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      A congressman’s ex got a protective order against him. His boss has little to say about it | Arwa Mahdawi

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      The party of family values strikes againMeet Cory Mills, a Republican congressman representing Florida. He is rabidly anti-abortion, incredibly anti-immigration, and obsequiously pro-Trump. Earlier this year, perhaps in a desperate bid to get Dear Leader to notice him, he introduced a bill, dubbed the “DON-ument Act”, which would make the wall on the US-Mexico border a national monument.In the great tradition of Republican congressmen from Florida (hello, Matt Gaetz!), it turns out Mills may also be a misogynistic creep. On Tuesday, a Florida judge granted a protective order against Mills at the request of his former girlfriend, Lindsey Langston, the reigning Miss United States. Langston, who is 19 years younger than 45-year-old Mills, told authorities she started a romantic relationship with the lawmaker in 2021, when Mills was still married but reportedly separated from his wife.According to Langston, after the breakup, Mills threatened to release nude images of her and harm any future boyfriends. The congressman has called the allegations “false” and hasn’t been charged with a crime, but, according to the New York Times, the judge said he did not find Mills’ “testimony concerning the intimate videos to be truthful” and granted an order restricting Mills from going within 500 feet of his ex’s residence or referring to her on social media. The court found that Langston “has reasonable cause to believe she is in imminent danger of becoming the victim of another act of dating violence”.Langston reportedly ended their relationship in February. That month also saw news reports that Mills was being investigated for an alleged assault on a 27-year-old woman called Sarah Raviani. This wasn’t his wife, if you’re trying to keep track. Rather, according to WRC-TV in Washington, who obtained an earlier version of the police report, Raviani was his “significant other for over a year”. When the authorities turned up she had bruises on her arm and that same police report, according to USA Today, “states Mills instructed the victim to lie about how she obtained bruises on her arms”. Raviani told the Daytona Beach News-Journal her bruising was caused by a medical condition and Mills, who has denied wrongdoing, was not arrested or charged with anything.Mills doesn’t just seem to have issues with these romantic partners; he seems to have quite a few problems meeting his financial obligations. Earlier this year the Republican was accused of failing to pay $85,000 in rent. His landlord tried to evict him after he failed to pay his monthly $20,833 rent between March and July. Most congressmen get paid $174,000 a year so I can understand why he struggled to pay an annual rent that was far higher than his salary. Mills, for his part, blamed an online payment problem for the issue and said he ended up paying his back rent later. The claims against him were dismissed.Poor old Mills always seems to get blamed for problems that are absolutely not his fault. He is also facing an investigation by the House ethics committee over allegations he held contracts with the US government while in Congress, in relation to a weapons company he founded a decade ago. So far, this investigation doesn’t seem to have had much impact on his career.We hear all the time about how the GOP is the party of law and order and family values. What, you might be wondering, do Mills’s colleagues have to say about all his run-ins with the law? Not much!“You have to ask Representative Mills about that,” said Mike Johnson, the House speaker, when asked about the allegations against Mills this week. “He’s been a faithful colleague here. I know his work on the Hill. I don’t know all the details … Let’s talk about things that are really serious.”Yes, let’s talk about things that are really serious, shall we? Because clearly being investigated for allegedly assaulting one girlfriend and then allegedly threatening to release sexual videos of another girlfriend aren’t serious at all. Certainly nothing that might disqualify someone from being a politician in a country that is led by an adjudicated sexual predator.From Matt Gaetz to Mills to Pete Hegseth to Roy Moore, the list of people in Trump’s orbit accused of sexual misconduct seems to grow by the day. And yet, funnily enough, a common theme among Republican men accused of sexual misconduct is that it’s trans people who are the real threat to women. “We must stop the lefts attack on women,” Mills wrote on X in 2022. “We must stand to protect women from biological males competing unfairly,” Mills wrote in another X post. If Mills is what Republicans “protecting” women looks like, I think I’ll pass.Costa Rica’s president limits abortion to life-threatening casesFulfilling a promise he had previous given religious conservatives, President Rodrigo Chaves has limited abortion access to situations when the mother’s life is in danger. Before running for president in 2022, Chaves worked at the World Bank, where he was accused of sexually harassing various women and was eventually sanctioned for misconduct. He has denied the allegations. Seems like he would fit in well with the Republican party.Virginia Giuffre on her abuse at the hands of Epstein and Maxwell“So many young women, myself included, have been criticised for returning to Epstein’s lair even after we knew what he wanted from us,” Giuffre writes in her posthumous memoir, an extract of which is published in the Guardian. “But that stance discounts what many of us had been through before we encountered Epstein, as well as how good he was at spotting girls whose wounds made them vulnerable. Several of us had been molested or raped as children; many of us were poor or even homeless. We were girls who no one cared about, and Epstein pretended to care … And then, he did his worst to them.”TikTok watches are desperate for a Crock-pot cauldronThere’s been a lot of toil and trouble brewing on WitchTok recently, after Crock-Pot apparently reneged on its promise to make a slow cooker in the shape of a cauldron. Not very sensible to get on the bad side of internet witches; they have quite the track record.