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      Trump news at a glance: president shrugs off tariff turmoil as ‘medicine’

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      Asia’s key indexes tumbled in early trading on Monday as fears of a tariff-induced global recession continued to rip through markets. Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index plunged nearly 9% in early trading on Monday, while South Korea’s Kospi index was halted for five minutes as stocks plummeted.Despite his tariffs wiping $6tn off US stocks, Trump appeared nonchalant late Sunday, saying, “I don’t want anything to go down. But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”Separately, Hugo Lowell exclusively reveals how Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz came to include the Atlantic’s chief editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, to the infamous Signal group chat about plans for US strikes in Yemen. An internal investigation showed a series of missteps that started during the 2024 campaign and went unnoticed until Waltz created the group chat last month.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump says countries must ‘pay us a lot of money’ to escape tariffsTrump said he had spoken to leaders from Europe and Asia over the weekend, who hope to convince him to lower tariffs that are as high as 50% and due to take effect this week. “They are coming to the table. They want to talk but there’s no talk unless they pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis,” Trump said, speaking to reporters on Air Force One late Sunday.Read the full storySenior Trump officials give conflicting lines on tariffs after markets turmoilSenior Trump administration officials gave conflicting messages on Sunday about the US president’s global tariffs, which have provoked rare expressions of dissent from within the Republican party.Cabinet members fanned out across Sunday’s political talkshows armed with talking points on Trump’s 10% across-the-board tariffs on almost all US imports, with higher rates targeted at about 60 countries. One official took an aggressive stance on the tariffs, while two others suggested they were negotiable.Read the full storyExclusive: how the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg got added to the White House Signal group chatThree people briefed on the White House investigation said Waltz inadvertently saved the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg’s number in his iPhone under the contact card for Brian Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council. According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.Read the full storyUS attorney general says Trump likely ‘going to be finished’ after second termPam Bondi, the US attorney general, has expressed skepticism about the idea of Trump serving a third term in the White House, saying that when her boss’s current presidency ends on 20 January 2029, he is probably “going to be finished”.Bondi’s comments come just a week after Trump gave his most blunt indication yet that he was seriously considering trying for a third term to follow up ones that began in 2017 and this past January – despite the clear prohibition against doing so enshrined in the US constitution.Read the full storyA Nicaraguan asylum seeker checked in with Ice every week. He was arrested anywayAlberto Lovo Rojas, an asylum seeker from Nicaragua, had been worried for weeks that immigration officials would arrest him. But he had pushed the worry aside as irrational – he had a permit to legally work in the US, and he had been using an app to check in monthly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).Still, something felt off. The Trump administration had promised mass deportations, and in the weeks since Trump’s inauguration, Ice had asked him to do extra check-ins each weekend. His last check-in with Ice was on 5 February – all normal. On 8 February, they came for him.Read the full storyDoJ lawyer put on leave after not backing erroneous deportation of Maryland manA federal justice department attorney, Erez Reuveni, has been placed on leave by the Trump administration for purportedly failing to defend the administration vigorously enough after it erroneously deported Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.Read the full story.Second child dies of measles in Texas amid growing outbreakA second child with measles has died in Texas amid a steadily growing outbreak that has infected nearly 500 people in that state alone. The US health and human services department confirmed the death to NBC late Saturday, though the agency insisted exactly why the child died remained under investigation.On Sunday, a spokesperson for the UMC Health System in Lubbock, Texas, said the child had been hospitalized before dying and was “receiving treatment for complications of measles” – which is easily preventable through vaccination.Read the full storyIn depth: Trump’s third term trial balloon: how extremist ideas become mainstreamFor longtime Trump watchers, the president’s suggestion that there are “methods” to circumvent the constitution to potentially serve a third term, it smacked of a familiar playbook of the American right and the Maga movement: float a trial balloon, no matter how wacky or extreme. Let far-right media figures such as Steve Bannon make the case that it’s not so outlandish because, after all, Democrats are worse. Stand by as Republicans in Congress avoid then equivocate then actively endorse. Watch a fringe idea slowly but surely become normalised.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Office closures, staffing and service cuts, and policy changes at the Social Security Administration have caused “complete, utter chaos” and are threatening to send the agency into a “death spiral”, according to workers at the agency.

      A woman being detained in Arizona by US border patrol for overstaying her visa died by suicide, according to Pramila Jayapal, who said “initial reports” suggested border patrol agents failed to perform required welfare checks prior to the woman’s death.

