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      Trump fires Doug Emhoff and others from US Holocaust Memorial Council

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      The Trump administration has fired several members of the US Holocaust Memorial Council appointed by Joe Biden, including Doug Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris.Emhoff described the move as a political decision that turned “one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue”.He said he had been informed on Tuesday of his removal from the board, which oversees the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and other Holocaust commemorations.“Let me be clear: Holocaust remembrance and education should never be politicized,” Emhoff said in a statement. “To turn one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue is dangerous – and it dishonors the memory of six million Jews murdered by Nazis that this museum was created to preserve.”Emhoff, who is Jewish and who led the Biden administration’s efforts to combat antisemitism, said he would continue to “speak out, to educate, and to fight hate in all its forms – because silence is never an option”.“No divisive political decision will ever shake my commitment to Holocaust remembrance and education or to combatting hate and antisemitism,” he added.His statement comes a day before Harris is due to deliver her first major speech since leaving office in January. The former US vice-president, who lost to Donald Trump in the November presidential election, is expected to offer a sharp critique of the Trump administration, in San Francisco.In addition, the Trump administration reportedly dismissed other Biden appointees to the council, including the former White House chief of staff Ron Klain; the former UN ambassador Susan Rice; the former deputy national security adviser Jon Finer; the former labor secretary Tom Perez; the former ambassador to Spain and Andorra Alan Solomont; and Mary Zients, the wife of the former White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, according to Jewish Insider.Anthony Bernal, who served as a senior adviser to the former first lady Jill Biden, was also fired from the council, the New York Times reported.Many of those reportedly fired on Tuesday had been appointed in January. Presidential appointments to the council typically serve for a five-year term.Solomont, who was appointed to the council in 2023, told Jewish Insider that he learned of his dismissal through an email from a staff member of the White House presidential personnel office.“On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council is terminated, effective immediately,” the email reads. “Thank you for your service.”The email provided no explanation for the dismissal and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.A statement from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reads: “At this time of high antisemitism and Holocaust distortion and denial, the Museum is gratified that our visitation is robust and demand for Holocaust education is increasing.“We look forward to continuing to advance our vitally important mission as we work with the Trump Administration,” it added. More

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      UN climate talks will be ‘uphill battle’ amid Trump rollbacks, says Cop30 chair

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      Crucial United Nations climate talks this year will be a “slightly uphill battle” due to economic turmoil and Donald Trump’s removal of the US from the effort to tackle global heating, the chair of the upcoming summit has admitted.Governments from around the world will gather in Belem, Brazil, in November for the Cop30 meeting, where they will be expected to announce new plans to deal with the climate crisis and slash greenhouse gas emissions. Very few countries have done so yet, however, and the world remains well off track to remain within agreed temperature limits designed to avert the worst consequences of climate breakdown.It is not clear what, if any, presence the US will have at the talks after Trump, who calls climate change “a giant hoax”, removed the world’s leading economic power from the Paris climate agreement and set about demolishing environmental regulations at home. A trade war triggered by Trump has also caused concerns over a global economic downturn, further distracting leaders from the task of cutting emissions.This backdrop will make the Cop talks challenging, its president, André Corrêa do Lago, conceded. “I think it’s going to be a slightly uphill battle,” the Brazilian diplomat said in New York on Tuesday. “Let’s say that the international context could help a little more.”View image in fullscreenAsked about the fear that other countries will also scale back their plans to address the climate crisis, Corrêa do Lago said that none had said they would do so officially. “But there is obviously some that say, ‘God, how am I going to convince my people that I have to try to lower emissions if the richest country in the world is not doing the same?,’” he said. Corrêa do Lago said that invites had yet to be sent to the US, so he did not know who will attend from the Trump administration.The focus at Cop, Corrêa do Lago said, would be on highlighting how the shift to cleaner energy and protecting forests provide tangible economic benefits to people. “That’s why we wanted to be a Cop of solutions, a Cop of action, and not so much a Cop in which you’re going to negotiate documents that you don’t know if they’re going to be implemented,” he said.“We negotiated so many things under the Paris accord, including about renewables, about energy efficiency, about transitioning away from fossil fuels, about ending deforestation. I believe that there are enough agreements on those things, now we have to translate that into the economy and into people’s lives.”Countries will again discuss climate finance at Cop30 but there remains a “very strong divide” between developed and developing countries on this issue, Corrêa do Lago said, with poorer nations urging those countries most responsible for the climate crisis to provide more funding to help deal with the impact of flooding, heatwaves, droughts and other mounting disasters. Small Pacific island states also recently called for rich countries to hurry up and submit their new climate plans.China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, is “demonstrating an absolute conviction that it’s the right way to go and to incorporate climate into their economic growth”, according to Corrêa do Lago. Xi Jinping, China’s president, has said that his country will “not slow down its climate actions” despite Trump’s backtracking on cutting carbon pollution.Corrêa do Lago was speaking at a BloombergNEF event which featured several gloomy comments from speakers about the US’s retreat from dealing with the climate crisis and the uncertainty this has caused for clean energy developers.States, cities and businesses within the US are still pushing ahead with the energy transition despite Trump’s actions, insisted Gina McCarthy, Joe Biden’s top climate adviser.“Yes we need to recognize that we have a president who wants to deny climate, yes we have tremendous challenges moving forward but we have incredible opportunities,” McCarthy said.“Clean energy is not gone, it may have gone quiet but businesses are still jumping in to make the investments to protect our future and our kids. That is what gives me hope.” More

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      Pete Hegseth scraps Pentagon’s Women, Peace and Security program citing DEI

