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      As the US retreats, Europe must look out for itself – so is Macron’s nuclear offer the answer? | Simon Tisdall

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      The startling contempt for Europe’s intensifying security concerns displayed by Donald Trump and his henchmen has brought an old, controversial question back to the fore: should Britain and France pool their nuclear weapons capabilities and create a Europe-wide defensive nuclear shield to deter Vladimir Putin’s Russia, if the US reduces or withdraws its support?Trump has not so far explicitly threatened to cut US nuclear forces based in Europe. But speaking last week, the president said he wanted to halve the US’s defence spending, especially on nuclear weapons. Trump often denigrates Nato, keystone of European security. Last year, he encouraged Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to member states that, in his view, spend too little on defence.Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, warned Nato defence ministers in Brussels that defending Europe was no longer a strategic priority, and raised the prospect of US troop withdrawals. In an insulting speech at the Munich security conference, he minimised the threat posed by Russia. Americans would not be taken for “suckers” by Europeans, he said.These unprecedented assaults on US-Europe ties have raised real fears of a damaging, possibly permanent rupture with Washington. It is against this volatile background that France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, has called an emergency summit in Paris of European leaders, including Keir Starmer. The meeting is expected to focus on Ukraine, its future defence, and Europe’s anticipated exclusion from US “peace talks” with Russia due later this week.Yet an even bigger issue overshadows the summit: how to better organise Europe’s collective defences in the context of reduced, unreliable or nonexistent US support and overt nuclear threats from an emboldened Russia. Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defence minister, has predicted that Putin could attack at least one Nato country within the next five years. Frontline Poland and the Baltic republics voice similar fears.Nato’s chief, Mark Rutte, has urged all 32 member states to expand defence spending. Many, including Britain, appear poised to do so. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, dismayed by what looks to many in Kyiv like US betrayal, told the Munich conference it was time to create an “army of Europe”. That reflects ideas long promoted by Macron, a passionate champion of more integrated, expanded, self-reliant European defence – and reduced US dependence.It is Macron who is leading the debate about a pan-European nuclear shield. The French leader gave new prominence to the idea in a 2020 speech at the École de Guerre in Paris, when he suggested a “strategic dialogue with our European partners … on the role played by France’s nuclear deterrence in our collective security”. Macron repeated the offer in 2022 and again last year.France is not proposing to place its independent deterrent, the force de frappe, which comprises about 290 warheads and operates separately from Nato, under the control of other countries – or the EU. What Macron is saying, like François Hollande and other French leaders before him, is that there exists a “European dimension” to France’s nuclear defence planning. If, for example, Berlin were threatened with nuclear destruction, that would be seen as a threat to Paris, too.“French leaders have three main worries,” an analysis published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) stated. “Firstly, there is a high risk that Trump could withdraw from Nato, or at least significantly reduce US conventional forces in Europe … Secondly, he may also reduce the number of US nuclear weapons currently deployed in Europe, though not much evidence currently supports that prospect.“Thirdly, and most importantly, a US president who loathes or dismisses many European countries is unlikely to risk American lives for Europe.” This latter argument has circulated in France since the days of Gen Charles de Gaulle, who created the force de frappe: namely that, if push came to shove, the US would go nuclear to save Boston but not Boulogne, Bratislava or Bognor Regis.Macron’s proposal raises numerous, complex questions. Among them, who could order the actual use of “Europeanised” nuclear weapons? Who would pay for such a force, especially if necessarily modernised and enlarged? Would such a move make matters worse, by accelerating US disengagement?The view from Germany, a necessary partner in any such project, is mixed. The chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and anti-nuclear parties such as the Greens strongly dislike the idea (as do French leftwing and far-right parties). But Friedrich Merz, Scholz’s likely successor, is reportedly interested. Manfred Weber, a leading German conservative, told the Guardian last year that doubts about Trump meant it was time to take up Macron’s offer. Weber also urged the opening of a “new chapter” with London.The need for British involvement has also been raised by Christian Lindner, another senior German politician. “The question is: under what political and financial conditions would Paris and London be prepared to maintain or expand their own strategic capabilities for collective security?” Lindner wrote last year. “When it comes to peace and freedom in Europe, we must not shy away from these difficult questions.”The IISS study raised similar issues. “As the only other nuclear power in Europe, Britain is a natural partner for France in any exploration of how to strengthen European deterrence … [They] regularly exchange data about nuclear safety and security … The British and French nuclear arsenals combined come to around 520 warheads, numerically equivalent to China’s current deterrent force. This alone could send a stronger message to Russia.”Development of a joint UK-French nuclear umbrella, under the auspices of the European Nato allies and sidelining the US, is politically explosive for Starmer. It would raise questions about sovereign control, not least from the Eurosceptic right. It could be seen by many in Labour as fuelling nuclear weapons proliferation, bringing nuclear war closer. Putin, who has threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, would view it as a provocation. So, too, for different reasons, might Trump. It would be a good test of how independent of the US the UK deterrent really is.But as the defence analyst Joseph de Weck argues in Internationale Politik Quarterly, times are changing fast. Governments urgently need solutions to Europe’s rapidly deepening security crisis. “Europeans may simply not have the time for gradualism in security integration any more,” De Weck wrote. Extending French and UK nuclear guarantees to the whole of Europe, including Ukraine, is an idea whose time has come.

      Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s foreign affairs commentator More

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      Trump’s plan for Gaza leaves Arab nations facing an impossible choice | Nesrine Malik

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      Arab states are in a bind. King Abdullah of Jordan squirmed in the Oval Office last week, as the press asked him and Donald Trump about the latter’s Gaza plan. He is in a tight spot, wanting to keep Trump onside while at the same time not agreeing to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Immediately after, anonymous Egyptian “security sources” – not parties prone to leaking without strategic direction from President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi – said that Sisi would not accept an invitation to visit Washington as long as the Gaza displacement plan was on the agenda. Now, this was probably more for the Egyptian public’s consumption than for Trump’s benefit – Egypt is in no position to make an enemy of the new administration – but it nonetheless shows how hard it is for Trump to secure the acquiescence of even the US’s closest allies.Saudi Arabia also postponed a visit to the US once Trump announced his intentions for Gaza. And in a remarkable change of tune, Saudi, which before 7 October 2023 was en route to normalisation with Israel and is not usually a country to make heated statements, lost its patience. When Benjamin Netanyahu quipped that maybe it would like to take Palestinians from Gaza (“they have a lot of territory”, he said), Saudi state media unleashed a storm of invective against him. When Trump announced his plan, Saudi Arabian authorities immediately put out a statement rejecting it. So keen was the government to signal that rejection that it released the statement at 4am local time.Leaders are scrambling to calibrate their responses at an emergency summit on Thursday hastily convened in Saudi Arabia. But they will struggle to do so without landing themselves in hot water with Trump, members of the Arab public or global opinion on the illegality of the plan. “The current approach is going to be difficult,” the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ambassador to the US said when asked if his government could find “common ground” with Trump on Gaza. He might have got away with that. But perhaps feeling that it was a little too strong, he went on to say that “we are all in the solution-seeking business” and he doesn’t really “see an alternative to what’s being proposed”. The clip immediately started doing the rounds on social media as evidence of the UAE’s endorsement of ethnic cleansing. There is clearly no consensus on Trump’s Gaza approach, or even how to respond to it, between countries that make up a political bloc but have divergent interests.Time is running out. On Sunday, Marco Rubio kicked off a trip to Israel and the Middle East. Conversations that some have been avoiding on Trump’s home turf will have to happen there. A need to come up with a common line and strategy on behalf of Arab countries is now pressing. The task is to thread a needle: flattery of Trump and rejection of his Gaza plan are irreconcilable, and each time even a single head of state engages with Trump or is asked about Gaza, there is the risk of a comment that inflames feelings or infuriates the US emperor. The Arab summit seems a very long way away when every day brings another Trump gambit or threats to the end of the ceasefire in Gaza.The scramble is part of a bigger problem. Arab states are unable to settle on a position on Palestine. Before 7 October, normalisation agreements with Israel had been secured by some Arab nations and were under way with others, with Palestinian statehood a nominally plausible prospect subject to technical questions, even though in reality everyone knew it was more remote than ever. The war killed that plausibility, and Trump buried it.With the stakes so raised, it is impossible for Arab nations to engage with Israel and the US on Gaza and Palestine one way or the other without undoing something big. The political landscape is finely balanced. Egypt and Jordan are the most important parties when it comes to any displacement of Palestinians from Gaza due to their proximity, and would be most affected by any resettlement campaign. They are also big US foreign assistance recipients with weak economies and governments with shaky mandates. These payments and military aid are in part remuneration for these states being “stabilising” parties in the region, serving as buffers between Israel, Iran, Hamas and all proxies, absorbing refugees and facilitating the movement of US military assets through the region. Losing US aid weakens not only their economies, but also their militaries, security agencies and ability to maintain the patronages and oppressions needed to stabilise politics.But there are other calculations. Agreeing to a plan that involves the expulsion of Palestinians in essence turns all receiving and facilitating countries into parties to what will simply be a wider, differently configured Israel-Palestine conflict. Instead of the removal of Palestinians from Gaza being an end to something, it would be the beginning of something else, with the horror of mass displacement on top. It is unfathomable not only in cruelty and criminality, but also in terms of practicality: already, 35% of Jordan’s population are refugees. Also – and Trump can be forgiven for not getting his head around this, considering how invisible they are – people live in these countries, millions of them. They might not have a say in how their politics is run, but they have an opinion. That opinion has historically been managed but by no means erased. It’s not a safe bet to assume that the mass removal of Palestinians won’t set off something explosive, either in terms of popular discord, or its exploitation by competing political or even extremist players.In short, Arab governments are being forced to confront and settle a question that goes to the very soul of the contemporary region – what does Arab identity even mean any more? Is it just a group of countries that speak the same language and share borders, but with regimes and elites that have become too enmeshed with the west to be viable on their own terms? Or is there still some residual sense of agency in those regimes, some echo of political integrity and duty towards other Arabs?Beyond the existential, though, here is what Arab leaders should learn from Trump giving them orders about their territories and people: the price of their US-stabilised status quo is now so high that it makes less and less sense on a practical basis. To submit to Trump would be to accept full vassal status and summon new domestic challenges, and all for an unreliable benefactor. To defy him would entail a full-blown reconfiguration of politics in the region that might seem too colossal to contemplate. Arab political elites find themselves in this mortifying position because of their historic feebleness on Palestine: it is a concentrated expression of their own weakness, capture and shortsighted self-interest. The future of Gaza is no longer an issue that can be finessed while saving face indefinitely. Trump’s plan is a gateway to the final erosion of the integrity and sovereignty of the wider Middle East.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Trump policies make US ‘scary place to invest’ and risk stagflation, says Stiglitz

