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      You can judge someone by their enemies. I write for the Guardian because it has all the right ones | Arwa Mahdawi

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      The year is 2050. The US government is run by President Elon Musk and his 690 children. Donald Trump, immortalized as an AI hologram, continues to send ALL CAPS tweets ALL THE TIME. The US has a special new relationship with the UK: the British Isles have been turned into a SpaceX rocket factory.In this brave new world, might is right. International human rights law doesn’t exist anymore. Journalists don’t exist either. Kash Patel, who Trump picked as his FBI director in 2024, promised to “come after people in the media” and he followed through. Now state news is piped directly into people’s brains via Musk’s proprietary microchips.I wish I could say this was all tongue-in-cheek, all completely fantastical. But it increasingly feels like we are marching towards a techno-authoritarian future. Over the past year we’ve seen norms shattered. We’ve seen what Amnesty International, along with many leading experts, have termed a genocide in Gaza, become horrifically normalized. We’ve seen international law dangerously undermined, an accelerated rollback of reproductive rights, and attacks on press freedom. We’ve seen book bans, and school curriculums warped by rightwing ideologues – with public schools in Florida teaching the “benefits” of slavery.As Trump, who has called the press “the enemy of the people”, readies himself for his “revenge” term, we’ve also seen his former critics scramble to kiss the ring. Two major (billionaire-owned) US newspapers refused to endorse a candidate in the US election, seemingly out of fear of getting on Trump’s wrong side. Anticipatory obedience, a term coined by the historian Timothy Snyder, is the phrase of the moment.At the Guardian we’re already practicing anticipatory disobedience. You can judge someone by their enemies – and the Guardian has lots of enemies in high places. The delightful Musk has described the Guardian as “the most insufferable newspaper on planet Earth” and “a laboriously vile propaganda machine”. (Propaganda, you see, is when you hold the most powerful people on earth to account.)As you may have guessed, this is where I ask you to support our work – which, because we are not owned by oligarchs, is only possible because of readers like you.I want you to know that I don’t make this request lightly. Over the past year, which has been the very worst year of my life, I have woken up every day to horrific, and seemingly never-ending, pictures of dead children in Gaza and felt utter despair. I have watched as Palestinians like me are dehumanized by many in the western media. The likes of the editorial board of the Washington Post argue that there should be two tiers of justice, and the ICC shouldn’t investigate war crimes against Palestinians. I have agonized over the role of journalism and asked myself again and again what the point of writing is. And I have, to be completely honest, felt frustrated by some of the Guardian’s own coverage of Gaza.But I wouldn’t still be writing for the Guardian if I didn’t believe it to be an essential force for good in the world; one which we simply can’t afford to lose. I write for the Guardian, and I’m asking for your support now, because there is no other media outlet with the global reach – and no paywall – that stands for progressive values in the way that the Guardian does. There is certainly no other comparable media outlet that would have let me write uncensored about Palestine in the way the Guardian has.And, of course, I write about other things as well: everything from woke chicken to feminism to vagina candles. One of the things I appreciate most about the Guardian is that although we do serious work, we don’t always take ourselves too seriously – there’s still room for humor. And in dark times, humor is not some sort of indulgence, it’s essential to getting by.As we head into a new year I hope you will consider supporting us. At the very least, please do join me in putting a very delicate middle finger up to all the Musks of the world, who would be ecstatic if the Guardian ceased to exist.You can make your contribution to the Guardian here. More

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      ‘Incredibly harmful’: why Trump’s FBI and DoJ picks scare civil liberties experts

