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      Trump administration mulling end to legal right to challenge one’s detention

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      The Trump administration is considering suspending the writ of habeas corpus, the legal right to challenge one’s detention, Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser, said on Friday.“The constitution is clear, and that of course is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus could be suspended in time of invasion. So that’s an option we’re actively looking at. A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not,” Miller said to a group of reporters at the White House.The US constitution says: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” The writ of habeas corpus has only been suspended four times in US history, most notably by Abraham Lincoln during the civil war. It was also suspended during efforts to fight the Ku Klux Klan in the 19th century in South Carolina, in the Philippines in 1905 and after Pearl Harbor.Suspending habeas corpus would be an extremely aggressive move that would dramatically escalate the Trump administration’s efforts to attack the rule of law in American courts as it tries to deport people without giving them a chance to challenge the basis of their removals.Miller, long known for his far-right positions on immigration, has sought to deploy a maximalist approach in carrying out mass deportations. The US government has already produced little evidence to justify immigrant deportations and in some cases has sought to remove students in the United States legally for expressing their views, specifically support for Palestinians.Many of the immigrants that the Trump administration has moved aggressively to deport – including Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk – have filed habeas petitions challenging efforts to deport them.The administration has already attempted to deport people without due process by invoking the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century law that allows the president to do so in a time of war.The Trump administration has justified its actions by arguing that the US is under “invasion” by Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. Multiple judges have rejected the idea that the United States is under invasion and tried to halt the removals.But, while courts have tried to stop the administration’s efforts to unlawfully deport people, Trump has attacked judges for ruling against him and in some cases openly defied the courts. More

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      Mayor of Newark arrested for trespassing at Ice detention center

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      The mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, was arrested for trespass at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center in New Jersey on Friday as Democratic members of Congress also attempted to conduct what they say was a visit to the controversial facility to conduct “federal oversight”.News of Baraka’s arrest at Delaney Hall was reported on X by Alina Habba, the acting US attorney for the district of New Jersey, and a former personal attorney and adviser to Donald Trump.“The Mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon,” Habba wrote.“He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. No one is above the law.”Kabir Moss, spokesperson for the Baraka for Governor campaign, said in a statement that he was taken to a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) office a few miles from the facility and remained in detention. Baraka is currently running for the Democratic nomination as New Jersey’s governor in a competitive race. The primary is scheduled for next month.“We are actively monitoring and will provide more details as they become available,” Moss said.The New Jersey Globe published a photograph of him being led away in handcuffs by officers in jackets marked “Police Ice”. The newspaper does not have a reporter at the scene, but said observers at Delaney Hall said there had been “a scuffle”.Baraka, who spoke out against Trump’s immigration policies in January after an immigration raid in Newark he said Ice agents conducted without a warrant, was at Delaney Hall with Democratic New Jersey Congress members Bonnie Watson Coleman, LaMonica McIver and Rob Menendez.The politicians have accused the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of reopening the detention facility, in contravention of local ordinances and without the necessary permits.It is the largest such facility in the north-eastern US, and was the first to open after Trump’s second term of office began in January, according to the Ice website.Coleman, in a tweet, said the visit was an attempt to establish conditions inside. “We’ve heard stories of what it’s like in other Ice prisons. We’re exercising our oversight authority to see for ourselves,” she wrote.Coleman also told reporters at a press conference outside the facility that the lawmakers had traveled to the facility to see the conditions, according to the Independent.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Ice is out of control,” she said. “Ice thinks it can intimidate all of us. And it cannot intimidate any of us. And we the people will make sure that this administration adheres to the rules that separate us from dictatorships and other third world countries.”Menendez accused Ice agents of having “put their hands on” representatives Coleman and McIver, reported the New York Times. “They feel no restraint on what they should be doing, and that was shown in broad daylight today,” Menendez said at the news conference.Axios reports that Coleman’s office said that they “arrived at Delaney Hall today at about 1pm to exercise their oversight authority as prescribed by law. After a period of explaining the law to the officials at the site they were escorted in.”Video attached to the tweet shows the Congress members inside the grounds of the center talking to employees. Other clips show them being threatened with arrest for trespass by uniformed officials. More

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      Immigrants set for Libya deportation sat on tarmac for hours, attorney says

