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      Kamala Harris says Trump ‘guilty’ of ‘stealing’ abortion rights at rally – as it happened

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      Harris emphasized the importance of turning out to vote in November to protect abortion access so that places like Maryland remain havens for reproductive healthcare.Pointing to the statistic that one-in-three American women live in a state with abortion restrictions, she said: “Today our daughters know fewer rights than their grandmothers. This is a healthcare crisis, and we all know who to blame: Donald Trump.”Making her case that Trump was “guilty” of stripping abortion access, which was previewed by the campaign before her appearance, Harris said Trump appointed three supreme court justices with the intention of overturning Roe v Wade.“It was premeditated,” Harris said from a stage, where a sign that said “Trust Women” hung behind her.“Trump has not denied, much less shown remorse, for his actions,” she added.Later this afternoon, Harris will go to battleground state Arizona for a second event marking the Dobbs anniversary.Democrats went on the attack as they marked the second anniversary of the Dobbs decision, in which the supreme court’s conservative justices overturned the constitutional protections on abortion guaranteed by Roe v Wade. At a speech near Washington DC, Kamala Harris said Donald Trump was “guilty” of “stealing” reproductive rights from American women with his appointment of three of the justices who supported doing away with the precedent. Joe Biden, who is days away from his Thursday presidential debate with Trump, called his predecessor the “sole person responsible for this nightmare”. Meanwhile, neither Trump nor any top Republicans in Congress said anything about the anniversary of the court’s decision.Here’s what else happened today:
      Trump plans to rally in Chesapeake, Virginia, the day after his debate with Biden. His campaign believes the state is winnable in November, even though it voted overwhelmingly for Biden in 2020.
      The supreme court will hear a challenge brought by the Biden administration against state-level bans on gender-affirming care for minors …
      … but first it will release decisions on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, almost certainly on at least some of the high-profile cases the justices have yet to decide.
      The fall of Roe upended life for aspiring doctors who hoped to provide abortions.
      A top White House official signaled that Biden supports an effort by Senate Democrats to repeal the Comstock Act, a 19th-century law that a second Trump administration might use to ban abortion nationwide.
      Meanwhile, in Florida, the judge handling Donald Trump’s stalled prosecution over the classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago resort is in the midst of a major hearing that could determing the case’s trajectory. Here’s the latest on what the two sides are arguing, from the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell: The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution for retaining classified documents is expected on Monday to consider modifying his conditions of release to include a prohibition on making statements that could endanger the safety of FBI agents involved in the case.The request to the US district judge, Aileen Cannon – the first time prosecutors have sought to limit Trump’ public remarks in this case – raises the stakes for Trump. Unlike in his other cases, where prosecutors sought gag orders, a violation of release conditions carries a risk of jail.The latest dispute over Trump’s inflammatory statements stems from his blatantly false characterization of the FBI’s use-of-deadly force policy when they executed a search warrant at the Mar-a-Lago club in August 2022 and retrieved more than 100 classified documents.The order, which limits FBI agents to use deadly force only if they face extreme danger and became public after the FBI’s operational plan for the search was unsealed, used standard language that is routinely used in hundreds of warrants executed across the country.But Trump and some allies twisted the limiting language to claim the FBI was authorized by the Biden administration to shoot him when they searched Mar-a-Lago, even though Trump was not there during the search and the language is standard US justice department policy.The supreme court has indicated that the justices may release more decisions on Thursday and Friday, as several politically weighty cases await rulings.The justices were already expected to issue decisions on Wednesday, thus bringing to three the number of days this week that we can expect to hear from the court. The conservative-dominated body has a bunch of matters outstanding, which touch on everything from Donald Trump’s legal fate, to the scope of government regulation. Here are a few:
      Trump’s petition for immunity from the federal charges brought against him by special prosecutor Jack Smith for attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
      Where the Biden administration can require federally funded hospitals to perform emergency abortions, even in states like Idaho, which the case centers on, that have strict abortion bans.
      A challenge to a longstanding doctrine underpinning many federal regulatory decisions.
      Whether municipalities can make it illegal for people to sleep outside, even when there is insufficient shelter space, in a case that could upend homeless policies nationwide.
