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      I’ve got the message: security leaks are no laughing matter | Stewart Lee

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      During the Brexit era, it became obvious many comments under these columns were being placed by Russian trolls, with slightly strange grasps of idiomatic English, cut-and-pasting blocks of approved pro-Putin and anti-EU texts to change the direction of the discourse. Their posts read like the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but trained on 90s MTV Europe presenters’ accents and Russia Today op-eds.I began to bait the bots by inserting deliberately incomprehensible, but also somehow provocative, sentences into my pieces, culminating in the following paragraph, from the summer of 2016, after which point the Russian provocateurs left me alone:“One may as well give the kosovorotka-marinading wazzocks something incomprehensible to feed their bewildered brainstems. To me, then, Vladimir Putin is a giant, prolapsed female worker bee that sucks hot ridicule out of langoustines’ cephalothoraxes. Let’s see what crunchy, expansionist lavatory honey this notion causes the parthenogenic Russian wendigos to inflate for us this week, in the shadow of Paul McGann and his art gnome.”But nature abhors a vacuum, and soon the comment space the Russians vacated was filled by Tories and Brexiters, like rats entering a vacant building, or unseated Tory MPs getting their own reality TV shows. Between 2020 and the fall of the last government these columns were the subject of complaints and criticisms on the right, many with their own newspaper columns in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph, and their own House of Commons notepaper and/or links to opaquely-funded Tufton Street outlets.But although Kemi Badenoch just took a £14,000 freebie from Neil Record – whose tentacular connections include Tufton Street’s climate change denial group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, its Truss-grooming charity the Institute of Economic Affairs, and its monomaniacal astro-turfed anti-National Trust outfit Restore Trust – the background noise has lessened since the election. Perhaps because the US government are now doing Tufton Street’s job of normalising rightwing talking points more effectively than just getting the former IEA staffer Kate Andrews on to the BBC’s Question Time for the 14th time. That’s what I call a special relationship!But, as I enter my 15th year of satirising the news for money here at the Observer, the quality of complaint has changed again. These past few weeks it has been helpful readers that have been writing in to correct my factual errors and my “jokes”, although admittedly last week’s column on the Trump government’s attitude to its Navajo citizens was a hot mess for which I, like Trump’s national securty adviser Mike Waltz, take full responsibility.I accept the point that Trump did acknowledge the Navajo veterans by inviting them to the White House in 2017, but at the same event he did then make a joke about Pocahontas while standing in front of a portrait of president Andrew Jackson, author of the Indian Removal Act, which relocated Indigenous peoples and saw their lands seized, which probably soured the celebration for the Indigenous wartime heroes.As usual with Trump, it’s difficult to know if the crass behaviour was calculated to play to his base, or whether it was just evidence of the ongoing tone deaf stupidity and systemic incompetence of his team. As a rule, one should hesitate before ascribing motive to a landslide, for example, or to a prolapse. Like Trump perhaps, they just happen.Which is where the worst western military security failure of the century so far comes in. On 15 March the Trump team used the Signal messaging service to discuss their forthcoming attack on the Houthi pirates, and accidentally invited a Democrat-supporting magazine editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, to join their discussion. If it was a sitcom plot you’d reject it as being too on-the-nose.Goldberg could have revealed the bombing plans and a CIA operative’s identity. And now everyone knows the depth of the current American administration’s ideologically-driven contempt for European democracy, and the fact that Mike Waltz, a 51-year-old man in a position of some responsibility, uses emojis to celebrate airstrikes. Like a baby with its own bombs.Does Keir Starmer still think he can salvage the special relationship, an abused husband watching his furious wife throw all of his jazz vinyl out of the bedroom window? The whole world saw America’s Uncle Sam mask slip. But when Trump was questioned about the incident by a journalist on Tuesday, he claimed to know nothing about it, as if he had just been roused from a 24-hour KFC coma and thrust before the cameras without being briefed on a story that was global front page news. Maybe, like in the classic Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads episode where Bob and Terry don’t want to know the football result, Trump was trying to savour the moment of discovery.Clearly, we can no longer share intelligence with Trump’s US, and no future defence or foreign policy plans can rely on the cooperation of a country that wishes Europe material harm. But more importantly, is it worth me writing jokes about Trump’s US? A paranoid reading of recent events makes it look as if they are targeting even their mildest visa-carrying critics, recently denying entry to a French scientist and three-quarters of punk veterans UK Subs. Although to be fair, five years ago the drummer from the offensively apolitical stoner metal band Orange Goblin was also denied entry, like some kind of innocent shrimp-like bycatch.First they came for a French scientist. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a French scientist.Then they came for UK Subs. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a member of UK Subs.And then they came for the drummer from Orange Goblin. And I did not speak out. Because I prefer Electric Wizard.And then they came for me. More

