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      Pandemic childcare funding is running out across the US: ‘The whole system is beginning to implode’

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      On an early fall day, toddlers played at Westwood Academy, a highly rated Denver childcare center serving children aged six weeks to five years. The room glowed with natural wood and light while preschoolers settled onto colorful floor circles to hear a book read aloud. “Where’s your circle?” one of the children asked the teacher.Westwood is located in west Denver, a lower-income part of the city; median family income in the surrounding area is less than $43,000 a year, according to census data.It is precisely because Westwood owner RB Fast serves this population that she and her peers are struggling to make the budgetary math work. The American childcare system, primarily a market-based, pay-to-play system, has always had inequities, but those inequities are growing ever sharper as federal pandemic-era funding, a boon to many families, has run out across the nation. Combine that with flat federal funding and for-profit childcare catering to affluent families, and, as Fast said, childcare “has become a service for high-income families, not low-income families”.In January, Denver joined many other Colorado counties in freezing enrollment for the state’s childcare subsidy program known as the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program (CCCAP). Given the high percentage of Westwood families using subsidies – Fast said that when full, the center had two-thirds of children receiving CCCAP – the freeze has meant would-be enrollees cannot afford a slot. So when a family moves away, there is no one able to replace them, despite high demand.As a result, Westwood has seven unfilled spots in its 16-slot preschool classroom. “I have slots available, and I could serve families tomorrow,” Fast said, “if there were subsidies.” The lack of public aid can also start a vicious cycle: when spaces are unfilled, revenue drops, and the bottom line falls apart for the whole program. If the CCCAP freeze continues indefinitely, Westwood’s future is uncertain.Programs serving lower-income families commonly struggle to maintain stable operations, often relying on meager public subsidies available in each state through the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG). Even though these subsidies are inadequate – and nationally, only one in seven eligible families receive them due to underfunding – they can be a financial lifeline. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the federal government surged money to the states, and that money was used to stabilize program operations and provide financial relief to families.Colorado, for instance, gave out more than $250m of such grants from 2021 to 2023, nearly double its current annual CCDBG allocation. Researchers from the Colorado Evaluation and Action Lab at the University of Denver found that the stabilization grants helped to keep programs open while allowing them to raise staff wages and reduce fees for parents. That was also the case nationally in states from Alabama to Alaska.When the pandemic funding began to dry up in September 2023, the impacts predictably fell on lower-income families and communities of color with less wealth or ability to navigate the renewed scarcity. However, the funds’ expiration did not occur all at once; many states distributed remaining money for months if not years after, and about a dozen have used their own dollars to extend the stabilization funding.Now, as the country wrestles with rising costs of living and economic uncertainty, pressures are again beginning to spike. No significant increase in CCDBG appears to be on the horizon, as budget bills moving through Congress hold federal funding largely flat.Within this context, Philip Fisher, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, noted that the center’s ongoing survey of families has begun seeing some of the highest rates of reported hardship since they began tracking in 2020. “The disproportionate impacts have been present for a long time, and they’re being exacerbated by the current circumstances,” Fisher explained, adding that with hardship rising even among families with young children in the middle- and upper-income brackets, “it becomes clear that the whole system is beginning to implode”.The mother of a five-month-old, Denver resident Iyanah French went to apply for CCCAP when her child was born but was told the freeze meant she couldn’t even be placed on a waitlist. She found the experience “overwhelming”, adding that “you have to work in this world”. She eventually found a slot thanks to the non-profit supportive housing complex in which she lives.Even within low-income populations, childcare scarcity can land unevenly. Colorado state representative Lorena Garcia is also executive director of the non-profit Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition. She noted that “English-speaking families are able to get information a little bit faster about what’s happening, so they can start looking for other options. But non-English-speaking families get their information a little bit later.”Colorado parents aren’t the only ones feeling pinched by post-pandemic changes.As of 1 August, New Jersey froze enrollment in its childcare assistance program, citing a $30m budget shortfall. The state also told already-enrolled families to expect an increase in their monthly co-pays. Other states, including Arizona and Virginia, have not enacted freezes but have subsidy waitlists in the thousands. And in many states, even families able to wrangle a voucher face decreasing options for using them: childcare programs in places like Indiana and North Carolina have begun to close in significant numbers due to harsh economics and inadequate support, including the only licensed program on the latter state’s Hatteras Island.Experts and advocates worry that the Republican budget-reconciliation bill passed this summer will worsen these trends. Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at the non-profit Zero to Three, explained that Medicaid and Snap cuts will force state legislatures to use more scarce state dollars that could otherwise go to childcare. Both low-income families and childcare educators – many of whom are low-income themselves, due to the sector’s notoriously low compensation – will struggle with the personal impact of the cuts. Boteach said: “So on three fronts, even though the words ‘Child Care and Development Block Grant’ were not said in the One Big, Beautiful Bill, there’s going to be a lot of [childcare] pain, particularly for lower-income families and families of color, and families in rural areas.”Still, there is a seeming paradox: despite the childcare sector’s myriad struggles, the total number of childcare programs has been modestly increasing in recent years. While there is no comprehensive data for 2025, the non-profit Child Care Aware of America reports from surveys of 40 states that the number of licensed centers nationally increased by more than 4,000 from 2022 to 2024. The increase is likely driven by growth among childcare programs that serve more affluent clienteles. For instance, Heather Tritten, president and CEO of the Colorado Children’s Campaign, a statewide non-profit, says that Colorado has also seen a small increase in licensed slots in the past year. Yet, Tritten questioned, with regards to equitable access: “Are they the right slots?” She added: “I think there’s sort of a dual economy when it comes to childcare: there’s the childcare that’s available for people who can afford childcare. And then there’s the childcare that is probably not available to people who are less able to afford it.”Many of the experts interviewed for this story offered that the solution to equitable childcare access is not merely better funding for subsidy programs, but a transformed system that eliminates the two-tier distinctions altogether. Ideally, Garcia said, “our childcare system wouldn’t be a private business model. It would be a public good, and we would take lessons from K-12 so that we’re not overpromising and underfunding”, and “we would design the system on a needs-based model and not a profit-based model”.There are indeed vast differences in how childcare and K-12 education are funded in the US, despite sharing many of the same features in terms of shaping children’s learning, supporting parents’ ability to work and serving as community infrastructure. The average per-child funding in K-12 education is more than $17,000, while it is less than $2,000 for early care and education. Shifting toward a more comprehensive childcare system could thus enhance social equality in a deeper sense: Tritten of the Colorado Children’s Campaign concluded: “It would be great to figure out how to have this conversation in a way that isn’t about just the haves and the have-nots, but about all children and the needs of all children. Because it doesn’t matter how much money your parents have, you still have the same needs in terms of what you need from birth until that first day of kindergarten to ensure that you’re ready for school.”This article was produced in partnership with New America’s Better Life Lab More

