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      Hegseth says Wounded Knee massacre soldiers will keep Medals of Honor

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      Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that 20 US soldiers who took part in the 1890 massacre of hundreds of Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee will keep the Medals of Honor that were awarded to them.The move is the latest in a number of contentious actions taken by the Trump administration to reinterpret US history.The long debate over the events at Wounded Knee includes a dispute over its characterization as a “battle” given that, according to historical records, the US army killed about 250 Lakota Sioux people – many of whom were unarmed women and children – despite fighters in the camp having surrendered.“We’re making it clear that [the soldiers] deserve those medals,” Hegseth said, announcing the move in a video on social media on Thursday. Calling the men “brave soldiers”, he said a review panel had concluded in a report that the medals were justly awarded. “This decision is now final, and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.”Hegseth’s Democratic predecessor at the Pentagon, former defense secretary Lloyd Austin, ordered the review of the honors in 2024 after Congress called for it in the 2022 defense bill. Announcing the review, the Pentagon said Austin wanted to “ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor”.But in Thursday’s video, Hegseth – who has a history of Christian nationalist sympathies – said his predecessor had been “more interested in being politically correct than historically correct”. It is unclear if the report will be made public.Hegseth’s move also halts a push from Democratic lawmakers to revoke medals tied to the massacre at a camp on what is now the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. For Native Americans, the massacre marked a devastating climax to the tragedy of Indigenous removals from their land.“We cannot be a country that celebrates and rewards horrifying acts of violence against Native people,” senator Elizabeth Warren said in a statement earlier this year after reintroducing the proposed Remove the Stain Act.After the massacre, 19 soldiers from the seventh cavalry were awarded the Medal of Honor for their “bravery” and “gallantry” over actions ranging from rescuing fellow troops to efforts to “dislodge Sioux Indians” hiding in a ravine.Native Americans have long pushed for revocation of the medals. As time has gone on, the isolated site has become a place of mourning for many tribes, symbolizing the genocidal history of brutality and repression they have suffered at the hands of the US government. While Congress issued a formal apology in 1990 to the descendants of the massacre, the medals were left in place and no reparations offered.Thursday’s announcement is the latest move to sanitize the nation’s history taken by the Trump administration since Donald Trump signed an executive order in March titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”.In recent months, Hegseth has reverted the names of several US army bases back to Confederate-linked names, monuments to the Confederacy and Confederate figures have been restored, and he renamed a US navy ship that honored gay rights activist Harvey Milk.The Trump administration has also gone after cultural institutions like Smithsonian museums for exhibits it considers “unpatriotic”, purged and rewritten federal webpages related to topics including slavery, diversity and discrimination (some of which were later restored), and cut funding to grants to institutions that honor the lives of enslaved people.Some historians took to social media to denounce the administration’s latest move.“Only an administration intent on committing war crimes in the present and future would stoop to calling Wounded Knee a ‘battle’ rather than what it truly was,” Columbia University history professor Karl Jacoby posted on Bluesky.Jacoby added: “Fortunately, history does not work as Hegseth seems to believe. It is never “settled” and the government cannot (at least for now!) impose its interpretation of events on the rest of us.” More

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      US supreme court allows Trump to withhold nearly $5bn in foreign aid

