely comes as no surprise to Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law and one of the foremost commentators on the US abortion wars. The anti-abortion movement, she writes in her new book Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, has really “always been a fetal-personhood movement” – one that is so emboldened, it is increasingly unconcerned with public opinion or even democratic norms.Fetal personhood is the belief that embryos and fetuses deserve the legal rights and protections afforded to people. If taken to its logical conclusion in US law, this belief would not only totally outlaw abortion, but also risk pitting the rights of fetuses against the rights of the women carrying them in all kinds of circumstances. In the first year after the US supreme court overturned Roe, at least 200 people were prosecuted for conduct relating to their pregnancies. Most of these cases involved charges of child endangerment, abuse or neglect – language that treats fetuses as children.A Guggenheim fellow who has published seven books on reproduction and abortion, Ziegler has long seen the fight for fetal personhood as the throughline in the anti-abortion movement’s centuries-long history. In recent years, with Roe gone, she grew convinced that the movement was no longer willing to pull punches in that fight. “The trajectory has been more and more punitive, more focused on saying: ‘Justice for the fetus means punishing a larger group of people that encompasses not just doctors, but people who assist them, and potentially abortion seekers themselves,’” she said in an interview.View image in fullscreenPersonhood, which was released Tuesday, argues that the anti-abortion movement did not have to be so punitive. While anti-abortion activists have never agreed on how to best implement fetal personhood, they over time started to take more cues from Republican politicians, whose own veneration of “law and order” grew alongside its antagonism toward a social safety net. Those developments ultimately paved the way for the more extreme anti-abortion activists to grab more power within the movement.After Roe legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, anti-abortion activists organized in support of an amendment to the US constitution that would recognize embryos and fetuses as people. (The effort never gained the political traction it needed to become a serious possibility.) Around the same time, some activists broke with mainstream anti-abortion groups to push for policies that would offer more support for pregnant women, rather than just ban abortion.Yet the voices advocating for better daycare and housing for mothers faded away as the anti-abortion movement tightened its alliance with the Republican party. Anti-abortion activists understood that, by portraying fetuses as defenseless victims of the ultimate crime, they could energize conservative voters – and open their pockets.“The Republican party, from the Reagan era onward, has really equated a kind of justice and equality with punishing wrongdoers,” Ziegler said. “It’s a natural fit for the anti-abortion movement: the more its fortunes relied on Republican politicians, the more it framed things the same way.”State-level bans on abortion still do not technically punish abortion patients. (Instead, it’s abortion providers, long positioned by the movement as coercing or confusing women into the procedure, and sometimes the people who help them, who are at risk of criminal consequences.) But, over the last few years, self-described “abortion abolitionists” have slowly migrated out of the fringes of the anti-abortion movement and moved towards its center. Unlike mainstream “pro-lifers”, “abolitionists” believe that, if a fetus is a person and abortion is the murder of that person, women should be punished accordingly: as murderers.Neither “pro-lifers” nor “abolitionists” are particularly popular. After Roe’s collapse enabled states to make their own abortion laws, several states – including GOP strongholds like Ohio and Missouri – passed ballot measures to protect abortion rights. According to Gallup, 85% of Americans think that abortion should be legal in all or some circumstances, while a 2024 survey from the 19th News and SurveyMonkey found that 41% of Americans think “a fetus has rights starting at conception that should be protected by the government.”Even people who support fetal personhood can have tangled, even contradictory views on the matter. Only 9% of people think that the government should restrict access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, even though IVF as it is currently practiced frequently involves the destruction or abandonment of embryos.None of the bills that allow abortion patients to be charged with homicide are likely to pass this year, but Ziegler doesn’t think “abolitionists” are going anywhere, for two reasons. First, the anti-abortion movement maintains a strong grip in southern Republican-dominated state legislatures, where many of these bills have emerged. Second, Ziegler believes that the anti-abortion movement is embracing “a conviction that it matters less what voters think and more what judges think”.