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      Were the No Kings protests the largest single-day demonstration in American history?

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      The scale of last weekend’s “No Kings” protests is now becoming clearer, with one estimate suggesting that Saturday was among the biggest ever single-day protests in US history.Working out exactly where the protest ranks compared with similar recent events has been a project of G Elliott Morris, a data journalist who runs the Substack Strength in Numbers, calculated turnout between 4 million and 6 million, which would be 1.2-1.8% of the US population. This could exceed the previous record in recent history, when between 3.3 million and 5.6 million people showed up at the 2017 Women’s March to rally against Trump’s misogynistic rhetoric.View image in fullscreenMorris estimated the No Kings Day protest turnout in two steps. First, his team gathered data at events for as many locations as possible, defaulting to tallies published in local newspapers. Where that wasn’t available, they relied on estimates from organizers and attenders themselves.To come up with a rough approximation of nationwide numbers, he then estimated the attendance in each unreported protest would be equal to the median of the attendance in places where data did exist. “That’s a tough approximation, but at least an empirical one,” Morris wrote in an email. “We use the median instead of the average to control for outliers, [such as the fact that] big cities pull the average up, but most events are not huge urban protests.”Morris stressed that the Strength in Numbers tally remains unofficial, and he hopes that researchers will “build” on his data when they conduct more studies. But his estimation is similar to that made by Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, the progressive non-profit that organized the event. He estimated that 5 million people across the globe took to the streets.Not everyone is ready to call it the biggest protest ever. Jeremy Pressman of the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint Harvard University/University of Connecticut project that estimates political crowds, told USA Today it would take “some time” to get an official tally.Meanwhile Steven Cheung, Trump’s director of communications, unsurprisingly called the protests “a complete and utter failure with minuscule attendance” on X. (No Kings took place on Donald Trump’s birthday, which coincided with a parade the president threw in celebration of the US army’s 250th anniversary.)Omar Wasow, an assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s department of political science, told the Guardian that the demonstration was “without question, among the largest single-day protests in history”.Wasow compared protest movements to standing ovations given at a theater. “We see a cascade effect: if one person stands after the curtain drops, then more follow,” he said. “If 1.8% of the US adult population showed up to protest on Saturday, those are the people who stood up to clap first. It sends a signal to all these other people that you can stand up, too.”The 1963 March on Washington, where Dr Martin Luther King Jr made his famous “I have a dream” speech was at the time one of the largest protests in history, with up to a half a million people in attendance. It was dwarfed in size by the first Earth Day protests in 1970, in which 20 million people helped spark the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. “At the time this was about 10% of the US population, possibly the largest we will ever realistically see – unless the political environment deteriorates significantly, prompting more backlash,” Morris said.View image in fullscreenIn 1986 at the Hands Across America fundraiser, an estimated 5 million Americans formed a human chain to raise money to fight hunger and homelessness (each person was asked to donate $10, though many participants didn’t end up paying and the politics of the Coca-Cola-sponsored event were murky). More than a million people took to the streets in 2006 for a boycott called “A Day Without Immigrants” in protest of stricter immigration laws. Polls taken during the summer of 2020 found that between 15 and 26 million Americans protested against the murder of George Floyd during the month of June (though day-by-day numbers were smaller).Gloria J Browne-Marshall, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of A Protest History of the United States, said that it was difficult to compare crowd sizes for various protests, especially ones that take place over the course of several days and span various locations. “There are different processes that have been used over the years, from eyeballing things to actually counting the number of people per square mile,” she said.In the days following No Kings, an idea put forth by the political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan called the 3.5% rule spurred social media discussion. Chenoweth, a Harvard professor and Stephan, a political scientist who covers nonviolent movements, studied 323 revolutionary campaigns around the world that took place from 1900 to 2006. They found that all nonviolent movements that had the support of at least 3.5% of a population always succeeded in triggering change. No Kings, with its massive turnout, could be seen as a turning point.There are caveats to this rule, which was published in the team’s 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works. “The 3.5% rule is descriptive, not prescriptive – and has been revised significantly since being originally published to allow for exceptions,” Morris wrote. “Chenoweth now is clear that hitting 3.5% does not guarantee success, especially in political regimes where change is harder, and that movements can accomplish their goals with much smaller mobilization, through things like media coverage and alliances with elites.”Organizers and attenders of No Kings feel invigorated enough to continue the demonstrations, with another round of coordinated protests to fall on 17 July, the fifth anniversary of the death of John Lewis, the congressman and civil rights leader.But they admit there are limits to these events. “We’re not going to win if a lot of people show up at a protest one day,” Levin said. “We need people actually taking democracy seriously, and that’s not going to be done through a top-down action. It has to be done from the bottom-up. When pro-democracy movements succeed, it’s because of a broad-based, ideological, diverse, geographically-dispersed, grassroots organizing – not just mobilizing.” More

