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      US food banks rush to stock supplies amid the Snap lapse: ‘We’re going to garner all the resources we can’

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      Waves of hungry Angelenos gathered outside the Community Space food bank’s storefront on a recent afternoon, grabbing dry goods like pastries, bagels, lentils and pasta along with refrigerated salads and frozen bags of brisket.The crowd ebbs and flows all day, said founder Gaines Newborn, but as news spread last week that the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) would cease on Saturday, he braced for the need to dramatically increase.“I’ve gotten more calls than we’ve ever gotten from concerned people saying: ‘My food stamps are getting cut, I need a plan,’” Newborn said. “People are trying to get ahead of food insecurity.”As the federal government shutdown stretches into its second month, the Trump administration announced that Snap, which helps around 42 million people afford food each month, will exhaust its funding at the start of November – something that has never happened before in the program’s half-century history.On Friday, two separate federal judges blocked the government’s attempt to stop paying out the benefits, but the administration could appeal the orders to a higher court. Food banks remain on edge for the possibility of a benefit cut, as they face increased demand driven by federal workers who have gone unpaid during the shutdown, along with people who have struggled to afford rising grocery prices.“The scale of what will happen when 1.8 million New Yorkers don’t get that benefit that they rely on to purchase groceries is sort of hard to wrap my head around, honestly,” said Nicole Hunt, director of public policy and advocacy at Food Bank for NYC, which serves the nation’s most populous city.The organization, which is the largest in New York City, planned to step up its aid during the period when Snap is unavailable, but Hunt said they cannot match the level of assistance the federal program provides.View image in fullscreen“We are going to do what we do, which is to show up with food. We’re going to try to concentrate as much as we can on the neighborhoods that are going to be the hardest hit and garner all the resources that we can, but that’s just not a scale that we’re going to be able to meet, and that’s the reality of how important Snap is and how many people rely on it,” she said.The federal government shut down on the first day of October, after Democrats and Republicans in Congress failed to agree on legislation that would have continued funding. Around 700,000 federal workers were furloughed, with hundreds of thousands more told to continue working for paychecks that will arrive only after funding is restored.The deadlock has continued as Republicans refuse Democratic demands to couple government funding legislation with an extension of tax credits that have lowered costs for Affordable Care Act health plans. While the Senate’s Republican leaders have tried 13 times to pass a bill to reopen the government, Democrats refuse to budge, and there is no sign of a resolution in sight.Snap benefits continued during previous shutdowns – including those that took place in Donald Trump’s first term – and a Department of Agriculture report outlining their plans for the latest funding lapse indicated they would continue during this one, too.But that report was deleted from the department’s website and replaced by a message that attacks Democratic senators and reads: “Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01.”David Super, a professor at Georgetown Law, said that between money allocated for Snap and funds for other programs that the law allows it to repurpose, the department could keep Snap dollars flowing, if it wanted to.“Clear congressional intent is that this money is available to pay benefits,” Super said at an event organized by the Brookings Institution. “They’re cutting off benefits to put pressure on Senate Democrats, and they put this offensive and dishonest statement on their website trying to blame anyone but themselves for this entirely voluntary termination of Snap benefits.”The program’s lapse will create need beyond the capability of any food bank to fill.View image in fullscreenOn average, Snap provides 95 million meals per month in New York City. In all of last year, Food Bank for NYC distributed 85 million meals, Zac Hall, the senior vice-president of programs, said.“We’re seeing mothers worried about what they’re going to be able to make for dinner for their kids, grandmothers worried about what they’re going to put on the table for Thanksgiving meals,” Hall said.In the Minneapolis suburb Brooklyn Park, Second Harvest Heartland, the country’s second-largest food bank, is stocking more inventory to be ready for Snap’s end, according to Sarah Moberg, the CEO.“The hunger relief network was not designed to do the work of Snap,” Moberg said. “We are designed to meet someone’s acute hunger need in a moment, and Snap is designed to do that so much more efficiently.”The pain of a cutoff would be particularly acute for the federal workers who are already struggling to get by without their normal salaries.“It’s horrible,” said Christina Dechabert, 52, a Bronx resident who has been working without pay for the Transportation Security Administration at John F Kennedy international airport. “You’re talking about trying to survive with no checks. I’ve had to come to a food bank to get food so our family can survive.”One mother in New York, who did not want to be named, said she was considering taking her two-year-old out of daycare as both she and her husband were federal workers.“We’re in a household with both of us not having paychecks, so that’s the toughest part,” she said. “My son’s under three, so there’s no free daycare, so if this goes on another month or so I might just take him out and have him at home so I don’t have to pay for daycare.”Joshua Cobos, a volunteer at Community Space in Los Angeles, is a Snap recipient himself. He hopes the credit he has earned from his hours at the food bank will see him through the benefit cutoff.“I’m racking up as much as I can around here, and with everything coming up I feel like we’re gonna be busy,” Cobos said.Some cities and states moved to pre-empt the financial hit from the Snap cutoff. Kathy Hochul, the New York governor, on Thursday declared a state of emergency that would free up $65m in state funds for food banks. Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, is sending $4m in state funding to food shelves to manage the Snap gap, but the need is far greater – $73m comes from federal funds to Minnesota for the program.The Atlanta Community food bank, where the monthly need has grown 70% over the past three-and-a-half years, announced Thursday it would draw $5m from its contingency to stock its pantries in anticipation of a surge of demand from unpaid federal workers and Snap beneficiaries. Andre Dickens, the city’s mayor, also announced a temporary eviction and water shutoff moratorium to support residents affected by the lapse in food aid.Super, the Georgetown Law professor, warned the cutoff for Snap bodes ill for the program’s long-term future in Washington.“This has been something that has not been political or ideological up to this point, and it would be tragic if we cross that line and this does become something that’s just part of partisan warfare,” he said. More