“If you don’t worry about what you’re doing being unpopular, and you believe that ideological consistency, or even logical consistency, is paramount, you would be more inclined to go with an abolitionist argument, and you might worry less about that having political fallout in a politically uncompetitive state,” Ziegler said. “You don’t need to convince most Americans you’re right. You only need to convince five justices on the supreme court.”With abortion bans proving deeply unpopular in the US, circumventing popular will has become a necessity for an increasingly hardline movement. And by relying on the courts rather than voters, the anti-abortion movement can afford to ignore voters’ misgivings.The movement has abandoned its earlier goal of amending the US constitution to recognize fetal personhood; instead, the anti-abortion movement is now seeking to convince courts that the 14th amendment, which guarantees the right of due process and equal protection, already recognizes embryos and fetuses as people from the moment of conception. It is, according to Ziegler, yet another sign of the movement’s drift away from democratic norms.View image in fullscreenThis interest in the 14th amendment is also something of an about-face for the anti-abortion movement, which is predominantly white and has had a convoluted relationship with race for more than a century. At the time that the amendment passed, as part of a post-civil war effort to recognize Black people’s rights, anti-abortion leaders “didn’t want to talk about race because they weren’t sure that people of color were persons with rights”, Ziegler said. Over time, the anti-abortion movement began using the language of civil rights and affirmative action – but primarily to argue that fetuses are the greatest victim of discrimination.“I think that’s one of the reasons fetal personhood language has been resonant for so long,” Ziegler said of the movement’s co-option of civil rights rhetoric. “It gives people a way to talk about equality and a way to elevate somebody as a victim of discrimination in a way that makes sense to a largely white group of conservatives.”As Roe recedes further into the rearview mirror, Ziegler expects the movement to become even more committed to some of the most unpopular implications of fetal personhood, such as restrictions on IVF. Although Republican politicians have shied away from limiting access to the treatment, the anti-abortion movement has grown more strident on the topic. Some of its leaders even condemned Donald Trump for his recent executive order supporting IVF.“I think the anti-abortion movement is going to be still full steam ahead,” Ziegler said. “There’s an increasing sentiment in the movement that this is not about pleasing Republicans. This is not about pleasing voters. This is about the importance of this, ideologically, to the people involved.” More
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Trump administration has set Noaa on ‘non-science trajectory’, workers warn
23 April 2025, 15:58
The Trump administration has shunted one of the US federal government’s top scientific agencies onto a “non-science trajectory”, workers warn, that threatens to derail decades of research and leave the US with “air that’s not breathable and water that’s not drinkable”.Workers and scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) are warning of the drastic impacts of cuts at the agency on science, research, and efforts to protect natural resources.“The problems are still there. We still have harmful algal blooms, we still have fisheries that are collapsing, waters you can’t swim in. These problems don’t go away because we fired all the people who were trying to solve a problem,” said one Noaa veteran, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “How do you save the arms and legs or the feet and hands when the core is dying?”The longtime research scientist with more than 20 years at Noaa has taken early retirement. “I left because it was just so demoralizing and fearful and scary,” they said.Trump administration officials are seeking to abolish the scientific research division at Noaa, the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (Oar) office. It is the latest of a series of cuts at the agency that began the second Trump administration with 12,000 employees around the world, including more than 6,700 engineers and scientists.The cuts are disrupting the collection of data sets, including recordings of global temperatures in the air and ocean, and that data cannot be replaced, said the Noaa veteran.The dismantling of Noaa, they said, would harm work in many areas, from finding solutions to combat harmful algae and improving sustainable fisheries to work on new medicines and industrial products and collecting information for disaster preparation.“We can look at other countries that are actively making these mistakes, where they have air that’s not breathable and water that’s not drinkable,” they said. “I think it’s done. I think this is done. The enemies are in the gate. I don’t see any indication so far of anyone stopping it. They’re just letting it burn. I honestly don’t understand how US science will recover.”More than 800 probationary employees at the agency were fired, reinstated, then refired this month. Employees have reported having their firings backdated and having their health insurance canceled even though premiums were being taken out of their paychecks.Rachel Brittin, worked as the federal deputy director of external affairs at Noaa before she was fired, then reinstated, then fired again as a probationary employee, with just a few months left on her two-year probation.