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKim Kardashian is now selling a thong with a built-in pubic wigIt’s called “the ultimate bush”, costs $32, and comes in 12 different colours. You can tell the Kardashians are fading from relevance because Kim keeps pulling these desperate and somewhat Goop-y stunts.Oscar Wilde’s library card reissued 130 years after being revoked over gay convictionI’d love to hear what the ghost of Wilde has to say about this. You know it would be pithy.Queer and trans immigrants allege forced labor and sexual assault in Ice facilityIn multiple legal complaints, immigrants detained at a South Louisiana Ice Processing Center have said they were made to perform hard manual labor for as little as $1 per day. They also allege queer people were targeted by an assistant warden who harassed and sexually assaulted them.The week in pawtriarchyChicago’s Roscoe Village is home to a funny-looking shape in the sidewalk that looks like a rat fell at high speed from outer space into wet concrete. The ro-dent, known as the Chicago Rat Hole or “Splatatouille”, has become something of a viral sensation and tourist attractions. Turns out, however, that no rats were harmed in the making of the hole. Rather, after conducting a serious scientific inquiry, a team of researchers now believes there’s a 98.67% chance the hole was actually made by a squirrel. It’s a sad tale, but at least that poor squirrel made its mark on the world.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      Why do so many gen Z women across the US identify as ‘leftist’?

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      When Emily Gardiner first started paying attention to politics, she was 15, just beginning high school in 2016. It was the start of the first Trump administration, a moment that politicized a lot of young Americans.Now 23, Emily works as a library assistant in eastern Connecticut and is rewriting the second draft of her adult fantasy novel. She describes herself as “definitely leftist, not liberal”.“I was raised by parents who were politically active,” Emily said, “but I think a lot of my views also come from being Indigenous. My community puts a lot of value in sovereignty.”She adds: “I think for a lot of us who identify as leftist versus liberal, we feel that both the Democrats and the Republicans have kind of capitulated in a way to authoritarianism.” She believes billionaires have too much influence over the Democrats and that “liberals are a little bit less socially active, more prone toward centrism, willing to compromise their values”.Her words echo a generational sentiment among young people and young women in particular: that moderation feels like surrender in a time when so much is at stake. Across the country, generation Z women like Emily represent the most leftwing demographic in modern US history.Such is not the case with the men of gen Z, whose views tend to skew more in line with the national average, according to a recent 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll. The polling found that only 26% of gen Z women approve of the job president Trump is doing, compared with 47% of gen Z men. The national average is 43% approval.“There’s definitely a gender divide,” said Lily, a 24-year-old from North Carolina who works in legal services. “A lot of men of my age group I’ve noticed are more right-leaning.” She believes this comes down to the fact that many of the issues that leftists care about more directly impact women compared to men. Women have to care about politics because their health and safety depends on it.“Unfortunately, I think people often only care about issues that affect them,” she said.For Rebecca J, a 26-year-old from Washington DC, politics were “never optional”.“I’m trans,” she said. “So politics has always kind of been in my life.” Raised in a conservative household, she describes herself as “a socialist, but more of a social democrat, think of it like a leftist by European standards.”What matters to her most now are material conditions. “Economic issues are very important,” she said. “All these social issues we’re grappling with like abortion, trans rights, queer rights, they’re all downstream of the economic issues.”Rebecca is a former tech worker and now works in delivery services. The instability colors everything, she believes. “People are so overwhelmed just getting food on the table. It’s convenient for billionaires that a large chunk of the population is distracted by culture wars instead of asking why rent is unaffordable.”Like many of her peers, she sees the Democratic and Republican parties as a closed duopoly “both failing,” as she puts it “because they don’t want to fix it. That’s their strategy”.Research shows that Gen Z is less likely than older cohorts to believe in meritocratic narratives about upward mobility. Younger people are notably more skeptical that hard work alone is enough to guarantee success.And much like Emily and Rebecca, more gen Zers are choosing to reject the label of “democrat” or “liberal”, feeling that the terms and the Democratic party as an institution no longer represent their stance on many issues.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRachel, a 26-year-old office worker from Michigan, also shares this sentiment. “I identify as left, not liberal,” she said. “‘Liberal’ is used to describe the Democrats and I’m much further left to the point that I don’t want to be considered under the same umbrella. Liberalism is still a capitalist ideology, and I consider myself an anti-capitalist.”For Lily, the issues that feel most urgent are reproductive rights as well as economic inequality. “Definitely healthcare, women’s healthcare specifically, the situation in Gaza, and anything economic affecting our work,” she said. “We’re passionate, but disappointed in our party. I think a lot of people my age would like the Democratic party to go in a different direction, more left.”Internet algorithms also play a significant role in shaping an individual’s worldview. Younger people are more likely to be regular news consumers on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Reddit. Research shows that algorithms used by social media platforms are rapidly amplifying extreme misogynistic content, especially when it believes the user is a young male.Gen Z men are more likely than baby boomers to believe that feminism has done more harm than good. Experts cite the influence of social media figures like Andrew Tate and the polarizing effects of online content as major contributors to this attitude shift.For gen Z women, it’s clear the leftward drift is deeply rooted in proximity to risk. Their generation came of age amid climate crisis, debt, job insecurity, and the growing threat of authoritarianism. They do not see compromise as civility, but rather as danger. If older generations saw politics as negotiation, Gen Z women see it as self-defense.“Both parties are in the pockets of billionaires,” as Emily puts it.“We don’t feel represented.” Lily said, adding “a lot of people in power now are older, and they’re men. Maybe they just don’t understand the position that a young woman is in.” More