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      Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, has abruptly banished the Pentagon’s Women, Peace and Security program as part of his crusade against diversity and equity – dismissing it as “woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative” despite it being a signature Donald Trump achievement from his first term.In a post on X, Hegseth wrote: “This morning, I proudly ENDED the ‘Women, Peace & Security’ (WPS) program inside the [Department of Defense]. WPS is yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops — distracting from our core task: WAR-FIGHTING.”The defense secretary added the program was “pushed by feminists and left-wing activists”, claiming “Politicians fawn over it; troops HATE it.”But the decision is raising some eyebrows as the initiative was established during Trump’s first administration when he signed the Women, Peace and Security Act in 2017, making the United States the first country in the world to codify standalone legislation on the matter.The Trump campaign even courted women voters by citing the initiative as one of its top accomplishments for women on its website.Attempting to square this circle, Hegseth later claimed the Biden administration had “distorted & weaponized” the original program. “Biden ruined EVERYTHING, including ‘Women, Peace & Security,’” he insisted.The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment clarifying what will change in this iteration of the WPS following the secretary’s announcement. Hegseth had indicated the Pentagon would comply with minimum requirements under federal statute but would lobby to defund the program during the next budget cycle in his initial post.The defense secretary’s problems with the program could also create awkward tension with multiple Trump cabinet members who were architects of the very policy he’s now dismantling. Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, wrote the 2017 legislation while serving in Congress and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, co-sponsored the Senate version.Rubio, just this month, called it “a bill that I was very proud to have been a co-sponsor of when I was in the Senate”, at the state department’s international women of courage awards ceremony.Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, also supported other legislation to strengthen the WPS and served as co-chair of the bipartisan Women, Peace and Security Caucus.And first-daughter Ivanka Trump, back in 2019, also publicly promoted the program, writing on social media that “Today I was proud to announce, with female police cadets, that Colombia will develop a #WPS National Action Plan as part of our WPS partnership.”The WPS program, which originated from a 2000 United Nations security council resolution, was first created to boost women’s participation in peace and security planning and protect women from violence in conflict situations.Iterations of the program have since been widely adopted globally as research has shown that peace agreements with women’s participation are more durable. More

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      Denied, detained, deported: the people targeted in Trump’s immigration crackdown