“The whole situation is a mess,” she said. “How is Noaa going to be able to keep up with the services it provides? I don’t know. I don’t know how that’s going to happen, but it’s very scary to me. The loss of anybody at Noaa is directly connected to services lost by every individual in the United States.”Contractors for the agency have been furloughed as all Noaa contracts over $100,000 have to now be approved by Trump’s Department of Commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick.Doge has slated 31 offices and building leases at Noaa for termination around the US. Nearly $4m in funding to Princeton University as part of a cooperative agreement with Noaa was cancelled on 8 April.Fourteen Noaa data services on earthquakes, marine, coastal and estuary science at have been slated for decommissioning, more than twice as many as in 2024.Four regional climate centers providing weather analysis tools and data for 21 states in the US have gone dark after lapses in funding, with the remaining two covering the US set to face a funding lapse in June.A reduction in force plan to cut an additional 10% of the agency’s workforce is anticipated and at least several hundred workers have taken voluntary buyouts or early retirement according to Noaa workers interviewed by the Guardian, though Noaa and the Department of Commerce did not disclose the numbers.“It seems clear that the actions that have been taken have intentionally reduced our ability to do our jobs,” said a Noaa scientist who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “You’re not expected to get anything done.”They said due to firings, early retirements and resignations, scientific research teams around the agency have been left with gaps of expertise that can’t be replaced.“We are scrambling,” they added. “We are finding workarounds, but its becoming increasingly difficult.”Marty Kardos, a research molecular geneticist at the northwest fisheries science center at Noaa, decided to resign after the agency’s violations of their collective bargaining agreement with workers meant he would be forced to move from Montana to Seattle in a week or resign.“The agency is on a non-science trajectory,” Kardos said, speaking in a personal capacity. “All the plans for research we were making for the upcoming years are out of the window. Morale is extremely bad.”The attrition of scientists and management at Noaa is effectively undermining the agency’s ability to sustainably manage fisheries and identify and recover endangered species, he said.“The agency is essentially, openly hostile to their mission and their people,” Kardos added. “A lot of this seems to be related to deregulation. The agency is responsible for the Endangered Species Act for marine species and one way to hamstring the act without repealing it is to get rid of the scientists who help to implement it.”The cuts come as the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and the Trump administration have installed allies in key positions at the agency.Neil Jacobs, the Trump nominee for Noaa administrator and acting head of Noaa in the first Trump administration, has yet to be confirmed. Jacobs was caught up in “Sharpiegate” – a bizarre 2019 incident when the White House was accused of altering a Noaa map of the predicted path of Hurricane Dorian with a black marker to support an incorrect claim by Trump that the Florida-bound storm would also hit Alabama.A staffer from Doge, Bryton Shang, announced this month he was appointed as a senior adviser to the Noaa administrator. Shang was one of the two Doge staffers who flew to Los Angeles during the wildfires in January, and attempted to open a large water pump system in California.Erik Noble, dubbed Trump’s “eyes and ears” at Noaa during his first administration, is back at the agency as deputy assistant secretary for oceans and atmosphere and is reviewing contracts at the agency with Keegan McLaughlin, a special assistant at the commerce department and former intern for the 2024 Trump campaign.Noaa was a target of Project 2025, the conservative roadmap for a second Trump administration. That document pushed to “break up NOAA” and labeled the agency “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”.“Understanding things lets us make decisions that can put us on a track to things getting better. Knowing bad news doesn’t create the bad news. It lets you be prepared to take actions that may let you avoid the worst consequences,” the Noaa scientist at Oar added on the Trump appointees and the authority they are being given over scientific decisions.“Pretending that our resources are inexhaustible doesn’t make them inexhaustible,” they added. “I don’t think people understand the arrogance of thinking: ‘Hey, I think I understand this, even though I know nothing about it.’ This whole antithesis to experts, I don’t understand it. Would you want to do that with your own personal health? Why would you do it with any kind of complex system?”Noaa and the Department of Commerce did not respond to multiple requests for comment. More
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Stock markets rise as Trump backtracks on high China tariffs and firing Fed chair
23 April 2025, 15:50