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      Donald Trump’s tariff threats have made the US “a scary place to invest” and may unleash stagflation, the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has said.“It risks the worst of all possible worlds: a kind of stagflation,” Stiglitz said in an interview with the Guardian.He argued that despite optimism about the US economy at the turn of the year, the uncertainty created by Trump’s on-off tariff plans and the president’s apparent contempt for the rule of law would deter investment.“If you’re a corporate in the US or in Europe, do you think you have a global market, or do you have just a European market? Where do you locate your factories?” he said.He highlighted Elon Musk’s efforts to slash government departments without congressional authority, and Trump’s disregard for contracts – including the trade pact he struck with Canada and Mexico in his first term – among damaging signals for investors considering the US as a destination.“The government has a huge number of contracts and we’re just tearing them up. How much risk do you want? The US has become, I would say, a scary place to invest,” he said.Stiglitz argued that the uncertainty was likely to slow economic growth, while at the same time Trump’s tariffs – and retaliation by other countries – would drive up inflation.The prospect of rising inflation in the world’s largest economy has led investors to pare back bets on the US Federal Reserve cutting interest rates since Trump’s return to office, amid mounting concern over the fallout from a global trade war.Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor and former World Bank economist who served as chair of Bill Clinton’s council of economic advisers, said the Fed was “clearly worried” about the inflationary effects of Trump’s policies, which could lead it to raise interest rates.“Almost all economists agree that the tariffs will increase prices. How much it will increase prices is a little bit affected by the magnitude of the appreciation of the exchange rate, but all economists think that the extent of the appreciation of the exchange rate won’t be anywhere near enough to compensate for the tariffs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I could certainly see a scenario where we get to stagflation – we get inflation, and a weak economy,” he said. “I cannot see a really robust economy, because I just see the global economy suffering so much from the uncertainty that Trump poses.”Scott Bessent, the US Treasury secretary, has suggested the administration wants to bring down 10-year US Treasury yields, an important interest rate, which would have a knock-on effect across global markets. Lower Treasury yields would make it cheaper for Washington to borrow.But Stiglitz suggested the only way the president’s policies would positively contribute to that goal was by running the US into the ground. “The inflation from the tariffs is going in the wrong way, and the only thing that is going in the right way for Bessent is his efforts to crater the economy,” he said.“In supporting Trump’s economic policies, [Bessent] is helping to get the yield curve down by crashing the US economy – not a good policy, I would say.” More

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      Badenoch and Farage to vie for attention of Trump allies at London summit

