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      How ‘revenge of the Covid contrarians’ unleashed by RFK Jr puts broader vaccine advances at risk

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      The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, entered office with a pledge to tackle the US’s chronic disease epidemic and give infectious disease a “break”. In at least one of those goals, Kennedy has been expeditious.Experts said as Kennedy makes major cuts in public health in his first weeks in office, the infrastructure built to mitigate Covid-19 has become a clear target – an aim that has the dual effect of weakening immunization efforts as the US endures the largest measles outbreak since 2000.“If his goal is to undermine public health infrastructure, he’s making strides there,” said Dorit Reiss, a University of California Law School professor whose research focuses on vaccine law. “If his goal is combating chronic diseases – he’s not doing very well.”The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been characterized by upheaval since Kennedy and the billionaire Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) cumulatively axed 20,000 jobs – roughly a quarter of the 82,000-person workforce.And it appears that turmoil will continue: a leaked budget memo shows the administration poised to propose a budget cut of another $40bn, or roughly one-third of the department’s discretionary spending.Amid the cuts, attacks on Covid-19 infrastructure have proven thematic, and show the administration’s hostility toward work that once mitigated the virus. That’s included attacking promising vaccine platforms and elevating once-ostracized voices to high-level roles.“The Covid-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” a spokesperson for HHS told the Guardian in response to questions about its strategy.“HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.”Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale University associate professor and infectious disease epidemiologist, calls this strategy the “revenge of the Covid contrarians”.“They’re not interested in the science, they’re interested in their conclusions and having the science bend to their will,” said Gonsalves. “They want to create a Potemkin village of their own making that looks like science but has nothing to do with science at all.”Among Kennedy’s changes: attacks on the promising platform that supported Covid-19 vaccine development, delayed approval of a Covid-19 vaccine, the clawing back of grants that provided local immunization support and studied vaccine safety, and elevating one-time critics of Covid-19 policy.“When the new administration came in, we were hearing even within the organization: ‘We can’t say Covid, we’re not allowed to say Covid,’” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive officer of the National Association of County and City Health Officials (Naccho), about her members’ conversations.Freeman noted that “we kind of saw the writing on the wall a couple months ago that: ‘OK, they really don’t want anything Covid-related to be pursued any more.’ Everything Covid-related is quite honestly at risk.”In the latest change, Kennedy said this week he may remove Covid-19 shots from the childhood vaccine schedule, which would probably make the shots harder to get by limiting insurance coverage.“The recommendation for children was always dubious,” Kennedy told Fox News. Although a minority of children are vaccinated, the shots are recommended, especially for immune-compromised children.Freeman believes the desire to erase the government’s Covid legacy led to HHS’s decision to claw back $11bn in public health funds from states and localities. In effect done overnight, the clawback gave local officials only hours to lay off workers, cancel immunization clinics and even stop construction projects.“That’s why we feel like the drawback of the funding occurred: Covid,” said Freeman.A spokesperson for HHS characterized this as a savings, and said most canceled awards were for Covid-19-related work.The pullback led to the cancellation of more than 50 measles immunization clinics in Texas, where the measles outbreak has already claimed the lives of two unvaccinated children, to pilot programs such as “Text4Vax”, which sent reminders about pediatric vaccines to parents.Among the canceled grants were also programs that would seem to align with Kennedy’s rhetoric about vaccine safety – among them, a study of the safety and effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines in pregnant women in California and global Covid-19 vaccine safety monitoring in New Zealand.“If you start to take away people from health departments – the immunizers, the educators, the clinicians – through some of these other funding cuts , it disables the program naturally,” said Freeman. “You can’t put as many shots in arms.”Larger cancelled grants included a $2.25bn grant program to reduce Covid-19’s impact on the people worst affected, which had been sent to states and localities from South Dakota to Florida and the Virgin Islands to Vermont.Under Kennedy’s watch, HHS has also taken the unusual step of delaying an expected vaccine approval, reportedly under the watch of a Kennedy political appointee.The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which sits under the umbrella of HHS, delayed the expected 1 April approval of the Novavax Covid-19 vaccine. Novavax confirmed to the Guardian that its application remained on hold, and said it would have “no further comments”.Reiss said she doesn’t think “any vaccine that’s in the pipeline is going to go forward under Kennedy” or that “he will let any vaccine go far now”.Dr Tracy Hoeg, a political appointee, was reportedly involved in the decision. Hoeg also appeared as the FDA’s representative at a special advisory committee on immunizations in April, where she took the opportunity to question the efficacy of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine.An HHS spokesperson told the Guardian: “The FDA’s independent review process for the Novavax vaccine, like all vaccines, is based solely on ensuring safety and efficacy, not political considerations. Any delays are a result of scientific review, not a lack of priority. It’s important to focus on the facts rather than unfounded speculation.”Scientists have also said they fear for the future of messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine technology – the platform that underpinned the fast development of Covid-19 vaccines and that held promise for treating and preventing a wide range of diseases.Hoeg served on Florida’s public health integrity committee, which served as a platform for Covid-19 criticism during the pandemic. At the time, it was chaired by the Florida surgeon general, Dr Joseph Ladapo, who has also sown doubt about the safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines.Hoeg could be further buttressed by insiders such as Dr Matthew Memoli, who, Kennedy said, “is going to be running Niaid [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases]”. Memoli, whom Kennedy described as “the top flu researcher at NIH”, is known for opposition to Covid-19 vaccine mandates and declined to be vaccinated. In March, Memoli sent an email to NIH grant officials requiring any grant applications that reference mRNA technology to be reported to Kennedy’s office. He also canceled government-backed studies on vaccine hesitancy.The nominee for HHS general counsel, Michael B Stuart, is also well-known for involvement in vaccine fights. Stuart, a former West Virginia lawmaker, in 2023 proposed a bill to exempt virtual public school students from vaccine requirements and allow private schools to set their own requirements, according to Stat.“Dismantling the sort of vaccine infrastructure this country relies upon – that’s been in place for several dozens and dozens of years – only impacts the chronic disease front he’s trying to ameliorate as well,” said James Hodge, a professor of law at Arizona State University and a health law expert who said he worries about the future of vaccine advisory committees. “Acquiring infectious diseases leads to chronic conditions later.”Still, some of Kennedy’s most ardent supporters and reported informal advisers, such as the former cardiologist Peter McCullough, have argued these actions don’t go far enough.“The big threat is that we still have Covid-19 vaccines on the market,” McCullough told KFF Health News. “It’s horrendous. I would not hesitate – I would just pull it. What’s he waiting for?” McCullough did not respond to requests for comment from the Guardian. More

