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      Pete Hegseth reported to have shared Yemen attack details in second Signal chat – US politics live

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      Norway’s prime minister Jonas Gahr Stoere and finance minister Jens Stoltenberg will meet with US president Donald Trump in Washington on Thursday, the prime minister’s office said.The meeting at the White House will, among other things, cover the security policy situation, Nato and the war in Ukraine as well as trade and business topics, the statement on Monday said.“Norway and the US cooperate in a number of areas, and the US is an important trading partner for Norway. I look forward to talking about areas where we can cooperate even more closely in the future,” Stoere said.Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.We start with news that defense secretary Pete Hegseth sent detailed information about military strikes on Yemen in March to a private Signal group chat that he created himself and included his wife, his brother and about a dozen other people, the New York Times reported.The Guardian has independently confirmed the existence of Hegseth’s own private group chat.According to unnamed sources familiar with the chat who spoke to the Times, Hegseth sent the private group of his personal associates some of the same information, including the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets that would strike Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, that he also shared with another Signal group of top officials that was created by Mike Waltz, the national security adviser.The existence of the Signal group chat created by Waltz, in which detailed attack plans were divulged by Hegseth to other Trump administration officials on the private messaging app, was made public last month by Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, who had been accidentally added to the group by Waltz.The fact that Hegseth also shared the plans in a second Signal group chat, according to “people familiar with the matter” who spoke to the Times, is likely to add to growing criticism of the former Fox weekend anchor’s ability to manage the Pentagon, a massive organization which operates in matters of life and death around the globe.According to the Times, the private chat also included two senior advisers to Hegseth – Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick – who were fired last week after being accused of leaking unauthorized information.See our full report here:In other news:

      Immigration officials detained a US citizen for nearly 10 days in Arizona, according to court records and press reports. Jose Hermosillo, a 19-year-old New Mexico resident visiting Arizona, was detained by border patrol agents in Nogales, a city along the Mexico border about an hour south of Tucson. Hermosillo’s wrongful arrest and prolonged detention comes amid escalating attacks by the Trump administration on immigrants in the US.

      Senator Chris Van Hollen, who travelled to El Salvador last week to meet Kilmar Ábrego García, the man at the center of a wrongful deportation dispute, said on Sunday that his trip was to support Ábrego García’s right to due process because if that was denied then everyone’s constitutional rights were threatened in the US. The White House has claimed Ábrego García was a member of the MS-13 gang though he has not been charged with any gang related crimes and the supreme court has ordered his return to the US be facilitated.

      Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar warned on Sunday that the US is “getting closer and closer to a constitutional crisis”, but the courts, growing Republican disquiet at Trump administration policies, and public protest were holding it off. “I believe as long as these courts hold, and the constituents hold, and the congress starts standing up, our democracy will hold,” Klobuchar told CNN’s State of the Union, adding “but Donald Trump is trying to pull us down into the sewer of a crisis.”

      Massachusetts governor Maura Healey said on Sunday that Donald Trump’s attacks on Harvard University and other schools are having detrimental ripple effects, with the shutdown of research labs and cuts to hospitals linked to colleges. During an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Democratic governor said that the effects on Harvard are damaging “American competitiveness”, since a number of researchers are leaving the US for opportunities in other countries. After decades of investment in science and innovation, she said: “intellectual assets are being given away.”

      A draft Trump administration executive order reported to be circulating among US diplomats proposes a radical restructuring of the US state department, including drastic reductions to sub-Saharan operations, envoys and bureaus relating to climate, refugees, human rights, democracy and gender equality. The changes, if enacted, would be one of the biggest reorganizations of the department since its founding in 1789, according to Bloomberg, which had seen a copy of the 16-page draft. More

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      Peter Navarro: the economist who has outsmarted Elon Musk and has the ear of Donald Trump

