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      Eswatini opposition attacks US deal as ‘human trafficking disguised as deportation’

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      Civil society and opposition groups in Eswatini have expressed outrage after the US deported five men to the country, with the largest opposition party calling it “human trafficking disguised as a deportation deal”.The men, from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba, were flown to the small southern African country, an absolute monarchy, last week as the US stepped up deportations to “third countries” after the supreme court cleared them last month.Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, is landlocked by South Africa and Mozambique and has a population of about 1.2 million. It is Africa’s last absolute monarchy and has been ruled by King Mswati III since 1986.The government estimated the five men would be held for about 12 months, a spokesperson, Thabile Mdluli, said, adding: “It could be slightly less or slightly more.”She said Eswatini was ready to receive more deportees, depending on the availability of facilities and negotiations with the US, which has also deported eight people to South Sudan after holding them for weeks in a shipping container in Djibouti, and more than 200 Venezuelans to El Salvador.Officials have said the men, who were put in solitary confinement, were safely imprisoned in Eswatini. However, they have refused to disclose the terms of the deal, other than to say the US was footing the costs of keeping the men locked up and that they would work with international organisations to deport them to their home countries.View image in fullscreenMany civil society organisations and politicians were not convinced. “This action, carried out without public consultation, adequate preparation, or community engagement, raises urgent questions about legality, transparency, and the safety of both the deported individuals and the people of Eswatini, especially women and girls,” said a coalition of seven women’s groups.The organisations delivered a petition to the US embassy on Monday calling for the US to take back the deportees, for the deportees’ human rights to be respected, and for Eswatini not to become a “dumping ground for unresolved problems from elsewhere”.The groups’ leaders held a protest outside the US embassy on Friday, where they sang, danced and held up signs with messages including: “Whose taxpayers?”, “Eswatini is not a prison for US rejects” and “Take the five criminals back to the US!!”Eswatini’s largest opposition party, the People’s United Democratic Movement (Pudemo), said in a statement: “Pudemo vehemently condemns the treacherous and reckless decision by King Mswati III’s regime to allow the United States of America to dump its most dangerous criminals on Swazi soil.“This is not diplomacy but human trafficking disguised as a deportation deal. It is an insult to all Emaswati who value peace, security, and the sanctity of our homeland.”The coordinating assembly of NGOs, an umbrella group, said the situation was “deeply alarming” and condemned the “stigmatising and dehumanising language used by US officials”. It called for the Eswatini-US agreement to be made public and to be suspended pending “genuine public consultation and transparent national dialogue”.View image in fullscreenTricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary at the US Department of Homeland Security, said in a post on X on 16 July that the men, who she said had been convicted of crimes including child rape, murder and burglary, were “so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back”.She added: “These depraved monsters have been terrorising American communities but … they are off of American soil.”Eswatini’s prime minister, Russell Dlamini, told local media on Friday that the government was confident it would safely manage the prisoners. “Eswatini is currently holding inmates who have committed more dangerous crimes than those attributed to the five deportees,” he said.A prison service spokesperson, Baphelele Kunene, said the country’s citizens should not be afraid. “We can confirm that the five inmates in question have been admitted to one of our high-security centres where they are responding very well to the new environment,” he said. “Even though they come from the US, there is no preferential treatment for them as they are guided by the same prison regulations, eat the same food as others and are also expected to exhibit the same and equal amount of respect for prison protocols.”The US state department’s most recent human rights report on Eswatini, in 2023, said there were “credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; [and] political prisoners or detainees”.Political parties are banned from taking part in elections, which the system’s advocates argue makes MPs more representative of their constituents. In September, Pudemo’s leader, Mlungisi Makhanya, was allegedly poisoned in South Africa. The party said it was an assassination attempt, which Eswatini’s government has denied.The Department of Homeland Security has been contacted for comment. More

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      Trump news at a glance: US House breaks early for summer recess as Republicans feel the heat over Epstein

