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    Civil rights groups condemn senator’s questioning of Arab American witness

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    A congressional hearing on hate crimes drew charges of the bigotry it was meant to address after a Republican senator told the female Muslim head of a thinktank to “hide your head in a bag” and accused her of supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.John Kennedy, the GOP senator for Louisiana, drew condemnation from Democrats as well as Muslim, Jewish and civil liberties groups for the remark, aimed at Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, at a hearing staged by the Senate judiciary committee.The proceedings witnessed further disruption when Ted Cruz, the Republican senator for Texas, was interrupted by a spectator protesting the number of Palestinians killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza. “You talk about the fucking Jews and the Israelis. Talk about the 40,000. Talk about all these people. Why is it about antisemitism?” the protester shouted, before being ejected from the chamber.Cruz responded: “We now have a demonstration of antisemitism. We have a demonstration of the hate.”Republicans criticised the theme of Tuesday’s hearing – set by the committee’s Democratic chair, Dick Durbin – for conflating antisemitism with bigotry against Muslims, Arabs and other groups.“The goal was to have a hearing about why it’s so hard to go to school if you’re Jewish,” said Lindsey Graham, the Republican ranking member of the committee and the senator for South Carolina. “If you’re Jewish, you’re being knocked down. You’re being spat on. It is just completely out of control. This is not the hearing we’re getting, so we’ll work with what we’ve got.”A Republican-led subcommittee in the House of Representatives has already staged a series of highly charged hearings focused on the rise of antisemitism on university campuses following Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel last October, which saw around 1,200 people killed and 250 taken hostage, and which triggered a devastating ongoing Israeli military retaliation.The House hearings prompted the resignations of two university heads after they gave responses to questions about their institutions’ policies on calls for genocide against Jews that were deemed insufficiently condemnatory.Graham tried to enter similar territory when he asked Berry whether she believed that it was goal of Hamas, the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah or Iran to destroy the only Jewish state. Berry answered that “these are complicated questions”.That eventually led to Berry’s hostile exchange with Kennedy, who asked her: “You support Hamas, do you not?”“Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization that I do not support,” Berry replied. “But you asking the executive director of the Arab American Institute that question very much puts the focus on the issue of hate in our country.”When Kennedy followed up by asking whether she supported Hezbollah or Iran, Berry answered: “Again, I find this line of questioning extraordinarily disappointing.”Finishing his interrogation by expressing “disappointment” at Berry’s unwillingness to declare outright opposition to the three named entities, Kennedy declared: “You should hide your head in a bag.”Invited by Durbin to respond to the outburst, Berry said: “It’s regrettable that I, as I sit here, have experienced the very issue that we’re attempting to deal with today. This has been, regrettably, a real disappointment, but very much an indication of the danger to our democratic institutions that we’re in now. And I deeply regret that.”The judiciary committee – with Durbin’s approval – later endorsed Berry’s response by posting it on X, with accompanying commentary reading: “A Senate Republican told an Arab American civil rights leader that ‘you should hide your head in a bag.’ We will not amplify that horrible clip. But we WILL amplify the witness’s powerful response calling it out.”The Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) accused Kennedy and other Republicans of treating Berry with hostility.“Maya Berry went before the committee to discuss hate crimes. Both Ms. Berry and the topic should have been treated with the respect and seriousness they deserve,” said Robert McCaw, Cair’s government affairs director. “Instead, Sen Kennedy and others chose to be an example of the bigotry Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims have faced in recent months and years.”Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, condemned what he called a “discriminatory and vitriolic attack” on Kennedy.“To use a hearing about the disturbing rise in anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and antisemitic hate crimes to launch personal and discriminatory attacks on an expert witness they’ve invited to testify is both outrageous and inappropriate,” he said.Sheila Katz, chief executive officer of the National Council of Jewish Women, called Berry’s treatment “heartbreaking”.“[T]he only Muslim witness faced biased questions about supporting Hamas & Hezbollah despite her clear condemnations,” she wrote on X. “This hearing should combat hate, not perpetuate it. The Senate must do better.” More

