US Politics

The US supreme court on Wednesday gave a boost to a St Louis police officer who sued after claiming she was transferred to an undesirable new job because of her sex, in a case testing the scope of federal workplace protections.The 9-0 ruling by the justices threw out a decision by a lower court to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the officer, Jatonya Muldrow, and directed it to reconsider the matter.At issue in the case is whether federal law banning workplace bias requires employees to prove that discrimination caused them tangible harm such as a pay cut, demotion or loss of job.Muldrow has claimed she was transferred out of a police intelligence unit by a new supervisor who wanted a male officer in the position.The city of St Louis, Missouri, has said officers are routinely transferred and that Muldrow’s supervisor transferred more than 20 officers when he took over the intelligence unit.Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars discrimination based on sex, race, religion and other characteristics “with regard to any term, condition, or privilege of employment”.Muldrow was backed by the Biden administration, which had urged the supreme court to endorse a broad application of Title VII. The justice department said that discriminatory transfers always violate the law because they necessarily involve a change in working conditions.Lower courts were divided over whether any workplace bias violates Title VII, or if companies violate the law only when discrimination influences major employment decisions.In Muldrow’s case, the St Louis-based eighth US circuit court of appeals in 2022 decided that her transfer had not negatively affected her working conditions, agreeing with a federal judge’s earlier ruling. The supreme court heard arguments in the case in December. More

