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    Judges rule against Trump administration on deporting Guatemalan children and Venezuelans

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    The Trump administration has been handed a double defeat by judges in immigration cases, barring the executive branch from deporting a group of Guatemalan children and from slashing protections for many Venezuelans in the US.A federal judge on Thursday ordered the administration to refrain from deporting Guatemalan unaccompanied immigrant children with active immigration cases while a legal challenge plays out.Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee based in Washington DC, kept in place an earlier judicial block on the policy, sharply criticizing the administration’s unproven assertion that the children’s parents wanted them deported.The administration attempted to deport 76 Guatemalan minors being held in US custody in a surprise move in the early morning on 31 August, sparking a lawsuit and emergency hearing that temporarily halted the move.The Department of Justice lawyer Drew Ensign initially said that the children’s parents had requested they be returned home, but the department later withdrew that claim. Reuters published a Guatemalan government report saying that most parents of the roughly 600 Guatemalan children in US custody could not be contacted and of those who could, many did not want their children forced back to the country.Kelly said the justice department’s explanation “crumbled like a house of cards” in light of that report.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the justice department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Kelly said some children were unexpectedly taken from their shelter beds in the middle of the night, driven to the airport and, in some cases, put on planes, leaving them worried and confused. At one shelter in McAllen, Texas, a young girl was so scared that she vomited, Kelly wrote, citing evidence submitted in the case.Immigrant children who arrive at US borders without a parent or guardian are classified as unaccompanied and sent to federal government-run shelters until they can be placed with a family member or foster home, a process outlined in federal law.Meanwhile, late on Wednesday, a federal appeals court rejected an attempt by the Trump administration to set aside a judge’s order holding that it unlawfully rolled back temporary protections from deportation granted to 600,000 Venezuelans living in the US.A three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals declined to pause a judge’s 5 September ruling holding that the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, lacked the authority to end the program, known as temporary protected status or TPS.“Vacating and terminating Venezuela’s TPS status threw the future of these Venezuelan citizens into disarray, and exposed them to a substantial risk of wrongful removal, separation from their families, and loss of employment,” the panel said.The justice department has said that if a stay were denied, it might take the case to the US supreme court, which in May put on hold an earlier injunction Chen issued and cleared the way for the administration to end temporary protections for about 348,000 of the Venezuelans at issue.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the DHS, in a statement said the ninth circuit’s ruling “is nothing short of open defiance against the US Supreme Court”. The administration had contended the supreme court’s May decision meant Chen’s latest ruling had to be similarly paused.“Luckily for us, and for all Americans, the Ninth Circuit is not the last stop,” McLaughlin said.TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event. It provides eligible migrants with work authorization and temporary protection from deportation. The program was created in 1991 and extended under Joe Biden to cover about 600,000 Venezuelans and 521,000 Haitians. Noem reversed the extensions, saying they were no longer justified, prompting legal challenges.Chen’s decision had also applied to 521,000 Haitians. The administration did not ask the ninth circuit to put that part of Chen’s ruling on hold as a second judge in New York had already blocked the revocation of the Haitians’ status. More

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      ‘I had teachers crying’: the schools trying to plug million-dollar funding holes after Trump cuts