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      By tapping two combative ultra-loyalists to run the FBI and the justice department, Donald Trump has sparked fears they will pursue the president-elect’s calls for “revenge” against his political foes and sack officials who Trump demonizes as “deep state” opponents, say ex-justice department prosecutors.Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, who Trump has nominated to run the FBI and Department of Justice, respectively, have been unswerving loyalists to Trump for years, promoting Trump’s false claims that his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden was due to fraud.Patel was a top lawyer on the House intelligence panel under rightwing member Devin Nunes for part of Trump’s first term and then held a few posts in the Trump administration including at the national security council advising the president.Bondi, a recent corporate lobbyist and an ex-Florida attorney general, defended Trump during his first impeachment and was active on the campaign trail during the late stages of his 2024 run.Patel and Bondi have each echoed Trump’s calls for taking revenge against key Democrats and officials, including ones who pursued criminal charges against Trump for his aggressive efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat and his role in inflaming the January 6 attack on the Capitol that led to five deaths.Trump has lavished praise on both picks, calling Patel a “brilliant lawyer” and “advocate for truth”, while hailing Bondi as “loyal” and “qualified”. But critics say their rhetoric and threats are “incredibly harmful to public trust” in the two agencies undermining the integrity of the FBI and justice department, and potentially spurring violence.Patel promised last year on Steve Bannon’s show to “go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media … who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections”.Patel, 44, who last year published a “deep state” enemies list as part of a book, added:“We’re going to come after you … Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”At the end of his first term as Trump scrambled aggressively to block Biden’s win, he briefly tried to install Patel as number two at the FBI or the CIA for support, but the idea died when the then attorney general, Bill Barr, vowed “over my dead body”.Meanwhile, Bondi, 59, told Fox News last year that when Trump wins “you know what’s going to happen: the Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated. Because the deep state … they were hiding in the shadows.”Bondi added: “But now, they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated, and the House needs to be cleaned out. Because now we know who most of them are; there’s a record of it, and we can clean house next turn. And that’s what has to happen.”Fears about the two nominees were compounded by Trump’s comments on Meet the Press on Sunday when he said he wouldn’t tell the justice department to prosecute his political enemies, but added threateningly that the House members on the panel that investigated the January 6 insurrection “should go to jail”.Ex-justice department prosecutors worry that Trump’s two picks will exact retribution against Trump foes, undermining the independence of both the justice department and the FBI and damaging the rule of law.“The rhetoric of Bondi and Patel is incredibly harmful to public trust in our government institutions and the reputations of individual public servants,” said Barbara McQuade, a former top prosecutor in eastern Michigan who now teaches law at the University of Michigan. “There’s absolutely no public evidence of wrongdoing to ‘rig’ the 2020 election.“Pledges to prosecute the prosecutors and investigate the investigators based on the complete absence of evidence is reckless because even if investigations do not materialize, unhinged members of the public will hear these bombastic accusations as a call to action.”Similarly, the former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich said: “Bondi and Patel are election deniers, in the face of the adjudication of more than 60 cases rejecting claims of election fraud in 2020. This is alarming.“Members of the Senate judiciary committee have a duty to explore the basis of those often-repeated beliefs. If Bondi and Patel maintain that the election was stolen, they either are liars – and lying under oath is a crime – or they are so detached from reality that they shouldn’t be trusted to run a two-person convenience store, much less the DoJ and the FBI.”The former federal prosecutor and Columbia law professor Daniel Richman likens Trump’s nominees to his heavy reliance in his real estate career on Roy Cohn, the late mafia lawyer and chief counsel to rightwing senator Joseph McCarthy.“Still casting about for a Roy Cohn replacement, Trump has gone to people like Bondi and Patel whose loyalty comes from their utter dependence on his favor,” Richman said.Richman added: “But their lack of experience with the agencies he wants them to lead promises a rocky road ahead, both for them and the agencies.”Richman noted: “Presidents can pardon and otherwise kill cases and his loyal minions can disrupt agency operations, but I suspect they will soon be railing at what they call ‘resistance’ and what everyone else calls rule-following.”Such concerns about both nominees have been reinforced by their eager echoing of Trump’s conspiratorial obsession of going after “deep state” foes, as well as their old ties to Trump and backgrounds.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPatel, who lacks experience leading an agency, shares Trump’s obsession and vindictiveness towards political critics and the press who Trump has branded an “enemy of the people”.Last year in his book Government Gangsters, Patel went further in an appendix where he included 60 “members of the Executive Branch Deep State” that consisted largely of top Democrats and Trump critics. Patel also wrote that Trump “must fire the top ranks of the FBI”.“Then, all those who manipulated evidence, hid exculpatory information, or in any way abused their authority for political ends must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Patel said.Patel’s incendiary comments and writings could lead to confirmation problems by the US Senate during hearings. Chris Wray, who Trump appointed as director after firing James Comey in 2017 and who Trump has often criticized, has three years left in his 10-year term, so he would have to resign or be fired to make way for Patel.“Kash Patel is manifestly unqualified,” said the ex-federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. “Given his intemperate support for retribution against the deep state and Trump’s political ‘foes’, he is temperamentally unqualified for the job.”While Bondi is an equally staunch Trump loyalist, she is expected to have fewer confirmation problems. Trump tapped her for the post within hours of his first candidate for AG, the ex-Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, dropping out after serious allegations arose of sexual misconduct that led to a House ethics inquiry while he was in office.Still, Bondi’s vociferous election denialism and attacks on the so-called “deep state” represent a sharp break historically with the rhetoric of attorneys general which critics are raising strong fears about.After Trump’s defeat in 2020, Bondi co-chaired the law and justice section at the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute, which has supplied a few of Trump’s new picks, including billionaire Linda McMahon for education secretary.Bondi also spent several years as a lobbyist for the powerhouse Florida firm led by the Republican fundraiser Brian Ballard, where her clients included Amazon, General Motors, and the government of Qatar.Often seen as a political operator, Bondi has ties to Trump that go back further and have raised some red flags. When Bondi was Florida’s attorney general in 2013, Trump donated $25,000 to a Pac backing her re-election. The donation’s timing drew scrutiny given that Bondi’s spokesperson told a newspaper just days before the donation that the AG’s office was reviewing a class-action lawsuit by New York which had been filed against Trump University for fraud.Veteran prosecutors warn that if the Senate confirms Bondi and Patel they could create a climate for violence against Trump’s foes.“I’m more worried about threats, harassment and political violence than I am in the success of baseless investigations,” McQuade said. “Bondi and Patel will be unable to get bogus charges past a grand jury, a judge or a trial jury, but someone who believes this deep state nonsense could decide to take matters into their own hands.”Looking ahead, Bromwich stressed too that if Patel and Bondi pursued baseless inquiries, they could boomerang.“Lawyers and investigators who willingly participate in the pursuit of a revenge and retribution agenda risk losing not only the respect of their peers but their future livelihoods. In particular, lawyers who initiate investigations and pursue prosecutions without factual predicates risk being the subject of ethics complaints and the loss of their law licenses.” More

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      Without proof, top Trump adviser accuses January 6 committee of destroying evidence – as it happened