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      Katie Miller is threatening the citizenship of a critic | Arwa Mahdawi

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      It’s Miller Meltdown TimeSome couples bond over shared hobbies; others over shared values. The Maga bigwigs Stephen and Katie Miller, on the other hand, appear to have connected over their shared love of terrorizing immigrant children.The political power couple, who married in 2020, bonded during Donald Trump’s first term, when Stephen helped engineer a family-separation policy at the border that ripped more than 5,000 children, as young as four months old, from their immigrant parents. At the time, Miller (then going by her maiden name, Waldman) was an immigration spokesperson, and a big fan of Stephen’s hardline policies. “DHS sent me to the border to see the separations for myself – to try to make me more compassionate – but it didn’t work,” she told MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff in 2018, according to his book on the border policy, Separated. The book also quotes Miller saying she didn’t expect to change her mind: “My family and colleagues told me that when I have kids I’ll think about family separation differently. But I don’t think so.”Fast-forward to the present day and the married couple now share three young children. Stephen is White House deputy chief of staff and possibly the most dangerous man in the Trump administration. Miller, meanwhile, quit a mysterious role at Elon Musk’s private ventures back in May to start a podcast about motherhood as part of an apparent plan to recruit more women to Maga. Yep, the woman who couldn’t muster up any compassion for kids in cages is now a momfluencer.Miller seems to have been correct in her earlier assessment: having kids hasn’t made her think differently about family separation, a practice that attorneys and former immigration officials allege has been revived. What has changed, however, is the fact that she’s now weaponizing her poor children against anyone who dares challenge her. And now that her husband is Trump’s right-hand man, she’s not just going after immigrants – she’s threatening to strip one of her critics of US citizenship.This week, Miller appeared on Piers Morgan’s YouTube show, along with a panel that included the leftwing commentator Cenk Uygur, to discuss Islamophobic attacks on the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Miller kicked off the discussion with an incomprehensible point about the anti-Israel movement and then accused Uygur of “using coded language to attack American Jews and to say that we should not be here and we should not be in existence”.Uygur retorted by saying she was lying, adding: “It’s very normal for a Miller to be completely and utterly lying.” An epic meltdown ensued.“Piers, quite frankly, I’m really sick and tired of this racist bigoted rhetoric that can comes from people like you against my husband, against my family and my children,” Miller yelled. (Uygur had said nothing about Miller’s children.) “I am raising Jewish children in this country … ”“Who brought your children into this?” Uygur then said. “What a weirdo.”Miller, who doesn’t appear to have much experience being challenged during an interview, then started ranting at Piers Morgan about how Uygur saying “the Millers lie” is coded language for them being Jewish. After some more screaming, she also told Uygur: “You better check your citizenship application and hope that everything was legal and correct … because you’ll be just like Ilhan Omar,” a frequent subject of Republican attacks.You can watch the whole thing for yourself but the bottom line is this: the wife of the US homeland security adviser apparently threatened to denaturalize someone because she didn’t like the fact he criticized her.This, to be clear, is hardly some one-off. Threatening to deport your critics, even those with American citizenship, seems to be Maga policy now. The representative Nancy Mace, a Trump loyalist, for example, has said she would “love to see” Omar, a progressive representative, “deported back to Somalia”.Various Republicans are also threatening to deport Mamdani; indeed, Miller’s meltdown occurred during a discussion about how the representative Randy Fine of Florida and Andy Ogles of Tennessee have been pushing the federal justice department to investigate Mamdani’s citizenship. (Mamdani was born in Uganda, moved to the US at age seven and became a citizen in 2018.) Fine, who has suggested Omar is a “Muslim terrorist” and called for Gaza to be nuked, recently demanded the federal government “review every naturalization of the past 30 years – starting with Mamdani”.Fine doesn’t really need to be demanding this, by the way, because the government is already on it. Back in June, the justice department announced plans to prioritize efforts to strip some naturalized Americans of their US citizenship. Barack Obama, I should note, also led a denaturalization push – but the difference between that and Trump 2.0 is the way in which the president is using deportation fears to chill political speech and intimidate his enemies.While people of color are the main target of these attacks, even some privileged white people are being threatened with deportation or the loss of their citizenship because of their opinions – a terrifying throwback to McCarthyism. Back when Musk and Trump were feuding, for example, the president responded to a question on whether he’d deport the South African tech billionaire by saying: “I don’t know, we’ll have to take a look.” And, in July, Trump said he was thinking of revoking the citizenship of Rosie O’Donnell, an American-born comedian and actor who has repeatedly criticized the president. To be clear, Trump can’t legally take away the citizenship of someone born in the US. But as we all know by now, Trump rarely seems to look at the law as an impediment.Expect more of this. The Trump administration has made it very clear to 24.5 million naturalized Americans in the US that they’d better keep their mouths shut to keep their passports. Ultimately, Miller’s threat on Piers Morgan’s show wasn’t just directed at Uygur, it was a warning to everyone in America: criticize Maga and there will be consequences.Kat Abughazaleh, who is running for Congress, says she has been indicted by the DoJ for protesting ICEAbughazaleh called the charges “yet another attempt by the Trump administration to criminalize protest and punish those who dare to speak up”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA disgraced Andrew has been demoted to plain old Mr Mountbatten WindsorShortly after the publication of Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous book, Nobody’s Girl, King Charles announced that Andrew’s titles were being removed. It’s not quite justice, but it’s something.Kim Kardashian thinks the moon landing was fakeOh dear.Horrifying mass killings in Sudan after El Fasher seizedThere is evidence of mass killings by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), after they took control of the city in Sudan’s western Darfur region last weekend. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), an ally of the UK and the US, has been repeatedly accused of supplying weapons to the paramilitary RSF in Sudan. According to the UN, the RSF is also using rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war. The US and the UK must end arms sales to the UAE. We have crept into a new dark age where genocide appears to have been normalized.France adds consent to rape law in the wake of Gisèle Pelicot caseThe country’s Senate has approved a bill defining rape and other sexual assault as any non-consensual sexual act. Previously, rape was defined as penetration or oral sex using “violence, coercion, threat or surprise”.Ms Rachel is one of Glamour Magazine’s women of the yearRachel Accurso has been one of the most vocal voices in the US for Gaza – and has been smeared and harassed because of this. Her “nursery school tenderness and moral clarity … explains why she’s not just a streaming juggernaut but a cultural flashpoint”, Glamour writes.The week in pawtriarchyShoppers at a Spirit Halloween in Texas were spooked after a pet monkey wearing a diaper escaped from its owner and began swinging from the rafters. Eventually, the monkey’s owner offered it a cookie and it came down. While the video is cute, there’s been a disturbing trend of monkeys being trafficked into the US because people see them on TikTok and want to keep them as pets, which is often cruel and inappropriate. Weird how it seems easier to get hold of a pet primate in Texas than it is to get abortion care for a life-threatening pregnancy.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      A South Park Halloween: latest episode destroys Trump over White House demolition

