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      ‘An underground thing’: what happens to a pet when its owners are targeted by immigration raids?

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      On 1 February, Kyle Aaron Reese saw a Facebook post from an old school friend urgently looking for someone to adopt a dog named Benny. Benny’s owners had just been deported after an immigration raid in New York City; faced with high costs and uncertainty, they hadn’t been able to take Benny with them. Reese did not have to stare long at the photo of the jowly bulldog’s silly smile before jumping in his car to go pick him up.“Everything about what I learned about that dog made me want him more,” said Reese, who is 39 and lives in Brooklyn.Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign started just days after his inauguration. Officers from federal law enforcement agencies have carried out raids in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Diego, Denver, Miami, Atlanta and other large cities, stoking fears in communities across the country. More than 8,000 immigrants have been arrested, NBC reported.Undocumented people are staying home from work and school, drawing up plans in case they are separated from their children, and tracking confirmed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raids on social media. Some are also worrying about what will happen to family pets.View image in fullscreenEnlace Latino, a public service journalism outlet for Latino immigrant communities based in North Carolina, published a piece shortly after Trump took office titled: “How can I plan for my pets’ future if I am detained or deported?” Steps include finding a trusted caregiver who agrees to watch after the pet, setting aside money for the pet’s care, and writing detailed notes about the pet’s breed, diet, medications, vaccinations and veterinarian.Benny’s owners, who declined to comment, left Benny with a close family friend, who used Facebook to permanently place him with Reese.“It’s almost like an underground thing,” Reese said of local efforts to re-home pets after Ice raids. “There’s no network in place, because we didn’t realize this was an issue. But people are really stepping up.”No one knows how many pets have been separated from their families due to Ice raids. A representative for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals wrote in an email that “it’s too soon to identify any specific trends” in animal shelter admissions due to immigration raids.Flatbush Cats, a Brooklyn non-profit that traps, neuters and releases stray cats to reduce the population of street cats, also runs an adoption program; Reese is a volunteer there.“We’re hearing heartbreaking word-of-mouth stories from one neighbor to the next,” said Will Zweigart, the group’s founder. “This morning, one of our volunteers was crying her heart out on the way to the clinic with a cat that belongs to some neighbors she knows are being displaced by a landlord who was creating unfavorable living conditions for them because he knows they’re undocumented and not in a position to fight back.” They made the painful decision to re-home the cat while they look for safe housing.When established immigrant advocate organizations and local-level rapid response groups are focused on preventing detentions, deportations and family separation, concerns about adopting out animals might not seem like a priority. Still, leaving a pet behind can be devastating, and knowing it will be properly looked after may provide some comfort to immigrant owners. “Pets are family,” Zweigard said.View image in fullscreenNaomi Pardasie, 28, is a naturalized US citizen, but her husband is not. In January, five Ice agents came to their apartment door. The couple did not let them in, and the agents waited outside for 45 minutes. Rattled by the encounter, Pardasie’s husband stayed home from his construction job for two weeks.The couple decided to voluntarily head back to Trinidad, where they’re from, in April. They’re bringing their cats – Oatmeal, Olive, Onyx and Zoboomafoo – with them.“They’ve been with us since they were born,” Pardasie, who works as a housekeeper and bartender, said. “I’ve known their moms, their dads, their moms’ moms and dads’ dads. I watched them come into this world, and it would be hard to just leave them here.” She is currently raising money to pay for their airfare and required vet visits.“Animals come into our lives for a reason,” Pardasie said. “It’s scary to know that people who don’t have the money to get their animals into another country have to leave them behind.”The US’s animal shelters are full. Last October, Animal Care Centers of New York, the city’s largest shelter, announced that it would no longer accept dog surrenders due to overcrowding.“Animal shelters should be a lifeline for communities in times of crisis, but with chronic overcrowding, they’re often unavailable when they’re needed most,” Zweigart said. “The same thing happened in Los Angeles with the fires – the animals had to be transported somewhere else because local shelters were full. This highlights where we’re headed: as more and more people are displaced for different reasons, we’re not able to take care of animals.”Reese, who adopted Benny the bulldog, says that when institutions fail, communities can step in. “When people are deported, what happens to their animals is such a small part of the bigger issue,” he said. “But if we can take care of the animals, that’s something we can do when we feel like we have little control over everything else.” More

