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      Novelist Katie Kitamura: ‘As Trump tries to take away everything I love, it’s never been clearer that writing matters’

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      Some years ago, Katie Kitamura came upon a headline that read something like: “A stranger told me I was his mother.” The headline gripped her, but she never clicked through to the article. She imagined the story would offer some explanation – perhaps the author had given up a child for adoption, for instance. “I was much more interested in not having a concrete answer but just exploring the situation itself,” she tells me. “I’m intrigued by the idea that you could be very settled in your life … and something could happen that could overturn everything that you understand about yourself and your place in the world.”The headline provided the inspiration for Kitamura’s fifth novel, Audition, a beguiling and unsettling book that opens with a meeting between an unnamed actor and a handsome college student, Xavier, who claims he is her son. As the story unfolds, the truth of their entanglement becomes ever harder to discern – is he a liar or a fantasist, or is she mad?Audition deliberately sets itself apart from the recent spate of popular novels – such as Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch or Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor – that explore the viscerality and intensity of early motherhood. Kitamura wanted to write something that was “temperature wise, on the opposite pole”, a novel more concerned with maternal separation, the unavoidable and necessary estrangement that occurs as children grow up and away from their parents. Her fiction has always been interested in the moments when you look at a person you know well and they appear to you as a stranger, and it occurred to her that this happens often between parents and their children. Her own children, aged 12 and eight, are “very surprising creatures”, she says, and she marvels at how rapidly their relationship, and her experience of motherhood, changes as they change. When she speaks to friends whose grown-up children have moved back home, they tell her it’s “like living with a stranger”. “You do not recognise large swathes of their personality and their way of being in the world,” she says. “Talking with people, it doesn’t seem like it’s a reconstitution of the old family unit. It feels like a reorganisation of the family.”In Kitamura’s books, the female protagonists are so reserved that they are often accused of being cold or arrogant, but she herself is disarmingly warm and unassuming. “Is it OK if I get a cookie too?” she asks when we first meet, at a coffee shop in Brooklyn, New York. She is dressed elegantly, in a slouchy suit and big sunglasses, and she laughs a lot, generally at herself. At one point, she tells me that when a family friend said she was excited to read her book, Kitamura’s daughter challenged her. “She doesn’t have a book coming out,” her daughter insisted, “I’ve never seen her write!” “And that,” Kitamura says, “feels like a very accurate description of my life.”“There’s something very interesting about being a parent, because suddenly there is another person in the world who is telling you who you are to them. And that is, in a lot of ways, the most important identity that you have, but it is somehow othered. I know very much that the person my children think I am is not the person I always feel myself to be – that crack in being, or experience, is something I wanted to explore.” The actor in Audition struggles to piece together the different parts of herself, her overlapping roles, on stage and in real life, as an artist, a wife and possibly a mother. Kitamura can relate. “Sometimes I feel like a teacher or a writer or a friend or a daughter or a wife or a mother, and there’s something that does feel a bit incommensurate about those parts,” she says.She is married to the British novelist Hari Kunzru. Kunzru writes faster than her, she tells me, and he is better at sitting down to work after the children are in bed, or writing in 45-minute snatches during the day. Ah, I say, is that because of your role in the family: are you the one carrying the household’s mental load? But it isn’t. “My friend said something like, ‘Who does all the playdates and who books the appointments with the dentists?’ – and Hari does all that,” she says, laughing. He also does all the cooking.View image in fullscreenDo they ever get jealous of one another, I ask, now openly stirring. No, she replies, because they write such different books: his are big and multistranded, hers are more compacted. Then she leans forward and says: “What does happen is one of us will have an idea and we’ll say to the other, ‘That’s something you should write’.” Her manner is confessional, as though this weren’t the opposite of what jealous people would do. They are each other’s first editors and always undertake a final read of one another’s work before submission. On a day-to-day basis, Kitamura says, she appreciates her husband as the unloader of dishwasher and purchaser of laundry detergent, and then she’ll read his new book and think: “This is smart! You’ve had all this going on in your head as well!”In light of her family dynamic, it’s interesting that her female characters in novels such as Intimacies and A Separation are often married to writers but themselves work as interpreters, translators or actors – mediums for other people’s messages. Kitamura says she is uncomfortable with the idea of being a writer and sees her own role as closer to interpreting, to channelling other people’s voices. The women she writes about are often passive in their professional and personal lives, which she believes is true to life. “Who of us has that much agency? I mean, what kind of a fantasy world are we living in? We have the illusion of agency,” she says. “I’m interested in passivity in part because it’s the condition most of us live in. But I’m also interested in passivity because it is itself a kind of action.” She’s fascinated