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

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

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      Trump draft order calls for drastic restructure of state department

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

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

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

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      The Trump-Harvard showdown is the latest front in a long conservative war against academia

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      The showdown between Donald Trump and Harvard University may have exploded into life this week, but the battle represents just the latest step in what has been a decades-long war waged by the right wing on American academia.It’s a fight by conservatives that dates back to Ronald Reagan, the hitherto spiritual leader of the Republican party, all the way to McCarthyism and beyond, experts say, as the rightwing scraps to seize more control in a manner that is “part of a standard playbook of authoritarianism”.Trump reacted furiously this week after the president of Harvard University, the US’s oldest, richest and most prestigious college, refused to acquiesce to demands that would have given the government control over whom it hired and admitted, and what it taught.But the anger was not just that Harvard had refused to roll over. It was that the move represented, for the time being, a step back for the Trump administration in what some believe is part of a wider attempt to overhaul US democracy at large.“It’s as dangerous as anything I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime,” said Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors.“They’re attempting to undermine and destabilize and ultimately control higher education. And at one level, it’s an assault on higher education, at another level, it could be seen as prevalent to a full-on assault on democracy. So I think this is a threat to the future of the United States of America, and because of this country’s role in the world, a threat to the entirety of the globe at this moment.”The government said on Monday it planned to freeze $2.2bn in grants and $60m in multi-year contract value to Harvard, hours after Alan Garber, the university president, said Harvard would not accept a series of demands made by the Trump administration. The demands included appointing a White House-approved external body to “to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity”, and that Harvard “immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs”.Garber said the government’s edicts “represent direct governmental regulation” of the school’s independence and constitutional rights.“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote in an open letter, which was hailed by the left and by college professors concerned at the capitulation of other schools.Yet, as evidenced by Trump’s emotional post on Wednesday, the government’s assault on universities is unlikely to stop anytime soon, particularly if he is to emulate the kind of strongman leaders, such as the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, he has praised in the past.“[People in the Trump administration] have read their history, and they know that authoritarian regimes often target higher education as an independent sector and society, and aim to undermine it because of its role in creating an educated populace that could stand up to all forms of authoritarian rule,” Wolfson said.“And so this is part of a standard playbook of authoritarianism: to attack and to attempt to control or destroy higher education.”The move against universities has echoes of the efforts by the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy in the middle of the 20th century to root out people he accused of being communists and Marxists. And like McCarthy, Trump’s efforts – led by a group of loyalists including the White House deputy chief of staff and head of policy, Stephen Miller – go beyond just universities. Trump has targeted some of the biggest law firms in the US with executive orders, prompting many to cave and pledge hundreds of millions of dollars of pro bono work to causes backed by the Trump administration.“The Trump administration is following the playbook of totalitarian dictatorships elsewhere in the world. It is trying to use the force of law to intimidate independent civic society organizations, so that opposition to its policies is impossible,” said Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard and co-chair of the university’s Council on Academic Freedom.