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      IRS to furlough nearly half its workforce due to government shutdown

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      The Internal Revenue Service said it will furlough nearly half of its employees – about 34,000 workers – due to the government shutdown, making it significantly harder for US taxpayers to receive assistance.In a statement on Wednesday, the IRS said that “due to the lapse in appropriations”, it would begin its furlough on 8 October for “everyone except already-identified excepted and exempt employees”.“Employee who are not exempt or excepted are furloughed and placed in a non-pay and non-duty status until further notice; however, all employees should plan to report to work for their next tour of duty,” the IRS said, adding that employees would be given up to four hours to close out work requirements and receive formal furlough notification.The furlough will leave only 53.6%, or 39,870 IRS employees, working as the government remains shut down.In the standard furlough letter provided to all affected employees, David Traynor, acting IRS human capital officer, confirmed that furloughed employees cannot work and will not be paid during the shutdown.The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents IRS employees, condemned the decision, with its president, Doreen Greenwald, saying on Wednesday: “Due to the government shutdown the American people lost access to many vital services provided by the IRS.”The statement continued: “Expect increased wait times, backlogs and delays implementing tax law changes as the shutdown continues. Taxpayers around the country will now have a much harder time getting the assistance they need, just as they get ready to file their extension returns due next week.”The IRS’s decision to furlough its employees comes a day after a White House memo suggested that furloughed workers may not receive back pay, despite the 2019 law Trump signed during his first term, during the last government shutdown; the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 (Gefta) ensures government workers would be automatically paid after future shutdowns.In his letter, Traynor said that “employees must be compensated on the earliest date possible after the lapse ends, regardless of scheduled pay dates”. More

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      NHS could pay 25% more for medicines under plan to end row with drugmakers and Trump

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      Ministers are preparing to raise the amount the NHS pays pharmaceutical firms for medicines by up to 25% after weeks of intensive talks with the Donald Trump administration and drugmakers.Labour has drawn up fresh proposals to end a standoff with the industry over drug pricing, including changing the cost-effectiveness thresholds under which new medications are assessed for use on the NHS, according to industry sources.The row has been cited as one of the reasons why big companies in the sector, including MSD (known as Merck in the US) and AstraZeneca, have cancelled or paused investments in the UK in recent weeks, while ramping up investments in the US.The Department of Health and Social Care is in a standoff with the Treasury and No 10 on how to fund the deal, with Downing Street resisting pressure to commit new funds for medicines in next month’s budget.The Liberal Democrats immediately criticised the move, first reported by Politico, asking how much it would cost and whether it would lead to cuts elsewhere in the NHS.The science secretary, Patrick Vallance, has publicly acknowledged that the UK’s spending on new medicines needs to rise from 9% of overall NHS spend, which is below drug spending in the US and many other European countries.The main element of the plan is thought to include raising the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) cost-effectiveness threshold by 25%, which has been unchanged since 1999. Under current rules, Nice considers a medicine costing between £20,000 and £30,000 for every extra year of good-quality life it provides a patient to represent good value for money for the NHS.The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry on Tuesday reiterated its call for “urgent action” on drug pricing, saying the Nice threshold should be increased as soon as possible in line with inflation to between £40,000 and £50,000, and index-linked thereafter. Making this change would, over time, lead to a greater share of the NHS budget being allocated to medicines, and additional funding would be needed to support this.In talks over the summer, Wes Streeting, the health secretary, proposed a deal that would save the pharmaceutical industry £1bn over three years, with billions more promised over the coming decade.But the industry argued that it was forecast to make repayments totalling £13.5bn over the same period and has been demanding about £2.5bn a year extra.A government source said ministers were prepared to spend more on medicines as they increasingly became more ​innovative and preventive. They cited the example of weight loss injections – which are forecast to save the NHS billions of pounds in treating obesity and associated health problems – and trials for cancer-preventing vaccines.The patient-led campaign group Just Treatment called it “deeply troubling news for patients and the NHS”, adding: “We are at risk of importing America’s disastrous drug pricing crisis.” It called on the government to “take steps to establish a system for developing and manufacturing medicines that puts patients first”.The NHS spent £20.6bn on medicines and medical devices in 2023-24, up from £19.2bn the year before.Trump has put pressure on pharma companies to lower their drug prices in the US and increase them elsewhere, accusing other countries of “freeloading” on high US prices. Nearly two weeks ago, he threatened to impose 100% tariffs on pharmaceutical imports from 1 October to ramp up the pressure, although these did not materialise.In response to pressure from Trump, Pfizer and several other US and European companies, including the UK’s biggest drugmaker, AstraZeneca, have started to cut their prices in the US and to sell directly to patients to cut out costly middlemen.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn return for reducing its prices by up to 85%, Pfizer won a three-year reprieve from tariffs last week, which was seen as a bellwether for the rest of the sector.Last week, Varun Chandra, Starmer’s main business adviser, flew to Washington DC for talks with senior US officials and drug companies, the latest in a series of visits to try to hammer out a deal on pricing and tariffs.A UK government spokesperson said: “We’ve secured a landmark economic partnership with the US that includes working together on pharmaceutical exports from the UK whilst improving conditions for pharmaceutical companies here.“We’re now in advanced discussions with the US administration to secure the best outcome for the UK, reflecting our strong relationship and the opportunities from close partnership with our pharmaceutical industry.”However, the Lib Dem health and social care spokesperson, Helen Morgan, said: “It beggars belief that the government is bending to a bullying US president having told patients for years that life-saving new drugs are unaffordable.“Ministers must come clean about how much this move will cost and whether it will be funded by cuts elsewhere in the NHS. They should also lay their plans before parliament without delay so they can be properly scrutinised. It increasingly feels like this government puts the whims of Trump before everything else – even our precious NHS.”The pharma sector’s negotiations with the UK government over drug pricing under a voluntary scheme broke down without an agreement in late August. Since then, MSD has abandoned plans for a £1bn research centre in London and AstraZeneca and New York-based Eli Lilly have paused projects, taking total pharma investments that are on hold or cancelled to nearly £2bn since the start of this year.One industry source said: “We are relieved to see a recognisable change in sentiment and language from August.” More