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      In the time it took to read an email, the federal money vanished before Eisa Cox’s eyes: dollars that supported the Ashe county, North Carolina, school district’s after-school program, training for its teachers and salaries for some jobs.The email from the US Department of Education arrived 30 June, a day before the money – $1.1m in total – was set to materialize for the rural western district. Instead, the dollars were frozen pending a review to make sure the money was spent “in accordance with the president’s priorities”, the email said.In a community still recovering from Hurricane Helene, where more than half of students are considered economically disadvantaged, Cox said there was no way they could replace that federal funding for the school system she oversees as superintendent. “It is scary to think about it,” she said. “You’re getting ready to open school and not have a significant pot of funds.”School leaders across the country were reeling from the same news. The $1.1m was one small piece of a nearly $7bn pot of federal funding for thousands of school districts that the Trump administration froze – money approved by Congress and that schools were scheduled to receive on 1 July. For weeks, leaders in Ashe county and around the country scrambled to figure out how they could avoid layoffs and fill financial holes – until the money was freed on 25 July, after an outcry from legislators and a lawsuit joined by two dozen states.“I had teachers crying, staff members crying. They thought they were going to lose their jobs a week before school,” said Curtis Finch, superintendent of Deer Valley unified school district in Phoenix, Arizona.View image in fullscreenNow, as students are back in classrooms, their school systems can no longer count on federal dollars as they once did. They must learn to plan without a playbook under a president intent on cutting education spending. For many districts, federal money is a small but crucial sliver of their budgets, potentially touching every part of a school’s operations, from teacher salaries to textbooks. Nationally, it accounts for about 14% of public school funding; in Ashe county, it’s 17%. School administrators are examining their resources now and budgeting for losses to funding that was frozen this summer, for English learners and for after-school and other programs.So far, the Trump administration has not proposed cutting the largest pots of federal money for schools, which go to services for students with disabilities and to schools with large numbers of low-income students. But the current budget proposal from the US House of Representatives would do just that.At the same time, forthcoming cuts to other federal support for low-income families under the Republican One Big, Beautiful Bill Act – including Medicaid and Snap, previously known as food stamps – will also hammer schools that have many students living in poverty. Some school districts are also grappling with the elimination of Department of Education grants announced earlier this year, such as those designed to address teacher shortages and disability services. In politically conservative communities like this one, there’s an added tension for schools that rely on federal money to operate: how to sound the alarm while staying out of partisan politics.For Ashe county, the federal spending freeze collided with the district’s attempt at a fresh start after the devastation of Helene, which demolished roads and homes, damaged school buildings and knocked power and cell service out for weeks. Between the storm and snow days, students here missed 47 days of instruction.Cox worries this school year might bring more missed days. That first week of school, she found herself counting the number of foggy mornings: an old Appalachian wives’ tale says to put a bean in a jar for every morning of fog in August. The number of beans at the end of the month is how many snow days will come in winter.“We’ve had 21 so far,” Cox said with a nervous laugh on 21 August.A funding freeze rollercoasterFragrant evergreen trees blanket Ashe county’s hills, a region that bills itself as America’s Christmas tree capital because of the millions of Fraser firs grown for sale at the holidays. Yet this picturesque area still shows scars of Hurricane Helene’s destruction: fallen trees, damaged homes and rocky new paths cut through the mountainsides by mudslides. Nearly a year after the storm, the lone grocery store in one of its small towns is still being rebuilt. A sinkhole that formed during the flooding remains, splitting open the ground behind an elementary school.As students walked into classrooms for the first time since spring, Julie Taylor – the district’s director of federal programs – was reworking district budget spreadsheets. When federal funds were frozen, and then unfrozen, her plans and calculations from months prior became meaningless.Federal and state funding stretches far in this district of 2,700 students and six schools, where administrators do a lot with a little. Even before this summer, they worked hard to supplement that funding in any way possible – applying for state and federal grants, like one last year that provided money for a few mobile hotspots for families who don’t have internet access. Such opportunities are also narrowing: the Federal Communications Commission, for example, recently proposed ending its mobile hotspot grant program for school buses and libraries.View image in fullscreen“We’re very fiscally responsible because we have to be. We’re small and rural. We don’t have a large tax base,” Taylor said.When the money was frozen this summer, administrators’ minds went to the educators and kids who would be most affected. Some of it was meant to pay for a program through Appalachian State University that connects the district’s three dozen early career teachers with a mentor, helping them learn how to schedule their school days and manage classroom behavior.The program is part of the reason the district’s retention rate for early career teachers is 92%, Taylor said, noting the teachers have said how much the mentoring meant to them.Also frozen: free after-school care the district provides for about 250 children throughout the school year – the only after-school option in the community. Without the money, Cox said, schools would have had to cancel their after-school care or start charging families, a significant burden in a county with a median household income of about $50,000.Will assistance for immigrant students go away?The salary for Michelle Pelayo, the district’s migrant education program coordinator for nearly two decades, was also tied up in that pot of funding. Because agriculture is the county’s biggest industry, Pelayo’s work extends far beyond the students at the school. Each year, she works with the families of dozens of immigrant students who move to the county for seasonal work on farms, which generally involves tagging and bundling Christmas trees and harvesting pumpkins. Pelayo helps the families enroll their students, connects them with supplies for school and home, and serves as a Spanish translator for parent-teacher meetings – “whatever they need”, she said.Kitty Honeycutt, executive director of the Ashe county chamber of commerce, doesn’t know how the county’s agriculture industry would survive without the immigrant families Pelayo works with. “The need for guest workers is crucial for the agriculture industry. We have to have them,” she said.A couple of years ago, Pelayo had the idea to drive to Boone, North Carolina, where Appalachian State University’s campus sits, to gather unwanted appliances and supplies from students moving out of their dorm rooms at the end of the year to donate to immigrant families. She’s a “find a way or make a way” type of person, Honeycutt said.Cox is searching for how to keep Pelayo on if Ashe county loses these federal funds next year. She’s talked with county officials to see whether they could pay Pelayo’s salary, and has begun calculating how much the district would need to charge families to keep the after-school program running. Ideally, she’d know ahead of time and not the night before the district is set to receive the money.Around the nationDistricts across the country are grappling with similar questions. In Detroit, school leaders are preparing, at a minimum, to lose Title III money to teach English learners; more than 7,200 Detroit students received services funded by Title III in 2023.In Wyoming, the small, rural Sheridan county school district 3 is trying to budget without Title II, IV and V money – funding for improving teacher quality, updating technology and resources for rural and low-income schools, among other uses, the superintendent Chase Christensen said.Schools are trying to budget for cuts to other federal programs, too, such as Medicaid and food stamps. In Harrison school district 2, an urban district in Colorado Springs, schools rely on Medicaid to provide students with counseling, nursing and other services.The district projects that it could lose half the $15m it receives in Medicaid next school year.“It’s very, very stressful,” said Wendy Birhanzel, superintendent of Harrison school district 2. “For a while, it was every day you were hearing something different. And you couldn’t even keep up with: ‘What’s the latest information today?’ That’s another thing we told our staff: if you can, just don’t watch the news about education right now.”There’s another calculation for school leaders to make in conservative counties like Ashe, where 72% of the vote last year went to Donald Trump: objecting to the cuts without angering voters. When North Carolina’s attorney general, a Democrat, joined the lawsuit against the administration over the frozen funds this summer, some school administrators told state officials they couldn’t publicly sign on, fearing local backlash, said Jack Hoke, executive director of the North Carolina School Superintendents’ Association.Cox sees the effort to slash federal funds as a chance to show her community how Ashe county schools uses this money. She believes people are misguided in thinking their schools don’t need it, not malicious.“I know who our congresspeople are. I know they care about this area,” Cox said, adding that they care even if they do not fully grasp how the money is used. “It’s an opportunity for me to educate them.”If the education department is shuttered – which Trump said he plans to do in order to give more authority over education to states – she wants to be included in state-level discussions of how federal money flows to schools through North Carolina. Importantly, she also wants to know ahead of time what her schools might lose.As she made her rounds to each of the schools that first week back, Cox glanced down at her phone and looked up with a smile. “We have hot water,” she said while walking in the hall of Blue Ridge elementary school. It had lost hot water a few weeks earlier, but to Cox, this crisis was minor – one of many first-of-the-year hiccups she has come to expect.Still, it’s one worry she can put out of her mind as she looks ahead to a year of uncertainties.Marina Villeneuve contributed data analysis to this story, which was originally produced and published by the Hechinger Report. More