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      Attorney general warns UK joining war on Iran may be illegal

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      Britain’s attorney general has warned ministers that getting involved in Israel’s war against Iran could be illegal beyond offering defensive support, it has emerged.Richard Hermer, the government’s most senior legal officer, is reported to have raised concerns internally about the legality of joining a bombing campaign against Iran.An official who has seen Hermer’s official legal advice told the Spectator, which first reported the story, that “the AG has concerns about the UK playing any role in this except for defending our allies”.Keir Starmer is considering whether to provide the US with military support if Donald Trump decides to bomb Iran, and whether to approve the use of the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean for the attack. Hermer’s advice could limit the degree of UK support for the US.A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said: “By longstanding convention, reflected in the ministerial code, whether the law officers have been asked to provide legal advice and the content of any advice is not routinely disclosed.“The convention provides the fullest guarantee that government business will be conducted at all times in light of thorough and candid legal advice.”The prime minister chaired an emergency Cobra meeting on Wednesday to discuss a range of scenarios and ongoing diplomatic efforts. David Lammy, the foreign secretary, is to meet his US counterpart, Marco Rubio, in Washington DC on Thursday as the US weighs up its options.Trump has yet to make a final decision on whether to launch strikes against Iran. The Guardian reported that the president had suggested to defence officials it would make sense to do so only if the so-called bunker buster bomb was guaranteed to destroy the country’s critical uranium enrichment facility, which is between 80 and 90 metres inside a mountain at Fordow.Israel and Iran have been exchanging fire for days after Israel launched airstrikes which it said were aimed at preventing Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon. Iranian officials claim the country’s nuclear programme is peaceful and that Israel has caused hundreds of civilian casualties.Taking Fordow offline – either diplomatically or militarily – is seen as central to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons after the International Atomic Energy Agency found the site had enriched uranium to 83.7% – close to the 90% needed for nuclear weapons.Miatta Fahnbulleh, an energy minister, said Starmer would take any decisions with a “cool, calm head” and be guided by international law.“Legal advice is for the prime minister, and I think that’s where it will stay – and you can understand why I won’t comment on that. But what I will say is that we have a prime minister who is a lawyer and a human rights lawyer, he will obviously do everything that is in accord with international law,” she told Times Radio.“No one wants an escalation. No one wants this to erupt into a major conflict in the region that is hugely destabilising for every country involved, and for us globally. So the most important role that the prime minister can play, and is playing, is to be that cool, calm head to urge all partners around the negotiating table and to find a diplomatic route out of this.”However, the shadow foreign secretary, Priti Patel, said the UK could “hide behind legal advice at a time of crisis”.Asked if she believed Hermer was right to sound a warning, Patel told Times Radio: “I don’t think we can hide behind legal advice at a time of crisis and national security when we have to work alongside our biggest ally in the world, the United States, when they look to us for potentially … setting out operational activities through our own military bases.”The UK had not received a formal request from the US to use Diego Garcia in the south Indian Ocean or any of its other airbases to bomb Iran as of Wednesday night.Diego Garcia was recently the subject of a new 99-year lease agreement with Mauritius that left the UK in full operational control of the military base. In practice, Diego Garcia is mainly used by the US, but the fact that it is ultimately a British base means that Starmer would have to approve its use for an attack on Iran.The US is also thought likely to want to request the use of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus for its air tankers, used to refuel B-2 bombers. The UK has deployed 14 Typhoon jets at Akrotiri to protect its bases and forces and to help regional allies, such as Cyprus and Oman, if they come under attack. More

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      ‘He’s moving at a truly alarming speed’: Trump propels US into authoritarianism