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      Donald Trump retook the White House vowing to stage “the largest deportation operation in American history”. As previewed, the administration set about further militarizing the US-Mexico border and targeting people requesting asylum and refugees while conducting raids and deportations in undocumented communities, detaining and deporting immigrants and spreading fear.Critics are outraged, if not surprised. But few expected the new legal chapter that unfolded next: a multipronged crackdown on certain people seen as opponents of the US president’s ideological agenda. This extraordinary assault has come in the context of wider attacks on higher education, the courts and the constitution.Here are some of the most high-profile individual cases that have captured the world’s attention so far because of their extreme and legally dubious nature, mostly involving documented people targeted by the Trump administration in the course of its swift and unlawful power grab.Students and academics hunted and ‘disappeared’In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) teams suddenly began arresting and detaining foreign-born students and academics on visas or green cards. In most cases the government has cited their roles in pro-Palestinian campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza following the 7 October 2023 attack. Claims that they “support Hamas” are invoked as justification for wanting to deport them, even though they have not been charged with any crimes. Those taken include:Mahmoud KhalilA recent graduate student of Columbia University in New York, Mahmoud Khalil, 30, is a Palestinian green-card holder who was a leader during protests last year. He was arrested without due process in front of his pregnant wife and has been in a detention center in Louisiana since mid-March, denied release to attend the birth. He told an immigration judge that he and hundreds of other detainees were being denied rights the court itself had claimed to prioritize: “Due process and fundamental fairness.”View image in fullscreenThe government is using obscure immigration law to make extraordinary claims in cases like Khalil’s that it can summarily detain and deport people for constitutionally protected free speech if they are deemed adverse to US foreign policy. A far-right group has claimed credit for flagging his and others’ names for scrutiny by the authorities.Rümeysa ÖztürkView image in fullscreenUS immigration officials encircled and grabbed the Tufts University PhD student near Boston and bustled her into an unmarked car, shown in onlooker video. Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar and Turkish national on a visa, had co-written an op-ed in the student newspaper, criticizing Tufts’ response to Israel’s military assault on Gaza and Palestinians. She was rushed into detention in Louisiana in apparent defiance of a court order. Öztürk, 30, says she has been neglected and abused there in “unsafe and inhumane conditions”.Mohsen MahdawiView image in fullscreenMahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and student at Columbia University, was apprehended by Ice in Colchester, Vermont, on 14 April, as first reported by the Intercept.He was prominent in the protests at Columbia last year. During his apprehension he was put into an unmarked car outside a federal office where he was attending an interview to become a naturalized US citizen. The administration’s arcane justification is that his activism could “potentially undermine” the Middle East peace process, citing a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). He is detained in Vermont. Democratic lawmakers have visited Khalil, Öztürk and Mahdawi but failed to secure their release.Yunseo ChungView image in fullscreenAnother Columbia student, Chung, 21, sued the administration for trying to deport her, and has gone into hiding. She is a pro-Palestinian campaigner and was arrested by the New York police in March while protesting, as first reported by the New York Times. She said a government official told her lawyer they wanted to remove her from the country and her residency status was being revoked. Chung was born in South Korea and has been in the US since she was seven.Alireza DoroudiView image in fullscreenThe Democrats on campus group at the University of Alabama said of the arrest of Doroudi, 32, an Iranian studying mechanical engineering: “Donald Trump, Tom Homan [Trump’s “border czar”], and Ice have struck a cold, vicious dagger through the heart of UA’s international community.”He was taken to the same Louisiana federal detention center as Khalil. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said he was a threat to national security, without providing details, and the state department had revoked his visa, while an immigration judge refused to release him.Badar Khan SuriView image in fullscreenMore than 370 alumni of Washington DC-based Georgetown University joined 65 current students there in signing on to a letter opposing immigration authorities’ detention of Dr Badar Khan Suri, a senior postdoctoral fellow at the institution’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).The authorities revoked his student visa, alleging the Indian citizen’s father-in-law was an adviser to Hamas officials more than a decade ago – and claiming he was “deportable” because of his posts on social media in support of Palestine. He was taken to Louisiana and then detention in Texas and was given court dates in May.View image in fullscreenKseniia PetrovaThe Harvard Medical School research scientist was stopped at Boston’s Logan airport by US authorities on her way back from France in February, over what appeared to be an irregularity in customs paperwork related to frog embryo samples. She was told her visa was being revoked and she was being deported to her native Russia.When Petrova, 30, said she feared political persecution there because she had criticized the invasion of Ukraine, she was taken away and also ended up in an overcrowded detention facility in Louisiana. Her colleagues say her expertise is “irreplaceable” and Petrova said foreign scientists like her “enrich” America.Student visas revoked, then restored amid chaosMore than 1,400 international students from at least 200 colleges across the US had their “legal status changed” by the state department, including the revoking of visas, in what the specialist publication Inside Higher Education called “an explosion of visa terminations”.Amid scant information and rising panic, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, lambasted protesters and campus activists as “lunatics”. Some were cited for pro-Palestinian views, others concluded they must have been targeted because of minor crimes or offenses, such as a speeding ticket. Some could find no explanation. Then in the face of multiple court challenges, the administration in late April reversed course and restored legal statuses that had been rescinded en masse, but said it was developing a new policy. Uncertainty prevails.The legal rollercoaster came too late for this high-profile case:Felipe Zapata VelásquezView image in fullscreenThe family of the University of Florida student Felipe Zapata Velásquez, 27, said he was “undergoing a physical and emotional recovery process” in his native Colombia after police arrested him in Gainesville in March for traffic offenses and turned him over to Ice. He agreed to be deported, to avoid lengthy detention and legal battles. The Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost accused authorities of “kidnapping” Velásquez.Removed by (admitted) mistakeKilmar Ábrego GarcíaView image in fullscreenThe Salvadorian man was removed to El Salvador by mistake, which the Trump administration admitted. But it is essentially defying a US supreme court order to “facilitate” his return to his home and family in Maryland. Ábrego García was undocumented but had protected status against being deported to El Salvador. He was flown there anyway, without a hearing, to a brutal mega-prison, then later transferred to another facility. The administration accuses him of being a violent gangster and has abandoned him, infuriating a federal judge repeatedly and prompting warnings of a constitutional crisis.He has not been charged with any crimes but was swept up with hundreds of Venezuelans deported there. He has begged to speak to his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who insists he is not a criminal. The sheet metalworkers union chief, Michael Coleman, described Ábrego García as an “apprentice working hard to pursue the American dream” and said he was not a gang member. Trump said he was eyeing Salvadorian prisons for US citizens.Deported to a third country, without due processThe US deported more than 230 Venezuelan men to the