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      Influential rightwingers from around the world are to gather in London from Monday at a major conference to network and build connections with senior US Republicans linked to the Trump administration.The UK opposition leader, the Conservatives’ Kemi Badenoch, and Nigel Farage of the Reform UK party, her hard-right anti-immigration rival, will compete to present themselves as the torchbearer of British conservatism.Conservatives from Britain, continental Europe and Australia attending the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference will seize on the opportunity to meet and hear counterparts from the US, including those with links to the new Trump administration. The House speaker, the Republican Mike Johnson, had been due to attend in person but will now give a keynote address remotely on Monday.Other Republicans due to speak include the US Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Vivek Ramaswamy – who has worked with Elon Musk on moves to radically reshape the US government – and Kevin Roberts, the president of the US Heritage Foundation, the thinktank behind the controversial “Project 2025” blueprint for Trump’s second term.View image in fullscreenThe conference, which is intended to be a gathering of influential intellectuals shaping global rightwing thinking, has a distinctly anti-environmental and socially conservative theme. It pledges to build on “our growing movement and continue the vital work of relaying the foundations of our civilisation”.ARC was co-founded in 2023 by the Canadian psychologist and self-help author Jordan Peterson and the Tory peer Philippa Stroud. Financial backers include Paul Marshall, one of the owners of GB News, and the Legatum Institute libertarian thinktank.After last year’s first event at the O2 Arena, it has moved to a larger venue this year at the ExCel centre. About 4,000 people from 96 countries are due to attend this year, compared with 1,500 last year.Badenoch returns to the lavish three-day event as leader of her party after last year using an appearance to launch a “culture war” attack on the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall. But while she will give a welcome address to the conference on Monday morning ahead of a keynote speech by Johnson, there is no escape from the challenge her party faces from the hard-right anti-immigration Reform UK.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenFarage, the party’s leader, will be interviewed on stage on Tuesday by Peterson while Reform’s chair, Zia Yusuf, is expected to later take part in a panel for a session called “The choices we face: unilateral economic disarmament or a pro-human way?”Figures on the advisory board of ARC include the former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, the Tory MP Danny Kruger, the self-styled “sceptical environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg and the Tory peer and financier Helena Morrissey.It also includes Maurice Glasman, the Labour peer associated with the socially conservative “Blue Labour” strand of thinking, who recently appeared on a podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, the US Republican strategist and on-and-off Trump ally.Peterson will also interview Peter Thiel, the US Republican donor and Silicon Valley billionaire known for controversial views such as asserting that democracy is not compatible with freedom and that he has “little hope that voting will make things better”.A list of attenders seen by Guardian Australia showed more than 50 Australians, including figures from rightwing thinktanks and churches, were intending to go to the gathering. Among those travelling are Bridget McKenzie, a senator for the National party, along with key figures from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.Those involved in ARC are keen to promote the gathering as more about the formulation of big ideas than political policy or campaigning and point to conference’s inclusion of scientists and figures from the arts.While religious faith does not explicitly feature in promotional material for the event, there is a strong religious influence on its direction from Peterson, who draws on the Bible in his work, and Stroud, a committed Christian credited with shaping many of the policies of the Conservative party during the 2000s. More