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      The second episode of South Park’s abrupt 28th season was meant to air this past Wednesday (the immediately preceding season 27 was just five episodes) but ended up being pushed back to Friday. This worked in the show’s favor, since tonight’s installment, titled The Woman in the Hat, is very much a Halloween special.After shuttering Tegridy Farms, the Marsh family find themselves rudderless, living out of motels while patriarch Randy looks for work (thanks to the federal government shutdown, he can’t go back to his former job as a government geologist). Out of desperation, Randy moves his family into the old folks’ home where he’s stashed his elderly father.This leads a bitter Stan Marsh to lament that “South Park sucks now … and it’s because of this political shit”. Reminiscing about simpler times when the boys used to do things together, he teams up with best friends Kyle and Kenny, as well as Kyle’s uber-stereotypical relative from New York, Cousin Kyle, to launch a new meme coin. Cousin Kyle works his “savvy Jew-jitsu” to “screw a lot of people out of their money”.Meanwhile, in Washington DC, President Trump oversees the destruction of the White House’s East Wing. Although he’s promised his lover Satan that the remodeling is for a new nursery for their forthcoming love child, he fully intends to build yet another party space for himself. Trump’s plans get derailed when he receives word from his inner circle – including a brown-nosed Pam Bondi (her face covered in literal feces, or “rectoplasm”) and a ghoulish Stephen Miller – that unknown forces are conspiring to kill his and Satan’s baby. Despite attempting to force an abortion himself, an already paranoid Trump is freaked out by the news, and he finds himself haunted by the ghostly specter of wife Melania, appearing as a ghostly figure from out of a J-horror film, a la The Ring or The Grudge.(The true murderous mastermind behind everything, JD Vance, continues to plot with co-conspirator Peter Thiel, who is keeping a demonically possessed Eric Cartman on ice.)These disparate threads converge when Cousin Kyle seeks out White House approval for the boys’ crypto dump, only to find himself part of an impromptu seance alongside Trump, Bondi, Miller, Vance, Don Jr, Kristi Noem and FCC head Brendan Carr (still suffering from injuries sustained a few episodes back). A ghostly wrath descends upon the party and threatens to expose both Trump’s Epstein ties and Vance’s power grab until Cousin Kyle, ravaged by guilt, admits that “crypto’s just a money-laundering scheme for the rich to get richer!” Cut to a screeching Fox News alert announcing that Bondi – her entire face still covered in feces – has indicted Cousin Kyle for crypto fraud. He gets sentenced to 10 years in prison, while Bondi vows to “indict anyone who says bad stuff about our amazing president”.Back home, a defeated Stan realizes that “there’s just no really going back to the way things used to be”. Kyle attempts to console him, promising that things will return to normal at some point down the line, but the dark, Shining-esque note that the episode closes on casts doubt on this.Another solid building block in what, when all is said and done, promises to be South Park’s most ambitious season (or two seasons) yet. While the show has always tackled current events, its never folded them into its long-term storytelling in such a way.At the same time, series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker clearly recognize that the fervency of these latest seasons’ political satire is alienating some of their longtime fans, who likely feel that the show has gone too far in this direction. The self-satirizing within this episode may not placate those critics, but it puts Stone and Parker’s perspective into sharp relief: as the world has changed, so too has South Park. Per voice-of-reason Kyle, there’s no point in trying to go back to simpler times – all anyone can do is “make the most of where we are”. More

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      US food banks rush to stock supplies amid the Snap lapse: ‘We’re going to garner all the resources we can’

