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Trump’s attack on George Soros is the next step in the autocrat’s handbook | Kenneth Roth
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 September 2025, 11:00
As a former federal prosecutor, I know that prosecutors should be guided by the facts. But in his determination to hound George Soros, Donald Trump wants prosecutors to become agents of his personal vendetta, facts be damned. That is the conclusion to be drawn from the instructions issued by one of Trump’s senior justice department officials to a group of US attorney’s offices across the country, telling them to investigate Soros’s foundation.This is the latest step in Trump’s implementation of the autocrat’s handbook, with the aim of chipping away at the checks and balances on presidential authority. Having already attacked judges, lawyers, media companies and universities, Trump now sets his sights on civil society. Soros, a longtime and extraordinarily generous funder of progressive causes around the world including in the United States, is Target Number 1. Trump shares this fixation with the likes of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Europe’s most prominent autocrat, who for years has used Soros as a scapegoat for widespread and growing dislike of his corrupt, self-serving rule.As the name of Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) suggests, he promotes the free and public exchange of ideas. Soros made his billions by recognizing that markets are fallible. He gave away billions based on the insight that human governance is imperfect, too, and that the best way to compensate is with independent voices engaged in free debate. Having survived as a Jewish boy in Hungary under Nazi rule, Soros understands that we are safer when people can contest government dogma.Soros has funded not only human rights activists who defend open societies but also intellectuals and journalists who have pushed the limits of public debate, as well as organizations devoted to redressing a range of injustices. My former organization, Human Rights Watch, was and remains a major beneficiary.Despite his brilliance, Soros is too modest to believe he has the ultimate answers to society’s most vexing problems. He is always self-critical, deeply aware of his inability to see the full truth, skeptical of any moment’s conventional wisdom.At age 95, he has stepped back from an active role in his foundation, which is now chaired by his son Alex. But his vision still guides the foundation and is antithetical to Trump’s delusional belief that he alone is the guardian of all wisdom while critics are to be demonized and persecuted. Soros has the self-confidence to eschew the kinds of sycophantic lackeys whom Trump prefers.The debate that Soros has long promoted is peaceful. That is the essence of the open society that he champions. OSF recently reiterated that they “unequivocally condemn terrorism and do not fund terrorism. Our activities are peaceful and lawful, and our grantees are expected to abide by human rights principles and comply with the law.”But that has not stopped Trump from insinuating without evidence that Soros and OSF are somehow supporters of people who engage in political violence. I have known Soros for more than three decades and have never seen a hint of that. It is the opposite of who he is. But stubborn reality has never impeded Trump and his acolytes in their universe of “alternative facts”.Straining to justify the vendetta, Trump’s justice department points to a report issued by a group that calls itself the Capital Research Center. It is filled with tendentious, McCarthyite allusions about OSF grantees having alleged sympathy for Hamas or tolerance of “direct action”, a supposed reference to violence.One of the prominent examples it cites is OSF’s funding of the highly respected Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, one of six Palestinian organizations that the Israeli government in 2021 designated as supposed terrorists. But the Israeli government bandies about accusations of terrorism the same way it tries to silence critics with false allegations of antisemitism. I have worked with Al-Haq throughout my career and have always known it to be a fact-based, principled, and peaceful organization that fairly and objectively investigates and reports on Israeli abuses in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.Another OSF grantee targeted is the human rights group Dawn, which was founded by Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was murdered by the Saudi government. One of its stated offenses is that while it condemned Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack, it focused on the civilian, not the military, victims.That such “evidence” might tempt Trump to order criminal charges against Soros under his newly announced effort to counter “domestic terrorism and organized political violence” means that almost anyone could be targeted.In persecuting Soros, Trump has taken on a tough target. Like Harvard, which successfully sued rather than capitulate, Soros has the means to fight back. Moreover, unlike some law firms that cut deals with Trump to escape his wrath, 100 progressive foundations have announced that they will mount a common defense if any of them faces Trump’s vengeance. That mutual support is the right response to Trump’s divide-and-conquer strategy.I would expect that the courts will promptly dismiss any action that Trump takes against Soros. Despite Trump’s efforts to bully them, federal judges have maintained their independence, and many continue to apply the law rather than Trump’s dictates. A fact-free prosecution of a well-known critic is a recipe for judicial rejection.But that doesn’t relieve Soros and his foundation from the burden of defending themselves from fabricated charges, which can be substantial. Trump’s abuse of his power to persecute an independent voice – his posturing to his base in utter contempt of the first amendment – should be widely and firmly denounced. Unless the pushback is intense enough, Soros may be Trump’s first civil society target but not the last.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments is published by Knopf and Allen Lane More
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‘Free speech for me, not for thee’: how Trump’s censorship blitz is splitting the right
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 September 2025, 10:00
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It has taken barely two weeks for Donald Trump to turn the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk to his political advantage, unleashing an unprecedented peacetime assault on free speech and a free press on the back of the assassination.Since Kirk’s death, the president and his top team have:
forced a private media company to suspend late-night TV star Jimmy Kimmel for inaccurate comments he made about Kirk’s suspected shooter;
threatened other TV networks with losing their licences should they say things Trump doesn’t like;
vowed to prosecute “hate speech” that is fully protected under the first amendment;
declared antifa a terrorist organisation in an indiscriminate attack on political ideology;
and told journalists covering the Pentagon that they will have their access revoked unless they agree to restrictions on their reporting.
