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      Gavin Newsom may call special election to redraw California congressional maps

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      California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, may call a special election in November to begin the process of redrawing the state’s congressional maps in response to Texas’s plans to change its own maps to help Republicans keep their majority in the House of Representatives.Donald Trump is pushing Texas and other Republican-dominated states to carry out mid-decade redistricting that will favor the GOP and potentially stop Democrats from retaking control of the House in next year’s midterm elections. Governors in Democratic-led states have responded by warning they will move to redo their own maps if Texas goes ahead with its plans, which could create an additional five Republican-leaning districts.California is viewed as the best opportunity for Democrats to pick up seats through gerrymandering, but voters will first have to approve changes to an independent redistricting commission that was given the power to draw congressional districts in 2010.Speaking at a Thursday press conference, Newsom said “a special election would be called, likely to be the first week of November” to approve the changes.“We will go to the people of this state in a transparent way and ask them to consider the new circumstances, to consider these new realities,” the governor added.The party out of power typically regains control of the House in a president’s first midterm election, as the Republicans did under Joe Biden in 2022 and Barack Obama in 2010, and Democrats did during Trump’s first term in 2018.Newsom argued that another two years of unified Republican control of Congress would be especially harmful for California, noting that Los Angeles residents were still waiting for lawmakers to approve aid from the wildfires that ravaged the region earlier this year.“They’re doing a midterm rejection of objectivity and independence, an act that we could criticize from the sideline, or an act that we can respond to in kind – fight fire with fire,” Newsom said.While Republicans could gain the most seats by redrawing Texas’s maps, Ohio, another red state, must also redraw its maps before next year’s election, and there’s talk of redistricting to the GOP’s advantage in Missouri and Indiana.Democrats are seen as having a more difficult path to improving their odds of winning the House majority through redistricting, often due to their states’ embrace of independent commissions intended to draw fair congressional amps.Voters created the California citizens redistricting commission in 2008 to draw its legislative maps, and in 2010 expanded its powers to congressional districts. Newsom said, “We’re not here to eliminate the commission,” but rather to respond to what he described as “the rigging of the system by the president of the United States.“And it won’t just happen in Texas. I imagine he’s making similar calls all across this country. It’s a big deal. I don’t think it gets much bigger,” Newsom said. More

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      Smithsonian removes references to Trump impeachments at history exhibit

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      The Smithsonian Institution has scrubbed all mention of Donald Trump’s impeachments from a prominent display at the National Museum of American History, temporarily eliminating any acknowledgment of the president’s unique status as the only US leader the House impeached twice.The alterations to the presidential power exhibit, first reported by the Washington Post, occurred in July, with museum officials replacing contemporary signage with an older version that excludes Trump’s impeachment proceedings entirely. Visitors now see only a generic reference to three presidents facing potential removal from office.Museum representatives confirmed the changes followed an institutional review of exhibition content.“In reviewing our legacy content recently, it became clear that the ‘Limits of Presidential Power’ section in The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden exhibition needed to be addressed,” a Smithsonian spokesperson told the Guardian. “Because the other topics in this section had not been updated since 2008, the decision was made to restore the Impeachment case back to its 2008 appearance.”The spokesperson pledged that “a future and updated exhibit will include all impeachments,” though they provided no specific timeline for implementation.The move comes as Trump has waged a systematic campaign to reshape federal cultural agencies since returning to power, and issued directives aimed at purging what he categorizes as diversity initiatives and halting new federal appointments.Earlier this year, he signed an executive order directing the elimination of “anti-American ideology” across Smithsonian museums and promising to “restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness”. The order specifically targets several Smithsonian facilities for ideological review, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture.Trump faced impeachment charges twice during his first presidency – initially over allegations he pressured Ukraine to investigate political rivals, then later for his role in the 6 January 2021 Capitol attack. The Senate cleared him on both occasions.That historic distinction has now vanished from the nation’s premier history museum, while displays covering Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon’s impeachment cases remain untouched.The spokesperson explained that temporary materials addressing Trump’s impeachments had been installed in September 2021 as “a short-term measure to address current events at the time, however, the label remained in place until July 2025”.The Smithsonian operates as a congressional trust with an annual budget exceeding $1bn and attracts millions of visitors annually to its network of museums, making it a key cultural touchstone for public education about American history. More

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      Why the US is burning $10m worth of birth control | Moira Donegan