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      Immigrants in Texas who were told they would be deported to Libya sat on a military airfield tarmac for hours on Wednesday, unsure of what would happen next, an attorney for one of the men has said.The attorney, Tin Thanh Nguyen, told the news agency Reuters that his client, a Vietnamese construction worker from Los Angeles, was among the immigrants woken in the early morning hours and bussed from an immigration detention center in Pearsall, Texas, to an airfield where a military aircraft awaited them.After several hours, they were bussed back to the detention center around noon, the attorney said on Thursday.The Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon and the state department did not respond to requests for comment.Reuters was first to report that the Trump administration was poised to deport immigrants held in the US to Libya, despite a court order against such a move, in a development that would escalate Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.Officials earlier this week told Reuters the US military could fly the immigrants to the north African country as soon as Wednesday, but stressed that plans could change.A US official said the flight never departed. As of Friday, it was unclear if the administration was still planning to proceed with the deportations.A federal judge in Boston ruled on Wednesday that any effort by the Trump administration to deport non-Libyan immigrants to Libya without adequate screenings for possible persecution or torture would clearly violate a prior court order.Lawyers for a group of immigrants pursuing a class action lawsuit had made an emergency request to the court hours after the news broke of the potential flight to Libya.Nguyen, who declined to name his client, said the man was told on Monday to sign a document agreeing to be deported to Libya. The man, who can not read English well, declined to sign it and was placed in solitary confinement and shackled along with others, the attorney said.The man was never provided an opportunity to express a fear of being deported to Libya as required under federal immigration law and the recent judicial order, Nguyen said.“They said: ‘We’re deporting you to Libya,’ even though he hadn’t signed the form, he didn’t know what the form was,” Nguyen said.Nguyen said his client, originally from Vietnam, has lived in the US since the 1990s but was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) earlier this year during a regular check-in, which is becoming more common.Vietnam declines to accept some deportees and processes deportation paperwork slowly, Nguyen said, making it harder for the US to send deportees there.There have been talks between the US and the east African nation of Rwanda about also deporting people there. More

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      ‘It’s all very sad’: Trump’s attack on arts funding has a devastating effect