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      ‘Indecency has become a new hallmark’: writer and historian Jelani Cobb on race in Donald Trump’s America

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      “From the vantage point of the newsroom, the first story is almost never the full story,” writes Jelani Cobb. “You hear stray wisps of information, almost always the most inflammatory strands of a much bigger, more complicated set of circumstances.”The dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York could be reflecting on the recent killing of the racist provocateur Charlie Kirk. In fact, he is thinking back to Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American student from Florida who was shot dead by a white Latino neighbourhood watch volunteer in 2012.“The Martin case – the nightmare specter of a lynching screaming across the void of history – ruined the mood of a nation that had, just a few years earlier, elected its first black president, and in a dizzying moment of self-congratulation, began to ponder on editorial pages whether the nation was now ‘post-racial’,” Cobb writes in the introduction to his book Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025.Many of the essays in the collection were written contemporaneously, affording them the irony – sometimes bitter irony – of distance. Together they form a portrait of an era bookended by the killing of Martin and the return to power of Donald Trump, with frontline reporting from Ferguson and Minneapolis along the way. They make a compelling argument that everything is connected and nothing is inevitable about racial justice or democracy.As Cobb chronicles across 437 pages, the 2013 acquittal of Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, became a catalyst for conversations about racial profiling, gun laws and systemic racism, helping to inspire the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement.Three years later, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, attended a Bible study session at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, then opened fire and killed nine Black parishioners. Cobb notes that Roof told police he had been “radicalised” by the aftermath of Martin’s killing and wanted to start a “race war”.View image in fullscreenSpeaking by phone from his office at Columbia, Cobb, 56, says: “It was a very upside-down version of the facts because he looked on Martin’s death and somehow took the reaction to it as a threat to white people and that was what set him on his path. Roof was this kind of precursor of the cause of white nationalism and white supremacy that becomes so prominent now.”Then, in the pandemic-racked summer of 2020, came George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man murdered by a white police officer who kneeled on his neck for almost nine minutes as Floyd said, “I can’t breathe,” more than 20 times. Black Lives Matter protesters took to the streets with demands to end police brutality, invest in Black communities and address systemic racism across various institutions.Cobb, an author, historian and staff writer at the New Yorker magazine, continues: “It was the high tide. A lot of the organising, a lot of the kinds of thinking, the perspective and the work and the cultural kinds of representations – these things had begun eight years earlier with Trayvon Martin’s death.“This was an excruciating, nearly nine-minute-long video of a person’s life being extinguished and it happened at a time when people had nothing to do but watch it. They weren’t able to go to work because people were in lockdown. All of those things made his death resonate in a way that it might not have otherwise. There had been egregious instances of Black people being killed prior to that and they hadn’t generated that kind of societal response.”Cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle and Los Angeles reallocated portions of police budgets to community programmes; companies committed millions of dollars to racial-equity initiatives; for a time, discussions of systemic racism entered mainstream discourse. But not for the first time in US history, progress – or at least the perception of it – sowed the seeds of backlash.“It also was a signal for people who are on the opposite side of this to start pushing in the opposite direction and that happened incredibly swiftly and with incredible consequences to such an extent that we are now in a more reactionary place than we were when George Floyd died in the first place,” Cobb says.No one better embodies that reactionary spirit than Donald Trump, who rose to political prominence pushing conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birthplace and demonising immigrants as criminals and rapists. His second term has included a cabinet dominated by white people and a purge of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.Trump lost the presidential election a few months after Floyd died but returned to power last year, defeating a Black and south Asian challenger in Kamala Harris. According to Pew Research, Trump made important gains with Latino voters (51% Harris, 48% Trump) and won 15% of Black voters – up from 8% in 2020.What does Cobb make of the notion that class now outweighs race in electoral politics? “One of the things that they did brilliantly was that typically politics has worked on the basis of: ‘What will you do for me?’” Cobb says. “That’s retail politics. That’s what you expect.“The Trump campaign in 24 was much more contingent upon the question of: ‘What will you do to people who I don’t like?’ There were some Black men who thought their marginal position in society was a product of the advances that women made and that was something the Republican party said overtly, which is why I think their appeal was so masculinist.”Trump and his allies weaponised prejudice against transgender people to attract socially and religiously conservative voters, including demographics they would otherwise hold in “contempt”. “I also think that we tended to overlook the question of the extent to which Joe Biden simply handing the nomination to Kamala Harris turned off a part of the electorate,” Cobb says.He expresses frustration with the well-rehearsed argument that Democrats became too fixated on “woke” identity politics at the expense of economic populism: “They make it seem as if these groups created identity politics. Almost every group that’s in the Democratic fold was made into an identity group by the actions of people who were outside.“If you were talking about African Americans, Black politics was created by segregation. White people said that they were going to act in their interest in order to prevent African Americans from having access. Women, through the call of feminism, came to address the fact that they were excluded from politics because men wanted more power. You could go through every single group.”Yet it remains commonplace to talk about appealing to evangelical Christian voters or working-class non-college-educated voters, he says: “The presumption implicit in this is that all those people see the world in a particular way that is understandable or legible by their identity, and so there’s a one-sidedness to it. For the entirety of his political career, Trump has simply been a shrewd promulgator of white-identity politics.”That trend has become supercharged in Trump’s second term. He has amplified the great replacement theory, sought to purge diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and complained that museums over-emphasise slavery. His actions have built a permission structure for white nationalists who boast they now have a seat at the top table.Many observers have also expressed dismay at Trump’s concentration of executive power and the speed and scale of his assault on democratic institutions. Cobb, however, is not surprised.“It’s about what I expected, honestly,” he says, “because throughout the course of the 2024 campaign, Trump mainly campaigned on the promises of what he was going to do to get back at people. They’re using the power of the state to pursue personal and ideological grievances, which is what autocracy does.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt is now fashionable on the left to bemoan the rise of US authoritarianism as a novel concept, a betrayal of constitutional ideals envied by the world. Cobb has a more complex take, suggesting that the US’s claim to moral primacy, rooted in the idea of exceptionalism, is based on a false premise.He argues: “America has been autocratic previously. We just don’t think about it. It’s never been useful … to actually grapple with what America was, and America had no interest in grappling with these questions itself. Who has ever managed personal growth while constantly screaming to the world about how special and amazing they are?”Cobb’s book maps an arc of the moral universe that is crooked and uneven, pointing out that, between the end of reconstruction and 1965, 11 states in the south effectively nullified the protections of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments of the constitution, imposing Jim Crow laws, voter suppression and violence to disenfranchise Black citizens.“The constitution gave Black people the right to vote but, if you voted, you’d be killed and this was a known fact,” he says. “This went on for decade after decade after decade. You can call that a lot of things. You can’t call that democracy. It was a kind of racial autocracy that extended in lots of different directions.”He adds: “We should have been mindful that the country could always return to form in that way, that its commitment to democracy had been tenuous. That was why race has played such a central role in the dawning of this current autocratic moment. But it’s not the only dynamic.“Immigration, which is tied to race in some ways, is another dynamic. The advances that women have made, the increasing acceptance and tolerance of people in the LGBTQ communities – all those things, combined with an economic tenuousness, have made it possible to just catalyse this resurgence of autocracy in the country.”It is therefore hardly unexpected that business leaders and institutions would capitulate, as they have in the past, he says: “We might hope that they would react differently but it’s not a shock when they don’t. Go back to the McCarthy era. We see that in more instances than not, McCarthy and other similar kinds of red-baiting forces were able to exert their will on American institutions.”Cobb’s own employer has been caught in the maelstrom. In February, the Trump administration froze $400m in federal research grants and funding to Columbia, citing the university’s “failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment” during Gaza protests last year. Columbia has since announced it would comply with nearly all the administration’s demands and agreed to a $221m settlement, restoring most frozen funds but with ongoing oversight.Cobb does not have much to add, partly for confidentiality reasons, though he does comment: “In life, I have tended to not grade harshly for exams that people should never have been required to take in the first place.”He is unwavering, however, in his critique of Trump’s attack on the university sector: “What’s happening is people emulating Viktor Orbán [the leader of Hungary] to try to crush any independent centres of dissent and to utilise the full weight of the government to do it, and also to do it in hypocritical fashion.“The cover story was that Columbia and other universities were being punished for their failure to uproot antisemitism on their campuses. But it’s difficult to understand how you punish an institution for being too lenient about antisemitism and the punishment is that you take away its ability to do cancer research, or you defund its ability to do research on the best medical protocols for sick children or to work on heart disease and all the things that were being done with the money that was taken from the university.