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      Conservatives fighting ‘antisemitism’ are actively targeting US Jews. Why? | Josh Schreier

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      The Trump administration claims that its moves to defund universities, arrest and deport students and force schools to demote or monitor professors are meant to combat antisemitism, protect Jewish students and remove “Hamas-supporting” foreign nationals from the country. American pro-Israel groups including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Hillel International, Aipac and the Heritage Foundation have united behind Republican measures to crack down on higher education and its putative antisemitism. Religiously identified groups such as the Orthodox Union and Christians United for Israel have joined the chorus, celebrating the punishment of supposedly antisemitic students and professors. Whatever their varied pasts, today’s pro-Israel groups are not about protecting American Jews. Instead, they are allies in Maga’s war on free speech, academic freedom and the US’s democratic society itself.To be clear: the pro-Israel campaign to “protect” Jews by punishing anti-Zionist speech often targets Jews. After a student complaint about a tenured Jewish professor’s Twitter post, Muhlenberg College fired her. The ADL has rewarded Muhlenberg by grading it “better than most” colleges for fighting “antisemitism”. The ADL also accused Jewish Voice for Peace, a large, anti-Zionist Jewish group with chapters on many American campuses, of “promot[ing] messaging” that can include “support for terrorists”. Under pressure from the Trump administration, Columbia University expelled a Jewish graduate student and United Auto Workers local president who demonstrated against the war in Gaza.Most chillingly, the Trump administration recently sent all staff at Barnard College a questionnaire inquiring if they were Jewish, ostensibly to gauge campus antisemitism. For many, the experience of being asked by the government to self-identify as a Jew was terrifying; as one historian put it: “We’ve seen this movie before, and it ends with yellow stars.”Canary Mission, a pro-Israel website that publishes information on students and professors who supposedly “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews”, has been targeting an Israeli American scholar of the Holocaust along with many other Jews (including the author of this piece). Project Esther, an initiative launched by the conservative Heritage Foundation – the thinktank behind Project 2025 – blames the “American Jewish community’s complacency” for the “pro-Palestinian movement’s” ability to continue working for “the destruction of capitalism and democracy”. Maga’s pro-Israel partners do not protect Jews; they help Trump in his war on our academic freedom and open society more generally.Of course, unlike some pro-Israel groups, the Trump administration has a broader antipathy toward higher education. As JD Vance put it, “the professors are the enemy”. But the pro-Israel movement furnishes Maga with a crucial weapon in their war on this “enemy”: charges of antisemitism. The entire “US education system”, according to Project Esther, has been “infiltrated” by “Hamas-supporting organizations” that now “foster antisemitism under the guise of “‘pro-Palestinian,’ anti-Israel, anti-Zionist narratives … within the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and similar Marxist ideology”. Of course, by linking Palestinian solidarity with longstanding rightwing bogeymen like antiracism and communism, Project Esther gives away the game; their “antisemitic” charge is a tool to silence Maga’s left-leaning critics in higher education.Meanwhile, many pro-Israel groups seem to tolerate Maga’s proximity to antisemitism. If they didn’t, we might expect to hear more about Vance’s meeting with Germany’s neo-Nazi-linked AfD, Steve Bannon’s singling out of “American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support Maga” as “the number one enemy to the people in Israel”, or Trump’s claim that the Democratic senator Chuck Schumer is “not Jewish” but “Palestinian”.The ADL went so far as to defend Elon Musk’s apparent Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration. True, the ADL rightfully criticized some of these other incidents, as well as Trump’s antisemitic advertisements, and his meeting with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. But these cases do not seem to merit breaking with Maga. Why? Because the pro-Israel movement advocates for Israel, not American Jews.For this reason, the American pro-Israel movement has been collaborating in the Trump administration’s campaign to roll back everyone’s constitutional rights. By now, most of us have seen the footage of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, both students at American universities, being surrounded by groups of government agents and forced into the backs of unmarked vehicles. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, promised that hundreds of other students have been stripped of their visas. Neither Khalil nor Öztürk have any demonstrated ties to Hamas. Khalil even spoke out against antisemitism, declaring that “antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on this campus and in this movement”. Furthermore, as a permanent resident and a student visa holder, both Khalil and Öztürk are guaranteed first amendment protections. Yet Hillel International failed to condemn the arrests, and the ADL outright celebrated Khalil’s.Ultimately, Trump and many in the pro-Israel movement have allied against free speech in higher education because it is a pillar of an open society that threatens both of them. The right has long had it out for universities. The pro-Israel movement, meanwhile, saw the campus encampments with horror; a wide cross-section of students and professors from a variety of religious, racial and ethnic backgrounds came together to speak out against Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of people.Even more galling for the pro-Israel movement, Jews actively participated in the protests – even conducting Passover seders, as well as Kabbalat Shabbat and Havdalah services amid them. These young Jews are not alone; less than half of Americans now sympathize with Israel, and one-third believe Israel is committing genocide. These facts do not threaten American Jews, but they do threaten Maga and the heavily evangelical pro-Israel movement. As long as increasing numbers of students, professors and many others speak out for Palestinians’ humanity, the pro-Israel movement, armed with disingenuous accusations of antisemitism, will aid Maga’s war on American higher education and democracy itself.