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      Mounting pressure over President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has reportedly rattled and divided Republican congress members so deeply that the House speaker called an early recess on Tuesday.Democrats had pushed for a vote to release files related to Epstein as Trump fends off questions over his relationship with the financier, who died by suicide in his jail cell in 2019. Now the House will break up on Wednesday instead of Thursday in what Democrats say is a way to dodge the vote.Here’s the what’s happened today:House speaker says calls for an Epstein files vote ‘political games’ Republicans downplayed the decision to cut short the workweek, while arguing that the White House has already moved to resolve questions about the case. Last week, Trump asked the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to release grand jury testimony, although that is expected to be only a fraction of the case’s documents.The House speaker, Mike Johnson, dismissed the calls for a vote as “political games” and also argued that Congress must be careful in calling for the release of documents related to the case, for fear of retraumatizing his victims.Read the full storyCongress to subpoena Ghislaine MaxwellCongress will subpoena Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned sex trafficker who was a close associate of Epstein, to testify amid a political firestorm over the Trump administration’s decision not to release its remaining Epstein files.Read the full storyTrump claims new CBS owner will give him airtimeTrump has claimed the future owner of the US TV network CBS will provide him with $20m worth of advertising and programming – days after the network cancelled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The US president recently reached a $16m settlement with Paramount, the parent of CBS News, over what he claimed was misleading editing of a pre-election interview with the Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris.Read the full storyTrump pulls US out of UnescoThe US will quit the United Nations’ culture and education agency Unesco, the US state department has said, as Donald Trump continues to pull out of international institutions. The move is a blow to the Paris-based global organization, founded after the second world war to promote peace through international cooperation in education, science and culture.Read the full storyObama breaks silence on Trump’s ‘outrageous’ call to prosecute himBarack Obama has broken his silence on calls from Trump for him to be prosecuted by unequivocally rejecting his successor’s accusations that he tried to engineer a “coup” after Trump’s 2016 election victory by “manufacturing” evidence of Russian interference.His office called the accusations “nonsense”, “misinformation”, “outrageous” and “a weak attempt at distraction”.Read the full storyTrump announces Japan trade deal after weeks of fraught negotiationsTrump has announced a trade deal with Japan, potentially resolving weeks of fraught negotiations between the two allies which had caused political uproar and economic uncertainty in Tokyo. While he gave few details of the deal, he described it as “massive” in a social media post, adding that “Japan will invest, at my direction, $550 Billion Dollars into the United States.”Read the full storyCoca-Cola to launch Coke with cane sugar in the US after Trump postCoca-Cola has announced it will launch a product made with US cane sugar this year, days after Trump claimed the company had agreed to replace high-fructose corn syrup. But the company said that the drink would be an additional product rather than a replacement for the drink containing corn syrup.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      General Motors announced that Donald Trump’s tariffs knocked $1.1bn off its operating income in its last quarter.

      The New York Times defended the Wall Street Journal after the Trump administration decided to bar the outlet from the White House press pool.

      Stephen Colbert declared to Donald Trump that “the gloves are off” in his first broadcast since his Late Show was cancelled amid a political firestorm.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 21 July 2025. More

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      Videos reveal harsh conditions inside Ice’s New York City confinement center

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      Two videos have surfaced shedding light on what is happening behind closed doors at a New York federal building where people are being confined after being seized by officers on their way out of immigration court on the 12th floor, with the footage offering a rare look inside a controversial and closely guarded space that is part of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown.The filming, shared by the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), captures one of several rooms at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, on the building’s 10th floor, where accounts have emerged of people being detained in wholly unsuitable conditions with few basic provisions, but there had been no public access to direct evidence.The footage in question shows about two dozen men confined in bare rooms, some lying on the floor wrapped in aluminum emergency blankets while others sit on benches, the City reported on Tuesday.One clip shows two toilets just feet away from where people sleep, separated by a low wall. The video was secretly recorded by a man who had been detained after an immigration court appearance last week, according to the City, which first obtained the footage from the NYIC.The man who filmed the scenes had reportedly managed to have a phone in his possession despite the usual protocol by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) of confiscating personal items at arrest. Reports of people being held for protracted periods in deprived conditions in the Manhattan building have followed weeks of controversy about Ice officers turning up at immigration courts across the country, where they are usually not present, and apprehending people. The footage shows people held in the same building as one of the main immigration courts in New York City. It was sent to state assembly member Catalina Cruz’s office. Until now, photos or videos from the 10th floor have not emerged in public.“The American dream,” the unseen and unnamed detainee says as he films. “Immigration, 26 Federal Plaza.”In a separate audio message also shared with the City , the same man adds: “They haven’t given us food, they haven’t given us medicine. We’re cold. There are people who’ve been here for 10, 15 days inside. We’re just waiting.”Concerns about what goes on inside the federal building had been growing. Advocates, attorneys and immigrants themselves have described the 10th floor as overcrowded, with no beds, showers, or adequate access to food or healthcare.“Ice is kidnapping so many people from New York’s immigration courts that they had to create a new detention facility on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza. But instead of sharing the truth with the public, Ice has skirted accountability by consistently lying about what’s happening on the 10th floor, and breaking the law by not allowing Congress members to view the conditions,” said Murad Awawdeh, president of the NYIC, in a statement.“The 10th floor detention facility must be shut down immediately, and regularly inspected to ensure that Ice adheres to federal guidelines as mandated by law,” Awawdeh added.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in earlier statements about the facility that “any claim that there is overcrowding or sub-prime conditions is categorically false”.Ice also maintains that the 10th floor is not used for detention. Officially, the agency describes the space as a processing center, and therefore not subject to congressional inspection rules that apply to detention facilities, where national lawmakers have to be allowed to visit. “26 Federal Plaza is not a detention center. It is a federal building with an Ice law enforcement office inside of it,” said McLaughlin.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut data from Ice detention logs analyzed by the City revealed that from September 2023 through late June this year, people were held there in what Ice calls the “NYC Hold Room” for an average of 29 hours. Some stayed for several days.The space remains off-limits to both journalists and lawmakers, even though members of Congress are supposed to be allowed to make unannounced visits to detention sites. Several Democrat representatives have been denied entry.Detainees and advocates continue to speak about grim conditions, including sparse food offerings, no showers or clothing changes, and people crammed into a single room with only the floor or hard benches to rest on, according to Gothamist.Meanwhile, Ice has been granted a huge budget boost. Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill” dedicates roughly $170bn for immigration and border-related operations – a sum that would make Ice the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the federal government. More