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      Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets | Kenan Malik

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      ‘Gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” It’s a line spoken by Walter Huston in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story about greed and moral corruption directed by his son, John Huston. That line was to have appeared on screen at the beginning of the film. It didn’t, on orders from the studio, Warner Bros. “It was all on account of the word ‘labor’,” John Huston later reflected. “That word looks dangerous in print, I guess.”It was a relatively insignificant moment in the drama of America’s postwar red scare. McCarthyism proper had still to take flight. Yet, so deep ran the fear already that a single, everyday word could create consternation in Hollywood.McCarthyism, the historian Ellen Schrecker has observed, “was a peculiarly American style of repression – nonviolent and consensual. Only two people were killed; only a few hundred went to jail.” Yet it constituted “one of the most severe episodes of political repression the United States ever experienced”.Sackings and legal sanctions created such fear that, in the words of the political philosopher Corey Robin, society was put “on lockdown”, with people so “petrified of being punished for their political beliefs” that “they drew in their political limbs”.It was not just communists who were silenced. “If someone insists that there is discrimination against Negroes in this country, or that there is an inequality of wealth,” claimed the chair of one state committee on un-American activities, “there is every reason to believe that person is a communist.” This at a time when Jim Crow still held the south in its grip. The red scare paused the civil rights movement for more than a decade and drew the teeth of union radicalism.Fear has always been a means of enforcing social order, most obviously in authoritarian states, from China to Saudi Arabia, Turkey to Russia, where repression becomes the foundation of political rule. In liberal democracies, order rests more on consensus than overt brutality. But here, too, fear plays its role. The worker’s fear of being sacked, the claimant’s of being sanctioned, the renter’s of being made homeless, the fear of the working-class mother facing a social worker or of the black teenager walking past a policeman – relations of power are also relations of fear, but fears usually so sublimated that we simply accept that that’s the way the system works.It is when consensus ruptures, when social conflict erupts, or when the authorities need to assert their power, that liberal democracies begin wielding fear more overtly as a political tool to quieten dissent or impose authority. Think of how the British state treated Irish people in the 1970s and 1980s, or miners during the great strike of 1984/85.Seventy years on from McCarthyism, America seems to be entering such a moment. Over the past month, we have seen the mass deportation to a notorious foreign jail of hundreds of people declared to be illegal immigrants and gang members, without evidence or due process; the arrest, detention and threatened deportation of foreign students, including Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Momodou Taal and Yunseo Chung, for protesting about the war in Gaza; the blacklisting of law firms representing clients of whom Donald Trump does not approve; the mass sackings of federal workers.Fear works here in two ways. The targets of repression are groups about whom it is easier to create fear, and so easier to deprive of rights and due process. Doing so then creates a wider climate of fear in which people become less willing to speak out, and not just about Palestine. Already, “whole segments of American society [are] running scared”, as one observer put it.Institutions such as universities, Schrecker concluded about the 1950s, “did not fight McCarthyism” but “contributed to it”, not only through dismissals and blacklists but also through accepting “the legitimacy of what the congressional committees and other official investigators were doing”, thereby conferring “respectability upon the most repressive elements” of the process.It’s a process repeating itself today. Earlier this month, after cancelling $400m (£310m) in federal grants and contracts, Trump made a series of demands of Columbia University, including that it change its disciplinary rules, place the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under “academic receivership” and adopt the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism that its own lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, condemns as having been “weaponised” into “a blunt instrument to label anyone an antisemite” and to “go after pro-Palestinian speech”. Last week, Columbia capitulated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMichael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, one of the few academic leaders willing to speak out, decries “the greatest pressure put on intellectual life since the McCarthy era”, describing “anticipatory obedience” as “a form of cowardice”. Cowardice, though, has become the defining trait, most university leaders “just happy that Columbia is the whipping boy”. Columbia may be the first university in Trump’s crosshairs, but it won’t be the last. Keeping silent won’t save them.In his incendiary speech in Munich in February, the US vice-president, JD Vance, harangued European leaders to worry less about Russia than “the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values”, especially free speech. The same, it would seem, applies to America, too. Many of those who previously so vigorously upheld the importance of free speech have suddenly lost their voice or now believe that speech should be free only for those with the right kinds of views. The brazen hypocrisy of Vance, and of the fair-weather supporters of free speech, should nevertheless not lead us to ignore the fact that, from more intrusive policing of social media to greater restrictions on our ability to protest to the disciplining, even sacking, of workers holding “gender-critical views”, these are issues to which we urgently need to attend.“I live in an age of fear,” lamented the essayist and author EB White in 1947, after the New York Herald had suggested that all employees be forced to declare their political beliefs to retain their jobs. He was, he insisted, less worried “that there were communists in Hollywood” than to “read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control”. It is a perspective as vital now as it was then, and as necessary on this side of the Atlantic as in America. More

