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      US shutdown enters second week as Senate votes again on funding bill

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      The US government shutdown entered its second week on Monday, with Democratic and Republican lawmakers making no apparent progress towards reaching a deal to restart funding, while the Trump administration warned it was moving forward with plans to slash the federal workforce.Many agencies and departments closed their doors and told employees to stay home last Wednesday, after Congress failed to approve legislation to continue the government’s authority to spend money.Democrats have refused to back any bill that does not include an array of healthcare-centered concessions, but Congress’s Republican leaders have refused to negotiate over their demands until government funding is restored. Later on Monday, the Senate will vote for a fifth time on the party’s competing proposals to reopen the government, but neither measure appears to have enough votes to advance.“We hope that the vote will not fail, because this administration wants to reopen the government,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters.Leavitt said that if the shutdown stretches on, a program thats pays for food for low-income mothers and children would exhaust its funding, while government employees would miss a paycheck, though federal law entitles them to back pay. She also reiterated the Trump administration’s threats to fire federal workers.“We don’t want to see people laid off. But, unfortunately, if this shutdown continues, layoffs are going to be an unfortunate consequence of that,” Leavitt said.In the days since the shut down began, Russ Vought, the director of the White House office of management and budget, has cancelled funding for energy projects in several states, as well as transportations developments in Chicago and New York – all of which are areas governed by Democrats.But though he warned before funding lapsed that he would use it as an opportunity to deepen cuts to the federal workforce, those have largely not yet taken place.Asked about when layoffs may be announced, Leavitt replied: “We’ll see how the vote goes tonight.”Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress have shown no signs of budging from their demands in the days since the shutdown began. Speaker Mike Johnson has kept the House on recess for a second straight week, in a bid to pressure Senate Democrats to provide the roughly eight votes the Republican funding bill is expected to need to advance in the upper chamber.“The ball is in the court of the Senate Democrats. There’s only a handful of people in the country who can solve this problem,” Johnson told a press conference.The Democratic minority has largely stuck to their demands that any legislation to fund the government includes an extension of premium tax credits for people covered by Affordable Care Act health insurance. Created under Joe Biden, the credits are set to expire at the end of the year, and costs for 20 million enrollees of the plans will rise if they are not extended.The party has also included in their funding bill a reversal of the Republican cuts to Medicaid, which provides health insurance to the poor and disabled, as well as a restoration of funding for public media outlets like PBS and NPR, and a prohibition on Donald Trump’s use of a “pocket rescission” to undo congressional appropriations.The Senate’s Republican majority leader John Thune has held four votes on the two parties’ bills in the past weeks. No Republicans have supported the Democratic proposal, while only three members of the minority – John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Angus King of Maine – have backed the GOP bill.In an interview on CBS News, Schumer said he and the top House Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, would be willing to negotiate with Trump and the Republican leadership, but they have refused. And while he has “encouraged” his lawmakers “to sit and talk to Republicans”, those conversations were not promising.“The Republicans offered nothing,” Schumer said. “The only way this will ultimately be solved is if five people sit together in a room and solve it.”Several recent polls have shown Democrats with a narrow edge in the public’s opinion of a shutdown. A Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll found that 53% of respondents held the GOP responsible for the shutdown, as opposed to 47% who blamed the Democrats. Seventy percent of those surveyed opposed the shutdown overall.Johnson reiterated that he would not call the chamber back into session until government funding is restored. He has also said he will only swear in newly elected Democratic representative Adelita Grijalva once the House returns to work.Grijalva is set to be the 218th lawmaker to sign a petition that will force a vote on a bill to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein. Johnson and Trump oppose releasing the files, and Thomas Massie, an iconoclastic Republican representative who has led the charge to make the documents public, accused Johnson of keeping the House out of session to delay that vote.“Why are we in recess? Because the day we go back into session, I have 218 votes for the discharge petition to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files,” Massie said, adding that Johnson “doesn’t want that to be the news”.Joseph Gedeon contributed reporting More

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      Boom time for US billionaires: why the system perpetuates wealth inequality