      Joshua Schreier is a professor of history and Jewish studies at Vassar College. More

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      They staged protests for Palestine. The consequences have been life-changing

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      EK was completing a take-home exam on 6 March when the dean of student conduct at Swarthmore College emailed her about an urgent Zoom meeting. On the video call, she said, the dean told her that she would be suspended for one semester for staging a protest at the college’s trustees’ dinner in December 2023. Using a bullhorn, EK had interrupted the event to demand that the school divest from products that fuel Israel’s war on Gaza.A panel of students and school employees had found her responsible for assault, among other code of conduct violations for the incident. EK, a final-semester senior who is using a pseudonym out of fear of retaliation, recalled being in shock: “I’ve been really distraught by all of this,” EK said. “I used to be unhoused before I came to Swarthmore, so to be put into this situation again is very disturbing.”She filed an appeal in mid-March and remained in campus housing until the school came to a decision on 10 April. A first-generation, low-income college student on financial aid, EK had been forbidden from campus housing pending the appeal decision, and lost crucial finances when she was let go from her school job. She said she also fears she may be vulnerable to attacks from the Trump administration, which has penalized pro-Palestinian protesters: “I’m worried that this is not the end, and only the beginning, especially now that it’s on my record. It could be the case that I could face further punitive measures from the federal government, and the college is not doing anything to protect students.”In March, the Trump administration listed Swarthmore College as one of 60 schools at risk of losing hundreds of millions of federal dollars for allowing what it considered antisemitic harassment on campus. Colleges and universities across the country were already quashing pro-Palestinian protests by suspending and arresting students, and several revised their policies to ban encampments prior to Trump’s inauguration. But some have gone even further to penalize students in light of the government’s threats to pull their funding.In some cases, those preventive measures have been for naught. Columbia announced that it expelled students who occupied a building last year and revoked alumnis’ diplomas at the same time the federal government still cancelled $400m worth of contracts and grants to the university. Harvard University placed the undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee on probation and temporarily banned the pro-Palestinian group from hosting events, only for the Trump administration to freeze $2.2bn in federal grants to the school two weeks later.Though Columbia and Harvard have received the most attention for their responses to activists, campus crackdowns have been widespread. The Guardian spoke to 1o student protesters in Pennsylvania, California, Wisconsin and New York who have faced disciplinary action from their colleges and universities. They said that the process is often arbitrary and marked by fear tactics aimed to discourage them from protesting in the future. Building a defense for disciplinary hearings, they said, distracted them from their studies and caused anxiety, as the processes can last months.In some cases, the disciplinary process has no conclusive end, causing students to languish while being banned from campus or otherwise limited from participating in student life. Following pushback from students and faculty, EK said, Swarthmore College agreed to pay for her off-campus housing until the end of the semester. She is taking virtual classes and will be allowed to graduate on time, but she is still barred from attending on-campus events or from walking with her peers during graduation.In a statement to the Guardian, Swarthmore College spokesperson Alisa Giardinelli said that the school repeatedly warned student protesters that their actions were in violation of the college’s code of conduct, and that they would face disciplinary action if found responsible. Despite the college’s efforts to discuss the students’ demands, including that the school divest from weapons manufacturers that fuel Israel’s war on Gaza, “some students chose to continue to engage in – and in some cases escalated – behaviors that violated the Code”, Giardinelli said.Guardian interviews with student activists, attorneys and researchers reveal an increased sense of hostility on campuses since 7 October 2023, which has stoked fear and anxiety and resulted in financial concerns for some pro-Palestinian student protesters. Some attorneys have said that Palestinians, Arab Muslims, and people of color have been universities’ primary targets when repressing pro-Palestinian free speech. In March, the federal government went even further in targeting pro-Palestinian scholars and students of color by arresting and detaining the Georgetown University professor Badar Khan Suri and the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil.“A majority of students who are contacting us for support are either Palestinian, Arab Muslim or other students of color,” said the advocacy group Palestine Legal’s staff attorney, Tori Porell. Additionally, low-income students or those who rely on financial aid are hardest hit by disciplinary actions, she said: “Students who live on campus might rely on campus meal plans. If they are abruptly suspended, they are losing access to housing, to their food, to healthcare, and they might not have funds to just fly home the way some students with more resources would.”In 2024, Palestine Legal received more than 2,000 requests for legal assistance, with about two-thirds coming from students, staff or faculty on college campuses.While schools have long served as stages for mass protests including against the Vietnam war and South Africa’s apartheid, activists say that the universities’ actions toward them have had a chilling effect on civil disobedience this academic year. Still, students such as Dahlia Saba, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, see it as their duty to continue pushing universities to divest from Israel, whose war on Gaza has killed at least 62,000 Palestinians since October 2023.Saba was at a conference in Colorado last July when she received a concerning text message from her schoolmate Vignesh Ramachandran. The two were being investigated by the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a May 2024 op-ed that they had written in a local publication. The article criticized the university’s failure to respond to a student-led proposal around transparent and ethical investment, and demanded that it divest from arms-manufacturing companies fueling Israel’s war on Gaza.She pulled up an email from the university about the charges that she faced, which included allegedly refusing to comply with rules about no picnicking or camping. (Wisconsin state statute prohibits tents or camping on undesignated parts of university land.) Saba, a graduate student in electrical engineering, recalled her thoughts in that moment: would the charges jeopardize her career, or prevent her from being vocal about Palestinian rights in the future?