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      Trump’s military pressure on Maduro evokes Latin America’s coup-ridden past

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      The ghosts of sometimes deadly Latin American coups of the past are being evoked by Donald Trump’s relentless military buildup targeting Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocratic socialist leader, whom Washington has branded a narco-terrorist.Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Marxist president of Chile toppled in a military coup in 1973, and Rafael Trujillo, the longstanding dictator of the Dominican Republic who was assassinated in 1961 in an ambush organized by political opponents, are just two regional leaders whose fates serve as a warning to Maduro.Allende is believed to have killed himself, although some doubt that explanation, as troops stormed the presidential palace in the Chilean capital, Santiago, in a coup – fomented by then president Richard Nixon’s administration – that ushered in the brutally repressive military regime of Gen Augusto Pinochet.The CIA is believed to have supplied the weapons used to kill Trujillo.Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, escaped into exile after being overthrown in a 1954 coup also instigated by the CIA. But the event triggered a 30-year civil war that killed an estimated 150,000 people and resulted in 50,000 disappearances.The agency is also thought to have made at least eight unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba’s communist regime, which is still in power and is closely allied to Maduro.The plot to depose Castro also included the failed Bay of Pigs invasion carried out by Cuban exiles and organized by the CIA in the early months of John F Kennedy’s presidency in 1961, but which was defeated by Cuba’s armed forces.Now, as the US stages its biggest naval buildup in the region since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, some believe Maduro’s life is equally at risk.Washington is preparing to carry out military strikes imminently inside Venezuela on already pinpointed targets that have been identified as military facilities used to smuggle drugs, according to reports.US officials are leaving little doubt that this could lead to fatal consequences for Maduro.“Maduro is about to find himself trapped and might soon discover that he cannot flee the country even if he decided to,” the Miami Herald quoted a source with close knowledge of US military planning as saying. “What’s worse for him, there is now more than one general willing to capture and hand him over, fully aware that one thing is to talk about death, and another to see it coming.”The Trump administration has offered a $50m bounty for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the Venezuelan leader, after announcing in August that it was doubling the $25m reward initially offered during Trump’s first presidency.Explaining his decision this month to authorize covert CIA actions against Venezuela, Trump pointedly refused to say whether US forces were authorized to “take out” Maduro. However, Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA Latin America analyst, said the intense security surrounding the Venezuelan leader in effect rendered the reward a “dead or alive” proposition, meaning any attempt to snatch him is likely to result in his death.“Anybody who’s going to try to take him is going to be so heavily armed that any defense that he put up would lead to them pulling triggers,” said Armstrong.“Let’s say it’s locals and they want the bounty. Most of them will assume that they’ll get the bounty dead or alive. Our forces would be a little bit more disciplined, but then imagine the adrenaline that anybody trying to do a snatch would have coursing through their veins. They’re going to be trigger-happy.“Only a fool would think that they can go in there and say, ‘OK, let me put handcuffs on you and escort you to the car.’ That’s not how it’s going to work.”Maduro has survived at least one apparent attempt on his life, when two drones exploded as he was speaking at a military parade in Caracas in 2018. Television footage shows several members of his security team rushing to his side to shield him after the explosions.Maduro accused neighboring Colombia of being responsible, although some opponents suggested the episode was a false flag operation staged to win sympathy.In May 2020, Venezuelan security forces foiled an attempt by about 60 dissidents, accompanied by two former US Green Berets, to capture and oust him in a plot that involved infiltrating the country by sea. The episode was afterwards dubbed the “Bay of Piglets” in mocking reference to the botched plot against Castro.But a fresh sign of Washington’s determination to get its hands on Maduro emerged this week when the Associated Press reported that a US agent, working for the Department of Homeland Security, had unsuccessfully tried to bribe the Venezuelan president’s pilot into diverting his plane to enable American authorities to capture him.The Trump administration has deployed a daunting array of military hardware off the Venezuelan coast in what appears to be an intimidating statement of intent to bring about regime change in the country.Last week, the Pentagon announced that the USS Gerald Ford, the biggest aircraft carrier in the US navy, would sail from Europe to join a military force consisting of destroyers armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, B-1 and B-52 bombers, and special forces helicopters.At least 57 people have been killed in more than a dozen US military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. Washington has accused Maduro and other senior Venezuelan officials of being at the head of a cartel smuggling drugs into the US. Maduro denies the charge and experts dispute the significance of Venezuela’s role in the illegal drug trade.Trump has intensified the pressure further by authorizing the CIA to carry out covert activities inside Venezuela, although the contents of his instructions are classified and unknown.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionArmstrong argued that Trump was aware that his policy could prove fatal for Maduro.“What person wouldn’t be aware of that potential because you’re trying to take out a head of state, a tenacious head of state,” he said.“We do assassinations on a routine basis of people that we suspect of not even being senior members of groups that we consider to be terrorists. If we’re authorizing the assassination of regular combatants in the war on terror, how crazy is it to think that the administration would authorize the use of lethal means, if necessary, to snatch the head of a cartel.”Another former CIA officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because of their previous involvement in targeted assassinations in the Middle East, said decisions to authorize such killings were normally taken with great care and based on threat severity.“It is very specific and usually because there is a lethal threat to America and our allies. They are done super carefully,” the former agent said.“The president and the [national security council] come up with the plan, and then they decide who’s going to take the shot … Is it going to be the military [or some other agency], will it lead to war?”High-profile assassinations in recent times include Osama bin Laden by a Navy Seal team in 2011; Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Qods force, killed by a drone strike ordered by Trump in 2020; and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s former deputy in al-Qaida, who was killed by a drone in Afghanistan in 2022 during Joe Biden’s presidency.“Bin Laden was an easy decision – he killed thousands of Americans, and even before the 9/11 attacks he had done lesser stuff,” said the ex-officer. “Suleimani, too, was easy because he had killed so many Americans.”Maduro, however, presents a less clearcut target, even though Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, has described the Venezuelan regime as “the al-Qaida of the western hemisphere”.“The idea of going after a guy, Maduro, who is a sitting leader of a sovereign country, whether we like the country or not, just seems really strange and disproportionate,” the former agent continued. “Maduro is not Hitler. Bin Laden, Suleimani and al-Zawahiri were not heads of countries.“If you look at our history, even in the last 40 or 50, years, we’ve been staying away from going after world leaders.”Disclosures about the CIA’s role in backing coups and assassination attempts on foreign leaders during the 1950s and 1960s led to committees being established in Congress to oversee the agency’s activities.While there is no evidence that Trump has authorized Maduro’s assassination, John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, told senators during his confirmation hearings that he would make the agency less risk averse and more willing to conduct covert action when ordered by the president.Armstrong suggested the administration’s preferred course was to goad Maduro’s opponents in the Venezuelan military and other parts of society to topple him in a coup, setting the scene for a democratic transition while precluding the need for direct US action.But some analysts believe such a scenario would probably spawn a replacement loyal to the leftist movement spearheaded by Maduro’s late predecessor, Hugo Chávez – with a full-blown democratic transformation potentially taking years to bear fruit.Angelo Rivero Santos, a former Venezuelan diplomat in the country’s US embassy and now an academic at Georgetown University, said the chances of a coup were likely to be dashed by domestic realities and the fact that even Maduro’s critics have rallied around the flag in response to recent US pressure. .“The year 2025 is not 1973,” he said, referring to the coup that deposed Chile’s Allende. “Statements from the opposition show that this is not heavily supported inside the country.” More

