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      Iran’s nuclear enrichment ‘will never stop’, nation’s UN ambassador says

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      Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, said on Sunday that the Islamic republic’s nuclear enrichment “will never stop” because it is permitted for “peaceful energy” purposes under the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.“The enrichment is our right, an inalienable right, and we want to implement this right,” Iravani told CBS News, adding that Iran was ready for negotiations but “unconditional surrender is not negotiation. It is dictating the policy toward us.”But Iravani said Tehran is “ready for the negotiation, but after this aggression, it is not proper condition for a new round of the negotiation, and there is no request for negotiation and meeting with the president”.The Iranian UN envoy also denied that there are any threats from his government to the safety of Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or against the agency’s inspectors, who are accused by some Iranian officials of helping Israel justify its attacks. IAEA inspectors are currently in Iran but do not have access to Iran’s nuclear facilities.Pressed by the CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan on whether he would condemn calls for the arrest and execution of the IAEA head, which Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state said a newspaper close to Iran’s leader had made, Iravani said that he would.“There is no any threat,” Irvani said, but acknowledged that Iran’s parliament had suspended cooperation with IAEA. The inspectors, he said, “are in Iran, they are in safe conditions, but the activity has been suspended. They cannot have access to our site … our assessment is that they have not done their jobs.”Iravani also responded to questions on why Tehran has not accepted proposals for a diplomatic solution. Referring to Trump’s “unconditional surrender” demand, Irvani said that the US “is dictating the policy towards us. If they are ready for negotiation, they will find us ready for that. But if they want to dictate us, it is impossible for any negotiation with them.”Iravani said on Saturday that Iran could transfer its stocks of enriched uranium to another country in the event of an agreement with the United States on Tehran’s nuclear program, according to news site Al-Monitor.The transfer of 20% and 60% enriched uranium would not be a red line for Tehran, Iravani said, adding that the material could alternatively remain in Iran under IAEA supervision.But as he said again on Sunday, Iravani stressed that Iran would not renounce its right to domestic uranium production, a condition the US rejects.Irvani’s comments comes as western nations, including the US, are pushing for Iran to resume negotiations over its nuclear program a week after the US launched strikes on three facilities, setting off days of heated dispute over whether the facilities has been “totally obliterated”, as Donald Trump initially claimed, or if they had delayed but not destroyed the program.Grossi told CBS that there is “agreement in describing this as a very serious level of damage” but went on to say that Iran will likely will be able to begin to produce enriched uranium within months.“The capacities they have are there,” he said. “They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that. But as I said, frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there.”On Sunday, President Trump again dismissed reports that Iran had moved 400kg (880lb) on 60% enriched uranium ahead of the strikes on Fordow, regarded as the center of Iran’s enrichment program.“It’s very hard to do, dangerous to do, it’s very heavy, plus we didn’t give them much notice because they didn’t know they we were coming,” Trump told the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo.Trump speculated that vehicles seen near the entrances to Fordow before the strikes were likely masons brought in to seal up the facility. “There are thousands of tons of rock in that room right now,” Trump said. “They whole place was just destroyed.”However, the Washington Post reported on Sunday that the US obtained intercepted Iranian communications in which senior Iran officials remarked that damage from the attack was not as destructive and extensive as they anticipated.The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, scoffed at the Iranian claims in a comment to the Post in which she did not dispute that such communications had been intercepted.“The notion that unnamed Iranian officials know what happened under hundreds of feet of rubble is nonsense,” Leavitt said.Separately on Sunday, Abdolrahim Mousavi, Iran’s armed forces chief of staff, reportedly told the Saudi defense minister during a call that Tehran is not convinced Israel will honour the ceasefire that ended their 12-day war announced by Trump.“Since we are completely doubtful about the enemy honoring its commitments, including the ceasefire, we are prepared to give it a tough response in case of recurrence of an act of aggression”, Mousavi said, according to Turkey’s state-run news agency Anadolu.Israel and the US, “have shown that they do not adhere to any international rules and norms” the Iranian general added. “We did not initiate war, but we responded with all our power to the aggressor.” More

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      Trump sent ‘explicit’ threat to cut funds from University of Virginia, senator says