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      Jason Miller, a top adviser to Donald Trump, went on CNN earlier today to defend the president-elect’s assertion that the bipartisan House committee tasked with investigating the January 6 insurrection destroyed evidence.Trump used that claim to then argue that the lawmakers who took part in the investigation should go to jail. The assertion appears factually wobbly, since the committee’s report and its evidence remains easily accessible online.Asked in the CNN interview if Trump would have Kash Patel, his nominee to lead the FBI, go after the committee members, Miller responded:
      I do have to take issue with saying that the select committee didn’t go and destroy records. They have wiped everything out …
      Other committees have looked through and said that those records are gone, that they don’t exist, that they’re not there. Even Republicans who are now in charge have said that those records are gone, that they’re not there. So I would completely take issue with that. We’re going to have to agree to disagree, but they got rid of it.
      But he seemed to moderate Trump’s comments slightly, arguing that the president-elect expects Patel and Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, “to apply the law equally”:
      He wants everyone who he puts into key positions of leadership, again, whether that’s Pam Bondi as the AG, Kash Patel, the FBI, or anybody else, to apply the law equally to everybody. Now, that means, if you’re somebody who’s committed some very serious crimes, who’s committed very serious felonies, who’s, for example, leaked confidential information, in direct violation of laws that are in place, well, then, obviously, that sets you up for different things …
      But as far as the politics aspect, if you listen to the entire interview with President Trump, he said he’s going to leave that up to the law enforcement agents in charge, including Pam Bondi and Kash Patel.
      Donald Trump this weekend made clear he would pardon rioters facing charges or convicted of involvement in January 6, while saying members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the violence “should go to jail”. That prompted a response from its vice-chair, Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney, who rejected his criticism, saying: “Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power.” Meanwhile, the supreme court turned aside an effort by Trump’s attorneys to lift the gag order imposed on him in his hush-money case.Here’s what else happened today:

      Jason Miller, a top adviser to Trump, said the House committee that investigated January 6 destroyed evidence, but provided no proof for his claim. He also slightly walked back Trump’s quip that the lawmakers involved should be jailed.

      Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator, said the January 6 committee members do not “have a reason to be afraid now”, but that their work is worth of investigating.

      Jim Clyburn, a veteran Democratic congressman, warned that Trump’s comments should be taken seriously, adding that they were reminiscent of the rhetoric that led to the rise of Jim Crow.

      Two senators proposed a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on supreme court justices, but it faces long odds.

      Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican who will chair the Senate judiciary committee next year, sent the FBI director and his deputy a letter saying they should resign for not cooperating with Congress and politicizing the bureau.
      Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary is back on Capitol Hill for more meetings with Republican senators, including Joni Ernst, whose views on him are seen as vital to his chances of confirmation.Ernst, a combat veteran and sexual assault survivor, has signaled hesitance with confirming Hegseth, after reports emerged of his excessive drinking and poor treatment of women, including a sexual assault allegation.Hegseth and Ernst met again today, but it wasn’t clear if the senator had made up her mind about Trump’s Pentagon pick. As he left her office, Hegseth said that it was a “very good meeting”, but little else.Chuck Grassley, the long-serving Iowa senator who will chair the chamber’s judiciary committee next year, has called for the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and his deputy to resign, saying they politicized the agency and refused to cooperate with him.Should Wray and his deputy FBI director, Paul Abbate, heed Grassley’s call, it would clear the way for Senate Republicans to confirm the former defense official Kash Patel to the job. Patel has drawn concern for calling for the imprisonment of journalists and vowing to radically downsize the FBI.In a letter sent to Wray, Grassley wrote:
      Rather than turn over a new leaf at the FBI, you’ve continued to read from the old playbook of weaponization, double standards, and a relentless game of hide-and-seek with the Congress. As your tenure as FBI director comes to an end, I want to take this opportunity to tell you where you went wrong, for the benefit of the bureau and that of your successor.
      Grassley went on to criticize Wray and Abbate for not being forthcoming enough on a range of matters, including sexual harassment claims made by female FBI employees, the vetting of evacuees from Afghanistan, and its agents’ search of Mar-a-Lago for classified materials Donald Trump was accused of hiding there.Grassley concludes:
      For the good of the country, it’s time for you and your deputy to move on to the next chapter in your lives. I’ve spent my career fighting for transparency, and I’ve always called out those in government who have fought against it. For the public record, I must do so once again now. I therefore must express my vote of no confidence in your continued leadership of the FBI. President-elect Trump has already announced his intention to nominate a candidate to replace you, and the Senate will carefully consider that choice. For my part, I’ve also seen enough, and hope your respective successors will learn from these failures.
      If they do not step down, Trump has the power to fire them.In his interview with NBC, Donald Trump also mulled putting his health secretary nominee, Robert F Kennedy Jr, in charge of researching the very vaccines he has pushed conspiracy theories against. Here’s more, from the Guardian’s Robert Tait:Donald Trump has said Robert F Kennedy Jr, his nominee for health secretary, may investigate a supposed link between vaccines and autism – despite a consensus among the medical establishment debunking any such connection.In a wide-ranging interview with NBC, the US president-elect claimed an investigation was justified by the increasing prevalence of autism diagnoses among American children over the past 25 years.“When you look at what’s going on with disease and sickness in our country, something’s wrong,” Trump said after the interviewer, Kristen Welker, asked him if he wanted to see some vaccines eliminated – a position for which Kennedy has argued.“If you take a look at autism, go back 25 years, autism was almost nonexistent. It was, you know, one out of 100,000 and now it’s close to one out of 100.”According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one out of every 36 children in the US were diagnosed with autism in 2020, compared with one in 150 in 2000.Kennedy, a noted vaccine sceptic, has repeatedly peddled discredited theories that the conditions is caused by childhood vaccinations.“I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” he said in a 2023 Fox News interview in which he called for more vaccine testing.“We should have the same kind of testing place or control trials that we have for other every other medication. Vaccines are exempt from pre-licensing control trials, so that there’s no way that anybody can tell the risk profile of those products, or even the relative benefits of those products before they’re mandated. We should have that kind of testing.”Jason Miller, a top adviser to Donald Trump, went on CNN earlier today to defend the president-elect’s assertion that the bipartisan House committee tasked with investigating the January 6 insurrection destroyed evidence.Trump used that claim to then argue that the lawmakers who took part in the investigation should go to jail. The assertion appears factually wobbly, since the committee’s report and its evidence remains easily accessible online.Asked in the CNN interview if Trump would have Kash Patel, his nominee to lead the FBI, go after the committee members, Miller responded:
      I do have to take issue with saying that the select committee didn’t go and destroy records. They have wiped everything out …
      Other committees have looked through and said that those records are gone, that they don’t exist, that they’re not there. Even Republicans who are now in charge have said that those records are gone, that they’re not there. So I would completely take issue with that. We’re going to have to agree to disagree, but they got rid of it.
      But he seemed to moderate Trump’s comments slightly, arguing that the president-elect expects Patel and Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, “to apply the law equally”:
      He wants everyone who he puts into key positions of leadership, again, whether that’s Pam Bondi as the AG, Kash Patel, the FBI, or anybody else, to apply the law equally to everybody. Now, that means, if you’re somebody who’s committed some very serious crimes, who’s committed very serious felonies, who’s, for example, leaked confidential information, in direct violation of laws that are in place, well, then, obviously, that sets you up for different things …
      But as far as the politics aspect, if you listen to the entire interview with President Trump, he said he’s going to leave that up to the law enforcement agents in charge, including Pam Bondi and Kash Patel.
      The idea is not new. Similar bills, like the Supreme Court Tenure Establishment and Retirement Modernization Act of 2023, which was introduced in the US house of representatives and has more than 60 co-sponsors, also calls for 18-year terms for supreme court justices and the establishment of a process for the president to appoint a new justice every two years.Another bill introduced this year by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, called the Judicial Modernization and Transparency Act, also called for overhauling the supreme court. But unlike the amendment proposed by Welch and Manchin, this would not limit their terms, but rather the total number of justices, allowing for expanding the court from nine to 15.The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law says supreme court justices are getting appointed at younger ages and living longer than they used to, which means they are sitting on the court longer than usual.Donald Trump appointed more justices during his first term than Barack Obama or George W Bush did during each of their two-term presidencies respectively.About two-thirds of Americans support imposing term limits on the members of the nation’s highest court, according to the results of the the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey released in September.Although Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who co-authored the proposed amendment to limit the supreme court justice terms with Welch, is seen as an obstructionist by Democrats, this latest proposal is a popular idea within the party.The progressive House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last year said: “We have a broad level of tools to deal with misconduct, overreach and abuse of power in the supreme court [that] has not been receiving the adequate oversight necessary in order to preserve their own legitimacy.“And in the process, they themselves have been destroying the legitimacy of the court, which is profoundly dangerous for our entire democracy.”Manchin left the party in May and registered as an independent after criticism for pushing against Joe Biden’s ambitious legislative goals, like those related to tackling the climate crisis or taxing the wealthy.Senator Pete Welch of Vermont took to X to announce his amendment to impose term limits on supreme court justices. He wrote:
      No other major democracy in the world gives lifetime seats to judges who sit on their highest court. It leads to divisive confirmation processes and reduced trust from the public.
      Donald Trump this weekend made clear he would pardon rioters facing charges or convicted of involvement in January 6, while saying members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the violence “should go to jail”. That prompted a response from its vice-chair, Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney, who rejected his criticism, saying: “Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power”. Meanwhile, the supreme court turned aside an effort by Trump’s attorneys to lift the gag order imposed on him in his hush-money case.Here’s what else has happened today so far:

      Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator, said the January 6 committee members do not “have a reason to be afraid now”, but that their work is worth of investigating.

      Jim Clyburn, a veteran Democratic congressman, warned that Trump’s comments should be taken seriously, adding that they were reminiscent of the rhetoric that led to the rise of Jim Crow.