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      The Observer view on JD Vance: spurned in Greenland and humiliated at home, the vice-president should resign

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      Not for the first time, JD Vance, America’s outspoken vice-president, has made a public fool of himself. He insisted on visiting Greenland despite unequivocal statements by the territory’s leaders and Denmark’s government that he was not invited and not welcome. Vance’s trip was confined to a remote Arctic base, where he briefly spoke to a few Americans. Plans to make a wider tour and speak to Greenlanders were cancelled – because Greenlanders did not want to speak to him.Such hostility is entirely understandable, given the repeated, provocative and disrespectful declarations by Vance’s boss, Donald Trump, that the US plans to annex Greenland and may do so illegally and by force. Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory within the kingdom of Denmark. Election results this month showed the vast majority of local people back expanded self-rule or outright independence. They do not want to be Americans.In a feeble attempt to justify what is, in effect, a Putin-style bid to seize another country’s sovereign territory, Vance claimed Denmark had failed to protect Greenland from Chinese and Russian threats – but did not produce any evidence. He also failed to explain why, if such dangers exist, the US, which like Denmark is a Nato member, has not honoured its legal obligation to develop a “collective capacity to resist armed attack” under the 1951 US-Denmark “Defence of Greenland” treaty.Trump, too, has been prating about Greenland’s importance for “world peace”. It’s true the Arctic region is seeing increased great power competition, partly because climate change renders it more accessible. Yet Trump, in another echo of Ukraine, appears more motivated by desire to control Greenland’s untapped mineral wealth. As in Gaza and Panama, his main interest is not security and justice but geopolitical, financial and commercial advantage. Insulting plans to enrol Canada as the 51st state reflect another Trump preoccupation: a return to an earlier age of aggressive US territorial expansionism.Vance in Greenland may have preferred a woolly hat to a pith helmet, but his imperialist intentions were unmistakable. Yet despite his frosty reception, he was perhaps glad to escape Washington, where he and his travelling companion, US national security adviser Mike Waltz, are feeling the heat for another scandalous piece of foolishness: the Signal message group security breach. This concerns the inadvertent inclusion of a leading journalist in an online discussion by Vance, Waltz and senior officials of real-time US bombing attacks on Houthi rebels in Yemen.This breach, by itself, is bad enough. It might have endangered US pilots and wrecked the Houthi operation. The discussion, on an insecure platform, could have been, and probably was overheard by the Russians and others. Yet its contents, which have now been published in full, also include rude and mocking comments by Vance and Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, about European allies. Their shaming, ignorant exchanges dramatically and damagingly highlight the rapid deterioration in transatlantic ties since Trump took office.Like the Greenland incursion, the official response to the Signal scandal speaks volumes about the true nature of the Trump administration. Trump’s shabby instinct was to deny all responsibility, minimise its importance, denigrate the journalist and dismiss the whole thing as a hoax. Hegseth’s claim that no classified information was released is an obvious, stupid lie, as the transcript demonstrates. There is huge hypocrisy in the refusal of Waltz, Vance and Hegseth to even contemplate resignation, when such a blunder by a lower-ranking official would certainly have led to the sack.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAbove all, the hubris, arrogance, amateurishness and irresponsibility revealed by both episodes is truly shocking – and a chilling warning to the world. More

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      Trump news at a glance: anti-Musk protesters target Tesla showrooms around the world