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      Did RFK Jr really drink fish medicine? He definitely has weird ideas about ‘making America healthy again’ | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr is many things, but he is not a tropical fish. Someone should probably tell him this because he appears to be guzzling fish medicine. Last week, a video of RFK sitting on a plane and putting a strange blue liquid into his glass of water went viral. It’s not clear what he was taking, but online sleuths are convinced it was methylene blue, which is used to treat parasites in fish as well as aquatic ailments such as swim bladder disease.To be fair, methylene blue does have human uses – in the US, it is FDA-approved to treat a rare blood disorder. Over the last few years, however, it has been touted as a miracle drug in wellness circles and people have been using it off-label in the hopes of staving off everything from jet lag to ageing. “Looks like RFK Jr is in on one of the best-kept secrets in biohacking – methylene blue,” wrote one prominent wellness influencer after the viral video. “When used correctly, it’s a gamechanger for mental clarity and longevity.”That’s a stretch. While some studies show methylene blue may help with those things, self-medicating is a bad idea. Too much of the stuff can turn your urine blue, for one thing. More importantly, it can interact with certain medications, which can have serious consequences.We don’t know for sure that it was methylene blue. But we do know that Kennedy, who is a prominent anti-vaxxer, has a lot of strange – and arguably very dangerous – ideas about medicine. These may stem from some of his own health problems, including one issue he memorably said “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”. According to the New York Times, the worm may have actually been a “pork tapeworm larva”. Tapeworms aside, Kennedy’s wellness opinions would be entirely his business were it not for the fact that he is closing in on the role of secretary of health and human services and is poised to inflict his ideas on the rest of us, all in the name of a movement he has termed “Make America Healthy Again” (Maha). Like every Maga movement, this one is being aggressively monetised: Kennedy has applied to trademark Maha for use in marketing potential products including food supplements, vitamins and (oddly) vaccines.Some people are aghast at his ideas; others are ecstatic about the prospect of him upending the US’s approach to food and healthcare. There has been a lot of coverage about the “crunchy moms” who are quite justifiably horrified about all the rubbish that is in processed foods and are thrilled by the Maha agenda.It’s interesting, however, to see just how much of the discourse around Maha seems to focus on woo-woo-women and their silly little wellness ideas, because – as Kennedy demonstrates – it’s men who are increasingly dominating the alternative health (if you’re being diplomatic) or pseudoscientific quackery (if you’re not) space. That’s partly because Silicon Valley has rebranded being obsessed with your health as “biohacking”. Men who are into biohacking and longevity don’t casually take vitamin pills like the rest of us. No, no, they build supplementation protocols and personalised “supplement stacks”. Supplementing appears to have become an extreme sport among a certain type of wellness bro: the more pills you swallow, the more macho you are. Bahram Akradi, the 63-year-old CEO of a gym chain, for example, recently said he’s been taking “about 45 to 50” pills every morning for years. Meanwhile, Bryan Johnson, the 47-year-old tech entrepreneur who is spending millions of dollars trying to de-age himself, takes more than 100 pills a day. According to one interview, he wakes up at 4.30am and takes 57 pills, does some ab stimulation, then takes 34 more.Spending a fortune on experimental pills, and not even the fun kind, is about as stupid as it sounds. I don’t know what Akradi has been taking, but for about five years Johnson was downing a pill called rapamycin that had been found to extend the lifespan of mice. But Johnson is not a mouse and he recently quit taking it because another study found it might increase ageing in humans. I think Alanis Morissette would call this ironic, don’t you think?Anyway, the upshot of all this is that the takeover of the US government by weirdos with dangerous ideas continues apace. Meanwhile, remember that you are not a mouse or a fish, and design your “supplementation protocol” accordingly. More

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      ‘It’s a constant weight’: Americans struggle with record credit card debt