America is big, diverse and polarized. Yet, when it comes to the war in Gaza, opinions here are converging. A Gallup poll in March found 55% of respondents “disapprove of Israel’s actions”, up from 45% in November. Among registered Democrats, the figure is 75%. As the number of citizens voting “uncommitted” in Democratic primaries makes plain, President Biden’s unqualified support for Israel is a problem. Beyond the human carnage – 32,000 Palestinians, including over 14,000 children, have been killed by Israel in Gaza – Biden’s Israel policy could cost him the election.“We have given Biden and his administration and the party a gift,” said Layla Elabed, organizer of the Listen to Michigan campaign, where 100,000 voters marked the “uncommitted” box in February. The vote in Michigan, a battleground state where Biden beat Trump by a little more than 154,000 votes in 2020, has triggered a cascade of protest votes in primaries across the country. At least 25 uncommitted delegates will be sent to the Democratic national convention in August.Elabed explained to me that these protest votes in swing states are meant to warn Biden that it’s time to restrict US military aid to Israel and call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. “Listen to your constituency and take action now,” she said, “or you’re going to have trouble in November.” Notably, Elabed and the campaign she leads hope that the president may correct course and earn their vote, thereby preventing a second Trump term.Prominent Democrats, Governor Gretchen Whitmer among them, have failed to engage with the substance of the argument and with the campaign’s stated goals.“It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that any vote that’s not cast for Joe Biden supports a second Trump term,” Whitmer announced ahead of the Michigan primary vote.Whitmer’s argument that critics of the president’s policy in Palestine, in effect, offer support to former president Trump seems designed to encourage voters to fall in line. Yet, as Judith Max Palmer, a Philadelphia voter and registered Democrat, said to me: “The Democrats think they can scare us into submission and people are tired of it.”The intraparty fight has taken Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan as its totem. As the only Palestinian American in Congress, she has used her sizable public platform to decry the “level of support for Netanyahu’s war crimes by the Biden administration” in commission of Israel’s “genocide in Gaza”. She also advised her constituents and others who are dismayed by the Biden policy to vote uncommitted in the primary. In doing so, she earned the opprobrium of other Democrats.Don Calloway, a Democratic strategist, railed against Tlaib.“When Jalen Rose Leadership Academy and Wayne State and Cass Tech don’t get the proper appropriations from the Democratic administration … remember it’s because your Democratic congresswoman told them to not vote for the Democratic president in the primary,” he said.Calloway’s argument, which seems to prize party discipline over individual choice, is basically at odds with the tenets of participatory democracy. Voters are not beholden to a party – rather, the candidate is charged with crafting policies that appeal to an electorate to win votes. If voters in Biden’s coalition are now advocating for a change in policy, that – as the protesters say – is what democracy looks like. The candidate, and not the voters, is to blame if he fails to win in November, a point the Democrats appear to have struggled to comprehend in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump in 2016.“The cruelty [of Israel’s campaign in Gaza] is beyond my worst imagination. It changes the calculus,” said Rabbi Alissa Wise, another Philadelphia voter and one of the founders of Rabbis for a Ceasefire. She admitted to me that she worries Donald Trump “would be even more horrific” as president, but she wants to concentrate on the value of a protest vote now: “My hope is that the uncommitted campaign could really scare [policymakers] into a conscience.”View image in fullscreenUnlike Elabed and others I interviewed for this story, I have a different perspective.I am a Palestinian American in Pennsylvania, a contested state. I plan to write in “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary on 23 April and in November, I will vote for a third-party candidate.Like many Democrats, I was underwhelmed by the prospect of another Biden term, but I was prepared to move past my concerns about the president’s age and cognitive fitness to support the broader agenda on climate, among other things. I reasoned that Biden is supported by a cadre of experts, and that his job is mostly to set priorities and enlist the best and brightest to fill in the gaps. Now I am no longer able to rationalize support for this administration; the president’s moral failure in Gaza has taken on historic proportions, like Lyndon Johnson’s in Vietnam before him.Nor am I alone. “There’s no way I can see myself supporting Biden in the next election,” Will Youmans, associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, told me. “Supporting a genocide is the reddest of lines,” he explained. In November, Youmans plans to vote for down-ballot Democrats, but he will write in a protest vote for president.For Palestinians, the prospect of a second Trump administration is distressing, even if Representative Debbie Dingell’s statement that Trump, were he president, might have “nuked Gaza” seems a little overheated. Jared Kushner, who advised Trump in his last administration, openly opined about “very valuable … waterfront property” in Gaza as he described a vision of ethnic cleansing in the Strip.Yet it’s not clear that Trump’s putative policies will be worse than Biden’s current policies are. In reality, if Benjamin Netanyahu decides to invite Kushner and others to develop Jewish settlements in Gaza, there is no reason to believe Biden will stop him from doing so. The president, after all, has only mouthed his discontent with Israel’s actions. That’s even as he has actively armed the Israelis, who seem able to do whatever they please. Actions – for better or worse – speak more loudly than words do.Nor is the question of who may be worse – measured against the lesser evil – sufficient to drive voter behavior on this issue. For many, myself included, a vote for Biden is simply impermissible – the extent of the moral calamity is so great as to render a vote for Biden a vote for complicity.Our values in this country – freedom of speech, enterprise, equality before the law – are unique among countries and are worth fighting for. In the best expression of America, our values are regarded as inviolable, and they provide a roadmap for our activism. This country is bigger than Trump or Biden and while elections matter, they only gain meaning as a way of expressing our values. We cannot be the source of arms that destroy the lives of millions of people. We cannot abet a famine.The uncommitted campaign – citizens banding together to petition democratically, in good faith, for a change in government policy – is the greatest expression of what it means to live in a democracy. Tlaib, Elabed, Wise and other engaged Americans who have worked to move the president to adopt a humane policy in Palestine embody our best values. As the president of the Center City mosque in Philadelphia, Mohammed Shariff, said to me: “My vote is the purest form of expression and speech.” President Biden ignores our voices at his own peril, and ours.
Ahmed Moor is a writer, activist, and co-editor of After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine (Saqi Books 2024). More

In August 1982, Ronald Reagan’s father-in-law was dying. Nancy Reagan’s beloved dad, Loyal Davis, was an atheist – a troubling fact to the 40th president. So Reagan penned a private, handwritten note in which he recounted how the prayers of colleagues and friends had cured him of a painful stomach ulcer.

Giving hope for what lay beyond, Reagan entreated the older man, “We’ve been promised this is only a part of life and that a greater life, a greater glory awaits us … and all that is required is that you believe and tell God you put yourself in his hands.”

For decades, some of Reagan’s critics have questioned his religiosity, noting he rarely went to church. But the missive to his father-in-law reveals a deep and heartfelt faith. That faith also factored heavily into his political stands and policies, as I discuss in my book “Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision.”

In recent years, Donald Trump, another former president and the current Republican presidential candidate, has often spoken about his faith, posing for photo ops with right-wing preachers and praising his “favorite book” – the Bible.