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      Waves of hungry Angelenos gathered outside the Community Space food bank’s storefront on a recent afternoon, grabbing dry goods like pastries, bagels, lentils and pasta along with refrigerated salads and frozen bags of brisket.The crowd ebbs and flows all day, said founder Gaines Newborn, but as news spread last week that the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) would cease on Saturday, he braced for the need to dramatically increase.“I’ve gotten more calls than we’ve ever gotten from concerned people saying: ‘My food stamps are getting cut, I need a plan,’” Newborn said. “People are trying to get ahead of food insecurity.”As the federal government shutdown stretches into its second month, the Trump administration announced that Snap, which helps around 42 million people afford food each month, will exhaust its funding at the start of November – something that has never happened before in the program’s half-century history.On Friday, two separate federal judges blocked the government’s attempt to stop paying out the benefits, but the administration could appeal the orders to a higher court. Food banks remain on edge for the possibility of a benefit cut, as they face increased demand driven by federal workers who have gone unpaid during the shutdown, along with people who have struggled to afford rising grocery prices.“The scale of what will happen when 1.8 million New Yorkers don’t get that benefit that they rely on to purchase groceries is sort of hard to wrap my head around, honestly,” said Nicole Hunt, director of public policy and advocacy at Food Bank for NYC, which serves the nation’s most populous city.The organization, which is the largest in New York City, planned to step up its aid during the period when Snap is unavailable, but Hunt said they cannot match the level of assistance the federal program provides.View image in fullscreen“We are going to do what we do, which is to show up with food. We’re going to try to concentrate as much as we can on the neighborhoods that are going to be the hardest hit and garner all the resources that we can, but that’s just not a scale that we’re going to be able to meet, and that’s the reality of how important Snap is and how many people rely on it,” she said.The federal government shut down on the first day of October, after Democrats and Republicans in Congress failed to agree on legislation that would have continued funding. Around 700,000 federal workers were furloughed, with hundreds of thousands more told to continue working for paychecks that will arrive only after funding is restored.The deadlock has continued as Republicans refuse Democratic demands to couple government funding legislation with an extension of tax credits that have lowered costs for Affordable Care Act health plans. While the Senate’s Republican leaders have tried 13 times to pass a bill to reopen the government, Democrats refuse to budge, and there is no sign of a resolution in sight.Snap benefits continued during previous shutdowns – including those that took place in Donald Trump’s first term – and a Department of Agriculture report outlining their plans for the latest funding lapse indicated they would continue during this one, too.But that report was deleted from the department’s website and replaced by a message that attacks Democratic senators and reads: “Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01.”David Super, a professor at Georgetown Law, said that between money allocated for Snap and funds for other programs that the law allows it to repurpose, the department could keep Snap dollars flowing, if it wanted to.“Clear congressional intent is that this money is available to pay benefits,” Super said at an event organized by the Brookings Institution. “They’re cutting off benefits to put pressure on Senate Democrats, and they put this offensive and dishonest statement on their website trying to blame anyone but themselves for this entirely voluntary termination of Snap benefits.”The program’s lapse will create need beyond the capability of any food bank to fill.View image in fullscreenOn average, Snap provides 95 million meals per month in New York City. In all of last year, Food Bank for NYC distributed 85 million meals, Zac Hall, the senior vice-president of programs, said.“We’re seeing mothers worried about what they’re going to be able to make for dinner for their kids, grandmothers worried about what they’re going to put on the table for Thanksgiving meals,” Hall said.In the Minneapolis suburb Brooklyn Park, Second Harvest Heartland, the country’s second-largest food bank, is stocking more inventory to be ready for Snap’s end, according to Sarah Moberg, the CEO.“The hunger relief network was not designed to do the work of Snap,” Moberg said. “We are designed to meet someone’s acute hunger need in a moment, and Snap is designed to do that so much more efficiently.”The pain of a cutoff would be particularly acute for the federal workers who are already struggling to get by without their normal salaries.“It’s horrible,” said Christina Dechabert, 52, a Bronx resident who has been working without pay for the Transportation Security Administration at John F Kennedy international airport. “You’re talking about trying to survive with no checks. I’ve had to come to a food bank to get food so our family can survive.”One mother in New York, who did not want to be named, said she was considering taking her two-year-old out of daycare as both she and her husband were federal workers.“We’re in a household with both of us not having paychecks, so that’s the toughest part,” she said. “My son’s under three, so there’s no free daycare, so if this goes on another month or so I might just take him out and have him at home so I don’t have to pay for daycare.”Joshua Cobos, a volunteer at Community Space in Los Angeles, is a Snap recipient himself. He hopes the credit he has earned from his hours at the food bank will see him through the benefit cutoff.“I’m racking up as much as I can around here, and with everything coming up I feel like we’re gonna be busy,” Cobos said.Some cities and states moved to pre-empt the financial hit from the Snap cutoff. Kathy Hochul, the New York governor, on Thursday declared a state of emergency that would free up $65m in state funds for food banks. Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, is sending $4m in state funding to food shelves to manage the Snap gap, but the need is far greater – $73m comes from federal funds to Minnesota for the program.The Atlanta Community food bank, where the monthly need has grown 70% over the past three-and-a-half years, announced Thursday it would draw $5m from its contingency to stock its pantries in anticipation of a surge of demand from unpaid federal workers and Snap beneficiaries. Andre Dickens, the city’s mayor, also announced a temporary eviction and water shutoff moratorium to support residents affected by the lapse in food aid.Super, the Georgetown Law professor, warned the cutoff for Snap bodes ill for the program’s long-term future in Washington.“This has been something that has not been political or ideological up to this point, and it would be tragic if we cross that line and this does become something that’s just part of partisan warfare,” he said. More

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      Trump’s military pressure on Maduro evokes Latin America’s coup-ridden past