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      There are few better metaphors for the receding status of American women than one offered up by the Trump administration at a medical waste disposal facility outside Paris this week: rather than distribute nearly $10m worth of birth control, which had been purchased by USAID and was destined to be given to women in low-income countries, primarily in Africa, the Americans decided to burn it.The incinerated contraceptives included 900,000 birth control implants, 2m doses of injectable long-acting birth control, 2m packs of contraceptive pills and 50,000 IUDs. The medicine is just the latest in the far-reaching fallout from cuts made by the so-called “department of government efficiency,” or Doge, a project in which Elon Musk and a group of his very young, overwhelmingly male acolytes unilaterally slashed congressionally appropriated funding to government programs they did not like. The cuts have been devastating for non-profits that work to improve women’s health and safety worldwide. Sarah Shaw, an associate director at the global family planning group MSI Reproductive Choices, says that the cuts will put women at risk as they strain their health with unplanned pregnancies and seek out illegal abortions; other women who are denied access to birth control will lose out on the opportunities for education, professional development or remunerative work that can help them escape abuse, rise out of poverty, pursue their talents and ambitions and better provide for the children they already have.When MSI attempted to buy the contraceptives, the administration would only accept full price, which the organization couldn’t afford, she said. Several non-profits, including MSI, had offered to pay to ship and repackage the supplies, according to another representative. But the Trump administration refused, partially due to federal rules the prohibit the US from providing such goods to groups that perform, provide referrals for or offer education about abortions. In addition to the cost of purchasing the contraceptives, American taxpayers will now be on the hook for about $167,000 for the cost of burning them.It’s just the latest in a series of signs that the Trump administration is turning against the provision of birth control, particularly the safe, effective and woman-controlled hormonal methods that have been a cornerstone of healthcare policy for decades and which were a precondition of women’s advancement in work and education over the past 60 years.In April, the Trump administration abruptly announced that it was suspending a large swath of the domestic service grants distributed under Title X, the program meant to help low-income Americans access birth control, STD treatment and other sexual and reproductive healthcare. Of the 86 Title X grants awarded for fiscal year 2024, nearly 25% were “temporarily withheld”, mostly based on highly suspect allegations that the grant-receiving institutions – including 13 Planned Parenthood affiliates – had failed to comply with Trump executive orders banning things like DEI programs. Eight states now receive zero Title X dollars: California, Hawaii, Maine, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee and Utah. Alaska, Minnesota and Pennsylvania have also lost most of their contraception funding.The domestic cuts – along with the exclusion of Planned Parenthood clinics from Medicaid reimbursements – mean that American women, too, are now facing dramatically greater obstacles to accessing birth control. Clinics that relied on Title X funding are now set to close: 11 Planned Parenthood clinics already have, including in Democratically controlled states like California. Planned Parenthood says that cumulatively, the cuts could lead the organization to close about 200 of its 600 clinics nationwide – a devastating cut to abortion providers in particular that will make a wide range of reproductive services inaccessible to women regardless of where they live.But the Trump administration is not merely forcing these programs for women’s health and dignity go up in flames. They are redirecting them to better suit their preferred cultural outcome: one in which women’s lives, ambitions and talents are all subordinated to the task of childbearing. The New York Times reported last month that the White House is redirecting Title X funds that once went to birth control to instead fund an “infertility training center” and programs in something called “restorative reproductive medicine”. If Title X’s original aim was to help American women control their fertility so as to build healthier families and to enable them to pursue other aims – like learning or work – in the new administration’s version, the program exists mainly to encourage women to have more children. But the switch should not be seen as a genuine investment in infertility, an often devastating condition with which many Americans struggle. Because the new Title X priorities do not, by and large, direct more money to IVF. Trump promised, on the campaign trail, to make IVF free. But the procedure, which has opponents on the Christian right, is not included in the administration’s new priority of “restorative” reproductive medicine, a practice that avoids controversial fertility treatments; instead, doctors seek the “root cause” of a woman’s infertility, which may involve telling them they can conceive with proper diet and exercise.In government, money allocation is a statement of values. With its dramatic cuts to contraceptive funding at home and abroad, the Trump administration is making its values clear. It does not value women’s health; it does not value their dignity, their control over their own lives, their aspirations, their earning potential, their desire to be freed from ignorance, or poverty, or the abuse they suffer under the hands of husbands and fathers. It does not value their ability to control their own bodies, and by extension, it does not value their ability to enter the public sphere. It does not value their dreams, their gifts, their hard work or invention or aspiration to anything other than making babies. American women, like women everywhere, depend on birth control to live lives of freedom and to pursue their dreams. But because of the Trump administration, those dreams are going up in smoke.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump | Rashid Khalidi