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      The University of Virginia (UVA) received “explicit” notification from the Trump administration that the school would endure cuts to university jobs, research funding and student aid as well as visas if the institution’s president, Jim Ryan, did not resign, according to a US senator.During an interview Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, Mark Warner, a Democratic senator for Virginia, defended Ryan – who had championed diversity policies that the president opposes – and predicted that Donald Trump will similarly target other universities.Warner said he understood that the former UVA president was told that if he “tried to fight back, hundreds of employees would lose jobs, researchers would lose funding, and hundreds of students could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld”.“There was indication that they received the letter that if he didn’t resign on a day last week, by 5 o’clock, all these cuts would take place,” Warner added. He also said he believes this to be the “most outrageous action” that the Trump administration has taken on education since it retook office in January.Ryan resigned from his position as UVA president on Friday. He was facing political pressure from Washington to step aside in order to resolve a justice department investigation into UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, the New York Times reported on the same day.“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” Ryan said in his resignation message to the university community. He expressed an unwillingness to risk the employment of other staff, as well as cuts to funding and financial aid for students.Ryan had a reputation for trying to make the UVA campus more diverse and encouraging students to perform community service. He had served as the university’s president since 2018.Warner criticized the administration for what he said was its overreach in education. He said federal education and justice department officials “should get their nose out of [the] University of Virginia”.“They are doing damage to our flagship university,” he remarked. “And if they can do it here, they’ll do it elsewhere.”He referred to Trump’s ongoing battles with Harvard, the US’s oldest university, including the president’s signing a proclamation to restrict foreign student visas and continued threats to cut funding over its DEI policies.“They all want to make them like Harvard,” Warner said. “End of the day, this is going to hurt our universities, chase away that world-class talent.“And, frankly, if we don’t have some level of academic freedom, then what kind of country are we?” More

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      Trump threatens to cut off New York City funds if Mamdani ‘doesn’t behave’

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      Donald Trump on Sunday threatened to cut New York City off from federal funds if favored mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, “doesn’t behave himself” should he be elected.Mamdani, meanwhile, denied that he was – as the president said – a communist. But he reaffirmed his commitment to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers while saying: “I don’t think that we should have billionaires.”In an interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, Trump argued that a Mamdani victory was “inconceivable” because he perceived the candidate to be “a pure communist”.He added: “Let’s say this – if he does get in, I’m going to be president, and he’s going to have to do the right thing, or they’re not getting any money. He’s got to do the right thing or they’re not getting any money.”More than $100bn flows to the city from the federal government through different entities and programs, according to the city’s comptroller last year.Speaking Sunday with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Mamdani said, “no, I am not” a communist.He also said that he had “already had to start to get used to the fact that the president will talk about how I look, how I sound, where I’m from, who I am – ultimately because he wants to distract from what I’m fighting for”.Mamdani said he was inspired by the US civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr, who once remarked: “Call it democracy or call it democratic socialism. There has to be a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children in this country.”He then reiterated his intent to raise taxes on New York’s wealthiest as part of a campaign pledge “to shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods”.“I don’t think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality – and ultimately what we need more of is equality across our city and across our state and across our country,” Mamdani said. “And I look forward to work with everyone, including billionaires, to make a city that is fairer for all of them.”Mamdani said the proposal reflected “a description of what we see right now”.“It’s not driven by race,” he said. “It’s more of an assessment of what neighborhoods are being undertaxed versus overtaxed.“It is not to work backwards from a racial assessment of neighborhoods or our city. Rather, it’s to ensure that we actually have an equal playing field.”Many New Yorkers and moderate Democratic politicians have expressed concern over Mamdani’s win over former governor Andrew Cuomo in the 24 June primary for the Democratic nomination.Among those to endorse him was progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But he has not been endorsed by many other prominent Democratic party figures, including the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, who said coolly after his win: “Obviously, there’s areas of difference in our positions, but I also think we need to have those conversations.”Mamdani said on Sunday that he was looking forward to discussions with Hochul, saying: “Ultimately, my policies, my vision, it’s driven by an assessment of what’s actually happening.”Asked if he thought moderate Democrats were afraid of him, Mamdani said: “I think that people are catching up to this election.“Ultimately what we’re showing is that by putting working people first, by returning to the roots of the Democratic party, we actually have a path out of this moment where we’re facing authoritarianism in Washington DC” under the Trump administration.In his comments on Mamdani’s having secured the Democrats’ nomination in the heavily Democratic city, Trump said: “It’s shocking.”“I used to say we will never have a socialist in this country,” the president said, in part.Asked about Mamdani’s proposals to oppose his administration’s immigration crackdown and to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he sets foot in New York, Trump said the mayoral candidate would “be very unsuccessful” on both counts.“He’s a radical left lunatic,” Trump said.Mamdani, for his part, said Democrats “need to be a party that’s not just against Donald Trump – but also for something”.“And our campaign was for working people, bringing dignity back into those lives,” Mamdani said. More

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      Trump considers forcing journalists to reveal sources who leaked Iran report