mega-prison in El Salvador without so much as a hearing in mid-March despite an infuriated federal judge trying to halt the flights, then blocking others. Donald Trump took extraordinary action to avoid due process by invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA), a law meant only to be used in wartime, prompting court challenges led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). John Roberts, the US chief justice, rebuked the president when he threatened the judge. The justices, by a majority, did not stop Trump from using the AEA but the bench unanimously reaffirmed the right to due process and said individuals must be able to bring habeas corpus challenges.Most of the men are reportedly not violent criminals or members of violent gangs, as the Trump administration asserts, according to a New York Times investigation.Many appear to have been accused of being members of the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua partly on the basis of their tattoos, with their families speaking out, including:Andry José Hernández RomeroView image in fullscreenHernández, a 31-year-old makeup artist and hairdresser, entered California last year to attend an asylum appointment, telling the authorities he was under threat in Venezuela as a gay man. But he was detained and accused of being in Tren de Aragua because of his tattoos, then suddenly deported under Trump, deemed a “security threat”.Jerce Reyes Barriosskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe former professional footballer, 36, has been accused of gang membership by the DHS, seemingly because of his tattoos, including one of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “dios”.“He chose this tattoo because it is similar to the logo for his favourite soccer team, Real Madrid,” his lawyer, Linette Tobin, said, adding that her client fled Venezuela after protesting against the government and being tortured.Francisco Javier García CasiqueView image in fullscreenRelatives were shocked when they spotted Francisco Javier García Casique, 24, in a propaganda video from El Salvador showing scores of Venezuelan prisoners being frog-marched off planes and into custody there. He is a barber in his home town of Maracay and is completely innocent of gang involvement, the family said, adding that Francisco and his brother Sebastián have matching tattoos quoting the Bible.Migrants seeking asylum removed to PanamaA US military plane took off from California in February carrying more than 100 immigrants from countries as far flung as Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, China, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Pakistan, dumping them in Panama. They were shackled and deported to a third country without due process because their countries of origin refuse to accept them back from the US. Shocking scenes unfolded of the people locked in a hotel in Panama City, signaling and writing on the windows pleading for help.The people, including children, were then moved and held at a facility deep in the dense jungle that separates Panama from Colombia. They were later reportedly freed and were seeking asylum from other countries, their futures uncertain. One of those deported from the US was:Artemis GhasemzadehView image in fullscreenGhasemzadeh, 27, a migrant from Iran, wrote “Help us” in lipstick on a window of the hotel in Panama City, as a desperate way of alerting New York Times reporters on the street to her and fellow detainees’ plight. She had thought that, especially as a convert from Islam to Christianity who faces danger in Iran as a result, that she would be offered freedom in the US, she told the newspaper while still in custody. She is possibly still in Panama trying to get a foothold.Americans questioned and threatenedAmir MakledView image in fullscreenMakled, a Detroit-born attorney, was questioned at the airport on returning from vacation. He was flagged to a terrorism response team, kept behind and pressured to hand over his phone, then give up some of its contents. The Lebanese American represents a pro-Palestinian student protester who was arrested at the University of Michigan. Experts said the incident was evidence of a weakening of fourth amendment constitutional protections at the border against “unreasonable search and seizure”.Nicole MicheroniView image in fullscreenThis Massachusetts immigration lawyer, a US-born American citizen, spoke out after receiving an email from the Trump administration telling her “it is time for you to leave the United States”. She said it was “probably, hopefully, sent to me in error. But it’s a little concerning these are going out to US citizens.” She told NBC she thought it was a scare tactic.Adam PeñaThis San Diego-based US citizen now carries his American passport and birth certificate everywhere with him and thinks he was sent one of the “time for you to leave” letters in error but because he represents clients in Ice detention locally. “I do believe this email was sent intentionally to immigration advocates around the country to instill fear and intimidation,” he told NBC news.Americans removedChildren who are seven, four and two and are US citizens were removed from the US in late April when their mothers were deported to Honduras. DHS said the two women chose to take their children with them but one of their lawyers told the Guardian that they were denied any opportunity to coordinate the care and custody of their children before being put on deportation flights from Louisiana. A federal judge said it was “illegal and unconstitutional” to thus remove a US citizen “with no meaningful process”.Visitors detainedJasmine Mooney, CanadaView image in fullscreenCanadian Jasmine Mooney was shackled and ended up in Ice detention in the US for two weeks over an alleged work visa irregularity while on one of her frequent visits to California. She spoke out about the harsh conditions and the information black hole and how outraged she was that so many other detainees she met, who helped her, are stranded without access to the kind of resources that ultimately got her out.Rebecca Burke, UKView image in fullscreenThe British graphic artist was stopped at the border when she headed from Seattle to Canada as a backpacker and, because of a visa mix-up, she became one of 32,809 people to be arrested by Ice during the first 50 days of Trump’s presidency. Almost three weeks of grueling detention conditions later, she smuggled out her poignant drawings of fellow detainees when she was released.Jessica Brösche, GermanyThe German tourist and tattoo artist, 29, from Berlin was detained by US immigration authorities and deported back to Germany after spending more than six weeks in US detention, including what she described as eight days in solitary confinement. Her family compared her ordeal to “a horror film”.Fabian Schmidt, GermanyView image in fullscreenThe 34-year-old German national and US green-card holder was apprehended and allegedly “violently interrogated” by US border officials as he was returning to New Hampshire from a trip to Luxembourg. His family said he was held for hours at Boston’s Logan airport, stripped naked and put in a cold shower, then later deprived of food and medicine, and collapsed. His case is being investigated and as of mid-April he was in Ice detention in Rhode Island.Sent back‘Jonathan’A man with a US work visa provided his anonymous account to the Guardian of being denied entry into the US after a trip to his native Australia to scatter his sister’s ashes. He was pulled aside on arrival in Houston, Texas, and accused, variously, of selling drugs and having improper paperwork. After being detained for over a day he was put on a flight back to Australia even though he has worked on the US east coast for five years, where he lived with his girlfriend.Denied entry – for criticizing Trump?Alvin Gibbs, Marc Carrey and Stefan Häublein of band UK SubsView image in fullscreenMembers of the punk rock band UK Subs said they were denied entry and detained in the US on their way to play a gig in Los Angeles, after being questioned about visas. Bassist Alvin Gibbs said: “I can’t help but wonder whether my frequent, and less than flattering, public comments regarding their president [Trump] and his administration played a role.” He and the two band mates were kept in harsh conditions for 24 hours then deported back to the UK.French scientistA French scientist, who has not been publicly named, was denied entry to the US after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration, according to a French government minister. The researcher was on his way to a conference in Texas.“Freedom of opinion, free research, and academic freedom are values ​​that we will continue to proudly uphold,” Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research, told Le Monde. More