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      The supreme court on Friday extended an order that allows Donald Trump’s administration to keep frozen nearly $5bn in foreign aid, handing him another victory in a dispute over presidential power.The court acted on the Republican administration’s emergency appeal in a case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.The justice department sought the supreme court’s intervention after US district judge Amir Ali ruled that Trump’s action was likely illegal and that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.The federal appeals court in Washington declined to put Ali’s ruling on hold, but John Roberts, the chief justice, temporarily blocked it on 9 September. The full court indefinitely extended Roberts’ order.The court has previously cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip legal protections from hundreds of thousands of migrants, fire thousands of federal employees, oust transgender members of the military and remove the heads of independent government agencies.The legal victories, while not final rulings, all have come through emergency appeals, used sparingly under previous presidencies, to fast-track cases to the supreme court, where decisions are often handed down with no explanation.Trump told House speaker Mike Johnson in a 28 August letter that he would not spend $4.9bn in congressionally approved foreign aid, effectively cutting the budget without going through the legislative branch.He used what’s known as a pocket rescission. That’s a rarely used maneuver when a president submits a request to Congress toward the end of a current budget year to not spend the approved money. The late notice essentially flips the script. Under federal law,Congress has to approve the rescission within 45 days or the money must be spent. But the budget year will end before the 45-day window closes, and in this situation the White House is asserting that congressional inaction allows it to not spend the money.The Trump administration has made deep reductions to foreign aid one of its hallmark policies, despite the relatively meager savings relative to the deficit and possible damage to America’s reputation abroad as people lose access to food supplies and development programs.Justice department lawyers told a federal judge last month that another $6.5bn in aid that had been subject to the freeze would be spent before the end of the fiscal year next Tuesday. More

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      ‘Dangerous abuse of power’: lawmakers sound alarm over Comey indictment

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      For Donald Trump, the indictment of former FBI director and longtime foe James Comey was,“justice in America”. Legal observers and lawmakers see something far more troubling.A former Republican appointed to lead the bureau by Barack Obama and kept on by Trump until he fired him in 2017, Comey was indicted Thursday on charges related to allegedly lying to Congress five years ago during a hearing on the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.The charges were filed in the eastern district of Virginia only after Erik Siebert was forced out as US attorney for reportedly finding no grounds to indict Comey. The justice department replaced him with a Trump loyalist with little prosecutorial experience, Lindsey Halligan, and shortly after, a grand jury indicted Comey on one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding.The indictment is the latest sign that the president is making good on his promise “to turn our justice system into a weapon for punishing and silencing his critics”, said Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.“This kind of interference is a dangerous abuse of power. Our system depends on prosecutors making decisions based on evidence and the law, not on the personal grudges of a politician determined to settle scores,” Warner said.Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator and a former federal prosecutor who played a lead role in Trump’s first impeachment, said on X he had “never witnessed such a blatant abuse of the” justice department, calling it “little more than an arm of the president’s retribution campaign”.In a letter to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee described Siebert’s firing and Comey’s indictment as “the latest steps in President Trump’s efforts to reshape the nation’s leading law enforcement agency into a weapon focused on punishing his enemies”.Top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries said it was “crazy to me” that Trump was pursuing a “malicious prosecution” against Comey, given that the FBI chief’s public revival of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email use days before the 2016 election is seen as playing a role in Trump’s victory.“These charges are going to be dismissed. James Comey will win in court. But what it reflects is a broader attack on the rule of law that should frighten every single American, whether you’re a Democrat, an independent or a Republican,” he said at the Capitol.Mike Zamore, national director of policy and government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union, said Trump “has yet again proven his disdain for the principles that have actually made America great”.“By undermining the rule of law at each and every turn, threatening individuals who speak out against him, and arresting, investigating, and prosecuting elected officials of the opposition party and others who displease him, the president and his administration have corrupted our system of justice to turn his campaign of retribution into reality,” he said, adding that Trump’s public push to indict Comey amounts to “a grotesque abuse of presidential power”.Eric Swalwell, the Democratic congressman and member of the House judiciary committee, told CNN: “I promise you, when Democrats are in the majority, we are going to look at all of this, and there will be accountability, and bar licenses will be at stake in your local jurisdiction if you are corruptly indicting people where you cannot prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt on.”Norm Eisen, executive chair of pro-democracy group Democracy Defenders Fund, warned the indictment puts “the safety of every American and our national security itself in danger. This indictment has all the hallmarks of a vindictive and meritless prosecution, worthy only of the totalitarian states the United States used to oppose”.“This matters far beyond James Comey. It’s about every citizen’s right to live free from persecution by their own leaders. Criticizing our leaders is a fundamental right, regardless of how much our leaders don’t like it,” he said.Trump has spent the hours since Comey’s indictment was announced insulting him on Truth Social, calling him “One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to” on Thursday night and “A DIRTY COP” on Friday morning.His allies have taken up his argument, if not his tone.“Comey demonstrated complete arrogance and unwillingness to comply with the law,” said Ted Cruz, the Republican senator whose exchange with the former FBI director at a 2020 hearing is the subject of the allegations.Chuck Grassley, the Republican chair of the Senate judiciary committee, said: “If the facts and the evidence support the finding that Comey lied to Congress and obstructed our work, he ought to be held accountable.”“Say it with me, Democrats: nobody is above the law,” said Mike Davis, a prominent Trump legal defender, echoing a phrase often used by Democrats when Trump and his allies were facing prosecutions before his election victory last year.“We are just getting started today with this indictment,” Davis said. “It’s going to get much worse for the Democrats.” More