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      People around the world joined protests against Elon Musk and his attempts to dismantle the US federal government on Saturday, gathering outside Tesla showrooms from Australia to Switzerland and California.Protest organizers asked people to do three things: don’t buy a Tesla, sell off Tesla stock and join the “Tesla Takedown” movement. “Hurting Tesla is stopping Musk,” reads one of the group’s taglines. “Stopping Musk will help save lives and our democracy.”Musk, the world’s richest person, heads Donald Trump’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), which he’s tasked with slashing federal budgets in the US, including laying off tens of thousands of workers.Thousands join anti-Musk protests around the worldWith more than 200 events planned worldwide, protests kicked off midday in front of Tesla showrooms in Australia and New Zealand and then rippled across Europe in countries including Finland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, the Netherlands and the UK.Each rally was locally organized with original themes. In Ireland, it was “Smash the Fash”, and Switzerland had “Down with Doge”.Read the full storySenior FDA official resigns citing RFK Jr’s ‘misinformation and lies’A senior health official in the US, who was seen as a guardrail against any future politicisation of the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of life-saving vaccines, has resigned abruptly, citing the health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s “misinformation and lies”.Multiple media outlets, citing people familiar with the matter, reported late on Friday that Dr Peter Marks had been given the choice to resign or be fired by a Health and Human Services (HHS) department official. He chose to resign.Read the full storyMost employees of US Institute of Peace fired en masseMost employees at the US Institute of Peace, a congressionally created and funded thinktank now taken over by Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency”, received email notices of their mass firing late Friday, the latest step in the Trump administration’s government downsizing.Read the full storyLeaders of Harvard’s Middle Eastern Studies center step downThe leaders of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies are leaving their positions after the center faced accusations of anti-Israel bias. Faculty members who spoke to the New York Times anonymously said they believed that Cemal Kafadar and Rosie Bsheer were forced out of their roles.The departures come as the Trump administration scrutinizes institutions that have had pro-Palestinian protests over the last year.Read the full storyPeter Hegseth’s wife attended sensitive meetings with foreign officials – reportThe wife of the US defense secretary Pete Hegseth attended two meetings with foreign defense officials during which sensitive information was discussed, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. Jennifer Hegseth has been present at two meetings where sensitive information was discussed, one with the UK secretary of defense, John Healey, and one in Brussels at Nato headquarters, the WSJ reported.Read the full storyTrump grants clemency to media executive convicted of fraudFormer talkshow host and Ozy Media co-founder Carlos Watson received clemency from Donald Trump, sparing him a 10-year jail sentence. Watson was traveling to the Lompoc, California, federal correctional institution when he learned of the presidential commutation afforded to him, as CNBC reported. He published a statement that thanked the president and insulted the Trump-appointed federal judge who sentenced him, Eric Komitee, as “conflicted and unethical”.Read the full storyJob cuts at health department will pave way for private sector takeover, experts warnMassive job cuts planned for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will pave the way for takeover of crucial services by the private sector, imperiling the US in future health emergencies, health experts and Democratic politicians warn.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The New College of Florida has fired a Chinese language professor under a state law that restricts Florida’s public universities from hiring individuals they deem to be from “countries of concern”.

      US President Donald Trump said on Saturday he did not warn car industry executives against raising prices as tariffs on foreign-made autos come into force, telling NBC News he “couldn’t care less” if they do.

      The Trump administration has ordered some French companies with US government contracts to comply with his executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes, highlighting the extraterritorial reach of US policies and their potential impact on European corporate practices.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 28 March. More

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      Most employees at US Institute of Peace mass-fired via late-night email

