US Politics

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares187 Views

      in US Politics

      Congo and critical minerals: What are the costs of America’s peace?

      by

      In March 2025, President Félix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) offered the country’s critical mineral reserves to the United States and Europe in exchange for security and stability.

      At the time, the March 23 (M23) militia insurgency was unleashing violence: killing civilians, committing sexual violence, displacing communities and looting mineral resources. Since 1996, eastern Congo has been engulfed in wars and armed conflicts driven by regional powers and more than 120 armed groups.

      The U.S.-brokered peace agreement between Rwanda and the DRC raises critical questions: Is this a genuine path to sustainable peace, or a continuation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s strategy to secure access to critical minerals through coercive diplomacy?

      Read more:
      4 things every peace agreement needs – and how the DRC-Rwanda deal measures up

      Global arms race for critical minerals

      The global shift toward renewable energy, digital infrastructure and military modernization has sparked a geopolitical scramble for critical and rare earth minerals.

      In early 2025, Trump signed a series of executive orders that introduced aggressive and imperial-style tactics to secure access to mineral wealth. He threatened Canada with annexation and tariffs, demanded access to Greenland’s resources and linked U.S. support for Ukraine to access to its mineral reserves.

      The DRC’s offer must be viewed through this lens of global resource competition.

      Congo’s critical mineral wealth

      The DRC holds some of the world’s richest deposits of critical minerals and metals. A 2012 article estimated the value of Congo’s untapped mineral wealth at US$24 trillion, a figure nearing the U.S. first-quarter 2025 GDP of $29.962 trillion.

      The DRC produces 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt, ranks fourth in copper, sixth in industrial diamonds and also possesses vast reserves of nickel and lithium, including the Manono deposit expected to yield 95,170 tonnes of crude lithium.

      But the struggle to control these resources has fuelled a cycle of armed violence, displacement and exploitation. Despite several peace agreements, peace and stability remain elusive.

      America’s interests in Congo

      U.S. involvement in Congo stretches back to the Cold War, when it played a role in the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first elected prime minister who sought economic sovereignty.

      In 1996, the U.S. was accused of backing Rwanda and Uganda in the initial invasion of eastern Congo. A U.S. diplomat, “Mr. Hankins,” was quoted in Goma saying: “I am here …to represent American interests.”

      In 2024, President Joe Biden met Tshisekedi to advance the Lobito Corridor, a strategic trade route to counter China’s dominance in the region. Chinese companies currently control around 80 per cent of Congo’s copper market.

      When Trump signed the 2025 peace agreement, he openly stated the U.S. would gain “a lot of mineral rights … foreign trade and investment from the regional critical mineral supply chains.”

      Miners work at the D4 Gakombe coltan mining quarry in Rubaya, Democratic Republic of Congo, in May 2025.
      (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)

      U.S.-brokered peace deal

      The deal, however, prioritizes America’s access to minerals over the well-being of Congolese citizens. Historically, Congo’s mineral wealth has enriched elites and foreign powers while leaving its people impoverished and vulnerable. The new agreement could entrench existing inequalities and inflame tensions further.

      The U.S. has also cut off aid for war survivors, including emergency medical kits and antiretrovirals for rape victims, undermining humanitarian efforts.

      Crucially, the agreement overlooks:

      The root causes and drivers of conflict at national, regional and international levels.
      The role of Rwanda and Uganda, whose militaries and intelligence services have long been implicated in supporting groups like M23. Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, son of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, has referred to M23 as “our brothers” and threatened military action in Congo.
      The voices of Congolese civil society, war survivors and the public, who were excluded from the negotiation process.
      State fragility and institutional collapse — major enablers of protracted violence.
      The grievances of Hutu and Tutsi communities in the DRC, deeply rooted in colonial and regional politics.
      The presence of more than 120 armed groups, many of them proxies for foreign powers engaging in what some scholars call “geocriminality.”

      Between January and February 2025 alone, more than 7,000 people were killed in the DRC. The United Nations and several human rights organizations have documented mass atrocities, including crimes of genocidal magnitude.