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      Donald Trump said he is weighing forcing journalists who published leaked details from a US intelligence report assessing the impact of the recent American military strikes on Iran to reveal their sources – and the president also claimed his administration may prosecute those reporters and sources if they don’t comply.In an interview Sunday with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, Trump doubled down on his claim that the 21 June airstrikes aimed at certain Iranian facilities successfully crippled Iran’s nuclear program. He insisted the attacks destroyed key enriched uranium stockpiles, despite Iranian assertions that the material had been relocated before the strikes.Trump dismissed the leaked intelligence assessment in question – which suggested the strikes only temporarily disrupted Iran’s nuclear development – as incomplete and biased. The report, circulated among US lawmakers and intelligence officials, concluded that the damage inflicted was significantly less than what Trump’s administration had publicly claimed.The president has attacked both Democratic lawmakers and members of the media for sharing portions of the classified analysis. He then threatened legal consequences for those responsible.During the interview, Bartiromo referenced a post Trump had shared on social media days earlier, in which he wrote: “The Democrats are the ones who leaked the information on the PERFECT FLIGHT to the Nuclear Sites in Iran. They should be prosecuted!”Trump then reiterated on-air that “they should be prosecuted”.“Who specifically?” Bartiromo asked.Trump replied: “You can find out – if they wanted, they could find out easily.”In recent days, Trump has targeted CNN and The New York Times for their reporting on the strikes. He has condemned the coverage as “unpatriotic” and even floated the possibility of legal action.The two outlets, along with several others, reported that preliminary findings from the US’s Defense Intelligence Agency indicated the strikes had only limited success. The bombings delayed Iran’s nuclear ambitions by several months but stopped short of destroying the program outright, according to the assessment.On Sunday, a social media account belonging to the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, accused Trump of needing to “exaggerate to cover up the truth and keep it secret” after the recent US military strikes “could not do anything”.Trump, in contrast, has repeatedly insisted that three nuclear facilities were “obliterated”.He elaborated on how his administration might pursue the sources of the leak.“You go up and tell the reporter, ‘national security – who gave it?’” Trump said. “You have to do that. And I suspect we’ll be doing things like that.”In the US, the constitution generally protects journalists from being compelled to reveal their sources – but there are limits to that reporter’s privilege, as it is colloquially known.The president had threatened to sue CNN and the New York Times for publishing articles about the preliminary intelligence report ahead of his comments to Bartiromo.In a letter to the Times, a lawyer for Trump said the article had damaged the president’s reputation and demanded that the outlet “retract and apologize for” the piece, which the letter described as “false,” “defamatory” and “unpatriotic”. More

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      This national monument is ‘part of the true history of the USA’. Will it survive Trump 2.0?