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      Rare orange lobster found in New York supermarket returned to sea

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      A rare orange lobster was released back into the wild this week after being spotted by an enthusiast at a local grocery store.The lobster, swiftly nicknamed Jean-Clawed Van Damme, is a one-in-30m catch, according to Humane Long Island, a wildlife rescue group, and the New York Aquarium, who aided in releasing it.Given that seeing an orange lobster typically means it is dead and boiled and on a plate, shopper Kyle Brancato did a double take when he spotted the lobster moving among the others for sale at a Tops grocery store in upstate New York.“I walked by the lobster tank, and I saw this bright orange lobster,” Brancato told WHAM, a local CNN affiliate. “Very different from all the other ones in the tank.”He suspected other shoppers mistook the lobster as diseased and passed it by.View image in fullscreenBrancato decided to buy it, with the hopes of ultimately freeing it, but without much experience in crustacean care he improvised at first.“I borrowed some tank water from Palmer’s, down the road,” said Brancato, referring to a local restaurant. “That bought me enough time to go to [pet supply store] Petco and pick up a 20-gallon tank, and I got 20 gallons of sea water that they sell in the store in boxes. And I emptied it into the tank, and cooled it down to the proper temperature.”The lobster was released into the open waters of the Long Island Sound on Wednesday, just a day before National Lobster Day, which marks the peak of the annual US lobster harvesting season.Amid seasonal special offers from eateries, thousands more lobsters than usual suffered a different fate from their wild orange cousin and ended up boiled, buttered, and eaten.In 2021 an orange lobster was rescued in Ontario by a Canadian couple, after being held captive in a grocery store tank, where it had languished for weeks after being shunned by shoppers because of its rare hue and was apparently being picked on by the other lobsters. That one ended up in an aquarium. More

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      Trump has called the US postal service ‘a joke’. But don’t expect Amazon to replace it | Niamh Rowe