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      It reads like a checklist of milestones on the road to autocracy.A succession of opposition politicians, including Alex Padilla, a US senator, are handcuffed and arrested by heavy-handed law enforcement for little more than questioning authority or voicing dissent.A judge is arrested in her own courthouse and charged with helping a defendant evade arrest.Masked snatch squads arrest and spirit people away in public in what seem to be consciously intimidating scenes.The president deploys the military on a dubious legal premise to confront protesters contesting his mass roundups of undocumented migrants.A senior presidential aide announces that habeas corpus – a vital legal defence for detainees – could be suspended.The sobering catalogue reflects the actions not of an entrenched dictatorship, but of Donald Trump’s administration as the president’s sternest critics struggle to process what they say has been a much swifter descent into authoritarianism than they imagined even a few weeks ago.“Trump is throwing authoritarian punches at a much greater rate than any of these other cases in their first year in power,” said Steven Levitsky, Harvard political scientist and author, with Daniel Ziblatt, of How Democracies Die. “But we don’t yet know how many of those punches will land or how society will respond.”Five months after Trump’s inauguration, seasoned analysts with years of studying one-time stable democracies degenerating into autocracies are voicing alarm at the speed of the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on institutions and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of expression. They are unnerved by the deployment of masked Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents – dressed in plain clothes and without identifying official insignia – to arrest people on the streets for deportation, a tactic critics say is evocative of dictatorships and designed to provoke fear among the general population.Some voice doubts about the judiciary’s capacity to act as a democratic safeguard, despite a wave of legal challenges to the president’s executive orders. They cite the 6-3 conservative majority of the US supreme court, which has a history of issuing rulings friendly to the president, who appointed three of its justices to the bench during his first administration.Trump has tried to propel the US in an authoritarian direction with greater intensity than noted autocrats like the late Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, or Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, according to Levitsky.Eric Rubin, a former US ambassador to Bulgaria and acting ambassador to Moscow, said Trump was outpacing Vladimir Putin, the Russia president for whom he had often voiced admiration.“This is going faster than Putin even came close to going in terms of gradually eliminating democratic institutions and democratic freedoms,” said Rubin, who witnessed Putin’s early years in power at close quarters. “It took him years. We’re not even looking at six months here.”Bright Line Watch, a survey of political scientists, recently gave the US a score of 53 – the lowest since it started collecting data in 2017 – on a spectrum ranging from 0 for total dictatorship to 100, denoting a perfect democracy, according to Brendan Nyhan, a professor at Dartmouth College, one of the institutions conducting the study.Academics commissioned said they expected the country to fall further, forecasting a score of 48 by 2027.“We’re in the range of countries like Brazil and Israel, but well above countries like Russia,” said Nyhan. “I do expect things to get worse. The potential for further democratic erosion is very real.”Key to whether Trump can tilt America decisively into authoritarianism will be his efforts to assert control over the armed forces, argued Levitsky.“Trump’s ramping up of the effort to politicize the military can still go in multiple directions,” he said. “It could be really ugly and bad, because the only way that you can get from where we are to real authoritarianism like Nicaragua or Venezuela or Russia is if Trump has the military and security forces on his side, and he’s taken steps in that direction.”Padilla’s manhandling – after he tried to question homeland security secretary Kristi Noem at a news conference – drew fierce scrutiny. It took place against a backdrop of Trump’s deployment of 4,000 national guard troops on to the streets of Los Angeles, later augmented by 700 active marines, against demonstrators protesting against the administration’s anti-migrant crackdown, who did not appear to be present an undue challenge to local law enforcement authorities.View image in fullscreenThe decisions took place against the opposition of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who would normally be empowered to deploy the national guard in the state but whose role Trump usurped as he sought to make an example of a state with a large immigrant population and whose Democratic stranglehold he wishes to break.The deployments, denounced by opponents as an attempt to foment violent confrontation, took place in the run-up to a military parade staged in Washington last Saturday. Ostensibly held to honor the US army’s 250th anniversary, the event was held – perhaps not coincidentally – on the president’s 79th birthday. Opponents said it was redolent of autocracies like China, North Korea and Russia and reflected a desire by Trump to turn the military into his personal tool.Amid speculation that the parade might be disrupted by an anti-Trump No Kings protest on the same day, the president threatened to use “very big force” against