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      The ghosts of sometimes deadly Latin American coups of the past are being evoked by Donald Trump’s relentless military buildup targeting Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocratic socialist leader, whom Washington has branded a narco-terrorist.Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Marxist president of Chile toppled in a military coup in 1973, and Rafael Trujillo, the longstanding dictator of the Dominican Republic who was assassinated in 1961 in an ambush organized by political opponents, are just two regional leaders whose fates serve as a warning to Maduro.Allende is believed to have killed himself, although some doubt that explanation, as troops stormed the presidential palace in the Chilean capital, Santiago, in a coup – fomented by then president Richard Nixon’s administration – that ushered in the brutally repressive military regime of Gen Augusto Pinochet.The CIA is believed to have supplied the weapons used to kill Trujillo.Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, escaped into exile after being overthrown in a 1954 coup also instigated by the CIA. But the event triggered a 30-year civil war that killed an estimated 150,000 people and resulted in 50,000 disappearances.The agency is also thought to have made at least eight unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba’s communist regime, which is still in power and is closely allied to Maduro.The plot to depose Castro also included the failed Bay of Pigs invasion carried out by Cuban exiles and organized by the CIA in the early months of John F Kennedy’s presidency in 1961, but which was defeated by Cuba’s armed forces.Now, as the US stages its biggest naval buildup in the region since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, some believe Maduro’s life is equally at risk.Washington is preparing to carry out military strikes imminently inside Venezuela on already pinpointed targets that have been identified as military facilities used to smuggle drugs, according to reports.US officials are leaving little doubt that this could lead to fatal consequences for Maduro.“Maduro is about to find himself trapped and might soon discover that he cannot flee the country even if he decided to,” the Miami Herald quoted a source with close knowledge of US military planning as saying. “What’s worse for him, there is now more than one general willing to capture and hand him over, fully aware that one thing is to talk about death, and another to see it coming.”The Trump administration has offered a $50m bounty for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the Venezuelan leader, after announcing in August that it was doubling the $25m reward initially offered during Trump’s first presidency.Explaining his decision this month to authorize covert CIA actions against Venezuela, Trump pointedly refused to say whether US forces were authorized to “take out” Maduro. However, Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA Latin America analyst, said the intense security surrounding the Venezuelan leader in effect rendered the reward a “dead or alive” proposition, meaning any attempt to snatch him is likely to result in his death.“Anybody who’s going to try to take him is going to be so heavily armed that any defense that he put up would lead to them pulling triggers,” said Armstrong.“Let’s say it’s locals and they want the bounty. Most of them will assume that they’ll get the bounty dead or alive. Our forces would be a little bit more disciplined, but then imagine the adrenaline that anybody trying to do a snatch would have coursing through their veins. They’re going to be trigger-happy.“Only a fool would think that they can go in there and say, ‘OK, let me put handcuffs on you and escort you to the car.’ That’s not how it’s going to work.”Maduro has survived at least one apparent attempt on his life, when two drones exploded as he was speaking at a military parade in Caracas in 2018. Television footage shows several members of his security team rushing to his side to shield him after the explosions.Maduro accused neighboring Colombia of being responsible, although some opponents suggested the episode was a false flag operation staged to win sympathy.In May 2020, Venezuelan security forces foiled an attempt by about 60 dissidents, accompanied by two former US Green Berets, to capture and oust him in a plot that involved infiltrating the country by sea. The episode was afterwards dubbed the “Bay of Piglets” in mocking reference to the botched plot against Castro.But a fresh sign of Washington’s determination to get its hands on Maduro emerged this week when the Associated Press reported that a US agent, working for the Department of Homeland Security, had unsuccessfully tried to bribe the Venezuelan president’s pilot into diverting his plane to enable American authorities to capture him.The Trump administration