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      in US Politics

      Trump administration halts Harvard’s ability to enroll international students

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      The Trump administration has said it is halting Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students and has ordered existing international students at the university to transfer or lose their legal status.On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration notified Harvard about its decision following ongoing correspondence regarding the “legality of a sprawling records request”, according to three people familiar with the matter.The records request comes as part of an investigation by the homeland security department in which federal officials are threatening the university’s international student admissions.The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, posted a copy of the letter on X, formerly known as Twitter. In it Noem said: “I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked.”“The revocation of your Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification means that Harvard is prohibited from having any aliens on F- or J-nonimmigrant status for the 2025-2026 academic school year. This decertification also means that existing aliens on F- or J- nonimmigrant status must transfer to another university in order to maintain their nonimmigrant status,” Noem continued.Noem justified the decision by saying: “This action should not surprise you and is the unfortunate result of Harvard’s failure to comply with simple reporting requirements … Consequences must follow to send a clear signal to Harvard and all universities that want to enjoy the privilege of enrolling foreign students, that the Trump administration will enforce the law and root out the evils of anti-Americanism and antisemitism in society and campuses.”The former governor of South Dakota also accused Harvard of “fostering violence, antisemitism and coordinating with the Chinese Communist party on its campus”.In a separate press release, the homeland security department said: “Secretary Noem is following through on her promise to protect students and prohibit terrorist sympathizers from receiving benefits from the US government.”A Harvard spokesperson called the government’s action “unlawful” in a statement to the Guardian on Thursday.“We are fully committed to maintaining Harvard’s ability to host our international students and scholars, who hail from more than 140 countries and enrich the university – and this nation – immeasurably,” the spokesperson said.“We are working quickly to provide guidance and support to members of our community. This retaliatory action threatens serious harm to the Harvard community and our country, and undermines Harvard’s academic and research mission.”Pippa Norris, an author and Paul F McGuire lecturer in comparative politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, told the Guardian on Thursday that Trump “is basically cutting off international knowledge to American students, he is reducing soft power, and therefore weakening America … And for me personally, it’s going to mean tremendous problems in terms of teaching.”Norris said “about 90%” of her students are international, so if she “can no longer recruit international students, then the demand and participants, etc, is going to go down”.She continued: “Imagine that you’ve come, you’ve spent a lot of money and resources to come to Harvard, and you’ve got in, and your second or third year of the undergraduate degree, or the second year of your master’s degree, and [they] say: ‘Well, I’m sorry, you know, you’re not going to be able to study here next year.’ I mean, it’s devastating.”Leo Gerdén, an international student from Sweden, called the announcement “devastating” in the university newspaper Harvard Crimson.“Every tool available they should use to try and change this. It could be all the legal resources suing the Trump administration, whatever they can use the endowment to, whatever they can use their political network in Congress,” Gerdén said, adding: “This should be, by far, priority number one.”The university currently hosts nearly 6,800 international students, with many being on F-1 or J-1 visas, according to university records. International students make up about 27% of the university’s population.The latest decision from the homeland security department comes amid growing tensions between federal officials and Harvard over the Trump administration’s claims that the university has implemented inadequate responses to antisemitism on its campus.The Trump administration terminated a further $450m in grants to the university in May, following an earlier cancellation of $2.2bn in federal funding.A Trump-appointed antisemitism taskforce has pointed to “just how radical Harvard has become” as nationwide anti-war protesters – including students – demonstrated against Israel’s deadly onslaught on Gaza, which has killed at least 53,000 Palestinians in the last year and a half.The Trump administration has also ordered the university to dismantle its diversity, equity and inclusion programming, restrict student protests, and disclose admission details to federal officials.In response to the federal cuts, the university – with an endowment of more than $53bn – filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration.Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, said in April that “no government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue”.Garber also said: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights … The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s first amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production and dissemination of knowledge.”Of how this will impact Harvard’s future, Norris said: “Why would any further international students apply to America, not just Harvard, if they can’t know that they’ve got a guaranteed place?“[This halt is] going to benefit Oxford and Cambridge and many other academic institutions, because of course, the best of the brightest could apply wherever they would. America, again, is going to have problems as a result.”Jenna Amatulli contributed reporting More