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      To many Americans, the economy of the past five years has been rough. Prices have soared yet pay remains stagnant. High mortgage rates have made buying a home a dismal prospect. The unemployment rate has been creeping up.Most people have indicated they are delaying major life decisions, including having kids or switching jobs, because of the instability. But for a very small group of people, the last five years couldn’t have been any better.The wealth of the world’s billionaires grew 54% in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. And even amid all the economic instability, the stock market has only continued to grow. This growth has largely benefited just a small number of Americans: 10% of the population owns 93% of stock market wealth.As uneven as this distribution seems, it’s the system working as it is currently designed.In his new book Burned by Billionaires, inequality researcher Chuck Collins argues that the system that perpetuates wealth inequality is purposely opaque to most Americans.“[The wealthy] have bought their jets, they’ve bought their multiple houses and mansions, but now they’re buying senators and media outlets,” Collins told the Guardian in an interview. “We’re now entering this other chapter of hyper-extraction where the wealthy are preying on the system of inequality.”Collins, a director at the Institute for Policy Studies, is no stranger to wealth. A great-grandson to Oscar F Mayer, the founder of the meat processing brand, he is a member of the Patriotic Millionaires, a non-partisan group of wealthy Americans who advocate for higher taxes for the rich and higher wages.To help others understand what exactly it means to be “wealthy” in the US, Collins borrows a concept from journalist Robert Frank who, in a 2007 book on the rich, imagined the different levels of wealth as “Richistan” villages: Affluent Town, Lower Richistan, Middle Richistan, Upper Richistan and Billionaireville.To modernize the concept, Collins categorizes these “wealth villages” based on income levels. At the lowest tier, Affluent Town, are the 10 million Americans who have a household income of at least $110,000 and an overall wealth of over $1.5m. The villages get more exclusive as wealth goes up: Lower Richistan has 2.6 million households who have wealth between $6m and $13m; Middle Richistan has 1.3 million households who have assets worth an average of $37m; while Upper Richistan, made up of 130,000 Americans (roughly the size of a small city) has between $60m to $1bn in wealth.Altogether, the residents of these villages make up the top 10% of the wealth income distribution, about 14 million Americans altogether, though their experiences vary dramatically.“You could be in Lower Richistan, and you’re still sitting in the coach section of a commercial plane,” Collins said. “Whereas in Upper Richistan, you’re flying in a private jet. That’s a really different cultural experience. You fly private, you have no stakes in the commercial aviation system. You don’t care if the whole system shuts down – you’re set.”The highest hill in “Richistan” is Billionaireville, which is made up of about 800 American billionaires who are some of the world’s wealthiest. The power that this group has far surpasses those who are simply affluent, let alone the average American who doesn’t reside in “Richistan” at all.But Collins thinks the progressive slogan “billionaires shouldn’t exist” or “abolish billionaires” misses the point and has a “whiff of exterminism” to it.“It’s the distinction between individual behaviors and a system of rules and policies,” Collins said. “We should be concerned about an economic system that funnels so much wealth upward to the billionaires.”In other words, it’s not about the billionaires themselves, but about the system that allows them to have an enormous amount of influence and control over society today.To understand how wealth at the billionaire level works, Collins breaks it down into four parts: getting the wealth, defending the wealth, political capture and hyper-extraction.When many Americans think about wealth, they usually think solely about the first step, Collins said. People can create a modest amount of wealth through starting or running a successful business, which could get them residency in Affluent Town.But getting to Billionaireville requires serious investment and strategy in those next three steps. Collins describes what he calls the “wealth defense industry”: the tax layers, accountants and wealth managers who use their expertise to ensure that the super rich are being strategic about their taxes.“Wealth defense professionals use a wide variety of tools such as trusts, offshore bank accounts, anonymous shell companies, charitable foundations and other vehicles to hold assets,” he writes.To further a wealth defense strategy, a family needs political support. Wealth of over $40m translates to political power, Collins says, and can be used to defend wealth and protect its accumulation. He notes that the 2010 landmark supreme court decision Citizens United v Federal Election Commission allowed the wealthy to pump a seemingly unlimited amount of money into elections, which has dramatically increased the power the ultra-wealthy have on politics.The last stage is a different kind of wealth accumulation, one that Collins calls “hyper extraction”, to describe how the wealthy have come to touch nearly every single part of an Americans’ everyday life largely through private equity, which allows wealthy individuals to invest in private companies.“Private equity is looking for those corners of the economy where they can squeeze things a little bit harder,” Collins said. “One thing I don’t think people understand is these billionaire private-equity funds are what happens when so much wealth is parked in so few hands, and they can kind of turn around and say, ‘Where else can we squeeze money out of the economy?’ Healthcare? Great. Mobile home parks? These people can’t go anywhere, [so] you can raise their rents.”Collins writes about the Mars family, best known for their dominance in the confectionary market, with M&Ms, Snickers and Skittles, but who have also cornered the pet industry. Along with being the biggest owner of pet care products in the US, the Mars family owns more than 2,500 pet care facilities across the US.The effects of this inequality go beyond the wealth getting wealthier. It’s about people paying more for their healthcare, rent and vet bills without seeing any meaningful wage increases. And Collins said the pain and frustration of this kind of society can lead to deep discontent.“The most powerful oligarchs understand people are being left behind [and] are economically suffering,” Collins said, adding that Republicans have been good at tapping into a potent “phony populism”.“They can basically project this message that actually, Democrats are elitists. They just care about rich Hollywood executives and woke politics, and the people who care about you are over here. They’re the Donald Trumps of the world. They hear your pain, they feel your pain,” he said.The irony, Collins points out in his book, is that Trump has appointed a string of billionaires to his cabinet. Along with Elon Musk, who had a brief but powerful role as head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”, which oversaw massive cuts to the federal workforce, Trump’s secretaries for commerce, treasury, education and the interior are also all billionaires.His cabinet, along with help from Republicans in Congress, helped him pass his huge tax bill, which will make permanent tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.While Republican continue to argue that immigration and bad trade agreements are the source of everyone’s economic problems, “the question becomes: Will the Democratic party, which has also been captured by the billionaires and big money, be able to meaningfully address the underlying harms?” Collins said.Democrats, he argues, know what policies are needed to “reverse the updraft of wealth”, including deep changes to the tax system, increasing the minimum wage and strengthening unions.Collins recalled four years ago, when the Democrats were in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. The Democrats introduced the $4.3bn Build Back Better bill, which would have seen deep investments in the climate crisis, Medicaid, housing and childcare, among other things. The bill was going to be partially funded through changes in the tax system, including higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy and closing out tax loopholes.But while the bill passed the House in November 2021, it ultimately died in the Senate because two centrist Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, blocked it. Both Manchin and Sinema have since both left their Senate seats.“It was so, so close, and the bill really did reflect the will of the majority of people who really want lawmakers to solve some of these urgent problems,” Collins said. “Oligarchic power is not about creating so much as blocking. It’s easier to block than it is to make something meaningful happen, but the muscle memory is there. We know what that looks like.”Collins is optimistic that there can be change, but said it would require sustained political momentum.“It may be before we know it that the pendulum swings back, and then it really is about maintaining a sustained really popular movement to make progress on this extreme inequality we’re living in,” he said. “We can fix this. It is fixable.” More