      A wildlife crossing in Los Angelesthat cuts across a major freeway will connect two parts of the Santa Monica mountains for animals and is starting to take shape.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 5 April 2025. More

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      US attorney general says Trump likely ‘going to be finished’ after second term

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      Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, has expressed skepticism about the idea of Donald Trump serving a third term in the White House, saying that when her boss’s current presidency ends on 20 January 2029, he is probably “going to be finished”.Bondi’s comments come just a week after Trump gave his most blunt indication yet that he was seriously considering trying for a third term to follow up ones that began in 2017 and this past January – despite the clear prohibition against doing so enshrined in the US constitution.In an interview broadcast on 30 March, the US president told NBC News that “I’m not joking” about the idea of a third term, adding: “I like working.” Asked how he could get around what appears to be a watertight two-term cap for any individual president, he said: “There are methods which you could do it.”Bondi’s take on the controversy carries weight because she is the top law enforcement official in the US and also a Trump loyalist whose devotion to the president is unquestioned. She told Fox News Sunday that in her opinion the president was a “very smart man, and we, I wish we could have him for 20 years as our president”.She then added: “But I think he’s going to be finished, probably, after this term. We’d have to look at the constitution, and it would be a heavy lift.”The two-term limit was set into stone in 1951 with the ratification by the states of the 22nd amendment. It says that “no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice”.The restriction was introduced in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s unprecedented record of serving three full presidential terms during the second world war. He won a fourth term but died in 1945 just one year into it.Bondi’s comment that it would be a “heavy lift” for Trump to overcome the two-term rule was a reference to what it would take to change the US constitution and revoke the 22nd amendment. Any reform to the text of the constitution requires a two-thirds vote from both chambers of Congress, combined with ratification by three-quarters of the 50 states.In today’s highly polarized political world, such a scenario is beyond imagination.Constitutional change aside, Trump’s cryptic remarks about other “methods” have prompted speculation about his intentions. One tactic that has attracted some attention would be for the vice-president, JD Vance, to run as Republican presidential candidate in 2028, with Trump as his running mate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThen, the theory goes, should the Vance-Trump ticket win the presidential election, Vance could step down on day one of the new term and Trump would then automatically become president for the third time.The strategy has an appealing simplicity. There is a major snag, however.The 12th amendment, which lays out procedures for electing both the president and vice-president, states that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States”. The clear implication is that Trump, debarred from running for a third term as president, would equally be debarred from running for vice-president – rendering the ruse null and void. More

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      DoJ lawyer put on leave after not backing erroneous deportation of Maryland man

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      A federal justice department attorney has been placed on leave by the Trump administration for purportedly failing to defend the administration vigorously enough after it says it erroneously deported a Maryland man to El Salvador, which a US judge called a “wholly lawless” detention.The action against justice department lawyer Erez Reuveni came after US district judge Paula Xinis had ordered that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant who lived in the US legally with a work permit, be returned to Maryland despite the Trump administration’s position that it cannot return him from a sovereign nation.The administration has appealed the case, and a ruling is expected as soon as Sunday night ahead of an 11.59pm Monday deadline for his return, which was set by the judge.Donald Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, went on Fox News Sunday and announced there that Reuveni was no longer actively working on the Abrego Garcia case or in the justice department in general.At a court hearing on Friday, Reuveni struggled to answer questions from the judge about the circumstances of Abrego Garcia’s deportation.Reuveni said he had raised questions with US officials about why the federal government could not bring back Abrego Garcia but had received no “satisfactory” answer. He acknowledged what he called an “absence of evidence” justifying Abrego Garcia’s detention and deportation.Of Reuveni, Bondi told Fox News Sunday: “It’s a pending matter right now. He was put on administrative leave by [deputy US attorney general] Todd Blanche on Saturday.“You have to vigorously argue on behalf of your client.”Reuveni’s supervisor, August Flentje, was also placed on leave, ABC News reported.The justice department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.Reuveni and Flentje, who according to his LinkedIn page is the deputy director of the justice department’s office of immigration litigation, civil division, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Trump’s administration asserted in previous court filings that it had erroneously deported Abrego Garcia to his home country despite a previous court order prohibiting his removal.The White House and administration officials have accused Abrego Garcia of being a criminal gang member, but there are no pending charges. His lawyers have denied the allegation.Xinis, in a written order on Sunday explaining her Friday ruling, said “there were no legal grounds for his arrest, detention or removal” or evidence that Abrego Garcia was wanted for crimes in El Salvador.“Rather, his detention appears wholly lawless,” she wrote in the filing.Abrego Garcia had complied fully with all directives from immigration officials, including annual check-ins, and had never been charged with or convicted of any crime, the judge wrote.Abrego Garcia was stopped and detained by immigration agents on 12 March and questioned about his alleged affiliation with the MS-13 gang, which he has denied.Abrego Garcia has been detained in El Salvador’s terror confinement center, colloquially known as Cecot, which the judge called “one of the most dangerous prisons in the western hemisphere”.The Trump administration has faced criticism in the US courts and elsewhere of its stepped-up enforcement against immigration rights. A judge in Washington DC is separately weighing whether the Trump administration violated a court order not to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members amid ongoing legal proceedings.Some of those deported have active asylum cases, and civil rights groups have argued the administration has failed to provide due process under the law.Bondi on Sunday vowed to continue the administration’s deportations, maintaining: “The best thing to do is to get these people out of our country.” More