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      in US Politics

      Number of US white nationalist groups falls as extremist views go mainstream

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      The number of white nationalist, hate and anti-government extremist groups in the US has dropped not because of their declining influence, but because many of their proponents feel their beliefs have become normalized in government and mainstream society, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).The SPLC’s annual Year in Hate and Extremism report, published on Thursday, said it documented 1,371 hate and extremist groups across the country in 2024, down from 1,430 groups in 2023.These groups use “political, communication, violent, and online tactics to build strategies and training infrastructure to divide the country, demoralize people, and dismantle democracy”, the non-profit group said.The 5% drop in hate and extremist groups in 2024 can be attributed to the fact that many feel a lesser sense of urgency to organize, because their beliefs have infiltrated politics, education and society in general, according to the report.In 2024, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives became “ground zero” for many of these groups, the report said, some using threats of violence and “creating chaos that opened the door for political strongmen and authoritarian measures”.These efforts built a foundation for nationwide policy actions to follow by Donald Trump, including legislative measures to restrict discussions of race and gender in classrooms, and cutting funding for programs that disproportionately affect marginalized communities.The SPLC said there were 533 active hate groups in 2024, including ones that express views that are anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigrant, antisemitic and anti-Muslim. Last year’s report saw “record numbers” of white nationalist and anti-LGBTQ+ groups, as well as an increase in direct actions such as hate crimes, flyering, protests and intimidation campaigns.The groups featured in this year’s report make up the “hard-right movement that has long been behind rhetoric and actions that target Black people, women, immigrants, Jewish people, Muslims, and low-income, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ people”, according to the SPLC Intelligence Project’s interim director, Rachel Carroll Rivas.“Their power comes from the use of force, the capture of political parties and government, and infesting the mainstream discourse with conspiracy theories.”The report’s release comes as a Japanese American college professor is scheduled to make his first public appearance after he was brutally attacked in Los Angeles last month in a possible hate crime.Aki Maehara, 71, was struck by a vehicle and called a racial slur while riding his bike in Montebello, 10 miles (16km) east of downtown Los Angeles. He suffered serious injuries to his elbow, neck, cheekbones, jaw, hips and lower back, according to the Los Angeles Times.Maehara teaches a course on the history of racism in the US at East Los Angeles Community College. “There’s a long history,” he told the paper.“They’ve picketed my classroom at East LA College. Chicano Republicans came after me and picketed me at Cal State Long Beach. The KKK came to my classroom at Cal State Long Beach when I was teaching a course on the US-Vietnam war. This is not the first time I’ve been targeted.” More