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      As boys shift to the right, we are seeing the rise of the ‘new chill girl’ | Naomi Beinart

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      Since Donald Trump returned to office, I have noticed a phenomenon at my high school that I call the “new chill girl”. A group of kids is talking casually about something. Seemingly out of the blue, one of the boys makes an off-handed joke. Maybe it’s racist or sexist or homophobic, but whatever the poison, they inject it and the group dynamic shifts ever so slightly. As a general rule, the boys continue as usual while the girls – who tend to be more politically progressive – face a choice: they can speak up, which usually results in them getting the reputation as annoying and unable to take a joke, or they can let it pass and be regarded as a chill girl who isn’t angry or woke. Since November 2024, the latter reaction has become far more common.This kind of fearful silence is becoming more common outside of high schools, too. In December 2024, Disney removed a transgender character from a new series. This April, the New York Times reported that a new Trump administration regulation bars government employees from adding pronouns to their email bios. Two days after that, Gannet, one of the US’s largest newspaper chains, cited Trump’s opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion when announcing that it would no longer publish statistics on employee diversity.This cultural shift promotes nostalgia for an earlier time, before the birth of DEI, when women wore aprons and let their husbands earn the money. As of August, the “trad wife” influencer Hannah Neeleman, better known as Ballerina Farm, has amassed 10 million followers on Instagram alone. Her videos of kneading sourdough and raising her eight kids mark a return to the ideal of women as homemakers. Last November, she appeared on the cover of Evie, a conservative magazine that openly praises Trump.This trickles down to us. In the Trump era, left-leaning teenage girls feel less comfortable expressing political views that could be derided as “woke”. This isn’t because most of them are becoming rightwing: last November, 58% of women ages 18-30 voted for Kamala Harris. It’s because the political atmosphere has changed and progressive-minded girls now feel more afraid of the consequences of speaking their minds.The girls I talked to say it’s riskier to be outspokenly blue. A high school girl reported that boys “are becoming more emboldened, more confident to make these [bigoted] jokes”. Another said that since Trump took office, casual racism and sexism have become common: “We see [the behavior] more and it’s happening to us.” Young women feel social pressure to remain passive in the face of offensive remarks. Your guy friends “will think you’re attacking them”, one girl said, adding that “it’s not worth it” to speak out against every incident. You need to “pick your battles”.A third girl added that the desire to not be known as one of those “super woke” girls is enough to make someone clamp their lips, knowing that if the girl objects, “there is no chance [boys] will ever take you seriously again.” These opinions are harsh, but they’re true. Pew Research Center reports that as of March, 45% of girls ages 13-17 feel “a great deal” of pressure to fit in socially, and as cultural conservatism grows, that changes what fitting in means. Even in comparatively liberal spaces, like my high school, girls who wince at locker room talk risk exclusion. No one wants to hang out with the stickler, so no one wants to become her. And therefore, juvenile illiberalism lives on.Trump has damaged our country in many blatant ways, but what I’m seeing is more subtle. Tectonic shifts don’t always make it to CNN. The cultural effects of this openly racist and sexist government on young people may skew gender relations as we enter the workforce, enabling sexual assault and discrimination and keeping women from positions of power. The divide between young women and young men is growing massively, with no end in sight. Trump is distorting American society, and I fear distorting us.

      Naomi Beinart is a high school student More

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      ‘We pray a visa comes before death’: Gaza’s injured children left in limbo