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      Senior Trump officials give conflicting lines on tariffs after markets turmoil

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      Senior officials within Donald Trump’s administration gave conflicting messages on Sunday about the US president’s global tariffs that have caused a meltdown in stock markets, prompted warnings of a world recession and provoked rare expressions of dissent from within his Republican party.Cabinet members fanned out across Sunday’s political talk shows armed with talking points on Trump’s 10% across-the-board tariff on almost all US imports, with higher rates targeted at about 60 countries. If the intention was to calm nerves with a clear statement of intent, then it backfired as top officials gave starkly contrasting signals.Howard Lutnick, the billionaire commerce secretary, struck an aggressive note on CBS News’s Face the Nation in which he portrayed the tariffs as here to stay. Asked whether there was a chance that tariffs would be postponed to allow countries to negotiate a deal with Washington, he replied: “There is no postponing – they are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks, that is sort of obvious.”Lutnick added that Trump intended to “reset global trade”.“The president has made it crystal, crystal clear,” he said.However, two other cabinet members gave the opposite take, suggesting that negotiations with individual countries were very much on the cards. Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, told Meet the Press on NBC News that Trump had “created maximum leverage for himself, and more than 50 countries have approached the administration about lowering their non-tariff trade barriers, lowering their tariffs, stopping currency manipulation”.The agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, echoed Bessent by flagging up possible talks. “We’ve got 50 countries that are burning the phone lines into the White House,” she told CNN’s State of the Union.The scale of Trump’s tariffs have sent shockwaves around the world, catching US investors as well as top Republican politicians by surprise. In just two days last week, more than $6tn was wiped off Wall Street’s market value.Trump told US consumers in a post on his Truth Social network to “hang tough, it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic”. Yet as he spent the weekend golfing at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, his unprecedented tax increase goaded senior Republicans to speak out, in a vanishingly rare display of criticism of their leader.Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, denounced the tariffs as the “largest peacetime tax hike in US history”. Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina, said: “Anyone who says there may be a little bit of pain before we get things right needs to talk to farmers who are one crop away from bankruptcy.”Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, warned of a “bloodbath” for Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections should the tariffs force the US into recession.Democrats are detecting opportunity in such unusual challenges to Trump from within his own party. Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator from California, floated on Meet the Press what sounded like a draft campaign strategy for the midterms.“If we head into a recession, it will be the Trump recession,” he said. Of Trump, Schiff also said: “He’s wrecking our economy.”Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota who ran as the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate in last November’s defeat to Trump, called the tariffs “really, really terrifying” on State of the Union. He warned that if you punish dependable trading partners like Mexico and Canada, “they don’t come back overnight.”As the tariffs kick in, analysts are increasingly pointing to the chances of a recession, which is normally assessed as being two consecutive quarters of falling GDP. The head of economic research at JP Morgan, Bruce Kasman, has raised the probability of global recession to 60%, a figure that he included in a memo titled There Will Be Blood.Larry Summers, the US treasury secretary during Bill Clinton’s presidency, called the tariffs the “biggest self-inflicted wound we’ve put on our economy in history”. Speaking on ABC News’s This Week, he gave his own estimate of the total loss to US consumers at $30tn – equivalent to doubling petrol prices at the pump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s cabinet members attempted to use rhetorical devices as a way of assuaging rattled investors and consumers. Rollins said the markets weren’t crashing – they were “adjusting”.Asked what he would say to Americans close to retirement who had just watched their lifetime savings drop significantly in recent days, Bessent called that a “false narrative”.“Americans who want to retire right now, they don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening,” Bessent said.Bessent’s answer was coloured, perhaps, by his own net worth, which has been put at more than $521m.There were moments of the surreal in the exchanges between Trump’s top officials and the political show hosts. Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper why 10% tariffs had been placed on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which are populated by penguins near Antarctica but no humans, Rollins said: “I mean, come on, whatever. Listen, the people that are leading this are serious, intentional, patriotic – the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.”Tapper then pushed back on the agriculture secretary’s justification for the 20% “reciprocal” tariffs that have been imposed on EU goods sold to the US. Rollins said that Honduras bought more pork from the US than the entire European Union.Tapper pointed out that the EU had tight restrictions on hormone use in livestock production. The EU banned use of synthetic hormones in 1981, and blocked imports of animals that had been treated in that way.Rollins then accused the EU of using “fake science” to prohibit US products. “That’s just absolute bull,” she said. “We produce the safest, the most secure, the best food in the world.” More