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      Elon Musk called him “dumber than a sack of bricks” but, in the raw contest for political power, Peter Navarro has outsmarted the billionaire.The tumult in global trade shows that for now it is the 75-year-old economist, not Musk, who has Donald Trump’s ear in the Oval Office.Navarro is the US president’s chief trade adviser and the intellectual driving force behind the global tariffs and trade war with China. The chaos and uncertainty have been too strong even for Musk, the great disrupter, but Navarro’s silky mien still assures the US all is well.Even after the tech tycoon publicly compared him to a sack of bricks, and added that he was “truly a moron”, Navarro retained his composure. “I’ve been called worse,” he told NBC.That is true. Navarro has been called a charlatan and a criminal who risks driving the world economy off a cliff.It is a remarkable metamorphosis for a man who a decade ago was a little-known academic nearing retirement at the University of California, Irvine, a respected, stolid institution in Orange County.Then the professor’s hawkish views on China caught the eye of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and vaulted him to Washington, where he played key roles in economic policy, the Covid pandemic and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, a vortex that landed him in jail – for contempt of Congress – only for him to re-emerge, more influential than ever, in Trump’s second administration.“This is the land of reinvention, both cosmetic and ideological, and he is part of that,” said John Pitney, a political scientist and author at Claremont McKenna College.Critics worry that Navarro is trying to reinvent economic rules and the postwar global order with improvisation and bluster that could trigger recession and backlash. For Trump, Navarro is the expert who can articulate a daring and necessary pivot to protectionism.Navarro’s early life, and career, suggested a different trajectory. The son of a musician and a secretary, he grew up on the east coast and obtained a master’s degree in public administration and then a PhD in economics from Harvard. His doctoral dissertation was not on trade but on corporations’ charity motives.He taught economics at San Diego universities and did research on public utilities before landing a tenure position as professor of economics and public policy at UCI in 1989. Tanned and svelte, he had the look of a glossy politician and ran as a Democrat for elected office, including for mayor of San Diego and Congress, but lost.In 2001 he switched to writing get-rich investing books such as If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks: The Investor’s Guide to Profiting from News and Other Market-Moving Events.In 2006 the professor took another swerve by publishing the first of a series of books, and accompanying documentaries, that assailed China as an insatiable menace that bullies, lies and cheats, especially on trade rules through currency manipulation, illegal export subsidies, intellectual property theft and polluting sweatshops.There is no evidence of causality but Navarro’s alarm coincided with California’s proliferating number of Chinese investors and students, notably at UCI, which prompted racially tinged nicknames such as the University of Chinese Immigrants and the University of Caucasian Isolation.Other economists also accused Beijing of unfair practices but Navarro’s radical critique put him on the fringe.In 2016 Trump reportedly instructed his son-in-law Jared Kushner to do research to bolster his views on China. Kushner found Navarro’s book, Death By China, on Amazon, and Navarro ended up advising the campaign.In an interview that year with the Guardian near his Laguna Beach home, Navarro endorsed Trump’s use of the word rape to characterise Beijing’s impact on the US. “It’s an apt description of the damage and carnage that China’s trade policies have wrought on the American economic heartland. What’s happening is rapacious.” He also endorsed Trump’s proposed 45% tariffs on Chinese goods, which he said would compel Beijing to back down. “We’re already in a trade war with China. The problem is we’ve not been fighting back. Trump, through tariffs, wants to call a truce.”Trump had few credentialed academics on his team so Navarro served a useful purpose, Pitney said. “He provided a degree of scholarly cover for what Trump was saying. That’s why he was brought into the administration.”Navarro’s standing in the White House survived the disclosure that his books cited a fictitious expert, Ron Vara, that is an anagram of Navarro. He sought to shrug off the deception by calling it an “inside joke” with himself and a “Hitchcockian writing device”.In Trump’s first administration, more mainstream economic advisers prevailed and there was no trade war. Even so, Navarro expanded his remit to public health during the pandemic, which afforded more opportunity to assail China, and established personal chemistry with the president that made him a survivor amid White House personnel flux.After his chief lost the 2020 election, Navarro promoted the theory that the election was rigged and sought to delay its certification. For rebuffing a congressional committee that investigated the January 2021 attack on the Capitol he was found guilty of criminal contempt and last year served four months in prison.Now back in the White House as Trump’s senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing, Navarro’s influence has been felt in tariffs, stock market volatility and grim economic warnings despite a pause in the most severe tariffs for 90 days.Navarro has a combative streak yet he chose to project indifference over Musk’s insults. “It’s no problem,” he told CNN. A White House spokesperson shrugged off the row: “Boys will be boys.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: Hegseth reportedly had Yemen Signal chat with wife, brother