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      In towns where Washington DC is an abstraction, the post office is the front desk of American democracy – sometimes the only public space at all. Here, postmasters are “the human side of government”, as the senator Jennings Randolph put it in 1976. “When such offices are closed,” he warned, “the American flag really comes down.”Championed by Benjamin Franklin in 1775, the roots of the US postal service – whose mandate is to “bind the nation together” – are older than the republic itself. The constitution calls for “post offices and post roads”. The USPS is still legally obligated to provide a “basic and fundamental” service to all Americans. In Scottsbluff, Nebraska, a rural carrier drives more than 700 miles a year to serve just two households.But after years in the red – and amid open hostility from the Trump administration – its future looks uncertain.The USPS has lost about $114bn since 2007, according to financial reports, amid declining letter volume, competition from private carriers and rising employee costs. Meanwhile, the specter of privatization looms larger than ever.“The postal service is a joke,” Donald Trump told reporters in 2020. A reform plan during his previous administration called for restructuring it “to return it to a sustainable business model or prepare it for future conversion from a Government agency into a privately-held corporation”.Given this historical scorn, it was no surprise when reports broke in February that Trump was considering dissolving the agency’s leadership and absorbing it into the Department of Commerce.“The fate of the USPS is no longer financial or managerial, but political,” James O’Rourke, a professor of management at the University of Notre Dame, recently told me. “Putting the post office up for an IPO would not be much of a stretch in the current climate. The checks and balances are gone.”Indeed, a Wells Fargo memo to investors titled “USPS Privatization: A Framework” was leaked last month. It reads: “Parcel could be carved out and sold or IPOed.” The plan predicts parcel prices would increase 30%–140% across product lines and proposes a post office sell-off so that “value can be harvested” from the real estate.Yet if the parcel segment were “carved out”, not all of the carcass would bear meat. Investors will seize only the parts they can further monetize, O’Rourke says. That would mean closing small-town post offices and ending home delivery on unprofitable routes.Think of the mule train that descends into Havasupai territory in the Grand Canyon; the small aircraft and seasonal boats that serve Little Diomede, Alaska, where residents can see Russia from their windows; or Point Roberts, Washington, where mail crosses Canada to reach a US town. If universal service falters, those addresses are likely to be abandoned first.People in affected zip codes – already more likely to be lower income – will have to travel to pick up parcels or pay steep delivery costs. “Those people will do with less or do without,” O’Rourke says.But the cost of losing universal service would be more than financial. Vote-by-mail and absentee ballots are particularly critical in rural areas with distant polling stations, and the USPS ensures those ballots reach voters. It also handles 1.2bn prescription-drug shipments each year, as of 2020, according to the National Association of Letter Carriers union. In places with no nearby banks, the post office may be the only location where residents can pay bills.Rural postal workers also fulfill a civic role that transcends transporting mail. A study of village postmasters from the 1970s illustrates how closely woven they can become into civic life: “People going out of town commonly leave their house keys with the postmaster … residents leave notes with the postmaster for friends to retrieve later in the day.”While the advent of the internet renders that depiction somewhat antiquated, its essence remains true. “Rural carriers are still the fabric that knits some communities together,” Don Maston, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association, told me. In some towns, carriers may be the only contact residents have with the outside world – and thus a lifeline, he added. Carriers still carry out “wellness checks” if a resident fails to collect their mail.Mark Jamison spent 15 years as a postmaster in a remote office in the mountains of North Carolina, where he was the town’s only government worker. Many residents were not literate, so he assisted with written tasks. Older residents would stop by the post office on their way home so he could open their jars. He assembled bicycles at Christmas. Locals referred to him as the “bartender”, because people came in with stories to tell and advice to seek.“There are still postal employees who do that,” Jamison said.While the USPS has staved off a formal sell-off so far under the current administration, its universal service is already being eroded in de facto terms. This year, its 10-year “Delivering for America” modernization plan kicks off in a bid to save at least $36 billion. The plan will slow service for about three-quarters of the country’s zip codes, according to the advocacy group Save the Post Office, with rural areas bearing the brunt. The Postal Regulatory Commission voiced opposition to the plan in January, noting it was “very concerned” about how it would disadvantage rural communities.Louis DeJoy, the former US postmaster general, announced a plan in March to cut 10,000 USPS jobs. Amid reports Trump urged the USPS board of governors to appoint FedEx board member David P Steiner as postmaster general, Brian Renfroe, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, alleged a “hostile takeover” of the postal service. (Steiner, who took the job in July, has said he does not believe the USPS should be privatized and that he believes “in the current structure of the postal service as a self-financing, independent entity of the executive branch”.)At the same time, Amazon Logistics is on track to surpass the USPS as the nation’s largest parcel carrier by volume. The company is also speeding up in rural America, as AI-driven efficiencies make more routes economically viable. In April, it announced a $4bn investment to expand its rural “last-mile” network – tripling its size by the end of next year and reaching 13,000 more rural zip codes.This will be welcome news to those households. But Amazon drivers can’t go the extra mile. They lack the civic responsibilities of government workers, and their routes fluctuate algorithmically, meaning it’s harder to build community ties.What’s more, Amazon’s last-mile network will expand only as long as it’s profitable to do so. “I don’t see it going into the mule train business, right?” said Christopher W Shaw, author of First Class: The US Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat. An Amazon driver will never sing the USPS’s unofficial motto: “Every piece, every address, every day.” Without a legal mandate, why would they?As one Minnesota town-hall clerk put it in the 1970s: “The post office is like drinking water. You don’t appreciate it till you don’t have it.”