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      Who decides how we adapt to climate change? | Leah Aronowsky

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      For decades, “stopping climate change” has been the singular goal of climate politics. Across the political spectrum, from grassroots climate campaigners to elite UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate policies.Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, water and land use policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact federal protections?These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we respond to these political crises – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about values and mediating between competing interests, not merely carbon accounting.Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of decarbonization. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. The Council on Foreign Relations, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to expose homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in high-risk areas like California. By contrast, the progressive Climate and Community Institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is stark: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that enable them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.

      Leah Aronowsky is a historian of science and assistant professor at the Columbia Climate School More

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      Labor activist takes on Teamsters leader allying with Trump: ‘He doesn’t represent the workers’

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      The Teamsters International president, Sean O’Brien, is putting the “working class in jeopardy” by allying with Donald Trump, according to a prominent labor activist challenging his leadership of the powerful union.O’Brien has “no business being a labor leader” and “shouldn’t be trusted”, Richard Hooker Jr – who is running against O’Brien’s re-election next year – told the Guardian.Hooker has emerged as a leading critic of O’Brien, who described Trump as “our enemy” during his first term in the White House, while criticizing the Teamsters leadership at the time for lack of opposition to Trump, and said it was “unfortunate” so many Teamsters members voted for Trump during his victorious campaign to lead the union in 2021.As Trump marched back to power, however, O’Brien pivoted. He met privately with the president last January, and hailed him as “one tough SOB” during an unprecedented address at last summer’s Republican national convention.“When he was running, the first time he was saying the truth about Trump,” Hooker said, suggesting O’Brien made his early attacks on Trump just to win election as Teamsters president. “Now that he’s elected, he has decided to go along with Trump and everything that he’s done. But not just Trump, also the ruling class, the employer class, billionaire class, because that’s who Trump represents. He doesn’t represent the workers.”View image in fullscreenAfter O’Brien’s convention speech, the Teamsters – one of the largest unions in the US, representing more than 1.3 million workers – controversially declined to endorse a candidate in November’s presidential election. The union had endorsed every Democrat on the ticket since 2000.The Teamsters deferred comment to the O’Brien slate’s campaign. O’Brien and his campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.With O’Brien up for re-election next year, Hooker, the secretary-treasurer and principal officer of Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia, is leading a rival slate of other union leadership candidates against O’Brien’s slate.The election will take place November 2026. Hooker’s campaign is currently gathering union signatures to make the ballot for the Teamsters national convention in June, where they will vie for 5% of delegates to make the ballot for the November election.Born and raised a preacher’s son around Fayetteville, North Carolina, Hooker began working at UPS shortly after high school in 1999 while attending Drexel University. As a package handler at a UPS warehouse near Philadelphia international airport, he became disillusioned with union leadership as a shop steward with the Teamsters when grievances about their contract were dismissed.His bid to lead Local 623 came up short in 2016. But in 2020, the married father of four became the first Black man to ever lead the union, which represents workers at companies including UPS and Greyhound.Now Hooker is running to replace O’Brien at the top of one of the most influential unions in the US, due to frustrations over his decision to align with Trump, the 2023 UPS contract as UPS recently reported cutting 48,000 jobs, and allegations of intimidation against criticizing O’Brien’s administration.View image in fullscreen“You have your supposed leader flirting with someone who does not care if you have a pension – someone who does not care if you have healthcare, who does not care if you have the [National Labor Relations Board], if you have protect protections at the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] or [Occupational Safety and Health Administration],” said Hooker. “If you align yourself with someone who is OK with being in a relationship with that type of person, then they have no business being a labor leader, because what you’re doing is you’re putting your members and the rest of the working class in jeopardy.“I get the whole bipartisanship, I get working across the aisle. I get that. But when someone has a history of annihilating workers and the working class, then we have no business being with that person.”Hooker also wants the Teamsters to re-affiliate with the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US. He would be the first Black man to lead the union. He has already started to receive harassment after launching his campaign, including an anonymous voicemail left at his office earlier this week which used racist language.View image in fullscreenRepublicans and Trump have often cited O’Brien in claims that Republicans are making inroads with labor and the working class, including from the Republican senator Markwayne Mullin, who sparred with O’Brien during a Senate hearing in 2023, but recently appeared on his podcast.Since Trump took office in January, the fallout from O’Brien’s relationship with Trump has intensified. Teamsters has also faced criticism for hiring Peter Cvjetanovic – whose face became a symbol of the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia – for an administrative job at the union’s headquarters in Washington DC. Cvjetanovic was later reportedly fired.O’Brien has maintained regular communication with Trump throughout his presidency, he claimed in an interview earlier this year with the Hollywood Reporter, while making several appearances on conservative media shows, including podcasts led by Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Bari Weiss, where he said Trump’s presidency so far was “a solid B” grade for the Teamsters.Under O’Brien, Teamsters has also significantly shifted its political donations, pouring money into Republican congressional candidates and groups rather than predominantly Democrats.“What has the union got from Trump? What have we got? We haven’t gotten anything now,” said Hooker. “Reaching across the aisle to some Republicans who have an issue of working with labor and making things better for labor, I understand that, and I agree with that.“But Trump does not have that résumé or history of doing anything for workers. Not one single thing. He comes in and eliminates contracts for workers. Even before he got elected, he told Elon Musk that he likes what he does when people go out on strike, he eliminates them. That’s who he is.” More

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      Canadian PM Carney apologises to Trump over anti-tariff Reagan ad run by Ontario premier

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      The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, said he had apologised to the US president, Donald Trump, over an anti-tariff political advertisement and had told the Ontario premier, Doug Ford, not to run it.Carney, speaking to reporters on Saturday after attending an Asia-Pacific summit in South Korea, said he had made the apology privately to Trump when they both attended a dinner hosted by South Korea’s president on Wednesday.“I did apologise to the president,” Carney said, confirming comments by Trump made on Friday.Carney also confirmed that he had reviewed the ad with Ford before it aired, but said he had opposed using it.“I told Ford I did not want to go forward with the ad,” he said.The ad, commissioned by Ford, an outspoken Conservative politician who is sometimes compared to Trump, uses a snippet of Republican icon and former president Ronald Reagan saying that tariffs cause trade wars and economic disaster.In response, Trump announced that he was increasing tariffs on goods from Canada, and Washington has also halted trade talks with Canada.When departing South Korea earlier this week, Trump remarked he had a “very nice” conversation with Carney at that dinner, but did not elaborate. On Friday Trump still said the United States and Canada will not restart trade talks.Carney said his talks with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, on Friday were a turning point in relations after years of tensions.The last formal meeting between the leaders of Canada and China happened in 2017 when the then prime minister Justin Trudeau had a brief exchange with Xi at a meeting in San Francisco.In recent years, Canadian citizens were detained and executed in China, and Canada’s security authorities concluded that China interfered in at least two federal elections.Carney said he had discussed foreign interference with Xi, among other issues.The trip to Asia had been part of efforts to reduce Canada’s reliance on the United States, Carney said.“It can’t happen overnight, but we’re moving very fast,” he said. More