“This new incarnation of the American right wing, with complete fealty to a single man, and an unprecedented attempt to disable civic society institutions like law firms and universities, is quite extraordinary.”The Trump administration has framed its move on Harvard and other colleges as an effort to crackdown on antisemitism, following protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, and as a move against alleged civil rights violations on campus. Few outside of the rightwing sphere see that as a good faith argument.“As a Jewish faculty member, I’m sensitive to antisemitism on campus, and it does exist and it should be combated. But the claim that Harvard is a bastion of antisemitism is just wild hyperbole. Three of our last four presidents who’ve served longer than a year have been Jewish. The fourth was married to a Jewish professor,” Pinker said.Harvard has found itself in the Trump administration’s crosshairs because of its status as the best known of America’s universities, one of the eight esteemed Ivy League schools. Thousands of influential figures across politics, media and business attended Harvard’s grand campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts; many of those who didn’t go to Harvard still tend to take an interest in its affairs.“We’ve got between 4,000 and 5,000 higher education institutions in the US. The Ivys always make headlines. The major cultural commentators in this country are obsessed with the Ivys, and have been for a long time. These are things that sell papers, they get a lot of clicks and a lot of attention,” said Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, a historian of US colleges and universities and the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars.“The other thing, too, is what happens at your regional state public flagship university often follows from the trends that are set at the Ivys. Not only do they generate a lot of headlines, they are influential in that way.”Just as Harvard’s existence predates the founding of the US, rightwing antipathy towards universities has been brewing for a long time. When Ronald Reagan was running for governor of California in 1966, he used anger towards anti-Vietnam student protesters for political gain: one of his main campaign strands was a promise to “clean up the mess at Berkeley” – the state’s flagship university.Reagan’s tactics bear echoes of Trump’s. Ray Colvig, UC Berkeley’s chief public information officer at the time, told the university’s news service years later that Reagan “wanted to establish a special process to select faculty in several disciplines”.“In other words, he wanted to set a political standard for appointing faculty members. This idea was widely opposed, and it went away,” Colvig said.Reagan wasn’t the first to take on the universities. Shepherd said efforts to set up rival, conservative universities, date back to the 1920s, while McCarthy’s war on higher education came later. Ellen Schrecker, a historian and author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, wrote in the Nation recently that the Trump administration’s efforts were “worse than McCarthy”, and Shepherd said Trump’s attacks were “much more accelerated” than the communist-paranoid senator’s tactics.“McCarthyism, in the 1940s and 50s, the idea was to identify specific professors, hardly ever students, always faculty, and have them fired. Today, we’re seeing much worse than that. These are attacks on entire programs and departments. So entire departments like Black studies or DEI initiatives. It’s also not just relegated to the professors. We’re seeing students with their visas revoked being literally plucked off the streets,” Shepherd said.Trump hasn’t just targeted Harvard. Columbia University caved to a series of demands from the Trump administration in March, as a pre-condition for restoring $400m in federal funding, while the White House has announced funding freezes to other schools including Brown, Northwestern, Princeton and Cornell.Harvard taking a stand is one of the first signs of a fight back – even if it came after it was reported in March that the leaders of the university’s center for Middle Eastern studies were forced out, a move seen by critics as an attempt to appease Trump – and academics and others hope it could begin a resistance. It is likely to require a group effort to avoid the right wing’s goal for higher education in the US: universities that are in effect government-controlled, and where freedom of speech and thought is restricted.“The right don’t want students to hear about the legacy to slavery. They don’t want them to hear about structural inequalities,” Shepherd said.“They don’t want to hear why billionaires are bad. They don’t want to hear, from the sciences, about climate change. They want a nice, friendly experience where the most students ever get to debate is the differences in Aristotle and Plato.“They don’t want the actual debates that we see unfolding on campuses today.” More