has deployed a daunting array of military hardware off the Venezuelan coast in what appears to be an intimidating statement of intent to bring about regime change in the country.Last week, the Pentagon announced that the USS Gerald Ford, the biggest aircraft carrier in the US navy, would sail from Europe to join a military force consisting of destroyers armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, B-1 and B-52 bombers, and special forces helicopters.At least 57 people have been killed in more than a dozen US military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. Washington has accused Maduro and other senior Venezuelan officials of being at the head of a cartel smuggling drugs into the US. Maduro denies the charge and experts dispute the significance of Venezuela’s role in the illegal drug trade.Trump has intensified the pressure further by authorizing the CIA to carry out covert activities inside Venezuela, although the contents of his instructions are classified and unknown.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionArmstrong argued that Trump was aware that his policy could prove fatal for Maduro.“What person wouldn’t be aware of that potential because you’re trying to take out a head of state, a tenacious head of state,” he said.“We do assassinations on a routine basis of people that we suspect of not even being senior members of groups that we consider to be terrorists. If we’re authorizing the assassination of regular combatants in the war on terror, how crazy is it to think that the administration would authorize the use of lethal means, if necessary, to snatch the head of a cartel.”Another former CIA officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because of their previous involvement in targeted assassinations in the Middle East, said decisions to authorize such killings were normally taken with great care and based on threat severity.“It is very specific and usually because there is a lethal threat to America and our allies. They are done super carefully,” the former agent said.“The president and the [national security council] come up with the plan, and then they decide who’s going to take the shot … Is it going to be the military [or some other agency], will it lead to war?”High-profile assassinations in recent times include Osama bin Laden by a Navy Seal team in 2011; Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Qods force, killed by a drone strike ordered by Trump in 2020; and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s former deputy in al-Qaida, who was killed by a drone in Afghanistan in 2022 during Joe Biden’s presidency.“Bin Laden was an easy decision – he killed thousands of Americans, and even before the 9/11 attacks he had done lesser stuff,” said the ex-officer. “Suleimani, too, was easy because he had killed so many Americans.”Maduro, however, presents a less clearcut target, even though Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, has described the Venezuelan regime as “the al-Qaida of the western hemisphere”.“The idea of going after a guy, Maduro, who is a sitting leader of a sovereign country, whether we like the country or not, just seems really strange and disproportionate,” the former agent continued. “Maduro is not Hitler. Bin Laden, Suleimani and al-Zawahiri were not heads of countries.“If you look at our history, even in the last 40 or 50, years, we’ve been staying away from going after world leaders.”Disclosures about the CIA’s role in backing coups and assassination attempts on foreign leaders during the 1950s and 1960s led to committees being established in Congress to oversee the agency’s activities.While there is no evidence that Trump has authorized Maduro’s assassination, John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, told senators during his confirmation hearings that he would make the agency less risk averse and more willing to conduct covert action when ordered by the president.Armstrong suggested the administration’s preferred course was to goad Maduro’s opponents in the Venezuelan military and other parts of society to topple him in a coup, setting the scene for a democratic transition while precluding the need for direct US action.But some analysts believe such a scenario would probably spawn a replacement loyal to the leftist movement spearheaded by Maduro’s late predecessor, Hugo Chávez – with a full-blown democratic transformation potentially taking years to bear fruit.Angelo Rivero Santos, a former Venezuelan diplomat in the country’s US embassy and now an academic at Georgetown University, said the chances of a coup were likely to be dashed by domestic realities and the fact that even Maduro’s critics have rallied around the flag in response to recent US pressure. .“The year 2025 is not 1973,” he said, referring to the coup that deposed Chile’s Allende. “Statements from the opposition show that this is not heavily supported inside the country.” More