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      Ted Cruz, US senator mocked for flight to Cancún, seeks airport police escorts

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      The Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz, who achieved viral infamy in 2021 when he was seen at Houston airport for a flight to Cancún even as his state faced a historic and deadly spell of cold weather, this week moved a step closer to securing police escorts for lawmakers at airports.Under an amendment to the Federal Aviation Authority Reauthorization bill introduced by Cruz, members of Congress and other prominent officials, and some family and staff members, will be offered security escorts if they are deemed “currently … or previously … the subject of a threat, as determined by such applicable federal protective agency”.If passed by the House and Senate, the bill will fund the FAA for four years.But given Cruz’s scrape with viral fame over his flight to Mexico in February 2021 – a trip to join a family vacation he abandoned after one day, admitting his “obvious mistake” as tweets and memes proliferated – the senator faces criticism and mockery over his attempt to secure security guards for future airport trips.“Cancún Cruz wants to flee Texas in secret,” said Lose Cruz, a Democratic political action committee supporting Colin Allred, an NFL player turned US congressman now challenging Cruz for his Senate seat.Matt Angle, founder of the Lone Star Project, an anti-Republican Texas group, said: “Ted Cruz is still chapped over being caught sneaking to Cancún. He can’t get a damn thing done to improve the border or keep kids safe, but Ted figures out how to get private security covered by taxpayers. Self-serving. Soulless. Worthless.”Insisting the amendment was needed, Cruz told Politico of “serious security threats facing public officials”, adding: “It’s important that we take reasonable measures to keep everyone safe.”There have been prominent cases of lawmakers being accosted at airports. But Kevin Murphy, of the Airport Law Enforcement Agencies Network, told Politico Cruz’s amendment would prove “a burden to airport police agencies” he said were not adequately funded.Melissa Braid, a spokesperson for Senate commerce committee Republicans, among whom Cruz is the ranking member, told the Dallas Morning News: “The airport security amendment was drafted in a bipartisan manner to address the growing number of serious threats against justices, judges, public officials and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.“It passed out of committee unanimously by voice vote and was included in the Senate’s bipartisan FAA Reauthorization bill.“With rising security incidents at airports, this amendment ensures that when law enforcement determines a threat exists, reasonable security measures will be taken to keep everybody safe.”Still, Cruz’s trip to Cancún seems sure to play a prominent campaign role.Earlier this week, Allred said: “We don’t need to ask where Ted Cruz stands when he’s challenged. We know. He stood in the airport lounge waiting to fly to Cancún while Texans froze in the dark. It’s time for him to go on a permanent vacation from the Senate.” More

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      Trump called Iowa evangelicals ‘so-called Christians’ and ‘pieces of shit’, book says