“In fact, what is being done is that we are criminalising the liberal or progressive ideas and centres that are tolerant of people having a diverse array of ideas or progressive ideas. The irony, of course, is that one of the things that happens in autocracy is the supreme amount of hypocrisy. They have an incredible tolerance for hypocrisy and so all these things are being done under the banner of protecting free speech.”That hypocrisy has been on extravagant display again in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing by a lone gunman on a university campus in Utah. Trump and his allies have been quick to blame the “radical left” and “domestic terrorists” and threaten draconian action against those who criticise Kirk or celebrate his demise. The response is only likely to deepen the US’s political polarisation and threat of further violence.Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah and a rare voice urging civil discourse, wondered whether this was the end of a dark chapter of US history – or the beginning. What does Cobb think? “There’s a strong possibility that it will get worse before it gets better,” he says frankly.“We’re at a point where we navigated the volatile moment of the 1950s, the 1960s, because we were able to build a social consensus around what we thought was decent and what we thought was right, and we’re now seeing that undone. Indecency has become a new hallmark.“But we should take some solace in the fact that people have done the thing that we need to do now previously. The situation we’re in I don’t think is impossible.” More

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      Biggest US labor unions fuel No Kings protests against Trump: ‘You need a voice to have freedom’

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      Recovery from a recent surgery for colon cancer will not stop James Phipps, 75, from attending Saturday’s No Kings demonstration in Chicago, Illinois. “I have a burning desire to be a part of the protest.” he said, “because that’s all I’ve done all my life.”Phipps, born in Marks, Mississippi, was involved in the civil rights movement in the 1960s from the age of 13, when he was part of racially integrating his local high school and organizing with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. At 15, he became involved in the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union (MFLU), which organized sharecroppers for better wages.At the time, the MFLU was organizing cotton pickers. “They were paid 30 cents an hour, working in the hot sun, 10 hours a day, which was $3, two and half cents per pound of cotton,” said Phipps. “It broke their necks, backs, pelvis and knees.”“They had no medical care,” he added. “That’s one of the key things in my mind right now.”Phipps, who now works in administrative support in Cook county, is a member of SEIU Local 73.He was thankful he had health insurance to cover his recent cancer surgery. The federal government shutdown continues, after Democrats demanded that Republicans address recent Medicaid cuts under Donald Trump and extend health insurance subsidies scheduled to expire at the end of the year. The expiration would set the stage for rapidly rising insurance premiums and risk driving an estimated 3.1 million Americans off health insurance.View image in fullscreen“You have greedy men thinking about one thing, and that’s about enhancing their pocketbook, their financial wellbeing,” said Phipps, who has also been alarmed by aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raids in Chicago. The Trump administration has defended the raids with false and misleading claims about crime.“There’s no reason why you should walk the streets, taking people out of their home, and they’ve been here for 20 or 30 years,” he said. “I had Mexican neighbors live next door to me 41 years. They were some of my best friends in life. We coalesced with each other.“We were social with neighbors, with each other, and we loved each other. When one saw somebody died or there was a problem, we were already there.”There are parallels, Phipps said, between how immigrants are being treated under Trump to the discriminatory laws he grew up under in Mississippi.“The same struggle that Mexican Americans and people of color are going through, we went through that since 1619, especially in the south when we had Jim Crow,” he said. “If you dared do anything at that time to confront them about the way you were treated, you would end up being found in the river or lynched somewhere, so I identify with what is going on.”‘We didn’t want kings then, and we don’t want kings now’Some of the largest labor unions in the US are involved in organizing the No Kings protests, with more than 2,600 demonstrations planned across all 50 states, with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and American Federation of Teachers anchoring events.“Unions understand that a voice at work creates power for regular people at work. Unions understand that a voice in democracy creates power for regular folks, for working folks in a society,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “These are two of the main ways that regular folks have any power.“We and labor understand that you need to have a voice to have freedom. Freedom does not come without a voice.”While prominent Republicans and Trump administration officials have claimed the protests amount to “hate America” rallies – in stark contrast to Trump’s description of January 6 rioters as “patriots”. The Republican congressman Tom Emmer went so far as to suggest that Democrats were bowing to the “pro-terrorist wing of their party” by standing by demands that Republicans address recent Medicaid cuts and extend health insurance subsidies.Weingarten said the events were actually a response to abuses of power by Trump, and designed to express frustration over his administration’s failure to deal with issues such as soaring grocery and healthcare prices.“I love America and I resent anyone attempting to take away my patriotism because I want the promise of America to be real for all Americans,” she said. “That’s where labor is. They want the promise of America to be real for our members, and for their families, and for the people we serve.View image in fullscreen“Our founders were a rebellious lot who said, ‘We don’t want kings.’ And now 249 years later, people are saying, ‘No, we meant it.’ There’s a lot of things that we’ve changed in America, but one of the things that had stayed constant is we didn’t want kings then, and we don’t want kings now.”“The real threat to this country isn’t peaceful protesters. It’s politicians shutting down our government to protect billionaires and corporate greed,” said Jaime Contreras, executive vice-president for SEIU 32 BJ, which represents 185,000 janitors, security officers, airport workers and other service employees around the east coast of the US. “What’s ironic to me is you call peaceful protesters ‘terrorists’, but then the people who destroyed our nation’s Capitol building ‘patriots’.“On 18 October, SEIU members will be in the streets across the country as part of the No Kings [protests], because America belongs to the people, working people, not to billionaires or a few politicians who think they can rule like kings in a democracy like ours.” More

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      Millions expected across all 50 US states to march in No Kings protests against Trump

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      Americans across all 50 states will march in protests against the Trump administration on Saturday, aligning behind a message that the country is sliding into authoritarianism and there should be no kings in the US.Millions are expected to turn out for the No Kings protests, the second iteration of a coalition that marched in June in one of the largest days of protest in US history. Events are scheduled for more than 2,700 locations, from small towns to large cities.Donald Trump has cracked down on US cities, attempting to send in federal troops and adding more immigration agents. He is seeking to criminalize dissent, going after left-leaning organizations that he claims are supporting terrorism or political violence. Cities have largely fought back, suing to prevent national guard infusions, and residents have taken to the streets to speak out against the militarization of their communities.Trump’s allies have sought to cast the No Kings protests as anti-American and led by antifa, the decentralized anti-fascist movement, while also claiming that the protests are prolonging the government shutdown. Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, has said he will send the state’s national guard to Austin, the state’s capital, in advance of the protests.Some politicians, including Democratic senators Chuck Schumer and Chris Murphy, and independent Senator Bernie Sanders, are expected to attend the protests. The No Kings coalition has repeatedly underscored its commitment to nonviolent resistance, and tens of thousands of participants have trained on safety and de-escalation tactics.“What’s most important as a message for people to carry is that the president wants us to be scared, but we will not be bullied into fear and silence,” said Lisa Gilbert, the co-president of Public Citizen, one of the protest organizers. “And it’s incredibly important for people to remain peaceful, to stand proud and to say what they care about, and not to be cowed by that fear.”More than 200 organizations have signed on as partners for the 18 October protests. Organizers have identified several anchor cities: Washington DC, San Francisco, San Diego, Atlanta, New York City, Houston, Honolulu, Boston, Kansas City in Missouri, Bozeman in Montana, Chicago and New Orleans.The simple framing of the protests is that the US has no kings, a dig at Trump’s increasing authoritarianism. Among the themes the organizers have pointed to: Trump is using taxpayer money for power grabs, sending in federal forces to take over US cities; Trump has said he wants a third term and “is already acting like a monarch”; the Trump administration has taken its agenda too far, defying the courts and slashing services while deporting people without due process.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe June No Kings protests drew millions to the streets, with the Harvard Crowd Counting Consortium estimating that between 2 and 4.8 million people attended protests across the more than 2,000 locations in what was “probably the second-largest single day demonstration since Trump first took office in January 2017”, second to the Women’s March in 2017. More

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      Trump says he has commuted sentence of George Santos in federal fraud case

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      Donald Trump announced on Friday he had commuted the sentence of George Santos, the disgraced former New York representative and serial fabulist who had been sentenced to more than seven years in prison after a short-lived political career marked by outlandish fabrications and fraudulent scheming.Santos left the Federal Correctional Institution Fairton in New Jersey just hours later and was “on his way home”, his attorney Joseph Murray told Agence France-Presse by phone late on Friday.In a Truth Social post, Trump called Santos “somewhat of a ‘rogue’” but expressed sympathy for the New York Republican. Santos was sentenced in April after pleading guilty last year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.“I just signed a Commutation, releasing George Santos from prison, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump said in the lengthy post. “Good luck George, have a great life!”The United States pardon attorney tweeted a photograph of the signed commutation shortly after Trump’s post, writing that he was “honored” to have “played a small role” Trump granting Santos clemency.“Thank you, Mr. President for making clemency great again,” he wrote.Murray also thanked Trump, posting on Santos’s X account: “God bless President Donald J Trump the greatest President in US history!”Santos reported to a federal prison in New Jersey in July and began serving an 87-month sentence for charges that ultimately led to his expulsion from Congress in 2023. Trump’s post suggested he was moved by a letter penned by Santos that was published in a local Long Island newspaper this week. Santos wrote about his life in solitary confinement and made direct plea to the president for a “chance to rebuild”.Trump issued the commutation after a push from key Republicans allies, most notably Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene, a prominent former House colleague of Santos, had called his conviction a “grave injustice” and urged intervention after the sentence was handed down. She also sent a letter in August asking the justice department for a commutation.Asked at the time whether he might consider clemency for Santos, Trump, who has a history of rewarding supporters with pardons, did not rule it out, but said he had not been asked.