“For me, it’s still important to speak up,” Saba, a Palestinian American, told the Guardian, “because the point of these repression tactics is to try to silence us. And so I think that makes it all the more imperative to refuse to be silenced.”A ‘Palestine exception’ to free speechSince October 2023, many schools have responded to pro-Palestinian campus protests in an outsized way compared with demonstrations going back several decades, say attorneys. In a Harvard Crimson series, 11 former student activists said that Harvard’s response to pro-Palestinian protesters had been more violent and punitive than the treatment they experienced for protesting against South Africa’s apartheid, against fossil fuel divestment, and for university workers to be paid living wages.Race and political views may account for universities’ stricter policies and punishments since last year. Pointing to the Orange county district attorney’s list of people who had been suspended and arrested, Thomas Harvey, a California attorney who represents pro-Palestinian students facing criminal charges, said: “It’s very rare that it’s anyone other than people of color.” Harvey said he knows many of the students on the district attorney’s list because he’s represented them or provided them pro bono legal support. “It seems very obvious that race, combined with political viewpoints about being pro-Palestinian, are the targets of the most severe punishment.”UT, a Muslim woman of color and Swarthmore College senior, said that she was alarmed to learn how closely the college surveilled her during pro-Palestinian protests. On 6 March 2025, UT, who is using her initials out of fear of being doxxed, received an email from the school that she would be on academic probation until she graduated for violating the college’s code of conduct during rallies between October 2023 and March 2024. Last spring, she received a packet from the university on the evidence they had against her, including CCTV footage of her walking on a path next to the woods on campus.“It was a real moment of realization that there is so much surveillance on this campus, and especially out of the students that were charged, very few were white students. Most students were students of color, and first-generation, low-income students. And to learn that the college is so meticulously tracking these students – it was a very scary moment.”Giardinelli of Swarthmore College told the Guardian that “sanctions are based solely on alleged misconduct, without regard to race, socioeconomic standing, or identity”. Of the surveillance, she said: “CCTV images are only used, when available, to verify involved parties and behaviors that are suspected to be, or are alleged violations of, the Student Code of Conduct or of state and federal law.”Schools’ crackdowns on pro-Palestinian student protesters are indicative of a “Palestine exception” to free speech, said Farah Afify, a research and advocacy coordinator at the civil rights group Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair). As the co-author of Cair’s analysis on how universities target pro-Palestinian protesters, Afify consolidated incidents found in newspaper reports and education-related complaints that Afify received from October 2023 to May 2024.“Students who support Palestinian rights,” Afify said, “tend to face harsher discipline, harsher criticism, more challenges by people who would otherwise encourage that kind of expression because it meets the standard principles of what we’d expect of our institutions of higher education.” Cair has since launched a website where students can report their campuses to be investigated and placed on the organization’s “institutions of particular concern” list for targeting pro-Palestinian protesters.‘There’s a genocide, and we need to be organizing against it’While Saba was found responsible for violating the University of Wisconsin’s policies by a student-conduct investigating officer last August, her charges were dropped in October after she appealed them before a committee consisting of a student and university employees. Palestine Legal also sent her school a letter demanding that they end disciplinary proceedings against students in September, which assisted in Saba and another unnamed student’s charges being dropped.In a statement to the Guardian, University of Wisconsin-Madison spokesperson Kelly Tyrrell said that the school “does not disclose details related to individual student conduct cases”, and weighs each case based on a person’s conduct history and the circumstances surrounding the offense. She said the university seeks to create a campus “where all students feel supported, can pursue their educational goals without disruption, and are free to express themselves and engage across difference on complex topics, whether in their local community or around the world”.Despite the intimidation and disciplinary action that student protesters say they faced by their universities, they remain resolute in their fight to speak against their schools’ ties to Israel.Saba said she feels vindicated that her charges were dropped, though she thinks that the university’s system was flawed for finding her co-author, Ramachandran, culpable on the same limited evidence. Still, she holds onto hope that her school will eventually disclose its investments to the public and divest from companies that contribute to or profit from Israel’s war on Gaza.“This university, like many other universities, has lost its sense as a moral institution, an institution of ethics and an institution that aspires to do good in the world,” Saba said. “I want to see a university that actually responds to the demands of its students, rather than restricting their rights, and that prioritizes acting as a force of justice in the world, rather than just a machine that takes in money and spits out degrees.”Additional reporting by Adria R Walker More