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      US credit card debt reached a record $1.17tn in the third quarter of 2024, growing from $770bn in the first quarter of 2021 and the share of active credit card holders making just minimum payments rose to 10.75%, the highest percentage ever in data going back to 2012.The Guardian spoke with individuals around the US about their experiences and issues with credit card and other personal debt. They requested to remain anonymous for privacy concerns about personal finances.Angela, a 42-year-old teacher in Virginia, explained she and her husband had struggled with paying off about $20,000 in credit card debt accrued mostly from paying medical bills not covered by her health insurance from infertility issues.“The medicines, procedures, and travel all hit us hard,” she said. “It just piles up and it piles up and you have to miss a payment because something else in life happens, and or you don’t make the payment you want to make, and it just starts to kind of snowball on you.”The debt has made it difficult to save anything and is always looming on her.“It’s a constant weight in the back of my mind which clouds all my little joys,” said Angela. “With inflation, cost of living rising, and life, I have struggled to pay down the debt. We do less, stress about what we can spend on or can afford.”A 54-year-old woman in Ohio said she lost her job in 2024 and was not approved for unemployment benefits because she was classified as a subcontractor, adding to debt she already had from medical bills and home repairs.“I’m now unable to pay them, and I can’t find a job due to a tight market and most likely age discrimination,” she said. “My debt has escalated to the equivalent of half my typical annual income. This and the inability to find a job have left me with no choice but to remain in a very unhappy, toxic, romantic relationship.”A 35-year-old software engineer in Los Angeles, California, said she accrued significant personal debt putting herself through engineering school at the age of 29, but despite making a salary of over $100,000 a year, she still struggles with paying it off and keeping up with bills.“I’m now facing huge interest rates and can barely pay down principal balances,” they said. “Student loans only covered my rent. If additional student loans existed for people in situations like mine, I wouldn’t have needed to charge so much to my credit cards.”This week the senators Bernie Sanders and Josh Hawley introduced a bill to cap credit card interest rates to 10% for the next five years, which Trump has claimed he would support. The average credit card interest rate is 28.6%, despite banks being able to borrow from the Federal Reserve at less than 4.5%.About 82% of all US adults have at least one credit card, with the average about four credit cards per US consumer, according to Experian, and the average household has over $21,000 in credit card debt.A 69-year-old retiree in Moody, Alabama, said she lived check to check on social security and had had no choice but to rely on credit card debt for food, bills and other living expenses.“I am constantly stressed about money,” she said, adding it had created anxiety, depression and sleeping issues.A 47-year-old teacher in Mesa, Arizona, said he had fallen into debt trying to provide for a family of four, and covering the funeral costs for his mother, even as he said he had been “working my car to the bone for gig work to pick up the slack”.A 72-year-old in California said she only made a little over $1,200 a month from social security, but more than half of it went toward a debt consolidation payment.“Money is always an issue with me, I’m currently keeping my debt at bay with loans out of what little I have for retirement, but still losing about half my monthly income to debt repayment that I wish I could be saving for a home.”A 53-year-old in Connecticut explained he had fallen into significant credit card debt after losing his small business due to the pandemic shutdowns, from barely ever using credit cards to maxing out several, even after finding a job, which was difficult at his age.“The pay was a fraction of what my business was pulling in and at this point, I maxed out the credit cards as I didn’t have a lot of credit on them to begin with. I have since taken out two personal loans and got a third credit card. All of them are maxed out,” they said. “I’ve gained 60lb, my hair has been falling out, and I can’t sleep more than four hours a night.”Money owed on revolving debt grew 52.5% to $645bn, from a decade low of $423bn in second quarter 2021, according to a report by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve.Twenty-three per cent of Americans with less than $25,000 annual income have no bank account. Forty-six per cent of Americans with annual incomes between $50,000 and $99,999 carried a credit card balance, while low-income Americans were more likely to predominantly use buy now, pay later, payday or pawn shop loans, with average annual interest rates of payday loans at 400%, with many much higher.According to data from the US Federal Reserve, 6% of Americans used a payday loan in 2023, up 1% from 2022, with users more likely to be low-income, Black and Hispanic adults, and adults with a disability.David, a 57-year-old gig worker and educator in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, said he first took out a payday loan about six years ago when he lived in Oklahoma and had just started a new job and needed a loan to bridge the gap between paychecks.He said he was offered more money for the loan than he asked for, and as he made payments, the lender frequently offered to extend him more credit.“They report every late payment, every non-payment to the collection agencies, and I got into a merry-go-round, in over my head, and it wrecked my credit score,” said David. “There’s no negotiating, settling, or anything like that with payday lenders.”He said the collection tactics included calling his place of employment, calling the references on his initial loan application, to demand payment from him, which continued to grow with high interest rates and added fees. The length of time and impact it had on him had given him major depression and suicidal thoughts, he said.“They’re so predatory on very vulnerable people,” he added. “I can’t even get my own apartment without a co-signer. It’s just humiliating.” More

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      ‘I became collateral damage’: the trans pilot falsely targeted over Washington DC crash