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      Dear Acting President Shipman,I am writing you an open letter since you have seen fit to communicate the recent decisions of the board of trustees and the administration in a similar fashion.These decisions, taken in close collaboration with the Trump administration, have made it impossible for me to teach modern Middle East history, the field of my scholarship and teaching for more than 50 years, 23 of them at Columbia. Although I have retired, I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the fall as a “special lecturer”, but I cannot do so under the conditions Columbia has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration in June.Specifically, it is impossible to teach this course (and much else) in light of Columbia’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews. Citing its potential chilling effect, a co-author of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, has repudiated its current uses. Yet Columbia has announced that it will serve as a guide in disciplinary proceedings.Under this definition of antisemitism, which absurdly conflates criticism of a nation-state, Israel, and a political ideology, Zionism, with the ancient evil of Jew-hatred, it is impossible with any honesty to teach about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba, culminating in the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza with the connivance and support of the US and much of western Europe.The Armenian genocide, the nature of the absolute monarchies and military dictatorships that blight most of the Arab world, the undemocratic theocracy in Iran, the incipient dictatorial regime in Türkiye, the fanaticism of Wahhabism: all of these are subject to detailed analysis in my course lectures and readings. However, a simple description of the discriminatory nature of Israel’s 2018 Nation State Law – which states that only the Jewish people have the right of self-determination in Israel, half of whose subjects are Palestinian – or of the apartheid nature of its control over millions of Palestinians who have been under military occupation for 58 years would be impossible in a Middle East history course under the IHRA definition of antisemitism.It is not only faculty members’ academic freedom and freedom of speech that is infringed upon by Columbia’s capitulation to Trump’s diktat. Teaching assistants would be seriously constrained in leading discussion sections, as would students in their questions and discussions, by the constant fear that informers would snitch on them to the fearsome apparatus that Columbia has erected to punish speech critical of Israel, and to crack down on alleged discrimination – which at this moment in history almost invariably amounts simply to opposition to this genocide. Scores of students and many faculty members have been subjected to these kangaroo courts, students such as Mahmoud Khalil have been snatched from their university housing, and Columbia has now promised to render this repressive system even more draconian and opaque.You have stated that no “red lines” have been crossed by these decisions. However, Columbia has appointed a vice-provost initially tasked with surveilling Middle Eastern studies, and it has ordained that faculty and staff must submit to “trainings” on antisemitism from the likes of the Anti-Defamation League, for whom virtually any critique of Zionism or Israel is antisemitic, and Project Shema, whose trainings link many anti-Zionist critiques to antisemitism. It has accepted an “independent” monitor of “compliance” of faculty and student behavior from a firm that in June 2025 hosted an event in honor of Israel. According to Columbia’s agreement with the Trump administration, this “Monitor will have timely access to interview all Agreement-related individuals, and visit all Agreement-related facilities, trainings, transcripts of Agreement-related meetings and disciplinary hearings, and reviews”. Classrooms are pointedly NOT excluded from possible visits from these external non academics.The idea that the teaching, syllabuses and scholarship of some of the most prominent academics in their fields should be vetted by such a vice-provost, such “trainers” or an outside monitor from such a firm is abhorrent. It constitutes the antithesis of the academic freedom that you have disingenuously claimed will not be infringed by this shameful capitulation to the anti-intellectual forces animating the Trump administration.I regret deeply that Columbia’s decisions have obliged me to deprive the nearly 300 students who have registered for this popular course – as many hundreds of others have done for more than two decades – of the chance to learn about the history of the modern Middle East this fall. Although I cannot do anything to compensate them fully for depriving them of the opportunity to take this course, I am planning to offer a public lecture series in New York focused on parts of this course that will be streamed and available for later viewing. Proceeds, if any, will go to Gaza’s universities, every one of which has been destroyed by Israel with US munitions, a war crime about which neither Columbia nor any other US university has seen fit to say a single word.Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an anti-university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on high what they can teach and say, under penalty of severe sanctions. Disgracefully, all of this is being done to cover up one of the greatest crimes of this century, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a crime in which Columbia’s leadership is now fully complicit. – Rashid Khalidi

      Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine More

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      Judge rules against Trump and extends deportation protections for 60,000 immigrants

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      A federal judge has ruled against the Trump administration’s plans and extended temporary protected status (TPS) for 60,000 people from Central America and Asia, including people from Nepal, Honduras and Nicaragua.TPS is a protection that can be granted by the homeland security secretary to people of various nationalities who are in the United States, preventing them from being deported and allowing them to work.The Trump administration has aggressively been seeking to remove the protection, thus making more people eligible for removal. It’s part of a wider effort by the administration to carry out mass deportations of immigrants.Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem can extend TPS to immigrants in the US if conditions in their homelands are deemed unsafe to return due to a natural disaster, political instability or other dangerous conditions. Noem had ruled to end protections for tens of thousands of Hondurans and Nicaraguans after determining that conditions in their homelands no longer warranted them.The secretary said the two countries had made “significant progress” in recovering from 1998’s Hurricane Mitch, one of the deadliest Atlantic storms in history.The designation for an estimated 7,000 from Nepal was scheduled to end on 5 August while protections allowing 51,000 Hondurans and nearly 3,000 Nicaraguans who have been in the US for more than 25 years were set to expire on 8 September.US district judge Trina L. Thompson in San Francisco did not set an expiration date but rather ruled to keep the protections in place while the case proceeds. The next hearing is on 18 November.In a sharply written order, Thompson said the administration had ended the migrant status protections without an “objective review of the country conditions” such as political violence in Honduras and the impact of recent hurricanes and storms in Nicaragua.If the protections were not extended, immigrants could suffer from loss of employment, health insurance, be separated from their families, and risk being deported to other countries where they have no ties, she wrote, adding that the termination of TPS for people from Nepal, Honduras, and Nicaragua would result in a $1.4bn loss to the economy.“The freedom to live fearlessly, the opportunity of liberty, and the American dream. That is all Plaintiffs seek. Instead, they are told to atone for their race, leave because of their names, and purify their blood,” Thompson said.Lawyers for the National TPS Alliance argued that Noem’s decisions were predetermined by President Donald Trump’s campaign promises and motivated by racial animus.Thompson agreed, saying that statements Noem and Trump have perpetuated the “discriminatory belief that certain immigrant populations will replace the white population.”“Color is neither a poison nor a crime,” she wrote.The advocacy group that filed the lawsuit said designees usually have a year to leave the country, but in this case, they got far less.“They gave them two months to leave the country. It’s awful,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, an attorney for plaintiffs at a hearing Tuesday.Honduras foreign minister Javier Bu Soto said via the social platform X that the ruling was “good news.”“The decision recognizes that the petitioners are looking to exercise their right to live in freedom and without fear while the litigation plays out,” the country’s top diplomat wrote. He said the government would continue supporting Hondurans in the United States through its consular network.Meanwhile in Nicaragua, hundreds of thousands have fled into exile as the government shuttered thousands of nongovernmental organizations and imprisoned political opponents. Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega and his wife and co-President Rosario Murillo have consolidated complete control in Nicaragua since Ortega returned to power two decades ago.The broad effort by the Republican administration’s crackdown on immigration has been going after people who are in the country illegally but also by removing protections that have allowed people to live and work in the US on a temporary basis.The Trump administration has already terminated protections for about 350,000 Venezuelans, 500,000 Haitians, more than 160,000 Ukrainians and thousands of people from Afghanistan and Cameroon. Some have pending lawsuits at federal courts.The government argued that Noem has clear authority over the program and that her decisions reflect the administration’s objectives in the areas of immigration and foreign policy.“It is not meant to be permanent,” justice department attorney William Weiland said. More

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      Joe Biden says US is facing ‘existential’ fight with marginalized groups ‘dramatically under attack’