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      Trump news at a glance: Friday rulings hamper administration on food stamps, voting access

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      President Trump received a trio of legal setbacks Friday related to the government shutdown and his attempts to tweak voting access in US elections.First, two federal judges issued back-to-back rulings in separate cases ordering the administration to use contingency funds to continue paying for food stamps under the Snap program.One judge in Rhode Island blocked the Trump administration from suspending all food aid for millions of Americans, in a case brought by a group of US cities, non-profit organizations and a trade union. At almost the same time, in a separate but similar case, a judge in Massachusetts ruled that the government must continue to fund the program that helps low-income households stave off food insecurity, in a case brought by the Democratic attorneys general from 22 states and the District of Columbia and three governors who sued the administration.And later Friday, a US district judge in Washington DC ruled that Trump’s proof-of-citizenship directive to overhaul US elections was unconstitutional.“Because our constitution assigns responsibility for election regulation to the states and to Congress, this court holds that the president lacks the authority to direct such changes,” judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in her opinion.That’s a blow to the administration and its allies who have argued that such a mandate is necessary to restore public confidence that only Americans are voting in US elections.Trump administration blocked from suspending Snap benefits for millions of AmericansTwo federal judges issued back-to-back rulings on Friday in separate cases ordering the Trump administration to use contingency funds to continue paying for food stamps during the government shutdown.A federal judge in Rhode Island blocked the Trump administration from suspending all food aid for millions of Americans, in a case brought by a group of US cities, non-profit organizations and a trade union.Read the full storyTrump can’t require citizenship proof on the federal voting form, judge rulesDonald Trump’s request to add a documentary proof of citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form cannot be enforced, a federal judge ruled today.US district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington DC sided with Democratic and civil rights groups that sued the Trump administration over his executive order to overhaul US elections. She ruled that the proof-of-citizenship directive is an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers, dealing a blow to the administration and its allies.Read the full storyJustice department seeks 2020 election records from Georgia countyTrump’s justice department on Thursday asked election officials in Fulton county, Georgia, to turn over records related to the 2020 election, a request that underscores how the administration is trying to revive one of the president’s biggest falsehoods about the election he lost five years ago.Investigators have cleared Fulton county of malfeasance in 2020. Nonetheless, a Republican majority on the board voted to reopen the investigation last year.Read the full storyHarrison Ford lays into Trump on climateHarrison Ford has said that Donald Trump’s assault on measures to address the climate crisis “scares the shit out of me” and makes the US president among the worst criminals in history.In a blistering attack, Ford told the Guardian Trump “doesn’t have any policies, he has whims. It scares the shit out of me. The ignorance, the hubris, the lies, the perfidy. [Trump] knows better, but he’s an instrument of the status quo and he’s making money, hand over fist, while the world goes to hell in a handbasket.”Read the full storyHow Stephen Miller is creating an ‘anti-immigration machine’The historic shifts in US immigration under Donald Trump have been dictated by Stephen Miller, the president’s immigration czar, who in recent months has turned the state department’s visa and refugee operations into what some current and former diplomats have described as a personal fiefdom.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, has said she will not suspend the US government’s aggressive immigration crackdown in Illinois over Halloween, denying a request from the state’s governor that children might enjoy the holiday “without fear”.

      Trump called on the Senate to scrap the filibuster, so that the Republican majority can bypass Democrats and reopen the federal government. The Senate majority leader, John Thune, a Republican known for defending Senate traditions, has repeatedly rejected proposals to weaken or remove the 60-vote rule.

      What is the filibuster and why does Trump want to get rid of it? Here’s what you need to know.

      More than half of Americans disapprove of Donald Trump’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing and the construction of a new ballroom, according to a new poll from the Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos. According to the poll, 56% of the respondents disagree with Trump’s recent move while 28% are in favor of it.