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      It’s easy to get lost in the Sáttítla Highlands in remote north-eastern California. There are miles of rolling lava fields, untouched forest and obsidian mountains. At night, the darkness and silence stretch on indefinitely.This is one of America’s newest national monuments. It’s also one of the most threatened.In January, the Pit River Tribe celebrated a victory decades in the making when Joe Biden granted federal protection to nearly 230,000 acres of forested lands with the creation of the Sáttítla Highlands national monument.“The awe-inspiring geological wonders collectively described here as the Sáttítla Highlands have framed the homelands of Indigenous communities and cultures for millennia,” the proclamation reads, recognizing the area as “profoundly sacred”.The tribe, along with environmental groups, had fought for years to safeguard the land from industrial energy development. The area just north of Mount Shasta, popular for recreation and some of the darkest nighttime skies in the US, is the site of the tribe’s creation story and regularly used for ceremonies.“This is a healing place for our people. It’s really tied to our traditional health,” said Brandy McDaniels, a member of the Pit River Tribe. “We’ve spent a lifetime trying to defend this area.”The designation ensures no future energy development and mineral extraction can occur on the land while keeping it available for public recreation.But then in March, Donald Trump said he would undo Biden’s action and roll back protections for Sáttítla and Chuckwalla national monument, which he argued “lock up vast amounts of land from economic development and energy production”.Although legal experts say there is no clear mechanism for a president to rescind monument protections – only to shrink them – the justice department argued in a recent memo that it is in fact within Trump’s authority to “alter a prior declaration”, suggesting the administration will move forward with efforts to remove national monument designations for hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness.View image in fullscreenNow, as the tribe tries to move forward after years of pushing with limited resources, pro bono attorneys and “scraping up every cent” to get to court hearings and protests, another battle could be on the horizon.‘Almost like you’re in another world’Located five hours north-east of the California state capitol in a sparsely populated region, Sáttítla is far off the beaten path.“You’re not trying to get somewhere else if you’re going there. It’s very dark, it’s very quiet, there’s no cellphone reception,” said Nick Joslin, the policy and advocacy director with the Mount Shasta Bioregional Ecology Center, an area environmental advocacy group. “It’s very easy to get lost.”The monument’s 224,676 acres include portions of the Modoc, Shasta-Trinity and Klamath national forests, are home to endangered and rare flora and fauna, massive underground volcanic aquifers that supply water to millions of people and store as much water as 200 of California’s largest surface reservoirs combined. Due to heavy snow, it’s largely only accessible by car for a few months of the year.The landscape, with its islands of old-growth pine forests, snow covered mountainsides and scattered lakes, is stunning and otherworldly. It is filled with unique geological features such as ice caves, lava tubes and lava flows, Joslin said. Then there is the half-million-year-old dormant volcano, roughly 10 times the size of Mount St Helens, within the monument. Locals routinely camp, hike the hundreds of miles of trails or take boats out on Medicine Lake.“It’s a place that’s known for its high quality of silence that you can’t experience in any other place, and also its night skies,” McDaniels said. “Depending on where you’re at, people describe it as it’s almost like you’re in another world, like you’re on another planet.”There are markers of human disruption. Checkerboard swaths of forest where trees have been clear cut, and large stretches of land with second-growth trees that look like toothpicks from the air.View image in fullscreenFor Indigenous people, this area is sacred as the place of the creation narrative of the Pit River Tribe. The tribe holds important ceremonies there and collects staple foods such as berries from manzanita and currant plants, sugar pine seeds, and plants used in medicinal capacities.“The landscape of the area literally tells the history of our people. In that way, it is part of the true history of the United States of America,” McDaniels said.An undeveloped landscape under threatThe tribe fought to protect the area for nearly three decades, she added, challenging geothermal development and large-scale logging.Because Sáttítla is a volcanic area, there was speculation that there might be enough heat to develop geothermal resources, and in the 1980s the federal government awarded leases on thousands of acres to private energy companies, said Deborah A Sivas, the director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Stanford.The Environmental Law Clinic represented the tribe in a series of litigation challenging the extension of some leases and proposed projects, arguing the federal government had failed to consult the tribe, Sivas said. Industrial energy development would have required a dramatic transformation of the landscape to achieve and the tribe was opposed to such an intrusion on sacred land, and feared the hydraulic fracturing used to generate geothermal energy could pollute the aquifers.Ultimately there wasn’t the resource potential initially thought, Sivas said. The final settlement with Calpine, the last remaining company with control over the land, was signed just two days after the monument declaration.While there has been broad community support for a monument, Joslin noted, some elected officials in the conservative region have been more tepid.Doug LaMalfa, a congressperson whose district includes Sáttítla, described Biden’s action as “executive overreach” and argued it would “create unnecessary challenges for land management, particularly in wildfire prevention and maintaining usage for local residents”.But there has been no organized opposition against the monument.Presidents have the authority to give protected status to land with cultural, scientific or historic resources of national significance, and Biden and other presidents have typically used it for conservation and to support tribes.In the case of Sáttítla, the designation protects against industrial energy development, but does not prevent recreation, Sivas said, or bar the US Forest Service from doing wildfire management work.But Trump has taken a combative stance on national monuments as part of his pro-energy agenda, slashing the size of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments during his first term (a move that was later reversed by Biden). Earlier this month, the Department of Justice issued a memorandum opinion arguing that Trump has the authority to not only shrink but entirely abolish national monuments created by his predecessor.View image in fullscreenBut the legal argument for that position appears tenuous. Sivas said the Antiquities Act, the statute under which national monuments are designated, does not give the president the authority to do so.“There’s no language in there that suggests that he could de-designate or roll back what prior presidents have done,” Sivas said. She added that the recent argument made by the administration was not particularly persuasive.Given the lack of opposition to Sáttítla, the move seems designed to instead test the limits of the president’s power, Sivas said. If the administration does proceed with a rollback, legal action will follow, she added, which she expects will make its way to the supreme court.“We will be filing litigation if that happens. This is a kind of a canary in the coal mine.”McDaniels described the efforts to rollback protections as “perplexing”. She pointed to the interior secretary Doug Burgum’s address to the National Congress of American Indians in which he indicated he didn’t believe the nation’s “most precious places”, such as parks and monuments, should be targeted for development.But the tribe is focused on celebrating the monument, informing the public about the significance of these lands and ensuring it continues to serve as a healing place for the Indigenous people who have endured a long history of genocidal acts and injustices, McDaniels said.“Truth and healing cannot begin if we’re constantly fighting to protect our sacred lands,” McDaniels said.“That’s what we don’t want for our kids, our grandkids and all future generations. Everybody deserves the right to experience the gifts that this land makes available for people.” More