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      Obama breaks silence on Trump’s ‘outrageous’ call to prosecute him

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      Barack Obama has broken his silence on calls from Donald Trump for him to be prosecuted by unequivocally rejecting his successor’s accusations that he tried to engineer a “coup” following Trump’s 2016 election victory by “manufacturing” evidence of Russian interference.Obama’s office took the unusual step of issuing an emphatic refutation after Trump told reporters that his predecessor had “[tried] to lead a coup” against him and was guilty of “treason” over intelligence assessments suggesting that Russia had intervened to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the campaign.“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” the statement said. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”The statement went on to criticize claims made in an 11-page document released last week by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who said she was passing evidence of what she claimed was a “treasonous conspiracy” among Obama national security officials to the justice department, recommending their prosecution.“Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes,” it said.“These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.”Obama’s response followed a fusillade of accusations by Trump in the White House as he was meeting the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, the son of the country’s former autocratic president, who was ousted in a popular “people’s power revolution” in 1986.Asked by a reporter who should be the main target of the criminal investigation recommended in Gabbard’s report, Trump said: “Based on what I read, and I read pretty much what you read, it would be President Obama. He started it, and Biden was there with him. And [James] Comey [the former FBI director] was there, and [James] Clapper [the former director of national intelligence], the whole group was there.“It was them, too, but the leader of the gang was President Obama, Barack Hussein Obama. Have you heard of him?”He went on: “This isn’t like evidence. This is like proof, irrefutable proof that Obama was sedatious [sic], that Obama … was trying to lead a coup, and it was with Hillary Clinton, with all these other people, but Obama headed it up.“He’s guilty. This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever even imagined.”Trump said Gabbard had told him she had “thousands of additional documents coming”.“It’s the most unbelievable thing I think I’ve ever read. So you want to take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense,” he said, in what appeared to be a coded appeal for supporters to drop their demands for the release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 as he awaited trial on sex-trafficking charges.But the Gabbard report, which accused the Obama administration of forcing spy agencies to alter their conclusions, conflated and misrepresented different issues to discredit the intelligence community’s assessment in 2017 that Russia sought to simultaneously help Trump and damage Clinton.The assessment concluded that Russia did not engage in cyber-attacks against election infrastructure to change vote tallies, but found Moscow hacked and leaked documents from the Democratic National Committee to damage the Clinton campaign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Gabbard report used that first conclusion to suggest that a broader Russian influence operation did not occur, and cited Obama’s presidential daily brief in December 2016 that concluded there were no Russian hacks of election systems being pushed back as evidence of political interference in the assessment.Assertions of Russian interference were subsequently borne out in the report published by the special counsel Robert Mueller, in 2019, and the bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report published the following year, led by Rubio, now secretary of state in Trump’s administration.A former CIA analyst and national intelligence officer, Fulton Armstrong, told the Guardian in an email that Gabbard’s paper “was obviously written with a pre-ordained conclusion”.“Even a quick read shows how the confusion between confidence and probability [over intelligence assessments] – even if not deliberate – leads to sloppiness and manipulation,” Armstrong said.“The bigger problem is that Tulsi’s paper is such shit. Her reference to ‘deep state officials’ is amateurish, silly, and undercuts the whole damned document.“She’s clever to use crappy precedents and confusion to make her case, but an issue like Russian manipulation of US elections, with so many analysts from diverse organizational cultures, is almost certainly going to leave enough offal on the floor that anyone who wanted to make a one-sided political slam job can find enough to fill an 11-page paper.” More

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      Obama’s office issues rare rebuke to Trump’s ‘ridiculous’ allegations about 2016 election – live