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      White House calls Amazon ‘hostile’ for reportedly planning to list tariff costs

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      The White House accused Amazon of committing a “hostile and political act” after a report said the e-commerce company was planning to inform customers how much Donald Trump’s tariffs would cost them as they shopped.The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was responding to a report in Punchbowl News, which, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that Amazon would begin displaying on its site how much the tariffs had increased the prices of individual products, breaking out the figure from the total listed price.“Why didn’t Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?” Leavitt asked during a press briefing.Trump himself called Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s billionaire founder, shortly after the report published to complain about the change, according to multiple reports.Amazon’s online marketplace has seen prices rise across the board since Trump announced sweeping tariffs at the start of April, particularly on China, where many products listed on Amazon.com ship from. In response, the company has pressured its third-party sellers to shoulder the burden of the extra import costs rather than pass them on to customers. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“This is another reason why Americans should buy American,” Leavitt continued, though Amazon is headquartered in Seattle.Amazon moved to distance itself from the report, saying the idea had been considered by Amazon Haul, the company’s recently launched low-cost shopping hub, but had been rejected.“The team that runs our ultra-low-cost Amazon Haul store considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products. This was never approved and is not going to happen,” said Tim Doyle, Amazon spokesperson.Online shopping has been upended by Trump’s trade policies. The day before the White House took aim at Amazon, discount retailers Temu and Shein, which ship from China, began displaying 145% “import charges” in customers’ totals to reflect the surcharge on Chinese goods.Asked if the strident statement from the White House signaled a rift between Trump and Bezos, who stepped down as CEO in 2021 and donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund earlier this year, Leavitt said: “I will not speak to the president’s relationships with Jeff Bezos.”Bezos and Trump endured a strained relationship during the president’s initial run for the White House. During the 2016 campaign, the Amazon founder publicly argued that some of Trump’s rhetoric, including threats to lock up his political opponents, damaged democracy, while Trump accused the tech giant of failing to pay enough taxes.Scrutiny of Trump’s first term by the Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos, angered the US president. He was further infuriated by Bezos’s apparent refusal to intervene. In a bid to pile pressure on Amazon, Trump threatened to block federal aid for the US Postal Service unless it hiked shipping rates for online firms.Since Trump’s return to power, however, Bezos has taken a noticeably different approach to the president. He attended Trump’s inauguration, alongside a string of other big tech founders, and Amazon donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund.Days before last November’s presidential election, the Washington Post announced its editorial board would not endorse a candidate for the first time in more than three decades – prompting an exodus of subscribers. Bezos insisted the move was a “principled decision” and claimed that “inadequate planning” had led to the last-minute call.The Post went a step further in February, announcing an overhaul of the newspaper’s opinion section to focus its output “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets”, Bezos said. The decision angered readers and staff and prompted the resignation of the opinions editor, David Shipley.His actions drew a sharp rebuke from Marty Baron, the highly regarded former editor of the Washington Post, who told the Guardian that Bezos’s plan for the newspaper’s opinion section amounted to a “betrayal of the very idea of free expression” that had left him “appalled”.Amazon, meanwhile, is reportedly paying some $40m to license a documentary on the life of the first lady, Melania Trump. More

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      The uniting theme of Trump’s presidency? Ineptitude | Robert Reich