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      Defence secretary Pete Hegseth is in the spotlight for a communications blunder in which he reportedly created his own Signal group chat that included his wife and brother, in which he shared confidential details of a US strike on Yemen this March.The chat on Signal, a commercially available app not authorized as a means to communicate sensitive or classified national defense information, allegedly included more than a dozen people.The revelations come weeks after national security advisor Mike Waltz created a separate Signal chat to discuss the Yemen strikes, which included top officials from the Trump administration, and inadvertently, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic.President Trump downplayed the first incident, describing it as “glitch”.Here are the key stories at a glance:Pete Hegseth shared Yemen attack details in second Signal chat – reportBefore the US launched military strikes on Yemen in March, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, sent detailed information about the planned attacks to a private Signal group chat that he created himself, which included his wife, his brother and about a dozen other people, the New York Times reported on Sunday.According to unnamed sources familiar with the chat, Hegseth sent information such as the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets that would strike Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, that he also shared with another Signal group of top officials created by Mike Waltz, the national security adviser.Read the full storyUS citizen wrongfully arrested by border patrol in Arizona held for nearly 10 daysImmigration officials detained a US citizen for nearly 10 days in Arizona, according to court records and press reports.Jose Hermosillo, a 19-year-old New Mexico resident visiting Arizona, was detained by border patrol agents in Nogales, a city along the Mexico border about an hour south of Tucson. Hermosillo’s wrongful arrest and prolonged detention comes amid escalating attacks by the Trump administration on immigrants in the US.Read the full storySenator says trip to El Salvador was to support Kilmar Ábrego García’s due processSenator Chris Van Hollen, who travelled to El Salvador last week to meet Kilmar Ábrego García, the man at the center of a wrongful deportation dispute, said on Sunday that his trip was to support Ábrego García’s right to due process because if that was denied then everyone’s constitutional rights were threatened in the US.The White House has claimed Ábrego García was a member of the MS-13 gang though he has not been charged with any gang related crimes and the supreme court has ordered his return to the US be facilitated.Read the full storyAmy Klobuchar calls on supreme court to hold Trump officials in contemptMinnesota senator Amy Klobuchar warned on Sunday that the US is “getting closer and closer to a constitutional crisis”, but the courts, growing Republican disquiet at Trump administration policies, and public protest were holding it off.“I believe as long as these courts hold, and the constituents hold, and the congress starts standing up, our democracy will hold,” Klobuchar told CNN’s State of the Union, adding “but Donald Trump is trying to pull us down into the sewer of a crisis.”Read the full storyMassachusetts governor calls Trump’s attacks on Harvard ‘bad for science’Massachusetts governor Maura Healey said on Sunday that Donald Trump’s attacks on Harvard University and other schools are having detrimental ripple effects, with the shutdown of research labs and cuts to hospitals linked to colleges.During an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Democratic governor said that the effects on Harvard are damaging “American competitiveness”, since a number of researchers are leaving the US for opportunities in other countries. After decades of investment in science and innovation, she said: “intellectual assets are being given away.”Read the full storyTrump draft order calls for drastic restructure of state departmentA draft Trump administration executive order reported to be circulating among US diplomats proposes a radical restructuring of the US state department, including drastic reductions to sub-Saharan operations, envoys and bureaus relating to climate, refugees, human rights, democracy and gender equality.The changes, if enacted, would be one of the biggest reorganizations of the department since its founding in 1789, according to Bloomberg, which had seen a copy of the 16-page draft.Read the full storyJD Vance granted lightning audience with Pope Francis in VaticanPope Francis and JD Vance, who have disagreed very publicly over the Trump administration’s attitude to immigration and its migrant deportation plans, met briefly in Rome on Sunday to exchange Easter greetings.The meeting came a day after the US vice-president, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 2019, sat down with senior Vatican officials and had “an exchange of opinions” over international conflicts and immigration.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      It was a nation of dreams, built for the screen. Then it shattered. Read this essay by Stephen Marche: The America I loved is gone.