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      Trump cuts reach FDA workers focused on food safety and medical devices

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      The Trump administration’s effort to slash the size of the federal workforce reached the Food and Drug Administration this weekend, as recently hired employees who review the safety of food ingredients, medical devices and other products were fired.Probationary employees across the FDA received notices on Saturday evening that their jobs were being eliminated, according to three FDA staffers who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.The total number of positions eliminated was not clear on Sunday, but the firings appeared to focus on employees in the agency’s centers for food, medical devices and tobacco products – which includes oversight of electronic cigarettes. It was not clear whether FDA employees who review drugs were exempted.On Friday, the US Department of Health and Human Services announced plans to fire 5,200 probationary employees across its agencies, which include the National Institutes of Health, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.People who spoke with the AP on condition of anonymity on Friday said the number of probationary employees to be laid off at the CDC would total nearly 1,300. But as of early Sunday afternoon, about 700 people had received notices, according to three people who spoke on condition on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. They said none of the CDC layoffs affected the doctors and researchers who track diseases in what’s known as the Epidemic Intelligence Service.The FDA is headquartered in the Maryland suburbs outside Washington DC and employs nearly 20,000 people. It’s long been a target of newly sworn-in health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr, who last year accused the agency of waging a “war on public health” for not approving unproven treatments such as psychedelics, stem cells and chelation therapy.Kennedy also has called for eliminating thousands of chemicals and colorings from US foods. But the cuts at FDA include staffers responsible for reviewing the safety of new food additives and ingredients, according to an FDA staffer familiar with the firings.An HHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday afternoon.Nearly half of the FDA’s $6.9bn budget comes from fees paid by companies the agency regulates, including drug and medical device makers, which allows the agency to hire extra scientists to swiftly review products. Eliminating those positions will not reduce government spending.A former FDA official said cutting recent hires could backfire, eliminating staffers who tend to be younger and have more up-to-date technical skills. The FDA’s workforce skews toward older workers who have spent one or two decades at the agency, and the Government Accountability Office noted in 2022 that the FDA “has historically faced challenges in recruiting and retaining” staff due to better money in the private sector.“You want to bring in new blood,” said Peter Pitts, a former FDA associate commissioner under George W Bush. “You want people with new ideas, greater enthusiasm and the latest thinking in terms of technology.”Mitch Zeller, former FDA director for tobacco, said the firings are a way to “demoralize and undermine the spirit of the federal workforce”.“The combined effect of what they’re trying to do is going to destroy the ability to recruit and retain talent,” Zeller said.The FDA’s inspection force has been particularly strained in recent years after a wave of departures during the Covid-19 pandemic, and many of the agency’s current inspectors are recent hires. It was not immediately clear whether those employees were exempted.FDA inspectors are responsible for overseeing thousands of food, drug, tobacco and medical device facilities worldwide, though the AP reported last year that the agency faced a backlog of roughly 2,000 uninspected drug facilities that hadn’t been visited since before the pandemic.The agency’s inspection force have also been criticized for not moving faster to catch recent problems involving infant formula, baby food and eyedrops. More

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      Trump under fire for likening himself to Napoleon amid attacks on judges