“He lied like hell,” Trump told Newsmax, adding: “But he was 100% for Trump.”On Friday, Greene thanked the president for the commutation and said of Santos: “He was unfairly treated and put in solitary confinement, which is torture!!”Elsewhere in his post on Friday, Trump compared Santos with the Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. He made reference to the decades-old claims that Blumenthal “made up” aspects of his military record. Blumenthal admitted in 2010 that he misrepresented his military service after saying he had been “in” Vietnam. Blumenthal served as a Marine Corps reservist during the Vietnam War, but was not deployed in Vietnam.Trump, who never served in the military, has repeatedly attacked Blumenthal. His account of the senator’s past misstatements have even become increasingly exaggerated in recent years.“This is far worse than what George Santos did, and at least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” Trump wrote of Blumenthal on Friday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBefore and after entering Congress, Santos lied prolifically about his biography. Despite making history as the first out LGBTQ+ Republican elected in Congress, his fabulist tendencies caught up with him with the release of a damning report from the House ethics committee. That report detailed how Santos used campaign funds for things like travel, cosmetic treatments and luxury goods and helped fuel his spectacular fall.But Santos, who catapulted from relative anonymity to pop culture sensation almost overnight, shared Trump’s love of the national spotlight – even when trained on his misdeeds.“Well, darlings … The curtain falls, the spotlight dims, and the rhinestones are packed,” Santos wrote in a tweet pinned to the top of his X account. “From the halls of Congress to the chaos of cable news what a ride it’s been! Was it messy? Always. Glamorous? Occasionally. Honest? I tried … most days.”The judge overseeing Santos’s case sided with federal prosecutors, who argued the former congressman ​had failed to show genuine remorse​ despite his legal team’s insistence to the contrary. That lack of contrition, they said, warranted a tougher sentence.​S​antos’s commutation marks the latest in a string of high-profile ​interventions ​by Trump, who has resumed the use of presidential clemency to reward political allies since returning to the White House in January.Trump, in May, issued a pardon to Michael Grimm, a former Republican congressman from New York who admitted to concealing income and wages related to a Manhattan restaurant he owned. Also pardoned was John Rowland, the former Connecticut governor whose political ascent collapsed under the weight of a federal corruption case and two prison terms.​At the same time, Trump has directed his justice department to bring criminal charges against his political enemies, including his former national security adviser turned prominent critic John Bolton, who was indicted this week and has pleaded not guilty.​Trump last year became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes, stemming from a hush money case in New York that he continues to dismiss as a witch hunt. More

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      Alaska governor asks Trump for federal aid after typhoon displaces 1,500 people

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      Mike Dunleavy, the governor of Alaska, has asked Donald Trump to declare a major disaster after a powerful storm devastated villages in the state’s south-west, displacing 1,500 people and prompting large-scale air evacuations.The state’s senators and congressman urged the president to approve the declaration to allow additional federal resources into the region to repair housing and utilities before winter. The scale of the disaster has surpassed the state’s ability to respond, Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, and Nick Begich, the Alaska congressman, wrote.“This significant storm affected thousands of miles of coast, spanning the Aleutian Islands to the North Slope,” the letter to Trump states. “Immediate federal assistance is needed to support Alaskans recovering from the damage of this storm and to mitigate the impact of future severe weather events.”The remnants of Typhoon Halong hit remote Alaska Native communities in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta over the weekend, battering the area with fierce winds, rain and record-breaking storm surge that sent water into homes and caused some to float off their foundations. At least one person was killed and two others remain missing.The state established makeshift shelters that soon swelled to hold about 1,500 people, an extraordinary number in a sparsely populated region where communities are reachable only by air or water this time of year. Before evacuees were transported to larger shelters, as many as 1,000 people were being housed in just two local schools, Alaska Public Media reported earlier this week. But conditions were challenging, with limited power and bathroom access, and the state began evacuating people via plane to larger shelters in Anchorage, about 500 miles (805km) away.Authorities are still evaluating the full scale of the damage, and destruction was extensive. Residents reported that the storm caused chaos, rocking communities on the south-west like an earthquake and sending waves into their houses.In the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk, Alexie Stone, who was with his brothers and children, said over the weekend he could look outside and see under the water, like an aquarium. A shed drifted toward them, threatening to shatter the glass, but turned away before it hit.The house came to rest just a few feet away from where it previously stood, after another building blocked its path. It remains uninhabitable, along with most of the village.