      Tom Philipps, the Guardian’s Latin American correspondent, has written a compelling feature of the family of Venezuelan musician sent to El Salvador prison who are agonizing over his fate.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened 19 April 2025. More

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      US citizen wrongfully arrested by border patrol in Arizona held for nearly 10 days

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      Immigration officials detained a US citizen for nearly 10 days in Arizona, according to court records and press reports.As the NPR affiliate Arizona Public Media, first reported, 19-year-old Jose Hermosillo, a New Mexico resident visiting Arizona, was detained by border patrol agents in Nogales, a city along the Mexico border about an hour south of Tucson.According to a border patrol criminal complaint, on 8 April, a border patrol official found Hermosillo “without the proper immigration documents” and claimed that the young American had admitted entering the US illegally from Mexico. Two days later, the federal court document notes that Hermosillo continued to claim he was a US citizen. On 17 April, a federal judge dismissed his case.Hermosillo’s wrongful arrest and prolonged detention comes amid escalating attacks by the Trump administration on immigrants in the US. Since Donald Trump took office, the administration has emboldened immigration officers to arrest and deport undocumented people, including foreign students whose visas have been revoked, leading to a series of errors.“Under the Trump administration’s theory of the law, the government could have banished this U.S. citizen to a Salvadoran prison then refused to do anything to bring him back,” Mark Joseph Stern, a legal analyst for Slate, wrote on Bluesky. “This is why the Constitution guarantees due process to all. Could it be more obvious?”During his campaign for the presidency, the US president promised to carry out “mass deportations”. In the three months since he took office, several foreign tourists have been wrongfully detained, federal agents from other agencies have been deputized to engage in immigration enforcement and Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, declaring that Venezuelan gang members are a leading foreign invasion of the United States to give himself the power to expel immigrants to a notorious Salvadorian prison.According to AZPM’s report, Hermosillo was visiting the Tucson area from Albuquerque, got lost without identification and was arrested by border patrol officials near its headquarters in Nogales. Hermosillo’s girlfriend’s family made numerous calls looking for him before they discovered he was being held at the Florence Correctional Center, a privately run Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility. After his arrest, the court docket shows, he was temporarily detained in the custody of the US marshals.After the family tracked him done, they provided officials with his birth certificate and social security card.“He did say he was a US citizen, but they didn’t believe him,” Hermosillo’s girlfriend’s aunt told AZPM. “I think they would have kept him. I think they would have, if they would have not got that information yesterday in the court, and gave that to Ice and the border patrol. He probably would have been deported already to Mexico.”Ice, Customs and Border Protection, the Department of Homeland Security and Hermosillo’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFederal magistrate judge Maria S Aguilera dismissed the case on 17 April. Hermosillo was released later that evening.Since Trump stepped into office, there have been a rising number of US citizens detained by immigration officials around the country. But immigration officials’ detention of citizens is not new, and it has taken place across presidential administrations. In 2021, the Government Accountability Office found that from 2015 through 2020, Ice arrested 674 US citizens and deported 70 of them. And from 2007 through 2015, 818 US citizens were held in immigration detention, according to a 2016 analysis from NPR.In recent months, the Trump administration has revoked the visas of hundreds of foreign students, many for taking part in Gaza solidarity protests the administration call antisemitic . Among those swept up in that crackdown is Aditya Wahyu Harsono, an Indonesian student in Minnesota, who is married to a US citizen, arrested at his hospital workplace this month after his visa was secretly revoked. More

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      Massachusetts governor calls Trump’s attacks on Harvard ‘bad for science’