The latest such demonstration was a video in which Trump promoted sales of a pricey US$59.99 version of the Bible. “Let’s make America pray again,” he urged viewers. “As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless the USA Bible.”

While Reagan and Trump – two of the most media-savvy Republican presidents – used religion to advance their political visions, their messages and missions are starkly different.

Why religion plays a part in politics

In my book, I explain that underlying American politics is a religious vision that links citizens to civic values. The most prevalent vision is that God blessed America and tasked its citizens with spreading freedom and democracy. It’s an idea that has undergirded Americans’ patriotism and inspired American domestic and foreign policies for decades.

Reagan telegraphed belief in a God-blessed America by describing the United States as “a shining city on a hill.” Reagan flipped the original meaning of a Biblical phrase from a 17th century Puritan sermon. In Matthew 5:14, Jesus warns that the world will judge whether or not his disciples, a symbolic city on a hill, stick to their ideals. By adding “shining,” Reagan sanctified American exceptionalism and the United States’ role as a global model of freedom.

Reagan described the U.S. as a ‘shining city on a hill,’ signaling American exceptionalism.
J. David Ake J./AFP via Getty Images

Once elected, Reagan sought practical ways to apply his faith in freedom, which, like many evangelicals, he believed came from God. By cutting taxes, ending industry regulations and privatizing government functions, he hoped to give individuals more economic and political freedom.

Reagan’s love of freedom also fueled his hostility to the Soviet Union. He labeled its communist government “an evil empire,” because it denied its citizens freedom. Casting a geopolitical stance as a cosmic battle between good and evil, Reagan made defeating communism a religious calling.

I argue that Reagan’s evangelical vision was mainstreamed through the media, which reported his interviews and public statements. This vision was not always apparent, but Americans liked his policies even if they missed their religious dimension. In other words, when Reagan proposed allowing the free market to determine the economy, limiting federal power and standing up for democracy worldwide, one didn’t need to be an evangelical to agree.

A new religious vision

Trump saw an opening for a new kind of religiously tinged politics when he ran for president in 2016. But unlike Reagan’s vision of spreading freedom and democracy here and abroad, Trump’s vision sticks closer to home.

I would argue that Trump’s religious vision is rooted in white Christian nationalism, the belief that the white Christians who founded America hoped to spread Protestant beliefs and ideals. According to white Christian nationalists, the founders also wanted to limit the influence of non-Christian immigrants and enslaved Africans.

Likewise, Trump’s rhetoric, mainstreamed by the media, portrays “real” Americans as white Christians. Many of these are men and women fearful that secularists and religious, racial and ethnic minorities want to replace, if not eliminate, them.

By most measures, Trump is not personally religious, although supporters contest that claim. But he has convinced conservative Americans, especially white evangelicals, that he is “God’s instrument on earth.”

When confronted with his financial misconduct, sexual crimes and outrageous lies, backers say that God works through flawed men. And evidence of that work – the U.S. Supreme Court overturning abortion rights, building the border wall and moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – has won him their support.

Trump’s mainstreaming of white Christian nationalism is evident in his latest scheme. The God Bless the USA Bible sports an American flag on its cover. Included with scripture is the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Pledge of Allegiance and the handwritten lyrics to singer Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” A portion of the sales will benefit Trump’s organization.

Christianity and nationalism hand in hand

Former President Donald Trump and his faith.

Trump rejects America’s role as the “shining city on a hill” and its mission to spread freedom and democracy. His goal is to restore what he calls the “founding fathers’ vision.” It’s a vision shared by Americans who think the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, despite proof to the contrary.

Religion can be a force for good or ill. Reagan believed that his religious vision would promote individual freedom and spread democracy worldwide. Americans may agree or disagree on whether he was successful and at what cost.