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      Why Tony Blair just can’t kick the habit of imperial interference in the Middle East | Oliver Eagleton

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      “There are two types of politician,” Tony Blair observed in 2012. “Reality creators and reality managers.” While postwar politics was generally a matter of steady management, he claimed, the emerging order called for more creativity, “both in the economy and foreign policy”. Only a particular type of visionary leader was fit for the task.More than a decade later, Blair has now joined forces with the pre-eminent reality-creator, Donald Trump, to draft a hallucinatory 20-point plan for Gaza. It aims to turn the devastated Strip into what seems to resemble a colonial protectorate: cleansed of armed conflict, buzzing with development projects and a “special economic zone” through which foreign capital can flow, and overseen by an international “board of peace” with Trump himself as chair.The authors of the programme have not explained how they intend to impose it on a resistant population, or how they will persuade Hamas to disarm and concede defeat. So there is a high likelihood that the Blair-Trump fantasy will remain just that. Whatever its fortunes, though, it is a clear reflection of our historical moment, representing the most recent mutation of an imperial worldview that has already left a trail of destruction across the Middle East.For Blair, “the economy and foreign policy” have long been entwined. His military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan tried to spread the virtues of the market to supposedly backward nations. The privatisation of resources created new investment opportunities, while a wide range of profiteers, from weapons dealers to security contractors, made a killing off the wars themselves.Upon leaving office in 2007, Blair immediately took up a post as Middle East envoy for the so-called Quartet: the United Nations, European Union, United States and Russia. His work in Palestine displayed the same unerring faith in free enterprise. He proposed a series of “industrial parks” to attract foreign investment, advocated eccentric agribusiness and tourism schemes, and promoted other ventures that raised questions about possible conflicts of interest: while being paid £2m per year as a JP Morgan adviser, for example, he was accused of using his Quartet role to advance the interests of JP Morgan clients. (Blair denied the claims, insisting he did not know about the links between the bank he worked for and the companies it served.)As envoy, Blair often bypassed or rejected political solutions – fighting vigorously against Palestinian attempts to win statehood at the UN – and instead treated economics as the route to progress. His diplomatic activities seemed to be based on the notion that peace would naturally follow prosperity. If securing the latter was the task of the intrepid statesman, then strong ties to the business sector could perhaps be framed as an asset.Yet Blair’s tenure in the Middle East brought no diminution of the conflict. In 2012, a senior Palestinian official gave a succinct assessment of his record: “Useless, useless, useless.” Still, undeterred by failure and fond of dramatic political comebacks, the former prime minister now appears to be seeking to apply the same logic to Gaza. Since the early months of the war, he has reportedly been crafting his plan for the “day after”.Staff from his thinktank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), participated in a project that appeared to endorse ethnic cleansing in the territory and outlined what could be built atop its mass graves: a “Trump riviera”, an “Elon Musk smart manufacturing zone”, “regional datacentres”. Although Blair’s organisation claimed it had no meaningful involvement in the plan, and rejected the idea of displacing Palestinians, there are a number of continuities with his own blueprint, details of which were soon leaked to the press.Drawn up with the help of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the 21-page document suggests reconstructing Gaza through “public-private partnerships”, forged by a “commercially driven authority, led by business professionals and tasked with generating investable projects with real financial returns”. Hamas would be demobilised and a small unelected executive would be installed. This would include Blair himself in a prominent role, plus “leading international figures with executive and financial expertise” and “at least one qualified Palestinian representative (potentially from the business or security sector)”. An international stabilisation force would meanwhile put down “threats to public order”.View image in fullscreenBlair met Kushner and Trump in the White House on 27 August and his proposals got a warm welcome from the president. They have since been refined and repackaged as the Trump “peace plan”. As with previous versions of the initiative, the emphasis is on creating a Gaza that is “conducive to attracting investment”, and in which Israel will continue to reign supreme. Blair is primed to take charge of governing the Strip until some unspecified future point when day-to-day administration may be returned to a “reformed” Palestinian Authority.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe practical issues are glaring. Which states would be irresponsible enough to send troops to serve this novel dictatorship? How can it hope to sustain itself with no mandate nor legitimacy? Even more striking, however, is the extent to which the plan signals the overlap between Blair’s ethos and Trump’s.It is not unreasonable to suggest that Blair might see a business opportunity beneath the rubble of Gaza. To figure out who may benefit, we can look at his network of paymasters. Since 2021, Larry Ellison, founder of the tech company Oracle, has donated or pledged £257m to the TBI. The thinktank has, in turn, transformed into what one commentator has called an “Oracle dealership”: promoting the company’s software around the globe, including in impoverished countries where it has been criticised for potentially “trapping” and “indebting” users. Ellison is also a prominent supporter of Israel who has given millions to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and, according to Haaretz, once offered Benjamin Netanyahu a seat on the Oracle board. Were Blair to rule over Gaza – perhaps establishing “regional datacentres” in line with the TBI-linked plan – it is possible that Ellison could wield major influence.The TBI has also received huge sums from the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, while Blair has been given a lucrative advisory contract by the UAE state-owned investment firm Mubadala. All three states have readily endorsed the plan for Gaza. Once the besieged enclave is opened for investment, they may well be first in line. Blair’s work for these petro-monarchies tallies with his involvement in the fossil fuel industry, having taken cash from a BP-led consortium, the oil company PetroSaudi and the South Korean UI Energy Corporation, which has interests in the Middle East. Given that Israel has recently granted new licences to explore for oil and gas off the Mediterranean coast, such connections could prove significant later down the line.In one sense, then, this “peace plan” could simply be read as an extension of Blair’s belief in market-led development. Yet this chapter in the annals of colonialism also has a uniquely Trumpian twist. Visions of a new world order that underpinned earlier regime-change projects are gone. Here politics is reduced to dealmaking, grand strategy to crude self-interest. The fusion of public power and private profit is complete. Blair may be creating new realities, but few would want to inhabit them.