That’s a far cry from the promise Trump made on the first day of his new presidency.On 20 January, hours after he had been sworn in as 47th president, Trump sat at his desk in the Oval Office and applied his distinctive signature to executive order 14149 – Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.The order pronounced that government censorship of speech was “intolerable in a free society”. It promised that under Trump’s watch, no federal official would engage in any conduct that would “unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen”.View image in fullscreenIt was a bold pledge to return America to the values of free speech and expression enshrined in the first amendment of the US constitution. But for some observers following events that day, the executive order was to be taken with a large pinch of salt.“I knew at the moment that the ink was not even dry, that executive order 14149 was a load of BS,” said Matt Welch, editor-at-large of the libertarian magazine Reason. “I knew it would not last.”Despite the administration’s rush to censorship as a result of Kirk’s killing, Trump has so far enjoyed almost complete support from the Republican party and his wider “Make America great again” (Maga) movement. Relatively few voices from the right of American politics have cried foul.But those voices are pointed, and in the longer term potentially critically important. Many of them subscribe to libertarianism, with its emphasis on individual rights, civil liberties and limited government. Or as Reason puts it, devotion to “free minds and free markets”.Other free speech critics have raised their voices from the wider conservative movement, while a few brave souls have even spoken out against Trump from within the Republican party. Collectively, they articulate a conservative and libertarian critique of Trump’s second presidency that, given that it comes nominally from his own side, may carry some weight with the president as he proceeds to pulverise constitutional norms.Their presence – lonely though at times it may seem – underlines that Trump and his Maga army have not yet secured an absolute monopoly of thought on the right. As guardians of free speech trying to hold back an increasingly authoritarian tide, they can also offer tentative clues as to how American conservatism might one day claw its way back from Maga’s iron grip.But for now they remain engaged in a long, uphill battle. “We are locked in a type of memetic combat,” Welch said. “We’re standing on the sidelines trying to get their attention, telling them that each new development is making it worse, and they are not listening at all.”Rightwing thinktanks have been central to Trump’s second presidency. The Heritage Foundation presented him with the blueprint for his incendiary return to office: the 920-page Project 2025.America First Legal, founded by the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, has provided legal ballast for many of Trump’s key ambitions. They include tearing down diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and initiating mass deportations.But as Trump has begun aggrandising his own power and wielding it against his opponents, a separate heavyweight thinktank, the libertarian Cato Institute, has emerged as a thorn in the president’s side.Initially, Cato’s belief in small government and deregulation led it to show enthusiastic support for the Maga agenda.Within 48 hours of Trump’s second inauguration, the thinktank had flagged up 22 of his predecessor Joe Biden’s executive orders including several countering the climate crisis and enhancing healthcare, all of which Trump dutifully revoked. It also offered its own blueprint, in this case a manual for Elon Musk and his demolition crew, the “department of government efficiency”, that was so well received that Rolling Stone dubbed Cato “Doge’s unofficial think tank”.More recently, however, Trump’s egregiously unconstitutional assault on the first amendment has goaded Cato into speaking out as a rare but influential adversary on the right. Thomas Berry, Cato’s director of constitutional studies, told the Guardian that several of Trump’s recent actions had offended one of the institute’s most fundamental values.“When government officials use the power of the state either to suppress speech or tilt the free marketplace of ideas, that’s incredibly dangerous in the long term. It places a core restriction on individual liberty – the right to say what you want and say what you believe,” he said.Cato began objecting to Trump’s authoritarian tendencies well before Kirk’s death. In June the thinktank joined a coalition of groups in filing an amicus brief supporting Harvard in its lawsuit against the Trump administration after billions of federal dollars were withheld from the university ostensibly as punishment for its failure to combat antisemitism.Cato also expressed concern about Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, students from Columbia and Tufts universities respectively, whom the administration tried to deport after their public criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. Berry called the administration’s yanking of Harvard funding and the student immigration actions “core infringements on academic freedom and speech”.He also denounced Trump’s executive order last month vowing to prosecute anyone burning the American flag. As he pointed out, “there is ironclad legal precedent that flag burning is protected speech.”View image in fullscreenSince Kirk’s killing, Berry has watched the unfolding of Trump’s “free speech for me, but not for thee” response with mounting alarm. Disney’s temporary cancellation of Kimmel’s late-night show for misrepresenting the Kirk suspect as a Maga supporter after threats of government penalties from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), was in Berry’s estimation a clear example of “government power being used to suppress speech that the administration doesn’t like”.Then there was the intervention of Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, who days after Kirk’s death vowed to prosecute hate speech. Like flag burning, hate speech is fully protected under the first amendment, as the country’s top law enforcement official ideally should have known.Ironically, Kirk himself was clear on this point, saying last year: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the first amendment.”Berry also regards as a free speech violation Trump’s threats to go against leftwing groups he dislikes. On Monday the president designated antifa a “domestic terrorist organization”, a move that potentially breaches the first amendment by criminalising political ideology.All of these quick-fire steps after Kirk’s assassination towards controlling public discourse leaves Berry profoundly apprehensive. “I’m very worried about what the executive branch is trying to do,” he said.In particular, the Cato director is concerned about what he calls the “capitulation factor”. He fears that private companies such as Disney, ABC’s owner that suspended Kimmel for six days before the comic was allowed back on air on Tuesday, will settle with Trump rather than stand up for constitutional rights.