But Trump’s religious vision – one that hawks Bibles, disparages democracy and mocks governance – isn’t one that Reagan would recognize. More

Elon Musk boasts that he’s a “free speech absolutist”, but that didn’t stop his rocket company, SpaceX, from firing eight workers who had criticized him for making light of reports that SpaceX had settled a sexual harassment claim against him.Not stopping there, SpaceX has moved to put the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the US’s top labor watchdog, out of business. Earlier this year, a day after the board accused SpaceX of illegally retaliating against those workers, SpaceX filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that seeks to have the labor board – which has successfully overseen relations between business and unions since the 1930s – declared unconstitutional and shut down.In so doing, Musk and SpaceX have joined a broader, rightwing effort that hopes to hobble the federal government’s ability to regulate business. Indeed, SpaceX’s lawsuit could serve as a potent wrecking ball in the right’s push to weaken and perhaps demolish the administrative state – the network of federal agencies that the US Congress created to, among other things, promote workers’ safety on the job, prevent fraud in financial markets, protect workers’ right to unionize, limit environmental hazards, make sure consumer products are safe and administer social security for seniors.With their lawsuit, SpaceX and Musk – who owns 42% of that company’s shares and controls 79% of its voting power – are seeking not just to silence the eight employees who criticized Musk, but also to shut down the agency that protects such workers’ rights to speak out at all. Musk, the $180bn man, is throwing a legal temper tantrum because the NLRB has sought to hold him and SpaceX accountable.Those employees wrote a letter saying: “Elon’s behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us.” They wrote that letter after Business Insider reported that SpaceX had paid $250,000 to silence a company flight attendant who accused Musk of exposing himself and propositioning her for sex. Musk dismissed her in a tweet, saying she was a “liar” and that the incident “never happened”.The NLRB’s complaint against SpaceX is based on a law, the National Labor Relations Act, that makes it illegal for companies to fire or otherwise retaliate against workers who join together to push to improve work conditions. In their letter, the eight employees also called on SpaceX to spell out its anti-harassment policies and enforce them more effectively.If SpaceX’s lawsuit succeeds in getting the federal courts to declare the NLRB unconstitutional, it could set a dangerous precedent that other courts seize on to weaken or even eviscerate other federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), and perhaps even the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the Social Security Administration.SpaceX’s lawsuit seeks to build on a case in which George R Jarkesy Jr, a rightwing activist and radio talkshow host, persuaded the hard-right fifth circuit court of appeals to declare the Securities and Exchange Commission unconstitutional after it fined Jarkesy hundreds of thousands of dollars for defrauding investors.In their effort to blow up the NLRB, Musk and SpaceX are hoping to capitalize on the federal judiciary’s sharp rightward turn – a shift accelerated during Donald Trump’s presidency. It shouldn’t be a surprise that SpaceX filed its lawsuit in Texas, the state that arguably has the nation’s most extreme, most activist conservative federal judges. Following SpaceX’s lead, Amazon, Trader Joe’s and Starbucks also filed legal papers seeking to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional.Like SpaceX, those companies face NLRB charges of illegally retaliating against workers. One way to look at all this is that a band of billionaires – Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, and Trader Joe’s German owners, the Albrecht family – are seeking to kill the federal agency that protects typical workers when they seek to unionize or merely speak up for better conditions.Using uncharacteristically tough language, Jennifer Abruzzo, the labor board’s general counsel, slammed SpaceX, Starbucks and the other companies as “deep-pocketed, low-road employers” that seek to stop the NLRB from fulfilling its pro-worker mission “because they have the money to do so”.“Unfortunately,” Abruzzo added, it seems that SpaceX and the others “would rather spend money initiating court litigation than improving their workers’ lives”.If these “low-road employers” prevail, the whole NLRB process of holding union elections and prosecuting companies that violate labor laws could crumble. This “would leave US workers more vulnerable to exploitation”, Kate Andrias, a law professor at Columbia, wrote recently.Of course, for Starbucks and Trader Joe’s, this effort to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional could backfire – sabotaging the “progressive” image they have long sought to cultivate. Many Starbucks and Trader Joe’s customers might be outraged that the companies that furnish them with lattes and organic produce have joined this conservative legal and political assault.Many legal experts have derided one of SpaceX’s main arguments: that the labor board’s administrative law judges – who determine, for instance, whether a company violated the law by firing pro-union workers – should be deemed unconstitutional. SpaceX asserts that the NLRB’s judges exercise executive functions and therefore that the president, as the head of the executive branch, should be free to fire them. (Under federal labor law, they can be fired only for cause.) SpaceX makes this argument even though it’s crystal clear that the labor board’s judges merely do what judges do: issue judicial decisions.Moreover, what SpaceX is demanding would allow Trump, if re-elected, to do something that corporate America would hate – fire labor board judges because they upset him by ruling in favor of companies whose CEOs had criticized him or not donated to his campaign. Administrative judges – whether labor board judges, immigration judges or social security judges – have legal protections against being summarily fired so that they can make honest, independent decisions without fear of being terminated for political reasons.It is sad, if not altogether surprising, that SpaceX, Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s have joined a rightwing effort to destroy the federal agencies that set the rules that helped make the US the world’s richest nation and Musk, Bezos, Schultz and other billionaires fabulously wealthy. Now these billionaires are seeking to destroy the NLRB so that they can become even more fabulously wealthy.This is yet another unsettling example of plutocrats exercising their financial might to reshape government to their liking. It’s an effort that, if successful, will hurt millions of average Americans – consumers, workers, small investors and anyone who wants the environment protected.Here’s hoping that public interest prevails over Musk and the billionaires.
Steven Greenhouse, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, is an American labor and workplace journalist and writer More