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      Fifteen years after Deepwater Horizon, Trump is setting the stage for disaster | Terry Garcia

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      Last month, I joined nearly 500 former and current employees of National Geographic, where I was executive vice-president and chief science and exploration officer for 17 years, urging the institution to take a public stance against the Trump administration’s reckless attacks on science. Our letter pointed out that the programs being dismantled are “imperative for the success of our country’s economy and are the foundation of our progress and wellbeing. They make us safer, stronger and more prosperous.” We warned that gutting them is a recipe for disaster.In the face of this danger, none of us can remain silent.I say this from the unique perspective of having been closely involved in the two most significant environmental disasters in US history: the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon oil spills. Fifteen years ago this Sunday, an enormous explosion tore through the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and unleashed an environmental catastrophe that devastated the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion triggered the release of more than 3m barrels of oil that polluted 1,300 miles of coastline from Louisiana to Florida. Eleven lives were lost, ecosystems were ravaged and the economic toll soared into the billions.I served on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, which investigated the root causes of the disaster, and before that I led the federal government’s implementation of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Restoration Plan. I have witnessed first-hand the human and economic toll exacted by these events. Men and women who, for generations, had made a living from the sea were suddenly confronted with the possibility that an entire way of life would be lost.Despite such painful lessons of the past, we find ourselves once again hurtling toward disaster. The Trump administration’s personnel and programmatic cuts at science, environmental and safety agencies, and the wholesale rollback of environmental regulations, threaten to unravel decades of progress in safeguarding our country. These actions aren’t just misguided – they’re a dangerous rejection of the hard-won knowledge gained from former crises and a gamble we cannot afford to take.Among the many alarming moves by the Trump administration are plans to weaken offshore drilling safety measures implemented in response to the Deepwater Horizon calamity, such as the reversal of the Biden administration’s ban on drilling in sensitive coastal areas, including the Arctic, and the closure of regional offices responsible for oil spill response. Eliminating these measures demonstrates a callous disregard for lessons learned at a staggering human and economic cost.Disturbingly, these actions are but a small part of a larger effort to weaken environmental regulation and oversight under the guise of restoring government efficiency. Take the recent rollback of dozens of Environmental Protection Agency health and safety regulations and the reported plan to eliminate the agency’s scientific research office. The administration claims these moves will unleash US energy and lower the cost of living, when in fact the only thing they’re guaranteed to achieve is undermining fundamental protections that keep our air and water clean. The mass layoffs and plans to dismember the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), where I was deputy administrator from 1997 to the end of 1999 and prior to that its general counsel, have nothing to do with cost savings – they’re an outright assault on science. Targeting programs that monitor ocean health, track ecosystem changes and study climate impacts – essential to understanding and mitigating looming threats – will leave us blind to and defenseless against the dangers ahead.Cuts to science funding amplify the harms, jeopardizing our ability to innovate solutions, assess risks and respond effectively to crises. In 2010, we lacked even basic data about ocean conditions in areas around the ruptured Deepwater Horizon well. This absence of critical knowledge hindered response and recovery efforts, including understanding the impacts of using oil dispersants in the deep ocean. After the spill, robust government support for science enabled researchers to develop new response and cleanup technologies, better understand long-term ecological impacts, and provide critical insights that helped shape environmental and safety policy. Without government support, these advances would have been impossible – and they will be impossible in the future as funding is slashed.The Trump administration’s insistence that its actions will reduce bureaucratic burdens or spur economic growth is false and deliberately misleading. It’s gaslighting on a national scale. The only sure result is that the burden of risk will be shifted on to communities, small businesses and ordinary Americans. The destruction of habitats and livelihoods is not an abstract consequence of environmental disasters. They devastate families, cripple economies, poison food supplies and leave communities struggling for decades. Businesses are boarded up, and community members suffer life-altering health consequences. After the Deepwater Horizon spill, losses in commercial and recreational fishing, tourism and property values amounted to tens of billions of dollars; cleanup and restoration costs exceeded $60bn – far surpassing what preventive measures would have required.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump and his industry allies will paint such an event as an unforeseeable tragedy, a terrible mishap, a sad accident. Don’t buy it.As we mark this somber anniversary, we cannot allow the cautionary tales of Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon to fade into history, only to be repeated when the next horror strikes. Science and environmental protections are our first line of defense against catastrophe. Now is the time to demand that our government stop the madness and commit to strong environmental and safety regulations, rigorous scientific research, and adequate funding for the agencies tasked with protecting our health and shared resources. The price of ignoring science and dismantling regulations is far too high.