by the point at which passivity becomes complicity. Her characters often find themselves in ethically unsustainable positions: working for institutions they disapprove of, for instance, or accepting an inheritance although it isn’t rightfully theirs.View image in fullscreenWe meet in late February, and it seems everyone I’ve passed today in New York has been discussing politics. Kitamura has not been sleeping well. She never sleeps well during a Trump presidency, she half jokes. She teaches on New York University’s graduate creative writing programme and says that the day after the 2024 election her students asked her what the point was of fiction: did they not have an obligation to resist Trump more directly? She had struggled with that question herself in 2016, but the second Trump administration has been so extreme that she can now see with greater clarity the urgent importance of writing, art and education. This is, she says, “in part because they are being targeted so fiercely, but also because [Trump and his allies] are trying to take away everything I love and care about. It’s never been clearer to me that writing actually does matter. It’s not a frivolous or useless task.”In an immediate way, she continues, writers are well placed to respond to Trump’s attacks on language, the obfuscation and doublespeak, the moral panic over pronouns or the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. More broadly, fiction can act as an antidote to authoritarianism. If authoritarianism thrives when people are isolated, fiction brings people together, she says. “In the most basic way, writing is about opening yourself to another person’s mind. The most intimate thing I do on a daily basis is pick up a book and open myself to another person.” And, while the Trump administration may be forcing one way of life on the world, fiction’s job is, as always, to remind people that there are “other ways of being”.Before Kitamura wanted to be a writer, she wanted to be a ballerina. She was raised in California, where her parents had moved from Japan for her father’s job as a professor of engineering at the University of California. Throughout school, she left class at noon to dance, and she planned to go professional. But she got injured and says that was “the nail in the coffin” because it was becoming clear that she wasn’t quite good enough to make it. Having never thought she’d go to college, she won a place at Princeton University, where she studied English. Kitamura sees similarities between dance and writing. Both require discipline: “It’s doing the same thing over and over again, reworking and reworking.” It strikes me too that if ballerinas excel at masking the pain and physical effort required for their art, Kitamura’s writing shows similar restraint and contrast, between the streamlined, exacting prose and its roiling undercurrents.In 1999, after Princeton, Kitamura moved to the UK to study for a PhD in literature at the London Consortium. She worked part time at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (where she met Kunzru) in the early 00s, and found London’s art and cultural scene vibrant and exciting. “People were taking incredible risks with their work, and that was interesting to see,” she recalls. In 2009, she published her first novel, The Longshot, about a mixed martial arts fighter preparing for his comeback match. She has retained a keen interest in performance, “both the pressures and incredible freedom of it”. In Audition, the actor believes that “a performance existed in the space between the work and the audience” and Kitamura believes the same to be true of books. She wanted Audition to be open to multiple, mutually exclusive interpretations, so that a reader could form their own conclusions. She’s curious about what it may say about a reader that they settle for one reading over another, concluding ultimately that the “son”, Xavier, is a con artist, perhaps, or that the actor is a “bad” mother.Audition forms a loose trilogy with her two preceding books, A Separation and Intimacies, novels that similarly have a keen eye for the sinister, for the subtle and yet threatening shifts in power between people, for the moments when closeness becomes dangerous or suffocating. “We have such a tendency to think of intimacy as something desirable, something we seek out with other people,” she says, “but it can also be an imposition.” In Audition, the narrator is almost pathologically attuned to the power renegotiations in the family. The person who is most desired holds the upper hand, the actor observes. Money also shapes how the characters relate to one another, sometimes in unexpected ways: at points, characters try to buy power, but their generosity only weakens them, exposing the extent of their need.Kitamura says she is both fascinated and horrified by the occasions when she has exerted power over her children. “Those moments make me very uncomfortable. It’s really simple things, like when you send them to their room or you lose your temper, or when they are little, you pick them up against their will. It’s really a brutal exertion of power over another person, but it’s also just parenting,” she says, revealing her ability to identify the disquieting elements in everyday interactions. At the same time, she observes, parenthood can make you feel powerless. She often feels powerless to protect her children from the world.She has already started on her next novel, which she says will be very different from her previous books. She checks herself: “Well, it’s not a maximalist … it’s a difference that will be significant to me and nobody else.” She is itching to write, but there’s the book tour, her teaching and, of course, family life. Like any working parent, the fact that she has so little time to herself, so little solitude, could make her unhappy, but she’s come to accept that “work comes from the mess of life”, creativity doesn’t come from a vacuum. “I have to write from the middle of my life, that’s all I can do,” she says. “I’m not going to wait for a decade to pass until I have more time.” More