Former US senator and two-term Florida governor Bob Graham, who gained national prominence as chairman of the Senate intelligence committee in the aftermath of the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks and as an early critic of the Iraq war, has died aged 87.Graham’s family announced the death in a statement posted on X by his daughter Gwen Graham on Tuesday.“We are deeply saddened to report the passing of a visionary leader, dedicated public servant, and even more importantly, a loving husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather,” the family’s statement said.Graham, who served three terms in the Senate, made an unsuccessful bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, emphasising his opposition to the Iraq invasion.But his bid was delayed by heart surgery in January 2003, and he was never able to gain enough traction with voters to catch up, bowing out that October. He didn’t seek reelection in 2004 and was replaced by Republican Mel Martinez.Graham was a man of many quirks. He perfected the “workdays” political gimmick of spending a day doing various jobs from horse stall mucker to FBI agent and kept a meticulous diary, noting almost everyone he spoke with, everything he ate, the TV shows he watched and even his golf scores.Graham said the notebooks were a working tool for him and he was reluctant to describe his emotions or personal feelings in them. “I review them for calls to be made, memos to be dictated, meetings I want to follow up on and things people promise to do,” he said.Graham was among the earliest opponents of the Iraq war, saying President George W Bush distorted intelligence data and argued it was more serious than the sexual misconduct issues that led the House to impeach President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. It led Graham to launch his short, abortive presidential bid.“The quagmire in Iraq is a distraction that the Bush administration, and the Bush administration alone, has created,” Graham said in 2003.During his 18 years in Washington, Graham worked well with colleagues from both parties, particularly Florida Republican Connie Mack during their dozen years together in the Senate.As a politician, few were better. Florida voters hardly considered him the wealthy, Harvard-educated attorney that he was.Graham’s political career spanned five decades, beginning with his election to the Florida House of Representatives in 1966. He won a state Senate seat in 1970 and then was elected governor in 1978. He was re-elected in 1982. Four years later, he won the first of three terms in the US Senate when he ousted incumbent Republican Paula Hawkins.View image in fullscreenGraham remained widely popular with Florida voters, winning reelection by wide margins in 1992 and 1998 when he carried 63 of 67 counties. In that latter election, he defeated Charlie Crist, who later served as a Republican governor from 2007 to 2011. Crist said on Tuesday that he came to “love him for the good, decent man that he was”.House speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi called Graham “a patriotic American” who “brought his love for his family and for his state of Florida to the Senate, where he served with immense dignity and courage”.Daniel Robert Graham was born 9 November 1936 in Coral Gables, where his father, Ernest “Cap” Graham, had moved from South Dakota and established a large dairy operation. Young Bob milked cows, built fences and scooped manure as a teenager. One of his half-brothers, Phillip Graham, was publisher of the Washington Post and Newsweek until he took his own life in 1963, just a year after Bob Graham’s graduation from Harvard law.In 1966 he was elected to the Florida legislature, where he focused largely on education and health care issues. He got off to a shaky start and was dubbed “Governor Jello” for some early indecisiveness, but he shook that label through his handling of several serious crises.As governor he also signed numerous death warrants, founded the Save the Manatee Club with entertainer Jimmy Buffett and led efforts to establish several environmental programs. Graham was also known for his 408 “workdays”, including stints as a housewife, boxing ring announcer, flight attendant and arson investigator. They grew out of a teaching stint as a member of the Florida Senate’s education committee and then morphed into the campaign gimmick that helped him relate to the average voter.“This has been a very important part of my development as a public official, my learning at a very human level what the people of Florida expect, what they want, what their aspirations are and then trying to interpret that and make it policy that will improve their lives,” Graham said in 2004 as he completed his final job as a Christmas gift wrapper.After leaving public life in 2005, Graham spent much of his time at a public policy centre named after him at the University of Florida and pushing the legislature to require more civics classes in the state’s public schools.Graham was one of five members selected for an independent commission by President Barack Obama in June 2010 to investigate a huge BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that threatened sea life and beaches along several south-eastern Gulf states. More