      Decisions on some, all, or theoretically none of these cases could come before the end of the week.Donald Trump and Joe Biden will hold the first of two debates they have scheduled on Thursday.The day after, the former president is scheduled to hold a rally in Chesapeake, Virginia, a state that Biden won overwhelmingly in 2020, but which Trump’s campaign argues is within his grasp this year.Trump will “speak with the people of Virginia about how he will reverse the devastating effects of Joe Biden’s failed presidency,” his campaign announced.“President Trump will ease the financial pressures placed on households and re-establish law and order in this country! We can Make America Great Again by tackling lawlessness head-on, ceasing the endless flow of illegal immigrants across our southern border, and reversing the detrimental effects of inflation by restoring people’s wealth.”Polls have lately showed a close, perhaps tied, race between Trump and Biden in Virginia, though there have been none released so far showing the former president with the advantage.Democrats are continuing to press their message against Republicans over their support for the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v Wade, and allowed states to ban abortions.“Two years ago, the extreme right-wing Supreme Court majority issued one of the most egregious rulings in our nation’s history,” the Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said.Here’s more:
      The Dobbs decision undermined reproductive freedom for women all across America as part of the extreme MAGA Republican plan to criminalize reproductive health care, outlaw contraception and march us toward a nationwide abortion ban. The decision by the out of control Supreme Court majority to take away the long-held right to an abortion represents an assault on freedom, the Constitution and the values shared by a majority of Americans. House Democrats will continue to fight until reproductive freedom is the law of the land and the extreme MAGA Republican effort to impose a nationwide abortion ban is crushed.
      Still not a peep from Donald Trump and most leading Republicans on the second anniversary of Roe v Wade’s overturning, but that’s not stopping the Biden campaign.Their official account has spent the day tweeting out past instances where Trump has taken credit for orchestrating the downfall of the precedent, which prevented the sorts of abortion restrictions now commonplace in Republican-controlled states.From his town hall in Iowa earlier this year:And what appears to be one of the many videos Trump has posted on his Truth Social account:Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, the GOP nominee for a Senate seat in the state, was one of the few Republicans to mark the second anniversary of the US supreme court ruling that overturned Roe v Wade.Hogan, in a statement shared by the Washington Post, said that if elected, he would work on bipartisan legislation to “codify Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.”He noted that as governor, he “reaffirmed my commitment to uphold Maryland law protecting access to abortion,” adding that he was “proud to make Maryland the first state in America to provide over-the-counter birth control covered by insurance.”Hogan, who last week tried to reject Donald Trump’s endorsement in his Senate race, also promised to protect women’s reproductive rights.“A woman’s health care decisions are her own,” he said.
      Whether it be the decision to start a family with the help of IVF, or exercise her reproductive rights, nothing and no one — especially partisan politics — should come between a woman and her doctor.
      Planned Parenthood will spend $40m ahead of November’s elections to bolster Joe Biden and leading congressional Democrats.The group will initially target eight states: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, where Biden is seeking to defend 2020 victories, as well as North Carolina, which the Biden campaign to flip, and Montana, New Hampshire and New York, which have races that could help determine control of the Senate and House, it told Associated Press.Jenny Lawson, executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes, said:
      Abortion will be the message of this election, and it will be how we energize voters. It will be what enables us to win.
      A six-week abortion ban in Texas was linked to a 13% increase in the number of infants who died in their first year of life, a new study published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics suggests.The study, published two years to the day since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and permitted more than a dozen states across the country to outlaw almost all abortions, is one of the first glimpses into how strict abortion bans impact babies’ health.The study also estimated that the ban may have led the number of infants in Texas who died within their first month of life to rise more than 10%.Because Texas enacted its six-week abortion ban in September 2021, months before Roe’s demise, scholars have studied what has happened in Texas for clues about how post-Roe abortion bans are now affecting the rest of the nation. Some of the researchers involved in the Monday study have previously concluded that the Texas ban also led to 10,000 additional births.The study found a 23% jump in infant deaths due to congenital anomalies – the kind of conditions that are often identified in utero and lead to abortions in states where the procedure is legal, since they can be incompatible with life. But that choice is no longer available to pregnant Texans.Two hundred and sixteen more infant deaths occurred due to the Texas six-week abortion ban, the researchers estimated.Kamala Harris has warned that abortion bans in states across the country are cutting women off from essential reproductive care and causing a “health care crisis”,In an interview with MSNBC aired today alongside reproductive rights advocate Hadley Duvall, Harris reflected on her experience visiting a reproductive care clinic in Minnesota in March.
      In those clinics that are trusted in the community, there is — you can get a Pap [smear] … breast cancer screening, HIV screening, the things that where people want to be able to walk into a health care facility and be treated with dignity and without judgment so they can address their health care concerns.
      She continued:
      That’s what these clinics do. And in states where they have passed these Trump abortion bans, these clinics are closing, which means that there is a reduction of very essential health care across the board for a lot of people.
      Democrats are on the attack as they mark the second anniversary of the Dobbs decision, in which the supreme court’s conservative justices overturned the constitutional protections on abortion guaranteed by Roe v Wade. At a speech outside Washington DC, Kamala Harris said Donald Trump was “guilty” of “stealing” reproductive rights from American women with his appointment of three of the justices who supported doing away with the precedent. Joe Biden, who is three days away from his Thursday presidential debate with Trump, called his predecessor the “sole person responsible for this nightmare”. Meanwhile, neither Trump nor any top Republicans in Congress have said anything about the anniversary of the court’s decision.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      The supreme court will hear a challenge brought by the Biden administration against state-level bans on gender-affirming care for minors.