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      How do we resist and rise? We have to believe the impossible is possible | V (Formerly Eve Ensler)

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      In this authoritarian and suffocating climate where being an American feels like a curse, where just breathing here feels like complicity with genocide, psychotic imperialism, misogyny and endless racism, it is hard to move, let alone imagine what one can do to transform this horror to good.Every day people are kidnapped by masked men in unmarked cars, taken to hidden sites and left in deplorable conditions; starving people in Gaza are slaughtered as they clamor for a bag of flour; public officials and leaders humiliated and murdered; the T erased from LGBT; brain-dead women forced to give birth; the glib language of hate and cruelty and easy thoughtless threats of world war, assassination, and dehumanization circling like invisible poison. What feels most perilous is the steady evaporation of the boundaries of what seemed impossible only a few weeks ago. Morality, compassion, care – slashed and burned.And yet I think of Beckett, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on”, “The world is essentially over. I will fight for another day”, “I have lost my faith in humans. I commit to love them more.”To live as Jung said – with two existing opposite thoughts at the same time. Survival right now depends on our ability to swim in this duality. To not linger in the pain, but to allow ourselves to be moved by it. To not whitewash reality, but also not to take up lodging in the house of despair. This is the dance of our times.We must become agile and flexible. To feel responsible but not so guilty we are immobilized. To feel rage but to learn how to direct it into action and passion and purpose. To lift ourselves to a more existential absurdist place where the fascists cannot touch us. Not disassociation or numbness, but finding the grace, energy and humor that come when we commit ourselves more deeply to one another.Before “No Kings” Day there was a part of me that frankly was tired of marching, wondering if these demonstrations really add up to anything. But then on 14 June, with an estimated 4 million to 6 million people in the streets of America, I realized something profound. Marches and demonstrations are not merely acts of resistance and refusal, but they are community events in which we meet and strengthen our resolve and bonds with our own tribe of like-minded people.They are public moments to show the rest of the world that we are the majority and we do not want and will not accept a king, or genocide in Gaza or precious immigrants being dragged off and separated from their families. They are places to let off steam and make great art and music and network and ultimately they are what we have, the expression of our collective sorrow and outrage, thereby saving our own souls.So how do we resist and rise? We have to believe the impossible is possible.I think of my sisters at the City of Joy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who give me inspiration and direction daily. The center is literally in the middle of a war zone. When the M23 militias invaded Bukavu in February, they made a radical decision to keep the center open despite the madness outside – gunfire, bombs and sometimes dead bodies on the road. They refused to stop building the world they dreamed. Instead, they developed strategies – coming to work on scooters, changing cars to avoid being noticed, keeping their hearts tuned to the work of healing survivors. It is now June and the 27th class of City of Joy is about to graduate and a new class is on the way.I think of one of my great inspirations, the former congresswoman Cori Bush who saw that in St Louis, after the recent tornado no local or national Fema had come or were coming. The majority of people had lost their homes or had huge holes in them. So she joined with local groups to provide tarps and food, cleaning products and formula. They formed hubs of care. They went to the senior homes who had lost electricity so there was no refrigeration for food or medicine and gave them both.She told me, “It’s my community. I believe that we take care of us. I learned through the Ferguson uprising that we can’t wait on politicians or leaders. We have to dive in and get to work. We have to talk to one another and know our communities. We need to organize in our living rooms, local businesses backyards – find out who amongst us are doctors, nurses, chefs, teachers. Knowing your community and what skills they can offer.” This is what we need to understand now more than ever.It is so clear something essential is dying. The illusion and seduction of the American dream is over. Neoliberalism is dead. There are huge cracks, openings in the old structures and narratives. These are opportunities to plant the seeds for the new world as we protect those suffering now.What the fascists want more than anything is our fear, exhaustion and despair. Or they want us angry, reactive, cruel and violent like them. In Cherien Dabis’s staggeringly brilliant saga about a family in Palestine, All That’s Left of You, (one of the best films I have ever seen), a married couple comes to a moral crisis and they turn to an iman for advice. This wise and very gentle iman tells them: “Your humanity is also your resistance. Don’t underestimate its power. It’s the only thing they can’t take away from you.” Every action matters now. Every effort small or large counts. And moving – movement is the essential key to dispelling despair. How we care now, how we love, how we come together, how we build and protect each other is in itself the building of the new world.

      V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright and activist and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls More

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      Fired federal workers lobby for help on Capitol Hill – is anyone listening?