Kharkiv is at risk of becoming “a second Aleppo” unless US politicians vote for fresh military aid to help Ukraine obtain the air defences needed to prevent long-range Russian attacks, the city’s mayor has warned.Ihor Terekhov said Russia had switched tactics to try to destroy the city’s power supply and terrorise its 1.3 million residents by firing into residential areas, with people experiencing unscheduled power cuts for hours at a time.The mayor of Ukraine’s second city said the $60bn US military aid package, currently stalled in Congress, was of “critical importance for us” and urged the west to refocus on the two-year-old war.“We need that support to prevent Kharkiv being a second Aleppo,” Terekhov said, referring to the Syrian city heavily bombed by Russian and Syrian government forces at the height of the country’s civil war a decade ago.View image in fullscreenOn 22 March, Russian attacks destroyed a power station on the eastern edge of the city as well all its substations; a week later officials acknowledged a second plant, 30 miles south-east of the city, had been eliminated in the same attack.Power in the city, about 30 miles from the Russian border, was interrupted after another bombing raid this week, causing the metro to be halted briefly. Residents said there was usually a few hours’ supply a day in the city centre, although in the outskirts the situation was said to be better.Children are educated either online or in underground schools, for their own safety. The water supply remains on, but Terekhov said there were concerns the Russian military may switch to targeting gas distribution, after storage facilities in the west were attacked last week.Ukrainian leaders have begun asking western nations to donate Patriot air defence systems, requests for help that were thrown into sharper relief by the US and UK military support for Israel over the weekend when it neutralised an air attack from Iran.President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the allies’ defensive action “demonstrated how truly effective unity in defending against terror can be when it is based on sufficient political will” – before making a comparison to Ukraine.Iranian-designed Shahed drones used by Russia “sound identical to those over the Middle East”, he said. “The impact of ballistic missiles, if they are not intercepted, is the same everywhere.”The Ukrainian leader concluded: “European skies could have received the same level of protection long ago if Ukraine had received similar full support from its partners in intercepting drones and missiles.”Seven people were killed in Kharkiv when two rockets struck near an unused shopping mall on the ring road north of the city shortly after midnight on 6 April, leaving behind 4-metre-deep craters and military debris near a residential area.Nina Mykhailivna, 72, who lives nearby, said the shock from the strike “lifted her bed in the air” and was followed by about 90 minutes of secondary explosions, the most serious she had experienced during the war.Few residents have left the city since Russia increased its bombing campaign around the turn of the year, and Kharkiv remains a lively metropolis with busy restaurants and cafes, and some businesses thriving despite the threat.View image in fullscreenOleksii Yevsiukov, 39, and Viktoriia Varenikova, 30, run the Avex clothing factory in a residential district and have installed $20,000 worth of solar panels on the roof since the start of the conflict. The additions provide enough electricity to power the sewing machines for the 10 employees working below in the Soviet-era building, which is undergoing a total refurbishment.“We anticipated there might be power cuts from energy infrastructure attacks this winter,” Yevsiukov said. “We looked at solutions and decided a diesel generator was not suitable, expensive and not very eco friendly, so we ordered the solar panels last year.”A newly installed power bank stores enough electricity for two days’ use if the panels are unable to generate it, and a geothermal pump keeps the building warm, avoiding the need for gas. As such, the factory is self-sufficient, which could become necessary as the owners anticipate at least two more years of war.View image in fullscreenTheir company makes women’s swim and fitness wear for branded companies in Ukraine, and, the couple say, sales have grown even though the goods might be considered luxuries during wartime. With the factory refurbishment nearly complete, Yevsiukov said they planned to roughly double the workforce.Soon after the war began, Varenikova found out she was pregnant. Their son Max is now one, and she expresses the hope that war might be over by the time he is ready for school. “I want him to go to a normal school, not an underground school, not a school in the metro, not an online school.”However, not everybody is so optimistic. One of the firm’s employees, Liubov, said she was planning to leave her home in Kharkiv and move to central Ukraine for at least a month to provide a calmer environment for her two daughters, who can continue to take classes remotely.Russian bombing had become “much more frequent, much more often”, Liubov said. The comprehensive attack on 22 March was “very, very scary and loud” and “attacks could come at daytime or night-time, in any part of the city”.Liubov did not want to be photographed or give a surname, reflecting perhaps a concern about not wanting to be identified as someone leaving the city. “We’ve had to get used to everything, I wish we didn’t have to. We have power banks, we have storage of food, but we want this to be over soon. We simply want to live.” More