      Oliver Eagleton is an associate editor at the New Left Review and author of The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right

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      A rightwing late-night show may have bombed – but the funding behind it is no laughing matter

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      A group of conservative donors spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a rightwing version of late-night talkshows like the Tonight Show and the Late Show, leaked documents reveal, in a further indication of the right’s ongoing efforts to overhaul American culture.News of the effort to pump conservative viewpoints into the mainstream comes as entertainment shows and the media at large are under severe threat in the US. In September, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was taken off the air, under pressure from the Trump administration, after Kimmel’s comments after the killing of Charlie Kirk, while Donald Trump has launched multiple lawsuits against TV networks and news organizations.Four pilot episodes, each of which has been watched by the Guardian, were made of the rightwing chatshow. It was promoted by the Ziklag group, a secretive Christian nationalist organization, which aims to reshape culture to match its version of Christianity. In an email in 2022, Ziklag – which ProPublica reported spent $12m to elect Trump last year – urged its members to stump up money for the project, called the Talk Show With Eric Metaxas.“For too long, the late-night talkers on network tv have filled the airwaves with progressive rants and outright mockery of anyone who espouses traditional American values,” the Ziklag email read.The Talk Show With Eric Metaxas, Ziklag wrote, will “change that forever”. The email said the show needed $400,000 to $500,000 to film five pilot episodes, “which will be presented to digital distributors, networks and tv ownership groups”.The Guardian sat through nearly four hours of the Talk Show, and found it to be an almost exact copy of existing late-night shows, just worse: with hack jokes about tired issues and has-been, conservative guests. The show was never picked up, presumably to the chagrin of Ziklag and its investors, who had lofty expectations.Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video. Here is a link to the video instead.“Spoiler alert! The secular elites who currently reign over late-night tv are about to find out the joke’s on them!” Ziklag’s pitch email read. It lauded Metaxas, a conservative radio host and author who was an eager proponent of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, claiming: “His comedic bent has gone largely unnoticed until now that is…”Unfortunately, across the four pilots, Metaxas’s comedic bent was noticeable only by its absence.“Big news in the world of show business,” Metaxas began the first episode. “Harrison Ford will be returning for a fifth Indiana Jones movie. Yeah. In this one Harrison will find an ancient artifact … by looking in the mirror.”There were a few titters from the audience, and scattered applause. Metaxas, appearing nervous, continued with the one-liners:“Barbie’s longtime companion, Ken, just turned 61 years old. Yeah. And he said the perfect gift for his birthday would be to finally get a prostate.”This time there were some audible groans. Metaxas stuck at it.“In India, doctors removed 526 teeth from a seven-year-old boy’s mouth,” he chortled. “The boy is recovering nicely. However, the Tooth Fairy declared bankruptcy.”Ziklag claimed the show would welcome “guests who are routinely shadow banned on other talk shows”, and quoted Metaxas as saying: “It’s kind of like Stalin has air-brushed these people out of the culture.”But the common theme among the guests was that they had been naturally phased out of existing talkshows due to their irrelevance.The first episode featured an exclusive interview with Carrot Top, the 60-year-old prop comedian. Carrot Top showed Metaxas some of his props, including a bottle of Bud Light that had a torch in the bottom of it and a dinner plate that had a hole in it. Carrot Top managed to say absolutely nothing of interest during the three-minute tête-à-tête, before Metaxas cut back to the studio.