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      In a statement sent to reporters on Tuesday, a spokesperson for former president Barack Obama dismissed Donald Trump’s “ridiculous” accusation that Obama had committed “treason” in 2016, by directing his administration to reveal, after the 2016 election, that the Russian government had attempted to boost Trump’s candidacy.Here is the full statement from Obama’s spokesperson, Patrick Rodenbush:
      Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.
      Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes. These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.
      The statement came after Trump claimed on Tuesday that documents reviewed by his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, prove that Obama was “guilty”.But Gabbard’s accusation is based on the false claim that Obama and officials in his administration had suppressed “intelligence showing ‘Russian and criminal actors did not impact’ the 2016 presidential election via cyber-attacks on infrastructure”.Obama and his administration never made that claim. Instead they made the case that Russia had attempted to interfere in the 2016 election through a social-media influence campaign and by hacking and releasing, via Wikileaks, email from Democratic officials and Hillary Clinton’s campaign aides. That conclusion was borne out by special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report and by a bipartisan 2020 report by the Senate intelligence committee whose members included then senator Marco Rubio.Speaking in the Oval Office during a meeting with the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, Trump deflected a question about Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender Trump socialized with for more than a decade, calling the uproar over Epstein “sort of a witch hunt”. He then added the baseless claim that, in 2020, Obama and those around him also “tried to rig the election, and they got caught”.“The witch hunt you should be talking about is that they caught President Obama absolutely cold”, Trump added.The senate voted 50-48 on Tuesday to proceed to debate on the nomination of Donald Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, Emil Bove, to fill a vacancy as a judge on a federal appeals court. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the only Republican to join all of the chamber’s Democratic senators in voting against Bove.There has been speculation that Trump wants his former lawyer, who is just 44, to be in place for possible consideration for a spot on the supreme court if either Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas retires soon.After Trump appointed him acting deputy attorney general, Bove ordered federal prosecutors in New York to dismiss corruption charges against the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, in return for his cooperation in immigration enforcement.Danielle Sassoon, the acting US attorney for the southern district of New York, refused and wrote to Bove that the mayor’s lawyers had “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed”.Sassoon also wrote that Bove had scolded a member of her team for taking notes at the meeting with the mayor’s legal team and ordered that the notes be confiscated.As our colleague Chris Stein reported, Bove’s nomination for the lifetime position has faced strident opposition from Democrats, after Erez Reuveni, a former justice department official who was fired from his post, alleged that during his time at the justice department, Bove told lawyers that they “would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such court order” blocking efforts to remove immigrants to El Salvador. In testimony before the committee last month, Bove denied the accusation, and Reuveni later provided text messages that supported his claim.Republicans announced Tuesday that the House of Representatives will call it quits a day early and head home in the face of persistent Democratic efforts to force Republicans into voting on the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.The chamber was scheduled be in session through Thursday ahead of the annual five-week summer recess, but on Tuesday, the Republican majority announced that the last votes of the week would take place the following day. Democrats in turn accused the GOP of leaving town rather than dealing with the outcry over Donald Trump’s handling of the investigation into the alleged sex trafficker.“They are actually ending this week early because they’re afraid to cast votes on the Jeffrey Epstein issue,” said Ted Lieu, the vice-chair of the House Democratic caucus.Republicans downplayed the decision to cut short the workweek, while arguing that the White House has already moved to resolve questions about the case. Last week, Trump asked the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to release grand jury testimony, although that is expected to be only a fraction of the case’s documents.“We’re going to have committee meetings through Thursday, and there’s still a lot of work being done,” said the majority leader, Steve Scalise. “The heavy work is done in committee and there is a lot of work being done this week before we head out.” He declined to answer a question about whether votes were cut short over the Epstein files.Senator Elizabeth Warren said Donald Trump’s claim that he expects to receive $20m in free advertising, public service announcements or similar programming from the new owners of CBS, “reeks of corruption”.Warren was responding to Trump’s boast that he would be paid $20m by the new owners of the network in addition to the $16m from the current owners he received on Tuesday to drop his lawsuit claiming that he had been damaged by the routine editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris last year.On Monday Warren, and fellow senators Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden, wrote to David Ellison, whose company Skydance needs federal approval to buy CBS owner Paramount, to ask if he struck any “secret side deal” with Trump, or had played any part in the decision to cancel Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s late-night CBS show.After Trump claimed that he did make a deal with Ellison’s company before federal approval was granted, Warren asked Skydance to confirm the news in a social media post of her own.“CBS canceled Late Night with Stephen Colbert—a show they called ‘a staple of the nation’s zeitgeist’—just three days after Colbert called out Paramount for its $16 million settlement with Trump”, Warren wrote in a second post. “Was his show canceled for political reasons? Americans deserve to know.”Later on Tuesday, Congressman Seth Magaziner, a Rhode Island Democrat, responded to Trump’s boast about the $20m he expects from the network’s new owner with the comment: “He’s bragging about taking bribes… In broad daylight.”In a statement sent to reporters on Tuesday, a spokesperson for former president Barack Obama dismissed Donald Trump’s “ridiculous” accusation that Obama had committed “treason” in 2016, by directing his administration to reveal, after the 2016 election, that the Russian government had attempted to boost Trump’s candidacy.Here is the full statement from Obama’s spokesperson, Patrick Rodenbush:
      Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.
      Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes. These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.
      The statement came after Trump claimed on Tuesday that documents reviewed by his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, prove that Obama was “guilty”.But Gabbard’s accusation is based on the false claim that Obama and officials in his administration had suppressed “intelligence showing ‘Russian and criminal actors did not impact’ the 2016 presidential election via cyber-attacks on infrastructure”.Obama and his administration never made that claim. Instead they made the case that Russia had attempted to interfere in the 2016 election through a social-media influence campaign and by hacking and releasing, via Wikileaks, email from Democratic officials and Hillary Clinton’s campaign aides. That conclusion was borne out by special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report and by a bipartisan 2020 report by the Senate intelligence committee whose members included then senator Marco Rubio.Speaking in the Oval Office during a meeting with the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, Trump deflected a question about Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender Trump socialized with for more than a decade, calling the uproar over Epstein “sort of a witch hunt”. He then added the baseless claim that, in 2020, Obama and those around him also “tried to rig the election, and they got caught”.“The witch hunt you should be talking about is that they caught President Obama absolutely cold”, Trump added.