      The fall of Roe upended life for aspiring doctors who hoped to provide abortions.
      A top White House official signaled that Biden supports an effort by Senate Democrats to repeal the Comstock Act, a 19th-century law that a second Trump administration might use to ban abortion nationwide.
      Kate Cox, the Texas mother who was denied an abortion under the state’s near-total ban last year, introduced Kamala Harris at her speech in Maryland.“Every minute that I stayed pregnant, the risk to my health and to a future pregnancy were growing,” Cox said.“My state chose to drive me out of my home, my community, away from my children and my doctors, rather than to let me access care,” she said, adding: “I never imagined having to fight for something so basic as a procedure to save my health.”As a young student and mother “just trying to stay afloat,” Cox said she didn’t always make time to vote.“I will never again miss an opportunity to vote. I will cast my ballot in every election like my life depends on it,” Cox said.Growing emotional, Cox then shared that she is pregnant again, expecting a child in January. The crowd erupted in applause, as many stood to cheer for her.“And I hope that by then, when we welcome our baby into the world, we will have a world led by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” she said.She then welcomed Harris on to the stage as a “champion of the cause” for reproductive freedom.“You are a hero of this movement,” Harris told Cox.Harris emphasized the importance of turning out to vote in November to protect abortion access so that places like Maryland remain havens for reproductive healthcare.Pointing to the statistic that one-in-three American women live in a state with abortion restrictions, she said: “Today our daughters know fewer rights than their grandmothers. This is a healthcare crisis, and we all know who to blame: Donald Trump.”Making her case that Trump was “guilty” of stripping abortion access, which was previewed by the campaign before her appearance, Harris said Trump appointed three supreme court justices with the intention of overturning Roe v Wade.“It was premeditated,” Harris said from a stage, where a sign that said “Trust Women” hung behind her.“Trump has not denied, much less shown remorse, for his actions,” she added.Later this afternoon, Harris will go to battleground state Arizona for a second event marking the Dobbs anniversary.Harris took the stage to chants of “four more years.”She then said Trump was “guilty” in “the case of the stealing of reproductive freedom from the women of America”, and went on to lay out what she said are the stakes for abortion access if Trump is re-elected.“Understand as much harm as he has already caused, a second Trump term will be even worse,” she said. “His friends in the United States Congress are trying to pass a national ban that would outlaw abortion in every single state in states like New York and California, and even right here in Maryland.”She called Republicans who have passed state-level bans Trump’s “accomplices”, and said voters shouldn’t be fooled by Trump’s wavering on abortion, but should focus on what he has said. And she warned that he would go even further, curtailing access to contraception and IVF.“If there were a second Trump term, he has admitted that he is ‘looking at restrictions on contraception,’” she said. “And pay close attention to how his friends in the United States Senate obstructed a bill to protect the right to contraception, not once, not twice, but three times.” More

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      Clothes, cookware, floss: Colorado law to ban everyday products with PFAS

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      A new law coming into effect in Colorado in July is banning everyday products that intentionally contain toxic “forever chemicals”, including clothes, cookware, menstruation products, dental floss and ski wax – unless they can be made safer.Under the legislation, which takes effect on 1 July, many products using per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances – or PFAS chemicals linked to cancer risk, lower fertility and developmental delays – will be prohibited starting in 2026.By 2028, Colorado will also ban the sale of all PFAS-treated clothes, backpacks and waterproof outdoor apparel. The law will also require companies selling PFAS-coated clothing to attach disclosure labels.The initial draft of state senate bill 81, introduced in 2022, included a full ban on PFAS beginning in 2032. But that measure was written out after facing opposition.Colorado has already passed a measure requiring companies to phase out PFAS in carpets, furniture, cosmetics, juvenile products, some food packaging and those used in oil and gas production.The incoming law’s diluted version illustrates the challenges lawmakers have in regulating chemicals that are used to make products waterproof, nonstick or resistant to staining. Manufacturers say the products, at best, will take time to make with a safer replacement – or at worst, are not yet possible to get made in such fashion.The American Chemistry Council said the bill before its dilution would have created “severe disruption for Coloradoans” as well as undercut “the compromises that were reached in 2022 PFAS legislation”. The council said the original bill would have created “broad, sweeping bans before that law [had] even been implemented”.But the trade group later said that it appreciated “the efforts of Colorado lawmakers to take a more focused approach to the issue”, adding: “Policymakers at both the state and federal levels seem to be recognizing that it is not scientifically accurate to group all fluoro chemistry together and that there are critical, safe uses of this chemistry.”Gretchen Salter – an adviser with Safer States, a group that says Colorado is one of 28 states to adopt policies on PFAS – told the Denver Post in March: “The more we look for PFAS, the more we find. That makes regulating PFAS really tricky because it is in so many things.”But the new law does not account for PFAS that are already in the environment. Colorado recently found that 29 of more than 2,000 water treatment facilities in the state do not meet new federal limits on PFAS levels of four parts per trillion.The ubiquity of “forever chemicals” was illustrated recently by a study that found microplastics in penises for the first time, raising questions about a potential role in erectile dysfunction. The revelation comes after the pollutants were recently found in every human placenta tested in a study, leaving the researchers worried about the potential health impacts on developing foetuses.In Colorado, state senator Lisa Cutter, one of the sponsors of the new law there, has said she still wants a complete ban on PFAS but acknowledges the problems. “As much as I want PFAS to go away forever and forever, there are going to be some difficult pivots,” she told the outlet.They include balancing the potential cost to consumers in making products PFAS-free. Cutter told CBS News that it was “really hard” challenging lobbying groups that “spent a lot of money ensuring that these chemicals can continue being put into our products and make profits”.Cutter said had been accused of stifling innovation and industry. She said she believed companies could be successful while also looking out for the communities they serve.“Certainly, there are cases where it’s not plausible right away to gravitate away from them, but we need to be moving in that direction,” Cutter said. “Our community shouldn’t have to pay the price for their health.” More

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      CNN abruptly ends live interview after Trump spokesperson criticizes network

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      CNN abruptly terminated a live interview with Donald Trump’s spokesperson on Monday after she criticised the two journalists whom the network chose to moderate the much anticipated upcoming debate between the former president and Joe Biden.Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign national press secretary, became embroiled in a heated exchange with Kasie Hunt, the presenter of CNN This Morning, after saying Trump would be entering a “hostile environment on this very network” when he debates the incumbent president in Atlanta on Thursday.Asked what strategy Trump would pursue on the debate stage, she said he would be contending “with debate moderators who have made their opinions about him very well known … and their biased coverage of him”.Leavitt’s comments were aimed, without initially naming them, at the moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper. They triggered an immediate reaction from Hunt, who defended her colleagues.“So I’ll just say, my colleagues, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, have acquitted themselves as professionals as they have covered campaigns and interviewed candidates from all sides of the aisle,” Hunt said. Citing analysts of previous debates, she added: “If you’re attacking the moderators, you’re usually losing.”Hunt then tried to steer Leavitt back on to the topic of the debate, asking what the Trump team expected from Biden.Leavitt, however, refused to be deflected. “Well, first of all, it would take someone five minutes to Google ‘Jake Tapper Donald Trump’ to see Jake Tapper has consistently …” she began, before Hunt cut her off.“Ma’am, we’re going to stop this interview if you’re going to keep attacking my colleagues,” Hunt said.The two then talked over each other, with Leavitt appearing to relish the exchange by grinning broadly. As Hunt repeated her threats to end the interview, Leavitt said: “I am stating facts that your colleagues have stated in the past …”At that point, Hunt ended the exchange, waving her hand in an apparent signal that Leavitt should be taken off air. “OK, I’m sorry, guys – we’re going to come back out to the panel,” Hunt said.Addressing Leavitt, she added: “Karoline, thank you very much for your time. You are welcome to come back at any point. She is welcome to come back and speak about Donald Trump.”Leavitt’s complaints may have been part of a deliberate strategy to gently lower expectations ahead of Thursday’s debate, which is taking place under conditions seen by many as more likely to favour Biden than Trump.Microphones will be muted when it is the opposing candidate’s turn to speak – a measure adopted to prevent the chorus of interruptions that Trump aimed at Biden during the first presidential debate between the pair in September 2020.The exchange will also take place in a TV studio minus a live audience providing the kind of partisan atmosphere that many analysts believe energises Trump, who lost the 2020 race to Biden four years after he won the presidency.But the questioning of the impartiality of Tapper and Bash may also date back to their comments about the infamous 2020 debate, moderated by the then Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who was widely believed to have lost control.Bash described the event, live on air, as “a shitshow” while Tapper called it “a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck”.He added: “We’ll talk about who won the debate, who lost the debate … One thing for sure, the American people lost.”Trump, having for months mocked Biden’s supposed cognitive decline, has suddenly started talking up his debating skills. The former president calling Biden “a worthy debater” in a podcast with a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, adding: “I don’t want to underestimate him.”In a speech in Philadelphia over the weekend, Trump described Biden’s likely debate performance in more colourful – though less complimentary – terms, suggesting that Biden was going to take performance-enhancing drugs after undergoing extensive preparation.“Right now, Crooked Joe has gone to a log cabin to ‘study,’” he said. “He’s sleeping now, because they want to get him good and strong. So a little before debate time, he gets a shot in the ass.” More