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      Under Trump and Musk, billionaires wield unprecedented influence over US national security

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      Just days before Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, Blue Origin, the space company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, launched its New Glenn rocket, named for John Glenn, the Mercury astronaut who was the first American to orbit the Earth. Around 2am on 16 January, the 30-story rocket powered by seven engines blasted off into the Florida night from Cape Canaveral’s historic launch complex 36, which first served as a Nasa launch site in 1962.The flight’s end was marred by a failure to bring the booster rocket back for further use, but the successful launch and orbit still marked a watershed moment for Blue Origin in its bid to compete with SpaceX, the company owned by Elon Musk, for dominance over American spy satellite operations. During the Trump administration, it is likely that both companies will play significant roles in placing spy satellites into Earth orbit, which could mean that the United States intelligence community will be beholden to both Bezos and Musk to handle the single most complex and expensive endeavor in modern espionage.In fact, Musk and Bezos are in a position during the Trump administration to personally exert significant influence over the direction of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the rest of the US national security apparatus. The two pro-Trump billionaires have already been awarded massive contracts with the US intelligence community, including some that predate Trump’s first term in office.The emergence of Musk, Bezos and a handful of other pro-Trump billionaires as key players in US intelligence marks a radical change in US spy operations, which have traditionally been controlled by career government officials working closely with a few longstanding defense and intelligence contractors, giant corporations such as Lockheed Martin, RTX and Northrop Grumman that are adept at lobbying both Democrats and Republicans in Washington. But with Musk, Bezos and other pro-Trump Silicon Valley figures gaining an edge through their personal ties to Trump, civil servants in the intelligence community may be reluctant to deny them ever-larger contracts, especially since Trump has already fired several inspectors general who investigated Musk’s businesses in other areas of the government.Anticipating big rewards, Musk is reportedly joining forces with other pro-Trump billionaires to try to carve up the defense and intelligence business. SpaceX is working with Palantir, a hi-tech data analytics intelligence contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, one of the most prominent rightwing figures in Silicon Valley; Anduril, a new defense contractor founded by 32-year-old pro-Trump tech bro Palmer Luckey; and several other Silicon Valley firms to form a consortium geared towards loosening the grip of the defense industry’s traditional players.Tech leaders eager to get into intelligence contracting have long complained that the business has become so consolidated around a few big players that it is nearly impossible for outsiders to compete, leading to a lack of innovation. “Consolidation bred conformity,” argued Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, in a widely read public memo, The Defense Reformation.Swapping one oligarchy for anotherIt is hard to separate Silicon Valley’s calls for breaking up the oligarchy now controlling the defense and intelligence business from the eagerness of pro-Trump tech bros to grab as much power and cash as possible while creating a new oligarchy of their own.“The idea of overturning the contracting process did intrigue me, but now, under Trump, I think it is just about greed,” observed Greg Treverton, a former director of the National Intelligence Council, the intelligence community’s top analytical arm. “Now, with Trump, it is mostly about money and connections.”In the eyes of their critics, tech entrepreneurs offer a simplistic, black-and-white picture of the defense and intelligence business in which Silicon Valley conveniently has all the answers.“Beware the instant expert,” said Peter Singer, a defense analyst at the New America Foundation. “It’s like they are saying ‘I watched a YouTube video and now I know everything.’ They have this narrative that only Silicon Valley can drive innovation.”Elon Musk, satellite spymasterAs he eagerly slashes and burns through the ranks of federal employees with his Doge apparatus, Musk has emerged as the most powerful and polarizing figure in the Trump administration. But what is less well known is that Musk has also gained an influential role in the US intelligence community despite never having served inside the spy world.Musk’s SpaceX has already become one of the main rocket contractors launching American spy satellites and is seeking to overcome the edge held by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the traditional giant in the niche. In addition, Starlink, Musk’s commercial satellite communication network, is playing a critical role in US foreign policy, providing internet service in remote regions of the world including in Ukraine, where it operates a communications network for the Ukrainian army. Starlink’s role in the Ukraine war has placed Musk squarely in the middle of the dispute between Trump and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Meanwhile, questions about whether Musk is assuming a dual role as both a player in Trump’s national security policymaking and a major contractor grew after he received a private briefing at the Pentagon on 21 March and visited the CIA headquarters 10 days later.SpaceX has a head start over Blue Origin in the spy satellite business, and Musk has a big lead over Bezos in Trump world. But Blue Origin and Bezos are working hard to catch up in both.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBezos seeks to add to classified cloud contractDuring his first term, Trump repeatedly attacked Bezos over negative stories that were published in the Washington Post, which Bezos owns, and as revenge threatened Amazon’s business dealings with the US Postal Service. Since the 2024 election, though, Bezos has turned himself into a Trump booster, lavishing praise and large donations on the president while also working to transform the Washington Post’s opinion page, which he says should focus on “personal liberties and free markets”.Bezos’s move into an alliance with Trump has put him in a position to expand his reach into the spy satellite business while also protecting the large stake he already holds in other aspects of intelligence. The billionaire, the second-richest person in the world after Musk, has been involved in the spy world for more than a decade through Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing subsidiary of Amazon, which Bezos founded and where he remains executive chair. Amazon Web Services has managed the CIA’s classified cloud since it won a $600m contract with the spy agency in 2013, and dramatically expanded its intelligence role when it was awarded a $10bn contract to manage the NSA’s classified cloud in 2022 through a program code-named “Wild and Stormy”.Palmer Luckey and Silicon Valley’s clique of young defense contractorsPlenty of other Silicon Valley billionaires are also seeking to crowd into Washington alongside Musk and Bezos. Palantir’s Thiel is a mentor of the vice-president, JD Vance, and his firm has a longstanding relationship with the intelligence community that is likely to expand under Trump. The CIA’s investment firm, In-Q-Tel, was one of the early backers of Palantir after its 2003 founding, and the company has had a major role in the development of data integration and data analytics systems for the intelligence community. Palantir is now seeking a broader role in developing AI for both the Pentagon and the intelligence community.Luckey, who made his name as a virtual reality entrepreneur by founding Oculus, has become a prominent new face at the intersection of Trump world and national security. Luckey’s Anduril now has a contract with the US army to develop battlefield virtual reality headsets, which would allow data to be sent directly to soldiers while also allowing them to control unmanned drones and other weapons. In addition, Anduril won a $642m contract with the Marine Corps to develop countermeasures against small drones in March. Luckey first supported Trump in 2016, when that was an unpopular position in Silicon Valley, but now that Trump is back, he has said that he’s on an “I told you so tour”, trumpeting his America-first political views.Luckey said in a recent interview: “I don’t think the United States needs to be the world police. It needs to be the world’s gun store.”Google once committed to not building artificial intelligence for weapons or surveillance in a watershed moment of divorcing tech from the defense and intelligence industry. Earlier this year, though, the company scrapped that pledge. The campaign by the tech bros to win bigger roles for themselves in defense and intelligence represents a return to Silicon Valley’s roots. Hi-tech originally grew in northern California because of its early connections to the military and defense industrial base in the region, observed Margaret O’Mara, a tech industry historian at the University of Washington.“Silicon Valley has always been in the business of war,” O’Mara said. More

