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      Trump news at a glance: Vance stakes US claim for Greenland as island’s new coalition insists it ‘belongs to us’

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      JD Vance told troops in Greenland that the US has to gain control of the Arctic island to stop the threat of China and Russia as he doubled down on his criticism of Denmark, which he said has “not done a good job”.As the US vice-president toured Pituffik space base, Donald Trump reiterated his previous claims that the US needs Greenland for “world peace”. “I think Greenland understands that the United States should own it,” the US president said at a press conference at the White House on Friday. “And if Denmark and the EU don’t understand it, we have to explain it to them.”In a show of national unity before Vance’s arrival, four of the territory’s five parties signed a coalition agreement that states on page one: “Greenland belongs to us.”Here’s the full story and other key Trump news of the day:JD Vance says US must control Greenland Under increasingly strained relations between the White House and Greenland and Denmark, Vance said: “Our message to Denmark is very simple: you have not done a good job by the people of Greenland.”Read the full storyTrump targets Smithsonian Institution for ‘improper ideology’Donald Trump has ordered a highly controversial reshaping of the US Smithsonian Institution, claiming he will eliminate what his administration regards as “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the world’s largest set of museums, educational and research entities grouped under one institutional umbrella.The announcement has sparked outrage from critics, accusing Trump of taking action to “remove diversity” from American history.Read the full storyTrump and Carney talk to avert trade warDonald Trump described a long-awaited call with the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, as “extremely productive” amid a trade war between the two nations launched by the US president.The Friday morning call, requested by the White House, marks the first time the two leaders have spoken since Carney became prime minister on 14 March. In the call, Carney also said his government would implement retaliatory tariffs “to protect Canadian workers and our economy” ahead of expected levies from the US due to come into effect on 2 April.Read the full storyUS to vet student visa applicants for ‘terrorist activity’The United States has ordered consular offices to significantly expand their screening processes for student visa applicants, including through comprehensive social media investigations, to exclude people they deem to support terrorism.Read the full storyClinton says Trump ‘stupidity’ a threat for USHillary Clinton on Friday called the Trump administration’s approach to governing both dumb and dangerous in an essay excoriating the Signal chat scandal and the Elon Musk-led mission to slash the federal workforce, and concluding that Trump would make the US “feeble and friendless”.Read the full storyFury as Trump axes collective bargaining for federal workers Union leaders have accused Donald Trump of union-busting in a “blatant” attempt to silence them after the president stepped up his attacks on government unions on Thursday, signing an executive order that attempts to eliminate collective bargaining for hundreds of thousands of federal workers.Read the full storyTwo law firms sue Trump as third makes $100m dealTwo prominent law firms sued the Trump administration on Friday, seeking to block executive orders that would halt the firms’ business with the government and revoke the security clearances of its attorneys.The suits come amid deep concern the legal community is not doing enough to push back against efforts to target them. A third top US law firm – Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom – reached an agreement to avoid an executive order, agreeing to do $100m in pro-bono work “in the Trump administration and beyond”.Read the full storyFired watchdog warns of rule by billionairesThe US is in the midst of an extraordinary battle between “the rule of law versus the rule of billionaires”, a top Democratic government official and attorney has warned, after his unprecedented firing by Donald Trump.Alvaro Bedoya, abruptly terminated as a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week, sounded a “blinking red alarm” over backroom “quid pro quo” dealmaking he said appears to be taking place in the Trump administration.Read the full storyElon Musk’s xAI company buys X in $33bn dealElon Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence firm has acquired Musk’s X – the social media platform formerly known as Twitter – for $33bn, marking the latest twist in the billionaire’s rapid consolidation of power.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The Democratic attorney general of Wisconsin has asked a court to block Elon Musk from giving $1m checks to voters as he seeks to influence a state supreme court race whose outcome could shape the future of the entire US.

      A US district judge blocked the Trump administration from dismantling a key consumer financial watchdog. Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s ruling puts in place a preliminary injunction that maintains the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s existence while she considers the arguments of a lawsuit seeking to prevent the president’s decimation of the bureau.

      Detained Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyers have called for his release, arguing he is facing inhumane treatment in detention. Baher Azmy, who argued Khalil’s case should be returned to a New York court, said: “They keep passing around the body in an almost Kafkaesque way.”