      Terry Garcia was National Geographic’s executive vice-president and chief science and exploration officer for 17 years. He also served as the assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and deputy administrator of Noaa, as well as its general counsel More

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      ‘I just ask God that he’s OK’: family of Venezuelan musician sent to El Salvador prison agonizes over his fate

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      In a recording studio in downtown Santiago, where the dad she has never met once sung, a four-month-old baby girl snuggles in her mother’s arms, noise-cancelling earmuffs shielding her tiny ears from the sound.Nahiara Rubí Suárez Sánchez is equally oblivious to the plight of her father, a Venezuelan musician who is thought to be languishing in a maximum-security prison thousands of miles away in El Salvador after being swept up in Donald Trump’s anti-migrant crusade.Arturo Suárez Trejo, 33, is one of more than 200 Venezuelan men sent to the Central American country from the US, accused by Trump’s administration – with no evidence – of being terrorists, rapists and gang members.More than a month later, Suárez’s relatives – who insist he is innocent – remain completely in the dark about his whereabouts, his wellbeing or how long he might be trapped behind bars.View image in fullscreen“Right now I have no idea what’s happening to him – I just ask God that he’s OK,” said Suárez’s 27-year-old wife, a fellow Venezuelan called Nathali Sánchez, who lives with their child in Chile’s capital. “If something happens to my husband, I will hold Donald Trump and [El Salvador’s president] Nayib Bukele responsible.”Critics have decried Trump’s decision to banish asylum seekers and immigrants to a jail in an authoritarian foreign land as part of a disturbing democratic backslide in one of the world’s largest democracies. “This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror,” the historian and author Timothy Snyder recently warned.For Suárez’s loved ones, the policy represents an emotional sucker punch that follows years of hardship after they, like nearly 8 million Venezuelans, fled economic and political turmoil in their South American homeland.“[It’s] fucked up, man,” said Denys Zambrano, a rapper known as Nyan who became one of Suárez’s best friends in Santiago after they migrated there from different parts of Venezuela.Suárez’s elder brother, Nelson, said they had left Venezuela in 2016 after joining anti-government demonstrations that were sweeping the country amid food shortages and hyperinflation. For challenging Nicolás Maduro’s government, the siblings were threatened by armed pro-regime gangs called colectivos.View image in fullscreen“It was a really difficult time,” recalled Nelson Suárez, 35, whose brother relocated to Cartagena and Bogotá, in Colombia, before moving to Chile, where hundreds of thousands of uprooted Venezuelans have migrated over the past decade. Nelson Suárez headed north to the US.In Santiago, Arturo Suárez built a new life, fixing fridges as he chased his dream of becoming a famous singer-songwriter, under the stage name is SuarezVzla. He became a relentless promoter of Venezuelan music, founding an event called Urban Fresh to showcase budding reggaeton and trap stars. “Arturo’s my mentor,” said Mariangelica Camacho, 20, a dancer and singer who fled Venezuela with her parents at age 14 and whose career he helped launch.At one gig he met his future wife.But making ends meet was a struggle, particularly after the Covid pandemic hammered Chile’s economy. Last May, Suárez decided to join his brother in North Carolina and embarked on a five-month odyssey to the US that involved crossing the treacherous jungles of the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama.Sánchez, who was pregnant, decided not to risk the journey having suffered a miscarriage the previous year, and remained in Santiago. Before setting off from their shoebox apartment looking out across the Andes, Suárez wrote a message to his “lioness” and his unborn child on a whiteboard hanging over her cot. “Soon we’ll be together again,” it says. “I love you both with all my life.”By September, after two months toiling in a Mexico City tortilla shop, Suárez reached the southern border, crossing into San Diego after making an immigration appointment on the Biden-era smartphone app called CBP One. From there he made a beeline for New