      A child carrying water walks past Wazalendo forces fighting M23 rebels patrolling in Sake, Democratic Republic of the Congo, in August 2024.
      (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)

      A path toward real peace

      The peace agreement fails to demand justice for crimes committed against the Congolese people. Nobel Peace laureate Denis Mukwege condemned the deal for “rewarding aggression, legitimizing the plundering of Congo’s natural resources, and sacrificing justice for a fragile peace.”

      It also ignores the roles of international mining corporations and external entities that have long profited from Congo’s instability.

      True and lasting peace in the DRC cannot be imposed from the outside. U.S.-led mineral extraction without justice risks deepening the crisis. Since 1999, UN peacekeepers have been deployed in the Congo , yet violence continues.

      Sustainable peace will require:

      An end to impunity;
      Thorough investigations into war crimes;
      Regional truth-telling processes;
      Justice and reparations for victims;
      And most importantly, inclusion of Congolese voices in shaping their future.

      Without these commitments, the U.S. risks replicating a long history of exploitation, trading in minerals while ignoring the human cost. More

    • 225 Shares197 Views

      in US Politics

      Leftists are determined to date each other – and not settle for liberals: ‘Politics are the new religion’

      by

      Zohran Mamdani gave Hinge an unofficial boost last month when the New York mayoral candidate revealed that he met his wife, Rama Duwaji, through swiping. “There is still hope on those dating apps,” he said on the Bulwark podcast a week before his stunning victory in the Democratic primary. The tidbit spread over social media, cementing the 33-year-old democratic socialist’s status as a millennial everyman. A subsequent Cosmopolitan headline read: “Zohran Mamdani could make history (as the first NYC mayor to meet his wife on Hinge).”Representatives for Hinge would not comment, but plenty of eligible New Yorkers did, claiming they would redownload the app due to Mamdani’s success, in spite of their dating fatigue. “Now I’m clocking in like it’s a full-time job,” one user posted on TikTok. “If he can find love on that app maybe I can,” another wrote in a caption.However, they could run into an ideological hurdle while filling out their profiles. Alongside answering basic questions – “Do you smoke, drink or do drugs? Where did you go to college?” – Hinge ask singles to choose their political affiliation: liberal, conservative, moderate, not political, or the mysterious “other”.Some people to the left say the label “liberal” does not encapsulate their socialist views. They associate it with establishment figures such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – or Mamdani’s rival, former governor Andrew Cuomo. Many liberals deem proposals by Hinge’s golden boy (freezing rent, taxing the super-rich, making buses free) too radical. A socialist might want to distance themselves from such center-leaning liberalism and instead embrace the “hot commie summer” that hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb warned his fellow billionaires of.“There’s a real appetite to date leftists now,” said Abby Beauregard, fundraising chair for Democratic Socialists of America’s New York chapter. She said that Mamdani’s victory reinvigorated the dating scene in in the city, “but it’s really hard to find explicitly leftist dating spaces. Most dating apps have a liberal option, but no leftist option, and it’s not a turn-on to see ‘other’, because that could mean anything.” (For instance, far-right or communist.)So lefty singles are finding more explicit ways to signal their politics to like-minded love matches, on Hinge and beyond.View image in fullscreenSome have turned their dating profiles into mini-manifestos, writing out their entire belief system as answers to the apps’ prompts. It’s common to see watermelon emojis as euphemisms for solidarity with the Palestinian people. Some users will warn that they’ll swipe left on Terfs (the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminists), cops or Donald Trump supporters.“It’s important for me to see those signifiers,” said Caroline, a 38-year-old florist who lives in Queens. (She and other sources are going by their first name for privacy reasons.) “There’s a nice feeling on the apps right now with people being proud to be communists or leftists, and they’re saying that.”But she’s wary of anyone who comes off as too lefty. “That seems kind of tryhard,” she said. “It can read as too performative, that you’re fishing for alt-girls or you’re a centrist who just wants someone freaky from Bushwick.”Tinder, OK Cupid and the kink-friendly app Feeld allow users to write their own bios, unlike Hinge, and they can choose within those bios whether they reveal their political affiliations. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Tinder also launched profile “stickers” so users could signal the issues they felt strongly about, such as “voting for reproductive rights”.For her part, Caroline, who uses Feeld, wrote in her profile that she’s “far left” and “COVID-cautious”. That feels like enough for her. “Saying ‘I love vaccines!’, ‘free Palestine!’ or ‘fuck Trump!’ would be trite. It’s all implied.”Dennis Mulvena describes himself as “very left-leaning”. He used to keep his affiliations private on Hinge because he believed there was room for nuance in discussing politics, but recently listed himself as liberal.“With the return of Trump in the last two years, it’s important to have that out there,” said Mulvena, 30, who works in customer service for a car manufacturer. “Admittedly gay people who live in Brooklyn tend to lean left, but I have had the experience of going on a date with someone who then revealed he was part of his college’s Young Republicans club.” That was the last time he assumed that everyone he matched with would share the same views as him.According to an NBC News poll from April, the partisan gap between gen Z women, who are more likely to say they are Democrat, and gen Z men, who have shifted right, is the widest of all generations. And, increasingly, a person’s politics have an impact on their perceived desirability. While past generations may have thought nothing about a conservative and liberal romantic pairing (“don’t talk about politics or religion at the dinner table”), 60% of 18- to 24-year-olds think it’s important to date or marry someone who shares their political beliefs.“Politics is the new religion,” said Dr Jess Carbino, a former sociologist for Bumble and Tinder who studies dating apps. “It’s become the way that people choose to frame how they look at the world and their values.”Lily, a 23 year-old socialist who was recently laid off, is wary of seeing someone identify as “not political” on Hinge. “I’m immediately scared of what that means,” they said. “As a queer person living through everything that’s happening in this country, I need to know someone has a baseline care for people and their community.”In New York, more voters between the ages of 25 and 34 – a mix of gen Z and younger millennials – turned out to vote in the Democratic primary than any other age cohort, indicating a vigor for leftist politics. Recently, Lily has seen young people write on Hinge that they’d only go out with someone who voted for Mamdani or that they’d never go out with a Cuomo supporter. They have seen multiple people answer the Hinge prompt “when was the last time you cried?” with: “when Zohran won”. (They presume these were happy tears.)This is not to say New York is a young Bolshevik paradise: conservatives in the city are also trying to find each other. Some have gone into voluntary exile from mainstream dating apps, creating their own options. “Our dating apps have gone woke,” reads the description for Date Right Stuff, one such app backed by Peter Thiel. “Connect with people who aren’t offended by everything.”In March, Date Right Stuff hosted a singles event at New York’s Trump Tower called “make America hot again”. It was a coming-out night for what the app’s former chief marketing officer Raquel Debono called “city conservatives”, or Republicans who prefer urban life to small towns and tradwifedom.They are not the only ones going off-app: the Mamdani effect on New York’s lefties could not be contained to Hinge.In early July, young people gathered inside a cocktail bar on the Lower East Side for a “sexy socialist singles” event hosted by New York’s DSA. Those looking for something casual – or, as the host put it, “if you just want fast and free, like Zohran’s buses” – were sent to one part of the bar, while those who wanted “a slow burn, like taxing the fucking rich” went to another. At one point, organizers directed polyamorous attendees to a room upstairs, where they could mingle with other non-monogamous individuals.Upstairs, Sven, 25, an economics master’s student who lives in Bushwick, said that young people view the DSA as a social club just as much as a platform for socialist candidates. “I saw a post on Reddit talking about how all Zohran’s canvassers are hot, and we have soccer leagues and book clubs,” they said. “It’s a great way to make friends.”Downstairs, back in monogamyville, Lauren, a video editor who lives in Astoria (the Queens neighborhood Mamdani represents as a New York assemblymember), waited for a friend who was off flirting. “There’s definitely an energy when I wear my Zohran T-shirt out,” she said. “People are revved up. They’ll call you from across the street saying, ‘What’s up?’ or ‘I love that guy.’ It’s a real conversation starter.”New York’s DSA will continue its sexy socialist mixers in youth hubs Bushwick and Williamsburg, and in the Upper West Side for those over 30. In the meantime, singles will have to keep parsing political signifiers on dating apps. More

