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      At least 11 detained after protesters and police clash outside Chicago Ice center

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      At least 11 people were taken into custody outside the Broadview Ice detention center in the Chicago area after heated confrontations between Illinois state police and protesters on Friday.Authorities had instructed demonstrators to remain in designated “protest zones”, but tensions escalated when officers moved to clear the roadway.According to the Chicago Tribune, at about 8am, protesters advanced toward the building. Within minutes, dozens of troopers equipped with helmets and batons moved in to push the crowd back. Officers tackled and dragged several individuals. Much of the clash was captured on video and posted to social media.At one point, protesters tried to intervene as a fellow demonstrator was detained. Later in the day, groups blew whistles at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents entering and leaving the facility.As arrests took place, chants of: “Who do you protect?” echoed through the crowd during tense exchanges with police, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.Protester and congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh voiced frustration over the restrictions. “A free speech zone implies that everywhere else is not a free speech zone,” she told the Associated Press. Abughazaleh said she was struck in the face with a baton and witnessed an officer push a woman to the ground.The Broadview facility has been the scene of recurring unrest in recent weeks. Federal agents have previously used teargas and other chemical agents on protesters and journalists. Illinois state police reported that some participants blocked a nearby street on Friday and refused to move to the authorized protest area.Local officials have faced mounting challenges managing hundreds of demonstrators who gather outside the detention center, mainly on Fridays and Sundays. Federal agents have repeatedly used chemical irritants and so-called “less-lethal” rounds to disperse crowds.Protests began around 8am Friday, appearing to violate the recent directive of Broadview’s mayor, Katrina Thompson, limiting demonstrations to the hours between 9am and 6pm.Thompson has been outspoken in her criticism of federal agents’ conduct, saying, “This is not Putin’s Russia,” and calling on federal officials to cooperate with ongoing criminal investigations.On Monday, Thompson reduced the size of the designated protest area, an arrangement previously coordinated with state and county law enforcement, citing that last week’s demonstrations “degenerated into chaos” and disrupted the village’s 8,000 residents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFriday’s clash followed a court order issued a day earlier requiring federal agents in Illinois to wear body cameras during immigration operations, after multiple incidents involving pepper balls, smoke grenades and teargas against protesters and local police.JB Pritzker, Illinois’s governor, who has criticized the deployment of federal forces to the state, praised the ruling.“The idea that there’s any justification for people tossing teargas in the context of people’s protests, I think the judge reacted to that properly by ordering that now the federal agents are required to have body cameras on them because they clearly lie about what goes on,” Pritzker said.The Trump administration targeted Chicago with federal law enforcement in August, falsely claiming there had been a rise in crime in the city in recent years. Since then, there have been reports of Ice increasingly aggressive enforcement in communities, including helicopters hovering over apartment raids. More

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      Donald Trump claims to be the president of peace, but at home he is fomenting civil war | Jonathan Freedland

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      Donald Trump had better hope the members of the Nobel committee are not paying attention to what’s happening inside the United States. If they did take a look, they’d notice a jarring pattern. While the US president likes to play the peacemaker abroad, at home he is Trump, bringer of war.It’s easy for the first fact to conceal, or divert our attention away from, the second. This week was a case in point. It began with Trump travelling to Israel, where he was hailed as a latter-day Cyrus, a mighty ruler whose name would be spoken of for millennia to come, the man who had brokered what he himself boasts is an “everlasting” peace.Never mind that Trump’s success, for which he certainly deserves some credit, was in pushing Hamas and Israel to agree a ceasefire and release of hostages and prisoners, a fragile arrangement that does not address, let alone solve, the underlying Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He presented it as a triumph of the ages and one more notch on his peacemaker’s bedpost, taking the tally of wars he claims to have ended to eight.Indeed, buoyed up by his success, he is having another go at the one he thought would be easy but which, to his irritation, has proved as complex as all the hated experts and deep state naysayers warned it would be: Russia’s war on Ukraine. On Thursday he announced his plan to meet yet again with Vladimir Putin, this time hosted by Viktor Orbán in Budapest (which has the happy side-benefit of trolling the EU).Unfazed by the failure of their last meeting in Alaska, and by his own failure ever to stand up to Putin, Trump clearly believes he has pacific momentum and that the healing magic his touch brought to Gaza will similarly unite Moscow and Kyiv.But what undermines this new, Nobel-ready look of Trump’s is not only the absurd braggadocio, or even the confusion of the style and optics of peacemaking for the substance and hard graft it requires. It is the fact that he is fomenting war at home on his own citizens. I am not speaking metaphorically. Increasingly, serious analysts not prone to hyperbole are warning that Trump seems bent on provoking a second American civil war. The evidence is piling up.The most obvious is Trump’s deployment of US troops on the streets of America’s cities. He claims that his original decisions to send in the National Guard to Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, Portland and Memphis were motivated solely by concern over crime. In his telling, these places were “overrun” by violence and local police needed his help. But that doesn’t stack up.The data shows that most of the cities Trump has targeted have lower rates of violent crime than other large cities that have remained untouched. (Of the 10 major US cities with the biggest crime problems, Trump has hit only one: Memphis.) So why would Trump be sending in the troops?One explanation is that he lives in such a closed filter bubble, his sources of information so narrow, that he is not in possession of the actual facts. Earlier this month, he described Portland, Oregon as a “burning hellhole”, adding that “You see fires all over the place. You see fights, and I mean just violence. It’s just so crazy.” The people of Portland – cycling or taking their kids to the park, as normal – were bemused. It seemed Trump had been watching Fox News, confusing footage from the riots of 2020 with today.But none of this is a mistake. For what the likes of Chicago, LA and Portland have in common is not imagined rates of runaway crime but something that angers Trump much more: they are Democrat-run cities in Democrat-led states. (The giveaway is that Cleveland, Ohio and Kansas City, Missouri have higher rates of violent crime but are under Republican governors. So they have been left alone.)This is a political act by Trump, designed to intimidate potential strongholds of opposition. Some critics suspect the administration hopes to provoke violence from those whose cities now feel like occupied territory. Perhaps a riot or an attack on the military that can be instantly spun, as the assassination of Charlie Kirk was, as an act of leftist terrorism that merits a further crackdown, seizure of emergency powers or suspension of liberties.Others believe this is about normalising the presence of troops on the streets before next year’s midterm elections, a crucial contest that could see Republicans lose the House of