demonstrators, in apparent contradiction of the US’s tradition of tolerance of peaceful dissent. In the event, no clashes between government forces and protesters were reported at the Washington parade on a day when an estimated 5 million demonstrators turned out at 2,100 locations across the US, according to organizers. However, there were sporadic reports of violence elsewhere; in northern Virginia, a man drove his car through a crowd of No Kings protesters, striking one, in what police said was an intentional act.But in a much worse portent for democracy on the same day, Melissa Hortman, a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, was shot dead at her home along with her husband Mark in what was called a targeted political assassination allegedly carried out by 57-year-old Vance Boelter, whose friends say was a Christian nationalist Trump supporter.Boelter, who is now in police custody, is suspected of then shooting and wounding another politician, John Hoffman – a Democratic member of the Minnesota senate – and his wife, Yvette. He is said to have had a list with more than 45 targets, all of them Democrats, at the time of his arrest.Rubin said the shootings created a climate of fear comparable to that of Weimar Germany before the rise of Hitler.“Fear is powerful and pernicious,” he said. “People won’t be willing to to be candidates for these positions because they’re afraid. The general public is intimidated. I’m somewhat intimidated.“You can say passivity is immoral in the face of evil, that it is complicity, all the things that were said about Nazi Germany. Well, it’s easy to say that. In Nazi Germany, there were some courageous people, but not very many, because they were afraid.”Equally significant, analysts say, is the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the legal boundaries of the president’s powers – the fate of which will be decided by the supreme court, which issued a ruling last year that effectively granted Trump vast prosecutorial immunity for acts committed in office.“Has Trump solidified his power? Have we reached a point where we have an out-of-control president who controls all the institutions? No, but we’re at the 11th hour,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociology and international affairs professor at Princeton University. “He’s moving at a truly alarming speed and pressing all the authoritarian buttons. We’re a few supreme court decisions away from having a president we can’t get rid of.”Trump’s national guard deployments in Los Angeles may have been aimed at establishing a legal precedent enabling him to deploy troops at will when state authorities tried to defy him.“He wants to establish that he can disable the governors from fighting back against him [by using] military force,” Scheppele said. “The Los Angeles deployment was perceived as an escalation but in reality, the military haven’t done that much. However, there’s a legal infrastructure underneath it all that’s scarier.”Levitsky, said the administration – spearheaded by Stephen Miler, the powerful White House deputy chief of staff – had adopted a practice of declaring emergencies to acquire potentially dictatorial powers.“In the US constitution, almost every existing constraint on executive power can be circumvented in a state of emergency,” he said. “And it’s becoming clear that the administration is learning that emergencies are the easiest route to circumvent the law and not be blocked by the courts. The supreme court is very reluctant to say, ‘No, that’s not an emergency, Trump, you lied. You made that up.’ It’s sort of a free pass for circumventing the rule of law.”The White House used economic emergency legislation to impose sweeping trade tariffs, while invoking the 1798 Alien and Sedition Act, passed in anticipation of a war with France, to justify summarily deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members. Miller repeatedly called last week’s protests in Los Angeles an “insurrection”, implicitly justifying the invocation of the Insurrection Act, which enables a president to use military forces to quash a rebellion on US soil.Writing in the Atlantic, David Frum, an anti-Trump conservative commentator, warned that the penchant for emergencies could be applied to next year’s congressional elections, when the Democrats hope to regain control of the House of Representatives, an outcome that could curtail his authoritarian power grab.“Trump knows full well that the midterms are coming. He is worried,” Frum wrote.“He might already be testing ways to protect himself that could end in subverting those elections’ integrity. So far, the results must be gratifying to him – and deeply ominous to anyone who hopes to preserve free and fair elections in the United States under this corrupt, authoritarian, and lawless presidency.”Even if Trump were to suffer an election reverse, his ability to wreak further havoc will remain, Nyhan warned, simply because Senate Republicans are unlikely to vote in sufficient numbers to remove him from office in the event of him being impeached by a Democratic-controlled House.“The Founding Fathers anticipated Trump precisely,” he said, referring to the constitutional provision to try and remove a president and other officials for “high crimes and misdemeanors”.“It was just assumed that Congress will jealously guard its prerogatives and impeach and remove any president who exceeded the boundaries of the constitution. But in our current political system, that is a seemingly impossible task.“So we face the prospect of a lawless authoritarian continuing to act for the next three and a half years, and there’s a great deal of damage he can do in that time.” More