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      Some Democrats fear they’re playing into Donald Trump’s hands by fighting his mass deportations rather than focusing on his failures on bread-and-butter issues like the cost of living.But it’s not either-or. The theme that unites Trump’s inept handling of deportations, his trampling on human and civil rights, his rejection of the rule of law, his dictatorial centralization of power, and his utterly inept handling of the economy is the ineptness itself.In his first term, not only did his advisers and cabinet officials put guardrails around his crazier tendencies, but they also provided his first administration a degree of stability and focus. Now, it’s mayhem.A sampling from recent weeks:1. The Pete Hegseth disaster. The defense secretary didn’t just mistakenly share the military’s plans with the editor of the Atlantic; we now know he shared them with a second Signal group, including his wife, brother and personal lawyer.He’s a walking disaster. John Ullyot, who resigned last week as Pentagon spokesperson, penned an op-ed in Politico that began: “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon.” Last Friday, Hegseth fired three of his senior staffers. His chief of staff is leaving. As Ullyot wrote, it’s “very likely” that “even bigger bombshell stories” will come soon. The defense department “is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership”.It’s not just the defense department. Much of the federal government is in disarray.2. The Harvard debacle. A Trump official is now claiming that a letter full of demands about university policy sent to Harvard on 11 April was “unauthorized”. What does this even mean?As Harvard pointed out, the letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised. Recipients of such correspondence from the US government – even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach – do not question its authenticity or seriousness.”Even though it was “unauthorized”, the Trump regime is standing by the letter, which has now prompted Harvard to sue.3. The tariff travesty. No sooner had Trump imposed “retaliatory” tariffs on almost all of the US’s trading partners – based on a formula that has made no sense to anyone – than the US stock and bond markets began crashing.To stop the selloff, Trump declared a 90-day pause on the retaliatory tariffs but raised his tariffs on China to 145% – causing markets to plummet once again.Presumably to stem the impending economic crisis, he declared an exemption to the China tariffs for smartphones and computer equipment. By doing so, Trump essentially admitted what he had before denied: that importers and consumers bear the cost of tariffs.Now, Trump is saying that even his China tariffs aren’t really real. Following warnings from Walmart, Target and Home Depot that the tariffs would spike prices, Trump termed the tariffs he imposed on China “very high” and promised they “will come down substantially. But it won’t be zero.”Markets soared on the news. But where in the world are we heading?4. The attack on the Fed chair fiasco. When Trump renewed his attacks on Jerome H Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve – calling him “a major loser” and demanding that the Fed cut interest rates – Trump unnerved already anxious investors who understand the importance of the Fed’s independence and feared that a politicized Fed wouldn’t be able to credibly fight inflation.Then, in another about-face, Trump said on Wednesday he had “no intention” of firing Powell, which also helped lift markets.An economy needs predictability. Investors won’t invest, consumers won’t buy, and producers won’t produce if everything continues to change. But Trump doesn’t think ahead. He responds only to immediate threats and problems.Who’s profiting from all this tumult? Anyone with inside knowledge of what Trump is about to do: most likely, Trump and his family.5. The Kilmar Ábrego García calamity. After the Trump regime admitted an “administrative error” in sending Ábrego García to a brutal Salvadoran torture prison, in violation of a federal court order, Trump then virtually ignored a 9-0 supreme court order to facilitate his return.To the contrary, with cameras rolling in the Oval Office, Trump embraced Nayib Bukele – who governs El Salvador in a permanent state of emergency and has himself imprisoned 83,000 people in brutal dungeons, mostly without due process. Trump then speculated about using Bukele’s prisons for “homegrown” (ie, American-born) criminals or dissidents.Meanwhile, after the Trump regime deported another group of immigrants to the Salvadoran prison under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law, the supreme court blocked it from deporting any more people under the measure.6. Ice’s blunderbuss. Further illustrating the chaos of the Trump regime, immigration officials have been detaining US citizens. One American was held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Arizona for 10 days until his relatives produced papers proving his citizenship, because, according to his girlfriend’s aunt, Ice didn’t believe he was American.Last week, the Trump regime abruptly took action to restore the legal status of thousands of international students who had been told in recent weeks that their right to study in the United States had been rescinded, but officials reserved the right to terminate their legal status at any time. What?Freedom depends on the rule of law. The rule of law depends on predictability. Just like Trump’s wildly inconsistent economic policies, his policies on immigration are threatening everyone.7. Musk’s ‘Doge’ disaster. Musk’s claims of government savings have been shown to be ludicrously exaggerated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRemember the claim that taxpayers funded $50m in condoms in Gaza? This was supposed to be the first big “gotcha” from the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), but as we know now, it was a lie. The US government buys condoms for about 5 cents apiece, which means $50m would buy 1bn condoms or roughly 467 for every resident of Gaza. Besides, according to a federal 2024 report, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) didn’t provide or fund any condoms in the entire Middle East in the 2021, 2022 or 2023 fiscal years.Then there have been the frantic callbacks of fired federal workers, such as up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration who work on sensitive jobs such as reassembling warheads. Four days after Doge fired them, the agency’s acting director rescinded the firings and asked them back. Similar callbacks have occurred throughout the government.Trump and Musk are threatening the safety and security of Americans – for almost no real savings.8. Measles mayhem. As measles breaks out across the country, sickening hundreds and killing at least two children so far, Trump’s secretary for health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, continues to claim that the measles vaccine “causes deaths every year … and all the illnesses that measles itself causes, encephalitis and blindness, et cetera”.In fact, the measles vaccine is safe, and its risks are lower than the risks of complications from measles. Most people who get the measles vaccine have no serious problems from it, the CDC says. There have been no documented deaths from the vaccine in healthy, non-immunocompromised people, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.Kennedy also says: “We’re always going to have measles, no matter what happens, as the [measles] vaccine wanes very quickly.” In fact, the measles vaccine is highly protective and lasts a lifetime for most people. Two doses of the vaccine are 97% effective against the virus, according to the CDC and medical experts worldwide. The US saw 3m to 4m cases a year before the vaccine. Today it’s typically fewer than 200.9. Student debt snafu. After a five-year pause on penalizing borrowers for not making student loan payments, the Trump regime is about to require households to resume payments. This could cause credit scores to plunge and slow the economy.Many of the households required to resume paying on their student loans are also struggling with credit card debt at near-record interest rates and high-rate mortgages they thought they would be able to refinance at a lower rate but haven’t. Instead of increasing education department staffing to handle a work surge and clarifying the often shifting rules of its many repayment programs, the Trump regime has done the opposite and cut staff.10. Who’s in charge? In the span of a single week, the IRS had three different leaders. Three days after Gary Shapley was named acting commissioner, it was announced that the deputy treasury secretary, Michael Faulkender, would replace Shapley. That was the same day, not incidentally, that the IRS cut access to the agency for Doge’s top representative.What happened? The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, told Trump that Musk had evaded him to install Shapley.Meanwhile, the Trump regime is cutting the IRS in half – starting with 6,700 layoffs and gutting the division that audits people with excessive wealth. These are the people meant to keep billionaires accountable. Without them, the federal government will not take in billions of dollars owed.At the same time, the trade adviser Peter Navarro has entered into a public spat with Musk, accusing him of not being a “car manufacturer” but a “car assembler” because Tesla relies on parts from around the world. This prompted Musk to call Navarro a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” in a post on X, later posting that he wanted to “apologize to bricks”.The state department has been torn apart by the firing of Peter Marocco, the official who was dismantling USAID, by Marco Rubio, the secretary of state. Career officials charged that Marocco, a Maga loyalist, was destroying the agency; Trump’s Maga followers view Marocco’s firing as a sign that Rubio is part of the establishment they want to destroy.Worse yet, Trump has fired more than a half-dozen national security officials after meeting with the far-right agitator Lara Loomer, who was granted access to the Oval Office and gave Trump a list of officials she deemed disloyal.Bottom line: no one is in charge. Trump is holding court but has the attention span of a fruit fly. This is causing chaos across the federal government, as rival sycophants compete for his limited attention.Incompetence is everywhere. The regime can’t keep military secrets. It can’t maintain financial stability. It can’t protect children from measles. It cannot protect America.While we need to continue to resist Trump’s authoritarianism, we also need to highlight his utter inability to govern America.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Why is the US sleeping as autocracy approaches? | Governor Jay Inslee