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      Most employees at the US Institute of Peace, a congressionally created and funded thinktank now taken over by Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency”, received email notices of their mass firing late Friday, the latest step in the Trump administration’s government downsizing.The emails, sent to personal accounts because most staff members had lost access to the organization’s system, began going out about 9pm, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal.One former senior official at the institute said that among those spared were several in the human resources department and a handful of overseas staffers who had until 9 April to return to the United States. The organization employs about 300 people.Others retained for now are regional vice-presidents who will be working with the staff in their areas to return to the US, according to one employee who was affected.An executive order last month from Donald Trump targeted the institute, which seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts, and three other agencies for closure. Board members, who are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and the institute’s president were fired. Later, there was a standoff as employees blocked Doge members from entering . Doge staff gained access in part with the help of the Washington police.A lawsuit ensued, and the US district judge Beryl Howell chastised Doge representatives for their behavior but did not reinstate the board members or allow employees to return to the workspace.A White House spokesperson, Anna Kelly, said in an email Saturday that the institute “has failed to deliver peace” and that Trump “is carrying out his mandate to eliminate bloat and save taxpayer dollars”.The letter to employees said that as of Friday, “your employment with us will conclude”, according to one longtime employee who shared part of the communication. A second email, obtained by the AP, said the terminations were at the direction of the president.Workers were given until 7 April to clear out their desks.Mary Glantz, a former foreign service officer who was working as a senior adviser at the institute, said she was not surprised by the late-night firings, calling it part of Doge’s playbook.Glantz studied how Russia has fomented conflicts around the world and analyzed options for resolving them. She hoped her research could be continued and used elsewhere. She said the institute plays a unique role because of its narrow focus on conflict resolution.“We are the other tool in the tool box,” she said. ”We do this work so American soldiers don’t have to fight these wars.”George Foote, a former institute lawyer fired this month who is with one of the firms providing counsel in the current lawsuit, said lawyers were consulting Saturday to discuss possible next steps. He said employees are not part of the pending lawsuit, so they would have to file separate cases. More

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      How Indigenous basketball teams are preserving culture: ‘This is a healing process’