      White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was the driving force behind a purge of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents who had investigated Donald Trump, a new book reveals.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened 30 October 2025. More

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      Judge rules Trump can’t require citizenship proof on federal voting form – US politics live

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      Donald Trump’s request to add a documentary proof of citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form cannot be enforced, a federal judge ruled today.US district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington DC sided with Democratic and civil rights groups that sued the Trump administration over his executive order to overhaul US elections.She ruled that the proof-of-citizenship directive is an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers, dealing a blow to the administration and its allies.“Because our Constitution assigns responsibility for election regulation to the States and to Congress, this Court holds that the President lacks the authority to direct such changes,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote in her opinion.The ruling grants the plaintiffs a partial summary judgment that prohibits the proof-of-citizenship requirement from going into effect. It says the US Election Assistance Commission, which has been considering adding the requirement to the federal voter form, is permanently barred from taking action to do so.Donald Trump arriving at Palm Beach international airport earlier, in West Palm Beach, Florida. He’s spending the weekend at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Palm Beach.The White House has announced a new rule restricting the ability of credentialed journalists to freely access the offices of press secretary Karoline Leavitt and other top communications officials in the West Wing, near the Oval Office.A memorandum issued late today bans journalists from accessing Room 140, also known as “Upper Press”, without a prior appointment, citing the need to protect potentially sensitive material. It said the change would take effect immediately.It follows restrictions put in place earlier this month for credentialed reporters at the Department of Defense, who were asked to sign a pledge not to gather any information – including unclassified documents – that had not been authorized for release. It prompted dozens of journalists to vacate their office in the Pentagon and returned their credentials. The department promptly announced a “next generation of the Pentagon press corps” featuring 60 journalists from far-right outlets.Earlier today, Donald Trump announced that he has renovated the bathroom inside the Lincoln bedroom at the White House, and shared an image of the lavish white-and-black-marbled remodel.“I renovated the Lincoln Bathroom in the White House. It was renovated in the 1940s in an art deco green tile style, which was totally inappropriate for the Lincoln Era,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform, attaching a photo showing that version. “I did it in black and white polished Statuary marble. This was very appropriate for the time of Abraham Lincoln and, in fact, could be the marble that was originally there!”It comes as Trump has renovated other parts of the White House, including his heavily criticized demolition of the East Wing to build a $300m ballroom, paving over the Rose Garden and decorating the Oval Office with gold.The Lincoln bedroom was originally used by Abraham Lincoln as his office and cabinet room.Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican congressperson, caused a fracas when she cursed at and berated law enforcement at the Charleston international airport yesterday, Wired reports.According to an incident report, Mace cursed loudly at police officers and made repeated derogatory comments towards them. “She repeatedly stated we were ‘fucking incompetent’, and ‘this is no way to treat a fucking US representative’,” the report states.The report also says that a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) supervisor told officers that Mace had treated their staff similarly and they would be reporting her to their superiors.“Any other person in the airport acting and talking the way she did, our department would have been dispatch (sic) and we would have addressed the behavior,” the incident report concludes.Donald Trump’s request to add a documentary proof of citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form cannot be enforced, a federal judge ruled today.US district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington DC sided with Democratic and civil rights groups that sued the Trump administration over his executive order to overhaul US elections.She ruled that the proof-of-citizenship directive is an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers, dealing a blow to the administration and its allies.“Because our Constitution assigns responsibility for election regulation to the States and to Congress, this Court holds that the President lacks the authority to direct such changes,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote in her opinion.The ruling grants the plaintiffs a partial summary judgment that prohibits the proof-of-citizenship requirement from going into effect. It says the US Election Assistance Commission, which has been considering adding the requirement to the federal voter form, is permanently barred from taking action to do so.Donald Trump is set to sit down with Norah O’Donnell, a CBS anchor, this afternoon, Semafor is reporting, in what would be the president’s first interview with the network since its parent company Paramount settled a $16m lawsuit with him.Trump sued CBS News and Paramount over the editing of an interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential election. Despite serious doubts about whether Trump’s legal argument would stand up in court, Paramount decided to settle the lawsuit for $16m in July.According to Semafor’s report:
      CBS is in the midst of a deliberate repositioning aimed, at least in part, at gesturing to the center and the right.
      The network decided against renewing the contract of Stephen Colbert, the late night host who has regularly needled Trump and expressed support for mainstream Democrats (critics, internally and externally, said Colbert was increasingly too expensive to maintain).
      Following new owner David Ellison’s acquisition of Paramount, he quickly bought the Free Press and installed its founder Bari Weiss atop CBS News; Weiss had made a name for herself as an opinion writer who critiqued what she believed was the illiberal and censorious online left in academia, progressive politics and the news media. CBS also appointed a new ombudsman who had previously run the Hudson Institute, a conservative thinktank.
      In recent months, the Trump administration’s pressure has altered editorial policies at the network. CBS agreed earlier this year to release full transcripts of future 60 Minutes presidential interviews. And following criticism from homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s team over an interview on the network’s Sunday show, Face The Nation, CBS News announced that in the future it would only air unedited interviews on the program.
      Trump has returned the favor by publicly nodding in the network’s direction. On Air Force One earlier this month, he speculated with the press corps about who would be the next anchor of CBS Evening News, and praised the Ellisons.
      “Larry Ellison is great, and his son, David, is great. They’re friends of mine. They’re big supporters of mine. And they’ll do the right thing,” Trump said. “And it’s got great potential. CBS has great potential.”
      In addition to praise from the president and some one-on-one access, Trump’s decision, for the moment, to bless Paramount could help it improve its business in other ways. The New York Post reported that people close to Trump believed Paramount had the inside track with federal regulators in its bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery; its most likely rival potential bidder, Comcast, faces a more steep regulatory hurdle if Trump’s statements about the company are considered.
      Donald Trump said earlier today that the United States and Canada will not restart trade talks, but that Canadian PM Mark Carney had apologized to him for an Ontario political ad that featured Ronald Reagan saying tariffs spell disaster.“I like [Carney] a lot but what they did was wrong,” Trump said. “He apologized for what they did with the commercial because it was a false commercial.”Trump last week called off negotiations over the ad aired by the Canadian province, adding that he was raising tariffs on Canadian goods by an additional 10%.The ad by the Ontario government featured former president Reagan, who was known for his support of free marks and free trade, saying that tariffs on foreign goods lead to trade wars and job losses.A ground stop had been in effect at New York’s JFK airport until 7.30pm ET due to staffing shortages in the air traffic system, according to the New York City emergency management department, but according to Reuters, it was lifted around 3.30pm ET.In a statement earlier on Friday, the New York City department had said that flights headed to JFK were being held at their departure airports.The department also said that JFK, as well as nearby airports LaGuardia and Newark are all “under FAA traffic restrictions” this evening and are under ground delay programs due to staffing shortages and wind in the region.As of 3.30pm ET, it seems as though the ground delays are still in place.New York governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has called on the Trump administration to “release emergency nutrition assistance for the 3 million New Yorkers set to lose their SNAP benefits tomorrow”.“No state should have to sue the federal government to ensure families can put food on the table,” she said. “But when Washington Republicans refused to act, New York took them to court to mitigate this crisis.”Hochul said that her administration “remains prepared for the worst” and is “fast-tracking over $100 million for food banks and pantries” and has declared a state of emergency.Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, the ranking member of the Senate agriculture committee, which oversees the food aid program, has released a statement following the court’s decision decision, saying that Trump officials “now have no excuse to withhold food assistance from Americans”.“The court’s decision confirms what we have said all week: The administration is choosing not to feed Americans in need, despite knowing that it is legally required to do so,” said Klobuchar. “The court was clear: the administration is ‘required to use those Contingency Funds as necessary for the SNAP program.’”If the administration decides not to issue Snap, Klobuchar said that it “is purely a cruel political decision, not a legal one.”“They should immediately act – as the court has required – to ensure food assistance continues to go to families in need” she added.