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      Who decides how we adapt to climate change? | Leah Aronowsky

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      For decades, “stopping climate change” has been the singular goal of climate politics. Across the political spectrum, from grassroots climate campaigners to elite UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate policies.Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, water and land use policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact federal protections?These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we respond to these political crises – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about values and mediating between competing interests, not merely carbon accounting.Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of decarbonization. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. The Council on Foreign Relations, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to expose homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in high-risk areas like California. By contrast, the progressive Climate and Community Institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is stark: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that enable them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.

      Leah Aronowsky is a historian of science and assistant professor at the Columbia Climate School More

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      Labor activist takes on Teamsters leader allying with Trump: ‘He doesn’t represent the workers’

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      The Teamsters International president, Sean O’Brien, is putting the “working class in jeopardy” by allying with Donald Trump, according to a prominent labor activist challenging his leadership of the powerful union.O’Brien has “no business being a labor leader” and “shouldn’t be trusted”, Richard Hooker Jr – who is running against O’Brien’s re-election next year – told the Guardian.Hooker has emerged as a leading critic of O’Brien, who described Trump as “our enemy” during his first term in the White House, while criticizing the Teamsters leadership at the time for lack of opposition to Trump, and said it was “unfortunate” so many Teamsters members voted for Trump during his victorious campaign to lead the union in 2021.As Trump marched back to power, however, O’Brien pivoted. He met privately with the president last January, and hailed him as “one tough SOB” during an unprecedented address at last summer’s Republican national convention.“When he was running, the first time he was saying the truth about Trump,” Hooker said, suggesting O’Brien made his early attacks on Trump just to win election as Teamsters president. “Now that he’s elected, he has decided to go along with Trump and everything that he’s done. But not just Trump, also the ruling class, the employer class, billionaire class, because that’s who Trump represents. He doesn’t represent the workers.”View image in fullscreenAfter O’Brien’s convention speech, the Teamsters – one of the largest unions in the US, representing more than 1.3 million workers – controversially declined to endorse a candidate in November’s presidential election. The union had endorsed every Democrat on the ticket since 2000.The Teamsters deferred comment to the O’Brien slate’s campaign. O’Brien and his campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.With O’Brien up for re-election next year, Hooker, the secretary-treasurer and principal officer of Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia, is leading a rival slate of other union leadership candidates against O’Brien’s slate.The election will take place November 2026. Hooker’s campaign is currently gathering union signatures to make the ballot for the Teamsters national convention in June, where they will vie for 5% of delegates to make the ballot for the November election.Born and raised a preacher’s son around Fayetteville, North Carolina, Hooker began working at UPS shortly after high school in 1999 while attending Drexel University. As a package handler at a UPS warehouse near Philadelphia international airport, he became disillusioned with union leadership as a shop steward with the Teamsters when grievances about their contract were dismissed.His bid to lead Local 623 came up short in 2016. But in 2020, the married father of four became the first Black man to ever lead the union, which represents workers at companies including UPS and Greyhound.Now Hooker is running to replace O’Brien at the top of one of the most influential unions in the US, due to frustrations over his decision to align with Trump, the 2023 UPS contract as UPS recently reported cutting 48,000 jobs, and allegations of intimidation against criticizing O’Brien’s administration.View image in fullscreen“You have your supposed leader flirting with someone who does not care if you have a pension – someone who does not care if you have healthcare, who does not care if you have the [National Labor Relations Board], if you have protect protections at the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] or [Occupational Safety and Health Administration],” said Hooker. “If you align yourself with someone who is OK with being in a relationship with that type of person, then they have no business being a labor leader, because what you’re doing is you’re putting your members and the rest of the working class in jeopardy.