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      The Tuesday Group was feeling something familiar as its members milled around a bank of elevators in the bustling basement of a Senate office building: rejection.They had often been told no over the past months – when the government moved to fire them with Donald Trump’s blessing, when judges rejected challenges to that decision and when the lawmakers who they have taken to tracking down on Capitol Hill once a week when Congress is in session would turn a deaf ear to their pleas.More than 59,000 federal workers have lost their jobs since Trump took office, according to government data, but those in power have not changed their tune.This Tuesday morning, it was staffers of Maine’s Republican senator Susan Collins who had told them no, even after they staged an impromptu sit-in in her office for the better part of a half hour. So they proceeded five floors down to the basement of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, hoping that some senator – any senator – would give them a moment of their time.Then the elevator doors opened and who should come out but Collins. “Senator Collins!” someone in the group yelled. Another tried to introduce themselves: “I’m a fired federal worker.” But the senator began waving her hands in front of her in an unmistakable sign of: I don’t have time for this.“Thank you,” Collins said, as she made her way down the hall.“It’s somewhat typical,” observed Whitt Masters, a former USAID contractor who has been unemployed since the end of March, when the company employing him decided to file for bankruptcy after its client began to shut down.“You know, I don’t expect every senator to stop and speak with us. I wish she’d been a bit more approachable, especially since we had spent some time in her office earlier today.”What’s been dubbed the Tuesday Group has come around the Capitol since mid-February, as Trump and Elon Musk’s campaign to thin out the federal workforce began to bite. Some who show up have been fired, others are on paid leave while a judge considers whether it is legal to fire them, and those who work for USAID expect to officially lose their jobs next Tuesday, when the agency shuts down.Democrats often welcome them, but when it comes to the Republicans who control Congress – and are weighing legislation to codify some cuts and make deeper ones in the next fiscal year – the reception has been uneven. They’ve been ignored, blown off and belittled – all things they would experience last Tuesday, their 17th visit to the Hill.Their encounter with Collins fruitless, the group formed something of a gauntlet at the intersection of a hallway leading between office buildings and to the Senate subway, a place where lawmakers were sure to pass on a scorcher of a day.They would call out to any face they recognized, but the group of 10 was nothing a determined senator couldn’t handle. Montana Republican Tim Sheehy speed-walked by with a reporter and cameraman in pursuit; Washington Democrat Patty Murray pounded past in sneakers; and Arkansas Republican John Boozman ambled through alone, displaying no sign that he knew the group was even there.“Would you like to hear how we are impacting your constituents?” asked Stephie Duliepre, who was fired from her Science for Development fellowship program at USAID, when Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn came around the corner. The senator pushed on, the answer apparently being no.John Hoeven, a Republican from North Dakota, exited a stairwell that deposited him right in the middle of the group. He appeared to recognize them – on a previous visit, attendees said that Hoeven had discussed his support for folding a major USAID food assistance program into the state department. “I see you’re still working on it,” he quipped, before heading off.The Democrats they encountered uttered words of encouragement, and a few stopped to talk. “Don’t give up,” Dick Durbin of Illinois said when he encountered the group. “I’m with you,” Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin called out.South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham attempted the silent treatment as he came past, but Amelia Hertzberg, who was on administrative leave from her job in the Environmental Protection Agency, was not having it. She followed him down the hall, and started prancing around to get his attention.“You have a bright future,” Hertzberg recalls the senator saying. “Well, I was going to have a bright future, and then I was fired,” she replied.The group spotted Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican and prominent Trump ally. “Senator Hawley, these are fired federal workers. Do you have a second to talk to them?” asked Melissa Byrne, a community organizer who had put together the group.“No,” he replied.The group was aghast, but they’d been treated worse. When Mack Schroeder encountered Indiana Republican Jim Banks one Tuesday and introduced himself as having been fired from the Department of Health and Human Services, the senator replied, “You probably deserved it,” before calling him “a clown”.That was in April. The incident made the news, Banks refused to apologize, and the Tuesday Group kept showing up.“I’ve spoken to the media and been on the radio. I’ve called my senators, my representatives, and it feels a little bit like shouting into a void,” said Hertzberg, who has made about 12 visits to the Capitol now.“So it feels good to go into senator’s offices and be there and take up space for a while and make them see, or their staff see that there is a person behind all this.” More

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      The ongoing fight to replace racist monuments in the US: ‘requires a lot of perseverance’