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      When a woman asked me a couple of weeks ago why leaders were not standing up to Donald Trump, my thoughts went immediately to political leaders. When I started to answer, she corrected me and said: “No, no, I’m talking about college presidents and law firms. Where the heck are they?”Where indeed? From all observations, most have been asleep as the US president dismantles democracy piece by jeweled piece. They are either cutting sweet little deals on their knees, or just remaining silent as the fruits of 250 years of national labor and life are strangled by Trump’s tentacles. From the cowering of major media companies to the shameful capitulation of some law firms, and oppressive silence from virtually all of them, the nation is sleepwalking into a slow but ever encroaching totalitarian state.As the woman continued her outpouring of anger and grief, I thought of John F Kennedy’s Pulitzer prize-winning book, Why England Slept, his brilliant exposition of why a proud and resilient nation ignored Germany’s mounting threat to their democracy when it was so obvious and imminent. Kennedy recognized the centrality of moments we now face, writing: “Any system of government will work when everything is going well. It’s the system that functions in the pinches that survives.” We are now being pinched by an autocrat who eats laws for breakfast and will not be stopped by any internal restraint.Whether our democracy survives to preserve the rule of law depends on so much more than senators and representatives. In a way, they are merely personal reflections of the public’s will. Depending exclusively on their personal commitment to the constitution is a good bet for the party now in the minority, but a sore loser for the majority party, or more accurately, the majority cult. The moment demands so much more than eloquence on the floor of the House and the Senate – it demands full-throated, continuous and united rebellion against the perverse oppression and malignant illegality of this authoritarian in the White House.Unfortunately, we are not seeing the necessary courage, not in the east, not in the west, not in large law firms, not in boardrooms, not in school district superintendents, not in chambers of commerce. The silence is deafening.Where was the united voice of major law firms when Trump maliciously began to target several of them? They were hiding. Where are the concerted voices of college presidents as their colleagues are being hung out to dry? Do they not teach history at these colleges, where any freshman could tell you that the Trump plan is right out of every autocrat’s playbook? First you tame the press, then you tame the colleges, then you tame the law firms so that no one can even get to court, then you eventually ignore the orders of the supreme court.We are well on our way to that final death knell of democracy, as we advance through the first three steps.My motivation to rally for our country is not driven solely by my love for democracy. Like millions of Americans, I see my own family being jeopardized by Trump’s callousness. I have seen first-hand the power of special education teachers to raise the prospects of special needs kids in my clan. I rebel at the Musk-Trump administration’s chainsaw attack eliminating the one agency that safeguards our kids’ access to special education investments, the US Department of Education. To Elon Musk, the department may be just a bureaucracy – to our family, it is a guardian angel.Is this passivity and lack of resistance understandable? Of course it is. That’s why the old saw “first they come for the … then they come for you” was invented.But we should call upon our college presidents, law firms, leaders of civil society, to get in touch with their responsibility to democracy itself, as well as their own institutions, which surely will end up on the firing line someday if Trump continues to be emboldened by his victims’ servility.Perhaps it is too strong to refer to these organizations as collaborators. Perhaps. But this wholesale timidity and collapse must be considered rank appeasement at best, modest complicity at worst.Kudos to Harvard University, Perkins Coie and others who have stood up, but some of the finest higher educational institutions in world history are now ignoring the well-trod path of autocracy in world history. Some of the best and brightest law firms in the nation are now providing free legal services to the very administration that has broken laws beyond counting the very legal codes the law firms purport to defend.Certainly, these silent aiders and abettors can explain their individual decision making, but their cumulative damage to the very fabric of democracy calls us to heed Benjamin Franklin when he said we must “all hang together, or all hang separately”. Is it asking too much for the college presidents of the US to band together and say this choking of research funds is unacceptable? Are the law firms just too busy to all say they are not going to yield to Trump’s perverse bullying and say what any good lawyer ought to say: “We’ll see you in court”?In fighting Trump’s assaults on democracy, I speak from experience. As the first governor to come out against his Muslim ban, one of the most vocal in speaking out against his Covid negligence, and telling him to his face to stop tweeting and start protecting our children, earning me the honor of being called a “snake”, I know standing up brings the heat. So be it.But my more important experience is decades watching a courageous citizenry force its federal government to change course. In the 50s and 60s, the government was forced to change, thanks in large part to a woman refusing to sit in the back of the bus. In the 70s, the Vietnam war ended only because thousands marched, including myself, proving the ability of committed people, though unelected, to compel change. In the 80s it was private citizens who forced the federal government to start treating HIV patients like humans.In each of these decades, small acts of defiance led to national change as courage rippled outwards. The benefit of having lived these decades during the American experiment is learning that leaders in civil society who resist should be exalted, joined, and followed.Those who believe that this call to action is an overstatement of the threat understand neither the nature of the tyrant-in-chief nor the slow but inexorable nature of how democracies are lost. I witnessed Trump’s cruelty and lack of empathy as I dealt with him during the Covid pandemic, as he willfully withheld help and then consciously spread misinformation that caused so many needless deaths. Anyone who saw this up close would make the call for resistance I am making today. How can anyone not understand that the refusal to follow the law on January 6 continues in full force today? Why would it stop unless it is made to stop?More importantly, we should listen to the late Justice William O Douglas, who said: “As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” It is past time for all our leaders in civil society to wake up, stand up and speak up. We are right in calling them to do so. Hiding is no longer acceptable.

      Jay Inslee served as the governor of Washington from 2013-2025 More

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      ‘They disappear them’: families of the detained see grim echo of Latin American dictatorships in Trump’s US