      Donald Trump has pardoned the three co-founders of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, who had pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act for failing to maintain anti-money laundering and know-your-customer programs.

      The FCC will investigate diversity efforts at the Walt Disney Company and its subsidiary ABC, the head of the US agency said on Friday.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 27 March. More

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      US judge temporarily blocks Trump from firing Voice of America staff

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      A federal judge on Friday ordered Donald Trump’s administration to temporarily pause its efforts to shut down Voice of America, stopping the government from firing 1,300 journalists and other employees at the US news service that were abruptly placed on leave earlier this month.District judge J Paul Oetken said in a Friday opinion that the Trump administration could not unilaterally terminate Voice of America and related radio programs that were approved and funded by Congress. Rescinding funds for those programs would require congressional approval, the judge wrote.Oetken did not require Voice of America to resume broadcasts, but his order made clear that employees should not be fired until further court proceedings could determine whether the shutdown was “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of federal law.“This is a decisive victory for press freedom and the First Amendment, and a sharp rebuke to an administration that has shown utter disregard for the principles that define our democracy,” said Andrew Celli, an attorney for the plaintiffs.The US Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other government-funded media, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.The agency had told unions that it was about to terminate 623 Voice of America employees, a number that “entirely forecloses” any attempt to resume broadcasts at the level envisioned by Congress, according to court documents filed by the plaintiffs.Voice of America was founded to combat Nazi propaganda at the height of the second world war, and it has grown to become an international media broadcaster, operating in more than 40 languages and spreading U.S. news narratives into countries lacking a free press. As a group, US Agency for Global Media employed roughly 3,500 workers with an $886m budget in 2024, according to its latest report to Congress.Voice of America journalists and their unions sued the US Agency for Global Media, its acting director, Victor Morales, and special adviser Kari Lake last week, saying that their shutdown violated the workers’ constitutional first amendment right to free speech.The Voice of America employees’ lawsuit is one of four pending challenges to the Trump administration’s attempted shutdown of government-funded media programs. Other challenges have been filed by Radio Free Europe, a separate group of Voice of America employees, and grant recipient Open Technology Fund.US Agency for Global Media had argued that it had not violated the laws that governed Voice of America’s operations. The agency said in court filings that it had reduced operations to a “statutory minimum” by restoring broadcasts in Cuba and reinstating 33 employees at the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. More

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      FCC to investigate Disney and ABC over potential violation in diversity practices

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      The US’s top media regulator on Friday said it was opening an investigation into the diversity practices of Walt Disney and its ABC unit, saying they may violate equal employment opportunity regulations.Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair, wrote to the Disney CEO, Robert Iger, in a letter dated on Thursday that the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts may not have complied with FCC regulations and that changes by the company may not go far enough.“For decades, Disney focused on churning out box office and programming successes,” Carr wrote in the letter. “But then something changed. Disney has now been embroiled in rounds of controversy surrounding its DEI policies.“I want to ensure that Disney ends any and all discriminatory initiatives in substance, not just name,” Carr wrote.He has sent letters to Comcast and Verizon announcing similar investigations into diversity practices.Disney has come into conflict with Republicans in recent years. In 2023 the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, clashed with Disney over its opposition to the state’s so-called “don’t say gay” law and rightwingers have attacked the company for being “woke” – most recently for the casting of Rachel Zegler, an American actor of Colombian descent, in the titular role of its Snow White reboot.“We are reviewing the Federal Communications Commission’s letter, and we look forward to engaging with the commission to answer its questions,” a Disney spokesperson said.Disney recently revised its executive compensation policies to remove diversity and inclusion as a performance metric, adding a new standard called “talent strategy”, aimed at upholding the company’s values.Carr said the FCC’s enforcement bureau would be engaging with Disney “to obtain an accounting of Disney and ABC’s DEI programs, policies, and practices”.Carr, who was designed chair by Donald Trump on 20 January, has been aggressively investigating media companies.In December, ABC News agreed to give $15m to Trump’s future presidential library to settle a lawsuit over comments that anchor George Stephanopoulos made on air involving the civil case brought against Trump by the writer E Jean Carroll.Days after Carr took over as chair, the FCC reinstated complaints about the 60 Minutes interview with Harris, as well as complaints about how ABC News moderated the pre-election TV debate between then president Joe Biden and Trump.It also reinstated complaints against Comcast’s NBC for allowing Harris to appear on Saturday Night Live shortly before the election.Trump has sued CBS for $20bn, claiming that 60 Minutes deceptively edited the interview in order to interfere in the November presidential election, which he won.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      White House asks supreme court to allow deportations under wartime law