“Tonight’s show is loaded with talent,” Metaxas announced to the live audience. The guests included a TikToker – “for our generation, Tic Tac was a breath mint”, Metaxas quipped – Tammy Pescatelli, a comedian who has been absent from the limelight for at least a decade; and Danny Bonaduce, best known for his work on the 1970s sitcom the Partridge Family.Throughout the episodes – as Metaxas sang a song with a terrified-looking Victoria Jackson, a self-described conservative Christian who was a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1986 to 1992 and has claimed Barack Obama is an “Islamic terrorist” – and as he continued with awful jokes about some scientists who had developed a robot that could build furniture but “cannot promise that the robot won’t swear”, it was hard to see what the point of this was.In its email, Ziklag said it was offering the opportunity to invest as part of the “Media Mountain”, a reference to the Seven Mountain Mandate, a theology popular among the Christian right. The theology proposes that Christians should seek to take over seven spheres of influence in public life: religion, the government, the media, education, culture, entertainment and business.Chris Himes, who produced the Talk Show, said the show was not intended to be a “rightwing late-night show”. The aim, Himes said, was “to create a broad, throwback late-night program for the entire country – not just one side”.“These are not partisan or ‘right-wing’ shows. Think Letterman or Dick Cavett in tone: humor first, with no space for snark or ‘clapter’,” he said in an email.“Sadly, much of late night over the past decade has shifted from being genuinely funny to becoming a vehicle for tribal signaling – even occasionally straying into messaging far beyond comedy. We believe the country deserves something better.”Himes added: “To be clear, a ‘right-wing’ late-night show would be a terrible idea. What we’re building is something more essential: a genuinely funny, unifying alternative.”In the pilot episodes, there were guests who were known for rightwing politics, but Metaxas largely didn’t ask them about those politics. In episode three, he seemed to decide he needed to at least say a bit of something to satisfy the rightwing donors funding this enterprise, but that came in the form of going over well-trodden ground about liberals.“Botanists have discovered a meat-eating plant in Canada,” Metaxas said in his intro. “Researchers determined that the plant started eating meat because it just got tired of explaining its vegan lifestyle.”He continued: “Detroit’s sanitation workers – I just read this – they’re threatening to go on strike. Detroit’s mayor said not to worry, because Detroit will continue to look and smell exactly the same.”Another quip ventured into current affairs: “Gas costs a fortune. It’s insane how much it costs. And who would have thought that the best deal at the Shell station would ever be the $3 microwave burrito?”Ziklag’s pitch to investors had promised big-name guests. It didn’t deliver apart from an interview – heavily touted by Metaxas – with film-maker Ron Howard. The interview turned out to be from a press junket, where directors or actors sit in a room for eight hours and basically anyone with a press pass can schedule time to question them.It’s unlikely Howard knew he was appearing on what Ziklag described as a “faith-friendly, late night alternative”, but that’s perhaps irrelevant, given networks clearly passed on what is a confused, drab copy of shows that are actually successful.But while Metaxas’s effort to shoehorn a conservative show into the mainstream may have been lamentable, the fact that wealthy rightwingers are attempting to do so should be cause for concern, given the threat television is under from Trump.Earlier this year, CBS scrapped the Late Show with Stephen Colbert – Colbert had repeatedly mocked Trump – weeks after CBS’s parent company settled a lawsuit with Trump. Trump has also called for late-night show hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, who have both criticized the president, to be fired, while the president has overseen NPR and PBS being stripped of funding, having decried “biased media”.The Talk Show was a terrible product, memorable only for dreadful humor and snooze-inducing interviews. In the current climate, however, it serves as a reminder that the right wing is waging a well-funded war on the media that is unlikely to end soon. More