Bern, North Carolina, where he found work as a handyman, mowing lawns and cleaning pools to support baby Nahiara, who was born in early December.But Suárez’s American dream quickly crumbled. In February, three weeks after Trump’s inauguration, he was detained by immigration officials while making a music video in Raleigh. After a stint in an Atlanta detention centre, he was moved to Texas and then – to his family’s horror – sent to El Salvador after being told he was being deported to Venezuela.View image in fullscreenOn 16 March, 24 hours after Suárez was incarcerated in Bukele’s terrorism confinement centre (Cecot), Sánchez spotted her shaven-headed husband in a propaganda photo released by the Central American country’s government. She recognized him because of tattoos on his neck and thigh and a childhood scar on his scalp. “I felt like the world had collapsed on top of me,” Sánchez said. Since then she has heard nothing and, in her darkest moments, fears he may not even still be alive.“We’ve lost all communication,” said Krubick Izarra, 26, a music producer who is godmother to the couple’s child.Trump’s El Salvador deportations – which activists call enforced disappearances – have grim echoes in Latin America, where such tactics were common during the US-backed dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Santiago, a brutalist museum commemorates the hundreds of people spirited into custody during Gen Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year regime – most never to return. “Nobody believed that in Chile people could disappear,” reads an entry in a picture book displayed in one exhibition room about the dictatorship’s dungeons.Half a century later, campaigners say the scores of Venezuelans sent to El Salvador find themselves in a similar void, deprived of contact with their families and lawyers, without due process and, in most cases, never having been convicted of any crime.“It’s a legal black hole – and in that legal black hole, I think it’s unlikely the families should expect a judicial remedy,” said Noah Bullock, the director of Cristosal, a rights group which has spent the last three years denouncing the plight of the 85,000 Salvadoran citizens incarcerated as part of Bukele’s hardline anti-gang crackdown. At least 368 of them have died as a result of torture, according to the Cristosal’s count.View image in fullscreenBullock believed the fate of prisoners such as Suárez hinged on whether it was “politically viable” for Trump and Bukele to keep them behind bars, despite mounting evidence of their innocence. “The only option for them, I think, is public advocacy and building sufficient political pressure for their freedom,” he said.Making noise is something Suárez’s musician friends in Santiago are good at.One evening last week, they gathered in a rehearsal room to practise for their latest concert and defend a man they called a cheery, kindhearted, teetotal dreamer whose only crime was seeking a better life.“Arturo has never harmed anyone – and he certainly isn’t a terrorist,” said Heberth Veliz, a 29-year-old musician who suspected his friend had been targeted because of his numerous tattoos, which include a tribute to his late mother, a map of Venezuela, a palm tree, some musical notes and the phrase “The future will be brilliant.”Veliz, whose body is also covered in tattoos, said he struggled to contain his anger when he saw the US president on television smearing Suárez as “the worst of the worst”. “I feel like jumping into the screen and slapping him so he stops talking nonsense. ‘Shut up, Trump! You don’t know what you’re talking about!’” he fumed, although he admitted he was not surprised by his friend’s treatment. “Everyone knows that the most ruthless people wear suits and ties,” he said.Cradling baby Nahiara in a pink shawl, Sánchez said she was determined to stay strong for the sake of her daughter and her absent husband. “It’s up to me to be the pillar of the family now,” she declared, vowing to continue denouncing her husband’s capture. “When he gets out, I want him to see that I didn’t give up – and I want him to feel proud.”View image in fullscreenSpeaking from the US, Nelson Suárez said he believed Trump was using innocent Venezuelans such as his sibling as “guinea pigs” to show off to his base. He felt “morally and psychologically shattered” by his disappearance.“I always wanted my brother to become world famous,” Suárez said. “But not like this, you know?” More