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      In the face of Trump’s mayhem, Europe is the direction to which the UK must turn – and Keir Starmer knows it | Tom Baldwin

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      Keir Starmer was back at the Emirates Stadium on Tuesday to watch Arsenal’s 3-0 win over Real Madrid, a result that far exceeded expectations of his team’s chances in Europe. And, over the next few days, I wouldn’t be surprised if he tries to snatch a short Easter break in the warmth and sunshine of that same continent.Football and family holidays offer him some much needed relief from the grim reality of a faltering economy, towering public debt and terrifying global insecurity, which are all being made worse on a daily – sometimes hourly – basis by Britain’s closest ally of the previous 80 years.But that mayhem being caused by Donald Trump’s extended stag party in the White House means that Europe is much more than an occasional distraction for the prime minister. Slowly, if not always surely, it is once again becoming the direction towards which Britain must turn.This is not exactly where Starmer thought he would to be. For all his talk of an EU “reset”, the plan had been to “make Brexit work” within self-imposed “red lines” ruling out joining the single market or a customs union, blocking freedom of movement and appearing to allow only some minor mitigation of the damage done by Boris Johnson’s deal.In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s inauguration, new horizons on the other side of the Atlantic briefly seemed rather more exciting. There was genuine interest in, if not admiration for, this insurgent disruptor of the US’s stuffy political establishment. There was also a prospect that Britain might gain advantage over the EU from a repurposed special relationship being gilded by inviting Trump to hang out with the royals.And, even now, securing some sort of US trade deal that might save thousands of British jobs, or the promise of the minimal military cooperation needed to maintain European security, are still prizes worth having. It’s silly to blame Starmer for trying to win them, or to expect him to strike poses against Trump for the sake of cheap headlines and not much else.What’s changed, however, is a recognition around the cabinet table that the US president is much more of a problem than part of any solution. Gone are the days when a government source would brief it had more in common with Maga Republicans than US Democrats, or Rachel Reeves could tell Britain to learn from Trump’s optimism and “positivity”. Nowadays ministers say it has become almost futile to anticipate his next move because “he’s only ever reliable in his unpredictability”. Whatever happens next, this is a US administration that can’t be regarded as a stable ally either on the economy or security.Those who think Starmer, in his repeated calls for “cool and calm heads”, is still being excessively polite have perhaps been too busy complaining to have noticed a subtle shift in his language. For instance, when the Times last week ran the headline: “Why Keir Starmer hopes Trump’s tariffs could be good news for the UK”, the rebuttal came from the prime minister himself, with an article in the same newspaper the next day, which began by stating: “Nobody is pretending that tariffs are good news.”View image in fullscreenOne well-placed Downing Street adviser now describes how Trump “wants to destroy the multilateral institutions” that Starmer believes are essential “to span divides and bring the world together”. Another mentions polling evidence that apparently shows even if a big US trade deal can be done, British voters would still prefer closer links to the EU because they don’t trust Trump to deliver.Certainly, efforts to reset those relations have been pursued with more vigour over recent weeks. These began with Starmer’s “coalition of the willing” to replace the military support for Ukraine that Trump appears so intent on taking away, and will continue ahead of the EU-UK summit on 19 May. More focus on shared interests and values and less on “red lines” should mean a security and defence pact is agreed. Also within reach is a so-called veterinary deal to make agricultural trade easier, while legislation is already going through parliament that would enable UK ministers to align with EU regulations in other areas to the benefit of small exporters.There may yet be a workable youth mobility scheme for those aged 18-30, which some EU members, notably Germany, regard as a test of whether this government is really different to the last one. Although the proposal was hastily ruled out during last year’s general election, the Treasury is increasingly sympathetic to it because, by some estimates, it could do more for growth than planning reform and housebuilding combined. At the same time, new cooperation on North Sea windfarms and negotiations to align the UK and EU carbon trading scheme could increase investment, improve energy security and generate billions of pounds in additional revenue.But there are still limits to this revived EU-UK relationship and it will never go far enough or fast enough to satisfy the many Labour supporters convinced that Brexit was a catastrophic mistake. Those close to Starmer emphasise he’s less interested in “relitigating old arguments from the previous decade” than in finding new ways to pursue the national interest now that “the era of globalisation is over”. Downing Street believes that part of the appeal of both Trump and our homegrown strain of rightwing populism lies in how institutions like the EU became too detached from the people they were meant to serve. In short, they’re determined not to be seen defending the status quo.The UK wants any security pact to include data-sharing on illegal immigration, which the EU, for its own arcane reasons, may be unwilling to accept. The government will insist that any defence deal must also allow British industry to bid for contracts from a massive new European rearmament fund. That agreement, in turn, could yet be held up by rows with a French government demanding concessions over fish quotas. The hope is that our political leaders prove big enough to hurdle such obstacles. But economic nationalism is not confined to the White House and making meaningful progress in Europe has never been easy.Though Arsenal’s Champions League victory will have been the high point of Starmer’s week, he may reflect that his team haven’t yet reached the semi-final stage of the competition. In politics, as in football, there is much to play for in Europe, and a long way to go.