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      ‘I don’t feel safe any more’: Dearborn’s Arab Americans on rising Islamophobia

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      Amirah Sharhan recalls it being a regular fall afternoon in October 2024.The Yemeni American, who had been living in the Dearborn and Detroit area for four years, was preparing dinner while her mother took Amirah’s seven-year-old daughter, Saida, to a nearby playground to play with her friends.But when the door of their home slammed open a little after 3pm, everything changed.Saida rushed in, holding a napkin against her neck. When Amirah moved it away, she saw a long, deep cut across her daughter’s neck. A man had approached her on the playground, grabbed her head and slit her throat with a knife.“My mind flipped. I didn’t know where I was,” Amirah recalls.“My son was screaming: ‘Don’t die! Don’t die!’ I didn’t even know how to dial 911.”The accused, 73-year-old Gary Lansky, who lives near the park, was caught shortly afterwards and in January was found competent to stand trial for assault with intent to murder and other charges.“For a mom to see her daughter’s throat open. It was terrifying,” says Amirah.“He’s a 73-year-old. How could he do that to a little child?”Saida received 20 stitches and is scarred mentally and physically. Most of her nights are still filled with nightmares.Amirah is convinced her daughter and mother were targeted for being Muslims; the attack happened two days after the first anniversary of Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel and her grandmother was the only visibly Muslim person in the park.That the accused was not ultimately charged with committing hate crimes has angered the local Muslim and Arab American communities who have been feeling abandoned and afraid since 7 October 2023. Those sentiments increased support for Donald Trump, but some are reassessing that support amid the continued killing in Gaza and ongoing threats against their community.Islamophobic attacks across the US have risen precipitously in the two years since Hamas’s attack on Israel, which killed about 1,200 people, and the ensuing destruction Israel has unleashed on Gaza that has killed more than 67,000 people and devastated the Strip. Last year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) recorded 8,658 complaints, a record.Reports of antisemitism have also surged in recent years – a report released on Sunday found that more than half of American Jews say they have faced antisemitism in the past year. Data is difficult to come by because some sources tracking antisemitism don’t make clear distinctions between anti-Zionism and anti-Jewish hate. However, synagogues have widely reported increasing their security budgets over violent threats, and Jewish institutions are especially unnerved after two people were killed in an attack on a UK synagogue last week.“Since the Pittsburgh synagogue bombing of 2018, in which 11 Jews were killed at worship, there have been anti-Jewish attacks in Poway, California (at a synagogue), Jersey City, New Jersey (at a kosher grocery store), at a rabbi’s house in Monsey, New York, and at the Coleyville, Texas, synagogue,” Mark Oppenheimer, of the John C Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, wrote in an email.While Muslim and Jewish communities face attacks that are often connected to anger over the Israel-Gaza war, a tense political climate in the US appears to be encouraging violence more broadly. After a recent shooting at a Mormon church in Michigan, the Washington Post reported mounting anxiety on the part of groups across religions. “No matter what level of violence you look at, violence against faith-based organizations is increasing,” said Carl Chinn, head of the Faith Based Security Network, a non-profit association of security professionals.But Dearborn, the US’s first majority-Arab-American city, home to many residents who have lost family members to Israeli bombardments in Gaza and Lebanon, seems to attract particular vitriol.Last month, a mosque in neighboring Dearborn Heights received a call from a Texas man threatening to burn down Dearborn and its mosques. On 23 September, a Virginia man was arraigned in court on terrorism charges for threatening on YouTube to attack a mosque in Dearborn.In August, a man in a neighboring city was arrested for writing on social media that he would like to see marchers at a Muslim religious event taking place in Dearborn that month be shot. Dearborn officials have also recently been targeted by pro-Israel groups.View image in fullscreenResidents report growing racism platformed on rightwing media outlets. In recent weeks, Fox News has devoted significant attention to Dearborn, highlighting, for example, noise complaints about mosques and an alleged dispute between a local pastor and the city’s Lebanese American mayor.Arab Americans have come in for criticism in some quarters for voting for Trump in last November’s election. In Dearborn, a city of 106,000 people of whom about 55% have Arab ancestry, Trump won 42.5% of the presidential election vote, more than any other candidate, helping deliver Michigan, a crucial swing state, to the president. Arab American leaders in Michigan were incensed by the Democratic party and former presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.Now, interviews with some of those who backed Trump last year suggest that support may be eroding.Faye Nemer, the founder of the Dearborn-based Mena American Chamber of Commerce, which works to build economic and cultural exchanges between organizations in the Middle East and US, says that many among the Arab American community who backed Trump in last year’s election did so on the premise that he would be a president of peace. She was among a cohort of Arab Americans who welcomed and organized Trump’s visit to Dearborn just days before the presidential election last November.“We’re cautiously optimistic about this ceasefire deal [but] it’s become somewhat problematic – what was promised during the campaign cycle versus what we’re seeing occur on the ground,” she says.View image in fullscreenNemer says she believes there’s a shifting of opinion in the Arab American community. “I think they are in for a rude awakening come the midterm elections,” she said of the Republican party. “There should be some introspection there.”But in addition to fear and disappointment, there is also defiance.On Saturday, dozens of people marched in Dearborn’s streets in protest of the ongoing bombardment of Gaza and the detention of members of the Global Sumud Flotilla by Israel. At a convention held in Dearborn last month, Michigan’s lieutenant-governor, Garlin Gilchrist, called Israel’s war on Gaza a genocide, becoming one of a tiny but growing number of US politicians to do so. Gilchrist is running for governor of Michigan as a Democrat in next year’s election.In the meantime, Saida Sharhan has had to move to a new school because of her former school’s proximity to the site of the attack. The park that’s a short distance from her home where she once played with her friends is now off limits.“Two days ago, she woke up me and her father, screaming. She was shaking,” Amirah, her mother, says.“She told me it’s the same dream all the time – the park is full of blood and [the attacker] telling her: ‘I’m coming back for you.’”“I don’t feel safe any more,” says Amirah, “like I used to.” More