      Two senators proposed a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on supreme court justices, but it faces long odds.
      The Democratic senator Peter Welch and independent senator Joe Manchin have proposed a constitutional amendment that would impose term limits on supreme court justices, saying such a move is necessary to restore faith in the nation’s highest court.“The current lifetime appointment structure is broken and fuels polarizing confirmation battles and political posturing that has eroded public confidence in the highest court in our land. Our amendment maintains that there shall never be more than nine justices and would gradually create regular vacancies on the Court, allowing the President to appoint a new justice every two years with the advice and consent of the United States Senate,” said Manchin, who is weeks away from concluding his 14 years of representing West Virginia.The senators cited one of many surveys that found dismal approval ratings for the court, where conservatives have a six-justice supermajority and liberals a three-justice minority. Welch, a recent arrival in the chamber who represents Vermont, said:
      Taking action to restore public trust in our nation’s most powerful Court is as urgent as it is necessary. Setting term limits for Supreme Court Justices will cut down on political gamesmanship, and is commonsense reform supported by a majority of Americans.
      Here’s how their proposal would work:
      The amendment would institute nonrenewable, 18-year terms for new U.S. Supreme Court Justices, with a new term starting every two years …
      The proposed amendment would not adjust the tenure of sitting Justices, but rather institute a transition period to maintain regular vacancies as current Justices retire. During that period, 18-year terms will begin every two years, regardless of when a current Justice leaves the bench. Once a current Justice retires, the newly appointed Justice will serve out the remainder of the next open 18-year term. The amendment would not change the overall number of Justices on the Court.
      It’s unlikely the idea will go far, particularly with Republicans in January assuming the majority in the chamber tasked with confirming the president’s appointments to the supreme court.It’s also proven difficult to win ratification of constitutional amendments. None has been approved since 1992, and the process typically requires the approval of supermajorities in the Senate and House of Representatives, as well as the legislatures in three-fourths of states.Police in Pennsylvania are reportedly questioning a man in connection with the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, in New York City last week.News of Thompson’s murder was greeted with sympathy and cheers on some corners of social media, particularly from people who are critical of the insurer’s treatment of its customers. Over the weekend, the Democratic congressman Ro Khanna reacted to that sentiment by saying it is a sign that the US healthcare system needs real reform. Here’s more:
      Progressive congressperson Ro Khanna has sympathy for the murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson – yet at the same time is not surprised that the killing reignited a national dialogue about inequities in the US healthcare system, he said in an interview on Sunday.
      ‘It was horrific,’ the California Democrat said on ABC This Week with respect to the slaying of Thompson, whose survivors include his widow and two sons ages 16 and 19. ‘I mean, this is a father we’re talking about – of two children, and … there is no justification for violence.
      ‘But the outpouring afterwards has not surprised me.’
      Khanna told the show’s host, Martha Raddatz, that he agreed with fellow liberal and US senator Bernie Sanders when he wrote recently on social media: ‘We waste hundreds of billions a year on health care administrative expenses that make insurance CEOs and wealthy stockholders incredibly rich while 85 million Americans go uninsured or underinsured. Health care is a human right. We need Medicare for all.
      ‘After years, Sanders is winning this debate,’ Khanna said, referring to the Vermont senator’s support for a single-payer national health insurance system seen in other wealthy democracies. More

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      Pope Francis and advocates add to pleas for Biden to clear federal death row

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      Pope Francis has called for commutations for people on death row in the US, as religious leaders, civil rights groups and current and former prosecutors urge Joe Biden to take executive action on capital punishment.In his Sunday prayer, Pope Francis, who has been a vocal death penalty opponent, said: “It comes to my heart to ask all of you to pray for the prisoners in the United States who are on death row. Let’s pray that their sentence would be commuted [or] changed.”On Monday, advocates fighting against capital punishment released letters from hundreds of leaders asking the president to clear federal death row before Donald Trump returns to office, with pleas from Black pastors, Catholic leaders, former prison officials, leading civil rights groups and mental health advocates.Biden has been facing intensifying pressure to grant clemency to people with death sentences after he recently announced that he was using his executive authority to pardon his own son.Advocates expect the incoming administration to be deadly if Biden doesn’t take action. In the final year of Trump’s first term, the US government executed 13 people in rapid succession, killing more people in the federal system than under the previous 10 presidents combined. The rushed process claimed the lives of people with intellectual disabilities, prevented defendants from presenting new evidence, and involved execution methods that lawyers said were torturous.Some of Trump’s first-term executions happened despite objections from prosecutors and victims, and took place after the US supreme court quickly overruled lower-court decisions halting the proceedings.The Catholic Mobilizing Network, which represents 30,000 advocates, including bishops and dioceses, urged Biden, who is Catholic, to commute every federal death row sentence, writing: “We know that the federal death row, just as in the states, is marred by significant arbitrariness, including racial bias and the imposition on vulnerable individuals such as those with intellectual disability, brain damage, and serious mental illness. There is also a risk that innocent people will be put to death.”Biden has previously opposed capital punishment and issued a moratorium on executions when he became president, but he has not yet indicated whether he will commute sentences.There are 40 men currently on federal death row, and 38% of them are Black, although Black people comprise 14% of the US population. Nearly one in four of the men were 21 or younger at the time of the crime. And 43% of them come from only three states – Missouri, Texas and Virginia.In another letter released on Monday, 38 current and former district attorneys, attorneys general and former US prosecutors and justice department officials laid out the flaws in capital punishment.“We know that we have not always executed the worst of the worst, but often instead put to death the unluckiest of the unlucky – the impoverished, the poorly represented, and the most broken,” they wrote. “Time and again, we have executed people with long histories of debilitating mental illness, childhoods marred by unspeakable physical and mental abuse, and intellectual disabilities that have prevented them from leading independent adult lives. We have also likely executed the innocent.” The group also pointed to studies demonstrating that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to violence and does not reduce crime.A group of current prison officials, including some whom have overseen executions, pointed to the harms correctional staff face when carrying out capital punishment: “We have witnessed the depression, suicide, substance abuse, domestic turmoil, and other manifestations of trauma in our colleagues that study after study has documented among correctional staff who are impacted by executions, and on those close to them.”Families of murder victims also pleaded with Biden, writing that the death penalty “wastes many millions of dollars that could be better invested in programs that actually reduce crime and violence and that address the needs of families like ours”.Others now urging Biden to act include the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a coalition of Latino advocacy organizations and the Innocence Project.Trump intensified his pro-death penalty rhetoric during his campaign, calling for executions of “everyone who gets caught selling drugs”. And Trump allies, through the rightwing manifesto Project 2025, have called for the expansion of capital punishment and for the US to do “everything possible to obtain finality” for the 40 people on federal death row.In an interview before the election, Billie Allen, who is on federal death row and has long maintained his innocence, recounted to the Guardian what it was like to witness rapid executions under Trump’s first term: “I came in at 19. These are people I grew up with. I’m seeing them be carried out, never to return again, never to see them smile or hear them laughing.”He said he wished wished people recognized death row defendants were capable of change: “The majority of people here become better men for themselves, their family and friends and supporters.” More