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      After nearly half a decade, Vinnie Bagwell, a self-taught sculptor-artist, is still waiting for the million dollars that the New York City department of cultural affairs promised for her to work on monument Victory Beyond Sims, after winning the artist competition to replace the monument of Dr J Marion Sims in 2020.“It just requires a lot of diligence and perseverance,” she said to the Guardian. “A lot of times, people don’t realize how important and impactful art in public places is until they see it.”Sims was a 19th-century gynecologist known for experimenting on 12 enslaved and poor immigrant women without consent. City officials removed his monument in April 2018 after a unanimous vote by the Public Design Commission.Bagwell will be the first Black woman to have a memorial on Fifth Avenue. Bagwell began sculpting in 1993 and created the First Lady of Jazz in Yonkers, the first public artwork made by a contemporary African American woman commissioned by a municipality in the United States.Her 9ft (2.7-meter) monument is of a Black woman with 14ft wings, only the second Black Angel statue to be visible publicly in the US.The shape of Africa cut away from the woman’s heart symbolizes the enslavement of 12 million people over hundreds of years. On her right side the braille will read “My Soul looks back and wonders how I got over!” and on the left it will read “Primum non nocere!” (First do no harm).View image in fullscreenTo honor the suffering of Sims’s victims, whose anguish brought advancement to the field of gynecology, there will be 12 women silhouetted on her back. A slave ship is also depicted on the back to illustrate the inhumanity of slavery. The names of the survivors we know will be emblazoned into the helm of the garment.Bagwell hopes that the monument, which will be across the street from the New York Academy of Medicine, will function as a vehicle of change for the community. “Women are more under fire now than we were before. So many of us women have lost a lot of the right to control our bodies. New York is still safe, but [women in] Arkansas aren’t,” she says. “When you look at some of the things that this particular administration is talking about, they’re talking about going backward; that is still something to be concerned about.”Bagwell’s situation is not unique, with many other cities also stalling progress to replace Confederate statues and symbols. However, Vinnie has encountered many obstacles.First, a committee chose artist Simone Leigh as the winner, even though community members had voted for Bagwell. After a heated debate, the city ultimately reversed its decision. Then, the city attempted to cut $250,000 from its budget but failed. Bagwell has been waiting longer than the typical 90 days after signing her contract to receive the money.In a statement to the Guardian, the department stated its excitement about the project moving forward. “New York City has taken bold steps in the effort to foster a collection of public artworks that better reflect who we are as a city, including this project – long called for by the local community – to commission a new monument for this site in East Harlem,” they note.“This administration remains committed to fostering a diverse, vibrant public art collection that more fully represents the vast range of stories, experiences, and backgrounds that define New Yorkers. We’re excited for the Victory project to move ahead.”View image in fullscreenOn 23 June, the design commission voted unanimously to approve Bagwell’s designs, and she can now begin work.Bagwell’s situation reflects a broader failure to follow through on legislation and promises made following the 2020 racial justice protests, where Americans dismantled statues of Confederate soldiers that stood in their communities after the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man.In 2021, Joe Biden passed legislation to replace the monument of Roger Taney, a pro-slavery chief justice who served on the court from 1836 until 1864, with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first African American supreme court justice, in the United States Capitol. The intended deadline for the building of the statute was December 2024, but that month, a source familiar with the matter said the joint committee on the library had only just signed off on a memorandum to begin the process.Now, a 2025 executive order signed by Donald Trump mandating that the secretary of the interior restore monuments removed in the last five years puts in jeopardy the already fragile progress made by past laws to diversify the public landscape in the US.Jamaican sculptor Basil Watson said that it’s “very possible” that more people are now in support of removing objects that help tell Black stories. “It’s the risk we take that is part of the struggle,” he said. Watson worked to replace a Confederate monument with a John Lewis memorial in Decatur, Georgia. “It would be a tragedy if it were to be removed, but then we’ll just have to do it again,” he said. “The journey cannot be stopped.”In 2017, Trump tweeted: “the beauty [Confederate monuments] that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”This debate on the rise and fall of monuments dates back to the 1870s. In 1876, Frederick Douglass called into question the making of the Emancipation Memorial, built by artist Thomas Bell in Washington DC. The creation of the statute was funded using donations from recently freed people.View image in fullscreenWhile the city created the monument to honor emancipation, it depicted a white man holding out his hand over a chained kneeling Black man, a design Douglass found problematic. “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the Negro, not couched on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man,” he said. DC officials removed the statute in 2021, and advocates are still discussing its replacement.Nearly 150 years after Douglass’s speech, only 10% of the top 50 national monuments are of Black and Indigenous people, according to an audit completed by the Monument Lab, a non-profit public art and history studio.