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      Mariam Sabbah had been fast asleep, huddled under a blanket with her siblings, when an Israeli missile tore through her home in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, in the early hours of 1 March.View image in fullscreenThe missile narrowly missed the sleeping children but as the terrified nine-year-old ran to her parents, a second one hit. “I saw her coming towards me but suddenly there was another explosion and she vanished into the smoke,” says her mother, Fatma Salman.As the parents searched desperately for their children, they found Mariam lying unconscious in a pool of blood; her left arm was ripped off, shards of shrapnel had pierced through her small body, and she was bleeding heavily from her abdomen.As well as losing her arm, the blast left Mariam with severe abdominal and pelvic injuries from shrapnel tearing through her bladder, uterus, and bowel.“Mariam needs specialised paediatric reconstructive surgery,” says Dr Mohammed Tahir, a British surgeon who treated Mariam while volunteering at al-Aqsa hospital in Gaza. “Her arm amputation is also very high and requires limb lengthening and specialist prosthesis. Without this, it will be very difficult for her to live a normal life.”View image in fullscreenMariam is one of tens of thousands of people in Gaza who have been injured by Israeli military attacks over the past 23 months, which have also killed more than 64,000, mainly women and children.Repeated military strikes and attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and Israel’s blockade of basic goods and supplies into the territory have left the health sector devastated and doctors without the means to treat the sick, injured, and famished.Since October 2023, 7,672 patients, including 5,332 children, have been medically evacuated from Gaza for urgent treatment abroad, but trying to get a medical evacuation organised and approved is a slow, arduous and heavily vetted process.So far more than 700 patients – many of them children – have died waiting for permission to be granted to leave Gaza by Cogat, the Israeli government department responsible for approving medical evacuations, according to the WHO.View image in fullscreenMariam and her family secured the offer of surgical care from a specialist team in Ohio, and the little girl waited two months to be given permission from Cogat to leave Gaza, by which time her condition had deteriorated. She was finally evacuated to Egypt but was then stuck for months waiting for her US travel documents to be processed.Then, just a few days before her appointment at the embassy in Cairo to approve her visa, the US suddenly stopped issuing visas for Palestinians – including children – to be treated in US hospitals.View image in fullscreenThe decision followed an online pressure campaign by Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer close to Donald Trump, who had posted pictures and videos of evacuated patients from Gaza arriving on US soil on social media channels, asking: “Why are any Islamic invaders coming into the US under the Trump admin?”Despite the rhetoric surrounding the visa ban – with Loomer hailing the move as a victory, saying it would stop “this invasion of our country”, the US has only accepted a total of 48 medical evacuations from Gaza, according to the figures provided to the Guardian by WHO. In comparison, 3,995 and 1,450 critically injured people have been evacuated to Egypt and the UAE respectively from Gaza. The UK has so far accepted 13.Medical NGOs say that around 20 severely wounded children have been affected by the ban, and are now stuck in transit countries with nowhere to go and with the treatment needed to save them dangerously out of reach.Since receiving the news that she had been blocked from receiving treatment, Salman has been unable to console her daughter. “She won’t leave her bed or stop crying,” she says. “Mariam had placed all her hopes of getting better on her medical treatment in the US.”A few wards down, and also now stuck in Egypt after the US visa ban, is 18-year-old Nasser al-Najjar, who can no longer bear to look at himself in the mirror.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenAfter becoming displaced, Najjar and his family were sheltering at a school in Jabaliya, northern Gaza, when it was targeted in an Israeli airstrike in January. The 18-year-old suffered devastating injuries to his face and jaw that left him completely disfigured; he lost his left eye, his nose was severed and his jaw shattered – leaving him unable to breathe, eat or speak properly.“I once took pride in my appearance but now I don’t even recognise myself,” says Najjar, his voice raspy and breathless.The teenager requires extensive reconstructive and cosmetic surgery that is not available in Egypt and doctors have warned that without the operations, his condition will deteriorate.He has been offered treatment at the El Paso children’s hospital in Texas, where specialist doctors are waiting to operate on him, but it is now uncertain if Najjar will ever be permitted to go.View image in fullscreenThe weight of uncertainty takes a heavy mental toll. Ahmed Duweik already suffers from phantom limb pain; sharp, stabbing sensations that come and go unpredictably and leave him screaming in agony. But since learning that his medical trip to the US might not go ahead, the 10-year-old has become withdrawn and emotionally unresponsive.View image in fullscreenAhmed was also asleep at home when the missiles struck the Nuseirat refugee camp in the middle of the night. During the bombing, he suffered horrific injuries with shrapnel penetrating his entire body; he was left with an amputated arm, soft tissue loss in his right thigh, and severe nerve and vascular damage.Ahmed requires complex reconstructive surgery and prosthetic fitting that are not available in Egypt. Since the attack, he has developed severe psychological trauma and is unable to sleep, waking up every night crying and screaming, clinging to his mother in fear.Doctors warn that if Ahmed’s treatment is delayed any further, his condition will continue to worsen.Dr Mosab Nasser, chief executive of FAJR Global, the medical aid organisation that managed to evacuate the children from Gaza and was due to arrange their surgical care in the US, said the visa ban had imposed an “indirect death penalty on the most innocent victims of this war”.View image in fullscreen“We’re talking about a handful of children suffering from severe, life threatening injuries,” he says. “These medical evacuations are a lifeline for these kids and we urge the US government to reject such divisive rhetoric and reaffirm its role as a temporary safe haven for those who so desperately need it.”In a statement to the Guardian, a US state department spokesperson confirmed it had paused the visas and would take the time necessary to conduct a full and thorough review, adding: “There are many countries around the world with great hospitals that should be stepping up to provide assistance, including France, Australia, UK, and Canada to name a few.”For now, a bleak Egyptian hospital has become the children’s home, where they have been stuck in limbo since the visa ban, with no designated doctors and limited specialist expertise to treat their extensive war injuries. The families are confined to small, sweltering and cramped rooms. None of them have any idea what comes next.“We feel so powerless,” says Khatib, as she sits beside her son. “All we can do is pray that his visa approval comes before death does.” More

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      How memes, gaming and internet culture all relate to the Charlie Kirk shooting