      Two federal judges ruled almost simultaneously this afternoon that the Trump administration must continue to fund Snap, the nation’s biggest food aid program, using contingency funds during the government shutdown. The rulings came a day before the US Department of Agriculture planned to freeze payments to the program, which serves about one in eight (or 42 million) Americans.

      The US will not send any high-level officials to the upcoming Cop30 climate summit in Brazil, a White House official told Reuters, alleviating some concern among world leaders that Washington would send a team to scupper the talks.

      Public tours in the White House will resume in December, according to a statement from the office of the first lady. They had been suspended indefinitely in August amid construction for Trump’s controversial $300m ballroom project.

      Donald Trump denied that he is considering strikes inside Venezuela, even amid reports that his administration may expand its counter-drug campaign in the Caribbean. It comes as the UN high commissioner for human rights said today that US military strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean allegedly carrying illegal drugs from South America are “unacceptable” and must stop.

      The president reaffirmed that the US would resume nuclear testing, and did not answer directly when asked whether that would include the traditional underground nuclear tests common during the cold war. “You’ll find out very soon, but we’re going to do some testing,” Trump told reporters onboard Air Force One as he flew to Palm Beach, Florida, when asked about underground nuclear tests. “Other countries do it. If they’re doing to do it, we’re going to do it, okay?”

      A Republican-dominated Ohio panel adopted new US House districts that could boost the GOP’s chances of winning two additional seats in next year’s elections and aid Donald Trump’s efforts to hold on to a slim congressional majority. You can view the map here.