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      Jo Ellis is alive.It was a non-controversial, irrefutable fact – until she was accused of piloting the military helicopter that collided with a commercial airplane in Washington DC on 29 January, killing all involved.After the crash, before valid explanations began to surface, Donald Trump blamed diversity. There is no evidence that diversity initiatives played any role in the crash, but that didn’t matter.Ellis, 34, wasn’t involved in the crash in any way. But she is a Black Hawk pilot in the Virginia national guard. And she’s transgender.In the immediate aftermath of the crash, two of the helicopter pilots killed were named, but the family of the third pilot initially elected to keep her name private, though she was later identified. Ellis was misidentified as the pilot in the in-between.On Friday morning, Ellis got a text from a close friend at about 4.30am telling her a random account was commenting on all of his public Facebook posts asking if he was friends with Ellis, “the one that killed those people in the crash”. She thought it was maybe a bot and discounted it.Ellis, who has been in the Virginia national guard since 2009 and has deployed to Iraq and Kuwait, had written for the news website Smerconish.com about being trans in the military on 28 January and then spoken to the commentator Michael Smerconish for an interview. She thought the attention was because of her article.In the article, she wrote that she grew up in a religious and conservative home with a history of military service, but that she knew she had gender dysphoria since she was five years old. She tried to be “more religious, more successful, more manly” in hopes it would “cure” her.“I got married, bought a house, helped raise a stepdaughter, played drums in the church band, and adopted a dog,” she wrote. “All the things I believed a good man should do. And I really wanted to do those things, but I also secretly hoped it would fix me. It didn’t work.”She realized during the pandemic that she was at a point where she could begin to address her gender dysphoria. She notified her command in 2023 that she would begin transitioning and came out to her unit in 2024 and got “overwhelming support”, she wrote. She paid for all of her trans-related care out of pocket.Ellis said she believed she was targeted because she’s a trans woman.“Once I put that article out, I became collateral damage, just like so many other trans people that are being unnecessarily targeted.”Later, on the Friday morning after the crash, another friend sent her screenshots of an article on a Pakistani website that included Ellis’s photo and claimed she was the third pilot. (This article, which says Ellis was “rumored to be” the unnamed pilot, is still uncorrected.)“Then the Daily Mail called my personal cellphone and asked if I was alive,” Ellis said. “And that’s when it kind of sunk in. And I was like, oh, this is big. This is not some corner of the internet saying something ridiculous.”She discovered that her name was trending on X, with some posts getting hundreds of thousands of views. “Why is this only on Twitter?” rightwing commentator Ann Coulter wrote on X, sharing a post about Ellis being the pilot. One account said the crash could be “another trans terror attack”.People opined that she hated Trump and was motivated by that hatred to act, killing herself and dozens of others to make a point. Trump issued an executive order banning trans people from joining or serving openly in the military, though it did not immediately kick trans people out. A group of trans military members have sued over the order.Ellis says she’s a political moderate and has voted red more than blue. “I didn’t say anything negative about Trump. I just said I want to keep serving.”Ellis posted on Facebook on Friday morning to try to quash the rumors, asking people to report any posts naming her as the pilot. But she soon realized that wouldn’t suffice, so she made a video. Proof of life.“Interesting morning,” she starts in the video. “It is insulting to the families to try to tie this to some sort of political agenda. They don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve this. And I hope that you all know that I am alive and well, and this should be sufficient for you all to end all the rumors.”She went quiet from there, packed some bags, and left her home for the night after arranging armed security and arming herself. She worried someone might use public records to find her home and try to hurt her family.The response to her video was overwhelmingly, though not uniformly, positive. Some people messaged her to say said she should have been on the helicopter instead, or that it’s nice she was alive but she shouldn’t be in the military because she’s mentally ill. Others shared anti-trans and antisemitic (she had said in the Smerconish interview that she was exploring the faith) comments on social media.But she said the video ultimately worked, due in large part to the misinformation being easy to debunk. “All I had to do was say I’m alive, and that kind of broke the whole rumor,” she said.She watched as people started correcting the rumor. She saw some veteran, pro-Trump accounts telling others they shouldn’t be going after a member of the military like this. Two days after the rumors reached a fever pitch, it appeared, she said, as if the misinformation was stopped in its tracks.She has tried unsuccessfully to report some remaining social media posts that falsely claim she was a pilot. “Calling me a murderer is apparently not a violation of X rules,” she said.She said she was not deterred from speaking out again, though. Her guard supported her throughout the ordeal, and it affirmed she wants to continue serving in the military.“I know not everyone loves me back, and that’s OK, but I want to serve everyone,” she said. “I want to use this incident somehow as a form of good. I don’t know what that looks like yet, but I really want to turn this into something that does good for the world.“I don’t want to make it about me,” she added. “I don’t want to be the victim or the martyr. I want to show people that being strong and standing up to this hate, that hopefully something good can come from it.” More

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      What Republicans really mean when they blame ‘DEI’ | Mehdi Hasan