Stock markets have risen around the world after Donald Trump said his tariffs on China would come down “substantially” and he had “no intention” of firing the chair of the US central bank, Jerome Powell.Weeks of tough talk on trade from White House officials have rattled investors and Trump now appears to be softening his tone. The president told reporters in Washington on Tuesday he planned to be “very nice” to China in trade talks and that tariffs could drop in both countries if they could reach a deal, adding: “It will come down substantially, but it won’t be zero.”Overnight in Asia, Japan’s Nikkei rose by nearly 2%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 2.4% and the South Korean Kospi gained 1.6%.The rally spread to Europe in early trading on Wednesday, with the UK’s FTSE 100 index up 1.6%, while the Italian FTSE MIB rose by 1.1%. Germany’s Dax gained 2.6% and France’s Cac 2.1%.Meanwhile, US stocks opened on a high Wednesday morning, with the Dow rallying over 800 points, and the Nasdaq Composite up over 3%. The rally stalled in the afternoon but all the major stock markets managed to end the day higher.On Wednesday, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, also took a softer, optimistic tone on China in remarks delivered at the Institute of International Finance in Washington DC, saying that China “knows it needs to change”.“If China is serious on less dependence on export-led manufacturing growth and rebalancing toward a domestic economy … let’s rebalance together,” Bessent said. “This is an incredible opportunity.”Bessent told investors in a private meeting on Tuesday that he expects a “de-escalation” of the trade war between China and the US in the “very near future”.“‘America First’ does not mean America alone. To the contrary, it is a call for deeper collaboration and mutual respect among trade partners,” Bessent said on Wednesday.Investor confidence also grew after Trump told reporters he would not fire Powell, the chair of the US Federal Reserve, reversing the previous day’s losses triggered by the president calling the central bank boss a “major loser”.The president has criticised the Fed chair repeatedly for refusing to cut interest rates and last week hinted that he believed he could dismiss Powell before his term as the head of the central bank comes to an end in May next year.Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, last week that Powell’s termination “could not come fast enough”, after the Fed chair raised concerns about the impact of trade tariffs on the American economy.However, the suggestion from the White House that the US central bank will remain independent helped stocks to rise on Wednesday, as well as the prospect of lower tariffs on Chinese imports to the US.The US dollar, which hit a three-year low on Tuesday before recovering, rose by 0.25% against a basket of major currencies.Oil prices also rose on Wednesday, with Brent crude rising above $68 (£51) a barrel amid hopes that lower tariffs will be less damaging to the global economy. The rise was also led by new US sanctions targeting Iranian liquefied petroleum gas and the crude oil shipping magnate Seyed Asadoollah Emamjomeh.Meanwhile, gold, which is traditionally viewed by investors as a safe haven asset during volatile periods, retreated from the new high of $3,500 (£2,620) an ounce it hit on Tuesday, to trade at about $3,307. More
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Jimmy Kimmel on Pete Hegseth: ‘Our secretary of defense is defenseless’
23 April 2025, 15:08
With several hosts still on Easter holiday, Jimmy Kimmel talks the search for a new pope and Pete Hegseth’s ongoing Signal scandals at the Department of Defense.Jimmy KimmelKimmel kicked off his show Tuesday by acknowledging Earth Day – and for the occasion, the US Environmental Protection Agency fired or reassigned hundreds of employees. “I can’t help but wonder how different things might be if Donald Trump’s father had taken him camping even one time,” he joked.He then turned his attention to the top global story of the week: the search for a new pope after Pope Francis died on Monday morning at the age of 88. “Nobody is going to be more insufferable this week than your friend who saw the movie Conclave and now knows everything about how it works,” said Kimmel. “I’ll tell you how it works: over the next few weeks, 135 flamboyantly dressed cardinals will gather to pass judgment on a series of aspiring candidates and in a lot of ways, it’s the Catholic version of RuPaul’s Drag Race.”Kimmel had a personal favorite: an Italian cardinal long stationed in Jerusalem named Pierbattista Pizzaballa.“Is he qualified? Honestly, we have no idea,” said Kimmel in a prayer for the very Italian-sounding Italian cardinal to be named pope. “Is he made of pizza? Also unclear. Is he round like a balla? We also don’t know. But his name is so funny, please grant the other cardinals the strength to give us a Pope Pizzaballa.”Kimmel also mocked Trump’s defense secretary, Hegseth, who is once again in hot water over using unsanctioned messaging apps to discuss sensitive military operations. Earlier this week, it was reported that Hegseth used a second Signal group chat, this one including family members, to discuss planned strikes in Yemen.Appearing on Fox News, Hegseth tried to dismiss furor as misguided: “Then and now, however you characterize it, was informal, unclassified coordinations … that’s what I’ve said from the beginning.”“Right, but it was bullshit from the beginning, too,” Kimmel responded. “You texted the exact time and place the secret bombing would begin before the secret bombing to your wife on an easily hackable phone. And is defense for this is ‘who told you? And how dare they tell you!’”“This is like your wife catching you in bed with another woman and your response is ‘well, why did you come home so early?’” he continued. “Our secretary of defense is defenseless, but it’s not his fault! The ones who get the blame for this is the leakers.”Kimmel then played a supercut of Hegseth complaining about “leakers” – “I don’t have time for leakers,” he said during the same Fox News interview.“You don’t have time for leakers? You are the leaker,” said an exasperated Kimmel. “You leak so much, you should be wearing Depends to work.” More
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‘An outlier’: why does the US rank low on demands for climate action?