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      Who will win bigly from Trump tariffs? | Brief letters

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      After Donald Trump raised a range of tariffs, the US stock market tanked (Report, 4 April). If Trump rescinded these, within weeks the stock market would bounce back. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know in advance when that was going to happen? Somebody could make a great deal of money.John KinderRomsey, Hampshire In the past, we referred to the ABC of the cost of living crisis: Austerity, Brexit, Covid. Now, it seems, we have to add D for Donald and E for Elon. I don’t want to think about what F might stand for.Ruth EversleyPaulton, Somerset Re your article (‘She treats everyone with a deep growl’: can you train an angry cat to be more sociable?, 30 March), sometimes it just requires patience: in his 20th year my adopted feral cat Twix finally gave up being antisocial and climbed on to my lap for a cuddle, and there he remains at every opportunity, living his best life.Rosemary JacksonLondon Re your report (Birmingham declares major incident over bin strike as piles of waste grow, 31 March), we can now acknowledge that, like medical staff, binmen are essential frontline workers, without whom public health collapses? The solution to the impasse? Attlee got it right. Stuff their mouths with gold.Jenny MittonSutton Coldfield, West Midlands I hadn’t noticed seat heights on Mastermind (Letters, 1 April) but I comment every week to my wife about the amount of manspreading, to the extent that when we board a bus or train, we often say quietly to each other: “A few potential Mastermind contestants here.”Ray JenkinCardiff More