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      In 1981, Lee Atwater, the most influential Republican party strategist of the late 20th century, sat down for an off-the-record interview with the political scientist Alexander P Lamis. At the time, Atwater was a junior member of the Reagan administration, but he would later go on to run George HW Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988 and then become chair of the Republican National Committee in 1989.In perhaps the most revealing, and most infamous, portion of the interview, the hard-charging Republican operative explained to Lamis how Republican politicians could mask their racism – and racist appeals to white voters – behind a series of euphemisms.
      You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘[N-word, N-word, N-word]’. By 1968 you can’t say ‘[N-word]’ – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites … ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘[N-word, N-word]’.
      Got that? No need to utter the N-word out loud as there were plenty of other “abstract” ways to say it.Today, more than four decades later, DEI has become the new N-word; the new rightwing abstraction deployed by Republicans to conceal their anti-Black racism. DEI – short for diversity, equity and inclusion – is thrown around by high-profile conservatives, from the president of the United States downwards, for the express purpose of undermining Black people in public life.Don’t believe me? In a recent interview on Fox News, the White House counselor and former Trump lawyer Alina Habba declared that the administration’s 27-year-old press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, “is overqualified, brilliant and was well-versed and ready … she didn’t need a thick binder … unlike our last press secretary who was put in there for … DEI reasons”.For the record, the “last press secretary”, Karine Jean-Pierre, is the Black daughter of Haitian immigrants. Is she less qualified than her successor? Well, let’s compare résumés, shall we?Neither Habba herself, nor Leavitt, are Ivy League grads.Jean-Pierre is.Neither Habba herself, nor Leavitt, worked in two different administrations before securing their top White House positions.Jean-Pierre did.Neither Habba herself, nor Leavitt, has served on three different election-winning presidential campaigns across three different decades.Jean-Pierre has.So when Habba says Jean-Pierre was appointed White House press secretary for “DEI reasons”, what else could she be alluding to other than that she is a Black woman?When the Republican congressman Tim Burchett called Kamala Harris – the then sitting vice-president, former senator and former attorney general of the country’s most populous state; a woman who would have entered the Oval Office with a longer record in elected office than Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump – a “DEI hire” within 24 hours of her becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, what else could he have been referring to other than that she is a Black woman?When a viral tweet (26m views and counting) from a popular far-right account (that is also amplified by Elon Musk) referred to Brandon Scott – the mayor of Baltimore who was elected with 70% of the vote and previously served eight years on the city council, including a stint as city council president – as the city’s “DEI mayor”, what else could it have been trying to point to other than that he is a Black man?DEI is the new N-word. In fact, the Black podcaster Van Lathan argues that DEI is now “worse than the N-word” and has become “the worst slur in American history”. The term “DEI hire”, he explains, “is not just being used to undermine the qualifications, capability and readiness of Black people … DEI is placing the blame of all of society’s ills at the feet of these people.”Plane crash? Blame DEI. Wildfires in LA? Blame DEI. Bridge collapse? Blame DEI.DEI is a racist dogwhistle. Blame Black people is the not so unsubtle message.You now cannot turn on the television or log on to social media without coming across a prominent conservative blathering on about the evils of DEI. To quote the loathsome Fox host Greg Gutfeld, DEI “can be used to explain everything … except, unlike racism and climate change, which the left found under every rock, every issue, DEI is, indeed, under every rock because the Democrats put it there.”This isn’t a good-faith critique of diversity programs or policies – whether they actually work or not; whether they restrict free speech; whether they are corporate box-ticking exercises. No, this is the weaponization of a three-letter term to denigrate Black people and pretend the political and economic advancement of minority communities over the past 60 years was a mistake. (“If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘Boy, I hope he is qualified,” the rightwing activist and top Trump ally Charlie Kirk casually remarked last year.)So why on earth is our “liberal” media credulously giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt on this? Treating their obsession with DEI as anything other than what it is? Anti-Black racism. The new N-word. A three-letter slur that seeks to, once again, mainstream bigotry and discrimination in the United States. (“DEI halftime show,” tweeted the far-right influencer Jack Posobiec during the Super Bowl on Sunday night.)For years, Donald Trump has been plagued by allegations that he used the N-word while filming The Apprentice. In 2024, a former producer on the NBC reality show claimed Trump used the racial epithet in 2004 to describe Kwame Jackson, a Black finalist on the first season of The Apprentice. In 2018, the former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman claimed in her book Unhinged that Trump was caught on tape during the making of The Apprentice saying the N-word “multiple times”, according to three of her sources.At the time, Trump vociferously denied that he had ever used the N-word: “I don’t have that word in my vocabulary, and never have.”But the awful truth is that, these days, he doesn’t even need to have such a word in his vocabulary. He and his acolytes have another, more insidious one that serves a similar racist purpose: DEI.

      Mehdi Hasan is the CEO and editor-in-chief of the new media company Zeteo More

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      Canada’s Liberal party was left for dead, but Trump might have just given it a second chance