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      in US Politics

      Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real

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      View image in fullscreenIn January, the comedian Ashley Bez posted an Instagram video of herself, trying to describe a heavy mood in the air. “How come everything feels all …?” she says, trailing off and grimacing exaggeratedly into the camera.Digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush saw the video, and got it immediately.“Welcome to the hypernormalization club,” Harfoush said in a response video. “I’m so sorry that you’re here.”“Hypernormalization” is a heady, $10 word, but it captures the weird, dire atmosphere of the US in 2025.First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.“What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working … and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has,” Harfoush says in her video.Within 48 hours, Harfoush’s video accrued millions of views. (It currently has slightly fewer than 9m.) It spread in “mom groups, friend chat circles, political subreddits, coupon communities, and even dog-walking groups”, Harfoush tells me, along with variations of: “Oh, so that’s what I’ve been feeling!” and “people tagging their friends with notes like: ‘We were just talking about this!’”View image in fullscreenWhy hypernormalization is relevant in the USThe increasing instability of the US’s democratic norms has prompted these references to hypernormalization.Donald Trump is dismantling government checks and balances in an apparent advance toward a “unitary executive” doctrine that would grant him near-unlimited authority, driving the US toward autocracy. Billionaire tech moguls like Elon Musk are helping the government consolidate power and aggressively reduce the federal workforce. Institutions like the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, which help keep Americans healthy and informed, are being haphazardly diminished.Globally, once-in-a-lifetime climate disasters, war and the lingering trauma of Covid continue to unfold, while an explosion of generative AI threatens to destabilize how people think, make a living and relate to each other.For many in the US, Trump 2.0 is having a devastating effect on daily life. For others, the routines of life continue, albeit threaded with mind-altering horrors: scrolling past an AI-generated cartoon of Ice officers arresting immigrants before dinner, or hearing about starving Palestinian families while on a school run.Hypernormalization captures this juxtaposition of the dysfunctional and mundane.It’s “the visceral sense of waking up in an alternate timeline with a deep, bodily knowing that something isn’t right – but having no clear idea how to fix it”, Harfoush tells me. “It’s reading an article about childhood hunger and genocide, only to scroll down to a carefree listicle highlighting the best-dressed celebrities or a whimsical quiz about: ‘What Pop-Tart are you?’”In his 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation, the British film-maker Adam Curtis argued that Yurchak’s critique of late-Soviet life applies neatly to the west’s decades-long slide into authoritarianism, something more Americans are now confronting head-on.“Donald Trump is not something new,” Curtis tells me, calling him “the final pantomime product” of the US government, where the powerful are abandoning any pretense of common, inclusive ideals and instead using their positions to settle scores, reward loyalty and hollow out institutions for personal or political gains.Trump’s US is “just like Yeltsin in Russia in the 1990s – promising a new kind of democracy, but in reality allowing the oligarchs to loot and distort the society”, says Curtis.Why the concept of hypernormalization is usefulWitnessing large-scale systems slowly unravel in real time can be profoundly surreal and frightening. The hypernormalization framework offers a way to understand what we’re feeling and why.Harfoush created her video “to reassure others that they’re not alone” and that “they aren’t misinterpreting the situation or imagining things”. Understanding hypernormalization “made me feel less isolated”, she says. “It’s difficult to act when you’re uncertain if you’re perceiving reality clearly, but once you know the truth, you can channel that clarity into meaningful action and, ideally, drive positive change.”Naming an experience can be a form of psychological relief. “The worst thing in the world is to feel that you’re the only one who feels this way and that you are going quietly mad and everyone else is in denial,” says Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist and instructor at the University of Bath specializing in climate anxiety. “That terrifies people. It traumatizes people.”People who feel the “wrongness” of current conditions acutely may be experiencing some depression and anxiety, but those feelings can be quite rational – not a symptom of poor mental health, alarmism or a lack of proper perspective, Hickman says.“What we’re really scared of is that the people in power have not got our back and they don’t give a shit about whether we survive or not,” she says.View image in fullscreenMarielle Greguski, 32, a New York City-based retail worker and content creator, posted about everyday life feeling “inconsequential” in the face of political crisis. Greguski says the outcome of the 2024 election reminded her that she lives in a “bubble” of progressive values, and that “there’s the other half of people that are not feeling the same energy and frustration and fear”.To Greguski, the US’s failings are not only partisan but moral – like the racism and bigotry that Trump’s second term has brought out of the shadows and into policy.Greguski is currently planning a wedding. It’s hard to compartmentalize “constant cruelty, things that don’t make sense”, she says. “Sometimes I’ll be like: ‘I have to put aside X amount of money for the wedding next year,’ and then I’m like: ‘Will this country exist as we know it next year?’ It really is crazy.”The effects of hypernormalizationConfronting systemic collapse can be so disorienting, overwhelming and even humiliating, that many tune it out or find themselves in a state of freeze.Greguski likens this feeling to sleep paralysis: “basically a waking nightmare where you’re like: ‘I’m here, I’m aware, but I’m so scared and I can’t move.’”In his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45, journalist Milton Mayer described a similar state of freeze in German citizens during the rise of the Nazi party: “You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? – Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.”“People don’t shut down because they don’t feel anything,” says Hickman. “They shut down because they feel too much.” Understanding this overwhelm is an important first step in resisting inaction – it helps us see fear as a trap.Curtis points out that governments may intentionally keep their citizens in a vulnerable state of dread and confusion as “a brilliant way of managing a highly febrile and anxious society”, he says.When we feel powerless in the face of bigger problems, we “turn to the only thing that we do have the power over, to try and change for the better”, says Curtis – meaning, typically, ourselves. Anxiety and fear can trap us, leading us to spend more time trying to feel better in small, personal ways, like entertainment and self-care, and less time on activism and community engagement.View image in fullscreenHow to overcome hypernormalizationProgressive commentators have urgently called for moral clarity and mobilization in response to changes like the cuts to USAID funding, which has resulted in an estimated 103 deaths per hour across the globe; the dismantling of the CDC; and Robert F Kennedy’s campaign against vaccine science.“Where is the outrage?” asks the Nation’s Gregg Gonsalves. “Too many lives are at stake to rest in this bizarre moment of frozen agitation.”“I don’t know if there’s a massive shift toward racism as much as an expanded indifference toward it,” the historian Robin DG Kelley said in a February interview with New York Magazine. “People are just kind of like: ‘Well, what can we do?’”Experts say action can break the spell. “Being active politically, in whatever way, I think helps reduce apocalyptic gloom,” says Betsy Hartmann, an activist, scholar and author of The America Syndrome, which explores the importance of resisting apocalyptic thinking.Greguski and a co-worker have been helping distribute multilingual information about legal rights and helpline numbers, to be used in the event of Ice raids.“It’s easy to feel like: ‘Oh, I’m in community because I’m on TikTok,’” she says. But genuine community is about “getting outside and talking to your neighbor and knowing that there’s someone out there that can help you if something really bad goes down,” she says.“You’re actually out there talking to people, working with people and realizing there are so many good people in the world, too, and maybe feeling less isolated than before,” says Hartmann.“But I also think we need a broader vision,” Hartmann notes. She suggests looking to resistance efforts against authoritarianism in countries like Turkey, Hungary and India. “How might we be in international solidarity? What lessons can we learn in terms of rebuilding sophisticated, complex government infrastructure that’s been hacked away at by people like Elon Musk and his minions in a more socially just and sustainable way?”“We are in a period now when it’s absolutely essential to protest,” says Hartmann, citing the Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth, who argues that just 3.5% of a population engaging in peaceful protest can hold back authoritarian movements.What makes dysfunction so dangerous is that we might simply learn to live with it. But understanding hypernormalization gives us language – and permission – to recognize when systems are failing, and clarifies the risk of not taking action when we can.In 2014, Ursula Le Guin accepted the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, saying: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”Harfoush reflects on this quote often. It underscores the fact that “this world we’ve created is ultimately a choice”, she says. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”We have the research, technologies and wisdom to create better, more sustainable systems.“But meaningful change requires collective awakening and decisive action,” says Harfoush. “And we need to start now.” More