      Despite the best efforts of Donald Trump and his allies to change the subject, the Jeffrey Epstein firestorm – which Trump today derided as “a witch hunt” – just won’t die. This morning, the justice department announced it hopes to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell to find out if she has “information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims” of Epstein. Deputy attorney general Todd Blanche said he anticipated meeting with Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for child sex trafficking and other crimes, “in the coming days”. “We are grateful to President Trump for his commitment to uncovering the truth in this case,” David Oscar Markus, an attorney for Maxwell, wrote on X, inspiring suggestions that Maxwell will seek for a pardon or commutation of her sentence from Trump.

      But the New York federal court handling the Epstein and Maxwell case said it would like to “expeditiously” resolve the Trump administration’s request to unseal grand jury testimony, but it could not do so due to a number of missing submissions. The justice department did not submit to the court the Epstein-related grand jury transcripts it wants to unseal, the judge said, and requested that the justice department submit the transcripts by next Tuesday under seal, so that the court can decide on the request to unseal them. The government had also not “adequately” addressed the “factors” that district courts weigh in considering applications for disclosure, including “why disclosure is being sought in the particular case” and “what specific information is being sought for disclosure”, the judge wrote.

      And despite the GOP’s valiant attempts to blame this all on the Democrats, there is ever more proof in the congressional pudding that this is very much a bipartisan issue (let’s not forget, it was Trump’s Maga base that kicked this all off). The embattled House speaker Mike Johnson (who is among those Republicans who have actually called for the evidence to be released) shut down operation of the chamber a day early, scrapping Thursday’s scheduled votes after the party lost control of the floor over bipartisan pressure to vote on releasing Epstein-related files. That means there won’t be any more floor votes until lawmakers return from summer recess in September.

      The House Oversight Committee also voted to subpoena Maxwell for testimony after recess.

      Trump announced that the Philippines will pay a 19% tariff rate following the conclusion of a trade deal with the United States.

      The New York Times defended the Wall Street Journal after the Trump administration decided to bar the global outlet from the White House press pool following its investigative coverage of ties between Donald Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In a public statement, a Times spokesperson said the White House’s actions represented “simple retribution by a president against a news organization for doing reporting that he doesn’t like”, warning that “such actions deprive Americans of information about how their government operates”.

      NPR’s editor-in-chief, Edith Chapin, has told colleagues that she is stepping down later this year. It comes just days after federal lawmakers voted in support of Trump’s plan to claw back $1.1bn from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the umbrella organization that funds both NPR and the non-commercial TV network PBS.

      A US appeals court declined to lift restrictions imposed by Trump’s administration on White House access by Associated Press journalists after the news organization declined to refer to the body of water long called the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

      The state department claimed one of the reasons for the US’s withdrawal from Unesco was the organization’s decision to admit Palestine as a member state, which was “contrary to US policy and contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization” [a charge the Trump administration frequently directs at the United Nations at large]. The state department also said that remaining in Unesco was not in the national interest, accusing it of having “a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy”. Trump pulled the US out of Unesco during his first term too.

      Elon Musk may return to US politics, Bloomberg News is reporting, citing SpaceX documents and people familiar with the content.

      Trump said he had received from CBS parent company Paramount $16m as part of a lawsuit settlement and that he expects to receive $20m more.