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      Second child dies of measles in Texas amid rising outbreak

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      A second child with measles has died in Texas amid a steadily growing outbreak that has infected nearly 500 people in that state alone.The US health and human services department confirmed the death to NBC late Saturday, though the agency insisted exactly why the child died remained under investigation. On Sunday, a spokesperson for the UMC Health System in Lubbock, Texas, said that the child had been hospitalized before dying and was “receiving treatment for complications of measles” – which is easily preventable through vaccination.The family of the child in question had chosen to not get the minor vaccinated against the illness.Michael Board, a news reporter at Texas’s WOAI radio station, wrote on Sunday that official word from the state’s health and human services department was that the child died from “measles pulmonary failure” while having had no underlying conditions.Citing records it had obtained, the New York Times described the child as an eight-year-old girl.That marked the second time a child with measles had died since 26 February. The first was a six-year-old girl – also hospitalized in Lubbock – whose parents had not had her vaccinated.The Trump administration’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, on Sunday identified the two children to have died with measles as Kayley Fehr and Daisy Hildebrand. Daisy was the one who died more recently, and Kennedy said in a statement that he traveled to her funeral on Sunday to be with her family as well as the community in its “moment of grief”.Kennedy for years has baselessly sowed doubt about vaccine safety and efficacy. He sparked alarm in March among those concerned by the US’s measles outbreak when he backed vitamins to treat the illness and stopped short of endorsing protective vaccines, which he minimized as merely a “personal choice” rather than a safety measure that long ago was proven effective.In his statement on Sunday, Kennedy said: “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” which also provides protection against mumps and rubella. He also said he would send a team to support Texas’s local- and state-level responses to the ongoing measles outbreak.A third US person to have died after contracting measles was an unvaccinated person in Lea county, New Mexico, officials in that state announced in early March.Dr Peter Marks, who recently resigned as the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine while attributing that decision to Kennedy’s “misinformation and lies”, blamed the US health secretary and his staff for the death of the child being buried on Sunday.“This is the epitome of an absolute needless death,” Marks said Sunday during an interview with the Associated Press. “These kids should get vaccinated – that’s how you prevent people from dying of measles.”Marks also told the AP that he had warned US senators that the country would endure more measles-related deaths if the Trump administration did not more aggressively respond to the outbreak. The Senate health committee has called Kennedy to testify before the group on Thursday.One of that committee’s members is the Louisiana Republican and medical doctor Bill Cassidy, who frequently speaks about the importance of getting vaccinates against diseases but joined his Senate colleagues in voting to confirm Kennedy as the US health secretary.Cassidy on Sunday published a statement saying: “Everyone should be vaccinated.”There is “no benefit to getting measles”, Cassidy’s statement added. “Top health officials should say so unequivocally [before] another child dies.”Measles, which is caused by a highly contagious, airborne virus that spreads easily when an infected person breathes, sneezes or coughs, had been declared eliminated from the US in 2000. But the virus has recently been spreading in undervaccinated communities, with Texas and New Mexico standing among five states with active outbreaks – which is defined as three or more cases.The other states are Kansas, Ohio and Oklahoma. Collectively, as of Friday, the US had surpassed 600 measles cases so far this year – more than double the number it recorded in all of 2024. Health officials and experts have said that they expect the measles outbreak to go on for several more months at least – if not for about a year.Texas alone was reporting 481 cases across 19 counties as of Friday, most of them in the western region of the state. It registered 59 previously unreported cases between Tuesday and Friday. There were also 14 new hospitalizations, for a total of 56 throughout the outbreak.More than 65% of Texas’s measles cases are in Gaines county, which has a population of just under 23,000, and was where the virus started spreading in a tightly knit, undervaccinated Mennonite community.Gaines has logged 315 cases – in just over 1% of the county’s residents – since late January.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      ‘Streamline’ or ‘lifeline’? Wyoming veterans divided over Trump’s VA cuts