Shomari Figures, an attorney and Obama White House executive from a politically-prominent civil rights family, has won the Democratic nomination to run in Alabama’s redrawn second congressional district Tuesday night, defeating state representative Anthony Daniels.The runoff election has been closely watched because of its implications for control of Congress in November, and for the effect of supreme court orders requiring southern states to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act and eliminate racial gerrymandering.Republicans currently control Congress by a margin of 218 to 213, with four vacancies. A win by Figures in November represents one seat flipping control from Republicans to Democrats.Alabama legislators resisted complying with the order of the US supreme court last year, requiring the state’s congressional map to add an additional district that would be politically competitive for a Black candidate. The courts eventually appointed a special master to oversee redrawing district lines, creating a new second district in southern Alabama, stretching through the “Black Belt” of counties with large African American populations.Just under half of the residents are Black. The Cook Political Report rates Alabama’s second congressional district as “leans Democratic” with a +4 Democratic partisan advantage, which Republicans believe may still provide an opportunity to hold the seat.Tuesday night, Republicans chose Caroleene Dobson, a real estate attorney and political newcomer, to face Figures in November. Dobson, a Harvard graduate and Federalist Society member, ran as a more conservative candidate than her runoff opponent, former State Senator Dick Brewbaker, who served a Montgomery-area district for 10 years.The Republican runoff candidates had contributed about a million dollars to their campaigns by March election filing deadlines, a sign of how hard fought the contest will be in November.The campaigns of Figures, 38, and Daniels, 41, differed less by ideology than biography. Daniels is the youngest Black man to lead Democrats in the Alabama house of representatives. He grew up in a small Black Belt town south of Montgomery, but represents Huntsville, Alabama, a prospering north Alabama city from which he has built a statewide power base.Daniels developed a reputation as a political dealmaker while serving in the legislature, navigating a political environment that is hostile to Democrats to get legislation passed that eliminated state income taxes on overtime pay. But Daniels could not overcome Figures’ financial advantages in a runoff.Figures is the kind of Alabama political royalty whose engagement five years ago was announced in the New York Times. Figures’ father, Alabama state Senator Michael Figures was a crusading attorney who famously bankrupted the Alabama Ku Klux Klan in the ’80s. His mother, state Senator Vivian Davis Figures, won the seat held by her husband after his death in 1996 and has held it since.Figures resigned his job as the deputy chief of staff and counselor to Merrick Garland, the attorney general, to compete in the crowded March primary. His longstanding connections to national politics helped him draw nearly $2m in outside spending from groups like Protect Progress, a Washington-based political action committee. More