    • 150 Shares167 Views

      in US Politics

      Are non-voters the key to Democrats winning in 2028? | Alex Bronzini-Vender

      by

      Since Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign, the electoral theory of the American left has rested upon the idea that a sizable bloc of Americans – alienated from the traditional politics of left and right – have withdrawn from politics entirely. They stand closer to the Democrats on many issues, but, seeing little by way of material benefit from the party’s soaring rhetoric of “defending democracy”, they have opted out of the political process. And, as the theory goes, a bold, populist candidate – someone like Sanders himself – could bring this silent constituency back into the fold.If that logic once explained how Sanders might have won, it might now explain why Kamala Harris lost. And, as new troves of post-election data surface, the debate over whether Democrats might have avoided last year’s defeat by mobilizing non-voters has become one of the party’s hottest factional disputes.Among those strategizing within the Democratic party, one’s confidence in voter activation is often a proxy for their broader politics. Those who believe Harris’s campaign failed to activate non-voters typically argue her platform lacked the populist edge needed to mobilize disaffected Americans. Their critics tend to believe the problem ran in the opposite direction: the electorate had moved right and the Democrats’ failure lay in their inability to meet it there.Detractors of the activation theory point to a 26 June Pew Research report – which found Donald Trump leading Harris by three points among non-voters – as decisive proof that non-participants lean Republican. The catch, though, is that the survey concluded less than two weeks after Trump’s victory. Polling taken in the aftermath of a race is notoriously vulnerable to distortion, and the bandwagon effect can temporarily inflate a victorious candidate’s popularity. That effect is especially pronounced among disengaged or loosely affiliated voters. That number almost certainly marks the high-water line of Trump’s support among non-voters.Another oft-cited figure from the New York Times/Siena College, which the Democratic strategist and data scientist David Shor referenced during his own interview with the Times’s Ezra Klein, found Trump leading by 14 points among 2020 non-voters. But it uses survey data collected before Biden dropped out of the race. Then there is Shor’s own post-election poll, conducted through his polling firm Blue Rose Research, which found Trump leading by 11 points among non-voters – though the underlying data remains private and the methodology undisclosed.The Cooperative Election Study (CES) – a late-November survey of more than 50,000 voters – offers one of the few high-quality, public windows on 2024. An analysis of the CES data by political scientists Jake Grumbach, Adam Bonica and their colleagues found that a plurality of non-voters identified themselves as most closely aligned with the Democratic party – and an absolute majority of registered voters who declined to cast a ballot in 2024 considered themselves Democrats. The non-electorate certainly wasn’t blue enough to have swung the race, but by no means as red as the activation theory’s opponents claim.What’s even clearer is the geography of turnout. Voter participation dropped especially sharply in Democratic strongholds – particularly urban counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. By contrast, turnout in Republican areas held steady or even increased modestly. In other words, the Democratic campaign had more to gain from energizing its own base than from chasing centrist swing voters.Harris wouldn’t have prevailed under conditions of 100% turnout. (Grumbach, Bonica, etc don’t claim as such.) But a more focused strategy – mobilizing the Democratic base, speaking directly to material concerns, and resisting the pull toward bland centrism – might have narrowed the margin significantly.Ironically, the aforementioned Pew report concludes the same. “As in prior elections, a change in voters’ partisan allegiances – switching from the Democratic to the Republican candidate or vice versa – proved to be a less important factor in Trump’s victory than differential partisan turnout,” write the authors. “Republican-leaning eligible voters simply were more likely to turn out than Democratic-leaning eligible voters in 2024.”Even so, the CES data may disappoint progressives, if not for the reasons their critics imagine. An analysis of the CES from the Center for Working Class Politics’s Jared Abbott and Dustin Guastella found that Democrats who stayed home in 2024 were, on average, less ideologically liberal on hot-button social questions – more skeptical of an assault-rifle ban, receptive to a border wall, less concerned with climate change, and cooler to the language of structural racism – than the Democrats who showed up.Yet, as Abbott and Guastella found, those same non-voters were more economically populist: disproportionately working-class and non-college, while eager for bigger public investment programs, a higher corporate tax rate, and a stronger social safety net.The Democratic non-electorate doesn’t clearly align with progressive orthodoxy. Equally clear, though, is that a blanket lurch toward cultural moderation, absent populist economics, would do little to fire up non-voters who already share many progressive economic instincts.Making decisive claims about non-voters is necessarily difficult. By definition, they are the least likely to respond to pollsters, and their political preferences are often tentative or inconsistent. Yet certain commentators’ eagerness to cast non-voters as Trump supporters reveals more about elite assumptions than about public sentiment.There’s been a rush to cast non-voters as conservatives, not because the evidence demands it, but because the alternative – that Democrats need to speak more directly to the working class – remains uncomfortable for the party establishment. There is no way around the fact that in 2024, those Americans didn’t hear anything worth voting for.