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      The anti-Trump camp was in disarray. How has No Kings managed to unite it? | Emma Brockes

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      Two months ago, around the US, mass demonstrations against Donald Trump were organised in what felt like the beginning of the great unfreezing of the popular movement. Since the inauguration in January there have been plenty of ad-hoc anti-Trump protests, but compared to the huge numbers that turned out in 2017 – half a million at the Women’s March in Washington DC alone – the response has been muted. What was the point? The threat was so large, and the failure of the first movement apparently so great, that Americans have been suffering from what appeared to be a case of embarrassed paralysis: a sense, at once sheepish and depressed, that pink hats weren’t moving the needle on this one.It looks as if that thinking has changed. On Saturday, in a follow-up to the protests in April, more than 2,000 coordinated marches took place in the US, organised by multiple groups under the umbrella No Kings Day and attended by numbers that at a glance seem startling. While in the capital on Saturday, Trump oversaw his weird, sparsely attended Kim Jong-un style military parade, an estimated 5 million people country-wide took to the streets to protest peacefully against him, including an estimated 80,000 in Philadelphia, 75,000 in Chicago, 50,000 in New York, 20,000 in Phoenix, and 7,000 in Honolulu. More heartening still were the numbers from deep red states, such as the 2,000 odd protesters who gathered in Mobile, Alabama, and a reported 4,000 in Louisville, Kentucky.These protests were different in nature to their earlier incarnations, according to the accounts of some of those in attendance. I was in New York last month and friends who’d been at the march in April recounted, with amusement and despair, how few young people had shown up. In addition, said a friend, an elderly demonstrator marching close to them had shushed the crowd and put her fingers in her ears, and another set of women had started dancing, obliviously, to the music being played by pro-Trump counter-protesters on the sidelines. All successful protests require participants to forgive each other their differences, but we shook with laughter as he told us how hopeless and uninspiring – “it’s a protest sweetie, what did you expect?” – he’d found some of his fellow marchers.It was a different story on Saturday. The crowds were bigger – by some estimates, the largest country-wide demonstrations ever recorded – younger, more energised and more focused. There was, I gather, a sense of urgency unleashed by the feeling not only that these protests were long overdue but that, after Trump’s deployment of the national guard in LA, some critical line had been crossed. Meanwhile, as a unifying slogan, the No Kings thing really seems to be working. When I first heard the phrase I thought it was limp – my forelock-tugging Pavlovian response to the word “king” and any reference to monarchy, I guess.I forgot: Americans presented with the same word go to George III not Charles III, and the signs on Saturday took up No Kings with real relish. This is a significant victory, given how hard it is to unite diverse constituencies under a single, snappy umbrella. There were a lot of very funny signs on the marches (some standouts: “Only he could ruin tacos”; “If Kamala were president we’d be at brunch” and my favourite, “Trump cheats at golf”.) But overarching them all was a slogan that in the most efficient way possible presented multiple groups with a non-partisan way to come out against Trump.So far, No Kings has also avoided some of the mistakes of the Women’s March, in which the celebrity of the organisers came to overshadow and poison the movement. The No Kings motif was coined earlier this year by the progressive group 50501 – the name is a reference to 50 protests, 50 states, one movement – and was created before the 17 February demonstrations as an alternative to the hashtag #NotMyPresidentsDay, which it was felt, shrewdly, struck the wrong tone. Instead, the group launched the phrase “No Kings on Presidents Day,” which by this month had compacted down into No Kings Day. As yet, 50501, which grew out of a Reddit post, has no identifiable leaders.This makes it a much harder target for Trump’s “black propagandists” to divide protesters via their political differences. Instead, No Kings seems to be offering a very broad on-ramp to protesters by way of a story that is simple and true: that opposition to Trump’s autocratic style is an act of patriotism with its roots in the country’s very foundations.

      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump news at a glance: president equivocates on Iran as US split over intervention