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      RFK Jr to research unsupported link between vaccines and autism, Trump says

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      Donald Trump has said Robert F Kennedy Jr, his nominee for health secretary, may investigate a supposed link between vaccines and autism – despite a consensus among the medical establishment debunking any such connection.In a wide-ranging interview with NBC, the US president-elect claimed an investigation was justified by the increasing prevalence of autism diagnoses among American children over the past 25 years.“When you look at what’s going on with disease and sickness in our country, something’s wrong,” Trump said after the interviewer, Kristen Welker, asked him if he wanted to see some vaccines eliminated – a position for which Kennedy has argued.“If you take a look at autism, go back 25 years, autism was almost nonexistent. It was, you know, one out of 100,000 and now it’s close to one out of 100.”According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one out of every 36 children in the US were diagnosed with autism in 2020, compared with one in 150 in 2000.Kennedy, a noted vaccine sceptic, has repeatedly peddled discredited theories that the conditions is caused by childhood vaccinations.“I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” he said in a 2023 Fox News interview in which he called for more vaccine testing.“We should have the same kind of testing place or control trials that we have for other every other medication. Vaccines are exempt from pre-licensing control trials, so that there’s no way that anybody can tell the risk profile of those products, or even the relative benefits of those products before they’re mandated. We should have that kind of testing.”Trump – who has previously said Kennedy would be allowed to “go wild” on health – said his health secretary pick would not “reinvent the wheel totally”.“He’s not going to upset any system,” he said.But on autism, he added: “Somebody has to find out. If you go back 25 years ago, you had very little autism. Now you have it … When you talk about autism, because it was brought up, and you look at the amount we have today versus 20 or 25 years ago, it’s pretty scary.”Scientists have attributed the rise in autism diagnoses to improved screening methods while saying it is caused by a complex mix of factors, including genetics, environment and conditions during pregnancy and birth.The World Health Organization has definitely ruled out a connection between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine or other childhood inoculations.Research led by the British doctor Andrew Wakefield asserting a link between autism and the MMR jab was later discredited, with the Lancet, a medical journal, issuing a full retraction of a paper it had published based on it.Wakefield was later banned from practicing in Britain after being found by the country’s general medical council to have broken its rules on research and to have acted “dishonestly” and with a “callous disregard” for children’s health.The Guardian reported in 2018 that Wakefield had attended an inaugural ball marking the start of Trump’s first presidency the previous year at which he was quoted calling for a shakeup of the US medical establishment.“What we need now is a huge shakeup at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – a huge shakeup,” he said. “We need that to change dramatically.” More

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      Liz Cheney calls Trump threat to jail her an ‘assault on the rule of law’

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      The former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney has described a threat by President-elect Donald Trump to imprison her alongside others involved in an investigation of his supporters’ 2021 US Capitol attack an “assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic”.Cheney was responding to comments made by Trump during an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday in which he said members of the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack “should go to jail” – but said he would not direct the attorney general or FBI he appoints during his second presidency to pursue the matter.During that interview, Trump said: “Cheney did something that’s inexcusable, along with [Bennie] Thompson and the people on the … committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps.“They deleted and destroyed all evidence”, Trump alleged without evidentiary support, adding that those responsible were Cheney and Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat. “For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail.”In a statement containing her response and obtained by the New York Times, Cheney said Trump had “lied about the Jan. 6 … committee” and that there was “no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis” to go after the panel’s members.“There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting – a Justice Department investigation of the work of a congressional committee – and any lawyer who attempts to pursue that course would quickly find themselves engaged in sanctionable conduct,” Cheney added.She added that Trump “attempted to overturn” the 2020 presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden so that he could remain in the Oval Office by mobilizing an “angry mob”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history,” said Cheney, the daughter of the former US vice-president Dick Cheney. “Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”The exchange comes as Biden is reportedly considering offering sweeping pardons to those who could become targets of Trump’s promised “retribution” against his political enemies.Efforts to prosecute Trump over the Capitol attack have been abandoned after he defeated Vice-President Kamala Harris in the 5 November White House election. But Cheney – a former Harris campaign surrogate – said material collected by the special counsel Jack Smith should be preserved and “as much of that information as possible should be disclosed in the special counsel’s upcoming report”. More