      A panel of judges in the US district court in New Jersey declined to permanently appoint Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba as the state’s top federal prosecutor, according to an order from the court.
      The editor-in-chief of the US public radio network NPR has told colleagues that she is stepping down later this year.Edith Chapin’s announcement comes just days after federal lawmakers voted in support of Donald Trump’s plan to claw back $1.1bn from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the umbrella organization that funds both NPR and the non-commercial TV network PBS.Chapin informed Katherine Maher, NPR’s chief executive, of her intention to step down before lawmakers approved the cuts but will stay on to help with the transition, according to what she told the outlet.Chapin has been with NPR since 2012 after spending 25 years at CNN. She has been NPR’s top editor – along with chief content officer – since 2023.In an interview with NPR’s media reporter, David Folkenflik, Chapin said she had informed Maher two weeks ago of her decision to leave.“I have had two big executive jobs for two years and I want to take a break. I want to make sure my performance is always top-notch for the company,” Chapin told NPR.Nonetheless, Chapin’s departure is bound to be seen in the context of an aggressive push by the Trump administration to cut government support of public radio, including NPR and Voice of America.Trump has described PBS and NPR as “radical left monsters” that have a bias against conservatives. In an executive order in May, the president called for the end of taxpayer subsidization of the organizations.Trump later called on Congress to cancel public broadcaster funding over the next two years via a rescission, or cancellation, request. That was approved by both houses of Congress on Friday, taking back $1.1bn.In an essay published by the Columbia Journalism Review on Tuesday, Guardian writer Hamilton Nolan said that while NPR and PBS will survive, “the existence of small broadcasters in rural, red-state news deserts is now endangered”.Elon Musk, who infamously served as a senior adviser to Donald Trump before a very public – and very spectacular – bust-up with his former buddy, may return to US politics, Bloomberg News is reporting, citing SpaceX documents and people familiar with the content.The company added that the language laying out such “risk factors” in paperwork sent to investors discussing a tender offer, according to Bloomberg. It is also believed to be the first time this language has appeared in these tender offers.Earlier this month, Musk announced his decision to start to bankroll a new US political party – the “America” party – and suggested it could initially focus on a handful of attainable House and Senate seats while striving to be the decisive vote on major issues amid the thin margins in Congress.The tech billionaire had previously stepped back from his role in Trump’s White House as he sought to salvage his battered reputation which was hurting his companies, including Tesla.He then fell out with Trump over the president’s signature sweeping tax and spending bill, which Musk slammed as “bankrupting” the country (the bill also repeals green energy tax credits that benefit the likes of Tesla).Donald Trump said CBS parent company Paramount paid $16m on Tuesday as part of a lawsuit settlement and that he expects to receive $20m more.Paramount earlier this month agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump over an interview with former vice-president Kamala Harris that the network broadcast in October.“We have just achieved a BIG AND IMPORTANT WIN in our Historic Lawsuit against 60 Minutes, CBS, and Paramount… Paramount/CBS/60 Minutes have today paid $16 Million Dollars in settlement, and we also anticipate receiving $20 Million Dollars more from the new Owners,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.A panel of judges in the US district court in New Jersey declined to permanently appoint Donald Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba as the state’s top federal prosecutor, according to an order from the court.Habba has been serving as New Jersey’s interim US attorney since her appointment by Trump in March, but was limited by law to 120 days in office unless the court agreed to keep her in place. The US Senate has not yet acted on her formal nomination to the role, submitted by Trump this month.The court instead appointed the office’s number two attorney, Desiree Grace, the order said.Last week, the US district court for the northern district of New York declined to keep Trump’s US attorney pick John Sarcone in place after his 120-day term neared expiration. Sarcone managed to stay in the office after the justice department found a workaround by naming him as “special attorney to the attorney general”, according to the New York Times.Habba’s brief tenure as New Jersey’s interim US attorney included the filing of multiple legal actions against Democratic elected officials.Her office brought criminal charges against US representative LaMonica McIver, as she and other members of Congress and Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, tried to visit an immigration detention center.The scene grew chaotic after immigration agents tried to arrest Baraka for trespassing, and McIver’s elbows appeared to make brief contact with an immigration officer.Habba’s office charged McIver with two counts of assaulting and impeding a law enforcement officer. McIver has pleaded not guilty.Habba’s office did not follow justice department rules which require prosecutors to seek permission from the Public Integrity Section before bringing criminal charges against a member of Congress for conduct related to their official duties.Her office also charged Baraka, but later dropped the case, prompting a federal magistrate judge to criticize her office for its handling of the matter.Until March, Habba had never worked as a prosecutor.She represented Trump in a variety of civil litigation, including a trial in which a jury found that Trump had sexually abused writer E Jean Carroll in a New York department store changing room 27 years ago.In 2023, a federal judge in Florida sanctioned Trump and Habba and ordered them to pay $1m for filing a frivolous lawsuit which alleged that Hillary Clinton and others conspired to damage Trump’s reputation in the investigation into Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.Donald Trump has said that the Philippines will pay a 19% tariff rate following the conclusion of a trade deal with the United States.