“The story of this continent is not reflected in our monument landscape in full,” said Paul Farber, the director and co-founder of the Monument Lab. “The monuments we have tell a partial story. Adding a monument or the selective removal of a monument can have a profound effect for a city or town. If we don’t respond to the erasures, the lies by design we will be doomed to repeat. Our audit also showed that 99.4% of monuments were not taken down in 2021 or 2022.”The Trump administration’s influence has now rolled back even that little bit of progress. This year, Pete Hegseth rolled back the names of two military forts to their namesakes of confederate soldiers. Following pressure from Republicans, Washington DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, also ordered the destruction of the Black Lives Matter plaza in front of the White House.Trump has proposed reviving his controversial National Garden of American Heroes, using money cut from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which ended hundreds of grants for libraries, museums and archives. The garden would include George Washington and Christopher Columbus statues alongside Martin Luther King Jr, Kobe Bryant and Whitney Houston.“When you look at some of the things that this particular administration is talking about, they’re talking about going backward,” Bagwell says. “That is still something to be concerned about.”View image in fullscreenNationally, Republicans have been mixed on the issue of inclusion in public spaces. A Kentucky state senator, Chris McDaniel, is still advocating for the replacement of a Confederate statue. In 2020, he pre-filed a bill that would replace Jefferson Davis in the Capitol Rotunda with Carl Brashear, the first African American US navy master diver born in Tonieville, Kentucky.“His story is inspirational,” he says. “That’s what monuments are supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be able to point to people and say: ‘This is somebody you can look up to.’”McDaniel’s bill to replace Davis in the Capitol is at a standstill as the Kentucky Capitol Arts Advisory Committee and other legislators must weigh in on who they believe deserves to be honored.Mississippi’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, has shown mixed messages about Confederate symbols in his state. During the 2020 election, almost 73% of people in Mississippi voted to remove the Confederate flag with a new state’s flag. “This is not a political moment to me but a solemn occasion to lead our Mississippi family to come together, to be reconciled and to move on,” Reeves said after the vote and before it was eventually replaced.In the same year, Reeves simultaneously opposed the removal of Confederate monuments. “I reject the mobs tearing down statues of our history, north and south, Union and Confederate, founding fathers and veterans,” he says. “I reject the chaos and lawlessness, and I am proud it has not happened in our state.” ​Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative who led the building of Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, a civil rights museum that works to reshape the racist narratives about African Americans in Alabama, explains Reeves’s messaging.“I think it’s a struggle, a competing narrative, and sometimes they give away a little something by holding on to something that makes what they’re giving away feel acceptable,” he tells the Guardian. Stevenson says it “is about power, because most of the people who are kind of in control of these things [are] aligned, in my view, with this problematic history. We can’t accept just what [they’re] gonna give” us.Some artists who have worked to replace Confederate monuments with ones that honor Black history have succeeded and received praise despite government resistance. In Roanoke, Virginia, the city sculptor commissioned Lawrence Bechtel to replace a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee with one of Henrietta Lacks.View image in fullscreenLacks’ cells, now called HeLa, were taken without her knowledge in 1951 and have now become vital to medical research; they have been used to develop polio and Covid-19 vaccines. It took about four years for the city to raise the money for the statue and a year from the contract being signed for Bechtel to build the monument.“I had bought a veil to cover it over, and everyone was invited to come close as the veil was pulled off, and people just mobbed it. It was fantastic,” he says. “It was just wonderful. It was very uplifting.” Bechtel said he has yet to receive a negative email.Watson, who built a monument of John Lewis to replace a memorial put in place by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, recalls the community’s excitement about the monument before he even finished. “The idea of putting up John Lewis in its place was quite exciting for the community, and since it has been up, I have had nothing but positive responses,” he says.Watson remains steadfast in his belief that the inclusivity of public art is crucial. “I think we artists need to represent our community; we need to have our values represented in our environment,” he says. “I think it’s important that we do have art in our community that represents the truth, represents our values, represents our history, and points our way forward.”Stevenson, a civil rights lawyer, believes that reclaiming the narrative in public spaces can challenge the racist narratives embedded into some Americans’ mindset.When he first started working in public art, there were 59 markers and monuments honoring the Confederacy in his state yet none paid tribute to Alabama’s history of being the state with one of the largest slave populations, so he and his team worked to create plaques in public spaces that honored those who were enslaved.View image in fullscreenHe refers to the process of reframing public conversation as narrative work, responding to the racist views long perpetuated by institutions. With the building and taking down of monuments, he suggests that we need a new framework to tell the full story of American history as a nation.“I think we have to find a better way to help people in this country recognize that there’s a place for people of African descent in this country and that our stories can’t be denied any longer,” Stevenson says.Bagwell also emphasizes the importance of honoring African Americans’ vital contributions to American society through public art. “It’s just stunning that we have made so much out of so little,” she says. “The contributions we’ve made to this country are phenomenal, and they should be remembered because we are very much a part of what made America great in the first place.” More