      Alex Bronzini-Vender is a writer living in New York More

    • 188 Shares157 Views

      in US Politics

      Migrants at Ice jail in Miami made to kneel to eat ‘like dogs’, report alleges

      by

      Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs”, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.The incident at the downtown federal detention center is one of a succession of alleged abuses at Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice) operated jails in the state since January, chronicled by advocacy groups Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South from interviews with detainees.Dozens of men had been packed into a holding cell for hours, the report said, and denied lunch until about 7pm. They remained shackled with the food on chairs in front of them.“We had to eat like animals,” one detainee named Pedro said.Degrading treatment by guards is commonplace in all three jails, the groups say. At the Krome North service processing center in west Miami, female detainees were made to use toilets in full view of men being held there, and were denied access to gender-appropriate care, showers, or adequate food.The jail was so far beyond capacity, some transferring detainees reported, that they were held for more than 24 hours in a bus in the parking lot. Men and women were confined together, and unshackled only when they needed to use the single toilet, which quickly became clogged.“The bus became disgusting. It was the type of toilet in which normally people only urinate but because we were on the bus for so long, and we were not permitted to leave it, others defecated in the toilet,” one man said.“Because of this, the whole bus smelled strongly of feces.”When the group was finally admitted into the facility, they said, many spent up to 12 days crammed into a frigid intake room they christened la hierela – the ice box – with no bedding or warm clothing, sleeping instead on the cold concrete floor.There was so little space at Krome, and so many detainees, the report says, that every available room was used to hold new arrivals.“By the time I left, almost all the visitation rooms were full. A few were so full men couldn’t even sit, all had to stand,” Andrea, a female detainee, said.At the third facility, the Broward transitional center in Pompano Beach, where a 44-year-old Haitian woman, Marie Ange Blaise, died in April, detainees said they were routinely denied adequate medical or psychological care.Some suffered delayed treatment for injuries and chronic conditions, and dismissive or hostile responses from staff, the report said.In one alleged incident in April at the downtown Miami jail, staff turned off a surveillance camera and a “disturbance control team” brutalized detainees who were protesting a lack of medical attention to one of their number who was coughing up blood. One detainee suffered a broken finger.All three facilities were severely overcrowded, the former detainees said, a contributory factor in Florida’s decision to quickly build the controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” jail in the Everglades intended to eventually hold up to 5,000 undocumented migrants awaiting deportation.Immigration detention numbers nationally were at an average of 56,400 per day in mid-June, with almost 72% having no criminal history, according to the report.The daily average during the whole of 2024 was 37,500, HRW said.The groups say that the documented abuses reflect inhumane conditions inside federal immigration facilities that have worsened significantly since Trump’s January inauguration and subsequent push to ramp up detentions and deportations.“The anti-immigrant escalation and enforcement tactics under the Trump administration are terrorizing communities and ripping families apart, which is especially cruel in the state of Florida, which thrives because of its immigrant communities,” said Katie Blankenship, immigration attorney and co-founder of Sanctuary of the South.“The rapid, chaotic, and cruel approach to arresting and locking people up is literally deadly and causing a human rights crisis that will plague this state and the entire country for years to come.”The Guardian has contacted Ice for comment. More

    • 113 Shares98 Views

      in US Politics

      Is Trump building a political dynasty? – episode one

      by

      The United States has had its fair share of political dynasties – the Bushes, the Clintons, the Kennedys … but has Donald Trump been quietly moulding his own family to become a political force long after he leaves office? Who from within the family fold could be a successor to the president? Or does Trump simply see the presidency as an opportunity to enrich himself and promote the Trump family brand?In this first episode, the author Gwenda Blair takes us back through Donald Trump’s family history and how the decisions made by his dad and grandfather led him to where he is today. The reporter Rosie Gray talks us through the role the first lady, Melania Trump, played in supporting her husband. And Ashley Parker profiles the roles of Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, as they served as senior advisers to the president during his first term.Archive: ABC News, BBC News, CBS Philadelphia, CNN, the Ellen Degeneres Show, NBC News, PBS Newshour
      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
      Help support the Guardian. Go to theguardian.com/politicspodus More