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      Why does the supreme court keep bending the knee to Trump? | Steven Greenhouse

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      Two 0f the world’s best-known authoritarian leaders – Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president – have each had at least 15 years at their country’s helm to pack the courts with loyalists and to pressure and intimidate judges. And no surprise, judges in those countries have repeatedly done what Orbán and Erdoğan want.Donald Trump has not had the opportunity to pack the US supreme court to nearly the same degree. Nor has he, despite his brash, bullying ways, done much to pressure or browbeat the court’s nine justices. Nevertheless, the court’s conservative supermajority has ruled time after time in favor of Trump since he returned to office. The six conservative justices have fallen into line much like Hungary’s and Turkey’s judges, even though the supreme court’s justices have life tenure to insulate them from political pressures.With the court’s new term beginning on Monday, many Americans are dismayed that the conservative justices have been so submissive to Trump, the most authoritarian-minded president in US history. Notwithstanding the US’s celebrated system of checks and balances, the justices have utterly failed to provide the checks on Trump that many legal scholars had expected. In ruling for Trump, the chief justice, John Roberts, and the other conservatives have let him gut the Department of Education, fire Federal Trade Commission and National Labor Relations Board members, and strip temporary protected status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants. The rightwing supermajority has also let Trump halt $4bn in foreign aid, fire tens of thousands of federal employees despite contractual protections and deport people to countries where they have no connection.In these and other cases, the supermajority has ceded huge power to Trump, for instance, by greatly reducing Congress’s constitutional power over spending as it let Trump unilaterally gut agencies and halt funding approved by Congress. What’s more, the court seems eager to snuff out independent, nonpartisan federal agencies by letting Trump fire agency chairs and commissioners without giving any reason, even though Congress approved laws explicitly saying those officials could only be dismissed for cause. (Pleasing corporate America, the court ordered last Wednesday that Lisa Cook can remain on the Federal Reserve Board, at least temporarily, while litigation proceeds over whether Trump can fire her as part of his effort to end the central bank’s independence.)“The chief justice is presiding over the end of the rule of law in America,” said J Michael Luttig, a highly regarded conservative former federal appellate judge.The conservative justices have repeatedly done Trump’s bidding even though they don’t begin to face the intense pressures that Hungary’s and Turkey’s judges face. Erdoğan has sometimes purged and blackballed judges seen as insufficiently loyal, while Orbán’s high-ranking allies have berated less obedient judges as “traitors”.The US supreme court has ruled for Trump in a startlingly high percentage of cases this year. It has issued 24 decisions from its emergency docket (often without giving any reasons) and ruled in Trump’s favor about 90% of the time.In doing so, the court has repeatedly vacated injunctions that lower courts had issued after concluding that Trump, with his 209 executive orders, had egregiously broken the law. Adam Bonica, a Stanford political science professor, found that in Trump administration cases decided between 1 May and 23 June, federal district courts ruled against Trump 94.3% of the time (82 out of 87 cases), often after looking closely at the facts. In contrast, the supreme court ruled 93.7% of the time for Trump (15 out of 16 cases), often without taking a close look at the facts.“The supreme court has pulled the rug out from under the lower federal courts, and it has done so deliberately and knowingly,” Luttig said, adding that the court is “acquiescing in and accommodating the president’s lawlessness”.With the court siding so often with Trump, a new Gallup poll found that a record high 43% of Americans think the court is too conservative, higher than the 36% who think the court is “about right”. Moreover, the court’s overall approval rating has fallen to its lowest level since Gallup began measuring, dropping below 40% for the first time in August (before climbing slightly) – and down from nearly 60% in the early 2000s.Steven Levitsky, a political science professor at Harvard and co-author of How Democracies Die, voiced bewilderment that the court has been so obliging toward a president who he says is a clear threat to democracy. According to Levitsky, courts come under the thumb of authoritarian governments in several ways. One way is “ideological agreement”. He said the court’s most rightwing members, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, seem in fundamental agreement with Trump, but he said the other conservatives do not love Trump even if they often rule for him. Levitsky suggested that those justices are so hostile toward liberals and liberal arguments that they gravitate towards Trump’s side in case after case.Court packing is another way courts fall under an authoritarian’s sway. Orbán, Erdoğan and their legislative allies have appointed the overwhelming majority of their countries’ judges, while Trump has appointed three of the nine justices. With life tenure, the justices should in theory feel free from political pressure and able to rule against Trump. In the past, many justices have ruled against the presidents and parties that appointed them.Levitsky sees another phenomenon at work: abdication. Pointing to both Congress and the supreme court, he said: “The major institutions that have the authority and responsibility to stand up and stop an authoritarian have declined to do so.”In his view, the conservative justices may have made a major miscalculation. “They are overconfident about the strength of our institutions,” Levitsky said. “They don’t really think our democracy is in danger. They don’t think it can really happen here. I really think a majority of members of the US establishment are in that camp.”The conservative justices have increasingly embraced the unitary executive theory, a once fringe, four-decade-old notion that the president has sole, unlimited authority over the executive branch and should, for instance, be free to fire members of independent agencies along with hundreds of thousands of federal employees. “If they really believed that Trump was a threat to democracy, they wouldn’t be giving him so much power,” Levitsky said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe court’s conservatives, Levitsky and many legal scholars say, are also engaged in appeasement. Roberts and the conservatives are “scared out of their minds that they will have to play chicken with Trump”, Levitsky said. “The worst thing for them is if the government ignores them and they don’t have any authority. They’re just terrified that Trump will trample on them and undermine their authority. Trump is not someone you want to play chicken with. They’re terrified of a big, high-profile fight with Trump.”In other words, the conservative justices are so eager to save face and avoid confrontation that they have often given a green light to what lower courts have seen as Trump’s lawlessness. Meanwhile, the three liberal justices – Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson – have written repeated, often angry dissents that chastise the supermajority for acquiescing to Trump’s lawlessness and steamrolling over parts of the constitution.One theory is that the conservative justices are deliberately giving Trump small victories – vacating lower courts’ injunctions and letting the president’s executive orders proceed and do their damage – as the justices wait for those cases to return to the supreme court, perhaps in a year or two. At that point, those cases would be fully briefed and argued, and the court would issue formal, longer rulings. Legal scholars hope, but are not optimistic, that the thus far compliant court will be more willing to defy Trump when the cases are fully briefed and argued, with the birthright citizenship and tariff cases most often mentioned.“What they’re doing,” Levitsky said, “is giving Trump small victories in an effort to placate him or preserve as much political capital for when the big fights come. It’s appeasement. Appeasement usually doesn’t work when you cede power to an authoritarian executive. It sends signals to society that no one is going to stop the guy. Ceding power to someone like Trump is really dangerous.”After Jair Bolsonaro, a rightwing Trump ally, was elected Brazil’s president in 2019, Alexandre de Moraes, a prominent member of Brazil’s supreme court, feared what he saw as Bolsonaro’s authoritarian tendencies. De Moraes cracked down on Bolsonaro’s efforts to spread disinformation on social media to undermine his opponents. When a mob of Bolsonaro’s allies stormed government buildings in January 2023, pushing for a coup d’etat, de Moraes led efforts to prosecute Bolsonaro. (Last month, Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison after being convicted of plotting a coup.)“When Bolsonaro got elected, de Moraes realized that he’s a threat to democracy,” Levitsky said. “He thought that the Brazilian supreme court could be Chamberlain or Churchill.” (Neville Chamberlain, a British prime minister, agreed to let Adolf Hitler take over a German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia in 1938, as part of the Munich agreement, infamously declaring that the agreement would assure “peace for our time”.)“The [US] supreme court hasn’t wanted to be Churchill.” Levitsky said. “John Roberts has been Chamberlain. I think that is incredible destructive behavior.”