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      Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Dara Kerr here, filling in for Blake Montgomery, who promises he’ll come back from vacation. Meanwhile, I’m looking at the memes, gaming and internet culture behind the shooting of Charlie Kirk.The bullet that killed conservative activist was inscribed with a message: “Notices bulge OwO whats this?” The online world quickly recognized the reference. It’s a phrase used in internet culture to troll people in online role-play communities, specifically furries (a subculture that cosplays as anthropomorphic animal characters).“The phrase has been popularized not only as a way of making fun of furries and related communities for being cringe, but has also been embraced by furries as a way of owning the meme,” writes Know Your Meme, a website that documents viral phenomena. “Ultimately, the phrase is portrayed in memes as being one of the most cringeworthy things someone could possibly write to another person.”Other bullet casings recovered by law enforcement in Utah also had etched inscriptions that appeared to nod to online gaming and insider memes, which have become part of the intense social media speculation on a possible motive for the killing. One said: “O Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao”, another said: “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO.” The first message refers to an Italian anti-fascist folk song that has become a gamer reference that’s big in Twitch and Discord circles. The second message is what web culture writer Ryan Broderick calls “just boilerplate edgelord speak” in his newsletter last week titled “Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme”.The final inscribed casing that law enforcement released said: “Hey fascist! Catch!” and was followed by an up arrow, right arrow and three down arrow symbols. The arrow sequence appears to reference the video game Helldivers 2, and is a set of commands used by players to release a 500kg bomb in the game.The alleged shooter, Tyler James Robinson, is a 22-year-old from a small town in Utah near the Arizona border. He is accused of killing Kirk at a campus event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. Kirk was struck by a single bullet fired with a “high-powered bolt action rifle” from a distant rooftop.As the suspect was steeped in online culture, so was Charlie Kirk, who was 31. He was at the school on behalf of his conservative youth organization, Turning Point USA. He’d become known worldwide speaking about and debating others, often on his extremist views on race, immigration, gender identity and gun rights. Kirk’s rise to fame was also largely bolstered by being extremely online.As my colleague Alaina Demopoulos wrote:A key figure in Donald Trump’s success, Kirk galvanized college-aged conservatives who moved in a different ecosystem from traditional media. The decade or so between Kirk’s beginnings as a teen activist and the shooting saw the rise of Maga politics alongside the shake-up of the conventional media landscape, with Kirk playing a crucial role in both.Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 with a clear goal of making Obama era-style youth outreach work for the right, and even those who didn’t agree with his values could not deny his ubiquity on the political scene. For the young Americans who grew up watching Kirk on their screens, he was a savant at YouTube, Twitter and later X, TikTok and live events. He was like a gen Z and millennial version of Rush Limbaugh – the rightwing, shock-jock commentator who dominated US airwaves in the 1990s – even if his base had no clue who that was.Read the full story here.Whistleblowers against Meta stack upView image in fullscreenMeta was hit by two separate whistleblower claims last week. One by a group of six former and current employees, who allege the social media company has covered up harm to children on its Metaverse virtual reality devices and apps. And another by Meta’s former head of security for WhatsApp, Attaullah Baig, who alleges the company brushed aside major security and privacy flaws in its messaging app, according to the New York Times.In response to my reporting about VR devices, Meta spokesperson Dani Lever said the company has approved 180 studies related to its VR Reality Labs since 2022, which include research on youth safety and wellbeing. “These few examples are being stitched together to fit a predetermined and false narrative,” she said, adding that Meta has introduced features to its VR products to limit unwanted contact and supervision tools for parents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOne of the first whistleblowers was Sophie Zhang, who brought her findings to the Guardian in 2021. Zhang documented how Facebook allowed political manipulation in more than 25 countries, which led to disastrous circumstances in several places including Myanmar, Azerbaijan and Honduras. Later that same year, Frances Haugen turned over to the Wall Street Journal reams of documentation verifying much of Zhang’s allegations and also bringing to light Facebook’s knowledge of how its social media apps harmed teens.In 2023, Arturo Bejar also went to the Wall Street Journal with evidence that Meta knew its algorithms for Facebook and Instagram were pushing content to teens that promoted bullying, drug abuse, eating disorders and self-harm.This year alone, eight more whistleblowers have come forward. Baig and the group of six former and current employees went public last week.US lawmakers are taking the allegations seriously. Politicians as disparate as Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, and Richard Blumenthal, the democrat from Connecticut, have said they see eye-to-eye when it comes to regulating Meta and other social media companies.“The details in these disclosures are hard to stomach – because they reveal such major risks to kids’ safety, and because they are so painfully familiar. Yet again, Meta is revealed to be willfully misrepresenting abuses on its platforms,” Blumenthal said of the whistleblower claims last week. “‘Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil’ is simply not an acceptable business philosophy.”Blumenthal added that he and other senators were looking forward to pushing ahead with “long overdue reform”.The wider TechScape

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      California nurses decry Ice presence at hospitals: ‘Interfering with patient care’