      Tom Baldwin is the author of Keir Starmer: The Biography More

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      I disagree with Mahmoud Khalil’s politics. But the deportation decision is abhorrent | Jo-Ann Mort

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      When the federal immigration judge Jamee Comans ruled in favor of allowing the government to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student in the US on a legal visa, her decision was based on “foreign policy concerns” presented by US secretary of state Marco Rubio. It was so shocking that I had to reread the news report several times before I could believe it.Rubio’s claim is based on Khalil’s leadership role in the anti-Israel protests at Columbia University. I didn’t agree with Khalil’s politics when he led the protests and I don’t agree today with his politics, nor even his actions during the protests. But I’m unwavering in supporting his right to his views, and his right to shout them in what, until Trump took the reins, was our free American nation.As an immigration judge, Judge Comans couldn’t make a constitutional determination. Immigration judges are not actually part of the judicial branch of government; they are part of the executive branch and, as such, don’t rule on constitutional questions but only on issues of immigration law. Therefore, it’s likely – and hopeful – that on further appeal, Khalil’s constitutional right to free speech could be upheld, though less likely than it would have been before the weakening of our constitutional fiber under President Trump.Since Rubio recently argued that non-citizens, even if here legally, can be deported if they undermine US foreign policy aims, the administration has taken further intimidating action. Today, visa-holders and US visitors are finding their social media being examined and their phones taken at the border for searches.From the day he entered office, Rubio has shown himself to be a weak link in preserving the national interest, justifying a range of abuses under the guise of US foreign policy. He has completely crouched under the heavy arm of President Trump, foregoing many of his previously long-held beliefs in everything from support for Ukraine to the use of soft aid via USAID, and generally in promoting American values. A child of parents who came to the United States as emigres from Fidel Castro’s Cuba, he once embraced democracy with as much bravado as he is now displaying in helping to sink it.To claim that one of the reasons for a deportation like this is to stop antisemitism, as the state department says, is really a ruse to garner support for the widening attack on campus free speech and universities. It is certainly not making Jewish students safer. On the contrary, dividing and conquering to strip higher education and free speech of their very essences endangers every group that has relied on the first amendment’s guarantee.It also strikes me as laughable that the secretary is claiming that Khalil’s presence in America is harming US foreign policy aims. After all, as I wrote here just last week, what in the world is US foreign policy, especially regarding the Middle East? There is no diplomacy and there are no stated foreign policy goals, unless you consider Trump’s dream of building hotel-casinos on Gaza’s beaches to be formal American policy.As the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu himself discovered when he traveled to the White House this week, Trump had nothing to offer him. Netanyahu came begging for tariff relief and a green light for continuing his war against Hamas, as well as an even brighter green light to bomb Iran. He was shocked when Trump announced during their joint press availability that he would send his adviser Steve Witkoff to discuss a peace agreement between the US and Iran. Netanyahu went home empty-handed on tariff relief, and stunned at Trump’s sudden dive into talks with Iran.But of course, neither the Gaza beach hotels nor, especially, the deportations of visa-holders are about foreign policy. Everything is about domestic policy; the actual purpose is to pit various groups of Americans one against the other. The memo circulated by Rubio argues that “while Khalil’s activities were otherwise lawful” his presence in the US would harm efforts by those who are implementing “US policy to combat antisemitism around the world and in the United States, in addition to efforts to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States”.Rubio went on to claim that “condoning antisemitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective”.What does this even mean? On the same day that Khalil’s freedom was being constricted, Witkoff, the White House adviser, had a four-hour meeting with Vladimir Putin, one of the leading purveyors of antisemitism in the world today. What is this administration’s plan for fighting antisemitism on a global scale? There is none, of course.Domestically, the president’s plan appears to be not only to divide and conquer, but also to weaken and even cripple institutions of higher education, the arts, and other critical underpinnings of democracy that keep American Jews – and all minorities – safe. Worse still, it is to simultaneously try to make us, American Jews, complicit in his evil dealings.The ripple effect of this ruling and the detention of other students, like Rümeysa Öztürk from Tufts University, is propelling many of us in the American Jewish community to act against the Trump administration. A new amicus brief filed by a coalition of 27 Jewish organizations, supported with pro-bono work by the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine (a firm that deserves a gold star for upholding our constitution, rather than making side deals with the president to crush it), says this: “Without presuming to speak for all of Jewish America – a diverse community that holds a multitude of viewpoints – amici are compelled to file this brief because the arrest, detention, and potential deportation of Rümeysa Öztürk for her protected speech violate the most basic constitutional rights.”Freedom of expression, particularly on matters of public concern, the brief makes clear, is a cornerstone of American democracy and extends to academic settings and campus discourse. I’m proud to say that my synagogue, Congregation Beth Elohim, in Brooklyn, is a signatory of the brief, along with an organization, New Jewish Narratives, where I serve on the board.Tonight begins the Jewish festival of Passover, a festival of liberation and freedom. It marks a journey that the ancient Jews who were slaves in Egypt took from servitude to freedom. It is a time when Jews around the world proclaim, “Let my people go,” as we see our own fight for freedom in the eyes of those who remain unfree. For me, the freeing of the Israeli hostages is central to the Passover message, as is the freedom of both the Palestinian people and the Israelis to live in a state where they are free from fear and have a vibrant democracy.It’s a vibrant democracy that I wish, too, for the United States. And, at my Passover table, I will pledge to fight to maintain and strengthen the bonds of all peoples here in the US toward collective action that defends and maintains our democracy. If Khalil’s right to remain in the US is not upheld, our nation will be weaker for it, and all our rights will be further endangered.