“Long term, we’ll get through this,” Berry said. “But in the short term a lot of speech is going to be chilled without ever getting into court, and that’s very, very bad.”View image in fullscreenOpposition to the assault on free speech goes beyond the libertarian right. Other prominent public figures from conservative and libertarian circles have spoken out, indicating fissures that, should they grow, could challenge Trump’s Maga hegemony.Bari Weiss, a rising star on the anti-woke right who is being reportedly groomed for a top job at CBS, has castigated the president in her online outlet, the Free Press. In an editorial, the site decried Trump’s many threats against media organisations as a “case where the medicine is worse than the disease”.In Congress, senator Ted Cruz, normally a reliable Trump acolyte, warned the president to avoid habitually bullying media companies. If he did, it would “end up bad for conservatives”.Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky who has led the charge to have the Epstein files released, compared Bondi’s threat to prosecute hate speech to George Orwell’s dystopian “thought crimes”.Even the Maga cheerleader Tucker Carlson cleared an episode of his online show to rail against the risk of hate speech laws being introduced in America. Were that to happen, Carlson said, then civil disobedience would be called for.“Because if they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think, there is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human.”So how did it come to this? How did Trump go from executive order 14149 to threatening an ABC reporter to his face last week that he might face prosecution “because you treat me so unfairly”?How did JD Vance move from pledging in February that under Trump’s leadership “we may disagree with your views but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square”, to calling for a mass doxing of anyone who had celebrated Kirk’s murder?How did the FCC chair Brendan Carr veer from having denounced in 2023 government censorship as the “authoritarian’s dream”, to using his federal power to force Kimmel’s suspension with the mob-like menace: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way?”Eugene Volokh, a libertarian conservative who is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, has a word for the Trump team’s razor sharp U-turn on free speech. He calls it “censorship envy”.“It’s human nature to want to restrict speech that you disapprove of, to retaliate,” he said. “People are motivated by censorship envy – the idea that the other side got to suppress speech they disliked, so I should jump on the bandwagon and get some of that action too.”Volokh added that in his opinion Trump’s get-you-back censorship was a mistake. “It’s bad for the country. It’s bad for the conservative movement.”View image in fullscreenThat admonition was echoed by Sabrina Schaeffer, a member of the executive team of the R Street Institute, which preaches classical liberalism, individual liberty and free markets. She said that she has been scratching her head over the past few days as so many Republicans applauded the clampdown on free speech.“I know they’re tired of ‘woke’ politics. But this should be a cautionary tale, because one day Democrats will hold the levers of power again and then they will be even more empowered to shut down dissenting views.”Welch, who regards his strain of libertarianism as neither of the right nor left, sees the current moment against the long arch of history. Under Ronald Reagan, the Republican party was a broad church that combined conservatism with libertarian activism, with free speech as one of its central tenets.What Trump has unleashed, by contrast, “is going against Reagan and 40 years of American politics. People are so addicted to power right now that they are throwing principles out the window.”It was Republicans, Welch pointed out, that in the 1970s and 80s led the charge on free speech grounds against the FCC’s so-called fairness doctrine that required TV networks to carry opposing viewpoints on controversial public issues. That is a world away from the Republican chair of the FCC threatening a broadcast company over one comment from a comedian.“I care about the federal government telling a private broadcaster how they are supposed to conduct their business,” Welch said. “That’s crazy.”Cato’s Berry is clearly disturbed by the turn of events, but he has not despaired. For him, the way out of this quagmire lies with the American judiciary and the first amendment itself, which he regards as the strongest safeguard of free speech in the world.“I remain confident that the courts will uphold the principles that the government cannot be biased, that it cannot chill speech through selective enforcement, that there is no law against hate speech.”As for Welch, he draws comfort in the storm from a more amorphous source. He looks to the American spirit, and a characteristic within it that he believes has been integral since even before the country’s founding.That is, the ability of Americans to trash each other.“We criticise, always have done,” he said. “We have just always been kind of assholes, cheeky.”Welch sees the portrayal of Trump in the latest season of the animated sitcom South Park as a seamless continuation of this trait. The president is depicted as a censorship-addicted dictator sleeping with the devil.That gives Welch hope.“I feel like the South Park in all of us will eventually win,” he said. “It’s the natural place for us to be, and by the time Trump finally goes, he’ll find himself on the losing end.”body{–primary-text-color: #121212;–secondary-text-color: #707070;–tertiary-text-color: #707070;–primary-bg-color: #ffffff;–secondary-bg-color: #f3f3f3;–tertiary-bg-color: #f6f6f6;–primary-line-color: #333333;–secondary-line-color: #dcdcdc;–border-divider-color: #dcdcdc;–axis-color: #bababa;–primary-button-color: #121212;–primary-button-text-color: #ffffff;–primary-button-highlight-color: #333333;–highlight-color: #ffe500;–highlighted-text-color: #121212;–info-color: #00b2ff;–news-grey-01: #121212;–news-grey-02: #707070;–news-grey-03: #a1a1a1;–news-grey-04: #bababa;–news-grey-05: #dcdcdc;–news-grey-06: #f3f3f3;–news-core-01: #005689;–news-core-02: #0094da;–news-core-03: #c70000;–news-core-04: 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Trump says he expects charges for other adversaries after Comey indictment
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 September 2025, 01:13
Donald Trump said on Friday that he expected more people whom he considers his political enemies to face criminal charges, a day after the justice department indicted former FBI director James Comey and faced a torrent of criticism for enacting the president’s campaign of retribution.