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      Anti-Trump protesters in the US might look to the Czech Republic: ‘We are an example’

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      A former cold war communist dictatorship and component part of the Habsburg empire seems an unlikely source of hope for Donald Trump’s opponents.One such country, Hungary, is often cited as the model for Trump’s no-holds-barred authoritarian assault on US institutions. Viktor Orbán, the central European country’s prime minister, has been a guest at the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate and has won Trump’s praise for transforming Hungary into an “illiberal state” that extols “traditional” values – and for projecting the kind of “strongman” persona the president admires.Now in his fourth consecutive term, Orbán and his Fidesz party have captured state institutions, tamed the media and been successfully re-elected, despite periodic waves of anti-government mass protests – the most recent this week against an attempt to ban the annual Pride march.It seems an ominous portent for Trump critics who took part Saturday in a second weekend of mass demonstrations, organized across 50 states by the 50501 group, following the “Hands Off” rallies staged in 1,000 locations across the US on 5 April.Yet the contrasting political fate of one of Hungary’s neighbours with similar historical antecedents may provide a glimmer of hope for the prospects of mass protest laying foundations for a successful onslaught against Trump, leading to victory at the ballot box.The Czech Republic – once part of what was cold war-era Czechoslovakia and, coincidentally, birthplace of Trump’s first wife, Ivana – is a possible blueprint for how street protest can bloom into a unified electoral strategy that eventually unseats a billionaire leader with autocratic aspirations and apparent scorn for democracy.In 2018, a popular movement, Million Moments for Democracy, began organizing rallies in the Czech capital, Prague, and other cities to protest the anti-democratic tendencies of the country’s prime minister, Andrej Babiš, who had been labelled “the Czech Trump”.View image in fullscreenBabiš, a billionaire oligarch who was the country’s second-richest person, had taken office as head of a coalition that relied on support from the remnants of the Czech communist party after his populist ANO (Action for Dissatisfied Citizens) party won the previous year’s election.Opponents accused Babiš – whose sprawling Agrofert conglomerate controlled vast segments of the Czech economy and two of the country’s biggest newspapers – of fraud and multiple conflicts of interest, while abusing power to further enrich himself. There were also complaints about past ties – upheld in court, despite Babiš’s denials – to the communist secret police, the StB, for which he reportedly acted as an informer.Early protests attracted crowds of up to 20,000, but within months attendances had skyrocketed as rallies were staged more regularly, always climaxing in calls for his resignation. By June 2019 – three months after Babiš was hosted by Trump at the White House in a visit that seemed to boost his international standing – Prague saw its biggest political protest since the 1989 fall of communism, with more than 250,000 turning out in opposition to the prime minister and his close ally, the elderly pro-Russian president, Miloš Zeman.An even greater number turned up in November 2019, ostensibly to mark the 30th anniversary of communism’s collapse – which had itself been triggered by mass protests. The prime minister stood firm, and as the Covid-19 virus forced the country into prolonged lockdown, protests diminished and Babiš’s position seemed more assured, despite widespread discontent over his handling of the pandemic.Yet in 2021 parliamentary elections, Babiš and his lavishly funded party were defeated by a five-party coalition whose ideological differences were superseded by their hostility toward the prime minister.View image in fullscreenThe demonstrations, despite the lost momentum caused by Covid and Babiš’s stubborn refusal to resign even as police lodged criminal fraud charges, had worked by converting discontent into votes at the ballot box.“We certainly had some role in the election results,” said Benjamin Roll, Million Moments for Democracy’s spokesperson and deputy leader at the time. “I believe we in the Czech Republic are an example of how long-term civic-society activities can bring, or help bring, political change.“Those protests gave us all the feeling we have the power, that we were not alone, and we can do something. I think this emotion is really crucial.”It is a potentially decisive factor amid swirling debate about how to respond to Trump as he has smashed long-established norms and assailed institutions at breakneck speed since his inauguration on 20 January.While the leftwing Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive New York representative, have attracted vast crowds on their Fighting Oligarchy road tour that seems to emphasize the value of popular dissent, other Democrats have adopted a less confrontational approach, with some opting not to fight Trump at every turn.The party’s leader in the senate, Chuck Schumer, drew fire from many on his own side for leading a group of fellow Democratic senators in voting for a six-month Republican funding bill last month, averting a government shutdown.The move sharpened criticism that congressional Democrats had reacted too passively to Trump’s authoritarian power grabs.At the same time, the party’s exclusion from power in the White House and on Capitol Hill has prompted questions over the effectiveness of mass protests. The failure of demonstrations to translate into electoral defeat for authoritarian-type leaders in some countries – Hungary, Turkey and Serbia are recently cited examples – has fed such doubts.View image in fullscreenHowever, Steven Levitsky, a politics professor at Harvard University and a specialist on authoritarian threats to democracy, said dismissing mass rallies as futile – which he called “a new conventional wisdom” after years of thinking they guaranteed a dictator’s downfall – was misplaced.