23 April 2025, 13:19
Over the last 12 months, the United States has endured a rash of disasters worsened by the climate crisis: devastating wildfires in southern California, a catastrophic hurricane in western North Carolina, and deadly heatwaves across the country.Americans increasingly believe global heating is a serious threat that will affect them personally – and 74% want to see more climate action. Yet while that sounds high, it is still lower than most other countries around the world. What explains this disparity?New insights into this question have emerged from recent research that examines attitudes toward the climate crisis across the world and in the US specifically.A report published by Nature Climate Change last year found 89% of the world’s population wanted to see more climate action, and 69% even said they would be willing to contribute 1% of their personal income to the cause.But on all counts, the United States – the world’s largest economy and its second largest carbon polluter – ranked among the lowest in terms of willingness to contribute, demand for action and belief that others would contribute.“The climate debate in the US was always very specific in international comparison,” said Peter Andre, a behavioral economist at Safe and the Goethe University Frankfurt and a coauthor of the Nature report. He pointed to research that has found “it was always more partisan, the media landscape is structured differently than in many European countries, and many [climate misinformation campaigns] also originated in the US.”Andre and his colleagues reviewed data from 130,000 people in 125 countries and found that respondents’ willingness to contribute part of their income to the fight against climate change was highest in poorer countries. In Myanmar, which has a GDP of $1,233 per capita, 93% of respondents’ said they would contribute; in the United States, where incomes are about 70 times higher, only 48% did.“One very plausible hypothesis is that, of course, the extent that you are exposed to climate risk makes you more willing to act against it. The richer you are, the easier it is for you to adapt,” Andre said. “The other story is resistance to change. Current economies are run on fossil fuels, so the bigger the economy, the more things need to change in order to become climate neutral.”The data, which was pulled from surveys conducted by Gallup in 2021 and 2022, showed respondents in France, Japan and Canada were about as willing as Americans to contribute financially to climate action but were more likely to demand political action. Danes, on the other hand, were about as likely as Americans to demand political action but much more willing to contribute income.“We’re kind of an outlier on the global scene,” said Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist and lecturer at Yale University. “I think it’s driven in large part by strong fossil fuel interests and the close associations they have with elected officials.”The oil and gas industry spent about $220m in campaign and political action committee donations in the 2024 US election, according to a recent Yale Climate Connections analysis. About 88% of donations went toward Republican candidates, including nearly $23m toward Donald Trump and groups supporting him.According to Marlon, Americans’ “strong sense that individuals can take care of everything” also hampered support for collective climate action.Marlon’s most recent analysis of public attitudes toward climate change, published last month, found 63% of Americans said they were worried about climate change yet fewer than half (45%) thought they would be personally and significantly harmed by it.She said that even though a majority of Americans support climate action, that didn’t necessarily translate into votes. “It has not been the primary motivating factor. People are just prioritizing other issues – education, healthcare or government overreach,” she said.Carey Funk, a senior adviser with the Aspen Institute, pointed to the United States’ deep political divisions over climate policy. “Other places with a more ideological division over climate action tend to be in western Europe and in English-speaking countries, such as Canada, Australia,” she said. “The [US’s] two-party system makes the polarization over issues like this more pronounced.”Funk said distrust in traditional journalism was another important factor. Only about one-third of Americans say they trust mass media. In 2023, Funk conducted in-depth interviews with Americans who did not see climate change as a major threat, and she said many respondents expressed skepticism of legacy media. She also said messaging from climate groups does not always have its intended effects. “The more the advocates are hyping up the problem, the more skeptical people feel they need to be,” she said.Peter Fisher, a professor of political sociology at the University of Oxford and an author of The Peoples’ Climate Vote, a climate survey of 1.2 million people, said the Nature findings largely tracked with what he found: widespread support “nearly across the board” for a rapid transition away from the burning of fossil fuels. He pointed to a few notable exceptions, including Russia, the US, Canada, Australia and, to a lesser extent, the UK. Like Funk, he attributed these exceptions, in part to “partisan divisions on climate issues”.However, he stressed, even in these countries a majority of respondents favored a transition away from fossil fuels. “There is concern about climate change and people want to see action,” he said.One thing respondents across the globe had in common? A tendency to underestimate their fellow citizens. In the United States, nearly half of respondents in the Nature study were willing to contribute some of their income to fighting climate change, but respondents believed only 33% of the rest of the country were willing to do so.Fisher and other experts said making people aware that they are in fact in the majority could help them put pressure on elected officials to act against climate change.“Politicians often have much more political space than they think they do on climate change and other issues,” he said. “And so I would say this, along with climate science, provides compelling reasons for actually acting on climate.”This story is part of the 89% Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now More