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      ‘Everyone’s scared’: little appetite for mirth before White House correspondents’ dinner

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      It is no laughing matter. The annual dinner for journalists who cover the White House is best known for American presidents trying to be funny and comedians trying to be political. But this year’s edition will feature neither.Instead the event in a downtown Washington hotel on Saturday night will, critics say, resemble something closer to a wake for legacy media still trying to find an effective response to Donald Trump’s divide-and-rule tactics and the rise of the Maga media ecosystem.Joe Biden’s effort to restore norms included the former president giving humorous speeches at the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) annual dinner. But just as in his first term, Trump will not be joining the group he has long branded “the enemy of the people” and most of his staff are expected to boycott.News outlets, including the Guardian, will be present but there will also be another major gap this year. The WHCA had lined up the comedian and writer Amber Ruffin but last month withdrew her invitation. Eugene Daniels, president of the association, wrote in an email: “I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists.”Ruffin had referred to the Trump administration as “kind of a bunch of murderers” on a podcast the previous week and asserted that “nobody wants” Trump to attend the dinner. The WHCA may have been seeking to avoid a repeat of the 2018 dinner in which the comedian Michelle Wolf savaged Trump administration officials sitting just feet away and was condemned by some for going too far.But critics described the decision to drop Ruffin as an exercise in capitulation and cowardice, a metaphor for the failure of the media to unite around a strategy to push back against Trump’s all-out assault. Since returning to office he has seized control of the pool of journalists that follows the president, barred the Associated Press news agency from the Oval Office and handed access and prominence to far-right influencers.Kurt Bardella, a political commentator, NewsNation contributor and former Breitbart News spokesperson, said: “I expect that for those who attend the dinner this year it’s going to just be a collective bitch fest of the Washington legacy media that has been completely neutered and embarrassed during this time of Trump.“The idea that there would be this gathering of self-proclaimed media elites who on their watch have been completely dismantled, whose parent companies have all kissed the ring at this point, it’s like, what are you celebrating, exactly? I’m not entirely sure.”The media were unified in fact-checking Trump during his first term, Bardella argued, whereas now the ecosystem is radically different, for example with the Trump ally Elon Musk in control of the X social media platform and the Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos, ordering that the newspaper narrow the topics covered by its opinion section to personal liberties and the free market.Bardella added: “I would get it if it was the White House correspondents’ party thrown by Fox News or Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan were throwing a big party. But for the traditional legacy media to throw this parade of parties is almost embarrassing.”The first White House correspondents’ dinner was held in 1921. Three years later Calvin Coolidge became the first president to attend and all have since except Trump. In 2006 the comedian Stephen Colbert roasted George W Bush and the media over the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In 2011 Barack Obama mocked a stone-faced Trump and even displayed a pastiche of what the White House would look like if the reality TV star became president one day.The event also allows the WHCA to present reporting awards, raise money for scholarships and celebrate the constitutional first amendment that protects freedom of speech. During Trump’s first term the speakers included the Watergate journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward and the historian Ron Chernow, who warned: “When you chip away at the press, you chip away at our democracy.” Saturday’s version is again likely to take a sober tone for a sobering time.Steve Clemons, editor at large of the National Interest and a guest at numerous WHCA dinners, said: “It’s not going to be as much fun. We’re going to see a tribute to quality journalism and there’s always a place for that but there’s a toxicity out there that is hard to ignore at this moment. In a way we all need to take a break for a year and see if we can get to a better place next year.”Clemons supports the WHCA’s decision to revoke Ruffin’s invitation. “You can’t use the dinner as a reason to do battle with the president,” he said. “When you have a comedian that goes out and says nobody wanted the president there that’s a real problem. That’s a dismissive and disrespectful position that the White House Correspondents’ Association cannot take, no matter what its grievances or problems are in working out the terms of trade.“You can’t create something that is institutionally biased against the presidency. That’s not our job. It’s not journalism’s job. Journalism is to report on the White House and the president in a fair and objectively distant way what’s going on. That exercise of having that comedian, if we’d gone through it, was not anything connected to the qualities of fair and objective journalism and celebrating the first amendment.”The WHCA, which is not a formal trade union, has an unenviable task. Its members are diverse, spanning wire service and newspaper reporters, photographers and TV and radio journalists from the US and countries all over the world. They work for outlets of all political stripes and inevitably hold conflicting views on whether to aggressively tackle Trump head-on or lie low and hope to wait out the storm.The association’s annual dinner could be a moment to regroup, renew a shared sense of purpose and gain brief respite from the relentless grind of the Trump beat. But it might just as easily prove a gloomy affair, full of chatter about declining relevance and failing strategies for combating Trump’s war on truth. And whereas celebrities were clamouring for a seat during the Obama years, the dinner has arguably also lost some of its glamour.Sally Quinn, an author, journalist and socialite, said: “I will never, ever, ever go to the White House correspondents’ dinner again because it’s the worst event in Washington every year. First of all, there are too many people in the Hilton Hotel; there are like 3,000 people jammed in; it’s like being in the subway in Manhattan at rush hour with bad food and bad jokes.“You stand in line forever and ever to get your ticket. Last year I was in line with the British ambassador in the rain because the line went all the way outside and we stood there and stood there and stood there and it was a nightmare.”For Quinn, the widow of Ben Bradlee, former editor of the Washington Post, the lack of an entertainer at the dinner is no great loss because there is not much to laugh at in Washington right now.“Everyone’s scared,” she said. “You’re scared you’re going to get thrown in jail if you write something he doesn’t like and that’s going to happen very soon.“Then you have the owners of these news organisations who keep keeling over and bending the knee so you’ve got all these people in the media who are quitting in protest. It’s a horrible time to be covering Trump. If you’re a journalist and you want to be on the story, this is the story to cover, but people are not having fun covering it. It’s very intense and very upsetting.” More