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      Until just a few weeks ago, it was an exhilarating time to be a Conservative in CanadaAfter nearly 10 years of Liberal rule, a deepening cost of living crisis had soured public support for Justin Trudeau and his shop-worn government. The Tory leader, Pierre Poilievre, had seized on a controversial carbon levy, and pledged to make the next federal vote an “axe the tax” election. Pollsters predicted his party would seize a convincing majority of seats. The country was on the cusp of a new Conservative era.And then Donald Trump suggested the US might take over Canada.The US president’s threats – ranging from “economic coercion” to outright annexation – have upended Canadian politics in a way few could have predicted. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday as he travelled to the Super Bowl game, Trump further escalated his rhetoric, claiming that Canada is “not viable as a country” without US trade, and warning that it can no longer depend on the US for military protection.For the last two years, any consideration of the future of Canada’s Liberal party had focused on the scale of its impending electoral loss. But in recent weeks, a series of polls have suggested that the Liberals have reversed their freefall.And a key factor in the party’s apparent resurrection has been Trump.Since Trump’s comments, Canada has seen a groundswell of visceral patriotism. Maga-style hats emblazoned “Canada Is Not for Sale” went viral. Canadians jeered visiting American sports teams, even during a children’s ice hockey tournament in Quebec City.And amid a shift in the public mood, the Canadian prime minister has positioned his government as leading a “Team Canada” approach to the emerging threat from the south.“In this moment, we must pull together because we love this country,” Trudeau said in a recent speech in response to Trump’s threats. “We don’t pretend to be perfect, but Canada is the best country on earth. There’s nowhere else that I and our 41-million strong family would rather be, and we will get through this challenge just as we’ve done countless times before: together.”But for Poilievre, who had harnessed a populist current in the country and drawn comparisons with Trump, the avenues forward are less clear.The Conservative leader’s combative politics have served him well against Trudeau, but now appear to be faltering as nationalism supplants partisanship.One poll, from Ipsos, found the Conservatives had shed roughly 12 points of support within two weeks. Another survey in Quebec, from the firm Leger, found that if the Liberals put former central banker Mark Carney atop their ticket, the party vaulted far ahead of both the Conservatives and the separatist Bloc Québécois.A third, from the outfit Mainstreet, found the Liberals were tied – or even leading – among likely voters in the battle ground of Ontario.“This is very much a race that still favours the Conservatives. But if the Liberals gain even a couple more points, we’re in a place where they would suddenly become much more competitive, and the potential for minority government is possible,” said Éric Grenier, a political analyst at the Writ.One of the main drivers in shifting sentiment has been the resignation of Trudeau as Liberal leader, after the Conservatives had gleefully prepared to wage an entire federal election campaign against him.“Now the election isn’t going to be about Trudeau. And with both Liberal candidates saying they won’t move forward with the carbon tax, it also won’t be about that. It will most likely be about the next four years and who is best able to dealing with Trump,” said Grenier.Last week, another poll from the Globe and Mail and Nanos found that 40% of Canadians felt Carney – the former governor of the Bank of England – was best suited to face off against Trump. Only 26% of respondents felt that person was Poilievre.For a campaign to go from a very specific issue – a referendum on Trudeau’s last nine years as leader – to a completely different issue – Donald Trump – is “rare”, said Grenier.The Conservatives plan to present a new, patriotic election message in the coming days. Attenders have been instructed to wear red and white – the colours of Canada, but also the colours of the Liberal party.“Adopting a Canada-first approach to the election is needed, but it’s an awkward one for them, because they’ve been saying for the last couple years that the country is broken,” said Grenier. “And now they have to say: ‘Well, it is but we still really love it.’ And it also feels a bit forced because a segment of their voting base – and probably a segment of their caucus – prefers to have Donald Trump as a president.”For the Liberals, the reversal confirms their decision to force Trudeau out. But Grenier cautions against reading too much into the polling.“The danger for someone like Carney, who is polling surprisingly well in a place like Quebec, is that some of the numbers are quite high. Can he live up to that? Or is the idea of him more attractive to voters than the reality of him as an actual leader?”Still, in an election fought over national identity and the protection of sovereignty, Liberals have unexpectedly found themselves dealt a few lucky cards.None of the Liberal candidates vying for the party’s top job are cabinet ministers, depriving opposition parties the chance to accuse them of dereliction.“It may still be a ‘change’ election, but it looks like it is not going to be a carbon tax election. Rhyming couplets like ‘axe the tax’ feel a little stale and disconnected from contemporary political and economic challenges,” said Scott Reid, a political adviser and former director of communications to the former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin. “And if the next election is going to be about how we rewire our relationship to the United States in the face of Trump’s capriciousness, someone with the credentials of Mark Carney starts to look interesting to some voters, and it at least gives the Liberal party the possibility of resurrecting itself.”Still, the polls at this point are “more akin to a spark than a bonfire’’, Reid said, adding that if an election were held today, Poilievre’s Conservatives would probably win a majority of seats.But the largely unprecedented nature of Trump’s unpredictable incursions into the national discourse means that honing a careful message, for either party, is largely a useless task.“What will Donald Trump do in the coming months when there’s a new prime minister on the scene [after the Liberals select their new leader]? How might he blunder into the minefield of Canadian politics? We just don’t know,” said Reid. “But we almost do know that it will happen. Either he determines the ballot question or, on any given day, he has the capacity to dictate the ballot question of the next election. That’s just the reality of it.” More

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      ‘Ridiculous blunder’: Trump wades into California’s water wars – and strikes some of his strongest supporters