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      In the heat of the Republican primary of 2016, Donald Trump called evangelical supporters of his rival Ted Cruz “so-called Christians” and “real pieces of shit”, a new book says.The news lands as the 2024 Republican primary heats up, two months out from the Iowa caucus and a day after Trump’s closest rival this time, the hard-right Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, was endorsed by Bob Vander Plaats, an influential evangelical leader in Iowa.The new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, by Tim Alberta, an influential reporter and staff writer for the Atlantic, will be published on 5 December. The Guardian obtained a copy.Early in the book, Alberta describes fallout from an event at Liberty University, the evangelical college in Virginia, shortly before the Iowa vote in January 2016.As candidates jockeyed for support from evangelicals, a powerful bloc in any Republican election, Trump was asked to name his favourite Bible verse.Attempting to follow the advice of Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, the thrice-married, not noticeably church-going New York billionaire and reality TV star introduced it as “Two Corinthians”, rather than “Second Corinthians”, as would have been correct.“The laughter and ridicule were embarrassing enough for Trump,” Alberta writes. “But the news of Perkins endorsing Ted Cruz, just a few days later, sent him into a spiral. He began to speculate that there was a conspiracy among powerful evangelicals to deny him the GOP nomination.“When Cruz’s allies began using the ‘Two Corinthians’ line to attack him in the final days before the Iowa caucuses, Trump told one Iowa Republican official, ‘You know, these so-called Christians hanging around with Ted are some real pieces of shit.’”Alberta adds that “in private over the coming years”, Trump “would use even more colourful language to describe the evangelical community”.Cruz won Iowa but Trump took the second primary contest, in New Hampshire, and won the nomination with ease. After beating Hillary Clinton and spending four chaotic years in the White House, he was beaten by Joe Biden in 2020.Pursuing the lie that his defeat was the result of electoral fraud, Trump refused to concede defeat. He has continued to dominate Republican politics, now as the clear frontrunner to be the nominee again.Trump has maintained that status despite having been impeached twice (the second for inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress) and despite facing 91 criminal charges (34 for hush-money payments to a porn star) and civil threats including a case arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Evangelicals remain the dominant bloc in Iowa, 55% of respondents to an NBC News/Des Moines Register poll in August identifying as “devoutly religious”. But despite his lengthy rap sheet, Trump’s hold on such voters appears to remain strong.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn October, the Register put him at 43% support overall in Iowa, with DeSantis and the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley 27 points behind. The same poll said 44% of evangelicals planned to make Trump their first choice, with DeSantis at 22% and Haley seven points back.Evangelicals have also stayed with Trump nationwide. According to exit polls, in the 2020 presidential election he was supported by 76% of white evangelical voters.DeSantis and Haley must attempt to catch Trump in Iowa. Vander Plaats’ endorsement was thus a sought-after prize, if one Trump did not pursue, declining to attend a Thanksgiving Family Forum Vander Plaats hosted in Des Moines last week.On Monday, announcing his decision to endorse DeSantis, the president of the Family Leader, which seeks to “inspire the church to engage government for the advance of God’s kingdom and the strengthening of family”, pointed to the conclusion he hoped his followers would reach.Speaking to Fox News, Vander Plaats said: “I don’t think America is going to elect [Trump] president again. I think America would be well served to have a choice, and I really believe Ron DeSantis should be that guy. And I think Iowa is tailor-made for him to win this.”Trump’s rivals may yet take encouragement from Register polling, should evangelicals begin to doubt Trump. In the October poll, 76% of Iowa evangelicals said they had a positive view of DeSantis, while 62% said they liked Haley. More

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      Mitt Romney mulled unity ticket with ‘scary’ Cruz to stop Trump, book says