Representatives, handing Democrats a serious check on Trump’s power. In this view, troops will be in place either to scare away minorities and others who might usually vote for the Democratic party, or for the battle after polling day, to enforce an attempt by the White House to void results that don’t go their way. Think of a re-run of 6 January 2021 – except this time with the armed forces on hand to ensure Trump’s will is done.The obvious objection to this scenario is that the US military would surely refuse to let itself be used as a partisan political instrument. But that is to miss what Trump and Pete Hegseth – now rebranded not as secretary of defence, but as secretary of war – are doing to the US military. Witness last month’s jawdropping meeting of hundreds of top US admirals and generals, gathered from across the globe. Trump could not have been clearer, instructing them that they now faced an “enemy from within”, that their job was to deal with “civil disturbances” and that they should regard America’s “dangerous cities as training grounds”. At one point, Hegseth said that any officer who disagreed with the new, Trumpian conception of the US military should “do the honorable thing and resign”.All of this comes in the context of a president who is nakedly using the justice system to punish his critics – note the indictment issued on Thursday against his former national security adviser John Bolton – whose chief adviser called the Democratic party a “domestic extremist organisation” even before the Kirk killing; that sends masked agents to snatch people, including US citizens, off the streets; that is using the government shutdown to eliminate “Democrat agencies”, meaning those pockets of the independent civil service that might act as a restraint on presidential whim, while cutting funds to institutions, from the universities to public broadcasting, that might do the same; and that is imposing ideological orthodoxy on the entire federal bureaucracy, with the FBI’s firing of an employee who had displayed the pride flag only the latest example.Trump likes talking the peace talk when it comes to Palestinians and Israelis or Russians and Ukrainians. But inside the US, where red meets blue, he does not see a contest between rivals but rather a conflict with an enemy he admits he hates – one that has to be fought by any means necessary, even to the very end.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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      US anti-vax stance to blame for continent-wide surge in measles, say experts

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      Governments across Latin America are stepping up efforts to vaccinate their populations against measles, as outbreaks in North America drive a 34-fold increase in the number of cases reported in the region this year.Measles cases have surged worldwide to a 25-year high, due to low vaccine coverage and the spread of misinformation about vaccine safety. However, there is added concern in parts of Latin America over unequal access to healthcare and the worrying situation in the US, which is facing its worst measles outbreak in decades following a reversal of vaccine policy led by Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.“The US’s political position in relation to health and vaccination is an outrage,” said Rosana Richtmann, an infectious disease doctor and coordinator of the Brazilian Society of Infectious Disease’s immunisation committee. “It’s a problem for us.”View image in fullscreenMeasles was successfully eliminated from the Americas in 2016, and then again in 2024, but the continent is now at risk of losing its measles-free status. There have been 11,668 cases reported across 10 countries in North and Latin America, according to the latest data from the Pan-American Health Organization (Paho).More than half of these cases are in the US and Canada, with three deaths in the US and two in Canada so far.Mexico is the hardest-hit country in Latin America, with more than 4,800 cases and 22 deaths, followed by Bolivia with 354 cases. Other countries, including Brazil, Belize and Paraguay, are dealing with a few dozen infections linked to imported cases.Concern over high numbers of cases in North America has led the Brazilian health ministry to focus more on the highly contagious disease with a nationwide vaccination campaign launched for children and teenagers in October. Adults who did not have the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine as children are also being offered the jab.View image in fullscreenBrazil also has protocols in place to respond swiftly to individual cases. When a nine-year-old tested positive for measles on 7 October in Várzea Grande, health authorities were swift to act. Nurses kitted out in protective gear visited the child’s school and worked quickly to implement “ring vaccination”, inoculating everyone who had been in contact with her.The city’s health teams have also been going from door to door to identify unvaccinated people and holding vaccination drives in a shopping centre and the international airport.Richtmann said the biggest fear was imported cases. “We are much more worried about Brazilians travelling to Europe, to the US or Canada [catching measles and bringing it back], than about those who live here,” she said.Amira Roess, a professor of global health and epidemiology at Virginia’s George Mason University, agreed that the outbreaks in the US posed a threat to neighbouring countries.“Now suddenly, you’re more likely to run into someone who has some kind of infectious disease [in the US]. You visit the US, you go home with souvenirs – and you might also go home with measles,” she said.Mexico’s first measles case in February was imported from Texas by an unvaccinated Mennonite boy. Bolivia’s first cases also spread through pockets of unvaccinated people living in Mennonite settlements.Mennonites are Anabaptist Christian communities of European descent who reject many aspects of modern life, including vaccines.Daniel Salas, executive manager of Paho’s special programme for comprehensive immunisation, said: “Having close-knit communities that are often reluctant to receive vaccinations and having large flows [of people] from country to country through the region are aggravating factors.”View image in fullscreenHealth authorities should identify communities resistant to vaccination and target their efforts there, Salas said.There is no cure for measles, which can lead to serious complications and even death, but it is easily preventable with two doses of the MMR vaccine, which provides 97% protection.MMR vaccination rates in Latin America fell during the Covid pandemic and the years leading up to it but have recovered since 2022, reaching 86% last year, according to the World Bank. However, this remains below the 95% threshold needed for herd immunity, with a lag in uptake of second doses and significant disparities between countries and within them.View image in fullscreenLack of information and access to heathcare has contributed to lower vaccination rates, but doctors also blame the influence of the growing anti-vaxxer movement in the US.“A lot of South American countries look to the US,” said Carlos Paz, head of infectious diseases at the Mario Ortiz Suárez paediatric hospital in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where 80% of the country’s cases have been reported.“The population sees what a US minister says about vaccines, and some people start to say, ‘well, we shouldn’t get vaccinated here either’,” he said.While the US health secretary did endorse the MMR vaccine after an outbreak in Texas in April, Kennedy has also spread misleading information about it and misinformation about measles treatment.This month the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, now led by a biotech investor, suggested the MMR vaccine should be given as three separate jabs, even though the safety and efficacy of combined shots have been demonstrated by decades of research and going against the CDC’s own longstanding advice.Bolivia declared a national health emergency in June, extended school holidays to avoid contact between children, and launched a widespread vaccination drive, relying partly on donations from Brazil, India and Chile. But coverage in October had still only reached 45%, while the government still has 1.6m doses available.“We’ve been campaigning to increase the vaccination rate. Each doctor, each paediatrician, is a soldier advocating for vaccination,” said Paz. More