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      Dianne Sposito, a 69-year-old nurse, is laser-focused on providing care to anyone who enters the UCLA emergency room in southern California, where she works.That task was made difficult though one week in June, she said, when a federal immigration agent blocked her from treating an immigrant who was screaming just a few feet in front of her in the hospital.Sposito, a nurse with more than 40 years of experience, said her hospital is among many that have faced hostile encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents amid the Trump administration’s escalating immigration crackdown.The nurse said that the Ice agent – wearing a mask, sunglasses and hat without any clear identification – brought a woman already in custody to the hospital. The patient was screaming and trying to get off the gurney, and when Sposito tried to assess her, the agent blocked her and told her not to touch the patient.“I’ve worked with police officers for years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Sposito said. “It was very frightful because the person behind him is screaming, yelling, and I don’t know what’s going on with her.”The man confirmed he was an Ice agent, and when Sposito asked for his name, badge, and warrant, he refused to give her his identification and insisted he didn’t need a warrant. The situation escalated until the charge nurse called hospital administration, who stepped in to handle it.“They’re interfering with patient care,” Sposito said.After the incident, Sposito said that hospital administration held a meeting and clarified that Ice agents are only allowed in public areas, not ER rooms and that staff should call hospital administration immediately if agents are present.But for Sposito, the guidelines fall short, as the hostility is unlike anything she has seen in over two decades as a nurse, she said..“[The agent] would not show me anything. You don’t know who these people are. I found it extremely harrowing, and the fact that they were blocking me from a patient – that patient could be dying.”Since the Trump administration has stepped up its arrest of immigrants at the start of the summer, nurses are seeing an increase in Ice presence at hospitals, with agents bringing in patients to facilities, said Mary Turner, president of National Nurses United, the largest organization of registered nurses in the country.“The presence of Ice agents is very disruptive and creates an unsafe and fearful environment for patients, nurses and other staff,” Turner said. “Immigrants are our patients and our colleagues.”While there’s no national data tracking Ice activity in hospitals, several regional unions have said they’ve seen an increase.“We’ve heard from members recently about Ice agents or Ice contractors being inside hospitals, which never occurred prior to this year, ,” said Sal Rosselli, president emeritus of the National Union of Healthcare Workers.Turner said nurses have reported that agents sometimes prevent patients from contacting family or friends and that Ice agents have listened in on conversations between patients and healthcare workers, actions that violate HIPAA, the federal law protecting patient privacy.In addition, Turner said, nurses have reported concerns that patients taken away by Ice will not receive the care they need. “Hospitals are supposed to discharge a patient with instructions for the patient and/or whoever will be caring for them as they convalesce,” Turner said.The increased presence of immigration agents at hospitals comes after Donald Trump issued an executive order overturning the long-standing status of hospitals, healthcare facilities and schools as “sensitive locations”, where immigration enforcement was limited.Nurses, in California and other states across the nation, said they fear the new policy, in addition to deterring care at medical facilities, will deter sick people from seeking care when they need it.“Allowing Ice undue access to hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and other healthcare institutions is both deeply immoral and contrary to public health,” said George Gresham, president of the 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, and Patricia Kane, the executive director of the New York State Nurses Association in a statement. “We must never be put into positions where we are expected to assist, or be disrupted by, federal agents as they sweep into our institutions and attempt to detain patients or their loved ones.”Policies on immigration enforcement vary across healthcare facilities. In California, county-run public healthcare systems are required to adopt the policies laid out by the state’s attorney general, which limit information sharing with immigration authorities, require facilities to inform patients of their rights and set protocols for staff to register, document and report immigration officers’ visits. However, other healthcare entities are only encouraged to do so. Each facility develops its own policies based on relevant state or federal laws and regulations.Among the most high-profile cases of Ice presence in hospitals in California occurred outside of Los Angeles in July. Ming Tanigawa-Lau, a staff attorney at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, represents Milagro Solis Portillo, a 36-year-old Salvadorian woman who was detained by Ice outside her home in Sherman Oaks and hospitalized that same day at Glendale Memorial, where detention officers kept watch in the lobby around the clock..Solis Portillo was then forcibly removed from Glendale Memorial against her doctor’s orders and transferred to Anaheim Global Medical center, another regional hospital, according to her lawyer. Once there, Ice agents barred her from receiving visitors, denied her access to family and her attorney, prevented private conversations with doctors and interrupted a monitored phone call with Tanigawa-Lau.“I repeatedly asked Ice to tell me which law or which policy they were referring to that allowed them to deny visits, and especially access to her attorney, and they never responded to me,” Tanigawa-Lau said.Ice officers sat by Solis Portillo’s bed and often spoke directly to medical staff on her behalf, according to Tanigawa-Lau. This level of surveillance violated both patient confidentiality and detainee rights, interfering with her care and traumatizing her, Tanigawa-Lau said.Since then, Solis Portillo was moved between facilities, from the Los Angeles processing center to a federal prison and eventually out of state to a jail in Clark county, Indiana.In a statement, Glendale Memorial said “the hospital cannot legally restrict law enforcement or security personnel from being present in public areas which include the hospital lobby/waiting area”.“Ice does not conduct enforcement operations at hospitals nor interfere with medical care of any illegal alien,” said DHS assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. “It is a longstanding practice to provide comprehensive medical care from the moment an alien enters Ice custody. This includes access to medical appointments and 24-hour emergency care.”The federal government has aggressively responded to healthcare workers challenging the presence of immigration agents at medical facilities. In August the US Department of Justice charged two staff members at the Ontario Advanced Surgical center in San Bernardino county in California, accusing them of assaulting federal agents.The charges stem from events on 8 July, when Ice agents chased three men at the facility. One of the men, an immigrant from Honduras, fled on foot to evade law enforcement and was briefly captured in the center’s parking lot, and then he broke free and ran inside, according to the indictment. There,the government said, two employees at the center, tried to protect the man and remove federal agents from the building.“The staff attempted to obstruct the arrest by locking the door, blocking law enforcement vehicles from moving, and even called the cops claiming there was a ‘kidnapping’,” said McLaughlin. The Department of Justice referred questions about the case to DHS.The immigrant was eventually taken into custody, and the health care workers, Jesus Ortega and Danielle Nadine Davila were charged with “assaulting and interfering with United States immigration officers attempting to lawfully detain” an immigrant.Oliver Cleary, who represents Davila, said a video shows that Ice’s claim that Davila assaulted the agent is false.“They’re saying that because she placed her body in between them, that that qualifies as a strike,” Cleary said. “The case law clearly requires it to be a physical force strike, and that you can tell that didn’t happen.”The trial is slated to start on 6 October. More

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      Six great reads: rebels in Nazi Germany, how creativity works and Europe’s biggest pornography conference