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      Mitt Romney considered a desperate, third presidential bid in 2016, aiming to stop Donald Trump as part of an unlikely unity ticket with Ted Cruz – a hard-right Texas senator who Romney privately considered “scary” and “a demagogue”, a new book reports.“Romney was willing to wage a quixotic and humiliating presidential bid if that’s what it took,” McKay Coppins writes in Romney: A Reckoning, a biography of the 2012 Republican nominee written in close cooperation with its subject.“He might even be able to swallow sharing a ticket with Cruz, a man he’d described as ‘scary’ and ‘a demagogue’ in his journal. But Romney didn’t think the gambit would actually succeed in taking down Trump. The problem was that no one else in the party seemed to know what to do about Trump, either.”Widely trailed, Coppins’ book will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy. A spokesperson for Cruz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Trump stormed to the nomination. Beating Hillary Clinton, he had four chaotic years in power before losing to Joe Biden. Trump refused to go quietly, however, inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress and now dominating polling for the next Republican nomination despite facing 91 criminal charges and an array of civil cases.Romney, now 76, is a former venture capitalist, Massachusetts governor and Winter Olympics chief executive who ran for the Republican nomination in 2008 then won it in 2012. Beaten by Barack Obama, he entered the next election as a party grandee.Describing backstage machinations by power players seeking to stop Trump, Coppins says Romney was approached five days before the New Hampshire primary by Robert O’Brien, a friend and adviser, and Jim Talent, a former senator from Missouri.“The party was in crisis,” Coppins writes. “An interloping frontrunner was on the verge of hijacking the GOP, and the rest of the field had shown they couldn’t beat him. If no one else stepped up by 1 March, they argued, Romney should enter the race and tap Cruz as his running mate to unite Republican opposition to Trump.“O’Brien and Talent called this the ‘Robert Kennedy’ strategy – get in late to build momentum, win enough delegates to keep the frontrunner from clinching the nomination, then march into the convention girded for a floor fight.”Robert F Kennedy entered the 1968 Democratic primary late, tapping a surge of support before being assassinated in California.Coppins says Romney entertained the Cruz idea, telling Talent and O’Brien his “number one priority is to stop Trump”.Formally, Romney broke with Trump after Trump refused to disavow support from David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader. Quoting Romney’s journal, Coppins says he reached for the words of Winston Churchill, writing: “It is nearly certain that he will be the nominee. I am not tempted in the slightest to retreat. I will fight him on the beaches. I will fight him in the air …” In public, Romney denounced Trump in a speech, calling him a “phony” and a “fraud”. That didn’t move the needle, so Romney reportedly sought to form another anti-Trump ticket, with Cruz as nominee for president and Marco Rubio, the Florida senator also in the race, as the Texan’s running mate. That didn’t work either. The two men were “just too self-interested”, Coppins writes, adding: “With each passing day of inaction, Trump gained more votes, more delegates and more momentum.”Coppins’ reporting lands amid a 2024 primary in which a huge Republican field has again refused to coalesce round one alternative to Trump.In 2016, Romney also tried to “usher John Kasich out of the race”, Coppins writes. The former Ohio governor refused, prompting Romney to write in his journal: “Delusion runs deep in politicians’ veins.” Romney sent Kasich “a series of increasingly gruff emails”, telling him to drop out, back Cruz then fight for the nomination at the convention. Kasich, Coppins writes, responded with “more stump speech pablum”.“Refusing to believe that Kasich was so obtuse that he couldn’t grasp basic math, Romney began to entertain the theory that Kasich was somehow back-channeling with Trump. How else to explain his bullheaded commitment to a nonsensical strategy that only helped the frontrunner?”Nothing worked. Trump became president.In a move symbolic of how many top Republicans soon resigned themselves to Trump, O’Brien, the man with the Romney-Cruz plan, ultimately became Trump’s last national security adviser.Romney became a Utah senator in 2018, going on to twice vote to impeach Trump and then call him a demagogue in a stinging retirement announcement last month. But even Romney was not immune to temptation. Coppins describes a famously humiliating flirtation with becoming secretary of state after Trump won power in 2016.“Finally, Trump cut to the chase. ‘You really need to say that you’ve come to the conclusion that I’m terrific and that I’ll be a great president. We need to clear this up.’“But Romney couldn’t bring himself to do it.” More

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      Ted Cruz faces new Senate challenge as Democrat attracts huge fundraising haul