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      The Trump administration on Friday asked the US supreme court to intervene to allow the government to continue to deport immigrants using the obscure Alien Enemies Act.The request came one day after a federal appeals court upheld a Washington DC federal judge’s temporary block on immigrant expulsions via a wartime act that allows the administration to bypass normal due process, for example by allowing people a court hearing before shipping them out of the US.Friday’s emergency request claims that the federal court’s order temporarily blocking the removal of Venezuelans forces the US to “harbor individuals whom national-security officials have identified as members of a foreign terrorist organization bent upon grievously harming Americans”.Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act has spurred a legal battle between the executive and judiciary branches of the US federal government.“We will urge the supreme court to preserve the status quo to give the courts time to hear this case, so that more individuals are not sent off to a notorious foreign prison without any process, based on an unprecedented and unlawful use of a wartime authority,” said Lee Gelernt in a statement on Friday afternoon. Gelernt is the deputy director of the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights project and lead counsel in the case.As the executive branch continues to battle the constitutionally coequal judiciary branch for primacy, the US justice department said in its filing on Friday that the case presents the question of who decides how to conduct sensitive national security-related operations, the president or the judiciary.“The Constitution supplies a clear answer: the President,” the department wrote. “The republic cannot afford a different choice.“On 15 March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime statute allowing the government to expel foreign nationals considered to be enemies to the US. When invoking the act, Trump, without proof, claimed that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had “infiltrated” the US at the behest of the Venezuelan government.A US intelligence document accessed by the New York Times contradicts Trump’s claim about the Venezuelan government’s ties to the gang.That day, attorneys filed an emergency motion to block the use of the Alien Enemies Act to expel migrants to El Salvador. Then planes took off from the US, transporting the nearly 300 immigrants accused of being gang members. As the planes were in mid-air, a federal judge in Washington blocked the use of the Alien Enemies Act to expel the immigrants, but the Venezuelans were not returned to the US.Despite the Trump administration in its supreme court filing claiming that it engaged in a “rigorous process” to identify members of the Venezuelan gang, news stories are increasingly placing those claims into question. Family members of many of the deported Venezuelan migrants deny the alleged gang ties. This month, the US district judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to engage in “individualized hearings” for immigrants accused of being members of Tren de Aragua. More

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      Organizers accuse Trump of trying to silence federal workers with union order