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      Birgitt Paul has worked as a nurse at the Veterans Affairs (VA) in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for over a decade – five years on the floor, five and a half coordinating at-home care for veterans in the region.Like many people working at the agency, she has her gripes with the system: it could be more efficient, more streamlined, easier to navigate for the veterans in need of its care, and better for the 400,000 employees that keep its wheels spinning.But Donald Trump’s order for all federal employees to return to the office, coupled with an expected 80,000 cuts at the agency amid sledgehammer-style layoffs at the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), makes Paul worry that this top-down style of reform will have dire consequences for US veterans.There are many people with strong ideas of how to make the VA more efficient and cut costs, she argued.“But that’s not what they’re doing right now.”Wyoming is a land of superlatives. It’s the US’s least populated state, with under 600,000 residents. It’s possibly the country’s most conservative, going to Trump by the widest margin for three elections in a row. And it has the highest share of veterans in the lower 48 states. More than 9% of the state’s adult civilian population were veterans in 2022, and it has two large VA centers: one in the north Wyoming town of Sheridan, and the other in Cheyenne, the state capital.The state’s strong support for the president does not mean a unanimous endorsement from its veterans for Trump’s proposed VA cuts. In more than a dozen interviews, veterans said they were eager for reforms at the VA and across the military, saying they wanted less bureaucracy, and wished that policy that affected veterans had more input from veterans themselves. Some veterans said they believed Doge’s cuts would bring drastic benefits at no loss to veterans. But many feared veterans would lose a lifeline in a state whose veteran suicide rate is double the national average. They feared VA services would be increasingly privatized, hamstringing care, and were worried about far-reaching economic impacts to the region.Bobby Gray, who served in the army for 11 years, seeks care at the Cheyenne VA, and fears the impact of layoffs on his healthcare. Sitting at a round wooden table in a Cheyenne bar, Gray sipped on a soda and minced no words about the importance of the VA in his life.“They’re my lifeline,” said Gray. “I wouldn’t be here without the VA. I’d have been gone a long time ago.”Dwight Null, who served for two years in the army, concurred the agency plays a singular role in the life of many US veterans, offering a level of cultural understanding not available in the private sector.“A high percentage [of VA employees] are veterans in one service or the other, or have family that were veterans, or have worked at the VA working with veterans long enough that they understand our culture,” said Null, who now helps veterans access resources and care. “If you’re sitting down with a therapist that doesn’t know what a combat veteran went through, there’s not much value in it.”View image in fullscreenTrevor Smith served in the air force for 18 years and gets his care through the VA as well. Sitting beside his wife in their north Cheyenne home, a cane resting against his leg, Smith talked about his second suicide attempt.“I got one of my guns out and charged around and put it to my head, and she fought me and called the police,” Smith said.Smith credits the VA’s care with keeping him alive. He worries about other traumatized veterans that have not had the same luck accessing care, and said that vets can be a “difficult” population to care for. If left to the private sector, Smith’s thoughts on behalf of vets and their caregivers are simple: “We’re fucked.”“I have been extremely fortunate. I have very good care, I have very good people. And even with that, you can still get to a point, even with the best care, where you have a gun to your head,” Smith said. “People that are barely holding their heads above water now. What’s gonna happen if they take some of that away?”Rosemarie Harding served 11 years in the army and 22 in the national guard and represents Laramie county on the Wyoming Veterans Commission, a government board whose mission is “to develop, enhance and promote programs, services, and benefits to Wyoming veterans”. Speaking in her own capacity, Harding wondered what alternatives would exist for veterans who would struggle to access care under layoffs.“If they don’t have the VA, where are they going to go? Medicaid, which the state of Wyoming did not expand and hasn’t expanded?” Harding said.When Doge looks for areas to cut, Paul, the nurse, worries that they will target at-home care, which she says is a vital VA service. She estimated that more than half of the female veterans she works with have sexual trauma, and the VA can accommodate this in a way the private sector cannot.“There are women who need help who won’t accept it from a [private] agency because they don’t know who’s coming into their house,” Paul said. “So I have a program where you can pick your caregivers that you trust.”‘There is a need for these cuts’Other veterans said that they were not worried about the cuts affecting their care. Arthur Braten served eight years in the navy and eight in the army. He works at the VA as an HVAC tech, and is a disabled veteran himself, receiving comprehensive benefits. He said he is not worried about job security or losing access to his care, and supports the cuts.“There is a need for these cuts. Biggest reason is, I believe that the VAs are top-heavy,” Braten said, leaning on the counter in an east Cheyenne bar. “I think all these cuts are going to streamline the VA and in the long run, it’s going to give us better-quality people and better care.”Braten used his workplace as an example, saying he saw overstaffing in high departments but vacancies in his own role. Braten voiced support for Doge and disdain for the “corruption they’ve found … Our tax money went to Afghanistan, it went to all these other countries for stupid, stupid things.”He said many people in his surroundings felt similarly: “I haven’t come across a person yet that has been against it.”A man in a yellow University of Wyoming sweatshirt took a break from ordering a drink to interrupt Braten’s interview.