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      ‘Pro-worker priorities’? Trump’s budget offers the exact opposite | Steven Greenhouse

      by

      With Donald Trump pushing hard to give big tax cuts to the rich and do huge favors for crypto billionaires, it was jarring to see a photo of a Trump aide carrying a sign that said: “President Trump’s Pro-Worker Priorities”. The aide was about to place the sign on Trump’s lectern; it mentioned such “pro-worker priorities” as ending federal taxes on tips and overtime pay: catchy, but scattershot policies that will help only a fraction of the nation’s workers.Not surprisingly, that sign made no mention of Trump’s many anti-worker policies that will do serious harm to millions of workers and their families. Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill, which is advancing in the House, includes the biggest cuts ever to Medicaid, a nearly 30% reduction in food assistance, and a $350bn cut in aid that helps working-class kids afford college. Trump has also pushed to end home-heating assistance and to make it harder for millions of Americans to afford Obamacare. If that isn’t painful enough, GOP deficit hawks have vowed to torpedo the budget bill unless it includes even more cuts. Under the current Trump House bill, at least 13.7 million people would lose health coverage – and the deficit hawks’ demands would increase that number.Even some prominent Republicans acknowledge that the Republican bill contains policies that will screw workers. Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri, slammed the Trump-GOP push to chop hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid. “These are working people and their children who need healthcare, and it’s just wrong to go and cut their healthcare when they’re trying to make ends meet, trying to help their kids,” Hawley said. He added: “No Republican should be supporting Medicaid benefit cuts.”To give a truer picture of what Trump is all about, that Trump aide should have also been carrying a sign that said: “President Trump’s Pro-Billionaire Priorities”. Those priorities are more ambitious and will cost far more than Trump’s “pro-worker priorities” – they include over a trillion dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy, stratagems to help crypto billionaires grow ever richer, and big cuts to the IRS budget to reduce the chances that the ultra-wealthy will get audited. To please his billionaire finance buddies, Trump has sought to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created to protect typical families from financial scams and extortionate banking practices. And let’s not forget the many ways Trump is helping to steer more business to Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and Trump’s biggest campaign contributor (to the tune of $270m backing the president and other Republicans).The Center for American Progress points out that the Trump/Republican budget bill would, if implemented, “be the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in US history”. Another progressive thinktank, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, notes that the budget bill would cut $1.1tn from food aid, Medicaid and other health programs while lavishing $1.1tn in tax cuts upon those earning over $500,000. Not only that, the 1m households earning over $1m a year would receive $105bn in tax cuts in 2027 – that’s more than the tax cuts going to the 127m households earning under $100,000.Republicans defend their painful program cuts as healthy, saying they will hold down the budget deficit. But there is of course a far less painful and more worker-friendly way to reduce the budget deficit: don’t extend the trillions in Trump tax cuts that overwhelmingly favor the rich.When Trump boasts about the “big, beautiful” bill, he talks only about the tax cuts, but never about how the cuts in Medicaid and Snap (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) will hurt millions of families. The Republican party consistently fails to note that one in four small-business owners and one in four veterans live in households that receive help from Snap, Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Under the planned cuts to Snap, 42 million people – including one in five children in the US – could see their food assistance reduced.According to the Penn Wharton Budget model, when one factors in the Medicaid and Snap cuts along with the tax cuts, the Trump-House bill would cause Americans earning less than $17,000 a year to lose $1,030 on average in after-tax income starting in 2026. Households earning between $17,000 and $51,000 a year would lose around $700 on average. The very wealthy do far better. For those in the richest 0.1% – that is, households earning at least $4.3m a year – their after-tax income would jump by over $388,000.That doesn’t sound very pro-worker to me. It’s a perversion of the truth for Trump to boast of his pro-worker bona fides when he steadfastly refuses to push for the two things that would do most to lift workers’ living standards: push to raise workers’ pay and push to strengthen labor unions and worker bargaining power. Not only has Trump done nothing to increase the paltry $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage, but he killed a Biden-era regulation that required federal contractors to pay their workers at least $17.75 an hour. Now many of those workers will see their pay sink to $13.30 an hour. What’s more, Trump has sought to sabotage unions, not strengthen them. He has moved to strip 1 million federal employees of their right to bargain while also seeking to cripple the National Labor Relations Board, which protects workers’ ability to bargain for better pay and conditions.As for Trump’s call to end the tax on tips, that will help many restaurant servers and hotel housekeepers, but the Yale Budget Lab says that provision has a narrow scope and will help less than 3% of all workers.Last year, candidate Trump said: “As soon as I get to office, we will make housing much more affordable.” But second-term Trump is doing just the opposite. His budget calls for a devastating 40% cut in rental assistance that millions of Americans rely on to pay their monthly rent. Candidate Trump also said: “Your heating and air conditioning, electricity, gasoline – all can be cut down in half.” But for millions of Americans he is increasing that burden by pushing to end a program that helps six million struggling households afford to heat and cool their homes.Many blue-collar Americans are eager to send their kids to college, but Trump and House Republicans would make that harder. Around one in eight Americans have federal student loans, which have been key to enabling millions of people to afford college. But Republicans want to eliminate subsidized loans for undergraduates and increase the minimum monthly payments that low-income borrowers already have a hard time paying.Trump boasts he is pro-worker, but he is doing absolutely nothing to help with what many workers say are their biggest priorities: making housing more affordable, reducing the cost of childcare and healthcare, making it easier to send one’s kids to college, and bringing down prices. Billionaires can rejoice that Trump is capitulating to them and their priorities, but American workers shouldn’t be fooled into believing that Trump is addressing their needs.