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      I left behind an authoritarian state to move to the US. Now I see my new home falling to the same dark forces | Mona Eltahawy

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      “What’s he done now?” My parents live in Cairo and I’m in New York City. We FaceTime once a week and that question is like a game we play. My parents ask about Donald Trump and I ask about Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, whom Trump calls “my favourite dictator”. Aren’t we Egyptian-Americans lucky – a dictator for each side of our hyphen.Tellingly, the “he” my parents ask about has dominated our conversations lately.I moved to the United States from Egypt in 2000 and I have spent the past 25 years watching the US turn into Egypt – from encroaching state power to the increasingly unchecked role of religion in politics.After each travesty – the lies used to invade Iraq, the zealotry that destroyed abortion rights, the arming and financing of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza – I thought: “Any minute now, there’ll be a revolution, they’ll burn things down.”And here is Trump, finessing that state power into a regime that, as with the regime in Egypt, is targeting culture, education, media, judges, students and any group or entity that poses a threat or even the potential of dissent to the regime. And I’m still waiting for the revolution.I now know, having lived in the US for more than two decades, that most white people in this country would rather hear comparisons to Russia or Hungary than Egypt or a place led by Black or brown autocrats, because even autocracies are separated along racial lines.I joined an anti-Trump protest in NYC earlier this month, which along with others across the country, was said to be the largest single-day protest since Trump’s return to the White House. The signs mocking Trump and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk were clever and there were dogs dressed in coats that had “I bite fascists” written on them, but the rage had stayed at home. Revolutions need feet on the ground, yes. But they also need rage, and lots of it.White Americans are the largest voting bloc and the group most responsible for bringing Trump to power both times – and they are the least enraged. The privilege of whiteness means that for many in the US, the loss of rights only happens to people who aren’t white, far away somewhere, in places such as Egypt. Only Black and brown people in faraway countries end up with an authoritarian ruler. But, if anything, where the Trump regime is taking the US is infinitely worse than what is happening in Egypt, because Egypt’s footprint on the world is not nearly as damaging as that of the US. This is why I’m enraged at the lack of rage.White people in the US have a delusional amount of confidence in their government and institutions. They are childishly naive in believing that institutions will save them from autocratic power. That stubborn belief in their exceptionalism undergirds the refusal to see the fascism that Trump brought when he was first elected and that he is now cementing. Black and Indigenous people and people of colour have no such delusions. They do not expect institutions to protect them because they are so often hurt by those institutions. To people like me and others who have lived in and survived autocracies, white state power and its institutions have always functioned like a regime – so we are well versed in scepticism of anything that politicians say.No matter how often those of us from authoritarian countries, who know to be suspicious of state power, and those of us who have fought fascism – whether implemented through military rule or the rule of religious fundamentalists – warned and warned, white people in the US arrogantly shook their heads and said it couldn’t happen here. Because the US is like a teenager who is stubbornly determined in their own self-destruction.In Egypt, when I interviewed officials from the Muslim Brotherhood – political Islamists who were Egypt’s most powerful opposition to the regime – about their policies, their answer would invariably be “Islam is the solution”. Their goal was the establishment of an Islamic state. Though the group briefly ruled Egypt after the 2011 revolution before being overthrown by Sisi, never in its wildest dreams would the Muslim Brotherhood have imagined holding as much power as white Christian nationalists in the US, for whom Christianity is the professed solution and who are creating a white Christian state in the most powerful country in the world.If Pete “I want a crusade and I have enough Crusader crosses to earn it” Hegseth were a Muslim, the US would have invaded his country to save the “free world” from his jihad. It is easy to see theocracy when the theocrats and zealots don’t look like you.The US media have been able to report on the ways the Muslim Brotherhood politicised and weaponised religion. But they have failed to bring that same urgency to the politicisation of Christianity in the US, especially by the white Christian nationalists who have been instrumental in bringing Trump to power. White and Christian are considered default – the harmless norm – in the white-dominated newsrooms of the US.As a feminist, I am especially enraged at the inability of US media, as well as many white people generally, to see what religion has done to women in the US. During this term, Trump has so far rowed back any diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and blocked federal funding for abortion services. During his first term, he appointed three conservative supreme court judges, which led to the reversal of Roe v Wade and the removal of federal protection for abortion rights, meaning that individual states can ban abortions. These policies have been promoted by some white women, who serve as foot soldiers of the white supremacist Christian patriarchy. The women who helped destroy abortion rights, for example, are rarely analysed, examined and pathologised in the way that Muslim women are.Living in the US has radicalised me. Over the past 25 years my rage at the state-sponsored patriarchy in both of my countries has injected anarchism into my feminism. Anarcho-feminist conveys the “don’t mess with me” level of rage I’m at. And unless (perhaps until) the Trump regime targets naturalised citizens, NYC will remain my home.Two years before Trump was re-elected, I began strength training. I can now deadlift and squat more than my body weight. The timing had nothing to do with the occupant of the White House and more to do with my personal goals, but my journey feels apt. When fascism flexes its muscles, it’s time to make feminism dangerous again.The rage must come. It will come.