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      Union leaders have accused Donald Trump of union-busting in a “blatant” attempt to silence them after the president stepped up his attacks on government unions on Thursday, signing an executive order that attempts to eliminate collective bargaining for hundreds of thousands of federal workers.The order limits the departments and classifications of federal workers who can organize a union and instructs the government to stop engaging in any collective bargaining.The office of personnel management issued a memo following the directive, providing guidance to the departments and subdivisions on the order, which includes terminating their collective bargaining agreements and ending voluntary union dues collection through payrolls.Following the order the Trump administration filed a lawsuit in a Texas court to support its move to end collective bargaining, claiming collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) “significantly constrain” the executive branch.“Plaintiffs wish to rescind or repudiate those CBAs, including so they can protect national security by developing personnel policies that otherwise would be precluded or hindered by the CBAs. But to ensure legal certainty and avoid unnecessary labor strife, they first seek declaratory relief to confirm that they are legally entitled to proceed with doing so,” the lawsuit states.Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US, said the move was “straight out of Project 2025”, the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s manifesto to remake the federal government.“This executive order is the very definition of union-busting. It strips the fundamental right to unionize and collectively bargain from workers across the federal government at more than 30 agencies,” said Shuler. “It’s clear that this order is punishment for unions who are leading the fight against the administration’s illegal actions in court – and a blatant attempt to silence us.”According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 29.9% of federal employees are union members as of 2024, representing more than 1.2 million workers.Unions representing federal workers have criticized the order and vowed to take immediate legal action.“President Trump’s latest executive order is a disgraceful and retaliatory attack on the rights of hundreds of thousands of patriotic American civil servants – nearly one-third of whom are veterans – simply because they are members of a union that stands up to his harmful policies,” said Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest union representing federal workers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“These threats will not work. Americans will not be intimidated or silenced. AFGE isn’t going anywhere. Our members have bravely served this nation, often putting themselves in harm’s way, and they deserve far better than this blatant attempt at political punishment.”Kelley added: “AFGE is preparing immediate legal action and will fight relentlessly to protect our rights, our members, and all working Americans from these unprecedented attacks.”The union held a press conference with Democratic lawmakers on Friday afternoon at the US Capitol, during which Kelley criticized the invocation of national security to strip federal workers of their union rights and called for support from the public.“This isn’t about safety or security. It’s about silencing workers who are courageously standing up to this non integrity, non accountability in the government,” said Kelley. “We won’t be silenced.”The congressman Jamie Raskin said the Trump order was an attempt to bring “chaos and retaliation” against the US labor movement.“It’s clear as day that they are retaliating against the labor movement for standing up for the rights of workers,” said Raskin. “When rightwing coups and authoritarian takeovers happen all over the world, the first thing they do is they attack the civil service, and then they attack the labor movement.”Unions representing federal workers can only bargain over conditions of employment, with wages, benefits, and classifications set by law and Congress. Bargaining is governed by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. Federal workers are also barred from conducting strikes.“President Trump’s attempt to unlawfully eliminate the right to collectively bargain for hundreds of thousands of federal workers is blatant retribution,” said Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). “This attack is meant to silence their voices, so Elon Musk and his minions can shred the services that working people depend on the federal government to do.”Sara Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, warned Trump’s executive order was a warning for more attacks on workers and labor unions to come from this administration.“If we allow this administration to tear up federal union contracts, fire federal workers who stand up for our legal rights and target federal unions and union activists, they won’t stop there,” Nelson said. “An injury to one is an injury to all. It is time for the labor movement and the American workforce to rise up for our rights and fight for our country – whatever it takes.” More

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      The US government is effectively kidnapping people for opposing genocide | Moira Donegan