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      Trump news at a glance: Democrats say administration refusing shutdown talks as president repeats threat of firings

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      The Trump administration will start mass layoffs of federal workers if the president decides negotiations to end the government shutdown are “absolutely going nowhere,” a senior White House official has said.Kevin Hassett told CNN he still saw a chance that Democrats would back down, but added that Trump was “getting ready to act” if he has to.No tangible signs of negotiations have emerged between congressional leaders since Trump met with them last week. The shutdown began on 1 October, after Senate Democrats rejected a short-term funding measure that would keep federal agencies open through to 21 November. Democrats are demanding that funding include healthcare measures for low-income Americans.“They’ve refused to talk with us,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer told CBS, saying the impasse could be solved only by further talks between Trump and the four congressional leaders.House speaker says Democrats aren’t serious about shutdown negotiation as Democratic leader blames RepublicansThe Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, accused Democrats of being “not serious” in negotiations to end the federal government shutdown, while the Democratic leader accused Republicans of driving the shutdown.Read the full storyUS struck another boat illegally carrying drugs off Venezuela coast, Trump saysUS forces on Saturday evening struck another vessel illegally carrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela, Donald Trump said on Sunday to thousands of sailors at a ceremony celebrating the US navy’s 250th anniversary.The United Nations has condemned the US strikes – which the US defends as countering “narco-terrorist” members of Tren de Aragua, designated a foreign terrorist organization, in international waters – as extrajudicial executions.Read the full storyNewsom to sue Trump as Pentagon sends California national guard to OregonCalifornia’s governor, Gavin Newsom, announced on Sunday that he is suing Donald Trump over the deployment of 300 California national guard personnel to Oregon.Newsom’s proposed lawsuit follows a federal judge’s ruling that blocked the Trump administration from deploying the Oregon national guard to Portland. US district judge Karin Immergut agreed with arguments it would inflame rather than calm tensions in the city.Read the full storyKristi Noem calls Chicago a ‘war zone’ after federal agents shoot womanKristi Noem, Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary, called Chicago “a war zone” on Sunday after federal agents shot a woman and the governor of Illinois accused the administration of fueling the crisis rather than resolving it.Speaking on Fox News Sunday morning, Noem took aim at the city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, who has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s Ice raids and deployment of the national guard in Illinois, a measure he called “unhinged and unhealthy”.Read the full storyIsrael continues Gaza bombardment as Trump plan negotiators arrive in CairoNegotiators have arrived in Cairo before talks on Monday expected to focus on the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza and a broader end to the war, as Israel continued strikes on the Palestinian territory, killing 63 people in the last 24 hours.The US envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to join the talks, according to Israeli media, in addition to Israel’s negotiators and a Palestinian delegation headed by Khalil al-Hayya, the deputy head of the political bureau of Hamas.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      In a rare display of unity, out-of-power Democrats have embraced the risky politics of a government shutdown as their boldest effort yet to rein in a president whom many Americans and constitutional scholars now view as a threat to US democracy.