“It was a beautiful visit, and we concluded our Trade Deal, whereby The Philippines is going OPEN MARKET with the United States, and ZERO Tariffs,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after Filipino president Ferdinand Marcos’s visit to the White House.“The Philippines will pay a 19% Tariff. In addition, we will work together Militarily,” Trump wrote, referring to Marcos as “a very good, and tough, negotiator”.On this subject, a US appeals court has declined to lift restrictions imposed by Donald Trump’s administration on White House access by Associated Press journalists after the news organization declined to refer to the body of water long called the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America as he prefers.The full US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit kept in place a 6 June decision by a divided three-judge panel that the administration could legally restrict access to the AP to news events in the Oval Office and other locations controlled by the White House including Air Force One.The DC circuit order denied the AP’s request that it review the matter, setting up a possible appeal to the US supreme court.In a lawsuit filed in February, the AP argued that the limitations on its access imposed by the administration violated the constitution’s first amendment protections against government abridgment of free speech.Trump in January signed an executive order officially directing federal agencies to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The AP sued after the White House restricted its access over its decision not to use “Gulf of America” in its news reports.The AP stylebook states that the Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. AP said that as a global news agency it will refer to the body of water by its longstanding name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.Reuters and the AP both issued statements denouncing the access restrictions, which put wire services in a larger rotation with about 30 other newspaper and print outlets. Other media customers, including local news outlets with no presence in Washington, rely on real-time reports by the wire services of presidential statements, as do global financial markets.The Trump administration has said the president has absolute discretion over media access to the White House.The AP won a key order in the trial court when US district judge Trevor McFadden, who was appointed by Trump during his first term, decided that if the White House opens its doors to some journalists it cannot exclude others based on their viewpoints, citing the First Amendment.The DC circuit panel in its 2-1 ruling in June paused McFadden’s order. The two judges in the majority, Neomi Rao and Gregory Katsas, were appointed by Trump during his first term in office. The dissenting judge, Cornelia Pillard, is an appointee of Democratic former president Barack Obama.Further to my last post, the New York Times is defending the Wall Street Journal after the Trump administration decided to bar the global outlet from the White House press pool following its investigative coverage of ties between Donald Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.In the public statement, a Times spokesperson said the White House’s actions represented “simple retribution by a president against a news organization for doing reporting that he doesn’t like”, warning that “such actions deprive Americans of information about how their government operates”.“The White House’s refusal to allow one of the nation’s leading news organizations to cover the highest office in the country is an attack on core constitutional principles underpinning free speech and a free press,” the spokesperson said.“Americans regardless of party deserve to know and understand the actions of the president, and reporters play a vital role in advancing that public interest.”The White House is facing backlash after banning the Wall Street Journal from the press pool set to cover Donald Trump’s upcoming trip to his golf courses in Scotland.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the change was made “due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct”, referring to the newspaper’s recent article alleging the US president sent Jeffrey Epstein a 50th birthday letter that included a drawing of a naked woman. The US president promptly sued the paper for $10bn. The WSJ has stood by its reporting.“This attempt by the White House to punish a media outlet whose coverage it does not like is deeply troubling, and it defies the First Amendment,” said Weijia Jiang, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, in a statement to the Guardian. She added:
      Government retaliation against news outlets based on the content of their reporting should concern all who value free speech and an independent media.
      We strongly urge the White House to restore the Wall Street Journal to its previous position in the pool and aboard Air Force One for the President’s upcoming trip to Scotland. The WHCA stands ready to work with the administration to find a quick resolution.
      Jiang said the administration had yet to clarify whether the ban was temporary, or if it was permanently barring Wall Street Journal reporters from the press pool.Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in a statement to CNN:
      It’s unconstitutional — not to mention thin-skinned and vindictive — for a president to rescind access to punish a news outlet for publishing a story he tried to kill.
      But hopefully the Journal reporters who were planning to join Trump for his golf trip are relieved that they can spend their newfound free time investigating more important stories, from Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein to his unprecedented efforts to bully the press.
      It marks the second time the Trump administration has punitively barred a publication from the press pool in this way. Earlier this year the White House banned the Associated Press from the Oval Office, Air Force One and other exclusive access after the outlet declined to use Trump’s new moniker for the Gulf of Mexico. A decision for the administration to control the press pool came shortly after. More