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      Maga is painting Saturday’s protests as violent treason. Prove them wrong | Judith Levine

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      “They have a ‘Hate America’ rally that’s scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said on Fox News on Friday. “It’s all the pro-Hamas wing and, you know, the antifa people. They’re all coming out.”The Republican Minnesota congressman Tom Emmer said the party’s “terrorist wing” was holding the “Hate America” rally. “Democrats want to keep the government shut down to show all those people that are going to come here and express their hatred towards this country that they’re fighting President Trump,” said the House majority leader, Steve Scalise. The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, embellished the story on Fox, referring to the demonstrations’ “paid protesters” and adding: “It begs the question who’s funding it.”These people are, of course, slandering the second round of No Kings marches, following those on 14 June, which dwarfed Trump’s pitiful birthday party military parade. This time the events – more than 2,500 of them, according to organizers, planned for every state – promise to be even larger.Trump’s allies are trying to overwrite the patriotic, historically resonant words “No Kings” with insinuations of treasonous violence.Everyone participating in the protests must prove them wrong. Nonviolence, both rigorously disciplined and open-hearted, must define 18 October.The stakes are bigger than anything that happens tomorrow. Because these politicians are not just talking. This smear campaign is one skirmish in the all-fronts war on a vaguely defined leftwing entity the administration calls “antifa”. This war – declared in the 25 September national security presidential memorandum, Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence – is not just supported by propaganda. Disinformation is its essence.The national security reporter Ken Klippenstein published a restricted-circulation FBI/homeland security bulletin on “domestic violence extremists” (DVE), released on 1 October, that links attacks on Ice buildings to peaceful anti-Ice demonstrations. Since June, it says, “small groups of threat actors, some of whom are DVEs, have leveraged large, lawful protests” in California and Oregon “to engage in violent activity” against Ice facilities and “violent confrontations with law enforcement”.Last week, at a White House “antifa roundtable”, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, claimed: “Antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as [Tren de Aragua], as Isis, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them.” The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, thanked the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, “for getting to the bottom of these funding mechanisms and individuals who are perpetuating [sic] this violence on our American cities”.Commentators on the “Hate America” blitz, including some of the events’ organizers, have called it an attempt to silence dissent by scaring would-be marchers into staying home. My hunch is that diminishing the crowds is just half of the strategy. The other half is more pernicious. With Ice and the military already dispatched to terrorize Black and blue cities, such language may inspire civilian paramilitaries – many of them armed, organized and trained – to go into the streets and cause mayhem.These militias took action on 6 January 2021. They are itching for another opportunity to attack the “enemy within”, and they don’t need explicit orders to do so. “Hate America” is the phrase that could impel them to act.In larger cities like New York and San Francisco, the marchers will far outnumber any counter-protesters. In the cities occupied by federal troops, where local police don’t relish the optics of teargas wafting through crowds of elderly baby boomers and babies in strollers, there’s no guarantee the feds will restrain themselves. The national guard and Ice have already gassed and pepper-sprayed demonstrators apparently doing nothing more aggressive than standing around and yelling, or, like the Chicago pastor shot in the head with a pepper ball canister, nothing aggressive at all.Enter the freelance enforcers. And it’s in the red states, where gun laws are lax and progressives constitute a small minority, that the odds of aggression and goading to aggression by Maga loyalists are highest.Maga wants nothing more than violence at the marches. Any violent clash, no matter who starts it, will be a green light to the administration to step up the policing crackdown, including on Saturday. The White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has been tossing around the word “insurrection” to describe peaceful opposition to the Trump agenda. The president could use anything construable as chaos to invoke the Insurrection Act.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNonviolence is not the same as passivity; it’s the antithesis of surrender. It is not mild, not even friendly. Contradictory as it sounds, steadfast nonviolent resistance against a violent state is the most righteous expression of rage.It’s reassuring that the national non-profit Indivisible, which is also reportedly in Trump’s sights, is among the groups at the helm of the No Kings events. Since its founding in 2016, the organization has been committed to nonviolence. “We reject all forms of political violence and intimidation, no matter the source or the target,” reads its website. “That’s not just a moral stance – it’s a strategic one. Movements that create lasting change do so by building trust, forging solidarity and demonstrating discipline, even in the face of threats or attacks.”Almost all of the 250 partner organizations that appear on NoKings.org are as politically vanilla as progressives can get: the ACLU, Faithful America, the Sierra Club, the Feminist Majority.Alert to the administration’s provocations, Indivisible provides detailed information on running legal, safe and peaceful events. “We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values,” it says. Weapons of any kind are always prohibited.The good news is that nonviolence is the 21st-century US left’s default behavior. With few exceptions, it is not just nonviolent; it is anti-violence. Prison abolition, disarmament, the feminist politics of care, pacifism – these are leftwing movements. By contrast, extreme-right causes, institutions and tropes – gun rights, the carceral state, the “warrior ethos” – spell out a politics of coercion, cruelty and punishment.On 18 October, tens of millions of people in the streets, peacefully exercising the democratic rights that the Trump regime is laboring to eliminate, will give the lie to Maga’s hallucinatory network of bomb-throwing traitors. No Kings will show America who the real haters are.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More

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      US cities to resist Trump’s crackdown on dissent with No Kings protests: ‘We will not be bullied’