“It’s not a list, but I think there’ll be others,” Trump said as he departed the White House to travel to the Ryder Cup golf tournament. “I mean, they’re corrupt. They were corrupt radical left Democrats.”Trump’s blunt remarks underscored the perilous moment for his political adversaries, given that the justice department pressed ahead with criminal charges against Comey, even though it was widely seen – inside and outside the administration – to be a weak case.The indictment against Comey, filed in federal district court on Thursday in Alexandria, Virginia, alleged that he misled lawmakers in September 2020 when he stood by his previous testimony to Congress claiming he had never authorized anyone at the FBI to leak to reporters.Prosecutors alleged that statement was not true and that Comey had authorized his friend and Columbia law school professor Dan Richman to leak to reporters about an investigation into Hilary Clinton, when Richman worked for a short time as a special government employee at the FBI.But the underlying evidence against Comey, which remains unclear from the two-page indictment, was considered to be insufficient for a conviction. The issues were laid out in a memo and Erik Siebert, the then interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, declined to bring charges.Trump fired Siebert within days and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, most recently a White House aide with no prosecutorial experience. Halligan was briefed on the problems with the case but pressed forward with charges anyway, presenting the case herself to the grand jury.The grand jury returned an indictment on two counts but declined to approve a third. Even then, only 14 out of 23 grand jurors voted to bring the false statement charge, barely more than the 12-person threshold, court documents show.The fraught nature of the Comey indictment raised fresh fears that Trump’s political appointees at justice department headquarters in Washington and at its field offices elsewhere will feel emboldened to pursue criminal cases against the president’s other adversaries.Among other people, Trump has fixated in recent weeks on criminal investigations against the New York attorney general Letitia James and Democratic senator Adam Schiff over mortgage fraud allegations. James brought a civil fraud case against Trump last year and Schiff led the first impeachment trial.Last weekend, before Comey’s indictment, Trump called on his attorney general Pam Bondi to pursue Comey, James and Schiff. “They impeached me twice and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!” Trump posted on Truth Social.The administration also launched a criminal investigation into former CIA director John Brennan, who Trump despises for his role in the US intelligence community’s assessment in 2016 about Russian malign influence operations aimed at helping the Trump campaign.Last month, the FBI also searched the home and office of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser turned critic, over allegations he mishandled classified documents. The FBI recovered documents with classification markings but Bolton’s lawyer claimed they had been declassified. More
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Trump news at a glance: president says he hopes ‘there will be others’ after Comey indictment
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 September 2025, 00:07
Donald Trump has denied the indictment of former FBI director James Comey is part of a campaign of retribution against his political opponents.The US president told reporters on Friday: “It’s about justice, it’s not about revenge. He didn’t think he’d be caught, and he got caught,” Trump said, referring to the former FBI director he fired in 2017. “He lied. He lied a lot,” the president claimed.Trump also said he hoped “there will be others” who were prosecuted.Comey, a former Republican appointed to lead the bureau by Barack Obama and kept on by Trump until he fired him in 2017, was indicted on Thursday on charges related to allegedly lying to Congress five years ago during a hearing on the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US election.‘Dangerous abuse of power’: lawmakers sound alarm over Comey indictmentThe indictment is the latest sign that the president is making good on his promise “to turn our justice system into a weapon for punishing and silencing his critics”, said Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.Democratic senator Adam Schiff, a former federal prosecutor who played a lead role in Trump’s first impeachment, said on X he had “never witnessed such a blatant abuse” of the justice department, calling it “little more than an arm of the president’s retribution campaign”.Read the full storyMusk among names in latest Epstein cache releasedDemocratic lawmakers on Friday released documents from the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein that may show interactions between the disgraced financier and prominent conservatives including Elon Musk, Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel.Read the full storyIce officer ‘relieved of duties’ after manhandling woman A federal officer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has been “relieved of his duties” after a video showing him pushing a woman to the floor at an immigration court in New York City spread quickly on social media.Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, sent a statement to the Guardian saying the officer’s actions were “unacceptable and beneath the men and women of Ice”. “This officer is being relieved of current duties as we conduct a full investigation,” she added.Read the full storyImmigrants without criminal records now largest group in Ice detentionImmigrants who have no criminal record are now the largest group in US immigration detention, according to data released by the government. The number of people with no criminal history arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detained by the Trump administration has now surpassed the number of those charged with crimes.According to the official data, 16,523 people in immigration detention with no criminal record were arrested by Ice, compared to 15,725 who do have a criminal record and 13,767 with pending criminal charges.Separately, the superintendent of Iowa’s largest school district was detained by Ice agents on Friday, prompting shock among fellow educators.Read the full storyUS refuses to support UN health declaration on noncommunicable diseasesA new vision for tackling the global noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) crisis has failed to reach consensus at the UN after the US refused to give its support, forcing member states to a vote.After months of negotiations, the fourth political declaration on NCDs and mental health received overwhelming backing from governments at the UN general assembly on Thursday, but was rejected by the US during a speech by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary.Read the full storyRepublican lawmaker makes post calling for execution of Democratic congresswomanAn Arizona Republican state representative who has expressed support for January 6 insurrectionists called on Wednesday for a Democratic congresswoman to be executed, as a response to a video clip.Read the full storyAbu Dhabi royal family to take stake in TikTok US under Trump dealThe Abu Dhabi royal family is to take a stake in TikTok’s US business after Donald Trump signed an executive order brokering a deal valuing the social media company at $14bn. MGX, a fund chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, will take a 15% stake and gain a board seat when TikTok US is spun out.Read the full storyTrump jokingly asked Rolex executives if tariffs prompted US Open invite, CEO saysDonald Trump asked Rolex executives if he would have been invited to watch this month’s US Open final from the luxury watchmaker’s VIP box had he imposed steep tariffs on Swiss exports weeks earlier.The US president’s remarks were made “in jest”, stressed Jean-Frederic Dufour, the Rolex CEO, in a letter to Elizabeth Warren, the US senator who had raised questions about the decision to invite Trump – including whether the conglomerate was seeking to “curry favor” with the administration.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:
The mass shooter who suspected he had CTE when he killed four people and himself in a Manhattan office building in July did in fact have the degenerative brain disease, the New York City medical examiner said on Friday.
Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to “finish the job” in Gaza and said the recognition of a Palestinian state was “insane” as delegations walked out of his address to the UN.
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that 20 US soldiers who took part in the 1890 massacre of hundreds of Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee will keep the Medals of Honor that were awarded to them.
The supreme court extended an order that allows Donald Trump’s administration to keep frozen nearly $5bn in foreign aid, handing him another victory in a dispute over presidential power.
Fewer than one in three teenagers with opioid use disorder receive treatment, according to a study published in this month’s Health Affairs journal that looked at the disorder in minors from 2022 to 2023. Drug overdoses are now among the leading causes of death for US teenagers.
Scores of Ryder Cup fans were denied glimpses of the opening tee shots at Bethpage Black due to stringent security measures put in place before the arrival of Trump.
Catching up? Here’s what happened 25 September 2025. More
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‘Dangerous abuse of power’: lawmakers sound alarm over Comey indictment
by Evelyn Reynolds 26 September 2025, 19:22
For Donald Trump, the indictment of former FBI director and longtime foe James Comey was,“justice in America”. Legal observers and lawmakers see something far more troubling.A former Republican appointed to lead the bureau by Barack Obama and kept on by Trump until he fired him in 2017, Comey was indicted Thursday on charges related to allegedly lying to Congress five years ago during a hearing on the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.The charges were filed in the eastern district of Virginia only after Erik Siebert was forced out as US attorney for reportedly finding no grounds to indict Comey. The justice department replaced him with a Trump loyalist with little prosecutorial experience, Lindsey Halligan, and shortly after, a grand jury indicted Comey on one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding.The indictment is the latest sign that the president is making good on his promise “to turn our justice system into a weapon for punishing and silencing his critics”, said Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.“This kind of interference is a dangerous abuse of power. Our system depends on prosecutors making decisions based on evidence and the law, not on the personal grudges of a politician determined to settle scores,” Warner said.Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator and a former federal prosecutor who played a lead role in Trump’s first impeachment, said on X he had “never witnessed such a blatant abuse of the” justice department, calling it “little more than an arm of the president’s retribution campaign”.In a letter to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee described Siebert’s firing and Comey’s indictment as “the latest steps in President Trump’s efforts to reshape the nation’s leading law enforcement agency into a weapon focused on punishing his enemies”.Top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries said it was “crazy to me” that Trump was pursuing a “malicious prosecution” against Comey, given that the FBI chief’s public revival of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email use days before the 2016 election is seen as playing a role in Trump’s victory.“These charges are going to be dismissed. James Comey will win in court. But what it reflects is a broader attack on the rule of law that should frighten every single American, whether you’re a Democrat, an independent or a Republican,” he said at the Capitol.Mike Zamore, national director of policy and government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union, said Trump “has yet again proven his disdain for the principles that have actually made America great”.“By undermining the rule of law at each and every turn, threatening individuals who speak out against him, and arresting, investigating, and prosecuting elected officials of the opposition party and others who displease him, the president and his administration have corrupted our system of justice to turn his campaign of retribution into reality,” he said, adding that Trump’s public push to indict Comey amounts to “a grotesque abuse of presidential power”.Eric Swalwell, the Democratic congressman and member of the House judiciary committee, told CNN: “I promise you, when Democrats are in the majority, we are going to look at all of this, and there will be accountability, and bar licenses will be at stake in your local jurisdiction if you are corruptly indicting people where you cannot prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt on.”Norm Eisen, executive chair of pro-democracy group Democracy Defenders Fund, warned the indictment puts “the safety of every American and our national security itself in danger. This indictment has all the hallmarks of a vindictive and meritless prosecution, worthy only of the totalitarian states the United States used to oppose”.“This matters far beyond James Comey. It’s about every citizen’s right to live free from persecution by their own leaders. Criticizing our leaders is a fundamental right, regardless of how much our leaders don’t like it,” he said.Trump has spent the hours since Comey’s indictment was announced insulting him on Truth Social, calling him “One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to” on Thursday night and “A DIRTY COP” on Friday morning.His allies have taken up his argument, if not his tone.“Comey demonstrated complete arrogance and unwillingness to comply with the law,” said Ted Cruz, the Republican senator whose exchange with the former FBI director at a 2020 hearing is the subject of the allegations.Chuck Grassley, the Republican chair of the Senate judiciary committee, said: “If the facts and the evidence support the finding that Comey lied to Congress and obstructed our work, he ought to be held accountable.”“Say it with me, Democrats: nobody is above the law,” said Mike Davis, a prominent Trump legal defender, echoing a phrase often used by Democrats when Trump and his allies were facing prosecutions before his election victory last year.“We are just getting started today with this indictment,” Davis said. “It’s going to get much worse for the Democrats.” More
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Trump has called the US postal service ‘a joke’. But don’t expect Amazon to replace it | Niamh Rowe
by Evelyn Reynolds 26 September 2025, 14:00