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      Long before Michael Jordan changed the sport of basketball, another Jordon transformed the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) history by breaking the league’s racial barrier as its first Native American player.In 1956, Phil “the Flash” Jordon, a descendant of the Wailaki and Nomlaki tribes, was drafted by the New York Knicks and played 10 seasons in the league. Though he may not carry the same cultural cache as other hoopers throughout professional basketball’s century-plus existence, Jordon embodies a longstanding Native American fixation on the sport – especially at the community level. Throughout the years, Native Americans have embraced basketball and made it their own. One way they’re doing so today is with “rez ball”, a lightning-fast style of basketball associated with Native American teams.Although the notion of Native Americans in basketball hasn’t fully permeated the mainstream sports consciousness (basketball gyms on reservations are still among the most overlooked in the country by talent scouts), the NBA, Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) and other basketball entities have begun to acknowledge native hoopers and their rich legacy more fully.Rez Ball, a LeBron James-produced film currently streaming on Netflix, is based on Canyon Dreams, an acclaimed book about a Navajo high school team in northern Arizona. The Toronto Raptors unveiled an alternate team logo designed by Native American artist Luke Swinson in honor of the franchise’s annual Indigenous Heritage Day; the illustration depicts two long-haired, brown-skinned hoopers flowing inside of a basketball silhouette, which doubles as an amber sunrise. And earlier this season, NBA superstar Kyrie Irving – whose family belongs to the Lakota tribe of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota – went viral for meeting with a group of Native American fans after a Dallas Mavericks game. The eight-time All-Star also debuted Chief Hélà, his pair of Indigenous-inspired sneakers, during the 2024 NBA finals last June.View image in fullscreenAs for the WNBA, the league boasts the only professional sports franchise owned by a Native American tribe. The Mohegan Tribe purchased the Connecticut Sun (formerly the Orlando Miracle) in 2003 and relocated the team to the Mohegan Sun arena in Uncasville, Connecticut.Still, there’s much left to be desired for Native American representation and their conservation of traditions and identity at large, both on and off the court. It’s something Native basketball players and coaches are hustling to retain and defend.“Imagine not being able to speak your language, that’s having your identity stolen,” says Adam Strom, a member of the Yakama tribe in Washington state. “I’m not fluent in Ichiskíin [a Yakama dialect]. I only know a few words. But there’s a big push in Indian country to preserve and hold on to your language. Basketball is a conduit for that.”For Strom and others invested in the Native American basketball community, the sport offers a chance to celebrate Native American history, retain Indigenous languages and provide an inviting, accessible space for intergenerational exchange.Strom is the head coach of the women’s basketball team at Haskell Indian Nations University – the only Native American institution in the country that offers a sanctioned four-year athletic program for Native Americans, and which Strom compares to an HBCU equivalent for Indigenous students. For that reason, it’s unlike any other campus in the nation.But Strom’s role – along with various staff positions at Haskell – have come under fire by the Trump administration’s budget cuts. The recent executive order has put the Native American institution directly at risk. After slashing tribal funds and attempting to revoke Native American birthright – a draconian move which a federal judge has deemed as “unconstitutional” – it’s an especially precarious moment for Haskell and its students. That hasn’t stopped Strom or his basketball program from trying to instill a winning mindset imbued with cultural awareness in the next generation of Native American community members. Despite formally losing his job, Strom – a 24-year veteran and son of the late basketball coach, Ted Strom – is leveraging his basketball prowess to proverbially level the playing field. Or, in his case, the hardwood court.“At Haskell, we play for Indian country,” Strom says, who is now working without pay as a volunteer due to Trump’s unprecedented firings. “Any time my players step on the court, they represent Native Americans throughout the United States. My recruiting pool is a sliver compared to those other universities we participate against. Players have to meet that bloodline. There’s a lot of pride in that.”View image in fullscreenAccording to the NCAA, only 544 student athletes out of 520,000 are Native Americans competing in Division I sports. As the least represented ethnic group in all of college sports, it speaks volumes that Native American women account for roughly 19% of all Native Americans in Division I competition. Players such as Jude and Shoni Schimmel, two Indigenous sisters who were raised on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon, are examples. The sisters went on to have successful careers at the University of Louisville, with Shoni becoming an All-American first-round draft pick of the Atlanta Dream in 2014.In a New York Timesarticle about the Schimmels, Jude referenced basketball as “‘medicine’ that ‘helps and heals’ Native Americans”. Shoni (who pleaded guilty to abusing her domestic partner in 2023) has since retired from the WNBA, while Jude, after playing overseas in Spain, is currently signed to Athletes Unlimited Pro Basketball.More than any institutional accolades or professional achievements, though, the Native American spirit for basketball is most visible at the grassroots level, where significant assists are being made to carry forth a vibrant legacy. For basketballers in Indian country, it’s a way to stay interconnected by passing generational knowledge on to the next player.“Without language you lose culture; without culture you lose your people. Kids from this community, their great-great-great-grandparents spoke [Indigenous] languages. So how do you count, pass, catch, run in that language?” says Mitch Thompson, co-founder of Bilingual Basketball and an assistant coach with the Seattle Storm.The program is designed to support marginalized communities by providing free basketball camps that utilize bilingualism and sociolinguistics as part of their core mission to reclaim historically overlooked spaces through basketball.Thompson, a basketball coach with experience working for NBA and WNBA organizations in the United States and Mexico, is a passionate advocate for social equity and cultural empowerment through the sport. Having grown up in northeastern Oregon, Thompson became familiar with rez ball through the nearby Yakama, Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla reservations.View image in fullscreenHis vision for Bilingual Basketball came to life in 2021 after Adrian Romero, a Mexican American basketball player he had formerly coached, and their friend, Irma Solis, decided to offer the program to local youth. At the time, that meant serving a predominantly immigrant, Spanish-speaking demographic. To date, they’ve served around 2,000 participants, mostly in the Pacific north-west.Everything changed in 2024 when Thompson teamed up with his former colleague, Strom, to bring the program to Native American reservations for the first time – starting with the Yakama in White Swan, Washington.“Adam and I worked closely with the Yakama language department. I believe it was the first ever basketball camp offered in Ichiskíin,” says Thompson. “There are only around 100 conversational speakers of this language on earth. Everything needs to be approved by tribal elders. But if you can combine that identity and those nuanced cultural aspects with basketball, that’s powerful.”The weekend-long camp mixed English with Ichiskíin. The program offered Indigenous prayers, a “basketball powwow” (dances and songs used to pass down Native American traditions), and dribbling routines led by ceremonial drummers. It may be the first and only basketball camp of its kind, according to Thompson, who has extensive experience working with non-traditional basketball communities around North America.“This is culturally sensitive. These communities had boarding schools and the kids were stolen from their families and forced into spaces where only English was spoken,” says Thompson. “They had to practice Christianity [and] cut their hair. This is the opposite of that. We’re celebrating language. This is a healing process.”Bilingual Basketball followed up their Yakama camp by working with the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation (PBPN) in Kansas – a tribe with even higher linguistic preservation needs. In 2019, the PBPN language and cultural department coordinator, Dawn LeClere, declared the Potawatomi language as nearly extinct, with only five known fluent speakers, a dwindling fraction of the estimated 10,000 that once flourished in the 1700s.Language preservation – outside of basketball – is a lifeline for North American tribes. To be sure, translating modern basketball jargon into an ancient language that isn’t fluently spoken isn’t easy. It requires tremendous creativity, and the phrases often don’t match on a 1:1 basis.There is no word in Ichiskíin for “basketball”, for example, so professional linguists and community members teamed up to invent a literal translation that combines the native words for basket and ball. For participants and coaches alike, it’s all a new experience.View image in fullscreen“We have learned so much working with the Yakama and Potawatomi nations,” says Romero, one of the program’s co-founders and directors. “The involvement from the language programs has been huge by providing translation of basketball terminology and everyday phrases. There have also been many volunteers to help teach the language throughout the duration of the camp. The kids got a chance to enhance their language skills and also learn cheers and cultural dances like Native American hoop dance.”As a bilingual speaker in English and Spanish, Romero learned new phrases including “kgiwigesēm” (“you all did good”) and “tuctu” (“let’s go”). If you try Googling those words, nothing appears. And that’s exactly the kind of gap that Strom and Bilingual Basketball are trying to bridge – rather than destroy – with basketball as their tool. While these native communities face persecution in other arenas outside of basketball, the 134-year-old recreational sport has offered an unlikely pathway towards cultural preservation. It’s something that Strom and the founders of Bilingual Basketball are committed to passing forward in real time.“There’s a sense of amnesia in American culture that [Indigenous] communities and people don’t exist anymore. They absolutely do,” says Thompson. “Their language and culture has persevered through genocide, boarding schools, and other intentional ways to keep them impoverished. Most Americans don’t have any real, interpersonal connection to tribal communities. Really connecting to the communities, going into the spaces. But they’re still there. It’s important for non-Indigenous Americans to realize it’s not just something of the past.” More