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      Donald Trump has promised to crack down on dissent and sent troops into US cities. His allies are claiming antifa, the decentralized antifascist movement, is behind plans to protest. He is looking for any pretext to go after his opponents.Still, this Saturday, even in cities with troops on the ground, millions of people are expected to march against the president as part of a second “No Kings” protest. The last No Kings protest in June drew several million people across more than 2,000 locations. This time, more than 2,500 cities and towns nationwide are hosting protests.Organizers expect this Saturday’s protests to draw more people than the June events as the American public sees the excesses of the Trump administration more clearly.“Their goal is to dissuade you from participating,” said Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, the progressive movement organization with chapters around the US that is a main organizer of No Kings. “That doesn’t mean that everybody has the same threat level. It doesn’t mean that people should ignore what the threats are, but it does mean we’re going to need to see a lot of courage out there on Saturday.”More than 200 organizations are signed on as partners for the 18 October protests; none have dropped off for fear of a Trump backlash, Levin said. The American Civil Liberties Union, the civil rights group, is a partner, as is the advocacy group Public Citizen. Unions including the American Federation of Teachers and SEIU are in the coalition. The new protest movement 50501, which began earlier this year as a call for protests in all 50 states on a single day, is also a partner. Other partners include the Human Rights Campaign, MoveOn, United We Dream, the League of Conservation Voters, Common Defense and more.Resistance to Trump continues to grow. The Harvard Crowd Counting Consortium, which tracks political crowds, noted that 2025 had seen “far more protests” than during the same time period in 2017. The June No Kings protests were “probably the second-largest single day demonstration since Donald Trump first took office in January 2017”, second to the Women’s March in 2017, the consortium said.In June, on the same day a man shot and killed a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband, tens of thousands of people still turned out for No Kings in St Paul while the shooter was on the loose, with attenders saying they didn’t want to back down in the face of political violence.The messages behind the No Kings protests are simple: Trump is acting like a king, and the US rejects kings. The No Kings coalition has cited Trump’s “increasing authoritarian excesses and corruption” as motivation for the protests, including ramping up of deportations, gutting healthcare, gerrymandering maps and selling out families for billionaires.In the months since the first No Kings protests, Trump’s menace against the opposition has only grown, particularly after the far-right commentator Charlie Kirk was murdered. Trump declared antifa to be a terrorist organization and has promised to investigate and take action against any leftwing groups he deems support terrorism.Amid this backdrop, tens of thousands of people have joined calls in recent weeks to prepare safety plans, train on how to serve as marshals for the protests and learn de-escalation tactics.Still, some people may decide to stay home because the threats against them are too great, including the fear of deportation for participating in peaceful protest.“They’re making choices like that every day when they decide whether to go to school or whether to go to work or whether it’s safe to go grocery shopping,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “Unfortunately, that’s the climate that the Trump administration is engendering aside from this particular day of activation, so I assume that people will make that calculus on this day as well. But I also think that the fact that people have to make that calculus is part of the reason for our protest.”Cities under occupation prepare for protestsTrump has declared war on Chicago, one of the several Democratic-run cities that have seen infusions of federal forces and increasingly militarized immigration agents on the ground. A judge last week blocked the deployment of national guard troops to the Chicago area for at least two weeks, but ramped up immigration enforcement has continued and Chicago is one of several cities that will have protests on Saturday despite the federal presence on the ground.It’s not clear what posture federal agents and military troops will take for the event. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott said he will deploy national guard troops to Austin, the capital city, though there will be protests in cities and towns throughout the state.In response to questions about whether immigration enforcement officials will be at protest sites, the Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said: “As it does every day, DHS law enforcement will enforce the laws of our nation.”In Portland, Oregon, where Trump sought to send in national guard troops but was blocked by the courts, protesters in recent days have leaned into the absurd, showing up naked on bikes, or in inflatable costumes. The Washington Post declared “inflatable frog suits” the “protest fashion statement of the year”.Portland organizers are planning Saturday events they have called joyful and family-friendly, including music and speakers. “Trump is sending militarized agents into our cities, muzzling voters and showering billionaires with handouts. Hard-working American families are left behind,” Dannelle D Stevens, who helps run Miller Street Indivisible, said in a statement. “That’s not democracy. That’s tyranny. And we will not meet it with silence. We refuse to give up.”Chicago, too, is fighting back, both in the courts and on the streets. People have sought to run immigration agents out of their neighborhoods. Some are using whistles to warn their neighbors when agents are nearby. Protests at detention facilities are ongoing, and agents have used teargas and pepper balls to deter protesters.On Saturday, the city is one of several sites serving as anchor protests, expected to be some of the day’s most attended.In June, more than 70,000 people attended Chicago’s main protest, overflowing Daley Plaza, said Denise Poloyac of Indivisible Chicago. On Saturday, the protest will be in the larger Grant Park, with a march planned to begin and end at the park’s Butler Field. It’s hard to predict turnout for a protest, but Poloyac said there had been a surge of interest and engagement in the event.Trump is “using our tax dollars to attack and declare war on our city and on the people that live here,” and locals should make it clear in large numbers that they don’t agree with it, Poloyac said. “We’re asking people to lean into their courage.”Organizers will have more than 150 safety marshals along the route and in the rally location, she said. The idea is that “we keep us safe.” Marshals from Indivisible Chicago and other organizations helped serve at other events, like Mexican Independence Day parades, to protect their community, she noted.People are “already taking risks” just by going about their daily tasks in the city now, Poloyac said. There’s also a sense of strength in numbers at a protest; when there are tens of thousands of people, it’s harder to single someone out, she said.“We’re hoping that people who didn’t come out in June are really angry now and upset and see what’s happening,” Poloyac said. “Those of us who do have more privilege need to come out and especially use that privilege to make our voices heard and to make it clear how unacceptable this is, what Trump and his agents are doing.”Republicans seek to undermineTrump’s allies, including members of Trump’s cabinet, have pre-emptively blamed No Kings for the government shutdown and smeared them as anti-American or paid protests, a common refrain against street protests.The House speaker, Mike Johnson, said the protests would be filled with the “pro-Hamas wing” of the Democrats and the “antifa people”. Tom Emmer, a Minnesota congressman, called the protests the “hate America rally” and said Democrats were beholden to the “terrorist wing of their party”. By claiming the protesters are part of antifa, the Trump administration could seek to go after people as domestic terrorists because of Trump’s recent executive order.Pam Bondi, the attorney general, said: “You’re seeing people out there with thousands of signs that all match, pre-bought, pre-put together. They are organized, and someone is funding it. We are going to get to the funding of antifa. We are going to get to the root of antifa, and we are going to find and charge all of those people who are causing this chaos.”Levin, of Indivisible, said the Trump administration was nervous about demonstrations that threaten its power, “so, in a weird way, it’s a compliment of our relevance and power.” These mass days of protest were often filled with “moms and grandmas and kids and dogs” and a joyful atmosphere, he said.The No Kings coalition affirms a commitment to non-violent action on all of its marketing materials, and organizers emphasize that their groups are all trained in tactics that enforce non-violence.