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      Critics rounded on Donald Trump on Sunday for likening himself to Napoleon in a “dictatorial” social media post echoing the French emperor’s assertion that “he who saves his country does not violate any laws”.The post came at the end of another tumultuous week early in Trump’s second presidency, during which acolytes questioned the legitimacy of judges making a succession of rulings to stall his administration’s aggressive seizure or dismantling of federal institutions and budgets.His defiance of some of those orders, including one ordering a restoration of funding to bodies such as the National Institutes of Health, has led to several of the president’s opponents declaring a constitutional crisis.“He is the most lawless president in US history,” Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, wrote on Wednesday in the Guardian.“This is bonkers. In our system of government, it’s up to the courts to determine whether the president is using his power ‘legitimately’, not the president.”Trump laid out his position in the tweet posted on Saturday afternoon, after a round of golf at his Florida resort. The quote, as internet sleuths soon discovered, is a version of a phrase attributed to Napoleon “Celui qui sauve sa patrie ne viole aucune loi,” translated as: “who saves his country violates no law”.Another version appeared in the 1970 movie Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger as the dictator who rode roughshod over the French constitution to declare himself emperor and pursue world domination before his comeuppance at the pivotal 1815 battle from which the film’s title is derived.Senior Democrats led the criticism of Trump. The Virginia US senator Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the 2016 presidential election that Trump won, told Fox News Sunday that occupation of the White House was not a mandate to ignore the courts.“The president has authority, but the president also has to follow the law,” he said.“There’s this law that, you know, the Empowerment Act, that says once Congress has appropriated dollars for a particular purpose the president is not allowed to say: ‘Yeah, I don’t like that. I’m going to spend this money, but not that money.’“That’s why, so far, there’s a whole lot of lawsuits that have been successful. They’ll go through appeals courts, but a lot of the president’s extreme executive actions that hurt folks are being challenged in court right now.”According to the Associated Press, the administration is facing at least 70 lawsuits nationwide covering actions from the attempted elimination of birthright citizenship to the freezing of federal grants and funds – and the accessing of sensitive computer systems and data by unofficial entities.Trump’s wrecking ball approach since his 20 January inauguration continued this week with deeper infiltration by Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) into federal institutions – and the latest firings of vast numbers of employees.On Sunday, Bloomberg reported a wave of new dismissals at health department agencies including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Other agencies where the workforce has, or will be, slashed include the homeland security department, the Food and Drug Administration, US Forest Service and National Park Service, the US Agency for International Development (USAid), and the Department of Education.Critics believe that a hollowing out of many essential taxpayer-funded services, especially in healthcare, support for veterans, and military and defense expenditure, will come with a lucrative corresponding financial windfall for private companies, including those owned by Musk.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMusk, the world’s richest man and Trump acolyte, who has been awarded the status of “special government employee”, has called on the administration to “delete entire agencies”, which it could not legally do without the sanction of Congress that created them.“I don’t like the fact that Donald Trump is shutting the government down as we speak,” Kaine told Fox.“He says he wants to shut down the Department of Education, shrink USAid staff down to 250 people. That is a shutdown unauthorized by Congress, against the law.“My outrage is about who they’re hurting. I don’t like unelected officials, those Doge guys, posting classified information on their website. You shouldn’t let people run rampage through offices that have classified information.”More turmoil came with the administration’s decision to ban Associated Press journalists from the Oval Office and Air Force One for refusing to comply with Trump’s executive order attempting to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.The White House sought to justify the punitive move by insisting that it was “a lawful geographic name change”. The AP pointed out that the agency served an international audience, and while it recognized Trump’s order, it would continue referring to the body of water by its globally accepted name.In a statement, Axios said the right of news organizations to report how they saw fit was “a bedrock of a free press and durable democracy”. Nonetheless, it also said it would use the name Gulf of America because “our audience is mostly US-based compared to other publishers with international audiences”.The Atlantic’s view was that it was a spat the AP should have avoided. “To cave now would be to surrender on the constitutional issue. But this is a fight that Trump is clearly happy to have, especially to the extent that it draws attention away from his more egregious affronts to the public interest and the rule of law,” it said.Meanwhile, economic headwinds continue to mount for the fledgling Trump administration as it prepares to impose new tariffs on trading partners that analysts predict will lead to an international trade war and job losses. Inflation rose to 3% in January, according to government figures, despite Trump promising during election campaigning that prices “will come down, and they’ll come down fast”.By Thursday, the message had changed. “Prices could go up somewhat short-term,” Trump said as he laid out his tariffs plan, before promising they would go down again at some point. More