“Mass protest is less likely to bring down a government in a place where elections are a viable channel, meaning where it is still a democracy or near-democracy,” he said. “Protest is not going to lead to Donald Trump’s resignation, or Orbán’s, but that doesn’t mean it’s not relevant. Protest can weaken the government, can shape public opinion and the media framing and discourse, which is very important.”At the “Hands Off” rally in Washington DC on 5 April, which drew tens of thousands of people, participants said one aim was to embolden reticent voters and Trump critics who might be intimidated by the president’s blustering tactics.Jiří Pehe, a Czech political analyst who is the director of New York University in Prague, said that message had its echoes in the Czech precedent.“It was this overall, this strategy of waking people up and telling them: ‘Look, you have agency. You can change things. You are not just passive observers of what’s going on, but you can change things, but you have to be active,’” he said.But allowing millions of dissatisfied Americans simply to vent their frustrations would not be enough, Pehe warned. “If the Czech Republic is to be an example, these demonstrations need to happen again and again across the United States and they need to have one or two strong messages. There has to be a very strong message towards the political class because only it can actually change things. And in this case, there should be pressure on the Democrats, saying: ‘Look, it’s your task to stop Donald Trump.’”Speaking to the Guardian at the 5 April Washington rally, Jamie Raskin, a Democratic representative from Maryland who is the party’s top member of the House judiciary committee, said “a popular resistance strategy” featuring protests could only work in harness with “an effective legislative strategy”, a tall order since the Republicans control both the Senate and the House of Representatives.“Ultimately, we’re going to have to win the elections next year, and when we take back the House and the Senate, we will be back in the driver’s seat,” he said.That aim evokes another lesson from the Czech example, observers say: the need for the Democrats to take their cue from the demonstrators and put aside their ideological differences for the sake of unity.“What you’ve seen in the Czech Republic is a broad array of political forces coming together to form a pro-democracy coalition and I think that’s instructive for the US,” said Norm Eisen, a former US ambassador to Prague and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who called for a “big tent” approach encompassing anti-Trump Republicans.“They were for putting aside particular differences on partisan issues, on ideology. That is one of the critical ingredients for success, and I believe we are seeing that here. In these deportation disputes, we filed a brief at the supreme court by more than three dozen conservatives, [who served in] every Republican presidential administration, from Nixon to Trump 1, and I was the lawyer on that, together with a senior justice department official from the Bush administration.”Levitsky said the US protests had assumed outsize importance given the failure of other institutions and pillars of the establishment – including major CEOs, law firms, the Catholic church and, until this week, universities – to mount a stand since Trump took office.“This emerging protest movement, and the size of the crowds at the Bernie Sanders and AOC events, is going to compel Democratic politicians to become more active, follow their base rather than so as not to lose it,” he said. “What the protest movement can do is contribute to an erosion of Trump’s popularity, and embolden opposition politicians and probably contribute to an electoral outcome in a couple years.“In that sense, these guys are not wasting their time. I think it’s a very, very important step in getting the opposition off the sidelines.”Back in Prague, Roll – recalling the intoxication of the anti-Babiš rallies – had advice for US demonstrators: stay positive and, whatever Trump’s provocations, avoid hateful rhetoric – something he fears the US’s two-party system makes hard to avoid.“The division in the United States is really dangerous because you see the other side as the enemy,” he said. “It’s crucial to remain non-violent and hopeful. Talking in front of lots of people, we realised you have to be careful about your language because if you are too negative or hateful, it can defeat your purpose. Remember that the other side are people. They’re your brothers and sisters.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: Mass anti-Trump protests sweep nation; supreme court issues midnight order