“I get the whole bipartisanship, I get working across the aisle. I get that. But when someone has a history of annihilating workers and the working class, then we have no business being with that person.”Hooker also wants the Teamsters to re-affiliate with the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US. He would be the first Black man to lead the union. He has already started to receive harassment after launching his campaign, including an anonymous voicemail left at his office earlier this week which used racist language.View image in fullscreenRepublicans and Trump have often cited O’Brien in claims that Republicans are making inroads with labor and the working class, including from the Republican senator Markwayne Mullin, who sparred with O’Brien during a Senate hearing in 2023, but recently appeared on his podcast.Since Trump took office in January, the fallout from O’Brien’s relationship with Trump has intensified. Teamsters has also faced criticism for hiring Peter Cvjetanovic – whose face became a symbol of the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia – for an administrative job at the union’s headquarters in Washington DC. Cvjetanovic was later reportedly fired.O’Brien has maintained regular communication with Trump throughout his presidency, he claimed in an interview earlier this year with the Hollywood Reporter, while making several appearances on conservative media shows, including podcasts led by Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Bari Weiss, where he said Trump’s presidency so far was “a solid B” grade for the Teamsters.Under O’Brien, Teamsters has also significantly shifted its political donations, pouring money into Republican congressional candidates and groups rather than predominantly Democrats.“What has the union got from Trump? What have we got? We haven’t gotten anything now,” said Hooker. “Reaching across the aisle to some Republicans who have an issue of working with labor and making things better for labor, I understand that, and I agree with that.“But Trump does not have that résumé or history of doing anything for workers. Not one single thing. He comes in and eliminates contracts for workers. Even before he got elected, he told Elon Musk that he likes what he does when people go out on strike, he eliminates them. That’s who he is.” More

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      Canadian PM Carney apologises to Trump over anti-tariff Reagan ad run by Ontario premier

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      The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, said he had apologised to the US president, Donald Trump, over an anti-tariff political advertisement and had told the Ontario premier, Doug Ford, not to run it.Carney, speaking to reporters on Saturday after attending an Asia-Pacific summit in South Korea, said he had made the apology privately to Trump when they both attended a dinner hosted by South Korea’s president on Wednesday.“I did apologise to the president,” Carney said, confirming comments by Trump made on Friday.Carney also confirmed that he had reviewed the ad with Ford before it aired, but said he had opposed using it.“I told Ford I did not want to go forward with the ad,” he said.The ad, commissioned by Ford, an outspoken Conservative politician who is sometimes compared to Trump, uses a snippet of Republican icon and former president Ronald Reagan saying that tariffs cause trade wars and economic disaster.In response, Trump announced that he was increasing tariffs on goods from Canada, and Washington has also halted trade talks with Canada.When departing South Korea earlier this week, Trump remarked he had a “very nice” conversation with Carney at that dinner, but did not elaborate. On Friday Trump still said the United States and Canada will not restart trade talks.Carney said his talks with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, on Friday were a turning point in relations after years of tensions.The last formal meeting between the leaders of Canada and China happened in 2017 when the then prime minister Justin Trudeau had a brief exchange with Xi at a meeting in San Francisco.In recent years, Canadian citizens were detained and executed in China, and Canada’s security authorities concluded that China interfered in at least two federal elections.Carney said he had discussed foreign interference with Xi, among other issues.The trip to Asia had been part of efforts to reduce Canada’s reliance on the United States, Carney said.“It can’t happen overnight, but we’re moving very fast,” he said. More