      Mona Eltahawy writes the FEMINIST GIANT newsletter. She is the author of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls and Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution

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      Trump news at a glance: Battle with judiciary escalates as FBI arrests county judge

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      The Trump administration’s war on the judiciary deepened on Friday as the FBI arrested a county circuit judge on charges of obstruction, accusing her of helping a man evade immigration authorities as they sought his arrest at her courthouse.The judge, Hannah Dugan, was apprehended in the courthouse where she works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a spokesperson for the US Marshals Service confirmed to the Guardian. Kash Patel, the Trump-appointed FBI director, wrote on X that he believed Dugan “intentionally misdirected federal agents away from” Eduardo Flores Ruiz, who he called an “illegal alien”. Agents “chased down” the man and arrested him later, he added.The case is the latest in a string of attacks by the Trump administration and federal agencies on judges who make decisions that challenge the government’s attempts to overhaul the country’s immigration system or slow its deportations program.Here are the key stories at a glance:Dugan vows to ‘defend herself vigorously’ Hannah Dugan will appear in court again on 15 May and “looks forward to be exonerated”, an attorney for the judge said in a statement, published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Hannah C Dugan has committed herself to the rule of law and the principles of due process for her entire career as a lawyer and a judge,” it said, adding that she “will defend herself vigorously”.Leftwing senator Bernie Sanders accused the Trump administration of “moving this country towards authoritarianism” in response to Dugan’s arrest, while Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren said the case “rings serious alarm bells”.Read the full storySon of CIA deputy director killed while fighting for Russia, report saysAn American man identified as the son of a deputy director of the CIA was killed in eastern Ukraine in 2024 while fighting under contract for the Russian military, according to an investigation by independent Russian media.Michael Alexander Gloss, 21, died on 4 April last year in “eastern Europe”, according to an obituary published by his family. He was the son of Juliane Gallina, who was appointed the deputy director for digital innovation at the Central Intelligence Agency in February 2024.Read the full storyWitkoff meets Putin hours after killing of Russian generalDonald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff has met Vladimir Putin in Moscow for high-stakes peace talks hours after a senior Russian military official was killed in a car explosion near Moscow. But no apparent breakthrough was reached on Friday.Read the full story Santos given seven-year prison termGeorge Santos, the disgraced former representative, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison on Friday, bringing an end to an extraordinary controversy that began with a fraudulent congressional campaign.Read the full storyAttorney general rescinds Biden-era protections for journalistsPam Bondi, the US attorney general, has revoked a Biden administration-era policy that restricted subpoenas of reporters’ phone records in criminal investigations. An internal memo, first reported by ABC News, shows Bondi rescinding protections issued by her predecessor, Merrick Garland, for members of the media from having their records seized or being forced to testify in the course of leak investigations.Read the full storyHegseth’s controversial chief of staff leaves unexpectedlyJoe Kasper, the controversial chief of staff to the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who was central to a dramatic power struggle at the Pentagon, has left his post in an unexpected departure.Read the full storyTrump administration investigates California university over foreign giftsThe Trump administration launched an investigation into the University of California, Berkeley, centered on foreign funding, making it the latest university to be targeted by the federal government.The investigation revives criticism from several years ago about the university’s partnership with China’s Tsinghua University. It comes after Trump earlier this week signed a series of executive orders focused on universities that he views as liberal adversaries to his political agenda.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      High-profile Democrats call on the Trump administration to release Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk from detention, warning the White House is engaging in “repression”.