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      Trump has managed to spin Signalgate as a media lapse, not a major security breach | Andrew Roth

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      When it comes to Trump-era scandals, the shameless responses to “Signalgate”, in which top administration officials discussing details of an impending strike in Yemen in a group chat without noticing the presence of a prominent journalist, should set alarm bells ringing for its brazenness and incompetence.In a particularly jaw-dropping exchange, Tulsi Gabbard, the United States’ director of national intelligence, was forced to backtrack during a house hearing after she had said that there had been no specific information in the Signal chat about an impending military strike. Then, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published the chat in full, contradicting Gabbard’s remarks that no classified data or weapons systems had been mentioned in the chat.“My answer yesterday was based on my recollection, or the lack thereof, on the details that were posted there,” said Gabbard. “What was shared today reflects the fact that I was not directly involved with that part of the Signal chat.”Then there was the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth who – staring straight down the camera – baldly stated: “Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that.” The next day, Goldberg revealed that Hegseth himself had texted the precise timing of the attacks and the weapons systems to be used, specifically F-18 jets and MQ-9 drones.And Michael Waltz, the White House national security adviser, was left scrambling on live television as he was quizzed by a Fox News anchor on how Goldberg’s number had ended up on his phone. “You’ve never talked to him before so how is the number on your phone?” asked conservative television anchor Laura Ingraham. “It gets sucked in,” Waltz, a former congressman and army special forces soldier, replied – without explaining how a number can get “sucked in” to a phone.But despite all this, no one is really taking the prospects of an investigation seriously. At heart, this is about politics – and the fact is that Democrats simply don’t have the votes or the sway to deliver a body blow to the administration at this point.It’s unlikely that anyone will be punished. Donald Trump has told his aides that he doesn’t want to give the Atlantic a scalp, and vice-president JD Vance responded forcefully during a trip to Greenland on Friday: “If you think you’re going to force the president of the United States to fire anybody you’ve got another think coming … I’m the vice-president saying it here on Friday: we are standing behind our entire national security team.”For decades, national security was broadly seen as the last bastion of bipartisanship in Washington, an area where Democrats and Republicans put aside their differences for a general consensus on supporting the national interest. Members of Congress on the intelligence and foreign affairs committees often maintained cordial relationships. There was also an understanding that big scandals could jump the partisan line, and lead to serious repercussions even with tensions between the parties at their highest.Scooter Libby, once chief of staff to vice-president Dick Cheney, was sentenced to prison after an investigation into the leak of the identity of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. The Department of Justice under Barack Obama launched more Espionage Act investigations for leaking sensitive information than all previous administrations combined.And the FBI, of course, launched a years-long investigation into Hillary Clinton for keeping emails on a home computer server that ultimately may have helped sway the elections. “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity,” Clinton wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Friday. “We’re all shocked – shocked! – that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws … What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.”Observers have remarked that the scandal would have been far greater if it had taken place at a lower level in the intelligence community. Mid-level officers and defence officials would all face far harsher blowback if they were caught divulging the kind of information that Hegseth sent into the chat, including the specific timing of the strikes and the weapons systems to be used.But the Trump administration believes that it can simply divert and divide public attention until there is a new scandal. That may be a winning strategy. Trump is to introduce tariffs this week that will probably dominate the news agenda for weeks. And his deputies are out on cable news every day, pushing back at the media for covering the scandal and suggesting that Goldberg somehow sneaked his way into the chat rather than being added directly by Waltz, the national security adviser.“They have treated this as a media event to be spun rather than a grievous error to be rectified,” wrote Phil Klay, a military veteran and guest columnist for the New York Times. The early indications are that the Trump administration will skate through this scandal, crossing into new territory in Washington where even a major security leak can be repainted as the fault of the media for covering it. More