“I’m against it. Now you’ve come across me,” the man said.Dan, another disabled veteran (“I’m all beat up”), is firmly in Braten’s camp. Dan served for 24 years in the air force, and is not worried about his VA healthcare access in the face of layoffs , or about his current job at a separate federal agency. “I do believe that I’m going to get the care that I need,” he said.“America got itself in such a deficit that it takes extreme measures to fix the damage,” Dan said.Dan refers to himself as a “sacrificial lamb”. He was hired remotely, and the federally mandated return to office will split him from his family and push him to a Denver suburb 100 miles (160km) south. He will rent an apartment, receive an increase in pay, and believes his productivity will suffer – “there’s no efficiency in that regard.”But he stands behind the cuts. His views were shaped by what he considered large amounts of wasteful spending in the military, he said.View image in fullscreenLeadership would tell him: “If you do not spend this amount of money, you’re not going to get it next year,” Dan said, or “if you don’t spend our budget, if you don’t spend a million and a half dollars, and you only spend $500,000, then next year, we’re only gonna get $500,000. So you need to make up for the difference.”‘Everybody doesn’t know what to expect’Eric, a 24-year army veteran (“I’ve been blown up four times and shot twice”), and an employee at the Cheyenne VA, speaks bluntly and has no fondness for the federal bureaucracy or its spending habits. But the Doge cuts and impending VA layoffs, follow a structure he cannot get behind. He wants to see more input from veterans and less from inside the beltline, he said.“It never works top-down,” said Eric, who asked the Guardian to only use his first name due to his current VA employment. “I wish I could have 10 minutes alone with [VA] secretary [Doug] Collins. It might cost me my job, but I really don’t care. Let me put together a team out of the VA employees that are there and figure out what the hell is the problem at the VA and fix it.”Eric spoke acidly about seesawing emails from Doge creating an atmosphere of insecurity at the department, and said the cuts would have the opposite of the advertised effect, with the VA’s best doctors moving to the higher-paying private sector.“They love the veterans, but goddamn, they’ve got to look out for their families. They’ve got to look out for their mortgages. They’ve got to look out for what happens when all of this goes to hell and everybody’s looking for a job at the only other hospital in town,” Eric said. “And the ones that we want to leave, the ones that aren’t performing, the underperformers, they’re digging in like ticks.”Robert, another Cheyenne VA staffer and 20-year air force veteran, said the atmosphere after the initial “Fork in the road” email has been heavy.“Everybody doesn’t know what to expect. I feel like every day, you’re worried about checking your email because you don’t know what it’s gonna say,” said Robert, whom the Guardian is identifying by his first name.Robert’s wife is a federal employee who was hired remotely. While Robert has some confidence that he will survive the VA layoffs, his wife’s in-person office would be in Bethesda, Maryland, which Robert dryly labels “a bit of a commute”.“What we had thought was going to be the next 10 years has vastly changed,” Robert said.Harding, at the Wyoming Veterans Commission, worries about the economic impact on Cheyenne, a city of 65,000 that is deeply dependent on the military. Along with the VA, the city boasts FE Warren air force base, as well two national guard outposts.View image in fullscreen“Cutting all those positions is going to have an immediate economic impact on the city, I don’t think that those people can readily be absorbed by the local economy,” Harding said.Lee Filer, a Republican state representative, was born on FE Warren and served for eight years in the Wyoming air national guard. Filer has economic concerns about reducing the VA’s workforce and benefits, but practical ones as well – would military recruitment suffer further if young people enlisting were skeptical that the government would take care of them?“They sign a contract. They’re entitled to all these different benefits. And if we’re going to take care of them, if they get hurt or anything else, whatever happens, we’re here to take care of you as the American people in a society,” Filer said. “But all it takes is a strike of a pen and no Congress to push back and guess what? Now they can lose that.”Filer emphasized that he believes waste exists, and supports “streamlining” the federal government. But he wants to see a more methodical approach, and worries Congress doesn’t have the political willpower.“They don’t want to cross the president in any way, whether because of primary threats or fear of losing re-election,” Filer said. “But we need to get past that. If we look at our federal delegation, they all ran on supporting veterans.”When Paul, the VA nurse, hears politicians decry soaring VA costs, she thinks of widespread rallying behind the Pact Act, which passed in Congress with large bipartisan support, and was one of the largest increases to the VA budget in recent years.Paul said she has been vocal about her concerns over Doge and potential VA privatization, to the point that she’s been advised by higher-ups to not say so over government channels. She has “come to peace” with the prospect of retaliation for having “spoken truth”, she said, but she won’t accept being told, like probationary employees in earlier Doge layoffs, that she is being fired for poor performance. After the initial February firings, Paul and her colleagues printed out their performance evaluations, just in case.“The evaluation I have is outstanding,” Paul said. “So if you’re gonna try to fire me because I had poor performance, I will be suing you.” More