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      The abductors wore masks because they do not want their identities known. On Tuesday evening, Rumeysa Ozturk exited her apartment building and walked on to the street in Somerville, Massachusetts – a city outside Boston – into the fading daylight. Ozturk, a Turkish-born PhD student at Tufts University who studies children’s media and childhood development, was on her way to an iftar dinner with friends, planning to break her Ramadan fast.In a video taken from a surveillance camera, she wears a pink hijab and a long white puffer coat against the New England cold. The first man, not uniformed but wearing plain clothes, as all the agents are, approaches her as if asking for directions. But he quickly closes in and grabs her by the wrists she has raised defensively toward her face.She screams as another man appears behind her, pulling a badge out from under his shirt and snatching away her phone. Soon six people are around her in a tight circle; she has no way to escape. They handcuff her and hustle her into an unmarked van. Attorneys for Ozturk did not know where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the US homeland security department that has become Trump’s anti-immigrant secret police, had taken the 30-year-old woman for almost 24 hours.In that time, a judge ordered Ice to keep Ozturk, who is on an F-1 academic visa, in Massachusetts. But eventually, her lawyers learned that their client had been moved, as many Ice hostages are, to a detention camp in southern Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles (1,600km) from where she was abducted.In the video, before she is forced into the van, Ozturk looks terrified, confused. She may well have thought she was being robbed by street thugs; she did not seem to understand, at first, that she was being kidnapped by the state. She tries to plead with her attackers. “Can I just call the cops?” she asks. “We are the police,” one of the men responds. Ozturk remains imprisoned; she has been charged with no crime. In the video of her arrest, a neighbor can be heard nearby, asking: “Is this a kidnapping?”The answer is yes. Ozturk is one of a growing number university students who have been targeted, issued arrest warrants, or summarily kidnapped off the streets by Ice agents. She joins the ranks of include Mahmoud Khalil, the Syrian-born Palestinian former graduate student and green card holder from Columbia University; Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian-born mechanical engineering doctoral student at the University of Alabama; Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia undergraduate who was born in South Korea but has long been a green card holder after immigrating to the United States with her parents at the age of seven; and Momodou Taal, a dual British and Gambian citizen who is studying for a graduate degree at Cornell University and has gone into hiding after receiving a summons from Ice to turn himself in for deportation proceedings.Many of these students had some connection – however tenuous – to anti-genocide protests on campuses over the past year and a half. Taal and Khalil, in different capacities, were leaders of protests for Palestinian rights at their respective universities. Chung attended one or two demonstrations at Columbia. Ozturk co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper that cited credible allegations that Israel was violating international human rights law in Gaza and called on the university president to take a stronger stance against the genocide. In a statement regarding her arrest, a DHS spokesperson said: “Investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” They meant the op-ed.The state department claims that some of these students have had their visas or permanent resident status rescinded – in a video of the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, taken by his pregnant wife, agents proclaim that his student visa has been revoked, but when they are informed that he has a green card, they say: “We’re revoking that too.” This unilateral revocation of green card protections, without notice or due process, is illegal. But that is not the point – the Trump administration clearly thinks of immigrants as a population with no rights that they need respect.Rather, the point is that Trump administration’s promise to crack down on student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza has the effect of articulating a new speech code for immigrants: no one who is not a United States citizen is entitled to the first amendment right to say that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, or that the lives of Palestinians are not disposable by virtue of their race.It is up to those us who do have citizenship to speak the truth that the Trump administration is willing to kidnap people for saying: genocide is wrong, Israel is committing it against Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinians, like all people, deserve not only the food and medicine that Israel is withholding from them, and not only an end to Israel’s relentless and largely indiscriminate bombing, but they deserve freedom, dignity and self-determination. This has become an unspeakable truth in Trump’s America. Soon, there will be other things we are not allowed to say, either. We owe it to one another to speak these urgent truths plainly, loudly and often – while we still can.Here is another truth: that the US’s treatment of these immigrants should shame us. It was once a cliche to say that the US was a nation of immigrants, that they represented the best of our country. It is not a cliche anymore. For most of my life as an American, it has been a singular source of pride and gratitude that mine was a country that so many people wanted to come to – that people traveled from all over the world to pursue their talent, their ambition and their hopefulness here, and that this was the place that nurtured and rewarded them.It may sound vulgar to speak of this lost pride after Ozturk’s kidnapping – all that sentimentality did nothing, after all, to protect her, and may in the end have always been self-serving and false. But as we grapple with what America is becoming – or revealing itself to be – under Donald Trump, I think we can mourn not only the lost delusions of the past but the lost potential of the future.Ozturk – a student of early childhood education, and someone brave enough to take a great personal risk in standing up for what she thought was right – seems like a person the US would be lucky to have. Instead we are punishing her, terrorizing her, kidnapping her and throwing her away. She deserves better, and so do all of our immigrants – hopeful, struggling people who mistook this for a place where they could thrive. Who, in the future, will continue to think of the US as a place where immigrants can make a difference, can prosper? Who will share their gifts with us now?

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      US government cuts imperil life-saving gun violence research. As doctors, we fear for the future | Jessica Beard and Elinore Kaufman