      Niamh Rowe is a New York-based writer and podcast producer More

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      Kimmel controversy highlights ‘wildly dangerous’ consolidation of TV broadcasting

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      If the controversy behind Jimmy Kimmel’s show is a series of dominoes that fell one after the other, from the late-night host making his comments on Charlie Kirk’s killing to ABC halting production of his show, the first domino arguably fell this summer.Months before Kimmel was briefly pulled off the air, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) quietly announced it was seeking to make a major change to broadcasting rules.The change would primarily affect three companies that own more local TV stations than any other company: Sinclair Broadcasting, Nexstar Media Group and Gray Television Inc. All three companies own the maximum number of local TV stations that is legally permitted for a single company to own.That national cap is set by FCC rules and says a single company can’t reach more than 39% of the total national television audience.In June, the FCC announced that it was seeking public comment to raise the cap, which would allow the companies to acquire more local TV stations. In a filing to the FCC, media watchdog Free Press said that changing the national cap would be “wildly dangerous”.“Handing even more media control to a handful of conglomerates and billionaires already so dominant in the space is a wildly dangerous idea, no matter who holds the presidency,” the group said.But by August, Nexstar announced its intention to acquire its broadcast rival Tegna for $6.2bn.“The initiatives being pursued by the Trump administration offer local broadcasters the opportunity to expand reach, level the playing field, and compete more effectively with the big tech and legacy big media companies that have unchecked reach and vast financial resources,” Nexstar’s chief executive officer, Perry Sook, said at the time.Nexstar – already the largest operator of local television stations – oversees more than 200 owned and partner stations in 116 markets across the US. Tegna owns 64 news stations across 51 markets. The deal would be illegal under current FCC rules, as it would put Nexstar over the national cap.Immediately after Kimmel was taken off the air, multiple reports have noted that Donald Trump’s appointed FCC chair, Brendan Carr, blatantly threatened the companies that air Kimmel’s show.“When you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said on a podcast. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”Media experts called the move unprecedented.“The FCC is explicitly threatening companies that, if they don’t change their content in some way, they would suffer regulatory consequences,” said Gregory J Martin, a political economy professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who has researched the effect that media conglomeration has had on local TV news. “That just didn’t really happen before.”Soon after, Nexstar announced it would preempt Kimmel’s show. As a local TV station conglomerate, Nexstar partners with the “big four” networks – ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC – to run their content on its stations. This is where the term “affiliate” comes from. If a station is, for example, an ABC affiliate, that means that the TV station owner has partnered with ABC to run shows like Kimmel’s.That’s why Nexstar’s announcement was such a big deal. When it comes to Kimmel being broadcast on TV, ABC relies on these local TV station owners to get him on the air.After Nexstar’s announcement, ABC announced that it was indefinitely halting the production of Kimmel’s show.The backlash that ensued led to ABC announcing it would continue producing Kimmel’s show. But Nexstar and its competitor, Sinclair Broadcasting, both said they will continue to preempt the show, meaning 25% of TV viewers won’t be getting Kimmel’s show on TV.