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      Under orders from Donald Trump, billions of gallons of irrigation water were laid waste in California’s thirsty agricultural hub this month, a move that left water experts shocked and local officials scrambling.The water, stored in two reservoirs operated by the army corps of engineers, is a vital source for many farms and ranches in the state’s sprawling and productive San Joaquin valley during the driest times of the year. It will be especially important in the coming months as the region braces for another brutally hot summer with sparse supplies.The reservoirs are also among the few the US president can control directly.Staged to give weight to Trump’s widely debunked claims that flows could have helped Los Angeles during last month’s devastating firestorm and to show that he holds some power over California’s water, he ordered the army corps to flood the channels. Less than an hour of notice was reportedly given to water authorities down-river who rushed to prepare for the unexpected release, which threatened to inundate nearby communities.The move is just the latest in a series of misinformed attempts Trump has made to wade into California’s water wars, adding new challenges and conflicts over the state’s essential and increasingly scarce water resources. But in what now appears to be just a political stunt, Trump has struck some of his strongest supporters. Many counties across California’s rural Central valley – home to much of its roughly $59bn agricultural industry – backed Trump in the last election, forming a red strip at the heart of the blue state.“It is almost mind-boggling that this has happened,” said Thomas Holyoke, a professor of political science and water expert at California State University, Fresno, calling the act a “ridiculous blunder”.Experts, who were left scratching their heads in the aftermath, have found no justification for the order. The reservoirs were not at risk of overflowing and irrigation is not necessary during the wetter winter months. These releases also did not support threatened ecosystems such as those in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, where contentious debates continue about flows and diversions.Some have suggested the flows will help bolster groundwater stores, “but a lot of that water will end up evaporating,” said Holyoke. “It’s just going to be water lost – and they know it.”‘Purely a stunt’Governed by agreements between an array of stakeholders and close coordination between federal and local officials, releases from these reservoirs are typically well-planned. Lake Kaweah and Lake Success, the two reservoirs in Tulare county, are part of a sprawling network of channels that do not flow to the ocean or connect to the aqueduct serving the southern part of the state.The water held within them is also largely spoken for. Its distribution isn’t often contentious.But Trump, it seems, saw it differently.“Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory!” he said in a post on Truth Social the day the release was ordered, boasting that he opened a flow for 5.2bn gallons of water alongside a photo of a nondescript waterway.Acting quickly, local authorities were able to convince federal officials to bring that total down to 2bn, which was released over three days.View image in fullscreenBut Trump’s rhetoric around the issue hasn’t shifted. He has made several false statements about water in California and his ability to direct it including claims that he sent the US military to turn on the water in the aftermath of the deadly fires, his clear misunderstanding about where water supplies originate from and distribute to, and his allusion to a simple valve that can be turned to control water supply.He posted again thanking the army corps of engineers “for their LOVE of our Country, and SPEED in getting this Emergency DONE! [sic]” saying that water was “heading to farmers throughout the State, and to Los Angeles”, even as experts repeatedly debunked this claim.“Those releases had absolutely zero to do with anything to do in Los Angeles,” said Gregory Pierce, a water policy expert and the director of the UCLA Water Resources Group, adding that this also did not benefit anyone in the central valley. “This was a stunt purely so Trump could say that he did something and released the water.”Few have been willing to admonish the administration for the move. Support for Trump and hopes that he will aid agriculture with its water woes is still strong in this region.“I have a conservative mindset. I encourage the trigger-pulling attitude, like: ‘Hey, let’s just get stuff done,’” Zack Stuller, a farmer and president of the Tulare county farm bureau told Politico, admitting that the reservoir release was a little nerve-wracking.The bureau declined to comment to the Guardian, but sent a combined statement from the four water management associations and districts, which attempted to make sense of the puzzling and dangerous release. In it, they said there would be “continued close coordination with the Administration and the Army Corp of Engineers”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome locals who said they were deeply concerned about the act and its outcome said they were afraid to speak out because their businesses might be targeted by supporters of the administration.While Trump continues to frame the action as evidence that he has taken power over California water, he isn’t able to control much water policy in the state, according to Pierce.“The federal government of course matters for water in California, but not that much,” he said, adding that’s why Trump ordered releases where he was able to, even if they weren’t connected to the overall problem he was claiming to address. The federal government does play a role in funding big projects but “California’s been left on an island with respect to federal support for quite some time,” he said.Trump has tried to exert more control through funding, especially now that the state is depending on the federal government for aid in the aftermath of the Los Angeles wildfires, now considered one of the most costly natural disasters in history with damage estimates climbing above $250bn.View image in fullscreenTrump has cast California’s governor Gavin Newsom as his opponent on the issue, but when it comes to water, and more specifically boosting supplies of it for cities and agriculture, the two might already be on the same page.The state recently issued a fact-check on Trump’s claims, which criticized him for spreading misinformation, but highlighted how supplies have increased since Trump’s first term.Environmental advocates have long criticized the Delta Conveyance, a controversial infrastructure project championed by Newsom that would reroute more water to the south, which could get even more momentum under a Trump presidency.“The governor is actually aligned with Trump on this and I think Trump has only recently figured that out,” Pierce said. “The cards are certainly stacking up that that’s going to be pushed forward.”That doesn’t mean that Trump’s misleading rhetoric won’t leave a mess.“President Trump comes blundering into this complex situation with no understanding at all or no effort at understanding how it works,” said Holyoke.“California is trying to strike a delicate balance,” he added, detailing the challenging and layered issues that come with distributing essential resources to residents, the agricultural industry, and declining ecosystems as the world warms and supplies run short.“Farmers in the valley are hurting from water cutbacks, there is no question about that,” Holyoke said. “The answer isn’t to toss all the laws and court orders aside and throw lots of water at farmers. We simply need to find inventive ways to make the best use of the water that we have.” More