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      We don’t have a reliable count for how many people have been shot in the United States this year. We don’t know how many were shot last year either. Or the year before that. These most basic numbers should inform our gun violence prevention efforts. But they don’t exist.This is the void of information that is created and persists when critical research is suppressed.For those struggling to keep up with our erratic news cycle, what we saw unfold in February at the National Institutes of Health – with communication blackouts, funding freezes and cuts that will obstruct life-saving research efforts – may feel inconsequential. But make no mistake: the peril hanging over our country’s research efforts remains, and we in the gun violence research community are bracing ourselves for a dangerous situation we know all too well.Our field has already experienced the devastating consequences of defunding and censorship. The story of how we got here begins in the 1990s.Buoyed by the success of a public health approach in curbing traffic fatalities, researchers were hopeful that the same approach – track the problem, identify and test solutions, share findings and implement what works – could be used to prevent gun violence. The researchers got to work, and that work advanced rapidly. But some of the findings that emerged – in particular, that owning a gun increased one’s risk of being murdered in one’s home – angered the powerful gun lobby.The late congressman Jay Dickey, who served as the National Rifle Association’s point person in Congress, took up the cause, introducing a provision into an omnibus bill that called for no federal funds to be used “to advocate or promote gun control”. The Dickey Amendment, passed in 1996, did not ban gun violence research outright, but research dollars within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were reallocated, and the search for solutions was reduced to a trickle.Sixteen years later, days after the Aurora theatre mass shooting, Dickey co-authored an op-ed reversing his stance. In it, he urged more scientific research, not less, and stated the truly “senseless” part of gun violence “is to decry these deaths as senseless when the tools exist to understand causes and to prevent these deadly effects”.Six months later – and one month after Sandy Hook – then president Barack Obama directed the CDC to “conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it”.But even with the public outcry that followed these mass killings, even with Dickey’s reversal, even with the president’s directive, the pause in research continued.In 2018, on the heels of yet another high-profile mass shooting – this one at a high school in Parkland, Florida – then president Donald Trump signed a bill clarifying that the Dickey Amendment did not actually prohibit gun violence research.But it wasn’t until 2021 that these policy changes would lead to the first dedicated federal funding for gun violence research in 25 years. By this time, we lacked the most fundamental tools to support gun violence research: expertise, mentorship, basic data, surveillance and the infrastructure to implement that critical public health approach to address and prevent gun violence.The year the funding returned, 2021, was also the deadliest on record for gun violence in the US: 48,830 lives lost to guns over the span of just 12 months. As trauma surgeons in Philadelphia, we witnessed this heartbreaking moment in our country’s history firsthand. We were bombarded by the dying and the desperate and the so many who were harmed by this disease of gun violence – a disease our government had, for 25 years, not deemed consequential enough to cure.Because the CDC tracks gun deaths but not the total number of people with non-fatal firearm injuries each year, we don’t know exactly how many people were shot during that 25-year funding pause. But we do know that hundreds of thousands of lives were forever altered or lost. And the research community could not ask why, could not ask how, could not find the answers we so desperately needed then and so desperately need now.The suffering of our patients motivates us to do research to prevent gun violence – and the suffering we witnessed during the pandemic-related surge of gun violence very nearly brought us to our knees. We want research to stop our patients from being shot. We want research to stop them from dying.The moment we find ourselves in today is especially painful because with renewed research efforts over the last few years, we had finally begun to untangle the root causes of gun violence and identify and test solutions. We had also been making progress with gun violence prevention policy nationally.Three years ago, with bipartisan support, Congress passed the first major federal legislation addressing gun violence prevention in decades. Two years ago, we saw the creation of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which implemented an all-of-government approach to tackling gun violence. And last year brought the landmark US surgeon general’s advisory, which deemed gun violence a public health crisis that demands attention.What’s more, we’ve seen the rate of gun violence decreasing. Here in Philadelphia, the total number of shooting victims over the last year is down about a third from the same point just before the pandemic.We had so much reason for hope, until January, when the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention was shuttered. Then in February, there were broad attacks on scientific research. And this month, the surgeon general’s gun violence advisory disappeared from the government’s website.We loathe to think of what the next news cycle may bring.We were among the first to document the rise in violence in 2020, anticipating the catastrophic years that would follow. Now, as we watch a cascade of executive orders threaten public health and public safety, as we see fears of economic disempowerment sowed across this country, we trauma surgeons are bracing ourselves for another surge in gun violence.We should be filled with hope, not fear.But here we are, fearing for our patients, for our communities and for the countless many who will die from this preventable and treatable disease of gun violence because the research that could have saved them was defunded and censored yet again.No matter your political allegiances, no matter your life experiences, no matter your job, your income, your religion, your age or your race, we must stand firmly, together, in support of research that will help us understand this disease that causes suffering for so many – and one day, find its cure.