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      The possibility of US intervention in the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran is exposing sharp divisions in president Donald Trump’s base, with some of his supporters urging the president against involvement in a new Middle East war.Trump says he remains undecided about the US getting directly involved, which if sanctioned would be a sharp departure from his usual caution about foreign entanglements.Speaking to reporters at the White House on Wednesday the president said that some of his supporters “are a little bit unhappy now” but that others agree with him that Iran cannot become a nuclear power.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump undecided on joining war on IranDonald Trump said he had not decided whether or not to take his country into Israel’s new war, as Iran’s supreme leader said the US would face “irreparable damage” if it deployed its military to attack.Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Israel had made a “huge mistake” by launching the war, in his first comments since Friday. “The Americans should know that any US military intervention will undoubtedly be accompanied by irreparable damage,” he said in a statement read out by a presenter on state TV.Read the full storyPete Hegseth suggests he would disobey court ruling against deploying military in LAThe US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, suggested on Wednesday that he would not obey a federal court ruling against the deployments of national guard troops and US marines to Los Angeles, the latest example of the Trump administration’s willingness to ignore judges it disagrees with.Read the full storyUS supreme court upholds state ban on youth gender-affirming careA Tennessee state law banning gender-affirming care for minors can stand, the US supreme court has ruled, a devastating loss for trans rights supporters in a case that could set a precedent for dozens of other lawsuits involving the rights of transgender children.Read the full storyNew US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profileForeign students will be required to unlock their social media profiles to allow US diplomats to review their online activity before receiving educational and exchange visas, the state department has announced. Those who fail to do so will be suspected of hiding that activity from US officials.Read the full storyCarlson v Cruz: Iran’s Maga rift erupts into public viewTed Cruz, the US senator from Texas, and conservative media personality Tucker Carlson have clashed over US military involvement in the Middle East, with the latter shouting: “You don’t know anything about Iran!” in a heated interview that exposes a sharp division within Donald Trump’s coalition as the president considers joining Israel in attacking Iran.Read the full storyNippon Steel acquires US Steel for $14.9bnNippon Steel’s $14.9bn acquisition of US Steel closed on Wednesday, the companies said, confirming an unusual degree of power for the Trump administration after the Japanese company’s 18-month struggle to close the purchase.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Senate Democrats staged a near-total boycott of a Republican-led Senate hearing on Joe Biden’s mental decline and its alleged cover-up during his presidency.

      Women across the political spectrum are more concerned than men about the US economy and inflation under Trump, according to an exclusive poll for the Guardian.

      A federal judge held Florida’s attorney general in contempt of court for enforcing an immigration law she blocked and bragging about it in media interviews afterwards.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 17 June 2025. More

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      New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles

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      Foreign students will be required to unlock their social media profiles to allow US diplomats to review their online activity before receiving educational and exchange visas, the state department has announced. Those who fail to do so will be suspected of hiding that activity from US officials.The new guidance, unveiled by the state department on Wednesday, directs US diplomats to conduct an online presence review to look for “any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States”.A cable separately obtained by Politico also instructs diplomats to flag any “advocacy for, aid or support for foreign terrorists and other threats to US national security” and “support for unlawful antisemitic harassment or violence”.The screening for “antisemitic” activity matches similar guidance given at US Citizenship and Immigration Services under the Department of Homeland Security and has been criticised as an effort to crack down on opposition to the conduct of Israel’s war in Gaza.The new state department checks are directed at students and other applicants for visas in the F, M and J categories, which refer to academic and vocational education, as well as cultural exchanges.“It is an expectation from American citizens that their government will make every effort to make our country safer, and that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing every single day,” said a senior state department official, adding that Marco Rubio was “helping to make America and its universities safer while bringing the state Department into the 21st century”.The Trump administration paused the issuance of new education visas late last month as it mulled new social media vetting strategies. The US had also targeted Chinese students for special scrutiny amid a tense negotiation over tariffs and the supply of rare-earth metals and minerals to the United States.The state department directive allowed diplomatic posts to resume the scheduling of interviews for educational and exchange visas, but added that consular officers would conduct a “comprehensive and thorough vetting” of all applicants applying for F, M and J visas.“To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M and J non-immigrant visas will be asked to adjust the privacy settings on all their social media profiles to ‘public’”, the official said. “The enhanced social media vetting will ensure we are properly screening every single person attempting to visit our country.” More

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      Pete Hegseth suggests he would disobey court ruling against deploying military in LA