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      The Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz spent time last weekend hobnobbing with Liz Truss, the shortest-serving British prime minister – but news closer to home suggested he might have reason to fear for his own job security.As reported by the Dallas Morning News and the Texas Tribune, the Democratic congressman Colin Allred, Cruz’s most likely opponent for re-election next year, reported $10.9m raised since declaring his candidacy in May.That was nearly 20 times as much as Allred’s closest Democratic rival, but it was also, the papers said, almost $2m more than fundraising reported by Cruz in the same period.The hard-right Republican – who was elected to the Senate in 2012, prompted a government shutdown in 2013 and ran for president in 2016 – reportedly raised $8.8m in the same period.In an email to the Guardian, a spokesperson for Cruz contested the reported figures, pointing to a Fox News report earlier in October which said the senator “brought in $5.4m during the July-September third quarter of 2023 fundraising … up from the $4.4m he raised during the April-June second quarter of fundraising and the $1.8m he brought in during the first three months of 2023.“… The Cruz campaign says they entered October with over $6.7m cash on hand.”Either way, Allred, a former Tennessee Titans NFL linebacker elected to Congress from his native Dallas in 2018, presents a formidable figure.Revelling in the show of fundraising muscle, Allred’s campaign manager, Paige Hutchinson, told the Texas Tribune: “Texans’ enthusiasm to retire Ted Cruz – and to elect Colin Allred to the Senate – is reflected in this quarter’s amazing outpouring of grassroots support.”Allred does seem set to breeze to victory in the Democratic primary and therefore advance to challenge Cruz. His party, however, has had its hopes dashed in Texas before.In 2018, Beto O’Rourke, then a congressman, mounted a strong challenge to Cruz but fell short. O’Rourke parlayed resulting prominence in national progressive circles into a campaign for president in 2020 but that and a run for governor of Texas two years later also ended in disappointment.On Saturday, meanwhile, Cruz tweeted a photograph of himself with his wife, Heidi Cruz, and Truss.“We are so grateful for our British friends and for strong leaders on the global stage who will champion conservative principles and defend liberty,” Cruz said.Truss thanked the Cruzes for their “warm welcome in Houston” and said: “It’s vital that conservatives win the battle of ideas both in the US and UK. The time is now.”Truss was prime minister for 49 days last September and October. Historically speaking, that made her the shortest-serving PM of all. In terms of pop culture, as promoted by the Daily Star, a tabloid newspaper, she lasted less time than a lettuce. More

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      The Conspiracy to End America review: Trump and the fascist threat