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What did Pope Francis think of JD Vance? His view was more than clear | Jan-Werner Mueller
23 April 2025, 10:00
We might never quite know what Pope Francis said to the US vice-president during their very brief meeting on Sunday. In the widely shared video clip, it was hardly audible. The morning after, Francis died, and Vance jetted to visit India, finding time to tweet that his heart went out to the millions of Christians who loved Francis (implying, I suppose, that not all Catholics loved him) and patronizing the dead pontiff by calling one of his homilies “really quite beautiful”).Francis had been as outspoken as could be without naming names, when he criticized Vance in his February letter to US bishops; but he was not just registering his rebuke of Trump and Vance’s cruel treatment of refugees and migrants; he was reacting to a broader trend of instrumentalizing religion for nationalist and authoritarian populism.In February, Vance had an online “close-quarters street fight” with Rory Stewart, the former UK Conservative minister, diplomat and now professor in the practice of grand strategy at the very university from which Vance obtained his law degree. At issue was what to most of us wouldn’t seem an obvious source of social media outrage: the correct reading of St Augustine’s notion of ordo amoris, the right ordering of love.In January, Vance had alluded to the concept in an interview with the Trump courtier Sean Hannity; according to the Catholic convert, it was a “Christian concept” that love and compassion start with family, then extend to neighbors, then nation, and, last and least, reach fellow human beings as such.Stewart had registered skepticism, observing that Vance’s stance was “a bizarre take on John 15:12-13 – less Christian and more pagan tribal. We should start worrying when politicians become theologians, assume to speak for Jesus, and tell us in which order to love.” The infamously very online Vance hit back with: “Just google ‘ordo amoris’.” In typically snarky fashion, Vance then questioned Stewart’s IQ and added that “false arrogance” of the Stewart type “drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years” (never mind what would constitute appropriate or correct arrogance).As plenty of learned observers remarked at the time, complex theological questions will not have bumper-sticker-size answers. But eventually a figure not entirely irrelevant for Catholics weighed in with a view that perhaps carries indeed more weight than those of others. Francis, in a letter to US bishops, instructed the flock that “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings!”He added, driving home the rebuke without naming names, that “the true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ … that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” Apparently, Cardinal Pietro Parolin was dispatched on Saturday to explain all this to Vance again.Vance is not the only far-right populist who has smuggled nationalism into what he touts as the correct notion of Christianity. Viktor Orbán, a great model for Vance and other self-declared US “post-liberals” (meaning: anti-liberals), has been declaring for years that a proper understanding of “Christian Democracy” is not only “illiberal”, but nationalist.That would have been news to the many Catholics who experienced nation-building projects in Germany and Italy during the 19th century as outright oppressive. After all, Catholics were suspected of putting loyalty to Rome ahead of civic duties (a suspicion still very much alive in the US when JFK ran for office). Bismarck started the Kulturkampf (the original meaning of culture war) against Catholics in the 1870s; the Vatican forbade the faithful to participate in the political life of unified Italy.Far-right populists claim that only they represent what they call “the real people”. Of course, they have to explain who “the real people” are (and, who by contrast, does not truly belong). Many have instrumentalized Christianity for that purpose. Giorgia Meloni, in her autobiography, states: “The Christian identity can be secular rather than religious.” What matters is not believing (let alone actual Christian conduct), but only belonging. It’s what the social scientist Rogers Brubaker has called “Christianism”, in contrast with actual Christianity.Some far-right populists have tried to square their Catholicism with their populism by criticizing the hierarchy as a somehow illegitimate, or at least hypocritical, elite. Italy’s Matteo Salvini, who likes to flaunt the Bible and a rosary when riling up the masses of “real” Italians, pioneered this move; Vance copied it when he insinuated that there was something corrupt about church leadership; concretely he had accused US bishops of resettling “illegal immigrants” in order to obtain federal funds (an accusation deemed “very nasty” by Cardinal Timothy Dolan).The point is not that the correct understanding of Catholicism (or Christian Democratic political parties, as they have existed in Europe and Chile) has always been liberal; that’s hardly plausible. The point is that Francis reaffirmed that Catholicism is not compatible with the “America first” (and humanity last) view of the Trumpists.
Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University More
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Wednesday briefing: Can the latest ceasefire talks in London break the stalemate in Ukraine?