House Republicans on Tuesday formally presented articles of impeachment against Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, to the Senate, part of the party’s attempt to force an election-year showdown with the Biden administration over immigration and border security.In a ceremonial procession, 11 House Republican impeachment managers carried the two articles of impeachment across the rotunda of the US Capitol, where they informed the Senate they were prepared, for the first time in American history, to prosecute a sitting cabinet secretary for “willful and systemic refusal” to enforce border policies and a “breach of public trust”.Constitutional scholars, including conservative legal experts, have said the Republicans’ impeachment case is deeply flawed and fails to meet the high bar of “high crimes and misdemeanors” outlined in the constitution.Democrats, who control the Senate, have made clear their intention to quickly dispense with the articles, arguing that the politically charged proceedings amount to little more than a policy dispute with the administration. A two-thirds majority is needed to win an conviction in the Senate, an impossible threshold if all of the Democrats are united in favor of dismissing the charges against Mayorkas, who retains the support of Joe Biden.In February, House Republicans bypassed skepticism within their own ranks and unified Democratic opposition to approve by a one-vote margin two articles of impeachment against the secretary, who they have made the face of the Biden administration’s struggle to control record migration at the US-Mexico border.“Impeachment should never be used to settle a policy disagreement,” the Democratic majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said on Tuesday, adding: “Talk about awful precedents. This would set an awful precedent for Congress.”Schumer has said the Senate would convene on Wednesday as a “court of impeachment” and senators will be sworn in as jurors. Patty Murray, the Senate president pro tempore, a Democrat of Washington, presided over the chamber as the House homeland security chair, Mark Green of Tennessee, read the charges aloud.Schumer said he hoped to deal with the matter as “expeditiously as possible”. But Republicans are pressuring Democrats to hold a full trial.“We must hold those who engineered this crisis to full account,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said in a statement on Monday after signing the articles of impeachment. “Pursuant to the constitution, the House demands a trial.”Johnson initially delayed the delivery of the articles to focus on funding legislation to avert a government shutdown. Then the transmission was delayed again after Senate Republicans asked for more time to strategize ways to ensure a Senate trial.In remarks on Tuesday, Senator Mitch McConnell charged that it would be “beneath the Senate’s dignity to shrug off our clear responsibility” and not give thorough consideration to the charges against Mayorkas.“I will strenuously oppose any effort to table the articles of impeachment and avoid looking the Biden administration’s border crisis squarely in the face,” the Senate minority leader said.Mayorkas, the first Latino and first immigrant to lead the agency, has forcefully defended himself throughout the process, writing in a January letter to House Republicans: “Your false accusations do not rattle me.”Hours before the articles were delivered to the Senate, Mayorkas was on Capitol Hill, pressing Congress to provide his agency with more resources to enforce border policies and to pass legislation updating the nation’s outdated immigration laws.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Our immigration system, however, is fundamentally broken,” he told members of the House homeland security committee on Tuesday morning. “Only Congress can fix it. Congress has not updated our immigration enforcement laws since 1996 – 28 years ago. And, only Congress can deliver on our need for more border patrol agents, asylum officers and immigration judges, facilities and technology.”Republicans seized on the opportunity to assail Mayorkas, blaming him for the humanitarian crisis at the country’s southern border.“The open border is the number one issue across America in poll after poll and that is exactly why this committee impeached you,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia congresswoman, one of 11 House Republicans tapped to serve as an impeachment manager.Several Republican senators have expressed deep skepticism about the House’s impeachment effort, former secretaries of homeland security as well as conservative legal scholars have denounced the Republicans’ case against Mayorkas as deeply flawed and warned that it threatens to undermine one of Congress’s most powerful tools for removing officials guilty of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”.A group of Republican senators are contemplating ways to slow-walk the process, suggesting they will deliver lengthy speeches and raise time-consuming procedural inquiries to keep the attention on immigration, one of Biden’s greatest political vulnerabilities.Americans broadly disapprove of the president’s handling of the border, now a top concern for many voters. Ahead of the 2024 election, Republicans have assailed Biden over the border while Donald Trump, the party’s likely presidential nominee, has again put immigration at the center of his campaign.An attempt to pass a bipartisan border bill – negotiated by Mayorkas and touted as the most conservative piece of immigration legislation in decades – was derailed by Republicans at the behest of Trump, who did not want Biden to notch a victory on an issue that plays to the former president’s political advantage.Biden has also asked Congress to approve requests for more border patrol agents and immigration court judges, but Republicans have refused, saying Biden should use his executive authority to stem the flow of migrants. Biden has said he is mulling a far-reaching executive action that would dramatically reduce the number of asylum seekers who can cross the southern border. More