“Nexstar is continuing to evaluate the status of Jimmy Kimmel Live! on our ABC-affiliated local television stations, and the show will be preempted while we do so,” Nexstar said in a statement. “We are engaged in productive discussion with executives at the Walt Disney Company, with a focus on ensuring the program reflects and respects the diverse interests of the communities we serve.”To media watchdogs, the conflict highlights the size of the media conglomerates such as Nexstar, which critics argue have become too large and too powerful.“This has been a problem at the FCC for quite some time. We’ve been concerned for decades about what happens when you allow media companies to become too consolidated and too influential,” said Timothy Karr, the senior director of strategy and communications at Free Press.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“They become beholden to political power because they have so many entanglements with government agencies regarding merger approvals [and] policy changes that they … soft-pedal their reporting when it comes to criticism of those in power,” he added.Historians often point to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which dramatically relaxed regulations limiting the number of TV and radio stations a single company could own. The law set the stage for media companies such as Nexstar and Sinclair to exist and own a massive number of local TV stations.Over the past few years, political experts have expressed concern that this consolidation has been negatively affecting the quality of local television news. Though the number of local TV news viewers has been declining, millions of Americans still rely on their local TV news. And the funding for these local TV broadcasts comes from the station owners such as Sinclair and Nexstar.The Kimmel affair is not the first time that the station owners have shown their political colors. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Sinclair directed its local news anchors to read identical scripts criticizing “fake” news stories and “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country”.Trump defended the decision: “So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased. Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke,” he wrote on what was then Twitter.When criticizing Kimmel, Carr said that the FCC has to ensure that broadcasters who are using public airwaves are operating in the “public interest”. Martin said that, typically, the “public interest” requirement refers to producing local TV news shows.“That’s how they satisfy their public obligation, by providing informative news shows. It’s never been on the table that they could be interpreted to mean they have to not criticize the president,” he said. “That’s a big, important change in how the FCC operates.”Karr, of Free Press, said that the media watchdog has made it clear, in a filing to the FCC, that the regulator would need congressional approval to change the national reach cap.“We need to be watching the FCC very carefully over the next couple of weeks to see how far Carr will go in removing this huge hurdle to the merger,” he said.The New York Post reported this week that there is also growing criticism of the Nexstar/Tegna deal from conservatives concerned that the Kimmel suspension is “nothing more than a ruse to convince the White House its programming is watchful of leftwing bias” in order to convince the FCC to pass a deal that will hand the media group too much power.When he went back on air on Tuesday, Kimmel took a direct jab at Carr in his monologue, which has now received over 20m views on YouTube. Kimmel quoted the threats Carr made to broadcast networks over his show and said it is “a direct violation of the first amendment [and] not a particularly intelligent threat to make in public”.“You almost have to feel sorry for him,” Kimmel said. “He did his best to cancel me. Instead, he forced millions of people to watch the show.” More