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      On the afternoon of 3 May, arts organizations around the US began receiving cryptic emails from a previously unknown government email account. The missives declared that these organizations’ missions were no longer in line with new governmental arts priorities, which included helping to “foster AI competency”, “empower houses of worship” and “make America healthy again”.Chad Post, a publisher at Open Letter Books, a program of the University of Rochester that specializes in publishing translated literature, got his email just before entering a screening of Thunderbolts*. He put a quick post on Instagram, and when he came out of the movie his phone was full of responses. “I seemed to be the first one to receive this,” he recounted. “But then, all of a sudden, everyone was getting these letters.”Post told me that he had been in touch with 45 publishers who had had their NEA grants terminated, and he suspected that all 51 publishers receiving grants for 2025 supporting the publication of books and magazines had now received the letter. Although Open Letter expects to still receive funding for 2025, Post is convinced that no further money will be forthcoming from the National Endowment for the Arts.“According to rules of the email, we should get the money, although if you come back in two months and they never sent it, I wouldn’t be shocked,” he said. “The chilling part of that email is that they’re eliminating the NEA entirely. It lists all these insane things that are the new priority, and says our venture is not in line with the new priority, so we can’t ever apply again.”The grant termination won’t deal a lethal blow to Open Letter Books, but it will alter the kinds of literature that they are able to publish. Post said that he would have to give preference to books from nations that can offer funding – which tends to favor books from European languages and from wealthier countries.This sentiment was echoed by other arts organizations, who see the loss of NEA money as a significant blow, but not a deadly one. Kristi Maiselman, the executive director and curator of CulturalDC, which platforms artists that often are not programed at larger institutions, shared that NEA grants account for $65,000 of a roughly $1.1m budget. Thanks to proactive work between her team and the NEA, Maiselman received her grant this year, but does not expect any further such money. “It’s a pretty significant chunk of the budget for us,” she told me. “What has been hard for us this year is that we really do provide a platform for artists to respond to what’s going on in the world.” Continuing to promulgate those kinds of artists would be more difficult in future.View image in fullscreenAllegra Madsen, the executive director of the LGBTQ+-focused Frameline film festival, said that her grant funding had been in limbo ever since the inauguration of Donald Trump, and was ultimately terminated last week. “I think we could all kind of sense that it was going to go away,” she told me. “I think these blows that came this week are going to be felt very intensely by a lot of different organizations.”Frameline is housed in the same building as a number of other arts organizations dedicated to film, including the Jewish Film Institute, the Center for Asian American Media and BAVC Media, and it also sits adjacent to SF Film and the Independent Television Service, all of which Madsen says were affected by the termination of NEA grants. “We’ve all been hit, and we’re all just sort of figuring out what our next steps are.”One fear that Madsen raised was that many private funders take cues from the Federal government, and now with NEA grants terminated – and possibly the NEA itself getting axed – she is unsure if other donors will get cold feet. “This year we have a cohort of sponsors that are very much sticking by us, and I am incredibly thankful for those organizations standing up. But it is a bigger ask now, it’s a bigger risk for them.”Despite the often seemingly indiscriminate cuts made to the federal government by the unofficial “department of government efficiency”, the organizations the Guardian spoke with all believed that they had been targeted in some way because of the programming that they offer. “Just because it’s being done in mass, I don’t think that takes away from the idea that this is pointed and intentional,” Madsen told me. “Governments like this try to attack the populations that seem to have the least power, and right now they are mistakenly thinking that’s going to be our trans and gender-nonconforming siblings.”Taking a similar perspective, Maiselman sees these cuts as perpetuating a broader cultural turn away from arts programs, in particular those that significantly represent people of color and the queer community. “Prior to losing the NEA, we had lost about $100,000 in sponsorships this year,” she said. “We’re hearing from our sponsors that there are a lot of eyes on them. They’re not exactly saying no, but they are saying saying, ‘not right now’.”View image in fullscreenPost sees private money as a possible way to make up some of the lost NEA funding but fears that there will be a stampede of indie presses all toward the same few donors. “Everyone is feeling a little more broke and a little more strapped right now,” he said. “Arts orgs writ large are going to be competing for funds from the same few individuals and that just scares me.”He also argued that, while a press like Open Letter will be able to continue functioning without NEA money, organizations that only publish literary magazines may fold without significant infusions of private cash. “Those literary magazines don’t have the opportunity to rely on a book breaking out,” he said. “They’re not suddenly going to have an issue of the magazine take off. This might be a massive blow to literary magazines.”Although some arts organizations appear poised to survive the loss of NEA money, they nonetheless feel existentially frightened by the general turn of the political culture away from diversity and toward authoritarianism. “It’s hard right now to see any light at the end of the tunnel,” said Maiselman. “With the rate at which things are changing, it’s going to take years to course correct – that is, if and when the administration changes.”Maiselman further argued that the cultural shift brought in by the aggressive moves of the Trump administration had the potential to profoundly transform the landscape of the arts world. “There’s going to be a reckoning,” she told me. “A lot of organizations won’t survive this.”For her own part, Madsen struck a defiant tone, placing the current repressive political atmosphere in the context of other such threats to the LGBTQ+ community. “We will survive, we have the privilege of being an almost 50-year-old org,” Madsen said. “The LGBTQ+ community has been down this road before. We got through McCarthyism, we got through the Aids crisis, we’ll survive this.”In hopes of surviving, arts organizations are again turning toward one another, finding a community sentiment that many of the people I spoke to called reminiscent of the Covid years. “There are a lot of conversations right now about how we can help one another,” Maiselman told me. Post echoed that, positioning this as a time of collective grieving. “It feels like the end of something,” he said. “It’s sad, it’s all very sad, but we have to keep going somehow. We are damaged but not defeated.” More

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      Why is Trump so fixated on toys for little girls? | Moira Donegan