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      Massachusetts governor Maura Healey said on Sunday that Donald Trump’s attacks on Harvard University and other schools are having detrimental ripple effects, with the shutdown of research labs and cuts to hospitals linked to colleges.During an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Democratic governor said that the effects on Harvard are damaging “American competitiveness”, since a number of researchers are leaving the US for opportunities in other countries. After decades of investment in science and innovation, she said: “intellectual assets are being given away.”In the past week, the US president cut off billions of dollars to Harvard in federal funds, after the university refused to concede to a number of the administration’s demands. Trump also called for its tax-exempt status to be revoked, a potentially illegal move, against the world-famous college in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Of the moves against colleges, Healey said: “It’s bad for patients, it’s bad for science, and it’s really bad for American competitiveness. There’s no way a state can make up for the cuts from federal funding.”She added: “I was in a hospital recently, Boston Children’s, where some of the sickest kids in the country receive care. Cuts to Boston Children’s and other hospitals are a direct result of Donald Trump’s actions, as these are part of a teaching hospital system.“These cuts to universities have significant ripple effects, resulting in layoffs of scientists and doctors, and clinical trials for cancer treatments have been shut down.“As governor, I want Massachusetts and America to soar. What Donald Trump is doing is essentially inviting other countries, like China, to take our scientists and researchers. This is terrible, especially considering what he has done to the economy. I am working hard every day to lower costs in my state, cut taxes, and build more housing, while Donald Trump is making life more expensive and harder for all of us.”Since Trump took office, his administration has deployed an “antisemitism taskforce” to demand various policy changes at different universities around the country.Columbia University, one of the first institutions targeted by the taskforce, quickly caved to the Trump administration’s demands to restore $400m in federal funding. Some of the measures that Columbia conceded to included banning face masks on campus, empowering security officers to arrest people, and placing control of the Middle Eastern department under a new senior vice-provost.Former Columbia University president Lee Bollinger said on Sunday that the Trump administration’s attacks on academic institutions represent a significant attack on first amendment rights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is a kind of weaponization of the government’s power,” Bolinger said on CNN, adding that it “seems like a campaign of intimidation”.“This is a kind of weaponization of the government’s power,” he said.Earlier this month, the federal government sent Harvard two separate letters with specific demands. After the university publicly rejected those demands, the administration quickly froze nearly $2.3bn in federal funding.The conflict between the administration and the elite university took a strange turn on Friday, with the New York Times reporting that an 11 April letter from the administration with additional demands – which escalated the showdown – was “unauthorized”. The university disputed that the letter was “unauthorized,” claiming the federal government has “doubled down” on its offensive. More

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      Senator says trip to El Salvador was to support Kilmar Ábrego García’s due process