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      Ex-FBI director James Comey indicted on two charges with reports that he will surrender on Friday – US politics live

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      Donald Trump on Thursday announced a new round of punishing tariffs, saying the United States will impose a 100% tariffs on imported branded drugs, 25% tariff on imports of all heavy-duty trucks and 50% tariffs on kitchen cabinets.The US president also said he would start charging a 50% tariff on bathroom vanities and a 30% tariff on upholstered furniture next week, with all the new duties to take effect from 1 October.Drug companies warned earlier this year that Americans would suffer the most if Trump decided to impose tariffs on pharmaceuticals.In 2024, the US imported nearly $233bn in pharmaceutical and medicinal products, according to the Census Bureau. The prospect of prices doubling for some medicines could send shock waves to voters as healthcare expenses, as well as the costs of Medicare and Medicaid, potentially increase.Pascal Chan, vice-president for strategic policy and supply chains at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, warned that the tariffs could harm Americans’ health with “immediate price hikes, strained insurance systems, hospital shortages, and the real risk of patients rationing or foregoing essential medicines”.Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.We start with the news that James Comey, the former FBI director and one of Donald Trump’s most frequent targets, was indicted on Thursday on one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding, the latest move in the president’s retribution campaign against his political adversaries.The indictment, filed in federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia, shows Comey’s charges centred on whether he lied and misled lawmakers during testimony in September 2020 about the Russia investigation.Comey was expected to surrender and have his initial appearance in federal district court on Friday morning, according to a person familiar with the matter. Comey is expected to be represented by Patrick Fitzgerald, a former US attorney for the northern district of Illinois.While the precise details were not clear in the sparse, two-page indictment, it appeared to reference Comey’s testimony that he had never authorized someone at the FBI to leak to the news media about the Trump or Hillary Clinton investigations – a claim prosecutors alleged was false.“No one is above the law. Today’s indictment reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people,” Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, said in a statement on Thursday.The indictment followed Trump’s instruction to Bondi to “move now” to prosecute Comey and other officials he considers political foes, in an impatient and extraordinarily direct social media post trampling on the justice department’s tradition of independence.It also came less than a week after Lindsey Halligan was installed as the top federal prosecutor in the eastern district of Virginia, after Trump fired her predecessor, Erik Siebert, after he declined to bring charges against Comey over concerns there was insufficient evidence.Halligan, most recently a White House aide and former Trump lawyer who has no prosecutorial experience, was also presented with a memo earlier this week laying out why charges should not be brought. But the justice department still pushed it through, people familiar with the matter said.Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the US senate intelligence committee, said:
      Donald Trump has made clear that he intends to turn our justice system into a weapon for punishing and silencing his critics.
      Responding to the indictment, hours after it was filed, Comey said in a video statement posted on Instagram that he was innocent and welcomed a trial.“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way. We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either,” Comey said.Read the full story here:In other developments:

      Authorities said on Thursday that the words of the suspect in the shooting on Wednesday at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facility in Texas were “definitively anti-Ice” but said that they did not find evidence that the suspect was a member of “any specific group or entity, nor did he mention any specific government agency other than Ice”.

      The Open Society Foundations (OSF), the major philanthropic group funded by George Soros, criticized the Trump administration for “politically motivated attacks on civil society” after a report that the justice department had instructed federal prosecutors to come up with plans to investigate the charity.

      Donald Trump issued a presidential memorandum on Thursday aimed at reining in what he has called a radical leftwing domestic “terror network” but which seemed likely to meet fierce legal pushback from critics depicting it as a licence for a broad crackdown on his political opponents.

      Donald Trump on Thursday announced a new round of punishing tariffs, saying the United States will impose a 100% tariffs on imported branded drugs, 25% tariff on imports of all heavy-duty trucks and 50% tariffs on kitchen cabinets. The US president also said he would start charging a 30% tariff on upholstered furniture next week.

      Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday outlining the terms of a deal to transfer TikTok to a US owner. Trump said he and China’s president Xi Jinping had come to an agreement to allow TikTok to continue operating in the US, separating the social media platform from its Chinese owner ByteDance. Trump said the deal complies with a law that would have forced the shutdown of the app for American users had it not been divested and sold to a US owner.

      A group of Disney investors is asking the company to turn over documents related to the company’s decision to temporarily suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, amid charges the media company may have been “complicit in succumbing” to media censorship.

      An impromptu statue of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein holding hands was unceremoniously removed from the National Mall in Washington just a day after a group of anonymous artists erected it there. More

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      Why is the Trump administration obsessed with autism? – podcast

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      Archive: Good Morning America, NPR, NBC News, WHAS11, BBC News, CBS News, Jimmy Kimmel Live, LiveNowFox
      Listen to Science Weekly’s episode factchecking Trump’s claims about paracetamol
      Buy Carter Sherman’s book, The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over its Future, here
      Buy Jonathan Freedland’s new book, The Traitor’s Circle, here
      Buy John Harris’ book, Maybe I’m Amazed, about connecting with his son James, diagnosed with autism as a child, through music
      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
      Support the Guardian. Go to theguardian.com/politicspodus More