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      Donald Trump has found a new target for his trademark mockery and dismissal: little girls.In comments at a 30 April cabinet meeting, the president seemed to dismiss the economic impact of his chaotic tariff regime on American consumers by citing girls as the primary complainants. “Somebody said, oh, the shelves are going to be open,” Trump said. “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”Trump is prone to odd non-sequiturs, but the dolls have become something of a sticking point. Onboard Air Force One on 4 May, he doubled down on his insistence that American girls should have fewer toys. “All I’m saying is that a young lady, a 10-year-old girl, nine-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl, doesn’t need 37 dolls,” he told reporters. “She could be very happy with two or three or four or five.”In an interview with Kristen Welker of Meet the Press that same day, Trump again mentioned the dolls. “I don’t think a beautiful baby girl needs – that’s 11 years old – needs 30 dolls,” Trump said. “I think they can have three dolls or four dolls because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable.” He went on to assert that American children also have too many pencils. “They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.”In some respects, the comments seem like a rare bit of honesty from the president: an acknowledgment of the reality that his tariffs will hurt consumers and lower the American their standard of living. With steep tariffs on many consumer goods, particularly those made in China, and supply chain issues caused by retailers and producers frantic attempts to offset the costs of the new tariffs, many common products – yes, including children’s toys – will become shorter in supply and steeper in cost. Because of Trump’s policies, it is indeed true that there will be fewer presents for children underneath American Christmas trees this year – a trend that is likely to continue for years to come if Trump’s trade war triggers an economic recession, as is widely expected. Americans themselves don’t have much say in this, but Donald Trump wants us all to know that he’s comfortable with us, and our children, having less.But the selection of dolls, in particular, as Trump’s stand-in for consumer prices reflects the gendered ideas about work, money and purchasing that animate Trump’s chaotic economic policy. After all, Trump did not talk about the impact of his trade regime on toy trucks or GI Joe action figures – and he certainly didn’t mention its likely impact on things like video games, basketballs, squat racks or protein powders. The tariffs will increase prices across economic sectors and hurt consumers of all kinds of goods. But Trump did not speak in general terms about those who might like to buy a house one day, or about who will be hurt by his tariffs on Canadian lumber, or about those who would like to be treated for their illnesses but who have to pay steeper prices for the medicines they need when tariffs hit pharmaceuticals. He didn’t talk about any of the consumption that Americans are uniformly agreed to think of as reasonable, dignified or aspirational. He chose, instead, something seen as trivial, childlike, and only for girls.The comments aim to cast the pain that consumers will face as ultimately feminine and frivolous, their complaints petulant and childlike. In this respect, Trump is drawing on a long tradition of economic rhetoric that aims to cast consumption as feminine, decadent and morally suspect – and to contrast it with the supposedly more manly and virtuous productive side of the economy. It’s a laughably stupid symbolism, one that only works for those deeply committed to their ignorance about how the economy actually works: in truth, everyone consumes, and people of all genders participate in the productive economy. But Trump does not argue based on the facts: he asserts dominance. And here, he casts those Americans who would complain about the economic pain that he is inflicting on them as feminine and hence as contemptible, deserving no more respect than spoiled children.The project of masculinizing the economy – perhaps especially at children’s expense – is one that the Trump administration seems to be pushing more broadly. Trump claims, despite the near-universal assertions of economists to the contrary, that his tariffs will shift the US away from the primarily female service sector industries that have dominated the American economy since the 1970s back to a more masculine manufacturing base.To this end, his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, a billionaire former CEO, went on MSNBC late last month to describe his vision for the future of the American worker. “It’s time to train people not to do the jobs of the past but to do the great jobs of the future,” Lutnick said, arguing that fewer people should be aspiring to bachelor’s degrees and should expect to occupy themselves in lower-skill factory work instead. “This is the new model, where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.”This is the vision for your children’s future that the Trump administration wants to put forward: deprived of material comforts and joy in childhood, then deprived of the hope for upward mobility in adulthood. They want you, and your kids, to be poor, desperate and ignorant. They want you to work in repetitive, dangerous, back-breakingly physical jobs, and they want you to have no aspiration to anything better. They want you to imagine your future, and your children’s futures, not as an open horizon of freedom and potential, but as a dark and desperate struggle, devoid of the notion that we might be anything more than useful instruments for the needs of capital. What do they offer Americans as compensation for this loss? Virtually nothing, aside from misogynist contempt, and the assurance that as our living standards sink and our prospects disappear, in our suffering, at least, we are masculine.On Fox News this past Tuesday, the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, tried to put this spin on things. Describing what he would say to a little girl who would be denied dolls because of Trump’s tariff policy, Bessent insisted that it was for her own good. “I would tell that young girl that you would have a better life than your parents,” Bessent said. But the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to ensure that America’s children – and in particular, its little girls – have it worse.