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

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      Fury as Republicans go ‘nuclear’ in fight over California car emissions

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      California has long been one of the nation’s preeminent eco-warriors, enacting landmark environmental standards for cars and trucks that go much further than those mandated by the federal government. Vehicles across the country are cleaner, more efficient and electric in greater numbers because of it.But that could all change if Donald Trump and his Republican allies manage to revoke the state’s ability to set its own, stricter emissions standards amid a White House crusade to combat climate-friendly policies.The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets and updates its own federal standards for all states on smog and emissions from cars and trucks, which the Biden administration made even stricter last year, saying they will save American drivers thousands in fuel costs and maintenance over the life of a vehicle.But for decades, California has been granted the ability to make those rules even stricter to help address some of the worst smog and air quality issues in the nation, which are linked to a host of health effects that disproportionately affect people of color.On Wednesday, the Senate voted to reverse the waivers, in move that prompted fury from Democrats who call it a “nuclear” option, calling it an unprecedented, and illegal, use of the statute. The Government Accountability Office and the Senate parliamentarian have agreed, saying EPA waivers are not subject to the review law.The House approved similar resolutions earlier this month. The resolutions now go to the White House, where Trump is expected to sign them.“This move will harm public health and deteriorate air quality for millions of children and people across the country,” said senators Alex Padilla, Sheldon Whitehouse and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, in a statement.“This Senate vote is illegal. Republicans went around their own parliamentarian to defy decades of precedent. We won’t stand by as Trump Republicans make America smoggy again,” California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said in a statement on Thursday. “We’re going to fight this unconstitutional attack on California in court.”Kathy Harris, the director of clean vehicles at the Natural Resources Defense Council, emphasized California’s ability to mandate strict emissions standards for cars, trucks and buses had existed for nearly 60 years, noting the state had been granted more than 75 waivers under Republican and Democratic presidents.Among the waivers include rules to increase the share of electric vehicles each year among all new car and truck sales, as well as mandates that auto companies introduce progressively cleaner vehicles.She described the waivers as a “quadruple win”, benefiting public health, air quality, drivers’ pockets and the economy as a whole.“These waivers are not new or novel,” Harris said in an interview. “California has historically been innovators in systems to help produce cleaner air and stymying California’s ability is a direct attack on our ability to limit pollution and health harming pollutants in the air.”View image in fullscreenShe added revoking the waivers would immediately lead to an increase in pollution on the nation’s roadways.More than a dozen states follow California’s lead on emissions standards, according to the California air resources board. The standards now cover nearly 40% of new light-duty vehicle registrations and more than a quarter of heavy-duty vehicles like trucks across the entire US.Automakers have largely followed California’s emissions standards as well so they can continue to sell cars there, as the state equates to the fourth-largest economy on the planet.Newsom upped the ante in the nation’s environmental future in 2020, declaring his state would ban the sale of all new gas-powered vehicles by 2035. Eleven states have also joined California’s plan to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by the 2035 deadline, a reality that has spooked major car companies.Joe Biden’s administration approved the plan at the end of his term. Trump, however – a vehement opponent to many of the nation’s climate efforts – has vowed to see them reversed.“California has imposed the most ridiculous car regulations anywhere in the world, with mandates to move to all electric cars,” Trump said during his campaign last year. “I will terminate that.”Newsom on Wednesday cast the battle as a nail in the coffin for the American car industry and decades of public health advancements.“The United States Senate has a choice: cede American car-industry dominance to China and clog the lungs of our children, or follow decades of precedent and uphold the clean-air policies that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon fought so hard for,” he challenged Republicans in a statement. “Will you side with China or America?”The Senate’s decision may have sweeping effects far beyond the state’s borders.Harris said she recently pulled up pictures of what air quality looked like in cities around the country in the 1960s before the Clean Air Act, the seminal environmental law that regulates the nation’s air quality, was in effect. She described normal levels of smog in California as blanketing the state similar to the apocalyptic clouds of wildfire smoke that have descended during recent fire seasons.The American Lung Association also found last month that Los Angeles remained the country’s smoggiest city for the 25th time in 26 years of tracking, despite decades of improvements in air quality.“I think we have forgotten about what our air used to look like,” Harris said. “We take it for granted because it’s a policy that’s been around for so long we don’t really recognize those direct benefits.“There is still a long way to go, we have not succeeded in fully cleaning up our air yet,” she added. “These types of policies help ensure we are moving in a positive direction.” More