“The violence is coming from the administration through their militarized crackdowns and through masked agents roaming our streets terrorizing communities, not coming from protesters,” Gilbert said. “The president wants us to be scared, but we will not be bullied into fear and silence, and it’s incredibly important for people to remain peaceful, to stand proud and to say what they care about, and not to be cowed by that fear.”What comes nextMass distributed protests help show that opposition is large and growing, in all corners of the country. They can help people find organizations or like-minded neighbors to work with on future actions, and they let people know that they aren’t alone in their dissatisfaction.But street protests alone are just one tool to counter the presidency. Other non-cooperation tactics, like economic boycotts or pressure campaigns, can help protesters achieve policy changes or get companies and pillars of civil society to stiffen their spines instead of caving to Trump.Levin cited the recent Disney boycott campaign after the company temporarily took Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show off the air as a successful model. This year’s Tesla Takedown boycotts and protests led to lower stock prices and reputational damage for Elon Musk’s company.The president of the Communications Workers of America union, Claude Cummings Jr, called on protesters to use No Kings to spread the word about a boycott of T-Mobile for its alignment with Trump, calling the phone company “some of the worst union busters in America”.“We know boycotts can work,” Cummings wrote in email this week.“We need to keep showing these companies that there’s a cost for embracing Trump’s un-American actions.”Gilbert, of Public Citizen, said protesters should think about how to take it one step further: “If you’ve never called your senator before, you do that. If you’ve never thought to boycott because of political issues, you do that. If you’ve never thought to post on social media about how you feel about militarization of your city, you do that. It’s really asking everyone to activate just a little bit more and to stay engaged.” More

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      US non-profits ‘lock arms’ amid Trump’s menacing of George Soros: ‘We will not be intimidated’

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      When Donald Trump named leftwing billionaire George Soros as the next on his growing list of targets for retribution, he was also targeting the long list of progressive causes that Soros funds.Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) network, now run by his son Alex, is a major funder of non-profits large and small, across sectors including democracy, voting rights, climate justice, racial justice, Palestinian rights and higher education. Public documentation of the group’s grant-making shows thousands of worldwide recipients receiving anywhere from small amounts to multimillion-dollar grants, and include major non-profit organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union.The US justice department has reportedly instructed US attorneys to come up with plans to investigate OSF as efforts to attack the left accelerate following the killing of rightwing commentator Charlie Kirk. In a presidential memo, Trump said the government needed to “investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence”, adding a comment that Soros was at “the top of everything”.“We have always and will continue to adhere to our rigorous compliance practices and operate within the bounds of the law while also refusing to surrender our legal and constitutional rights to free speech, association, due process, and the rule of law without challenge,” an OSF spokesperson said.The menacing of Soros comes as part of Trump’s wider agenda to defeat progressive non-profits. This month, sources told Reuters that the US president plans to deploy the nation’s counter-terrorism apparatus – including intelligence agencies, the justice department, the Internal Revenue Service and the treasury department – against some leftwing groups it claims are backing political violence.In May, Republican lawmakers also attempted to add language to Trump’s spending act, the so-called “big beautiful bill”, that could strip organizations deemed to be “terrorist-supporting” of their non-profit status. And in July Ted Cruz, a senator of Texas, introduced the Stop Financial Underwriting of Nefarious Demonstrations and Extremist Riots (Stop Funders) act, which would empower the justice department to prosecute groups that officials have deemed to be coordinating or supporting violent riots.Last month, Trump announced that he was designating “antifa” – the decentralized, leaderless antifascist movement – a “terrorist organization”.In its statement, OSF also said it “unequivocally” condemns terrorism and does not fund it, noting that its grantees “are expected to abide by human rights principles and comply with the law”. In the US, the organization noted, it funds work to strengthen democracy and uphold constitutional freedoms.View image in fullscreen“These accusations are politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with and undermine the first amendment right to free speech,” the statement said. “When power is abused to take away the rights of some people, it puts the rights of all people at risk.”Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that Soros’s money aids “leftwing terrorism” provided more specificity to a threat that liberal non-profits have been planning for since his election victory last year: a crackdown on their organizations and major Democratic funders designed to intimidate them from carrying out their work, waste their time with investigations and ultimately hobble the opposition.“When the White House or other government agencies, like the IRS, target non-profits for political reasons, it forces these orgs to spend their resources – staff focus, time, money – responding to attacks, instead of working towards their missions, and it threatens all the work they do,” said Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits.Soros has long been a shared foe for rightwing leaders worldwide, who often draw on antisemitic stereotypes in their attacks that paint him as a shadowy, foreign billionaire seeking to undermine western civilization by supporting liberal causes and minority rights.“For years, George Soros has been attacked by people who oppose open society values,” OSF’s spokesperson said. “They do not want to see a world where the human rights of all are respected, where democracies hold governments accountable, where there is free expression to promote pluralism and debate.”The Guardian talked with non-profits across sectors that Trump has deemed dangerous, and which OSF has funded, to understand how activism could be affected as attacks on Soros intensify and to see how they are reacting. Some groups have been directly named by rightwing Trump allies; others have not yet been targeted directly but are bracing for impact.PalestineThe justice department’s instructions to US attorneys to investigate OSF reportedly cited as evidence a report by Capital Research Center, a rightwing group monitoring the funding of liberal non-profits. The group’s head admitted to the New York Times this month that the paper does not include evidence that the Soros network had committed any crime.The 72-page report, which claims Open Society Foundations gave more than $80m to what it calls “pro-terror” groups, lists dozens of organizations, including some of the most prominent Palestinian-rights groups in the US and abroad.The report accuses the groups of “assisting domestic terrorism and criminality” by supporting US protest movements, of “endorsing” the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, or of working with “pro-terrorism” groups and activists. It lists some of the leading groups in the Palestine solidarity movement in the US, like Jewish Voice for Peace, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and the Center for Constitutional Rights. It also lists Palestinian human rights groups in Palestine and US groups working on other issues that have expressed solidarity with Palestinians, like the Movement for Black Lives and the Sunrise Movement.The OSF spokesperson called the Capital Research Center report “fundamentally flawed”.