      Jo-Ann Mort, who writes and reports frequently about Israel/Palestine is also author of the forthcoming book of poetry, A Precise Chaos. Follow her @jo-ann.bsky.social More

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      Trump news at a glance: US can deport lawful resident for his views in ‘unjust and alarming’ court ruling

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      At the end of a tumultuous week, a US immigration judge has sided with Trump administration lawyers, ruling that Columbia University graduate and Palestinian organizer Mahmoud Khalil can be deported from the US for his views.The decision came on the same day Trump lawyers were criticized by another judge for defying an order to provide details on how they would return a wrongly deported man to the US.Meanwhile, the US president insisted his tariff war was going “really well” despite mounting fears of recession and Beijing raising its retaliatory tariffs on the US to 125%.Catch up with the key Trump administration stories of the day:Judge rules Mahmoud Khalil can be deported for his viewsMahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and Palestinian organizer, is eligible to be deported from the United States, an immigration judge ruled on Friday during a contentious hearing at a remote court in central Louisiana.The decision sides with the Trump administration’s claim that a short memo written by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, which stated Khalil’s “beliefs and associations” were counter to foreign policy interests, is sufficient evidence to remove a lawful permanent resident from the United States. The undated memo, the main piece of evidence submitted by the government, contained no allegations of criminal conduct.Supporters of Khalil branded the decision as “unjust as it is alarming”.Read the full storyDoJ unable to tell court where wrongly deported man isLawyers for the Trump administration were unable on Friday to tell a federal court exactly where the Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego García is after he was wrongly deported to El Salvador last month. The judge, Paula Xinis, admonished the government at a heated hearing. “I’m not asking for state secrets,” she said. “All I know is that he’s not here. The government was prohibited from sending him to El Salvador, and now I’m asking a very simple question: where is he?”Read the full storyHead of US military base in Greenland fired after JD Vance visitThe head of the US military base in Greenland has been fired for criticising Washington’s agenda for the Arctic island after JD Vance visited two weeks ago.Col Susannah Meyers, who had served as commander of the Pituffik space base since July, was removed amid reports she had distanced herself and the base from the US vice-president’s criticism of Denmark and its oversight of the territory.Read the full storyTrump insists tariff war going ‘really well’Donald Trump insisted his trade war with much of the world was “doing really well” despite mounting fears of recession and as Beijing hit back and again hiked tariffs on US exports to China.As the US president said his aggressive tariffs strategy was “moving along quickly”, a closely watched economic survey revealed that US consumer expectations for price rises had soared to a four-decade high.Read the full storyImmigration agents try to enter LA elementary schoolsImmigration officials attempted to enter two Los Angeles elementary schools this week, but were turned away by school administrators. The incident appears to be the Trump administration’s first attempt to enter the city’s public schools since amending regulations to allow immigration agents to enter “sensitive areas” such as schools.The Los Angeles unified school district superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, confirmed that agents from the Department of Homeland Security were seeking five students in first through sixth grades. They were turned away after the schools’ principals asked to see their identification. Los Angeles Unified is a sanctuary district and does not cooperate with federal immigration agencies.Read the full storyMore law firms make pro bono deals to appease TrumpDonald Trump said on Friday that five major law firms reached agreements to together provide his administration $600m in pro bono legal work, among other terms, to avoid executive orders punishing them, a significant capitulation to the president as he attacks the legal profession.The five firms – Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Allen Overy Shearman Sterling, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft – are among the most prestigious and recognized firms in the US.Read the full storyOfficials told to denounce ‘anti-Christian’ colleaguesThe state department is ordering staff to report colleagues for instances of “anti-Christian bias” during the Biden administration, part of Donald Trump’s aggressive push to reshape government policy on religious expression in his first months back in office.Read the full storyTrump ally snipes at musician for Kennedy Center DEI concernsThe Kennedy Center’s interim executive director, Richard Grenell – a staunch ally of Donald Trump – accused a professional musician of “vapidness” after she emailed him over concerns of the now Trump-controlled center’s rollbacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.Read the full storyLaw firms scrap DEI mentions from websitesNearly two dozen US law firms have quietly scrubbed references to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) from their website and revised descriptions of pro-bono work to more closely align with Donald Trump’s priorities, a Guardian review has found, underscoring the Trump administration’s successful campaign of intimidation against the legal profession.Read the full storyTrump weakens US defenses against foreign meddling, says reportThe Trump administration has weakened tools the US government uses to combat foreign-influence campaigns, even as covert attempts by Saudi Arabia and other “malign actors” to influence American policy are growing in “scope, sophistication, and reach”, according to a new Senate report.Read the full storyUK man’s tattoo ‘used by US officials’ to identify alleged gang membersA British man was shocked to discover that a photo of his tattoo was included in a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document used to identify alleged members of a notorious Venezuelan criminal gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA).Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The Mississippi library commission has ordered the deletion of two research collections: the race relations database and the gender studies database. The collections were stored in what’s called the Magnolia database, which is used by publicly funded schools, libraries, universities and state agencies in Mississippi.