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      OpenAI CEO tells Federal Reserve confab that entire job categories will disappear due to AI

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      During his latest trip to Washington, OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, painted a sweeping vision of an AI-dominated future in which entire job categories disappear, presidents follow ChatGPT’s recommendations and hostile nations wield artificial intelligence as a weapon of mass destruction, all while positioning his company as the indispensable architect of humanity’s technological destiny.Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement.“Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone,” he said, singling out customer support roles. “That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine.”The OpenAI founder described the transformation of customer service as already complete, telling the Federal Reserve vice-chair for supervision, Michelle Bowman: “Now you call one of these things and AI answers. It’s like a super-smart, capable person. There’s no phone tree, there’s no transfers. It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do. It does not make mistakes. It’s very quick. You call once, the thing just happens, it’s done.”The OpenAI founder then turned to healthcare, making the suggestion that AI’s diagnostic capabilities had surpassed human doctors, but wouldn’t go so far as to accept the superior performer as the sole purveyor of healthcare.“ChatGPT today, by the way, most of the time, can give you better – it’s like, a better diagnostician than most doctors in the world,” he said. “Yet people still go to doctors, and I am not, like, maybe I’m a dinosaur here, but I really do not want to, like, entrust my medical fate to ChatGPT with no human doctor in the loop.”His visit to Washington was aligned with the Trump administration’s unveiling of its “AI action plan”, which is focused defining and easing some regulations and promoting more datacenters. Altman’s latest engagement is with the federal government under Donald Trump, which has taken on a new tune compared with years past. While much has changed with the tech over the years, under the Biden administration, OpenAI and its rivals asked the government to regulate AI. Meanwhile under Trump, they talk of accelerating to beat China.At the fireside chat, he said one of his biggest worries was over AI’s rapidly advancing destructive capabilities, with one scenario that kept him up at night being a hostile nation using these weapons to attack the US financial system. And despite being in awe of advances in voice cloning, Altman warned the crowd about how that same benefit could enable sophisticated fraud and identity theft, considering that “there are still some financial institutions that will accept the voiceprint as authentication”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOpenAI and Altman are already under way on their big pivot to Washington, attempting to crash a party at which Elon Musk once held the golden ticket. Along with announcing plans to open his company’s first office in Washington next year, Altman faced the Senate commerce committee for his first congressional testimony since his high-profile appearance in May 2023 that propelled him on to the global stage. More

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      Atlanta reporter detained by Ice ‘punished for his journalism’, rights groups say

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      Mario Guevara, a Salvadoran journalist imprisoned in a south Georgia immigration detention center after being arrested covering a “No Kings Day” protest in June, is being “punished for his journalism”, first amendment rights groups said.“The charges were dropped, yet he remains detained by Ice,” said José Zamora, the regional director for the Americas at the Committee to Protect Journalists, during a press conference on Tuesday morning at the Georgia capitol with Guevara’s attorneys and family. “Let’s be clear, Mario is being punished for his journalism. He is now the only journalist in prison in the US in direct retaliation for his reporting.”A police officer from the city of Doraville in north DeKalb county arrested Guevara on 14 June on misdemeanor charges of pedestrian in the roadway, failure to disperse and obstruction while Guevara was covering a protest in an immigrant-heavy neighborhood. Guevara is widely followed by a Spanish-speaking audience for his coverage of immigration raids in Georgia, and more than 1 million people were watching his livestream on Facebook when he was arrested.Guevara, a native of El Salvador, has been in the US for more than 20 years. While his petition for asylum was rejected in 2012, his deportation was administratively closed in an appeal, and he has both a work permit and a pending application for a green card, his attorney Giovanni Diaz said.Though charges from the protest were quickly dropped, the sheriff of nearby Gwinnett county laid a second set of unrelated misdemeanor traffic charges shortly after Guevara’s arrest. The Gwinnett county solicitor subsequently dropped those charges as well, but not before Gwinnett’s sheriff’s office seized his cell phone with a search warrant.Guevara’s cell phone has not been returned, and it is unclear where it is, what data has been transferred from it or whether that data has been shared with federal agencies, Diaz said.“Everybody’s saying we don’t see a warrant in the system,” Diaz said, describing his office’s inquiries with the sheriff and other agencies. “So, one of two things happened. Some other agency that hasn’t contacted us took it – US attorney’s [office], Ice, somebody else has it – or the phone was just plain stolen.“I think it’s par for the course, considering the government’s conduct in this case. We’re doing this, at least initially, to see if we get the phone back, but again, if they don’t give the phone back, its another reason to file a lawsuit in federal court.”Guevara’s family was forced to make an extortion payment after another inmate threatened him while he was briefly held in general population in the federal prison in Atlanta. Guevara is now being held in isolation, which may help protect him, but also limits his ability to report on conditions at the Folkston immigration center, set to become the largest Ice detention center in the US.“With every day that passes, we are losing time that we will never get back,” said his daughter Katherine Guevara. “I know so many others in the same situation understand it all too well. I’m deeply disappointed with this country. This is not just about one journalist. This is about what kind of country we want to be. If a government can punish a reporter for doing his job, what message does this send? What protections are left for the rest of us?” More