      Trump is intensifying his attacks on Soros little more than a year before the midterm elections for Congress, in what’s been described as a “chilling message to other donors”. The billionaire reportedly contributed more than $170m to help Democrats during the 2022 midterm cycle.

      The Trump administration is targeting 100m acres of forest across the country for logging. One critical wilderness area – Ohio’s sole national forest – could be wiped out.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 4 October 2025. More

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      US struck another boat illegally carrying drugs off Venezuela coast, Trump says

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      US forces on Saturday evening struck another vessel illegally carrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela, Donald Trump said on Sunday to thousands of sailors at a ceremony celebrating the US navy’s 250th anniversary. He added that the US would also start looking at drug trafficking happening on land.Trump made the comment during a speech at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, next to the Harry S Truman aircraft carrier. It was not immediately clear if he was referencing a strike announced on Friday by defense secretary Pete Hegseth.During his speech, Trump said the navy had supported the mission “to blow the cartel terrorists the hell out of the water. There are no boats in the water anymore. You can’t find them.”The navy has also been utilized to join an armed conflict with drug cartels, leading to four strikes in the Caribbean on what the administration says are fast-boats engaged in drug trafficking.Trump added that if drug smugglers were not coming in by sea, “we’ll have to start looking about the land because they’ll be forced to go by land. And let me tell you that’s not going to work out out well for them either.”The United Nations has condemned the US strikes – which the US defends as countering “narco-terrorist” members of Tren de Aragua, designated a foreign terrorist organization, in international waters – as extrajudicial executions.“International law does not allow governments to simply murder alleged drug traffickers,” the UN said last month. “Criminal activities should be disrupted, investigated and prosecuted in accordance with the rule of law, including through international cooperation.”The navy celebrations come amid a shutdown of the federal government that has left some military personnel working without pay. Trump has accused Democrats of enabling the shutdown and attempting “to destroy this wonderful celebration of the US Navy’s Birthday”.“I believe, ‘THE SHOW MUST GO ON!’” Trump posted on Friday night on his social media site. “This will be the largest Celebration in the History of the Navy. Thousands of our brave Active Duty Servicemembers and Military Families will be in attendance, and I look forward to this special day with all of them.”Trump has pledged to rebuild the navy’s shipbuilding capacity after warnings that the service is in danger of losing its status as the world’s dominant naval power.The US fleet is at its smallest size since before the second world war, while state-subsidized Chinese shipyards have surpassed the productivity of US shipyards.Navy secretary John Phelan, who was confirmed in March, has identified “urgency” as a missing element in naval shipbuilding and ordered an accelerated production schedule for the Columbia- and Virginia-class submarine programs.The navy celebrations come after months of turmoil at the Pentagon as Hegseth rearranges the military’s top leadership of the army, navy, air force and coast guard.In a controversial speech to military leaders last week, Hegseth declared an end to “woke” culture and announced new directives that include “gender-neutral” or “male-level” standards for physical fitness.Hegseth said: “The only mission of the newly restored Department of War is this: warfighting, preparing for war and preparing to win, unrelenting and uncompromising in that pursuit not because we want war, no one here wants war, but it’s because we love peace.”At the meeting, Trump proposed using US cities as training grounds for the armed forces and he spoke of needing military might to combat what he called the “invasion from within”. More

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      Newsom to sue Trump over California national guard deployment to Oregon