    • 188 Shares108 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump news at a glance: president goes on offensive over NFL and MLB team names

      by

      Donald Trump has weighed into a new fight – this time with two sports teams. The president wants Washington’s football franchise the Commanders and Cleveland baseball team the Guardians to revert to their former names, which were abandoned in recent years due to being racially insensitive to Native Americans.Trump said on Sunday on Truth Social that: “The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team …. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past.”Josh Harris, whose group bought the Commanders in 2023, said earlier this year the name was here to stay. The Guardians’ president of baseball operations, Chris Antonetti, indicated before Sunday’s game against the Athletics that there weren’t any plans to revisit the name change.Here is more on this and other key Trump stories of the day:Trump demands Guardians and Commanders change namesDonald Trump has said that he would move to block the Commanders’ plans to build a new stadium at the old RFK Stadium site in Washington DC unless they changed their name. It is unclear if Trump would be able to do so. The RFK Stadium site was once on federal land but Joe Biden signed a bill earlier this year – one of his final acts in office – transferring control to the DC city government for a 99-year term.Trump also posted that the call to change names applied to Cleveland’s baseball team, which he called “one of the six original baseball teams”.Read the full storyIce secretly deports man, 82, from PennsylvaniaAn 82-year-old man in Pennsylvania was secretly deported to Guatemala after visiting an immigration office last month to replace his lost green card, according to his family, who have not heard from him since and were initially told he was dead.According to Morning Call, which first reported the story, longtime Allentown resident Luis Leon – who was granted political asylum in the US in 1987 after being tortured under the regime of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – lost his wallet containing the physical card that confirmed his legal residency. He and his wife booked an appointment to get it replaced and when he arrived at the office on 20 June he was handcuffed by two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, who led him away from his wife without explanation, she said. The family said they made efforts to find any information on his whereabouts but learned nothing.Read the full storyIce chief says he will continue to allow agents to wear masksThe head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) said on Sunday he would keep allowing the controversial practice of his officers wearing masks over their faces during their arrest raids.As Trump has ramped up his unprecedented effort to deport immigrants around the country, Ice officers have become notorious for wearing masks to approach and detain people, often with force. Legal advocates and attorneys general have argued that it poses accountability issues and contributes to a climate of fear.Read the full storyUS scientists describe impact of Trump cutsScores of scientists conducting vital research across a range of fields from infectious diseases, robotics and education to computer science and the climate crisis have responded to a Guardian online callout to share their experiences about the impact of the Trump administration’s cuts to science funding.Many said they had already had funding slashed or programs terminated, while others feared that cuts were inevitable and were beginning to search for alternative work, either overseas or outside science. So far the cuts have led to a 60% reduction in Johnson’s team, and fear is mounting over the future of 30 years of climate data and expertise as communities across the US are battered by increasingly destructive extreme weather events.Read the full storyTrump fossil-fuel push setting back green progress decades, critics warnEver since Donald Trump began his second presidency, he has used an “invented” national energy emergency to help justify expanding oil, gas and coal while slashing green energy – despite years of scientific evidence that burning fossil fuels has contributed significantly to climate change, say scholars and watchdogs.It’s an agenda that in only its first six months has put back environmental progress by decades, they say.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Trump said he would help Afghans detained in the United Arab Emirates for years after fleeing their country when the US pulled out and the Taliban took power.

      Polls released on Sunday showed falling support among Americans for Trump’s hardline measures against illegal immigration, as the Republican president celebrated six months back in power. Polls from CNN and CBS show Trump has lost majority support for his deportation approach.