      Donald Trump’s executive order imposing sanctions on the international criminal court (ICC) is facing a legal challenge from two US human rights advocates who argue it is “unconstitutional and unlawful”.

      California’s $59bn agricultural industry is bracing for disruption as Donald Trump’s tariffs continue to spike tensions and trigger economic turmoil with China – one of the state’s biggest buyers.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 10 April 2025. More

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      Documents reveal Trump’s plan to gut funding for Nasa and climate science

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      Donald Trump shows no signs of easing his assault on climate science as plans of more sweeping cuts to key US research centers surfaced on Friday.The administration is planning to slash budgets at both the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (Noaa) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), according to internal budget documents, taking aim specifically at programs used to study impacts from the climate crisis.Craig McLean, a longtime director of the office of oceanic and atmospheric research (OAR) who retired in 2022, told the Guardian that the cuts were draconian and would “compromise the safety, economic competitiveness, and security of the American people”.If the plan is approved by Congress, funding for OAR would be eviscerated – cut from $485m to $171m – dismantling an important part of the agency’s mission.All budgets for climate, weather and ocean laboratories would be drained, according to the document reviewed by the Guardian, which states: “At this funding level, OAR is eliminated as a line office.”“The elimination of Noaa’s research line office and all of its research capabilities is a crushing blow to the ability of our country to protect our citizens and also to lead the world,” said the former Noaa administrator Rick Spinrad, adding that the document included “an extraordinarily devastating set of recommendations”.The proposal would also cut more than $324m from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), instructing the agency to align its work with administration priorities to “unleash American energy”. Species-recovery grants, habitat conservation and restoration, and the interjurisdictional fisheries grant program, which supports coordinated management and research with the states, would all lose funding. The document also outlines a plan to move the NMFS under the US Fish and Wildlife Service.Noaa is facing a $1.3bn cut to overall operations and research, with various programs on the chopping block, and the National Ocean Service would be cut in half.Science done outside the agency would also be undermined with cuts to Noaa’s climate research grants program, which provides roughly $70m a year.“It’s a really disturbing and concerning development – but I would say it is not all that surprising,” Spinrad said of the plans outlined in the document, noting that there have been many indications the administration would take steps such as these. “But it also has an element of randomness associated with it,” he added. “There are specific programs called out, the reasons for which are absolutely not clear.”The fallout from cuts this deep, should Congress adopt the president’s plan, would be felt in communities around the world, and in far-ranging sectors, from agriculture to emergency management.“By making a complete divestiture in science and in our research enterprise, we are basically saying we are not interested in improving our quality of life or our economy,” Spinrad said.The administration also outlined plans to severely defund research at Nasa, the country’s space agency. The agency is slated for a 20% overall budget loss, but deeper cuts would be directed at programs overseeing planetary science, earth science and astrophysics research, according to Ars Technica, which first on Trump’s plans when agency officials were briefed last month.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNow documents have been issued to back up those plans, halving funding for science at Nasa.The plan for Nasa would also scrap a series of missions, including some that the federal government has already poured billions of taxpayer dollars into. The Nancy Grace Roman space telescope, which could offer glimpses into distant galaxies after its scheduled launch next year, is among them, along with the Mars Sample Return and the Davinci mission to Venus. The Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which employs roughly 10,000 people, would also be closed.“This is an extinction-level event for Nasa science,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society, told the Washington Post. “It needlessly terminates functional, productive science missions and cancels new missions currently being built, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars in the process. This is neither efficient nor smart budgeting.”Still not set in stone, these “passback” documents are a part of how the government goes about budgeting. They are issued by the White House to federal agencies before the discretionary budget is released and are seen as a guidance on presidential priorities. The numbers aren’t final and could be changed, and Congress will also have to act on the plans to finalize them.Spinrad is confident that many legislators won’t support the cuts. “Many of the actions put forward by [the White House’s office of management and budget] are in direct contradiction to congressional intent,” he said. “Zeroing out programs that Congress has worked hard to authorize over the years – that’s a clarion call to specific members and sponsors.”There’s also likely to be strong pushback from the public and from industries that rely on the tools and services made possible by the country’s scientists.But the drastic degree of these cuts also shows the administration’s position on climate science and its determination to hamper US research, experts say. That alone is enough to cause concern.“This proposal will cost lives,” McLean said of the document if it is enacted. “When a room full of doctors tell you that it’s cancer, firing the doctors does not cure you.” More

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      People in the US: tell us how you think Trump’s first 100 days have gone so far

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      On the eve of his inauguration in January, Donald Trump vowed to deliver the “most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history”.Since taking office, the president has issued a flurry of executive orders that amount to a shock-and-awe campaign, and made a series of policy moves to dramatically reshape the United States.They range from imposing sweeping tariffs; establishing the “department of government efficiency”; gutting programs including USAID; declaring a national emergency on the southern border; attempting to put an end to birthright citizenship; attempting to deport US students for engaging in protest; and ending diversity programs in the federal government, to name a few.As the 100-day mark approaches, we want to hear from people across the political spectrum in the US on the second Trump administration. Tell us, in 100 words or less, what you think of the beginning of Trump’s second term and how you think he has or has not succeeded on his promise of an “extraordinary first 100 days”.We will curate 100 responses from people across the country. More

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      Trump DoJ unable to tell court where man wrongly deported to El Salvador is