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      California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, announced on Sunday that he is suing Donald Trump over the alleged deployment of 300 California national guard personnel to Oregon.“They are on their way there now,” Newsom said in a press statement. “The Trump Administration is unapologetically attacking the rule of law itself and putting into action their dangerous words – ignoring court orders and treating judges, even those appointed by the President himself, as political opponents.”Newsom’s proposed lawsuit follows a federal judge’s ruling that blocked the Trump administration from deploying the Oregon national guard to Portland. US district judge Karin Immergut agreed with arguments it would inflame rather than calm tensions in the city.Immergut said in her ruling, which delays sending the guard until at least 18 October, that there was a lack of evidence that the recent protests in Portland justified the move.Caroline Turco, Portland’s senior deputy attorney, said that there had been no violence against Ice officers for months and that recent Ice protests were “sedate” in the week before the president declared the city to be a war zone, sometimes featuring fewer than a dozen protesters.“This isn’t about public safety, it’s about power,” Newsom said. “We will take this fight to court, but the public cannot stay silent in the face of such reckless and authoritarian conduct by the President of the United States.”In a statement on X, Oregon attorney general Dan Rayfield said the state is “quickly assessing our options and preparing to take legal action.“The President is obviously hellbent on deploying the military in American cities, absent facts or authority to do so,” he wrote. “It is up to us and the courts to hold him accountable. That’s what we intend to do.”The California national guard referred questions to the defense department. A department spokesperson declined to comment.“President Trump exercised his lawful authority to protect federal assets and personnel in Portland following violent riots and attacks on law enforcement. For once, Gavin Newscum should stand on the side of law-abiding citizens instead of violent criminals destroying Portland and cities across the country,” read a response from the White House deputy press secretary, Abigail Jackson.The news from Oregon came just a day after Trump authorized the deployment of national guard troops to Chicago, the latest in a string of similar interventions across several US states.Trump had first announced the plan on 27 September, saying he was “authorizing full force, if necessary” despite pleas from Oregon officials and the state’s congressional delegation, who said there had been a single, uneventful protest outside one federal immigration enforcement office.For years, Trump has amplified the narrative that Portland is a “war-ravaged” city with anarchists engaging in chaos and unlawful behavior.During his first term in 2020, he deployed federal forces to the city amid the protests over the murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The protests spread across the US but were especially heightened in Portland. Despite protests against Ice being relatively small in the state this year, Trump has used them as a justification to deploy troops.Speaking on X about the latest move from Trump, Newsom said: “It’s appalling. It’s un-American, and it must be stopped.” More

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      Bad Bunny pushes back on Kristi Noem threat that immigrants stay away from Super Bowl

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      Bad Bunny responded to homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s threats to send federal immigration enforcement agents to the Super Bowl next year, joking during Saturday Night Live that everyone was happy about his planned half-time performance, “even Fox News”.The 31-year-old Puerto Rican singer who has criticized the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies hosted the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, using his opening monologue to address controversy around his 2026 Super Bowl performance.“It’s good to be back. This is my second time hosting and my fourth time being here,” he said as he took the stage. “I’m doing the Super Bowl half-time show. I’m very happy and I think everyone is happy about it.”The line was followed by a quick montage of Fox news contributors, each saying one word that was clipped together to say, “He should be the next President.”During the opening, the artist included some words in Spanish that he devoted to “all the Latinos and Latinas in the entire world and here in the United States”.“More than being an accomplishment of mine, it’s an accomplishment for everybody, demonstrating that our mark and our contribution to this country will never be able to be removed or erased by anybody,” he said in Spanish. Afterwards, he said in English, “If you didn’t understand what I just said, you have four months to learn.”The announcement that Bad Bunny would headline the Super Bowl half-time show sparked a wave of conservative outrage including from Noem.Trump’s homeland security secretary said on a rightwing podcast on Friday that only Americans should attend next year’s Super Bowl and warned that Ice agents “will be all over” the event. She also said the NFL will “not be able to sleep at night” over its decision to choose Bad Bunny as the half-time performer.Bad Bunny was born and raised in Puerto Rico, a US territory, and is an American citizen.Bad Bunny has said that fears that his fans would be subjected to immigration raids prompted him to exclude the US from his forthcoming world tour. The musician just wrapped a three-month concert series in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which drew in an estimated 600,000 attendees.“My residence was beautiful, everyone loved it,” he said during his monologue, acknowledging the success of the recent tour.In other sketches during the 51st season opener, Colin Jost stepped in as Pete Hegseth. “You will now be yelled at by a former Fox News host,” a colleague announced as Jost entered, before the sketch turned to an angry tirade on the US military.“Our military will now have the same rules as any good frat party: No fat chicks. And if you’re a fat dude, goddam it, you better be funny as hell,” Jost said, a clear reference to Hegeth’s recent call out against diversity and fat shaming of troops as he directed generals to fall in line or quit.Trump, played by James Austin Johnson, also made a brief appearance, not as the sketch’s target but as its self-appointed monitor. “I’m just here keeping my eye on SNL, making sure they don’t say anything too mean about me.” More