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      Judge in classified files case to consider reining in Trump attacks on FBI

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      The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution for retaining classified documents is expected on Monday to consider modifying his conditions of release to include a prohibition on making statements that could endanger the safety of FBI agents involved in the case.The request to the US district judge, Aileen Cannon – the first time prosecutors have sought to limit Trump’ public remarks in this case – raises the stakes for Trump. Unlike in his other cases, where prosecutors sought gag orders, a violation of release conditions carries a risk of jail.The latest dispute over Trump’s inflammatory statements stems from his blatantly false characterization of the FBI’s use-of-deadly force policy when they executed a search warrant at the Mar-a-Lago club in August 2022 and retrieved more than 100 classified documents.The order, which limits FBI agents to use deadly force only if they face extreme danger and became public after the FBI’s operational plan for the search was unsealed, used standard language that is routinely used in hundreds of warrants executed across the country.But Trump and some allies twisted the limiting language to claim the FBI was authorized by the Biden administration to shoot him when they searched Mar-a-Lago, even though Trump was not there during the search and the language is standard US justice department policy.“Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE — 25TH AMENDMENT!” Trump wrote in a social media post last month.Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, last month asked Cannon to revise Trump’s conditions of release to bar him from making any public comments “that pose a significant, imminent and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents participating in the investigation”.By falsely suggesting that FBI agents were prepared to kill him, prosecutors argued, Trump exposed them to the risk of threats, violence and harassment. “These deceptive and inflammatory assertions irresponsibly put a target on the backs of the FBI agents involved in this case,” the motion said.To back up their point, prosecutors reminded Cannon that a man tried to shoot his way into an FBI office in Ohio just days after the Mar-a-Lago search, saying “patriots” should head to Florida to defend Trump and kill FBI agents.But prosecutors did not include an example of Trump’s remarks directly leading to a threat, a point on which Cannon previously criticised prosecutors when they sought in a separate motion to force Trump to redact the identities of people involved in the investigation to ensure their safety.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe question was adopted by Trump’s lawyers in their 20-page response to prosecutors’ motion, arguing they had failed to point to a single example of an agent working on the documents case who has faced threats because of Trump’s inflammatory statements.“President Trump and the defense are similarly unaware of any hostility, harassment or risk of harm directed at any agent involved in this case based on President Trump’s statements,” the Trump lawyers wrote. More

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      Anger, fear and desperation: people reflect on two years since fall of Roe

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      After Roe v Wade was overturned in June 2022, Daphne did not want to leave anything to chance.Abortion is currently legal until 18 weeks in Utah, where the 38-year-old lives – but the state has a 2020 trigger law banning almost all abortion care that is currently under appeal.Daphne knew she didn’t want children so she decided to undergo surgical sterilization in October 2022, to have “peace of mind that [she] physically cannot become pregnant”.“My husband could have gotten a vasectomy for less money and an easier recovery time. However, that doesn’t change the outcome if I were to be assaulted. Living in Utah, I could not and would not risk having to seek an abortion, likely having to leave the state to do so, after an already traumatic event,” Daphne said.The procedure, which was not fully covered by her health insurance, left her around $1,000 out of pocket.“I’m lucky I was able to take these measures, and most cannot,” she added.Almost two years after the supreme court decided there is no constitutional right to abortion in the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, patients have increasingly been forced to travel out of their state in order to access abortion care, while others have carried unwanted pregnancies to term. A study earlier published in January estimated there have been nearly 65,000 pregnancies from rape in states with abortion bans.Interstate travel for abortion care in the US doubled between 2020 and 2023, from one in 10 to almost one in five people leaving their state to access treatment, data from the Guttmacher Institute shows.In states where it is possible, many go to neighboring states. Hanz, a 30-year-old who works as a clinical social worker in an abortion clinic in Illinois, but lives in Missouri, found out they were pregnant in late July 2022, they recalled: “As soon as I saw the two lines on the test, I knew I had more rights standing in Illinois than I would when I got home that night. Abortion rights had already got so much worse in recent years – and then Roe was overturned.” (Missouri passed a trigger law in 2019 that banned abortions except in medical emergencies.)Hanz wanted a child, but felt it wasn’t the right time. “I was really weighing what I wanted and what felt like the right decision. It was very hard for me to terminate the pregnancy, but I had a difficult time growing up and didn’t feel I could bring a child into the world and not be able to give them the quality of life I wanted to,” they said.After spending a month carefully weighing their options, they crossed into Illinois to terminate the pregnancy at the beginning of September at nine weeks.