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      ‘Currying favor with Trump’: Eric Adams’ rightward drift sparks speculation as prosecution looms

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      Eric Adams was elected New York mayor as a centrist-sounding Democrat. A Black former cop who talked tough-on-crime but fit fairly squarely in the overwhelmingly Democratic politics of the city.But Adams was also always famed for his eccentricities and foibles – scandals over the true extent of his veganism, whether or not he might actually live in New Jersey, and some of the tall tales he would recount from his past.But few New Yorkers might have expected the most recent twist in the Adams’ story: his firm drift rightward, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory.In fact, Adams’ ever-closer relationship with Trump has sparked speculation as to exactly what the Democrat mayor of a famously liberal city – embroiled in deep legal troubles – might want from America’s soon-to-be Republican president.Recently, Adams did not dismiss switching to the Republican party, in which he had been a party member from 1995 through 2002, before turning Democrat. “I’m a part of the American party,” he said. “I love this country.”Last week alone Adams stunned observers with the depths of his rightward tilt on one of the key issues of the election: immigration. Adapting the language of extreme Republicans – who have fear-mongered over immigrant crime – Adams came out swinging for Trump, who plans a mass deportation of millions of immigrants as soon he gets back in the White House.“Well, cancel me because I’m going to protect the people of the city,” Adams said when asked if he plans to cooperate with Trump’s plan for federal deportation agents to remove migrants accused of felony crimes in the city.The comment came as Adams said he had requested a meeting with Trump’s incoming “border czar”, Tom Homan. Adams said he wanted “it clear that I’m not going to be warring with this administration”.He added: “I would love to sit down with the border czar and hear his thoughts on how we are going to address those who are harming our citizens. Find out what his plans are, where our common grounds are. We can work together.”Adams’ hard line adds a new wrinkle to how Democrat-led “sanctuary cities” such as New York, Los Angeles and Denver will adapt to the second Trump administration and raises the prospect that some top Democrat leaders may actively assist mass deportation.Adams is already looking to roll back sanctuary city laws approved by his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, that prohibit New York law enforcement – the NYPD and correction and probation departments – from cooperating with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents unless the cases involve suspected terrorists or serious public safety risks.View image in fullscreenSome moderate Democrats on the city’s usually progressive-leaning city council are supporting the move, with the councilmember Robert Holden calling in June for a repeal, saying: “Sanctuary city laws put all New Yorkers, both immigrants and longtime residents, in danger.”Kathy Hochul, New York’s governor, said recently that while she supports legal immigrants, including asylum seekers, she will cooperate with the Trump administration to remove immigrants who break the law. “Someone breaks the law, I’ll be the first one to call up Ice and say: ‘Get them out of here,’” Hochul said.But some observers look at Adams’ tack towards Trump and see other factors at play, beyond playing to a segment of the electorate tired of Democrats’ traditional softer positions on immigrants.Adams is facing a multi-count federal complaint over alleged fundraising abuses involving Turkey brought by the outgoing local US district attorney Damian Williams, a Joe Biden nominee. Adams’ trial is set for the spring, just as his mayoral re-election campaign moves into high gear.Trump has nominated Jay Clayton to be Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor. Clayton is known for bringing white-collar corruption cases while serving as commissioner of the US Securities and Exchange Commission but has no experience litigating criminal law cases, raising the question as to whether Adams is cozying up to Trump in the hope that the complaint will be dropped.Adams is also now on the same page as Trump when it comes to unfounded claims of the political weaponization of the Department of Justice. In September, Adams defiantly suggested prosecutors had gone after him because he had criticized Biden’s immigration policies.“Despite our pleas, when the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system with no relief, I put the people of New York before party and politics,” he said. “I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be a target – and a target I became.”But amid all the fresh posturing there is no doubt that immigration is a thorny political issue.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore than 200,000 people have come to New York over the past several years after entering the United States seeking asylum. The Adams administration has projected the cost of housing and support to New York taxpayers could hit $10bn by June next year, and Trump made pronounced inroads in the city in last month’s election, particularly among Asian voters and Hispanic voters.Yet Adams has struck a notably hard line and nationalistic language that echoes Trump. Last week, he floated the idea of deporting migrants who had been accused but not convicted of felony crimes.“If you come into this country and this city and think you are going to harm innocent New Yorkers, and innocent migrants and asylum seekers, this is not the mayor you want to be under,” Adams said last week. “I’m an American. Americans have certain rights. The constitution is for Americans. I’m not a person who snuck into this country.”That brought a pushback from civil rights groups.“Everyone residing in the United States regardless of their immigration status has specific inalienable rights under the constitution, including the right to due process,” said the New York Immigration Coalition.“Immigrant communities have been key to New York’s success, both past and present. The answer to the ongoing crisis in our city is not to turn our back on our values, but it’s to ensure fair treatment,” said Andrea Gordillo, a progressive Democrat candidate for the city council.It is possible that Adams’ recent sidling up to the incoming Trump administration is both a self-serving move and a pragmatic step in keeping with a shift in New York’s political coloring and a recognition of the reality of the next four years of Trump rule.“He’s currying favor with the Trump administration, and it’s smart for any New York mayor to have friends in Washington because the city always has problems,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic strategist.“By playing that card he’s also playing to the population of the city that have moved not insignificantly to the center and away from the left. New Yorkers are angry about the basic conditions of life here and tired of paying the cost of the nation’s problems. By doing so he’s setting himself for re-election.”There is also no doubt Adams is also dealing with a nasty criminal situation. At least seven top Adams officials have resigned or announced plans to resign as a result of the federal criminal investigation.“Making it go away would a boon to Adams’ re-election chances. Whether it is or it isn’t, everything in politics is conspiratorial by nature,” says Sheinkopf. “Any New York mayor who wants to make an enemy of the White House is nuts. New York mayors need the president no matter who they are.”By the end of last week Adams was even being asked whether he intended to stay in the Democratic party and join the Republicans. His answer was hardly a firm no.“The party that’s most important for me is the American party – I’m a part of the American party,” he said. More