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      Former United States President Joe Biden took the stage at the National Bar Association’s 100th Annual Awards Gala in Chicago to deliver remarks honoring the United States civil rights legacy, and the state of the country.Speaking amid continual scrutiny around his physical and mental health, Biden played up the importance of a strong judicial branch, and characterized the US as at a moment in time that “makes us confront hard truths.”“So many of you have fought to make this country live up to its highest ideals,” Biden said. “Not since the tumultuous days of the 1960s has this fight been so existential to who we are as a nation, with marginalized groups so dramatically under attack.”Founded in 1925, the National Bar Association is the largest and oldest network of Black law professors, judges, and lawyers in the US. Biden’s speech focused heavily on the contributions of Black lawyers to America’s civil rights history, and the need to continue that legacy, in light of an administration that he said “seeks to erase history, erase quality, erase justice itself.“We see the apparent glee of some of our politicians while watching immigrants who are in this country legally torn from the arms of their family, dragged away in handcuffs from the only home they’ve ever known,” Biden said. “My friends, we need to face the hard truths of this administration.”Law firms representing those opposing the Trump administration’s agenda have been targeted with executive orders by the administration. Some have capitulated to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Federal judges, increasingly on the receiving end of harsh rhetoric and threats to their safety, have weighed creating their own security forces.“We see the law firms, bowing to pressure, bending to bullies, instead of staying rooted in justice of the law,” Biden said.The gala is not the first speaking engagement of the summer that Biden has used to take aim at current US President Donald Trump. In June, he offered oblique criticism of the Trump administration during a Juneteenth celebration service at the Reedy Chapel AME Church, one of the places in Texas where an order proclaiming the end of slavery was read on 19 June 1865.Earlier this month, Biden delivered a keynote address at the Society for Human Resource Management conference in San Diego. During a question and answer session, Biden said he was “working like hell” to finish a memoir of his presidency as he contends with his prostate cancer diagnosis.In his book, a reflection of the 46th president’s four years in office, Biden will probably attempt to shape his legacy – and to confront questions about his mental health and physical fitness that clouded his final years in office and ultimately forced to end his bid for re-election.While Biden heaped praise on former vice-president Kamala Harris during his speech, he did not reference his decision to step down mid-election.In sporadic public appearances since leaving the White House, Biden has hit back against new reporting that alleges a “cover up” by the then-president’s closest aides to hide his frailty and decline from an American public who polls showed believed he was too old to serve another four years.Biden’s speech did not directly address these allegations, although he did note his two of his claims to fame in US politics – being the youngest person ever elected to the US Senate, and the oldest person elected to the presidency.The White House and congressional Republicans have amplified the claims, opening investigations into whether Biden was in control when he made a series of notable clemency decisions at the end of his presidency. In an interview with the New York Times this month, Biden said he orally authorized every pardon and commutation issued during his term and called Republicans who said his staff abused the presidential autopen “liars”.Hours before Biden spoke, Mike Donilon, one of the former president’s top advisers and longest-serving aides, gave a closed-door interview to the House Oversight Committee as part of the Republican-led panel’s investigation into Biden’s cognitive decline. On Wednesday, Steve Ricchetti, another top adviser to the former president, also appeared before the committee. More

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      Trump to build ‘beautiful’ $200m ballroom at White House

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      The White House will soon begin construction of a new $200m ballroom to be ready before Donald Trump’s term ends in early 2029.Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the building will be 90,000 sq ft (8,300 sq metres) and will hold up to 650 seats.It will be the latest change introduced to what’s known as “the People’s House” since the Republican president returned to office in January. It also will be the first structural change to the executive mansion itself since the addition of the Truman Balcony in 1948.The White House is currently unable to hold large-scale events, given the 200-person capacity in the White House’s East Room. In a phone interview with NBC News, Trump pointed to the White House’s set-up for large-scale events, which necessitates ferrying guests to tents set up on the South Lawn.“When it rains or snows, it’s a disaster,” Trump said, noting that tents are currently set up “a football field away from the White House”.From Trump’s view, a new ballroom has long been in demand.“I’m doing a lot of improvements,” Trump said to NBC. “I’ll be building a beautiful ballroom. They wanted it for many, many years.”Levitt said funding for the addition will come from Trump, as well as other “patriot donors”, according to the White House website, leading Trump to label the project as “his gift to the country”.McCrery Architects has been chosen to complete the design, with Clark Construction as the construction lead, and AECOM handling engineering. The ballroom will be separate from the White House’s main building, and will take the place of the current East Wing.The project fits nicely in the wheelhouse of America’s real-estate magnate president, who has taken the presidential tradition of redecoration a step further. While Trump’s past changes, such as paving portions of the Rose Garden and layering gold filigree throughout the White House, are easily reversible, a new ballroom building would last long after Trump leaves office. More