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      Senator Chris Van Hollen, who travelled to El Salvador last week to meet Kilmar Ábrego García, the man at the center of a wrongful deportation dispute, said on Sunday that his trip was to support Ábrego García’s right to due process because if that was denied then everyone’s constitutional rights were threatened in the US.The White House has claimed Ábrego García was a member of the MS-13 gang though he has not been charged with any gang related crimes and the supreme court has ordered his return to the US be facilitated.But in an interview with ABC’s This Week, Van Hollen, a Maryland senator, stressed that the government had presented no evidence linking Ábrego García to MS-13 in federal court. “Mr President,” the senator said, “take your facts to court, don’t put everything out on social media.”Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Van Hollen said Trump’s “argument that you can’t fight gang violence and uphold people’s constitutional rights at the same time. That’s a very dangerous view. If we deny the constitutional rights of this one man, it threatens the constitutional rights of everyone in America.”Van Hollen, who returned to the US on Friday after meeting with Ábrego García, has accused administration officials of lying about Ábrego García’s case in attempt to distract from questions about whether his rights were violated when he was deported to El Salvador last month.“I’m for whatever gives him his due process rights,” Van Hollen told the outlet. “An immigration judge in 2019 said he should not be deported to El Salvador because that would put his life at risk from gang members like MS-13.“The Trump administration did not appeal that immigration judge’s order to keep him in the United States. He is here legally now, has a work permit, is a sheet metal worker, has a family, and three kids,” he said.“I am fine with whatever result happens as long as he is given his due process rights under the constitution,” Van Hollen added. The administration has said Ábrego García’s deportation was an “administrative error” and the supreme court has ordered that the government “facilitate” his return, setting up a contentious debate of what that means in practical terms.As Van Hollen made the rounds of political shows on Sunday, he expanded on the theme of a constitutional crisis. On NBC’s Meet the Press he was asked if the US was in constitutional crisis with the Trump administration.“Oh, yes, we are. They are very much flouting the courts as we speak. As the courts have said, facilitating his return means something more than doing nothing, and they are doing nothing. Yes, they’re absolutely in violation of the court’s orders as we speak,” he said.“My whole point here is that if you deprive one man of his constitutional rights, you threaten the constitutional rights of everybody,” Van Hollen said later to Fox News Sunday host, Shannon Bream. “I would hope that all of us would understand that principle – you’re a lawyer. I’m not vouching for the individual, I’m vouching for his rights.”On ABC’s This Week, Van Hollen was asked if he had walked into a trap when García was brought to his hotel for an hour-long meeting and the pair were pictured with margaritas. The senator said the drinks were placed there by a government official for the photos, and not touched, and added that the trip wasn’t a trap because his purpose had been to meet with García so he could “tell his wife and family he was okay”.“That was my goal. And I achieved that goal,” he said.But he added that “the Salvadorian authorities tried to deceive people. They tried to make it look like he was in paradise. They actually wanted to have the meeting by the hotel pool originally.”The senator also accused Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar”, of “lying through his teeth” about Ábrego García, and strongly rejected comments by Gavin Newsom, the California governor seen as a potential candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, who said that it was politically dangerous for Democrats to defend the wrongly deported man.“I think what Americans are tired of, is people who want to put their finger to the wind to see what’s going on,” the senator said. “I would say that anyone that’s not prepared to defend the constitutional rights of one man, when they threaten the constitutional rights of all, doesn’t deserve to lead.”After the meeting, President Nayib Bukele post the image on X, writing that García “miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Senator Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!”Van Hollen said the venue for the meeting and the subsequent picture “just goes to show the lengths that Bukele and Trump will go to try to deceive people about what this case is all about”.On Friday, the White House mocked Van Hollen by annotating a headline about his Thursday meeting with García. “Fixed it for you, New York Times,” the White House X account shared. “Oh, and by the way, Chris Van Hollen – he’s NOT coming back.”The annotated headline changes “Senator Meets With Wrongly Deported Maryland Man in El Salvador” included crossing out “Wrongly” in red ink and replacing the words “Maryland Man” with “MS-13 Illegal Alien”. They also added “Who’s Never Coming Back.”But Ábrego García’s deportation was also facing opposition from Republicans. On Sunday, Louisiana senator John Kennedy was asked on Meet The Press if Ábrego García should be returned to the US.Kennedy said that Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador and calls for Ábrego García to be returned to the US were “utterly and gloriously wrong” and said that “most of this gauzy rhetoric is just rage bait. Unless you’re next level obtuse, you know that Mr García is never coming back to the United States, ever.”But Kennedy conceded that Ábrego García’s deportation “was a screw up”, adding that “the administration won’t admit it, but this was a screw up. Mr Garcia was not supposed to be sent to El Salvador. He was sent to El Salvador.” But he said Democrats’ response was typical.“The Democrats say, ‘Look, you know, we told you, Trump is a threat to democracy’. This is going to happen every other Thursday afternoon. I don’t see any pattern here. I mean, you know, some day pigs may fly, but I doubt it,”” he added. More

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      Trump draft order calls for drastic restructure of state department