      Dr Jessica Beard is the director of research for the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting, a Stoneleigh Foundation Fellow, and director of trauma research at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University; Dr Elinore Kaufman is the research director for the division of trauma at the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the Pennsylvania Trauma System Foundation Research Committee. Both are trauma surgeons in Philadelphia. More

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      So many souvenirs for JD Vance to take home from Greenland: oil, gas, minerals – and that’s just the start | Marina Hyde

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      There’s a Gerard Butler movie called Greenland, which – via a series of cataclysmic events handled incredibly Butlerishly – ends with Gerard cocooned in a remote secure bunker in Greenland. As the week has worn on, this has increasingly become the mood of today’s supposedly super-fun tourist trip to Greenland by the second lady of the United States, Usha Vance, and her husband, the vice-president, JD Vance. Who, come to think of it, does actually look like the Cabbage Patch Gerard Butler.Anyway: Greenland. Like I say, the trip has evolved this week both in style and substance. Originally, it was announced that the second lady was going to take one of her sons, immerse herself in various local events – she’s apparently simply fascinated by Greenland’s culture – and attend the famous Avannaata Qimussersua dog sled race. No more. Now, it’s her husband instead of her son, and the Vances are only going to a military facility. This is a little bit like announcing you’re travelling to Kyoto to see the blossoms, then “recalibrating” your trip so that all you’ll actually be taking in is a tour of the storage facility where they keep the most boring documents from the signing of the 1997 climate protocol. Extremely important, no doubt – and extremely, extremely boring. Or as the White House has chosen to characterise this shift in emphasis: “The Second Lady is proud to visit the Pituffik Space Base with her husband to learn more about Arctic security and the great work of the Space Base.” It is unclear at time of writing if Pituffik has spa facilities. Presumably it’s got something of a year-round après-ski vibe.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, the Vance kid now has to stay at home and go to school, instead of skipping it to enjoy a taxpayer-funded trip to a country his dad and friends are openly trying to annex. Still, the good news is that Mike Waltz should still be going. Yes! The second lady was in fact always slated to go on her little tourist jaunt accompanied by the national security adviser to the US president – and there’s nothing weird about that. Personally, I never minibreak without one. And it goes without saying that the travelling party will be joined in spirit by whichever journalists/Russian assets/assorted randos that Mike has added to the groupchat “Greenland Annexation Brunch With The Girls”.Alas, it seems that the sheer obnoxiousness of the Vances’ trailed visit was the thing that fatally repulsed the locals, leaving US organisers with no choice but to commute the trip down to just one secure base visit. It’s reported that advance-party administration officials went door to door in Greenland trying to find a local family who would be pleased to welcome Usha and her large adult son Mike Waltz into their humble dwelling – presumably in order that they could say something like: “Wow, what a beautiful humble home you have. Be a real shame if anything happened to it …”Strangely, no such family was forthcoming. It’s almost as if people in Greenland have the internet, and are able to read or watch the constant and intensifying statements on their country’s potential annexation by the covetous US president, Donald Trump. “It’s an island … that we need,” observed Trump with chilling mildness earlier this week. “And we’re going to have to have it.” Further matter-of-fact justifications have been repeatedly forthcoming. “We need greater national security purposes [sic],” ran another. “I’ve been told that for a long time, long before I even ran [for president]. People really don’t even know that Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security.” Spoken with all the kindly rationale of the school bully explaining you should give up your lunch money because he needs it.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, a series of proxies are emerging to push America’s case – or, in the case of Vladimir Putin, to not argue with it in a way that is tantamount to cheerleading. “In short, America’s plans in relation to Greenland are serious,” the Russian president observed this week. “These plans have deep historical roots. And it’s clear that the US will continue to systematically pursue its geo-strategic, military-political and economic interests in the Аrctic.” On Friday morning, Stephen Moore – a former Trump economic adviser-turned-Heritage Foundation wingnut – explained cheerfully to the BBC that the Greenlanders were “the people who would benefit the most from this … let’s call it a sale, or acquisition.” Let’s not, but go on. “They could, overnight, turn into millionaires.” This somehow reminds me of that old statistic suggesting that instead of going to an expensive war to protect them, the British government could instead have just made every Falkland Islander a millionaire to soften the unwanted blow of having been taken over by Argentina. After all, what else do people want in life, except for money?“There could be trillions of dollars’ worth of minerals and oil and gas and other types of … precious minerals that could be of value to the United States,” speculated Moore, adding, almost by way of an afterthought about the Greenlanders, that there’s “essentially a treasure chest right below their feet”. Mm. The trouble with the nakedly rapacious hawks of Trumpworld putting it that way, of course, is that it’s only a very short hop to seeing the Greenland people as the obstacle. If only they, and their feet, could just be dug through, then the treasure chest could be rightfully – or wrongfully – claimed.

      Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More