      Xi Jinping has announced plans to counter China’s economic fallout from the US trade war, as reports swirl it could drop tariffs on some US products, including semiconductors.

      US consumer sentiment plummeted in April after Trump’s trade war threw the global economy into chaos, according to a new report.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 24 April 2025. More

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      Trump administration investigating California university over foreign gifts

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      The Trump administration launched an investigation into the University of California, Berkeley, on Friday centered on foreign funding, making it the latest university to be targeted by the federal government.The investigation revives criticism from several years ago about the university’s partnership with China’s Tsinghua University. It comes after Donald Trump earlier this week signed a series of executive orders focused on universities that he views as liberal adversaries to his political agenda.One order called for harder enforcement of Section 117, a federal law requiring colleges to disclose foreign gifts and contracts valued at $250,000 or more.The Department of Education’s office of general counsel will investigate “UC Berkeley’s apparent failure to fully and accurately disclose significant funding received from foreign sources,” education secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement.UC Berkeley denied the government’s claims, saying that for the last two years “UC Berkeley has been cooperating with federal inquiries regarding 117 reporting issues, and will continue to do so.”The department cited media reports from 2023 about UC Berkeley failing to disclose “hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from a foreign government” but didn’t mention the country.On May 2023, the Daily Beast reported that UC Berkeley failed to report it got $220m from the Chinese government to build a joint Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI), which UC Berkeley and Tsinghua University opened in 2014 in the city of Shenzhen to focus on “strategic emerging industries”, according to the institute’s website.Last year, a report by the Republican members of the House select committee on the Chinese Communist party found that US tax dollars have contributed to China’s technological advancement and military modernization when American researchers worked with their Chinese peers in areas such as hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence, nuclear technology and semiconductor technology.In response to the report, UC Berkeley said Berkeley’s researchers “engage only in research whose results are always openly disseminated around the world” and the school was “not aware of any research by Berkeley faculty at TBSI conducted for any other purpose”. The university also said then it would unwind its partnership.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe university said on Friday it’s no longer affiliated with TBSI.Last week, the Department of Education demanded records from Harvard over foreign financial ties spanning the past decade, accusing the school of filing “incomplete and inaccurate disclosures”. Trump’s administration is sparring with Harvard over the university’s refusal to accept a list of demands over its handling of pro-Palestinian protests as well as its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. More

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      Pam Bondi rescinds Biden-era protections for journalists

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      Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, has revoked a Biden administration-era policy that restricted subpoenas of reporters’ phone records in criminal investigations.An internal memo, first reported by ABC News, shows Bondi rescinding protections issued by her predecessor, Merrick Garland, for members of the media from having their records seized or being forced to testify in the course of leak investigations.The memo says federal employees who leak sensitive information to the media “for the purposes of personal enrichment and undermining our foreign policy, national security, and government effectiveness” are engaging in conduct that could be characterized as “treasonous”.“This conduct is illegal and wrong, and it must stop,” the memo states. The justice department “will not tolerate disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people”.Bondi’s memo states that she has concluded that “it is necessary to rescind Merrick Garland’s policies precluding the Department of Justice from seeking records and compelling testimony from members of the news media in order to identify and punish the source of improper leaks”.But, she said, the department would continue to employ procedural protections to “limit the use of compulsory legal process” to obtain journalists’ records, acknowledging that a “free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy”.Under the new policy, Bondi wrote, the attorney general “must also approve efforts to question or arrest members of the news media”.The move comes after Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said she had made multiple criminal referrals to the justice department related to alleged leaks in the intelligence community.One of the leaks included information leaked to the Washington Post, Gabbard told Fox News on Wednesday. She went on to describe the leakers as “deep-state criminals” with “partisan political purposes to undermine President Trump’s agenda”.In 2022, Garland issued regulations to restrict how federal prosecutors could pursue leak investigations, following revelations that justice department officials under the previous Trump administration had secretly obtained the phone records of reporters at the Washington Post, CNN and the New York Times.Bondi’s memo comes as Donald Trump, who has frequently branded journalists “the enemy of the people”, has escalated his attacks on the US media landscape since returning to the White House in January.The new Trump administration’s war on the press has included seizing control of the White House press pool from news organisations, engaging in a highly publicized dispute with the Associated Press over the wire agency’s decision not to adopt the name Gulf of America instead of Gulf of Mexico into its stylebook, and moving to dismantle Voice of America (VoA).The justice department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More