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      Biden has been wrecking his legacy, but he still has time to do the right things | Judith Levine

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      President Joe Biden seems intent on demolishing his legacy.For months, the Democrats begged him to drop out of the presidential race. He defied them until the 11th hour. Kamala Harris lost.For years, capital punishment opponents pressed him to make good on his 2020 pledge to abolish the death penalty. In the past few weeks, they’ve been begging him to commute the death sentences of the 40 people on federal death row before Trump delivers them what Project 2025 icily calls “finality”. During his last term, Trump dispatched one woman and 12 men – more executions in six months than during the preceding 40 years.Biden has not responded to the pleas of the condemned. Instead, he pardoned Hunter, granting his son immunity from prosecution for any crime he “has committed or may have committed” between 2014 and 2024. The pardon, which experts call unprecedented in scope, not only breaks another vow (and “cements his legacy as liar-in-chief”, Fox News gleefully reports). It also hands Trump cover to use the Department of Justice to shower mercy on his fellow crooks and assorted sycophants and ruin his foes.And now Biden is considering preemptive pardons for the dozens of law-abiding public servants whom Trump is threatening with retaliatory criminal prosecution. Further abusing his office, tarring these people’s reputations with rumors of guilt, Biden is, in short, out-Trumping Trump.At the start, Biden called himself a human rights champion. Speaking at the state department shortly after his inauguration, he proclaimed that “upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law and treating every person with dignity” would be “the grounding wire of our global policy – our global power”. There was no asterisk indicating an exception for Palestine.Yet since 7 October 2023, while Democratic opposition to the war in Gaza has grown to a majority, the Biden administration has drawn, and trampled, one line after another in Israel-Palestine’s sand. A year and a week into the war, on 13 October 2024, the US secretaries of state and defense – though, pointedly, not the president himself – signed a letter to the then Israeli secretary of defense Yoav Gallant threatening unspecified “implications for US policy” if Israel did not implement a list of “concrete measures” to end the starvation, disease and arbitrary displacement – to “reverse the downward humanitarian trajectory” in Gaza, “starting now and within 30 days”.Thirty days passed. The conditions were not met. The Democrats lost the election, in some part due to disaffection over the war. Bernie Sanders brought a resolution to the US Senate floor to withhold military aid to Israel, citing US law prohibiting it to countries that use the weapons to commit war crimes. The White House quietly lobbied against the resolution, claiming that “disapproving arms purchases for Israel … would put wind in the sails of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas at the worst possible moment”. With nearly 44,000 Palestinians killed and 2 million displaced, it was unclear when a better moment might be.The next day, the international criminal court issued arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Gallant and the presumed-dead Hamas leader, Ibrahim Al-Masri (known as Mohammed Deif), alleging the same war crimes and crimes against humanity that Sanders cited in support of his resolution.And barely a week later, Biden asked Congress to approve a $680m arms package for Israel, which it did. The package included the weapons the Israel Defense Forces had been using to wipe out entire families, with no apparent military objective.What else has the president been doing since the election to burnish his memory in the world’s eyes? He recognized National Family Week, National Apprenticeship Week and National Impaired Driving Prevention Month. He pardoned two Thanksgiving turkeys. And oh, yes, he brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, leaving the IDF undistracted from pulverizing every structure and living thing in Gaza.Biden is capable of changing his mind. In 1974, for instance, he opined that he didn’t “think a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body”. In 1994, he boasted of his steadfast record – “no fewer than 50 occasions” – of voting against federal funding for abortion. He reversed that stance in 2019, and, running for president in 2020, promised to “protect women’s constitutional right to choose”. The candidate had noticed that states were “passing extreme laws” against abortion. “Circumstances have changed,” he said – again, too late.There are a few explanations for this almost petulant farewell performance. Perhaps Biden is mad at the Democrats for pushing him aside. Perhaps Mr Nice Guy is the same obnoxious misogynist who interrogated Anita Hill during Justice Clarence Thomas’s 1991 confirmation hearings and declined to take testimony from three other women who alleged that Thomas had sexually harassed them too. Perhaps Biden is not really “driven” by human rights, as Politico’s Nasal Toosi concluded earlier this year, though he’ll tack them on if they don’t interfere with other realpolitik or economic goals.Or perhaps he’s entered the later stages of dementia and, in the muddle, switched parties.But the hell with explanations. The question is: now what? Circumstances have changed. Biden is a lame duck, free to do what he wishes. Trump is the next president. Biden’s legacy may be shot – and what’s not shot, Trump will shoot down or take credit for. But the president still has time to do the right things. He could start by saving a few, or a few thousand, lives.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books More