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      Protesters picket London Tesla showroom on global anti-Musk day

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      Blaring car horns on the three-lane A40 in west London are nothing new. However, on Saturday, they weren’t aimed at other drivers for a change; instead it was Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, who was the target of their anger as part of the “Takedown Tesla” movement, which has spread from the United States.“It’s too overwhelming to do nothing,” said Louise Cobbett-Witten, who has family in the US. “There is real solace in coming together like this, everyone has to do something. We haven’t got a big strategy besides just standing on the side of the street, holding signs and screaming.”The protest was part of a global day of protests planned under the umbrella of the Tesla Takedown movement. Organizers say the rallies will take place in front of more than 200 Tesla locations worldwide, including nearly 50 in California. Musk has not commented on the demonstrations.Cobbett-Witten has family in Washington DC, and is planning to move back to the US. The 39-year-old NHS worker, who lives in south London, said: “The checks and balances have just failed. As much as people are trying to not say these words, they are fascists, they are white supremacists, they’re xenophobes, they’re misogynists, and they’re coming for everyone. And what starts in America comes over here.”In the last fortnight, Tesla has responded to the protests outside its showroom and charging point in Park Royal by stationing a lone security guard at its gate, who said protesters had been friendly and peaceful. Dozens turned up on Saturday, their largest turnout since they began weeks ago.While Tesla sales have fallen in Europe, they rose in the UK by more than a fifth in February, according to new car registration figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.View image in fullscreenGay rights campaigner Nigel Warner MBE was attempting to hand out stickers to Tesla drivers entering or leaving the site in Park Royal. “This is the only thing you can do to make a difference,” the 77-year-old retired accountant from London said. “We are pretty helpless over here, the same as Europe, the only thing we can do is try to affect Tesla’s share prices and sales. It is something that has been done already with the Tesla sales dropping in many places. If he can’t sell his cars he is finished.”Documentary film-maker Jim Green, 56, who lived in New York and Los Angeles before moving back to the UK 18 months ago, had worked with Musk on a film a decade ago.Green said: “He was a different person, and he was very charismatic. He was talking when I was hanging out with him about the gigafactory where the batteries were being built, and he had a very compelling argument to make about the importance of batteries, an argument he made extraordinarily articulately. So I was very much leaning in to believing this guy wouldn’t turn into the fascist he has become.”He said Musk had attacked typical Tesla buyers, whom he described as wealthy liberals who care about the environment: “Musk has gone out of his way to insult that exact group of human beings. I lived in LA during the time when everyone who was wealthy and liberal traded their Toyota Prius in for their Tesla during 2014-2015.”Retiree Anne Kajava, 59, who is originally from Minnesota but lives in Cambridgeshire, said she was concerned about the United States’ change in policy on Europe and Ukraine.She said: “I am truly concerned about a world war three. I am concerned about a civil war within the United States. You could say those are extreme views but Trump is talking about war. You have JD Vance in Greenland; it’s not impossible.”Holding a banner attached to a Donald Trump toilet brush, she said: “I used to not hesitate to say I’m an American. Now actually I’m working with an acting coach, to fake a British accent so I can turn it on and off when I want to. I don’t want to be identified as American.” More