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      Bari Weiss is a weird and worrisome choice as top editor for CBS News | Margaret Sullivan

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      If you’re old enough to have admired CBS in its heyday, watching its decline has been painful.Decades ago, it was dubbed the Tiffany Network – home of the great journalist Walter Cronkite (“the most trusted man in America”), and innovator of the top-flight magazine program, 60 Minutes.Even outside its news division, the network was a place where the variety-show host Ed Sullivan could break down racial exclusion by inviting outstanding Black entertainers to his Sunday night program; that was controversial in an era of intense racial turmoil. The CBS news department had some of the best journalists in the nation, and the corporation itself exuded a sense of public mission.But on Monday, when Bari Weiss was named editor-in-chief of CBS News, it was the latest turn in the network’s confounding departure from its roots.Given her lack of experience in news, “placing Weiss at or near the helm of a television news division makes no more sense than it would have, a generation ago, to have given such a role to William F Buckley of the National Review or Victor Navasky of The Nation,” wrote Richard Tofel, an astute media observer, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and ProPublica, mentioning conservative and liberal opinionators of their era.Weiss – a staunch Zionist and a fierce opponent of supposed wokeness and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives – famously left the New York Times opinion section, claiming she had been bullied by her colleagues for her beliefs. She started a Substack newsletter and eventually founded the wildly successful website Free Press.Her rise has been meteoric. She “has ascended the mountain of journalism on a slingshot”, Jessica Testa of the New York Times put it this week.To her many critics, her appointment was just one more step on the shameful path that CBS has trod since Donald Trump was elected to a second term.The network caved to the US president when its parent company, Paramount, settled a lawsuit it could have won, sending millions of dollars for a future presidential library. Trump claimed that he was harmed during last year’s presidential campaign by the editing (actually, quite routine) of a 60 Minutes interview of his then rival Kamala Harris. Not only did the company settle the case, but now it has decided not to edit taped interviews with political figures on its Sunday morning Face the Nation – a dubious idea at best, and another piece of capitulation to Trump.The longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes quit a few months ago, saying he feared the loss of his prized editorial independence; and the network’s evening newscast ratings continue to lag their competitors. Recently, the company named an ombudsman for CBS News – someone with no news experience – to monitor claims of bias, but with no arrangement to communicate regularly to the public, as normal news ombudsmen or public editors have.Others were much harsher than Tofel in their criticism, noting that Paramount paid an astonishing $150m for Weiss’s site, Free Press. Paramount is led these days by David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people, and Weiss is very much his pick to led CBS News; the corporate press release said she will, among other things, “reshape editorial priorities”. She will report directly to Ellison, rather than to the CBS News president, a more traditional arrangement.“Like Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the deal can be understood as part of a broader elite project to smudge the lenses through which many people see the world,” wrote the Defector’s Patrick Redford. “By installing Weiss, the richest people in the world have taken another step toward ushering in the toothless, acquiescent future of mainstream media they’ve always wanted.”Certainly, that is something that Trump and his allies have worked relentlessly for.Redford called it “yet another victory of marketing over its natural enemy, journalism”.As she took the helm, Weiss sent around a friendly-sounding note to the news staff that had one particularly notable line. Among her “core journalistic values”, she wrote, is “journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny”.Sounds good, but the two parties are far from equal these days.“CBS should brace for a heavy dose of bothsiderism,” wrote Oliver Darcy in his Status newsletter, observing that the Free Press has, as its central thesis, “that Trump and his supporters are largely right about the cultural rot of the woke-elite” and liberal overreach (wokeness) is a bigger problem than Trump’s existential threats to American democracy.As independent media gains influence, it may not matter very much any more who leads a major TV network. Certainly, it matters far less now than in the years when CBS ruled the airwaves.But it is telling that Weiss – such a polarizing provocateur herself – has been chosen to reinvent the most mainstream of legacy networks at this fraught and dangerous time in the US.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Comey due in court over Justice Department case accusing him of lying to Congress – US politics live