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      Lawyers for the Trump administration were unable on Friday to tell a federal court exactly where the Maryland resident who was wrongly deported to El Salvador last month is or how he is, as the judge admonished the government at a heated hearing.The US district judge Paula Xinis said it was “extremely troubling” that the Trump administration failed to comply with a court order to provide details on the whereabouts and status of the Salvadorian citizen Kilmar Abrego García and she wanted daily updates on what the government is doing to bring him home.“Where is he and under whose authority?” Xinis asked in a Maryland courtroom.“I’m not asking for state secrets,” she said. “All I know is that he’s not here. The government was prohibited from sending him to El Salvador, and now I’m asking a very simple question: where is he?”The government side responded that it had no evidence that he is not still in El Salvador. “That is extremely troubling,” Xinis said.As Newsweek reported, Xinis added: “We’re not going to slow-walk this … We’re not relitigating what the supreme court has already put to bed.”The US supreme court on Thursday upheld the judge’s order to facilitate Abrego García’s return to the US, after a lawsuit filed by the man and his family challenging the legality of his summary deportation on 15 March.Abrego García has had a US work permit since 2019 but was stopped and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers on 12 March and questioned about alleged gang affiliation. He was deported on one of three high-profile deportation flights to El Salvador made up chiefly of Venezuelans whom the government accuses of being gang members and assumed special powers to expel without a hearing.Xinis on Friday repeatedly pressed a government attorney for answers but the administration defied her order for details on how or when it would retrieve Abrego García and claimed she had not given them enough time to prepare.“I’m not sure what to take from the fact that the supreme court has spoken quite clearly and yet I can’t get an answer today about what you’ve done, if anything, in the past,” Xinis said.Drew Ensign, an attorney with the Department of Justice, repeated what the administration had said in court filings, that it would provide the requested information by the end of Tuesday, once it evaluated the supreme court ruling.“Have they done anything?” Xinis asked. Ensign said he did not have personal knowledge of what had been done, to which the judge responded: “So that means they’ve done nothing.”The administration said in a court filing earlier on Friday that it was “unreasonable and impracticable” to say what its next steps are before they are properly agreed upon and vetted.“Foreign affairs cannot operate on judicial timelines, in part because it involves sensitive country-specific considerations wholly inappropriate for judicial review,” the filing said.Abrego García’s lawyers said in a Friday court filing: “The government continues to delay, obfuscate, and flout court orders, while a man’s life and safety is at risk.”The case highlights the administration’s tensions with federal courts. Several have blocked Trump policies, and judges have expressed frustration with administration efforts – or lack of them – to comply with court orders.Abrego García’s wife, US citizen Jennifer Vásquez Sura, has not been able to speak to him since he was flown to his native El Salvador last month and imprisoned. She has been rallying outside court and has urged their supporters to keep fighting for him “and all the Kilmars out there whose stories are still waiting to be heard”.The family sued to challenge the legality of his deportation and on 4 April Xinis ordered the administration to “facilitate and effectuate” his return. The administration challenged that order at the supreme court, which upheld Xinis’s order but said the term “effectuate” was unclear and might exceed the court’s authority.The justice department in a supreme