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      Volodymyr Zelenskyy has courage. Pope Francis had it too. Why are there so many cowards? | Alexander Hurst

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      “Courage is seeking the truth and speaking it,” Jean Jaurès, the French philosopher and Socialist party leader, told a group of high school students in 1903. “It is not yielding to the law of the triumphant lie as it passes, and not echoing, with our soul, our mouth and our hands, mindless applause and fanatical jeering.”When the first world war reared its ugly, pointless head, Jaurès refused to give in to mindless fanaticism and attempted to coordinate a Franco-German general strike to stop the rush to war. In 1914, he paid for those efforts with his life when a 29-year-old French nationalist shot him twice in the back.Courage among ordinary people is not in short supply. The doctors and humanitarian workers who rush to war zones and refugee camps to care for those who need it. Rümeysa Öztürk, the PhD student who was arrested in the US for voicing an opinion against the relentless bombing of Gaza. Israeli conscientious objectors and an increasing number of other refuseniks. The protesters in Tbilisi, Belgrade and Istanbul who have repeatedly faced down their governments’ attempts at repression.Examples of political courage from those in power, though? These feel less numerous. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has displayed it endlessly. French judges did too, when they upheld the rule of law – which in normal times would simply be doing their duty, but in our times meant facing death threats. Pope Francis pushed reforms of the Catholic church to make it more compassionate and inclusive, and didn’t veer from them. He didn’t “change strategy” when attendance failed to pick up, because he didn’t have a strategy – he was simply doing what was right.View image in fullscreenOn the other hand, we’ve witnessed so many high-profile examples of political cowardice in recent months that I can only talk about them in broad categories. The US supreme court justices who, last summer, bent over backwards to create a monarchical presidency with impunity to break the law as it desires. The law firms that have offered up hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of pro bono work to an administration busy dismantling the rule of law.The CEOs and companies that have turned on the money tap and tripped over themselves to cancel inclusion initiatives to placate a president who is tanking their share prices. An almost comically conspicuous level of grift, alleged corruption and insider trading. Congressional Republicans who have sold out their country’s constitutional principles in order to avoid primaries – or perhaps, as the senator Lisa Murkowski put it, because “we are all afraid … because retaliation is real”.What is just? Who is acting with honour? With courage? When did we stop thinking it normal to consider such questions – and to demand those things from the people who lead us? To demand that they, well, lead?Left with basically no other choice, Harvard University finally made the decision to oppose the Trump administration’s outrageous demands. That is not to downplay the moral courage in the decision; other universities might have and did make different choices when they were in the same bind. As a result of Harvard’s stand, hundreds of college and university presidents have decided that sticking together is better than falling one by one.But perhaps in this moment, Harvard and other elite schools like it might take the opportunity to reflect on exactly what kind of virtues they have been instilling in their students. For years, nearly half of Harvard’s graduates have stepped straight from campus into roles at consulting firms and investment banks. It’s disheartening but perhaps not surprising, given that according to its newspaper, the Crimson, for the past four decades far more first-years have been concerned with “being well-off financially” than with “developing a meaningful life philosophy”.When the primary metric becomes “success” in amassing something – money, followers, territory, votes – society loses its moral centre. As Pankaj Mishra wrote in his 2017 book, Age of Anger, part of the crisis of the current moment is that commercial society has unleashed individuals who are unmoored from each other or from some greater social fabric.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt may sound quaint, almost conservative, to denounce a breakdown in society’s engagement with morality in public life. But I reject that. Without an ability to think and speak in real moral language, we end up in a place where there is no more shame in hypocrisy, no dishonour in rapacious greed; where if something is true or false matters less than how many people believe it. We end up in a place where the world’s wealthiest man has overseen a series of devastating aid cuts that will indirectly kill hundreds of thousands of children and sentence millions more to death from disease. There is an appropriate descriptive word for that: the word is evil.Much of the media – US media, most certainly – have a lot to answer for in the ways that they have oriented public conversation. Far too frequently, they have approached politics primarily as a horse race. What does this or that mean for a candidate’s electoral chances? How will it play out in the polls? Who is up, who is down? Who agrees, who disagrees, and what is each party saying about the other? What the media don’t like to do, because it’s far more difficult and far riskier, is to talk about whether the policies being proposed and the decisions being taken are morally commendable, just, honourable, courageous.A focus on speaking the truth, of the kind that Jaurès extolled, opens wide other doors. Among them, the ability to move from a political question – what do we want? – to a more courageous one: is this what we should want?

      Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Trump’s massive tax and spending bill clears hurdle to advance to House vote in coming hours

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      The Republican-controlled House of Representatives will attempt to pass President Donald Trump’s massive tax and spending bill in the pre-dawn hours of Thursday, following weeks of intra-party divisions of how deeply to cut spending.The bill cleared an important procedural hurdle in the House on Wednesday evening, when a gatekeeper committee approved the measure and set up a floor vote for passage to occur within hours. Shortly before midnight in Washington, the full House reconvened to consider Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill”, opening the floor for debate and a series of procedural votes.Republicans have been deeply divided over the bill, which would extend Trump’s signature 2017 tax cuts, create new breaks for tipped income and auto loans, end many green-energy subsidies and boost spending on the military and immigration enforcement.It would pay for those changes by tightening eligibility for food and health programs that serve millions of low-income Americans.The nonpartisan congressional Budget Office estimates the bill will add $3.8tr to the US’s $36.2tr in debt over the next decade.The House Rules Committee voted 8 to 4 to advance the bill late on Wednesday after a marathon session that lasted nearly 22 hours. Republican leaders later scheduled two votes, one to begin debate and a second to pass the bill, before sunrise on Thursday.House passage would set the stage for weeks of debate in the Republican-led Senate.A handful of party hardliners, angry that the bill did not contain more spending cuts, met with Trump and house speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday, a day after Trump’s visit to the Capitol failed to unify the narrow 220-212 majority.Johnson expressed confidence that the bill would pass the House. “I believe we are going to land this airplane,” he told reporters.Representative Dusty Johnson, who leads the chamber’s Main Street Caucus, said he believed the speaker had reached a deal that could pass the House.“The speaker has been working with a broad cross section of the conference,” he told reporters. “We have every expectation, the speaker has every expectation, that we will get there.”Credit rating firm Moody’s last week stripped the US government of its top-tier credit rating, citing the nation’s growing debt. US stocks fell on Wednesday amid investor concern about the mounting debt.The Medicaid health program for low-income households had proved to be a major sticking point, with fiscal hawks pushing for cuts to partly offset the cost of the bill’s tax components, which moderate Republicans say would hurt voters whose support they will need in the 2026 midterm congressional elections.The rules committee approved an overall amendment package containing deals between Johnson and various Republican factions.The revisions included imposing work requirements for the Medicaid program at the end of 2026, two years earlier than previously planned. It also penalized states that expand Medicaid in the future and raised the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted from federal income taxes.The amendment package also exempted firearm silencers from registration requirements under the National Firearms Act and eliminated a $200 tax on the firearm accessories, changes demanded by Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia.Democrats railed against the legislation.“Republicans are kicking millions of Americans off their healthcare and (food) benefits in order to finance tax cuts that will help billionaires,” said Representative Jim McGovern, the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee.“Cutting benefits means families will go hungry, farmers will suffer and health care costs will go up,” he said.Trump visited Republican lawmakers at the Capitol on Tuesday to try to persuade holdouts to get in line on what he calls a “big, beautiful bill.”Johnson has little room for error on the House floor, as a handful of Republican “no” votes could scuttle the bill.Republican lawmakers have said they do not believe the nonpartisan analysts’ projections and accused Moody’s of deliberately timing its downgrade last Friday to try to block the bill’s passage.Lawmakers must act to address the debt limit by this summer or risk triggering a devastating default.“Deficits aside, this bill is ugly because it is ultimately a betrayal of the contract that we have made with the American people, and especially to our babies and to our working people,” said Democratic Representative Gwen Moore. More