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      A draft Trump administration executive order reported to be circulating among US diplomats proposes a radical restructuring of the US state department, including drastic reductions to sub-Saharan operations, envoys and bureaus relating to climate, refugees, human rights, democracy and gender equality.The changes, if enacted, would be one of the biggest reorganizations of the department since its founding in 1789, according to Bloomberg, which had seen a copy of the 16-page draft. The New York Times first reported on the draft.The US state department disputed the report, with a spokesperson telling Newsweek that the reporting is “entirely based on a fake document”.Earlier on Sunday, the US secretary of state Marco Rubio called the reported overhaul “fake news” in a post on X. “The ⁦nytimes falls victim to another hoax.”The proposals reportedly also include the elimination of the Bureau of International Organizations, which liaises with the United Nations and a cut in diplomatic operations in Canada.Under the changes, the sprawling state department would be reorganized into four regional bureaus covering Indo-Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East and Eurasia. But an unspecified number of “non-essential” embassies and consulates in Sub-Saharan Africa would be closed.The New York Times said the proposal executive order could be signed by Donald Trump this week and the changes would take effect by 1 October.The order is designed to impose “a disciplined reorganization” of the state department and “streamline mission delivery” while cutting “waste, fraud and abuse”, the outlet quoted from the document.If the proposals happened, they would be a significant rejection of the US commitment to a multilateral world order.A senior diplomatic official in Africa said information circulating within the state department about foreign service reforms that are set to be announced would be less sweeping than those described in the document.One poster on a US foreign service-dedicated Reddit page said they doubted that the changes would go as far as the draft order. “I suspect this is being leaked as a red herring designed to make us grateful for a more modest but still unpopular reorganization,” wrote one user. “It will be basically immediately challenged and enjoined, and then ‘implementation’ will be dragged out until Trump is voted out.”Still, any radical reorganization of the US foreign operations comes after the Trump administration moved to fold the US Agency for International Development (USAID) into the state department, cut operations, and then reinstate some, including programs for emergency food assistance.The bureau of humanitarian affairs would “assume any mission-critical duties previously carried out by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)”, the order reads.The draft order leaked on Sunday would eliminate the Bureau of African Affairs, the special envoy for climate, the Bureau of International Organizations, and the Office of Global Women’s Issues.“Diplomatic relations with Canada shall fall under a significantly reduced team delegated as the North American Affairs Office (NAAO) within the Office of the Secretary,” according to the document. That includes a substantial downsizing of the US embassy in the capital, Ottawa.The shake-up would also see US diplomatic staff assigned to regions for the duration of their careers rather than be deployed in rotations around the world. State department-awarded Fulbright scholarships would be reformed as “solely for master’s-level study in national security-related disciplines” with emphasis placed in “critical” languages.Fellowships associated with historically Black Howard University in Washington, would also be cancelled as part of the administration’s effort to end diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.“All positions and duties must receive explicit written approval from the President of the United States,” according to the order, which also calls for ending the foreign service exam for aspiring diplomats. The new criteria for hiring, it said, includes “alignment with the president’s foreign policy vision”.But the order is not the only internal document circulating to propose changes to US diplomatic operations. Another proposes a 50% reduction in the state department budget, and a third calls for the cutting 10 embassies and 17 consulates.The US state department workforce includes 13,000 members of the foreign service, 11,000 civil service employees, and 45,000 locally employed staff at more than 270 diplomatic missions worldwide, according to its website. More

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      RFK’s statements prove autistic people and their families everywhere should fear Trump and his allies | John Harris