In towns where Washington DC is an abstraction, the post office is the front desk of American democracy – sometimes the only public space at all. Here, postmasters are “the human side of government”, as the senator Jennings Randolph put it in 1976. “When such offices are closed,” he warned, “the American flag really comes down.”Championed by Benjamin Franklin in 1775, the roots of the US postal service – whose mandate is to “bind the nation together” – are older than the republic itself. The constitution calls for “post offices and post roads”. The USPS is still legally obligated to provide a “basic and fundamental” service to all Americans. In Scottsbluff, Nebraska, a rural carrier drives more than 700 miles a year to serve just two households.But after years in the red – and amid open hostility from the Trump administration – its future looks uncertain.The USPS has lost about $114bn since 2007, according to financial reports, amid declining letter volume, competition from private carriers and rising employee costs. Meanwhile, the specter of privatization looms larger than ever.“The postal service is a joke,” Donald Trump told reporters in 2020. A reform plan during his previous administration called for restructuring it “to return it to a sustainable business model or prepare it for future conversion from a Government agency into a privately-held corporation”.Given this historical scorn, it was no surprise when reports broke in February that Trump was considering dissolving the agency’s leadership and absorbing it into the Department of Commerce.“The fate of the USPS is no longer financial or managerial, but political,” James O’Rourke, a professor of management at the University of Notre Dame, recently told me. “Putting the post office up for an IPO would not be much of a stretch in the current climate. The checks and balances are gone.”Indeed, a Wells Fargo memo to investors titled “USPS Privatization: A Framework” was leaked last month. It reads: “Parcel could be carved out and sold or IPOed.” The plan predicts parcel prices would increase 30%–140% across product lines and proposes a post office sell-off so that “value can be harvested” from the real estate.Yet if the parcel segment were “carved out”, not all of the carcass would bear meat. Investors will seize only the parts they can further monetize, O’Rourke says. That would mean closing small-town post offices and ending home delivery on unprofitable routes.Think of the mule train that descends into Havasupai territory in the Grand Canyon; the small aircraft and seasonal boats that serve Little Diomede, Alaska, where residents can see Russia from their windows; or Point Roberts, Washington, where mail crosses Canada to reach a US town. If universal service falters, those addresses are likely to be abandoned first.People in affected zip codes – already more likely to be lower income – will have to travel to pick up parcels or pay steep delivery costs. “Those people will do with less or do without,” O’Rourke says.But the cost of losing universal service would be more than financial. Vote-by-mail and absentee ballots are particularly critical in rural areas with distant polling stations, and the USPS ensures those ballots reach voters. It also handles 1.2bn prescription-drug shipments each year, as of 2020, according to the National Association of Letter Carriers union. In places with no nearby banks, the post office may be the only location where residents can pay bills.Rural postal workers also fulfill a civic role that transcends transporting mail. A study of village postmasters from the 1970s illustrates how closely woven they can become into civic life: “People going out of town commonly leave their house keys with the postmaster … residents leave notes with the postmaster for friends to retrieve later in the day.”While the advent of the internet renders that depiction somewhat antiquated, its essence remains true. “Rural carriers are still the fabric that knits some communities together,” Don Maston, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association, told me. In some towns, carriers may be the only contact residents have with the outside world – and thus a lifeline, he added. Carriers still carry out “wellness checks” if a resident fails to collect their mail.Mark Jamison spent 15 years as a postmaster in a remote office in the mountains of North Carolina, where he was the town’s only government worker. Many residents were not literate, so he assisted with written tasks. Older residents would stop by the post office on their way home so he could open their jars. He assembled bicycles at Christmas. Locals referred to him as the “bartender”, because people came in with stories to tell and advice to seek.“There are still postal employees who do that,” Jamison said.While the USPS has staved off a formal sell-off so far under the current administration, its universal service is already being eroded in de facto terms. This year, its 10-year “Delivering for America” modernization plan kicks off in a bid to save at least $36 billion. The plan will slow service for about three-quarters of the country’s zip codes, according to the advocacy group Save the Post Office, with rural areas bearing the brunt. The Postal Regulatory Commission voiced opposition to the plan in January, noting it was “very concerned” about how it would disadvantage rural communities.Louis DeJoy, the former US postmaster general, announced a plan in March to cut 10,000 USPS jobs. Amid reports Trump urged the USPS board of governors to appoint FedEx board member David P Steiner as postmaster general, Brian Renfroe, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, alleged a “hostile takeover” of the postal service. (Steiner, who took the job in July, has said he does not believe the USPS should be privatized and that he believes “in the current structure of the postal service as a self-financing, independent entity of the executive branch”.)At the same time, Amazon Logistics is on track to surpass the USPS as the nation’s largest parcel carrier by volume. The company is also speeding up in rural America, as AI-driven efficiencies make more routes economically viable. In April, it announced a $4bn investment to expand its rural “last-mile” network – tripling its size by the end of next year and reaching 13,000 more rural zip codes.This will be welcome news to those households. But Amazon drivers can’t go the extra mile. They lack the civic responsibilities of government workers, and their routes fluctuate algorithmically, meaning it’s harder to build community ties.What’s more, Amazon’s last-mile network will expand only as long as it’s profitable to do so. “I don’t see it going into the mule train business, right?” said Christopher W Shaw, author of First Class: The US Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat. An Amazon driver will never sing the USPS’s unofficial motto: “Every piece, every address, every day.” Without a legal mandate, why would they?As one Minnesota town-hall clerk put it in the 1970s: “The post office is like drinking water. You don’t appreciate it till you don’t have it.”