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      The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, suggested on Wednesday that he would not obey a federal court ruling against the deployments of national guard troops and US marines to Los Angeles, the latest example of the Trump administration’s willingness to ignore judges it disagrees with.The comments before the Senate armed services committee come as Donald Trump faces dozen of lawsuits over his policies, which his administration has responded to by avoiding compliance with orders it dislikes. In response, Democrats have claimed that Trump is sending the country into a constitutional crisis.California has sued over Trump’s deployment of national guard troops to Los Angeles, and, last week, a federal judge ruled that control of soldiers should return to California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom. An appeals court stayed that ruling and, in arguments on Tuesday, sounded ready to keep the soldiers under Donald Trump’s authority.“I don’t believe district courts should be determining national security policy. When it goes to the supreme court, we’ll see,” Hegseth told the Democratic senator Mazie Hirono. Facing similar questions from another Democrat, Elizabeth Warren, he said: “If the supreme court rules on a topic, we will abide by that.”Hegseth was confirmed to lead the Pentagon after three Republican senators and all Democrats voted against his appointment, creating a tie vote on a cabinet nomination for only the second time in history. The tie was broken by the vice-president, JD Vance.There were few hints of dissatisfaction among GOP senators at the hearing, which was intended to focus on the Pentagon’s budgetary needs for the forthcoming fiscal year, but Democrats used it to press for more details on the deployment of troops to Los Angeles, as well as the turmoil that has plagued Hegseth’s top aides and the potential for the United States to join Israel’s attack on Iran.The Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin asked whether troops deployed to southern California were allowed to arrest protesters or shoot them in the legs, as Trump is said to have attempted to order during his first term.“If necessary, in their own self-defense, they could temporarily detain and hand over to [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. But there’s no arresting going on,” Hegseth said. On Friday, marines temporarily took into custody a US citizen at a federal building in Los Angeles.The secretary laughed when asked whether troops could shoot protesters, before telling Slotkin: “Senator, I’d be careful what you read in books and believing in, except for the Bible.”An exasperated Slotkin replied: “Oh my God.”Trump has publicly mulled the possibility that the United States might strike Iran. Slotkin asked if the Pentagon had plans for what the US military would do after toppling its government.“We have plans for everything,” Hegseth said, prompting the committee’s Republican chair, Roger Wicker, to note that the secretary was scheduled to answer further questions in a behind-closed-doors session later that afternoon.In addition to an aggressive purge of diversity and equity policies from the military, Hegseth has also ordered that military bases that were renamed under Joe Biden because they honored figures in the Confederacy to revert to their previous names – but officially honoring various US soldiers with the same name.The Virginia senator Tim Kaine said that in his state, several bases had been renamed under Biden in honor of accomplished veterans, and their families were never officially told that the names would be changed back.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You didn’t call any of the families, and I’ve spoken with the families, and the families were called by the press. That’s how they learned about this. They learned about it from the press,” Kaine said,He asked Hegseth to pause the renaming of these bases, which the secretary declined to do, instead saying: “We’ll find ways to recognize them.”Democrats also criticized Hegseth for turmoil in the ranks of his top aides, as well as his decision to name as the Pentagon’s press secretary Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly shared on social media an antisemitic conspiracy theory.The Pentagon head had a sharp exchange with the Democratic senator Jacky Rosen, who asked whether he would fire Wilson. “I’ve worked directly with her. She does a fantastic job, and … any suggestion that I or her or others are party to antisemitism is a mischaracterization.”“You are not a serious person,” the Nevada lawmaker replied. “You are not serious about rooting out, fighting antisemitism within the ranks of our DOD. It’s despicable. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”Rosen then asked if the far-right activist Laura Loomer was involved in the firing of a top national security staffer. Hegseth demurred, saying the decision was his to make, but the senator continued to press, even as the committee chair brought down his gavel to signal that she had run out of time for questions.“I believe your time is up, senator,” Hegseth said. A furious Rosen responded: “It is not up to you to tell me when my time is up. And I am going to say, Mr Secretary, you’re either feckless or complicit. You’re not in control of your department.” More

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      VA hospitals remove politics and marital status from guidelines protecting patients from discrimination