“Making the decision was much harder than having the actual abortion,” Hanz said, adding that fears remain about crossing the border to receive care.“I’ve talked to people who thought they may be arrested when they returned to their home state – you’re not breaking the law by crossing the state,” Hanz said.For others, the introduction of abortion restrictions has meant they are not having children they may have had. Over the last few years, Brie, 41, had been considering having another child – but after Dobbs, she felt she could not undergo the risk of a pregnancy at her age in the state of Texas.“My husband and I had dreamt of a third child. Now, I know it’s definitely not going to happen,” Brie said, adding that she felt she could not risk a pregnancy in Texas, which has a near-total abortion ban.Her medical history adds to her fears: she had a complicated first pregnancy, including experiencing pre-eclampsia, and needed an emergency C-section.“It was scary and dangerous,” she said. “With my history, there’s no way I’d trust having this pregnancy in Texas or the south. I’d have to move.”The loss of the constitutional right to abortion has taken the choice out of her hands, she feels. “Our seven-year-old son is asking for a younger sibling,” Brie said. “I know I’m in a privileged position – we have two wonderful, healthy kids – but I don’t appreciate the state making my family planning decisions.”Abortion is an issue that divides her family. “The last two years have been a very volatile time, even having these discussions within my extended family,” she said. The issue is at odds with other values prized in Texas, she believes: “People here are very concerned with freedom. But there’s this huge conflict here between concern with personal freedom, and the approach to women and fertility. The only acceptable carveout is women that are pregnant.”Every month, she feels anxious about the chance of pregnancy. “It’s constantly on my mind and has been since Dobbs: am I going to be thrown under the bus by my state this month?“You play scenarios out, what if, where would I go, who would I tell. It’s a big wall of separation between who could you trust. I think that’s the goal: to isolate and put women in a position of insecurity.”For some, the fall of Roe was a call to action. Paul, in his mid-50s and living in North Carolina, knew little about abortion rights when he heard the news two years ago.“Up until then, it was not something I cared about – it was obvious that women should have the right to choose,” he said. He had thought abortion was a “settled issue”.When he heard the news, he remembers that he and his wife “stared at each other in silence, and thought, what the hell happens next? It doesn’t affect us personally, but it does affect millions of women. I went in completely blind.”Compelled by a need to take action, by November 2022, Paul had begun volunteering with a group that offered logistical assistance to people requiring abortions, often picking up patients who had travelled from states with more restrictive laws and driving them to clinics.“I’ve driven young teens with their parents who are absolutely petrified; women in their 20s who accept it’s something they have to do, and others to whom it’s no big deal. Everyone has a different set of circumstances – you don’t have to explain your reason to me,” he said.After North Carolina reduced the limit from 20 to 12 weeks in May 2023, the number of patients traveling to the state dwindled until the service disbanded. Now, Paul volunteers most weeks as a clinic escort.“More Saturdays than not, I can be found wearing a rainbow-striped vest, shielding women behind umbrellas as I walk them into the clinic. I have been called a murderer, a baby killer … And I’ll happily do it again next weekend as well,” he said. “A lot of men don’t want to acknowledge that men have a role to play in fixing this – it’s not up to just women.”For Jane*, a woman from Texas in her 60s, the writing was on the wall before Dobbs as she watched restrictions chip away at abortion rights year after year. ​Between 1973 and May 2022, 1,380 abortion restrictions were enacted in states, according to the Guttmacher Institute, with more than 630 of these enacted since 2011.Jane became involved in direct action in 2018, driving people in need of abortion to appointments: “I became involved because I realised pro-choice is just that – it doesn’t address access. It’s a limited way at looking at reproductive justice. Seeing the impact of restrictions on abortion, I felt that to do nothing is to be complicit.”After Texas passed a bill outlawing abortion following the detection of cardiac activity – usually around six weeks – in 2021, Jane was galvanized to take further action. Toward the end of that year, she reached out to Las Libres, a Mexican network that mails pills for self-managed medical abortion.“The inhumanity of restrictions just raised my temperature and made me increasingly angry and willing to stick my neck out and do something to help,” she said. “Dobbs was the logical next step after increasing regulations permitted under Roe. [Access] was very effectively overturned before Dobbs.”Jane has been packaging and posting pills to states with abortion bans for the last two years.“It is empowering and effective to fight back,” Jane said. “Perhaps I am in denial about my own risk, but I have had a good life, I enjoy relative financial stability in my retirement, and who better than me to be in a position to fight back? Small actions matter, and allow me to maintain hope.”