Niamh Rowe is a New York-based writer and podcast producer More
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Kimmel controversy highlights ‘wildly dangerous’ consolidation of TV broadcasting
by Evelyn Reynolds 26 September 2025, 11:00
If the controversy behind Jimmy Kimmel’s show is a series of dominoes that fell one after the other, from the late-night host making his comments on Charlie Kirk’s killing to ABC halting production of his show, the first domino arguably fell this summer.Months before Kimmel was briefly pulled off the air, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) quietly announced it was seeking to make a major change to broadcasting rules.The change would primarily affect three companies that own more local TV stations than any other company: Sinclair Broadcasting, Nexstar Media Group and Gray Television Inc. All three companies own the maximum number of local TV stations that is legally permitted for a single company to own.That national cap is set by FCC rules and says a single company can’t reach more than 39% of the total national television audience.In June, the FCC announced that it was seeking public comment to raise the cap, which would allow the companies to acquire more local TV stations. In a filing to the FCC, media watchdog Free Press said that changing the national cap would be “wildly dangerous”.“Handing even more media control to a handful of conglomerates and billionaires already so dominant in the space is a wildly dangerous idea, no matter who holds the presidency,” the group said.But by August, Nexstar announced its intention to acquire its broadcast rival Tegna for $6.2bn.“The initiatives being pursued by the Trump administration offer local broadcasters the opportunity to expand reach, level the playing field, and compete more effectively with the big tech and legacy big media companies that have unchecked reach and vast financial resources,” Nexstar’s chief executive officer, Perry Sook, said at the time.Nexstar – already the largest operator of local television stations – oversees more than 200 owned and partner stations in 116 markets across the US. Tegna owns 64 news stations across 51 markets. The deal would be illegal under current FCC rules, as it would put Nexstar over the national cap.Immediately after Kimmel was taken off the air, multiple reports have noted that Donald Trump’s appointed FCC chair, Brendan Carr, blatantly threatened the companies that air Kimmel’s show.“When you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said on a podcast. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”Media experts called the move unprecedented.“The FCC is explicitly threatening companies that, if they don’t change their content in some way, they would suffer regulatory consequences,” said Gregory J Martin, a political economy professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who has researched the effect that media conglomeration has had on local TV news. “That just didn’t really happen before.”Soon after, Nexstar announced it would preempt Kimmel’s show. As a local TV station conglomerate, Nexstar partners with the “big four” networks – ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC – to run their content on its stations. This is where the term “affiliate” comes from. If a station is, for example, an ABC affiliate, that means that the TV station owner has partnered with ABC to run shows like Kimmel’s.That’s why Nexstar’s announcement was such a big deal. When it comes to Kimmel being broadcast on TV, ABC relies on these local TV station owners to get him on the air.After Nexstar’s announcement, ABC announced that it was indefinitely halting the production of Kimmel’s show.The backlash that ensued led to ABC announcing it would continue producing Kimmel’s show. But Nexstar and its competitor, Sinclair Broadcasting, both said they will continue to preempt the show, meaning 25% of TV viewers won’t be getting Kimmel’s show on TV.“Nexstar is continuing to evaluate the status of Jimmy Kimmel Live! on our ABC-affiliated local television stations, and the show will be preempted while we do so,” Nexstar said in a statement. “We are engaged in productive discussion with executives at the Walt Disney Company, with a focus on ensuring the program reflects and respects the diverse interests of the communities we serve.”To media watchdogs, the conflict highlights the size of the media conglomerates such as Nexstar, which critics argue have become too large and too powerful.“This has been a problem at the FCC for quite some time. We’ve been concerned for decades about what happens when you allow media companies to become too consolidated and too influential,” said Timothy Karr, the senior director of strategy and communications at Free Press.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“They become beholden to political power because they have so many entanglements with government agencies regarding merger approvals [and] policy changes that they … soft-pedal their reporting when it comes to criticism of those in power,” he added.Historians often point to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which dramatically relaxed regulations limiting the number of TV and radio stations a single company could own. The law set the stage for media companies such as Nexstar and Sinclair to exist and own a massive number of local TV stations.Over the past few years, political experts have expressed concern that this consolidation has been negatively affecting the quality of local television news. Though the number of local TV news viewers has been declining, millions of Americans still rely on their local TV news. And the funding for these local TV broadcasts comes from the station owners such as Sinclair and Nexstar.The Kimmel affair is not the first time that the station owners have shown their political colors. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Sinclair directed its local news anchors to read identical scripts criticizing “fake” news stories and “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country”.Trump defended the decision: “So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased. Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke,” he wrote on what was then Twitter.When criticizing Kimmel, Carr said that the FCC has to ensure that broadcasters who are using public airwaves are operating in the “public interest”. Martin said that, typically, the “public interest” requirement refers to producing local TV news shows.“That’s how they satisfy their public obligation, by providing informative news shows. It’s never been on the table that they could be interpreted to mean they have to not criticize the president,” he said. “That’s a big, important change in how the FCC operates.”Karr, of Free Press, said that the media watchdog has made it clear, in a filing to the FCC, that the regulator would need congressional approval to change the national reach cap.“We need to be watching the FCC very carefully over the next couple of weeks to see how far Carr will go in removing this huge hurdle to the merger,” he said.The New York Post reported this week that there is also growing criticism of the Nexstar/Tegna deal from conservatives concerned that the Kimmel suspension is “nothing more than a ruse to convince the White House its programming is watchful of leftwing bias” in order to convince the FCC to pass a deal that will hand the media group too much power.When he went back on air on Tuesday, Kimmel took a direct jab at Carr in his monologue, which has now received over 20m views on YouTube. Kimmel quoted the threats Carr made to broadcast networks over his show and said it is “a direct violation of the first amendment [and] not a particularly intelligent threat to make in public”.“You almost have to feel sorry for him,” Kimmel said. “He did his best to cancel me. Instead, he forced millions of people to watch the show.” More