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      The Department of Veterans Affairs has imposed new guidelines on VA hospitals nationwide that remove language that explicitly prohibited doctors from discriminating against patients based on their political beliefs or marital status.The new rules, obtained by the Guardian, also apply to psychologists, dentists and a host of other occupations. They have already gone into effect in at least some VA medical centers.Under federal law, eligible veterans must be given hospital care and services, and the revised VA hospital rules still instruct medical staff that they cannot discriminate against veterans on the basis of race, color, religion and sex. But language within VA hospital bylaws requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated from these bylaws, raising questions about whether individual workers could now be free to decline to care for patients based on personal characteristics not expressly protected by federal law.Explicit protections for VA doctors and other medical staff based on their marital status, political party affiliation or union activity have also been removed, documents reviewed by the Guardian show.The changes also affect chiropractors, certified nurse practitioners, optometrists, podiatrists, licensed clinical social workers and speech therapists.In making the changes, VA officials cite Donald Trump’s 30 January executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”. The primary purpose of the executive order was to strip most government protections from transgender people. The VA has since ceased providing most gender-affirming care and forbidden a long list of words, including “gender affirming” and “transgender”, from clinical settings.The Department of Veterans Affairs is the nation’s largest integrated hospital system, with more than 170 hospitals and more than 1,000 clinics. It employs 26,000 doctors and serves 9 million patients annually.In an emailed response to questions, the VA press secretary, Peter Kasperowicz, did not dispute that language requiring medical staff to treat patients without discriminating on the basis of politics and marital status had been removed from the bylaws , but he said “all eligible veterans will always be welcome at VA and will always receive the benefits and services they’ve earned under the law”.He said the rule changes were nothing more than “a formality”, but confirmed that they were made to comply with Trump’s executive order. Kasperowicz also said the revisions were necessary to “ensure VA policy comports with federal law”. He did not say which federal law or laws required these changes.The VA said federal laws and a 2013 policy directive that prohibits discrimination on the basis of marital status or political affiliation would not allow patients within the categories removed from its bylaws to be excluded from treatment or allow discrimination against medical professionals.“Under no circumstances whatsoever would VA ever deny appropriate care to any eligible veterans or appropriate employment to any qualified potential employees,” a VA representative said.Until the recent changes, VA hospitals’ bylaws said that medical staff could not discriminate against patients “on the basis of race, age, color, sex, religion, national origin, politics, marital status or disability in any employment matter”. Now, several of those items – including “national origin,” “politics” and “marital status” – have been removed from that list.Similarly, the bylaw on “decisions regarding medical staff membership” no longer forbids VA hospitals from discriminating against candidates for staff positions based on national origin, sexual orientation, marital status, membership in a labor organization or “lawful political party affiliation”.Medical experts said the implications of rule changes uncovered by the Guardian could be far-reaching.They “seem to open the door to discrimination on the basis of anything that is not legally protected”, said Dr Kenneth Kizer, the VA’s top healthcare official during the Clinton administration. He said the changes open up the possibility that doctors could refuse to treat veterans based on their “reason for seeking care – including allegations of rape and sexual assault – current or past political party affiliation or political activity, and personal behavior such as alcohol or marijuana use”.Dr Arthur Caplan, founding head of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, called the new rules “extremely disturbing and unethical”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It seems on its face an effort to exert political control over the VA medical staff,” he said. “What we typically tell people in healthcare is: ‘You keep your politics at home and take care of your patients.’” Caplan said the rules opened the door to doctors questioning patients about whether they attended a Trump rally or declining to provide healthcare to a veteran because they wore a button critical of JD Vance or voiced support for gay rights.“Those views aren’t relevant to caring for patients. So why would we put anyone at risk of losing care that way?” Caplan said.During the 2024 presidential campaign and throughout the early months of his second term, Trump repeatedly made threats against a host of people whom he saw as his political antagonists, including senators, judges and then president Joe Biden. He called journalists and Democrats “the enemy within”.In interviews, veterans said the impact of the new policy would probably fall hardest on female veterans, LGBTQ+ veterans and those who live in rural areas where there are fewer doctors overall. “I’m lucky. I have my choice of three clinics,” said Tia Christopher, a navy veteran who reported being raped in service in 2000.Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Christopher advocates on behalf of military sexual trauma survivors throughout the country. Under the new policy, some may have to register at a hospital in another region and travel more than a hundred miles to see a doctor. It “could have a huge ripple effect”, she said.As concerned as they were about the new policies themselves, medical experts were equally worried about the way they came about. Sources at multiple VA hospitals, speaking on condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation, told the Guardian that the rule changes were imposed without consultation with the system’s doctors – a characterization the VA’s Kasperowicz did not dispute.Such a move would run counter to standards established by the Joint Commission, a non-profit organization that accredits hospitals. Kasperowicz said the agency worked with the Joint Commission “to ensure these changes would have no impact on VA’s accreditation”.At its annual convention in Chicago this week, the American Medical Association’s 733-member policymaking body passed a resolution reaffirming “its commitment to medical staff self-governance … and urges all healthcare institutions, including the US Department of Veterans Affairs, to ensure that any amendments to medical staff bylaws are subject to approval by medical staff in accordance with Joint Commission standards”.The changes are part of a larger attack on the independence of medicine and science by the Trump administration, Caplan said, which has included restrictions and cuts at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, last week fired every member of a key panel that advises the government on vaccines. The Guardian has earlier reported on a VA edict forbidding agency researchers from publishing in scientific journals without clearance from the agency’s political appointees. More