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      An American has become pope. Will he be the moral leader we desperately need? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      America is back, baby. Not only has the Gulf of Mexico been successfully Americanized, the Vatican is now officially US territory. OK, fine, not officially, but, on Thursday, the Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost was announced as pope. The 69-year-old, who has taken the papal name Leo XIV, is the first clergyman from the United States to lead the Roman Catholic church.While Prevost was a frontrunner for the papacy, his victory seems to have taken many experts by surprise. There has long been resistance to an American pope for a number of reasons, including the fact that it might make it appear as if the Vatican is aligned with the world’s strongest economic and military power.“If the Catholic church were also run by an American, the global dominance of the US would be simply pervasive and overwhelming,” Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, a watchdog group that tracks clergy child abuse cases in the Catholic church worldwide, told ABC News recently.I’ll tell you who doesn’t seem particularly overwhelmed by the first American pope: Donald Trump. The president has spent the last few days posting AI-generated pictures of himself as the pope and generally mocking the Catholic church. Still, Trump was on his best behaviour when the official announcement came through, and posted a fairly restrained message on Truth Social, congratulating the pope and saying it was a “Great Honor for our Country”.Just give it a few days, though, and I’m sure Trump will be on Fox News taking credit for the new pope and announcing that the Vatican is going to get rid of all their dusty old Bibles and replace them with the Trump God Bless the USA Bible. Only $99.99 for the platinum edition and a bargain $74.99 for the pink and gold edition!Vice-President JD Vance, one of the last people to see Pope Francis alive, also posted a diplomatic message of congratulations, saying he was “sure millions of American Catholics and other Christians will pray for [Pope Leo’s] successful work leading the Church”.I am not an American Catholic. Nor am I Protestant, Episcopalian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist or anything else. I am an atheist, although not a terribly devout one. But I am certainly praying as hard as I can that Pope Leo will be the moral leader that the world so desperately needs at this moment.For most of my life I have not been particularly interested in who the pope is. And I have had very little faith that the Vatican, which covered up systemic sexual abuse, could ever be a real force for good. But – and I know I am not alone when I say this – the past 19 months has fundamentally changed how I see the world. I used to believe in things like international human rights law. I used to believe that while the arc of the moral universe may be extremely long, it bends toward justice. I used to believe that universities would stand up for free speech. And I used to believe that no matter how craven western world leaders might be, they wouldn’t go so far as to enable the livestreamed genocide unfolding in Gaza. That western leaders wouldn’t stand by and cheer as Israel, whose total blockade on Gaza has entered its third month, starves children to death.During a time when international law has been dealt a deadly blow, when might is right and decades of progress seem to be unravelling, the late Pope Francis made an impression on non-Catholics like me for his moral clarity towards many marginalized groups and his advocacy for peace everywhere from “martyred Ukraine” to Gaza. Of course, his legacy is not perfect: many abuse victims have questioned whether he went far enough in acknowledging children sexually abused by clergy. But Pope Francis undoubtedly fought for the most vulnerable in society.Pope Francis also understood what many newspaper editors and politicians don’t seem to be able to comprehend: that there is no “both-sidesing” atrocities. That there are times where you must take sides because, as Desmond Tutu said, “if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”In 2023, for example, Pope Francis went on a historic trip to South Sudan and told churches in the region that they “cannot remain neutral” but must speak up against injustice and abuse of power.Pope Francis also visited the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2023, where he criticized the “poison of greed” driving conflict in the region. “Hands off the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hands off Africa. Stop choking Africa: it is not a mine to be stripped or a terrain to be plundered,” Francis said.When it came to Gaza, Pope Francis spoke clearly and powerfully. He would call the only Roman Catholic church in Gaza almost nightly after this iteration of the conflict broke out. When so much of the world seems to have turned away from Gaza’s suffering, Pope Francis let anguished civilians know he cared. One of his last wishes was that his popemobile be turned into a mobile health clinic for children in the Gaza Strip.And Pope Francis was not shy about criticizing the US – consistently speaking up for immigrants and refugees. “We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories,” he told the US Congress in September 2015.We do not yet know how Pope Leo will undertake his duties but he is widely considered a centrist who was aligned with Francis on a number of social issues. Notably, in February Leo tweeted an article that disagreed with Vance’s views on immigration, headlined “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others”. In April, he also retweeted commentary criticizing Trump deporting a US resident to El Salvador.Whether Pope Leo will remain outspoken, whether he will continue Francis’s demands for a ceasefire in Gaza, remains to be seen. But the world desperately needs strong moral leadership at the moment. May Leo be the light we need in the current darkness. And, for his own sake, may he stay away from Vance.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trade deals, global wars and AI Jedi posts: where is Trump’s focus? – podcast