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      Pope Leo told US bishops visiting him at the Vatican on Wednesday that they should firmly address how immigrants are being treated by President Donald Trump’s hardline policies, attendees said, in the latest push by the pontiff on the issue.Leo, the first US pope, was handed dozens of letters from immigrants describing their fears of deportation under the Trump administration’s policies during the meeting, which included bishops and social workers from the US-Mexico border.“It means a lot to all of us to know of his personal desire that we continue to speak out,” El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz, who took part in the meeting, told Reuters.The Vatican did not immediately comment on the pope’s meeting.The case against former FBI director James Comey comes as attorney general Pam Bondi was questioned in the Senate yesterday over claims that the justice department is being weaponised to pursue Trump’s enemies.Throughout the five-hour hearing, Bondi declined to talk about many of the administration’s controversial decisions, despite persistent questioning from the Democrats. When pressed, she personally attacked several senators from the minority or invoked the ongoing government shutdown to depict them as negligent.“You voted to shut down the government, and you’re sitting here. Our law enforcement officers aren’t being paid,” Bondi replied when the committee’s top Democratic senator, Dick Durbin of Illinois, questioned the Trump administration’s rationale for sending the national guard into Chicago.“I wish you love Chicago as much as you hate President Trump,” she continued, adding: “If you’re not going to protect your citizens, President Trump will.”In his opening statement, Durbin described Bondi as doing lasting damage to the department tasked with enforcing federal law.“What has taken place since January 20, 2025, would make even President Nixon recoil,” he said.. “This is your legacy, Attorney General Bondi. In eight short months, you have fundamentally transformed the justice department and left an enormous stain in American history. It will take decades to recover.”Of particular concern to Democrats were the charges against Comey, which came after Trump publicly called on Bondi to indict his enemies and fired a veteran prosecutor who refused to bring the case.The attorney general avoided talking about the indictment, saying it was a “pending case”, but argued it was approved by “one of the most liberal grand juries in the country”.Good morning and welcome to our coverage of US politics with former FBI Director James Comey set to make his first court appearance in a Justice Department criminal case accusing him of having lied to Congress five years ago.The arraignment is expected to be brief, according to Associated Press, but the moment is nonetheless loaded with historical significance given that the case has amplified concerns that the Justice Department is being weaponized in pursuit of Donald Trump’s political enemies.Comey is expected to plead not guilty at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, and defense lawyers will almost certainly move to get the indictment dismissed before trial, possibly by arguing that the case amounts to a selective or vindictive prosecution.The two-count indictment alleges that Comey made a false statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee on 30 September 2020, by denying he had authorized an associate to serve as an anonymous source to the news media, and that he obstructed a congressional proceeding.Comey has denied any wrongdoing and has said he was looking forward to a trial. The indictment does not identify the associate or say what information may have been discussed with the media.Though an indictment is typically just the start of a protracted court process, the Justice Department has trumpeted the development itself as something of a win.Trump administration officials are likely to point to any conviction as proof the case was well-justified, but an acquittal or even dismissal may also be held up as further support for their long-running contention that the criminal justice system is stacked against them.The judge randomly assigned to the case, Michael Nachmanoff, is a Biden administration appointee. Known for methodical preparation and a cool temperament, the judge and his background have already drawn the president’s attention, with Trump deriding him as a “Crooked Joe Biden appointed Judge.”You can read our report here and stay with us to see how it plays out:We’ll also be covering all the developments amid the national guard arriving in Chicago and the ongoing government shutdown.In the White House, Trump is due to receive an intelligence briefing at 11am EST and taking part in a round table on Antifa at 3pm.And in Egypt, a US delegation has joined the indirect talks taking place between Hamas and Israel on Trump’s Gaza plan with the latest news that hostage and prisoner lists have been exchanged.In other developments:

      Donald Trump met the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, and jokingly pushed him to agree to “a merger” of their two countries. He also declined to rule out invoking the insurrection act to put troops on the streets of the US, which might have made the prospect of joining the union even less appealing.

      Trump suggested that he might not follow a law mandating that furloughed government workers will get backpay after the government shutdown ends.

      In a tense hearing before the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, stood accused by Democrats of weaponizing the US Department of Justice, “fundamentally transforming” the department, and leaving “an enormous stain on American history” that it will take “decades to recover [from]”. Bondi criticized Democratic lawmakers in personal terms as she faced questions over the department’s enforcement efforts in Democratic-led cities.

      House speaker Mike Johnson said that his decision to stave off swearing in representative-elect Adelita Grijalva of Arizona has “nothing to do” with the fact that she would be the 218th signature on the bipartisan discharge petition – to compel a House vote on the full release of the Epstein files.

      Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, visited the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility in Portland, Oregon accompanied by conservative influencers. Portland police cleared the street outside ahead of Noem’s arrival, keeping a handful of protesters, one dressed as a chicken and another as a baby shark, at distance. More

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      Ex-FBI director James Comey to appear in court on lying to Congress charge

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      The former FBI director James Comey is set to make his first appearance in court on Wednesday in connection with federal charges that he lied to Congress in 2020.Comey will be booked and fingerprinted, which is normal practice for defendants, at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, before being arraigned and formally read the charges against him by US district judge Michael Nachmanoff. Nachmanoff was appointed to the federal bench by Joe Biden in 2021.The FBI has reportedly been weighing whether to submit Comey to a “perp walk” in which they would parade him in front of media cameras. An FBI agent was reportedly relieved of duty for refusing to participate in such an effort.The brief indictment handed down by a federal grand jury on 25 September accused Comey of making a false statement and obstructing a congressional investigation in connection with his September 2020 testimony to Congress. While the details of the charge remain unclear, they appear to be related to his claim that he never authorized anyone in the FBI to be an anonymous source in news stories. “I have great confidence in the federal judicial system and I’m innocent. So let’s have a trial. And keep the faith,” Comey said in a video statement the night the charges were filed.The case against Comey marks a significant step in Donald Trump’s effort to politicize the justice department and punish his political enemies. Even though the attorney general and top justice department officials are political appointees, the department has typically operated at arm’s length from the White House in order to preserve independent decision-making necessary to uphold the rule of law. Trump has upended that norm and has said more charges are coming.Trump fired Comey in 2017 and has fumed at the former FBI director for years for his role in investigating connections between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. Comey’s firing eventually prompted the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to take over the investigation. Mueller’s final report detailed numerous instances in which Trump attempted to influence the investigation.Trump forced out Erik Siebert, the top federal prosecutor in the eastern district of Virginia, after Siebert determined there wasn’t sufficient evidence to bring charges against Letitia James, New York’s attorney general. At Trump’s request, the justice department replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide who was part of Trump’s personal legal team and has no prosecutorial experience.Career prosecutors in the eastern district of Virginia reportedly presented Halligan with a memo outlining why charges against Comey were not warranted. In an unusual move, Halligan presented the case herself to a federal grand jury, which handed down the indictment just a few days after she started on the job.No career prosecutors from the eastern district of Virginia have entered an appearance in the case. Instead, two prosecutors from the eastern district of North Carolina, Nathaniel Lemons and Gabriel Diaz, will join Halligan in handling the case.Two other prosecutors in the eastern district of Virginia have been fired since the charges against Comey were filed. The prosecutors, Maya Song, a top Siebert deputy, and Michael Ben’Ary, a top national security prosecutor, both at one point had worked under Lisa Monaco, a top official in the justice department under the Biden administration.Trump has also put pressure on the office to file charges against James over specious allegations that the New York attorney general committed mortgage fraud.“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump told Bondi in a brazen 20 September post on Truth Social, asking her to bring charges against Comey, James, and California senator Adam Schiff. “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”Elizabeth Yusi, a top prosecutor in the office, plans to present the case to Halligan soon that there is no probable cause to file charges against James. Colleagues expect Yusi to be fired. More