      A growing group of African Americans are ditching corporate big-box retail stores that rolled back their DEI programs and instead are shopping at small, minority- and women-owned businesses they believe value their dollars more.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 19 July. More

    • 188 Shares128 Views

      in US Politics

      Ice chief says he will continue to allow agents to wear masks during arrest raids

      by

      The head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) said on Sunday that he will continue allowing the controversial practice of his officers wearing masks over their faces during their arrest raids.As Donald Trump has ramped up his unprecedented effort to deport immigrants around the country, Ice officers have become notorious for wearing masks to approach and detain people, often with force. Legal advocates and attorneys general have argued that it poses accountability issues and contributes to a climate of fear.On Sunday, Todd Lyons, the agency’s acting director, was asked on CBS Face the Nation about imposters exploiting the practice by posing as immigration officers. “That’s one of our biggest concerns. And I’ve said it publicly before, I’m not a proponent of the masks,” Lyons said.“However, if that’s a tool that the men and women of Ice to keep themselves and their family safe, then I will allow it.”Lyons has previously defended the practice of mask-wearing, telling Fox News last week that “while I’m not a fan of the masks, I think we could do better, but we need to protect our agents and officers”, claiming concerns about doxxing (the public revealing of personal information such as home addresses), and declaring that assaults of immigration officers have increased by 830%.While data from January 2024 to June 2024 does show 10 reported assaults on Ice officers compared to 79 during the same period last year, those six months have also seen Ice agents descend in record numbers on streets, businesses, farms and public spaces, rounding up and detaining mostly Latino people as part of a massive Trump administration push to rid the US of as many as 1 million immigrants every year.Videos have flooded social media showing Ice agents wearing masks over their faces, detaining people without immediately identifying themselves, refusing to answer questions or explaining why people are being detained, and pushing them into unmarked cars with tinted windows.“I do kind of push back on the criticism that they don’t identify themselves,” Lyons said. “Men and women of Ice, and our DoJ partners, and local law enforcement partners who do help us are identified on their vest.” The only identification many agents wear is body armor marked with the word “police”, despite not being police officers.The interview was described as the first major network sit-down at Ice headquarters in Washington.Lyons also confirmed in the interview that Ice obtained and is using Medicaid data to track down immigrants believed to be in the US unlawfully, despite undocumented people not being eligible to receive Medicaid.White people comprise the largest share of Medicaid recipients, at 39.6%.A June report from the Pew Research Center found that 84.2% of Medicaid recipients are born in the US, 6.6% are naturalized citizens and 9.2% are foreign-born non-citizens authorized to be in the US.As well as the tens of thousands of arrests, there have been several reported cases of masked criminals posing as Ice officers, such as a man in Raleigh, North Carolina accused in January of kidnapping and raping a woman, threatening to deport her if she didn’t comply, or a man in Brooklyn attempting in February to rape a 51-year-old woman. In April 2025, a Florida woman posed as an immigration officer to briefly kidnap her ex-boyfriend’s wife from her job.Ice agents have also been reported to overstate assaults, such as in New York City mayor candidate Brad Lander’s arrest by immigration officers, where Lander was accused of assaulting officers despite charges being dropped later that day.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCritics say using a mask allows Ice agents to obscure accountability and avoid transparency for their actions.“The use of masks is one among a panoply of legal issues presented by the administration’s recent actions against immigrants and visitors (and some citizens) but a significant one that can – and should – be immediately addressed and remedied,” said the New York City Bar Association in a statement on the practice.A coalition of 21 state attorneys general, including New York’s Letitia James, wrote to Congress last week urging it pass legislation prohibiting “federal immigration agents from wearing masks that conceal their identity and require them to show their identification and agency-identifying insignia”. In California, state legislators last month proposed the No Vigilantes Act, which would require federal agents to provide identification, including their last name and badge or ID number.“We have a Los Angeles Police Department that has to deal with crime in this city every single day – and they’re not masked, and they stay here,” said the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, in a Sunday interview with ABC News.“I don’t think you have a right to have a mask and snatch people off the street.” More

    • 63 Shares158 Views

      in US Politics

      Should we ban opinion polls?