“It relies on incomplete data, guilt by association and irresponsibly equates protected political speech with terrorism,” they said. “The authors never contacted us for verification, and have quietly changed their inflammatory title accusing us of funding terrorist groups – effectively admitting their accusation was false. Open Society has rigorous compliance processes and only funds peaceful and lawful work advancing human rights, democracy, and justice. Our grantees are obliged to follow the law.”Stefanie Fox, Jewish Voice for Peace’s executive director, called the Capital Research Center report “paranoid, outlandish, baseless”.“The hyper focus on Soros plays on antisemitic conspiracy theories that suggest that a shadowy cabal of wealthy Jews are controlling politics and are responsible for society’s ills,” she added. The US Campaign for Palestinian Rights did not respond to a request for comment.View image in fullscreenWhile the accusations at the core of the report are largely baseless, the report does capture the landscape of civil society groups most prominent in the movement for Palestinian rights.“OSF has been funding a range of organizations working on Palestine solidarity. They’ve always been one of the big sources of funding for this group,” said Rebecca Vilkomerson, a former executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace and author of two reports about philanthropy and the Palestinian freedom movement.Vilkomerson noted that the movement has always been “hard to fund” – particularly in the US, due to its stigmatization and fear on the part of donors.Attacks on the funding of Palestinian solidarity groups preceded the Trump administration, said Leena Barakat, president and CEO of Women Donors Network. In 2024, Barakat, who is Palestinian American, launched the Block and Build Funder Coalition, a network of nearly 175 funders, after Republican legislators called on the treasury department to investigate the funders of a series of groups involved in what they described as “pro-Hamas, antisemitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American protests”.She also noted that while OSF has traditionally been one of the most significant institutional funders backing Palestine solidarity groups, the movement has never received much institutional backing, forcing it to diversify its funding streams.“So attacking that funding plays a big role, but does not significantly shift the capacity for the movement to do the work that the movement has always done,” she said.Still, Barakat cautioned: “The Palestinian movement – they are our canaries. What they test on the Palestinian movement are strategies that will eventually impact all other movements.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDemocracy and resistanceOSF funds a long list of non-profits focused on democracy issues, voting rights and civic engagement around the globe. In the US, these grants also include policy advocacy and electoral goals; some ballot measure campaigns have gotten support, as have political action committees.Some groups that have received funding from OSF are signed on as partners of a mass day of protest set for 18 October , dubbed No Kings, the second iteration of a mass demonstration across the US under that name. Of the more than 200 organizations who are part of the action, none has dropped out, despite Trump promising to crack down on peaceful opposition, said Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, the progressive resistance group. Making these actions as big as possible shows that non-profits and the people they serve won’t be intimidated by Trump’s threats.Indivisible, which started in 2017, has received OSF funds over the years, and the group hasn’t shied away from talking about it – they’ve been called “Soros-funded Astroturf” by many on the right since their inception, Levin said. Levin said it wouldn’t surprise him if Republican leaders tried to “make up some bogus shit” to go after the group.“I will say because I believe we are squeaky clean, and we believe that we’re under a microscope for our entire existence, we do basically everything we do out in the open,” he said. What worries him more is the potential for violence if they’re targeted.These threats of investigations or criminal charges take their toll, though – mostly in the form of wasting the time and money responding to them, which distracts from the organizations’ missions, part of Trump’s goal of hobbling the opposition. Many of the organizations are specifically tasked with protecting the people being targeted by Trump, including immigrants and LGBTQ+ people. Others are well-versed in the playbooks of autocratic leaders, so they haven’t been surprised by Trump’s threats against civic groups.View image in fullscreenThe Center for American Progress (CAP), a progressive thinktank that has received funding from OSF, said the Trump administration’s attacks on the funder are “the tip of the spear” and part of a systematic attempt to silence those who disagree with the president so he can consolidate power.“We’ve seen time and time again over the past nine months that the best way to stop Trump is to speak out and fight back,” said Ben Olinksy, CAP senior vice-president of structural reform and governance. “CAP is locking arms with a broad group of foundations and non-profits around the country who stand for the same principles we do around building a stronger and more democratic America.”Groups have learned lessons from watching other sectors – like higher education, media and the legal industry – capitulate to Trump, so they’ve been having conversations for months about how to band together and speak deliberately as a collective, the leader of one non-profit working in the democracy space said. Smaller organizations with fewer resources to handle legal challenges will be able to draw upon the legal network of the bigger organizations, said the leader, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about these attacks.“Because Soros has a very strong posture in fighting, that makes everybody else stiffen their spine who’s connected to them in any way,” they said.The groups have also learned that being quiet will not serve them, multiple leaders said. They have set their posture more as, if he goes after one of us, treat it like an attack on all and respond accordingly.“I think you’re in many ways safer the more out there you are,” Levin said. “Because if they can quietly come after you, they absolutely will.”Climate justiceSince re-taking the White House, Trump has often intimidated climate-focused groups. Around Earth Day in April, rumors swirled that he would revoke the tax-exempt status of green non-profits. Now, green organizations are concerned the targeting of Soros could put their budgets at risk.OSF last year committed $400m over eight years to sustainably grow global south economies and allotted additional funds to green infrastructure in the US. The foundations have also donated millions to climate and environmental non-profits with a wide range of political views and beliefs. They range from big green-policy organizations, to groups focused on uniting labor and environmental causes, to groups connecting survivors of climate disasters.The Trump administration’s crackdown will not deter OSF from working to promote “economic and climate prosperity”, the OSF spokesperson said.One beneficiary of OSF funding has been the progressive youth-led climate justice group Sunrise Movement, which was named in the Capital Research Center’s September report for its support of a legal defense fund associated with the decentralized movement to stop the controversial “Cop City” police-training facility in Atlanta. In 2018, Sunrise popularized calls for a Green New Deal. From 2019 to 2023, the group received $2.1m from OSF. Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, called Trump’s threats “textbook authoritarianism”.View image in fullscreen“Trump is targeting grassroots orgs in an attempt to silence peaceful dissent against his dangerous and unpopular agenda, whether it’s TV hosts or non-profit organizations like ours,” she said, referring to Trump’s attacks on late-night TV talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel.While the report baselessly refers to the Stop Cop City protesters as “terrorists”, most of the charges against them were dropped last month.The report is “misguided and dangerous”, Shiney-Ajay said.“Sunrise has always been a movement of young people that engages exclusively in peaceful, nonviolent activism advocating to stop the climate crisis and secure a livable future,” she said. “This so-called report from Capital Research Center is filled with baseless claims clearly designed to give the administration pretext to silence progressive organizations they view as threats to their agenda.”This month, Sunrise announced it will expand its focus from climate-justice efforts to broader actions to fend off authoritarianism.“Sunrise will not be intimidated into silence,” said Shiney -jay. “We will raise our voices against this authoritarian abuse of power and continue building our nonviolent movement to stop the climate crisis and win a Green New Deal.” More