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      Donald Trump’s supporters want an American Caesar. Back in 2016, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, made it explicit. “We need a Donald Trump to show some authoritarian power in our country,” he declared. Joe Sitt, a major player in New York real estate and an early Trump backer, chipped in: “We don’t have a president, we have a king.”Five years later, January 6 and its aftermath crystalized another reality: Trump found fair and free elections useless. He and his allies had grown weary of democracy. After all, they had lost.The Republican party had a new credo: “Heads, I win. Tails, you lose.”The last time the GOP won the popular vote was in 2004, and before that 1988. Seeking to return to office, Trump has threatened the media with charges of treason and hankered for the execution of Gen Mark Milley, the former chair of the joint chiefs of staff.Against this dystopian backdrop, Stuart Stevens delivers his second book, The Conspiracy to End America, on what happened to the party he served for so long, this one under the subtitle Five Ways My Old Party Is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy. The words are jarring but dead-on. Once a senior campaign operative, Stevens knows of what he speaks. In his view, only the Democratic party values democracy as an end in itself.He did media for George W Bush’s White House runs, then helped guide Mitt Romney to the Republican nomination in 2012. Now, though, Stevens is at the Lincoln Project, a haven for never-Trumpers. Their commercials got under Trump’s skin – to the delectation of Democrats. They were mean and funny. On the page, Stevens picks up where he left off in It Was All a Lie, his book of 2019. Four years furnished plenty of new material. At present, Trump faces 91 felony counts across multiple jurisdictions yet is the odds-on favorite to capture the 2024 presidential nomination. Truth is stranger than fiction.“Trump understood the true nature of the Republican party better than those who were the party’s leaders,” Stevens writes of Trump’s first campaign, launched in 2015, a tacit admission that the author himself did not fully comprehend the world around him. It was about resentments, not upward arc: “Hate was creating a surge of appeal.”Trump beat Hillary Clinton, then lost to Joe Biden. His ambitions were only momentarily derailed. His chief challenger, the hard-right Florida governor Ron DeSantis, faded in primary polling. The rest of the field is running in place or approaching asterisk status. None can land a punch.As Stevens sees it, the late Weimar Republic and the US today have plenty in common. As was the case 90 years ago, democracy could be made expendable, particularly if the donor class goes along for the ride.Back then, in Stevens’ telling, the German aristocracy lost touch with the workers. Fearing communism, they and the industrialists made peace with Adolf Hitler – much as GOP donors opened their wallets to Trump. Stevens leaves little to the imagination: “Like Adolf Hitler, Trump hated the establishment figures who supported him, and they despised him.”He quotes Mitch McConnell, the living embodiment of the Republican establishment, the Senate majority leader when Trump won the White House. With hindsight, McConnell sounds clueless, oblivious to the approaching storm.“I think we’re much more likely to change [Trump] because if he is president, he’s going to have to deal with the sort of the right-of-center world, which is where most of us are,” McConnell told CNBC.“Going to have to deal”? Really?After McConnell helped Trump’s judicial nominees over the finishing line, the senator became expendable. He emerged as a target for Trump’s rants and loathing, including potshots at Elaine Chao, McConnell’s Chinese American wife, who resigned from Trump’s cabinet – if only after January 6. At times, McConnell’s disdain seeped out. Ultimately, though, he maintained sufficient devotion to his Caesar: McConnell blamed Trump for January 6 but refused to vote to convict at the second impeachment trial.In the same quisling spirit, McConnell has said he would vote for Trump if he becomes the Republican nominee again. A coda: just like Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, McConnell never responded to the barbs Trump aimed at his wife.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs for Cruz, Trump linked his father to the assassination of John F Kennedy and, for good measure, called his wife ugly. No matter: “lyin’ Ted,” as Trump nicknamed him, was there to polish Trump’s boots with his tongue.Not surprisingly, Stevens shines an unflattering light on Cruz. He also stresses that McConnell wasn’t alone in trashing Trump and then acquiescing to his dominance: he namechecks the former House speaker Kevin McCarthy, the former vice-president Mike Pence, the New York Republican Elise Stefanik and senators Lindsey Graham, Marsha Blackburn and Tim Scott, all for condemning the insurrection only to backslide swiftly.“Two weeks after the insurrection, Kevin McCarthy was once again the aging fraternity rush chairman who would do anything to be accepted by the Big Man on Campus fraternity president,” Stevens writes.This month, in McCarthy’s hour of need, Trump did not rally to his side. The Californian became the first House speaker ever ejected by his own party – while Trump toyed with the idea of becoming speaker himself. Meanwhile, out on the presidential campaign trail, Pence and Scott go nowhere. The Republican party really is The Trump Show.On Wednesday, House Republicans tapped Steve Scalise, reportedly a David Duke wannabe, as their guy for House speaker. But his candidacy was short lived. On Thursday, he pulled the plug. Other far-right connections continue. Eric Trump was slated to share the stage with Ian Smith, a Nazi apologist, at Trump Doral in Florida this week.“The collapse of American democracy is like the pandemic,” Stevens warns. “Whatever you say at the beginning will sound alarmist but likely prove inadequate at the end.”
      The Conspiracy to End America is published in the US by Hachette More

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      ‘Holy crap’: Ted Cruz duped by fake image of shark on flooded LA highway

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      The Texas US senator Ted Cruz, a former candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, appeared on Monday to fall for one of the oldest internet hoaxes, sharing a supposed picture of a shark on a flooded highway in Los Angeles with the remark: “Holy crap.”California does indeed face potentially catastrophic flooding thanks to Storm Hilary but users of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, were swift to point out that the image Cruz reposted is in fact wholly crap.Many quoted the fact-checking website Snopes, which says: “An image purportedly documenting a shark swimming down a highway flooded by hurricane-related heavy rains was originally circulated as showing a street in Puerto Rico just after Hurricane Irene hit that island in August 2011.“Since then the same image has been recirculated several times over, typically localised to some big city in the United States that has just experienced a hurricane or other weather event producing heavy rains and floods.”Cruz shared a post from @BarstoolBigCat, AKA Dan Katz, a podcaster for Barstool Sports. It said: “Friend of mine out in LA just took this picture on the 405. And yes, all news and media outlets you have permission to use this. Wild.”Katz later shared a tweet saying “got you” as well as another fake picture: of two sharks apparently swimming at the foot of two indoor escalators.“Wait who said it was a joke?” Katz wrote. “It’s a shark on a highway. It’s real as real could be. Look I also have a shark in a mall.”Had Cruz checked Snopes before posting his remark, he might have noted the site’s description of previous uses of the shark-on-a-highway picture, including in relation to his own state.The picture, Snopes says, has appeared in relation to “Houston after heavy rains pounded portions of Texas over Memorial Day weekend in 2015, Daytona Beach after Hurricane Matthew approached Florida in October 2016, and Houston again in August 2017 after Hurricane/Tropical Storm Harvey caused massive flooding throughout the city”.Snopes also notes where the picture of the shark comes from: a picture of a great white trailing a kayak, taken in 2005.Cruz did not delete his post. Hours later, he wrote: “I’m told this is a joke. In LA, you never know … And everyone please stay safe from the storm or otherwise.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTropical storm warnings have been issued for Texas on Tuesday.It was not Cruz’s first flirtation with social media ridicule. In 2017, the senator’s account on the service then known as Twitter “liked” a tweet showing pornographic material. Cruz appeared to blame a staffer.“It was not me, and it’s not going to happen again,” he said. More