23 April 2025, 05:53
Good morning.Representatives from the US, Britain and France are gathering in London today to resume discussions with Ukrainian officials on a possible ceasefire in the war. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, was scheduled to attend but announced at the last minute he would no longer be present – the White House’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, will be there in his place.Overnight, the US website Axios reported that Kellogg is arriving with a full, “final” US-Russia peace plan that reportedly includes official US recognition of Crimea as part of Russia and unofficial recognition of Russian control of nearly all areas occupied since the start of the invasion. Axios cited sources with direct knowledge of the proposal. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has made clear Kyiv has not been privy to any such negotiations and said on Tuesday that “there is nothing to talk about. This violates our constitution. This is our territory, the territory of the people of Ukraine.”This latest phase of talks follows a dubious 30-hour truce and several weeks of intensified Russian bombardment of Ukrainian cities, including a particularly brutal strike that killed at least 35 people in the north-eastern city of Sumy on Palm Sunday.The months of deadlock has frustrated Trump – last week, Rubio threatened that the president might ditch the process altogether if a resolution could not be found soon. “We are not going to continue with this endeavour for weeks and months on end,” Rubio said, adding that the US had “other priorities to focus on”.For today’s newsletter, I spoke with the Guardian’s defence and security editor, Dan Sabbagh, about the status of the peace talks, and what we can expect this week. That’s right after the headlines.Five big stories
Tariffs | The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned of a “major negative shock” from Donald Trump’s tariffs and has cut growth forecasts for every major global economy. The lender cut the UK’s expected growth from 1.6% to 1.1%, a downward trend mirrored across the world.
British Steel | Redundancy plans have been halted after the government took control of the Scunthorpe steelworks this month, potentially saving up to 2,700 jobs.
US | Republican lawmakers have followed Donald Trump’s lead and rallied behind Pete Hegesth, the beleaguered US secretary of defence, who has defended his use of the Signal messaging app to share details of US military strikes on Yemen to a group including his wife and brother.
UK | Number 10 has said that Keir Starmer no longer argues that trans women are women. Starmer said yesterday that he welcomed the “real clarity” of last week’s supreme court ruling on gender recognition.
Health | More than 150,000 additional people in England are living with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) – or ME – than previously thought, with the total number thought to be about 404,000.
In depth: A win-win for Russia?View image in fullscreenLast week, Emmanuel Macron hosted peace talks in Paris in an effort to reassert Europe’s role in bringing an end to the war in Ukraine. “Everyone wants to achieve peace – a robust and sustainable peace. The question is about phasing,” the French president said. The talks suggest Trump, increasingly frustrated by his inability to end the war in the decisive manner he promised, is seeking to involve Europe more directly in the negotiations – though it remains unclear whether any real progress is being made.Russia at the tableThough Vladimir Putin has paid lip service to the idea of peace – even going so far as to express a willingness to engage in bilateral talks with Ukraine for the first time in years – he has not seemed “particularly serious in his desire”, Dan says, in part because Moscow has continued to pursue its maximalist objectives of controlling all of Ukraine’s partially occupied provinces – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.However, according to a report in the Financial Times, the Kremlin has said that it would halt its invasion of Ukraine along the current frontline if the US agreed that Crimea belonged to Russia. Ukraine has rejected any Russian claim on Crimea and reiterated that discussions should take place around the table, not in the headlines.The overall US proposal, thought to be linked to Trump’s threats to walk away from the table completely, is perhaps the first time since the early days of the war that Moscow is stepping back from its maximalist demands. On top of “de-facto recognition” of most of the occupied territories, the plan reported by Axios also includes assurances to Russia that Ukraine will not become a part of Nato, the lifting of sanctions against Russia and bigger economic cooperation between Russia and the US.In a previous attempt to pressure Kyiv into agreeing to a 30-day ceasefire, Trump has suspended all US military aid to Ukraine and blocked billions in critical shipments. There will likely be renewed pressure to accept these news terms.The change in Russia’s demands comes after Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, whom Ukraine has accused of peddling Russian narratives, met with Putin for several hours last week.What now?After today’s meetings in London, the US is expected to relay Ukraine’s response to Putin, as Witkoff is set to visit Moscow later this week in his fourth meeting with the Russian president.Ukraine’s priority seems to still be a 30-day ceasefire, as opposed to pivoting to this new US-led framework. How this will shake out in negotiations, as Trump grows increasingly tempestuous, is unclear.What if the US walks away?Bringing an end to this war has proven