      by

      Ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, opinion polls predicted a win for Hillary Clinton. She lost, and the polling industry went through one of its regular spasms of self-criticism and supposed reform. Alas, it did not vote itself entirely out of existence. France and Spain ban the publication of opinion polls in the days leading up to an election, but we should go one better and ban their publication at any time.No doubt it adds much to the gaiety of the British nation to see the Conservative party slip to third or fourth in the polls, but any poll asking who you would vote for if there were a Westminster election tomorrow, held at a time when there almost certainly will not be an election for another four years, is meaningless as a guide to the makeup of the next Parliament.If polls were simply useless that would be no reason to ban them, though. A better reason is that they are actively harmful: a species of misinformation that pollutes the public sphere.One fundamental problem, recognised long ago, is that there is no such thing as “the public”, thought of as a hive mind with a single homogeneous view. To report the results of any poll as “the British public thinks…” is simply a falsehood, except perhaps in the unlikely circumstance that fully 100% of respondents agree on some point. There is, for the same reason, no such thing as “the will of the British people”, a spectre conjured into being only when something very dubious is being proposed.So what is it exactly that opinion polls measure? A random sample, hopefully statistically reliable, of differing and irreconcilable opinions. Not informed opinions exclusively, of course, but also the opinions of conspiracy theorists, the news-phobic and the merely deranged. By such a scientific operation we may uncover the valuable truths that a third of Conservative voters would prefer to see Nigel Farage as prime minister, while 7% of American men believe they could beat a grizzly bear in unarmed combat.A deeper question is whether polls actually create, in whole or in part, what they purport to be revealing. Does everyone go around with settled, reasoned views on every hot-button issue of the day, just waiting to be revealed by a questioning pollster? The answer was clear to the American journalist Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book Public Opinion. It is unrealistic, he argued, to expect people to be able to form “sound public opinions on the whole business of government”, and they shouldn’t actually have to. “It is extremely doubtful whether many of us would … take the time to form an opinion on ‘any and every form of social action’ which affects us.”The act of asking a question, though, heightens the importance of the subject in the mind of the questionee, creating an urge to have one’s say where there might previously have been neither urge nor say at all. As Walter Bagehot, the 19th-century political theorist and editor of the Economist, once observed: “It has been said that if you can only get a middle-class Englishman to think whether there are ‘snails in Sirius’, he will soon have an opinion on it.” As though to prove him right, in 1980 a third of American respondents helpfully offered their view on whether the “1975 Public Affairs Act” should be repealed, even though that legislation did not actually exist.The way you ask the question, moreover, can profoundly influence the outcome. A 1989 study by the American social scientist Kenneth A Rasinski found that varying verbal framings of political issues changed the outcome: “More support was found for halting crime than for law enforcement, for dealing with drug addiction than for drug rehabilitation, and for assistance to the poor than for welfare.” Other such experiments have shown that the order of questioning also matters, that Americans express more support for government surveillance if terrorism is mentioned in the question, and that nearly twice as many people think that the government “should not forbid speeches against democracy” than it “should allow speeches against democracy”, though the options are exactly equivalent.Modern opinion polls, then, are part of the machinery behind the “manufacture of consent”, a phrase originally coined by Lippmann to describe the propaganda operations of politicians and the press. It is no accident, after all, that George Gallup had been an advertising man, with the Madison Avenue firm Young & Rubicam, before he helped to pioneer the methods of systematic opinion polling by borrowing from market research and PR. In 1936, Gallup and his colleagues correctly predicted the election of Franklin D Roosevelt, proving the old-fashioned forecasting methods outdated. Using the “new instrument” of polling, he declared happily in 1938, “the will of the majority of citizens can be ascertained at all times”. This was, of course, partly by way of advertising his own commercial interest as founder, in 1935, of the American Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup Poll). His fellow pollster Elmo Roper described their nascent industry as “a veritable goldmine”.Profitable it may be, but the constant drizzle of polling also incentivises short-term, knee-jerk decision-making by governments. A leader may make a hasty policy change merely in response to a poll, and then if the polling improves, take that as proof that the new policy is correct. Keir Starmer was no doubt cheered when, following his Enoch Powell-adjacent speech on immigration in May, polling found that “more Britons [now] believe that the government wants to reduce net migration”. But a policy designed to massage approval ratings over the course of weeks is not always going to be the same as a good policy that will last years.It would be invidious after all this not to mention one consideration that strongly favours opinion polls, which is that they provide a steady stream of pseudo-news to the media. If each day did not bring a new revelation about the imaginary public’s confected opinion on one or another issue, there would be much less for news programmes to report on. And what would we all do then?Further readingPublic Opinion by Walter Lippmann (Wilder, £7.49)Manufacturing Consent by Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky (Vintage, £12.99)Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Michael Wheeler (WW Norton & Company, £13.99) More