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      US Republicans oppose climate funding as millions suffer in extreme weather

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      Swaths of the US are baking under record-breaking heat, yet some lawmakers are still attempting to block any spending to fight the climate crisis, advocates say.Nearly 90 million Americans are facing heat alerts this week, including in Las Vegas, Nevada, which may break its all-time hottest temperature record; Phoenix, Arizona, which will probably break its streak of consecutive days of temperatures over 110F; and parts of Florida, where a marine heatwave has pushed up water temperatures off the coast to levels normally found in hot tubs.Stifling heat is also blanketing parts of Texas, which for weeks earlier this summer sweltered under a record-shattering heat dome which one analysis found was made five times more likely by the climate crisis. Despite this, the state’s Republican senator Ted Cruz is rallying his fellow GOP members of the Senate commerce committee to circulate a memo attacking climate measures in Biden’s proposed 2024 budget, Fox News reported on Wednesday.The memo specifically calls on Republican members of the Senate appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee to reject spending provisions focused on climate resilience and environmental justice efforts for scientific agencies. In one example, the memo objects to a Nasa request to fund its Sustainable Flight National Partnership, which seeks to help zero out planet-warming pollution from aviation.“If the goal is to make imperceptible changes in CO2 emissions as part of the administration’s zealous effort to micromanage global temperatures, then Nasa should abandon such wasted mental energy. Nasa should not become a plaything for anti-fossil fuel environmentalists,” the memo says.It should come as no surprise that Cruz, who has accepted massive donations from oil and gas companies, is defending the fossil fuel industry’s interests, said Allie Rosenbluth, US program co-manager at the environmental advocacy and research non-profit Oil Change International.“What is really devastating for communities who are experiencing extreme heat, wildfires, flooding and drought across the US is that because of these bought-out politicians, they are not getting the support that they need to be resilient in the face of climate impacts at the federal level,” she said.House Republicans are fighting climate spending, too. To avoid a government shutdown, lawmakers must pass a slew of spending bills before current funding expires on 30 September. But Republican members of the GOP-controlled House appropriations committee are slipping in anti-climate provisions, which aim to block renewable energy funding and imperil federal efforts to tackle the climate crisis, into their spending bill drafts.Last week, the Clean Budget Coalition – a group of non-profits such as the League of Conservation Voters, Environmental Defense Fund and Public Citizen – identified at least 17 of these “climate poison pills” in appropriation bill drafts. Among them are amendments that would prevent the federal government from purchasing electric vehicles or building EV charging stations; block funding for the Green Climate Fund, which helps developing countries meet their climate goals under the Paris agreement; and prohibit funding for a Department of Energy initiative aiming to send 40% of the overall benefits of certain federal investments to flow to disadvantaged communities.Elizabeth Gore, senior vice-president for political affairs at Environmental Defense Fund, said these proposals will impede lawmakers’ chance to reach a budget deal before their fall deadline.“This is not a starting point for any reasonable negotiations,” she said in a release.Early last month, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling. David Shadburn, senior government affairs advocate at the League of Conservation Voters, said that from his perspective, that agreement didn’t include nearly enough government funding, but now, Republicans are trying to cut funding even more.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We wanted to see more spending. We thought the deal was insufficient,” he said. “But a deal is a deal and yet what Republicans immediately did was go back on it.”All Republican representatives can submit proposals to the House appropriations committee and no member is required to sign off on specific proposals. So it’s not clear who is responsible for each “poison pill”. But Shadburn noted that not a single Republican member of the House voted for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which included the most climate spending of any bill in US history and that Republican representatives have also repeatedly attempted to overturn the bill’s climate provisions.“The entire House Republican conference is on the record here … [including] those representing places that are seeing extreme weather,” he said.House Republicans also recently proposed an array of amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act aiming to limit the Pentagon’s deployment of electric vehicles, Shadburn said.One of them, which would force the defense department to terminate contracts for electric non-combat vehicles, came from Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, whose state is preparing for triple-digit heat this week. Another, which would authorize soldiers and civilians at the US army Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona to use fossil fuel-powered vehicles, came from Representative Paul Gosar from Arizona, where heat last Friday was comparable to “some of the worst heatwaves this area has ever seen”, according to the National Weather Service.“In addition to the extreme heat in the south-west and elsewhere, there’s massive flooding in Vermont and New York … yet the House this week is spending their time debating just how many climate attacks they should include in the defense authorization,” said Shadburn. “It just shows how unserious they are about doing anything significant to tackle the climate crisis.” More