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      In the recent past, Robert F Kennedy Jr has said that Donald Trump is “a terrible human being” and “probably a sociopath”. But in the US’s new age of irrationalism and chaos, these two men are now of one voice, pursuing a strand of Trumpist politics that sometimes feels strangely overlooked. With Trump once again in the White House and Kennedy ensconced as his health and human services secretary, what they are jointly leading is becoming clearer by the day: a war on science and knowledge that aims to replace them with the modern superstitions of conspiracy theory.Nearly 2,000 members of the US’s National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have warned of “slashing funding for scientific agencies, terminating grants to scientists, defunding their laboratories, and hampering international scientific collaboration”. Even work on cancer is now under threat. But if you want to really understand the Trump regime’s monstrousness, consider where Kennedy and a gang of acolytes are heading on an issue that goes to the heart of millions of lives: autism.Last Wednesday, Kennedy spoke at a press conference staged in response to a report about apparently rising rates of autism published by the US’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And out it all came: an insistence that autism is an “epidemic” and a “preventable disease”, and – in complete defiance of the science – that the root cause lies with “environmental toxins”. A range of new studies, he said, will begin reporting back in September: with the same banality that defines his boss’s promises on international conflict and global economics, he told his audience that answers would be presented to the public “very, very quickly”.Most of the people present would have been aware of Kennedy’s past support for the thoroughly discredited idea that autism is somehow linked to the use of vaccines. As he spoke, they were presumably reminded of the occasions when he has talked about autistic people with a mixture of disgust and complete ignorance. Autism, he said, “destroys” families; today’s autistic children “will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” Those comments have rightly triggered a huge backlash. But what has been rather lacking is a broader critique of Kennedy’s ideas, and how they go deep into aspects of the US’s culture and politics.As I explain in the book I have just written about my autistic son, James, I began my immersion in autism and the arguments that swirl around it 15 years ago, when he received his diagnosis from the NHS. That came amid visits from speech therapists and educational psychologists, and increasingly futile appointments with a paediatrician, who in effect told us to go away and manage as best we could. But straight away, I was also aware of a much more exotic subculture rooted in the US, based around the idea that autism could somehow be cured, and an array of regimens and pseudo-treatments.The anxieties surrounding Andrew Wakefield’s disgraced work on a link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) jab were still easy to pick up. I read about “chelation”: injecting chemicals into the bloodstream, supposedly to remove the toxic preservatives used in vaccines from the body and send autism on its way. It was easy to find stuff about impossibly restrictive diets, and the terrifying notion of forcing people to drink diluted bleach. These ideas, moreover, came with claims of endless government cover-ups: proto-Maga stuff, which had long been snowballing online.That said, the underlying logic of all this quackery was encouraged by much more mainstream voices. By and large, British campaigning and research tends to focus on what autism actually is, and how to make autistic lives better – whereas in the US, very powerful forces have seen autism as a disease. In 2006, President George W Bush signed a legislative package tellingly called the Combating Autism Act, hailed by one of its supporters as “a federal declaration of war on the epidemic of autism”. At that point, there were initiatives and organisations with names such as Cure Autism Now and Defeat Autism Now! All this had already spawned the autistic self-advocacy movement that continues to loudly contest such ideas, but its appeal obviously still lingers.If I were in the US, I would now have two big worries. As well as constant attacks on the public sector that have already hacked back help for autistic people, there is a huge question about what Kennedy’s nonsense might mean for other areas of federal government policy, and the kind of MMR-style panics his “answers” on toxins might trigger. But some of those concerns also apply to the UK, thanks to the ease with which ideas travel, and how Trump and his allies influence politics across the world.Kennedy’s pronouncements are not only about what causes autism; they also reflect an age-old perception of autism as an aberration, and many autistic people as “ineducable” and beyond help. This surely blurs into populists’ loathing of modern ideas about human difference: once you have declared war on diversity, an attack on the idea of neurodiversity will not be far away. It also chimes with one of the new right’s most pernicious elements: its constant insistence that everything is actually much simpler than it looks.Which brings me to something it feels painful to have to write. Autism denotes a fantastically complicated set of human traits and qualities, but that does not make them any less real. It presents with and without learning disabilities, and can be synonymous with skills and talents. Its causes (if that is even the right word) are largely genetic, although careful research is focused on how those heritable aspects might sometimes – sometimes– intersect with factors during pregnancy, and with parental age. And obviously, those characterisations barely scratch the surface, which is some indication of the absurdity of Kennedy’s position, and how dangerous it is.On this side of the Atlantic, there are very good reasons why many of us who have families with autistic members feel deep anxiety about the constant shunting of politics to the right. The care, education and official understanding of the people we love and sometimes look after is fragile enough already: what would happen if their fate was in the hands of the Trumpist know-nothings of Reform UK, or Alternative für Deutschland? The American tragedy unfolding in front of our eyes shows the future we now have to avoid, and the kind of people we may have to fight, who will not just be arrogant and inhumane, but set on taking us back to a failed past: terrible human beings, you might call them. More