far more difficult than the Trump administration had hoped. Rubio’s suggestion that the US may be willing to withdraw from the talks and remove itself from the situation entirely, represent the most explicit expression of frustration and impatience so far. “To try and bring about peace is an action, but to not be involved is also an action that has consequences, such is the weight of US power,” Dan says.So what might that look like? US military aid and funding to Ukraine has already dropped significantly, with European allies stepping in to try to fill the gap. However, a complete withdrawal by Washington could still have serious consequences. “They could shut off some of the intelligence sharing, make it difficult for Ukraine to operate certain US-supplied weapons systems, which would certainly worsen Ukraine’s position on the battlefield, though it is unclear how much worse it would become,” Dan adds.“In any event, it would affect Ukrainian morale and their determination to resist Russian aggression.”Whether or not Trump ultimately walks away, this is a win-win scenario for Russia, Andrew Roth writes in his analysis: Russia is “either taking a favourable deal with the White House or waiting for Trump to lose patience”.What else we’ve been readingView image in fullscreen
A global survey has found that 89% of people across the world want stronger action on the climate crisis but trap themselves in a “spiral of silence” because they think they’re in the minority. Damian Carrington spoke to experts who said that making people aware that theirs is the majority view could unlock a “social tipping point”. Annie Kelly
Now more than ever, it “seems that Congress – with both houses controlled by Republicans – exists to do little else but flatter the man who lives at the other end of the Mall, and ratify his edicts” writes Antonia Hitchens in the New Yorker, in a comprehensive (and chilling) piece that lays bare the extent of the sycophancy and unquestioning loyalty that define the Trump White House. Nimo
On 27 February 2010, Pedro Niada woke in the middle of the night to find his house being swept into the south Pacific Ocean by a colossal tsunami wave. His story of how he and his family survived is a gripping read by Jonathan Franklin. Annie
Last month, the government announced plans to get rid of the leasehold system and switch it out with a new law that makes all new build flats commonhold. Jessica Murray and Robyn Vinter helpfully explain what that means in practice. Nimo
“Good honest folk in this country are paying for this”; the cost of spiralling energy theft across the UK is laid bare in this report by energy correspondent Jill Ambrose who investigated how cannabis farms and bitcoin miners pile an extra £50 a year on every one of the country’s household bills. Annie
skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSportView image in fullscreenFootball | Matheus Nunes scored in stoppage time to hand Manchester City a 2-1 victory over Aston Villa and give the hosts a major advantage in the top-five race.Rugby union | England’s most-capped player, Ben Youngs, will be retiring from professional rugby after representing England a record 127 times. Youngs made his professional club rugby debut as a 17-year-old for Leicester and has been a one-club player ever since.Golf | The Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews (R&A) has said it would “love” Donald Trump’s Turnberry golf course to host the golf Open Championship in July, a reversal of its decision in 2021 that Trump’s course would not be used to stage championships after the 6 January attack on the US Capitol.The front pagesView image in fullscreenThe Guardian has for its splash today “IMF blames Trump tariffs for ‘major negative shock’ to world economy”. But, says the Express, “Reeves cannot blame Trump for UK’s growth ‘mess’”. The Times runs with “Slave labour setback to Miliband’s green goals”. “In the arms of God” – the Mirror has a full-page picture of Pope Francis lying in state. “Kemi: PM owes apology to so many women” – fallout from the supreme court sex ruling, in the Daily Mail. The i reports “Dash for cash ISAs: savers scramble to lock in best rates before reforms hit”. “Trump to let Putin keep seized land” says the Telegraph and the Financial Times has “Putin’s offer to halt war at current front line piles pressure on Ukraine”. “Instant sack for bad cops” is the main story in the Metro.Today in FocusView image in fullscreenThe UK supreme court and the definition of a womanA ruling on equality law has caused relief, fear – and confusion. Libby Brooks reportsCartoon of the day | Rebecca HendinView image in fullscreenThe UpsideA bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all badView image in fullscreenWorking with seaweed ink reminded the acclaimed artist Antony Gormley of the “plough mud in West Wittering”, instantly transporting him back to the smell and atmosphere of his childhood.Gormley is one of 16 artists asked to create ocean-inspired artworks using ink made from kelp grown in the waters off the island of Skye to raise money for ocean conservation. The project clearly held great emotional resonance for Gormley who spoke of how he feels most alive “when I am in the embrace of seawater” and his belief that the oceans will endure the devastation humanity is wreaking on them and continue to nurture life on earth.The art created from the Art for Your Oceans project will be sold to raise money for WWF ocean conservation projects in the UK and beyond.Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every SundayBored at work?And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
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