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      1. The astonishing story of the aristocrat who hid her Jewish lover in a sofa bed – and other German rebels who defied the NazisView image in fullscreenFrom a diplomat who embraced the exiled Albert Einstein to a schoolteacher who helped “non-Aryan” students flee, these remarkable individuals refused to bend the knee to Hitler – only to be dramatically betrayed. What, asked Jonathan Freedland, in this extract from his new book, The Traitors Circle, made them risk it all?Read more2. The unconscious process that leads to creativity: how ‘incubation’ worksView image in fullscreen“One of the most marvellous properties of the brain,” wrote Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis in this fascinating piece from Well Actually, is its ability to continue working unconsciously when the conscious mind has moved on to something else.Read more3. Disgruntled NYT journalist to ‘anti-woke’ power grab: how far can Bari Weiss go?View image in fullscreenAfter leaving the New York Times, Weiss turned her Substack into an unshakable pro-Israel voice. Now as Paramount eyes acquisition of her company, David Klion profiled a writer who is poised to become Trump’s ally among media elites.Read more4. Israel is forcing us to leave Gaza City. We know they may never let us returnView image in fullscreenIn this deeply personal piece, Gaza reporter Malak A Tantesh wrote about her family’s decision to leave northern Gaza, the area they call home, for the tents of the south where they had also endured last year’s winter. The family has stayed in 10 locations since they were first forced out of their prewar home in Beit Lahia.Read more5. Boom times and total burnout: three days at Europe’s biggest pornography conferenceView image in fullscreenIn this powerful feature, Amelia Gentleman, alongside photographer Judith Jockel, reported from the biggest pornography conference in Europe, where she spoke to entrepreneurs who were excited about AI and soaring profits, and creators who were battling burnout and chronic illness due to the industry’s gig-economy structure.Read more6. ‘I wasn’t terrified of dying, but I didn’t want to leave my kids’: Davina McCall on addiction, reality TV and the brain tumour that nearly killed herView image in fullscreenWhen the TV presenter was offered a free health screening, she thought it was pointless: she was “the healthiest woman you’ve ever met”. But then came the shocking diagnosis. Now fully recovered, she told Simon Hattenstone, she’s re‑evaluating everything.Read more More

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      Virulent debater and clickbait savant: how Charlie Kirk pushed a new generation to the right

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      After clinching the title of top conservative podcast in America (and second overall news podcast, according to Apple’s ranking) in March, Charlie Kirk said: “We’re not just talking. We’re activating a revolution.”In the hours after his killing at age 31 on the first stop of a buzzy college campus tour, the rightwing activist’s words echoed through young conservative circles. Social media eulogies rolled in, with users reposting clips of Kirk with his wife and children. Parents of teens wrote on X of learning about Kirk’s death through their children. “My 17 year old is bumming. Told me he plays Charlie in the background on his computer when he’s on it,” the conservative radio host Jesse Kelly wrote on X. Another X user wrote about speaking to teens at a church youth group: “Everyone I talked to is so distraught and heartbroken at his passing.”A key figure in Donald Trump’s success, Kirk galvanized college-aged conservatives who moved in a different ecosystem from traditional media. The decade or so between Kirk’s beginnings as a teen activist and the shooting saw the rise of Maga politics alongside the shake-up of the conventional media landscape, with Kirk playing a crucial role in both.Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 with a clear goal of making Obama era-style youth outreach work for the right, and even those who didn’t agree with his values could not deny his ubiquity on the political scene. For the young Americans who grew up watching Kirk on their screens, he was a savant at YouTube, Twitter and later X, TikTok and live events. He was like a gen Z and millennial version of Rush Limbaugh – the rightwing, shock-jock commentator who dominated US airwaves in the 1990s – even if his base had no clue who that was.Kirk’s ideology was caustic; he espoused openly homophobic, racist, sexist, Islamophobic and Christian nationalist views while uplifting misinformation and conspiracy theories. He also campaigned on issues that mattered to young Americans, engaging directly with them – no matter how virulently – on hot-button topics such as abortion, transgender rights, race and Palestinian solidarity.View image in fullscreenAmy Binder, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University who studies politics and education, describes Kirk’s values as “insurgency conservatism” that was “designed to get attention”.It worked: TikTok users under 30 who voted for Trump in 2024 said they trusted Kirk more than any other individual, according to a New York Times profile, despite the fact that he never held office or a role in the White House. That election saw male voters ages 18 to 29 swing hard to the right; Trump also made inroads with gen Z women. Earlier this year, Trump praised Kirk for “what he’s done with the young people”.As a millennial growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Kirk was obsessed with Limbaugh and the Tea Party movement. His fans also felt like outsiders within the American political system.“After Trump was elected in 2016, I was really surprised to see just how many students who were conservative were no longer identifying with the Republican party or with college Republicans, and had instead pivoted over to being really intrigued with what Turning Point was doing on campus,” Binder said. “They were doing much more exciting programming. It was less electorally focused, less about campaigning, and more about having events that were really confrontational.”Kirk appeared equally at ease chumming it up with high-powered donors as he did debating 20-year-olds in sweatpants. Kirk sparred directly with young people through video templates such as “prove me wrong” (a one-on-one debate, where students could wait in line to ask him a question), and he was an early guest on the YouTube series Surrounded, where he sat in a room with 25 liberals and goaded them with statements such as “abortion is murder and should be illegal” and “trans women are not women.”Turning Point USA raked in funding – the New York Times estimated a $92.4m revenue in 2023 – while advancing campus culture wars. Kirk’s content brought classic and extreme rightwing ideals to young people’s media feeds; he looked like both an old-school, suited conservative in the style of a Fox News host, and a social media-savvy man of the times. His video titles usually bent toward hyperbole (“Charlie Kirk Crushes Woke Lies at Michigan State,” was posted less than a week before the shooting). There were gonzo premises, such as when Kirk and the YouTube prank team Nelk Boys showed up at a Wisconsin frat party to get out the vote in 2024. His meme literacy showed when he handed out hats that read: “White Boy Summer”, a remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hot Girl Summer” catchphrase.With his wife, Erika, owner of a faith-based fashion brand and a former Miss Arizona USA, Kirk softened his image, presenting himself as devoted husband, father and a bit of a lifestyle influencer. He talked to tweens in Maga hats about his preferred Starbucks order and promoted “cuteservatives” like Alex Clark, a Turning Point USA podcaster who branded her show on Maha culture as a rightwing Call Her Daddy. After Kirk’s death, Brett Cooper, a 23-year-old conservative influencer in the “womanosphere” with more than 1 million Instagram followers, reposted a video homage that depicted him as a champion for girls and young women. (Yet this was a man who compared abortion to the Holocaust and claimed that women over 30 “aren’t attractive in the dating pool”.)View image in fullscreenFor 10 years, Turning Point USA hosted a “women’s summit”, where Kirk and others like Clark and Cooper encouraged attenders to focus on finding husbands. Evie, the conservative women’s magazine, published an obituary that called Kirk a “loving father, patriot, and husband”.Even young people who were disgusted by Kirk’s rhetoric could not deny his impact. Hasan Piker, the hugely popular leftwing Twitch streamer whose ideology stands in direct contrast to Kirk, was scheduled to debate with Kirk at the end of September at Dartmouth University. Both Piker and the gun control activist David Hogg spoke against political violence in the wake of the shooting (as did many Democratic figures such as Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom and the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani). Piker told his followers not to make jokes about Kirk’s shooting. “This is a terrifying incident,” Piker said. Hogg called the news “horrifying” on X.“I think it’s undeniable to say that Kirk was one of the first and most prominent people to shape what it means to be young and on the right in the US,” said Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor of communications at American University who studies extremism.After Kirk’s death, Braddock said he had seen “individuals calling this an inflection point, or a turning point where the left can no longer be tolerated”. Rightwing pundits have been eager to blame the left for the shooting.Adam Pennings, 25, is the executive director of Run Gen Z, a non-profit that supports young Republican candidates. “He’s always just been such an important part” of the young conservative party, Pennings said of Kirk. “He was everywhere.”Pennings knew Kirk through his work, but the two were not close. Still, Pennings said, due to Kirk’s omnipresence: “I feel like I lost a friend.” More