      *Name has been changed More

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      Trump made Nazi ‘ovens’ joke in Jewish executives’ presence, ex-employee says

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      A former employee of Donald Trump’s pre-presidency organization has publicly claimed that he once made jokes about Nazi “ovens” while Jewish executives were in the same room.Barbara Res – a lead engineer on the construction of Trump Tower and author of a memoir, Tower of Lies, about her almost two decades working for the former president – told MSNBC on Sunday that her erstwhile boss would make “ridiculous remarks”.“We had just hired a residential manager, a German guy,” Res said. “And Donald [Trump] was bragging among – to us executives, there were four of us – about how great the guy was and he was a real gentleman, and he was so neat and clean. And he looked at a couple of our executives who happen to be Jewish, and he said, ‘Watch out for this guy – he sort of remembers the ovens,’ you know, and then smiled.“Everybody was shocked,” she continued. “I couldn’t believe he said that. But he was making a joke about the Nazi ovens and killing people, and that’s the way he was.”The Nazis in Germany systematically murdered more than 6 million Jews during the Holocaust and the second world war, and burned the bodies of many in ovens at concentration camps.Res’s story on Sunday came as both parties are attempting to court the Jewish vote in November’s election, which is expected to be a rematch between Trump and Joe Biden. That vote may be in play over the Biden White House’s handling of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.Trump has argued that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats hate both Israel and Judaism, saying that he and his Republican party are better placed to help end the Gaza war.Res, who has been critical of Trump’s treatment of women in the past, said the former president’s “embrace of religion” is “absolute nonsense”. She didn’t elaborate, but at the center of the criminal prosecution which recently led to Trump’s conviction on 34 felonies was hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actor who alleged an adulterous affair with Trump early into his marriage with Melania Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRes offered advice to Biden ahead of his televised debate with Trump, scheduled for Thursday.“I wish [Biden] would goad him and make him go nuts, because when he goes nuts, he’s really crazy,” Res said.Res’s MSNBC appearance came after Trump held a weekend campaign rally in Philadelphia. She recalled the Nazi joke Trump once told in part because of his choosing to repeat at the rally a hypothetical situation involving an electric boat that sinks under the weight of its batteries and electrocutes the passengers, who are then circled by a shark. More

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      Conservatives could accidentally help Biden win his debate with Trump | Margaret Sullivan

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      If Joe Biden is to win November’s election, he must win this week’s televised debate. He must come off as energetic and competent. He must make the case, persuasively, that Donald Trump is a danger to the nation and the world. And, perhaps most of all, he must seem mentally sharp.That’s a lot to do in under 90 minutes, especially while sharing the stage with someone as unpredictable as Trump, whose dominant personality and in-your-face tactics can put him at an advantage.Luckily for Biden – and anyone who gives a damn about the future of America – the president already has some crucial advantages going into Thursday evening’s CNN debate.The format is good for him. First off, there is no studio audience to create a disruption or cheer Trump’s wild utterances; thus, the debate will not turn into one of those fake “town halls” packed with rightwing cult members posed as undecided voters. (Is there really an undecided voter left in the nation? If so, why?)Secondly – and crucially – each candidate’s microphone will be shut off when it’s not his turn to speak. This limits Trump’s habit of relentlessly interrupting, which dominated the first presidential debate in 2020.Given those ground rules, it’s surprising that Trump agreed to the debate at all – and it’s still possible that he’ll back out, no doubt citing how “rigged” the entire world is against his noble greatness.But even with these reasonable regulations in his favor, Biden must meet the challenge of convincing prospective voters that he’s capable of doing the job for another four years.Toward that end, he’s had some help from an unexpected quarter: the media, both mainstream and rightwing.In recent months – and especially in recent weeks – much of the media has been on a campaign to depict the 81-year-old Biden as nearly senile and certainly incapable of another term, while seldom focusing on 78-year-old Trump’s lunatic ravings on the campaign trail or his long list of other disqualifications.Recall what happened in February after special prosecutor Robert Hur’s report described Biden as an elderly man with a poor memory. An amazing barrage of coverage followed. For many days, it was as if there were no other subject. At one point, the New York Times opinion section offered a list of four pieces, lined up in a neat row, all on the same subject, while CNN gave us a chyron for the ages: “Is Biden’s age now a bigger problem than Trump’s indictments?”Once that frenzy settled down, another bombshell hit – a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal with a devastating headline: “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.”The piece was much criticized, and not just by Democrats, some of whom complained that the only on-the-record source was Republican Kevin McCarthy; the former House speaker slammed Biden’s mental sharpness even though he reportedly has said quite the opposite in private.Media critics jumped in, too. Tom Jones of the Poynter Institute, no partisan, judged the Journal article “a pointed piece based pretty much on quotes and opinions from those who don’t want to see Biden elected to a second term”.Soon after, that report began to spread through the media ecosystem, most notably on dozens of TV stations around the country owned by right-leaning Sinclair Broadcasting, whose local anchors read from almost identical scripts. It was powerful anti-Biden coordination that must have delighted the Trump campaign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlthough this is all bad for Biden, it comes with