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      A federal grand jury has indicted John Bolton, the former national security adviser in Donald Trump’s first term, on charges of mishandling and transmitting classified information.The indictment, filed in Maryland, appears to ultimately have had sign off from career prosecutors in the US attorney’s office there despite initial reluctance to bring a case before the end of the year.The 18-count indictment against Bolton involves 8 counts of unlawfully transmitting national defense information and ten counts of retaining classified information under the Espionage Act, according to the 26-page indictment.A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected the Trump administration’s request to lift a lower court’s order that temporarily blocks the deployment of National Guard troops in Illinois during its appeal.The ruling allows a temporary restraining order against the deployment issued by US District judge April Perry in Chicago last week to remain in place.A three-judge panel of the Chicago-based 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals, made up of judges nominated by George HW Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, concluded that that “the facts do not justify the President’s actions.”Trump had asserted the power to deploy National Guard troops in Illinois after claiming federal immigration enforcement officer had faced violent protests as they attempted to arrest people.“Immigration arrests and deportations have proceeded apace in Illinois over the past year, and the administration has been proclaiming the success of its current efforts to enforce immigration laws in the Chicago area,” the court said.The court said there had likely been a violation of Illinois’ constitutional right to sovereignty, made worse by the fact that Texas National Guard troops were sent into the state.The court did pause a portion of Perry’s order that had barred the federalization of Illinois National Guard troops, allowing the troops to remain under federal control.The Trump administration announced Thursday that it is urging US employers to create new fertility benefit options to cover in vitro fertilization and other infertility treatments.In an announcement from the Oval Office, Donald Trump also said his administration had cut a deal with the drug manufacturer EMD Serono to lower the cost of one of its fertility drugs and list the drug on the government website TrumpRx.The justice department says that Donald Trump’s former national security advisor, John Bolton, has been charged with 10 counts of unlawful retention of national defense information and eight counts of transmission of that information.The indictment alleges that Bolton used personal email and messaging app accounts to send documents classified as high as Top Secret.The documents contained intelligence about what the government terms “future attacks, foreign adversaries, and foreign-policy relations.”The indictment also alleges that Bolton, like Trump after he left office in 2021, kept secret documents in his home. The documents Bolton kept included “intelligence on an adversary’s leaders as well as information revealing sources and collections used to obtain statements on a foreign adversary,” the government alleges.“Anyone who abuses a position of power and jeopardizes our national security will be held accountable,” Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, said. “No one is above the law.”When Donald Trump was indicted for the same crime by special counsel Jack Smith in 2023, in an indictment that cited evidence that Trump showed a ghostwriter working for his former chief of staff Mark Meadows “a four-page report” detailing US plans for striking Iran.According to audio of the conversation obtained by CNN, Trump even acknowledged that the document he showed the writer was “highly confidential, secret information” he could not make public because it was “still a secret”.A federal grand jury has indicted John Bolton, the former national security adviser in Donald Trump’s first term, on charges of mishandling and transmitting classified information.The indictment, filed in Maryland, appears to ultimately have had sign off from career prosecutors in the US attorney’s office there despite initial reluctance to bring a case before the end of the year.The 18-count indictment against Bolton involves 8 counts of unlawfully transmitting national defense information and ten counts of retaining classified information under the Espionage Act, according to the 26-page indictment.John Bolton, who served as Donald Trump’s national security advisor during his first term, but turned into a fierce Trump critic, has reportedly been indicted on federal charges by a grand jury in Maryland, officials tell MSNBC and CNN.At the White House a reporter asked Trump for his reaction to the news that Bolton was just indicted by a grand jury in Maryland.The president said: “I didn’t know that. You’re telling me for the first time, but I think he’s a bad person. I think he’s a bad guy.”“That’s the way it goes, right? That’s the way it goes,” said the president who vowed retribution on his political enemies while campaigning to be restored to office last year.Bolton becomes the third Trump critic to be indicted by his justice department in the past month, along with James Comey, the former FBI director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general.Bolton has reportedly been under investigation for retaining classified information after leaving office, and showing it to associates.The United States is “on a trajectory” toward authoritarian rule, according to a stark new intelligence-style assessment by former US intelligence and national security officials, who warn that democratic backsliding is accelerating under the Trump administration – and may soon become entrenched without organized resistance.The report, titled Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline, was released on Thursday by the Steady State, a network of more than 340 former officers of the CIA, NSA, state department, and other national-security agencies.“These are people who have seen these indicators develop in countries that shifted dramatically away from democracy towards authoritarianism,” Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior intelligence official who spent two decades at the NSA, told reporters on Thursday. “And we’re seeing those things happening in our country today.”The analysts conclude with “moderate to high confidence” that the US is moving toward what scholars call “competitive authoritarianism”, a system in which elections and courts continue to function, but are “systematically manipulated” to consolidate executive power and weaken checks and balances. According to the assessment, these trends are increasingly visible in the US, as part of a broader effort by Donald Trump in his second term to “ensure loyalty and ideological conformity” across the federal government.Amid escalating tensions with Venezuela, and US military strikes on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean, the US admiral who commands military forces in Latin America will step down at the end of this year, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth announced on social media.The admiral, Alvin Holsey, just took over the US military’s Southern Command late last year for a position that normally lasts three years.A source told Reuters that there had been tension between him and Hegseth and questions about whether he would be fired in the days leading up to the announcement.The New York Times reports that an unnamed US official said that Holsey “had raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats.”Hegseth, in his social media post, did not disclose the reason for Holsey’s plan “to retire at year’s end.”Hegseth’s post noted that Holsey began his career “through the NROTC program at Morehouse College in 1988.” Morehouse is a private, historically black college in Atlanta.In February, Donald Trump abruptly fired the air force general CQ Brown Jr as chair of the joint chiefs of staff, sidelining a history-making Black fighter pilot and respected officer as part of a campaign to purge the military of leaders who support diversity and equity in the ranks.In 2021, Holsey recorded a public service announcement urging Black Americans to take the covid-19 vaccine.Trump on his social media site said he’s “outraged” by a vote planned on Friday by the International Maritime Organization to impose a global fee on the carbon emissions produced by container ships.