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      On Thursday, the White House announced a framework for a US-UK trade deal. Earlier in the week, when asked for his take on India’s missile attack on Pakistan, Donald Trump replied: “I get along with both.” But before all of that, on an otherwise quiet Sunday, the US president announced tariffs on foreign films and the reopening of Alcatraz. Throw in the White House posting another AI-generated image of Trump – this time featuring a lightsabre, muscly arms and two bald eagles – and you have one chaotic week.Archive: BBC News, CBS News, ABC News, NBC News, Sky News, Sky News Australia
      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com

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      Trump news at a glance: military to immediately remove trans troops and use medical records to oust more

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      “No More Trans @ DoD,” Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, posted after the supreme court allowed the Trump administration’s ousting of transgender troops to go forward. As of Thursday, the orders have been issued to identify and involuntarily force trans people out of service.Department officials have said it is difficult to determine exactly how many transgender service members there are, but medical records will show those who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, show symptoms or are being treated. Those troops would then be forced out.Separately, Britain has become the first country to strike a trade agreement with Donald Trump since his announcement of global tariffs on what he called “liberation day”.Here are the key stories at a glance:Up to 1,000 trans troops to be removed The Pentagon will immediately begin moving as many as 1,000 service members who identify as transgender out of the military and give others 30 days to self-identify, under a new directive issued on Thursday.Buoyed up by Tuesday’s supreme court decision allowing the Trump administration to enforce a ban on transgender individuals in the military, the defense department will then begin going through medical records to identify others who have not come forward.Read the full storyUS and UK agree ‘breakthrough’ trade dealThe UK and US have agreed a “breakthrough” trade agreement slashing some of Donald Trump’s tariffs on cars, aluminium and steel. The UK prime minister said the deal would save thousands of British jobs.Keir Starmer said it was a “fantastic, historic day” as he announced the agreement, the first by the White House since Trump announced sweeping global tariffs last month.Read the full storyVance says Kashmir crisis ‘none of our business’JD Vance has said that the US will not intervene in the conflict between Pakistan and India, calling fighting between the two nuclear powers “fundamentally none of our business”.The remarks came during an interview with Fox News, where the US vice-president said that the US would seek to de-escalate the conflict but could force neither side to “lay down their arms”.“Our hope and our expectation is that this is not going to spiral into a broader regional war or, God forbid, a nuclear conflict,” Vance said. “Right now, we don’t think that’s going to happen.”Read the full storyTrump names Fox host to replace pick for DC’s top prosecutorDonald Trump on Thursday said he would look for a new candidate for the role of top federal prosecutor in Washington DC, after a key Republican senator said he would not support the loyalist initially selected for the job.He then named Fox News host and former judge Jeanine Pirro for the job.Read the full storyUS House approves Trump’s renaming of Gulf of MexicoRepublicans in the House of Representatives on Thursday approved legislation to codify Donald Trump’s policy of renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”. The measure was sponsored by rightwing Georgia lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene and passed nearly along party lines, with all Democrats opposed and almost every Republican, with the exception of Nebraska representative Don Bacon, voting in favour.Read the full storyTrump invokes state secrets in case of wrongly deported manThe Trump administration is invoking the “state secrets privilege” in an apparent attempt to avoid answering a judge’s questions about its erroneous deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García to El Salvador.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Trump’s top trade adviser Peter Navarro told reporters that British consumers will like chicken and beef imported from the US despite the use of chlorine and hormones. “Let’s see what the market decides,” Navarro said, adding: “We don’t believe that once they taste American beef and chicken that they would prefer not to have it.”

      The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will no longer track the cost of climate crisis-fuelled weather disasters, including floods, heatwaves, wildfires and more. It is the latest example of changes to the agency and the Trump administration limiting federal government resources on climate change.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 7 May. More