court filing on 7 April stated that while Abrego García was deported to El Salvador through “administrative error”, his actual removal from the United States “was not error”. The error, department lawyers wrote, was in removing him specifically to El Salvador despite the deportation protection order.Asked at the White House media briefing on Friday if Donald Trump wants the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, to bring Abrego García with him when he visits the US on Monday, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the supreme court’s ruling “made it very clear that it’s the administration’s responsibility to ‘facilitate’ the return, not to ‘effectuate’ the return”.Similarly, the administration’s court filing said: “The court has not yet clarified what it means to ‘facilitate’ or ‘effectuate’ the return as it relates to this case, as [the] plaintiff is in the custody of a foreign sovereign. Defendants request – and require – the opportunity to brief that issue prior to being subject to any compliance deadlines.”Maya Yang, Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Ice can conduct enforcement actions in places of worship, US judge says

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      A federal judge on Friday sided with the Trump administration in allowing immigration agents to conduct enforcement operations at houses of worship despite a lawsuit filed by religious groups over the new policy.Dabney Friedrich, a US district judge in Washington, refused to grant a preliminary injunction to the plaintiffs, more than two dozen Christian and Jewish groups representing millions of Americans.She found that only a handful of immigration enforcement actions had been conducted in or around churches or other houses of worship and that the evidence did not show “that places of worship are being singled out as special targets”.The groups argued the policy violated the right to practice their religion. Since Donald Trump retook the presidency in January, attendance has declined significantly, with some areas showing double-digit percentage drops, they said.The judge, though, found that the groups had not shown their drops were definitively linked to the church policy specifically, as opposed to broader increased actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) or other agencies.“That evidence suggests that congregants are staying home to avoid encountering ICE in their own neighborhoods, not because churches or synagogues are locations of elevated risk,” wrote Friedrich, who was appointed by the Republican president during his first term.That means that simply reversing the policy on houses of worship would not necessarily mean immigrants would return to church, she found.On 20 January, his first day back in office, Trump’s administration rescinded a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policy limiting where migrant arrests could happen. Its new policy said field agents using “common sense” and “discretion” could conduct immigration enforcement operations at houses of worship without a supervisor’s approval.Plaintiffs’ attorneys claimed the new DHS directive departs from the government’s 30-year-old policy against staging immigration enforcement operations in “protected areas” or “sensitive locations”.The ruling comes as Trump’s immigration crackdown hits courtrooms around the country. On Thursday alone, another judge cleared the way for the administration to require people in the country illegally to register with the government even as the US supreme court ordered the administration to work to bring back a man mistakenly deported to prison in El Salvador.There have been at least two other lawsuits over that sensitive locations policy. One Maryland-based judge agreed to block immigration enforcement operations for some religious faiths, including Quakers.A judge in Colorado, though, sided with the administration in another lawsuit over the reversal of the part of the policy that had limited immigration arrests at schools. More