“The United States will NOT stand for this Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping, and will not adhere to it in any way, shape, or form,” the president wrote on Truth Social.He added: “We will not tolerate increased prices on American Consumers OR, the creation of a Green New Scam Bureaucracy to spend YOUR money on their Green dreams. Stand with the United States, and vote NO in London tomorrow!”The US Chamber of Commerce is suing the Trump administration over the $100,000 fee imposed on H-1B visa petitions.The country’s biggest business lobbying group argues that the new fee is unlawful because it overrides provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that govern the H-1B program, including the requirement that fees be based on the costs incurred by the government in processing visas.Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s chief policy officer, said in a statement:“The new $100,000 visa fee will make it cost-prohibitive for US employers, especially start-ups and small and midsize businesses, to utilize the H-1B program, which was created by Congress expressly to ensure that American businesses of all sizes can access the global talent they need to grow their operations here in the U.S.”The University of Pennsylvania has become the latest educational institution to reject the White House’s proposed preferential funding compact, according to an email to the University community.“Earlier today, I informed the US Department of Education that Penn respectfully declines to sign the proposed Compact,” President J Larry Jameson wrote in a message to the Penn community Thursday, adding that his university did provide feedback to the department on the proposal.The “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” is a proposed agreement from the Trump administration that would impose restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and limits on international student enrolment.Penn’s refusal makes it the third of the nine institutions that had initially been offered the deal to publicly turn it down. No institution has agreed to sign the compact so far.Brown University announced it had rejected the offer Wednesday, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did the same last Friday. After MIT’s rejection, the Trump administration said the compact was open to all colleges and universities that want to sign it.Senate Democrats blocked debate on a defense appropriations bill on the floor earlier this afternoon, which was seen as a test for whether regular individual bipartisan funding bills can gain any traction despite the shutdown, now dragging into its third week.The bill, which passed out of committee with strong bipartisan support earlier this year, needed 60 votes to advance, but the final vote was 50 to 44. Several Democrats including Jeanne Shaheen voted to advance the bill.Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer objected to considering the bill without also voting on the annual labor, health and human services appropriations bill.“Right now, the only thing that is on the floor is just the defense bill. [John] Thune needs unanimous consent to add anything else to it. We don’t even know if he’ll get that,” Schumer told reporters earlier ahead of the vote.
      It’s always been unacceptable to Democrats to do the defense bill without other bills that have so many things that are important to the American people, in terms of healthcare, in terms of housing, in terms of safety.
      Senate majority leader John Thune expressed frustration that they couldn’t take that first step and said the optics were bad for the Democrats.
      If they want to stop the defense bill, I don’t think it’s very good optics for them. Particularly since this is just getting on it, and they would have multiple opportunities after this to block it if they want to.
      “I believe it is critical that the Senate and Congress return to a bipartisan appropriations approach and try to begin rebuilding trust,” Shaheen said in a statement after voting. “This vote would allow us to consider Senate appropriations bills which were passed out of committee with overwhelming bipartisan support.”The other Democratic senators who voted with Republicans were Catherine Cortez Masto and John Fetterman. Majority leader John Thune changed his vote to “no” so that procedurally he can bring the bill up for consideration again.Cortez Masto and Fetterman have previously voted for the GOP’s House-passed bill to reopen the government while Shaheen has been at the heart of talks with GOP colleagues about finding a way to end the shutdown.Vladimir Putin told Donald Trump in their phone call today that supplying US Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine would harm the peace process and damage US-Russia ties, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters.As I said earlier, this comes a day before Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s meeting with Trump at the White House tomorrow in which he is set to push for more US military support, including the crucial long-range offensive missiles.Ushakov said the planned new summit between the two presidents will be preceded by a phone call between US secretary of state Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in the coming days.The Putin-Trump call took place at Russia’s initiative, Ushakov added.In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump has just said:
      If Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the Deal, we will have no choice but to go in and kill them.
      It comes after Hamas fighters have been captured on video in recent days ramping up their presence and reasserting the group’s authority by executing members of rival groups on the streets of Gaza.This is Trump’s clearest indication on the matter yet, after giving mixed messages in recent days, initially saying the violence “didn’t bother me much” as Hamas was clearing up “gangs”. Yesterday he appeared to concede that it could be “gangs plus” when asked if there was a possibility that Hamas was killing innocent civilians.“They will disarm, and if they don’t do so, we will disarm them, and it’ll happen quickly and perhaps violently,” Trump also said yesterday, though, as with the statement today, he hasn’t specified how he would follow through on his threat.A reminder that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is heading to the White House tomorrow to push for more US military support, including potential long-range offensive missiles. He will no doubt be nervous by Trump’s positive tone following his call with Putin.Trump has said he could supply the long-range weapons to Ukraine if Putin fails to come to the negotiating table. In its latest barrage, Russia launched more than 300 drones and 37 missiles to target infrastructure across Ukraine in overnight attacks, Zelenskyy said. Kyiv has ramped up its own attacks on Russian targets, including an oil refinery in the Saratov region today.Russia has been hitting Ukraine’s energy and power facilities for consecutive winters as the war drags into its fourth year.In the latest warnings to Russia, Trump said yesterday that Indian PM Narendra Modi had pledged to stop buying oil from Russia, and that the administration would push China to do the same. India has not confirmed any such commitment, though Reuters reported some Indian refiners are preparing to cut Russian oil imports, with expectations of a gradual reduction.US defense secretary Pete Hegseth said yesterday that Washington would “impose costs on Russia for its continued aggression” unless the war ends. More