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      Neiyerver Rengel’s captors came one sunny spring morning, lurking outside the apartment he shared with his girlfriend and pouncing as soon as he emerged.The three government agents announced the young Venezuelan man had “charges to answer” and was being detained.“Everything’s going to be OK,” the man’s girlfriend, Richely Alejandra Uzcátegui Gutiérrez, remembers the handcuffed 27-year-old reassuring her as she gave him one last hug.Then Rengel was put in a vehicle and vanished into thin air: spirited into custody and, his family would later learn, dispatched to a detention centre notorious for torture and inhuman conditions hundreds of miles from home.“We have to take him,” Uzcátegui recalls one officer saying before they left. “But if this is a misunderstanding, he’ll be released and given a phone call to contact you.”That call never came.View image in fullscreenThe scenes above might have played out in any number of Latin American dictatorships during the 20th century, from Gen Augusto Pinochet’s Chile to Gen Jorge Rafael Videla’s Argentina. Thousands of regime opponents were seized at home or on the street – and slipped off the map, becoming “desaparecidos” (the disappeared ones).But Rengel’s disappearance took place on 13 March this year in Donald Trump’s US, where what campaigners call the “forced disappearance” of scores of Venezuelan migrants has fuelled fears of an authoritarian tack under a leader who vowed to be a dictator “on day one” of his presidency. Those fears intensified on Friday amid reports that a judge had been arrested by the FBI for supposedly helping “an illegal alien” evade arrest.Juanita Goebertus, Human Rights Watch’s Americas director, said she had no hesitation in calling the detentions of those Venezuelans enforced disappearances. “Under international law, when someone is detained and there’s no account of where the person is, it amounts to enforced disappearances – and this is exactly what has happened,” she said.View image in fullscreenFor five weeks after Rengel’s detention in Irving, Texas, relatives remained in the dark over his whereabouts. His brother, Nedizon León Rengel, said he spent hours calling immigration detention centres but failed to get clear answers. “They told us he’d been deported but wouldn’t say where,” recalled Nedizon, who migrated to the US with his brother in 2023.Finally, on 23 April, came the bombshell: a report on NBC News said Rengel was one of at least 252 Venezuelans who had been flown to authoritarian El Salvador and jailed for supposedly belonging to the Tren de Aragua (TdA), a Venezuelan gang that Trump’s administration has designated a foreign terrorist organisation.“Finding out through the news was devastating. But the worst part was having to tell my mum,” said Nedizon. “Before I came here, the US represented a land of opportunity – a place to fulfil dreams and improve our quality of life … Now it feels like a nightmare. Human rights aren’t even being respected any more – not even the right to make a phone call, which is guaranteed to anyone who is detained.”Rengel was not the only Venezuelan to disappear after being ensnared in Trump’s crackdown on immigrants he has repeatedly smeared as rapists, murderers and terrorists who have supposedly launched an “invasion” of the US.Ricardo Prada Vásquez, 33, was apprehended in Detroit in mid-January, days after sending his brother a video showing the Chicago snow – a magical moment for a man raised on Margarita, a sun-kissed Caribbean island, who had never seen a northern winter.On 15 March, Prada told a friend he was being deported to Venezuela – but he never arrived. Nor was Prada’s name on a list published five days later by CBS News identifying 238 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s “terrorism confinement” prison. (Rengel was also not on the list. US and Salvadoran authorities have refused to publish a register of the prisoners’ names.)For the next five weeks, Prada’s relatives – who deny he is a criminal – also had no idea where he was.View image in fullscreen“It’s mentally exhausting to be constantly thinking about how he is and what he’s going through,” his brother, Hugo Prada, said from Venezuela. Only last Tuesday, after Prada’s story was featured in the New York Times, authorities did confirm where he had been sent.“This TDA gang member didn’t ‘disappear’. He is in El Salvador,” Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assistant secretary, wrote on X, claiming Prada had been “designated a public safety threat”.Prada defended his brother, a former shoe salesman he described as a laid-back, hard-working quipster who migrated to the US last year hoping to provide a better future for his four-year-old son, Alexandro, who still lives on Margarita. “Dammit, he went [to the US] in search of a better life and what he got was this disaster,” said Prada, insisting his sibling was innocent.Before Prada’s detention, he held near-daily video calls with his child. In recent days, Alexandro has repeatedly asked relatives why he can no longer speak with his father. “They say he’s working,” said Hugo, voicing shock that people could vanish into custody in the US.“It’s unbelievable that they just grabbed them and sent them to a concentration camp for them to die, just like Hitler did with the Jews,” Prada added. “[The US is] a democratic country – and it’s as if we’ve gone 50 or 100 years back in time.”View image in fullscreenNelson Suárez, the brother of a third Venezuelan jailed in El Salvador, said the treatment of the detainees – some of whom have been paraded on television with shaved heads and in shackles – reminded him of how the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro dealt with his foes. “[They are doing] the same thing they do in Venezuela when they capture a political prisoner. They lock them up and disappear them – and nobody hears anything more from them until the government feels like it,” said Suárez, whose brother, Arturo Suárez, is a musician with no criminal background.The wave of detentions and disappearances has devastated the US’s Venezuelan community, which has swelled in recent years as a result of the South American country’s economic collapse.“The community lives in uncertainty and in terror,” said Adelys Ferro, who runs the Venezuelan American Caucus advocacy group. “People are petrified. They are thinking: ‘What if I am next? What if they stop me? What is going to happen?’“Even people with documents are terrified. Even people with green cards are terrified,” added Ferro, a Venezuelan-American who has lived in the US for 20 years. “This is something that shouldn’t be happening anywhere in the world, much less – for Christ’s sake – in America.”Six weeks after federal agents seized her hairdresser boyfriend outside their home in Irving, Texas, Uzcátegui said she was still not convinced she knew the full truth about his plight, despite the DHS admitting last Tuesday that he had also been sent to El Salvador.View image in fullscreenWithout offering evidence, McLaughlin told NBC News Rengel was “an associate of Tren de Aragua … a vicious gang that rapes, maims, and murders for sport” – a claim relatives reject. Rengel’s only run-in with the law appears to have been being last year fined $492 after he was stopped in a co-worker’s car in which police found a marijuana trimmer.“To me, he’s still missing. This doesn’t give me peace of mind,” Uzcátegui said of the government’s admission. “Because there’s no record, no photo, no phone call. I insist – he’s still missing.”Even families who now know their loved ones were sent to El Salvador do not know how they are, in which prison they are being held, what charges, if any, they face, or how long they may be held there.“On one hand I feel a little bit calmer knowing that he’s somewhere and he’s not dead. But what situation awaits us? What comes next?” wondered Hugo Prada, who had no idea what charges his brother was facing or how long a sentence he could face.Ferro vowed to continue denouncing the “nightmare” such families were facing. “It is exhausting, and so painful and disheartening. But that pain is not going to make us cease fighting for justice, that’s for sure,” she said.Speaking from her home in Venezuela, Rengel’s 50-year-old mother, Sandra Luz Rengel, recalled begging him “from the bottom of my heart” not to travel to the US. But he was unmoved – and now he was lost.“Not knowing anything about him is outrageous,” she said. “And there’s nothing I can do.” More