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      US may restrict visas for Ugandan officials in wake of anti-LGBTQ+ laws

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      The US may restrict visas issued to Ugandan officials in its latest condemnation to the African country’s enactment of stringent – and highly controversial – anti-LGBTQ+ laws.Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said that Joe Biden’s White House is “deeply troubled” by the Anti-Homosexuality Act, which was signed into law by Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president, on Monday. Blinken said that he was looking to “promote accountability” for Ugandan officials who have violated the rights of LGBTQ+ people, with possible measures including the curtailment of visas.“I have also directed the department to update our travel guidance to American citizens and to US businesses as well as to consider deploying existing visa restrictions tools against Ugandan officials and other individuals for abuse of universal human rights, including the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons,” Blinken said in a statement.Uganda’s government has faced widespread criticism over the new laws, with the EU, human rights groups and LGBTQ+ organizations all calling for it to be reversed. Biden, who has raised the possibility of sanctions against Uganda, has called the law a “tragic violation of universal human rights” while Volker Turk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, described the law as “devastating”.Homosexual acts were already illegal in Uganda but now those convicted face life imprisonment under the new laws, with the legislation imposing the death penalty for “aggravated” cases, such as gay sex involving someone below the age of 18. People convicted of “promoting” homosexuality face 20 years in prison, with Human Rights Watch noting the bill essentially criminalizes “merely identifying” as LGBTQ+.Anita Among, Uganda’s parliamentary speaker, said on the Twitter the new law will “protect the sanctity of the family”.“We have stood strong to defend the culture, values and aspirations of our people,” Among said.But the measure appears to have bipartisan disapproval in the US, with the Republican senator Ted Cruz calling the law “horrific and wrong”. Cruz wrote on Twitter: “Any law criminalizing homosexuality or imposing the death penalty for ‘aggravated homosexuality’ is grotesque & an abomination. ALL civilized nations should join together in condemning this human rights abuse.#LGBTQ”Cruz’s remarks drew out some domestic detractors because fellow Republican lawmakers in Texas – his home state – have this year promoted bills banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender children. They have also sought to limit classroom lessons on sexual orientation and the college sports teams that trans athletes can join.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, Ron DeSantis, the Florida Republican governor who is running for US president, has overseen the so-called “don’t say gay” law in his state, prohibiting discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in classrooms, a ban on people from entering bathrooms other than their sex assigned at birth and a crackdown on children seeing drag artists. More