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      Protesters poured into the streets across the country again on Saturday in the second wave of demonstrations this month, as organizers seek to turn discontent with Donald Trump’s presidency into a mass movement that will eventually translate into ballot box action.Large protests took place from east coast to west, in major cities like Washington, New York and Chicago, as well as Rhode Island, Maryland, Wisconsin, Tennessee, South Carolina, among many others. Americans abroad also signalled their opposition to the Trump agenda in the Irish capital of Dublin and other cities.In San Francisco, protesters formed a human chain to spell out the words, “Impeach Remove!” while holding the American flag upside down.Protests cut across party lines, organizers sayThe 50501 movement behind the “Hands Off” protests said it was seeking to send a message to opposition politicians and ordinary voters that vocal resistance to Trump’s policies was essential. It also said that demonstrators were supporters of different parties.“We have registered Democrats, registered independents and registered Republicans all marching because they all believe in America, because they all believe in a fair government that puts people before profits,” said organizer Heather Dunn.Read the full storySupreme court orders temporary halt to deportationThe US supreme court ordered the Trump administration to halt the deportation of Venezuelan men in immigration custody in Texas, after their lawyers said they were at imminent risk of removal without a judicial review.The order came just minutes after midnight on Saturday and puts into question the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law.Read the full storyIndonesian student detained by Ice after visa revokedAn Indonesian father of an infant with special needs will remain in custody after an immigration judge ruled on Thursday that his case can proceed.Judge Sarah Mazzie denied a motion to dismiss the case against Aditya Wahyu Harsono on humanitarian grounds, according to his attorney. Harsono, 33, was detained by federal agents at his hospital workplace in Minnesota after his student visa was secretly revoked. He was arrested four days later without notice and is scheduled for another hearing on 1 May.Read the full storyBarbara Lee, trailblazing former US Congress member, elected Oakland mayorBarbara Lee, a trailblazing former member of Congress, has been elected as the next mayor of Oakland, California, after fending off an insurgent challenge from the center at a critical moment for the Bay Area city.Lee defeated the former city council member Loren Taylor after nine rounds of ranked-choice voting gave her more than 52% of the vote to Taylor’s 47%, according to the Alameda county registrar of voters.Read the full storyJD Vance visits Vatican amid immigration policy criticism The vice-president, JD Vance, had “an exchange of opinions” with the Vatican’s secretary of state over current international conflicts and immigration, the Vatican has said.The Vatican issued a statement after Vance, a Catholic convert, met Cardinal Pietro Parolin and the foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher. The Holy See has responded cautiously to the Trump administration, in keeping with its tradition of diplomatic neutrality but has expressed alarm over its crackdown on immigration and cuts in international aid.Read the full storyDay by day: the Harvard-White House showdownIt took Harvard University less than 72 hours to reject a series of demands put forth by the Trump administration, setting up a high-stakes showdown between the US’s wealthiest and oldest university and the White House.The swift rebuke on Monday came after weeks of mounting pressure from Harvard faculty, students and alumni and the city of Cambridge, all urging the university to defend itself, and higher education as a whole, against what they saw as an unprecedented attack from Washington. Here’s how it all unfolded, day by day.Read the full storyOutrage as Trump’s coal expansion coupled with health cuts: ‘There won’t be anyone to work in the mines’The Trump administration’s efforts to expand coal mining while simultaneously imposing deep cuts to agencies tasked with ensuring miner health and safety has left some advocates “dumbfounded”.Agencies that protect coalminers from serious occupational hazards, including the condition best known as “black lung”, have been among those affected by major government cuts.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      US chocolate prices surge amid soaring cocoa costs and tariffs right as many Americans celebrate Easter.

      Bill Clinton called on Americans to put aside “whose resentments matter most” at commemorations for the Oklahoma City bombing 30 years ago.

      Associating with Elon Musk and misusing artificial intelligence are among the most surefire ways for companies to damage their brands, a new survey shows.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 18 April 2025. More