      Donald Trump has called on the Senate to scrap the filibuster, so that the Republican majority can bypass Democrats and reopen the federal government. The filibuster is a way for a relatively small group of senators to block action by the majority. The filibuster rule allows a minority of 41 senators to prevent a vote on most kinds of legislation. The Senate majority leader, John Thune, a Republican known for defending Senate traditions, has repeatedly rejected proposals to weaken or remove the 60-vote rule.
      A federal judge in Rhode Island has blocked the Trump administration’s plan to suspend all Snap food aid benefits for millions of Americans amid the ongoing government shutdown, Reuters reports.US district judge John McConnell in Providence issued a temporary restraining order at the behest of cities, nonprofits and a union who argued the US Department of Agriculture’s suspension of Snap starting from Saturday was unlawful, and told the administration it “must distribute” aid using a set of emergency funds – and potentially other sources – and pay the benefits as soon as possible.He ruled minutes after another judge in Boston ruled that the suspension was likely unlawful in a related case pursued by a coalition of Democratic-led states that also sought to avert the suspension.That judge has ordered the Trump administration to indicate by Monday if it would provide either full or partial SNAP benefits in November.“There is no doubt and it is beyond argument that irreparable harm will begin to occur if it hasn’t already occurred in the terror it has caused some people about the availability of funding for food, for their family,” McConnell said during a virtual hearing.The US will not send any high-level officials to the upcoming Cop30 climate summit in Brazil, a White House official has told Reuters, alleviating some concern among world leaders that Washington would send a team to scupper the talks.Brazil will host a high-level leaders’ summit next week before the two-week UN climate negotiations begin in the Amazonian city of Belem.Earlier this month, the US threatened to use visa restrictions and sanctions to retaliate against nations that would vote in favor of a plan put forward by the United Nations shipping agency, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from ocean shipping.Those tactics led a majority of countries at the IMO to vote to postpone by a year a decision on a global carbon price on international shipping. The White House official said Donald Trump has already made his administration’s views on multilateral climate action clear in his astonishing speech at last month’s United Nations general assembly, where he called climate change the world’s “greatest con job” and chided countries for setting climate policies that he said “have cost their countries fortunes”.“The president is directly engaging with leaders around the world on energy issues, which you can see from the historic trade deals and peace deals that all have a significant focus on energy partnerships,” the White House official told Reuters.The Trump administration has pursued bilateral energy deals in its trade negotiations to boost US liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports with countries like South Korea and also the European Union. On Friday, the US energy secretary, Chris Wright, said there is “room for great energy trade between China and the United States” given China’s need for natural gas as the two economic giants negotiate over tariffs.Trump announced on his first day in office that the US would exit the 10-year-old Paris climate agreement, taking effect in January 2026, and the state department has been reviewing the US’s engagement in multilateral environmental agreements. Earlier this year, the US also put pressure on countries negotiating a global treaty to reduce plastic pollution not to back an agreement that would set plastic production caps.The White House official told Reuters that “the tide is turning” on prioritizing climate change, pointing to a memo circulated this week by billionaire and longtime climate philanthropist and investor Bill Gates, who said it is time to pivot away from focusing on meeting global temperature goals and claimed that climate change will “not lead to humanity’s demise”.Public tours in the White House will resume in December, according to a statement from the office of the first lady.“The White House will reopen its doors for public tours on Tuesday, December 2, 2025, with an updated route offering guests the opportunity to experience the history and beauty of the People’s House. In celebration of the holiday season, all December tours will feature the White House Christmas decorations on the State Floor,” it said.Public tours were suspended indefinitely in August amid construction for Trump’s controversial $300m ballroom project.China “made a real mistake” by threatening to shut off exports of its rare earths, US treasury secretary Scott Bessent told the Financial Times (paywall) in an interview published today.US and Chinese leaders had reached an “equilibrium” but warned that China would not be able to keep using its critical minerals as a coercive tool, Bessent told the paper, adding that China “made a real mistake” by “firing shots” on rare earths. More

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      US judge blocks Trump order requiring proof of citizenship to vote

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      Donald Trump’s request to add a documentary proof of citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form cannot be enforced, a federal judge ruled on Friday.US district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington DC, sided with Democratic and civil rights groups that sued the Trump administration over his executive order to overhaul US elections.She ruled that the proof-of-citizenship directive was an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers, dealing a blow to the administration and its allies who have argued that such a mandate is necessary to restore public confidence that only Americans are voting in US elections.“Because our Constitution assigns responsibility for election regulation to the States and to Congress, this Court holds that the President lacks the authority to direct such changes,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote in her opinion.She further emphasized that on matters related to setting qualifications for voting and regulating federal election procedures “the Constitution assigns no direct role to the President in either domain.”Kollar-Kotelly echoed comments she made when she granted a preliminary injunction over the issue.The ruling grants the plaintiffs a partial summary judgment that prohibits the proof-of-citizenship requirement from going into effect. It says the US Election Assistance Commission, which has been considering adding the requirement to the federal voter form, is permanently barred from taking action to do so.A message seeking comment from the White House was not immediately returned.The lawsuit brought by the Democratic National Committee and various civil rights groups will continue to play out to allow the judge to consider other challenges to Trump’s order. That includes a requirement that all mailed ballots be received, rather than just postmarked, by election day.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOther lawsuits against Trump’s election executive order are ongoing.In early April, 19 Democratic state attorneys general asked a separate federal court to reject Trump’s executive order. Washington and Oregon, where virtually all voting is done with mailed ballots, followed with their own lawsuit against the order. More