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      US accuses Australia of breaking ‘verbal commitment’ on aluminium exports as Trump weighs tariffs exemption

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      Donald Trump has called Australia’s prime minister a “very fine man” and said he would give “great consideration” to exempting the country from his new 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, after a phone call between the two leaders.It came after comments on Tuesday from the US president that there would be no exceptions or exemptions on the tariffs, which will start on 12 March unless Anthony Albanese can secure an exemption.The official proclamation to impose the aluminium tariff appeared to explain why Australia was not exempted from the outset, with the US accusing Australia of breaking a “verbal commitment” to limit aluminium exports.

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      The new proclamation read: “The volume of U.S. imports of primary aluminum from Australia has also surged and in 2024 was approximately 103% higher than the average volume for 2015 through 2017. Australia has disregarded its verbal commitment to voluntarily restrain its aluminum exports to a reasonable level.”Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull negotiated a carve out from steel and aluminium tariffs during Trump’s first term.Asked about the proclamation on Tuesday night, the deputy prime minister and defence minister, Richard Marles, told ABC’s 7.30: “I can’t speak for the former government, in terms of what it did or didn’t do … but in the discussion that was had today, in the president’s own press conference, having signed the executive order, he made clear that Australian exemptions to this order would be under active consideration. And that’s where this is now at.”Earlier on Tuesday, Albanese said his second call with Trump had been a “very positive and constructive discussion”, which canvassed the Aukus defence pact, critical minerals and foreign investment between the two countries.Albanese said he had also made the case for Australia to be exempted from tariffs and was hopeful of such an outcome.“If you have a look at what we’ve achieved already, it’s been a tremendous start to the relationship,” Albanese told a press conference in Parliament House.Minutes later, the White House announced that the president was signing executive orders to place a 25% tariff on the imports, stepping up a long-promised trade war.Trump initially said the tariffs would be imposed without exceptions but then confirmed he was giving “great consideration” to an Australian carve-out.Asked about his call with Albanese, Trump called the Australian leader “a very fine man” and noted the US trade surplus with Australia.“We have a surplus with Australia, one of the few … I told him that [exemptions] is something we will give great consideration,” Trump said.The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, also publicly urged the Trump administration to exempt Australia from tariffs, claiming any move to the contrary would “damage the relationship” between the two countries.“Tariffs are not warranted against Australia because we have a trade surplus,” he said.Australian politicians were rocked on Monday when Trump told reporters in the US that he planned to announce new tariffs on all steel and aluminium arriving in America.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Labor government been bracing for such a decision after Trump levelled similar tariffs in his first term, with senior ministers and officials working behind the scenes for some time to secure exemptions like those secured by the then-Coalition government after months of negotiations in 2018.“Our aluminium is a critical input for manufacturing in the United States,” Albanese said on Tuesday after his call with Trump. “Our steel and aluminium are both key inputs for the US-Australia defence industries in both of our countries.“I presented Australia’s case for an exemption and we agreed on wording to say publicly, which is that the US president agreed that an exemption was under consideration in the interests of both of our countries.”Albanese would not reveal more about the process by which the exemption would be considered, the timeline by which a decision would be reached, or what Australia would do if the exemption was ultimately rejected. He said he would not speak for Trump but again referred warmly to the Australia-US relationship.“What I envisage is continuing to act to respond diplomatically,” he said. “That’s how you get things done. My government’s got a record of getting things done in Australia’s national interest. I’ll continue to do so.”A US congressman has hit out at any attempt to slap tariffs on Australian products.Joe Courtney, a Democratic politician and co-chair of the Friends of Australia Caucus,, noted that Australia had just this week begun sending payments to Washington as part of the Aukus pact to help bolster the US submarine construction program.“What we’re seeing is a completely needless, almost insult to the people of Australia by raising tariffs of Australian products coming into this country,” Courtney said.The shadow trade minister, Kevin Hogan, suggested that the government should “reach out to whoever may help” Australia secure exemptions, including the former Coalition politicians Scott Morrison and Joe Hockey.“I encourage the prime minister and indeed ambassador [Kevin] Rudd to talk to people like Morrison, people like Hockey,” he told the ABC. “We had a precedent when we got an exemption, they should be using those resources.” More