“In our village, we’d say that we’re Native strong, we have Native pride, and nothing can break us down. But this is the hardest that we went through,” Stone said on Thursday outside a shelter in the Alaska Airlines center in Anchorage. “Everybody’s taking care of everybody in there. We’re all thankful that we’re all alive.”Stone’s mother, Julia Stone, is a village police officer in Kipnuk. She was working last weekend when the winds suddenly picked up and her police cellphone began ringing with calls for help from residents – some who reported that their houses were floating. She tried to reach search and rescue teams and others to determine if there were available boats to help, but the situation was “chaos”, she said.“It’s a nightmare what we went through, but I thank God we are together,” she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKipnuk and Kwigillingok, the hardest-hit communities, saw water levels of more than 6ft. In Kipnuk, a village of about 700 people and about 121 homes were destroyed and in Kwigillingok, three dozen homes drifted away. In the village of Napaskiak, water, sewer and well systems are inoperable.The disaster has brought renewed attention to Trump administration cuts to grants aimed at helping small, mostly Indigenous villages prepare for storms or mitigate disaster risks.Earlier this year, the administration canceled a $20m US Environmental Protection Agency grant to Kipnuk, which was inundated by floodwaters in this weekend’s storm. The grant was intended to protect the boardwalk residents use to get around the community, as well as 1,400ft (430 metres) of river from erosion, according to a federal website that tracks government spending.In the aftermath of the storm, Alaskans have raised more than $1m to support evacuees. More

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      Trump claims Maduro willing to give ‘everything’ to ease US tensions

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      Donald Trump used an expletive to threaten the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, on Friday, claiming that the leftist autocrat had offered major concessions to appease the US.The US president was speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday during a meeting with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.Asked about reports that Maduro offered “everything in his country, all the natural resources” to ease tensions, Trump agreed: “He’s offered everything; you’re right. You know why? Because he doesn’t want to fuck around with the United States.”Maduro, who came to power in 2013, has recently shored up his security powers and deployed tens of thousands of troops around the country. He also accused Trump of seeking regime change, an allegation the US president has downplayed.Last week the New York Times reported that Maduro offered a stake in Venezuela’s oil and other mineral wealth in recent months to stave off mounting pressure from the US.Meanwhile, Venezuelan government officials are said to have floated a plan in which Maduro would eventually leave office. The Miami Herald newspaper reported that Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez and her brother Jorge, who is president of the national assembly, had funneled proposals through intermediaries in Qatar to present themselves to Washington as a “more acceptable” alternative.The US has acknowledged carrying out at least five strikes on vessels near Venezuela that it says were transporting drugs, killing at least 27 people.A sixth strike targeted a suspected drug vessel in the Caribbean on Thursday, and in what is believed to be the first such case, there were survivors among the crew, who were reportedly rescued and are being held on a navy ship.One source told Reuters that the vessel struck on Thursday moved below the water and was possibly a semi-submersible, which is a submarine-like vessel used by drug traffickers to avoid detection.Trump confirmed to reporters: “We attacked a submarine. That was a drug-carrying submarine built specifically for the transportation of massive amounts of drugs – just so you understand.”He added: “This was not an innocent group of people. I don’t know too many people that have submarines and that was an attack on a drug-carrying loaded-up submarine.”The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who was also present, did not dispute that there were survivors and repeatedly said details would be forthcoming.The US has described some of the victims in the first five strikes as Venezuelans, while the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, has suggested some were from his country. In Trinidad, family members of one man believed killed in a strike this week have demanded proof he was a drug trafficker.Venezuela’s government has said the strikes are illegal, amount to murder and are an aggression against the country.Trump has justified the strikes by asserting that the US is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, relying on the same legal authority used by the George W Bush administration when it declared a war on terror after the September 11 attacks.But legal scholars have warned that the president’s use of overwhelming military force to combat the cartels, along with his authorisation of covert action inside Venezuela, possibly to oust Maduro, stretches the bounds of international law.Juanita Goebertus Estrada, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said the attacks violated international human rights law and amounted to extrajudicial executions.“The US is not engaged in an armed conflict with Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, or with alleged criminal groups involved. Under human rights law standards, officials engaging in law enforcement must seek to minimize injury and preserve human life. They may use lethal force only when strictly unavoidable to protect against an imminent threat of death or serious injury,” she said.The strikes have caused unease among Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, with some Republicans saying they had not received sufficient information on how the strikes were being conducted.Friday’s outburst was not the first that Trump has peppered the language of diplomacy with profanities. In June, frustrated with Israel and Iran attacking each other after a ceasefire, he told a group of reporters that the countries had “been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing”. More