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      MLK’s family fear new batch of assassination files will have FBI ‘smears’

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      The family of Martin Luther King Jr has expressed concern over Donald Trump’s executive order to release records surrounding the civil rights leader’s assassination, saying the president’s mandate could revive efforts to discredit the revered activist with the public.Speaking to Axios, a friend of the King family said: “We know J Edgar Hoover tried to destroy Dr King’s legacy, and the family doesn’t want that effort to prevail,” referring to the late former FBI director and his agency’s years-long surveillance of King as well his associates.In addition to covert surveillance, the FBI threatened King in other ways – including by sending King’s wife, Coretta, a tape of King allegedly having an extramarital affair, as well as a note encouraging him to kill himself for the sake of the civil rights movement.The latest remarks from the King family friend follow an executive order signed by Trump in January, the first month of his second presidency, that ordered the release of thousands of classified federal documents on King’s 1968 assassination.He ordered a similar release of classified federal documents pertaining to the 1963 and 1968 assassinations of President John F Kennedy and Senator Robert F Kennedy.Respectively, the Kennedy brothers were the uncle and father of Trump’s newly appointed health and human services director, Robert F Kennedy Jr.“Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth,” Trump’s executive order said. “It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.”Trump in January boasted to reporters: “Everything will be revealed.”After Trump’s order, King’s family released a statement, saying: “For us, the assassination of our father is a deeply personal family loss that we have endured over the last 56 years. We hope to be provided the opportunity to review the files as a family prior to its public release.”However, according to a White House official speaking to Axios, the Trump administration refused that request from King’s family, though it claimed the refusal did not stem from “animus toward the family”.Speaking to the outlet, a second source who spoke with one of King’s two surviving adult children said that “there are deep concerns” within the family over the ordered release.“They know the right wing wants to smear Dr King, and one way to do it is by putting these smears in the public under the guise of transparency. If there are assassination records, release those. But smears are not assassination records,” the source told Axios.King dedicated his life’s work to advancing civil rights across the United States before assassin James Earl Ray fatally shot him at the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on 4 April 1968.A 2020 documentary by US film-maker Sam Pollard titled MLK/FBI explores the agency’s pursuit of King via state-sanctioned surveillance. More

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      JD Vance and those threats from within | Letters

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      Among the justified furore around America’s new position in the world, one part at least triggers a bit of nostalgia (JD Vance stuns Munich conference with blistering attack on Europe’s leaders, 14 February). JD Vance’s description of the “threat from within” brings back memories of Margaret Thatcher’s designation of those who disagreed with her as “the enemy within”. I still have a badge with that somewhere. Maybe it’s time I dusted it off.Steve TownsleyCowbridge, Vale of Glamorgan As JD Vance lectures European leaders about freedom of speech, Louisiana is banning health officials from promoting vaccinations and libraries across the US are having to purge their shelves of any books that make mention of subjects that Republicans dislike. No hypocrisy there, then?Tony GreenIpswich, Suffolk Britain thought it had a special relationship with the US. Seems we got dumped on Valentine’s Day.Emma TaitLondon Your report (‘Guess who’s back?’: the inside story of Nigel Farage’s quest for power, 15 February) confirmed what I already suspected: Reform is basically a party run by millionaires, for the benefit of millionaires, with a good dollop of nativism added to the mix.Alan PavelinChislehurst, Kent Re remarks in school reports (Letters, 14 February), my favourite is from around 1971, courtesy of a great history teacher: “Intelligent answers, a mastery of the facts would help.” I’m sure CP Scott would have agreed with him.Kevin McGillPrestwood, Buckinghamshire More