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Ex-FBI director James Comey indicted on two charges with reports that he will surrender on Friday – US politics live
by Evelyn Reynolds 26 September 2025, 09:47
Donald Trump on Thursday announced a new round of punishing tariffs, saying the United States will impose a 100% tariffs on imported branded drugs, 25% tariff on imports of all heavy-duty trucks and 50% tariffs on kitchen cabinets.The US president also said he would start charging a 50% tariff on bathroom vanities and a 30% tariff on upholstered furniture next week, with all the new duties to take effect from 1 October.Drug companies warned earlier this year that Americans would suffer the most if Trump decided to impose tariffs on pharmaceuticals.In 2024, the US imported nearly $233bn in pharmaceutical and medicinal products, according to the Census Bureau. The prospect of prices doubling for some medicines could send shock waves to voters as healthcare expenses, as well as the costs of Medicare and Medicaid, potentially increase.Pascal Chan, vice-president for strategic policy and supply chains at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, warned that the tariffs could harm Americans’ health with “immediate price hikes, strained insurance systems, hospital shortages, and the real risk of patients rationing or foregoing essential medicines”.Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.We start with the news that James Comey, the former FBI director and one of Donald Trump’s most frequent targets, was indicted on Thursday on one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding, the latest move in the president’s retribution campaign against his political adversaries.The indictment, filed in federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia, shows Comey’s charges centred on whether he lied and misled lawmakers during testimony in September 2020 about the Russia investigation.Comey was expected to surrender and have his initial appearance in federal district court on Friday morning, according to a person familiar with the matter. Comey is expected to be represented by Patrick Fitzgerald, a former US attorney for the northern district of Illinois.While the precise details were not clear in the sparse, two-page indictment, it appeared to reference Comey’s testimony that he had never authorized someone at the FBI to leak to the news media about the Trump or Hillary Clinton investigations – a claim prosecutors alleged was false.“No one is above the law. Today’s indictment reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people,” Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, said in a statement on Thursday.The indictment followed Trump’s instruction to Bondi to “move now” to prosecute Comey and other officials he considers political foes, in an impatient and extraordinarily direct social media post trampling on the justice department’s tradition of independence.It also came less than a week after Lindsey Halligan was installed as the top federal prosecutor in the eastern district of Virginia, after Trump fired her predecessor, Erik Siebert, after he declined to bring charges against Comey over concerns there was insufficient evidence.Halligan, most recently a White House aide and former Trump lawyer who has no prosecutorial experience, was also presented with a memo earlier this week laying out why charges should not be brought. But the justice department still pushed it through, people familiar with the matter said.Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the US senate intelligence committee, said:
Donald Trump has made clear that he intends to turn our justice system into a weapon for punishing and silencing his critics.
Responding to the indictment, hours after it was filed, Comey said in a video statement posted on Instagram that he was innocent and welcomed a trial.“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way. We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either,” Comey said.Read the full story here:In other developments:
Authorities said on Thursday that the words of the suspect in the shooting on Wednesday at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facility in Texas were “definitively anti-Ice” but said that they did not find evidence that the suspect was a member of “any specific group or entity, nor did he mention any specific government agency other than Ice”.
The Open Society Foundations (OSF), the major philanthropic group funded by George Soros, criticized the Trump administration for “politically motivated attacks on civil society” after a report that the justice department had instructed federal prosecutors to come up with plans to investigate the charity.
Donald Trump issued a presidential memorandum on Thursday aimed at reining in what he has called a radical leftwing domestic “terror network” but which seemed likely to meet fierce legal pushback from critics depicting it as a licence for a broad crackdown on his political opponents.
Donald Trump on Thursday announced a new round of punishing tariffs, saying the United States will impose a 100% tariffs on imported branded drugs, 25% tariff on imports of all heavy-duty trucks and 50% tariffs on kitchen cabinets. The US president also said he would start charging a 30% tariff on upholstered furniture next week.
Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday outlining the terms of a deal to transfer TikTok to a US owner. Trump said he and China’s president Xi Jinping had come to an agreement to allow TikTok to continue operating in the US, separating the social media platform from its Chinese owner ByteDance. Trump said the deal complies with a law that would have forced the shutdown of the app for American users had it not been divested and sold to a US owner.
A group of Disney investors is asking the company to turn over documents related to the company’s decision to temporarily suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, amid charges the media company may have been “complicit in succumbing” to media censorship.
An impromptu statue of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein holding hands was unceremoniously removed from the National Mall in Washington just a day after a group of anonymous artists erected it there. More

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