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      Trump news at a glance: Ramaphosa keeps his cool in Trump’s ‘orchestrated show for the cameras’

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      South African president Cyril Ramaphosa refused to take the bait when Donald Trump falsely accused his nation of committing white genocide, in what his spokesperson dismissed as “an orchestrated show for the cameras”.Ramaphosa remained composed and suggested the two leaders “talk about it very calmly” as Trump ambushed him with a video making the untrue allegations that white Afrikaners in South Africa were victims of genocide.“President Ramaphosa came here not for a TV show, he came here to discuss with President Trump in earnest how we can reset the strategic relationship between South Africa and the US,” Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, told South African TV station Newzroom Afrika.Ramaphosa was more cordial after the meeting, insisting “it went very well”. He added that he expected Trump to attend the G20 summit in Johannesburg in November, as the US is due to take over the group’s presidency in 2026.“I want to hand over the presidency of the G20 to President Trump in November, and I said he needs to be there,” he said. “I don’t want to hand over the presidency of the G20 to an empty chair.”Trump calls treatment of Afrikaners ‘the opposite of apartheid’ At the White House meeting, Trump said that treatment of white people in the country was like “the opposite of apartheid”. Trump has long maintained that Afrikaners, a minority descended from mainly Dutch colonists who ruled South Africa during its decades of racial apartheid, are being persecuted. South Africa rejects the allegation. Murder rates are high in the country and the overwhelming majority of victims are Black.Read the full storyTrump accepts jet from QatarThe Trump administration accepted the controversial gift of a Boeing 747 jetliner from the government of Qatar, and directed the air force to assess how quickly the plane can be upgraded for possible use as a new Air Force One. The offer of the jet has set off a firestorm of bipartisan criticism of Trump, particularly after the president’s visit to the country last week to arrange US business deals.Read the full storyTrump says he’s ‘seriously considering’ taking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac publicTrump said he will make a decision in the near future about taking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac public. The companies are the backbone of the US housing market and together support about 70% of US mortgages. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said: “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are doing very well, throwing off a lot of CASH, and the time would seem to be right. Stay tuned!”Read the full storyWhite House violated order by trying to deport migrants to South SudanA federal judge ruled that the Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to deport migrants to South Sudan was “unquestionably violative” of an injunction he had issued earlier. Judge Brian E Murphy made the remark at an emergency hearing he ordered in Boston after the Trump administration’s apparent deportation of eight people to South Sudan.Read the full storyMahmoud Khalil blocked from holding son for first time by Ice, lawyers sayMahmoud Khalil, the detained Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist, was not allowed to hold his newborn son after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials refused to allow a contact visit between him and his family, his lawyers said on Wednesday. Instead, Khalil was forced to meet his month-old baby for the first time behind glass at a Louisiana detention facility, where he has been detained since March.Read the full storyGeorge Washington University student banned after pro-Palestinian graduation speechA student has been banned from campus at George Washington University after she used her graduation speech to criticize the university’s ties to Israel and express support for Palestinians. The graduating senior, Cecilia Culver, delivered her remarks to nearly 750 students.Read the full storyJustice department moves to cancel police reform dealsThe justice department moved on Wednesday to cancel a settlement with Minneapolis that called for an overhaul of its police department after the murder of George Floyd, as well as a similar agreement with Louisville, Kentucky, after the death of Breonna Taylor, saying it does not want to pursue the cases. It comes amid pressure on the right to recast Floyd’s murder, undermine diversity efforts and define liberal-run cities like Minneapolis as crime-ridden.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Gerry Connolly, a Democratic congressman from Virginia who previously served as the top Democrat on the House’s key oversight committee, died at age 75.

      Target sales fell more than expected in the first quarter, and the retailer warned they will slip for all of 2025 year as its customers pull back on spending.

      The US Senate passed the No Tax on Tips Act after the Nevada senator Jacky Rosen brought the bill up for a unanimous consent request.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 20 May 2025. More