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      As the Epstein case shows, Trump’s Maga faithful care about only one kind of sex-crime victim | Emma Brockes

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      On Monday, Donald Trump appeared in two, unrelated stories involving the sexual abuse of women. The first was a ruling by the US federal court of appeals, upholding an earlier judgment in which the president was found liable for $83.3m in damages for defaming the writer E Jean Carroll – a woman whom, it was ruled in civil court in 2023, had been sexually abused by Trump. On the same day, Trump’s alleged contribution to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s “birthday book” was shared by Democrats on social media in the form of a lewd drawing the president denied having made. The E Jean Carroll news caused no public inconvenience for Trump; the Epstein story went up like a mushroom cloud in what has become the most politically dangerous episode of his presidency.What, exactly, is the difference then between the sexual abuse of E Jean Carroll, for which Trump has been found liable in a civil court, and the trafficking and abuse of victims by Epstein, in which there is no direct evidence of Trump’s involvement? For that matter, why does Trump’s record of gross references to grabbing women “by the pussy” and calling them “fat” and “ugly” elicit barely a shrug from supporters, while his friendship with Epstein, a man referred to in the press, variously, as the “billionaire paedophile”, the “paeodophile financier”, and, surely coming down the pike at some point, the “hell-based paedophile money manager”, has triggered not only fury among the Maga faithful but accusations of a Trump cover-up?Trump people would argue it’s a question of degree: Epstein occupies the worst and most taboo category of sex offender – a child abuser, in which no grey area exists. This assumes the existence, within Maga circles, of a continuum ranging from paedophile sex trafficking (very bad), through other categories of sex offending (less bad but still quite bad), to “date rape” and the whole of #MeToo (lot of fuss about nothing). But this isn’t how Trump supporters have calibrated their outrage. Instead, what we have seen is mass, Maga hysteria over Epstein, in which even the likes of Tucker Carlson have made veiled accusations against Trump, and complete indifference to every other accusation made by women against the president.It is a feature of misogyny, of course, that the flipside of abusing women and curtailing their rights is selective sentimentalisation. Animating the Maga movement is the desire for a return to traditional gender roles and pronatalism, a force driven, one assumes, by a sense of frustrated male entitlement that has built up over decades of gains made by the women’s movement. A hatred of women as extreme as the one seen within the current Republican movement requires a moral counterweight. And what better source of moral clarity – what starker moral issue, one that brooks no dissent or equivocation from anyone on either side – than the defence of abused girls? In the rightwing media, the only stories relished as much as those about Epstein’s crimes, are ones about violent offences committed by immigrants.As a result, the use to which “child abuse” is put within the rightwing ecosystem is not only as a bat signal for conspiracy theories, designed to increase the reach of each story, but as a pretext for everyone in that world to feel, perhaps fleetingly, very good about themselves, moral crusaders in a horrible world. In the case of Epstein, there’s the bonus of liberal names being ensnared in the net. In Epstein’s “birthday book”, Bill Clinton appears to have left a whimsical message referring to Epstein’s “childlike curiosity”, and “drive to make a difference”. And Peter Mandelson appears in a bathrobe to address Epstein as “my best pal”. (Sidenote: there can be few situations in which being gay in public life is an advantage over being straight – but downplaying one’s involvement with Epstein is definitely one of them.)The curious thing about all this is that, per the biases that govern how victims of sexual abuse are perceived, E Jean Carroll is a pretty good victim: an older woman (she was 52 when Trump abused her in 1996), doing a mundane chore (shopping), in a public place (Bergdorf Goodman). And yet the judgment of the civil courts in her favour in 2023 elicited no sympathy among Trump supporters, in or outside Congress, and since then the president has suffered no apparent drop in political fortunes.But here’s the rub: Carroll is an adult woman, liberal, successful, stylish, and articulate – everything that threatens and triggers Trump’s base. The only female victim worth defending in Trumpland is the fallen girl, a figure straight out of a Victorian lithograph, and one who inspires such fervour, such delusions of nobility, that if it comes to a straight contest, she may win out over Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More