an upside for this debate.Many viewers are probably expecting him to be infirm and inarticulate. As one right-leaning acquaintance of mine put it: “If the choice is between the orange guy and a corpse, I’ll go with the orange guy.”The choice, of course, is not that at all. It’s between a traditional, pro-democracy president with a strong record of accomplishment versus a twice-impeached would-be autocrat with 34 felony convictions – and his own alarming set of gaffes, memory lapses and campaign-trail ravings about sharks. Only one of these candidates fomented an insurrection, or appointed three Supreme Court justices who seem hellbent on denying women’s bodily autonomy.Biden may make some missteps in the debate, but he’ll be well prepared and focused on appearing vigorous, as he was in his high-energy State of the Union address in March. He won’t become a compelling TV star or a great public speaker between now and Thursday, but he doesn’t need that.Thanks to the incessant media messaging, the bar for Biden is nowhere near that high. Those of us who care about democracy in America are hoping he clears it with ease.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Making US public schools display the Ten Commandments isn’t harmless or neutral | Judith Levine

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      I was 10 in 1962, when the supreme court ruled, in Engel v Vitale, that the officially sanctioned recitation of prayer in public schools violated the constitution’s first amendment, which prohibits the establishment of a state religion.Before that, my school day started with the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by an appeal to God. We rose and pushed our chairs under our desks. Then we stood erect, gazed at the flag sticking out at an angle above the blackboard, and placed our right hands over our hearts. After the pledge, we bowed our heads and said a prayer composed by the New York state board of regents, which held authority over the schools: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country.”As far as I could tell, none of this presented a problem for my classmates, almost every one of them Italian, Greek, or Irish Catholic. Many kids clasped their hands during the prayer.But as the only Jew in the class and the daughter of militantly atheist socialists to boot, saying these words every day was no simple exercise.To my parents, both the pledge and the prayer constituted authoritarian brainwashing. They had reason to suspect oaths of allegiance. Under the anticommunist regime of Senator Joe McCarthy, my father, a high school teacher, was required to sign a loyalty oath disavowing membership in the Communist party. He refused, and, like other government employees on the left, resigned rather than be fired.Although the Pledge of Allegiance contained no such explicit ideology, in 1954 Congress added the words “under God” to the pledge, a rebuke to godless communism. My parents weren’t thrilled by this conflation of patriotism and theism. But even if the US deserved fealty – and my mom and dad were not convinced it did – they objected to children being trained to give it by rote.It was the prayer that really riled them, though. Its authors called it “non-denominational”, but that did not distract the supreme court, or my parents, from the law’s intent: “to further religious beliefs”, said the justices – a clear breach of the separation of church and state. “In this country, it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government,” they wrote.I’d been attending civil rights and Ban the Bomb demonstrations since infancy. I was an unswerving non-believer as far back as I could remember. I was proud to be different, because nonconformity meant rejecting lies and standing up for what was right.Still, a kid wants to fit in. It was hard enough being Jewish. Hurtful to endure casual antisemitism (“I hate Jews,” an erstwhile friend announced one day, out of the blue). Uncomfortable to be left alone with the teacher and the one Protestant girl on Wednesday afternoons, when the Catholic kids were excused for “catechism”.It was dicey being an atheist. In third grade, I was consumed by terror after my three best friends convinced me that if I didn’t start believing in God I would end up in hell, which they described in ghastly detail. Anti-communism also threatened my family’s security – I kept that part of me a secret.Mom and Dad assured me that the law allowed me to remain silent or leave the room during the prayer, and they’d support my doing so even if it were illegal. I wanted to. But didn’t they understand that either act would only call attention to my apostasy?I was destined to betray something or someone – America, God, the truth, my family. Or myself. But what elementary school child knows who that is? What child should be compelled to figure it out?Jeff Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana, recently signed a law requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every classroom. “If you want to respect the rule of law,” he said, “you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”It was a nod to the “Judeo” in the “Judeo-Christian values” the Christian right is forever invoking – never mind that some people are neither Jews nor Christians, but Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, or none of the above. The Republican state representative Dodie Horton insisted that the law “doesn’t preach a certain religion”, but merely “shows what a moral code we all should live by is”.These statements recall New York’s statement on moral and spiritual training in the schools, in which the “non-denominational” prayer was published three-quarters of a century ago. “We believe that this statement will be subscribed to by all men and women of good will,” the officials wrote, “and we call upon all of them to aid in giving life to our program.”Civil libertarians are challenging the Louisiana law. Its supporters are keen for the challenge, betting that the justices who have begun removing bricks from the constitutional wall of church-state separation will demolish the whole thing this time. Republican politicians in Texas have already indicated they plan to follow Louisiana’s lead.Government-mandated religion is patently unconstitutional. It reproduces the religious coercion that Europeans came to this continent to escape. It is no boon to children’s spiritual or civic education. Rather, it is harmful to children – or some children, as it was to me. And legally and morally, even one is too many.
      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books More